No Compartments, with David Dark
“I think we miss something when we label one another, when we label songs and stories, as strictly religious or as strictly political. I’m trying to break that down.”
About the Guest
David Dark is Assistant Professor of Religion and the Arts at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is author of Life's Too Short To Pretend You're Not Religious, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, and The Gospel According To America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea, which was included in Publishers’ Weekly’s top religious books of 2005. He also teaches at the Tennessee Prison for Women and the Charles Bass Correctional Facility.
Best Books
Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious, by David Dark.
The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, by David Dark.
David recommended:
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Transcript
DAVID DARK: I don't think of doubt as a fearful thing. I think of it as a possibly righteous skepticism.
BLAIR HODGES: David Dark seems hard to pin down sometimes. He's a professor of religion and the arts, he's a Christian, and also a self-identified agnostic. I know it seems contradictory, but Dark says he comes by his righteous skepticism honestly. He got it from the Bible.
DAVID DARK: To me, the witness of scripture communicates that our honest confusion, and even our honest anger and indignation are pleasing to God. That part of being true to the communal witness contained in scripture, is being relentlessly honest about what we feel, and relentlessly honest about what we don't know, what we're completely unsure of. We get to bring our anxiety, our hopes, and our joys to one another candidly, without playing at infinite knowledge or absolute confidence.
BLAIR HODGES: Certainty used to matter so much to me. Religious certainty especially—I wanted to know. But the more I studied, the more I learned, the more I realized how much I didn't know. And as I watched my questions multiply, I began to feel replenished.
Welcome to Fireside with Blair Hodges. In this episode, author David Dark joins us to talk about what he calls "the sacredness of questioning everything." His work engages readers all along the spectrum of belief by claiming that everyone believes in some sort of scripture, even if it's a sci-fi novel or a Radiohead album.
DAVID DARK: So to recognize that they have movies, film, songs, that are essential to them regardless of whether or not they're part of a church, temple, or mosque is kind of getting at the heart of their own moral imagination, their own conscience.
BLAIR HODGES: What's in your personal canon? Dark believes this is the key to breaking through some of our hardest disagreements: Connecting with each other through cultural touchstones.
DAVID DARK: We find ways, like when I can think of my own relatives who are anti-vaxxers, I look for something like, “You remember that Peter Gabriel song?” Or “Have you heard that War on Drugs album?” Like anything I can find of common affection and interest is a starting point.
BLAIR HODGES: This is episode 6. No Compartments.
Defining religion with Radiohead - 1:53
BLAIR HODGES: David Dark joins us from Nashville, Tennessee. Welcome to Fireside, David.
DAVID DARK: Thank you. Very grateful to be with you.
BLAIR HODGES: I'm grateful to have you here. I've been a fan of your work for a long time. I'm excited to dig into some of the books you've written here.
One is called Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious. A book with a title like that really grabbed me when I saw it and I knew I had to read it. It begins strangely enough with saying, "I come to you, reader, as a person bummed out by the way people talk about religion." So you begin on this note of being bummed out. What's that about?
DAVID DARK: [laughs] Well, I don't want to get heavy right away. But I am trying to decompartmentalize human expression. I don't like when people say “religion” as if they have successfully shrink wrapped someone's experience or someone's voice. And I feel left out when I get pegged as religious, as if my position will now be predictable or easily dismissed. I do believe that religion is always in the room. I believe whenever someone speaks of "the role" of religion, they've gotten it wrong.
BLAIR HODGES: Is that because they're compartmentalizing? Is that why?
DAVID DARK: Yes, I think saying "the role of religion" is a little like saying "the role of culture," or "the role of stories." That which is named by religion is too broad to ever be confined to a role. It's like saying "the role of language." It's like, okay, how are you going to do that? Or this might be too hard of a sell, "the role of the environment." To speak the word environment, as if you could speak the word “environment” without an environment, is to fall immediately into the myth of critical detachment.
I think critical detachment is a necessary but possibly lethal myth, the idea that we can stand outside of human experience or other people's experiences.
And let me say quickly that in the title, I'm not trying to insist that anyone start calling themselves religious, because there's very solid reasons to disassociate from much that passes for religion. But what I am trying to do is persuade people to stop speaking of religious folks as if religious folks are involved in some kind of brainwash scheme that they themselves have escaped by being not religious.
BLAIR HODGES: It seems like it's sort of personal for you. You mentioned being religious yourself, or quote-"religious." Give us a sense of your religious background in the typical sense of like, do you go to a church? What's your faith community? That sort of thing.
DAVID DARK: Yes, well, I grew up in a kind of sect called the Church of Christ in the south, loosely connected to the Stone-Campbell Movement, though I'm technically Presbyterian now. Yeah, I suppose I'm revealing a bit of my hang-up already! So I grew up in the Church of Christ, we baptize adults, we have communion every Sunday, we don't use musical instruments. Because though there are our musical instruments in the last Psalm, there are no musical instruments alluded to in the New Testament. So that was kind of part of our thing. There was an anxiety of continuity. We wanted to be like the New Testament Church.
BLAIR HODGES: I come from a Latter-day Saint or Mormon background, there's actually some crossover there. Some of the most prominent early Mormons came from that tradition, Sidney Rigdon, was an associate of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. And so there’s actually some crossover in this seeking the primitive church and trying to live true to what the Bible says.
How has your religious background informed your own definition of religion, which seems to be broader than a church that you go to?
