The Anchor

The thought came to me in a flash: I am a post-liberal and a post-traditionalist.

I mean “post-liberal” in the following sense. (Remember as always that I am a half-educated autodidact, so forgive me for missing some niceties.) I accept that I am a modern person, that is, the modern worldview, the secular worldview, the scientific worldview is so deeply engrained in me that I cannot in honesty avoid it.

I have actually tried to bring myself to believe I live in a Ptolemaic universe. You know the thought that “after covid, anything could be true”? Well, I figured I might as well try to apply this blanket realisation that really weird things may be true and be mocked and derided by the Archons who dictate our worldview to us, and see if I could make myself believe the earth was at the center of the universe. I read a bunch of books. (Wolfgang Smith was the most helpful.) I gave up. Couldn’t do it. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t take hallucinogens anymore (entheogens as the hip kids call them now). But I always have a sad, let-down kind of moment when I realize that this kind of existential ontology hacking is just too tall an order — a taller order even than believing we’re ruled by blood-drinking Satanic pedophiles, a scenario to which, post-covid, I ascribe better than 50/50 odds of being true. I can reach the point where I have a full framework in place — and yet when I look up at the night sky, I still see the empty spaces that terrify me, and not the celestial spheres concealing the Empyrean.

Hence, the liberal critique of tradition makes complete sense to me. I am also a child of modernity in this sense: I have fully imbibed the turn to the person. Personhood, inward experience, freedom, communion — these are all at the center of my real, heartfelt religious concerns. In the end, I am honestly less fascinated with Chalcedonian theology than I am with the depths that I see revealed in my own heart, and in the hearts of other people — or perhaps I could say that I am honestly only interested in Chalcedon inasmuch as it throws light on the question of the person. The same for every element of the Nicene Creed I sing every Sunday. This is a profoundly modern and “liberal” perspective.

My visceral sense of the significance of the human person and of human liberty means that in the end I have no use for the formal authority of the church. No coercive external authority means anything to me, except as a power operative in the world that I have to deal with pragmatically, as I might deal with taxes or rain or earthquakes or wild animals. If the church speaks a truth I can recognize in my own heart, then I listen. Otherwise I keep my own counsel. And in my heart of hearts, I think anyone who does otherwise is a traitor to God. I don’t believe anything “because someone says so,” no matter whether they’re acclaimed as a saint or otherwise as a sanctioned channel for divine grace and wisdom. I actually think that everyone operates this way, if only because everyone who listens to an authority chooses the authority to listen to in a pluralistic society such as ours. In other societies — to which an increasing number of bitter fools want to return (cf Erich Fromm’s “escape from freedom”) — the state and the church together tell you what to think, and you can refer to what I said above about “taxes, rain, earthquakes, and wild animals.” My response is not to agree; it is to hire a lawyer, wear a poncho, buy insurance, get a firearm. You may compel my body: you will never compel my mind or my heart. This also is a profoundly modern and classically “liberal” perspective.

And yet.

The liberal project in Christianity failed. (I am pretty sure it has failed in every religion where it has been implemented, though some have put up less of a fight than Christians — it has certainly failed in Judaism.) It failed because it accommodated too much. It gave too much away. It ended up with people like John Shelby Spong, the atheist Episcopal bishop of Newark. It ended up with Paul Tillich who theologized God as the “ground of being” and Henry Nelson Wieman who theologized God as “creative interchange.” It turned out that it is impossible to sustain living faith on a thoroughly secular, thoroughly modern foundation.

Further, the theological liberals laid waste to everything outward, all the inheritance of the ages of faith, really the entire religious history of humankind, and bequeathed to their children a pale, bloodless, feeble church, which those children, and especially their grandchildren, have abandoned as irrelevant, because it is.

Enter the traditionalists.

The traditionalist response (reaction, more properly) is simply to deny that modernity ever happened, to summon us back to a world where we believe “what the church teaches” (whatever church the given traditionalist may have decided to adhere to), where we simply accept late ancient (or medieval) metaphysics and morals and social structures, where we simply pretend that we can exist as a beseiged outpost of this kind of religious revanchism, a faithful remnant, and make a little world for ourselves.

It’s a lie. We don’t believe it. I certainly don’t, and I don’t think anyone else really does either. We are all still moderns. Our instincts are modern. Our instincts are, by any reasonable description, liberal. The effort to force ourselves into the thoroughly pre-modern mindset is just like my hopeless attempt to inwardly resuscitate a Ptolemaic cosmology. It can’t finally work. We are who we are, in the context we are, and very fundamental elements of our understanding of and feeling of the world are inescapably at odds with the past we say we want to reanimate and reinhabit.

