Making Christianity Weird Again
By Tracey Rowland
It’s rare for me to hold a fashionable position but I am delighted to be in the company of high-profile people, from the historian Tom Holland to Bishop Robert Barron and the authors Michael Frost and Nijay Gupta, who all recommend making Christianity “weird” again.
For Catholics this means putting our way-laid ecclesial car into reverse and backing out of the correlationist ditch theologians—notably with Flemish surnames—got us into in the 1970s.
“Correlationism” was the pastoral strategy of correlating the faith to the culture of modernity. In the 1970s it took such banal forms as festooning Catholic classrooms with posters featuring cute animals declaring “Jesus is cool.”
More recently, I read a report of the homily given at the parish church attended by the British royal family this Christmas. The vicar was reported to have held up a Terry’s Orange chocolate. This is a popular chocolate in the UK that is made in the shape of an orange with shards of chocolate that fall apart like the segments of a real orange. According to the report, the Vicar then explained to the congregation that Christianity is like a Terry’s chocolate. The spherical shape of the chocolate reminds us that the Christian message was intended for the whole globe, and the individual chocolate shards are like the good news of the Gospel to be broken and shared like the segments of an orange. Christian revelation was thus correlated to a Terry’s chocolate.
The intellectual argument behind such strategies to market the faith by correlating it to something popular and mundane was that the culture of Catholicism appeared weird to the modern sophisticated secularist. White First Communion dresses, Holy Angel sodalities, rosary beads, fast days and feast days, patron saints, confirmation names, eating fish on Fridays, holy hours of adoration, novenas, not to mention concepts like chastity and the virgin birth, certainly look and sound weird to the modern rationalist.
Thus the idea arose that the way to bring the modern rationalist back to Christianity was to find something in the secularized culture that the rationalist liked and then tie the faith to it. So Jesus became a “cool” political activist, interested in social justice. His divinity was elided, his relationship to the other two persons of the Trinity rarely ever acknowledged, and those who wanted to bring in his mother, and especially the circumstances of his birth, were the subject of ridicule.
Moreover, whole academic departments engaged in projects to translate Catholic teachings into the idioms of the culture of modernity. Even the Catholic opposition to abortion was defended on the secularist ground that the developing infant had a right to life—not on the theological ground that all human life is sacred. The realm of the sacred had to be sidelined since no common ground could be found in that quarter. The natural law tradition found itself transposed into the language of political “rights.”
However, somewhere between the late 1960s and late 1980s modernity itself ceased to be fashionable. Some sociologists locate the moment of change in the cultural earthquake year of 1968, which marked the end of the western elite’s enthusiasm for concepts like “pure reason” or “pure nature.” Reading Nietzsche persuaded the generation of ’68 that there are “myths” (theological presuppositions) lurking beneath all appeals to reason, and the view arose that nature was also relative since it could be changed by scientific advancements. In time, nature could be whatever we desired it to be. We just needed to develop the technology to fiddle with DNA.
Other sociologists and intellectual historians located the shift from the modern to the post-modern sometime around 1989. This is because faith in the pseudo-science of Marxism lingered on until 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down and one Communist government after another collapsed. The triumvirate of St. John Paul II, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and President Ronald Reagan put the Soviet system under enough pressure that it buckled when Archduke Otto von Hapsburg encouraged the Hungarian government to open its border with Austria. Over the course of one European Summer, thousands of academics re-identified themselves as “post-moderns” rather than remain on the wrong side of history as defeated Marxist moderns.
With the post-modern turn, concepts like “difference” and “identity” advanced to faddish status. No longer was there only one way to present oneself as an educated member of the professional classes. “Identity” was now linked to one’s preferred mythology. Taking an interest in religion was okay, but being a bourgeois conformist was not okay. Social conformism is intellectually boring. It cuts no ice on the university campuses of the world unless the form of conformism is conforming to the canons of post-modernity itself or what is today described as “wokery.”
Ironically, the correlationist project was precisely designed to turn Catholics into bourgeois conformists, lock-step in time with the movements of the Zeitgeist. Its guiding purpose was to close the gap between Catholic culture and the secularist culture. Karl Rahner famously argued that Catholics emotionally attached to pre-modern elements of ecclesial culture would need to be left behind in the Church of the future. They would be, in effect, collateral damage in the project of modernization.
Nonetheless, consistent with the post-modern turn, pastoral strategists who spent decades promoting sacro-pop music and folk liturgies and modernized prayer books and manuals of ethical behavior devoid of any reference to God, grace, or sacrality, just “principles”, woke up to find themselves surrounded by a generation who want to study scholasticism, attend liturgies in Latin and, in the context of ethics, want to know how this or that act impacts upon their relationship with God.
