The Slavery of Death: Part 12, The American Culture of Death Avoidance

Recall, in this series we are trying to understand the following text:

Hebrews 2.14-15
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

How, exactly, are we held in slavery by our fear of death?

In my last post--The Pornography of Death--I argued that our fear of death is largely unconscious and neurotic in nature. Our slavery to the fear of death is largely hidden from view.

This feat is accomplished, as I argued in the last post, by a host of cultural mechanisms that aid in death avoidance. Overt psychic confrontations with our mortality have been minimized.

The great psychological treatment regarding this death avoidance is Ernest Becker's seminal work The Denial of Death. Becker's work will be critical for us as we go forward, but for today's post I'd like to share the complementary analysis of Arthur McGill in his book Death and Life: An American Theology.

The basic contention of McGill's Death and Life is that Americans worship Death. Death is the god of contemporary America, the idol we serve, the hub of the wheel. And if this isn't obvious it is, again, because an ethic of death avoidance is operative throughout American society.

McGill starts Death and Life by observing that “Americans like to appear as if they give death hardly any thought of all.” The American lifestyle is, thus, “for people to create a living world where death seems abnormal and accidental. [Americans] must create a living world where life is so full, so secure, and so rich with possibilities that it gives no hint of death and deprivation.”

We accomplish this feat, according to McGill, through acts of death avoidance. Americans live with “the conviction that the lives we live are not essentially and intrinsically mortal.” But, as noted in the last post, this is a neurotic fantasy. McGill calls it a “dream,” an “illusory realm of success.”

So how is this illusion maintained? According to McGill, "Americans accomplish this illusion by devoting themselves to expunging from their lives every appearance, every intimation of death . . . All traces of weakness, debility, ugliness and helplessness must be kept away from every part of a person’s life. The task must be done every single day if such persons really are to convince us that they do not carry the smell of death within them."

What we see in all this is how the American success ethos, the cultural expectation to be “fine,” is being driven by an underlying existential fear. This is the slavery to the fear of death. It is a collective pretending, a psychic game that allows us to avoid a direct confrontation with our own mortality. And through these acts of avoidance “Americans,” writes McGill, “are able to shield themselves from the awfulness of life, from the torment and devastation which always threaten to overwhelm their sensitivity.”

To shield ourselves from the “awfulness of life” we create illusions to protect us. Here is McGill on this point:

This whole realm of successful life (even for the people who live by it) is only a dream, only an illusion, only an imaginative creation like a work of art…Americans know, at some deep level, that every generation will suffer like its predecessors and will die like them. Foam rubber mattresses, anesthetics, fast airplanes, and color TVs—these do not enhance the quality of inner life. These do not make human life any less a plaything for death. But these do help to create an illusory realm of success and happiness: a realm without pain, without failure, without destitution and death; an illusory realm so centered in life that on Sunday afternoons in the fall, the spectacle of twenty-two adult men running around after a bag of air is enough to provide millions of people with zest and joy. The optimism is known to be an illusion. But, like a work of art, it is serious and important because it is a work of imagination. This illusory world is critical, in fact, because it performs an absolutely important function for the American people. It helps them conceal the horror of life which they half know to be there. In order for these sensitive Americans psychically to endure their existence at all, they have to interpose between themselves and actual life a dream world of success and cleanliness and health and beauty and perpetual youth.

Beyond entertainment culture and our effort to create nice appearances, McGill goes on to observe that vast portions of American Christianity are aimed at propping up these illusions, giving religious sanction to American death-avoidance. McGill contends that “It is the Christian God who helps veil the horror,” it is the Christian God who is “the crucial figure in the illusory world…[helping] us veil and endure this nightmare world.” We see this in the triumphalism in many sectors of Christianity. The almost manic optimism of church culture that cannot admit any hint of debility, disease, death or decay. Churches thus are filled with smiling cheerful people responding "Fine!" to any inquiry regarding their social, financial, emotional, physical or spiritual well-being. Fellow church members too afraid to show each other their weakness, brokenness, failure and vulnerability. For such admissions threaten to expose the neurotic lies that sit at the heart of Christian culture and American society.

