When I was in college, my Southern Baptist church back home went through a years-long conflict over musical styles in church. While the particulars of my church’s situation were unique, the battle lines in their iteration of the “worship wars” were drawn in similar places: the propriety of drums in the sanctuary, the prominence of guitars over a brass section, the potential loss of the choir and, most of all, the priority of “new songs.” Many of the congregants who felt threatened by the prospect of a praise band felt so in large part because new instruments also meant new music. They wanted to hold on to the “traditional” songs. Several years later, similar debates (although this time not as lively) surfaced over the question of whether the church should replace the long wooden pews with movable interlocking chairs (the pews won out, if anyone is curious).
The story’s been told over and over. Debates over music and chairs are never just debates over music and chairs. In both cases, individual and group preferences were guided primarily by assumptions about identity. Holding on to certain kinds of music, certain configurations of seating, declared something about the church. They were parts of a matrix of presentations that helped say, “this is the kind of church we are.” The alternatives—changing musical elements of the service or changing the seating—represented for many a kind of capitulation. To do such things would have not only shifted the identity of the church. It would have constituted a betrayal of the traditions that formed them and a surrender to the whims of modern trends. It wasn’t just about the instrumentation, the age of the songs, or the functionality of pews vs. chairs. The questions belied a deep-seated instinct to preserve the way things were in a time where one by one, other churches in the neighborhood and across town were changing. I couldn’t help but feel folks back home were trying to keep ground, to establish boundaries that would allow them to stand out and stand for something, to create a haven for anyone who wanted to hold on to church as it used to be—as it ought to be.
Cracker Barrel Culture Warriors
Although not a church, the chain restaurant Cracker Barrel’s recent rebrand has caused no less uproar than a congregational debate over pews or praise choruses (but in the case of Cracker Barrel, the uproar is obviously more artificial). For the last 50 years, Cracker Barrel restaurants were a dependable roadside standby, where patrons could step into a world of rocking chairs, old-style taffy, kitschy embroidered hand towels and corporate America’s take on “home cooking.” But when Cracker Barrel’s CEO announced major changes to the branding, including the removal of the iconic “old timer” figure, some online right-wing personalities began playing the move as a personal affront. Chris Rufo and Glenn Beck criticized the rebrand as bowing the knee to “wokeness.” The X account “Woke War Room” posted that Cracker Barrel’s CEO Julie Felss “scrapped a beloved American aesthetic” and should be “replaced with leadership that will restore Cracker Barrel’s tradition.” Even Hillsdale College’s social media team got in on the beatdown, likening the rebrand to protest vandalism of presidential statues and saying that the restaurant was “tied to the lifestyle and memories of truth-seeking Americans.”
What’s ironic about all the lament over lost legacy, the American aesthetic, and tradition is that Cracker Barrel has only been around since 1969. Unlike the old-timey general stores of the early 1900s, the very first Cracker Barrels weren’t located in the middle of town. They were on the side of interstates, a staple of highway travel in the latter part of the 20th century. They’re to 1930s general stores what Medieval Times is to English court culture in the Middle Ages. Over at The Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg called Cracker Barrels “little capitalist temples to faux authenticity.” I think that’s basically right.
“You are participating in the church universal”
The Cracker Barrel brouhaha got me thinking about another viral social media moment—or viral at least in the circles I observe. Last month, Southern Baptist theologian Matthew Barrett announced he was leaving Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, as well as the SBC itself, to join the Anglican Church in North America and teach at Trinity Anglican Seminary. While I’m not interested in laying out all the aspects of Barrett’s conversion, a few things about his own explanation for his leaving the SBC and joining the ACNA stood out to me. In his Substack piece about the major shift, Barrett said he “found the church” when he found St. Aidan’s in Kansas City. After walking through the liturgy of St. Aidan’s Sunday worship, which he calls “ancient,” Barrett opines, “What a comfort to tell our kids, ‘The way we are worshipping is how Christians have worshipped across history. It’s really, really old. You are participating in the church universal.”
The implication of Barrett’s post was that his erstwhile Southern Baptist churches were not participating in the church universal–at least, not meaningfully.
Steve Wedgeworth, himself an Anglican priest, wrote a pastoral rejoinder to Barrett. In it, Wedgeworth set to clearing up some common misconceptions that were repeated by Barrett. Here it’s worth quoting Wedgeworth at length:
A lot of the most common liturgical elements, ceremonies, clerical dress, lectionary and calendar observances are not actually “traditional” when it comes to the classic Anglican tradition. They are instead a product of the post-Vatican 2 ecumenical liturgical renewal project. This doesn’t mean that they are automatically bad, but it does mean that we need to be very careful before we pronounce them to be ancient or a part of “the great tradition.” Entering into the church with a cross was once highly controversial. Crucifixes would have been prohibited. Weekly communion was typically only found in the cathedrals. The parishes would hold Morning Prayer with the Litany and then the Antecommunion portion of the service. And Communion was typically “closed” rather than open. (The 1662 BCP has a rubric which says the people who intend to commune must inform the minister by at least the day before. A little later it says that they must be confirmed or desirous to be confirmed in order to partake in the sacrament.) A fair amount of what happens in “liturgical” churches today is not actually all that old. You’ll want to spend some time really digging into this. This place we call “Anglicanism” is a very particular wing of the old Christian house.
