The Question Every Culture Must Answer

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Tradition: Beyond the Label

David: If someone says, "Are you Christian?" I can say, "Tell me what you think a Christian is, and we can figure out if that fits." We can do that with anything. "I'm conservative." Fantastic. What do you want to conserve? Let's talk. Or, "I'm liberal." Okay. Who do you want to see liberated? The labels are the costliest mental shortcut in our lives. We can always ask, "What do you mean by that?"

Why Religion Matters to Every Culture

CJ Casciotta: Hey, welcome to Reculture. My name is CJ Casciotta. This is a podcast about better messages. Messages that don't just tell us what to react to. There are too many of those out there right now, in my opinion. Instead, this is about messages that help us understand the moment we're in. Messages that don't just grab our attention, because attention is fleeting, but point us somewhere afterward.

Because whether we're navigating a brand, a team, a family, or even just the world right now, we're all living inside stories. And the most important story we can navigate is whatever story we're in the midst of becoming.

When I work with a brand, one of the questions I'm constantly asking is: What actually survives? Not the logo. Not the language. What still means the same thing after the company grows? After leadership changes? After AI gets introduced? After the market shifts?

On the previous episode, we talked about culture and how the biggest challenge facing brands, institutions, and even individuals right now is preserving meaning in the face of change, uncertainty, complexity, and corruption. All of that disruption makes it incredibly difficult for anything to continue meaning something. Every day we have more voices competing to tell us what's important. We have more content than ever before. More language than ever before. We literally have large language models producing content at a rate no human being can possibly keep up with.

The knee-jerk response to all of that is nihilism. We're seeing it everywhere. "None of this matters. Meaning is over. I'm just going to phone it in." That creates distrust. It creates disillusionment. And it isn't particularly good for productivity, innovation, or getting meaningful work done.

The opposite of all that is meaning. And culture is the collective embodiment of meaning. It's what meaning looks like once people begin living it together. It's the thing that survives disruption and comes out the other side saying, "This is what still matters."

Which brings us somewhere we can't really avoid. We can't talk about culture without eventually talking about religion.

You might already be reaching for the skip button, but hear me out. Whether we like it or not, we've inherited belief systems that continue shaping how people behave, how they see the world, and how they decide what matters.

In this conversation, we're sitting down with both a Muslim and a Christian who have devoted much of their lives to reconciling the traditions they come from with a world that has changed dramatically since those traditions first emerged. They're trying to preserve the meaning they believe still matters while shedding inherited assumptions they no longer believe serve either their communities or society.

What's fascinating is that this isn't really a debate between two religions. It's remarkable how similar their journeys have actually been.

My hope is that you'll listen to this conversation and apply it to whatever story you're leading. Because if two of the world's largest belief systems can adapt without losing what matters most, then maybe there's hope for all of us leading much smaller cultures.

Whether it's a religion, a company, or a family, every culture eventually faces the same question:

What deserves to survive into the next chapter?

This conversation was recorded at our Reculture Live event in Los Angeles and is moderated by my good friend, Esteban Gast.

Joining him is Misha Euceph, an award-winning writer and producer whose work has received Tribeca, Signal, and Webby Awards. She produced The Michelle Obama Podcast, and her own series, Tell Them, I Am, was recognized by TIME, The Atlantic, Esquire, and numerous other publications as one of the year's best podcasts. She's also currently working on her first book.

She's joined by Dr. David Dark, author, professor, and guest lecturer at Belmont University. His book The Gospel According to America was named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Religious Books of 2005, and his newest book is Everyday Apocalypse: Art, Empire, and the End of the World.

Enjoy.

When Labels Become Conversation Stoppers

Esteban Gast: I'm curious. Both of you seem to say, "Yes, I'm Christian," or "Yes, I'm Muslim," while also recognizing that those labels carry baggage. I'd love to hear about the journey that led each of you there, because I know it's something both of you wrestle with in your work.

What did that arc look like?

David Dark: I'll go first.

I'm David Dark from Nashville. I was deeply formed by church. As a kid, I wanted Godzilla and God. I wanted comic books, The Twilight Zone, and the Bible. I never accepted the distinction between the sacred and the secular, and I've spent my whole life refusing it.

I think that division dissolves the moment it encounters the human heart. We love what we love.

