Disenchantment I

This is the first part of the lecture I gave in October at St. Margaret’s Anglican in Winnipeg, as part of the Slater-Maguire Lecture series. I worked my ass off on it, because these people were incredibly nice and also paid me, and I wanted to say something really smart. Now I have no idea what I’m going to do with it; for now, it will live here.

Video is available, but, again, I’d rather be read than looked at.

1. Every so often, you run across a piece that puts the vanity in Vanity Fair. Here is the opening of an article called “God Complex,” which ran in that (sometimes excellent) magazine this past April:

It’s mid-October in San Francisco, and a crowd of 200 or so congregants—some seated in pews, others standing below cathedral windows at the back—bow their heads in prayer. Over cranberry-apple cosmos and plates of Burmese food served by black-shirted waiters, a DJ plays a thumping soundtrack of remixed worship music. This is not a church service or even a Bible study. It is, instead, an entirely new kind of event in Silicon Valley. We are here to listen in on a conversation between Dr. Francis S. Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and leader of the Human Genome Project, and Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Silicon Valley’s influential start-up incubator Y Combinator, which has hatched thousands of tech companies with a combined valuation of more than $600 billion. The event is called Code & Cosmos, and its underlying thesis is that the fields of science and technology, once considered diametrically opposed to religion and spirituality, might converge with the teachings of the Bible. In other words, business networking for the spiritually curious.

This paragraph fascinates me. The author, Zoe Bernard, describes an event that is banal in at least three ways: One, it sounds both expensive and lame and thus exactly like most things in Silicon Valley; two, it involves Francis Collins explaining that there’s no law against being both a Christian and a scientist, as he has done in some way every few months for my entire adult life; three, it is, as even Bernard recognizes, simply “business networking for the spiritually curious,” AKA a type of event that happens in nearly every US city where money moves around. The fusion of Christianity and business networking is not only not strange in a US context, it’s almost unavoidable. And yet she writes as though she just saw someone levitate.

The implied reasons for her astonishment are themselves astonishing. She tells us that the event unites “the fields of science and technology,” which were “once” — when? — “considered diametrically opposed to religion and spirituality.” Only in a universe where the middle ages had immediately been succeeded by a six-hundred year interregnum of circa-2009-Reddit-style atheism would these statements make any sense.

Ah, Bernard might respond, but this is Silicon Valley, where (and again I quote): “For many years, the running joke—popularized by the HBO show Silicon Valley—was that in the Bay Area, Christianity was ‘borderline illegal.’” This piqued my curiosity, so I went searching for evidence of this extraordinary unpopularity, starting with the article itself. How, beyond quoting old TV shows, did Bernard justify this extraordinary claim? She starts by demurring a little. “Of course there have always been Christians in Silicon Valley; they just knew better than to advertise their faith. This is to say: The Christians were effectively in hiding.” Ah, like Communist Russia. Where did they hide? Did they meet in basements rather than churches? “And one specific place they were hiding was, according to Tan, on a spreadsheet made up of Christians in tech, which was passed around for years among a dozen or so of the techno faithful.” Bernard lists some of these martyrs-in-waiting. “One of them was Trae Stephens, cofounder of the defense tech company Anduril and a partner at Founders Fund, the venture capital firm cofounded by Peter Thiel.” Truly, a life on the margins.

So two thoughts here. One, this doesn’t sound like a desperate and embattled people encircled by hostile priests. This sounds like a rich and powerful person decided to keep a spreadsheet of like-minded associates. The impression is reinforced by, two, the fact that we’ve been hearing about the Valley popularity of Girard for years now. Perhaps sensing that she has written herself into a corner, Bernard goes on:

Part of the problem is that for most of Silicon Valley’s existence, its overarching monoculture privileged a certain type of ‘smart person.’ It was the kind of smart person who campaigned for Barack Obama, marched for gay rights, and built a custom prayer stool to complement their priest fetish at the Folsom Street Fair. The subject of ethics was brought up frequently, but almost exclusively in the context of their nonmonogamous relationships. Black Lives Matter signs sprouted from their yards, and if they strayed beyond the strictures of atheism into spirituality, it was of the Eastern variety.

