Speaker 1: Hello everybody, Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends.
Speaker 1: I am back with you again after a brief hiatus
Speaker 1: of sorts. I don't know if I would call it that,
Speaker 1: but I basically spent the last couple of weeks just
Speaker 1: hammering away on my thesis chapter that was due yesterday
Speaker 1: as of this recording, and it's going well. But now
Speaker 1: that that's done, I can get back to telling you
Speaker 1: guys all these crazy stories from history that lately have
Speaker 1: been following themes that I've been concerned with both in
Speaker 1: and out of grad school, and speaking of my thesis,
Speaker 1: that is the theme that we're finally getting into with
Speaker 1: this new set of episodes. Last time was imperialism. The
Speaker 1: time before that was basically a sort of deeper dive
Speaker 1: into the Israeli Palestinian conflict in various corners. But this
Speaker 1: time we're going to be talking about the phenomenon of
Speaker 1: American Christianity and American belief itself. Before we get into that,
Speaker 1: I want to quick give a shout out to my
Speaker 1: longtime executive producer level supporters on Patreon, John Andre Sather
Speaker 1: and Mike Maleban, who have been sticking with me all
Speaker 1: this time, and I cannot tell you, guys how much
Speaker 1: I appreciate you. Thank you again as always for your
Speaker 1: ongoing support and very kind words whenever we speak via
Speaker 1: DM or email, which, by the way, all of you
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Speaker 1: way of grad school. The new semester starting soon, guys.
Speaker 1: So yes, without further ado, I think that about covers it.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, before I forget, spread the word of this show.
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Speaker 1: And don't forget to leave a review over on Apple Podcast.
Speaker 1: Let's get that average score up a little bit. I
Speaker 1: think I've pissed off a few people lately seeing where
Speaker 1: the score is sitting at right now, So let's get
Speaker 1: up to a four point five, which might be a
Speaker 1: little low for some people's taste, especially mine. So yes,
Speaker 1: without further ado, let's get into this episode, which, like
Speaker 1: I said, has to do with the phenomenon of American Christianity.
Speaker 1: A little background. This is adapted from an essay I
Speaker 1: actually wrote for now unfortunately defunct but not forgotten Areo
Speaker 1: Magazine under the stewardship of Helen pluck Rose and Ione Italia,
Speaker 1: who are both still doing great work. Iona over at Couillette,
Speaker 1: where I occasionally correspond with her and Helen on her
Speaker 1: own substack. I believe it's called The Overflowings of a
Speaker 1: Liberal Brain. Great title. So yes, this essay was published
Speaker 1: there at the beginning of twenty twenty one. Actually, so
Speaker 1: some stuff in there might feel a little dated to
Speaker 1: a certain degree. I can understand that, but I do
Speaker 1: think it's kind of important for at least for me
Speaker 1: to look at this because it gets into something that
Speaker 1: I think has been happening more lately, and I appreciate that,
Speaker 1: which is the memory of the we could say, the
Speaker 1: pandemic years. What I've come to see. And this is
Speaker 1: where the thesis comes into play, because it's sort of
Speaker 1: the angle I'm taking is the new and I think
Speaker 1: enduring Unfortunately in many cases relationship between individuals and institutions
Speaker 1: thanks largely to the perceived and very real failures of
Speaker 1: those institutions. And when you start to think about that relationship,
Speaker 1: especially the further back in time you go, you start
Speaker 1: to realize that those institutions might have changed, but that relationship,
Speaker 1: at least in the United States, remains the same pretty
Speaker 1: consistently throughout the entire history of I would go so
Speaker 1: far as to say English colonization. That's basically what my
Speaker 1: thesis is getting into. You guys will find out more
Speaker 1: about that as time goes on and I get more
Speaker 1: work done on it. But that line of thinking was
Speaker 1: animating me when I wrote the essay that this is
Speaker 1: based on what you guys are about to listen to.
Speaker 1: But in this particular case, we're talking about just the
Speaker 1: general scope and continuity of American Christianity, or really America's
Speaker 1: relationship with religion. In general, if the title of this
Speaker 1: episode has not made it clear, I'm definitely interested in
Speaker 1: the idea that we might be living through or maybe
Speaker 1: already have. I mean, it's hard to say what would
Speaker 1: be termed one of our great awakenings. There's a bit
Speaker 1: of dispute on how many great awakenings we've had. We've
Speaker 1: at the very least had two. I believe we've had
Speaker 1: four now possibly five. I've heard people making the argument
Speaker 1: that we've had six already. So there's not a consensus
Speaker 1: in academia or otherwise. There's some academics, historians Frank Lambert
Speaker 1: comes to mind, who completely discount the idea of a
Speaker 1: great awakening at all and just see it as a
Speaker 1: sort of post hawk rationalization for religious ecstasy in a way,
Speaker 1: or a way to sell future revivals, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: I don't know where I fall on that yet. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that it's safe to say that we've had them.
Speaker 1: We've had these events, whatever you want to call them
Speaker 1: of maybe not ecstasy but religious agitation. I think they've
Speaker 1: happened multiple times. And well, to put my cards on
Speaker 1: the table, guys, I mean, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: you who followed me for a long time. Know that
Speaker 1: I carry within me not just a pretty deep distrust
Speaker 1: of organized religion, but even of the religious impulse itself.
Speaker 1: That's sort of been what has kept me from being
Speaker 1: anything other than an atheist most of my life. Honestly,
Speaker 1: if you guys tuned into the conversation Brendan O'Neil and
Speaker 1: I had the last episode, you probably remember us talking
Speaker 1: about that about how the challenge from being an atheist
Speaker 1: comes from finding wonder in the world. Doesn't mean it's impossible.
Speaker 1: You of course can, but there is a challenge, and
Speaker 1: that challenge is self imposed. I don't think that anyone
Speaker 1: would be honest if they said they were an atheist
Speaker 1: but didn't have that kind of challenge, and I can't
Speaker 1: do anything about that. I know a lot of you
Speaker 1: listening our believers, and I do respect all of you
Speaker 1: for it. I wouldn't have said that when I was
Speaker 1: in my twenties, because, as I said to Brendan when
Speaker 1: we talked about this, it's because I was in my twenties.
Speaker 1: So as I've grown up, I've come to appreciate those
Speaker 1: who practice religion. So please know that when I'm talking
Speaker 1: about this kind of stuff, it's not with derision, at
Speaker 1: least for those who believe this stuff, and especially as
Speaker 1: I've learned more about our great awakenings, our religious traditions.
Speaker 1: Whatever one thinks about religion does nothing to diminish the
Speaker 1: fact that the people who experience these things, these phenomena,
Speaker 1: whether they believe they were demonic possession or the possession
Speaker 1: of the Holy Spirit, whatever you want to call it,
Speaker 1: they really did believe, at least most of them did,
Speaker 1: that they were going through these things. And whether, again,
Speaker 1: whatever you think about that or not, personally, you have
Speaker 1: to respect that they actually believed it. You have to
Speaker 1: respect that their behavior was affected by their belief in
Speaker 1: these things. And it wasn't necessarily always a bad thing.
Speaker 1: I would argue a lot of the times it is,
Speaker 1: and that's sort of the ultimate trade off that one
Speaker 1: has to think about when thinking about religion, or especially
Speaker 1: popular religion. So with all of that said, that distrust
Speaker 1: that I have felled in my life led me to
Speaker 1: pretty quickly recognize what I believe at least we were seeing,
Speaker 1: especially in the summer months of twenty twenty. But I
Speaker 1: think continuing on and to a certain degree, even continuing
Speaker 1: on to this very day, but especially during those early years,
Speaker 1: I basically thought what I was seeing was more of
Speaker 1: a religious phenomenon than a political one. And there were
Speaker 1: two things that made me think this. The first, unfortunately
Speaker 1: I have to describe this because it's an audio medium,
Speaker 1: was a photo. It was taken a few blocks from
Speaker 1: where I grew up, right at the site where George
Speaker 1: Floyd was killed, where, if people forget, that was a
Speaker 1: site that had and I think to this day though
Speaker 1: there's been some dispute about it, as I understand it,
Speaker 1: at least in Minneapolis, politics is a memorial site, and
Speaker 1: in those early months, it was something much more intense.
Speaker 1: It was the site of what only could be described
Speaker 1: as a religious revival. And there was a photo of
Speaker 1: this young woman standing in a tub about to be
Speaker 1: baptized at the site of what was deemed a second
Speaker 1: degree murder at the sight of To put a less
Speaker 1: controversial point, ONYX, I know people like to dispute that
Speaker 1: the site where somebody died who shouldn't have died. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you'll let me editorialize for a moment, that's grotesque,
Speaker 1: At least to me, It's almost as grotesque as when
Speaker 1: Nancy Pelosi said to George Floyd in absentia that he
Speaker 1: sacrificed himself for all of us, which I'm sorry, I
Speaker 1: don't think George Floyd would have felt that way, never
Speaker 1: mind the fact that he's not Jesus in every sense
Speaker 1: of the word. He was not apparently a very good guy.
Speaker 1: But he shouldn't have died, and he didn't sacrifice himself.
Speaker 1: He died unnecessarily. That's it. Anyway, point should be well taken. There.
Speaker 1: What I'm talking about, am I editorializing aside? It doesn't
Speaker 1: really matter, like how grotesque it might have or might
Speaker 1: not have been. What obviously was going on in that photo,
Speaker 1: a woman being baptized at the site of a national tragedy,
Speaker 1: is really revealing to what's going on. What we're looking
Speaker 1: at in that image is a religious right being done
Speaker 1: through a supposedly secular lens of racial justice. The Christian
Speaker 1: Post reported this. Actually they wrote that quote, a number
Speaker 1: of Christian groups that have been holding revival services at
Speaker 1: the site where George Floyd died in Minneapolis say that
Speaker 1: they're seeing many people turn to God in baptisms and miracles,
Speaker 1: which apparently are occurring unquote. Now, these images were coming
Speaker 1: out as I was reading the Masterful Tone of Christian
Speaker 1: History by Tom Holland, Dominion How the Christian Revolution Remade
Speaker 1: the World, in which in his final chapters of that
Speaker 1: book he made the parallels between Christian tradition and what
Speaker 1: we now call quote unquote wokeness quite explicit. He had
Speaker 1: actually written his book a few years before everything that
Speaker 1: happened in twenty twenty, but the rhetoric was already quite apparent,
Speaker 1: especially in the vestiges of what the famous or infamous
Speaker 1: rather Curtis Yarvin calls the cathedral or what I just
Speaker 1: prefer to call the elite academic to professional class pipeline
Speaker 1: that has always existed in one form or another. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Maybe I'm naive to call it that and
Speaker 1: not give it a much more ominous name like Jarvin did,
Speaker 1: but you know whatever. Anyway, these connections that Holland had
Speaker 1: made were only made clearer in twenty twenty with the
Speaker 1: tent revival atmosphere of the George Floyd protests, and even
Speaker 1: the riots to a certain degree being obvious to anyone
Speaker 1: who knew even a little bit about America's Christian history.
Speaker 1: And this is what led me to do some more digging,
Speaker 1: and what resulted in this essay and now this episode
Speaker 1: you're about to listen to. So with all that said,
Speaker 1: let's get into some impossible history.
Speaker 2: Well, let me to tell you what you would have
Speaker 2: seen and heard.
Speaker 3: If we're not being pleasant listening, if you're at lunch,
Speaker 3: or if you have.
Speaker 2: No appetite, now is a good time to switch off
Speaker 2: the radio.
Speaker 4: An ancestor of mine main Chaine, that if you eliminate
Speaker 4: the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable evations banis of it.
Speaker 5: You know, you.
Speaker 6: Know, I wish I could say tonight that a lasting
Speaker 6: piece is inside. I feel amoting dream, I feel a
Speaker 6: laughing light.
Speaker 3: Noore you were as to kill, we care for kill.
Speaker 7: Some say the world.
Speaker 5: Will end empire.
Speaker 2: Some say an from what I have tasted of desire,
Speaker 2: I hold those of favor fire. But if it had
Speaker 2: to perish twice, I think I know him of hate
Speaker 2: to say that for destruction. Ice is also great and
Speaker 2: looked surficed.
Speaker 1: This is History Possible, Part one. A spiritual yearning. Nietzsche
Speaker 1: had foretold it all. God might be dead, but his shadow,
Speaker 1: immense and dreadful, continued to flicker even as his corpse
Speaker 1: lay cold, Tom Holland dominion. The United States of America
Speaker 1: has had a long and common located relationship with religion.
Speaker 1: I think that is a very uncontroversial thing to say,
Speaker 1: perhaps even obvious. Religion is likely more fundamental to America
Speaker 1: and American history than most people believe, and that situation
Speaker 1: is by no means over or predetermined to end. Though
Speaker 1: this may not seem obvious, given that Americans have seemingly
Speaker 1: never been less religious than they are now. Back in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, the Pew Research Center found that almost a
Speaker 1: quarter of Americans were unaffiliated with any religion, and that
Speaker 1: three percent and four percent of them were atheists and agnostics, respectively.
