Theological notes on Severance

On bodies, souls, humanness, and idolatry

Fellow Pilgrims,

First, big news here! My new book Why I Am Protestant is available for preorder!

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Now, let’s talk Severance.

The season 2 finale of the Emmy winning series aired last Friday on Apple TV. In the show, coworkers Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry), Irving (John Turturro), and Helly (Brit Lower) have undergone a procedure called “severance” in order to split their work lives from their personal lives.

At the office, they are “innies,” who know nothing about their “outie” lives or the outside world. The four band together to find out what their sinister employer is really doing.

The rest of this piece contains spoilers for seasons 1 and 2.

After undergoing the severance procedure, Helly wakes up at the office with no idea of who or where she is, presumed a blank slate with no knowledge of or commitments to the outside world.

Let’s set the scene with an awkward dinner party. Two men who have had an “innie” romantic relationship at work meet in the outside world, and outie Burt invites outie Irving to have dinner with him and his insufferable husband, Fields. Both Burt and Irving are aware of their “innie” relationship, but they don’t have any conscious memory of it.

Burt and Fields explain why Burt chose to undergo the severance procedure. Burt says he was “guided” by Jesus, and Irving is taken aback.

Irving: Jesus Christ?

Burt: That’s the one. [laughs]

Burt has a past; he was, “a scoundrel.” Because of this, he believes he will not go to heaven.

It seems that Burt and Fields are Lutherans, and “the church’s stance is that innies are, you know, complete individuals, with souls . . . that can be judged separately from their outie.” An “innie can go to heaven” while their “outie burns.”

So, Burt split himself in two, in the hope that his non-scoundrel innie would be saved and he and Fields could one day be together again. Sort of.

This is . . . an extremely strange conversation.

It’s fairly heavy theological lifting for a mainstream television show (even though the theology is, of course, terrible.) It also says a lot about popular theology and popular understandings of what it means to be human. What shall we make of it?

Burt and Irving at the office.

7 theological notes on Severance

1. First, it’s quite odd—for the sort of progressive Lutherans Burt and Fields would seem to be—to hold such a rigid understanding of heaven and hell. And it seems even odder for them to assume that Burt is damned eternally, with no hope of forgiveness. Any Lutheran pastor worth their salt would answer their concerns, not with a weird theology of severance, but with the gospel of the grace of Jesus Christ, in whom the worst “scoundrel,” no matter their past, can find grace and new life.

2. It’s not clear whether the “church teaching” here is meant to be that of a local church, a denomination, or something broader, but there you go; look at the church forming doctrine about something brand new it doesn’t understand. Rings true.

3. The idea that an innie could be a “complete individual,” endowed with their very own soul reveals something about popular understanding of what it means to be human.

4. According to classic Christian teaching, there really is no such thing as a “complete indivdual,” but there is an understanding of what it means to be human, or to be a whole person, and having a soul would not be enough to cut it. Christian theology holds that a human being is one integral person, composed of a soul and a body together. (And, when Jesus came to dwell with us, he too, took a human body and a human soul.)

   1. Burt believes he has one body and two souls.

   2. But bodies and souls are of one piece. You can’t have a soul without a body, or at least you’re not meant to (Christian theology does suppose that such a separation is possible, and that it happens at death, but it is not a good thing, for death is an enemy, nor is it the final state of the human being, which is reunion of body and soul as one integral person at the resurrection of the dead.)

   3. One body/soul = one person. If Burt has one body and one soul, and humans are meant to be integral body-soul wholes, then his hope for the life to come can only be hope for the integration of his one self.

5. The “church” in Severance understands “soul” to mean something like “a discrete consciousness.” I think souls probably are related to consciousnesses, but Christian faith has to insist that it’s damaging and reductive to equate soul and consciousness. To “have” a soul is to be a spiritual creature. And a soul is probably not, exactly, a thing one can have anyway. A soul is who one is, in the integrity of one’s bodily and spiritual reality.

6. In the world of Severance, a body is a mere container for a consciousness. Like those who believe they could “download” their minds into a computer and still be themselves, the understanding at Burt’s dinner table radically discounts the importance of the body to being human. There’s nothing here of muscle memory or the brain-gut connection, nothing of scars and of the way the Body Keeps the Score. And there’s nothing of the way that bodies are, for us humans, irreducibly the way we relate to one other.

7. And this is what makes the show so fun. Even here, at the close of season 2, we’re seeing characters forced to reckon with such a reductionist account of the person. How bizarre that Fields and Burt think they could be together in heaven, when the “individuals” who would meet in a such a heaven would be an innie and an outie who have never met one another before, have no shared memories or past relationship. If, in their heaven, they don’t have bodies, I can’t imagine how these two floating consciousnesses could possibly recognize each other. In their hope that they could be together in this heaven, Burt and Fields are trading on a deep and true assumption that one body = one person. Who knows where season 3 will go, but I’d love to see these hints picked up and played out as characters think about “reintegration.”

Mark, Dylan, Irving, and Helly form a rebellious community at the office.

The corporation in the show is clearly a religion of its own, and of course, Severance is about the evil of insatiable corporate greed, demanding full allegiance of its people, asking only that we pimp ourselves out to it, body and soul. It’s about idolatry, and the ways false gods devour. I have no doubt season 3 will take us further into that mess.

Grace & peace,

BFJ

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If you want to think more about bodies and human nature, John Cooper’s Body, Soul & Life Everlasting is marked down to $2.99 on kindle, as of posting.

Also, check out Kelly Kapic’s You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News.

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