Increasingly, it seems that a very public and nationalized Christianity is bouncing back as a live, contested question around the world, and there’s a temptation to exist on the extremes of either loyalty to the point of idolatry, or total opposition to the point of suspicion of the human beings we need to get along with every day. That creates a dilemma for Christian witness, one that can perhaps only be solved by the courage and fortitude to live in the tension this creates, honoring everyone’s dignity, and not falling into a gross idolatry of the state. Oxford's Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology Luke Bretherton joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to name what's happening as Christianity sees a resurgence in democratic public life, and what faithful witness demands. In this episode, Bretherton reflects on Christianity's re-emergence and the theology it requires. Together they discuss the real-time collapse of secular progressivism, democratic agency, Augustine on glory and shame, how media monetizes suspicion, why community organizing outlasts protest, and how the church might tell a truer—and more costly—story about common life. Episode Highlights "The plausibility structure of Christianity is kind of back in play in the post-progressive vibe shift." "We want to have enemies—it's really hard to organize the world around love of enemies, and it's hard to make money off love of enemies." "How do you express loyalty to your particular political community—loyalty without idolatry?" "The giving over of responsibility is itself an act of self-dehumanizing." "The uncle who drives you crazy at Thanksgiving is also the one who turns up with a bake when your child is ill—that's how idolatry works." About Luke Bretherton Luke Bretherton is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life, and a canon of Christ Church. Previously at Duke University and King's College London, his work spans political theology, democracy, and grassroots politics. He hosts the Listen, Organize, Act! podcast. Books include A Primer in Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 2023), Christ and the Common Life, and Christianity and Contemporary Politics. Learn more at https://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/people/rev-canon-professor-luke-bretherton and @WestLondonMan https://x.com/WestLondonMan Helpful Links and Resources A Primer in Christian Ethics: Christ and the Struggle to Live Well (Cambridge, 2023) https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Christian-Ethics-Christ-Struggle/dp/1009329022 Listen, Organize, Act! podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/listen-organize-act-organizing-democratic-politics/id1553824477 Luke Bretherton at Oxford https://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/people/rev-canon-professor-luke-bretherton Show Notes - “Post-progressive vibe shift”; Christianity newly plausible across UK and Europe - Bible Society "quiet revival" research; young people back in Oxford churches - "The plausibility structure of Christianity is kind of back in play in the post-progressive vibe shift." - Meaning, purpose, character; religion in government policy commissions - Tom Holland; civilizational Christianity; the post-new-atheist turn - Political theology replacing secular ideology: Ukraine, Gaza, India-Pakistan - Two dominant scripts: total shame vs. lost glory - Augustine's third way: grace, ambiguity, open wounds - "How do you express loyalty to your particular political community—loyalty without idolatry?" - Local social trust still holds; national trust collapsed - Social media systems that profit from suspicion: monetized idolatry - "We want to have enemies—it's really hard to organize the world around love of enemies, and it's hard to make money off love of enemies." - Think with the body, from place; neighbors before scripts - "The uncle who drives you crazy at Thanksgiving is also the one who turns up with a bake when your child is ill." - Mass mailing dissolved federated civil society: unions, denominations, guilds - Moses's challenge: atomized crowd to covenantal people - Strongmen and unmediated belonging; technology and concentrated power - Polanyi's two responses: strong man or democratic organizing - "The giving over of responsibility is itself an act of self-dehumanizing." - Mobilizing vs. organizing; the Arab Spring - The Westfield story: a teenager discovers her democratic agency - Thick vs. thin trust: the only metric that matters #PublicTheology #PoliticalTheology #ChristianWitness #Democracy #CommunityOrganizing #FaithAndPolitics #ChristianEthics #PostProgressivism #ChurchAndState #Secularism Production Notes - This podcast featured Luke Bretherton - Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz - Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa - Hosted by Evan Rosa - Production Assistance by Noah Senthil - A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
Increasingly, it seems that a very public and nationalized Christianity is bouncing back as a live, contested question around the world, and there’s a temptation to exist on the extremes of either loyalty to the point of idolatry, or total opposition to the point of suspicion of the human beings we need to get along with every day.
That creates a dilemma for Christian witness, one that can perhaps only be solved by the courage and fortitude to live in the tension this creates, honoring everyone’s dignity, and not falling into a gross idolatry of the state.
Oxford's Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology Luke Bretherton joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to name what's happening as Christianity sees a resurgence in democratic public life, and what faithful witness demands. In this episode, Bretherton reflects on Christianity's re-emergence and the theology it requires. Together they discuss the real-time collapse of secular progressivism, democratic agency, Augustine on glory and shame, how media monetizes suspicion, why community organizing outlasts protest, and how the church might tell a truer—and more costly—story about common life.
