Brief: Secular Person of Faith: pt 1 (w/Brad Onishi)
Friend of the pod and Straight White American Jesus host Brad Onishi joins Matthew for a New Year’s discussion of post-religious spirituality. Onishi fills out the details on a nascent identity that many of you might resonate with: the “secular person of faith.” They talk about the false choice of Max Weber’s fork in the road: that either we commit to the sciences or languish in the churches. They discuss Jeffery Kosky’s idea of “disenchantment with disenchantment.” And they try to figure out what Thomas Altizer was going on about when he proposed a “Christian Atheism.”
This is Part One of two-part conversation. Part Two drops Monday, New Year’s Day, on Patreon.
Show Notes
Brad Onishi
Straight White American Jesus
Axis Mundi Media
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Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And for this brief, I should add how sometimes we're not so sure what basic terms like faith mean, and that that might be a good thing.
Today I'm joined by a friend of the pod, Bradley Onishi, who teaches religious studies at the University of San Francisco.
He's the co-host of the excellent Straight White American Jesus podcast and the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism.
Now we hosted Brad for episode 167 to walk through his fantastic book and his journey out of evangelicalism and I'm pleased to welcome him back for a little less analysis of religious extremism and a little more reflection on religious and spiritual experience.
And it feels right for this double episode to fall over the new year.
The second part of it will drop on our Patreon feed on New Year's Day.
Because, to be frank, 2024 is going to be a really hard year.
I don't think it's much of a prediction to say that the war machines will grind on, that anarcho-capitalism and right-wing extremism will gather speed, and US electoral chaos will spread like the wildfire smoke of climate disaster, and the hot takes will flood the zone as Twitter circles the drain.
And we'll continue to follow and analyze the zombie of paranoid spirituality as it lurches forward.
We'll be debunking scams, decoding charismatics, and tracking the commodification of our bodily and religious anxieties.
We'll document the strengthening alliances between New Age apocalypticism and Christian nationalism.
We'll continue to hold up a mirror.
And of course, the hope is in holding up a mirror that the culture sees itself more clearly and course corrects.
But from where I stand, I'm not sure that the stark reflection is enough these days.
More and more, it seems to me that sustaining helpful journalism from both production and consumption sides might mean adding depth to the mirror function.
Adding some warm light.
If you're going to foreground the bad actors du jour, it's good to make sure the less visible but more numerous good actors can also be seen in the background.
If you're going to highlight terrible ideas, don't let them drown out the good ideas.
So, I can't think of a better way to start off my year than by talking with someone who does exactly that.
Because Brad is an excellent diagnostician when it comes to the violence of religious extremism, but he's also a bit of a doctor when it comes to the healing potential of spiritual instincts.
So, here's our discussion of his term, secular person of faith, which is his attempt to find
a good place to stand after leaving religion, but also after leaving disenchantment.
Thank you for joining me, Brad.
It's so great to have you back.
It's so great to be here.
I'm not going to lie.
The first time I came, my hope and prayer in a secular way was that we would get to hang out again somehow.
And I'm so grateful for your invitation.
I am traveling unexpectedly for the holidays and my technology and microphones are not what they should be.
So I want to apologize to you and to your audience for that bit of what's happening today.
Well, that's fine, and I think we can imagine that you're speaking from maybe out of the past, maybe from a less disenchanted time.
This is a brief episode called Secular Person of Faith, and that's your phrase.
We're making t-shirts and mugs for the holiday season, but we're also going to dig into what that actually means.
And I wanted to ask you about it because you first uttered the phrase back on our episode 167, where after we spent this time tracking your path through evangelical Christianity, and then to academia, and now to your work on straight white American Jesus, We asked you after all of this, how do you identify and where do you stand?
And you said, I'm a secular person of faith.
And that, I can't really describe it any other way but to say that it rang some kind of deep bell in my brain.
So I wanted to get your 101 definition on that just to start.
I think for me, identifying as a secular person of faith is trying to express a few things.
One is that, hey, I am secular.
I don't participate formally in a religious tradition, and I'm not somebody who takes on that identity as a Christian, as a Buddhist, as even somebody who would say that they're heavily invested in spiritual practices.
