In today’s New York Times, David Belcher has this interesting article discussing Patty Griffin’s new album titled “Downtown Church.” Apparently the album focuses on renditions of gospel from the 1950s and ’60s, music that was the very bread of life for so many, and was foundational for rock and roll. Griffin has this to say about singing this old-time gospel music: “I grew up Catholic, so I have these defenses about listening to anything with too much religiosity; some of the lyrics didn’t sit well in my mouth.” (She goes on to add that “One of my beefs is the patriarchal setup. Having the he, he, he, God, God, God, king, king, king stuff was hard for me.”)

It seems like the “Catholic” line was meant to correlate to Griffin’s avowed religious “defenses,” and not the sensitivity to patriarchal theology. But there can be little doubt that growing up Catholic gave her plenty of opportunities to learn in painful detail about what she so helpfully calls “the patriarchal setup.”

Why it is that so many Catholics are so reticent to get too specific about their faith and to feel “too religious” is one of the more interesting unanswered questions from a practical-theological perspective. Two provocative popular explorations of this in the last few years have been provided in the U.S. Jesuit magazine America, one by Martin Pable, called “Why Don’t Catholics Share Their Faith?” is here. The other, by David Nantais, is called “What Would Jesus Listen To?” and can be found here.

While there are no doubt many reasons that many (but by no means all) Catholic Christians tend not to feel as comfortable expressing or publicly indulging explicit religiousness as some Protestant and evangelical Christians (and even this would have to be further specified racially and ethnically in order to really get at whether this defensiveness is correlated to Catholics of a certain social class, ethnicity or some other factor), the generalization does, in my experience, bear some truth.

And this is precisely one of the things I appreciate about Catholic Christianity, the way it can leave room for the faith or unfaith of others without getting its theological feathers ruffled. Think about the notable and frequent intensity of religious indirection in some “secular” musicians with a Catholic background: Madonna, Springsteen, Alanis Morrisette, just to name three to start.

(By the way, Griffin calls herself a “lapsed Catholic” in the video above. Morrissette has called herself “post-Catholic.” The very invention of these kind of terms, which signal a kind of continual negotiation with Catholicism, and the slow invention of a new way of living with Catholicism (including beyond but still in relation to it), reminds me of the secular Catholicism I’ve tried to outline on this blog.)

There is a kind of religious indirection or defensiveness among Catholics born no doubt of lack of awareness or confidence about one’s (ir)religiousness, and those who labor in youth and young adult ministry work often with a titanic creativity and persistence in face of this. But much less acknowledged is a kind of religious indirection or defensiveness born, however unaware, of a deeper sense about modesty in face of mystery. That’s one quite interesting side of Ms. Griffin’s forthright comment.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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