Jesus Christ Superstar: On Christian Atheism
A conversation with Dr. Cadell Last
If you were given the oxymoronic phrase “Christian Atheism” and asked to make sense of it, what would you come up with? What would it mean to you?
This is the deceptively rich the question at the heart of my recent conversation with
, in anticipation of his upcoming course, Christian Atheism, beginning next week. (I particularly recommend this course for its accessibility and its surprising relevance. The course will also feature a guest session with the befamed Christian Atheist himself, ).The following is a (rather freely) edited transcript of our conversation on the topic, plus my own interjecting thoughts/explanations on our conversation as I watch and edit.
Cadell Last:
If you told me 10 years ago that I would be doing a course on Christianity, I would probably tell you're out of your mind.
Interjection: Absurdly soon to interject, but before I forget—I wasn’t surprised to be sitting there, talking to Dr. Last about Jesus. Just like I wasn’t surprised to be asked to play Jesus Christ in that Ben-Hur remake movie a few years back. (I turned down the role… which was very Jesus of me, don’t you think?). But as a kid, I did want to play Spiderman or Batman… Or Jesus. You know, Superheroes.
“If not them, their sidekicks”, I beamed at that child-actor agent sitting behind her desk. (I was a reasonable 5 year old, after all.)
I wasn’t a Christian kid, mind you. I didn’t have Christ in my life like that. I had a Salvadoran nanny. Born again. Terribly nice lady. My mother didn’t know it, but she’d take me to Salvadoran Sunday School here and there. And that’s where I found Jesus. In the coloring books they handed out. There he was, walking on water. A pretty good super power, I figured. Maybe not Spiderman-level, but good. I’d like to have those powers—I’d like to be Jesus.
And so it was that Jesus Christ became for me what sociologists call a mimetic model. Well, a mimetic supermodel, really, him being a superhero of sorts.
So I imitated him. I even eventually grew a beard and wore white gowns and shared all of my stuff. Like communist ‘ol Jesus. And when my crazy ex’s father told me to “Be like Jesus, bro” when dealing with his daughter, oh, daddy, did I listen. I turned Cirque Du Soleil level cheek. "How do you do it??" They would all ask in amazement. I ate pain for breakfast. That’s how I did it. A real struggle feast. And when I was sitting outside a church in Birmingham and that stranger walked by and said, “Hello, Jesus”, I thought, yeah, kind of. Not totally—not saying totally—but… kinda.
I mean, compared to others… Compared to Christians….
Now, this ^ sounds wildly egotistical, but it’s the way most of the secular west views most of the devoutly Christian west—as far less like Jesus than they are. But then, in preparing for my talk with Cadell and our phrase of the day—Christian Atheism—I found a simple but large problem with the typical secular view of Christian hypocrisy:
Atheists try to act like Christ because they don't believe he is God, but Christians don’t try to act like Christ because they do believe he is God.
I expand more on this as the conversation continues…
Cadell:
I was not only raised in a secular environment, but I'm someone who has maintained a consistently atheistic point of view throughout my entire intellectual career. However, our society has undergone a weird dialectical inversion where the moment seems to be calling forth discussions about Christianity and its metaphyscial consequences…
Before throwing it over to you, Ebert, I just want to say that I think the civilizational stakes for the concept of Christian atheism are high: How can we, on the one hand, think a trinitarian concept of God (which is the unique contribution of Christianity to metaphysics, theology, and religion) as well as the inexistence of God—at the same time? How is that possible?
Of course, it's a contradiction, of course it's disorienting. But that's in many ways what the history of modern philosophy points us towards holding. What do you make of that? Am I off? Do you see the same thing I'm seeing here?
Alex Ebert:
What do you mean by “trinitarian contribution to metaphysics”?
Cadell Last (Graciously):
I think that this is a really important distinction. Christianity has the idea of the trinity, which is that God is one, but it's a three-in-one (God, Christ, Holy Spirit). And so in logical terms, you could say that the mystery of the Trinity is that:
God is not Christ. Christ is not Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is not God. But somehow they're all one. What's here unique is that you have a monotheistic religion which is attempting to think about (one) God in the form of a triad. Does that answer your question?
Alex Ebert:
What is the Holy Spirit according to your own metaphysics?
Cadell Last:
For me personally, Holy Spirit is the community of believers that have no figure of the big other.
