Art and the Kingdom

Art and the Kingdom

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The Road: Is Life Worth Living?

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Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic novel The Road offers three distinct responses to the question of whether or not life is worth living.

What do you think of existential questions like “what is the meaning of life”, and “why are we here”, and “is life worth living”? Does it matter to you what the answers are? Or are they nothing more to you than abstract intellectual questions, trapped (and thankfully so) in the isolated classrooms of higher ed? 

In Cormac McCarthy’s somber novel The Road, our characters are forced to confront these questions every time they wake up in the morning. In the aftermath of an apocalypse, the land is barren, ashen, and cold, and for our protagonists, a father and his son, each day is a desperate struggle to scrounge for food. On top of this, the land is crawling with cannibals who would not hesitate to murder and eat both the father and his son. So, what’s the point of continuing this miserable and unremitting struggle? 

In this novel, McCarthy seems to write his characters according to three distinct archetypes: the wanderer, the nihilist, and the existentialist. These archetypes represent different ways of responding to the problem of meaning. The wanderer lacks any type of definitive purpose for living. The nihilist accepts that life is hopeless and sees death as the only way out. The existentialist, on the other hand, refuses to give in to despair and instead rebels: although life may have no objective purpose, the existentialist invents a reason to live. We will see how these three responses fare in the unforgiving landscape of The Road. 

Slogging Along

We only get into the heads of a small number of characters in The Road, but it’s safe to say that most of the people left in this world are wanderers. They continue to try to survive, but they lack any type of goal or reason for persisting in life. 

The cannibalistic gangs are a great example of this. They seem to have completely abandoned any semblance of humanity and have become thoroughly animalistic. Indeed, one of these cannibal raiders is described as “reptilian”. They do not try to live good, meaningful lives, but simply do whatever they can to make it to the next day.

The father and the son meet an old man on the road who, while not a savage cannibal, is still a wanderer. The father’s conversation with the old man reveals the aimlessness of the old man’s life:

 (Disclaimer: McCarthy has a very unique writing style. It isn’t always easy to discern who is speaking in the dialogue. Just try your best to follow it.)

“How long have you been on the road?

I was always on the road. You cant stay in one place.

How do you live?

I just keep going. I knew this was coming.”1

The old man just keeps grimly marching along the road, not headed in any particular direction, never staying in one place for very long, and doing whatever he can to survive. 

When you go about life with no direction, and no overarching goal, then the decision to live, and all your decisions, really, become utterly arbitrary. You do not have a grand religious or metaphysical narrative to orient your life around, and you don’t have a clear subjective narrative to live by either. In this kind of life, you just sort of exist. You are a wanderer. 

The band Wye Oak in their song We Were Wealth summarizes the life of the wanderer pretty succinctly: 

Fill the days at any cost and
Spend your earnings, ease the losses2

For at least some people, I suspect, life is simply a matter of desperately stuffing their days full of distractions (food, sex, music, movies, vacations, drugs, etc…), refusing, either out of ignorance, apathy, or cowardice, to reflect on or confront the ultimate questions of life. But unfortunately for the denizens of the world in The Road, there are really no more distractions left. Life is stripped of all those empty pleasures that make life mediocre instead of abysmal. All that is left is the primal, animalistic instinct to survive no matter what one’s quality of life is. And so, as the old man says,

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”3

Well, except for the people who do want to leave. And so now we turn to the nihilist. 

A Morbid Romance

The nihilist declares that life is meaningless and that life is not worth living. This is the position of the father’s wife. The night of her death, the father tries in vain to talk his wife out of her fateful decision to commit suicide. But the wife has long made up her mind:

“I should have done it a long time ago. When there were three bullets in the gun instead of two. I was stupid. We’ve been over all of this. I didnt bring myself to this. I was brought. And now I’m done. I thought about not even telling you. That would probably have been best.”4

The father begs his wife to stay, but she refuses. Why is she doing this to her husband and little son? Well, the wife explains her cold logic very clearly: 

“Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen.”5

The wife chooses some very interesting language to describe her decision. She frames her suicide as a form of adultery, in which she leaves her husband for another man:

“I’ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.

Death is not a lover.

Oh yes he is.”6

So, in the face of constant starvation, and bitter cold, and the looming threat of falling into the hands of cannibal raiders, the wife’s image of death has become romantic or erotic. And so that night she leaves her family and makes good on her words. 

The French philosopher Albert Camus would understand the wife’s decision very well. Camus once declared, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy”.7

Later in the same essay, Camus writes, “Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.”8

Let’s say there is no God, and there is no grand cosmic metanarrative which promises a hopeful future that vindicates all our suffering. Moreover, our existence is an accident, and so there is truly no goal or purpose “out there” for us. If this is so, then why endure all the suffering? The nihilist says, there is no point in enduring. But the father is no nihilist. And even though he couldn’t save his wife, he refuses to die himself, and he makes his life solely about his son.

Carrying the Fire

You might be surprised to hear that The Road is actually one of McCarthy’s more optimistic novels. This is because the father does not resign himself to either the empty life of the wanderer or the self-destruction of the nihilist. He realizes there has to be some sort of reason for carrying on that’s deeper than the mere robotic drive to keep living. His wife recognizes this, as well. Before her death, she says,

“The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body.”9

The father chooses to live for his son. He tells his son: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.”10

He also tries to give his son some sort of hope to cling to. He tells his son that they are “carrying the fire”, a phrase which seems to represent their determination to live, be good people, and hope for a better future: 

“We’re going to be okay, arent we Papa?

Yes. We are.

And nothing bad is going to happen to us.

That’s right.

Because we’re carrying the fire.

Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire.”11

Pooja Singal argues, “Even in the most miserable circumstances which he can’t control, the man chooses existence, he chooses life for his son…The father chooses to have a project for both of them-to be the ‘keepers of the fire,’ and to be one of the ‘good guys’-in the face of dread.”12

Do you think this is a good enough reason to justify living? I always thought it was touching, but I think it fails. “Carrying the fire” is not anchored in anything substantive. The father’s “project” is his own subjective narrative that he chooses for himself and his son. But since this project is subjective, it is not true for everyone. It is just the existentialist answer to the meaning of life: you make it up for yourself. 

But is that really what we’re looking for when we ask if life has meaning, and if life is worth living? I think the (secular) existentialist approach to the problem of meaning is an abject failure. It is a mere restatement of the problem. The problem is that (given atheism) life seems to lack objective meaning, and so all we have is subjective meaning: our own imaginary stories, no different than a child’s game of make-believe.

Just think of the philosophical duel between the man and his wife. The man can tell his son to live in order to “carry the fire”, but this only works insofar as his son buys into this narrative. But what if someone rejects it? If the meaning of life is subjective, then what do you say to someone who prefers death? The wife presses her husband on this, and he has no answer for her:

“As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.

He didnt answer.

