Scott R. Paeth is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. He works in the fields of Christian Social Ethics and Public Theology.
Redstate.com's Eric Erickson went on Fox Business the other day and made some rather ... amusing ... comments about the scientific evidence that men are supposed to be the "breadwinners" in the family because ... birds, I suppose.
In response, Ed Kilgore made a very astute observation about the nature of the world that conservatives think we should all go "back" to, a world where the men do the working and the women raise the kids (which is, not work?). Ed wonders what the policy implications should be of desiring such a world:
If you are a conservative misogynist who doesn’t believe in using government to achieve desired social means any more than is necessary, it gets tough .... After all, many women are in the work force instead of staying home to be “full-time moms” not because they are lacking the beneficent servant-leadership of a man, but because the menfolk can’t earn enough to support a family alone. An economy characterized by high and growing inequality isn’t terribly conducive to large families and stay-at-home mothers outside the very privileged classes. And anyone saying “it used to work” might want to consider the kind of collective bargaining agreements, minimum wage laws, and subsidized housing arrangements we “used to have”—back before we all understood that those items were socialistic and hence un-American.
And this is really the crux of it. Conservatives have a mythic view of society, one that doesn't conform to any actual society that's actually existed, but which is best understood by imagining that all conservative policy is based on watching repeated Leave It To Beaver marathons.
The case for jihad as some kind of special radicalizing force is rooted in the fact of Islamist terrorism and analysis of the more violent parts of the Koran. I don’t buy this. From my nonbeliever point of view, the major religious traditions have very many potential interpretations, and which ones are dominant depend greatly on the social conditions of the age. Indeed, Razib Khan makes a persuasive case that the content of religious texts is essentially irrelevant: “The key insight of cognitive scientists is that for the vast majority of human beings religion is about psychological intuition and social identification, and not theology.”
That may be too strong. But it is surely the case that the social context of a particular religion is enormously influential over which doctrines are expressed in mainstream religious circles and which are forgotten. Who today bothers with Leviticus 19:19, which forbids planting two kinds of seed in the same plot?
The answer to that last question is, of course, some people. But it is hardly viewed as being a central religious teaching, even among Jews. There are other aspects of the tradition that are far more central to Jewish self-identification.
And this has always been the case with Christianity as well. The internal tensions among the texts of the Christian tradition have produced multiple interpretations that are often mutually incompatible. What creates a particular dominant tradition has far more to do with the social context in which the interpretation takes place than with any objective assessment of what the core elements of Christian identity are. When, in 1oo years, opposition to homosexuality seems as backward and antiquated as support of slavery seems today, it will not be because Christian discovered that they had always been objectively wrong on the question, but because they will be asking questions of Christian responsibility in a changed context.
And of course this pertains to Islam as well, as the quote above indicates. As a scholar of religion, this strikes me as so self-evident that I'm often surprised it needs stating, but we keep coming back around to the same questions again and again, buffetted by loudmouths on both the left and the right, and so periodically, it does need restatement.
This weekend I spoke at a symposium in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the BBC's Doctor Who. It was a great time, and it made me think about a few themes related to Doctor Who and religion that I've been thinking about for some time.
A few months ago I came across this short feature on the idea of Doctor Who itself as a religion:
Now, that's an interesting question, and the video explores it well, but it's not really the question that interests me. I'm more interested in the way that the narratives and characters on Doctor Who illuminate themes within the Christian theological tradition.
And, perhaps surprisingly, the linkages are often quite explicit, and nowhere more-so than in the climax to the three-part episode that ends Series Three -- "Utopia," "The Sound of Drums," and "Last of the Time-lords." NB. Spoilers for Doctor Who Series Three follow.
In this series of episodes The Master returns to Earth and, masquerading as the British Prime Minister, develops a plan to destroy the human race and colonize the earth with the Toclafane, a race that is revealed ultimately to be humanity's own future state of existence. Ultimately, the Doctor is captured and reduced by the Master to an ancient, wizened state. Martha escapes with a mission from the Doctor, and spends a year travelling the earth attempting to fulfill the mission.
