Everybody still worships: 20 years of "This is Water"
Plus, a conversation with Light Reading's Joe Deitzer
I teach a wide range of classes at John Brown University, from a first-semester course introducing students to Christian higher education to an upper-division sequence on social science research design. And in almost every course I teach I routinely find myself referencing a college graduation address from 20 years ago.
Speaking to the Kenyon College class of 2005, author David Foster Wallace delivered a now-famous commencement speech titled “This is Water.” Notbaly, the address includes the following:
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
Everybody worships. We can choose what we worship, and some things are better to worship than others. But everybody ultimately worships.
Such a statement is at once a truism and also quite controversial. It is a truism in that of course people elevate some set of principles, beliefs, or values to a special place in their lives. Religious and nonreligious people alike are, at a fundamental level, driven by something. This isn’t remotely interesting or innovative; it’s how human beings have lived for millennia.
But observing that everybody has a natural inclination and predisposition to worship can also be controversial. To see why, just limit this observation to the United States, in a culture that is a) reasonably prone to associate worship with religious practice, b) dominated by expressive individualism, and c) experiencing a decline of religious affiliation. Or consider this exchange from a couple of years ago:
Yesterday The Gospel Coalition published a thoughtful article titled “The Myth of the ‘Irreligious World.’” James Eglinton, a lecturer and theologian in Scotland, reflects on his students’ inclination to consider the world as increasingly irreligious despite persistent evidence to the contrary — certainly in the developing world, but also in the more overtly “secular” cultures of the West.
Eglinton’s article is ultimately about the persistence of faith and religion in a secular age, drawing on the Christian account of creation and elements of Reformed theology as explanations. “Suppress it as we might,” he writes, “we can never truly rid ourselves of it.” Institutional religion and all its trappings may change and transform, but this does not—it cannot—erase the inherent pull of religion on humanity.
At the same time, “The Myth of the ‘Irreligious World’” raises the specter of Wallace’s 2005 remarks in clear and important ways. Just because people don’t identify as religiously affiliated does not mean religion plays no role in our lives. And while previous decades showed a trend away from religious identification in almost every American demographic, Eglinton acknowledges a thirst for religion in younger generations that suggests the potential for resurgence.1
Whether or not this transpires, Wallace’s “This is Water” remains timeless. Yes, culture is changing, as it always has and always will. Yes, what constitutes “religion” is changing, with today’s decreased emphasis on institutional religion and increased emphasis on individual experience.
Still, we cannot not worship. We are programmed to elevate something above our day to day existence, be it our experienced identity or transcendent truth or something else entirely. We must worship, either a god of our own making or God himself. Yes, we can choose what we worship, but we cannot choose not to worship.
Whether we live in an environment saturated with religion or the most secular of ages, everybody worships.
A Conversation with Joe Deitzer
I mentioned last time that I’ve been fortunate to appear on several podcasts and platforms, discussing a variety of subjects largely related to Uneasy Citizenship. My most recent appearance can be found on Light Reading, a Substack managed by my friend (and fellow NWA transplant) Joe Deizter. In this conversation we touched on my book, the state of American politics amid Trump 2.0, and much more.
Check it out!