Panpsychism, the Emergence Problem, and the Fractures Inside Mythicism with Dr. Skrbina
Today’s conversation isn’t just about whether Jesus existed.
It’s about something sitting underneath that entire debate.
Most mythicist conversations, meaning scholars and skeptics who argue that Jesus may be a literary or constructed figure, operate inside a philosophical framework called materialism.
Materialism in this sense doesn’t simply mean “trust science.” It’s a deeper metaphysical claim: that everything that exists is ultimately physical. Matter is fundamental, and consciousness is something the brain produces when matter is arranged in the right way.
Revisit a past episode where we discussed the dogma of materialism further
In that picture, mind comes after matter. Meaning comes after biology. Religion becomes a byproduct of social evolution.
But there’s a philosophical tension hiding inside that assumption.
Evolution can explain how biological bodies change. It can describe how organisms adapt and diversify. What it does not explain is something much more basic:
Why is there subjective experience at all? Why does pain actually hurt? Why does the color red look like something?
If matter is completely mindless at the ground level, how does experience suddenly appear?
Philosophers call this the emergence problem.
One alternative view (panpsychism) proposes that consciousness isn’t produced by matter at all. Instead, consciousness may be fundamental to reality itself.
That’s where philosopher Dr. David Skrbina enters the conversation.
His book Panpsychism in the West traces this idea across centuries of philosophical thought, showing that the notion of a mind-infused cosmos has appeared again and again throughout Western intellectual history.
But Skrbina has also stepped directly into the mythicist debate with his book The Jesus Hoax. More recently, he published a sharp response to criticism from fellow skeptics David Fitzgerald and Richard Carrier.
Add to that Adam Green’s recent book The Jesus Deception, which approaches early Christianity from yet another angle, and something interesting starts to appear:
Mythicism isn’t a unified theory. It’s fracturing into camps.
So, this conversation moves across several layers at once:
• consciousness and materialism • the emergence problem • whether panpsychism overlaps with Neoplatonism • Paul: historical strategist or literary construct? • and how The Jesus Hoax differs from The Jesus Deception
Let’s start with the philosophical ground beneath it all.
Consciousness and the Return of Panpsychism
Panpsychism is one of those philosophical ideas that sounds strange the first time you hear it but becomes harder to dismiss the more you think about the alternatives.
In plain terms, the idea is simple: mind or experience may exist at some level throughout reality.
That doesn’t mean rocks are thinking thoughts. Rather, it suggests that the basic constituents of the universe may possess extremely simple forms of experience.
The reason this idea keeps resurfacing across centuries of philosophy is precisely because of the emergence problem.
If consciousness appears only when matter becomes sufficiently complex, we still have to explain how completely mindless matter suddenly gives rise to subjective experience.
Panpsychism flips that question around. Instead of asking how consciousness emerges from matter, it proposes that matter itself may already possess proto-mental properties.
Skrbina’s historical work traces this idea from ancient Greek philosophy through early modern thinkers and into contemporary debates in philosophy of mind.
The interesting thing is that the idea never quite disappears. Even in periods dominated by strict materialism, it keeps resurfacing whenever philosophers run into the same problem: explaining how subjective experience arises from purely physical processes.
Materialism and the Emergence Problem
Materialism has been extraordinarily successful as a scientific framework.
It assumes that the universe is composed of physical entities governed by consistent laws. That assumption has allowed science to model everything from particle physics to molecular biology.
But when we apply that framework to consciousness, something unusual happens.
If matter is entirely mindless at the fundamental level, then at some point in the evolutionary process subjective experience must suddenly appear.
But where?
There’s no obvious “magic neuron” where awareness switches on. There’s no clear moment in development when matter transforms from non-experiencing to experiencing.
This is the emergence problem in its most basic form: explaining how subjective experience arises from purely physical systems.
Some scientists have attempted to address this by looking deeper into physics itself. Theories like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s Orch-OR model propose that consciousness may be connected to quantum processes occurring inside neurons.
Whether or not those models succeed, they reveal something important: even within science, researchers are exploring ways to rethink the relationship between mind and matter.
Panpsychism is one such attempt.
Is Panpsychism Just Neoplatonism?
Because panpsychism proposes a cosmos infused with mind, people often assume it’s simply a modern version of Neoplatonism.
But the two traditions aren’t identical.
Neoplatonism describes reality as a hierarchical structure flowing from the One— a metaphysical unity that gives rise to intellect and soul. It carries strong teleological and ethical implications about how humans align themselves with the structure of reality.
Panpsychism, by contrast, is often framed as a metaphysical hypothesis about the nature of matter and consciousness, without necessarily including the moral or spiritual framework found in Neoplatonic thought.
Still, the overlap is hard to ignore. Both challenge the idea that the universe is purely mechanical.
Both suggest that mind and reality may be deeply intertwined.
The Mythicism Debate Fractures
Another interesting tension here is that some of the things Skrbina is criticized for aren’t that far from ideas that already exist in mythicist literature.
One of the central claims in The Jesus Hoax is that St Paul and a small cabal of early Christians may have functioned as a kind of non-military strategy within the Roman world. Instead of armed revolt, the movement theologically conquered by the spread through ideas, theology, and cultural influence.
Skrbina frames this as a kind of ideological or narrative strategy that could reshape behavior across the empire.
What makes the criticism somewhat puzzling is that a similar concept appears in Richard Carrier’s own work.
In Not the Impossible Faith, Carrier describes early Christianity as a movement that spread not through military rebellion but through cultural transformation. Rome could defeat armed revolts, but it could not easily suppress ideas that moved through communities, texts, and belief.
Carrier even characterizes this as a kind of revolutionary strategy. If Rome would always win a military conflict, the only rebellion that could succeed would be a cultural one— a war ofideas rather than armies. (Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith, Ch. 9).
In that sense, the notion that early Christianity functioned as a non-military cultural movement is not controversial. It is widely recognized that the early Jesus movement spread through persuasion, networks, and theology rather than organized violence.
Where the real disagreement emerges is over intent and origin.
Skrbina interprets this cultural transformation as something that may have been deliberately constructed or strategically shaped. His critics tend to view it as an organic religious development rather than a coordinated narrative project.