Episode Highlights
"The plausibility structure of Christianity is kind of back in play in the post-progressive vibe shift."
"We want to have enemies—it's really hard to organize the world around love of enemies, and it's hard to make money off love of enemies."
"How do you express loyalty to your particular political community—loyalty without idolatry?"
"The giving over of responsibility is itself an act of self-dehumanizing."
"The uncle who drives you crazy at Thanksgiving is also the one who turns up with a bake when your child is ill—that's how idolatry works."
About Luke Bretherton
Luke Bretherton is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life, and a canon of Christ Church. Previously at Duke University and King's College London, his work spans political theology, democracy, and grassroots politics. He hosts the Listen, Organize, Act! podcast. Books include A Primer in Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 2023), Christ and the Common Life, and Christianity and Contemporary Politics.
Learn more at https://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/people/rev-canon-professor-luke-bretherton and @WestLondonMan https://x.com/WestLondonMan
Helpful Links and Resources
A Primer in Christian Ethics: Christ and the Struggle to Live Well (Cambridge, 2023) https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Christian-Ethics-Christ-Struggle/dp/1009329022
Listen, Organize, Act! podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/listen-organize-act-organizing-democratic-politics/id1553824477
Luke Bretherton at Oxford https://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/people/rev-canon-professor-luke-bretherton
Show Notes
#PublicTheology #PoliticalTheology #ChristianWitness #Democracy #CommunityOrganizing #FaithAndPolitics #ChristianEthics #PostProgressivism #ChurchAndState #Secularism
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Luke Bretherton: Are we dehumanizing? 'cause we reduce people to an ideological checklist? I think that is a real problem. Again, on both left and right.
Evan Rosa: This is Luke Bretherton.
Luke Bretherton: And so the reduction of people are complex SC creatures with multiple loyalties and their views change over time and are open to change.
Evan Rosa: He's a theological ethicist that's working at the intersection of religion and democracy.
Luke Bretherton: And do we have a politics which is porous enough to actually account for that and relate to people in that way, or do we. Um, in a sense with a tank and certain kind of positions we've gotta hold and then fire off on people if they don't meet our exact positions. And, and I think they're two very different orientations.
One is a genuinely humanizing politics. You don't have to agree with people to not want to kill coerce or cause 'em to flee. If people in the state apparatus, which is killing, coercing, causing flee. Then there probably needs to be some witness against that. Uh, and treating others in, in human and dehumanizing ways.
Yes. That, that needs calling out and challenging how one does that, what that means in practice. Uh, that's, that's a matter of practical deliberation.
Evan Rosa: He is currently the Regis professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, and his most recent book is What Is Political Theology Co-authored with Vincent Lloyd and Valentina Napolitano, and in this episode he notices a dilemma.
That's hiding in plain sight, often unconsciously operating in every conversation we're in, every bit of news we read every sideline interaction training, the social media algorithms that just put it back into your feed, creating an infinite feedback loop that just. Keeps you in the trenches. But more and more this tension is becoming more deeply felt.
It's rising to the surface. 'cause increasingly, it seems that a very public and nationalized Christianity is bouncing back as a live contested question around the world being put into the service of authoritarianism. And there's a temptation to exist on the extremes of either loyalty. To the point of idolatry or total opposition, to the point of suspicion of the human beings we need to get along with every day.
This creates a dilemma for Christian witness. One that can perhaps only be solved by the courage and fortitude to live in the tension this creates, honoring everyone's dignity and not falling into a, a gross idolatry of the state.
Luke Bretherton: And so how do we tell a story of grace and disgrace of ambiguity and irony, but also a story where there are scenes of wonder and stories where there are still open wounds? And that's a very tough story to tell, but it's a story. But it's a story which cut against the shivers of both left. To write, but I think that's a faithful story.
That's a loving story. That's a hopeful story. So I think there's a narrative project, which is an imaginative and theological exercise to understand who we are in relation to Jesus Christ. So that's a, that's always in a sense. A theological task. I think it presses upon us in particular ways when the, the stakes feel very high for lots of people.
If certain stories get told, vast ways of the population get written off. Nested within that is this very deep challenge of how do you express loyalty without idolatry? How do you tell a story and, and engage with your political community locally, regionally, nationally, in a way that. Both honors and names what needs cherishing and also calls out injustices and refuses the way certain human beings are named as not human, and therefore could be treated, uh, without regard for their intrinsic dignity in the image of Gods in them and for whom Christ died.
