Building a Mystery

I recently referred to myself as a "postsecular atheist," which I think might be fairly accurate if I knew what it meant. I've been wondering about that. Insisting that I'm technically a theological non-realist (or a metaphysical non-realist more generally) seems pointless since nobody knows what that is, either. But the problem with identifying as an atheist is that I'm not the sort of atheist for whom being an atheist is the goal as opposed to an artifact of not believing in God. There is no "right way" to be an atheist, but some atheists seem to act like it, and I'm not sure I pass the test. It's mutual, though: atheism, as a discourse community, is not that attractive to me -- no offense to my atheist friends.

I don't share the (stereo)typical atheist disdain for religion. I don't think we'd all be better off if we just got rid of religion, as if that were even possible. I'm an atheist less by virtue of being certain that God does not exist than by not being able to say what it would mean if God did, or why we should assume there is only one God, or how I should comport myself in the face of the existence of said God. I don't know how we would know those things, which I suppose is more agnostic than atheist. But being allergic to metaphysics, I don't have a framework in which "I believe in God" is intelligible. Redefining God as whatever might happen to be "out there" doesn't really do much work, and neither does redefining God as something I might be a little less reticent about, like the Tao or something (if that worked, wouldn't it make more sense to just be a Taoist?). So, to recap: I don't believe in God, which I think is the definition of atheism. I just don't fit the usual profile. 

This is where the "postsecular" bit comes in. Postsecularity describes the sense in which we're realizing -- at least in some areas of thought -- that what we think of as "the secular" is not something that was revealed when we finally pulled back the veil of religion, but rather a way of thinking that was constructed in response to and on the heels of developments in Christian theology. There are various ways of narrating this, from Charles Taylor to John Milbank to Marcel Gauchet, but the basic idea is that there is no neutral sphere in which we can negotiate the common good without influence from religion or ideology. Moreover, the idea that there is such a sphere is itself a claim about the "way things are" that is already at odds with religious formulations.

It would be silly, for instance, to say that liberal democracy is a religion, per se (though perhaps not that silly) but it does make defacto (meta-)religious claims and cannot avoid doing so. A claim that religion and state should remain separate is still a claim about religion, and suggests that the state, and only the state, should be able to do things that might otherwise fall under the purview of religion. Questions about the common good or how we might best live to together, questions that we assume to be political, are not questions about which religion has been silent. Even the idea that there is a genus "religion" of which a given person's way of constructing the world can be seen a species is problematic -- especially for those ways of seeing the world we tend to call religions. What lies at the core of many people's construction of identity is precisely the thing that liberal democracy says they should bracket.

[Postsecularity is the condition in which we recognize that "the secular" is just some shit we made up. This opens us up to the realization that postsecularity is just some shit we made up in the wake of realizing that secularity was some shit we made up. Basically it's shit all the way down.]

So what does it mean to be an atheist self-consciously in this milieu? I can identify three candidates for what postsecular atheism might look like -- three versions of it -- and I find them all unsatisfying. First and foremost, of course, is Slavoj Žižek. I love Žižek; I don't love how that makes me a lot like a bunch of nerdy post-evangelicals who also love Žižek. And I'm not sure how much I agree with Žižek, especially since most of the stuff he's on about -- psychoanalysis and Lacan and all that -- I really don't have much use for. Still, there's an attraction. Žižek's like the crazy drunk uncle whom you secretly love just because he makes things more interesting. You don't want to emulate him, or take any of his advice, but he's a hell of a lot of fun.

For Žižek, God is the Lacanian "Big Other" we need to do without. The psychoanalysis is over when you recognize that there is no Big Other -- that you are, basically, on your own. To the extent that this speaks to the experience of postfoundationalism, I'm on board. But Žižek doesn't stop there. The twist is that it is Christianity that tells us this. Jesus' cry "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is this realization, Jesus beating the crazy old man in Thus Spake Zarathustra to the punch by almost 2,000 years.

Žižek and Jesus are like Tyler Durden telling his minions, "You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, never wanted you, in all probability he hates you. This is not the worst thing that could happen," except that God can't be bothered to actually hate you because he's not there. God the father empties himself into Jesus the son and gets whacked and can now only be found "resurrected" in the Spirit in the form of community. And we all have to enter into this realization. There is no God, no Big Other; there's just us, muddling through, doing whatever we can. We, collectively, are the only God we're going to get.

Two things bother me about this. One, it seems to prescribe a normative (and normatively Christian!) path. If we'd just get over our fixation with the Big Other (God being merely one candidate for this), we could be free and move on to...whatever. And this, to me, introduces a kind of back-door humanism -- that's the second thing -- an emancipatory project presuming a human subject to be liberated.

Another possibility is Alain de Botton's "Atheism 2.0." I'll be honest -- I haven't read the book, Religion for Atheists; I've only seen his TED talk. And I hadn't heard of him at all before I read this scathing review by Terry Eagleton. So my introduction wasn't great and my knowledge is not robust. I may be getting him wrong. Still, Botton is interesting in that he thinks atheists too quickly dismiss aspects of religion that might be helpful. From the aforementioned talk:

Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about -- people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine. Until now, these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice. It's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

Botton's solution? Raid the various religious traditions for ideas, concepts, rituals, etc. (the "nice stuff") that might give us the purported benefits of religion without committing ourselves intellectually or otherwise. On one hand, this seems hopelessly consumeristic; on the other hand, Botton seems to be enriching his particular tradition -- atheism -- with things learned from outside that tradition, much as postmodern Christians might enrich their tradition with the findings of science or the musings of philosophy. Traditions are not hermetically sealed, and most if not all have a history of syncretism and cross-pollination. Nevertheless, I don't much see the point. I really don't see atheists banding together in a parody of religion to feel better about themselves. Or they already do and we call them Unitarian Universalists.