DAVID DARK: So this is this is helpful. This is like a therapy session in a way. [laughs]
I get worried about teams. And I get worried about folks excluding other people, or people getting talked into joining a kind of mob without really thinking through what they're submitting to. So let me let me say that my definition of religion—which I suppose I'm kind of purloining from Paul Tillich, who defined religion as “ultimate concern,” I define religion as perceived necessity. And I think everyone has more than one, but in the same way that Joan Didion says we tell ourselves stories in order to live, I think that, hopefully, our perceived necessity changes over time. But we are all guided by some perceived “have-to forever” type thing.
So and that alludes to a hang up that I kind of stumbled over earlier. I haven't been to a Church of Christ service probably in over twenty years. But if I met someone from the Church of Christ—and they're very much in my life still, family members—and one of them said, well, you're not a member of the Church of Christ anymore, I would say, well, I am a member, I don't know what you're talking about. And then we would have a conversation, because I would insist that they tell me how, why, and when I stopped being part of that fellowship. And if they tried to suggest that I'm no longer part of that community, because I allowed my daughter to be baptized within a different church—
I mean, even that language, to “allow my daughter”? So there's just all these questions of control. Again, perceived necessity. And I think it's helpful to recognize there's a somewhat universal thing going on there. It doesn't mean that everybody believes in God, or that everybody has to. But I would even say of my PhD, I entered into a learning community, but I also kind of talked myself into the cult of academia. I entered into that ritual, and I got certified, accredited, in some sense.
BLAIR HODGES: You're a part of a community, there are rituals involved, there are goals that are involved, and you live in certain ways when you're part of that community. And that's living “religiously”?
DAVID DARK: That's right. And to call it a cult is not to dismiss it. You know, I mean I don't intend to dismiss it. I'm noting that it is a cultural form, and they're everywhere. And this is kind of a bit of an anecdote as well, but I teach religion and science fiction, I teach religion and pop culture, and one of the first things that I say, I proclaim my love for Radiohead. And a lot of people in the class like Radiohead, and then I'll say, you know, I don't just love Radiohead. I believe Radiohead. [laughs] And by that, I mean, the witness of Radiohead. The sacred talent that is Radiohead is something that has formed me over the last twenty-plus years.
And in the same way that Dorothy Day was once asked, "How do you want to be remembered?" She said, I want to be remembered as someone who read Dostoyevsky well. It doesn't mean that Dostoevsky was a saint. It means that Dostoevsky laid something down, and if you picked it up and lived according to it, that really says something about your witness.
BLAIR HODGES: What's something from Radiohead you would point to? Is there a lyric or something that you say kind of entered into you that way?
DAVID DARK: Oh truly, I mean, you could really just pick any song. But the most popular album they've done is OK Computer, and I love Radiohead so much that I generally believe that their latest album is always their best album, that it is always an advance. But even a song like “Airbag” on OK Computer kind of opens with the language of "I'm born again in an interstellar burst. I'm born again, I'm back to save the universe."
What's he doing there? Well, interestingly, somebody picked up a copy of William Blake's Songs of Innocence at a Goodwill-type place, and they found lyrics from OK Computer written in that copy. And they figured out that it was written in the handwriting of Thom Yorke of Radiohead, and eventually Thom Yorke verified that yes, that was his copy, and this early manuscript of the lyrics he jotted down while reading William Blake. And William Blake isn't the only influence in the work of Radiohead, but a reading of William Blake gave rise to the lyrics of OK Computer. And now we have a tradition.
BLAIR HODGES: And it's speaking to these human needs, right? It's more existential, it's about human relationships?
DAVID DARK: That's right. There's a solid rock and roll trajectory. This isn't to say William Blake invented rock and roll, but rock and roll belongs to so many people, so many occurrences in human history. And so I like to speak of rock and roll, or even science fiction, as a living tradition.
And of course, we all partake of different traditions. When I was baptized within the Church of Christ what I remember most about that day is I watched Superman 2 on television that night. To me that isn't connecting two unrelated things. And yeah, to go back, I want to decompartmentalize human expression. So I'm doing a very generalist culture work largely because I love so many things. And I want to hunger and thirst for righteousness in my reading, my sharing, and my teaching, because others have done that for me.
Oppositional energy - 11:49
BLAIR HODGES: And you can't help but even insert religious language there, when you say “hunger and thirst for righteousness.” When you're using a word like “religion” broadly, the way that you do, it seems to me that you're used to people maybe pushing back on that, because I keep hearing you insert your caveats. “Here's what I mean. Here's what I mean.” Is using a word like religion bringing in baggage that makes people uncomfortable from the beginning, and they say, “Hey, why are you calling me religious? Why bring that into it? That's strange.”
DAVID DARK: Yes, it can. And it has. But we don't have to live according to the given compartmentalizations. And I think we miss something when we label one another, when we label songs and stories as strictly religious or as strictly political. I am trying to break it down. And it is personal because, well, I do believe in God. And I love the Bible. And I teach a Bible class. And I feel like half of my gig in teaching that Bible class is to open the biblical witness up to both those who believe that they know the Bible already because they've gone to church their whole lives, and those who haven't been to church, or are estranged from the church, and who are at risk of confusing the biblical witness itself for whatever some abusive authoritarian leader told them the Bible says.
So one of my big ones right away is that the Bible doesn't “say.” It can't say. It's a collection. And in fact, to insist that the Bible says, and not recognize the context of whatever verse or passage you're referring to, is, to me to sin against the Bible, is to reduce the Bible to a product, or to a kind of weapon with which you're going to position yourself or bring somebody down.
BLAIR HODGES: What I'm thinking of when you say that is that it's difficult to approach the Bible that way, in a sense, because it's easier, I think, to look for the common narrative, to believe that the Bible as a collection tells this common story from beginning to end. And I mean, it almost demands that reading in some ways, because Genesis is the beginning, and then you get to the book of Revelation, and it's presuming to speak of the End Times. And so it seems really natural for readers to read it in that scope. And you're asking people to look for the fractures and look for the different voices in a biblical text.
