Yet increasingly all the major AI companies are working toward a scenario where humans hand over authority of the world to AI-controlled robots, hoping the machines will have our best interests in mind. That is the situation that Daniel Kokotajlo warned about when talking to Steven Bartlett earlier this month.

Kokotajlo, who used to work for OpenAI, walked away from the organization to warn the world. He explains that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, etc., are not just locked in an arms race to make better LLMs; rather, they are seeking to automate the entire research process so that AI can recursively self-improve until it achieves “superintelligence.” A superintelligent AGI will then be tasked with figuring out how to integrate itself into every domain of human life. At that point—potentially only a few years away—armies of AIs will be put in charge of creating robot factories that built more robot factories, culminating in massive robot deployment to every sector of society, resulting in widespread unemployment. It could also result in new forms of violence, as the recent kerfuffle about putting Claude in charge of lethal weapons demonstrates.

Kokotajlo’s specialty is future forecasting, and while some of his predictions are based on bad metaphysics and faulty anthropology, he raises legitimate concerns about the situation we are racing toward as we allow a handful of tech companies to have unprecedented power with very little transparency and oversight.

Maybe these doomsday scenarios won’t happen, and maybe the human race will take a more cautious direction. In addition to giving his projection of what he expects to happen, Kokotajlo outlines what he hopes will happen: specific ways that world governments and tech companies could cooperate toward a safer and more prudent future. (Although even in Kokotajlo’s best case scenario, robots are still controlling the world by 2040.)

Regardless of what the next five to ten years will hold, we’ve likely already gone past the point of no return in the debasement of language, and therefore thought. In my earlier article, “The New King’s English and the Homogenization of Thought,” I warned that once we reach a critical mass where enough English publications are either written or heavily edited by LLMs (not necessarily books, but even just policy documents, website content, emails, etc.) then the LLM style will become self-reinforcing according to the basic principles of language acquisition. Moreover, by standardizing syntax and grammar, and simplifying what can count as “good English,” LLMs are subtly homogenizing thought itself, offering what Talbot Brewer referred to as “a seductive simulacrum of authority—the authority of reigning opinion, the authority of the herd.”

In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Sam Altman recognized the societal scale effect of millions of people talking to the same models. In reflecting on the ways entire societies are now imitating the diction of LLMs, Altman told Carlson that “it’s not a big deal.”

What Altman doesn’t appreciate is that more is going on here than just an increase in em dashes. As people begin aligning their language to the style of LLMs, they gradually surrender their rationality. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell warned that the way to neutralize a population was to give them a more standardized vocabulary. With fewer words, civilians have a simpler language, and with a simpler language, they will be less likely to commit “thought crimes.” In other words, to create homogeneity of thought, one must first render lifeless the written and spoken word. And that is exactly what LLMs are doing. Frequent exposure is normalizing the AI style, making it seem correct and authoritative. This is creating self-reinforcing loops that favor polished, middle-of-the-road global English over and against more human-sounding prose. By simplifying our language, LLMs are simplifying our thought. (Case in point, when I just copied the present article into ChatGPT to ask it to identify any spelling or grammar mistakes as bullet points, it said that the words “over and against” in the second to last sentence was “archaic.” LLMs may have a huge vocabulary, but they are nudging us toward a simplified modern style, what I call the new “King’s English.”)

AIs may not yet be creating robots to control us, but they are already controlling us in ways few people realize. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Co-pilot, etc., are thought factories slowly working away on us, lulling us into intellectual passivity. As millions of us give up on the type of deep thinking involved in writing, we gradually surrender our rational powers to the machine. As millions of us ask LLMs to “improve clarity” before publishing something, our tolerance for complexity is gradually diminishing. But intolerance for complexity is one of the epistemological conditions in pre-totalitarian societies. We may not yet live under the regime of technological totalitarianism, but we are fast creating the conditions for one.

Consider Rose Horowitch’s warning from a much-discussed article for The Atlantic, published earlier this month.

The skill of deep thinking will likely become rarer and rarer in a world where much of the population uses AI to avoid writing. It will also become more and more important. AI is creating a superabundance of text. It has led to a threefold increase in the number of books released on Amazon each month since 2022, when ChatGPT was launched. Over the same period, scientific-journal submissions have also surged. Many were written at least in part by artificial intelligence.

AI produces crisp, professional prose. Presented with human- and AI-produced text side by side, even M.F.A. candidates have been shown to prefer the work of the machines. If AI writing is pleasing and convincing, however, it is also unoriginal, often inaccurate, or both. People will therefore need their powers of discernment and comprehension more than ever. They will need to know what they think and how to make their own judgments. These are the exact skills that the use of AI threatens to erode.

What’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. If people become overreliant on AI to write for them, they could lose the capacity to interrogate or even develop their own views. These are quintessentially human capacities. “If we gave those up,” the NYU philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah told me, “we’d stop being the kind of humans that we are. We’d be very different creatures.”

This is sobering. Whether AI models come to control the world, this AI-driven cognitive capture should alarm us. By eroding human language, LLMs are destroying the very context of human rationality. And this is happening at precisely a time when the only thing standing between us and digital totalitarianism may be our ability to think clearly and act wisely.

Further Reading

• Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine, by Robin Phillips (Author), Joshua Pauling

• ChatGPT Is Changing the Words We Use in Conversation

• Mechanical Theosis: The Tech Industry’s Quest for Transcendence

• The Slot Machine in Your Pocket: It Isn’t Just Actual Interruptions That Drain Our Working Memory—It’s Also the Potential Ones

• Toolkit of Digital Boundaries for Healthy Living How I Reclaimed My Life From the Machine

• How I Was Taken Over by AI And Why an Entire Generation Could Be Next

• Digital Totalitarianism

• Is AI Magic? How Medieval Magic Became Artificial Intelligence—and Why Reading About It Doesn’t Make Me a Wizard

• The New King’s English and the Homogenization of Thought

Music was once considered an essential part of a classical education. For the ancient Greeks, it stood alongside gymnastics as one of the two most vital pillars of a well-rounded education. They believed that while gymnastics trained the body, music cultivated the soul.

But how does music cultivate the soul? One way music assists toward soul-cultivation is by training our desires toward rightly ordered affection, honing us toward the good, the true, and the beautiful, and thus ultimately to God Himself. As Gregory Wilbur put it, when summarizing the classical understanding of music,

The foundation of an ancient Greek education—paideia, which came to mean the realization of the human ideal—began with gymnastics and music. In its educational context, gymnastics trained and equipped the body and appetites through physical activity and practiced denial through fasting. Music, in contrast to gymnastics, trained the desires through enculturation by the Muses, the nine daughters of Memory: Epic Poetry, History, Love Poetry, Lyric Poetry, Tragedy, Comedy, Sacred Poetry, Dance and Choral Music, and Astronomy. These forms of music are expressions of the culture, stories, beliefs, values, and beauty that formed a student to then study philosophy and theology.

During medieval times, music was placed alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as one of the four branches of study known as the quadrivium. Moreover, Dominic A. Aquila reminds us that as part of applied arithmetic, music was placed within the quadrivium, yet it was also unique in being a bridge to rhetoric, which—along with grammar and logic—is part of the trivium.

In its function as a bridge subject, music is an induction into a liberal arts education. To quote again from Dominic Aquila, “For Augustine and pre-Christian philosophers music opened up onto a range of disciplines, to know music was to know everything.”

Yet today the role of music in the liberal arts is at best marginal. Nowhere is this more clearly visible than in the fact that music has receded to an elective in most schools, if it is offered at all. When schools face budget cuts, it is music and other arts programs that are typically the first to go, as these are considered “soft” subjects that are “non-essential” compared to core subjects tied to standardized metrics, workforce preparation, and measurable outcomes.

Students who do have the opportunity to receive music instruction in classical schools are rarely taught to actually be musical — that is, to listen to music attentively, to understand basic harmony and counterpoint, or to identify and enjoy the different musical forms (i.e., sonata-allegro, fugue, rondo, etc.). Some students even after ten years of music lessons cannot identify the difference between Baroque and Classical music, or the distinction between a theme and a motif.

Even students pursuing postgraduate studies in music education, by studying music in isolation from history and the other liberal arts, often struggle to become truly accomplished musicians because they are unable to place works in their historical contexts—contexts that are essential to interpretation—as Professor Amit Peled has shown in his discussion of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto. As Peled does master classes around the world, working with graduate students learning this remarkable piece, he asks them “when was this concerto composed?” The students habitually don’t know. After Peled tells them that it was written in 1919, they do not that this is the year after WWI finally ended. They’re just not curious, approaching the work in total isolation from all the other liberal arts. Having approached the work in isolation from history and the other liberal arts, they lack the context necessary for faithful interpretation, with the result that their musicianship suffers.

If this is true of graduate students, it is even more the case with children and young adults taking, so called, “music lessons.” This means that parents, seeking to cultivate even a modicum of musicality in their children, must contend with the almost comical situation in which the various components of musical formation—music performance, music appreciation, music theory, music history, music philosophy, theological aesthetics, and the rudiments of composition—have been fragmented and then siloed into specialist domains.

Even classical Christian institutions rarely structure curriculum in ways that lead to genuine musicality. Schools that do offer musical tuition typically focus on isolated technique on instruments or voice without actually treating music as one of the liberal arts. More often, music is treated as one of the fine arts—a mere skill like sculpting or filmography. Accordingly, schools often prioritize impressive concert performance over student formation in genuine musicality.

The eclipse of music as one of the liberal arts has meant that students who are taught to read music, to sing, or even achieve competence on an instrument, are often approached in much the same way as students participating in after-school sports: as acquiring a discrete skill rather than being formed in a discipline that illuminates the whole of reality. Thus, students at classical Christian schools who do receive music tuition often never learn how music integrates with the other humanities, nor the difference between a theocentric vs. an anthropocentric understanding of music, nor how to distinguish between music that rightly orders the soul vs. music that disorders it.

Aristotle taught that children should learn just enough skill on a musical instrument to be better listeners, to have good musical taste and wise judgment. By contrast, today even the most advanced musical education usually neglects the judgments that go in to good taste.

Perhaps most puzzling of all, in the wider corpus of scholarship claiming to defend or impart a “Christian worldview,” there is a consistent lack of serious reflection on music. In his opening lecture of a four-part series on music in 2013, Ken Myers noted that in his involvement with academics exploring the disorders of secular modernity, he has been hard pressed to find serious engagement with questions of music. This is all the more surprising given that Christian scholars have been giving serious thought on almost every imaginable part of culture, from how secular modernity impacts eating practices, to how we think about reason, education, philosophy, travel, sports, funeral practices, city planning—you name it. Yet when it comes to music, Myers explains, there remains a puzzling lacuna. The truth is that there has been hardly any engagement with how music functions at the intersection of Christianity and contemporary culture. Where such discussions exist, they are usually confined to questions about worship music.

“This is very strange when you think about it,” Myers observed. He continued by noting:

An outside observer might easily come to the conclusion that music is the only area of cultural life that has been immune from the distortions of secular modernity.” Indeed, one might be forgiven for concluding either that “this one area of our life is so pure that it has withstood all of the temptations and confusions” apparent in other domains, or that we are “so culturally captive” that “we’re not just suffering from cultural captivity, we’re suffering from Stockholm Syndrome…where somebody who’s being held captive actually starts to love their captors and defends them.

In this article, I want to make a few strides toward recovering from this cultural captivity. I will begin by briefly tracing the contours of an ancient understanding of the role music plays in cosmology, metaphysics, and psychology. From there, I will offer some reflections on the differences between the ancient understanding of music and contemporary assumptions prevalent even among believers. In the course of these reflections, I will observe that even conservative Christians have fallen prey to aesthetic relativism. Then I will suggest some reasons why music has receded from its once-prominent place in cultural life and education. How to address this problem at a pedagogical and institutional level will be saved for future articles.

Music, Cosmic Order, and Soul Harmony: The Ancient Understanding

In his counterpart to Genesis, the Timaeus, Plato associated the creation of the world with music, an idea hinted at in the Bible (Job 38:4-7) and recapitulated in later literature, specifically Tolkien’s Silmarillion and Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew.

In Plato’s understanding, God gave us sight specifically for perceiving the intelligence of the heavens so we might echo the ordering of the planets through an internal harmony of soul. But how is that harmony to be achieved? Plato’s answer was that harmony of soul is achieved through music.

Building on his predecessor, Pythagoras, who taught a connection between music and cosmic order, Plato suggested that the gift of hearing was given to man not only for the sake of hearing reasonable words, but for the sake of harmony and rhythm, that through music we might be assisted in the harmonious ordering of our souls.

The idea that music is central to both cosmic and anthropological order may strike us as odd. Yet the Greeks believed that the harmonies of the planets, like the harmonies of the soul, are essentially musical. It is significant, as the late Roger Scruton pointed out, that medieval cosmology grew out of Greek musical aesthetics.

In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis describes how medieval Christians, drawing on their classical heritage, believed that, if only our ears were open, we might hear the harmony of the celestial movements as actual music. Yet though we are too dull to hear the music of the spheres, nevertheless by participating (as a listener or performer) in music that echoes cosmic harmony, we join the great dance that, like the practice of the virtues, helps align the soul with cosmic order. As the late William Peter Mahrt observed when reflecting on the classical understanding:

In the view of Timaeus, the heavens are a display of the order of creation, and upon seeing that order we model the order of our own souls. And then there is the sense of hearing; it is given for the sake of speech, which conveys the products of reason, as does sight, but it is also for the sake of music. There are several kinds of music; one is the kind that we can hear; another is the internal music of the soul, “being in harmony and agreement with herself’; the third is the harmonious order of the cosmos itself. The music we can hear is to model that internal music of the soul, correcting any disorder in it and bringing it into harmony with the music of the cosmos.

Even today we need to heed Plato’s words: the sound of music aids putting our souls into order, an order that is modeled upon heavenly order….

We should listen to music which presents to our mind a principle of order in motion which resonates with the orders internal to our own souls, such that we are brought into harmony with something larger than ourselves.

In this understanding, music has unique power to shape our inner lives to be in tune with the world. Yet the Ancients also understood that this power within music comes with a corresponding danger. Although listening to or participating in music that reflects the harmony of the spheres assists us to become well-ordered and to grow toward inner harmony and virtue, other types of music can have a disordering effect, scattering our attention and nudging us toward the passions. Much music that is fun and seemingly benign has the potential to disorder and corrupt, leaving the soul fragmented, scattered, and restless.

Conscious that music comes as a double-edged sword, Plato famously banned certain types of music from his ideal republic. Throughout late antiquity and the medieval period, Christian reflection followed Plato in the awareness that music has unique spiritual potency, for good or ill. Thus, much medieval music was designed to help men and women become realigned with the music of the spheres and thus with God. This reflected the classical understanding that music can help a person be collected and well-ordered, or music can orient one’s soul toward chaos and disoder. Thus, as Calvin Stapert explains in his book on musical thought in the early church, a “musical” person is someone, not with great performing skills, but “a well-balanced or virtuous person.”

According to the second century church father, Clement of Alexandria, music assists in the embellishment and composure of manners. As Stapert summarized, “One’s music, Clement believed, is not merely a reflection of the kind of person one is; it is, to a certain extent, involved in shaping a person.”

Clement of Alexandria was not alone but represented a well-established tradition within early Christian thought which positioned music at the forefront of a holistic education. For example, 5th and 6th century Christian philosopher, Boethius, wrote an entire treatise on music in which he identified three spheres of musical activity.

1. musica mundane – the harmony of the spheres

2. musica humana – the harmony of the human body (this includes the proper ordering of the soul, in addition to all the faculties of the human person)

3. musica instrumentalis – music produced on instruments

For Boethius, musical education was indispensable because it enabled students to discern the unity underlying the three forms of music: the harmony heard in voices and instruments reflects the harmony of the human person, which itself mirrors the harmony of the cosmos. We could call this ancient understanding of music “sacramental” insofar as music participates in a larger cosmic, symbolic order.

From Cosmic Harmony to Aesthetic Relativism: The Modern Understanding

We have seen that, in the classical Christian understanding, music held a place of honor among the liberal arts, and was indispensable in a well-rounded education. Yet modern Christian educators have been content to quietly ignore this ancient pedigree. Significantly, when Baker Academic brought together twenty-five evangelical experts in Christian education to produce their landmark anthology, Christian Education, music does not appear once in their extensive index of subjects (an index that includes everything from “tea party activity” to “thinking-aloud pair problem solving”). Even their surveys of historical and philosophical foundations of Christian Education neglects to mention music.

When we neglect any subject, the result is not the absence of thought about it, but the presence of bad ideas, usually in the form of unrecognized assumptions. And so it has been with music. The lack of serious engagement has created a vacuum that has been colonized by relativism. Consider how those of us who claim to have a Christian worldview often become functional relativists when it comes to music. Conservative Christians who would eschew relativism in ethics (“we make up our own goodness”) or relativism in epistemology (“what’s true for you might not be true for me”) routinely become practical relativists when it comes to art (“beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder.”)

Perhaps this relativism is easiest to spot when it comes to literature. Recently a friend contacted me and shared that he has spent his career teaching children from ages eleven to seventeen in classical Christian schools. He told me that the imaginations of his students are filled with social media and “junk they watch in movies.” Sad, but no surprise. But what I found really interesting is that he has recently had a class of eleven-year-olds who reject out of hand his teaching about stories. When he suggests that certain stories are congruent with the patterns of reality, while other stories can be subversive, his students turn around and instruct him, saying, “That’s just your opinion.” Behind this is a cynicism about virtue itself. My friend doesn’t see that open cynicism about virtue yet from the eleven-year-olds, since for them the cynicism is limited to stories. But then a couple of grade levels up, in 8th and 9th grade, it shifts from skepticism about what makes a good story, to skepticism about virtue. The students believe that when teachers try to hold up virtuous behavioral examples or models, they are simply pushing their own personal preferences. At his classical Christian school he started seeing this in ninth grade about seven years ago (around 2019), while he started seeing it in eighth grade three years ago (around 2003) and in 6th grade just this year (2026).

Significantly, this battle we are fighting now in the arena of stories and virtue is a battle we lost over a century ago when it comes to music. The notion that certain combinations of melody, harmony, and rhythm can be more aligned with cosmic order than other types—and can for this reason assist or retard human flourishing—is often dismissed out of hand even by conservative Christians. As the composer and critic, Julian Johnson, put it in Who Needs Classical Music?, to deny that music is reducible to merely a matter of taste is routinely perceived as “coercion and a kind of cultural high-handedness or elitism.”

If you think I’m exaggerating, try this little experiment. Go up to a friend and start criticizing the type of music he listens to during car journeys, or that his church performs during worship. Nine times out of ten, the response you’ll receive is not that the criticisms are false, but that they are based on a category mistake since music is a realm regulated by pure subjective taste. Instead of receiving the retort, “You’re wrong—this type of music is actually very appropriate,” the person will often reply like the students in my friend’s literature class, “Who are you to say?” The subtext is that because music has no intrinsic meaning apart from the words, any meaning we assign to particular combinations of melody, harmony and rhythm is purely arbitrary. The very idea that music has ontological significance—and therefore that unique combinations of melody, harmony and rhythm can contribute to the ordering or disordering of the soul—often strikes us as strange. But in reality we are the ones who are strange. To quote again from Julian Johnson,

To an earlier age, our contemporary idea of a complete relativism in musical judgment would have seemed nonsensical. One could no more make valid individual judgments about music than about science. Music was no more ‘a matter of taste’ than was the orbit of the planets or the physiology of the human body. From Plato to Helmholtz, music was understood to be based on natural laws, and its value was derived from its capacity to frame and elaborate these laws in musical form. Its success was no more a matter of subjective judgment than the laws themselves.

That music has fallen into the orbit of relativism is not surprising. Nor should we be shocked that music has receded from its once-prominent place in cultural life and education. But what should surprise and disturb us is how the church has generally succumbed to this shift. Why is this? Without trying to be comprehensive, I’d like to suggest six factors that have contributed to the current lacuna in Christian musical thinking.

1. Reason #1: Music and the Inward Turn

Part of the issue is simply Christian captivity to the prevailing zeitgeist. Since the Renaissance, and even more since the late nineteenth century, we have become deeply entrenched in the idea that an artist’s primary task is self-expression. The notion of inspiration arising from an external source like the muses—an idea from which even the word “music” owes its origin—has been replaced by the notion of the muse being rooted in one’s own interiority. Accordingly, art is seen to be fundamentally about expressing the inner self, not reflecting cosmic metaphysical order. From here, it is a small step to the type of aesthetic relativism described above, even amongst Christians. Music is seen as expressing our personal preferences and feelings rather than reflecting the objective cosmic, metaphysical, and spiritual order.

The problem is not the claim that music expresses human emotion—a point Aristotle himself affirmed—but rather a conception of emotion detached from objective reality. In the contemporary calculus, feelings exist within a self-enclosed realm of interiority rather than as responses to an order transcending ourselves. In such a scheme, music merely expresses feelings that are fundamentally self-contained and morally neutral. By contrast, the ancients believed that our inner dispositions can be rightly aligned with the structure of reality, and can be brought into harmony with the order of the world (a point I have discussed elsewhere). And crucially, music is a key tool for rightly aligning our feelings toward the good. Indeed, in historic Christian thought, the ability of music to delight the soul makes it a unique form of instruction, if not a model for how all the disciplines can begin to function in a well-educated student. As Christina George noted,

In Augustine’s De ordine (The Order that Exists within the Disciplines), Augustine asserts that music is uniquely positioned to instruct us because of the way it first invites us to attend to it. Our attraction to it is the expected response to its delectability, or sweetness. As such, it collaborates with our desire to experience pleasure, thereby facilitating an earnest process of learning….The qualities that render it attractive are intended to invite the learner to consider truth as it is presented in other disciplines. Due to its nature as unseen—but material—sound substance, it makes many principles put forth in other disciplines easier to understand. It exemplifies the nature of particularity, insofar as it is comprised of particular, demarcated figures (both visually and sonically) that are delineated from inchoate and infinite sound. It teaches about the relationship between things. It gives instruction regarding the nature of motion and communication, constituting a bridge between itself and areas of study like astronomy and rhetoric. The regular employment of music to exemplify such principles was expected in the medieval mind and has been a tool consistently deployed by philosophers for centuries.

2. Reason #2: The Loss of Musical Context

There are also technological factors that have contributed to our current musical malaise. Our music delivery systems prime us to think of music in decontextualized ways. We no longer “hear” an Allemande as a dance nor a march as a civic procession. Through playlists and streaming services, individual movements can be detached from the larger works in which they were originally situated. Even worship music like Gregorian chant, is often taken out of worship and consumed as mere relaxation.

If it is true that we strip music of its historical and liturgical contexts, this is also true of its cosmic context, with music decontextualized from its primal metaphysical and celestial meaning. It has been hard even for believers to resist the gravitational pull of this sea change, making it easy to assume that music can be unbundled from anything that might inform it with objective meaning. And naturally, if music doesn’t have meaning, then it is a fundamentally different type of thing than liberal arts like arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. But what kind of thing is it? In the contemporary calculus, music is mere entertainment, hinging on what Gregory Wilbur refers to as “the modern reduction of music to that which is primarily concerned with the emotions, beauty, and the senses and thus relegated to the subjective movement of desires.”

3. Reason #2: The Rejection of Cultivation

For many people living in the modern west, the operating assumption is that our musical preferences are fixed, so that the idea of struggling to grow towards more refined musical tastes seems like a relic of a bygone age. Since it is part of the very air we breathe that there can be no such thing as good taste, the idea of training desire and affection toward good art seems pretentious and snobbish, if not a complete category mistake. But it takes skill to appreciate good music, just as it takes learning to recover the type of musical-centric worldview held by the ancients.

I have argued elsewhere that it is through struggle and through habits that may initially feel unnatural, that we arrive at our deepest dispositions, and that we ultimately determine which behaviors will come to feel natural to us, and what types of art and literature we come to enjoy. When we pathologize skill, the result is not only bad taste, but bad art, and distorted understandings of the place of art in the universe.

Consider how in so much commercialized popular painting, what people often want is sentimental art that appeals to the emotions immediately without making any demands on, or requiring any training from, the viewer. Art that invites the viewer or listener to struggle, and perhaps requires effort or education before it can be fully appreciated, has receded from mainstream culture to become a specialist pursuit. Accordingly, it is unusual to find popular singers having to stretch to intervals beyond a perfect fifth. The fine vocal training required to execute the difficult intervals in Schubert’s lieder or Verdi’s arias feels less authentic and personal to many catechized by modern popular music. In fact, many popular singers often strive to convey a sense of raw immediacy by making their singing sound effortless.

In the second video of the aforementioned series on music, Ken Myers argues that behind these trends lies a latent suspicion of music as art, as artifact.

Now sometimes I’ve heard it said—and much more often have heard it implied from well-meaning people—that music should just come from the heart….It should just flow out of our natural feelings. And many Christians would argue—following certain dictates of 19th century romanticism—that musical experience should be natural, it should be untrained, it should be sincere, uncultivated. And the key word that’s often used in these settings is authentic - it should be authentic…. I’m intrigued by this use of authenticity. If it means untrained, unschooled, instinctual, then to be an authentic human, or to make authentic music, is to be bestial.

Part of the delights of being a human being is that we are trainable. We are educable - we can learn things. But it’s often objected that music requiring any kind of deliberateness or discipline, training or cultivation to either listen to or to perform is artificial. It’s well, yes it is [artificial]. It’s an artifice like wine is an artifice. It’s something that is artfully crafted. It’s constructed. But somehow that’s regarded as not as spiritual as music that just oozes, that we simply secrete somehow... Well, that is like saying that wild grapes (not those actually cultivated artificially in a vineyard) or that rye from raw grasses are more authentic than a good loaf of rye bread, or or that freshly picked olives are better than a rich olive oil.

Just as music, as an artifact, is the result of cultivation, so music invites us to become more cultivated human beings, as we grow in musical ability, musical taste, and musical judgment. As pointed out to me in an email, the arts invite us into carefully cultivated aesthetic virtues that mirror the virtues needed in daily life, works of service, and communities of healing. These include the virtues of gratitude, diligence, attentiveness, perseverance, reverence, wonder, joy, compassion, attending, presence, empathy, restraint, self control, courage, gentleness, discernment, openness to being formed, and sitting in discomfort (delayed gratification). She pointed out that

We are psychosomatic beings—body and soul together. Because of that, the arts are not just entertainment. They are one of the ways the whole person learns virtue, healing, and understanding....A cellist learns patience and order, humility and grace, through the constant sliding, moving, bow stroking, years of practice shape the body and soul, a dancer’s balance, a chanter’s attentiveness to tone and timbre. All of this cultivates interior virtues.

4. Reason #4: Moral Reductionism

Then there are disorders systemic to Christian culture that make us primed to think of music differently from our ancient forebears. The legalism—and even a quasi-voluntarism—hovering in the background of so much Christian thinking on ethics, has meant that everything from art to food is often assessed in frameworks of behavior that neglect prior questions of cosmic, ontological and teleological ordering. As I’ve described elsewhere, when I try to talk about Christians making healthy diet choices, people immediately ask, “Are you saying it’s a sin for me to eat this?” Or if I talk about modesty, people immediately want to ask, “Are you saying it’s a sin for me to wear such-and-such a swimsuit?” It’s as if all ontological, metaphysical, teleological categories have been evacuated from ethics, resulting in no middle ground between complete license and legalistic restriction.

And so it is with music. Often in conversations with Christians when trying to raise questions about the theology of musical aesthetics, or to suggest that our musical tastes can grow in maturity, people immediately want to ask, “Are you saying it’s a sin for me to listen to such-and-such?” The rich vocabulary for talking about music that has been handed down to us from over two millennia of reflection is neglected as the entire issue is collapsed into a choice between affirming that certain music is sinful vs. saying that music is a realm of complete spiritual neutrality. The result is that questions of theological aesthetics and musical metaphysics have a difficult time even getting off the ground.

5. Reason #5: Educational Reductionism

Within the culture of Christian education, further factors militate against sustained commitment to developing true musicality in students. The zeitgeist of metrics and outcome-based education has converged with the rationalistic tendencies of worldview-obsessed Presbyterians in a pincer movement that has left art as its principal casualty. So much supposedly “classical” education leaves us approaching the arts as a type of decoding exercise to find the worldview implicit in the artwork to then affirm or critique. Within this model, we hardly know what to do with music. Music, the most abstract of all the arts and the least susceptible to didactic reductionism, exists as an appendage to educational modalities centered around worldview, doctrine, and apologetics.

6. Reason #6: Spirituality Without the Senses

Protestant Christian culture suffers particularly when it comes to music. In his book State of the Arts: From Bezalel to Mapplethorpe, Gene Edward Veith cited research showing that when a Catholic begins taking his faith more seriously, the result is deeper engagement with the arts, whereas among Protestants it tends to be the reverse: a move toward deeper faith correlates with less interest in art. While there are sociological factors to explain this, there are also theological reasons rooted in Protestant identity. I have explained elsewhere how the drift within the magisterial reformation toward disembodied spirituality has left some (not all) streams of Protestantism—including many which came to dominate much of the United States—often unsure how to handle something as obviously physical as music.

Next Steps in Recovering Music as a Liberal Art

Where do we go from here in recovering music as one of the liberal arts? That is a question I hope to explore in future offerings, but for now, I’d like to make four suggestions.

1. Tuning the Affections Through Music

Believers are finally becoming aware that apologetics must strive to show, not only that Christianity is true, but that it’s beautiful. It is certainly the case that people leave the faith because of errors in logic and worldview (far more people than we realize), but more often people leave Christianity because the faith isn’t perceived as lovely. This realization has led to a new wave of interest in fields such as “imaginative apologetics” and “cultural apologetics” that I have discussed elsewhere. One of the benefits of this realignment has been a recapitulation of the spiritual potency of stories, leading to a new wave of Christian reflection about, and participation in, the tradition of story-telling and myth-making. One important step we can take in this apologetic realignment is to bring back music to the center of this discussion. Because music bypasses our mental roadblocks to go straight to the heart, it is particularly seductive, both for good and ill. Music forms our loves in ways that dispose us toward truth or estrange us from it. If the stories we tell can baptize the imagination, then the music we listen to can tune—or mistune—the affections, honing what we consider desirable and sculpting what we find worthy of adoration. As we begin taking this seriously as parents, godparents, clergy, educators, and youth group leaders, we can start giving as much attention to music as we give to literature and other forms of imaginative apologetics. This will involve didactic instruction, both in basic music pedagogy and music philosophy, but also the invitation to enjoy good music together, from singing aloud in the home to participating in music at church, to going to live performances, to incorporating music in the type of hospitality practices I have discussed elsewhere.

2. Music Education is for Everyone, Not Just Specialists

Here’s another step we can take. We need to stop thinking about music as a specialist domain. All of us can begin our music education tomorrow, even if we’ve never played an instrument. Start by simply listening to great music. At no other time in history have we had so much access to such a plethora of great music, but to whom much is given much will be expected. If you don’t know where to start in curating a good musical diet, then seek counsel from a musical friend, or browse the growing collection of recommendations I’m offering in the Music Archives of my personal website.

In addition to listening to great music, you can begin educating yourself about the relationship of music to all the other liberal arts. If you’re interested in history, then you can study the relation between music and history, with this fascinating course on music as a mirror of history. If you’re interested in theology, then study the relationship between music and theology, perhaps starting with Ken Myers’ epiphany lectures already mentioned and then moving onto Jeremy Begbie’s books. If you’re interested in neuroscience or psychology, then study the relation between music and the brain, perhaps beginning with Renée Fleming’s 19-episode series on the intersection of music, neuroscience, and healthcare, and moving onto Oliver Sax’s fascinating work Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. The same is true of philosophy, literature, mathematics, and even the natural sciences—whatever your interest, music has something for you! The point is not to become a professional musician, but to recover the older vision in which music belongs to a well-rounded education and illuminates every other field of knowledge.

3. Rethinking Private Music Lessons

As parents, we can begin a conversation to rethink the philosophy behind music lessons. Many parents pay thousands of dollars for their children to have private lessons on the piano, guitar, violin, or some other instrument. This is good, but we can begin insisting that our children be taught, not just to be competent performers, but to be musical in a holistic and classical sense. This involves a paradigm shift in how we think of children’s music teachers.

Ideally, a piano teacher should not be perceived fundamentally as a “piano teacher” but as a music teacher who is using a specific instrument as a portal into a general musical understanding and outlook on life. Currently parent demand militates against this. Parents want to hear their kids playing pieces, and to see their kids in recitals. (Side-note, the recital model does much damage because it’s often based on the method of learning a piece and then forgetting it, then learning another piece and forgetting it, etc.) They may pour thousands of dollars into children’s music lessons even though they know that, statistically, over half will no longer continue as adults because they haven’t been personally invested in the learning process. What if, instead, we thought of music teachers in the same way we think of educators in other disciplines—not as instructors hired merely to produce a particular skill or performance outcome, but as mentors entrusted with cultivating a lifelong love of learning and a deeper understanding of the subject itself? Consider how a literature teacher does not simply train students to pronounce words or analyze plots but cultivates a way of seeing the world through literature. Why can’t we expect the same of our children’s music teachers?

One piano teacher told me that she wants to introduce more music appreciation into pedagogy but that parents don’t appreciate the value of this since they are paying to see their kids perform impressive pieces in recitals. If the industry of private music lesson is driven by parent demand, we can shift that by demanding something different.

4. Integrate Music Across the Classical Curriculum

As teachers and administrators at classical Christian schools, we can push for conferences and symposia recovering music as one of the liberal arts. In most cases, the infrastructure is already in place in classical Christian schools for integrating music into the curriculum more holistically. History teachers can begin playing music relevant to the period being studied. Philosophy teachers can foreground the metaphysics of music. Science and mathematics teachers can explore the numerical foundations of harmony and acoustics. Theology teachers can recover the church’s rich tradition of reflection on the role of music in worship, liturgy, and the Christian life. And of course, music teachers themselves can lead the way in educating faculty and parents on the central role of music in the liberal arts. Through this education, we can cease thinking of music as merely entertainment, but recover music as a mode of perceiving reality and rightly participating in it.

Further Reading

• The Battle for Your Child’s Imagination, and Why Stories Matter More Than You May Think

• Training Our Affections and the Role of of Beauty in Worship

• She Walks in Beauty: Lord Byron, Taylor Swift, and the Teacher’s Vocation

• Virtue and Classical Education: A Commencement Address to a Graduating Class

• The Mythic Vision of George MacDonald

• Walter Mitty and the Long Road Back to the Ordinary

Over the last couple years there has been a lot of debate about the relation between Christianity and culture, with many believers are now questioning whether “Christian culture” or “cultural Christianity” is even a good thing.

Questions about the relation between Christianity and culture are actually nothing new. From the very beginning of the faith, we’ve had to wrestle with how to understand ourselves in relation to the wider society. Neglecting this rich tradition comes with a cost, and that cost is false solutions. Thus the current discourse on Christianity and culture increasingly straddles two opposing paradigms:

1. grossly politicized frameworks that would immanentize the eschaton (that is, attempt to create utopia this side of the Second Coming);

vs

2. neo-anabaptist modalities that would repudiate inaugurated eschatology (that is, denying that the kingdom of God has any present earthly significance).

In my recent keynote for our regional Parish Life Conference, I suggested that there is a better way, one that does justice to both church history and the redemptive-historical narrative. I argue that the biblical model of cultural renewal is restored communion with God in the Eucharist, and the embodied micro-communities that emerge out of sacramental celebration.

The church is truly counter-cultural by inviting us back to the primordial human vocation of existing in communion with God and with each other, thus answering the fundamental human need for belonging. As such, the Eucharist is cosmic because healing flows from the divine presence at the Communion Table, to the parish community, and then outward to society like concentric rings. While the full effects of societal transformation are ultimately eschatological, Eucharistic micro-communities function as advanced signs of the heavenly empire that will one day fill the entire earth. Eucharistic communities offer a counter-culture that shows Christ’s inaugurated kingdom already at work, while anticipating the culmination of that kingdom when the heaven and earth synthesis will finally be complete.

Those who have read Lewis’s book, That Hideous Strength, will be familiar with this basic framework, though Lewis never quite landed on the Eucharist as the solution (though he came tantalizingly close). Lewis showed how the apocalyptic conflict between the New Jerusalem (city of God) vs. Babel (the city of Man), is played out in humdrum community activities like putting up with one another, faithfully saying our prayers, loving each other in community, helping the poor within our parish, and creating things of beauty that draw us to one another. I’m taking Lewis’s argument one step further and arguing—both from scripture and historical observation—that when we do these community things as outgrowths of union with Christ in the Eucharist, we develop a shared public culture and the world around us is renewed.

From my talk:

We may acknowledge that Eucharistic miracles occur as people are occasionally healed of disease when they receive the body and blood of Christ, yet the greater miracle we often miss is that through the Eucharist God is constituting a people—a community amidst anti-community….

Love is what connects the Holy Mysteries to all the details of parish life, and love is what connects the parish community to the larger society we are transforming. And as we’ve seen again and again, the loving common life that is essential to culture is not just for ourselves; it’s also how we disciple the nations…. Just as we bring to the sacramental community our insecurities, traumas, and anxieties so we can process these things together and be healed, so we bring our cultural expressions—our art, music, literature, and creativity—into the kingdom so it can be transformed, and healed.

Watch entire video at the St. Patrick’s Orthodox Church and the Orthodox West.

Further Reading

• The Battle for Your Child’s Imagination: Why Stories Matter More Than You May Think

• Mechanical Theosis: The Tech Industry’s Quest for Transcendence

• The New King’s English and the Homogenization of Thought

Over the years it has been interesting to see classical educators, many of them Presbyterian with little sympathy for Catholicism, also treating Latin as magic, though for different reasons.

Classical schools and associated publishing houses naturally devote much ink to explaining, defending, and justifying their programs, and it is common to find apologetics for Latin featuring prominently in these polemics. Sadly, these polemics often veer toward ideology and even, occasionally, misleading claims. I’d like to walk through some of these claims, showing where I find them wanting, while offering a proposal of my own to suggest a different way of approaching Latin in the classroom. As you read this, if you feel I’ve sold my soul to modernism and abandoned everything I’ve stood for over the years, please persevere until reaching my alternative proposal.

Bad Justification #1: Latin Helps With SAT Scores

Let’s begin by considering the oft-repeated notion that Latin helps sculpt the cadences of the mind, nudging students toward critical thinking in ways that help them score better on SAT tests. Let’s call this “Latin justification #1.” As argued in his book Becoming Classically Educated, “one ancillary and pragmatic reason [for studying classical languages] is that students who study Latin overwhelmingly score higher on standardized tests than students who have not studied Latin.”

