Novocastrian Pentecostalism: An Account of a Service.

Church 180 is situated on Hunter Street, the main road through Newcastle’s central business district, and housed in The Royal, an old art-deco cinema. The building’s exterior is elaborate with several distinct sections of unique design, while its condition has somewhat deteriorated over the years. Aside from a small sign bolted to the wall that indicated the presence of a church, there is nothing external to the building that signals its use for religious services. I arrived an hour before the service and the only sign of activity was a coffee cart set up to the side of the main entrance, in an attached vehicle bay. Most people seemed to arrive on foot; however, given the nature of the street it is hard to find parking in the immediate vicinity. The cars that did arrive outside of the building were typical of the area, standard production-line family cars and some utility vehicles that all appeared to be in good condition and well kept.

As the service time drew nearer people started to arrive in greater numbers and I approached the main entrance, which led into a large foyer with people milling about in conversation with each other. Near the front doors spread at intervals there were a team of greeters. Upon entering I was immediately noticed by a greeter dressed in a black collared shirt and dark slacks, who made eye contact and approached me to introduce himself and handed me a brochure that contained information about the church and its services. He asked me where I was from and introduced me to one of the younger Pastors at the service, dressed in a causal surf-brand t-shirt and jeans, who took me into the main body of the theatre and informed me that tonight’s service would have a special “rock theme”. He showed me to the seats and said that if I had any questions he’d be happy to answer them. At first I sat towards the back of the theatre, but given that even the front section of seats was not filled I moved forward before the service began. Perhaps the most striking feature of the space was the complete lack of obvious religious decoration, I scanned the room and it was merely a white-washed multi-purpose room with no crucifixes, no depictions or inscriptions. The most prominent feature were three large plasma televisions arranged upon high-platforms draped in a glossy black material. The space seemed secular in nature, and the people sat chatting as young children ran around playing. While the service itself seemed to be very youth-focused, the actual congregation was largely made up of middle-aged people with a scattering of individuals both younger and older than the mean. Their attire was casual to semi-formal with some men and women dressed in t-shirts and jeans, whilst other woman wore dresses, and other men sported jeans and collared shirts. The participants dressed in styles typical of middle and working class people of the area. The ethnic breakdown of the congregation was largely Caucasian, representative of the city, with few ethnic minorities present and the gender differential appeared to be roughly even.

To signal the commencement of the service, the plasma televisions were turned on and their screens displayed a count-down from three minutes and smoke machines started to bellow out mist that obscured part of the stage. No one seemed that fussed by this and continued to talk until the counter reached one minute to the beginning and people started to file in and the first section of chairs filled out quickly with approximately three hundred in attendance. In the last few seconds of the countdown, a band assembled on the stage and the lights dimmed, the music started with a jolt of guitar and drums as people stood up on their feet one by one until I could see no one sitting. I felt compelled to stand up and fain enjoyment – it would have been extremely conspicuous and odd to remain seated. Some people put their hands upward towards the roof, while others swayed with eyes closed and others still jumped about and danced. There was a feeling of anonymity given the dim lighting and invasive sound that permeated the hall to the extent you could not hear the person next to you. The first song was fast and energizing with the chorus line that went “everybody stand up if you praise him”, obviously designed to draw people into the service and uplift their moods. The lyrics were displayed upon the screens and I noticed that they were copyrighted by Hillsong church, Australia’s largest Church which would indicate a similar platform and uniformity of Pentecostal churches in Australia.

The band continued through two more songs, connected by bridges that melodically rose and fell between peaks of intensity and mellow lows, which lyrically concerned the awe inspiring power of Jesus and his love for all of us. It was at this moment that two points continued to recur to me. Firstly, that, as Sigmund Freud argued in The Future of An Illusion, the belief cannot be separated from the wish, as the lyrics continuity reiterated that Jesus gave himself for humanity, to save us, to protect us and that he is looking out for us. Secondly, that given the elaborate means employed to stimulate emotional response, how was it possible for participants to differentiate between the excitement of the music (alongside the general ambiance) and the experience of faith ('evidence of things unseen')? With the end of the first musical segment of the service, one of the Pastors started by noting that the music, band and theatrics of the service were a “mask” for god, that god was working through them to reach the congregation and help them feel the Holy Spirit.

