What if every culture in history knew something about God that Western modernity made us forget?

00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer. I'm joined by my co host, doctor Rashish Pharma, and today our guest, our returning guest is doctor Kevin Flat He's an Associate Dean of Humanities and professor of History at Redeemer University, and he is also the author of a book called Secularization, Social Order, and World History. And in that book he talks an awful lot about sacred social order. We actually did our previous podcast on the book and on that concept, and so if you want to check that out, we'll put that link in the show notes. But today we're going to talk a little bit more about sacred social order and how it might be of use in Christian formation, in helping people to have a framework and a deep understanding what the scriptures are actually teaching, and maybe even how it could be used in something closer to a catechism than maybe we have in churches today. So that said, welcome Kevin, thanks for coming back on the podcast.

00:01:30
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me back. James and Ashish looking forward to our conversation.

00:01:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think it's probably wise for us to start out. You know, when we say word it's like sacred social order, people may have a vague idea of what that is, but I think it's probably best if we define our terms a little bit, and so maybe we could start out just giving us a brief description of what sacred social order actually is in your mind.

00:01:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll start by contrasting it with the way we typically divide things up in the modern West. So, in modern Western culture, very often we divide life into two categories. There's religion and there's stuff that isn't religion, and so religion has to do with God or the gods, and then there's sort of everything else that really doesn't have to do with God or the gods. And this is a specifically Western way of looking at things that has become dominant in the last couple centuries in the West. But if you look at most civilizations and cultures in world history, you find they actually don't divide things up in that way, and instead many of them had this way of thinking that all of human life, including the way we relate to each other in society, across all the different domains of human activity, ought to conform to or harmonize with, something that's higher than us as human beings, the will of God, the cosmic order, something like that takes different forms in different cultures. But I use the term sacred social order to capture this idea of an alignment between human society and something that's higher than us to which we owe reverence and obedience. And that applies not just to a religious domain the way that we would normally talk about that, but it applies to lots of other things, to government, to the economy, to family life, all these different domains. So sacred social order is a concept for is kind of a shorthand for that, this idea that the social mirrors or needs to harmonize with the sacred, this thing that's higher than us as human beings.

00:03:39
Speaker 1: And you reference some of them with those different domains. I think in the book you talk a little bit about orderer of space and ordering of time, which, just by the way, are two of the categories that really got me thinking about how this could be used in churches to sort of cultivate a more catecheal sort of movement. But then you also have things like interactions with the deity government. Can you maybe walk us through some of those and help us understand what each one of them is, and maybe we just start with an easy one, like interactions with deity seems like a fairly simple one. What do you mean when we talk about interactions with deity?

00:04:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, so in pretty much every human culture that we know of, people have believed in beings that are more powerful than us, that are higher than us, Gods and spirits, God with a capital G and monotheistic cultures, and we have to approach them, we have to deal with them. And so every society has had ways of interacting with deities, with spiritual beings, and what that looks like varies a lot, but very often it includes some kind of system of sacrifice or offerings. It's not universal, but it's very common. So you see this in ancient Mesoamerican civilizations, which famously included an element of human blood letting even up to like full on human sacrifice as a way of establishing contact with the gods and sort of getting their attention, but lots of other forms as well. And it also includes typically some kind of prayer like communication one way or two way communication. Often it includes ways of trying to determine what the will of the gods is through the reading of signs or omens, or through oracles or prophets, and it includes a variety of other things that we might classify as kind of worship. So these are the sorts of things that happen particularly in temples and churches and those sorts of places, but can also happen in other places as well. So I see that as it's a particular domain of human activity that you see. It's not culture really specific. You see it across human cultures. That this is one domain of activity is relating to super human beings as I call them. And then you have other domains too, And there could be a long list of these, the ones that I talk about in the book. In addition to interaction with superhuman beings. Is the category of government, which includes what in modern times you would call politics. It includes the category of kind of gender, family, sexuality, marriage, that's kind of a connected group of things. It includes the category of cultural transmission from one generation to another generation, which includes formal education but also more informal ways of transmitting culture. So those are kind of four domains. There's other ones you could include agriculture, economics, what we call the arts. And then there's these three kind of general frameworks that I talked about in the book as well, and so you talked to you mentioned the ordering of space and the ordering of time, so that's.

00:07:07
Speaker 1: Two of them.

00:07:08
Speaker 2: The third one is what I call principles of right action, So it's kind of the overall framework of what's the right way to act as a human being. And so the category of law is part of this, especially if we define law very broadly. The notion of law is another one of these general frameworks. So these are things, again, they're cross cultural categories. All of the major civilizations that a look at in the book had some conception of law or principles of right action. They had a way of ordering space and time, and people engaged in the domains of activity that we call worship and government, and sexuality and cultural transmission or education. And again there could be other examples.

