“Truth can be both our shield and sword in the battle of life.”
There are people who influence us not only through what they teach, but through the manner in which they live what they teach.
Over the last several months, my friend Torna Braggison has offered me a remarkable degree of openness, patience, friendship, and spiritual guidance. He has answered my many questions, challenged me to think more deeply, and helped me better understand a Heathen worldview that cannot be reduced to symbolism, abstract belief, or solitary spiritual consumption.
Torna is the author of Power Through Truth, an exploration of the relationship between sacred breath, truthful speech, oath-keeping, honor, and spiritual power within the Heathen tradition.
His guidance has continually returned me to something more demanding: conduct.
How do we speak?
What do we promise?
Do our actions uphold our words?
Can the people closest to us trust what comes out of our mouths?
What happens to us (personally, socially, and spiritually) when they cannot?
What if truth is not merely something we believe, but something we breathe, speak, promise, remember, and live?
Ask and Embla, Robert Engels, 1919. Odin’s gift of Ond—the sacred breath that gives life and carries the spoken word.
Truth Is Not Merely an Idea
Modern people are accustomed to treating truth primarily as a matter of intellectual agreement.
We ask whether a proposition is correct, whether a doctrine is factual, or whether someone possesses the proper beliefs. Religion often becomes a matter of assenting to particular claims. Politics becomes a competition between competing narratives. Online identity becomes a collection of publicly declared values.
But declaring a value is not the same as embodying it.
A person can speak endlessly about compassion while behaving cruelly. Someone can build an identity around authenticity while lying to the people closest to them. A spiritual leader can speak of love, healing, transcendence, and divine truth while refusing accountability for the damage caused by their conduct.
Words alone do not prove character.
Within the framework Torna presents, however, words are not inconsequential. They are not merely sounds, opinions, or disposable expressions. They are carried upon the sacred breath and given force through the character and intention of the speaker.
Torna describes Ond as the sacred breath of life, the divine spark gifted by Odin. Our words ride upon that breath, and when we speak, we give those words a kind of life. Their quality is connected to the truth, intention, and honor of the person speaking them.
Speech therefore becomes more than communication.
It becomes participation.
We breathe something of ourselves into the world.
The Breath Behind the Word
In Völuspá, Odin’s gift to Ask and Embla includes Ond—the animating breath without which they do not yet fully possess life. Torna connects this sacred breath to speech, creativity, ecstatic power, ritual, galdr, and the ability to shape reality through will and expression.
This does not mean that every passing sentence is a magical incantation in the theatrical or New Age sense.
It means that speech carries consequences.
Words can establish trust or destroy it. They can bind people together, orient a community, transmit memory, establish obligation, inspire courage, or leave another person spiritually and emotionally disoriented. A truthful word spoken at the right moment can restore someone’s sense of reality. A deliberate lie can make another person doubt their own perception.
Our words affect the world because other people must live inside the reality those words help create.
This is one reason truth matters so deeply to me.
I do not want truth to remain an attractive principle I discuss in essays or podcasts. I want the people in my life to know that my word means something. I want to follow through when I make a commitment. I want to be honest even when honesty is uncomfortable. I want to recognize when my conduct contradicts what I have claimed and accept the responsibility of repairing what I can.
That is not always easy.
Truth as lived accountability demands more than being “right.” It demands self-examination, restraint, memory, courage, and humility. It may require us to admit that we have behaved dishonorably. It may force us to stop protecting the version of ourselves we would prefer others to believe.
Truth can defend us, but it can also cut through our own self-deception.
It is both shield and sword.
Words in the Well
One of the most compelling ideas in Torna’s article is that some words carry more weight than others.
He distinguishes between common or everyday speech, words placed “in the well” through intimate or sacred relationships, and the giving of formal oaths. Each carries a different degree of personal, communal, and spiritual consequence.
We all understand this intuitively.
Telling a cashier that we are “fine” when we are having a terrible day does not carry the same moral weight as lying to a spouse, deceiving a close friend, betraying a confidant, or breaking a solemn vow.
The closer the relationship, the more of ourselves we place behind the word.
Words spoken to those who trust us become part of a shared memory. They shape how another person understands us, themselves, and the relationship between us. Words spoken during ritual enter the memory of the group. Stories told by the skald or bard help shape a people’s understanding of their ancestors, heroes, virtues, and obligations.
These are words placed into the well.
The well can be understood as Mímir’s well, ancestral memory, cultural memory, or the accumulated memory of the community. What is spoken does not simply disappear after the vibration leaves the air. It continues through consequence, reputation, story, recollection, and relationship.
A truthful word can strengthen the speaker and those who hear it.
A dishonest word can poison the well.
“The Spiritual Weight of an Oath”: John Bauer, Tyr and Fenrir
The Spiritual Weight of an Oath
An oath carries the greatest weight because an oath is not merely a prediction about what we hope to do.
It is an act of binding.
Torna describes an oath as something given life through sacred breath and powered by the will. The oath involves not only the person who gives it, but the recipient, the witnesses, the place, and the spiritual powers invoked or present. Until it is fulfilled or broken, the oath continues to possess force.
This is almost incomprehensible within a culture of casual promises.
We say, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” “I’ll always be there,” “You can trust me,” or “I swear I’ll change,” often with little awareness of the weight those statements carry for the person receiving them.
Our society encourages constant speech while teaching very little discipline of speech.
We post immediate reactions. We make dramatic declarations. We promise more than we can deliver. We publicly perform virtues we have not yet cultivated privately. We use language to manage how others perceive us, then become resentful when we are held accountable to the identity we presented.
A Heathen understanding of oath asks us to become more careful.
Do not promise lightly.
Do not offer your word merely to relieve the discomfort of the present moment.
Do not invoke trust when you are unwilling to behave in a trustworthy manner.
The answer is not to become silent, emotionally unavailable, or terrified of commitment. It is to understand that a promise contains part of the self. When we repeatedly keep our word, we become someone whose speech possesses weight. When we continually break it, our words become thin and useless.
Eventually, no one believes us… and that isn’t because they are cruel, but because we have taught them not to.
Honor Is Accumulated
Torna connects the keeping of oaths with Hamingja, a concept often translated as luck but also associated with honor, power, fortune, and the accumulated strength of the self.
This is not luck imagined as random cosmic favor.
It is closer to luck that has been cultivated.
A person who consistently acts with integrity develops trusted relationships, a dependable reputation, communal support, and an internal sense of coherence. Their words and actions reinforce each other. They become spiritually and socially substantial.
Keeping one’s word strengthens the whole self, while dishonorable conduct weakens it.
We might recognize this even without using explicitly spiritual language.
A trustworthy person is often surrounded by people willing to help them because they have proven that help will not be wasted. Their reputation opens doors. Their community remembers their conduct. When hardship comes, they are not entirely alone.
This is not always fair or perfectly reciprocal. Honorable people can still be betrayed, harmed, or abandoned. But the larger principle remains: character accumulates.
So does dishonor.
Every promise kept or broken becomes part of the person we are becoming.
Truth as Communal Participation
Truth is often framed as an individual possession: my truth, my beliefs, my authenticity.
But Torna’s article presents truth as profoundly relational.
As a bard and skald, he writes that believing in the moral truth of a story allows the teller to connect with those listening. Honest words can create a communal experience in which teller, listener, folk, hero, deity, moral teaching, place, and ancestral memory are brought into relationship.
Truth does not merely sit inside the mind.
It passes between people.
It is sung, remembered, witnessed, and enacted.
This is where the concept becomes essential to The Wisdom of Participation. Traditional cultures did not generally understand humans as isolated consumers of spiritual information. People gathered. They sang. They told stories. They made vows before witnesses. They remembered their dead. They carried inherited obligations. They participated in the maintenance of a shared moral world.
The skald did not simply deliver “content.”
The community did not merely observe.
Everyone present became part of the remembering.
This is radically different from a spirituality centered on private revelation, personal vibration, or self-created metaphysical truth. The well does not belong to the isolated ego. It contains the memory of relationships—between the living, the dead, the Gods, the land, and those yet to come.
What we place into that well matters.
Bragi, Carl Emil Doepler, 1882. Bragi, the Norse god of poetry and eloquence, represents speech as sacred craft: words shaped through memory, rhythm, truth, and responsibility. The skald does not merely entertain, but gives voice to the stories and values through which a people remembers itself. Public domain.
No One Can Embody Truth on Our Behalf
Christianity famously places the words “I am the way, the truth, and the life” into the mouth of Jesus.
In that worldview, truth is ultimately embodied in and accessed through a singular salvific figure. The believer is asked to place faith in that figure and the theological claims made about him.
The Heathen framework explored here places the emphasis elsewhere.
Truth is not merely a person to profess belief in. It is a standard we must demonstrate through conduct.
No savior can keep our promises for us.
No doctrine can repair the trust we have broken.
No spiritual identity can substitute for honest speech.
No declaration of belief can transform dishonorable behavior into honorable behavior.
Truth must be renewed each time we speak carefully, fulfill a commitment, admit a wrong, make recompense, resist convenient deception, or allow our actions to bear the weight of what we have claimed.
It must be breathed and lived.
The Question Before Us
My upcoming conversation with Torna Braggison will explore the relationship between Ond, speech, oath, honor, memory, galdr, storytelling, and spiritual power.
But beneath the terminology lies a deeply human question.
What kind of person does my speech reveal me to be?
Do my words give life, orientation, and trust to the people around me?
Do I make promises carelessly?
Have I confused saying the right things with becoming an honorable person?
Have I demanded truth from others while excusing dishonesty in myself?
And when I fail, am I willing to make recompense rather than simply inventing a more flattering story about what happened?
Truth is not merely the absence of false information.
It is the alignment of breath, speech, memory, promise, and deed.
It is the weight accumulated when we repeatedly prove that our words can be trusted.
It is what we place into the well.
It is what others will remember.
And it is what remains when every attractive spiritual claim has been stripped away and only our conduct is left to speak for us.
The Lessons of Asgard– WorldTree Publications, 36pgs. Completely revised, with original kennings to the Gods by Torna Braggison. An introductory study of the principle Gods & Goddesses in the lore.
What if strength training wasn’t simply about building muscle?
What if stepping beneath a barbell could become an act of devotion?
In this episode, I sit down with Awen of Primal Druidry, whose approach to physical training challenges many of our modern assumptions about both fitness and spirituality.
For her, the gym isn’t merely a place to improve health or appearance. It becomes sacred space—a place where discipline becomes ritual, physical hardship becomes offering, and strength training becomes a way of cultivating relationship with the divine.
Throughout our conversation, we explore questions like:
What is Primal Druidry, and what makes it a living tradition rather than an attempt to recreate the ancient past?
Why has strength training become such a central part of her spiritual practice?
What changes when exercise becomes ritual instead of self-improvement?
How does physical discipline shape character, devotion, and spiritual life?
What does she mean when she describes receiving guidance through training?
How do we think carefully about deeply personal spiritual experiences without dismissing them…or accepting them uncritically?
One aspect of our discussion that I found especially compelling is the challenge it poses to a very modern assumption: that the body is simply a vehicle for the mind. Throughout history, many religious and philosophical traditions have understood bodily practices (whether fasting, pilgrimage, martial arts, dance, or manual labor) as capable of shaping the soul.
This conversation asks whether lifting weights might belong in that lineage.
Even if you don’t share her theology or spiritual framework, I think the deeper questions are worth exploring.
Can repeated physical practice become a form of prayer?
Can discipline become devotion?
Can the body become a place where meaning is discovered rather than simply performed?
Those are the questions at the heart of this conversation.
As always, the goal isn’t to tell you what to believe. It’s to explore ideas with curiosity, ask better questions, and think more deeply about the relationship between body, mind, and the search for the sacred.
Thank you for taking the time to listen/watch, comment and share. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
A conversation with Jay Feldman on bioenergetic health, stress physiology, and what mainstream fitness culture misses
This week I have a really exciting interview for you with Jay Feldman of Jay Feldman Wellness, and this conversation felt like such a natural continuation of everything we’ve been unpacking lately around calories, metabolism, stress, food, fitness culture, and what happens when the body finally says, enough.
If you listened to the episode I dropped a couple weeks ago, Calories In, Common Sense Out, this conversation with Jay is the perfect next step.
That episode laid the groundwork for something I keep coming back to: the body is not a calculator. Yes, calories matter. But the way modern fitness culture talks about calories often strips the body of important context: stress, hormones, thyroid function, energy production, sleep, recovery, nervous system load, and years of restriction.
Jay and I both come from backgrounds where we have done restrictive dieting, pushed hard, and learned the hard way that the body eventually keeps the score. That shared history is part of what made this conversation so good. We’re not talking about metabolism from a detached, abstract place. We’re talking about what happens when people spend years under-eating, overtraining, living on caffeine, pushing through exhaustion, and then wondering why their body no longer responds the way it used to.
In this episode, we talk about Jay’s approach to bioenergetic health, which starts with cellular energy rather than just calories, macros, or “discipline.” Instead of asking only, “How do I lose weight?” we ask a deeper question:
Does the body have enough energy to do what we keep demanding from it?
A lot of my audience includes current or former athletes, military and veteran types, fitness-minded people, chronic dieters, and folks who are used to pushing through pain. Many have spent years being praised for discipline while quietly feeling cold, exhausted, anxious, inflamed, underfed, over-caffeinated, and metabolically stuck.
We get into the difference between looking fit and actually being healthy. Can someone look lean, disciplined, or high-performing while internally running on stress hormones? How can you tell the difference between real energy and survival energy? Are cold hands and feet, waking at night, cravings, low libido, anxiety, or needing caffeine just to function clues that something deeper is going on?
We also talk about one of the most frustrating places people end up:
“If I eat more than 1,500 calories, I gain weight.”
That is such a common fear, especially for people who have dieted for years. And this is where the conversation gets really practical. We talk about metabolic adaptation, why the body may resist weight loss after long periods of restriction, and why eating more can feel terrifying even when it may be part of the long-term solution.
This also ties into something I’ve talked about before in my Earn Your Right to Diet episode: sometimes the next step is not another fat-loss phase. Sometimes the next step is rebuilding. That can mean a slow, strategic reverse diet—gradually adding calories back in, supporting thyroid and metabolic function, reducing stress load, and spending time at maintenance before asking the body to diet again.
Reverse dieting is not “just eat everything and hope for the best.” It is a methodical process of giving the body more energy while watching biofeedback: temperature, sleep, digestion, mood, training recovery, hunger, cravings, cycle health, libido, and overall energy.
Toward the end of the episode, Jay gives tangible advice on how people can start making sure they are eating enough food.
We talk about using basic calorie-needs charts as a starting point, especially because many adults are eating amounts that are closer to what a child or sedentary teenager might need… then wondering why they feel awful.
I also share some visuals during the episode, including examples of what 1,800, 2,000, and 2,200 calories can actually look like across three meals and two snacks. Because sometimes people hear those numbers and assume it means massive amounts of food, when in reality it can look pretty normal, nourishing, and manageable.
This episode is for anyone who feels like their body is betraying them after years of trying to do everything “right.”
We talk about:
bioenergetic health and cellular energy
the limits of “eat less, move more” advice
chronic dieting and weight-loss resistance
stress physiology and caffeine-driven energy
the difference between discipline and health
former athletes, veterans, and burned-out high-achievers
reverse dieting and rebuilding metabolic capacity
why the body may need more food before it can safely lose fat again
This is not a conversation about abandoning personal responsibility or pretending calories do not matter. It is a conversation about restoring much needed nuance and context.
Because sometimes the problem is not that you need more willpower.
Sometimes the problem is that your body has been running on fumes for far too long.
And that’s all I have for you folks, I’d love to hear your thoughts, leave me a comment or shoot me a private message to share them. If you appreciate this kind of work, please share and subscribe—that would mean a lot to me!
Jesus, Scripture, and the Mythmaking Machinery of the Abrahamic World
Listen here
One of the most successful ideas in modern spirituality is the belief that Jesus represented a radical break from the religious world that produced him.
The problem is not merely that modern people have misunderstood Jesus. It is that the Gospel texts themselves are capable of generating multiple, even contradictory versions of him: compassionate teacher, apocalyptic judge, mystic, revolutionary, cosmic redeemer. That textual instability is one reason Christianity has proven so endlessly adaptable. Readers can extract the Jesus they want and then present that selection as the essence.
Whether presented as an enlightened teacher, a cosmic Christ, a universal sage, or simply a wise moral reformer, Jesus is often portrayed as transcending the tribalism, judgment, and exclusivity associated with the covenantal and apocalyptic world of the Hebrew scriptures. In popular imagination, he stands opposed to the harshness of the Old Testament: a teacher of love replacing a god of wrath, compassion overcoming law, and universal brotherhood replacing ancient tribal loyalties.
Later philosophical and spiritual movements took that elasticity and pushed it even further. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century currents such as Theosophy, New Thought, Western esotericism, and Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual reinterpretations recast Christ as a universal principle rather than a figure embedded in a specifically Jewish apocalyptic and covenantal world. “Christ” becomes less a messianic title rooted in Jewish expectation and more a symbol of inner divinity, cosmic consciousness, or spiritual evolution.
I reject that rescue attempt entirely. The modern “cosmic Christ” is not a recovery of some hidden essence. It is one more extraction from a set of texts already structurally open to reinterpretation. The same flexibility that allows one reader to find a gentle moral teacher allows another to find a figure of judgment, exclusion, and cosmic authority.
And that harsher figure is not hidden in some obscure corner of the tradition. Jesus speaks of judgment. He divides humanity into the saved and the condemned. He warns of outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth, eternal punishment, and destruction for those who reject his message. Paul speaks of everlasting destruction. Revelation culminates in divine wrath, cosmic warfare, and the final defeat of God’s enemies.
This is not a departure from the older scriptural framework. It is its expansion.
What if the New Testament did not abandon the worldview of the Hebrew scriptures, but carried its deepest assumptions forward in universalized form?
That is the argument I want to follow here. The New Testament did not discard the basic structure of the Hebrew scriptures. It expanded it. Covenant became salvation history. Chosenness became a global saved-versus-condemned framework. Messianic expectation became cosmic kingship. Scripture became biography. On this reading, Christianity was not a liberation from the older framework, but its Gentile-facing sequel.
Representative examples of New Testament passages in which Jesus is portrayed not only as a moral teacher, but as a figure of exclusive authority, judgment, division, and ultimate rule.
Research from the Copenhagen School, along with scholars such as Russell Gmirkin, Jan Assmann, Yonatan Adler, and Thomas Thompson, has challenged assumptions many of us once took for granted. Their work points toward a far more dynamic process of literary construction, cultural memory, reinterpretation, and retrospective claims to antiquity behind the Hebrew scriptures. Some of that scholarship presses the issue further still, raising the unsettling possibility that Jesus himself may belong in the same larger scriptural problem-set as other biblical figures whose historicity has been asserted far more confidently than it has been demonstrated.
In previous episodes of my Jesus Myth series, I argued that the Gospels should not be treated as straightforward eyewitness biographies. Archaeology can illuminate the world of first-century Judea, but it does not confirm the Jesus of the Gospels. Paul’s letters give us a cosmic, scriptural Christ rather than a detailed memory of a recent Galilean teacher. The early Christian movement appears fragmented from the beginning, with competing visions of Christ long before later orthodoxy cleaned up the story.
This essay begins where that argument left off.
If the Gospels are not simple biography, then what are they? And if the Jesus figure is shaped so deeply by earlier scripture, then an even more unsettling question follows:
What kind of scripture was doing the shaping?
Because once we begin examining the New Testament closely, an extraordinary pattern emerges. The Jesus of the Gospels does not merely quote scripture. He is a product of it. The story begins to look less like the fulfillment of ancient history than the continuation of an ongoing literary tradition.
And if that scriptural world could generate covenant, chosenness, law, and sacred history, the possibility that it could also generate a messiah is no longer so easy to dismiss.
God giving the Tablets of the Law to Moses, from a manuscript attributed to Chrétien Legouais, 1325 CE. Image source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque municipal de Rouen.
Not Influence but Scaffolding
The claim that the Gospel writers drew from Jewish scripture is not controversial. Virtually every New Testament scholar acknowledges that the evangelists quoted, interpreted, and reworked earlier biblical texts. The real question is what kind of borrowing we are dealing with.
Some modern writers argue that the Gospels are fundamentally Greek in character, shaped by Hellenistic literary conventions such as heroic archetypes, divine signs, dramatic climaxes, and narrative form recognizable to a Greek-speaking audience. There is truth in that observation. The Gospels were written in Greek, circulated in a Hellenistic world, and emerged from a culture saturated with literary adaptation and symbolic storytelling. But that framing can miss something more concrete. The density of engagement with Jewish scripture in the Gospels is not merely thematic or stylistic. It is textual, structural, and relentless.
Dozens of explicit citations appear across the texts. Beneath them lies a much larger web of allusions, echoes, narrative patterns, and character templates drawn from the Hebrew Bible. Counted conservatively, these parallels number in the dozens. Traced more fully, they run into the hundreds. Entire scenes are shaped by earlier passages. Entire narrative arcs follow scriptural precedent. By comparison, proposed parallels to Greek myth or pagan figures are usually broader, more conceptual, and far less anchored in specific texts. My aim is not to deny Greco-Roman influence, but to put it in proportion. The Gospels may speak Greek, but they think in Hebrew scripture.
This framing is not idiosyncratic; volumes such as Is This Not the Carpenter? place the question of Jesus’ historicity alongside Paul, intertextuality, and the “rewritten Bible,” showing how difficult it is to separate later “biography” from scriptural rewriting and theological construction.
One example of that scriptural-political matrix appears in the star and scepter imagery attached to messianic expectation.
Star, Scepter, and Political Theology
Long before Christianity, certain biblical oracles had already been charged with political and eschatological force. Numbers 24:17, “a star shall come out of Jacob, a scepter shall rise out of Israel,” was read in the Dead Sea Scrolls as prophecy of a coming Davidic ruler. Matthew places a star over Bethlehem. Revelation has Jesus call himself the bright Morning Star. This imagery stood at the crossroads of Jewish expectation and the wider symbolic world of antiquity, where heavenly signs marked kingship, divine favor, and world-changing rule. Early Christians did not invent that language. They seized it and redirected it toward Jesus.
Matthew tells us that the holy family’s return from Egypt fulfills Hosea’s words, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” In its original context, Hosea was speaking about Israel, not a future messiah. The passage is not simply cited. It is repurposed. And that pattern repeats across the Gospels.
The crucifixion sharpens the problem because it is often treated as the most historically secure element of the Gospel tradition. Yet when we look closely, the scene does not read like a bare report of an execution. It reads like a carefully arranged scriptural drama. Psalm 22 is especially central. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” appears in the Gospels as Jesus’ cry from the cross. The mocked sufferer, the taunts of the crowd, and the casting of lots for garments all appear in the passion narrative. Isaiah 53 adds the rejected and afflicted servant who is silent before his accusers and numbered among transgressors. Psalm 69 contributes the sour wine. Zechariah supplies the struck shepherd and pierced figure. Even the Wisdom of Solomon describes a righteous man mocked for calling God his father and condemned to a shameful death. Taken one by one, these parallels can be treated as interpretation. Taken together, they stop looking incidental and start looking compositional.
At minimum, the evangelists are constructing the meaning of Jesus’ death through inherited texts. At maximum, some of the scene’s most memorable details may have been generated by those texts.
The same dynamic extends beyond individual scenes into the wider narrative structure. Joseph is betrayed by his brothers, sold for silver, stripped, cast into a pit, and later exalted. Jesus is betrayed by Judas, sold for silver, stripped, entombed, and exalted. Jonah spends three days in the belly of the fish; Jesus predicts three days in the heart of the earth. Moses escapes a ruler bent on killing Hebrew infants, emerges from exile, ascends a mountain, and mediates a covenant. Jesus follows the same symbolic arc: threatened by a murderous ruler, called out of Egypt, tested in the wilderness, teaching from a mountain, and inaugurating a renewed covenant. This is not random resemblance. It reflects a world in which earlier stories functioned as templates.
Ancient Jewish authors did not treat scripture as a static archive of facts. They treated it as a living body of tradition that could be revisited, reinterpreted, and applied to new circumstances.
One key technique is typology recognized recurring patterns across time: Moses could become a template for a future deliverer, and Israel’s exile could foreshadow restoration. Midrash explored hidden meanings, tensions, and new applications within older texts. Pesher, attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, treated scripture as containing encoded meanings that spoke directly to the interpreter’s own time.
By the time we arrive at early Christianity, scripture is no longer functioning merely as a record of the past. It is functioning as a codebook. The first Christians did not read the Hebrew scriptures as neutral background material for a life that had already happened. They searched them for hidden patterns, veiled prophecies, typological correspondences, and Spirit-guided meanings. A passage did not have to be about Jesus in its original context in order to become about Jesus through inspired interpretation. Israel could become Jesus. The suffering righteous man could become Jesus. The rejected servant could become Jesus. A sign given to an ancient king could become Jesus. The text became a map, and Christ was the figure readers were trained to find within it.
That is crucial because it shows how scripture was actually being used. Early Jewish readers were not passively receiving texts as fixed records of the past. They were searching them, recombining them, and uncovering patterns that could be applied to their own historical moment. As Richard Carrier and others have noted, this kind of scriptural decoding was not marginal. It was widespread. The New Testament writers emerged directly out of this world. They were Jews steeped in a tradition where scripture was not treated as a flat archive of past events, but as a living body of meaning to be searched, reread, and reapplied. When early Christians portrayed Jesus, they were not simply recording a life in the modern biographical sense. They were rereading the Hebrew scriptures to interpret his life, death, mission, and cosmic significance. That is why so much of the Gospel narrative appears to fulfill older texts. The authors were not recording events and then attaching verses afterward. They were crafting a theological portrait through inherited techniques of scriptural interpretation.
