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A political cartoon once depicted a mujahideen squad with the caption “Faith-based government-funded organization.” The image sticks with me as I see the increasing encroachment of church upon state in the US. We have come a long, strange way since the Pilgrims colonized America to escape the Church of England, and since John F. Kennedy, addressing Protestant fears in the 1960 Presidential election that if elected, he would answer to the Pope, said, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” Now US Presidential elections are seemingly contests as to which candidate is the most Christian. It’s ironic that the Christian right has mobilized against the candidate that’s the most overtly Christian. The idea of Jesus voting Republican today is ludicrous.
Efforts to destroy the separation of church and state in America often revolve around the Founding Fathers. Some argue that they were Christian, or that they founded this country on Christian principles. A New Yorker article earlier this year examined four books about this. It’s a lucid, informative primer on the topic. The article observes that the Founding Fathers set up separation of church and state precisely to allow people to worship as they pleased. In other words, they wanted to encourage the practice of religion by freeing it from entanglement with the state. Whether or not religion is a good thing, strong reasons exist for such sequestering – the tyranny of the majority, compromise of religion by not allowing it to stand on its own merits, and so on. It’s ironic that the loudest champions of free markets are often the loudest advocates of state imposition.
Though metal has plenty of anti-church and anti-state songs, I haven’t found many metal songs about the separation of church and state. Maybe my research skills are weak, or maybe there are other reasons. Perhaps other countries are comfortable with the notion of state religion. Perhaps separation of church and state wasn’t in danger until the Christian right arose as an American political force in the ’80s. However, Misery Index’s latest record, Traitors, has a song on point called “Theocracy.” Now this is a campaign song.
Stalking, these jackals never cease
Clawing at our gates
With nebulous beliefs, apocryphal
Born from the callow minds of men
Not resting til they have theocracy in hand
…and Church molesting State
I appreciate the last few political/musical posts.
Separation of church and state is much more in effect in European countries, though it is hard to say it is achieved anywhere completely. America seems like a crazier place than I could take, as a Greek.
I don’t think I’ve heard any HM directly tackle this issue but as you know it has grappled with religion on the ontological and moral level in a million different ways. I believe both approaches are important, though for me “the problem with god” is an ontological and epistemological one and not a social or communal one. Which goes to say it is not because god doesn’t exist that I want church and state to be separate.
The inverse of this is the reason a lot of people kneejerk in very wrong directions when the issue of seperation of church and state is brought up (which is a purely political and economic effect as church in state means corruption of goverment and sapping of funds as a rule) even though it is to EVERYONE’S best interest – as you noted – is that people are being trained to not think and just react to sound-bites. They hear ‘removing… the church’ and they go NO NOT MY CHURCH CHURCH IS GOOD YOU’RE NOT TAKING MY CHURCH.
It’s important to note that the Constitution, the founding document of the U.S., has no mention of God in it. The Treaty of Tripoli also states “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion;”
Also, any mention of any “god” on any document, seal or currency does not imply a specific “god”, only that there is a “a god”.
A good number of the founding fathers were not partial to Christian religions but rather against organized religion.
I think that the overzealous Christian problem has been around awhile but it has picked up a lot of steam since 9/11. I feel it is one of the more unfortunate outcomes of that day.
Kind of like what Clooney said in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
“Well, I guess hard times flush the chump.”
That image reminded me of something that deeply bothers me in certain subgenres of metal–why is it okay to trash and hate Christianity and simultaneously praise and worship the pagan religion of our forefathers? What makes paganism (or any religion) more legitimate than any other? Frankly, I don’t give a damn what my forefathers believed or did over a thousand years ago. Slavic paganism includes some poorly documented nonsense about Chernobog… I don’t believe the religions that have written pretty much everything down, why would I believe in something people barely remember and which was forgotten for centuries? The fact that it’s so forgotten makes me laugh at all Slavic pagans who try to insist that they truly hold those beliefs when, realistically, it’s just an extension of silly bullshit nationalism. It’s worth noting that nationalism and excessive pride has never done my corner of the world (the Balkans) any good.
As for the election and state-church relations, let’s just say I’m almost too jaded to vote (probably writing in). And at least they haven’t started officially teaching religion in most public schools like they did in England when I lived there and like they are starting to do now in my home country. It’s nauseating.
rob is right–I think it has been confirmed that religious polarization has been on the rise since 9/11. I don’t really remember folks like Brother Micah visiting campuses and spouting ridiculous illogical crap at smirking college students.
