Brueggeman does underestimate the difficulty of liberating ourselves from these scripts, or at least he doesn't take it up much in his theses. As evidence, we only have to consider the politics of the past two or three years. The public has been clear and consistent about what it wants, yet despite electing a Congress to give it to them, they still find themselves dominated by the agents of militaristic consumer control giving them pretty much exactly the opposite of what they demand. And there's no end in sight, as the government continues to lurch in favor of security and moneyed interests. With the kind of soft control this system can exert in a democracy, it could be a very long time before alternative scripts achieve any meaningful success.

It would be interesting as well to see how the script could be charted out against the conservative ascendency of the past forty years. How much of this can be laid at the feet of modern conservatism? How might the script have been different in a period of progressive dominance? I have no confidence that a liberal political establishment could have done any better with this script, or that it wouldn't have established a different but equally pernicious one. But without an analysis of the immediate context as compared to the broader situation, the framework seems incomplete.

Still, I like these ideas. They are deeply formed by conversation with biblical thought, which is Brueggemann's genius. They are also authentically counter-cultural, and I think they could be used to bridge many of the divides between "personal responsibility" and "social transformation" we were talking about last night. I'll talk more about how that might work in the context of the church in another post.

At the moment, I'm more interested in applying this framework to our common project at Street Prophets. I'm not sure how this fits into Dr. Brueggemann's script, but we definitely have been promised that we will be able to maintain the clean lines of tribal identities. In America, that always refers back to race, but also class, and most important for our purposes, religious identity.

Courtney Bender writes at the Immanent Frame:

These projects of mapping the territories of religious diversity are frequently coupled with normative prescriptions about how modern citizens should engage religious others. Professor Eck argues that pluralism, defined as “the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference” is best understood as an “energetic engagement with diversity” achieved through a dialogue rooted in the encounter of commitments. Similarly, sociologist Robert Wuthnow worries over the lack of religious interchange between religious communities in his recent volume, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity. He calls for religious leaders to teach their faithful about the theologies and the beliefs of neighbors to better foster understanding and, ultimately, integrated social life.

Recent conferences at Columbia and Toronto began by questioning the types of religiousness that are imagined within these normative projects. Each of the initiatives contains a strong tendency to identify religions as encompassing discrete and recognizable communities and traditions with explicit boundaries across which interchange or conflict occurs. And, while the normative goals of religious pluralism may be debated endlessly (and we certainly hope that such debate will continue), the conversations among scholars gathered at these conferences reflected a broader concern that the blending of descriptive and prescriptive assessments of religious pluralism is problematic. Our question then becomes: To what degree does the view of “religions” as discrete groups occupying clearly marked terrain make sense?

The impetus for these conferences grew out of conversations between my colleague Pamela Klassen at the University of Toronto and myself. We are both completing books in which interreligious interaction diverges radically from the types of dialogue exchange associated with models of “religious pluralism.” In our respective historical and ethnographic research with American Protestants and post-Protestants, we find not borders and exchange, but poaching and appropriation, confusion or lack of clarity about the origins, ownership, and authenticity of various religious ideas, practices, and identities. “Religious diversity” and “exchange” is messy business, often full of conflict and lacking clearly defined lines or boundaries. At other times it takes place via structures that unwittingly shape the possibilities for interaction in ways that demand multiple translations and recalibrations among groups and individuals.

Setting aside the narrow academic questions, doesn't this sound like what we do at Street Prophets? We chew over the complications of religious identity in the postmodern age, the "ragged and disjunctive and incoherent" line between pluralism and diversity, belief and ideology, faith and politics and cookies and God knows what else. In other words, we disengage the script that proclaims that religious beliefs can be neatly delimited for political purposes and seek to engage a new script for encountering one another.

That is decidedly unglamorous work, but necessary. I started this place with the vision of winning a partisan argument or three about faith and politics, and we seem to have done okay on that score. But the real action behind Street Prophets seems to be incarnational. However modestly, we seem to embody an admittedly tentative conversation about the ways diverse perspectives come together.

This drives me insane, because I love winning arguments. Instead, I find myself helping to build social capital by building up a new kind of community based on a counter-cultural script. This is not sexy.

But it is in its own way a profound challenge to the political order. Whether or not it will be a successful one in the end, I don't know. I suppose it's not for me to say. My job - our job - is simply to follow the new script as faithfully as we can, and see what happens. Talk about testing our limits for ambiguity.