Lead singer and bassist Doug Pinnick of King’s X has for many years let out some of the most righteous anger in contemporary rock. King’s X, of course, was early on identified as at least a Christian-friendly band, if not “Christian rock.” Their music has changed, however, due no doubt to Pinnick’s own transformation away from Christianity.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the moment I was reading an evangelicalish faith-and-culture magazine called Regeneration Quarterly about ten years ago, while walking around Somerville, Massachusetts, and there was an interview with Pinnick, in which he stated bluntly that he was gay. I almost dropped the magazine and yelled out something between “whoah” and “no way!” Rock stars don’t often do this, of course. Rock’s LGBTQIA turn has in many ways not yet arrived. (However, scholars like Robert Walser and others have already done substantial work on rock’s queernesses of gender performance.)

Back to Pinnick: At the time, I thought: “It’s all over for him,” even though we were late in the Clinton years and the country seemed to be getting more progressive. (Not to mention my own homophobia-decompression-chamber process).

In the flurry of internet chatter that inevitably followed, someone posted Pinnick’s mailing address in a King’s X “newsgroup,” and I sent him a supportive note, and copy of my first book, to try to say I was a spiritual ally, for whatever that was worth. Since that time, in his music and interviews, he has been charting a terrain beyond what anyone early on thought King’s X might stand for, and struck me as someone from whom Christians analyzing rock have much to learn, having gone through his own decompression chamber and emerged into post-Christianity. See, for example, a recent interview here. He perhaps has gone through what scholars call a “deconversion.”

Why should theology care? Conversion has long been valorized over against its silent other—one of its many silent others—deconversion. This time of a “new evangelization” in the Catholic Church of postmodernity must also be a time of availability for deconversion, as the “missiological” counterpart to what I have elsewhere called a Christian spirituality of dispossession. This is a missiology to and for the “already converted,” sharing in the conviction of recent catechetical documents that due to the challenges to Christianity’s vitality in Western culture, those Catholics raised in the faith themselves need a deeper evangelization, catechesis unending, but now drawing a different inference: that a mature deepening of “faith” might in fact lead to a deconversion, faith’s releasement.

Much of the ecclesial or theological literature concerning the situation of Christianity in a postmodern and religiously pluralistic context has contemplated the possibility and complexity of conversion from one religion to another religion, or a conversion to a second religious faith without giving up the first (for example, in many of the conversations about “multiple religious belonging”). Theologies of inculturation share in this conversional rhetoric, typically framing the significance of attention to culture for the purpose of deeper conversion of the believer in a specific context.

We seem constantly, then, to be talking about the value of “ongoing conversion,” whether within or, more cautiously in Catholic theology, between one religious tradition and another. But all this talk of movement in one direction, of a deepened faith that respects the given religious categories that will contain the new convert and allow a journey down into the depths of that tradition, signals a reluctance to explore the possibility of a backward breaking up, a dissolution, a fragmentation—a deconversion, a “holy departure” from religious belief, community, tradition.

The processes of deconversion, the lives of those who “leave the faith,” are almost never the focus of theological reflection, having disqualified themselves from the ability to bear a disclosure about the faith, and not just its aberrations or imperfections. “Ex-Christians,” “Ex-Catholics” or “Recovering Catholics” make many theologians wince, and have yet to be generally seen as a potential source of real insight about the adult life of faith, indeed as one possible outcome of a Christian theological life. And yet, as John Barbour argues, in his fascinating study Versions of Deconversion, the “insights of those who have conscientiously rejected Christian beliefs ought to play a role in Christian self-definition,” especially if such definition is the work of a “self-critical Christian theology.”

A stance of dispossession suggests that the willingness to relinquish Christian faith to the service of a truth not comprehended by the faith that can be had today, can serve as a decompression chamber, of considerable length and complexity, into a new theology. This is a very particular way of saying that faith can be the midwife of doubt, that one can love the truth one learns in church so much that one experiences a commencement from the church. That one can fall so deeply for Christ that one falls through Christ (with Christ, and in Christ), into an unforeseen relationship to truth. Deconversion is of the spirit of a postmodern, and for me particularly Foucauldian, theological exposure, yet is a much broader contemporary phenomenon. As Barbour recognizes, deconversion “is a subtle yet pervasive impulse and theme…in a great deal of modern and postmodern thinking,” recalling that it was “Nietzsche [who] first discerned that deconversion from all inherited beliefs could become a systematic program reflecting a scrupulous intellectual conscience.”

King’s X, help our unbelief.

Tom Beaudoin
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

4 Comments »

1. 

   i sometimes wonder if the church created its own mess on this account. i think of jesus in the gospels, healing on the sabbath, showing us, as we are learning in class, a practical or ordinary theology. the law is for the sake of the people, and for the benefit of the people, not for its own sake, its own immutable existence. jesus seeks to address the theology of the moment and the need of the moment, to heal. when i hear people who wish to leave the church, or as you say, deconvert, the reason given is that christian thought is seen as immutable, inflexible, not able to meet the demands and situations of this day and age. apparently the church over these last 1800 years or so was not able to hear jesus’ message. yet, it appears to be a perennial human problem: the fact that jesus had to address it in his day shows that the religious institution of his day was also using religion as some immutable rule of life, instead of examining how faith works in the immediate moment, in the immediate need. can we who claim faith in christ find a way to communicate this faith shown by jesus, to a world skeptical of centuries of the church’s own inability to understand the needs of the moment?

