Professor Christine Helmer shares how Davóne Tines’s MASS inspired her Introduction to Christianity course, through the interplay of culture, music, theology, history, and politics

Professor Christine Helmer and bass-baritone Davóne TinesLeft to right: Professor Christine Helmer and bass-baritone Davóne Tines

In this article by Christine Helmer, Professor of German and Religious Studies, she shares how Davóne Tines’s MASS inspired her Introduction to Christianity course. Helmer explains how his performance interweaves culture, music, theology, history, and politics, and communicates “new possibilities of liberation and compassion, peace and justice.” In Tines’s musical explorations, he brings a queer and Black perspective that could inspire the future of classical music for diverse generations, explains Helmer. So inspired, Helmer requested if Tines’s recital could be brought to Northwestern, and now he will perform his original work, Recital No. 1: MASS at Northwestern on March 29, and also offer a lecture with a Q&A session on March 30.

Tine’s Mass reflects the “African American experience while highlighting what all humans share in common. Using Caroline Shaw’s miniature Mass (a reimagined Latin service created especially for Tines) as a framework, the experience interweaves music from the Western European classical tradition, African American spirituals, and contemporary compositions.”

By Christine Helmer

For a long time, I wanted to teach the Introduction to Christianity course at Northwestern University. The course is generally offered once a year in the Department of Religious Studies, alongside introductions to other religions, such as Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism. These courses are fundamental to the department’s work. They offer Northwestern undergraduates the opportunity to approach religious traditions using the historical, critical, socio-cultural, existential, and conceptual tools of the modern study of religion. They attract numerous students: some with family backgrounds in the religion that is being taught, some from other religious backgrounds, some with no religious background, others curious about religion as a dimension of human culture, and others taking it for distribution credit.

The pedagogical challenge is how to frame the respective religion, in my case Christianity, in such a way as to do critical justice to its historical, cultural, and theological diversity accumulated over millennia and around the globe in the ten short weeks of the Northwestern academic quarter. How to represent the ideas and practices of a religious world without reducing them to bullet points; to construct a timeline without flattening adjacent and synchronous developments; identify the traumas inflicted by power; be inspired by the transcendent joys these religions offer; and at the same time introducing students to the modern study of religion?

Christianity did not begin as a religion (few religions did). Jesus was a Jew, born in Bethlehem, who learned carpentry from his father in Nazareth, and devoted the last years of his short life to announcing the imminent advent of something he called “the kingdom of God.” He followed in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, pointing to the arrival of an era characterized by “love of neighbor” rather than control over them. The man Jesus offered anticipations of this new community by healing the sick, exorcising demons, and raising the dead. Jesus’ teachings—and the size of the crowds coming to hear him—attracted the anxious attention of the powerful, who were determined to put an end to the threat they saw in him, and to their own dominance. He was betrayed by a close friend and crucified under Roman law, a horrific method of execution reserved for those guilty of treason. Yet news of what his followers experienced as his resurrection soon spread around the Mediterranean basin. The Roman emperor Constantine pronounced Christianity the dominant religion of his empire, but even in this triumphalist and imperial instantiation, the faith that rose from the stories about Jesus’s life and death never lost its subversive potential. The disinherited, as African American theologian Howard Thurman wrote, have insistently in many different societies claimed the crucified Jesus as their comfort and strength.

How could I teach Christianity, in all its tragedy, irony, violence, and hope to Northwestern students, many of whom identify with one of the different Christian denominations, others curious about this dominant religion, and others fascinated by the strange prophet who wandered around Galilee preaching to the lost and searching?

On November 15, 2021, I came across an article in the New Yorker and I finally knew how I could do it. The article, written by music critic Alex Ross, was titled “Davóne Tines is Changing What it Means to be a Classical Singer”? Tines brings to his musical explorations a queer and Black perspective, contesting the dominant whiteness of so much classical music. If Western classical music is to have a global future reaching new and diverse generations, it must change, and Tines seemed to me to be pointing out the direction it might go. Ross’s article, however, did not note the religious dimension of Tines’s work that caught my attention.

At Ravinia, in Highland Park, Illinois, in the summer of 2021, Tines premiered a new work, MASS. This is his composition, a curation of different songs framed by what is called the Ordinary of the Mass, which comprises the parts of the liturgy that are sung or spoken in Latin or the vernacular in Roman Catholic churches and some Protestant churches. Yet Tines’s MASS does not pay homage to centuries of ecclesial tradition and clerical power. It is subversive. Tines is a layman (not an ordained priest) who participates in what Christian theologians call the “priesthood of all believers.” He takes up the Mass and remakes it with his own experiences—inherited, cultural, and personal—deeply rooted in his identity as a Black gay man in contemporary America.

Inspired by his work, I contacted the concert department of Northwestern University with a request to invite Davóne Tines to Northwestern. He will now be performing Recital No. 1: Mass at Northwestern on March 29 and also offer a lecture with a Q&A session on March 30. Tines’s MASS also inspired me to teach the introduction to Christianity course this past winter quarter of 2023.

Tines uses the frame of the Ordinary but transforms its elements into extraordinary religious, spiritual, and theological expressions. The Kyrie Eleison (Lord, have mercy) becomes the cry of the disinherited to the crucified One who comforts with mercy and establishes justice. The Agnus Dei (lamb of God) identifies the lynching tree with the cross, as Black theologian James Cone and womanist theologians Eboni Turman Marshall and Kelly Brown Douglas have likewise done. The Credo—the one word that Tines sings—replaces the doctrinal and propositional content of the Christian creed with an aria from J.S. Bach that expresses the desire to bury the dead Jesus. Tines interpellates the Gloria (glory) and Sanctus (holy) which articulate the trinitarian structure of the Christian God with African American spirituals bringing Jesus from the past into present experience, or present into past in the conflation of time that marks the Christian experience of its mortal God. Tines calls his hearers to remember the extraordinary compositional talent of Margaret Bonds, an African American woman, a graduate of Northwestern’s music department, and survivor of its racism at the time. Contemporary composer Caroline Shaw’s “Mass” introduces each liturgical element. Tines concludes MASS with the Benedictus (benediction), the simple three-times-three intonation of one line of the prayer once attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi, “where there is darkness, bring light,” insisting that it is “we” who bring light. This ending demonstrates the revolutionary potential when Christianity is perceived through the lens of Jesus’s own reversal of power into a liberatory “soul force.” Tines mirrors this possibility by insisting that Blackness is the bearer of light in a world in which whiteness tortures and kills. Tines composed another work, “Vigil,” with Igee Dieudonne in memory of Breonna Taylor.

My Introduction to Christianity class became a quarter-long meditation on Tines’s performance and a study of his work that viewed Christianity through his experience of culture, music, theology, history, and politics, and through his dream—one shared by many of us—that the life-giving message of the Jew from Nazareth can be communicated in the present in such a way as to disclose new possibilities of liberation and compassion, peace and justice.