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‘Manning Fireworks’: The Poetics of Beige Catholicism

October 11, 2024

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MJ Lenderman has enjoyed a meteoric rise since 2020 as a major figure in underground indie rock. Since starting out working at an ice cream shop to pay his bills, he has established himself as a sought-after songwriter and collaborator for many celebrated indie artists and, through his other band Wednesday, achieved a new presence in American music culture for casual, gritty alt rock. Lenderman released his most recent solo record, Manning Fireworks, on September 6 to great acclaim from critics. His laid-back yet incisive songs have garnered just comparisons with the work of giants in early lo-fi rock including Stephen Malkmus, David Berman, Bill Callahan, and Jason Molina. Manning Fireworks hearkens back particularly to Neil Young, seasoned as it is with faint accoutrements inherited from post-sixties Americana.

Lenderman’s lyrics are sarcastic, pedestrian, and crudely mundane. He couches meditations on guilt, self-loathing, materialism, and heartbreak in references to Lightning McQueen, Kahlua shooters, Apple watches, and half-mast McDonald’s flags, attempting a kind of exegesis of commonplaces for those coming of age in the 2020s.

What sticks out like a sore thumb in these songs, and not because they are exegetical, are the constant references to Roman Catholicism. Lenderman grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, not far from the present author’s own upbringing. He attended parochial school, and his family went to Sunday Mass frequently. Lenderman served as an altar boy and considered the priesthood for a short time, though he now admits that the main allure behind the priesthood was rather fickle: “I guess I learned that the Church provided a house for the priest. That was enough to sell me.” This fleeting fascination later supplied fodder for a popular Lenderman song titled “Catholic Priest”:

Used to believe
I wanted to be
A Catholic priest
I would never have to worry
About the girls tryin’ to break my heart

All expenses paid
Yeah I’d have it made
The house would come furnished
Yeah I’d have it made

Stories of Catholic childhood such as Lenderman’s result so frequently in Catholicism being reduced to ephemera, ephemera which he has employed deftly into his ballads of contemporary plebeian consciousness. This provides yet another lucid view into why people in their twenties and thirties look back on the Catholic faith as nothing more than a memory with no import whatsoever for their lives, because beige Catholicism per se yields that result. Lenderman’s music suggests clearly that he, as most Catholics of recent decades, received a watered-down catechesis; or worse, the catechesis itself may not even have been watered down, but the Catholic community surrounding him lived out that catechesis in a watered-down manner at best. All the strangeness and grandeur of Catholic living was, by all accounts, an empty show compared to the real-time ekklesia. The centrality of liturgy and sacraments? Not if it looks like what many witness on Sunday mornings and if the confessional is only open for one hour every week. The “glories of divine grace,” to use Matthias Scheeben’s term? An inaccessible reality reserved for the try-hards with little else to concern them. Angels and saints? Mere children’s stories and figments of imagination that mature adults reject. Loving neighbors as oneself? Perhaps, but what does that have to do with believing in God when everyone outside the Church already knows they ought to be charitable?

Beige Catholicism has nothing to instill in its students other than its own insecurity and anxiety.

If any of these sound familiar, then beige Catholicism has made its appearance. What, then, does one do with these shallow concepts of revealed religion? The historical answer has been to either just leave them behind or put them to use as metaphors or symbols for the more apparently glaring issues at hand in daily living: finding love, pondering what career to follow, rubbing salt in the wound of one’s own self-pity.

Consider “Joker Lips,” the second track off the record, which details an exercise in lamenting such a self-conception as good for nothing. Reflecting on his lack of prospects, Lenderman jests at a theoretically possible but nigh improbable career for every male Catholic: “Please don’t laugh, only half of what I said was a joke / Every Catholic knows he could’ve been Pope.”

The song “Rudolph” follows next, in which Lenderman peddles the depleted conception of priesthood and the vocation to chastity buttressed by nought but a sentiment of “Father What-a-Waste.” He enters the psyche of an imagined seminarian addressing a would-be girlfriend:

How many roads must a man
Walk down ’til he learns
He’s just a jerk who flirts
With the clergy nurse ’til it burns

I wouldn’t be in the seminary
If I could be with you

The title track follows a man much like the Bible salesman of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” one who weaponizes the Word to take advantage of unknowing victims, “Sneakin’ backstage to hound the girls in the circus.” Lenderman’s description of the man’s own relationship with the Bible comes closest to a personal address of the Catholic religion:

You’ve opened the Bible in a public place
You’ve opened the Bible to the very first page
And one of these days, it will all end
Your tired approach to original sin

Beige Catholicism is insecure Catholicism. It belies confidence in presenting the splendor of the faith in a manner that turns out to be deflated and flattened. Its beigeness originates in the same fear that afflicted Adam and Eve in the Garden, sewing fig leaves on its attempts at evangelization so that it might hide its doubts in the wholeness of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. But that fear has failed to correct the “tired approach,” which still remains as one of the chief motives for becoming a “none.” In its conventional treatment as an archaic principle used to coerce people to stay in the safety of the Church at the risk of damnation, original sin—a sine qua non of Catholic belief—simply cannot appeal to youth already deprived of positive meaning, sick with depression, and confined to a safe and sanitized society. In a word, beige Catholicism has nothing to instill in its students other than its own insecurity and anxiety.

Hence arises the soul of the characters articulated by Lenderman in Manning Fireworks. Lenderman’s own perspective on the record, given in an interview with The Guardian, reflects this effect: “The fact that so many of his songs tap into a visceral sense of shame and embarrassment is ‘the Catholic lingering in me.’” Truly, MJ Lenderman has made a sobering account of the results of this real, day-to-day lingering Catholicism, because that Catholicism, for so many, has only given something to be ashamed and embarrassed about. For an aspiring evangelist in 2024, Manning Fireworks offers a via negativa, a place to incline the ear of the heart to those who, perhaps more than anyone else, need to be offered a voice and room to air their grievances.