DAVID DARK: Yes, and to note with Genesis—and I'm just now concluding one of my Bible classes—if someone wants to say, I believe the Genesis creation account, or if somebody was to say, do you believe the Genesis creation account? I say, yes, I believe both of them. [laughter] And at that point, it's back to that collection thing, you know? You have one account, and that ends, and then you have a second one right next to it.
So my hope with my students—I'm not going to be able to get them to read the whole Bible in one semester. But my hope is that they would look at the footnotes, and that they wouldn't let anyone else tell them what's in the Bible without opening it themselves, for the rest of their lives.
I feel like I might have scored one for Homeland Security in a way, if I can get them to not take someone else's word for it ever again. Because biblical illiteracy is a real terror threat in the United States right now, yes! Many of my students even now have kept their vaccinations secret because they have parents who believe that the vaccination is the mark of the beast, that kind of thing.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, how do you deal with that, as a believer, as someone who values religion, and Christianity in particular, knowing that there are pretty big portions of Christian communities who resist something like a vaccine, and would say they're doing that because of religion? The temptation, as a believer, is to distance myself from that either say, I'm not associated with that at all, or even just become a little tired of being religious, being a Christian practitioner. Because here's this community, they're doing these things that at this point could threaten the health of a nation or a whole world!
DAVID DARK: That's right. You just described the oppositional energy that we often bring to our exchanges. “I'm not like them. I voted for so-and-so but I'm not like everyone who voted for so. I'm not crazy.” A sort of dissociative dumpster fire in a way, where in our eagerness to not be mistaken for someone else we try to draw a line.
And as I do in the classroom, I try to share the microphone, I try to listen closely regarding myself and others with curiosity and compassion. So my schtick concerning religion as a much broader thing than the question of who does doesn't believe in God is an effort to amplify kinship, to increase the possibility of real empathy between people, and to kind of take it one person at a time. Even when people behave like cartoons, that doesn't mean that we have to treat them like cartoons or accept their most cartoonish self-presentation. So that's part of what I'm trying to do both in my written work and in the classroom.
Perversion - 17:03
BLAIR HODGES: That's David Dark. He's author of the book, Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious and a book called The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. He's associate professor of religion and the arts at Belmont University.
David, that brings to mind that when you're making this move toward empathy, when you're making this move to discussing empathy, in your book The Sacredness of Questioning Everything you have a chapter in there on perversion. And when I see that as the subject of a chapter, I'm expecting something about, you know, sexual morality or something. But your book invites us to think about perversion in a much broader sense that connects with your ideal of empathy. Maybe explain a little bit about what you mean when you're talking about perversion.
DAVID DARK: Yes, well, this might relate to my work as a “presumed” educator in incarcerated communities. When I first started with that kind of work, I had to resist with—and I hope this isn't annoying the way I keep doing this, but I had people who were called my “students” in the classroom. I do now outside of prisons. I try not to presume that anybody is my student unless they tell me. I know that they're in there, and that they're gonna sit quietly while I'm talking. But I don't think of it as, I'm bringing in the light, or I'm bringing in literacy or something like that.
But all that is to say, I developed relationships with people who are probably going to die in prison, or at least live most of the rest of their lives incarcerated. And a line that I picked up from Bryan Stevenson is that no one is just the worst thing they've ever done. And that's certainly applicable when we're thinking through the death penalty, life sentences, restorative justice.
But it's also true in our own lives. There's so much shame, where we maybe want to fix someone to one moment in their lives and live in judgment and accusation toward them for the rest of their lives. On the one hand, cancel culture feels like a movement of the Holy Spirit, in the sense that people who have exercised power abusively are being told to step down. But on the other hand, cancel culture can be this kind of satanic accusation shame spiral. And with my "Spot the Pervert" chapter, and it sounds strange, that's the title of the chapter—
BLAIR HODGES: Spot the pervert, yes. Yeah, I had to take a pause when I saw that chapter title.
DAVID DARK: Yeah, “pervert” is a verb, primarily, it is a twisting of what occurred. If I pervert the story of what occurred between me and another person, I am no longer remembering it, I am dismembering it. I'm cutting it down to size to fit some other end. So I think that we do pervert, or think perversely, in regard to other people when we insist on only regarding them concerning their use value to us. Or if we only find them interesting to the extent that they serve some sort of scheme, or some kind of upward mobility thing—treating people as assets and resources rather than infinitely valuable bearers of the divine image. Or just people of conscience; you don't have to bring God into it.
So with that, I'm trying to get down to this question of how we speak of each other. Of course, Jesus forbids calling anyone a fool, and suggests that if you do call someone a fool, that you are entering the fires of Gehenna, which is a kind of burning landfill. And I do try to do that with words like “liberal” and “conservative” and “fundamentalist.” I try to not affix labels to people that they themselves would not agree to if they were in my presence. And of course, and this is kind of a kicker, I say that to say that any human being is just a pervert, or is just evil, is to speak perversely of that person.
BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. There's a quote here where you say that it's a reductionism. “Perversion reduces people. It doesn't do justice to the fullness of what we are.”
DAVID DARK: So it is a justice thing. I want to speak—and this would be part of my Church of Christ hang up—I really don't want to bear false witness. Lupe Fiasco, the musician, said that if he lies in a song and then he sells a million records, he said I've told a million lies, which is a really heavy self-assessment. Our words do not return void. Our words create situations that we may not have intended. It would be good to be quicker as people to rethink our words, to express regret; to rethink, regret and repent, changing our minds and letting our actions follow. So I am trying to hold the space for really thinking and talking things through in a candid, humble way. Because I think that's kind of what we all long for, is real interaction with each other.
