The late historian of religion James Carse (1932-2020) made a radical proposal in his 2012 book, The Religious Case Against Belief. He argued that beliefs, far from being central to or definitive of religion, are actually antithetical to religious community.
A religion’s historical longevity, he argued, depends on its ability to absorb and neutralize beliefs—epistemological dead ends built on willful ignorance.
“The challenge to religion,” Carse says, “is not its opponents from without, but its believers from within, and the real enemy of religion is belief itself.”
What does this mean for a project like Conspirituality and other projects of disillusionment carried out in the shadow of New Atheism and other modern skeptical movements?
Blair Hodges of the Fireside and Family Proclamations podcasts joins Matthew to discuss a potential casualty of the battle against religious extremism: a nuanced understanding of religion itself.
Show Notes
The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse
Fireside with Blair Hodges
Family Proclamations w/ Blair Hodges
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, I can add to that tagline that one casualty in the battle against religious extremism might be a nuanced and useful understanding of religion itself, the oldest and most mysterious of human institutions.
I'm Matthew Remsky, And we are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod and you can access all of our episodes ad-free plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
Now, my guest today is Blair Hodges, the host of the excellent Fireside podcast, but now I think it's called Family Proclamations podcast.
Hello, Blair, and welcome.
Hey, Matthew.
It's great to be here with you.
We met when you reached out to interview me about our book for the New Books Network, and I really appreciated the questions you prepared.
And, you know, you have a graduate degree in religious studies from Georgetown.
You're the former host of the Maxwell Institute podcast at Brigham Young.
And currently, you direct communications for Ronald McDonald House Charities in Salt Lake City.
They provide free housing and support for families with pediatric patients.
So, I also understand that you were brought up Mormon and that you talk to a lot of, you dialogue with a lot of members and former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Is that right?
That's right.
I was born Mormon and I still consider myself a Mormon today, but probably a weird Mormon.
I think it's a good place to start because I've asked you on as a fellow traveler as we encounter a pretty radical idea that was proposed by James Carse.
He is a late scholar of religious literature.
He died in 2020.
His 2012 book is called A Religious Case Against Belief and it's been ringing in my brain and so I asked you to read it and to discuss it with me because I think you can help me suss it out.
I think we come from some of the same places with this material.
Here's Carse's elevator pitch as told to Paul Kennedy on CBC's Ideas program in 2014.
One thing I discovered is that the challenge to religion is not its opponents from without, but its believers from within, and that a real enemy of religion is belief itself.
Now that's a complicated point, but that was the insight with which I began this book, really.
All right, so that is James Carse's very beautiful voice, and he's correct that it's a complicated point, and we're going to unpack it.
And I thought that to do that, we could start with our snapshots of his entire enterprise.
So here's mine.
A religion that expresses any millennia-sized longevity is like an ocean system filled with diverse forms of life living in community.
Now the diverse species know they are different, they might be prickly with each other, and yet they know they share the same waters and food sources, and they can gin up beliefs about benign mysteries like who Neptune is or where he comes from or his fundamental nature Or, there can be beliefs that anxiously seek to manage the community.
Like, how does Neptune want everyone or no one to have sex?
Or, should males and females dress and act differently?
But, the beliefs are always contested.
And they have to be, because they have no real basis in fact.
They always change.
And if they fade in and out of prominence at a peaceable rate, that's just part of the unending conversation of the ocean.
And the ocean thrives to the extent that no single belief or tribe of believers becomes so powerful and predatory that it begins to choke out diversity with its pride and certainty and misanthropy.
Because when that happens, the endless conversation of what it means to share the ocean has come to an end.
So, when Karst says that the real threats to the ocean, or religion, come from within, I think that's what he's pointing to.
And his caution to outsider critics of religion is that they not confuse the predators for the ocean itself.
Okay, Blair, your turn.
I think that's a really great description of his project.
A couple things I want to pull out of that really quick.
You mentioned anxious, anxiety, anxiously seeking to manage the community.
And I think Kars is saying that the best, not just the best of religion, but also the best of philosophy in general, Maintain space for anxiety.
A lot of people today are trying to just escape anxiety and find some sort of anxiety free place.
Right.
And he says anxiety can actually be a really important part of what it means to live and that we should lean into the anxiety not let it take us over.
