Abstract for a Paper in Progress: The Subjectivity of the Free-Church

My aim in this essay is to reformulate the notion of the voluntary character of the church specifically in the context of its perversion in the ideological matrix of late capitalism. In spite of the dangers of individualism, the voluntary nature of the church remains a crucial manifestation of the radically interruptive nature of the call to discipleship, which can never be assumed as a given. It is simply that within contemporary American Evangelicalism, the notion of freedom has drifted away from its theological moorings. Rather than a gift of the believing community, freedom is seen as a natural attribute of human nature. Having been thusly vacated of its positive theological content, the church’s practical use of the notion of voluntarism has been arrogated by the notion of freedom of choice between differing commodities that is uniquely endemic to the ideology of late capitalism, in which the church itself becomes a commodity. Yet this self is not truly free, for it remains bound to its own desires. Although this conception of freedom is problematic on multiple levels, this paper will focus on the narrative of “subjectification” that it tells about the constitution of selfhood. The self actualized by its choice of goods remains lord over the chosen—an active, unaffected arbiter between potential selves that might be established by the addition of the product. Such an anthropology is patently hostile to the Christian narrative of selfhood, the via passiva in which our choice of Christ is predicated upon Christ’s prior choice of the believer. To choose Christ is to follow, and as such is always a rupturing of the self’s stability. The church, then, must fight for a genuinely theological understanding of freedom, in which the only freedom comes by way of participation in God’s freedom. This participation, though, does not come in the existential “moment of decision,” but rather through participation in the concrete practices of the gathered saints.