It's In the Code Ep. 93: Rethinking the Relationship Between Life and Death
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Life and death are commonly seen as representing the starkest of binaries: Death is the ultimate adversary of all that lives. Dan talks with Dr. Beatrice Marovich, faculty at Hanover University, who argues that such understandings of mortality have been deeply influenced by a strain of Christian political theology that has left its mark on both religious and secular narratives. Adapting the figure of “Sister Death” from Saint Francis of Assisi, she calls for recognizing that life and death are family, rather than enemies.
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Welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, I want to thank our listeners, so many of you, whether you support us by word of mouth, whether you support us financially, whether you just suffer through the ads that none of us like to listen to with streaming content, but you keep us going.
And today on It's in the Code, we're doing something a little bit different.
We do this from time to time.
I don't get to do it often enough, but I'm here interviewing Professor Beatrice Marovitch.
She is the Associate Professor of Theological Studies at Hanover College, has written a really interesting book called Sister Death, Political Theologies for Living and Dying.
And first, Beatrice, if I can call you Beatrice, I just want to say hello and thank you for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me.
Yeah, so everybody who listens to the series knows that I, you know, it's called It's In The Code because I'm always sort of decoding lots of things about sort of popular religion, popular Christianity.
And one of the themes that I often talk about is the way that things that a lot of American Christians are really adamant about and see their religion as doing and that they critique in secular culture, I often argue that these are actually tendencies within that religious subculture itself.
So, for example, a lot of a certain kind of Christian will criticize secular culture and say that it sexualizes people, especially women, To a degree that it shouldn't, and I agree with that, but purity culture in some of those religious subcultures, I would argue, sexualizes women to an even greater degree, or at least as great a degree.
You get the fixation right now on trans and gender non-conforming people and policing pronouns and things like this.
There's a hyper fixation on gender within that subculture that I think exceeds anything they critique secular culture for.
Uh, in the kind of mania for denying that racism is a real thing in America, you know, the accusation that secular people or non-Christians or liberals or what have you are always making everything about race, there's a sense in which race is this like pervasive kind of defensive concern.
And the thesis I would throw out—and I'm interested to hear what you have to say about this, because I think you'll have a more sophisticated take on it than I do, which is why you're here—is I think another one of these themes is death, the concept of death and dying.
And I think there's a sense in which a certain kind of Christianity can accuse secular, quote-unquote, culture of Kind of promoting a culture of violence and death, claiming that secular culture—or that if you're not the kind of Christian that they are, that's kind of the claim—that you don't have any answers for death, you can't take account of it, and that this is something that only they can do.
It promises the overcoming of death and, by implication, a life of peace and security from the fear of dying.
But I would also argue that, in many ways, that same kind of popular Christianity It's hyper fixated on death.
There's always a fear of death.
It's the enemy to be overcome.
It's a constant fear that's applied to when we look at sort of international relations or migrants coming across the border or abortion or any number of different things.
And so I would argue that death is kind of in the code of this kind of popular Christianity.
And so I want to throw it there and as a way of getting into your book, What do you think about that?
Am I way off target?
Am I onto something?
What do you have to say about death as this kind of part of Christianity?
Yeah, I agree with a lot of what you have to say.
I certainly think, and it's pretty clear from the argument I make in my book that, you know, Christians might believe that Christianity sort of solves the problem of death by promising that God will overcome it in the end somehow.
But I think what actually seems to have happened is that Christians have become totally obsessed with and fixated on death.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It feels like to me, like that's that, that's that theme, that fixation.
I didn't mean to cut you off, but I think so, so far I'm what, what I like is the, I agree with a lot of what you say, which means that's, that's the general way of saying that, uh, you miss some stuff, Dan.
So, so say, say more about that, the way that it's obsessed with death, but I feel like there's a butt there that, that maybe adds some depth to that.
It's not an especially new argument, necessarily, that Christianity is obsessed with death.
And this is an argument that the 19th century philosopher Nietzsche was already making a long time ago.
So he, he argued that Christianity was dead, right?
And what really seemed to anger him about Christianity was this, like, fixation on death and this morbidity.
I think this is probably a little bit more obvious visually in the religious culture of its own time.
I think visually the image of Christ crucified on the cross I think was a much more common sight in the European churches of his era.
Outside of Catholic churches in the United States you might not necessarily see that scene quite as much anymore, although I guess that's not necessarily true on the internet because you can see pretty much anything on the internet today.
But at any rate, I think for him, that image of Christ crucified on the cross was a sort of visual sign of the morbidity of Christianity.
I can hear it now.
I can hear the defensive listener, or I can hear, I don't know, somebody being like, so you think Christianity is just about nihilism?
You just think it's terrible.
Nietzsche says it's morbid.
Because of course, Nietzsche Nietzsche's a complicated fellow, but doesn't see a lot of redeeming qualities in Christianity.
Are you, if we're talking about Beatrice Marovitch, Nietzschean?
Or is there more to it than that?
Are you just sort of a wholesale, Nietzsche said it, I believe it, that settles it, there's the bumper sticker?