So I think that's, that's a tricky thing. We either have one set of people who are like totally in opposition and another set of people total loyalty. A theological problem, but it's also a posture and requires a certain moral courage to live in that tensional place. But I think that, again, is a central theological claim about living between the the now and the not yet.
Evan Rosa: In this episode, Ryan McAnally-Linz. Welcome to Luke Bretherton onto the show to discuss what's happening as Christianity sees this resurgence in democratic public life and what faithful witness will demand, they reflect on this reemergence of faith and the theological implications thereof. The apparently real-time collapse of secular progressivism that discussed democratic agency at the individual and communal level, Augustine on glory and shame, how media monetizes suspicion, why community organizing, outlasts protest, and how the church might tell a truer and more costly story about human life together.
Thanks for listening.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Hey Luke, welcome to for the On the
Luke Bretherton: Great to Be With You, real
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: of us. Who. Pay at least a little attention to what's going on over in Europe with respects to kind of the profile of Christianity the church have been hearing. Over recent years of a kind of resurgent public Christianity, both on the continent and in in the United Kingdom.
And sometimes this will take the form of young people are, are showing back up in the church or famous people are showing back up in the church. And I, I wonder if we could start by you just giving us your sense of, of what's afoot. Whether there's, whether there's anything real happening that.
Corresponds to these whispers or not?
Luke Bretherton: Yeah, I think, I think there is, uh, it's a very good question. I think there is something real, and I think, I think it's operating at a number of levels. So I think at, at a kind of very high level, there's, there's a plausibility structure, if you like, of, of Christianity.
Is is kind of back in play, you know, in the, what might call the kind of post progressive vibe shift, like if we wanna coin a coin a term. You heard a hit first, but I'm trying to avoid the term postliberal to make sure that's quite right. But there's, so there's undoubtedly a, a sense in which the.
Assumptions about a kind of secularization, and the more broadly you become, the more secular you become. And the story we might tell about reality under the auspices of a progressive tale about how we move from revelation to reason, from scarcity to abundance, from. The, the sacral realm to the secular realm from kind of tradition to rationality.
This, this story has come unstuck. Um, it still circulates in the circles of the university I'm at and in certain kind of technocratic, elite circles, but for most people that story is a kind of bankrupt story and doesn't really work anymore. So I think within that context, people are clearly open to.
Different kinds of visions of life, different, uh, certainly more kind of moral languages present in public life. And questions of meaning, purpose, and character are much more on the agenda, or at least can be talked about without being dismissed and the kind of cultural despises. It's like, these are serious, very serious questions.
So a good example would be I sit on this independent commission, it's kind of set up by the government, but independent commission on community and cohesion. And I'm very struck by, I think 10 years ago, really a very different conversation. So I'm there in kind of various capacities related to my re research on kind of democracy, but also, you know, as a religious leader kind of figure.
But there are many others there who were there in different capacities, but they're, they're some are Sikh, some are Muslim, some are Jewish. People feel very comfortable talking about the importance of their religious commitments and how the role of religion and public life. I just don't think that conversation in that kind of setting, which is set up to think about government policy, I think it would've been a very different conversation 10 years ago.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: This may be tangential, but is there a corresponding. Kind of rise of what you might call religiosity as a whole in the United Kingdom. Uh,
Luke Bretherton: yeah. So then, so then, so that, that's the next level. So I think there's a, if, if that's a, that's a rather what I've just described as in a sense of rather opaque, but I think very present change of temperature and see you like it.
Diffuse terms, but I think then there are then are also in the Bible Society that this contested research on the, the quiet revival. But I think there is. Along with that shift, the kind of end of a, the dominance of a certain progressive narrative. We do see young people, we see it here in Oxford, you know, we've got, even, even the fuddy, ddy, dusty cathedral.
We see more young people come coming in, but certainly over the road from the, as an old dates, which is a kind of charismatic, evangelical church, heaving, heaving.
I think evidence of a greater engagement and interest of, of actual people coming into church. How I spread that is, is that just young men? Is that more broader? That's hard to tell, but I think there's definitely something going on. I, I do think the more significant piece is a kind of shift of mood and possibility.
Then I think you see obviously the political. Side, and it tends to be the, the movement of people into churches tend to be, tends to be read in a more kind of conservative way. I certainly don't think that's true. I think you see a whole range of. Public intes, whether it's gonna Paul Kings North on one side, you know, coming out environmental kind of world, or various other figures on, on the other side.
So I, I think that there's something, there's something definitely happening. How to quantify it. How to specify it. That's, that's a, you know, that, that I'm sure that will keep sociologists of religion happy, but, and in jobs for another 10 years. I should add to, I what I didn't say, I said, I think in the political discourse.
