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AR 25:2 - The Left's vision of "magic-as-perspective"
In this issue:
KELLER, TIMOTHY - trust contingencies, scientism, materialism, and politics
WITCHCRAFT - becoming "a bona fide demographic bloc"?
Apologia Report 25:2 (1,459)
January 16, 2020
KELLER, TIMOTHY
"The Moral Universe of Timothy Keller" by Peter Wehner (The Atlantic, Dec 5 '19) -- an interview with the founding pastor of Manhattan's Redeemer Presbyterian Church serves up abundant food for thought: "as Keller explained it, 'in a blue-collar town, your pastoral work sets up your preaching.' Unless congregants have gotten to know you personally, unless you've supported them through all kinds of problems and shown wisdom in the way you as a minister treat them, they won't listen to your preaching. They have to trust you first.
"In a place like New York, however, 'people look for expertise; they're professionals, and they want to know you've got the goods; they want to know you're really good at what you do. And if they hear you and they say, 'Oh, that's smart, that's very interesting, that's very skillful,' then they'll come and talk to you about their problems.'"
On scientism: "Keller told me that recent books such as Science and the Good, by James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky [1], and Atheist Overreach, by Christian Smith [2], do a good job of making the case that has also been made by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas.
"In a nutshell, their point is that science can tell you what you can do and how to do it efficiently, but it can never tell you whether you ought to do it. Science can't get you from the 'is' to the 'ought'; it can't give us a basis for morality. And if science and objective human reasoning can't give us that, Keller told me, 'we will not be able to order our society without recourse to religion or faith of some kind.' ...
"Beyond that, Keller said, the philosophy of secular materialism - the view that there is no transcendent, supernatural dimension; no God; no soul - can't really support its own moral values.
"'This is a major theme of the philosopher Charles Taylor,' Keller told me. 'In short, he says that secular materialism has to explain our moral beliefs as merely the result of evolution and biology, or of social construction, or both. There are no moral absolutes grounded in a cosmic order, as the Greeks thought, or in God and heaven.'"
On politics: "The upshot of Keller's position is that whereas individual Christians should be engaged in the political realm, the Bible makes it impossible as a Church to hitch your wagon to one political party, especially in these times. 'For Christians just to completely hook up with one party or another is really idolatry,' Keller said. 'It's also reducing the Gospel to a political agenda.' (He pointed me to an address by Nathan Hatch, president of Wake Forest University, called 'The Political Captivity of the Faithful,' <www.bit.ly/2NpYXJp> with which he concurs.)" [There's a good reason Christians are often on both sides of many debates. - RP]
"Keller noted that this danger isn't new. As is his wont, he cited a book to help me more fully understand his argument - H. Richard Niebuhr's The Social Sources of Denominationalism [3], which holds that denominationalism is primarily a social phenomenon that tends to be captured by different political and social classes. Keller observed that because Christianity properly understood is not a legalistic religion - 'there is no New Testament Book of Leviticus,' he told me - it can be a part of almost any culture. In that sense, it's a fairly flexible faith. ... There's ever the danger of 'cultural and political captivity.'
"When I pressed the point further, Keller admitted he believes that 'most Christians are just nowhere nearly as deeply immersed in the scripture and in theology as they are in their respective social-media bubbles and News Feed bubbles. To be honest, I think the 'woke' evangelicals are just much more influenced by MSNBC and liberal Twitter. The conservative Christians are much more influenced by Fox News and their particular loops. ...
"Too many Christians are characterized by their tribal commitments....
"On Donald Trump, Keller said that unlike a generation ago, many evangelicals are not looking to put Christians into power in order to turn the culture back to God; now they are looking for a protector, a champion.
"'Both those evangelical strategies are wrong,' Keller told me. 'Both of them are about power and saying, How are we going to use power to live life the way we want? They're not enough about service; they're not enough about serving the common good.'"
Regarding Keller's take on the spiritual temperature of the nation: "'I think the perplexity I see is that people want to have a foundation for making moral statements, but at the same time, they want to be free, and so they want to talk about the fact that all moral statements are culturally constructed,' he told me. 'And so when somebody pushes a little bit on their life, they'd say, 'All truth and all fact, all facts and all moral statements, are culturally constructed.'"
"As Keller pointed out, they're creating, at least philosophically, a kind of relativism.... 'What we need is a non-oppressive moral absolute,' in Keller's words. 'We need moral absolutes that don't turn the bearers of those moral absolutes into oppressors themselves.'" [We have the answer. We just need to be faithful messengers. The Master will sort out the rest. - RP] <www.bit.ly/2R3l89a>
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WITCHCRAFT
Back in the mid-1970s, when I (RP) began to take an interest in Christian responses to the occult, those willing to admit that they practiced witchcraft would quickly defend themselves by saying it only involved white, or good, magic (often <www.bit.ly/2ZqeTzV> spelled "magick"), insisting that it represented the only authentic form of modern witchcraft. This seems to have changed in the last decade. Religion News Service ("The Next Stage of Witch Resistance Is Here", Tara Isabella Burton, Nov 15 '19) offers an excerpt from the recent book Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism, by Sarah Lyons [4], which explains that "in a modern world in which we decreasingly agree on a single set of facts and internet reality often doesn't seem so concrete, magic is more likely to be practiced as a psychic upending. Witches don't warp what we think we see. To cast a spell, they only need to cultivate an ideology or a value system that is at odds with the oppressive 'real' world and impose it on others.
"That, at any rate, is the view of writer and witch Sarah Lyons [who] casts witchcraft as the spiritual arm of a wider subversion of the powers that be, ready to be harnessed to resist the forces of tyranny, patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. ...
