Dr. David Deane is an Irish-born Canadian theologian and Associate Professor of Theology at the Atlantic School of Theology (AST) in Halifax, where he has taught for 17 years and, as of July 2026, has been appointed Academic Dean. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin (BA, MA, PhD), he previously served as Theologian in Residence at Colorado State University. His teaching and research span Roman Catholic theology, Christian doctrine, moral theology, apologetics, and Christian anarchism. David is a frequent public commentator on radio and television and has written on theological and cultural issues for the Times of London, the Irish Times, and the Irish Independent. He is the author of Nietzsche and Theology (2007), The Tyranny of the Banal: On the renewal of Catholic Moral Theology (2023), and co-author of Still Unhealed (2019).
Debates over Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) often turn on questions of autonomy, dignity, and the relief of suffering. But what if those words themselves carry assumptions we rarely stop to examine? In this conversation, theologian David Deane looks beneath the political debate to the cultural “grammar” shaping how we understand dependence, aging, suffering, and death. He argues that Christians have too often absorbed a vision of the good life formed by productivity, independence, consumption, and control—and, in the process, forgotten some of Christianity’s more radical claims about human dignity. Drawing on Augustine, Christian traditions of dying well, contemporary culture, and his own experience, David asks a provocative question: before Christians decide what to say about MAiD, do we first need to remember how to think—and die—as Christians?
Radix: David, thank you for taking the time to do this. To begin, could you tell our readers a little about yourself and how you came to where you are today?
David Deane: I’m a Roman Catholic systematic theologian who, in recent years, has focused increasingly on moral theology. I teach at Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax, Nova Scotia, an ecumenical school where we have Roman Catholic, United Church of Canada, and Anglican students. We train Anglican priests and United Church ministers, and many Roman Catholic students take our master’s and bachelor’s programs. It’s a wonderfully broad and ecumenical conversation, and I’m very happy there. On July 1, I begin serving as academic dean, which means I’ll have considerably more administrative work than I currently do. Strangely enough, I’m actually looking forward to it.
My most recent book—and the one most relevant to our conversation—is The Tyranny of the Banal, an attempt to renew Catholic moral theology, which I believe has fallen into disrepair through the dominance of both liberal and conservative forms of discourse. In many respects, I think liberals and conservatives are simply two different forms of modern secularism. Both shape the conversation in ways that move it away from the broad, small-“c” catholic Christian perspective that once characterized the tradition.
I’m currently working on another book, somewhat provocatively titled Christian Anarchism. In it, I engage a number of anarchist philosophers and economists to offer a diagnosis of the nation-state, technology, and capitalism in the twenty-first century. While the title sounds radical, my theological responses are actually very traditional and orthodox. I argue that Jesus, the early Christian movement, and many of the Church Fathers had views on the state, capital, and power that bear surprising similarities to some of these critiques. I’m trying to bring those insights into conversation with Catholic social teaching, a tradition that emerged in the late nineteenth century with the encyclical Rerum Novarum. Catholic social teaching looks carefully at what is happening in the world and then seeks to offer a coherent Christian response.
Rerum Novarum, for example, attempted to chart a path that rejected both unrestrained capitalism and Marxism. But I would argue that much of our thinking in the Church remains rooted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century assumptions about capitalism, technology, and the nation-state. We need to update our analyses if we are to speak persuasively in the twenty-first century.
The Tyranny of the Banal focused more on personal moral questions—sex, death and dying, and other deeply human concerns. The new book turns to broader social questions. That’s where I find myself these days and the kind of work that occupies my thinking.
Radix: That sounds fascinating, especially your comments about the political roots of liberalism and conservatism. A friend of mine, Ron Dart, is a great admirer of George P. Grant, and one of the arguments I often hear from them is that many people mistakenly believe conservatism is the opposite of liberalism, when in fact both spring from the same individualistic roots. In general, questions about economics and the Church’s engagement with it are profoundly important. People often become absorbed in things that are ultimately less significant, which is why it’s so important that scholars like you are writing and speaking into these conversations.
DD: Well, hopefully. You know, one of the interesting things about Rerum Novarum is that it emerged at a time when the Church was actually far more radical than we often imagine. When people think of the nineteenth-century Church, they tend to picture something authoritarian, conservative, and staid. But in some respects it was remarkably countercultural. Take something as simple as trains. The Vatican had real concerns about them. That sounds quaint, even absurd, today, but the reasoning behind it is fascinating. Many Catholic thinkers argued that the good life consisted in growing up among one’s family and community, loving God and neighbor, and living a life of sufficiency and flourishing. Why, then, should people have to leave in pursuit of wealth, fame, and fortune?
