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After Religion: Generation X and the Search for Meaning: 12

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After Religion: Generation X and the Search for Meaning: 12 (Paperback)

by Gordon Lynch (Author)

2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

Paperback: 144 pages
Publisher: Darton,Longman & Todd Ltd (15 Jul 2002)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0232524297
ISBN-13: 978-0232524291
Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 13 x 1.2 cm

Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 413,384 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Book Description

How can we best understand life? What views of life might help us to live with more imagination and courage? What stories, symbols or ideas can help us to resist contemporary forces and structures that dehumanise us or starve our spiritual lives? Can the idea of 'God' have any real significance for us any more? We stand at the edge of an uncertain future for religious life in Britain. With senior figures in the Church speaking openly about the demise of Christianity, and the numbers attending church services in dramatic decline, it is clear that we are moving through a period of significant religious change. 'After Religion' draws on the idea of Generation X to make sense of these changes. Gordon Lynch focuses on the fact that many individuals today are making a personal search for meaning, rather than accepting pre-packaged 'truths' of religious, political or commercial organisations. He explores different forms this search takes, including the emergence of the!
'post-evangelical' and 'alternative worship', the use of popular culture as a source of meaning, and the possibility of a 'clubbing spirituality'. 'After Religion' will be of interest to all who seek to make sense of life today, as well as to those studying theology or training for religious ministry.

About the Author

Gordon Lynch teaches practical theology at the University of Birmingham, and is one of a growing number of young theologians who are taking a fresh look at the meanings and values that are important for people in today's society.

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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Ultimately a theological response to modernity, 29 Jul 2006

By	Sociologist of religion "miramirabile" (Denmark) - See all my reviews

I am coming to this book as a sociologist of religion rather than a theologian. This of course influences the way I read this book. theology, after all, has the very specific purpose of maintaining the relevance of faith, whereas sociologists are generally more concerned with the functionality of lived life.

Gordon Lynch uses the concept of GenerationX (to which he feels himself to belong) as a prism through which to see theology.
GenerationX is explained as a state of mind, of seeking meaning and communitas in a world in which there are no obvious and authoritarian guidelines.
Lynch belonged to an evangelical community, but has experienced disillusionment as he matured. Is there, he asks, some way in which spirituality and religion can be relevant in the lives of GenXs.
This is a valid question, one which occupies the minds of many sociologists and theologians. However, Lynch's arguments suffer from some fundamental flaws, as I see it.

1. He opposes popular culture (the culture that GenX is familiar with) with culture. Culture, implicitly, is a shared meaning and value system, whereas popular culture is something which each individual engages in and consumes in his or her personal way. So there is no shared meaning and value system in popular culture. The flaw lies in Lynch's conviction that institutionalised culture is consumed as a shared system, as if everyone in the community agreed and got the same out of their engagement with the faith and the community. In actual fact, what people do is share a vocabulary through which they can express themselves about certain things, and this is the case whether we talk to clubbers or to evangelicals. Popular as well as other kinds of cultures (if one could even talk about such a distinction) all have a diversity of potential meaning, that can be constructed and lived. People do not have to realise the same potential in order to share the conviction of communitas. But they do construct and seek to maintain some sort of social plausibility structure that supports the vocabulary and to a large extent glosses over the differences of opinion.

2. Lynch talks to clubbers and uses other researchers' works on clubbing to investigate the potential for spirituality in this environment. Because some clubs use religious or spiritual words to market their venues - the words sound hip and countercultural, and work as marketing speak. And also the clubbing culture has been (is?) associated with drugs and trance etc which are known elements of many cultic practices. He concludes that because people do not share a system of meaning and values, and because a number of them distance themselves from the idea that clubbing is a spiritual experience, that there is no potential here for shared meaning and spirituality. The chapters in question are based on a few informants and a little research into the environment. But I think that he may be going about the question in a wrong way. Lynch is a theologian with a belief in a personal god. He believes that meaning is inherent, it is there, available in the universe, that it reveals itself. Implicitly therefore, there is true and coherent meaning and then there is all the rest. Clubbers and all the rest of us who do not share this belief may be more than satisfied when we engage in various social practices from which we construct our personal meanings, and we may feel that we share with others some experiences and values, and we may not feel the need to construct theology and dogmatics to support the activity. Clubbers and others construct meaning through the activities we engage in. Meaning that makes sense to us at a given time in a given place. The problem arises when one mixes up the concepts of meaning construction and religion. Religion is a term which must be reserved for specific forms of meaning making requiring a belief in some kind of ultimate source of reality. Meaning making activites are functional, sociological phenomena that should be approached differently. This is not to say that one cannot use sociology to understand religion, but religion has its own distinctive terminology and world view.
Lynch, I think, is not quite clear to himself about what he is seeking. He thinks that he is looking for new ways of being religious or spiritual, but he is using the perspective of traditional theology to measure it, and therefore obviously he will not find what he is looking for. He believes that people must seek meaning, that this is a human trait. That may be so (although certainly not everyone would agree) but I would claim that meaning is constructed rather than uncovered.

The book, I would say, is an expression of Lynch's personal quest to align his beliefs with the age and culture in which he feels at home. It is not particularly accademic, so it is accessible to those GenXs out there that grapple with the same frustrations. But it is ultimately a theology, not a sociology as the title would suggest.

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