“Spirituality is too opaque”: How Nick Cave and Stan Grant point us back to Christianity’s strangeness

The singer-songwriter Nick Cave and award-winning writer and journalist Stan Grant have emerged as unexpected contributors to Australia’s ongoing conversation about faith, religion, Christianity and even theology. What is perhaps most striking is the way both push back against the common “spiritual but not religious” trope — and they do so in quite similar terms.

For Nick Cave, spirituality is a “little amorphous for my taste. It can mean almost anything.” By contrast, religion is “spirituality with vigour; it makes demands on us”.

“Some people”, writes Stan Grant, “may reach for the spiritual but not religion. But religion matters to me. Spirituality is too opaque … [Religion] asks something of me.”

In both instances, the “religion” towards which they are most oriented is Christianity.

Admittedly, it might seem counterintuitive to think of being Christian but not spiritual — after all, Christianity has a rich treasury of discourses and developed practices focused on the spirit, the life of the spirit, and above all the Holy Spirit.

Moreover, it could be argued that both Cave and Grant are trading here on a dated binary that pits free-wheeling, individualistic spirituality against organised, institutional religion. And indeed, such a binary has been rightly challenged. Social commentators, Indigenous writers and sociologists of religion have demonstrated that spirituality is most often far from individualistic or ethically indifferent. Theologian and trawlwoolway man Garry Worete Deverell, for instance, has made this point by connecting “country” with “well-being and spiritual health”. For Deverell, from country and the spirituality it nurtures, Indigenous Australians “read who we are, to whom we belong, and what our vocation or responsibilities are”. There is something comprehensive, integrating and social about it.

Anna Halafoff and Rosie Clare Shorter make the related point: “Both religion and spirituality can be social and inform how we live in the world.”

So have Nick Cave and Stan Grant missed the point? I do not believe so. For even if it is legitimate to push back against a particular form of the binary between spirituality and religion, the contrast continues to have cultural currency.

Anecdotally, pastors, priests and chaplains report on how this “spiritual but not religious” trope is invoked by those who wish to engage such matters as God and mystery, but who insist on keeping their distance from any official or institutional manifestation of religion. Such an understanding also tends to assume that spirituality is really what religions are about, if only organised religions didn’t obscure and complicate it. Thus spirituality, it seems, has migrated from the churches to wider and more accessible expanses.

But is it really that straightforward?

What’s wrong with “religion”?

In his book Beyond Belief: How We Find Meaning, With or Without Religion, and drawing on conversations with people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, social researcher Hugh Mackay notes that “the label might be new, but the concept is not”. It stands for a “rich tradition of thinkers, mystics, doubters, agnostics and passionate theists who have resisted formal connections with institutional religion while never losing interest in the spiritual”. He summarises the stance as follows:

Though institutional religion has become unattractive and even repugnant to many people, spirituality remains an appealing concept, based on the assumption that whatever a spiritual life might offer, it would be beneficial … [It] points to some power beyond ourselves or some interpretation of life’s meaning that offers more than biology.

Spirituality, on this understanding, points to “the broadest and deepest form of connectedness”, to “having a place in the universe”, to a “feeling of great calm, peace or tranquillity”. And, importantly, it is used “almost always in response to positive experience”. The contrast is clear enough: spirituality is good, appealing and relational; religion is unattractive, to some even repugnant.

There is no doubt that Christianity has its own “repugnant” expressions of religious belief and practice. Indeed, Mackay records that “many people who identify as Christian would not choose to call themselves religious” — including the Australian Anglican theologian, Bruce Kaye, who considers himself “Christian but not religious”.

When “religion” stands for institutionalism, dogmatism, authority, clericalism, patriarchy, ritualism and cultural inertia — to say nothing of hypocrisy — then Christians, as followers of Jesus, will be provoked to push back against it.

So “Christian but not religious” might make sense; what about “Christian but not spiritual”, then? It all depends on what you mean by “spiritual”.

“Nature itself … is where God is best found”

A quick glance at the spirituality section of a bookstore reveals the wide range of approaches to spirituality now on offer, and the many areas of life in which it is supposed to have relevance. There can be business spirituality, health-care spirituality, and spirituality in sport. Even atheists like Sam Harris and André Comte-Sponville have written books sympathetic to spirituality.

The word “spirituality” itself is a good an example of the dictum that “words take their meaning from the company they keep”. It would be naïve to think that the word can migrate from these different domains of life and mean the same thing in each case.

One scholar of spirituality, Philip Sheldrake, has proposed four categories to classify the way the term is variously used: the ascetical, the mystical, the practical and the prophetic. Some of these different uses of the word would inform the spirituality invoked in the “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon, but none of them necessarily or exhaustively define the spirituality there at issue. It belongs in a category of its own.