But anxiety can drive humility and it can drive curiosity and it can drive a desire for something better.
So I think he would you could use anxiety negatively or positively here depending on how you're depending on how you're employing it.
The second thing you mentioned is beliefs are contested and they have to be because they have no real basis.
In fact, I would nuance that by saying they have no provable thing about them. There's nothing that could be universally
agreed on. So they could have some sort of metaphysical basis in fact, but there's no
real way for everybody to universally see that and be able to just easily agree with it. And in
that way, we're all swimming in the ocean and we're all engaging in these ecologies of
ocean life.
So it's easy to separate ourselves out and say, Well, I'm not a religious person.
So here's all the flaws of religion.
And I'm going to identify those, but not look at how my own life can still be impacted by all those flaws in my own new way of belief, my own new belief system that I sort of replacing my religious belief system.
So yeah, I think the overall metaphor that you're using gets at what cars is doing, which is we need to pay attention ecologically to what what life is like and instead of focusing on beliefs as the
end of religion, to think more ethically and to think more communally than that.
Maybe I thought you could give us the 101 on Kars' place and legacy in religious studies.
Sure, Matthew.
So, Kars, I hadn't heard of him before you reached out and suggested the book, but the title instantly drew me in, and I was glad that you pointed it out to me.
He's a really interesting figure, and I think looking at his career can give people a better grasp on what the academic field of religious studies is about, some of the tensions in that field, some of its strengths, what it's trying to do.
So let's speak to the question of Kars' legacy first.
I wouldn't say that Kars has a direct legacy on the field of religious studies.
That's mostly because he was a scholar of history and literature of religion at New York University, not a religious studies, capital R, capital S scholar.
He didn't publish much of direct consequence to that field in particular.
He's largely unknown there.
However, that's not to say that his work doesn't matter or that it doesn't belong in religious studies.
In fact, he's a really great example of how religious studies as a field includes a bunch of really different academic folks under its umbrella.
How do you know you're doing religious studies?
Because you want to do So, there's capital religious studies and lowercase religious studies.
Capital would be like the big theorists, the influential people in the field, the people who are really focused on defining what religion is.
And that's the biggest question of religious studies is how you can even define that, right?
And then there's a lot more people who theorize and write about religions in particular, lowercase r religions.
And there's some disagreement about what the role of the religious studies scholar should be, how theological should a religious studies scholar be, what their role is.
Should they be critiquing religion?
Should they be trying to manage religion?
Or should they take an emic or insider's perspective?
Should they be etic or outside and critique?
It's a lot of questions.
Kars is coming at it from having a religious background.
And thinking through religious ideas and religious texts and analyzing what it's like as a religious believer or a nuanced religious believer, which is also part of religious studies.
So that's kind of how he fits into the broader field.
And again, the biggest tension in that field is going to be religious studies as a secular enterprise and religious studies as theology, which is more involved in religion.
He definitely seems to embody this eclecticism, and I wanted to talk about this work because it's in the nature of The Beast that when we're talking about religious influence in the present day, and specifically when, you know, our podcast is talking about interrogating Catholicism, the New Age, cults.
If you're talking with people about leaving Mormonism, if we're talking about understanding conspirituality, we have to soberly evaluate beliefs.
And sometimes those beliefs are harmful.
We have to soberly evaluate practices.
Some of those beliefs are harmful.
We see instances of coercive control in religious environments, spiritual bypassing, and then we see whatever it was that drove the QAnon shaman into the Senate chamber on January 6th.
So, you and I are both somewhat in the business of evaluating what it's like to be from a religion, and sometimes that involves the practice of disillusionment.
So, is that fair?
Is that a good summary?
One of the reasons I was drawn to Conspirituality as a podcast is because it's reckoning with disillusionment from traditions that I haven't personally participated in directly.
So more of the stuff that's borrowed from the East or meditative practices, yoga and this sort of thing.
And I come up through Mormonism, which is a branch of Christianity, right?
So when we talk about disillusionment, we're talking about people who the thing stops kind of working for them.
They start seeing cracks in the surface.
They start feeling uncomfortable or either squeezed out or pushed out or like
they're not part of that community anymore.
And so this happens across different religions, right?