I know some people listening will say, well, I'm not a part of a religious tradition either, but I'm very spiritual, and that's wonderful.
I don't even actually usually describe myself in that way.
Even if many people would.
However, what I found, and I mentioned this last time we spoke, is that after I left evangelicalism, I found in many forms of atheism and non-religion, fundamentalisms that reminded me of evangelicalism.
And they didn't resonate with how I understood myself and the world.
And just briefly, I'll say it's because for me, Even though I'm secular, the world remains mysterious, and it remains uncertain, and it remains unpredictable.
There's a level of unknowing that is always, in my mind, built into the human condition.
And so, to be a human being means to have faith, and I think we can talk about faith more elaborately in a second and what that means.
But that meant that I came to see myself as a secular person of faith.
So I think in terms of my kind of identity, it really fit.
And then politically, I think it's important because it says, hey, secular people are also people of faith.
And all the privileges, all the ways that we sort of Look up to and revere the reverend or the minister or the vicar in the public square as a respectable source of authority and moral insight.
Well, you know, secular folks are trying really hard to live lives of meaning and purpose and moral clarity, just like they are.
And so they should also at times be sort of seen as those voices and those sources.
Maybe we should unpack the term faith then, and especially to disambiguate it from belief, let's say.
I think faith is an imperfect word.
The religious studies scholar in me is very aware that when we say person of faith, we're actually using Protestant terms.
We're using terms that come right out of a kind of Martin Luther framework of what Christianity is.
So, it's imperfect.
I can already hear my colleagues raising their hands at the seminar talk being like, well, yeah, you know, I'm not sure about that word, Onishi, and that's completely fair.
The reason I use it is because faith, I think, signals, and you actually caught on to this right away last time we spoke, it signals humility.
It signals generosity.
It signals a demand to say, I don't know everything in this context.
There's probably no chance that I ever will.
There's even a chance that humans will never know.
All there is to know, whether it comes to quantum mechanics, whether it comes to the uncertainty principle and the ways that that builds in unpredictability and unknowability into our universe.
So it means that I'm a person who recognizes that there is a gap between what I know be true or real or actual.
And that means that I have a certain kind of attitude or comportment to how I think about my condition
in the world.
And I think that's really important.
So even though it's an imperfect term, I think it's a term that can be used very effectively.
I think there can be something about the gap that you're describing that can feel either perilous
or generative.
It's both.
So there's a great book out there I'll recommend to everyone.
It's called Strange Wonder by Mary Jane Rubenstein.
And Mary Jane does a great job in that book of explaining how wonder is this word we usually use positively.
You might see it on candles being sold to you or to get you to attend a retreat.
Wonder, right?
Don't we all want to fall back into wonder?
And Mary Jane reminds us that Plato is the person who gave us the phrase that, you know, philosophy begins in wonder.
What I think is really important to remember about faith, but about wonder as well, and I think these two go together, is that they mean we are vulnerable perpetually.
And that's so hard.
It's so hard to be a human being.
Let's just say it.
It's just so hard to be a human being because we are aware of ourselves.
We're aware of the fact that we're going to die.
We're aware of others.
And so we are vulnerable.
So it feels perilous at times to be this creature who lives in that state.
But I also think it's generative, because this is exactly the beauty and promise of being a human, is the fact that we are aware of ourselves acutely, aware of our death acutely, aware of others acutely.
And that means we don't just shove food in our mouth, we break bread.
We don't just eat and mate and sleep, that we write, we sing, we create art.
There's a generativity to being human that comes right from the uncertainty.
And so to me, it's the promise and peril.
And they're always together.
And it's hard.
It's not easy.
It's no shortcut.
But it's, it's everything that's meaningful about living this, this strange and at times awful condition of being a human.
I think I'm asking you about secular person of faith because it seems to be of real relevance to the project of sifting conspiratorial and reactionary thinking out of spiritual discourse and culture because it depends on a kind of reverence for uncertainty, for patience, and for process.
Because I think like an ideology of salvation or of certainty, a conspiracy theory offers kind of epistemological and emotional shortcuts, but I think what you're describing in terms of secular faith just refuses to do that.
Is that fair?
This is the exact place where I see a difference between secular person of faith and conspiratorial thinking.
