Tradition and Traditionalism

This is part two of a series on Tradition, with new installments posted each week. You can read part one here.

We began by defining tradition in its broadest sense as “giving over” and discussed some of the ways Christians understand what it means to pass down the practice of the Faith through the generations. We also explored how Anglican Catholics have a unique sense of obligation to the past and to those giants of the Faith on whose shoulders we now stand. A high view of tradition is an expression of gratitude for what has been preserved through great trials, recognizing that many have suffered to remain faithful to the Lord as they encountered Him in the Church’s prayer, and for whom they endured unimaginable persecution. They understood that the Faith was a gift, one to be received and then given in turn within a view of the Church that was bigger than themselves but of which they were a vital part. It is to that volta between reception and gift in tradition that I would like to turn our attention in this essay.

Tradition is an experiential counter-argument to secularity. To say that something is secular, in its plainest sense, refers to its obsession with what can be done in any given saeculum or the span of a given lifetime. Secularity is a state of obsession with the here and now at the expense of the before and hereafter. Further, the secular fixates on the outward and visible qualities of the world at the expense of the inward and spiritual; there is a tendency to divorce matter and spirit. Unlike the gnostics of past and present who also sever these spheres, however, secularists relegate the spiritual and ultimately supernatural things to disorganized storage in the cosmic attic. As Fr. Stephen Freeman observes, the universe gets turned into a cosmic duplex, with all the real things down here on our level and all the God-things upstairs. Secularism may not deny the existence of these things–though it usually does so in effect–but it problematizes and distances the relationship of matter and spirit to the point that it ceases to be a practical consideration. It is like a soft denial of what is above and beneath life as we know it most quantifiably.

A commitment to sacred tradition undermines the secular project by obliging us again to the before and then the above, then to the beneath and the after. I say ‘sacred’ in the sense of being ‘set apart’ which obliges us to a kind of ecstasy, literally a going out from ourselves. Sacred traditions are found in many religions and the cultures that surround them, they are rites that reconnect us to a narrative that is larger than ourselves and make us participant in the drama of heaven and earth, history and future. I want to be clear: I am not suggesting that all sacred traditions are valid. I am firmly and deliberately a Christian and I believe our sacred tradition is bestowed, empowered, and directed to its true end by the one, true God. Our tradition as catholic Christians is the fullest expression of such that has been or will be revealed. That being said, I do believe there is something to be observed in sacred traditions more broadly that suggests their general power to restore that integrated quality of human nature. Let’s consider, as an example, the institution of the Passover in Exodus 12: 

And you shall observe this thing as an ordinance for you and your sons forever. It will come to pass when you come to the land which the Lord will give you, just as He promised, that you shall keep this service. And it shall be, when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ that you shall say, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice of the Lord, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households.’

Observe, first, that sense of ‘giving over.’ The LORD Himself delivers this tradition and commands it to be observed through the generations of the people. It is assumed that each new generation will inquire what is meant by these acts. The ‘giving over’ refers back to the events of the exodus from Egypt, and remembers how the LORD was the agent of history. This remembrance returns them to the significance of what they are doing in the moment in the ritual of Passover and cements it culturally in the practice of their children every year as active participants. Observe, too, how the ‘giving over’ is not an abdication of responsibility to the tradition but an expansion of that responsibility to others with no clear endpoint. The same sacrifice made in the slave quarters of Egypt was the same sacrifice made in the wilderness, and was the same sacrifice made in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus Christ. Past and present, heaven and earth, are met in the observance. 

There is such a thing as secular tradition. Consider one of the high holidays of the American consumer religion: Black Friday. Every Friday after Thanksgiving, turkey-engorged acolytes ritually line up outside of Targets, Wal-Marts, and Best Buys awaiting the commencement of a chaotic procession through the aisles in search of the best deal on this year’s lineup of cheaply-made electronics and apparel. Consider, too, the unraveling of that unity of before and after, above and beneath. That Black Friday occurs every year and largely features the same products envisions one of two scenarios: that the consumer market has rapidly expanded in 364 days or that the same consumers can be enticed to buy roughly the same things as they did the last year. We know, of course, of the open scandals of planned obsolescence in many of our goods, which suggests that the second option is more accurate. What this amounts to is a ritual of acquisition that assumes the discarding of even the recent past, an evasion of the near future, and little consideration about the quality of these products or the ethics involved. All we are left with is the thrill of the chase in the moment and the ad hoc justification for why such rabid buying fulfills some vision of the good. 

