“Truth can be both our shield and sword in the battle of life.”
There are people who influence us not only through what they teach, but through the manner in which they live what they teach.
Over the last several months, my friend Torna Braggison has offered me a remarkable degree of openness, patience, friendship, and spiritual guidance. He has answered my many questions, challenged me to think more deeply, and helped me better understand a Heathen worldview that cannot be reduced to symbolism, abstract belief, or solitary spiritual consumption.
Torna is the author of Power Through Truth, an exploration of the relationship between sacred breath, truthful speech, oath-keeping, honor, and spiritual power within the Heathen tradition.
His guidance has continually returned me to something more demanding: conduct.
How do we speak?
What do we promise?
Do our actions uphold our words?
Can the people closest to us trust what comes out of our mouths?
What happens to us (personally, socially, and spiritually) when they cannot?
What if truth is not merely something we believe, but something we breathe, speak, promise, remember, and live?
Ask and Embla, Robert Engels, 1919. Odin’s gift of Ond—the sacred breath that gives life and carries the spoken word.
Truth Is Not Merely an Idea
Modern people are accustomed to treating truth primarily as a matter of intellectual agreement.
We ask whether a proposition is correct, whether a doctrine is factual, or whether someone possesses the proper beliefs. Religion often becomes a matter of assenting to particular claims. Politics becomes a competition between competing narratives. Online identity becomes a collection of publicly declared values.
But declaring a value is not the same as embodying it.
A person can speak endlessly about compassion while behaving cruelly. Someone can build an identity around authenticity while lying to the people closest to them. A spiritual leader can speak of love, healing, transcendence, and divine truth while refusing accountability for the damage caused by their conduct.
Words alone do not prove character.
Within the framework Torna presents, however, words are not inconsequential. They are not merely sounds, opinions, or disposable expressions. They are carried upon the sacred breath and given force through the character and intention of the speaker.
Torna describes Ond as the sacred breath of life, the divine spark gifted by Odin. Our words ride upon that breath, and when we speak, we give those words a kind of life. Their quality is connected to the truth, intention, and honor of the person speaking them.
Speech therefore becomes more than communication.
It becomes participation.
We breathe something of ourselves into the world.
The Breath Behind the Word
In Völuspá, Odin’s gift to Ask and Embla includes Ond—the animating breath without which they do not yet fully possess life. Torna connects this sacred breath to speech, creativity, ecstatic power, ritual, galdr, and the ability to shape reality through will and expression.
This does not mean that every passing sentence is a magical incantation in the theatrical or New Age sense.
It means that speech carries consequences.
Words can establish trust or destroy it. They can bind people together, orient a community, transmit memory, establish obligation, inspire courage, or leave another person spiritually and emotionally disoriented. A truthful word spoken at the right moment can restore someone’s sense of reality. A deliberate lie can make another person doubt their own perception.
Our words affect the world because other people must live inside the reality those words help create.
This is one reason truth matters so deeply to me.
I do not want truth to remain an attractive principle I discuss in essays or podcasts. I want the people in my life to know that my word means something. I want to follow through when I make a commitment. I want to be honest even when honesty is uncomfortable. I want to recognize when my conduct contradicts what I have claimed and accept the responsibility of repairing what I can.
That is not always easy.
Truth as lived accountability demands more than being “right.” It demands self-examination, restraint, memory, courage, and humility. It may require us to admit that we have behaved dishonorably. It may force us to stop protecting the version of ourselves we would prefer others to believe.
Truth can defend us, but it can also cut through our own self-deception.
It is both shield and sword.
Words in the Well
One of the most compelling ideas in Torna’s article is that some words carry more weight than others.
He distinguishes between common or everyday speech, words placed “in the well” through intimate or sacred relationships, and the giving of formal oaths. Each carries a different degree of personal, communal, and spiritual consequence.
We all understand this intuitively.
Telling a cashier that we are “fine” when we are having a terrible day does not carry the same moral weight as lying to a spouse, deceiving a close friend, betraying a confidant, or breaking a solemn vow.
The closer the relationship, the more of ourselves we place behind the word.
Words spoken to those who trust us become part of a shared memory. They shape how another person understands us, themselves, and the relationship between us. Words spoken during ritual enter the memory of the group. Stories told by the skald or bard help shape a people’s understanding of their ancestors, heroes, virtues, and obligations.
These are words placed into the well.
The well can be understood as Mímir’s well, ancestral memory, cultural memory, or the accumulated memory of the community. What is spoken does not simply disappear after the vibration leaves the air. It continues through consequence, reputation, story, recollection, and relationship.
A truthful word can strengthen the speaker and those who hear it.
A dishonest word can poison the well.
“The Spiritual Weight of an Oath”: John Bauer, Tyr and Fenrir
The Spiritual Weight of an Oath
An oath carries the greatest weight because an oath is not merely a prediction about what we hope to do.
It is an act of binding.
Torna describes an oath as something given life through sacred breath and powered by the will. The oath involves not only the person who gives it, but the recipient, the witnesses, the place, and the spiritual powers invoked or present. Until it is fulfilled or broken, the oath continues to possess force.
This is almost incomprehensible within a culture of casual promises.
We say, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” “I’ll always be there,” “You can trust me,” or “I swear I’ll change,” often with little awareness of the weight those statements carry for the person receiving them.
Our society encourages constant speech while teaching very little discipline of speech.
We post immediate reactions. We make dramatic declarations. We promise more than we can deliver. We publicly perform virtues we have not yet cultivated privately. We use language to manage how others perceive us, then become resentful when we are held accountable to the identity we presented.
A Heathen understanding of oath asks us to become more careful.
Do not promise lightly.
Do not offer your word merely to relieve the discomfort of the present moment.
Do not invoke trust when you are unwilling to behave in a trustworthy manner.
The answer is not to become silent, emotionally unavailable, or terrified of commitment. It is to understand that a promise contains part of the self. When we repeatedly keep our word, we become someone whose speech possesses weight. When we continually break it, our words become thin and useless.
Eventually, no one believes us… and that isn’t because they are cruel, but because we have taught them not to.
Honor Is Accumulated
Torna connects the keeping of oaths with Hamingja, a concept often translated as luck but also associated with honor, power, fortune, and the accumulated strength of the self.
This is not luck imagined as random cosmic favor.
It is closer to luck that has been cultivated.
A person who consistently acts with integrity develops trusted relationships, a dependable reputation, communal support, and an internal sense of coherence. Their words and actions reinforce each other. They become spiritually and socially substantial.
Keeping one’s word strengthens the whole self, while dishonorable conduct weakens it.
We might recognize this even without using explicitly spiritual language.
A trustworthy person is often surrounded by people willing to help them because they have proven that help will not be wasted. Their reputation opens doors. Their community remembers their conduct. When hardship comes, they are not entirely alone.
This is not always fair or perfectly reciprocal. Honorable people can still be betrayed, harmed, or abandoned. But the larger principle remains: character accumulates.
So does dishonor.
Every promise kept or broken becomes part of the person we are becoming.
Truth as Communal Participation
Truth is often framed as an individual possession: my truth, my beliefs, my authenticity.
But Torna’s article presents truth as profoundly relational.
As a bard and skald, he writes that believing in the moral truth of a story allows the teller to connect with those listening. Honest words can create a communal experience in which teller, listener, folk, hero, deity, moral teaching, place, and ancestral memory are brought into relationship.
Truth does not merely sit inside the mind.
It passes between people.
It is sung, remembered, witnessed, and enacted.
This is where the concept becomes essential to The Wisdom of Participation. Traditional cultures did not generally understand humans as isolated consumers of spiritual information. People gathered. They sang. They told stories. They made vows before witnesses. They remembered their dead. They carried inherited obligations. They participated in the maintenance of a shared moral world.
The skald did not simply deliver “content.”
The community did not merely observe.
Everyone present became part of the remembering.
This is radically different from a spirituality centered on private revelation, personal vibration, or self-created metaphysical truth. The well does not belong to the isolated ego. It contains the memory of relationships—between the living, the dead, the Gods, the land, and those yet to come.
What we place into that well matters.
Bragi, Carl Emil Doepler, 1882. Bragi, the Norse god of poetry and eloquence, represents speech as sacred craft: words shaped through memory, rhythm, truth, and responsibility. The skald does not merely entertain, but gives voice to the stories and values through which a people remembers itself. Public domain.
No One Can Embody Truth on Our Behalf
Christianity famously places the words “I am the way, the truth, and the life” into the mouth of Jesus.
In that worldview, truth is ultimately embodied in and accessed through a singular salvific figure. The believer is asked to place faith in that figure and the theological claims made about him.
The Heathen framework explored here places the emphasis elsewhere.
Truth is not merely a person to profess belief in. It is a standard we must demonstrate through conduct.
No savior can keep our promises for us.
No doctrine can repair the trust we have broken.
No spiritual identity can substitute for honest speech.
No declaration of belief can transform dishonorable behavior into honorable behavior.
Truth must be renewed each time we speak carefully, fulfill a commitment, admit a wrong, make recompense, resist convenient deception, or allow our actions to bear the weight of what we have claimed.
It must be breathed and lived.
The Question Before Us
My upcoming conversation with Torna Braggison will explore the relationship between Ond, speech, oath, honor, memory, galdr, storytelling, and spiritual power.
But beneath the terminology lies a deeply human question.
What kind of person does my speech reveal me to be?
Do my words give life, orientation, and trust to the people around me?
Do I make promises carelessly?
Have I confused saying the right things with becoming an honorable person?
Have I demanded truth from others while excusing dishonesty in myself?
And when I fail, am I willing to make recompense rather than simply inventing a more flattering story about what happened?
Truth is not merely the absence of false information.
It is the alignment of breath, speech, memory, promise, and deed.
It is the weight accumulated when we repeatedly prove that our words can be trusted.
It is what we place into the well.
It is what others will remember.
And it is what remains when every attractive spiritual claim has been stripped away and only our conduct is left to speak for us.
The Lessons of Asgard– WorldTree Publications, 36pgs. Completely revised, with original kennings to the Gods by Torna Braggison. An introductory study of the principle Gods & Goddesses in the lore.
On metabolism, nourishment, food reverence, and the systems that shape what feeds us
Welcome back to Taste0fTruth Tuesdays. Today, we are mixing things up with a subject that is very near and dear to my heart: nutrition, metabolism, and our increasingly distorted relationship with food in our modern world.
This episode covers a lot of ground. We are moving from diet culture and my own history with restriction into metabolism, morality, industrial food, local agriculture, and the growing technological control of our food systems. It may sound like several different conversations, but they are all part of the same story.
This episode will also lay some of the groundwork for an upcoming interview at the end of the month with Jay Feldman Wellness.
Jay is a health coach, independent health researcher, and host of The Energy Balance Podcast. His work explores bioenergetic health and nutrition, including ideas influenced by biologist Ray Peat—principles I have found myself returning to, on and off, for the last several years.
But before we get there, I need to explain why this conversation is so personal for me.
As many of you know, I have spent more than 20 years in the health and fitness world. I have also written openly about how intense and complicated that journey has been.
I came of age during the late 1990s and early 2000s, an era saturated with diet magazines, celebrity weight-loss stories, low-fat everything, Special K commercials, “bikini body” workouts, and television programs that treated shrinking the body as both entertainment and moral achievement.
And those cultural messages did not exist in isolation.
I grew up in a household where my body was not simply noticed. It was scrutinized, compared, and commented on.
Those kinds of comments do not disappear with time. They become part of the architecture of how you see yourself. They follow you into mirrors, fitting rooms, photographs, swimming pools, doctors’ offices, and every room where you become aware that other people can see your body.
They teach you that the body must be managed and monitored.
They plant the belief that remaining small is the price of safety.
I grew up believing that if I could control my body well enough, I could avoid humiliation. I could avoid becoming the punchline. I could avoid being seen in the wrong way.
For a while, I turned that fear into something our culture rewards: discipline.
But fear does not stop being fear simply because it learns the vocabulary of health and fitness.
In high school, I followed plans like the Special K diet. I relied on Carnation Instant Breakfast instead of complete meals. I skipped classes to work out before heading to my afterschool job. My protein intake was low. My fear of gaining weight was high.
Restriction became familiar.
And because restriction was praised as willpower, I did not always recognize it as deprivation.
That is the background I bring into this conversation. I am not critiquing calorie culture because I have never understood its appeal. I understand it intimately.
Numbers can feel safe.
Numbers feel objective. They offer the illusion that if you calculate carefully enough, track consistently enough, and exert enough control, the body will become predictable. Calories give food a score. The scale gives the body a verdict. And when you have learned to fear your own appetite, arithmetic can feel more trustworthy than sensation.
I have lived through periods in which weight loss looked like success from the outside while my body was becoming increasingly undernourished, stressed, depleted, and disconnected from its own signals.
So when I say that weight loss and health are not synonymous, trust me: I learned that lesson the hard way.
That is why I am interested in the bioenergetic perspective. Rather than asking only, “How little can I eat to make the number on the scale decrease?” it asks a more useful question:
How well is the body actually producing and using energy?
This episode is not intended to settle every claim made within bioenergetic nutrition. That is part of what I want to explore with Jay during our upcoming conversation.
Today, I want to lay the groundwork by examining the difference between consuming calories and producing usable cellular energy; between losing weight and becoming healthy; and between treating food as a number and understanding it as biological information, ecological relationship, and participation in a living system.
Because the body is not simply a furnace. Food is not merely a number.
And losing weight is definitely not proof that a person is nourished or healthy while doing so.
Modern nutrition has flattened food into arithmetic while removing almost everything that makes it meaningful.
SAD is the perfect acronym for the Standard American Diet because, whew, it really is sad what modern food culture has become.
And I do not just mean sad in the obvious “everyone is eating ultra-processed food and wondering why they feel terrible” kind of way. I mean sad in the deeper sense.
Sad as in spiritually impoverished.
Sad as in disconnected from land, animals, seasons, labor, gratitude, death, and actual nourishment.
Sad as in we have managed to turn food (one of the most intimate relationships a human being has with the living world) into a bland, plastic-wrapped transaction between a lonely person and a microwave, or a vehicle going to a fast food drive thru window.
That sounds dramatic.
But is it really?
We live in a culture that calls ultra-processed food “good enough,” celebrates weight loss regardless of how it was achieved, and then treats anyone who questions that framework as judgmental, elitist, or unnecessarily intense.
But that is exactly the problem.
Our culture has reduced food to numbers while stripping it of meaning. Calories. Macros. Points. Deficits. Cheat meals. Protein hacks. Low-cal swaps. “If It Fits Your Macros.” (I lived and breathed that lifestyle) We talk about food like it is accounting, not relationship. Like the human body is a calculator.
Of course, calories matter. I am not pretending energy balance is fake. But if your entire health philosophy begins and ends with calorie math, you are missing the human being attached to the equation.
Food is not only fuel. Food is information. Food sends a signal. Food affects insulin, thyroid output, leptin, ghrelin, cortisol, digestion, gut signaling, inflammation, mitochondrial function, cell communication, mood, cravings, satiety, sleep, fertility, and gene expression. A Hot Pocket and a grass-fed steak may both contain calories, but they do not speak the same biological language once they enter the body.
The lie of “calories in, calories out” must die.
Not because energy does not matter. It does. But because reducing food to calorie math is one of the dumbest things modern nutrition culture has done to the human body.
A calorie is a unit of energy, but the number printed on a label cannot tell us how effectively a food will be digested, absorbed, converted into ATP, or allocated among the body’s competing demands. That process requires minerals, vitamins, enzymes, hormones, functioning mitochondria, adequate protein, and a body that is not constantly underfed, inflamed, stressed, or depleted.
This is where the “just eat less” crowd loses the plot.
Most people are not building truly nutrient-dense meals, even when they think they are. They may be tracking protein, counting calories, or hitting some macro target, while still missing the deeper nourishment their body needs to actually turn food into energy. If someone is living on refined grains, muscle meats only, no seafood, low mineral intake, low variety, and almost no traditional foods, they can be “hitting their calories” while still undersupplying some of the micronutrients and cofactors involved in energy metabolism, tissue repair, and hormonal function.
But producing energy is only part of the story.
The body must also decide where that energy goes.
Mitochondrial psychobiologist Martin Picard and his colleagues have proposed an emerging framework called the Energy Constraint model. Their central idea is that the body operates with a limited but dynamic energy budget that must continually be allocated across cells, organs, systems, and behaviors.
Everything costs energy.
Neurons firing costs energy. Producing proteins costs energy. Mounting an immune response costs energy. Digestion, movement, cognition, reproduction, tissue repair, and communication between cells all carry energetic costs.
Nothing is free in biology.
Hierarchy of Energy Needs. From @martinpicard, “Energy Constraint on Health,” based on the Energy Constraint framework developed by Alexander Behnke, Evan Shaulson, Herman Pontzer, Chris Kempes, Martin Picard, and colleagues. Reproduced with permission from Martin Picard. Original article and primary paper linked here.
In their framework, the body’s energetic demands can be divided into three broad categories: vital functions; stress responses; and growth, maintenance, and repair.
At the base are the vital functions necessary to sustain life in the immediate term: breathing, heart activity, brain function, membrane potential, ion exchange, and basic metabolism. These processes receive priority because they are necessary for survival over minutes, hours, and days.
The next category includes stress-related demands. Exercise is a stressor. So are infection, inflammation, toxins, psychological distress, injury, sleep loss, and activation of the sympathetic nervous system. All of these require the body to spend energy responding and adapting.
At the top are growth, maintenance, and repair. These processes may not be essential for surviving the next several minutes, but they are essential for healing, resilience, muscle maintenance, reproduction, cognition, motivation, vitality, and long-term health.
When the body’s total demands become difficult to sustain, energy is not distributed evenly. More urgent vital and stress-related processes may be prioritized while investment in growth, maintenance, and repair becomes compressed.
In other words, the body may preserve what is necessary to keep you alive while reducing what is available to help you recover, reproduce, think clearly, maintain muscle, and feel fully alive.
This does not mean these higher functions simply switch off in a rigid order. It means the body makes trade-offs.
And duration matters.
Not every stressor is harmful. Exercise itself temporarily redirects energy, but when it is appropriately dosed and followed by sufficient nourishment, sleep, and recovery, the body can adapt and become more resilient.
The deeper problem is stress that becomes excessive, chronic, or inescapable.
When energetic demands continue for weeks, months, or years—whether from illness, infection, psychological stress, overtraining, sleep disruption, undernourishment, or some combination of pressures—the body may repeatedly postpone the repair work that was supposed to happen later.
This framework helps explain how someone can technically be eating enough calories (or even losing weight successfully) while experiencing fatigue, poor recovery, low libido, disrupted cycles, reduced motivation, brain fog, loss of muscle, or declining resilience.
It does not mean every one of those symptoms has a single energetic cause. But it gives us a much richer way of understanding health than simply asking whether someone stayed within a calorie target.
The body is not failing to obey an equation.
It is adapting to competing demands.
Nutrient status is only one part of this energetic landscape, but it is an important one. The body’s ability to produce, allocate, and use energy is also shaped by sleep, illness, stress, activity, mitochondrial function, recovery, and the cumulative demands being placed upon it.
This is why vitamins and minerals matter so much. They are not little bonus points sprinkled on top of a diet. They are part of the machinery that turns food into usable energy. They help build hormones and neurotransmitters, repair tissue, maintain immune function, support the liver, regulate the nervous system, and keep the organs doing their jobs.
Or said more simply: macronutrients burn on the flame of micronutrients.
That is the part calorie math misses. A Hot Pocket and a mineral-rich, protein-rich, whole-food meal may both contain calories, but they do not offer the body the same tools. One delivers energy potential wrapped in industrial convenience. The other provides the raw materials the body needs to actually build, repair, signal, regulate, and produce real cellular energy.
So when people say “it’s just calories in, calories out,” what I hear is a worldview that has confused potential with function.