Speaker 1: This was up from the fifteen percent reported by the
Speaker 1: American Religious Identification Survey in two thousand and eight, the
Speaker 1: one that was touted by Bill Maher and his docu
Speaker 1: comedy Religious, which was itself already double that of the
Speaker 1: numbers cited in the nineteen ninety report. The reasons for
Speaker 1: this decline are many, not least the incredible pace of
Speaker 1: scientific and technological advancement, which has satisfied many people's desire
Speaker 1: for immediate wonder. But the decline was also due to
Speaker 1: the market increase in beautifully written, oftentimes and generally logically
Speaker 1: sound works by members of the so called New atheist movement,
Speaker 1: including such luminaries as the late Christopher Hitchens my favorite,
Speaker 1: of course, but also figures like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris
Speaker 1: and Daniel Dennett, and of course people forget this amplified
Speaker 1: by YouTube videos of their debates with religious figures, the
Speaker 1: kind of events that would previously have only been available
Speaker 1: to ticket holders or viewers of book TV. Some of
Speaker 1: you listening might not be old enough to remember this,
Speaker 1: but the late two thousands, one of the most popular
Speaker 1: things to search for on YouTube was something known as
Speaker 1: the hitch slap, where you had compilations never longer than
Speaker 1: ten minutes, because that was the limit back then of
Speaker 1: how long videos could be of chrispher Hitchin providing hitch
Speaker 1: slaps where he essentially smacks down rhetorically speaking his opponents
Speaker 1: and debates, sometimes about politics but oftentimes about religion because
Speaker 1: that was just what he was so good at.
Speaker 8: The first question, obviously, is for you, Christopher, since mister
Speaker 8: McGrath has just finished, I would let put the question
Speaker 8: to you, which is, if.
Speaker 3: God does not exist, on what basis. Can anyone say
Speaker 3: this action is right or this action is wrong?
Speaker 6: So whoever asked that only just came into the room, right,
Speaker 6: I mean, I can't believe that I didn't say what
Speaker 6: I thought about it, But I won't repeat it because
Speaker 6: actually what Dr McGrath just said I thought was unusually
Speaker 6: good on this point. You'll recall what he said on
Speaker 6: the dostev skin matter. If God exists, we have to
Speaker 6: do what he says. If he doesn't, we can do
Speaker 6: what we like. Now, just apply this for a second
Speaker 6: in practice and in theory.
Speaker 3: Is it not.
Speaker 6: Said of God's chosen people, and is it not said
Speaker 6: to them by God in the Pentateuke that they can
Speaker 6: do exactly as they like to other people. They can
Speaker 6: enslave them, they can take their land, they can take
Speaker 6: their women, they can destroy all their young men, they
Speaker 6: can help themselves to all their virgins.
Speaker 3: They can do what.
Speaker 6: Anyone who had no sense of anything but their own
Speaker 6: rights would be able to do. But this case, with
Speaker 6: divine permission, doesn't that make it somewhat more evil? In
Speaker 6: Iran where I've been, I've been to all three acts
Speaker 6: of evil in the countries. By the way, I think
Speaker 6: I'm very right. Who can say that you're not allowed
Speaker 6: to sentence a woman who is a virgin to death,
Speaker 6: even though she may have committed in the eyes of
Speaker 6: the mulla's a capital crime, perhaps by showing her hair
Speaker 6: to often all her limbs. She can't be sentenced to death,
Speaker 6: but religious law means she can be raped by the
Speaker 6: revolutionary guards, and she's not a virgin anymore, then they
Speaker 6: can kill her. Do what thou wilt shall be. The
Speaker 6: whole of the law used to be considered the motto
Speaker 6: of Satanism.
Speaker 3: Miracle.
Speaker 6: Divine permission given to people who think they have God
Speaker 6: on their side, enables actions that a normal, morally normal
Speaker 6: unbeliever would not contemplate, the mutilation of genitalia of children,
Speaker 6: who would do that if it wasn't decided that God
Speaker 6: wanted it. Just as when the poet in England gets
Speaker 6: the poet laureateship, they start to write drivel instead of
Speaker 6: poetry for some reason. It's the king's scrofula. The other
Speaker 6: way around, morally normal and intelligent people find themselves saying
Speaker 6: fatuously wicked things when this subject comes up. The suicide
Speaker 6: bombing community is entirely faith based. The gentle mutilation community
Speaker 6: is entirely faith based. Slavery is mandated by the Bible.
Speaker 6: People keep hearing how many abolitionists were Christians, Well, it
Speaker 6: was about time that they took a stand against it,
Speaker 6: having mandated it for so long. So it's it's it's
Speaker 6: it's not even a tautology. I think to say that
Speaker 6: that there's a relationship between the human impulse to do evil,
Speaker 6: to be selfish, to be self centered, to be greedy,
Speaker 6: and a contrast between that and faith. Because given only faith,
Speaker 6: mountains can be moved, and millions of people who would
Speaker 6: never normally acquierce and evil are brought to it straight
Speaker 6: away and with ease and with self righteousness. There that's
Speaker 6: my answer to that. And the question did not answer
Speaker 6: my challenge. Name an ethical statement made or action performed
Speaker 6: by a believer in the name of faith that couldn't
Speaker 6: have been by an infidel, And name if you can,
Speaker 6: this is easier a wicked action that could only be
Speaker 6: mandated by faith, And then you'll see how silly your
Speaker 6: question was.
Speaker 1: Wherever you were, these interactions from people like Kitchens and
Speaker 1: all these other new atheists revealed just how shaky the
Speaker 1: logical and moral foundations of religion, particularly Christianity, a lot
Speaker 1: of the time, actually were, especially in the face of
Speaker 1: neo Enlightenment arguments. This had already been clear since at
Speaker 1: least January sixth of two thousand and two, when the
Speaker 1: quote unquote spotlight article exposing the widespread rape and abuse
Speaker 1: of children within the Catholic Church hit the front page
Speaker 1: of the Boston Globe. It was therefore unsurprising when eight
Speaker 1: years later Christopher Hitchins defeated former British Prime Minister Tony
Speaker 1: Blair in a debate over whether religion was a force
Speaker 1: for good in the world, a loss that Blair himself
Speaker 1: actually conceded. So it was clear in the late two
Speaker 1: thousands and early twenty tens that irreligiosity was growing, and
Speaker 1: in some ways seems to still be growing, depending on
Speaker 1: which polls you look at, and many non religious folks
Speaker 1: become understandably complacent, believing that hey, maybe this whole religious thing,
Speaker 1: this whole Christian thing, is over. Unfortunately for them, at least,
Speaker 1: they may be about to face a rude awakening, no
Speaker 1: pun intended. Many of the new atheists, including Richard Dawkins
Speaker 1: and Sam Harris, seem to have accepted that religion is
Speaker 1: probably here to stay, despite declining church attendants and the
Speaker 1: statistics I referenced earlier. Now, this doesn't mean that the
Speaker 1: new atheists have given up their fight. However, some of
Speaker 1: the recent trends in the supposedly secular world have taken
Speaker 1: on an increasingly religious character, and at least in my view,
Speaker 1: that shows that growing irreligiosity seems to lead to an
Speaker 1: increase in spiritual yearning. You can kind of see this
Speaker 1: with the number of former atheists public atheists at least,
Speaker 1: who have turned to Christianity. I'm thinking specifically Ion heir
Speaker 1: Cili and Neil Ferguson, her husband, the Scottish historian, both
Speaker 1: have taken to going to church and seeing themselves as
Speaker 1: cultural Christians. Even Richard Dawkins referred to himself I believe.
Speaker 1: I don't want to put words in his mouth, but
Speaker 1: I believe he referred to himself as a cultural Christian
Speaker 1: at one point, or at least respected, in his words,
Speaker 1: the Christian origins of the society in which he calls home.
Speaker 1: So there has been a shift in that sense, but
Speaker 1: that seems to be more of a political shift. The
Speaker 1: shift on the ground that I'm talking about is the
Speaker 1: one that seems to have more to do with what
Speaker 1: I just called that sense of spiritual yearning. Well, things
Speaker 1: don't seem to be going in his favor as much
Speaker 1: as they used to. Take Jordan Peterson for example, He's
Speaker 1: had a guru like appeal for a long time with
Speaker 1: his most dedicated audience, at least who are mostly comprised
Speaker 1: of young men, to be fair, and his appeal to
Speaker 1: them has always had a distinctly religious character. Put aside
Speaker 1: the fact that he can't admit that he's a Christian,
Speaker 1: because I starting to suspect, as many have pointed out,
Speaker 1: he probably isn't He's probably an agnostic, but who's also
Speaker 1: a Christian apologist? Regardless of that, though many people have claimed,
Speaker 1: and I would be reasonable to assume, many still claim
Speaker 1: that he and his book has changed their lives. Who
Speaker 1: want to jump in a time machine and jump back
Speaker 1: to this event. It was a big event at Liberty University,
Speaker 1: that is Jerry Folwell's university back in twenty nineteen. A
Speaker 1: young man rushed the stage as Jordan Peterson was speaking.
Speaker 1: There's video of this and it's striking to watch. The
Speaker 1: guy says, my name is David, I'm Unwell and I
Speaker 1: need help. I just wanted to meet you. And then
Speaker 1: he collapsed in tears.
Speaker 9: And the reason that I was speaking forcefully, let's say,
Speaker 9: or perhaps even somewhat angrily by the end, was because
Speaker 9: not only was the freest the white noise generator.
Speaker 10: My name is David, leave out shield my unwell.
Speaker 1: I need help.
Speaker 4: I need help.
Speaker 10: I just wanted to meet you. I hope that you're
Speaker 10: not fairy.
Speaker 9: I want to find the help that you need.
Speaker 3: God.
Speaker 7: I want to know him better.
Speaker 11: Stop again, Father, thank you for thank you.
Speaker 10: That's the treasure and parking, praise for him, Salvation, restoration
Speaker 10: man right, Dad.
Speaker 1: Comes his life.
Speaker 10: And I know this now, Lord, praidance in this moment
Speaker 10: and just begin to work. He's forty or not against it.
Speaker 10: And you just can you and this that is here
Speaker 10: and you put it here in your form.
Speaker 3: Great a spend.
Speaker 8: Let me let me tell you something. I think what
Speaker 8: you just saw is where a lot of you are.
Speaker 8: But David's just honest enough to cry for help. And
Speaker 8: some of you are a placed And this is I
Speaker 8: think why your book has connected with people. You're at
Speaker 8: a place where you're just looking for answers. No one
Speaker 8: ever taught you basic principles of life, basic survival skills.
Speaker 8: No one ever told you to make your bed or
Speaker 8: to show up and listen and learn and then the
Speaker 8: damn breaks.
Speaker 1: Judging by subsequent comments and articles about this event, this
Speaker 1: really did touch a chord and it really started to
Speaker 1: make a lot of sense when Peterson's former colleague Bernard
Speaker 1: Schiff remembered and then wrote about how Peterson once told
Speaker 1: him that he wanted to purchase a church. I don't
Speaker 1: know about you, guys, but to me, that seems pretty apt.
Speaker 1: But despite Peterson's reverential overtures about the metaphysical truth of Christianity,
Speaker 1: his following is probably a little less interested in religion
Speaker 1: than he is. They just want to get their lives together,
Speaker 1: as he likes to say. However large his audience, Peterson
Speaker 1: alone hardly explains, though, the current spiritual yearning that seems
Speaker 1: to exist in Western culture, particularly American culture. The other
Speaker 1: factor here, in my view, is that of social justice
Speaker 1: part two, a new religion. Despite a founding members claim
Speaker 1: that the organizers of the now since long disgrace Black
Speaker 1: Lives Matter organization are quote unquote trained mark systs. The
Speaker 1: social justice movement, widely speaking, has a distinctly religious character,
Speaker 1: as the linguist John mcworder has written. He wrote this
Speaker 1: back in twenty fifteen, actually for The Daily Beast, but
Speaker 1: he's written a whole other book about the subject called
Speaker 1: Woke Racism that you guys might remember. But as he
Speaker 1: wrote back in twenty fifteen, quote, anti racism is now
Speaker 1: a religion. It is inherent to a religion that one
Speaker 1: is to accept certain suspensions of disbelief, certain questions are
Speaker 1: not to be asked, or if asked, only politely, and
Speaker 1: the answer one gets, despite being somewhat half cocked, is
Speaker 1: to be accepted as doing the job. Over the years,
Speaker 1: as opposition to the Trump administration, the first Trump administration
Speaker 1: at least, and support for movements like Black Lives Matter
Speaker 1: had grown, it became increasingly clear that social justice was
Speaker 1: more than just a political phenomenon. I use the term
Speaker 1: social justice advisedly because it is a very wide term
Speaker 1: and seems to have more to do with other things
Speaker 1: than what we were calling anti racism only a few
Speaker 1: short years ago. It has to do with basically the
Speaker 1: idea of standing up for the marginalized, whether they want
Speaker 1: you to or not, and in ways that you see
Speaker 1: as correct, whether they agree with you or not. That
Speaker 1: is how I would at least broadly define what came
Speaker 1: to be known broadly speaking as social justice or critical
Speaker 1: social justice. But mcwerder's definition can really be applied to
Speaker 1: all facets of it. Most recently we were seeing it
Speaker 1: being applied to the quote unquote gender question or gender
Speaker 1: affirming question that seemed to pretty much blow up in
Speaker 1: the faces of those advocates during their hearing at the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court. But regardless, it was pretty clear in the
Speaker 1: late twenty teens and up into the early twenty twenties
Speaker 1: that this formally simply political phenomenon became something else. And
Speaker 1: this wasn't just because of the fervor of its adherents.
