How Kurt Cobain was More Christ-like than Any Pope
The ironic essence of Christianity’s countercultural reverence for losers
The often-misunderstood essence of Christianity lies in what Jesus had in common with Kurt Cobain, the singer of the grunge rock band Nirvana.
You had an overly sensitive, world-weary culture critic who would sooner die than sell out his ideals or his artistic vision. Jesus of Nazareth, or at least the main character of the synoptic gospels and of the Gospel of Thomas railed against the hypocrisy and antispirituality that were rampant in the Roman Empire’s Judea.
Everywhere there was talk of gods or of God, but no one got the message or took it to heart. How did Jesus know? Because he looked around him and saw the same brutal dominance hierarchies that had prevailed in civilizations since Sumer. The righteous many were dominated by the corrupt few.
And everywhere folks fooled themselves. They pretended God wasn’t watching so they need follow only the letter of the law, ignoring its upshot: according to the radical Jesus, all of Heaven and Earth are overshadowed by almighty God, so if you weren’t living constantly blissed out in a mystical apprehension of everything that is what it is in relation to an infinite Being, you were living in sin, which is to say you were dying, having forsaken your birthright.
Jesus’s main message was “Wake up!” Thus, as a countercultural figure, Jesus naturally came into conflict with the ruling powers of the day, and they killed him. Or perhaps he had no intention of living till old age, not because he was sent to sacrifice himself to save humanity from Hell or because of any such theological rigmarole, but just because Jesus was an idealist who was disgusted by imperfection. He died before he’d have to sell out his convictions as a religious leader on political or economic grounds.
Similarly, Kurt Cobain railed against the normie mainstream, reminding us that life has an ugly side. He sublimated his rage and that of his young adult listeners, channeling it into music. And when his music caught on and Cobain became a celebrity, he noticed a cruel paradox: he couldn’t keep producing angry music when he lived in a mansion as a rich and famous rockstar. So, he shot himself rather than betraying his artistic integrity, or rather than admitting that he might have lacked the imagination to reinvent his art.
What, then, is the ironic essence of Christianity, given that comparison? Christianity isn’t something that could be organized as a religion. Thus, the Church has always been anti-Christian. Centuries after Jesus’s death, authentic Christian experience is necessarily accidental.
This is because authentic Christianity is countercultural. No mainstream culture could ever be conceivably Christian, which means the Christian conception of paradise, of the everlasting establishment of Christian values is a nonstarter. Such a Heaven would be Hell from Jesus’s perspective. The meaning of life for a rebel is to rebel. Once the rebellion wins over the world, the rebel can only be a vestige.
The Christian counterculture is plain from the medium of the gospel narrative. The New Testament narratives parody the pagan hagiographies of emperors or of epic heroes like Romulus (as in Virgil’s Aeneid) who likewise had miraculous births, who defeated fearsome enemies, conquered vast territories, or carried out other mighty labours with divine power, and who were deified after their death. Kings were identified, too, with the Mediterranean dying and rising gods, in that they lived as though they were immortal, having “died” to their lower self and been reborn as incarnations that deserve their royal station.
The Hellenistic Jewish idea at the heart of early Christianity was to turn that narrative on its head. Instead of worshipping royalty, why not worship a lowly Jewish carpenter? After all, for centuries Jews had seen themselves paradoxically as both the lowest of the low, having been perennially conquered by more powerful tribes, and as secretly chosen and favoured by the most powerful force in Creation. Jews had always been proto-Christlike, according to the upshot of Jewish scriptures as they came to be shaped after the Babylonian captivity.
So now, according to Jesus and his early followers, the first would be last, and the last first. To be godlike you had to be “poor in spirit,” not regal in bearing (contrary to the more allegorical, Gnostic, and late Gospel of John). To catch God’s eye, you had to be poor, powerless, friendless, and oppressed, eking out a living perhaps as an itinerant wise man or healer. And you had to be crushed by the demonic powers that ruled in nature, rather than rising satanically to the top of that power pyramid.