00:07:57
Speaker 1: And one of the key things, like when we talk about government and politics and those kind of things, it just worth clearing up that underneath a sacred social order sort of a framework, or we're looking at government, the governing officials are generally viewed in some way, shape or form as agents or manifestations of the gods. Is that a fair You probably nuanced at a bit.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I would nuanced a bit, but I often that is the case.

00:08:27
Speaker 1: Right.

00:08:27
Speaker 2: So in a lot of historical sacred social orders, the king is himself considered to be divine or to be descended from the gods, either in a literal sense in the case of the Imperial Family of Japan, where traditionally they claim to be descended from the Sun goddess, or in a somewhat more abstract sense. So the Emperor of China historically was considered to be the son of Heaven. That has more the idea that he is a servant of Heaven, being kind of an impersonal stand in for God, the idea that there's this overarching power over the universe that has moral authority over human beings, and the emperor is kind of the representative of that and the servant of that. But there can be different versions as well. So in Buddhism, the gods, they believe that there's gods, but they don't believe they're really important in the same way that they are in a lot of other traditions. But there too, they have a concept of what they call the righteous universal ruler, the person who follows dharma, which is this great Indian word for justice and righteousness and duty. So there's the righteous universal ruler who isn't a god, but he is distinguished by the fact that he puts into practice the principles of dharma. And so in early Buddhist writings, one of the early emperors of India, again named Ashoka, is held up as kind of an example of this sort of righteous universal ruler. So the ruler isn't divine. But what makes government a part of sacred social order in that kind of a system is still the idea that government and the purposes of government is not something that we just kind of come up with arbitrarily as human beings. It's not about us and about serving us primarily or entirely. But it's about putting into practice some kind of higher cosmic principle of justice or righteousness, which isn't something we invent as human beings. Our job is to learn what it is and to follow it, rather than to come up with it ourselves.

00:10:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just word saying and then she shall let you jump in here. But as I was reading through Genesis again the other day, ran across Genesis twenty six y five, and this is where Abraham is described as one who followed all of God's commands, statutes, and laws. And you read that text now through this grid and lens, and what you really understand is that God's commands, laws and statutes, Yes they probably haven't been given yet, right, but they're reflective of the divine order that the people are to be reflecting. And so when Abraham's described like this, what he's really being described as is this sort of moral authority or theological authority, this embodiment of the crucial aspects of what it means to be in Israelite that later Israelite generation should emulate in some degree. And so I think that's an interesting sort of spot where I see that showing up aside from a lot of the kingship passages even in the Old Testament.

00:11:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a really good opportunity to mention that this idea of sacred social order in the book, I derived the idea simply from looking at Indian civilization, Chinese civilization, as Lam civilization, Mesoamerican civilization. But it is actually a deeply biblical concept. We see it in the Old Testament and the New Testament. And so God's law in the kind of the eternal universal sense, right, Abraham is following God's law. And then we have the Mosaic law that's given to the people of Israel, which is kind of a an instantiation of that eternal universal law for a particular people in a particular setting. But what is that law about. It's not just about or even mainly about what we would consider religious matters, right, right. It covers excuse me, it covers kingship, It covers the economy, it covers the treatment of the poor, it covers how do you govern handling things like communicable diseases. Right, So it's it's a comparing blueprint for sort of here's what a just a righteous society that conforms to God's law. Here's what it would look like.

00:13:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, very good, super helpful.

00:13:13
Speaker 3: Yeah. I have a couple of questions that I think will lead us into the sort of catechisis questions that we're leading towards. Answer them in any order you want or however you want. But the two that I think are somewhat related are You've got this dynamic in say the American setting, right where we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, where there seems to be a movement at that point, and yet at the same time it's yet people are endowed by certain with certain inalienable rights by a creator. Right where there's not a complete disconnect in the formation of law in this country as opposed to the way that you're describing them kind of pan globally across many cultures in slightly different ways where there's more direct connection. Maybe the best way to describe it is you have initially more of a deist concept in this country, and then it seems to move into over the course of time, a removal of even that deist element, right, where it's just the ability to perceive, maybe in this content way a universal ethic that we can just reason to hardstop. Where they come from, how they're tied to anything beyond what we know is irrelevant. So that's part one, Part two. On the popular level, I can imagine you've encountered a lot of this as well, even north of the border, whether it be media, whether it be people, even Christians that I talk to, love to talk increasingly about, Well, the universe has lined things up for us. The universe is that keyword. And I was noting that you use the term universe and the way that you're describing the Buddhist concept, and maybe there's some connection there. What do you see as going on? I guess it's the short version to join those two things. Right, You've got this larger historical reality that what you're describing is also true of early and medieval Christianity. Yeah, And yet we've got this movement in what we think of as the modern West and too, perhaps initially the deist mode and then eventually just slopping off the necessity of the deist part of it as well. And yet popularly we're more than happy to keep talking about the universe lining things up, the universe helping me out and so on and so forth.

