Christ After Christianity: Metamodern Reconstructions of Religion (dialogue with Brendan Graham Dempsey)

Transcript:

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Hey? How’s it going?

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Good to see you, too, man?

Matt Segall: Yeah.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Who’s that?

Matt Segall: This is Philo.

Matt Segall: He loves attention, especially when we’ve got Zoom sessions.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Very cat-like. I have a cat named Shadow that looks very similar.

Matt Segall: Oh, now he’s done. Okay, yeah. Well, thanks so much for jumping on Zoom with me at short notice. I just was inspired by your last YouTube conversation with Jim Palmer. And of course, I’ve been watching your interviews over the last year. I guess it was probably earlier this year, with Jordan Hall and Paul VanderKlay and Rafe Kelly, and probably others I’m forgetting to mention, exploring this theme of post-religious or reconstruction—the reconstruction of Christianity after the loss of a more traditional form of belief. And I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that for a long time. We’ve kind of danced around the topic a little bit. And I think this is actually the first time you’re on my podcast, so thanks for hosting me at your place for a while. And I will—I think most of my audience will know who you are, and I’ll link to your stuff below. Oh, and the other context for this is not just all the great conversations you’ve been having, but sometime—Is it January or February or March? I can’t even remember right now—when we’re going to speak with Philip Goff.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Hmm! It’s in the coming months. I think March, yeah.

Matt Segall: It’s March. Okay. So still a few months away. But Philip Goff has also had a very interesting public kind of post-religious conversion to Christianity, and we’re going to get to talk to him about that. And so I figured you and I should unpack our own relationship to this project in the run-up to talking to Philip. And so, yeah, I have a question for you related to all this, but I want to pause there and just give you a chance to add any other context you think might be relevant.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Well, first, I just want to say thanks. This is—yeah, exciting. I’m happy to be on your podcast. And as you say, we’ve talked about—we’ve talked about talking about this for a little bit now, so I’m excited to be actually about to talk about it momentarily, and explore whatever comes up around that. I think some of the framing, entry-point questions or issues that you outlined briefly seem like really productive, exciting ones. And no, I think that pretty much covered it—what you said.

Over the past year—and it’s kind of—it’s pretty wild, actually. I’m always like, time is so strange to me. But to think that earlier this year was when I was talking to Jordan Hall about all that—I mean, so much has happened. And yeah, a lot of that sort of cultural engagement or re-engagement, a kind of excitation of the cultural field broadly around Christianity again, in sort of the—particularly growing towards the latter part of the year—and seeing a lot of that get picked up again in the Zeitgeist and all of the debate that spawned. It’s really—yeah, seems to be really alive for people. So there’s a lot more that could be said about the cultural context, but I think a lot of people already have that. So I’d say let’s just—yeah, let’s dive in.

Matt Segall: Yeah. Okay, so one of the things you talked to Jim Palmer about was the importance of the deconstruction process of one’s traditional faith before trying to rush into a reconstruction. And yeah, one of the things I scribbled in the notes I shared with you is asking this question: Maybe atheism is actually a necessary developmental stage on the way to a kind of genuine faith, which we might distinguish from, say, belief in the dogmas of your community—your religious community of origin—because of some need for either belonging to that community or for some psychological need to go through the atheistic deconstruction phase to realize that, oh, a lot of that doesn’t actually square with rational reflection and with scientific understanding.

And, you know, to really go through a loss of a kind of prescribed meaning that is no longer adequate to the conditions of the modern and postmodern world seems like a crucial prerequisite for then trying to reconstruct some new form of non-religious spirituality, or however we want to talk about it. And so my question for you has to do with: given all these people you’ve talked to—some who are very explicitly claiming to be sort of trans-religious or returning to Christianity with, you know, a deep understanding of the limitations of traditional faith, but I think you’ve also spoken with a lot of kind of evangelicals who want to know, like, what is this metamodern thing you’re bringing into discourse with Christianity? And so, I know there are a lot of different types of people you’ve spoken to, but in general, do you feel like this developmental process is going well? Or do you feel like the recent conversions and interest in evolving Christianity is maybe off on the wrong track?

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Wow, yeah, great question. I mean, I would say if I were to kind of step back and take in the broader gestalt of this cultural moment—yeah, I don’t know if I would necessarily see it as that kind of post-rational, atheistic, reconstructive move on the main. You know, I think that a lot of what we’re seeing in the broader cultural moment—and that did come out a lot in the conversations that I was having with a number of people—was, I think, skewed more towards a sense of people grappling with a lack of religiosity in their lives, or grappling with the kind of waning of a certain intensity to kind of the religious criticism that sort of found its way back to religious engagement being sort of a totally viable option again, maybe, is like—I think what people are interested in.

So what I mean by that is that I would say only a minority of the conversations that I’ve been a part of, or that I see playing out in culture more broadly, I think, are actually the kind of movement from, let’s say, a deep investment in faith, a rational working-through of that faith to the point of a deconstruction event that leads through a kind of genuine grappling with the prospect at least of atheism, if not nihilism, that then moves through that towards a reconstructive move on the other side. That, I would say, is the minority.

So in terms of what this is all kind of orienting us to presently, I think that remains to be seen, obviously. But I think I am generally not—how would I say—I’m not seeing this playing out primarily from that vantage. And so I think where we’re going to be in some time in the future isn’t necessarily going to be a kind of developmental move into some kind of a conjunctive faith style. (And we can talk about maybe a faith development theory in a bit, because I’m really deep into that at the moment.) But I think it’s more this kind of oscillation, this kind of lateral move that can go on in culture, kind of back and forth—that there are these periods of maybe secularization and disenchantment, and then there’s a move maybe back to more conservative, maybe even fundamentalist forms of religion, and then reactions and reactions, and so on.

So yeah, I’m seeing a lot of it more from that vantage. But I think within that, there is this sliver of that other thing, and that’s what I’m excited about, and that’s what I’m trying to amplify. Those are the kinds of conversations that get me the most excited. And so I think whether or not that is sort of the bulk of what’s going on, it can definitely be the occasion in which some of those, I think, meatier and weightier conversations can also be happening, and can be, like, moving the ball forward. Yeah.

Matt Segall: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it does seem like while the discourse of the early 2000s—the early aughts—was weighted in favor of the atheist point of view, that’s what was cool, say, culturally. And now we’ve entered a phase where I was quite shocked and surprised that it suddenly became cool to convert to Christianity. And there were some who were, you know, more or less prominent figures in that New Atheist period who then converted. And even Richard Dawkins now is saying, well, cultural Christianity is not so bad. And yet, recently Richard Dawkins sat down with Jordan Peterson and had an exchange of some kind where they seemed to both be speaking totally different languages, out of very different modes of consciousness.

And so, this science-and-mythopoetic-approach-to-religion debate seems to be very alive right now. And a lot of the people returning to Christianity are doing it in a more or less Jungian or Petersonian type of way, if they haven’t read Jung. Do you find that that is a helpful development, that this oscillation is now shifted to the other pole? Is there hope for some synthesis position arising, or is it just a complete mess? Are we more confused now, with the Peterson-Dawkins debate being an exemplar of that confusion, than we were, you know, 15 years ago when the New Atheists were saying, “All religion is dumb, and we need to grow up”?

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Yeah, no, I think that it’s on the whole a good progression. I mean, it’s a welcome one, at least, because that kind of simplicity of, you know, the New Atheist moment, I think, was bound to get its reaction. I think what I would say is that I’d like to see that reaction be more nuanced and more sophisticated than what we are seeing. I think that, you know, I, like other people, I think, in kind of metamodern spaces, were really energized by Peterson when he first showed up on the kind of cultural scene. He seemed to be getting at a kind of synthetic nuance a lot of the time, largely apart from his political engagement—despite that being the kind of mechanism that jettisoned him into the public light. When you watched his videos, for example, and his lectures, and that sort of thing—him doing more of that Jungian, kind of maps-of-meaning sort of stuff—and the way he was able to bring that into a kind of public engagement in a way that resonated—there was a moment when that seemed really exciting and promising.

I think that over the last 5 years, that train kind of left the station. I think that a lot of the rhetoric and the entire framework, I would argue, that he’s now operating within has really moved away from that kind of more expansive Jungian, archetypal space. So that’s really shifted the whole discourse, I think, that he has been very much kind of a—I don’t know—a leading figure in. And so, I mean, even if you just look at the sorts of conversations and conversation partners now that are literally who’s at the table—you know, the conversation table and his, say, Bible series—this sort of thing. You’ve got, you know, Bishop Barron, a very conservative thinker, religious thinker. You’ve got Jonathan Pageau, who I would, again, put in a different camp than kind of the Jungian approach. And just generally speaking, you’ve got a lot of people that he’s drawing into the conversation that are maybe using the Jungian archetypal lens as just, like, the door. But then once they’re kind of in the vestibule, they kind of just, you know, take over, in a sense, that just reclaims it for a kind of conservative theology that I don’t find very productive.