At this point, the Pastors began to talk about the “awesome power of god” and how good it felt to praise him. Pumping his arm into the air, he claimed that earlier that day he had been unable to raise his arms above his shoulders until someone from the earlier service had prayed over him and healed his injury. Then, he discussed a section of the book of Hebrews that pertained to a high-priest in the time of Abraham who had received tithing from Abraham and foreshadowed the coming of Jesus who now represented the high-priest. And, just as in those days, it was the duty of the godly to tithe. He did not quote biblical scripture directly and the story was rendered in a colloquial and informal fashion, as he enthusiastically gestured and pasted up and down in front of the congregation. Buckets were passed down through the rows and people where encouraged to give to god, not man, as the funds required for running the church where for him and not man. Moreover, visitors at the service were invited to mark their details upon “connect cards” that would allow the Church to remain in contact with them and send news of upcoming events. As the bucket past me, I noticed it did not contain money but someone had dropped a connect card into it. This process completed, the congregation was invited to pray for a member who had been through some recent distress and anyone in their lives who was suffering through hard times. When the pastor was done with the group pray, a multimedia presentation was screened on the plasma televisions that relayed Church news from the return of the senior pastor from an overseas trip to planed activities of “connect groups” and the upcoming “couples night”. Music, media and theatrical flares were highly integrated into the service, or rather, seemed to constitute the main components of the service. After the Church news, the smoke machines were turned on and smoke obscured the stage as the band reemerged dressed as Kiss, the American rock band known for their elaborate costumes and face-painting, to preformed God Gave Rock 'n' Roll To You. The song and the original lyricist Russ Ballard’s life and theological questioning were used by the senior pastor as a means to discuss the book of Job and the question of what god does for man and how it isn’t for man to question god, but for god to question man.

The senior Pastor’s sermon was ushered in by another short multi-media production that used rock music and flashing graphics to signal who was delivering the sermon. Unlike the first pastor, the second pastor was more subdued and deliberate in his delivery and affected a solemn importance at crucial points in the speech, while still rendering scripture into distilled colloquialisms. Dressed in a collared shirt and blue- jeans, the pastor retold the story of Job, his misfortunes and resultant indignation levied at god for the existence of suffering. At which point, the pastor explained the response of god that came not in the form of answers but in further questions, designed to put Job in his place and emphasise his inability to comprehend the magnitude of the world and the power of its creator. The theological summation was: god is powerful beyond question and questions us in our purposes and not visa-versa. Toward the end of the sermon, the congregation was invited to close their eyes and bow their heads. The pastor continued to talk of Job and God, while personalizing the story and reiterating that some of the congregation might feel or have felt like Job and that it wasn’t for us to question god. He continued that it fell upon each individually to act against suffering in the world and live up to god’s expectations. He then invited people to take Jesus into their heart today and started to vaguely indicate positions in the room where people might wish to do so, “perhaps someone at the back wants to accept Jesus into their heart” and then the he asked people to raise their hand to indicate acceptance of Christ. He congratulated someone at the back and told them they weren’t the only one to make that decision today as others in the morning service had raised their hands. I opened my eyes and a girl seated to the left of me had raised her hand and seemed uneasy to have been the only person singled out.

After the Sermon was finished, the band again took to the stage and the lights were dimmed. Once the band was finished, the service was concluded and everyone was invited into the foyer for refreshments. It took roughly half an hour to forty five minutes for the congregation to dissipate as people took their time chatting amicably.

Written by Mathew Toll.

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Also on A Night of Dostoevskian Smiles and Sadean excesses:

- God Against The Maelstrom: Fundamentalism and Modernity.

- Marx on Religion.

- The Logic of Existential Meaning.

Adolf Hitler on Standpoint-Epistemology.