Another point raised in the exchange concerns the authorship of the gospels, particularly the question of whether Luke was a Gentile writer. Skrbina notes that even if certain details of authorship were revised, for example: if Luke were ultimately shown to be Gentile, the core structure of his argument would not collapse. It would simply require refinement.
That willingness to concede smaller points while maintaining the broader model is something he addresses repeatedly in his response.
The broader takeaway from this debate is that mythicism itself is not a single theory. It is a field where scholars often agree that the traditional gospel narrative is historically unreliable but disagree sharply about what actually replaced it.
One of the most important figures in this entire discussion is Paul of Tarsus.
Skrbina’s model treats Paul as a strategic actor who played a central role in shaping early Christian theology.
But other scholars have raised a more radical possibility: that the Pauline corpus itself may not represent a stable first-century historical figure at all.
Research such as Nina Livesey’s work on the Roman literary context of the Pauline letters suggests that some of these texts may reflect later second-century developments.
If Paul himself were partly a literary construct, it would reshape the debate considerably.
Yet even in that scenario, Skrbina argues, the broader thesis of deliberate narrative construction would not necessarily collapse. It would simply require revision.
Adam Green and the Midrashic Jesus
Adam Green’s recent book The Jesus Deception adds another dimension to the conversation.
Green emphasizes the possibility that the gospel narratives were crafted through midrashic techniques, weaving together Hebrew scriptures to construct the story of Jesus.
This raises a broader question about how religious narratives function historically.
Are they simply stories? Or do they operate as cultural scripts that shape behavior across entire societies?
Green invokes a concept from cultural theory called hyperstition: the idea that beliefs can begin to influence reality because people act as if those beliefs are true.
In other words, a prophecy doesn’t need to be literally true to become historically powerful.
It only needs to be believed strongly enough that people start behaving in ways that bring it about.
That possibility becomes particularly interesting when we look at modern geopolitics.
Some recent reports have suggested that military personnel have framed conflicts in the Middle East through apocalyptic biblical language, describing events as part of a divine plan leading toward Armageddon.
Whether or not such interpretations reflect official policy, they illustrate how powerful religious narratives can be in shaping political imagination.
For readers who want to explore the topics discussed in this episode more deeply, the following books and research have shaped the ideas discussed in this conversation. These works cover philosophy of consciousness, panpsychism, early Christianity, and the intellectual history of the ancient world.
Philosophy of Consciousness & Panpsychism
Panpsychism in the West – David Skrbina A comprehensive historical survey tracing the idea that mind or experience may be fundamental to reality across centuries of Western philosophy.
Science Set Free – Rupert Sheldrake A critique of the assumptions underlying modern scientific materialism and an exploration of alternative ways of thinking about nature, consciousness, and scientific inquiry.
The Emperor’s New Mind – Roger Penrose A physicist’s investigation into the nature of consciousness, the limits of artificial intelligence, and the possibility that consciousness is tied to deeper physical processes in the universe.
The Jesus Hoax – David Skrbina Explores the possibility that early Christian narratives functioned as a strategic cultural movement within the Roman world.
The Jesus Deception – Adam Green Argues that the story of Jesus may have been constructed through Jewish midrashic storytelling traditions.
Not the Impossible Faith – Richard Carrier Carrier’s argument that Christianity’s success in the Roman Empire was historically improbable given the cultural environment of the time.
The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context – Nina Livesey A scholarly examination of whether the Pauline letters reflect later Roman literary production and rhetorical conventions.
The Opening of the Western Mind – Charles Freeman A history of classical Greek and Roman intellectual traditions and the philosophical foundations of the ancient world.
The Closing of the Western Mind – Charles Freeman Examines how classical philosophical traditions were gradually replaced by Christian orthodoxy in late antiquity.
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).
Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All
Today’s episode is one I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. I sat down with author and researcher David Fitzgerald, whose book Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All has stirred up both fascination and controversy in both historical and secular circles.
Before anyone clutches their pearls — or their study Bible — this conversation isn’t about bashing belief. It’s about asking how we know what we think we know, and whether our historical standards shift when faith enters the equation.
Fitzgerald has spent over fifteen years investigating the evidence — or lack of it — surrounding the historical Jesus. In this first part of our series, we cover Myth #1 (“The idea that Jesus being a myth is ridiculous”) and Myth #4 (“The Gospels were written by eyewitnesses”). We also start brushing up against Myth #5, which explores how the Gospels don’t even describe the same Jesus.
We didn’t make it to Myth #7 yet — the claim that archaeology confirms the Gospels…. so, stay tuned for Part Two.
And for my visual learners!! I’ve got you. Scroll below for infographics, side-by-side Gospel comparisons, biblical quotes, and primary source references that make this episode come alive.
🧩 The 10 Myths About Jesus — According to Nailed
Myth #1:“The idea that Jesus was a myth is ridiculous!” → Fitzgerald argues that the assumption of Jesus’ historicity persists more from cultural tradition than actual historical evidence, and that questioning it isn’t fringe. It’s legitimate historical inquiry.
Myth #2:“Jesus was wildly famous — but somehow no one noticed.” → Despite claims that Jesus’ miracles and teachings drew massive crowds, there’s an eerie silence about him in the records of contemporaneous historians and chroniclers who documented far lesser figures.
Myth #3:“Ancient historian Josephus wrote about Jesus.” → The so-called “Testimonium Flavianum” passages in Josephus’ work are widely considered later Christian insertions, not authentic first-century testimony.
Myth #4:“Eyewitnesses wrote the Gospels.” → The Gospels were written decades after the events they describe by unknown authors relying on oral traditions and earlier written sources, not firsthand experience.
Myth #5:“The Gospels give a consistent picture of Jesus.” → Each Gospel portrays a strikingly different version of Jesus — from Mark’s suffering human to John’s divine Logos — revealing theological agendas more than biographical consistency.
Myth #6:“History confirms the Gospels.” → When examined critically, historical records outside the Bible don’t corroborate the key events of Jesus’ life, death, or resurrection narrative.
