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Yeah you right: happy Mardi Gras, everyone! In most American locales, this past Tuesday was just another dreary, winter-ish affair, but in my native New Orleans, carnival rides again.

For your humble preacher, Tuesday was a workday, but I still managed to steal away with a friend to a lunch break at the Khyber Pass Pub in Old City, where a special-for-Mardi Gras muffuletta awaited me. Then beignets at Reading Terminal Market, plus a Fat Tuesday feast at Casa Angehr that evening with a bunch of other Liberti pastors. It felt quite early when the morning of Ash Wednesday had broken upon your boy.

Even though New Orleans headlines the Mardi Gras scene here stateside, you’ll find similar expressions in places as far away as Brazil (“Carnivale”) and Bavaria (“Fassenacht”). These different strands share the same DNA: as the solemn season of Lent approaches—when typically Christians will abstain from various goods for the sake of spiritual obeisance—you may as well blow of some steam ahead of time. Before Ash Wednesday falls Fat Tuesday (or “Mardi Gras” in French).

At first glance, then, Mardi Gras serves as the irreligious yin to Lent’s pious yang. But that’s not the whole story. I was interested during my 2018 sabbatical to learn from Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age that the roots of Mardi Gras/carnival possess a different provenance than I had otherwise recognized.

During the Middle Ages in Europe, Taylor observes, the Roman Catholic Church perpetuated and animated the “social imaginary” of a supercharged moral order to reality in which God by his mighty power holds at bay the forces of chaos and evil (Satan, demons) that nevertheless vie against the right and good ordo seclorum. Concomitant to this divinely sustained cosmos was a highly codified social structure maintained by the church itself.

Into this social imaginary: enter carnival! Periodically, and more often than just once a year, European communities and towns would host carnival periods when the regular social order was intentionally upended and mocked. For a time, people would swap genders, sexually transgress, and engage in violence; the village idiots would be made kings for a day, and the parties would last all night.

No one disagrees that these carnivals occurred, but there are various theories as to why. For example, although carnival often took aim at religious and ecclesial order, why did the priests themselves regularly endorse it? If carnivals were basically state- and church-sanctioned, what was their social function?

Opinions on this question vary, but it seems that the bottom line is that somehow carnival served to buttress the vision of a Christian order to the universe by giving occasional outlet to its antithesis. Taylor writes:
The general phenomenon [of carnival] is a sense of the necessity of anti-structure. All codes need to be countervailed, sometimes even swamped in their negation, on pain of rigidity, enervation, the atrophy of social cohesion, blindness, perhaps ultimately self-destruction. Both the tension between temporal and spiritual, and the existence of carnival and other rights of reversal, show that this sense used to be very alive in Latin Christendom (50).
In other words, carnival was irreligious and also deeply religious at the same time. Paradox!

Now, please don’t draw the wrong conclusions here. I’m not endorsing wantonness on Mardi Gras (or any other day), nor do I think personally that I did anything particularly on Tuesday for which I’d need to repent, my “regular” sin patterns notwithstanding. Still, if we consider Mardi Gras from a historical vantage point, there may be more to letting the bon temps rouller than meets the eye.

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