Is, there's something interesting there that, that is con connected in is the use of religion and, and particularly Christianity as a point of reference. So I, whether it's, we used to be very anxious and, and kind of an anti-communist crusade, so there's kind of negative sides to now it's Islam and woke as the enemy for certain strands.
Then instead of turning to. Liberal rationality is the answer as it would've happened in a previous moment. Kind of new
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: atheists would've done
Luke Bretherton: that. New atheists would've done that. It's now a Christian civilization discourse, whether that's on the one hand become story of faded glory, it's all going to, in Hancock, we used to be great and now we've kind of lost it through the pollution of Websters and and, and Muslims, or a kind of story of total shame.
The real answer is not capitalism, it's Christianity. It's a story. Total shame. It's just Christianity is just a story of hetero, patriarchal, racist to holism and, but it's Christianity's the problem, not some other bug bear you might put in there. Think about Lin White and the environmental. It's really all why we're in this climate change.
It's already your Christianity. That's, that feels like a shift. So it plays out negatively, but also then positively we might have Tom Holland. You lose liberalism if you let say of Christianity or kind of a FD and Ski Builders and Freedom Party in Austria. And we have a sense of where if we now their, their interest, and this is a very old version, their, their kind of Oswald Spengler wrote this kind of stuff in the 1920s and thirties and it's kind of back, but the, there it's a kind of anti enlightenment thing where we lose these high European values.
Um, this of racially coded. Kind of rationality, university, Shakespeare, science, if we lose Christianity. So obviously that's very different from a kind of new atheist thing, which is Christianity is a problem we need to get rid of in order to get to rational and science. That's why I call it post progressive.
Now it's we're gonna lose Christianity and therefore lose. We're gonna become barbarian, but they're not interested in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. They're very interested in saving liberal rationality in Europe and Christianity is the crux through which that battle is fought over and against what they see as the forces of barbarism Islam and works.
So it's a, it's you. So Christianity and then realism more broadly, whether positively or negatively, and you can read that positive negativ in either way is interestingly, that's the problem. And then, and then of course. We afraid play that out around the world. It used to be we fought, fought battles between capitalism and communism.
And the reality is, you know, now whether it's Israel Palestine or whether it's the, the ideology shaping the invasion of, of Ukraine or India, Pakistan, or the Civil War in Sri Lanka, or you know, everyone. It's all some version of political theology. It's not the high modern ideologies of communism, socialism, nationalism coming out.
French Revolution, IE, secular nationalism. It's some variation of whether it's in Islam, Hinduism, Hindu, Zionism. It's some version of a political theology. So I think that is a you. It's difficult. It's tricky to disaggregate developments on the ground from a massive shift. More broadly and how the world is imagined and narrated and, and I, I think often the story is told as kind of there are more bums on seats in church.
There's, you know, mixed evidence for that. But I think there is some, definitely something happened anecdotally, I see that and clergy report that to me and I see the evidence of it in the churches around me here in Oxford.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah.
Luke Bretherton: But I think you can't disentangle that from a broader discursive shift.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah.
And, and that. Discursive shift is complex. It sounds like it. It's not kind of one thing, and it's, yeah, it's connected presumably to massive social developments, technological change, all these sort of things, which, which is a really complicated situation for Christians to live in.
And so my next question would be, how do you. Think of the task of Christian witness in this kind of sea change type moment?
Luke Bretherton: That's a great question. I think so. I think partly it's, it's, it is an, it is a IV one, so just go back to the kinda stories we tell. One has to do the imaginative labor and I think it's something we see Jesus doing the whole time.
We're often handed a script by. Or the authorities of the day, and too often I think the church just accepts that script. It doesn't take a pause. I think what's going on here and then rerate the world's back and refuse the terms and conditions of the script it's given. So as I mentioned before, I think there are two kind of dominant scripts playing out either this, this story of total shame.
We've just gotta leave behind the past. It's, it's a, it's just a hell hole of racism, patriarchy, extractivism, capitalism, et cetera. Quite what the future we're heading into is not clear, but we know we've gotta abolish the past or it's a story of lost glory. But we were once great, we were once civilized, we were once more religious.
We once have moral bearings. We once were in community. We once weren't individualistic and atomized. Now we are, we've got to recover. And I think that's, if you, that kind of story of course was the story that the Romans were telling about themselves. When Augustine was writing in four 10 with a second row, yeah, we were once great.
And look at these in their day. It wasn't the Sters and the Muslims who were the problem, it was the Christians. They were the foreign influence that led to the lack of virtue, the abandonment of the gods and the, the corruption of, of our civilization, and had to be kind of punished for it. And, and Augustine, I think, tells this more complicated story.