Speaker 1: But it also doesn't mean that the movement had no
Speaker 1: secular power. Observant Christians like Andrew Sullivan have noted similarities
Speaker 1: between the Devout. We could say of both main factions.
Speaker 1: That is, back then the Trump supporters and anti racists,
Speaker 1: but today we'll just say the pro Trump and anti
Speaker 1: Trump faction at this point. But he made the comparison
Speaker 1: between them and cult followers when he wrote the following quote,
Speaker 1: The need for meaning hasn't gone away. But without Christianity,
Speaker 1: this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction, and religious impulses,
Speaker 1: once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in
Speaker 1: various political cults. These political manifestations of religion are new
Speaker 1: and crude, as all new cults have to be. They
Speaker 1: haven't been experienced and refined and modeled by millennia of
Speaker 1: practice and thought. They are evolving in real time, and
Speaker 1: like almost all new cultish impulses, they demand a total
Speaker 1: and immediate commitment to save the world. But, however, fervent
Speaker 1: the support for Trump, and despite the events of January sixth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, and despite everything that has been going
Speaker 1: on with him, both right before he was re elected
Speaker 1: and after, and in the first now going on eight
Speaker 1: months of his administration, it really did, at least back then,
Speaker 1: pale in comparison to the spiritual yearning that suffused the
Speaker 1: rhetoric of the Western leftist social justice movements. Many people
Speaker 1: pointed this out back then, and it is really important
Speaker 1: to remember that even though today a lot of that
Speaker 1: stuff seems to be on the back foot just because
Speaker 1: it's not very popular anymore, and the overstepping that occurred
Speaker 1: in the pandemic years kind of I think maybe killed
Speaker 1: it a little bit. It was something that everybody was
Speaker 1: noticing across the political spectrum, at least those who cast
Speaker 1: a critical lie. That's everybody from Jonathan Height to Douglas
Speaker 1: Murray to Coleman Hughes to hell and Pluck Rose to
Speaker 1: Josh Zepps to Peter Bagosian to Sam Begee Hall and
Speaker 1: many many others. Those are just the ones I could
Speaker 1: think of when I originally got to work on this essay.
Speaker 1: And now this all makes a lot of sense. After all,
Speaker 1: as Andrew Sullivan put it, quote, we are a meaning
Speaker 1: seeking species unquote goes back to what I said in
Speaker 1: the intro. I think it might be an innate characteristic
Speaker 1: of all of us to be looking for something to
Speaker 1: believe in, but to keep things rooted in the context
Speaker 1: of the pandemic years, Rudderless twenty somethings at elite colleges
Speaker 1: and under and unemployed twenty somethings trapped in their homes
Speaker 1: during a pandemic with nothing but rage filled social media
Speaker 1: to keep them company might well panic when the lack
Speaker 1: of meaning in their lives finally hits home. You have
Speaker 1: nowhere to run when you're locked down. You can't go
Speaker 1: to work, and you can't go to the now touted
Speaker 1: third spaces, gyms, bars, neighborhood hangouts, whatever they are. You
Speaker 1: can't go to these places to hide from that lack
Speaker 1: of meaning anymore. So it's going to bring that despair
Speaker 1: to the forefront of your mind, and you will be
Speaker 1: looking for any kind of outlet you can. That reality
Speaker 1: was just starting to set in when George Floyd was
Speaker 1: killed and the subsequent consensus of righteous outrage. It must
Speaker 1: have given this unbelievable rush of purpose to a lot
Speaker 1: of these people. Now, of course, some people are sympathetic
Speaker 1: to social justice ideas and committed to reducing racism, but
Speaker 1: they're also uncritical or unaware of the movement's more clerical
Speaker 1: fundamentalist aspects that were obviously present at the time. It's
Speaker 1: understandable that social justice adherents, especially during COVID, should focus
Speaker 1: on the unsatisfactory outcomes that persist despite the huge legislative
Speaker 1: gains made over the course of the twenty century in
Speaker 1: protecting the rights of disenfranchised populations. But the movement always
Speaker 1: lacked self criticism, at least meaningful self criticism. They considered
Speaker 1: struggle sessions a form of self criticism, when really all
Speaker 1: that was was a form of social shunning. So the
Speaker 1: lack of real, meaningful self criticism and its tendency in
Speaker 1: all of us different permutations, from anti racism to pro
Speaker 1: trans lobbying to whatever you want to point out, was
Speaker 1: always linked with totalizing explanations that were more concerned with
Speaker 1: examining the soul and character of humanity rather than proposing
Speaker 1: meaningful reforms. In that it was unmistakably an illiberal force,
Speaker 1: it being social justice in this case as practiced by
Speaker 1: advocates in the late twenty teens up into twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: and even a little bit beyond what that secular aesthetic
Speaker 1: I guess you could say to a certain degree hid
Speaker 1: was the religious zeal behind supposedly secular politics. We can
Speaker 1: easily see this in the pronouncements of people like the
Speaker 1: educational theorist Betina Love, who wrote back in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: that quote, we need therapists who specialize in the healing
Speaker 1: of teachers and the undoing of whiteness and education unquote.
Speaker 1: Some hear echoes of China's cultural revolution or even the
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge in proclamations like this one, especially those who
Speaker 1: seem to just be permanently possessed by the Red scare,
Speaker 1: even though they weren't even remotely close to being alive
Speaker 1: when that was last happening. But what I hear is
Speaker 1: the echoes of Jesus camp.
Speaker 12: You actually you didn't say yours what you're racist? Thing
Speaker 12: thing that you've done thought about. You have something inside
Speaker 12: of you that's not quite like that's racist, So you
Speaker 12: must have you must have examples in your own life. Well,
Speaker 12: I also work in environmental engineering.
Speaker 13: I have absolutely no people of color or minimal people
Speaker 13: of color, possibly the exclusion of being slightly Hispanish.
Speaker 1: Fine, Sayrath doesn't like her at I can say a.
Speaker 12: Racist thing you've done because it just happened. When you
Speaker 12: just talk to me, the way you just did this
Speaker 12: is how white women talk to us all the time.
Speaker 12: These are microaggressions.
Speaker 1: When I say the exact same thing to my white
Speaker 1: girlfriend who says the same exact.
Speaker 12: Thing, I don't care if you talk to everybody like that.
Speaker 12: The way you just spoke to me was straight up
Speaker 12: white supremacy.
Speaker 14: You actually just answered with real I sense in my
Speaker 14: heart tonight what I heard the Lord say is that
Speaker 14: there's some kids here that say they're Christians. They go
Speaker 14: to church all the time. But you're one thing once
Speaker 14: you're at church, and you're another thing when you're at
Speaker 14: school with your friends. You're a phony and a hypocrite.
Speaker 14: You do things you shouldn't do. You talk dirty, just
Speaker 14: like all the other kids talk dirty. And it's time
Speaker 14: to clean up your acts. Come up here and get washed,
Speaker 14: because we can't have phonies in the army of God.
Speaker 14: If that's you, put your hands up here, whoa baby,
Speaker 14: wash your hands, Father, We just wash them.
Speaker 5: With the water of your word. We say no more, devil,
Speaker 5: no more. Say it was the girls. In the name
Speaker 5: of Jesus. You know exactly what you need to repents up.
Speaker 5: Name it, Name it out loud, name it. What do
Speaker 5: you need to be forgiven up?
Speaker 15: Oh?
Speaker 1: As Robert J. Lifton has explained in his book Thought
Speaker 1: Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, human beings can easily
Speaker 1: succumb to cults twenty tens and twenty twenty. Social justice
Speaker 1: makes use of many of the methods of totalizing ideologies
Speaker 1: meil you control I e. Complete depends on specific methods
Speaker 1: of communication or behavioral manipulation. For some greater, usually metaphysical
Speaker 1: or spiritual purpose, demands for purity and confession of sin
Speaker 1: quote unquote, sacred science i e. This theory isn't up
Speaker 1: for debate, or it's not my job to educate you,
Speaker 1: or loaded language, and especially the prioritizing of the doctrine
Speaker 1: over the person, and what Lifton calls quote the dispensing
Speaker 1: of existence unquote i e. The idea that the individual
Speaker 1: matters less than where they are placed within this ordering
Speaker 1: of the world. Anyone who falls outside the order should
Speaker 1: heed the words of torturer O'Brien to Winston Smith in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, you do not exist. That is the
Speaker 1: best way to explain all of that, that behavior that
Speaker 1: held so much purchase up to the early twenty twenties.
Speaker 1: As Tom Slater has written, quote identity politics is in
Speaker 1: many ways more spiritual than material. Heretics must be ousted,
Speaker 1: Blasphemies must be scrubbed, past sins must be come to
Speaker 1: terms with in some vague, undefined sense unquote. That social
Speaker 1: justice very clearly became a religion is now, at least
Speaker 1: in my view, surely beyond doubt. The question of where
Speaker 1: it would go from twenty twenty is a little less
Speaker 1: open than it was back then. But again, this stuff
Speaker 1: hasn't necessarily gone anywhere, so the question still must be asked,
Speaker 1: where will it go from here? Will it persist or
Speaker 1: will it fade out? Or will something else entirely occur?
Speaker 1: That's an open question. What I suspect, though, is that
Speaker 1: the endgame will probably not be as simple as a
Speaker 1: mere fizzling or as dramatic as a complete Balkanization of
Speaker 1: the United States, though I will admit, given how a
Speaker 1: lot of things have been going since I first started
Speaker 1: thinking about this stuff almost really over five years ago,
Speaker 1: at this point, those are becoming even more distinct possibilities. Regardless,
Speaker 1: in order for us to get a clearer picture of
Speaker 1: how things might turn out, we must look to America's past.
Speaker 1: That's what I like to do here on history impossible.
Speaker 1: As Tom Holland wrote in his book Dominion in a
Speaker 1: country is saturated in Christian assumptions, as the United States,
Speaker 1: there could be no escaping those assumptions influence, even for
Speaker 1: those who had imagined that they had.
Speaker 3: Another example share is delution.
Speaker 16: Photographs about what you've had hallucinations which you believed you
Speaker 16: held in your am.
Speaker 3: They never existed? Say what you're about to say, Winston,
Speaker 3: exist in memory? I remember.
Speaker 16: You remember, I do not remember. Only the discipline mind
Speaker 16: can see reality, Winston. It needs an act of self destruction,
Speaker 16: an effort of the will. Do you remember writing in
Speaker 16: your diary. Freedom is the freedom to say two plus
Speaker 16: two equals four?
Speaker 14: Yes?
Speaker 3: How many fingers am I holding up.
Speaker 8: Four?
Speaker 3: And if the party says that are.
Speaker 7: Not four but five?
Speaker 3: And how many? Him? Ah? No ah, that's news. You're lying?
Speaker 3: How many things? Please? Ah hah? For what else could
Speaker 3: I say?
Speaker 8: Five?
Speaker 3: Don't think you like? Or you please stopping? Stop the pain?
Speaker 14: Oh?
Speaker 16: Either the past or the present or the future exists
Speaker 16: in its own rightness. Reality is in the human mind,
Speaker 16: not in the individual mind, which makes mistakes and soon perishes,
Speaker 16: but in the mind of the party, which is collected.
Speaker 3: And immortal.
Speaker 16: No one escapes whilst there are no martyrs here. All
Speaker 16: the confessions made here are true. We do not destroy
Speaker 16: the heretic because you resist us. As long as you
Speaker 16: resist us, we never destroy him. We make him one
Speaker 16: of ourselves before we kill him. We make his brain
Speaker 16: perfect before we blow it out.
Speaker 3: And then.
Speaker 16: When there is nothing left but sorrow, and love of
Speaker 16: Big Brother. We shall lift you clean out of history.
Speaker 16: We shall turn you into gas and pour you into
Speaker 16: the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name
Speaker 16: and a register, not a memory in a living brain.
Speaker 16: You will be annihilated in the past as well as
Speaker 16: in the future. Now, before we bring this session to
Speaker 16: an end, I want you to ask me your questions.
Speaker 16: I want you to clear your mind.
Speaker 3: Does Speaker to exist, of course.
Speaker 8: The same way as me?
Speaker 3: You do not exist? Yeah, fix your eyes on mine.
Speaker 3: Oh h.
Speaker 1: Part three Revival American as apple Pie. Andrew sulliv And
Speaker 1: once wrote the following on this subject. Quote. And so
Speaker 1: the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal
Speaker 1: of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish
Speaker 1: heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them into
Speaker 1: public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption
Speaker 1: in the form of a thorough public confession of sinot.
Speaker 1: Having studied the Great Awakening in much more detail since
Speaker 1: I originally wrote this essay, I can say that Sullivan
Speaker 1: somewhat overstates the case here, And I don't want to
Speaker 1: impune any motive because he is a practicing Catholic in
Speaker 1: comparison to the Protestant tradition is it's very different, but
Speaker 1: his overall point is sound. Though the Great Awakening was
Speaker 1: less about admitting sin because of social pressure to do
Speaker 1: so akin to a communist struggle set and more because
Speaker 1: people actually wanted to admit their sins and to be saved.
