“Spiritual Warfare 2.0”
How do appeals to “spiritual warfare” relate to the social and political struggles of the flesh-and-blood world? How do different kinds of Christian communities and traditions understand the relation between spiritual forces and the flesh-and-blood world? And what role does racial identity play in shaping understandings and expressions of “spiritual warfare”? Dan tackles these and other questions in this episode.
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Hello and welcome to the series "It's in the Code", part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and glad to be with you as always.
I want to begin by thanking the CAP Center, UCSB, for their partnership with us, and even more important and all-important always, the support that we receive from everybody who listens.
All of you who continue to email with ideas for the series.
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So thank you to everybody for that.
I want to dive right in here.
The episode I did last time focused on the concept of spiritual warfare.
I said then it was going to be a two-part series, so I guess this is Spiritual Warfare 2.0.
And last time, if you didn't catch the episode, I invite you to go back and listen to it.
I talked a little bit, gave a little bit of background about what we mean by this concept of spiritual warfare and where it comes from and the ways that different traditions sometimes talk about this.
And then when it came down to kind of the nuts and bolts, I mean the real decoding of the work that this idea does or what we can often sort of figure out if we begin to understand it, Looking at specifically the way in which the idea of spiritual warfare can effectively undermine awareness of and treatment for mental illness and just sort of general mental health issues.
But I also said that the idea of spiritual warfare is important for understanding Christian attitudes toward and engagement with, you know, let's say the flesh and blood world, but specifically the kinds of conflicts and issues that we face in, say, the so-called culture wars, or issues of social justice, or sometimes issues of concrete violence, and so forth.
And that's what I want to turn my attention to today, as I suggested in that episode.
And to reiterate, as I said, Christians don't always mean precisely the same thing when they talk about spiritual warfare, but for Christians who use this language or sort of, let's just say, live in this kind of universe, right?
The language of spiritual warfare is something that they, a way that they understand their faith, right?
For all of them, regardless of where they are in kind of the political or social or ideological spectrum, The spiritual world, quote-unquote, is connected to the everyday material world.
And that's really, really important to understand.
We can often make a contrast between the spiritual and the material or the spiritual and things that are more concrete or something like that.
And it could lead to the idea that the quote-unquote spiritual warfare is somehow sort of detached from or something different from the everyday world.
But for Christians who think in terms of spiritual warfare, that's not the case.
It's going to be true for all of them, right?
So within a broadly traditional Christian way of understanding the world, the world is never just the world, right?
Let's say the so-called secular world never sort of stands alone.
Rather, the world we live in is the context in which spiritual forces play out.
Experiences in the world represent the contest of spiritual forces or the context, excuse me, the contest of God's people, meaning Christians within a Christian way of thinking about it.
And those spiritual forces that oppose God and God's purposes.
So the spiritual world and the material world are two worlds that are intimately connected.
They cannot be separated.
And that is, again, if you're kind of coming from outside the context of that, that's something that's really important to understand.
Because it sounds really strange that the kinds of things that Christians will say, if you don't understand this intuitive sense that the spiritual world and the material world are sort of, they overlay one another.
They are intimately connected.
The one reflects the other.
And that's really key, and it's key for understanding, again, more things about this idea of spiritual warfare.
So I want to read again, there's this passage from the letter to the Ephesians that is Paul, this guy, the Apostle Paul, writes a letter to this church in Ephesus.
City in Asia Minor, and this is one of the passages where the language of spiritual warfare really comes through.
But he says at Ephesians 6, 12, our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
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