James Lindsay and the Christian Right

Abortion, Christianity & Gnosticism: bad takes all around?

James Lindsay, the notorious deconstructivist of the deconstructivists, seems to have entered a sort of Twitter spate with the Christian right.

Two issues seem to have sparked it: Lindsay’s take on abortion, and his idea that Wokeness is sort of a Gnostic religion. I’d like to push back on both parties here.

Abortion and Christian Authoritarianism

The Christian Right’s position on abortion is as clear as day: abortion is literal child murder, always.

But frankly, this is not even a “take.”

It is just repeating a dogma some authorities have come up with.

I don’t want in any way to justify the insane moral degradation of our culture and society here; that is a given. But to pretend that the question of abortion can be reduced to “this is child murder!” is ridiculous.

The fact is, the church’s teaching about abortion changed many times over the course of its history. The points of contention have always been, as they are today, sexual morals and the question of when life begins.

When does life begin? Back in the day, we framed the question differently: we used the word “ensoulment” and asked: when does the soul enter the body? It seems to me that many Christians today are as incapable of thinking about it in these terms as are their atheist counterparts. All that’s left are nebulous arguments about DNA.

I mean, do Christian right-wingers seriously believe that there is no difference between some cells at conception and a baby? Or between some DNA strand and a human being? Have they overdosed on Richard Dawkins or what? Do they know that the role of DNA is in no way as clear as Official Sciencedom often has us believe? That we actually have no clue about how we get from DNA to limbs, organs, and brains? Do they even believe in souls these days? Have they thought even one second about any of that? Or do they just repeat what their religious authorities say at this particular point in time?

Note that what I said here doesn’t imply that abortion should be considered permissible, or morally neutral, much less desirable. It does, however, mean that we can’t simply equate it with child murder and be done with it.

As for sexual morals, let’s not pretend that this is not a real issue here. It seems obvious to me that any ban or regulation of abortion has always been partly about discouraging people from randomly giving in to their sexual urges, especially before contraception became widely available. The reverse is obviously true, too: the problem of wide-spread abortion is the result of bad sexual decisions. Which, in part, is a consequence of our hyper-sexualized society with its porn epidemic and all-out loss of anything resembling sexual morality in the media, public discourse, and culture.

But should we infer from this state of affairs that a complete ban of abortion needs to be implemented to solve these issues?

People who think like that are, frankly, hostage to a rigid belief system that looks at morality as a set of absolute laws, which they will mercilessly enforce even while they crush others and cause misery. It is the character trait of the holier-than-thou personality type that is quick to lecture everybody about morals, but somehow happens to apply the so-called absolute moral laws in precisely the wrong situations in a way that gives him the advantage, while hurting those around him.

As frustrating as it might sound to those who believe in absolutes, the question whether an abortion is moral or not can only be answered in an individual case by a wise person talking to someone he or she knows well, who is struggling with that decision and who is in a bad place.

Not to mention that at the very least, a society should be able to talk about such issues and find some compromise (which seems to have been possible for a long time until recently) without one side screaming “child murderers!” and the other screaming “patriarchy!” whenever someone dares mention sexual morals.

So, I tend to agree with Lindsay on this one.

(You can read my take on the tension between moral order and liberty here: The Human Condition: An Unsolvable Equation)

Gnosticism and Christian Authoritarianism

As for Lindsay’s idea that Wokeism is best interpreted as a Gnostic Religion, in the sense of an exclusive and elite spiritual teaching that misguidedly seeks to impose their idea of personal spiritual transformation on society, I’m more skeptical.

I don’t deny that this approach has its merits if the terms are defined correctly. No doubt, Wokeism has a cult flavor to it, and no doubt those entrenched in it believe they hold absolute truth in their hands, the Truth which alone will lead to the woke utopia. However, I think that equating it with Gnosticism is, uh, problematic. So let’s problematize.

First, I don’t think you can gloss over the fact that Wokeism is explicitly secular, no matter how many religious impulses and themes might be implicit in the movement.

Wokeism is a sort of mimicry, ersatz religion, and to my mind, a central aspect in its development is its atheism/materialism.

To put it simply, if you give up any notion of the transcendent and any attempts to come up with a philosophical justification of the priors which allow a moral position in the first place, and you are critical towards empirical science and tend to interpret it as a servant of the bourgeoisie whose role it is to cement existing class structures, as seems to have happened with the Frankfurt school, then the inner logic of this construct will lead to relativism, anything-goes rejection of science where convenient, a regression to moral base-level nature (which is an open invitation to pathological individuals seeking to be “freed” from conventional morality), weird attempts to combine relativism with activism and all the mental twists and turns this requires, and so on. In other words, over time, you will get to Wokeism. I don’t think this development would have been possible at all in a religious context.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, Gnosticism is a very complex phenomenon. One way to put it (very) simply would be to say that Gnostic teachings are alternative teachings that crept up in the history of Christianity, with many mutual dependencies and complex relationships with the Christian mainstream. But it’s perhaps safe to say that those teachings were always in tension with official doctrine, or at least they had been interpreted that way by the ruling authorities of the day.

Gnosticism also goes back to Paul, whose teaching cannot be understood by those who are exclusively focussed on the material, on this world, as opposed to the “world of the unseen.” Paul called them the people of the flesh. And sadly, church authorities at various times have featured quite a lot of those. As does, no doubt, the woke movement.

Notice that Paul’s teaching, like any genuine spiritual teaching, doesn’t advocate ignoring the material world in favor of some imagined utopia, not at all. It is about seeing and interacting with our world in light of the higher realm, whose principles and truths can be discerned if we develop eyes to see and pay strict attention using our growing understanding of the spiritual world. See also what I wrote here.

That is, Lindsay seems to side here with the Christian authoritarians: those who hate any attempt to go beyond mainstream doctrine—who hate those, in other words, who like to think for themselves, and are all about achieving personal spiritual transformation and developing a direct, personal relationship with God. Does he really want to side with guys like those who pathologically stalked Jacob Boehme, the famous German theosopher?

Yes, everything isn’t rainbow and unicorns in Gnosticism, mysticism, theosophy, and so on. Charlatans, authoritarian cults, and perverts coming up with twisted teachings to justify their sick passions are, unfortunately, part and parcel of human history.

Esoteric teachings are dangerous; straying from official doctrine is dangerous. And yet, if you simply don’t have it in you to uncritically obey authorities and accept their claims at face value, and you seek the truth of the matter in all directions, it might be a risk worth taking. Crucial on the path is a sense of humility, though, and of course, love: “Gnosis puffs up, but love edifieth.” (St. Paul)

(More on that here: Gnosis Puffeth Up)

So: I don’t think Lindsay is right if he wants to convince everybody that the Gnosis angle is the most important angle from which to look at Wokeism. Looking for similarities between Marxist Theory and religion is certainly fruitful to an extent, but only up to a certain point. We can’t overlook the explicit atheism of the entire tradition leading up to it. If you want to call this “scientific Gnosticism,” an atheist version of the church authorities’ negative interpretation of Gnosticism as a form of heresy, ok. But to drag old school Gnostics into this fight is arguably to side with authoritarian religion, which, if anything, is a better candidate to compare Wokeism to.

However, the analysis of Wokeism as a sort of bastardization of genuine Gnostic/religious thought might still be useful: it would explain to an extent the success of the ideology, tapping as it may do into some deep truth while mapping it entirely onto the material realm—the flesh, in Paul’s words.

A monstrosity like this can only lead to a world of the people of the flesh, for the people of the flesh.

For those who see and feel the unseen, the beyond, it is hell on earth.