Finally, there's Robert Jensen. Jensen shares a leftist politics with Žižek (I'm not sure of Botton's politics; Eagleton calls him a libertarian), but unlike Žižek and Botton is actually a member of a church. He tells his story in All My Bones Shake: he met the pastor of a Presbyterian church in the course of his political activism and became attracted to the church's collective life and the way it intersected with progressive politics. Eventually he got sucked into that life even though he's not really come around to believing in God as such. The story is a good one, and while Jensen is not the riveting memoirist that Anne Lamott is, it's the best part of the book.

The rest of the book outlines what we might call his political theology, which he sums up in the paradoxical "There is no God, and now more than ever we all need to serve the One True Gods." The construction is deliberate. By "there is no God" he means basically what Žižek means by there not being a Big Other but without that language. What we think of as God, he says, is just a name for mystery itself, which is not something we worship or commit ourselves to.

The "One True Gods" are community (as a concept) and communities (as concrete expressions of that concept), things we must attend to if we're going to survive as a species. This is, perhaps, compatible with  Žižek's emphasis on the death of God and the birth of community in the Spirit. Jensen comes off as a communalist (and something of a localist) with a bit of anarcho-primitivist ecological apocalypticism thrown in the mix, but without landing on anything recognizable as anarchist theory. He's a progressive, which is better than a lot of the alternatives, and his theology seems like a bit of a mainline liberal rehash that at least has the stones to admit to being atheist.

There are also out-and-out Christian Atheists, and Žižek and I have both been branded with that designation. I'm sometimes loath to call myself either one, let alone both. My atheist friends wonder, given my interest in Christianity (and my not-infrequent defense of Christianity as a coherent body of thought) if I'm really an atheist at all. Some of my Christian friends who know of my "status" are holding out a none-too-subtle hope that this is just a phase for me, and that I will come around. It's been over a decade, but there are days I can almost imagine what it would be like to believe again. I don't think they're right, but I can't predict the future.

On the other hand, I'm reluctant to call myself a Christian because it seems like, well, God is kind of a big deal. At any rate, I'm coming to realize that my own admixture of intellectual atheism and social participation in Christianity is largely artifactual, a result of what I call "social inertia": I've been part of the Christian tradition for most of my life. In some ways I've been in and out; in others, I've just been in, with the idea that I could ever be out being largely illusory. These are my people. Many of my friends and most of my family are Christians. I also don't believe in God -- but being an atheist isn't enough of an identity marker for me to disrupt all of those relationship and become "the atheist" in that social grouping. Or become somebody's project, which is what tends to happen.

I'm not, however, trying to combine those things into a cohesive philosophical framework. I happen to be a theologically literate but otherwise nominal Christian, mostly by heritage. I also happen to not believe in God.

This is not the worst that could happen.

Christmas Time Is Here

It's Christmas morning. Three of our four kids are up, and they've opened their stockings. This is the rule in our house: you can get up any time after 5am and open your stocking. You are then free to play with or consume anything in the stocking, but you can't open any of the proper presents until after everyone is awake and we've had breakfast. This year, though, things are further complicated by the fact that I'm playing at church; we'll have to do the presents afterward.

The service goes well. It's just me and our worship leader, Ben, on acoustic guitars. I play in DADGAD and sing harmony. Ben asks me to play piano for the prelude and for offering/communion and I whip up a medley of "Christmas Time Is Here" with a jazzy rendition of  "Angels We Have Heard on High" for the prelude. ("jazzy" meaning styling the rhythms and laying it over a I-vi-ii-V progression with lots of extensions). For communion I do a quartal harmony improvisation and for offering I treat "Go Tell It on the Mountain" to a sloppy stride. They love it.

Our pastor, Jason, preaches a sermon on the politics of the birth narrative in Luke. He does a good job of hitting the major points, allowing us a glimpse into the subversive rhetoric of the Christmas story that we too easily gloss over out of familiarity. For fun, he lets a clip of Linus from "Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown" set up the reading, and I'm glad I did the Guaraldi thing for the prelude. People who notice (all three of them, I suppose) will think we planned that.

He does an okay job of connecting the dots for us in the here and now without freaking people out. This is a church that still has both the American flag and the Christian flag (ugh) on the platform -- though Jason would love to ditch them both and makes every effort to hide them. Things move slowly, and since he's very nearly been preaching anarcho-communism the past few weeks without getting lynched, he seems to be balancing things well. I'd have been more direct, but then again I don't get asked to preach. There are reasons for that.

I have coffee with Jason once a month, and mostly we discuss his sermon plans. I'm usually good with some historical and/or political context, and to point to resources. I don't consider myself his mentor in any way, just a friend and fellow thinker who's good for bouncing ideas off of. We agree about the radical political ramifications of the Gospel but we disagree as to its transcendental and eschatological backing. He asked me once if it was uncomfortable for me to have these conversations, since they mostly take place on the level of the scriptures themselves, which affirm a cosmology I don't share. I told him no -- I don't have a problem taking the texts at face value, and  I like the politics we're deriving from them.

