Rule 7: Market Christianity to College Professors and Computer Nerds

Andrew Breibart said that politics is downstream from culture. Religion is a very important part of culture.

The United States began as a very Christian nation. Many of the original colonies were founded by religious groups, by people willing to defy the British government in order to practice Christianity as they saw proper. They weren’t just going to church because it was expected. Today, many millions have fallen away from the Christian faith. But they didn’t all lose the religious impulse.

Until recently many political progressives replaced Christianity with Being Conscious. They became religiously aware of the plight of the poor, and performed assorted mystical exercises to purge themselves of Hate. I could work with that. Back when I was a Libertarian activist in a hippie town, I could openly infiltrate progressive organizations and pitch portions of the libertarian programme and it was all cool. I had a great time arguing economics over locally crafted beers. The Libertarian Party of that County had outreach tables and produced a skit at a local Rolling Thunder event and we were well received. (Rolling Thunder was a movement started by Jim Hightower, and yes, I got a chance to talk with him at a party.) We pointed out the regressive nature of Keynesian Economics and how over regulation favored Wal Mart at the expense of local business – and the message sometimes got through.

Those groovy days are gone, alas. Today, the political Left is embracing a harsh puritanism. Instead of going to yoga classes to quash tribal impulses, the new mystical exercises consist of taking courses in elaborate gibberish which provides endless excuses to be ever more angry – all the witch hunting with none of the salvation.

Except it’s not witches they are hunting. They are hunting down all who connect with what America once was. As a heterosexual white male with roots going back to the Jamestown colony, I am at the top of their hate list. It matters not that I was campaigning against the mass incarceration of Black men decades before Black lives started mattering. Their religion calls for my subjugation and self flagellation.

I can’t work with that.

America can’t work with that.

The cause of liberty, or simply avoiding a bloody civil war, requires finding better religions for the younger generations.

As Ayn Rand correctly pointed out, a free society requires a compatible Sense of Life. Perhaps it could be her philosophy of Objectivism. Or maybe the groovy wackiness of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. It could include Nordic pagan revivals, the Boomer generation’s New Age Consciousness or something else entirely.

Or it could be Christianity. The Bible contains a law code that works without a professional police force. It describes a welfare system which encouraged the poor to be productive. The Bible answers Karl Marx’s objections to capitalism and even has a solution for overpopulation. (I will cover this in Rule 12).

I’m a Christian, so I’ll focus on making the US a Christian dominant nation again; I could use a bit of treasure in Heaven, so I'm going to mix in some Christian outreach with my political rantings. Also, the United States could use a fresh infusion of divine intervention; I fear that over the past half century we've spent most of the divine favor racked up by our more devout ancestors. In other words this is the most important Rule in the book, and I was originally going to make it Rule 1. But I decided to push it back in order to avoid scaring off too many readers. This one is going to be controversial.

And I mean controversial to modern Christians. The intellectual elite in this country have gone Post Christian in large part because serious Christianity has gone anti-intellectual and intellectual Christianity has gone Lite. In this Rule I'm calling for a revival of intellectual Christianity, and it's going to smart.

The Problems with Christianity Lite

I was born in a high church Episcopalian home and became conscious in an age when Beatles and hippies roamed the earth. As such, I watched the dumbing down and decline of Mainline Protestantism first hand.

When I was tiny, Church services were beautiful, but boring for young children. The liturgy was hard to understand, but solemn, awesome. The minister was stern and scary; the threat of Hell was real to me.

Then the Church tried to be Relevant. The Book of Common Prayer was dumbed down. The hymns were simplified. The stern and scary minister gave way to a succession of mushy milquetoasts. By the time I was ready to get confirmed, the requirements were dumbed down to the point where I didn’t truly learn what I was committing to.

And through these years as the Episcopal Church compromised with the world, the Episcopal Church shrank. Lowering the barriers to membership resulted in fewer members.

When I got to college I took a break from Christianity entirely. I dabbled in pagan philosophies and experimented with assorted New Age psychic technologies.

When I outgrew my rebellious phase I tried going back to church. Finding an Episcopal parish that resembled what I grew up in proved to be a challenge. I found ministers who would take the scripture reading and give a sermon expounding the exact opposite meaning of the Biblical passage. I joined a local startup church that met in a school cafeteria while raising money for their own building. When they did build their building, the new sanctuary looked like something in an office park – complete with mini blinds! I traveled down the road to an older church and found Sunday school classes teaching yoga and New Age nonsense.

