Covert Materialism

Against re-enchantment minimalism.

When I first started writing, my intended audience was myself five years prior.

That is, I wrote with materialists in mind from the perspective of my growing re-enchantment. I was more or less able to wrestle my frustrations onto the page about the worldview I was leaving behind.

As a result of taking that seriously, I live a wildly different life: married and Catholic and living in Louisiana. Like getting kicked in the occipital lobe and knocking a bad fixation loose and breathing from my belly for the first time in twenty years, I realized I had been on the verge of tears the entire time.

What got me here was a slow walk across a phenomenological bridge, overgrown and nearly forgotten, thinking the whole time that there is no way it had just been sitting there and no one told me about it.

What I used to find extremely frustrating was that materialists either won’t read those thinkers, can’t understand them, or dismiss them as word salad. These days, I mostly chalk it up to a deficit of trait openness: Little Scientists and their communicators are not truly creative like the Great Scientists, who are themselves almost never strict materialists. Oh well.

I find it hard to be mad about that anymore. At least they are committed to their worldview even as it becomes demonstrably nonsense. Perhaps I’m just a little more remote from them now, too. A little less in relationship; and hate is just murderous love. When a materialist leaves a comment on one of my essays, my genuine reaction is surprise that they still exist, and feeling unsure where to even begin to make a connection. We share a lot less ground these days. I suppose I’m also grateful that they still bother to engage with me.

When I got to the other side of my phenomenological bridge, I was disappointed to find that the people on this side also don’t seem to care about our atrophied callosum. A lot of the time, actually, they scorn those connections to mainstream science. From my perspective, here is the only bridge that coherently connects their meaning systems to the brutal and lonely modern world, which is most of their everyday life anyway. I suppose they feel that doing things like dovetailing psychology into theology diminishes or threatens orthodoxy, or at the very least their sense of certainty. My growing frustration (and therefore love) is now with those Christian friends who dismiss the “mythical” or “Jungian” perspective as either dangerous, pagan, made-up, or otherwise not a particularly useful way to spend your time.

My sense, actually, is that the greatest single threat to modern Christianity is our own blasé dismissal of what is likely the only good defense against modern ennui. I gather they feel the myth people overcomplicate questions of simple faith, or maybe just think they’re word salad like the materialists do.

With the stark exception of a literal reading of only the miracles depicted in canonical scripture, they tend to tacitly accept that the world as reported by scientific materialism as the most real and solid ground truth. God, in this view, has severed Himself from earth after winding up the clock, leaving all real enchantment long in the past, abandoning you and your Samsung TV to a reductionist cosmos. That Clockwork God was the God, by the way, Nietzsche proclaimed dead. He was more right about that than modern Christians are willing to see.

On the other side of the gorge, “atheists,” unless they are unusually committed to a clockwork universe, tend to themselves be Covert Theists. They are generally seekers—open to occult explanations of things—but far from willing to settle for the “boring” and “repressed” view of practically any Western Traditional Christianity. They are naturally drawn to the more esoteric and exotic Eastern religions, which promise to satisfy this search beyond the merely material without the cringe and rigid moralizing of their parents’ Church, or the ontological horror of being an Ordinary Religious Boomer.

Those entrenched in religion have the opposite shadow tendency: since the mysteries of everything are all presumably captured by their dogma, they ease into a comfortable Covert Materialism in every other area of their lives. If nothing else, as an ontological convenience, but more likely a defense against the terrors of doubt. They are largely not seekers. All that might otherwise be revealed to be alive and new and enchanted in ordinary life is permanently petrified by performative certainty. Both as a way of never questioning their faith but also epistemic laziness and a very unappealing and unaesthetic lack of wonder.

An Orthodox Christian I generally agree with said in an argument that it’s not possible that AI could be inhabited by a spirit because he “knows how AI works.” It’s just a “text prediction algorithm.” For one, the second claim refutes the first, to put it kindly. Then he said, “You wouldn’t say Google was a spirit, would you?” Yes, as a matter of fact, I would. The early Church Fathers well understood the reality of subtle bodies, as do neuroscientists like Erik Hoel.

