1. The life and career of Little Richard is a thorny topic with today’s culture wars, particularly when it comes to his complicated sexuality. The son of a minister, Richard would oscillate between rock and roll excesses and the religious devotion of his youth. As told by Spencer Kornhaber in an article for the Atlantic, Little Richard’s story cannot easily be pressed into service for the narratives many might want to tell. Though a recent documentary about Richard seems disappointed by his religiosity, Kornhaber believes there’s something beautiful to be gleaned:
As a kid, Richard dreamed of becoming a minister like his father. As Jagger notes in the documentary, if you have the idea that secular music is the devil’s music drilled into you during childhood, you’re going to have a complicated adulthood as a secular musician. Watching the film, it also becomes apparent that many of Richard’s Christian awakenings coincided with moments when the excesses of his rock-star life were especially pronounced: a long-haul tour in the ’50s, a period of heavy drug use in the ’70s.
What the documentary doesn’t note are the familiar, even poignant, dimensions of Richard’s seemingly shocking reversals. Many other iconoclastic musicians — Prince, Ye (formerly Kanye West), Bob Dylan — have, at various points, found God and begun reevaluating or neglecting their earlier work. The history of popular music is in part a history of bold people changing the world, being rewarded with riches, and then facing the question of how to survive burnout, addiction, and the waning of public affection. Endless rebellion is taxing and has, for many stars, proved fatal — is it that surprising for religion to beckon as a refuge? To a viewer of the film, Richard’s spiritual journey raises questions about him as a human, not a symbol. I wanted to understand his significance to the church communities he joined; I wanted to know whether those around him found him to be at peace in his later years.
Sex, drugs, rock and roll, and … God — certainly Christianity is no stranger to prodigal son narratives. Whether Richard was right to have forsaken everything for Christianity will be a matter for debate for many. Even still, in his last interview before his death in May of 2020, Richard offered something of a fitting epitaph: “I’d rather have Jesus than anything the world could afford today.”
2. Echoing Sarah Condon’s moving reflection on “Almond Moms,” Erica Schwiegershausen of the Cut profiled Virginia Sole-Smith and her quest to decouple eating and shame, particularly the anxiety parents can feel to have their children eat healthy food. As happens so often, fear and control go hand-in-hand:
For me, the permission to stop stressing about how often my 2-year-old eats only French fries for dinner has been a welcome relief. But after years of telling myself to just eat salad or jog a few more miles, I know I’m still a long way from viewing my body or my daughter’s with anything approaching neutrality. Truly relinquishing control is hard to do. “If you give up chasing weight loss, you invite in all of the shit that comes with being a fat person or even with being a less-thin person,” Sole-Smith says. But she has convinced me that it’s worth it to keep trying. The way she sees it, it’s really about the willingness to give up a little bit — or a lot — of privilege. She knows that’s scary. “But it’s also incredibly liberating.”
3. On the subject of childhood habits and the fear of long-term consequences, a twelve-year old wrote in to Meghan O’Gieblyn’s advice column for Wired, worried that her life on screens is wasting her childhood. What a thing to ask!? I’m sure many adults wonder the same thing about the addictive games they play on their phones. As always, O’Gieblyn does not disappoint, plumbing deeper questions that lurk beneath the surface. She writes:
It seems to me that you are burdened by common misperceptions about the purpose of childhood. On the one hand, youth in the 21st century is often regarded as a means to an end: a time to cultivate the skills and personal qualities that will allow you to excel as an adult, which requires postponing your immediate desires for the sake of some future ideal — scholastic success, hireability, financial stability. On the other hand, childhood is often said to be a unique period (as I’m sure many adults in your life remind you) of freedom, perhaps the only years when you can indulge in fun, creativity, and personal enjoyment without the ambient worries and responsibilities that adulthood brings.
