Reflecting on Wake Festival 2025

Another year, another Wake

May 18, 2025

Peter Rollins will be leading a reading group focused on some core chapters of Real Speculations that center the work of pyrotheology. To get involved, see: Peter Rollins.

Peter Rollins’ Wake Festival is a five-day transgressive festival in Belfast that mixes the best in intellectual exploration, underground art, music, magic, comedy, tours and talks to forge an experience that embodies the destabilising essence of pyrotheology.1 The name Wake itself is also named after the Irish funeral ritual, and functions as a metaphor for welcoming death as the key to affirm life in all of its dirt and mess.

I have been attending Wake now for three years, and while I have participated as a speaker over these years, this year represents a new experiment in the sense that the work of Philosophy Portal has been more actively building up to contributing theoretically to challenges and ideas of pyrotheology. This of course has included the work on the Christian Atheism course,2 but also the work in The Portal focused on Christianity in Transition.3 Inspired by this work, Philosophy Portal hosted several conversations and breakout groups at this year’s Wake Festival which were designed to deepen the ideas and reflections that had been building up to this event.

First off, there is a unity between the Christian Atheism course, the Christianity in Transition series, as well as the aims of the Philosophy Portal events at Wake 2025. This unity is not to create a non-dialectical separation or opposition between Christianity and Atheism, or more generally, the inside of religion and the outside of religion. The dialectical unity between Christianity and Atheism, as well as the inside of religion and the outside of religion, I believe, is key to thinking the culture war tensions in our moment, and ultimately moving towards the theopolitical challenges before us. What happens when Christianity or any religion becomes self-enclosed from the “secular/atheist outside” is a type of artificial separation which will lead to a withdrawal from inescapable and universal political concerns; and what happens when Atheism or secularity totally cuts itself from the “Christian/religious” dimension is the return of the repressed of the theological foundations of the political.

The Christian Atheism course aimed to teach that Christianity and Atheism need each other, and that not only is Christianity more robust, dynamic, and interesting when interfacing with Atheism, but Atheism itself becomes capable of more deeply engaging secular and liberal concerns if it is capable of self-processing itself through Christianity.

The Christianity in Transition series sought to develop this thesis in the style of The Portal, that is the style of interfacing or engaging with other Christian theorists and practitioners from various backgrounds. While it may be a simplification, I think it is still a useful simplification, to suggest that the Christianity in Transition series was featuring guests that either fall into the category of:

“Ex-vangelical” (those who were raised within Evangelical Christianity but have now deconstructed themselves out of it for a more secular naturalist point of view, engaged in historical criticism, evolutionary or complexity science), or
“Metagelical” (those who have tried to reconstitute Evangelical Christianity inclusive of a more dynamic engagement with Christian resources found in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, or simply Christendom in general).

The crucial emphasis from the point of view of Philosophy Portal, as well as the aforementioned principle of Christian Atheism, is that it would be a mistake to view “Ex-vangelical” as separate from “Metagelical”, or “Metagelical” as separate from “Ex-vangelical”. They must be thought of as a “Christian Atheist” unity.4 Of course, the basis of this logic is Hegel’s “being-nothing” as opening a “true becoming”.

Concretely, and for example, Jim Palmer and his deconstructionology project may be in the category of the “Ex-vangelical”,5 and Ross Byrd and his Parish Manifesto project may be in the category of the “Metagelical”.6 I have discussed at length with both Palmer and Byrd their respective projects, for Palmer the idea of “deconstructionology” as opening to ex-vangelicals resources in secular science and philosophy, while including the core of Christ;7 and for Byrd the idea of the “Patient Kingdom” as opening to a Metagelical project that may be essential for the re-establishment of a commons, or commons spaces, that give shelter from overly aggressive and totalising capitalist dynamics.8

Can these projects be thought of as a unity?9

Here we can connect this thread explicitly to the opening of Wake Festival between Peter Rollins and myself, where I tried to provoke thought in the direction of the opening an impossible bridge between the Ex-vangelical and the Metagelical. While most people in both categories do not see their truth in the opposite, if we were able to cultivate a philosophical reflection capable of internalising this weird unity, I suspect a new conversation might appear on the other side. In this context, I explicitly situated Jim Palmer and Ross Byrd’s projects because I saw in their actual work in The Portal, that the possibility for an “impossible bridge” between these worlds is actually not so impossible. And so as The Portal continues its project of building a milieu between different para-academic networks and liminal web communities, this project should come into clearer focus.10

For me, the dizzying challenge of Christian Atheism involves entertaining the idea that the truth of the Ex-vangelical is found in the Metagelical, and the truth of the Metagelical is found in the Ex-vangelical. What conversations could be discovered at this intersection? Between Rollins and I, our conversation has a historical legitimacy in the sense that Rollins’ pyrotheology emerged in the context of the Evangelical inspired Emerging Church movement. While many in the Emerging Church movement now find themselves in the Metagelical turn towards a new interior of Christianity, many also find themselves more on the outside of Christianity in the Ex-vangelical sphere.