And that's the crucial move—the idea that forms of subjectivity that have moved through a subjective destitution (in terms of the death of the big other*) have a unique capacity to engage in spiritual community without any transcendental guarantee of being saved. Instead, success is dependent on the love between the individuals in that community.
Interjection: The "Big Other” is here referring to the Lacanian concept of a Subject’s ultimate external authoritative Object—the “Big Other”. "Subjective destitution”, then refers to a Subject’s experience of the death of that ultimate external authority, which leaves one feeling the extraordinary aloneness of being one's own authority. In the context of the Last/Zizek's notion of Christian Atheism, then, that "Big Other" which dies is God itself.
The death of God, then, (via the story of Christ's death on the cross), lends the ultimate societal experience of religion as: The congregation which has for its Big Other only the congregation itself. A congregation in which the relational love of the congregation itself is "God".
OK, back to the conversation:
Cadell (continuing):
In terms of my personal experience, and my exile from institution led to my own subjective destitution—a form of being alone.
But embracing my destitution, I have witnessed the emergence of a distributed network. I can't name it, I don't have a word for it. I don't have boundaries that cover all of my relational connections and include us all into one group, but there is a network dynamic that may have more power and more reach than traditional institutional environments.
Of course, the language that most resonates with me personally is a psychoanalytic language. And so the main categories I would develop here would be:
God is the big Other,
Christ is subjective destitution,
The Holy Spirit is the social network effect of people who have moved through this process.
Alex Ebert:
So instead of opposing Christianity and atheism, the Zizekian brand of ”Christian Atheism" really just says Christianity is atheism—that the death of Christ is the death of God (in that absolute and brutal Nietzschean sense), and that this death forces us to be both religiously inter-dependent social beings and, technically, atheists (as God is now dead).
I should say I do like this interpretation. But I also think I may disagree with some of it. I also am curious at the disconnect between the Holy Spirit—this “subjectively destitute” social congregation of Christianity—and the edicts of Christ.
There is an incredible disconnect between the teachings of Christ and the behaviors of many Christian congregations, their belief systems, their xenophobic tendencies, their monopoly on Western jingoism, their proclivity for racism, their gun-toting, their fag-bashing, their anti-socialism, all of which is explicitly antithetical to the teachings of he whom they call their savior.
This is not a new observation.
…But even more curiously, on the other side, you have avowed atheists who act in such a way that they seem to have fetishized Christ as their mimetic supermodel.
So while I agree with the notion of Christian atheism as you just outlined it, and it makes sense in a theoretical sense, in practical terms what I've seen is the curious disregard of Christ's teachings among Christian congregations, and the curious embrace of Christ's teachings among atheist groups.
And when I look at why that might be, I come to a slightly different conclusion—that a congregation’s ability to disregard Christ's teachings rests entirely on the belief that Christ is still God.
Far from having died, God remains and Christ remains God, the remains of his body upon the cross. And Christ and his suite of teachings and acts remain at a Godly, impenetrable distance.
And so, far being imitable, far from being a mere hero or behavioral model, Christ remains at that inimitable godly distance which is unbridgeable. And so the Christian congregation is relieved of the burden of having to act in any way like Christ.
And so they get to have their guns. They get to hate faggots. They get to uphold the ideas of slave era racism and be a Christian. So the Christian understands this:
The very contingency of Christ = the presence of my sins.
On the other hand, with atheists who don't believe in Christ as God, that godly distance between themselves and the Christ figure collapses. Poof. What was inimitable and sacrilege for the believer is just a hop and a skip for the atheist. The atheist has no compunctions about trying to emulate Christ. There’s no boogeyman telling the atheist not to. The atheist views Christ as an immensely popular self-help guru who, yes, some crazies say had magical powers. It’s not an exaggeration to say Christ, dead or alive, is the mimetic supermodel of the predominately secular world of the progressive. He’s about peace, justice, love—why wouldn’t a decent atheist try out emulating him?
And here’s where things get interesting, I think…
The Atheist’s Emulation of Christ…
The single most identifiable, memetic, viral, culturally embedded act of Christ was his crucifixion. His self-martyrdom, I should clarify. Emphasis on self. Christ set himself up to get caught and killed on purpose, remember.1
Christ self-victimized. Christ self-martyred. To become what? Savior of the downtrodden. A hero to the oppressed.
