In lieu of Happy Hour on this Ash Wednesday, a brief reflection on the admission that we have “bad taste” in popular society, and the embarrassments that prevent our honesty.
Since it is always unpleasant to have to admit the lack of something that everyone has as a matter of course, and which therefore properly gets a sort of special significance only when someone is stupid enough to betray his defect, what wonder then that no one admits it? In the case of what amounts to something presupposing skill or aptitude or the like, it is easier to make an admission. But the more insignificant the matter, insignificant, namely, because we are all in possession of it, the more it is stupid and in bad taste to make the admission. And this is the modern category for any sign of concern lest one should not be a Christian: it is in bad taste. Ergo, we are all Christians.
The Taste of Popular Society
Is it embarrassing today not to be a Christian? Perhaps in some places, still. Certainly, in some families or communities: those in which faith remains the norm—that is, the norm, the unquestioned presupposition of what everyone is, or believes; of the “normal” and “reasonable” position. If one belongs to a family in which religious belief rules the days, weeks, months, and years, a departure from that faith signals an embarrassment, of the one leaving to those staying, and of those who remain in the one who has departed.
But the words above were published by Søren Kierkegaard in 1846 in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript: at a time when Christianity did indeed remain the norm in the Western world. Today, at the remove of nearly 180 years, it is closer to the inverse. It is more likely that, if someone says, “I am a Christian”, it would be an embarrassment not to follow it up with, “but…” and a string of qualifiers. These qualifiers (it hardly needs stating) largely disqualify one from being regarded a “follower of Christ”. One must distance himself from doctrine; one must make his Christianity intensely personal and in no way institutional. Doctrines must be denied or mitigated. Consequences of sinful behavior must be evaluated solely from by the radically subjectivized conscience. The truth of faith does not belong to the world, but only to the individual soul.
Today’s bad taste, that is, consists in being a Christian without anti-Christian qualifiers—and perhaps one may seem some irony, here, in the wake of quoting Kierkegaard.
Admission and Embarrassment
Ironies aside, there exists a powerful observation in the words of the great Danish thinker. We, all of us, struggle to admit we lack something everyone else seems to have. In recent decades, Scientific Rationality™ seems to have taken the place of Kierkegaard’s Christian-adherence. Can we not hear someone say, “I am a Christian, but I believe in Science.” Or perhaps it has been Liberal Democracy© and its specifically-sexual libertarian dimension: “I am a Christian and I have lots of married gay friends!” (where “and” is really yet another “but”).
Embarrassment is a powerful feeling: that feeling of being pinned by shame—held down for all to see, exposed as something unfitting to the world in which one lives. But of course…
Does that not tell us something about ourselves? And the world in which we want to live, to be accepted? Whose judgments of taste should we yearn to please? Why should we hold ourselves embarrassed when derided for not believing in nonsense?
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