So myself, I'm mostly a Mormon heretic, getting more heretic here by the day, as I said.
So for me, when it comes to understanding disillusionment, I've especially been interested
in not just debunkery, but helping people find helpful ways to either divorce from a
religious tradition or to continue engaging with a religion that they have found to be
problematic in certain ways.
And so, to me, it depends on where that person wants to be.
I don't often take sides and saying like, you've got to leave or you've got to stay.
It's right or wrong.
I think everybody's individual circumstances have to be taken into account when you're talking about disillusionment.
So there's a lot of people in the ex-Mormon and post-Mormon movement that want to just re-litigate the trauma, re-litigate the questions and doubts and difficulties.
And just keep doing that, whereas I would see that process as more of a stage within a process of growth and change.
So for me, when I talk about disillusionment, I hope that's not the endgame or that people don't have to get stuck there, but that it can be a part of healthy engagement with spirituality or rationality or whatever you want to call it.
The task of disillusionment as it comes down to our sort of media ecosystem unfolds, I think, in the long shadow of movements like New Atheism and modern skepticism.
But people like Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens didn't limit themselves to criticizing the toxic or violent beliefs held by members of religious communities.
They sought to find the roots of those beliefs in the religions themselves.
And so the general idea was that if a thought system harbored, you know, metaphysics or anything deemed irrational at its root, then everything growing from that root would be irrational and generally useless and something that you might really want to leave behind.
Yeah, I mean, the slogan has been religion poisons everything, right?
That's the vibe of the new atheism.
And yes, it's It really is an indictment of religion or belief and a certain caricature of those things as being the root of the problem and religion poisons everything.
According to this logic, however, Islam becomes easily conflated with jihadism.
Christianity with the Westboro Baptist Church, Judaism with religious Zionists, then there can be a subtler and I think sometimes more demoralizing argument that Muslims who abhor jihadism are painted as the moderates who cover over for extremists or, you know, they're laundering a fundamentally violent religion for cultural export.
Or, for example, progressive Catholics can be said to be providing respectability cover for tradcaths.
And maybe in your neck of the woods, you know, people who have really left the island altogether will say things like, well, there's no such thing as good Mormonism.
Yeah, I really want to take a second on this.
This is a really important point.
I'm glad you brought this up.
This is especially the case in Mormonism when it comes to LGBTQ issues.
Right.
So, LGBTQ within the Latter-day Saint tradition are ostracized.
They're not seen as fitting into God's plan of salvation.
In fact, they run directly contrary to that, to be gay.
is to separate yourself from God or rather to act on being gay.
That's the newer Mormon position.
Mormonism has softened a little bit from being gay as a sin to acting in homosexual or same-sex attracted ways is a sin, right?
So, people are born into the faith and realize that they're gay and then encounter all of this difficulty, ostracization, demonization, and a lot of LGBTQ folks separate from the faith for that reason, right?
And their pain that they have gone through, that's usually connected with their family systems, not just their church, but their family systems, carries with them.
And so, they'll look at progressive Mormons who support LGBTQ folks and who want the church to change.
And they'll say, you're not going to change the church.
And by staying and paying tithes and participating, you're actually just upholding that oppressive system.
Right.
Now, I'm sympathetic in some ways to that view, right?
I'm sympathetic to it as well, and yet there's no real sort of calculus that will show who is correct there, right?
Right.
Like, how can I prove that, like, me leaving isn't going to bring Mormonism down, right?
Not gonna happen.
And Mormonism is composed of so many people that if all the progressives who supported LGBTQ folks left, it would make a little dent, but the tradition itself would maintain.
So we can put that there.
Also, if all the people who support queer folks leave, then queer folks who are being raised, brought into that tradition, are going to encounter fewer sympathetic ears, are going to have fewer arms to go into.
And so, as I mentioned earlier, I'm sort of in this position of saying, if it's better for you health-wise to stay, I think what Karse would say, and we're going to get into his text momentarily, is that belief structures in Mormonism around LGBTQ identity, existence, and behaviors are belief systems within a larger culture.
And that's what he's getting at when he's talking about the distinction between religion and belief.
Karse opens the book with a response to those who would criticize religion wholesale.
He says, in the current and quite popular assessment of religion, there is one thing conspicuously missing, religion itself.
