In the latest episode of Mere Fidelity, I join Matt and Derek to continue our discussion of Augustine’s Confessions, exploring Book 11 of the work.
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Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO
— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018
Beyond drawing attention to the specific issue of racial injustice, in kneeling for the American national anthem before the start of games, Colin Kaepernick’s actions served to expose the power of the American cult of patriotism, which has steadily brought professional sports into its orbit. While many justifiably lament the increasing politicization of every area of life, it wasn’t Kaepernick who really initiated the politicization of the NFL. The spread of the cult of the state and the military in American football was considerably advanced before Kaepernick ever took a knee.
People who vocally resist the ‘compelled speech’ of preferred pronouns for trans persons or cakes baked in celebration of same-sex weddings should recognize that American sports increasingly involve a sort of—if not compelled—at least obliged speech of patriotism. For the power of the cult to be made manifest, all Kaepernick had to do was to kneel.
The cult of patriotism, with its particularly close conceptual attachment to the validation and celebration of American might in its military and its police, is not only seen in football games. It is also seen in the civil religion that is part of the wallpaper of much of American life, within which things such as the flag and the anthem are all implicitly theologized symbols and America is the one true church, resting beneath the settled smile of its effaced deity.[1]
What the cult of American patriotism did was gradually to co-opt the inherently unpolitical act of participating in a sports game—whether as a spectator or an athlete—and reframe it as an implicit celebration and validation of American might and social order (something similar has happened to many churches in the US). This ideology is almost invariably veiled to some extent: most people involved would not regard themselves as making any strong statement with their participation, but just going along with a fairly innocuous mass ritual. When someone failed to participate, however, it soon began to become apparent that a great deal more symbolic weight was invested in the patriotic rituals than many might have supposed.
While ‘compelled patriotic speech’ might be overstating matters—although perhaps not, when one considers the consequences Kaepernick’s actions had for his employment prospects—there is at the least a sort of co-option of certain formerly neutral rituals and activities as political and civil statements. To participate in an activity that is inherently non-political, one must validate and affirm a political ideology. Ideological demands gradually become more intrusive, gradually squeezing out dissenters. While conservatives may rightly complain about companies that put pressure on their employees to display support for LGBTQ causes, they are much less alert to the creeping demands of the cult of patriotism.
Colin Kaepernick took a knee against the co-option of his participation in a football match in order to validate American might and order. Whatever we might think about the beliefs that motivated his refusal to stand for the anthem, he revealed something about the subtle ways in which such rituals can make demands upon our integrity.
Which is why it is so striking to me that the man who would not stand for the American patriotic cult is now standing for the cult of the market.
‘Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.’
Taken by themselves, these are powerful words. However, when they are rendered an advertising slogan, they are radically debased. While the locutionary act of the statement (the surface meaning of the words themselves) remains the same, its illocutionary force (its intended effect) has shifted markedly. The illocutionary force is now to associate Nike with one’s highest commitments and to buy Nike’s products in order to ‘brand’ oneself as the sort of person.
‘Believe in something…. Believe in Nike.’
Neoliberalism, as some have observed, is social justice (#NLSJ). While they are seldom as inept in execution as Pepsi was with its protest ad of a year or so ago, big businesses have proved remarkably eager to associate themselves with the culturally ascendant values of various social justice movements. However, what the Pepsi ad does reveal is how essentially unprincipled such associations can be, as the attractive and youthful aesthetics of protest and social justice movements—with their foregrounding of the individual consumer and celebration of their unfettered self-expression—are often more appealing than the specific things for which they stand. In some this co-option of social justice by corporations will produce cynicism; in many others, however, it will merely reinforce the cult of consumerism and the debilitated selfhood that it sells its subjects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA5Yq1DLSmQ
As I’ve remarked in the past, social media also effects a related degrading of our moral discourse, as the acute attention to self-branding that it encourages increasingly pulls our moral discourse towards the reflexivity of self-representation. Our discourse becomes less objective and truth-driven in its orientation and more preoccupied with brand management for our online personae. In a realm where we are defined almost entirely by our words, where actions barely register, scrupulously saying those things that reflect well upon our character in the eyes of those people whose judgment we most care about at all times can becomes exceedingly important.
