Thursday, October 12, 2023
Saturday, October 7, 2023
FOUNDATIONAL PRACTICES IN THE INTEGRAL YOGA OF SRI AUROBINDO AND MIRRA ALFASSA
PART 1: INTIMATIONS OF OUR ESSENTIAL NATURE
(NOTE – This is part of a series I’m writing on “Integral Yoga in Everyday Language.” While this is somewhat more complex than the previous essays, the practice, “Space of Awareness,” is easily accessible even to those with no prior familiarity with yogic philosophy or practice. Please read it very slowly, with long pauses between sentences – and allow the experience to which it is pointing to unfold slowly, easefully and with much quiet, peace and deep stillness)
THE VIEW FROM INFINITY
Intimations of Infinity
While India – the home of yogic psychology – has always placed great value on intellectual understanding, the yogic tradition takes direct spiritual experience to be the foundation for any valid intellectual view. the spiritual experience at the core of the Indian tradition has been described as the experience of an infinite Consciousness, an infinite Being in whom the entire universe has its existence.i But it is important to remember that the description of the vision is not itself a “view from infinity” – that is, the direct “knowing” of that Reality. It is meant only to be a pointer to an experience or way of knowing which cannot be captured in words.
This experience – perhaps more correctly referred to as a recognition – provides a means of a radical transformation in our own body and mind, and potentially, a transformation in the very root of how we understand the universe. Having “attained” this recognition, we can learn to bring attention to the various workings of the Infinite Being throughout the universe, and to provide intimations of Its Presence here and now, in our every thought, feeling and sensation, every rock, plant and animal in our environment, and each person we encounter. The various streams of the yoga tradition are one in their agreement that the ordinary human mind is not capable of perceiving the Infinite. However, yogis of all traditions have always made use of words to evoke something beyond the mind, to open a window onto the richness, beauty and vastness of that Reality which is the very substance of all we experience.
While the Indian spiritual tradition has perhaps been the one to speak most openly of the all- pervasive, all-embracing nature of the Infinite Divine Being, all spiritual teachigns have – at least at their mystic core – pointers to this experience.
In the New Testament, St. Paul describes God at that “in whom we live and move and have our being.”ii In the Koran, Allah is referred to as being closer to us than life itself, closer than “the jugular vein.” In the Hebrew Bible, God, speaking to Moses, gives His name as “I Am That I Am.”iii Native American and other indigenous peoples recognize Spirit to be present and active throughout the universe.
Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel describes a state of mind that can make the experience of this greater Reality more accessible. He suggests cultivating an attitude of awe which is “itself an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves... [enabling] us to perceive in the world intimations of the Divine... to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.”iv
But how can we cultivate an attitude of awe? For some, a “thinning of the veil” which opens us to the sense of awe can occur in communion with the power and beauty of nature: listening to the gentle, unearthly silence of a large metropolis blanketed in snow... watching the play of light dancing on the wind-swept surface of Lake Geneva... walking down Fifth Avenue in the hush of twilight, lost in thought, suddenly catching sight of the deep orange sunlight setting fire to skyscraper windows. The awesome quality of these experiences tends, to some extent, to calm the disjointed play of our ordinary thought, bringing about an openness and tranquility that allows for something deeper to emerge from within.
Literature, painting, dance, theatre, cinema, and religious ritual have all, since prehistoric times, been at heart, a means of softening the boundaries of our ordinary awareness, thus helping us to experience something that transcends our limited selves. In the solemn intonation of a priest’s chanting of a sacred text, our hearts softened, our minds stilled, we feel a mysterious Presence spreading throughout the cathedral... we are transported with Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, as she voyages “through worlds of splendor and of calm”v ... in a darkened theater, we face death with Sir Thomas More, at peace in the noble equanimity of a high ideal.
The various practices of the yoga tradition are designed to make it possible for us to enter into this deeper experience at will, without need for external triggers. Ultimately these practices can help to dissolve the filmy screen altogether so that the “stillness of the eternal,” the soft and luminous presence of the Infinite is always and everywhere present in our experience. All yogic practice calls upon us to shift our attention – to step back from the familiar round of thoughts, feelings and sensations that tend to absorb us, and to gently redirect our attention inward. We invite you to join us in doing just that.
Shifting Attention: The Space of Awareness
Bring your attention to the sensations of your body. Let your eyes remain open, taking in the words of the text with a gentle, non-grasping awareness. Move your attention to different parts of the body, noticing the different sensations that arise...
As you attend to various sensations, notice that there is no clear boundary in your awareness between the sensations that make up the body and the space around the body...
As you release the sense of a clear boundary, begin to notice the larger space in which these sensations move...
Allow the sense of this larger space to continue to expand until you lose the sense of it having a beginning or ending, just open space...
As your sense of this space expands, see if you can notice a quality of stillness and calm associated with the unchanging nature of the space, the feeling of simply being which remains unchanged while the sensations continue to move and change in various ways...
Notice any sounds which are occurring, notice that they all occur within this larger space... notice whether near or far, the sounds all exist within the same open space ...
Notice images arising in the mind... these too are moving and changing in various ways, all within this larger space ...
Thoughts arise in space, move through it, dissolve back into it, the space remains, unchanged by whatever moves through it...
Feelings come and go – whether feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, joy, liking or disliking – constantly changing, leaving the space untouched, unchanged...