The data analysis that supposedly supports this justification hinges on a confusion between correlation and causation, together with a good dose of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Of course students who go to more rigorous schools generally score better on standardized tests, but the fact that many of these rigorous schools also teach Latin does not establish that the Latin instruction has caused the test result in a way that Chinese or Russian instruction would not. Much more evidence would be required for showing that Latin instruction itself, rather than other factors, is tied to the higher SAT scores.

We might also legitimately question whether high SAT scores what we should be aiming for as parents and educators.

Bad Justification #2: Latin is Good For The Brain

Another oft-repeated argument is that because Latin is a highly inflected language, students will acquire transferable skills that help in other domains such as linear thinking, cognitive elasticity, skills in argumentation, and attentiveness. Let’s call this “Latin justification #2.” This is where magical thinking comes in, as if Latin is a kind of talisman for developing the brain of an intellectual. The idea is that the types of mental functions needed for learning such a highly inflected language are transferable skills, influencing other domains and activities.

Again, problems abound, for among those who proffer this argument, it is not clear whether the transferable benefits only emerge (A) after fluency has been achieved, or whether (B) it is the process of learning Latin in the classroom leads to these transferable skills regardless of whether fluency is ever obtained. Clarifying this distinction is important since A and B may be in tension, given that speaking Latin to a child in the home (a real possibility now among the community of Latin teachers) might lead to fluency in the absence of classroom Latin instruction; yet if these cognitive benefits emerge through the process of classroom learning, then fluency via natural language acquisition should be eschewed since that would render classroom language acquisition impossible. Put more simply, advocates must decide whether the cognitive benefits come from knowing Latin or from learning Latin, because if it is the latter, then natural acquisition would actually bypass the very mechanism thought to produce those benefits.

Justification #2 comes with a high burden of proof, since one would need to show that (1) the type of linear thinking, cognitive elasticity, attentiveness, etc. that emerge from studying Latin is indeed transferable to other brain activities in the way claimed, and (2) that learning Latin is a superior and more efficient way of achieving these cognitive benefits compared to other types of learning activities often thought to be effective in attaining this same goal.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that either the study of Latin or the achievement of fluency (or both) confers a range of generalized cognitive benefits, including logical thinking and attentiveness. It is not clear why this argument, if true, should support Latin specifically over other languages, including other inflected languages like Spanish, or other highly inflected languages like Russian or Turkish. Similarly with attentiveness: memorizing classical music, or quotes from the church fathers, or even playing the Chinese game Go, are all good for the brain and involve attentiveness, so further reasons would need to be given to show why schools need to specifically privilege Latin above alternative modalities. Indeed, if attentiveness is our goal, might this be realized better by reallocating resources to activities that more effectively address this concern, such as daily sitting meditations, training in digital minimalism, learning musical instruments, facilitating times of quiet and boredom during the day, or exercises focused on strengthening mindfulness and metacognition? What if we are spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on Latin instruction in the hope of achieving goals that, frankly, can be achieved easier and with greater efficacy by simply having our kids sit still for five minutes a day with their eyes closed and their smartphone turned off, or some of the other types of attention-strengthening exercises that I have discussed elsewhere? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they would need to be addressed before justification #2 would be convincing.

More generally, however, we need to be cautious when making claims about transferable skills. The psychological literature shows that transference is often counter-intuitive, because some learning skills do transfer to other domains, but some don’t. We know, for example, that exercises that help with attentiveness (even something as simple as sitting still for five minutes a day, deep-breathing and refusing to give in to mental distractions) does seem to help with attentiveness in other areas of life, including engagement with literature, relationships, empathy, etc. Similarly, there also seem to be some convincing preliminary research suggesting that reading quality novels may be transferable to people-skills like EQ. But many other activities that we might suspect are transferable are not. For example, there have been some studies that playing brain games to not help with the type of cognitive fitness they were once thought to deliver because the skills needed for playing them are so granular. Thus, we need solid research from psycholinguistics before we could rationally assert that learning Latin provides transferable competencies in the ways often claimed.

Moreover, the example of the ancient Greeks should caution us from being too hasty in assuming that learning Latin is essential for the development of cognitive skills like critical thinking, following linear arguments, etc.. Greeks like Plato and Aristotle did not know Latin, yet were hardly lacking in these cognitive virtues.

Bad Justification #3: Latin is Good Because it’s Hard

Once a schoolboy was asked on a test, “What was the greatest achievement of the Romans?” He answered, “Learning Latin.” This boy knew, like all of us who have tried our hand at the language, just how difficult it is for English speakers to learn Latin. Declension for nouns and adjectives are counter-intuitive for English speakers, which is why even years of Latin tuition is often not enough for mastery. Yet this very difficulty is often thought to provide the justification for the language. In many of the polemics produced by classical educators, we hear that Latin orients students toward the virtues of hard work, endurance, grit, and perseverance.

If this argument were taken seriously, all the schools offering Latin instruction should cease and immediately switch to classical Greek, since Greek is harder. Classical Greek contains a different alphabet; it distinguishes not only singular and plural but also dual (for pairs); it contains aorist tense, middle voice, optative mood. None of these exist in Latin and provide an extra layer of grief for English speakers. Even St. Augustine of Hippo complained about the difficulties of learning Greek.

Ironically, justification #3 is at odds with one of the most effective means to Latin mastery that I mentioned earlier, namely having one parent in the family speak Latin to their children from infancy (a real possibility in the hundreds of families where one parent is a Latin teacher). If difficulty-induced grit really were a chief benefit of Latin tutelage, then educators would be justified not speaking Latin to infants, lest early fluency deprive the child of the supposed cognitive gains of struggle later on in life.

Moreover, if our goal is character building through enduring difficult things, then why Latin when there are a myriad of other activities—from memorizing Shakespeare to learning to play the violin to going all day without eating—that could equally provide opportunities for endurance?

Bad Justification #4: Latin Helps With Other Languages

Consider the oft-repeated argument that Latin helps students master other languages. I find this line of reasoning particularly Quixotic. If one is learning Latin as a head-start on a modern language, why not invest all that time studying the intended language itself? If learning living languages is so crucially important that it justifies hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in Latin instruction simply to make the living language a little easier, then why not spend that time directly learning a living language?

It is rather ironic to see Latin instruction justified by this type of cost-benefit reasoning (i.e. the cost of learning Latin is justified by the benefit of the student being helped to learn living languages) when the same apologists will often defend Latin for its non-pragmatic value, as if doing something without clear functional value somehow gives the black-eye to the latent utilitarianism of the contemporary moment.

Bad Justification #5: Latin Helps With Word Origins

Maybe Latin tutelage is justified because it helps students with word origins. But if etymological literacy is our goal, wouldn’t it be more efficient to just study etymology directly?

Moreover, French has just as much influence on English as Latin, as indicated by the chart below, so why is Latin treated as having a particular primacy?

Additionally, we might well dispute why etymological literacy is so important. If etymological literacy helps us grow deeper in understanding and appreciation of the English language, it seems a rather circuitous route since there are other activities that could more directly feed and understanding and appreciation of English, including spending more time on our own poets and rhetoricians, or even learning the great speeches of antiquity in translation.

A school cannot do everything; therefore, any allocation of resources must be justified not merely by the good it aims to achieve, but by demonstrating that this good outweighs all the opportunities and pursuits that will necessarily be neglected as a result of the resource allocation. With that in mind, I remain skeptical that the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars that classical schools devote to Latin really is justified on the basis of knowledge of word origins.

Bad Justification #6: Latin Helps With English

Another common justification for Latin instruction is that Latin will help students be more proficient at English. To quote again from , “Learning Latin provides students with a fuller understanding of the English language since about 40% of English is derived from Latin.” But if learning a foreign language is so important as a round-about way of learning English, then why Latin over French, given that the French language has contributed an identical share of words to English (28.3%) to Latin (28.2%).

Moreover, even if Latin instruction does improve English vocabulary, is it the most effective means of doing so, compared to alternative pedagogical approaches that could be pursued with the same instructional resources? Remember, a school cannot do everything; therefore, any allocation of resources must be justified not merely by the good it aims to achieve, but by demonstrating that this good outweighs all the opportunities and pursuits that will necessarily be neglected as a result of the resource allocation.

An article at the University of Dallas has offered some further reasons why justification #6 is not only faulty, but opposed to the very spirit of classical education.

The most common reasons listed for studying Latin are that it improves students’ vocabulary, their understanding of English grammar, their logical reasoning, that it prepares them for career fields such as law, medicine, and science, that it helps with learning other languages, and that it improves cognitive abilities and study skills in general, fostering attention to detail and analytical skills.

While these reasons are all mostly true, they are welcome side-effects, but not intrinsic reasons for studying Latin. Moreover, students can achieve all of them without studying Latin. (Learning a musical instrument also fosters study skills and attention to detail, and if you want to go for the brain boost, logic, and analytical skills, try Finnish – it has 15 noun cases and 51 declension groups and far fewer exceptions than Latin. And many people have excellent knowledge of English grammar and a wide vocabulary without having studied Latin.)

Furthermore, such utilitarian goals are decidedly not classical and likely wouldn’t have occurred to anyone before the 18th century.

The Issues Behind the Issue

Many will sympathize with the concerns raised above yet still insist that justifications 1–6, though individually flawed, carry an aggregate weight when taken together. But that makes about as much sense as saying that the solution to a leaky bucket is to put it inside another leaky bucket. One bad argument plus another bad argument is still a bad argument.

I suspect that, in reality, justifications #1-6 merely mask the issues behind the issue. Because Latin is counter-cultural, it becomes emblematic for a larger network of legitimate concerns about recovery and cultural ressourcement. To teach Latin feels like a return to the ancient ways, whereas teaching skills like how to manage credit cards, how to find locally-sourced produce, how to exercise virtue online, all feel modern, and thus may be greeted with a knee-jerk skepticism among ideologically-motivated classical educators. Because Latin is a totem for an entire network of thought, culture, and spirituality that we wish to recover, we have a strong intuition that it’s important, leading us to reach to post hoc justifications to legitimize this intuition.

Justification #7: Latin Literature and Culture is Beautiful

The above concerns notwithstanding, there is a justification for learning Latin with which I have great sympathy, but which, when stripped of magical thinking and ideology, ironically turn out to be an argument for less Latin. Consider the notion, articulated best by Tracy Lee Simmons, that Greek and Latin will help induct us into the Great Books of antiquity, and with those books, the great riches of Greek and Roman culture that remains the proper object of the appellation “classical.” These riches, which Latin gives us access to, are valuable for their own sake, like anything that is truly beautiful is intrinsically valuable. I articulated this argument in 2013 when I observed that “Just as the best reason for smelling a rose is that it has a lovely fragrance, so the best reason for learning Latin is that Virgil’s Aeneid is beautiful.”

To summarize this argument: the culture, heritage and tradition of Greece and Rome are beautiful; classical languages are the means to this rich heritage (not to mention the heritage of the Latin church fathers); ergo, Greek and Latin are worthy objects of education. We want our children reading Cicero, Horace, Virgil, St. Augustine, etc. in the original, because this literature is a portal to wisdom, beauty, and spiritual joy.

Interestingly, this is opposed in spirit to justification #3, namely that Latin is good because it’s hard. If Latin teachers were truly committed to giving young people access to the beauties of Roman literature, they would speak Latin to their babies so the children could grow up bilingual; if parents who don’t know Latin were truly committed to providing unmediated access to the beauties of Roman literature, they would group together to hire a tutor to speak Latin to their kids in the language acquisition stage of their development. Yet even teachers with proficiency in Latin rarely do this, and perhaps the reason is not surprising, given the stranglehold of justification #3: why offer children Latin mastery in the most natural method possible and thereby deprive students of the grit that comes from learning language latter when it is difficult? To revisit a point I made earlier, why help children achieve fluency in Latin at the language-acquisition stage and thereby deprive them of the unproven hypothetical cognitive benefits of struggling through Latin later in life?

To be sure, when Latin fluency can be achieved, either through early language acquisition or extensive study, the benefits are myriad, and might be compared to a German speaker learning English to access Shakespeare, Coleridge and Keats. As Thomas Jefferson noted, “To read Latin and Greek in their original, is a sublime luxury. I thank on my knees him who directed my early education for having put into my possession this rich source of delight; and would not exchange it for anything which I could then have acquired, and have not since acquired.”​ This is where I can get on board (kind of) with Latin tuition, and it is why, when my boys were growing up, I spent thousands of dollars on providing them with Latin instruction.

But…

I hinted above that there is still a problem, although this time the problem isn’t with the goal but the means. The truth is that we rarely succeed in teaching Latin to a level where the benefits of fluency can be realized. Few classical schools devote enough time resources to achieving the type of Latin fluency that will facilitate entry—via a plethora of primary texts—into the beauties of Roman culture and literature. Heck, I have even asked Latin teachers if, during their personal reading, they read Cicero, Virgil, Horace, etc., in the original, and I have yet to receive an affirmative answer. Nor are most people who teach Latin in classical schools actually reading the Latin Fathers like St. Augustine and St. Jerome in the original. Instead, they all tell me that in their person reading time, they use English translations. Now if that is the case with teachers who have specialized in Latin, is it realistic to expect their students to achieve a different result when the best we can offer is an hour a day five days a week for four to eight years? We may be in love with the idea of being sufficiently fluent in Latin to access the beauties of Roman literature and culture, but it remains an unrealized ideal even in most Latin teachers.

Might there be a different way to achieve the goals sought by justification #7 that is more easily within reach? I submit that there is, and it is so counter-intuitive that my instinct was first to deny it until I had entertained the thought for an entire decade.

A Tweaked Version of Justification #7: A Little Latin

What if we were to strive to teach only a little Latin? What if we made mediocre Latin instruction our actual goal?

Ok, hear me out.

Very few classical schools in America today devote enough time resources to achieving Latin fluency. And that’s a good thing, given that achieving fluency would involve hundreds of thousands of hours at the expense of everything else except perhaps math, writing, and English – certainly no extracurricular activities, including music. And that would be bad. In the older schools where Latin fluency was achieved, the students did very little except Latin, sometimes studying Latin for as much as six hours a day. Even in the type of education that C.S. Lewis received, learning the classics came at the expense of just about everything else. Lewis became a classics master but at a high cost, for as he recounted in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, “In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics.” In the article from the University of Dallas already cited, we read that

In 1867, the 5th and 6th graders of a Latin School in Germany had 10 hours of Latin, 4 of French, and only 3 in their native German. 7th and 8th graders had 9 hours of Latin, 5 of Greek, 4 of French, and 2 of German. A British school in 1768 had a total of six hours of language classes (French, Latin and Greek) every day: “The School begins at Seven in which languages are taught ‘till Nine. […] From One till Four languages are taught.”

Consider, if we wanted to reproduce this, then the entire classical school model should be structured around Latin. And that would be bad. Few educators and parents actually want that in practice, and so the students never really persist at Latin long enough to reap its benefits. Unless the entire curriculum is structured around Latin, the most that contemporary students can hope to achieve is a smattering of a little Latin. But here’s the problem: all the curricula used by classical schools are geared toward fluency. When a curriculum is geared toward fluency, it actually does a very poor job at giving students a smattering of a little Latin since that is not its aim. Because these curricula are geared toward mastery in contexts where mastery is rarely ever attained, five years after graduation it is typical that students can’t even remember what famous phrases like “veni, vidi, vici” or “dulce et decorum est” or “alea iacta est” mean. This is a classic case (no pun intended) where too much is less. It’s like a musician trying to learn ten different instruments but ending up lacking proficiency in any of them. Again the problem is simple: in practice, we are only offering our students a little Latin but using curricula designed for fluency.

If, on the other hand, we were to make peace with the fact that the most we can hope to give students is a smattering of a little Latin, then we could have a realistic conversation about our goals, and create a new curriculum geared toward those goals, rather than a curriculum geared toward fluency.

Whenever I frame the question in these terms, I come up with a method of teaching Latin something like the following.

1. Strive toward mastering (and that means yearly reinforcement, with almost obsessive repetition on the spaced repetition model) the fifty most frequently repeated Latin phrases, especially those that appear in traditional worship, but also phrases that appear in key works of English literature like Shakespeare, Milton, and selected poets. (In some cases, I would advocate reading the full English works where these Latin phrases occur, or at least long sections, so students can see the context.)

2. Strive toward mastery of the hundred and fifty most significant Latin words, especially words important for the etymology of English words or scientific terms.

3. Teach a love for Greek and Roman literature, especially myths, using good English translations.

This is what I would have done over again if I could go back in time with my boys. As young adults, my boys remember nothing of their earlier Latin instruction, yet if I had spent the same resources studying texts in translation with them—perhaps a small number of books or even passages that we reviewed in increasing depth year after year—they would now have a greater foundation in the beauties of Roman literature (both classical & patristic) than now. I venture to suggest the same is true of the body of students currently in classical schools throughout America: if the hundreds of hours that students are spending getting a mere smattering of Latin were instead allocated to reading Latin texts in translation, then although this would still not be as ideal as reading those same texts in the original, this seems far superior than not reading those texts at all, the latter being precisely the real-world situation we are dealing with in schools that succeed in teaching merely a Latin.

In other words, by devoting so much time to acquiring only rudimentary Latin, schools may inadvertently prevent students from engaging with the very literary tradition that Latin instruction is supposed to make accessible. Students will spend years learning Latin and never read Julius Caesar, Horace, Ovid, or Cicero even in translation, let alone in the original, and the one or two texts that they do struggle through in the original are within the context of a linguistic decoding exercise for Latin class – valuable, to be sure, but quite different from the type of immersive reading and absorption that can really allow the riches of classical culture to get under one’s skin and become a source of joy. Yet that kind of deep classical immersion becomes entirely achievable if we redirect the considerable time currently devoted to Latin instruction toward the rich enjoyment of excellent English translations.

Consider this thought experiment. Suppose you have two classical schools: School A and School B. School A does an hour a day of Latin instruction throughout both middle school and high school, while School B allocates the same amount of time to immerse students in translations of Greek and Roman texts. By 12th grade, which students will likely have a greater grasp of classical literature?

Latin Purists will balk at my suggestion that we use good English translations, and they will point out (quite rightly) that translations never do justice. Sometimes Latin apologists will go even further to implicitly or explicitly deny that studying classics in translation can even serve as a gateway to Western thought and humanistic learning. For example, consider Michael Champagne’s extraordinary statement for The Imaginative Conservative that

Latin, as the primary historical language of erudition and learning in the West, is the sole gateway into the halls of Western thought and humanistic learning. Without the use of this language, we can hardly know ourselves, and certainly not the road that brought us to the modern day.

No! We can enter the halls of Western thought and humanistic learning without Latin, through the use of good translations. Of course, all things being equal, it would be best to read Latin works in the original. But all things are not equal. As I have emphasized, classical schools across America are devoting so much time to Latin instruction that could otherwise be spent reading classical works in excellent English translations, while not spending enough time enabling students ever to read and enjoy those works fluently in the original. Remember, we are not dealing with schools like the type C.S. Lewis attended which basically did only Latin.

To believe, as Michael Champagne does, that the only gateway to Western thought is the Latin language, then we set the bar of entry so high that we are like the man who will never marry until he can afford to buy his wife a house, or a man who won’t immerse himself in The Divine Comedy until he has first mastered Italian. Sometimes less is more, as Malcolm Gladwell explained in the final chapter of The Tipping Point,

There is something in all of us that feels that true answers to problems have to be comprehensive, that there is virtue in the dogged and indiscriminate application of effort, that slow and steady should win the race. The problem, of course, is that the indiscriminate application of effort is something that is not always possible. There are times when we need a convenient shortcut, a way to make a lot out of a little. (The Tipping Point, pp. 256-7)

I think Gladwell’s point is relevant to classical schools, which generally overreach by trying to teach too much content. When a school teaches too much, students have insufficient opportunities to revisit the same content year by year, and so the opportunities for genuine retention are missed; moreover, students continually feel rushed, with the result that the schools become great factories of inattention, of cursory reading, of rushing from one assignment to the next. This can lead to the habit of evaluating texts before surrendering to them, or assuming one is competent to have an opinion on a text after only a single read (a point discussed in “Rethinking Classical Education (Part 1): Education or Ideology?”). All of this mitigates against some of the very marks of a truly educated student, such as having a contemplative disposition, a sense of continual curiosity, an ability to be still in the presence of beauty, an ability to surrender to great works of art and literature on their own terms, etc.. To achieve these things, sometimes less is more.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Once I taught history at a school where students spent a year learning Homeric Greek. Ten years down the road those same students couldn’t have told you about Odysseus’s encounter with Circe. They would have been served better by spending the entire year on that one section from the Odyssey, reading and re-reading it, noting parallels in other stories and movies, acting it out, discussing it leisurely, etc. But as it stood, they remembered nothing. Too much ends up being less.

Once when I was tutoring a homeschooled high school student on the Odyssey, I asked if we could go up into the mountains to read the section of Odysseus’s encounter with Polyphemus - to spend all day leisurely reflecting on that fantastic encounter. The parent gave the green light, but on the condition that we didn’t fall behind on the required reading (then at the incredible rate of around 30 pages a day). The student, wanting to go into the mountains but fearing falling behind, declined the invitation. As a result we sped through the passages and a year later he remembered nothing.

As in literature, so in language instruction: sometimes we need to do less but go deep. And I’ve suggested there is a way to teach Latin that leverages this principle.

Latin Must Decrease; English Must Increase (and Why English is a Superior Language)

Though I have embraced a tweaked version of justification #7 above, I do need to qualify how far I’m willing to run with it. Justification #7 above is legitimate, but only up to a point, and even then only with important qualifications.

Just as idealization of paganism is a real problem that we must be on guard against (especially today with the rise of right-wing vitalism among the youth), so we must be careful not to idealize classical culture and conventions. Just as there have been periods and places where it has been in vogue to idealize classical architecture as the purist form of building, so our culture (and language) has often suffered from the idealization of Latin, as if it represents the pinnacle of human linguistics.

Idealization of Latin lurks behind the silly idea—which I memorably encountered when going before a committee at King’s College London to defend a thesis—that a person should never split infinitives. The only justification for not splitting infinitives is that it doesn’t work in Latin, and of course why wouldn’t we want to follow the Romans? But English speakers, who often have legitimate rhetorical grounds for building up to the verb, can revel in the split infinitive. After all, it wouldn’t quite pack the same punch if the mission of the Star Trek team was “boldly to go where no man has gone before.”

But there is a more important reason I would want to qualify justification #7. As English speakers, we have a great heritage with some of the richest and most beautiful literature, both in original texts and translations from other languages. Yet what is happening is that students who don’t even know all the vocabulary in Hamlet spend hundreds of hours learning Latin grammar that they won’t remember five years after graduation. Wouldn’t it have been better to spend those same time-resources expanding our English vocabulary so as to better enjoy Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, etc.? I knew one student who spent a whole year translating painstakingly translating Caesar’s Gallic War yet didn’t know all the vocabulary in Macbeth. Unfortunately that is not an isolated instance. The situation we’re facing is like someone knowing all about green tea from Japan without being able to identify the herbs in the local woods for making tea, or someone who lives in southern Arizona and has studied Homeric Greek yet can’t speak a word to her Hispanic neighbors.

The tea analogy breaks down if pressed too far. Latin is part of the foundation of our Western culture in a way that Japanese green tea is not. But while Latin is part of our literary and cultural foundation, it is not as directly relevant to us as our great English writers from Spenser to Shakespeare to Jane Austen to Edmund Burke. Since every hour learning Latin is siphoning off time that could be spent going deeper into our own immediate English literature tradition, it comes at a high cost. Remember, schools cannot teach everything, and part of being conservative in education as well as politics, is to make peace with limitation.

All things being equal, I agree that mastering Latin is good. But the question is not whether learning Latin is a good, but whether it is such a high good as to justify the extraordinary claims about its benefits, including claims that privilege it above other learning opportunities, including spending time going deeper into our tradition of English literature. And that brings me to the rather provocative title of this essay about English being a superior language. The English tongue is superior to us in the same way that, all other things being equal, the local traditions of my village should have a primacy over the traditions of a village halfway around the world, or learning the stories from my own grandparents should have a primacy over the stories from someone else’s grandparents.

Here’s why I think it’s important to make this point. The Latinizing agenda that is now mainstream within the classical education movement—bolstered by bad pop neuroscience that treats Latin as unleashing a type of cognitive magic in the little brain—ends up functionally neglecting English literature in order to focus on Latin. This is not on purpose, but is simply a biproduct of the fact that resource allocation is always a zero-sum game: every hour you spend on Latin tuition is an hour not spent on more English texts. That is why we have the strange spectacle of students spending hundreds of hours learning Latin grammar (which most of them won’t remember five years after graduation) who don’t even know all the vocabulary in Hamlet or MacBeth.

Here we can learn from Dante, who spent a lot of his time defending the “language of the people,” in his case Italian. In works such as De vulgari eloquentia, Dante tried to give his vernacular Italian the same dignity as Latin. Maybe it’s time we borrowed from Dante’s playbook and began better appreciating the dignity of our vernacular, namely English.

Not to mention that English is a pretty badass language. You can do all sorts of cool things in English that you can’t do in other languages, as Jorge Luis Borges explained in the 1977 conversation with William Frank Buckley Jr. below.

Summary and Conclusion

I have argued that Latin is often treated with a kind of magical or ideological reverence, leading to exaggerated and poorly supported claims about its educational benefits. Common justifications for Latin instruction (higher SAT scores, cognitive transfer, character formation through difficulty, facilitation of other languages, or etymological literacy) fail under scrutiny, either because these arguments confuse correlation with causation, lack empirical support, or point toward goals that might be achieved more effectively through other means. The real motivation behind these arguments, I suggest, is that Latin functions as a cultural totem for recovery, seriousness, and resistance to modernity, though this often masks itself in a series of post hoc justifications that are themselves defective.

Yet the one justification I find genuinely compelling—that Latin grants access to the beauty of classical and patristic literature—ironically suggests a need for less Latin, not more. Since most schools lack the time and resources to achieve genuine Latin fluency, students typically end up with neither fluency nor meaningful engagement with classical texts. I therefore propose a reorientation: teach a small, well-retained body of Latin phrases and vocabulary while redirecting most instructional time toward deep, repeated immersion in great Greek and Roman works through excellent English translations, alongside greater attention to our own English literary inheritance.

Further Reading

• The Battle for Your Child’s Imagination Why Stories Matter More Than You May Think

• She Walks in Beauty: Lord Byron, Taylor Swift, and the Teacher’s Vocation

• Rethinking Classical Education (Part 1): Education or Ideology?

• What’s the Use? On Choosing Gratuitous Nature over Modern Pragmatism

• Putting the Wildness Back into Classical Education: Homer, John Senior, WCC, and the Recovery of Reality

• Worldview Education, Technology and the Value of Boredom

• How We Lost Music as a Liberal Art

• The Abstraction of God and the Culture Wars

• The Joys of Reading: How I Lost and Rediscovered Leisure Reading

• Lost & Profound: How One Woman Found, Lost, and Re-Discovered the Intellectual Life

• Virtue and Classical Education: A Commencement Address to a Graduating Class

• More Than Schooling: The Perils of Pragmatism in Christian Attitudes Toward the Liberal Arts

• The Joys of Reading: How I Lost and Rediscovered Leisure Reading

• A Classical School’s Guide to Senior Thesis Research, Introduction: Classical Education and Information Literacy

• Caitlin Gilbert on the Orthodox Intellectual Life

In Greek mythology, King Midas of Phrygia once performed a great service to the god Dionysus by finding the latter’s schoolmaster and foster father, Silenus, after the aged satyr had gone missing. In gratitude, Dionysus promised Midas anything he wished. Greedy for wealth, the king asked that everything he touched be henceforth turned to gold.

Initially King Midas was delighted at his newfound ability, experimenting on an oak twig and a stone. But upon finding that food on his banquet table turned to gold before he could taste it, he began to regret the choice. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling of the myth, Midas reached out to embrace his daughter only to find himself holding a golden statue.

The Midas myth is a fitting analogy for the destruction of language currently happening in real time. LLMs offer a type of linguistic Midas Touch, putting at human fingertips unprecedented wealth and power. Any of us can now harness, aggregate, synthesize, combine, and recombine, the linguistic power of the entire internet and put that power to the service of whatever communication need we happen to be facing.

Not even King Midas, for all his greed, could have conceived such power. Even if he had built libraries, schools, and scriptoria throughout the entire Mediterranean, and filled them with scribes furiously working around the clock at pattern recognition—not even then could he have achieved the data-processing capacity at the disposal of a simple 13-year old with a basic laptop and internet connection. Our medieval forefathers conceived of turning base metals into gold, but not even in their wildest dreams of a Philosopher’s Stone did anyone conceive of wealth that might result from turning electricity into knowledge.

But maybe we should stop to ask whether, in our techno-utopian rush to harness the wealth of language, we might actually be killing it.

To understand how LLMs offer a type of linguistic Midas Touch, we need to understand how language works over time. The normal state of language is that of permanent flux. All the anthropological and historical evidence points to the fact that language has never been static but constantly changing. If people from one village leave and start a settlement a hundred miles away, it takes only a few generations before not only their accent, but the language itself changes, undergoes significant alterations. Add a few centuries, with the normal influence of migrations, war, etc., and you’ll have enough organic lexical change and grammatical restructuring that a completely new language comes to exist. This is why, in the early stages of British colonization in America, Australia, South Africa, etc., thinkers predicted that in a hundred years the inhabitants of each of these lands would be speaking a new form of English incomprehensible to the others.

That never happened with English, and the reason is obvious: mass literacy and print distribution effectively froze the English language. The fact that we can still read and understand Shakespeare is amazing. Sure, people don’t speak Shakespearean English anymore, but it’s clearly recognizable as the same tongue. The linguistic differences that separate us from the 16th century are not nearly as great as the differences that separated 16th-century English speakers from their Old English predecessors some six hundred years earlier.

But while English has remained relatively constant, we still enjoy all the beautiful variations of style from one English writer to another. But the graces of style, and all the wonderful idiosyncrasies, have been partially smothered through word processing tools that freeze English—at least partially—in the bland sterility of “correct” style. Consider the platform Grammarly, which does more than merely identify spelling and grammar mistakes, but introduces rigid syntactical uniformity. Grammarly and similar tools function like an over-eager English major patrolling prose with a sense of syntactical superiority. When researchers have put text from Austen, Dickens, and Shakespeare into Grammarly, the algorithm flags their prose as technically incorrect. Unfortunately, as more students defer to Grammarly as the standard, the result is a prescriptive uniformity that overrides nuanced stylistic choices. This becomes self-reinforcing because as more Grammarly-assisted content makes its way into print, and therefore into the minds of readers, these publications reinforce the Grammarly style.

If this was a problem with Grammarly, it is multiplied a hundred-fold now that LLMs are doing content generation for an increasing number of writers (not to mention that Grammarly is now integrated with Azure OpenAI Service, so that the editing tool now suggests entire sentences and paragraphs of AI-generated prose). Consider that much of what now exists as policy manuals, professional documents, emails, website content, Substack articles, college essays and discussion posts, was rewritten by an LLM prior to publishing. It is becoming increasingly common for authors to feed their final drafts through AI prior to publishing, asking the LLM to churn out a polished and fully proofed copy. This means that the final published document is in the AI style. Each time an author does this, he adds to the growing corpus of English texts that further reinforces the AI style. When enough people do this, the result is that the corpus of English publications starts to have the sterility of sameness and bland predictability.

In fact, predictability is how these systems work: impervious to meaning, they merely predict the next most probable token. As more of this AI-generated content becomes what people read on websites, documents, emails, etc., it begins to self-reinforce itself as “the King’s English,” so to speak – the canonical way that English ought to be spoken. This doesn’t happen all at once – it will take decades of AI saturation before the machine’s style begins to feel fully “correct,” but there is significant evidence that this process is already well underway. Frequent exposure is normalizing the AI style, making it seem correct and authoritative. This is creating self-reinforcing loops that favor polished, middle-of-the-road global English over and against more human-sounding prose. Because this is happening largely beneath conscious awareness, it is hard not to be swept up in this style freeze, especially if we are not actively reading large amounts of good literature to counteract the style foisted on us by LLMs.

But that isn’t even the worst news. More than simply nudging language into the sterility of uniformity, AI could standardize thought itself. Here’s what Talbot Brewer warned in Hedgehog Review when discussing LLMs.

Their stochastic parroting gives to their pronouncements a seductive simulacrum of authority—the authority of reigning opinion, the authority of the herd. Now that we can access this authority with the push of a button and undetectably attach our name to it, claiming it as our own, will we continue with the struggles that it promises to spare us from? Or will we be seduced by the frictionless-ness that is both the design ideal of the virtual realm and the central element of the technology sector’s operative notion of the human good?

The term “stochastic parroting” refers to language-generation based on probabilities, and comes from Sam Altman who suggested in a tweet that probability-based parroting is the essence of language.

It’s hard not to perceive in Altman’s words the very feedback loop that Joshua Pauling and I warned about in our 2024 book Are We All Cyborgs Now? Here I can only make a nod to the larger argument we developed, but essentially we argued that the entire technological project is based on a false equivalency between humans and machines. We suggested that when we make the machine in our image, we actually end up existing in the image of the machine, subtly thinking of ourselves in mechanized ways.

This feedback loop between the machine and the human is now happening at rapid speed in the one gift that marks us as distinctly human: language. The power LLMs give us over the world—the Midas Touch of being able to craft the perfectly “correct” communication—ends up turning our very language into something as lifeless as a gold image. Mr. Altman justifies this by suggesting that the LLM approach to language is all language was ever about anyway, not realizing the profound implications of this cynicism. Because language is the context of human thought, what is at stake is nothing less than human rationality itself. This is one of the ominous take-home points in Brewer’s piece at the Hedgehog Review already referenced. Brewer went on to offer the following warning in his essay, “The Word Made Lifeless Are we becoming stochastic parrots?“:

The quest for words is a crucially important driver of this continuous emergence toward being. As we bring our thoughts to words, we give to ourselves a more definite and concerted identity. This too is sometimes audible, and even visible. There is a difference between a speaker who is reading a paper without thinking the thoughts being articulated and a speaker who is having the thoughts expressed by his words. In the latter case, you can hear the speaker gathered up and enlivened by his speech. This is what fresh and truly fitting words do: They awaken us. They reenact the uncanny event of the quickening of clay.

Matters are quite otherwise with the new text generators we have so recently brought into our lives, and to which we now delegate a rapidly growing share of our quest for fitting words. If we can speak of thinking here, it is thinking of a wholly different kind. These new entities have no still-hazy intimations of their own that their words might either crystallize or bastardize. There is no possibility of felt urgency in their quest for words, none of that nearly erotic excitement we humans feel when we finally have the thought we have been groping for. They have no pangs of conscience when their words sound shallow or cliché. Indeed, cliché is their special strength: They cleave to the center of gravity of the vast sea of human-generated texts, finding each new word by predicting what human beings would most likely say. They have nothing of their own to say, no life from which they might say it, nor any soul or self their words might fashion or disfigure. They are, as it has aptly been put, stochastic parrots.

It would be a brazen slander for anyone to add: and so are we, as Sam Altman did in a 2023 tweet soon after the release of ChatGPT: “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.” Such words could emerge only from a willful forgetting of the lived experience of being human and of seeking to say something worthwhile to fellow humans. No one speaking to his own child in a moment of despair, or to his spouse in a moment of marital reckoning, could consciously aim for faithful mimicry of the patterns laid down by past generations of fellow mimickers. To hear yourself, suddenly, as speaking in this way would be to lose all faith in your capacity to rise to the occasion….

Pretend for a moment that you’ve been granted the enormous memory and data-processing capacity of the new generation of large language models (LLMs). You could then adopt and hold yourself to the standard of successful word choice that they use. Actually, we don’t have to pretend: We can already ensure that our words are meeting this standard simply by letting the LLMs choose them for us. It is obvious that we could not pursue any worthy ideal of speech while applying this suddenly available method. There is, after all, only an occasional coincidence between the word that is the most probable successor to a string of already-written words and the next word required by any worthy ideal, including unflinching lucidity. This should come as no surprise. It takes only a moment’s serious thought to see that stochastic parroting is utterly beneath us.

Or, at any rate, I hope we see this. Yet this insight might prove fragile. As Iris Murdoch once wrote, “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.” We should keep this in mind when we assess Sam Altman’s declaration that we are all stochastic parrots. If we were to internalize this picture of ourselves, we might slowly release our attachment to whatever aspirations and ideals are obviously at odds with it. We would then be living more faithfully in accordance with the self-conception recommended by certain enthusiasts of “human-level” AI. Which is to say, we would be busy dying.

The common come-back to these concerns goes something like this. “All technology causes certain skills to atrophy. For example, we no longer have skills at driving a horse and buggy, but we accept that as part of the cost for greater efficiency. All technology comes with a trade off, and LLMs are no different.” But I don’t accept this argument. It is true that new inventions always weaken or render unnecessary former abilities. Yet it’s important to ask, what are the abilities that LLMs weaken? It is our rational powers! It is one thing to lose the ability to drive a horse and cart, quite another to lose the ability to think and communicate rationally and beautifully, both of which are central to our very humanity. As the word becomes lifeless, so do we.

Rendering the word lifeless brings obvious psychological and neurological implications in its wake, but it also brings political consequences. LLMs have arrived at a time when the vocabulary used by English speakers is already shrinking and simplifying at an astonishing rate—a trend that reminds us is taken from the Orwellian playbook on how to neutralize a population. With fewer words, civilians have a simpler language, and with a simpler language, they will be less likely to commit “thought crimes.” Orwell understood that to create homogeneity of thought, one must first render lifeless the spoken and written word. And that is exactly what LLMs are doing.

Further Reading

• Is AI Magic?

• Mechanical Theosis: The Tech Industry’s Quest for Transcendence

• Technology and the Story of Redemption: Being the People of God in a Mechanized World

• Digital Totalitarianism: How Technological Mission Creep is Destroying Society

• Joshua Pauling and Annie Crawford discuss “Are We All Cyborgs Now?” with Shanda Fulbright

In a substack article, “The Hidden Danger in Becoming Orthodox That Is Rarely Talked About,” shares his experience as an Orthodox catechist. As he instructs people in their journey to Orthodoxy, he finds they usually “do not bring with them the moral chaos of pagan temples, but they often carry something subtler and, in its own way, equally difficult to address.” This “something subtler” is a tendency to reduce Christianity to the cerebral at the expense of a lived and practical faith.

