What to make of all this? I honestly don’t know yet.
by Charles Mudede
For many years, I believed I was a hardcore atheist. I came out about this soon after my father, a theologian trained at the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, died. At that time, around 2010, I felt I was finally free to speak my mind on matters concerning the Bible, Jesus walking on water, the resurrection after three cold-dead days, the whale that swallowed this guy, the donkey that talked on the street (“Why are you hitting me?”), turning wine into water, and the seedy business of washing feet. But when I joined the atheist camp, I found myself in the company of snots like Richard Dawkins, whose book The Selfish Gene not only did lasting damage to the biological sciences but also audaciously chained the complexities of genetic replication to a dry fiction constructed by mainstream economics: methodological individualism. Dawkins put Thatcher in our genes. I will not even bother to discuss Dawkins’s ally Daniel Dennett, a “philosopher” and regular blowhard who, up to his last breath, contributed almost nothing to the rich picture of human sociality but had a great time bashing Christian faith with a stick that had as much substance as the ones used to divine water.
But there was another problem with atheism. It rejected, whenever possible, anything that had the whiff of a story. For example, the theory of the Big Bang, first formulated by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and theoretical physicist, in 1927 was rejected until the cosmic microwave background (the ancient light predicted by the theory) was accidentally detected in 1964 by scientists at Bell Labs (these were the days when American corporations actually made huge research and development investments). The reason why Lemaître’s reasoning was discredited for so long? He believed in God. And many thought his faith required him to impose a story on the creation of the universe. Atheists, such as the great cosmologist Fred Hoyle (he brought the stars to life), wanted a story-less universe, one without a beginning or end. Epistemology without narratology. They were wrong. We are in a story. And I do believe in stories.
During my time in the “desert of the real,” atheism, I realized that the music with the most meaning to me never left the Black church of my childhood: the choir, the sermons, the spirit rippling through the pews filled with believers. Had I overreacted? I wondered. Was not white Christian nationalism completely different from church in the Black community? The former being more social and realistic than the latter? Combine this with my three-year consumption of books—some popular, others technical—of the history of theoretical physics (the universe is truly more bizarre than the trippiest of human dreams imaginable), and I found myself losing my atheism. It didn’t provide the answers I wanted. But nor did I turn to and open the door into the room called: reborn Christian. That’s not going to happen. But I did, a year or so ago, give up on crass certainty and embrace the complexity of it all.
A step in this new direction—the step of reassessing and reformulating my confused religious feelings—was the recognition of what I now consider to be the most underappreciated transition in the history of pop music. It starts near the middle of Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album What’s Going On. It deserves our attention in these times of unremitting gloom and doom. It’s the transition from “God Is Love” to “Mercy, Mercy (The Ecology).” The former, which is filled with Christian love, abruptly ends, and we enter the shock of the latter, which is disenchanted and scientific. The sacred is absent from Gaye’s urgent description of the Anthropocene. Mercury in the water, radiation in the air, the fall of acid rain. God is not here, but He was everywhere in the previous track. And maybe this is how it can only be: this harsh and irreconcilable split between the two. It recalls Niels Bohr’s quantum complementarity principle. We have to live with the fact that reality is not one thing. It has two (or even more) confirmations. “God Is Love” is real. “Mercy, Mercy (The Ecology)” is real. Both are not untrue.
There is more. Listen to the Staple Singers’ tune “I’ll Take You There.” Listen to the lyrics: “I know a place… [where] ain’t nobody cryin’… Ain’t nobody worried.” What kind of place is this? In the church, it’s Heaven up above. The region of the clouds, the kingdom of the lord, the land of the dead. But this place, the place the singer will take you, is not eschatological; it’s clearly erotic. She will fuck you there: “I’m callin’, callin’, callin’ for mercy (I’ll take you there) / Mercy, mercy (I’ll take you there).” This is profane. And yet, church is still in the tune. That is indeed the source of the song’s power. He is still in here. (And I use the expression “He” because I want to point to the conventional God of Christianity and not the one of, say, Spinoza or Alfred North Whitehead, the impersonal Jesus, which is far from the one you can call “to hear your prayers, someone who cares.”)
But then there is house music. Here we find a truly fascinating development in Black popular music. It begins, as far as I can tell, in 1986 with Marshall Jefferson’s “Move Your Body.” It happens like this: During the recording of the house classic, Jefferson, the producer, tells Curtis McClain, the performer, to sing the track’s simple lines (“Gotta have House, music, all night long / With that House, music, you can’t go wrong”) not with R&B smoothness and elegance but with the urgency and punch of church. From this point on, house, a musical form that has its roots in Black queer culture, draws its defining delivery directly from the choir . House is secular/sacred music. And often this fact is made plain, as with Jay Williams on U.B.P.’s “Testify.” The dance floor, physical desire, the driving beat become the House of the Lord. In church, you testify about how much you love Jesus; on the dance floor, you testify about how much you love the body who is moving you. But the church did not dismiss the power of house; instead it, without difficulty, recaptured the hedonism of the dance floor and injected it into the spirit of the congregation. This genre is called gospel house.
All you have to do is listen to “Testify” right next to Byron Stingily’s “It’s All Jesus” to see the ease with which the secular reverts to the sacred. It happens without missing a beat. The same cannot be said for much of Christian rock or the like. Christian pop tends to sound lower than even second-rate. But not with gospel house: that music does not fail to take you there.
What to make of all this? I honestly don’t know yet. But I do think we live in a world that’s ruled by people who have no sense of wonder. This is the real catastrophe. And by wonder, I mean “thaumazein,” which the philosopher Hannah Arendt described as “shocked at the miracle of being.” We know that anyone applying for a job at ICE has never experienced this kind of shock. But if you do not believe in God and you have lost a sense of wonder (“it’s just selfish genes”), then you are far poorer than a person who does and hasn’t.
