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If you’ve encountered today’s right-wing culture warriors, you have heard them lambast efforts at LGBTQ+ inclusion, police reform, combatting climate change, and myriad other issues as reflecting the “spirit of the age.” But what do they mean by this? Where does this phrase come from? Is it specifically Christian, or does it have broader meanings? And most importantly, once we decode this phrase, what do we find people doing with it? Dan tackles these questions in this week’s episode.
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Hello and as always welcome to It's In The Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
Again, my name is Dan Miller, and I am pleased to be with you today.
I had been out for a couple weeks, as I've shared in some other contexts.
My mom is ill, not doing well, and I had gone and spent some time with her and doing some things.
With her house and so forth and just wanted to thank those who reached out some very kind words kind sentiments I know a lot of people listening are in the same boat with aging parents and everything that that brings with it.
So Thank you for that But delighted as always to be back delighted as always to be hitting on one of the topics that I've heard about from a lot of you As always, I'm behind on the emails, but I am responding to them and value your insights, questions, comments, topic ideas so much.
Reach out to me, Daniel Miller Swedge, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Value your insights and your questions and just the sort of community so much.
And I'm going to dive in here to pick up on a theme, as I say, that I've heard about from a number of people, and it is the language of, or references to, the spirit of the age.
When people talk about the spirit of the age, or the spirit of our age, or the spirit of this age, they go on to say what that is.
It's a phrase that you would hear a lot in conservative Christian contexts.
It also, I think, comes up a lot in sort of culture war contexts.
Contexts where, I think for most of us, if we're aware of this at all, we know that religion is at work.
We know that religion is in the background, but it may be articulated in non-religious terms, or the religion may be sort of downplayed or muted.
But that's where we're likely to have bumped into this phrase.
And as always, I'm interested to take a look at, okay, so where does this phrase kind of come from?
What does it mean?
What are its references?
And then more importantly, or for me, the sort of most important thing is, if we sort of do some decoding and we decode that phrase, what is it doing?
Again, when people say things, when they post signs, when they hang banners, when they do these kind of things, they are doing something.
And I'm always interested in what it is that they are doing or trying to do.
And so that's what we're going to take a look at.
And I want to start by saying that this idea of a spirit of the age, I think it's deeply Christian, or maybe more broadly, deeply Abrahamic in really complex ways.
I say Abrahamic because it is not limited.
I think the origins of the idea don't come just from Christianity, they come from Judaism.
And I think you could find parallels to it in the present, not just in Christianity, but in Judaism, and I think in Islam as well.
Though I think that those are not the contexts given our American cultural milieu, so to speak, where we're most likely to hear those.
But I think that that's all there.
And so I want to start, this might sound paradoxical, I just said it has deeply Christian roots, but I want to start with a kind of a more or less secular understanding of this phrase, the spirit of the age, and I'm going to circle back around to the religion piece.
And in its more secular usage, the spirit of the age, it's very literally captured in a German term that a lot of us might be familiar with, and it's the term zeitgeist, right, which is literally the spirit of the age or the spirit of the time.
And you've probably often heard this phrase maybe in popular cultural discussions or other things of the zeitgeist.
Well, that's an idea that was developed in 18th and 19th century German philosophy And what it did is it sort of captured the idea that different historical periods or movements were characterized by particular distinctive cultural characteristics or sometimes spiritual forces, right?
That there was, in the cases of some of these German philosophers, very literally a spirit, an unfolding spirit of the age, a kind of inner essence of the age that was manifest in the historical movements and so forth.
And I call it a secular idea in the sense that it was often developed, as I say, in German philosophical circles.
They were often not theological.
These were philosophers who often stood at some distance from or even opposition to The theology of the seminaries of their time, the theology of the churches of their time, and so forth.
And they were often very, very critical or opposed to institutional Christianity, official church teaching and so forth.
But despite that, the notion of the zeitgeist as it develops in German philosophy is also an idea with deeply Christian and pre-Christian, meaning Jewish, roots, right?
A lot of those German philosophical movements had origins in Christian theology, and if you've studied theology formally and you've looked at figures like, say, Hegel is probably the giant towering figure here, Very aware that Hegel, on one hand, was not a theologian in the sense that, you know, lots of German theologians were.
But by contemporary standards, the Christian impulse, the Christian imprints on his philosophy are very, very manifest and very clear to see.
And this was true of lots of German philosophers of this time.
And the reason is that they often understood themselves to be kind of distilling what they saw as the intellectual or philosophical truth of Christian and Jewish teachings from their more mythological trappings.
And so they would do away with things like, oftentimes, an anthropomorphic God, or the language of maybe sin and atonement, or stories of miracles or biblical narratives and so forth.
But what they would often keep is this idea that What we experience in the world, the culture, the history that we experience and that shapes us is a kind of unfolding of a divine truth, of something more than us, of something transcendent.