Staying aware of sensations, images, thoughts and feelings arising and passing away, notice the tendency of the mind to hold on to them, to harden them into solid objects... Releasing this tendency, see if you can become aware of a sense of ease and calm that may emerge as the sense of spaciousness expands... As the feeling of wide open space continues to expand, a feeling of quiet joy may enter into awareness...
Notice how everything moves, changes constantly within this space – sensations, thoughts, feelings – all patterns of moving energy, contained within the space, but not disturbing it...
The Field and the Knower of the Field
Within various spiritual traditions, there are many words to describe these two aspects of experience – the changing, shifting field of sensations, thoughts and images, and the still space of Consciousness in which they exist. The sacred yogic text, The Bhagavad Gita (literally “The Song of God”) refers to these, respectively, as the “Field” and “Knower of the Field.”vi
The Knower (or “Conscious-Being”) refers to that Infinite Being which holds the entire universe within Its Awareness. It is also That which, at this very moment, is seeing through our eyes, but which – in the words of the Kena Upanishad – “our eyes cannot see... which hears through our ears, but our ears cannot hear.”vii It is seeing and hearing equally through all eyes and ears – those of an ant as well as those of a cat or human being. It remains aware whether we are awake or asleep. We can get a sense of it by looking for that in us which is unchanging from infancy through all the changes of life, that core feeling of “I am” in the depths of our psyches.
This Infinite Conscious-Being is frequently referred to as “God,” but that word has so many images and associations attached to it, it rarely serves as a portal to experience. Describing the advantage of a simple word like “Being,” Ekhart Tolle writes:
The word ‘Being’ explains nothing, but nor does ‘God’. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite
entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization “I am” that is prior to “I am this” or “I am that.” So it is only a small step from the word “Being” to the experience of Being.viii
The Field (or “Conscious-Energy”) includes all that we sense – sights, sounds, physical sensations, tastes and smells; all that we feel – pleasure and pain, liking and disliking, anger, joy, love, sadness; and all that we think – our beliefs, memories, plans, worries, ideas, and the images passing through our minds; everything that exists within space and time. All are forms of Conscious-Energy, movements of Conscious-Energy arising out of the Being of the Knower – over billions of years of evolution, throughout our lifetimes, and in this moment and every moment of experience.
All that exists is the interaction of the Knower and the Field. Every atom, every tree, bird, rock and mountain range are movements of Conscious-Energy within the Consciousness of the Being at the center of all things. But these two – the Knower and the Field, Conscious-Being and Conscious-Energy – are not actually two. They are inseparable aspects of one unbroken Infinite Reality – one aspect being the still, changeless, witnessing Consciousness, the other an ever-moving, ever-changing Consciousness – outside of which nothing exists.
i Regarding postmodernists’ concerns about “totalizing” systems: the “view from infinity” is neither a system nor a view.
ii Acts 17:26-28.
iii Exodus, 3:14
iv Heschel, A., God in Search of Man.
v Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book I, Canto II, Verse 37.
vi The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 13, Verse 2. For translation, see Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita.
vii Kena Upanishad, Part I, Verses 6 and 7.
viii Tolle, E., The Power of Now, p. 14.
Saturday, June 24, 2023
Your Phone Is a Mindfulness Trap
Your Phone Is a Mindfulness Trap
Relying on apps for meditation is a recipe for distrac—hold on, I just got a text.
“Let’s travel now to moonlit valleys blanketed with heather,” Harry Styles says to me. The pop star’s voice—just shy of songful, velvet-dry—makes it seem as if we’re at a sleepaway camp for lonely grown-ups, where he is my fetching counselor, and now it’s time for lights out.
Styles’s iambic beckoning lies within a “sleep story” in the mindfulness app Calm. Like many of its competitors, Calm has become a catchall destination for emotional well-being. In recent years, I’ve cycled through several of these platforms. Using them turns the amorphous, slightly unaccountable act of meditation into something I can accomplish, and cross off the list. That’s the forte of the modern mobile app, after all: easing the completion of a discrete task. Send an email, watch a show, order Kleenex, run at a moderate pace for 30 minutes, doomscroll yourself to sleep. There’s an app for it, and you’ll know when you’re done.
The most popular mindfulness apps have roots in this model, outcome-oriented and timebound. Traditional meditation disciplines can be open-ended, fuzzy, and noncommittal in their benefits, which might take months or years to accrue. Plus, they are disciplines, anchored in study and practice and receiving instruction, and, quite often, traversing periods of frustration. Calm, Headspace, Insight Timer, and Ten Percent Happier all offer neat repackagings of the underlying product. Don’t have half an hour to sit around in witness of your inner being’s birthright quietude? No problem: Here’s a three-minute guided option for the bus. Maybe you’re going through a bout of insomnia and heard that a mindfulness practice could help? To put you to bed, here’s a spoken lullaby from Matthew McConaughey.
There is obvious good in this—in anything that dials down the temperature, that provides some relief from the ever-present human thrum of animus and danger. Headspace—the thing, not the brand—is something 100 percent of us could use more of. And these have been popular years for Big Mindful. In 2022, Calm reportedly had 4 million paid subscribers. In 2021, Headspace merged into a health-care endeavor backed by Blackstone that was valued in the billions. Fox is expanding the Ten Percent Happier franchise into a TV show—a comedy. Peace of mind is a business opportunity.
