AND THE SEX WOULD BE A LOT BETTER TOO

What if we stopped being so fixated on death, and gave life a chance? (The Rev Dr. Giles Fraser, The Guardian, 20/12/03)

Why are we so obsessed with what other people think of us? Why are we so concerned to fit in? Why do we submit so readily to the tyranny of the "they"? Heidegger's famous answer is that social conformity is a function of the fear of death. Standing alone is to face the full force of our own mortality. The crowd, on the other hand, is impersonal and immortal. The crowd is beyond the reach of death. Heidegger concludes that we hide from the unwelcome prospect of death by submerging our identity in the "they". The crowd anesthetises us from the thought of our own mortality. [...]

Heidegger's thought suggests that a culture obsessed with death will place ultimate value upon self-sufficiency and subjectivity. Replacing cultural necrophilia with a celebration of birth would transform our social and political paradigms. "Whereas mortality is the condition that leads the self to withdraw from the world into a fundamental concern with a fate that can only be its own, natality is the condition through which we immerse ourselves into the world through the goodwill and solidarity of those who nurture us," writes Seyla Benhabib, professor of government at Yale.[...]

A faith premised upon natality would have little place for an indifference to the physical. The thought that human beings are souls trapped beneath a veil of flesh makes no sense to a mother caring for her child. Likewise Plato's conception of love as an abstract intellectual virtue - that the "beauty in souls is more honourable than that in the body" - could never have been dreamt up by someone who had given birth or spent time cuddling, kissing or tickling their kids. The love inherent within nativity is inescapably physical: beginning in the womb and continuing in the physical intimacy of feeding and cleaning.

Most important of all, a culture of natality would be inscribed with a permanent sense of hope. Too much Christian theology has immediately displaced this hope into the beyond, effectively denying its applicability to the world in which we live. Hence the importance of the Christian Aid strapline: We believe in life before death. Often Christianity is imagined as transcending the human, in favour of some other realm, thereby betraying the constitutive elements of our humanity. But again it is Plato that is the real villain, insisting, as he does, upon transcending humanity to reach a perspective "unalloyed, pure, unmixed, not stuffed full of human flesh and colours and lots of other mortal rubbish". The nativity of Christ tells a very different story, returning Christians to a concern for the human in all its vulnerability and glory. In this way, a culture of natality provides a secure theological footing for an insistence upon social justice and the significance of the environment. [...]

The western cultural imagination has been obsessed with death. No doubt, a version of Christianity that has wedded itself to Platonism is partly responsible for this unhealthy fixation. Salvation is achieved through the death of Christ. Death is the pathway to life. Properly speaking, even here it is the resurrection, the affirmation of the triumph of life over death that is being celebrated. None the less, without the corrective of natality, a certain unhealthy morbidity can easily attach itself to the Christian vision. Even the modern rite of baptism is surprisingly heavy on the death imagery, perversely preferring a theology of death and rebirth to the miracle of birth itself. The feminist theologian Grace Jantzen, who has done most to develop a theology of natality, has suggested that the evangelical emphasis on being born again is a way in which men have wrested the power of birth away from women...

That this confused mishmash of trendy, secular-inspired drivel would undoubtedly resonate with many Christians is evidence of why the faith is in such trouble in the West. The objections are so numerous. Firstly, isn’t it a tad tasteless to champion a discredited crypto-Nazi over Plato? Secondly...

Oh, never mind. Let’s just thank the vicar for giving the culture of death such a good name.