00:15:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, so these are very perceptive questions, and there's a few things going on here. So one thing that I'll note is it's one thing for us to talk in terms of these kind of ideal types of like a sacred social order, whether it's an Islamic one or an early modern Christian one or a Buddhist one. You know, there's kind of an ideal form of that, and then there's what you actually have existing in any given society at a given time. And the contrary, I think, to what we often assume pluralism, in the sense of having people sharing the same society who don't all share the same fundamental worldview and belief even about sacred social order, that's actually not a new phenomenon. There's lots of examples of that historically, particularly in places like India and China, where almost through the whole recorded history that we have of those places, there are different accounts on offer. And that's also true in our own modern history.

00:16:46
Speaker 1: Right.

00:16:46
Speaker 2: So if you look at the American Founding, and I am not an expert as a historian on the American Founding, but the works of kind of the really smart people that I've read who have developed an expertise in this that I find convincing. You know, they argue there's kind of overlapping traditions that are represented among the Founders that you see in the Founding itself, and you have kind of a strand that you the Enlightenment kind of strand which is more deistic and believes there's a creator, but you know, it is suspicious of anything that looks like revealed religion and wants to kind of just use pure reason to derive here's what the political orders should look like. So there's that strand that's represented. But then you also have these other traditions that are really influential. You have kind of the particularly the English political tradition, which has a lot of Reformed influences through Puritanism and other ways, which has developed a kind of worked out Christian conception of the responsibilities of rulers and the limitations of the powers of the magistrate and of the king, and that's been developing for centuries out of like a much more explicitly Christian framework. You have the very old kind of civic republican virtue tradition, not republican in the modern sense, but coming out of early modern and medieval republics, places like Venice, which is partly looking to the classical pagan tradition but then also has put it very much in a Christian framework too. So what you get with something like the Declaration of Independence, as I understand it, is not kind of in pure form any one of these things, But it's sort of like an overlapping consensus of a few different strands that are coming together, some of which are very explicitly Christian and they're thinking, others of which, in the Enlightenment mode have kind of distanced themselves from that. And so I think, and I don't at all mean this in a negative way, there's a kind of inherent ambiguity in the American founding where you can read the American constitutional order, which I'll say as a Canadian who who is very fond of the British tradition, and I am a monarchist and I love our constitutional monarchy, but I will say, you know, the American constitutional order is absolutely brilliant. We have very few political orders in the modern world that were sort of created and drawn up at a particular time, Republican political orders that have stood the test of time. And although we're going through a turnailent period right now for the American political order. As you are well aware, it's been remarkably robust through a lot of things, so I have enormous respect for that as a Canadian. But there's this ambiguity. You can read it very easily within a Christian mode of thinking, particularly a protest and particularly in evangelical motive thinking, harmonizes really well. But of course Catholics have found ways of doing this also, But you can also read it in a much more deistic and even atheistic way. It's a little bit harder to read it completely atheistically given the reference to the Creator, but of course people can take it that way and then come up with sort of purely humanistic grounds for thinking that this is a good political order as well. So there's this ambiguity I think that's kind of in the heart of the American political establishment. And of course, in different eras of American history, people have read it in a more Christian way, most commonly through most of American history, but in the last three generations or so, it's become more common to read it in a not explicitly Christian way, and often in an implicitly deistic or atheistic way.

00:21:04
Speaker 1: There's an interesting phenomenon that happened early in American history. The federal government was relatively weak at the beginning, and so even though it was you know, saying, hey, we're going to have this separation of church and state in the sense that where you know, the government is not going to establish religion, the states actually had state established churches, and so they also had religious tests for governmental service those kind of things, And I believe it was in Pennsylvania, but I'd have to go back and double check that. But they used to have a very explicit reference to if you wanted to serve as a political agent in the government, you needed to believe in the Old and New Testaments as inspired texts. And there was pushback from a local synagogue, and they eventually amended that to something like you need to believe that there is a God and that that what you do on earth will garner you rewards or punishment in the afterlife. There was this sense in which they could broaden that out and still hold on to this kernel of sacred social order that said what we do in this life matters, and that mattering should be a strong guide for how people interact with one another here and now. And so even within this ambiguity, which I agree with you on, that they were finding these common ways to relink the social order and the sacred order. What I think people are frustrated about today are more frustrated about it, seems like, and we see this sort of coming out in things like Christian nationalism or what have you. I think they're concerned that that linkage is gone, that there is no real implication for what we do here, and that the you know, the one who dies with the most toys is the winner kind of idea. And so I'm wondering if you see that as a shift towards secularization, you know, a more pure form of secularization, as you describe it in the book, And maybe it'd be worth sort of teasing that out. But to me, there is this sort of iteration in American history where you start to see a broadening of the sacred social order away from specifically Christian things out into things that would preserve some semblance of a social order. And now we're sort of back to this point where I'm kind of with Ashish, I don't know that it really means anything to most of the people.

