Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What To Do About It
By Brian D. McLaren
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
Few Christian thinkers and writers in America have a larger following than this Maryland pastor-turned-author/speaker/activist now living in Florida. He is one of the leading advocates of progressive Christianity, and this book will further cement this reality.
In earlier books, McLaren wrote extensively about his journey out of Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity. This book seeks to analyze that experience enriched by thirty years of pastoral conversations with people struggling with the same issues he dealt with. What resulted is this four-stage typology of the spiritual journey from Simplicity, through Complexity and Perplexity to Harmony.
McLaren began with his experience of discerning right from wrong and the corresponding value of doing right, pleasing authorities, and (once he became one of those authorities) teaching the right answers to all the questions. When doubt eroded his confidence in this paradigm of the religious life, he moved into stage two (not knowing at the time, though, of the four-stage journey he had commenced). This stage of Complexity was dominated by the search for success by setting goals, achieving goals, and coaching others to embrace goal-sitting as a virtue. McLaren became a winner, for sure.
Once again doubt crept in, undermining his assurance that hanging spiritual victory banners, so to speak, represents what being Christian or even human is all about. Once again, doubt served as a midwife to a new perspective on religion and a fresh experience of spirituality, one he calls Perplexity (stage three).
Perplexity replaces deep commitment (stage one) and high enthusiasm (stage two) with wide sympathy; it embraces “honesty, curiosity, and critical thinking” as the convenient chart in Appendix I states (223ff). Doubt has become “a virtue to be cultivated.”
It is not the end, though, as the virtuous doubter evolves into the harmonious and humble traveler who practices compassion, inclusion, and openness, all the while seeking the common good and accepting the overriding reality of God and life as mysteries. “In the loving humility of Harmony, we begin to see things without the obsessive dualistic judgments of Simplicity, without the compulsive pragmatic analyses and schemes of Complexity, and without the deconstructing suspicions of Perplexity chattering away in our heads” (98).
McLaren is living in harmony with himself, his God, and his place in the universe. This religion is “a new kind of faith, a faith after doubt, a faith practicing humility rather than arrogance, solidarity with other rather than exclusion and antagonism, courage rather than fear, collaboration rather than competition, and love rather than self-interest” (111). Reaching back into the tradition in which he had lived, and moved, and had his being for decades, McLaren describes this new experience of Harmony as “faith expressing itself in love.”
The final section of the book advocates communities of Harmony, affirming the role of religion and its gatherings as the best hope for leading the human community into a deeper, richer experience of faith, hope, and love. He endorses the practical version of this vision as outlined in The Practicing Congregation, a 2004 book by Diana Butler Bass (138).
There is no question that religion in the world is too often toxic and in need of help and healing. McLaren’s four-stage journey undoubtedly offers a way into that future for many people and many congregations. And I confess that his journey is very much like my journey, and much of what he describes I have experienced and embraced.
But not everybody is moving from Fundamentalist Protestant to Liberal Protestant. Many are moving from Liberal Protestant to Evangelical, and from Something to Nothing and back again, and from Atheism to Theism to Catholicism, even to embracing the “hard rules” of Catholicism (as one recent convert to Rome put it to me). Then there is the movement in and out of other world religions. Does this four-stage journey from Simplicity to Harmony take into account the testimonies of a million and more of these seekers whose path has been so different than mine and McLaren’s?
What does he do with the Pentecostal experience, surely the most powerful and impactful alternative for those whose “beliefs stopped working” somewhere along the way? Does his four-stage paradigm differ enough from the various other ways we humans segregate people into clubs, tribes, denominations, and nations? Does it have the power not only to describe accurately our experience but also to transcend our divisions and cultivate the one human race that we are and that we need?
I don’t know; but I intend to ask him a few of these questions when he walks into The Meetinghouse this week and sits down for a conversation. A person resting in stage two (Complexity) would have answers; those living in stage four (Harmony) might not! Even so, I’ll give him a bag of coffee and thank him for leading us into a deeper reflection on the journey that pulls us into a future that is, for sure, pure mystery!
(April 2021)
