What if a Death Cult Isn’t What You Think it is?

What gets buried, when death is demonized

Photo by Fred Pixlab on Unsplash

I finally had the opportunity to listen to a couple of podcast episodes, featuring an interview I did with Dan Miller from the Straight White American Jesus (SWAJ) podcast. Dan and I talked about my book, Sister Death, and we explored how some of the themes in the book intersect with discourses on white Christian nationalism, and conservative Christianity, which are the primary targets of critique for SWAJ. The conversation is wide-ranging, and accessible. And it’s split between two short (20-minute) episodes. They’re easy to listen to, in other words. Check them out!

Since listening to the conversation, I’ve still been mulling something over. It’s something I thought about tackling in my book, but didn’t. So it’s one of those things that I feel like I’m always kind of chewing on. Something a little undigested. It’s the use of the term “death cult” as derogatory—as an insult.

In the game of American pro-life politics, it’s easy to see how people who drive the anti-abortion agenda have placed themselves clearly on the side of life. The implication, of course, is that their enemies are on the side of death. This is a perfect example of how to use (or weaponize) the enmity-loaded bifurcation of life and death that I critique, in my book. 

There are lots of ways to react to this, but one of the things I’ve often seen people on the left do in response is to inhabit that same binary, arguing that Christians have actually imagined themselves on the wrong side of this dividing line. In other words, Christians like to think of themselves as warriors on the side of life. But actually, their religion is a morbid death cult.

This often makes for a catchy headline. And it’s an echo of an older idea, from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who—already by the late 19th century—was accusing Christianity of being nothing but a morbid, death-loving, cult. 

Unfortunately, as I discuss in my book, I think that Nietzsche’s analysis was hyperbolic and incomplete. And I think that people who use this kind of “gotcha” argument against Christians whose politics they despise are still stuck in a conceptual quagmire that Christianity has been capitalizing on for generations. When you argue that pro-life Christians are a problem because they don’t actually love life enough, and they’re obsessed with death, I think you’re missing an extremely important part of the picture. You’re missing how contemporary pro-life Christianity is creating a violent ideology of life itself.

The long-dominant political theology of life that’s been propounded by the colonial Christian tradition  that most of us Americans are familiar with has presented us with a vision of pure life as pure good. Life, life, and more life means good, good, and more good. Now, I won’t argue that this is wrong in any simple way, of course. I want everyone I know and love to live a long, and beautiful, life. But the most purely alive, immortal cells that inhabit our bodies are often cancer cells, who want life, life, and more life. Often, they succeed at our expense. What sort of beautiful ideal is that? And this claim that more life is always a pure good is precisely the idea that feeds into the anti-abortion politics that refuse to see abortion (which can be understood as a form of death) as a crucial harm reduction practice, as well as life-saving method, for the living. 

The relationship between life and death is not simple. These powers and forces that we tend to think of as distinct and separate are not actually that easy to pull apart. And when we try to keep them rigidly separated, I think we end up coming up with malignant ideologies for a reason. Life and death are family to one another. They have to be reconciled in some way. If what we want is tenderness toward one another, creating rigid regimes to enforce ideologies of pure life is not what we should be after. We have to be able to see where death breaks in, to be present to one another even in the face of it, and to help one another navigate the difficult and rocky paths that this rupture so often opens up for us. I fear that we won’t do this, if we’re caught up in an endless battle against the very processes at work within and around us.

Kyle Smith, in his book Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity, essentially embraces the argument that Nietzsche makes. Smith argues that Christianity is indeed a death cult, a cult of the dead, or a mortuary cult that’s endured for thousands of years. But Smith doesn’t see this as an insult. Instead, he’s open to exploring what might be beautiful about this. Smith points out the fact that Christianity was forged on the bodies of martyrs, who died for their faith. And it’s a form of worship that has always been attentive to the dead (often to the physical relics and remains of their actual bodies). This is the part of Christianity that can’t see anything like a divine temporality, except if one passes through death—the idea that even in the dead wood of the deadly cross, there is still something kindling that might look like life. Honestly, I feel kind of sorry for Christians who think that all their religion offers them is some ideal of pure life, and not a tradition that helps them think about and cope with death, or a way to feel connected with the dead. 

The cult of the dead that Smith describes is a death cult in a crucial and important sense: it’s describing a long-standing tradition of burial, and of coming into relation with the dead. A death cult may often describe, in the language of today, a group of people whose views seem morbid (perhaps to the point of violence). But the same term has, for a much longer time, also described a social and cultural practice for respecting and relating to the dead. Some would argue (and I tend to agree) that American culture today is, for the most part, lacking in the latter sort of death cult. Older traditions for observing the grief that comes with death, and for finding ways to keep open relationships between the living and the dead, are lacking in our culture today. Demonizing death only contributes to this lack.

My training in religious studies and theology has taught me to be skeptical when someone throws around the term “cult.” The term has, for a long time, been used to identify a form of heresy: something that goes against whatever has come to be accepted by the mainstream. It’s a simple, easy, and off-handed way to cast a group of people in a position of shame. Of course, there are some groups of people whose violent ideologies need to be critiqued. But offhand dismissal isn’t the same thing as critique.