A body is not helped by potential alone. It needs conversion. It needs nourishment. It needs signal. It needs minerals, protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, salt, sunlight, rest, and rhythm.
Food is not just a number entering a furnace. Food is a set of instructions entering a living system. And if the instructions are poor, incomplete, synthetic, depleted, or chaotic, the body will respond accordingly.
This is where the lazy appeal to “thermodynamics” becomes almost comical. Yes, the laws of thermodynamics exist. Congratulations. But the human body is not a closed metal box in a lab. It is a living, adaptive, self-regulating organism. Inputs change outputs. Food changes appetite, energy expenditure, hormones, cravings, sleep, mood, metabolic rate, and behavior. The “calories out” side is not fixed. It responds to the quality, timing, and composition of what we eat.
Rupert Sheldrake has criticized the way modern science can harden living systems into dead-mechanistic models, and that critique fits here. The calorie model treats the body like a machine. But we are not machines. We are organisms. Food is not merely burned. It is received, interpreted, metabolized, stored, signaled, and woven into the body.
So yes, calories matter. But “calories in, calories out” as a complete theory of health is basically nutritional kindergarten, and it’s time to grow out of that.
But calorie reductionism is only one way modern food culture disconnects us from the complexity of nourishment.
We also have a tendency to turn eating into a moral identity. Foods become clean or dirty, virtuous or shameful. Diets promise not only better health, but innocence: a way to eat without exploitation, suffering, contradiction, or death.
I understand the appeal of that promise because I lived inside it.
I was vegetarian for years. At the time, I genuinely believed it was both the healthier and more ethical choice. I cared about animals. I still do—deeply. I did not want to participate in harm if I could avoid it.
But eventually, health-wise, vegetarianism stopped working for me. My body was not thriving. Practitioners I trusted encouraged me to reconsider whether I was receiving enough protein and nourishment, and over time I began incorporating animal foods again. That transition gradually led me toward a more pro-metabolic, ancestral approach to food.
I am not as critical of vegetarianism as I am of veganism because vegetarian diets can still include many traditional, deeply nourishing foods: eggs, butter, cheese, milk, yogurt, cream, and honey. These foods can still connect us to animals, farms, fermentation, older foodways, and the forms of nourishment on which human communities have relied for generations.
Veganism is different. I understand the moral impulse behind it. But modern veganism often depends heavily on the very industrial food system it imagines itself resisting.
It often depends upon global supply chains, fortified products, industrial monocrops, protein isolates, seed oils, and laboratory-like replacements for foods that once came directly from local land, animals, kitchens, and communities.
That does not describe every vegan meal or every person who avoids animal foods. But veganism as a widely accessible modern lifestyle has been made possible, in large part, by the industrialization and globalization of food. It became easier to imagine a diet detached from local ecology only after the modern food system detached nearly everyone from local ecology.
Before supermarket abundance, refrigerated transport, synthetic supplementation, and year-round imports, diets were far more directly shaped by region, climate, labor, animals, seasons, preservation, and survival.
This is what troubles me about the moral certainty that can surround veganism. Morality can bind us around compassion, but it can also blind us to costs outside the frame we have chosen. A person may avoid animal foods while remaining dependent upon monocropping, habitat loss, exploited labor, heavily processed substitutes, and corporations with no meaningful relationship to the land being depleted.
The suffering has not necessarily disappeared.
It has moved out of sight.
An ethical identity can become so focused on the visible animal that it loses sight of soil, insects, wildlife, farmers, rural communities, and the ecological relationships required to sustain human life.
This is why I keep thinking about survival programs like Alone. You do not typically see people in genuine survival conditions adhering to rigid dietary identities made possible by modern abundance. They eat the carbohydrates they can gather. They fish, hunt, forage, trap, and preserve whatever food the environment makes available.
A television program does not settle the ethical debate. But it does expose how much our modern food identities depend upon stability, infrastructure, supplements, supermarkets, and global abundance.
Most of us have no idea what we would actually eat if supermarkets, refrigeration, restaurants, and global supply chains disappeared.
It is easy to construct an identity around dietary purity while standing beneath fluorescent lights in a store containing food from every climate on Earth.
Survival has a way of stripping ideology down to appetite, ecology, and availability.
The point I’m trying to make here, is the deeper problem is not simply meat. It is our total disconnection from food itself.
The Standard American Diet is not built around reverence. It is built around convenience, profit, shelf life, hyper-palatability, and perpetual consumption. It is often high in refined carbohydrates and industrial fats, low in nutrient density, easy to overeat, and engineered to override the body’s natural signals.
It keeps people fed but not nourished.
Full but not satisfied. Stimulated but depleted.
I do not blame meat itself for the sickness of modern food culture. I blame the collapse of small and local food systems. I blame industrial agriculture and the consolidation of food production. I blame ultra-processed convenience food. I blame the severing of people from land, seasons, animals, kitchens, skills, and community.
I blame a culture in which people no longer know where their food comes from, what it took to produce it, or what kind of life and death made it possible.
Because that is the uncomfortable truth: death is always involved in food.
Neither vegetarianism nor veganism remove death from the food system. Fields are cleared. Habitats are displaced. Soil life is disrupted. Insects, birds, rodents, snakes, rabbits, and countless unseen creatures are killed through large-scale crop production. Farm workers are exploited. Water is diverted. Communities are transformed to serve distant markets.
Even a plate composed entirely of plants carries a cost.
That does not mean all dietary choices are morally equivalent. It means purity is not available to us. The moral task is not to imagine that we have escaped the web of life and death. It is to become more conscious of how we participate in it.
Nature is a total system, and within that totality it is not morally tidy.
We often use the word “natural” as if it means good, pure, balanced, or morally clean. But nature does not produce constant perfection. Nature produces totality. Beauty and monstrosity. Strength and weakness. Flourishing and failure. Healthy forms, botched forms, failed adaptations, extinction, decay, renewal.
Food belongs to that same uncomfortable order. There is no pure way to eat outside of life, death, appetite, cost, and consequence. The fantasy of a morally spotless diet is just another modern escape hatch from reality.
Morality works in a similar way. It is not merely a list of rules imposed from above. It is an energy-management system. It curbs violence, lust, greed, vengeance, ambition, and appetite so a group can maintain some version of peace. Morality contains the passions so they do not destroy the social body.
At both the personal and social level, morality determines which appetites may be expressed, which must be restrained, and which costs remain visible.
And maybe this is why modern food culture feels so spiritually sick. It has stopped containing appetite. It does not discipline desire. It engineers it. It stimulates it. It tells us we can eat industrially manufactured, hyper-palatable food and reduce the whole thing to calorie math, as if the body is not receiving signals, adapting, craving, storing, resisting, inflaming, and remembering.
Food is energy, yes. But not in the dead mechanical sense. Food is energy moving through a living moral and biological system.
That is why “calories in, calories out” feels so thin. It treats food as if it enters a furnace. But food enters a body. And bodies are not furnaces. Bodies are fields of signal, memory, hunger, restraint, ancestry, hormone, and meaning.
I completely understand the discomfort around eating conscious animals. I have read so many stories from first-time farmers who raise animals with love and then struggle deeply when it is time for slaughter. That pain means something. I respect it. Honestly, I trust that pain more than the numbness of the average grocery store shopper tossing factory-farmed meat into a cart with no thought at all.
The pain shows there is still reverence there.
And maybe that is what we have lost most.
We have been removed from the reality of food for so long that we tend to swing between two false extremes. On one side, we sentimentalize animals from a distance and pretend we can opt out of the death cycle entirely. On the other hand, we consume without thought, without gratitude, without responsibility, without even a pause. Both are forms of disconnection.
The more honest path, at least for me, is not pretending death can be removed from food. It is learning to approach food with more gratitude, humility, and responsibility.
That means caring about how animals are raised. It means caring about soil. It means caring about farmers. It means caring about local food systems. It means asking whether our food builds health or slowly drains it from us. It means understanding that “cheap” food often has hidden costs paid somewhere else, by animals, by land, by farm workers, by our own bodies, by our children, and by our communities.
And yes, it also means having higher standards.
I am tired of the cultural pressure to pretend that all food choices are basically the same as long as the calories work out. They are not. A calorie deficit may lead to weight loss, but weight loss is not the same as nourishment. You can lose weight while eating foods that do very little to support your metabolism, hormones, digestion, mood, or long-term health. You can shrink a body while starving it of what it actually needs.
Real nourishment asks more of us.
It asks us to pay attention. It asks us to recover old skills. It asks us to cook, to preserve, to source better when we can, and to know the difference between food shaped by land, animals, microbes, seasons, and human hands—and food assembled in a factory to survive for months in a freezer.
This is where food becomes spiritual for me.
Not spiritual in the vague influencer sense. Not “raise your vibes with an açai smoothie bowl” nonsense.
I mean spiritual in the older, more connected to earth sense: eating is an act of dependence, participation, and transformation.
Rudolf Steiner once approached nutrition through the idea that eating is never merely mechanical. Whatever one makes of his more esoteric language, I think there is something valuable in the underlying insight: food does not simply enter the body and disappear into a calorie ledger. The body must meet it, break it down, transform it, and incorporate it into the self.
What was once sunlight, soil, rain, grass, grain, fruit, milk, muscle, mineral, or microbial life becomes blood, tissue, hormone, neurotransmitter, heat, thought, movement, and memory.
Eating is one of the most literal ways the world becomes us.
That alone should make the act feel less trivial.
We are not floating minds temporarily renting bodies. We are dependent creatures. We require soil, water, sunlight, animals, plants, microbes, farmers, bees, rain, death, decay, and renewal. Every meal places us inside a web of relationships whether we acknowledge them or not.
And this means that food may shape more than our body weight.
What we eat can influence energy, mood, cognition, resilience, inflammation, digestion, and the clarity with which we move through the world. I do not mean that one perfect diet produces spiritual enlightenment, or that illness reflects moral or spiritual failure. Food is not a purity test.
But neither is it neutral.
The quality of what we repeatedly take into the body helps shape the material conditions through which we think, feel, recover, create, and relate to others.
Modern food culture wants us to forget all of this.
It wants food to be easy, cheap, fast, addictive, and morally weightless. It wants us to believe that a frozen pocket of refined flour, industrial oils, modified starches, sodium, flavoring agents, and processed ham is simply another option.
Just calories.
Just convenience.
Just people doing their best.
But I do not believe “doing our best” means lowering our standards until nothing matters. Nor do I believe the answer is to shame ordinary people for choosing the foods that our economic and agricultural systems have made cheap, available, familiar, and nearly effortless.
It is easy to preach ancestral nourishment from a well-stocked kitchen.
A serious food ethic must also account for price, time, disability, geography, cooking knowledge, working conditions, and access. Reverence that only the wealthy can afford is not reverence.
That does not mean pretending a Hot Pocket and a nutrient-dense meal are biologically or spiritually interchangeable. They are not.
It means directing our anger beyond the individual shopper and toward a system that has made industrial convenience easier to obtain than genuine nourishment—and then taught us to call that arrangement freedom.
But reverence cannot remain an individual lifestyle choice.
Our relationship with food is shaped by the systems surrounding us: what is affordable, what is available, what is subsidized, what is processed, what is imported, and what people realistically have the time and energy to prepare.
It is one thing to tell people to eat closer to the land. It is another to live inside an economy that has made industrial food cheaper, faster, and more accessible than the local, nutrient-dense food we claim to value.
So, this is not only a question of personal responsibility.
It is also a question of access, power, and who controls the conditions under which nourishment is produced and distributed.
As of May 2026, grocery prices were 2.7 percent higher than they had been one year earlier. Fruits and vegetables were up 6.1 percent. Food away from home was up 3.5 percent. Meanwhile, overall energy prices had risen 23.5 percent over the same period. These increases are layered on top of years of cumulative inflation, and they shape what families can realistically put on the table. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Consumer Price Index Summary—May 2026.” June 10, 2026.
At the same time, the infrastructure surrounding American agriculture is becoming increasingly centralized and digitized.
In February 2026, the USDA announced its “One Farmer, One File” initiative, which is intended to create a single record following each farmer across the Farm Service Agency, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and Risk Management Agency. The department says the system will reduce duplicated paperwork, retire outdated technology, improve program delivery, and be completed in 2028.
“Protecting America’s farmland is protecting America itself, and this work gives USDA the visibility and speed needed to safeguard our food supply,” said USDA Chief Information Officer Sam Berry.
The government presents this as modernization: faster services, stronger cybersecurity, reduced fraud, better disaster response, and greater protection of American farmland and the food supply. Some of those goals are understandable. Farmers should not have to enter the same information into a dozen broken government systems. Disaster assistance should not be trapped behind obsolete technology. Modernization is not inherently sinister.
But neither is it irrational to ask questions when enormous amounts of agricultural information are consolidated through a company deeply involved in defense, intelligence, surveillance, and government analytics.
Who controls the data? Who is permitted to access it? How is that access audited?
Can information gathered for one purpose later be used for another?
What happens when one private contractor becomes embedded deeply enough in public infrastructure that removing it becomes nearly impossible?
How are farmers protected from political misuse, commercial exploitation, cybersecurity failures, or policies imposed by people who understand data models far better than they understand soil, weather, livestock, and living ecosystems?
Food is not merely another sector to be optimized.
Agriculture is biological, regional, unpredictable, and rooted in relationships that cannot be fully represented on a dashboard. Technology may assist farmers. Data may make government programs more efficient. But efficiency and resilience are not the same thing, and greater visibility from the top does not automatically create greater security on the ground.
A resilient food system requires more than centralized information.
It requires independent farmers, healthy soil, regional processing facilities, seed diversity, local knowledge, accessible markets, functioning supply chains, and communities that retain some capacity to feed themselves. It requires people who know how to grow something, preserve something, cook something, and recognize nourishment before a corporation packages and markets it back to them.
That is why the spiritual, biological, economic, and political dimensions of food cannot be separated.
The same reductionist worldview that treats the body as a furnace can treat the farm as a data point.
The same culture that reduces nourishment to calories can reduce agriculture to output.
The same system that tells us a calorie is a calorie can tell us that control is merely efficiency and dependence is merely convenience.
I reject both forms of reductionism.
A body is not a furnace to be calculated.
A farm is not a monocrop to be optimized or a data file to be controlled.
Food is not merely fuel, inventory, content, or data.
It is soil transformed by sunlight. It is water, labor, death, digestion, memory, culture, and life passing into life. To control food is to touch the most intimate point of contact between the individual body, the community, and the living world.
So, the question is no longer only whether we can eat without forgetting.
It is whether we can remember soon enough to reclaim some agency over what feeds us.
What Christianity Absorbed, Built, and Left Behind
Listen as you read here!
People say this all the time.
That the West got its ideas about pluralism, tolerance, and liberty from Christianity. That without it, there would be no concept of human dignity, no rights, no freedom in the modern sense. And that if those things feel unstable now, the solution is simple: return to the source.
The claim that pluralism, tolerance, and liberty are direct inheritances of Christianity is not just oversimplified. It reverses the historical pattern.
In Part 1, I pushed back on the idea that Christianity “founded the West” in any clean or singular sense, or that returning to it offers an obvious path forward. In Part 2, I stepped back and looked at something more fundamental: the fragility of freedom itself. Not as an abstract ideal, but as a social order that depends on limits, restraint, and a population capable of sustaining it. More importantly, I looked at how quickly that order begins to break down when those conditions are no longer present.
Across the responses to both pieces, there was a shared sense that something is not working. Not just politically, not just culturally, but at a deeper level that is harder to name.
One way to make sense of that is to stop looking for a single cause and start looking at how the whole inheritance fits together.
Western civilization did not develop along one track. It emerged through multiple layers operating at the same time. At a minimum, those layers include institutions, culture, and psychology.
Institutions include law, political authority, and the distribution of power. Culture includes religion, tradition, identity, and shared meaning. Psychology includes the moral instincts people use to interpret the world: instincts tied to fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, harm, belonging, and threat.
For long stretches of time, those layers reinforced one another. Institutions reflected shared values. Cultural traditions gave meaning to authority. Moral instincts were channeled through forms of life that provided both order and legitimacy.
But that fit was never permanent.
When those layers begin to pull apart, the result is not merely disagreement. It is instability.
That is the backdrop for this final piece.
The goal here is not to argue that Christianity caused the West, or that it deserves credit for everything people now associate with Western civilization. It is also not to reduce Christianity to a purely destructive force. Both approaches distort the picture in different ways.
The same problem appears in the phrase “Judeo-Christian values.” This often creates the impression of a smooth and unified inheritance, when the actual history is far more fractured. Judaism and Christianity are related, but they are not interchangeable. Christianity did not simply preserve Jewish covenantal thought. It reinterpreted it, universalized it, and claimed fulfillment over it. A tradition rooted in a particular people, law, land, and covenant was recast as a universal message for all mankind.
This repositioning changed the role of religion entirely. It no longer sits alongside other domains. It began to judge them.
It loosened religion from peoplehood and place. It made belief itself the primary marker of belonging. And once belief becomes the primary boundary, disagreement takes on a different moral weight.
Today’s article will address the harder question:
What did Christianity reorganize, what did it scale, and what did it leave unstable?
Because Christianity’s real inheritance was not simply compassion, liberty, or dignity. It reshaped how belief, authority, identity, and moral obligation functioned at a civilizational level. It expanded moral language in ways that could operate across large populations, but it also introduced sharper boundaries between true and false belief, salvation and error, belonging and exclusion.
That combination, expansion on one side and constraint on the other, is where the inheritance becomes complicated.
McClees, Helen and Christine Alexander. 1933. The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans: As Illustrated in the Classical Collections, 5th ed. pp. 131, 133, fig. 159, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
SECTION I: THE GOOD What Christianity Absorbed and Reorganized
Before getting into what Christianity actually contributed, it’s worth being clear about what is usually attributed to it.
A moral framework. Stable family structures. The unification of fragmented tribal societies into something resembling a shared civilization. A sense of cohesion strong enough to hold large populations together.
Those developments did happen. The question is where they came from…
Because none of those things begin with Christianity. They depend on something older: stability across generations, shared practices, inherited obligations, and a way of life that binds people before it explains itself.
That is what tradition is.
The word itself comes from the Latin traditio: a handing over, a passing down, something delivered across generations. But that definition only gets you so far. Tradition is not just a set of ideas preserved in texts or doctrines. It is lived. It shows up in habits, rituals, inherited gestures, seasonal rhythms, family patterns, and the quiet repetition of things people do not always stop to explain but continue to do anyway.
It exists in the structure of daily life.
You see it most clearly in how societies deal with death.
Long before Christianity became dominant in Europe, burial practices already reflected a deep sense of connection between the living and the dead. In the Stone Age, communities used mass graves in caves or pits. Later, megalithic cultures constructed communal tombs that anchored memory to specific places. Indo-European groups developed barrows and cremation practices that changed over time while preserving the same underlying logic.
The dead were not discarded. They were placed, remembered, and integrated into the ongoing life of the community.
Tradition, in that sense, is not something invented at a particular moment. It is something carried forward, shaped and reshaped over time without losing its original intention.
Christianity enters into that world rather than creating it from scratch.
What changes is not the existence of tradition, but its scale and its organizing thought.
Earlier religious life was largely tied to local identity: tribe, land, household, ancestry, city, and people. Christianity expands beyond that. It speaks in universal terms and builds a shared symbolic order that can operate across regions and populations that do not share the same lineage, gods, rituals, or customs.
That increases the reach of the moral imagination.
Concern no longer stops at the boundary of immediate belonging. It extends outward, attaching value to individuals beyond their role within a specific family, tribe, or city. Over time, that broader vision feeds into developments people now associate with the Western inheritance: ideas about dignity, education, care for the poor, moral responsibility, and obligation toward those outside one’s immediate circle.
But this is typically where the story gets oversimplified.