00:23:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, based on my understanding of American history, that sounds exactly right to me. You kind of have Initially, there's just sort of this background assumption, well, basically everybody here is some kind of Protestant, right, So at a federal level, we're not going to establish a church. At the state level, some states are going to have established churches, and there's going to be a high degree of toleration of other kinds at this point Protestantism, right, maybe in a few cases Catholicism and Judaism as well, But the basic assumption is, you know, this is an overwhelmingly Protestant environment, and so really what we're talking about is how do we live together as different kinds of Protestants. And that becomes more complex over time as you end up with larger Catholic populations, as you move into the nineteenth century of more immigration from Catholic parts of Europe. You have, of course a Jewish presence which goes back very far, which is important as well, and in relatively recent times you have also the growth of still relatively small, but populations of people following other traditions entirely. And so there is I think a shift over time in the American political consciousness from what we have here is basically a Protestant consensus that can make room for other groups as well, but it's basically a Protestant consensus. And public institutions, including public schools, including state universities, for example, and this is you can document this historically, they're just going to assume a Protestant, generically Protestant ethos, even like I mean, even state universities in the late nineteenth century in the US had mandatory chapel service attendance at kind of generically Protestant or even denominationally more kind of leaning one way or the other chapel services, because the assumption was most of us are coming from that, and we can have carvoutes and exceptions and toleration of other groups, but the majority consensus is this, and then you can broaden that out to include Catholics. But there's a shift. And my understanding is in terms of you know, American constitutional thinking, there's a shift in the twentieth century, through a number of Supreme Court cases, towards a more stringent idea of the separation of church and State as requiring the exclusion of any kind of religious perspective, So you get, you know, the removal of prayer from public schools, you get the controversy around should we have the Ten Commandments up in the courthouses and those sorts of things. And they can look back to things that some of the founders said, like there's things that Jefferson said, for example, that can provide a basis for that, but really that's not the consensus in American constitutional thinking until the twentieth century. There's a transition there and this there's parallel developments in other West Extern countries, but they play out differently. Your listeners are probably mostly not going to know a ton about the Canadian experience, and I'm not going to go too deep down that rabbit hole. But our experience is different, partly because when the British conquered what is now Canada in the seventeen sixties, seventeen fifties and seventeen sixties, there was already a large French speaking Catholic population in what is now the province of Quebec. What happened in New France up until that point, and they made a very significant decision, We're going to create a constitutional order here within the British Empire in Canada that is going to allow French speaking Catholics to preserve their religion and their language under the umbrella of British institutions. And so from the beginning, or very early in Canadian history, you have an attempt to say, Okay, we have Catholics, and we have Protestants, mainly French speaking Catholics the English speaking Protestants, and we have to build a political order that accommodates both of those, but where the kind of overarching dominant viewpoint is Christian and basically defaults to Protestantism as the dominant view but with space for Catholicism as well. And in Canada that actually is never really officially repudiated, but in practice it kind of breaks down surprisingly recently, even sort of like nineteen sixties to nineteen nineties is kind of when a lot of the legal changes came that demolished that. So even myself, you know, I was born in nineteen eighty went to a public school here in Canada, and when I was in grade two, so this is kind of mid to late eighties, we still said the Lord's Prayer every morning in my public school. It was the last year. It was legal to do that because there was a core case, and I think it was nineteen eighty eight or so where they said, well, if you're gonna do the Lord's pray, you have to give equal time to all prayers of all faith traditions. And it was already very unusual that that teacher did that in the public school at that time, but it was still kind of legally that was still the thing you could do. So there's a similar transition that happens over a different period of time. And there's no even today in the Canadian political order, there is no constitutional basis really for an absolute separation of church and state in Canada, even though we don't have an established church. Sure, the head of state of Canada is also the head of the Church of England. All over our coins say that he rules by the grace of God, you know. So if you pick up a Canadian coin that's been minted since His Majesty King Charles became king, it says d G. Rex So de gratia Rex King by the grace of God. When it was Queen Elizabeth, it was DG. Regina or Regina right Queen by the grace of God.

00:30:06
Speaker 1: So there's a.

00:30:07
Speaker 2: Sense in which even now in a very secular country like Canada, our political order is not fully secularized. There's still these vestigial Christian things. So again reality is more very interesting.

00:30:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, really interesting. Here's what you think.

