“O senseless and foolish people, who have eyes and see not, who have ears and hear not.” That would seem to be Kieran Flanagan’s verdict on liberal theologians in The Enchantment of Sociology, though the accused are not named or their unhappy deeds documented by textual reference. As a class they are those who appear to accept the sociological mode of social scrutiny while resolutely avoiding its clear implications, whereas their traditionally-minded opponents appear to reject sociology and all its works while putting forward essentially sociological arguments. Flanagan suggests that one reason liberal theologians are so disoriented in their understanding is because their location in the secular university has made them strangers to the body of the Church. He, on the other hand, is enabled both to see and to hear because he is a stranger and an alien in the body of English society. He walks in our supermarkets and our semi- secularised cathedrals assisted by distance to envisage the true nature of the secular challenge and a possible response.

One response is to find unmarked (and unremarked) theological clues scattered in the detritus of postmodemity. At the end of the line in the trajectory of modernity we may discern again our beginnings. As sociology seeks sources of enchantment to reverse the chill closure of Weber’s “iron cage” it may also stumble upon an unexpected preparation of the gospel.

The argument is that sociology can locate metaphors of the sacred and of theology lodged in the calculative, administered and commodified culture of postmodemity. The existence of such metaphors in itself points to a deficiency and to a vacancy at its heart where “superstition dances on the grave of positivism”.

On 20 May 1982 Pope John Paul II signed a letter founding the Pontifical Council for Culture. In it he spoke of human destiny itself being at stake in the field of culture, and he stressed that “living culture” constitutes the “ethos of a people”. Then he went on to express a key challenge for faith horizons today: “A faith which does not become culture is a faith which has not been fully received, not thoroughly thought through, not fully lived out.”.

Kieran Flanagan’s The Enchantment of Sociology could be regarded as a long footnote to that claim (which he does not quote). Even though he is suspicious of much of the discourse of inculturation, he is passionately concerned about how faith embodies itself within culture by constructing its own “habitus”—a favourite term he borrows from Pierre Bourdieu. In this respect he engages in some running battles with theologians who have misread the power of the “living culture” and whose “liberal” options for “relevance” have undermined the power of religious belonging and of the sacred. Even the Second Vatican Council’s important document (issued in 1965) Gaudium et spes, on the Church in the modem world, is accused of naivety over the question of culture, or, more particularly, of ignoring sociological insights concerning the complexity and power of culture as a product. As a result it fell into excessive optimism about the hoped-for dialogue with contemporary culture and is criticised for playing down the necessity of religious distance from the deceptions of culture.

Introduction

Social scientists show a surprising lack of interest in the influence of climate on social and cultural life. Montesquieu’s claim that climate influences social life usually falls on deaf ears these days. Can anyone seriously believe that the Economic and Social Research Council would fund a research project to test the hypothesis that “in cold countries the nervous glands are less expanded: they sink deeper into their sheaths, or they are sheltered from the action of external objects; consequently they have not such lively sensations”? Yet, I know that my mood is affected by weather conditions. It is difficult, however, to know exactly what the effect is and whether the same conditions are invariably associated with the same effects. My responses to The Enchantment of Sociology are a good case in point. I read it in proof in bleak midwinter; I read the published volume under a blazing Umbrian sun. The responses were quite different, but, as I shall explain, it is not easy to see why my responses to the book’s arguments varied with these different climatic conditions. In fact, the results were counter-intuitive in some respects, so perhaps this is why Montesquieu’s climatic thesis is regarded as problematic.

With the publication of The Enchantment of Sociology, Kieran Flanagan becomes one of the contemporary sociologists whose work is shaped by the devastating indifference which dominates so many social and cultural relationships. This is an indifference of apathy and unconcern in the face of the sense of the emptiness of so much of what passes as the good life in our commodified and media-saturated culture. It means that all the things and qualities which could once be taken to make a difference to what it means to be a human being in the world have been thrown into the flux of the quest for perpetual newness. Indifference has emerged to the extent that there has been a collapse of the chance that some quality, some ideal, or some value, might possess the abilities to make a difference.

In itself there is little new about this sociological care about the absence and lack of care. It bears some comparison with Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of dark times as those in which outrages can be perpetrated without a murmur of outrage (Arendt 1973). Meanwhile, and perhaps more pertinently for the purposes of this discussion, C. Wright Mills noted the prevalence of indifference in the late 1950s in The Sociological Imagination (Mills 1959). Mills looked at the situation which had emerged out of the settlement of the Second World War and saw people who had been left lost and alone by the erosion of their ability to accept readily the time-honoured ways of making sense of the world. He identified the outlines of what amounted to an existential and hermeneutic vacuum.

I approached The Enchantment of Sociology primarily as a sociologist of religion who teaches within both the Theology and Social and Political Science Faculties of an ancient University and whose research interests include the impact of the social sciences upon religious functionaries. I am also an intermittently active Anglican. From all three perspectives I was wholly engaged—if not always wholly enchanted—by Flanagan’s quirky originality, capacity for creative polemic, and heady mixture of sociological radicalism and theological conservatism. The prose is often dense, convoluted and subtly nuanced but a close and careful reading brings with it those two rarities, sustained intellectual excitement and an urge to continue the argument beyond the academy and into pulpit and presbytery.

At one point Flanagan cites Cooley’s observation that “a true sociology is systematic autobiography” (p.50) and in this case three components of personal biography form an integral subtext to his main arguments. One is his Irish identity. This, when not being acted out in Joycean word-play (eg. “exasperating an individualism” (p.9]),Wildean aphorism (“Satanism... a folk panic invented by Evangelical fundamentalists” [p.45]) or Shavian table talk (“theologians can appeal to the Holy Ghost when all the sociologist can evoke is the ghost of Weber” [p.86]), is nucleated around both a sense of being at one remove from English society and culture, and pride in what he calls “the capricious genius of the Gaelic intellect lying beyond the pale” (p.153).

In May 1996, addressing the central problems of faith, Ratzinger commented on the great disillusionment and non-fulfillment of hope that came after 1989. Covering issues such as pluralism and New Age religions, where god replaced God, Ratzinger observed that “if we consider the present cultural situation....frankly it must seem a miracle that there is still Christian faith despite everything”. For him, relativism has now become the central problem of the faith. But the issues he raises also belong to sociology. It also has to deal with relativism, nihilism and the escape into the New Age, the unexpected spiritual impulses that mark the condition known as postmodemity. Uncertainty has arisen over religious affiliations that oscillate between pluralism and fundamentalism, both ambiguous responses to modernity. The relationships between theology and culture have been affected in an inescapable manner.

The Enchantment of Sociology is an effort to provide something oddly unwritten: a sociological reading of the link between theology and culture. It was conceived against the moral and cultural despond of British society between August 1991 and Easter 1995. The theological mandate for the book, as Howes notices, came from Radcliffe’s irenic hope for peace in the vexatious relations between theology and sociology. His belief was that sociology could “provide a locus for the encounter of gospel and the world” and that this would be accomplished through the internal transformation of the discipline itself. The need for sociology to re-think its place in its own field of deliberations relates to a wider sense of unsettlement in a society characterised by postmodemity where matters concerning spirituality, identity and community have become uncertain.