They come with a deeply ingrained habit of treating the faith primarily as an intellectual exercise.

One notices, almost immediately, a kind of restless energy. There is an eagerness to read, to analyze, to compare. Councils are studied, doctrines are parsed, distinctions are drawn with remarkable precision.

It is not uncommon to find a newcomer who has read more theology in six months than many lifelong Orthodox Christians. Yet there is often an unspoken assumption beneath all this activity, that Christianity is something to be figured out, rather than something to be lived.

Kenneth takes a different approach. Rather than giving new converts what they want to hear, he challenges them with a more embodied approach to the faith.

Yet when we turn to the words of Christ, we find something at once simpler and more demanding. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. And love your neighbor as yourself.” There is nothing here about mastering theological systems. There is nothing about winning arguments. There is only the call to love, which is both the easiest thing to understand and the hardest thing to do. Many who come into the Church want to complicate this.

I think these concerns are spot on, and I would go further by connecting Kenneth’s observations to a kind of operational Gnosticism (something Kenneth himself did in a later article).

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, we like to congratulate ourselves on being incarnational and avoiding the gnostic separation of the spiritual and the material. I even published an anti-gnostic book for Ancient Faith, which Orthodox people love to use when congratulating themselves on not being gnostic. In fact, some reviewers have even polemicized the book against Protestants. Yet our own culture of learning within Eastern Orthodoxy often leans heavily toward abstract intellectualism, without always attending to how the heaven-earth synthesis of Holy Communion translates into the nitty gritty of community life.

As many people’s entry to Orthodoxy has been through the internet, a growing cohort of young men are entering the church. This cohort, often referred to as “orthobros,” usually come from troubled backgrounds and merely layer the faith on top of a highly politicized—and often explicitly misogynist—worldview. Because their entry into the faith is largely online, the type of orthodoxy that emerges tends to be disembodied and quasi-gnostic.

It isn’t just the new converts that are to blame here. When I lived in the Pacific Northwest, I sat through many catechism classes in which Orthodox theology remained largely abstract, disconnected from the ordinary demands of communal life. Similarly, our seminaries emphasize church history, the minutiae of liturgical theology, patristic studies, the grammar of theological languages, while devoting comparatively fewer resources to the practical domains required for building strong communities, or addressing the needs of people who have been wounded by anti-culture.

A professor at one of the Orthodox seminaries told me that instruction in counseling and psychology—two areas in which Orthodoxy is on the front lines of addressing the crises of anti-culture as manifested in addiction, mental illness, anxiety, depression, and related disorders—is chronically under-resourced. One seminarian described to me the strange spectacle of classes that would typically offer tools for pastoral counseling being diverted into the study of pastoral-care theory. Instead of studying how to help people in need, they studied the theology of the Good Shepherd.

Not surprisingly, clergy coming out of Orthodox seminaries often feel unqualified to address the crisis of anti-culture and loneliness as it manifests itself in mental health challenges, trauma, family breakdown, addiction, and so forth. The result is that we often outsource these problems to secular experts, leading to further fragmentation, perpetuating the sense in which the church is only one compartment in a life with multiple centers. This is analogous to what has occurred in the death industry, where a domain once integral to the life of the Church has gradually become an area in which the Church participated in its own marginalization.

I will be addressing these issues next week in my keynote talk at the upcoming Parish Life Conference for the Dioceses of New York and Washington, D.C. & Oakland, Charleston and the Mid-Atlantic. Part of the problem, I will argue, is that the Eucharist is often treated like magic, as if its efficacy for our community will be automatic, without requiring strategy and planning to connect the dots between theory and praxis.

I plan to address the operational Gnosticism, not as it exists in modern evangelicalism, but as it has found root within the culture of Orthodoxy. I will be challenging us to think of the Eucharist like conception: just as human conception starts a process that culminates in a person with a unique personality, so the Eucharist starts a process that culminates in a parish culture with a unique personality. But it takes intentionality and strategy to flesh out the heaven-earth synthesis of Holy Communion into Christian education, reading and prayer groups, addiction recovery resources, art, music, poetry, food traditions—in short, a shared common life and associated culture. It takes strategy, research and planning to develop infrastructures to address the concrete human needs that arise in community, and to put together counseling resources, benevolence ministries, addiction recovery resources, accountability groups, and so forth. Just because everyone is partaking in the blessed sacraments, doesn’t mean community will just happen, nor that the community will be healthy. We have to work to translate God’s presence into all the nooks and crannies of parish life.

Often we give insufficient attention to that translation, as if the fruits of the Eucharist are automatic. Somehow we are less susceptible to this misplaced monergism when it comes to the other sacraments. When you are baptized, you don’t just forget about it; rather, you have to engage in everything involved in a transformed life to make your baptism a reality. Or again, when a man and wife are joined in the sacrament of marriage, or when a clergyman is ordained into the sacrament of priesthood, the initial sacrament begins a work that will only flourish with perseverance, creativity, strategic planning, and day to day participation with the energies of God. Similarly, when we join with each other in Holy Communion, that begins the real work of learning to live as a community.

Here the Benedictine monasteries can serve as examples. They fostered community not simply in the technical sense that they were communes where people lived together, but also because these monks were proactive in facilitating community. These communities functioned as hospitals, centers of learning, centers for collecting and transmitting herbal knowledge, places that facilitated poverty relief, mental health counseling—encompassing much of what we would now classify as social work. They created the type of shared public life that, according to Christopher Dawson, is the essence of culture. As a result, these monastic communities blessed the villages around them and societies outside their own walls. And in the process, they saved civilization. If we want to save our civilization, it can only happen with the same model.

But the Benedictine model has fallen on hard times. As I’ll be noting in my keynote next week, when tried to foreground discussion of the Benedictine solution in the discourse on “the Benedict Option,” this was widely received as a rejection of cultural renewal – as if focus on community amounts to a run-for-the-hills isolationism and rejection of society.

I will argue that neglecting the role of community in societal renewal has led to massive misunderstandings, not only about strategies for cultural renewal, but even about the nature of our current anti-culture. For example, when Christians speak of “taking back the culture,” this is often be abstract, or else focused entirely at the macro level of national or international society, while neglecting attention to embodied communities in time and place.

The process of saving civilization begins by reaching out to the people in your parish community who are in need, who are struggling, who are lonely, and then being proactive to cultivate a healthy community where people can come and be healed. You can call that “The Benedict Option” if you want, but it’s really just the church being the church. As C.S. Lewis realized so presciently in his book, That Hideous Strength, the apocalyptic conflict between the New Jerusalem (city of God) vs. Babel (the city of Man), is played out in humdrum community activities like putting up with one another, faithfully saying our prayers, helping the poor within our parish, and creating things of beauty that draw us to one another. In these days as we contend with a digital tower of babel, the solution is the same, communities of resistance marked by relationships of love.

And that brings us back to Kenneth B.’s excellent article, “The Hidden Danger in Becoming Orthodox That Is Rarely Talked About,”

My primary responsibility, as I see it, is to remind those who are inquiring what it actually means to be a Christian.

• It means to love the people God has placed in your life.

• It means to love not only those who are easy to love, but also those who are difficult, inconvenient, or even hurtful.

• It means reaching out to someone you have not seen at church in some time, asking how they are, and perhaps inviting them for coffee.

• It means attending to the small, quiet acts of kindness that rarely attract notice, but which shape the soul.

Further Reading

• The Orthobro Phenomenon

• Hospitality as a Christian Practice

• St. Porphyrios on the “Spiritual” Things that Distract

• The Cross of Least Resistance

• Letting Go of Troubled Thoughts

• How We Are Raising Fragile Children, Why Pain isn’t Always Bad, and How Healthy Activities Protect us from Addiction

• The Power of Baby Steps in a Superman Culture

• Use Positive Self-Talk to Overcome Anxiety

Ever since the dawn of western philosophy, the primary impulse has been to discover the principle of everything. This was the quest that animated the presocratic philosophers, who wondered whether the fundamental substratum of reality was motion, atoms, air, change, water, or something else.

In the modern era there have arisen various disciplines or methodologies that were widely believed, for a time, to function as a skeleton key for unlocking all the secrets of life. Clockwork, steam-power, electricity, engineering, mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry have each enjoyed a brief period at the center of an intellectual totalitarianism that presumed to colonize all domains of experience with the categories appropriate for only one.

When we look over the various theories-of-everything from our culture’s recent past, they naturally strike us as antiquated and even Quixotic. We ceased understanding human psychology with metaphors drawn from steam power once electricity replaced the steam engine, though we do still contend with the notion that an angry person must sometimes “vent” to feel better, a false but lingering concept from the age of steam power.

In time we eventually come to realize that the principles or methodologies that enchant us with the lure of omnicompetence are actually limited in the benefits they confer. Yet when a new method-for-everything is first in vogue, it can often seem to offer the illusion of simplifying life with one set of all-encompassing principles. Sometimes the fashionable principles or methodologies are prescriptive, as in the early 20^th century when many people assumed we had an ethical mandate to electrify everything in order to solve the world’s problems. But often the excitement about a single principle, discipline, or method comes to be descriptive, with thinkers seeking from it a final insight into the ontological foundations of reality itself. For example, in the wake of Newton’s discoveries about the laws of motion, numerous European intellectuals proposed that reality is nothing but matter in motion. Thomas Hobbes even tried to reduce all psychology—including the complexities of human feelings—to motion.[1] Moreover, many political concepts that still linger today, from ways of conceptualizing just revolution to certain variants of social contract theory, are rooted in motion-centric theories of society, which saw human relations as the sum of competing forces reacting against each other like billiard balls following the inscrutable logic that for every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction.

During the 20^th century, long after motion had ceased to tempt intellectuals with the aura of omnicompetents, chemistry took center stage, and numerous thinkers proposed that all of reality is nothing but chemical reactions. Meanwhile, those wishing for a more philosophically robust metanarrative for explaining human motivations and societal movements have been able to choose from Marx, who reduced everything to money, or Nietzsche who reduced everything to power, or Freud who reduced everything to sex.

Today, a quarter of the way through the 21^st century, one might suppose that we had become immune to this type of intellectual hubris, given what we now know about the sheer complexity of the world and the human brain. Yet Western thought continues to be plagued by the scepter of the Presocratics and their quest to find the single principle by which all of reality will be rendered transparent.

The latest contender at the center of a new intellectual imperialism is, of course, computation, understood in the broadest sense to include the language and logic of the digital ecosystem and the algorithms on which so much of it now runs. And as with the 17^th and 18^th century obsession with motion, the worldview of computation has both prescriptive and descriptive aspects.

Prescriptively, the computer-centric worldview leads to utopianism and technocracy. To the mechanical mind, computation promises to clean up the messiness of our world by introducing into all of life the precision and objectivity associated with computer code. And as with the Scientism of the twentieth century, which promised to bring scientific solutions to every area of experience, there is a growing contingent today who see it as a moral imperative to export the computer’s way of “thinking” to every domain, on the hope that we might be just one computation away from fixing the world’s problems or that, in the words of Evgeny Morozov, “numbers might eventually reveal some deeper inner truth about who we really are, what we really want, and where we really ought to be.”[2]

But what if computation is not just prescriptive (showing us how to reach a better world), but descriptive, offering insight into the type of world we already inhabit? What if computer code is involved in more than simply running programs on my PC or organizing the vast interconnected networks of data in the cloud—what if computer code comprises everything? What if the proper organizing metaphor for understanding the world and ourselves is not clock technology, pumps, nor steam power, but the binary code that runs everything from computer processors to large language models? What if reality is fundamentally computation?

At this point, you’re probably thinking I’m circling the simulation hypothesis– the theory that’s been floating around for over two decades based on the supposition that everything we take to be life experience is actually part of a computer simulation. Well, yes I am talking about that, but I’m also talking about much more. The simulation hypothesis is just one among a number of conceptual templates offering a computer-centric ontology and machine-mediated metaphysics.

The variants of the new metaphysics include the notion that anthropology and psychology are just a subset of computation to the belief that human-computer integration must be sought as a moral imperative, to the idea that there is a virtual heaven of digitality waiting to receive us, to the idea that computers are the new bread of immortality that will confer eternal life on those who submit to the Machine Mind.

In all these variations, we see a new metaphysics rising and, with it, hope of transcendence.

Lest it be supposed that in describing these ideas as “metaphysical” or “transcendent” I have inadvertently surrendered ground, let me be clear that the digital ecosystem is not trans-physical, let alone metaphysical in any meaningful sense. Rather, it is hyper-industrial and hyper-material.

Just as Isaiah pointed out that idols are merely wood and stone, we might point out that to run computer code—even to generate it at any level of complexity—is parasitic on elements of the earth, including rare earth minerals mined from the ground. There is no ghost in the machine, and there is certainly no metaphysics in it. But there are strong metaphysical hopes attached to the digital realm. And that hope is energizing venture capitalists, computer engineers, tech executives, and CEOs throughout our nation, especially around the California Bay area.

Consider one variation of the new metaphysics. All the connected computers, datacenters and phones in the world are the nervous system and sense organs of an entity that can be described as God – a Being we can influence through prayer and worship.

That is the idea being pioneered by Anthony Levandowski, famous for being the co-founder of Google’s self-driving car program, in addition to being involved in numerous startups.[3]

Or consider a slightly different twist on the new metaphysics. Through computer technology, the human race will eventually transcend physicality while individual people will have the ability to incarnate themselves in various bodies and thus live multiple human lives while still having a singular identity. That is the prediction of Ray Kurzweil, the engineer who serves as Principal Researcher and AI Visionary for Google.[4]

And just so you don’t think I’m exaggerating, I transcribed exactly what Kurzweil told Rogan last year.

Rogan: Wouldn’t it be better just, Ray, just download yourself into this beautiful electronic body? Why do you want to be biological?

Kurzweil: I mean, ultimately, that’s what we’re going to be able to do.

Rogan: You think that’s going to happen?

Kurzweil: Yeah.

Rogan: So do you think that we’ll be able I mean, we’ll be able to create...

Kurzweil: I mean, the singularity is when we multiply our intelligence a million fold, and that’s 2045. So that’s not that long from now. That’s like 20 years from now. Right. And therefore, most of your intelligence will be handled by the computer part of ourselves. The only thing that won’t be captured is what comes… with our body originally. We’ll ultimately be able to do that as well. It’ll take a little longer, but we’ll be able to actually capture what comes with our normal body and be able to recreate that. That also has to do with how long we live, because if everything is backed up, I mean, right now, any time you put anything into a phone or any electronics, it’s backed up. So I mean, this has a lot of data. I could flip it and it ends up in a river and we can’t capture anymore. I can recreate it because it’s all backed up.

Rogan: And you think that’s going to be the case of consciousness?

Kurzweil: That’s going to be the case of our normal biological body as well.

Rogan: What’s to stop someone like Donald Trump from just making 100,000 versions of himself? If… you can back someone up, could you duplicate it? Couldn’t you have three or four of them? Couldn’t you have a bunch of them? Couldn’t you live multiple lives?

Kurzweil: Yes

Okay, we have come to expect that sort of hyper-materialist quasi-transcendence from Ray Kurzweil, the author of books like The Age of Spiritual Machines, while Levandowski is clearly a fringe character. But let me share another theory from someone more mainstream and influential.

Earlier I mentioned the simulation hypothesis, which is probably the best known in the emerging cluster of machine-mediated metaphysics. This view contends that the world of mountains, rivers, cities, and human consciousness is likely a simulation, perhaps one big computer game. Though the idea has a long pedigree in science fiction, mythology, and various philosophical thought experiments, it was first proposed as a serious description of our situation by Nick Bostrom in a 2003 article for Philosophical Quarterly.[5] It is advocated by Elon Musk. We are all familiar with how Musk is a key driver in technological innovation, but he is also influential as a philosopher, because his metaphysics has trickled up into academic philosophy. Prestigious outlets such as the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and the Journal of Evolution and Technology have all devoted pages to analyzing the simulation hypothesis that Musk has helped popularize. I’ll never forget when I was attending a theology symposium at Gonzaga University and one of the speakers said, “Who am I to disagree with someone as smart as Elon when he says he’s figured out that we’re in a simulation?

The basic idea offers a type of quasi-Gnosticism, postulating a higher reality (literally, a transcendental realm) compared to which our cosmos is not truly substantial or, in the words of Elon Musk, lacks the characteristics of “base reality.”[6] For Musk, this scenario is not mere speculation: in a 2016 conference for Vox Media, he stated there is only a one in a billion chance we’re not living in a simulation.[7]

Simulation theory is not limited to academics and computer engineers. In a 2016 article for The New Yorker, Tad Friend reported that billionaires have been paying people to help them get out of the simulation.[8]

Let’s consider another twist. This one goes like this. Humans must merge with machines, and perhaps our consciousness already has without us realizing it. The reason human consciousness must merge with machines is because otherwise AI will likely enslave us. This is a variation of the adage, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” But in this case, joining them is seen as a literal merge, as human consciousness in the collective is joined to the decentralized machine mind in the cloud.

That theory comes from none other than Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. And lest you suppose I’m exaggerating his beliefs, here is what Altman said in an interview referenced in The New Yorker:

The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into the cloud. I’d love that...

We need to level up humans, because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever. What a time to be alive![9]

Here Altman explains merge theory as a potential future event, but in March 2023, he gave a nod to the simulation hypothesis by suggesting that the computer-human merge may have already happened. Speaking on the Lex Fridman podcast, he discussed what he called “the religion of the simulation” and said, “I’m certainly willing to believe that consciousness is somehow the fundamental substrate and we’re all just in the dream, or the simulation.” Altman went on to compare what he called “the religion of the simulation” to Brahman, a variant of Hinduism which also posits a single principle as the explanation-of-everything.[10]

In suggesting that “consciousness” is the fundamental substrate for reality, Altman does not mean a kind of immaterialism or subjective idealism along the lines of Bishop Berkeley, but more something like Descartes’ hypothetical evil deceiver causing the illusion of sensory experience, although in this case the illusion is being caused by a more advanced race of computer geeks. Think The Matrix but with no red pills or cells of resistance.

In the classic simulation theory of Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk, there is a physical base reality; it’s just unlikely to be us. But what Altman gives voice to is the growing suspicion that maybe there is no material base reality anywhere: everything is just digitally-mediated consciousness. But however the theory may be cashed out, it remains a quest for transcendence, and the hope that transcendence might be found in a cybernetic base reality, from which everything else is ultimately derivative.

Believing that the machine mind is a portal into what is truly real, it becomes easy to suppose that everything else is mere reflection or, at best, irrelevant epiphenomena that must be overcome to reach what is really real and truly true. That true reality is a digital heaven in which we must come to rest as the final answer to the longings of the unquiet heart.

The idea that a digitized version of consciousness could be the ultimate principle behind reality has a certain plausibility in our particular cultural moment. Simulation theory became plausible once we began imagining that computers could explain everything in our world, just as Hobbes’s reductionist psychology and politics became plausible after Europeans began to suppose that everything might be explicable by the laws motion.

In this new outlook, Marx was wrong to reduce everything to money; Nietzsche was mistaken to reduce everything to power, and Freud was wrong to reduce everything to sex. In the end, everything is actually reducible to the digital ecosystem. Yet what we’re observing is more than merely the latest in a long line of theories-of-everything. The metaphysics of the machine is more than simply a misfiring of the perennial impulse to explain through reduction, though it is certainly that as well. Fundamentally, we are observing a religious quest, complete with transcendent hopes. From transhumanism in all its variants, to the hope that technology will yield an elixir of life that will confer on us immortality, to the increasingly widespread quest to use AI to talk with the dead[11] or even channel spirits,[12] we are observing transcendent hopes attached to electronic interfaces, and a new spirituality growing up around digital machinery.

Nothing I’ve shared is surprising for those who have been following the discourse from the last decade. But what came as a surprise to Joshua Pauling and myself when we were researching our book, Are We All Cyborgs Now?, is just how widespread and influential these ideas have become amongst the engineers, programmers, CEOs, and venture capitalists driving technological innovation and policy.

And this helps to explain something that many have puzzled over, namely, why there has been such a rush to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) as fast as possible despite so many insiders warning about the risks. There are many political and economic factors that explain the accelerationist approach we are witnessing, from a new type of arms race to the type of perverse incentives that drive large companies. But for many in Silicon Valley, an accelerationist approach to AI is driven by a strong desire to connect to the perceived transcendence of the digital ecosystem. Those working within the small number of AGI labs are being driven by spiritual longings to move as quickly as possible into unknown areas of digital innovation. Consider this report from Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology.

So I have a friend who I’ve spoken to informally, and really [asked him], “Why are these AI labs racing to build AGI given all the risks?” And he wrote back to me about a lot of the conversations that he’s had with the small number of people building AGI at these major labs, and he wrote the following, “In the end, a lot of the tech people I’m talking to, when I really grill them on it, they retreat into, number one, determinism, number two, the inevitable replacement of biological life with digital life, and number three, that being a good thing anyways.” And he goes onto say that “at its core, it’s an emotional desire to meet and speak to the most intelligent entity they’d ever met. And they have some eco-religious intuition that they’ll somehow be a part of it. It’s thrilling to start an exciting fire. They feel they will die either way, so they prefer to light it and see what happens.”[13]

While it might be tempting to dismiss this as anecdotal, it coheres with what I am hearing from people within Silicon Valley. They all tell the same story: the impetus for innovation has moved out of the modernist paradigm of industrial efficiency toward a type of mechanical theosis – a techno-pagan quest for transcendence. Sometimes this quest sediments into the metaphysical frameworks I shared earlier, while sometimes it remains at the level of praxis (i.e., countless technocrats flooding to events like Burning Man to give expression to inchoate longings).

Ultimately, however, digitality offers the false promise of transcendence without God, and metaphysics without any disruption of the fundamental materialism on which it ultimately depends. We may thus be witnessing the fulfilment of the dream of Lewis’s Screwtape, who wanted a world in which the materialist magician was no longer an anachronism.[14]

FURTHER READING

• Is AI Magic?: How Medieval Magic Became Artificial Intelligence—and Why Reading About It Doesn’t Make Me a Wizard

• The Battle for Your Child’s Imagination

• Digital Totalitarianism: How Technological Mission Creep is Destroying Society

• The Slot Machine in Your Pocket

• Technology & The Story of Redemption: Being the People of God in a Mechanized World

• How I Was Taken Over by AI And Why an Entire Generation Could Be Next

REFERENCES

[1] In chapter 6 of Leviathan, Hobbes declared that phenomena like our appetites, aversion, delight, and trouble are “but the appearance.” What is “really within us” is “only motion.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 2017), 44.

[2] Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2013), 232. Morozov does not concur with the view he is summarizing in the sentence I cited.

[3] “With the internet as its nervous system, the world’s connected cell phones and sensors as its sense organs, and data centers as its brain, the ‘whatever’ will hear everything, see everything, and be everywhere at all times. The only rational word to describe that ‘whatever’, thinks Levandowski, is ‘god’—and the only way to influence a deity is through prayer and worship.” Mark Harris, “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence,” Wired, November 15, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/anthony-levandowski-artificial-intelligence-religion/.

[4] For a discussion of Kurzweil’s views on duplicating ourselves, see Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine (Basilian Media & Publishing, 2024), 149.

[5] Nick Bostrom, “Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211), 2003, 243–255.

[6] Elon Musk, cited in Rich McCormick, “Odds Are We’re Living in a Simulation, Says Elon Musk,” The Verge, June 2, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/2/11837874/elon-musk-says-odds-living-in-simulation.

[7] Jason Koebler, “Elon Musk Says There’s a ‘One in Billions’ Chance Reality Is Not a Simulation,” Vice, June 2, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en/article/8q854v/elon-musk-simulated-universe-hypothesis.

[8] Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” The New Yorker, October 3, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny.

[9] Sam Altman, cited in Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” The New Yorker, October 3, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny.

[10] “I think it’s interesting how much sort of the Silicon Valley religion of the simulation has gotten close to, like, Brahman, and how little space there is between them, but from these very different directions. So, like, maybe that’s what’s going on. But if it is, like, physical reality as we understand I and all of the rules of the game are what we think they are, then there’s something. I still think it’s something very strange.” Sam Altman, Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #367, 2023.

[11] Areesha Lodhi, “Never say goodbye’: Can AI bring the dead back to life?” Aljazeera (9 Aug 2024), https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/9/never-say-goodbye-can-ai-bring-the-dead-back-to-life

[12] See Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now?, pp. 444-46.

[13] Tristan Harris, “Can Myth Teach Us Anything About the Race to Build Artificial General Intelligence? With Josh Schrei,” January 18, 2024, http://www.humanetech.com/podcast/can-myth-teach-us-anything-about-the-race-to-build-artificial-general-intelligence-with-josh-schrei.

[14] C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942), 39–40.

In Christ’s parable about the sheep and goats (Mt. 25:31-46), the punchline may strike us as odd. The division between the saved and the damned hinges on who showed hospitality.

I had occasion to reflect on this parable recently when listening to a lecture from the late Christine D. Pohl. Presented at the Henry Center back in 2013, Pohl convincingly demonstrated that hospitality is an organizing motif throughout the redemptive-historical narrative, even forming a backdrop for the gospel. Moreover, she also discussed how the earliest theological disputes—the identity of the covenant community, the conflict with the Judaizers, even justification by faith—were all worked out within the context of hospitality.

Pohl shows that the practice of hospitality among the early Christians differed significantly from that of the surrounding culture. It wasn’t that the Christians practiced hospitality and unbelievers didn’t. Everyone agreed that hospitality was crucial. In fact, in the ancient world it was commonly accepted that hospitality is a pillar of morality on which the universe depends. (If that seems like overreach, we have to remember that in a world before inns and restaurants, travelers depended on hospitality for their very survival.) But what really distinguished the Christian approach is the love behind their hospitality practices.

Texts from the Greco-Roman world show that hospitality was usually rooted in ambition: one showed hospitality to get something in return, often as a way of reinforcing beneficial relationships. But Christian hospitality was different: it was extended to people who couldn’t repay—the most needy in society—as a way of reenacting God’s welcome to us. In the process, Christian hospitality broke down social barriers that had traditionally kept people apart.

Pohl, who did extensive research on this topic when writing her book Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, shows that hospitality remained a central practice of the Church for centuries. But after the first thousand years of Christian history, the community-building role of hospitality began to wither. During the late Middle Ages, hospitality became associated with lavish entertainment sponsored by the rich and powerful. Hospitality became less about welcoming and more about entertaining; less about loving the needy and more a status symbol. Instead of Christian hospitality being a means for transcending social boundaries, it ended up reinforcing social differences and power.

Pohl describes how the earlier understanding of hospitality was partially recovered at the Protestant Reformation, though in compartmentalized ways that eventually contributed to hospitality being focused on entertaining family and friends. By the eighteenth-century, hospitality became lost as a significant practice for the church, with the remnants of the earlier understanding fragmented and scattered over different spheres. For example, welcoming of the poor and vulnerable was reshaped into social services, resulting in care becoming bureaucratized and impersonal. Furthermore, a hospitality industry sprang up with hotels, resorts, etc., that further depersonalized hospitality.

Where Christian hospitality has persisted on an interpersonal level, it is receded to simply having people over for dinner, often perpetuating the emphasis on entertaining rather than welcoming. This often reinforces the same misunderstanding of the Medieval period, where hospitality is more about the host than the guest, a paradigm shift leads to all sorts of unnecessary barriers (is my house clean? what will my guests think of my cooking? Is it ok to have people over if all I have to offer is snacks?).

Recovering Hospitality as Welcoming

In the Greco-Roman world, when Christians offered hospitality to the most needy in society, that often meant feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, especially in areas disrupted by wars or plagues. What might be the equivalent today?

I was thinking about that question when sent me an article from titled, “The Church Keeps Creating Programs; But People Are Still Lonely.” Kenneth B suggests that in our culture one crucial way we demonstrate hospitable love is simply through making ourselves available.

I had known to a certain extent over the years that it was my time spent sitting at coffee shops, whether the independent family coffee shop we previously owned, or simply sitting at a chain coffee shop in the community, that people tended to gravitate toward my table where I would be studying because I was present and available and they were longing for someone to connect with.

It wasn’t because I was anything special that people would seek me out, but simply because I was available.

In much of modern life people seem increasingly sealed away behind doors.

In both rural communities and urban neighborhoods, it is uncommon to see neighbors sitting together on porches.

Rarely do people wander across the street merely to visit.

Hospitality, once woven naturally into the fabric of everyday life, has become something unusual enough to merit comment.

What struck me here was the idea that people would seek out this gentleman simply because he was willing to be present with people. If we want to recover the Christian practice of hospitality as welcoming, maybe that’s a good place to begin: presence and attentiveness, especially attentive listening.

Hospitality Through Attentive Listening

In the 20th century, thinkers began rediscovering the healing power of listening. The psychologist Carl Rogers (1902–1987) found that when he was in doubt about how to help a client in an active way, he simply listened—not superficially but with deep attentiveness to the feelings and emotions behind the words, while reflecting the feelings back to the person. You don’t have to be a therapist to offer this type of hospitable listening. For thousands of years, the process we call “therapy” happened informally within community through people simply being available to each other, especially available to listen.

Listening is about more than merely conversation. It involves willingness to grieve together, to be confused together, to share each other’s joys and pains. It could even be a simple look or gesture conveying, “I know what you’re going through and I care.” Ultimately, it’s about being present. As the Orthodox author and professor Dr. Albert S. Rossi often reminds us, we act as a healing presence not through our skills or words, but simply through our presence.

In the days when one’s livelihood depended on the cohesion of small communities, my concern for you would have been inseparable from my survival. So, of course, I would sit and rejoice with you, grieve with you, worship with you, play with you, be present with you in pain, discomfort, or confusion. But today, modern economic, technological and political systems have isolated us from each other while fostering the illusion of independence, leading us to believe we can have community without truly listening, as if empathy and attentiveness can simply be outsourced to professionals. Though we have more communication aids than ever before, it can often feel that genuine listening is at an all-time low. How many of us may be physically stationary—sitting down on the couch, in the office, at the dinner table—while still embodying the mentality of distraction and inattention. Our minds are often too preoccupied even to give attention to someone else in the same room. We may even imagine we are giving someone our attention when we are only offering continuous partial attention.

If we want to recover hospitality as welcoming rather than entertaining, maybe listening is a good place to start. Open your homes for sure, but also open your heart. Not only sharing food, but sharing attention.

Just as you don’t need a clean house and a nice meal before opening your home, you also don’t need to to know how to speak into someone’s situation with the right words before you can offer hospitable listening. It starts by being willing to simply be present. In our age of distraction and individualism, we may find that hospitality is what saves the world, a point recently emphasized by and on the Commitment to Reality podcast. Pauling shared how, while waiting at the airport with hundreds people glued to their phones, a man reached out to him and offered to share a pizza. That is the type of hospitality we need to transform society and break the cyborg creep that is engulfing us all.

Further Reading

• When the Machine Stops We Still Have Each Other

• Anti-Gnosticism Starts at Home

• The Church Keeps Creating Programs; But People Are Still Lonely The Orthodox Secret to Building Community

• St. Porphyrios on the “Spiritual” Things that Distract

• The Cross of Least Resistance

• The Power of Baby Steps in a Superman Culture

• Use Positive Self-Talk to Overcome Anxiety

Tolkien describes his legendarium as “mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine” and then explains how fallen beings express their rebellion in machinery and magic.

“He will rebel against the laws of the Creator - especially against morality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, - and so to the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents - or even the use of these talents with the corruptive motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised.”

The association of the Machine with magic may appear an odd juxtaposition, but it has an ancient pedigree, and one which, I’m convinced, contains a key to understanding AI. Tolkien presciently grasped a point that has come into sharper focus in recent years, namely that the high-tech wizardry of our age is driven by many of the same ambitions that drove ancient magic: to cheat death, accumulate power, and bend other wills to our own.

Last year, when developing this hypothesis for chapter 12 of our book, Are We All Cyborgs Now?, I did some reading about ancient magic, and was struck by the similarity between medieval magic and the new techno-utopian wizardry of artificial intelligence.

Recently, one of Jay Dyer’s followers, who has devoted a remarkable amount of time to denouncing me online—and who has constructed an elaborate theory in which I am a liberal operating a feminist dummy account while masquerading as a conservative Orthodox academic in order to ingratiate myself with —came across a picture of me reading Richard Kieckhefer’s Magic in the Middle Ages. Commenting on it, the gentleman announced this was a final vindication of his contention that I am “a subversive academic from an off-the-rails ecumenist parish" who is promoting Hermeticism and Neoplatonism. (Well, I don’t mind owning that I am a closet Neoplatonist if it comes to that.)

This seems to be a common pattern: any interest in medieval symbolism or intellectual history is immediately transmuted, through some alchemy of interpretation, into proof of occult affiliation or ideological subversion. For example, in talking about alchemical symbolism in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, had to clarify on Twitter that she had “no desire to encourage occult practice” after accused her of descending into woo woo. And while I have already clarified that my interest in medieval magic has been in the context of critical engagement with AI, it seems I wasn’t clear enough.

So to set the record straight, I want to share the relevant portion of Are We All Cyborgs Now? where I discussed the magical pedigree behind AI. In this section, I have identified four types of magic from the Middle Ages, all of which I argue coalesce in the modern technological project. (And although my critics will be disappointed, I am not currently practicing any of these four forms of magic. Nor does reading about ancient magic make me a wizard.)

Is AI Magic? An extract from chapter 12 of Are We All Cyborgs Now?

At the close of the millennium, David Noble published a book titled, The Religion of Technology, in which he explored the spiritual underpinnings beneath the modern technological vision. In the book’s introduction, Noble commented on the strange fusion of rationalism and spirituality that now animates the techno-utopian impulse:

Although today’s technologists, in their sober pursuit of utility, power, and profit, seem to set society’s standard for rationality, they are driven also by distant dreams, spiritual yearnings for supernatural redemption. However dazzling and daunting their display of worldly wisdom, their true inspiration lies elsewhere, in an enduring, other-worldly quest for transcendence and salvation.[1]

Noble, himself an historian, shows that when technological innovation first began to emerge in the Middle Ages, it was directly tied to a vision of spiritual progress, and even connected to the Christian idea of redemption. Similarly, from the Industrial Revolution through to the contemporary era, there has been a constant fusion of spirituality and technology. Noble thus found it strange, when writing at the dawn of the 21st century, that most people had come to think of technology/science and spirituality/transcendence as contrary historical forces:

With the approach of the new millennium, we are witness to two seemingly incompatible enthusiasms, on the one hand a widespread infatuation with technological advance and a confidence in the ultimate triumph of reason, on the other a resurgence of fundamental faith akin to a religious revival. The coincidence of these two developments appears strange, however, merely because we mistakenly suppose them to be opposite and opposing historical tendencies.[2]

Twenty-two years later, David Noble’s point is easier to accept. The gurus of Silicon Valley no longer disguise the spiritual cast to their endeavors as they pursue their techno-utopian social vision with religious zeal and fanaticism.

The intersection of religion and technology has seen the rise of a new mysticism, with what Wesley Wildman and Kate Stockly refer to as “the brave new world of consciousness hacking and enlightenment engineering.”[3] It has seen the rise in a new eschatology, known as the doctrine of the Singularity. It has seen the emergence of a new corpus of prophetic literature, such as Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines[4] and David Chalmers Reality+.[5] The techno-spiritual order even offers its own vision of transcendence, with the pseudo-mystical cluster of ideas that now surround the theories of bot consciousness. Even the economic and media structures on which technology depends revolve around a kind of magic, as the Romanian philosopher, Ioan P. Culianu, observed.

Nowadays, the magician busies himself with public relations, propaganda, marketing, publicity, information, misinformation, and counter-information, with censorship and cryptography — a science which was in the 16th century a branch of magic… Historians have been wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the arrival of “quantitative science.” The latter has simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and goals by means of technology.”[6]

The engineers, venture capitalists, and programmers at the heart of this endeavor have been quite open about the religious nature of their quest, especially when it comes to AI. To quote from Joshua Schrei, in a piece that has been widely discussed throughout Silicon Valley, [13]

And the programming architects at the center of this magic have been very open about it. They’ve directly said over the years that the AI issue is more religious than scientific. Some have even compared themselves directly to sorcerers… Writers and philosophers and even some AI architects themselves have said since the 60s that the fundamental questions underpinning AI are actually religious questions. Questions of apocalypse, salvation, of power and sentience. These are deeply important questions — and AI is bringing all of them to the surface. And showing us yet again, that the world we inhabit is mysterious, and the primary questions facing us are spiritual questions.[14]

Within the religion of technology, mystery functions more like it did for ancient savages than in the monotheistic religions. Like a primitive savage whose world is haunted by demons and shadowy forces, we may soon live in a shadowy netherworld where the phantasmic is mistaken for the real. Indeed, as more aspects of reality come to be mediated through our machines, the distinction between actuality and simulation, real intelligence and artificial intelligence, genuine information and fake information, become not only porous, but trivial and irrelevant for many.[15]

In his 1999 book Technology as Magic: the Triumph of the Irrational, Richard Stivers identified a strange juxtaposition of the rational and the irrational, observing that our technological society offers extensive rational control juxtaposed with “the need to escape into fantasy, dreams, and ecstasy.”[16] The fixation with escaping from reality—manifested in everything from gaming to the transcendent aspirations of the transhumanist movement—threatens to blur the distinction between the real and the fake, the rational and the irrational. This escapism, rooted in man’s hunger for transcendence, offers a type of reverse sacramentalism to a world where years of rationalism and materialism has left him starved for transcendence. As the French sociologist, Jacques Ellul, put it, “the desacralization of nature, of the cosmos, and of the traditional objects of religion is accompanied by a sacralization of society as a result of technology.”[17] Ellul understood that as the world becomes emptied of mystery, transcendence, and wonder, the sacralization of technology promises to fill the vacuum:

“In the world in which we live technique has become the essential mystery, and that in diverse forms according to milieu and race. There is an admiration mingled with terror for the machine among those who have retrained notions of magic.”[18]

I have been using the word “magic,” following ’s idea that magic lies at the heart of digital culture. “But,” someone will point out, “the modern technological quest is not animated by real magic.”

“Magic” is a tricky term that requires a careful definition—four definitions, in fact.