Myth #7:“Archaeology confirms the Gospels.” → Archaeological evidence supports the general backdrop of Roman-era Judea but fails to verify specific Gospel claims or the existence of Jesus himself.
Myth #8:“Paul and the Epistles corroborate the Gospels.” → Paul’s letters — the earliest Christian writings — reveal no awareness of a recent historical Jesus, focusing instead on a celestial Christ figure revealed through visions and scripture.
Myth #9:“Christianity began with Jesus and his apostles.” → Fitzgerald argues that Christianity evolved from earlier Jewish sects and mystery religions, with “Jesus” emerging as a mythologized figure around whom older beliefs coalesced.
Myth #10:“Christianity was totally new and different.” → The moral teachings, rituals, and savior motifs of early Christianity closely mirror surrounding pagan traditions and Greco-Roman mystery cults.
📘 Myth #1: “The Idea That Jesus Being a Myth Is Ridiculous”
This one sets the tone for the entire book — because it’s not even about evidence at first. It’s about social pressure.
Fitzgerald opens Nailed by calling out how the mythicist position (the idea that Jesus might never have existed) gets dismissed out of hand…even by secular historians. As he points out, the problem isn’t that the evidence disproves mythicism. The problem is that we don’t apply the same historical standards we would to anyone else.
Case in point: Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon.
Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon at the head of his army, 49 BC. Illustration from Istoria Romana incisa all’acqua forte da Bartolomeo Pinelli Romano (Presso Giovanni Scudellari, Rome, 1818-1819).
When historians reconstruct that event, we have:
Multiple contemporary accounts from major Roman historians like Suetonius, Plutarch, Appian, and Cassius Dio.
Physical evidence — coins, inscriptions, and monuments produced during or shortly after Caesar’s lifetime.
Political and military documentation aligning with the timeline.
In contrast, for Jesus, we have:
No contemporary accounts.
No archaeological or physical evidence.
Gospels written decades later by anonymous authors who never met him.
That’s the difference between history and theology.
Even historian Bart Ehrman, who does believe Jesus existed, has called mythicists “the flat-earthers of the academic world.” Fitzgerald addresses that in the interview (not defensively, but critically) asking why questioning this one historical figure provokes so much emotional resistance.
As he puts it, if the same level of evidence existed for anyone else, no one would take it seriously.
✍️ Myth #4: “The Gospels Were Written by Eyewitnesses”
We dive into the authorship problem — who actually wrote the Gospels, when, and why it matters.
🔀 Myth #5: “The Gospels Don’t Describe the Same Jesus”
⚖️ Contradictions Between the Gospels
1. Birthplace of Jesus — Bethlehem or Nazareth?
Matthew 2:1 – “Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king.” Luke 2:4–7 – Joseph travels from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census, and Jesus is born there. John 7:41–42, 52 – Locals say, “The Messiah does not come from Galilee, does he?” implying Jesus was known as a Galilean, not from Bethlehem.
🔍 Mythicist take: Bethlehem was retrofitted into the story to fulfill the Messianic prophecy from Micah 5:2. In early Christian storytelling, theological necessity (“he must be born in David’s city”) trumps biographical accuracy.
2. Jesus’ Genealogy — Two Lineages, Zero Agreement
Matthew 1:1–16 – Jesus descends from David through Solomon. Luke 3:23–38 – Jesus descends from David through Nathan. Even Joseph’s father differs: Jacob (Matthew) vs. Heli (Luke).
🔍 Mythicist take: Two contradictory genealogies suggest not historical memory but theological marketing. Each author tailors Jesus’ lineage to fit symbolic patterns — Matthew emphasizes kingship; Luke, universality.
3. The Timing of the Crucifixion — Passover Meal or Preparation Day?
Mark 14:12–17 – Jesus eats the Passover meal with his disciples before his arrest. John 19:14 – Jesus is crucified on the day of Preparation — before Passover begins — at the same time lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple.
🔍 Mythicist take: This isn’t a detail slip; it’s theology. John deliberately aligns Jesus with the Paschal lamb, turning him into the cosmic sacrifice — a theological metaphor, not an eyewitness timeline.
4. Jesus’ Last Words — Four Versions, Four Theologies
Mark 15:34 – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” → human anguish. Luke 23:46 – “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” → serene trust. John 19:30 – “It is finished.” → divine completion. Matthew 27:46 – Echoes Mark’s despair, but adds cosmic drama (earthquake, torn veil).
🔍 Mythicist take: Each Gospel shapes Jesus’ death to reflect its theology — Mark’s suffering human, Luke’s faithful martyr, John’s omniscient divine being. This isn’t eyewitness diversity; it’s evolving mythmaking.
5. Who Found the Empty Tomb — and What Did They See?
Mark 16:1–8 – Three women find the tomb open, see a young man in white, flee in fear, tell no one. Matthew 28:1–10 – Two women see an angel descend, roll back the stone, and tell them to share the news. Luke 24:1–10 – Several women find the stone already rolled away; two men in dazzling clothes appear. John 20:1–18 – Mary Magdalene alone finds the tomb, then runs to get Peter; later she meets Jesus himself.
🔍 Mythicist take: If this were a consistent historical event, we’d expect some harmony. Instead, we see mythic escalation: from a mysterious empty tomb (Mark) → to heavenly intervention (Matthew) → to divine encounter (John).
6. The Post-Resurrection Appearances — Where and to Whom?
Matthew 28:16–20 – Jesus appears in Galilee to the eleven. Luke 24:33–51 – Jesus appears in Jerusalem and tells them to stay there. Acts 1:4–9 – Same author as Luke, now extends appearances over forty days. Mark 16 (longer ending) – A later addition summarizing appearances found in the other Gospels.
🔍 Mythicist take: The resurrection narrative grows with time — geographically, dramatically, and theologically. Early silence (Mark) gives way to detailed appearances (Luke/John), mirroring the development of early Christian belief rather than eyewitness memory.
🌿 Final Thought
Whether you end up agreeing with Fitzgerald or not, the point isn’t certainty… it’s curiosity. The willingness to look at history without fear, even when it challenges what we’ve always been told.
