The Wild of God

Christianity may have killed the wildness for a faith of the refined

Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Salome, 1896

I think about Christianity and its relationship to culture a lot. And I mean a lot a lot. Part of this is due to my scholarly interest in the religious writing of the 17^th century—the age of the first Rosicrucian documents, the Metaphysical poets, Protestant mysticism (yes, there is such a thing), as well as the rise of the nation state and the Scientific Revolution. The rise of the nation state and the Industrial Revolution—not to mention the Reformation—over time did much to supplant the very idea of “Christian culture.” Such a thing no longer exists. What we have instead are a plethora of Christian quasi-cultures, a bewildering array that spans from Ortho Bro or Traddie piety and austerity to Evangelical praise-band worship and the often comical if not embarrassing forays into “Christian contemporary music” and film, such as the dreadful (and unintentionally hilarious) God Is Not Dead franchise.

I am also interested in Christianity and its relationship to culture because I am a Christian trying to find a way to pass on Christianity to my nine children. It’s a fool’s errand. As many, many homeschooling parents who live to see their children grow into adulthood will tell you, it’s pretty difficult to keep the kinder down on the ecclesial farm once they leave home. It’s a crap shoot with some wins, but mostly losses.

You see, my intention in raising my children has never been to raise Automatons for Jesus, good soldiers of the Benedict Option, but to raise them in an atmosphere of faith, joy, and wisdom in the trust that such a formation will enable them to come to a mature faith on their own terms and in their own time. Just as we all did. Our own social reality here in the West has created an environment that requires almost a kind of self-initiation into the Mysteries in adulthood. But—to all you parents of young children thinking your results will be different—all I can say is talk to me in twenty-five years and we’ll see who was right.

Among other, the English poet and Anglican priest Robert Herrick, about whom I’ve written both here and in my book The Incarnation of the Poetic Word, is pretty much my patron saint in the forging of a Christian culture in the face of such a hostile social and political environment. His also was a losing proposition—but he had a lot of fun along the way. Herrick embraced both the holiness and weirdness of the world and of Christianity in a raucous and rollicking way that rejoiced in human flourishing and relished in poking fun at the precisian Puritan party-poopers trying to turn Christianity into a grey-hued exercise in disdain for life. I’m sure you know the type.

Anyway, as I said, I had been thinking a lot about Christianity and culture—and Christian “culture”—quite a bit lately when I read Jeffrey Tucker’s recent article, “Twenty Grim Realities Unearthed by Lockdowns” in which he succinctly nails what may be one of Institutional Christianity’s (including all denominations) most heinous betrayals of Christ and Christians, perhaps in history (he also goes after academia and others—definitely worth reading the entire piece). Please indulge me a quote from Mr. Tucker:

“16. The shallowness of the faith communities. Where were the churches and synagogues? They closed their doors and kept out the people they had sworn to defend. They canceled holy days and holiday celebrations. They utterly and completely failed to protest. And why? Because they went along with the propaganda that ceasing their ministries was consistent with public health priorities. They went along with the state and media claim that their religions were deeply dangerous to the public. What this means is that they don’t really believe in what they claim to believe. When the opening finally came, they discovered that their congregations had dramatically shrunk. It’s no wonder. And who among them did not go along? It was the supposed crazy and odd ones: the Amish, the estranged Mormons, and the Orthodox Jews. How non-mainstream they are. How marginal! But apparently they were among the only ones whose faith was strong enough to resist the demands of princes.”

This was my Rubicon. The complicity of Christian leadership with the Archons, most tellingly articulated in Pope Francis’s pronouncement that getting the COVID vaccine was an “act of love,” offered me no choice but to return to the catacombs of the house church. It was an entrance into the Wild of God.