   Comment by Mark Frickey — February 11, 2009 @ 3:19 pm

2. 

   Thanks for this posting – as I write (more stories about my children, look out!), my 8 year old son has finally gone to bed. He has been improvising at the piano over Queen’s “We Will Rock You” – and we have been watching Freddie Mercury on YouTube singing the song as well as “We are the Champions.”

   I know this posting was about theology and deconversion, but the homosexual and gender issues also mentioned are poignant for me, watching my son sing like Freddie Mercury (my son’s tenor is bit more like a mariachi’s) and seeing Freddie work the stage in his black and white jumpsuit…the man with an amazingly high and powerful voice, now lost to us. Like so many. The New York arts community still has a great black hole from all the wonderful artists lost in the AIDS crisis of the 1980′s. And we just received the email regarding Ken Starr trying to abolish the same-sex marriages in CA that took place in the brief months before Proposition 8 – have you seen the little film with Regina Spector’s “Fidelity” on “Please Don’t Divorce Us”? It is very touching.

   A convergence of thoughts: my son enamored of the sounds of Queen, the souls we still remember that vanished in the 80′s, the struggles of King’s X with a religious worldview that could not expand to include his full humanity (as Mark has written, “immutable and inflexible”), and the political issues in California that are disrupting the lives of people trying to look after each other.

   Sigh. A new generation. How will my son and daughter engage with music, with protest, with the struggle for justice, with love, and for the expression of life? What will we have left for them?

   I agree with you Mark that this seems to be a perennial human problem, and challenging inadequate theologies and religious expression is found in the stories of Job and Jesus, among others, so we have examples in our religious history to lead us. One of the roadblocks of sharing these examples is the bad track record we inherit as well – with a “world skeptical” before us. But we have to use our imaginations! — but then, don’t get me started on education!(smile)

   Comment by Lisa — February 12, 2009 @ 8:05 pm

3. 

   Interesting stuff. Pinnick’s story is a fascinating one, and one I’ll continue to follow no matter where his spiritual path my lead.

   I too sent Mr. Pinnick a supportive email when I heard about his struggles, and he actually was kind enough to get back to me. He seems like a genuinely decent guy, and if he’s got one thing going for him, it’s sincerity.

   Regardless of whether one is in the midst of “deconversion”, it would behoove a good many of Pinnick’s detractors (the same ones that skewered Amy Grant and Stryper) to consider the fact that the three most profound words in the English language are sometimes “I Don’t Know”. Nobody ever promised us that the Bible would neatly explain every situation and struggle. Why not let Mr. Pinnick and others who struggle with faith and homosexuality to be people we love without understanding?

   My main problem with so many of these people is that they don’t seem to recognize that the worst problem they’ve ever faced is having a zit on their chin before the prom. Some of us have bigger issues to grapple with than that, no matter how magical the Jesus of evangelicalism can sometimes be portrayed, and not matter how many presumptuous sermons and articles imply that he’ll wave his wand over your life and make everything ducky. I often wonder if a story like Pinnick’s is just one more challenge to the copacetic Ned Flanders existence to which so many evangelicals seem to feel they’re entitled. Perfect kids, a constant sense of well-being, etc., etc.

   King’s X has made some of the most heartfelt and moving statements of Christian faith I’ve ever seen in the music world (just the cover of the fourth album, for example) and Dug’s gayness does not erase that for me, nor should it. Truth is truth. I wish some of us in the Church would learn to ask questions first and shoot later.

   He was already a beneficial iconoclast for Christianity before he “deconverted”, in my opinion. The band in general was able to convey realistic struggle in the face of faith and life, as opposed to flaccid mainstream MOR Christian radio, which leaves me feeling like I’m sitting down for a nice haircut as opposed to sizing up the realities of true Christian struggle (or any other struggle for that matter).

   Faith needs its mavericks, and some of us have that role thrust upon us. If Pinnick is mad at God, I don’t blame him. So am I. If Pinnick is mad at the Church, I blame him even less. I agree that an outspoken, thinking individual like Dug Pinnick can give many of us in Christendom the theological kick in the crotch we so desperately need.

   Happy kicking, Dug.

   Comment by Curt — March 16, 2009 @ 9:56 am

4. 

   When I learned that Doug Pinnick had come out, the music they had written to that point made a whole new dimension of sense to me. Tom Beaudoin’s metaphor of the “decompression chamber” helps me understand that. I found in their music–especially in Doug’s lyrics as given expression and carried by their powerful instrumental and vocal performances–a heartbreaking sense of brokenness and longing that reached deep into my soul and assured me that I was not alone in my struggle with faith. I cried like a baby the first time I finished listening straight through to _Gretchen Goes to Nebraska_. Doug was apparently on his way out of the faith when I discovered King’s X on the release of _Faith Hope and Love_ (though it ain’t over til it’s over), but their music gave me something to lean on as I groped my way further in. Doug’s honesty, his sensitivity, and the band’s ability to give powerful expression to both played a huge role in my own spiritual journey. I remain grateful to Doug, Ty, and Jerry for that. The decompression chamber can serve people heading in both directions. And I wonder whether its length and complexity might be coterminous with each person’s lifespan?

   Comment by Tim Hall — May 14, 2009 @ 8:31 am

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