But he does this extraordinary act of remuneration. And as I think echoing what we see Jesus doing in, in response to the authorities of his stay, which is refusing the terms and conditions that were presented and opening out a different way of imagining the world in the light of Christ. And in that, in Augustine's way of imagining it, it's, well, all political communities are founded on domination.
God can be at work through any political community, providentially. And so how do we tell a story of grace and disgrace of ambiguity and irony, but also a story where there are scenes of wonder and stories where there are still open wounds. And that's a, a very tough story to tell. Yeah. But it's a story.
But it's a story which cut against the shibolet of both left and right. But I think that's a faithful story. That's a loving story. That's a hopeful story. There's that kind of work and that that work needs to be done in your locality, in your region, in your nation. What story do we tell about Great Britain?
What story do we tell about America? So I think there's a narrative project, which is an imaginative and theological. To understand who we are in relation to Jesus Christ. So that's a, that's always in a sense, the theological task. I think it presses upon us in particular ways when the, the stakes feel very high for lots of people.
If certain stories get told, vast ways of the population get written off. So I think that's one challenge. Yeah. And then I think the other challenge is within that, nested within that is this very deep challenge of how do you, how do you. Express loyalty to your particular political community, whether it's America or Britain or France or um, India or wherever, but, but loyalty without idolatry.
How do you tell a story and, and engage with your political community locally, regionally, nationally, in a way that both honors and names what needs cherishing and also. Calls out injustices and refuses the way certain human beings are named as not human, and therefore could be treated without regard for their intrinsic dignity in the image of God in them and for whom Christ died.
So I think that's, that's a tricky, that's a tricky thing. We either have one set of people were like we could with totally in opposition and another set of people total loyalty. And I think both that that's a kind of posture problem. That's, it's both a theological problem, but it's also a posture and, and requires moral courage to live in that tensional place.
But I think that, again, is a central theological claim about living between the, the now and the not yet.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. Yeah. It, which is, I, I worry, I guess. Something of a discursive disadvantage over simpler stories. Yeah. Right, because the stories you've just told Augustine's story is, is. Very nuanced and complicated.
His, the way he's relating to the Roman past is, is ambiguous and ambivalent and see it kind of in the reception history of Augustine that there's this kind of constant deviation towards. Kind of Christian civilization version of it. Yeah. Like, which you might read as like, uh, the kind of pressure towards simplification.
And I, and I worry that maybe in our time, one thing we're seeing is this, like you get simple stories in the everything is is and has been awful story and everything was great and is now awful story. Although it does seem that a lot of people share the sense that something is awful. And I wonder like, like, yeah, yeah.
How do we as Christians. Kind of speak into that sense in a way that opens up a willingness to listen to a more complicated story.
Luke Bretherton: Yeah, and I, I think this is where the kind of groundedness of the, of the story, but also crucially of the kind of the witness, the very, he's simplifying and highly polarizing stories, which.
Depend on and reproduce a deep suspicion, whether it's a kind of hermeneutics suspicion, born out of too many seminars at Yale and Duke, or, or a kind of conspiracy theory suspicion born out of too long on listening to Joe Rogan. Uh, whatever it is, like the, the kind of, the kind of deep suspicion. The, the immediate reflex way in which people read the world in thinking the worst and, and assuming bad faith.
So the kind of, and we see that lots of indicators both in the UK and in America in terms of breakdown at civic trust.
Evan Rosa: Yeah,
Luke Bretherton: at a more national and regional level. Interestingly enough, both in the UK and the us. Civic trust or not Civic social trust still operates quite well at a local level.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That's interesting.
Luke Bretherton: And I think that speaks to me about the ways in which the part of the challenge, I think before us, and I think it's a challenge for the church, but I think it's beyond the way for everyone has, is our capacity to, and, and this I think goes back to it deeply. Theological commitment to the incarnation and to truth not as a kind of algorithmic procedure or a rational process.
This is the kind of problem with the new this, but a lived participative reality. We participate in Christ who is the ground of all truths and beauty and being, and the question then is how do we, how do we learn and how we form to participate more richly. Profoundly more, hopefully, more lovingly, more hopefully.
And I think what we have is we're inside of, to put it in very old ancient terms, kind of GST systems, which want to abstract us from our bodies, treat each other as kind of ones and zeroes in an abstract space that by the way, make billions of dollars for already rich people and turn us against each other to make more money.
So, so you are right. Those, those, those narratives are effective and also weaponized because, and, and the systems we have kind of reproduce them ad nauseam and they do that because they're, they do kind of play into, you know, toga. They kind of con. Certain kind of negative affective register in the, in the human psyche and in the human soul, we want to have enemies.