Electric blanket faith - 22:23
BLAIR HODGES: Speaking of humility, I think the idea behind this book, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, demands a pretty radical humility on a person's part that doesn't seem to be common in religious settings, in traditional religious settings, in other words, in churches and things. And there's an author, Flannery O'Connor, who pops up in your work here, there, and everywhere, really. And here in this book, you refer to her comments about how some people tend to treat religious faith like an electric blanket, and I wanted to hear more about that idea.
DAVID DARK: Yeah, I think she was anticipating something there. I'm in Nashville. One of the currencies in Nashville is professional God talk. A lot of almost like religious entrepreneurs in terms of mega churches, authors, leadership curriculums—a lot of folks telling people what's what in regard to God. Flannery O'Connor—it might have been as early as the forties, fifties, maybe sixties, said that Christian faith is not a warm electric blanket, it is a cross.
And with that idea, she knows that it is a sometimes costly and difficult way of discerning and responding to the world. And of course, the cross isn't just, you know, a caffeine addiction, or a weakness for sweets. That isn't anyone's cross to bear. The cross is what is imposed on you by powerful people who do not like what you have to say. And to carry your cross is to take up that which has been unjustly imposed on you because you have dared to tell the truth, or to unmask some form of injustice.
So I do think that Flannery O'Connor saw—and she of course is coming from the Catholic tradition—but she saw in a kind of easy affiliation with Christianity, a catastrophic watering down of Jesus and the prophets, and the ethical heft of the moral movement that we can call Christianity.
BLAIR HODGES: What kind of crosses have you have you had to bear then like, what has your cross bearing looked like as Christ follower?
DAVID DARK: Yes, that's quite the question! [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: And I'll tell you why I ask, because I'm setting up the next question, which is you also warn people against making themselves into martyrs or pursuing imagined crosses, or feeling like criticism is persecution, or something.
DAVID DARK: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: That's why I want to see, how has the cross really worked for you and your faith, but also has led you to a caution about not seeking the cross?
DAVID DARK: Yes. Well, I should say that while I have participated in protests, and I have been reprimanded privately by folks that are upset with some of what I've had to say in my writing and my tweeting and my essays, I am not comfortable suggesting that I have experienced real persecution.
Yeah, I meet resistance, I will say, but I wouldn't say that I've been persecuted for my own efforts to tell the truth and my own efforts to bear witness.
BLAIR HODGES: Maybe that's why it was easier for you then to see, I guess, the temptation to take criticism as persecution?
DAVID DARK: Yes, well, let me say, too, I'm not a pastor. I'm employed at a university. We're a learning community that tries to be Christian. We're not advertised as a Christian university in quite the way Liberty University might be or Wheaton or something like that. So I have, I'm 51, I'm now in a place where it's maybe easier for me to say that I believe in climate change [laughs], or that I affirm same-sex marriage, or that white supremacy is real.
BLAIR HODGES: And you've had to suppress that before in the past?
DAVID DARK: I think sometimes in order to keep other people at the table, or keep people from accusing me of being a liberal, or not being a Christian, or something—I don't know that I ever have, I'm just saying that it's easier for me to affirm things than it might be for others.
I'll mention quickly that I know folks who do believe in climate change, but if they were to say it from the pulpit, they believe that they might lose their jobs, or their following, or their support, which isn't just losing fame, it can mean losing your access to affordable health care.
I will mention that—I wouldn't call this persecution, but when I declined to say the Pledge of Allegiance when I was teaching at a Presbyterian High School, there were people who came after me. But I think that I out-conservatived them [laughter] by saying, you know, it isn't just the idolatry, it's that Jesus says, "Let your yes be yes and your no be no." And when I said that, it's like, oh, my gosh, he's got a double here! He's talking idolatry, and he's appealing to the sermon on the mount. And that was kind of more than anybody wanted to talk about. That's my “out-conservative the opposition” move.
But I wouldn't call that a cross. I would call that a friendly conversation that got heated and that fortunately, hasn't led to me being fired from a job or something like that.
Using and receiving - 27:44
BLAIR HODGES: Well in this book as well, the different chapters talk about different things to question. So there's a chapter on questioning religion, being critical about one's own religion in the sense of taking it seriously and not just accepting it at face value, but engaging with it more. And you bring up C. S. Lewis in this chapter on questioning religion, a distinction that he made between people who use art, and people who receive art, and you apply this to religion.
DAVID DARK: Yeah, I would say that I am a recipient and a glad beneficiary of the Christian tradition. And of course, there is much that is marketed as Christian that has been terror and has been abuse. But when I say “Christian tradition,” I'm referring to the witness of Jesus, the prophets, the early church, and I am never going to be done studying that and striving to be a part of it. It is a witness to mystery, but it is also a mystery in itself.
That's where I would differ from folks who might want to say, "basic Christianity says—". I want to say it's way too myriad and weird and way too broad an umbrella to ever think that you could reduce the whole peasant philosopher movement of the early church to this list of tenets or beliefs. So to go to the C. S. Lewis thing, many use scripture, but not everybody receives it. And I want to receive it, and I never want to use it. I don't even want to use Radiohead, or Bojack Horseman, or Black Mirror to say, "You're using Radiohead to say this," or even "You're using Jacques Derrida to make this point." Use is too perverse a way of describing.
BLAIR HODGES: Give me an example of use then, like, give me a specific example. I'm trying to get that difference between using and receiving.
DAVID DARK: Yeah, using would just be quoting Thomas Paine, or Toni Morrison, to make a point, right?
BLAIR HODGES: And perhaps to make a point at someone else, maybe even?
DAVID DARK: Yes. Like I'm going to draw James Baldwin into this to shut that person down, or to strengthen my hand.