The very “weirdness” of things pre-modern is part of what makes them different and thus attractive to those of post-modern sensibilities. It’s a little like the difference between going into a coffee shop on some cobbled street of old Catholic Europe, with its not-to-be-found anywhere-else-in-the-world ambience and picking up a coffee at Starbucks. Those who were young in the 60s may have been excited by the proliferation of modern chain stores, replicated in every town in the country, but today’s youth are bored by this. If, for example, it’s the Feast of the Epiphany, they like receiving a little packet of blessed chalk from their parish priest so they can write the initials of the three magi—Caspar, Melchior,and Balthasar and Christus Mansionem Benedicat (May Christ bless this house)—above their doorposts. It might look weird to the atheist or neo-pagan neighbors, but it’s an affirmation of one’s Catholic identity and so playfully pre-modern!
However there is obviously no virtue in being weird for the sake of weird itself. The reason that Christianity needs to become weird again is simply that it needs to be seen as a radical alternative to what we have now as our dominant social, political, and media-driven mythology. This is some kind of materialism—mere matter in motion—that contains within itself no telos, no inherent purpose and meaning. Today the cosmology is not even Aristotelian let alone Christian.
Making Christianity weird again entails the suggestion that there is some logic, some order, within Creation. We then need to explain that the Creator of this order is God the Father, in unity with the Son and the Holy Spirit. In other words, we need to have the courage to acknowledge that our understanding of God is Trinitarian. While Kant said that it did not matter whether there are three persons in the deity or ten, he was dead wrong about this!
We must also have the courage to explain that God the Son did truly become incarnate of a virgin in ancient Israel. This proposition is super-weird, but why bother about Christianity if this is not true?
This second person of the Trinity was subsequently crucified by the Roman occupiers of Israel because he got the local Jewish leaders off-side by daring to say that he was the son of God. He also failed to garner the support of the Roman governor, who did not want to be seen protecting a potential rival authority to Caesar and, in any case, the governor had a mob baying for Christ’s blood—a mob that could prove difficult to control. This part of the narrative is not so weird because these political factors are easy to imagine; but then the weird returns with the claim that this really-existing historical figure rose from the dead and, after spending some forty more days with his followers, ascended to God the Father.
These are certainly the most-weird elements of Christian teaching, but it doesn’t stop here.
We also need to bring back a sacramental imagination. This was one of the biggest casualties of the Reformation. A sacramental imagination means the ability to approach the whole of creation as revelatory of the divine, the ability to see how the material and the spiritual intersect. This in turn requires a belief in grace. We need to talk about grace more than we need to talk about social justice. Social ethics is a long way down-stream from anthropology. If our youth don’t have the faintest clue about Christian anthropology, then they won’t be able to tell the difference between a Christian conception of social justice and other conceptions on the political smorgasbord.
To approach the whole of creation as revelatory of the divine means explaining to people that every part of nature has been marked with the form of the Trinity. As the late Stratford Caldecott argued, “the ‘unity-in-distinction’ of the Trinity is the basis for an analogy that runs right through creation as a kind of watermark: the analogy of ‘spousal’ union between subject and object, self and other.” This particularly weird concept is the best way to account for the difference and the equality of the sexes—far better than anything feminist ideology has been able to devise.
Finally, of all the dimensions of the sacramental imagination, two of the weirdest are that the Body of Christ is really present in the Eucharist and that this presence is effected through the agency of a priest. Moreover, such priests acquire their spiritual power through another sacrament called Holy Orders. Priests are not glorified social workers, professional grief counsellors, or other styles of community elder easily understood by the mind of the rationalist, but agents of grace.
Such ideas are now gaining momentum. At least since the late nineteenth century there have been Catholic scholars who have argued that the project of marketing Christianity by reference to its ability to meet the goals of eighteenth-century philosophy is a doomed project. Newman called it promoting the religion of the age. Instead of looking over our shoulders at books by Immanuel Kant—the “Aristotle of Protestantism” as Ratzinger called him—Theodor Haecker suggested that we need to fight on sacramental ground. This is the ground upon which the earliest Christians fought during the Roman Imperium. In those times people across Europe gave up praying to the Roman gods and presented themselves for baptism.
Theodor Steinbüchel, a theology professor of the young Joseph Ratzinger, echoed Haecker. He said: “we must fight by amplifying the dimension of Christian mystery.” Gottlieb Söhngen, another of Ratzinger’s theology professors observed that “the supernatural and the natural order do not lie next to each other, but the supernatural order encompasses and also penetrates the natural order.” Indeed, a Christian culture is precisely one where there has been a high degree of penetration of the natural by the supernatural.
The penetration of the natural by the supernatural is not banal, is not boring, is not a matter of bourgeois conformism. For the Catholic it’s beatific and for the unbeliever fascinatingly weird and different—and it’s what we need now as an alternative to a bland materialist cosmology.
Tracey Rowland holds the St. John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Australia). In 2020 she won the Ratzinger Prize for Theology and in 2023 she was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences.
Very nicely written.