Those impulses did not originate with Christianity. Traditions within the Greco-Roman world had already developed forms of civic responsibility, philanthropy, patronage, public works, and mutual obligation. Grain distributions, civic benefaction, philosophical ethics, and local forms of duty were not Christian inventions.
But even the Greco-Roman world was not self-contained. It had already absorbed influences from older and neighboring civilizations (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Phoenician) through trade, conquest, and cultural exchange. As scholars like Martin L. West and Walter Burkert have shown, Greek thought itself was shaped in part by these eastern traditions.
The ancient world was not morally empty before the church arrived. It was already layered, interconnected, and carrying forward inherited forms of order, obligation, and meaning.
You can see this clearly in Stoic thought. Christianity is often treated as if it introduced universal human concern into a cruel and indifferent ancient world. Stoicism already spoke in universal terms. It could describe human beings as participants in a shared moral order and extend concern beyond tribe, city, or immediate kinship.
But the structure was different.
The bronze Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, Capitoline Hill, Rome.
Runar Thorsteinsson’s comparison of Roman Christianity and Roman Stoicism helps clarify the distinction. Stoicism could speak of universal humanity without making moral belonging depend on conversion to a saving truth. Early Christianity, by contrast, carried a universal message while also drawing a sharper boundary around religious adherence. Its moral vision expanded outward, but it did so through a division between those inside and outside the saving order.
Christianity did not invent universal concern but it did reorganize it.
It took older moral instincts, philosophical ideas, Jewish inheritance, Roman scale, and local traditions, then bound them into a universal religious narrative. It gave those instincts a broader scope, a more unified story, and a more durable institutional form.
But expansion alone does not explain why a civilization holds together.
A social order lasts when it fits the way people already experience the world.
People do not move through life as detached rational observers. They respond through instinct: loyalty and betrayal, fairness and injustice, authority and rebellion, purity and contamination, belonging and threat. These instincts do not operate on their own. They cluster.
In more traditional societies, moral intuitions tend to reinforce one another. Care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred operate together rather than pulling apart. Even when people disagree, they often draw from the same underlying moral vocabulary when interpreting what is happening around them.
That shared moral vocabulary gives a society stability.
Christianity operated at that level.
It did not simply present moral rules. It gave instinct narrative form and placed it inside a larger story about meaning, suffering, hierarchy, obligation, sin, redemption, and ultimate reality. It offered a way of interpreting the world itself.
For people living in unstable conditions, where political authority could be inconsistent and survival uncertain, that kind of story organized experience. It offered coherence in a world that might otherwise feel random. It placed individuals inside a larger order and gave meaning to suffering, duty, death, and loss.
Once that fit took hold between cultural meaning, institutional power, and moral instinct, it became difficult to dislodge.
At the same time, Christianity did not remain completely closed off to innovative thought. Even within a religious order that emphasized authority and inherited truth, there were moments where that inheritance was tested from within.
Peter Abelard represents one of those moments.
His importance lies less in the drama of his life and more in the method he applied to truth itself. The intellectual world he entered was structured around inherited authority. Figures like Augustine were treated as settled voices, and the role of the student was often to understand, organize, and transmit what had already been established.
Peter Abelard with Book Giclee
Reasoning had a place, but it operated within limits. It was expected to clarify, not destabilize.
Abelard did not reject the tradition from the outside. He worked within it and exposed its internal tensions. In Sic et Non, he placed authoritative statements side by side in a way that made contradiction difficult to ignore.
If these sources were meant to provide certainty, why did they diverge so sharply?
If truth had already been handed down in a unified form, why did it fracture under comparison?
He treated those questions as a starting point rather than a threat to avoid.
“For it is from doubt that we arrive at questioning, and in questioning we arrive at truth.”
That quote represents the change in intellectual posture.
Instead of beginning with certainty and using reason to defend it, Abelard begins with tension and uses reason to work through it. Authority alone no longer settles the issue. Claims must be examined, language clarified, and assumptions tested.
Once questioning becomes legitimate, authority can no longer rely on transmission alone. It now has to also persuade.
Abelard pushed beyond accepted limits. He applied reason to doctrines often treated as beyond rational explanation and placed greater emphasis on intention in moral evaluation. In doing so, he opened space for a more nuanced understanding of ethics, one not entirely bound to inherited categories.
The response to him was what you would expect from institutional power.
He was condemned. His works were burned. He was brought before councils that were less interested in exploring his arguments and more so in containing their implications. The reaction showed what was at stake. A religious order grounded in authority does not easily absorb a method that legitimizes doubt.
And yet the method persisted.
Even when his specific conclusions were rejected, the habit of inquiry he modeled proved difficult to suppress. The practice of setting opposing views side by side and working through contradiction became central to scholasticism. The intellectual tradition that later shaped medieval universities carried forward elements of an approach once treated as dangerous.
Abelard does not stand alone as the cause of a broader intellectual reopening. The recovery of classical texts, the reintroduction of Aristotle, contact with Islamic and Jewish scholarship, and the growth of educational institutions all played a role.
What his story represents is the shift in attitude.
Inherited knowledge no longer functions as a sealed inheritance. It became something that can be examined, refined, and, within limits, challenged.
Of course, those constraints never fully disappeared.
Abelard was allowed to question, but not indefinitely. He was permitted to reason, but not without consequence. The same religious culture that made his work possible also defined where it had to stop.
That tension between authority and inquiry did not remain confined to intellectual life. It also carried forward into the institutions that developed over time.
A university lecture (an illustration from the second half of the 14th century).
The medieval university is one of the clearest places to see this pattern at work. Often treated as a distinctly Christian achievement, it grew out of a much broader mix of influences.
In Spain, Baghdad, and Cairo, Islamic schools, libraries, and observatories held resources far beyond anything available in much of Europe at the time. Arab, Jewish, and Christian scholars shared intellectual interests through expanding trade networks and translation movements. After the Christian capture of Toledo in 1085, that city became one of the key places where these worlds met, allowing texts to move across languages, traditions, and religious boundaries.
The Western reopening of inquiry did not happen because Europe simply looked inward and rediscovered itself.
It happened because knowledge traveled.
Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle, translated into Latin, became essential sources for thirteenth-century Christian intellectuals, including Thomas Aquinas. That alone should complicate any idea that Christian scholarship developed in isolation. The university absorbed, translated, debated, and reorganized knowledge that had already passed through Greek, Arabic, Jewish, and Latin traditions.
Islamic Astronomers #1 is a photograph by Science Source
Even the structure of medieval universities reflects that broader inheritance. They developed their own corporate identities, governed collectively by masters, with distinct curricula and examination systems. By the late thirteenth century, Master of Arts could vastly outnumber Master of Theology. Historian Charles Freeman notes one example where 120 teachers of the arts were listed against only 15 Masters of Theology. That imbalance tells you what mattered most. The curriculum leaned heavily on classical texts, not purely Christian foundations.
Christian Europe helped institutionalize learning, but the material being organized was older, broader, and more cosmopolitan than the church-centered story suggests. The university becomes another example of Christianity’s larger pattern: it absorbed existing goods, gave them institutional form, and placed them inside its own theological horizon.
But the results did not move in one direction.
The same religious vision that could support care and dignity could also justify hierarchy and control. Because the tradition depended on scriptural interpretation, and interpretation depended on authority, very different conclusions could emerge from the same source material.
That instability is not only a matter of later interpretation. It is already present in the texts themselves.
The Gospels do not present a single, unified account. They offer overlapping portraits that do not fully align.
In Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Mark, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” while in Gospel of John, he concludes, “It is finished.” The tone shifts from abandonment to completion.
The timeline shifts as well, with the Synoptic Gospels placing the final meal at Passover, while John places the crucifixion before it begins.
Even the ethical posture is not entirely consistent: in Matthew, Jesus teaches “turn the other cheek,” while in Luke, he tells his followers, “Let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.”
Taken together, these are not minor discrepancies. They open space for fundamentally different readings of what the tradition demands.
Christianity persists not as a fixed form, but as a tradition capable of producing multiple, competing forms while still claiming continuity.
This becomes especially clear in debates over slavery.
Christians were involved in abolition movements, and that history is part of the record. The language of universal moral equality played a real role in mobilizing opposition to slavery and reshaping moral expectations.
But that is not the whole story.
The same texts were also used to defend slavery, reinforce it, and argue that existing social orders were divinely sanctioned.
That contradiction is not incidental. It reveals something important about the Christian inheritance itself.
A religious order that combines universal moral language with authoritative texts creates the conditions for both expansion and constraint. It can push moral concern outward, but it can also bind that concern within approved categories. The outcome depends on who interprets the texts, which authorities prevail, and what social pressures shape the reading.
Critics of abolitionist movements, including Thomas Carlyle, argued that what they saw as abstract humanitarian concern could override more immediate obligations or practical realities. A contemporary political cartoon captured this dynamic under the phrase “telescopic philanthropy”—a tendency to focus moral concern at a distance while neglecting what is closer at hand.
The point I’m trying to make here is not that concern beyond one’s own group is inherently false or wrong.
The point is that moral expansion creates distance.
The farther a concern stretches, the easier it becomes to neglect concrete obligations close at hand: family, neighbors, local order, inherited duties, and the people one is actually responsible for. Abstract compassion can become morally flattering precisely because it asks less of the person expressing it.
Whether one agrees with those criticisms or not, they point to something very real.
A moral order that expands obligation beyond local belonging gains reach, but it also risks losing proportion. It can elevate the stranger while forgetting the neighbor. It can speak beautifully about mankind while failing the people right in front of it.
Christianity extended moral concern beyond tribe and built institutions that carried that vision forward. But it also introduced pressures around authority, interpretation, exclusion, and the limits of acceptable thought.
The good is real, but…so is the tension inside it.
Christianity’s inheritance was not simply compassion, dignity, or education. It was a moral architecture: universal in scope, institutional in form, inward in psychology, and unstable once detached from the cultural world that had once held it together.
That brings us to our next inquiry.
Not just what Christianity gave the West, but what kind of order made those outcomes possible.
SECTION II — THE BAD
Truth, Authority, and the Limits of Inquiry
At this point, the issue is not simply what happened when Christianity moved from the margins to power. I’ve explored that elsewhere: the suppression of rival systems, the narrowing of acceptable thought, and the long habit of treating competing worldviews not as alternatives to debate, but as errors to contain.
The deeper question here is more structural.
What kind of religious order produces those outcomes in the first place?
Because the shift was a reorganization of how truth operated, how disagreement was handled, and how legitimacy was defined.
Earlier Greco-Roman religious and philosophical life was not tolerant in the modern sense, but it was more comfortable with multiplicity. Rival schools, local cults, household gods, civic rituals, and philosophical traditions could coexist without requiring one totalizing creed to absorb or eliminate the rest. That did not make the ancient world peaceful or morally pure. It did mean that truth was not always treated as one fragile object that had to be protected from every rival.
The Abrahamic worldview introduced something different, often called the “Mosaic distinction.”
God giving the Tablets of the Law to Moses, from a manuscript attributed to Chrétien Legouais, 1325 CE. Image source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque municipal de Rouen
It drew a sharper line between true and false in a way that changed the stakes of disagreement. Belief was no longer simply one option among many. It became a dividing line. Once that line was drawn, alternative ways of seeing the world did not remain neutral. They became errors, and error began to carry drastic consequences beyond private belief.
If truth is singular and binding, then the religious order has to decide what to do with everything outside of it. Some ideas are absorbed. Some are tolerated for a time. Others are pushed out entirely. But none of them sit comfortably alongside it anymore. They exist in tension with the claim that one truth must govern above all others.
As we previously discussed, Christianity is often credited with preserving learning and building universities, and that claim is not false. Medieval universities became important institutions for intellectual training, debate, law, theology, medicine, and philosophy. They helped organize knowledge and gave scholastic inquiry a durable form.
But that achievement has to be kept in proportion.
The medieval university was an achievement, but it was not a recovery of classical freedom. It was classical inheritance under theological supervision.
Ancient philosophy could be studied, but it had to be reconciled with Christian doctrine. Aristotle could return, but not as Aristotle alone. He had to be interpreted through Christian categories, corrected where necessary, and placed beneath revealed truth. Reason was permitted, even sharpened, but it was not sovereign.
The medieval university did not represent inquiry on open ground. It represented inquiry inside boundaries. Reason could clarify doctrine, defend doctrine, organize doctrine, and reconcile contradictions within inherited authorities. But when reason pressed too far against the architecture of belief, the limits became quite visible.
That does not make medieval learning worthless. It makes it conditional.
And that conditionality is the point.
Christian Europe did not simply preserve the classical world. It received it, edited it, baptized it, and constrained it. What could be made useful to the Christian order survived more easily. What threatened that order did not.
This is the kind of intellectual narrowing later critics would recognize in Christianity’s relationship to philosophy. Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology is not aimed at Christianity alone, but it helps name the pattern: open-ended questioning becomes absorbed into a prior explanatory order. Instead of wonder remaining primary, inquiry is routed through established claims about creation, causality, divine order, sin, and salvation.
The question is no longer allowed to remain fully open.
It has to be answered inside the architecture of doctrine.
Once orthodoxy is established it operates within boundaries that have already been set, and stepping outside those boundaries starts to carry not just intellectual consequences, but social ones. Access to authority, education, and influence becomes tied, at least in part, to alignment.
At that point, belief is no longer just something people hold. It becomes something that moves outward, seeking to correct and expand.
SECTION III: THE UGLY
Universalism, Power, and the Moral Afterlife
By the time you reach the modern West, the question is no longer whether Christianity shaped it. That much is obvious. The deeper issue is what, exactly, it left behind, and what happens when the conditions that once sustained that inheritance begin to unravel.
Christianity did not simply introduce a set of beliefs and then fade as those beliefs weakened. It reorganized moral life at a level that persists long after doctrine loses its authority. It changed how individuals understood themselves, how they related to others, where moral responsibility resided, and how truth was expected to move through the world.
The ugly side of the Christian inheritance is not merely universalism. It is universalism with a missionary engine.
Christianity does not simply say, “This is true.” It says truth must be spread. Error must be corrected. The world must be brought into submission to the saving order. That structure changes the meaning of difference. A rival worldview is not merely foreign, local, or ancestral. It becomes spiritually demonic.
And once a difference becomes an error, correction can be justified as mercy.
The religious world Christianity emerges from was already in tension with the surrounding Greek and Roman order. Second Temple Judaism didn’t simply blend into Hellenistic life. Again and again, it resisted it—politically, culturally, religiously.
D. H. Lawrence saw this tendency clearly. In Apocalypse, he describes a fear-driven impulse within Christianity—a refusal to leave other ways of understanding the world intact. Not just disagreement, but the drive to overcome, absorb, or eliminate what stands outside the truth.
That instinct is already embedded in the apocalyptic world Christianity emerges from. Second Temple Judaism carries expectations of final judgment, cosmic conflict, and the ultimate victory of a single, rightful order-the coming of the Moshiach/Messiah.) Christianity inherits that framework and gives it a wider reach.
That is where Christianity’s relationship to Rome becomes essential. Christian universalism did not spread on its own. It moved through the late imperial Roman systems: roads, cities, law, administration, literacy, political centralization, and habits of governance already trained toward scale. The faith did not merely conquer Rome. It also inherited Rome’s machinery.
Rome gave Christianity infrastructure. Christianity gave Rome a sacred moral horizon. Together, they helped produce a form of power that could move across peoples, lands, languages, and customs while claiming to operate in the name of truth rather than mere domination.
This is also why Christianity receives too much credit for goods it did not invent.
One reason it’s treated as the source of Western morality is that it became dominant enough to absorb older goods and narrate them backward as Christian achievements. Care for the poor, philosophical inquiry, civic duty, moral discipline, education, and concern for the common good did not appear out of nowhere when Christianity entered history. Many of these were already present in Greek, Roman, Jewish, and local European worlds. Christianity reorganized them inside its own story.
That reorganization gave them reach.
But it also gave them a new master narrative.
Older traditions were often embedded in particular peoples, places, households, ancestors, cities, gods, calendars, and sacred landscapes. Religion was not just a private belief system. It was woven into the life of a people. Christianity altered that relationship by making belief portable. It could cross borders, override local cults, and create a community defined less by blood, land, or inherited custom than by shared confession.
That is one of the most consequential shifts in Western history.
Christianity weakened the older link between people, place, ancestors, and gods. It did not erase those attachments overnight, and in practice it often absorbed local festivals, sacred sites, and folk customs. But the deeper logic changed. The highest belonging was no longer rooted primarily in the local or ancestral. It was relocated into a universal religious identity.
Conversion, then, was not merely persuasion. It was the remaking of belonging.
A people could be separated from their gods, their rituals, their inherited calendar, their sacred places, and their ancestral memory, then folded into a new universal story that claimed to redeem them while also replacing the world that formed them.
Not every conversion was violent. That would be too simple. Some conversions were gradual, political, strategic, sincere, blended, or partial. But once that universal truth claim became tied to salvation, rival traditions do not remain equal neighbors. They become obstacles to be overcome, errors to be corrected, or remnants to be absorbed.
The First Crusade: Pope Urban II and Jerusalem vs. Diplomatic Unification
The crusades make this structure visible in its most explicit and militarized form.
They were not only political wars. They were religious wars shaped by sacred geography, penitential promise, and the belief that violence could be folded into a redemptive order.
The Crusades did not simply mobilize Europe—they redirected it toward Jerusalem, a sacred center that was not its own.
That does not mean every participant had the same motive, and it does not mean politics, land, wealth, status, and military ambition were irrelevant. Of course they mattered. But the crusading imagination reveals something specific: once warfare is placed inside a sacred story, conquest can be interpreted as obedience, purification, defense, or salvation.
That is the danger of missionary structure joined to power.
It sanctifies expansion.
And this is not confined to medieval history. The same basic pattern can reappear whenever politics inherits religious moral intensity. The opponent is no longer merely wrong about policy. He becomes a threat to truth, justice, salvation, progress, safety, democracy, equality, or whatever sacred term now carries the old theological weight.
At that point, disagreement becomes harder to contain.
The modern West inherited this moral intensity even as explicit Christian authority declined. Most people inherited a world in which Christianity had already begun to lose its grip, but nothing fully replaced it. The rituals became optional. The authority fractured. Yet many of the underlying assumptions remained intact.
What had once been explicitly theological was gradually translated into secular terms.
At the center of that structure is a form of universalism Christianity helped entrench: the idea that all people stand beneath one moral order, that identity is secondary to a broader human category, and that truth applies universally rather than locally. That assumption did not disappear with religious decline. It migrated.
Liberalism, in many of its modern forms, carries that template forward: the individual abstracted from place, lineage, inherited duty, and thick communal belonging, then positioned inside a universal framework of rights, equality, and moral expectation.
The language changes. The structure does not.
The West moved from Christian universalism to liberal universalism without seriously interrogating the universalism itself. It replaced theological justification with philosophical or political justification, but it retained the assumption that the highest moral order transcends particular identities rather than emerging from them.
And what carries forward is not only universal morality, but missionary mentality.
Salvation becomes progress. Sin becomes injustice. Heresy becomes hate. Evangelism becomes activism. The world must still be corrected. The morally backward must still be brought into line.
And the irony is hard to miss. The same people who pride themselves on rejecting religious dogma often reproduce its structure almost perfectly—moral certainty, heresy-hunting, and the impulse to correct and convert, just without calling it religion.
You can see this most clearly in the modern left, especially in its activist and radical edges. What presents itself as political theory often behaves like secularized salvation mythology. The infrastructure is unchanged: the world is broken and the masses need liberation. God is removed, but everything else remains. The heretics still need correction. Sin becomes hierarchy. Salvation becomes self-rule. The missionary doesn’t disappear—he just changes form.
It still sorts people into the righteous and the condemned. It still creates moral taboos. It still treats disagreement as contamination. It still imagines that the world can be redeemed if only the right moral order is imposed—with enough force, shame, education, policy, or institutional pressure.