And so the German idea of zeitgeist grew out of Jewish and Christian notions that God moved and interacted with the world in different ways during different historical epics.
And if that starts to sound like Theological movements like dispensationalism that would develop later in the US and Great Britain, I think that there are real connections there, right?
Because it's that same basic idea.
It also tied in with Jewish and early Christian ideas of apocalypticism, right?
There's this kind of ongoing revelation of God through historical events and so forth.
And that builds into Christian ideas of what's called progressive revelation or the idea that God reveals increasingly more truth about God's self over time and so on.
So what this led to, okay, were kind of secular or I might say supposedly secular or seemingly secular accounts of history.
that claimed to not be theological, to not be Christian distinctively and so forth, but they nevertheless saw history as progressively unfolding toward a fuller and fuller truth or fulfillment, And distinct historical periods within this were marked by identifiable features that set them apart from one another.
Okay, that's the idea.
And if that sounds pretty heady, that sounds pretty wonky, we're about to leave that behind.
But that was this kind of German philosophical background to the notion of the zeitgeist or the spirit of the times.
I should say it's a notion that was pretty widely rejected within contemporary historiography.
This is not how historians typically think about history now.
And the broadly theological roots of these supposedly secular conceptions are pretty well recognized and either affirmed if you're of a theological event or critiqued or whatever.
But here's the point, okay?
And here's where it ties in to our topic.
I think there remains a persistent cultural sense for many That even if it's not articulated in explicitly religious terms, different historical periods do have distinctive quote-unquote spirits.
They have distinctive emphases, distinctive features.
And I think that that's an idea that still has a broad and intuitive cultural resonance.
And the reason that's important is I think it paves the way for a more religiously articulated or more religiously inflected conception of the spirit of the age.
So let's hold that idea.
Okay.
This broad sense that there are kind of historical epics that have their own spirit, their own distinctive features and what have you.
Okay.
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When we hear people say, this reflects the spirit of the age, or the spirit of the age is such that blah blah blah blah blah, it's not typically because they're reading German idealist philosophy.
They're not typically reading a bunch of 18th, 19th century German philosophers and zeitgeist philosophy and so forth.
Okay?
Instead, when the social or religious conservatives that you've encountered, when Uncle Ron talks about and says, well, you know, all this stuff about, you know, transition for transgender minors is just part of the spirit of the age.
He's not invoking German philosophy, right?
What they're usually referring, when most of us hear this, is they are referencing the idea of spiritual warfare.
That's something we talk about a lot.
You hear a lot if you've listened to Straight White American Jesus.
If you've listened to this series, you hear about this.
They're talking about spiritual warfare.
That's what they're invoking.
And they are talking about, I think in particular, they are alluding to, it's not a direct quote, but they are alluding to a passage that is attributed to the Apostle Paul.
Okay, so I want to talk about that for a minute.
Specifically, they're looking in the New Testament.
There's a book called Ephesians, traditionally attributed to the Apostle Paul.
He was viewed as the traditional author.
I think most Bible scholars now think that it was probably a follower of Paul or somebody who was part of what we'd call a Pauline community, that is, A community of early Christians really influenced by Paul who writes this book, and so it sounds a lot like Paul, but there are also some distinctive features.
It doesn't really matter, okay?
But if you're talking to Uncle Ron or Cousin Lonnie in seminary, they're going to say it's Paul, okay?
But this is what it says.
This is from the book of Ephesians.
It's chapter 6, and it says, finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power.
Put on the whole armor of God so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
Those are verses 10 and 11.
Here comes verse 12.
This is the one that if you've listened to the podcast or you have people in your life who talk about spiritual warfare, this is the one that you'll have heard.
For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, or sometimes this dark age.
Against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly place.
So this language of this present darkness.
The spirit of the age is the spirit of this present darkness, or this dark world, depending on the translation.
That's what the spirit of the age is.
This linkage is made, and as that verse says, this is that whole thing about how when we struggle in this world with, you know, people who disagree with us or think different things about gender or sexuality or immigrants or whatever, we're not just fighting with people, we're fighting with spiritual forces.
That is the context for references to the present age.
So when people talk about the spirit of the age, right, or when they make references to the spirit of age, when Uncle Ron says, yeah, that's just the spirit of the age, that's just the spirit of the times, that's just how it works now, that's how we live now, we've departed from something, all of that stuff, right?
References to the spirit of the age are situated in this context of spiritual warfare, And that means that they are situated in a context of Christians envisioning themselves as being at war with spiritual agents who seek to make their culture in anti-Christian ways.
Okay?
So let's tie these threads together and see where it gets us.
The first is, to go back to all that German stuff, there's this vague cultural sense that different historical periods, including our own, are defined by a particular spirit or by particular characteristics.
