Christianity For The Based

Part 1: Intellectuals Playing Dumb

Christianity is having a moment. Baptisms and conversions in the UK, Europe and the U.S. are on the rise. Will it lead to Christian Nationalism as some fear, or will it produce a more thoughtful, enlightened version of itself?

This two-parter will examine Christianity’s “shock” revivification from two related angles.

1. The (somewhat conspicuous) post-ironic return of the “Christian Intellectual”.

2. Christianity as a sudden marker of individualistic rebellion and based thinking; the cool factor.

If you haven’t yet noticed either of these shifts, you probably will soon.

In this, part 1, I’ll focus on the slippery way in which the Christian Intellectual has newly manifested. There’s a much longer history¹ of Christian Intellectualism, but I’ll keep it short and begin with the 4 year reign of YouTube philosophers, 2019-2023; pandemic era.

In hindsight, much of the past four years of YouTube philosophizing could look more like the razzmatazz of ulterior motives than honest inquiry. Were we all playing three-card monte with Christianity, hiding it in talk of “community”, and “meaning”? Or is the hard turn to Christianity the genuine extension of a genuine inquiry…

This past February you may have noticed an extreme number of “sense-makers” podcasting with Jordan Hall, a somewhat revered figure in today’s American intellectual circles. A technologist, co-founder of the neurohacker collective and the Game B project, Jordan had just converted into a full-blown, trinity-sure² Christian, and his public-facing peers seemed curious. Why would such a galaxy brain technologist, Harvard educated, Silicon Valley-type big boy suddenly commit to an unscientific metaphysics… so publicly. And so much.

It’s all chock full of hmms and ahhs and secular bedside manner, lots of white glove curiosity from those interviewing him. But what you likely didn’t hear in this heap of podcasts is that Jordan’s baptism capped a 4 year back-to-Christianity program—seeded by the same circle of “secular” YouTube philosophers eagerly hosting him. Is it wrong to accuse my fellows of subterfuge? I don’t think so.

It’s an open secret that Christian academics have felt pressured to display more secularity than they actually carry to retain their intellectual credibility. Why wouldn’t YouTube intellectuals desperate for secular-world subscribers feel the same pressure? Nothing nefarious. Your very own Bad Guru was naively featured alongside them, so it couldn’t have been bad! But a ploy? Deceitful? Sure. A bit. Yeah.

In simple hindsight, it’s all pretty crystalline…

At the start of the pandemic…

…Us all tucked into our couches and hooked on content, two outfits were mediating the explosion of YouTube philosophy. The Stoa (run by

Peter N Limberg

, an Orthodox Christian), and Rebel Wisdom (a rather Christian project, as it turned out). The bulk of their content centered around a problem we all agreed to call “the meaning crisis”.

The basic idea: 

• There is a “meaning crisis” characterized by mass disorientation, linguistic destabilization, siloed political realities, and upticks in depression and suicide. Let's solve it with "sense making". 

Hours upon hours, days upon days, months upon months of scintillatingly complex content would be produced, and careers certified. Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke’s monumental 50-part lecture series, Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, stands as an (excellent, actually) exemplar. In it, he passionately insists on “religio” (pointing to the etymology of “religion” as “to bind”), and the need to form a “religion that is not a religion”. To that end, Vervaeke’s frequent collaborator, Gregg Henriques, went ahead and developed a religion—complete with a decidedly silly new garden of eden and sun god—to accompany his otherwise brilliant UTOK theory of “the enlightenment gap”.

Then there was the endless Jordan Peterson parade, wherein it was easy to locate his increasingly visible flirtation with God and… with Christianity? Yes? No? But even those galaxy brains who resolutely claimed non-believer status were quietly urging folks toward their nearest church. Take Dr. Iain McGilchrist, who is among today's most respected intellectuals, and whose work on the hemispheres of the brain (and their respective modes of constructing meaning from experience) underpins an increasing swath of today’s philosophical thinking. While McGilchrist does not claim to be religious, he has claimed that atheistic views of consciousness are “wholly incoherent”, and tells people that if he were to convert to a religion, he would convert to its most intense form—Orthodox Christianity—because “it is the form of Christianity that best balances the hemispheric ways of knowing”. 