As for the Constitution, since so few people actually bother to sit down and read the damn thing (especially those who are US citizens by virtue of being born on US soil), it’s pretty easy to make all sorts of moronic claims about what is in it. People are too lazy to investigate things for themselves so they rely on sound bites and let other people make their decisions. Pathetic.
helm – according to the Wikipedia entry on “state religion,” a bunch of the Scandinavian countries have a Lutheran church as the state religion. And Greece is one of a few countries with state-established, state-funded Eastern Orthodox churches. I don’t know how that actually plays out in real life. Do these countries have more “actual” separation of church and state than the US? Americans are statistically more “religious” than Europeans.
Speaking of “taking away church” – in our Constitution, the First Amendment guarantees that Congress will not make laws “respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
The Christian right has been using legal arguments saying that governmental failure to fund Christian activities (i.e., not establishing a religion) is actually prohibiting the free exercise of Christianity (and thus un-Constitutional). It’s a twisted argument, but it’s sadly been working.
rob – Interestingly, the Declaration of Independence mentions a “Creator.” I wonder why the Founding Fathers did this in 1776 and not in 1787 in the Constitution.
onerode – that’s an astute observation. Christianity borrows some elements of pagan religions, so they’re perhaps not so different. Nationalism isn’t “silly” or “bullshit” in that it’s very powerful and potentially destructive, as you know. (Your corner of the world is perhaps my favorite, I must say.)
The conflict between religions isn’t only doctrinal. There are serious consequences, like colonization, occupation, forced conversion, and in general all the bad stuff that happens when one entity imposes upon another. Norwegians may very well have a legitimate beef in seeing their traditional values replaced.
However, Christianity was evidently dominant in Norway by the 12th century, so I’m curious what connection 20th century black metallers have to paganism.
Something that keeps me up at night…if heavy metal praises individualism and self-knowledge above all else, why isn’t there more heavy metal that upholds our right to choose whatever we choose to believe, as long as it’s honest? While tenets of religion’s organized form are often twisted and used as an excuse for all sorts of unspeakable acts, it can also be tremendously healing and fulfilling for its adherents. Religion is just one path among many.
Onerode, I have a feeling that paganism is viewed as okay in metal circles because it represents a form of religion that was untainted by government (whether this is true or not is another question). The mythological richness of Celtic and Viking lore also appeals to the heavy metal fan’s passion for mythmaking. Still, you gotta believe that the Vikings were chanting odes to the gods while they were slaughtering and pillaging, so maybe you’re right that we shouldn’t spare the non-Judeo-Christian religions from our ire?
I misphrased what I meant by nationalism. It should not be taken lightly in practice but in theory it just seems… silly. Cool, so I was born on this piece of land, my ethnicity is such-and-such, and so-and-so were my ancestors. And…? I’m not ashamed of where I come from but I don’t see any real reason to feel like I’m the best because of what they have done or whatever. As an example, I deeply respect Tesla’s scientific work and I’m honored to call him a countryman but I won’t claim his achievements for my own. I can only hope to achieve so much in my lifetime.
You’re right about colonization and so forth (which is one of the biggest issues with most religions–you have to always be right). I sympathize with the people whose ways of life were changed by Christians moving into their land but those days are long gone. That said, who even says that their original life was particularly good or as romantic as it seems to us nowadays? Modern black metallers are essentially grasping at some pretty flimsy straws.
etan, you’re right about religion being one path among many. I personally find it illogical but I am aware that not everyone thinks as I do (and not everyone is as enamored of logic as I am
). My problem lies in the fact that most religions that I’m familiar with are intrinsically convinced that they are right the first time, always. Such is not the case with humble logic. It just doesn’t work for me but I try not to be respectful and not shove my views down other people’s throats (to avoid being an ‘atheist fundie’) so I get pretty annoyed when others disrespect me.
I think the metal allure of paganism comes from very romantic views of the past. Yeah, I’m the jerk who walks all over people’s fantasies of living in another era and reminds ‘em that life really sucked back then–you were lucky to live to your 40s and even then half your teeth would be missing. I can’t properly eat all the food I like? Screw that!! To sum it up, the stories are cool (as they are in many religions, anyone familiar with Hinduism?) but they just aren’t reality.
