God for the Godless

A postmodern Joan of Arc redefines the sacred

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre really wanted you to watch the opening monologue to their new play I, Joan, until they suddenly didn’t. Last week, the company’s Twitter account shared a clip of the performance by “nonbinary” actress Isobel Thom, who is reimagining Joan of Arc as an LGBT+ icon. The clip was widely reshared and mocked, causing the company to delete it—not just on Twitter, but on their YouTube channel. Of course, nobody told the folks at the Globe that the Internet is forever. Whole or partial copies of the monologue have since sprung up in different places, like the replies here.

As poetry—if one can even call this stuff poetry—it’s atrocious. Here are the first lines:

Trans people are sacred

We are the divine

And we are practicing our divinity

By expressing authenticity

By enjoying our multiplicity

Elevating our humanity

Finding the unity

Hidden inside community

Remembering our collective connectivity

Fuels courageous creativity

Unlocking the blessed spirituality that we all seek

Yeh, this shit’s about to get spiritual

It only gets worse from there. Thom performs the monologue with an insistently obnoxious “street” affect, giving Joan a working-class makeover. She’s energetic and clearly not untalented, but her talent is thoroughly wasted on the script.

Still, the monologue is worth some reflection. Not for its poetic quality, which is nonexistent, but for the pithy way it crystallizes LGBTQ+ ideology as a postmodern religion. The “sacred” and the “divine” are not denied here, because no religion can survive without pouring something into these vessels. That “something,” in this case, is pure expressive individualism. Trans people are “sacred” not because they are made in God’s image, but because God is made in their image.

Of course, Joan 2.0 wants to insist, as the kids say, that she is spiritual, not religious:

Setting aside all religiosity, we’ll focus instead

On more of a… street god, if you will

A god for the queers, and the drunks,

And the beautiful f*ck-ups

A god for the godless

A god for you, if you want, today

Because today is a celebration

It’s a holy Communion for saints and sinners

And everyone in between

What sort of god is this, you might ask? You might recall that Jesus himself had a bit of a reputation as a god for drunks, f*ckups, etc. Yet he doesn’t seem to be in this picture. Why might that be? Perhaps it’s because we are not, in fact, being offered a god for the godless. Rather, this is a god of the godless, by the godless. “We offer you restitution,” Joan goes on to promise on their behalf. “We offer you revolution. We offer you love.” Where “love,” like “god,” is now what “we” make it.

After a short history lesson, Joan’s iconic sacred visions are rewritten like so:

An insignificant life was my destiny

Small, quiet, a nobody from nowhere

A poor farm girl with nothing but a list of duties

And expectations: Work hard, marry a man, bear children

Die quietly.

But I always suspected, secretly, that I might be destined for more

But I hardly dared hope

And then suddenly, a miracle occured

A moment of unexpected divinity, of love

A phwoom! That sudden alignment with creativity Herself

And I’m blessed with a calling,

And with a purpose far greater than my mind can hold alone

I mean clarity and confidence like I have never known

God lit a fire in my belly, and I’m burning

I’m burning, I am burning with possibility

Now, perhaps I should put my cards on the table here and confess that I’m not precisely sure what it was the real Joan of Arc did see in her dreams and visions, or whether they were really the sort of dreams and visions she claimed they were. Not being a Catholic, I don’t have to take a position on the matter. But it must be said that Joan’s account of them was rather more contentful than the experience of a “sudden alignment with creativity Herself.” They were, in fact, extremely religious, in the extremely medieval Catholic sense of the word. St. Michael the Archangel allegedly showed up and had a whole chat with her. I haven’t scored a sit-down with St. Michael for his opinion on this monologue, but I’m fairly confident he would think it’s really gay.

But seriously, this misappropriation is an excellent application of Philip Rieff’s handy, though simplistic schema of human history by representative types: Beginning with the Ancient Greeks, you have “political man,” who finds his identity in the public life of the polis. In the Middle Ages, political man then gives way to “religious man.” Or woman, as case may be. As the political man’s identity is grounded in political activity, so the religious man’s identity is grounded in religious activity—the complete dedication of his life to the service of God and the church.

Moving into the modern era, religious man is displaced by “economic man,” whose sense of self is grounded in wealth creation. Then, finally, there emerges “psychological man,” who is different from all the other men who came before. Where the political, the religious, and even the economic man looked outside themselves for their identity, the psychological man looks within. His is the secret, sacred self.

Obviously, counter-examples can be given to show why Rieff’s framework falls short as a comprehensive analysis, but he’s certainly not wrong on where it ultimately tends. I, Joan perfectly illustrates this. Given Joan of Arc, the religious woman, the postmodern generation has produced Joan, the nonbinary expressive individualist.

Granted, the translation is tempting, given the intensely private nature of Joan’s visions and dreams. Yet, as a religious woman, Joan saw even the waging of war as a religious act, undertaken for God and king and country. She may have been tried for heresy, but she was not a heretic in her own mind. When her accusers attempted to entrap her by asking whether she knew she was in God’s grace (a “yes” would be considered heresy, a “no” would be self-damning), she ingeniously replied that if she wasn’t, she hoped God would put her there, and if she was, she hoped to remain so. Before her death, she asked for a cross and was given one made of sticks, which she tucked in her breast after kissing it. Another cross was held before her dying eyes while her hands were bound.

In I, Joan, this cruciform vision—a vision of suffering, of renunciation—is replaced by a Rousseauian vision “of limitless expansion, of delicious, fluid freedom.” We are not asked to be open to an actual divine revelation. Instead, we are asked to be “open to the infinite.” The world is our vast blank white page to fill. Here, there is no room for a cross. There is no room for the true Joan’s true God.

“Pride began with an uprising,” Thom’s sleeveless shirt reads as she delivers the monologue. Indeed, this is true. More true than psychological man, or woman, will acknowledge.