In fact, spirituality is often presented as an improvement on what the churches have to offer. We can catch a glimpse of this sentiment in some reflections by the Australian author, broadcaster and journalist Julia Baird. As someone who has shone a light on domestic abuse within the church, she acknowledges that the church is more than its failures and sins. She has spoken about the positive influence of growing up in faith communities. She writes warmly of church members who “act as quiet vigilantes of grace”.

Baird also provides eloquent language with which to understand the impulses and frustrations that produce the “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon (without using that trope herself). In her book Phosphorescence, she reflects at some length on her own frustration with the church, her understanding of the core of Christianity, and the quest for mystery in nature. On the church, she writes:

This is only place of faith I am really comfortable in now, with those who wish to be a quiet witness of love. The egregious sins and stag fights of an institutional church have sullied its public face and caused harm to countless numbers of people; we can too easily forget that the true church is based on love, and lived out in thousands of little parishes, where people care for each other.

The image, admittedly, risks a certain romanticism — as if “little parishes” are immune to “egregious sins and stag fights”. Even so, Baird’s substantial critique of the “institutional church” rests in rightly measuring it against Christianity’s fundamental theological claim: the identification of Jesus of Nazareth with God. About this she writes:

At the heart of Christmas story is a baby — God as a naked, poor, newborn refugee; God as utter absence of power. Not a bearded patriarch obsessed with doctrine and church law, but a kid who grew up to teach in parables, then a young revolutionary who was killed for sedition. Who told people to love, to train their hearts to be kind, to let their life be their witness.

Arising from the tension between the lived church and its theological foundation, Baird then turns to those who cast their gaze outside the church:

Many who don’t attend church or adhere to any particular religion congregate on beaches, in forests and on mountaintops — to experience awe and wonder … and seek ways to bring living light into their lives. Such sites are nature’s cathedrals of awe, places where we can sit alongside strangers in silence and understand what we share; where we exclaim at the firefly or the sea sparkles or the cephalopods because they are signs of the miraculous and they usher in a kind of quiet respect for the fantastic, the improbable and the marvellous …

What this passage crystallises the prevailing understanding of spirituality as something that is going on outside the church which is better than what the church itself is supposed to offer. As Baird puts it: “nature itself … is where God is best found”.

But here I can’t help but wonder whether the fundamental purpose of the church is to foster experiences of awe and wonder? Surely there is a category difference between the awe and wonder produced by fireflies and sea sparkles, and the awe and wonder produced by discovering God in the life of a young revolutionary killed for sedition. Indeed, perhaps awe and wonder are too benign for that discovery.

If, as Baird rightly says, Christianity is based on God as naked and poor, who lives a revolutionary and seditious life, might not Christianity be something more unsettling, harder to categorise, and basically a lot more interesting than even many of our churches suggest it is?

So just as the answer to the question of the relationship between Christianity and spirituality depends on what is meant by “spirituality”, it also depends on what is meant by “Christianity”. And this brings me back to Nick Cave and Stan Grant.

_{Although he goes to church, Nick Cave is not a conventional Christian. (Photo by Andreas Rentz / Getty Images)}

“Christianity is a deeply strange religion”

Both Cave and Grant have experienced life in ways that give them every reason to reject Christianity. But against all odds, both of them are drawn to it. If those who are “spiritual but not religious” walk away from Christianity, Cave and Grant walk into it.

Cave’s recent reflections on Christianity emerge from a series of interviews he conducted with Seán O’Hagan, and published as Faith, Hope and Carnage — a book that is framed to a large degree by his many experiences of profound and tragic loss. 

Cave, of course, is not a conventional Christian, although he does go to church. He is impatient with Western culture’s rationalism and the scepticism it fosters, which he says is “simply standing in the way of a better lived life”. In contrast, he is intrigued by Christianity’s ideas. He speaks of a yearning for something beyond himself. The “religious impulse”, he says, is “not to bring happiness or comfort, necessarily, but to bring about an expansion of the self — the possibility to expand as a human being rather than contract”.

When he speaks about the elements of Christianity that have claimed him, he names the crucifixion and Christ’s raw humanness. He is drawn to Christianity’s strangeness. For Cave, going to church is an act of defiance:

What I like about church is that it stands defiantly against the gods of reason and rationality. It’s a deeply a strange place, and Christianity is a deeply strange religion, all based on a deeply strange set of ideas.

He doesn’t mean a strangeness that repels or offends him. He means “strange” in the sense of being interesting, curious and intriguing.

In his book The Queen is Dead, Stan Grant reflects extensively on the connection between Christianity and colonialism comes in for harsh critique. He wonders how Jesus who “stood against tyranny and empire, who spoke only of love, became allied to the service of conquest?” His answer: through the White Jesus of Christendom, the Jesus whose image was placed at the head of European armies and European empires. 

