An essay from Matthew exploring the problem of authenticity which plagues every investigation we do on the spiritual influencer beat.
There are queasy questions we’re always contending with when we’re listening to the preaching of Charles Eisenstein, Kelly Brogan, Zach Bush, or RFK Jr:
Has this person really committed to the spirituality they are presenting? Or is spirituality instrumental to them? Do they have experience to share, or programs to sell?
It’s hard if not impossible to find the line between these things, especially in the society of the spectacle, especially when we’re talking about influencers we don’t personally know. But it's an important consideration because assumptions made in one direction or another taint the entire discourse.
Maybe, we’re talking about the difference between unearned faith and earned faith.
Show Notes
Zero at the Bone: Wiman
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We're on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod, 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.
Okay, today's bonus is called Faith Unearned and Earned, and it's an attempt at getting at the problem of authenticity, which I think plagues every investigation that we do on the spiritual influencer beat.
It's really about this basic queasiness that I think we're always contending with when we're listening to somebody like Charles Eisenstein or Kelly Brogan or Zach Bush or RFK Jr.
And I think that queasiness can be summed up in a question.
Has this person really earned the spirituality they are presenting?
Or is spirituality instrumental to them?
Do they have experience to share or programs to sell?
And I think it's hard, if not impossible, to find the line between these two things, especially in the society of the spectacle, especially when we're talking about influencers we don't personally know.
But I think it's an important consideration because assumptions made in one direction or another just sort of taint the entire discourse.
But, recently, I believe I've stumbled across a heuristic for what we're guessing at here.
I think we're often talking about the difference between unearned faith and earned faith.
Now, I can't take credit for this basic idea, because like many ideas I've had over the past several months, it was directly inspired by the work of the American poet and theologian Christian Wyman, who in one of the lectures I've listened to him give, mentioned the difference between earned and unearned faith.
And I've scoured his books to see if he flushes that out anywhere else, and I can't find it.
So I'm going to try to do that here, because I think I know what he means.
Now, for those who don't know Wyman, I think it's worth giving a snapshot through a single quote.
This is from his most recent book.
It's called Zero at the Bones, 50 Entries Against Despair.
It's not directly about earned faith, but it does describe the process of coming back to a religious or spiritual view after some period of disillusionment.
So it's about bringing life into an older, hollowed-out thing, and I think in that way, it's apt, he writes.
People who have been away from God tend to come back by one of two ways.
Extreme lack or extreme love.
An over-mastering sorrow or a strangely disabling joy.
Either the world is not enough for the hole that has opened in you, or it is too much.
The two impulses are intimately related, and it may be that the most authentic spiritual existence inheres in being able to perceive one state when you are squarely in the midst of the other.
The mortal sorrow that shadows even the most intense joy.
The immortal joy that can give even the darkest sorrow a fugitive glean.
So Wyman is a guy who started off with an unearned faith because he was born into a West Texas charismatic and claustrophobic, as he says, family and community.
And he fell out with it all in his twenties, but then he came back to it or something like it decades later through both the extreme lack of a terminal cancer diagnosis and the strangely disabling joy of having a family.
And also his encyclopedic knowledge of modern poetry.
I don't think you can really read Wyman on the subject of faith without believing what he says or at least believing that he believes what he says.
He's not selling anything.
He's not offering platitudes.
He's cranky and alienated on the subject of organized religion and church in general.
He finds doctrine uninteresting.
He's really recording a journey of struggles and how they haven't killed him.
Because he's been able to read and write poetry that points to the void beyond, which seems to brim with promise.
You've been listening to a Conspirituality bonus episode sample.
To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com slash conspirituality, where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing.
You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
