Crypto-Religious Explained: Bob Dylan, Madonna, and the Hidden Language of Faith (Part 1)

Cameron (00:01)

Hello and welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I'm your co-host, Cameron McAllister.

Nathan (00:05)

and I'm your co-host, Nathan Rittenhouse.

This episode is for those of you who want to be on the know about what crypto religiosity is or what does it mean to be crypto religious. This comes out of a book that Cameron is reading and it gets complexed and nuanced in all sorts of ways. And in fact, we run out of time in this conversation. So this is part one of an introduction to what it means to be crypto religious and whether or not it's a real thing or even valuable. As always, if you like what we're doing, don't forget to like, share and subscribe. And if you want to support the work that we're doing, you can do so by visiting www.toltogether.com.

Cameron (00:07)

So I've been thinking about the term or the phrase crypto religious lately, Nathan, and I think this one's about to enter into the popular lexicon a little bit more. I could be wrong.

Nathan (00:17)

All right,

listen up everybody. You're about to get a head start.

Cameron (00:21)

Yes.

Well, so perceptive listeners will recognize perhaps the source of that quote and it is the Polish poet Czesław Milosz. I've heard people say Miosz before too. mean, there's an L in there, I'm going to say Milosz, but so Polish poet.

Nathan (00:40)

Let's go with 99 % of the people

listening to this haven't heard it either way. So start fresh.

Cameron (00:45)

You know what? You're right, that's always the good wet blanket comment from Nathan there, it's probably true.

Nathan (00:49)

Well,

mean, it's like cameras like well as the French the famous philosopher you're like, yeah, nobody's ever heard of it. So anyway

Cameron (00:56)

famous. Let's qualify that.

But some of you will know Czesław Milosz. Perhaps he's most famous not as a poet, but for his book, The Captive Mind, on what it was like to live day in and day out in a communist nation where truth was carefully policed or truth in quotes, in scare quotes. It's a really great book. his main vocation was as a poet at the time. So he lived

He lived in exile for a long time, settled at the University of California, Berkeley for a while, was a very successful poet there at the time, even had a private meeting with Pope John Paul II. And those of you who remember John Paul II was himself Polish. The Catholic Church is very important in the nation of Poland. It had its communist years, but of all of the European nations, Poland is perhaps one of the most fiercely Catholic actually.

So a very important, significant meeting. he, it's Czeslaw Milos who coins the term crypto-religious and he does it in exchange with Thomas Merton, author of the Trappist Monk, probably one of the most famous Trappist monks of all time. And he really is famous. The Seven Story Mountain was a massive bestseller that he wrote. he was, so Thomas Merton was very explicitly religious as a devout Catholic and a monk.

He was pressing on Miloš on what do you actually believe? Are you or aren't you? And Pope, John Paul II, did this too. And Miloš refused to take a firm stance and said, have to be crypto-religious because if I was explicit with my religious convictions, they would be co-opted politically and they would be used against me.

Some people will hear that as just kind of lame excuses. Some people will be thinking of figures right now who are doing much the same thing. Public intellectuals. Horton, Whederson, does that, you know, rhymes with. But

Nathan (03:00)

Rhymes.

Cameron (03:03)

Anyway, we have the term crypto-religious. There's a book that's come out by Paul Eli and it's called The Last Supper. I think it's a very good book. I'm not quite finished with it, about halfway through it, so I'm going to reserve my critical judgments for it for when I finish the book. He is the author of another book also called The Life You Save May Be Your Own. That was

a spiritual biography of four Catholic writers and it's a marvelous book. Some of you have probably read it, but the four authors he's looking at in that book are Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Catholic journalist, and Flannery O'Connor, the youngest of those four. But people have asked him for years, are you going to do a follow-up? mean, what's the follow-up book about other spiritual artists? And he says this one's his answer.