I'm not above quoting someone to shift the dynamic of an argument. But the idea that I would use Shakespeare, or use Walt Whitman—it's like, these are living witnesses, like scripture, who can't be reduced to a tool. So my hope is that—going all the way back to something earlier, I want to be someone who read Toni Morrison well, and I want to enter into the lyrical witness of Emily Dickinson and attempt my own thing.
I don't want to use human expression. I want to bear witness to it. So if I'm writing a paper or an article, it's very important that if I quote someone that I don't quote them out of context so as to drive a point home. I want to be alert to the context and, to the extent that I can within my word count, I want to quote people in a way that they themselves might be happy being quoted.
BLAIR HODGES: And to receive it would mean like letting it challenge you and letting it move you?
DAVID DARK: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Receiving the challenge, receiving the comfort, the illumination, the courage of an old Woody Guthrie song, or Kendrick Lamar album. It isn't just purloining phrases to be used in whatever way I want. It's taking the genius, the witness of what's being passed over and passed down to me, and making my own thing of it.
Questioning interpretations - 31:50
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I think this connects with another chapter in the book called "Questioning Interpretations." You've written passionately, as we've talked about so far, about the importance of recognizing the ways that religion informs everything we do. Religion, in the sense of this “ultimate concern,” this need for higher meaning. Someone might call it a value system or something, which again, I think you would resist.
DAVID DARK: Yeah, yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: That's what makes it surprising to see you identify as an agnostic in your book. And I guess that should have been kind of expected? Because you're telling people to question everything. But talk about what you mean by being agnostic.
DAVID DARK: Thank you. I was discussing this with someone today. Well, two things actually happened today. Somebody accused me of being an atheist on Twitter, and a friend said, "David Dark, are you an atheist?" And I said, not to my knowledge! [laughter] Which, I am trying to be funny, but I'm trying to be humble in my response. I don't think that I'm an atheist. But I do know that I sometimes behave and speak in such a way that God is not a living reality in my imagination.
And to go over to agnostic—agnostic just means that you don't know. And in that sense, I do think everyone's agnostic in one way or another. I believe in God. I am banking that God is going to heal the world. I believe in God's future. I hope that I'm a true witness to the truly human future in which the love of God swallows death and every form of degradation.
Do I know that that future is coming? No! I really don't. Do I believe that I will see my long dead father when I die? I sure do. And I sometimes even think that my father can hear me right now. Do I know that I'll see my father again, do I know that my father can hear me? Of course not. This is just part of being a finite knower.
And I think sometimes in the prayer trade, people sell confidence. And they pretend to know all kinds of things that, not only do they not know, they maybe don't even believe it. So there's a kind of humility of speech and expression, that those of us who don't have to pretend to know God exists in order to keep our jobs, or stay in office, or avoid getting hurt by somebody, we have some ease of expression that we can allow ourselves.
So, one little provocation I have is that the fear that would have me speaking as if I know God exists at all times is one of the things I believe Jesus has saved me from.
BLAIR HODGES: How so?
DAVID DARK: Because Jesus does not bring that hard sell. The Bible itself does not bring that hard sell. But those who claim to speak for Jesus, and the Bible, often do bring that hard sell, and we confuse it for the witness of scripture.
To me, the witness of scripture communicates that our honest confusion, and even our honest anger and indignation are pleasing to God. That part of being true to the witness, the communal witness contained in scripture, is being relentlessly honest about what we feel, and relentlessly honest about what we don't know, what we're completely unsure of. We get to bring our anxiety, our hopes, and our joys to one another candidly, without playing at infinite knowledge or absolute confidence.
BLAIR HODGES: What drives you to seek that pause? It seems like you sort of want to pause that belief and not go all the way into a certainty. Is it because you don't want to be wrong about something? Or does it change the way you're actually living your life?
In other words, I don't want to say “I know that I'm gonna see”—My father died as well, you know, twenty some-odd years ago, and yeah, and I feel the same way of like, I hope to see him again, that's part of my faith. But if someone pushed me against the wall, I would say, you know, I can't guarantee it. I don't have that kind of certainty. Is that because I just don't want to be wrong about something? Or does that change what my religious life is?
DAVID DARK: Hmm, well, a couple things. And this would go back to my anxiety of, you know, worrying about going to hell if I sin, I think I do have a peculiar sensitivity over not lying, not being a false witness. So Jesus's command against vows and pledges also include this kind of—and I should say, maybe counsel instead of command—”let your yes be yes and your no be no, and anything extra is of the evil one.”
So when we push it, when we push the hard sell to ourselves and others, we're being less than true. You also have this ancient saying of, if I was to say, "I'm going to be on your podcast tomorrow," my grandmother and my head says, “if the Lord wills.”
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, and Muslims have inshallah like, you know, “Allah willing.”
DAVID DARK: Yeah, so there's just this humility of speech that is essential to being in relationships of trust, so that we can survive, so that our words are reliable, rather than being a false covenant. So there's the fact that I really don't want to lie.
And I'll tell you, even as a child if I was singing a hymn and I said, “I love you, Lord,” there were times when I thought, “I don't really love you because I think that you want to put me and other people in hell forever. But I guess I'll go ahead and say that I love you because if I don't, eventually, that's just one more sin that is going to cost me everything,” you know, so why not? So there is an anxiety over being truthful.
But there's also an anxiety over bullying. And I think that people bully each other into pretending all kinds of things. Deferential fear. Something about the authoritarian mind I’m kind of hypersensitive to, and the authoritarian mind to me is not at all Adolf Hitler's mind or Donald Trump's mind. The authoritarian mind is the mind that would rather hand over to someone else my right and my ability to see what's in front of me, and to decide what needs to be done.
