What is a Christian? The mechanised condition of living does not afford the time nor the space in which to reflect on what is happening in the inner core of our beings, if 'that' is what religion is supposed to be about - an indispensable description of your very soul - and if you need to check some details there are the holy texts.

Not that long ago, no one in the town of Bevagna would have said that he was a Christian, not because he wasn't but because that would have been like going around saying, 'I am a man' just because one 'was' as a sort of truism. There are still six basilicas for prayer and mass for a population of three thousand people and an umpteen number of other chapels and adorations. People still believe but nowadays it is touted as a sort of choice. So for the sake of argument, adopt this paradigm; 'religion seen as a matter of choice' and perhaps a blurry subject will come into sharper focus.

By making the choice, in being a Christian one becomes good, a priori. An ego rationalist would be a religious person by definition, given the myth of the hidden reward. There is a difficulty therefore in thinking that being good is predicated on a mere decision. So for argument's sake it could be said that in being a Christian, one becomes bad, a posteriori, if being presumptious could be seen as a bad thing but there is a tinge of irony there as used in American English to mean the opposite. For better or for worse, we carry into the choices the ingots of the modernist intellectual baggage; for example, Albert Einstein's theory of Relativity or indeed the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, not to mention loud declarations like, "Ornament is a Crime!"

Yet, in Søren Kierkegaard's heart none of this really matters. His mind desires what is substantial and how faith 'really' manifests or not, to an individual. Here is a version of Christianity trying to transcend mere law-abiding. Is the latter not sufficient? Perhaps but it is just that Søren Kierkegaard thinks there is more to it.

Christ has freed us from the need to contemplate too much. He is God made flesh. The Gospel points to action as the place where truth lies and so does Kierkegaard think that this point is commendable - to act - upon which the value of his teachings becomes not so much 'evident' as 'infused'. As Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, "Love is not a feeling." Understanding Christ does not necessarily make you a Christian, rather, it sets you free! Free? Free for what? Perhaps this is what Søren Kierkegaard is trying to answer in his critique of orthodoxy in the Danish society of his time. It is not the title of the piece that is in question here. By the way, how is 'ø' pronounced? Could it be that it is like an 'i'? If it is, it would seem quite fitting.

In theory at least, in being free, one can partake lovingly and enthusiastically in the most lurid forms of liturgy in a hazy atmosphere filled with the incantations of incense, with great abandon and completely without any fear of castigation, embarrassment or some political backlash from the neo-con or the neo-lib cousins. They too have rights to their choices. They too can design masks and anatomical rituals, should they wish to embark on such a drastic course of festival action.

The Medieval world prospers within these twin paradoxes of love and freedom. Under the sun and under the twinkling stars, they fill back the moral vacuum that nearly brings down the Vatican. People go down to the fertile plains of the Valle Umbra to till the fields and care for the animals in the exercise of brotherly love, while the saints look benignly upon them from the city centre of Assisi. They give away the harvests, as everyone trades the fruits of their labour for something else so that at the end of the day everyone, weak and strong, has everything that they need. In many ways the Franciscan traditions are still alive in the spirit of the stout communal entities one finds there nowadays but it could well be that the exchanges of the goods themselves are much less fun. The handshakes are still firm but there is always some paperwork involved.