I think you hit it right on the head.
Which is that one of them tries to take shortcuts to meaning and to answers.
One of them wants to know and to know in ways that feel gratifying and feel like they take you away from the peril or they at least explain the peril.
If I have a conspiracy theory about the way things are, Then I still might feel like I'm in danger.
But I have this like, explanation.
And I'm, and I'm in this community of people who knows it.
And we're kind of exclusive.
And we're the only ones that really know.
And that makes me feel better at night.
Because I've explained the hurt.
I've explained the injustice.
It's, it's rationalized through an irrational kind of theory.
Okay.
For me, Being a secular person of faith means never taking a shortcut.
And you know, if you know me, and this is not always a good thing, I just, I never take the shortcut.
Like I want to look it all in the face and say, What's at stake here?
And to be a secular person of faith means a lot of hard work.
It means actually taking stock of the peril you just spoke of, the vulnerability, but also the promise.
And it's really difficult, but I think it's also really rewarding.
And this is where, just to go back to our previous conversation, Leaving evangelicalism meant for me becoming a person of faith for the first time because there's so many spiritual and religious traditions that are based on certainty rather than on faith or humility or unknowing or not knowing and therefore when you're in those traditions
The world might call you a person of faith because you identify as Catholic, but in my mind, you're the exact opposite because you have a framework, a worldview that is certain at every point, and therefore none of that is needed.
And you had a kind of remark or a response to, you know, fellow believers who would note Your departure, and say, have you lost your faith?
And you said something like, well, actually, maybe you have, or maybe you've never had it, or I'll be thinking about you.
How did that go again?
It was a joke.
There was something funny about it.
This really brings us into the kind of social and political dimensions of these categories, because again, and this is especially true in the United States, I recognize there are nuances here in terms of how it works in Canada and other places, but in the United States, the person of faith in the public square, especially the Christian, is often given the benefit of the doubt, and often even more than that, looked to as the kind of, you're the good one.
You're the trustworthy one.
You're the moral one because you're the person of faith.
So my tactic with folks who want to converse with me about this is say, look, here's the problem for you is I've spent the last 20-25 years of my life studying your religious tradition and any others I could find and learn from.
I have read your Bible in Greek.
I can quote to you, if you want, the Book of Romans or Maestro Eckhart or Thomas Aquinas.
Do you want to talk about Martin Luther or John Calvin, Teresa of Avila, origin of Alexandria, Tertullian, whoever may be.
I would love to do that because that's what I do in my spare time.
I do that because I am a person of faith who's deeply interested in trying to understand and that means actually learning from religious people.
I think the problem for you is you've accepted a worldview with no shadows.
You've accepted a worldview with no gray area.
You're a person of certainty.
And so I'll be thinking of you because that clearly means you're very far from God.
I know that because I read Augustine and he taught me that.
So it means you're very far from God.
And therefore, I'm going to pray for you because it seems as if you really need it.
I mean, it's also a worldview that suggests that all of the writers that you just cited are somehow in agreement with each other.
And that's the beauty of it, right?
To me, when I read those folks, when I read folks from the Jewish tradition, when I read folks from other spiritual traditions, what you realize about the word tradition is that tradition means argument.
It means folks trying to come to some sense of what's important to them as a group.
Tradition is not Adopting something in a mechanical, robotic way, but certain religious worldviews, certain religious traditions, practices would have you say either you're with us in every way without questioning or get out.
And to me, that's again, the opposite of faith as I'm discussing it today.
Now, you've also said that in the development of this, you've been very influenced by Jeffrey Kosky, who's a religious studies professor who studies art and aesthetics.
And he's got a book that I've made my way through partially called Arts of Wonder, Enchanting Secularity, Walter DeMaria, Diller & Scofidio, James Turrell, and Andy Goldsworthy.
And he writes about his disenchantment with modern disenchantment.
What kind of disenchantment is Kosky getting at and why, in his view or yours, is this not really working?
So this takes us back to a sociologist of religion named Max Weber.
Folks listening may know their Max Weber, right?
They may not, but Max Weber, highly, highly, highly influential, maybe the most influential sociologist of religion and In the history of the discipline.
