Spiritual-Social Dichotomy

Is it the Church’s responsibility to seek for social change and/or reform? This is perhaps the single most asked question by conservative Christians when the issue of Church and community involvement comes up. As far as these well thinking believers see it, the Church has a spiritual responsibility and ought not to be side-tracked by social concerns, as urgent as those might be. We elect governments to see to the physical and social wellbeing of the community; the Church ought to care for the spiritual.

In my previous blogs I have shown, I believe clearly, why I do not support the above view, at least not in its entirety. The Church does have a spiritual concern, and merely thinking socially does not address that concern. However, if we divorce the physical and social from the spiritual, we have missed the full essence of the Biblical message. I will not argue that point again here. What I am more concerned with is where this dichotomy has come from, to the extent that it is the dominant way of thinking for so many Christians today.

I want to suggest that this dichotomized spirituality is as a result of our former colonial masters being the ones who brought us the Christian message. In England, even in the heyday of slavery, this strict separation between the social and spiritual was not a reality in the Anglican Church. In fact, the Church of England was, in the minds of many thinkers, a mere change in name and titular head, when compared to the Roman Catholic Church that it replaced. As the Roman Catholic Church was the final authority on all matters spiritual and social, so was the Anglican Church in England. How then did this change in the Caribbean?

Historical evidence suggests that when the Anglican Church established itself in the West Indies in the mid 1600’s (see Arthur Dayfoot – The Shaping of the West Indian Church) as a means to minister to the British Plantation owners and operators, they soon found it pragmatic to separate their spiritual message from that of the social responsibilities of their followers, as a means of keeping the financial support of these said followers. The government in England had told the Church in the West Indies that they would not be supporting her financially, and so created the Parish system where taxes levied on the planters looked after the social and spiritual welfare of the colonies. Apparently the church leaders believed it expedient not to overly trouble the planters about the social misbehaviours, fearing their withholding of taxes, which would lead to the church’s demise. As such, in a fairly short time the church’s message was limited to the spiritual, to the extent that there was not even a community centre present on any church property. The buildings were only seen as places of worship.

What began as expediency for the survival of the Church soon became binding law, and later non-conformist churches that came (Methodists, Moravians, Presbyterians, etc.) found themselves operating in these strictures in order to be allowed to maintain a presence here. Apparently, this was the pattern of the establishment of Christianity wherever the colonial masters went, to the extent that we have had a large number of Christians growing up in such contexts where today they themselves defend the idea that as long as the soul is alright for the afterlife, we need not be overly bothered by the social realities in which we live. They know no other theology.

Unfortunately, these same Christians scoff at theology and theological education, saying that such amounts to nothing more than man’s perverse ideas of the Bible. They strongly believe that their ideas are taken only from the Bible. But if they were to take off the denominational lenses they have inherited, and read the Bible cover to cover, they would see that though the spiritual is not the same as the social, it is almost impossible to maintain the spiritual without a serious concern for the social. The challenge is for them to take up any book of the Bible, and attempt to read it without bias. I guarantee that they will see that a dichotomy does exist between the spiritual and the social, but not in the Bible. Such exists only in the minds of people who have been conditioned to see it just that way, simply because it was sinfully beneficial to others. And that dichotomy continues today, simply because it remains sinfully beneficial to some.

What do you think?