Read: The app that monetized doing nothing
But what are the apps selling, really? Mindfulness—let’s define that tersely as the ability to be present in your sensations without judgment—is an aim compatible with a range of lifestyles and beliefs. It’s so compatible as to invite blanket application: mindful eating, mindful meetings, mindful sleeping, mindful fights. Stripping some of the negative charge from life’s tediums and hardships can benefit anybody. But the mindfulness platforms have taken each of these use cases as a jumping-off point for another tile on the screen, another video or podcast, another claim on your gaze. And here, mindfulness seems to blur into something bigger and so different as to verge on its opposite: mindfulishness.
The first time I quit Headspace was because of an ad—for Headspace—on the subway. I don’t remember exactly what it said, but it was akin in spirit and tone to “I meditate to crush it,” part of the company’s 2016 growth campaign. This frontally transactional framing so reviled me—and so differed from my experience, which is that meditation doesn’t mimic the reliability of a Toyota—that I canceled my subscription on the spot.
By coincidence, I’d recently started to frequent a place where phones weren’t even allowed: a yoga studio. I’m 6 foot 3, with hamstrings that could wire a tennis racket, and restless down to my organelles. But a cycling crash had sent me to physical therapy, which sowed the first seeds of flexibility and balance, along with just enough patience to make it through a simple restorative-yoga class. In the early days, I was treading a sea of thoughts and anxieties, my attention on everything but my breath and the poses. As the practice became less foreign to my body, and helped me release deeply buried tensions, I would leave with an unprecedented sense of stillness. This was more than a five- or 10-minute retreat from the buzz of life, and—even as I got into more vigorous classes—it was more than a workout: It was a complex orchestration, the body marshaling itself in support of the mind’s deliberate, repetitive self-grounding.
If only there were always an hour for yoga. In a frenetic job leading the news desk at The New York Times, during and after the 2016 presidential race, I missed the hand’s-reach lull of Headspace—particularly the bright, lilting vibe and voice of its co-founder and front man, Andy Puddicombe, a former Buddhist monk. There’s something primally calming about a few minutes with a pleasantly timbred human, confident and chill, and Puddicombe is as adept a meditation teacher and guide as I’ve encountered. So I signed up again, and off I’d go mid-morning to a borrowed glass-door office.
Still, I found myself more and more inclined to fidget with my phone, instead of meditate, as Puddicombe spoke. On some days, I would finish my meditation without even a single moment of interior quiet. This is a problem easily enough solved, I know: Just turn up the volume and put the phone across the room. But anyone who has ever had an hour slip away to texts knows that it’s not that simple. Your phone can be anything—including a grenade, its target the cohesion and integrity of your thoughts. For almost anyone who owns one, a smartphone is not only the most omnipresent distraction from a mindfulness practice; it’s also most likely a principal vector for much of the stuff that unfocuses, stresses, addicts, enrages, or dismays you. Just having your phone in the room—it can be in your pocket, turned off—has been found to meaningfully diminish cognitive capacity. Using it to meditate, I started to realize, is like learning you have high cholesterol and signing up for a subscription to bacon.
The most productive move for any mindfulness app would be to engineer ways for you to spend as little time interacting with your phone as possible, as you focus on centering your awareness. But most of the big meditation apps have something less obvious in common than their nominal purpose: They’re subscription-driven content machines whose existence depends on you consuming the content. Open one up and you’re likely to see a whole day of programming laid out for you. In Headspace, for example, you can start with a few deep, animation-assisted breaths, then watch a moody video about an in-the-zone English bookbinder, before you even get to the day’s main meditation, with a choice of two English-language guides or a German one. When the 3 o’clock doldrums hit, slide into “Your Afternoon Lift,” a video of nature scenes: whales frolicking, jellyfish jellying. And nod off later to a sleepcast, or switch apps and return to Harry Styles’s moonlit valleys.
Read: The app that reminds you you’re going to die
I spoke with representatives of Calm and Headspace for this story, and both emphasized to me the ways their apps could be used without actively looking at a screen. They also defended the value of the access that phones provide: meditation anywhere, anytime, for people who might otherwise lack exposure to mindfulness techniques. Under this view, the omnipresence of phones is a blessing. “We would have folks who would download the app in the parking lot of the hospital while their mom is in surgery to have this kind of anchor point of support,” Cal Thompson, who runs design at Headspace, told me. “Some people have great friends they can call, some people have a great teacher on speed dial, but really, not everyone can have that.” As Thompson spoke, I thought of those days back at the Times, when a few minutes with Andy Puddicombe were the only port in a storm.
Thompson didn’t buy my argument about phones being too much of an intrinsic distraction. “I think that’s the dynamic that a lot of us have created with our phones, that we’ve set it up in such a way where it can consume our attention,” Thompson, who uses they/them pronouns, said. “And what we actually need to own and change is that behavior.” Attaching mindfulness practices to more parts of our day, they contended, helps us “get more clear about what we are doing in our lives and make more mindful choices. And then, from that place, it makes it a lot easier for us to use or not use our phones.”