But Max Weber has this very famous line that students of religion will get in a lot of their introductory classes, which is, the world has become disenchanted.
That the old gods have faded, and that we now live in a world of rationalization, of intellectualization.
That if you are somebody who engages in superstition, magic, dare I say mysticism, then you are a pre-modern person.
Then you refuse to live in the world that is one of science, of data, of evidence.
And he draws in my mind, and there's some people who disagree with me, a stark binary between the modern person who is rational and who is disenchanted, and the pre-modern religious person who refuses to come into the new era.
And so disenchantment for Weber is, he's German, and the German word is Entzauberung.
So Ent, E-N-T, and then Zauber.
So Zauber is magic, right?
And Ent is like negation, D. So it's the demagicking of the world is disenchantment.
And he's basically saying, there's modern people like me who believe in science and data and evidence, and then there's everyone else.
And he even at the end of his His essay, Science as a Vocation, sort of taunts religious people.
And he's like, look, or he taunts everyone who he thinks is kind of wavering, thinks that they can be on both sides.
He's like, if you can't deal with the stark reality of the scientific worldview, the churches are open.
Go ahead and go back. Loser, you weakling, go ahead. You can't deal with being a scientist
and a scientific person and get...
Go ahead.
You're not worth it.
Go back and pray and whatever you want to do over there.
The reason I think Kosky says he's disenchanted with disenchantment is because I think he's saying, I'm a secular person.
I know Jeff.
I've read Jeff's book a hundred times.
We've talked about this over the dinner table.
I'm not a religious person.
And I'm not even, and this is I think where Jeff and I are in agreement, we're not even overly spiritual people.
I'm not somebody who's drawn to spirituality in a kind of natural way.
But I don't think, and this is the key, I don't think the demagicking of the world Equates to the demystification of the world that I may not believe in magic in a way that is coded negatively.
I may not believe in things that are not part of a scientific worldview based on evidence or data or experimentation.
But that does not mean that there's no mystery in the world.
That doesn't mean that in a quantum world, in a world that is post Einstein, right, post Newton, that we are not living in a universe beset by uncertainty and unpredictability and unknowability.
So if I'm disenchanted with disenchantment, it means I'm saying to Max Weber, I may follow you in some limited sense as somebody who thinks that he's adopting what might be called a scientific worldview.
But I'm not going to follow you into saying that that means that there's no more mystery and therefore no more uncertainty or unpredictability in our world.
And so when we draw the little chart on the board in my class, and on one side we have religion and on the other side we have secular.
My class usually says, yeah, religious people usually believe in mystery, uncertainty, unpredictability.
How about secular people?
Certainty, scientific data, experimental results.
And what I say is to be disenchanted with disenchantment is to mess up that chart.
It's to mess up that binary.
And it's to say that even though I follow Weber into the scientific aspect of his worldview, I'm not going to follow him into the demystification of his world.
And that leads to one more conclusion that I'll just mention real quick, which is that opens up pathways for me to have dialogue with my religious colleagues in ways that I can say, you know, I don't believe in what you're talking about in terms of the God you worship or the things you believe in the afterlife.
But you also have a universe beset by unpredictability and unknowability.
You also see that.
So I wonder if there aren't ways I might learn from you in an analogous way, and that my worldview may be resonant with yours, even if not to convert one to the other, even if the one is not to
make one into A into B or B into A. And so it opens up, instead of an adversarial
relationship with religious people, it opens up a dialogical one of mutual respect and learning.
It would also seem to let the attempt at a literalist conversation go, and so that you
could appreciate each other's metaphors.
One of the ways that I'll talk about this is my former PhD advisor Tom Carlson calls it the apophatic analogy.
And apophatic is a way to talk about mystery or unknowing, right?
And it's usually used to talk about mystics of the 13th century, right?
So the apophatic analogy means that as a secular person, there are parts of my world that are beset by uncertainty, unknowability.
How do I react to that?
You know, that peril you talked about a couple minutes ago?
How do I react as a person in the world trying to like raise kids, pay the mortgage, plan for retirement, worry about my neighbors, worry about climate change, pursue justice?
And there's no easy answers.
There's no straightforward, just I solved it.
How do I react?
What do I practice in those moments?