This is visible even in the words attributed to Jesus. What later readers encounter as the “red-letter” sayings are not free-floating teachings dropped into history untouched by tradition. They are deeply embedded in a scriptural world. When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus answers by quoting Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19. His warning that “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” comes from Psalm 118. Even his cry from the cross is lifted from Psalm 22. He does not stand outside the tradition commenting on it from a distance. He speaks from within it.
Once the literary architecture of the Gospels becomes visible, a more difficult question comes into focus. Are the evangelists taking a real remembered life and interpreting it through scripture, or are they using scripture itself to shape the narrative they present? Those are not small variations of the same idea. They are rival explanations. One begins with a historical figure and treats scriptural patterning as interpretation. The other begins with a scriptural tradition and understands the figure as emerging from it. The more densely these patterns appear, the harder it becomes to maintain a clear boundary between the person being described and the literary tradition doing the describing.
The Foundation Is Younger Than It Appears
Most readers imagine the Hebrew scriptures as ancient deposits of sacred memory stretching deep into the past. Moses belongs to remote antiquity. The prophets stand centuries before Jesus. The New Testament then appears as the culmination of an immense and venerable arc.
But that inherited picture is much shakier than people like to admit.
Biblical minimalists associated with the Copenhagen School, including Thomas L. Thompson, Niels Peter Lemche, and Philip Davies, challenged the assumption that the Hebrew Bible gives us transparent access to early Israelite history. Their argument was not that nothing existed before the texts, but that the biblical story of Israel may be less a record of national origins than a later literary construction of those origins.
Elephantine Temple reconstruction petition, 5th century BCE. The Elephantine papyri preserve evidence of a Jewish/Judean military community in southern Egypt that worshiped Yahweh and maintained a temple outside Jerusalem — a striking challenge to the assumption that Torah-centered Judaism was already universally organized around Jerusalem by this period.
The Elephantine Problem
The Elephantine papyri make that problem hard to ignore. In the fifth century BCE, a Jewish/Judean military community in southern Egypt worshiped Yahweh, maintained its own temple, practiced sacrifice, and remained in contact with Jerusalem. Yet this community does not clearly reflect the fully formed Torah-centered Judaism later projected backward into Israel’s past. There is no obvious evidence of an exclusive Jerusalem cult, a centralized Pentateuchal legal order, or the religious system later treated as ancient and universal. That does not prove no Pentateuchal traditions existed in any form, but it does make the traditional timeline look far less secure.
Archaeology adds more pressure. The patriarchal age, the Exodus, the conquest, and the grandeur of the united monarchy have all been heavily challenged. Egyptian records do not confirm the biblical Exodus. Archaeology has not vindicated the conquest of Jericho in the form the Bible presents it. Even early Israelite religion appears messier than later monotheistic memory allows, with inscriptions invoking Yahweh alongside Asherah. The issue is not merely that the Bible contains embellishment. The issue is that some of its foundational stories may be retrospective national myths written as ancient history.
Plato, Moses, and the Making of Sacred Antiquity
This is where Russell Gmirkin pushes the argument further. He argues that the Pentateuch reached final form around 273–272 BCE, in the Alexandrian and Ptolemaic world of the third century BCE, close to the Septuagint project and the intellectual culture of the Great Library. On this model, the Torah was not merely translated into Greek at Alexandria. It may have been composed or finalized there.
Gmirkin’s argument is controversial, but it is not random. He points to literary dependence: Genesis 1–11 drawing on Berossus’ Babylonian history, Exodus engaging Manetho’s Egyptian history, and the Torah’s legal materials reflecting Greek, especially Platonic, models of law, constitution, and national foundation. Philippe Wajdenbaum develops a similar comparison, arguing that the Hebrew Bible resembles Greek literature, especially Plato’s Laws, in its construction of a people around a lawgiver, sacred land, twelve tribes, and a divinely authorized legal order.
This changes the way Moses looks. In Gmirkin’s reading, Moses is not simply a prophet. He resembles an oikist, a founder figure: the one who organizes a people, distributes land, establishes institutions, and anchors political order in a sacred origin story. The Torah, in turn, begins to look less like a loose bundle of ancient laws and more like a charter myth. It tells a people who they are, where they came from, why their laws are sacred, and why obedience to that order is obedience to God.
That is where the real trick lies. Once law is placed in the mouth of Moses and projected backward into sacred antiquity, it stops looking like legislation and begins to look like revelation.
This also helps explain later apologetic reversals. By the time we reach writers such as Philo and Josephus, the direction of influence has been flipped. Greek thinkers are now said to have borrowed from Moses, not the other way around. The issue was never merely content. It was priority. The Bible’s authority depended not only on what it said, but on when people believed it had been said. The Letter of Aristeas belongs to the same machinery of sacred self-presentation: Jewish antiquity staged for the Greek world as though ancient wisdom were simply being translated, rather than emerging from a competitive Hellenistic culture of literary production and historical self-invention.
Yonatan Adler adds one final complication. The question is not only when these texts were written, but when they became socially real. Adler argues that widespread Torah observance becomes clearly visible much later than tradition claims, especially in the Hasmonean period. A text can exist before it rules. A law can be written before it governs a people.
The implications of that compressed timeline are enormous.
The implications are enormous. If the Pentateuch reached final form around 273–272 BCE, and the Gospels were written between roughly 70 and 100 CE, then the scriptures supposedly being “fulfilled” by the Gospel writers may be only three or four centuries older than the Gospels themselves.
That does not make the connection less Jewish. It makes it look less like the unfolding of immemorial revelation and more like literary tradition building on literary tradition.
And once that compressed timeline is taken seriously, the next question is no longer simply how old the tradition was supposed to be. It is how sacred antiquity itself was made.
The Library of Alexandria in Egypt: the intellectual crossroads of the Hellenistic world, where texts were collected, translated, and rewritten. Building on comparative studies and source criticism, Russell Gmirkin argues that the Pentateuch may have taken shape in this environment in the third century BCE, drawing on Greek histories, legal traditions, and philosophical works.
From Failed Kingdom to Spiritual Messiah
This is the missing hinge. Jewish messianic hope did not arise in a vacuum. It was forged in the long shadow of conquest, exile, humiliation, and imperial domination. From Assyria and Babylon to the Greeks and Romans, Jewish life was repeatedly shaped by foreign rule. It is not difficult to see why restoration, divine justice, and the dream of an anointed deliverer became so central. A people under pressure will search its own sacred memory for the pattern of rescue.
By the first century, that hope had become unstable. Second Temple Judaism was not a unified religion serenely awaiting fulfillment. It was a fractured landscape of rival sects, competing scriptural interpretations, anti-Temple resentment, apocalyptic expectation, and bitter disagreement about where Israel had gone wrong. Some blamed foreign occupation on sin. Some blamed corrupt elites. Some rejected the legitimacy of the Temple leadership altogether. In that environment, scripture was not merely read. It was mined for survival strategies.
This is where Carrier’s point becomes useful. As he writes, “The traditional messianic hope (of a conclusive military victory over all of Israel’s neighbors) was a doomed hope, and that would have been obvious to at least some Jews.” A warrior-king who would visibly crush Rome was precisely the kind of messiah history kept refusing to produce. A spiritual messiah, by contrast, could not be falsified so easily. He could conquer Satan rather than Caesar, the heavens rather than the earth, sin rather than empire. Defeat could be reinterpreted as hidden victory. Political disappointment could be absorbed into myth.
That shift matters. A suffering, dying, or heavenly messiah fits prolonged subjugation far better than a triumphant Davidic conqueror who never arrives. Christianity did not solve the Roman problem by overthrowing Rome. It solved it by changing the terms of victory. The kingdom became “not of this world.” The struggle moved from flesh and blood to cosmic powers. The messiah no longer needed to raise an army from Jerusalem if he could instead be enthroned in heaven.
And that made Christianity exportable. The movement that emerged did not require Gentiles to become Jews in the full covenantal sense. It offered a way for Gentiles to worship the God of Israel without circumcision, kosher law, or full Torah observance. Acts 15 is the obvious flashpoint. The Jerusalem leadership approves Gentile inclusion through a reduced set of obligations, allowing the biblical framework to expand beyond ethnic Judaism without dissolving its theological core. The God remains the God of Israel. The scriptures remain Jewish scriptures. The messiah remains the Jewish messiah. What changes is access.
That is one of the most important transformations in religious history. Christianity became, in effect, Judaism for Gentiles: a way of universalizing Israel’s God, Israel’s scriptures, Israel’s messianic story, and Israel’s eschatological framework without requiring the nations to become Jews. The old covenantal architecture was not abandoned. It was scaled.
And once that is clear, the next question presses harder than ever. If this new messiah emerged from scriptural reinterpretation, apocalyptic disappointment, sectarian fragmentation, and theological adaptation to empire, then the issue is no longer merely what early Christians believed about him.
It is whether there was ever a stable historical figure there in the first place.
The Last Firewall: “But Surely Jesus Was Historical”
By this point in the argument, a familiar fallback usually appears. The miracles may be myth. The resurrection may be theology. The birth stories may be literary invention. The passion narrative may be scriptural construction. The speeches may be later compositions. The chronology may be artificial. Fine. Grant all that, people say. But surely there was still a man underneath it all.
I no longer accept that assumption, and I do not think it deserves to be treated as intellectually safe merely because it is familiar.
Once literary and theological construction has been conceded at nearly every level of the tradition, the so-called “historical Jesus” begins to look less like a demonstrated figure than like a residue, a placeholder left standing after everything obviously mythic has been stripped away. The problem is not that a historical core has been disproved in some crude, absolute sense. The problem is that it is constantly assumed, while the evidence for it remains astonishingly thin.
Where, exactly, is this man supposed to be found?
There is no contemporary, independent, non-Christian evidence for Jesus as a historical person. There is no inscription, no administrative record, no eyewitness account, no Roman report from his lifetime, no Jewish source from his lifetime, no archaeological evidence identifying him, no surviving text from anyone who actually met him. What we possess are Christian theological writings.
And our earliest source, Paul, does not give us a remembered Galilean teacher wandering around first-century Judea. He gives us a revealed, cosmic, scriptural Christ known through visions, revelation, scripture, death, resurrection, and heavenly significance. Paul does not preserve a stable earthly biography. He does not narrate Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, Judas, Mary Magdalene at the tomb, Pilate’s trial scene, or the sermon material that later becomes central to the Gospel portrait. That absence is not a trivial inconvenience. It is a structural problem.
Even 2 Peter is revealing on this point. “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” The denial is telling. It does not prove invention by itself, but it does show that early Christian claims could be heard as mythic, visionary, or constructed. And the response is instructive. The author does not answer by providing a grounded earthly biography. He answers with prophecy, revelation, glory, and Spirit-soaked authority.
The Gospels themselves do not rescue the situation. They are anonymous literary-theological compositions written decades after the alleged events, in Greek, through dense scriptural patterning. They do not read like independent eyewitness memory. They read like sacred narrative built from older texts, typology, apocalyptic expectation, and theological necessity.
The supposed external witnesses do not solve the problem. Josephus is late, textually disputed, and preserved through Christian transmission. Tacitus is later still and tells us, at most, what Christians in his own time believed about their origins. These are not contemporary confirmations of Jesus’ life. They are later references to a movement that already existed. They tell us Christianity happened. They do not securely tell us that the Gospel figure at its center was historical in the way readers are encouraged to imagine.
The same goes for the phrases in Paul that are endlessly hauled out as if they settle the matter. “Born of a woman,” “seed of David,” “brother of the Lord” — these are not granite biographical anchors. They can function as incarnation language, messianic credentialing, or intra-community title. They do not give us a recoverable historical Jesus standing solidly behind the later narratives. They give us phrases. The heavy lifting is done by prior belief.
This is why I reject the polite compromise that says, “Of course the Gospel Jesus is mythologized, but there must have been a real preacher behind him.” Must there? Why? Because modern scholars feel more respectable keeping one sandal planted on the ground? Because the imagination panics at the thought that the whole figure may be literary from the start? Because once the miracles, fulfillment scenes, speeches, chronology, passion details, and resurrection appearances are recognized as constructed, people still want one final reassuring object left?
To me, this often functions less like an argument than a psychological reflex.
And this is precisely where Gmirkin’s work ceases to be merely interesting and becomes a consistency test.
If we are willing to follow biblical minimalism when it exposes the Pentateuch as a late literary-theological construction, why should the inquiry suddenly stop at Christianity? If the Hebrew scriptures can be composed, adapted, borrowed, and projected backward into sacred antiquity, why is Jesus protected from the same analysis? Why is the critique allowed to dismantle Moses, law, covenant, and national memory, only to halt politely at the Messiah as if some invisible velvet rope had been lowered around him?
That exemption makes no sense.
Christianity does not escape the biblical matrix. It depends on it. It preserves the God of Israel, the prophets, the covenants, the messianic framework, the chosen-people logic, and the eschatological expectation that history moves toward divine judgment and final rule. Its dispute with Judaism is not over the structure. It is over who gets to occupy the central role within it. Christianity is not the grand liberation from the older framework that its admirers like to imagine. It is the sequel.
And once that is admitted, the next step is not radical at all. It is obvious.
If scripture can generate Moses, covenant, law, land, chosenness, and sacred national memory, then scripture can also generate Jesus, fulfillment, cross, resurrection, judgment, and cosmic kingship. If a literary-theological tradition can manufacture sacred antiquity, why should it suddenly lose that power when it reaches the first century? If the old stories can produce a founder, a people, a law, and a history, why should they not also produce a messiah?
Christianity does not begin, in our earliest sources, with a stable man later decorated with myth. It begins with a revealed Christ known through scripture and visions. The earthly biography comes later, and when it appears, it arrives already saturated with literary design.
If that is true, then the task is no longer to keep exhausting ink and paper trying to peel a “real Jesus” out of layers of literary construction. The more urgent question becomes: what were the earliest apostles, visionaries, and authors actually doing? What experiences did they think they were having? What apocalyptic expectations drove them? What rhetorical and mythical work were the later stories performing? Once the data about Jesus comes to us primarily through scripture, revelation, and literary invention rather than recent biography, the center of gravity shifts. The real subject is no longer a recoverable Galilean teacher hiding behind the text, but the motives, methods, and imaginative world of the people who produced the text.
The Gospel Jesus is not history remembered and then embellished. He is scripture personified, given narrative form, furnished with a recent setting, and made to walk through a world already prepared for him by text. At that point, Christianity begins to look less like a movement built around a misremembered man and more like a movement built around visionary claims, apocalyptic expectation, scriptural decoding, and later literary elaboration. What demands explanation is not how a historical teacher was gradually mythologized, but how a mythic and scriptural Christ was gradually narrativized.
That is the last firewall. Once readers are willing to concede literary construction everywhere else, Jesus becomes the one figure they are still expected to protect. Not because the evidence suddenly improves, but because the emotional and institutional cost of following the argument any further becomes too high. And if that protection finally collapses, then a great deal of Jesus studies will have to admit that it has been spending enormous effort on the wrong pursuit. The real work would no longer be reconstructing a man behind the myths, but reconstructing the interpretive practices, sectarian motives, visionary experiences, and literary intentions that produced the myth in the first place.
And that is exactly where Jan Assmann becomes useful.
The resistance here is not just intellectual. It is civilizational. By the time people reach Jesus, they are no longer defending one ancient figure among others. They are defending a memory-world: a moral vocabulary, a theory of suffering, a structure of hope, a story about history, and often the emotional architecture through which they understand themselves. That is why the argument suddenly feels so charged. It is no longer just about evidence. It is about what happens when literature hardens into memory and memory hardens into reality.
Mnemohistory: When Literature Becomes Memory
“Mnemohistory,” a term coined by Jan Assmann, refers not simply to the past, but to the way societies remember the past. That sounds academic. In practice, it is far more destabilizing than it first appears.
I was first introduced to Assmann’s work through my friend Brado, and once the idea clicked, a great deal of human behavior stopped looking mysterious. One of the hardest things to swallow is realizing how much of what people confidently call “history” is not history in the plain sense at all, but mnemohistory: emotionally charged civilizational storytelling repeated so often that it hardens into something psychologically untouchable.
A society does not merely pass down facts. It passes down stories about origins, suffering, enemies, rescue, chosenness, betrayal, exile, return, and destiny. Those stories do not simply describe the past. They train perception. They teach people what to love, what to fear, whom to trust, whom to blame, and what future to desire. After a while, people are no longer defending a memory. They are defending the world that memory built for them.
That is why historical arguments go feral so quickly. You are never just disputing an event. You are touching the memory structure through which a group recognizes itself. The Exodus is one of the clearest examples. It is not merely a story to be remembered, but a story about remembering: bondage, liberation, divine rescue, covenant, promised land. It turns memory into identity and identity into destiny. The past is ritualized so that it can keep governing the present.
This is also where Neil Van Leeuwen’s distinction between factual belief and religious credence becomes clarifying. A factual belief is supposed to track reality across contexts. Religious credence works differently. It behaves less like stable fact-tracking and more like an imaginative, identity-bound commitment activated in specific social and ritual settings. A church can gather in a gymnasium and everyone still knows they are sitting on bleachers under fluorescent lights. Yet within that setting, the space becomes sacred. The credence does not erase ordinary reality. It overlays it and reorganizes meaning.
That helps explain why apologetics so often feels impervious to evidence. It is not primarily a truth-seeking enterprise, but a credence-maintenance system. Doubt is framed as danger, questions are met with prefabricated responses, and rituals, narratives, and authorities work together to protect identity rather than expose it to risk. As Van Leeuwen argues, when an attitude is rooted in group identity, truth can easily take a back seat.
Once you see that, a great deal of Christian apologetics becomes easier to understand. Its stubbornness is not a bug. It is the design. It is not really trying to investigate whether the historical Jesus can bear the weight placed on him. It is trying to prevent the collapse of the cognitive and social world built around him.
That is why arguments about Jesus’ historicity so often feel like Groundhog Day. One side keeps asking what the evidence can actually support. The other keeps reasserting the figure as though familiarity itself were proof. By the time people reach Jesus, they are no longer just defending one ancient claim among others. They are defending a moral universe, a structure of consolation, a theory of suffering, a promise of justice, a spiritual identity, and often an entire social world.
This is how Christianity became one of history’s most successful Trojan horses. It entered the Roman world clothed in humility, forgiveness, self-denial, and the sanctification of suffering. But that moral vocabulary was tailor-made for rule. A religion that teaches obedience, glorifies submission, and casts suffering as meaningful does not merely coexist with empire. It serves it. Constantine did not have to distort Christianity into something authoritarian. Its authoritarian potential was already there, waiting to be scaled.
The reason this matters is not that ancient people wrote sacred stories. Humans have always done that. The reason it matters is that some sacred stories do not stay on the page. They become political grammar. They teach civilizations how to imagine enemies, destiny, land, obedience, suffering, and war.
Modern Consequences: When Sacred Story Becomes Political Machinery
And this is where the conversation is no longer academic or safely trapped in antiquity.
In the modern West, and especially in the United States, support for Israel is often presented not merely as a strategic choice but as a moral and even spiritual duty. For millions of Christians, conflict in the Middle East is not simply geopolitics. It is part of a sacred script. Apocalyptic language has not remained tucked away in pulpits and prophecy conferences. It has drifted upward into policy, media, lobbying, diplomacy, and war.
And the problem is larger than American evangelicalism.
What is now sold as “Judeo-Christian friendship” increasingly functions as a transnational political package. Israel is marketed not simply as a nation-state but as a symbol of “the West,” biblical truth, anti-communism, anti-Islamism, anti-woke moral order, technological modernity, and civilizational resolve. That is why gatherings such as the JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem and the Judeo-Christian Zionist Congress matter. They are not quaint interfaith exercises. They are strategy rooms in which theology, media, diplomacy, philanthropy, and security discourse are braided together and sent back out as political messaging.
Latin America makes the pattern especially visible. As evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity grows as a political force, Israel is increasingly recoded as a sacred-political emblem of order, family values, anti-left resistance, and biblical destiny. The Isaac Accords are a perfect example. They are presented in the language of democratic values, innovation, security, and cooperation, but the emotional engine underneath them is older and hotter than that. Israel becomes a proof-text. Foreign policy becomes catechism by other means. The old Abrahamic machinery has simply evolved to speak the language of diplomacy, branding, and strategic partnership.
This is why the usual dismissals fail. We are not dealing with private religious sentiment lingering harmlessly at the margins. We are dealing with inherited apocalyptic structures that shape how nations imagine enemies, allies, legitimacy, time, and destiny. When political leaders, religious institutions, military personnel, media ecosystems, and ordinary citizens inherit stories about Israel, Iran, final battles, messiahs, Armageddon, and divine destiny, the line between prophecy and policy begins to blur. Conflict stops looking contingent. It starts looking prewritten.
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit coined the term hyperstition for ideas that bring themselves into existence because people believe them strongly enough to act on them. That concept belongs here. A prophecy does not have to be true to become dangerous. It only has to recruit enough believers willing to organize behavior around it. Once that happens, old stories stop functioning as symbolic expectation and begin operating as strategic motivation.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all carry end-times narratives organized around the same theological lore: messianic figures, final conflict, cosmic judgment, and the Middle East.
A revealing example appears in the Qur’an’s treatment of Jesus. In Surah 3:45, Jesus is called al-Masīḥ — the Messiah. Islam does not use that title in the Christian sense: Jesus is not divine, not the Son of God, and not a crucified savior. But the messianic category remains.
The traditions are not identical, and their details often conflict sharply. But they share enough inherited narrative architecture to be significant here.
Maimonides makes the continuity unusually explicit, and his wording matters because he was no fringe oddball. He was one of the most important Jewish legal and philosophical authorities in history. In Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings 11:4, frames Jesus and Muhammad as figures who, within divine providence, helped spread knowledge of messianic expectation and the God of Israel among the nations.
That is the blueprint: a shared body of theological lore, a transmitted narrative architecture that persists even as details are revised. Its logic is self-reinforcing. Prophecy validates scripture, scripture is reread as fulfilled prophecy, and each new crisis is folded back into the old frame as confirmation. The game works not because the texts reliably predict history, but because they are endlessly reinterpreted, retrofitted, and made to certify one another.
And that is why literary origins matter. If sacred histories are constructed, revised, projected backward, and then defended as untouchable truth, they do not remain harmless. They shape borders, justify wars, license alliances, sanctify violence, and train populations to see obedience as virtue and confrontation as destiny. The danger is not simply that people believe old stories. The danger is that these stories still command institutions, budgets, media systems, electorates, intelligence networks, and weapons.
Entire populations become characters in someone else’s sacred drama. Human beings become pieces on an apocalyptic chessboard. War ceases to be merely war. It becomes fulfillment.
Voltaire’s warning still bites: those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
This is why I do what I do with such fierce passion. I believe the Abrahamic traditions are built on layers of fabrication, borrowed myths, retroactive claims to antiquity, and sacred stories whose origins are rarely examined with the seriousness they deserve. To me, it is an insult to wisdom, curiosity, and the pursuit of knowledge that so much of our culture remains shaped by narratives that are historically unstable, morally suspect, and fiercely defended as untouchable truth.
Questioning these stories is not hatred. It is not divisive. It is intellectual self-defense. It is spiritual self-defense. It is the work of reclaiming the human mind from inherited scripts that have too often taught people to sanctify obedience, suffering, conquest, and fear.
If sacred stories can shape civilizations, then examining them is not a niche academic exercise. It is necessary work.
Resources and Further Reading
Laurent Guyénot — “Russell Gmirkin and the Biblical Con” (Substack series) Jan Assmann: Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism Jan Assmann: Cultural Memory and Early Civilization Richard B. Hays: Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels Dale C. Allison Jr.: The New Moses: A Matthean Typology E.P. Sanders: The Historical Figure of Jesus Geza Vermes: Jesus the Jew Bart D. Ehrman: Did Jesus Exist? Yonatan Adler: The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal Russell Gmirkin: Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus Russell Gmirkin: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible Philippe Wajdenbaum: Argonauts of the Desert Thomas L. Thompson: The Mythic Past Philip R. Davies: In Search of “Ancient Israel” Ze’ev Herzog: “Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho” (Haaretz, 1999) David Skrbina: The Jesus Hoax Richard Carrier: On the Historicity of Jesus, The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas S. Verenna, eds., Is This Not the Carpenter? The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus
On metabolism, nourishment, food reverence, and the systems that shape what feeds us
Welcome back to Taste0fTruth Tuesdays. Today, we are mixing things up with a subject that is very near and dear to my heart: nutrition, metabolism, and our increasingly distorted relationship with food in our modern world.
This episode covers a lot of ground. We are moving from diet culture and my own history with restriction into metabolism, morality, industrial food, local agriculture, and the growing technological control of our food systems. It may sound like several different conversations, but they are all part of the same story.
This episode will also lay some of the groundwork for an upcoming interview at the end of the month with Jay Feldman Wellness.
Jay is a health coach, independent health researcher, and host of The Energy Balance Podcast. His work explores bioenergetic health and nutrition, including ideas influenced by biologist Ray Peat—principles I have found myself returning to, on and off, for the last several years.
But before we get there, I need to explain why this conversation is so personal for me.
As many of you know, I have spent more than 20 years in the health and fitness world. I have also written openly about how intense and complicated that journey has been.
I came of age during the late 1990s and early 2000s, an era saturated with diet magazines, celebrity weight-loss stories, low-fat everything, Special K commercials, “bikini body” workouts, and television programs that treated shrinking the body as both entertainment and moral achievement.
And those cultural messages did not exist in isolation.
I grew up in a household where my body was not simply noticed. It was scrutinized, compared, and commented on.