Magic originally meant “the arts of the magi,” to reference the skills and knowledge of Zoroastrian priests from Persia whose influence extended to the classical world and Southern Europe. The learning of these magi, no less than their claims to cure people through mysterious ceremonies, seemed exotic to those in the Mediterranean lands and accounts for the association between “magic” and the exotic that remains to this day.[20]

In time, Christians encountered “magic” from sources other than the magi. As Christendom expanded into Europe, believers confronted witches and wizards who used a variety of techniques and mechanisms—including divination, fortune-telling, sorcery, and necromancy—to manipulate non-human intelligences. Thus, we can posit our first definition of magic.

• Definition of “Magic” #1). The use of techniques and mechanisms to manipulate and communicate with non-human intelligences.

In the Middle Ages, the term magic was mainly confined to philosophical and theological literature. On ground level, however, it was not always clear when a special cure or procedure might involve licit knowledge from philosophia naturalis (what later becomes natural science) or magic, or a combination of both. We see this in the trope of the witch who is learned in both herbology and, so-called, magic potions (the magic potions themselves often concocted from knowledge of plant lore). “The word magic is mainly an abstract and analytical term used in the theological literature. Practitioners more often described the purposes their operations served (e.g., healing, cursing, arousing love), without troubling to place these operations in an abstract category such as magic.”[21]

Around the thirteenth century, some thinkers began to address this ambiguity by distinguishing between demonic magic and “natural magic,” the latter including the marvelous and hidden (occult) powers, processes and procedures of nature that would later fall under natural science. This included many natural powers or processes (including those we no longer consider scientific, such as alchemy, the special powers of gemstones, the influence of the planets on terrestrial life, etc.), and differed from the manifest powers of a thing that could be explained without reference to external forces.[22] Some thinkers, like Aquinas and Roger Bacon, reserve “magic” for things involving sorcery and divination and use virtutes occultae (occult powers) to describe hidden powers in nature. But most medieval people did not make such a distinction although they may have had a vague understanding of the difference between white and black magic. On ground level, however, these distinctions tended to be blurry, and few people would have been able to specify the difference between a charm and a cure. With these qualifications in mind, we can posit our second definition of magic:

• Definition of “Magic” #2). Natural magic, where one deals with marvelous and hidden properties and processes of nature.

In practice, natural magic was believed to have the potential to produce results that might appear, on the surface, like illicit magic. We see this in the famous story of the mechanical head constructed by Thomas Aquinas’s teacher, Albertus Magnus. The author of a 1337 text describing the head is at pains to clarify that while the mechanical head could speak and reason (essentially an early version of AI), it was not through demonic power but instead through the great philosopher’s knowledge of the planets and their rotations.

“We find that Albertus Magnus, of the Preaching Friars, had such a great mind that he was able to make a metal statue modeled after the course of the planets, and endowed with such a capacity for reason that it spoke: and it was not from a diabolical art or necromancy—great intellects do not delight in such things because it is something that makes one lose his soul and body; such arts are forbidden by the faith of Christ. One day a monk went to find Albertus in his cell. As Albertus was not there, the statue replied. The monk, thinking that it was an idol of evil invention, broke it. When Albertus returned, he was very angry, telling the monk that it had taken him thirty years to make this piece and “that I did not gain this knowledge in the Order of the Friars: The monk replied, “I have done wrong; please forgive me. What, can’t you make another one?” Albertus responded that it would be thirty thousand more years before another could be made, as that planet had made its course and it would not return before that time.”[23]

The story of Albertus Magnus’s talking head is also valuable in indicating that even in a pre-scientific age, medieval man understood the distinction between something powered by demonic arts, and something powered by natural and mechanical means, though the monk in the story mistook the latter for the former. This story also illustrates how the influence of the planets, though part of virtutes occultae, was seen as separate from the diabolical arts, and more aligned with what we would call science. Yet in practice, the distinction between planetary influence and demonic influence was often blurry, as seen in the legend of the werewolf, whose demonic abilities were, in some sense, powered by the full moon.

Thus, we can posit our third definition of magic.

• Definition of “Magic” #3). Automata / robots.

Medieval man also understood stage magic—sleight of hand. When discussing types of magic, John of Salisbury’s (1120–1180) includes illusions (praestigia). We need not dwell on this but can simply posit a fourth definition of magic.

• Definition of “Magic” #4). Prestidigitation or “sleight of hand.”

What is curious about our digital technology, and especially AI, is that it integrates all four of the medieval senses of magic.

Let’s start with the fourth and work backwards. Clearly, people can perform various tricks with AI, such as perpetuating the growing illusion that chatbots are sentient. Even the term “artificial intelligence” hinges on the illusion that these systems actually think in what amounts to a digital sleight of hand.[24]

But these systems are also magical in sense #3, as they represent a modern equivalent of Albertus Magnus’s mechanized talking head.

These systems also involve magic in the second sense, where one manipulates the marvelous and hidden properties and processes of nature. Though we do not still use the medieval distinction between manifest and hidden powers, if ever anything qualified for the latter it would be AI. Consider, AI involves harnessing the hidden properties of the world (i.e., electrical energy, magnetism, optics), just as it involves discovering the hidden processes of nature (i.e., the processes we’ve discovered for turning rocks into mechanical heads, which is to say, to turn quartz into the high-purity single-crystal silicon wafers used in microprocessors).

What is perhaps especially fascinating is to see AI increasingly harnessed for the first sense of magic, as people believe they can use it to communicate with non-human intelligences—both those thought to reside in the systems themselves, as well as intelligences within the spirit realm (a point I have discussed in more detail in an article for The Symbolic World and in the video below from the 2025 Paideia conference). In fact, you may not have realized it, but the leaders of some of the largest tech companies in the world are hoping to use AI to merge with non-human intelligences in a coming synthesis of biological and digital life. Clearly, this qualifies as magic according to the first sense, namely the use of techniques and mechanisms to manipulate and communicate with non-human intelligences.

Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that today’s technological enterprise, and the larger scientific endeavor that undergirds it, is the true successor of ancient magic. As C.S. Lewis explained in The Abolition of Man.

The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse… There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead.[25]

If Lewis were writing today, he might choose different examples, such as digitally “resurrecting” the dead and mutilating the living. He would also find more than abundant confirmation for this understanding that, far from sweeping magic away as is often thought, modern science and engineer stands in continuity to the quest of the ancient magician.

Further Reading

• Digital Totalitarianism: How Technological Mission Creep Could Destroy Society

• Toolkit of Digital Boundaries for Healthy Living How I Reclaimed My Life From the Machin

• The Battle for Your Child’s Imagination Why Stories Matter More Than You May Think

• The New King’s English and the Homogenization of Thought

Notes

[1] David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York, NY: Penguin Publishing Group, 1999), 3.

[2] Noble, 3.

[3] Wesley J. Wildman and Kate J. Stockly Ph.D, Spirit Tech: The Brave New World of Consciousness Hacking and Enlightenment Engineering (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2021).

[4] Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York, NY, 2000).

[5] David J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022).

[6] Ioan P. Culianu, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 104.

[8] L. M. Sacasas, “The Analog City and the Digital City,” The New Atlantis, Winter 2020, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-analog-city-and-the-digital-city.

[9] Kent Anhari, “Bot Anxiety,” The New Atlantis, Summer 2021, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/bot-anxiety.

[10] “BJ Campbell, who brought the word into some focus...was struck by the way that on internet social networks, morality is outsourced away from the individual and onto the network. But there is no code of morality here—the moral codes seem to constantly, arbitrarily change. We could say that here we have a situation in which neither individual humans nor an organised group of humans are making decisions about what the group morality should be. But neither is it an algorithm, or any other known entity or intelligence. Thus Campbell, although he doesn’t appear to have any occult background, happened upon the word ‘egregore’ to refer to a semi-agentic ‘emergent’ group entity which could be said to ‘hold’ real power, in this case some control over the morals of individuals.” Daniel Townhead and Kenneth Michael Florence, “The Symbolic World vs Egregores, Part 1,” June 5, 2022, https://thesymbolicworld.com/content/the-symbolic-world-vs-egregores-part-1.

[11] Leng Shumei and Huang Lanlan, “Bringing Back Deceased Beloved Ones through AI Technology Becomes a New, Controversial Business in China as ‘Era of Digital Humans’ Approaches,” Global Times, March 28, 2024, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202403/1309721.shtml.

[13] Josh Schrei, “AI in the Age of Mythic Powers,” The Bigger Picture, March 14, 2024, https://beiner.substack.com/p/ai-in-the-age-of-mythic-powers-by.

[14] Schrei, “AI in the Age of Mythic Powers.”

[15] For examples of this, see chapter 10 in Robin Phillips & Joshua Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity From the Machine (Basilian Media, 2025).

[16] Richard Stivers, Technology as Magic (New York, NY: Continuum, 2001), 203.

[17] Jacques Ellul, The New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1973), 67.

[18] Jacques Ellul, 72.

[19] Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Vintage, 1996), 448 & 646.

[20] Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10.

[21] “Magic: Magic in Medieval and Renaissance Europe .” Encyclopedia of Religion. Encyclopedia.com. (April 15, 2024). https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/magic-magic-medieval-and-renaissance-europe

[22] These were distinct from manifest powers in nature. A power of an object, say a plant, that cannot be explained by its own properties, is a power hidden from the senses and thus occult. But this did not mean “spiritual” in the modern sense. “The power of a plant to cure certain ailments, or the power of a gem to ward off certain kinds of misfortune, may derive not from the internal structure of the object but from an external source: emanations coming from the stars and planets. These latter powers were technically known as occult, and natural magic was the science of such powers. The properties in question were strictly within the realm of nature, but the natural world that could account for them was a broad one: instead of examining the inner structure of a plant to determine its effects, one had to posit influences that flowed from the distant reaches of the cosmos.” Richard Kieckhefer, p. 12-13.

[23] From the Rosaio della vita, cited in Minsoo Kang and Ben Halliburton, “The Android of Albertus Magnus: A Legend of Artificial Being,” in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, ed. Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020).

[24] See Charley Johnson, “The Illusion of ChatGPT,” Untangled with Charley Johnson, February 26, 2023, https://untangled.substack.com/p/the-illusion-of-chatgpt.

[25].S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: MacMillan, 1994), 83-84.

“I once had a 5th grade student whose mother had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, we were reading The Hobbit as a class. This particular student wasn’t a serious reader and he was known by some of the other boys as being a bit of a ‘baby’. After finishing The Hobbit, he came to me and said, ‘You know what I learned from Bilbo? Even if you are small and scared, you can still have courage. I need to be like Bilbo.’ Afterward, this student traded Captain Underpants and Pirates of the Caribbean graphic novels for The Lord of The Rings. Bilbo’s journey, both external and internal, shaped what this student saw as noble and good. His story is one of a budding moral imagination.” (Hannah St Claire, From Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Fairy Tale: Searching for Fairyland Part I)

I like this anecdote, not simply because it’s an inspiring nod to the power of good literature, but because it brings to the forefront a central theme in the Christian life, the moral imagination.

In speaking to human experience, good stories help our imaginations become rightly ordered, aligned with the patterns and principles that undergird reality. As St Claire continued in the same article:

Fairy tales, the good ones, are true. Not because they actually happened in “real life”. But because, in Fairyland, choices matter, and good and evil are real. Suffering exists in Fairyland, but redemption is possible. Humility is honored while pride has consequences, and faithfulness often requires courage. If these don’t speak to the human experience, I don’t know what does.

A good story does more than simply reinforce these primal patterns of human experience; rather, good stories—like good art, music, and poetry—help us perceive these patterns as lovely. This, in turn, is central to the development of moral imagination.

Many of us have never given a second thought to the role imagination plays in the virtuous life, while the term “moral imagination” may even appear an odd juxtaposition. Still others are often suspicious of the imagination. I’ll never forget when a good friend, after being warned about the dangers of fantasy, threw away a beautifully illustrated children’s edition of Shakespeare stories. When I arrived on the scene, it was too late to retrieve the book from the trash, but I explained a more perfect way, and no other books were destroyed. Other people I have talked to feel that the imagination, especially when leveraged for fairy tales with themes centered around magic, is liable to corrupt. For example, just today I received the following message from a friend, a fellow dad who has long been concerned that I’ve encouraged my children in reading habits shaped by the Narnia books and Lord of the Rings. This friend is now raising concern about my involvement in The Symbolic World community with scholars like Jonathan Pageau and Annie Crawford, whose emphasis on fairy tales he sees as subversive.

There is much we could say about this. The infiltration of “foreign concepts” likely refers to work on alchemy symbolism in literature (for which we have been taking some flack recently), while the reference to the occult likely refers to Lord of the Rings (which does describe demonic practices and objects, as does the Bible, but the whole point is that the occult is defeated!) Yet rather than offering an apologetic for these or other themes and techniques in story-telling, I’d like to take a big picture view of where fairy tales and magic fit within the moral imagination so central to Christian ethics.

To appreciate the context behind the moral imagination, we need to marinate ourselves in some theological ethics. After laying this theological groundwork, we’ll return to the discussion of stories (and I’ll even be recommending some stories to help develop your child’s moral imagination!).

The Moral Imagination and the Reordering of Desire

The recognition that the imagination is the handmaid of morality rests on the role desire and affection play in the ethical life. Unfortunately, this dimension of ethics is often neglected by modern Christians, many of whom even look askance at the affective dimension of Christian growth. Indeed, contemporary thinking about duties, even among believers, lingers under the long shadow of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who taught that duty involves suppression of human feelings such as desire and affection. Still others have been influenced by the shadow of twentieth-century fundamentalism, with its legalistic emphasis on the constant suppression of human desire.

But in the classical Christian understanding, the right ordering of desire is central to sanctification. As I explained in my article, “Gratitude, Love, and the Struggle for Spiritual Emotion,”

Spiritual emotions are involved in virtues such as peace, contrition, joy, patience, love, and of course gratitude. These virtues certainly involve more than emotion but not less. For example, a person cannot be completely contrite without feeling repentant for his or her sins. You cannot be wholly patient while you’re feeling frustrated and agitated. So growing in virtue involves, at whatever level, the formation of spiritual emotions.

One of the most important spiritual emotions is the joy we derive from holy living. Take Psalm 19:10 which describes God’s judgments as more desirable than gold, and sweeter than honeycomb. Or again, in passages like Psalm 119, we see that the goal is not someone who merely obeys God’s laws, but someone who derives joy from God’s commands—a man or woman whose affections have been honed to delight in the ways of God. Put simply, a saintly person enjoys being holy.

We all know instinctively that holiness involves rightly ordered emotion, especially right desires. When illustrating this in his book The Art of Living, Edward Sri asks us to consider who is the better husband out of two examples. Is it the man who says to his wife, “Honey, I really wanted to have an affair, but I love you so much that I resisted. Honestly, it was a real struggle, but I made the sacrifice, and I did it for you.” Or is it the husband for whom an affair would be repulsive—who does not even desire to be unfaithful to his wife? Obviously the second, for as Sri comments, “His desires have been ordered well and transformed by God’s grace so that he doesn’t just do the right thing; he desires the right thing and possesses an inner ability that makes it easy for him to resist temptation.” (p. 28.) And again,

“Being a virtuous person is not simply about doing the right things. It runs much deeper than that. It’s about a person’s disposition, character, emotions, and desires. Do you desire the right things? Do you take delight in the right things?…

God doesn’t want us to have to battle against our desires all the time. He ultimately wants to heal them. He wants to get to the root of our sins by retraining and healing our passions and desires.” (pp. 26-28).

So clearly the Christian life is not just about doing right; it’s also about being attracted to what is good and repulsed by what is evil. Ethics is as much about feeling as it is about doing, specifically, it’s about the particular type of feelings in the person who finds goodness attractive, and who takes delight in what is beautiful. Here’s how I described this in my 2020 book, Gratitude in Life’s Trenches:

It is easy to react to the idolization of feelings in our culture by… denying the role that both feelings and beauty play within the moral ordering of our lives. This is a mistake, for it is through an emotional attraction to beauty that we are motivated to make moral judgments and to order our lives according to transcendent realities.

Beauty and emotion are closely related in the moral life. Through the sense of beauty, we are moved out of indifference to become emotionally invested in pursuing one outcome rather than another. When Eve succumbed to the temptation to disobey God (Gen. 3:6), it was because the beauty of the tree and its effects (“pleasant to the eyes . . . desirable to make one wise”) captured her imagination with greater force than the beauty of remaining faithful to the will of God. That example might lead us to disparage the role of beauty in moral decision-making, and yet the same principle also works in the other direction as the Holy Spirit sanctifies our feelings, imagination, and aesthetic sensibilities.

Through a sense of Christ’s beauty, we become emotionally invested in following Him. When we observe character traits in Bible characters and saints that are worthy of emulation, when we identify certain conditions as honorable or shameful, when our hearts are stirred in worship by “the beauty of holiness” (Ps. 96:9), or when we order our actions based on a longing for outcomes that lie outside the scope of the present life but are attractive to the imagination—all these powerfully move us because they appeal, at some level, to our emotional dispositions. A rightly ordered sense of beauty is thus central to the moral imagination of the believer.

How do we cultivate right desire? How do we train our affections so we feel that goodness is beautiful? There are a multiplicity of ways: worship, prayer, developing good habits, spending time with virtuous people, using theology to better understand our faith, etc. We also cultivate our sense of beauty through being surrounded by lovely and inspiring artifacts, which is why the work of is so important in raising awareness about the war on beauty. But one central way for training the affections is through the imagination, specifically cultivating the moral imagination through stories that shape what we perceive as noble and good.

The Most Important Part of Education isn’t Information: it’s Imagination

As soon as children are verbal, if not earlier, stories are portals for understanding the world. They are part of the process, described by Stratford Caldecott, for “nourishing of the imagination, [and] orienting of the heart so that we intuit the world aright, even before we begin to develop our theories.”

Through stories a child learns that monsters can be defeated, that there is always hope, and everyone’s true nature is eventually revealed. Through stories, a child learns that we discover ourselves, not through a process of self-making but through humility, virtue, and the arts of self-limitation. Through stories, a child learns that selfishness leads to loss and division but virtue leads to restoration, that pride leads to folly but humility leads to wisdom, that true love is found not in consuming and devouring but in self-giving and sacrifice. Over time, this trains the child to delight in what is good, true, and beautiful, and thus, ultimately, in God Himself.

Educating Desire: Imagination and the Destiny of the Soul

The educational power of imagination is a double-edged sword, given that it can also disorder the human soul. As George MacDonald teaches us, if we do not healthfully nurture the innate longing for beauty, transcendence and enchantment, then our longings will inevitably be colonized by subversive forces; if the imagination “be not occupied with the beautiful, she will be occupied by the pleasant; that which goes not out to worship, will remain at home to be sensual.” And sadly, that is what much modern education does (“education” understood here in the broadest sense to include not only classroom time, but also children’s media programming.) Instead of shaping children’s imagination to enjoy what is noble and good, much contemporary education nudges children to the normalization of disorder. The normalization of disorder happens in a variety of ways—through media, music, peer culture, advertising, social media, educational curricula—but not least through story-telling.

It is important to note that the malformation of the imagination through stories is rarely obvious. It isn’t that children are watching cartoons that glorify burglary or portray murderers as heroes. It’s more subtle than that. Perhaps the father figure is presented as stupid, maybe weakness is glorified, or authority is treated as inherently suspect. Perhaps self-expression is presented as inherently antithetical to self-mastery, or intellectuals are presented as out of touch or pretentious. Or consider how so much modern story-telling malforms the imagination by subverting the traditional motif of the hero’s journey. Through subversive story-telling, children’s affections may be subtly recalibrated to enjoy what is trivial, to be cynical toward the ceremonious and formal, or even to laugh at the sacred.

Even worse, the moral imagination can be malformed by authors lacking sufficient skill in storytelling to portray goodness as fascinating, captivating, and desirable. Many Christian storytellers, thinking they are doing God’s work, end up hindering the gospel by lapsing into mere moralizing. We ought rather, as Chesterton said in his introduction to George MacDonald and His Wife, to have a religion that competes with the beauty and vividness of the passions, so that we do not let the devil have all the bright colours.

If a child’s formative imaginative experience is malformed by an unwholesome diet, then the risk is that he or she will grow up to be revolted by what is good, true, and beautiful—ultimately revolted by God Himself.

The stakes are very high, my friends, for nothing less than the salvation of our children hangs in the balance. For just as we can acquire dispositions that enable us to delight in what is good, true, and beautiful (ultimately in God Himself), it is also possible to corrupt ourselves so that heavenly joys are perceived as torment. And that is the true state of hell. It is not so much that the wicked are deprived of heavenly pleasures after death when they would rather spend eternity delighting in God’s presence; rather, their soul-corrupting habits in this life have created a condition in which the wicked can no longer receive heavenly pleasures as pleasure, much like Milton’s Satan, whose hatred of earthly beauty paled in comparison to his much greater revulsion of heavenly beauty.

With what delight could I have walked thee [earth] round,
If I could joy in aught, sweet interchange
Of Hill, and Vallie, Rivers, Woods and Plaines,
Now Land, now Sea, and Shores with Forrest crownd,
Rocks, Dens, and Caves; but I in none of these
Find place or refuge; and the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries; all good to me becomes
Bane, and in Heav’n much worse would be my state.

From Paradise Lost Book 9

Satan hated the beautiful hills, valleys, and rivers of his earthly exile, yet preferred these to the torment he would undergo if faced with the beauties of heaven. Paradise Lost, like C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, explores the paradox of a being so corrupted that he prefers misery to the infinite pleasure of the beatific vision.

And that brings us back to education. Education, properly conceived, is the project of nudging students to become the sorts of people who delight in the good, and who can therefore enjoy the beauty of God’s presence in this life and the life to come, rather than those who, like Milton’s Satan, recoil at what is good.

The Forgotten Front in Christianity’s Cultural Struggle

Modern Christianity has largely neglected the imagination, even while investing disproportionate energy in political approaches to cultural renewal that often yield only marginal temporary gains. At least, that is Tony Esolen’s thesis in a delightful 17-minute lecture delivered at Thomas More College in 2019.

Esolen argues that the imagination is the taproot of Christian culture; consequently, if you want to save our civilization from total collapse, the solution is in good stories, good poetry, and good art.

Esolen, a fellow Touchstone author and one of the most prophetic minds of our generation, explains that we are either headed into the great and noble vision of beauty, or we are going in the direction of the appetites; the imagination is either leading us to heaven or to hell.

Esolen goes on to argue—a point echoing George MacDonald’s essay on the imagination—that if we have not given our students visions of true beauty, then young people will be sucked into the counterfeit beauty of mass entertainment, mass education, and mass politics. The devil is quite content for Christians to have token victories in politics and societal reform, if only he can corrupt the imagination.

I couldn’t agree with Esolen more. As I noted on p. 312 of Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation,

Satan is quite satisfied to let us go about our business as Christians—to attend church, to lobby our politicians, to have Bible studies and catechism classes—as long as he can control our imaginations. Once a child’s imagination has become corrupted, then all the church services, catechism classes, family worship, and good education in the world will accomplish little.

Once we recognize that spiritual warfare takes place at the level of the imagination, our strategies for missions, apologetics, and evangelism must be recalibrated accordingly. My friend and others have started talking about Literary Apologetics as a way to emphasize that nurturing the imagination may be even more important than classical apologetics (although properly done, both can cross-fertilize each other, as we see from C.S. Lewis’s ministry.) Fairy tales, folk tales, and myth, offer what Crawford has called a “medicine of meaning” that speaks into the current meaning crisis sometimes with greater clarity than rational argument.

I teach a Bachelor’s class in which a quarter of the students are Buddhist. At one time I would have gone in with classical apologetics, defending the rationality of the Christian worldview. But literary apologetics, like its handmaid cultural apologetics, invites us not simply to show that Christianity is true, but to demonstrate that it is beautiful. So in my class, while we do talk about the Christian worldview, my main evangelistic weapon is the power of good stories. So when I explain the Christian worldview, I try to tell it like a fairy tale. (You can read my work in progress in my post, “Approaching Biblical Theology as a Story.” I am now working with an illustrator toward getting my story published so Christian children can have the gospel introduced to them with the clarity and beauty of myth.)

Building Your Literary Arsenal

If you’re just starting out as a parent and find yourself excited or convicted by what I’ve shared, there are no shortage of lists to point you in the right direction.

has a list of recommended children’s books in her article, “On Reading Fairytales with Children Searching for Fairyland: Practical Advice for Parents & Teachers.”

My friend Vigen Guroian gives some recommended books, and guides us through them, in his classic, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination (a book I reviewed here.)

Fun fact about Vigen: when I first moved to the St. Patrick’s parish and didn’t yet have a car, Vigen would pick me up to drive me to church. I had already read some of his work and appreciated him as an intellectual, but I came to also appreciate him as a good friend.

Back to the lists.

Kathie Johnson has a long-running column at Touchstone with recommended books.

A mother and blogger named Cheryl has made this list of books, focusing mainly on stories from history.

Louis de Wohl’s has authored numerous books telling the stories of saints for young people.

See also ’ list “Fifty Books Every Child Should Read Before Twelve."

Ambleside Online offers the following list for each grade:

• First Grade

• Second Grade

• Third Grade

• Fourth Grade

• Fifth Grade

• Sixth Grade

• Seventh Grade

• Eighth Grade

I am working on my own list of recommended children’s books. But for now I want to talk about one of my favorite books.

During the infancy of my three children, each would habitually wake up early (around 5:00 am) and I was tasked with entertaining the child until the rest of the household came to life. So I spent hours reading Eric Kincaid’s illustrations of classic nursery rhymes, which I prefer to the more familiar Mother Goose (which Kincaid has also illustrated).

Eric Kincaid—who is no relation to the sentimental landscape artist Thomas Kinkade—has illustrated a number of different nursery rhyme books, but this one with the red cover is the best. Every illustration is simply magical, full of a verisimilitude that ushers the viewer into a self-contained universe of wonder. At first the babies just enjoyed the pictures, then they began to understand the words, then finally to sing or chant along. The cadences and rhymes prepared them for poetry later on, while these early routines helped sculpt the cadences of their minds for the discipline of reading and attentiveness.

We think young children love novelty but they actually appreciate familiarity. Every time we opened the nursery rhymes, my children would become excited to re-visit their own friends: Jack and Jill, Old King Cole, Wee Willy Winky, the Grand Old Duke of York, the woman who lived in the shoe, etc. And it seemed that every reading session we would notice new and previously-overlooked details in Kincaid’s magical illustrations.

Somewhere along the line, I discovered the Broadside Band’s album of nursery rhymes, arranged in the style of the English folk tradition (Spotify link here, Youtube here). Some of their songs offer surprising arrangements to familiar songs, like this more traditional melody to “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” that is so much superior to the bland tune with which Americans are mostly familiar.

This album is simply delightful and added a musical counterpart to our reading. In the mornings I would read the nursery rhymes to the children, and then in the afternoon while making dinner I would put on the album. And just as the nursery rhymes prepared them for poetry later on, the Broadside Band prepared them for classical music later in life.

If you’d like to learn more about why stories are important, or to read past articles where I’ve discussed specific stories or movies that form the moral imagination, I’ve put a “further reading” section below. But before closing, I’d like to offer an appeal on behalf of a friend.

Postscript: Appeal for the St. Constantine Community

I just heard from a friend, who I mentored years ago while living in England. I was both delighted and surprised to hear that he’s been ordained to the priesthood, where he helps serve the Orthodox Community of St Constantine in York. This friend, Fr Christopher Bennigsen, shared with me some of the issues they face as a parish community not owning a building but renting the chapel of a university within the city. But…an opportunity has arisen for them to purchase an ancient church.

This church began as an Anglo-Saxon monastic cell in the 11th century built on Roman foundations. It is mentioned in the Doomsday Book as the church of St Martin. During the 13th to 15th centuries it was periodically expanded, before being remodeled and combined with the nearby (now demolished) church of St Gregory in the 16th century. Throughout the 20th century, the church fell into decline, and by the 1980s it fell into complete disuse. In 2004, it was deconsecrated and delisted as a place of worship.

Once purchased, they will likely retain the patronage of St Martin alongside their own parish’s patron, St Constantine. But money is an issue. The St. Constantine community needs to raise funds to both purchase the building and complete some immediate renovations before it can be used again as a church.

If it is within your means, I am asking all my readers to go to their Fundraiser Page and consider donating between $5.00 and $10.00 to this project. I’ve done the math, and if each of my readers donates $5.00, that will double what they’ve already raised and bring them significantly closer to their goal.

Further Reading

• Subverting the Hero’s Journey: How Modern Stories Malform the Imagination

• The Mythic Imagination of George MacDonald

• The Joys of Reading: How I Lost and Rediscovered Leisure Reading

• Walter Mitty and the Long Road Back to the Ordinary

• The Role of Beauty in Worship

• Virtue & Classical Education: A Commencement Address to a Graduating Class

• More than Schooling: The Perils of Pragmatism in Christian Attitudes Toward the Liberal Arts

• Using Cultural Apologetics and Story-Telling to Reclaim The Beauty of Struggle

• Reflections on MacDonald Bicentenary Celebration

• Judgers and Haters: Life After the Age of the Morally Gray

• Life, Longing, and Ladders in the Land of Shadows

• George MacDonald and the Redemption of Imagination

Washington’s divine counsel consists in the goddess Victory, the goddess Liberty, and thirteen maidens representing the original colonies. The perimeter scenes in the fresco, not fully visible from the floor of the Capitol, depict gods representing war, science, marine, commerce, mechanics, and agriculture.

From Caesar to Washington: The Politics of Apotheosis

The idea that George Washington rules from heaven may strike us as odd, a bit of idolatrous over-reach, yet it makes a certain sense. In the classical world that formed part of the backdrop to so much American ideology, ascension is what legitimized rulership. Here’s how N.T. Wright explains this in The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is:

“After Julius Caesar’s death, someone was bribed to swear that he had seen Caesar’s soul ascending to heaven. That trick was repeated with many of the subsequent emperors. It meant that the emperor had now officially been ‘deified’ – so that their successor became ‘son of the deified Julius’ or whoever. This was a rather obvious way of solidifying Rome’s hold on its vast empire.”

While nobody actually believes George Washington ascended to heaven, the symbolism is significant since from the beginning of the American experiment our leaders and ideologues have sought to underscore national power with quasi-spiritual narratives of divine legitimization. If Washington didn’t ascend to heaven he should have. Or at least, his ascension would be consistent with the strange civil religion that Peter Leithart refers to as “Americanism”—the mythos that positions the US as a redeemer nation; the mythos that is implicitly invoked every time the US engages in wars of territorial expansion.

Over the years the tenets of this civil religion have included doctrines such as Manifest Destiny, national redemption through blood atonement, inaugurated eschatology through American statehood (the latter being a stable of most older Protestant hymnbooks), and the quasi-deification of the state. These doctrines are certainly nothing new in the history of empires, although historically such ideas have been secured by claims of divinity, often a founding epic that places a god or demigod at the center of national origins.

The World Under New Management

I have shown elsewhere that the earliest records indicate that for a polis or empire to persuade citizens of legitimacy, law must ultimately flow from divinity. In the flattened metaphysical world of modernity, we assume that mere power establishes authority; but the ancients were wiser—they knew that when authority can only appeal to power, it is arbitrary and meaningless.

When we read the gospels, we find that Christ doesn’t challenge the ancient understanding that law must flow from divinity; rather, He assumes it. Christ tells Pilate that the latter only commands authority because it is given from above (Jn 19:10-11.) This offers a provisional legitimacy to human rulership (Rom 13:1-7) while also calling rulers to account. After all, if all authority comes from God, then no human authority can be absolute but remains accountable to a higher tribunal.

That higher authority is Christ’s kingdom. The devil’s presumption of authority over the world (Mt. 4:9 and Lk. 4:6) has been reversed in Matthew 28:18 when all authority over the kingdoms of this world is given to Christ.

But how was Christ’s authority over the kingdoms of this world secured? It was secured by the ascension: the climactic event that cemented the victory of the cross and resurrection, unambiguously establishing Jesus as rightly king.

Just as the spiritual significance of Ascension would not have been missed in the Greco-Roman context, it also would not have been missed within the Jewish context. In the Messianic prophecies of Daniel, the “Son of Man” ascends to the throne of the Ancient of Days to receive “dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him.” (Dan 7:14). The ascension accounts in Luke 24:50-53 and Acts 1:6-11 clearly invoke Daniel’s symbolism. The point would have been clear: the devil’s time is up and the world is now under management of the Heavenly Man.

Christ’s Kingdom Moves Into Enemy-Occupied Territory

Many Christians, especially those influenced by dispensational forms of Christianity, are uncomfortable acknowledging the present reality of Christ’s kingship. In my book Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics, I discuss how one of my early spiritual mentors frequently drew attention to how bad the world is, proclaiming, “Just look around you—clearly Christ isn’t Lord of the world; the devil is!” His point wasn’t anti-Christian cynicism but to emphasize that Christ’s kingship is deferred until the second coming.

This is a dangerous view, but we can understand why someone might take such a position. After all, Jesus and the New Testament writers sometimes describe God’s kingdom as fully present, while elsewhere they describe it as still future. For example, Jesus declared that the Kingdom of God has come upon the people (Lk. 11:20) and is “at hand,” (Mt. 4:17) while also instructing us to pray “Thy Kingdom come,” (Mt. 6:10) as if it is something yet to be realized. Similarly, Paul taught that Jesus is the king of this world (1 Tim. 6:13-15) yet he also said that the powers of darkness rule the earth (Eph. 2:1-3; 6:12). He proclaimed that Jesus was raised above all principalities and powers (Eph. 1:21) with “all things under his feet,” (Eph. 1:22) and yet elsewhere wrote that Christ must reign until all things are put under His feet (1 Cor. 15:25).

This theme of already and not-yet makes perfect sense in light of the classical world that formed the backdrop to the New Testament. In that world, political rulers would often assert dominion over lands that were still enemy occupied territory. “I’m the new ruler now,” they would essentially declare, “so it’s time to bow the knee or be conquered.” Even when the ruler’s ascendancy to the throne was initiated by overthrowing the previous king, there would still follow a period in which the new ruler would have to assert his authority, both among those who had not yet heard the news, as well as among those who were defiant and still clinging to the previous regime. The new king would have to put down rebellions and bring order and rule to the lands that were now rightfully his, or which he considered to be rightfully his as a result of conquest. Consider Herod the Great. In 40 B.C., the Roman Senate officially declared that Herod was “King of Judea.” There followed a period in which Herod mercilessly established his rule by pursuing Jewish nationalists, rebels, and brigands. The authority that Herod was given de jure needed to be established de facto.

And so it is with Christ’s kingdom. Christ has been seated at the right hand of the Father and is now engaged in a process of subduing to Himself the lands that are rightfully His. Christ made all things clean, but this finds its fulfillment in space and time as Christians offer up all food to God in thanksgiving. Christ opened the way back to Eden, but this finds fulfillment only as we feed on the Tree of Life that He offers us in the Sacred Mysteries. Christ defeated death, but this finds its fulfillment in space and time as we identify with Christ’s resurrection through communities of healing.

Outposts of the True King

Because Christ, not George Washington, rules from heaven, we should think twice about the national idolatries which surface every few decades in new guises. Currently, America is in the grip of a particularly strange variant of civil religion (let the reader understand!) of which the less said the better. But whether our false gods express themselves in state worship, political messianism, consumer culture, or other idolatries, the communities centered around the Ascended Lord offer an alternative. The church advances a counter-culture, not by mobilizing alternative modes of human power, but through communities of healing that offer rival accounts of what it means to be human.

In my upcoming talk for the Parish Life Conference, I will suggest what this looks like in practice, including specific ways we can bring Christ’s kingship into all the nooks and crannies of our communities. I will suggest ways our communities can effectively function as outposts of the true king, cells of resistance, within enemy-occupied territory. I hope to see you there!

Further Reading

• The Politics of Real Presence

• Register for Parish Life Conference

• MAGA Goes Woke

• Anti-Gnosticism Starts at Home

• Why Christians Shouldn’t Be Pacifists

• Approaching Biblical Theology as a Story

• Spiritual Nationalism in America

In the library where I work, I picked up a copy of Michael J. Sandel’s bestseller, Justice: What’s The Right Thing to Do. Skipping past the chapters on Bentham, Mill, Kant, and Rawls, I jumped straight to Sandel’s chapter on Aristotle (of course I did).

My attention was captured when Sandel noted that children instinctively view the world teleologically, only to have that understanding drummed out of them in adulthood.

We don’t think as much about teleology as did our ancestors, though the noun “telos” has risen sharply since the end of the last century. “Teleological” refers to explanations, actions, or systems that are understood in terms of their final purpose, design, or end (telos in Greek). In simple terms, a teleological explanation answers the question, “What is it for?”

Think, for a moment, about the chair you’re sitting on right now. (I would have said the chair I’m sitting on as I write, except I do all my work on a wobble stand).

Since most people don’t appreciate wobble stands, I’ll stick to chairs. Using Aristotelian categories, we can address the causes of chairs as follows.

• Material Cause. The Material Cause of a chair addresses the question, “What is it made of?”, and the answer is likely wood. (Okay, I know they’re making chairs from recycled ocean plastic, but I’m not talking about that type of chair right now.)

• Formal Cause. The Formal Cause would address the question “What gives this its form or structure?”, and the answer would be the design or shape that makes something a chair rather than, say, a table (or a wobble stand).

• Efficient Cause. The Efficient Cause would address the question, “What brought it into being?”, and the answer would be the agent—in this case, a carpenter—who built the chair. As a subdivision of efficient causality, we might also speak of Instrumental Causes, namely the tools and processes employed to bring the chair into being, such as a hammer, saw, chisel, etc..

• Final Cause. The Final Cause addresses the question, “What is it for?”, and addresses the purpose of the chair, namely to be sat on (leaving aside all the perverse utility functions to which a chair can be put).

The important take-home point is that the last type of causation (what Aristotle called the Final Cause) addresses the question of teleology—-the meaning and purpose of a thing, the reason for which a thing exists.

Of course, that is very different from how we think about causes today, and we are less inclined to use teleological explanations when describing the world. And that’s just the point. At least, it’s Michael Sandel’s point in Justice: What’s The Right Thing to Do.

Sandel, who serves as the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, argues that modern science has vanquished teleological explanations, orienting us against seeing the world as a purposeful whole. In the process, final causes lose the explanatory force they had for Aristotle and the classical tradition.

“In the ancient world, teleological thinking was more prevalent than it is today…. With the advent of modern science, nature ceased to be seen as a meaningful order. Instead, it came to be understood mechanistically, governed by the laws of physics. To explain natural phenomena in terms of purposes, meanings, and ends was now considered naïve and anthropomorphic.” p. 189

Certainly, sequestering teleological questions in the scientific pursuit can be purely methodological without necessarily implying a false world picture; one can study mechanism without having a mechanistic mindset. But I have argued elsewhere that the methods by which we understand the world often overflow their banks to become totalizing metaphors for all of life. This has happened in much modern science where focus on purely material and efficient causes means that, as Sandel put it, “to explain natural phenomena in terms of purposes, meanings, and ends was now considered naïve and anthropomorphic.”