Actually it's the music that bugs me more. It can be fun at times, and given my background it certainly seems the logical place for me to be plugged in. Moreover, it's a good place for me to fly under the radar as a skeptic. I don't have to teach or pray or put on airs; musicians are used to singing things they don't mean, or don't mean literally. But it's not all that interesting to me, from a social or political standpoint. We're not terribly discerning about the songs we pick on an intellectual or theological level though I have to admit Ben seems to avoid some of the more egregiously trite or banal offerings out there. It seems pointless to me, but it's part of who we are and people like to see (and hear) me involved. It's good discipline for me to submit, I suppose. I'm not in charge -- this is not about being in charge.

Once home, we open presents. The kids take turns, and we watch. This year is fairly modest by American standards, but of course luxurious in global context. They enjoy the gifts and we have some laughs and life is good. Kate's boyfriend Caleb and our friend John came with us after church and I deal some blackjack to John until he has to leave to meet another friend. He's got a system, and it works fairly well. He's up 315 dollars (of fake money) by the time he has to go, and I tease him that we should have gone to the casino if his luck is that good. He only has five dollars in his pocket, though, and neither of us really wanted to go out anyway.

Lunch is a ham we found in the deep freeze and spent the last three days thawing. It turned out fine. Since we had a sit-down dinner on Christmas Eve we opt for buffet style, with everyone getting their own place in the midst of whatever Christmas enjoyment they happen to be involved in. I drink coffee and lose at online poker and read a little of Todd May's book on Deleuze. I'm not allowed to study today -- no Milbank, no dissertating, it's Christmas, dammit -- but I figure May on Deleuze is like the anti-Milbank. He's helping me understand the ontological issues from the other direction. I still hate ontology, but I'm starting to get it, and why it's crucial to understanding Milbank's project.

The kids take turns watching new movies and playing new video games. I text my mom and my brother with holiday greetings (my dad had texted earlier in the morning). I surf Facebook. We make hot cocoa and I make a fake eggnog by stirring some vanilla, nutmeg and sugar into whole milk. I tried to make eggnog earlier in the week, but not being interested in eating raw eggs, I cooked it and it turned out more like a liquid custard. This was not entirely unpleasant, but not really what I had in mind. The flavored milk is tasty, and I find myself wondering what it might be like if I just put egg yolks in. An experiment for another time.

Two of our new movies won't play apparently, and/or one of our DVD players died. First world problems. But the day is winding down. Later we'll have cheesecake, maybe, and finish the current disc of The West Wing so we can return it. I'll put The Father Christmas Letters away for another year, and tomorrow it's back to work, wrestling Milbank until he blesses me or wrenches my hip out of its socket or both. 

Mr. Jones and Me

Believe in me

'Cause I don't believe in anything

                                                                                      -Counting Crows         

I like to think of myself as a fun guy. I crack jokes, I'm easygoing. And I'm not just fun, but funny as well: I go for laughs and I get them, if not every time. But there's also an edge to my humor. I can be sarcastic, sardonic, cynical. I sneer at nearly everything. I was once accused of being The Joker -- why so serious? But it's true there is not a lot I take completely seriously. I have a hard time getting worked up about anything. It might be the flattening of affect that comes with my depression issues -- my affectation of cynical nihilism is a compensation for lack of affect. There's a nice wordplay there. At least not taking myself seriously serves to attenuate my narcissism. 

But partially I sneer because I'm afraid. I'm afraid to hope. I'm afraid to believe, not because there aren't good reasons to believe or things to believe in but because I fear the failure of my own capacity for belief. I once went out for a date with a girl and high school and never called her again because she was too nice. I wasn't looking for someone trashy, necessarily, but I liked this girl as a friend and didn't want her to become just another one of my ex-girlfriends. At least that's what I told myself -- I've never been a romantic genius. But in the same way that I did not want to add this girl to that list, I'm tired of contributing to the fetid pile of things I used to believe.

I'm an atheist because I don't believe in God. I'm a theological non-realist because I don't believe in atheism. I'm an anarchist because I don't believe in top-down solutions to oppression and injustice. I'm a nihilist because I don't believe in anarchism. And it's not like I really believe in nihilism. The list goes on.

So I don't believe in anything, but what this really means is that I only believe in things that I haven't identified as beliefs yet -- things that are, in some sense, believed for me by the wider culture of which I am a part. Things that have been constructed as part of my upbringing. Things that are at least partially the product of my experiences and relationships. The scorched-earth tactics of my skepticism have left me with beliefs I have not chosen. I've rooted some of them out, but there is always a remainder, the dangerous bits of the tumor that couldn't be removed.

All of this colors my reaction to Occupy Wall Street. On one hand, I'm fascinated by what appears to be a leftist populist uprising. The sheer scope of it -- the number of cities and countries in which this has sprung up -- makes it difficult to dismiss. The general dissatisfaction with the status quo of neoliberal capitalism is heartening. The fact that the authorities in some places are reacting violently speaks to the timeliness of the message. I don't know what they'll accomplish, but something is getting itself said here.

On the other hand, I'm not a joiner. I don't believe. Anarchists and conservatives are panning the movement as a bunch of whiny liberals, and there's some truth to that. The movement is loosely grounded in the consensus-based decision-making process (General Assemblies and all that) associated with some forms of contemporary anarchism (and anarchist David Graeber played a role there), but their agenda, such as it is, is largely reformist: they want capitalism to play nice.

There's a pragmatic logic there: if we're going to have capitalism, we should at least try to attenuate its more deleterious effects. The idea that the market -- Smith's "invisible hand" -- will channel self-interest into the public good is a pipe dream. This is not what has happened. In order for capitalism to be responsive to the public good at all it needs to be tweaked. It needs to be regulated. It doesn't actually work. Not for the 99%. What it's very good at is funneling wealth to a handful who know how to work the system. And it's a feedback loop: the more wealth you control, the more of the system you can gank in your favor. It's not a meritocracy. It's not about industry and inventiveness. It's a game, and the people really in the game play it to win.