So to the bullying thing, I think that in the haste to pretend that I'm absolutely confident, or that I can guarantee something, I think that is a haste that leads to bullying, to violence, to perversion. And I'm trying not only to address that haste within myself, but in my teaching, I'm trying to create a kind of relaxed environment, where we can sit with our thoughts, we can slow our speech down, and we can kind of look for the right word. I do think that true education is the overcoming of deferential fear in ourselves and others, so that we can kind of say what we're seeing, rather than saying what's expected, or saying and doing whatever we think we have to say and do to get paid or to avoid conflict. So there's kind of a long healing game at work there that I'm trying to do with myself and others.
BLAIR HODGES: But to that I think the fear would be that doubt can become corrosive. The idea that doubt can lead down a slope of disenchantment or a distance from God or from one's understanding of Christ. And you start doubting this, and then it sort of dominos, the domino effect of doubt. Right? So, how do you deal with that possibility?
DAVID DARK: Yeah, I don't think of doubt as a fearful thing. I think of it as a possibly righteous skepticism, and a kind of, “okay, I hear what you're saying,” or like what we can bring to film, to a news story, to all of it: To pause it, to put a question to it, to say, “I know you interpret that verse that way, but give me a little more context,” that that is a kind of righteous skepticism, it seems to me, that is also different from doubt. I mean, it can be crippling, but I think we kind of have to let it ride the way we can do with desires and anxieties. And I do think faith without doubt is probably something other than true faith.
And yet, there's different personalities. I think I'm about ready to conclude that there are some personalities that will never read particular scriptures literally, but can only read them figuratively. And to me that's not a deal breaker. That's just different gifts, different perspectives, different brains even.
BLAIR HODGES: I think we can make it a deal breaker, right?
DAVID DARK: Yes, we can.
BLAIR HODGES: We can put pressure on someone that they have to read in this particular way or start to squeeze them out of community.
DAVID DARK: That's right. That's right. So I try to avoid speaking in conversation stoppers. And I think I surprise people with that. Because I think sometimes folks might assume that I'm trying to get them to believe in God, or get them to love the Bible or something like that. And that truly isn't what I'm bringing in my work.
BLAIR HODGES: Loving the Bible or whatever would be a byproduct of what the Bible was able to say to them.
DAVID DARK: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: It's not the entry point. It's the outcome of if, you know, if the Bible in some way can speak to somebody. But I think sometimes I've gotten that backwards, saying, okay, I should love the Bible, or I should love God, and then what? Rather than having things happen that lead me to love those things.
DAVID DARK: Yes, I have said within the last few days in the classroom, we need to avoid should-ing on ourselves, and others. [laughter] There's a “should spiral” that happens, we get to let it be. And we get to be honest about what we're picking up and reading.
BLAIR HODGES: This is a paradox ,because you present this as a religious move. You quote Meister Eckhart, a religious thinker who said the paradoxical statement, “God, rid me of God!”
DAVID DARK: Well, we have conceptions. God—if God exists, and I believe God exists—cannot be contained by any image of God, a graven image.
We do have “God is love.” I believe that God is love. But often, that which we're projecting into the ether when we try to speak of God is just that: a projection of our bad experiences with abusive adults, or corrupt leaders. And “God rid me of God” is a beautiful prayer to me, because it suggests that God does not require any particular concept on our end in order to hear us.
But it's lovely to know that no conception of God saves you or delivers you. And I will draw on Paul Tillich again, who said that we are each already so accepted by God, that we can't even accept God. All we can do is accept God's acceptance of us. And that leaves a lot of room for speaking, thinking, acting freely, a lot of room for becoming less estranged from our own intuition, which I think Eckhart would say is the image of God within us. I believe Eckhart said that the eye with which God sees us, and the eye with which we seek God, is actually one eye. And I think there's something really beautiful about that.
That's Bob Marley as well, the phrase “I and I.”
Where do you stand - 44:00
BLAIR HODGES: That's David Dark. He's author of the books Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious and The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. Those are the two books we're talking about today. But he's written other things. He's also associate professor of religion and the arts at Belmont University. And as you heard, he also teaches in incarcerated communities as well.
Alright David, so if we're looking at religion from a questioning standpoint, if we incorporate questioning into our life, into our religious life, then how do we decide to make a move? How do we decide where to stand?
DAVID DARK: Yes, well, two things come to mind. An obstacle I can face in a university setting of getting students to talk about religion is their decision that they are not religious, or that they have left a religion. And my little thought experiment is this: I say something like, “I know that we all have a weird religious background.” And I can tell they don't like that suggestion, and then I say, “many of you are raised capitalists, for instance.” And so suddenly, like, okay, hold on, he's not just talking about who was brought up reading the Bible, he's talking about how we're formed. And there's a sense in which capitalism or global consumerism isn't just a religion, it is the most powerful world religion in human history. It is arguably making the planet itself a living sacrifice to the gods of alleged profit, or user growth, or something like that.
So situating ourselves within a kind of maze or script of sometimes-controlled behavior I think is the start of—and I know I'm kind of mixing my disciplines here a little bit, but is the beginning of philosophy, of questioning the given script. Socrates, famously, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The unexamined religion is not worth having. You have to examine your perceived "have-to’s."
And one starting point for that with my students is asking them what their favorite movie is. And when we start talking about our favorite movie, or who we would love to see live in concert, or what's on our playlist, we are now easing into this question of our “pocket canon” of essentials. “Torah” means “that which is essential.” So to recognize that they have movies, film, songs, that are essential to them, regardless of whether or not they're part of a church, temple, or mosque, is kind of getting at the heart of their own moral imagination, their own conscience. Like, these are the songs that if I'm dating you, and you hate this song, or you hate this movie, I think we're done. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: That says enough about it.