At first glance it seems terribly old-fashioned, but it’s actually a profound challenge to the assumptions of the modern West. Our culture tells us that we must go out, accumulate wealth, and endlessly pursue success. In many ways it makes everyone into a kind of conquistador. The conquistador becomes the model of success. The Church’s hesitation about trains was, in part, a protest against that worldview. Rerum Novarum also speaks of the universal destination of goods. It suggests that once a person has enough, any surplus ultimately belongs, in a moral sense, to the poor and the needy. God intends the goods of creation for everyone.
One of the things that happened during the twentieth century was that the Church became enormously successful. In the nineteenth century it was still recovering from the French Revolution. The Pope had been held under house arrest by Napoleon. Tens of thousands of clergy had been killed in France. The Church’s place in society was deeply precarious. Then everything changed. By the middle of the twentieth century, Christianity had become culturally dominant across much of the Western world. And as that happened, the Church increasingly became a kind of chaplain to the modern liberal capitalist project.
Rather than challenging the system, it often settled for simply trying to soften its edges—to suggest, perhaps, that we should be a little gentler or a little kinder. We became content to use the mechanisms of the market and the accumulation of wealth, provided we invested more ethically or behaved somewhat more responsibly. At times, that can amount to putting lipstick on the pig of savage capitalism. I think we need to recover the deeper radicalism of the Christian tradition.
I was at a presentation yesterday where someone spoke about the highly sanitized image of Jesus that often exists in the Church today. I knew exactly what she meant. In many ways, that sanitized Jesus is a product of modern capitalism—a mass-produced, marketable image of a blond, blue-eyed Christ. If you look at medieval Christian art, however, you find something entirely different. The crucifixion is often depicted in all its horror. Images such as Christ in the Winepress are deeply visceral and unsettling. There is nothing sanitized about them. I’m not sure the Church has historically been as tepid as it often appears today. But over the last couple of centuries, I do think we’ve drifted into becoming capitalism’s chaplain and, in doing so, we’ve lost touch with some of our more radical roots.
Radix: That’s deeply interesting work. I hope, in the future, we can have you back again to talk about church history and its role in economics. Anyway, as concerning the importance of language, one of the things that struck me immediately in The Tyranny of the Banal was your use of the word grammar. I was recently reading Erasmus’s Enchiridion in an antiquated English translation, and after a while I found myself beginning to write in the margins using the same old-fashioned language—doths, beholdeths—and all the rest. I caught myself and thought, “Isn’t that fascinating?” After being immersed in it, I found myself employing that same grammar. The point is though that we live within particular ways of speaking and thinking – a culture that uses a particular grammar. In your book you discuss ontological grammar, Trinitarian grammar, hegemonic grammar, Darwinian grammar—and all of this has implications for how we talk about MAiD. So, to the question: Why is it so important that we think carefully about the language we use?
DD: Grammar shapes and corrals speech and writing. It directs our sentences, but it also shapes our thinking. If we approach an issue through one set of terms and categories, we’ll process it in one way. If we approach it through another set, we’ll understand it differently. A controversial example might be the grammar of inclusion and exclusion. I think it has been an extraordinarily successful grammar. It did tremendous work in relation to the civil rights movement in the United States and helped people understand the exclusion of non-white communities from positions of power. It was an incredibly important tool.
But, as Maslow observed, if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail. He uses the example of trying to wash your car with a hammer: you’ll simply smash it to pieces. In the same way, if inclusion and exclusion become the only lens through which we view reality, we end up misunderstanding a whole host of issues. To take a deliberately silly example, we’re all agreed that fascists and racists should be excluded from certain conversations. But if exclusion is always bad and inclusion is always good, then we’d have to become more inclusive of fascists and racists. The example is absurd, but it demonstrates the point: every grammar has limits.
