I’ve been learning about the disintegration of American civil society since reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone in my Sociology 101 class over 20 years ago. In this now-classic text, Putnam charts the erosion of our common life since the 1960s, a loss now exacerbated by the rise of social media and smartphones. We are isolated, disconnected, and atomized. Loneliness is epidemic. We are clearly not okay.
There’s no shortage of prescriptions for this social illness. Yet in his new book, A Time to Gather, Bruce Feiler suggests another solution: ritual. Feiler believes rituals can save us, and his goal in this rather lengthy book is “to create a field guide for modern ritual and, perhaps, a framework for repairing our fractured world.”
The idea is intriguing, but I’m not so sure ritual is up to such a mighty task—and I found Feiler’s case occasionally astute but largely unsatisfying.
The idea for the book came from Feiler’s own sense of dislocation, what he calls “a kind of existential homesickness.” He’d just lost his father and was losing his mother. His marriage, family, and friendships were all in a season of transition. Trying to find his way home, as it were, turned his attention to ritual, “the single most effective tool in holding any community together.”
Feiler’s research led him to tour 16 countries, observing rituals both ancient and new and trying to tap into the essence of this fundamental human activity. Some of the rituals he describes are fascinating, like a Balinese tooth-filing ceremony in which teens become adults. Others, like the honor walk some hospitals perform to recognize organ donors, were deeply compelling. Still others were maddening, especially those designed by “ritual entrepreneurs” to help people celebrate their divorces as festive events.
Feiler is clearly tapping into the zeitgeist here. His research suggests a rising interest in ritual, and so do successes in Christian publishing like Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary and the Every Moment Holy books. We seem to be living amid a kind of ritual renaissance, and A Time to Gather is a helpful primer. Feiler focuses on communal and intentional actions that mark meaningful changes in our lives—“rituals around having a baby, becoming an adult, falling in love, losing a loved one”—and proves himself an effective apologist for why and how ritual matters, especially for group identity.
Perhaps the most illuminating part of the book was its analysis of what makes rituals “work.” Two dimensions stand out here.
First, boundaries: Rituals mark out and even create sacred space and action from ordinary life. We recognize this difference in church: A baptism is not a bath, and the Lord’s Supper is not leftovers on Tuesday night. Rituals serve as a kind of threshold for the people who participate: “Outside we were that; inside we are this. The separation encourages the transformation.”
And second, the stakes: “Rituals thrive in moments when risks are highest and stakes are greatest,” Feiler writes. The more challenging, involved, and costly a ritual, his research suggests, the more effective it is in transforming individuals and communities. This is why getting married in a church community that knows you, has prepared you for marriage, and is invested in the success of your relationship is so much more significant than an elopement service in Vegas.
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Beyond this, unfortunately, A Time to Gather is a frustrating book.
Part of this is about Feiler’s style. The book is a combination of anthropological research and travel memoir, and in most chapters, multiple story lines are threaded together. Sometimes that works well, but too often I found myself wondering how it all fit. There’s something to be said for showing over telling, but Feiler could have made his point with tighter argument in about 100 fewer pages.
More importantly, I question a core premise of Feiler’s perspective. He argues ritual can save us because ritual created us in the first place. That is, he contends that “ritual preceded civilization, society, and religion. Organized religion did not invent ritual; if anything, it’s the other way around. The act of narrativizing and routinizing these universal experiences is what built universal religions.”
Feiler largely bases this claim on a theory inspired by archaeological discoveries from a ritual site called Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey. Initially, archaeologists didn’t find evidence of a permanent human settlement near the spot where people performed rituals. This undermined an older theory that religion gave rise to ritual. If people were participating in ritual before they were rooted in one place and practicing organized religion, the thinking went, ritual must have come first. As the new theory goes, rituals “inspired stories, which in turn led to customs, traditions, liturgies, and laws, which in turn led to the religions.”