Does any of this self-victimization and self-martyrdom sound familiar?
The atheist, free to imitate the figure of Christ, is free to trigger their heroic arc through self-victimization.
And so without a belief in Christ as God, with the godly distance between themselves and Christ collapsed, they are thereby able to imitate the Christ figure. Now, at first one might think this should mean that atheists are thereby more moral than Christians. Perhaps, yes.
But it's also the case that by collapsing that distance and using Christ as our mimetic supermodel, we have found ourselves in a compulsive fetishization loop of “heroic” self-victimization.
One effect of this Christ-fetishization loop is that if we run out of an existing struggle, we will manufacture one to satisfy our mimetic compulsion.
In any event, I'd just summarize by saying that we grow up within the atmosphere of Christianity, whether or not we want to admit it, whether or not we're Christian, atheist, Buddhist. Whatever we are, we have grown up (if we are growing up in the West) within the saturated atmosphere of Christianity. It's rather inescapable.
More to say, but I guess I'll leave it there.
Cadell Last:
Well, I already feel like the nature of this conversation is the type that I'd like to cultivate both in myself and hopefully with others, because I don't think that you could classify this conversation as falling into the atheist or the theist trap.
We need to open up the spaces where we can play with the contradictions of these identities in a way that opens up new thinking—like you just demonstrated with the idea of connecting Christ to our superhero figures and the mythology of our modern industries. That to me is just demonstrating—and of course as a long-term collaborator, as someone who's been an integral part of philosophy portal, and who's contributed as a teacher and as a leader in this space—you're already thinking kind of implicitly in this way.
This course is for the people who are feeling trapped in one of these categories, either feeling confused about one of these Christian/Atheist categories, or feeling a lack in one. It could be from the Christian side of things, or it could be from the atheist side of things. And I think there's unique traps in both.
But now we have secular people showing a renewed interest in Christianity, in perhaps this unconscious dimension of civilizational Christianity. And so there's these reversals going on in our culture, which I do think require philosophical space. There's also super interesting questions and paradoxes that come up about, for example, the superhero movie industry, as you brought up.
Do we have a spontaneous need to fill the religious void with, for example, the Marvel movie cinema industry? I think this directly applies Hegel's dictum: The secrets of the Ancient Egyptians were secrets for the ancient Egyptians themselves. Which is to say that the secrets of our modern day liberal subjectivity are secrets for the modern day liberal subjectivity itself. We don't know the religious significance that we are imbuing into these characters like Spider-Man or Batman or Superman, and very much this has religious transcendental functions.
I just want to say one more thing before passing it on, is that at least in my current conception of the Trinity—and here want to link this to our history thinking about the philosophy of lack—is that all three categories in the Trinity for me necessarily require lack in order to think their interconnection:
God lacks, Christ lacks, and Holy Spirit lacks.
And if you think the ways in which each of these figures lacks, this prevents some of the pitfalls of the Christian turning God into a big other or the atheist turning Christ into a mimetic supermodel.
Really confronting what it requires to exist in Holy Spirit, at least for me (can prevent these pitfalls). Holy Spirit is this very complex web of relations that require deep attention to the singularity of each individual member in this complex web of relations. Because it's not being held together by any institutional framework or structure. It's only being held together by the relations between the individuals themselves and their capacity for love.
That's a very fragile thing, and I don't think that it could possibly hold together if there's any type of LARPing or if the people who are engaged in those relations do not love what they do, and do not love the people they're doing it with. It wouldn't work. It couldn't work.
And now I have a very rich and complex relational network of people that I interact with and collaborate with and create with, but there's not necessarily one group that everyone's a part of. And in fact, there's a bigger challenge because there are some people in those groups that either disagree or have enemies with other people or that don't overlap completely or they use completely different language. And what you have to deal with is The Real of the human mess, just how messy human life is, how messy human relationships are, and how difficult it is to actually learn what love is.
Alex Ebert:
I would say there's a philosophical yearning that we all share, and beyond that there is no category—but you sense a genuine desire, as you said. And they feel like comrades, even though maybe what they're expressing is absolutely antithetical to what I am processing, or they deeply disagree with what I'm expressing either politically or philosophically—or I think they're idiots—it doesn't matter. I still think of them as comrades.