So I’ve been disappointed to see how that conversation’s panned out. And there are still glimmers and, you know, things that are coming through occasionally there still, but for the most part, I feel like that wave has kind of crested. And so I’m not sure if that is what I would look to for, you know, the spearhead anymore of this kind of cultural conversation. But I do think it’s been productive, you know, and I’m glad that we again are on the other side of that kind of simplistic New Atheism. I would just love to see now some really robust, deep philosophical, metaphysical conversations playing out so that people, one, aren’t just kind of talking past each other, as you rightly, I think, noted about the Peterson-Dawkins conversation or debate or whatever that was, and—but so we can kind of make collective, you know, better collective sense out of all of this. And so I’m, yeah, kind of waiting to see what the next stage of that looks like. But I feel like, broadly speaking, it’s kind of stalled.

What are your takes? I mean, what do you think?

Matt Segall: Well, just to comment on Peterson, I think he represents actually precisely the kind of postmodern logic that he’s always railing against, and he’s a kind of postmodern conservative, where the move, as far as I can understand it, seems to be something like, “Yes, all knowledge claims are relative and perspectival. It’s chaos out there, and the only way to establish order is through this sort of, like, masculinist, patriarchal power move to be like: I declare it so!” You know, and there’s something heroic about that. It’s very appealing to young men especially, who feel like there’s no place for them in this postmodern, progressive world where it’s the feminine power move that’s dominant. And I’m, you know, oversimplifying here, but I think that there are these two forms of postmodernism and two ways of dealing with the relativistic and more-or-less nihilistic situation that we have found ourselves in, in the postmodern paradigm.

And the conservative and the progressive reactions to that situation do seem to have this gendered aspect to it—I mean archetypally. It doesn’t need to be flattened into man and woman, but often it is, because that’s how gender norms tend to play out. And so I think it’s very psychologically interesting to recognize this dynamic, and I don’t know if you agree with the way I’m construing it, but it feels like a pregnant moment, and there’s obviously a need for some kind of hieros gamos, you know. We need—and I don’t know that that’s just “sacred marriage” in the old, traditional sense of that archetype, or if we need to queer that a little bit, get a little nonbinary. I mean, maybe it’s a mix of all of these different tropes to find some source of integration where we would be able to move beyond this disintegrated phase, which, yeah, it’s manifesting as a culture war, but it’s also a gender war.

And the Peterson moment really reflects that sense of anxiety about this polarity that structures our society and that religion in the modern period became especially linked to—like the way that Christians get involved in politics in the U.S. And I assume it’s similar elsewhere, in Europe and such—that they’re very triggered by these, you know, the traditional family values: the man’s the head of the household, and, you know, the woman has a role to play, making sure that, you know, marriage is man and woman, et cetera, all these things. There’s a lot of emphasis on how an interpretation of Christianity prescribes a certain kind of gender norm and social structure stemming from the patriarchal family. And that’s all—it is under threat, you know. The conservatives are right about that, and the progressives are like, “Well, it’s a traumatizing Oedipal structure that we need to break free of.” And so anyways, I get into all of that because I feel like religion is not just a set of beliefs about another world—it really does structure how we organize and shape this world.

And I think, you know, there are these two sides to Peterson that we might want to compartmentalize and say, “Oh, well, the Jungian side is interesting, the psychologist is interesting, whereas this reactionary political side, oh, I don’t want anything to do with that.” But they’re really deeply connected.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Sure. Well, yeah. So just on that point, a couple thoughts, is that, yeah, what I’m broadly concerned about is that in this moment of a certain kind of coming to roost of the problems of postmodernity, let’s say, and some of its movements that have gone too far, reached certain kinds of impasses, self-sabotaged, whatever—we’re in a moment, and again Peterson is reflective of this, where postmodernism is this thing that people are talking about, and they’re identifying it as a sort of, like, problem. Now, what do we do about that, and how do we frame that problem?

I would myself say, yes, I’m very sympathetic with a lot of those critiques, and if I weren’t, I wouldn’t think that there’d be any reason to try to move beyond the postmodern paradigm, let’s say. But I also recognize that there are things that we do genuinely want to carry forward from postmodern insights into something going beyond. But what we’re finding at the moment is that in this kind of moment of chaos and breakdown and confusion, a lot of which, broadly speaking—and again, in a somewhat simplistic way—we can lay at the feet of the postmodern cultural paradigm. In that moment of that critique, there is either that move to, yeah, take what was valuable but then go a different direction in the same—or, you know, broadly progressive orientation, let’s say—or to kind of turn around, do a 180, and recoil and say, “This was all wrong. We took a wrong road. We’ve got to go back,” basically. And again, this is just maybe a simplistic kind of navigational metaphor, but, like, broadly conceived, I’m concerned about just the reaction to the failures of postmodernism, and I think that that’s a lot of what we’re seeing. And I think that as that’s kind of become more acute, and as that’s also become sort of more politicized and polarized, a lot of that moment where some of that generative tension could have broken through into kind of a new synthesis, I think, is largely just sort of broken into camps that are now fighting as part of the culture war.

And it seems like there’s a lot of just momentum towards moving away. And I think that what Peterson has unfortunately kind of done is created this sort of gravitational field around him for people who are broadly critical of postmodernism, whether that is a Stephen Hicks or whether that’s a Jonathan Pageau, which is really interesting because they’re both very different in their critiques—like, Hicks is much more of, like, an Enlightenment modernist, and Pageau is much more of a sort of premodern traditionalist, I would say. But because they share this critique of the postmodern, they can have a seat at the table. And I think the kind of overall result of that is this cultural momentum to just back away from all of that.

And what I would like to see is what you’re gesturing to, which is, like, a kind of synthesis, hieros gamos. And again, maybe, you know, we don’t know exactly what that looks like because it even transcends some of these archetypal categories. But I don’t think that on the whole that’s what we’re seeing, and that’s why conversations like, you know, the ones that we’ve been having, and this broader conversation around different, more developmental ways of approaching Christianity after atheism, after nihilism, after deconstruction—that’s why I find those really, yeah, pregnant with possibility, as you say, because I think that’s the road forward.

And unfortunately, if we keep going in this direction that we’re currently going in, which is the reactive one, all those reactions do is engender their own reactions, right? And then you just get stuck in this back-and-forth of, you know, once people get fed up with the kind of resurgent traditionalism, they’re going to resurge again toward a kind of, you know, more extreme secularism. And do we want new atheism 2.0? I don’t think so, you know. So how do we get beyond these kind of classic dualities and into something new is, I think, what we really need to be focusing on.

Matt Segall: Well, maybe this is a good point to pivot towards—and I don’t know if this takes it in a more personal direction or just in a more philosophical direction—and to get into, like, what you might mean and what I might mean by “Christ after Christianity.” And for me, I think one of the ways that I try to retrieve some sense of pre-Christian—some sense of the pre-Christian Christ impulse, let’s call it—before religion built up around this event which occurred, and we know this and that about it, we’re unsure about plenty of things historically, but nonetheless something happened. And to recover the essence of what that something was—one way I like to do that is to say, actually, the effects of Christianity are just beginning. And I mean the psycho-spiritual effects, but also the social and cultural effects. Like, yeah, it’s been 2,000 years, wars have been fought over this religion, but I feel like the deep transformative implications of it are really just beginning.

And one example of that would be Luigi Mariani (editor’s note: in the transcript, the name was pronounced more like “Mangione,” but context suggests a reference to a recent event). And the response of many, many people—I don’t know what the exact percentage is—but a large percentage of people are celebrating him as a kind of martyr figure. I mean, he’s still alive; he might get the death penalty, but he seems like an expression of this collective need for a scapegoat, the ritual of sacrifice, you know, to quench this need for revenge and vigilante justice as this very old sort of ritual that really isn’t a justice at all. It’s what we used to do before we had courts. That, to me, is a profoundly un-Christ-like way of dealing with the situation. It’s this old form of sacrifice. And yes, you could say, oh, the story of Christ is just another repetition of this story of sacrifice, but I think there’s something else going on beneath the surface, which is that really it’s a story about forgiveness.