From a theistic perspective, the point of Jesus’s story is that God or the source of nature isn’t impressed by our political titles or material riches, nor even by our epic triumphs. Our secular standards of excellence are signs of foolishness to God who, as we learned much later, had already created many worlds, thus demonstrating no partiality to any of them. Having created such an inhumanly vast and rich plethora of galaxies, God, too, must have a mad artist’s sensibilities. God’s an aesthete and a lover of the journey, not of the destination.
Thus, God wouldn’t be obsessed with how we live. He wouldn’t want to be caught dead leading a religion that crusades against foreign misconceptions. True, Jesus seems to have been a moral purist. But what preoccupied him wasn’t the details of whether this or that act was ungodly. No, what mattered to him was hypocrisy in general, the lack of spiritual inwardness that made for a coherent, heartfelt way of life.
The creator of the universe couldn’t possibly care about the tribal trappings of our lifestyles, but what would offend him is the lack of personal integrity, the squandering of our earthly opportunities.
Also evident are the political ramifications of this counterculture: like other rockstars, Kurt Cobain spoke for bullied or melancholy young adults who saw themselves as outcasts (even if they suffered only from First World problems, as spoiled members of the middle class). And Jesus spoke for Jews, who represented an underclass in the Roman Empire, and perhaps for the downtrodden everywhere.
This was the primary appeal of Christianity, the fact that this religion put a representative of the untouchable underclass front and center in its theology. For Christians (Hellenized Jews), the dying-and-rising deity wasn’t just the symbol of a pharaoh like Osiris, but was Everyperson, a nobody in earthly terms but who likewise has a divine spark just by being a person (a clever animal that would especially intrigue its maker).
If all of that’s at the heart of Christianity, there’s every reason to scoff at practically everything most so-called Christians have said or done since the fourth century CE. Obviously, every established form of Christianity is a grotesque co-optation of countercultural purity and integrity, like a Coca-Cola ad that’s made to look cool. Obviously, there are no wealthy Christians, nor any powerful ones, nor any who tend to succeed at anything in earthly, secular terms. Obviously, few if any Christians have ever been married. All such combinations are oxymoronic.
Obviously, the bulk of established churches have always been silly abominations, from a Jesus-centered standpoint. Obviously, most Christians, including the loudest apologists have missed Jesus’s point. Again, the Christian God wouldn’t care what we believe, nor would he prepare everlasting paradise or punishment for us on tribal, moralistic grounds. God would have gone to the trouble of creating a universe of galaxies that will go on evolving for trillions of years. And when that universe finally fades away, he could create another universe, and another after that, and another, and another, and another.
In so far as divine judgment has something to do with Jesus’s message, the point would be not the familiar one of tribal resentment, but that our savior ought to be a loser in earthly terms because God’s justice would naturally make no sense to us. Far from wanting to overwhelm us with evidence of his existence and of his righteous character, God would leave his status ambiguous, only tantalizing us with clues and paradoxes. The promises of supernatural rewards and punishments derive from human tribal resentments and cynical institutional agendas, all of which are irrelevant to Jesus’s countercultural vision.
The real Christian God’s not a closeminded proselytizer, so no sanctimonious Christian apologist has ever done God’s work. Ironically, a fellow iconoclast like Kurt Cobain was far more Christian than any pope or televangelist. Indeed, even an atheistic philosopher like me who highlights the clash between mainstream and marginalized visionary cultures is closer to Jesus’s spirit than the majority of conventional, card-carrying “Christians.”
What, then, is the meaning of Christianity in the twenty-first century?
Just look at the symbol of the cross. Those who miss the point are stuck on the medieval imagery of punishment and payment for sins. The real meaning, that is, the reason the symbol might still resonate with honour is evidently that there’s a crossroads in life. The Christian crossroads isn’t the choice whether to serve Jesus as your lord and savior since that hero-worshipping creed is a travesty that arose from the ancient Christians’ shock by Jesus’s execution and by Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem.
No, the crossroads or the conflict Jesus would have cared about is that between mainstream culture and the counterculture. And the chief Christian value would be the irony that what’s precious is typically perverted when it’s entrusted to many human hands.