And here’s the fun part! David actually wants to hear from you. If you’ve got questions, pushback, or something you want him to unpack next time, drop it in the comments or send it my way. I’ll collect your submissions and bring a few of them into Part Two when we dig into Myth #7 — “Archaeology Confirms the Gospels.”
and as always, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in. 🎙️
📖 Further Reading 📖
Foundational Mythicist Works:
Richard Carrier – On the Historicity of Jesus
Robert M. Price – The Christ-Myth Theory and Judaizing Jesus
In recent decades, the Law of Attraction has become one of the most influential belief systems in wellness, self-help, and multilevel marketing (MLM) circles. Its premise is seductively simple: your thoughts shape your reality. Think positively, and abundance will flow; dwell on negativity, and you’ll attract misfortune.
We have discussed the pitfalls of Law of attraction in a previous episode, you can find here.
🎙️ Another throwback episode is linked below, where I unpack my journey from wellness fanatic within MLM into a high-control religion. Together, we explore the wild “crunchy hippie to alt-right pipeline.” 🌿➡️🛑 social media, influencers, and wellness hype quietly nudge people toward extreme ideas, and in this episode, we break down exactly how. 🎧🔥
This modern doctrine of “mind over matter” is often traced to The Secret (2006) by Rhonda Byrne, but its genealogy is much older. It reaches back to New Thought philosophy of the 19th century, where figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Phineas Quimby, and later Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science) claimed that divine thought itself was the engine of reality. These Mind Cure and faith healing movements linked spirt and matter together. Disease, poverty, and suffering were seen as products of “wrong or stinking thinking.” Salvation was not just spiritual but cognitive: change your thinking, change your life.
and so again I say: It is shockingly right instead of shockingly wrong of you to be prosperous. Obviously, you cannot be very happy if you are poor and you need not be poor. It is a sin. –Catherine Ponder (The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity)
In fact, it is the search for spiritual healing of the body that led to what is known today as prosperity consciousness or in Christian evangelism, it’s prosperity theology.
That intellectual lineage matters because it shows how the Law of Attraction has always been more than a harmless pep talk. It represents a cosmology of control, one that locates all responsibility (and blame) within the individual mind. As we have discussed many times before, Jonathan Haidt observes in The Righteous Mind, belief systems serve a dual function: they bind communities together and blind them to alternative explanations.
In this sense, the Law of Attraction doesn’t just inspire positive thinking; it narrows. By framing success and failure as purely mental vibrations, it obscures structural realities like economic inequality, physical health and genetic limitations, racism, or corporate exploitation.
And that narrowing is precisely what makes it the perfect handmaiden to MLM culture.
When Positive Thinking Becomes a Business Model
Robert L. FitzPatrick, in False Profits and Ponzinomics, describes MLMs as “endless chain” recruitment schemes. What sustains them isn’t product sales but the constant influx of hopeful recruits. Yet these schemes require something more than numbers: they require belief.
Here, the Law of Attraction becomes the MLM’s best salesman. Distributors are told:
Failure isn’t about the structure of the business; it’s about your mindset.
Doubt is “negative energy” that will block your success.
Quitting is not just a business choice but a moral failing.
In the Amway training program, the “ABCs of Success” are “Attitude, Belief and Commitment.” Attitude was the key which must be guarded. Don’t let anyone steal your attitude. Negative was defined as “whatever influence weakens your belief and commitment in the business” -False Profits
This is where Norman Vincent Peale’s “positive thinking” gospel dovetails with MLM. In his 1948 book Positive Thinking for a Time Like This, Peale popularized the phrase
“Let go and let God. Let Him take over your life and run it. He knows how.”
While originally a call to spiritual surrender, the phrase has since been weaponized in countless contexts from Holiness movements to Alcoholics Anonymous to prosperity preaching. At its worst, it functions as a silencer: don’t question, don’t resist, don’t think critically. Just “let go,” and trust that outcomes (or uplines) will provide.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity has a word for this: prelest. It’s the belief that human beings are so easily deceived that any private sense of spiritual progress — a feeling of clarity, joy, empowerment, even a mystical experience — can’t be trusted on its own. Without humility and the guidance of a spiritual father, you’re told it may just be pride, delusion, or the devil in disguise.
That’s the trap: you can’t trust your own mind, heart, or gut. The only “safe” option is obedience to the system. Which is exactly how MLMs and other high-control groups operate — undermining self-trust to keep you dependent.
Nietzsche would have called this a kind of slave morality, a belief system that encourages resignation to suffering rather than rebellion against unjust structures. The Law of Attraction, framed in this way, doesn’t challenge MLM exploitation; it sanctifies it.
More powerful than any product, charismatic leader, or compensation plan, the MLM mindset materials (the tapes, courses, and “personal development” kits) are the prime tools used to recruit and control distributors. Once you’re in the system, you’re encouraged to buy these materials week after week, keeping you invested emotionally and financially while feeding the company’s bottom line.
I went back through my Facebook to find some goodies for you! 😜This photo says “My energy creates my reality. What I focus on is what I will Manifest.” Here is the original caption so you can hear how brainwashed I was. “💥🙌🏼Belief is a feeling of certainty about something, driven by emotion. Feeling certain means that it feels true to you and therefore it is your reality. 💥🙌🏼 💪🏼 What you focus on you find 💪🏼 👀 You’ve got to believe it, to see it 👀”
Flashback to my first corporate event Aug 2016. My upline purchased my flight basically forcing me to go.
My caption at the time: 🤮
🔥IGNITE YOUR VISION! 🔥 ⚡Attended an event that changed my life. Showed me the massive vision of this company. 🤗Join our passionate, growing team of 18-35-year-olds striving for extraordinary lives and ownership of health, dreams, and contributions. 🤩Returning to this LIFE CHANGING event soon! Nashville, TN—let’s learn, grow, and celebrate!
Sounds inspiring, right? Except what they’re really selling is mandatory product purchases, endless hype, and a community that keeps you chasing the next status milestone. That “massive vision” isn’t about your health or dreams—it’s about the company’s bottom line.
