Who could have imagined the changes that 2020 would bring to our entire planet? We certainly did not. We began preparing this issue of Liturgy in 2019. Our focus was on ritual performance in worship practices, and our two guiding assumptions were these: 1) ritual meaning lies not just in what is done but how it is done, and 2) ritual performances are culturally embedded and therefore contextual actions. In the intervening months, the Covid-19 pandemic instigated more extreme and rapid changes in how Christian practices are performed than any other event since the Reformation. Literally overnight, weekly religious rituals of all faiths around the world went online or perhaps to the drive-in. Rituals that mark and shape our lives were immediately and significantly upended. Traditional funerals were forbidden; baptisms were put on hold; lawyers and judges explored the legal requirements for “presence” in weddings, pondering the legality of virtual attendance; and the “whether,” “why,” and “how” of virtual Eucharist became hotly debated. Elements of our two guiding assumptions changed overnight: how rituals are performed and the context in which they are performed.
Immediate Questions
Many congregations decided, independently and immediately, to transition to online worship. Churches tried Zoom and Facebook Live and other platforms, often with a steep learning curve for both pastoral staff and congregants. Technology has been an enormous blessing in allowing communities to join together and ministries to continue. Miracles have happened—when the Spirit flowed through electronic devices and the isolation of quarantine was punctured by love.Footnote1 Communities of faith whose members found in-person worship inaccessible have been able to join their church families. There have also been heavy losses, too. Medical experts identified singing to be a potent means of transmitting the disease when people are together in person, and the tiny time lags in computer connections make real-time congregational singing online painful.
Some denominations decided to wait to celebrate the Eucharist until congregations could co-locate with the priest and eat the same consecrated elements. Others allowed for new ways of celebrating, with congregants bringing their own food and drink to their individual computers, attempting to be together—to partake of and become one body—from myriad locations. Some congregations even distributed consecrated elements to their congregants to be used in their next celebration of the Lord’s Table. Central to debates and decisions about celebrating the Eucharist has been the desire for the unity and nourishment of the sacrament for those living in social isolation and fear because of Covid-19. For many churches, the context of need was more important than how the Eucharist would be performed.
Two of the essays in this issue examine these pandemic-related issues directly. Others, written before the outbreak, testify to the liberating power of performance in shared spaces. The contrast is appropriate to the moment in which we find ourselves. We do not know when this pandemic will end, but some of its effects on our shared life will be lasting, including changes in how and how often we use technology to make our ritual performances accessible to dislocated people. It might be useful, then, to frame these essays within reflections on the less immediate, larger questions regarding how shifting online might affect the how and the context of liturgical performance.
Broader Questions
The fields of liturgy and performance studies both look closely at how what we do forms us—shaping who we are and how we know. Covid-19 has changed performances of liturgy in recent months, making them less embodied out of necessity. But there has long been a bias against performance in education and religion, and possibly culture in general in North America since its “European inception.” The pilgrim’s anti-Catholic and anti-ritual bias is a common trope among liturgical and ritual scholars. The Puritanical distrust of performance as exhibitionism and deception was a common theme in their distrust of theater, gambling, holy days, and the Eucharist (improperly understood). There was a sense in which this reflected a distrust of physical creation, including human embodiment. This is a significant strand of the tapestry of American piety that would be woven in the coming centuries.Footnote2
Many of us were raised to believe that knowledge happens between our ears. This idea is reflected in the set-up that is standard in most K-12 classrooms in the United States. Students sit still at desks, in rows facing the teacher at the front of the classroom. From early on, children are often disciplined to act as if their bodies have no part in learning, their emotions are an obstacle to learning, and their communities outside of the classroom are set apart from their learning. This is part of the “implicit curriculum” taught through unspoken expectations and not listed on the syllabus. The education system in the U.S. was established, at least in part, on modern sensibilities—exemplified in Descartes’ statement, “I think therefore I am”—that the human person is a rational, autonomous, individual subject and agent.Footnote3 The very best knowledge—Truth with a capital “T”—is true always and everywhere. The best way to attain this knowledge is through individual, rational thought that explicitly tries to ignore emotions, ethical commitments, embodied reality, and communal ways of being. Descartes articulated this in a work designed to defend the scientific method that was emerging in his lifetime, and it is still taught—in some way or another—in ours. This was and remains compatible with an anti-performance bias.
