The dark side of the Christian revival
Plus other articles and links on psychedelic and ecstatic integration
Welcome to this week’s Tuesday brunch, a weekly round-up of articles and links about psychedelic and ecstatic integration. The first bit is free, the second half just for paid subscribers.
The Free Press (Bari Weiss’ incredibly popular alternative news Substack, which now has over a million subscribers) had an article in December called ‘How Intellectuals Found God’. Author Peter Savodnik suggested there is a remarkable shift taking place among Anglo-American intellectuals towards Christianity.
Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something.
He gives the example of the philosopher and author Matthew Crawford:
Finally, late last year, Crawford converted to the Anglican Church. Then, in June, Crawford and Simon were married at Saint Margaret’s. “I liken it sometimes to a psychedelic experience,” Crawford said. “You feel like you’ve gained access to some layer of reality, but you just weren’t seeing it.”
There’s also the historian Niall Ferguson and his wife, atheist author and activist Aayan Hirsi Ali, both of whom converted to Christianity last year; there’s philosopher Philip Goff, New York Times columnist David Brooks and Substack author Paul Kingsnorth…all of whom publicly converted to Christianity in the last few years. And then there’s those leading public intellectuals Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson and Jordan Hall – I wrote about their shift to Christianity previously in my article Blessed are the Sense-Makers.
You can also see this shift in Silicon Valley, where head of YCombinator Garry Tan is part of an unlikely Tech-Christian revival. Elon Musk also recently declared he is ‘a big believer in the principles of Christianity’ and that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.” Meanwhile his ex-wife pop-star Grimez announced it was only the death and resurrection of our Lord and Saviour that helped her quit vaping.
So what’s going on?
One shouldn’t over-estimate this shift – it has not yet led to a marked increase in the numbers attending church in the US or elsewhere. The broader trend is still one of rapid decline in church attendance. Nonetheless, there’s clearly something of a ‘vibe shift’ or ‘preference cascade’ to use Silicon Valley’s terminology.
I think part of what is going on is a greater openness to ecstatic states of consciousness and non-materialist explanations of reality. That’s what drew me to convert to Christianity myself, briefly, in 2012-2014, while I was researching ecstatic experiences for The Art of Losing Control. I wanted a cultural frame for such ecstatic / mystical experiences – a way to open to the Divine, in company with others. I think others are also now more open to such ecstatic states and to what they point to – a greater reality beyond the ego. That makes some of them more open to Christianity.
In addition, there’s a growing awareness of how much our culture owes to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and of how liberalism emerged from Christian values, as historian Tom Holland pointed out in his deeply influential book Dominion (here is Holland discussing faith with Nick Cave in front of 800 people last week at an Unherd event in London).
So I can understand the shift. Secular materialism is fine in times of economic growth, less so in times of economic stagnation and climate crisis, when it’s hard to buy a place to live, and even if you can, it might burn down or get flooded. Stoicism offers a great philosophy for the individual in times of crisis, but lacks community, shared rituals and a personal relationship to the Divine. And – this was my reasoning in 2012 when I converted from Stoicism - Christianity is ‘true enough’. It gives you values, ritual, community, charity, consolation in times of trouble. and a collective way to connect to the Divine Mystery, as well as to 2000 years of European culture and tradition. It’s true enough.
Nonetheless, I decided after 18 months or so that I was kidding myself, that ‘true enough’ was ultimately not true enough for me. I found Christianity too specific and too much of a personality cult in its focus on the crucial historical and cosmic importance of Jesus of Nazareth and his death and supposed resurrection. I found it literally incredible that God sent his Son – Jesus of Nazareth – to first-century Galilee to die for our sins and be reborn at this particular time and place in the universe (a place filled with the expectation of just such a Messiah), and that eternal salvation lies in recognizing this and preparing for His return, which will happen any day now. Christians have been waiting ever since.
Christianity baldly stated like that seems to me totally incredible, way too confident in its claims about the Divine and way too confident in its eschatological prediction, which has so far failed to occur. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t transformed countless lives for the better, just that I personally find it incredible.
