Rant #1.1 Justifying the Mad Crew
The Politics of Religion
At the dawn of democracy
The year 1650 was a momentous time in English history. So said the anonymous author of a pamphlet entitled A Justification of the Mad Crew published in that year. A year in which “men’s hearts fail them for fear, and looking after things that are coming”. It offered a defence of ‘ways and principles’ of “the madness and weakness of God in Man proved wisdom and strength”. At the same time it was a ‘true testimony’ of an “unspeakable joy and everlasting glory that dwells in and breaks out through this strange and unheard of appearance”. An experience which the author claims to have been wrought over, unashamed, to new life and Being.
What was this strength of madness that appeared in 1650? As a contemporary commentator, Kirk Watson, notes A Justification of the Mad Crew reads as a manifesto for a radical group of religious nonconformists and dissenters commonly called Ranters. It was a defence of the worldview and behaviour of a subversive religious movement which was no less political in its hopes. If they had a common doctrine it was the simple idea that God is present in everyone and everything. A truth which undermined both class distinctions and moral certitudes. They questioned both the authority of a clerical elite and the legitimacy of the strict social hierarchy. A social order secured only by the collusion of church and state. Most shockingly, many refuted the reality of sin as a human invention, doubted a literal afterlife, and took the resurrection to be a transforming inward experience.
In short, the Ranters were trouble makers. Appearing in the heady atmosphere of free expression and millenarian expectation that followed the English Civil Wars, they made trouble for both the minister and the magistrate. Perceiving a threat, Cromwell passed a Blasphemy Law that took special aim at the Ranters. They were the most radical of various dissenting groups that emerged to pose an ‘antinomian’ challenge to moral and political authority. Risking imprisonment, they refused to pay the tithe but many also rejected the formalism of the independent and Baptist churches. Seekers and Ranters met together instead and developed their own practices and theology.
Persecuted by church and state, within a couple of decades the Ranters had disappeared entirely from view. Many were absorbed into ranks of the Quakers with whom they shared a common inheritance. But when during the 1670s leading Quakers began to implement institutional reforms that looked like a misplaced effort to create a national church, those that opposed them were accused of being Ranters. The name became a term of abuse directed at those who worried that institutionalisation would cede the authority of spiritual experience to a collective means of control. Concealed by a call for order and discipline, these dissidents detected the ghostly reappearance of what Michel Foucault has since called pastoral power. Perhaps proving their point, some notable troublemakers were simply ‘unfriended’ and expelled from the community. Haunted by the spectre of an unruly Ranterism in their midst, the early Quakers declared instead a commitment to peace, promoted a tame middle-class morality, and confessed a more orthodox theology: a public relations campaign that eventually won their toleration. By the turn of the century radicalism had surrendered to a quietism shorn of its political promise / threat.
From Dissent to Deconstruction
What has this Mad Crew to do with the entanglements of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ today? Can we detect a contemporary strand of ‘Ranterism’ in our supposedly ‘post-Christian’ but ‘post-secular’ culture? If so, does the spirit of the Ranter inhabit a political spirituality that troubles the church? Or the state for that matter. If so, the anonymous Ranter might be found today voicing his opposition to all forms of authoritarianism. Certainly to its theocratic variety. For today’s Ranter, Christian Nationalism is a contradiction. It is a discourse on identity that stabilises the meaning of ‘us’ by way of an exclusionary boundary. What is not ‘Christian’ is not proper to the name. But boundaries can be breached. They are deconstructible.
It is true that the Ranters were a fleeting moment in history at the dawn of the modern era; a disposable product of a peculiar dislocation of English society by momentous events. Yet there was something distinctly postmodern about the ‘ways and principles’ of the Mad Crew. The hopes raised by the displacement of sovereignty from a divinely appointed king to an elected parliament were quickly dashed under Cromwell. But the heretical idea that the Spirit of God dwelled in the hearts of common people gave the principle of popular sovereignty a new urgency to what Jacques Derrida has called a ‘religion without religion’. By investing the poor and despised with a spiritual authority equal to that of priest and apostle, the Ranters dared to question the unquestionable.