I hate to break it to Bernard, but there were a lot of Christians who campaigned for Barack Obama, one of whom may even have been Barack Obama. There are still a lot of Christians who campaign for gay rights. And when I say “Christians” I don’t mean “people who have a vestigial fondness for Christianity”; I mean people who actually believe some or all of the Nicene Creed, or try to. As for her contrast between people who sport Black Lives Matters signs and Christians, it implies one of two truly baffling possibilities: She thinks that white people were leaders, rather than sometimes awkwardly enthusiastic followers, of that movement, or she thinks that Christianity is anything other than the dominant religion in American black communities. I’ve known a couple of Black atheists who could set her straight on that.

If I wanted to know whether Christianity were actually historically rare in Silicon Valley, Bernard was obviously going to be no help. So I googled around. The Pew Research Center finds 46% of San Francisco metro area adults identifying as Christians, which is low for the US but still a statistical plurality — greater than any other religion, and greater than no religion, according to the same survey. I found an article from 2018 titled “Silicon Valley’s Surprising Business Booster: Faith,” in which the writer explained how she created a prayer group at Salesforce. She describes the fear and trepidation with which she “came out” as a Christian, the way the braced for backlash, before admitting that “there hasn’t been much.” In 2016, Buzzfeed reported on “Silicon Valley’s Hippest Church.” In 2015, the BBC reports on “a surprising number of churches and temples” in the Valley; the same year, PBS devotes an entire episode of Religion and Ethics Newsweekly to “Finding God in Silicon Valley.” In 2014, the LA Times reports, “Silicon Valley Gives Conservative Christians A Boost.” In 2001, the Christian Century devotes an entire cover story, also titled “Finding God in Silicon Valley,” to the subject. Again and again, the beleaguered Christians of Silicon Valley have emerged from their catacombs to talk to a journalist, only to discover, to their relief and astonishment, that they live in a hegemonically Christian-lite country.

Bernard’s article, however unusual in its shoddiness, is an example of a type of trend piece that has seen an uptick in the last several months: the Intellectuals Are Rediscovering Christianity story. In a recent issue of Christianity Today, Nathan Guy writes of a “growing number of ‘intellectual Christians’—people whose turn to faith is tethered far more to cognitive knowledge than to subjective experience.” (As an aside, I have never known what people are talking about when they invoke a dichotomy between “cognitive knowledge” and “subjective experience,” although I was constantly presented with, and often threatened by, this dichotomy for the entirety of my evangelical childhood. Real, saving faith, the adults around me all agreed, came from “subjective experience” and not “cognitive knowledge.” Now, personally, when I cognitively know something, I experience that knowing subjectively, but perhaps that is a skill issue on my part.) Guy cites the high-profile conversions of the historian Tom Holland, the writer A.N. Wilson, and the dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Emma Camp, explaining “How the elite changed its mind on Christianity for Reason, points to the popularity of trad Catholicism—the sort of Catholicism that fights with its own pope—on the “intellectual right.” In a piece for The Conversation, Simon McCarthy-Jones surveys several thinkers who have extolled Christianity’s benefits for social and moral cohesion, including Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson, and, unbelievably, Elon Musk, as well as Hirsi Ali and Holland again. Writing for Bari Weiss’s ironically named Free Press—the publication where you can say anything as long as it’s not a boring truth like “Trump is a fascist” or “Israel is doing genocide in Gaza”—Peter Savodnik instances the novelist Paul Kingsnorth, the disgraced former comedian and accused multiple rapist Russell Brand, and the technologist Jordan Hall as examples of “How Intellectuals Found God.” We hear again about Richard Dawkins, who has merely toned down the intensity of his attacks on Christianity, and Jordan Peterson, who thinks Christianity is good for you whether or not it’s true, but Savidnok is most compelling when he examines people like Kingsnorth and, again, Hirsi Ali and her husband Niall Ferguson who have actually converted. (I was delighted to see St. Margaret’s, where I am giving this speech, credited with helping to inspire Shop Class as Soulcraft author Matthew Crawford’s turn toward Christ.) It is probably good for my own soul to know that Niall Ferguson is a churchgoer now, because Ferguson, a self-confessed defender of imperialism, has spent his career worshipping power in the most disgraceful and undignified way, and I have loathed him for as long as I’ve been aware of his existence, and it’s good for me to remember that Christ’s heart is not frozen against my enemies, and that that is good news both for me and for my enemies. I need Christ to go on forgiving sinners, whatever the inconvenience to myself.

