The New Goth is the Original Goth

Goth is passé. Although the goth subculture has shown more staying power than did the “flower children” of the 1960s, its “counterculture” largely shows up in dress, music, and attempts to shock and disturb a society in which they believe they don’t really belong. As a critique of our society, it’s insubstantial and somewhat insincere, too easily seen through and ignored. Social dislocation meets adolescent drama and rebellion. Within the next 5 – 10 years, I predict, a more authentic and alienating counterculture will displace the goth subculture: faithful, practical, old-school Catholicism.

“We’re the Original Goths”

Pauline Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble is a popular social media figure. A convert from atheism, her Twitter handle (@pursuedbytruth) and tweets feature a skull-and-crossbones emoji; her published works include the journal, devotional, and prayer book Memento Mori (Remember Your Death). According to her website, Sr. Theresa Aletheia “was inspired by her order’s founder, Blessed James Alberione, who kept a skull on his desk to remind him of his inevitable death. After a spiritual retreat in 2017, [she] received a ceramic skull from one of her sisters and … has been meditating on death daily ever since.”

Even her rosaries feature skulls. You gotta love that.

Last July, a goth named — no kidding — DothTheDoth tweeted, “Be the reason a nun clutches her Rosary when you walk by.” Sister Theresa Aletheia verbally rolled her eyes: “Oh please. No one is clutching a rosary because you are a goth. We’re the original goths. But I’ll say a rosary for you anyway. [skull-and-crossbones emoji]” Her retort garnered 15,000 likes and 2,000 retweets by the next day. Even DothTheDoth retweeted it. Some lapsed Catholics found their interest in the Church reawakened. Heck, after reading the ChurchPOP article, I started following her!

The reality, unpredictability, and temporal finality of death are all intrinsically connected with Catholic theology and spirituality, as they were with Catholicism’s Jewish roots. Death, skeletons, and skulls were once recurring themes in Catholic artwork. (Former Patheos blogger Katrina Fernandez used to feature such art under the tag “My Religion is Cooler Than Yours.”) Many classical composers scored music based on the Tridentine funeral Mass, possibly the most famous of which is Mozart’s Requiem. Though some say that priests began wearing black because they were college scholars, the color black has had a long association with death.

Then again, Socrates (a dead white man) called the right pursuit of philosophy, literally “the love of wisdom,” a practice or preparation for death (Plato, Phaedo, 80d-81a).

Tradition and Postmodern Ageism

Really, just about any Westerner other than a goth would find the traditional Catholic fascination with death to be … well, creepy, if not downright unhealthy. But even more irritating to the postmodern soul is the traditional Catholic’s obsession with tradition itself. The postmodernist is all about leaving the past in the past. It’s bad enough that such people concern themselves with the disiecta membra of the dead; they must also repeat the words and carry on the practices of the departed as if they still have relevance.

(And speaking of “dead,” must they constantly try to resurrect Latin? I mean, “disiecta membra”? Seriously? Just say “remains,” smart-aleck!)

The postmodernist talks a good game about equality, ageism, respect for others, and even democracy at times. But in their passion for novelty, they commit ageism against the dead. Even the goth with a taste for Victorian and Edwardian fashion pays more respect to ancestors than does the philistine postmodernist. Wrote the very sane, very humorous, and (yes) very dead G. K. Chesterton:

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. (Orthodoxy, p. 53)

Yes, traditional Catholicism takes dead people seriously. They’re part of the “cloud of witnesses” to which the (dead) author of Hebrews refers (Hebrews 12:1), “witness” translating the Aeolic Greek word mártyr. The vampires, zombies, and other creatures which are the goth’s fascination are the dead taking anarchic revenge on the living. By contrast, the saints, martyrs, and the great intellects of the past to whom traditional Catholics pay respect are models for living, pointing us toward the freedom that comes with charity, truth, and virtue.

The goth merely admires and envies the dead. The Catholic brings them back into life.