Whether it is the cult of patriotism, the cult of individualistic consumerism and choice, or the various cults of self-expressive identity, it can be incredibly difficult to extricate ourselves from their attempts to co-opt us and our speech. The self-expressive ethos of the Internet can subtly compromise any expression of Christian truth upon it. To declare that ‘Jesus is Lord’ and have those words ring clear and true is not possible where the self-expression and autonomy of interchangeable individuals are governing principles.
For all of the churches that have succumbed to the cult of patriotism, a great many more are entangled in the cult of the consumer. Much of evangelicalism, for instance, is built around the reality of the self-expressive, individualistic, and autonomous religious consumer. And this is hardly exclusive to evangelicalism: a great many people who are in high church traditions are no less committed to a sort of self-expressive religious consumerism, albeit driven by a different set of aesthetic values and cultural and social affiliations.
We would be foolish to think that we can straightforwardly extricate ourselves from this religious consumerism. It is the water that we swim in, much as virtue-signalling is something that we are all inescapably involved in online. In large measure this is simply a consequence of our material reality, a result of our possession of cars, TVs, online personae, etc. and our living in societies ordered around such things.
We should, however, seek to mitigate where we can the power that these things have over us, to develop tactics of resistance to their determination and framing of our values, behaviours, and thinking. Looking at the way Colin Kaepernick’s principled stance is debased by its co-option by advertisers, we should be even more alert to the insidious ways in which our own speech is degraded by forces in our society, and more creatively attentive to ways in which we can push against this.
[1] I am, of course, saying all of this as an Englishman. While the specks in the eyes of my brethren across the Atlantic appear with great clarity, they should not distract me from the planks in my own eyes and those of my compatriots. The cult of the American state has almost unavoidable been more extensive, as America has a much thinner peoplehood to rest upon and some common sense of identity has to be vigorously ‘astroturfed’, and civil religion and patriotic ritual are some of the most promising ways of going about this. As the UK moves from being defined by its composite nations—England, Scotland, Wales, and (Northern) Ireland—and becomes a multi-ethnic state, it is also exhibiting a lurch towards the inculcation of progressive state ideology as a source of unity. The lack of clear alternatives is a genuine problem, and even more so as ‘astroturfed’ identities themselves become sources of conflict and division.
Today’s question: “Does Christ’s abstention from wine until the consummation of the Kingdom have any connection to Lemuel’s mother’s counsel in Proverbs 31 regarding the kingly use of alcohol? If so, what’s the best way to present this connection?”
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Today’s questions:
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Today’s question: “Was it a sin for Israel to ask for a king? 1 Sam 8 makes it seem so. But then Deut 17 seemingly gives permission for Israel to ask for a king. How should we think about Israel’s monarchy? Should it have happened, or is it an example of an evil that God used for good?”
Within the video, I reference this article, which I wrote for the Theopolis website.
If you have any questions for me, please leave them on my Curious Cat account. If you have found these videos helpful, please tell your friends. If you would like to support my continued production of them, you can do so on my Patreon account. You can also get the audio of these videos on Soundcloud or iTunes.
A fortnight ago, I had the opportunity to participate in the Theopolis Institute’s intensive course with Dr Esther Lightcap Meek. Titled ‘An Introduction to Covenant Epistemology’, the course brought together over thirty students for a week of exploration into a Christian vision of knowing.
A Theopolis intensive course really is a unique experience. It begins on the Sunday evening, as we all assemble at the Leitharts’ house. Over a few hours, we begin to get to know each other, with informal conversation being followed by introducing ourselves to the gathered group, with a time of song and a charge and introduction to the week of studies ahead. Community, fellowship, and friendship are a critical dimension of any Theopolis intensive and this dimension is encouraged from the very beginning of the week: every participant in a course should expect to make new friends during their time.
Over the five days of the course itself, we begin with breakfast around 8am, followed by matins. Liturgy has always been at the heart of Theopolis’ vision and each day is punctuated by three periods of worship: matins, sext, and vespers (you can download the liturgy for free here).