You have no argument because there is none.”13

And later, the father admits:

“She was right. There was no argument. The hundred nights they’d sat up debating the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall.”14

So the construction of a fictitious subjective narrative is really no better than the directionless life of the wanderer. There is no substance, if atheism is true, to the phrase “carrying the fire”. There is nothing to stop someone from taking death as a lover. And if the decision to live is just as arbitrary as the decision to die, then we are lost. All the pretty slogans in the world (think of, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”) will not save us.

Meaning is Found Elsewhere

As a Christian, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the biblical solution to our problem here. But first, here is a concise biblical restatement of our problem (try teaching this one at Sunday school):

“‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’
says the Teacher.
‘Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.'” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

In his commentary on this verse, the Old Testament scholar John Walton explains:

“Modern readers are inclined to read statements like this through the lens of existential pessimism, amounting to a statement meaning ‘life is not worth living.’ If the Teacher is prefiguring stoicism, however, his point is not so much on the ‘lack of meaning in everything that is’ and more on ‘meaning is found elsewhere.’ The stoic objective is not existential despair, but the devaluing of things to which most (nonphilosophers) assign value, so that the real value of really valuable things (virtue and philosophy for stoics, fear of the Lord for Ecclesiastes) can be properly demonstrated.”15

This is the task of the Christian existentialist: not to depress people, but to destroy their hope in the things of this world, so that people “may know [Christ] and the power of His resurrection” (Phillippians 3:10). For, “In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind” (John 1:4). We want to give people real hope, which, as William Lane Craig argues, can indeed be found in Christianity:

“According to the Christian worldview, God does exist, and man’s life does not end at the grave. In the resurrection body man may enjoy eternal life and fellowship with God. Biblical Christianity therefore provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life for man: God and immortality.”16

We do not have to be wanderers slogging along the road with no end in sight, or nihilists aching to kill ourselves at the first opportunity we get, or existentialists with flimsy slogans. We have Christ, and that is why we live: to glorify and love Him, and to be loved by Him in return. As McCarthy puts it: “If he is not the word of God, God never spoke.”17

  1. Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 168. ↩︎
  2. Wye Oak, “We Were Wealth,” recorded March 2011, track 9 on Civilian, Merge Records, audio. ↩︎
  3. McCarthy, The Road, 169. ↩︎
  4. Ibid, 56. ↩︎
  5. Ibid, 56. ↩︎
  6. Ibid, 57. ↩︎
  7. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 10. ↩︎
  8. Ibid, 11-12. ↩︎
  9. McCarthy, The Road, 57. ↩︎
  10. Ibid, 77. This quote seems to imply that the man’s motivations are theistic in nature, rather than “secular existentialist”. But as Pooja Singal argues, “The man believes that if there is a God, and
    if there is meaning, it is found in his son, and nowhere else” (Pooja Singal, “Existentialism in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road“, International Journal of Research 6, no. 4 (2019): 191). So the man’s existentialist narratives seem more fundamental than his theism; it seems that the man dictates what God’s will is. ↩︎
  11. Ibid, 83. ↩︎
  12. Singal, “Existentialism in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road“, 191. ↩︎
  13. Ibid, 57. ↩︎
  14. Ibid, 58. ↩︎
  15. John Walton, NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, 1074. Emphasis mine. ↩︎
  16. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, 86. ↩︎
  17. McCarthy, The Road, 5. ↩︎
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Movies

Interstellar: A Test of Faith

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The movie Interstellar grapples with faith and the grueling endurance it requires when it is put to the test by time and doubt.

As we witness the blood soaked horrors of the 21st century in real time, faith can be a difficult thing to hold on to. Why think that relief is coming, when history has made it abundantly clear that it never has? This problem is a bit unique for Christians, for our Holy Scriptures promise us that Christ will return one day, and that we will all rise from the dead to a glorious new existence, and that sickness and pain and death will be finally done away with. But it has been over 2000 years since that promise was made. 

The struggle to persist in faith is a key theme in Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece film Interstellar. In this movie, Joseph Cooper, a former NASA pilot, accepts a mission to find inhabitable planets in another galaxy for the people of earth to populate, as Earth will soon be uninhabitable. Neither Cooper nor his kids (his daughter, Murph, and son, Tom) have any idea when (or if) he’s coming back, and so Murph, Tom and the rest of Earth’s population must wait in uncertainty for his return. 

Long Delays and Lost Faith

The first planet that Cooper’s crew explores is called Miller’s planet, where 1 hour of time equals 7 years on earth due to time dilation. Things almost immediately go awry here, and the crew is forced to wait on Miller’s planet until the ship is ready to fly again. While for them, they only waited a few hours, the delay cost them 23 years of Earth’s time.

Cooper, knowing he just missed a large chunk of his kids’ lives, plays back all the messages he has received from them in that 23 year time span. He watches his son, Tom, grow from a 15 year old boy to a married man to a father. Eventually, it becomes clear that Tom son has stopped believing that he will return. Tom says:

“You aren’t listening to this, I know that. All these messages are just drifting out there in the darkness. Lois says that I have to let you go, and so I guess I’m letting you go. I don’t know wherever you are dad, but I hope that you’re at peace, and goodbye.”

That kind of message is jarring for us as a viewer, since we have been following Cooper’s mission from his perspective, and for him it’s only been around 3 hours on Miller’s planet. To see Tom lose faith in his father’s return in what seems like such a short time for us is devastating.

But think about it. Tom has been waiting on Earth for 23 years. That wait is a longer time span than all the 15 years he spent with his father. Our lives are measured in years, but they are lived in hours, minutes, and seconds, and each discrete bit of time presents us with the same demand to persevere in faith. Each morning, we wake up, and of course, there is no good news waiting for us. We start to question. Maybe we were fools to believe for so long. 

Us Christians can relate to this struggle. In Revelation 22:7-21, Jesus declares, “And behold, I am coming soon”. Soon? It is now 2026. Generations and generations of Christians have come and gone since then, each believing themselves to be the last, each believing that they will see the second coming of Christ in their lifetimes.

And the problem isn’t just eschatological. In John 16:23, Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name”. And so, we ask God for healing, or financial relief, or sanctification. And then we wait…and wait…and wait. Is God listening? Or are all our prayers just drifting out there in the darkness? 

Abandoned

While Tom has lost faith, it seems that Murph still has some semblance of hope that her father will come back. In a message she sends to her father, she says,

“I never made one of these when you were still responding cause I was so mad at you for leaving. And then when you went quiet, it seemed like I should live with that decision, and I have. But today’s my birthday. And it’s a special one, because you told me…you once told me that when you came back we might be the same age. And today I’m the age you were when you left. So it’d be a real good time for you to come back.”

Ironically, though Tom has been sending all the messages until now, while Murph was silent, it is Tom who gives up on the prospect of his father returning. But Murph still hasn’t let her father go. Will her faith be rewarded? Sadly, not yet. Her faith crisis is about to get much, much worse.

