The “Nones” should play more Bob Dylan
The Whole ’Nuther, Vol. 2022, No. 6
Perhaps I’m a child of the 20th century, but you could say I didn’t grow up until the 21st.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, Bob Dylan’s song “My Back Pages” was proclaiming, “I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” Back then, members of my generation felt we were moving past things like pious, judgmental religiosity, and racism’s hate and fear. We grew up joking about and lampooning them. Sure, you could still find lots of Bible-thumping on television and AM radio, and racial bigotry was in the mix around us even as a born-again Southern Baptist was elected President the year I entered college. But we “knew” deep down that America’s future depended on putting aside straitlaced Christian attitudes about duty and piety, as well as the My-Country-’Tis-of-Thee squareness and conservatism that went with them. Earlier generations just couldn’t see the truth as clearly as ours did.
What we didn’t understand was that those Archie Bunker attitudes we snickered at were an effect, not a cause. And so, in its own way, was our own attitude, which now seems just as laughable because it sprouted from the same roots. Despite bell-bottom blues, granny glasses, and anti-establishment posturing, my generation was coming of age wedded to an old way of looking at the world—a habit that remains hard for many Americans today to break.
For me, breaking it has meant growing into faith.
Looking forward at a new millennium
My parents lived into their eighties; if I do too, my life will have almost exactly straddled that moment the millennium turned, in AD 2000–2001. Like the Roman deity Janus, who faces both forward and backward and gives his name to January, I’m a dweller of the threshold. Looking back, I see how my contemporaries considered our parents’ generation old-fashioned and ours “modern” (which was precisely the aspect of the problem we couldn’t see). Looking forward, I wonder if being modern still keeps many of us from what we might hope to find.
Our parents were actually modern too, as were most Americans born in the late 19ᵗʰ and 20ᵗʰ centuries. One mark of that was a conviction that people could tell the right way from the wrong way, and that the world could be understood through the difference: true was true, false was false, and the job was proving it. Our parents’ generation was wrong, we concluded. But instead of making us right, our conclusion actually made us just like them, viewing the world in “either/or” and “true/false” terms. They’d been just as convinced as we were that big truths could be clearly understood—we shared that distinctly modern kind of certainty. We just disagreed about what the truths were.
These days, though, that true/false, either/or worldview doesn’t cut it. It’s time for a new something. Or, maybe, something really old and young at the same time.
That binary way of seeing things has been around for a long time. Fashions and institutions might have changed since it first emerged back in the late 1600s, at the dawning of the Enlightenment and the Modern Era, but its approach hasn’t. It teaches a kind of empirical, semi-scientific mindset, and in America today that outlook appears to be killing the very faith that for so long has shaped Western culture.
Cultural journalists and scholars of the sociology of religion report that people in America, who until late in the last century were notable among Western populations for their strong religious identities, seem to be abandoning traditional belief—particularly Christian faith—in numbers that suggest it has lost much of its importance to them. One major study estimated that between 1972 and 2021, for instance, the proportion of Americans claiming some kind of religious affiliation fell from 95 to 69 percent; only 63 percent identified as Christians in 2021. The fastest-growing faith category, according to the survey, was a group informally referred to as “the Nones”—those reporting no particular link with any religious tradition. By 2021, that group included 29 percent of the American population.1
Despite alarm among some American Christians about rising numbers of immigrants from Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist countries, other religions aren’t “replacing” anything, either. Most new American immigrants are still Christians, and the percentage of people here who practice other faiths has barely increased over the past half-century, rising from 5 percent in 1972 to 6 percent in 2021—hardly a ripple, much less a powerful wave threatening to wash away the religious foundations of the nation. No, the problem appears to lie with Christianity itself, and particularly with the way American Christians perceive and practice it.
A 2016 survey by Pew polled members of the Nones, trying to determine why their numbers were growing. In general they said they had:
Stopped believing, or
Been alienated by institutional religion, or
Lost a sense of certainty, or
Simply become focused on other things that seemed more important.2
Problems of “Modern” Christianity
Not coincidentally, this was happening at the same time as the growing political influence of conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, the rise of so-called Christian Nationalism, and an increasingly dramatic “Red/Blue” divide among Americans. What has been called “civil religion” (shared public faith and participation in national rituals and traditions that allow different groups to bond) has become a matter of contention rather than something that gives Americans identity and unity. All of it, I’m increasingly convinced, stems from the mindset I mentioned earlier—the “either/or” duality that defines what historians have called the Modern Era. Faced with an either/or choice about organized faith, the Nones are choosing to reject it.
“I was so much older then,” Saint Bobby sang back in 1964 and, as I was growing up, most took it as a commentary on our parents’ generation, the one that had led America into Vietnam, blacklisted Communists, and jailed Martin Luther King. We were younger, purer, able to see more clearly, and the song celebrated youth. But he was saying something harder than that.