It's easier to organize the world around enemies. It's really hard to organize the world around well, love of enemies and so, and it's hard to make money off love of enemies. So I think we need to be very wise to the kind of political economy of all of this, and just call that out for what it is, which is, you know, monetized idolatry.
But saying that I think at a local level and if we can get people to think with their bodies and inside the actual meat space reality, to use a concrete example, and I now move to Oxford, but was living in North Carolina for many of 13 years and the, and the cul-de-sac, good suburban cul-de-sac, I lived in, shout out to.
American Village. They, you know, my neighbors are all sorts of different funny folk. Uh, and I was the funniest and weirdest of the lot, but I wasn't really worrying about their voting patterns from the guy. Very sweet. Used to pick up my kids from soccer. Um, when I was in a, in a jam or my wife was in a jam, so, or, or you have that fantastic stuff.
Freezing rain comes down, amazing sort of precipitation. I'm now free of here in the dull drizzle with Oxford is. So I find myself slightly missing, freezing rain, although I cursed it at the time. But, you know, freezing rain comes down and North Carolina. Being North Carolina, the power always goes out. We had a, we had a, a, a gas oven, which meant that we didn't lose power.
We could make the soup.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah,
Luke Bretherton: my, my people in the culdesac incredibly handy. I'm not very handy. I'm a good academic. I have no idea how to fix anything. They would come and fix things and be brilliant by that. Again, in that moment of care. The reality of our lives together. I wasn't checking their voting record.
Um, now I know they all sorts of different ways. Some aligned, some are not. You know, we share certain views, not views, but. The pressure given my social media feeds and Fox News or M-S-N-B-C or whatever one's kind of media bubble one lives inside of is to narrate my neighbors in a polarizing friend enemy script, whether of the left or the right.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Mm-hmm.
Luke Bretherton: How do I think with my body and of my place-based encounters? And then imagine the worlds up from there. To understand the broader obvious from that place, rather than download literally these scripts from which are created to make money elsewhere and then read my local reality through those scripts.
So I think there's a, the challenge is how do you. How can the church genuinely, in a sense, reject these kind of GST forces, which atomize and polarize and for very, very venal ends and actually help people understand the world through their actual experiences, which are more complicated. And the uncalled who drives you crazy, it's Thanksgiving is also the one who turns up with a bake when your, when your child is ill or some, there are a million in these kinds of stories, but those stories.
Which are the actual existential world of people. The extraordinary thing we live in, that those feel fake. Yeah. And the fake feels real. And that's, but that's a, but that's how idolatry works. It chance us to, to see its world as the real world. And the real world is the fake world.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. The, the, the stance of suspicion comes into play, right?
In those, in, in those complicated interactions by kind of pushing towards a sorting such that the, you know, the real or more important thing about the uncle is the political views that you find important.
Luke Bretherton: Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Which. When aggregated with millions of other people have actual real consequences in the world.
Right? And, and it can be, I, I think there's a attempting narrative to tell oneself that, that the kind of, the truthful and good thing to do is to look at that aggregate and, and to say, well, like, I mean, it's nice that somebody's nice to me, but like some people who Jesus would have me call my neighbors.
Several cities away. Yeah. Are currently being kind of violently repressed or something like that. Right. Um, what, what would your pitch be for No. Stay. Stay in
Luke Bretherton: Right, right.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Stay in the local.
Luke Bretherton: Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. And, and how does that, is there a way to bootstrap that locality towards hope for the broader.
Luke Bretherton: Right.
Yeah. So I think a couple couple of things on that. I mean, the, the first is to say, you know, it's true, you know, you might, it might genuinely be some of your on uncle's views are abhorrent. That is, that can be an absolutely true statement. It can also be a true statement that does that tell you everything there is to know about your on call?
And so do we have, are, are we dehumanizing 'cause we reduce people to an ideological checklist? I think that is a real problem. Again on both left and right. And so the reduction of people are complex SC creatures with multiple loyalties and, and views change over time, um, and are open to change. And then, and do we have a politics which can, can, is porous enough to actually account for that and relate to people in that way?
Or do we come. In a sense with a tank and certain kind of positions we've gotta hold and then fire off on people if they don't meet our exact positions. And, and I think they're two very different orientations. One is a a, a genuinely humanizing poli politics. You don't have to agree with people to not want to kill coerce or cause them to flee.
You can just think it's probably a bad idea to kill coerce and ative flee. So if, if people, if the uncle is in some state of the state apparatus, which is killing, coerce, coercing, ative, flee, then there probably needs to be some witness against that. Uh, and treating others in, in human and dehumanizing ways.