Contemporary research teaches us that this way of understanding both humanity and knowledge is inaccurate. From the field of embodied cognition, we learn that the entire nervous system is involved in cognitive processes.Footnote4 This is why a driver can hit the brakes before the image of an obstacle in the road can be received and processed in the brain. From the field of trauma studies, we learn that emotions are so deeply involved in how we perceive and interpret the world that pretending we can ignore them is a dangerous form of self-deception. Indigenous authors in various fields teach that it is ecological suicidal to see the human person as first and foremost an individual, isolated from both human and non-human community. Theological and biological perspectives both demonstrate that human beings are interconnected to their environment, which includes other human beings.Footnote5
Research by performance theorists concludes that the paradigms of disembodied understanding are colonial ways of understanding humanity and knowledge that necessarily lead to oppression. The human person consists of intellect, emotion, body, and volition. We know by using all of ourselves. Modern ways of viewing both person and knowledge slice us up into separable pieces and elevate intellect over all else. This technique was a key move in colonial conquest.Footnote6
Performance theorist Diana Taylor delineates two ways of creating, storing, and disseminating knowledge: the archive and the repertoire.Footnote7 The archive is written down, inscribed. The repertoire is performed, embodied. One could learn how to bake bread from one’s grandmother, working together in the kitchen, through repertoire, or one could learn the same recipe from a cookbook, through archive. Taylor’s research details how the process of colonizing the American continents included a separation of the archive from the repertoire and culminated in an elevation of archive over repertoire as a superior form of knowledge.Footnote8 The words of books and maps—held by the colonizers—were real Truth, while the dances, rituals, and oral traditions of the indigenous population did not count as “knowledge” at all. The elevation of the archive continues after the initial phase of conquest because it is easier to control access to writing (including pencils, paper, and publication) than dancing. To this day, people of European descent are much more likely to work in “archive” settings—lawyers, professors, accountants, and so forth—while people of color in the U.S. have more “repertoire” options open to them—jobs of manual labor, physical care, and in case of great success, sports or music.
Dwight Conquergood, another performance theorist, uses different terms to detail the same patterns of colonialism. He analyzes how the knowledge of those who were colonized was ignored and dismissed. “Subjugated knowledges have been erased because they are illegible; they exist, by and large, as active bodies of meaning, outside of books, eluding the forces of inscription that would make them legible, and thereby legitimate.”Footnote9
In Belize, for example, Garifuna people, an African-descended minority group, use the word gapencillitin, which means “people with pencil,” to refer to middle- and upper-class members of the professional-managerial class, elites who approach life from an intellectual perspective. They use the word mapancillitin, literally “people without pencil,” to refer to rural and working-class people, “real folks” who approach life from a practitioner’s point of view.Footnote10
Keep in mind that the modern understanding of the best way to know is wrapped up in the modern understanding of humanity. For Descartes, the essence of humanity was to think rationally. When colonialism denied the knowledge of indigenous peoples, this was a way of denying the humanity of the colonized. Theologian Brian Bantum explicates the connection between the Cartesian ideal of Truth, archived in print and disconnected from bodies, emotions, and community, and the brutality of colonization and slavery. He refers to the converging “realities of the slave ship and the encyclopedia.”Footnote11 The way of thinking that allowed slavery to thrive is exemplified in the encyclopedia’s attempt to classify and contain “objective” knowledge independent of embodiment, emotion, ethical commitments, or even geography.Footnote12
These ideas about truth and knowledge, pervasive in the early modern period in Europe, were entangled with the Protestant Reformation in complex ways. The Reformers initially aimed to stop the abuse of religious power in the Roman Catholic church. One effective tactic in the new age of the printing press was to de-emphasize the importance of particular religious people (priests), places (cathedrals), and things (relics), highlighting instead that access to God was available to all through God’s printed Word. A related approach, particularly in the Reformed tradition, was to move the importance of worship away from embodied performance of ritual and toward the speaking and hearing of the Word of God. Even repeated prayers—which might become muscle memory—were generally discouraged in strict Calvinist congregations, as the purest type of worship was cast as spiritual, with spirituality understood in increasingly disembodied and individualistic terms. After the work of the initial reformers, the meaning of “faith” itself began to change in Protestant theology, moving away from a form of relationship with God and neighbor that involves the whole person, toward an interior, intellectual assent to propositional truth claims about God. In some way you could chart the various expressions of the Reformation in later years by how much or how little embodied ritual was preserved in their worship.
Historian Richard Muir describes what happened in the Protestant, post-printing press world as separating the Upper Body from the Lower body. The experience of Christianity in the late medieval period by the common person was one in which the church’s rhythms were in sync with the agrarian rhythms of their life. You would fast during planting season, and feast during the winter when you had food stores to eat and less work to do. Religion was not separate from basic bodily needs and functions, but rather a way of inhabiting daily life. However, in medieval imagery, it was common for Christ’s divinity to be visually located in his Upper Body, with his humanity located “below the belt.”Footnote13 For the rest of the population, the Lower Body was associated with the excess and ambiguity of Carnival, while the Upper Body was associated with the self-discipline of Lent. Eventually, a separation of the Upper Body from the Lower and an emphasis on the Upper, displayed in highly regulated postures and mannerisms, became signs of aristocracy and upper-class status. The Protestant Reformation added fuel to the “civilizing” fire.