This way of looking at things resonated with me, to a degree, as I listened back to my recording of our conversation. Then it took me three tries to transcribe Thompson’s quote. First my boyfriend texted me about the grocery list. Then someone needed my Venmo name to sell me some tickets. Then I looked up and realized I was in the kitchen for another round of peanut-butter pretzels. I might be generalizing too much based on my own attentional inadequacy, but lots of people I know use their phone more than they want to. If it’s not a universal affliction, it’s common. In my own case, meditating has not solved that problem, but moving meditation away from my phone has made it more of a refuge.
The word mindfulness is an accurate label insofar as it describes paying attention to the content of our mind. But it misleads, as I found in yoga, in its omission of our body. The path to thinking and feeling from hormones and nerves is in some sense linear, often traceable. And the physical state of the organism—pained, eager, bracing, soft—tracks with the text and nature of our thoughts. A professor of mine once referred to bodies as “brain buckets,” an image that anyone who’s gone through the physical deprivations of finals week can relate to. Most phone apps have their business with the brain, not the bucket. But my professor was joking: Everything we are comes from the whole big blob.
A phone is not a villain, just a vessel. But with some narrow exceptions, where movement is the point, it does tend to exert on us a kind of physical binding, an arrest of motion and focus. Some of the apps I’ve mentioned include a daily yoga video or cues for a mindful run, but these serve a double purpose, roping our assertions of embodiment back into the hungry domain of the screen. Do you know what else is on that screen? Instagram. The effect of a mindfulness app, as with any other kind, is to keep you in the place you already spend much of your time. It’s a motionless place, and, not by coincidence, also a bit mindless.
Monday, May 1, 2023
The Evangelical Church Is Breaking Apart
Christians must reclaim Jesus from his church.
By Peter Wehner
October 24, 2021
The election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event. But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. A trio of elders didn’t receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed.
“A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church,” David Platt, a 43-year-old minister at McLean Bible Church and a best-selling author, charged in a July 4 sermon.
Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.
Platt, who is theologically conservative, had been accused in the months before the vote by a small but zealous group within his church of “wokeness” and being “left of center,” of pushing a “social justice” agenda and promoting critical race theory, and of attempting to “purge conservative members.” A Facebook pageand a right-wing website have targeted Platt and his leadership. For his part, Platt, speaking to his congregation, described an email that was circulated claiming, “MBC is no longer McLean Bible Church, that it’s now Melanin Bible Church.”
What happened at McLean Bible Church is happening all over the evangelical world. Influential figures such as the theologian Russell Moore and the Bible teacher Beth Moore felt compelled to leave the Southern Baptist Convention; both were targeted by right-wing elements within the SBC. The Christian Post, an online evangelical newspaper, published an op-ed by one of its contributors criticizing religious conservatives like Platt, Russell Moore, Beth Moore, and Ed Stetzer, the executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, as “progressive Christian figures” who “commonly champion leftist ideology.” In a matter of months, four pastors resigned from Bethlehem Baptist Church, a flagship church in Minneapolis. One of those pastors, Bryan Pickering, cited mistreatment by elders, domineering leadership, bullying, and “spiritual abuse and a toxic culture.” Political conflicts are hardly the whole reason for the turmoil, but according to news accounts, they played a significant role, particularly on matters having to do with race.
“Nearly everyone tells me there is at the very least a small group in nearly every evangelical church complaining and agitating against teaching or policies that aren’t sufficiently conservative or anti-woke,” a pastor and prominent figure within the evangelical world told me. (Like others with whom I spoke about this topic, he requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.) “It’s everywhere.”
Michael O. Emerson, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me that he and his research team have spent the past three years studying race and Christianity. “The divisions and conflicts we found are intense, easily more intense than I have seen in my 25 years of studying the topic,” he told me. What this adds up to, he said, is “an emerging day of reckoning within churches.”
The aggressive, disruptive, and unforgiving mindset that characterizes so much of our politics has found a home in many American churches. As a person of the Christian faith who has spent most of my adult life attending evangelical churches, I wanted to understand the splintering of churches, communities, and relationships. I reached out to dozens of pastors, theologians, academics, and historians, as well as a seminary president and people involved in campus ministry. All voiced concern.
The coronavirus pandemic, of course, has placed religious communities under extraordinary strain. Everyone in America has felt its effects; for many Christians, it’s been a bar to gathering and worshipping together, sharing Communion and performing baptisms, and saying common prayers and participating in rituals and liturgy. Not being in community destabilized what has long been a core sense of Christian identity.
But there’s more to the fractures than just COVID-19. After all, many of the forces that are splitting churches were in motion well before the pandemic hit. The pandemic exposed and exacerbated weaknesses and vulnerabilities, habits of mind and heart, that already existed.
The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.
How is it that evangelical Christianity has become, for too many of its adherents, a political religion? The historian George Marsden told me that political loyalties can sometimes be so strong that they create a religiouslike faith that overrides or even transforms a more traditional religious faith. The United States has largely avoided the most virulent expressions of such political religions. None has succeeded for very long—at least, until now.
The first step was the cultivation of the idea within the religious right that certain political positions were deeply Christian, according to Marsden. Still, such claims were not at all unprecedented in American history. Through the 2000s, even though the religious right drew its energy from the culture wars—as it had for decades—it abided by some civil restraints. Then came Donald Trump.