The liturgy largely involves responsive singing, with chanted psalms. At the beginning of the week, when the liturgy is first explained, this might seem alien to students from many evangelical traditions. However, by the end of the week, most have become familiar with it and, on the two occasions I have been involved in a Theopolis intensive, a number have remarked on how powerful and important a feature of the week it is. Perhaps my favourite part of every day is the vespers service in Beeson’s spectacular Hodges chapel, where, accompanied by the organ and enjoying the great acoustics of the space, the worship is particularly glorious. Within this service, Peter Leithart delivers a brief yet rich homily related to some of the some of the themes that we have been exploring over the course of the day.
Dr Esther Meek is a compelling and charismatic lecturer, with an infectious delight in and enthusiasm for her subject and a tremendous capacity both to connect with students and to catalyse their bonding among themselves. At the beginning of the week, she carefully ordered the class into covenant epistemology groups, which we remained in for the entirety of the week. We regularly divided into these small groups of three or four participants to discuss among ourselves the concepts that we were learning, applying them to our own experience, before feeding back to the wider class.
Within this last course there were several denominational backgrounds represented, a significant range of ages, men and women, along with a wide variety of different vocations: people in the trades, in business, in the arts, in pastoral ministry, in academia, etc. This diversity allowed for some fascinating cross-pollination of and stimulating interaction of perspectives to occur.
The course itself was concerned with exploring the riddle of knowledge, with the question of epistemology. Although ‘epistemology’ may sound like a dry or forbidding subject, in Dr Meek’s hands it was anything but! From the very first session, she framed the subject matter of the course as intimately related to the ways that we arrive at the most concrete and practical of skills—learning how to ride a bike or drive a car, learning a musical instrument, or the art of photography.
A central concern of Dr Meek’s is to unsettle what she terms the Defective Epistemic Default, or the D.E.D.—students soon discovered that Dr Meek is fond of acronyms! The Defective Epistemic Default is, among other things, a ‘knowledge as information’ mindset. It is also a paradigm of thought that systemically privileges certain things over others: knowledge over belief, facts over values, reason over emotion, science over religion, objective over subjective, mind over body, etc.
Dr Meek regards herself as offering a sort of epistemic therapy to her students and, over the course of the week, it was clear that her teaching proved transformative for many. Her teaching didn’t just rearrange certain concepts in people’s minds, but changed the very manner that they perceived themselves to be involved in reality. The highly interactive form of her teaching encouraged students to become aware of how they already knew the things that they knew in a new way.
In place of the dysfunctional understanding of knowledge with which modern society has saddled us, Dr Meek offers an alternative epistemology, one heavily influenced by the work of Michael Polanyi. Where our prevailing frameworks can focus upon static knowledge, Dr Meek foregrounds the exciting process of coming to knowledge, something more akin to a pilgrimage towards an epiphany.
Knowing involves two stages, with a from-to movement, in what is called a ‘subsidiary-focal integration’ (S.F.I.). In riding a bike, playing an instrument, or doing philosophy, there are ‘subsidiary’ dimensions of our activity. Whether this is keeping our balance and managing our feet on a bike’s pedals, moving our fingers over the keys of a piano, or using familiar philosophical categories, these are skills or forms of awareness upon which our activity depends, but which are not its focus. They are generally things that we look from, rather than at. Indeed, we only tend to look at them when something has gone awry, or when we are learning a skill for the first time.
Dr Meek stresses the covenantal character of knowledge: truth involves our giving of ‘troth’, our pledge-like commitment to the object of our knowledge. Reality, framed by the fact of its givenness by its Creator, can never truly be scoured of the personal—indeed, it could be described as ‘personlike’. We must ‘know’ it in a way appropriate to the truth of its existence.
‘Best epistemic practice’—a very Meekian phrase!—requires a transformed comportment and composure in relation to the objects of our knowing, one marked by love, trust, humility, patience, respect, and joyful consent to our creaturehood. We must put ourselves in the way of reality, where it is likely to turn up. We must practice attentiveness to it.