What are the ways of resilience?
What are the ways of persistence?
What are the ways of building community?
I've got to find those.
And I guess one of the answers I would say is, is there analogous practices with my religious neighbors?
And if there are, maybe we can learn from each other.
I am.
And I know there's people listening that are getting tense.
They're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And I totally understand it.
And I'm not telling you, you have to do anything.
All I'm saying is, is this might open up different political possibilities in terms of coalitions.
It might open up different ways that we can understand each other as human beings and, and, and think about facing the difficulty of being human.
Together, even if we will never agree on what might come to ultimate questions.
Well, I'll tell you about a recent kind of revelation that I've had, which is that I didn't realize that there is a category of evangelical Christian that identifies as progressive.
Now, they may be anti-abortion.
They may have, you know, what I would consider to be conservative or anti-feminist views on, you know, reproductive rights.
But, they will also say that Christian nationalism is a heresy.
They will also say that, you know, if you think that overturning Roe was actually moral, and instead of actually persuading the public about the good news that we have to offer, then you're sorely mistaken.
And so, when I think about coalition building, I think about, oh, The values that I have in pushing back against reactionary Christofascism and authoritarian rule, they're actually being expressed in a place that I didn't expect them to be expressed in.
They are there, and it is fascinating.
There's a new book by Isaac Sharp called The Other Evangelicals.
If people want to read this book, it kind of goes into depth of what you're talking about.
Unfortunately, what happens so often now with those types of evangelicals you're discussing is they are shown the door.
Yeah.
Because the communities have become so reactionary and militant when it comes to their politics that it almost makes those people religiously homeless because they don't identify as an Episcopalian or some other form of Christian, and yet their churches are like, You can't hold these views and stay so you decide and so it's one of the ways that these things work where you if you're gonna have a world view of certainty you're gonna kick anyone out with any sense of wonder or uncertainty and say please don't bring that around here it's dangerous.
Just back to Weber for a moment, and by the way, he's having quite a year because I think Riz is one of the words of the year, right?
But he, I think a contemporary lack of understanding about the antipathy that is proposed between modern and pre-modern selves allows for certain conspirituality influencers to flourish.
Because what a lot of them do is they say, I am a trained doctor.
I know about the microbiome.
I know that germ theory isn't quite, you know, what it's all cracked up to be.
And then in their public lives, they basically act as evangelical ministers.
They exist in this double space of assumed rationality, but also prophetic certainty.
And they do both at the same time, and that's extremely compelling, and I think that's because it's tugging on some conflict within the culture that hasn't been clarified.
This is so astute.
I think you're so right.
And I think that here's what I see happening in the case you just laid out is somebody saying, I've been trained in the ways of modernity, in science, in Western medicine.
I'm a biologist.
I'm a physicist.
I'm fill in the blank.
And because I have that authority, you can trust me when I say modernity doesn't have the answers.
Right.
And so if you want to be healed, we got to go to the pre-modern.
We need to go back to the ancient.
If you want to be pure, if you want to feel whole, if you want yourself to match up with your authentic big S self, you got to get on the ride with me to go to the ancient wisdom that I have because I can tell you I have studied, I know for a fact, as a fill-in-the-blank doctor, as a fill-in-the-blank scientist, this stuff doesn't work, right?
So, they're claiming the modern authority and then telling you, this is why you shouldn't trust it, you should trust me.
And that's the evangelical minister part, right?
So, yeah.
I guess they are monetizing a particular kind of disillusionment, but they're replacing it with something usually invented rather than practiced in community.
I mean, often the influencers that we study are sort of appropriating kind of reconstructed traditions from other places.
So yeah, very strange activity.
There's a disenchantment with disenchantment.
I think the people you're describing who are susceptible to these influencers, they're also disenchanted with disenchantment.
But I think when you get there, that's the fork in the road.
It's are you going to choose a shortcut that promises you, if you do this cleanse, if you do this fast, if you pay me this much money and you take my advice, I will heal you.
I will literally solve you.
Or are you going to enter into a path that's like, It's going to be a lot of hard work and self-reflection, a lot of learning.
There's going to be moments of healing and relief and alleviation.