I wanted my faith to include all of it. I never liked the idea that someone could hear the word "Christian" and think, "Got it. I know exactly who you are." I've been resisting that assumption for a long time.

The word witness is important to me because, yes, I'm Presbyterian, but I'm also Radiohead, Doctor Who, and Star Trek.

There is a white supremacist terror movement active in this country. It controls parts of our federal, state, and local governments. It has been successfully marketed as Christianity.

Call it Christofascism if you want.

If Christianity is really a prophetic, peasant movement rooted in beloved community, then wonderful. But Christianity has also been successfully marketed as empire. We've watched empire get baptized by abusive people, and too many parts of the tradition have been useful to abusive systems.

So I have a fight in this. I don't like how words like faith and religion become conversation stoppers. A big part of my life's work is opening those conversations back up.

Claiming a Tradition Without Being Trapped by It

Misha Euceph: My journey is remarkably similar, just through the lens of Islam.

One of my favorite stories, both in the Bible and in the Qur'an, is when Moses encounters the burning bush for the first time. He's overwhelmed by the presence of God, and he asks God to define Himself.

The name that's given is Yahweh, often translated as "I Am," or "I Was, I Am, and I Will Be."

I've been obsessed with little stories like that since I was a little girl. It's a strange obsession. It definitely gets in the way of being cool, although I've always been determined to somehow be both.

That story suggested to me that we ultimately transcend labels. If our goal is to emulate not just prophets but God Himself, then perhaps our goal should also be to transcend labels.

For a long time, I took that too far. I refused to call myself Muslim because I thought that wasn't my responsibility. I thought that was for God to decide, or maybe history to decide.

But eventually I encountered the same forces David described. I realized it was the Islamophobes, along with oppressive forces within the Muslim world, who had largely taken ownership of defining what Islam meant.

Ironically, many of the same people the Prophet Muhammad opposed became the ones who spread Islam after his death, and the message became distorted remarkably quickly.

The more I read the Qur'an, and honestly the Bible as well, the more I felt compelled to reclaim that message. What I found was something radically anti-empire and radically pro-human.

Eventually I realized I couldn't challenge those distortions without entering the conversation myself. That meant claiming the label "Muslim," proudly, even if my understanding of that word is probably much broader than many people expect.

Why Staying Matters More Than Leaving

David Dark: I'll throw in something I've heard before: you have to hate a tradition in order to love it properly.

I think about that often. I want to stand inside this tradition while also struggling with it. I can say "Christianity," but what I really mean is beloved community, because I don't believe God is Christian. One of our biggest problems is that people assume that's what Christianity itself claims.

I want to be true to this tradition. I am an adherent, a recipient, and hopefully a faithful practitioner of it.

Esteban Gast: I think something both of you share is that you've become frustrated with your traditions, yet you've chosen to stay. Walk me through that. Misha, you went through a period of saying, "I'm not this," before eventually saying, "Actually, I am."

What compelled you to stay? If you have to hate a tradition to love it, what made you love it enough to keep wrestling with it?

Misha Euceph: For me, it's the Qur'an. I just think it's incredibly beautiful.

The way I think about Islam is actually very simple. Islam means surrender. To be Muslim is simply to be on the path of surrendering. And the Qur'an is a proclamation. I believe it's a divine message encoded into the DNA of the universe, which means every one of us can arrive at that message, with or without the Qur'an itself. But it remains an extraordinary aid that comes from my tradition.

Even during the years when I called myself an atheist or culturally Muslim, I could never let go of the book. It always felt like a puzzle I needed to solve.

I've returned to that puzzle over and over again because it gives me a framework for wrestling with the human condition. It gives me a language that resonates with me. For someone else it may be something entirely different, but that's the tether that kept bringing me back to Islam, to spirituality, and to my own moral framework.

Esteban Gast: Would you define that yearning to solve the puzzle as God? Is that itself a divine yearning, or is that simply the way Misha Euceph happens to be wired?

Misha Euceph: I think all of our yearnings are divine.

This goes back to David's larger point that there really isn't a separation between the sacred and everything else. I know there's a lot happening right now around Christian nationalism, and that's a real problem. But I also don't believe it's actually possible to separate church and state, or church and anything else.

The idea that church is simply something you do one day a week instead of something that shapes every part of your existence strikes me as absurd. I think everything is spiritual. We simply pretend otherwise.

