Religion is defined by many as dependent on morality. Others find it is historical or ethnic or supernatural, or whatever is most important to them. This time I want to think in terms of something that is so embedded in my life that it is, as they say, “visceral.” That is, deep in my gut. I want to understand it. The dyad is ROMANTIC versus SENTIMENTAL. I chose these Google definitions to suit my prejudices. The definitions themselves are various and confused.
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.
Sentimentality is a quality of being overly, dramatically emotional — sad or loving or nostalgic. When your emotions go overboard, becoming a little theatrical or false, that's sentimentality.
I started thinking about this contrast when stories with children in them, like “Anne of Green Gables” or the various Durrell animal stories, were remade in the style of Walt Disney or Hallmark. The terror and injustice that powered the plots were made cute and politically correct, entirely removing their significance. Watching them made me nauseous.
Neither of these approaches — Sentimental or Romantic — is either practical or even fact-based. They are more like cultural religions. I would add the distinction that Romanticism is story-generating, encouraging going out across borders and assumptions, and potentially dangerous. Sentimentality is limiting, demanding conformity, full of marketing like seasonal holiday decorations, motivated by safety through decoration and busy-ness. Romanticism is characteristic of “high” level comparative and historical learning about world religions that are so serious that they burn dissenters alive. Sentimentality holds ordinary and custom-governed congregations together in a shared calendar. They feel they are the only true version of the big picture, which they avoid. Nothing disturbing, please.
Romanticism is more likely to be abstract, tolerant, and academic. Sentimentality is often only smug, intolerant, and pop culture — but cannot be criticized through populism, since that’s what it is. The weak spot in UU’s idea of avoiding dogma by going to principles still doesn’t address Romanticism — Transcendentalism or people who claim both UU and Buddhism — versus Sentimentalism like coffee hours, demonstrations, and historical pieties. Sentimentality found its way in when the ministry went from “Papa” to “Mom”, from theology to therapy.
Romanticism and Sentimentality interweave until we are confused. This confusion scrambled both my relationship/marriage and my short career as clergy. Sometimes it was between me and my family, other times about the culture, and mostly about my lack of clarity. It should have been confronted in seminary, but seminaries don’t want to rock the boat. They are domestic except in periods of social uproar, which may destroy them, even though it brings in the candidates.
In fact, neither frame of mind is a perfect alternative to simple meaningful reflection, based on facts, which is not what comes to mind when considering either love or religion. Nor even artistic genius, which was the Romanticism that ruled me more than sex. I was very practical about sex: income, vasectomy (no taking chances), no hitchhikers, no left-overs. A lot of it just gets taken out of one’s hands, like the rule about no children, overruled by the appearance of someone else’s children who must be accepted.
Few in Browning had any sense of great sculpture of the past, the Romantic transcendence of a woman with wings, the evocative entwining of Rodin’s naked lovers. They knew kitsch, just short of toys. Bob’s mom always admired his work saying, “Oh, look! You can even see the buttons on the man’s shirt!” That attitude changed over the decades, partly because of the terrifying challenges of punk rockers. Religious awe moved out of the churches and into sci-fi movies. The young craved Romance.
When I was a child, my mother and we kids attended Vernon Presbyterian church because our father needed the car. In those days families only had one car. One of the most moving Sentimental events at that little neighborhood church was a Mother’s Day luncheon. The women carried long tables and folding chairs out to the yard and spread white clothes, used real dishes, decorated with armfuls of roses as one can do in Oregon. Red roses meant your mother was living, white roses meant they had passed.
Everyone sang songs they knew and ate the food they had brought, and celebrated even the mothers no longer living. Nothing is more Sentimental than mother’s loving and being loved, which is why it’s so traumatic when it goes wrong, but we were just leaving a world war and had to honor the deaths of sons as well as their dangerous birth. The Sentimentality of a sweet sunlit sharing was against a background of horror and terror, trying to make it tolerable.
The minister made a brief appearance, I guess. At the back of this church was a Chinese family. They were actually from China and their daughter was in my classes though a bit older. She has been a lifelong friend. This minister hated the family because they continued Chinese customs by drying fish, hanging them on the swing set, and receiving turtles meant for eating, scrabbling in wooden boxes. The high Romantic drama of leaving China and making a new home was entirely invisible to this man who thought only his own Englishness was admirable. It was my introduction to hypocrisy.
A later minister at Vernon Presbyterian in the Nineties, with a new church as a base, took on the problem of slum landlords in Portland, a Romantic undertaking meant to release people trapped by poverty, so forced to accept trash housing.
In the shifting fortunes of the Methodist congregation here in Valier, they once hired a ministerial couple. He had been military and enjoyed having so much status that he could park where it was forbidden, drive in the out access, and snub all lesser folk. His wife, a former owner of a bridal supply business, wanted the church to be pretty and therefore determined to get rid of all the clutter: benches, stained glass, mozaics, etc meant to commemorate earlier people and events. These people used a corrupt Sentimentality to justify self-importance.
The underlying dynamic of the Sentimental versus the Romantic seems to be dimension. Sentimental people want their horizon to be near and familiar in order to feel safe, to stick together. The Romantics want possibility to be always there, to be able to go over the mountain to find out more. Both impulses are intensified in chaotic times like ours.
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