Words like passionate, extraordinary, innovators, ownership are carefully chosen psychological nudges, making you feel like life itself is on the line if you’re not on board. And the countdown to the next “life-changing” event? Keeps you spending, attending, and emotionally hooked.
This is exactly what FitzPatrick calls out in Ponzinomics: the sales rep is the best customer. Only a tiny fraction of participants earn anything; the rest are paying to stay inspired.
More flashback images from my cult days….
The Psychological Toll
When these elements collide the New Thought inheritance of “mind over matter,” Peale’s positive thinking, religious community networks and MLM compensation plans… the result is a high-control environment dressed in empowerment language.
The outcomes are rarely empowering:
Blame and guilt when inevitable losses occur.
Anxiety from the demand to maintain “high vibrations.”
Suppression of doubt, lest skepticism be mistaken for weakness.
Financial harm disguised as personal failure.
In wellness communities, this logic extends beyond money. If essential oils don’t heal your illness, it’s because your mindset was wrong. If the diet doesn’t work, it’s because you didn’t “believe” enough. Structural realities (biology, medicine, inequality) are flattened into personal responsibility.
As Haidt warns, morality (and by extension ideology) can both bind and blind. The Law of Attraction, when paired with MLM, binds participants into a shared culture of hope and positivity while blinding them to exploitation.
Connecting the Dots: Bodybuilding, Metabolism & Team Isagenix
A couple weeks ago on the podcast, I shared about my bodybuilding years and the metabolic fallout I still live with today. I had forgotten how much of that season was actually entangled with my Isagenix obsession. My upline (the couple who enrolled me) were a part of Team Isagenix®, and I craved the validation of being “seen” as a successful athlete inside that community.
The requirements were brutal: placing in the top three of multiple competitions in a short span of time. So, between May 2017 and October 2018, I crammed in four shows in just 18 months. No off-season. No recovery. Just constant prep cycles. My metabolism never had a chance to stabilize, and I pushed myself past healthy limits. I wrecked my body and I’m still paying the price.
This is why I push back so hard when people insist that success is all about having a “positive enough” attitude to manifest it. My mindset was ironclad. What I lacked the conscious awareness that valued human health over recruitment and body image. That drive wasn’t just about stage lights and trophies. It was about proving my worth to an MLM culture that dangled prestige as the price of belonging. Team Isagenix® made the bar steep, and I was determined to clear it, no matter the cost.
And if you need proof of how deep this “mindset over matter” indoctrination goes, look no further than my old upline…now rebranded as a Manifestation Coach. Picture the classic boss-babe felt hat, paired with a website promising “signature mindset tools for rapid results.” According to her, if fear or doubt was “shrinking your dreams,” this was your moment to “flip it.” She name-drops 8-figure companies, influencers, and visionaries (the usual credibility glitter) while selling memberships, live events, and 7-day challenges.
It’s the same pitch recycled: your struggle isn’t systemic, it’s your mindset. If you’re not living your “life you truly love,” it’s because you haven’t invested enough in flipping the script (with her paid framework, of course). The MLM grind culture just got a new coat of “manifesting” paint.
🧠 Isagenix Programs & Their Psychological Impact
Healthy Mind and Body Program: A 60-day “mindset” initiative framed as holistic wellness. In practice, it ties product use to personal development, creating behavioral conditioning and binding members into a sense of shared identity and belonging. 🚩
IsaBody Challenge: A 16-week transformation contest requiring regular Isagenix product purchases. Completion comes with swag and vouchers; finalists are paraded as “success stories,” gamifying loyalty and dangling prestige as bait. The grand prize winner earns $25,000 but most participants earn only deeper entanglement. 🚩
Team Isagenix: Marketed as a prestige group for elite athletes with current national certifications, offering exclusivity and aspirational branding. This elevates certain members as “proof” of the products’ legitimacy, fueling both loyalty and recruitment. 🚩
Product Consumption: Isagenix requires 100 PV every 30 days just to remain “active.” This equates to about $150/month you HAVE to spend. On paper, bonuses and ranks promise unlimited potential. In reality, most associates struggle to recoup even their monthly product costs. Personal development rhetoric and community belonging often eclipse these financial realities, keeping participants cycling through hope, debt, and blame. 🚩
🤮🐦🔥 “Transform Your Life with Isagenix | Empowering Wellness and Wealth” 🐦🔥 🤮
Watch closely, because this is where the magic happens: the company paints a picture of limitless opportunity, but as Robert L. FitzPatrick lays out in Ponzinomics, the secret is that the sales rep is the best customer. That’s right… the real profits aren’t coming from your vague dreams of financial freedom; they’re coming from the people who are already buying the products and trying to climb the ranks.
The numbers don’t lie. According to Isagenix’s own disclosure: the overall average annual income for associates is $892. Among those who actually earned anything, the average jumps to $3,994. Do the math: $892 ÷ $3,994 ≈ 0.223 — meaning only about 22% of associates earn anything at all. The other 78%? Zero. Nada. Zilch.
And before you start fantasizing about that $3,994, remember: that’s before expenses. Let’s run a realistic scenario based on actual product spend:
$150/month on products or promotional materials = $1,800/year → net ≈ $2,194 − $1,800 = $1,194 before other costs.
Factor in travel, events, or socials? That $1,194 could easily drop to near zero…or negative.
The point: the so-called “income potential” evaporates fast when you account for the mandatory spending MLMs require. The only thing truly transformed is the company’s bottom line, not yours.
No wonder the comments are turned off.
Apparently, nobody actually crunches the numbers while the marketing spiel promises energy, strength, and vitality as if a shake could fix financial exploitation, metabolic burnout, and guilt-tripping at the same time.
My story is just one case study of how these tactics play out in real lives: I was recruited through trusted connections, emotionally manipulated with promises of transformation, pressured into relentless product use, and left with financial strain and long-lasting health consequences. That’s the “empowerment” MLMs sell and it’s why scrutiny matters.
Cultural Ecosystems That Enable MLMs
MLMs don’t operate in a vacuum. They flourish where belief structures already normalize submission to authority, truth-claims, and tightly networked communities. Evangelicals and the LDS Church provide striking examples: tight-knit congregations, missionary training in persuasion, and a cultural emphasis on self-reliance and communal obligation create fertile ground for recruitment.