In the modern West, certain phrases become loaded with positive significance. They become totems, and anyone who questions them is immediately regarded as a bad person. Terms such as inclusion, individual freedom, and individual rights can function this way. As an Irish person who has read a great deal of medieval Irish history, I often find it amusing to watch Norway in the World Cup and see fans doing Viking chants and rowing motions. Vikings have become culturally positive figures. We have television shows, films like How to Train Your Dragon, and all sorts of romanticized imagery. But to someone in the tenth century, Vikings were the SS of their day—perhaps worse.
Radix: Right!?
DD: They arrived to kill, enslave, and rape. Sometimes I wonder how many centuries it would take before we had sports teams called the Portland Nazis or the Wisconsin SS. It sounds outrageous, but it reminds us that our cultural totems shift over time. The meanings attached to words and symbols are not fixed.
The same thing happens in theology. In the nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church was fighting against forms of secularism and nationalism, particularly in Germany and England. The Church emphasized that Catholics belonged first to the Body of Christ. The problem was that, over time, the Church began to conflate itself with Christ. This had terrible consequences during the sexual abuse crisis. If damage to the Church’s reputation was seen as damage to Christ himself, then protecting the institution became synonymous with protecting the faith. Survivors of abuse could be viewed as threats to the Church rather than people who had been grievously harmed. A particular grammar had created a blindness.
I grew up in an Ireland where Catholicism and Irishness were so closely linked that Protestants were often seen as somehow not fully Irish. At the time, I couldn’t see the violence of that way of thinking. The grammar itself prevented me from seeing reality clearly. You mentioned in an email Mel Gibson dying in Braveheart shouting, “Freedom!” It’s a wonderful and deeply anachronistic scene. To a modern Western audience, of course he must be dying for freedom or for Scotland as a nation-state. But those are modern categories. They don’t map neatly onto the medieval imagination at all.
One of my favorite examples of this comes from Umberto Eco and Marco Polo’s famous “unicorn.” Marco Polo writes of his great disappointment upon seeing a unicorn for the first time. Instead of a sleek, white creature, he encountered something with a dirty grey body, short legs, small ears, and an upturned horn. Of course, we know he was looking at a rhinoceros. But Marco Polo didn’t have a category for rhinoceros. The category available to him was unicorn, and so that grammar shaped what he believed he was seeing. In my book I note that he was almost certainly looking at a Sumatran rhinoceros, which actually has two horns. He was close enough to describe the animal’s tongue, yet he never mentions the second horn. It raises an intriguing question: was his experience itself shaped by the grammar through which he interpreted reality? The Wittgensteinian in me says yes.
This is why grammar matters and why we need to become attentive to the grammars shaping how we experience reality and think about moral questions. If we want to think as Christians—to develop a Christoform or Trinitarian grammar—we also need to be aware of the other grammars that compete with it. Take someone like J.D. Vance. He is a Roman Catholic and someone who genuinely wants to think with the Church. But if his primary grammar is formed by a particular understanding of the American experience, of freedom, and of the nation, then those assumptions will inevitably shape how he reads the Christian tradition. They will determine what he sees and what he doesn’t see. His reading of Augustine’s order of loves strikes me as highly idiosyncratic. He’s an intelligent man, so I don’t think the issue is a lack of intelligence. Rather, the grammar of the American experience is so powerful that it constrains his ability to interpret the tradition differently.
Radix: One of the central ideas in debates around MAiD, euthanasia, and assisted suicide is dignity. The argument often comes back to preserving dignity, though a growing body of research suggests that many people aren’t primarily afraid of physical pain; they’re afraid of the existential realities that accompany dying. At the same time, dignity today seems so closely associated with autonomy, independence, and control. I was recently speaking with a palliative care physician who was mentioning some stats: basically many of the people requesting MAiD are often relatively affluent and accustomed to being in control of their lives. Losing that control can be deeply frightening. Thus the potential link to MAiD.
So how should Christians think about dignity?
DD: I think that’s exactly right about the conflation between dignity and autonomy. As Christians, we believe that God reveals himself in and as the man Jesus Christ. If God is powerful, if God is loving, if God is good, if God is dignified, then we discover what those things mean by looking at Jesus. And very often what we see there contradicts our secular assumptions.
Take lordship, for example. In the world, lordship means power and mastery. But in Christ we encounter the Lord on the cross, and suddenly lordship becomes indistinguishable from servitude, from self-giving, from dying for others. The same is true of dignity. If we look to Jesus—to his body on the cross and, indeed, to the whole movement of the incarnation, this conscious surrender of power and self-giving for others—we discover that dignity is not the robust, domineering notion of mastery that characterizes much of the secular West.