Savodnik, I will note, also refers us to the supposed Christian turn in Peter Thiel’s thinking. Peter Thiel. I do have to admit that the conversion of Peter Thiel would be God’s greatest joke. Imagine the scene: One night he’s hunched over a spreadsheet, trying to figure out how he’s gonna beat those allegations, and all the Rene Girard he supposedly read hits him at once. His heart flips like a canoe. Weirder things have happened, I guess. If Thiel starts giving large amounts of money to the people he has spent his whole public life denouncing as subhuman parasites, I will praise God for such immense charity to the morally least of us, and I will also praise God for having such a sense of humor. At the moment, Peter Thiel is, so far as I can tell, going about the world claiming that any attempt to regulate artificial intelligence will risk bringing about the antichrist, and intellectually and financially sponsoring an administration that kidnaps Christian grandmothers off the streets and throws them in ICE detention. I am not the Celebrity Conversion Quality Control Inspector, but I must say that the fruit of this tree stinks at least in these nostrils.

What is it about the Intellectuals Are Rediscovering Religion story, as a genre, that arouses my suspicion? Partly it’s that such stories are almost always about something other than Christianity. I take it, of course, that the God roughly described by Christian theology and incarnated in Jesus is alive, and can be relied on to do all sorts of wild things, which include not only “saving us from our sins” but also “not allow us to destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons even though they’ve been on the mantelpiece waiting to go off since 1945,” or even “keep Christianity from the total eclipse that it richly deserves.” It would not really surprise me to see our God reversing the demographic trend away from Christianity in the US or even in Canada, the UK, and Europe. It wouldn’t surprise me to see God convert my enemies, or my friends, or “the intellectuals,” however conceived. I hope for the salvation and renewal of all things. But trend pieces are the last place I would expect to find God’s activity toward any of the ends. Usually, what a “Christianity is back” trend piece means is that some rich people think they see a percentage in God. With a few heartening exceptions, that’s what we’re seeing here. For example, in Bernard’s Vanity Fair piece, one of her subjects gives workshops about “Christianity and innovation” and “how basic venture investing principles are an exemplar of divine forgiveness.”

More particularly, these stories often focus on Christianity’s possibilities as a sort of noble lie. I do not like to see sacred truth treated that way. Christianity nearly always becomes its own worst self when it allows itself to be used as the fiction that holds society together and keeps the rabble in line. A religion is true or it isn’t, and if it isn’t, the idea of wanting other people to believe untrue things so that we can all rub along together a little more gently — that just feels fundamentally insulting to everyone. It’s not an attitude for adults. Nor is it fair to other religions to default to instrumentalizing Christianity in this way. If I were auditioning religions solely based on the likelihood that they’d make us kinder and less selfish, I’d take a good look at Wicca, or Ba’hai. Various Native spiritualities seem like they’d do amazing things for the environment. I am interested in a revival of Christianity only because I think Jesus is God and that acknowledging as much would, at least, save us all a lot of precious time.

But it’s also that, over many years scanning headlines, I’ve simply realized that there are certain story-archetypes that middlebrow US culture, for lack of a better label, is always telling itself. Other examples of these story-archetypes include: Trash Is the New High Art, The Democrats Must Sell Out Harder Than Ever, Did You Know That There Are Noncanonical Gospels Where Jesus Acts Weird, It’s Time to Tighten Our Belts and Throw People Out of Work, Whatever Happened to Masculinity, Today’s College Students Are Annoying In a New and Special Way, and I Found A New Type of Nazi Who’s Fancy. And Christianity: It’s Not Just For Dumb People Anymore is definitely one of these stories.

Why do we want to hear the story Intellectuals Rediscover Christianity over and over again from our journalism, as though it were a form of bedtime reassurance? What cultural values is it enforcing? First of all, its very existence reassures us, despite the overt content of the story, that the coexistence of intellectual life and Christian faith is a problem that must be noted and explained, thus preserving us from the far better, but perhaps more destabilizing news that it is a fairly common thing and needs no explanation. It tells the sort of readership so credulous before power, so slovenly in its intellectual habits, that it is willing to take Peter Thiel or, God help us, Elon Musk as representatives of “intellectual seriousness” rather than money and luck, that they are, despite this absurd credulity, in fact wised-up, enlightened, emancipated people who don’t believe in bedtime stories. It allows us to congratulate ourselves on being good little disenchanted moderns. And while I accept the reality of God, the Incarnation, angels, and resurrection, I have to say that I don’t believe in disenchantment anymore.