Companies like Nu Skin, Young Living, doTERRA, and Melaleuca have disproportionately strong followings in Utah and among Mormon communities. FitzPatrick notes that MLMs thrive where trust networks and shared values make persuasion easier. The kind of environment where aspirational marketing and “prestige” teams can latch onto pre-existing social structures.
In short, it’s not just the products or the promises of positive thinking; it’s where belief, community, and culture all collide… that allows MLMs to hook people and keep them chasing elusive success.
Beyond Magical Thinking
The critique, then, is not of hope or positivity per se, but of weaponized optimism. When mantras like let go and let God or just thinking positive to manifest it are used to shut down discernment, discourage action, or excuse exploitation, they cease to be spiritual tools and become instruments of control.
Nietzsche challenged us to look beyond systems that sanctify passivity, urging instead a confrontation with reality even when it is brutal. FitzPatrick’s work extends this challenge to the world of commerce: if we truly care about empowerment, we must be willing to see how belief systems can be manipulated for profit.
That’s why MLMs and the Law of Attraction deserve scrutiny. Not because they promise too much, but because they redirect responsibility away from unjust structures and onto the very people they exploit.
Coming Up: A Deeper Dive
Next week on the podcast, I’ll be speaking with Robert L. FitzPatrick, author of False Profits and one of the world’s leading experts on MLMs. With decades of research, FitzPatrick has testified in court cases exposing fraudulent MLM schemes and helped unravel the mechanisms behind these multi-billion-dollar operations. He’s seen firsthand how MLMs manipulate culture, co-opt spirituality, and turn belief itself into a product.
Stay tuned. This is a conversation about more than scams, it’s about the machinery of belief, and how it shapes our lives in ways we rarely see.
Byrne, Rhonda. The Secret. New York: Atria Books, 2006.
Eddy, Mary Baker. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1875.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
FitzPatrick, Robert L. False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes. Charlotte, NC: Herald Press, 1997.
FitzPatrick, Robert L. Ponzinomics: The Untold Story of Multi-Level Marketing. Charlotte, NC: Skyhorse Publishing, 2020.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Vintage Books, 2012.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989 (originally published 1887).
Peale, Norman Vincent. Positive Thinking for a Time Like This. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948.
Quimby, Phineas P. The Quimby Manuscripts. Edited by Horatio W. Dresser. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1921.
Wallace, David Foster. “Consider the Lobster.” In Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. (Useful on consumer culture critique, if you want a modern edge.)
Today we’re unpacking several interwoven topics I’ve explored in my writing before why people get drawn into high-control environments and how forgiveness in Christian culture is often weaponized, not as a path to healing, but as a tool to silence victims and protect institutions. This isn’t just a personal issue; it’s an institutional one.
This came into sharp focus after Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, said she forgives her husband’s killer. I’m not here to critique her grief, that’s her own process. What I want to explore is the cultural framework that makes this kind of forgiveness expected, celebrated, and even demanded in evangelical spaces. I have a MUCH MUCH longer blog linked here if you want to go much deeper than I plan to cover today.
Before even touching forgiveness, let’s pause on why this moment is so primed for revivalist recruiting. Sociologists and psychologists have long noted that people are most vulnerable to high-control groups (whether churches or MLMs) during times of disruption and emotional chaos.
Laura Dodsworth, in her book Free Your Mind, calls this a “blip.” A blip is any disruption that cracks our normal defenses: loss, illness, exhaustion, grief. Even smaller stressors (Think HALT) Hunger, anger/anxiety, loneliness or being tired can chip away at our resistance. Push long enough, and the conscious mind collapses into a state of openness, hungry for belonging and ready to absorb new narratives.
That’s exactly what makes funerals, memorials, and major crises fertile ground for recruitment. Orwell nailed it in 1984:
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in shapes of your own choosing.”
Jehovah’s Witnesses even admit to targeting what they call “ripe fruit”-the recently bereaved. In Brazil, recruiters have driven cars with loudspeakers through cemeteries on All Souls’ Day, broadcasting sermons to tens of thousands of mourners. That isn’t compassion; it’s strategic exploitation. Naomi Klein would call it the Shock Doctrine: trauma as an entry point for control.
We’re seeing the same tactics play out online right now. Someone posts about “returning to church” after years away, and within hours their feed fills with love-bombing-likes, comments, and digital hugs. It feels affirming, but it’s also classic manipulation: vulnerability plus attention equals a wide-open door into manipulation.
And so it’s no surprise that revivalist energy is surging in the wake of Kirk’s death.
Situational vulnerability + orchestrated belonging = fertile ground for expansion.
The Myth of “Christlike” Forgiveness
This brings us back to forgiveness. I want to be CLEAR HERE, obviously Erika Kirk wasn’t coerced into forgiving, but in evangelical culture forgiveness is never entirely personal, it’s baked into the ethos. The more you forgive, the more “Christlike” you appear.
Matthew 6:14–15“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
That expectation is dangerous. Forgiveness is sacred when it grows out of genuine healing. But when demanded prematurely, it becomes a weapon. Survivors are told to “forgive as you’ve been forgiven” before they’re ready, before their pain is acknowledged, and typically long before their abuser is held accountable.
Pete Walker, in The Tao of Fully Feeling, argues that forgiveness is not a one-time act but a continual choice and that choice only works after grief, rage, and hurt are fully processed. Skip that, and forgiveness turns into compliance, a way to silence anger and keep victims stuck.
In other words: real forgiveness empowers the survivor. Weaponized forgiveness protects the institution.
How Churches Use Forgiveness to Protect Themselves
We’ve seen this pattern across evangelical institutions:
The Guidepost Report (2022) exposed that SBC leadership maintained a secret list of over 700 abusive pastors, shielding them from consequences while survivors were ignored, discredited, or retaliated against.
Jennifer Lyell, an SBC abuse survivor, was vilified by church leadership when she came forward. Instead of support, she was publicly shamed, and her abuser faced no consequences.