Those kinds of comments do not disappear with time. They become part of the architecture of how you see yourself. They follow you into mirrors, fitting rooms, photographs, swimming pools, doctors’ offices, and every room where you become aware that other people can see your body.
They teach you that the body must be managed and monitored.
They plant the belief that remaining small is the price of safety.
I grew up believing that if I could control my body well enough, I could avoid humiliation. I could avoid becoming the punchline. I could avoid being seen in the wrong way.
For a while, I turned that fear into something our culture rewards: discipline.
But fear does not stop being fear simply because it learns the vocabulary of health and fitness.
In high school, I followed plans like the Special K diet. I relied on Carnation Instant Breakfast instead of complete meals. I skipped classes to work out before heading to my afterschool job. My protein intake was low. My fear of gaining weight was high.
Restriction became familiar.
And because restriction was praised as willpower, I did not always recognize it as deprivation.
That is the background I bring into this conversation. I am not critiquing calorie culture because I have never understood its appeal. I understand it intimately.
Numbers can feel safe.
Numbers feel objective. They offer the illusion that if you calculate carefully enough, track consistently enough, and exert enough control, the body will become predictable. Calories give food a score. The scale gives the body a verdict. And when you have learned to fear your own appetite, arithmetic can feel more trustworthy than sensation.
I have lived through periods in which weight loss looked like success from the outside while my body was becoming increasingly undernourished, stressed, depleted, and disconnected from its own signals.
So when I say that weight loss and health are not synonymous, trust me: I learned that lesson the hard way.
That is why I am interested in the bioenergetic perspective. Rather than asking only, “How little can I eat to make the number on the scale decrease?” it asks a more useful question:
How well is the body actually producing and using energy?
This episode is not intended to settle every claim made within bioenergetic nutrition. That is part of what I want to explore with Jay during our upcoming conversation.
Today, I want to lay the groundwork by examining the difference between consuming calories and producing usable cellular energy; between losing weight and becoming healthy; and between treating food as a number and understanding it as biological information, ecological relationship, and participation in a living system.
Because the body is not simply a furnace. Food is not merely a number.
And losing weight is definitely not proof that a person is nourished or healthy while doing so.
Modern nutrition has flattened food into arithmetic while removing almost everything that makes it meaningful.
SAD is the perfect acronym for the Standard American Diet because, whew, it really is sad what modern food culture has become.
And I do not just mean sad in the obvious “everyone is eating ultra-processed food and wondering why they feel terrible” kind of way. I mean sad in the deeper sense.
Sad as in spiritually impoverished.
Sad as in disconnected from land, animals, seasons, labor, gratitude, death, and actual nourishment.
Sad as in we have managed to turn food (one of the most intimate relationships a human being has with the living world) into a bland, plastic-wrapped transaction between a lonely person and a microwave, or a vehicle going to a fast food drive thru window.
That sounds dramatic.
But is it really?
We live in a culture that calls ultra-processed food “good enough,” celebrates weight loss regardless of how it was achieved, and then treats anyone who questions that framework as judgmental, elitist, or unnecessarily intense.
But that is exactly the problem.
Our culture has reduced food to numbers while stripping it of meaning. Calories. Macros. Points. Deficits. Cheat meals. Protein hacks. Low-cal swaps. “If It Fits Your Macros.” (I lived and breathed that lifestyle) We talk about food like it is accounting, not relationship. Like the human body is a calculator.
Of course, calories matter. I am not pretending energy balance is fake. But if your entire health philosophy begins and ends with calorie math, you are missing the human being attached to the equation.
Food is not only fuel. Food is information. Food sends a signal. Food affects insulin, thyroid output, leptin, ghrelin, cortisol, digestion, gut signaling, inflammation, mitochondrial function, cell communication, mood, cravings, satiety, sleep, fertility, and gene expression. A Hot Pocket and a grass-fed steak may both contain calories, but they do not speak the same biological language once they enter the body.
The lie of “calories in, calories out” must die.
Not because energy does not matter. It does. But because reducing food to calorie math is one of the dumbest things modern nutrition culture has done to the human body.
A calorie is a unit of energy, but the number printed on a label cannot tell us how effectively a food will be digested, absorbed, converted into ATP, or allocated among the body’s competing demands. That process requires minerals, vitamins, enzymes, hormones, functioning mitochondria, adequate protein, and a body that is not constantly underfed, inflamed, stressed, or depleted.
This is where the “just eat less” crowd loses the plot.
Most people are not building truly nutrient-dense meals, even when they think they are. They may be tracking protein, counting calories, or hitting some macro target, while still missing the deeper nourishment their body needs to actually turn food into energy. If someone is living on refined grains, muscle meats only, no seafood, low mineral intake, low variety, and almost no traditional foods, they can be “hitting their calories” while still undersupplying some of the micronutrients and cofactors involved in energy metabolism, tissue repair, and hormonal function.
But producing energy is only part of the story.
The body must also decide where that energy goes.
Mitochondrial psychobiologist Martin Picard and his colleagues have proposed an emerging framework called the Energy Constraint model. Their central idea is that the body operates with a limited but dynamic energy budget that must continually be allocated across cells, organs, systems, and behaviors.
Everything costs energy.
Neurons firing costs energy. Producing proteins costs energy. Mounting an immune response costs energy. Digestion, movement, cognition, reproduction, tissue repair, and communication between cells all carry energetic costs.
Nothing is free in biology.
Hierarchy of Energy Needs. From @martinpicard, “Energy Constraint on Health,” based on the Energy Constraint framework developed by Alexander Behnke, Evan Shaulson, Herman Pontzer, Chris Kempes, Martin Picard, and colleagues. Reproduced with permission from Martin Picard. Original article and primary paper linked here.
In their framework, the body’s energetic demands can be divided into three broad categories: vital functions; stress responses; and growth, maintenance, and repair.
At the base are the vital functions necessary to sustain life in the immediate term: breathing, heart activity, brain function, membrane potential, ion exchange, and basic metabolism. These processes receive priority because they are necessary for survival over minutes, hours, and days.
The next category includes stress-related demands. Exercise is a stressor. So are infection, inflammation, toxins, psychological distress, injury, sleep loss, and activation of the sympathetic nervous system. All of these require the body to spend energy responding and adapting.
At the top are growth, maintenance, and repair. These processes may not be essential for surviving the next several minutes, but they are essential for healing, resilience, muscle maintenance, reproduction, cognition, motivation, vitality, and long-term health.
When the body’s total demands become difficult to sustain, energy is not distributed evenly. More urgent vital and stress-related processes may be prioritized while investment in growth, maintenance, and repair becomes compressed.
In other words, the body may preserve what is necessary to keep you alive while reducing what is available to help you recover, reproduce, think clearly, maintain muscle, and feel fully alive.
This does not mean these higher functions simply switch off in a rigid order. It means the body makes trade-offs.
And duration matters.
Not every stressor is harmful. Exercise itself temporarily redirects energy, but when it is appropriately dosed and followed by sufficient nourishment, sleep, and recovery, the body can adapt and become more resilient.
The deeper problem is stress that becomes excessive, chronic, or inescapable.
When energetic demands continue for weeks, months, or years—whether from illness, infection, psychological stress, overtraining, sleep disruption, undernourishment, or some combination of pressures—the body may repeatedly postpone the repair work that was supposed to happen later.
This framework helps explain how someone can technically be eating enough calories (or even losing weight successfully) while experiencing fatigue, poor recovery, low libido, disrupted cycles, reduced motivation, brain fog, loss of muscle, or declining resilience.
It does not mean every one of those symptoms has a single energetic cause. But it gives us a much richer way of understanding health than simply asking whether someone stayed within a calorie target.
The body is not failing to obey an equation.
It is adapting to competing demands.
Nutrient status is only one part of this energetic landscape, but it is an important one. The body’s ability to produce, allocate, and use energy is also shaped by sleep, illness, stress, activity, mitochondrial function, recovery, and the cumulative demands being placed upon it.
This is why vitamins and minerals matter so much. They are not little bonus points sprinkled on top of a diet. They are part of the machinery that turns food into usable energy. They help build hormones and neurotransmitters, repair tissue, maintain immune function, support the liver, regulate the nervous system, and keep the organs doing their jobs.
Or said more simply: macronutrients burn on the flame of micronutrients.
That is the part calorie math misses. A Hot Pocket and a mineral-rich, protein-rich, whole-food meal may both contain calories, but they do not offer the body the same tools. One delivers energy potential wrapped in industrial convenience. The other provides the raw materials the body needs to actually build, repair, signal, regulate, and produce real cellular energy.
So when people say “it’s just calories in, calories out,” what I hear is a worldview that has confused potential with function.
A body is not helped by potential alone. It needs conversion. It needs nourishment. It needs signal. It needs minerals, protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, salt, sunlight, rest, and rhythm.
Food is not just a number entering a furnace. Food is a set of instructions entering a living system. And if the instructions are poor, incomplete, synthetic, depleted, or chaotic, the body will respond accordingly.
This is where the lazy appeal to “thermodynamics” becomes almost comical. Yes, the laws of thermodynamics exist. Congratulations. But the human body is not a closed metal box in a lab. It is a living, adaptive, self-regulating organism. Inputs change outputs. Food changes appetite, energy expenditure, hormones, cravings, sleep, mood, metabolic rate, and behavior. The “calories out” side is not fixed. It responds to the quality, timing, and composition of what we eat.
Rupert Sheldrake has criticized the way modern science can harden living systems into dead-mechanistic models, and that critique fits here. The calorie model treats the body like a machine. But we are not machines. We are organisms. Food is not merely burned. It is received, interpreted, metabolized, stored, signaled, and woven into the body.
So yes, calories matter. But “calories in, calories out” as a complete theory of health is basically nutritional kindergarten, and it’s time to grow out of that.
But calorie reductionism is only one way modern food culture disconnects us from the complexity of nourishment.
We also have a tendency to turn eating into a moral identity. Foods become clean or dirty, virtuous or shameful. Diets promise not only better health, but innocence: a way to eat without exploitation, suffering, contradiction, or death.
I understand the appeal of that promise because I lived inside it.
I was vegetarian for years. At the time, I genuinely believed it was both the healthier and more ethical choice. I cared about animals. I still do—deeply. I did not want to participate in harm if I could avoid it.
But eventually, health-wise, vegetarianism stopped working for me. My body was not thriving. Practitioners I trusted encouraged me to reconsider whether I was receiving enough protein and nourishment, and over time I began incorporating animal foods again. That transition gradually led me toward a more pro-metabolic, ancestral approach to food.
I am not as critical of vegetarianism as I am of veganism because vegetarian diets can still include many traditional, deeply nourishing foods: eggs, butter, cheese, milk, yogurt, cream, and honey. These foods can still connect us to animals, farms, fermentation, older foodways, and the forms of nourishment on which human communities have relied for generations.
Veganism is different. I understand the moral impulse behind it. But modern veganism often depends heavily on the very industrial food system it imagines itself resisting.
It often depends upon global supply chains, fortified products, industrial monocrops, protein isolates, seed oils, and laboratory-like replacements for foods that once came directly from local land, animals, kitchens, and communities.
That does not describe every vegan meal or every person who avoids animal foods. But veganism as a widely accessible modern lifestyle has been made possible, in large part, by the industrialization and globalization of food. It became easier to imagine a diet detached from local ecology only after the modern food system detached nearly everyone from local ecology.
Before supermarket abundance, refrigerated transport, synthetic supplementation, and year-round imports, diets were far more directly shaped by region, climate, labor, animals, seasons, preservation, and survival.
This is what troubles me about the moral certainty that can surround veganism. Morality can bind us around compassion, but it can also blind us to costs outside the frame we have chosen. A person may avoid animal foods while remaining dependent upon monocropping, habitat loss, exploited labor, heavily processed substitutes, and corporations with no meaningful relationship to the land being depleted.
The suffering has not necessarily disappeared.
It has moved out of sight.
An ethical identity can become so focused on the visible animal that it loses sight of soil, insects, wildlife, farmers, rural communities, and the ecological relationships required to sustain human life.
This is why I keep thinking about survival programs like Alone. You do not typically see people in genuine survival conditions adhering to rigid dietary identities made possible by modern abundance. They eat the carbohydrates they can gather. They fish, hunt, forage, trap, and preserve whatever food the environment makes available.
A television program does not settle the ethical debate. But it does expose how much our modern food identities depend upon stability, infrastructure, supplements, supermarkets, and global abundance.
Most of us have no idea what we would actually eat if supermarkets, refrigeration, restaurants, and global supply chains disappeared.
It is easy to construct an identity around dietary purity while standing beneath fluorescent lights in a store containing food from every climate on Earth.
Survival has a way of stripping ideology down to appetite, ecology, and availability.
The point I’m trying to make here, is the deeper problem is not simply meat. It is our total disconnection from food itself.
The Standard American Diet is not built around reverence. It is built around convenience, profit, shelf life, hyper-palatability, and perpetual consumption. It is often high in refined carbohydrates and industrial fats, low in nutrient density, easy to overeat, and engineered to override the body’s natural signals.
It keeps people fed but not nourished.
Full but not satisfied. Stimulated but depleted.
I do not blame meat itself for the sickness of modern food culture. I blame the collapse of small and local food systems. I blame industrial agriculture and the consolidation of food production. I blame ultra-processed convenience food. I blame the severing of people from land, seasons, animals, kitchens, skills, and community.
I blame a culture in which people no longer know where their food comes from, what it took to produce it, or what kind of life and death made it possible.
Because that is the uncomfortable truth: death is always involved in food.
Neither vegetarianism nor veganism remove death from the food system. Fields are cleared. Habitats are displaced. Soil life is disrupted. Insects, birds, rodents, snakes, rabbits, and countless unseen creatures are killed through large-scale crop production. Farm workers are exploited. Water is diverted. Communities are transformed to serve distant markets.
Even a plate composed entirely of plants carries a cost.
That does not mean all dietary choices are morally equivalent. It means purity is not available to us. The moral task is not to imagine that we have escaped the web of life and death. It is to become more conscious of how we participate in it.
Nature is a total system, and within that totality it is not morally tidy.
We often use the word “natural” as if it means good, pure, balanced, or morally clean. But nature does not produce constant perfection. Nature produces totality. Beauty and monstrosity. Strength and weakness. Flourishing and failure. Healthy forms, botched forms, failed adaptations, extinction, decay, renewal.
Food belongs to that same uncomfortable order. There is no pure way to eat outside of life, death, appetite, cost, and consequence. The fantasy of a morally spotless diet is just another modern escape hatch from reality.
Morality works in a similar way. It is not merely a list of rules imposed from above. It is an energy-management system. It curbs violence, lust, greed, vengeance, ambition, and appetite so a group can maintain some version of peace. Morality contains the passions so they do not destroy the social body.
At both the personal and social level, morality determines which appetites may be expressed, which must be restrained, and which costs remain visible.
And maybe this is why modern food culture feels so spiritually sick. It has stopped containing appetite. It does not discipline desire. It engineers it. It stimulates it. It tells us we can eat industrially manufactured, hyper-palatable food and reduce the whole thing to calorie math, as if the body is not receiving signals, adapting, craving, storing, resisting, inflaming, and remembering.
Food is energy, yes. But not in the dead mechanical sense. Food is energy moving through a living moral and biological system.
That is why “calories in, calories out” feels so thin. It treats food as if it enters a furnace. But food enters a body. And bodies are not furnaces. Bodies are fields of signal, memory, hunger, restraint, ancestry, hormone, and meaning.
I completely understand the discomfort around eating conscious animals. I have read so many stories from first-time farmers who raise animals with love and then struggle deeply when it is time for slaughter. That pain means something. I respect it. Honestly, I trust that pain more than the numbness of the average grocery store shopper tossing factory-farmed meat into a cart with no thought at all.
The pain shows there is still reverence there.
And maybe that is what we have lost most.
We have been removed from the reality of food for so long that we tend to swing between two false extremes. On one side, we sentimentalize animals from a distance and pretend we can opt out of the death cycle entirely. On the other hand, we consume without thought, without gratitude, without responsibility, without even a pause. Both are forms of disconnection.
The more honest path, at least for me, is not pretending death can be removed from food. It is learning to approach food with more gratitude, humility, and responsibility.
That means caring about how animals are raised. It means caring about soil. It means caring about farmers. It means caring about local food systems. It means asking whether our food builds health or slowly drains it from us. It means understanding that “cheap” food often has hidden costs paid somewhere else, by animals, by land, by farm workers, by our own bodies, by our children, and by our communities.
And yes, it also means having higher standards.
I am tired of the cultural pressure to pretend that all food choices are basically the same as long as the calories work out. They are not. A calorie deficit may lead to weight loss, but weight loss is not the same as nourishment. You can lose weight while eating foods that do very little to support your metabolism, hormones, digestion, mood, or long-term health. You can shrink a body while starving it of what it actually needs.
Real nourishment asks more of us.
It asks us to pay attention. It asks us to recover old skills. It asks us to cook, to preserve, to source better when we can, and to know the difference between food shaped by land, animals, microbes, seasons, and human hands—and food assembled in a factory to survive for months in a freezer.
This is where food becomes spiritual for me.
Not spiritual in the vague influencer sense. Not “raise your vibes with an açai smoothie bowl” nonsense.
I mean spiritual in the older, more connected to earth sense: eating is an act of dependence, participation, and transformation.
Rudolf Steiner once approached nutrition through the idea that eating is never merely mechanical. Whatever one makes of his more esoteric language, I think there is something valuable in the underlying insight: food does not simply enter the body and disappear into a calorie ledger. The body must meet it, break it down, transform it, and incorporate it into the self.
What was once sunlight, soil, rain, grass, grain, fruit, milk, muscle, mineral, or microbial life becomes blood, tissue, hormone, neurotransmitter, heat, thought, movement, and memory.
Eating is one of the most literal ways the world becomes us.
That alone should make the act feel less trivial.
We are not floating minds temporarily renting bodies. We are dependent creatures. We require soil, water, sunlight, animals, plants, microbes, farmers, bees, rain, death, decay, and renewal. Every meal places us inside a web of relationships whether we acknowledge them or not.
And this means that food may shape more than our body weight.
What we eat can influence energy, mood, cognition, resilience, inflammation, digestion, and the clarity with which we move through the world. I do not mean that one perfect diet produces spiritual enlightenment, or that illness reflects moral or spiritual failure. Food is not a purity test.
But neither is it neutral.
The quality of what we repeatedly take into the body helps shape the material conditions through which we think, feel, recover, create, and relate to others.
Modern food culture wants us to forget all of this.
It wants food to be easy, cheap, fast, addictive, and morally weightless. It wants us to believe that a frozen pocket of refined flour, industrial oils, modified starches, sodium, flavoring agents, and processed ham is simply another option.
Just calories.
Just convenience.
Just people doing their best.
But I do not believe “doing our best” means lowering our standards until nothing matters. Nor do I believe the answer is to shame ordinary people for choosing the foods that our economic and agricultural systems have made cheap, available, familiar, and nearly effortless.
It is easy to preach ancestral nourishment from a well-stocked kitchen.
A serious food ethic must also account for price, time, disability, geography, cooking knowledge, working conditions, and access. Reverence that only the wealthy can afford is not reverence.
That does not mean pretending a Hot Pocket and a nutrient-dense meal are biologically or spiritually interchangeable. They are not.
It means directing our anger beyond the individual shopper and toward a system that has made industrial convenience easier to obtain than genuine nourishment—and then taught us to call that arrangement freedom.
But reverence cannot remain an individual lifestyle choice.
Our relationship with food is shaped by the systems surrounding us: what is affordable, what is available, what is subsidized, what is processed, what is imported, and what people realistically have the time and energy to prepare.
It is one thing to tell people to eat closer to the land. It is another to live inside an economy that has made industrial food cheaper, faster, and more accessible than the local, nutrient-dense food we claim to value.
So, this is not only a question of personal responsibility.
It is also a question of access, power, and who controls the conditions under which nourishment is produced and distributed.
As of May 2026, grocery prices were 2.7 percent higher than they had been one year earlier. Fruits and vegetables were up 6.1 percent. Food away from home was up 3.5 percent. Meanwhile, overall energy prices had risen 23.5 percent over the same period. These increases are layered on top of years of cumulative inflation, and they shape what families can realistically put on the table. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Consumer Price Index Summary—May 2026.” June 10, 2026.
At the same time, the infrastructure surrounding American agriculture is becoming increasingly centralized and digitized.
In February 2026, the USDA announced its “One Farmer, One File” initiative, which is intended to create a single record following each farmer across the Farm Service Agency, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and Risk Management Agency. The department says the system will reduce duplicated paperwork, retire outdated technology, improve program delivery, and be completed in 2028.
“Protecting America’s farmland is protecting America itself, and this work gives USDA the visibility and speed needed to safeguard our food supply,” said USDA Chief Information Officer Sam Berry.
The government presents this as modernization: faster services, stronger cybersecurity, reduced fraud, better disaster response, and greater protection of American farmland and the food supply. Some of those goals are understandable. Farmers should not have to enter the same information into a dozen broken government systems. Disaster assistance should not be trapped behind obsolete technology. Modernization is not inherently sinister.
But neither is it irrational to ask questions when enormous amounts of agricultural information are consolidated through a company deeply involved in defense, intelligence, surveillance, and government analytics.
Who controls the data? Who is permitted to access it? How is that access audited?
Can information gathered for one purpose later be used for another?
What happens when one private contractor becomes embedded deeply enough in public infrastructure that removing it becomes nearly impossible?
How are farmers protected from political misuse, commercial exploitation, cybersecurity failures, or policies imposed by people who understand data models far better than they understand soil, weather, livestock, and living ecosystems?
Food is not merely another sector to be optimized.
Agriculture is biological, regional, unpredictable, and rooted in relationships that cannot be fully represented on a dashboard. Technology may assist farmers. Data may make government programs more efficient. But efficiency and resilience are not the same thing, and greater visibility from the top does not automatically create greater security on the ground.
A resilient food system requires more than centralized information.
It requires independent farmers, healthy soil, regional processing facilities, seed diversity, local knowledge, accessible markets, functioning supply chains, and communities that retain some capacity to feed themselves. It requires people who know how to grow something, preserve something, cook something, and recognize nourishment before a corporation packages and markets it back to them.
That is why the spiritual, biological, economic, and political dimensions of food cannot be separated.
The same reductionist worldview that treats the body as a furnace can treat the farm as a data point.
The same culture that reduces nourishment to calories can reduce agriculture to output.
The same system that tells us a calorie is a calorie can tell us that control is merely efficiency and dependence is merely convenience.
I reject both forms of reductionism.
A body is not a furnace to be calculated.
A farm is not a monocrop to be optimized or a data file to be controlled.
Food is not merely fuel, inventory, content, or data.
It is soil transformed by sunlight. It is water, labor, death, digestion, memory, culture, and life passing into life. To control food is to touch the most intimate point of contact between the individual body, the community, and the living world.
So, the question is no longer only whether we can eat without forgetting.
It is whether we can remember soon enough to reclaim some agency over what feeds us.
What Christianity Absorbed, Built, and Left Behind
Listen as you read here!
People say this all the time.
That the West got its ideas about pluralism, tolerance, and liberty from Christianity. That without it, there would be no concept of human dignity, no rights, no freedom in the modern sense. And that if those things feel unstable now, the solution is simple: return to the source.
The claim that pluralism, tolerance, and liberty are direct inheritances of Christianity is not just oversimplified. It reverses the historical pattern.
In Part 1, I pushed back on the idea that Christianity “founded the West” in any clean or singular sense, or that returning to it offers an obvious path forward. In Part 2, I stepped back and looked at something more fundamental: the fragility of freedom itself. Not as an abstract ideal, but as a social order that depends on limits, restraint, and a population capable of sustaining it. More importantly, I looked at how quickly that order begins to break down when those conditions are no longer present.
Across the responses to both pieces, there was a shared sense that something is not working. Not just politically, not just culturally, but at a deeper level that is harder to name.
One way to make sense of that is to stop looking for a single cause and start looking at how the whole inheritance fits together.
Western civilization did not develop along one track. It emerged through multiple layers operating at the same time. At a minimum, those layers include institutions, culture, and psychology.
Institutions include law, political authority, and the distribution of power. Culture includes religion, tradition, identity, and shared meaning. Psychology includes the moral instincts people use to interpret the world: instincts tied to fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, harm, belonging, and threat.
For long stretches of time, those layers reinforced one another. Institutions reflected shared values. Cultural traditions gave meaning to authority. Moral instincts were channeled through forms of life that provided both order and legitimacy.
But that fit was never permanent.
When those layers begin to pull apart, the result is not merely disagreement. It is instability.
That is the backdrop for this final piece.
The goal here is not to argue that Christianity caused the West, or that it deserves credit for everything people now associate with Western civilization. It is also not to reduce Christianity to a purely destructive force. Both approaches distort the picture in different ways.
The same problem appears in the phrase “Judeo-Christian values.” This often creates the impression of a smooth and unified inheritance, when the actual history is far more fractured. Judaism and Christianity are related, but they are not interchangeable. Christianity did not simply preserve Jewish covenantal thought. It reinterpreted it, universalized it, and claimed fulfillment over it. A tradition rooted in a particular people, law, land, and covenant was recast as a universal message for all mankind.
This repositioning changed the role of religion entirely. It no longer sits alongside other domains. It began to judge them.
It loosened religion from peoplehood and place. It made belief itself the primary marker of belonging. And once belief becomes the primary boundary, disagreement takes on a different moral weight.
Today’s article will address the harder question:
What did Christianity reorganize, what did it scale, and what did it leave unstable?