What this means is that complaining about the 1% is a little like playing blackjack and complaining that the odds favor the house. It's not that it's not true; it's just that the whole system is predicated on it. It is not in the interest of the 1% to give up any of their advantage. It is not in the interest of the 1% to actually encourage the universal upward mobility that capitalism supposedly makes possible. The system needs poor people; "the poor you will always have with you" becomes a command in the capitalist Bible.

What passes for the left in the United States seeks to maintain the compromise between capitalism and the public good. The reactionary right has grown weary of the compromise and wants to unleash the beast of the market on the public. The debate, as we are seeing in Washington, is getting ugly and rancorous, and the right is winning at the moment, mostly by virtue of being bigger dicks about the whole thing.

This is a long way to say that while I'm sympathetic to OWS, I'm not sure what they're going to accomplish. If they get their way, we'll get some reforms, and these will be helpful in the short term, but it will amount to enabling a dysfunctional system. If they fizzle, or get put down, it could set leftist activism back, which is not t o say they shouldn't try. My reticence might just be an unhelpful acquiescence to my own conditioning. Perhaps my imagination has been stunted. Between peaceful protesters and pepper-spraying police, it's not hard to pick sides, even if I'm not going to pitch a tent.

Maybe something more than I'm seeing is taking place. Something is going to emerge out of the dialectical tension between the resistance and the resisted, and we have no control over what that is. It could be something wonderful. Something new. Something unexpected. Something hopeful.

I just wish I could believe.

Santa Fe

"So, forgive me for not remembering this," Ruthie said to me -- my friends Ben and Ruthie live in Cincinnati and I had a chance to visit recently -- "but you teach...?"

"Yes," I said, "I teach --"

"--Computer Age philosophy," Ben broke in.

"But his students would rather watch TV," Ruthie finished.

I suppose, had I been on my game, I'd have shrugged and said, "America," but at least I knew the reference. This started us on a tack about our mutual love of  RENT. They're big fans of the movie, which my wife and I saw a few years ago. We were recently introduced to the musical itself when a friend of ours directed a local production. I got to do a cameo and sit in with the band a couple of nights. Doris was so taken with it that she bought the Best of RENT CD, which we've been fairly obsessing over. I never, ever, thought I'd be grooving to the soundtrack of a musical, but I am.

Tom Collins, who sings the lines we were quoting, is probably my favorite character. For one, he's named after a drink. Granted, he couldn't have been named after just any drink -- "Harvey Wallbanger" wouldn't have quite the same ring to it, for instance -- but still, he's named after a drink. How cool is that? I also identify with him because he's a college instructor. Earlier in the song he has the line "I'm sick of grading papers, that I know." As a writing teacher who gets to grade a lot of papers (and whose "drinking coffee and grading papers" Facebook status updates are the stuff of legend) I'm pickin' up what he's layin' down.

But he really intrigues me because he's identified as an anarchist. We could have a conversation about whether the anarchist elements in RENT are "real" anarchism or just sentimentalized youth rebellion (a little of both -- and what's "real" anarchism anyway?), but either way, I have this thing for anarchism. This has been on my mind recently because one of our grad students approached me about directing an independent study on anarchist theory and history. I applied for graduate faculty status and got approved, so I'll be doing my first graduate-level teaching in the spring semester, and I'll get to do it by immersing myself in anarchist literature. That, as they say, doesn't suck.

It's strange, though, because I thought maybe I was an anarchist for awhile, albeit a Christian one, but I sort of gave up on it, consigning myself to being just another liberal. Then I sort of gave up on the Christian part, consigning myself to being just another godless liberal (I've thought about getting a T-shirt that says "I'm the liberal professor your youth minister warned you about"). So naturally I'm still going to church, at least partially because our pastor is enough of a Yoderian to be taking the church, slowly, in an anarchist direction (one of the tenets of my dissertation is that John Howard Yoder's ecclesiology, taken to its logical conclusion and lived out to its fullest extent, is anarchist) and I find that I like that. That's not confusing at all, right?

I'm reluctant to actually call myself an anarchist, partially because I don't want to be one of those people who co-opts a sexy sounding word because it supposedly has some kind of cachet. Partially, too, because it is a deeply misunderstood designation, owing not a little to all those people who like to co-opt sexy sounding words because they supposedly have some kind of cachet. I'm not saying that people whose political thinking doesn't go much beyond Dead Kennedys T-shirts and a predilection for shouting and breaking things aren't anarchists, but they might be making things confusing for anarchists who construct their anarchism a little differently. I don't want to be that guy.

Mostly, I hesitate to identify as an anarchist because I don't really do anarchist-y things. I lack a taste for the theater of protest. I lead a fairly conventional (if quasi-agrarian) bourgeois life. True, I drink fair trade coffee and have latent suspicions of authority and property -- as well as a deep-seated disdain for capitalism -- but it manifests more in a refusal to take things like authority or property (mine or anyone else's, on both counts) all that seriously than it does any desire or effort to overthrow anything. Mine is a sort of bemused nihilistic anarchism, and I'm not sure that has much street cred.