And it’s real—I think—moral import is in regard to the infinite value of each individual being. And, you know, the way in which love is not just some kind of abstract universal principle, but actually to be divine means to be as intimately personal as possible—that divine love is as intimately personal as possible. And so what’s so un-Christian about—or un-Christ-like, I should say, again, distinguishing from all the institutional religious trappings that formed around this—the essence of what the Christ event was about, it seems to have been about, in my opinion, is a kind of recognition that the individual soul is the locus of value. And as soon as you are willing to sacrifice an individual soul for the sake of whatever ideological principle or abstract rule or whatnot, you’re actually undermining the very basis for the idea of justice.

And I’m mixing a little of my Platonism here, but, you know, when I try to say, resurrect some sense of what the Christ event signifies to me, it seems to be the exact opposite kind of morality that would—if morality doesn’t even seem like the right word, because I want this to be beyond good and evil in a way—but it signals to me the opposite of what would lead to the celebration of a figure like Mariani. Even if I recognize and share some of the resentment that is behind that celebration of what he did, I still feel like murdering another individual undermines the very basis for what we might mean by justice, right? And so this cultural moment, to me, signals just how far we are from—actually, this is a supposedly Christian nation or whatever, and people across the political spectrum are celebrating this deed. It feels like, oh wow, we still haven’t gotten it at all.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Hmm. Yeah, wow. So there’s a lot there. I mean, I agree—I totally agree. And where would I start with that? I like your notion, you know, that the implications of the Christ event are just only beginning to be—like, we’re not at the end of Christianity, maybe we’re just at the beginning, so to speak. But of course, to work with a framework like that, one has to have a very expansive sense of Christianity, which I think we are called to do. We’re called to, you know, expand our sense of what that means, because I think that that is the legacy of Christianity.

I mean, we were talking just a second ago about this kind of cultural moment and some of these figures who are making these public conversions, this sort of thing. And one aspect of that conversation that I do deeply agree with is what’s come out of the whole Tom Holland conversation around his book Dominion. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that. It’s basically—this is adjacent to the Richard Dawkins issue as well, which is that people recognize the kind of cultural legacy of Christianity, that when you want to look at—and I guess in this case, let’s just say Western history, Western intellectual history, Western moral history—it’s so dominated by Christianity that, in order to, in a sense, just appreciate the full scope of the arc of that history and all the things that we do value in a modern society, we have to, I think, appreciate where that comes from, or at least where that originating impulse and all of that originally stems from. And so people who—even just sort of a secular intellectual level—acknowledge the deep legacy of Christianity for how our culture has unfolded, I think, are recognizing something really significant, which is part of that more expansive sense of Christianity which I’m very comfortable with, which is something like that Christ event and everything that sort of stemmed from it. Let’s just say, we’ll work with that as a kind of cascading, rippling, emanating force that’s moved through 2,000 years of intellectual and cultural history by, I would say, calling us to that more expansive scope of neighborliness and love of your neighbor, and a more universal ethic, right?

I think that there’s a kind of apologetics move that I think, if it’s just in service of trying to justify traditional Christianity, misses the mark, but is, I think, onto something when it’s gesturing at something more expansive, which is that, you know, if you want to look at our really developed systems of justice that we do, I think, genuinely appreciate about kind of the legacy of, let’s just say, the Enlightenment and democracy spreading, and the spread of human rights—these sorts of things, right?—that this does come out of a culture that was deeply saturated in Christian thought. And if you want to draw that connection and see that continuity there, I think it’s justified.

So I say all that for a couple of reasons: one, I want to kind of give what’s due to that theory. But I think, again, that I don’t want to just leave it as, “Oh, I guess therefore what we need to do is just go back to the Christianity that got us here,” or something, right? Because that can also then feed into this sort of, you know, “make America great again” kind of theory that, like, we’ve lost this greatness because we moved away from Christianity. And I don’t think that’s right. I think rather that Christianity, in its expansive sense, is what generated secularism, it’s what generated the Enlightenment, and these eventually kind of atheistic notions and scientific notions that have been key to, I think, the continual advance and development and progression of society. And that might sound kind of contradictory, but of course, you know, dialectics is full of contradictions that are resolving themselves over time.

But I think that that really is one way, and an important way, that Christians can read cultural history and see where we are now as a result of what got started in that kind of Christian origin moment. So what you’re getting at is this kind of more expansive sense of, you know, rather than vendetta justice, rather than “oh, eye for an eye,” rather than, you know, “this person harmed me so I’ll go harm them,” or all of the kind of resentment and revenge logic that historically governs societies, you can recognize a kind of progression—that it moves through that moment of the Christ event, I would say, and then expands outward from it, ripples outward from it, where basically Christ says, “No, like, that’s not the way,” right? And actually, “Who is my neighbor?” Right? My neighbor is the Good Samaritan, it’s the person who helps you, and it’s the person who has that deeper sense of your own, as you say, that kind of deep soulfulness or the recognition of the other that isn’t just rooted in superficial identities, whether that is religious identities in your community that you’re a part of or, you know, racial or class-based kinds of identities that, like, “oh, we can all band together because, you know, it was the rich guy who got it, and so ha-ha!” Right? There’s a sense in which, no, like, Christianity calls us to a more expansive sense. Like, that is another human being—that’s another soul. And because of that, I think that that gets ultimately enshrined in what become the secular notions of justice and what get at the core of the sort of post-Enlightenment Western experiments that happen in America and other places, and the kind of liberation movements, etc.

So all that’s a rather long-winded way of saying, yes, I agree. And I think that when we can see it this way, though, we’re not limited to a Christianity of a traditional sort that would just identify Christianity with a certain set of propositional beliefs about this person, Jesus, and, you know, related to another world. You can see it in that more expansive sense of this long, unfolding arc that has moved from that moment and continues to move into the present by calling us forth to, like, see that greater sense of moral regard, right, to continually open up our sense of moral care and concern for other people rather than narrow it. And so, yeah, I mean—anyway, there’s so much in what you said. I’m trying to get as much of it as I can, but I’ll pause there, because I’ve said a lot.

Matt Segall: Yeah, beautiful. I mean, I can’t help but think of the obvious idolatry in the idea of Christian nationalism in this context, because in America in particular—because, you know, I was just on that horrible, horrible website X that I can’t seem to peel my attention away from yet, and you know, I saw someone tweeting about how Grok is just as woke as the other AIs, because you ask it for a group of American scientists, and oh my gosh, there’s, like, Asian guys and Black guys and stuff. It’s like, but what do they think America is? If America is anything, it’s this experiment in a multicultural democracy. Anyone—you could be from anywhere, any skin color, any blood bonds—blood relations—and still be an American. That’s the whole fucking point of this country, and it’s similarly the whole point of this move from a religion based on blood bonds. And no, I don’t mean—I’m half-Jewish, I don’t mean to cast shade on Jews. You can stay Jews. It’s perfectly fine.

But Jesus is a Jew who’s like, “Hey, this Mosaic law—it’s too restrictive, and actually the real law is love. And you can be one with God and not be Jewish. You could be any ethnicity,” you know, that’s beside the point. And so this move towards a kind of universalism was quite radical for the time. And so it’s a—if America is a Christian nation influenced by this event and this transformative moral deed that Christ represents, then we’re a very weird kind of nation, because we’re a nation that’s not just based on your first birth, but on your second birth. Which is to say, not that you need to convert to Christianity or something, but that you would need to assent to these values—individual freedom, social justice, you know, whatever else we might want to include in the idea of democracy as a way of life.

Which, of course, Christianity was born in a cultural period when democracy wasn’t a thing, you know. We were still living in a monarchical type of society. And so there was this contradiction implicit in what Jesus was teaching. You know, Alan Watts would talk about the paradox of the idea of democracy in the Kingdom of Heaven. And yet, as you were saying, there very much is a clear line of cultural development and social and political development from Christianity to secular democracy, and this sense of individual freedom. And, you know, this “the individual soul as the locus of value” in some sense, which isn’t to downplay our associations and our sociality, and like, we’re intrinsically relational creatures. But nonetheless, the health of a society seems to depend, for those who share these values, on the protection of the individual as this important locus of value, because of the imago Dei, you know. It’s like we are all sons of the divine—and/or daughters—in this sense.