Professor Brand, the genius behind the whole operation to save the people of earth and find a habitable planet, reveals a terrible secret to Murph on his deathbed. For years, Dr. Brand has told the staff at NASA that “plan A”, or the plan to rescue everyone on Earth and transport them to a habitable planet, is feasible. “Plan B”, or the plan to use frozen embryos to populate a habitable planet (while everyone on Earth perished) was supposed to be the last ditch backup. But it turns out that Professor Brand had given up on plan A for a long time. He tells Murph: 

“You had faith. All those…all those years, I asked you to have faith. I wanted you to believe that your father would come back.”

But in the Professor’s eyes, that faith was misplaced from the start. He confesses,

 “I lied, Murph. I lied to you. There was no need for him to come back. There’s no way to help us.”

As another scientist, Dr. Mann, later explains, Professor Brand lacked the means to obtain the data needed to solve the gravity equation. NASA needed the solution to this equation in order to create a spaceship which could transport all the people off of Earth. So Professor Brand abandoned plan A and settled for plan B, which is what Cooper’s mission was actually supposed to accomplish.

After the Professor dies, a heartbroken Murph sends another message to Cooper’s spacecraft, addressing both Amelia Brand (the daughter of the Professor and a member of Cooper’s mission) and Cooper. She says,

“Brand, did you know? He told you, right? You knew. This was all a sham. You left us here. To suffocate. To starve. Did my father know, too? Dad, I just want to know…if you left me here to die. I just have to know.”

Of course, Cooper cannot respond to her, as his messages don’t get back to Earth. So instead, he has to watch helplessly as his daughter begins to believe that her father abandoned her to save his own skin. 

It’s difficult enough to persevere in faith when we must endure through long stretches of time without knowing when or if relief is coming. It’s even more difficult when we are presented with a reason to believe that our faith has been false all along. For Murph, it was discovering Professor Brand’s lie, and for Christians, it can be any number of intellectual objections and/or emotional doubts. 

So maybe during these moments we start to seriously question our faith. Not only are we slogging through each day holding on to unfulfilled hope, but now we may be angry with God, and now we may be facing intellectual pressure to give up our beliefs. The allure of apostasy hangs over our heads. 

While arguing with her brother, Murph reveals that she too has lost faith in her father’s return after the Professor’s fateful confession. 

Tom says, “You’re gonna save everybody? Cause dad couldn’t do it.” And Murph responds, “Dad didn’t even try! Dad just abandoned us! He left us here to die.”

A Strange Sort of Providence

Are you familiar with the doctrine of divine providence? According to William Lane Craig, “Divine providence concerns God’s governance or supervision of the world-all that happens”.1 A good biblical example of this doctrine is Romans 8:28, in which Paul says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” So we can say that God providentially orders the events of history so that ultimately everything contributes to the flourishing of God’s children. 

There is a kind of providence at work in Interstellar. During Murph’s childhood, all sorts of seemingly paranormal events happen in her bedroom. Books fall from her bookshelf at random without her having touched them, and one time they even spell out a message in Morse code, which reads: STAY. Murph thinks it is a ghost. Later, during a dust storm, the dust on the floor of Murph’s rooms spell out a message in binary. Once again, Murph believes that this is the work of her ghost, but Cooper believes that it is due to a gravitational anomaly. The dust message turns out to be coordinates to a top secret NASA facility, which Cooper and Murph travel to, and where Cooper is recruited for his mission.

Much later in the movie, Cooper falls into a black hole, and finds himself in a tesseract structure which contains infinite copies of Murph’s bedroom from different moments in time. Cooper finds that he can manipulate gravity in Murph’s bedroom across time, enabling him to do things like push the books off of Murph’s bookshelf. At first, in grief from missing all those years of Murph’s life, he tries to get his past self to stay with Murph instead of leaving her to go on his mission. He pushes the books off of Murph’s bookshelf to communicate the message: STAY. Cooper turns out to be Murph’s ghost all along. 

But Cooper can’t change the past. So he decides to use his power to try to save the future. He manipulates the dust in Murph’s room to communicate the coordinates to the NASA facility to his past self. And then, using Morse code, he transmits the data which was required to solve the gravity equation into Murph’s watch (which he gave her before he went on his mission, and which she left in her childhood bedroom). As an adult, Murph goes back to her room and recovers the watch, discovers the data, and uses it to complete the gravity equation, thus enabling humanity to construct the spacecraft needed to leave Earth. 

When I first watched this scene, I couldn’t help but think of the doctrine of divine providence. In the tesseract, Cooper affects past phenomena in Murph’s bedroom, phenomena which are witnessed by his past self and past Murph. Witnessing the phenomena gets them to act, thus setting the events of the story in motion. Divine providence is kind of like this. God puts us in situations to get us to act, and then uses our actions to accomplish His purposes. 

Moreover, God also allows evil to happen for good reasons. In the tesseract, Cooper was powerless to prevent his past self from leaving his daughter behind to go on his mission, but ultimately Cooper needed to go on his mission in order to save humanity. In a similar way, by allowing certain actions and events to happen, including sinful actions and horrible events, God can achieve great goods. So, after reuniting with his brothers who once threw him down a well, Joseph says confidently, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). 

So how does this relate to faith and doubt? Well, going back to Murph, she experiences a revival in her faith after finding the watch. In her childhood bedroom, she realizes that her dad was her ghost, and that her dad encoded the data into her watch for her to find. She then rushes out of the house, and exclaims to her brother, 

“He came back! It was him, all this time, I didn’t know it was him. Dad’s gonna save us.”

It’s a beautiful moment, because Murph realizes that her father never abandoned her. Rather, all this time he was working to save her and the whole human race, and now he has given her the information needed to do exactly that.

So while we wait for the Lord, we must remember that God is working everything for good. He has not abandoned us. Rather, He is enacting His perfect plan to bring salvation and eternal joy to all who trust in Him. When He finally comes back, it will be the right time, the proper culmination of our divinely ordained story. And once we remember that, it becomes a little easier to wait, “knowing that in the Lord [our] labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). And instead of a watch as evidence of God’s providence, we have the Bible, God’s love letter to us, as well as the whole cosmos which testifies to us the glory, majesty and lovingkindness of the Lord.

  1. Craig, William Lane. “Doctrine of Creation (Part 10): Divine Providence.” Reasonable Faith, November 6, 2024. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-4/doctrine-of-creation/doctrine-of-creation-part-10-divine-providence. ↩︎
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Music

Wye Oak, Religious Belief, and Fear

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The indie rock band Wye Oak wrestles with fear as a motivation for religious belief and unbelief in their song Dog’s Eyes.

Do you believe in God, or not? Take a moment to reflect. Now be honest with yourself: do you believe (or not) due to purely rational considerations? Do you hold onto this belief, not because it is driven by your desires, emotions and preferences, but because you think it is truly the best explanation of the world? Maybe, you want to insist that yes, you are a believer or nonbeliever solely due to a cold, detached, probabilistic assessment of the dizzying amount of arguments for and against God. But chances are, the answer to this question is no. You are a human being, after all. Your feelings are at least as much of a factor as the facts. 