Or is there more to it, do you think?
I definitely think the story is more complicated than that.
I think one of the things that he doesn't really address is the way that I think Christianity has also A long-standing practice of really like revering and honoring the dead.
So here's a book that I think does a really nice job of illuminating this.
A professor at Dartmouth named Kyle Smith recently published a book that looks at Christianity and what he called the cult of the dead.
And I think like the word death cult gets It's kind of a bad rap.
People often will accuse anything that looks morbid of being a death cult, but I think like a cult of the dead is, it's a burial cult.
It's a ritual for remembering and honoring the dead.
And so looking at how much Christianity over the centuries has been oriented around remembering, focusing on, and to some extent even kind of obsessing with the dead.
So I think that's like a really interesting example of The way that this kind of interest in death, this morbidity, as Nietzsche put it, in Christianity can sometimes turn into a sort of honorific and very beautiful sort of set of rituals and remembrances.
There's a cult of the relics in Christianity that I think celebrates the power of bodies to endure over time by holding up body parts of saints as sacred relics.
I think this kind of brings us to what Nietzsche misses.
So I think he helps us to understand the sort of, I don't know, there's like a hypocrisy there, right?
Where I think Christians would want to say that their religion is all about overcoming death.
And yet, still at the same time, it's very much a kind of death cult.
I think it's interesting that you label it as a kind of hypocrisy, where I think you're right.
I think probably everybody, I think, has probably had the experience of going to a funeral and talking about a celebration of life and the role that that can play, and it's such a central And I think you're right.
I think the Christian tradition has a lot of depths to plumb there.
I think it takes us outside of this episode, but it'd also be interesting to look at like, I don't know, historically Protestant versus Catholic appropriations of that, right?
But I think you're right.
I think it's good to highlight that.
I think what's interesting to me is the way that oftentimes, obviously Christianity is not one thing and it has never been one thing, and it's the same tradition that can spawn that remembrance oftentimes denies it at the same time and i think that hi my name is peter and i'm a prophet in the new novel american prophet i was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened oh and the pandemic
and that crazy election and don't get me wrong i'm not bragging it's not like i asked for the job actually no one would ask for this job and At least half the people will hate whatever I say, and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country and meet some really interesting people and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's the kind of, I don't know, the tendency that I see.
And I think Nietzsche is not, he doesn't paint in fine lines.
It's a very, very broad brushstroke sometimes.
So I think that that's something.
So I think it's interesting that you talk about, I don't know, those positive elements, but you also say that, you know, Christians have also been obsessed with death in a kind of unhealthy way, that it's not always affirmative.
Where are some of the places you see the tensions in that?
I think that in my book, I think that the big problem for me is this really sharp distinction that's drawn between life and death that turns life and death into enemies.
And so there is this description of life and death being in this relationship of enmity where they are fundamentally enemies to one another.
On the one hand this responds to like a basic intuition that we have as living being to keep living and not die and to keep the people that we love alive and not let them die.
I think there's very much this like deeply like elemental I don't know.
that we have that there's an undesirability to death.
But I think where that becomes really troublesome to me is when I look at Christian texts and I look at the way that they've been used in Christian history.
And, you know, I see there's this sense in Christianity that it's possible to be on the side of life, whereas like one's enemies can be on the side of death.
So if, for instance, God is a friend of life and not in front of death.
If death was an enemy of God, then those who are friends of God are friends of life, and those who are enemies of God are on the side of death.
So I find this idea of becoming a warrior for pure life and an enemy of death to be troubling on a kind of political level.
I think that there are A lot of really unsettling ideological consequences for a line that's drawn in a particular kind of way.
I should tell folks now, this is going to be one of two interviews.
We're going to, in the next episode, delve right into some of those sort of culture war issues, cultural politics issues.
Here I want to pause and sort of stay with this.
I think it's really interesting because, as you also note in your work, that opposition can go both ways.
Because you can have secular critics of Christianity that cast it as just being about death and fixated on the afterlife, and you don't affirm life now and so forth, and Christians can sort of—it's interesting to me that some of the same accusations will be made both ways.
But it seems like part of what you're suggesting is That whether one is speaking as a Christian or a critic, or you're a proud atheist sometimes, or you're a devout Christian, whatever, oftentimes the framework is kind of the same, right?
That it's life versus death, death versus life.
And what I think is interesting about your work is you're suggesting, and you can explain this more for me here just in a second, is That they're, I might say, flip sides of a coin, or that they are partners, or that, to use the language of your text, drawn from a thinker a long time ago, that death is like a sister and a company, somebody who accompanies life, that they are not strictly in opposition.
Am I hearing you, reading you right in that?
And can you say more about that?
Because I think that that's a profound idea that we find in parts of our contemporary culture, but not a lot.
I think we're a culture that sort of I don't know, fears death, keeps it out of sight, puts it in rooms behind closed doors, all that sort of stuff.
Can you say more about that?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that that's definitely something that a lot of contemporary critics of Christianity also miss.
So people will say things like, Christianity is a death cult.
And then they'll sort of say, well, like, unlike Christians, we love life, not death.