It has long been a fashion, and even more so now, to frame arguments against religion in largely scientific language From that perspective, critics are right to expose the inherent falsehood of much that believers claim to be true.
And as an example here, we could say that, you know, LGBTQ life is somehow unnatural or immoral or something like that.
Karst goes on, for all of their righteous passion, however, what these critics are attacking is not religion, but a hasty caricature of it.
Religion has presented itself in so broad an array of disconnected and unique manifestations across the span of human history that no generalization can conceivably apply to the full variety of its expression.
So I don't think this is a new argument, is it?
Yeah, not at all.
Actually, I think some of the predecessors of New Atheism actually get a bum rap on this.
I'm thinking about people like Nietzsche and Thomas Paine and Karl Marx.
These are folks that had really stinging criticisms of religion, but actually I think they took religion a lot more seriously on its own terms than the New Atheists.
Obviously, the New Atheists is more of sort of a pop Phenomenon like they're they're sort of like pop music, like they're going to hit the masses, it's going to be more popular, more accessible, whereas your earlier atheists really wrestled with
with religion much more deeply.
They didn't just present the weakest possible religious argument and say, that represents all of religion.
You know, this is your Bill Maher religious documentary where he just found all the kookiest people he could find.
Right.
And said, this is religion.
Or someone that would point to Mormonism and say, see, Mormonism is very homophobic, and therefore religion at its root is very homophobic, rather than trying to look at the varieties within, not just within Mormonism, but within religion itself.
So, no, Cory Garse isn't making a new argument here.
Yeah.
Well, he also says, and I think this is really important for us on the podcast, that religious belief does not wither in the face of rational rebuttal.
It actually thrives on it.
He argues that beliefs require opposition, that beliefs strengthen in relation to opposition and doubt.
Now, if this is true, I think it says something cautionary about the instinct to debunk and disillusion.
So, what do you think?
I agree.
I think debunk culture, boy, the algorithm loves it, right?
Like nothing's going to hit the algorithm better than just this guy said this.
Well, that's dumb.
Here's this thing that's actually true.
It's quick.
It's easy.
Yeah.
It doesn't really require a lot of thought on my part.
Debunking needs to happen, but it can have a lot of negative side effects.
You all have covered this on your show.
The ways that directly attacking beliefs can actually cause retrenchment.
Or on the other hand, when you convince someone of harm that they're undergoing and you're not replacing it with something else with a story or a community or with connection, you're pulling the rug out from under somebody and leaving them completely floundering and perhaps more susceptible to even more fantastical tales or strange things.
And I think this is where things like QAnon and other things are coming into play is that people become disillusioned with the medical system.
They need a story about why that's happening.
And conspiracy theories can fill that explanatory gap and make someone feel empowered with a story and connect with a community that's energized by it.
And so debunking like the chapter in your book about saying, yeah, there's problems with the medical system.
Like, let's talk about those.
Yeah.
But if you're not replacing it with a mission, with something else, that's when the danger comes in, when people are floundering.
Carr says that beliefs, to the extent that they are rigid, are actually antithetical and toxic to religious community and its longevity because they presume certainty.
Which indicates the end of a process, the end of an argument or a conversation, and that this is destructive rather than a supportive force within a religion.
So, beliefs create cul-de-sacs, dead ends, and the only reason, Carr says, that the great religions persist over time Far outliving any other institution is that they are vast in comparison with the often contradictory belief systems that they catalyze.
They exist because their adherents are arguing constantly about what they actually are.
Constantly rejecting fixed beliefs in the shadow of, you know, incomprehensible mysteries like death and the purpose of life.
So, religion in its purest form, Karst writes, is like a vast work of poetry.
Now, is that an argument that you'd heard before?
Okay, it is.
But Kars is bringing his own kind of flavor to it.
So let me explain.
It's funny because religion as poetry actually has a really long history.
I mean, the Koran is literally poetry, right?
It was revealed to Muhammad as this beautiful Arabic poetry.
And a lot of Muslims will say, if you've only read a translation of the Koran, you've never actually read the Koran.
You can only read the Koran in its original because the poetry was part of the message.
And so, I think the general idea of religion is poetry.
It really has a long history.
I mean, we can go back to Homer, the epics.
We can talk about Milton and Christianity and the poetry that he wrote.