The thing is, projecting oneself into the future is always a treacherous gambit. Our assumptions about how life will be 10 or 20 years from now are unavoidably limited by the conditions of the present. … Given the pace of technological development, it’s very possible that your adulthood will be radically different from your life now. […]
I don’t say this, Future, to cause more anxiety about the path ahead. Quite the opposite. To my mind, the uncertainty about what adult life will be like gives you an unusual measure of freedom. If childhood cannot be seen as the kiln of future ambitions (or a time to frantically gather ye rosebuds for the sake of fond memories), then it might be viewed, somewhat radically, as an end in itself. […]
The natural world is itself full of change: Seasons come and go, birds migrate from north to south and back again. While these conditions don’t preclude the possibility of planning for the future, they also reveal how futile it is to live in service to one’s future self. Thoreau wrote in his journal, in 1859, that in a world of constant flux, we must “let the season rule us.” The life of intention can only be lived in the present, by giving energy to the things that have value in the here and now. Given that he put this better than I can, I will leave you with his words: “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment … Do what you love … let nothing come between you and the light.”
O’Gieblyn quotes the Romantic philosopher Thoreau, but the same ideas were espoused by Jesus, who said, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Mt 6:34). The same could be applied to parents worried that their child’s preference for chicken tenders would lead to a life of fast food consumption. It is not we who are the movers and shakers of our destiny, but God, and the question of who we are to become is beyond our pay grade (or capability).
The uncertainty of life, Gieblyn notes, is paradoxically the wellspring of freedom. Because if we decouple the present moment for the artifice from “narrative” or the judgments of the future, we might just find ourselves embracing what today has to offer.
4. For laughs this week, Reductress ran a report finding that “You’re Never Gonna Watch That Really Sad Movie” because “the guilt of this obviously isn’t enough to make you sit down and watch all of the many tearjerker movies you have yet to give the time of day.” Elsewhere, Slackjaw published “My Ideal Church Coffee Hour,” which has the advantage of being 100% true. And the UK’s Daily Mash found that, “All Restorative Benefits of Bank Holiday to Completely Wear Off by Lunch.”
But the top spot, instant classic, goes to the Onion’s “Secular Man Wishes He Had Better Way To Console Bereaved Friend Than ‘Total Bummer, Dude’“:
“Yeah, I wish I could just tell him that his mom was in a better place or looking down on everyone, but all I could really think of was ‘Tough luck, big guy,’” said Frahm, who reportedly groped for any consolation more helpful than “That fucking blows, man” that wouldn’t involve him appealing to an omnipotent deity’s divine ways or the commandments of a religious text. “What do I say? ‘Your mom dying is no bueno’? No, that sounds insane. He’s probably getting tired of hearing ‘That’s really rough, man,’ but I’m not sure I’ve got anything better in my back pocket.”
5. A couple of fascinating quick hitters from the world of neuroscience and psychology.
Over at the Conversation, researchers discovered that shame and judgment is counterproductive (shocking, I know…)
One experiment found that when people were reminded of their successes of the past, they were more likely to repeat those successful behaviours. But when they were conscious of or actively made aware of their failures from the past, they were less likely to overturn the pattern of behaviour that led to failure. So people were in fact still likely to repeat that behaviour.
That’s because, when we think of our past failures, we are likely to feel down. And in those moments, we are more likely to indulge in behaviour that makes us feel comfortable and familiar. Even when we think carefully and slowly, our brains have a bias towards the information and templates we had used in the past, regardless of whether these resulted in errors. This is called the familiarity bias.
And the Washington Post highlighted findings from the field of forgiveness studies (yay, science!) that shows how forgiveness improves overall wellbeing:
Researchers led by Robert Enright,a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, have also focused on forgiveness for programs for young people. Their workbooks and teacher training programs have been shared with thousands of educators worldwide.
Studies have shown that children who forgive do better academically and that, overall, forgiveness can result in lower blood pressure, better sleep and less anxiety, among other things.
Now, whatever personal benefit there might be to forgiveness don’t necessarily move the needle when it comes to actually forgiving someone. We humans aren’t exactly known for doing what’s best for us. Nor does it soften the commands of Jesus to forgive. But it does at least bolster Paul’s claim that the law is good (Rom 7:12).