There's going to be moments of just making your way through because it's a Wednesday and this is just not easy.
But that's life and we're going to do it that way.
You see what I mean?
It's a lot easier to sell the first one.
Like I'm thinking about Christiane Northrup, who after, you know, 40 years of looking at lab reports and studying, you know, new medications and doing all of the desk work and the administrative work of, you know, gynecological medicine, she always had some new age ideas.
But I can imagine that for some people, it just starts to feel cold and empty.
They don't see the sort of... They don't see the long arc of history that somehow all of that lab work is gonna pay off.
And so, they want something else, something magical to happen.
So, I wonder if that's a factor, too.
I do, and I think that... So, I think we've talked about disenchantment.
So, here we are.
We're people.
We get disenchanted with disenchantment.
We look at Weber and his, like, he gets up in the morning, He eats the same breakfast every day, goes into the lab, wears the same Dockers.
He has 16 pairs of the same Dockers, 17 Oxford shirts that he buttons up every morning, 18 navy blue ties.
And there he is, he's in the lab, he comes home at 7 p.m.
and he eats his dinner and he goes to bed and that, you know, that's it, right?
And you're like, I don't know that I want to live in what he called the iron cage of rationality.
This does not seem like where I want to be.
It hurts.
I have trauma.
I have pain.
This is not fulfilling.
So I want to re-enchant the world.
How do I re-enchant the world?
And I think one of the options is through the kinds of conspirituality, conspiratorial, spiritual leaders that you're so good at covering and discussing and analyzing.
Because those folks are going to say, I'm going to re-enchant your world with magic, with the divine, with something that will feel ancient and revelatory.
And all of a sudden you're like, I want that.
That sounds really great.
And I guess for me, to be a secular person of faith means the world is enchanted.
But the enchantment doesn't necessarily mean something that will provide a shortcut to mythical wholeness.
It means there is mystery, uncertainty, unpredictability, and unknowability.
There is a charm to the universe and to the human condition.
That is there.
And we can miss it because we're looking for that one thing that will solve the puzzle rather than the joy of breaking bread with a friend.
Rather than the joy of sitting on a park bench in Toronto, in New York City, with someone you haven't seen for a year, and catching up for two hours, and not having to human alone for that period of time, and feeling a sense of understanding and compassion and love.
The feeling of simply taking a walk and being overwhelmed by a sunset or by the call of birds.
Those things are full of wonder and enchantment.
But it's so much easier to say, I want to take these supplements, do that yoga, and learn the teachings of this person.
And hopefully in a year, I will be fully healed and have no worries ever again.
One last thing that I think feeds into or may have been formative as you came into secular person of faith discourse, which is, this also blew my mind.
I did not know that Christian and Catholic atheism was a thing.
And when I found out recently, I had another jolt of recognition.
Then by email, you said, oh yeah, this was a study field for me early on.
And so I've started reading Thomas Altizer's, The Gospel of Christian Atheism.
And there are two ideas that stood out in the first couple of pages, a dozen pages or so.
So here are the two ideas.
I'll summarize them and maybe you can respond to them because I think he might be pointing to a number of the things that we're talking about.
So firstly, he says, on a theological and also a mythic level, The death of Christ initiates the death of theism.
It's a sign that the old God has entered into material life and will never leave and is now to be found in the faces of everyone and that's part of the story of Christianity.
Thomas Altizer, first of all, is amazing.
If you remember the God is Dead Time Magazine cover of the 60s, Thomas Altizer, somebody's going to get asked about that during that time period because he's writing Death of God books.
I mean, he's writing about the death of God at Harvard and all these other places.
Tom Altizer is also an amazing human being.
He's passed away a couple years ago.
If you met him, he had the loudest voice I've ever heard.
And anytime you went to a restaurant with him, you would almost get kicked out.
You'd almost get kicked out because he'd be yelling about like the eminence of God in the in the dirt and the body and you'd be, you know, and someone would be like, this is an Applebee's, you guys need to leave.
Um, so he's an amazing guy.
He's an amazing guy.
I have so many Tom Altizer stories.
But the thing that you just mentioned is so interesting.
Because he's basically saying the death of Christ is in some ways the death of Christianity and theism as you know it.