But—and this is important—there is one area where the mechanistic outlook has not succeeded in totally vanishing teleology, and that is in the imaginations of children. Again from Sandel:

“Despite this shift, the temptation to see the world as teleologically ordered, as a purposeful whole, is not wholly absent. It persists, especially in children, who have to be educated out of seeing the world in this way.” p. 189

As an example, Sandel draws on his own experience reading Winnie-the-Pooh to his own children.

This book, Sandel suggests, “evokes a childlike view of nature as enchanted, animated by meaning and purpose.” As an example of this “childlike view” of the world, Sandel cites the delightful passage from chapter 1 so familiar to all Pooh lovers.

Winnie-the-Pooh sat down at the foot of the tree, put his head between his paws and began to think.

First of all he said to himself: “That buzzing-noise means something. You don’t get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something. If there’s a buzzing-noise, somebody’s making a buzzing noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you’re a bee.”

Then he thought another long time, and said: “And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey.”

And then he got up, and said: “And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.” So he began to climb the tree.

For Pooh, a buzzing noise is not just a buzzing noise: it is a sound pregnant with meaning. And bees exist for a purpose.

Pooh’s view of the world is somewhat egocentric since he sees everything existing for the satiation of his belly. Yet Pooh is nonetheless wiser than many modern thinkers, who believe we can understand the world independently of questions of meaning, purpose, and intentionality.

Pooh is basically good yet immature. He reflects a childish sense that the world is there for him. As he matures, Pooh will need to lose none of that sense of wonder and purpose. He will continue to see bees and trees and honey, the world itself, as inherently purposeful—and thus in some sense enchanted—yet with a purpose pointing beyond himself (and even beyond itself).

Many of us never reach that stage of maturity. We shed the childish sense of wonder of a world that exists to serve our appetites, without ever growing into the childlike sense of wonder at the privilege of living in a world that is full of meaning, glory, and intention.

Pooh realized that the buzzing-noise means something. Do the beautiful internal workings of a call mean something? Does the harmonious dance of the celestial bodies mean something? Is the universe itself ordered toward purpose and intentionality?

Back to Sandel.

“Pooh’s childlike line of thought about the bees is a good example of teleological reasoning. By the time we are adults, most of us outgrow this way of viewing the natural world, seeing it as charming but quaint. And having rejected teleological thinking in science, we are also inclined to reject it in politics and morals.” (p. 190)

Ah, there’s the rub, and the central problem of the modern liberal political project. To talk about the ends (telos) for which human communities exist, and toward which they should be ordered, is necessarily to inquire into the purpose for which humanity exists. It is to ask questions such as, “What is the good life?” and thus, “What is the Good?” But that introduces into politics questions of values, metaphysics, and even theology. The problem is that since the Enlightenment it has become increasingly axiomatic that politics must be value-neutral. Though there are important exceptions (especially in regimes that have reacted against modern liberalism), modern statecraft has generally proceeded without open acknowledgement of any substantive notion of human flourishing or of the Good toward which human communities should be ordered. Thus, politics has tended to collapse into a closed system with no goal, no final principle, and no destination. In the modern world, we view this type of value-neutral politics as a feature and not a bug; the very essence of a free society. As Sandel explains,

“To attribute some purpose or end to political community in advance would seem to preempt the right of citizens to decide for themselves. It would also risk imposing values not everyone shares. Our reluctance to invest politics with a determinate telos, or end, reflects a concern for individual freedom. We view politics as a procedure that enables persons to choose their ends for themselves.” 192-93

The problem with the modern liberal order is that it has never been clear how the political enterprise can achieve coherence if there is no acknowledged end or goal towards which human society is oriented. But this is precisely the conceit of attempting to construct a political order on value-neutral premises. To pursue the common good independent of any conception of the Highest Good is to collapse the political enterprise into self-referentiality.

This is precisely why Alasdair MacIntyre predicted the collapse of liberalism. In his Harvard inaugural lecture “The Privatization of the Good,” MacIntyre noted that while liberalism presents itself as neutral and rational, it actually depends on unacknowledged moral traditions; it focuses on procedural categories like rights, rules, fairness, even though these categories become interminably debatable (and ultimately incoherent) when their grounding is not acknowledged, and indeed cannot be acknowledged within the terms left by the modern liberal order assumed by both left and right.

What is the solution? Maybe the answer lies in returning to teleology. Just as many of our top scientists are now realizing that we cannot do science properly without questions of purpose and intentionality (and thus Intelligence), so many political philosophers (including many associated with post-liberal conservatism) are now coming to realize that we cannot do law and statecraft without first settling metaphysical questions like, “what is the purpose of human society?” and “what is the Good toward which human communities should strive?”

Sandel gives a nod to this nascent understanding. In the second half of his chapter, Sandel gives Aristotle’s teleological conception of politics a fair hearing, even showing how it could apply to contemporary questions like affirmative action and political participation. He doesn’t go as far as MacIntyre, or even Pooh for that matter, but he does get pretty close with this fantastic ending of this chapter.

“Debates about justice and rights are often, unavoidably, debates about the purpose of social institutions, the goods they allocate, and the virtues they honor and reward. Despite our best attempts to make law neutral on such questions, it may not be possible to say what’s just without arguing about the nature of the good life.” 207

If Sandel is correct, then maybe we should pay more attention to Aristotle. And maybe Plato was onto something as well when he advocated rule by philosopher-kings. If we want a better world, perhaps we need to work toward the day when all politicians are philosophers, and all scientists are poets. If that seems out of reach, then maybe we should simply aim to become more like Winnie-the-Pooh.

Further Reading

• A Teleological Odyssey: Homer’s Ethical Realism and Odysseus’ Emotional Labors

• The Dark Side of Libertarian Freedom (Part 1): How an Anarcho-Capitalist Experiment Went Bad

• The Dark Side of Libertarian Freedom (Part 2): Why Freedom for the Sake of Freedom Leads to Bondage

• The Dark Side of Libertarian Freedom (Part 3): A Classical Christian Alternative to the Freedom Debate

• Subverting the Hero’s Journey: How Modern Stories Malform the Imagination

The reason the first man didn’t feel any pain is because his injuries, though severe, were framed in positive terms. The injuries saved his life by allowing him to exit the war for the safety of the hospital. He was glad to be injured and alive – in fact, to be alive because he was injured. Given this framing narrative, he experienced amazing resilience to the impact of pain.

What about the other man with the 12-inch nail through his foot? When the hospital staff finally succeeded in cutting away his shoe, they noticed an incredible sight: the nail had landed between his toes, not puncturing his skin at all. His pain (real physical pain, to be sure) resulted from a perceived lack of resilience to what he thought had happened. The key here is what he “thought” he experienced. What we think about our struggles, pain, and suffering, has a direct impact on how we feel and our level of resilience. For example, if we think, “this situation is impossible to cope with,” you probably will be unable to cope.

The story of these two men is told in Anna Lembke’s book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. I revisited this book when researching for my article “The Slot Machine in Your Pocket.” I wanted better to understand addiction, which is such an important issue today given the almost endless availability of chemical and behavioral drugs. But for me the most valuable part of Lembke’s addiction research is her insight on how resilience is directly tied to our thoughts about struggle and the mindset we bring to pain. She challenges us to ask whether we approach struggle with an “I can’t cope,” mentality, or with a growth mindset that embraces hardship as an opportunity to become stronger.

Lembke’s thesis is that the current addiction crisis is not merely because of the ready availability of chemical and behavioral drugs, but because we live in a society that pathologizes any type of discomfort. Believing we need to run from all pain, the result is not resilience but fragility, weakness, and ultimately addiction.

Lembke, who is program director for the Stanford Addiction Medicine Fellowship, believes that one of the core problems behind addiction can be found in the fact that children growing up in the modern west are increasingly socialized to be fragile.

Perceiving children as psychologically fragile is a quintessentially modern concept… Today, many parents I see are terrified of doing or saying something that will leave their child with an emotional scar, thereby setting them up, so the thinking goes, for emotional suffering and even mental illness in later life.

This notion can be traced to Freud, whose groundbreaking psychoanalytic contribution was that early childhood experiences, even those long forgotten or outside of conscious awareness, can cause lasting psychological damage. Unfortunately, Freud’s insight that early childhood trauma can influence adult psychopathology has morphed into the conviction that any and every challenging experience primes us for the psychotherapy couch.

Our efforts to insulate our children from adverse psychological experiences play out not just in the home but also in school. At the primary school level, every child receives some equivalent of the “Star of the Week” award—not for any particular accomplishment but in alphabetical order. Every child is taught to be on the lookout for bullies lest they become bystanders instead of upstanders. At the university level, faculty and students talk about triggers and safe spaces.

That parenting and education are informed by developmental psychology and empathy is a positive evolution. We should acknowledge every person’s worth independent of achievement, stop physical and emotional brutality on the schoolyard and everywhere else, and create safe spaces to think, learn, and discuss.

But I worry that we have both oversanitized and overpathologized childhood, raising our children in the equivalent of a padded cell, with no way to injure themselves but also no means to ready themselves for the world.

By protecting our children from adversity, have we made them deathly afraid of it? By bolstering their self-esteem with false praise and a lack of real-world consequences, have we made them less tolerant, more entitled, and ignorant of their own character defects? By giving in to their every desire, have we encouraged a new age of hedonism? (p. 35-37)

Lembke’s insights cohere with observations I made in my column at Salvo Magazine in the articles, “What Does Social Science Say About Hardship?” and “Grit and Godliness.” In the latter piece, I drew on a conversation Keith McCurdy had with Brian Phillips for the Circe Institute podcast. McCurdy explained that in his work as a professional counselor, he continually encounters parents who believe their calling is not to produce sturdy children but happy children. These parents will go to great lengths to try to keep their children perpetually comfortable. McCurdy explains that trying to make children happy by keeping them comfortable is actually self-defeating since it leads to low levels of life satisfaction. Children who have not learned to embrace struggle will more likely be ruled by their emotions and will thus lack the durability that enables them to weather difficulties with sturdiness, competence, and resilience. Moreover, children who have not been trained to embrace struggle will be more likely to go to pieces at the slightest difficulty. From McCurdy:

I ask groups of parents all the time at the beginning of a talk (and I say this is a question to be thinking about as we talk tonight): “would you rather have a child that’s sturdy and capable, or a child that’s happy and successful?” And that really frames it because the two really go in two different directions if that’s your target, because the way we target happiness and satisfaction today is not through struggle – it’s through clearing the path. But if we really target “sturdy and capable” then our children… experience more happiness through life, they experience more peace through life, more joy through life. And parents really struggle with that. But what I tell parents is this: unless we introduce struggle into the lives of their children, they will be run by their emotions.

Listen to Keith McCurdy’s entire podcast with Brian Phillips (no relation to me). And while you’re at it, also listen to the two interviews he did about raising sturdy kids, here and here. The take-home point is that one of the keys to a flourishing life is being able to sit with discomfort; accordingly, when we help our kids embrace struggle as positive, they grow in sturdiness and resiliency. This is counter-cultural to the messages our children get from the media and popular movies, which often encourage weakness (see my earlier post, “How Disney’s ‘Encanto’ Encourages Weakness”).

The opposite of sturdiness and resiliency is to be ruled by one’s emotions. A person who is ruled by emotions, and who believes we must avoid struggle at all costs, becomes vulnerable to behavioral and chemical addictions. And that brings us back to Lembke’s work. She believes that by trying to shield our children from all discomfort, we are creating a generation who are weak and lacking in resilience. When you add this to the ready availability of drugs, is it any wonder we have an addiction crisis?

Lembke goes further, showing how the planned pursuit of moderate pain can recalibrate our hedonic set point, leading to greater mental and emotional resilience over time. It might seem incredible, but the research she cites suggests that everything from fibromyalgia to impulse control to mood disorder to ordinary aches and pains can sometimes (not always) be addressed with therapeutic applications of moderate pain.

Consider the discomfort of cold water immersion. This causes the body to be flooded with dopamine similar to the effects of cocaine, but with one important exception: afterwards you taper back to baseline dopamine unlike drugs that culminate in a prolonged dip below baseline. In the long term, repeated exposure to uncomfortable activities help toughen a person, leading to more resilience and (sometimes) reducing general susceptibility to pain.

Pain leads to pleasure by triggering the body’s own regulating homeostatic mechanisms… With intermittent exposure to pain, our natural hedonic set point gets weighted to the side of pleasure, such that we become less vulnerable to pain and more able to feel pleasure. (Lemke, p. 144-5)

Lemke tells of an interesting experiment with dogs, conducted in the 1960’s before ethical regulations prohibiting cruelty to animals. The dogs hind paws were connected to an electrical current, and they were subjected to severe shocks. The dogs were terrified and gave all the symptoms of severe pain. After repeated exposure, however, the dogs not only stopped seeming to mind the pain, but started to experience longer and longer after-response that the experimenters described as “fits of joy.”

With repeated exposure to a painful stimulus, the dog’s mood and heart rate adapted in kind. The initial response (pain) got shorter and weaker. The after-response (pleasure) got longer and stronger. Pain morphed into hypervigilance [which] morphed into a “fit of joy.” An elevated heart rate, consistent with a fight-or-flight reaction, morphed into minimal heart rate elevation followed by prolonged bradycardia, a slowed heart rate seen in states of deep relaxation.”

It’s not possible to read this experiment without feeling pity for the animals subjected to this torture. Yet the so called “fit of joy” suggests a tantalizing possibility: By pressing on the pain side of the balance, might we achieve a more enduring source of pleasure?”

After reading Dopamine Nation, I realized how most of my bad habits arise from trying to avoid discomfort. One example is that if I’m hungry and food is available, I find it hard to wait until the next meal even though, given my personal goals, I know I ought to wait. The root of this struggle is that I don’t like to be uncomfortable. That same is true when it comes to my spiritual and athletic goals: I make excuses because I don’t want to be uncomfortable. Thus, I started to wonder if I could give myself a boost toward better habits by increasing my tolerance to discomfort. So I have been doing cold water immersion for a while. Here’s me trying to put this into practice in practically freezing water at Cedar Run Falls at the Shenandoah National Park (my happy place).

After reading about the experiment with the dogs, I decided to try something a little more drastic: I began seeing how long I could hold two ice cubes simultaneously – one in my right hand and the other in my left. At first I could only do it for 25 seconds, then 30 seconds, then…well, now I can hold the ice cubes until they melt. This has both a short-term and a long-term benefit. In the short-term, the feeling I get afterwards is euphoric, as my body compensates for the pain by flooding my system with dopamine before tapering off to baseline (the hedonic set point); in the long-term, I have become more resilient to pain so it takes more to get me rattled.

Okay, maybe my experiments on myself are just another case of mind over matter like the men at the hospital. But…isn’t that the whole point? Again, what we think about our struggles, and the conceptual template by which we frame our challenges, actually change how we experience those struggles. From chapter 7 of Gratitude in Life’s Trenches:

The frames through which we view our experience do not simply influence the way we think about our lives; they also affect our quality of life. The difference between a life of joy and a life of self-pity lies in the power of these frames, as does the difference between a life of gratefulness and a life of grumbling…

Research has found that if we are not deliberate about our mindset, then we naturally gravitate toward negative ways of framing our experience (e.g., the glass is half empty rather than half full)....

By being deliberate about our mindset, we can disrupt negative thoughts and find alternative ways of viewing the same experiences. We can learn, as one ancient prayer puts it, to “bury in me the evil devices of the devil with good thoughts.” By practicing this type of reframing over an extended period of time, we actually effect material changes in our brain, causing growth of new synapses between our neurons.

Ok, so your life is influenced by mindset. And that should challenge us to assess the mindset we have about discomfort. I’ve suggested that having a different mindset about struggle can help us become more resilient. But the dark side is that our mindset can also make us fragile, and that is exactly what is happening with so much modern parenting. It is also what we see happening in many modern universities.

In her book While Time Remains, North Korean’s defector, Yeonmi Park, shares how she was shocked, as a student at Columbia University, to see American professors preoccupied over their students’ comfort: telling students they didn’t have to read the textbook if it triggered them, obsessing over “safe spaces” where students could be insulated from challenge, or teaching students they were oppressed even though these students came from some of the richest and most elite families in America. Given that Park had endured physical abuse, starvation, and human trafficking as a girl, you can imagine her concern when encountering the fragility of her American peers. Park warns that the institutional pursuit of weakness is creating a generation lacking in basic resilience.

We don’t need to face the harsh realities of a police state like North Korea to cultivate the inner strength that enables us to face hardship without reflexively seeking escape in addictive comforts. On the contrary, normal life usually offers enough opportunities for us to embrace struggle, in everything from household chores to homework to challenging relationships. By being mindful about our mindset in these struggles, we can leverage them for inner growth, developing the type of resilience that buffers us from vulnerability to addiction.

In closing, I want to suggest that there is something else that acts as a protective layer against addiction: good wholesome community activities, whether hiking, music, reading groups, church activities, exercise (perhaps especially team sports, including martial arts).

Evidence for this comes from Iceland of all places. In 2017, Emma Young wrote an article for The Atlantic observing how Iceland, a nation historically characterized by extreme rates of adolescent addiction, came to “[top] the European table for the cleanest-living teens.”

How did the Icelandic people achieve this staggering transformation? It started with Harvey Milkman, an American psychology professor who taught for part of the year at Reykjavik University in Iceland. Milkman recognized that teenagers were turning to addictive substances to get high as a way of dealing with stress. But rather than simply confronting the drugs directly—for example, focusing exclusively on enforcement measures, or the problem of easy access—Milkman wondered what would happen if community leaders worked with the grain, offering healthy activities that delivered the same types of highs the adolescents were seeking from chemical substances.

Milkman reflected: “Why not orchestrate a social movement around natural highs: around people getting high on their own brain chemistry—because it seems obvious to me that people want to change their consciousness—without the deleterious effects of drugs?” His plan for achieving this was simple: work with community leaders to give adolescents access to music, dance, exercise, martial arts, and other activities that help people cope with stress and offer healthy highs.

Milkman was given a $1.2 million government grant to test his idea. Icelandic local governments got on board, organizing wholesome activities young people could do after school. Emma Young reported that

State funding was increased for organized sport, music, art, dance and other clubs, to give kids alternative ways to feel part of a group, and to feel good, rather than through using alcohol and drugs, and kids from low-income families received help…to pay for recreational activities.

The results? Young continued:

The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42 percent in 1998 to 5 percent in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 percent to 7 percent. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 percent to just 3 percent.

Other factors played into the transformation of Reykjavik, but at the core was replacing addiction with healthy pursuits. These results, though staggering, should not come as a surprise, for folk wisdom and common sense have always affirmed that healthy activities like (e.g. exercise, music, dance, crafts, etc.), help us flourish as human beings, and thus protect us against the forces that would enslave us to our appetites.

I also strongly suspect that the success of the Icelandic plan was because these activities fostered healthy social connections. As Mary Mesiha reminded us at last year’s OCAMPR conference, healthy human relationships creates a protective layer against addiction since the opposite of addiction is not sobriety but connection. Social activities, and healthy connection with others, is not an optional extra, but essential to a spiritually healthy, flourishing human being.

The Islandic examples comes with a warning for parents: if you want to protect your children from addiction in later life, start when they’re young by encouraging activities based on healthy social connections (group hikes, group dance, group music, group worship, group games), while putting healthy digital boundaries in place to discourage children becoming isolated in their bedrooms with technology. Moreover, given what we know about the therapeutic value of discomfort, perhaps the best activities are those that join human connection with healthy struggle: such as sports, hiking, and ascetic worship practices pursued communally.

Further Reading

• Nine Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Parenting Teenagers

• Saint Paisios and the Value of Struggle

• Struggle is an Opportunity For Growth!

• What Does Social Science Say About Hardship?

• Grit and Godliness

• Is the New Country Music Making us Weak?

• Great Lent and Cultural Anthropology

In 1722, Count Nicolas Ludwig von Zinzendorf offered a portion of his land, in modern-day Germany, as a settling place for refugees from the Moravian church. The Moravians, a Protestant sect following the teachings of Jan Hus, had been experiencing persecution for centuries at the hands of both Catholics and Protestants.

With the refuge available on Count Zinzendorf’s land in Herrnhut, struggling Christians relocated from neighboring Moravia, located in the modern-day Czech Republic. During the next five years, religious refugees started trickling into the Herrnhut community from all over Europe. This included not only displaced Moravians, but also people from other Protestant groups seeking religious freedom. Eventually the community numbered around three hundred.

From the outset, the group was fractured. It was not easy for so many scattered refugees, all with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, to exist as a single community. Many of the newcomers defined themselves, not by their new community, but by the different traditions they had come from. The divisions came to include theological disagreements, personality disputes, and a web of misunderstandings, until the community lay on the verge of total disintegration.

Up to this point, Count Zinzendorf had remained distant from the community, living separately from them. But after five years, learning how dire the situation had become, he moved into the area and began working to unify the group. He began going door to door, encouraging people to come together for accountability and prayer. His work culminated in a Communion Service on August 13, 1727. This was significant because the group had not celebrated Holy Communion in over a year. Before the service Count Zinzendorf urged people to make their hearts ready, visiting each household, encouraging repentance and hearing their confessions.

The result of the communion service was transformative. The various refugees stopped defining themselves by their previous cultural backgrounds and preferences but by the new community constituted around the Eucharist. This community became so strong that it exists to this day.

Once they began functioning as a Eucharistic community, they started developing a culture. The culture that developed out of the shared common life would come to have its own traditions of food, music clothing, and architecture. Much of this culture has lasted to this day.

The healing of the community through the Eucharist, in turn, led to an impact on the wider society. Once the group began functioning as a community, they began sending out missionaries. Eventually they sent out 226 missionaries and started 13 missions around the world, as far afield as Greenland and the West Indies. They started providing discipleship and education to slaves at a time when other Christian groups were neglecting them. They worked with other marginalized groups, including the American Indians.

What is fascinating about the Moravians is that even though they were Protestants, and in some sense part of the larger movement referred to by historians as the Radical Reformation, they did believe in the Real Presence of Christ in Holy Communion. Their model of the Eucharist was not just “eat it and go” like a Starbucks drive through; rather, they understood that in the Holy Supper, God was constituting them as a community. They would always look back to Christ meeting them in the Eucharist as the basis of their healed society, and the cultural renewal that emerged out of it.

I want to thank Dr. Cory Wilson, president of Emmaus Theological Seminary, for his research on these events of the 18^th century, and for passing it onto me.

Renewing Society Through Communion

Like the Moravian refugees, Christians today are also scattered and divided. The cultural and economic dynamics of the contemporary world have resulted in most people having the status of refugees, displaced from the towns in which they grew up, and finding themselves worshiping with people from different economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. And even if we’ve been blessed by stability of place, the dynamics of modern economics and technology often isolate us. Whether isolated in suburbs, fragmented on social media, or caught in the consumerist trap of industrial capitalism, modern men and women suffer isolation and fragmentation similar to the refugees seeking safety in the Herrnhut community. Like them, we also must somehow find a way to live together as one family, and to define ourselves by the new community constituted around the Eucharist. And as we cooperate with God’s grace, then rather than existing merely as isolated individuals, we can begin developing a shared common life. We begin to renew the culture centered around the Holy Mysteries, which then flows outward to the broader society.

It’s easy to gloss over the links between Eucharist, community, and culture. We may acknowledge that Eucharistic miracles occur as people are occasionally healed of disease when they receive the body and blood of Christ, yet the greater miracle we often miss is that through the Eucharist God constituting a people—a community in the midst of a society of anti-community.

But is there really a link between the Eucharist and the renewal of society? If you had asked me this question before I started attending St. Patrick’s, I probably would have said no. But I joined the parish just as Fr. Patrick was mid-flow in an extensive Sunday school series on culture and community, and the relationship of both to the sacrifice of the Mass. Fr. Patrick has been teaching us that the Eucharist is what generates, nurtures, and sustains the parish community which, in turn, provides the divine energies for the transformation of all other societies and nations.

Making the case for Eucharistic community is difficult for a number of reasons. For one thing, we often misunderstand the Eucharist. Most of the current ways of conceptualizing Communion, even among sacramental traditions, treat the Holy Mysteries in ways not integrated with community, with the result that the Eucharist becomes compartmentalized from our understanding of culture and community. Though we might expect this within non-liturgical traditions holding a purely memorial view of the Supper, it is even prevalent among Orthodox, Catholic and High Church Protestants, since what functionally prevails is often more akin to a franchise view of Communion: the Eucharist is approached like a Starbucks drive-through with no organic connection to the community in which it is celebrated.

But we also find ourselves up against misunderstandings of culture. Most of the current prescriptions for cultural renewal bypass the role of embodied community, treating culture as an abstraction. I’ve been involved in the discourse on cultural renewal ever since I was 26 years old when I started working for a Christian lobby group in the UK. Since then, I’ve worked for numerous Christian organizations that have a mission to renew culture and transform society. Yet in all this ministry, it’s been very rare to see attention given to the relationship between cultural renewal and community. Significantly, when Rod Dreher ignited discussion about the relation between community and cultural renewal in the discourse on the Benedict Option, his emphasis on sacramental micro-communities was widely received as a repudiation of culture, as if focusing on community as the linchpin of cultural renewal somehow equates to a run-for-the-hills isolationism. Neglecting the role of community in cultural renewal has led to massive misunderstandings, not only about strategies for cultural renewal, but even about the nature of our current anti-culture.

I’d like to explore this last point, as well as the relation between culture and community. This will lay the groundwork for returning to a discussion of the Eucharist, and its role in transforming society through re-constituting community.

Culture, Community and Anti-Community

When we think of our current anti-culture, many things come to mind. Anti-culture manifests itself in widespread violence, pornography, addiction, hedonism, abortion, atheistic education, and the relegating of religion to the personal and private sphere.

But I want to suggest that we can actually understand all these disorders as symptoms of a far deeper malaise. These are all symptoms of an anti-culture that can be defined, first and foremost, as an erosion of community.

The legacy of the great historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970) helps us understand the relation between culture and community.

Dawson defined culture as the common life of an aggregate of people. Culture is a shared public life, a life a people live in common. If we take Dawson’s conception seriously then, of course, culture cannot be abstracted from embodied community. “Culture” is not an abstraction that exists in the same abstract plane as “the market” in economics – as a disembodied phenomenon. There is only the culture of embodied communities.

Today we often use the word “culture” as simply short-hand for society or civilization. “Society” or “civilization” is a legitimate way to talk about the aggregate cultures that make up, say, American society or Chinese civilization. But what we sometimes forget is that these broader societies only exist as the aggregate of multiple micro-cultures (of people sharing a common public life), just as “the market” only exists because of the commerce of actual individuals.

Though this point might seem merely definitional and pedantic, it is extremely important in properly orienting our thoughts on culture. Often when Christians talk about cultural renewal, we neglect the role of embodied micro-communities, with the result that culture becomes something disembodied and abstract. This would be like analyzing abstract trends in “the contemporary family” in a way that neglected the experience and importance of actual embodied families. And when we think of culture as an abstraction, we end up neglecting the role of community. A case in point is that when Christians speak of “taking back the culture,” this often references a detached mono-culture, namely the national or transnational institutions of media, politics, music, literature, and so forth, with no necessary connection to embodied communities in time and place.

If we attend to the etymology of the word “culture,” we find that embodied communities are intrinsic to it. Culture, in the original sense, is a place we inhabit—a place we inhabit sufficiently to cultivate it even as a farmer tills his field. As the contemporary American philosopher, Edward S. Casey, observed when defining culture in his 1996 essay, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time”:

“The very word culture meant ‘place tilled’ in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, ‘to inhabit, care for, till, worship’ and cultus, ‘A cult, especially a religious one.’ To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly.”

Notice the relation between habitation and cultivation. When we inhabit a culture and have a sense of responsibility for it, then it becomes a place we attend to with art, institutions, ceremonies, festivals, local traditions, worship—in short, all the things that come to mind when we think of culture, and all the things we seek to defend from the forces of chaos and barbarism.

But habitation is an embodied reality. Nobody inhabits the institutions of media, politics, music, etc., in the aggregate; what we inhabit is a particular place that we embody with a shared public life.

A shared public life in an embodied community is ultimately about love. It’s about love between us and the people with whom we share a common life. And culture is about the creative products—institutions, art, traditions, leisure practices—that emerge out of that loving common life.

As an example of how culture emerges out of a loving common life, consider a family. A man and woman are private individuals, but when they come together in marriage, their shared common life creates a mini-culture. This culture is creative, giving birth to a little community, a family. A family is a miniature culture: each family has their own customs, rituals, and traditions that organically emerge out of their shared public life. And the culture of one family is different to the culture of another family, even though both families may inhabit the same broader society.

Similarly, the culture of a village, a tribe, a neighborhood, will have its own traditions, rituals, and unspoken understandings, that give cohesion and meaning to their shared public life.

So let’s recap the ground we’ve covered so far.

1. Culture presupposes community, and community presupposes culture.

2. Culture is a shared public life particular to a people inhabiting a place, and the cultivation of that public life via traditions and creative products (i.e., institutions, art, customs, buildings, laws, patterns of leisure, etc.)

3. Culture is rooted in love—love between us and the people with whom we share a public life.

4. Culture exists in the institutions, art, creativity, traditions, and products that emerge out of that loving common life.

Conceptualizing culture in this way helps us understand the true import of what it means to live in an anti-culture. The reason culture is in disarray, and can often only be conceived in the abstract, is because there has been an erosion of embodied community, of shared public life, and of the love that holds culture and community together. There are many examples we could give but consider towns.

Neighborhoods Without Neighbors; Churches Without Parishes

In my previous article, “After Habitation,” I mentioned that the typical modern neighborhood has nothing to distinguish it from hundreds of other similar neighborhoods, while the features of towns that used to help establish a common public life—things like town squares, street corners, taverns, walkable market places—are usually not accessible from, let alone within, the neighborhoods, wherever else they may exist in the city.

This means that the things that tie us to the land—including shared public life particular to a locale—become tenuous and fungible, with the consequence that we are not truly “inhabiting” the places we live in a real and meaningful sense.

Today’s neighborhoods and cities that once fostered community have become places that actually isolate us from one another. Many people tell me, not simply that they don’t know their neighbors, but that if they were to take steps to get to know their neighbors, that would be considered highly weird. Gestures of goodwill to people on one’s own street risk getting oneself labelled as a creep. Through automatic garage doors, we can enter and exit our house literally without ever having to step foot in our neighborhood, and many people go years without even knowing the names of people two or three houses adjacent.

One of the ways I think of hell, based on near death experiences, is a place where there are lots of people crammed together but no love—no community. And sadly that is a description of many contemporary residential areas. Our neighborhoods have, in fact, become zones of anti-community, as the logic of individualism and industrial capitalism have swallowed up shared civic life. Spiritually, we are like the displaced individuals who congregated in the Herrnhut community.

This is a picture of where I lived when I was writing this part of the present essay.

I don’t actually live there anymore because I was subsequently evicted. (It wasn’t because of not paying rent, and I was only late on my rent once. I was evicted because the landlord wanted to sell the house and I couldn’t afford to buy it.) Anyway, you can see that they’ve tried to create an old-fashion city vibe, complete with street lamps, that has a certain aesthetic appeal. Yet people are effectively warehoused together without any real sense of communal life. If I were to open a coffee shop or create a town square or a place of worship, I could face civil penalties, and ultimately even arrest, because city planners have deliberately worked to separate living from commerce, and work from leisure, and leisure from worship.

Not only are these structures built as a militant violation of God’s stamp on creation through the rejection of geometry and sacred patterns, but their very design and layout turn them into temples to autonomous individualism.

This type of housing, like anti-communal neighborhoods and cities, does not spring up naturally. If development is left to unfold organically within economies of scale, then city streets, villages, and neighborhoods typically foster shared public life. What we have today is the result of thousands of political and economic choices, including numerous rules and artificial impositions, that collectively suppress the natural impulses of humans as social creatures. From Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” which bulldozed neighborhoods in the name of progress, to economic policies hostile to small businesses, to so-called urban renewal schemes that separate commerce from living, to the growing logic of the modern nation state, we now live within a political, economic and regulatory ecosystem inimical to genuine community. The common factor in this ecosystem has been to facilitate what Philip Bess refers to as “that shrinkage of the public realm happening reciprocally and in tandem with America’s growth industry, the care and tending of the autonomous self.”

This has brought political consequences that are rarely understood, including renegotiating the very meaning of patriotism. If you love your community you will fight for it. However, when one community or neighborhood is more or less interchangeable with any other, then people become disincentivized to fight against policies or persons threatening to undermine the integrity of their community, because one can always just move somewhere else. If a data center goes up in your neighborhood, then rather than fight, you can simply relocate. When nothing ties you to the particularity of one locale vs. another, then patriotism becomes merely abstract, reduced to a vague allegiance to the bureaucratic mechanisms of the nation state.

The same mentality often prevails in how we approach church: on the franchise view of church, where one parish is more or less interchangeable with any other, then if there is a recurring problem, or if there is a person you don’t get on well with, then instead of learning to work through the problems in love, patience and long-suffering, you can simply leave. Church begins to be approached, not as an actual parish community, but like a drive-through, where the services offered become fungible with any other church in your larger archdiocese or communion. For many modern evangelical Christians, the very term “parish” has receded into anachronism. Our approach to church then comes to mirror the breakdown of community that is the hallmark of our anti-culture.

Now to be sure, the vestiges of community still exist today, but they have migrated around amenities (the gym, swimming pool, coworking lounge), or affinity groups centered around entertainment (sports, music, etc.).

Even in some rural communities where the echoes of authentic social cohesion still linger, technology is isolating the younger generation from any deep awareness of mutual dependence, as the omnipresent digital ecosystem reinforces the myth of self-sufficiency and radical autonomy. When universities, or malls, or coffee shops, make a nod toward the need for communal bonds, it often feels that community is just one more therapeutic add-on in the ongoing quest for self-actualization.

We know in our bones that there is a different type of life. Tourists come from thousands of miles to visit old towns built in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages, with the tourists often not fully understanding what attracts them to these spots. Yes, we like them because they are old and historic, but even more fundamentally, whether we realize it or not, old European towns attract us because all the elements—from winding cobblestone roads to marketplaces to city gates to village commons—foster community. Streets and the squares designed to be active public places have a humanizing pull that is remarkably strong, even when these spaces no longer function as living centers of shared communal life, just as historic churches attract us even when they no longer function as vibrant places of worship.

Remember that shared public life is the seedbed of culture. In historic villages, principalities and small kingdoms, the culture of community became incarnated in customs, rituals, and institutions that included everything from local food traditions to leisure practices to unique forms of clothing and music. But within the modern context, to the extent that culture is incarnated in customs, rituals, and institutions, these tend to be the institutions and traditions of mass mono-culture, without any intrinsic relationship to real embodied micro-communities. Even when this mono-culture is subdivided into affinity groups—such as youth culture or consumer subculture, or ideological tribes—these occur within the matrix of largely disembodied consumption networks possessing no organic relation to actual embodied communities and spaces.

If you can’t have a culture without community, the recovery of community must lie at the heart of cultural renewal. So let’s add a 5^th and 6^th point to our earlier summary.

5. Modern society is inimical to community. As such, we live in an anti-culture.

6. The recovery of community must lie at the heart of cultural renewal.

And you can probably guess, based on my opening story about the Herrnhut community, where I’m headed in this argument:

7. The solution to recovering community, and thus culture, is restored communion with God in the Eucharist, and the embodied micro-communities that emerge out of sacramental celebration.

At this point, many questions emerge. Christians celebrate the Eucharist tens of thousands of times every week, so why do we still live in an anti-culture? Is the renewal of culture and community via the Eucharist something mystical, or is it something we can see and participate in tangibly? And how does this relate to other aspects of societal engagement?

In order to properly address these questions, we need to marinate ourselves in Eucharistic theology. Unfortunately, the sacramental debates between Protestants and Catholics over the last 500 years have largely hijacked discussion of the Eucharistic to narrow categories about how Christ is or is not present in Communion, thus eclipsing biblical aspects of how Holy Communion reconstitutes community and culture. To properly align our thinking with scripture, we need to go back to the very beginning.

The notion that there is a necessary relationship between culture and community is rooted in the Garden of Eden.

The Cultural Mandate and the Rise of Anti-Culture

In the beginning, God gave the human family a world rich in cultural, technological, aesthetic, and institutional potential, and He told them to go out and develop it. That is why Genesis 1:26–28 and 2:15 are often referred to as the “cultural mandate.” But what was the foundation of Adam and Eve’s culture-building vocation? It was communion with the Creator. The little community Adam and Eve had with each other and the animals—and en potencia with all the future communities implicit in the command to be fruitful and multiply—were outgrowths of communion with the Creator, who came down to walk and talk with them in the cool of the day (Gen 3:8).

Through culture and godly community, men and women could take what was true in heaven—and that little part of heaven that had come to earth known as Eden—and extend that throughout the entire planet, making everywhere habitable for the divine presence. As such, the culture-building tasks humans were given—geographical and numerical expansion, tending and guarding, shepherding and dominion-taking, etc.—were not ends in themselves, as if the human vocation was fundamentally utilitarian. Rather, the culture-building vocation was an outgrowth of, and a means to further facilitate, intimate union with the Creator. This becomes particularly clear if we read the Genesis narrative in the context of the Ancient Near East (ANE).

Genesis, though it describes events at the very beginning of history, is a literary product of the ANE, and thus must be interpreted in that setting. And scholars have noted that the creation account reads like an ANE temple construction narrative.

In the ANE, temples were places to facilitate the presence of a god. Here’s briefly how it worked. In the mindset of the ANE, the purpose of religion was not for humans to go to heaven, which was a place in the sky, or on top of a mountain, where a nation’s god was enthroned above the gods of rival nations. Rather, the goal was that by worshiping the deity, people could bring heaven down to earth—to make the earth habitable for their god. The means for bringing heaven down to earth was to build a temple for the god to inhabit, so he could dwell amongst his people. The temple then became a boundary or frontier between earth and heaven. Divine presence in the temple would then enable the deity to rule on earth as a microcosm of his rulership in heaven. That rule would begin with his favored nation and then gradually be implemented throughout society.

This implementation happened through conquest, expansion, and law. By facilitating law, order, and right worship, ANE temples brought people together, establishing a little community that reflected heavenly society, centered around divine presence.

