Why Relevance is Irrelevant

As a TA this semester, I had the rather interesting, if sometimes interminable, experience of glimpsing a sector of contemporary culture through the English 100 essays which I had to mark. In particular, I found these essays’ emphasis on relevance intriguing. Even though the essays’ topics had little to do with relevance, students often felt the need to state, usually at the beginning or end of their essays, that the piece they were working on, usually a classical work of English literature, was still relevant in contemporary society. On a superficial level, one might suggest that this emphasis on relevance is something that they are taught both directly and indirectly; because English majors like to know that their work is still important, one might magically get extra marks for employing a “relevance formula” that demonstrates a work’s contemporary importance. On a deeper level, however, the formulae that entry level students often unskilfully employ reflect, in a simple form, the hegemonies that govern academic circles. In this post, I will analyse – perhaps deconstruct – the idea of relevance as it is espoused in both the academy and the church, and will then attempt to articulate a Christian response to the question that the concept of relevance purports to answer.

Defined succinctly, relevance involves a demonstration that one thing is somehow defined in the context of another thing. If I state that a certain legislation is relevant to farmers, I mean that that legislation can (and probably should) be interpreted within the sphere and context of farming. If I state that a certain book is relevant to my life, I mean that this book touches on issues that I have experienced; thus, my life (my experience) becomes the locus from which that book derives its importance. The fact that such examples are relevant in one sphere does not necessarily exclude them from being relevant in another sphere; the legislation that is relevant to farming may also (somehow) be relevant to small businesses, and the book that is relevant to my life may also be relevant to yours. What is important is that, in each sphere of relevance, only the parts of the relevant item that affect the subjects of these spheres are retained. The remainder of the item is discarded as irrelevant.

In contemporary society, the “relevant” parts of a subject are usually determined in terms of the unchallenged exaltation of the individual. In literary fields (and presumably in other fields), the search for relevance involves simultaneous modernity driven arrogance and postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion; those theories that empower the individual are conveniently adopted, while those that pose an external (essential) threat to the omnipotent self are deconstructed as mere societal constructions – a modernity driven faith in something human (idolatry) is thus protected against intrusion leading to humility by a deconstruction that seeks to level everything that raises itself against this human idol. While contemporary deconstructors seek to offset this selfishness by deconstructing the ego itself, they simply displace the discussion, as they merely imply a different definition of the self – the self that is performing the act of deconstruction - to which the deconstructed version must bow. Thus, when a contemporary person asserts that something is relevant, they mean that that thing reinforces a selfhood developed in a secular, late capitalist context.

In literary criticism, the quest for relevance simply involves making the past look as much as possible like our own society by selectively retrieving certain portions of it, and selectively ignoring others. Thus, Shakespeare (and, increasingly, the Bible) becomes a proof text for fads and trends that change every 5-10 years, and Milton’s relatively minor heresies, rather than his much more influential orthodoxy, become legitimation for the neo-heresies that have become popular in contemporary society. When the contemporary reader picks up a book, she looks for those elements which resonate with her experiences, which are usually shaped by the greed of a consumer culture that promotes immediate gratification; only those works that can provide instantaneous McPleasure with little work become relevant, and those texts which require one to actually step outside of oneself into another language, culture, or worldview, become irrelevant. While postmodernity claims to seek an encounter with “the other,” it actually subjugates “the other” inasmuch as the very term, as used in literary criticism and cultural studies, is foreign to (and therefore imposed upon) the subjects that these disciplines purport to study.

This quest for relevance, which seeks to indiscriminately reduce all things past and present to the image of the contemporary individual, allows no room for the individual to encounter anything that can properly check or challenge his pride. Whereas those in past societies sought to learn humility by exposing their lives to the critiques of past and present authorities, the contemporary individual cannot access authority induced humility, as the authority becomes an “authority,” a bubble figure who will burst at the slightest whim of the self that purportedly constructed her. As authentic experience begins when one runs up against something larger than oneself – the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom –contemporary individuals cannot gain authentic experience because they deconstruct all things and persons larger than themselves.

To move from literary criticism to evangelical subculture, contemporary evangelical Christians have often syncretised Christianity with the contemporary, self-oriented search for relevance. Thus, the gospel merely becomes another product that can satiate the capitalist consumer – people skip from church to church as they might skip from shop to shop in a mall – and the name of Christ, emblazoned on Protestant neo-relics (T shirts and bracelets) sold at your local Christian marketplace, is indistinguishable from the name of Coca Cola; both fulfil the desire of a paying customer. However, when the gospel is promoted as relevant – that is, as something that satiates the contemporary consumer – it can no longer challenge the hollowness of self-centred relevance. By defining the gospel in terms that placate the individual’s desire to place himself in the centre of the sphere of relevance, one precludes its ability to challenge the self that must die and be displaced by the lordship of Christ. This alliance between evangelical subculture and selfishness masked as a search for relevance explains the increasing inability of evangelical churches to produce true self-sacrifice; because selfishness has been smuggled into the very heart of evangelical subculture, it has no word that it can speak to the greed and lust not only of a culture that is ever self-seeking and never fulfilled, but also to the members of the congregation who are given no weapons with which to resist their cultural milieu. Consequently, evangelical syncretism between Christianity and the contemporary quest for relevance results in what Ron Sider has recently termed “the scandal of the evangelical conscience.”

I realise, of course, that the first question that readers will have is “How can we attract our peers to Christianity if we are not to appeal to those issues, ideas, and art forms which are relevant to them.” A preliminary response to this question is that it is not our job, but rather the holy spirit’s job, to attract people to Christianity; we are called, not to contort the gospel so that it fits our historical milieu, but rather to proclaim it with integrity. Beyond this, however, I would suggest that preaching the gospel is not a matter of wholeheartedly adopting or eschewing contextualisation, but rather a matter of witnessing to God’s truth using whatever means, relevant or irrelevant, that God has given us. As Lesslie Newbigin points out in his “The Gospel in a Pluralist Society,” Christ sometimes sought to appeal to the needs and desires of the people that surrounded him – he fed the five thousand, and turned water into wine – but, other times, he absolutely refused to become “relevant” – as when he refused to become a political ruler, or when he refused to sidestep the difficult issue of telling people that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood to be saved.

I would also suggest that we should not look at the evangelical church’s syncretism as a fatal flaw, but rather as a site of God’s grace. Throughout church history we see God taking a flawed church, and working his grace through her – telling church history is not a matter of covering up those portions that are most embarrassing, but rather a matter of praising God for the miracles that he has worked in despite of ecclesiastical situations that seem beyond hope. Somewhere in Romans, Paul states that God has handed all over to sin that he may have mercy on them all. We should be excited by this discovery of syncretism, not because it is itself good, but because we look forward to the ways that God’s grace can overcome it, and make it into something beautiful in spite of its folly.