So, with Carse, he has a lot in common with those thinkers.
He's not creating poetry, but he's talking about religion as it operated for those poets, more as a community, more as a feeling, more as a vibe than as a set list of things you have to affirm.
And when you have that set list of things you have to affirm, you have the answers, right?
You have certainty.
And the goal then becomes indoctrination, not personal growth.
And so he's putting mystery at the heart of poetry, contestation, interpretation, communal reading, personal and collective interpretations shift over time.
As Carse observes, this is actually one of the main reasons why religion keeps working, why it's still around.
The Enlightenment thesis was that religion was dying out, that religion is a relic of a bygone age.
And we found that's not true, that religion persists.
And even when particular religious traditions atrophy, other religious-type bodies continue to grow.
Now, why is that?
Because religions succeed when they do two things.
When they adapt and when they change.
A religion that doesn't adapt is a religion that dies.
I think what Carse misses, though, is something that a religious scholar, Steve Tason, a friend of mine, points out, which is that religions survive because they adapt, but also because they're really good at denying they're adapting at all.
Right.
Yeah, and I think that's what Carse would say is part of the problem, is that when they deny that they are adapting, When their legitimacy is rooted in an idea of eternal, unchanging truth, that's where rigidity and certainty get introduced, and that's when people dig in their heels.
So, to Karsh's point, yes, religions have mystery at the heart of them, and I think he would agree if he was around today, and he passed away a few years ago, but if he was around today, I think he would agree with that, that yes, religions have mystery at the core, but the belief that he's critiquing
that says that we should kind of get rid of that is partly this belief that they don't do
that, that they don't change.
He writes that as richly verbal as religions are, like poetry, they say nothing, meaning they come
to no conclusion.
There is no point to any of them.
Not one of them is perfect, of course.
Each is vigorously threatened by the believers who attempt to lay claim to it.
So he's also talking about religious discourses being kind of like a territory that can be colonized or can be taken over by particular belief-oriented interests.
But that will always cause a kind of atrophy.
And I think that this really made sense to me With regard to how I defined my own background or how I would define my own background as a Catholic in my youth, because if you were to ask me what the point of Catholicism was, my answer from the point of view of creed or canon law would be very, very thin.
I would know that the hymns and the architecture and the sermons that I grew up with here in Toronto are profoundly different from those same things in, let's say, West Africa.
I've lived through four popes.
They're all very different people.
And if I run into traditional Catholics, they really seem like children to me.
So, if I went to church today, You know, I would remember and recite along by memory the Nicene Creed, for example, but if Sam Harris was eavesdropping on me doing that, he might say, oh, well, that's what you and all Catholics believe.
And he would be completely full of shit because whatever I'm actually in while I'm in that building saying that creed, There's a whole library of chattering voices around me and the text of that creed is a very small part of that chorus.
So, does that resonate with your own experience of Mormonism?
If I were to ask you, what were your core beliefs or what are your core beliefs, is that an easy question to answer?
Well, the answer that I'd give you is probably not an answer that a lot of current practicing Mormons, I would say mainstream Mormons, would give.
My Mormonism developed in different directions, and a lot of my social justice-oriented thoughts are rooted in my Mormonism.
Most Mormons in Utah where I live voted for Donald Trump.
And so we're clearly dealing with a big difference here.
Now, to your point about being full of shit, like Sam Harris would just say, well, either say like, why the hell are you still Mormon?
Or he would be like, no, that's not what Mormonism is.
So I think the problem with Harris's approach to that is it's rooted in a kind of cultural chauvinism.
I'm not someone Harris would really be trying to engage with.
I would be a tool in his broader project of just discrediting religion, right?
He's not really concerned with an individual believer in their experience of religion.
And so if he could look at you, Matthew, and how you were brought up in Catholicism and dismiss you, he's really not engaging your Catholicism.
He's doing this whole other project, which is to condemn capital C Catholicism in general.
It's interesting that, you know, you all talk about spiritual bypassing a lot.
I think this is a form of intellectual bypassing.
There are shortcuts that he invokes to not have to actually engage with what believers really think, the diversity of beliefs within any particular tradition or amongst traditions, and he's outsourcing that to just general shared distrust of institutions that's kind of grown up since the 60s and is very frankly, very justified in the ways that powers have been
abused in religion.
