Lest anyone remains among Transpositions readership who has missed the copious memos,1 Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have released records. In an era where our collective attention span marches ever nearer the infinitesimal under endless torrents of content, daily created and disseminated to our smartphones and streaming devices, new music from these two pop superstars still rises to the level of genuine cultural events. It’s an increasingly rare occurrence, particularly in the realm of popular music, where technological advances over the last several decades have made it easier than ever to produce and distribute songs. For the average musician trying to make a living from their art, this is something of a mixed blessing; this ease creates a genuinely oppressive glut of choice for potential listeners, making it much more difficult to capture—much less hold—any substantive level of public attention outside of increasingly micro-generic-niche audiences.
Beyoncé and Swift, however, are anything but “average musicians.” By all reasonable metrics, they are two of the most successful and widely acclaimed artists ever to have worked in popular music. The levels of fame they have reached are stratospheric on a level that bears precious little precedent; their every public move is news, the reach of which is certain to extend far beyond the realms of self-identified Swifties or members of the Beyhive. The sheer number of vehement think-pieces debating whether Cowboy Carter constitutes a “proper” country album and TikToks dissecting which one of Taylor’s less-famous former or current boyfriends is the subject of any given song on Tortured Poets Department is enough to make even erstwhile appreciators among us just a tad weary—this writer included.
What’s more, for all the hype surrounding these two records, I must admit that neither holds up very well to repeated listening. While each record has a few genuinely delightful moments, both are overlong2 and tend towards the underwritten (Beyoncé) or overproduced (Swift), breaking very little novel artistic ground for either artist. As a result, both relatively quickly become…well…a little boring.
And yet…here I am, all the same, adding my own words to the din. Why? After all, it’s just pop music. Surely, an online journal devoted to the intersection of Christian theology and the arts has more substantive, more Christian—or at least more spiritually-minded—art it could and should engage with?
While these questions are not without validity, I would nevertheless argue that the juggernaut phenomenon that is these two women working at the very heights of cultural ubiquity is not only worthy of but demands our careful, sustained, and thoughtful—in a word, loving—attention as Christians and theologians. Indeed, I would further claim that Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are, in fact, necessary theological conversation partners if the Church is to take seriously its existence as a redeemed community living in the way of the Christ who gives Himself for the life of the world.
Theology as a Habitus
Foundational to my argument is a conception of Christian theology that is not simply reducible to the systematic discipline practised primarily in the halls of academia or the studies of ordained clergy. Prior to—and transcending—this “professional” understanding, theology exists fundamentally as a habitus. Latin for “way of life,” a habitus is the sum of all the actions that form our way of being in the world. An excellent introduction to this conception comes from Edward Farley, who first employed it at length in his 1983 book, Theolgia, on the current state of, and challenges within, theological education.
For Farley, arguing for a conception of theology as a habitus is the first step towards a kind of ressourcement. In a broad-strokes historical survey of the changes within theological education over the Church’s first two millennia which, in deference to Michel Foucault, he terms ‘an archaeology of the theological school’,3 Farley argues that ‘theology in its original and most authentic sense referred to a sapiential and personal knowledge’.4 In other words, theology was first broadly understood as the practical wisdom operative in the life of every believer, allowing them to faithfully navigate the world in all of its aspects while uniquely situated in a particular time and place.
However, over time—and accelerating over the last two centuries—a shift occurred within the academy. Formal theological education has become increasingly severed from theology’s fundamentally practical nature as a habitus. The result is an atomised series of distinct disciplines within the university or seminary, centred around the education of individuals for ordained ministry. Farley names this phenomenon the ‘clerical paradigm’: theological education that is focused primarily on training clergy or those who will continue to train clergy within the academy. The predictable effect downstream of this move is that theology comes to be understood by the broader Church as the theoretical domain dealing with the articulation and development of doctrine. The work of theology, in turn, is often reduced to particular disciplines (systematic, historical, practical, philosophical, etc.) best left to professionals properly trained in their field, over/against an approach that views theology as primarily ‘the wisdom by which one brings the resources of a religious tradition to bear on the world’.5
Why does this matter? In short, the way we conceive of theology as such will naturally have a correlative effect on the content with which we engage when we are “doing” theology. If theology is conceived of as a primarily theoretical discipline aimed at the ongoing articulation of doctrinal truth undertaken by and for the academy in the interest of preparing clergy for ordained ministry, then it will naturally tend to limit itself to the historical content most germane to that particular sphere: the Scriptures, creeds, councils, and the most salient theological and philosophical texts of the tradition up to the present day.6
Suppose instead we were to privilege a conception of theology as knowledge of God that at its most fundamental assumes the form of practical, embodied wisdom, rooted in the ongoing riches of the Church tradition and oriented towards faithful living in our particular time and place—a habitus. Understood as such, theology can never be the exclusive realm of professionals, but belongs always to the Church and all its members. As such, the work of theology must articulate not only knowledge about God but also how all knowledge of God makes demands upon the lives of real persons. Further, it must aim for the wisdom by which these demands can be addressed in and through the Church in the lives of the saints. In this case, no sphere of human existence could fall outside the purview of theological reflection because theology is nothing less than the applied knowledge by which a believer shapes their way of being in the world, moment to moment.