Christa Brown, another survivor, spent years advocating for reform after being assaulted by her youth pastor. The SBC’s response? Stonewalling, gaslighting, and further silencing.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have a longstanding pattern of protecting sexual predatorsunder their “two-witness rule,” which requires at least two people to witness abuse for it to be considered valid. This impossible standard allows abusers to go unpunished while victims are shunned for speaking out.
In each case, forgiveness isn’t about healing. It’s about compliance, silence, and institutional survival.
Nietzsche, Freud, and the Cycles of Guilt
This isn’t new. Nietzsche warned that Abrahamic religions hijacked older wisdom traditions, reframing them into systems of obedience rather than life-affirmation. Freud saw religion as a kind of collective neurosis, trapping people in loops of guilt and repression.
What is ironic, Freud’s own psychoanalytic model looks eerily similar to the religious structures he critiqued. As historian Bakan and others have suggested, Freud may have drawn (consciously or not) on Jewish mysticism, replacing priests with analysts, confession with therapy, sin with repressed desire. In trying to explain away religion, Freud ended up reproducing its patterns in secular form. In other words, the pattern of taking human vulnerability and channeling it into control runs deep.
And this is where Laura Dodsworth’s idea of the “blip” becomes so relevant. The blip is that moment of rupture…when you’re grieving, disoriented, exhausted, or otherwise cracked open. Your defenses are down, your critical mind isn’t firing at full strength, and the brain is searching for something to hold onto. In these liminal spaces, new ideologies rush in.
That’s why this moment is so ripe for revivalist energy. It’s not just about forgiveness…it’s about the total atmosphere of grief and disruption that can act as a blip. And high-control groups know it. It’s why political movements, religious revivals, and even MLMs wait for crisis points: job loss, divorce, a death in the family. The blip isn’t compassionately held-it’s exploited.
So when we watch something like Kirk’s memorial, we’re not just seeing personal mourning. We’re watching a social script unfold, one that revivalists know how to activate. In this script, forgiveness, obedience, and “turning your life over” aren’t neutral virtues—they become instruments of recruitment. Which means the real question isn’t should people forgive, but who benefits when forgiveness and emotional openness are demanded at the exact moment people are least able to resist?
Sources & Recommended Reading
Laura Dodsworth, Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It (2023) – esp. Chapter 10, “Watch Out for the Blip.”
George Orwell, 1984 (1949) – “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces…”
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007).
Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame (1996).
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887); The Antichrist (1895).
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927).
David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (1958).
Hey hey my friends, welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays. Today’s episode is going to be heavier than usual, because I want to process something that has been shaking me to my core over the past week, the brutal death of Charlie Kirk.
Now, I need to start here: I did not agree with Charlie on everything, especially not his theology. You know me, I don’t subscribe to the idea that morality begins and ends with the Abrahamic scriptures. That’s a hard pass. But I also can’t deny the impact Charlie had on me. I spent years watching him debate, learning from the way he sharpened his arguments and stayed composed with people he deeply disagreed with. He’s one of the people who actually inspired me to study the Constitution, socialism, and to pay more attention to what’s happening politically.
So when I heard he was brutally murdered, I cried. It was horrific. And then, when I looked online and saw people celebrating his death? Saying he deserved it because he was a white, conservative, Christian man? That was gutting. Not just emotionally but morally.
In fact, let me show you a comment I received. This person told me she couldn’t believe I was mourning the death of a Trump supporter, that he had ‘spewed so much,’ and then announced she was unfollowing and blocking me.
That’s the climate we’re in. Not just disagreement, but outright dehumanization.
That kind of reaction, the dancing-on-the-grave energy, it’s not just tasteless. It’s a reflection of how far moral tribalism has gone. She is a perfect example of what I saw when I was navigating ex-Christian and ex-evangelical spaces. It is the same trend there: conservatives painted as villains, ridiculed, dismissed, treated as less-than.
Folks in my parasocial networks would send me podcasts or Instagram pages that were just openly disrespectful and overgeneralizing, like mocking anyone who leaned right was simply part of the healing process. And I remember sitting there thinking… how are you even friends with me if you despise people like me so much?
It’s like the hatred is so baked into the zeitgeist, people don’t even notice they’re doing it.
I’ve already done an episode on the radical left and why I left the left in 2020. Back then I saw the extremism ramping up with Black Lives Matter, with pandemic policies, and yes, with those shocking poll results in 2022, where a significant portion of Democrats said they believed unvaccinated people should have their kids taken away or even be put into camps.
That was the moment I realized this wasn’t just about public health. It was about authoritarianism cloaked in moral righteousness.
And I want to tie that moment to this moment. Because what we’re seeing with Charlie Kirk’s death is the exact same kind of moral righteousness, just flipped.
This is where Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind comes in and yall know I bring this book up a lot, but today it’s essential.
Haidt’s big idea is that morality isn’t one single thing. It’s made up of six different foundations, like taste buds of the moral sense. Let me walk you through them:
Care vs. Harm – the instinct to protect others from suffering. Progressives tend to emphasize this one the most.
Fairness vs. Cheating – concern for justice, reciprocity, equal treatment. Again, heavily weighted on the left.
Loyalty vs. Betrayal – valuing group solidarity, patriotism, belonging. This resonates more on the right.
Authority vs. Subversion – respect for tradition, leadership, order. Again, more prominent for conservatives.
Sanctity vs. Degradation – ideas of purity, sacredness, things that must not be defiled. Religion is one form, but health and nature can trigger it too. Conservatives score higher here, but you see progressives activate it around food purity or environmentalism.
Liberty vs. Oppression – the drive to resist domination and protect freedom. This one cuts across both sides but is framed differently, the right fears big government, the left fears corporate or systemic oppression.
Now, how does this help us explain what we’re seeing?
Progressives, whose moral taste buds are dominated by Care and Fairness, look at Charlie Kirk and say, ‘He caused harm to marginalized groups, he propped up unfair systems.’ So when he died, they felt justified in celebrating. Their moral taste buds told them: this is justice.