But there is a solipsistic unity to this cabal that loosely hangs, because the stickiness of it is afforded by the very saturated interiority (of yearning) of each individual. Each individual is at their own capacity, at their maximum yearning, and that very maximum consolidates the individual and creates a singularity, creating a one-to-one equivalence with every single other singularity, every other yearning person. So I'm equivalent to you and your equivalent to whoever and whoever's equivalent to whoever, and we are all sort of vibrating at the same level.
And I suppose in some ways that's the apotheosis of the Holy Spirit to me—where as opposed to being a collected singularity, where are each throbbing out there in the void by ourselves, together.
Previously, I didn’t like what I just described. I went through a period of my life where collective unity was the most important thing to me. I really wanted the collective singularity. Recently, my mother showed me my very first piece of writing. I was six. And it began:
“Once there was a boy who had a crew”.
It was that important to me. A crew. Togetherness. The first thing on my little mind. And the apotheosis of that for me was Edward Sharpe. I put an unnecessary amount of people into the band. 13 people, some of them didn't even know how to play music. Some people were just playing the tambourine—but I wanted to saturate that bus. I wanted a saturated experience, and we got it. And it was amazing and beautiful.
And then it exploded, atomized, just like most singularities do.
And I wouldn't even say I'm licking my wounds at this point, but I also wouldn't say I've ascended to a next level in which now the automized subjectivity is the higher order. But what I am curious about is that I don't feel an intrinsic pull toward the conglomeration of destitute subjectivities.
For instance, when you invite me to one of your IRL summits, the first thing on my mind is, okay, sure, but what is the point? Is the point to be a collectivity of destitute subjectivities and to create a conglomerate of singularity, of one-to-one harmonics within a group to feel that Holy Spirit extended beyond the self and into these others? Or is it to get down to business and figure out all of the little metaphysical quirks that we've been working on now.
Now that second category may be the masturbatory aspect of philosophy to begin with, and maybe what philosophy is, in the first place, is a vehicle for congregation and for feeling one another. And maybe the desire to get down to business and really figure out some interesting quirks of the universe is materially irrelevant. And maybe it really is all about just getting together and talking.
So that whether if it's a bunch of morons drunk in the park or if it's a bunch of brilliant philosophers having fun figuring out the secrets of the universe, they're effectively, isomorphic—they're the same thing. As long as you have that unity of spirit, that's all that matters.
Maybe.
But for whatever reason, I can't access a genuine personal lack that desires that at the moment—because I did so much of it and I took it way beyond its excess point. It was a fetish, it was maniacal, and I hurt myself doing it.
I self immolated in favor of the group.
And so I'm coming at this from a slightly different, some would say cynical point of view, but to throw it back to you—my sense of you is that this process for you is more glacial. Where each moment of it is, I hope, being more properly metabolized by you, and you're coming to this point at its proper moment for you in your life, and that possibly your move toward the Holy Spirit is somehow consistent.
Cadell Last:
I feel what you're saying.
Alex Ebert:
And then I'll just tag on this last question. To what extent does this Holy Spirit project of yours feel like a vanishing horizon for you?
Cadell Last:
It's very helpful to see my process mirrored back through your interpretation, but also to see my process through the vantage point of what I know you've gone through with building the band (to the point of communal excess). So I appreciate that. I think that the way I'm trying to think about this is that we don't only have to think about this as a process from God to Holy Spirit, but also as a process of Holy Spirit to God.
This is the challenge for us—can this magical collective reproduce itself?
And here would be my hypothesis, that in order for the magical collective to reproduce itself, you need to become a big other for the next generation.
Both the process of learning how this Big Other-to-destitution-to Holy Spirit happens and the reverse; Holy Spirit giving birth to the next generation—I think that's where we do real philosophy.
Of course, we have to read the great texts. Of course, we have to familiarize ourself with the people who came before us. But at the end of the day, it comes down to are you cultivating the type of cognition and the type of being that can actually learn from these processes? At least that's my current wager.
Maybe I'll stop there then.
Alex Ebert:
You were saying that this loose affiliation network of destitute subjects doesn't have a name, which is to say it doesn't have a phenomenal container, which is to say it doesn't have a boundary, which is to say it can't saturate, which is to say that it can forever undergo its basic dialectical oscillation without coming to a point of singularity.