That is not the absence of Christianity.
It is part of its afterlife.
Later European expansion, and even modern geopolitical projects, often operate within the same structure—intervention framed as liberation, reform, or progress.
Whenever universal moral claims are aligned with power and tied to the belief that truth must spread, action begins to feel necessary rather than optional.
To understand why it persists, and why it adapts so easily across different historical contexts, you have to look at what is happening at a deeper level. Not just in institutions or empires, but within the individual.
Because the most enduring change Christianity introduces is not only institutional.
It is psychological. It altered where morality is located.
In earlier classical traditions, especially in Aristotle, the moral life is oriented outward. The Greek conception of eudaimonia assumes that human beings can develop toward excellence. Flourishing is cultivated through practice, discipline, rational activity, and participation in the world. Character is formed through what one does, and the moral life is outward, embodied, and lived over time within a shared civic and social context.
Christianity, especially through Augustine of Hippo, redirects that focus inward.
The problem is no longer simply what a person does, but what a person is. Human nature itself becomes suspect, marked from the beginning. The doctrine of original sin reframes the individual not as someone developing toward excellence, but as someone starting already compromised. This is not just about isolated wrongdoing. It is about a baseline disorder built into human existence, transmitted across generations, shaping inclination before any conscious choice is made.
From that premise, morality reorganizes itself accordingly. If the problem lies within, then moral evaluation cannot remain limited to outward behavior. It extends inward, into thought, desire, intention, and impulse—the parts of life no one else sees but are still treated as morally significant.
Fra Angelico, The Conversion of St. Augustine (c. 1430−1435)
This becomes structured into daily practice. Monastic traditions classify internal states (temptation, pride, doubt, desire) as if they were items that could be named, tracked, and corrected. Authority expands beyond regulating behavior into defining what counts as acceptable thought, shaping not just action but the boundaries of the inner life itself.
Once it relocates inward, the primary site of regulation is no longer only the community. It is the individual mind, where conscience, guilt, confession, fear, and self-regulation operate continuously, often without any visible external enforcement.
You can see the implications of this in the conflict between Augustine and Pelagius. Pelagius emphasizes human capacity: the ability to choose, improve, and take responsibility for moral development. Augustine rejects that position, insisting on dependence—on God’s grace, on divine intervention, on something beyond human effort.
This is not only a theological disagreement.
It is also a question about agency.
If the individual cannot fully rely on their own capacity to move toward the good, then moral development becomes entangled with God’s authority. Responsibility does not disappear, but it no longer stands on its own. It becomes mediated, conditioned, and in some cases limited, as the individual is situated within a framework that places ultimate transformation outside of purely human reach.
Over time, that tension begins to shape intellectual life as well. Historians like Charles Freeman do not argue that inquiry simply disappeared, but that the conditions surrounding it changed. When belief becomes tied to salvation, and when error carries not only intellectual but spiritual consequences, curiosity itself begins to look different. Questions are no longer neutral exercises. They take on moral weight, and in certain contexts, they begin to carry risk.
Writers like Thomas Paine noticed this and pushed directly against the idea that truth can rest on inherited authority. In The Age of Reason, Paine argues that revelation, once it passes through human hands, can no longer function as unquestionable truth. What begins as divine claim becomes human interpretation, and therefore something that must be examined rather than simply accepted. That move cuts directly against the structure that treats questioning as risk. It reopens the possibility that belief itself should be subject to the same scrutiny as anything else.
Mark A. Noll describes a similar pattern in later Christian intellectual culture: a tendency to preserve belief rather than extend it. Questioning is not always welcomed as curiosity. It can be interpreted as disloyalty, a sign that alignment is weakening rather than deepening. The safest position, in that environment, becomes one of conformity rather than exploration.
The obedient mind is the secure mind.
This is not new. It is already visible earlier in the tradition. The same system that could produce figures like Abelard (where questioning began to reopen) also produces the conditions Noll is describing, where belief becomes something to preserve rather than extend.
The instinct to monitor thought, to moralize disagreement, to treat deviation as more than error—those habits do not emerge in a vacuum. They develop within specific historical conditions, and they persist even as the surrounding language changes.
This is why the internal reorganization matters.
It is not only about doctrine.
It is about how individuals learn to relate to themselves.
If Augustine relocates morality inward, Protestantism amplifies and personalizes that shift. The individual is placed in more direct relation to truth, expected to read, interpret, examine, and align himself without the same mediating structures that once guided that process. Authority does not vanish. It becomes more diffuse and more demanding.
The church hierarchy may weaken in some places, but new pressures emerge through scripture, sermon, household discipline, community surveillance, literacy, and conscience. The individual is made more responsible before God, but also more exposed.
The burden of interpretation moves further into the self.
Over time, that inward structure detaches from the communal and cultural worlds that once gave it shape. What remains is a society of individuals expected to interpret, justify, and regulate themselves inside a universal moral order, but without a shared culture capable of holding that process together.
That misalignment becomes visible in how people interpret conflict, identity, history, and political life.
In modern America, this can still be seen in forms of biblical literalism, dispensationalism, and end-times prophecy that shape how many Christians understand Israel, war, nationhood, and world events. These beliefs do not remain private. They influence political imagination. They affect how people interpret history, alliances, enemies, and what they believe is inevitable or divinely sanctioned.
In this context, belief stops being just belief. It starts shaping how everything else is seen.
That is the same mechanism operating in another key. The pattern that once defined orthodoxy and constrained variation does not disappear. It adapts as the cultural environment shifts. The language evolves, but the underlying habit remains… truth is singular, error is dangerous, and those outside the moral order must be corrected, converted, contained, or cast out.
What this reveals is not a simple story of progress or decline.
Christianity did not leave behind a stable moral foundation that the West either followed or abandoned. It left behind a set of interacting pressures: universalism and particular identity, internalized morality and external authority, individual responsibility and collective order, compassion and conquest, salvation and exclusion.
For a time, those pressures could be held in relative balance, but this fit no longer holds.
The institutions remain, but they no longer command the same trust. The moral instincts remain, but they are no longer guided by a shared tradition. The universal language remains, but it floats above increasingly fractured peoples, places, and loyalties.
Conflict becomes more moralized. Disagreement becomes harder to contain.
This is why the modern West feels both thin and volatile.
Thin, because inherited forms of continuity have weakened.
Volatile, because the moral pressure embedded in the inheritance remains, now operating without the older structures that once gave it proportion.
That is the condition the modern West has inherited.
CONCLUSION: Why the West Still Cannot Escape the Problem
The Christian inheritance of the West cannot be reduced to either gratitude or resentment.
It gave moral concern, meaning to suffering, durable institutions, and the preservation and transmission of knowledge, even as that knowledge was filtered through doctrine. It created a shared moral vocabulary capable of binding large populations together.
But it also changed the terms of belonging.
It loosened religion from peoplehood, place, ancestry, and local custom. It made belief portable. It turned truth into something singular and binding, making disagreement morally charged. Once rival traditions became errors rather than neighbors, the pressure to absorb, correct, or suppress them followed naturally.
The West did not abandon Christianity so much as carry its habits forward. The missionary impulse remained. The abstract individual remained. The suspicion of rooted identity remained. Social Justice became their new end times.
That is why a return to Christianity does not solve the problem. It would not restore a stable foundation but reassert one layer of the inheritance while leaving its tensions unresolved.
Secular liberalism does not solve it either. It often preserves the universalism while stripping away the cultural limits that once gave it proportion, asking people to live as abstract individuals inside a moral framework detached from place, memory, and inherited obligation.
What remains is not a coherent worldview, but a contradictory one.
From the beginning, the inheritance carried competing impulses. Early Christianity emerged from an apocalyptic environment while also developing moral and institutional frameworks for life within the world. Over time, those tensions were not resolved but reworked and emphasized in different ways.
Within Protestantism alone, some strands treated the world as something to be ordered and reformed, energizing movements like abolition, while others emphasized its corruption and eventual end, orienting life toward endurance and escape. The divergence is not a break from the tradition, but a difference in emphasis within it.
The result is a system that can point in opposite directions while still claiming the same foundation.
This is not a foundation a civilization can stand on.
A civilization needs moral scale, but also proportion. Compassion, but not so abstract that it forgets its own people. Rights, but not detached from duty. Inquiry, but not subordinated to sacred certainty. Space for disagreement, but enough shared identity to keep it from becoming civilizational warfare.
Above all, it needs rooted obligations.
A civilization cannot survive on abstract principles alone. It needs loyalty, shared memory, boundaries, place, and a people capable of recognizing what is theirs to preserve.
Because removing structure does not remove power. It removes the forms that make power visible and accountable. And when that happens, power does not disappear. It shifts—into forms that are harder to see and harder to resist.
We are not standing outside this inheritance.
We are still working within it.
And the task is not to romanticize Christianity, completely demonize it, or pretend we have escaped it, but to understand what it absorbed, what it built, what it destabilized, and what it left behind clearly enough to stop repeating its most destructive patterns.
Atkinson, Kenneth. “Judean Piracy, Judea and Parthia, and the Roman Annexation of Judea: The Evidence of Pompeius Trogus.” Electrum 29 (2022): 127–145. https://doi.org/10.4467/20800909EL.22.009.15779
Augustine. Confessions.
Augustine. The City of God.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000
Burkert, Walter. The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Doner, Colonel V. “Cognitive Dissonance of Political Activists, Or Whatever Happened to the Religious Right?” Chalcedon, July 1, 1999.
Freeman, Charles. The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. London: Heinemann, 2002.
Freeman, Charles. The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment. London: Head of Zeus, 2023.
Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse. 1931.
Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration. 1689.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700. London: Allen Lane, 2003.
A historical documentary blended with a personal reckoning and a cultural warning
This one has been sitting with me for a long time.
Six months, maybe more. Notes in the book margins. Tons of screenshots. Quotes stacked in my notes folder. Books half-highlighted and folded pages revisited. Every time I thought I was ready to write it, I wasn’t…
Because this isn’t just about history. It’s about a story we keep repeating with confidence: that Christianity saved the West and what happens when you actually slow down to examine that claim.
The claim that Christianity civilized Europe. Christianity gave us human rights, pluralism, rational inquiry, restraint. And if Western civilization feels unstable today, the prescription is simple— return to Christian moral supremacy.
I find myself increasingly tired of hearing it.
Tired of watching “Judeo-Christian values” invoked as shorthand for liberty. Tired of hearing that our freedoms, our intellectual life, our legal architecture all flow directly from the Bible. Tired of the way paganism is casually used as a synonym for barbarism, ego, domination — while Christianity is cast as the moral counterweight, the conscience that civilizes power.
A recent example sharpened that fatigue. Leighton Woodhouse published an opinion piece in The New York Times titled Donald Trump, Pagan King. The framing was familiar and rhetorically smooth. Paganism was associated with appetite, force, and unchecked authority. Christianity appeared as restraint, humility, moral seriousness. The implication was subtle but unmistakable: whatever is broken in our politics represents a departure from Christian virtue.
The structure of this narrative is ancient. Pagan equals raw power. Christian equals moral discipline.
But that framing rests on an assumption that deserves far more scrutiny than it receives. It assumes that Christianity is the moral software of the West. Before it, there was chaos; after it, civilization.
The deeper I have gone into late antiquity, through Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age, Charles Freeman’s analysis of intellectual narrowing, Ramsay MacMullen’s documentation of coercive conversion, and through primary sources from both Christian and pagan voices— the more that tidy civilizational story begins to unravel.
Because when Christianity gained institutional dominance, what followed was not the natural flowering of pluralism and inquiry. It was very opposite.
And for us to truly understand, we have to begin this story before Christianity held power.
A World Before Monopoly
The Greco-Roman world was not a utopia. It had power structures, that were often violent, and deeply unequal. But it operated within a religious and intellectual framework that functioned very differently from exclusive monotheism.
Roman religion was additive rather than subtractive. One could honor household gods, civic gods, the imperial cult, foreign deities, and philosophical conceptions of the divine without renouncing the others. Orthopraxy mattered more than orthodoxy. What counted was correct ritual performance, not exclusive belief. The pax deorum (the peace with the gods) was maintained through observance, not doctrinal conformity.
Philosophically, multiplicity was the norm. Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics, and Platonists argued openly about cosmology, ethics, and the nature of reality. Protagoras could admit uncertainty about the gods without being erased from the record. Cicero articulated natural law grounded in reason and universality long before Christianity gained political authority. Debate was public. Rhetorical training was a civic skill. Argument was like oxygen at the time.
Cicero
The Roman legal system developed sophisticated structures of administration and legislation that would profoundly shape Western law. None of this depended on exclusive revelation. It depended on human reasoning operating within a plural environment.
Rome suppressed what it perceived as politically dangerous. It was capable of cruelty. But structurally, it tolerated metaphysical competition. Truth was not framed as singular and jealous in the way later Christian orthodoxy would insist.
Christianity did not enter this world as one more school of thought among many. It entered with a different moral architecture. Not “add Christ to the pantheon.”
But “burn down the rest.”
That distinction is not merely cosmetic. It is foundational to understanding the real history.
The Architecture of Exclusivity
The Hebrew scriptures that Christianity inherited contain a recurring moral posture toward rival worship. Altars are to be broken down. Sacred groves burned. Idols smashed. “You shall have no other gods before me” is not a suggestion of preference; it is a declaration of exclusivity. Rival worship is not seen as a mere mistake; it is corrupting.
When confined to private devotion, this posture functions as identity formation. When fused with state power, it moves from conviction to coercion.
For the first three centuries of its existence, Christianity lacked imperial authority. It survived in the margins of society. The decisive shift came when Christianity aligned with imperial power under Constantine and his successors.
Estimates vary, but many scholars place Christians at roughly ten percent of the empire around the year 300. The exact percentage is debated (ancient demographic modeling is necessarily approximate) but the trajectory is clear. Within a few generations, that minority became the ruling faith. By the end of the fourth century, imperial law assumed Christianity as normative and increasingly treated rival ritual as illegal.
This demographic reversal was not merely theological. It was political.
Once exclusivist theology acquired enforcement capacity, differences in beliefs was no longer merely error. It was threat.
In the 380s and 390s, imperial edicts against non-Christian ritual multiplied. In 399, a Christian emperor issued a decree stating:
“If there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down without disturbance or tumult. For when they are torn down and removed, the material basis for all superstition will be destroyed.”
The language is bureaucratic. The effect was not.
These edicts provided legal cover for demolition. Bishops lobbied rulers for stricter laws. Congregations became demolition crews. Rival worship was framed as superstition whose material foundation had to be eradicated.
As Ramsay MacMullendemonstrates, once rival belief is conceptualized as spiritually dangerous, compromise becomes morally suspect. In a plural system, rivals are mistaken. In an exclusivist system, rivals are demonic. And demons are not debated. They are expelled.
This is the mechanism. And it becomes visible in stone.
Once theology fused with imperial authority, enforcement did not remain theoretical. It moved outward into public space. It moved into cities. It moved into stone.
Catherine Nixey opens The Darkening Age not with doctrine but with an image. The choice is deliberate. Arguments can be abstract. Statues cannot.
The Temple of Athena in Palmyra had stood for centuries. It was not a relic in a museum. It was part of a living civic landscape. Its columns had watched merchants pass through the city, soldiers march under banners, pilgrims move between worlds. Within it stood Athena— goddess of wisdom, of strategic intelligence, of disciplined thought. She represented more than devotion. She embodied the classical inheritance itself: philosophy, rhetoric, ordered reasoning, the cultivation of mind.
When the destroyers arrived, what they attacked was not simply stone.
Nixey describes a man entering the temple with a weapon and striking the back of Athena’s head with such force that the goddess was decapitated. The violence did not stop there. Her nose was sliced off. Her cheeks crushed. Her once composed face mutilated with intention.
And yet her eyes were left intact.
Those eyes still exist.
They look out from a ruined face that once symbolized wisdom.
This was not accidental vandalism. It was theology enacted physically. The old gods were not to be debated, not to be reinterpreted, not to be absorbed into new meaning. They were to be neutralized. Their presence was dangerous. Their very material existence was a threat to salvation.
The word often used for this period is triumph. Christianity triumphed over paganism. But triumph over what? Over multiplicity? Over a world in which philosophical disagreement could exist without annihilation? Over the idea that wisdom might not belong exclusively to one revelation?
The violence at Palmyra was not isolated. Temples across the empire were damaged, repurposed, stripped of ornament, or demolished. Some were converted into churches. Others were dismantled entirely. Sacred spaces that had structured civic and religious life for centuries were rendered spiritually illegitimate almost overnight.
What makes the image of Athena more destabilizing is its repetition.
In 2015, Islamic State militants bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud because it was deemed idolatrous. The reconstructed remnants of Athena were attacked again. Beheaded again. An arm sheared off again.
Different century. Different scripture. Different empire.
Same logic. When rival sacred presence is conceptualized as contamination, destruction becomes purification.
This is not about equivalence between traditions. It is about structure. When any Abrahamic framework defines truth as singular, exclusive, and threatened by proximity to rivals, pluralism becomes fragile. Once that framework acquires political power, fragility becomes enforcement.
And enforcement does not stop at statues.
Hypatia and the Enforcement of Certainty
If Athena represents symbolic erasure, Hypatia represents human cost.
Hypatia of Alexandria was not an obscure mystic. She was a philosopher, mathematician, and teacher in a city long known for intellectual life. Alexandria had been home to the great library and to competing schools of thought for centuries. Hypatia occupied a visible position within that tradition.
By the early fifth century, Alexandria was also home to a group known as the parabalani — often translated as “the reckless ones.” Officially devoted to acts of charity, they functioned in practice as muscle for ecclesiastical authority. By some estimates there were hundreds of them in the city. Roman legal documents describe them using the word terror.
Hypatia lived in the same civic space as these enforcers.
Her murder was not random street violence. It occurred within an atmosphere already shaped by escalating Christian authority and shrinking tolerance for rival influence. When exclusivist theology defines truth as singular and civic order as dependent upon that truth, intellectual figures outside that structure become destabilizing.
Hypatia was stripped, beaten, and killed by a mob associated with Christian zeal.
Her death did not mark the beginning of violence. It marked the normalization of it.
Once difference is framed as corruption and corruption as emergency, elimination becomes defensible.
This pattern appears again and again in late antiquity. Pagan philosophers were exiled. Schools were closed. Public debate narrowed. The emperor Justinian would eventually close the philosophical schools of Athens entirely. Inquiry did not vanish overnight, but the atmosphere changed. What had once been competition became suspicion.
And suspicion reshapes a civilization quietly before it reshapes it violently.
Fear as Teacher
One of the most revealing threads in the historical record is not the destruction itself but the emotional atmosphere that made it possible.
Demonology was not marginal superstition. It structured perception. Pagan temples were described as inhabited by malevolent spirits. Sacrifices were not merely mistaken rituals but demonic feasts. The world itself became morally charged terrain.
The Devil Belial before the Gates of Hell, from Das Buch Belial, published in Augsburg, 1473
Christians wrote anxious letters asking whether they could sit in places pagans had sat, use baths used on feast days, drink from wells near deserted temples, eat food that might have been associated with sacrifice. The fear was not symbolic. It was visceral.
Augustine’s response: that it was better to refuse contaminated food with Christian fortitude even if one starved, reveals a hierarchy of values. Survival could be negotiable. Purity could not.
John Chrysostom’s sermons described eternal punishment in sensory detail: rivers of fire, venomous worms, inescapable bonds, exterior darkness. Fear was not incidental rhetoric. It trained the imagination to view error as catastrophe and proximity to rival belief as existential threat.
When fear becomes formative, pluralism becomes psychologically intolerable.
And when that psychology is paired with law, narrowing becomes institutional.
The Disappearance of Thought
The destruction of statues is visible. The destruction of thought is quieter.