At the climax of the episode, Martha is captured and brought to the Master, who is holding the Doctor in a cage. She then reveals that her time travelling the earth has been spent telling people about the Doctor, and urging them to concentrates their thoughts on him, so that at a single moment they will all be calling out his name at once, all around the world. Via a bit of technological hand waving (which is known, no doubt intentionally, as the "Archangel" network on the show), this combined thought allows the Doctor to renew himself and escape from captivity. In defeat, instead of destroying or humiliating the Master, the Doctor instead says "I forgive you."
The Master is ultimately killed, though not by the Doctor, who actually encourages him instead to join him on the TARDIS as a sort of prisoner/companion. Refusing to regenerate, the Master truly dies (well, sort of ), and is genuinely mourned by the Doctor.
It's hard to miss the rather overt Christian overtones in this episode. First and foremost is the idea of Martha as a sort of "evangelist" for the Doctor. Although the Master believes she's travelling the world seeking a weapon, she's actually spreading the message of the Doctor, of his care for humanity and the length's he's gone to save it. It is not hard at all to translate this to the message that Christian evangelists give as they spread the Gospel.
Then there is the fact that Martha's act is itself an act of self-sacrificial martyrdom. She travels the world, at great risk to herself, to spread the Doctor's Gospel. When she is finally recaptured, she is willing to die rather than renounce the Doctor.
And of course, then there is the content of her message, specifically the idea that, if they desire salvation, it is essential that humanity, for all intents and purposes, pray to the Doctor, and doing so actually does empower the Doctor to effect their salvation. Furthermore, this is an act that people undertake solely as an act of faith. There is no guarantee, and really no reason that people should focus their minds on the Doctor, but they do, and in doing so, they receive salvation.
And, finally and most powerfully, there is the Doctor's decision to meet the Master's evil, not with his own wrath and judgment, but rather with forgiveness. One could argue very persuasively that this is wholly due to the fact that they are the last two Time Lords. But it doesn't change the reality that the Doctor's first imperative regarding the Master is to offer forgiveness.
More could be said, and I'm hoping that I can expand these ideas into something of greater length in the future. It should be noted that Russell T. Davies is not himself religious, but in this episode in particular the religious overtones are so overt as to be (for me at least) wholly inescapable.
Recently, Jonathan Ryan at the Christianity Today blog offered up an analysis of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones from a Christian perspective, comparing Martin's world to that of J. R. R. Tolkien. His verdict:
Martin is missing Tolkien's sense of "eucatastrophe," the word Tolkien famously coined in his essay On Fairy Stories: "The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous "turn"…. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."
Ryan argues that "Martin's relentlessly grim view of human beings is far from realistic. He is looking at the world with just one jaundiced, damaged eye."
On the one hand, Ryan is certainly right that Martin's view of the world is much darker than Tolkien's, but it's a rather strange to criticize Martin for writing a different kind of story than Tolkien. What's more, I think the key difference between their stories is precisely the one that Ryan overlooks, namely, that Martin isn't writing a "fairy story" in Tolkien's sense. Rather, Martin is writing the historical fiction of an imaginary world, and as such, he is trying to convey as realistically as possible the human limitations and failings of a world that runs according to the principles of "real-world" power politics, and not according to an idealistic assessment of how the world ought to work. The underlying moral question for Martin is whether there is still any place for honor or morality in such a world. The answer to that question, it seems to me, is still very much in doubt for Martin.
But there are many characters in Martin's universe who still attempt to embody principles of nobility and honor, even in the midst of their tragic and fallen circumstances. Ryan's biggest misstep, as Amanda McInnis points out at Cheesewearing Theology, is in his reading of Tyrion Lannister. In comparing Tyrion to Gollum, he demonstrates how little he knows about the character:
Martin paints this grimness in the portrait of Tyrion Lannister. Tyrion is a small and deformed figure born to a powerful and noble family in Westeros. Years of poor treatment and outright abuse leads Tyrion to drink more and more deeply from the corruption around him.
If you've read Lord of the Rings, you can't help but compare Tyrion to Smeagol, the hobbit who becomes Gollum after becoming corrupted by Sauron's ring The difference comes in Frodo's attempt to redeem Gollum. That attempt has no parallel in Martin's world, nor is there anything like Gandalf's admonition to treat Gollum with kindness. Tyrion has no Frodo, and he never will. No one reaches out to him; no one tries to save or redeem him.