Cadell Last:
Very well said.
Alex Ebert:
However, I wonder if that can produce a Big Other, because to me the Big Other is institutional, which means it's a contained singularity against which to break.
Cadell Last:
This is crucial. So the people who are leading the “Holy Spirit” are operating within a social dynamic that is basically an infinite drive. And maybe our language is the same here, maybe it's different. I like calling it the Immortal Drive, and it can't be contained by the Big Other. And the people who are leading it know that—in this situation, you and I—we will function as Big Others for the children. And that's necessary.
And so we need to be aware of how we function as a Big Other. That's a vanishing mediator.
Interjection: I realize this part of the conversation is getting a little psychoanalytical, so I’m going to jump in and see if I can quickly explain what Cadell and I are laying out here, because I think it’s important.
To begin, we’re both saying that the youth need a Big Other to transcend—that this transcendence is a vital crucible for subjective becoming.
I then problematized Cadell’s notion of our loosely knit, “subjectively destitute” congregation of online philosophers refusing a designation, because without more strict boundary conditions—without a name, structure and so on—our loose knit cabal could not produce itself as a Big Other for the next generation of philosophers.
Cadell then goes on to refer to vanishing mediators, and that’s the most important—and difficult to do—part here. What Cadell is advocating is something I likewise advocate: learning how to occupy an earned position of authority while knowing that your authority is there to be overthrown—and loving every bit of it. This means we, as Big Others (as parents, especially), must learn to simultaneously hold the two oppositional functions of our authority: Its presence to teach our youth and its vanishing to graduate them.
When Cadell is mentioning Immortal Drive, he is referring to the total insatiable movement of, for instance, Institution->Rebellion->Institution->Rebellion->institution, which can be more fundamentally described as the basic Stasis->Flux->Stasis->Flux->Stasis movement of the dialectic.
Cadell Last (continuing):
So the Big Other still functions, but we have to get the relationship right between the Big Other and the Immortal Drive—both need to be held because otherwise you have a social population that can't reproduce itself.
Alex Ebert:
Yeah, I agree with that. And I should note there are orders of magnitude of Big Other, and perhaps, as you hint at, maybe the only Big Other we really need are our parents, leaving our other Institutions more pliant.
Cadell Last:
I mean, teachers can also function as big others.
Alex Ebert:
Sure.
Cadell Last:
I know people in our network that look up to as a kind of Big Other because when you speak and someone else speaks the same words, your words hold more weight. That's the consequence of being in that position. And you don't necessarily pick it. It's obviously relational.
Alex Ebert:
Sure.
Cadell Last:
Do you think that this concept of Christian Atheism in the way I've started to unpack it, holds an interesting and vital conversation space between philosophy and the weird dialectical inversions going on in our society?
Alex Ebert:
I do, because as a secular kid growing up, you're inclined to want to deny the idea that Christianity plays any role in your life. You're inclined to want to deny that, as a scientist or philosopher you are living in an atmosphere which is itself drenched in Christianity. You want to deny that your dreams may be affected by this, that Christ itself may be your mimetic supermodel.
And to admit the truth of your atmosphere is not only a relief, it's highly enlightening, because then you get to grapple with what actually is happening—the air you're actually breathing, and the behavior you’ve actually been codified into.
And the only way to really address it is to admit it in the first place. So I think on just a very fundamental level this is a crucial and absolutely verdant grounds to be thinking through.
Cadell Last:
I really appreciate this conversation. It does offer, I think, a unique window and also represents, as an example, as a teaching example, the power of this concept and the types of different conversations that can emerge when you play with this concept. Because I think the type of conversation we've just had is very dissimilar to the types of conversations you hear in either theist, echo chambers or atheist echo chambers. And I want to explode those, and I want to open up more interesting conversation on the level of social history. And I think in the reflective way, we've done it. We've done it. So I, I'll end there and thanks again.
Last Interjection:
If this exchange is any indication (and I think it is) Cadell Last really is a wonderful Big Other…er… teacher. I highly recommend engaging with this project, Philosophy Portal, and especially recommend this particular course, Christian Atheism.
If you’d like to learn more about Cadell’s thoughts in anticipation of his course, see this piece of his here.
(Matthew 16:21 (NIV):
“From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”