And it's not going to be the answer people were looking for though, because the figures he looks at in this book are what he calls crypto-religious. And I'll define that as he defines it here in a second, because he ⁓ has actually a fairly technical way of defining it, and he's pretty careful with how he uses that. But the figures in there, he's looking at people in the decade of the 80s. He sees the 80s as a very artistically rich and interesting period. He also happened to live through it himself.

that he was a student at that time. And he said it was a very exciting time to be to be a young person. But so the artists he chronicles in The Last Supper are people widely disparate. I mean, this is going to so people like Prince Madonna. Yeah, Madonna Bono. think you two will make more sense to people. You from Andy Warhol. You know, a lot of people don't know this. Andy Warhol had a

Nathan (04:49)

From Merton to Madonna. My my my.

Cameron (04:57)

very devout Catholic upbringing, but remained.

I don't, you know, you can't call Andy Warhol devout in the traditional sense, but he went to church his entire life. He attended mass his entire life. He made a vow to do it and he did. He was more spiritually serious than people realized, but it's figures like this. So let's talk about, and then I'll kick it over to Nathan here for a second, but what he means by crypto-religious, and he is taking it from Czeslaw Milosz. He means an artist that

uses explicit religious imagery, metaphors, motifs, tropes, but remains, but the status of their actual belief remains ambiguous. And because you ask yourself the question, well, do they actually believe? They bring a dynamic that forces you, the audience, to wrestle with your own faith and ask yourself, but do I believe?

And he believes this is really important, especially for the 1980s, because as we enter into a post-secular world where Christianity is always contested, it's one option among many options, it's not really possible to be as forthright. I mean, can be forthright. Of course it is. I mean, you can be forthright, but you're not going to be heard in the same way if you're really forthright and just explicit with your beliefs. These artists are, in order to remain powerful and prophetic, have to be cryptic.

He's, know, Paul Eli is arguing. Another figure here, we've talked about him before, and I think it's worth bringing him in, is Bob Dylan, Nathan. Bob Dylan is one of the easiest to point to in terms of, you know, a lot of people, does he really believe? Because Bob Dylan just seems to, he has this really uncanny ability to anticipate the next big wave of what's gonna capture people's imaginations.

and to latch onto it and really dig in, burrow into the roots of it. it's even, and this is how Paul Eli represents him when he begins his so-called Christian moment. It's the, album, Slow Train Coming. think that came out in 1979. And even the picture of the slow train coming is Paul Eli sees that as, as Bob Dylan anticipating there's going to be this big wave where Christianity is suddenly very, very important and it's in the public eye. It has real political force.

And he did, he anticipated that, he caught it, and this record is one of the first hits he has in a long, long time. It's a really big moment. But then as the years wear on and Bob Dylan begins to change and release more spiritually ambiguous material, certainly in his lifestyle doesn't seem like he's really, certainly not an evangelical Christian.

That question remains. mean, we're so it's very important for Paul Eli that the artist in question, you their status, their own belief remains ambiguous. So I thought this was really interesting. I thought it'd be worth talking about two questions, Nathan, whether it's whether crypto religiosity is possible in our moment, which is so politically polarized and charged and whether and if so,

Who are some of the artists who might fit into this category? You don't have to answer both of those right now, but yeah, that's just, that's where I'm gonna kind of point us for the time being.

Nathan (08:29)

OK.

can give short answers to both of these. Yeah, no.

All right, so let's go some definitions. I think if you're like me and you hear the word crypto, you're thinking cryptocurrency. So crypto has, the word crypto itself has become shorthand for cryptocurrency. And it's a very biblical word. It just means hidden or secret. know, so your father who sees what is done in crypto, cryptos, will reward you. So the idea of a secretness or a hiddenness, some kind of, yeah, inaccessible.

Yeah. And accessibility. Yeah. So cryptos is very much there. Usually translated secret in the New Testament. So a cryptocurrency would have some kind of hiddenness. can't, the blockchain, can't trace it back. That's why it's hip. It's why it's crypto. It's cryptic, I guess is the way we would say that. secret religion is not really a, ⁓ a powerful biblical concept. There are times in which I think Jesus is cryptic.

in himself about what he is doing, but he's never really cryptic. I'm trying to debate in your mind as I'm saying this, like, what are the biblical precedents? Because there's a whole lot more of like, hey, you're either with me or against me. There's a little more twofold here. And my hunch would be that, and my personal sentiment, not having read the book, so you'll have to push back here, is that I think...

artists themselves, it's hard for me to say, there's like some kind of, is he saying there's a strategic cryptic-ness to what they're doing or is it just an ambiguity in their own minds about what they actually believe? Because I interpret artists that way more, like even Yeats talked about writing good poetry that he himself wasn't exactly sure what it meant or that a poet can do that. ⁓ Or there's a sense in which the culture that we

Cameron (10:14)

That's a really good question.

Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Nathan (10:28)

I remember one time being at a debate where Michael Shermer, who's, you know, professional skeptic, and he said, he pulled the audience on something about like, what percentage do you believe that Jesus, that, ⁓ you know, there's an afterlife and like half the audience raised their hands and he goes, Jesus Christ. And of course everybody cracked up laughing because like, why would you. So Michael Shermer is not a Christian. He's just using Jesus Christ as a culturally known responsive phrase to a, so there's, there's a way in which the language that he is using.

Cameron (10:44)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yes.

Nathan (10:57)

I think you do see this even in your your Jonathan Heights and your Jordan Petersons and so forth who are not explicitly religious, but just find religious language to pack the most. Even your Peter Thiels these days who are talking about big technological things and theological that it's it's not really a it's not that they have a belief that is defined to themselves and then they're hiding it from the public in order to do some sort of Trojan horse in order to secret this knowledge into the halls of power.

as much as this language just works best for them and they're using it while they're scrambling to describe reality as they see it. So I think that'd be a good starting point to clarify here.

Cameron (11:39)

Great. It was really helpful.

Nathan (11:41)

Which one is he using?

Cameron (11:44)

So he actually has been asked questions along these lines as well in interviews and he is Paul Eli. It's just obviously I'm a fan of the guy. So he's on top of being a phenomenal writer, very humble in interviews and very down to earth, but clearly just one of these blazingly brilliant people. It just comes across certain people just give off that aura. Aura, everybody uses that word.

Nathan (12:07)

they're connecting the dots rather

rapidly.

Cameron (12:10)

they are and he does that. Well, there's also just there's an incredible depth, but there's he's very careful. very he weighs what he says very carefully and you can feel that in every interview. So when when we talk about first of all, it's important to recognize that he is talking about artists, not just not so not public intellectuals, artists. And it's very important. That's one of the interesting features of this book. He is doing something different from books that usually examine a decade.

Nathan (12:32)

Mm-hmm.

Cameron (12:40)

Usually if you're looking at, let's say it's a book on the 1960s, well, you can bet that a good deal of it is going to be devoted to politics and sociological factors, the economy, things like that. And those are important factors, but that's not what his book is doing. He's looking through an artistic lens. So all of his examples of crypto religion are artists. And so that's important to recognize as well.

Nathan (13:08)

But

I think that's what confuses it, is because artists are given the most flexibility culturally in not needing to land on anything but more articulate a mood.

Cameron (13:20)

Mm-hmm. Yes, and one so one question that's asked I think is directly related to what you you said Nathan is Can is there such a thing as non? Crypto religious art, know that can you have lasting art that doesn't have some? Spiritual dimension it won't last probably, you know, presumably it won't last if it doesn't have some spiritual dimension in it and his answer to that I thought that was a good question his answer to it surprised me He said absolutely without hesitation. Absolutely. Yes, there is

He said there's a lot of modernist art that has no, that clearly has no, he gives, so I'll give you a few examples that he gives because they're good, but that has no real spiritual dimension in it in the sense that you have no, there's no question where the author stands on the matter. One, there you go, the Macarena, yes. Well, I mean, there is the question, of course, of whether that actually is art or not. I'm just joking. But the example he gives is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Nathan (14:07)

The Macarena.

you ⁓

Cameron (14:20)

And even so the title itself is making use of biblical imagery, interestingly enough. But the reason he gives that as an example is he says when you read The Handmaid's Tale, there is no question in your mind that Margaret Atwood ⁓ has a very negative view of Christianity. You know where the author of this story stands. In order for something to qualify as crypto-religious, that has to remain ambiguous.