“When Trump was able to add open hatred and resentments to the political-religious stance of ‘true believers,’ it crossed a line,” Marsden said. “Tribal instincts seem to have become overwhelming.” The dominance of political religion over professed religion is seen in how, for many, the loyalty to Trump became a blind allegiance. The result is that many Christian followers of Trump “have come to see a gospel of hatreds, resentments, vilifications, put-downs, and insults as expressions of their Christianity, for which they too should be willing to fight.”
Tim Schultz, the president of the 1st Amendment Partnership and an advocate for religious freedom, told me that evangelicalism was due a reckoning. “It has been held together by political orientation and sociology more than by common theology,” he said. The twin crises of the summer of 2020—COVID and a heightened awareness of enduring racial injustices—exposed this long-unnoticed truth.
Some of the most distinctive features of the evangelical movement may have left it particularly vulnerable to this form of politicization. Among religious believers, evangelicals are some of the most anti-institutional, Timothy J. Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, in Manhattan, told me. The evangelical movement flourished in this relatively anti-institutional country at a particularly anti-institutional time. Evangelical ministries and churches fit the “spirit of the age,” growing rapidly in the 1970s, and retaining more of their members even as many mainline denominations declined.
At the same time, Keller argues, that anti-institutional tendency makes evangelical communities more prone than others to “insider abuse”—corruption committed by leaders who have almost no guardrails—and “outsider-ism,” in which evangelicals simply refuse to let their church form them or their beliefs. As a result, they are unrooted—and therefore susceptible to political idolization, fanatical ideas, and conspiracy theories.
“What we’re seeing is massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis failure,” James Ernest, the vice president and editor in chief at Eerdmans, a publisher of religious books, told me. Ernest was one of several figures I spoke with who pointed to catechism, the process of instructing and informing people through teaching, as the source of the problem. “The evangelical Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And that stimulus came.”
“Culture catechizes,” Alan Jacobs, a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University, told me. Culture teaches us what matters and what views we should take about what matters. Our current political culture, Jacobs argued, has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing—television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts among them. People who want to be connected to their political tribe—the people they think are like them, the people they think are on their side—subject themselves to its catechesis all day long, every single day, hour after hour after hour.
On the flip side, many churches aren’t interested in catechesis at all. They focus instead on entertainment, because entertainment is what keeps people in their seats and coins in the offering plate. But as Jacobs points out, even those pastors who really are committed to catechesis get to spend, on average, less than an hour a week teaching their people. Sermons are short. Only some churchgoers attend adult-education classes, and even fewer attend Bible study and small groups. Cable news, however, is always on. “So if people are getting one kind of catechesis for half an hour per week,” Jacobs asked, “and another for dozens of hours per week, which one do you think will win out?”
That’s not a problem limited to the faithful on one side of the aisle. “This is true of both the Christian left and the Christian right,” Jacobs said. “People come to believe what they are most thoroughly and intensively catechized to believe, and that catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consume them. The churches have barely better than a snowball’s chance in hell of shaping most people’s lives.”
But when people’s values are shaped by the media they consume, rather than by their religious leaders and communities, that has consequences. “What all those media want is engagement, and engagement is most reliably driven by anger and hatred,” Jacobs argued. “They make bank when we hate each other. And so that hatred migrates into the Church, which doesn’t have the resources to resist it. The real miracle here is that even so, in the mercy of God, many people do find their way to places of real love of God and neighbor.”
The way our sensibilities are shaped determines who we are, including the order of our loves. For many Christians, their politics has become more of an identity marker than their faith. They might insist that they are interpreting their politics through the prism of scripture, with the former subordinate to the latter, but in fact scripture and biblical ethics are often distorted to fit their politics.
Scott Dudley, the senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington, refers to this as “our idolatry of politics.” He’s heard of many congregants leaving their church because it didn’t match their politics, he told me, but has never once heard of someone changing their politics because it didn’t match their church’s teaching. He often tells his congregation that if the Bible doesn’t challenge your politics at least occasionally, you’re not really paying attention to the Hebrew scriptures or the New Testament. The reality, however, is that a lot of people, especially in this era, will leave a church if their political views are ever challenged, even around the edges.
“Many people are much more committed to their politics than to what the Bible actually says,” Dudley said. “We have failed not only to teach people the whole of scripture, but we have also failed to help them think biblically. We have failed to teach them that sometimes scripture is most useful when it doesn’t say what we want it to say, because then it is correcting us.”
Teaching people how to think biblically would help, Dudley added, as well as teaching people how to disagree with one another biblically. “There is a lot of disagreement in the New Testament, and it gives us a template for how to listen to each other to understand rather than to argue,” he said.
Many Christians, though, are disinclined to heed calls for civility. They feel that everything they value is under assault, and that they need to fight to protect it. “I understand that,” Dudley said. “I feel under assault sometimes too. However, I also know that the early Christians transformed the Roman empire not by demanding but by loving, not by angrily shouting about their rights in the public square but by serving even the people who persecuted them, which is why Christianity grew so quickly and took over the empire. I also know that once Christians gained political power under Constantine, that beautiful loving, sacrificing, giving, transforming Church became the angry, persecuting, killing Church. We have forgotten the cross.”
Dudley, my high-school and college classmate, left me with this haunting question: How many people look at churches in America these days and see the face of Jesus?
Too often, I fear, when Americans look at the Church, they see not the face of Jesus, but the style of Donald Trump.