Because Christianity’s real inheritance was not simply compassion, liberty, or dignity. It reshaped how belief, authority, identity, and moral obligation functioned at a civilizational level. It expanded moral language in ways that could operate across large populations, but it also introduced sharper boundaries between true and false belief, salvation and error, belonging and exclusion.
That combination, expansion on one side and constraint on the other, is where the inheritance becomes complicated.
McClees, Helen and Christine Alexander. 1933. The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans: As Illustrated in the Classical Collections, 5th ed. pp. 131, 133, fig. 159, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
SECTION I: THE GOOD What Christianity Absorbed and Reorganized
Before getting into what Christianity actually contributed, it’s worth being clear about what is usually attributed to it.
A moral framework. Stable family structures. The unification of fragmented tribal societies into something resembling a shared civilization. A sense of cohesion strong enough to hold large populations together.
Those developments did happen. The question is where they came from…
Because none of those things begin with Christianity. They depend on something older: stability across generations, shared practices, inherited obligations, and a way of life that binds people before it explains itself.
That is what tradition is.
The word itself comes from the Latin traditio: a handing over, a passing down, something delivered across generations. But that definition only gets you so far. Tradition is not just a set of ideas preserved in texts or doctrines. It is lived. It shows up in habits, rituals, inherited gestures, seasonal rhythms, family patterns, and the quiet repetition of things people do not always stop to explain but continue to do anyway.
It exists in the structure of daily life.
You see it most clearly in how societies deal with death.
Long before Christianity became dominant in Europe, burial practices already reflected a deep sense of connection between the living and the dead. In the Stone Age, communities used mass graves in caves or pits. Later, megalithic cultures constructed communal tombs that anchored memory to specific places. Indo-European groups developed barrows and cremation practices that changed over time while preserving the same underlying logic.
The dead were not discarded. They were placed, remembered, and integrated into the ongoing life of the community.
Tradition, in that sense, is not something invented at a particular moment. It is something carried forward, shaped and reshaped over time without losing its original intention.
Christianity enters into that world rather than creating it from scratch.
What changes is not the existence of tradition, but its scale and its organizing thought.
Earlier religious life was largely tied to local identity: tribe, land, household, ancestry, city, and people. Christianity expands beyond that. It speaks in universal terms and builds a shared symbolic order that can operate across regions and populations that do not share the same lineage, gods, rituals, or customs.
That increases the reach of the moral imagination.
Concern no longer stops at the boundary of immediate belonging. It extends outward, attaching value to individuals beyond their role within a specific family, tribe, or city. Over time, that broader vision feeds into developments people now associate with the Western inheritance: ideas about dignity, education, care for the poor, moral responsibility, and obligation toward those outside one’s immediate circle.
But this is typically where the story gets oversimplified.
Those impulses did not originate with Christianity. Traditions within the Greco-Roman world had already developed forms of civic responsibility, philanthropy, patronage, public works, and mutual obligation. Grain distributions, civic benefaction, philosophical ethics, and local forms of duty were not Christian inventions.
But even the Greco-Roman world was not self-contained. It had already absorbed influences from older and neighboring civilizations (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Phoenician) through trade, conquest, and cultural exchange. As scholars like Martin L. West and Walter Burkert have shown, Greek thought itself was shaped in part by these eastern traditions.
The ancient world was not morally empty before the church arrived. It was already layered, interconnected, and carrying forward inherited forms of order, obligation, and meaning.
You can see this clearly in Stoic thought. Christianity is often treated as if it introduced universal human concern into a cruel and indifferent ancient world. Stoicism already spoke in universal terms. It could describe human beings as participants in a shared moral order and extend concern beyond tribe, city, or immediate kinship.
But the structure was different.
The bronze Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, Capitoline Hill, Rome.
Runar Thorsteinsson’s comparison of Roman Christianity and Roman Stoicism helps clarify the distinction. Stoicism could speak of universal humanity without making moral belonging depend on conversion to a saving truth. Early Christianity, by contrast, carried a universal message while also drawing a sharper boundary around religious adherence. Its moral vision expanded outward, but it did so through a division between those inside and outside the saving order.
Christianity did not invent universal concern but it did reorganize it.
It took older moral instincts, philosophical ideas, Jewish inheritance, Roman scale, and local traditions, then bound them into a universal religious narrative. It gave those instincts a broader scope, a more unified story, and a more durable institutional form.
But expansion alone does not explain why a civilization holds together.
A social order lasts when it fits the way people already experience the world.
People do not move through life as detached rational observers. They respond through instinct: loyalty and betrayal, fairness and injustice, authority and rebellion, purity and contamination, belonging and threat. These instincts do not operate on their own. They cluster.
In more traditional societies, moral intuitions tend to reinforce one another. Care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred operate together rather than pulling apart. Even when people disagree, they often draw from the same underlying moral vocabulary when interpreting what is happening around them.
That shared moral vocabulary gives a society stability.
Christianity operated at that level.
It did not simply present moral rules. It gave instinct narrative form and placed it inside a larger story about meaning, suffering, hierarchy, obligation, sin, redemption, and ultimate reality. It offered a way of interpreting the world itself.
For people living in unstable conditions, where political authority could be inconsistent and survival uncertain, that kind of story organized experience. It offered coherence in a world that might otherwise feel random. It placed individuals inside a larger order and gave meaning to suffering, duty, death, and loss.
Once that fit took hold between cultural meaning, institutional power, and moral instinct, it became difficult to dislodge.
At the same time, Christianity did not remain completely closed off to innovative thought. Even within a religious order that emphasized authority and inherited truth, there were moments where that inheritance was tested from within.
Peter Abelard represents one of those moments.
His importance lies less in the drama of his life and more in the method he applied to truth itself. The intellectual world he entered was structured around inherited authority. Figures like Augustine were treated as settled voices, and the role of the student was often to understand, organize, and transmit what had already been established.
Peter Abelard with Book Giclee
Reasoning had a place, but it operated within limits. It was expected to clarify, not destabilize.
Abelard did not reject the tradition from the outside. He worked within it and exposed its internal tensions. In Sic et Non, he placed authoritative statements side by side in a way that made contradiction difficult to ignore.
If these sources were meant to provide certainty, why did they diverge so sharply?
If truth had already been handed down in a unified form, why did it fracture under comparison?
He treated those questions as a starting point rather than a threat to avoid.
“For it is from doubt that we arrive at questioning, and in questioning we arrive at truth.”
That quote represents the change in intellectual posture.
Instead of beginning with certainty and using reason to defend it, Abelard begins with tension and uses reason to work through it. Authority alone no longer settles the issue. Claims must be examined, language clarified, and assumptions tested.
Once questioning becomes legitimate, authority can no longer rely on transmission alone. It now has to also persuade.
Abelard pushed beyond accepted limits. He applied reason to doctrines often treated as beyond rational explanation and placed greater emphasis on intention in moral evaluation. In doing so, he opened space for a more nuanced understanding of ethics, one not entirely bound to inherited categories.
The response to him was what you would expect from institutional power.
He was condemned. His works were burned. He was brought before councils that were less interested in exploring his arguments and more so in containing their implications. The reaction showed what was at stake. A religious order grounded in authority does not easily absorb a method that legitimizes doubt.
And yet the method persisted.
Even when his specific conclusions were rejected, the habit of inquiry he modeled proved difficult to suppress. The practice of setting opposing views side by side and working through contradiction became central to scholasticism. The intellectual tradition that later shaped medieval universities carried forward elements of an approach once treated as dangerous.
Abelard does not stand alone as the cause of a broader intellectual reopening. The recovery of classical texts, the reintroduction of Aristotle, contact with Islamic and Jewish scholarship, and the growth of educational institutions all played a role.
What his story represents is the shift in attitude.
Inherited knowledge no longer functions as a sealed inheritance. It became something that can be examined, refined, and, within limits, challenged.
Of course, those constraints never fully disappeared.
Abelard was allowed to question, but not indefinitely. He was permitted to reason, but not without consequence. The same religious culture that made his work possible also defined where it had to stop.
That tension between authority and inquiry did not remain confined to intellectual life. It also carried forward into the institutions that developed over time.
A university lecture (an illustration from the second half of the 14th century).
The medieval university is one of the clearest places to see this pattern at work. Often treated as a distinctly Christian achievement, it grew out of a much broader mix of influences.
In Spain, Baghdad, and Cairo, Islamic schools, libraries, and observatories held resources far beyond anything available in much of Europe at the time. Arab, Jewish, and Christian scholars shared intellectual interests through expanding trade networks and translation movements. After the Christian capture of Toledo in 1085, that city became one of the key places where these worlds met, allowing texts to move across languages, traditions, and religious boundaries.
The Western reopening of inquiry did not happen because Europe simply looked inward and rediscovered itself.
It happened because knowledge traveled.
Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle, translated into Latin, became essential sources for thirteenth-century Christian intellectuals, including Thomas Aquinas. That alone should complicate any idea that Christian scholarship developed in isolation. The university absorbed, translated, debated, and reorganized knowledge that had already passed through Greek, Arabic, Jewish, and Latin traditions.
Islamic Astronomers #1 is a photograph by Science Source
Even the structure of medieval universities reflects that broader inheritance. They developed their own corporate identities, governed collectively by masters, with distinct curricula and examination systems. By the late thirteenth century, Master of Arts could vastly outnumber Master of Theology. Historian Charles Freeman notes one example where 120 teachers of the arts were listed against only 15 Masters of Theology. That imbalance tells you what mattered most. The curriculum leaned heavily on classical texts, not purely Christian foundations.
Christian Europe helped institutionalize learning, but the material being organized was older, broader, and more cosmopolitan than the church-centered story suggests. The university becomes another example of Christianity’s larger pattern: it absorbed existing goods, gave them institutional form, and placed them inside its own theological horizon.
But the results did not move in one direction.
The same religious vision that could support care and dignity could also justify hierarchy and control. Because the tradition depended on scriptural interpretation, and interpretation depended on authority, very different conclusions could emerge from the same source material.
That instability is not only a matter of later interpretation. It is already present in the texts themselves.
The Gospels do not present a single, unified account. They offer overlapping portraits that do not fully align.
In Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Mark, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” while in Gospel of John, he concludes, “It is finished.” The tone shifts from abandonment to completion.
The timeline shifts as well, with the Synoptic Gospels placing the final meal at Passover, while John places the crucifixion before it begins.
Even the ethical posture is not entirely consistent: in Matthew, Jesus teaches “turn the other cheek,” while in Luke, he tells his followers, “Let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.”
Taken together, these are not minor discrepancies. They open space for fundamentally different readings of what the tradition demands.
Christianity persists not as a fixed form, but as a tradition capable of producing multiple, competing forms while still claiming continuity.
This becomes especially clear in debates over slavery.
Christians were involved in abolition movements, and that history is part of the record. The language of universal moral equality played a real role in mobilizing opposition to slavery and reshaping moral expectations.
But that is not the whole story.
The same texts were also used to defend slavery, reinforce it, and argue that existing social orders were divinely sanctioned.
That contradiction is not incidental. It reveals something important about the Christian inheritance itself.
A religious order that combines universal moral language with authoritative texts creates the conditions for both expansion and constraint. It can push moral concern outward, but it can also bind that concern within approved categories. The outcome depends on who interprets the texts, which authorities prevail, and what social pressures shape the reading.
Critics of abolitionist movements, including Thomas Carlyle, argued that what they saw as abstract humanitarian concern could override more immediate obligations or practical realities. A contemporary political cartoon captured this dynamic under the phrase “telescopic philanthropy”—a tendency to focus moral concern at a distance while neglecting what is closer at hand.
The point I’m trying to make here is not that concern beyond one’s own group is inherently false or wrong.
The point is that moral expansion creates distance.
The farther a concern stretches, the easier it becomes to neglect concrete obligations close at hand: family, neighbors, local order, inherited duties, and the people one is actually responsible for. Abstract compassion can become morally flattering precisely because it asks less of the person expressing it.
Whether one agrees with those criticisms or not, they point to something very real.
A moral order that expands obligation beyond local belonging gains reach, but it also risks losing proportion. It can elevate the stranger while forgetting the neighbor. It can speak beautifully about mankind while failing the people right in front of it.
Christianity extended moral concern beyond tribe and built institutions that carried that vision forward. But it also introduced pressures around authority, interpretation, exclusion, and the limits of acceptable thought.
The good is real, but…so is the tension inside it.
Christianity’s inheritance was not simply compassion, dignity, or education. It was a moral architecture: universal in scope, institutional in form, inward in psychology, and unstable once detached from the cultural world that had once held it together.
That brings us to our next inquiry.
Not just what Christianity gave the West, but what kind of order made those outcomes possible.
SECTION II — THE BAD
Truth, Authority, and the Limits of Inquiry
At this point, the issue is not simply what happened when Christianity moved from the margins to power. I’ve explored that elsewhere: the suppression of rival systems, the narrowing of acceptable thought, and the long habit of treating competing worldviews not as alternatives to debate, but as errors to contain.
The deeper question here is more structural.
What kind of religious order produces those outcomes in the first place?
Because the shift was a reorganization of how truth operated, how disagreement was handled, and how legitimacy was defined.
Earlier Greco-Roman religious and philosophical life was not tolerant in the modern sense, but it was more comfortable with multiplicity. Rival schools, local cults, household gods, civic rituals, and philosophical traditions could coexist without requiring one totalizing creed to absorb or eliminate the rest. That did not make the ancient world peaceful or morally pure. It did mean that truth was not always treated as one fragile object that had to be protected from every rival.
The Abrahamic worldview introduced something different, often called the “Mosaic distinction.”
God giving the Tablets of the Law to Moses, from a manuscript attributed to Chrétien Legouais, 1325 CE. Image source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque municipal de Rouen
It drew a sharper line between true and false in a way that changed the stakes of disagreement. Belief was no longer simply one option among many. It became a dividing line. Once that line was drawn, alternative ways of seeing the world did not remain neutral. They became errors, and error began to carry drastic consequences beyond private belief.
If truth is singular and binding, then the religious order has to decide what to do with everything outside of it. Some ideas are absorbed. Some are tolerated for a time. Others are pushed out entirely. But none of them sit comfortably alongside it anymore. They exist in tension with the claim that one truth must govern above all others.
As we previously discussed, Christianity is often credited with preserving learning and building universities, and that claim is not false. Medieval universities became important institutions for intellectual training, debate, law, theology, medicine, and philosophy. They helped organize knowledge and gave scholastic inquiry a durable form.
But that achievement has to be kept in proportion.
The medieval university was an achievement, but it was not a recovery of classical freedom. It was classical inheritance under theological supervision.
Ancient philosophy could be studied, but it had to be reconciled with Christian doctrine. Aristotle could return, but not as Aristotle alone. He had to be interpreted through Christian categories, corrected where necessary, and placed beneath revealed truth. Reason was permitted, even sharpened, but it was not sovereign.
The medieval university did not represent inquiry on open ground. It represented inquiry inside boundaries. Reason could clarify doctrine, defend doctrine, organize doctrine, and reconcile contradictions within inherited authorities. But when reason pressed too far against the architecture of belief, the limits became quite visible.
That does not make medieval learning worthless. It makes it conditional.
And that conditionality is the point.
Christian Europe did not simply preserve the classical world. It received it, edited it, baptized it, and constrained it. What could be made useful to the Christian order survived more easily. What threatened that order did not.
This is the kind of intellectual narrowing later critics would recognize in Christianity’s relationship to philosophy. Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology is not aimed at Christianity alone, but it helps name the pattern: open-ended questioning becomes absorbed into a prior explanatory order. Instead of wonder remaining primary, inquiry is routed through established claims about creation, causality, divine order, sin, and salvation.
The question is no longer allowed to remain fully open.
It has to be answered inside the architecture of doctrine.
Once orthodoxy is established it operates within boundaries that have already been set, and stepping outside those boundaries starts to carry not just intellectual consequences, but social ones. Access to authority, education, and influence becomes tied, at least in part, to alignment.
At that point, belief is no longer just something people hold. It becomes something that moves outward, seeking to correct and expand.
SECTION III: THE UGLY
Universalism, Power, and the Moral Afterlife
By the time you reach the modern West, the question is no longer whether Christianity shaped it. That much is obvious. The deeper issue is what, exactly, it left behind, and what happens when the conditions that once sustained that inheritance begin to unravel.
Christianity did not simply introduce a set of beliefs and then fade as those beliefs weakened. It reorganized moral life at a level that persists long after doctrine loses its authority. It changed how individuals understood themselves, how they related to others, where moral responsibility resided, and how truth was expected to move through the world.
The ugly side of the Christian inheritance is not merely universalism. It is universalism with a missionary engine.
Christianity does not simply say, “This is true.” It says truth must be spread. Error must be corrected. The world must be brought into submission to the saving order. That structure changes the meaning of difference. A rival worldview is not merely foreign, local, or ancestral. It becomes spiritually demonic.
And once a difference becomes an error, correction can be justified as mercy.
The religious world Christianity emerges from was already in tension with the surrounding Greek and Roman order. Second Temple Judaism didn’t simply blend into Hellenistic life. Again and again, it resisted it—politically, culturally, religiously.
D. H. Lawrence saw this tendency clearly. In Apocalypse, he describes a fear-driven impulse within Christianity—a refusal to leave other ways of understanding the world intact. Not just disagreement, but the drive to overcome, absorb, or eliminate what stands outside the truth.
That instinct is already embedded in the apocalyptic world Christianity emerges from. Second Temple Judaism carries expectations of final judgment, cosmic conflict, and the ultimate victory of a single, rightful order-the coming of the Moshiach/Messiah.) Christianity inherits that framework and gives it a wider reach.
That is where Christianity’s relationship to Rome becomes essential. Christian universalism did not spread on its own. It moved through the late imperial Roman systems: roads, cities, law, administration, literacy, political centralization, and habits of governance already trained toward scale. The faith did not merely conquer Rome. It also inherited Rome’s machinery.
Rome gave Christianity infrastructure. Christianity gave Rome a sacred moral horizon. Together, they helped produce a form of power that could move across peoples, lands, languages, and customs while claiming to operate in the name of truth rather than mere domination.
This is also why Christianity receives too much credit for goods it did not invent.
One reason it’s treated as the source of Western morality is that it became dominant enough to absorb older goods and narrate them backward as Christian achievements. Care for the poor, philosophical inquiry, civic duty, moral discipline, education, and concern for the common good did not appear out of nowhere when Christianity entered history. Many of these were already present in Greek, Roman, Jewish, and local European worlds. Christianity reorganized them inside its own story.
That reorganization gave them reach.
But it also gave them a new master narrative.
Older traditions were often embedded in particular peoples, places, households, ancestors, cities, gods, calendars, and sacred landscapes. Religion was not just a private belief system. It was woven into the life of a people. Christianity altered that relationship by making belief portable. It could cross borders, override local cults, and create a community defined less by blood, land, or inherited custom than by shared confession.
That is one of the most consequential shifts in Western history.
Christianity weakened the older link between people, place, ancestors, and gods. It did not erase those attachments overnight, and in practice it often absorbed local festivals, sacred sites, and folk customs. But the deeper logic changed. The highest belonging was no longer rooted primarily in the local or ancestral. It was relocated into a universal religious identity.
Conversion, then, was not merely persuasion. It was the remaking of belonging.
A people could be separated from their gods, their rituals, their inherited calendar, their sacred places, and their ancestral memory, then folded into a new universal story that claimed to redeem them while also replacing the world that formed them.
Not every conversion was violent. That would be too simple. Some conversions were gradual, political, strategic, sincere, blended, or partial. But once that universal truth claim became tied to salvation, rival traditions do not remain equal neighbors. They become obstacles to be overcome, errors to be corrected, or remnants to be absorbed.
The First Crusade: Pope Urban II and Jerusalem vs. Diplomatic Unification
The crusades make this structure visible in its most explicit and militarized form.
They were not only political wars. They were religious wars shaped by sacred geography, penitential promise, and the belief that violence could be folded into a redemptive order.
The Crusades did not simply mobilize Europe—they redirected it toward Jerusalem, a sacred center that was not its own.
That does not mean every participant had the same motive, and it does not mean politics, land, wealth, status, and military ambition were irrelevant. Of course they mattered. But the crusading imagination reveals something specific: once warfare is placed inside a sacred story, conquest can be interpreted as obedience, purification, defense, or salvation.
That is the danger of missionary structure joined to power.
It sanctifies expansion.
And this is not confined to medieval history. The same basic pattern can reappear whenever politics inherits religious moral intensity. The opponent is no longer merely wrong about policy. He becomes a threat to truth, justice, salvation, progress, safety, democracy, equality, or whatever sacred term now carries the old theological weight.
At that point, disagreement becomes harder to contain.
The modern West inherited this moral intensity even as explicit Christian authority declined. Most people inherited a world in which Christianity had already begun to lose its grip, but nothing fully replaced it. The rituals became optional. The authority fractured. Yet many of the underlying assumptions remained intact.
What had once been explicitly theological was gradually translated into secular terms.
At the center of that structure is a form of universalism Christianity helped entrench: the idea that all people stand beneath one moral order, that identity is secondary to a broader human category, and that truth applies universally rather than locally. That assumption did not disappear with religious decline. It migrated.
Liberalism, in many of its modern forms, carries that template forward: the individual abstracted from place, lineage, inherited duty, and thick communal belonging, then positioned inside a universal framework of rights, equality, and moral expectation.
The language changes. The structure does not.
The West moved from Christian universalism to liberal universalism without seriously interrogating the universalism itself. It replaced theological justification with philosophical or political justification, but it retained the assumption that the highest moral order transcends particular identities rather than emerging from them.
And what carries forward is not only universal morality, but missionary mentality.
Salvation becomes progress. Sin becomes injustice. Heresy becomes hate. Evangelism becomes activism. The world must still be corrected. The morally backward must still be brought into line.
And the irony is hard to miss. The same people who pride themselves on rejecting religious dogma often reproduce its structure almost perfectly—moral certainty, heresy-hunting, and the impulse to correct and convert, just without calling it religion.
You can see this most clearly in the modern left, especially in its activist and radical edges. What presents itself as political theory often behaves like secularized salvation mythology. The infrastructure is unchanged: the world is broken and the masses need liberation. God is removed, but everything else remains. The heretics still need correction. Sin becomes hierarchy. Salvation becomes self-rule. The missionary doesn’t disappear—he just changes form.
It still sorts people into the righteous and the condemned. It still creates moral taboos. It still treats disagreement as contamination. It still imagines that the world can be redeemed if only the right moral order is imposed—with enough force, shame, education, policy, or institutional pressure.
That is not the absence of Christianity.
It is part of its afterlife.
Later European expansion, and even modern geopolitical projects, often operate within the same structure—intervention framed as liberation, reform, or progress.
Whenever universal moral claims are aligned with power and tied to the belief that truth must spread, action begins to feel necessary rather than optional.
To understand why it persists, and why it adapts so easily across different historical contexts, you have to look at what is happening at a deeper level. Not just in institutions or empires, but within the individual.
Because the most enduring change Christianity introduces is not only institutional.
It is psychological. It altered where morality is located.
In earlier classical traditions, especially in Aristotle, the moral life is oriented outward. The Greek conception of eudaimonia assumes that human beings can develop toward excellence. Flourishing is cultivated through practice, discipline, rational activity, and participation in the world. Character is formed through what one does, and the moral life is outward, embodied, and lived over time within a shared civic and social context.
Christianity, especially through Augustine of Hippo, redirects that focus inward.
The problem is no longer simply what a person does, but what a person is. Human nature itself becomes suspect, marked from the beginning. The doctrine of original sin reframes the individual not as someone developing toward excellence, but as someone starting already compromised. This is not just about isolated wrongdoing. It is about a baseline disorder built into human existence, transmitted across generations, shaping inclination before any conscious choice is made.
From that premise, morality reorganizes itself accordingly. If the problem lies within, then moral evaluation cannot remain limited to outward behavior. It extends inward, into thought, desire, intention, and impulse—the parts of life no one else sees but are still treated as morally significant.
Fra Angelico, The Conversion of St. Augustine (c. 1430−1435)
This becomes structured into daily practice. Monastic traditions classify internal states (temptation, pride, doubt, desire) as if they were items that could be named, tracked, and corrected. Authority expands beyond regulating behavior into defining what counts as acceptable thought, shaping not just action but the boundaries of the inner life itself.
Once it relocates inward, the primary site of regulation is no longer only the community. It is the individual mind, where conscience, guilt, confession, fear, and self-regulation operate continuously, often without any visible external enforcement.
You can see the implications of this in the conflict between Augustine and Pelagius. Pelagius emphasizes human capacity: the ability to choose, improve, and take responsibility for moral development. Augustine rejects that position, insisting on dependence—on God’s grace, on divine intervention, on something beyond human effort.
This is not only a theological disagreement.
It is also a question about agency.
If the individual cannot fully rely on their own capacity to move toward the good, then moral development becomes entangled with God’s authority. Responsibility does not disappear, but it no longer stands on its own. It becomes mediated, conditioned, and in some cases limited, as the individual is situated within a framework that places ultimate transformation outside of purely human reach.
Over time, that tension begins to shape intellectual life as well. Historians like Charles Freeman do not argue that inquiry simply disappeared, but that the conditions surrounding it changed. When belief becomes tied to salvation, and when error carries not only intellectual but spiritual consequences, curiosity itself begins to look different. Questions are no longer neutral exercises. They take on moral weight, and in certain contexts, they begin to carry risk.
Writers like Thomas Paine noticed this and pushed directly against the idea that truth can rest on inherited authority. In The Age of Reason, Paine argues that revelation, once it passes through human hands, can no longer function as unquestionable truth. What begins as divine claim becomes human interpretation, and therefore something that must be examined rather than simply accepted. That move cuts directly against the structure that treats questioning as risk. It reopens the possibility that belief itself should be subject to the same scrutiny as anything else.
