Secular Ecclesiologies: Airline Lounges
This is the first 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.
On a recent return from a work trip, I had the pleasure of going through the experience of many a plane-traveller, the long layover. Already tired from my first leg, I was desperate from some respite from the usual din of big-city-airport crowds.
It was then that I realised that I had a complimentary voucher to the lounge attached to a frequent flyer program I joined some years before, and had spent the necessary monies on flights to be bumped up the tier that provided these glorious tickets. So, with voucher flashing proudly on my phone screen, I marched up to the lounge and eagerly awaited my quiet corner and sumptuous complimentary snacks.
Of course, in my travel induced stupor, this brilliantly laid plan hit a snag: in order to gain entry, I had to have a forward flight by the airline whose lounge this was, while the boarding pass I had was of a flight from which I had just alighted. The connecting flight, provided, by another carrier, was not sufficient for entry. This meant being booted from the hallowed halls of the lounge, out into the teeming hordes, where there was weeping and grinding of teeth.
While licking the grievous wounds to my most precious asset, my ego (whilst also gnawing on a chicken sandwich acquired from the food court - more on that next week), I realised that what I had encountered was an exercise in postmodern ecclesiology.
By way of background, the word “ecclesiology” comes from the greek ekklesia, meaning “gathering”. The study of ecclesiology, whilst understood to be a topic confined to the study of the Church, can have a much wider applicability when you take the etymology seriously. Wherever people gather, you can look at how that gathering is formed and the terms by which one is either gathered or scattered, and that can be in a broad sense the subject of an ecclesiological study. Put another way, to paraphrase William Cavanaugh in his Theopolitical Imagination, it is possible to look at processes of gathering people as parallels to the kinds of gathering that you would expect at Church, such that there can be secular as well as Christian ecclesiologies.
This raises the question of the kind of ecclesiology that is at play at an airport lounge. At one level, we could argue that an important clue to discerning any ecclesiology is to discern the objects or ends for which the gathering of people serves. In the case of the airport lounge, there are many ends that one can identify. However, one particular end that I think was particularly pertinent (at least for the purposes of my travel experience) was access to a silent corner. As I wrote in an essay in 2015, the commodification of everything has reached a point where even silence can be seen as a luxury to be bought. Seen in this light, it can be argued that the ecclesiology of the lounge is one oriented by the privileged access to silence, akin to a monastery.
While the objects can give us a clue, another clue to the lounge’s ecclesiology could be discerned by the means of gathering. This is where the picture becomes more complex.
At one level, you could argue that the means of gathering is a financial one, so that membership is confined to those with the capital to spend on flights to gain the necessary status that avails the customer of complimentary vouchers that grant access to this luxurious silence. Thus, you could say that the Church of the Airport Lounge is a body whose ligaments are made of money.
At another level, however, no amount of money could have remedied the situation I found myself in. The fact that my connecting flight was not given by a carrier is not something that could be magically solved by the expenditure of more capital.
What this experience put me in contact with was the myriad forms of churches that permeate postmodern culture. It also highlighted the contradictions and limits presented by these forms of secular ecclesiologies.
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