In short, what you find in high church Anglican services is meant to look and feel old, but it is itself a product of changes that arise in the context of modern concerns. Moreover, Wedgeworth helpfully points out that while Anglicanism is a storied and trusted “wing” of Christianity, it is not representative of all that Christianity is or ought to be. It is culturally conditioned and historically contingent.
Idealistic Remembrances and the Unbridgeable Gap (?)
Conservatives aren’t wrong to love Cracker Barrel and Matthew Barrett isn’t wrong to love Anglicanism, of course. And I’m certainly not suggesting that Anglicanism is the Cracker Barrel of the Christian Church in antiquity or the Middle Ages. My only point in tying these two events together is there’s something inside most of us that draws us into nostalgic places, whether in our purchasing consumer habits or our church consumer habits. That draw into nostalgia—even or especially nostalgia for something we never experienced like the rural South of the 1930s or the high medieval English cathedral—can drive us to over-inflate continuities between ourselves and the past and to idealize rituals, expressions and—in the case of church and Cracker Barrel—aesthetics we think capture our imagined communities in their purest form. At the risk of devolving into clumsy analogies, for some people the rocking chairs at Cracker Barrel and the incense and vestments in the Anglican parish are doing similar work in very different spaces. They’re symbols evoking a sense of the past that captures the transcendence and timelessness of foundational ideals—true America or true Church—and inviting patrons to dip into those transcendent ideals.
We all do this in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of reasons. But certainly, one major reason is because being able to locate ourselves in a stream of tradition helps us say something about ourselves as much or more than it says anything about the past. “We are the kind of people who still carry the values of hard-working, family-centered Southerners who loved the simple things in life.” “We are the kind of people who still take the traditions of the Church seriously, who carry forward the old faith and its practices.” (This could just as easily be my hymn-loving Southern Baptist brothers and sisters as my liturgical family in the ACNA, by the way.)
But when we rush too quickly into the warm embrace of traditionalism and its aesthetic, it can mask the discontinuities and dissonance between our idealistic consumption of the past and how it actually was. What we want to believe and what we want to stand for can override our critical senses.
For instance, in the case of Cracker Barrel, Jonah Goldberg’s piece points out that the death of the general store and the rural culture that Cracker Barrel parrots wasn’t due to wokeness; general stores were killed by the innovative and homogenizing forces of capitalism, the same capitalistic forces that turned Cracker Barrel into a well-known interstate staple, selling pre-packaged Southern charm across the contiguous United States. Taken this way, Cracker Barrel is the cultural appropriation of rural Southern culture and symbols by the hands of mega-corporations. A hermeneutic of suspicion might even suggest Cracker Barrel is a mockery of the very culture and values its visual and culinary aesthetic project!
In the case of the ACNA, since it is a diverse denomination with both Anglo-Catholic expressions and low-church evangelical expressions, what is Barrett to do with his coreligionists who don’t observe the procession of the cross? Who don’t participate in aural confession? Who don’t waft incense? Who ordain women to the priesthood? Whose pastors wear—gasp—tucked-in polo shirts? Are they equally a part of the church universal Barrett claimed to discover at St. Aidan’s?
In the case of church more broadly, the traditionalism of high-liturgical churches in the US can hide the ways they participate in the same culture of individualism, a culture foreign to most people of the past. The very fact that I can choose to stay at my church or to leave, to accept certain aspects of my theological upbringing or to reject them without any fear of rejoinder or social hardship—this points to a state of affairs utterly unknown to Christians up through at least the 17th century. In modern culture, even the decision to adhere to a tradition in the face of modernizing forces (in the church or in society) is an expression of individualism. And that fact has to have ramifications for how we talk about “upholding tradition” in a liberal society.
As Rowan Williams writes,
“‘reaching for’ a tradition is precisely what those inhabiting a tradition do not do; they inherit a perspective which they continue to accept as trustworthy; they do not survey a field of options and decide on one. ‘Traditionalism’ as an elective position is quintessentially modern in that it presupposes a prior distance from any specific traditional scheme…[t]o the extent that it sees fidelity to tradition as a choice whose possibility has to be secured, it presupposes that the subject—and the community of subjects—exists first in an indeterminate and contested space in which solidarity has to be created and its terms defined.”
Williams’ observations pose a major problem for the concept of tradition as it is typically deployed in our political and theological polemics. So where does that leave tradition? In a future post, I’ll talk about the development of tradition as a locus of authority in American evangelicalism. Ironically, it becomes such relatively late in the history of the movement. More on that later.
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