21AR26-11

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AR 26:11 - Our "religiously remixed culture" …and "pagan" Catholics

pdf = www.bit.ly/2OAyfSb

In this issue:

CHURCH HISTORY - apologists correct misconceptions about the church's past

CULTURE - how internet culture spawned "a more participatory and polyphonic understanding of spiritual life"

JUNG, CARL GUSTAV - the under-recognized dangers of his occult philosophy

Apologia Report 26:11 (1,516)
March 17, 2021

CHURCH HISTORY

Urban Legends of Church History: 40 Common Misconceptions, by John Adair and Michael Svigel <www.bit.ly/388gjog> -- the publisher says that "While these 'urban legends' sometimes arise out of falsehood or fabrication, they are often the product of an exaggerated recounting of actual historical events." Included are "legendary misconceptions, such as the early church worshiping on Saturday and the unbroken chain of apostolic succession. Urban Legends of Church History will correct misunderstandings of key events in church history and guide readers in applying principles that have characterized the Christian church since the first century."

Notable endorsements:

* - "This volume bears witness to the fact that, if things are repeated long enough, if they are found in copious footnotes in worthy publications, and if they were written by trustworthy spokespersons, they will make it into the world of repeatable 'truths.'" John D. Hannah, research professor of theological studies and distinguished professor of historical theology, Dallas Theological Seminary

* - "As long as there are popular authors like Dan Brown and Bart Ehrman, there will be a need for a book like this." William Varner, professor of Bible and Greek, The Master's University

Related titles from the same publisher (B&H Academic):

* - Urban Legends of the New Testament, by David A. Croteau

* - Urban Legends of the Old Testament, by David A. Croteau and Gary Yates

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CULTURE

In his interview with Religion News Service columnist Tara Isabella Burton about her 2020 book <www.bit.ly/3bZMIhT> Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Kenneth E. Frantz begins: "Her book takes readers through a number of spiritual subcultures, including among the followers of SoulCycle, Jordan Peterson, and witchcraft."

Burton <www.bit.ly/3eHSxnn> explains: "I think that traditional conceptions of secularization in America have looked at the religiously unaffiliated as an indicator that America is getting less religious. That is actually not the case. About 72 percent of the religiously unaffiliated say they believe in some sort of higher power. About 17 percent say they believe in the Judeo-Christian god. In addition, you have people who affiliate with religious tradition - i.e., self-identified Christians - whose belief systems, structures, practices, and rituals are a little bit more eclectic. Almost 30 percent of self-identified Christians, for example, say they believe in reincarnation, which traditionally would not be something you would associate with orthodox Christian doctrine."

What interests her is a "phenomenon I see as much more salient than so-called secularization, which is the way in which spirituality, meaning, purpose, community, and ritual are all divorced both from traditional religious observance and from one another. ... This kind of mix-and-match mentality, this anti-institutionalism, and desire to remake one's own religious life in a more individualized way...."

In her book, Burton discusses "three categories of remixers." As she explains to Frantz: "These categories aren't mutually exclusive. They come from different forms of polling and data. You have your faithful 'nones' - your people who say they are religiously unaffiliated but also say they believe in a higher power. You have your people who self-identify as spiritual but not religious. What's interesting about that group is there are people who say that they're spiritual but not religious but will also say 'but I'm Christian' or 'but I'm Jewish.' They might be affiliated with a religion, but they don't call themselves religious, which itself opens up a field of questions. ...

"The final can of worms is what I call the religious hybrids. These are people who do identify strongly with a religious tradition but who - as in the case of the Christians and reincarnation - have a personal theological outlook that is more eclectic than traditional orthodox theology. We don't have good enough data to tell the overlap between these people because these are different polling systems. But, when we take it all together, what we can see is that a huge proportion of religious and not explicitly religious Americans fall into these categories. ... To put it very bluntly and reductionistically, they're making their own religion in some sense. ...

"There are three major elements that I would point to in looking at the way internet culture led to our modern religiously remixed culture. The first is the development of a kind of tribalization that transcended geographic limitations. ... Secondly, I think there's the idea rooted in consumer capitalism that our choices define us. What we buy and what we consume can be indicative in how we build our personality. ... The narrower an affinity base becomes, so too our approach to spirituality becomes something that should work for us and work for our choices, or so the prevailing cultural ethos goes. Thirdly and finally, I think the internet culture of user-generated content, where we are not just passive consumers but active creators ... has lent itself to a more participatory and polyphonic understanding of spiritual life. Again, there's a hunger for ownership; we don't want to passively consume a text but rather kind of write our own. ...