One of the most devastating aspects of late antique Christianization was not merely the smashing of temples but the narrowing of what was considered worth preserving.
The ancient Mediterranean world once contained the greatest concentration of written knowledge humanity had yet assembled. The Library of Alexandria, even allowing for scholarly debate about its exact size, symbolized an ambition toward accumulation. Knowledge was not singular. It was expansive. It was contradictory. It was messy.
Scholars selecting and reading scrolls in the Great Library of Alexandria hall
What remains of that intellectual inheritance is fragmentary.
By some estimates, only about one percent of Latin literature survives from antiquity. Entire authors are known only by name. Entire schools of philosophy survive only in hostile summaries written by opponents. Whole lines of speculation disappeared not because they were refuted but because they were not copied.
Copying is survival.
In the late antique world, the people doing the copying increasingly operated within Christian institutions.
And institutions preserve selectively.
“Stay clear of all pagan books!” reads the Apostolic Constitution. The warning is not casual. It reflects a moral anxiety about contamination. Texts are not neutral. They are spiritually charged. Exposure to the wrong argument is dangerous.
Celsus, one of the few pagan critics whose voice survives, accused Christians of discouraging inquiry. He mocked the posture: “Do not ask questions; just believe.” His tone is sharp, even sarcastic, but the anxiety is real. In Greek philosophy, reason was virtue. Inquiry was sacred. Faith, as unexamined assent, was the lowest epistemic posture.
Even Origen, writing within the Christian tradition, conceded the problem with striking bluntness, remarking that “the stupidity of some Christians is heavier than the sand of the sea.” The anti-intellectual reputation of early Christianity was not a later invention. It was noted by contemporaries.
The tragedy of Democritus crystallizes this narrowing.
Democritus — the philosopher often described as the father of atomic theory — wrote extensively across cosmology, mathematics, and ethics. He proposed a universe composed of atoms and void centuries before modern physics. And yet none of his works survive intact.
Not one.
What we know of his thought survives because it was partially preserved inside a single poem, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, which itself survived precariously through a single manuscript discovered in a German monastery centuries later.
The physicist Carlo Rovelli has called the total loss of Democritus’s writings “the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of the old classical civilisation.”
An entire philosophical lineage survived by accident.
That should unsettle anyone who claims Christianity simply “preserved learning.”
Yes, monasteries copied texts. But copying is filtration. Texts deemed dangerous, frivolous, obscene, or spiritually corrupt were less likely to be preserved. When a civilization narrows its moral boundaries, its archive narrows with it.
Charles Freeman, in The Closing of the Western Mind, argues that the most significant shift was not physical destruction but the narrowing of acceptable modes of thought. Public philosophical debate gradually gave way to appeals to authority and revealed certainty. Disputes were settled by councils backed by imperial power. Orthodoxy was defined not by open inquiry but by boundary enforcement.
The world did not stop thinking overnight. But the conditions for free competition of ideas shifted.
And once intellectual diversity contracts, recovery takes centuries.
The Martyr Myth and Moral Insulation
The martyr narrative sits at the emotional center of Christian self-understanding. It does more than preserve memory. It defines identity.
The story is familiar: early Christians were persecuted by a pagan empire. They were imprisoned, tortured, executed for their faith. They endured without retaliation. They did not conquer. They survived.
There is truth in this. The Great Persecution under Diocletian was real and brutal. Scriptures were burned. Churches destroyed. Christians were imprisoned and executed. No serious historian denies that.
What modern scholarship questions is scale and continuity. The most severe empire-wide persecution lasted roughly a decade. Other persecutions were local, sporadic, and uneven across regions. They were not a continuous three-century campaign of systematic eradication.
Martyr literature itself expanded over time. Detailed analysis of saints’ calendars reveals duplication, embellishment, and narrative layering. Some figures appear under multiple names. Some accounts contain anachronisms or miraculous flourishes that complicate their historical reliability.
The historian G. E. M. de Ste. Croix observed that later martyr literature increasingly displayed what he called “a contempt for historicity.”
That line matters. Because it signals a shift: suffering was not only remembered. It was shaped.
And shaped suffering serves a purpose.
Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian is an Italian Renaissance Tempera Painting created by Andrea Mantegna in c.1480.
Once Christianity aligned with imperial authority, the martyr narrative did not recede. It hardened into interpretive insulation. The same tradition that now authorized temple closures and school shuttings still understood itself as historically persecuted.
The story generates moral asymmetry: whatever Christians do can be framed as response, not domination.
And the function of the martyr narrative did not end in late antiquity. In modern apologetics, it often operates as proof. The logic runs like this: the apostles would not have died for something they knew was false; early Christians endured torture rather than recant; therefore, their testimony must be true.
But willingness to suffer proves sincerity, not metaphysical accuracy. People across religions have died for beliefs that contradict one another. Martyrdom establishes conviction. It does not establish truth.
This is why the martyr story is so stabilizing. It allows a movement to wield authority while retaining the self-image ofinnocence. It transforms power into protection and critique into persecution.
When temples were outlawed and philosophical schools shuttered, the tradition exercising authority did not see itself as conqueror. It saw itself as guardian of truth under threat.
If you are always defending truth, enforcement feels righteous.
The Last Pleas for Coexistence
One of the tragedies of this period is that the archive becomes overwhelmingly Christian. The winners preserved their own voices. The losing side survives in fragments.
But some fragments remain.
Libanius, a pagan orator in the fourth century, watched as temples across the empire were damaged, repurposed, or destroyed. His speeches are not the rantings of a fanatic. They are the anxious observations of a man watching his world contract. He describes sacred spaces falling into ruin, rituals forbidden, property seized. He notes opportunists dividing temple lands for personal gain under the cover of piety. What Christian historians later frame as triumph, Libanius experiences as loss.
Then there is Symmachus.
In 382 CE, the Christian emperor Gratian ordered the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Roman Senate House. For centuries, senators had offered ritual observances there before conducting civic business. It was not merely religious decoration; it was part of Rome’s public identity.
Symmachus wrote an appeal for its restoration.
His language is remarkable for its restraint. He does not demand dominance. He does not threaten revolt. He argues for coexistence.
“We look on the same stars,” he writes. “The sky is common. The same world surrounds us. What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth? We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road alone.”
It is difficult to imagine a clearer articulation of pluralism in the ancient world.
He closes not with hostility but with humility: “We offer now prayers, not conflict.”
He lost. The altar was not restored. The plea for multiplicity was overridden by certainty.
This moment matters because it reveals a collision between two moral architectures. One sees truth as approached through many paths. The other sees truth as singular and threatened by rival proximity.
Symmachus represents not pagan decadence but civic pluralism. He is not asking to suppress Christianity. He is asking for coexistence.
The answer he receives is enforcement. The narrowing was not accidental. It was structural.
The Long Return of Pluralism
The narrowing of late antiquity did not permanently extinguish intellectual life. But it did change its conditions. For centuries, inquiry moved within theological boundaries defined by ecclesiastical authority. Councils determined orthodoxy. Deviation could be punished. Philosophical speculation survived, but often cautiously, often cloaked.
What we now call the Enlightenment did not arise as a natural extension of Christian supremacy. It arose within tension — sometimes quiet, sometimes explosive — with religious monopoly.
Beginning in the Renaissance, Europe experienced a gradual rediscovery of classical texts. Manuscripts long buried in monastic libraries re-entered circulation. Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, preserving echoes of Democritus’s atomism, resurfaced. Greek philosophy was studied not merely as commentary on theology but as intellectual inheritance in its own right.
The recovery of classical thought did not instantly dissolve Christian authority. But it reintroduced plurality into the bloodstream of European intellectual life.
The Enlightenment sharpened that reintroduction.
Thinkers like John Locke articulated natural rights grounded not in revelation but in reason and shared human nature. Locke’s arguments for religious toleration did not emerge from biblical exclusivity; they emerged from a recognition that coercion in matters of belief corrupts both faith and civic peace.
Montesquieu analyzed the separation of powers not as a theological doctrine but as a structural safeguard against concentration of authority. His framework was explicitly concerned with preventing tyranny — whether monarchic or clerical.
These ideas did not descend seamlessly from medieval orthodoxy. They developed alongside, and often in resistance to, religious entanglement with state power.
When we reach the American founding, the tension becomes explicit.
The framers of the Constitution were deeply literate in classical thought. They read Cicero. They read Tacitus. They studied Roman republicanism. They were steeped in Enlightenment political theory. They feared concentrated power, including ecclesiastical power.
The Constitution contains no reference to Jesus Christ. It prohibits religious tests for office. The First Amendment forbids establishment of religion and protects free exercise. This was not a casual omission. It was intentional architecture.
The American experiment was not a biblical republic.
It was a republic designed to prevent religious monopoly.
Thomas Jefferson provides a particularly revealing case. Jefferson famously produced his own edited version of the Gospels, physically cutting out miracles and supernatural elements. The result, often referred to as the Jefferson Bible, retained ethical teachings while discarding divine intervention.
This was not the act of a man seeking to found a theocracy.
It was the act of a man separating moral philosophy from revealed absolutism.
Jefferson’s project reflects a broader Enlightenment impulse: to preserve ethical insight while disentangling it from exclusivist authority.
Roger Olson’s theological scholarship further complicates the claim that Christianity simply “gave us” pluralism. Olson emphasizes that Christianity was never doctrinally uniform in its early centuries. Orthodoxy was consolidated through contest, suppression, and boundary enforcement. The unity later invoked as civilizational foundation was itself the product of narrowing.
The Enlightenment did not grow naturally from that narrowing. It reopened debate.
It reintroduced skepticism as virtue.
It separated church and state not to destroy religion but to protect civic plurality.
If Christianity had already secured pluralism, the Enlightenment would have been unnecessary.
The fact that it was necessary tells us something profound.
Pluralism survived not because exclusivity reigned, but because exclusivity was restrained.
Did Christianity Give Us Human Rights?
At this point, the most common objection surfaces.
Even if there were excesses. Even if there was narrowing. Even if temples fell and texts disappeared. Christianity still gave us the concept of human dignity. Christianity laid the groundwork for human rights.
The claim sounds intuitive because Christian theology does contain a powerful moral idea: humans are made in the image of God. That idea has inspired reformers and abolitionists and activists. It matters.
But the existence of moral language is not the same thing as institutional pluralism.
The Stoics articulated a form of universal human rationality centuries before Christianity held power. Roman law developed ideas of legal personhood and universality that would influence later legal systems. Cicero’s natural law did not depend on revelation.
Christianity contributed to moral discourse. That is true.
But the institutional protection of dissent: the right to disagree publicly, to publish heterodox ideas, to worship differently without legal annihilation… did not emerge during periods of Christian monopoly. Those protections developed when religious authority was structurally limited.
Rights require restraint of power.
And historically, the moments when Christianity was most fused with state authority were not the moments when pluralism expanded.
What This Feels Like From the Inside
What unsettles me most about this history is not simply that it happened. It is that I recognize the mechanism.
I have lived the internal version of it.
Burn the books. Throw away the tarot cards. Remove your new age spirituality material. Avoid contamination of demonic entities. Guard the mind. Monitor the thoughts. Stay pure.
When you inhabit Christianity long enough, the anxiety internalizes. You become your own enforcer. You police your curiosity. You treat rival ideas not as intellectual challenges but as spiritual threats.
When I read about Christians in late antiquity asking whether they could sit where pagans had sat or drink from wells near deserted temples, it was too relatable.
The narrowing does not begin with demolition crews. It begins with fear.
Fear reshapes perception. Fear shrinks curiosity. Fear frames difference as danger.
Scale that fear across institutions and you have late antiquity.
Scale it across a nation and you have something far more consequential.
The Warning
This is why the rhetoric of Christian supremacy unsettles me.
Not because Christianity has contributed nothing to Western civilization. It has shaped art, music, law, charity, moral imagination. That is undeniable.
Much of this period is still narrated as civilizational triumph rather than suppression. As the academic John Pollini notes, “modern scholarship, influenced by a Judeo-Christian cultural bias, has frequently overlooked or downplayed such attacks and even at times sought to present Christian desecration in a positive light.”
But the claim that Christianity saved the West collapses complexity into myth. It erases the plural foundations of Greco-Roman thought. It erases the Enlightenment’s deliberate separation of church and state. It erases the long struggle to restrain religious monopoly.
Reformers like John Calvin did not argue for a secular state. In his Institutes, Calvin insisted that magistrates had a duty to suppress blasphemy and false worship.
Pluralism did not emerge from supremacy.
It survived by limiting it.
When modern commentators frame Christianity as the sole guardian of civilization and paganism as barbaric force, they repeat a frame older than they realize. They invoke a story in which exclusivity is equated with order and multiplicity with chaos.
History suggests something different.
Civilizations are stabilized not by monopoly but by constraint. Not by erasing rivals but by tolerating them. Not by conflating revelation with law but by separating the two.
If we forget that, if we mythologize exclusivity as the foundation of freedom, we risk mistaking that narrowing for renewal.
And that is not a mistake history makes gently.
aaaand that’s all I have for you today folks. If you’ve been here for a while, you know this is what Taste of Truth Tuesdays is about. Not tearing down for sport. Not defending tradition out of reflex. But slowing down long enough to ask: Is the story we’re repeating actually true?
and As always…
Maintain your curiosity. Embrace skepticism. And keep tuning in.
Endnotes
Leighton Woodhouse, “Donald Trump, Pagan King,” The New York Times, February 11, 2026. (Referenced as an example of contemporary framing of paganism versus Christianity.)
Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Knopf, 2002). Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). See also Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
On Roman religion as orthopraxic and plural in structure, see: Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Jörg Rüpke, Religion of the Romans (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
Cicero’s articulation of natural law appears in De Re Publica and De Legibus. See: Cicero, On the Republic and On the Laws, trans. James E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
On late fourth-century anti-pagan legislation, see: Theodosian Code 16.10 (various edicts restricting sacrifice and authorizing temple closures). For analysis: Michele Renee Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy (Harvard University Press, 2002). Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire.
On the debated scope and frequency of early Christian persecutions: Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution (HarperOne, 2013). G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy (Oxford University Press, 2006). These works challenge the traditional narrative of continuous empire-wide persecution and note embellishment in later martyr literature.
On the parabalani and Hypatia: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, Book VII. Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 2017). Roman legislation regulating the parabalani appears in Theodosian Code 16.2.42 and related laws.
On the Altar of Victory controversy and Symmachus: Symmachus, Relatio 3 (Petition for the Restoration of the Altar of Victory). Ambrose of Milan’s response in Epistle 17–18. See also: Michele Renee Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy.
On demonology and late antique Christian perceptions of paganism: Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Blackwell, 1996). Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age. Brown discusses the moralization of the inner life and late antique anxiety regarding contamination and spiritual danger.
On the survival rate of classical literature: It is widely acknowledged among classicists that only a small fraction of ancient literature survives. See: Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997). James J. O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word (Harvard University Press, 1998). The exact percentage is debated, but the scale of loss is undisputed.
On Democritus and the loss of his works: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Book IX). Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems (Riverhead Books, 2016), where Rovelli refers to the loss of Democritus as a major intellectual tragedy. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, as the principal ancient source preserving atomist philosophy.
On the closure of pagan philosophical schools under Justinian: Procopius, Secret History. Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation (University of California Press, 2015).
On Enlightenment political theory and religious toleration: John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748).
On Thomas Jefferson’s edited Bible: Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (commonly known as the Jefferson Bible), completed in 1820. See also: Edwin Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Eerdmans, 1996).
On early Christian theological diversity and consolidation of orthodoxy: Roger E. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology (InterVarsity Press, 1999). Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003) (for broader context on early doctrinal diversity).
What Women Were Never Told About Weight, Aging, and Control
The Science They Never Told Us
This is the first episode of 2026, and I wanted to start the year by slowing things down, getting a bit personal instead of chasing the latest talking points.
At the end of last year, I spent time reading a few books that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. Not because they offered a new diet or a new protocol, but because they challenged something much deeper: the story we’ve been told about discipline, control, and women’s bodies.
There is a reason women’s bodies change across the lifespan. And it has very little to do with willpower, discipline, or personal failure.
In Why Women Need Fat, evolutionary biologists William Lassek and Steven Gaulin make the case that most modern conversations about women’s weight are fundamentally misinformed. Not because women are doing something wrong, but because we’ve built our expectations on a misunderstanding of what female bodies are actually designed to do.
A major part of their argument focuses on how industrialization radically altered the balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in the modern food supply, particularly through seed oils and ultra-processed foods. They make a compelling case that this shift plays a role in rising obesity and metabolic dysfunction at the population level.
I agree that this imbalance matters, and it’s a topic that deserves its own full episode. At the same time, it does not explain every woman’s story. Diet composition can influence metabolism, but it cannot override prolonged stress, illness, hormonal disruption, nervous system dysregulation, or years of restriction. In my own case, omega-6 intake outside of naturally occurring sources is relatively low and does not account for the changes I’ve experienced. That matters, because it reminds us that biology is layered. No single variable explains a complex adaptive system.
One of the most important ideas in the book is that fat distribution matters more than fat quantity.
Women do not store fat the same way men do. A significant portion of female body fat is stored in the hips and thighs, known as gluteofemoral fat. This fat is metabolically distinct from abdominal or visceral fat. It is more stable, less inflammatory, and relatively enriched in long-chain fatty acids, including DHA, which plays a key role in fetal brain development.
From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense. Human infants are born with unusually large, energy-hungry brains. Women evolved to carry nutritional reserves that could support pregnancy and lactation, even during times of scarcity. In that context, having fat on your lower body was not a flaw or a failure. It was insurance.
From this perspective, fat is not excess energy. It is deferred intelligence, stored in anticipation of future need. This is where waist-to-hip ratio enters the conversation.
Across cultures and historical periods, a lower waist-to-hip ratio in women has been associated with reproductive health, metabolic resilience, and successful pregnancies. This is not about thinness, aesthetics, or moral worth. It is about fat function, not fat fear, and about how different tissues behave metabolically inside the body. It is about where fat is stored and how it functions.
And in today’s modern culture we have lost that distinction.
Instead of asking what kind of fat a woman carries, we became obsessed with how much. Instead of understanding fat as tissue with purpose, we turned it into a moral scoreboard. Hips became a problem. Thighs became something to shrink. Curves became something to discipline.
Another central idea in Why Women Need Fat is biological set point.
The authors argue that women’s bodies tend to defend a natural weight range when adequately nourished and not under chronic stress. When women remain below that range through restriction, over-exercise, or prolonged under-fueling, the body does not interpret that as success. It interprets it as threat.
Over time, the body adapts, not out of defiance, but out of protection.
Metabolism slows. Hunger and fullness cues become unreliable. Hormonal systems compensate. When the pressure finally eases, weight often rebounds, sometimes beyond where it started, because the body is trying to restore safety.
From this perspective, midlife weight gain, post-illness weight gain, or weight gain after years of restriction is not mysterious. It is not rebellion. It is regulation.
None of this is taught to women.
Instead, we are told that if our bodies change, we failed. That aging is optional. That discipline and botox should override biology. That the number on the scale tells the whole story.
So, before we talk about culture, family, trauma, or personal experience, this matters:
Women’s bodies are not designed to stay static. They are designed to adapt.
Once you understand that, everything else in this conversation changes.
Why the Body Became the Battlefield
This is where historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s work in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, provides essential context, but it requires some precision.
Girls have not always been free from shame. Shame itself is not new. What has changed is what women are taught to be ashamed of, and how that shame operates in daily life.
Brumberg asks a question that still feels unresolved today: Why is the body still a girl’s nemesis? Shouldn’t sexually liberated girls feel better about themselves than their corseted counterparts a century ago?