I am sorry to be the bearer of these bad tidings to the young people coming in droves into the traditional churches, desperately seeking some kind of firm foundation that’s been stolen from them. They feel cheated and abused, because they have been.

However, our inescapably modern and liberal instincts, are, in many cases, actually very good. I think my fundamental regard for the mystery of the human person and human liberty is indeed very good. I will die on this hill.

I think traditional formulations of religion, both theology and praxis, are deeply shaped by the societies within which they arose. I am particularly struck, in recent reading, by the deep continuity of body and sex negativity between the late ancient world and historic Christianity. The story that Christianity brought restraint to a Sybaritic ancient world is nonsense. The ancients were ascetics and the instinct to reject the world was the common air that everyone breathed, so Christians did too. In a real sense, Christian sexual morality is simply imposing on moderns a set of sexual mores that arose in a completely different historical epoch for completely different reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the endlessly elaborate metaphysical justifications that are spun for them (cf the Roman Catholic ban on contraception). Catholic priests and Orthodox monks are celibate because sexual activity was thought to impede openness to divine grace or inspiration. Everything else is a complex post hoc justification (aka “bullshit”). And I, for one, believe (1) that the original impulse was false, and (2) that the structures imposed to enforce it over the millennia have done far more harm than good. A good critical companion here is Wilhelm Reich, a man who knew quite a bit about government as a force of nature with which one must contend when one says things outside the Overton Window. (Tl;dr the agents of the state killed him and destroyed his work.)

I see the same dynamic played out across so many domains. Because so many critical concerns have gone off the rails and have been appropriated by the Archons for their own purposes, it’s now de rigeur, for example, for trad-minded people and new converts to inveigh against “feminism.” Please: if you want to do away with the concrete improvements in human life (in women’s lives, particularly) that have come about as a result of feminist thought and effort, just go away. I have two daughters. I am overjoyed that they live in a world in which they can choose the kind of life they want to live, choose their vocation; a life in which they are not infantilized, in which it is not thought necessary for them to be forever under the tutelage of men. I am overjoyed that female scholars introduce core aspects of female experience into domains where men’s concerns have been the only ones really to be heard. We need this. We have needed it for millennia. We might destroy ourselves as a species if we don’t redress the balance. When I listen, I can hear that what I thought were universal human concerns are actually largely male-colored concerns, and that a genuine female perspective might possibly offer me a viewpoint from which I could find a deeper inspiration that heals my heart.

Obviously there are many other strands to discuss here, but I will let them go for now.

So here I am: a post-liberal, in the sense that, although I see the fundamental value of the liberal project, the fundamental importance of its witness to precious truths, and I want to support that project, I see also that it has gone off the rails; as it has been built thus far, it is a failure. Therefore I don’t want to give up on it; I want to find, by any means I can — and I will also die on this hill! — a way to retain its fundamental concerns and yet to accommodate a deep and living faith.

And here I am: a post-traditionalist, in the sense that, although my heart burns when I enter into the depths of traditional religion, I also see that traditionalism as a movement is ultimately false and bankrupt, it is a hopeless and deceptive rearguard action, a denial of reality and a denial of so much concrete, theoretical, and mystical good that people have created when they have striven as moderns to free themselves from tradition, from what has been merely handed down. As the early Quaker Margaret Fell said, “You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this, but what canst thou say?”

Indeed — what canst thou say? This is what I want to hear, what I want to discover, both in freedom, and in the deepest love and gratitude for our forebears in the faith. Because above all, I want to do this for the sake of cleaving to Jesus. What is the anchor, what is the center, when criticism turns everything upside down, when a mere formal, outward return to ancient faith is impossible, and where inwardly and existentially conforming myself to that ancient faith is also impossible? Where a thoroughgoing modernity, on the other hand, leaves us lost in a land barren and untrodden and unwatered?

Somehow, in the midst of it all, all the struggle and uncertainty, I come back to Jesus. I come back even when I question the ancient Christologies. I come back even when I question the extent to which the canonical Gospels are thorough and reliable representations of His life and teaching. I come back when I see the Church is “human, all-too-human.” I come back through every cycle of metaphysical agony, and He is with me in every search, as He has been with me since before I started searching. How do I know? Perhaps I don’t know, perhaps I only hope.

My “believer’s prayer,” the prayer that in the depth of pain set me on His path, was this: “I do not know who you are, but if you don’t help me, I will die.” I keep praying that prayer. And He keeps answering.

This post was not written using AI.