“Why Are Millennials and Gen Z So Obsessed With Death?” Vice News asked. The signs are all around: “GriefTok” is popular on TikTok and “Tombstone Tourism” is now a thing.
Commentators blame the fascination with death on the pandemic, or the aging population, or the constant exposure to foreign wars and catastrophes on social media. But I am with St. Paul: I blame the human condition, and the need for baptism.
Fascination with death is nothing new.
Today’s young people indulge in a “pop culture of death,” wearing t-shirts with macabre figures on them, posting skull stickers on their trucks, killing digital people in clouds of digital blood on screens, or following real deaths on true crime podcasts.
But they are not unique in this. Death has been a fascination from the ancient mystery cults to Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball tour — and it has been sensationalized in literature from Odysseus’ trip to the underworld to the horror movie resurgence.
When I was a teenager, I listened to music about death too — music from my parents’ day. My favorites included Bob Dylan’s first album, featuring “Fixin’ to Die,” “In My Time of Dying,” and “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean;” and Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence, featuring “A Most Peculiar Man,” “Leaves That Are Green (Turn to Brown)” and “Richard Cory.”
I think teens in affluent societies are safe and secure enough that they have space to indulge thoughts of death. Only later, when we experience loss and face our own mortality, does death stop being fun to think about.
Baptism takes on this fascination with death head on.
When I was a teen, the only baptism I ever witnessed was the one in the movie The Godfather.
The movie’s baptism scene has been called anti-Catholic with good reason, but my teenage brain saw a message about baptism I could learn no other way. The movie shows the Godfather Michael Corleone rejecting “Satan … and all his works … and all his pomps” in a beautiful Catholic church intercut with footage of his hitmen stalking and killing his foes. A rival don drops with each “I do.”
I saw the hypocrisy, for sure, but I also saw that, for the Corleones, the baptizing was as important as the killing — and that the world of sin these people epitomize is what makes the baptism necessary.
You could as easily intercut footage of anyone’s baptism with jarring scenes of their sins. Or, since those sins are responsible for Christ’s death, you could intercut any baptismal scene with images of Christ being stalked and killed by his foes.
In a totally unintentional way, that movie says something true about St. Paul’s baptismal theology.
You could say that every one of us is born into a crime family marred by sin, and baptism is our way out.
“You are slaves of the one you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness,” says St. Paul.
Christ is the man who embraces death and eternal life -- both -- in his person, the way we as teens only imagined we did.
He is the one who said, “I have the authority to lay my life down and take it up again.” He is the “one who was pierced” -- the crucified one, but also “the resurrection and the life.”
Baptism is what applies his virtues to our lives. “We know that our old self was crucified with him, so that our sinful body might be done away with, that we might no longer be in slavery to sin,” says St. Paul.
Christians shouldn’t shy away from admitting that death is fascinating, and scary.
It certainly was for St. Paul — and Jesus. But the faith they left us has the power to take that fascination with death and do something positive with it: Attach it to the one whose horrifying death means death need no longer horrify us.
As St. Paul put it, “Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.”