6. Speaking of science, long gone are the days when Richard Dawkins pitted Christian faith’s supposedly superstitious wish-fulfillment against science’s pure, rational inquiry into the mysteries of the cosmos. More than glibly noting that Newton, Darwin, and Einstein all believed in God, humanities scholars now have had the gall to examine the underpinnings of the scientific method itself, which turn out to be remarkably Christian, or at least highly dependent upon a Christian worldview. Take, for example, the Carl Sagan’s book Contact on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which concludes with its characters receiving proof of the existence of God:
At first thought, I find it extraordinarily strange that Contact, a book about the power of scientific inquiry as a source of awe and self-discovery, would end with proof that God is real. Not the God of Jesus or Abraham or anyone else, but some creator, some Star Maker who embedded a message in math. Ellie’s journey, though she is an atheist, is one of faith — her SETI research is motivated by a belief in something bigger beyond Earth; upon her return, she has no proof aside from experience of the journey.
But maybe faith in the numinous by way of alien contact isn’t so distinct from proof of the intentional creation of the universe. Druyan told me, “It’s the laws of the universe as a kind of holy, sacred thing … Not punitive, not judgmental, not telling you what to eat or who to love. But the idea that the laws of this universe are knowable … There is something sacred in discovering these laws.”
By expanding our sense of the scope of the world, science fiction and fantasy “have the same central function as myth and theology,” writes Ryan Calvey in his doctoral thesis, “Transcendent Outsiders, Alien Gods, and Aspiring Humans.” As the anthropologist John Traphagan points out, “It is no accident that SETI arose in a cultural context heavily shaped by Christianity and its inherent assumptions about the existence of a higher being.” In Contact, the alien offers Ellie not just knowledge and information but a benevolent attention focused on humanity, offering us a small nudge in the direction of peaceful survival. Even if our worldview doesn’t include God, we want to be able to see ourselves through his eyes. For context, for insight, but also to know we’re okay.
Along the same line, Nautilus recently interviewed Mary-Jane Rubenstein, professor of science and religion at Wesleyan University, who offers more data:
[Natural sciences] tend to generate these big stories, big mythologies, about the origins and the ends of the world. And conjure characters who are heroes, gods, and monsters. I started tracking the way that the natural sciences themselves generate new ways of understanding the world that, a couple centuries ago, we would have called religion. […]
[Nietzsche] got really cranky at the extent to which Christianity had taken over absolutely everything. He was upset that it vanquished Greece and Rome, and these aesthetic marvels of culture. What he means by Christianity is a particularly other-worldly form of Christianity that says this Earth is a veil of tears, the material world is sinful. Bodies are sinful. Everything that we can see and touch is not real. What’s really real is in heaven. Nietzsche says that kind of thinking, an insistence on a singular truth outside the world, now has been taken up by modern science, which insists that it doesn’t create truth but discovers truth: The truth is singular, out there, disembodied. He says the priests of the modern world are actually scientists, dedicating themselves monastically to the singular pursuit of a truth outside the world.
It’s likely that modern science wouldn’t be possible if not for Christian beliefs about the world, which is still a far cry from that science practices Christianity (see, for comparison, Islam’s dependence on Christianity). Peering for a glimpse of God in that telescope won’t prove the existence of a crucified God, but perhaps there is something — or better, Someone — out there looking back at us.
Strays:
- Death by Referral: When my doctor offered to help me end my life.
- A Time of Regret: FOMO and other modern ills.
- In podcast news, Sarah Condon was on 1517’s Outside Ourselves and David Zahl spoke with Make it Simple.
- The dark religious vision of Nick Cave.
- In book news — Mbird contributor, Jeremiah Webster has just published a brilliant novel Follow the Devil / Follow the Light.
COMMENTS
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It’s so worrying this week to see several pieces highlighted which look at the worst junk consumerism has to offer and say “Do you think this would be bad for children? Turn that instinct off… it’s probably fine! They should have unfettered access.”
The idea that the only alternative to this view is a capitulation to toxic shame is nonsense — surely we can reject things which are CLEARLY bad for our mental and physical health in a way that is responsible and nurturing. Truly alarming capitulations in some of these articles. Our communities deserve much better!