Marini’s book does not discuss the cooption of secular music by religious congregations, even though it is not an uncommon phenomenon in churches today. First UU Spring, for example, has performed such songs as Graham Nash’s “Our House” and the 1950s doo-wop ballad “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” without a trace of irony, if not humorlessly, in the same services as songs like “This Little Light of Mine,” “Siyahamba,” and various hymns specific to the Unitarian Universalist tradition. The resultant juxtapositions, even if they seem to assert themselves and demand an explanation or interpretation, just as often elude conventional rationalization. To understand this phenomenon without attempting to posit some definitive explanation for it or simply surrendering to the fundamental irrationality of religious practice, I want to again consider Adorno’s critical theory of art, focusing on his dialectical approach.
My analysis starts with Max Paddison’s Adorno, Modernism, and Mass Culture, which locates the central dialectical tension in Adorno’s writings on music in the oppositional relationship between consistency and ideology; in other words, the contradiction is between our ability to understand the composition as both an “autonomous, self-consistent, self-contained text” where “the work is more or less consistent with its own definition of itself” and a “commodity” where “the ‘autonomy’ of the musical work” is an ideological mystification that conceals “the repressed contradictions of society and its power relations.”[1] The dialectical synthesis of the simultaneous state of separate from and contingent on society is authenticity, or “the degree to which the musical work’s unity of form is attained through antagonisms, through the conflict between its ‘autonomy character’ and its ‘commodity character’” (71).
Likewise, the central dialectical tension in First UU Springfield is the opposition between the church’s appearance as a self-consistent, autonomous religious community and the degree to which the congregation’s apparent consistency is a projection of ideology. As I noted in my previous field report, the major social contradiction that is my primary concern is the relationship between the religious and the secular as epistemic categories and as overlapping spaces of practice. The inclusion of religious music (UU hymns, repurposed Protestant hymns) and secular music (pop songs) at First UU Springfield represents a formal innovation that simultaneously expresses that contradiction and offers a critical response to that contradiction. Thus, the dialectical synthesis as expressed through the performance of music at First UU Springfield allows the congregation to construct a religious identity based on a series of antagonisms integrated into the formal structure of weekly service.
When Marini notes in his conclusion that theories of religion “conspicuously fail to address the problem of how different aspects of religion might relate to one another” (328), a materialist, dialectical analysis that emphasizes contradictions is clearly not what he envisions. For in the final paragraphs of his book, Marini adopts a passionate, practically sermonizing tone: “[Sacred song] reveals the moving, protean, interactive reality that gives religious cultures their dynamism and vitality. In this sense sacred song comes close to disclosing what makes religion live as an expression of human meaning” (328).
Marini’s argument is emphatic, but his thinking is sloppy. The necessary precondition for accepting this thesis, even though Marini himself denies it, is the assumption that religions and, by extension, religious congregations are neatly packaged, self-consistent entities. In this way, Marini reproduces the mechanical conception of the theories he disdains but with far less lucidity. My question, on the other hand, is simple: Why does music need to relate to other aspects of religion in a non-contradictory way? However, rather than resorting to a vague acceptance of the irreducible and irrational nature of religion, the non-conclusion that Marini champions to resolve the paradoxes of religious practice, I have argued that a different mode of rationality, the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, can illuminate the way such paradoxes play a fundamental role in shaping religious identity. The synthesis represented by the production of autonomous religious identity does not so much resolve these contradictions as it takes contradictions as its starting point and builds upon them.
NOTE
[1]
Max Paddison, Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music (London: Kahn & Averill, 1996 [Rev. ed., 2004]), 71-73. Hereafter, page numbers will be referred to parenthetically.
[1]
Max Paddison, Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music (London: Kahn & Averill, 1996 [Rev. ed., 2004]), 71-73. Hereafter, page numbers will be referred to parenthetically.