Mark A. Noll describes a similar pattern in later Christian intellectual culture: a tendency to preserve belief rather than extend it. Questioning is not always welcomed as curiosity. It can be interpreted as disloyalty, a sign that alignment is weakening rather than deepening. The safest position, in that environment, becomes one of conformity rather than exploration.
The obedient mind is the secure mind.
This is not new. It is already visible earlier in the tradition. The same system that could produce figures like Abelard (where questioning began to reopen) also produces the conditions Noll is describing, where belief becomes something to preserve rather than extend.
The instinct to monitor thought, to moralize disagreement, to treat deviation as more than error—those habits do not emerge in a vacuum. They develop within specific historical conditions, and they persist even as the surrounding language changes.
This is why the internal reorganization matters.
It is not only about doctrine.
It is about how individuals learn to relate to themselves.
If Augustine relocates morality inward, Protestantism amplifies and personalizes that shift. The individual is placed in more direct relation to truth, expected to read, interpret, examine, and align himself without the same mediating structures that once guided that process. Authority does not vanish. It becomes more diffuse and more demanding.
The church hierarchy may weaken in some places, but new pressures emerge through scripture, sermon, household discipline, community surveillance, literacy, and conscience. The individual is made more responsible before God, but also more exposed.
The burden of interpretation moves further into the self.
Over time, that inward structure detaches from the communal and cultural worlds that once gave it shape. What remains is a society of individuals expected to interpret, justify, and regulate themselves inside a universal moral order, but without a shared culture capable of holding that process together.
That misalignment becomes visible in how people interpret conflict, identity, history, and political life.
In modern America, this can still be seen in forms of biblical literalism, dispensationalism, and end-times prophecy that shape how many Christians understand Israel, war, nationhood, and world events. These beliefs do not remain private. They influence political imagination. They affect how people interpret history, alliances, enemies, and what they believe is inevitable or divinely sanctioned.
In this context, belief stops being just belief. It starts shaping how everything else is seen.
That is the same mechanism operating in another key. The pattern that once defined orthodoxy and constrained variation does not disappear. It adapts as the cultural environment shifts. The language evolves, but the underlying habit remains… truth is singular, error is dangerous, and those outside the moral order must be corrected, converted, contained, or cast out.
What this reveals is not a simple story of progress or decline.
Christianity did not leave behind a stable moral foundation that the West either followed or abandoned. It left behind a set of interacting pressures: universalism and particular identity, internalized morality and external authority, individual responsibility and collective order, compassion and conquest, salvation and exclusion.
For a time, those pressures could be held in relative balance, but this fit no longer holds.
The institutions remain, but they no longer command the same trust. The moral instincts remain, but they are no longer guided by a shared tradition. The universal language remains, but it floats above increasingly fractured peoples, places, and loyalties.
Conflict becomes more moralized. Disagreement becomes harder to contain.
This is why the modern West feels both thin and volatile.
Thin, because inherited forms of continuity have weakened.
Volatile, because the moral pressure embedded in the inheritance remains, now operating without the older structures that once gave it proportion.
That is the condition the modern West has inherited.
CONCLUSION: Why the West Still Cannot Escape the Problem
The Christian inheritance of the West cannot be reduced to either gratitude or resentment.
It gave moral concern, meaning to suffering, durable institutions, and the preservation and transmission of knowledge, even as that knowledge was filtered through doctrine. It created a shared moral vocabulary capable of binding large populations together.
But it also changed the terms of belonging.
It loosened religion from peoplehood, place, ancestry, and local custom. It made belief portable. It turned truth into something singular and binding, making disagreement morally charged. Once rival traditions became errors rather than neighbors, the pressure to absorb, correct, or suppress them followed naturally.
The West did not abandon Christianity so much as carry its habits forward. The missionary impulse remained. The abstract individual remained. The suspicion of rooted identity remained. Social Justice became their new end times.
That is why a return to Christianity does not solve the problem. It would not restore a stable foundation but reassert one layer of the inheritance while leaving its tensions unresolved.
Secular liberalism does not solve it either. It often preserves the universalism while stripping away the cultural limits that once gave it proportion, asking people to live as abstract individuals inside a moral framework detached from place, memory, and inherited obligation.
What remains is not a coherent worldview, but a contradictory one.
From the beginning, the inheritance carried competing impulses. Early Christianity emerged from an apocalyptic environment while also developing moral and institutional frameworks for life within the world. Over time, those tensions were not resolved but reworked and emphasized in different ways.
Within Protestantism alone, some strands treated the world as something to be ordered and reformed, energizing movements like abolition, while others emphasized its corruption and eventual end, orienting life toward endurance and escape. The divergence is not a break from the tradition, but a difference in emphasis within it.
The result is a system that can point in opposite directions while still claiming the same foundation.
This is not a foundation a civilization can stand on.
A civilization needs moral scale, but also proportion. Compassion, but not so abstract that it forgets its own people. Rights, but not detached from duty. Inquiry, but not subordinated to sacred certainty. Space for disagreement, but enough shared identity to keep it from becoming civilizational warfare.
Above all, it needs rooted obligations.
A civilization cannot survive on abstract principles alone. It needs loyalty, shared memory, boundaries, place, and a people capable of recognizing what is theirs to preserve.
Because removing structure does not remove power. It removes the forms that make power visible and accountable. And when that happens, power does not disappear. It shifts—into forms that are harder to see and harder to resist.
We are not standing outside this inheritance.
We are still working within it.
And the task is not to romanticize Christianity, completely demonize it, or pretend we have escaped it, but to understand what it absorbed, what it built, what it destabilized, and what it left behind clearly enough to stop repeating its most destructive patterns.
Atkinson, Kenneth. “Judean Piracy, Judea and Parthia, and the Roman Annexation of Judea: The Evidence of Pompeius Trogus.” Electrum 29 (2022): 127–145. https://doi.org/10.4467/20800909EL.22.009.15779
Augustine. Confessions.
Augustine. The City of God.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000
Burkert, Walter. The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Doner, Colonel V. “Cognitive Dissonance of Political Activists, Or Whatever Happened to the Religious Right?” Chalcedon, July 1, 1999.
Freeman, Charles. The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. London: Heinemann, 2002.
Freeman, Charles. The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment. London: Head of Zeus, 2023.
Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse. 1931.
Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration. 1689.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700. London: Allen Lane, 2003.
Hey hey, welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays. Today’s episode is where we dig into philosophy, culture, history, and the ideas that have shaped the world we’re living in—everything from classical texts to the American founding documents that are still very much relevant to how we should think about freedom today.
Listen here:
There’s a growing sense that something isn’t working.
You see it in the fragmentation of identity, the erosion of shared norms, and the breakdown of trust across institutions.
You don’t have to look very hard to notice it.
People don’t trust elections, medicine, or the media—sometimes all at once, and often for completely different reasons.
Dating is “freer” than it’s ever been, and yet it feels more unstable, more transactional, and more confusing than most people expected.
Corporations speak like moral authorities, issuing statements about justice and truth, while operating through incentives that have nothing to do with either.
Everything is still functioning. But less of it feels legitimate.
In my last piece, I traced one part of this problem back to a common assumption, that Christianity built the foundations of the West. But when you actually follow the development of those ideas, much of what we associate with Western thought—natural law, reason, and the structure of political life—has deeper roots in the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition.
That matters, because the frameworks we inherit shape what we think freedom is, and what we expect it to do.
This piece is a continuation of that question. Not only about where those ideas came from, but about what they require to hold together.
Because a free society doesn’t sustain itself on freedom alone. It depends on discipline, restraint, and a shared understanding of limits—conditions that the system itself cannot produce.
And when those begin to erode, the system doesn’t just break. It follows a pattern that’s been observed for a very long time.
Jefferson intentionally designed the Virginia Capitol in Richmond directly after the Roman temple Maison Carrée~16 CE
I. The Fear Beneath the Founding
This isn’t a new problem.
The relationship between freedom and instability shows up wherever societies try to govern themselves.
The American founding emerged out of that concern. The people designing the system weren’t just thinking about how to create liberty, they were trying to understand why it collapses.
The colonists weren’t casually referencing Rome. English translations of Vertot’s Revolutions that Happened in the Government of the Roman Republic (1720) were in almost every library, private or institutional, in British North America. They studied how free societies decay, how power shifts from shared trust into something self-serving, and how internal corruption (not just external threat) brings systems down.
They believed they were watching it happen in real time.
What they took from antiquity was not blind optimism about freedom, but caution.
And this wasn’t limited to classical history. As Bernard Bailyn observed, the colonists were immersed in dense and serious political literature, shaped by philosophy, and sustained reflection on the problem of power.
Part of what they were working with was an older line of thought running through Greek and Roman philosophy.
The idea that human life is not directionless. That there are patterns to how people live, and that some ways of living lead to stability and flourishing, while others lead to breakdown.
You can already see the foundation of this in Aristotle. He didn’t use the term “natural law,” but the structure is there. Human beings have a nature, and flourishing comes from living in alignment with it—not whatever we happen to want in the moment, but a way of life shaped by discipline, balance, and the cultivation of virtue over time.
The Stoics make this more explicit. They describe the world as ordered by reason—logos—and argue that human beings can come to understand that order.
From that perspective, moral truth isn’t something we invent. It’s something we discover. And law, at its best, should reflect that underlying structure rather than contradict it.
By the time you get to Rome, this idea is articulated more directly. Cicero describes a true law grounded in right reason and in agreement with nature—something universal, not dependent on custom or preference, but rooted in reality itself.
These ideas don’t disappear. They are carried forward and developed.
Christian thinkers later absorb and expand them, especially through Thomas Aquinas, who integrates Greek philosophy and Roman legal thought into a more explicit framework of natural law. And that influence is real. It’s part of the Western story whether we like it or not.
But that’s not the point of this piece.
What matters here is that by the time you reach the early modern period, this idea of a structured moral order—something that places limits on behavior and grounds freedom in discipline—is already well established.
You can see that continuity clearly in how the Founders and colonists read earlier political thought. Returning to those earlier sources, Plato describes how political systems degrade over time, arguing that excessive and undisciplined freedom can produce disorder, which eventually leads people to accept tyranny in the search for stability. Aristotle traces how democracies collapse when law gives way to persuasion and personality. Polybius maps the recurring cycle through which governments rise and decay.
What he described was called anacyclosis, a recurring cycle of political systems. Governments begin in relatively stable forms, rule by one, by a few, or by many, but over time they degrade. Kingship becomes tyranny. Aristocracy becomes oligarchy. Democracy, when it loses discipline, collapses into what he called ochlocracy, rule by the mob.
This wasn’t abstract to the colonists, like I said, they believed they were watching this pattern unfold in real time. And it shows up just as clearly in the political language of the founding era itself.
As Bailyn explains, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy were each seen as capable of producing human happiness. But left unchecked, each would inevitably collapse into its corrupt form: tyranny, oligarchy, or mob rule.
Writings like Cato’s Letters were widely read in the colonies and helped shape how ordinary people understood government, power, and liberty.
What’s striking when you read Cato more closely is how little confidence they placed in moral restraint alone. It doesn’t describe freedom as unlimited expression or personal autonomy. The idea that belief, fear of God, or good intentions would keep power in check is treated as dangerously naive. Power is not self-regulating, and it is not made safe by the character or beliefs of those who hold it. It has to be exposed, limited, and actively resisted—because even institutions and ideas meant to restrain it, including religion, can be repurposed to justify its expansion.
It describes government more as a trust—one that exists to protect the conditions that make ordinary life possible.
As Cato writes:
“Power is like fire; it warms, it burns, it destroys. It is a dangerous servant and a fearful master”
And more directly:
“What is government, but a trust committed…that everyone may, with the more security, attend upon his own?”
The assumption is clear. Power must be restrained. Freedom depends on it.
But in Cato’s framing, that restraint doesn’t come from structure alone. It depends on constant exposure and resistance. Freedom of speech and a free press aren’t treated as abstract rights, but as active safeguards—tools for uncovering corruption and preventing power from consolidating unchecked. The logic is simple but demanding: power does not correct itself. It expands, protects its own interests, and, if left unchallenged, begins to operate beyond the limits it was given.
The point of understanding the political cycles of revolution wasn’t to say that any one system was uniquely flawed. It was that all systems are vulnerable to the same underlying problem:
Human nature.
Self-interest eventually creeps in. Restraint erodes. Power shifts from a trust into something personal and extractive.
And once that shift happens, the form of government matters less than the character of the people within it. That thread runs directly into the founding.
The American system wasn’t designed as a pure democracy. It was an attempt to stabilize a problem earlier thinkers had already identified.
Rather than choosing a single form of government, the founders built a mixed system, blending elements of rule by one, rule by a few, and rule by many. An executive to act with decisiveness. A Senate to provide deliberation and continuity. A House to represent the people more directly.
This wasn’t accidental.
It reflected an awareness that each form of government carries its own risks, and that concentrating power in any one place tends to accelerate its corruption.
By distributing power across different institutions, the goal was to create tension within the system itself. Ambition would check ambition. Competing interests would slow the consolidation of power.
From my understanding, they weren’t trying to escape the cycle Polybius described. They were trying to manage it.
They weren’t designing a perfect system. They were attempting to design one built to withstand imperfect people.
But even that depended on something it could not guarantee.
In Federalist No. 10, James Madison writes:
“The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.”
He’s not describing a temporary problem. He’s describing a permanent one.
Differences in opinion, interests, wealth, and temperament don’t disappear. They organize. They form groups. And those groups will sometimes pursue aims that are at odds with the rights of others or the stability of the system itself.
Madison’s conclusion is straightforward:
“The causes of faction cannot be removed… relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”
That distinction is crucial. He doesn’t try to eliminate conflict or force unity. He assumes conflict is inevitable and builds a system around that reality.
Instead of requiring perfect discipline from individuals, the structure disperses power, multiplies interests, and forces negotiation. Representation slows decision-making. Scale makes domination more difficult.
Freedom is preserved not by removing conflict, but by structuring it.
“They looked ahead with anxiety, not confidence. Because they believed liberty was collapsing everywhere. New tyrannies had spread like plagues. The world had become, in their words, “a slaughterhouse.” Across the globe: Rulers of the East were almost universally absolute tyrants…Africa was described as scenes of tyranny, barbarism, confusion and violence. France ruled by arbitrary authority. Prussia under absolute government. Sweden and Denmark had “sold their liberties.” Rome burdened by civil and religious control. Germany is a hundred-headed hydra. Poland consumed by chaos. Only Britain (and the colonies) were believed to still hold onto liberty. And even there… barely.” From revolutionary-era political writings, as compiled by Bernard Bailyn
University of Virginia Rotunda-Modeled after the Roman Pantheon
II. Ordered Liberty and the Kind of Person It Requires
The founders believed in liberty, but not as an unlimited good. They believed in ordered liberty. Freedom that exists within a framework of responsibility, discipline, and civic virtue. The system they designed assumed a certain kind of person, one capable of self-governance, restraint, and participation in a shared moral world.
That assumption was not optional. It was structural. It’s easy to miss how much is built into that.
And this is where the modern tension and the current understanding of freedom begins to diverge from its origins.
Classical Liberalism, in its earlier form, was not about as Deneen states in Why Liberalism Failed, detaching individuals from all institutions, identities, or relationships. But it was about protecting individuals from tyranny while preserving the conditions necessary for a functioning society. It assumed the continued existence of family, community, religious frameworks, and shared norms.
But where Deneen is right, early liberal thought did introduce something new.
John Locke, for example, reframed institutions like marriage as voluntary associations rather than fixed, inherited structures. That didn’t mean early liberal political philosophy was designed to erode the family. But it did change how those institutions were understood. It placed individual choice alongside social stability in a way that could be expanded over time.
To understand where this expansion comes from, you have to look at what came before it
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as publick liberty, without freedom of speech: Which is the right of every man, as far as by it he does not hurt and control the right of another; and this is the only check which it ought to suffer, the only bounds which it ought to know. Cato’s letters No.15
III. The Moral Inheritance of the West
The Lia Fail Inauguration Stone on the Hill of Tara in County Meath Ireland
In many pre-Christian societies, moral life wasn’t organized primarily around abstract rules or universal doctrines, but around continuity. Identity was tied to lineage, family, and inherited roles. Authority came not from individual preference, but from what had been passed down—customs, obligations, and expectations shaped over generations. To live well wasn’t just a personal project. It meant upholding something larger than yourself: maintaining the reputation of your family, fulfilling your role within a community, and carrying forward a way of life that you didn’t create but were responsible for preserving.
You can see how this played out in places like Anglo-Saxon England, where social structure and legal life were more embedded in family and local custom than in centralized doctrine. Women, for example, could own property, inherit land, appear in legal proceedings, and in some cases exercise real economic and political influence. These weren’t modern equality frameworks, but they complicate the assumption that agency and rights only emerge through later “progress.”
That structure did more than organize society. It created cohesion. It gave people a shared reference point for what mattered, what was expected, and what should be restrained—even when no one was watching. Authority wasn’t something constantly renegotiated. It was inherited, lived, and reinforced through participation in a shared way of life.
Greek and Roman life was also structured around civic duty, hierarchy, and inherited roles.
Their moral frameworks reflected that structure. Thinkers like Aristotle emphasized virtue as balance, habits cultivated over time within a community, oriented toward harmony and the common good.
As Christianity spread, moral authority became less tied to lineage and local custom, and more anchored in universal doctrine—rules that applied across communities, not just within them. Obligation didn’t vanish, but it was increasingly reframed. Less about inherited roles within a specific people, more about the individual’s relationship to a broader moral order.
That shift didn’t happen all at once, and it’s not a simple story. The development of early Christianity, its integration into the Roman Empire, and the ways it reshaped intellectual life and authority are far more complex than a few paragraphs can capture here. I’ve gone into that in more detail elsewhere, particularly around the Constantinian period and the rise of revelation and fall of reason.
This development intensifies further with the rise of Protestantism, where that reframing of obligation becomes even more explicit.The movement from the Seven Deadly Sins to the Ten Commandments as a dominant moral framework.
The Seven Deadly Sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, are not rules in the strict sense. They describe internal dispositions, patterns of character that distort judgment and pull a person out of balance. They are concerned with formation, with who you are becoming.
The Ten Commandments, by contrast, are structured as prohibitions. You shall not. They define boundaries, obedience, and transgression in relation to divine authority.
Both frameworks aim at moral order. But they operate differently. One is oriented toward the cultivation of character within a shared moral world. The other emphasizes compliance, law, and accountability before God.
The Protestant Reformation further reduced the role of mediating institutions, emphasizing personal conscience, direct access to scripture, and an individual relationship to truth. Authority became less external and more internalized, but also more individualized and less uniformly shared.
The emphasis is unmistakable. Moral responsibility is no longer primarily inherited or communal, but individual and direct.
This did not dissolve the community. But it did begin to relocate the moral center of gravity, from the maintenance of balance within a community, to the accountability of the individual before God.
A political system built on individual rights and self-governance emerged from a cultural framework that had already begun to center moral responsibility at the level of the individual.
At the same time, Christianity reshaped how the natural world was understood. Earlier traditions often treated nature as infused with meaning, order, or even divinity. Christianity maintained that the world was ordered, but no longer sacred in itself. It was created, not divine.
That distinction introduced a kind of distance. A world that is no longer sacred in itself becomes, over time, easier to treat as something external, something to study, measure, and ultimately use.
None of these shifts were inherently destabilizing on their own. But they altered the underlying framework.
Over time, they contributed to a gradual reorientation, one that made it easier to conceive of the individual as separate, autonomous, and capable of standing apart from inherited structures.
That development would later be expanded and amplified through liberal thought.
But the point is not that Protestant Christianity caused modern individualism. It is that it helped make it thinkable.
By the time you reach the Enlightenment and the American founding, those earlier shifts had not disappeared. They had been carried forward and reworked into a new framework—one increasingly shaped by reason, not as a rejection of religion entirely, but as a refusal to let authority go unquestioned simply because it claims moral or divine legitimacy.
The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… (and) when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.
-John Locke on the rights to life, liberty, and property of ourselves and others
IV. When Freedom Loses Its Structure
Over the next two centuries, that framework continued to expand. Early expansions focused on political participation—who could vote, who counted as a citizen, and who could take part in public life.
By the mid-20th century, that expansion accelerated through civil rights movements, which pushed the language of equality and access further into law, culture, and institutions.
In the 1960s into the 1970s, the focus widened into personal life. Questions of family, marriage, sexuality, and individual identity were increasingly reframed in terms of autonomy and personal choice.
The sexual revolution, in particular, was widely understood as an expansion of personal freedom: loosening traditional constraints around sex, marriage, and family life. But over time, some of the assumptions underlying that shift have come under renewed scrutiny. The idea that women can navigate complete sexual and relational autonomy without significant cost appears increasingly fragile, especially in the absence of the social structures that once provided stability and direction.
Expanding rights changes the system, not just access to it.
What’s often assumed is that this expansion is self-justifying—that extending rights is always a net good, and that the system can absorb that expansion without consequence. But that assumption is rarely examined.
As the scope of participation widens, so does the demand placed on the system and on the people within it.
A political system built on equal participation assumes a level of judgment, responsibility, and long-term thinking that is not evenly distributed. It assumes that individuals, given more freedom, will be able to navigate it without undermining the conditions that make it possible in the first place.
What we also see in modern times is the cultural and institutional structures that once shaped behavior—family expectations, community standards, shared moral frameworks have become much weaker, more contested, or easier to reject.
For most of known human history, moral behavior wasn’t just a matter of personal conviction. It was embedded in small, stable, reputation-based communities where actions were visible, remembered, and judged over time. Behavior carried consequences because it was tied to relationships that endured.
That community system relied on three conditions: shared standards, stable enforcement, and long-term relationships. As those weaken, accountability becomes less consistent or non existent. Not because human nature has changed, but because the structures that made behavior visible and tied to consequences have broken down.
Part of that shift is tied to the broader move toward secularism. As religious frameworks lose authority, the shared narratives that once provided cohesion, meaning, and moral orientation begin to fragment. This doesn’t eliminate the human need for structure—it shifts where people look for it. It disperses into competing sources of identity, morality, and meaning.
In The Republic, Plato makes a similar observation about belief itself. What matters is not just what people claim to believe, but whether those beliefs hold under pressure. “We must test them… to see whether they will hold to their convictions when they are subjected to fear, pleasure, or pain.”
Without shared structures reinforcing those convictions, belief becomes more reactive, more situational, and more easily reshaped by external forces.
We are left with a society of multiple, incompatible systems of belief—each with its own values, demands, and claims to legitimacy, but no widely accepted structure holding them together.
What was once a shared moral world becomes a contested one.
In Propaganda, Edward Bernays makes a blunt observation: the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the masses is not only possible, but essential to managing modern society. That insight becomes more relevant, not less, in the absence of a shared framework.
Because when a society loses the unifying structures that once held it together, the vacuum doesn’t stay empty. New ideologies rush in (secular, political, cultural) offering belonging, morality, and meaning, often with more intensity than the systems they replaced.
More autonomy. Less formation. More fragmentation. Less agreement on what freedom even demands.
This raises a harder question: whether removing earlier constraints produced the kind of freedom it promised, or simply replaced one set of pressures with another.
As that imbalance deepens, people don’t simply become more independent. They look for stability elsewhere.
This is where Deneen’s observation becomes useful, even if I don’t fully agree with his framing. As traditional institutions weaken, dependence doesn’t disappear—it shifts. From local, relational structures to larger, more abstract systems like the state and the market.
Another way to see this is that societies don’t just rely on formal institutions. They rely on something less visible—a kind of cultural immune system. Shared norms, expectations, and informal boundaries that regulate behavior without constant enforcement.
When those weaken, systems don’t become freer. They become easier to exploit.
One of the clearest examples of that vulnerability is the modern corporation.
The American system was designed in deep suspicion of concentrated power, yet over time it has extended expansive protections to corporate entities, allowing large institutions, backed by wealth, media, and legal abstraction, to shape public life in ways the founding framework was poorly equipped to restrain.
The founders were wary of concentrated power, but they were not designing a system for multinational corporations with vast economic and informational reach. Over time, constitutional doctrine expanded in ways that made these entities increasingly difficult to limit, culminating in decisions like Citizens United, where the Court held that independent political spending by corporations and unions could not be restricted under the First Amendment.
This is part of the same pattern. A system built to preserve liberty becomes easier to exploit when power no longer appears as a king, a church, or a visible ruling class, but as diffuse institutions operating through law, markets, and media.
And as we have seen that happen, trust has eroded, cooperation breaks down, and the very conditions that made freedom possible have begun to unravel.
But I don’t think that was the original aim of classical liberalism.
It’s not that it set out to dismantle the community. It’s that over time, through cultural, economic, and technological changes, the balance between freedom and structure eroded. And now we’re dealing with the consequences of that imbalance.
The more I read, the harder it is to ignore the tension at the heart of the American Revolution itself.
It speaks the language of liberty, but often operated through pressure, surveillance, and social enforcement. Groups like the Sons of Liberty didn’t just resist authority—they replaced it with their own forms of coercion, loyalty tests, and public punishment.
The sons of liberty regularly tar and feathered anyone who offended them or were officers of the British government.
I am not saying the ideals were wrong. It means liberty, on its own, doesn’t sustain itself.When formal authority is rejected, power doesn’t disappear. It simply relocates.
And without shared discipline or internal restraint, it often reappears in more fragmented, less accountable forms.
Liberty is not the absence of power.
It’s a problem of how power is structured, restrained, and lived.
There’s another reaction to this tension that’s worth acknowledging, even if it goes too far.