DAVID DARK: If you hate that movie, you kind of hate me, because that movie is essential to who I am. So that's approaching the question in terms of our loves. What do we love and why? That's the goal of asking ourselves that. And also becoming more comfortable saying what we love and why. And maybe mixing it up a little bit, where we seek out stories and songs that challenge our perception, rather than only seeking out that which confirms what we already thought. This is kind of the life of examination and consciousness. And “religion” happens to be the word with which I try to get that journey going.
BLAIR HODGES: When I read this book, I feel this so much. But then sometimes I just wonder, okay, so then how do I ever stop and make a decision? Or how do I arrive at this is the right thing, or that these are my values? And there's a songwriter that you and I both love, David Bazan. There's a song he wrote in the chorus that talks about a person who's not a very great person. And the chorus says, “Man, it was a beautiful day to stay the same.” And sometimes I feel like that, sometimes I feel like this questioning can become—it can become problematic, because I can't find rest. I can't find that rest in Christ, or that rest in an ultimate concern, or whatever. Because I'm questioning, questioning, questioning. And wouldn't it be a beautiful day to stay the same sometimes?
DAVID DARK: Yeah. I want to say that a person is a process. To love a person is to love a process. To love a self is to love a process. I don't think I'm arguing for always being adrift or at sea in some way. Flannery O'Connor says that “somewhere is better than anywhere.” And I think that we do well to land within relationships, within communities. I think that's kind of how we feel our own pulse, our own heart. I'm not calling for a constant wandering, in a sense [laughs]. But I am calling for a constant re-examination of the way I view the world so that I don't fall prey to death-dealing ideologies that are destroying the humanly inhabitable world.
BLAIR HODGES: I like the idea of holding faith, holding faith in your hands, and holding it lightly like—
DAVID DARK: Yes, yes.
BLAIR HODGES: I just had this image come to mind one day about a sort of injured bird. And, you know, you have to hold it, you've got to keep it safe. But you also need to hold it loosely, so you don't crush it, you know?
DAVID DARK: That's right. And that's our conversations with each other sometimes, because we never know what the person we're talking to, or who we cut off in traffic or they cut us off, we never know where another person is. And we get to proceed with caution and care and compassion.
Sowing doubt and misinformation - 49:37
BLAIR HODGES: Alright, there's one other big question I had revisiting these books after a couple years, in fact, revisiting these books after the Trump years. And it's that the impulse to question, I think, has also become a tool to sow doubt and misinformation. I'm thinking about people, like we mentioned earlier about people who maybe doubt vaccines or say like—
DAVID DARK: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: —“Do your own research” is the phrase that a lot of people use.
DAVID DARK: Mmhmm.
BLAIR HODGES: And so what kind of cautions do you offer? When we think about the impulse to question in that way, of sowing doubt, or misinformation, or even manipulating people into harmful things?
DAVID DARK: Yes. I would say that weaponized despair in America right now is a kind of product, is a kind of currency, is a kind of way of controlling people. Yeah, I'm gonna answer this question with—I'm gonna go back to the thesis a little—a writing prompt, which can be like an exorcism in a way, is to ask someone to finish this sentence with a paragraph or a paper and it's this: "I used to think..." Like, fill it in, “I used to think” what?
And to me, to complete that sentence is to recognize that you are a person in motion. A person who changes their mind in light of new evidence. And I think that's essential, because I don't know that Donald Trump, for instance, could finish that sentence. I think his strength was in never changing and never apologizing, and never backing down about anything—including, I hesitate to say it because it's just so sad, a recording of his own boasting of an act of sexual assault. Even on that, he managed to say, “locker room talk” and move swiftly on. There was no reckoning of that over four years ago. And any of the things he said in terms of calling for violence against Black American athletes who kneel during a song. There was never a back down. And there's power in that.
But it is ultimately, and I say this descriptively, a fascist power, because it's the power of monologue, and wearing people down until their resistance and their ability to process information is gone, because they're stupefied.
And I think often with anti-vaxxers and climate deniers, they're stupefied because there is so much coming at them, and they feel discounted in their own efforts to have conversations with people sometimes. So I think the job is to get that flowing, to get people to talk about their fear, and receive the communal attempt at civilization that is medical science.
And I don't always know how to do it, because we get really hardened in these things. It's very difficult to change your mind when you feel shut down. But I think the job is, one person at a time, to try to help people feel a little less shut down and more open to receiving incoming data. Because I do believe that sin is active flight from a lived realization of available data. And it takes two to receive meaning together. But we're going to have to do this if we're going to ever achieve herd immunity, or any of that.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. So basically, it sounds like you're saying our solution to this problem of doubt and despair is people reaching out to people who are in doubt and despair. And I don't know if that inspires confidence or inspires despair in me! If it's up to me to reach out to people—[laughing]
DAVID DARK: It is scary. But if we're just avoiding the people that we think of as the enemy, we're not exactly working toward restorative justice, or reconciliation, or a better future.
We find ways, like when I can think of my own relatives who are anti-vaxxers, I look for something like, “You remember that Peter Gabriel song?” Or “Have you heard that War on Drugs album?” Like anything I can find of common affection and interest is a starting point. Even if it's Star Trek or Twilight Zone or a comic book, you look for the common places of celebration. And then of course, you view the folks that you disagree with as people who might have enlightenment for you. Even if you're scared that they're gonna storm the Capitol again, you know? [laughs] To know that they have their own experiences, and you get to listen to them.
Because I think that is what we all want is for somebody to really listen to us and ask questions. So I think there is a little bit of outreach that needs to happen, here and there and in small, non-threatening ways, in order to progress.