Another reason I don't really embrace the moniker is that I don't think an anarchist society is practical. I don't mean to say that "anarchist society" is an oxymoron -- one of the horrible clichés people almost instantly reach for -- but that a) there's no way we're ever going to get enough people behind the idea to make significant progress toward it; and b) it seems like the sort of thing that would be all too easy to fuck up if we did. In this I find myself siding with Jacques Ellul in Anarchy and Christianity:

The true anarchist thinks that an anarchist society—with no state, no organization, no hierarchy, and no authorities—is possible, livable, and practicable. But I do not. In other words, I believe that the anarchist fight, the struggle for an anarchist society, is essential, but I also think that the realizing of such a society is impossible. (19)

Ellul's assumption that anarchism means "no organization" strikes me as naive, but the gist of things is that the fight (such as it is) is important but somewhat hopeless, at least in human terms. Here Ellul has a theological resource -- eschatology -- that I don't: Ellul can look beyond our human hopelessness to a God-centered hope that things will turn out all right after all.

Ellul saw Christianity and anarchism as compatible, but he still tended to hold them slightly apart. There are more nuanced and integrated forms of Christian anarchism, such as that which characterizes the Jesus Radicals, and what I find fascinating is how close this anarchism comes to recognizing its own contingency. Christian anarchism seems uniquely poised to recognize that Empire is not going away. It may change -- or merely change hands -- and there may even be revolutions, but there is not going to be some glorious revolution that ushers in, finally and fully, the world we long for. Not, at least, through human agency. Not without a divine inbreaking, one that Christians look toward as the telos of history.

The opportunity here is to recognize that anarchism and radical Christianity and other forms of resistance to Empire are nevertheless parasitic upon Empire as the thing they need to kick against. There is no pristine or primordial anarchist site that has been obfuscated by Empire; there is only the negative space that is always already defined by Empire. The Christian anarchists may not agree with this (it probably doesn't sit well with theological realism), but I think they can nevertheless help us to see it. Christian theology veils this in apocalypse, which allows us to draw closer to it.

What this suggests is that if anarchism isn't practical, in conventional terms, it is a least practicable, in small communities and small ways. In fleeting and furtive moments. In the refusal to wield power or the decision to use power outside of approved channels to help those with no access to power. When our pastor was a junior staff member and thought things might be headed in the direction of him taking the helm, he balked a bit; being "in charge" was antithetical to his vision for the church, and even being in the kind of church that had positions of power was already problematic for him. I encouraged him to take the mantle as a way of occupying the place of power, which the community sees as necessary, in order to give power away. It's a little like having an anarchist mayor in Reykjavik; it sounds oxymoronic, but it's not, necessarily.

Another illustration that comes to mind is an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine [special H/T to Tony Hunt for helping me remember the details of this episode]. In the story, an unfamiliar ship docks at the station in need of repairs. The ship's lone operator, of a previously unknown species called a Tosk, manages to strike up a friendship with the station's chief engineer, O'Brien but also gets in trouble for snooping around the weapons stores (for which he refuses to offer an explanation) and lands in the brig.

Eventually another unknown alien vessel comes looking for the Tosk. They are not the same species, and it turns out they they are hunting the Tosk, not in a law enforcement or bounty hunter kind of way, but in an English-gentlemen-out-with-the-hounds kind of way: the Tosk is their prey. The Tosk are bred, in fact, to be exciting quarry and honored for their cunning in evasion. The captive Tosk is bound by social custom to be the hunted, and in getting caught alive (facilitated, of course, by his being held in the brig) he faces humiliation. The station is prepared to hand him over to his pursuers.

O'Brien is scandalized by this; he realizes that the Tosk was interested in the weapons as a possible hedge against his pursuers, and finds the idea of hunting a sentient race repugnant -- but the Prime Directive (which, in some ways, represents the logical outworking of liberal "tolerance") prevents him from interfering with the social customs of these other races. The Tosk could ask for asylum but he refuses; it would only be further indignity and a violation of his code. He would rather die with honor than evade his fate, even though the means for that evasion are available.

O'Brien takes things into his own hands and launches a plan to help the Tosk escape. The plan succeeds, and the Tosk is freed, in not in O'Brien's sense of what freedom would be, but to continue the hunt without further loss of honor. O'Brien, however, must be reprimanded for violating orders -- for violating the Prime Directive, in fact. He is called into the station captains's office for a dressing-down. As he accepts his reprimand, he pauses to admit puzzlement over one aspect of the plan: at a certain point he was certain it would fail, but the force field system he thought would stop them was curiously slow to engage. The captain, Sisko, says suggestively, "I guess that one got past us," and the two exchange a knowing look.

The Tosk's escape is a violation of the law but not of the social code by which the Tosk lives. He cannot accept asylum but he can accept O'Brien's offer of outlaw justice. He is restored not to freedom as we might think of it but to the life for which he is bred and to which he seeks to return. Sisko is required by the law to reprimand O'Brien and does, but in the process it becomes clear that he not only secretly approved of O'Brien's actions but also played a role in making sure those actions were successful.

Of course, there are ideologies and social constraints that are upheld, to a certain extent precisely through this violation of the law (Žižek would have a field day with this), and in no sense are O'Brien or Sisko enacting an anarchist society or articulating an anarchist theory. But they are working in the negative space of empire to offer aid to the oppressed on the terms of the oppressed. It is a fleeting anarchical moment.

I'm not one for affectation, and I'm a bit stubborn. I'm not going to try to be something that doesn't seem organically a part of the life I'm actually living. But already this is a problem: that life, and my sense of what might be "organic" to it, is already enculturated, already formed and shaped by middle class America, by liberal democracy, by neoliberal capitalism. To go with the flow is to accede to it, to be caught up in it, to be held in bondage.

