Podcast Episode #3: Pádraig Ó Tuama

In this episode of the podcast, Jason speaks with Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama about the virtues of exile, the vulnerability of writing poetry and the effort to reconcile being a gay man in a religious tradition that has long demonised (literally) LGBTQ identity. He has published several books of poetry and prose, including "In The Shelter", "Sorry For Your Troubles" and "Readings From The Book Of Exile".

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Podcast Episode #2: Derek Webb

In this episode of the podcast, Jason speaks with songwriter Derek Webb about guilt, shame and creativity. Webb discusses what he learned from songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, Amy Ray and Bob Dylan about the delicate art of prying open one's ribs and inserting a microphone. Is getting onstage night after night to sing – and thereby re-live – one's grief an act of healing or masochism?

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The Same Yesterday, Today and Forever

I love books. I love their calm company.

You can revisit a book any time you wish and, without pang of inadequacy, resume where you left off. I love the ordered symmetry of their spines on my bookshelf. I love the privacy of their hallucinations. I love the feel of the page, the coarseness between your thumb and forefinger as you drag it across like a stage curtain to reveal a fresh column of words.

I love the feel of snapping a book shut after reading its parting sentence, the audible thwop signalling both a physical and mental closure, conflict resolved, a storm of dramatic tension stilled by the very person who whipped up its gale in the first place. I willingly suffered the fuming of a college girlfriend who’d been away all summer, only to return and knock on my apartment door as I was two pages shy of finishing John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany. My desperation to achieve the closure of that final sentence caused me to leave her standing waiting for a homecoming hug while I apologised and read to the end. Putting the ‘me’ in meany, I suppose.

During high school I became obsessed with the author Michael Crichton after a friend loaned me his copy of Jurassic Park. After finishing it I headed to the local library and checked out as much of his back catalogue as I could find in stock. I navigated the bustling hallways of my high school with a newly developed sonar sense, holding my book in front of me while I strolled between classes, head bowed over its pages like a monk pacing monastery grounds in silent meditation. I read during school assemblies. I read during class downtime. I read during lunch while my friends socialised around me.

Books allow us a fantasy of structural perfection. The simple fact that the same words, in the same order, greet you on every visit gives them a sturdiness and dependability I’ve always struggled to find outside literature. The same yesterday, today and forever. So much of this life is liquid. Your most devoted friend today might not make much of your existence next week, but a book, in principle, never changes its story.

Is it any wonder that evangelicals place such an emphasis on the inerrancy of scripture and balk at any discussion of its compositional drift over time, the scribal revisions vying for transcription into the next generation? Evolution is a dirty word in evangelical subculture. If the mooring of bedrock is what you crave, you must cling to a belief that your holy book is divinely revealed (perfect at inception) and has maintained that integrity over time (perfect in continuity). Our distant ancestors may have emerged from the sea, but we’ve lost our ability to cope with such boundlessness. Seasickness intrudes. We demand solid footing. For many, the notion of an unchanging God, an unchanging book, an unchanging moral rubric, offers a steadying counterweight.

Though post-evangelical today I remain just as subject to this craving. The memoir as a literary form represents its own quest for grounding. Emotions feel so swampy and indistinct in your head but once you write something down, no matter how ineloquently, the ideas crystallise, assume a concrete form on the page. The sea waves of one’s inward experience turn dense enough to walk upon. The chaos of my life, that string of random occurrences, I can force it all into the mold of a story. I can manufacture the illusion that every one of my life experiences, traumas and pleasures alike, were sublimely authored and fit together into a predestined narrative, a perfect storm, a wonderful plan for my life.

The clutter of one’s life story can be tidied away by the writer’s rotating and placement of language, one word, after another, after another.

That time Dan Savage went back to church

This evening I came across a tweet from somebody who goes by the handle Armchair Philosopher, which reads, "I'm agnostic, but I started going back to church. What am I thinking?!" His sentiment immediately called to mind one of my all-time favourite This American Life segments – a Dan Savage essay that wrecks me every time I listen to it.

A lapsed Catholic, Savage discusses his atheism and the way in which his mother's passing tempted him to return to the church St. Ignatius in which he grew up. The comfort of the church-going ritual, the way the memory of that institution bonded him to his mother. He bristles at how the Catholic church regards sexuality in general, and his homosexuality in particular. He wonders aloud how you enter into the grieving process when Christian doctrine so eagerly assures you that your mother's not really dead, just relocated.

The audio version of Savage's reading has always been a treat, so intimate in my earbuds. As if spoken into a hand cupping my ear only. But tonight, after that random tweet sent me searching, I found a video clip of it from a staged broadcast of This American Life that was beamed out to cinemas. Seeing the author's composure crack as he reads the page in front of him. Even more powerful. Rituals bring comfort. Going back to enjoy this essay again, that's a ritual too I suppose.