And so that's, and now as to the question of whether that can carry some real prophetic force, that's a really important question too. Let me answer it cryptically myself. And then you can push, yeah, go ahead.

Nathan (15:03)

Well, hang on a second before we move on because that the Handmaid's Tale is

not. The Handmaid's Tale is not as anti-religious as Margaret Atwood herself is. It's strange. mean, a religious faction is what saves the day at the end of the Handmaid's Tale. So it's it does. I don't know. That's a confusing example to me a little bit.

Cameron (15:22)

Yeah,

but well, no, his example is used because he says that it's clear that the author is atheistic and that comes through pretty loud and clear in the tone of the book. I think it does too. I would agree with him on that. that's why his definition is a little bit more nuanced than it may initially seem. And I also worry about crypto-religious entering into the popular lexicon because it's going to lose some of this nuance.

Nathan (15:39)

Okay.

Cameron (15:51)

because his definition really hinges on that necessary ambiguity. So that would also exclude artists who are making cynical use of Christian tropes and imagery, to either to mock or to try to just get some poetic leverage from it without really

Nathan (16:13)

Okay,

but back to my question. Is he saying that this is intentionally done or that the artist himself is just confused about what they actually believe?

Cameron (16:28)

He is saying that this, think he, well, if I'm not misreading him.

Nathan (16:31)

Cause cause

let's jump ahead to like a modern, like, what do they call it? Like crossover music? Like, is this person singing about Jesus or their boyfriend? Like it's, it's, seems like it's strategically written in a way that too, like it's made to play well to two audiences. And that's not, and that's just like a marketing choice, probably more than a statement about the belief of the musician.

Cameron (16:34)

Mm-hmm.

Right. Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Yes.

Mm-hmm. So he is arguing, if I'm understanding him correctly, that this is an intentional choice. And again, the people he's choosing, he recognizes, he takes them seriously as artists. So he doesn't think they're just mere commercial artists. So that's why the book is, what I love about this book is how surprising it is. You know, I would expect Bob Dylan, yeah. Leonard Cohen, absolutely. That fits. Leonard Cohen is a profound poet. So is Bob Dylan.

They're amazing songwriters. They are recognized as serious art. Their music is taught in college courses, but not, hold on, but not Madonna. I haven't heard Madonna taken with this level of seriousness. Prince is taken seriously because he's just an absolute first rate musician, but he's also a very sexually flamboyant and explicit, you know,

Nathan (17:31)

Okay, bud, Help me. ⁓

Right.

Cameron (17:54)

singer who pushed the boundaries and pushed the envelope. to have them singled out for serious artistic consideration is also really surprising and really interesting when it comes to this book. And I didn't realize that Madonna called her... Do you know Madonna is her given name, by the way? I did not know that. That was news to me. I assumed that was a clever...

Nathan (18:20)

you

Cameron (18:21)

choice on

her, but it wasn't. That's her name. She was born Madonna Louise. But then, not only that, I didn't realize that in the 80s, she proclaimed herself to be a Catholic. And she was still Madonna, doing all... No. No, no, no, no. So she was locked into an intense... Part of what made her so compelling at the time... See, we missed the boat on this because we weren't... I mean, I was a little...

Nathan (18:36)

Did the Catholic Church proclaim her to be a Catholic?

born.

Cameron (18:50)

kid, right, or born. But there was an intense controversy between her and the Catholic Church because she represented a PR nightmare for them. know, Ms. Like A Virgin talking about how she's a Catholic and advocating loudly for the use of the distribution of condoms in the inner city. Also, a huge factor, one big sociological factor that he does deal with because it was so important in 1980s was the AIDS epidemic.

and how it disproportionately affected the gay community, particularly in New York City. And so many of these artists, Madonna included, were working in New York, had close friends who were dying and died of AIDS, and the Catholic churches. mean, you have to, this was something that just, you know, it's easy to look back, and hindsight is 20-20, but at the time, there was a mix of panic, fear, and people were just.

trying to wrap their heads around what was happening in the first place. And then, you know, of course, Catholic bishops are expected to have a stance on this and have a clear response. And some of them weren't so, you know, weren't so merciful in that response. But all of these artists, Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol had so many friends who died, of AIDS. So that was a, that was a big, that was a part of all that was going on here as well. I'll pause there.

