The Dish

by Dish Staff

Steve Holmes, a Baptist minister, shares what it was like to lead a funeral service for his grandmother, who requested that services include no religious content:

Inevitably, I looked around for help; I’ve done enough liturgical work to know that there are always riches from which to borrow. That said, the Humanist material I discovered surprised me – although on reflection the problem was predictable. Like most contemporary ‘humanism’, it all failed rather badly to be nonreligious. I looked at half-a-dozen or more published patterns for a humanist funeral; every one borrowed central Christian texts, deleted the obvious references to God, and then used the filleted remains to shape the service. (Even Scripture was not immune; Eccl. 3 was several times in evidence. John Donne’s Divine Meditation XVII was also referenced more than once.) This of course reflects the reality – and the tedious banality – of too much contemporary Western atheism: take a philosophically-rich account of things; delete surface references to the divine; and assume that what is left will be meaningful or coherent or interesting. Nietzsche, the world hath need of thee…

The experience itself was interesting; the defiant rebellious joy of a Christian funeral was of course absent (‘Where, death, thy sting? Where, grave, thy victory?’ (a phrase I recall Graham Tomlin describing as the liturgical equivalent of ‘You’re not singing, you’re not singing, you’re not singing anymore!’); ‘Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son – endless is the victory thou o’er death hast won!’), but that did not feel like a huge problem. We came to say goodbye, and goodbye was said; if I personally could have said so much more, that was the absence of a wonderful bonus, not the presence of a yawning absence. I know the philosophical stuff on the obscenity of death, but my grandmother died old and full of years, and it did not feel like that.

by Dish Staff

Roger Kimball argues that there’s a moral component to the kind of bad taste we call “kitsch”:

[T]o say that something is kitsch is to utter a judgment that is moral as well as aesthetic. The failure of kitsch is not just an artistic failing. There is an ethical dimension as well. Hermann Broch identifies kitsch as “the element of evil in the value system of art” and notes that “kitsch” describes not only certain works of art but also a certain attitude towards life. … [T]he element of untruthfulness is key. “He who produces kitsch,” Broch writes, “is not someone who produces art of meager value. He is not someone of little or no talent. He is definitely not to be judged according to the standard of aesthetics but is ethically depraved; he is a criminal who wills radical evil.”

That may seem hyperbolic. We’ve certainly come a long way from corny genre scenes, paintings of puppies with big eyes, or pretentious, pseudo-classical hotel lobbies bedizened with colored lights. But Broch understands that kitsch rests on a fundamental refusal of reality, on an effort to counterfeit life, to replace reality with a species of narcissistic fantasy. The puppy with big eyes may seem innocent enough. But when extended to the whole of life and invested with the pathos of untrammeled fantasy, kitsch forms a brew that is toxic as well as infatuating. “Evil” is not too strong a word.

(Image via Flickr user Mark]

by Matthew Sitman

That seems to be the gist of Rod Dreher’s latest response to me in our ongoing exchange about Christianity’s place in the modern world. If you go on and on above love, as I tend to do, what makes such goodwill and charity different from mere “secular idealism”? Rod even breaks out an oft-quoted line from H. Richard Niebuhr, implying that how I discuss Christianity comes perilously close to the following: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” What he means is that there’s nothing particularly Christian about just being nice to each other or having a “social conscience,” so if that’s all you’re claiming for your faith, then there’s really no need to hang onto all the metaphysical claptrap and depressing talk of sin. Christianity becomes indistinguishable from vague notions of making the world a better place, which is to say it ceases to really be Christianity. If that’s what Rod thinks I’m arguing for, or even where my arguments lead, then I definitely need to clarify what I mean.

The more I’ve considered Rod’s arguments, the more I think he’s trying to pin down what makes Christianity distinctive. Consider this passage from his recent post:

If the younger generations look to the churches — liberal and conservative both — and see nothing much different from what they see elsewhere, they will rightly wonder, “Why bother?” Wouldn’t you? If being a Christian means nothing more than being a respectable conformist — conforming to a suburban conservative culture, to a liberal urban culture, or anything else — then why be a Christian at all? To comfort ourselves psychologically? Is that all there is?

I appreciate that Rod, unlike many conservative Christians, is an equal-opportunity critic of our culture. He’s against same-sex marriage, but he’ll also call out the excesses of capitalism and our idolatry of wealth. On many occasions I nod along when reading him, actually. Yet I still find myself approaching Christianity – thinking about its distinctiveness – differently than Rod.