In the early stages of human urbanization in Ancient Mesopotamia, common people did not live in cities (even allowing for the qualification that ancient cities are more akin to what we would call a village today). Archeology indicates that, in the earliest stages of urbanization, a city was initially just a temple complex, with public structures like granaries and administrative buildings attached to it. But drawn to the power of the temple and the protection it promised, people gradually moved nearer the temples, with cities then expanding to include common dwellings. By being near the sacred space of the temple, people believed they could ward off chaos, receive protection, and perform rituals that would ensure good harvests and fertility. In time, these little communities around the temple became the basis of a distinct culture, with its own language, rituals, obligations, customs—in short, a shared common or public life.

So to reiterate: first you have a heavenly pattern—in a sense, a heavenly community. This heavenly community was then embodied in an earthly temple—an area of sacred space. What establishes it as sacred space is an image or idol that supposedly acted as a boundary between earth and heaven. (Just think of the stone idol of Ungit in C.S. Lewis’s story Till We Have Faces.) The temple then became a control room for creating an earthly culture structured around divine presence.

You’re probably already beginning to connect the dots and understand how the Genesis narrative both assumed and challenged this basic narrative. When Moses began asserting the supremacy of Israel’s God over the gods of the other nations, the Genesis creation account was part of that assertion, as it challenged rival creation accounts such as Babylonian Enuma Elish. Genesis, though it describes events at the very beginning of the world, is very much a literary product of the ANE; as such, it is part of Moses’ project of asserting Yahweh’s supremacy. It is a polemic against rival gods, and it has many of the same literary features as rival creation accounts and temple-construction narratives. And Genesis also contains a template for the right-ordering of society, but that right-ordering won’t occur through the presence of Marduk or Ra being extended via conquest and idol-construction, but through the presence of Israel’s God being spread via His images.

Genesis challenges ANE paganism by showing that the primordial vocation to connect heaven and earth is through humans being fruitful, subduing the wilderness outside the garden, and shepherding the earth with loving husbandry as God’s vice-regents. By faithfully fulfilling this vocation, humans act as priests between God and the rest of creation, ushering all of the world—including the broader society that existed then only potentially—into intimate union with the Creator. They would reflect all their love and creativity back to Him in worship, eventually spreading His love from sea to sea.

But all of this creative, culture-building work (tending and guarding, building and preserving, numerical and geographical expansion, taking dominion, stewarding the earth, loving husbandry of the animals) was to unfold within this larger template of communion with the Creator, as indicated by the first concentric circle in the diagram. The community of Eden—initially just the little society of the human family dwelling in intimacy with the Creator—is the basis of the cultural mandate.

If the prelapsarian state had continued, then obedience to the command to expand numerically and geographically would have produced multiple small communities, all rooted in communion with the Creator. If this loving communion with God had continued uninterrupted, then obedience to the dominion and cultural mandates would naturally have led to numerous human communities, each with their common public life—their own traditions, customs, rituals, languages, literature, and cultural artifacts—all living in harmony with each other through their harmony with the Lord.

Of course, this was disrupted by the Fall. After the Fall, mankind was banished from the garden-temple where God was present. Thus, communion with the Creator was lost. And as we see early on in Genesis, this breakdown of communion with the Creator leads to a breakdown in human community and therefore a breakdown in culture.

Human community (concentric circle 2), begins to be constructed independently of divine presence (concentric circle 1). This, in turn, results in a broader society (concentric circle 3) built independent of community. A society of cities and empires springs up which undermines, rather than emerges out of, human community. And as we saw, temples became places, not of union with the true God, but communion with devils. The presence of these false gods led, not to loving community, but to unlove in the form of temple prostitution and human sacrifice. Whereas the presence of God in the primordial garden-temple was fundamentally about loving relationships, within paganism, the presence of a god became terrifying, again depicted so well by C.S. Lewis in Till We Have Faces (though the book takes place in the Iron Age, not ANE Bronze Age).

So false worship led to the inversion of true community, and when this flowed outward to society the result was anti-culture.

Anti-culture came to a climax in Babel. We often think of the tower of Babel as man’s attempt to reach the gods in heaven. But again, in the ANE, the purpose of religion was not to go to heaven but to bring heaven down to earth—to create an earthly society that was a microcosm of heaven.

In Genesis 11:4 we read that the people of Southern Mesopotamia said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” The language of “a tower whose top is in the heavens” can be found throughout Mesopotamian literature to describe ziggurat towers, which were attempts to touch heaven through a simulated mountain. As I’ve explained in the discussion of Babel in the final chapter of Are We All Cyborgs Now? and also in my article on technology at The Symbolic World, these temple-tower-city complexes were based on the idea that by meeting the needs of a deity, a people could manipulate their god to achieve power for themselves, rule over other peoples, prevent disintegration, and achieve greatness.

Babel was a rejection of the Edenic vocation, it was also an attempt—as are all utopias—to recreate Eden through human pride, to recover the order and power of sacred space, to restore the lost security of the antediluvian world. But above all, Babel represented the ultimate anti-community. Through the city, it became possible to organize human beings into social structures larger than God originally intended men and women to live within. We know from paleoanthropology, and the work of scholars like Jared Diamond, that cities became ways of leveraging surplus labor for empire-building. The leader/s of a city will exert control over the surrounding countryside; the city will become a nation state; the nation state may eventually turn into an empire, where a few people have unprecedented power over thousands.

In Genesis 11:6, after surveying the centralization of power at Babel, the Lord declared that “now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.” The underlying idea is of a people growing in power so that nothing—and no one—will escape them. This is even more evident in the Jubilees textual tradition, where the Babel narrative describes a growing power that threatens to draw everything and everyone into the orbit of its domination. Seen in this context, the single language is emblematic of a totalizing system, an oppressive unity—a macro society that is antithetical to genuine community.

God broke up the Babel project by confusing their languages and scattering them abroad in small, linguistically distinct societies. This slowed down the growth of anti-culture, but it did not establish true community. For true community to happen, communion with the Creator must be re-established.

If there can be a re-establishment of true sacred space, based around communion with the Creator, then cities themselves can be expressions, not of anti-culture like Babel, but of the humanizing values of Eden. And this is an important point to make, especially today with the anti-civilizational message being propagated by people like Iain Mcgilchrist, whose work I have interacted with elsewhere. Certainly, if we simply read Genesis 1–11 and no further, it would be easy to conclude that cities, temples, and nation states are unqualifiedly bad, or that God desired for mankind to remain always in a paleolithic condition. From there, we might develop a type of romanticized primitivism or Christian agrarianism like Orthodox thinkers in the tradition of the late Philip Sherrard, or more recently now Paul Kingsnorth with his 2024 Erasmus lecture. But I think that would be a mistake, for just as the Church Fathers suggest that God eventually intended for Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Life, the Lord also seems to have intended for our dominion of the earth to culminate in cities and even a rightly ordered kingdom. Yet He intended for mankind to build a different sort of city, one that would facilitate community and love. And, as we will see in the ensuing story of Israel, for godly cities to be built and function properly, divine presence must be at the center.

Right after the Babel narrative what happens? God calls Abraham away from the idolatry. Through God’s covenant with Abraham, the divine presence that had been lost at Eden was re-established, at least partially.

And immediately God promised Abraham many descendants, and we read about the sanctification of a little community growing up around his household—a community defined by true worship rather than the surrounding idolatry.

And what did God say about this community? He said He would bless this community in order that all the nations would be blessed.

So here again, we see the three-fold progression from the divine presence to culture to broader society.

This pattern keeps playing out like fractals. Initially the divine presence had simply established a community around the household of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But after the captivity in Egypt, this expanded to include the nation of Israel, which became broken down into micro-cultures of different tribes and extended family groups.

The purpose of the covenant community—the people with whom divine presence was restored—was always the mission to the Gentiles, that the broader society might be habitable for the divine presence. And so we see that each time there is a recapitulation or intensification of the divine presence and God reiterated his covenant with one of Abraham’s progeny, He also emphasized that this is for the sake of the whole world. For example, when Abraham’s grandson Jacob had a dream of God’s presence, symbolized by a ladder of heavenly beings ascending and descending, the Lord promised Him a community, and then immediately promised that this community would transform the broader society—that through his family all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Gen 28:11-14). Or again, when God’s presence was intensified in Moses’ tabernacle, and then later in Solomon’s temple, the Lord made clear that the purpose is again the blessing to the nations.

All of this is a recapitulation of Genesis. Remember that in Eden, intimacy with the Creator is what established community and then drove the cultural mandate.

After the covenant with Abraham, intimacy with the Creator established community and then drove the mission to the Gentiles.

This is why it was so tragic when God’s people rejected Him. When the covenant community broke covenant with their God—for example, by using idolatry to seek the presence of false deities—there was a breakdown of human community, and God’s people became divided and began warring against each other. And as a result, there was a breakdown of the flow outward to the broader Gentile society. As Isaiah warned, the name of God was blasphemed continually among the Gentiles after God’s people ceased functioning as ambassadors of His presence.

By the Second Temple period, we can see that many of God’s people had developed the type of insularity that neglected their international vocation, the third concentric circle, making an idol out of their own community—now bereft of divine presence.

Real Presence Restored; Community Renewed

So what does God do? If God’s solution is in keeping with this primordial pattern, then in order to restore society, He must reconstitute community, and in order to reconstitute community, He must restore the divine presence. In fact, God restores His presence in the ultimate way through tabernacling among us in the flesh. Through Emmanuel (“God with us”) the Creator walked and talked with mankind just like in the Garden-Temple. In fact, the incarnation is the ultimate recapitulation of Eden, restoring in the person of Christ (the perfect image of God) the primordial human vocation to act as a boundary or frontier between heaven and earth. And when intimacy with the Creator is re-established, what is the result?

The result is community. Christ establishes a community around Himself in the twelve disciples, who function as types for the restoration of the 12 tribes of Israel, and thus the entire covenant community. Then He began restoring the micro-communities around Him, namely the families and villages in the regions He visited in his itinerant ministry. We tend to overlook this last point, but just consider how much of Christ’s teaching is concerned with the community virtues like brotherly love, forgiveness, mercy, self-sacrifice, and living at peace with those around us. Christ isn’t just offering isolated moral teaching to show us how to improve ourselves; rather, He was showing the people of His day how to flourish in community so that households and villages can reflect kingdom values. And this is how culture is renewed, because when households and villages function with kingdom values, the result is distinctive cultural traditions, which is why a Christ-centric Syrian culture will look different from a Christ-centric Chinese culture, etc.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As we read the gospels, the emphasis is still not the broader society, although there are some hints, particularly in Luke’s gospel. But for the most part, Christ’s direct emphasis is on the community and communities of Israel. He makes this point—uncomfortably for many readers—in His initial rebuff of the Samaritan woman. Given what we know of this pattern, however, the renewal of culture and community in Israel (evident in the strategic locales of Christ’s travels, and in His symbolic restoration of the twelve tribes) must culminate in the healing of the broader society: all the ends of the earth, every tongue, tribe and nation. And if the broader society is to be restored, the engine that drives it must be the divine presence.

Thus it should come as no surprise that after the ascension, when the divine presence was temporarily withdrawn, there was a pause in taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. In the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19, Jesus had instructed His followers not just to convert individuals but to disciple the nations – to transform the broader society. But what is needed before this can happen is a restoration of Christ’s presence. So what does Christ say to them, as recorded in Acts 1? He says they will take the gospel to the ends of the earth only after the return of His presence via the Spirit. They are told to wait for this before getting on with the job of discipling the nations. Their waiting culminates in Pentecost, when divine presence is restored in the spirit of every baptized Christian. And then immediately two things happen that become the themes of Acts 2-4:

1. human communities are renewed, beginning with the Jerusalem church;

2. the broader world—which is to say, all the language groups—is reached.

We often focus on how the second of these is a reversal of Babel, but so is the first, given that Babel was the ultimate anti-community.

But divine presence isn’t just in the form of God the Spirit coming at Pentecost. God the Son also returns to us to create a community around His presence. How does this happen?

In Christ’s great Eucharist sermon of John 6, He declares that the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven, and that there would be a recapitulation of the Incarnation through the bread of His presence. (For understanding eucharistic theology of John 6, I highly recommend Brant Pitre’s amazing book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper.)

In the Eucharist, no less than in the Incarnation and at Pentecost, God comes down. Or you might say that we ascend and go up. The liturgical practices of the East have tended to emphasize that in the Eucharist heaven descends to earth, whereas the liturgical practices of the West have tended to emphasize that in the Eucharist we ascend to heaven. It doesn’t really matter how the vertical imagery plays out, because the point is that in the Eucharist there is a restoration of the heaven and earth synthesis that was the telos of the original garden-temple. Like Jacob’s dream about the ladder, there are heavenly beings ascending and descending both directions, reconnecting earth and heaven. That reconnection is what happens in the Eucharist: in the bread and wine, heaven and earth are united, just like they were in the original garden-temple. In the sacred mysteries, our communion with the Creator is no less real and personal than when He walked in the garden in the cool of the evening, or when He tabernacled among us during His earthly sojourn.

This is why the doctrine of Real Presence is so crucial: Christ really does enter our bodies with the bread and wine, enlivening us as living temples to fulfil the primordial human vocation of connecting earth and heaven. He really is present with us in the Sacred Mysteries (not just metaphorically or symbolically) even as He was really present in the Garden of Eden when he walked with mankind in the cool of the evening.

This synthesis of heaven and earth, which we enjoy every time we celebrate the sacrifice of the Mass, is what ANE temples were trying to achieve. And pagan people in the bronze age understood something that modern Christians often miss: they understood that sacred space diminishes the further away you get from the heaven and earth synthesis of the temple. Remember that anthropologists tell us that cities, the first communities and cultures, began as people moved to be closer to temples, and the heaven-earth synthesis they claimed to offer. This dynamic is no less true in the context of true religion: the further our life is from the sacrifice of the Mass and its handmaid the Divine Office, and the more our lives and identities are defined by activities, ideas, and media that de-center us from the Eucharistic community, the more our own lives lose their sacred quality. But conversely, the more our lives center around the sacrifice of the Mass, the more we flourish as people, and the more we contribute to the transforming the broader society.

This is why Real Presence has social, societal, and even political implications. Remember that in Genesis, intimacy with the Creator is what established community and then spurred the cultural mandate. And then after the covenant with Abraham, intimacy with the Creator established community that always had the broader Gentile world as its aim. The intimacy we enjoy with our Creator every time we celebrate the Mass is no less the means by which God is discipling all nations.

Intimacy with the Creator through the Sacred Mysteries now becomes the basis for us, as redeemed images of God, to fulfil the cultural mandate. And as we’ve seen, culture-building is nothing short of tending, guarding, and nourishing the common life of a people—in this case, the life of a community centered around the sacraments.

The culture of Eucharistic communities, in turn, spills into the broader society. And if you want to know what this means in practice, just look at what happened in the first century. The Apostle Paul went around establishing Eucharistic micro-communities, and what was the result? The result was that the brutal Roman Empire eventually folded into Christendom. Through these communities, the broader society was eventually renewed and the world was blessed with centuries of cultural Christianity. In my book Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation, I explain how even before the conversion of the Roman empire, the micro-societies that grew up around the Eucharist started a revolutionary counter-culture, resulting in societal shifts in everything from how women were treated to how people thought about practices like exposure of infants.

If we want to renew culture today, it can only happen on this same template: transformative communities centered around the Sacred Mysteries. But now, two thousand years after St. Paul, our thinking about the sacraments is muddled, caught in the pincer movement of two equally damaging errors. On the one hand, there is the anti-sacramentalism of modern Christianity which, having a low view of Communion, will deny that anything particularly transformative occurs when we consume the body of Christ. And so rather than seeing church as a community unfolding around the sacred mysteries, church becomes just one more affinity group among a myriad. But in more historic communions, like Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and some High Church Protestant groups that affirm Real Presence, there can be a tendency to have such an exalted view of the Eucharist that it starts being approached like magic, as if its efficacy in our community will be more or less automatic. Both are anti-incarnational, the one because it is Gnostic and the other because it is mechanistic and monogeristic (and thus not actually an exalted view of the Eucharist).

In reality it takes work to connect the dots between Real Presence and community, just like the other sacraments require synergistic participation. And as Fr. Patrick reminds us below, it takes work—including strategy, planning, and intention—to make the community constituted in the Eucharist function as the absolute center of parish life. We have to constantly assess if the design of our buildings, the allocation of our resources, the focus of our teaching, etc., are facilitating community.

Somehow we grasp this better with the other sacraments. When you are baptized, you don’t just forget about it; rather, you have to engage in everything involved in a transformed life to make your baptism a reality. Or again, when a man and wife are joined in the sacrament of marriage, or when a clergyman is ordained into the sacrament of priesthood, the initial sacrament begins a work that will only flourish with perseverance, creativity, strategic planning, and day to day participation with the energies of God. Similarly, when we join with each other in Holy Communion, that begins the real work of learning to live as a community.

Or you could think of the Mass like conception: it starts a process that culminates in a person with a unique personality. The sacrifice of the Mass starts a cultural soul, a parish culture with a unique personality. But it takes intentionality and strategy to flesh that out into Christian education, art, music, poetry, reading and prayer groups—in short, a shared common life and associated culture.

At the heart of a shared common life is love. The community-building virtues like forgiveness, benevolence, longsuffering, patience, etc., are precisely how we create a culture and transform the world. What connects the Holy Mysteries to all the nooks and crannies of day-to-day parish life, and what connects parish life to the larger society we are transforming, is love: virtues like putting up with one another, being patient, being humble, listening to each other, bearing each other’s burdens, etc. This is how we tend and guard the shared public life that is the heart of a culture.

Community and Inaugurated Eschatology

This shared public life is not just for ourselves; it’s also how we disciple the nations. The whole significance of St. Paul’s mission to the Gentiles—undertaken in the face of strong Judaizing elements—is that he was bringing in the Gentiles qua Gentiles as part of the broader international implications of the gospel, inviting them to sanctify their own cultural traditions, with their own histories, creativity, and unique cultural expressions. That is also what the Orthodox Western rite is trying to achieve in a small way, offering to westerners an Orthodox understanding of their heritage.

At the heart of a transformed Western culture is community. Throughout modern western society, people are fragmented, lonely, and in disarray, much like the refugees who sought peace at the Herrnhut community. All around us, people are hungry for community, but these needs will not be met in the pseudo-communities of tribalism, identity politics, or consumer affinity groups. It won’t even be fully met in building beautiful buildings, new urbanism, or practicing Christian agrarianism, though all these things will certainly help. Ultimately, it can only be met in the body of Christ, mediated to us in the Sacrifice of the Mass and then becoming a reality in the sacramental community that forms around that.

As the church lives out her mission, and people flock to her for healing, then gradually an alternative society will be created in the broader world. As we live as citizens of the kingdom of God, this counter-cultural society offers a subversive element to the power structures of the world, showing a different way to be human.

The idea of a counter-culture is key. We are not just trying to prop up the city of man, but to be truly counter-cultural, to offer a new society running parallel to anti-culture. And as Lewis shows so well in his novel about a modern-day Tower of Babel, That Hideous Strength, these sacramental micro-communities are all around us, often hidden from view, yet already participating today in the eschatological reality of Revelation 17-20, when there is the final overthrow of anti-culture.

The final apocalypse promises that the Heavenly City will descend to earth and the redeemed will ascend to heaven—the fulfillment of Jacob’s ladder, where traffic flows both ways, sealing the marriage of heaven and earth. Yet the author of Hebrews reminds us, we can begin ordering our lives toward the heavenly Jerusalem today, so that this eschatological horizon is already a partial reality for those of us who are in Christ (Heb. 12:22–24).

This side of the eschaton, these two cultures—the inaugurated New Jerusalem and the City of Man—are existing together like the wheat and tares, often side by side in the same places, even the same institutions and governments. One represents the Heavenly City and true culture; the other, the corpse of Babel, and thus anti-culture.

This isn’t what many Christians want to hear. The current discourse on Christianity and culture is increasingly straddled between grossly politicized paradigms that would immanentize the eschaton and bypass the sacramental life, on the one hand, and neo-anabaptist modalities that repudiate inaugurated eschatology by problematizing the very idea of “cultural Christianity,” on the other. (I have interacted with the latter here and here.) Notice how the opponents of cultural Christianity—with their oft-repeated mantra “the apostles weren’t trying to transform culture”—never talk about parish life, nor the pedestrian duties of supporting sacramental communities with love, or Christian education, art, marriage, music, poetry, reading and prayer groups, etc. And that’s no accident, since the answer to the skepticism about cultural Christianity is the real heaven-earth synthesis (the inaugurated new Jerusalem) happening in embodied parishes formed around the sacraments.

Of course, all this has political implications, and in one sense there is nothing more political than “this is my Body,” since it is through the Sacred Mysteries that New Creation is bursting into earth with God’s counter-cultural agenda for the broader society—an agenda to transform the nations, their institutions, and their governments. Some of us are called to work directly at that transformation in government, education, culture, education, etc., while others work behind the scenes through nurturing relationships of love in whatever sacramental community God has placed us in. But in both cases, the engine that drives our work is the heaven and earth synthesis of the Mass, and the transformed communities springing up around it.

The full effects of this transformation are ultimately eschatological. This is again something that Lewis captures so well. In his book, That Hideous Strength, he shows that the apocalyptic conflict between the New Jerusalem (city of God) vs. the Babel (the city of Man), is played out in humdrum community activities like putting up with one another, or Mother Dimble faithfully saying her prayers, loving each other in sacramental communities, creating things of beauty that draw us to one another. And when we do these community things as outgrowths of our intimacy with Christ, then we develop a shared public culture, and the world around us is saved.

In December 2024, , the proprietor of the Hickman’s Hinterlands Substack, posted on Twitter about the ways his town had been decimated in four successive acts.

1. The industrial revolution took us away from small farms and business and made us reliant upon an economic system managed by distant capitalists who would later offshore our jobs.

2. The automobile destroyed the “village culture” of our towns by enabling people to commute to out-of-town jobs. As offshoring worsened, commute times lengthened to as much as 2hrs one-way. Meanwhile, the villages went empty, becoming only “bedrooms” for people working elsewhere.

3. Heroin and meth came as those commutes lengthened, killing almost 10% of my graduating high school class and entrapping many more in a lifetime cycle of poverty, addiction, rehab, and relapse.

4. Zillow gave rootless, quaint-seeking out-of-towners the ability to easily see and purchase real estate there during Covid. They are slowly replacing the impoverished and aging locals, and are spurring an increase in real estate values that priced out the few young locals who might’ve aimed to own a house. 95% of these newcomers hate the locals openly. Yes, I am angry. And yes, it began with the industrial revolution. Many people who complain about offshoring seem to forget that.

Hickman’s observations get to the heart of something my priest and I have been thinking a lot about recently, which is the nature of our current anti-culture, and the relationship between community and culture. Can you truly have a culture in a society where patterns of habitation are constantly disrupted at every turn? And if not, what role does community play in cultural renewal?

Anti-Culture and the Erosion of Community

As traditional Christians, it’s typical to reflect on what it’s like living in what sociologist Philip Rieff described as an anti-culture. And many things come to mind: anti-culture manifests itself in widespread violence, pornography, hedonism, abortion, addiction, atheistic education, and the relegating of religion to the personal and private sphere. But it’s possible to see all these as symptoms of a far deeper malaise. These are all symptoms of an anti-culture that can be defined, first and foremost, as a lack of community.

While the erosion of community is perhaps the most insidious manifestation of our current anti-culture, it is often the least noticeable since it has become so ubiquitous. Most of us are not old enough to remember what it was like to live in a village with a functional town square, or where it was normal to call on neighbors unannounced after work, or what it was like to dwell in communities where recreation, work, and worship were not hermetically sealed but integrated within a shared social world. We have no point of reference for what true dwelling might look like, let alone how culture is downstream of embodied habitation.

At this substack I regularly discuss the restoration of culture, including recovering leisure, promoting classical education, healthy tech use, and encouraging healthy activities among youth like sports, dance. But in this post I want to suggest that any effort toward cultural ressourcement must necessarily place community at the center. Moreover, any paradigm for cultural renewal that neglects community is not truly engaging with culture at all, but rather promoting a gnostic simulacrum of culture. This essay will be primarily diagnostic, exploring how our anti-culture has disrupted communal habitation, while hinting at the direction I will go in future essays, which will develop the argument that eucharistic micro-communities are the solution for reconstituting authentic community.

How The Modern Nation State Swallowed up Community

We are in great need of correct diagnosis, for it is no exaggeration to say that the modern world has been built on the principles of anti-community. And while Hickman is right to trace this trend to the Industrial Revolution, it actually goes back even further: the entire impetus of ideology and politics since the early modern period has been toward the creation of mono-cultures organized according to the logic of the modern nation state.

Though the modern nation state is such a fixture of how we understand the world, many people don’t realize that it is a comparatively recent innovation, that emerged in direct abrogation to earlier community-based forms of social organization such as guilds, associations, extended kinship loyalties, and various forms of local organization. As Mary Harrington recently pointed out when summarizing the insight of Carlton J Hayes’ 1931 treatise Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism,

“The nations that arose from the seventeenth century…generally weren’t ethnically homogeneous, unless you consider all European peoples to be the same ethnicity (which only makes sense from an American or Third Worldist perspective). Rather, they typically had one dominant, ‘official’ people and language, but also absorbed a cluster of other peoples and dialects, making them ‘more akin to small empires than large tribes’.”

It has taken nearly three centuries to achieve societal homogenization, but that is exactly what has occurred as the logic of the modern nation state has obliterated piecemeal the ancient distinctives and associated communities. In fact, the early modern tendency of nation-states to absorb previously distinct peoples accounts for the present international political order. The nations of Germany, Spain, Italy, Romania, Russia, as we know them today—each spanning previously independent or semi-independent principalities and promoting a unified national identity and common language—largely took shape by the second half of the nineteenth century as a result of nationalist revolutions.

Even France, though it has been more or less united since the late Middle Ages, was only nominally a nation until the Revolution, as Jean Benoit Nadeau & July Barlow pointed out so vividly:

“Until the French Revolution, France was a divided patchwork of nationalities similar to the present-day Balkans. There was hardly any relationship between the Alsatians, the Flemish, the Bretons, the Basques, the Occitans, and Burgundians, the Lyonnais, the Bordelais, the Provençaux, the Corsicians, and the Savoyards. They all spoke different languages, lived in distinct geographical areas, and, of course, ate different food. Even one hundred years ago a lot of the French still spoke regional languages… France didn’t end up like the Balkans because Paris effectively bulldozed regional differences after the Revolution to create a common French identity.” Jean Benoit Nadeau & July Barlow, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, p. 21-22

What is significant for our discussion of culture is that the modern nation state didn’t simply absorb previously independent territories; it also absorbed institutions, associations, and organizations into itself, including those that had previously been locally constituted. The full political significance of this is rarely grasped, for throughout the medieval period right through to the 19^th century revolutions, power-hungry monarchs were kept at bay by community, as manifested in guilds, church, extended kinship networks, local municipalities, and powerful noble families. These all served as mediating institutions connecting people horizontally and buffering citizens from centralized sources of power. But as these institutions have gradually been either absorbed by the state, or left intact but rendered politically impotent, the fundamental relation between the individual and government has become a vertical one, with citizens existing as atomized individuals in an unmediated relationship to increasingly centralized mechanisms of power.

Life in the Post-Community Nation

We have been ushered into a world that is lonely and where community, where it exists at all, has been emptied of public significance. Naturally this has had political implications in how we understand freedom and citizenship, but it also brings profound psychological implications. The correlate of social atomization is inner alienation.

There’s a story that doesn’t often get told, which is how in the pre-modern world and even up until relatively modern times, a person’s very identity was connected to the place he or she inhabited, which itself was nested within various overlapping social groups and associations. Robert Nisbet tried to foreground that story in his 1953 work The Quest For Community. He pointed out that as webs of obligation, belonging, and mutual responsibility that once sustained local life have been dissolved by modern governments, individuals have been left socially isolated, existing in an unmediated relationship to the nation state.

• “The real conflict in modern political history has not been, as is so often stated, between State and individual, but between State and social group… The conflict between central political government and the authorities of guild, village community, class, and religious body has been, of all conflicts in history, the most fateful. From this conflict have arisen most of the relocations of authority and function which have formed the contexts of the decline of medieval communalism and the emergence of both individual and central political power.” pp. 100-101

• “The real significance of the modern State is inseparable from its successive penetrations of man’s economic, religious, kinship, and local allegiances, and it’s revolutionary dislocations of established centers of function and authority.” (From the Preface)

• “The rise and aggrandizement of political States took place in circumstances of powerful opposition to kinship and other traditional authorities” p. 99

These “traditional authorities” that Nisbet references did more than merely limit the state’s power; they connected people horizontally in a web of pre-political bonds that facilitated social belonging in ways that, as moderns, we can scarcely conceive. Despite the potential for abuse and corruption, these localist bonds—which included everything from guilds to patronage systems to fraternities, to networks of dependence—connected people in familial-type networks. These have steadily been dissolved or neutralized by the growing preeminence of the modern nation state, leaving individuals socially isolated and standing together in an unmediated relationship to the nation state.

We even see this shift in how we talk about a citizen and a subject. In the Middle Ages, a “citizen” was an inhabitant of a free town, and this was a category distinct from the same person’s status as “subject” of the king. Today, as the nation state has absorbed all mediating institutions, citizen and subject have been conflated.

“In the Middle Ages, the citizen was literally the inhabitant of a free town. His status under the king, however, was that of subject. The two statuses were sharply distinguished then, and even at the end of the sixteenth century, in the writings of Bodin, we may see the continuation of this distinction. But in the modern history of politics, especially since the Age of Revolutions, the clear tendency has been for the terms citizen and subject to become virtually synonymous. The frame of reference has changed from the town to the nation as a whole, and the citizen is the atom-unit of the political association of the State.” Robert Nisbet, The Quest For Community, p. 100

Even in pre-revolutionary America, individuals existed within a patchwork of relationships and communal obligations that flowed down from the monarch at the top. The obligations to those above you or below you in the hierarchy created a safety net more effective than anything we can imagine in the modern welfare state. At least, that is part of Gordon Wood’s thesis in his 1991 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood shows that people generally accepted inequalities because of the comfort of existing within communities structured around relationships, where everyone was linked in a web of local connections.

“Authority and liberty flowed not as today from the political organization of the society but from the structure of its personal relationships. In important respects this premodern or early modern society still bore traces of the medieval world of personal fealties and loyalties out of which it arose… The inequalities of such a hierarchy were acceptable to people because they were offset by the great emotional satisfactions of living in a society in which everyone, even the lowliest servant counted for something. In this traditional world, ‘every Person has his proper Sphere and is of Importance to the whole.’ [Hume] Ideally, in such a hierarchy no one was really independent, no one was ever alone and unattached. Hence followed the fascination of the eighteenth century with the fate of isolated individuals, like Robinson Crusoe, strangers without relatives or connections cast alone in the world.” Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, p. 11 & 19

This web of local connections in pre-revolutionary America provided a sense of belonging and habitation that was carefully guarded and, if necessary, enforced. It seems unthinkable to us, but if someone left his town, he could be forcibly conveyed to his hometown.

“Both the New England towns with their ancient ‘warning out’ regulations and the southern colonies with their vagabond legislation expected everyone to belong somewhere, and they used the force of law to maintain their inherited sense of community. Under the warning-out laws, for example, towns could legally eject ‘strangers’ and have constables convey them from town to town until they were returned to the town where they legally belonged.” Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, p. 20

Wood’s larger point is that the nation state that emerged out of the American Revolution was truly radical insofar as it wiped out this older system of embodied belonging and habitation.

From Belonging to Bureaucracy and the Abstraction of Social Life

A similar process to what Gordon Wood describes happening in the United States also unfolded in Europe after the nineteenth-century revolutions. These revolutions, which strengthened the idea of a central national identity, culminated in World War I, which finally swept away the remnants of medieval fealties and local community loyalties that had persisted, though often embalmed, even after the rise of early modern nation-states. In that older world, political bonds emerged out of community loyalties—loyalties to people in my community and aristocratic families. Indeed, prior to the nationalism of the early modern period, conflict between “states” really meant conflict between ruling aristocracies. But in the interval between the 19th century revolutions to WWI, these intermediate loyalties were gradually replaced by mechanisms of allegiance that were fundamentally bureaucratic and abstract. The problem is that political bonds structured around what Max Weber described as the progressive rationalization and bureaucratization of social life, do not naturally command loyalty in the same way that local community does. Hence the modern state must compensate for this through the unity manufactured through war, or through the quasi-deification of the nation state.

As intermediate institutions have been neutralized under the growing preeminence of the nation-state, society has been reimagined as a collection of isolated individuals whose primary—and often only—meaningful relationship is to an impersonal administrative apparatus. We saw this conceit on full display with President Obama’s “The Life of Julia” campaign, which walked us through a fictional woman’s life, from birth to death, showing how government-dependence enabled Julia to achieve a near fairy-tale existence without reference to any relationships or community (with the exception of a “community garden” where Julia worked in retirement). It was a lonely vision in which community was replaced by bureaucracy. Obama’s Julia advertisement gave us a close up view of a paradox that lies at the heart of the modern political project, namely that individualism and authoritarianism cross-fertilize each other in their mutual antagonism to human community.

This individualistic conception of the human being is deeply unsatisfying, for it perpetuates the conceit that we can ignore the inescapable role that non-governmental institutions (i.e., family, church, fraternity associations, neighborhoods, guilds, extended family groups) play in human flourishing. In this social void, the nation state offers manufactured bonds that are ultimately artificial because dependent on the increasing bureaucratization of social life.

The Vanishing Neighborhood and the Suppression of Community

We know in our bones that there is a different type of life. Tourists come from thousands of miles to visit old towns built in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages, often without even fully understanding what attracts them to these spots. Yes, we like them because they are old and historic, but even more fundamentally, whether we realize it or not, old European towns attract us because all the elements—from winding cobblestone roads to marketplaces to city gates to village commons—fosters community. Streets and the squares designed to be active public places have a humanizing pull that is remarkably strong, even when they no longer function as living centers of shared communal life, just as historic churches attract us even when they no longer function as vibrant places of worship.

By contrast, today’s neighborhoods and cities that once fostered community have become places that isolate us from one another. Many people tell me, not simply that they don’t know their neighbors, but that if they were to take steps to meet their neighbors, that would be considered highly weird. Gestures of goodwill to people on one’s own street risk getting oneself labelled as a creep. Through automatic garage doors, we can enter and exit our house literally without ever having to step foot in our neighborhood, and many people go years without even knowing the names of people two or three houses adjacent.

This is a picture of where I live, and though they’ve tried to create an old-fashion city vibe that is not lacking in aesthetic appeal, people are effectively warehoused together without any real sense of communal life. If I were to open a coffee shop or create a town square or a place of worship, I could face civil penalties, and ultimately even arrest, because city planners have deliberately worked to separate living from work, and work from leisure, and leisure from worship.

These types of anti-communal neighborhoods and cities do not spring up naturally. If left to develop organically, humans inevitably design city streets, villages, and neighborhoods to accommodate shared public life. What we have today is the result of thousands of political and economic choices, including numerous rules and artificial impositions, that collectively suppress the natural impulses of humans as social creatures, and follow the inexorable logic of the nation state in rendering local public life impotent. From Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” which bulldozed neighborhoods in the name of progress, to economic policies hostile to small businesses, to so-called urban renewal schemes that separate work from living, to the growing logic of the modern nation state, we now live within a political, economic and regulatory ecosystem inimical to genuine community. The common factor in this regulatory ecosystem has been to facilitate what Philip Bess refers to as “that shrinkage of the public realm happening reciprocally and in tandem with America’s growth industry, the care and tending of the autonomous self.” Bess, who is Professor Emeritus at University of Notre Dame, goes on to note that:

“Like the decline of the street and square as active public spaces—and the demise of the alley, the ubiquity of the driveway, the transformation of the garage door into the front door, the demise of uninterrupted curbs on residentials blocks, the relocation of domestic life to yards and family rooms at the rear of the house, and the creation of complex suburban roofs apparently intended to simulate small villages—the growing number and importance of domestic bathrooms and bedroom suites indicates yet another way we materialize in our built environment our culture’s turn from the civic to the private.” Philip Bess, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred, p. 34

To be sure, the vestiges of community still exist today, but they have migrated around amenities (the gym, swimming pool, coworking lounge), or affinity groups centered around entertainment (sports, music, etc.). Even in some rural communities where the echoes of authentic social cohesion still linger, technology is isolating the younger generation from any deep awareness of mutual dependence, as the omnipresent digital ecosystem reinforces the myth of self-sufficiency and radical autonomy. When universities, or malls, or Starbucks, make a nod toward the need for communal bonds, it often feels that community is just one more therapeutic add-on in the ongoing quest for self-actualization.

Can Culture Exist Without Community?

Where does this leave us as a culture? Can you have a culture without community? Can a true culture exist within a society structured around political and economic conditions antithetical to community?

If we attend to the etymology of the word “culture,” we find that community is intrinsic to it. Culture, in the original sense, is a place we inhabit—a place we inhabit sufficiently to cultivate it even as a farmer tills his field. As Edward S. Casey observed when defining culture,

“The very word culture meant ‘place tilled’ in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, ‘to inhabit, care for, till, worship’ and cultus, ‘A cult, especially a religious one.’ To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly.”

Notice the relation between habitation and cultivation. When we inhabit a culture and have a sense of responsibility for it, then it becomes a place we attend to with art, institutions, ceremonies, festivals, local traditions, worship—in short, all the things that come to mind when we think of culture, and all the things we seek to defend from the forces of chaos and barbarism.

Because culture is particular to a people, to a land, to time and place, and to a shared public life particular to a locale, to talk of living in a culture presupposes that you are, in fact, inhabiting a place. Yet with the shrinkage of shared public life, modern man increasingly does not truly inhabit places in any meaningful sense. For many of us, growing up in large cities, or the suburban sprawl of metropolitan centers, or what is often called “middle America,” one place is largely undifferentiated from another. This means that the things that tie us to the land—including shared public life particular to a locale—become tenuous and fungible, with the consequence that we are not truly “inhabiting” the places we live in a real and meaningful sense.