Speaker 1: There is a certain synergy between these things, at least
Speaker 1: when it comes to the impulse. But in discussing the
Speaker 1: concept of a great Awakening, it's important for us to
Speaker 1: point out, like I was saying before, that there have
Speaker 1: been at least two great Awakenings in US history, though
Speaker 1: that is also contested in some of the scholarship, but
Speaker 1: put as broadly and simply as possible, saying that there
Speaker 1: are two great awakenings in US history is about as
Speaker 1: much consensus as one can find in American religious history scholarship.
Speaker 1: But it's also been argued that there have been more,
Speaker 1: like I was saying, with the most compelling argument, at
Speaker 1: least in my view, being that there have been about
Speaker 1: four periods of time seeming to herald a rise in religiosity,
Speaker 1: however transient it might be. As the writer Sam McGee
Speaker 1: hall has pointed outquote America goes through cycles of religious
Speaker 1: panics unquote end quote, through a series of historical circumstances
Speaker 1: peculiar to the United States. These periodic religious panics have
Speaker 1: over centuries been transformed into an unconscious ritual complex. This
Speaker 1: is why I tend to believe that we can pretty
Speaker 1: confidently ascribe four great awakenings to the United States history.
Speaker 1: The United States has long complex relationship with Christianity. But complex,
Speaker 1: while also being relatively straightforward, stems from the tensions between
Speaker 1: its undeniably Christian origins as a colony and its fundamentally
Speaker 1: secular official foundation in the seventeen seventies. We should look
Speaker 1: at it this way. We take the most religious English
Speaker 1: Christians in a lot of ways of the early seventeenth century,
Speaker 1: we let them establish a new home in the so
Speaker 1: called New World, and then when they eventually become a
Speaker 1: United nation nearly two centuries later, their new society was
Speaker 1: codified by men who said things like quote, in every country,
Speaker 1: in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.
Speaker 1: In the words of the I'll say the most interesting
Speaker 1: and compelling founding father, Thomas Jefferson. Now this tension between
Speaker 1: these two standards, the secular and the religious, created a
Speaker 1: tug of war between fundamental ideals that only increased, I
Speaker 1: would argue, at least as the culture of the growing
Speaker 1: United States became ever more heterogeneous. As mentioned a couple
Speaker 1: times now, scholars differ to put him mildly as to
Speaker 1: how many great awakenings that America has had. It really
Speaker 1: depends on what you define as an awakening. Religious revivals
Speaker 1: have occurred throughout American history, beginning with the first Great
Speaker 1: Awakening in the early eighteenth century, about four decades before
Speaker 1: the American Revolution, though continuing arguably into the seventeen sixties,
Speaker 1: but its peak really was between the seventeen thirties and
Speaker 1: seventeen forties. Now, officially there was no United States at
Speaker 1: that time, but there was a growing philosophical undercurrent that
Speaker 1: would come to characterize its founding, and the Thirteen Colonies
Speaker 1: were by no means as theologically homogeneous as the society's
Speaker 1: formed by the Puritan arrivals had originally been up in
Speaker 1: New England. And it's important to note that even the
Speaker 1: Puritan colonists had not been an ideologically harmonious group. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of division there, which in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways but not all, but in a lot of
Speaker 1: ways helps explain what was going on during the Salem
Speaker 1: Witchcraft Crisis, which we will be talking about in another episode.
Speaker 1: The First Great Awakening largely began from the work of
Speaker 1: the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards, grandson of the Puritan Solomon Stoddard.
Speaker 1: There was a lot more to the Great Awakening, the
Speaker 1: First Grade Awakening at least than Edwards's work, but I
Speaker 1: think credit is due to him because he was sort
Speaker 1: of the first major name at the beginning of this
Speaker 1: period of revival. Other names come up that are far
Speaker 1: more significant, including George Whitefield and James Davenport. But those
Speaker 1: names and those stories are part of a much larger
Speaker 1: mosaic that I am currently hard at work on for
Speaker 1: grad school, and I'm hoping I can share all that
Speaker 1: with you at some point in the hopefully not too
Speaker 1: distant future. But regardless, back to Edwards, it was in
Speaker 1: his sermons that ushered in the Northampton Revival of seventeen
Speaker 1: thirty four to seventeen thirty five, which was arguably the
Speaker 1: very beginning of the First Grade Awakening. In those revivals,
Speaker 1: Edwards began attacking various ideologies, including most importantly Enlightenment ideas,
Speaker 1: which he regarded as fundamentally incompatible with his own Calvinist
Speaker 1: interpretation of God as an absolute sovereign who could never
Speaker 1: be questioned and could only be understood through complete piety
Speaker 1: and submission to his will. In other words, no matter
Speaker 1: what the individual did in life, it was God who
Speaker 1: would ultimately decide whether or not he could or would
Speaker 1: be saved. Now, Edwards's hostility towards Enlightenment values so to speak,
Speaker 1: were not consistent, and they didn't remain consistent throughout his career.
Speaker 1: In fact, he used a lot of Enlightenment ideas, especially
Speaker 1: appeals to rationalism in certain contexts, though at the end
Speaker 1: of the day he was always deeply devout and very
Speaker 1: dedicated to the idea that only God would know what
Speaker 1: to do with someone's soul, so to speak, and that
Speaker 1: was one major area of consistency, as well as a
Speaker 1: distrust of the previously established religious authorities. Now we flash
Speaker 1: forward to the summer of seventeen forty one, we can
Speaker 1: see elements of these views crystallized, most clearly in Edwards's
Speaker 1: sermon his famous Sinners at the hands of an Angry God,
Speaker 1: in which he proclaimed, among many things, quote, there is
Speaker 1: nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out
Speaker 1: of Hell but the mere pleasure of God unquote. This
Speaker 1: fatalistic approach appealed to many of the New England Colonies's
Speaker 1: young people, and around one thousand new converts joined Edwards's
Speaker 1: church early on. But going back to his first Northampton revival,
Speaker 1: Edwards was emboldened by the growing success of his preaching,
Speaker 1: so he began to study the process of conversion itself.
Speaker 1: In his essay A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work
Speaker 1: of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton,
Speaker 1: he highlights the four major steps toward conversion. First, a
Speaker 1: person develops an interest in Christianity and hopes to avoid
Speaker 1: damnation by following its creed understandable enough. Then, when it
Speaker 1: becomes clear that the sinner cannot possibly live up to
Speaker 1: the standards laid out in the Old Testament, the sinner
Speaker 1: believes that he has committed what Edwards calls unpardonable sin
Speaker 1: in quotes. There then the sinner realizes, or as Edwards
Speaker 1: puts it, he will quote unquote awaken or get woke.
Speaker 1: If you will, to the fact that salvation is not
Speaker 1: impossible but inevitable through Christ's sacrifice. Finally, the sinner, now convert,
Speaker 1: experiences a new light within himself, and without even being
Speaker 1: consciously aware that he has been converted at times at
Speaker 1: least becomes a true servant of God. Now, to put
Speaker 1: it broadly, Edwards's ideas had profound effects on American colonial society,
Speaker 1: not all of them positive. As his revivals and then
Speaker 1: other revivals spread across to England, it became clear that
Speaker 1: this path to salvation was not going to end well
Speaker 1: for everyone who embraced it. Bouts of insanity broke out
Speaker 1: at some of the more emotionally charged events, usually at
Speaker 1: the hands of other itinerant preachers, as they were known
Speaker 1: preachers who did not necessarily stay in one fixed place.
Speaker 1: As the name implies, we're talking about the more radicals
Speaker 1: among the Great Awakening, especially as the seventeen thirties became
Speaker 1: the seventeen forties and we started seeing people like the
Speaker 1: Aforemation in George Whitefield and especially James Davenport run around.
Speaker 1: The insanity I'm talking about went from simply experiencing swooning
Speaker 1: effects fainting even and great emotional turmoil, which were all
Speaker 1: very controversial to straight up people experiencing visions and behaving
Speaker 1: in very similar ways, at least superficially to the demonic
Speaker 1: possessions that plagued the town of Salem half a century earlier.
Speaker 1: In sixteen ninety two, things got so intense, in particular
Speaker 1: under the preaching of the figures like James Davenport, that
Speaker 1: we started to see mass book burnings and explicit calls
Speaker 1: to reject the authority of even moderate revival preachers like
Speaker 1: Jonathan Edwards. One can say, at risk of overstating it,
Speaker 1: this was starting to look a little bit like the
Speaker 1: French Revolution's terror years. Things eventually subsided, as they often
Speaker 1: do during great social upheaval like this, but by Edwards's
Speaker 1: own account quote unquote, multitudes of congregants were so convinced
Speaker 1: of their own sinful damnation that they killed themselves. Now
Speaker 1: there are only two confirmed cases of such suicides, but
Speaker 1: some historians have found circumstantial evidence of many more. One
Speaker 1: even cites the quote unquote suicide craze of the seventeen
Speaker 1: thirties as a major reason for the initial decline of
Speaker 1: the First Great Awakening, but it is during the first
Speaker 1: wave that suggests explanations as to why this awakening occurred
Speaker 1: to begin with. Now, my beliefs on this have shifted
Speaker 1: over time, especially the more I've been studying things like
Speaker 1: the Salem Witchcraft Crisis and the Great Awakening itself, but
Speaker 1: I do stand by my original view that one major
Speaker 1: reason for the growth of the Great Awakening during the
Speaker 1: seventeen thirties was the decline in church attendance in the
Speaker 1: early eighteenth century, and that actually does connect to what
Speaker 1: I've been studying and what I've been sort of discovering.
Speaker 1: I'll even be willing to say about the effects of
Speaker 1: the Salem Witchcraft Crisis, which we will explore in the
Speaker 1: next episode of this mini series of sorts that we're
Speaker 1: doing right now. There was also the influence of Enlightenment
Speaker 1: rationalism that had alienated a lot of people from going
Speaker 1: to church, at least among the more educated people of
Speaker 1: the populace, who would then turn to less pious forms
Speaker 1: of religious practice such as Unitarianism and deism, though that
Speaker 1: wouldn't really become as common until later in the eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: There's an argument made, and I'm not really sure how
Speaker 1: many people can actually confirmed this, at least through the
Speaker 1: scholarship that a lot of people even became outright atheists.
Speaker 1: But regardless of whether that's true or not, many preachers
Speaker 1: were starting to believe it, and this incentivized preachers from
Speaker 1: all over New England to begin their calls for revival,
Speaker 1: and at first they only attracted small, localized crowds. Now,
Speaker 1: some historians have suggested, I would actually say, unfairly to
Speaker 1: some degree, that the pursuit of increased wealth, especially among
Speaker 1: the land owning class, distracted the early settlers from usual
Speaker 1: forms of piety. And again, the dwindling church attendants may
Speaker 1: also have been a result of the increasing adomization of
Speaker 1: spiritual life and the colonies over the previous centuries, since
Speaker 1: the Quakers, the Anglicans, the Presbyterians, the Baptists and others
Speaker 1: all advocated their own paths to salvation. Another factor, in
Speaker 1: my opinion, was present that I'll be discussing in more
Speaker 1: detail in another episode, and that is, I'll just say
Speaker 1: the short version a fundamental mental and ongoing distrust in
Speaker 1: institutions of power in the colonies, specifically in New England.
Speaker 1: But I think a good catalyst that we can't forget
Speaker 1: happened in seventeen twenty seven when an earthquake struck off
Speaker 1: the coast of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, literally splitting the ground,
Speaker 1: shaking the foundations of buildings, and injuring and frightening a
Speaker 1: large amount of people. Now, at this time, obviously the
Speaker 1: scientific causes of earthquakes were still barely understood, but it
Speaker 1: didn't take long for the clergy to convince many people
Speaker 1: who were afraid and running to churches in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases, that this was in fact the act of
Speaker 1: an angry God. Amid the malaise of a potentially meaningless
Speaker 1: existence revealed by the destruction and fear created by the earthquake.
Speaker 1: The locals were literally shaken free of their belief that
Speaker 1: they were in control of their lives. In many ways,
Speaker 1: this would set the template for all great awakenings to come.
Speaker 1: The second grade Awakening that occurred in the early to
Speaker 1: mid nineteenth century was similar to the first in many ways,
Speaker 1: but it had a more recognizably American character. Its messaging
Speaker 1: was far more populist, though let's not understate how populist
Speaker 1: in nature a lot of the first grade Awakenings preachers
Speaker 1: actually were. Again, this is something I've been studying a
Speaker 1: lot lately, and hopefully we'll be able to share a
Speaker 1: lot more with you guys in the future. But for
Speaker 1: the sake of this story that we're talking about here,
Speaker 1: it is important to highlight just how populous the second
Speaker 1: grade Awakening actually was, specifically because much of the lower
Speaker 1: classes got involved, as did blacks and women. However, the
Speaker 1: biggest trend that occurred amid the second grade Awakening was
Speaker 1: the rise of more fundamentalist and even separatist Christian sects,
Speaker 1: most of which originated in the region of western New
Speaker 1: York that came to be known as the Burned Over District. So,
Speaker 1: in essence, and so the second grade Awakening was more
Speaker 1: of an American Great Awakening. The first had largely been
Speaker 1: confined to the more literate class of colonists, though we
Speaker 1: shouldn't underplay the role of the poor and of occasionally
Speaker 1: slaves blacks in this case. There were even some Native
Speaker 1: Americans who got involved in the first grade Awakening, though
Speaker 1: that was also a relatively small number. But the point is,
Speaker 1: in this case, the second grade Awakening was much more
Speaker 1: universalist in a lot of ways. The second grade Awakening
Speaker 1: was also characterized by a broader resentment towards elites, even
Speaker 1: more so than the first was Its tent preachers were
Speaker 1: plain spoken, and, as historian Chris Jennings explains in his
Speaker 1: excellent book Paradise Now, the Story of American Utopianism, they
Speaker 1: rejected quote traditional denominational authority unquote. So like Martin Luther's
Speaker 1: Reformation three centuries earlier, this really was about bringing the
Speaker 1: Word of God to the people, by the people in
Speaker 1: a very fundamental, again American way. The most famous of
Speaker 1: the separationist movements to come into being during the seismic
Speaker 1: shifts was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints,
Speaker 1: better known as the Mormons. Now, I know this is
Speaker 1: somewhat controversial for Mormons to hear. I have no idea
Speaker 1: if I have Mormon listeners, But I'm speaking from a
Speaker 1: sociological perspective here when I say that Mormonism began as
Speaker 1: a cult, especially under its more nefarious leader, Brigham Young.
