I honestly wouldn’t recognize Madonna’s singing and am not sure I’ve ever heard any of her songs, but I’ve learned a lot about her over the years just from reading the news. She must be very good at what she does, but I’m not sure what the fuss is all about.

Here’s a woman who grabbed attention by wearing less on stage than female singers had worn before and by bringing the techniques of the strip club out of those dodgy-looking places by the side of the road into the big arenas and theaters. She has made herself a sex object, though she also makes sure everyone sees her winking at them as she does so. She sings about sex without the traditional indirection and euphemism.

She’s been doing this for a very long time, and is nearly sixty, but still packs in the crowds. That should be enough for an entertainer, but Madonna has to have an idea behind her provocations. She’s about to appear in a new show, titled “Rebel Heart,” which she’s advertised with trailers that include, according to Entertainment Weekly’s puff piece, “dancing nuns on stripper poles.” The dancing nuns reportedly (I will not watch the trailers so can only report what I’ve read) wear bikini bottoms and revealing habits.

Nuns. Strippers. Stripper’s poles. Wow, that’s just so . . .

Stupid.

Really?

Strippers in nun outfits. Really? Just who today thinks that’s cool or clever or transgressive or edgy? It’s so 1980s. It’s like someone saying a formerly rude word on late-night television and expecting the network’s phones to light up with protests from church ladies in Iowa. Even the church ladies are just going to roll their eyes.

Madonna’s not just being naughty, she wants you to know. She has a reason for the stripper nuns. She explained to Entertainment Weekly: “I just like the juxtaposition. I’m very immersed in deconstructing the concept of sexuality and religion and how it’s not supposed to go together, but in my world it goes together.”

It must sound impressive to some, what she says about juxtapositions and deconstructionism. On one side: nuns. On the other: strippers. Nuns: religious, godly, holy, establishmentarian, clothed. Strippers: not religious, godly, holy, establishmentarian, or clothed. White, black. Or in Madonna’s world, perhaps, black, white.

And maybe, as I suspect is often the case with Madonna’s fans: Nuns: your parents’ world. Strippers: Not your parents’ world. Dress the second like the first and let them frolic on stripper poles. Take that mom and dad!

Madonna wants to put the two together. That juxtaposition will, she says, deconstruct religion and sexuality — sorry, the concept of sexuality and religion — in a way that reveals . . . what I don’t know, and I’m fairly sure Madonna doesn’t either.

Just having half-naked women dressed kind of like nuns tells us nothing about sexuality or religion. It deconstructs nothing. It does not make us see the hidden inner logic of sexuality and religion. It’s just a gimmick, even if the singer remembers some fancy terms from freshman English she can use to impress the rubes.

True Deconstruction

You know what juxtaposition is really deconstructive? Marriage and death. Particularly the good marriage and the early death. You have two people who’ve built a life together, raised a family, sacrificed for each other, forgiven each other, grown dependent on each other, shaped a life that requires both of them, and suddenly they’re divided, the survivor cut off from the other for as long as he lives.

Think of the wife sitting by her husband’s bedside when his heart-monitor stops beeping. Think of the husband standing by the graveside as his wife’s coffin is lowered into the grave. That’s a juxtaposition for you. There you see two things that should go together even less than nuns and stripper poles.

Now this juxtaposition deconstructs a lot. It takes apart the self-indulgent stories our culture tells itself. It reveals how false and foolish are the happily-ever-after stories our culture has told about marriage. The romantic, sentimental stories that treat marriage as an easy way to happiness and self-fulfillment, as part of the good life to which we have a right.

It also reveals how false and foolish are our culture’s anti-happily-ever-after stories. The stories, just as romantic and sentimental as the first, that treat marriage as a restriction, as something that ties you up and keeps you from doing what you want to do, and which you enter, if you do, only because you can exit it if you need to.

What True Deconstruction Tells Us

What, by deconstructing the false stories, does the juxtaposition of marriage and death tell us? It tells us that marriage requires change and sacrifice, that it does not guarantee happiness, that it is always a risk and a gamble that might well end in a broken heart — and yet that we can find the life joyous and the broken heart a reasonable price to pay for the life lived together. It tells us that the restrictions don’t bind and limit but guide and direct us to a place we can only reach if we accept them, a place almost infinitely better than the one we will reach on our own.

This deconstructive juxtaposition helps us see the truth. Young women in bikini bottoms and revealing habits, dancing on stripper poles — that juxtaposition’s just too banal to get upset about, even if the performer dresses it up in pseudo-intellectual language. It’s just a gimmick, and a pretty tired one.

But the widow and widower, they deconstruct the culture’s dominant understanding of sexuality and religion in a much more interesting way. They’re worth watching. They’re the ones with the true rebel hearts.

“Madonna’s Stripper Nuns Don’t Tell Us Anything” is adapted from David Mills’ latest weekly column for the website Aleteia.