Also, as far as I understand, pagan religions 1000+ years ago were MUCH more closely linked to the ‘government’ (or similar structures) than Christianity is to the US government. So untainted by potentially corrupted government they are not.
(sorry for the very wordy blabbering
)
Etan – What you’re getting at is quite complex. Metal has certain orthodox (ironically) modes – (1) anti-Christianity, which isn’t necessarily the same thing as (2) anti-religion (which separates further into atheism and non-organized religion), and (3) the whole Satanic deal, which is religious as well. In metal, people attack/wear symbols willy nilly, methinks.
onerode – Wordy blabbering is good, this is precisely the type of discussion I encourage. Nationalism, too, deserves a deeper look. People set up boundaries because of fear, and so maybe nationalism is just a fancy fence people erect to protect their interests. Really, the only thing that people should be proud of is what they’ve actually done, not things over which they have no control, like birthplace, gender, or race.
The romantic aspect of pagan metal might be relevant today. I just saw an Amon Amarth show where a 1000-strong crowd of all types – men, women, metalheads, yuppies, all kinds in between – were chanting about Odin. It was completely sincere and there was a real energy in the place. I’m still trying to figure out what people get from the whole thing (past the surface aesthetic trappings).
I am not particularly honored to call Tesla my countrymen.
What makes paganism (or any religion) more legitimate than any other?
I don’t think it is more legitimate in the sense that the pagan gods exist whereas jesus christ rots inside his tomb, never to have transcended. It is however, for the proponents of paganism, part of a package of a more pro-active, naturalist way of life. It doesn’t really matter that one believes in Odin or whatever to them as actual deities, it matters that they consider the folklore of the bygone faiths how – potentially – it paints a picture of humanity as more integrated in a natural way of life that would be best for their communities. The symbols aren’t real, but we way we live by them is a real way.
With that being said, if on the flipside a Christian wasn’t just a Christian by name but actually put in the effort to live according to Christian teaching (regardless of whether he would actually believe in the existence of the deity behind it) their way of life would ultimately be no more destructive naturally or spiritually than the life of the tree-hugger pagan. Christianity is HARD, forgiving people that do you wrong is hard, trying to not judge is hard. It’s no wonder nobody tries to do it for real.
cosmo: Greece has a state religion and although it is annoying to hear the fundies rave and rant about whatever in the Greek political scene (the loud few often appear to be numerous but they aren’t, really) , it is at least allowed still for people to talk back, to question and check the power of the church where it matters. In the US it seems if you say a single word against Christianity you’re politically persona non grata. That’s the thing, I don’t care how it reads in paper, I care how it plays out. Orthodox Christians in Greece are usually pretty laid back people as far as jesus lovin’ goes. They go to church in easter and they might fast a few days a year and that’s it.
etan: there is a LOT of Heavy Metal that is all about believing what you believe as long as it’s honest. Christian, secular, quasi-spiritualist, the whole (western, granted) span. You might just not be listening to the right kind of HM. Sorry to sound like a curmudgeon – especially since my age doesn’t really allow it! – but here it is: turn back to the 80’s HM for music with a vibrant meaning in its center. The 90’s and 00’s – for all the good stuff on the fringes, were all about glorification of the sound while the meaning withered. In fear the post-modern hipsters will call us on our silliness or whatever.
Anyway, meaning is slowly coming back to HM (and to culture on the whole, we don’t exist in a vacuum). That this discussion is happening is indicative of that.
onerode: I am much like you in that I am ambivalent as to where I grew up. “Greece”. So what. But I am not ambivalent towards the culture, the thinking, the history of humanity in this particular place of the world. Every place has its own story and it is a point of spiritual health for one to have a vivid feel of what has transpired on the ground on which he now stands. It’s not a nationalist feeling as much as it is a tribal one, if we were to classify. We are bound to the ancient ancestors through the sun that shines on us here, the water that we drink and the soil that we stand on, their difficulty in life is the same with ours and their thoughts and solutions are worth hearing. That memory makes us feel less lost and alone, we are part of something that emerged and survived through constant hardship and in today’s mid-class comfortable ennui living we seem to forget that, but the memory, if recalled, is like an arrow. Direction and flight. Every human is made up from the same shit, but we all configure out different. We all face the same difficulties, but the ways we try to survive are different. A story of the past should not be about the past, it should be about the human situation. Modern-day pagans have their hearts in the right place, we have rich histories of symbols that speak to our core and if we utilize them and define ourselves through their personal interpretations, we can stand to live a fulfilling life. That is what HM is about too, conceptually: Using symbols to tell a story, using the story to steel one’s courage to live a fulfilling life.