Amanda notes how wrong-headed this reading is:
Ryan fundamentally misunderstands and misconstrues the character of Tyrion. In fact, I would argue that Tyrion is in fact one of the most honourable characters in Westeros, with the understanding that the rules of morality in A Song of Ice and Fire are very, very distinct from the rules of morality in something like The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, it is this honour-in- spite-of-all-he’s-been-through that makes Tyrion one of the more beloved characters to readers (and viewers). The same endearment cannot be said of Gollum.
In trying to compare Tyrion to Gollum, the author overlooks all the good things that Tyrion has done.
Tyrion befriends Jon Snow. He rescues Sansa from a fate worse than death if she were to stay in King’s Landing. He protects the kingdom from Joffrey, by reining him in as best he can.
There is nothing comparable to be found in Tolkien's treatment of Smeagol, who is utterly corrupted by the ring and ultimately serves only the Ring, and subordinately himself. When Tyrion is raised, against all expectations, to be the Hand of the King, and asked what he intends to do, his first response is: "Justice."
And by and large he does this. As Amanda notes, he also does other, quite horrible things, most of which are understandable in the context of the character and his sufferings (Amanda says that "while they are not inexcusable, they are understandable," but I think she means that they actually aren't in themselves, actually excusable). But no matter what evil Tyrion does along the way, it is clear that at almost every point, at least to the end of A Storm of Swords, he is acting to keep his head above the waters of corruption in which he's immersed, to hold on to a sliver of morality, while still doing what's necessary to stay alive in the context of the deathtrap that is Westerosi political life.
As much as Ryan misreads Tyrion though, I suspect he also fundamentally misreads real-world politics, at least in the context of the Medieval setting that Martin is attempting to emulate. While modern politics tends to publicly eschew the kinds of cloak and dagger assassination that is part of life in Westeros, one only needs to pick up any reasonable history of ancient Rome, or Medici Italy, or the English War of the Roses (Martin's historical inspiration for the series), to understand that the maliciousness and brutality of political life was indeed part and parcel of a particular time and place.
Even today, the realities of war and politics are far less subject to moral constraint than Ryan seems to acknowledge. Surely he recognizes that in many war zones around the world, the tactics used by Gregor "The Mountain that Rides" Clegane are nothing new. Surely he's read about Vladimir Putin's penchant for eliminating his political foes through the creative use of applied nuclear physics. Surely he's aware of the damage done to the "small folk" around the world by our own projection of military power, whether via the repeated invasions we've undertaken over the last decade or via the "death from above" approach to drone warfare we've embraced in the last few years. While we may like to comfort ourselves with the illusion that political life and war-making in the 21st century are less brutal than in the past, or that Martin doesn't accurately represent the "real world" of violence in his fantasy setting, I suspect that Martin understands what those circumstances are like from the inside with far more perspicacity than Ryan does.
None of which is to say that there is not room for honor, nobility, bravery and morality in either Martin's world or our own, but what Tyrion Lannister (as well as Ned Stark, Jon Snow, Jeor Mormont, Robb Stark, and Brienne of Tarth) reveals as a character is that those characteristics, when they are displayed, put one at great risk in a world where those traits are viewed as weakness. and thus one's survival in such a setting requires one to be "wise as a serpent" if one wishes to strive toward being "innocent as a dove."
These are the thoughts and memories that come to me this afternoon.
April 19, 1993, New Britain, CT: I am walking from the campus bookstore to class when I hear tell of the firey end of the seige at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX.
April 19, 1995, Boston, MA: Sitting in class at Andover Newton Theological School, we are told of the bombing of the Federal Building in Oaklahoma City, OK.
April 20, 1999, Princeton, NJ: In the aftermath of the shootings in Columbine, I am sitting with my precept of theology students, as they comfort one another in the aftermath of the shooting. One student is from the Columbine area.
April 15, 2013, Chicago, IL: I arrive back at my office to discover that the Boston Marathon has been subject to at least two bomb attacks.