Augustine roots dignity in God’s goodness and, even more profoundly, in God’s love. Every human being possesses dignity because we are made in the image and likeness of God. Therefore dignity can never be earned, and it can never be entirely lost. Augustine makes this point in a remarkable passage in The City of God. He considers all sorts of strange creatures described in classical sources—people with a single giant leg, people with the heads of dogs, even conjoined twins—and asks whether they possess dignity and belong to the race of Adam. His answer is an unequivocal yes. Why? Because dignity rests in God’s love for us, not in our attributes. For Augustine, God’s love is not simply a distant feeling that God has toward humanity. God’s love is the Holy Spirit, God’s very self poured out toward and dwelling within human beings. Therefore our dignity cannot depend on how high we can jump, how fast we can run, how intelligent we are, or what capacities we possess. It certainly cannot depend on our independence or our usefulness.
Yet this is precisely where our culture often goes wrong. In a capitalist society, dignity becomes associated with control, productivity, and self-sufficiency. So we hear elderly people say, “I don’t want to be a burden on my children.” From a Christian perspective, that is an extraordinary thing to say. Think of the Pietà. Any human being, Christian or not, sees that dead body lying across his mother’s lap and instinctively feels sympathy and tenderness toward it. Michelangelo deliberately exaggerates the proportions. If the figures stood upright, Mary would be enormous and Jesus comparatively small. He is emphasizing Christ’s vulnerability, his brokenness, his limpness and helplessness.
And then, as Christians, we realize something astonishing: this is what we believe God is. Dignity is not lost in weakness. Dignity is not lost in dependence. Dignity is not lost in vulnerability. In fact, vulnerability can become a gift. I write about this in The Tyranny of the Banal in relation to my mother-in-law. If she allows us to care for her, that is not merely something she receives from us; it is also a gift that she gives to us. It enables us to become one with Christ through her and in her. We become one with Christ as caregivers because we participate in Christ’s compassion and care. We also become one with Christ because Christ is present in her vulnerability and suffering. That is a gift of salvation.
There is almost nothing more valuable a person can give than the opportunity to love them in their weakness. If someone allows us to care for them, allows us to see them at their most vulnerable, that is an extraordinary act of trust and even grace. I think there is a parallel here with something Augustine wrestled with and that later theologians, especially John Paul II, developed more fully. Augustine was deeply suspicious about whether genuinely self-giving love between spouses was possible because our loves are always distorted by selfishness and desire. Later thinkers became more optimistic. Through grace and the sacrament of marriage, they argued, it is possible to give oneself to another for the good of the beloved.
I think something similar can happen in vulnerability. If you allow someone to care for you—to clean your backside, to feed you, to see you at your most broken—you are giving them an opportunity to love in a Christlike way. That, too, is a kind of miracle. It requires union with Christ, both for the one who gives care and for the one who receives it. And this reveals the stark difference between Christianity and the culture of secular capitalism. What we’re seeing with MAiD is that many Christians have forgotten how to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. We’ve forgotten how to think as Christians.
Instead, we’ve absorbed an ableist and, in many ways, Darwinian logic that tells us our dignity disappears if we become dependent, if we begin peeing and pooping ourselves, if we require care from others. So we no longer want to undergo the dying process. We simply want to push a button and be dead. Historically, Christians thought very differently. The Book of Common Prayer, for example, includes prayers asking not to die suddenly or in one’s sleep. Why? Because Christians wanted time to prepare for death, to pass through the dying process consciously, to become one with Christ in it. We’ve forgotten that. We have become subjects of another grammar.
That’s why, for me, MAiD is not primarily a legal question. It’s a theological question. It’s a barometer and an acid test of who we are, whose lordship we live under, and what body we belong to. Are we fundamentally members of the secular capitalist nation-state and shaped by its grammar? Or are we members of the Body of Christ? I think very few issues reveal that distinction more clearly than this one.
Radix: You write that dying requires the practice of virtues such as humility, patience, and fortitude, and that a dying person “preaches with their body” in a culture that often sees aging and frailty as indignities. But here’s the difficulty. We can talk about this among Christians—we’re, in a sense, preaching to the choir. Yet even many Christians struggle with the idea that suffering, or even vulnerability, could be a gift to others. Of course, we’re not talking about glorifying terrible pain. And when that pain exists there are things like palliative sedation that are entirely different from euthanasia. As I sometimes put it, being put out is different from being put down. Still, the idea that our difficulties, and even our dependence, might become gifts to those caring for us—that’s a very hard sell in our culture.