And so yeah, I think this dispensation, or this move towards a human form of relationship that would be beyond blood, is, you know, one way of articulating what Christianity—what the Christ event—brought. But it’s also something we can find in other wisdom traditions, importantly.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Exactly, yeah. I just wanted to pick up on all of that, and that was one of the things I wanted to bring in, too, which is, you know, in conversations around, let’s say, a metamodern Christianity, I think that this is a crucial thread to follow, but in a more sort of broader context—which, ironically, I would say, it all draws us towards. We should also recognize that these kinds of dynamics aren’t limited to the Christian tradition, right? I mean, you see this movement unfold, as you say, across the different Axial contexts, the different traditions that emerge out of that. And I would say, kind of run in parallel movements in different ways in the different traditions. So you certainly see, you know, a version of this unfolding, and I think this is actually really crucial to emphasize in Judaism itself, because one way that this can get critiqued is, oh, you know, Jesus versus Judaism, and, you know, love versus the law, and then it all kind of pits this version of Judaism as being the antithesis of Christianity. And obviously that’s to totally miss the point, but it’s also been—it’s led to a lot of nastiness. So we want to avoid that confusion, because Pharisaic Judaism on into Kabbalah and other forms of deepening of, you know, not just mystical Judaism, but, you know, Rabbinic Judaism in general, follow this trajectory, too.

And so while it is in the West, I think, particularly through the Christian tradition, that it gets realized and permeates culture, there are huge ways in which this unfolds globally, cross-culturally, and even in the West, certainly through those other traditions certainly also playing their role. I mean, the role of Judaism in European and American culture has been—you know, can’t be overstated.

So anyway, there’s all that to say. But what I did—and Buddhism as a criticism of the Vedic caste system, too. Similar dynamic there, yeah. And I’m actually doing a lot of work at the moment that is, in some ways, kind of advancing that Axial line of thought that Jaspers kind of, you know, inaugurates, but also critiques it, because there’s actually really interesting ways in which we can see versions of this happening before the Axial Age. And it’s a very complicated story. But I think the basic story is there, and I think Habermas is one of the best articulators of this, particularly contra the kind of postmodern voices that want to—or let’s just say lead to—the disruption of this kind of recognition of this kind of progression.

Because I just wanted to speak a little bit to one of the ironic aspects of the postmodern move that I think we’re also facing the consequences of, just to bring this in, because I do want to give that devil its due. And while I want to carry aspects of the postmodern paradigm forward, I also want to—we should be able to see the ways that it’s run afoul; it’s broken things up, it’s fissured things. And I think, ironically, even though we tend to relate a lot of progressivism and postmodernism, there’s an irony there, because a lot of what comes out of certain postmodern thought is the breakdown of various kinds of progressive narratives, like the one that we’re telling, right? Supposedly, we’re telling a story in which, over time, there’s at least been a strain in thought that has deepened into society where people are becoming more universal in their scope and their ethical regard, and there’s progress, in some sense. And we can appreciate that kind of progress separate from just, you know, crude technological sorts of progress that might have been associated with kind of simplistic modern narratives. But we can also see a form of progress in a kind of cultural development that unfolds as we are able to expand our social horizon and take in a broader scope of humanity, so that we’re not just related to our blood ties, we’re not just related to our immediate communities, but we’re able to extend that care, you know, beyond.

And that’s where, initially, I think, this focus on marginalization and cares for the oppressed and these kinds of things come into that conversation. But ironically, I think a lot of that stalls when a certain kind of relativism creeps into this that wants to basically challenge or contradict or undermine notions of progress in history that ultimately winds up, yeah, kind of aborting the kinds of moves that I think, at the value level of a lot of postmodern thinkers, you know, that’s what wants to come through. But at the ideological level, at the theoretical level, it’s like, but we can’t necessarily affirm progress, so we have to say that it’s all relative. And I think that part of that impasse, part of that confusion, is to blame for this seeming kind of cultural regression, for lack of a better term, around these sorts of issues. The fact that so many people could celebrate, you know, someone being gunned down in cold blood on the street, I think, signals that there’s a moral confusion there.

And I think that that’s not unrelated to the way that we’ve decoupled any sense of progress or development in society and culture and what it is that we’re all trying to do together, you know, to expand that scope and that love and regard to the point where now it’s just a matter of power plays, and it’s a matter of, you know, these kinds of identity struggles that are pitting person against person and group against group. So I just wanted to speak to all that to kind of bring some of that back in and throw that all into the mix.

Matt Segall: Are you familiar with the concept of “Beloved Community” that comes out of the work of Josiah Royce and by Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King?

Brendan Graham Dempsey: I’ve heard the first part.

Matt Segall: By Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King. It’s—so Josiah Royce—have you heard of him before, the American philosopher? He was buddies with William James at Harvard, and challenged James. James, you know, was a critic of idealism. Royce is an idealist. He called himself an “absolute pragmatist.” Not only did he learn from James about pragmatism, but also from Charles Sanders Peirce. Anyways, he wrote this book, The Problem of Christianity. It was a series of lectures he gave in—I think it was like 1915, the 19-teens. And I wanted to just read a paragraph at the end of this, where he’s offering his main—the moral of the story, basically, about how to inherit Christianity and what the beloved community means as sort of the essence of this impulse which has radiated through culture for a few thousand years.

So he says, “My maxim is this: look forward to the human and visible triumph of no form of the Christian church—still less look to any sect, new or old, as the conqueror. Henceforth view the religious ideal as one which in the future is to be won, if at all, by methods distinctively analogous to the methods which now prevail in the sciences of nature. It is not my thought that natural science can ever displace religion or do its work; but what I mean is that, since the office of religion is to aim toward the creation on earth of the beloved community, the future task of religion is the task of inventing and applying the arts which shall win men over to unity and which shall overcome their original hatefulness by the gracious love not of mere individuals, but of communities. Now such arts are still to be discovered. Judge every social device, every proposed reform, every national and every local enterprise by the one test: does this help towards the coming of the universal community? If you have a church, judge your own church by this standard,” etc., etc.

And so he’s calling religion to be more scientific in the sense that it would be more experimental and pragmatic, ultimately, in devising these methods to transform human beings from hateful, selfish creatures into loving community members, you know. And earlier I was mentioning—I was emphasizing the individual as a locus of value. And the reason I wanted to read Royce is that, you know, the thing about individuality is that we only become individuals if we are raised by loving communities, right? And so there’s no conflict, I would say, between this community orientation that Royce is speaking to and the individual orientation I was speaking to earlier. But yeah, this idea of the beloved community as an ideal towards which we strive in all of our social action—I think that is one of the ways of understanding what this Christ impulse has been about. It could also be, you know, the Buddha impulse, and it can take different cultural forms, but it’s a movement towards a form of loyalty that would transcend any in-group. Royce would call it loyalty to loyalty as such.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Yeah, yeah. Well, which is where you get principles and kind of, you know, what can sound dry when we talk about abstract ideals. But, I mean, this is the power of such ways of thinking. But I wanted to say, directly related to all of that, I think very much historically, even, was the work of Mead—George Mead—who was, you know, deeply influenced by the pragmatists, but he was doing a kind of social psychology, right? So in Mind, Self, and Society, that’s kind of his emphasis—is that the individual self only emerges in collective social contexts. And so what he concludes towards the end of that work is what we’re talking about. He talks about the field of universal discourse, and he talks about this universalization of thought. But it’s the same idea: it’s that you broaden your horizons through taking in more perspective from the others in your community, basically. And that is the means by which your own individuality deepens, and that ultimately, through that process, you know, we can become more universal in our sense of not just our identity, but because our identities become more universal, the communities that we’re a part of are more universal.

So, you know, he was writing in the 1930s, and he was looking towards, like, the League of Nations, you know, as this ideal that society was beginning to move towards. But, you know, obviously since then a lot has disrupted that sort of, you know, march towards this universal, more rational kind of collective community. And I think also some of those ideas do receive a meaningful critique, you know. I mean, a lot of the critiques of globalism come out of this, right, that it’s not just as simple as, “Oh, well, let’s just expand everything,” because how do we lose potentially our particularity and our local kind of flavor, and all these things? So there’s other critiques that need to be taken into that.

But in that pragmatic tradition, in a broadly kind of developmental tradition, there is this idea, which I find very compelling and is really at the heart of the work that I’m doing and the way that I’m conceiving of this more expansive Christianity—which, again, I’ll refer again to Habermas, too, because he’s getting at the same thing with his sort of rationalization of society through communicative action and kind of expanding your scope through taking on more perspectives and engaging in more conversation and dialogue. This is why diversity matters, right? This is why we want to recognize the plurality and the variegated differences that we’re surrounded by, rather than walling ourselves off from them, because they expand us, and then they expand our concern.

And this, to me, is the big, you know, telos, I guess you could say. You know, when I want to move into a more distinctly, explicitly religious register of rhetoric, this is the orientation in which society moves, provided that it doesn’t experience these, you know, regressive recoils or these kinds of, you know, conservative, reactionary kind of disruptions. I think that, left to its devices in healthy development, people and societies will become more open, expansive, and universal in their orientation to self and other. And I think that if we had a sense for that again and were able to appreciate that as an ideal, I think that that would go a long way to, you know, moving us in that right direction.