So I think that's where the shit is.
It's like, it's not really engaging individual religious believers in their beliefs or how
they fit into a community.
It's more this bigger game of sort of discrediting religion as an idea.
I think the game is playable because the gulf between belief and experience can be exploited
between a stated belief or a canonical belief and then a generalized religious experience
can be really, you can really pry into that.
And I'm wondering whether anybody in religious studies has developed any tools for assessing that difference between belief and experience.
Yeah, in fact, there's a big debate in religious studies about whether scholars should even try to do that.
And there's a whole field.
There's a whole subset of religious studies, people and philosophers sort of bleeds over into philosophy called the phenomenology of religion.
I think this is really what you're asking about.
People can Google that.
There's a nice Wikipedia entry on the phenomenology of religion.
This tries to assess how religion is experienced by humans.
What's it doing psychologically and experientially for people?
So what are the kind of claims that humans are making?
How do those claims bear on human behavior?
How do those behaviors reinforce beliefs?
And how do those beliefs, how are those tied up into social systems and communities?
The phenomenology of religion, what religion produces and how it's produced.
And within religious studies, there's really big controversies about how far you can take it, like, is, can God be a component
in that discussion?
Or should you bracket out any sort of quote, supernatural claims
and just assess religion as a completely human phenomenon?
There's a big divide in religious studies and, and I'm kind of tired of all those fights, I think.
Just, just let us know where you're coming from and then run your machine and we'll see how it works.
Like, if I know you're playing that game, cool, I'm going to look at your data.
If I know you're playing this game, cool, I'm going to see how that works, right?
So, these are some of the thorniest questions in religious studies, though.
So, Karst makes this argument from longevity.
He says there are no comparable institutions to the major religions in terms of age and resilience.
So, as an example, Christianity has survived countless schisms, all brought on by belief systems that eventually change and then destroy themselves.
So, if, for instance, we see that the new Apostolic Reformation emerges as a political force in America, This is not the influence of Christianity per se, but the ascendancy of a dead-end belief system within a diverse religious discourse.
I think that's how he would say it.
And it won't survive the test of its political goals.
And to illustrate this, Kars differentiates between communitas and civitas in religious culture, or community and, I guess, civil organization.
And I wanted to ask you what you made of that distinction and whether you think it can help us think about how we can be politically clear but also religiously accepting.
Before I answer that, I have a question for you on this question, which is, and this is super speculative.
Why do you think Kars is making that distinction?
What's the cash value of making this distinction between It seems that he has an underlying analysis of power accumulation that is not built up and expressed in community relations, but it is the project of civics.
And he says when those two things blend, when those begin to get entangled, when the church merges into or when Christianity becomes the Holy Roman Empire, things get very complicated.
I think he's got some great line about kings and politicians have always wanted to wrap themselves in the poetry of religious discourse in order to elevate their quest for power.
And that creates complications and dead ends.
It creates belief systems that become sort of Disconnected from the higher ignorance, which is what he praises first and foremost as being the project of religious contemplation.
So, I think he has an analysis of power, human pride, and certainty that distinguishes the civic project or the project of building and organizing power from the community project of Okay, I love that.
So yeah, he's saying like the civic side of things is more about authority, power, boundaries, control.
And this is where violence can get introduced, right?
Like the state's supposed to wield the sword.
And then he says the communitas is this more Horizon-oriented thing.
It's broader.
It's more nebulous.
It includes more people.
The authority is more shared.
The threat of violence is supposed to be dissipated.
And this is what he's comparing to poetry, as you said in the beginning when he's kind of saying religion is more about poetry.
Yeah, I think you're right.
What he's trying to do is rescue, I think, the idea of religion from the kind of things that the New Atheists are criticizing.
As I said, I think the New Atheists are pretty shallow and kind of rinky-dink.
If you're into atheism, please, for the love of God, or whatever, Go and find the good atheists who like have really dug in.
But I think the new atheists are helpful in identifying some of the stereotypes about religion that even religious believers themselves come to accept and defend.
So when we're talking about another thing I would put in that civic bucket is Secular knowledge and I don't do that to say there's something wrong with secular knowledge.
I value the life of the mind.