I think ecclesial complicity in these crimes is made even more horrific by the psychological mechanism intrinsic to the Christian mindset that addresses the need for authority, in particular of a fatherly authority. I wrote about this a little over two years ago in a post entitled “Call No Man Father.” It seems to me that many of those drawn to the more austere expressions of Eastern Orthodoxy and Traditional Catholicism are looking for a father figure, and think they will find the Big Father by learning to bow to authority or a “spiritual father.” Which is why they so often cite “the Fathers” (the Mother and the Mothers are generally absent to them) in their discourse. It might work. For a time. But it’s a crutch and ultimately debilitating. Like taking prescription drugs long after they are needed or becoming addicted to psychotherapy, this father search eventually weakens the soul, the spirit, and the body. I’m sorry to have to break it to you this way.

I think this is what annoyed Friedrich Nietzsche so much about Christianity (though I think he was sometimes more authentically Christian than people give him credit for, as you can read in this excellent article). He didn’t like the psychological conditioning that is often a part of Christian initiation. I don’t either. He writes about this, for example, in Human, All too Human:

“As long as a man knows very well the strength and weaknesses of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety he feels toward him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a religion, and soon usually has for that reason more power than the master. The influence of a man has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces the victory of the former.”

Of course, there is clearly a bit of an Oedipus conflict lurking in Nietzsche’s critiques of Christianity—his own father, after all, was a Lutheran pastor who died when the philosopher was five years old—and Nietzsche had at one point intended on becoming a minister himself. It’s not that he was speaking as an outsider. Abandoning the search for the absent father, the Father God Nietzsche found available to him—insecure and demanding obedience—was not God enough, not man enough, and not wild enough.

Christians are called “followers of Christ,” but in practical terms that usually plays out as “followers of religious authorities,” whether that is a pope, a patriarch, or a pastor, surrogate fathers all. And many alleged followers of Christ have followed their religious authorities like oblivious children the Pied Piper as “acts of love.” William Blake was onto something when he characterized this psychological spectre of the god image as “Nobodaddy.” It’s an egregore.

Interestingly, while going through my current poetry manuscript (still not done), I came upon a poem I wrote last November in my deer blind. (I tend to get a lot of poetry done in a deer blind since I usually don’t have anyone to interrupt me. I have nine kids.) The poem is entitled “The Angel of Memory” and is more consciously autobiographical than most of my poetry, and it’s also longer. The concluding stanza concerns the manner in which the image of John the Baptist has haunted me since childhood:

The figure of the Baptist harries me,
His soul immersed in wildness and the earth,
Like Pan, Enkidu—strange, untamable,
A dark contrast to his fair and gentle 
Cousin. Christianity may have killed
The wildness for a faith of the refined:
And this is why he had to die, his head
Taken, separated from the body.
This is a religion we can live with,
But through which we cease to live.
But now it is time for a retrieval:
Return the severed head to the body
And venerate the wild of God once more.

I had forgotten I wrote this, and when I read through it the other day it rather disarmed me. It was one of those “Did I write this?” moments. Well, I did.

Connected to this rediscovery is a moment in the recent conversation Mike Sauter and I had on The Regeneration Podcast with mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw in which Martin wondered about a what a phenomenological Christianity might look like. This is a Christianity that I have been proposing for a while now: it’s called Sophiology. As I write in The Incarnation of the Poetic Word, “It’s not that I’m proposing a marriage between phenomenology and sophiology. My claim is that they are already married.” While knowledge of Tradition is certainly a good thing, it too easily becomes an idol—just as the Church, the Pope, the Fathers, or even the Eucharist can become idols. But if Christianity can’t be independently discovered as the essential ground of the universe—which a phenomenological approach can provide—can it not be said that Christianity is merely another epistemology amongst other epistemologies? That is, that it’s just another set of arguments and proposals, intellectual constructs, the understanding of which requires recourse to “experts” or surrogate fathers? On the other hand, is it possible that we can once again discover the wild of God?

My wager is that we can.

Join me, Spencer Klavan, and Paul Vander Klay, and others in Washington, DC for Christ and Community, and Renewing Culture this July.