00:30:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, A former colleague of mine introduced to me this notion that in the American setting, because you don't have a centralized established church, right even when in the period you're talking about, right where different different colonies that became states might have had their own distinctiveness, right, for instance, Pennsylvania as the Quaker state. Because of that ambiguity, that leads you into what the idea of the United States is. And no establishment of a particular church, the unifying thrust functionally, maybe intentionally, but probably functionally at the time, makes the United States itself have to occupy that position of the religious identity, so that to be an American, to buy into the idea of being an American, is to buy into our religious identity, right, and so within that would be the sorts of things we talk about when we speak of silverl religion. You see this. I think of a good friend of mine who went to Mayo for med school, and he talked about the eeriness of stepping foot on campus that as much as he loved the experience, it felt very much like a religious experience where you've got the center of campus. Is it very much feels like the cult statue to the Brothers Mayo, the way in which everyone walks around in their priestly white robes, right the medical guard and right down to the very center of it. But you can think about that in terms of really that that is very much still the experience I had. I went to the University of Iowa, and you've got the fight song, and you've got the religious sort of gathering, and you've got this sort of sense of school pride that's built. It's supposed to override everything else. Right, So you can also be a Quaker, you can also be a Baptist, but that takes second stage to the Cult of America. I think about that in conjunction with I think it was Martha Nusbaum, if I'm remembering correctly, wrote a book where she's describing how the growth of India as a democracy post partition is deliberately trying to draw upon that. Right, So you've got the music built into it. The Gore who creates the Indian national anthem is trying to make that corner reality. The siding with Mahatma Gandhi over Bosa is supposed to be an attempt to create a cult of India, so to speak, where you can be Muslim, you can be Hindu and Hindus itself abroad idea, as we talked about last time. Now in India you've got the Nehendra Modas who are very much leaning heavily into a repealing of that and to giving you a distinctly religious identity which in some ways fits more the historical model in Canada, as you describe whether or not it's very religious, and arguably in some ways it's very irreligious. Still at its core is this idea of a state church, at least functionally right through the Anglican the Bishop of Canterbury being the head of the church right and that being connected to King Charles as the king. It's an Anglican identity, and the US you could not do that, right, even if people were to agree, okay, Christian from the onset, you can't do that. Now, where I'm going with this is that I'm leaning towards my colleague. I think he's onto something, and I'm gathering by your nodding that you think so as well. But I'm wondering if that inherently requires sort of what we might think of as a secular catechism in order to make people into this religious identity of America first.

00:34:19
Speaker 1: Does that make sense? Yeah?

00:34:21
Speaker 2: No, I think this is very insightful, and so one of the realities that it's pointing to here. So I distinguish between sacred social orders and what I call the secular order. And I'm using here the word sacred as a shorthand for this idea. There's something higher than us as human beings, like kind of a cosmic order, a divine order. But there's also an equally valid sense in which you can talk about there being sacred secular values. And so what I mean by is I have a couple of colleagues here at at the University of Waterloo here here in Ontario who've recently authored a paper and they talk about the secular sacred canopy and what they're that it's a nuanced argument, but part of what they're getting at is the idea that also in a secular society, there still has to be some kind of shared framework, what is reality and what are the sacred values, what's important and what can we kind of unite around. And in the case of these more secular societies, if you don't have an agreed upon sacred social order, it doesn't mean that sacred values in this other sense disappear. You still have sacred values, you still have symbols that are sacred, you still have rituals that are sacred, except now those things have to be located somehow in the human plane. So one form that that can take is national identity. So you know, that can be a kind of American civil religion where what becomes sacred are the symbols of America, of the flag, of the American constitutional order, of the Bill of Rights, of the office of the President. That kind of accumulates a certain kind of symbolism and gravitas around it, that sort of stands in for the place of a divinely ordained monarch right. And those things I think are an indication that, you know, really there can't be a vacuum. There might be a transitional period where we're not sure what the sacred things are. But if you get rid of if you do away with a sacred social order as we do in secularization. My argument is that secularization is a revue social order. It's not like that space stays empty, you replace it with something, and that nationalism. It can be extreme forms of nationalism like we see in fascists and Nazi movements in the middle of the twentieth century. It can be a worldview and a framework like communism which absoluteizes egalitarianism and anti oppression and tries to build a whole society around those things as sacred values and comes up with its own rituals and ceremonies and sumpost to go with that. I would even say, and here we're starting to tread into, you know, controversial waters. I don't know how it is in the US, but right now, it's the month of June in Canada. It's obviously the month of June in the US as well, but one of the things that we see in the month of June in Canada all of the schools, all of the publicly funded schools in Ontario are flying a flag in addition to the Canadian flag. And I think we all know what flag that is sacred flag in a lot of ways, right it can't be challenged, it can't be questioned. It's a sacred value, and it symbolizes something that has come to be sacred in our society, which in this case is gender identity and sexual orientation as expressions of what you might call our core sacred value of the individual, individual autonomy, individual authenticity, individual self expression. Right, these things are sacred or seen as sacred because they're manifestations of these core sacred values and fundamentally human like. Right, So the human being, the human individual becomes the sacred thing. So that's a bit different from nationalism, where there's a human community becomes the sacred thing and they coexist obviously in this kind of overlapping, messy existence for us as Christians, I think, and this might start to turn us into some of the pieces question for us as Christians, I think we have to be aware of what are these alternative sacred values in our society, which in our society are going to be humanistic, secular versions of the sacred And that might be the religion, so to speak, of American nationalism, it might be the quote unquote value system that's represented by a rainbow flag. Right, And so an important question for us is might we inadvertently kind of subordinate the teachings of Christianity and a Biblical scale of values to some other set of sacred values that are really prominent in our society. Which again, yeah, and I'm here, I'm not picking on left or right. You see, right, on the right, the temptation maybe is the religion of American nationalism. On the left, the temptation is maybe, you know, I don't know if religion is the right term, but this other set of sacred values around sexuality and gender as expressing kind of the sacredness of the individual. So that's I think a beginning of sort of a catechetical way of thinking about that.

