What is power? How can power be yielded in helpful and harmful ways?
Brad is joined by Dr. Stephen Backhouse, an international scholar, speaker, and podcaster. They discuss the idea of magical thinking - not in the sense of sleight of hand tricks - but in the sense of trying to bend other peoples' wills towards yours. This form of power yielding is a zero-sum game - one in which either I win and you lose, or vice versa. There is no room for dialogue, compromise, or cooperation. The goal is vanquishing the other in order to dominate.
As Dr. Backhouse explains, this form of power often overtakes institutions, governments, and churches. We see it today in the rising authoritarianisms of Brazil, Hungary, and the USA. It is also rampant in Christian nationalist churches that have accepted the mission of having dominion over the earth in God's name.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show's hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And today I have, I always say this, cause I just, everyone who comes on this show, I love and respect and admire, but some days are just different.
And that is, today's one of those days because I have with me Dr. Steven Backhouse.
So Steven, thanks for joining me.
Oh, good friend as well.
So I need to tell people that I first met Steven when I, very first sort of days at Oxford University.
I was a very bright-eyed and unprepared master student who had no idea what he was doing.
Still an evangelical, I suspect.
Yes.
Kind of.
Quickly melting.
But we were both about to get on the slide off that particular one.
Well, and you were one of those people, Stephen, who had been at Oxford, had got an undergraduate degree there.
You're Canadian, but you had studied there.
And for somebody who was just so intimidated and really didn't feel like he belonged, meeting someone friendly and caring like you was a real help to me.
And so I've always been thankful for that.
You're also the only academic to this day that I've seen in an improv show Which was, from my memory, very good.
And so, you're a man of many talents.
So, it's really great to connect, and it's really great to talk to you today.
Let me tell people about you.
So, you are the founder and director of Tenth Theology, and an international speaker, author, and teacher.
You've taught and spoken all over the place.
You are the author of numerous works, two on the work of Soren Kierkegaard.
So, I have to say, Stephen was on Christian nationalism before it was cool.
Fifteen years ago when I met him, he was writing a dissertation on Soren Kierkegaard and Christian nationalism, and here we are.
He also wrote an award-winning biography of Soren Kierkegaard called Kierkegaard, A Single Life, and another book, The Essential Companion to Christian History.
He has two podcasts, one called Hyphen that he does with a rabbi and there's sort of some Very interesting inter-religious dialogue and other topics there.
And Tent Talks, which is following from just a lot of the work you do to bring philosophy, theology, theory to kind of real people and to a real public, which is obviously work that is near and dear to my heart.
But today we're going to talk about something, you know, you're one of the, as I just sort of outlined, Stephen, One of the friendliest people I met at Oxford.
Oxford is a notoriously elitist place, let's just be honest.
But it's kind of a weird cognitive dissonance for me right now because it's great to see you and an old friend, and yet we're going to talk about something that's kind of gross and kind of grimy at times.
It doesn't have to be, but most times it is, and that is power.
Right?
Yeah.
Let's talk about, I know you have a new book project in the works on this.
You're thinking a lot about power as it comes to politics, morality, as it comes to money, as it comes to all kinds of things.
So let me just kind of ask a really basic question.
And I feel like on this show, we do a lot of history.
We do a lot of like digging into events and, but this is a chance to kind of go back to my roots and philosophy and theory and really think sort of like about concepts and ideas.
What is power?
What is that?
I think that this is one of those questions, it's a bit like religion or a country or a state.
It's very hard to define, right, as soon as you ask.
But I think power is something like having the will, the measure by which you have the will to do something and then the ability to act on that will.
Okay.
So it's wanting to have a desire and to act on it.
And the measure to which you can do both of those things is the measure to which we say you have power.
And I think that nobody has no power, so everybody has some power.
And that's not to say that everybody is equally powerful, but I think there's no human being who's without any will or any ability to act.
It's just that once you get those two working together, that's when you can start measuring the degree to which they have it.
So we have two kind of main components, the will to do it, your desire and the ability, right?
So you want to do something and you're able and all of us have some power, like we have some measure of that and others obviously have much more.
So you're working on a project where again, friends, you might be thinking, all right, you're talking about power.
How does this fit into politics and religion and Christian nationalism?
Well, we're living in an age where we're seeing power structures shift.
We're living in an age where we're seeing institutions change and in some senses crumble.
And Stephen, you've really outlined two ways to think about power or two forms of power, I should say.
One of them, in your mind, Negative and the other much more positive.
The negative version you call magical thinking and it's a kind of bad kind of power yielding.
So, what is that?
Well, I noticed a while ago that a lot, almost exclusive, like almost without exception, the kinds of ways that people in my spheres, in church or in business or in government, the way they used power Was exactly similar to the way black magicians were using power.
So I realized, well, wait a second.
Like when you say black magicians, you mean like dark arts?
Or just magical thinking in general.
So because I'm a bit of a geek and I enjoy, sometimes I enjoy reading like these weird alternative histories.
And I was reading a little bit about, I don't know, do you know who Jack Parsons is or Aleister Crowley?
Yes.
And, you know, reading about, I don't know, the origins of Scientology.
I don't know, you just kind of read about, like, these alternative, New Age-y, magical thinking kind of systems.
And I realized that there are people like Aleister Crowley who self-confess dark magicians.
Like, they say, I am practicing black magic.
This is what I do.
And they would say, well, how we do this is we use your will to focus your energy and you focus your will to dominate inferior wills.
I think a lot of people think, oh, magic is all about like worshiping demons or something like that.
It's like, no, it's not about Satan worship.
It's about dominating others with your will.
And but more than that, it's that ability to if you crystallize or visualize what you want, then the universe will be shaped to your will.
So it's about like changing reality and subordinating others and all this.
And I look at around it just like, You know, PTA meetings or church board membership meetings.
And you have these people who will like, we just got to purge this space of voices that we don't agree with.
We got to get our people in the board and control it all.
Or we got to get rid of and purge, excise, get rid of any voices that we don't like.
And if we all get together, how many times have I been in a church, especially ones with sort of charismatic bent, where they're like, we all shout together in unison, then it will happen.
And I was thinking, that's just magic.
And now, like, Aleister Crowley could sit in this room and he'd go, yeah, that's black magic.
Well done, everyone.
And I thought, okay, this is an interesting way of thinking about power.
Magical thinking has taken over the world.
And by the way, am I allowed to swear?
You do whatever you want.
It's fucked us up.
Like, it's really brought the world to ruin.
Like, it's behind climate chaos and catastrophe.
It's behind rapacious capitalism.
It's behind nationalism.
You know, it's the form of power, which is behind pretty much any toxic system you can think of.
It's 'cause people have thought, we are gonna dominate this space with our will, and we are going to get rid of any voice that doesn't agree with us.
And it is completely wrecking us right now. - Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swag episode.
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