Neopopulist Blog

Dr. Frank Wright, the President of the NRB, a Christian broadcaster's association, has recently attacked Neopopulism for what he thinks is its faulty subjectivity.  He even quotes our web site complaining that our landing page banner is an obvious symptom of a viscious disinterest in objectivity.  He fears that we have abandoned the "Truth".

What a demonstration of how completely saturated even the contemporary Christian mind is in Enlightenment rationalism.  Rationalist categories have become the reflexive content even of minds informed by faith. 

Of course Dr. Wright's misconceptions about our Neopopulist tradition prove that he has read nothing more than our banner and taken it completely out of context. 

We are happy to disabuse the good Dr., especially as our Christian brother, of his misunderstandings.

First of all, our Neopopulist tradition, as will be made manifest in our upcoming book, is NOT radically relativist.  In fact it is inseparable from America's Christian tradition precisely because Christianity puts reason in its place without radical relativism.

Much of the ineffectiveness of the contemporary Christian church, let alone the contemporary Christian academy, is induced by an implicit acquiescence to rationalism.  It is perfectly obvious that the Judeo-Christian tradition preserves its power when it recognizes its inherent anti-rationalism and loses that power when it promotes naïve intellectualism which is just the hand-maiden of rationalism.  Once religion mistakenly buys into the rationalist game (and it is just a game) it cannot win.  Or to put it another way, it has surrendered in principle to an unarmed poseur.  Paul Feyerabend, our favorite philosopher of science, once pointed this out in a letter to a priest.

Dear Father Rupert,

I am surprised.......by the speed with which the church now retreats in the face of scientific results.  The fearfulness of the church....rests on an ideology.  When I was a student I revered the sciences and mocked religion and I felt rather grand doing that.  Now that I take a closer look at the matter I am surprised to find how many dignitaries of the Church take seriously the superficial arguments I and my friends once used.....

Paul Feyerabend

Dr. Wright does not seem to understand that we neopopulists, like Paul Feyerabend, have grown up in the church of rationalism (this culture) and have simply lost our faith in it.  This should be good news, not bad news to Christian broadcasters who should better understand and explore such a phenomena.

The whole cultural crisis for the contemporary church and the Christian academy is its lack of any explicit understanding of two strategic truths:

1.  The only way that Christianity, and the political freedom it founds, can possibly be reasserted in this culture is through a massive attack on all of the rationalism which has eroded faith and freedom.  The modern scientific "republic" has to be put down.  A republic can no more be limited in a rationalist age than a pure democracy could be limited in any age.

2.  "Conservative" Christians, who are so often paradoxically rationalist, must start understanding, articulating and promulgating the difference between anti-rationalism and wholesale relativism. 

We believe that the clearest, most coherent mission of the Christian academy is to hold rationalism by the nose and kicks its ass, day in and day out, until there is no rationalism left in this culture.  The result of this is the complete liberation of religion, culturally and politically, without subsequently allowing religion to turn into religious ideology (just more rationalism) and proposing tyranny all over again.

Since Dr. Wright is concerned about the Truth, here is an inescapable part of it:  Rationalism is dead.  Yes, we are post-modern in the sense that we recognize that the Enlightenment dream of a single, universal standard of rational justification has never been realized and never will be realized.  Science is dead (as scientism). 

This means that secular philosophers and scientists do not and never will have some way of rationally binding the culture to secular models of Reality.  And it means that Christian philosophers and scientists will never have some way of rationally binding the culture to Christian models of Reality.  (Christian scientists "see" design -- irreducible complexity.  Secular scientists just don't, and there's no rational way of forcing them to see it.)  Orthodox Christianity never suggested that pure reason was going to win souls.  And frankly, we think C.S. Lewis was exaggerating if not lying when he suggested that he was forced into orthodoxy by reason alone. 

Orthodox Christianity is obviously very skeptical of human reason and pride of the mind.  Friederich Hayek, obviously a champion of freedom, and a Catholic, noticed that socialism was nothing more than "crude rationalism".  All modern statism is part of a sick, rationalist syndrome.  This is an anti-rationalist statement of Truth.  Dr. Wright is experiencing false anxiety about neopopulism.

We are confident we can get Dr. Wright, as a Christian, to join us in an increasingly conscious rejection of rationalism.  This means the rejection of the scientistic myth that there is some one method, or some one standard of justification (or even one standard of falsification) which can settle our questions about Reality.  This hasn't happened yet and it's never going to happen at the level of metaphysical model building.

Instead what we Neopopulist Christians recognize is that God is in control of human nature.  Whereas rational thinkers can build alternative models of the empyrean, none of which can be either verified or falsified, none of them can alter human nature.  Once one recognizes that the religious world view is no more and no less verifiable or falsifiable than secular world views, even when this involves objectifying human nature, subjectively we will all tend, each one of us, to either become liars (existentially inauthentic) or end up in the same tradition if human nature is universal.  God doesn't need abstract reason to be binding on people.  He has a much more powerful weapon: The moral causes and effects in human nature which He directly controls.  Neopopulists believe in moral and religious knowledge, not so-called "objective", "scientific" knowledge.  We have discovered that the latter is the myth, and the former is the reality.

In other words, from a Christian point of view, the decisive objectivity of faith is in our subjective reasons for embracing it.  How could the universe have produced our subjective demand for Christ if it was not a Christian universe?  In effect, as Christians, and neopopulists, we refuse the separation of the objective and the subjective.  It is a false dichotomy.  The only universal method for arriving at the same place is not the building of abstract conceptual models of reality, but confronting the same subjective needs.  The use and products of reason are not universal.  But if human nature is universal, then this need not be considered a dangerous situation.  A culture which recognizes the relativity of reason, and the universality of human nature (by faith) is an inherently Christian culture.

The key to returning to a Christian culture and, therefore, a political culture of freedom, is not to sustain the naïve rationalism that has consistently mischaracterized and shackled religion, but to liberate mankind's utterly legitimate subjective motivations for choosing faith over despair.  This choice is the most dramatic symptom of the objective truth of the religious understanding of reality.  Any Christian who believes in human nature need not fear the demise of rationalism but should, instead, celebrate its death.  It has kept us from focusing on the ancient subjective methods for discovering the objective Truth.  Christianity tells us that our subjectivity means something.  This is something which other traditions cannot claim.  And it is perfectly consistent, perfectly rational for Christianity to notice that human nature, from God's point of view, is an objective process which may be designed to lead to the objective Truth from His point of view, while being lived (not objectified) by the one who arrives at the truth.  In other words God has fore-ordained a lived moral journey to the truth, not an abstract theoretical road.  This is why life is worth living and is so very interesting.  This is precisely why it really means something.

It's time for even the popular Christian mind to get past all of its naivete about subjectivity, objectivity, Truth, and Reason.  The best way to start is to cooperate in spreading the news of Rationalism's demise.  What a delightful mission for Christian broadcasters as well as Christian professors.