DD: One hundred percent. It’s such a countercultural idea that I actually think it can be shocking and even inspiring, especially to younger people. We shouldn’t shy away from it. We need to help older people—and ourselves—prepare for this reality, because, God willing, we will all one day go through the dying process. Now, this is not a glorification of suffering. Suffering is not good in itself. It’s a product of our fallen condition and our separation from God. It’s not something we should seek. But from a Christian perspective, it is also a place where we can come to know Jesus Christ.
I tell my children all the time that Jesus loves them. They’ve heard it a thousand times. But those words can become so familiar that they lose their force. They become almost abstract. Then imagine someone lying in a hospital bed. They know fear. They know uncertainty. They know the anguish of waiting to hear what the doctor will say in the morning. In those moments, they can begin to understand something of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane. They can begin to taste, in their own bodies, something of what Christ willingly endured out of love for them.
Practices such as the Stations of the Cross are designed to help us know Christ’s love not merely in our minds, but in our very cells. This is a relational and experiential knowledge that unites us to Christ through the Holy Spirit. It’s transformative. People often respond by saying, “Well, that’s all very Christian—but how does it convince everyone else?” My answer is that I don’t think it does. From a purely secular, Darwinian perspective, suffering is ultimately meaningless. I don’t think there is any coherent meaning that can be ascribed to it. So my goal isn’t to convince something called “society” or something called “Canada.” It’s not even primarily to convince Parliament. My goal is to help Christians think as Christians and therefore to help Christians live and die differently. If enough Christians do that, then that itself becomes evangelism. It becomes witness.
Tertullian famously said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. The martyrs preached with their bodies. In the same way, if Christians become people who die differently, then that way of dying bears witness to another way of life—one that can be attractive and inviting. I think that’s how Christianity spreads: through people who live and die differently. Stanley Hauerwas has said something similar. In the future, Christians may simply be those strange people who don’t kill their unborn and don’t kill their very old. We’ll be the weirdos. And that’s all right. What matters to me is that Christians understand why dying matters and why, in a sense, it’s showtime.
You mentioned another idea that sounds utterly ridiculous to modern ears: that the dying themselves should strive to die virtuously. People say, “Surely someone who’s dying has enough on their plate without worrying about being a witness to others.” But from the Christian perspective, this is precisely the point. Throughout Christian history we have the Ars Moriendi traditions—the “art of dying” literature—in which theologians and spiritual writers offered guidance on how to die well. St. Bellarmine, for example, says that we shouldn’t rush toward death and say, “Please, God, let me die.” That would be a rejection of life as a gift. But neither should we cling desperately and manically to life, because that can suggest a lack of trust in God’s promises and in eternal life. Instead, one must learn the virtues of holding life gratefully without grasping it. The dying person teaches these things through the way he or she dies.
Radix: Right … without grasping it.
DD: When I was a child in Ireland, I remember elderly relatives or neighbours dying in a bedroom while the children played outside and were constantly being shushed. There were people in the kitchen making tea and sandwiches, and everyone had a role. You learned how to do this dying thing by watching others. Death was a public event. But in the modern West, death stands as a contradiction to the entire project of progress. We like to imagine that through technology and wealth we can conquer everything. Death reminds us that we cannot. And so we sequester it. We hide it away. We remove it from public life. I think that’s a mistake. I think we need to recover dying as something communal and public. We need to learn from it. And Christians, in particular, need to become the kind of people who die in strange ways—people who are willing to go through the process and, by doing so, bear witness to another kingdom.
Radix: Speaking of something being a witness to the glory of life—despite suffering—well, let me tell you a story. There was this man I once worked with, a quadriplegic fellow named Wayne. It was one of the great privileges of my life, and I learned an enormous amount from him. Now in many ways, he had a hard life. His movement was extremely limited, and he lived in very modest circumstances to put it sweetly. But the way he lived, and enjoyed life! He enjoyed food like few other people I have ever seen; the way he enjoyed small road trips; the joy he took in his little model-airplane business, it was remarkable; even just getting to sit in the sun he made look like a luxury. I’d come home not only grateful for being ambulatory, but asking myself, “How could I become more like Wayne?”