Savage in front of that crowd. He could be a preacher, or a poet. And a poet.

The preacher tells us we're going to die, the poet reminds us we're not dead yet. You'll find both sentiments here.

On Childhood & Exploration Through Art

In his essay “The Wilderness of Childhood”, author Michael Chabon frets aloud about the narrowed confines of the world contemporary children are free to explore without adult supervision. He notes some of the rationale for this curtailing of adventure and shutting down of Wilderness – heightened anxiety over child abduction due to lurid news cycles, a society predisposed to tort cases over even minor scuffs, etc. – and ponders what unintended effects such diminished room for exploration might have on creativity at large.

“Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map,” Chabon writes. “If children are not permitted – not taught – to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?”

My own parents never stood between me or my siblings and the Wilderness. We spent entire childhood summers in southern California barefoot, burning our soles numb on the blacktop. We rode bikes all over the hills surrounding our Mission Viejo neighbourhood. We speculated about a splotch of red staining the wall lining one of those hilltop bike paths. Neighbourhood lore had it that a child had struck his head against the wall after somebody who lived in a house up the hill had launched a gobstopper at him from a slingshot. The stain on the wall allegedly evidence of where the blood from his head had oozed, baked into the stone beneath unstoppable sunshine.

But when it came to ideology and politics, that’s where the Wilderness experience ended and the metaphorical chainlink began. Only approved music and literature found their way inside. Our primary social circles conformed to the demographics of the church youth groups and Christian school clubs we frequented. Though Chabon laments the foreclosure of physical Wilderness spaces and geographical exploration, you could just as easily apply its logic to the realm of imagination. When children are penned in and prevented from poking around the Wilderness of ideas, having adventures outside the confines of parentally mandated wisdom and party lines, you can train a child to fear knowledge, to regard it as forbidden fruit.

I’ll confess to interpreting the Garden of Eden myth differently today. The Garden seems an obvious picture of childhood, before shame enters the world. Family photos of me as a young child naked from the waist down building sand castles, unconcerned with my nakedness. The Garden, where Adam and Eve walked alongside their parent in the cool of life’s morning. When they developed an appetite for knowledge, he kicked them out. Instead of being fed and pampered they would have to struggle with soil to grow their own food, irrigate fields with the sweat of their brow, bring forth new life in agony. The scriptures deemed such toil a curse.

If only I’d realised then what I’ve come to understand since, that the difficulty and struggle to feed oneself (either physically or intellectually) is one of life’s most ennobling privileges. That to stay in the Garden, even if it meant the company and protection of a helicopter parent, is no life at all. The walled Garden doesn’t need bricks to form an enclosure. The moment we leave the Garden and undertake the toil of living and learning, even if it means losing the father’s presence, that is a blessing to be cherished. Let Jesus curse the fig tree while we reserve our spite for its discarded leaves, the ones Adam and Eve used to shield their skin as the axe of separation fell. The fallen leaves. The fallen axe. My fallen forbears. The fall from the nest that had to inevitably occur before I learned how to fly.

I needed a new spate of experience. I craved exploration. The nascent Internet, the strangers I met there, opened a crease between me and a wider intellectual wilderness, the world outside the Garden of childhood. I caught a glimpse of something.

David Bazan and the scars of intimacy

When songwriter David Bazan impeached Pedro, his former band, and began performing under his own name, it wasn’t clear just how much of himself he was committing to offer listeners in so doing. The bracing parables of infidelity and self-righteousness and murder and religiosity and capitalism that he’d recorded under the Pedro The Lion moniker always vibrated with observations about human nature that seemed almost impolite to voice aloud.

Working in the realm of fiction furnished a truth-telling hall pass. The sensationalism of the plot twists – on Winners Never Quit a squeaky-clean politician murders his wife after she threatens to expose him, on Control a spurned wife stabs her philandering husband – reassured us with the implicit disclaimer that any connection to real persons or events was entirely coincidental. And concept albums, as we all know, are contrived by definition (right?). The wrapper of fiction offered plausible deniability, that we weren’t really that awful to each other. Bazan could hacksaw all the way to the bone and exhibit the black-rot marrow because it was somebody else’s bone, and the bone was all just a metaphor anyway. For all we know, Bazan might even be autopsying a straw man. But if his concept albums could be safely relegated to fiction, what were we to make of songs like “I Do” off 2004’s Achilles Heel?

“And when his tiny head emerged from hair and folds of skin

I thought to myself if he only knew he would climb right back in...