I'm evidence oriented like I'm I'm that's where I live, but I also want to acknowledge the limits of that space as well because it can become its own controlling power.
It can become its own dogmatism.
And so I think I think we can apply this civic and communitas idea to anybody, regardless of whether they consider themselves to be religious or not.
Are we operating within a world that's trying to constrict and control, or are we really trying to reckon with The weird crazy and interesting and diverse perspectives that really exist.
Are we trying to constrict or are we trying to engage in the poetry of it?
Is our belief system closed off and therefore dying?
A belief system that isn't growing is dying.
Or can religion be open And vibrant and and accepting and embracing.
And what's the underlying values of that religion?
Is it geared to individualism?
Is it geared to collectivism, et cetera?
Right.
So so to maybe like I'll give like two cheers for the new atheists.
not three, and say, I'm going to take him seriously a little bit. And then I'm going
to say, I appreciate Karrs identifying humility and mystery as at the center of what he believes
is the best of religion. And I think humility and mystery is the best at the center of science
as well. And the best scientists that I know will tell you the same thing.
Okay, so as we finish up, I want to return to and test that metaphor that I've been thinking
about the ecology metaphor. It feels like Karrs makes the major religions sound like
ecosystems.
So this one's the Arctic.
This one is the tropics.
This one is the savannah.
When you're in one of those ecosystems, you know it.
You're born into it.
It becomes part of your the way you are in the world.
And over long periods of time, people develop ways of living in relationship to that particular ecosystem.
And they seek to thrive in it.
They care for it.
They terraform it.
They create lore within it.
They turn its raw materials into art.
Sometimes they exploit it.
Sometimes it harms them.
Now, some people will clump together and try to control an ecosystem.
And they can do a lot of damage.
They can exploit resources.
They can control others.
They can limit the lore.
But I think that Kars is implying that they never really changed the basic territory and its mysteries.
Yeah, I think that's right.
What makes an ecosystem a healthy place?
What does thriving look like?
What does that require?
And for someone like Karse, he's trying to embrace religion without dogmatism.
And again, I just feel like everybody could take a page from that.
I don't limit.
That ecosystem analogy to religion.
I think this applies to politics.
I think this applies to social systems in general, like how our social systems are working, how we're diagnosing ills within that system, who's benefiting from the ills, what needs to change to address those ills, who needs to give up things to address those things.
So I think where Kars' words could apply to everybody listening to this discussion is that in a sense,
in Kars' sense, everyone is engaging in religion in the broad sense, in the broad sense of systems of
meaning stories that justify that meaning,
values that inform those stories and that direct us toward some kind of common goal.
So again, the book and what Kars' project is doing connects in with a long history of religious studies,
folks and philosophers.
I think coming back to the top, though, when I asked you about how you orient yourself towards your Mormon fellows or your borderline Mormon fellows or your ex-Mormon fellows, is the feeling that I get throughout Carse's text is that You are born into this thing or you are immersed in this culture and deciding what it is is actually pretty complicated.
Separating out what you have been told to do or told to believe by the various authoritarian personalities within that structure is one thing and then understanding the sort of wealth of familial and community relationships that also surround that or that characterize that connection is sometimes another.
And what I get from the text is a feeling of gentleness, actually, towards the fact that these are long-lasting institutions because they are as rich as culture themselves.
And, you know, I think that throughout I was reminded of Leonard Cohen singing that it begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.
That there is always a sort of social matrix that we're talking about when we are speaking about religious experience and that belief is kind of like this jagged, you know, disruptor within that.
It's part of it for sure, but it's definitely not definitional as far as I can tell.
So, that's part of what I'm taking away.
Any last thoughts?
Yeah, to connect up with that, I think religion's at its best when it can critique prevailing ideas and systems and obviously Progressive religion has been at the root of social justice movements.
It has powered and energized people.
I'm thinking of Martin Luther King Jr., but all the way back to slaves that were embracing Christianity that was enforced upon them.
But then they remixed that Christianity into a liberatory gospel that informed Overthrowing their masters, right?
So, religion itself, if it's going to be, I guess, religion's implicated today in some of the most challenging areas of contemporary life.
Right.
It's trying to make sense of pain and suffering, and progressive religion, like the kind that James Carse is advocating for, I think it's a key component in causes for social justice.
