Photo by Stephen Mease on Unsplash. Taylor Swift performing at Gillette Stadium in May 2023 as part of the US Era’s Tour.
As a teenager, I often had intense religious experiences. I wasn’t yet a Christian, but I had a sense that God was there. My school bus stop was near my house in a leafy suburb without proper footpaths. The gum trees would creak in the wind and when I sang the leaves would swish together like a thousand tiny hands clapping. It felt like God was listening and telling me he liked my voice.
Fiona Apple, the Beatles and Coming to Christ
How do we explain these experiences of faith, belief, or ecstatic joy without a clear confession of Jesus as Lord and saviour first? I became a Christian four years later and I look back on those many intimate moments with God, tugging at me, gently, as though on a silver thread attached to my heart. A loving, gentle, irresistible call towards him.
The night before I became a Christian I was at a party, the only sober person there, clutching the Bible I had started taking everywhere. By midnight, my friends were asleep, collapsed on couches and floors amidst the detritus. I sat awake, watching Rage, a music video programme on TV, when Fiona Apple’s cover of the Beatles classic “Across the Universe” burst into the room. Tears filled my eyes as she sang “nothing’s gonna’ change my world.” I got up off the couch and went to tap on the window of a Christian friend who I knew would tell me what was next.
Tears and Taylor Swift
Music, lyrics, and emotion were the common grace that God used to draw me to him, out of darkness and into his light. I’ve been attracted to secular music as a vehicle of the joy that Christ has brought me ever since. But I didn’t discover Taylor Swift until 2023. I mean, I knew she existed. I knew there were concerts and Swifties and broken ticketing platforms. I knew there were glitter and bracelets. I had friends and colleagues who went on about her, but I thought it was the same kind of delight they took in Britney Spears, that icon of sparkling pop culture.
Then in 2023 I had a deep, private grief that I could only share with a small group of people. The pain was debilitating, I lost 6 kgs and had to remind myself to eat. I got into a habit of scheduling daily “crying playlists” to relieve stress. My driving glasses were covered in salt spray from my tears, and I stopped wearing eye make-up.
On one occasion when my playlist ended, Spotify queued up “cardigan” from Taylor Swift’s lockdown album folklore. I still remember the exact moment when the first soft piano tones fell into my ears. It was like God had sent a common grace missive straight to my shattered heart. I listened to that album repeatedly for months after and found it the exact type of comfort I needed.
Researching the Taylor Swift Experience
I’ve spent the last three months researching the experience of the Taylor Swift fandom through the lenses of philosopher Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and affect theorist Lauren Berlant’s “intimate publics.” I have decided they’re two sides of the same coin. They describe the experience of transcendence from two different perspectives.
Charles Taylor uses the term “horizontal” transcendence to mean an ecstatic experience that is profound but not otherworldly, while vertical transcendence connects to the divine. Mike Cosper describes Charles Taylor’s separation between the material world and the spiritual this way:
Imagine it like a dome. Everything inside the dome is the realm of immanence; outside is the realm of transcendence. People whose imaginations are formed by life in a secular age bump their heads on the ceiling of the dome when they veer near ideas that invoke transcendence, be they religious, moral, or aesthetic.
Thus, Taylor Swift fans in my view are having an experience in which they bump up against the dome of usual experience. It is not ours to judge whether they are experiencing vertical or horizontal transcendence.
Anthony Steinbock used the term “givenness” to describe lived experience of “verticality.” He argues the spiritual experience of mystics such as St Theresa of Avila are evidence of such lived experience. He was uncomfortable with horizontal transcendence and wrote “… if our society and ecosystems are in disarray and in turmoil, it is because our relations to the vertical dimensions of experience are in disarray and in turmoil.”
Steinbock described what Taylor called “the malaise of immanence”, that feeling of existential dread that comes from being in a secular world. Swifties are also feeling that malaise, the sorrow of a breakup, the nostalgia of remembering a childhood friend, the rage of being ignored, but they have the consolation of sharing it with Swift.
Affect Theory and Belonging
Affect theory studies emotion as an internal and external influence. Affect theory studies how emotion shapes political discourse and the people we choose to connect with. Affect is why we don’t always have rational reasons for our behavior and beliefs, sometimes we’re just captured by the emotion of something.
Lauren Berlant is an affect theorist who developed the concept of an “intimate public.” An intimate public is a liminal social and emotional space that we occupy when we feel connected to it. Berlant wrote about these spaces before Swifties would come to be the perfect example of “women’s culture”:
“Women’s culture” is one of the many flourishing intimate publics in the United States. An intimate public operates when a market opens up to…consumers, claiming to circulate texts and things that express those people’s particular core interests and desires.
Swifties, in their connection with both Swift and each other, experience a communal intimacy which is church-like.
Welcome to the Swiftie Church
Fans of Taylor Swift feel seen and understood, the power of an intimate public is that concert goers in a crowd of 100,000 people feel personally connected to Swift. Journalist Leigh Sales described her experience at a Swift concert in Melbourne this way:
Swift is somehow you alone in your bedroom as a kid, singing into your hairbrush… even though you’re some suburban schlub from Australia and she’s on stage in front of 100,000 people and SHE’S TAYLOR FREAKING SWIFT
In The Summer I turned Swiftie, Summerhill wrote
…she led us on a journey through her—our—eras. “Welcome to church,” a friend replied to my Instagram stories from the show. In this faith, each glance, dress, and word Swift selects is deeply significant.
What are we as Christians to make of these church-like experiences in the modern concert experience?
The Common Grace of Experience
A few weeks back, I was talking to the electrician who contracts at the theological college where I work. I explained the article I was working on and that I was trying to argue that being a Swiftie was a religious experience. He needed no convincing, saying “well there’s more people going to her concerts than to church these days.”
Chatting with a philosophy-inclined theological student, I asked how we can know that churchgoers are meeting with Jesus and not just having a horizontal transcendent experience of liturgy, music, or fellowship. He responded that we can’t know, we can only pray they meet Jesus at church.
Common grace is something available to all humans made in God’s image, special grace is the mercy of Christ supernaturally entering our material worlds. Taylor Swift’s music speaks deeply to people made in God’s image, making them feel seen, heard, and included – in this it can be as with other music an experience of common grace. I pray that Swifties may also receive the special grace of Christ.
Dr Amy Isham is the Library Manager at The Catholic Theological College in Melbourne. Amy has a doctorate in Leadership, is a CPX Associate, and is on the Board of Publica.
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