Now that my blushing bride has done what she was born to do

It's time to bury dreams and raise a son to live vicariously through

The sperm swims for the egg

The finger for the ring

If i could take one back

I know what it would be”

How's that for confessional candor? Even if we could be sure this narrator was simply an invented character, couldn’t it still be a sock puppet used by Bazan to vent his own ambivalence about parenthood? The playfulness of the cliche “blushing bride”. The brazenness of a father openly acknowledging his desire to live vicariously through his son. Maybe it’s all just black comedy, even if that final unresolved hypothetical left hanging in the air makes our chest tighten. Regretting a child or regretting a marriage. Which admission leaves the less scorching impression?

Consider the early Pedro song “Criticism As Inspiration” in which Bazan visits this same theme of how we commodify others to give our lives meaning, how we use them to plug up our own emptiness. Instead of the open legs of a labouring mother, this time it’s the posture of a receptive lover.

“Then there's your girlfriend / She opens her legs and gives your life meaning / Is that what you love her for? / It makes me feel so good to always tell you when you're wrong / The big man that I am to always have to put you down / It makes me look so good to always put you in your place / I can write it in a song but never say it to your face”

There it is again, the wallpaper-stripping sarcasm. Bazan seems to be checking his own motives for drawing attention to the messiness of other’s lives. What better way to deflect attention than to indulge in a critique of one’s neighbour. But then came Curse Your Branches, the first album to feature a photograph of David Bazan (however blurry), obscured somewhat by the giant, bright yellow text “BAZAN” in all-caps. It felt like a proper ‘coming out’ moment, the singer megaphoning his disillusionment with Christian fundamentalism, his slow dissolve into the booze he enjoyed a bit too much for his own good, his empathy with sinners, drunks, losers and fuck-ups the world over. Bazan seemed to be engaged in controlled burning as a means of clearing away the weeds and tangle and occasionally whole trees, giving light a chance to hit the forest floor. Self-immolation as the path to being born again, or at least giving new life some room to grow.

Bazan’s solo albums do have this weird obsession with trees, come to think of it. The cover art of 2006’s Fewer Moving Parts featured an illustration of Bazan cradling an axe against shoulder, standing in front of a grove of tree stumps. Clear-cutting. On the track “Backwoods Nation” he sang about America’s most regressive, hateful fringe existing in this metaphorical forest, insulated from multiculturalism and what some might deem progressive social values. Then on Curse Your Branches the tree imagery returns, wholly unavoidable given the fact that Bazan’s axe had finally bitten into the biblical tree of life itself. Leaves fall from branches, unable to determine where they land, or if they even have to fall at all.

By the time you get to Bazan’s last couple solo albums, Blanco (2016) and now Care, his axe has chopped to kindling any guitars hanging about the studio, making way for moody synths and programmed drum beats. The coarse grain of Bazan’s baritone finds its perfect complement in the album’s toasty-warm synth textures, shimmering keys and throbbing bass frequencies. Though the electronic components take on a grungy patina at times, the overall impression is one of cleanliness, clarity and metronomical order. Counter-intuitively, the more Bazan seems to slide into various forms of intoxication (“I recreate in the usual way, shut some breakers off but not the whole box, next day I wake till the fog finally abates, again at risk of being bored by clear thought”), the more sober his instrumental and compositional instincts become.

If Curse Your Branches found Bazan searching arms extended through the cloud of steam left over from the evaporated reservoir of his own baptismal font, Care seems to investigate the dissolution of a more terrestrial bond – marriage. He sings of infidelity (“Stop romanticising cheating, we are cowards everyone, all of us need major healing, come and get yours in the sun”), but this isn’t the hyper-dramatic sort from the protagonist of Pedro the Lion’s Control. The record’s title track follows a platonic relationship between a man and woman that pulses with not-so-naive intensity. “Later on we went out walking without ruining our lives," Bazan sings, "we know the difference between talking and going just outside the lines. It’s not like we’re immune to it.”

“Make Music” captures the struggle to hold together the planks of a marriage’s splintering hull, even as salty ocean gushes through the breach:

“Didn’t the disappointment press in the middle of your chest / Disbelief turned to bargaining, heartbreak turned to stress / Though the words had not been said yet, it was all you were gonna to get / You don’t know what will happen now and it’s caving in your head... / Didn’t I always interrupt that the sun was coming up / You believed it for a little while but you might have given up / I considered getting sober, I don’t want to be left over / But I would need a little more of you to try and fill the void...

"Didn’t we always vote for love when our friends were breaking up / Then they’d go and see a counsellor to find it’s not enough / Didn’t we hope it wouldn’t come for us when adulthood called our bluff / And we tried to turn the volume down and muddle through the hush… / Didn’t we make music? / Didn’t we always risk our hearts to do this?”