From the Metagelical perspective, one could critique Rollins’ project of pyrotheology as the ‘wholesale deconstruction of the Christian tradition for an affirmation of its Atheistic liberal secular outside’. But Rollins work, in moving towards a more deconstructive theology, did not stop there, but rather started to innovate on the level of psychoanalytic theology. This move from deconstructive theology to psychoanalytic theology has led to new connections between the theological space and contemporary artistic and philosophical movements, providing us with new resources and possibilities for creativity and communion that are not available in an exclusively Metagelical space (but could in principle be attractive to it). To be specific, there is a darkness and a courage that is required to enter Rollins’ ex-vangelical space, which is neither possible with a self-enclosed Christianity, but neither is it possible with a simple straight forward Atheism, which does not thematise the dimension of subjective lack in the way that Wake Festival and Rollins’ work in general objectively does.

Rollins’ work is intimately bound to my own, insofar as it engages the Žižekian philosophical project at The Portal which highlights the centrality of secular socialist politics. At Wake Festival this dimension was also brought into contact with the psychoanalytic project of Alfie Bown’s Everyday Analysis which highlights the centrality of the unconscious psyche. This is not even to mention Rollins’ capacity to engage Julie Reshe’s “negative practice”, which takes us outside of both the boundaries of the “Western philosophical subject” and the “Freudian psychoanalytic domain” for something more disturbing. Here we might find a weird quadruplicity:

Rollins’ Pyrotheology = unconscious theology external to traditional religion
Žižek’s Philosophy = philosophy for rethinking secular emancipatory politics
Freudian Analysis = unconscious psyche and its fixations/symptoms/tics
Reshe’s Negative Practice = embodying non-dialectical negativity as such

What we find in Rollins’ capacity to engage the philosophy of emancipatory politics, psychoanalysis and negative practice as such is the limit-edge of theology after the Death of God. This is not simply a negation of God, but the negation of the negation which brings us to think the limit-edges of life in the dirty mess of life itself (e.g. political crisis, unconscious symptoms, pure and non-dialectical negativity itself). As a result, Wake Festival, and Peter Rollins’ work in general, is like nothing one could find in a purely and non-dialectical Christian space. While such spaces have their place, and their necessity, the need for leaders of such spaces to interface with their own outside is integral if we are going to think how Christian theology and religion can genuinely engage secular struggle on the level of socialist politics, psychoanalytic symptoms of the unconscious psyche without obsessive fixation on religious symbolism and narratives, and negative practice itself as the non-dialectical core of the negativity of existence itself.

The other side, and perhaps the challenge of the “impossible bridge”, is that Wake Festival is in-and-of itself an annual festival and not a replacement for the dimensions of Christianity that provide daily, weekly, and monthly support and engagement. What we find in the Metagelical space is the desire and drive for a commitment to church itself, as well as embodied local community. This dimension is not totally alien or excluded from the ex-vangelical space, but if there is a fundamental dividing line between the two positions, the theoretical and practical relation of the subject to a weekly church practice is perhaps the central core.

In this distinction, there is a lot that the Ex-vangelical space and learn from the Metagelical space, not only in regards to church, but in general in regards to the commitment to regular weekly practice. At the same time, there are resources within the aforementioned quadruplicity which give the seed potentials for this type of growth and commitment. Peter Rollins leads regular reading groups around core psychoanalytic and philosophical texts, is developing pyrotheological cartels inspired by Lacanian analysis, and also offers other annual events dedicated to the cultivation of leadership inside and outside the church.11 Alfie Bown leads a pamphlet publishing effort which distributes the latest theoretical interventions from core theorists and analysts living today, and is also now developing course work on Freudian analysis.12 Julie Reshe is currently in the process if leading a year long Negative Course through her own website which is bringing together thinkers from many different fields and focused on many different topics to orbit non-dialectical negativity.13 And of course, at Philosophy Portal, we have been developing The Portal community now for 1.5 years, coupled to our course offerings, that aims to establish or build a milieu of philosophical communities capable interfacing with real difference.14

When taken all-together, what we find orbiting the core of Wake Festival is a nexus of thinkers, projects and possibilities that do offer the opening for real engagement throughout the year, even on a weekly and monthly basis, that can possibly feedback into the annual festivities at Wake Festival 2026. What I am trying to stress here is that, while the annual physical festivals are crucial and integral, that we should not forget how crucial and integral it is to also connect these annual physical festivals to regular weekly and monthly rituals throughout the year that keep the network alive and dynamic, constantly thinking itself, and attempting to forward the culture in the midst of a breakdown of social relations and possibilities. In this context, there is a central reason why Rollins pyrotheological work centres the dimension of lack, subjective destitution, and from the Christian perspective, the dimension of Christ’s crucifixion. It is because without an embrace and a working through of this dimension, human social life may not be able to reconstitute itself towards the establishment of a new world. However, this effort is not just the repetition of the original Christian way, it is the repetition of the original Christian way inclusive of all of the dimensions of historical process that have emerged in modern history, and embedded with a subjective disposition that is capable of working with the real mess of living relations that present themselves to us here and now.

Peter Rollins will be leading a reading group focused on some core chapters of Real Speculations that center the work of pyrotheology. To get involved, see: Peter Rollins.