And now, some recommended reading for your Saturday afternoon

In the post immediately below, I state that while the countercultural impetus in our society has steadily gained steam for about 55 years, ultimately, its brittleness will be revealed, and I say that's because it is a secular force.

Since then, I've come a cross a Federalist piece by the campus pastor at the University of Toledo, Peter M. Burfeind, about how millennial have politicized everything because leftist ideology is their religion.

It's worth your time.

He discusses two of the six essayists included in the 1949 anthology The God That Failed. What these former Marxists have to say about why that ideology fires some people up is definitely applicable to our time:

Arthur Koestler’s description in the book of his conversion to communism is illustrative: “Every page of Marx, and even more of Engels, brought a new revelation. . . . [T]he demonstration of the historical relativity of institutions and ideals – of family, class, patriotism, bourgeois morality, sexual taboos – had the intoxicating effect of a sudden liberation from the rusty chains with which a pre-1914 middle-class childhood cluttered one’s mind. . . . [I]t is difficult to recapture that mood of emotional fervor and intellectual bliss.”

Koestler’s language—“revelation,” “intoxicating effect of a sudden liberation,” “emotional fervor”—betrays the inherent religiosity of his conversion. Change the words, and he could just as well be describing his day at the revival tent.

Political philosopher Eric Voegelin rightly recognized the psychic mechanisms going on here as ultimately gnostic. Gnosticism fits the quest for an atheist spirituality (or secular religion), because it grants meaning and morality through the back door when your premise is scientific and materialistic absolutism. The political religionist is a gnostic who on one hand denies any teleology for this world (the randomness of its evolution being absolute), while on the other hand insisting with fervor and absolute conviction on quite specific political ends.

Voegelin identifies six characteristics of the gnostic psychic mechanism. (1) It begins with a dissatisfaction with one’s situation. (2) Lacking a doctrine of original sin, the drawbacks of one’s situation are attributed not to anything in him, but rather to the constitution of the world, or even nature itself, at a minimum to the intrinsic corruption of the world’s systems and institutions. (3) Contrary to all evolutionary evidence, but faintly recalling the paradisaical Eden of traditional religion, the gnostic “just knows” salvation is possible, that the world can be changed into something special. (4) For this salvation to occur, the order of being itself must be changed in a historic process. As Voegelin writes, “From a wretched world a good one must evolve historically.” (5) This historical change in the order of being lies within the capacity of human action. (6) Knowledge, or gnosis, here becomes the central concern, for only one enlightened about history’s proper course can help spearhead the world-historical change.

In fact, the whole notion of collectivism-with-a-sheen-of-grooviness goes back to the Middle Ages:

Voegelin sees Joachim of Fiore, the twelfth-century monk and first new-age prophet, as ground zero for secular religion, or as it’s sometimes called, millenarianism. Joachim divided history into three epochs, claiming that imminent in his day was the final epoch in which God’s Spirit would have direct influence—outside the workings of the church—on the direction of history, by inspiring an elite body of elect saints to establish the kingdom of God on earth.

Joachim’s position set the foundation for Hegel’s spiritualization of history, which Marx, Comte, and others adapted to proclaim the gospel of communism, progressivism, and other totalitarian creeds. Taking Joachim to his logical end, a spiritual atheism animates their political creeds, whereby all the goodies we identify with Christianity—charity, respect for the dignity of individuals, societal justice, care for the poor, etc.—become magically destined by history to be baked into our DNA. This creates a species of “new man,” an updated version of Joachim’s elect saints. Significantly, the church is no longer needed as a third-party administrator of those goodies. Today’s “spiritual but not religious” millennials are descendants of Joachim through Hegel and Marx. 

Burfeind even, in his own way, touches on the point I made about cornered-animal behavior:

Expect the music to get more passionate, more anxiety-laden, and more despairing, because every religious movement needs its hymn-writers. Expect the movies to become over-the-top in their critiques of institutions, capitalism, and the government. Expect histrionics like never before, not seen even in the days of Ronald Reagan. Such dramatic displays will preserve the flame of gnosis in leftist hearts.

Check it out.