"[T]he the example of the Harry Potter fandom which is the one I focus on my book. Between 1997 and 2000, which is when the first through fourth books of the Harry Potter series came out, internet household usage went from 19 million Americans to a 100 million. A huge increase. Around that time, Harry Potter became the forefront not just of a phenomenon but a phenomenon that took on an internet form....

"... as J.K. Rowling has alienated a lot of her fans through her transphobic views, the response has not been, 'Let's not read Harry Potter.' Some people have said that, but the predominant response has been, 'She doesn't own Hogwarts. These characters are ours. We can still write stories set in Hogwarts. ... [T]hese characters, this world, belongs to us, and it's J.K. Rowling whom we want to exile from Hogwarts rather than boycott.'

"What's to stop us from taking a similar approach of ownership of reimagining to sacred texts, to sacred stories?" (After all, the West has done this with yoga.)

"What we need is to restore a kind of emotional connection to the divine. You find that rhetoric in both Christian and non-Christian or Christian-adjacent versions.... You find this certainly in the Great Awakenings with your tent revivals and your Methodist circuit riders. You find it too in the philosophy of the transcendentalists like Emerson or Thoreau with their focus on the individual spiritual experience over and against that of society. You find it in pop culture crazes of the nineteenth century like New Thought and Spiritualism. And you find it in the rise of contemporary evangelical American culture as well as in our modern kind of internet-based great awakening. In each case, the pendulum swings [away] from religion as a cohesive social force, one that is about community and structure to religion as a kind of inward source of personal connection with the divine. Those things have always existed in tension, I would argue, in American culture up to and including today - with the difference today being that late capitalism and the internet have kind of kicked this phenomenon into overdrive. ...

"They are groups that want to rewrite the scripts or rewrite the rules of being. There's a focus on internal desire. What do you want? What do you hunger for? There's a sense that the establishment of society at large is dangerous insofar as it stops you from achieving your truest self or being your most authentic self. All of these qualities, which I think are embedded in contemporary American culture, I felt I could explore in the most nuanced way possible through turning a more specific lens to these groups." Religion and Politics, Sep 22 '20, <www.bit.ly/3sOE78S>

For a little more context, also see this March 12 column by veteran religion reporter Richard Ostling, "How do categories differ among America's rising non-religious 'nones?" <www.bit.ly/3eLMXjG>

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JUNG, CARL GUSTAV

The Rod Dreher blog includes a significant look at Jung (Dec 18 '20, half-way down the page) in reference to the "deeply Jungian" 2001 novel <www.amzn.to/3kGoE7X> Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. Dreher is a self-described "Conservative, Orthodox Christian, Southern eclecticist" and author of The Benedict Option <www.bit.ly/2OkMaeq> and Live Not by Lies <www.bit.ly/3bUn5Ax> among other influential books.

Here he includes a YouTube link to "an old Mars Hill Audio Journal segment <www.bit.ly/3lmwbsI> about C.G. Jung's connections with Gnosticism and the occult. It's an interview with Richard Noll, a clinical psychologist and historian of medicine who talks about his 1997 book The Jung Cult" <www.bit.ly/3e7AjeI> (previously titled "The Aryan Christ").

Also included is a link to "a fascinating 1997 interview with Noll, conducted by psychotherapist Ivan Tyrrell. Noll claims that Jung's theories are pseudoscientific, and designed by Jung to bring respectability to his attempt to revive ancient paganism and set himself up as a cult leader."

Excerpts include a reference to "some of the dangers that the Jungian movement presents."

Dreher also links to a "stunning" 1994 interview "that Noll did with The Wanderer, a traditionalist Catholic newspaper, about Jung. The interviewer points out that Noll, who has taught at Harvard and MIT, describes himself as a lapsed Catholic who no longer believes in the teachings of the Catholic Church. ... The point is, Noll had no Catholic axe to grind with Jung. Excerpt: [Noll] Second only to Julian the Apostate, Jung is probably the most successful pagan prophet in the last 2,000 years. Jung is a very similar figure; he was a polytheist. He was a pagan in the old sense of the word. He believed in the multitude of gods and spirits, and he believed that what made modern man diseased was essentially Judeo-Christianity - that you had to believe in one God and only one God and believe in dogma. ...

"Anyone who is a true Catholic, and I would include charismatics, cannot teach these things. Jungian teachings are antithetical to Christianity. You can't have it both ways, at least from a Catholic perspective. ...

"It looks like Catholicism is lost in this country, because you have people who think they are Catholic, and they practice Jungian teachings about contacting the great mother goddess, or some other mythical figure. ...

"That's how it was in Julian's world. You could get up in the morning and offer a sacrifice to one god, and burn incense to another in the afternoon, and still call yourself a Christian to your friends.

"Anyone who claims he accepts both Jung and the Catholic Church is a pagan." <www.bit.ly/387AvH8>

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