Matt Segall: Yeah, and I think what Royce means by the beloved community is not some kind of legislative agenda. And so, you know, in response to this worry about global governance and whatnot, I think that’s too abstract a way of thinking about what a truly human community would be beyond national boundaries and blood bonds and all of that. The beloved community is a project for the transformation of hearts—it’s not a global government. And I think, you know, that speaks to the way in which, while politics, as the realm wherein we, you know, collectively decide democratically—hopefully decide—on our rights and responsibilities, religion is something that takes place in the cultural domain, where it’s more about our personal relationships with one another, where yes, we’re always going to have the mediation of laws that we have to follow that, you know, we’ve agreed to. And that’s the basis upon which, say, a justice system functions, and we make sure that mob rule is replaced by the impartial order of, yeah, these laws. But the beloved community is meant to take place in a realm too ambiguous for the application of abstract law. You know, we’re talking about—it usually would just be referred to as our private lives now, but it’s more like our civic existence, our interpersonal day-to-day interactions with the people in our neighborhood. And—but now we have the internet, and so you might be on the other side of this continent, and I still feel like we can have a personal connection, you know.

And so this isn’t merely local in the geographic sense that it might used to have meant, but it is that, too. And we need to maybe pay a bit more attention to that, despite our non-local internet form of coexistence and personal connection. But yeah, I think the key is not allowing the beloved community or the Christ impulse to be transposed onto the political domain, where it functions in a really unhealthy way. As the kind of imposition of law, and the whole point is that this is about a loving connection to your neighbor, and not the abstract imposition of law by police power.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: I would say, though, I mean, I agree, I agree. And there’s sort of a sense there of like, you know, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” but at the same time it’s also the case that how we are with one another in our intersubjective relationships—that is the basis of society, kind of writ large, when you kind of expand that out. And when you can have a society that can kind of count on being grounded in a very healthy, intersubjective, you know, beloved-community dynamic, you’re going to have a different level of civic engagement and civic identity and these sorts of things, right, whereas if that social fabric is frayed—as I think it certainly has in America—and, you know, neighbor doesn’t know neighbor, and all of this, right, then what do you get, right?

So I hear you. Like, I share that it’s a different kind of realm of thought and action than, say, politics specifically, and yet also, politics in that sense of Aristotle—you know, man is the political animal—like, it is inherently political in that sense.

Matt Segall: Connected. So it’s just like what’s downstream from what. I think because our culture is fragmented and broken, we’re trying to culturally engineer by blunt instrument of politics, right? Whereas politics is downstream from culture. So we got to fix our hearts, and then we’ll have better laws. Yeah.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Well, and I wanted to say, too, that what you were getting at around the—yes, often forgotten and not very well communicated or taught— notion that America is this multicultural, pluralistic society predicated not on bonds of blood but on shared commitments to, you know, a set of ideals, I think that that then suggests that for America to work successfully, it, I think, has to intuitively get with that notion of the beloved community as its sort of teleological orientation, because it doesn’t work absent that. And I think that that’s what we’re experiencing, right? When you see the fissuring and the identity politics taking all these different directions that are leading towards this kind of internal fissure and fracture and mutual hatred and resentment along class and racial and orientation lines—all this stuff that’s happening, right?—I think is because do we have a sense that that actually is the ideal, that’s the—almost, you could say, the prerequisite for the whole American experiment to be ideally operating? And if we’re not able to operate at that level, and we regress back to this more tribalistic notion of “I’m in my group, and so I hate your group,” America, I think, in its very theory, no longer functions.

So it’s really in our kind of existential—I don’t know what you’d say—out of existential necessity, I think, that there’s this urgency to be able to relate to that ideal again. Otherwise, you know, everything you were saying about the Mariani incident is just going to spread and metastasize, and we’re never going to see what an actually, genuinely Christian nation could look like, right? So conceived.

Matt Segall: Yeah. So do you have about a half hour left, or I don’t know what your timing—

Brendan Graham Dempsey: I’m pretty open.

Matt Segall: Because we’ve been speaking to the ethical and social side of a kind of post-religious return to the Christ as an important transformative event or symbol, but I also want to talk about the metaphysics here. Because I know you had some conversations with prior guests who still profess to be Christians of some sort, but not of the traditional literalist form. And so the question of, like, so the Resurrection, so the Immaculate Conception, so, you know, all these—whatever miracles—like, how do you deal with that stuff? And so, in other words, what is the metaphysical or cosmological import of this Christ event? What—other than just the psycho-spiritual interior domain of how human beings make value and decide on what’s good in life, which does seem to have been deeply transformed by this event—is there some sense in which the whole creation was transformed, as Paul would have it? Or, you know, we could think more like in the evolutionary context of the 20th-century Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his vision of the cosmological significance of Christ.

And so, yeah, I mean, obviously I think a lot about this, but one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you—it’s not just because of the ethical side of things, where I wasn’t expecting there to be any disagreement or tension between us, but in terms of the metaphysics of this, what’s your Christology on these questions?

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Yeah, so, you know, in your notes, you were thinking of some stuff we could get into. You had some terms, and I really liked them. One that you talk about: “naturalistic Christology” or a “Christological naturalism,” I think were the terms you used. And I really loved “Christological naturalism.” That’s a juicy one. And so that would be kind of where I would want to start, I think, with this. I would say something like this: that, you know, if we’re talking about naturalism, and we’re using that kind of orientation, then we are, I think—let’s just say—more in the orientation of, let’s say, the Logos, in how that gets deployed in naturalistic contexts, right? And again, this is its own legacy of the Christian movement, you could say—that wave, that Logos that moves from, you know, the Word into the Logos, the logic of science, all the “ologies” that we get from kind of more rationalistic thought, and all these things carried forward.

But in terms of thinking about the universe as governed by Logos, you could say—which, again, framed in that way, it’s a very kind of Christian way of framing it, but of course a scientist could say the same thing if they mean Logos in that kind of more abstract sense—I would want to say something like, if we work with that, that again, in its least kind of controversial sense, there are deep law-like patterns that seem to be observable in nature. And if “law-like” sounds too, I don’t know, hard and fast, maybe “regularities,” “patterns,” right? And that’s what the Logos is about—that there are these deep patterns that we can read, you could say, in nature.

I recently learned the term “the Ionian enchantment,” which I think captures this idea, which is that notion of, you know, hey, we can actually look at nature and understand it, right—that there’s some sense in philosophy that we can do natural philosophy of drawing out those patterns and corresponding our minds to them or what have you, in a way that we can kind of get a grip on them, and that things aren’t just a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” certainly, and things are much, much more than that. They are deeply patterned and ordered—there’s an order to nature, and that’s what makes it a cosmos.

So anyway, all of this, I think, comes out—well, I shouldn’t even say “comes out of,” but it certainly gets picked up by and codified in the Christian tradition and on into science. What I’m getting at, though, is that accepting some version of that, let’s read the Christ event in terms of that kind of Logos. So rather than the Logos of, you know, you could say, the Logos is Christ in heaven who gets sent down, and then this is the kind of event that we’re referring to, this sort of imposition from a supernatural realm into the natural world to do some kind of supernatural set of acts that will change the world forever—that’s not so much how I see it. That’s not the metaphysics that really works for me. It’s more like, implicit—immanent—in the natural world is a law-like pattern and Logos and logic, and that if you kind of set that going, it is a developmental, unfolding, progressive, evolutionary logic that will logically and in a law-like fashion produce certain kinds of events, right? In the same way that, if you work with a kind of Big Bang cosmology, you could say, “All right, you run that clock, you’re going to get stars,” right? And once you get stars, you know, you’ve also then got the life cycle of stars: they explode, they implode, and then, when the stars end, they create the heavy elements, and then those create new kinds of stars, and then those explode, and then you get planets as that coalesces, and then on planets you can get life, etc. You can see that there’s a kind of sequential, a kind of law-like pattern that would go into the sorts of things that create what is the world that we experience—the transcendental conditions that render the sort of world that we experience. And there’s a logic to that, you could say; it’s kind of woven into the fabric of things.

