A good number of commentators will tell you that the popular-cultural practices of “secular life” must be opposed because they represent, tout court, the “culture of death.” One has to deal in particular with this kind of judgmentalism in my own Catholic circles. A good way to deal with it is: calmly, asking for explanations, distinctions, definitions, and contexts. Thankfully, I find that most thinking Christians cultivate more careful registers for learning from their experience and sifting out how they fit into (or not) their larger cultural contexts. And not just thinking Christians, of course. If one spends any time on the rock circuit, one meets any number of seekers, wayfarers, journeywomen and journeymen, half-Christians, half-Buddhists, half-agnostics, half-atheists, as well as full-on Jews, Christians, Wiccans, and more.

Spending time in secular music cultures, especially performance and fan cultures, like club scenes and online communities, can be a “sampler” of religious-spiritual identities on offer in the USA and globally today; but it can also become more: a gentle and ongoing “pressure” on faith identity that keeps people open, curious, and wondering. Popular music cultures, and more specifically the rock cultures with which I am most familiar, have ways of letting people be that are not reducible to “relativism” (that new religious slur of choice among many Christians, and Catholics in particular, today).

Christians are not used to thinking that they need tonics for their own tradition, but as Charles Taylor (among many who know the history of Christianity) argues in A Secular Age (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2007), there is a “long-standing obsession in Latin Christendom to nail down with ultimate, unattainable and finally self-destructive precision the bases of final, unchallengeable, inerrant authority, be it in a certain form of Papal decision, or a literal reading of the Bible” (p. 512).

I don’t intend to glorify the benefits of the more casual practice of religious authority in the music scenes, only to make the simple theological point that living simultaneously in multiple irreducible zones for religious experience and practice is not only more possible than ever in our culture, and is not only interesting or useful, but might also be part of the spiritual insurance that allows one to remain in the practice of Western Christianity, a practice that comes now with the imperative to mitigate its historic “obsessions.”

[As multimedia free-associations for this topic: The first embedded video is of Alanis Morissette singing "Baba" at the Vatican concert in 2000. The second and third are pilgrim videos from Taize. They raise visually for me the practice of continuing faith in face of self-destructive tendencies in Western Christianity.]

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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