Bottom line: you say ‘the stories are cool but they aren’t reality’. There is no reality. Nothing is real. The only thing we have are stories, and the only thing we feel is the hardships and joys of the struggle to survive. This positivist urge towards THE REAL, ONLY THE REAL ends up in neurosis, the human is not a computer as much as we’re enamored to the idea that we could be. Every time you open your mouth to speak and say ‘well, I…’ you are engaging in very very illogical procedures anyway (what with self-reference and so on) so the strictest and most ‘correct’ way to be is to be silent. To – essentially – not exist. The crux there is that the human experience is fundamentally illogical and that every belief is wrong and that if one is to survive and be happy he would need to use the symbolic tools to communicate the commonality of his experience. He doesn’t have to believe in anything. He simply needs to tell a story to survive. Religions are such toolboxes of symbols, and stories are told. Heavy Metal is about stories too. This blog is about stories and this comment space is full of stories. I would sincerily urge anyone to spend less time trying to verify these stories and more trying to understand them, why they’re here and what good they do.
Oh man, hugerant.
Before I dive into helm’s huuuuuuuuuge walloftext, let me take a moment to acknowledge that he made my response look puny.
This comment box is too small!!
Wow, attempting to reply is going to be a rough one, especially to helm.
Here we go:
IO — The first paragraph really sums up a lot of my feelings regarding what one should be proud of. You absolutely hit the nail on the head with that.
As for the Amon Amarth show, I think for those people you saw as well as many many others, it’s the feeling of (wait for the cheese….) community that brought them together. Look at how different we all are–and yet we all feel the same passion for this music! I could go on and on about how I don't feel enough people are truly 'touched' or how it's a basic survival instinct to congregate with like-minded folk, but I'll be brief and leave it at that.
re: Tesla — engineering > music! You are inferior!!
helm — I'm completely with you on the concept of a more natural style of living. And as you said yourself, real Christianity without the trappings is essentially very similar. This goes back to how organized and oppressive religion often corrupts some genuinely good ideas. For me this comes down to the fact that just being a 'good' person is difficult.
I think most Orthodox Christianities are basically the same–most of the Serbians I know (including my parents) are also really laid back about their religion. An icon may be on the wall, you may go to church for Christmas and Easter, and you might try to stick with a few fasts but no big deal. The problem in the US is that the English settlers were Puritan nutjobs who were anything but laid back about their religion. This weird intense attitude has trickled down through the years and still exists today in some form.
When it comes down to it, I just don’t get the same feeling you do about your country. I’m admittedly quite jaded about the behavior of my countrymen and too many places have too many ugly memories. Maybe this is a feeling that will go away with time (and I hope it does). As it is, I think I do feel some basic similarity to what you describe: I always feel a stirring of excitement when I hear a Slavic language (Serbian or not) spoken somewhere completely random and often approach or get approached by the speakers. I still have some ‘Balkan’ attitudes that my friends here don’t always understand that I still find quite important. They are reflexes that I nurture and can’t fully explain.
And, yes, I’m practical almost to a fault.
I’m not sure how to respond to your eloquent response except that, simply, I agree with you. You summed up a lot of things beautifully. However I still maintain that there’s stories and then there’s stories. Stories in and of themselves aren’t bad–they entertain, they educate, they give some shred of something that could probably be called ‘faith’. My issue is with people who corrupt stories for bad manipulative reasons (beyond basic emotional and mental survival).
int x;
x = x;
(I intentionally waited for a full hour to pass between comments, check it out!)