Let me say quickly, that I myself was a Rush Limbaugh aficionado in the late 80s and early 90s.
BLAIR HODGES: Were they like “ditto heads” or something like that? Didn't they have like a nickname?
DAVID DARK: Yes! And it took people who knew that I wasn't just a ditto head, that I also liked Public Enemy and U2, that people kind of thought, "Oh, yeah, I mean, he's into Rush Limbaugh. But he seems to have a clue here, here, and here." It took that intellectual hospitality from others, to keep me from going down a particular path. If I had been offered a job to act like Rush Limbaugh when I was 21 or 22, I don't know what would have happened to me. So much has to do with our incentive structures. And who we're surrounded by.
BLAIR HODGES: That's David Dark. He's author of Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious and The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. We'll be right back after this with one more question for David. We're going to talk about best books.
[BREAK]
Best books - 57:49
BLAIR HODGES: We're back with David Dark. We've been talking about his books Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious and The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. He's associate professor of religion and arts at Belmont University and he also spends some time teaching in incarcerated communities.
And now it's time, David, for our best book segment. This is when you get to take charge here and talk about a book that changed your life, or a book that you read recently, or a book that—you could talk about a book you don't like for all I care. This is your moment to talk about books.
DAVID DARK: I think the book that I'm going to choose is Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. It's a science fiction novel. To my knowledge, it is the best science fiction novel. It introduces a concept called the ecumene, which is a kind of galactic Vatican or United Nations.
BLAIR HODGES: Like the word “ecumenism”?
DAVID DARK: Yes, absolutely. Like ecumenism. And at the beginning of the novel, we eventually figure out that Earth has joined the ecumene, that this is some time in the far-flung future and this kind of constellation co-op of planets is out there inviting other civilizations to join it.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it sounds like the UN.
DAVID DARK: Yeah, absolutely like the UN. But it also has a kind of evangelical missionary zeal to it. Because, rather than having someone called a missionary, you have a person called “the envoy.” And the envoy goes to the planet, and has been preceded by investigators who are also from the ecumene. But they, in secret, studied the civilization to prepare for the envoy’s mission, for the envoy’s invitation for the entire planet to join the rest of humanity, in a sense. To learn more about themselves, technology, science, medicine, art, philosophy.
And so it's just a beautiful work on what culture is, and what hope and joy and communion are. Because of course, the envoy might be killed by the civilization. The envoy might be hidden away by politicians from warring nations who don't see what's in it for them. And add to that thing, what's in it for them is they don't see what good it will do for their entire planet to join the rest of the cosmos. So you kind of get this sense of, again, perceived necessity, where you have politicians who know they owe it to their fellow planet inhabitors to seize this opportunity, but that if they think they're going to lose power by doing that, they're not interested. A little like the climate crisis, a little like vaccines, a little like all kinds of things in our own world, where our own small-minded thinking can destroy the possibility of life and thriving for others.
There is so much more to it than I've just told you, but it's a very, very rich novel. And I'll mention as well that Ursula K. Le Guin believed that artists, novelist, potters, visual artists, poets, are realists of the higher reality. There's realism, people claim to be realistic. But then there's a deeper realism that is almost mystical, because it's a realism that doesn't believe in national borders, that doesn't believe in the right of corporations to destroy the sacred land, you know? So she has this very far-reaching indigenous-type vision that is well-housed in a science fiction novel about people from outer space. So Left Hand of Darkness, that's the one.
BLAIR HODGES: I'm not surprised to hear you recommend that based on the things I've read from you, and you said you’ve even taught courses on science fiction. But how do you sell sci-fi to a person who just never really got into it? Isn't that just weird goofy space stuff and aliens and stuff like that?
DAVID DARK: Here it is! I am paraphrasing the sci-fi novelist William Gibson. He said that science fiction functions as the oven mitts with which you can handle the hot burning casserole of the present. Science fiction isn't just a kind of fantasy thing. Science fiction as a genre gets at what's happening in our nervous systems and in our world in a way that conventional storytelling cannot.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, like seeing a different society and all these different things can, put alongside our reality, call into question things that we've just take for granted?
DAVID DARK: That's right.
BLAIR HODGES: Like, it's the old joke of the fish swimming with each other and saying, “the water sure here feels nice today.” And the other fish is like, what are you talking about, what water?
DAVID DARK: Yes, sci-fi cracks the pavement of the status quo.
BLAIR HODGES: You've even said that imagination itself, which is sci-fi’s main thing, is the central ethical task. Imagination is the central ethical task.
DAVID DARK: Yeah, “empathy” is fewer syllables, but being imaginative in our consideration of others. I think Iris Murdoch said that love is coming to accept the fact that other people are real, as real as you are. That is our only hope. That's the only human future, is the task of imagination.
BLAIR HODGES: That's excellent. There's so much we could talk about. We covered so little from these excellent books, David, Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious, and The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. I want to say thank you so much for taking time with us on Fireside.
DAVID DARK: Thank you. It's been a joy.
Outro - 1:03:32
BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. Which includes shows like Beyond the Block where Brother Jones and Brother Knox, a Black Mormon and queer Mormon convert, break down LDS theology from their unique perspectives. Another show on the dialogue Podcast Network is Funeral Potatoes for the Singles Ward, a show where Tracy and Kaylee break it down for all the single members of the church who usually don’t get as much attention in official church curriculum and so forth. So listeners to this show who are Latter-day Saints who are looking for sort of outside-the-box thinking should check those out. Beyond the Block and Funeral Potatoes for the Singles Ward. You can get them where you get this show. Same place. You don’t even have to go far.
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Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistant, Kate Davis. She created the transcript. And also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, Caroline Kline, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges.
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[End]
NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.