From d25318313c079d186057e0a2f65562506a5016e1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Madison Scott-Clary Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2022 16:55:19 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] update from sparkleup --- writing/3/unknown-things/mfa/communities.html | 21 ++++++++++++++++++- writing/3/unknown-things/mfa/intro.html | 4 ++-- 2 files changed, 22 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/writing/3/unknown-things/mfa/communities.html b/writing/3/unknown-things/mfa/communities.html index 925d6bc76..9cb0edaf5 100644 --- a/writing/3/unknown-things/mfa/communities.html +++ b/writing/3/unknown-things/mfa/communities.html @@ -13,9 +13,28 @@

Communities

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I live in a little town up in the Cascades called Sultan. It’s one of a string of pass-through towns strung along highway 2 and the Skykomish river, little pearls of population separated by peaks and bends in the road.

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Lazy weekend drives up the road deeper into the mountains reveal a strange pattern, though. There’s the requisite church in each of those town, sometimes a few, but each town seems to have sprouted up from a separate denomination. Sultan is Baptist, Startup is Lutheran, with an LDS church on the eastern outskirts, Goldbar is Baptist again, and so on.

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That so many intentional communities spring up around spirituality isn’t terribly surprising. When one thinks of villages in the middle ages, one thinks about concentric rings of houses surrounding a central square and a church. When one thinks about small town America, one thinks of Main Street with its drug store and post office, and the church down at the end.

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Even in my own meeting — the Quaker term for a congregation — one of our professed testimonies is community, though this in a much looser sense of the word. Settled as it is in the south end of Seattle’s University District, one of the more densely populated areas of the city, there’s a distinct lack of that centrality that makes up communities in the sense above.

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This may also speak to the general shifts in attitudes towards and approach to religion and in Christianity in particular. There is a growing wariness around churches, whether they follow a mainline denomination model or a non-denominational evangelical one.

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That’s not to say that they’re not still integral to society; that I’ve heard evangelicalism described as ‘American civil religion’ should certainly speak towards that.

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However, in notably liberal and leftist circles, churches with any sense of power are viewed with distrust. That they they so easily close ranks around abusers, and that they so easily influence the politics of their members leaves a sour taste in people’s mouths.1

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We seem to have in-group mentality built into us, though, and even among those who don’t subscribe to any Christian faith and yet find themselves still leaning on spirituality, that community plays an important role. There is a neopagan community with ‘temples’2 in the area that is just as focused on community, activism, and political togetherness as any Christian church.

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    While not strictly pertinent, it’s interesting to note that, as Brad Lee Onishi describes in “The Orange Wave”, prior to the seventies, one’s church was often further left than its membership, leading to organized letter-writing campaigns, donation drives, and political organization behind what are now considered strictly liberal points. It wasn’t until the rapid rise in evangelicalism that this began to change, with the neo-Calvinism core at many of their theologies professing an “if you’re poor/downtrodden/discriminated against, you likely deserve it”. ↩

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    ‘Temples’ in the sense of a congregation, though neither the Chicago nor Seattle temple has location. ↩

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