Growing up, most of us have been taught that children don’t know right from wrong, lies from truth, and safe from dangerous. Not good! Our parents soon remedied this, wanting us to know how to survive and to tell good guys from bad guys. In a cruel, dangerous, unforgiving world, doing otherwise would leave us vulnerable, invite trouble, and lead to bad choices. Learn all that or perish, they taught; join or die. It’s either/or!
Only . . . not always. Sometimes it can be both/and. That’s how I hear Dylan’s song:
Crimson flames tied through my ears Rollin’ high and mighty traps Pounced with fire on flaming roads Using ideas as my maps . . . Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth “Rip down all hate,” I screamed Lies that life is black and white Spoke from my skull. I dreamed . . .
Those burning voices in our heads, he sings, are lying, setting “high and mighty traps” for us when they insist on black and white instead of colors or shades of gray, and claiming that mastering details and ideas will save us. As angry young people, we were actually thinking in an old way. But perhaps, as we become older and wiser, we might learn to think in a younger and more childlike way—both/and.
That’s hard to do. While young children can easily see something as “make believe” and “true” at the same time, and imagination can be as real as fact, too often we leave that behind us. We’ve been taught that if we encounter a paradox, there must be some mistake—both yes and no can’t be true. Interestingly, Jesus’s message in the Gospels is full of such both/and paradoxes: kings serve, losers win, wealth is poverty, and dying leads to living. That’s what he tries to get his audience to understand.
In one story from Mark’s Gospel, after the disciples have been arguing about which of them deserves to lead the band, he confronts them with the example of a child that doesn’t know first from last or right from wrong:
[Jesus] said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them, and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (9:35–37)
Here we see that divine wisdom can be found as fully in the child (I picture it as a baby that can’t even walk yet) who knows “nothing” as in the Messiah with all the answers. I take from Jesus’s paradox (and from Dylan’s song!) the idea that in a child’s guilelessness, having never learned that one must choose, there can be more “truth” than in the carefully considered either/or distinctions modern culture so values, because such choices so often separate us from each other and from God.
Yet Christianity has too often demanded just such choices. Beginning during the Reformation, it began to leave behind medieval ideas that were much more open to ambiguity. Rather than offering a spiritual check and counterpoint to the either/or approach of the Modern Era that encroached on its traditions, during the last four hundred years Christians have frequently adopted that very same approach as their own: Who are you going to believe, Darwin or the Bible? Are you going to accept church doctrine about scripture or not? If you don’t think like us, leave. Choose: us and heaven, or them and hell. Are you going to trust our ways or your lying heart?
Christianity, in other words, adopted the dualistic metric of the Modern Age. And, for many fundamentalists, this has meant rejecting the ambiguity of contemporary life, and what science teaches us about our world, in favor of a literalism in which the Bible becomes a kind of idol to worship and definitive rule-book to follow.
Reasons not to be religious
That’s increasing hard for many to accept these days. You can maybe see why the Nones gave those four reasons in the Pew Center’s poll that I mentioned earlier:
1.) Doubt. Asked to choose between what science teaches about our universe and literal belief in an ancient, supernatural cosmology, is it any wonder they might doubt traditional claims about an all-powerful creator no one can see, miracles that defy natural laws, and a system of faith based on primitive ideas about divine beings?
2.) Alienation. Faced with judgmental congregations that in practice (if not always in so many words) exclude people of different skin colors, different cultural backgrounds, and different views about issues of money, power, sex, gender, and justice, they wonder why they should suffer such judgment and hypocrisy silently in a pew when the law and social norms no longer demand it?
3.) Uncertainty. If, as modern thought teaches, we must make that either/or choice, the validity of things like religious doctrines or the “truth” of fiction and art seem doubtful. Because they can’t be certain, the Nones feel obligated to write religion off, even if they feel an urge to faith (a majority describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”).
4.) Priority. Activities like taking the kids to soccer on Sunday mornings, or weekend getaways in the mountains, or shopping, or even entertainment now compete with church for many people. If you’re not part of a community in which the spiritual pull of church and the social pull of church friendships trump other activities, those other things can become, as the Pew survey showed, more important. In a capitalist, consumerist economy, it’s also easy for focusing on our jobs and possessions to get top priority.
Those are all “modern” responses, examples of either/or dualistic thinking. As we look forward, Janus-like, into a new millennium, though, increasingly “postmodern” thinking offers another lens through which to see. I think that’s what Bob Dylan sensed, all the way back in 1964.
Some today have moved beyond this modern “prove it”-mindset. The Postmodern Era (some might call it the Post-secular Era) took root in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and really began blossoming in the 21st century. In this new era, things aren’t so simple.
