(8:19 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Value of Pointlessness

A while back, I wrote a post quoting a dialog participant who said to me, "As far as I understand your views, I cannot refer to them as Christian." I'm starting to wonder if I should take that as a compliment, or, further, if I shouldn't claim to be a Christian. When the person in question wrote that, I recall being offended not so much that he didn't think I was a Christian, but that he was so egregiously ignorant about Christianity. My feelings about being feebly insulted by a braying jackass are admittedly not going to be the best source of information about what's going on "deep down inside of me," but it still seems relevant.

It's not really a big concern to me to advertise the fact that I am a Christian. In fact, I'm willing to side with the fundamentalists on this and say that I'm not a Christian, I'm a Catholic. If "being a Christian" means a bunch of obscurantist things like having Jesus in your heart and believing in God (seriously, what does it mean to say you "believe in God"? I honestly don't know) and holding strong opinions about abstract things, then I really have no interest in it. Being a practicing Catholic is another matter. I basically follow the teachings of the church, within reason. I don't particularly care if anyone out there in Reader Land wants to join me in those practices. In fact, if you're going to try to convert Catholicism into a new fundamentalism (such that all of a sudden we have "nominal Catholics," then the real "devoted Catholics" who worry about really obscurantist things like their "relationship with God" [WTF?!] or how strongly they believe in what the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith churns out each year), I'd rather that you just stay in evangelical circles.

I don't know if I'm quite to the point where I don't care whether God "exists" or not or whether there was ever a real person named Jesus who grew up in Nazareth, etc., but I'm close. A lot of people arrange their lives in ways that refer to stuff that never happened, and I don't fault them for it as long as they aren't assholes about it. For instance, I don't think that it's very likely that YHWH appeared to Moses on Mt. Sinai and gave him all these laws, but I also don't think Judaism is stupid. In fact, I think Judaism is great. Honestly, I think that Islam and maybe even Mormonism are fairly good religions, too. (I'd continue along these lines, but I reached my "startling ignorance threshold" with that last sentence.)

I wish that the Catholic Church hadn't gotten rid of so much of the ridiculously arbitrary stuff -- mainly just the Latin. I think there's some value in preserving the Latin language "just because." Plus, maybe having the liturgy in a foreign language would help people not think that it's all about their "relationship with God" and hearing a bunch of stuff that will "strengthen" that "relationship" -- it's also about keeping a connection with the communio sanctorum. Virtually every day for several centuries, people have been gathering together to hear some readings out of an old book, recite a few old prayers, assume a variety of bizarre postures, and eat some highly stylized bread (and often wine, too). A lot of other stuff has gone on alongside that, a lot of dedicated service to the poor, a lot of intellectual dispute, a lot of heroic asceticism, a lot of really stupid and cruel and petty acts, but what makes it all into one continuous history is this repetition of a few antiquated ceremonies that are, in themselves, pretty pointless.

I wrote on dialog tonight that Christianity is a culture. Clearly other cultures have liturgies of their own, pointless rituals that are carried on largely for the sake of continuity. Maybe that's what worship is, in general, the community presenting itself in thanks that it has endured thus far and in hope that it will endure still further. I wonder if the secular world can produce worship, in that sense, whether a secular liturgy is possible -- and I also wonder if, in a secular world, the older liturgies of subcultures can long endure. Certainly in previous world empires, it was assumed that the subjects would have their own liturgies, and they would either be tolerated or would be compelled to conform to the imperial liturgy. But to continue the liturgy when the world believes, in its heart of hearts, that having a liturgy is stupid and pointless? That it's a sign of weakness? That participation in it is virtually a signed confession of ignorance and stupidity, of not being able to get over the past?

We've had proposals for replacement liturgies over the course of the modern period -- the two with which I'm most familiar are the turn to "nature" and the turn to literature. The turn to nature is still given token honor in the many nature-themed "motivational" posters that litter our classrooms and our offices, but it's difficult to sustain a devotion to nature when it turns out that everything we value depends on destroying nature. Matthew Arnold thought that literature could and should fill most of the functions that religion did in the past; it is not by accident that we post-Victorians were bequeathed a "canon" of literature. That dream was undone, however, by the solitary nature of reading in the modern world and by the aggressive incomprehensibility of high modernism.

Worship, in order to function properly, must be a communal event. Through the 20th century, we have had the movie theater for our place of worship (I owe this insight to Kurt Vonnegut), but the home entertainment center is destroying even that. It would appear that the only alternative that has had even localized success has been the nationalistic political rally, as practiced by Hitler -- or else, perhaps, the revolution as practiced by Lenin.

Sometimes I honestly don't know how I get from the beginning to the end of these things. If a post is sufficiently long, the ending is almost always a surprise.

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