Given that habitation is intrinsic to culture, if patterns of habitation are disrupted, so will our experience and understanding of culture itself. And thus we see that today culture has become an abstraction since disconnected from embodied community within particular locales. A case in point is that, within the modern context, to the extent that culture is incarnated in customs, rituals, and institutions, these tend to be the institutions and traditions of mass mono-culture, without any intrinsic relationship to real embodied community. Even when this mono-culture is subdivided into affinity groups—such as youth culture or consumer subculture, or ideological tribes—these occur within the matrix of largely disembodied consumption networks possessing no organic relation to actual physical community. Christians often speak of “taking back the culture,” but this too is usually referencing a detached mono-culture (i.e., the national or transnational institutions of media, politics, music, literature, and so forth) with no necessary connection to embodied communities in time and place.

Often when we are part of embodied local communities, these tend to be dislocated from land and thus ultimately fungible: we might have a community at our gym, another at our children’s school, another community with our work colleagues. And often our church community becomes just one more micro-society for self-expression, ultimately reinforcing rather than challenging the erosion of genuine community that has become the fundamental hallmark of our anti-culture. To the extent that we behave differently within these various micro-societies, we often internalize within our psyche what Zygmunt Bauman described as “liquid modernity.” Inhabiting multiple compartments fosters a kind of spiritual, intellectual, and emotional vagrancy, contributing to divided loyalties, and deepening the fragmentation and dislocated attachments that underlie so much of the contemporary malaise.

Remember the definition of culture, how cultivation is linked to inhabiting a place. To inhabit a place is more than just residing somewhere—it is to be part of the community tied to a place; it is to have one’s identity tied to community in a way that is sufficiently intense to incentivize community-members to care for and cultivate their shared spaces with institutions, art, beautiful buildings, inspiring public works, traditions, festivals, civic customs, sacred sites, and local traditions.

Robinson Crusoe knew he was lacking in community, but our technological dependence has created forms of fake connection and disembodied forms of digital community. And while these may certainly help to ease the alienation of life in an anti-culture, often our virtual connections merely burrow us deeper into the loneliness that is the hallmark of life in the anti-culture.

Can Inner Wholeness Exist Without Community?

This lack of real habitation lies at the heart of our anti-culture, and is a source of deep alienation. In his recent book Liturgies of the Wild, Martin Shaw observes that in the Celtic world, there was an old belief that “if you aren’t wrapped in the cloak of story and the cloak of place then you are liable to experience huge rushes of angst as you age.” (pp. 3-4)

Shaw’s observations cohere with other thinkers, such as war journalist Sebastian Junger, who argued convincingly that community belonging is key to buffering us from mental illness. (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.)

These and similar thinkers suggest that, just as community protects us from power-hungry rulers by animating mediating institutions, so embodied community also protects us from forms of psychological disintegration. This includes, I would add, confusion about identity. Once organic communities are replaced by mass culture, is it any wonder we see so many people confused about who and what they are? As Kelly Kapic observes in You’re Only Human, it is only in community that we can truly find ourselves, given that we know ourselves only in relationship. Kapic observes that “historically—and it is still true today in much of the non-Western world—the default way people viewed themselves (the ‘self’) was through their social relations.” He continues,

Identity was essentially found through social and physical locations and networks rather than through introspection. Questions of identity were less about solitary figures and far more about communities and connections. Who you were was all about whose you were (your parents, clan, land, etc.).

Kapic’s observations coheres with the Eastern Orthodox writer, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, who reminded us that “we know nothing and nobody except through a relationship,” adding,

If we are disconnected nothing exists for us…. In referring everything to ourselves we deform it and make it as small and mean as we are, with our small mean cravings.

The Unresolved Wound

The erosion of true community left an unresolved wound of alienation that formed the backdrop for the great political heresies of the twentieth century. Both Communism and Fascism were attempts to address the breakdown of community: Communism, by relocating communal bonds in the state; and Fascism, by offering a blood and soil nationalism that sought a recapitulation of primitive tribal bonds as the fundamental organizing principle for society.

The post–World War II liberal order has been defined primarily in opposition to these political heresies; consequently, for a long time, liberty could be articulated by negation (for the right, not Communism and for the left, not Fascism) without being coordinated toward a positive cultural telos (and often in direct opposition to teleological understandings of freedom). But as the 20th century recedes from living memory for many, the basic problems that Communism and Fascism sought to address are reemerging in new configurations and misguided solutions, from tribalism and identity politics on the left, to the vitalism and nationalistic identity politics on the right. The unresolved wound remains the erosion of community.

What does this disintegration mean for us as believers? Clearly, if we are to disciple the nations (thus their cultures), and if we are to create a culture of life instead of a culture of death, then the recapitulation of community will be at the heart of this endeavor. Without community, there can never be true culture. This is a theme I hope to take up in a follow-up article. I will suggest that this conflict between community vs. anti-culture is none other than the age-old war between the City of God vs. the City of Man, and between Eden vs. the Tower of Babel. My argument will be that community is restored in the Eucharist, though the work of allowing the sacraments to heal this unresolved modern wound does not happen automatically, but requires sustained effort, as we allow the sacramental vision of community to flesh itself out in all the nooks and crannies of parish life.

Further Reading

Strayer invited three neuroscientist friends to join him on the trip—one who shared his concern that ubiquitous communication is undermining our capacity for deep thinking and attention, and two friends who were skeptical. The two skeptics, including Dr. Todd Braver, came along for a fun vacation and to humor Strayer, but “they [were] not convinced that anything lasting will come of the trip – personally or scientifically.”^[1]

The journalist accompanying the researchers recorded their constant debates. One of Strayer’s skeptical friends, the neuroscience researcher Arthur Kramer (under whom Strayer earned his doctorate), is constantly connected. Though he has a colleague who complains that he goes on his computer during meetings, Kramer remains confident that multitasking hasn’t weakened his attention. But Strayer isn’t convinced: as the group stops for gas and Kramer checks his email one last time, Strayer remarks that his friend shows all the classic signs of addiction.

When the group finally put out on the San Juan River, silence descended. No more texts, emails, or notifications—just miles of beautiful scenery with occasional wildlife.

Being in nature against a backdrop of stillness spurred the group’s creativity, leading to challenging discussions. One of the scientists, the late Steven Yantis, suggested that the real significance of digital omnipresence might not be the actual interruptions coming from our devices so much as our constant readiness to be interrupted at any moment. Yantis, then chairman of the psychological and brain sciences department at Johns Hopkins, remarked, “The expectation of e-mail seems to be taking up our working memory.”^[2]

Yantis’s remark gets to the heart of Strayer’s concern when organizing the trip. Is our working memory—the part of the brain that regulates attention, in addition to creatively integrating ideas with past knowledge—compromised not just from actual interruptions that come to us from our phones, but also by the anticipation of what might be coming down the digital pipeline? As Matt Richtel wrote in his New York Times article about the trip,

These researchers are wondering whether attention and focus can take a hit when people merely anticipate the arrival of more digital stimulation…. Working memory is a precious resource in the brain. The scientists hypothesize that a fraction of brain power is tied up in anticipating e-mail and other new information.^[3]

The trip did not yield any great epiphanies for the cautious scientists, apart from strategies for how their various hypotheses might be clinically tested. Yet the time on the gentle river, free of all distraction, did seem to leave all of them—even the more technologically sanguine—with a new openness to quiet, and even boredom. When Todd Braver, psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, finally retrieved his phone, “it dawned on him how much he turns to it in tiny moments of boredom: ‘Sometimes I do use it as an excuse to be antisocial.’”^[4]

After the wilderness excursion, all of the academics seemed more willing to consider that stillness, and even boredom, may have benefits. Perhaps the most telling part of the experience was that Arthur Kramer, the skeptic of the group, began rethinking his relationship to multitasking.

As they near the airport, Mr. Kramer also mentions a personal discovery: “I have a colleague who says that I’m being very impolite when I pull out a computer during meetings. I say: ‘I can listen.’”

“Maybe I’m not listening so well. Maybe I can work at being more engaged.”^[5]

The Paradox of the Unread Message

Fifteen years later, the hypothesis the researchers tossed around on the trip—that our working memory is compromised by constant availability to interruptions—has been established through a string of clinical studies. For example, a 2023 study by Adrian Ward, et al, demonstrated that even when a phone does not interrupt sustained attention, and even when it does not increase the frequency of phone-related thoughts, the mere presence of the device still adversely affects working memory capacity (WMC) and functional fluid intelligence (Gf).^[6] Subsequent meta-analysis has supported the phenomenon of phone-induced brain drain, despite many remaining questions.^[7] It all goes back to Dr. Yantis’s comment during the trip about expectation of messages. It seems that the presence of a phone keeps a person in a state of “interruption-readiness.” Knowing that at any moment your attention might be pulled away from an activity—whether homework, a conversation, a project at work, or restorative activities like reading or walking—seems to stop one from being able to fully engage in the task at hand.

If someone uses willpower to resist digital distractions, then the unread message or unviewed notification may undermine focus as severely as the brain drain experienced by someone in the actual moment of checking his or her phone, given the cognitive burden of unsatiated curiosity, especially curiosity about something that might be a stimulus for either anxiety or excitement, however mild. We might compare this to the brain-drain of a hungry person on a diet trying to read while there is a dish of chocolate within sight. The deficits this creates in working memory capacity and functional fluid intelligence should not be taken lightly, since these are the systems involved in attentiveness, as well as deep thought, meaningful connection, mental adaptability, and abstract thinking.

This challenges the popular tendency to think of distractions in purely quantitative terms (for example, as merely a time-drain). It may take only a split second to quickly glance at an incoming message during a conversation with a friend or while reading a book, especially if the electronic distraction conveys nothing relevant. But the research increasingly suggests that the real issue is not quantitative but qualitative—not time drain but brain drain. Moreover, it is not merely the messages, alerts and posts we actually read that siphon cognitive resources; it is also the unread ones, the continual stream of information potentially at our fingertips, always just a second away. And it is not even the unread messages and alerts that subconsciously drain our attention, but our constant anticipation of future messages and alerts, yet to arrive, for which we remain in a perpetual state of readiness, poised always to redirect our focus at any moment should we hear a beep, see a notification, or notice an incoming message.

Is Interruption-Readiness Addictive?

So why do so many of us remain tethered to constant digital noise, especially when we might easily remove ourselves from a state of interruptibility by simply turning off the phone or temporarily putting the device in another room? It may be that we are addicted not merely to digital noise, but to the state of passive interruption-readiness. Stanford addiction researcher, Dr. Anna Lembke, notes that a defining feature of addictive or pre-addictive behavior is when an activity that once brought significant pleasure becomes something a person must repeatedly engage in simply to feel normal.^[8] And if we’re honest, most of us require constant access to digitally-mediated messages and alerts to feel normal, which is why we find it difficult to turn off our phones for even an hour.

The key word here is “access,” for even when we are not actively using our devices, we normally still remain accessible to incoming stimuli in the form of alerts, status updates, dings for emails and text messages, etc. These interruptions excite the pleasure pathways in the hunter-gatherer brain, which are wired to remain alert to anything that could be useful, novel, or unexpected.^[9] To remove access to digital distractions—for example, by silencing all interruptions, having set times for checking messages, or implementing various digital boundaries that remove actual or potential distractions^[10]—may be experienced as a dopamine deficit state, a form of mental pain, however slight.

Consider further how interruption-readiness follows the same variable reinforcement schedule as slot machines: even if only one in every twenty interruptions offers the type of social nourishment we crave, the mere availability to be interrupted becomes linked to the potential for dopamine. Significantly, we never know when the silence will be punctuated by an interruption, nor when that interruption will actually result in a pleasure stimulus. It’s that not knowing, and the possibility of constant reward-prediction error, that keeps us on edge. This makes sense given how dopamine circuits work. If you drop a pellet of food into a rat’s cage every five minutes, eventually the animal stops being in a state of arousal, whereas if you drop the food at random intervals, the rat remains in a heightened state of anticipation.

B.F. Skinner, the pioneer of operant conditioning, discovered that when birds could trigger a stimulus themselves but the number of pecks required varied unpredictably, they became excited and pecked frantically.^[11] This was the animal equivalent of slot machine use, or the activity or compulsively checking one’s phone.

In classic gambling activities like a slot machine, an individual activates the potential stimulus (for example, by pulling a lever). But often the smartphone user is passive, like the rat who never knows when a nourishing pellet will drop from the sky. Consequently, silence itself becomes subliminally stimulating, since at any moment the stillness could be broken by the pleasure-stimulus of a message or alert. The occasional rewarding moments of digital interruptions, mixed with unrewarding or irritating ones, compel us to keep returning, although in this case “returning” may simply be our willingness to remain available to audible or visual interruptions, even at times when such availability is clearly antithetical to wellbeing (for example, while driving, sleeping, conversing, or even immediately following sexual intimacy).

If I mute or remove my phone while engaging in meaningful activities, then while the potential for interruptions is eliminated, so is the potential for dopaminergic distraction.

“But I’m Good at Multitasking”

Most of us likely imagine we’re outliers and can switch attention quickly between one thing and another without cost, or perhaps we even think that interruption-readiness and attention-switching increases our productivity. But multitasking—even when, or perhaps especially, when we’re “good” at it—always comes at a cost. Earl Miller, professor of neuroscience at MIT, says that “switch cost” (the loss of attention when we’re pulled away from a task, even if only for a split second to glance at a message) has an effect on the brain’s ability to focus that lasts up to 15 or 20 minutes. The worst effects of switch cost occur in the first 64 seconds after checking one’s email or text messages regardless of whether or not there was a message of significance.^[12]

Miller’s research was echoed by David Strayer: in pilot data presented at Tedx, he shared that there can be a 20-minute technology hangover among subjects who walked in nature while using their phone, compared to those who walked without a device.^[13]

I would go even further. Because the brain regions that regulate attention are the same systems involved in critical thinking, problem-solving, and impulse control, when we weaken these networks through a lifestyle of multitasking and attention shifting, we inadvertently nudge ourselves toward increased susceptibility to various maladaptive conditions, including anxiety and low impulse control. After all, impulse control depends on rejecting interference from irrelevant stimuli, whether arising from one’s emotions, passions, and mental representations, or arising from an external source like a demon or a digital distraction. A person who has control over attention can nip negative cognitions in the bud before they mature into full-fledged anxiety or chaos. The implications should be obvious: if you want to resist the inner demons, start by resisting the digital ones.

But attention is not just how we weed out what’s negative: through the gift of our attention, we preserve the things we love. If there is something you care deeply about—whether a hobby, a type of music, or a spouse—you will need attention to protect it. But if we allow offline activities that are meaningful to us to be punctuated by digital distractions (including even passive interruption-readiness), we risk diluting the quality of our experiences by habituating ourselves to a condition of continuous partial attention, never fully engaged and never fully present.

Fifteen Years Later

What happened to the scientists who took the wilderness excursion fifteen years ago? To find out, I phoned Dr. David Strayer, still at the University of Utah and now professor of cognition and neural science.

Stayer, whose meticulous mind is reflected in a measured and deliberate speaking style, told me of a plethora of studies his lab has undertaken to identify brain-based measures of cognitive restoration. A great outdoorsman who loves the wilderness of Eastern Utah, Strayer has been particularly intrigued by the restorative effects of time in nature. In study after study, he and his colleagues have proved that benefits of time in nature include enhanced creativity, better attention, improved working memory, and healthier functioning in the brain regions associated with emotional regulation.

I asked Stayer what his thoughts were today on the phenomenon of interruption potential. “The mere presence of your phone,” he said, “especially if it’s starting to go off and so forth (even if you’re not interacting with it), leads to the thought, ‘is that my phone?’” He explained that a person habituated to these types of distractions may experience interruption potential even after the phone has been removed. Reflecting on the 2010 hiking trip, he said that some of the people who came along were so conditioned to their devices that they experienced phantom vibrations, even though their devices had been left behind at the base.

I asked if he had any different perspectives now, fifteen years later. “Well,” Stayer said, “I wish I knew then what I know now about what the science has discovered over the last fifteen or twenty years, because I would have been able to answer the skeptics….We haven’t answered all the questions but now there is an abundance of research…. Fifteen years ago there was a debate about whether you could become addicted to this technology. But now, years later moving forward, there is a pretty clear consensus that it can be a behavioral addiction, with all sorts of negatives. The message isn’t that technology is bad but that if we are unwise in how we use it then our social interactions suffer, as do our cognitions and creativity.”

Carving Out Wilderness With Technological Askesis

Is there a solution to our addiction to passive interruption-readiness? Not all of us can unplug to go on a five-day wilderness expedition. But we can carve little spaces of wilderness into our lives—times of quiet where we can slow down and embrace stillness, removing the continual stream of information potential from our fingertips. And the research suggests that this stillness might be easier to access than we realize, as it could simply involve removing the phone from our presence for periods of time, or turning off the features that keep us tethered to a condition of interruption-readiness.^[14]

In my own life, I use a k-safe box where I will literally lock away my phone during my times of contemplation, sleep, or activities I want to be interruption-free.

Of course, locking away my phone isn’t always practical. Even at night I sometimes need audiobooks and music to help with insomnia. And during the day I generally need be available for some types of interruptions, such as phone calls from family members, loved ones, or work colleagues. And while I have messaging notifications turned off and routines for checking messages at certain times, I often find myself pervaded by the sense of interruption availability; sometimes I even find myself compulsively checking my messages. To address that, I’ve recently begun using something called AppBlock: a program that allows me to block messaging apps for a designated amount of time, thus removing even the potential for message-based interruptions. If your Achilles’ heal is YouTube or Instagram, you can block those as well for designated periods of time. The iPhone has similar applications.

The important point in all these strategies is not simply to remove distractions, but also to block the sense of passive interruption readiness.

These strategies are similar to how we have come to approach food. As a species, we have not fully adapted to the food surpluses of the agricultural revolution, and hence we have the obesity crisis. Similarly, we have yet to adapt to the information surplus wrought by the digital revolution, and hence we have a range of attention disorders. The solution to abundance of information, like abundance of food, will be found in the arts of self-limitation and askesis. A healthy individual recognizes that even though he may be hungry and even though food may be readily accessible, he can wait until the next meal. Similarly, we are coming to realize that even though digital stimulation may be only a click away, we need to take measures to limit the availability of digital distractions, protect our attention, and preserve silence. When we crave noise and stimulation, those are often the times when we most need to lean into greater stillness and quietude; when we most feel the urge to fill up life’s silences with distraction, those may be the very moment when God is calling us to submit to the pause.

Of course, the best strategies are those that we can pursue communally. In the book I co-authored with Joshua Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity From the Machine, we offer a number of best practices for creating healthy digital boundaries for school, home, and church. When families come together to pursue these strategies collectively, it becomes more than merely one person’s self-improvement plan; it becomes an entire community oriented around a shared vision of flourishing.

Further Reading

Notes

[1] Matt Richtel, “Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain,” The New York Times, August 15, 2020. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html.

[2] Steven Yantis, cited in Matt Richtel.

[3] Matt Richtel.

[4] Matt Richtel.

[5] Matt Richtel.

[6] Ward, Adrian F., Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W. Bos. “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 2, no. 2 (April 2017): 140. https://doi.org/10.1086/691462.

[7] See the meta-analysis of Böttger, Tobias, Michael Poschik, and Klaus Zierer. “Does the Brain Drain Effect Really Exist? A Meta-Analysis.” Behavioral Sciences 13, no. 9 (September 2023): 751. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs13090751.

[8] Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (New York: Dutton, 2021).

[9] “For our prehistoric ancestors, information was a precious commodity, just like food. It makes sense, from the perspective of adaptation, that new information would stimulate the pleasure pathways in the brain. After all, being able to listen, learn, and notice—especially about changes happening in the visual or auditory field, things that might incite fear or outrage, or anything unusual—could mean the difference between survival or destruction for your family or tribe. Moreover, in a culture before writing, failure to pass on new information—whether information about a medicinal use of a plant to the habits of an animal— might mean permanent loss of critical facts from the collective memory of your society. In itself this would not have thrown our paleolithic ancestors into a condition of chaotic alerting because the amount of new information available to any single people group was relatively unchanged from day to day. When there was a sudden influx of new information, this would usually have signaled something wrong or unusual—certainly something to attend to. The problem is that humans still have what is essentially a hunter-gatherer brain, with the same insatiable curiosity to know all available information. Our brains are still perfectly adapted for an environment of information scarcity. Our dopamine and adrenaline systems, like that of our ancestors, are still wired toward novelty, stimulation, excitement, fear, and outrage. Yet unlike our ancestors, we no longer live in a world where the opportunities for novelty, stimulation, etc., are comparatively limited. Instead of living in an environment of information scarcity, we live at a time of information surplus. Just turn on your phone and you’ll find an endless supply of content to feed the brain’s hunger for novelty, stimulation, excitement, fear, and outrage. The problem is that our paleolithic brain is unsuited for this type of stimulatory flood. The instincts that served our ancestors well—to constantly listen, learn, notice, and pass on all available information—becomes maladaptive in the digital age.” Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine (Basilian Media & Publishing, 2024), ch. 30 & 31.

[10] For best practices on digital boundaries, see Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine (Basilian Media & Publishing, 2024), 372-3.

[11] Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long, The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race (Dallas, TX, BenBella Books, 2018), 12-13.

[12] “Mindfulness: The New Science of Health and Happiness,” Time Special Edition (New York, NY: Time Inc. Books, 2016).

[13] David Stayer, “Restore Your Brain with Nature,” Tedx, November 2017, https://www.ted.com/talks/david_strayer_restore_your_brain_with_nature.

At least, that is what Noelle McEachran recently suggested, when asking us to consider the fallout from Americans’ long love affair with the morally gray.

The “Morally Gray” Generation

McEachran’s article, “How Empathetic ’90s Hollywood Created Today’s Judgers and Haters,” reflected on the diet of TV dished up in the 90s.

Having grown up in the ’80s and ’90s, it seemed like almost every sitcom, movie, and paperback seemed to beat the same drum—’nothing is morally black and white.

Shows like Three’s Company, Married with Children, Friends, Modern Family, and movies like Pretty Woman, Fried Green Tomatoes, Cider House Rules, and later Maleficent and Wicked, and many more—all offered a sympathetic look at morally gray characters. Their message? Life is complicated. Ethics are situational. No one’s purely good or evil.

And at first glance, that sounds wise. Viewers were offered a picture of moral complexity—a balanced, almost enlightened perspective that taught there are no clean lines between right and wrong. The world, they suggested, isn’t so simple.

This does indeed sound good at first glance. After all, we want young people growing up to understand that the world, even the world of ethics, is full of subtlety and complexity.

Why Nuance Requires Moral Absolutes

We should use storytelling to help children understand that things are not always black and white. The problem is that catechizing children in the wisdom of ambiguity can only be effective against a strong backdrop of objective morality.

In Lord of the Rings, we can see that Frodo isn’t all good, that Gollum isn’t all bad, and that even the characters that succumb to the dark side are animated by a mixture of both good and bad motives. But here’s the key: Tolkien’s story invites this type of nuance only because it is situated within a clear framework for understanding good and evil, sin and redemption. One cannot appreciate moral nuance and complexity in a conceptual landscape where there is no morality, just as forgiveness is not possible in a conceptual landscape without sin. A strong sense of right and wrong is thus foundational for exercising nuance, compassion, empathy, mercy, and forgiveness.

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Again from McEachran:

You can’t show mercy unless there’s something truly wrong to forgive… The world thinks wisdom and compassion mean dissolving moral absolutes. But real wisdom can hold both. Real stories reveal uncompromising good and evil, while still showing sympathy, growth, and complexity…. It’s wisdom that a simplistic world can’t grasp. The world insists on breaking truth into pieces—it has to be one or the other. They remove evil and call it compassion. They remove justice and call it tolerance. They remove absolutes and call it wisdom.

But the very reason stories are so powerful is that they can hold all these tensions and seeming contradictions together at once. They can both bend and have a backbone. They can show the good, the bad, and the grey without compromise.

From Moral Complexity to Moral Inversion

Many contemporary films have been written by people attempting to cultivate nuance and moral complexity but without a backdrop of ethical absolutes. Often the best that happens is that traditional good and evil roles are merely inverted. Consider the genre of villain origin stories, which offer new backstories to famous villains to explain why they turned out the way they did. I pointed out elsewhere that villain origin stories might offer a rich opportunity—following in the tradition of tragedies like Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex—to explore the complex antecedents to wickedness, and to explore the relationship between nature and nurture, or the relation between dispositional and situational factors in determining character. That might help us be more sensitive to those we are apt to judge, and to have empathy even to those who corrupt their character by choosing the dark side. But that would require an understanding of character, and thus virtue, morality, and ultimately the Good; it would require acknowledging that there actually is a dark side. Given that we are deeply confused about all these elements today, the best villain origin stories can do is merely to read things upside down, reversing hero and villain in the classic tradition of Blake’s reading of Paradise Lost.

Consider Elphaba, the supposedly “wicked” Witch of the West in the musical Wicked. Elphaba has no actual character defects while Galinda (the supposedly “good” Witch of the North) is gossipy, materialistic, self-conscious, and manipulative. Rather than answering the question the musical poses—“Are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?”—the narrative merely inverts the roles of protagonist and antagonist, making the traditional villain not really all that wicked after all. That is why villain origin stories like Wicked fail even to rise to the level of good tragedy. Ultimately, these types of stories don’t even help us to empathize with villains because the villain is rendered merely not so bad after all.

None of this should be surprising. A clear sense of right and wrong—with characters who are actually good and evil—is necessary if we are to judge with mercy, discriminate with wisdom, and even properly empathize with villains. Without a firm grounding in justice, true mercy—like Gandalf’s plea for Gollum or his leniency toward Saruman—becomes impossible.

We’re All Judgers and Haters Now

When storytelling removes our ability to even know what heroism and villainy are, the result is not that we stop judging, but that we stop doing it well. And that brings me back to McEachran’s excellent article.

If we stop consuming stories that teach us how to judge well, we don’t stop judging—we just do it badly. We become judgmental monsters....

Stories can’t have wisdom without moral absolutes. You can’t explore moral complexity if you erase right and wrong.

But that’s exactly what we did.

From the late ’80s onward, Hollywood churned out stories with no clear villains, no real evil, and no final justice. The goal was to appear deep, nuanced, and unjudgmental. But the result wasn’t wisdom—it was a massive void. A vacuum.

When we undermine black and white morals for a generation, the result is not greater acceptance, empathy, or tolerance for moral ambiguity, but quite the opposite: a shrill, brittle morality that turns us into judgers and haters.

So where does that leave us now? McEachran identifies three genres where the craving for judgment and justice has resurfaced:

1. Crime & Detective Stories. Even in the height of the 1990’s “gray era,” true crime documentaries restored a closed system of good, evil, and justice. People enjoy true crime documentaries not merely for the detection, but also for the catharsis of seeing bad guys caught and punished.

2. Reality TV. Reality TV was never intended to administer justice, but that is what happened. As McEachran points out, “Viewers sat on their couches, and the court was in session. Contestants were praised, mocked, analyzed, and sentenced—sometimes within a single episode. People call it ‘entertainment,’ but really, it’s an ugly outgrowth of the void—a symptom of a world starving for justice. Reality shows are the unhealthy byproduct of that hunger. It’s what happens when we live in a world without moral order and start necessarily manufacturing our own.”

3. Superhero Movies. Audiences, weary of narratives that blurred lines between hero and villain or refused to deliver justice, flocked to stories where right and wrong were unmistakable, In superhero movies, the clash between good and evil returns to us in stark unmistakable terms, offering a respite from our cultural anxieties, and satiating our primal need for justice.

Before Christians start rejoicing that the era of the morally gray is on its last legs, we should pause with caution. America’s brief love affair with moral confusion has given way to a new cultural mood characterized by increasingly strident demands for moral uniformity, but not the morality of the Christian worldview. From the rise of a cancel culture that enforces only the “right” viewpoints, to human resource policies that exclude the “wrong” types of people from the workplace, the craving for moral justice has returned with fervor. Many millennials who were catechized under the moral ambiguity of Three’s Company, Friends, etc., now work in human resource departments or as diversity officers, enforcing corporate speech codes, and ideological litmus tests, with puritanical fury.

And this is hardly surprising according to McEachran:

“When we erase moral systems from our stories, we don’t get peace—we get anxiety. When our stories stop showing good, evil, and any real system of judgment, something strange happens. We start carrying that missing system inside ourselves. Because we don’t see justice in the world, we feel the need to enforce it personally.”

We are all judgers and haters now, living in the revenge of the black and white world. From the way the MAGA movement demonizes “the other” through an inverted form of identity politics, to the way leftists are shifting away from the language of tolerance and liberty, we are entering a starkly black-and-white world, shaped not by timeless truths but competing tribal pseudo-moralities.

Why We Need Good Stories

Is there a solution? Yes. Read and write good stories! At this time, more than ever, we need stories that can effectively portray human complexity and confusion against a backdrop of objective morality. Only stories rooted in a moral universe can ultimately succeed in helping us have true empathy to human pain, struggle, and confusion.

Here I think of three of my favorite novels: Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. Each is situated within the sacramental vision of traditional Christianity. Each, written by a 20th-century Roman Catholic author, shows a world of flawed, wounded, and deeply divided people, yet at the same time it is a world permeated by grace. Each novel is unsettling because it resist tidy resolution, drawing the reader into a deeper empathy for those whose lives are characterized by brokenness. Characters struggle with confusion, doubt, and human weakness in ways that are so visceral that the reader comes away realizing that our world is way more complicated than previously conceived. Yet while these books disrupt our black and white stereotypes—showing saintly people who get drunk, and pious people who lie and commit adultery—the stories are not subversive, for the narrative unfolds within a moral and spiritual universe that is intelligible. In fact, it is precisely this moral intelligibility that allows the narratives to be so unsettling and challenging, much as diatonic music creates a backdrop in which composers can experiment with dissonance in a way not possible within a purely atonal system.

Further Reading

• Subverting the Hero’s Journey: How Modern Stories Malform the Imagination

• How Empathetic ’90s Hollywood Created Today’s Judgers and Haters

• How the Woke Stole Tolerance

I don’t want to miss the opportunity of pointing out that there is actually good historical evidence for the December 25th dating. In 2003, my friend William J. Tighe wrote an article for Touchstone titled, “Calculating Christmas The Story Behind December 25.” In his meticulously researched essay, Dr. Tighe shows that “the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.”

Tighe adds that the now-familiar claim that the dating of Christmas represents a compromise with paganism originated with Paul Ernst Jablonski, a late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century German Protestant who “wished to show that the celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25th was one of the many ‘paganizations’ of Christianity that the Church of the fourth century embraced, as one of many ‘degenerations’ that transformed pure apostolic Christianity into Catholicism.”

Read Tighe’s whole piece, and share it with the next person who tells you that we shouldn’t be celebrating Christmas right now (because, of course, we have only just begun the season of Christmastide).

But it ultimately wouldn’t matter even if our Christmas traditions were of pagan origins, since the whole message of the gospel is that Christ is taking back what rightfully belongs to God, from our celebration of time to the cosmos itself.

It also doesn’t make any difference if Jesus was or was not actually born on December 25. Why? Because spiritual feasts do not proceed according to the worldly logic of secular time. This emerges when we consider the biblical basis of Christian holidays in the Old Testament.

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Consider that the rationale for the spiritual organizing of time is found in Exodus 13:14 and 23:14-19, where God provided His people with three main feasts as a tangible way to remember what He had done for them. Although the feast of Passover expired when Jesus brought Israel’s exile to an end (a fact hinted at in Jeremiah 16:14-15 and 23:7-8), this does not mean that the people of God are now without any feasts to celebrate. On the contrary, just as our forefathers had the three cardinal feasts of the law (Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles), Christians also have a number of feasts that celebrate our ongoing salvation. These feasts—celebrations like Pentecost, Pascha or Easter, Advent, Christmas or Nativity, Theophany or Epiphany, to name only a few—proclaim that time itself, once the medium only of death and decay, has become the very medium of our redemption. One of the Christian feasts, Pentecost, was also an Old Testament feast (known as the Feast of Weeks), though it has been transformed by the gospel to take on a fuller meaning. And just as our forefathers had numerous supplementary holy days between their feasts like the Day of Atonement, so the church has numerous saints’ days to celebrate.

These holidays are not merely reminders about spiritual truths; rather, these holidays are a tangible means for Christians to live through the story of redemption every year and to sacramentally participate in the realities they commemorate. This idea of sacramental participation also has its origins in the feasts of the Old Testament, particularly Passover. The annual celebration of Passover was always more than simply a reminder that God had delivered His people out of Egyptian bondage. Rather, the faithful believed that through the Passover liturgy, they were mystically participating in those original events. Through the ritualistic reenactment of the Passover night, the ancient past was brought forward into the present.

Jesus celebrated the Passover in the event we call the Last Supper, as faithful Jews and Israelites had been doing for hundreds of years. Significantly, this occurred on the night before His death when Jesus, the new Passover lamb, rescued Abraham’s descendants from their final bondage. By mysteriously participating in the original Passover, Christ was able to transform the celebration in light of His dawning victory over slavery and exile. Taking the Passover bread and wine, Christ declared that it was His body and blood, shed for the remission of sins and for the initiation of a new covenant Mt. (26:26-29) When Christians thereafter celebrate the Last Supper, or the Eucharist as it later came to be called, they participate in Christ’s victorious death, the ultimate Exodus out of bondage. Just as the annual Passover liturgy was a participation in the original Passover meal, so the Christian Eucharist became a participation in the new Exodus made possible by Christ’s sacrificial death.

When the Hebrews celebrated the Passover every year, the symbolism and typology enabled them to spiritually participate in those original events, even though in purely secular time, the Passover was in the distant past. The ancient Hebrews did not believe that the Passover repeated itself hundreds of times throughout linear history, just as Catholics and Orthodox do not believe that Christ is re-sacrificed anew every time a priest serves the Eucharist. Rather, the doctrine of liturgical participation is built on the notion that a specific punctiliar event in the distant past can come rushing forward into the present, and that through “reminiscence” (anamnesis in Greek), those events can be “made present.” As the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor observed in A Secular Age, p. 96, “The original Passover in Egypt, and the last supper, are brought into close proximity by typology, although they are aeons apart in secular time.”

This challenges how we think of time. Consider the following question that Charles Taylor asks: what is closer to the original Easter: January 3^rd 1975, or Easter Sunday 2023? According to human reason, we would say that January 3^rd 1975 is forty-eight years closer to the original Easter than Easter Sunday in the year 2023. But that is a secular way of approaching time. When our thinking has been informed by a Christian worldview, we understand that Easter Sunday is actually “closer” to the events of Christ’s resurrection, though on a different axis from secular time. The church holidays disrupt the purely secular way of conceiving time to bring us into alignment with the events they make present.

The ancient prayers and hymns that accompany the church’s fasts and feasts build on the same reality the Hebrews understood in their Passover celebrations: under the right conditions, great events from the past are brought into conjunction with the present, enabling worshipers to participate in spiritual realities that transcend their immediate location in time and space. For example, during the recent Advent or Nativity fast, we re-enacted and participated in the long period during which our forefathers painfully waited for the Messiah, even as we are now waiting for His second coming. Advent culminated in Christmas, which celebrates the incarnation, that great event when God became man. After Christmas comes the season of Theophany or Epiphany, which recalls the coming of the Magi, a foretaste of Christ’s revelation to the Gentiles. During Lent, the church remembers and participates in Christ’s sufferings, both His suffering in the wilderness and finally His passion on the cross. As we participate in Christ’s temptation and suffering, we give particular attention to our own struggle against temptation. All the events of Christ’s final week are re-enacted during Holy Week. Lent and Holy Week culminate in the Paschal mysteries of Easter, when Christ rises from the dead, defeating death once and for all. Pascha leads to Pentecost, in which Christ’s revelation to the Gentiles comes into full bloom and the wilderness begins to be made transformed.

Sadly, the rhythm of the church year is unfamiliar to many modern Christians, who think of Easter as a single day rather than as a season, or who assume that Christmas ends rather than begins on December 25, or who consider Lent to be “something Catholics do.” Why is this? Part of it goes back to the origins of Protestantism. The French Reformer John Calvin urged doing away with Christmas and all other feasts. In one letter he denounced Christian holidays as unprofitable because they were full of superstition and abuse. (See Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Advice, trans. Benjamin W. Farley and Mary Beaty, pp. 90–91.) In Geneva he reluctantly observed Christian holidays because the magistrates ordered him to do so. But he had interesting ways of practicing the observance: in 1538, he and William Farel refused to offer communion on Easter Sunday as part of a power struggle with the city’s government over who controlled the Church in the republic.

Calvin’s ideas were formative for the Puritans who helped shape the religious imagination of the United States. In their Directory for the Public Worship of God, the Westminster Assembly had prohibited holidays, making clear that “there is no day commanded in scripture to be kept holy under the gospel but the Lord’s day, which is the Christian Sabbath. Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.”

We get an idea how opposed the Puritans were to these holidays from the fact that when Oliver Cromwell turned England into a Puritan commonwealth he instructed his leaders to make sure that Christmas day was an obligatory work day. Jonathan Gifford reminds us of how Cromwell’s “troops roamed the streets looking for signs of inappropriate feasting: mince pies and plum puddings were seized.”

America’s strong Puritan heritage, brought to the United States by both the Pilgrim Fathers as well as the hundreds of thousands of Scotch-Irish who immigrated during the eighteenth century, sought to enforce these measures with what Hambrick-Stowe called “calendary iconoclasm.” In his book The Practice of Piety, pp. 48–49, he notes

“The Puritan vanguard was dedicated to the destruction of an entire world view, a whole system of values and meaning woven from Roman liturgical forms and pagan religious traditions in their English manifestation. The clearest illustration of this ‘purification’ process was the Puritan renunciation of the ecclesiastical year, ordered according to saint’s days and local agricultural legends, a renunciation that one scholar referred to as ‘Puritan calendary iconoclasm’... The result, however, was a major devotional disjunction with the Roman system of special days, which had been carried into the practice of the Church of England. Not a single saint’s day survived the voyage to New England. Entirely new temporal patterns and rhythms emerged as Puritan spirituality developed and matured.”

The remnants of this legacy have only been recently reversed, as seen by the fact that Christmas Day only became a federal holiday in 1870.

By eradicating the church year and all Christian holidays, the Puritans and their descendants left a vacuum that has ultimately been filled by the non-religious ordering of time, which helped reinforce the idea that there exists a secular world that functions separately from spiritual categories. By rejecting the church year as a legitimate way to tell the story of redemption, the Puritans and their descendants inadvertently underscored the sense that religion is disembodied, detached from the space-time continuum. This would ultimately reinforce a number of dualisms that emerged in North American culture, including a false dichotomy between the sacred and the secular.