The indie rock band Wye Oak is probably my favorite band out there. Their music is gorgeous and their lyrics are poetic and compelling. But they are a secular band with some atheistic messages in their music that, as a Christian and a fan of theirs, I always wanted to address. I’ve found that Wye Oak’s messages are usually subtle and ambiguous, but there is at least one song which expresses one of the most articulate attacks on religious belief I’ve ever heard in music (but maybe I just haven’t listened to enough music). 

What’s the attack, you may ask? Well, it’s about fear. Wye Oak suggests that (Christian) theists are subconsciously driven by existential terror to believe what they believe. In some cases, at least, they might have a point. Like I said, religious belief is difficult to disentangle from personal feelings, and fear is certainly no exception. But that sword cuts both ways. 

Dog’s Eyes

Perhaps Wye Oak’s most well known album is the 2011 album Civilian. One of the songs in this album is called Dog’s Eyes. It’s an excellent song, in my opinion. It’s also pretty anti-religion. This song opens with some pretty blunt lyrics:

Can’t see yourself in evolution
The history of our creation
So dogs eyes
Smiling
Scare you about dying1

Of course, Christian apologetics has come a long way since the 1925 Scopes Trial. Plenty of theists, and even Christians, believe that the Neo-Darwinian evolutionary paradigm and traditional theism (as well as biblical Christianity) are compatible. But this issue is irrelevant for our discussion, because I think that Wye Oak’s point has broader application than just the creation-evolution debate. In an interview, Jenn Wasner, the lead singer of Wye Oak, addresses the song and explains, 

“I think some people have a really hard time being like, ‘I’m not an animal, you know, I’m something else. We’re not monkeys.’ You know, that thing of just like, ‘Oh, you’re just afraid. You’re just afraid to die, like you’re afraid that you will waste away…You will waste away into eternity, like every other living creature on this planet.”2 

So this is the point: theists believe that human beings are specially created by God (whether by evolution or a more direct method of creation) and that there is an afterlife. But they believe this because they are afraid of the alternative. The alternative says that there is no God, that human beings are nothing more than clumps of matter produced by blind evolutionary processes, just like dogs, and that when they die, there is no afterlife, only eternal nothingness. Our theistic rejection of atheism is not rational, but is rather more like a coping mechanism. 

Wye Oak are certainly not the first to have made this point. Sigmund Freud also thought that theistic belief was a kind of psychological coping mechanism or “wish-fulfillment”. He writes, “the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection-for protection through love which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life…”.3

It’s really not a very novel argument. We’ve heard it all before. Religion is a crutch, a way to cope, something you run to when you’re being shot at in a foxhole or something like that. Perhaps, as some atheists have suggested, religious belief is something programmed into us by evolution because it’s biologically advantageous. There are a few theistic responses we can offer to this kind of objection.

First of all, to argue that a belief is false by pointing to its origin, or how someone came to acquire said belief, is not a sound argument. It commits the genetic fallacy; even if the way you came to acquire a belief is strange or illegitimate, it does not follow that your belief itself is false. Maybe someone has a phobia of flat Earth theory (call it “flat-phobia”), and that is the only reason he believes in a round Earth; let’s say that “flat-phobia” is the only reason anyone believes in a round Earth. It doesn’t follow from this that it is false that the Earth is round. So maybe religious or theistic belief is a product of irrational or arational motivations, like fear, or maybe evolutionary processes are responsible. It still does not follow that theism or religious belief is false.

But could religious belief be irrational, or at least not rationally justified? Obviously “flat-phobia” is not a good reason to believe in a round Earth, so could religious belief be irrational in the same way? The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has argued that the answer to this question is: it depends. It ultimately depends on which worldview is true. Plantinga argues,

“What you properly take to be rational or warranted depends upon what sort of metaphysical and religious stance you adopt…the dispute as to whether theistic belief is rational (warranted) can’t be settled just by attending to epistemological considerations; it is at bottom not merely an epistemological dispute, but a metaphysical or theological dispute”.4

If atheism is true, then religious belief is (probably) irrational, for likely the same reasons that Wye Oak, Freud, and evolutionary biologists offer. On the other hand, if theism is true, then God has likely provided us with the cognitive faculties to accurately “detect” Him, so religious belief is (probably) rational.5 In short, Plantinga concludes that this whole Freudian type objection fails. You cannot dismiss religious belief as irrational without first determining whether or not religious belief is true.

So I think the most interesting part about Wye Oak’s treatment of religion is not their direct attack of it, but rather the way that they wrestle with the testimony of God and the culpability of unbelief. Because maybe it is here that we can discover that fear and other irrational or arational motivations for belief are not uniquely religious phenomena. There is no “free lunch” for atheism.

God’s Eye

Through Dog’s Eyes, we’ve seen religious belief from a secular lens. But what about secular belief from a Christian perspective? Could it be that atheists are not solely motivated by “rational” considerations with respect to their beliefs? Maybe. Maybe the problem with unbelief is not ignorance, but the same type of emotional resistance that atheists accuse Christians of having. 

The next two stanzas of Dog’s Eyes explores Wye Oak’s struggle with religious belief. It turns out that they can’t fully escape the lingering idea that God really is with us. Here is what Wasner sings:

I can’t shake the superstition
Jesus give me your permission
And God’s eye
Looks in
Like a ghost you don’t believe in6

And in the next stanza, Wasner sings:

Someone let me live this way
And I cannot get rid of it7

What exactly is Wye Oak admitting here? Why are they so haunted by religion, if they think it’s just a fear-based illusion? In the aforementioned interview, Wasner says,

“There was definitely some religion in my upbringing. I wasn’t in the most strictly religious family, but it was there. And also, it’s just sort of, it’s ambient, it’s in the air, like we pick it up, you know, it’s around.”8

I’ve found these particular lyrics as well as Wasner’s statement to be very interesting. In Christian theology and apologetics, much is made of God’s “general revelation”. This is the idea that God has made Himself known to all people as the moral lawgiver through their conscience and as the creator of the universe through the evident signs of design in creation. This theological concept is based off of Paul’s reflections in Romans 1:

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:18-20). 

So from a Christian perspective, the reason that unbelievers “can’t shake the superstition”, and feel like “God’s eye looks in”, and even perversely feel the need to ask Jesus for permission to disbelieve in Him, is because they know that God exists, as God has made it plain to them. As Wasner puts it: it’s in the air. 

Cosmic Wish-fulfillment

So how does fear come into the picture for the atheist? Here is what Scripture says:

“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed” (John 3:19-20). 