Popular Culture as a Conversation Partner
If theology is practical, contextual wisdom oriented towards living faithfully in light of human relationships with God, each other and the world, then it is necessarily situated in the particularities of everyday lived experience. In a hyper-networked world, popular culture is ubiquitous. So much so that, to paraphrase Dick Hebdige, for a majority in the West, popular culture constitutes that which is primarily experienced and appreciated as culture as such.7 Further, as Kelton Cobb has noted:
The media-world is the shelter where the vast majority of those of us who live in the West dwell and from which we draw the material out of which we make sense of our lives. It is under the canopy of the media that we imbibe, speculate about and negotiate the meaning of love, friendship, beauty, happiness, truth, hope, pain, grace, luck, work, sacrifice, and death. The mediated world of electronic images, sounds, and printed words provides us with our most broadly shared symbols, icons, myths and rituals—the signs with which we enlighten ourselves, search for consolation, and establish our bearings.8
Popular culture deserves a place in any discourse that aspires, as theology must, to address the whole of the human experience. Our own tastes and prejudices cannot excuse thoughtful Christians—and especially those of us committed to the work of theology—from substantive engagement with the world as it is in the lived experience of the vast majority of its people, including the Church itself. It is incumbent upon the contemporary theologian to ‘grasp the implicit theology of this modern world of ours, and understand why and how it was born, so that we can recognise both its vitality and its congenital defects’.9 Popular culture, reflecting as it does ‘widely assimilated and accepted behaviours, language, rituals and the like’,10 is fertile ground for just such a task—and the broader the reach, the deeper and more discerning our engagement must be.
In Practice
What might this engagement look like in practice—and am I really suggesting that merely because an artist’s work is culturally dominant, we must assume that it has something profound to say to us? Isn’t it, as Guy Garvey sings, ‘really all disco’ in the end? Well, yes and no. The contention that there are serious artists working in the medium of popular music whose work reveals genuinely theological insights of positive value for the Church to discern is a hill I will readily die on.11 Having said that, even works of popular music of lesser quality may prove revelatory to those trying to theologically engage the cultural milieu of our everyday life, if we know how to read them well.
Paul Tillich may at first seem an unlikely candidate to turn to in helping us find a way forward in applying such an approach. In his writings, he roundly denounced both mass media and kitsch, condemning the former as ripe for the propagandistic machinations of aspiring totalitarians, and the latter as ‘“beautifying sentimentalism” which is fundamentally dishonest’.12 Nevertheless, Tillich is a substantial figure whose work towards a theology of culture remains foundational. Further, Cobb suggests that if we attend well to the substance of Tillich’s work, it may prove possible to ‘transcend Tillich’s prejudice against popular culture by applying Tillich’s method’.13
Tillich’s theology of culture is built on the fundamental contention that ‘faith is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, and God is the name of the content for that concern’.14 Further, for Tillich there is no genuinely faith-less individual—only those who put their faith in ‘the God who is manifest in Jesus the Christ[…], the true subject of an ultimate and unconditional concern’, and those who instead direct their faith towards ‘less than valid objects of an ultimate concern, [which] if they are made into one, become idols’.15 That concern which attains such a position becomes a functional god, which exerts ‘ultimate demands’ in exchange for the promise of ‘ultimate fulfillment’.16 In other words, humans are fundamentally religious creatures, and human culture is always revelatory of where our fundamental religious hopes lies: ‘religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion…there is no cultural creation without an ultimate concern expressed in it’.17
If Tillich is correct, then in light of what we have already said about popular culture as a bearer of ‘our most broadly shared symbols, icons, myths and rituals’, then it follows that for the Christian theologian seeking to discern ‘the implicit theology’ of the age, the artefacts of popular culture would seem an ideal—perhaps the ideal—place to begin.
For better or worse, the songs of pop artists like Beyoncé and Swift provide the soundtrack to our common lives; we hear them on television and the radio, in the background of grocery stores and restaurants, through the walls of our neighbours’ flats and the windows of passing cars. We listen, we sing along, we dance. These songs simultaneously reflect and shape our values, the objects of our desires, and where we invest our hope—those objects, more or less worthy, of our ultimate concern. In this way, even when the songs themselves lack the lustre of artistic genius, there remain veins of truth to be mined within—about who we are and who we are becoming as humans in our shared time and place.
This is why I lovingly listen even when it sometimes leaves me bored—and why I think you should, too. Pop music, mindfully attended, becomes a locus of discernment for the ultimate concern(s) of the culture we inhabit, to which we are not immune. Only when we can see those things that present themselves as subtle alternatives to the Gospel of Jesus Christ can we resist their pull on our own fickle hearts and more compassionately live our faith as habitus, in witness to the radical alterity of the kingdom of God. From attentive and charitable listening, we are able to affirm those good desires for acceptance, belonging, justice, meaning, pleasure, joy and love that lie at the heart of being human (and, thus, the heart of most pop music), while pointing with our lives to the God in whom only they can find full satisfaction. Further, we can acknowledge and enjoy the realities of God’s common grace expressed in all human culture—even the delights of a three-minute pop song—and better love our neighbours, as God has first loved us all.