Figuring out what was causing the meaning crisis—and what could solve it—seemed a bottomless trove of inquiry. It all seemed to be heading somewhere exciting, somewhere unknown... Or just heading quietly, ramblingly, digressively to Church.

But back to the premise of this meaning crisis for a moment…

There was, of course, the more obvious reason for the meaning crisis: Social media. Our 3-dimensional, formerly tactile world of interactions were being collapsed into 2-D abstractions by social media, creating a phenomenological crisis of monumental proportions. But for our cohort of tech-adjacent sense makers, social media would only get passing blame for the atomization of humanity. Tech is gonna tech. Instead, they found a more personally convenient cause—declining Christia… er, declining religious affiliation.

There were those who were already saying the quiet part out loud. Orthodox Christians like Jonathan Pageau were proselytizing on a conspicuous number of Rebel Wisdom episodes, while the hosts and other assorted guests (myself included) mmm’d and ahh’d and lobbed them softballs. We would talk about Religion, roundly, the embedding of its congregations, its deterministic metaphysics to calm the quivering spirit, the intergenerational preservation of its traditions and so on. All strong—but safely secular—arguments.

With so much effort made, one could have taken this endlessly contemplative onslaught of investigations into the meaning crisis to be entirely in earnest. Some were, to be sure! (Vervaeke, Pageau, and Henriques get passes, imo). But as time went on it became clearer that, on the whole, this was more ruse than rigor.

Packed with all the requisite mannerisms of secular intellectualism, these inquiries were fueled by a Christian religiosity that tacitly rigged itself for the final answer.

None of this is to say that this answer is necessarily wrong, but to say that the conclusion cannot be trusted to have derived from an honest examination of the issue. Most of these guys never meant a lack of religion was to blame. It is presently obvious they had always meant a lack of Christianity was to blame.

Take The Stoa founder,

Peter N Limberg

(host of a vast number of these inquiries into the meaning crisis), as he most recently claims the Orthodox Christianity of his grandmother to be his sole philosophy:

“I could have avoided all those years of philosophical rumination if I had discovered this sooner.”

…A conspicuously late discovery. If an Orthodox anything doesn’t first consider whether their orthodoxy—ahem, orthodoxy—may be affecting their ability to develop philosophies which deviate from the aforementioned orthodoxy, their philosophical years of “rumination” are a sham to begin with. (I love Peter, despite some recent disagreements). Now, Peter is smart. And he is always keen to be on one cutting edge or another. So I suspect what’s actually happened is that Peter—a reader of tea leaves if ever there was one—has sensed into Christianity’s ascendant cachet, and, now that the water is safe to walk on, is owning in full what he was previously more tentative to.

Shall we be surprised when other good fellows follow? Our dear

Jonathan Rowson

? The 60%³ of American professors who identify as some variety of Christian?

As I wrap part 1, I should probably prelude part 2. And to do so, it occurs to me I should circle back to Peter Limberg. He’s the perfect segue. Peter, who built his intellectual status being attuned to cultural trend mutations, understands the power of ascendent social asymmetry, and so no doubt understands this:

It’s now a sign of independent and “based” thinking to be a Christian Intellectual—as intellectualism is where Christianity experiences its greatest asymmetry.

In part 2 I will lay out how, in part due to the intellectual moves laid out in this piece, claiming one’s Christianity has gained the asymmetric cachet of subcultural transgression—the aura of Cool.

Until next time,

Ebert.

1. Of course, most post-Socratic intellectual pursuits, whether scientific or philosophical, have been adjacent to Christianity in some manner. But starting with Nietzschean critiques, compounding with postmodern critiques, and culminating with “woke” campus culture, the “Christian Intellectual” as an earnest designation had become an oxymoron of sorts…

2. According to Jim Rutt, Jordan Hall has made the case to him that “if one fully understands the idea of the Christian trinity (specifically the Protestant Evangelical flavor)  the Christian God becomes a logical necessity.” Rutt and Hall will be debating this on Rutt’s show in August.

3. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-religious-are-america_b_749630#:~:text=The%20research%20also%20describes%20the,and%202.6%20percent%20are%20Muslim.