Might this be why unbelievers wrestle with “God’s eye” looking in? Wasner says,

“I think the more poisonous aspects of religion, of organized religion, are sort of the cause of much of human suffering, and pain and violence. And not even if you want to, you know, just talk about on a personal scale, rather than a global scale, shame, shame, it’s just a source of so much shame. And that feeling of ‘I am bad, I am wrong.'”9

I don’t think Wasner is alone here. I think a lot of people distrust the church due to its “fire and brimstone” messages. Whenever the church becomes legalistic in its teaching and treatment of people and it focuses solely on shaming people and saying falsehoods like “God hates gays” and telling people that they are going to hell (period, no gospel afterwards), then the church has become a stumbling block and a failed witness. This sort of religious trauma is something that Jesus can speak to and heal.

However, I suspect that the “shame” which Wasner, and many non-Christians, speak of, is not just directed at illegimate Christian teaching and practices. Rather, I think lots of people just don’t like the idea that they are a sinner. Everyone wants to think of themselves as a good person. But this is not what the Bible teaches. Paul says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). And so all people are deserving of God’s wrath. In light of this, of course people are afraid. They know they are guilty, and, like the murderer on death row, know they deserve punishment. Of course people want to deny that God exists or that Christianity is true.

The atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel admits,

“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well- informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.”10

So, ironically, it seems that the fear narrative can be turned on its head. If Christianity is true, it is atheists who are motivated, not purely by rational considerations, but by fear, to reject God. It is God’s eye that scares them about dying (only this time, the death in question is spiritual death). Plantinga writes,

“Indeed, unbelief can also be seen as resulting from wish-fulfillment-a result of the desire to live in a world without God, a world in which there is no one to whom I owe worship and obedience.”11

The Antitode to Fear

Alright, but so what? So what if, given Christianity, atheists are the irrational ones? Given atheism, Christians are the irrational ones, so it seems we’re even. Like Plantinga said, we are in a sort of epistemic deadlock. So who cares? Maybe we should just leave each other alone.

But how can we? Someone has to be right. And depending on who’s right, someone may have good reason to fear. So who is right? I will not try to answer this question here, but (no surprise) I think the evidence points towards Christian theism as being true. And so, to the atheist I will say, take Nagel’s discomfort seriously. This is no stalemate.

But that is not how I want to end this article, especially because it is about Wye Oak’s music. It was a bit painful for me to write this, because I love and admire the band so much, and especially Jenn Wasner and all her other music. So there is no personal hostility towards the band; in fact, I was partly inspired to write this out of love for them. And out of love for all non-Christians and atheists, I want to end by saying that the Christian message is not primarily about hell. It is primarily about hope. In the Wye Oak song It Was Not Natural, Wasner sings,

It was not natural, all along
Only human hate could give us something so unforgiving12

But when it comes to Christ, nothing could be further from the truth. Though Paul says that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”, in the very next verse he says, “and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). Christ has died for everyone, theist and atheist, believer and nonbeliever, and everyone can accept God’s forgiveness and free offer of salvation through Christ. For “as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12). Don’t ask Jesus for His permission to deny Him. Ask Him for freedom from sin and shame.

  1. Wye Oak, “Dogs Eyes,” recorded March 2011, track 4 on Civilian, Merge Records, audio. ↩︎
  2. “The Making of Civilian by Wye Oak,” Life of the Record, accessed March 2026, https://lifeoftherecord.com/wye-oak-notes. ↩︎
  3. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 30. ↩︎
  4. Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 40. ↩︎
  5. I think this would be true even if other arational or irrational factors, such as fear, motivated religious belief. As long as our God-given cognitive faculties were functioning well, and would in fact “detect” God, then our theistic belief would be rational, our emotional motivations notwithstanding. In fact, it might be that, given theism, a proper fear of mortality and the prospect of divine judgment is a rational motivation for religious belief. ↩︎
  6. Wye Oak, “Dogs Eyes,” audio. ↩︎
  7. Ibid. ↩︎
  8. “The Making of Civilian by Wye Oak,” Life of the Record, https://lifeoftherecord.com/wye-oak-notes. ↩︎
  9. Ibid. ↩︎
  10. Thomas Nagel, The Last Word, 130-131. Emphasis mine. ↩︎
  11. Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 43-44. ↩︎
  12. Wye Oak, “It Was Not Natural,” recorded April 2018, track 5 on The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs, Merge Records, audio. ↩︎

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Movies

Project Hail Mary

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Project Hail Mary inspires questions about the cinematography of space, the existence of aliens, and the importance of sacrifice.

Project Hail Mary, a movie already receiving Oscar buzz for best actor, best picture, best visual effects, and many more, dropped into theaters this past Friday achieving a weekend box office of $140 million globally and $80 million domestically.1 The movie tells the story of Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a reluctant but brilliant and underappreciated science teacher, who is recruited by NASA to fix the catastrophe of the sun dying due to a bacteria called Astrophage that is eating our sun. It turns out that Astrophage is not only eating the Milky Way’s star, but other stars as well. So, in desperate need to save earth, Grace is sent to another galaxy’s star – Tau Ceti – where he meets an unlikely friend named Rocky.

The movie is an achievement in all areas, deserves Oscar nominations, and is worth the money to go see in theaters! The movie also makes me want to dive into Andy Weir’s novel which the movie is based off of, and has inspired three main thoughts regarding the cinematography of space, the existence of aliens, and lastly, the thematic importance of sacrifice throughout the film.

The Heavens Declare the Glory of God

The film begins with a phenomenal portrait of space, or of what one should call “the heavens.” The visuals, screenwriting, and cinematography do not hate space! While many space movies portray space as a dark nothingness that wants to kill us, this movie is more optimistic and portrays visuals that are hauntingly reverent. Today, our culture thinks of space much like the writers of the Ancient Near East thought of water as primeval dark chaos, something deadly and itself lifeless, and something that destroys our order.2 While some may still fear water, our culture at large does not fear it. However, we do fear space.

Grace, when he wakes up on the ship, also fears it; although, this may be due to him being alone without his past memories, not necessarily because he fears space, as later on in the movie, he is comfortable and maneuvers space as if it is his home or a regular street on earth. The cinematography captures the life-giving nature of space when it pans forward to reveal a heavenly painting of galaxies and stars set before Grace’s eyes:

Space should not be thought of as a deadly dark void; rather, it should be viewed as something that has a voice, a life-giving voice that makes us aware of the beautiful artist that painted it! We ought to return to gazing at the stars and feeling the immense grandeur of the heavens that our home floats in. Oddly enough, this was the intention of the directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller:

“One thing about this story that’s unique is that a lot of films are about someone who feels at home on Earth, wakes up in space, and they feel lonely. This is a movie about someone who feels lonely on Earth. They go to space and find a friend. We wanted space to be, in a funny way, inviting. The old vacuum of space is actually warm and inviting. You’re closer to heaven. The way the film is textured visually, we wanted it to feel more homey.”3

The directing, acting, and dazzling cinematography achieve this invitation to ponder space not as lonely but as a warm home that “brings us closer to heaven.” I argue that it doesn’t just bring us closer to heaven, it is the heavens! C.S. Lewis, in Out of the Silent Planet, uses the character Ransom to explore the misnaming of space. Ransom, just like Grace, wakes up in a spaceship and experiences the vastness of the heavens. Lewis writes:

“He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more! No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens – the heavens which declared the glory.”4

Lewis is right. When I look at photos from NASA’s Hubble Telescope, or go stargazing, or when I watch interstellar movies, I do not think of space as “space.” Simple “space” does not cause reverence within me nor does it cause me to feel the presence of God. Grace in the movie asks Eva Stratt, the leader of Project Hail Mary, if she believes in God. She replies, “it beats the alternative.” While that sentiment is most definitely true, a more confident reply could be given. The heavens scream from the top of their lungs that God exists! The only question is if our ears are attuned enough, and not blocked, so that we can hear the voice of the heavens.