Based on extensive historical research, including diaries written by American girls from the 1830s through the 1990s, Brumberg shows that although girls today enjoy more formal freedoms and opportunities, they are also under more pressure and at greater psychological risk. This is due to a unique convergence of biological vulnerability and cultural forces that turned the adolescent female body into a central site of social meaning during the twentieth century.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, girls did not typically grow up fixated on thinness, calorie control, or constant appearance monitoring. Their diaries were not filled with measurements or food rules. Instead, they wrote primarily about character, self-restraint, moral development, relationships, and their roles within family and community.
One 1892 diary entry reads:
“Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversation and in actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”
In earlier eras, female shame was more often tied to behavior, sexuality, obedience, and virtue. The body mattered, but primarily as a moral symbol rather than an aesthetic project requiring constant surveillance and correction.
That changed dramatically in the twentieth century.
Brumberg documents how the mother-daughter connection loosened, particularly around menstruation, sexuality, and bodily knowledge. Where female relatives and mentors once guided girls through these transitions, doctors, advertisers, popular media, and scientific authority increasingly stepped in to fill that role.
At the same time, mass media, advertising, film, and medicalized beauty standards created a new and increasingly exacting ideal of physical perfection. Changing norms around intimacy and sexuality also shifted the meaning of virginity, turning it from a central moral value into an outdated or irrelevant one. What replaced it was not freedom from scrutiny, but a different kind of pressure altogether.
By the late twentieth century, girls were increasingly taught that their bodies were not merely something they inhabited, but something they were responsible for perfecting.
A 1982 diary entry captures this shift starkly:
“I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can with the help of my budget and baby-sitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got a new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”
What changed was not the presence of shame, but its location. Shame moved inward.
Rather than being externally enforced through rules and prohibitions, it became self-policed. Girls were taught to monitor themselves constantly, to evaluate their bodies from the outside, and to treat appearance as the primary expression of identity and worth.
Brumberg is explicit on this point. The fact that American girls now make their bodies their central project is not an accident or a cultural curiosity. It is a symptom of historical changes that are only beginning to be fully understood.
This is where more recent work, such as Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, helps extend Brumberg’s analysis into the present moment. Perry argues that while sexual liberation promised autonomy and empowerment, it often left young women navigating powerful biological and emotional realities without the social structures that once offered protection, guidance, or meaning. In that vacuum, the body became one of the few remaining sites where control still seemed possible.
The result is a paradox. Girls are freer in theory, yet more burdened in practice. The body, once shaped by communal norms and shared female knowledge, becomes a solitary project, managed under intense cultural pressure and constant comparison.
For many girls, this self-surveillance does not begin with magazines or social media. It begins at home, absorbed through tone, comments, and modeling from the women closest to them.
Brumberg argues that body dissatisfaction is often transmitted from mother to daughter, not out of cruelty, but because those mothers inherited the same aesthetic anxieties. Over time, body shame becomes a family inheritance, passed down quietly and persistently.
Some mothers transmit it subtly.
Others do it bluntly.
This matters not because my experience is unique, but because it illustrates what happens when a body shaped by restriction, stress, and cultural pressure is asked to perform indefinitely. Personal stories are often dismissed as anecdotal, but they are where biological theory meets lived reality.
I grew up in a household where my body was not simply noticed. It was scrutinized, compared, and commented on. Comments like that do not fade with time. They shape how you see yourself in mirrors and photographs. They teach you that your body must be managed and monitored. They plant the belief that staying small is the price of safety.
So, I grew up believing that if I could control my body well enough, I could avoid humiliation. I could avoid becoming the punchline. I could avoid being seen in the wrong way.
For a while, I turned that fear into discipline.
The Years Before the Collapse: A Lifetime of Restriction and Survival
Food never felt simple for me. Long before bodybuilding, chronic pain, or COVID, I carried a strained relationship with eating. Growing up in a near constant state of anxiety meant that hunger cues often felt unpredictable. Eating was something to plan around or push through. It rarely felt intuitive or easy.
Because of this, I experimented with diets that replaced real meals with cereal or shakes. I followed plans like the Special K diet. I relied on Carnation Instant Breakfast instead of full meals. My protein intake was low. My fear of gaining weight was high. Restriction became familiar.
Top left is when I started working out obsessively at age 16, top right and bottom photo are from middle school when I was at my “heaviest” that drove the disordered behaviors.
In college, I became a strict vegetarian out of compassion for animals, but I did not understand how to meet my nutritional needs. I was studying dietetics and earning personal training certifications while running frequently and using exercise as a way to maintain control. From the outside, I looked disciplined. Internally, my relationship with food and exercise remained tense and inconsistent.
Later, I became involved in a meal-replacement program through an MLM. I replaced two meals a day with shakes and practiced intermittent fasting framed as “cleanse days.” In hindsight, this was structured under-eating presented as wellness. It fit seamlessly into patterns I had lived in for years.
Eating often felt overwhelming. Cooking felt like a hurdle. Certain textures bothered me. My appetite felt fragile and unreliable. This sensory sensitivity existed long before the parosmia that would come years later. From early on, food was shaped by stress rather than nourishment.
During this entire period, I was also on hormonal birth control, first the NuvaRing and later the Mirena IUD, for nearly a decade. Long-term hormonal modulation can influence mood, inflammation, appetite, and weight distribution. It added another layer of complexity to a system already under strain.
Looking back, I can see that my teens and twenties were marked by near constant restriction. Restriction felt normal. Thriving did not.
The book Why Women Need Fat discusses the idea of a biological weight “set point,” the range a body tends to return to when conditions are stable and adequately nourished. I now understand that I remained below my natural set point for years through force rather than balance. My biology never experienced consistency or safety.
This was the landscape I carried into my thirties.
The Body I Built and the Body That Broke
By the time I entered the bodybuilding world in 2017 and 2018, I already had years of chronic under-eating, over-exercising, and nutrient gaps behind me. Bodybuilding did not create my issues. It amplified them.
I competed in four shows. People admired the discipline and the physique. Internally, my body was weakening. I was overtraining and undereating. By 2019, my immune system began to fail. I developed severe canker sores, sometimes twenty or more at once. I started noticing weight-loss resistance. Everything I had done in the past, was no longer working. On my thirty-fifth birthday, I got shingles. My energy crashed. My emotional bandwidth narrowed. My body was asking for rest, but I did not know how to slow down.
Around this time, I was also navigating eating disorder recovery. Learning how to eat without panic or rigid control was emotionally exhausting even under ideal circumstances… but little did I know things were about to take a massive turn for the worst.
COVID, Sensory Loss, and the Unraveling of Appetite
After getting sick with the ‘vid late 2020, everything shifted again. I developed parosmia, a smell and taste distortion that made many foods taste rotten or chemical. Protein and cooked foods often tasted spoiled. Herbs smelled like artificial chemical. Eating became distressing and, at times, impossible.
My appetite dropped significantly. There were periods where my intake was very low, yet my weight continued to rise. This is not uncommon following illness or prolonged stress. The body often shifts into energy conservation, prioritizing survival overweight regulation.
Weight gain became another source of grief. Roughly thirty pounds over the next five years. I feel embarrassed and avoid photographs. I often worry about how others will perceive me.
If this experience resonates, it is important to say this clearly: your body is not betraying you. It is responding to stress, illness, and prolonged strain in the way bodies are designed to respond.
When years of restriction, intense exercise, chronic stress, illness, hormonal shifts, and emotional trauma accumulate, the body often enters a protective state. Metabolism slows. Hormonal signaling shifts. Hunger cues become unreliable. Weight gain or resistance to weight loss can occur even during periods of low intake, because energy regulation is being driven by survival physiology rather than simple calorie balance.
This is not failure. It is physiology.
The calories-in, calories-out model does not account for thyroid suppression, nervous system activation, sleep disruption, pain, trauma, or metabolic adaptation. It reduces a complex biological system to arithmetic.
Women are not machines. We are adaptive systems built for survival. Sometimes resilience looks like holding onto energy when the body does not feel safe.
Despite this biological reality, we live in a culture that ties women’s value to discipline and appearance. When women gain weight, even under extreme circumstances, we blame ourselves before questioning the system.
Diet culture frames shrinking as virtue.
Toxic positivity encourages acceptance without context.
Industrial food environments differ radically from those our ancestors evolved in.
Medical systems often dismiss women’s pain and metabolic complexity.
Social media amplifies comparison and moralizes body size.
None of this is your fault. And all of it shapes your experience.
This is why understanding the science matters. This is why telling the truth matters. This is why sharing stories matters.
In the book, More Than a Body, Lindsay and Lexie Kite describe how women are taught to relate to themselves through constant self-monitoring. Instead of living inside our bodies, we learn to watch ourselves from the outside. We assess how we look, how we are perceived, and whether our bodies are acceptable in a given moment.
This constant self-surveillance does real harm. It pulls attention away from hunger, pain, fatigue, and intuition. It trains women to override bodily signals in favor of appearance management. And over time, it creates a split where the body is treated as a project to control rather than a system to understand or care for.
When you layer this kind of self-objectification on top of chronic stress, restriction, illness, and trauma, the result is not empowerment. It is disconnection. And disconnection makes it even harder to hear what the body needs when something is wrong.
Weight gain is not just a biological response. It becomes a moral verdict. And that is how women end up fighting bodies that are already struggling to keep them alive.
The Inheritance Ends Here
For a long time, I believed that breaking generational cycles only applied to mothers and daughters. I do not have children, so I assumed what I inherited would simply end with me, unchanged.
Brumberg’s work helped me see this differently.
What we inherit is not passed down only through parenting. It moves through tone, silence, and self-talk. It appears in how women speak about their bodies in front of others. It lives in the way shame is normalized.
I inherited a legacy of body shame. Even on the days when I still feel its weight, I am choosing not to repeat it.
For me, the inheritance ends with telling the truth about this journey and refusing to speak to my body with the same cruelty I absorbed growing up. It ends here.
Closing the Circle: Your Body Is Not Broken
I wish I could end this with a simple story of resolution. I cannot. I am still in the middle of this. I still grieve. I still struggle with eating and movement. I am still learning how to inhabit a body that feels unfamiliar.
But I know this: my body is not my enemy. She is not malfunctioning. She is adapting to a lifetime of stress, illness, restriction, and emotional weight.
If you are in a similar place, I hope this offers permission to stop fighting yourself and start understanding the patterns your body is following. Not because everything will suddenly improve, but because clarity is often the first form of compassion.
Your body is not betraying you. She is trying to keep you here.
And sometimes the most honest thing we can do is admit that we are still finding our way.
References
Brumberg, J. J. (1997). The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. Random House.
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2011). Why Women Need Fat: How “Healthy” Food Makes Us Gain Excess Weight and the Surprising Solution to Losing It Forever. Hudson Street Press.
Kite, L., & Kite, L. (2020). More Than a Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Scientific and academic sources
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2006). Changes in body fat distribution in relation to parity in American women. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27(3), 173–185.
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2008). Waist–hip ratio and cognitive ability. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 275(1644), 193–199.
Dulloo, A. G., Jacquet, J., & Montani, J. P. (2015). Adaptive thermogenesis in human body-weight regulation. Obesity Reviews, 16(S1), 33–43.
Fothergill, E., et al. (2016). Persistent metabolic adaptation after weight loss. Obesity, 24(8), 1612–1619.
Kyle, U. G., et al. (2004). Body composition interpretation. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 79(6), 955–962.
Simopoulos, A. P. (2016). Omega-6/omega-3 balance and obesity risk. Nutrients, 8(3), 128.
Trauma, stress, and nervous system context
Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt and Company.
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Books.
Archaeology, “External Evidence,” and Groundhog Day in the Comment Section
Welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays, where we stay curious, stay skeptical, and keep a healthy distance from any dogma, whether it’s wrapped in a Bible verse or a political ideology.
This is Part Two of my Jesus Myth series, and I’m going to be straight with you:
This one is a doozy. Buckle up, buttercup. Feel free to pause and come back.
Originally, the plan was to bring David Fitzgerald back for another conversation. If you listened to Part One, you know he’s done a ton to popularize the idea that Jesus never existed and to dismantle Christian dogma. I still agree with the core mythicist claim: I don’t think the Jesus of the Gospels was a real historical person. If you missed it, here is the link.
But agreeing with someone’s conclusion doesn’t mean I hand them a free pass on how they argue.
After our first interview, I went deeper into Fitzgerald’s work and into critiques of it (especially Tim O’Neill’s long atheist review that absolutely shreds his method.) While his critique of Fitzgerald’s arguments is genuinely useful; his habit of branding people with political labels (“Trump supporter,” “denier”) to discredit them is… very regressive.
It’s the same purity-testing impulse you see in progressive (should be regressive) spaces, just performed in a different costume.
And that’s what finally pushed me over the edge: The more I watch the atheist/deconstruction world online, the more it reminded me of the exact rigid, dogmatic cultures people say they escaped.
Not all atheists, obviously. But a very loud chunk of that ecosystem runs on:
dunking, dog-piling, and humiliation
tribal loyalty, not actual inquiry
“You’re dead to me” energy toward anyone who may lean conservative or shows nuance
It’s purity culture in different branding.
Then I read how Fitzgerald responded to critics in those archived blog exchanges (not with clear counterarguments) but with emotional name-calling and an almost devotional defense of his “hero and mentor,” Richard Carrier. For me, that was a hard stop.
Add to that: his public Facebook feed is full of contempt for moderates, conservatives, “anti-vaxxers,” and basically anyone outside progressive orthodoxy. My audience includes exactly those people. This space is built for nuance for people who’ve already escaped one rigid belief system and are not shopping for a new one.
He’s free to have his politics. I’m free not to platform that energy.
So instead of Part Two with a guest, you’re getting something I honestly think is better:
me (😜)
a stack of sources
a comment section that turned into a live demo of modern apologetics
and a segment at the end where I turn the same critical lens on the mythicist side — including Fitzgerald himself
Yes, we’re going there. Just not yet.
Previously on Taste of Truth…
In Part One, I unpacked why “Jesus might never have existed” is treated like a taboo thought — even though the historical evidence is thin and the standards used to “prove” Jesus would never pass in any other field of ancient history.
Then, in a Taste Test Thursday episode, I zoomed out and asked: Why do apologists argue like this at all? We walked through:
early church power moves
modern thought-stopping tricks
and Neil Van Leeuwen’s idea of religious “credences,” which don’t function like normal factual beliefs at all
Today is about the evidence. Especially the apologetic tropes that showed up in my comments like a glitching NPC on repeat.
⭐ MYTHS #6 & #7 — “History and Archaeology Confirm the Gospels”
Papyrus P52 (𝔓52), often called the oldest New Testament manuscript. (It’s the size of a credit card) Apologists treat it like a smoking gun. It contains… one complete word: ‘the.’
These two myths always show up together in the comments, and honestly, they feed off each other. People claim, “history confirms the Gospels,” and when that collapses, they jump to “archaeology proves Jesus existed.” So, I’m combining them here, because the evidence (and the problems) overlap more than apologists want to admit.
In short: Archaeology confirms the setting. History confirms the existence of Christians. Neither confirms the Jesus of the Gospels. And once you actually look at the evidence, the apologetic scaffolding falls apart fast.
1. What Archaeology Really Shows (and What It Doesn’t)
If Jesus were a public figure performing miracles, drawing crowds, causing disturbances, and being executed by Rome, archaeology should show something tied to him or to his original movement.
Here’s what archaeology does show:
Nazareth existed.
Capernaum existed.
The general layout of Judea under Rome.
Ritual baths, synagogues, pottery, coins.
A real Pilate (from a fragmentary inscription).
That’s the setting.
Here’s what archaeology has never produced:
no house of Jesus
no workshop or tools
no tomb we can authenticate
no inscription naming him
no artifacts linked to the Twelve
no evidence of a public ministry
no trace of Gospel-level notoriety
Not even a rumor in archaeology that points to a miracle-working rabbi. Ancient Troy existing doesn’t prove Achilles existed. Nazareth existing doesn’t prove Jesus existed.
Apologists push the setting as if it confirms the character. It doesn’t.
If the Gospels were eyewitness-based biographies, their geography would line up with first-century Palestine.
Instead, we get:
• Towns that don’t match reality
The Gerasene/Gadarene/Gergesa demon-pig fiasco moves between three different locations because the original story (Mark) puts Jesus 30 miles inland… nowhere near a lake or cliffs.
• Galilee described like a later era
Archaeology shows Galilee in the 20s CE was:
taxed to the bone
rebellious
dotted with large Romanized cities like Sepphoris and Tiberias
But the Gospels portray quaint fishing villages, peaceful Pharisees, and quiet countryside. This reflects post-70 CE Galilee: the era when the Gospels were actually written.
• Homeric storms on a tiny lake
Mark treats the Sea of Galilee like the Aegean (raging storms, near capsizings, disciples fearing death) even though ancient critics mocked this because the “sea” is a small lake.
Dennis MacDonald shows Mark lifting whole scenes from Homer, which explains the mismatch: his geography serves his literary needs, not the historical landscape.
• Joseph of “Arimathea” (a town no one can find)
Carrier and others point out the name works more like a literary pun (“best disciple town”) than a real toponym.
• Emmaus placed at different distances
Luke places it seven miles away. Other manuscripts vary. There was no fixed memory.
These aren’t the mistakes of people writing about their homeland. They’re the mistakes of later authors constructing a symbolic landscape.
3. The Gospel Trial Scenes: Legally Impossible
This is the part Christians never touch.
One of the most respected legal scholars of ancient Jewish law did a line-by-line analysis of the Gospel trial scenes. He wasn’t writing from a religious angle, he approached it strictly as a historian of legal procedure.
His conclusion? The trial described in the Gospels violates almost every rule of how Jewish courts actually worked.
According to his research:
capital trials were never held at night
they were not allowed during festivals like Passover
capital verdicts required multiple days, not hours
the High Priest did not interrogate defendants
witness testimony had to match
beating a prisoner during questioning was illegal
and Jewish courts didn’t simply hand people over to Rome
When you stack these facts together, it becomes clear:
The Gospel trial scenes aren’t legal history…. they’re theological storytelling.
That’s before we even get to Pilate.
Pilate was not a timid bureaucrat.
He was violent, ruthless, removed from office for brutality.
4. Acts Doesn’t Remember Any Gospel Miracles
If Jesus actually:
drew crowds,
fed thousands,
raised the dead,
blacked out the sun,
split the Temple curtain,
and resurrected publicly…
Acts (written after the Gospels) should remember all of this.
Instead:
No one in Acts has heard of Jesus.
No one mentions an empty tomb.
No one cites miracles as recent events.
Roman officials are clueless.
Paul knows Jesus only through visions and the scriptures.
Acts behaves exactly like a community whose “history” was not yet written.
5. Manuscripts: Many Copies, No Control
Apologists love saying:
“We have 24,000 manuscripts!”
Quantity isn’t quality.
almost all are medieval
the earliest are tiny scraps
none are originals
no first-century copies
scribes altered texts freely
entire passages were added or deleted
six of Paul’s letters are pseudonymous
many early Christian writings were forged
Even Origen admitted that scribes “add and remove what they please” (privately, of course.)
The manuscript tradition looks nothing like reliable preservation.
6. The Church Fathers Don’t Help (and They Were Tampered With Too)
This is where Fitzgerald’s chapter hits hardest.
Before 150 CE, we have:
no Church Father quoting any Gospel
no awareness of four distinct Gospels
no clear references to Gospel events
Justin Martyr (writing in the 150s) is the first to quote anything Gospel-like, and:
he never names Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John
many of his quotes don’t match our Gospels
he calls them simply “the memoirs”
Even worse:
The writings of Ignatius, Polycarp, Dionysius of Corinth, and many others were tampered with. Some were forged entirely.
So the apologetic claim “The Fathers confirm the Gospels” collapses:
They don’t quote them. They don’t know them. And their own texts are unstable.
Metzger claimed we could reconstruct the New Testament from the Fathers’ quotations but his own scholarship shows the Fathers don’t quote anything reliably until after the Gospels were circulating.