This has been a tragic week over the past 20 years. My prayers are with my friends and family in Boston
Russell Brand, not generally one of my favorite commentators, gives Margaret Thatcher a sort of eulogy:
The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.
For my part, I've always thought Sinead O'Connor's "Black Boys on Mopeds" summarizes my feelings about the Thatcher era quite well.
One of the perennial arguments that I've seen made by gun control opponants in my arguments about guns these past months is that gun control legislation won't, apparently a priori and by definition, work. Of course, there's actually a lot of data out there to the contrary, but how do you publicize it?
Well, that leads me to this post, and however many subsequent posts I can manage on this topic. Whenever possible, I will list one or more studies on the topic of firearms control that demonstrates, to a greater or lesser degree, the ways in which gun control is effective. I'll provide links to full texts whenever possible, but in a lot of cases I may only be able to provide links to abstracts. Either way, I invite readers to go and read the studies for themselves. Feel free to leave (civil!) responses in the comments.
The purpose of this study is to statistically and empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the gun control laws that have been adopted by states and municipalities. States are divided into two groups: states with no restrictions as to gun use and states with restrictions (e.g., waiting periods, license, etc.). Multiple linear regression models are used to evaluate the relationship between the number of gun related deaths in 1990 and sets of determinants which include state laws and regulations governing the use of firearms. The study results indicate that gun control laws have a very mild effect on the number of gun related deaths while socioeconomic variables such as a state's poverty level, unemployment rate and alcohol consumption, have significant impact on firearm related deaths. These findings suggest that any reduction in resources spent on social programs tied to the Crime Bill may be counter-productive.
Results from past research on the effectiveness of gun control legislation have been mixed. This study posits that one of the reasons for these conflicting results is the use of individual laws as the major variable. Instead, this study uses a holistic and comprehensive measure of state gun control laws, grouping states into extreme and lax gun control states. A multivariate linear regression analysis is used to investigate the relationship between a set of determinants, including the holistic gun control measure, and firearm deaths per 100,000 inhabitants of each state. The results show that comprehensive gun control legislation indeed lowers the number of gun-related deaths anywhere between one to almost six per 100,000 individuals in those states that have the most extreme gun-related legislation. Our study also reveals that socioeconomic and law enforcement factors play equally important roles in containing gun-related fatalities. These findings suggest that gun-related deaths have a variety of causes and that attempts to legislate a solution to this problem will need to be correspondingly complex and multifaceted.
Comment:
These are the first two peer-reviewed studies I was able to find on a quick search of the issue. I intend to continue digging and post what I find here. But what these studies indicate is that a) gun control legislation is effective, but it is clearly not a panacea. Other social factors enter into the equation and must be dealt with alongside reasonable gun-control legislation.
Far from supporting the contention that gun control laws are ineffective then, then evidence seems to suggest that they do exactly what they are intended to do: Reduce firearm injuries and deaths. But by themselves, they won't result in massive overall improvements. That leads me to conclude that legislation is necessary, but is only part of the larger puzzle of solving the problem of gun-related violence.
As I find peer-reviewed studies that pertain to the issue, I'll post them here, along with any studies that offer a dissenting point of view. Again, feel free to offer civil commentary, including links to peer reviewed studies that offer the other side of the argument.
Apart from the headlines, I haven't been following the whole Pussy Riot case in Russia particularly closely. I've know the broad outlines of the case, and I was aware that several of the members of the "punk feminist collective" had been tried and imprisoned for allegedly disrupting a church service to protest Vladimir Putin. But beyond that, most of the content of their protest had escaped me.
I was fascinated, then, to read Betsy Philips' post at ThinkProgress about a recent Vanderbilt University panel exploring the deep religious roots of Pussy Riot's protest, and its connection to the larger currents of Russian politics and history:
What Spektor explained was that the new church stands on a site of monumental rhetorical significance, a site that is always seen as meaningful by the people who have power at the time. So, it’s not just a church, not even just a cathedral, but a monument to who controls Russia. And the Church Patriarch has been incredibly supportive of Putin, seeing him as a man who is erasing the mistakes of history—in other words, erasing the erasure of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Pussy Riot, as Tim Beale later pointed out, is trying to disrupt this marriage of church and state, since the state uses religious leaders and religious symbolism to further the state’s agenda. Beale further went on to quote some from Pussy Riot about how they imagine religion as a “pool of creative wisdom” from which everyone is free to draw out what is meaningful and useful to them, whereas they see their opponents as using it as a political cudgel, which they think corrupts the Church.
