Georgetown Professor Joshua Mitchell, author of the book American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, joins me to talk about what factors caused the rise of identity politics in America.
This is a great conversation and highlights a lot of themes that I've worked with, as well. We need to recognize that we have a New Civic Religion in America, that it is an incompatible rival to Christianity, that it is derived from Christianity in significant ways, and most importantly, that you cannot both be a Christian while participating in the rituals or holding the core beliefs of the New Civic Religion. Giving your pinch of incense to the "god" Caesar is anathema in the 1st Century as well as the 21st Century.
So long as we pretend that we're not fighting a competing faith, we're going to continue to lose Christians who convert to this faith and attack the Church from the inside.
I've vaguely heard of it, but no, I studied the works of Eric Voegelin in graduate school at LSU. My major influences on that topic are Voegelin's "New Science of Politics" and "Science, Politics, and Gnosticism." I also found some others to be helpful like John Crowe Ransom's "The God Without Thunder", Paul Gottfried's works, and Niebuhr's "The Kingdom of God in America." On the flip side, reading Richard Ely's "The Social Aspects of Christianity" and William Freemantle to see the transformation of Mainline Protestantism into a political doctrine.
This conversation knocked my socks off. I never liked the term Cultural Marxism - now I know why…
This is a great conversation and highlights a lot of themes that I've worked with, as well. We need to recognize that we have a New Civic Religion in America, that it is an incompatible rival to Christianity, that it is derived from Christianity in significant ways, and most importantly, that you cannot both be a Christian while participating in the rituals or holding the core beliefs of the New Civic Religion. Giving your pinch of incense to the "god" Caesar is anathema in the 1st Century as well as the 21st Century.
So long as we pretend that we're not fighting a competing faith, we're going to continue to lose Christians who convert to this faith and attack the Church from the inside.
Absolutely agree. Out of interest, were you influenced by Curtis Yarvin's "How Dawkins got Pwned" at all? https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/ at all? He explains well the "memetic evolution" of Christianity into, as he calls it, "non theistic Christianity".
I've vaguely heard of it, but no, I studied the works of Eric Voegelin in graduate school at LSU. My major influences on that topic are Voegelin's "New Science of Politics" and "Science, Politics, and Gnosticism." I also found some others to be helpful like John Crowe Ransom's "The God Without Thunder", Paul Gottfried's works, and Niebuhr's "The Kingdom of God in America." On the flip side, reading Richard Ely's "The Social Aspects of Christianity" and William Freemantle to see the transformation of Mainline Protestantism into a political doctrine.