Maybe I need to take myself a little more seriously as an anarchist thinker instead of hiding behind nihilistic bemusement. Maybe my dissertation can be -- or be parlayed into -- a contribution to anarchist thought. Maybe I need to open myself to praxis: especially those fleeting moments, but also opportunities to show solidarity with other making similar efforts, and even when those efforts make me feel vulnerable or require me to publicly take sides (or, God forbid, a stand on something).

This is the sort of thing I've been thinking about lately. It's not running naked through the Parthenon or anything, but it's something.

Sweet Hour of Prayer

It's Sunday, and I'm not sitting at home doing the New York Times crossword puzzle -- I'm playing bass at church. Although it has a band, this is not some über-contemporary cutting edge church. The feel is folksy and we mix up old hymns and new stuff and a lot of it is quite pleasant and some of it is banal and vacuous and sometimes those are the same songs. On this particular Sunday I play bass and sing tenor and most of the time I can keep that straight. I usually play drums, so this is a nice change of pace. I feel a little like Sting, actually, only neither so cool nor so incredibly good-looking. So maybe more like the lead singer from Mr. Mister.

I used to be very anxious in church, not least when I was on staff. I had a lot to lose: I felt that if people knew my theological proclivities, I'd be ostracized. Out of a job. Or just out, I guess. I felt fake, and in some ways I was fake, though I was trying really hard. I lived in constant fear of being outed and yet also with a constant desire to come out, to be known, to tell my story. The tension wasn't unbearable, but it was  uncomfortable, to say the leas -- especially since the kind of Christianity I thought maybe I could believe in was still not something that would sit well with this crowd. Either way I was on the outside.

I get to rehearsal and don't immediately recognize the drummer -- he's not a regular -- until our worship leader points out that we played together once this past summer at a youth event. We shake hands and make small talk. I wonder why there's no sound coming out of my bass and we check a few things until I realize it's not plugged into the amp. This sparks a round of "absent-minded professor" jokes at my expense, most of them instigated by me. My self-designated role at practice is comic relief, anyway: I play an interminable series of 8th notes on the E string of my bass. "What am I playing?" I ask, grinning mischievously. Nobody has a guess, but they know I'm up to something. "Every U2 song," I say. This gets a laugh. I then stumble upon something that sounds a lot like the bass line to "Crossroads" by Stevie Ray Vaughn so I spend the rest of the warm-up trying to get it right until the worship leader signals it's time to start.

It seems strange that after ten years of tension (and the process began long before that) that now that I've given up on any overt theological project, I'm more relaxed. The pastor knows where I'm at with things. I'm a baptized unbeliever, some kind of sympathetic apostate; do with that what you will. I don't try to talk people out of their faith. I'm no proselyte for atheism. I nod and smile at the right times. Should my preacher friend decide that this is untenable, I'll stop playing. Maybe I'll decide I'm not interested anymore and stop playing on my own. I don't know. I've had my fifteen minutes of worship leaderish fame and I'm good. There's always the crossword puzzle.

We finish practice and I grab a cup of coffee and mingle a bit. I'm not much of a mingler, really, but I know these people. They're my people, even though I confess that kind of embarrasses me. The whole thing has a kind of Lake Woebegone-esque quality to it; we're here in church because this is what we do and where we're from and the fact that I don't really believe in God is immaterial next to the history I have of singing with these people and eating with them and watching their kids grow up (as they've watched mine grow up). As evangelicals, we don't have the rich history of the liturgy behind us, or the communion of the saints, or little bits of Jesus, but there is nevertheless a sense of community, a sense of being a people.

The spunky old widow in the prayer room doesn't want my theological history as much as she just wants a hug and a laugh and a wink, as if getting a hug from me is some kind of guilty pleasure. The worship leader doesn't want to rehearse my epistemological misgivings about evangelical theology as much as he needs me to play bass and kvetch about Chris Tomlin (he doesn't really how much he needs me to do the latter, but he does). The high school kid playing keyboard just needs a crash course on how to voice an added second, which is something I can answer. It's not that they wouldn't care I'm an atheist -- they might well be scandalized -- so much as it seems like bringing it up would just make things more complicated than they need to be.

We take to the stage and play our set and people sing along, not exactly lustily, but at least earnestly. There are two services. I sit through the first one, and during the second I hang out with the other musicians in a back room, sort of like a green room. We talk in hushed tones and stop nervously whenever there's a lull in the sermon, wondering if the preacher is headed into the final prayer -- our cue to go back up. (If you get the urge to get up and move whenever someone prays publicly, you might be a church musician.)

It seems odd to me that, in the wake of finally owning up to being an atheist, or something very much like one, I would find myself digging in to church a little more rather than less. This is not quite what I had expected, though I must confess I've stopped expecting much at all because it doesn't seem to do me much good. But I think I know what's going on; I've externalized that tension I've borne for so long. In a way, it's somebody else's problem. The fact that I'm an atheist and a church musician is no longer a conundrum to be resolved or a question to be answered. It just is, and I'm coming to terms with it.

The preacher starts into the prayer and we take our spots. As he's praying I look out at the congregation to see who else is looking up, or looking around. I like doing this for some reason; I'll catch someone's eye, and maybe smile a bit. Some people just pray with their eyes open, but others look strangely guilty, like they think they should have their eyes closed, but for some reason they don't, and there's a story in that reason. I don't know the story, and it's unlikely that it's the same as mine, but still -- I like to think that my smile lets them know that they're not alone. 

