In my youth I became a fan of Marshall McLuhan, cryptic sage of “the medium is the message.” His thesis, as I understood it, is a useful prism through which to deconstruct the present-day plight of the churches our age calls mainstream. You know, the ones with all the puzzled faces in the few pews the are occupied. Even Presbyterian ministers are writing revolutionary essays and letters in the pages of the Record.
In January’s issue, Rev. Ron VanAuken writes: “Even now the torch of the gospel … is being taken from us because we have not the visual acuity to discern the times in which we are living.” And in a letter, Rev. Dr. Chuck Congram worries about “a reluctance to make spiritual issues a foremost part of the challenge.”
It is with some trepidation that I dip my toe in waters roiled by gentlemen with more degrees than I have dreams, but ol’ Prof. McLuhan may have something to offer us.
The gift he left us was an explanation of what media do to us, and by “media” he meant all the tools we have developed for communication, from wheels through airplanes to TVs and the internet. There have been two critical revolutions in the history of human communication. The first was Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type and the second was the application of electricity to, initially, the telegraph and then the telephone and radio and onward to TV, the internet and cellphones. Before Gutenberg, we were an oral society. Wisdom was handed down over the generations by sages, and few could read or write the few books and scrolls that were arduously inscribed and zealously guarded in palaces and monasteries. We were comfortable with myths and legends that either caused great fear of the unkown or comforted us with gods who would protect us.
The printing press, McLuhan says, changed all that, turning us into a visual society that became rapidly accustomed to the linear logic of the printed line. Although it democratized knowledge, kings and priests learned that this new medium permitted the extension of standardized laws, regulations and controls across ever wider territories. Myth and legend, if not eradicated, fell behind the search for logic which led to the Age of Reason and to Science. That search extended to the Bible, written by men of an oral society, and we pored over its pages seeking logic in the tales it tells.
McLuhan’s electric age began to change all that. We began to recreate a worldwide oral society—his famous global village. The world is in our living room, and we are in the world. In one of his memorable examples, he refers to the weeks it used to take a letter sailing on a ship from, say, Montreal to Hong Kong. Now we can pick up a phone and are, in a very real sense, in Hong Kong. We are, in some senses, gathered around the tribal fire listening to new myths and legends. When politicians recount myths they call it “spin.”
How right was McLuhan? Take a random quote from his The Gutenberg Galaxy: “Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.” Try going to an airport or watching CNN sometime.
Where are mainline churches in all this? Surveys claim that more than 80 per cent of Canadians believe in God. Statistics Canada reports that 21 per cent of Canadians aged 15 and over attended a religious service at least once a week in 2005, down from 30 per cent in 1985 and 67 per cent in 1946. Attendance at Pentacostal or fundamentalist churches—the Bible literalists—is growing, and so are other paths to God. Again StatsCan: “Of those who infrequently attended religious services over the previous year (2002), 37 per cent engaged in religious practices on their own on a weekly basis.”
It seems to me that the Revs. VanAuken and Congram have channelled McLuhan who, 50 years ago, foresaw the “times in which we are living,” a return to an oral tribal society in which many approach God ready to move from seeking logic in the inexpressible and once again search myth and legend for truth and meaning. And that’s the challenge we’re wrestling with.
Come, children, gather ‘round the campfire and I shall tell you how God created the world.
