The Aesthetics of Atheism

Theology and Imagination in Contemporary Culture

Kutter Callaway, Barry Taylor

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781506439884
• eBook ISBN: 9781506439891
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Atheism

To really understand God, you have to understand atheism. Atheism and Christianity are often placed at polar opposite ends of a spectrum, forever in stark conflict with each other. In The Aesthetics of Atheism, Kutter Callaway and Barry Taylor propose a radical alternative: atheism and theism need each other. In fact, atheism offers profound and necessary theological insights into the heart of Christianity itself. To get at these truths, Callaway and Taylor dive into the aesthetic dimensions of atheism, using everything from Stranger Things to Damien Hirst's controversial sculptures to the music of David Bowie, Nick Cave, and Leonard Cohen. This journey through contemporary culture and its imagination offers readers a deeper understanding of theology, culture, and how to engage faith in a chaotic and complex world where God is present in the most unexpected place: atheism.

I

The Where

1

A Genre: Horror

Human beings love to tell stories about the basic unknowable-ness that conditions everything—ethereal stories about ghosts and monsters and the undead (or reanimated), stories where the world that exists encounters a world that does not. Often, these stories evoke visceral responses, for they play upon the listener’s fears, dreads, and anxieties. At times, they are downright horrifying, which is why they are called “horror stories.” Nevertheless, these stories have long served as one of the primary means by which individuals and communities seek to name, know, and even interact with that which perpetually haunts them, that which is somehow present to them even—and perhaps especially—in its absence.

Late-modern society is experiencing a moment of renewed fascination with the pervading sense of ghostliness these horror stories contain. It’s a ghostliness rooted in negation—a catastrophic absence that includes both the trauma of past losses and the terrifying prospect of a future that is now lost, too, or at least receding.^[1] Think of the 2017 movie Get Out, a story that generates horror not through jump scares or other generic conventions, but through a taut exploration of a uniquely devastating trauma (i.e., racism) that not only haunts the narrative’s present but also robs it of a future. As this Oscar-winning film demonstrates, the narrative worlds of contemporary horror are haunted not by a something or someone per se, but rather by an absent center—a no-thing and no-one.

While some may believe and even argue that present-day technocratic society has matured beyond the quaint superstitions of its pre-Enlightenment forebears, contemporary cultural productions suggest otherwise. Indeed, it would seem that no amount of scientific fideism or technological optimism has been able to fully exorcise the specter that hovers around the edges (and sometimes in the very center) of life as it is lived today. It may even be that the collective ignorance concerning the very scientific and technological advances upon which contemporary people so thoroughly depend has created the conditions for a return of the mysterious and the mystical.^[2] For all its sophistication and enlightened rationality, the modern world remains haunted by a je ne sais quoi—a certain “we know not what.” From this view, it would be a gross mischaracterization to conceive of the early decades of the twenty-first century as some kind of an extension or amplification of the glorious Age of Enlightenment. Far more fitting would be to understand this particular moment in time as the dawn of a new Dark Age. Or to put a finer point on the matter, dusk has arrived in the Age of Uncertainty.

Horror speaks from within this context. And when it does, the genre directly addresses the all-pervading uncertainty that currently haunts the cultural imagination. For the most part, it’s a particular kind or subgenre of horror that functions in this way, which is why much has rightly been made of what might be called “supernatural” or “paranormal” horror. From literature like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, and even to contemporary young-adult fiction like R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, certain manifestations of the horror genre are concerned with the relationship between the natural world and its supernatural counterpart, generally making clear the (moral, philosophical, and theological) demarcations between the two.^[3]

But there is another strain of horror that quite intentionally turns these metaphysical assumptions on their head—one that not only appropriates or inverts religious symbolism, but also often rejects the transcendent outright. It’s a form of the genre that is notably a/theistic, which is not to say that it is antireligious or even reductively materialist, although it can be both. Rather, it’s to say that, much like the work of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (who was himself a staunch atheist), contemporary horror stories often unfold in a context in which God, the Divine, and the Super-natural are nowhere to be found. Yet, even here, the genre tends to belie stark atheism, instead hinting at what can only be called a religious or spiritual sensibility in the midst of this divine absence.^[4]

This seeming paradox captures well the basic a/theistic impulse that gives shape to the formal elements of horror (and vice versa), but it’s an impulse that typically goes unidentified or unrecognized as such, in part because it is embodied in particular instances of the genre, each of which reveals a unique dimension of the relationship between aesthetics and a/theism. As a consequence, to articulate the theological significance of a concrete cultural artifact of this kind—one in which the divine is utterly absent—requires a radical reordering of one’s imagination. It involves reading horror as a kind of folk a/theology. In truth, the genre invites this kind of approach. In fact, it would seem that most horror fiction would have it no other way.

The Netflix series Stranger Things offers an illuminating example of how horror can serve as an a/theology of this sort, representing, as it does, one of the more current manifestations of the horror genre. It is also the case that its platform (an online streaming service), its distribution network (Netflix), and the consumption practices it generates (binge-watching) are as much a part of its aesthetic as the narrative content itself.^[5] In other words, the unique modes by which people engage horror stories are part of the equation, too, and this series in particular highlights the shifting dynamics between consumers, producers, and the digitally mediated content they co-create.^[6] Perhaps most importantly though, Stranger Things offers what is possibly one of the best encapsulations of the contemporary cultural imagination in recent memory, for it presents viewers with a resonant depiction of the location—the “where”—in which contemporary life now unfolds. In part because it operates according to the conventions of the horror genre, the show is able to place its audience in a context defined not by the natural or the supernatural, the human or the superhuman, but by the unhuman—a world haunted by the Upside Down.

