On ‘weird’ Christianity and its critics

This blog has existed for a long time – through both its Anglo-Catholic and its Orthodox phases – on the edges of the ‘weird’ Christian phenomenon, which was recently highlighted in one op-ed piece written by Tara Isabella Burton for the New York Times. I’m more heavy metal than punk, admittedly, but her characterisation of the countercultural proclivities of the segment of young and disaffected Christendom I belong to hits straight home. It’s somewhat unfortunate that this op-ed is somewhat loose and all over the place, because there is a distinct and eloquent core to it that recognises and speaks directly to the project this blog represents:

The Weird Christian movement, loose and fledgling though it is, isn’t just about its punk-traditionalist aesthetic, a valorization of a half-imagined past. It is at its most potent when it challenges the present, and reimagines the future. Its adherents are, like so many young Americans of all religious persuasions, characterized by their hunger for something more than contemporary American culture can offer, something transcendent, politically meaningful, personally challenging. Like the hipster obsession with “authenticity” that marked the mid-2010s, the rise of Weird Christianity reflects America’s unfulfilled desire for, well, something real.

I say it’s ‘somewhat unfortunate’ that this blog piece is so loosely-structured and free-form, because it opens itself up to a lot of bad-faith criticism, such as some of the criticism it got at the National Catholic Reporter from Jamie Manson – which is, in roughly equal parts: illiterate fact-free griping about Bernie Bros, Dreher-bashing and Katie Kelaidis-style fashion-shaming of women who wear veils.

I do not at all begrudge Manson her bashing of Dreher or even her defence of Pachamama-as-Marian-image – a position on which I am agnostic for Christological reasons, but to which I’m generally sympathetic on account of my antipathy to iconoclasm. But her oblique woke-liberal bellyaching about Bernie Bros (‘socialism — as we've seen in its young, white-male dominated form in the U.S. — does not inherently disassociate anyone from racism, misogyny, homophobia or transphobia’) is simply not based in facts. American socialism is predominantly young and millennial, yes, but it isn’t white-dominated or male-dominated, and it does and has dissociated itself strongly from racism, misogyny and other forms of gender discrimination, particularly after 2016. Manson’s continued use of this ideological fiction fails to indict socialism, but it does say something about her own priorities – that these identity politics issues matter more to her than œconomic inequality.

The veil-shaming crap follows from this somewhat. It’s actually no less perverse and no less purity-policing to tell women that they shouldn’t wear a veil in a church setting, than to tell them that they should. The only difference is that the mainstream norm for appropriately-feminine behaviour has changed. If, as Manson suggests, ‘head coverings were compulsory for centuries because the female body was seen as a threat to men's chastity’, and that this is a moral problem, then it is incumbent on us not to simply leave it there but to inquire why this is a moral problem. The initial, and valid, feminist reaction was against norms which policed the way a woman dresses to meet the psychosexual demands of men in their community. It placed the burden of incapably-restrained male libido unfairly on the women.

But this knife cuts both ways. Now the norm is for women to not cover their heads, anywhere. Katie Kelaidis complains about the resurgence of headscarves in Orthodox churches, at bottom because they make her feel insecure. I would argue that, if we accept it as morally axiomatic that it’s not a woman’s responsibility to restrain men’s libido for them, neither is it a woman’s responsibility to dress a certain way to suit other women’s insecurities. If my defence of veils in church sounds individualistic, that’s because to some extent it is. Call it the ‘oikonomia defence’. Outside a certain set of broad civic boundaries and strictures against lewdness common to most settled cultures past and present, I don’t believe in policing women’s dress.

But on the few occasions where she actually addresses what I take to be the ‘punchline’ of Burton’s piece, Manson misses the point and does so in profound ways that make me wonder if she actually read the piece or if she is just reacting to it. For example, when she says this:

Weird Christians claim to want a faith that is "totally demanding," but they do not seem inclined to do the demanding work of examining the relationship between the exaggerated medieval rituals they fetishize and the barbaric economic and social injustices of the Middle Ages.

I dare not speak for others in the broader ‘weird Christian’ ambit; I’m sure they’re more than capable of speaking up for themselves. But speaking for myself in my own little idiosyncratic corner of the Orthosphere, I happen to be doing exactly this, and I have been doing it for a long time. Even in the places where I tend to vaunt the Middle Ages for various reasons – particularly polities which did away with the death penalty, or banned torture of prisoners, or made it mandatory to feed the poor on public feast-days – I am not blind to the political failings of those times, which were often incurably deep. Being Orthodox, I am an intense critic of the Crusades (especially the fourth one). And being aware of the œconomic consequences of the Norman invasion, I am also intensely critical of feudalism.

Lest one think from the above descriptions that I’m being a chauvinist triumphalist convertodox here, I don’t ignore political failings and faults in our ‘holy lands’ either. Even mediæval Russia, even Kievan Rus’ with its deep-rooted Christian radicalism, was rife with princely backstabbing, and the hyperdox hang-ups of rural Russian priests of this time are more than occasionally embarrassing to read (though they did come in for some censure from their bishops, even back then). On a note of personal self-criticism, I’m well aware that there’s a certain unresolved sexual component to my own straight-Shôta yearning for green and pleasant pastoral idylls of an English and Tory flavour, and I’m doing my best to keep it in view and in check.

So it’s simply wrong – egregiously so – for Manson to allude that being drawn to the ‘smells and bells’ of mediæval ritual automatically demands that you turn off your brain or that we take refuge in ‘kitsch and camp’, particularly given the punchline of Burton’s piece which directly contradicts this point. There are certain aspects of mediævalism which we would do well to reappropriate against the new nationalist right, rather than surrendering them wholesale. A very important one of these is a certain broad sense of civilisational humility, which is missing as much on the ‘woke’ left as it is among the new nationalists.

However – and here I allow myself the conceit that my ‘weird’ Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican brothers and sisters would broadly agree with me – the point of having a prisca theologica is not to take refuge in an idealised and static imagery of the past, but instead to creatively articulate the basis for a transfigured future. That means throwing off the balance of a status quo that has little use anymore for public considerations of Christ. Are we ‘unique’ in that? Dear God, I hope not – I hope Manson’s right about that. But it behooves our critics to note that a genuine transfiguration of society in a more just direction requires a hierarchy of values – not of people, but of values – for which Christian antiquity provides a useful guidepost.