Putting that aside, though, what would possess him to insist that just because he can point to some mechanical feature of a phenomenon, he can claim the totality of what it is? That’s exactly what the materialists are trying to do to you. Don’t pull their tricks: just because I can point out the electrochemical nature of your brain doesn’t mean I can say how you work or that you therefore have no subjectivity. Just because I can measure the iambs in a pentameter doesn’t mean I know Shakespeare.

As I am now openly a Christian, I’m officially allowed to say that there aren’t many groups in the world with more half-baked ontological arrogance than us. I’m not immune, either: it’s very tempting to fall into the pride of certainty and dunk on the libs or whatever. More and more these days, too, I would probably be celebrated for it because many people lonely and tired of the decadent modern world crave certainty. It actively pays to be a religious know-it-all. But that only works to further alienate the seekers, in the end. Our job isn’t to be palatable, it’s to be useful.

A systematic mystical philosophy is the only powerful counter to implicit Enlightenment thinking, which has been devastating to all forms of belief in direct proportion to the control it has granted us over the world. If Christians really want to be ready to defend and expand their belief systems and get to keep their iPhones, they should read thinkers like René Girard.

I saw a post recently that said something to the effect of “Reading René Girard as an atheist: this is wrecking my whole worldview! Reading René Girard as a Christian: the Church Fathers said this, but spicier.”

First of all, no they didn’t. The Church Fathers were establishing the Christian metaphysic in a world that believed gods and occult magics to be a given. Their job was to rigorously establish why God was the ultimate God and how and why to worship Him above all others. For uninitiated moderns, though, reading about how sweetness is the compost of warmth and wetness will sound about as outdated as a lobotomy.

Girard’s writing, on the other hand, was written in a Post-Christian era, where believing in no gods is a given. For religious people who take modern scientific thought seriously, Girard helps establish not only how old gods could exist from within a modern frame, but also the many anthropological indicators that it is reasonable to worship the Creator God above all the lower principalities.

Reading the Church Fathers is great. In general, the older the book, the more you will get out of it. I do agree with that on average. However, the Church Fathers did not at all have to deal with modern thought, and so provide basically no immunological defenses against it. If you read only them and the Bible (and probably neither, let’s be honest), you leave your psyche undefended from materialism and so just absorb it like osmosis in every unexamined aspect of your life. Hence, Covert Materialists and their IKEA Christianity.

Practically everyone was educated in the modern style of thinking, so you’re going to need a massive counter-education to allow for any deep belief to penetrate into your everyday life and not just be some vague segregated “belief” you hold in some faraway God on Sundays. Girard, for his part, gave me an anthropological account for the belief in Christ. McGilChrist gave me a neurological one. Neumann gave me a historical one. Heidegger gave me a philosophical one. Jung gave me a psychological one. Eliade gave me a mythological one. Not all of these people were 100% correct and maybe one or two of them was a little evil. Hard for me to say, and it depends on who you ask. Still, their observations dovetailed and dissolve into the ultimately unspeakable divine to induce a feeling of awe as it unleashed in me what I assume was the original feelings the gospels produced in ancients. This allows for a more genuine and vigorous application of the principles in my life because I actually believe it pragmatically works rather than only saves me from some abstract fiery pit in some over-there future.

In fact, the modern Christian obsession with the afterlife is partly explained by a quite recent inability to bring religious thought “down to earth” and apply it to our lives to see that it works now and in perpetuity, even if we can’t always see that in the short term and have to make some hard sacrifices.

I get the sense that certain Christian types feel somewhat scandalized by the profane implication that God exists in and through observable phenomena like evolutionary biology, in the fragments of all pagan mythology, and even in the manner they eat Reese’s rabbits with their half-niece on Easter. Of course, God became the ultimate profanity by manifesting as a man and then being crucified, so that complaint is a non-starter.

Modern religious thinkers should add Girard, Jung, Eliade, and Neumann to the roster along with the Bible and the Church Father. It’s very difficult to actually believe things in a substantiated way unless you can robustly contend with the materialism that is already established within you, trained in you as it was rigorously since you were young through TV and movies and school. It is the water we’re swimming in, and most people don’t even know what the hell water is.

Aligning all of your rational nature with what is highest produces a heat that isn’t comparable to the lukewarmness of repressed doubt.

There are gigawatts of belief pent up in the deepest layers of ourselves, waiting to shake the earth.