Of course, Hitler didn’t live long enough to rub shoulders with supporters of foucauldian discourse theory, feminist-standpoint epistemology or any form of ‘post-modern’ sociological analysis and the parallel does not invalidate their position. But, Rob Moore’s use of the quote in Towards the Sociology of The Truth was a delicious if somewhat cheeky deployment of the dictator’s views to attack epistemological relativism, which is self-undermining and damaging to the discipline of sociology if taken too seriously. As of now, I’m only a couple chapters into the work but I’ve found nothing to quibble with and find myself nodding and agreeing - perhaps, that’s a fault in and of itself but I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the sociology of knowledge, science or education.

God Against The Maelstrom: Fundamentalism and Modernity.

Fundamentalism is a term that originated in the United States. Early in the 20th century, Protestant groups adopted the designation to differentiate themselves from forms of liberal Protestantism and secularists (Jones, 2010). The recent coinage of fundamentalism suggests that its development is related to modernity, and while fundamentalist movements are characterized by their commitment to traditional belief-systems, they are often highly innovative adaptations to the modern experience. In this paper, the relationship between fundamentalism and modernity will be analysed; first by elaborating the concept of modernity and then reviewing the theoretical literature on the defining characteristics of religious fundamentalism, which will be tied together with two specific case studies: Protestant fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism. It will be shown that religious fundamentalism is a defensive strategy employed in response to the uncertainties and rapid shifts of modernity.

Henry Miller Asleep and Awake

Tom Schiller's documentary on Henry Miller, the author of The Tropic of Cancer, and the intricacies of his bathroom walls.

'Risk'

And then the day came,
When the risk to remain tight
In a bud
Was more painful
Than the risk
it took
to blossom.

- Anaïs Nin.

E.P. Thompson's 'Queen of The Humanities': Class Theory and Historical Materialism.

E.P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory is a critique of Louis Althusser’s structuralist interpretation of Marxism and it’s relation to discipline of history. In this critique, Thompson defended his formulation of the materialist conception of history, the importance of historical analysis and an outline for the proper use of conceptual abstractions. Thompson’s theoretical framework, that favoured the “empirical idiom”, underpinned his historical work on the English working class. His discussion of working class experience between the 1780s to the early 1830s became a crucial reference point in the class theory of the Marxian tradition and generated much contention and debate with his assertion that class is neither a “structure” or “category”, but a “historical relationship” that is not reducible to economic relations. Thompson attempted to reintroduce human agency into the study of class and redress the failings of economic reductionism that stemmed from the base-superstructure model. Thus, Thompson’s work is at odds with ‘orthodox’ Marxism and draws attention to the difference between class as “structure” and class as “lived experience”. That is, the conflict between structural accounts of class that emphasises the political economy of capitalism and those that conceptualize class in terms of social and cultural formations. However, this tension in class theory needn’t be irresolvable as these two modes of analysis and conceptualization of class are not mutually exclusive. Structural accounts of class, properly employed, are a useful tool for understanding historical processes and historical accounts of class cannot proceed without invoking conceptual frameworks of what constitutes class. Class theory, both with regards to structural approaches and historical analysis, has validity when engaging with both the political economy of class and the historical experiences of class. Insofar as each methodology is applied appropriately and their respective limitations understood.

Class is both a theoretical construct and lived experience. Analytical categories are legitimate to the extent that they are approximations of empirical data and attempt to elucidate actual experience. Thompson’s critique of Orthodox Marxism is based around its perceived processes of sociological reification and economic reductionism that rendered historical hypotheses from the vantage point of overriding economic determination either false or trivial. Class experience cannot be reduced to economic dynamics alone and more comprehensive understandings require a conception of the “dialectical intercourse of social being and social consciousness”. Thus, for Thompson:

“Classes do not exist as abstract, platonic categories, but only as men come to act in roles determined by class objectives, to feel themselves to belong to classes, to define their interests as between themselves as against other classes.”