Thinkers like Mencken argued that the real problem isn’t the system, but the people—that democracy inevitably lowers the standard because it reflects the average citizen.
And I understand the sentiment; but that framing misses something important.
The issue isn’t that people are inherently incapable of self-government.
It’s that self-government requires habits, discipline, and formation that a system alone cannot produce.
What makes this moment particularly interesting is that the unease people feel doesn’t map neatly onto political categories.
Across both the left and the right, there’s a growing intuition that something isn’t functioning the way it should.
You see it in the rare points of agreement. Public frustration over the lack of transparency in the Epstein files cuts across political lines, with overwhelming majorities convinced that key information is still being withheld and justice is yet to be served.
You see it in foreign policy as well. Even in a deeply divided country, there is broad skepticism toward escalating conflicts like the war involving Iran, with many of us questioning the purpose, cost, and direction of involvement.
That concern isn’t new. It shows up clearly in Cato’s Letters, where distrust of power wasn’t abstract—it was grounded in history. The Roman Empire was a constant reference point, especially in how standing armies, once established, could be turned inward, gradually eroding liberty and consolidating control.
They weren’t against defense. But they were deeply wary of permanent military power and foreign entanglements that primarily served those in control, not the public. War wasn’t just protection. It was one of the fastest ways power could expand.
And it’s hard not to wonder how they would look at what we now call the military-industrial complex—how permanent it’s become, how embedded it is, and how easily it justifies its own expansion.
Power attracts interests that seek to influence it through money, proximity, and favor and over time those interests become embedded within the system itself, shaping decisions in ways that are no longer aligned with the public.
How this shows up today in modern times points to the fact that governmental power no longer feels like a trust. We The People who want to put America and her people’s needs First, are witnessing an occupied government like never before. And that our institutions are no longer held accountable. They have become self-protective and disconnected from the very people they’re meant to serve.
“Power, in proportion to its extent, is ever prone to wantonness.” — Josiah Quincy Jr., Observations on the Boston Port-Bill (1774)
“The supreme power is ever possessed by those who have arms in their hands.” (colonial political writing, mid-18th century)
Standing armies, they warned, could become “the means, in the hands of a wicked and oppressive sovereign, of overturning the constitution… and establishing the most intolerable despotism.” — Simeon Howard, sermon (c. 1773–1775)
Which is why Jefferson insisted on keeping “the military… subject to the civil power,” not the other way around (1774).
There’s also empirical evidence from over a decade ago pointing in that direction.
Sometimes known as “the oligarchy study” published in 2014 by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analyzed nearly 1,800 policy decisions in the United States and found that economic elites and organized business interests have a substantial independent influence on policy outcomes, while average citizens have little to no independent impact.
Policies favored by the majority tend to pass only when they align with the preferences of the wealthy. When they don’t, public opinion has almost no measurable effect.
This one study doesn’t prove that the system has fully collapsed into oligarchy.
But it does reinforce our intuition that something has shifted, that power is no longer functioning as it should and that representation is much more limited than we assume.
What I’ve learned from putting this together is that this concern is not new. It’s ancient.
It’s the same fear that appears in the Greek philosophers, carries through Rome, reemerges in the founding era, and is now unfolding again in modern society.
This is the same dynamic Madison was pointing to in Federalist No. 10. When legitimacy starts to weaken, people don’t simply disengage.
They form groups around competing explanations for what’s gone wrong—different interests, different priorities, different visions of what should replace it.
Within the modern left, those responses are not all the same.
Establishment Democrats still operate within existing systems. Liberals tend to push for reform through policy. Progressives begin to question the structure itself. And further out, democratic socialists and revolutionary groups are not aiming to fix the system, but to replace it entirely.
That distinction matters. Because once you move from reform to replacement, you’re no longer arguing about how to use a system.
You’re arguing about whether it should exist at all. At the far end of that spectrum, some movements push toward dismantling foundational structures entirely, treating them as irredeemably corrupt.
You can see this in specific, coordinated efforts.
Large-scale protest movements like the recent “No Kings” demonstrations, like on March 28th, 2026, bringing 8 million people into the streets across the United States. With more than 3,300 coordinated events spanning all 50 states, the mobilization set a record for the largest single day of protest in U.S. history.
They have planned actions like May Day strikes, where activists are calling for mass labor disruption and economic shutdown. And organized noncooperation campaigns designed to train people in how to resist, overwhelm, or halt existing systems altogether.
Their logic is that the system of capitalism is no longer seen as something to work within, but something to resist, bypass, or bring to a stop.
Not reform. But disruption and replacement.
I’ve spent enough time around these spaces to understand the appeal. When institutions feel captured or unresponsive, the instinct is not to reform them—but to burn them down to the ground.
Freedom is not collapsing because people have rejected it. It’s becoming unstable because we can no longer agree on what it is, what it requires, or what its limits should be.
And as more of the burden falls on individuals while leadership fails to model it, people start to feel both responsible and powerless. And that’s where apathy begins to take hold——when it no longer feels like it matters, especially to the people at the top.
United States Capitol Rotunda — The Dome Painting “The Apotheosis of Washington” Painted by Constantino Brumidi in 1865
V. The Human Problem at the Center of Freedom
A republic doesn’t survive on laws alone.
It survives on citizens who can exercise restraint, who understand limits, who see freedom not just as permission, but as responsibility.
One way to understand this shift more clearly is through moral psychology. Human beings don’t arrive at morality purely through reasoning. We rely on a set of underlying intuitions (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred) that shape how we judge right and wrong before we ever explain why.
In more conservative or traditional societies, these moral intuitions tend to operate together rather than in isolation. Care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred reinforce one another, creating a more unified moral framework. People may still disagree, but they are drawing from a shared moral language, with expectations around family, roles, restraint, and what should or should not be done.
But that kind of shared moral framework doesn’t hold evenly across modern society.
The second way to see this is by looking at how these moral intuitions organize into distinct patterns cluster across different groups. In the chart, you can see three broad orientations: progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. Progressives tend to cluster around care and fairness. Conservatives draw from a wider range, incorporating loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred alongside those concerns. Libertarians center heavily on liberty, placing less weight on the others. What looks like a disagreement about politics is often a difference in moral orientation—people emphasizing entirely different parts of the same moral landscape.
And the differences don’t just show up in orientation, but in intensity.
This bar graph illustrates this pattern more clearly when we look at how different groups actually prioritize these moral intuitions.
Secular liberals and the religious left tend to emphasize care and fairness most strongly, focusing on reducing harm and promoting equality. By contrast, more traditional or socially conservative groups draw more evenly across a broader set of values, including loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred alongside care and fairness. Libertarians tend to narrow even further, prioritizing individual liberty while placing less emphasis on collective or traditional moral structures.
The result isn’t just disagreement over morality—it’s a difference in what people are even measuring in the first place, which makes shared judgment harder to sustain.
You can see the split in how people respond to the same breakdown in trust.
For those on the left, freedom means removing constraint entirely and that leads to a push to dismantle systems they see as corrupt or oppressive.
For those on the right, it produces deep suspicion: distrust of elections, media, public health authority, and government itself, along with a desire to restore order, stability, and clearer boundaries. In some cases, that turns into nostalgia for earlier structures: family roles, gender norms, and forms of religious authority that are seen as more stable, even if that restoration comes with its own trade-offs.
These aren’t just different political positions.
They reflect different instincts about what matters most and different assumptions about what freedom is for.
And both risk missing the deeper question.
Not just: what system creates freedom?
But what kind of people can sustain it?
This is where Aristotle’s framework becomes difficult to ignore. In that sense, his may be closer to the truth than many modern assumptions. It starts from the premise that people are not equal in their capacity for judgment or self-governance—and builds from there, rather than pretending those differences don’t matter.
It shows up in how people live, how they make decisions, and how they exercise restraint. That’s where his framework of virtue comes in—not as an ideal, but as a way of describing what it actually takes to live well and participate in a functioning society.
He didn’t think virtue was about perfection. He thought of it as balance. Courage sits between cowardice and recklessness.
Self-control between indulgence and insensibility.
Generosity between stinginess and excess.
Virtue is not automatic. It is cultivated. And it can be lost.
He applied that same logic to political systems. A government can exist in a healthy form, oriented toward the common good, or in a corrupted form, serving only a faction. At that point, the difference isn’t just structural. It comes down to character.
One tension that keeps resurfacing in political thought is the gap between equality in principle and inequality in capacity.
You can see this play out in small, everyday ways. Give ten people the same freedom, the same opportunity, the same set of rules—and you don’t get the same outcomes. Some plan ahead. Some act impulsively. Some take responsibility. Others look for ways around it. The structure is equal, but the response isn’t.
Because human beings are not identical in judgment, discipline, or temperament. Some are more capable of long-term thinking, self-restraint, and navigating complexity than others.
A free society doesn’t eliminate those differences. It has to operate in spite of them. And that creates the real challenge.
A system built on self-government depends on habits it cannot enforce, on restraint it cannot require, and on a shared understanding of limits it cannot guarantee.
Which raises a difficult question:
What happens when a system built on equal freedom depends on unequal capacities to sustain it?
Freedom is not self-sustaining. The more we treat it like it is, the more fragile it becomes.
When those conditions weaken, the structure doesn’t collapse all at once. It loosens, then drifts, and eventually begins to follow the same pattern that earlier thinkers warned about.
Not because the idea of freedom was flawed, but because it was always contingent on something more demanding than we like to admit.
And that’s what makes the older warnings so difficult to ignore. The concerns that show up in Greek philosophy, carry through Rome, and reappear in the founding era weren’t tied to one moment in history. They’re describing something recurring. Power doesn’t stay put. It accumulates. It protects itself. And without pressure against it, it shifts (often quietly) into something more self-serving than it was at the start.
The documents and letters from the founding era weren’t written for a stable world. They were written by people who assumed this drift was inevitable. That’s why they were obsessed over things like faction, corruption, and the abuse of power. Not just as political problems, but as moral ones. Because once corruption sets in, it doesn’t just distort institutions. It reshapes the people within them. A corrupt government cannot be a just government. That’s why they treated free speech, free press and an informed public less like ideals and more like important tools—ways of forcing power into the open before it had the chance to consolidate.
Cato’s letters, in particular, were relentless on this point. They knew that a society that becomes consumed with wealth, status, and self-interest doesn’t just become unequal. It becomes easier to manipulate, easier to divide, and eventually less capable of governing itself at all. Civic virtue wasn’t a side note. It was the condition that made freedom possible in the first place.
And when you look at it from that angle, it doesn’t feel like you’re reading writings from the 18th century. It feels familiar, much closer to home.
Of course, the scale is different now. The mechanisms are different. But the tension is very much the same. Governments and corporations operate with a level of reach the founders never could have imagined with technology. Information is filtered, behavior is shaped, and power often moves through systems that don’t look like power at all. You don’t always see it directly. But you feel the effects of it.
So the responsibility doesn’t go away. It never did.
If anything, it becomes less obvious and more necessary at the same time.
A system like this doesn’t hold because it was designed well. It holds, when it does, because enough people are still paying attention. Still pushing back. Still unwilling to let power define its own limits.
And once that slips…once that expectation fades, the structure doesn’t fail all at once. It just stops holding in the way it used to. And the pattern continues.
United States Capitol Rotunda — The Dome Painting “The Apotheosis of Washington” Painted by Constantino Brumidi in 1865
Resources:
This piece pulls from a mix of ancient sources, founding-era writing, and modern critiques. Not because I agree with all of them, but because each one sharpens a different part of the problem. If you want to work through it yourself, these are the ones that shaped how I’m thinking about it:
Bernard Bailyn — The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Less about what the founders built, more about what they were reacting to—especially the collapse of earlier republics.
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay — The Federalist Papers A direct look at how they thought about human nature, power, and why freedom needs structure to hold.
Patrick Deneen — Why Liberalism Failed I don’t agree with all of it, but the critique of modern individualism and the erosion of shared norms is worth taking seriously.
Plato — The Republic Still one of the clearest descriptions of how excessive freedom destabilizes a society.
Aristotle — Politics Helpful for understanding how democracies drift when law loses authority and personality takes over.
Polybius — Histories His framework for how governments rise and decay is hard to unsee once you see it.
Louise Perry — The Case Against the Sexual Revolution A modern example of how expanded freedom doesn’t always produce the outcomes people expect.
Jonathan Haidt — The Righteous Mind Useful for understanding why reason alone doesn’t hold societies together—and why people experience morality so differently.
Charles Freeman — The Closing of the Western Mind Explores how early Christianity reshaped intellectual life in the West. Also recommended:The Opening of the Western Mind
Roger E. Olson — The Story of Christian Theology A clear overview of how Christian thought developed over time and how its internal tensions evolved.
Judith Bennett — Women in the Medieval English Countryside Insight into everyday life, structure, and roles in pre-modern society.
Christine Fell — Women in Anglo-Saxon England A look at social organization and cultural norms in early English society.
What Women Were Never Told About Weight, Aging, and Control
The Science They Never Told Us
This is the first episode of 2026, and I wanted to start the year by slowing things down, getting a bit personal instead of chasing the latest talking points.
At the end of last year, I spent time reading a few books that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. Not because they offered a new diet or a new protocol, but because they challenged something much deeper: the story we’ve been told about discipline, control, and women’s bodies.
There is a reason women’s bodies change across the lifespan. And it has very little to do with willpower, discipline, or personal failure.
In Why Women Need Fat, evolutionary biologists William Lassek and Steven Gaulin make the case that most modern conversations about women’s weight are fundamentally misinformed. Not because women are doing something wrong, but because we’ve built our expectations on a misunderstanding of what female bodies are actually designed to do.
A major part of their argument focuses on how industrialization radically altered the balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in the modern food supply, particularly through seed oils and ultra-processed foods. They make a compelling case that this shift plays a role in rising obesity and metabolic dysfunction at the population level.
I agree that this imbalance matters, and it’s a topic that deserves its own full episode. At the same time, it does not explain every woman’s story. Diet composition can influence metabolism, but it cannot override prolonged stress, illness, hormonal disruption, nervous system dysregulation, or years of restriction. In my own case, omega-6 intake outside of naturally occurring sources is relatively low and does not account for the changes I’ve experienced. That matters, because it reminds us that biology is layered. No single variable explains a complex adaptive system.
One of the most important ideas in the book is that fat distribution matters more than fat quantity.
Women do not store fat the same way men do. A significant portion of female body fat is stored in the hips and thighs, known as gluteofemoral fat. This fat is metabolically distinct from abdominal or visceral fat. It is more stable, less inflammatory, and relatively enriched in long-chain fatty acids, including DHA, which plays a key role in fetal brain development.
From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense. Human infants are born with unusually large, energy-hungry brains. Women evolved to carry nutritional reserves that could support pregnancy and lactation, even during times of scarcity. In that context, having fat on your lower body was not a flaw or a failure. It was insurance.
From this perspective, fat is not excess energy. It is deferred intelligence, stored in anticipation of future need. This is where waist-to-hip ratio enters the conversation.
Across cultures and historical periods, a lower waist-to-hip ratio in women has been associated with reproductive health, metabolic resilience, and successful pregnancies. This is not about thinness, aesthetics, or moral worth. It is about fat function, not fat fear, and about how different tissues behave metabolically inside the body. It is about where fat is stored and how it functions.
And in today’s modern culture we have lost that distinction.
Instead of asking what kind of fat a woman carries, we became obsessed with how much. Instead of understanding fat as tissue with purpose, we turned it into a moral scoreboard. Hips became a problem. Thighs became something to shrink. Curves became something to discipline.
Another central idea in Why Women Need Fat is biological set point.
The authors argue that women’s bodies tend to defend a natural weight range when adequately nourished and not under chronic stress. When women remain below that range through restriction, over-exercise, or prolonged under-fueling, the body does not interpret that as success. It interprets it as threat.
Over time, the body adapts, not out of defiance, but out of protection.
Metabolism slows. Hunger and fullness cues become unreliable. Hormonal systems compensate. When the pressure finally eases, weight often rebounds, sometimes beyond where it started, because the body is trying to restore safety.
From this perspective, midlife weight gain, post-illness weight gain, or weight gain after years of restriction is not mysterious. It is not rebellion. It is regulation.
None of this is taught to women.
Instead, we are told that if our bodies change, we failed. That aging is optional. That discipline and botox should override biology. That the number on the scale tells the whole story.
So, before we talk about culture, family, trauma, or personal experience, this matters:
Women’s bodies are not designed to stay static. They are designed to adapt.
Once you understand that, everything else in this conversation changes.
Why the Body Became the Battlefield
This is where historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s work in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, provides essential context, but it requires some precision.
Girls have not always been free from shame. Shame itself is not new. What has changed is what women are taught to be ashamed of, and how that shame operates in daily life.
Brumberg asks a question that still feels unresolved today: Why is the body still a girl’s nemesis? Shouldn’t sexually liberated girls feel better about themselves than their corseted counterparts a century ago?
Based on extensive historical research, including diaries written by American girls from the 1830s through the 1990s, Brumberg shows that although girls today enjoy more formal freedoms and opportunities, they are also under more pressure and at greater psychological risk. This is due to a unique convergence of biological vulnerability and cultural forces that turned the adolescent female body into a central site of social meaning during the twentieth century.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, girls did not typically grow up fixated on thinness, calorie control, or constant appearance monitoring. Their diaries were not filled with measurements or food rules. Instead, they wrote primarily about character, self-restraint, moral development, relationships, and their roles within family and community.
One 1892 diary entry reads:
“Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversation and in actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”
In earlier eras, female shame was more often tied to behavior, sexuality, obedience, and virtue. The body mattered, but primarily as a moral symbol rather than an aesthetic project requiring constant surveillance and correction.
That changed dramatically in the twentieth century.
Brumberg documents how the mother-daughter connection loosened, particularly around menstruation, sexuality, and bodily knowledge. Where female relatives and mentors once guided girls through these transitions, doctors, advertisers, popular media, and scientific authority increasingly stepped in to fill that role.
At the same time, mass media, advertising, film, and medicalized beauty standards created a new and increasingly exacting ideal of physical perfection. Changing norms around intimacy and sexuality also shifted the meaning of virginity, turning it from a central moral value into an outdated or irrelevant one. What replaced it was not freedom from scrutiny, but a different kind of pressure altogether.
By the late twentieth century, girls were increasingly taught that their bodies were not merely something they inhabited, but something they were responsible for perfecting.
A 1982 diary entry captures this shift starkly:
“I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can with the help of my budget and baby-sitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got a new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”
What changed was not the presence of shame, but its location. Shame moved inward.
Rather than being externally enforced through rules and prohibitions, it became self-policed. Girls were taught to monitor themselves constantly, to evaluate their bodies from the outside, and to treat appearance as the primary expression of identity and worth.
Brumberg is explicit on this point. The fact that American girls now make their bodies their central project is not an accident or a cultural curiosity. It is a symptom of historical changes that are only beginning to be fully understood.
This is where more recent work, such as Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, helps extend Brumberg’s analysis into the present moment. Perry argues that while sexual liberation promised autonomy and empowerment, it often left young women navigating powerful biological and emotional realities without the social structures that once offered protection, guidance, or meaning. In that vacuum, the body became one of the few remaining sites where control still seemed possible.
The result is a paradox. Girls are freer in theory, yet more burdened in practice. The body, once shaped by communal norms and shared female knowledge, becomes a solitary project, managed under intense cultural pressure and constant comparison.
For many girls, this self-surveillance does not begin with magazines or social media. It begins at home, absorbed through tone, comments, and modeling from the women closest to them.
Brumberg argues that body dissatisfaction is often transmitted from mother to daughter, not out of cruelty, but because those mothers inherited the same aesthetic anxieties. Over time, body shame becomes a family inheritance, passed down quietly and persistently.
Some mothers transmit it subtly.
Others do it bluntly.
This matters not because my experience is unique, but because it illustrates what happens when a body shaped by restriction, stress, and cultural pressure is asked to perform indefinitely. Personal stories are often dismissed as anecdotal, but they are where biological theory meets lived reality.
I grew up in a household where my body was not simply noticed. It was scrutinized, compared, and commented on. Comments like that do not fade with time. They shape how you see yourself in mirrors and photographs. They teach you that your body must be managed and monitored. They plant the belief that staying small is the price of safety.
So, I grew up believing that if I could control my body well enough, I could avoid humiliation. I could avoid becoming the punchline. I could avoid being seen in the wrong way.
For a while, I turned that fear into discipline.
The Years Before the Collapse: A Lifetime of Restriction and Survival
Food never felt simple for me. Long before bodybuilding, chronic pain, or COVID, I carried a strained relationship with eating. Growing up in a near constant state of anxiety meant that hunger cues often felt unpredictable. Eating was something to plan around or push through. It rarely felt intuitive or easy.
Because of this, I experimented with diets that replaced real meals with cereal or shakes. I followed plans like the Special K diet. I relied on Carnation Instant Breakfast instead of full meals. My protein intake was low. My fear of gaining weight was high. Restriction became familiar.
Top left is when I started working out obsessively at age 16, top right and bottom photo are from middle school when I was at my “heaviest” that drove the disordered behaviors.
In college, I became a strict vegetarian out of compassion for animals, but I did not understand how to meet my nutritional needs. I was studying dietetics and earning personal training certifications while running frequently and using exercise as a way to maintain control. From the outside, I looked disciplined. Internally, my relationship with food and exercise remained tense and inconsistent.
Later, I became involved in a meal-replacement program through an MLM. I replaced two meals a day with shakes and practiced intermittent fasting framed as “cleanse days.” In hindsight, this was structured under-eating presented as wellness. It fit seamlessly into patterns I had lived in for years.
Eating often felt overwhelming. Cooking felt like a hurdle. Certain textures bothered me. My appetite felt fragile and unreliable. This sensory sensitivity existed long before the parosmia that would come years later. From early on, food was shaped by stress rather than nourishment.
During this entire period, I was also on hormonal birth control, first the NuvaRing and later the Mirena IUD, for nearly a decade. Long-term hormonal modulation can influence mood, inflammation, appetite, and weight distribution. It added another layer of complexity to a system already under strain.
Looking back, I can see that my teens and twenties were marked by near constant restriction. Restriction felt normal. Thriving did not.
The book Why Women Need Fat discusses the idea of a biological weight “set point,” the range a body tends to return to when conditions are stable and adequately nourished. I now understand that I remained below my natural set point for years through force rather than balance. My biology never experienced consistency or safety.
This was the landscape I carried into my thirties.
The Body I Built and the Body That Broke
By the time I entered the bodybuilding world in 2017 and 2018, I already had years of chronic under-eating, over-exercising, and nutrient gaps behind me. Bodybuilding did not create my issues. It amplified them.
I competed in four shows. People admired the discipline and the physique. Internally, my body was weakening. I was overtraining and undereating. By 2019, my immune system began to fail. I developed severe canker sores, sometimes twenty or more at once. I started noticing weight-loss resistance. Everything I had done in the past, was no longer working. On my thirty-fifth birthday, I got shingles. My energy crashed. My emotional bandwidth narrowed. My body was asking for rest, but I did not know how to slow down.
Around this time, I was also navigating eating disorder recovery. Learning how to eat without panic or rigid control was emotionally exhausting even under ideal circumstances… but little did I know things were about to take a massive turn for the worst.
COVID, Sensory Loss, and the Unraveling of Appetite
After getting sick with the ‘vid late 2020, everything shifted again. I developed parosmia, a smell and taste distortion that made many foods taste rotten or chemical. Protein and cooked foods often tasted spoiled. Herbs smelled like artificial chemical. Eating became distressing and, at times, impossible.
My appetite dropped significantly. There were periods where my intake was very low, yet my weight continued to rise. This is not uncommon following illness or prolonged stress. The body often shifts into energy conservation, prioritizing survival overweight regulation.
Weight gain became another source of grief. Roughly thirty pounds over the next five years. I feel embarrassed and avoid photographs. I often worry about how others will perceive me.
If this experience resonates, it is important to say this clearly: your body is not betraying you. It is responding to stress, illness, and prolonged strain in the way bodies are designed to respond.
When years of restriction, intense exercise, chronic stress, illness, hormonal shifts, and emotional trauma accumulate, the body often enters a protective state. Metabolism slows. Hormonal signaling shifts. Hunger cues become unreliable. Weight gain or resistance to weight loss can occur even during periods of low intake, because energy regulation is being driven by survival physiology rather than simple calorie balance.
This is not failure. It is physiology.
The calories-in, calories-out model does not account for thyroid suppression, nervous system activation, sleep disruption, pain, trauma, or metabolic adaptation. It reduces a complex biological system to arithmetic.
Women are not machines. We are adaptive systems built for survival. Sometimes resilience looks like holding onto energy when the body does not feel safe.
Despite this biological reality, we live in a culture that ties women’s value to discipline and appearance. When women gain weight, even under extreme circumstances, we blame ourselves before questioning the system.
Diet culture frames shrinking as virtue.
Toxic positivity encourages acceptance without context.
Industrial food environments differ radically from those our ancestors evolved in.
Medical systems often dismiss women’s pain and metabolic complexity.
Social media amplifies comparison and moralizes body size.
None of this is your fault. And all of it shapes your experience.
This is why understanding the science matters. This is why telling the truth matters. This is why sharing stories matters.
In the book, More Than a Body, Lindsay and Lexie Kite describe how women are taught to relate to themselves through constant self-monitoring. Instead of living inside our bodies, we learn to watch ourselves from the outside. We assess how we look, how we are perceived, and whether our bodies are acceptable in a given moment.
This constant self-surveillance does real harm. It pulls attention away from hunger, pain, fatigue, and intuition. It trains women to override bodily signals in favor of appearance management. And over time, it creates a split where the body is treated as a project to control rather than a system to understand or care for.