I’ve been through stretches in my own marriage where the silences punctuating the hardest conversations felt bottomless, spike-lined. And even those pits, without any safety net below to catch a falling body, felt safer than any web of words that might be stretched across the gap. That is a terrible despair, an almost impossible vulnerability. Maybe it’s something that every married person experiences at one time or another, if only for a season, but the marital scars Bazan spends several songs on Care describing certainly feel like a eulogy. In “Lazerbeams” he sings in unmissable past-tense,

“I woke up thinking I should stay / Awake whatever's coming next / Tears in someone's office / Unpacking our regrets / Now it's time to repaint / But it could be time to sell / All the plans we made together / And all there is, mis-remembered wealth / And though we couldn't see the future / Or comprehend the past / We knew that it would last / When we were lazerbeams”

Though it would be presumptuous to believe we have a perfect read on Bazan’s life simply from listening to Care, it feels like (if only in parable) he's written a second divorce record. And once again he accomplishes the feat with miraculous sensitivity and compassion. Maybe that’s what Bazan’s songwriting is all about – tracing a finger along the bruises, the scarred wrists, not out of disbelief but simply to acknowledge that we all carry them beneath our sleeves. He caresses these bruises. In short, he treats them with care.

The Chemistry of Ignorance & Awe

I’m fascinated by the plot twists fate appears to write into our life stories, if only to create drama for its own amusement. Writing about my religious upbringing may seem like a non sequitur after publishing a book-length appreciation of a video game. But don’t be fooled. There's a thread uniting these two projects – one about a medieval fantasy role-playing game, the other about religion. And that link resides in the way mystery interacts with the human psyche.

Mystery inspires appreciation, even worship. Mystery fosters the interactivity of conjecture. Mystery in art (the ‘Elsa Effect’ of don’t let them in, don’t let them see) is what drew me to Dark Souls. And I’m increasingly convinced that, despite my eventual deconversion and exit from the church, mystery is the thing that provokes my ongoing fascination with religion to this day. I’ve heard my condition referred to as being “Christ-haunted” (though it's difficult to understand why Christ would do the haunting himself when there’s a Holy Ghost on the payroll).

Four or five years ago, as I was beginning to admit to myself that I didn’t see or feel any compelling evidence of God’s presence – in the world, in my life – I ended up texting with an old pal. He’d gone through his own spiritual deconstruction but his curlicue trajectory had led him from evangelicalism to the Greek Orthodox church. He talked about the enjoyment of loosening his grip on certainty and seeking the rapture of mystery, of letting oneself be dazzled by a light too searing for the mind’s eye to register, of calling that God. Even if we couldn’t form an intelligible mental picture, we could still shut our eyes and bask in its warmth, he suggested. There was something attractive to me about that idea. A letting go of the need for certainty, a growing peace with “I don’t know” even while clinging to that old majesty.

© Paul Scott Canavan

I write in You Died about how the game’s use of ruined architecture and intentionally fragmented narrative draws you in and keeps your mind engaged, long after you’ve stepped away from the game. If you’re a straight man living in a historical period that obligates women to cover their bodies head to toe, the mere sight of an exposed ankle might drive you insane with lust. You might spend hours ruminating on the landscape concealed behind that curtain. Religion doesn’t reveal God’s ankle so much as it passes down a body of literature written by people who did and were transfigured by the sight. If we believe the stories, this simply creates even more mystery for our brains to chew over. With no empirical evidence to review, the pleasure loop of cogitation and conjecture – what we’ve come to call theology – can cycle like a perpetual-motion machine.

The ignorance of having never seen God’s face, or heard his voice, wasn’t bliss exactly but it felt like a necessary precursor to bliss. The straining toward illumination, the intellect’s version of sexual tension. The less resolved the question could be, the more you could exist in the strip tease of the half-naked truth. I’m convinced this is where the ecstasy of religion exists for many people. A mystery so impenetrable that one can spend a lifetime squirming in anticipation of the dam burst of answers occasioned by one’s own little death.

I’ve heard fellow atheists mock God as the “hide-and-seek champion of the universe” (no less strident a provocation than the words God’s own prophet Elijah used to troll the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18:27). I just think He’s a love interest that plays ‘hard to get’ more effectively than any being in the universe. His unattainability, his silence, his aloofness, is the very thing that makes his admirers want to drop everything and chase him, panting and deranged with desire, to the horizon's far edge.