Were the Ranters doing what many today call ‘deconstructing’ their faith? If so, it began with a disagreement that united them in their dissent. They expressed their objection by refusing to be part of the consensual order. They simply took their leave and opened-up new spaces. Spaces in which they could articulate new forms of faith and practice. Their departure was a political act and their spaces of worship were an experiment in an alternative political community. Forms that called into question the grounds of authority. They were not starting with a blank canvas of course. The Ranters were re-articulating their faith through a critique of an inherited discursive structure. But they were alert (we might say ‘awake’ if it didn’t sound like ‘woke’) to the latter’s taken-for-granted assumptions, concepts, metaphors and hierarchies. Each could be held up to a piercing critique.
The Ranters were critical and creative thinkers. But they were radicals in the sense that they believed they were stripping Christian religion back to its primitive roots. Some claimed to be waiting for the ‘true church’ to appear among them: an ‘emergent church’. The church to-come was a priesthood of believers possessing in-common an inward ‘Light’ that authorised anyone to speak truth. In their spiritual enthusiasm they thereby heralded the democratisation of religious life - with all its wider social and political implications. Religion and politics intersected in a zeal for social reform prefigured experimentally in their practices. They believed they were modelling a Godly society by example. And that meant a society defused of power by diffusing authority in the name of equality. In short, their spiritual practices were those of a radical democracy.
Away with Words
The deconstructive mode of their dissent can be seen most clearly in their words and actions. We know of the Ranters today largely from the characterisation made by the orthodox establishment in their day. They were portrayed as raucous libertines. They danced. They swore. They refused to doff their hat. They parodied the preaching style. They mocked the preacher. Some disrupted church services, others practised ‘free love’. By openly flouting social conventions, each was a symbolic display and minor political act of resistance. Unsurprisingly, the Ranters have been compared to contemporary counterculture hippies or foul-mouthed punk rockers. But at their extremes they were testing the limits; crossing boundaries in order to reveal their artifice. Questioning the taken-for-granted was not a matter for lofty debate but an everyday practice. They tried to live authentically the social and political implications of their radical theology. We might say ‘deconstructively’, thereby opening the way to a new creation. In their moral panic, all that their opponents could see were the harbingers of anarchy.
The Ranter’s abuse of convention extended to their use of language. Their way of speaking and writing exposed an undecidability in accepted oppositional terms: presence / absence; light / dark; spirit / flesh. The presence of God was by no means assured in fleshly human words. Instead, the condition of possibility for spiritual speech was their absence - that is to say, silence. Silence was a figure of whatever may be said and done. The possibility of God’s presence in words not yet spoken or written; an absence not merely prior to speech but beyond words and the determination of meaning. Silence betokened the beyond-Being as its condition of possibility. Thus, words spoken from silence may be on the side of Spirit as God’s Word. But one could never be certain. The silence of an unprogrammed worship, stripped of liturgical repetition, was a space for new possibilities that cannot be prefigured, anticipated or expected. The Ranters expected the unexpected - or what Derrida calls the possibility of the impossible. With ‘God’ all things are possible. As Jack Caputo reads Derrida, ‘God’ is a name of an event; the may-being (‘perhaps’) or the coming of what is always, structurally, to-come. A messianic promise or threat.
It is with this spirit of openness that the Ranters invested their novel and creative use of language with a free interpretive value. Their words made ‘spiritual’ sense in the response of the recipient. Divinely inspired words were evidenced by their subjective effect on the reader. The spiritual origin of words spoken from silence were warranted by their rhetorical power to convince: by its transformative effect on equal speaking subjects. Their playful dance with undecidability reflected at the same time the way they read the Bible and interpreted it. In the hands of the clerical hierarchy scripture had become a dead letter. But the Ranters sought to bring it to new life. Scripture was experienced as the inward workings of the same Spirit that inspired it. Thus they claimed to read scripture “spiritually” rather than literally: its symbolic and metaphorical significance revealed by an imaginative leap of faith. For the Ranters, reading scripture was not a ritual repetition but a recitement that solicits the reader or listener in its performance. They saw themselves as active participants in what we might today call a theo-poetics.