7. External Pagan Sources: Late, Thin, and Dependent on Christian Claims
This is the other half of the myth… that “history” outside the Bible confirms Jesus.
Let’s look quickly:
• Tacitus (116 CE)
Reports what Christians of his day believed. He cites no source, no archive, no investigation.
• Pliny (c. 111 CE)
Says Christians worship Christ “as a god.” Confirms Christians existed — not that Jesus did.
• Josephus (93 CE)
The Testimonium is tampered with. Even conservative scholars admit Christian hands were all over it. The “James, brother of Jesus” line is ambiguous at best.
These are not independent confirmations. They’re late echoes of Christian claims.
In closing:
You can confirm:
towns
coins
synagogues
political offices
geography
But that only shows the world existed, not the characters.
The Gospels are theological narratives composed decades later, stitched out of scripture, symbolism, literary models, and the needs of competing communities.
Archaeology confirms the backdrop. History confirms the movement. Neither confirms the biography.
Once you strip away apologetic spin, the evidence points to late, literary, constructed narratives, not eyewitness records of a historical man.
Myth #8: “Paul and the Epistles Confirm the Gospels”
Albert Schweitzer pointed out that if we only had Paul’s letters, we would never know that:
Jesus taught in parables
gave the Sermon on the Mount
told the “Our Father” prayer
healed people in Galilee
debated Pharisees
From Paul and the other epistles, you wouldn’t even know Jesus was from Nazareth or born in Bethlehem.
That alone should make us pause before saying, “Paul confirms the Gospels.”
Paul’s “Gospel” Is Not a Life Story
When Paul says “my gospel,” he doesn’t mean a narrative like Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. His gospel is:
Christ died for our sins
was buried
was raised
now offers salvation to those who trust him
No:
Bethlehem, Nazareth, Mary, Joseph
John the Baptist
miracles, exorcisms, parables
empty tomb story with women at dawn
And this isn’t because Paul is forgetful. His letters are full of perfect moments to say, “As Jesus taught us…” or “As we all know from our Lord’s ministry…”
He never does.
Instead, he appeals to:
his own visions
the Hebrew scriptures (in Greek translation, the Septuagint)
what “the Lord” reveals directly to him
For Paul, Christ is:
“the image of the invisible God”
“firstborn of all creation”
the cosmic figure through whom all things were made
the one who descends to the lower realms, defeats spiritual powers, and ascends again
That is cosmic myth language… not “my friend’s rabbi who did a lot of teaching in Galilee a few decades ago.”
The “Lord’s Supper,” Not a Last Supper
The one place people think Paul lines up with the Gospels is 1 Corinthians 11, where he describes “the Lord’s Supper.”
Look closely:
He never calls it “the Last Supper.”
He never says it was a Passover meal.
He never places it in Jerusalem.
He says he received this ritual from the Lord, not from human eyewitnesses.
The phrase he uses, kuriakon deipnon (“Lord’s dinner”), is the same kind of language used for sacred meals in pagan mystery cults.
The verb he uses for “handed over” is used elsewhere of God handing Christ over, or Christ handing himself over not of a buddy’s betrayal. The specific “Judas betrayed him at dinner” motif shows up later, in the Gospels.
Then, when later authors retell the scene, they can’t even agree on the script. We get:
Paul’s version
Mark’s version
Matthew’s tweak on Mark
Luke’s two different textual forms
and John, who skips a Last Supper entirely and relocates the “eat my flesh, drink my blood” thing to a synagogue sermon in Capernaum
That looks less like multiple eyewitness reports and more like a liturgical formula evolving as it gets theologized.
Hebrews and the Missing Connection
The author of Hebrews:
goes deep on covenant and sacrificial blood
quotes Moses: “This is the blood of the covenant…”
spends time on Melchizedek, who brings bread and wine and blesses Abraham
In other words: The author sets up what would be a perfect sermon illustration for the Last Supper… but he never takes it. No “as our Lord did on the night he was betrayed.” No Eucharist scene. No Passover meal.
The simplest explanation: He doesn’t know that story. He knows the ritual meaning; the later narrative scene in Jerusalem hasn’t been invented yet in his circle.
How Paul Says He Knows Christ
Paul is very clear about his source:
He did not receive his gospel from any human (Galatians 1).
He barely met the Jerusalem “pillars,” waited years to even visit them, and insists they added nothing to his message.
He says God “revealed his Son in me.”
His scriptures are the Septuagint, which he reads as a giant coded story about Christ.
In other words, for Paul:
Christ is a hidden heavenly figure revealed in scripture and visions.
The “mystery” has just now been unveiled.
That only makes sense if there wasn’t already a widely known human teacher whose sayings and deeds were circulating everywhere.
The Silence of the Other Epistles
If it were just Paul, we could say, “That’s just Paul being weird.”
But the pattern runs across the other epistles:
From the New Testament letters outside the Gospels and Acts, you would never know:
Jesus was from Nazareth or born in Bethlehem
he grew up in Galilee
he taught crowds, told parables, healed people, or exorcised demons
he had twelve disciples, one of whom betrayed him
there were sacred sites tied to his life in Jerusalem
“Bethlehem,” “Nazareth,” “Galilee” do not appear in those letters with reference to Jesus. Jerusalem is never presented as, “You know, the place where all this just happened.”
The supposed “brothers of the Lord” never act like family with stories to tell. The letters attributed to James and Jude don’t even mention they’re related to Jesus.
When these early authors argue about circumcision, food laws, purity, and ethics, they consistently go back to the Old Testament…not to anything like a Sermon on the Mount.
That is very hard to reconcile with a memory of a recent, popular Galilean preacher inspiring the entire movement.
Myth #9: “Christianity Began With Jesus and His Twelve Besties”
If you grew up on Acts, you probably have this movie in your head:
Tiny, persecuted but unified Jesus movement
Centered in Jerusalem
Led by Jesus’ family and the Twelve
Paul shows up later in season two as the complex antihero
That’s the canonical story.
When you step back and read our earliest sources on their own terms, that picture melts.
Fragmented from the Start
In 1 Corinthians, Paul complains:
“Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:12–13)
That’s not “one unified church.”
He also:
rants about people “preaching another Jesus”
calls rival apostles “deceitful workers,” “false brothers,” “servants of Satan”
invokes curses on those preaching a different gospel (Gal. 1:6–9; 2 Cor. 11)
Meanwhile, the early Christian manual Didakhē warns communities about wandering preachers who are just “traffickers in Christs” (what Bart Ehrman nicknames “Christ-mongers.”)
Right away, we see:
multiple groups using the Christ label
competing versions of what “the gospel” even is
no sign of one tight central group everyone agrees on
Different Jesuses for Different Communities
By the time the Gospels and later texts are in circulation, we can already see:
Paul’s Christ: a cosmic, heavenly savior, revealed in scripture and visions, ruling spiritual realms
Thomasine Christ: in the Gospel of Thomas, salvation comes through hidden wisdom; there’s no crucifixion or resurrection narrative
Mark’s Jesus: a suffering, misunderstood Son of God who’s “adopted” at baptism and abandoned at the cross
John’s Jesus: the eternal Logos, present at creation, walking around announcing his unity with the Father
Hebrews’ Christ: the heavenly High Priest performing a sacrifice in a heavenly sanctuary
These are not just “different camera angles on the same historical guy.” They reflect:
different liturgies
different cosmologies
different starting assumptions about who or what Christ even is
And notice: there is no clean pipeline from “this man’s twelve students carefully preserved his teachings” into this wild diversity.
Paul vs. Peter: Not a Cute Disagreement
Acts spins the Jerusalem meeting as:
everyone sits down
hashes things out
walks away in perfect unity
Paul’s own account (Galatians 2) is… not that:
he calls some of the Jerusalem people “false brothers”
he says they were trying to enslave believers
he says he “did not yield to them for a moment”
he treats the supposed “pillars” (Peter, James, John) as nobodies who “added nothing” to his gospel
That’s not a friendly staff meeting. That’s two rival Christianities:
a more Torah-observant, Jerusalem-centered Jesus-sect
Paul’s law-free, Gentile-mystic Christ-sect
Acts, written later, airbrushes this into harmony. The letters show how close the whole thing came to a full split.
Where Are the Twelve?
If Jesus’ twelve disciples were:
real,
the main founders of Christianity,
traveling around planting churches,
we’d expect:
lots of references to them
preserved teachings and letters
at least some reliable biographical detail
Instead:
the lists of the Twelve don’t agree between Gospels
some manuscripts can’t even settle on their names
outside the Gospels and Acts, the Twelve basically vanish from the first-century record
Paul:
never quotes “the Twelve”
never appeals to them as the final authority
treats Peter, James, John simply as rival apostles, not as Jesus’ old friends
We have no authentic writings from any of the Twelve. The later “Acts of Peter,” “Acts of Andrew,” “Acts of Thomas,” etc., are generally acknowledged to be later inventions.
The simplest explanation is not that the Twelve were historically massive and weirdly left no trace. It’s that:
“The Twelve” are symbolic: twelve tribes, twelve cosmic seats, twelve zodiac signs, take your pick.
Their names and “biographies” were built after the theology, not before.
The Kenosis Hymn: Jesus as a Title, Not a Birth Name
In Philippians 2, Paul quotes an early hymn:
“Being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — death on a cross. Therefore God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow…”
Notice:
The hymn does not say God gave him the title “Lord.”
It says God gave him the name Jesus after the exaltation.
That is not what you expect if “Jesus” was already the known name of a village carpenter from Nazareth. It makes a lot more sense if:
“Jesus” functions originally as a divine name for a savior figure (“Yahweh saves”),
assigned in the mythic story after his cosmic act,
and only later gets retrofitted as the everyday name of a human hero.
Mark: From Mystery Faith to “Biography”
All of this funnels into the earliest Gospel: Mark.
Mark announces up front that he’s writing a gospel, not a biography. Modern scholars have shown that Mark:
builds scenes out of Old Testament passages
mirrors patterns from Greek epics
structures the story like a giant parable, where insiders are given “the mystery of the kingdom,” and outsiders only get stories
In Mark’s own framework, Jesus speaks in parables so that many will see but not understand. The whole Gospel plays that way: symbolic narrative first, later read as straight history once the church gains power.
So did Christianity “begin with Jesus and his apostles”?
If by that you mean:
One coherent movement, founded by a famous rabbi with twelve close disciples, faithfully transmitted from Jerusalem outward…
Then no. That’s the myth.
What we actually see is:
multiple competing Jesuses
rival gospels and factions
no clear paper trail from “Jesus’ inner circle”
later authors stitching together a cleaned-up origin story and branding rivals as “heresy”
Biographies came after belief, not before.
Myth #10: “Christianity Was a Miraculous Overnight Success That Changed the World”
The standard Christian flex goes like this:
“No mere myth could have spread so fast and changed the world so profoundly. That proves Jesus was real.”
Let’s slow that down.
But before we even touch the growth rates, we need to name something obvious that apologists conveniently forget:
Christianity wasn’t the first tradition built around a dying-and-rising savior. Not even close.
Long before the Gospels were written, the ancient Near East had already produced fully developed resurrection myths. One of the oldest (and one of the most important) belonged to Inanna, the Sumerian Queen of Heaven.
Ancient Akkadian cylinder seal (2350–2150 BCE) depicting Inanna
Inanna’s Descent (c. 2000–3000 BCE) is the earliest recorded resurrection narrative in human history.
She descends into the Underworld, is stripped, judged, executed, hung on a hook, and then through divine intervention, is brought back to life and restored to her throne.
This story predates Christianity by two thousand years and was well known across Mesopotamia.
In other words:
✨ The idea that a divine figure dies, descends into darkness, and returns transformed was already ancient before Christianity was even born.
So, the claim that “no myth could spread unless it were historically real” falls apart immediately. Myths did spread. Myths do spread. Myths shaped entire civilizations long before Jesus entered the story.
Now (with that context in place) let’s actually talk about Christianity’s growth..
Christianities Stayed Small…. Until Politics Changed
Carrier’s modeling makes it clear:
even if you start with generous numbers (say 5,000 believers in 40 CE),
you still don’t get anywhere near a significant percentage of the Empire until well into the third century
And that includes all groups who believed in some form of Christ — including the later-branded “heretics.”
So, for the first ~250 years, Christianity:
is tiny
is fragmented
is one cult among many in a very crowded religious landscape
The “miracle” is not early explosive growth. It’s what happens when their tiny, disciplined network suddenly gets access to empire-level power.
Rome Falls; Christianity Rises
Fitzgerald is right that Christianity benefitted from Rome’s third-century crisis:
chronic civil wars
inflation and currency debasement
border instability and barbarian incursions
trade networks breaking down
urban life contracting
As conditions worsened:
Christianity’s disdain for “worldly” culture
its emphasis on endurance, suffering, and heavenly reward
its growing bishop-led structure and charity networks
…all became more attractive to the poor and dispossessed.
“It was a mark of Constantine’s political genius … that he realized it was better to utilize a religion … that already had a well‑established structure of authority … rather than exclude it as a hindrance.” Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason
But there’s a step many historians including Fitzgerald often underplay:
How Christianity destroyed the classical world.
From Tolerated to Favored to Tyrannical
A quick timeline:
313-Constantine legalizes Christianity (Edict of Milan). Christianity is now allowed, not official. Constantine still honors Sol Invictus and dies as a pagan emperor who also patronized bishops.
4th century– Christian bishops gain wealth and political leverage. Imperial funds start flowing to churches. Pagan temples begin to be looted or repurposed.
380– Emperor Theodosius I issues the Edict of Thessalonica: Nicene Christianity becomes the official state religion.
395 and after– Laws begin banning pagan sacrifices and temple worship. Pagan rites become crimes.
Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age and Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind document how this looked on the ground:
temples closed, looted, or destroyed
statues smashed
libraries and shrines burned
philosophers harassed, exiled, or killed
non-Christian rites criminalized
Christianity didn’t “persuade” its way to exclusive dominance. It:
received funding and legal favor
then helped outlaw and dismantle its competition
That is not a moral judgment; it’s just how imperial religions behave.
The “Overnight Success” That Took Centuries and a State
So was Christianity a new, radically different, overnight success?
Not new: it recycled the son-of-god savior pattern, sacred meals, initiation, and rebirth themes common in the religious world around it. Even early church fathers admitted the similarities and blamed them on Satan “counterfeiting” Christianity in advance.
Not overnight: it stayed statistically tiny for generations.
Not purely spiritual success: it became powerful when emperors needed an obedient, centralized religious hierarchy to stabilize a collapsing state.
Christianity didn’t “win” because its evidence was overwhelming.
It won because:
it fit the needs of late-imperial politics
it built a strong internal hierarchy
it could supply social services
its leaders were willing to suppress, outlaw, and overwrite rival traditions
This is not unique. It’s a textbook case of how state-backed religions spread.
Why the Pushback Always Sounds the Same
After Part One, my comment sections turned into Groundhog Day:
“You’re ignoring Tacitus and Josephus!”
“Every serious scholar agrees Jesus existed.”
“Archaeology proves the Bible.”
“There are 25,000 manuscripts.”
“Paul met Jesus’ brother!”
“If Jesus wasn’t real, who started Christianity?”
“Ancient critics never denied his existence — checkmate.”
“You just hate religion.”
“This is misinformation.”
Different usernames. Same script.
This is where Neil Van Leeuwen’s work on religious credences helps:
Factual beliefs are supposed to track evidence. If you show me credible new data, I update.
Religious credences function differently: they’re tied to identity, community, and morality. Their job isn’t to track facts; it’s to hold the group together.
So when you challenge Jesus’ historicity, you’re not just questioning an ancient figure. You’re touching:
“Who am I?”
“Who are my people?”
“What makes my life meaningful?”
No wonder people come in hot.
That doesn’t make them stupid or evil. It just means the conversation isn’t really about Tacitus. It’s about identity maintenance.
Now Let’s Turn the Lens on Mythicism (Yes, Including Fitzgerald)
Here’s where I want to be very clear:
I am a mythicist.
I do not think the Jesus of the Gospels ever existed as a historical person.
But mythicism itself doesn’t get a free pass.
Carrier’s Probability Model: When Someone Actually Does the Math
Most debates about Jesus collapse into appeals to authority. Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus at least does something different: it quantifies the evidence.
Using Bayesian reasoning, he argues roughly:
about a 1 in 3 prior probability that there was a “minimal historical Jesus”– a real Jewish teacher who got executed and inspired a movement
about 2 in 3 for a “minimal mythicist” origin– a celestial figure whose story later got historicized
Then, after weighing the actual evidence (Paul’s silence, the late Gospels, contradictions, etc.), he argues the probability of a historical Jesus drops further, to something like 1 in 12.
You don’t have to agree with his exact numbers to see the point:
Once you treat the sources like data, not dogma, the overconfident “of course Jesus existed, you idiot” stance looks a lot less justified.
O’Neill’s Critique of Fitzgerald: Atheist vs Atheist
Tim O’Neill, an atheist historian, wrote a long piece on Fitzgerald’s Nailed and does not hold back. His basic charges:
Fitzgerald oversells weak arguments
cherry-picks and misuses sources
ignores mainstream scholarship where it contradicts him
frames mythicism as bold truth vs. “apologist cowards,” which is just another tribal narrative
When Fitzgerald responded, he didn’t do so like someone doing serious historical work. He responded like an internet keyboard warrior.
And that same ideological vibe shows up in how he talks about people in general, which I said in the beginning.
Atheism as New Orthodoxy
The more time I spend watching atheist and deconstruction spaces online, the more obvious it becomes that a lot of these folks didn’t escape religion, they just changed uniforms. They swapped their church pews for Reddit threads, pastors for science influencers, and now “logic” is their new scripture. Ya feel me? It’s the same emotional energy: tribal validation, purity tests–like what do you believe or think about this? And the constant hunt for heretics who dare to ask inconvenient questions.
Say something even slightly outside the approved dogma…like pointing out that evolution (calm down, Darwin disciples) still has gaps and theoretical edges we haven’t fully nailed down and suddenly the comment section becomes the Inquisition. They defend the theory with the exact same fervor evangelicals defend the Book of Revelation. It’s wild.
And look, I’m all for science. I’m literally the girl who reads academic papers for funsies. But when atheists start treating evolution like a sacred cow that can’t be questioned, or acting like “reason” is this perfect, unbiased tool that magically supports all their existing beliefs… that’s not skepticism. That’s a new orthodoxy, dressed up as a freethinker. Different vocabulary, same psychology. Good gravy, baby— calm down.
and….here’s the uncomfortable truth a lot of atheists don’t want to hear:
Reason isn’t the savior they think it is.
French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have spent years studying how humans actually use reason and prepare yourself because: we don’t use it the way we think. Their research shows that reason didn’t evolve to help us discover truth. It evolved to help us win arguments, protect our identities, and persuade members of our group.
In other words:
confirmation bias isn’t a flaw
motivated reasoning isn’t a glitch
tribal loyalty isn’t an accident
They are features of the reasoning system.
Which is why people who worship “logic” often behave exactly like the religious communities they left… just with new vocabulary and a different set of heretics.
This is also why intellectual diversity matters so much. You cannot reason your way to truth inside an ideological monoculture. Your brain simply won’t let you. Without competing perspectives, reasoning becomes nothing more than rhetorical self-defense, a way to signal loyalty to the tribe while pretending to be above it.
John Stuart Mill understood this long before modern cognitive science confirmed it. In On Liberty, Mill argues that truth isn’t something we protect by silencing dissent. Truth emerges through friction, through the clash of differing perspectives. A community that prides itself on “rational superiority” but cannot tolerate disagreement becomes just another church with a different hymnal.
And that’s where many atheist and deconstruction spaces are now.
They haven’t transcended dogma. They’ve recreated it. Trading one orthodoxy for another.
This isn’t just about online atheists. This is about what happens when any movement stops questioning itself.