00:40:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, just to circle back to what Ashesh was saying, I tend to agree. I mean, my work on American civil religion. I don't know that I came to the exact same conclusion as it was Michael McDuffie I assume you were talking about. So I'm not sure I came to the exact same conclusion as Michael McDuffie, but very close you start to see that the God language is co opted and it no longer has the same conceptual background as we would want it to have as Christians. So whenever we say the way I usually explain it to people, when we're talking about Christian nation, we're not saying the same thing is when we're saying Christian worship or Christian doctrine. Those are two different of Christian. And so the concept behind the word actually does matter. And so when we're saying under God, we're probably not saying under the Triune God, right, We're probably talking about under the transcendent idea or being whichever one you'd prefer. And so you have this sort of slippage in the language. And I think that this does get at the catechisis question, because what I see in your work and in this notion of sacred social order, I actually saw first in that ordering of time. And so I've done a lot of work in technology, and one of the things that has come out and surface from that is they are these inconspicuous patterns that technology tends to ingrain within our lives, and we don't notice that we're really giving them up until it's way gone. This relates very strongly both to an ordering of space and an ordering of time. With regard to technology, are space has been sort of exploded, right, because we can do travel so easily because we can transcend space and the way we're doing now, it's not all bad, but we can you know, we don't have to travel to Canada or you don't have to travel here, so we can have this conversation. But it creates a dissonance with space to some degree if we don't think about it. And then time obviously, where everything can be much more immediate. This move toward increased efficiency is always framed as a good thing, and it probably isn't. And so these notions seem to me to be I think in terms of like Pierre Bordieau, he would you know, these are counter fields, right, they're they're they're they're counteracting the formation of an existing world that we live in, and they're pointing us to counter practices that we would do within the kingdom. And now we're able to reform ourselves into kingdom people who are aware of these other pressures that are pushing in on us, and we're resisting those in order to be formed and shaped according to the pattern of God's sacred social order. The trying God's sacred social order. That's sort of the narrative I have in my head for how this could be potentially used.

00:43:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, the way that we relate to space and time crazy, it's yeah, So it's we're now living in the secular order, right, So space and time are kind of disenchanted for us, right, So yeah, I talk, we don't need to get into it, or we can if you like. But I talk in the book about the incredibly rich and complex ways that sacred social orders structured time and space in these very civilizations. Quite different across the different examples, yea, but all of them had the sense that, like, this isn't an empty or meaningless expanse of space or expanse of time. There's purpose and order and meaning that is built into it. And as humans we have an important place in that. But we're not the masters of it. But in a secular order. And of course this is partly enabled by our technology, but then also reflected in our technology and the way we use and think about our technology. We are the masters. We think of ourselves as the masters. Time is whatever we want it to be, right, It's just this empty expanse moving forward infinitely, of one day following another, and we impose on it whatever shape we want. We try to optimize it. We try to control it, we try to be efficient with it, we try to manage it. But all of that implies there's this kind of instrumental control. It's there to be used and dominated by us, right, And same thing with space, right, space, sugg just this. It's a container. It's an empty container for us to do what we want as human beings. And I think this is related to some of our environmental and ecological problems as well. We look at the soil as this kind of inert thing that we just use for our purposes instead of a thing that has life and integrity of its own that has to be respected and lived with it.

00:45:24
Speaker 1: Right.

00:45:24
Speaker 2: And so there's a connection here, I think, to some of our misuse of the earth. But again, it's about control. It's about using these things as masters rather than as stewards and caretakers of them, and a refusal to acknowledge our limits as human beings that were just one part of a larger cosmos that we didn't create. It's a gift to us, a gift that we receive with gratitude, but then also need to steward and cultivate. And that applies to time and space.