I’ve written this before, but it’s worth reiterating: Christianity is not fundamentally about morality. It is not, finally, just a system of ethics. If Jesus were merely another guru telling us how to live better and more moral lives, with perhaps this or that original flourish, I’m not sure how compelling I’d find his message. Instead, I understand Christianity as a faith for those who can’t help but sin, one that assumes our inability to be moral. And this isn’t because we all fail to uphold certain ideals on occasion, but because we are sinners, meaning that even our supposed good works are tinged with self-interest or self-regard. Nothing pure issues forth from human hands, nothing escapes from the fallibility and brokenness in which we are inevitably implicated. Jesus didn’t just talk about our deeds, but our motives. He told us to pray in closets and not let our left hand know what our right hand is doing, such is our capacity for arrogance and self-congratulations. He didn’t just talk about adultery, but lust, and asked those of us who have never murdered someone if we’ve ever been filled with anger. I wish more churches would preach about sin this way – not as some kind of list of what not to do, but rather as the impossibility of being truly good.

What I find distinctive about Christianity is that, in the face of all this, it offers the promise of forgiveness. It holds out mercy and grace as a response, in Francis Spufford’s blunt phrase, to “the human propensity to fuck things up.” And this forgiveness comes not as a reward for getting our acts together, but despite the fact we never quite do. Christianity says you are loved unconditionally, loved before you deserve it – which you never really will, anyway. To be a Christian means most of all to perceive, however falteringly, that God forgives and loves you in the midst of your brokenness, and to then live in light of that love. As St. John put it, “We love, because He first loved us.” The order really does matter.

When Rod asks what a person might see in churches that makes them different from the surrounding culture, I hope it is what I’ve just described: people profoundly humbled by their sins who, because of the love shown to them, offer compassion and mercy to all who suffer and struggle. This does not mean churches simply should say, “I’m okay, you’re okay.” It means churches should be places where you can be honest that you are not okay, places we stumble into when we are at our worst – and yet still find we are embraced. If that’s not all there is to the Christian life, it certainly is where it starts.

This still leaves open questions about how Christians should view certain dilemmas posed by modern life, how historic Christian teachings should be brought to bear on new situations. So Rod still might find the above too vague – but, in a way, that gets to the heart of our disagreement. My claim from the start has been that Christianity assumes our moral efforts never are sufficient, meaning I can’t bring myself to say what makes Christianity different simply by pointing to the morals it might teach. Which makes me want to ask Rod why he thinks certain moral positions are what should set Christianity apart from the mainstream culture, what outsiders should see as making Christians different. If you are against same-sex marriage and critical of large swaths of modern life – well, so are many Muslims. Presumably Rod would find a fair amount of agreement between himself and many Orthodox Jews on a number of these issues. I’d even wager that some cranky, bow-tie wearing agnostic feels just as alienated from modern capitalism as Rod does. If you don’t need to be a Christian, or even religious, to make the same moral critiques of our culture as Rod, then I can’t help but wonder if I’m not the only one needing to explain why he bothers with Christianity.

(Image: Christ cleansing a leper by Jean-Marie Melchior Doze, 1864, via Wikimedia Commons)

by Dish Staff

Adam Kirsch revisits Simone Weil’s 1943 essay, “On the Abolition of All Political Parties”:

“Political parties,” she writes, “are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice.” The member of a party delegates his conscience to the party, accepting its verdict on all political and moral questions; a person will do “as a Communist” or “as a Nazi” things that he would never do as himself. Once again, Weil brings the discussion back to the question of truth. Independent thought, she writes, necessarily seeks the truth: “If … one acknowledges that there is one truth, one cannot think anything but the truth.” It is only when one stops searching for truth and starts calculating partisan advantage that one falls into what Weil calls “inner darkness.”

It is obvious that Weil’s argument against parties stands or falls by her definition of truth. Truth, as this deeply religious thinker sees it, is unitary and self-subsistent: it exists somewhere “out there,” and our job is to look for it. There is a right answer to every political question, which every individual, and society as a whole, would necessarily discover if we approached it with pure hearts. Parties, by intervening between the individual and the truth, frustrate this quest; they stifle the conscience and confuse the mind. “Mendacity, error,” she writes, “are the thoughts of those who do not desire truth, or those who desire truth plus something else. For instance, they desire truth, but they also desire conformity with such or such received ideas.”

But what, one might ask, is the “truth” about a question such as taxes? Is an income tax rate of 35 percent more in conformity with the truth than a rate of 40 percent? Is this the kind of question to which, as in mathematics or religion, there is only one correct answer?