That would be how I would be inclined to see the Logos, including the Logos of Christ, which is that it’s not so much, again, that Jesus came from without and then changed the world, but it’s more like, once the world was going, you could say the Christ event, in a sense, was somehow—if not unavoidable, then, you know, there was something like this that was going to happen by the nature of this sort of progressive, recursively complexifying logic of things. And that would be one way of reading it. And I think also, when you dig into the history of things, it’s not— you know, that makes a lot of sense, I’ll put it that way. When you read, for example, Josephus, and you get into that cultural milieu in which Jesus emerged, you find all these Messiahs and prophets and religious leaders, and John the Baptist himself seems to have been one in these kinds of communities—there’s a kind of, like, it was—the conditions were ripe, you could say, for something like the Christ event to happen. And, you know, did it have to be Christ? You know, I would say this is an interesting kind of naturalistic Christology or a Christological naturalism, where it’s a sort of like, well, yeah, there was going to be a Christ-like event that happened in that situation.

Now, I’m speaking in broad terms, and certainly there’s a certain level of kind of poetic romanticization to the looseness that I’m using here. But I think it gestures to the way that I think of the metaphysics of this, and I don’t think that any of this hardly takes away from the profundity or the sublimity or, you know, the “magic,” you could say, of what then cascades forth from the Christ event by situating it in kind of natural space-time as being a certain kind of set of conditions coming together that led to this cascading event. In the same way that, you know, I think that evolution makes life more miraculous when you set it in that context of billions of years and the conditions becoming ripe and all these things, right? It’s almost—it’s almost—well, I don’t want to run afoul of anyone’s theology and say—I don’t want to say—I don’t want to call anyone’s theology cheap, but I would say that we’re in danger of cheapening life if we just say, “And then someone went poof, and then there it is,” right? I mean, it’s a less grand story than appreciating the billions of years of contingent factors and law-like processes that all went into, you know, the set of conditions that then led to this thing.

So that would be an invitation to consider the Christ event in similar terms, right? And again, there’s a kind of theological reason for doing so—there’s that sense, and you get it even in Milton, you know, where, like, Christ is already up there in heaven when Adam and Eve are made, right? There’s a sense in which Christ is there from the beginning with the Father. And you could almost say that in a similar way, right? Like, all that kind of exists in reality that is law-like and natural in that sense is, in a sense, kind of that sort of metaphysical—I don’t say eternity per se, but it has a deep, deep continuity with what is. And I don’t think that that also runs afoul of the deep creativity, either, that leads to new things emerging in that process.

But anyway, I’ll pause there because I think I’ve gotten the basic point across of sort of this naturalistic Christology, at least. And then, you know, more could be said, I think, about a Christological naturalism, which again is an even more beautiful phrase. I think that in my mind it gestures to this notion of reading all of the natural world through a divine Logos-like intuition that can see that happening and unfolding, and everything we were just talking about, I would suggest, at the cultural intersubjective level is, I think, an outgrowth of that sort of Christological naturalism. But anyway, yeah, I’ll pause.

Matt Segall: Hmm, yeah, no, I think you’ve done a marvelous job articulating what a naturalistic Christology would look like, with also some gestures toward a Christological naturalism. And I think we need both. We need to sort of coordinate these different approaches towards the same integration, you know, coming from either end. And yeah, I mean, there’s something quite striking about this, like, super-saturated social fluids that the Christ event occurs within, as a kind of, you know, seed that took root in soil that was just so ready for it. But that event suggests something, I think, about the nature of the cosmos that we live in and that life itself has emerged within.

And so you spoke to Logos as this principle of intelligibility that, in some sense, natural science presupposes. There can only be creatures like us capable of doing natural science if there was some intelligibility latent in nature that makes it a cosmos such that we can have a cosmology. And that’s why all of the founders of natural science during the Scientific Revolution in Europe were Christians and “intelligent design” theorists, basically. That connection between, you know, the human mind and the intelligibility of nature wouldn’t have—to them—felt justified without the theological background, the theological imaginary background that they all had.

So that, like, you know, even Immanuel Kant, who becomes such a critic in his later work in the 1750s, you know, wrote this “universal theory of the heavens” based on the Newtonian approach to universal gravitation and figuring out laws of physics. And for Kant, at that point in the evolution of consciousness, the mechanistic picture of the universe was the best proof of God you could ever ask for, right? That there should be such systematic, lawful order in nature that we are capable of knowing—it’s like, wow, obviously this was designed by some infinite being. And then, you know, only a century later, you’ve got Nietzsche saying, “What? No, that’s the exact opposite of what we should take away from this idea.” And, you know, Kant was already describing a kind of evolutionary cosmology.

Nietzsche takes a very different lesson from that scientific story. So some major transformation has occurred in that time period where science presupposes this type of theology, to all of a sudden science being the best proof against—the best proof of atheism, you know. And I know, you know, it’s complicated. Nietzsche had issues with Darwinian evolution and some approaches to science, but this general picture, I think, holds true. And so I think at this point, I think we need—what I would want out of a Christological naturalism would be some picture of evolution that makes room for aim and purpose, and isn’t simply reducing the process to the lowest common denominators of our moral motivations, like greed and selfishness and just the survival instinct. Like, I think clearly there is that, and that is operative, and that’s why Darwin’s formula is so powerful, because obviously, us organisms want to survive. And from that basic little, you know, minuscule drop of a kind of teleology, you can get endless forms, most beautiful. But I think there’s also ways in which this organic striving goes beyond merely the selfish desire to reproduce—that there’s also these other values and aims that, yeah, maybe become more intense as you move from single cells to reptiles to, you know, birds and mammals to primates. Like, there’s an enhancement of this, to put it in neurophysiological terms, like the limbic system comes online, and all of a sudden we start to feel things for each other, and organisms begin to form these social bonds which are super-important and motivating, and then group selection becomes obviously a factor in what types of organisms survive. And so you could say, yes, this capacity for deeper sources of motivation than just greed and selfishness is amplified over the course of evolution, but I think there’s some sense in which it’s been there from the beginning, right?

And there’s no reason to overemphasize the greed part, just as we don’t want to overemphasize, you know, the altruism part or something. It’s just like the aim of evolution, let’s say—there are aims of evolution all along the way. And so there’s room for, I think, a Christic impulse long before first-century Jerusalem, going all the way back to, you know, the formation of the first atoms, the formation of the first stars. There’s something about the very laws of physics themselves that suggest a desire, a striving for unification, a striving for ever more intimate coexistence, such that novel forms continue to arise out of the relationships formed between the earlier types of existence, right? So this community impulse is there from the origin of things.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: I mean—so, okay, so like, here’s one way of starting to get at some of that, which is like, okay, there’s the physics, which is, all right, let’s watch some things and see what they do. And when we do that, we can get some empirical data and say, “Oh, yeah, you know, this is how evolution does this, and this is how atoms do this,” this sort of thing, and there is this sense of moving towards oneness. But then you need to step back from that. You get to do some metaphysics to say, “Okay, there are patterns here—this is a Logos of a kind of, you know, a trend,” you could say. This is not just in a particular—it’s not just an instance. It is part of a deeper groove or, yeah, orientation to the nature of things. And then you’re already in that kind of metaphysics. And I think a lot of my work happens there, as I’m thinking, okay, well, gosh, if we’re looking at, you know, evolution, biological evolution, but then we also tie in cosmic evolution into that and see that those are continuous but also discontinuous, and then we tie in cultural evolution, we’ve got overarching patterns that have a logic to them—a Logos to them. And that’s what, in a sense, is governing the physics, you could say. But there’s a kind of grander vision there. And again, I would say that’s broadly metaphysical.

And I think what you’re getting at, though, is a kind of something beyond even that, or it’s a kind of scale of metaphysics that is—you know, again, I hesitate to ever say things like “meta-metaphysics,” but it’s something that I think orients us to, why, you know, like, why are there these metaphysical orientations, and what I mean by that is just, like, again, here’s the pattern we can witness. Okay, then we get a kind of a law from that, let’s just say even something like the second law of thermodynamics, right? Like, that’s a kind of first principle, and we’re like, “Okay, this is the way it is,” and we can’t have recourse anymore to more physical explanations—there’s no physical explanation over here that’s going to explain the second law of thermodynamics, because the second law of thermodynamics is the abstraction of all these physical events that we’re kind of seeing as a law-like pattern. So now we’re at the level of first principles. But then we have to say, well, why does the second law of thermodynamics work the way it works? And then you have to get into this background context to even consider that. And again, you’re not doing science per se anymore at that point—you’re doing something else. But I think it’s an important set of questions to ask.

And I think that one is justified to then say, “All right, if things move toward unification in the way that we’re talking about, why—like, where did that come from?” You know, it’s sort of that sort of question. And it could be, by the way, that that level of analysis proves to be unwarranted if you can account for it at purely, let’s say, I don’t know, metaphysical levels potentially, or not—maybe it’s like, okay, how do we account for this meta set of principles that unfolds across cosmic evolution in a way that moves in this seeming direction? Who kind of oriented, or what oriented, things towards that direction, I think, is kind of the question that is being asked there, and that’s then a deeper set of questions than even the kind of stuff that I’m necessarily getting into in, like, my “Evolution of Meaning” series.