On Perfectionism

Of all the oasis mirages at which I’ve knelt and gulped, Perfectionism has been the most unexpectedly rancid. The conviction of its reality and the mental models I built atop that foundation may take the rest of my life to disassemble. And I'm OK with that. It will be time well spent. No illusion has been more stunting in my growth as a person, more counter-productive in the furnishing of my worldview and ethical intuitions, more corrosive to my mental health, more devilling in my attempt to get a finished sentence on the page. If a theoretical perfect sentence does exist, you could spend a decade trying to crowbar the one you’re writing into closer resembling it. You might die trying. Or die from the trying. If you had an obsessive enough streak you might never arrive at sentence two. And by you, of course I mean me.

In its most popular usage, “perfectionism” refers to a lofty personal standard or philosophy that rejects any contribution judged inferior. I’ll call that lower-case “p” perfectionism, the sort author Elizabeth Gilbert warns against in Big Magic, her book on creative living:

"Perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear... perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more than a deep existential angst that says, again and again, ‘I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.’"

I’m not using the idea of Perfection to mean, simply, top marks. As in the phrase ‘Frightened Rabbit’s album The Midnight Organ Fight is perfect’ (though it is). I use the term 'Perfectionism' to describe a belief system, predicated on the existence of an ideal form against which we can measure deviation (a.k.a. sin). It's then a natural follow-on to bring that almost mathematical certainty into arenas of life filled with ambiguity: art, ethics, faith, etc. Guilt can be understood as the psychic angst and frustration experienced by the inability to bring ourselves and our contributions to this world sufficiently into alignment with this hypothetical ideal.

After becoming disillusioned with Christianity in my mid 30s, I assumed the root of my quarrel with religion hinged on its peddling of truth claims that didn’t stand up to scrutiny. That the world was created ex nihilo in six days. That death and suffering entered the world because my ancestors snacked on the wrong piece of fruit. That Jonah survived in the digestive tract of a giant fish. That there was an otherworldly inferno called Hell into which God would one day plunge his adversary Lucifer along with the rest of the world’s unbelievers. At five years old I anxiously informed my mother, “If the devil has wings like an angel and God throws him into the lake of fire, he could fly out again.” I was doing my best with the facts I'd been given.

Much of the modern case made against religion in the years since the attacks of September 11th has focussed on the ills of religious fundamentalism – terrorism (the attempt to move the world closer to one's model of Perfection through armed struggle), apocalyptic ideology, dogmatism, imperviousness to any scientific finding that contradicts one's holy book, etc. Yet the more I attempt to understand what injury I suffered in my evangelical upbringing, if any, it wasn’t just the systematic teaching of the scriptures as an exam answer key. Religion, and not just its fundamentalist strain, rests atop the premise of Perfectionism – a fundamental faith in the existence of Perfection. Fundamentalists carry this assumption further than their more liberal co-religionists, granted, but the vast majority of Christians take at least a handful of the following from religion's buffet:

• There is a perfect being: God

• Parent: also God

• Human: Jesus

• Book: the Bible

• City: heaven

• Earth: the Garden of Eden, before humanity’s rebellion

• Morality: whatever is consonant with God’s nature

• Sexual expression: straight, married

I could list more, but you get the gist. Religion thrives on the steadying benchmark of Perfection. Having such tidy parameters removes guesswork. People often describe the fundamentalist mode of thinking as ‘black and white’. Even the notion of black represents a taxonomical Perfection. Unambiguous evil. Perfection boasts a reassuring simplicity, whether earned or not. The more perfect the model against which one bases a judgment, the more certainty one feels entitled to marshal.

Bless This Mess

© Richard Hogg

Let's call the antidote to Perfectionism “Messiness”. In almost every zone of knowledge the fundamentalist argues, “It’s simple!” Even as the progressive, fielding the same question, surveys the Messiness before her and says, “It’s complicated!”, deploying caveats and further considerations. The fundamentalist will immediately detect such a response as weakness, insecurity, a smokescreen, a dodge. This is why fundamentalists have a relatively easy time winning converts – they radiate certainty, which makes their conclusions, even the bankrupt ones, feel unassailable. As a child I preferred simplicity. Who doesn’t?

The belief that every living thing appeared on earth in its present form, immutable, unchanging – that’s Perfectionism. Asking somebody to embrace the veracity of evolution, on the other hand, invites them to make a truce with biological Messiness on a grand scale. Whales with hip bones left over from their landlubbing ancestors. Humans with tail bones. Human embryos with gills, with coats of hair covering their entire body but shed prior to birth. Unending change, every living thing a so-called “transitional form”. A whopping 4,500 different species of cockroaches alone. It’s enough to make a Perfectionist dizzy. Ask a creationist about abiogenesis and they’ll tell you, “It’s simple: God did it!” Ask a scientist and they’ll tell you, “It’s complicated! There’s so much we don’t know.”

In Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, a book-length appreciation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, he considers the biological version of Platonic essentialism, the widespread creationist intuition that animal species possess essential forms in the way that geometric shapes do. That there is, for example, an essential rabbit, a sort of celestial cookie-cutter shape with floppy ears that could be used to stamp out such a form at the dawn of creation. The basic act of giving animals names further adds to the aura of immutability.

"The Platonist regards any [evolutionary] change in rabbits as a messy departure from the essential rabbit, and there will always be resistance to change – as if all real rabbits were tethered by an invisible elastic cord to the Essential Rabbit in the Sky. The evolutionary view of life is radically opposite. Descendants can depart indefinitely from the ancestral form, and each departure becomes a potential ancestor to future variants....

"If there is a ‘standard rabbit’, the accolade denotes no more than the centre of a bell-shaped distribution of real, scurrying, leaping, variable bunnies. And the distribution shifts with time. As generations go by, there may gradually come a point, not clearly defined, when the norm of what we call rabbits will have departed so far as to deserve a different name. There is no permanent rabbitiness, no essence of rabbit hanging in the sky, just populations of furry, long-eared, coprophagous, whisker-twitching individuals, showing a statistical distribution of variation in size, shape, colour and proclivities… All is fluid, as another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, said; nothing fixed. After a hundred million years it may be hard to believe that the descendant animals ever had rabbits for ancestors."

It’s a seductive idea: that we might be able to file living things into categories as clearly labelled as “triangle”, no additional qualification needed. And not just rabbits, but an Irishman, say, or a Christian. I suspect that xenophobia and resentment for immigrants owes much to the dissonance that arises from seeing a Platonic ideal muddied. The smile of a flag-pledging American patriot framed by the fabric of her hijab? Nice try, scoffs the jingoist in his camouflage cap, swatting away the cognitive dissonance, that orbiting mosquito whose buzz never quite goes away.

Perhaps my childhood experience growing up in Ireland in the early ’80s contributed to my illusion of a perfect Irish archetype. We shared an accent. We shared a paleness. How clearly I remember the classmate of mine who spent the entirety of his summer holidays in Africa and returned with his skin tone noticeably darker than when he departed. His transfiguration confused me. Six years on the planet by then and I’m not sure I’d seen anything resembling dark skin till that moment. Homogenous communities, how deftly they trick us into believing cultural purity exists outside the mind.

It’s comforting to imagine we live in a world of sturdy taxonomies. It helps us orient ourselves in the cosmos. Christianity’s various simplifications appear to arise from the same urge. The waypoints of a prepackaged moral system. The equatorial delineation of God and Devil, good and evil, angels and demons, heaven and hell, lost and found.

Culture Warriors

© Richard Hogg

Once the software of Perfectionism begins running on the human brain, however, it doesn’t stay corralled within the religious sphere. If there’s a perfect God and a perfect book, why shouldn’t there be a perfect mental archetype of what it means to be American? The famous metaphor of The Melting Pot, after all, is simply one way of expressing the desire to reduce the Messiness of cultural pluralism down to the simplicity of a uniform ideal. When Obama took office, the conspiracy shit-show of Birtherism seemed to ooze from a desire to resolve the cognitive dissonance of an American President that diverged from the perfect mental model of what an American looks like, the sort of name he ought to have. It’s easy to understand how a certain kind of fundamentalist would find in WASP-y homogeneity a sort of Perfection. Multiculturalism, after all, is demographical Messiness on a grand scale.

It’s no coincidence the American culture war between Left and Right tends to centre on the issue of abortion. To many opponents of abortion, there couldn’t be an easier ethical quandary. When does life begin? “Simple! At conception, end of story.” When Obama was asked by Rick Warren, at a 2008 campaign stop, when life began, he claimed the question was “above his pay grade”. Obama’s critics pounced on this answer, characterising it as a weaselly attempt to sidestep a question that has a simple answer.

However flippant Obama's answer may have come across, the phrase “above my pay grade” is simply another way of saying “it’s complicated". If a foetus has a heartbeat and can respond to stimuli, can we then conclude that it possesses an immortal soul? That the stopping of its heartbeat ought to be classified as murder? To the Perfectionist, any assertion of Messiness in such an allegedly tidy moral issue will seem unconscionable. To concede that foetal development is a nuanced progression, and carries with it corresponding nuances in our ethical obligations, would require a stand-off with Messiness that might never be satisfactorily resolved. The path of least resistance is to just affirm a belief that life starts at conception, that we have the same ethical obligations to an embryonic stem cell that we do to a 20-year-old college student, and move right along.