This process of re-ordering the world and time often entailed the migration of the sacred from the religious to the political, and to landmarks denoting the achievements of civic nationalism. These migrations had begun to occur in Calvin’s own lifetime: significantly, while Saint Peter’s in Geneva was whitewashed to remove all religious imagery, a new stained glass window was installed to display the arms of the city.

Because human beings are inescapably liturgical and religious, we invariably organize the year into rhythmic structures that reflect our priorities. If our priorities are not the great feasts of the church, then by default our year will most likely be structured around secular holidays that tell the story of political redemption or else holidays that pay homage to the god of hedonism. And this is exactly what has happened. “One by one, the Church’s holy days have been overshadowed by secularizing forces, by new false gods,” wrote Fr. Scott Wilson for Touchstone. Fr. Scott continued, “It is striking that nearly every major feast day in the church year has been preempted, to one degree or another, by a secular event that now absorbs the greater part of public attention.” Fr. Scott pointed to many examples of this, not least the way Easter break has been hijacked by “Spring Break”:

Even in public school systems, the weeklong break that occurs in the spring used to be called the ‘Easter break.’ No more; it is now just called ‘spring break.’ And while it often coincides with Holy Week, the solemn week culminating with Good Friday, when our Lord’s Passion is commemorated, many people use the break to skip town and head to warm climates for festive activities, in a recess from daily and academic grinds.

Perhaps the saddest casualty in these secularizing shifts is the church-less Christmas so familiar to most American Christians. As church has ceased to be central to the celebration of Christmas, the sacred quality of Christmas has migrated to merchandise, hedonism, and sentimentalism, all of which are now treated like surrogate gods. This hit me when I moved back to America after living in England for ten years. In England, church attendance on Christmas morning is as much a part of the celebrations as stockings, mince pies, and carols. In fact, many English men and women who hardly ever set foot inside a church attend their local Anglican church on Christmas morning. Indeed, walking to the village church on Christmas morning, accompanied by the festive music of the church’s bells, is such an integral part of an English Christmas that when we moved to America I found it difficult to imagine Christmas morning any other way. I found it disconcerting that most American Protestants think of their church-less Christmases as normal. Yet before it was anything else, Christmas was a mass of the church (Christ-mass) and only pagans would have skipped out on the occasion.

And this is why, ultimately, concerns about the historicity of December 25 is insufficient reason not to celebrate the incarnation. Although there is good evidence that the date for Christmas was chosen in a sincere attempt to date Christ’s birth, this is ultimately irrelevant. To argue endlessly about the precise date of Christ’s birth is to miss the deeper claim Christianity makes about time itself. Christmas is not a historical reenactment tethered to a calendar calculation, nor a relic of borrowed pagan customs; rather, it is a liturgical event in which the mystery of the Incarnation is made present to the Church. When Christians enter the rhythms of Advent, Christmas, and the feasts that follow, we are not indulging in superstition, nor are we making implicit claims about the historicity of certain dates. Rather, we are following our Old Testament forefathers by inhabiting time sacramentally. In a world increasingly ordered by secular schedules and commercial seasons, the recovery of this different approach to time is an an act of spiritual resistance—a quiet proclamation that time itself belongs to the Christ child who was born in Bethlehem.

But maybe I can help the situation by simply sharing what’s been going on in my area.

I live in Prince William County Virginia, and recently took a trip to North Idaho. While in the Northwest, I came to realize what massive ignorance there is about the actions of ICE agents. Specifically, I found a huge informational disconnect between what is happening on ground level and what the White House and the conservative media are telling their devotees. While the left-leaning press has been reporting on the myriad human rights violations perpetrated by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (see this chilling video put out by CBC News), conservatives tend to dismiss these reports as fake news, or else downplay the human rights violations as marginal.

It isn’t hard to understand the skepticism against left-leaning media sources on the immigration issue. In 2019, I puzzled at how Democrats like Pelosi were framing their opposition to border protection in moral rather than prudential terms, and how their association of border enforcement with racism was painting Democrats into a corner where they could not, even in principle, advocate for stricter measures, even Obama-level enforcement measures (see my earlier articles about this here and here). This over-simplified framing of the immigration debate has understandably left many conservatives distrustful of leftist or even mainstream reporting on anything related to the immigration crisis. Moreover, it is possible to follow carefully curated information diets that reinforce ideological prejudices and insulate people (even people who imagine they are well-informed) from what is really happening on ground level. All this can contribute to a massive information disconnect.

But I usually (not always) find that when I have conversations with people and explain what I’ve been witnessing in my communities, people trust me and change their perspective. All to say, maybe one small thing I can do to help in the current crisis is to share with all of you, dear readers, some of what I’ve been encountering.

ICE Agents Are Targeting Legal Immigrants

Here’s the short version: the propaganda the White House wants us to believe is that ICE agents are only deporting illegal immigrants. This simplistic narrative is perpetrated (often by omission of information rather than lies of commission) on the White House website (see here) and on the website for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (see here). The narrative they want us to believe (and which, sadly, tens of thousands of well-meaning conservatives now take as gospel truth) goes something like this: people are coming over the border illegally, and this includes both “the worst of the worst” who are committing crimes, as well as well-intentioned people who simply want a better life but are changing America’s demographic in unsustainable ways.

What they are not telling us in the press releases and headlines (although data about this is available even from White House sources if you dig deeper than their flashy talking points) is that ICE agents are arresting and deporting thousands of legal immigrants. (They are also arresting foreign-born citizens, but that’s a different story to the one I’m telling.)

Immigration and Legal Residency

A legal immigrant is not necessarily a citizen. Legal immigrants include people who are living in the United States on various visas, hoping eventually to receive a green card or become a citizen.

Federal law allows for immigrants to pursue a path to citizenship, or permanent residency, under a variety of circumstances, including but not limited to the following:

• Family-sponsored immigration (e.g., immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, such as spouses, unmarried minor children, or parents, or other family preference categories like siblings or married adult children)

• Employment-based immigration (e.g., for workers with extraordinary ability, advanced degrees, skilled/unskilled labor needs, or as investors creating jobs)

• Humanitarian protections (e.g., asylum for those fleeing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group; refugee status; or Temporary Protected Status for nationals of designated countries)

• Diversity Visa Lottery (annual program allocating visas to immigrants from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.)

• Special categories (e.g., for certain religious workers, victims of trafficking or crime who assist law enforcement, or Amerasian children)

• F-1 student visa (nonimmigrant visa for full-time academic or language students at accredited U.S. institutions; allows limited on-campus work and, with approval, off-campus training via CPT or OPT)

• Curricular Practical Training (CPT) (temporary employment authorization for F-1 students when the work is an integral part of an established curriculum, typically part-time during the academic year or full-time during breaks)

• Optional Practical Training (OPT) (temporary employment authorization for F-1 students directly related to their major field of study; available for up to 12 months post-completion, with a 24-month STEM extension possible for qualifying degrees)

• H-1B visa (nonimmigrant specialty occupation visa for professionals in fields requiring at least a bachelor’s degree or equivalent; allows dual intent, meaning holders can pursue permanent residency while working temporarily)

Again, immigrants falling into these and similar brackets are living in the United States legally even though they haven’t obtained citizenship. Most of these categories are structured in such a way as to offer a status to immigrants that can become a path to potential citizenship, which is why so many foreigners are incentivized to pursue these options. Some men I know have been circling through the above options for over a decade while separated from wife and family, in the desperate hope of becoming a citizen in order to sponsor wife and child to immigrate.

My point is that people within these categories—legal residents—are being targeted by the new immigration reforms and enforcements, both through tighter enforcement of existing red tape, as well as through new reforms in immigration policy.

Nobody who works in immigration, either at the political, administrative or legal level, denies that legal residents are being intentionally deported (as opposed to deported by mistake as a side-effect of trying to deport illegals). This should not be controversial, because if you read the wording of many of the immigration reforms that President Trump is introducing or enforcing, the texts explicitly describe the deportation of legal residents. Yet a large number of Americans, especially those lacking strong ties with immigrant communities or who have a carefully curated information diets, do not believe that Trump’s ICE agents are going after many legal immigrants, including long-term legal residents. For example, one conservative recently wrote to me saying, “I’d love to see a real array of sources before I can believe that deportation of legals is somehow part of the program/intentional and not representative of an error margin that is mathematically likely when you deport so many people.” As difficult as it may be to believe, people who are living in America legally, and not merely illegal immigrants, are being deported in the thousands. I know this from my own work in immigration, from interviewing immigration officers and lawyers, and from extensive interviews with people in immigrant communities.

Now I am not suggesting that everyone who pursues residency or citizenship on the above provisions should be allowed to indefinitely remain in this country. Sometimes legal immigrants need to be denied residency, and thus deported. Indeed, any country can only assimilate a limited number of immigrants at a time, and the spectacles we are witnessing in Europe show that when a nation opens her borders irresponsibly, then the country ceases to function as a nation in any meaningful sense. Moreover, borders are not just geographical boundaries but also administrative, so the regulatory frameworks for immigration do need to be enforced fairly and consistently. Later in this article I’ll give examples of how these frameworks are not being enforced fairly, but the point I’m making here is to explain a distinction that is often missed in much of the prevailing folk conservatism, even among those who consider them well-informed. The basic point is that foreigners who are living in America under the above provisions are fundamentally different to illegal immigrants sneaking over the border at night and then committing crimes, yet the former are still being targeted, often violently, by ICE agents.

Moreover, ICE’s rapid expansion and reduced oversight have created a dragnet effect whereby minor violators are swept up with serious ones, eroding due process and human rights. For example, if an immigrant has been living here legally but there is a minor error in his or her paperwork, or if someone is found to have a traffic violation or small misdemeanor from years ago, or if a student on an F1 visa doesn’t get good grades, misses classes, or falls behind on their tuition, or if someone accepts a cash payment for work without the proper work visa, or if someone overstays their visa by even a single day, fails to report a change of address to USCIS within 10 days, or is accused of minor misrepresentation on an application, then they become vulnerable to the same raids and deportation being leveled against the, so called, “worst of the worst.” If a foreigner holding an H-1B worker is laid off and doesn’t find new sponsor in 60 days, he also is deportable. Long-term legal residents who have lived in the country for decades are losing status over minor bureaucratic issues. I know all of this, not from reading liberal media, but from my own involvement with different immigrant communities.

Many of these immigrants struggle with English and can’t afford immigration lawyers, or they inadvertently make mistakes on their paperwork that leave them vulnerable to deportation. Moreover, a lot of the deportations come down (especially in cases where people are seeking asylum on humanitarian, religious, or political grounds), come down to the arbitrary decisions of immigration officers, which so far do not offer any type of consistent pattern. For example, ethnic Mongolians from China are being given a free pass, more or less, whereas Christian converts from Islam in the Middle East are not).

Moreover, this system is plagued by perverse incentives that leave the innocent and vulnerable at most risk. Stephen Miller, the current homeland security advisor who has been building himself a mini kingdom within the Trump administration, set a goal of 3,000 arrests per day. Because ICE agents are under pressure to meet the quotas of arrests, they aim for the low-hanging fruit—peaceful residents with documentary problems, “courthouse arrests,” or Vietnamese ladies doing under-the-table work in nail salons—rather than focusing more resources on the cartels, where arrests are harder and more dangerous.

Making a Broken System Worse

Part of the prevailing disfunction is that ICE agents are enforcing laws that are themselves unjust, inconsistent, and confusing. The current immigration system seems to have emerged out of a multi-decade tug-of-war between bureaucrats eager to open multiple paths to residency vs. those determined to restrict it at every turn. This dialectic has created a trail of mixed messages and inconsistences, resulting in a regulatory framework of byzantine complexity and policy schizophrenia.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Much of the immigration system has been structured around encouraging foreign students to come to America to study. But with a few exceptions (i.e., CPT or OPT status), foreigners staying in the US on a student visa are not allowed to take employment but must pay tuition with savings. They often get multiple Master’s degrees, desperately hoping to be awarded a Green Card before their savings runs out. If they accept under-the-table work, even in exchange for food, they immediately become deportable. However, while an F-1 student cannot even wash my car in exchange for food, he is permitted to start a business and hire U.S. workers. He can pay employees market wages but cannot pay himself a salary as the owner of the business. However, he can receive dividends as a shareholder! Go figure. A student could, in theory, become a millionaire on dividends in his own business, but if he pays himself even a dollar, he is rendered deportable.

When a legal resident is deported or has his or her status denied, it does not retroactively make the person’s prior presence in America “illegal.” Again, many immigrants are here legally even if they are not citizens. In fact, there are millions of legal immigrants in the United States right now who have become potentially vulnerable. But even immigrants who face no risk of deportation are now suffering under onerous policies that appear to have no rationale other than President Trump’s desire to make life as difficult as possible for all foreigners. To give one recent example, asylum seekers with an “asylum pending” status are legally permitted to get jobs, and many have obtained commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) to work in the trucking industry. However, new regulations have now invalidated all CDLs held by individuals with “asylum pending” status. This is just one instance of how President Trump, having inherited a broken system, is making it worse, not only by adding new layers of complexity, but by enacting policies that seem designed simply to make immigrants suffer.

Sometimes law-abiding legal residents, who have a family, job and community in the United States, are asked for their family to attend a meeting to discuss their path to citizenship, only to find themselves forcibly detained on the spot, not on any criminal charge, but because a bureaucrat suddenly decided to reject their application. These are known colloquially as “courthouse arrests.” The victims are not allowed to return to their house to collect their belongings and paperwork, the children are not allowed to return to school to say goodbye; rather, they are treated as prisoners, though without the legal protections normally afforded to prisoners. They are held in detention centers where human rights violations abound, including denial of medical attention to children, lack of habeas corpus or meaningful due process.

Christian Immigrants at Risk

One friend, a man I’ll call Dawit from Eritrea, was thrown into jail after converting to Christianity from Islam. This was a great ordeal to Dawit because he has a wife and family to support. After being released, Dawit took his family to live in South Korea for ten years, before moving to the United States. Normally, someone in Dawit’s circumstances would be able to apply for asylum on humanitarian grounds. However, because Dawit didn’t seek asylum right away upon fleeing Eritrea, but lived in South Korea before coming to the US, he falls outside the bracket of someone who can seek religious or political asylum. If he really needed American asylum, he should have come here first, the argument seems to run. Consequently, Dawit is here on a student visa instead. But here’s the rub: if anything goes wrong with his paperwork, or if he runs out of money and can’t keep paying his tuition, then he will be deported to Eritrea where he and his family will face imprisonment or execution.

Or consider another Christian friend of mine, a lady I’ll call Nafisa. She used to be a journalist in Turkmenistan but got into trouble when she wrote an article criticizing the government. She was blackballed and, consequently, started being denied good employment opportunities. So Nafisa immigrated to the United States as a political refugee with her husband and three children. But now an immigration officer must decide if her case is serious enough to warrant political asylum. If her application is denied, she will be deported. There are many people like Nafisa seeking political or religious asylum in the United States, including large numbers of Muslim converts to Christianity from totalitarian Islamic regimes. Historically, our nation has been hospitable to these types of cases, but now the tide is changing and we are deporting people even to nations where their return is an almost inevitable death-sentence.

Consider the following case of the mass deportation of Iranian asylum seekers on September 29. Many of these deportees are Christians who came to the US seeking religious freedom. From the Word & Way Report:

The Trump administration’s deportation of more than a hundred Iranians held in ICE custody on a flight that touched down in Tehran on Sept. 29 includes Christian converts and other religious minorities who may face harsh penalties for their religious beliefs upon return to the Islamic Republic, advocates warned.

“Among those deported were four women and a 72-year-old man who had lived in the United States for nearly 50 years,” said Pastor Ara Torosian in a Facebook post after the flight, in an account attributed to an anonymous witness on the flight. The Iranian-born evangelical Christian pastor has been protesting the detainment of several of his congregants for months. “The group included an estimated 15 Iranian Christian converts, along with political and ethnic asylum seekers,” Torosian wrote….

While some protection is afforded to churches with a longstanding history in Iran, such as the Armenian Apostolic Church, Assyrian Church of the East, and Chaldean and Aramean churches, Protestant and evangelical Christian groups have no such protections. Christian worship in Farsi (as opposed to Armenian or Syriac Aramaic) is outlawed, and proselytizing and conversion are punishable by fines, corporal punishment, jail time or, potentially, the death penalty under Iranian law.

The unrecognized converts from Islam to Christianity bear the brunt of religious freedom violations, carried out by the government in particular and to a lesser extent by society and the converts’ families,” noted Open Doors’ report. “The government sees these Iranian Christians as an attempt by Western countries to undermine Islam and the Islamic regime of Iran. Both leaders and ordinary members of Christian convert groups have been arrested, been prosecuted, and received long prison sentences for ‘crimes against national security.’”

Why is President Trump making himself complicit in the persecution of Christians, sending our Iranian brothers and sisters to the wolves? Remember, this is the president that Christians were heralding as our new King David and frequently comparing to Jesus Christ! A clue to Trump’s bizarre behavior can be found in the following line from the Word & Way Report and, as is usually the case with President Trump, it all comes down to politics and posturing.

According to The Associated Press, the flight was the result of a rare deal struck between the Trump administration and the Islamic Republic, even as the U.S. continues to push sanctions on Iran and bombed its nuclear facilities just months ago.

Since the Word & Way report, new facts about this situation have emerged and have been reported by the London-based Persian satellite television channel, Iran International. This includes accounts of the refugees being denied medical care while in US detention, and suicide attempts on the flight back to Iran to avoid falling into the hands of the Islamic Republic. The Religious News Service reported on what happened when the Christians arrived back in Iran. Their source is a well-informed lawyer who published information on Facebook, who I contacted when performing due diligence on this case.

Refugees were lined up, searched, and their belongings seized. Particularly alarming was the targeting of 10-15 Christian converts, who were forced to display their Bibles and crosses on camera while being interrogated,” read the Facebook report.

“They were then separated into individual rooms where they were coerced into making video confessions, statements discrediting their conversions, claiming they were misled by pastors, and admitting they had sought Christianity merely to gain asylum. These staged confessions are expected to be broadcast soon by Iranian state television as part of propaganda against both Christianity and the United States,” read the Facebook post.

But they may face more dangers, the lawyer said, due to how the U.S. handles deportations. Deportees’ possessions, said Herischi, are normally in the custody of the U.S. government and are sent ahead of the deportees to their destination. In this case, that means all their court documents, including case files detailing their asylum claims, would have been handed over directly to the Iranian government.

“So in those packages, there may be a copy of their files, all sorts of documents that they had to support their immigration case. So that’s very dangerous, and there may also be Bibles,” Herischi said. “Based on how much information [Iran] has about their immigration process and what they have been provided, they can charge them with allegations of working with a foreign government, working against national security and apostasy claims, which can be up to execution — capital punishment.”

To date, we know that the Christians are still isolated, and cut off from communication with anyone outside Iran.

Police State Creep

There is, of course, another side to the debate. “Yes,” someone might say in response, “innocent people are becoming casualties of immigration reform, but that’s the price that must be paid for letting immigration reach these unsustainable levels, similar to how innocent people are sometimes killed in war. Moreover, if we’re talking about innocent people suffering, what about all the innocent Americans who can’t get jobs now because immigrants are doing work for cheaper?”

This counter-argument isn’t entirely without warrant: there is a great need for immigration reform, including better enforcement of existing laws. Moreover, as with any type of enforcement, you will always have innocent casualties.

But…

What has taken away American jobs is not immigrants—whether legal or illegal—but structural economic changes over the last forty years. Beginning in the late 20th century, multinational companies have been going offshore, to places like China, where labor is cheaper. This has been the result of a constellation of economic and political factors—ranging from Reagan-era deregulation to the emergence of shareholder-driven capitalism, to China’s entry into WTO in 2001—which create perverse incentives for manufacturing companies to move oversees.

As for the other part of this objection, let’s not forget that President Trump already solved the border crisis, with the number of illegal crossings now at an all time low. The move from border enforcement to this condition of permanent emergency fueling hysteria against foreigners, seems to give credence to the Democrats who alleged that Trump’s immigration agenda was always merely a smokescreen for a more sinister ideological agenda.

Moreover, the abuses we are witnessing (both at the regulatory and enforcement level) are NOT an inevitable effect of tighter enforcement. Rather, this is the result of deliberate choices by the Trump administration to reject alternative models of reform and enforcement that would have been safer, more humane, and even more effective in the long-term.

When leaders introduce largescale revolution-type reforms—especially reforms that are sudden, cataclysmic, and guided by an ideology of grievance rather than prudential reasoning—this tends to open up space for hysteria, ideological purity cultures, and human rights violations. When revolutionary reforms are driven by resentment, then even the necessary reforms usually cannot take root in a healthy way and often bring a cascading range of unintended consequences in their wake. This applies regardless of whether the revolution is grass-roots (civil insurrection, such as during the early days of the French Revolution) or top-down (government-induced revolutionary measures, such when the Committee of Public Safety ruled France in the 1790s). I would submit that we see just such dynamics occurring now, leading to an anti-immigration hysteria that bears all the hallmarks of a revolution in the Burkean sense.

Consider how ICE agents, which constitute a fighting force larger than the military of most nations, are assuming power outside the accountability structures that would govern the police force. The increasing militarization of the domestic space creates a feedback loop: sensational arrests generate headlines that justify further funding and expanded authority, which in turn produce more arrests, including high-profile mistakes, leading to grassroots fighting against ICE agents. (This is, in fact, a dynamic similar to what happened leading up to the Spanish Civil War, with obvious differences. Read Rod Dreher’s 2019 article, “Learning From the Spanish Civil War.”) All this is unnecessary since there were safer and more humane pathways to immigration enforcement that could have been pursued by President Trump but which he chose to reject.

The hysterical anti-immigration mood can also be said to bear the hallmark of a revolution to the degree that it is fueling the us-vs.-them polarity that is increasingly becoming a feature of the woke-right. President Trump has tapped into a primal fear that, once activated or amplified, exists on a visceral level: the fear of the other. This fear, if unchecked by reason, can turn an entire population into beasts, leading to uprisings, revolutions, and even genocides. This is concern is not hypothetical. In some of the professional circles I inhabit, I am witnessing a knee-jerk demonization of foreigners, as legal residents and even naturalized citizens are finding themselves outside the new purity culture of American nationalism. I am watching conservative cultures become colonized by ideas typically associated with leftist revolutions, including ideas of collective guilt, scapegoating, witch-hunting, and the adoption of the victim-oppressor framework as a master narrative for all cultural conflict. I’ve discussed these dynamics in more detail at my Substack article, “MAGA Goes Woke: Will the Real Neo-Marxists Please Stand Up,” but suffice to say that a lot of the rhetoric against foreigners (not merely illegals, but also legal immigrants and even foreign-born citizens) is starting to become eerily similar to the ethnonationalism in Germany leading up to the Kristallnacht of 1938.

None of this is new or uncharted territory, and Americans have a long tradition of debate, and a rich body of wise writings, that could help us navigate these waters. But one of the features of the revolutionary mind is amnesia against tradition. Those attentive to history will know that we’ve been here before. To give only one example, when President John Adams was about to sign the “Alien and Sedition Acts,” which sought to reform immigration while also giving the President unprecedented powers, James Madison wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson on May 13, 1798 warning that crisis-generated policies against foreigners could result in restrictions of freedom at home. He added that “the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions agst. danger real or pretended from abroad.”

I agree with Madison, and would submit that the current crackdown against foreigners is resulting in loss of liberty at home. Consider, there is a reason many nations have historically kept police and army strictly separate: police and FBI agents enforce the law among citizens they live alongside, while armies project national power against external threats. Accordingly, the police are understood to represent the people, which is why it is always a scandal when a police officer abuses his power. But when the military or a paramilitary force turn their weapons against citizens or legal residents, it gives a dangerous message that the state itself has become the adversary. And this is true even in specific incidents where the use of force may have been justified. When the military or military-like bodies begin operating in the domestic space, this sows distrust, alienation, and the seeds of unrest. And that is exactly what is happening now, as ICE agents are being allowed to function like a para-military body, and to exercise force independent to the accountability structures governing the police. This brings a war-time dynamic to domestic spaces.

This appears intentional, as President Trump’s attempt to invoke the Alien Enemies Act during peacetime signals a deliberate effort to impose wartime conditions within the homeland. This is creating a dangerous precedent that could have consequences beyond anything we can now imagine.

Further Reading

• MAGA Goes Woke: Will the Real Neo-Marxists Please Stand Up?

• The Republican Retreat to Identity Politics

• Josh Hawley Resurrects the Ghost of Rousseau

• Tucker Carlson – Man of the Left

• Right-Wing Violence and the Trump Personality Cult

• Paine-fully Conservative?: Remembering “Rights of Man” and the Original Left-Right Divide

• Letter to a Conspiracy Theorist

The reason the first man didn’t feel any pain is because his injuries, though severe, were framed in positive terms. The injuries saved his life by allowing him to exit the war for the safety of the hospital. He was glad to be injured and alive – in fact, to be alive because he was injured. Given this framing narrative, he experienced amazing resilience to the impact of pain.

What about the other man with the 12-inch nail through his foot? When the hospital staff finally succeeded in cutting away his shoe, they found the nail had landed between his toes, not puncturing his skin at all. His pain (real physical pain, to be sure) resulted from a perceived lack of resilience to what he thought had happened. The key here is what he “thought” he experienced. What we think about our struggles, pain, and suffering, has a direct impact on how we feel and our level of resilience. For example, if we think, “this situation is impossible to cope with,” you probably will be unable to cope.

The story of these two men is told in Anna Lembke’s book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. I revisited this book when researching for the panel on digital addiction that I participated in during my recent trip to Chicago. I wanted better to understand addiction, which is such an important issue today given the almost endless availability of chemical and behavioral drugs. But for me the most valuable part of Lembke’s research is her findings on how resilience is directly tied to our thoughts about struggle and the mindset we bring to pain. She challenges us to ask whether we approach struggle with an “I can’t cope,” mentality, or with a growth mindset that embraces hardship as an opportunity to become stronger.

Lembke’s thesis is that the current addiction crisis is not merely because of the ready availability of chemical and behavioral drugs (though that is a huge part of it, to which she devotes considerable attention), but because we live in a society that pathologizes any type of discomfort. Believing we need to run from all pain, the result is not resilience but fragility, weakness, and ultimately addiction.

Lembke, who is program director for the Stanford Addiction Medicine Fellowship, believes that one of the core problems behind addiction can be found in the fact that children growing up in the modern west are increasingly socialized to be fragile.

Perceiving children as psychologically fragile is a quintessentially modern concept… Today, many parents I see are terrified of doing or saying something that will leave their child with an emotional scar, thereby setting them up, so the thinking goes, for emotional suffering and even mental illness in later life.

This notion can be traced to Freud, whose groundbreaking psychoanalytic contribution was that early childhood experiences, even those long forgotten or outside of conscious awareness, can cause lasting psychological damage. Unfortunately, Freud’s insight that early childhood trauma can influence adult psychopathology has morphed into the conviction that any and every challenging experience primes us for the psychotherapy couch.

Our efforts to insulate our children from adverse psychological experiences play out not just in the home but also in school. At the primary school level, every child receives some equivalent of the “Star of the Week” award—not for any particular accomplishment but in alphabetical order. Every child is taught to be on the lookout for bullies lest they become bystanders instead of upstanders. At the university level, faculty and students talk about triggers and safe spaces.

That parenting and education are informed by developmental psychology and empathy is a positive evolution. We should acknowledge every person’s worth independent of achievement, stop physical and emotional brutality on the schoolyard and everywhere else, and create safe spaces to think, learn, and discuss.

But I worry that we have both oversanitized and overpathologized childhood, raising our children in the equivalent of a padded cell, with no way to injure themselves but also no means to ready themselves for the world.

By protecting our children from adversity, have we made them deathly afraid of it? By bolstering their self-esteem with false praise and a lack of real-world consequences, have we made them less tolerant, more entitled, and ignorant of their own character defects? By giving in to their every desire, have we encouraged a new age of hedonism? (p. 35-37)

Lembke’s insights cohere with observations I made in my column at Salvo Magazine in the articles, “What Does Social Science Say About Hardship?” and “Grit and Godliness.” In the latter piece, I drew on a conversation Keith McCurdy had with Brian Phillips for the Circe Institute podcast. McCurdy explained that in his work as a professional counselor, he continually encounters parents who believe their calling is not to produce sturdy children but happy children. These parents will go to great lengths to try to keep their children perpetually comfortable. McCurdy explains that trying to make children happy by keeping them comfortable is actually self-defeating since it leads to low levels of life satisfaction. Children who have not learned to embrace struggle will more likely be ruled by their emotions and will thus lack the durability that enables them to weather difficulties with sturdiness, competence, and resilience. Moreover, children who have not been trained to embrace struggle will be more likely to go to pieces at the slightest difficulty. From McCurdy:

I ask groups of parents all the time at the beginning of a talk (and I say this is a question to be thinking about as we talk tonight): “would you rather have a child that’s sturdy and capable, or a child that’s happy and successful?” And that really frames it because the two really go in two different directions if that’s your target, because the way we target happiness and satisfaction today is not through struggle – it’s through clearing the path. But if we really target “sturdy and capable” then our children… experience more happiness through life, they experience more peace through life, more joy through life. And parents really struggle with that. But what I tell parents is this: unless we introduce struggle into the lives of their children, they will be run by their emotions.

Listen to Keith McCurdy’s entire podcast with Brian Phillips (no relation to me). And while you’re at it, also listen to the two interviews he did about raising sturdy kids, here and here. The take-home point is that one of the keys to a flourishing life is being able to sit with discomfort; accordingly, when we help our kids embrace struggle as positive, they grow in sturdiness and resiliency. This is counter-cultural to the messages our children get from the media and popular movies, which often encourage weakness (see my earlier post, “How Disney’s ‘Encanto’ Encourages Weakness”).

The opposite of sturdiness and resiliency is to be ruled by one’s emotions. A person who is ruled by his or her emotions, and who believes we must avoid struggle at all costs, becomes vulnerable to behavioral and chemical addictions. And that brings us back to Lembke’s work. She believes that by trying to shield our children from all discomfort, we are creating a generation who are weak and lacking in resilience. When you add this to the ready availability of drugs, is it any wonder we have an addiction crisis?

Lembke goes further, showing how the planned pursuit of moderate pain can recalibrate our hedonic set point, leading to greater mental and emotional resilience over time. It might seem incredible, but the research she cites suggests that everything from fibromyalgia to impulse control to mood disorder to ordinary aches and pains can sometimes (not always) be addressed with therapeutic applications of moderate pain. For example, the discomfort of cold water immersion causes the body to be flooded with dopamine similar to the effects of cocaine, but with one important exception: afterwards you taper back to baseline dopamine unlike drugs that culminate in a prolonged dip below baseline. In the long term, repeated exposure to uncomfortable activities help toughen a person, leading to more resilience and (sometimes) reducing general susceptibility to pain.

Pain leads to pleasure by triggering the body’s own regulating homeostatic mechanisms… With intermittent exposure to pain, our natural hedonic set point gets weighted to the side of pleasure, such that we become less vulnerable to pain and more able to feel pleasure. (Lemke, p. 144-5)

Lemke tells of an interesting experiment with dogs, conducted in the 1960’s before ethical regulations prohibiting cruelty to animals. The dogs hind paws were connected to an electrical current, and they were subjected to severe shocks. The dogs were terrified and gave all the symptoms of severe pain. After repeated exposure, however, the dogs not only stopped seeming to mind the pain, but started to experience longer and longer after-response that the experimenters described as “fits of joy.”

With repeated exposure to a painful stimulus, the dog’s mood and heart rate adapted in kind. The initial response (pain) got shorter and weaker. The after-response (pleasure) got longer and stronger. Pain morphed into hypervigilance [which] morphed into a “fit of joy.” An elevated heart rate, consistent with a fight-or-flight reaction, morphed into minimal heart rate elevation followed by prolonged bradycardia, a slowed heart rate seen in states of deep relaxation.”

It’s not possible to read this experiment without feeling pity for the animals subjected to this torture. Yet the so called “fit of joy” suggests a tantalizing possibility: By pressing on the pain side of the balance, might we achieve a more enduring source of pleasure?”

After reading Dopamine Nation, I realized how most of my bad habits arise from trying to avoid discomfort. One example is that if I’m hungry and food is available, I find it hard to wait until the next meal even though, given my personal goals, I know I ought to wait. The root of this struggle is that I don’t like to be uncomfortable. That same is true when it comes to my spiritual and athletic goals: I make excuses because I don’t want to be uncomfortable. Thus, I started to wonder if I could give myself a boost toward better habits by increasing my tolerance to discomfort. So I have been doing cold water immersion for a while (the above picture is from the frigid pools near the Cedar Run Falls Trial in Virginia), a practice I discussed in my earlier article, “Struggle is an Opportunity For Growth.” After reading about the experiment with the dogs, I decided to try something a little more drastic: I began seeing how long I could hold two ice cubes simultaneously – one in my right hand and the other in my left. At first I could only do it for 25 seconds, then 30 seconds, then…well, now I can hold the ice cubes until they melt. This has both a short-term and a long-term benefit. In the short-term, the feeling I get afterwards is euphoric, as my body compensates for the pain by flooding my system with dopamine before tapering off to baseline (the hedonic set point); in the long-term, I have become more resilient to pain so it takes more to get me rattled.

Okay, maybe my experiments on myself are just another case of mind over matter like the men at the hospital. But…isn’t that the whole point? Again, what we think about our struggles, and the conceptual template by which we frame our challenges, actually change how we experience those struggles. From chapter 7 of Gratitude in Life’s Trenches:

The frames through which we view our experience do not simply influence the way we think about our lives; they also affect our quality of life. The difference between a life of joy and a life of self-pity lies in the power of these frames, as does the difference between a life of gratefulness and a life of grumbling…

Research has found that if we are not deliberate about our mindset, then we naturally gravitate toward negative ways of framing our experience (e.g., the glass is half empty rather than half full)....

By being deliberate about our mindset, we can disrupt negative thoughts and find alternative ways of viewing the same experiences. We can learn, as one ancient prayer puts it, to “bury in me the evil devices of the devil with good thoughts.” By practicing this type of reframing over an extended period of time, we actually effect material changes in our brain, causing growth of new synapses between our neurons.

Ok, so your life is influenced by mindset. And that should challenge us to assess the mindset we have about discomfort. I’ve suggested that having a different mindset about struggle can help us become more resilient. But the dark side is that our mindset can also make us fragile, and I’ve suggested that this is exactly what is happening with so much modern parenting. It is also what we see happening in many modern universities.

In her book While Time Remains, North Korean’s defector, Yeonmi Park, shares how she was shocked, as a student at Columbia University, to see American professors preoccupied over their students’ comfort: telling students they didn’t have to read the textbook if it triggered them, obsessing over “safe spaces” where students could be insulated from challenge, or teaching students they were oppressed even though these students came from some of the richest and most elite families in America. Given that Park had endured physical abuse, starvation, and human trafficking as a girl, you can imagine her concern when encountering the fragility of her American peers. Park warns that the institutional pursuit of weakness is creating a generation lacking in basic resilience.

We don’t need to face the harsh realities of a police state like North Korea to cultivate the inner strength that enables us to face hardship without reflexively seeking escape in addictive comforts. On the contrary, normal life usually offers enough opportunities for us to embrace struggle, in everything from household chores to homework to challenging relationships. By being mindful about our mindset in these struggles, we can leverage them for inner growth, developing the type of resilience that buffers us from vulnerability to addiction.

In closing, I want to suggest that there is something else that acts as a protective layer against addiction: good wholesome activities, whether hiking, music, reading groups, church activities, exercise (perhaps especially team sports, including martial arts).

Evidence for this comes from Iceland of all places. In 2017, Emma Young wrote an article for The Atlantic observing how Iceland, a nation historically characterized by extreme rates of adolescent addiction, came to “[top] the European table for the cleanest-living teens.”

How did the Icelandic people achieve this staggering transformation? It started with Harvey Milkman, an American psychology professor who taught for part of the year at Reykjavik University in Iceland. Milkman recognized that teenagers were turning to addictive substances to get high as a way of dealing with stress. But rather than simply confronting the drugs directly—for example, focusing exclusively on enforcement measures, or the problem of easy access—Milkman wondered what would happen if community leaders worked with the grain, offering healthy activities that delivered the same types of highs the adolescents were seeking from chemical substances.

Milkman reflected: “Why not orchestrate a social movement around natural highs: around people getting high on their own brain chemistry—because it seems obvious to me that people want to change their consciousness—without the deleterious effects of drugs?” His plan for achieving this was simple: work with community leaders to give adolescents access to music, dance, exercise, martial arts, and other activities that help people cope with stress and offer healthy highs.

Milkman was given a $1.2 million government grant to test his idea. Icelandic local governments got on board, organizing wholesome activities young people could do after school. Emma Young reported that

State funding was increased for organized sport, music, art, dance and other clubs, to give kids alternative ways to feel part of a group, and to feel good, rather than through using alcohol and drugs, and kids from low-income families received help…to pay for recreational activities.

The results? Young continued:

The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42 percent in 1998 to 5 percent in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 percent to 7 percent. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 percent to just 3 percent.

Other factors played into the transformation of Reykjavik, but at the core was replacing addiction with healthy pursuits. These results, though staggering, should not come as a surprise, for folk wisdom and common sense have always affirmed that healthy activities like (e.g. exercise, music, dance, crafts, etc.), help us flourish as human beings, and thus protect us against the forces that would enslave us to our appetites.

I also strongly suspect that the success of the Icelandic plan was because these activities fostered healthy social connections. My team from the recent OCAMPR panel will be publishing on this next year, building on Mary Mesiha’s recent reminder that healthy human relationships creates a protective layer against addiction since the opposite of addiction is not sobriety but connection. Social activities, and healthy connection with others, is not an optional extra, but essential to a spiritually healthy, flourishing human being.

The Islandic examples comes with a warning for parents: if you want to protect your children from addiction in later life, start when they’re young by encouraging activities based on healthy social connections (group hikes, group dance, group music, group worship, group games), while putting healthy digital boundaries in place to discourage children becoming isolated in their bedrooms with technology. Moreover, given what we know about the therapeutic value of discomfort, perhaps the best activities are those that join human connection with healthy struggle: such as sports, exercise, and ascetic worship practices pursued communally.

Further Reading

• Nine Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Parenting Teenagers

• Saint Paisios and the Value of Struggle

• Struggle is an Opportunity For Growth!

• What Does Social Science Say About Hardship?

• Grit and Godliness

• Is the New Country Music Making us Weak?

• Great Lent and Cultural Anthropology