Bonus Sample: Secular Person of Faith: pt 2 (w/Brad Onishi)
Friend of the pod and Straight White American Jesus host Brad Onishi returns to pick up with Matthew where they left off in their discussion of post-religious spirituality. They discuss what happens after disenchantment, the spirituality of boredom, and why, as we hurtle into the coming chaos of 2024, it’s good to keep an eye out for new allies in unlikely places.
This is Part Two of two-part conversation. Look for Part One in your pod feeds, dated December 30.
Show Notes
Brad Onishi
Straight White American Jesus
Axis Mundi Media
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
To support independent media, access our entire catalog of bonus episodes, and listen to everything ad-free, please visit patreon.com slash conspirituality.
You can also access these full bonus episodes on Apple Podcasts.
Thank you for your support.
Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
This is a Patreon bonus episode that follows up on my brief episode discussion with Bradley Onishi on his notion of secular person of faith.
Bradley teaches religious studies at the University of San Francisco and he's the co-host of Straight White American Jesus and the author of Preparing for War, the Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism.
We hosted Brad for episode 167 to look at his book and his journey out of evangelicalism and in his return visit we began discussing what can at times feel unsatisfying about some aspects of the modern secular project.
We talked about the long shadow of Max Weber declaring the demagicking of the modern world, and how religious literalism has responded.
We discussed Jeffrey Kosky's notion of disenchantment with disenchantment, and the deep materialism of Thomas Altizer, who proposed the idea of Christian atheism, which I just didn't know was a thing.
Now today we continue our conversation with me telling Brad a couple of stories about religious disenchantments that paradoxically have led to feelings of deep connectedness.
Now I said a little bit last time about how in the midst of reporting on terrible news about spiritual charlatans growing their influence through audience capture into political extremism, I'm feeling a growing need to spend more time on better ideas and antidotes.
And I've been thinking about how the field of science communications is pretty well developed You know, we've interviewed a lot of expert guests in the discipline and puzzled out the problems of dealing with misinformation, not platforming, bad ideas that we actually want to disappear, and how to avoid blowback, and how to empathetically listen to people who are confused or anxious about vaccines or chemotherapy.
But have we, and I'm not just talking about us on this podcast, but everyone in the cultural criticism sphere, paid as much attention to religious communications?
I think we've got good strategies against pseudoscience, but what about pseudo-religion?
I mean, the analogy is very imperfect, because who's really to say what pseudo-religion or spiritual misinformation is?
There's no vaccines cause autism claim to categorically debunk, and I would stay away from anyone who would want to be in charge of defining spiritual misinformation on a case-by-case basis.
Still, there are very compelling arguments to be made against religious rigidity, fundamentalism, literalism, bypassing, and the commodification and weaponization of spiritual instincts.
There are good reasons to push back against purity culture and the fake pieties of so-called ancient traditions, which are really postmodern pastiches of privilege and neurosis.
And we have to push back because this stuff melts the brain and twists the heart.
So the question is, how do you do it?
What is the PSYCOM's answer to the religious communications question?
Is debunking enough?
Or do you also have to provide good information?
If you report on spiritually inflected conspiracy theories, do you spread them around just by reporting?
When you provide good information, is it after really being present for the person's anxiety?
If you're going to tell someone their facts are wrong, how will you also bear witness to their feelings?
Now, Brad and I do not answer these questions here, not even close, so I'm considering this a doorway to a new year and I'm looking forward to where it leads.
Bradley Onishi, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
Once again, we're going to pick up our conversation that we started in that brief episode called Secular Person of Faith.
Welcome back.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
Once again, my microphone has not been fixed, so I'm speaking to you from a pre-modern source, and I apologize to all those listening, but hopefully you can bear with us.
So I wanted to tell you two stories about how I perhaps have been a secular person of faith without really knowing it, and maybe from a very young age.
So the first goes like this.
I was a constant top-tier churchgoer, Catholic as a child.
I went to a school that was created to provide a choir for the church obligations at St.
Michael's Cathedral here in Toronto, which is the center of the archdiocese and also the seat of some of the most conservative archbishops and cardinals in Toronto's history.
And that involved a lot of hours every week in rehearsal, in, you know, a stiff collar, in, you know, ties and sutans and surpluses for mass, and then in the performance and administration of mass.