Speaker 1: While the Millerites and the Adventists simply took a more
Speaker 1: hardline stance on Christian teachings, the Mormons managed to subvert
Speaker 1: the entire Christian theology in a way that hadn't really
Speaker 1: been seen since the writing of the Qur'an over a
Speaker 1: millennium earlier. They gave the Bible a sequel which not
Speaker 1: only explained supposed mysteries like the origin of Native American
Speaker 1: tribes across the continent, but also placed America at the
Speaker 1: center of Christian myth. While the idea of manifest destiny
Speaker 1: provided a convenient religious justification for America's westward imperialism, Mormonism
Speaker 1: provided the quote unquote real explanation of America's origins. To
Speaker 1: put it, perhaps too crudely for some, it was the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century's very own sixteen nineteen project. Now, the increasingly
Speaker 1: disparate movements of the Second Grade Awakening arose for reasons
Speaker 1: similar to those that led to the first, increasing schisms
Speaker 1: within pre existing belief systems, declining church attendance, abject human suffering,
Speaker 1: and a natural disaster, followed by periods of economic uncertainty.
Speaker 1: In eighteen fifteen, the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history
Speaker 1: at least occurred in Indonesia, where it seems to often happen,
Speaker 1: as we've talked about on this show before. In this case,
Speaker 1: unlike Kakatoa in the eighteen eighties, the explosion happened at
Speaker 1: Mount Tambora, and this produced the infamous eighteen sixteen year
Speaker 1: Without Summer. Almost immediately afterward, economic calamities began to occur
Speaker 1: one after the other, culminating in the Panic of eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven. As historian Michael Barkoon has observed in his
Speaker 1: book Crucible of the Millennium, these calamities gave many Americans
Speaker 1: quote a special receptivity to Millinerian and utopian appeals. However,
Speaker 1: there was more to this than simple existential fear. The
Speaker 1: disenfranchised and enslaved suffered the most, and therefore resented the
Speaker 1: elites the most. As a result, many of the increases
Speaker 1: in church attendance during the Second Great Awakening were also
Speaker 1: due to women converts, who, at least one sources claimed,
Speaker 1: outnumbered male converts by three to two. Now, historians can't
Speaker 1: agree on the reasons for this imbalance. Perhaps the economic
Speaker 1: insecurity hit harder among women, or perhaps many American women
Speaker 1: had simply had enough of being treated as if they
Speaker 1: had no minds of their own and being expected to
Speaker 1: follow their husband's influence in everything. And indeed, many husbands
Speaker 1: disapproved of these conversions, seeing them as a threat to
Speaker 1: familial stability. It's easy to understand why black slaves are
Speaker 1: drawn to the religious revivals of the time, especially after
Speaker 1: the extremely violent and religiously motivated Slave Uprising led by
Speaker 1: Nat Turner in eighteen thirty one. Some Baptist ministries in
Speaker 1: states like South Carolina were started by slaves, largely as
Speaker 1: a way for black people to come together as a
Speaker 1: community and cope with the hardships of their day to
Speaker 1: day existence as slaves. We can really see the Second
Speaker 1: Great Awakening as the first marriage between Christian devotion and
Speaker 1: what would come to be known as social justice. It would,
Speaker 1: by no means be the last. The Third Grade Awakening
Speaker 1: spanned a much longer period than the first or the
Speaker 1: second one. Like those awakenings, the third one focused on
Speaker 1: devotion to Christ and American identity, but it also incorporated
Speaker 1: a more explicit and renewed focus of contemporary social and
Speaker 1: even outright secular issues, or at least secular issues by
Speaker 1: today's standards. And I've mentioned this a couple times before,
Speaker 1: but some historians actually reject the notion outright of a
Speaker 1: third grade Awakening because of the prominence of these more
Speaker 1: secular concerns and while there is plenty to argue about
Speaker 1: the nature of the so called Greade Awakenings in American history, again,
Speaker 1: this is something that goes well, it goes beyond my
Speaker 1: pay grade right now, but it's something I intend to
Speaker 1: explore a little bit with my own academic work and
Speaker 1: in future discussions on this subject. I do think it's
Speaker 1: a bit naive for us to simply discount the possibility
Speaker 1: that there have been new awakenings just because they took
Speaker 1: on a more secular character. After all, as the Second
Speaker 1: Grade Awakening showed us, there is no incompatibility between secular
Speaker 1: populist impulses and Christian revivalism. In this movement, they often
Speaker 1: complemented each other. And as I've sort of alluded to
Speaker 1: in this and you know, even outright claimed and something
Speaker 1: I'm getting into with my own research, it wasn't even incompatible.
Speaker 1: During the first grade Awakening, these things were deeply intertwined,
Speaker 1: and as we modernized and things became more explicitly secular,
Speaker 1: that intertwining just became a little less obvious. During the
Speaker 1: third grade Awakening, the latest and most dedicated and famous
Speaker 1: causes among Christians were the abolition of slavery and the
Speaker 1: eighteen fifties of the eighteen sixties, which we can see
Speaker 1: in Frederick Douglas's Methodist preachings, and of course the famous
Speaker 1: or infamous it depending on who you are, John Brown's
Speaker 1: fire and brimstone approach. These were parts of this, and
Speaker 1: then later on we see it in the prohibition of
Speaker 1: alcohol that culminated in the early nineteen twenties, though the
Speaker 1: movement to get that done was intertwined with another movement
Speaker 1: that started a bit before that. By a number of decades,
Speaker 1: we see that intertwining of the temperance movement as it
Speaker 1: came to be known, with the early women's suffrage movements,
Speaker 1: which really were getting their start in the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: at least in a very recognizable way. I know there's
Speaker 1: earlier incarnations of it, of course, but I'm talking about
Speaker 1: this period of their prominence. In this period of American history,
Speaker 1: and as in the Second Grade Awakening, there emerged yet
Speaker 1: more atomized religious groupings that began as cults again, and
Speaker 1: I know it's a pejorative, but that's the best way
Speaker 1: to describe them, including spiritualist and occult movements of late
Speaker 1: nineteenth century and early twentieth century, like Thalma and Theosophy,
Speaker 1: as well as the more seemingly legitimate denominations like the
Speaker 1: Jovah's Witnesses and the Christian Science movement. There were also
Speaker 1: non denominational splinter groups like the Chautauqua movement founded by
Speaker 1: the Methodists, which prioritize more secular aims, especially involving adult education.
Speaker 1: All of this religiosity was spurred on by external forces,
Speaker 1: yet again that placed individuals under greater pressure. The wars
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century, like the Mexican American War, but
Speaker 1: especially the Civil War, those really had an impact as
Speaker 1: far as external pressures go. That might be putting in
Speaker 1: a little mildly, especially in the context of the Civil War.
Speaker 1: There was also extreme economic hardship due to the First
Speaker 1: Great Depression, which began in eighteen seventy three, and there was,
Speaker 1: as we've talked about on this show before, a very
Speaker 1: stark and always increasing wealth gap that existed between the
Speaker 1: rich and the poor. Now to this were even more
Speaker 1: explicitly political issues going on, including growing distrust in government
Speaker 1: institutions and a rapid rise in immigration that led to
Speaker 1: increased labor tensions. Again, this is stuff we talked about
Speaker 1: in fact in the very first episode of History Impossible,
Speaker 1: you might recall. Now, while many Americans turned to secular,
Speaker 1: populist demagogues like the guy we talked about in that
Speaker 1: first episode, California's infamous Dennis Kearney, whose racist antics were
Speaker 1: partially responsible at least for the Chinese Exclusion Act of
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty two, many Americans looked to God and to
Speaker 1: God's communicators his preachers for salvation. Many of these preachers
Speaker 1: at the time decried the excesses of the Gilded Age
Speaker 1: and proclaimed that rich industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D.
Speaker 1: Rockefeller were in league with the devil himself. After all,
Speaker 1: these men who by most metrics I believe still, though
Speaker 1: that might have changed since I originally wrote this essay,
Speaker 1: I believe they were still richer than the richest men
Speaker 1: on earth today, including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos if
Speaker 1: you adjust for inflation. Though again that might have changed
Speaker 1: since then. I'm not quite sure, but they were by
Speaker 1: every metric wealthier than anybody had ever been before, and
Speaker 1: clearly had more money than they knew what to do with,
Speaker 1: though they, in my opinion, at least spent it a
Speaker 1: bit more wisely than a lot of the billionaires of today,
Speaker 1: but that's a whole other conversation. They were very much
Speaker 1: seen as indicative of secular materialisms, limits, and potential for
Speaker 1: spiritual perversion, so that was largely why they became very
Speaker 1: easy targets for a lot of these new religious revivalists.
Speaker 1: But things did eventually die down and the world was
Speaker 1: engulfed in two major conflicts as well as a lot
Speaker 1: of social and economic upheaval that pretty much made questions
Speaker 1: of siritual revival somewhat moot or at least pushed into
Speaker 1: the background, which, as best I can tell, was largely
Speaker 1: thanks to the rapid change in technological progress and the
Speaker 1: sheer violence that was about to unfold. Of course, I'm
Speaker 1: talking about the First and Second World Wars, as well
Speaker 1: as the Great Depression, and really just the massive amounts
Speaker 1: of a miseration that occurred thanks to them. It's definitely
Speaker 1: something we can't underestimate, especially when you combine them into
Speaker 1: one essentially lengthy conflict that was only interrupted by about
Speaker 1: a fifteen year armistice, which is a very compelling way
Speaker 1: to interpret the World Wars, as Neil Ferguson, the famous historian,
Speaker 1: has done in his amazing book that I know I've
Speaker 1: referenced more than once War of the World, and was
Speaker 1: thanks to these conflicts that America essentially experienced what many
Speaker 1: would see as a spiritual deadening, like I was basically saying,
Speaker 1: a moment ago, there just had been so much suffering
Speaker 1: and uncertainty caused not only by those wars, but also
Speaker 1: by the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic, which I've talked about
Speaker 1: quite a bit on this show, as well as the
Speaker 1: Great Depression of the nineteen thirties and the uncertain beginnings
Speaker 1: the existentially uncertain beginnings of the atomic Age. And yet
Speaker 1: despite all of that stuff, the future looked very bright,
Speaker 1: especially if you were much more of a materialistically minded person.
Speaker 1: The economy was by every metric booming, Technology was improving exponentially,
Speaker 1: like I was saying, and everyone was buying homes and
Speaker 1: having families. They were ushering in the baby boom. Not
Speaker 1: to diminish anyone's actual faith that they might have had
Speaker 1: at the time, but at a cultural level, at a
Speaker 1: broad cultural level, life was really just too good to
Speaker 1: worry all that much about the wrath of God. But
Speaker 1: the complacency of the privileged could not the fact that
Speaker 1: despite geopolitical victories, an economic boom, and a general sense
Speaker 1: of optimism, there were plenty of Americans that were being
Speaker 1: left behind and even held back. It is no coincidence
Speaker 1: that Martin Luther King Junior was a preacher who took
Speaker 1: crisis his gospel and as his example. There's a reason
Speaker 1: why people are still impressed with him to this very day,
Speaker 1: and a lot of it has to do with his
Speaker 1: love first, non violent approach, which really was what defined him,
Speaker 1: no matter how much revisionists liked to claim otherwise. However,
Speaker 1: as the past great Awakenings had shown, American religious movements
Speaker 1: don't necessarily remain purely religious for very long, and the
Speaker 1: further we go into the timeline of American history, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing seems to become increasingly true. The social
Speaker 1: justice inspired spiritual fulfillment that King promised gave way to disillusionment.
Speaker 1: After his execution in nineteen sixty eight, what could have
Speaker 1: begun the fourth grade Awakening was cut short and was
Speaker 1: soon replaced by a highly secular political radicalism, the likes
Speaker 1: of which America had not seen for nearly a century.