Highway to Hell

An old boss of mine was fond of saying that he was busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, a metaphor that was never entirely satisfying to me. For one thing, while the one-legged man in question might be working harder than his fully bipedal competitors, that's not usually what we mean when we speak of being busy. But the real problem for me is that this aphorism assumes a literal understanding of ass-kicking that doesn't pertain to real life.

This metaphor, like "blown away," is one for which there isn't exactly a real-life referent (which is why "literally blown away" is almost never true). This is the kind of thing one would imagine making Baudrillard happy. Mostly we use "ass-kicking" and its variants to mean some sort of profound defeat, and what we might be tempted to consider its literal meaning -- a sound physical beating -- could obtain without anyone's foot actually making contact with anyone else's gluteous maximus. Moreover, this literal meaning is something for which we wouldn't even use the phrase in question, largely owing to the fact we almost always use it metaphorically -- or, to put a fine grammatical point on it, metonymically.

To wit, if Tim kicks Joe in the rump, we probably would not say that Tim kicked Joe's ass, unless we also meant that the event marked some sort of significant defeat for Joe, or that the cumulative effect of Tim's assault on Joe's hindquarters was particularly debilitating or humiliating for Joe. But we would say the same thing even if Joe's posterior remained relatively uninvolved, or entirely so. In other words, when we speak of ass-kicking, "ass" is a metonymy for the person. In still other words, I think about this sort of thing way too much.

It's been almost three months since I blogged anything, which I suppose isn't bad considering I pretty much said I was going to stop. It doesn't actually seem that long since June, and that has me fighting the urge to say pedestrian things about how fast the summer seems to have gone. Time flies, apparently, when you're cleaning dorms, teaching two classes, and trying to write a dissertation, and I imagine that won't change now that I'm teaching six sections and still writing that damned dissertation. I've considered having one leg amputated and finding an ass-kicking contest, just so I can relax.

In the June post I finally just came out and admitted I'm basically an atheist. We can quibble over the details and definitions, but there it is. What I really mean by this is that I've given up thinking that: a) being a theological non-realist -- which is how I actually identify my position -- is different from being an atheist in any way that isn't hopelessly arcane or academic, and b) being a theological non-realist Christian makes sense in a way that doesn't involve more work than I'm willing to put into it. There are people doing it, or something close to it, and there are resources for doing it, but basically they've stopped being interesting to me. The resources, I mean.

My thinking didn't really change that much. I've probably been a theological non-realist (aka atheist) for at least ten years, give or take some moments of trying really hard not to be. Then again, in those moments I've described myself as believing in God give or take moments of trying really hard not to. At any rate, the change was on one hand rather slight, having less to do with a shift in thinking than with a shift in how I reckoned the ramifications of that thinking, and on the other hand the difference has been huge.

I'm basically a lot more relaxed. I shared my shift in thinking with my pastor friend at Old Church, at which I've been playing drums, and his reaction was that's all well and good but I should keep playing drums, so I am. But now the way I narrate this to myself is not as some deep conflict begging for resolution but as the simple if slightly absurd fact that I'm an atheist who happens to like spending the occasional Sunday morning beating the hell out of something in church. It was that or the New York Times crossword puzzle and I'm all out of pencils. It doesn't need to mean more than that; it's perfectly explicable in terms of my background, the friendships I maintain, and the fact that I'm not the sort of atheist who thinks everything about religion is stupid and we'd all be better off spending Sunday mornings doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.

In fact, the problem I have now is trying to find my voice without being all angsty about religion, which has been my schtick for a long time. I took my journal (a real one) on vacation, and the entries were utterly mundane: did this, did that, still pretty much an atheist, blah blah blah. I went to pour out my soul but found I don't have much soul to pour out. I used to read voraciously, hoping to find "the answer"; now I only read things because they pertain to my research or seem interesting for some other reason. A lot of them I thumb through listlessly and return half-read, because there's no itch there for them to scratch. I haven't blogged much, not just because I'm busy but also because I haven't had any of my usual material. I'm like a one-trick pony who lost his one trick. I'm like a Tommy Tutone concert right after playing "Jenny": now what?

I used to follow a blogger whose posts were poignant and profound. I don't follow today, for a number of reasons, but one is that the blogger was diagnosed with depression and put on medication -- and this was probably a really good idea, let me be clear -- after which the posts became less interesting. Again, there are other reasons I don't follow the blog anymore, and it's perfectly conceivable that this writer found a new, less depressed groove and is writing great stuff. If not, the tradeoff was probably worth it. But it struck me as funny, and not a little cliché, that I thought the blog was more interesting when its creator was suffering from untreated depression.

I haven't cured my depression, which I never thought was terribly generative anyway, but I have come to what I honestly think is a healthier attitude toward my own lack of belief, and this takes away what I realize now was quite generative: my struggle with belief. I'm really surprised at how much less crazy I feel having come to that, for whatever that might mean. But it's also a little disconcerting, because it means letting go of something I leaned on pretty heavily in constructing my identity and especially my voice as a writer. That's very important.

I don't quite have a new schtick yet, and I'm getting worried that the one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest is not only less busy than I am, but also more interesting.

Prone to Wander

As I begin this essay, I'm skipping church. When I left my gig at what we're going to call the Big Church, I thought -- and told a few people -- that we'd probably end up going back to what we'll call the Old Church. This is somewhat true, since I've been doing the occasional drumming (and even some bass playing) at Old Church. There's a certain familiarity there, and the preacher is a friend of mine. But our two middle children are pretty active in Big Church, and somebody has to take them. The rest of the family consists of inveterate church skippers, so when I'm not playing drums (or whatever), I chauffeur.