I finally found a truly Christian parish in the town of Fairfax, with a huge congregation and an amazingly talented choir. They could take the most difficult hymns and sing them in four+ part harmony. But they also mixed in mass quantities of modern Praise and Worship music: mind numbingly repetitive Jingles for Jesus. I literally got nightmares of people singing something like “We have Jesus. Na na na na naa naa!”

I had to leave.

Charismatic Christianity works for many people. If you are one of them, go for it.

But for me and people like me – and there are many in Silicon Valley and other hyper educated hot spots – such forced emotionalism is anti spiritual: worse than fingernails on chalkboards, waiting in line at the Post Office, or filling out tax forms. More on this later, but let’s get back to Christianity Lite.

Once upon a time there was a real market for Christianity Lite. Back when I was a child, going to Church was expected. Millions of non-Believers went to church just to be upstanding members of their respective communities. (And this is fine, by the way. The Gate is narrow; true believers are supposed to set an example that others follow. Something about letting their light shine…Also Jesus was cool with Fellow Travelers [Luke 9:50, Mark 9:40])

Today, it is possible to be respectable and not show up for church. Indeed, in many niches today, being a regular church goer is frowned upon.

So today the market for Christianity Lite is much weaker – but not zero. Church going does provide a form of social contact that doesn’t involve going to bars and whatnot. In rural areas, churches and high school sporting events are the primary places to social network.

But colleges are societies unto themselves. So are big corporations, especially those which entice knowledge workers via on-campus perks. A religious organization needs to provide something beyond social networking. It needs to provide spiritual experience, moral instruction for the children, a connection with the past, and/or...a better afterlife.

Spirituality for Silicon Valley

Consider the mindset of your stereotypical Silicon Valley computer nerd: hyper-intelligent, introverted, socially awkward, often weird.

Consider also what they are tasked to do for their day jobs. They dissect the ambiguous statements of natural language into the deterministic logic that a machine can “understand.” The resulting tangles of logic are often huge, more than any human mind can contemplate at once. So a large part of the job is organizing that logic into hierarchies so a human can focus on manageable chunks at a time. And even then, the more chunks one can hold at a time, the better.

This leaves no room for ear worms – including Jesus Jingles.

Modern day Accessible Christianity is not so accessible to the denizens of Silicon Valley.

Try this thought experiment: imagine Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek series attending a modern hip church service with its repetitive tunes and forced emotionalism. He would stand still looking over the crowd displaying a mix of confusion and disgust. The only way he would participate would be if some hostile alien energy beings forced him to participate. Then, Spock would indeed end up speaking in tongues – due to brain damage. Dr. McCoy would have to come up with a miracle cure, probably involving a Klingon nerve gas derivative.

Now imagine Mr. Spock attending an old school Catholic or Orthodox service in a beautiful cathedral. Order, beautiful art, beautiful music. Mr. Spock appreciated such things. In early episodes he played an electronic lyre type of instrument. In a later episode he demonstrated a thorough knowledge of earth art history, and the ability to sight read a Brahms waltz at a piano. And yes, I can imagine Mr. Spock visiting a Medieval Christian monastery as well. Mr. Spock meditated frequently…

Our Silicon Valley overlords are not quite Vulcans, but comparatively speaking, the analogy is useful. There is plenty of spiritual hunger among those who write code. Stoicism, Minimalism, Zen, and psychedelic drugs are all relatively popular among this crowd. So is fantasy literature.

Much the same can be said about academia. Reading hard books and appreciating unapproachable art are what humanities professors do for a living. For them (and me), NPR is the best Christian music radio network.

Ancient Christian traditions are rich with ceremonies and spiritual exercises suitable for those who think for a living. Indeed, Christianity was once tailored too much for nerds. Making Christianity more accessible/democratic was a good thing up to a point. But we have overshot the mark. By writing off the intellectual elites, we end up with a Post Christian overclass at odds with a Christian middle class. The arrangement is dangerous...

This is Part 1 of what will be multiple parts of this important but controversial Rule. In future parts we will explore making theology compatible with both Bible and the modern age.