At the Dusk of Democracy?
In their words and actions, their reading and writing, their speaking and listening, the Ranters - and the Quakers that followed them - sought to make sense of a changing world. Meaning was not given but disclosed in or by an event that demanded a response. Their open-ended quest for truth accompanied a deep sense of response-ability. A responsiveness to momentous events that is not merely reactionary. There is no possibility for change, for a re-articulation of faith, without the differences that fund it. Response-ability is thus a ‘spiritual’ practice of openness to possibilities; to what may be or is to-come. An openness to the Other.
Among the assorted misfits who are leaving the church today to ‘deconstruct’ their faith we may therefore glimpse an uncanny resemblance. The ghostly figure of the troublesome Ranter called to question and to speak up. Who are these troublemakers? Who can name them? ‘Post-evangelicals’. ‘Exvangelicals’. ‘Post-Christian’. ‘Post-theist’. Names for ‘who’ or ‘what’ comes after. Names for a more radical faith or theology. But the names of dissenters are often those given to enemies, not by the friends of ‘perhaps’. The identity of the radical critic is often the product of name-calling, the name given to the accused. The name reserved for those who have lost their faith in the commonly accepted. Yet deconstruction imperils all naming as an enclosure from which ‘we’ may break free. Perhaps ‘we’ should think not in terms of the closure of a given identity or even the self-enclosure of an identification we take-up. But rather of a disidentification as the refusal of an identity that says who or what ‘we’ are. This is the moment of departure.
Many of us who have left the church no longer know what to call ourselves. If this is a good thing, it is also a difficult thing. ‘Who am I?’ can feel like ‘where am I?’ To which comes the reply of our accusers: ‘lost’. Others may be all too ready to call us names in order to shore-up their own. A collective identity is necessarily exclusive. But a stable self-identity, if it is not illusory, also threatens to enclose us. Conversely, a courageous spirituality of openness resists the temptation of ‘ontological’ security in the repetition of the self-same. That is to say, in a false sense of security purchased at the expense of the other, sacrificed at the altar to the self. It cannot make for ‘me’ a safe space precisely because it blurs the boundaries constructed by its own discourse. As soon as we say ‘we’, we have bolted the door on whoever is not. This is the politics of ‘religion’.
A political spirituality, on the other hand, knows no bounds. It unbinds knowledge from power and calls it faith. It is the reason that faith is not knowledge. Even religious knowledge that is presumed to be ‘given’ in English translations of ancient texts. Instead, constantly shifting contexts open-up interpretation not as foresight but to insight. Faith is knowledge radically exposed to what lies beyond it - to what it cannot understand on its own terms. To what - or who - is to-come unannounced and unexpectedly. And however unintelligible the appearance seems at first. Faith believes in keeping doors open. It is in the encounter with the other-than-me that ‘my’ utmost possibilities are revealable: as a self be-coming.
Therefore, deconstruction is dissent because it begins and ends with openness to the Other. An openness to the other that is at the same time an openness to the other I am yet to be. To otherness in general. To difference. To change. Exposed, who we are and what we know are simultaneously called to question; called into question. It is a mode of being that we can in truth only practise together. There is no new life and Being that is not a Being-with others. Others who are not the same as me.
Today’s Ranter, if we can call them that, practises a postmodern spirituality continuous with a longer tradition of what we may call ‘mystical anarchism’. A spiritual practice that opens up a common space for differences, for ethical reflection, creative and critical thinking free from institutional power and dogma. Which is to say, free from a certain rule or doxa or creed that demands no real faith at all.