And I think that that would be where we would probably find that kind of Christological naturalism, which is to say, all right, if this is all, then moving, like, in this direction, then you could in a sense say that, like, the kinds of, you know, move towards beloved community and that universalizing love, that is implicit in the meta-metaphysics of reality, because we see it play out in the physics that lead to—or you can say we see it play out in the metaphysics of all the physical things that occur that lead to the kind of physical world that we see, if that’s making sense, if that’s tracking at all. And that would be maybe where I could locate a question like that.

And I’m open to that, but I’m also open to this other thing—and then I’ll set this up, and then I’ll see where you’re at with these things—but, like, I’m also open to the notion that maybe that meta-metaphysical stance is a kind of post-hoc reading of what has already occurred out of the creativity of time unfolding in the direction that it unfolded, meaning there is also a sense of indeterminacy, and of, yeah, let’s just say that indeterminacy about nature, and that even these law-like things that emerge aren’t necessarily precluded in their origins, right? Like, you need to get certain phenomena going and interacting in a certain way to then be able to have certain kinds of laws that can be assessed at that level of analysis. And maybe there are other kinds of things happening throughout the universe that are different sorts of levels of analysis that we haven’t even seen here play out on Earth, and maybe they’re even divergent lines, right?

So what I’m getting at with all this is that I’m also open to the idea that all of this kind of bubbles up from the bottom, right, and it’s sort of like that “appetition,” right, is, like, maybe the drive that gets this all going, but maybe that appetition doesn’t fully know its own self from the beginning. And that’s why I would be wary of overreading the Christological nature from the beginning, because then I think we’re not open to that narrativization of the account, right, that, like, maybe—and this is an important idea for me, you know—that this deep aspect of the universe is coming into its own increasing self-knowledge in a way that it didn’t exist in, you know, from the beginning. And if we read it in the beginning, then we’re kind of putting God already, the “consequent God,” already at the beginning. And I’m not sure if that’s what we want to do. So I struggle with that tension, and I don’t know—what are your thoughts?

Matt Segall: Yeah, no, I share the hesitation about, you know, as Richard Dawkins would simplistically articulate in his God Delusionbook, like, you know, how could—if God created the universe, then God must be more complex than the universe, and so something must have created God. And it’s like, you know, how do you get out of these sorts of dilemmas? And so we don’t want—you know, I don’t envisage the divine existing before the creation and planning it out. Cosmogenesis is a historical process, which means there’s contingencies, bifurcation points throughout it. It could have unfolded differently.

And this time-developmental picture of the universe that we have come to understand is one wherein, I think, increasingly, physicists are coming around to this position that, you know, Charles Sanders Peirce and Whitehead and others were articulating a century ago, which is that these laws are not externally imposed from some deistic designer, but emerge in the course of history, like everything else—they’re regularities and habits. And so, if we’re going to understand this as a process of divine creativity, then God, too, must be in some sense along for the ride.

And I like this idea of, you know, if we’re going to use the term “spirit,” there’s an unconscious spiritual yearning at the base of existence, and, like, well, why should there be nature and embodiment and material existence? Well, it’s like this unconscious yearning sought embodiment and ever richer forms of embodiment, almost as if to provide itself with a means of reflecting on its own existence. And so this spirit needed matter as a mirror to become conscious. And so—and this is mythopoetic, but it’s like speaking to a deeper principle at play in cosmogenesis and cosmic evolution, where spirit takes on embodiment in order to become conscious. And because it begins unconscious, of course this creative process is going to be full of—it’s going to be a learning process. Mistakes are going to occur. But because there is an accumulating memory, despite spirit being originally unconscious, there’s still an accumulation of memory such that learning can transpire, and gradually there’s a movement from deep sleep, to dreaming, to wakefulness, to a kind of consciousness of that whole process and how it happened and what we, as the conscious self-reflection of this process, are to be doing now.

And so this is part of where, you know, as I framed it in my notes to you, the moral and the physical world orders come to coincide. We desperately need to find a way to bring these two world orders back together, because we’re moral creatures. The problem with modernity is that it gave us a picture of the natural world that produced us that was totally amoral at best, if not immoral. It’s very difficult for us as moral creatures not to project onto nature and say, “Well, that’s devilish—what a torture chamber.” But if we’re trying to be strictly scientific, we’ll say, well, there’s no morality in nature. That’s—even if we say there’s no morality, rather than saying, “Wow, that’s an immoral process,” we’re still, you know, like, as Jacques Monod would say, “like gypsies lost in a desert with no sense of home,” which is profoundly alienating in this universe. And that puts us in a rather unstable psychological and social situation. So we need to find some way of bringing the moral and physical orders together.

What I’ve just described is one way of trying to do that. I’m sure there are others, but it seems crucial.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Yeah, well, I mean, so there’s—this is good stuff, and there’s so much—there’s so much in all of this. But a couple of thoughts that I wanted to bring in is, yes, part of why it’s important not to locate, let’s say, the fullness of Christ at the origin point, you know, let’s say, and then read that as just this continual through line through everything, is the question of theodicy, right? It’s the question of all this suffering and pain that’s been produced over the course of evolutionary history, right? And for me, finding evolutionary accounts of this kind of progressive development of morality has been really helpful to elucidate that, because the theodicy is one of the biggest questions. And if you have this supposedly omnipotent, omniscient God—and maybe it doesn’t have to be the whole triple-omni, you know, omnipresent maybe—but any one of those problematizes our notion then of, like, how that could be good and there could be so much suffering.

When you take that out of the equation, though, and God is, as you say, along for the ride, and that it is a learning process even that God is experiencing and taking stock of, you could say, then all of that suffering and immorality or amorality even from biological evolution that gets experienced is part of that in a way that leads to the development of morality, right, but would be unjustifiable if we presume the kind of moral totality and perfection from the beginning. So I think that that becoming a—like, “Christogenesis” is really important to, in a sense, “justify the ways of God to men,” you could say. So there’s that aspect of it.

But then there’s also, like, it’s interesting, because, like, people want to say there’s no morality in nature, but it’s like, yes there is—look at us, you know, we’re it, we are natural, and we are the product of the evolutionary process, and we have morality. So that’s not to be snarky, it’s to get at something really important, which is, again, this—this is a continuous and a discontinuous process. And so there might not be morality at the level of guinea pigs and rattlesnakes, but there is once you get the complex human social organism that has language in which—and then this goes back to what we were talking about at the outset—that individuals get socialized in collective contexts so that you’re in my brain and I’m in your brain, and I’m only myself because I’m in relationship to you, right? Then our goals and our concerns and our moral considerations are deeply interwoven with each other. And there’s a logic to that as well, and there’s a logic to reading into that, and that is the logic of the rationalization of society and the movement towards more universal morality as that process becomes learned better and better. And, you know, the developmental literature is kind of helpful there—not as a total explanation, but at least as some good guideposts, the work of Kohlberg and that kind of tradition.

So there’s all that, which is to say that, you know, oh, and then—this is the third point, which is all related—which is, yes, we want to tie the physical and the moral together. And the reason why modernity was so disruptive of that is because it kind of cleaved those apart, but then assumed a kind of simplistic, unilevel nature to reality, of, like, “Oh, okay, now we know how rocks bumping into each other operate in law-like fashion. I guess we can just extrapolate this to all levels of existence,” right? And what that didn’t take into account, obviously, is that actually animals don’t behave like rocks, and people don’t behave like animals, and we actually have to account for the stratification of these different ontological levels of behavior. And that is actually only what comes out of the scientific insight—it wouldn’t have been possible before it, because it needed to be able to do this initial work to have these realizations. But science itself, I think, is a self-correcting thing, and when it realizes, “Hey, maybe trying to understand the human mind like a bunch of billiard balls doesn’t work very well. We’ve been at this for a couple of centuries now, guys, and we got to look elsewhere,” you know, there is paradigm shift, and there is updating of models, and these sorts of things.

And so that learning process goes on, and part of it is learning better and better how to carve nature at its joints. So that’s all just to say that I think what was so disruptive but also necessary about the move into that modern critical, and maybe even atheistic, moment was that it needed to be able to give us that sense of at least how some mechanistic-style things behave in the world, and when we over-extrapolated that, that led to a lot of confusion and anomie and all these kinds of levels of disenchantment. But they were not grounded in a full scientific picture that would actually need to account for the stratification. And so, as the kind of mind of God, you could say, has looked back and understood better and better the whole evolutionary process and gained greater self-knowledge, those levels of stratification have entered back in, and I think that allows us then to situate the moral plane as a sedimentary deposit on top of the physical, you know, just material plane that’s continuous, but again discontinuous as well. And when we can do that, we can see it is all one, but also new things emerge in different levels of complexification. And that, I think, is how we untangle that knot, you know, and return a sense of value and morality into the nature of things—which, again, just to repeat, we are direct evidence of.