Many people probably already accept postmodern ideas without knowing it!
For a postmodern person, things are often relational, rather than absolute. Truth depends on being in relation. If you find the idea of being “in relation” difficult to picture, try thinking of it in the way Joni Mitchell does in “Big Yellow Taxi,” where she sings to us that “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” In other words, absence defines presence: you can’t truly know what it means to have something until you’ve lost it. Another analogy might be a shadow, which always exists in relation to light shining on the object that casts it. Likewise, Chinese philosophy says forces of Yin and Yang, negative and positive, darkness and light, always exist in relation, both defining and creating one another.
In a sense, secularism (the idea that a factual “real world” exists separately from a world of faith) effectively “colonized” Christianity during the Enlightenment. It moved into territory that faith had traditionally claimed and constructed new, foreign rules by which faith had to operate. Suddenly, our relationship with stories of the Bible changed. Either they were provably true (God actually created a garden in Mesopotamia and kicked the first two people out of it) or they were fictional (somebody invented a creation myth).
Whither postmodern Christianity?
From the postmodern point of view, that resulted in an approach that cried out to be “deconstructed,” both to reveal the richness of the earlier way of life and to properly understand the biases of what replaced it. To get that richness back, I’d argue, we need not certainty but faith.
For example, someone like me who goes to church on Sundays can’t prove (and I see no need to try to do so) that God created our universe. But I have faith that God’s part of the process. And, however skeptical scientific cosmologists and biologists may be of a divine creator, none can say with certainty what “In the beginning” entails. Many of today’s cosmologists, for instance, propose the existence of a “multiverse”—an infinite number of universes that exist simultaneously, and in which many sorts of time, physical laws, and states of existence are possible. That theory is a story too, one told by some of the world’s smartest and most highly trained theorists who’ve worked through the possibilities in great mathematical depth. But in the end, their story is still just detailed conjecture based on calculations from incomplete data. And, since I’ve never believed in an old guy with a beard who snapped his fingers to start the universe’s motor, I’m eager to learn about such theories as they develop and are tested. Both/and.
Faith is not certainty. But it’s not a lie. And the idea that God might be involved isn’t just wishful thinking, either. That’s an important distinction.
For example, I am certain that the sun will rise tomorrow—I believe the science about how the world turns and the universe works. Yes, astronomers tell us, the sun will burn out or collapse in about 5 billion years, or a wandering black hole could swing by and eat everything before then, destroying Earth in the process, but absent that we can be reasonably certain the sun won’t soon disappear, and our planet will keep spinning in its orbit (even if we make it uninhabitable for ourselves).
Faith is different. While I have faith that I’ll be there to see that sun come up tomorrow, I’m also significantly overweight and there’s a real chance I could have a heart attack and crash my car today while driving to the store. Does that mean my expectation of seeing sunrise is a lie? Hardly. Acting as if I’ll be around tomorrow, which makes what I do today count, is a matter of faith. And faith in tomorrow gives today meaning.
So having faith can mean a lot. But by definition you can’t have faith without doubt. Or, to put it another way, both/and: Faith means believing in something that can be doubted. Because it gives faith moral and ethical meaning, doubt, you might even say, is a feature, not a bug. Accepting that link between faith and doubt is the first step toward being authentically Christian in this new millennium.
Although I grew up in an agnostic home, with parents (one Christian and one Jewish) thoroughly at home with the modern approach to ideas, I always felt the urge to believe and retained a kind of hopeful faith about the future. For me there was never a moment of conversion, but over the years that feeling deepened and became more complex, and eventually led to formal membership at a church. (Marrying a nice Episcopal girl didn’t hurt!) And so it is that I find myself at the threshold between the modern and the postmodern, and between two centuries, wondering what the future holds for Christianity, and other religions, as we both accept the modern world and its discoveries and learn that there can be more than either/or.
Although he’s Jewish, and didn’t enter his “Christian Phase” until a dozen or so years after he wrote “My Back Pages,” it seems to me that Bob Dylan was anticipating that kind of both/and postmodern approach to faith in his song, if not in so many words. He was talking about putting aside abstract ideas and ways of looking at the world that reflected old thinking.
As usual, he was ahead of the rest of us:
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats Too noble to neglect Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect Good and bad, I define these terms Quite clear, no doubt, somehow Ah, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now
See Modeling the Future of Religion in America, Pew Research Reports, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/?p=38127.
See Michael Lipka, “Why America’s ‘nones’ left religion behind,” Pew Research Center, http://pewrsr.ch/2bOZAJk.
I have a notion that binary thinking has been around longer than the Enlightenment. “He who is not for me is against me,” as the man said. I like thinking about paradox as an engine for thinking, though: it’s like an ideational pun where both meanings are defensible.