While I do feel the presence of God while gazing at the stars, I also do wonder if there is more than just us human beings.

Are There and Should There be Aliens?

Our culture is fascinated with the idea of extraterrestrial life, especially extraterrestrial intelligent life (ETI). From NASA and SpaceX to countless movies and novels to academic and unhinged podcasts, we all ponder if we are alone in this universe. Around 65% of American adults think life exists outside of our planet.5 Historically, when we thought of Aliens, we always connected malicious intent and danger with them; however, Project Hail Mary reverses that! The trailers make it known that Grace forms a deep friendship with Rocky and while Project Hail Mary is not the only story to portray Aliens as loving and safe, it is one of the only ones that has stirred this question in my mind: if there does exist ETI, are they sinful? This question does presuppose some metaphysical conditions of our world, namely the fall and that our human nature is inclined to sin. It also engages the wider discussion of whether or not theism, and the Christian story in particular, is compatible with ETI. Interestingly, those who are religious are less likely to believe in ETI.6 However, religious folk need not worry that ETI is incompatible with their faith.

Historically, Christians have not seen other life forms as contrary to the faith. During the medieval church, there existed the medieval dictum “bonum est diffusivum sui” (roughly “goodness is self-diffusive”), which argued that God’s goodness implies that He created an infinite number of worlds with an infinite number of creatures so that His goodness could be shared. Even today, massively influential figures like Billy Graham and Pope Francis believe in the possible existence of aliens.7 Once one allows for the existence ETI, fun theological questions arise: to what extent did the fall of both Satan and the fall of humanity affect the universe; if there are fallen alien creatures, does Christ save them in the same manner He saves us; if so, could Christ take on multiple incarnations (interestingly, giants of the faith like Augustine, Aquinas, and Bonaventure thought yes);8 what kind of natures would these creatures have; could what we mistake as aliens be us interacting with the spiritual realm; would they have their own scripture?; and what other creations, like what unimagined, humanly impossible colors, exist?

Answering these questions would take essay upon essay so I leave them for you to ponder; however, the answer to the question that arose in my mind while watching Project Hail Mary is no; I currently see no reason why ETI would have to necessarily be sinful.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

Before watching Project Hail Mary I never thought that I would care so much about a faceless rock creature but, as a good movie does, I slowly began to find this character extremely endearing. Rocky does not give off a scent of sin. He first seeks out Grace even though he does not know if Grace is a threat or not, Rocky is deeply saddened by the death of his fellow crew that were on his ship, lives on what seems to be a peaceful, sin-free planet, and he ends up displaying an incredible act of love for Grace. There already does exist unfallen creatures in this fallen world (e.g. Archangels Michael and Gabriel). C.S. Lewis explored in Out of the Silent Planet the existence of unfallen creatures and I see no theological, historical, practical, or philosophical reasons why such creatures could not exist. And if such creatures do exist, then they could display great acts of love such as self-sacrifice.

Sacrifice

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

The movie is centered around friendship and this friendship builds into a deeply moving climax. Due to a fuel leak that leads to Astrophage causing the ship to spiral into chaos, Grace is knocked out by the chaos and is left for dead while Rocky is still conscience. However, Rocky cannot escape his bubble without risking death due his physical nature being entirely made up of metal with oxides. If he leaves his bubble, he will essentially catch fire due to the oxygen. Rocky, fully knowing this, risks his life to save Grace.

Later on, after recovering and heading their separate ways, Grace finds out that the Taumoeba (the predator of the Astrophage) is able to escape Rocky’s ship which would leave Rocky and his planet doomed. Grace, who was forced into this mission and did not want to sacrifice himself for his own human race, chooses to sacrifice himself and go back to save Rocky and his people. This pulls at one’s heart, completes a great character arc for Grace, and demonstrates the altruistic narratable desire that all humans have… to be told a story about sacrifice! However, there is one glaring element that is missed in the story.

The Sacrifice of both Rocky and Grace are not of the highest sacrificial order. Grace has amnesia for the whole movie, but near the end we, alongside Grace, learn that he was cowardly and selfish as he could not muster any courage to sacrifice himself for the betterment of his planet. In a flashback scene, Grace speaks with one of the astronauts that is going on the mission and tells him that that he admires the gene that makes him brave. The astronaut responds, “It’s not a gene, you just have to have someone to be brave for.” The bravery and love that Rocky and Grace have is the love of friends, something admirable and beautiful, but there is a deeper love. The Apostle Paul writes:

Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! (Romans 5:7-10).

We love because He first loved us, and His love is unconditional, a love that is foolish to our human intuition because it dies for it’s enemies. Neither Rocky nor Grace die for their enemies, Grace could not even die for his acquaintances. The love of God is unique and radical. It is something we all desire, to be loved even though we ourselves are often unlovely. This is the Gospel – that we are reconciled to God through Himself and for Himself so that we can learn to be like Him and share such unconditional love with the world. We all have a human itch for this love and while Project Hail Mary does not portray love for enemies, it does satisfy this itch of sacrificial love and is why the movie is phenomenal as all great movies reveal and copy the meta-truths and meta-narrative that we live in.

  1. Rubin, Rebecca. “Box Office: Ryan Gosling’s ‘project Hail Mary’ Scores Biggest Debut of Year with $80.5 Million, Sets Amazon MGM Record.” Variety, March 22, 2026. https://variety.com/2026/film/box-office/project-hail-mary-box-office-biggest-debut-2026-amazon-mgm-record-1236696247/. ↩︎
  2. Thanks to my friend Michael Hamilton for this connection to Ancient Near Eastern Literature. ↩︎
  3. Thomas, Lou. “Phil Lord and Chris Miller on Project Hail Mary: ‘We Wanted the Movie to Feel like You Were in the Guts of a Machine.’” BFI, March 13, 2026. https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/phil-lord-chris-miller-project-hail-mary. ↩︎
  4. C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Scribner, 2003), 34. ↩︎
  5. Kennedy, Courtney, and Arnold Lau. “Most Americans Believe Life on Other Planets Exists.” Pew Research Center, June 30, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/06/30/most-americans-believe-in-intelligent-life-beyond-earth-few-see-ufos-as-a-major-national-security-threat/. ↩︎
  6. Alper, Becka A., and Joshua Alvarado. “Religious Americans Less Likely to Believe Intelligent Life Exists beyond Earth.” Pew Research Center, July 28, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/28/religious-americans-less-likely-to-believe-intelligent-life-exists-on-other-planets/. ↩︎
  7. C. A. McIntosh and Tyler Dalton McNabb, “Houston, Do We Have a Problem? Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life and Christian Belief,” Philosophia Christi 23(1), 2021, 113-114. ↩︎
  8. Ibid., 109. ↩︎
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Music

Noah Kahan and Religion Part 2

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9 min read

Noah Kohan’s music explores themes of religious trauma, spiritual divide, and the impact of religion on friendship.