The Haunting

Stranger Things makes no attempt to tell a universal story. Rather, it tells an incredibly local story firmly situated in a concrete time and place. In so doing, the series not only locates its characters in space and time. It also locates the viewer in a historically situated context that serves as the background conditions against which the entire narrative takes place.

Because Stranger Things simply assumes these background conditions as a matter of fact, it helps to make explicit a few key features of the show’s (and by extension, the audience’s) historically situated context, which philosopher and cultural theorist Charles Taylor has described as a “secular age.”^[7] Taylor points out that, not too long ago (say, five hundred years), the default assumption for most human beings was that the world was fundamentally “porous”—constantly open (and thus vulnerable) to a host of spirits, forces, and gods that not only transcended the material world, but actively impinged upon it. This, of course, is no longer the case. Indeed, the background conditions of belief have changed quite radically for contemporary people. Along with the advent of modernity came the rise of what Taylor calls the “buffered self,” which conceives of both the individual human person and reality as a whole as closed off from transcendence. While it is certainly true that individuals continue to exhibit various degrees of “closed” or “open” takes on the nature of reality, many, if not most, people (whether religious or not) now live their lives within a closed world system.

It’s not just that people today struggle to believe in God or the gods of a particular religion (Christian or otherwise). It’s rather that the default position—the shared starting point—is one in which there is nothing “out there” to believe in at all. In telling the story about how Western society got to this point, Taylor suggests that the huge shifts involved in moving from a world where spirits and forces impinged upon daily life to a world where there is nothing more than what can be tasted and seen and touched have changed both how people doubt and how people believe. On the one hand, those who need no higher (i.e., transcendent) realm to make their life meaningful cannot seem to shake the ghosts of a once-porous world. They sense society’s loss of belief as if it were a haunting presence, and as a result, they experience profound longings for a fullness or depth or meaning they once knew but have long since forgotten. On the other hand, those who do believe are equally haunted by doubt.

The basic assumption that there is no “out there” in the first place calls into question what it means to believe in a god, much less the God of a particular religious tradition. In this context, belief is neither easy nor given, but always already includes a pervasive sense of doubt. In other words, life in late modernity is fundamentally conflicted. It is “cross-pressured,” to use Taylor’s language. Every believer is uncertain, and every skeptic is haunted. More than anything else, it is this sense of hauntedness—the nontranscendent kind—that serves as the invisible but ever-present background in Stranger Things.

The Presence of an Absence

Like the secular age Taylor describes, the entire narrative world of Stranger Things is haunted, but not by the terrifying creature abducting humans in the dead of night. Nor is it haunted in the sense that some supernatural, disembodied agent is making its presence known in the natural realm. Rather, Stranger Things depicts a wholly immanent world haunted by vestiges of a transcendence that once was but no longer is. Case in point: the very first scene in the pilot episode provides viewers with a specific date. It’s November 6, 1983. Something is amiss at the US Department of Energy’s National Laboratory in Hawkins, Indiana. Inside, a scientist in a lab coat flees—from something. Viewers never see what is pursuing him, but the sound of atonal clusters and shrieking stinger chords gives a pretty good sense of what’s about to happen. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well for him.

Smash cut to a basement where a group of young boys are in the midst of a thirteen-hour Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Mike Wheeler, the dungeon master, offers play-by-play narration, while Dustin Henderson and Lucas Sinclair argue over competing strategies for defeating the dreaded Demogorgon who has just happened upon them. The fateful roll of the dice comes at the hands of Will Byers, the young man whose mysterious disappearance provides the impetus for the entire story. Will accidentally rolls the dice off the table, and as the boys scramble to discover the outcome of their heroic campaign, Mike’s mother brings it unceremoniously to an end with her call to the dinner table. As Mike’s three friends gather their bikes to ride home, Will confesses the truth: “The Demogorgon—it got me.” His words soon prove prophetic, but they should come as no surprise. After all, the title of the first episode is “The Vanishing of Will Byers.” As he rides into the night, that’s exactly what transpires.

The remainder of season 1 is about Mike, Lucas, and Dustin’s quest to rescue their missing friend Will. Along the way, they befriend a young girl named Eleven, whose scientifically engineered telekinetic powers provide them with the means not only to find Will, but also to defeat the creature that absconded with him in the first place. It’s not entirely clear how much time (if any) passes between the scientist’s death, Will’s disappearance, and the beginning of their journey, but from a number of subtle and not-so-subtle hints scattered throughout the series, it would seem that all of the narrative events unfold during what is colloquially known as the holiday season. For instance, the intertitle in the final scene announces that the denouement occurs one month after the story’s climax. In addition, given the non-diegetic music playing during this sequence (“Carol of the Bells” and “White Christmas”), the gift that Nancy (Mike’s sister) gives to Jonathan (Will’s brother), and the various decorations in and around their homes, it appears to be Christmas Eve, which would have been exactly one month after Thanksgiving Day in 1983 (Thanksgiving was on November 24 that year).^[8] In other words, the entire story takes place between the days just before Thanksgiving and leading up to Christmas.

One of the more explicit references to the holiday season occurs in episode 3, which is titled “Holly Jolly.” Joyce Byers (Will’s mom) discovers that, by nailing Christmas lights to the walls of her house, she is able to communicate with her missing son. Interestingly enough, she is the only character in the show who mentions Christmas explicitly, claiming that she put up the lights because “Will always loved Christmas.” Otherwise, no one utters a word about this o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for The Aesthetics of Atheism
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Where
• The What
• The How
• Conclusion: A Faith of Crisis
• Index