Which last thing I’ll say is why it’s so absurd then when people flip that on its head and take consciousness and value and morality as epiphenomena and as illusions and these sorts of things, because they’re taking, you know, an earlier level of complexity and complex behavior and sort of presuming that everything works in that way, and then, as a result, has to negate or undermine or suggest as false consciousness, consciousness itself, and the very notion that is most immediately apprehendable to us, which, again—like you and your conversations with Evan Thompson. His Mind in Life or In the Blind Spot—that does a great job unveiling. So that would be my—there’s—yeah, again, there’s so much there, and I wanted to hit on all those points because they’re all related. But yeah.

Matt Segall: Yeah, yeah. So we should move towards trying to wrap this up, but I want to, you know, in thinking about the relationship between the moral and the physical and how we work through that connection, I’m thinking of, you know, the ways in which the human being provides a—that in some sense, yes, the human being creates God, to turn the usual story on its head, where God creates the human being. And you see this in Jung’s Answer to Job, where he’s speaking about psychological reality and not doing the sort of Jonathan Pageau thing where all of a sudden you think you’re talking about symbols, but then all of a sudden you’re talking about literal truth. Jung stays in psychological reality, and he talks about, you know, Yahweh being a still predominantly unconscious deity who’s tricked by its own shadow into torturing poor Job, and Job’s response to that actually puts Job morally above Yahweh, and Christ becomes the transformation in Yahweh. That’s a response to the moral superiority of Job. So in other words, the human being caused the divine to undergo this transformation, to become conscious of God’s shadow, and so more moral. And to become more moral, God had to become human, in a way.

And so if we then transpose that story that Jung’s telling in a sort of psychological reading of the biblical tradition and the biblical worldview to a cosmological context, and we understand how, yes, what we understand as morality at the level of some higher mammals and animal behavior and then human beings wasn’t present at earlier phases of cosmogenesis, and yet at the origins of everything, this unconscious, yearning spirit performed this deed, which wasn’t maybe initially conscious of itself, but upon reflection, after a process of evolutionary learning, became more and more aware of the love that motivated that deed, right? And so I’m trying to complexify the story that would make morality—that would tempt us into thinking, “Oh, well, morality is ultimately epiphenomenal. What’s originally going on and still going on, really, is just this purely physical, aimless process.” But that physicality itself is the expression of this spiritual act, right? And so I’m not trying to make morality primary, because, you know, that’s problematic because of theodicy, and if God’s originally good, then why all the suffering? But I’m trying to bring some kind of parity to the material–moral, the moral–physical relationship.

But in the last thing I want to say there, though, is I feel like Jesus is already post-Nietzsche and beyond good and evil. And so when we do talk about the moral lesson in all of this, I don’t want us to get hung up in that pre-Nietzschean understanding of morality as just, you know, power moves that a society makes in determining what it believes is good in a particular historical epoch or whatever. I think, you know, when Jesus says, “Hate your family and love your enemies,” there’s something beyond good and evil going on there. And so when we speak about morality, I don’t want people to think that we’re ignoring everything Nietzsche taught us about the genealogy of morality. And I think Jesus is in some ways already hip to that.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Hmm, hmm. Well, yes, and actually, just on that point, I think that Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality is maybe helpful up to the kind of genuine axial insight, and then I think at that point he kind of—he misreads that move, and he then wants to revert to a kind of more imperialistic morality that I think—because he doesn’t really see the true breakthrough of what could be called that axial move which Jesus embodies, but different conversation. But yeah, I mean, so I think what we’re dancing with here is that we’ve got—there’s certain things that we want to maintain from a bunch of these different ways of seeing this, and they all come with aspects that are resolving of certain tensions, but then we don’t want to create new tensions by, you know—well, tension’s fine, but yeah. Or contradictions, or, you know, like, when you solve one problem over here, you’ve created another problem for yourself over here.

And so, if we want to position the Christ in some flavor at the origin that is working its way out through the entire evolutionary story, we want to do so in such a way that doesn’t give it full, kind of total, omniscient preapprehension of everything in advance, because then you get the theodicy problem. At the same time, if you don’t give it some sense of intentionality to it, then it is entirely just a contingent process that’s working its way out through a kind of, you know, groping. And again, I’m open to that account, but maybe it’s not as beautiful or sublime or as correct as something where it’s a mixture of both. So you’re kind of—We should consider it. I think we are—intellectually, it behooves us to consider it as a possibility if we’re intellectually honest. And to me, it’s not—maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t find anything horrific about it. I find it intellectually rather satisfying, but I also find it with its own profound beauty, as well, of, like, the idea of God’s face being chiseled out of the marble, you know, but like the process of that face being chiseled isn’t like a sculptor methodically doing something with a predetermined plan in mind—it’s more like a slime mold moving through a maze, or, you know, these chaotic patterns that we see, like the “ruliad” of Stephen Wolfram, or something. So, like, generally creating, like, the God face that Dante sees in the Paradiso, and I find that also profound.

But I’m, you know, very open to this other idea, which is that there is something nascent and implicit there from the beginning that is, you know, this more Christ-like aspect that is kind of, you know, putting its thumb on the needle, so to speak, so that things are moving in a particular direction that is—well, anyway, that might not be the best way of putting it. What I want to say, though, is—what do I want to say? I want to say something like, yes, that I track with the notion of, you know, the embodiment serving as the mirror for the divine that’s able to see itself. And if we want to read that Job story that Jung offers us as a reflection of this process, that there’s something kind of unconscious behind the surface that is God working God’s self out, and that we are the means by which, you know, through interaction with that, that is coming to greater clarity.

How we understand that becomes difficult, but I think is also really worthwhile to take apart. And I think another thing that’s really important here is that one thing that this does allow us to do is keep our traditional scriptures and work with them, but from a new hermeneutical register, you know? Like, imagine someone being like, “Oh, yeah, I’m a Christian.” It’s like, “Oh, you believe in the atonement sacrifice of Jesus Christ for your soul so you can go to heaven?” It’s like, “Well, no, I think that God, you know, had to one-up Job.” And so, you know, like, one could be a Jungian Christian, I guess, is what I’m saying. And I want to see a future in which those are really viable options. And anyway, so that’s one thing.

And then the other thing is, you know, there’s a book called God: A Biography by Jack Miles, who’s—it’s a Pulitzer Prize–winning book published in 1995, where he basically takes the Bible in its Jewish canonical form and just reads God as a literary character that is, you know, going through this personality transformation arc. And it is very Jungian in the sense that we’re talking about, of God needs to kind of create humanity in order to gain a better understanding of Himself. And you can read the Bible in that way, and I want us to read the Bible in that way. I think that that’s probably the most productive way that the scriptures can still be mined for this kind of deep insight about, you know, what is God and how is God evolving—not because God was actually in, you know, the Book of Judges, you know, smiting Amalekites, you know, but because people thought God in those terms, and so God is always kind of an image of humanity, and so God’s learning God’s self by means of humanity.

But then with Christ, there’s sort of like, no, “I and the Father are one.” It’s like, oh, this whole divine thing has, like, been playing out in the psychological realm, and that’s a kind of way of withdrawing the projection and identifying with the divine. And gosh, there’s so much, you know—there’s so much to all this. So anyway, those are some thoughts on all of that.

Matt Segall: I love all of that. We could continue to feast on these ideas, but I want to respect your time, Brendan, and I think we should bring this conversation to a close. Merry Christmas. Hope it’s not too cold in Vermont, but I imagine you have snow right now, or it’s very—

Brendan Graham Dempsey: Cold, and it’s very snowy. But yes, it’s at least a white Christmas here, and a very beautiful one. I see you’re wearing your red Santa-inspired clothes there. No, this was a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate being able to jam with you on all this. And yeah, I’m glad we were able to do it in time for Christmas and a time for holy, reverent consideration of these Christological mysteries that one is never able to plumb the depths of. So thanks for this, I really appreciate it.

Matt Segall: Yeah, no, it was a great Christmas—early Christmas gift—to speak with you, Brendan. And yeah, I hope to catch up with you in the new year.

Brendan Graham Dempsey: ‘Til next time.

Matt Segall: Alright, take care!