Yes. That, that needs calling out and challenging how one does that, what that means in practice. Uh, that's, that's a matter of practical deliberation. Now I think in terms of the movement from the local, I think again there, there's a kind of long history to tell. I blame the discovery of mailing list, mass mailing in about 1950, but the shift whereby, if you think in the 19th century we had a kind of moment of institutional genius.
Whether it's trade unions, whether it's denominations, whether it's scouts and guides, women's institutes in this country, guilds, I'm just thinking about kind of institutional right in this country, but there are many equivalent rotary clubs. What you had actually was local bodies, which would then confederate to regional bodies, which would then confederate to national bodies.
And what that did was there was a kind of mycelial life. Of, of identification, belonging, and conversation between the very local and the national. And then basically someone discovered mass mailing. And you could sit in an office in DC talk to some politicians, and you didn't have to sustain those trust buildings.
Social, that social ecology, which renewed the worlds of trust, relationship, and belonging, and the ways those then interconnected. All you needed to do was send out a mass mailing and treat all the people at the other end who used to meet together and talk together as a campaign for, for whatever it was, whether it's a Democratic party or the Rotary Club or whatever.
Now some people kept that and churches for a while kept that. And then we moved to megachurches and were no longer at the kind of local, regional, as in the classic mainline denominational structure. Mm-hmm. So I think that is if, if we take that imaginary. And think about a kind of trans localism and a con federalism where you move between localities and across localities and then federate.
And that's a much thicker form of association. And I think part of our problem is. We are vulnerable, and this is a point made in the twenties and thirties through to the forties the problem of the mass society. Mm-hmm. Lots to do with the crowd. There's lots of writing on, in sociology on, in the thirties on this, but the, the, how do you move from a mass or a crowd, which is a bunch of individuals who are atomized and don't have thick, blurry of, of relationships between themselves and therefore can easily be manipulated, have no.
Intentionality and connection where they can come together and say, huh, I just read this thing on social media. Is that true? If all you are connect, the only thing that connects you with social media, you are very vulnerable to manipulation and to the top down kind of mobilization. Again, whether on the left or on the right, if you are forms forming, sticker forms of association, and then those forms of association can organize together.
Anticipates, perhaps the community organizing stuff we'll get into later, then actually you are much more resilient and resistant to that kind of manipulative. Yeah, and the, the movement from a mass or a crowd. To a people or a d os is always the challenge. But of course that was Moses's challenge. Yeah.
How do you take a bunch of people who were disaggregated outta my, didn't have a sense of connection, fearful, very prone to suspicion both of each other and of the outside enemy and move them to being a covenantal people able to relate and connect together, defend their own interests, and actually work together in what, and treat each other justly and generously.
And, and that's always, that's always the challenge. And I think that's the challenge of the church. It's a challenge. Any political challenge with just under particular material social conditions, which exacerbates that perennial challenge.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Right, right, right. And, and technological conditions in particular where the. There's the, the kind of paradox of mediation, which is that it, technological mediation, mass mediation undercuts these more social confe forms of, of mediation. There has been a, a kind of striking rise of the figure of the strong man in it globally.
Yeah. And the promise of unmediated belonging. Right, right. Yeah. Like what? One thing that the authoritarian figure does is promise, direct connection. Yeah. To power and belonging. That doesn't require the messy kind of tangled ness of that local stuff. Yeah. And yeah, and now I think it would just underscore your point, right?
Yeah. That, and again, the technology feeds into that because you can, like, you can sign up for your. Favorite figures, feed on X or whatever. Right?
Luke Bretherton: Yeah. I mean, two, two things on that. I think one on the mediation, one on the strong man, I think on the mediation point, I think that's exactly right. However, and, and this is a kind of broader philosophy of technology question of of, of adherences and affordances and that kind of stuff.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Mm-hmm.
Luke Bretherton: I think we need a more granular sense of the, the different possibilities of different media forms. So WhatsApp is not the same form as TikTok,
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: right? Right. Yep.
Luke Bretherton: Now, I think there are questions about AI and blockchain, but to use an example, cryptocurrency is built very explicitly built off a hyper individualistic libertarian.
Frame of reference, which, um, so there are, is no loyalty to the nation in a kind of cryptocurrency frame, right? It's meant to aid if you, if America goes down, you just move all your crypto over to a server in Singapore that goes down, you move it out to wherever. So it's, it's built, there's no loyalty to people or place and money is, is then instantly movable and totally un individual.
And it's that kind of lockian possessive individualism
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: mm-hmm.
Luke Bretherton: Is operating in that. And I, I think. It's ironic that it's being promoted by people who kind of wanna hold up ethnonationalist frames of reference when it's absolutely represents the opposite of that. Now, I think you could take blockchain and, and there's some really interesting experiments on this.