Serbia, such a beautiful place with so much human pain and despondency in its recent history :/ I would think it’s very hard for a Serb to have a positive image of modern USA for example…
re: organized religion, well it’s impossible for it to not be organized, isn’t it? People congregate and people make communities out of any story. Here we are, all very different people united by an affinity for HM. I mean, who are we to judge? At least we’re not demanding tax cuts yet.
re: country and self image. Greeks are taught to loathe themselves in juxtaposition of their history. The common Greek – if you’ve met any – shows a faux superiority to foreigners that is lined with very deep-seated self-loathing below it, but that’s another story. I just mean to say that I had to counter all that shitty programming and dig deeper and think more before I could arrive in a position to love my country as an extension of myself and not some withered irrelevant pathological history fetish. In its essential form my statement is that I learned to love Greece as I learned to love humanity on the whole (how right hand path of me!) A life-giving patriotism can only occur after one has started feeling ready to respect and support all humanity. No human being is my enemy, and that is why I love the stories of my own homeland and would like nothing better than trade such with the people from other places. The only patriotism that is worth a damn is that which elevates the humanity in its core to a pananthropic ideal. When the memory of where you come from gives you a positive direction. Not just someone to hate.
re: practicality. Yet you listen to Heavy Metal and your name is One Rode to Asa Bay (while mine comes from Brocas Helm!). Such seeming ‘contradictions’ are dialectic and life-giving, roots that communicate underground into the same tree. Do not deny the right of the practical man to live in the clouds in his brain. Any decent Heavy Metal has in its core a life-giving contradiction too. ‘Iron Maiden’, ‘Black Sabbath’, ‘Judas Priest’, take something and invert it and let it still ring true on both its facets at the same time.
There’s stories and there’s stories. Let’s just remember the stories that suit us aren’t any more right than the stories of others and that we should try to understand more before we judge.
Ha, that’s where we differ. A huge number of Serbians are taught to live with pride because of the history of Serbians and because we have always lived in ‘martyrdom’. Whenever I’ve piped up and said ‘hey, maybe we screwed up too’, people usually have all sorts of explanations ready about the West, the Vatican, and blah blah blah. And when I ask for something resembling proof, all I get is ‘well it’s OBVIOUS’ or very very rough circumstantial evidence. Essentially, we as a people want the achievements of our ancestors to be our own even if their achievements weren’t as great as we make them out to be and we’re rarely to blame because of the world wide conspiracy theory against Serbs. Frankly, it sounds about as legitimate as believing in nonsense like ZOG or other conspiracy theories.
As for the USA, my thoughts on it are very mixed (as they are for Serbia). On the one hand, I detest the tendency to think that democracy is a perfect system or that the Constitution is infallible. Actually, I detest a lot of things about American culture, attitudes, and history but that’s just a few. On the other hand, this place has given me a perspective on things that I might not have seen otherwise. If I had not lived here, who knows if I would today have extremely close friends from Indonesia and Turkey. This second one, as you can imagine, makes a sad number of people back home say something along the lines of ‘do you not care about your history?!?!?!’… no, I don’t care enough to be prejudiced against someone for their ethnicity even though, incidentally, my last name is Turkish and his first name is Slavic. So, briefly, there are goods and bads.
And I absolutely agree: no human being is my enemy. I sincerely don’t actually hate anyone although my lack of hate comes from a different place than yours. Even people I ’should’ hate because of wars, I don’t. If anyone (including ‘enemies’ like Albanians or Croats) is a good person and wants to be my friend, I will welcome them with open arms. Few things makes me more pleased than sincerely good, intelligent people and I will never reject someone’s friendship if they are good.
And, yes, I do have a very curious and impractical hobby in metal.
I guess it fulfills those strictly impractical needs we all need fulfilled–emotional, artistic, and communal. At the same time, I also love drawing with charcoal and I loooove watching horribly bad movies. I have idealistic dreams that one day the people I know personally will quit disappointing me and finally fulfill the potential I know they have. I’m quite practical on the whole, but I admit that I’m still human. 
You’re misunderstanding me. I’m not blindly judging every story. But I have a difficult time adhering to and enjoying stories that ring false to me, whether by gut instinct or through examination. Ergo, some stories (like religious ones) I don’t have ‘faith’ although I can find enjoyment in them from the entertainment and education point of view.
Good discussion, everyone.
I’ve never seen such humanistic discussion on an American website. Bravo. Here, people think of turkey only when they are eating it for Thanksgiving holiday.
And on a metal blog, of all places!
Cosmo – thank you for providing the platform for it then.
onerodetoasabay: I think understand your point of view. Thank you for the discussion.