But here’s the point of the story. Wayne became paralyzed in his twenties. Before that, he loved women, rock and roll, cars—to the max. After being paralyzed, he spent something like nine months in a special part of the Vancouver Hospital and said it felt like a prison because, in his words, “People in my situation just wanted to die.”
I remember saying, rather naively, “Really?” He replied, “Of course. My whole identity was wrapped up in those things. Suddenly they’re gone. What else is there to live for?” He passed away before MAiD became such a significant issue, but his story often comes back to me. We live in a culture that assumes life should be pleasurable, free from suffering, and constantly enjoyable. I recently heard someone say on a podcast, “I want MAiD because I want to leave the party while it’s still fun.” If MAiD had been an option for twenty-year-old Wayne, I think he would have chosen it. And what he, and others who got to be his friends, would have missed out on is horrible to contemplate. So, even a secular person can look at someone like Wayne and see that meaning can still be found in life despite suffering. Which raises a larger question: What is life actually for? Because however we answer that question will shape how we think about suffering and whether we decide, “I’ve had enough. I want to pull the plug.”
DD: Absolutely. One of the things I discuss in the book is that there is an ambient understanding of life in the modern West that is largely Darwinian. Think about nature documentaries narrated by David Attenborough—Blue Planet, Planet Earth, and so on. They’re wonderfully done and full of facts, but they also present the natural order through a particular lens. From a Christian perspective, that lens is incomplete. There is more to reality than that. But for many people in the secular West, this is all there is. As a result, we inherit what I call the “bell curve” model of life. We grow up, become productive adults, have children, acquire wealth, buy houses and cars, achieve things—and then we begin the downward slope toward decline and, ultimately, nothingness. People often find themselves at sixty or seventy with many years still left to live, but without any meaningful story about what those years are for.
This understanding of life also shapes how we treat the elderly. Studies suggest that many people see older adults as intellectually and morally deficient. Because the past contained more racism, more sexism, and more prejudice, older people are sometimes viewed as repositories of outdated and harmful ideas. At the same time, intelligence is increasingly understood in technological terms—how well one navigates an iPhone or the internet. Since older people often need help with those things, they can be perceived as deficient. And so many elderly people experience not only physical decline but also a kind of social loathing and marginalization. This is profoundly different from how most cultures throughout history have viewed old age.
Radix: That is so true—and terribly sad.
DD: It is, right? In Jewish and Christian traditions, and in many Indigenous traditions as well, the elderly are repositories of wisdom. They remember things we do not remember. They know things we do not know. They carry the tradition. They are honoured. But the progressive story of the modern West often does the opposite. So what, then, is life for according to our culture? In many ways, it’s for the acquisition of pleasure—for the next hit of dopamine, serotonin, or endorphins. We eat certain foods, buy certain products, stream certain shows, and seek experiences that momentarily alleviate our unhappiness. Augustine says that if you want to understand a society, look at what it loves.
I live in Dartmouth, very close to North Dartmouth, where there is a great deal of poverty. Many people there are not starving or homeless, but they are being kept alive without ever being made healthy. They have enough money for Tim Hortons, McDonald’s, alcohol, and perhaps a few purchases on Amazon, but not enough opportunity or meaningful work to flourish. It suddenly struck me that the proletariat of the twenty-first century may no longer be workers but consumers. Our economy requires people to keep consuming, and so we keep them alive, medicated, and spending. Studies have shown that our serotonin levels spike when we’re researching something to buy, spike again when we click “purchase,” and remain elevated while we track the package. Then, almost as soon as the item arrives, the feeling evaporates. And so we need to buy something else.
It’s like the she-wolf in Dante’s Inferno, possessed by an insatiable hunger: the more she consumes, the hungrier she becomes. We are trapped in a cycle of endless consumption. And when age or illness begins to strip away our ability to consume, when pleasure diminishes and the glamour wears off, we often discover that we have no deeper understanding of life’s meaning. This is the hegemony of the modern secular West. It produces a world in which medical assistance in dying appears entirely coherent. It fits perfectly with an understanding of life whose purpose is pleasure, productivity, and consumption. And, to our shame as Christians, we have often failed to offer a compelling alternative. We’ve been shaped by the same discourse.