If you squint a bit and soften the edges, if you take Jesus as a mythical archetype and a good path to the God of Love, then perhaps it’s ‘true enough’. But I don’t think that’s fair to Christianity, to squint like that and blur the edges. I think CS Lewis was right – Christianity makes one very clear and outrageous claim, that Jesus of Nazareth was the only Son of God, who died for our sins, was resurrected, and saved humanity with his blood, and this is the One Crucial Fact of All Time. And if you can’t accept that One Crucial Fact, you’re not really a traditional Christian (although you could perhaps be a Quaker or Unitarian).
I still go to church sometimes and have enormous respect and love for my Christian brethren and the good they do in the world. I still pray to God quite often, and believe in the ultimate divine goodness beyond all things. But still, every time I go to church, for all that I get from it, I still find it a personality cult. That’s why I call myself a hopeful agnostic rather than a Christian - I now accept the limit of my capacity to understand what’s going on at the divine level. And I recognize that ‘hopeful agnosticism is probably not a strong cultural basis for civilization, but then again, there are Buddhist societies and Buddhism is pretty much hopeful agnosticism…
Still, I have no problem with the rehabilitation of Christianity in western intellectual culture – I welcome the return of ultimate questions of meaning and transcendence to our public conversation, because I found secular materialism stifling to self-transcendence and I agree with Aldous Huxley that self-transcendence is a basic human urge.
However….
There is a risk that the turn to Christianity by various public figures goes hand in hand with a growing demonisation of European Muslims and calls for their deportation or even civil war.
Last week’s Unherd sell-out event on hipster Christianity was brought to us by the owner of Unherd, Paul Marshall. He’s an evangelical British millionaire and media tycoon who goes to the same ecstatic Anglican church I went to, Holy Trinity Brompton (also the church that converted Russell Brand). He is also on the board of St Paul’s, the Theological College in London where I went looking for deep answers and found instead a really basic and unpersuasive evangelical theology.
I liked my time in HTB and admire the evangelical priest who helped it grow, Nicky Gumbel (here’s an interview I did with him). I liked how open this church is to ecstatic experiences or ‘Holy Spirit encounters’. But the flip-side of ecstatic Christianity is sometimes a paranoid tendency to also see demonic forces as active in society and lurking behind anyone who opposes your views.
And I sometimes noticed that among some (not all!) of my fellow ecstatic Christians – a tendency to see Islam as a hostile and even demonic force – the ultimate competitor in the cosmic battle between Good and Evil. Again, let me emphasize this was just a tendency I sometimes noted, even in myself when I was a fervent new convert.
And there is plenty of evidence that Marshall shares this view – Hope Not Hate looked at tweets he shared and liked (through his anonymous account Areopagus) which are very hostile to Muslim immigration in Europe and which call for mass deportation and even civil war against European Islam.
According to Hope Not Hate, in January 2024 Marshall liked a tweet which said: ‘If we want European civilization to survive we need to not just close the borders but start mass expulsions immediately. We don’t stand a chance unless we start that process very soon’
To be clear, there are fundamentalist Muslims both outside and within Europe who do see Christianity as The Enemy, who persecute and murder Christians in places like Nigeria, and who long for the violent downfall of both liberal democracy and Christianity to be replaced by the ultimate triumph of Islam.
But that is the violent extreme. And if a Muslim preacher is preaching the violent destruction of liberal democracy, I think they should be prosecuted as an extremist terrorist. I also think it is legitimate to be against continued rising immigration into European countries, in the interests of social stability. But it’s deeply unfair and un-Christian to treat existing Muslim migrants to European countries as The Enemy, and deeply dangerous and extremist to try and foment a new religious war between Christians and Muslims.
It would be disastrous if a revival of Christianity led people to reject the liberal idea of a cosmopolitan society where people of different religions and worldviews live together, and there is no one enforced religion; if, in effect, we went back to medieval theocracy amid the climate crisis, and declared war on Muslim migrants within European countries.
The idea of a civil war in Europe between hardline Christians and hardline Muslims is a grim and dystopian vision of the future – yet there are powerful people pushing for this storyline, willing it to occur, including of course the richest man in the world, Mr Busy Thumbs himself.
After the paywall, an important new article shows almost 60% of Americans who practice meditation report at least one adverse effect, plus ‘is a brain stimulation head-set the answer to depression?’ and board changes at Lykos as the potential takeover and return of Rick Doblin gathers momentum.
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