As is often the case, archaeological evidence can change. Archaeologists have since come to think that humans had, in fact, settled in the Göbekli Tepe area when this ritual activity was taking place. This suggests humans were carrying out rituals in the context of an agrarian society in which religion may well have been central already.
These later discoveries, which the book acknowledges, should complicate or even refute the new theory. But Feiler hasn’t changed his mind (and doesn’t explain why). He still says ritual is the source of religion, an assumption that leaves little room for divine revelation in any worldview, Christianity included.
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Feiler also attributes our humanness to ritual. He’s convinced it’s “the original fire in the belly of humanity; without it, we risk extinguishing the eternal flame that burns at the heart of being alive.” This is why creating new and improved rituals is so critical to his project of helping us save the world (and ourselves).
To this end, Feiler devotes considerable attention to ritual entrepreneurs, people who offer—often for a price—the creation and ministration of new rituals for death, divorce, or whatever you want. These are the new priests in our new (un)religious age, the latest iteration of the “spiritual but not religious” movement. Now we can also be ritualistic but not religious.
I understand why this may appeal to people outside the faith, but it rings hollow. It reminds me of the hypocrisy of Western culture’s attempt to keep Christian ethics of justice, mercy, and care for the least of these without their foundation, the living God of the Bible.
For the Christian interested in learning about ritual, then, this book is not the first place to look. Instead, I’d recommend Human Rites: The Power of Rituals, Habits, and Sacraments by Dru Johnson. Or, for a fascinating exploration of the rise of ritual in contemporary American culture, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World by Tara Isabella Burton.
Feiler is not wrong in his recognition that there’s great power in ritual. His around-the-world survey is interesting, and I can absolutely see myself using his step-by-step guide to ritual creation to make a rite of passage for my sons on their way to becoming men.
Even so, A Time to Gather leaves me unconvinced and disappointed. As an Anglican priest, I consider myself a steward and practitioner of true and ancient rituals. This being the case, I’m unconvinced our old rituals are broken and ought to be replaced. Feiler seems to take this for granted, making hyperbolic declarations like “No one wants their grandmothers’ formulaic weddings.”
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This has not been my experience. In fact, my experience has been quite the opposite. In my local parish, old rituals are precisely what many young people tell me they want. They are eager to say the same vows their grandmother spoke at her wedding. They don’t want a personalized experience. They don’t want to write their own vows (which would probably be embarrassing just a few years later). They want to stand on solid ground, so they actively seek out the beauty and sobriety of the Book of Common Prayer’s ritual for holy matrimony.
Contrary to Feiler’s view that the old rituals don’t work, I see more and more people coming to appreciate the ancient rituals for their remarkably modern genius.
Assuming that we need new rituals—and that ritual made without religion can be just as meaningful as any other—Feiler devotes much of his book to helping readers craft their own bespoke rituals. In a sense, he wants to train us all as priests. It’s a well-intended and often creative and thoughtful project. And we certainly need help. But unmoored from the understanding of humanity and reality revealed in Scripture, an understanding Feiler demonstrably does not have, it can get us only to the “soulless and shallow” rituals he hopes to avoid.
“New” and “bespoke” may be the currency of the day, but we would be unwise to jettison the old and common. They are old and common for a reason. Their wisdom and power have been tested and proven by use, generation after generation.
What is more, the most effective rituals, the ones that create the thickest sense of community connection, are those we inherit. They’re effective because they’re shared, not only among those of us alive today but also between new generations and those who have gone before. This is something bespoke rituals cannot do. They are just as atomized as the rest of our disintegrated society.
Ritual is a good thing, but it can only take us so far. Or, I should say, ritual by itself can’t save us. Only God can do that.
Kevin Antlitz is a writer and an Anglican priest in Pittsburgh. He previously pastored in Washington, DC, and did campus ministry at Princeton University.
The post The Rise of the Ritualistic but Not Religious appeared first on Christianity Today.