00:46:01
Speaker 1: You look at the.

00:46:01
Speaker 2: Sabbath laws and the land laws in the Law of Moses, and there's this fascinating parallelism.

00:46:11
Speaker 1: Right.

00:46:12
Speaker 2: So you have the Sabbath in time every seventh day, every seventh year, every fiftieth year after the forty ninth year, the cycle of seven sevens right, Right, there's time that is set apart where we are not the masters, we're not doing anything productive, we're not exerting control. And that applies to the land too. The land gets at sabbath rests, or is supposed to. If it doesn't, then you get sent into exile and it gets the Sabbath rest anyway, but you don't harness to the edges of your field. Right. So you know, there's this, i think recognition, even outside of explicitly Christian circles, that this mentality of mastery and control, which is tied up with the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution in Western culture and has immediately given us a lot of really good things. It's good that we've eradicated smallpox, right, So it's not all bad, but it has its dark side. Hard mood Rosa, who's a German sociologists social critic. You know, he's written this book. He's written a few books about various things, but one called The Uncontrollability of the World, and he points out there's this paradox that by thinking that we can control everything that it's sort of laid at our feet for us to master, paradoxically, we actually cut ourselves off from meaning and from the most meaningful experiences in life, which come out of things that are uncontrollable.

00:47:46
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:47:47
Speaker 2: So, yeah, so there's there's there's something to that. And so I think, then, as Christians living in a very secular world where we've come to see time and space as empty, disenchanted things that are just there for us to control and master and manage and optimize, how do we break out of that? And how do we do that in a way that recognizes the lordship of Christ, that recognizes that it is God who is the master of time and space, not us. He's created it for us to live in, but we're not the masters of it. We're his stewards. But also doesn't then impose on people a lot of kind of man made rules and regulations. And this is of course the danger of you can't just go back to medieval Catholicism. The reformers were right in kind of challenging and simplifying a lot of the things that had crept in around sacred conceptions of space, pilgrimages, relics, shrines, altars, and things that had crept in around sacred conceptions of time, Saints days, feast days, obligatory fast and so on. I didn't go back to having space for those kinds of things without them making them a law into themselves. And one place to begin maybe is the sabbath a practice of Sabbath or recovery of the Sabbath. And here, of course I'm speaking as a Protestant, but in our pistant churches where in the last few generations we've largely i think lost sight of the Sabbath as a sanctuary in time, as one author has called it.

00:49:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that I did my dissertation on Sabbath, so I'm always awesome. Yeah, Sabbath is awesome. I think as I've thought through this, the other thing I think is we just have to get a sense of what the sacred order actually is that we're living in, not the ideal one, but just this conversation we've even had today of what might those sacred order pieces be, and how is it that we are adopting them in ways that we don't really recognize? You know, I think that especially early on when I was first starting to talk about technology or even politics, people took it as you know, your anti politics or anti tech, and I had to really learn to nuance it because I'm not saying we should get rid of all technology, but we have to recognize that these things do come with revenge effects, right. They are forming and shaping us in very particular ways, and so as we adopt them, we need to understand what ideology we need to be combating as we do that, and how is it that these things are are pushing us toward a notion of the sacred that we don't want to adopt. And so we can use them more as tools, But we have to be pretty vigilant to do that. And so I'll leave it there at asheesh, I'm sure you have some follow up questions. I let you go ahead, you know I do.

00:51:04
Speaker 3: There's a lot of voices swrolling in my head, so I'll see if I can bring them together into something succinct. As you were talking. As you both were talking, the language of space kept coming up and Kevin, you described space in terms of container. I often think of it as it's something mouldible, right, It's something that is expansive, no boundaries. We think of outer space. But it's a thing that we enter into. We shape it. And kadakisas precisely at this point can also show the possibility of malformation. So if we're catechized into space, moldible space that we enter into, the domineering sort of thing flows out of that. We control this. I like to call it the McDonald's effect. Here, there, and everywhere. It looks the same because we've shaped it according to our preferences. You know, you're driving through I once took a road trip to BC and you pass through all these areas that are very foreign to a Chicago area kid, Right, and you have a choice to make McDonald's.

00:52:15
Speaker 1: I don't.