I appreciate your show even engaging in this conversation because it truly is a lot easier to shortcut and be like, you know, screw religion.
I'm done with that.
And, you know, we don't need it, but we can ally with it.
Actually, we can tap into the good elements of religion.
And I think we do that best when we also don't ignore or forget the downsides of religion, religion being implicated in harm and all that.
So that's a word of caution to sort of progressive Minded religious folks is if you're going to use religion as a tool for liberation, you also need to include and reckon with its role in oppression.
Right.
And so and I would say to say and again, I think the same kind of thing applies to scientific thinking that we need.
We can both champion and celebrate the advance of science, but we also shouldn't shy away from or ignore the really terrible things that the scientific enterprise is engaged in.
We have to reckon with the whole story.
That goes for religion, that goes for science, that goes, that's the line that cuts through the heart of every single human.
We've all, like we all are reckoning with our own internal problems as well.
So even having this conversation on a show like Conspiratuality means you're engaging in the kind of work that Carse says is the best kind of human meaning making.
I really appreciate that, Blair.
That's very kind.
I think that we all have different takes on religion, and those takes can also change over time.
I think this is important to remember.
I think it's really healthy to experience the disillusionment of, you know, understanding that heartfelt but rigid beliefs are also feeble justifications for accumulating social power within religious communities, and then carrying that power out into the world on a crusade.
But I think the disillusionment itself can also begin to roll into a mirror crusade.
So when Christopher Hitchens stands up in 2007 and he says, as you quoted at the start, religion poisons everything, he's making a fundamentalist statement.
And it's wildly uneducated, it's prematurely certain, and what's more, it's completely inactionable.
It's like saying culture poisons everything because it's not like there's an antidote.
Yeah, I love that.
I think that's exactly right.
Anyway, before we go, tell us about your podcast projects.
We've got Fireside and we've got Family Proclamations.
What are they about?
OK, great.
So Fireside actually started as I was leaving a very conservative university where I did a podcast for a number of years, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
It's a Mormon or Latter-day Saint university.
And Fireside started because as I was leaving, I reflected back on all the episodes that I kind of wasn't allowed to do.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, it was like, OK, I want to talk to this person.
I want to talk to this person.
And it was too hot button for Brigham Young University.
And so I started this podcast.
So, for example, there's an episode on white colonialism and Christianity.
Wow.
Right.
Mormonism is a very white religion and has a history of significant racism that in some
ways it's trying to overcome, but it really still needs to do more on.
So I wanted to do this episode about colonial Christianity with a scholar of Christianity.
And, you know, I couldn't do that because it would touch too much on some of the it's like a dentist poking around at your teeth.
It's going to hit the nerves and it's going to cause problems.
So there was that.
There's episodes on transgender folks.
So I have a historian of transgender history who talks about And has a connection to Latter-day Saint tradition.
Stuff I just couldn't talk about.
So, Fireside is about culture, religion, and really trying to critique from a place of regard.
Religious belief, Christianity, and Mormonism.
Then the second show that I'm doing right now is called Family Proclamations.
And it's similar.
In Mormonism, they have one view of what a family is supposed to be like.
It's the nuclear family.
It's one husband, one wife, ironically, because of Mormonism's history of polygamy.
The one husband, one wife, and lots of kids.
And it defines what gender roles are.
Men are supposed to provide.
Women are supposed to nurture.
This is a declaration the church created in the wake of same-sex marriage rulings, especially in Hawaii.
Growing up with that and learning that was the only true way.
As you live in the world, you're going to bump into things that disprove that you're going to meet gay people, you're going to meet same sex partners that are awesome and have great kids and a wonderful life, and things like this.
And so Family Proclamations, I decided to explore the evolution of family relationships in general.
And sexuality and gender identity.
So I have episodes on same-sex marriage, the legalization of it or the practical side of it.
I have episodes on how people are engaging with new reproductive technologies, histories of transgender identities.
People who don't want to have any kids and what that's like.
People who can't have kids.
Miscarriage.
Postpartum depression.
Parenting with disabilities.
Parenting children with disabilities.
It's a grab bag of every great book I could find on something that pertains to family.
I sit down with the authors.
I talk to them about it.
I'm trying to build a library of as many different kinds of families.