Certain Calvinist regions…and the Quaker sects took the process to the most marked extremes. The civilizing process figuratively turned the walls of the monastery inside out, subjecting first the aristocracy and eventually even the peasantry to the systematic self-discipline once expected of only monks and nuns. For spiritual and social benefit, every civilized person adopted a repertoire of manners to surround and isolate their physical body, especially in the three areas characteristic of Carnival license: behavior relating to the consumption of food, the pursuit of sexual pleasure, and the acting out of violent impulses.Footnote14
The same egalitarian impulses within the Reformation that declared all people, not merely the avowed religious, have access to God also expected all people to have a bodily discipline of pious manners.
The Reformed and Quaker groups (to name two, as Muir did above) exported this sort of Upper Body faith to North America and then to the world. The contrast between this way of being, which elevates the archive, the Upper Body, and the written word, contrasted significantly with the ways of native residents encountered in the Americas and in Africa. The contrast was seen by colonizers as justification for the exploitation and enslavement of indigenous American and African peoples. And as such, full-bodied performance, especially of worship, was seen as being beneath civilized Godly people.
Of course, churches with such rationalized worship are a minority in the vast diversity of Christianity across time and space, and even in the U.S. today. The ethnic diversification of the Protestant churches and the influence of charismatic and Pentecostal renewal movements have made significant headway more recently in reuniting the Upper and Lower bodies in many Protestant churches. Christianity is an incarnational faith that affirms God’s presence in a human body, God’s value for all human bodies, and God’s creation as both the site and “stuff” of revelation. Christian worship includes eating, drinking, splashing, dancing, singing, clapping, and shouting; incense, icons, rosaries, and stained glass. Liturgy, at its best, is precisely the kind of formation that integrates all aspects of the human person—intellect, emotion, body, and will. Even the most staid Reformed congregations are moving in this direction, guided by the increasing awareness that dividing the person up into pieces is a practice that causes harm.
Online Formation?
Enter Covid-19: suddenly, both education and worship move primarily online. The limits of technology and its users can reinforce the implicit curriculum of early modernity. We sit still and keep ourselves on “mute” to hear what is spoken. The written word becomes paramount as we type questions or greetings in the chat box. Back and forth conversation is stifled and awkward. Perhaps we use photos as backgrounds so that our physical locations—messy living rooms or shared kitchen tables—are invisible as we place ourselves, virtually, elsewhere. It can seem that we are merely individual minds, as we interact without benefit of handshakes or hugs, without smelling one another’s perfume or coffee breath, without sensing one another’s weariness or comfort. Online interactions appear to be a Cartesian dream come true.
And they are, in the sense that Descartes’ picture of the intellect separated from body, emotion, and will was always an illusion. The implicit curriculum taught us to pretend our bodies and emotions did not matter, that the best view was the one from nowhere. It was never true. As we sit in front of our computers, necks ache from looking down, eyes tire from the screen, and legs grow stiff. These minor pains affect emotions, as do our desires to see each other face to face. We do not sit here as autonomous individuals, but as people intertwined with others and the world around us. Descartes declaration, “I think therefore I am,” was never adequate to human reality. It is important both to recognize that disembodied rationality as the essence of humanity is false and to actively work against propagating the illusion, as history has shown us the oppressive results of this fallacy. As people in the business of formation, we must consider carefully how to avoid the technological trap of only addressing the intellect, without intentionally forming the body, emotions, and will. We must counter the bias against performance. In the context of Covid-19, how can we form and perform our faith without continuing oppressive patterns?
Rhizomatic Uprising
Covid-19 was not the only reality that shifted as this issue was coming together. Ahmaud Arbery was jogging when white men followed him in a pickup truck and killed him. Breonna Taylor was asleep in her bed when police officers burst through her door and shot her eight times. And George Floyd called out for his mama as a police officer knelt on his neck for seven minutes and forty-six seconds, others watching as his breath and life were taken from him.Footnote15 Because George Floyd’s killing was recorded, that technology allowed many of us to witness fatal injustice virtually. Protests against police brutality and structural racism arose in over 1,700 cities across the country, in all fifty states. From small towns in Appalachia to big cities on the coasts, people took to the streets to demand justice.Footnote16 The protests spread from the U.S. to the world—Spain, England, Nairobi, Hong Kong, France, Japan, Kenya, and many more.Footnote17 Local, embodied performances of protest were organized by text and social media, which connected and inspired others to protest in their own towns and cities, in their own embodied ways.Footnote18
This movement is rhizomatic, like wild strawberries. Strawberry plants root down in one location, then send out a long tendril elsewhere, touch down and root again. They exist by creating a non-linear interconnected web which cannot be seen on the surface in their seemingly independent existence.