Thompson’s definition of class quoted above aligns with concept of “class-for-itself” and eschews the category of “class-in-itself” often derived from Marx’s discussion of class in The Poverty of Philosophy and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, though not explicitly categorized as such by Marx it is nevertheless an analytically fertile distinction. The category of class-in-itself refers to a common social position within the relations of production, while class-for-itself denotes a consciousness of this common experience and recognition of the antagonistic interests of opposed classes. However, despite this clear distinction between class-in-itself and class-for-itself the former is never fully explicated within Marx’s overture. In fact, the manuscript of Marx’s final volume of Capital breaks off before answering the question, “What constitutes a class?” Having just defined wage-labours, capitalists and landowners as the three great classes of modern capitalism, Marx identifies the source of each class in their source of income: wages, profits and rents. He then argues that with this division of classes into sources of income, stratification and differentiation can be identified within these social groups. Marx’s truncated discussion of class in Capital does not render class theory invalid, but introduces the complexities of intermediate strata and class fragments not acknowledged in standard accounts of class found in orthodox Marxism. However, Marx maintained that the “continual tendency and law of development of the capitalist mode of production” was ever forming the opposition of labour and capital. And this relation between capital and labour constitutes a structural feature of the capitalist system.

Marx’s account of the political economy of capitalism is based around the opposition of two classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. He acknowledged the existence of other classes and in later writings noted the increase in a middle stratum between labour and capital, but considered these two social groups and their relationship to be of central importance to defining the modern mode of production that developed in Western Europe after the collapse of feudalism. Moreover, Marx argues the intermediate classes between proletariat and bourgeoisie contributed to the “social security and power of the upper ten thousand”. Thus, while Marx recognized the empirical reality of complex stratification both between and within the classes of 19th century Britain, he still affirmed the dichotomous two-class model as representing the most salient and important features of the economic system.

Marx’s simplification of class relations is based on the observation that the mode of production that prevailed at the time was predicated upon the concentration of the means of production within a concentrated social group and the alienation of the means of production from the majority of the population that formed the ranks of free labour. That is, the relations of production that prevailed at the time were largely divided between the class of individuals who owned the means of production and those who lived by selling their labour power, while the middle stratum occupied a marginal position in the mode of production. Marx’s analytical categories of labour and capital were used to represent the economic dynamics of capitalist social relations, with the production and appropriation of surplus-value that constitutes the “absolute law” of capitalist production. Of course, the historical experience of class cannot be reduced to relations of production and economic categories alone, such an attempt to theorize along those lines would lead to crude economic determinism and neglect the agency of class actors.In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx offers an account of the social position and political role of the peasantry during the tumultuous birth of the second French empire, which illuminates the distinction between class in and for itself alongside the interplay of economic and cultural dynamics. Marx argues:

“In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class”

Though, he continues:

“In so far as there is merely local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interest begets no community…no political organization among them, they do not form a class.”

Thus, in the latter case, while not a class-for-itself the peasantry is not capable of “enforcing their class interest” which is distinct from the proposition that that such a group of individual would not constitute a class. In the historical experience of the French peasantry of the mid-19th century, the peasantry was split into class fractions and the conservative fraction of this class supported the regime of Louis Bonaparte. This historical eventuality was the result of a unique confluence of events and part of any explanation of these events must involve the memory of Napoleon and the glory bestowed on the nation from his military victories. Class consciousness and the dynamic of class conflict are not reducible to economic determinates and relations of production alone, but are always a unique cultural and social formation. In this vein, Thompson argued:

“Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationships with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time – that is, action and reaction, change and conflict”

For Thompson, the experience of class is embedded in historical time and can only be understood as a diachronic phenomenon and that reduction to set of ‘laws’ cannot but be a process of reification that obscures and misconstrues actually historical processes. Therefore, Thompson’s conception of class is centred on the historical experience of individuals and their consciousness of this experience as class consciousness. In Thompson’s formulation, class involves the dialectical interplay of both social being and social consciousness. Contrary to accounts of class in political economy, Thompson does not assign an undialectical determinism to the relations of production in his historically grounded conception of class formation. He argues that relations of production have a determining influence on the lived experience of individuals, but this determining influence does not determine class consciousness. Prior to class consciousness, historical relationships can exhibit “class logics” and “ways”, but this does not represent class in the “full sense”. Moreover Thompson argued, the manifestation of class patterns through the historical continuum cannot be rendered into absolute “laws”, commonalities of experience are discernable, however, these never manifest in exactly same fashion in each historical period. In this view, the formulations of structural theories of class perpetuate sociological reification and incorrectly impose class models on ill-suited historical data.