When you layer this kind of self-objectification on top of chronic stress, restriction, illness, and trauma, the result is not empowerment. It is disconnection. And disconnection makes it even harder to hear what the body needs when something is wrong.
Weight gain is not just a biological response. It becomes a moral verdict. And that is how women end up fighting bodies that are already struggling to keep them alive.
The Inheritance Ends Here
For a long time, I believed that breaking generational cycles only applied to mothers and daughters. I do not have children, so I assumed what I inherited would simply end with me, unchanged.
Brumberg’s work helped me see this differently.
What we inherit is not passed down only through parenting. It moves through tone, silence, and self-talk. It appears in how women speak about their bodies in front of others. It lives in the way shame is normalized.
I inherited a legacy of body shame. Even on the days when I still feel its weight, I am choosing not to repeat it.
For me, the inheritance ends with telling the truth about this journey and refusing to speak to my body with the same cruelty I absorbed growing up. It ends here.
Closing the Circle: Your Body Is Not Broken
I wish I could end this with a simple story of resolution. I cannot. I am still in the middle of this. I still grieve. I still struggle with eating and movement. I am still learning how to inhabit a body that feels unfamiliar.
But I know this: my body is not my enemy. She is not malfunctioning. She is adapting to a lifetime of stress, illness, restriction, and emotional weight.
If you are in a similar place, I hope this offers permission to stop fighting yourself and start understanding the patterns your body is following. Not because everything will suddenly improve, but because clarity is often the first form of compassion.
Your body is not betraying you. She is trying to keep you here.
And sometimes the most honest thing we can do is admit that we are still finding our way.
References
Brumberg, J. J. (1997). The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. Random House.
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2011). Why Women Need Fat: How “Healthy” Food Makes Us Gain Excess Weight and the Surprising Solution to Losing It Forever. Hudson Street Press.
Kite, L., & Kite, L. (2020). More Than a Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Scientific and academic sources
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2006). Changes in body fat distribution in relation to parity in American women. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27(3), 173–185.
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2008). Waist–hip ratio and cognitive ability. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 275(1644), 193–199.
Dulloo, A. G., Jacquet, J., & Montani, J. P. (2015). Adaptive thermogenesis in human body-weight regulation. Obesity Reviews, 16(S1), 33–43.
Fothergill, E., et al. (2016). Persistent metabolic adaptation after weight loss. Obesity, 24(8), 1612–1619.
Kyle, U. G., et al. (2004). Body composition interpretation. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 79(6), 955–962.
Simopoulos, A. P. (2016). Omega-6/omega-3 balance and obesity risk. Nutrients, 8(3), 128.
Trauma, stress, and nervous system context
Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt and Company.
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Books.
This episode isn’t about religion versus religion. It’s about power, fear, and what happens inside belief systems when conformity becomes more important than honesty.
In this conversation, I’m joined by Sigrin, founder of Universal Pagan Temple.
She’s a practicing Pagan, a witch, a public educator, and someone who speaks openly about leaving Christianity after experiencing fear-based theology, spiritual control, and shame. I want to pause here, because even as an agnostic, when I hear the word witch, my brain still flashes to the cartoon villain version. Green. Ugly. Evil. That image didn’t come from nowhere. It was taught.
One of the things we get into in this conversation is how morality actually functions in Pagan traditions, and how different that framework is from what most people assume.
She describes leaving Christianity not as rebellion, but as self-preservation. And what pushed her out wasn’t God. It was other Christians.
For many people, Christianity isn’t learned from scripture. It’s learned from other Christians.
The judgment. The constant monitoring. The fear of being seen as wrong, dangerous, or spiritually compromised.
In high-control Christian environments, conformity equals safety. Questioning creates anxiety. And the fear of social punishment often becomes stronger than belief itself.
When belonging is conditional, faith turns into survival.
What We Cover in This Conversation:
Paganism Beyond Aesthetics
A lot of people hear “Paganism” and immediately picture vibes, trends, or cosplay. We spend time breaking that assumption apart.
Sigrin explains that many beginners jump straight into ritual without actually invoking or dedicating to the divine.
She talks about the difference between aesthetic practice and intentional practice.
For people who don’t yet feel connected to a specific god or goddess, she offers grounded guidance on how to approach devotion without forcing it.
We talk about the transition she experienced moving from Christianity, to atheism, to polytheism.
We explore the role of myth, story, and symbolism in spiritual life.
She shares her experience of feeling an energy she couldn’t deny, even after rejecting belief entirely.
We touch on the wide range of ways Pagans relate to pantheons, including devotional, symbolic, ancestral, and experiential approaches.
The takeaway here isn’t “believe this.” It’s that Paganism isn’t shallow, trendy, or uniform. It’s relational.
No Holy Book, No Central Authority
One of the most misunderstood aspects of Paganism is the absence of a single text or governing authority.
Sigrin references a line she often uses: “If you get 20 witches in a room, you’ll have 40 different beliefs.”
We talk about how Pagan traditions don’t operate under enforced doctrine or centralized belief.
She brings up the 42 Negative Confessions from ancient Egyptian tradition as an example of ethical self-statements rather than commandments.
These function more like reflections on character than laws imposed from above.
We compare this to moral storytelling across different myth traditions rather than rigid rule-following.
She emphasizes intuition and empathy as core tools for ethical decision-making.
I add the role of self-reflection and introspection in systems without external enforcement.
This raises an important question: without a script, responsibility shifts inward.
Why This Can Be Hard After Christianity
We also talk honestly about why this freedom can be uncomfortable, especially for people leaving authoritarian religion.
Sigrin notes how difficult it can be to release belief in hell, even after leaving Christianity.
Fear doesn’t disappear just because belief changes.
When morality was once externally enforced, internal trust has to be rebuilt.
Pagan paths often require learning how to sit with uncertainty rather than replacing one authority with another.
This isn’t easier. It’s quieter. And it asks more of the individual.
That backdrop matters, because it shapes how Paganism gets misunderstood, misrepresented, and framed as dangerous.
The “Pagan Threat” Narrative
One of the reasons Pagan Threat has gained attention and sparked controversy is not just its content, but whose voice it carries and how it’s framed at the outset.
The book was written by Pastor Lucas Miles, a senior director with Turning Point USA Faith and author of other conservative religious critiques. The project is positioned as a warning about what Miles sees as threats to the church and American society. The foreword was written by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. His introduction positions the book as urgent for Christians to read.
From there, the book makes a striking claim:
It describes Christianity as a religion of freedom, while framing Paganism as operating under a hive mind or collective groupthink.
A key problem is which Paganism the book is actually engaging.
The examples Miles focuses on overwhelmingly reflect liberal, online, or activist-adjacent Pagan spaces, particularly those aligned with progressive identity politics.
That narrow focus gets treated as representative of Paganism as a whole.
Conservative Pagans, reconstructionist traditions, land-based practices, and sovereignty-focused communities are largely ignored.
As a result, “wokeness” becomes a kind of explanatory shortcut.
Modern political anxieties get mapped onto Paganism.
Gender ideology, progressive activism, and left-leaning culture get blamed on an ancient and diverse spiritual category.
Paganism becomes a convenient container for everything the author already opposes.
We also talk openly about political realignment, and why neither of us fits cleanly into the right/left binary anymore. I raise the importance of actually understanding Queer Theory, rather than using “queer” as a vague identity umbrella.
To help visualize this, I reference a chart breaking down five tiers of the far left, which I’ll include here for listeners who want context.
Next, in our conversation, Sigrin explains why the groupthink accusation feels completely inverted to anyone who has actually practiced Paganism.
Pagan traditions lack central authority, universal doctrine, or an enforcement mechanism.
Diversity of belief isn’t a flaw. It’s a defining feature.
Pagan communities often openly disagree, practice differently, and resist uniformity by design.
The “hive mind” label ignores that reality and instead relies on a caricature built from a narrow and selective sample.
“Trotter and Le Bon concluded that the group mind does not think in the restricted sense of the word. In place of thoughts, it has impulses, habits, and emotions. Lacking an independent mind, its first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader. This is one of the most firmly established principles of mass psychology.” Propaganda by Edward L. Bernays
We contrast this with Christian systems that rely on shared creeds, orthodoxy, and social enforcement to maintain cohesion.
Accusations of groupthink, in that context, often function as projection from environments where conformity is tied to spiritual safety.
In those systems, agreement is often equated with faithfulness and deviation with danger.
Globalism, Centralization, and Historical Irony
We end the conversation by stepping back and looking at the bigger historical picture.
The book positions Christianity as the antidote to globalism.
At the same time, it advocates coordinated religious unification, political mobilization, and cultural enforcement.
That contradiction becomes hard to ignore once you zoom out historically.
Sigrin points out that pre-Christian Pagan worlds were not monolithic.
Ancient polytheist societies were highly localized.
City-states and regions had their own gods, rituals, myths, and customs.
Religious life varied widely from place to place, even within the same broader culture.
I reference The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey, which documents this diversity in detail.
Pagan societies weren’t unified under a single doctrine.
There was no universal creed to enforce across regions.
Difference wasn’t a problem to be solved. It was normal.
Christianity, by contrast, became one of the first truly globalizing religious systems.
A single truth claim.
A centralized authority structure.
A mandate to replace local traditions rather than coexist with them.
That history makes the book’s framing ironic.
Paganism gets labeled “globalist,” despite being inherently local and decentralized.
Christianity gets framed as anti-globalist, while proposing further consolidation of belief, power, and authority.
What This Is Actually About
This isn’t about attacking Christians as people. And it’s not about defending Paganism as a brand.
It is a critique of how certain forms of Christianity function when belief hardens into certainty and certainty turns into control.
Fear-based religion and fear-based ideology share the same problem. They promise safety. They demand conformity. And they struggle with humility.
That doesn’t describe every Christian. But it does describe systems that rely on fear, surveillance, and moral enforcement to survive.
What I appreciate about this conversation is the reminder that spirituality doesn’t have to look like domination, hierarchy, or a battle plan.
It can be rooted. Local. Embodied.
It can ask something of you without erasing you.
And whether someone lands in Paganism, Christianity, or somewhere else entirely, the question isn’t “Which side are you on?”
It’s whether your beliefs make you more honest, more grounded, and more responsible for how you live.
That’s what I hope people sit with after listening.
Ways to Support Universal Pagan Temple
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Archaeology, “External Evidence,” and Groundhog Day in the Comment Section
Welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays, where we stay curious, stay skeptical, and keep a healthy distance from any dogma, whether it’s wrapped in a Bible verse or a political ideology.
This is Part Two of my Jesus Myth series, and I’m going to be straight with you:
This one is a doozy. Buckle up, buttercup. Feel free to pause and come back.
Originally, the plan was to bring David Fitzgerald back for another conversation. If you listened to Part One, you know he’s done a ton to popularize the idea that Jesus never existed and to dismantle Christian dogma. I still agree with the core mythicist claim: I don’t think the Jesus of the Gospels was a real historical person. If you missed it, here is the link.
But agreeing with someone’s conclusion doesn’t mean I hand them a free pass on how they argue.
After our first interview, I went deeper into Fitzgerald’s work and into critiques of it (especially Tim O’Neill’s long atheist review that absolutely shreds his method.) While his critique of Fitzgerald’s arguments is genuinely useful; his habit of branding people with political labels (“Trump supporter,” “denier”) to discredit them is… very regressive.
It’s the same purity-testing impulse you see in progressive (should be regressive) spaces, just performed in a different costume.
And that’s what finally pushed me over the edge: The more I watch the atheist/deconstruction world online, the more it reminded me of the exact rigid, dogmatic cultures people say they escaped.
Not all atheists, obviously. But a very loud chunk of that ecosystem runs on:
dunking, dog-piling, and humiliation
tribal loyalty, not actual inquiry
“You’re dead to me” energy toward anyone who may lean conservative or shows nuance
It’s purity culture in different branding.
Then I read how Fitzgerald responded to critics in those archived blog exchanges (not with clear counterarguments) but with emotional name-calling and an almost devotional defense of his “hero and mentor,” Richard Carrier. For me, that was a hard stop.
Add to that: his public Facebook feed is full of contempt for moderates, conservatives, “anti-vaxxers,” and basically anyone outside progressive orthodoxy. My audience includes exactly those people. This space is built for nuance for people who’ve already escaped one rigid belief system and are not shopping for a new one.
He’s free to have his politics. I’m free not to platform that energy.
So instead of Part Two with a guest, you’re getting something I honestly think is better:
me (😜)
a stack of sources
a comment section that turned into a live demo of modern apologetics
and a segment at the end where I turn the same critical lens on the mythicist side — including Fitzgerald himself
Yes, we’re going there. Just not yet.
Previously on Taste of Truth…
In Part One, I unpacked why “Jesus might never have existed” is treated like a taboo thought — even though the historical evidence is thin and the standards used to “prove” Jesus would never pass in any other field of ancient history.
Then, in a Taste Test Thursday episode, I zoomed out and asked: Why do apologists argue like this at all? We walked through:
early church power moves
modern thought-stopping tricks
and Neil Van Leeuwen’s idea of religious “credences,” which don’t function like normal factual beliefs at all
Today is about the evidence. Especially the apologetic tropes that showed up in my comments like a glitching NPC on repeat.
⭐ MYTHS #6 & #7 — “History and Archaeology Confirm the Gospels”
Papyrus P52 (𝔓52), often called the oldest New Testament manuscript. (It’s the size of a credit card) Apologists treat it like a smoking gun. It contains… one complete word: ‘the.’
These two myths always show up together in the comments, and honestly, they feed off each other. People claim, “history confirms the Gospels,” and when that collapses, they jump to “archaeology proves Jesus existed.” So, I’m combining them here, because the evidence (and the problems) overlap more than apologists want to admit.
In short: Archaeology confirms the setting. History confirms the existence of Christians. Neither confirms the Jesus of the Gospels. And once you actually look at the evidence, the apologetic scaffolding falls apart fast.
1. What Archaeology Really Shows (and What It Doesn’t)
If Jesus were a public figure performing miracles, drawing crowds, causing disturbances, and being executed by Rome, archaeology should show something tied to him or to his original movement.
Here’s what archaeology does show:
Nazareth existed.
Capernaum existed.
The general layout of Judea under Rome.
Ritual baths, synagogues, pottery, coins.
A real Pilate (from a fragmentary inscription).
That’s the setting.
Here’s what archaeology has never produced:
no house of Jesus
no workshop or tools
no tomb we can authenticate
no inscription naming him
no artifacts linked to the Twelve
no evidence of a public ministry
no trace of Gospel-level notoriety
Not even a rumor in archaeology that points to a miracle-working rabbi. Ancient Troy existing doesn’t prove Achilles existed. Nazareth existing doesn’t prove Jesus existed.
Apologists push the setting as if it confirms the character. It doesn’t.
If the Gospels were eyewitness-based biographies, their geography would line up with first-century Palestine.
Instead, we get:
• Towns that don’t match reality
The Gerasene/Gadarene/Gergesa demon-pig fiasco moves between three different locations because the original story (Mark) puts Jesus 30 miles inland… nowhere near a lake or cliffs.
• Galilee described like a later era
Archaeology shows Galilee in the 20s CE was:
taxed to the bone
rebellious
dotted with large Romanized cities like Sepphoris and Tiberias
But the Gospels portray quaint fishing villages, peaceful Pharisees, and quiet countryside. This reflects post-70 CE Galilee: the era when the Gospels were actually written.
• Homeric storms on a tiny lake
Mark treats the Sea of Galilee like the Aegean (raging storms, near capsizings, disciples fearing death) even though ancient critics mocked this because the “sea” is a small lake.
Dennis MacDonald shows Mark lifting whole scenes from Homer, which explains the mismatch: his geography serves his literary needs, not the historical landscape.
• Joseph of “Arimathea” (a town no one can find)
Carrier and others point out the name works more like a literary pun (“best disciple town”) than a real toponym.
• Emmaus placed at different distances
Luke places it seven miles away. Other manuscripts vary. There was no fixed memory.
These aren’t the mistakes of people writing about their homeland. They’re the mistakes of later authors constructing a symbolic landscape.
3. The Gospel Trial Scenes: Legally Impossible
This is the part Christians never touch.
One of the most respected legal scholars of ancient Jewish law did a line-by-line analysis of the Gospel trial scenes. He wasn’t writing from a religious angle, he approached it strictly as a historian of legal procedure.
His conclusion? The trial described in the Gospels violates almost every rule of how Jewish courts actually worked.
According to his research:
capital trials were never held at night
they were not allowed during festivals like Passover
capital verdicts required multiple days, not hours
the High Priest did not interrogate defendants
witness testimony had to match
beating a prisoner during questioning was illegal
and Jewish courts didn’t simply hand people over to Rome
When you stack these facts together, it becomes clear:
The Gospel trial scenes aren’t legal history…. they’re theological storytelling.
That’s before we even get to Pilate.
Pilate was not a timid bureaucrat.
He was violent, ruthless, removed from office for brutality.
4. Acts Doesn’t Remember Any Gospel Miracles
If Jesus actually:
drew crowds,
fed thousands,
raised the dead,
blacked out the sun,
split the Temple curtain,
and resurrected publicly…
Acts (written after the Gospels) should remember all of this.
Instead:
No one in Acts has heard of Jesus.
No one mentions an empty tomb.
No one cites miracles as recent events.
Roman officials are clueless.
Paul knows Jesus only through visions and the scriptures.
Acts behaves exactly like a community whose “history” was not yet written.
5. Manuscripts: Many Copies, No Control
Apologists love saying:
“We have 24,000 manuscripts!”
Quantity isn’t quality.
almost all are medieval
the earliest are tiny scraps
none are originals
no first-century copies
scribes altered texts freely
entire passages were added or deleted
six of Paul’s letters are pseudonymous
many early Christian writings were forged
Even Origen admitted that scribes “add and remove what they please” (privately, of course.)
The manuscript tradition looks nothing like reliable preservation.
6. The Church Fathers Don’t Help (and They Were Tampered With Too)
This is where Fitzgerald’s chapter hits hardest.
Before 150 CE, we have:
no Church Father quoting any Gospel
no awareness of four distinct Gospels
no clear references to Gospel events
Justin Martyr (writing in the 150s) is the first to quote anything Gospel-like, and:
he never names Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John
many of his quotes don’t match our Gospels
he calls them simply “the memoirs”
Even worse:
The writings of Ignatius, Polycarp, Dionysius of Corinth, and many others were tampered with. Some were forged entirely.
So the apologetic claim “The Fathers confirm the Gospels” collapses:
They don’t quote them. They don’t know them. And their own texts are unstable.
Metzger claimed we could reconstruct the New Testament from the Fathers’ quotations but his own scholarship shows the Fathers don’t quote anything reliably until after the Gospels were circulating.
7. External Pagan Sources: Late, Thin, and Dependent on Christian Claims
This is the other half of the myth… that “history” outside the Bible confirms Jesus.
Let’s look quickly:
• Tacitus (116 CE)
Reports what Christians of his day believed. He cites no source, no archive, no investigation.
• Pliny (c. 111 CE)
Says Christians worship Christ “as a god.” Confirms Christians existed — not that Jesus did.
• Josephus (93 CE)
The Testimonium is tampered with. Even conservative scholars admit Christian hands were all over it. The “James, brother of Jesus” line is ambiguous at best.
These are not independent confirmations. They’re late echoes of Christian claims.
In closing:
You can confirm:
towns
coins
synagogues
political offices
geography
But that only shows the world existed, not the characters.
The Gospels are theological narratives composed decades later, stitched out of scripture, symbolism, literary models, and the needs of competing communities.
Archaeology confirms the backdrop. History confirms the movement. Neither confirms the biography.
Once you strip away apologetic spin, the evidence points to late, literary, constructed narratives, not eyewitness records of a historical man.
Myth #8: “Paul and the Epistles Confirm the Gospels”
Albert Schweitzer pointed out that if we only had Paul’s letters, we would never know that:
Jesus taught in parables
gave the Sermon on the Mount
told the “Our Father” prayer
healed people in Galilee
debated Pharisees
From Paul and the other epistles, you wouldn’t even know Jesus was from Nazareth or born in Bethlehem.
That alone should make us pause before saying, “Paul confirms the Gospels.”
Paul’s “Gospel” Is Not a Life Story
When Paul says “my gospel,” he doesn’t mean a narrative like Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. His gospel is:
Christ died for our sins
was buried
was raised
now offers salvation to those who trust him
No:
Bethlehem, Nazareth, Mary, Joseph
John the Baptist
miracles, exorcisms, parables
empty tomb story with women at dawn
And this isn’t because Paul is forgetful. His letters are full of perfect moments to say, “As Jesus taught us…” or “As we all know from our Lord’s ministry…”
He never does.
Instead, he appeals to:
his own visions
the Hebrew scriptures (in Greek translation, the Septuagint)
what “the Lord” reveals directly to him
For Paul, Christ is:
“the image of the invisible God”
“firstborn of all creation”
the cosmic figure through whom all things were made
the one who descends to the lower realms, defeats spiritual powers, and ascends again
That is cosmic myth language… not “my friend’s rabbi who did a lot of teaching in Galilee a few decades ago.”
The “Lord’s Supper,” Not a Last Supper
The one place people think Paul lines up with the Gospels is 1 Corinthians 11, where he describes “the Lord’s Supper.”
Look closely:
He never calls it “the Last Supper.”
He never says it was a Passover meal.
He never places it in Jerusalem.
He says he received this ritual from the Lord, not from human eyewitnesses.
The phrase he uses, kuriakon deipnon (“Lord’s dinner”), is the same kind of language used for sacred meals in pagan mystery cults.
The verb he uses for “handed over” is used elsewhere of God handing Christ over, or Christ handing himself over not of a buddy’s betrayal. The specific “Judas betrayed him at dinner” motif shows up later, in the Gospels.
Then, when later authors retell the scene, they can’t even agree on the script. We get:
Paul’s version
Mark’s version
Matthew’s tweak on Mark
Luke’s two different textual forms
and John, who skips a Last Supper entirely and relocates the “eat my flesh, drink my blood” thing to a synagogue sermon in Capernaum
That looks less like multiple eyewitness reports and more like a liturgical formula evolving as it gets theologized.
Hebrews and the Missing Connection
The author of Hebrews:
goes deep on covenant and sacrificial blood
quotes Moses: “This is the blood of the covenant…”
spends time on Melchizedek, who brings bread and wine and blesses Abraham
In other words: The author sets up what would be a perfect sermon illustration for the Last Supper… but he never takes it. No “as our Lord did on the night he was betrayed.” No Eucharist scene. No Passover meal.
The simplest explanation: He doesn’t know that story. He knows the ritual meaning; the later narrative scene in Jerusalem hasn’t been invented yet in his circle.
How Paul Says He Knows Christ
Paul is very clear about his source:
He did not receive his gospel from any human (Galatians 1).
He barely met the Jerusalem “pillars,” waited years to even visit them, and insists they added nothing to his message.
He says God “revealed his Son in me.”
His scriptures are the Septuagint, which he reads as a giant coded story about Christ.
In other words, for Paul:
Christ is a hidden heavenly figure revealed in scripture and visions.
The “mystery” has just now been unveiled.
That only makes sense if there wasn’t already a widely known human teacher whose sayings and deeds were circulating everywhere.
The Silence of the Other Epistles
If it were just Paul, we could say, “That’s just Paul being weird.”
But the pattern runs across the other epistles:
From the New Testament letters outside the Gospels and Acts, you would never know:
Jesus was from Nazareth or born in Bethlehem
he grew up in Galilee
he taught crowds, told parables, healed people, or exorcised demons
he had twelve disciples, one of whom betrayed him
there were sacred sites tied to his life in Jerusalem
“Bethlehem,” “Nazareth,” “Galilee” do not appear in those letters with reference to Jesus. Jerusalem is never presented as, “You know, the place where all this just happened.”
The supposed “brothers of the Lord” never act like family with stories to tell. The letters attributed to James and Jude don’t even mention they’re related to Jesus.
When these early authors argue about circumcision, food laws, purity, and ethics, they consistently go back to the Old Testament…not to anything like a Sermon on the Mount.
That is very hard to reconcile with a memory of a recent, popular Galilean preacher inspiring the entire movement.
Myth #9: “Christianity Began With Jesus and His Twelve Besties”
If you grew up on Acts, you probably have this movie in your head:
Tiny, persecuted but unified Jesus movement
Centered in Jerusalem
Led by Jesus’ family and the Twelve
Paul shows up later in season two as the complex antihero
That’s the canonical story.
When you step back and read our earliest sources on their own terms, that picture melts.
Fragmented from the Start
In 1 Corinthians, Paul complains:
“Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:12–13)
That’s not “one unified church.”
He also:
rants about people “preaching another Jesus”
calls rival apostles “deceitful workers,” “false brothers,” “servants of Satan”
invokes curses on those preaching a different gospel (Gal. 1:6–9; 2 Cor. 11)
Meanwhile, the early Christian manual Didakhē warns communities about wandering preachers who are just “traffickers in Christs” (what Bart Ehrman nicknames “Christ-mongers.”)
Right away, we see:
multiple groups using the Christ label
competing versions of what “the gospel” even is
no sign of one tight central group everyone agrees on
Different Jesuses for Different Communities
By the time the Gospels and later texts are in circulation, we can already see:
Paul’s Christ: a cosmic, heavenly savior, revealed in scripture and visions, ruling spiritual realms
Thomasine Christ: in the Gospel of Thomas, salvation comes through hidden wisdom; there’s no crucifixion or resurrection narrative
Mark’s Jesus: a suffering, misunderstood Son of God who’s “adopted” at baptism and abandoned at the cross
John’s Jesus: the eternal Logos, present at creation, walking around announcing his unity with the Father
Hebrews’ Christ: the heavenly High Priest performing a sacrifice in a heavenly sanctuary
These are not just “different camera angles on the same historical guy.” They reflect:
different liturgies
different cosmologies
different starting assumptions about who or what Christ even is
And notice: there is no clean pipeline from “this man’s twelve students carefully preserved his teachings” into this wild diversity.