As much as we could continue to take a baseball bat to such secular traditions, however, I find them less concerning than a third kind of tradition, a hybrid of the first two. Strongly secularized traditions are like cotton candy; they have an intrinsic, vomit-inducing quality if indulged excessively. They make us hate ourselves, eventually, which very often forces us to look for a better tradition. Unfortunately, the third type of tradition too easily endears itself to such seekers. This ‘tradition’ borrows from sacred tradition in its gesturing toward a reintegration into a story that is larger and more significant than survival, consumption, and pleasure. At the same time, they are still dominated by the refusal to repent from self-obsession and the needling demands of one’s own age, characterized by a refusal of humility, patience, forgiveness, wonder, and hope. This parasitic worldview is what we might call ‘traditionalism,’ which feeds on the lifeblood of tradition while seeking to discard what it finds distasteful. Tradition is something in which we participate; traditionalism is something we seek to use, whether it be pretentiously or belligerently. 

Traditionalism is ultimately about control. I noted a similar co-opting of a vital part of the Church’s life in my series last year on evangelism. Like evangelism, tradition is a life-giving property of the Church. But when tradition is loosened from its organic unity with the rest of the Faith, it becomes like any other ideological tool: a mode of rhetoric increasingly obsessed with spectacle, insularity, and coercion. A traditionalist church is obsessed with idealistic purity–it is quick to prefer ideas to people and has little patience for complexity, nuance, or paradox. This church is scrupulous in the performing of its rituals and with how it looks while doing so. It is obsessed that only the right kind of Christians are allowed to be there, and visitors are scrutinized to ensure that they will not rock the boat, if they are talked to at all. The traditionalist church is nostalgic, speaking glowingly about a pristine past era while disparaging all subsequent generations. It wants to be powerful by exerting influence on the surrounding world to conform to its idealistic vision; it wants unconditional victory here and now, and it will not suffer the thought of some new generation reaping the fruits of its labors. 

The traditionalist is dismissive of what is not immediately charmed or compelled by its claims and offers only mercenary hospitality to those who are already committed to its claims. The traditionalist church identifies and vilifies external threats and neglects self-examination except in order to root out suspected double-agents in its ranks. The traditionalist church privileges its superior differences with other traditions, and spends much of its time questioning their validity. The traditionalist church wants converts only to substantiate by numbers the right-ness of its claims, and pathologically avoids being questioned. The traditionalist church is not necessarily conservative or progressive. It narrowly avoids simply being a cult only by deeming no member sufficiently pure to function as its guru. Traditionalism is secular: past and future, God and man are deemed useful only insofar as they advance the present obsession with a past agenda. 

I should say that I have never encountered such maximalist traditionalism, and so I am not talking about anyone in particular. In my pastoral experience, though, traditionalism seems to be a way-station aspiration for the spiritual seeker leaving more obviously secularized contexts. If they find a church with traditionalist tendencies, they feel welcomed and validated insofar as they are welcomed into the midst of a people who are as inclined as them to vilify the outsiders and the unenlightened. That there seems now to be many such seekers looking for that kind of a church presents churches with a temptation to adopt traditionalist tendencies to attract more members, even if those churches would not usually be inclined to do so. Unless churches are principled and committed to tradition and evangelism (rather than their ideological counterfeits), they will, in the name of conversion, become enclaves of grudge-bearing, power-obsessed Christian secularism. Traditionalism ruins churches. It cannot, however, be avoided or healed by rejecting the tradition on which it parasitically feeds, which is an error to which many churches are prone (becoming anti-traditional traditionalists in the process). 

A return to tradition unravels those diabolical tendencies in traditionalism. Tradition restores us to a posture of humility, a sense of smallness that knows we are not enough of ourselves to be all there is. This humility produces appreciative love for those in the past who labored to preserve and provide what the Lord gave them, knowing that it was not ‘theirs’ but still theirs to steward until others came. Tradition teaches us to look with wonder for those whom the Lord will call after us, and welcomes the seeker with a patient openness and a willingness for them to ask repeatedly and with increasing vigor and nuance: why are we doing this? Tradition is not afraid of such questions and of the work it takes to explore novel ways of presenting what is timeless. Those who love tradition seek to forgive what has not been done well by those before, knowing that they will need the forgiveness of those who come after them. They know that the Lord Himself is the beginning and end of all real tradition, and that all they do is because of Him and the people He loves. 

Tradition teaches us to be present with the errors of the age, not seeking to avenge, control, or anxiously evade them; tradition teaches us that we rarely understand such things with reliable clarity and to bear witness to what we know is good rather than to attempt to manage evil. Tradition provides a kind of quiet stability that enables us to let others come and go without a sense of threat, understanding that it is meaningful if just two or three are gathered as it is if there are two or three hundred. Tradition looks for common ground while acknowledging difference. It can be very firm in its convictions while being charitable toward debate. Tradition is hopeful in the Spirit’s leading the Church into all truth, and seeks a quiet life of stability in place to more ably watch and join in that steady, intergenerational work.

To heal from traditionalism means to come back to a sense of Christian life as given and to be given. In our next post, we will talk more about how the sacramental tradition uniquely forms our imaginations for such a sense of life. Until then, may God bless you and draw you ever closer into the life of His Church.