I grew up watching countless television shows and films in which, at a funeral, any mention of heaven was treated as sentimental nonsense—as a trite and foolish answer. We’ve absorbed the idea that religion is merely an opiate. Marx said that, of course, but it’s one of his less perceptive observations. Marx was a genius in many respects, yet he missed something profoundly important. Many of the great revolutionaries were deeply religious. Think of John Brown or Nat Turner. These were people who challenged slavery because they believed in God, believed in heaven, and believed that those who killed them could not ultimately destroy them. Far from being an opiate, faith became a source of courage and resistance. Yet we’ve imbibed this suspicion of religion and created generations of people for whom the Christian story of death and eternal life sounds naïve or embarrassing.
I’ve attended many funerals where no one dares to proclaim what Christians once proclaimed with confidence: “Death, where is thy sting?” That vision of eternal life actually robs Amazon and Walmart of much of their power over us. If eternity is true, then getting a great deal on a cheap cable from Amazon may not provide quite the thrill it otherwise would. To become the kind of “proper” consumers our economy requires, we need to forget Christian truths, Islamic truths, Hindu truths—we need to forget all those larger stories that situate human life within something greater.
And the important thing is this: there are no villains secretly orchestrating all of this. There is no evil genius pulling the strings. This is simply the kind of social order that emerges from certain assumptions. The seeds of greed, mastery, conquest, and endless progress produce a particular kind of society and, inevitably, shape a particular kind of person.
Radix: What you say about us being more cognizant of what shapes us is so important. Is there anything else you’d want people—especially Christians—to be thinking about?
DD: Yes. I think every one of us in the Church needs to remember something very simple: we’re all going to die. And we need to ask ourselves a question: Has the Church prepared me for that? Have I learned how to die as a Christian? If the answer is no, then we should recognize that we’re probably among the first generations in Christian history for whom that has become normal. Christians used to be formed for dying. They knew what dying looked like, and they knew that dying well was part of discipleship. For us, life often looks like a bell curve. We grow, become productive, accumulate resources, enjoy our health, and then slowly decline.
But the Christian vision is different. Life is a movement toward union with the Trinity. We should be drawing closer to God all the time, and in dying the distance between ourselves and God becomes cobweb thin. In suffering and vulnerability, we can come to know Christ from the inside out. We can practice virtues, bear witness, and become united with him in new ways. In many respects, dying is the Super Bowl. It’s the Oscars. It’s showtime. It’s the great moment, and yet we hardly talk about it in our churches.
For me, the real issue isn’t whether MAiD is legal or illegal. The question is whether the Church is helping Christians think about life, death, and dying in a coherently Christian way that offers a genuine alternative. And if we’re not, then let’s start. Go to your priest or minister and say, “We haven’t done anything on this. Could we? Could we run a five-week course on dying well? Could we think about what it means to die with Christ? Could we study how Christ himself dies? Could we develop practices and habits that prepare us for this?”
I’ve heard plenty of church talks about leaving money to the church in your will. But I’ve rarely heard anyone say, “When you’re lying in a hospital bed, medicated and frightened, here’s how you might pray. Here’s a playlist of hymns and prayers that may help. Here’s how you can journey with Christ through fear and uncertainty.” That’s practical wisdom, and it’s desperately needed. The banality of our age needs to be resisted, and ordinary Christians can resist it by helping their congregations think differently about death and dying. Christians have been waging war against death since Easter. In a sense, that’s our cheat code—a hidden advantage that changes the whole game. It’s one reason Christians were so difficult to govern in the Roman Empire. The empire couldn’t ultimately control people who believed in resurrection and eternal life. Somewhere along the way we’ve either forgotten that or unconsciously surrendered it. We’ve bent the knee to secular capitalism and become its faithful subjects. We need to push back against that and recover our own resources.
This became very personal for me. I was in my forties when I received a cancer diagnosis, and it suddenly struck me: I have no idea how to die. I’d been Catholic my whole life, and no one had really taught me. We wait until someone is seventy-five and in hospital before we ask these questions. We call in a chaplain when someone is already on their deathbed. But by then there is often very little time left to prepare. How do we speak about these things to young people? To young families? How do we train people for this long before they need it? I’ve seen what that kind of preparation can mean.