The Great Divide

Now with the two songs in our rearview, we shall now see the possible connections. First, Kahan mentions self harm and a car crash. He sings:

We got cigarette burns in the same side of our hands, we ain’t friends
We’re just morons, who broke skin in the same spot
But I’ve never seen you take a turn that wide
And I’m high enough to still care if I die1

Secondly, Kahan also mentions that the one friend, maybe the one who stayed in the hometown and who battled with suicidal alienation, failed to understand his friends life:

You know I think about you all the time
And my deep misunderstanding of your life
And how bad it must have been for you back then
And how hard it was to keep it all inside2

Thirdly, the friend, who found absolution in religion, may have done so only through imperfect contrition due to the moral injury he received in the car accident. He may also have grown up experiencing religious trauma. Kahan sings,

I hope you settlе down, I hope you marry rich
I hope you’re scarеd of only ordinary s***
Like murderers and ghosts and cancer on your skin
And not your soul and what He might do with it3

The interpretation can vary, as I myself wonder if this worry for his own soul comes from a deep moral injury or from religious trauma or both. Fourthly, we get some clues about how the friend feels towards religion. Echoing the hurt found in “Orange Juice,” Kahan sings,

I hope you threw a brick right into that stained glass
I hope you’re with someone who isn’t scared to ask
I hope that you’re not losing sleep about what’s next
Or about your soul and what He might do with it4

Once again, the interpretation is unclear. The stained glass could refer to a church or it could refer to mentally seeing through a stained glass due to one’s mental health, and the friend wishing for the stained glass to be destroyed so that the friend can see clearly.5 I think the correct interpretation, due to the religious connections in the song itself and in “Call Your Mom” and “Orange Juice”, is that the stained glass is of a church. If this is so, then it seems that the friend who stayed in the hometown desires for his friend to abandon his religion. And it seems that the primary reason for the severance of the friendship isn’t the traumatic event itself but a great spiritual divide.

The Great Spiritual Divide

One’s faith often separates; in fact, sociology and psychological studies demonstrate that boundaries and separation is almost necessary for community and identity to exist.6 Paul understood this when he wrote to the Corinthians. He writes, “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people — not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people” (1 Cor. 5:9-11).

Paul speaks of not associating with people inside the church that do not follow Jesus’ commands. However, Paul does recognize that Christians must associate with all people – believer or not. Today we have a dichotomy between private faith and the rest of our lives. This dichotomy is a later approach to religious life and did not exist in the first century. Religious life was one’s life, it carried over into all aspects of one’s life. One’s religious life has a deeper impact on relationship then trauma or shared history does and this is exactly what Noah Kahan’s song portrays. The telos of a person’s religious life demands that he walks on a different road. This goes for all people, not just Christians. What we bow down to, what we give priority to, directs our path no matter who we are!

Because of this, a great divide does exist and is bound to show up in friendships that have different values. As C.S. Lewis remarked, “That is why those pathetic people who simply ‘want friends’ can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be ‘I see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,’ no friendship can arise- though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers.”7

With this said, this should not stop one from saying hi and loving his friends, no matter their friends life choices, when roads cross. When roads cross, one can simply say “we’re just glad you could visit” or “I hope you settle down and marry rich.” But, as Noah Kahan’s friend points out, some times one can’t say hi because of the possibility of stumbling off the road. For the friend, alcohol is too much of a temptation and the friend ought to understand this and have sympathy. Paul recognizes this when he talks about eating meat sacrificed to idols (1 Cor. 8). For such moments, both the unbeliever and believer should use reason in love to go about their relationship.

Now, Noah Kahan also brings up Hell and the fear of it that his friend has; however, as they exist across a divide, they may misunderstand one another.

Religious Trauma and Misunderstandings

Throughout the three songs, we only hear from the perspective of the non-religious friend. Although the friend was fine with his friend “swearing his soul to Jesus,” it does seem that there exists anger for Jesus taking the number one spot. Is it possible that the friend singing builds a straw man for his friend’s faith as he thinks he is only religious because he is fearful for his soul? This could be a misunderstanding as there are often infinite misunderstandings across a great divide. Strawmanning one’s belief system, whether religious, non-religious, or anti-religious, is something we ought to never do. It could also be possible that the friend does only believe in Christ because he fears for his soul, resulting in imperfect contrition. This leads to the discussion taken up by many fans of Noah Kahan about religious trauma.

To this, I wish to provide an antidote to the problem of religious trauma within church culture. On Hell, C.S. Lewis said, “There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power.”8 God Himself would gladly get rid of Hell (Ez. 33:11). Secondly, the culture and the church have a massive misunderstanding on what Hell is and we ought to fix this through scriptural teaching rather than continuing in conceptions of Hell from Christian/Greek folklore such as Dante’s Inferno. Thirdly, Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of Heaven/God more than one hundred times while he speaks of Hell only 11-12 times. The church should reflect this! The church, like God, should desire for there to be no Hell and emphasize the Kingdom over Hell, but we also must not shy away from hard scriptural passages.

We must do this in a way that avoids real trauma. The church goer should not feel like God is an abusive father who will whip him with a belt anytime that he disobeys; rather, God is a father who calls his scared child out from the bed to hug him and to tell him that he loves him. What God calls His church to do is to model Christ and Christ did not come to condemn the world but to save it (Jn. 3:17). Jesus Himself makes an interesting note that it is people’s words that condemn, not Himself (Jn. 12:47-48). We ought to incorporate nuances in how we speak about hell such as incorporating other historical positions such as annihilationism and waiting to teach such doctrines to people of a suitable age. Lastly, we must get clear that it is not God that sends one to Hell.