And then, instead of going to church, I come to my office and write, or I run errands, or both, because to be perfectly honest I don't need another "worship set" of sentimental Jesus-songs or three points on how to be a better middle-class suburbanite. I don't want to go, and I don't. This is part of a constellation of things that have got me thinking maybe my run at some kind of "genuine" faith (whatever that means) is pretty much over. No, I'm not exactly an atheist -- I remain a theological non-realist, which is not the same thing -- but in the spirit of Derrida I rightly pass for one.

So I submit to you my three witnesses: the first is myself. I'm tired of church, tired of arguing theology (which is not to say I'm tired of talking about theology; I'm just tired of pretending I have a coherent theology I'm willing to defend as such). I tend to roll my eyes at theological pontifications. A lot. I try not to let on. Actually, maybe it's better to say that I enjoy trying to understand the theological conversation, as it is taking place right now in parts of the Christian world, but I don't have a dog in the hunt of getting theology right.

My second witness is the redoubtable John Milbank. He wrote this in an interview with the Immanent Frame:

If you are going to be an atheist and nihilist, then be one. Only second-raters repeat secular nostrums in a pious guise. Such theology can never possibly make any difference, by definition. It’s a kind of sad, grey, seasonal echo of last year’s genuine black. All real Christian theology, by contrast, emerges from the Church, which alone mediates the presence of the God-Man, who is the presupposition of all Christian thinking.

I don't exactly agree; I don't think what Milbank is railing against is somehow not theology, especially inasmuch as we can't really escape the theological anyway. And I don't accept the logic that says if this is the case, then we're all just parasitic upon (orthodox) Christian theology proper and should get back to the real deal. Just because Western thinking is still colonized by Christian theological thought-forms doesn't mean we have to tow the party line.

Nevertheless, Milbank's words here hit me rather powerfully. They seem to be saying: stop pretending. Be what you are (become what you are?). I don't read this in the sense of a misguided quest for "authenticity," as if there's a "real me" apart of from the circumstances in which I find myself, and I certainly don't think every one in every circle of my life needs to know everything I'm thinking all of the time. But the truth is that, as far as I can tell, I'm something of an atheist and nihilist. The problem is that once you describe yourself as one of those things people totally get the wrong idea, and/or they seem to immediately know what you should or shouldn't be about. It's not much different, I suppose, from being a Christian or an anarchist (which is related to what I've been trying to be).

The third witness is actually me again. I realized, in a conversation with some Facebook friends, that my latest attempt to come to terms with my relationship with the Christian faith was essentialistic. I was trying to find some essence of Christianity, some secret key, that I might actually be willing to believe in. This would have the two benefits. It would allow me to flesh out that core belief with the contents of the Christian narrative, those bits I don't believe anymore (at least not at face value), reanimating them now that I've found the secret. It would also give me bragging rights -- if the essential secret is, say, anarcho-pacifism (that's the angle I was working), then I could be more Christian than those people who signed off on the other stuff but weren't properly anarcho-pacifist, if I myself were willing to fully embrace it. The problem is a) I'm not sure I really was, though it sounded cool, and b) this is a philosophical move that I would not assent to in any other area of my thinking. It is a rather bald form of essentialism, though I hid it from myself.

[This is not to suggest that all Christian anarchism is reductionistic in this way, or essentialist. What I was doing is not the same as having a robust faith that also happens to look like anarchism.]

There is no essence of Christianity. There is only Christianity as it manifests in a given time and place practiced by people who are always already themselves contextually situated. Even things that look like internal reductions -- Jesus' take on the shema, or his invocation of the Golden Rule, or James' "true religion" of looking after widows and orphans -- are set deeply within a particular sociopolitical/religious context, birthed within a particular milieu. Whatever it is that I might find interesting about Christianity, or worth hanging onto, is irreducibly bound up in all that stuff I find less tenable. Even Jung realized that Christianity was something of a package deal.

I'm not suggesting that there is no room for critique; in fact, internal critique is largely what has been generative of Christianity's sacred texts, not to mention its history and even its origins as a Jewish apocalyptic sect. Nor am I suggesting that there's no room to forward some idea of what might be getting said through Christianity even if that doesn't line up with what the authors of its text were (or have been) intending. In fact, that's just it: I can do any of those things --those moves are available -- but what I can't do is pretend to be assessing the "truth" of Christianity on the basis of something outside the Christian narrative that is "more true" and thus able to validate it.

I'm off track, however; what essentialism is and why it's a problem are not the issue here. The issue is that I was indulging in a philosophical luxury I deny on other fronts. I realized this as I was typing a comment; seeing it print made the structure suddenly clear to me, and there was the sound of squealing brakes and breaking glass. This was disconcerting to me, and then, eventually, freeing. No, I haven't been liberated from the bondage of religion nor have I cast off the shackles of skepticism. I'm not "post-Christian," which implies I've somehow gotten over Christianity; I'm just a garden-variety apostate.

No, I'm just free now to call things as I see them. Is this the way things are? I have no idea. But I think I can honestly say that I'm fascinated by theology even though I don't believe much of it. I still bear a connection to the faith of my youth and most of my adulthood, and pretty much because it's the faith of my youth and most of my adulthood. I'm not trying to be a pacifist, though I don't like violence, and I'm not trying to be an anarchist, though I have no idea how to run a nation-state and am suspicious of the whole enterprise. I'm not even trying to be an atheist, though if I pass for one that's fine with me (I have no idea how one would try to be a nihilist; I assume it's not that hard).

If I might invoke Zaphod Beeblebrox: I'm just this guy, you know?