Nathan (20:12)

Yeah, but so I'm still not convinced. know we're only halfway through this, so I'm make you keep working here. I'm not.

Cameron (20:18)

Well, what are you not convinced by?

Nathan (20:23)

So Leonard Cohen's song, yes, so Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah played everywhere ad nauseum. Prime example, where he himself, I think has said he doesn't ascribe a particular meaning. Like if you, have you ever listened to the words of that? You're like, what in the world is that? Like, okay.

Cameron (20:24)

Or what are you not convinced of? Yeah.

Right. It's prime example. Yep. Yep.

⁓ yeah. Well,

they're also very sexually charged. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nathan (20:46)

Yeah,

so so but he himself doesn't claim that he's making a point or know what it means just kind of a spontaneous ⁓

Cameron (20:56)

Well,

he's got another one called Song of Isaac from the perspective of Isaac, who's going to be sacrificed by his dad. He's made clear that that was really about the Vietnam War as well. so he's using heavy, yep.

Nathan (21:09)

Okay, so there's...

So, Paul's argument is that these people are actually true believers and they're... Okay, I think maybe that's a more pointed way of asking what I'm saying here.

Cameron (21:22)

No, Yeah. it's, it's a no.

That's a great, yeah. Thanks for asking it pointedly. No, is that no, his argument is that they are crypto religious precisely because you can't pin them down explicitly. You don't know. His argument is that they clearly, but that for them, religion is something very serious. So Leonard Cohen, if we take him as an example, spent years in

I mean, everywhere from Buddhist monasteries and went to and then made pilgrimages to Israel. mean, clearly lived as a kind of weary pilgrim seeking out new spiritual experiences. Yes, now he was also a total womanizer. He was also an absolute hedonist. So Paul Eli is himself, by the way, he doesn't he doesn't draw explicit attention to this, but Paul Eli is himself, by the way, a Catholic. So he he's not arguing.

that these people were Christians or that they, he's not even arguing that they necessarily believed every, he, in fact, I think Paul Eli might say some of them maybe believe, some of them maybe don't really know where they fall, but what they are doing is they have found in religion a very real resonance and it is, and they recognize that resonance as real and powerful and vital, but they don't land, they don't,

necessarily land on an explicit set of convictions. Yeah.

Nathan (22:50)

Let me give you, let me throw this story in here and

you see if this parallels a bit of the argument or maybe this clarifies the angle that I'm coming to it. Let's take the book of Ecclesiastes. People quote bits and pieces out of the book of Ecclesiastes and you know, there's some of them are proverbial in a sense, but I think when I was pretty young that my grandpa pointed out to me, he's like, the book of Ecclesiastes are not like a list of to-dos. It's the...

It's a record of the thoughts that are passing through a man's mind as he's trying to make sense of reality. And then, you you get to the conclusion at the end and he's like, and here's the summary of it all. But that doesn't mean that you go back through, like he's just thinking out loud and reflecting on his experience and saying, you know, so that doesn't mean that I go and try to do all the things that are in the book of Ecclesiastes. It's just an artistic or poetic rendering of an attempt at making sense of life.

And it feels more to me like that would be what I would see in these, the term that he's using, crypto religious, is that they're grappling with something that maybe they themselves have not fully comprehended the fullness of, but there's a resonance there with their experience and their art form that works even though they themselves aren't necessarily acutely aware of what that is. So for me, I kind of look at it as a...

⁓ Well, maybe jump ahead to the second part of what you were saying there is like, what's the value or what's the takeaway? Where does? Yeah.

Cameron (24:23)

I was going say, you want me to tell you why I like it?

Why I think it's cool? Yeah.

Nathan (1:01:12)

After we finished recording this, we realized that this conversation got way longer than we intended. And so for the sake of your sanity and our sanity, and for the sake of time, we're going to split this and release part two of this conversation as our next episode.