The former president normalized a form of discourse that made the once-shocking seem routine. Russell Moore laments the “pugilism of the Trump era, in which anything short of cruelty is seen as weakness.” The problem facing the evangelical Church, then, is not just that it has failed to inculcate adherents with its values—it’s that when it has succeeded in doing so, those values have not always been biblical.
But of course Trump did not appear ex nihilo. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University and the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, argues that Trump represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of many of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. Her thesis is that American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. (She defines Christian nationalism as “the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such,” which she says is a powerful predictor of attitudes toward non-Christians and on issues such as immigration, race, and guns.
Du Mez told me it’s important to recognize that this “rugged warrior Jesus” is not the only Jesus many evangelicals encounter in their faith community. There is also the “Jesus is my friend” popular in many devotionals, for example. These representations might appear to be contradictory, she told me, but in practice they can be mutually reinforcing. Jesus is a friend, protector, savior—but according to one’s own understanding of what needs to be protected and saved, and not necessarily according to core biblical teachings.
“Evangelicals are quick to label their values ‘biblical,’” Du Mez told me. “But how they interpret the scriptures, which parts they decide to emphasize and which parts they decide to ignore, all this is informed by their historical and cultural circumstances.” That’s not simply true of this one community, she added, but of all people of faith. “More than most other Christians, however, conservative evangelicals insist that they are rejecting cultural influences,” she said, “when in fact their faith is profoundly shaped by cultural and political values, by their racial identity and their Christian nationalism.”
Gender plays a role here as well, according to Du Mez. Over the past half century, evangelicals have tended to depict men and women as opposites. “They believe God ordained men to be protectors and filled them with testosterone for this purpose,” she said. Women, on the other hand, are seen as nurturers. The fruits of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control—are deemed appropriate feminine virtues. “Men, however, are to exhibit boldness, courage, even ruthlessness in order to fulfill their God-appointed role,” Du Mez explained. “In this way, the warrior spirit and a kinder, gentler Christianity go hand in hand.”
Du Mez pointed out that even men who embrace a kinder, gentler version of masculinity— servant leadership, for example—may tip into a more rugged, ruthless version when they deem the situation sufficiently dire. And for more than half a century, she said, evangelical leaders have found reason to deem the situation sufficiently dire. They rallied their congregations against the threats of communism, secular humanism, feminism, gay rights, radical Islam, Democrats in the White House, demographic decline, and critical race theory, and in defense of religious liberty.
“Evangelical militancy is often depicted as a response to fear,” she told me. “But it’s important to recognize that in many cases evangelical leaders actively stoked fear in the hearts of their followers in order to consolidate their own power and advance their own interests.”
Du Mez is somewhat more sympathetic toward ordinary evangelicals than she is toward powerful evangelical leaders. She acknowledges that many evangelicals have genuinely sought to follow God’s will; they were directed to believe what they do by pastors, Bible-study leaders, Christian publishers, and Christian radio and television programming. “Many have sought certainty in turbulent times,” she said, and they know that challenging these narratives may well involve the loss of meaningful communities.
Fear has played a central role in the explosion of conflict within American evangelical churches. “Dwelling on fear and outrage is spiritually deforming,” Cherie Harder, president of the Trinity Forum, told me. “Both biblical wisdom and a large body of research holds that fear and grace, or fear and gratitude, are incompatible.” She quoted from one of the New Testament epistles: “Perfect love drives out fear.”
There are moments, of course, when fear is an appropriate and necessary response, but there are risks when it becomes a constant presence. “Fear and anger should presumably function as alarm systems—and an alarm is not supposed to stay perpetually on,” Harder said. It is not the onset of fear or anger that is most dangerous, she said, “but stoking it, cultivating it, and dwelling within it that distorts and deforms.”
And then there is a regional component to the crisis of evangelical Christianity. Claude Alexander, the senior pastor of the Park Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, told me we must come to terms with the “southernization of the Church.” Some of the distinctive cultural forms present in the American South—masculinity and male dominance, tribal loyalties, obedience and intolerance, and even the ideology of white supremacism—have spread to other parts of the country, he said. These cultural attitudes are hardly shared by every southerner or dominant throughout the South, but they do exist and they need to be named. “Southern culture has had a profound impact upon religion,” Alexander told me, “particularly evangelical religion.”
The conservative writer David French, who lives in Tennessee, has written about the South’s shame/honor culture and its focus on group reputation and identity. “What we’re watching right now in much of our nation’s Christian politics,” he wrote, “is an explosion not of godly Christian passion, but rather of ancient southern shame/honor rage.”
Pastors now find themselves on the front lines of this conflict, their congregations splitting into warring camps. I spoke with 15 of them, and what I heard was jarring. They told me that nothing else they’ve faced approaches what they’ve experienced in recent years, and that nothing had prepared them for it.
Scott Dudley of Bellevue Presbyterian Church said he knows of several pastors who have not just quit their churches but resigned from ministry, and that many others are actively seeking to switch careers. “They have concluded that their church has become a hostile work environment where at any moment they may be blasted, slandered, and demeaned in disrespectful and angry ways,” he said, “or have organized groups of people within the church demand that they be fired.”
