Secular Ecclesiologies: Food Courts
This is the second of a two-part series of conceptions of ecclesiology that is playing out in secular, postmodern contexts. Some are borne of reflections on a recent experience at an Australian airport, but they draw from the important works of William Cavanaugh and Daniel Bell Jr, both of whom have provided powerful critiques of secular forms of gathering as parodies of the Church.
In last week’s post, I hinted at how postmodern culture was replete with ecclesiologies, logics of gathering that are informed by particular objects around which to gather, and means by which people are gathered. I spoke about how anything - mundane things like money and even silence - can become focal points for gathering.
In that post, I also mentioned gnawing on a chicken sandwich…
Having acquired said sandwich from one of a vast ring of fastfood outlets and getting myself seated in one of the grid of tables at the centre of this ring, I began to munch and people watch. In the course of watching the flows of people moving around me, towards some stalls, assembling round the tables, cutting across the paths of others on their way to their boarding gates, it occurred to me that this semi-liquid collection of flows of people was also a form of postmodern ecclesiology at work.
The liquidity of the flows of people was a deliberately chosen motif, for in a way it highlights the juxtaposition between the kind of ecclesiology presumed by the Christian Church, and the kind presumed by the food court.
This became clearer after having read a striking chapter in Daniel M. Bell Jr’s Theopolitics in an Age of Terror. In a chapter entitled “The Politics of Indifference and the Overcoming of Capital”, Bell made (without using the word “ecclesiology”) reference to a conception of gathering that was heavy with particularity. This gathering had ties to people, and also to specific places, which only deepened as time went on. This was the gathering of the Jewish people, and a gathering that - Bell argues - Paul relied upon in speaking of the Church.
I found this a distinct contrast to the flows of people that surrounded me in that busy airport food court, for, even though there were gatherings of people, they were marked by impermanence. Indeed, a food court is a church whereby one is not meant to be connected. While one connects oneself to a table, chair, or charging station, the aim of the game was to get up and rejoin the endless flows of passengers.
This disconnect can also be seen in the food that is presented. As Kamila Soh wrote in a recent column for the Catholic Weekly, part of the experience of postmodern culture is that one gets exposure to a wide variety of dishes and, by ostensibly, a wide variety of cultures. The trouble with this is that, as Soh and also Bell note, the cultures that are celebrated by postmodernity are but cultural fragments that are unmoored by the dense ties to place and people. There may be, as Bell notes in his chapter, a going through the motions of having a distinctive particularity, even though underneath the distinctive wrapping, there is a morass of similarity coming in the form of cultural fragments. These are fragments which, like the flows of people that consume them, get caught up in the endless stream of consumption that in turn follow the endless stream of capital, and eventually wind up in the endless streams of sewage in the frequent intervals of toilets.
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