In The Peculiarities of the English, Thompson criticises Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn historical work on the English class system for imposing class models on inappropriate historical data. Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn in a series of New Left Review articles had advanced a thesis regarding the “symbiosis” of the English bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy in the Glorious Revolution and again with the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 that extended political representation to men of property. In these pieces, Anderson and Nairn criticised the conciliatory temperament of the English bourgeoisie and the effect of this on the English intelligentsia and working class movement. Thompson criticized the authors on multiple points, particularly for their importation of models derived from the French experience of revolution to evaluate and rebuke the English bourgeoisie for their lack of “courage” and the subsequent impact on the working class movement, which was said to have inherited an improvised revolutionary ideology. He objected to Anderson and Nairn’s thesis on the basis that it neglected the unique experience of the English bourgeoisie that militated against the wholesale overthrow of the aristocracy. Throughout this critique, Thompson’s explicit point is that the experience of class constitutes a unique historical, social and cultural formation that cannot be reduced to an a priori model. Of course, Thompson did regard conceptualization to be an important part of historical analysis. He stated: “without the (elastic) category of class – an expectation justified by evidence – I could not have practiced at all”. However, models crafted on a particular historical episode and extrapolated beyond its original realm often produce gross mistakes of historical analysis.

Thompson noted “concepts are approximations”, and this does not render them “fictions”. Conceptualization is vital to the facilitation of understanding, the extent to which actual historical processes deviate from logical schema can be ascertained from empirical observation. Class is both a theoretical construct and lived experience; the concept of class is useful, only in so far as it pertains to the experience of class. Moreover, the political economy of class is not without its usefulness; class relations constitute an important structural feature of the capitalist system. However, class experience cannot be reduced to economic relations and to apprehend class in its full sense requires an understanding of the unique social and cultural formation of each historical episode. The historical outcomes of class-conflict cannot be understood from economic factors alone and the importation of a model from one historical episode to another without sufficient elasticity to accommodate important differences is often inappropriate and can lead to sociological reification. Thompson’s claim that history is the “queen of the humanities” and that political economy must be “superseded” by historical materialism is not without merit when approaching the experience of class. Class-in-itself is an important economic category, but class-for-itself viewed from the unitary perspective of historical materialism centred on the dialectical interplay of social being and social consciousness renders a more nuanced understanding of class.

Written by Mathew Toll.

Bibliography

Andrew, E. (1983), “Class in Itself and Class against Capital: Karl Marx and His Classifiers”, Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol. 16, No. 3., pp. 577-584.

Johnston, J. and Dolowitz, D.P. (1999), “Marxism and Social Class”, Marxism and Social Science, ed. A. Gaulile, D. Marsh and T. Tant, Basingstoke, Macmilam, pp.129-151.

Kaye, Harvey J. (1984), The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Marx, K. (1919), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3. , ed. F. Engels, Translated E. Untermann, Chicago; Charles H. Herr and Company.

Marx, K. (1950), “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, Selected Works, Moscow; Foreign Languages Publishing House, pp. 225-311.

Marx, K. (1986), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Trans Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Ed. Frederick Engels, Moscow; Progress Publishers.

Thompson, E.P. (1968), The Making of the English Working Class, London; Penguin Books.

Thompson, E.P. (1979), The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, London; Merlin Press.

Hemingway on Writers.

From Hemingway's 'Death in the Afternoon':

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured, or well-bred, is merely a popinjay. And this too, remember: a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."