Several months ago, I spoke with one such pastor, who had not only resigned from his church, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America, but had also decided, at least for now, to leave the ministry altogether. He told me that he felt undermined by people in his congregation, including by some whom he had trusted but who, it turned out, were less animated by spiritual matters than by political agendas. This former pastor used the word betrayal in our conversation; he talked about the pain this episode has caused him and his wife. In his words, “The gentleness of Jesus was utterly discarded” by those who felt he wasn’t championing their cultural and political agendas aggressively enough.
“They don’t care about the relational collateral damage,” he said.
In a similar vein, I recently had a conversation with a senior pastor who is planning to leave his position soon; he’s not yet sure where he’ll land, or even whether he’ll stay in the ministry. He has simply been worn down by the divisions within his church. He has not been the target of outward hostility, but he can feel the ground shifting beneath his feet. He feels that he is growing apart from people in the congregation; there’s no longer the same sense of common purpose. He is watching the collapse of an evangelical movement to which he has devoted much of his life. At one point, as we talked about what is unfolding within American Christianity, his eyes welled with tears.
Bob Fryling, a former publisher of InterVarsity Press and the vice president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical campus ministry, has been part of a weekly gathering of more than 150 individuals representing about 40 churches. He’s heard of conflicts “in almost every church” and reports that pastors are exhausted. Earlier this year, the Christian polling firm Barna Group found that 29 percent of pastors said they had given “real, serious consideration to quitting being in full-time ministry within the last year.” David Kinnaman, president of Barna, described the past year as a “crucible” for pastors as churches fragmented.
The key issues in these conflicts are not doctrinal, Fryling told me, but political. They include the passions stirred up by the Trump presidency, the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and the January 6 insurrection; the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and critical race theory; and matters related to the pandemic, such as masking, vaccinations, and restrictions on in-person worship. I know of at least one large church in eastern Washington State, where I grew up, that has split over the refusal of some of its members to wear masks.
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“There have always been mean people who cloak their unkindness in religious devotion,” one minister in a conservative denomination told me. “The New Testament itself is pretty clear about that.” But, he added, the conflicts have grown more widespread and more intense. “Without doubt you’ll see—you already are—a ton of pastors quitting,” he said. ”Most pastors actually hate conflict. So if you’re going to pay me one-quarter of what I could make on the market, why put up with this?”
In his own church, some of the elders are devoted to culture-war politics. “These guys can be a special kind of relentless, and I don’t think I’ve had it as bad as many,” he said. “But when we’re stressed out, trying to be public-health experts without the training to do that, trying to keep our own families from blowing up with COVID stress, getting criticized from both sides at once, and then having folks doing whatever they can to ruin us and get us run out of town— we’d love to just be trusted as friends and shepherds. I understand why many folks have just said, ‘I’m done.’ I’m not there yet, but I hardly think I’m above it or guaranteed not to. I just pray to Jesus to not let me throw in the towel.”
The historian Mark Noll’s 1994 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, will be rereleased next year. In the forthcoming preface, which Noll, himself an evangelical, shared with me, he argues that in various spheres—vaccinations, evolutionary science, anthropogenic global warming, and the 2020 elections, to name just a few—“white evangelicals appear as the group most easily captive to conspiratorial nonsense, in greater panic about their political opponents, or as most aggressively anti-intellectual.” He goes on to warn that “the broader evangelical population has increasingly heeded populist leaders who dismiss the results of modern learning from whatever source.” And he laments the “intellectual self-immolation of recent evangelical history.”
“Much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity,” Noll has written. And he is surely correct. I would add only that it isn’t simply the case that much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity; it is that now, in important respects, much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism has become antithetical to authentic Christianity. What we’re dealing with—not in all cases, of course, but in far too many— is political identity and cultural anxieties, anti-intellectualism and ethnic nationalism, resentments and grievances, all dressed up as Christianity.
Jesus now has to be reclaimed from his Church, from those who pretend to speak most authoritatively in his name.
Too many Christians have “domesticated” Jesus by their resistance to his call to radically rethink our attitude toward power, ourselves, and others, Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, told me. We live in “an era of acute anxiety and great fear,” he said. As a result, too often Christians end up wrapping Jesus into our angry and fearful distortions. We want Jesus to validate everything we believe, often as if he never walked the face of this Earth. What we’re witnessing can be explained “more by sociology than Christology,” he said.
Unlike in the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Good Samaritan—unlike Jesus’s barrier-breaking encounters with prostitutes and Roman collaborators, with the lowly and despised, with the unclean and those on the wrong side of the “holiness code,” with the wounded souls whom he healed on the Sabbath—many Christians today see the world divided between us and them, the children of light and the children of darkness. Blessed are the politically powerful, for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the culture warriors, for they will be called children of God.
For many of us who have made Christianity central to our lives, the pain of this moment is watching those who claim to follow Jesus do so much to distort who he really was. Those who deform his image may be doing so unwittingly—this isn’t an intentionally malicious enterprise they’re engaging in; they believe they’re being faithful—but it is nonetheless destructive and unsettling.
I believe the portrait I’ve painted in this essay is accurate, but it is also, and necessarily, incomplete. Countless acts of kindness, generosity, and self-giving love are performed every day by people precisely because they are Christians. Their lives have been changed, and in some cases transformed, by their faith. My own life has been immeasurably blessed by people of faith who have walked the journey with me, who have shown me grace and encouraged me in difficult moments. But I can recognize that while also recognizing the wreckage around us.