In his controversial book Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out Of Ethics, Richard Holloway, who was still serving as bishop of Edinburgh at the time of its publication, writes:

“I regret it when either side in the abortion debate assumes the moral high-ground, so that prohibitionists give the impression that those who believe in choice have no moral basis for their point of view and are little more than murderers; while pro-choicers sometimes give the impression that abortion is as morally unproblematic as a tonsillectomy. That is why some of us feel acutely uncomfortable in positioning ourselves at either end of the continuum and prefer, however agonisingly, to pick our way with considerable care through the middle of the battlefield.”

It’s hard to imagine a more articulate contrasting of Perfectionism and Messiness.

Like the abortion debate, it’s also no coincidence that the gender issue has become another key battleground of the culture wars. When right-wing Americans get distraught about transgender citizens using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, that anxiety isn’t just about safeguarding the nation's youth against pedophilic opportunists. The opponent of transgender rights, the person who would rather we just file gender dysphoria in the drawer marked mental illness and move on, the person who may even flat-out deny the possibility of sexual ambiguity or hermaphroditism, is simply building a big, not-so-beautiful border wall between themselves and Messiness. Don’t even try to break down the tidy categories of male and female, they seem to be saying, don’t you dare. Boys have penises, girls have vaginas. It’s simple!

The conservative right wing hardly holds a monopoly on Perfectionism. The same propensity manifests on the far Left in abundance. Asserting that all people who oppose gay marriage are bigots – Perfectionism. That all people who have concerns about immigration are backwoods racists – Perfectionism. That all Americans who deem Islam’s radical fringe a threat to national security are paranoid Islamophobes – Perfectionism. All I hear in these epithets is a conviction that, in making such judgments, it’s simple! Human beings are not complicated, the illiberal Left has them all figured out. (Granted, some of the above folks might actually be honest-to-god bigots, racists and Islamophobes. But to tell one from the other, you'd actually need to interact with them and give their views an honest hearing, you'd need to lay down your bag of slurs and quit broadcasting long enough to listen.)

At this stage in my own political affiliations I’m trying to carve out room in the rapidly shrinking centre, but it’s hard. The dialogue polarises to the fringes as people strive to impose a Perfectionistic narrative. Good and evil. White and black. Republican and Democrat. Christian and Islamic. My own father, who delighted for eight years in referring to Barack Obama by the nickname “BO” (geddit? the acronym for body odour) claims to this day that nothing good came out of the Obama presidency, that it was an unqualified mess from start to finish. Partisan Perfectionism, that’s my heritage. To acknowledge the presidency of a rival political party to have produced some positive results, and some negative, that would be a cognitive dissonance too Messy to bear.

Rehearsals For Departure

© Richard Hogg

My long, slow disillusionment with Christianity occurred in direct proportion to my willingness to declare a ceasefire with Messiness. Going all the way back to my high-school love affair with the roots-rock band Vigilantes of Love, who sang about God but also about sex and depression and Eleanor Roosevelt (really). The band’s songwriter Bill Mallonee dropped the occasional bit of profanity, which felt to my Perfectionist sensibilities like eating a healthy salad and occasionally cracking my teeth on a Gobstopper. I would be forced to reconcile that even sentiments laced with profanity could speak a truth worth hearing. A band that was, as the saying went, “too Christian for the secular market, and too secular for the Christian market”, this was Messiness in the artistic domain. The Perfectionism of the Christian music industry demanded that Christian artists sing about Jesus in as literal a manner as possible, and leave the ambiguity and metaphor to their secular counterparts. Anybody raised in the evangelical subculture has seen the chart on the wall at the Christian bookstore: If you like Perfectionism, then you'll love [Christian Artist X].

As I grew older, the dominos of Perfectionism tumbled in slow motion, over the course of years:

• The Bible’s Perfection eroded by my reading of scholars who worked unbridled from the yoke of apologetics.

• The Perfection of my own snazzily costumed Christian family, as it fissured and cracked in ways both overt and subterranean.

• The assumption of one Perfect sexual expression undermined by friendships with flesh-and-blood gay friends and colleagues.

• The Perfection of creation quaking as I took the time to understand how fully the theory of evolution departed from my unchecked checkmates (“then why are there still monkeys?”), as I engaged honestly with the supporting evidence.

• The Perfection of God and the morality to which his nature supposedly gave shape, destroyed by a frank appraisal of his Old Testament rap sheet, refusing any interpretive contortions to make apology for his poor behaviour. The growing feeling that to do so would be tantamount to a battered wife saying, He loves me, he just has a strange way of showing it.