Speaker 1: What followed was widespread violence across the United States, especially
Speaker 1: seen in the domestic terror attacks by groups like the
Speaker 1: Weathermen and the kidnapping of the heiras Paddy Hearst by
Speaker 1: the leftist terrorist group the Symbionese Liberation Army. Although most
Speaker 1: of the activism at that time was motivated by opposition
Speaker 1: to the Vietnam War, which was basically seen as the
Speaker 1: epitome of rapacious Western imperialism, the broad radical movement increasingly
Speaker 1: devolved into abject nihilism, resulting in a swathe of drug addicts,
Speaker 1: rape victims, and single mothers. To put it crudely, at
Speaker 1: least many of the casualties of the radical movement of
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies began, in their
Speaker 1: aimless wanderings to end up in cults, the most famous
Speaker 1: of which was Jim Jones's People's Temple, which united in
Speaker 1: extreme socialist ideology with proclamations from scripture. So the fourth
Speaker 1: grade Awakening had begun, but thanks to the interruption caused
Speaker 1: by the threat and I say that in air quotes
Speaker 1: there created by a figure like Martin Luther King, his
Speaker 1: influence was cut short in favor of these far more
Speaker 1: fractious and radical movements that really had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with Christianity, at least in any meaningful way, and that
Speaker 1: changed the trajectory of how the Fourth Grade Awakening would manifest.
Speaker 1: Thanks largely to the fact that all of these cults,
Speaker 1: these groups would self destruct, oftentimes in spectacular and in
Speaker 1: the case of the People's Temple under Jim Jones, horrific fashion.
Speaker 1: When these cults eventually did self destruct, many people probably
Speaker 1: felt as if there was nothing left. But in what
Speaker 1: was to become known as the Bible Belt, preachers like
Speaker 1: Billy Graham were beginning to make a name for themselves,
Speaker 1: and movements like Pentecostalism were gaining followers as never before.
Speaker 1: They were, in essence, filling the vacuum created by these cults.
Speaker 1: Raucus displays of speaking in tongues, hysterical weeping in the
Speaker 1: presence of the Holy Spirit, faith, healing, and even prophecies
Speaker 1: were making a comeback. After nearly two centuries of seeming absence.
Speaker 1: The spiritual void that a gripped America for the past
Speaker 1: half century was over. That was when the Republican Party
Speaker 1: took notice, as they were licking their wounds from their
Speaker 1: humiliation at the hands of the paranoia of Richard Nixon
Speaker 1: to put it as bluntly and simply as possible, and
Speaker 1: they used this momentum, helped along by figures like William F. Buckley,
Speaker 1: to get the evangelical back to Ronald Reagan elected into
Speaker 1: the presidency in two landslide elections throughout the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: This standard, actually, they probably lasted a bit longer than
Speaker 1: people might expect, with the quote unquote go go nineties
Speaker 1: being more defined again by materialist progressivism and Bill Clinton's
Speaker 1: neoliberalism and so forth. But in two thousand and five
Speaker 1: one could hear those echoes from the eighties of that
Speaker 1: fourth grade awakening, when George W. Bush claimed that God
Speaker 1: himself had told him to end the tyranny in Iraq.
Speaker 1: It may seem hard to imagine that another Christian revival
Speaker 1: could take place anytime soon after such a brazen display
Speaker 1: of supposedly pious warmongering, which has arguably given us the
Speaker 1: new form that the Republican Party has taken in recent years,
Speaker 1: and given us the populist backlash that was only intensified
Speaker 1: by things like the financial crisis of two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: And yet, as we have seen, America's Christian legacy has
Speaker 1: a funny way of reasserting itself at the most un
Speaker 1: expected of time my.
Speaker 17: YouTube channel, and I'm just here in Minneapolis where the
Speaker 17: Revival streat Revolveal was happening here, and I'm here with
Speaker 17: Pastor which it's my name. Yes, this is Pastor Charles,
Speaker 17: and he's the one that is leading the baptism and
Speaker 17: the streets and he's doing this every night.
Speaker 18: We are doing it every single day.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's amazing.
Speaker 17: Yeah, it's amazing. So I want Pastor Charles to share
Speaker 17: a little bit about what God's doing. If you can
Speaker 17: just tell us a little bit about who you are
Speaker 17: and how you ended up starting this ministry.
Speaker 18: Well, past a song. My name is Pastor Charles, and
Speaker 18: I am the one leading the United Revival Minneapolis. You
Speaker 18: can find us on Facebook page Unity Revival Minneapolis. And
Speaker 18: what we did on Pentacost Sunday, we met right there
Speaker 18: where I'm pointing, which is the place where George Freud died,
Speaker 18: and that's where we are right now, and we did
Speaker 18: a prayer of repentance and racial reconciliation. We saw people
Speaker 18: kneeling in humanity and praying and asking for forgiveness, and
Speaker 18: then we saw racial reconcerviation. And many people said, we've
Speaker 18: never seen what you're doing happened before, and we want
Speaker 18: to be a part of something that is going to
Speaker 18: bring a difference. And we prayed, and the Lord said,
Speaker 18: we come here as often as we can to pray
Speaker 18: for people, to minister to people, to get them reconciled,
Speaker 18: first to God and then one to another. And what
Speaker 18: happened from there is what now we are seeing as
Speaker 18: a unity revival, where so many people are coming to Christ.
Speaker 18: You're getting them baptized in water.
Speaker 7: Father.
Speaker 1: We love you, Father, we worship you.
Speaker 7: Father.
Speaker 18: Begin to heal, bandons, begin to deliver, the sick, begin
Speaker 18: to break, causes, begin to destroy, strongholds of the enemy.
Speaker 1: What are your peoples shine?
Speaker 15: Oh my gosh, shit, catch your fucking hands. Uh, get
Speaker 15: on there, your seats all es on me, All eyes
Speaker 15: on me. Ktcho fucking hands up.
Speaker 11: Get on there, your.
Speaker 13: Seats alas on me, all ys on me. Are you
Speaker 13: feeling nerves? Are you having fun? It's almost over.
Speaker 15: It's just me gone.
Speaker 4: Don't overthink this.
Speaker 3: Look in my eye.
Speaker 4: Don't be scared, don't be shy. Come on in the
Speaker 4: Water's fine, We're going to go. Everybody knows. Everybody knows everybody.
Speaker 4: We're going to go everybody knows, everybody, no.
Speaker 15: Stop.
Speaker 1: Part four, The Emerging Awakening. We hear a lot, including
Speaker 1: from yours. Truly. I know I've talked about it before.
Speaker 1: I believe I talked about it with Brendan O'Neill in
Speaker 1: the last interview that I did for History Impossible. But
Speaker 1: we hear a lot about victimhood culture and how that
Speaker 1: has largely replaced the idea of a dignity culture. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if it's totally replaced it yet in the
Speaker 1: present day, but it's definitely taken on more value, more
Speaker 1: social capital, to use a five dollars term, and when
Speaker 1: it comes down to it, as tempting as it is
Speaker 1: for some people to point to things like Marxism and
Speaker 1: postmodernism when talking about the idea of a victimhood culture,
Speaker 1: it's actually rooted in Christian values. As a great historian
Speaker 1: Tom Holland writes in his book Dominion Quote, the measure
Speaker 1: of a man's compassion for the lowly and the suffering
Speaker 1: comes to be the measure of the loftiness of his soul.
Speaker 1: It was this the epochal lesson taught by Jesus' death
Speaker 1: on the Cross, that Nietzsche had always despised most about
Speaker 1: Christianity two thousand years on, and the discovery made by
Speaker 1: Christ's earliest followers that to be a victim might be
Speaker 1: a source of power could bring out millions onto the streets.
Speaker 1: Wealth and rank and Trump's America were not the only
Speaker 1: indicators of status, so too were their opposites against the
Speaker 1: preoptic thrust of towers fitted with gold plated lifts. The
Speaker 1: organizers of the Women's March in twenty seventeen sought to
Speaker 1: invoke the authority of those who lay at the bottom
Speaker 1: of the pile. The last were to be the first,
Speaker 1: and the first were to be the last. Quote, and indeed,
Speaker 1: as Holland later writes, quote, the retreat of Christian belief
Speaker 1: did not seem to imply any necessary retreat of Christian values.
Speaker 1: Quite the contrary, unquote. Holland views America's twenty first century
Speaker 1: culture war as a quote unquote civil war between Christian factions,
Speaker 1: while Sam macgee hall argues that quote the outbreak of
Speaker 1: personally transformative manias like social justice will lead to collective
Speaker 1: disappointments or tragedies. Quote. In my opinion, Neither of these
Speaker 1: observations are wrong, and are in fact a far more
Speaker 1: accurate diagnosis of the so called culture war that seems
Speaker 1: to have no end in the twenty first century. The
Speaker 1: tragedy of Jim Jones's People's Temple, in which, lest we forget,
Speaker 1: a concern for racial social justice, was weaponized by what
Speaker 1: turned out to be a drug addled megalomaniac who convinced
Speaker 1: nearly one thousand people to kill themselves, is evidence enough
Speaker 1: of what can go wrong when social justice takes on
Speaker 1: a religious character. But neither Tom Holland nor Sam McGee
Speaker 1: hall ask what this means for American Christianity itself. Given
Speaker 1: America's history of religious revivals, we may indeed be witnessing
Speaker 1: the opening stages of a new great Awakening, the fifth
Speaker 1: one by my count at least, which, like its predecessors,
Speaker 1: could result in an explosion in the numbers of church goers.
Speaker 1: Now I'm not sure about that. I'm really not sure
Speaker 1: what the answer is to that, especially because a lot
Speaker 1: has happened since I originally wrote the essay that this
Speaker 1: podcast you're listening to is based on. Since then, I've
Speaker 1: obviously started studying American religion with a much greater depth
Speaker 1: than I ever thought I would. But on top of that,
Speaker 1: I've read a number of books that have actually tackled
Speaker 1: this very question, books that didn't exist yet. They weren't
Speaker 1: out it yet, at least when I originally wrote the essay.
Speaker 1: John mcwerder put a very fine point on it when
Speaker 1: he talked about how what we call wokeness is essentially
Speaker 1: just a religion, not religious or religion adjacent, but a
Speaker 1: literal religion. I'm not so sure about that. I think
Speaker 1: he makes a good case, but I think he puts
Speaker 1: like I used the word there to find a point
Speaker 1: on it, in a broader, sort of more balanced way
Speaker 1: of looking at things. The theologian and history and terry
Speaker 1: Isabella Burton wrote in her book Strange Rights, New Religions
Speaker 1: for a Godless World, that what we're looking at right now,
Speaker 1: or what we have been looking at, is a remixing
Speaker 1: of religion. She's using my in parlance, of course, and
Speaker 1: that's a really good way to explain it to a
Speaker 1: lay audience. But what she's really talking about is the
Speaker 1: process by which a religion is formed, the remixing of
Speaker 1: past beliefs and standards into new ones. Redefinition, or to
Speaker 1: use the phrasings of those who went through these changes,
Speaker 1: these convulsions hundreds of years ago. Revivals remix equals revival,
Speaker 1: at least as far as I'm concerned. In the conclusion
Speaker 1: of her mostly amazing book, I have some criticisms of it,
Speaker 1: and maybe one day we'll get into this book in
Speaker 1: a little more detail, because it is truly one of
Speaker 1: the best books I've read in a long time, and
Speaker 1: every good book has things to criticize, of course. But
Speaker 1: in her book Strange Rights, Burton writes the following summary
Speaker 1: that I want to read to you guys at length
Speaker 1: to help give you an idea of, partly at least
Speaker 1: where I'm coming from with a lot of this, and
Speaker 1: perhaps give an idea of where things are going before
Speaker 1: give you my own take on things. As Burton Rights quo,
Speaker 1: we do not live in a godless world. Rather, we
Speaker 1: live in a profoundly anti institutional one where the proliferation
Speaker 1: of internet, creative culture, and consumer capitalism have rendered us
Speaker 1: all simultaneously parishioner, high priest, and deity. America is not secular,
Speaker 1: but simply spiritually self focused, no less than the rise
Speaker 1: of Protestantism, which was inseparable from the invention of the
Speaker 1: printing press and the spread of mass literacy. This shift
Speaker 1: is deeply rooted in the technological changes of the twenty
Speaker 1: first century. Anti institutional institutional self divinization is at heart
Speaker 1: the natural spirituality of internet and smartphone culture. Much of
Speaker 1: the responsibility for that shift belongs to institutions themselves. Traditional religions,
Speaker 1: traditional political hierarchies, and traditional understandings of society have been
Speaker 1: unwilling or unable to offer compellingly meaningful account out of
Speaker 1: the world, provide their members with purpose, foster sustainable communities,
Speaker 1: or put forth evocative rituals, and in return, young Americans
Speaker 1: have lost their faith, not simply in the tenets of
Speaker 1: a religion, but in civic and social institutions as a whole.
Speaker 1: More and more Americans, particularly younger Americans, report plummeting levels
Speaker 1: of trust in both institutions and in other people. A
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen Pew study, for example, found that nearly three
Speaker 1: quarters of American adults under thirty believe that people quote
Speaker 1: just look out for themselves unquote most of the time,
Speaker 1: seventy one percent so that most people quote would try
Speaker 1: to take advantage of you if they got a chance, unquote.