But I think that this idea, like, still remains trapped in this kind of life-death opposition that I think is really set up in Christian discourse.
And like, that's the thing that I kind of want to push beyond.
So what are some ways to do that?
Where, where do you go to push beyond that?
How do we, how do we think that differently?
What's the alternative?
Cause I think I, I love the idea that you have is one of the things that I feel like I'm often trying to do in this series.
I know I try to do it with students.
I try to do it in my own work is that we get caught in these, these binaries, these either or things.
I work on it with my, with my coaching clients, whatever it is, we get trapped, excuse me, in these either or options.
What's the alternative?
In my book, I borrow the term life-death from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
And so I think this isn't just like a way of trying to like cram the two things together and make them look as if they're just the same thing, as if life and death were just the same.
There's one I'm not trying to suggest that there's not a difference between them, but this for Derrida is a way of still acknowledging the difference between the terms, but yet also pointing to the ways in which the terms are kind of deeply entangled with one another.
So I think, you know, his his critique was against thinking of life and death as merely oppositional forces.
So it's not to say that they're not different, but it is to say that they're not always and exclusively oppositional.
So they're not always and exclusively in a relationship of enmity, for instance.
It's also not to say that they're friends.
And I'm not making that argument, and I'm really clear about that in my book.
I think sometimes people will assume that, like, well, hey, if I don't think that life and death are enemies, then I must think that they're friends.
But, you know, again, I'm trying to sort of suggest a different way of thinking about it.
So I think that, you know, Derrida was challenging us to think about the fact that, like, in essence, life and death are just deeply bound to one another.
So, for example, life needs death in order to be life at all.
Life literally needs death and decay in order to make more life.
That's how it works.
So, that doesn't mean that life and death always work against one another or that they always are.
Or in cahoots, but I think there's more than simply antagonism between life and death, which is basically what I'm trying to argue.
So they're bound together in a kind of relationship.
I was going to say, as an old school Daridian, you mentioned Jacques Derrida.
I don't get to talk about Derrida very often in this series, but one of the ideas he has, if I put my door cat on for a minute, is the idea of the trace.
Everything has the trace within.
It's the sense that life has the trace of death.
As you're saying, you know, both that I think new life comes from former lives, if we're talking about that sort of very visceral Sort of earthy way of thinking of the creation of life.
But I think also senses that, you know, the way that we live, life has meaning because it's finite.
I'm going to sound really existentialist there, but there's a sense in which we know that at some point it's over and it's part of what gives life value.
And I think also having been alive and the vibrancy of that as part of what makes death poignant or significant or painful.
So I think I feel like that's a really great idea that that language of entanglement right of being entangled together and and brought together And I think part of what you suggest as well, we've got to wind this down, but we'll maybe close with a final thought here, and then we'll pick this up again and take it, I think, in a sort of concrete direction in the next episode.
But for you, that's the piece that's missing in both a lot of secular culture, but also a certain kind of popular American religious discourse, is that I don't know the right word.
Appreciation of each?
The recognition of the value of each?
That co-defining element?
I'm searching for the words here, too.
Is that what's missing?
That kind of awareness?
That intertwining of the two?
Yeah, and that's where the title of my book comes from, this idea of sister death and thinking about the sisterhood relationship between life and death.
I use sisterhood not because it's necessarily like a happy, copacetic relationship.
Sibling relationships are always like that.
They always get along well, as those of us that sibling know.
Yeah, I think that one of the things I learned as an only child of a mom who had, she was one of seven, and had a number of sisters.
But one of the things that I learned is that sisters are often, there's often a lot of tension in sisterhoods.
But yet, like, their bond remained.
Even when my mom and her sister hated each other, like, they have remained deeply bound to one another.
And I think there's a really deep sense of love for one another, despite some of the tensions that have also existed in their relationships.
So I felt like Sisterhood was a relational figure that Could kind of illuminate the deep bonds that can exist also with a lot of tension.
So it's not necessarily like you have to say, oh, life and death, like you have to just see them as happy partners.
I don't think we have to.
I don't think we have to see it that way in order to just recognize that there is a deep bond of entanglement between the two.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
So thank you for that.
I think that's a great place to pick up the conversation next time.
For folks listening, again, it's Professor Beatrice Marovitch.
Sister Death is the name of the book.
Really excited to talk about it further.
You've implied or hinted at that, you know, that this for you has real sociopolitical sort of resonances as well.
And we're going to pick those up in the next episode.
For now, I want to thank everybody again for listening.
As always, this series in particular is driven by listeners.
Please feel free to tell me what you think.
Ideas, topics that we need to look at, danielmillerswaj.com is the best way to send me, especially the missives.
That I sometimes get.
I love our listeners have a lot of thoughts and a lot of ideas and I love them.
Please keep them coming.
I always say I'm behind on the emails.
I am perpetually trying to close the gap between the ones I've responded to and the ones that I haven't, but I read them.
I value them.
Value our listeners a lot.
We put out content three times a week.
Couldn't do it without you.
So thank you and Beatrice, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks so much for having me.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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