Heaven Only Knows

Providing a new angle on Christianity: Geez magazine's editor, Will Braun (left), and publisher, Aiden Enns. Photo Gina Mount. Courtesy Geez Magazine.

Your mom might have told you that saying “geez” was a way of sneaking in a curse word through the backdoor. Geez is a cheeky title for a religious magazine, and the editors of this new quarterly got an earful before the first issue even hit the stands in the fall of 2005.

“‘Geez’ is a form of taking Jesus’ name in vain, usually in a whiny, complaining sort of voice,” said one concerned citizen from Sudbury in a letter to the magazine. “My kids would get their mouths washed out with soap if they ever used that word.” In a quintessentially Canadian bit of fair-mindedness, the reader added: “That said, I wish you good success.”

Geez explores the intersections of personal faith and social action, with articles on everything from the theology of dumpster diving (First Commandment: Take only what you need) to tips on constructing a DIY home altar. Published out of Winnipeg without government grants or even church funding, the mag survives on “love money” from family and friends and sweat-of-the-brow toil from its volunteer editors. Geez’s headquarters is a co-op house in the leafy green, granola-belt neighbourhood of Wolseley, where the editors get together to create what they like to call “chicken poop for the soul.”

Aiden Enns, 44, is a self-described urban Anabaptist, a former editor at Adbusters and founder of Buy Nothing Christmas. Will Braun, 33, grew up a Manitoba Mennonite farm boy and is now a market gardener as well as a writer and researcher on environmental issues. Miriam Meinders, a 35-year-old nurse, is in an ongoing dialogue with her “inner Calvinist.” Of churchgoing, she says: “I gave it up for a few years and now I think I’ve finally quit” — almost as though she was talking about smoking.

While the editors and many of the writers at Geez are Christians, readers need not be. As Braun suggests: “We’re writing for people who have some kind of love-hate relationship with religion, as many of us do.” According to the magazine’s mission statement, Geez is for “the over-churched, out-churched, un-churched and maybe even the un-churchable.” This far-flung constituency likes to respond in the magazine’s lively letters page, denouncing Geez as “post-modern drivel” put out by “pretentious bohos” or praising it as “a great joy and comfort.”

Courtesy Geez Magazine.

The first two issues of Geez sold out their modest print runs (2,000 and 3,500), and the third issue (with 4,000 copies) will hit indie bookstores and Chapters later this month. The subscriber list reaches across Canada and 40 American states.

Braun feels that many faith-based forums “operate in a cautious religious realm, where people don’t have a good time, where they’re wringing their hands, where they’re chokingly earnest.” Geez’s mandate is to have some fun with faith, to mix it up a little. One page in the premiere issue was set up as a boxing card, with televangelist Pat Robertson’s right-wing Jesus duking it out with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s left-wing Jesus in a comic critique of people who drag God into party politics. The recurring Make Affluence History page offers a funny parallel to the Make Poverty History campaign, with a plea to help over-privileged children by unplugging them from their expensive electronics and sending them outside to climb trees.

The magazine’s tone tends to be irreverent but affectionate, a bit like Heeb: The New Jew Review, a New York-based magazine that takes a this-ain’t-your-zaida’s-Judaism stand. Geez recognizes that it holds a certain appeal for “the disgruntled children of hook-line-sinker conservative Christians,” but the editors carefully dodge any attempts to label the mag “cool.”

“Maclean’s did a story on us, and the subhead was something about making Christianity hip,” Braun says. “I mean, it was very positive and everything, but it sort of missed the point.” In fact, Geez is suspicious of “lifestyle Christianity,” says Braun, with its “flashy new media and products to buy.”

In its own, low-budget way, Geez simply searches for ways to be smart and innovative. Manitoba-based design consultant Robert L. Peters and designer Darryl Brown — a practicing Quaker who lives in Oregon — oversee the look of the magazine, and their work will surprise anyone who grew up with photocopied church newsletters. The magazine favours an image-saturated look: archival photographs, original art, patches of poetry, mock maps and graphs (like the Gospel Dilution Index).

Part of the reason there’s so much room for experimentation is that Geez is ad-free. Well, sort of. Between issues one and two, the editors received a request for a half-page ad from the organizers of Nidus, a faith, arts and justice festival taking place in Kitchener, Ont., in August. What might have been a simple business transaction for another magazine was cause for a lot of soul-searching around the Geez editorial table. The editors weren’t worried about taking money, since this would be a barter situation (Nidus had offered plane tickets to Kitchener and a festival pass). But Geez had already taken a little swipe at alternative-media giant The Utne Reader, for heaven’s sake, for its commerciality.

“To me, there’s something very appealing about an ad-free magazine,” Braun says. “You know there’s no connection between money and voice.” The editors finally arrived at a compromise: Braun will cycle to Kitchener — that would be, uh, 2,120 kilometres — and grab a Greyhound bus back. Geez will use its presence at the festival to kick-start its new “De-motorize Your Soul” campaign, aimed at reducing our reliance on cars.

Not only do the Geez people agonize about advertising, they agonize about agonizing. Geez dreads coming off as preachy. “Feel free to pull the plug on my didactic self-righteousness as required,” Braun joked in an e-mail reply to the Nidus organizers — a quote that, in the interests of moral transparency, was eventually published right next to the advertisement.

Geez approaches the “Judge not, lest ye be judged” problem by laughing at itself, and by tackling the big serious questions with a wildly diverse range of perspectives. The second issue, which dealt with 21st century forms of asceticism, included a report from Bob and Jill, who live in rural Georgia in a cabin built with $100. Bob eats rats, cicadas, snakes and possums and cans his own bin-scrounged bologna and hamburger. Admits Meinders: “Some of these things [in the magazine] are just not things I’m ever going to do. Like [Bob]. I mean, wow. I’m not going to can hamburger. But it’s neat to be in an atmosphere where somebody’s doing it.”

More readers will identify with contributor Carrie Martin, who writes of her bemusement at finding herself a middle-class pastor’s wife in the American Bible belt. Martin claims she has to look up the definition of “asceticism” on her T-Mobile Sidekick and finally decides that her bid for penitence will involve going 40 days without nail polish. (This brings up the potentially schismatic point of whether clear nail polish should be included in the ban.)

So, maybe salvation lies somewhere between fried possum and a lapsed pedicure. Clearly, everyone has his or her own path to walk. Geez magazine just wants to offer a little company along the way.

Alison Gillmor is a writer based in Winnipeg.

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