Speaker 1: Among the over sixty fives, these percentages plummet to forty
Speaker 1: eight and thirty nine percent, respectively. Young adults are significantly
Speaker 1: less likely than their elders, too, to say that they
Speaker 1: trust the military, just sixty nine percent, due compared to
Speaker 1: ninety one percent of adults age fifty year older, or
Speaker 1: religious leaders fifty percent versus seventy one, the police sixty
Speaker 1: seven versus eighty five, or business leaders thirty four percent
Speaker 1: versus fifty Some of this failure on the part of
Speaker 1: religious institutions is due in part to the increasing exodus
Speaker 1: of people such as queer and gender nonconforming people and feminists,
Speaker 1: alienated by what they perceive as many organized religions progressive
Speaker 1: attitudes towards things like sex, gender roles, and family life.
Speaker 1: Queer people remain among the most unaffiliated of any demographic,
Speaker 1: with nearly half rejecting organized religion entirely. It is due too,
Speaker 1: to the litany of now public sexual abuses rampant not
Speaker 1: only in the Catholic Church, perhaps the most visible example,
Speaker 1: but also in numerous evangelical communities. Several evangelical megachurch pastors
Speaker 1: like Bill Hybels of Willow Creek near Chicago and Andy
Speaker 1: Savage of High Point Church in Memphis have likewise been
Speaker 1: brought down in recent years by allegations of sexual abuse.
Speaker 1: But we should not overlook the no less obvious institutional
Speaker 1: failures produced by well apathy. The remixed are most likely
Speaker 1: to come from either unaffiliated homes or from homes in
Speaker 1: which religion was taken for granted or rarely discussed. They
Speaker 1: were more likely to attend church or synagogue pro forma
Speaker 1: for major holidays like Christmas or Easter or Rashiashana, rather
Speaker 1: than for any genuine sense of spiritual hunger and curiosity.
Speaker 1: In this way, traditional organized religion has found itself something
Speaker 1: of a catch twenty two. More stringent, spiritually demanding traditions,
Speaker 1: like say, Christian Evangelicalism or Orthodox Judaism, may be more
Speaker 1: likely to retain the average member, but they're conversely more
Speaker 1: likely to alienate those members who are unable to conform
Speaker 1: their identities and values to those of the community. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: more progressive in liberal traditions such as mainline Protestantism, are
Speaker 1: often capable of being more welcoming to those on theological margins,
Speaker 1: but more often than not fail to retain members or
Speaker 1: fulfill their spiritual needs. Once you are willing to relax
Speaker 1: some elements of your faith tradition, after all, what is
Speaker 1: to stop you from seeking something even more specific to
Speaker 1: your personal needs, your identity, your situation. Why not create
Speaker 1: a mix and match religious identity, fusing, for example, Episcopalianism
Speaker 1: with yoga, taro and polycommunities, or seek communal and spiritual
Speaker 1: fulfillment outside of organized religion altogether. Yet it's not just
Speaker 1: formal organized religions that have failed. Civil religions have failed too.
Speaker 1: Our civic ideals the modern day inheritance of the classical
Speaker 1: liberal and capitalist tradition of the neutral public square, of
Speaker 1: the power of rational self interest to collectively coalesce into
Speaker 1: societal cohesion, of our fundamental belief that we are at
Speaker 1: our core rational creatures, all these two seem to have
Speaker 1: failed us. In the age of Trump, of a renewed
Speaker 1: passionate populism across the globe, of a resurgent obsession with
Speaker 1: our biological and ethnic roots, Classical liberalism seems nearly as
Speaker 1: outdated as mid century Protestantism. The better angels of our
Speaker 1: nature seem from this vantage as much a fiction as nepheline,
Speaker 1: So too does the classical chaotic liberal vision of private
Speaker 1: morality and forming an ultimately neutral public square, safely secular,
Speaker 1: free of any ideology except a commitment to human flourishing
Speaker 1: and freedom. These ostensibly impartial spaces have provided little more
Speaker 1: than moral vacuums, an empty space for newer, more potent,
Speaker 1: more valent, and more compelling cults to flourish. The result
Speaker 1: has been a cornucopia of anti authoritarian, anti institutional American
Speaker 1: religious traditions. Some, even most, take liberal autonomy to the extreme.
Speaker 1: They accept as gospel the idea that there is nothing
Speaker 1: and nobody more reliable than one's own self, and that
Speaker 1: there is no ontological good more pressing than the care, cultivation,
Speaker 1: and perfection of that existence. Others long for the power
Speaker 1: and security that institutions once provided, even as they mourned
Speaker 1: the possibility of any institution being legitimate unquote. I think
Speaker 1: Burton makes a very good case there for what is
Speaker 1: going on, what has been going on for many years now,
Speaker 1: and in essence, where things continue to seem to be going.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: Of course, no one can predict the future. There may
Speaker 1: be no fifth grade awakening or whatever number it might be. Now,
Speaker 1: the social justice craze has already fizzled as of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five compared to where it was shortly before I
Speaker 1: wrote the essay this is based on back in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one. As has been said, we've passed peak woke,
Speaker 1: and while at the time I wasn't sure if it
Speaker 1: was going to fizzle or flame out, and honestly we
Speaker 1: shouldn't consider ourselves completely pasted it. As John Macwadur recently wrote,
Speaker 1: woke is here to stay, as in overly zealous concerns
Speaker 1: or social justice are probably here to stay, however, regardless
Speaker 1: of how that manifests, and it seems to be very
Speaker 1: firmly connected to much more dire and serious geopolitical concerns,
Speaker 1: namely involving the ongoing Israel Hamas war and what's been
Speaker 1: coming out of that, as well as other conflicts around
Speaker 1: the world and conflicts here at home ever since the
Speaker 1: beginning of the new Trump administration. But regardless, I don't
Speaker 1: think it is unreasonable to say that America seems to
Speaker 1: be undergoing a fundamentally religious and political reorientation, and a
Speaker 1: lot of it seems to be rooted in exactly what
Speaker 1: Tara Isabella Burton wrote. There a fundamental distrust, if not
Speaker 1: outright disdain of pre existing institutions. And again, if we'll
Speaker 1: recall that that is exactly the same kind of social
Speaker 1: forces that animated the previous great Awakenings, from the first
Speaker 1: in the seventeen thirties and forties all the way to
Speaker 1: the fourth in the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties. Now,
Speaker 1: while it's true that the fourth grade Awakening began to
Speaker 1: take on a pretty singular appearance in terms of its
Speaker 1: political orientation, with people who identified with the American right
Speaker 1: filling the void that was left by the nihilistic radicalism
Speaker 1: of the American left at the time, there's no guarantee
Speaker 1: that that's going to be how things shake out this time. Again,
Speaker 1: the individualism that animates every awakening, because that is in
Speaker 1: essence what it is, is at its most extreme than
Speaker 1: it's ever been. That is one way in which I
Speaker 1: will say that this is a very unique time in
Speaker 1: American history, and a lot of that has to do,
Speaker 1: as Burton explained, with how technology has facilitated that individualism. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, it's possible that the people quietly retreating from
Speaker 1: quote unquote wokeness will start to find Jesus, so to speak,
Speaker 1: and start going to church, and then might start becoming
Speaker 1: a little more politically uniform just out of sheer exhaustion
Speaker 1: from all the individualism. That is definitely possible, because again,
Speaker 1: that does seem to be the trend. The hyper individualization
Speaker 1: that occurs during the awakenings themselves does tend to coalesce
Speaker 1: around particular institutions. That does seem to be the trend.
Speaker 1: So what happened after the fourth grade Awakening hit in
Speaker 1: Earnest in the nineteen eighties and it became the realm
Speaker 1: of the Republican voter, that could happen again. However, the
Speaker 1: GOP is currently I mean quietly or loudly, but I
Speaker 1: think we're really seeing it with all this Jeffrey Epstein stuff,
Speaker 1: is frantically trying to reorient its public image in a
Speaker 1: post Trump world. And while they're still clearly on friendly
Speaker 1: terms with American evangelicals, we no longer see the same
Speaker 1: sort of unified front that we at least perceived to
Speaker 1: be there during the George W. Bush administrations or especially
Speaker 1: the Ronald Reagan administrations. Frankly, it's now the left that
Speaker 1: has been expressing more and more interest in matters of
Speaker 1: the soul, as best I can tell, even though that
Speaker 1: interest is refracted through a secular political lens. That was
Speaker 1: at least how it appeared around twenty twenty through twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, it was almost a guarantee that the terminology
Speaker 1: used by much of the anti racist, intersectional social justice
Speaker 1: crowd was increasingly spiritual, especially in the wake of George
Speaker 1: Floyd's death, like I was talking about at the very
Speaker 1: beginning of this episode, and that surely did have a
Speaker 1: powerful effect on many of the online keyboard warriors who
Speaker 1: had been under lockdown and suffering from relative social isolation
Speaker 1: for over a year. We're starting to see the after
Speaker 1: effects of what that's been doing to people. Was captured
Speaker 1: very powerfully in the recent film Eddington, directed by Arias,
Speaker 1: which I highly recommend anybody who's interested in seeing a
Speaker 1: sort of artistic rendition of the craziness that was twenty
Speaker 1: twenty put on film, I highly recommend you go see that.
Speaker 1: And while it doesn't seem to be the case, at
Speaker 1: least not clearly so, at least not yet, there may
Speaker 1: be a growing swath of young leftists emerging looking for
Speaker 1: any way to replicate the online communities in which their
Speaker 1: views had been incubating during all those years of lockdown.
Speaker 1: Meetups won't cut it, and neither will Tinder. Loneliness was
Speaker 1: already an epidemic long before COVID nineteen hit, and after
Speaker 1: a year of being socially distanced sometimes longer, depending on
Speaker 1: the city you lived in, in your own predilections towards
Speaker 1: distancing loneliness will probably result in a lot of desperation.
Speaker 1: I think we've already been kind of seeing that, especially
Speaker 1: among those who strictly adhered to lockdown orders and hesitated to,
Speaker 1: as they say, touch grass for a bit longer than
Speaker 1: others did. We're already kind of seeing some difficulty with
Speaker 1: readchi adjustment. People are trying to reconnect with a world
Speaker 1: that no longer exists, and when they realize that, they're
Speaker 1: going to have to find a new world to create
Speaker 1: or one that already exists to join. And the only
Speaker 1: place is that offer relief from social isolation that don't
Speaker 1: require proactive planning and scheduling, at least not to any
Speaker 1: real significant amount are churches. Now, Imagine how attractive churches
Speaker 1: could be to those who were so isolated and who
Speaker 1: were largely non religious people who have been going through
Speaker 1: psychological turmoil both during lockdown and afterward, as they struggle
Speaker 1: to find a place in the world, in this new
Speaker 1: world that no longer really resembles the past one, even
Speaker 1: though in some ways it does. We're living in a
Speaker 1: time of seeming unreality for a lot of people, and
Speaker 1: unreality can only be fixed by something well fixed, and
Speaker 1: there is nothing more fixed than faith. Faith is also
Speaker 1: the anchor that helps people break free, not all people,
Speaker 1: of course, but some people, many people from things like
Speaker 1: substance abuse and mood disorders, which have both been spiking.
Speaker 1: Even in the years after the COVID nineteen pandemic waned,
Speaker 1: those numbers are still high. Guys now, keeping that in mind,
Speaker 1: imagine how effective these hypothetical churches or literal churches in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases, could be to attracting these people
Speaker 1: if they adopt the language of social justice, which, as
Speaker 1: we know, is not exactly incompatible with Christian teachings, as
Speaker 1: evidence by Christianity's history in America. While it seems like
Speaker 1: there are a lot of churches, I've seen some of them,
Speaker 1: especially in my hometown, that have quote unquote gone woke.
Speaker 1: It's also possible that that will not continue and the
Speaker 1: woke will start to go Christian. There may be a
Speaker 1: rise in Christian religiosity, perhaps of a left character in
Speaker 1: that sense, or maybe the churches will indeed just go woke,
Speaker 1: though I find it hard to believe that will be
Speaker 1: able to sustain itself, thanks largely to the fact that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people who just want to go
Speaker 1: to church to connect with God and want nothing to
Speaker 1: do with all of this secular stuff. And I get
Speaker 1: the feeling a number of the people who really signed
Speaker 1: on to the social justice tenets of the most recent
Speaker 1: Great Awakening, if it is indeed what it has been,
Speaker 1: really want anything to do with that stuff anymore. They
Speaker 1: want certainty, and there's nothing certain about absolutist secular claims
Speaker 1: that can be disproven with a simple Twitter post or
Speaker 1: free press article. As we know, the woke are already
Speaker 1: spiritually inclined. They are concerned with things like sin and repentance,
Speaker 1: and if their ideology matures out of the need for crude,
Speaker 1: performative vengeance, they are concerned with things like redemption. Unfortunately
Speaker 1: for them, I have not seen that last thing happen,
Speaker 1: but it's definitely possible that it could. Being angry is exhausting,
Speaker 1: forgiveness is liberating, at least for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: it is. And if that happens, if the path to
Speaker 1: redemption becomes a virtue among the so called woke, then
Speaker 1: the transformation will be, in my opinion, complete, and Christianity
Speaker 1: in America will take on a new aspect, perhaps a
Speaker 1: new schism if you want to place it in a
Speaker 1: little more negative context, but it will be a new
Speaker 1: aspect because it will be meeting needs that we're thought
Speaker 1: to be able to be satisfied in the secular world,
Speaker 1: but we're not, because the secular world is, as we know,
Speaker 1: full of fallible, unreliable human beings, unfair and inefficient structures
Speaker 1: and systems, and just a propensity for greed and opportunism.