Separation, Assimilation, and Exposure

No, the goth subculture isn’t a proper counterculture. To my best understanding, being a goth is all about externalizing one’s darkest feelings — desperation, depression, anger, hatred, despair, and angst — because they’re so much a part of one’s life. But the goth doesn’t really seek to change or destroy the culture they reject. In a sense, they’ve separated themselves by becoming “undead.” There’s no shared ethos, no articulated “goth ideology” which drives or demands social change. And once people understand that something is an attention-getting device, they generally stop paying attention. Goths are now so much cultural set dressing.

We don’t think of Catholicism as countercultural because for the last several decades we’ve tried to assimilate ourselves, to become indistinguishable within a largely Protestant culture. But that culture is disappearing, exposing us once again. The culture replacing American Protestantism is at best tolerant of Christianity, so long as Christians sacrifice their doctrine on the altars of Intersectionality and Sexual Liberation. According to political scientist George Hawley, not only did the Religious Right fail to halt the progressives’ momentum, it contributed to religious disaffiliation even among Republicans. As I warned almost three years ago:

The blue tribe has been slowly shucking its Christian clothing for the last century. The libertarianism, ethnonationalism, and laissez-faire economics of red-tribe politics need no Christian doctrine to sustain them, and may even gravitate more naturally to “the cruel gospel of the proud atheist Ayn Rand” ([Pascal-Emmanuel] Gobry). For a time, both tribes will continue to treat the self-identified Christians in their ranks as useful idiots. However, if liberal Christianity “as a ‘project’ and a theology … is doomed to oblivion” (Patrick J. Deneen), so too is conservative Christianity, as young red-tribe zombies discover they can take their secular ideology straight up, without a religious mixer.

Blend In or Stick Out?

So much for assimilation. If we aren’t already a counterculture, we will become one soon. When Catholics intentionally and faithfully practice their creed and traditions, they can’t help but become signs of opposition: living testimony against much the world imagines to be true. So long as we seek to blend in with the surrounding culture, we risk losing Christ. But so long as we seek Christ through the Scriptures, the sacraments, and the doctrines and devotions of the Church, we risk sticking out and sticking in our culture’s craw.

We can resist our “outcast” status. Or we can consciously embrace and own it. Go big or go home. Or, as they used to say, “Might as well be hanged for [stealing] a sheep as for a lamb.”

I’ve argued before that we need to resurrect the “fence” of traditional practices and devotions, not to become snooty “uber-Catholics” but rather simply to reinforce our identity and better teach what Catholicism is and is not. I’ve also argued that we’re as much a “crucifixion people” as we are a “resurrection people,” that without original sin and death our salvation is meaningless. Our return to the older traditions, then, should include a spiritual return to our “original goth” roots.

I’m not talking about adopting a gray color palette or shaving odd areas of our heads, of course. (In fact, the medieval palette was bright primaries and secondaries.) As Sr. Theresa Aletheia points out in her Lenten devotional, the practice of memento mori is more about living than about dying. It’s about living and acting in the now, the only time we have to do good and avoid evil, the only time we can give ourselves to God by giving of ourselves to others. Death makes life fragile, transient, and scarce, which makes life intrinsically precious.

Conclusion

I write this conclusion on Ash Wednesday, which is all about remembering our deaths. It’s also the one day of the year we fly our Catholic freak flag high, the ashes on our forehead subtly poking everyone else in the eye: “We’re here; we’re traditional; get used to it.” (Well, yeah, some Anglicans and Lutherans still do it, too, and good on them.) But, unlike the postmodern goth, the OG (Original Goth) doesn’t irritate people just to get some malicious jollies. Rather, it’s a risk we take in order to make a point: You’re doing life wrong.

Then again, I don’t see anything wrong with a little OG bling, like Sr. Theresa Aletheia’s skull rosaries, for everyday wear and use. Let’s have more artwork on the danse macabre, more musical settings for Psalm 51 [50], perhaps more Día de Los Muertos makeup, costumes, and decorations. Let’s find new ways to shout our gothic tradition. Let’s be a bit deliberately weird — a word connected with fate and the supernatural. After all, if we’re going to be out of step with the rest of the postmodern world, we might as well have some fun with it.

And perhaps we can get more people wondering what being Catholic and Christian is really all about.