Conservatives, on the other hand, lean more heavily on Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. Charlie embodied loyalty to the nation, respect for conservative traditions, and yes, defense of the sacred. So his death wasn’t just tragic, it was an attack on everything sacred to them. That’s why you’re seeing these martyrdom narratives, even AI videos of Charlie in heaven with other ‘heroes of the faith.’ It’s moral psychology in action.
I’m aware that this is AI of course — but it has moved me, I can only imagine how Charlie is celebrating 🕊️ pic.twitter.com/b9G4lBGVpZ
👉 And this is also the perfect moment to point out the formula behind Psy-Ops. Because these martyrdom narratives aren’t just spontaneous. They follow a pattern of influence:
That’s the formula. You feed people a stimulus, in this case, AI imagery of Charlie Kirk as a martyr. You attach it to a strong feeling: grief, anger, hope. By doing so, conscious awareness is bypassed, people aren’t stopping to analyze, they’re in raw emotion. And then you repeat it over and over. Before long, it’s not just an image, it’s a belief. This is why these videos are so powerful, they’re not just content, they’re psychological conditioning.
In the book FreeYour Mind, which we discussed in our previous podcast episode, Chapter 9 emphasizes the importance of getting ideas in writing—but it also highlights the unique power of images. As the book notes:
“An image tells a thousand words, and seeing is believing. You tend to be more easily persuaded by images than by words, and video is even more persuasive. On the other hand, reading leaves more breathing room for critical thinking.”
Images can define ideas and stick in our minds in ways words alone often cannot. A single powerful metaphor or visual statement can leave a lasting impression. Take Donald Trump’s political career, for example: it wasn’t only shaped by complex and abstract immigration policies, but also by concrete, visual symbols—a border wall, or the image of him standing with his fist raised, signaling defiance after the attempted assassination. Mental images grab our attention and viscerally anchor themselves in our minds. They’re persuasive tools that can move political movements forward.
Psychologists agree. This phenomenon is known as the picture superiority effect: images are far more memorable than words. In one study, participants were shown a mix of 612 images and words for six seconds each. When asked later which they recognized, 98% of the pictures were remembered, compared to just 90% of the words. Another study of news broadcasts found that only 16% of stories were remembered when heard over the radio, versus 34% when watched on television.
The takeaway? Images are not just memorable-they shape perception.
Seeing really is believing.
And here’s Haidt’s main takeaway: morality binds and blinds. Both sides feel righteous, but both sides are blinded. The left is blinded to the humanity of someone they disagreed with, so they cheer for his death. The right is blinded to pluralism and nuance, so they sanctify him and risk sliding into Christian authoritarianism.
And let’s pause here…because this rise in religious fervor is deeply concerning to me. I used to push back when people warned about Christian nationalism. I thought it was overblown. But watching Gen Z churn out martyr videos of Charlie Kirk, watching this wave of revivalist passion roll in, I can’t deny the potential for backlash anymore.
Go along with Jesus or you are a terrorist is basically the narrative these guys are spinning. pic.twitter.com/kRv2XRXnvp
It’s not just reverence – it’s symbolism, its revivalism, its identity politics wrapped in scripture. And that’s where my alarm starts.
Take the Noahide Laws movement. People often describe it as returning to a universal moral code. On its face, sure, that sounds appealing. But when morality is rooted in a particular scripture or identity, it often becomes a tool to say: ‘these norms are non-negotiable, and dissent or spiritual alternatives are forbidden’ That’s when spirituality crosses into political power-building.
Listen to this clip from Ben Shapero on the Daily Wire.
And we’re already seeing it creep into policy.
The administration just passed an executive order on ‘Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.’ Protecting religious freedom is vital, yes. But there’s a difference between protecting believers from discrimination and making laws where Christian sentiment is immune from critique or satire.
The White House posted a video mourning Charlie Kirk concluding with:
In loving memory of Charlie Kirk, a fearless patriot & man of unwavering faith who dedicated his life to America.
"It's bigger than you, I want you to remember that… It's bigger than me – you are here to make somebody else's life better, the pursuit of liberty & freedom."❤️ pic.twitter.com/3Xrf5dcFlP
“1 Corinthians 5 and 15 provide compelling evidence (not only intrabiblical but also extrabiblical) that Jesus Christ was a real historical figure. He lived a perfect life, was crucified, rose on the third day, and is Lord and God.”
If you still don’t see how Christianity and faith in Jesus, a figure who probably never existed—is both holding this country back and enabling Zionism, it’s time to wake up.
We’ve already seen new laws against so-called antisemitism that start to look a lot like blasphemy laws. How long before similar protections are extended to Christian sentiment?
This matters because young people might get swept into this revivalist Christian / Abrahamic framework without realizing it.
It reduces room for spiritual alternatives, for pluralism, for traditions like panpsychism or animism, worldviews that see all of reality as alive, interconnected, and worthy of respect. That feels more universal to me. Less tied to tribal texts, less prone to turning spirituality into a weapon of the state.
History has shown us that religious revivalism mixed with nationalism and state power is a dangerous cocktail. It binds, but it also blinds. And that’s why I can’t jump on board with this new wave of Abrahamic revivalism being fueled by Charlie’s death. My skepticism sharpens right here.
So here’s where I land: I grieve. I grieve for a man who influenced me. I grieve the way his life was taken. But I also grieve the way his death is being used by some to celebrate evil, by others to canonize him into sainthood. Both sides reveal how morality binds and blinds. And if we don’t wake up to that, we’ll keep swinging between authoritarian extremes.
And I want to close with a reminder from Jonathan Haidt himself. He wrote:
“Social scientists have identified at least 3 major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. We are now at the greatest level of political polarization since the 1860s. It’s more necessary than ever to return to these 3 forces in every way we can, individually and as a society.”
That’s where I want us to go. Beyond tribal stories of vengeance or martyrdom, back toward trust, strong institutions, and stories that unite rather than divide.
So, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in.
Further Reading & Sources
The Righteous Mind– Why Good People are Divided on Religion and Politics by Jonathon Haidt
Charlie Kirk’s Death Exposed the Biggest Scam in History This video exposes how suppression, radicalization, and division are weaponized not by ideology, but by systems designed to keep you outraged, divided, and distracted.
Taste0ftruth Tuesdays 