Speaker 1: If enough individuals fail to achieve the aims of the
Speaker 1: social justice left, there will be a further move towards
Speaker 1: the literally infallible, that is God. However, it's very hard
Speaker 1: to say whether or not this will come to pass.
Speaker 1: This prognostication may well be wrong. We're in the midst
Speaker 1: of this right now, and you know, my business is history,
Speaker 1: not necessarily predicting the future, though I do think we
Speaker 1: can point out some things that seem to be a
Speaker 1: repeating pattern within the human condition that do seem to
Speaker 1: be playing out as we speak. As has seemed to
Speaker 1: be the case, and a lot of people have been
Speaker 1: pointing this out, at least on more you know, commentariat podcasts,
Speaker 1: so to speak. The adage of get woke, go broke
Speaker 1: has kind of turned out to be true, at least
Speaker 1: in the sense that a lot of companies do seem
Speaker 1: to believe that it was probably a mistake to really
Speaker 1: lean into all of that woke stuff. This is because
Speaker 1: of a lot of things, not least of which the
Speaker 1: changeover of power and the sort of rude awakening that
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty four election caused with a lot of people,
Speaker 1: but a lot of Americans, I would say, in general,
Speaker 1: got really tired of being hectored by the woke elites
Speaker 1: that pretty much every but he grew to resent many
Speaker 1: years ago. At this point, because of that, or at
Speaker 1: a time when the true believers in social justice, the
Speaker 1: ones who really loved putting up the black Square during
Speaker 1: the summer of twenty twenty and many other things that happened,
Speaker 1: they're now facing with a choice, do they fade away
Speaker 1: quietly or do they double down? And once they lack
Speaker 1: the cultural force to back up their truth claims, which
Speaker 1: they seem to be lacking or starting to lack, doubling
Speaker 1: down and sounding like an out of touch has been
Speaker 1: extremist is going to seem far less attractive than simply
Speaker 1: adapting to the new cultural trends. Now, cynics and skeptics
Speaker 1: like me might then just be proven right, and the
Speaker 1: whole social justice project might be revealed to be a massive, performative,
Speaker 1: emotional Ponzi scheme that is making ever fewer people a
Speaker 1: lot of money while encouraging the rest of us to
Speaker 1: just distrust and hate each other on the basis of
Speaker 1: immutable characteristics. And if this happens, Christianity will remain the
Speaker 1: domain of the right and the left will continue to
Speaker 1: search out the latest progressive trends and nothing will really change.
Speaker 1: That is definitely a possibility that we could be facing
Speaker 1: the likelihood of a Christian rebranding of social justice. The
Speaker 1: completion of our new great Awakening is all the greater
Speaker 1: if the social justice movement fails, though, because people are
Speaker 1: highly motivated to avoid cognitive dissonance, and the cognitive dissonance
Speaker 1: experience by someone who has invested more than a decade
Speaker 1: of his or her life in the cause of social
Speaker 1: justice would be profound. In addition, there already were a
Speaker 1: lot of incentives to distance oneself from the increasingly corporate
Speaker 1: side of social justice, and when it became clear that
Speaker 1: that wasn't a very profitable way to go about things,
Speaker 1: and companies basically divorce themselves from the mission statement, so
Speaker 1: to speak, it was a welcome change, I think for
Speaker 1: a lot of people. Though we do see some people
Speaker 1: getting outraged by, you know, Target's lack of a Pride
Speaker 1: Month recognition, but at the end of the day, most
Speaker 1: people who are true believers in social justice causes are
Speaker 1: more than happy to see corporation step out. I mean,
Speaker 1: after all, the cynical, performative nature of corporate social justice
Speaker 1: flies in the face of spiritual social justice, and many
Speaker 1: people hate corporate power as much, if not more, than
Speaker 1: they love social justice. In these circles, it's important to
Speaker 1: remember that all effective activists are opportunistic, keen to grab
Speaker 1: whatever power and influence that they can get. So many
Speaker 1: activists unless their funding it's taken from them are not
Speaker 1: going to relinquish their influence over media and corporate America
Speaker 1: out of some vague commitment to principle. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of these people still deeply embedded within parts of our
Speaker 1: culture that a lot of folks are underratium when they
Speaker 1: say that there's been a vibe shift or that wokeness
Speaker 1: has peaked. These people are still there. Even with the
Speaker 1: cuts to DEI programs. It's already pretty clear that a
Speaker 1: split between the corporate and spiritual aspects of the social
Speaker 1: justice movement have occurred. Though, because this unholy alliance with
Speaker 1: capitalism kind of proved the hollowness of most claims towards
Speaker 1: things like diversity, equity, and inclusion. I originally predicted that
Speaker 1: this might come about from a subtle cultural shift or
Speaker 1: a massive economic collapse. I thought that those were possibilities.
Speaker 1: What I didn't really think about was a massive and
Speaker 1: very rapid cultural shift. Though I don't think it was
Speaker 1: as rapid as it feels like. I think when we
Speaker 1: look back, we'll see the signs that it really started
Speaker 1: in earnest in the years leading up to the reelection
Speaker 1: of Donald Trump. But regardless, it was a massive cultural shift.
Speaker 1: As I record this. I'm still hearing arguments about the
Speaker 1: new Sydney Sweeney starring ad for American Apparel, which I
Speaker 1: just I don't really understand. I just think it's kind
Speaker 1: of silly and feels like a weird throwback to all
Speaker 1: this stuff that I've been talking about. I also did
Speaker 1: not predict the mass exodus from Twitter after Elon Musk
Speaker 1: took over, and its own transformation into sort of a
Speaker 1: health escape of trolls, anti Semites and just overall ghoulish assholes,
Speaker 1: of which I count myself admittedly, because I'm there and
Speaker 1: I have a blue check, I'll admit it. But I
Speaker 1: did predict that there would be an exodus of people
Speaker 1: from where they normally used to congregate, and that was Twitter.
Speaker 1: What I didn't really think about was it was just
Speaker 1: going to go over to what I didn't even know
Speaker 1: existed at the time. It might not even have existed
Speaker 1: at the time, and that is Blue Sky, the other
Speaker 1: social media platform. But what I was considering was there
Speaker 1: could be an exodus from all of these secular technological
Speaker 1: spaces of these people who were left wanting from the
Speaker 1: great awakening that was the social justice movement of the
Speaker 1: twenty tens into the early twenty twenties, and they might
Speaker 1: realize that there needs to be better met in a
Speaker 1: place of worship where spiritual and even truly existential meaning
Speaker 1: can be married to civic and political concerns. Honestly, all
Speaker 1: it would take would be one influential, extremely charismatic church
Speaker 1: pastor who welcome disenchanted social justice warriors into his or
Speaker 1: her flock. If this started to happen at scale and
Speaker 1: even straight up turn into a new sort of schism
Speaker 1: within the American Protestant tradition, the future could well be
Speaker 1: inhabited by a piously Christian left and a fervently anti
Speaker 1: clerical right. It is still very hard for me to
Speaker 1: imagine the true believers of the MAGA movement being anything
Speaker 1: other than anti clerical while still claiming to be fervently Christian.
Speaker 1: At the end of the day, they're the very anti
Speaker 1: clerical ones these days, is what it feels like. It
Speaker 1: is also possible that the notion of oppression will continue
Speaker 1: to become so atomized that the intersection is reduced to
Speaker 1: the individual, and everyone who calls themselves intersectional will realize
Speaker 1: that they've just been anarchists all along. Concerned with absolute
Speaker 1: individual liberty sovereign citizenship as they are known already, that
Speaker 1: does seem to be a possibility, But again we're at
Speaker 1: a point where the future is very uncertain, even though
Speaker 1: there seem to be trends going in various directions, especially
Speaker 1: for what was once the intersectionalist left. Douglas Murray wants
Speaker 1: Astuteley argued that the big problem with intersectional leftism is
Speaker 1: the dearth of forgiveness to be found within the movement.
Speaker 1: This lack will either lead to widespread despair and even
Speaker 1: horrible collapse of well being that can go up to
Speaker 1: and including suicide, because we've already seen that happen, or
Speaker 1: it could lead to a search for something that will
Speaker 1: absolve guilty people of the existential sin that they believe
Speaker 1: they are guilty of because of their whiteness, complicit silence,
Speaker 1: or privilege of any kind. In that sense, the woke
Speaker 1: are true believers in ariginal sin, and if you are
Speaker 1: a true believer, the only solution to original sin of
Speaker 1: this kind is the vicarious redemption offered by God's only son, jes.
Speaker 12: Go, My go to the.
Speaker 7: The my making thoughts from between fires.
Speaker 3: My styleygrees.
Speaker 14: For so b my.
Speaker 3: To my God to things, need.
Speaker 1: My go to the.
Speaker 14: T stay.
Speaker 1: My son, show.
Speaker 16: My God, to.
Speaker 3: My God, to be.
Speaker 1: All right. That actually might have been one of the
Speaker 1: most challenging recordings I've ever done, guys, because so much
Speaker 1: of that original essay, if you read it on the
Speaker 1: Patreon or the substack, was very clearly written in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, and in written form. That's fine because there
Speaker 1: is a little tag at the end that says where
Speaker 1: and when it was originally published, so it gives context
Speaker 1: for what I'm saying there. So I had to essentially
Speaker 1: update a lot of what I was saying in that
Speaker 1: essay on the fly. So I got kind of a
Speaker 1: good insight, maybe not that great of an insight, but
Speaker 1: a decent enough insight into the process that our grand
Speaker 1: puba Dan Carlin gets into, because as I understand it,
Speaker 1: that man doesn't do any kind of scripting. He might
Speaker 1: have a loose amalgamation of notes, but he just goes
Speaker 1: into the booth and hits record and you know, has
Speaker 1: some books on hand. And that's essentially what I had
Speaker 1: to do, especially for the last part of this episode,
Speaker 1: and that was well, it was interesting. I mean, it'll
Speaker 1: be really interesting to see how it comes together in
Speaker 1: the editing room, so to speak, and it'll be really
Speaker 1: to see what you guys think of it. I hope
Speaker 1: you guys enjoyed that. Before I get going here and
Speaker 1: we move along and we get to more scholarly pursuits
Speaker 1: with the next episode, I'm want to give some shout
Speaker 1: outs to those people who are kind and generous enough
Speaker 1: to support this show that is History Impossible over on
Speaker 1: Patreon and substack, though I haven't gotten anybody supporting the
Speaker 1: show at this level on substack yet, So these people
Speaker 1: I have nothing but love and appreciation for Zazu, Ben Ben,
Speaker 1: Bob Downing, Greg Hunter, s So Skip, Achaco, Molly Pan,
Speaker 1: John Pisano on a r PJ Raider, Matthew m Rice,
Speaker 1: Philip Rice, Emily Schmidt, Pierre Vupuni, and of course f you.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate all of you guys supporting me for
Speaker 1: all this time. I really appreciate everybody who supports this show.
Speaker 1: Please do consider heading over to Patreon dot com, slash
Speaker 1: History Impossible Orhistory Impossible dot substack dot com and become
Speaker 1: a pay supporter of me and my work today. It
Speaker 1: does help me keep the lights on, especially as I'm
Speaker 1: going into ever increasing debt for grad school, but also
Speaker 1: because you know, it is a good way to just
Speaker 1: show your support. I mean, if you like what I do,
Speaker 1: you know, a couple of bucks here and there is
Speaker 1: a very much appreciated But again, like I said in
Speaker 1: the intro, or like I often say in the intro,
Speaker 1: at least just spread the word about the show. If
Speaker 1: you don't have any money to spare, that's usually enough
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Speaker 1: over on substack and on Patreon, but substack seems to
Speaker 1: be where a lot of people like to go these days,
Speaker 1: and that is where you're going to find, you know,
Speaker 1: most of my written work. I mean, I posted on
Speaker 1: both it and Patreon, but a lot of people, like
Speaker 1: I said, seem to like the format. So please consider
Speaker 1: subscribing if you haven't already, and feel free to send
Speaker 1: me an email at history Impossible at gmail dot com
Speaker 1: if you have any feedback you want to give, and
Speaker 1: stay tuned for the next episode. We have another adaptation
Speaker 1: from something I wrote at this time for grad school
Speaker 1: that is actually fitting very well into my work that
Speaker 1: I'm doing on my thesis. Like I was saying at
Speaker 1: the beginning, So please stay tuned for that, and for
Speaker 1: a number of other conversations that I've recorded and are
Speaker 1: planning to do. At the very least, we have one
Speaker 1: coming up. I have to you know, work out some scheduling,
Speaker 1: you know, questions with some people. But yeah, that's where
Speaker 1: we're at right now. And stay tuned for a special
Speaker 1: double feature of the Pop Quiz Show, which is finally
Speaker 1: coming back after a very long hiatus. Just thanks to
Speaker 1: busyness and whatnot, Molly and I got we like spent
Speaker 1: the time to actually like record a double feature talking
Speaker 1: about the imperialism episodes that I did, So please stay
Speaker 1: tuned for that. Everyone has access to that who supports
Speaker 1: the show at a financial level of five dollars or above.
Speaker 1: I will let you guys know when that comes out,
Speaker 1: But until then, and until the next episodes come out,
Speaker 1: please stay tuned and thank you again for tuning into history.
Speaker 1: Three Impossible