Learning Across Traditions Without Losing Your Own

David Dark: For me, it comes back to the Bible.

I do think of it as the Word of God. I also think of it as the composition notebook of a centuries-long caravan of asylum seekers. It's both.

I love reading it. I love trying to remain faithful to the tradition as I understand it.

James Joyce was once asked when he stopped being Catholic. He supposedly replied, "You'll have to ask them." I've always loved that answer because it captures how I feel. I'm still trying to remain faithful to what is true and transcendent.

The world seems charged with the grandeur of God.

Sometimes people from my evangelical background talk about having a "personal relationship with God." I actually don't think it's possible not to be in relationship with God. I think we're all children of God. Some of us may simply be more estranged from that love than others. And that love can't be separated from love of neighbor.

I won't give this tradition up. If you were raised on the Bible, you learn not to back down to anybody. I'm committed to this tradition, and it's important not to let yourself be pushed out of the conversation or allow someone else to define it for you. These sacred witnesses are worth defending.

Misha Euceph: Can I build on that?

One thing that's changed for me is how I think about spirituality itself.

For most of my life I was taught that life is a test. Lately I've started thinking that life is actually a puzzle. And not only a puzzle, but one that none of us can solve alone.

There's that famous Rumi poem about people standing in a dark room, each touching a different part of an elephant. One person thinks it's a rope. Another thinks it's a tree. Another thinks it's a wall. Only when the lights come on do they realize they're all describing the same elephant.

Incidentally, Rumi was deeply rooted in Islam. There's a wonderful New Yorker essay by Rozina Ali called Rumi Was a Muslim that talks about how often the Qur'anic roots of his work get erased.

The point of that poem is that if everyone had simply shared what they were experiencing, they might have understood the elephant much sooner.

I've come to believe something similar. I've learned as much about Islam from Buddhism as I have from Islam itself. There's an incredible book called The Tao of Islam that I highly recommend.

I've realized I learn far more from people who faithfully pursue their own traditions than I do from trying to convince them to adopt mine.

If all of us pursue our traditions with integrity, humility, and openness, and then share what we've learned, we begin piecing together something much larger than any one tradition can offer on its own.

If we listen to the sacred witnesses of the past, to one another, to our children, and to our contemporaries, maybe together we begin to glimpse a fuller picture of the divine.

When Religion Becomes Branding

Esteban Gast: Let's bring this into the present moment.

Both of you have suggested that distorted versions of your traditions have been marketed incredibly successfully. Even having a panel like this, where we say, "We're going to hear from a Christian and a Muslim," already carries assumptions.

David, you're writing a book about U2. That's a kind of marketing. So I'm curious: are both of you consciously thinking about how to market your understanding of your own faith tradition?

David Dark: Let me tell you a quick story.

I was at a dinner party in London when the doorbell rang. My friend said, "I forgot to tell you. Brian Eno is coming."

Brian Eno asked what I taught, and I told him I teach religion and science fiction.

He said, "I've wanted to ask someone this for years. Is religion just art?"

I said, "Kind of."

I define religion as perceived necessity, because I think there is good religion and bad religion, true religion and false religion.

The most heavily armed and well-funded religion in human history is empire. Empire demands human sacrifice. It even demands the sacrifice of a habitable planet.

Bad religion is empire.

Good religion, like good art, remembers where empire dismembers. Good religion integrates where empire disintegrates.

When I write about U2, I'm lifting up what I believe is a sacred artistic witness. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't really on my radar until I heard "Pride (In the Name of Love)." I grew up in the MTV generation. I literally can't explain myself apart from U2 and witnesses like that.

So yes, I'm always trying to amplify what I believe are righteous witnesses among us.

Rebranding a Tradition Without Losing Its Meaning

Misha Euceph: I've thought about this very consciously. It sounds a little perverse, but I think it's an important task.

I've often felt that Islam doesn't need a Reformation. It needs a rebrand.

When I first started my series Qur'an Book Club during COVID in August of 2020, I remember thinking carefully about something as simple as the logo. Was it going to use the same geometric patterns people associate with an ancient religious tradition? Was it going to be green and gold?

Instead, I chose rainbow colors. The logo was animated. It looked more like something from The Simpsons than something people would associate with sacred texts.

That branding choice mattered.