00:52:15
Speaker 3: I'm not interested, but I know what it is. Sally's Beisenberger Shop could be really good, it could be a painful experience, right. And McDonald's is hedging its bet that you're going to go with the predictable, right, and that sort of facilitates it's in a cultural way. A catechisis of how we begin to think about space rather than place, a place where I received myself from. So the voices I have swirling in my head, some of them your own work, Kevin. I'm also thinking of Willie James Jennings and his work as he talks about our Christian theologies of creation have lost a sense of place and replaced it with a sense of space, and as a result, we don't see ourselves as shaped, we don't see ourselves as belonging to places of sticking your hands in the dirt. But I also think of the work of Norman Wurzba, who we just talked to, So be on the lookout for that everyone, But he talks about the same sort of thing in terms of we look at the Genesis account of humanity being given creation in some sense as dominion, and we take dominion to be domineering, We take mastery to be control instead of taking it more artistically right, where the work of the gardener mastering the garden is never ever to control it. And I wonder if that katechisis is so deeply rooted. You see those effects already there in medieval Christianity. You see it as they encounter first nations, peoples and their initial impulse isn't to see them as doing something beautiful of the land, the land that they coveted and didn't recognize that what made it so covetable was the deep, the deep natured hands in the soil approach to the land of seeing themselves as belonging to it and understanding it and being able to work from within that place. Now, on this side of the project, the catechisas of space seems like it continues to hinder us, right, so as Christians, it becomes something to fight. We don't see and I'm not saying all things are good, but we don't see the possibilities in all things right. We don't see the chance to be able to say, okay, this.

00:54:39
Speaker 2: Is where I am.

00:54:40
Speaker 3: I don't have the ability to say, let's rewind five hundred years and reset things. The earth is in the shape that it is. Now, what what can we use? Can we take these things that have been made for mastery and reimagine them? And I wonder if that's the work of the catechisus that we have to get to have that ground level, hands in the dirt place rather than space approach. Do you have do you have thoughts on that well.

00:55:08
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm just eating this up, and I think part of the solution here, and this is actually something that's been championed by King Charles as well. I didn't intend to spe to be a monarchist podcast, but I think he's very right. Like I think he's recognized if you look at some of his charitable causes that he supports and some of his writings, he recognizes these these are interconnected problems, right, So, like the ecological crisis, the spiritual crisis, the ugliness of modern architecture, like these are all interconnected problems. And one of the things that we're missing is a recognition of the importance of harmony and the importance of limits. And one of the ways that we can recover that, I think is through you know, the kids these days say we need to touch grass, and I think that's true. You know, it's actually engaging in something like preparing for plants and animals and the practice of gardening, which, especially in urban environments, many of us have become somewhat removed from. Man. It's a reminder you're not in control. You know, you're there to tend, you're there to try to create conditions that are favorable for certain things, but you are not a control and you have to work with the life that is there and screwed it. That's our first vocation, right. We are created, our first parents. What is the work that God gives them. He places them in the garden to tend to it, to care for it, to keep it. And that does involve dominion, but it's dominion in the sense of you know this great old word husbandry. It's an intimate, caring kind of relationship with that kind of dominion. It's taking care of in order to make fruitful. And I think, you know, literal gardening is a very good practice for many reasons. I think that's that's one of them. Yeah, so I'm eating up with what you're saying, Ashish. I don't know that I have much more to add to that, but yeah, other than.

00:57:46
Speaker 1: I think it's sort of fascinating and we're running out of time here, so we'll probably close it out. But I mean, there was it was probably five years ago now, there was a book written called Shop Classes Soul Craft. I don't know that you either of you had an opportunity to read that. As a kid. I was not a very handy person. I've never been a real outdoorsy kind of guy, but in high school I worked on a farm, and those are some of my fondest memories being outside. And even if it was freezing cold and you're out doing stuff in the snow, or you're trying to you know, unthaw the water so the pigs can drink or whatever, you know, I think there is something grounding about that. And having been married into a family who farms there, I've sort of adopted or been adopted into. I suppose a deeper sense of land that looks a little probably less violent than like Yellowstone if you've ever seen that show, but is no less tenacious about keeping it. You know, there's a sense in which the ground that you know, my wife's grandpa passed down to her dad, and it will eventually be passed down to our kids. It's just never going to be sold, and we don't view it as sacred. But the air is thinner there, you know, and so it's got an import that I think is really crucial. So I appreciate the conversation. I think that these categories that we've talked about today, and there's so much more we could explore, really are crucial for Christians today to understand the begin thinking through And it just strikes me that we've got so many of these pieces that are sort of floating around in the ether, shaping and changing the way we think about the world around us, that we've got to get back on track here. So Kevin very much appreciated your work. Like this is the second time we've had you on to talk about it. I think there's so much more we could talk about and just really appreciate you coming back on.

00:59:47
Speaker 2: Well, that's a delight, James. You know, anytime you're an author of a book, to have people engage with that and get some value out of it as really rewarding. And I've loved these questions in these conversations. So thank you very much.

01:00:00
Speaker 1: Thank you. All right, everybody, Well, well, oh go.

01:00:03
Speaker 3: Ahead, oshizh no, I was saying thank you as well.

01:00:06
Speaker 1: Oh okay, that's it. Very cool. Well, we'll catch everybody on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.