Even so, he says he can find faith in all sorts of places and among different religions, adding: “I find it in churches. Yes especially in church.” He speaks of the little wooden church in Wiradjuri country in which his own Christian faith was nurtured. He says that he knew nothing but love in that church. But it was love as experienced by the afflicted and the forsaken. His pastor-uncle taught him quite specifically to be a Wiradjuri Christian, not a European Christian. The Christ he learned to follow was the “crucified Christ” — the one who was himself afflicted and forsaken. He spells this out by describing his faith as an Easter Saturday faith, a faith that doesn’t rush to a triumphant resurrection, but waits for the resurrection as the manifestation of love.

_{Stan Grant says that his pastor-uncle taught him quite specifically to be a Wiradjuri Christian, not a European Christian. (Photo by Graham Denholm / Getty Images)}

Like Nick Cave, Grant’s words go to the heart of Christianity: this strange Easter story that mixes death with life, faith with doubt, abandonment with presence. The words which Grant uses to describe the Bible — “perplexing, confusing, confounding, enraging, enlightening and enlarging” — could well be applied to the way both he and Cave speak about the paradoxes of faith more generally. The fact that each of them perceives Christianity to be “enlarging” or “expanding” is noteworthy, at least.

Neither Nick Cave or Stan Grant looks to Christianity primarily to make him happy or to bring him comfort. Neither is seeking a less perplexing or less paradoxical faith. They are both seeking something that expands and enlarges their experience of being human. Christianity, after all, is not meant always to be positive. Rather, it is meant to be true to life — because at its heart is a one particularly complex human life, and the way God was revealed in the paradoxical words, the confronting actions, violent execution and the mysterious raising of that one life.

The Christianity to which Grant and Cave are drawn is not the ugly combative culture-warrior Christianity so common today. Nor is it the intellectually closed (and therefore also spiritually closed) Christianity of dogmatism in its many forms. Rather, it strikes me as a Christianity in the mode of ever-renewed discovery of the expansive fruitfulness of its own very strange starting point.

The table beneath the spire

The Christianity to which Nick Cave and Stan Grant point is thus very different from both the “spirituality” and even “religion” referred to in the “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon described by Hugh McKay. But it doesn’t have to be a difference which is necessarily competitive. Christianity and spirituality do not need to relate as better or worse versions of the one thing — which is to say, their relationship is not that of a binary.

Let me unpack this by returning to Julia Baird’s reference to the cathedrals of nature where people gather and are drawn into experiences of awe and wonder, of mystery and community. There is no doubt that “nature’s cathedrals” can produce awe and wonder. And there is equally no doubt that they do so among atheists, agnostics and believers, all of whom interpret the experience differently. Those experiences can indeed bind people together, increase respect for creation, and foster gratitude and humility. I have no interest in denying any of this.

At the same time the church has no need to think that its task is to outdo the cathedrals of nature in their work. Christianity also has its cathedrals — literal and metaphorical. Those cathedrals also have spires (or some parallel architectural structure) that point upwards, often evoking awe and wonder.

But somewhere beneath every spire in Christianity’s cathedrals is a table. It is a table where people encounter mystery through eating, drinking, remembering, praying and hoping together, and hearing over and over a story of love, mercy, grace, confrontation, betrayal, death and hope: the story of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection. It is a table from where you look out and move out before you look up. It is this encounter which can turn people into what Julia Baird describes as “vigilantes of grace”.

At this table, the mystery is not the mystery of unknowing, or the mystery of the grandeur of creation, but the mystery of what has been made known in one fragile, vulnerable, disruptive, loving Jewish life and what happened in and to that life. 

Christian mystery is not better known by withdrawing from people and place, conflict and controversy, love and loss. It is best known by stepping into them — in the same way that Jesus made God known through his interactions with people and place, conflict and controversy, love and loss.

The mystery of God proclaimed by the Christian faith is a mystery that is true to life in all its complexity. You cannot pull back the veils of injustice, violence and pain as if the encounter with God lies above and beyond them. This is why the theologian Andrew Prevot argues that Christian spirituality:

comes only through overt struggles against particular structures of violence and only through intimate, cooperative relationships with those whose lives are regularly impeded and destroyed by such structures.

In the end, there is no need to extrapolate from “spiritual but not religious” to “Christian but not spiritual” — and certainly not to replicate in the latter the binary relationship often attributed to the former. But even to ask the question about being “Christian but not spiritual” is an invitation to those in the Christian community to ask how comfortable we are Christianity’s own odd starting point and its difference.

There is merit in being confronted with the strangeness of Christianity, and being freshly curious about it, and not least about the graciously curious way of Jesus who calls the church to follow him into the realities of life — even when there are no guarantees of positive experiences of awe and wonder.

Geoff Thompson teaches systematic theology at Pilgrim Theological College and is Associate Professor at the University of Divinity.