The protests—ongoing as we write—have been powerful precisely because they are embodied performances amplified by the technological dissemination of pictures, videos, and live feeds. We see the sheer number of people willing to go out in a pandemic after they have been quarantined for weeks. We see the violent police response—tear gas, sound cannons, pepper balls, and rubber bullets. As of this day, two dozen people have been killed by police and National Guard actions during these protests. And still, more people are willing to put their bodies on the line to declare that Black lives matter.
Local and global, embodied and technologically enabled, these protests defy any separation of Upper and Lower Body, of archive and repertoire, of intellect, emotion, body, and will. Perhaps the rhizomatic uprising of these protests can be a model for formation in these strange days. An inspiration for how we can embrace the blessing of technology that allows us to connect, without dismembering the human person into bits and pieces.
Our Invitation
So welcome to our issue on performance. We begin with Todd’s exploration of how every person’s participation in worship has the potential to form other people’s worship practices and faith. We next invite you to consider the life-giving qualities of technology and how this can translate to on-line worship, even the Lord’s Table, according to Deanna Thompson. Then consider how people, no matter how wired they may be, are still intrinsically connected to our planet’s ecology by their body, as Cláudio Carvalhaes observes, and how this might even be enhanced by technology. Maria Fee will then introduce us to the Black church inspired performance art of Theaster Gates and what it might teach us about performances of Christian worship. Brandon McCormack will examine practices of Maafa rituals as performances of healing that can aid and sustain the healing of Black communities. This will lead into the contemporary performances of worship in Black churches and the integration of hip hop with gospel music as mutually enriching resources drawing on the riches of the Black community both present and past overcoming a fragmented faith, an analysis brought to us by Charrise Barron. Shannon’s essay finally suggests that rituals and performances of joy could have positive effects in healing trauma and even protecting future generations. In much the same way the fully embodied rites of Black churches invite us to restore our humanity in worship, they also invite us to celebrate the joy of God’s love in all circumstances.
We have no idea what life will be like when you read this, but we have a suspicion that issues of technology, ecology, race, ritual and faith formation, and practices that bring joy—not to mention the nature of our shared humanity—will still be explored in the conversations surrounding Christian liturgical performances.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Shannon Craigo-Snell
Shannon Craigo-Snell is professor of theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
Todd E. Johnson
Todd E. Johnson, the current vice-president of The Liturgical Conference which publishes Liturgy, holds the Brehm Chair in Worship, Theology, and the Arts at Fuller Theological Seminary in California.
Notes
1 Danny Westneat, “Some churches sued over the coronavirus shutdown. But some say more people are coming than ever,” Seattle Times, June 5, 2020, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/some-churches-sued-over-the-coronavirus-shutdown-others-say-it-made-them-better/.
2 See Jonas Barish, “Exhibitionism and the Antitheatrical Prejudice,” English Literature History 36, no. 1 (March 1969): 1–29; and Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Most recent scholarship has nuanced this somewhat, as the Puritans understanding of worship being “all of one’s life” had a connecting point between the necessity of worship (particularly prayer and preaching) being edifying and living a “purified” and upright life. Ritual actions such as kneeling were seen as either superstitious or meaningless. See Alan Rathe, Evangelicals, Worship, and Participation: Taking a Twenty-first Century Reading (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 214–215.
3 Rene’ Descartes, Discourse on Method and Related Writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke (New York: Penguin, 1999), 25.
4 For introductions to this field see Lawrence Shapiro, Embodied Cognition (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Lawrence Shapiro, The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition (London: Routledge, 2014).
5 The two of us were involved in a double-blind study examining the effects of embodied versus disembodied learning in teaching spiritual practices to seminary students. It was written up in Todd E. Johnson, “A Body of Evidence,” SPIRITUS 18, no. 2 (Fall 2018): 231–45.
6 This is in addition to the explicitly racist nature of many Protestant rituals in the context of pre- and post-slavery America. See William Scott Haldeman, Towards Liturgies that Reconcile: Race and Ritual among African-American and European-American Protestants (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
7 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19–20.
8 Taylor, 18.
9 Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial (New York: Routledge, 2004), 370.
10 Conquergood, 372.
11 Brian Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016), 1.
12 Bantum, 2.
13 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 126.
14 Muir.
15 Minnesota prosecutors acknowledged that the video timestamps showed the officer’s knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for a shorter time than had been widely reported. The one-minute difference would not affect the charges filed. See https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-06-18/derek-chauvin-had-knee-george-floyd-neck-746-rather-than-846.
18 Some particular types and instances of activism have been criticized as “performative,” meaning that they are just for show. This is a different use of the terms “performative” and “performance” than that of academic and liturgical discourse. For a more detailed discussion of these terms, see Shannon Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church: Theater, Theology, and Bodily Hope (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 13–20.