Dr Meek said a great deal about ‘aha!’ moments and, over the course of the week, one of the striking things was seeing how many personal and collective epiphanies we experienced as students. The approach she offered provided a helpful framework and illuminating language for understanding many things related to our Christian thought and callings, to which she was repeatedly connecting her teaching. By Friday evening, we all felt that we had much to digest. Speaking just for myself, the week stimulated me to think more directly about key aspects of my ‘knowing ventures’ (another expression Dr Meek frequently employed), perhaps especially those related to the reading of Scripture. Even in areas where I was unpersuaded or somewhat critical of her approach, I was considerably clearer in my understanding by the end of the week.
A further delight of the week were the evenings spent in conversation and fellowship, especially the talent evening we had on Thursday, during which we were entertained with displays of dancing, singing, rapping, the reciting of poetry, acrobatic feats, the playing of musical instruments, the baking of cookies, and other impressive skills from various participants in the course! By the conclusion of the course, I felt exhausted but deeply fulfilled, and impatient for the next Theopolis course, in which Dr David Field will teach on the subject of ‘Paths to Human Maturity’.
While it will be a limited taste of the fuller experience of attending the course—not least because the lectures were so interactive and involved so much group work—audio lectures should be available in the near future on the Theopolis Institute site. If you would like to read Dr Esther Meek’s work for yourself, she has written several books. Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology is perhaps the best book to read to get a deeper sense of her work. For those wanting more accessible introductions, I would recommend A Little Manual for Knowing and Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People.
The Theopolis Institute seeks to renew people’s imaginative grasp of the symbolic world of the Scripture, enacted in the liturgy, for the reviving of the Church and the renewal of the culture. They train pastors and lay persons, provide resources to churches and students of Scripture, and help to forge networks of relations. It has been an immense privilege to work for them over the past few months; I can wholeheartedly commend their work and am excited about the ways it is developing into the future (while I work for Theopolis, I wrote the above post of my own independent choice).
If you would like to know more about Theopolis, you can sign up for their regular newsletter, In Media Res, here. If you would like to support the work that we do at Theopolis, you can do so here. On the Theopolis website there is also a frequently updated blog and various resources. I also participate with Peter Leithart in the regular Theopolis podcast.
Today’s question: “Some have described Christ as a sort of “fruitful eunuch.” Others have pointed out that he in fact has a bride. While these would be mutually exclusive in a literal sense, does the Bible require us to choose between them when taken as metaphors?”
If you have any questions for me, please leave them on my Curious Cat account. If you have found these videos helpful, please tell your friends. If you would like to support my continued production of them, you can do so on my Patreon account. You can also get the audio of these videos on Soundcloud or iTunes.
Today’s question: “Was David’s victory over Goliath a miracle? Was he really an underdog or was this a case of misperception as to who was the favorite? We know it is not uncommon for smaller people to defeat larger people in fights.”
Within this episode I recommend Peter Leithart’s commentary on 1&2 Samuel, A Son To Me, available for purchase here.
If you have any questions for me, please leave them on my Curious Cat account. If you have found these videos helpful, please tell your friends. If you would like to support my continued production of them, you can do so on my Patreon account. You can also get the audio of these videos on Soundcloud or iTunes.
In this episode of the Theopolis Podcast, Peter Leithart and I discuss the readings for the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9; Ephesians 6:10-20; and Mark 7:14-23.
You can follow the Theopolis podcast on Soundcloud, iTunes, and on most podcast apps. You can read show notes over on the Theopolis podcast website. You can also see past episodes I have contributed to by clicking the ‘Theopolis’ link in the bar above.
Today’s question: “Why are so many references to God in the NT binitarian (Father and Son) rather than trinitarian (Father, Son and Spirit)? I’m thinking of Paul’s greetings, Stephen’s vision, Jesus’ speeches about unity with the Father, etc. Admittedly the Spirit grows more prominent after Pentecost, but I’ve wondered about this a lot. I’ve seen anti-trinitarians use this argument, but though I can explain it away, I’m not sure I can positively account for it. Thoughts?”
If you have any questions for me, please leave them on my Curious Cat account. If you have found these videos helpful, please tell your friends. If you would like to support my continued production of them, you can do so on my Patreon account. You can also get the audio of these videos on Soundcloud or iTunes.
n. pl.
A miscellaneous collection of notes, remarks, or selections.
Alastair's Adversaria 