Paul vs. Peter: Not a Cute Disagreement
Acts spins the Jerusalem meeting as:
everyone sits down
hashes things out
walks away in perfect unity
Paul’s own account (Galatians 2) is… not that:
he calls some of the Jerusalem people “false brothers”
he says they were trying to enslave believers
he says he “did not yield to them for a moment”
he treats the supposed “pillars” (Peter, James, John) as nobodies who “added nothing” to his gospel
That’s not a friendly staff meeting. That’s two rival Christianities:
a more Torah-observant, Jerusalem-centered Jesus-sect
Paul’s law-free, Gentile-mystic Christ-sect
Acts, written later, airbrushes this into harmony. The letters show how close the whole thing came to a full split.
Where Are the Twelve?
If Jesus’ twelve disciples were:
real,
the main founders of Christianity,
traveling around planting churches,
we’d expect:
lots of references to them
preserved teachings and letters
at least some reliable biographical detail
Instead:
the lists of the Twelve don’t agree between Gospels
some manuscripts can’t even settle on their names
outside the Gospels and Acts, the Twelve basically vanish from the first-century record
Paul:
never quotes “the Twelve”
never appeals to them as the final authority
treats Peter, James, John simply as rival apostles, not as Jesus’ old friends
We have no authentic writings from any of the Twelve. The later “Acts of Peter,” “Acts of Andrew,” “Acts of Thomas,” etc., are generally acknowledged to be later inventions.
The simplest explanation is not that the Twelve were historically massive and weirdly left no trace. It’s that:
“The Twelve” are symbolic: twelve tribes, twelve cosmic seats, twelve zodiac signs, take your pick.
Their names and “biographies” were built after the theology, not before.
The Kenosis Hymn: Jesus as a Title, Not a Birth Name
In Philippians 2, Paul quotes an early hymn:
“Being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — death on a cross. Therefore God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow…”
Notice:
The hymn does not say God gave him the title “Lord.”
It says God gave him the name Jesus after the exaltation.
That is not what you expect if “Jesus” was already the known name of a village carpenter from Nazareth. It makes a lot more sense if:
“Jesus” functions originally as a divine name for a savior figure (“Yahweh saves”),
assigned in the mythic story after his cosmic act,
and only later gets retrofitted as the everyday name of a human hero.
Mark: From Mystery Faith to “Biography”
All of this funnels into the earliest Gospel: Mark.
Mark announces up front that he’s writing a gospel, not a biography. Modern scholars have shown that Mark:
builds scenes out of Old Testament passages
mirrors patterns from Greek epics
structures the story like a giant parable, where insiders are given “the mystery of the kingdom,” and outsiders only get stories
In Mark’s own framework, Jesus speaks in parables so that many will see but not understand. The whole Gospel plays that way: symbolic narrative first, later read as straight history once the church gains power.
So did Christianity “begin with Jesus and his apostles”?
If by that you mean:
One coherent movement, founded by a famous rabbi with twelve close disciples, faithfully transmitted from Jerusalem outward…
Then no. That’s the myth.
What we actually see is:
multiple competing Jesuses
rival gospels and factions
no clear paper trail from “Jesus’ inner circle”
later authors stitching together a cleaned-up origin story and branding rivals as “heresy”
Biographies came after belief, not before.
Myth #10: “Christianity Was a Miraculous Overnight Success That Changed the World”
The standard Christian flex goes like this:
“No mere myth could have spread so fast and changed the world so profoundly. That proves Jesus was real.”
Let’s slow that down.
But before we even touch the growth rates, we need to name something obvious that apologists conveniently forget:
Christianity wasn’t the first tradition built around a dying-and-rising savior. Not even close.
Long before the Gospels were written, the ancient Near East had already produced fully developed resurrection myths. One of the oldest (and one of the most important) belonged to Inanna, the Sumerian Queen of Heaven.
Ancient Akkadian cylinder seal (2350–2150 BCE) depicting Inanna
Inanna’s Descent (c. 2000–3000 BCE) is the earliest recorded resurrection narrative in human history.
She descends into the Underworld, is stripped, judged, executed, hung on a hook, and then through divine intervention, is brought back to life and restored to her throne.
This story predates Christianity by two thousand years and was well known across Mesopotamia.
In other words:
✨ The idea that a divine figure dies, descends into darkness, and returns transformed was already ancient before Christianity was even born.
So, the claim that “no myth could spread unless it were historically real” falls apart immediately. Myths did spread. Myths do spread. Myths shaped entire civilizations long before Jesus entered the story.
Now (with that context in place) let’s actually talk about Christianity’s growth..
Christianities Stayed Small…. Until Politics Changed
Carrier’s modeling makes it clear:
even if you start with generous numbers (say 5,000 believers in 40 CE),
you still don’t get anywhere near a significant percentage of the Empire until well into the third century
And that includes all groups who believed in some form of Christ — including the later-branded “heretics.”
So, for the first ~250 years, Christianity:
is tiny
is fragmented
is one cult among many in a very crowded religious landscape
The “miracle” is not early explosive growth. It’s what happens when their tiny, disciplined network suddenly gets access to empire-level power.
Rome Falls; Christianity Rises
Fitzgerald is right that Christianity benefitted from Rome’s third-century crisis:
chronic civil wars
inflation and currency debasement
border instability and barbarian incursions
trade networks breaking down
urban life contracting
As conditions worsened:
Christianity’s disdain for “worldly” culture
its emphasis on endurance, suffering, and heavenly reward
its growing bishop-led structure and charity networks
…all became more attractive to the poor and dispossessed.
“It was a mark of Constantine’s political genius … that he realized it was better to utilize a religion … that already had a well‑established structure of authority … rather than exclude it as a hindrance.” Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason
But there’s a step many historians including Fitzgerald often underplay:
How Christianity destroyed the classical world.
From Tolerated to Favored to Tyrannical
A quick timeline:
313-Constantine legalizes Christianity (Edict of Milan). Christianity is now allowed, not official. Constantine still honors Sol Invictus and dies as a pagan emperor who also patronized bishops.
4th century– Christian bishops gain wealth and political leverage. Imperial funds start flowing to churches. Pagan temples begin to be looted or repurposed.
380– Emperor Theodosius I issues the Edict of Thessalonica: Nicene Christianity becomes the official state religion.
395 and after– Laws begin banning pagan sacrifices and temple worship. Pagan rites become crimes.
Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age and Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind document how this looked on the ground:
temples closed, looted, or destroyed
statues smashed
libraries and shrines burned
philosophers harassed, exiled, or killed
non-Christian rites criminalized
Christianity didn’t “persuade” its way to exclusive dominance. It:
received funding and legal favor
then helped outlaw and dismantle its competition
That is not a moral judgment; it’s just how imperial religions behave.
The “Overnight Success” That Took Centuries and a State
So was Christianity a new, radically different, overnight success?
Not new: it recycled the son-of-god savior pattern, sacred meals, initiation, and rebirth themes common in the religious world around it. Even early church fathers admitted the similarities and blamed them on Satan “counterfeiting” Christianity in advance.
Not overnight: it stayed statistically tiny for generations.
Not purely spiritual success: it became powerful when emperors needed an obedient, centralized religious hierarchy to stabilize a collapsing state.
Christianity didn’t “win” because its evidence was overwhelming.
It won because:
it fit the needs of late-imperial politics
it built a strong internal hierarchy
it could supply social services
its leaders were willing to suppress, outlaw, and overwrite rival traditions
This is not unique. It’s a textbook case of how state-backed religions spread.
Why the Pushback Always Sounds the Same
After Part One, my comment sections turned into Groundhog Day:
“You’re ignoring Tacitus and Josephus!”
“Every serious scholar agrees Jesus existed.”
“Archaeology proves the Bible.”
“There are 25,000 manuscripts.”
“Paul met Jesus’ brother!”
“If Jesus wasn’t real, who started Christianity?”
“Ancient critics never denied his existence — checkmate.”
“You just hate religion.”
“This is misinformation.”
Different usernames. Same script.
This is where Neil Van Leeuwen’s work on religious credences helps:
Factual beliefs are supposed to track evidence. If you show me credible new data, I update.
Religious credences function differently: they’re tied to identity, community, and morality. Their job isn’t to track facts; it’s to hold the group together.
So when you challenge Jesus’ historicity, you’re not just questioning an ancient figure. You’re touching:
“Who am I?”
“Who are my people?”
“What makes my life meaningful?”
No wonder people come in hot.
That doesn’t make them stupid or evil. It just means the conversation isn’t really about Tacitus. It’s about identity maintenance.
Now Let’s Turn the Lens on Mythicism (Yes, Including Fitzgerald)
Here’s where I want to be very clear:
I am a mythicist.
I do not think the Jesus of the Gospels ever existed as a historical person.
But mythicism itself doesn’t get a free pass.
Carrier’s Probability Model: When Someone Actually Does the Math
Most debates about Jesus collapse into appeals to authority. Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus at least does something different: it quantifies the evidence.
Using Bayesian reasoning, he argues roughly:
about a 1 in 3 prior probability that there was a “minimal historical Jesus”– a real Jewish teacher who got executed and inspired a movement
about 2 in 3 for a “minimal mythicist” origin– a celestial figure whose story later got historicized
Then, after weighing the actual evidence (Paul’s silence, the late Gospels, contradictions, etc.), he argues the probability of a historical Jesus drops further, to something like 1 in 12.
You don’t have to agree with his exact numbers to see the point:
Once you treat the sources like data, not dogma, the overconfident “of course Jesus existed, you idiot” stance looks a lot less justified.
O’Neill’s Critique of Fitzgerald: Atheist vs Atheist
Tim O’Neill, an atheist historian, wrote a long piece on Fitzgerald’s Nailed and does not hold back. His basic charges:
Fitzgerald oversells weak arguments
cherry-picks and misuses sources
ignores mainstream scholarship where it contradicts him
frames mythicism as bold truth vs. “apologist cowards,” which is just another tribal narrative
When Fitzgerald responded, he didn’t do so like someone doing serious historical work. He responded like an internet keyboard warrior.
And that same ideological vibe shows up in how he talks about people in general, which I said in the beginning.
Atheism as New Orthodoxy
The more time I spend watching atheist and deconstruction spaces online, the more obvious it becomes that a lot of these folks didn’t escape religion, they just changed uniforms. They swapped their church pews for Reddit threads, pastors for science influencers, and now “logic” is their new scripture. Ya feel me? It’s the same emotional energy: tribal validation, purity tests–like what do you believe or think about this? And the constant hunt for heretics who dare to ask inconvenient questions.
Say something even slightly outside the approved dogma…like pointing out that evolution (calm down, Darwin disciples) still has gaps and theoretical edges we haven’t fully nailed down and suddenly the comment section becomes the Inquisition. They defend the theory with the exact same fervor evangelicals defend the Book of Revelation. It’s wild.
And look, I’m all for science. I’m literally the girl who reads academic papers for funsies. But when atheists start treating evolution like a sacred cow that can’t be questioned, or acting like “reason” is this perfect, unbiased tool that magically supports all their existing beliefs… that’s not skepticism. That’s a new orthodoxy, dressed up as a freethinker. Different vocabulary, same psychology. Good gravy, baby— calm down.
and….here’s the uncomfortable truth a lot of atheists don’t want to hear:
Reason isn’t the savior they think it is.
French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have spent years studying how humans actually use reason and prepare yourself because: we don’t use it the way we think. Their research shows that reason didn’t evolve to help us discover truth. It evolved to help us win arguments, protect our identities, and persuade members of our group.
In other words:
confirmation bias isn’t a flaw
motivated reasoning isn’t a glitch
tribal loyalty isn’t an accident
They are features of the reasoning system.
Which is why people who worship “logic” often behave exactly like the religious communities they left… just with new vocabulary and a different set of heretics.
This is also why intellectual diversity matters so much. You cannot reason your way to truth inside an ideological monoculture. Your brain simply won’t let you. Without competing perspectives, reasoning becomes nothing more than rhetorical self-defense, a way to signal loyalty to the tribe while pretending to be above it.
John Stuart Mill understood this long before modern cognitive science confirmed it. In On Liberty, Mill argues that truth isn’t something we protect by silencing dissent. Truth emerges through friction, through the clash of differing perspectives. A community that prides itself on “rational superiority” but cannot tolerate disagreement becomes just another church with a different hymnal.
And that’s where many atheist and deconstruction spaces are now.
They haven’t transcended dogma. They’ve recreated it. Trading one orthodoxy for another.
This isn’t just about online atheists. This is about what happens when any movement stops questioning itself.
Challenging the Mythicist Side (Without Turning It Into Another Tribe)
Let’s get honest about the mythicist world too — because every camp has its blind spots.
Tim O’Neill’s critique of David Fitzgerald wasn’t just angry rhetoric. Strip away the insults, and he raises a few legitimate issues worth taking seriously:
1. Accusation of Agenda-Driven History
O’Neill argues that Fitzgerald starts with the conclusion “Jesus didn’t exist” and works backward, much like creationists do with Genesis.
Now Fitzgerald absolutely denies this. In his own words, he didn’t go looking for mythicism; mythicism found him when he started examining the evidence. And that’s fair.
But the deeper point still stands:
The mythicist movement can get so emotionally invested in debunking Christianity that it mirrors the very dogmatism it critiques.
You see this all over atheist spaces today — endless dunking, no nuance, purity tests, and very little actual curiosity.
That’s a valid critique.
2. Amateurism and Overreach
O’Neill also accuses Fitzgerald of relying too heavily on older scholarship, making confident claims where the evidence is thin, and occasionally overstating consensus.
Again — not entirely wrong. Fitzgerald’s book is sharp and compelling, but it’s not the cutting-edge end of mythicism anymore.
There are places where he simplifies. There are places where he speculates.
This matters because mythicism deserves better than overconfident shortcuts.
3. Fitzgerald doesn’t push far enough
And ironically, this is where I diverge from O’Neill entirely. He thinks Fitzgerald goes too far; I think Fitzgerald stops too soon.
There are areas where the mythicist case has advanced beyond Fitzgerald’s framework, and he doesn’t touch them:
• The possibility that “Paul” himself is a literary construct
Nina Livesey and other scholars argue that:
The Pauline voice may be a 2nd-century invention.
The letters reflect Roman rhetorical conventions, not authentic 1st-century correspondence.
The “apostle Paul” may be a theological persona used to unify competing sects.
Fitzgerald doesn’t address this— but it’s now one of the most provocative frontiers in the field.
• The geopolitical legacy of Abrahamic supremacy
Fitzgerald critiques Christian nationalism. Great. But he doesn’t go upstream to examine the deeper architecture:
It focuses almost exclusively on Christian excess while leaving the deeper architecture untouched: how Abrahamic identity claims themselves shape law, land, empire, and modern geopolitics.
When you zoom out, the story is not “Christian nationalism versus secular reason.”
It is competing and cooperating Abrahamic power structures, each with theological claims about chosen-ness, inheritance, land, and destiny.
Abrahamic Power Is Not Just Christian
Very few people are willing to look at the broader landscape of Abrahamic influence in American politics and global power structures. When they do not, they miss how deeply intertwined these traditions have been for over a century.
One under-discussed example is the longstanding institutional relationship between Mormonism and Judaism, particularly around shared claims to Israel and the “house of Israel.”
This is not hidden history.
In 1995, Utah Valley State College established a Center for Jewish Studies explicitly aimed at “bridging the gap between Jews and Mormons” and guiding relationships connected to Israel. One of the board members was Jack Solomon, a Jewish community leader who publicly praised the LDS Church as uniquely supportive of Judaism.
Solomon stated at the time that “there is no place in the world where the Christian community has been so supportive of the Jewish people and Judaism,” noting LDS financial and symbolic support for Jewish institutions in Utah going back to the early twentieth century.
This matters because Mormon theology explicitly claims descent from the house of Israel. Mormons do not merely admire Judaism. They see themselves as part of Israel’s continuation and restoration.
That theological framework shapes real-world alliances.
1. The Mormon Church Is a Financial Superpower
Most Americans have no idea how wealthy the LDS Church actually is.
The Mormon Church’s real estate & investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, was exposed in 2019 and again in 2023 for managing a secret portfolio now estimated at:
👉 $150–$200 billion
(Source: SEC filings, whistleblower leaks, Wall Street Journal)
To compare:
PepsiCo market cap: ~$175B
ExxonMobil (oil giant): ~$420B
Disney: ~$160B
Meaning:
📌 The LDS Church is financially on par with Pepsi and Disney, and not far behind Big Oil.
This is not a “church.” This is an empire.
And it invests strategically:
massive real estate acquisitions
agricultural control
media companies
political lobbying
funding influence networks
And let’s be clear: Mormons see themselves as a literal remnant of Israel (the last tribe) destined to help rule the Earth “in the last days.”
Which brings us to…
2. Mormonism’s Quiet Partnership with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR)
NAR is the movement behind the so-called “Seven Mountain Mandate”— the belief that Christians must seize control of:
Government
Education
Media
Arts & Entertainment
Business
Religion
Family
This is the backbone of Christian nationalism and it’s far more organized than people realize. But here’s the part that never gets discussed:
Mormon elites collaborate with NAR leadership behind the scenes.
Shared goals:
influence over U.S. political leadership
shaping national morality laws
preparing for a prophetic “kingdom age”
embedding power in those seven spheres
This isn’t fringe. This is the largest religious–political coalition in the country, and yet most journalists never touch it.
3. The Ziklag Group: A $25M-Minimum Christian Power Circle
You want to talk about “elite networks”?
Meet Ziklag: an ultra-exclusive Christian organization named after King David’s biblical stronghold. Requirements for membership: a minimum net worth of $25 million Their mission? Not charity. Not discipleship.
Influence the Seven Mountains of society at the highest levels.
Members include:
CEOs
hedge-fund managers
defense contractors
political donors
tech founders
Including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.
AND YET…
Most people yelling about “Christian nationalism” have never even heard of Ziklag.
4. Meanwhile, Chabad-Lubavitch Has Met with Every U.S. President Since 1978
Evangelical influence isn’t the only Abrahamic power Americans ignore.
Chabad (a Hasidic cult with global reach) has:
direct access to every U.S. president
annual White House proclamations (“Education & Sharing Day”) explicitly honor a religious leader as a moral authority over the nation.
a network of emissaries (shluchim) embedded in power centers around the world
This is influence, not conspiracy.
This is religious lobbying at the highest level of government, treated as unremarkable simply because the public doesn’t understand it.
The Rebbe’s ambassador to Washington D.C., Rabbi Abraham Shemtov, addresses the crowd at an event in front of the White House organized by American Friends of Lubavitch, as President Carter and The Honorable Stuart E. Eizenstat, Chief Domestic Policy Adviser and the Executive Director of the White House Domestic Policy Staff, look on.
President Gerald Ford is greeted by Rabbi Abraham Shemtov (left), national director of American Friends of Lubavitch; Rabbi Moshe Feller (right), Chabad-Lubavitch emissary to Minnesota; and Senator Rudy Boschwitz; at the American Friends of Lubavitch Philadelphia dinner, May 1975.
President Ronald Reagan signs the Education Day U.S.A. proclamation
President Bill Clinton places a dollar bill in a charity box after receiving members of the American Friends of Lubavitch in the White House.
President George W. Bush speaks to Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis after signing the Education Day U.S.A. proclamation.
President Obama Welcomes Chabad-Lubavitch to the White House
Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis meet with President Donald J. Trump on Education and Sharing Day, U.S.A. in 2018. “The First Lady and I encourage all Americans to reflect upon the Rebbe’s teachings,” President Trump wrote in this year’s proclamation. “His inestimable dedication and unwavering example have become woven into the very fabric of our nation and its character. His memory remains a blessing to the world.”
Biden meets with over 100 Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis
See the Pattern Yet?
When people say “Christian nationalism,” they’re talking about one branch of a much older tree.
Christianity isn’t the problem. Atheism isn’t the solution.
The issue is Abrahamic supremacy: the belief that one sacred lineage has the right to rule, legislate, moralize, and define history for everyone else.
Across denominations, across continents, across political parties, the pattern is the same:
chosen-people narratives
divine-right entitlement
mythic land claims
sacred-tier influence operations
the blending of theology with statecraft
“Groupish belief systems that justify valuing one’s group above others must be inventable.” — Religion as Make-Believe.
Exactly.
These power structures aren’t ancient relics. They’re alive, wealthy, organized, and deeply embedded in American political life. And yet we’re told to panic exclusively about MAGA Christians… while studiously ignoring:
Mormon financial empires
NAR infiltration of U.S. political offices
Zionist influence networks
Chabad’s presidential pipeline
elite Christian dominionist groups like Ziklag
This isn’t about blaming individuals.
It’s about naming systems. Because if we’re going to talk honestly about orthodoxy, myth, and power…
we need to talk about all of it— not just the parts that are fashionable to critique.
4. Mythicism still hasn’t grappled with empire
Most mythicist writing stops at: “Jesus didn’t exist.”
Cool. Now what? The real question is:
HOW? How did a mythical figure become the operating system for Western civilization?
So, here’s where I actually land:
Christianity didn’t emerge from a single man. It emerged from competing myths, political incentives, scriptural remixing, imperial needs, and evolving group identities.
And if that makes me someone who doesn’t quite fit in the Christian world, the atheist world, or the deconstruction world? Perfect. My loyalty is to the question, not the tribe. That’s exactly where I plan to stay.
That’s exactly where I plan to stay.
aaaand as always, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in. 🎙️🔒
Footnotes
1. Jodi Magness, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit (Eerdmans, 2011).
Archaeologist specializing in 1st-century Judea; emphasizes that archaeology illuminates daily life, but cannot confirm Jesus’ existence or Gospel events.
2. Eric M. Meyers & Mark A. Chancey, Archaeology, the Rabbis, and Early Christianity (Baker Academic, 2012).
Shows how archaeology supports context, not Gospel narrative details.
3. Steve Mason, Josephus and the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Hendrickson, 2003).
Explains why the Testimonium Flavianum is partially or heavily interpolated and cannot serve as independent confirmation of Jesus.
4. Alice Whealey, “The Testimonium Flavianum in Syriac and Arabic,” New Testament Studies 54.4 (2008): 573–590.
Analyzes manuscript traditions showing Christian editing of Josephus.
5. Louis Feldman, “Josephus,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3 (Yale University Press, 1992).
Standard reference summarizing scholarly consensus about the unreliable portions of Josephus’ Jesus passages.
6. Brent Shaw, “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution,” Journal of Roman Studies 105 (2015): 73–100.
Shows Tacitus likely repeats Christian stories, not archival Roman data, making him a witness to Christian belief — not Jesus’ historicity.
7. Pliny the Younger, Epistles 10.96–97.
Earliest Roman description of Christian worship; confirms Christians existed, not that Jesus did.
8. Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus (HarperOne, 2005).
Explains why New Testament manuscripts contain thousands of variations, with no originals surviving.
9. Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (Yale University Press, 2000).
Argues Mark intentionally modeled episodes on Homeric motifs — supporting literary construction rather than eyewitness reporting.
10. Attridge, Harold W., The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia Commentary Series).
Shows how Hebrews relies on celestial priesthood imagery and makes no connection to a recent earthly Jesus, even when opportunities are obvious.
11. Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle (1999).
Early mythicist argument emphasizing the epistles’ lack of biographical Jesus data.
12. Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix, 2014).
Presents a Bayesian model estimating mythicist origins as more probable than historicity.
13. Richard Carrier, Proving History (Prometheus, 2012).
Explains the historical method he uses for evaluating Jesus traditions.
14. Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (Yale University Press, 2000).
Demonstrates the pluralism and fragmentation within earliest Christianity.
15. Burton Mack, The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy (Continuum, 2006).
Describes the emergence of various Jesus traditions as literary and theological constructions.
16. Clayton N. Jefford, The Didache (Fortress Press).
Analyzes early church manual revealing “wandering prophets,” factionalism, and market-style competition among early Jesus groups.
17. Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age (Macmillan, 2017).
Documents the destruction of pagan culture under Christian imperial dominance.
18. Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind (Vintage, 2005).
Explores how Christian orthodoxy displaced classical philosophy.
19. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (Yale University Press, 1984).
Shows Christianity expanded primarily through imperial power, incentives, and legislation, not mass persuasion.
20. H.A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Outlines Constantine’s political use of Christianity and the shift toward enforced orthodoxy.
21. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
Provides context for how Christianity overtook the Roman religious landscape.
22. Neil Van Leeuwen, “Religious Credence Is Not Factual Belief,” Cognition 133 (2014): 698–715.
Explains why religious commitments behave like identity markers, not evidence-responsive beliefs.
23. Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (MIT Press, 2015).
Useful for understanding modern online purity culture dynamics, relevant to atheist-internet behavior discussed in your commentary section.
24. Joseph Reagle, Reading the Comments (MIT Press, 2015).
Analyzes comment-section behavior and ideological enforcement online.
25. Tim O’Neill, “Easter, the Existence of Jesus, and Dave Fitzgerald,” History for Atheists (2017).
Atheist historian critiquing Fitzgerald’s methodological errors, exaggerated claims, and misuse of sources.
26. Raphael Lataster, Questioning the Historicity of Jesus (Brill, 2019).
Secular academic arguing mythicism is plausible but insisting on higher methodological rigor than many popularizers use.
27. Richard Carrier, various blog critiques of Fitzgerald (2012–2019).
Carrier agrees with mythicism but critiques Fitzgerald for overstatement and inadequate source control.
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