And we should look for the divine in the imminent.
It's a theology of radical imminence.
God is in the dirt.
God is in the tissue.
God is in the everyday.
God is in the subway ride to work when you're dead tired.
God is in the moments when you put some effort into making dinner for your family on a Thursday night when you're all exhausted, but it's important to sit around the table and discuss.
God is in the tissue of the suffering, in the faces of anguish of the people.
And what that does, whether it holds together for folks as a coherent worldview, is that it refocuses us.
and says, there's a sense of the divine as ordinary.
There's a sense that the extraordinary, the incalculable, is often in the places we're so unwilling to look, that we'd rather go chasing that influencer who's promising me wholeness, rather than to see what is in the imminent, everyday, quotidian moments of being human, which may sound like a bad folk song or something, but I think Altaija is really good at reminding us all this.
Okay, now number two is, he seems to suggest that on the level of intellectual history, The 19th century disenchantments of evolutionary theory and materialist philosophy are part of the Christian story, not rejections of it.
And theologians who have bent over backwards for two centuries, holding their finger in the dike, are actually acting in bad faith by trying to keep things in order.
And their task should now be to absorb disenchantment into their understanding of spirituality.
This is a really fascinating line of thinking.
So, Altaizer's writing this in the late 60s.
He's writing in the early 70s.
That's really when he's really famous.
And at the very same time, there are sociologists of religion, like Peter Berger and Thomas Lukman and others, who are basically saying, from a sociological perspective, the same thing.
That Christianity, in many ways, is a large actor in the story of industrialization, in the story of modern scientific worldview and its development through Darwin and through so many others.
And in many ways, this means that Christianity has sort of signed its own death by way of leading us to this moment of rationalization and intellectualization.
And so, someone like Altizer, a theologian, is going to come along and say, That means that the death of Christ is not the end of Christianity.
It just means that if you are a person of faith, you have to be open to a radical Christianity where God is dead and therefore God can live again.
That's the resurrection story, right?
And so he's trying to use this Christian imagery to cohere what he takes to be a kind of modern scientific moment.
And a Christian story that has the symbols and the myths to really give meaning to it in a way that makes sense theologically and historically.
So, not everyone buys it, not everyone's interested in it, but it is a very fascinating pathway of thinking about religion in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Well, I can tell you, as a lapsed Catholic, it gives new meaning to this is my body, which will be given up for you, and the breaking of the bread on the altar, and the dissolution of that bread into the bodies of the people who are gathered there.
It's like, oh, this is me, and it became you.
On the Catholic front, there's this whole lineage of Catholicism.
That really takes a cue from Altizer and says, God is dead means we need to stop trying to conceptualize God.
That if you try to put God into human language, if you try to put God into human concepts, you're creating a projection of God rather than allowing God to be whom God is, right?
I spent years living in France.
I actually lived in a Catholic monastery at one point, even though I was a secular person.
Because I was studying with these French philosophers who were basically saying, God is dead, and that's why God is alive.
God is dead, and that's why I refuse to encapsulate God in these sort of human linguistic cages.
And so there was a post-metaphysical understanding of God coming after Altizer.
And so anyway, it does give brand new meaning to this is my body.
And the whole sense of sacrament, the whole sense of communion,
the whole sense of flesh, the whole sense of embodiment.
So there have been many sort of Catholic folks who've really gone the ways that you're suggesting
and really thought them through and tried to make sense of them from their own perspective.
Bradley, we're gonna leave it there, but I have two stories to tell you
that I want you to respond to, and we're gonna put that onto Patreon.
But before you go, first of all, thank you so much.
I think that the way you speak about this Intersection between secularity and faith and enchantment and disenchantment is like pretty crucial to the psychology that we examine here.
So thank you for that.
And you have a huge media project that I think is revving up this year.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, so I founded Axis Mundi Media, which is a podcast network.
We create content that tries to connect the ivory tower to the grassroots, and we really have in mind safeguarding democracy and the public square from extremisms, from religious nationalisms, from authoritarianism, things that y'all here at Conspirituality are doing in ways that are very resonant with ours.
So check out AxisMundi.us and you can find all the things we're producing.
We have a new show out that traces the history of Thank you, Bradley.