I believe Islam was always meant to be the people's religion. Somewhere along the way, that was taken from ordinary people and became the religion of power.

I'm just a regular person. I have every right to talk about these things. I curse in everyday life, so when I talk about religion, sometimes I curse there too. That may offend people, but I actually think all of that is part of the branding.

Honestly, I think we just need more hot girls talking about Islam.

We have too many old men with long beards speaking in one particular register about a tradition that was always meant to belong to everyone.

The Qur'an was revealed in Arabic so ordinary people could understand it. It was revealed orally. It came through poetry because poetry was the language of the people.

It was always meant to be accessible.

So I think we simply need more ordinary people talking about it. I'm trying to be one of those people while preserving my own ordinary-ness. Sometimes that may not look especially sacred, but I actually think that's part of the work.

David Dark: I've got to throw this in.

Bad religion can become the opiate of the masses.

True religion becomes the poetry of the people.

What Religion Is Still For

Esteban Gast: Last question.

I know I'm cheating because this is a huge question, but answer it in ten seconds or less. Make it a tweet.

Where do we go from here? What work should religion be doing today? And I'd especially love your thoughts for people who don't consider themselves religious but can still sense that something about the way we're living isn't right.

Misha Euceph: Who's "we"?

Esteban Gast: Concerned Americans. Or really anyone who can feel that this isn't the way we're supposed to be living.

Misha Euceph: I actually think there are a few concrete things everyone can do.

Become familiar with the religious tradition you come from, or the one you're drawn toward. Read the texts.

It's time to reclaim our stories and our symbols and use them the way they were originally meant to be used.

Jesus was a revolutionary who flipped tables.

Muhammad was an orphan, an exile, an immigrant who challenged patriarchy and oligarchy.

Moses stood against slavery.

Mary was, for all practical purposes, a single mother.

When we look at ICE raids, what's happening in Gaza, or the abuses of political power today, those symbols still matter because they're eternal.

We have these ancient stories that continue speaking to the human soul.

Learning what they actually stand for, and knowing the texts well enough to speak from them, takes the power back.

A lot of people are using these symbols without really understanding them. Once you begin speaking from actual knowledge, much of that power evaporates.

So I think the most practical thing we can do is arm ourselves with knowledge. Read the texts. Learn the stories. Reclaim the symbols.

An Imagery of Infinite Possibility

David Dark: Daniel Berrigan once said, "Stand where you must stand. Be human there."

That's the work. Be who you are, where you are, when you are. Each of us has different circumstances and different responsibilities.

I'll close with Reverend James Lawson.

He taught my nonviolence course at Vanderbilt. He pastored here in Los Angeles. He invited Dr. King to Memphis during the sanitation workers' strike. He trained John Lewis in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins.

Before those sit-ins, every student signed a pledge committing not to retaliate when they were insulted, spat upon, threatened, or assaulted.

Lawson's job wasn't only to remind the students of that commitment. He also told the surrounding crowd, "If you punch them, they're committed not to punch you back."

Think about what that says regarding courage and cowardice.

One day, a man pushed through the crowd wearing a leather jacket. He spat directly in Lawson's face and called him the N-word.

As the spit rolled down his face, Lawson calmly looked at him and asked, "Do you happen to have a handkerchief I could borrow?"

The man, almost without thinking, handed him one.

Lawson wiped his face, looked over, and asked, "Is that your motorcycle?"

The man said yes.

Lawson asked, "What's the horsepower?"

They simply started talking.

Eventually the man asked, "Is there anything I can do to help you people with what you're doing?"

He had been completely disarmed.

Now, to be clear, Lawson admitted the handkerchief strategy didn't always work.

But after hearing him tell that story, I raised my hand and asked, "How do you become the kind of person to whom it would even occur to ask for a handkerchief?"

He said:

"What you have to do is keep in your mind an imagery of infinite possibility."

That doesn't sound easy.

But it feels like something profoundly poetic. Prophetic. An act of disciplined imagination.

So I'll leave you with Daniel Berrigan's words:

Stand where you must stand.

Be human there.

Closing Thoughts

CJ Casciotta: Thanks so much for listening.

If these conversations resonate with you, you can explore more episodes, writing, and ideas at notes.reculture.tv.

And if you'd like to learn more about Reculture, our sense-making studio focused on brand, culture, and media advisory, you can find us at reculture.tv.