Noah Kahan, while getting music right, gets theology wrong as he thinks God sends one’s soul to Hell, but this is not the case. C.S. Lewis seems to pull from John 12 when he writes, “Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others… but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will be hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”9

It is the grumbling that condemns us. It is the abuse of alcohol that creates Hell. If the abuse is not nipped in the bud, then that alcoholic misery shall remain for all eternity. When we teach on Hell, we ought to be clear that it is sin (missing the mark), that puts one a trajectory towards hell, and that it is God who calls us to repent (to turn) so that we can hit the mark! While some may still accuse the church of causing trauma for simply teaching about sin and eschatological realities and will refuse to engage in dialogue, the church ought to still conversate with all people willing to listen and understand. Ultimately, there will be divides, something that Noah Kahan knows well, but these divides do not need to sever hospitality, friendship, and love. If this happens, then we miss the mark and that is exactly what God calls us not to do!

  1. Noah Kahan, “The Great Divide,” (Mercury Records, 2026), audio. ↩︎
  2. Ibid. ↩︎
  3. Ibid. ↩︎
  4. Ibid. ↩︎
  5. https://genius.com/38485682 ↩︎
  6. Haslam SA, Fong P, Haslam C, Cruwys T. Connecting to Community: A Social Identity Approach to Neighborhood Mental Health. Pers Soc Psychol Rev. 2024 Aug. 28(3):251-275. doi: 10.1177/10888683231216136. Epub 2023 Dec 26. PMID: 38146705; PMCID: PMC11193917. ↩︎
  7. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960). ↩︎
  8. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (London: Centenary Press, 1940). ↩︎
  9. C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). ↩︎

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6 min read
Music

Noah Kahan and Religion Part 1

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6 min read

Noah Kohan’s music explores themes of religious trauma, spiritual divide, and the impact of religion on friendship.

Noah Kahan, an artist with over seventeen million streams and who was nominated for a Grammy in 2024, is releasing a new album on April 24th of this year. To begin hyping up his album, he released the album title track “The Great Divide.” In it, he explores a relationship that was merely based off of shared trauma that has been severed and explores his own feelings of longing to know if the friend is well. He also explore religious themes such as Hell. There are multiple easter eggs in the music video for the song. Two very important callbacks are to the songs “Orange Juice” and “Call Your Mom.”

When we see young Noah in a car with his childhood friends, the visor of the car reads “Call Your Mom” and later we see a younger Noah hand his friend orange juice. While there are many more easter eggs, these two are pivotal as the three songs – “The Great Divide,” “Call Your Mom,” and “Orange Juice” – may be exploring the same themes and life story.

Call Your Mom

First, we’ll quickly go over “Call Your Mom.” This song is about desiring one’s friend to find purpose, to refrain from self-harm, and about being there for a friend through darkness. In the song, the lengths to which Kahan goes for his friend is seen when he sings:

Stayed on the line with you the entire night
‘Til you let it out and let it in

Don’t let this darkness fool you
All lights turned off can be turned on
I’ll drive, I’ll drive all night
I’ll call your mom
Oh, dear, don’t be discouraged
I’ve been exactly where you are
I’ll drive, I’ll drive all night
I’ll call your mom
I’ll call your mom1

The song then talks about nights in the hospital and the grief that suicidal alienation creates. The ache is loud and silent at the same time, is terrifying, and is something that many of Noah Kahan’s fans can sympathize and empathize with. The bridge of the song explores ways the friend can stay alive:

Medicate, meditate, swear your soul to Jesus
Throw a punch, fall in love, give yourself a reason
Don’t wanna drive another mile wonderin’ if you’re breathin’
So won’t you stay, won’t you stay, won’t you stay with me?
Medicate, meditate, save your soul for Jesus
Throw a punch, fall in love, give yourself a reason
Don’t wanna drive another mile without knowin’ you’re breathin’
So won’t you stay, won’t you stay, won’t you stay with me?2

We are alive only when we have trajectorial lines to walk on; we need to “give ourselves a reason.” Having no purpose in life, or being an existential nihilist, increases the statical chances of suicidal thoughts, depression, and many more harmful associations.3 We need teleology within our lives and often this is brought by meditation, religion, and love. Noah Kahan does not care what option his friend chooses; he just wants his friend to keep breathing. In “Orange Juice”, it seems that the friend may have chosen religion.

Orange Juice

I do not know for sure if the friend in all three of these songs is the same friend, but there are many parallels. Noah Kahan, elaborating on the song, says,

I wrote Orange Juice about two friends reconciling after years of being apart. A tragic accident that they went through kind of separated them and one person found religion and the other person stayed in the town where the accident happened and kind of just moved forward… It’s really a song about how trauma can bind you and how it can also separate you and I always think that going through something traumatic should at least bring you closer to the person that experienced it with you. And I think the hardest part about that is sometimes it makes you go farther away and I wanted to write about two people coming back together after that time… I drew a lot of inspiration from my own life, my own struggle with addiction, and alcohol, and friendships that I’ve lost and haven’t been able to maintain. And I wanted to create a story about two people that represented a lot of challenges that I’ve gone through, that people in my life have gone through, and that’s what Orange Juice is about at its core.4

The song itself is amazing and is one of my favorites. In the song, there is the notion that religion has caused the main separation between the two. Kahan sings,

See the graves as you pass through
From our crash back in ’02
Not one nick on your finger
You just asked mе to hold you
But it made you a stranger
And filled you with angеr
Now I’m third in the line up
To your Lord and your Savior.5

Kahan here possibly refers to the fatalities that we learned about from “Call Your Mom” and Kahan later says that the friend did not put “those bones in the ground.” It seems that the drunk driving incident has caused his friend to find absolution in religion and because of that, he has abandoned his friends as they are like “crows that pull him down.” This will be of major importance in “The Great Divide.” This great divide is something one friend seems to want while the other does not. Kahan ends the song singing:

Honey, come over
The party’s gone slower
And no one will tempt you
We know you got sober
There’s orange juice in the kitchen
Bought for the children
It’s yours if you want it
We’re just glad you could visit6

Sadly, it seems that religion is the main cause of the chasm between the two. One friend has changed too much to come back to his life – both to his hometown and his friends. The other has not changed and this creates the challenge that many of us may experience in our own lives. To what degree should one’s faith dictate how one goes about past friendships? Can a devoted sober-minded Christian socialize with friends that drink? How can a Christian live in love, but yet cast aside his old friends? Should the other friends accommodate their friend’s desire to remain sober? Is it wrong for religion to divide? And, a question that I think “The Great Divide” proposes, is religion the correct answer to moral injury?

These questions will be explored more in Part 2 as we dive into the Great Divide.

  1. Noah Kahan, “Call Your Mom,” track 10 on Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever), (Mercury Records/Republic Records, 2023), audio. ↩︎
  2. Ibid. ↩︎
  3. Kyron, M. J., Page, A. C., Chen, W., Delgadillo, J., & Ngo, H. (2025). Beyond meaning in life: How a perceived futility in searching for meaning in life predicts suicidal ideation, Death Studies, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2025.2529281 ↩︎
  4. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CqgIdTiJDDS/?hl=en ↩︎
  5. Noah Kahan, “Orange Juice,” track 10 on Stick Season (Republic Records, 2022), audio. ↩︎
  6. Ibid. ↩︎

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