The members of Pussy Riot drew from that pool of "creative wisdom" in formulating a prayer to the Virgin Mary, calling on her to side with them against the power of repression in contemporary Russia, particularly the repression of women:
Pussy Riot in the You Tube translation says, “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist,” “Mary, Mother of God, is with us in protest!” and “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away.” But Critical Mass Choir’s website has a translation from Carol Rumens that maybe gets at the spirit of the song better than a literal translation (It does for me, anyway, but my Russian is terrible) — ” Join our protest, Holy Virgin, please” and then “Virgin Mary, Mother of God/ Holy feminist, we pray thee/ Virgin Mary, Mother of God/ Be a fucking feminist, set Mother Russia free.”
For Philips, this prayer evokes memories of Liz Phair and the Riot Grrrl era of '90s rock. But for me, it evokes nothing less than Mary's own Magnificat:
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour;
he has looked with favour on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed;
the Almighty has done great things for me and holy is his name.
At Religion Dispatches, George Schmidt offers an analysis of the morality in George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, looking in particular at what Reinhold Niebuhr can tell us about the differences in leadership style between Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister:
Placing traditional theodicy aside for a moment, the question after all this misery is simple: Why did Eddard die? At the outset, identifying Eddard’s death as a simple tragedy misses an important point that is often made by Christian realists. Tragedy, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed in The Irony of American History, elicits “admiration as well as pity” for a man like Eddard. We pity him for such a terrible finality while we admire his conviction and compassion for Cersei and her children.
However, tragedy does not account for the way in which, to quote Niebuhr once again, “virtues are vices.” This lack of dialectical thinking, according to which human agency is essentially either virtuous or sinful, is unthinkable in Christian realism. An idealist who quickly classifies an event as tragic fails to take into account the evil that is an “inevitable consequence of the exercise of human creativity”: the evil that is in the good.
Irony, however, notes that the very quality that made Eddard worthy of praise ultimately led to his downfall. For Niebuhr, irony is fundamentally a religious category, presupposing a divine judge who “laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations.” The Christian realist interpretatively locates irony in spaces of “hidden meaning” that “elicit not merely laughter but a knowing smile.” This “knowing smile” in turn acknowledges the failings in the virtues themselves by revealing absurd juxtapositions of “strength and weakness; of wisdom through foolishness; or foolishness as the fruit of wisdom; of guilt arising from the pretensions of innocency; or innocency hiding behind ostensible guilt.”
By contrast, Tyrion does not trust in the nobility of others:
Upon the execution of Eddard Stark, in perhaps the major juxtaposition of the series thus far, Tyrion Lannister is then appointed to the newly vacant office of Hand of the King. Eddard’s moral sentimentalism prompts his trusting of those who would ultimately betray him, whereas Tyrion devises elaborate ruses to trick would-be enemies. Unlike Eddard, Tyrion is not deluded by moral illusions and therefore capable of predicting the direction of self-interest in the pursuits of those around him.
This leads him to a consideration of Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, in which Niebuhr reflects on the way in which niavety about the role of self-interest in political life has hobbled the ability of Christians to effectively and sucessfully fight for social justice:
It’s the charge of the transcendent that differentiates Christian realism from pure realism. Which is to say that Christian realism’s emphasis upon transcendence, provides an enduring, critical judgment, centered on the Gospel, upon any accommodation of the ideal in politics. In Simon Critchley’s formulation, this imperative is experienced as an “infinite demand” that interrupts the politics of accommodation that so often weigh down realist efforts. Christian realism, in other words, finds its fulfillment in a synthesis between the two Hands of the King, Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister.
In the main, I agree with Schmidt's analysis, though I still have cause to wonder whether or not Martin has any such transcendent moral vision in store for us at the end of his story. Thus far he's been fairly scornful of the idea that the end result of the political struggle is the establishment of social justice, and seems to be suggesting that, in the end, all succumbs to dust and entropy, or that on the whole those willing to give themselves wholly over to their will to power will ultimately prevail.