Something has gone amiss; pastors know it as well as anyone and better than most. The Jesus of the Gospels—the Jesus who won their hearts, and who long ago won mine—needs to be reclaimed.
Friday, March 10, 2023
The Ugly Elitism of the American Right
No one hates ordinary people like the Republicans and their media enablers do.
Fox News will likely never face any real consequences for the biggest scandal in the history of American media. But will Republican voters finally understand who really looks down on them?
Loathing and Indifference
It’s time to talk about elitism.
Last month, I wrote that the revelations about Fox News in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit showed that Fox personalities, for all their populist bloviation, are actually titanic elitists. This is not the elitism of those who think they are smarter or more capable than others—I’ll get to that in a moment—but a new and gruesome elitism of the American right, a kind of hatred and disgust on the part of right-wing media and political leaders for the people they claim to love and defend. Greed and cynicism and moral poverty can explain only so much of what we’ve learned about Fox; what the Dominion filings show is a staggering, dehumanizing version of elitism among people who have made a living by presenting themselves as the only truth-tellers who can be trusted by ordinary Americans.
I am, to say the least, no stranger to the charge of elitism. When I wrote a book in 2018 titled The Death of Expertise, a study of how people have become so narcissistic and so addled by cable and the internet that they believe themselves to be smarter than doctors and diplomats, I was regularly tagged as an “elitist.” And the truth is: I am an elitist, insofar as I believe that some people are better at things than others.
But even beyond talent and ability, I do in fact firmly believe that some opinions, political views, personal actions, and life choices are better than others. As I wrote in my book at the time:
Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s. This is the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense. It is a flat assertion of actual equality that is always illogical, sometimes funny, and often dangerous.
If that makes me an elitist, so be it.
In this, elitism is the opposite of populism, whose adherents believe that virtue and competence reside in the common wisdom of a nebulous coalition called “the people.” This pernicious and romantic myth is often a danger to liberal democracies and constitutional orders that are founded, first and foremost, on the inherent rights of individuals rather than whatever raw majorities think is right at any given time.
The American right, however, now uses elitist to mean “people who think they’re better than me because they live and work and play differently than I do.” They rage that people—myself included—look down upon them. And again, truth be told, I do look down on Trump voters, not because I am an elitist but because I am an American citizen and I believe that they, as my fellow citizens, have made political choices that have inflicted the greatest harm on our system of government since the Civil War. I refuse to treat their views as just part of the normal left-right axis of American politics.
(As an aside, note that the insecure whining about being “looked down upon” is wildly asymmetrical: Trump voters have no trouble looking down on their opponents as traitors, perverts, and, as Donald Trump himself once put it, “human scum.” But they react to criticism with a kind of deep hurt, as if others must accommodate their emotional well-being. Many of these same people gleefully adopted “Fuck your feelings” as a rallying cry but never expected that it was a slogan that worked both ways.)
In 2016, I believed that good people were making a mistake. In 2023, I cannot dismiss their choices as mere mistakes. Instead, I accept and respect the human agency that has led Trump supporters to their current choices. Indeed, I insist on recognizing that agency: I have never agreed with the people who dismiss Trump voters as robotic simpletons who were mesmerized by Russian memes. I believe that today’s Trump supporters are people who are making a conscious, knowing, and morally flawed choice to continue supporting a sociopath and a party chock-full of seditionists.
I have argued with some of these people. Sometimes, I have mocked them. Mostly, I have refused to engage them. But whatever my feelings are about the abominable choices of Trump supporters, here is the one thing I have never done that Fox’s hosts did for years: I have never patronized any of the people I disagree with.
Unlike people such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, I have never told anyone—including you, readers of The Atlantic—anything I don’t believe. What we’re seeing at Fox, however, is lying on a grand scale, done with a snide loathing for the audience and a cool indifference to the damage being done to the nation. Fox, and the Republican Party it serves, for years has relentlessly patronized its audience, cooing to viewers about how right they are not to trust anyone else, banging the desk about the corruption of American institutions, and shouting into the camera about how the liars and betrayers must pay.
Fox’s stars did all of this while privately communicating with one another and rolling their eyes with contempt, admitting without a shred of shame that they were lying through their teeth. From Rupert Murdoch on down, top Fox personalities have admitted that they fed the rubes all of this red, rotting meat to keep them out of the way of the Fox limos headed to Long Island and Connecticut.
You can see this same kind of contemptuous elitism in Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Elise Stefanik. They couldn’t care less about the voters—those hoopleheads back home who have to be placated with idiotic speeches against trans people and “critical race theory.” These politicians were bred to be leaders, you see, and having to gouge some votes out of the hayseeds back home requires a bit of performance art now and then, a small price to pay so that the sons and daughters of Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford, can live in the imperial capital and rule as is their due and their right.
Some years ago, I was at a meeting of one of the committees of the National Academy of Sciences. The conferees asked me how scientists—there were Nobel laureates in the room—could defend the cause of knowledge. Stand your ground, I told them. Never hesitate to tell people they’re wrong. One panel member shook his head: “Tom, people don’t like to be condescended to.” I said, “I agree, but what they hate even more is to be patronized.”
I believed it then, but we’re now testing that hypothesis on a national scale. I hope I wasn’t wrong.
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