A good friend of mine, who was also one of my students, and his wife are remarkable people. They have a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and she was pregnant with their third child when routine tests discovered a lump in her breast. Further tests revealed that the cancer had spread to her lungs, liver, abdomen, and spine. The prognosis is very poor. It’s almost impossible to imagine anything more devastating for a young family. There have been tears and fear and panic, of course. But there has also been something else. They know they have an opportunity to encounter and participate in the life of the Trinity in a way they never would have otherwise. They’re asking how to die well and how to entrust themselves to the God who is joy itself, bliss itself, and happiness itself. Interwoven with all the fear and grief, there has also been genuine transformation. Through their own faithfulness and attentiveness, they’ve been able to think about this in a deeply Christian way. In one sense, they’re fortunate to have those resources.
Part of our task in the Church should be to help everyone think like that. Because when we do, we loosen the grip of what I call banal capitalism and the lies our culture tells us about what happiness should look like, what a successful life should look like, and even what a human body should look like. My daughters need to see more elderly people. They need to know what a human body really is. They need to know what their own future may look like. That perspective matters.
We often think social justice means feeding the hungry, resisting oppression, and doing good in the world—and it certainly includes those things. But we can also be revolutionaries simply by living deeply into our Christian faith, by praying together, by living in community, and by learning how to die—and helping others learn how to die—in coherent, faithful ways. I think that’s one of the great tasks before us.
Radix: Is there anything you’d want to say specifically to pastors and clergy?
DD: The first thing I’d say is that, as a layperson and someone who isn’t trained as a pastor, ministers probably know much more about these things than I do. But I would encourage them to consider this: if they were trained in the twentieth century or even in the early years of the twenty-first, then they may have been shaped by a culture in which the Church sought to make itself respectable in the eyes of secular society by avoiding what were called “easy answers” or “trite answers.” Unfortunately, that often led us toward things that sounded sophisticated but were, in some cases, less helpful and less faithful to the Christian tradition.
I remember giving a paper near the end of my PhD at a conference in Glasgow. I had prepared what I thought was a solid piece of twentieth-century Protestant theology—Moltmann, Barth, the suffering God, God’s presence in human suffering. It was all very respectable and very much in step with the theological mood of the time. Then an African American scholar from Los Angeles presented her dissertation research on the spirituals and their rich tradition. What she said completely devastated my paper.
Her point was that people who are truly suffering—enslaved people, for example—didn’t primarily want a Christ who simply suffered alongside them in an impotent sense. They didn’t want someone saying, “Yes, this is terrible, but Jesus suffers too.” That wasn’t enough. They wanted a God who would set things right. They wanted a God who would raise them up, bring justice, and carry them home. They wanted Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. They wanted good news. What I had presented was the sort of theology that educated, bourgeois Europeans thought was sophisticated because we had become afraid of speaking about heaven and eternal life. And in the end, it left us somewhat impotent in the face of suffering and death.
Radix: Wow. A sobering thought. Thank you for saying that.
DD: I think we need to recover the radical reality of heaven. Eternal life isn’t escapism. It’s not an opiate. It’s a source of resistance. It loosens the grip that capitalism has on us, and it gives comfort and courage to people who are suffering and dying. At the same time, the theology of the cross that we find in Luther, Barth, Moltmann, and others is also indispensable. Christ truly suffers. And Christ’s suffering is not meaningless. He gives everything—to God and to us—and that self-giving takes him into the darkest place imaginable. There is no darker place than the cross. And because Christ has already gone there, when we find ourselves in dark places, we discover that he is already present.
In our suffering we can begin, perhaps for the first time, to understand how deeply Christ loves us. Not in the shallow sense of “Love ya,” but in a profound and transformative way. We can understand something of his fear in Gethsemane. We can understand something of his cry of abandonment on the cross. Suffering can become a place of union with Christ. So rather than backing away from questions of suffering and evil because they have so troubled the modern world, I think we need to lean more deeply into the Christian story. We need to help people resist despair and tyranny here and now and also journey toward full union with God.
So my plea to pastors and ministers is this: don’t buy the story that Hollywood has told us—the idea that if we speak honestly about eternal life, we’ll sound crass or simplistic. Of course there are bad answers. There are foolish and hurtful things people say in moments of grief, and we should reject those. But the truth—that God is eternal, that God is joy itself, that God shares his own life with us through the Holy Spirit, and that our ultimate destiny is union with him—that isn’t escapism.
It’s power.
It’s hope.
And it’s good news.