There's something that demarks different historical periods from one another.
Second, and here we bring in the Bible stuff, the New Testament stuff, the spiritual warfare stuff, there is this sense linking the present age with the age of darkness, with spiritual forces that oppose us, and so forth.
But let's remember this, if you've encountered somebody who talks about the spirit of the age, if you've encountered somebody who envisions what's going on in the world today or in the U.S.
context today as spiritual warfare, you're talking to somebody who is a biblical inerrantist, most likely.
We've done a long sort of sub-series on biblical inerrancy.
You're talking to somebody who's a biblicist.
You're talking to somebody who holds that the Bible is a book that speaks to them directly, that our practices and policies and positions should be drawn from the Bible and so forth.
And here's why that matters.
The Bible then becomes a timeless document.
That is, it applies in all times and all places.
So when Paul or somebody following Paul writes about this present darkness, they're not just writing about some period of time 2,000 years ago.
They're not talking about a time or a place in Asia Minor somewhere.
They are talking about now, here, in our present.
If I'm a Biblicist reading that passage, and I believe in spiritual warfare, and I believe that that's what American politics is now, is this complex spiritual warfare, and I read a reference to this present darkness, it's now.
What does that mean?
It means that this age is a spirit of darkness.
It means that when we talk about the spirit of the age and we bring those things together, the spirit of this age is spiritual darkness.
Always it is a description of something that opposes God, that opposes God's will, that opposes God's people.
So when Christian or cultural conservatives invoke the spirit of the age, that's always code for something that is morally corrupt or sinful and needs to be opposed.
It is code for a spirit of opposition to God and God's desired social order.
So when people refer to the spirit of the age, or when they say something as part of or expresses the spirit of the age, it is always an epithet.
It is always a negative judgment.
It is a way of judging the age, the present moment, and whatever it is that we're lumping under that as, the spirit of the age, as being opposed to an authentically Christian society.
And this is where it all flows together, because this notion is then well-suited to the interests of Christian nationalists and like-minded Americans.
And again, this is a thing we talk about a lot.
We've been talking about it since the earliest days of straight white American Jesus.
What it does is it means that anything we oppose Maybe it's equal rights for women.
Maybe it's abortion access.
Maybe it's LGBTQ plus rights.
Maybe it's combating police brutality.
Maybe it's fighting climate change.
Maybe it is immigration reform.
Whatever it is.
Anything that we oppose, if we can paint it with the rhetorical brush and say we oppose it because why?
Because it expresses the spirit of this age.
It means it is an expression of spiritual darkness.
It is an expression of spiritual forces that oppose God.
It means that it's not just political.
It's not just about policy.
It's not just about economics.
It's not just about equal rights or something like that.
It is elevated to an apocalyptic, spiritual level.
To fight against these things is to fight for the cause of God.
And on the flip side, those who espouse things like LGBTQ inclusion or equal rights for women or fighting climate change, we are spiritual enemies who must be combated.
We are the agents of this present age.
We reflect the spirit of the age, this present darkness, and we must be fought.
We must be Combat it, right?
So what it does is it takes a culture that I think is, again, already sort of predisposed to this notion of thinking in terms of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, but inflecting it in a very specifically Christian, and in our context, Christian nationalist way, such that I can paint any political topic I want, and if I can just get it to stick under this moniker of this present age,
I can rally all of that religious energy and religious fervor in its opposition.
So what those appeals to the spirit of the age do, right?
Once we sort of decode them and dig around and say, well, what's really going on when somebody appeals to the spirit of the age?
What it does is elevate anything we don't like or approve of.
Anything that threatens us to the level of a demonic force that we need to oppose with everything that we have, including, again, the religious energy and fervor that comes with that.
Okay?
That is why The things I hear from listeners, in my experience, and just trying to sort of listen, excuse me, to our own signs of the times, I guess, when I hear people refer to the spirit of the age, it is almost always in the context of the fight to take America back, it is in the context of culture war, and so forth, because this is how these different streams flow together, okay?
So that's the context when most of us hear it.
I've given this background on it, but when most of us hear it, it's going to be in this context of contemporary culture wars, appeals to America as a Christian nation, which again means that if we crack the code, if we say what is really going on when somebody talks about the spirit of the age, it is basically a code for the restoration of the so-called Christian America and everything that that means for contemporary Christian nationalism, Everything we talk about in this series, in our weekly roundups, and in the things that we do on Straight White American Jesus.
Need to wind this down.
Thank you for that.
Thank you for those who reached out with that.
It's a really interesting topic to give some thought to.
Again, I welcome any thoughts, feedback that you have.
It takes me a while to get back to folks, but I do it.
Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at Gmail.com.
I have a lot of different emails that I use, but that's the best one to reach me for this.
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