Challenging the Mythicist Side (Without Turning It Into Another Tribe)
Let’s get honest about the mythicist world too — because every camp has its blind spots.
Tim O’Neill’s critique of David Fitzgerald wasn’t just angry rhetoric. Strip away the insults, and he raises a few legitimate issues worth taking seriously:
1. Accusation of Agenda-Driven History
O’Neill argues that Fitzgerald starts with the conclusion “Jesus didn’t exist” and works backward, much like creationists do with Genesis.
Now Fitzgerald absolutely denies this. In his own words, he didn’t go looking for mythicism; mythicism found him when he started examining the evidence. And that’s fair.
But the deeper point still stands:
The mythicist movement can get so emotionally invested in debunking Christianity that it mirrors the very dogmatism it critiques.
You see this all over atheist spaces today — endless dunking, no nuance, purity tests, and very little actual curiosity.
That’s a valid critique.
2. Amateurism and Overreach
O’Neill also accuses Fitzgerald of relying too heavily on older scholarship, making confident claims where the evidence is thin, and occasionally overstating consensus.
Again — not entirely wrong. Fitzgerald’s book is sharp and compelling, but it’s not the cutting-edge end of mythicism anymore.
There are places where he simplifies. There are places where he speculates.
This matters because mythicism deserves better than overconfident shortcuts.
3. Fitzgerald doesn’t push far enough
And ironically, this is where I diverge from O’Neill entirely. He thinks Fitzgerald goes too far; I think Fitzgerald stops too soon.
There are areas where the mythicist case has advanced beyond Fitzgerald’s framework, and he doesn’t touch them:
• The possibility that “Paul” himself is a literary construct
Nina Livesey and other scholars argue that:
The Pauline voice may be a 2nd-century invention.
The letters reflect Roman rhetorical conventions, not authentic 1st-century correspondence.
The “apostle Paul” may be a theological persona used to unify competing sects.
Fitzgerald doesn’t address this— but it’s now one of the most provocative frontiers in the field.
• The geopolitical legacy of Abrahamic supremacy
Fitzgerald critiques Christian nationalism. Great. But he doesn’t go upstream to examine the deeper architecture:
It focuses almost exclusively on Christian excess while leaving the deeper architecture untouched: how Abrahamic identity claims themselves shape law, land, empire, and modern geopolitics.
When you zoom out, the story is not “Christian nationalism versus secular reason.”
It is competing and cooperating Abrahamic power structures, each with theological claims about chosen-ness, inheritance, land, and destiny.
Abrahamic Power Is Not Just Christian
Very few people are willing to look at the broader landscape of Abrahamic influence in American politics and global power structures. When they do not, they miss how deeply intertwined these traditions have been for over a century.
One under-discussed example is the longstanding institutional relationship between Mormonism and Judaism, particularly around shared claims to Israel and the “house of Israel.”
This is not hidden history.
In 1995, Utah Valley State College established a Center for Jewish Studies explicitly aimed at “bridging the gap between Jews and Mormons” and guiding relationships connected to Israel. One of the board members was Jack Solomon, a Jewish community leader who publicly praised the LDS Church as uniquely supportive of Judaism.
Solomon stated at the time that “there is no place in the world where the Christian community has been so supportive of the Jewish people and Judaism,” noting LDS financial and symbolic support for Jewish institutions in Utah going back to the early twentieth century.
This matters because Mormon theology explicitly claims descent from the house of Israel. Mormons do not merely admire Judaism. They see themselves as part of Israel’s continuation and restoration.
That theological framework shapes real-world alliances.
1. The Mormon Church Is a Financial Superpower
Most Americans have no idea how wealthy the LDS Church actually is.
The Mormon Church’s real estate & investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, was exposed in 2019 and again in 2023 for managing a secret portfolio now estimated at:
👉 $150–$200 billion
(Source: SEC filings, whistleblower leaks, Wall Street Journal)
To compare:
PepsiCo market cap: ~$175B
ExxonMobil (oil giant): ~$420B
Disney: ~$160B
Meaning:
📌 The LDS Church is financially on par with Pepsi and Disney, and not far behind Big Oil.
This is not a “church.” This is an empire.
And it invests strategically:
massive real estate acquisitions
agricultural control
media companies
political lobbying
funding influence networks
And let’s be clear: Mormons see themselves as a literal remnant of Israel (the last tribe) destined to help rule the Earth “in the last days.”
Which brings us to…
2. Mormonism’s Quiet Partnership with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR)
NAR is the movement behind the so-called “Seven Mountain Mandate”— the belief that Christians must seize control of:
Government
Education
Media
Arts & Entertainment
Business
Religion
Family
This is the backbone of Christian nationalism and it’s far more organized than people realize. But here’s the part that never gets discussed:
Mormon elites collaborate with NAR leadership behind the scenes.
Shared goals:
influence over U.S. political leadership
shaping national morality laws
preparing for a prophetic “kingdom age”
embedding power in those seven spheres
This isn’t fringe. This is the largest religious–political coalition in the country, and yet most journalists never touch it.
3. The Ziklag Group: A $25M-Minimum Christian Power Circle
You want to talk about “elite networks”?
Meet Ziklag: an ultra-exclusive Christian organization named after King David’s biblical stronghold. Requirements for membership: a minimum net worth of $25 million Their mission? Not charity. Not discipleship.
Influence the Seven Mountains of society at the highest levels.
Members include:
CEOs
hedge-fund managers
defense contractors
political donors
tech founders
Including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.
AND YET…
Most people yelling about “Christian nationalism” have never even heard of Ziklag.
4. Meanwhile, Chabad-Lubavitch Has Met with Every U.S. President Since 1978
Evangelical influence isn’t the only Abrahamic power Americans ignore.
Chabad (a Hasidic cult with global reach) has:
direct access to every U.S. president
annual White House proclamations (“Education & Sharing Day”) explicitly honor a religious leader as a moral authority over the nation.
a network of emissaries (shluchim) embedded in power centers around the world
This is influence, not conspiracy.
This is religious lobbying at the highest level of government, treated as unremarkable simply because the public doesn’t understand it.
The Rebbe’s ambassador to Washington D.C., Rabbi Abraham Shemtov, addresses the crowd at an event in front of the White House organized by American Friends of Lubavitch, as President Carter and The Honorable Stuart E. Eizenstat, Chief Domestic Policy Adviser and the Executive Director of the White House Domestic Policy Staff, look on.
President Gerald Ford is greeted by Rabbi Abraham Shemtov (left), national director of American Friends of Lubavitch; Rabbi Moshe Feller (right), Chabad-Lubavitch emissary to Minnesota; and Senator Rudy Boschwitz; at the American Friends of Lubavitch Philadelphia dinner, May 1975.
President Ronald Reagan signs the Education Day U.S.A. proclamation
President Bill Clinton places a dollar bill in a charity box after receiving members of the American Friends of Lubavitch in the White House.
President George W. Bush speaks to Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis after signing the Education Day U.S.A. proclamation.
President Obama Welcomes Chabad-Lubavitch to the White House
Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis meet with President Donald J. Trump on Education and Sharing Day, U.S.A. in 2018. “The First Lady and I encourage all Americans to reflect upon the Rebbe’s teachings,” President Trump wrote in this year’s proclamation. “His inestimable dedication and unwavering example have become woven into the very fabric of our nation and its character. His memory remains a blessing to the world.”
Biden meets with over 100 Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis
See the Pattern Yet?
When people say “Christian nationalism,” they’re talking about one branch of a much older tree.
Christianity isn’t the problem. Atheism isn’t the solution.
The issue is Abrahamic supremacy: the belief that one sacred lineage has the right to rule, legislate, moralize, and define history for everyone else.
Across denominations, across continents, across political parties, the pattern is the same:
chosen-people narratives
divine-right entitlement
mythic land claims
sacred-tier influence operations
the blending of theology with statecraft
“Groupish belief systems that justify valuing one’s group above others must be inventable.” — Religion as Make-Believe.
Exactly.
These power structures aren’t ancient relics. They’re alive, wealthy, organized, and deeply embedded in American political life. And yet we’re told to panic exclusively about MAGA Christians… while studiously ignoring:
Mormon financial empires
NAR infiltration of U.S. political offices
Zionist influence networks
Chabad’s presidential pipeline
elite Christian dominionist groups like Ziklag
This isn’t about blaming individuals.
It’s about naming systems. Because if we’re going to talk honestly about orthodoxy, myth, and power…
we need to talk about all of it— not just the parts that are fashionable to critique.
4. Mythicism still hasn’t grappled with empire
Most mythicist writing stops at: “Jesus didn’t exist.”
Cool. Now what? The real question is:
HOW? How did a mythical figure become the operating system for Western civilization?
So, here’s where I actually land:
Christianity didn’t emerge from a single man. It emerged from competing myths, political incentives, scriptural remixing, imperial needs, and evolving group identities.
And if that makes me someone who doesn’t quite fit in the Christian world, the atheist world, or the deconstruction world? Perfect. My loyalty is to the question, not the tribe. That’s exactly where I plan to stay.
That’s exactly where I plan to stay.
aaaand as always, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in. 🎙️🔒
Footnotes
1. Jodi Magness, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit (Eerdmans, 2011).
Archaeologist specializing in 1st-century Judea; emphasizes that archaeology illuminates daily life, but cannot confirm Jesus’ existence or Gospel events.
2. Eric M. Meyers & Mark A. Chancey, Archaeology, the Rabbis, and Early Christianity (Baker Academic, 2012).
Shows how archaeology supports context, not Gospel narrative details.
3. Steve Mason, Josephus and the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Hendrickson, 2003).
Explains why the Testimonium Flavianum is partially or heavily interpolated and cannot serve as independent confirmation of Jesus.
4. Alice Whealey, “The Testimonium Flavianum in Syriac and Arabic,” New Testament Studies 54.4 (2008): 573–590.
Analyzes manuscript traditions showing Christian editing of Josephus.
5. Louis Feldman, “Josephus,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3 (Yale University Press, 1992).
Standard reference summarizing scholarly consensus about the unreliable portions of Josephus’ Jesus passages.
6. Brent Shaw, “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution,” Journal of Roman Studies 105 (2015): 73–100.
Shows Tacitus likely repeats Christian stories, not archival Roman data, making him a witness to Christian belief — not Jesus’ historicity.
7. Pliny the Younger, Epistles 10.96–97.
Earliest Roman description of Christian worship; confirms Christians existed, not that Jesus did.
8. Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus (HarperOne, 2005).
Explains why New Testament manuscripts contain thousands of variations, with no originals surviving.
9. Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (Yale University Press, 2000).
Argues Mark intentionally modeled episodes on Homeric motifs — supporting literary construction rather than eyewitness reporting.
10. Attridge, Harold W., The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia Commentary Series).
Shows how Hebrews relies on celestial priesthood imagery and makes no connection to a recent earthly Jesus, even when opportunities are obvious.
11. Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle (1999).
Early mythicist argument emphasizing the epistles’ lack of biographical Jesus data.
12. Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix, 2014).
Presents a Bayesian model estimating mythicist origins as more probable than historicity.
13. Richard Carrier, Proving History (Prometheus, 2012).
Explains the historical method he uses for evaluating Jesus traditions.
14. Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (Yale University Press, 2000).
Demonstrates the pluralism and fragmentation within earliest Christianity.
15. Burton Mack, The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy (Continuum, 2006).
Describes the emergence of various Jesus traditions as literary and theological constructions.
16. Clayton N. Jefford, The Didache (Fortress Press).
Analyzes early church manual revealing “wandering prophets,” factionalism, and market-style competition among early Jesus groups.
17. Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age (Macmillan, 2017).
Documents the destruction of pagan culture under Christian imperial dominance.
18. Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind (Vintage, 2005).
Explores how Christian orthodoxy displaced classical philosophy.
19. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (Yale University Press, 1984).
Shows Christianity expanded primarily through imperial power, incentives, and legislation, not mass persuasion.
20. H.A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Outlines Constantine’s political use of Christianity and the shift toward enforced orthodoxy.
21. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
Provides context for how Christianity overtook the Roman religious landscape.
22. Neil Van Leeuwen, “Religious Credence Is Not Factual Belief,” Cognition 133 (2014): 698–715.
Explains why religious commitments behave like identity markers, not evidence-responsive beliefs.
23. Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (MIT Press, 2015).
Useful for understanding modern online purity culture dynamics, relevant to atheist-internet behavior discussed in your commentary section.
24. Joseph Reagle, Reading the Comments (MIT Press, 2015).
Analyzes comment-section behavior and ideological enforcement online.
25. Tim O’Neill, “Easter, the Existence of Jesus, and Dave Fitzgerald,” History for Atheists (2017).
Atheist historian critiquing Fitzgerald’s methodological errors, exaggerated claims, and misuse of sources.
26. Raphael Lataster, Questioning the Historicity of Jesus (Brill, 2019).
Secular academic arguing mythicism is plausible but insisting on higher methodological rigor than many popularizers use.
27. Richard Carrier, various blog critiques of Fitzgerald (2012–2019).
Carrier agrees with mythicism but critiques Fitzgerald for overstatement and inadequate source control.
Are we wearing poison? Let’s talk the Hidden Chemistry of Modern Clothing
We obsess over what goes into our bodies (the food we eat, the supplements we take) but what about what touches our skin every day? From Victorian gowns to modern period underwear, the history of fashion is riddled with invisible chemicals that make us sick, sometimes quietly, sometimes catastrophically.
In this week’s Taste of Truth Tuesdays, we explore the hidden chemistry in the fabrics we wear, the cultural stories that taught us to hide what’s natural, and small steps we can take to reclaim autonomy over our own bodies.
I sat down with Arielle, founder of Flower Girl, a brand reimagining period underwear with natural, breathable fibers— no toxic coatings, no gimmicks. But this episode isn’t just about a product. It’s about the invisible chemistry that touches our skin, and the cultural stories that taught us to hide what’s natural while normalizing what’s toxic.
🧵 A Brief History of Poisonous Fashion
From Victorian gowns to modern athleisure, fashion has a long history of exposing us (sometimes invisibly) to chemicals that affect our health. Here’s a quick dive:
Victorian Era: Those green dresses weren’t just a statement— they were laced with arsenic, and mercury-based pigments were common. The result? Rashes, lung damage, even death. Fashion literally killed.
Early 1900s: Factory workers handled lead, aniline dyes, and formaldehyde finishes. Mercury made hat-makers insane, while young women painting radium watch dials suffered bone decay and radiation poisoning.
Mid-20th century: Synthetic fabrics like nylon and polyester promised convenience and comfort — but chemical coatings for stain-proofing, wrinkle-free finishes, and flame retardants added a new layer of invisible toxins.
Modern Toxic Threads
Fast-forward to today, and the chemical story hasn’t improved much:
Plastic fibers (polyester, nylon, spandex): Shed microplastics into waterways and can absorb and re-release toxins through skin contact with these substances. And yes— even period products aren’t safe from the chemical experiment.
PFAS (“forever chemicals”): Used for stain- and water-resistance in yoga pants, athleisure, and some period underwear. Linked to hormone disruption, infertility, thyroid disease, and cancer.
Formaldehyde finishes: Wrinkle-free clothing often contains formaldehyde, a known skin irritant and probable carcinogen.
Azo dyes & heavy metals: Cheap and fast-fashion fabrics often use dyes with heavy metals, which can trigger allergic reactions and long-term organ toxicity.
Some of the most publicized cases show just how pervasive these risks are:
Thinx Period Underwear (2023): Independent testing revealed PFAS in products marketed as organic and “clean,” sparking lawsuits and class-action settlements. Even items sold as safe aren’t always free from hidden chemicals.
Flight Attendant Uniforms: Airlines like Alaska, Delta, and American faced reports of workers developing rashes, respiratory issues, and thyroid problems after new uniforms were treated with PFAS or formaldehyde coatings.
Outdoor & Athleisure Brands:Major brands like Patagonia, Lululemon, and REI have been scrutinized for PFAS in waterproof or sweat-wicking gear, showing that convenience and performance often come at a chemical cost.
Globally, more than 40,000 chemicals are used in textiles and apparel, yet only a fraction have been tested for safety— for humans, animals, or the environment. These scandals aren’t isolated; they reflect a system where toxic exposure is often invisible, normalized, and poorly regulated.
A 2024 study from UC Berkeley and Columbia found 16 different metals (including lead and arsenic) in tampons across both organic and non-organic brands. The levels were low, but researchers warned that the vaginal route is especially absorbent— a reminder that what we wear inside our bodies matters as much as what we eat.
💬 From Ritual Impurity to Hygiene Marketing
Over the last century, the cultural messaging around menstruation has shifted in a few distinct stages and each one carried the same underlying expectation: women should hide and control their bodies.
Ritual or moral framing (ancient to early modern): In many societies, including biblical times, periods were treated as a matter of ritual purity. Women were temporarily “unclean” in religious or social terms, meaning they couldn’t participate in certain activities. The focus was spiritual or moral, not about hygiene or appearance.
Hygiene framing (early 20th century): With industrialization and the rise of consumer products, periods were recast as a hygiene problem. Ads emphasized cleanliness and odor control, implying that menstruation was inherently messy or dangerous. Women were encouraged to conceal their cycles, but the emphasis was still largely about avoiding germs and embarrassment.
Performance framing (mid-to-late 20th century onward): Marketing and media shifted the conversation again, this time framing periods as an obstacle to a woman’s ability to perform socially, professionally, and physically. Products promised to let women stay active, go to work, exercise, and socialize “normally”, without anyone noticing their period. The message became: your body is natural, but it shouldn’t interfere with the image of a controlled, capable, and flawless woman.
In other words, the period itself didn’t change, but what society demanded of women did. “Performance” here doesn’t mean athletics alone— it means the expectation that women should navigate daily life seamlessly, keeping their bodies’ natural processes invisible, as if menstruation were a glitch in an otherwise perfect system.
🌍 The New Awareness
Today’s “wellness” world loves to market empowerment but secretly it’s still selling control. Arielle’s work with Flower Girl pushes against that. Her goal isn’t fearmongering about chemicals; it is about helping women rebuild trust with their own bodies, starting with the fabrics that touch them daily.
Because true control over your body is about sovereignty, not ideology.
What we wear, what we absorb, and how we relate to our cycles all tell a deeper story about modern womanhood…. one that’s overdue for rewriting.
Next Steps: What You Can Do
Read Labels Critically: Seek out brands that disclose fabric treatments and avoid PFAS, formaldehyde, or undisclosed chemical finishes. Wicker highlights the challenge in identifying safe clothing due to the lack of ingredient transparency, urging consumers to demand more disclosure from manufacturers.
Prioritize Natural Fibers: Opt for materials like cotton, bamboo, or other certified breathable fabrics to reduce your chemical load. Wicker notes that while natural fibers are generally safer, it’s crucial to ensure they are not treated with harmful chemicals during processing.
Wash New Clothes: Especially synthetics- washing before first wear can remove some surface chemicals. Wicker advises washing new garments to reduce initial chemical exposure, particularly from dyes and finishes.
Choose Sustainable Period Products: Brands like Flower Girl use body-safe fabrics designed for comfort, breathability, and longevity— and are tested for safety. Wicker emphasizes the importance of selecting period products that are free from toxic chemicals, as these items are in close contact with sensitive areas of the body.
Advocate for Transparency: Demand that brands tell you what’s in your clothing. Knowledge is power, and the more we ask, the more companies will act. Wicker encourages consumers to be vocal about their concerns, as increased demand for transparency can drive industry-wide change.
🎧 Listen In
Tune in to this week’s Taste of Truth Tuesdays episode, “What’s Really in Our Clothes (and What That Says About Us)”, where Arielle and I unpack the hidden toxins in textiles, the myths around “clean” wellness marketing, and what it really means to live in a body that’s free— not just from chemicals, but from shame.
Taste0ftruth Tuesdays 