The Purpose of a Parallel Society

There was a moment in time when I was really, really into Vaclav Havel. He had only recently spearheaded the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, in which the oppressive Soviet-sponsored government was peacefully overthrown. He had more recently served as guest editor of Civilization, a magazine briefly published by the Library of Congress. And a friend of mine had written a book about his worldview as it intersected with a Christian worldview. Vaclav Havel was cool—cooler than Che Guevara, cooler than Bono. He was almost as cool as Nelson Mandela.

The moment passed, and I haven’t read any of Havel’s plays or other writings firsthand since. But I recently came across a throwaway comment from him in Michael Frost’s Exiles, a book about “living missionally in a post-Christian culture.” Michael Frost observed what my friend had observed in his worldview book: living Christian-ly today should perhaps look less like how it’s portrayed on TV—with giant rooms filled with thousands of hand-waving, tear-shedding people hanging on every word coming from a charismatic, pristinely hygienic preacher—and more like the subversive underground political movements taking place under the fist of the world’s various empires.

Frost quotes Craig Van Gelder quoting Mary Jo Leddy quoting Vaclav Havel (apparently I’m not the only one neglecting a firsthand reading of this Czech poet-politician):

“We had our parallel society. And in that parallel society we wrote our plays and sang our songs and read our poems until we knew the truth so well that we could go out to the streets of Prague and say, ‘We don’t believe your lies anymore’—and communism had to fall.”

The notion of parallel societies has an inherent appeal, I think, particularly to groups of people who see themselves as, one way or another, set vehemently against the ways and wiles of those in power. That may be the band geeks in high school, if I may get slightly autobiographical for a moment, or it may be the democrats under communist rule. Or—and this is Frost’s point—it may be the church.

But where the church often goes wrong in its execution of a parallel society is its washing of its hands of the powers that be. Let the empire be the empire, the church seems to say, and we’ll do our thing. This is especially the case when the church enjoys the benefits of empire: prosperous economy, material wealth, global dominance, just to name a few off the top of my head. In effect, the church blesses the empire, telling the powers that be to continue capitalizing on their power while the church continues to sing its parallel songs, write its parallel plays, read its parallel poems—because it can, because the empire has everything well under control.

That’s not the purpose of a parallel society. The purpose of a parallel society, according to Havel, is to immerse itself in truth as a means of countering the dominant lies, and so to overcome a culture of lies with a culture of truth. To the extent that any parallel society lets lies stand in the majority culture, that parallel society indicts itself: “You have been distracted by the insularity of your worship from the scope of your mission.”

For Frost, “worship”—the singing, playwriting and poetry-reading that coalesces around a common theme, which in the case of the church is the triune God—is not the primary role of a parallel society; its primary role is its mission. For the parallel society that is church, the mission is the renovation of the world, from the ground up, as the kingdom of God. “Worship,” Frost writes, “issues more powerfully from a missioning communitas than mission issues from a worshipping community.”

He’s right, of course, if you look at outcomes. The worship of the empire is in service to its mission: the powers that be are celebrated and given full authority over the conduct and expectations of the governed. All this has happened before, from the Caesars to the Czars to the Celebrities. And all this will happen again, until the parallel societies among us—and I count myself among that number—see our worship as being in service to our mission.