This reminds me of Walter Brueggemann's assessment about why Christian churches avoid the use of the lament psalms in worship:

It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented…It is my judgment that this action of the church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to me, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture. Such a denial and cover-up, which I take it to be, is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users, given the larger number of psalms that are songs of lament, protest, and complaint about an incoherence that is experienced in the world…I believe that serous religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God’s “loss of control”…The point to be urged here is this: The use of these “psalms of darkness” may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith…

It's interesting that Brueggemann uses the same language of repression. The avoidance of the lament psalms is a "a frightened, numb denial and deception," a "cover-up" that "does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity."

Why is there this frightened, numb denial and deception within our churches? Again, according to McGill it's a symptom of a fear of death, the very slavery spoken of in Hebrews 2. And this fear of death creates an ethical duty, the duty to deny the existence of death in the midst of our lives. As McGill describes it:

The most crucial task is for people to create a living world where death seems abnormal and accidental. They must create a living world where life is so full, so secure, and so rich with possibilities that it gives no hint of death and deprivation. Here we have the first ethical duty imposed by the conviction that death is outside of life and that life is the only good for which we should live. According to this duty, a person must try to live in such a way that he or she does not carry the marks of death, does not exhibit any hint of the failure of life. A person must try to prove by his or her own existence that failure does not belong essentially to life. Failure is an accident, a remediable breakdown of the system.

McGill calls this duty to hide death--the pressure to be "fine"--the ethic of death avoidance:

Every American is thus ingrained with the duty to look well, to seem fine, to exclude from the fabric of his or her normal life any evidence of decay and death and helplessness. The ethic I have outlined here is often called the ethic of success. I prefer to call it the ethic of avoidance...Persons are considered a success not because they attain some remarkable goal, but because their lives do not betray marks of failure or depression, helplessness or sickness. When they are asked how they are, they really can say and really do say, "Fine...fine."

But again, the ethic of avoidance is being driven by fear-based illusions. This results in an enslavement that is both hard to see and admit. The truth is too terrifying to face.

Why is there this passion to gather people into the arena of true life and to remove from them all marks of sickness and debility? Because many Americans have to create a society which does not cause or require debility and death. Life, life, and more life--that is the only horizon within which these Americans want to live. Epidemics of sickness, economic disasters bringing mass starvation, social violence and disorder threatening at every street corner--if any such things were to happen, then death would no longer be outside of life, be accidental to life. Then, the American venture of nice homes, clean streets, decent manners, and daily security would prove to be false.

...

Fabricating this illusory world is a high and necessary calling...The more clearly Americans perceive grim horror and senseless suffering in their actual existence and the more eagerly they long for release, the more they are compelled to believe that this realm of happy, healthy appearances is real. The more they wrap themselves in those appearances, in the comfortable and peaceful suburban streets, the more they will say that the dreadful things are merely appearances.

...

The whole American venture into health and success and beauty and vigor, the whole existence which Americans try to live with all their consciousness rests on the hidden substratum of suffering and dreadful knowledge...I am convinced that the American joy of life, its style of success, and its passion for service are all born out of the heart of darkness...

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The world is awful, but Americans usually do not say so. Instead they have a good and loving god. This god is not real. Death is real. But like tan skin and regular exercise and peaceful neighborhoods, this god belongs to the realm of illusion, by which Americans are able to shield themselves from the awfulness of life, from torment and destitution which always threatens to overcome their sensitivity.

This god of death denial, the governing ethic of American culture and much within contemporary Christianity, is, I contend, the satanic power described in Hebrews 2:

Hebrews 2.14-15
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

To be set free from the illusions of "success" and the ethic of being "fine" we need to be set free from the satanic power the holds the power of death, the fear that is keeping us all enslaved.