The Sacrament of Revolution

---

Dom Rottman

28 August 2024

---

Once a year, off some backroads in Northern Kentucky, a small Catholic parish imperializes unkempt campgrounds with tents, stalls, and portable toilets, stocking its decades-old shacks with hundreds of pounds of American meat products, junk food, and beer. Here, people of all classes gather rain or shine for an evening of hot air and a chicken dinner. A perpetually growing single-file line encircles the muddied lawn, containing everyone from retirees to crying children, business owners to overworked college students, gender-questioning cousins to conspiracy-spouting uncles, and everyone in between. The air reeks of light beer and cigarettes, it reverberates with the sound of conversations and awful country covers, and tastes like fried and grilled foods that threaten to ruin your appetite. This is the Catholic Church festival: a weekend-long bacchanalian celebration of drinking and gambling most unbecoming of midwestern sensibilities. The parish would be lucky to see a hundredth of its attendees at mass next weekend.

While my parents were themselves among the other ninety-nine hundredths that did not care for mass, both sides of my family are Catholic, as are many of my childhood and family friends. If I can’t say I grew up in the Church, I at least grew up next to it—inundated enough to recite the mass (well, pre-2011 anyway) and be a regular attendee at a few of these festivals. In my home of greater Cincinnati, they remain so ubiquitous that they ruin suburban traffic every summer weekend. It wasn’t until I took a step back that I realized how bizarre these occasions truly were: whereas every weekend pious churchgoers would engage in a strict, delicate ritual and receive moral instruction, one weekend out of the year not only regular mass attendees, but holiday attendees, even non-attendees, along with their families and entire neighborhoods would participate in almost every vice under the sun in a church-sponsored event. Those who clutch their pearls at tattoos and yoga pants (how satanic!) are happy to have their beers held by their toddlers as they gamble on a fistful of pull-tabs thrown on the ground after losing. Cynically speaking, it’s just a front for a massive fundraiser—but by that logic, so is mass. Why the antinomy?

It’s not like a church festival is anything fundamentally new; feast days have been an occasion for convivial celebration since the Middle Ages—if anything, there were probably more rowdy parties back then. And let’s not forget Carnival and Mardi Gras—secularized though people might pretend them to be, were it not for the Church, they wouldn’t exist at all. The Church has, for centuries, institutionalized celebrations of life where social norms and relations are completely upheaved and inverted, and there is more to this than we realize. The church festival is a tradition which preserves a mechanism of social change and embodies a popular—even democratic—revolutionary spirit.

Anthropologically speaking, festivity and religiosity are inextricably linked. One need only broadly gesture at the ancient festivals conducted in the name of the Greco-Roman Pantheon as ritual celebrations, which, from a wide perspective, are not so different than ritual seasons, dances, or events in Mesoamerica. Christianity is no exception to this link—both the Old and New Testaments contain festive imagery, the Kingdom of Heaven and the end of the world are compared to grand celebratory feasts, and Jesus transforms water into wine as his first miracle in the Gospel of John.¹ The spread of Christendom in late antiquity and in the early Middle Ages saw pagan holidays not abolished but subsumed, such as the Germanic traditions of Yuletide and the festival of Sol Invictus on 25 December. If Christianity was responsible for creating any new festivals or feast days, it was likely quite literally late to the party. The point is that festivity itself was never considered to be a serious threat to religious authority, and might even be integral to religious piety. Despite this, from a historical point of view, it would have behooved the Church to crack down on feast days and festivals considering that they coincided with several peasant revolts. Yet the church festival has not vanished, and—while there are less peasant revolts today—they have not necessarily changed in spirit. They have, however, by being relegated to a minor, private affair, been robbed of a meaningful sociopolitical character, to which we now turn.

That peasant revolts and religious festivals tended to coincide already speaks to this sociopolitical character, but this spirit extends to a much larger scale. Festivals both large and small, spontaneous and state-organized, were a common practice during the French and Russian Revolutions. Historians note a dual character of the festival as both an expression of grassroots social liberation and a means of control. A “safety valve” argument, that festivals are just a means of allowing a controlled population to blow off pent up steam,² seems intuitive enough, much like how today’s state holidays are often more looked forward to as a day off (or for increased wages) than a cause for celebration. But the politicization of festivals and holidays comes not from on high but from the popular revolutionary spirit of its celebrants, who in the festival are not merely subjects of a sociopolitical order but participants in sociopolitical life. Recalling our comparison with Mass, we can see how this is phenomenologically true: celebrants of the Eucharist are literally preached to and stand, sit, kneel, and recite doctrine as directed, while festival attendees are free to do and say pretty much whatever they want without being rebuked by the pulpit—which one is more conducive to political organizing? Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a figure celebrated by French revolutionaries, does not emphasize the “carnivalesque” inversion of social relations and good manners, but regardless spoke highly of the festival as a celebration of free men befitting a republic. However, this does not make the inversion—and ultimate subversion—of social relations in a festival any less real or significant. Importantly, rather, it confers on this inversion a popular, democratic character, as opposed to an inversion imposed and conducted by a vanguard party or other revolutionary institution. The creation and recreation of social and political institutions are, seen through the festival, the will of the people, to which even the most rigid and hierarchical institutions are subject (“Every man’s a king and every king’s a clown/Once again it’s topsy turvy day”).

But if history gives credence to the democratic character of festivals between numerous peasant revolts and celebrations by revolutionaries, it gives just as much credence to an authoritarian conclusion. Medieval peasant revolts didn’t stick for long, The French Revolution went towards the Terror and ultimately Napoleon, and the Soviet Union became one of modernity’s most authoritarian institutions. The separation of Church and State splits the difference between a festival’s social and political character and causes the democratic revolutionary spirit to fall in the chasm between them. Festivity as an inversion of social relations is confined to the realm of private affairs, while festivity in the public becomes mere commemoration. The capacity for things to be radically and totally different, to even recognize the capacity that things can be different, is deemed unsuitable for a public sphere which has supposedly resolved social antagonisms. This makes the church festival all the more peculiar. Despite two millennia of movements and transformations both minor and radical, the Church has endured along with its tradition of radical festivity. This capacity for transformation might very well be integral to its health. Even a simple safety valve argument permits the fact that consciousness is utterly unable to stand eternal rigid conformity. Likewise, today’s institutions struggle with maintaining permanent order and are forced—often literally—to permit a break from everyday life. However, vacations are no substitute for transformation and upheaval which festivals both signify and permit; a transformation which in its relegation to a private realm is made insignificant. Even if your local church festival were to break out into a riot, one wonders what demands one could possibly make that would transform the public. The carnivalesque inversion of the church festival has weight only in proportion to the church’s effect on everyday life, which for festival attendees is very little. Still, the fact that one of our oldest and most notorious institutions will permit everything short of heresy as a regular event illustrates the transience of structures and the ultimate foundation of popular power. Today there is an imperative to restore the capacity for sociopolitical transformation to the public sphere where it belongs. We have reason to believe, furthermore, that this restoration must be properly democratic.

---