"Revolutionary Witchcraft is only the latest in a long line of Trump-era books that envision witchcraft as an integral part of political and spiritual opposition to Trumpism. "But Lyons goes further that most in exploring the degree to which contemporary, late-capitalist, Internet-culture America runs on a panoply of energies, each of which might once have been thought of as their own kind of magic....
"For Lyons, we need to recognize these systems not so much as concrete reality but a product of collective symbolic consensus - and turn them to our own purposes. ...
"How you do this often sounds like political organizing as much as it does hexing....
"By treating magic as a shift in perspective with the power to change the wider 'reality' of the world, Lyons captures the heart of what has made contemporary occultism - from astrology to Tarot to sage cleansing to eclectic New Age-tinged wellness spiritualism - so attractive to today's millennial and Generation-Z religiously unaffiliated. ...
"The idea that reality itself is so unfixed and unstable that differing perspectives, underscored not by empirical reality but by bona fide emotional commitment, lends itself to a postmodern vision of magical possibility.
"If all realities are equally plausible - be they the words of President Trump or the reality of hexing - then there is no reason that magic should be less plausible, indeed less powerful, than any other form of reality-creation. Magic is possible precisely because everything else seems to be.
"This vision of magic-as-perspective is not confined to the progressive left. Since 2016, advocates of 'meme magic' on the right have credited mysterious occult forces - helped by an army of web trolls - for helping to elect Donald Trump.
"In this, at least, the progressive witch-left and the atavistic right are in agreement: insofar as the world we live in is an utterly absurd one, magic has no more - or less - right to credibility than money, or politics, or information.
"Whether we consciously choose to be or not, we're all meme magicians now." <www.bit.ly/39jMJLI>
Writing for The American Interest ("The Great Awokening: The Rise of Progressive Occultism," Jun 7 '19) Tara Isabella Burton <www.bit.ly/2QgL8xn> describes "packaging the connection between left-wing politics and occultism as an integral part of the progressive millennial experience. ...
"Progressive occultism - the language of witches and demons, of spells and sage, of cleansing and bad energy, of star and signs - has become the de facto religion of millennial progressives: the metaphysical symbol set threaded through the worldly ethos of modern social justice activism. ...
"Suspicious of institutions, authorities, and creeds, this demographic is less likely to attend a house of worship, but more likely to practice the phenomenon Harvard Divinity School researchers Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston [of Sacred Design Lab <sacred.design/who-we-are>] have termed 'unbundling': a willingness to effectively 'mix and match' spiritual, ritualistic, and religious practices from a range of traditions, divorced from their original institutional context. ...
"Reconstructionist pagan religions like Wicca ... grew popular with a demographic that felt marginalized by 'traditional' organized religions. Central to most of these movements was the idea that the intuitional, usually female self could access a deeper truth than patriarchal religions like Christianity grasped. Power came from within, not outside. ...
"Still, throughout most of the New Age movement, the number of actual practitioners of Wicca were limited. In 1990, there were only about 8,000 self-identified Wiccans in America. But in the past few decades, those numbers have been growing: By 2001, there were 134,000, and by 2014, Pew data suggested that the combined number of pagans and Wiccans in America was over a million. Wicca, by that estimation, is technically the fastest-growing religion in America.
"But contemporary witchcraft - the kind of occultism we see in [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez's star chart and the hexing of Brett Kavanaugh - isn't limited to those who practice paganism or Wicca as a religion, with a well-structured set of metaphysical and magical assumptions. It appears far more often as a component of 'unbundled' religious identity, where it is nearly always wedded to social justice activism. ... Symbols and images of the uncanny, the demonic, and even the diabolical are recast as icons of the falsely accused, the wrongly blamed, the scapegoated."
Burton briefly reviews the change going on within witch culture: "While New Age practitioners of the 1960s onward often characterized their practice as unfailingly benign ... contemporary witch feminism rebrands occult darkness as a legitimate, even necessary response to a structural oppression. ...
"[T]he rhetorical and spiritual popularization of 'resistance magic' in the age of Trump reveals the degree to which one of America's supposedly most 'secular' demographics - urbane, progressive millennials - aren't quite so secular after all. ...
"The contemporary millennial Left, increasingly alienated from a Christianity it sees as repressive, outmoded, and downright abusive, has used the language, the imagery, and the rituals of modern occultism to re-enchant its seeming secularism. ...
"For decades, the Christian Right has been able to consistently mobilize its voters more successfully than most other religious groups, precisely because it raised the political stakes to a battle between Good and Evil, while the 'religiously unaffiliated' have consistently failed to show up at the polls. ... The proliferation of progressivism as a spiritual as well as political identity may well be the unifying force the Left needs to emerge as a bona fide demographic bloc. ...
"It's impossible to know where these diffuse strains of pietism will ultimately lead. But at minimum, they suggest that secularization is not the inevitable or even the most logical endpoint for today's Left. Far from it. Rather, we're looking at a profoundly pagan form of re-enchantment." <www.bit.ly/2Zqlx9l>
If you'd like to pursue this in greater depth, consider Burton's upcoming book: Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World [5].
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality, by James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky (Yale Univ Prs, 2018, hardcover, 312 pages) <www.amzn.to/38cgCvV>
2 - Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can't Deliver, by Christian Smith (Oxford Univ Prs, 2018, hardcover, 168 pages) <www.amzn.to/2szqb9a>
3 - The Social Sources of Denominationalism, H. Richard Niebuhr (Facsimile Publisher, 2016, hardcover, 318 pages) <www.amzn.to/30qFWM9>
4 - Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism, by Sarah Lyons (Running Press, 2019, paperback, 168 pages) <www.amzn.to/2ZlrZhS>
5 - Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, by Tara Isabella Burton (PublicAffairs, June 2020, hardcover, 288 pages) <www.amzn.to/2MrGBHl>
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