Every time I looked within myself, I observed Messiness, a fact I’d once lamented but had started to regard with more compassion. And, increasingly, pride. Here’s the rub: imperfection is so much more compelling. Imperfection is texture. Imperfection is the Rice Krispies snapping and popping of a record needle on a beat-up LP. Imperfection is the crack in the singer’s voice at the edge of her range. Imperfection is the recipe for surprise. Imperfection is you, and me, all of us beneath our party masks.

A Stepford Wife fem-bot is perfect; yet I still prefer the grit and opinionated spikiness of my wife Summer. Plastic is perfect; I prefer fabric, wood (splinters included) and leather. The auto-tuned pop diva’s voice is perfect; I prefer the idiosyncratic voices of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits and Tom Petty and Scott Hutchison and Bill Mallonee and Dave Bazan. Classical music is perfect; I prefer traditional Irish folk music with its improvisation, unpredictability and unpretentious humanity. A mainstream summer blockbuster may have a two-dimensional villain trying to blow up the world; I prefer films (and television and books and video games) in which both the good guys and bad guys have a yin-yang mixture of dark and light.

Certainty is perfect; I now prefer doubt, the modesty it engenders, the journey of learning that terminates not at any destination or epiphany but only at the hard stop of death itself, cutting us off mid-senten_. In the face of such consorting with Messiness, many fundamentalist Christians double-down on their faith. Richard Holloway, a personal hero of mine who I've quoted earlier, describes this impulse in his memoir Leaving Alexandria:

"How does such hard and punishing certainty emerge from the existential gamble of faith? Paradoxically, it is lack of faith and fear of doubt that prompt it. What do you do if you can no longer live with the doubt that is co-active with faith? You try to cure yourself. And the best cure for doubt is over-conviction. A well-known mark of the uneasy doubter is over-confidence. It is like the refusal to let pity weaken you in the face of your enemy. Doubt, like pity, erodes certainty.

"If you are desperate for certainty because you believe only it can hold chaos at bay, including your own inner chaos, then you have to repress your doubt and pump up your convictions. Tone is the giveaway here. If you want to sell something, whether a commercial product or an ideology, hyper-conviction is an essential element in the transaction. Pooling your doubts, sharing your uncertainties, may be humanly more interesting, and may even lead to genuine discoveries that prompt a rueful, modest sort of faith, but it will never persuade multitudes. Or yourself, for that matter, which may be the real name of the game."

When the realisation dawned sufficiently in my mind that God, more than likely, did not exist, I fumed at my indoctrination. I veered into an atheist facsimile of the over-conviction Holloway describes. I splashed offensive memes across my Facebook page, one of which boiled down Christianity to the belief that “some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.” And there was the meme I posted of Jesus in his crucified posture photoshopped onto a water slide, arms outstretched as he hits the splash pool. (My older brother sent me an angry message telling me I was acting like our father's blowhard hero Rush Limbaugh, and he wasn't wrong.) I was busy working through my anger, my regret over pointless self-chastisement, my embarrassment over what I’d put stock in for so long, for too long. Just like that crucified Jesus, I had my own puncture wounds, many of them inflicted by the very faith I'd embraced with open arms.

I Of The Storm

© Richard Hogg

At a certain point you have to move from the question of “does God exist?” to the more nuanced question of “what are the consequences of believing a God exists?” What are the consequences of Perfectionism?

I’m starting to mellow. I still think the idea of God is a bit nutty – an assessment my Christian friends would likely endorse, even as they press forward into that presence they feel but are happy to consign to mystery. Embracing Messiness to any degree hardly obligates a person to renounce her faith. The move away from Perfectionism can be roughly measured by how many tenets of Perfection mentioned earlier, how many absolute certainties, one has foreclosed on. Is the Bible the perfect inspired word of God or a messy, fascinating porridge of poetry and metaphor? Were its pages written by a perfect God? Or messy humans?

The Bible has transformed in my conception to a work of classical literature, as worthy of study as Homer’s poetry or similarly important works of antiquity. Ethically instructive with sufficient cherry-picking, but hardly a Perfect guide to living. The ritual of prayer has been replaced with mindfulness practice. Being present, being non-judgmental of the Messiness of my own thoughts, attempting not to get swept away in that whitewater. I need infinitely more practice.

I still battle my addiction to Perfection and the easy certainty I once possessed. But I can't afford to keep up the habit any longer. The clinical depression I’ve struggled with throughout my life, for decades unnamed, drew nourishment from my Perfectionism, which in turn drew nourishment from my religious conception of the world. I still feel the overwhelming urge to check out, either mentally or physically, when the Messiness surrounding me gets too intense. Having two young children means I can’t escape it. But it’s a process. I’m getting there slowly. Bear with me. These are the musings of an Irishman with an American accent, remember.

It’s complicated.