How he ends his story will tell us much about the moral world in which he dwells.
Returning briefly to the "Spiritual But Not Religious" question, I notice that there's been some recent stir about Marcus Mumford's reluctance to own the label "Christian" in describing himself, despite a) coming from a strongly Christian background, b) clearly still believing in God and having some form of reverence for Jesus Christ and c) suffusing his music with strongly Christian themes, symbols and tropes.
His reticence seems clearly related to what I mentioned last week: The failure of Christianity to make itself attractive and credible in the contemporary context. As he says to Rolling Stone magazine, in answer to the question of whether he's a Christian:
“I don’t really like that word. It comes with so much baggage. So, no, I wouldn’t call myself a Christian. I think the word just conjures up all these religious images that I don’t really like. I have my personal views about the person of Jesus and who he was. … I’ve kind of separated myself from the culture of Christianity.”
Clearly what's being said here is not that he's separated himself from Christ, but that he's separated himself from a particular kind of cultural expression of Christianity, presumably one that is rooted in the kind of evangelical baggage that I've mentioned, which often trades in sexism, homophobia, and intolerant narrowness.
Refusal to be boxed into a definition of Christianity that is associated in the minds of many Rolling Stone readers with authoritarian ecclesial structures is understandable, and I give Mumford the credit he deserves for wanting to dissociate himself from that. At the same time, it's worth noting how he continues:
His spiritual journey is a “work in progress,” Mumford said, adding that he’s never doubted the existence of God and that his parents are unbothered by his ambivalence toward the Christian label.
There is something salutary in refusing to be rushed into a commitment to a particular way of expressing one's understanding of spiritual truth. To those who want to label him a Christian in order to dismiss him as well as those who want to label him so in order to claim him, Mumford refuses to accept the label.
Lillian Daniel, for whom I have exceptionally high regard, comments on this line of thought:
People will explain to me that without the Church, they are traveling light, without all that Christian baggage. But what exactly is this baggage? It’s people—who might actually be some of the best road companions there are.
Certainly, Marcus Mumford got one thing right—the Church is something you enter at your own risk.
Because you might actually bump into humanity there. You might hit up against something you disagree with. You might have to listen to music you don’t like. You might get asked to share your stuff. You might learn from a tradition far older than you, and realize how small you are standing before such a legacy. You might even be asked to worship something other than yourself.
As I've mentioned before, I get exactly what Lillian is talking about, and largely agree with her on the merits. At the same time, I think that this is a conversation taking place within the Christian fold. It's not that Mumford has genuinely placed himself outside of it. Rather, as I read it, he is unhappy with what the word "Christian" has come to mean, and so refuses the label in order to be free to embrace what the label implies. He doesn't want to be a Christian because that makes it more difficult to embody Christ.
I didn’t hear Mumford’s remarks as a wishy-washy equivocation about the precepts of Christianity or a capitalist concern about alienating non-Christian fans. Rather what I took away from his answer was a keen wariness about other Christians and our too-often brutal judgmentalism.
Growing up as a pastor’s kid, undoubtedly Mumford knows this all too well. And as someone who is newly accustomed to standing in the unforgiving glare of celebrity’s spotlight, he surely also understands our cultural obsession with putting people on pedestals and knocking them off with great glee and heaping doses of schadenfreude.
What I heard in his reticence to label himself a Christian was not a denial of faith, but instead something that falls between Dorothy Day’s famous “Don’t call me a saint — I don’t want to be dismissed so easily,” and Soren Kierkegaard’s, “Once you label me you negate me.”
I don't think one can listen to the lyrics of a Mumford & Sons song and not take very seriously Marcus Mumford's attempt to seriously interrogate what the elements of the faith he was raised in mean for him today. Doing that, for him, quite understandably means refusing to wear the uniform, but he still talks the talk through his music. As important as it is to understand the role that the Christian community plays in creating the possibility of following Christ in an authentic way, it is equally important to recognize how difficult the church can make that task as well. What's more, it is also crucial to recognize the authenticity of the honest search, after all, that's how this Grace thing works, too.
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