There's one in Durham, North Carolina, I slipped of building on the model of Korean lending circles. You, because of the transparency you can create peer-to-peer lending networks mm-hmm. In locality. Particularly in poor communities with, in particularly in African American communities with historic redlining and create and ensure capital people in place stay connected.
So there's investment allows investment in that place. Now, that's a pro-social, pro-democratic. Engineering project, which has a fundamentally different imaginary and understands and, and rethinks FinTech through the lens of its social impact. No one's gonna get, that's still wealth creation, still generating kind of investment than Microsoft.
But it's a radically different vision than if you is
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: that
Luke Bretherton: it's not,
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: not it's wealth creation that doesn't move directly to wealth concentration.
Luke Bretherton: Yes. It doesn't concentrate power. And I think then that relates to the strong man point. What I think the genius of that kind of re-engineering blockchain through a pro-social lens.
And I think we could take all technologies and reimagine through that frame of a kind of pro-social, pro-democratic agency centric and relational frame. But if you think about the strong man we are, and going all the way back to where we began with the different stories we tell, we're going through a period of seismic change.
We've changed how we, our relationship to nature, think about climate change, what it means to be a man or woman. Questions about gender. How are we gonna work? Think about the impact of ai. How are we talking to each other and communicating about social media. Every single thing is going is, is, is, is intensely changing.
Family patterns, work patterns, how we do politics, et cetera. Now we, we lived through a parallel period of that through the 19th, early 20th century.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Mm-hmm.
Luke Bretherton: And there were only two responses, and this is kind of Carl plan's thesis. In the great transformation, there are only two responses. One is you, you give you, you want order.
The world is disordered. So how do you get order? You can either give over responsibility to the strong man or to the party or to the, and that's the kind of fascism communism to, to a kind of vanguards group or the strong man or whatever. Mm-hmm.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah.
Luke Bretherton: And they promise order, and that's what you get. Or there's the democratic option, which is you come together, and that was the trade union movement.
You could see that in the environmental movement, whereas those looked classically in the trade union movement. And you come together and build shared relational power and relational agency through taking responsibility for each other. And those really are the only options and we see both today.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Mm-hmm.
Luke Bretherton: And but theologically understood. The giving over of responsibility and you can hear kind of bahar and bonoff and others in the background here. The giving up of responsibility, the giving over, and then the giving up of responsibility is itself a as an act of self dehumanizing.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Hmm.
Luke Bretherton: Yeah. It, it actually is a refusal of our vocation to stand as though he's responsible before God and each other in kind of party in terms, but then crucially.
In in, we can think here in more personalist terms, whether maritime, Catholic, social, teaching others. If I can't be human, I can't be fully realized the image of God in me outside the relationship with you. And I have to be able to contribute to some shared world of meaning and action for me to fulfill my person, but to move from really merely being human, to being fully realizing who I'm as a person before God and before you.
Then how am I able to contribute to shared worlds of meaning and action and both receive from and give to and become contribu, contributory and participative way? So that's a relational anthropology connect to a participative account of truth in the sense of becoming human through relationship with and for others.
That's the only way I can realize who I'm as a person, the giving up and giving over responsibility, not only dehumanizes myself, but it creates material and social conditions, which is harder and harder for everyone else to realize who they are as person. So there's a structural dynamic is quickly in play there.
And again, that's what we're seeing around us today. And so I think that sense in which. Both the kind of redesign of our material social conditions and then how that is the context of certain political conditions and how that altogether is the context in which is it the case that each and every person is able to contribute to and receive from and act in the, the world around them.
And, and that's where I think the real crisis of our time lies the crisis of agency. People don't feel they have agency, but instead of Right,
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: right.
Luke Bretherton: Coming together in forms of broad based democratic movements in which you take kind of shared responsibility for the world and therein realize your own agency through democratic means you give over responsibility to the strong man, or I would argue on the left, to some rather brittle ideology that can't deal with the realities of life and, and then becomes a kind of hammer to beat everyone up with.
That living in the kind of weeds of actually how we humans relate and therefore discover our agency, discover our capacity to be who we are and have a sense of who we are in relation to others. That is a messy, but that's also where the energy is, where the life is, that's where the creativity is. And I think that's, that is part of the challenge before us.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So I, I'm thinking a little bit about the US context and where, if anywhere. We see things that might be candidates for broad-based democratic movements, participatory things. And so two, two things come to mind and, and I, I wonder kind of if they indicate different kinds of phenomena. For you. So, so one is, is mass protest,
Luke Bretherton: is it,
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: so the, so the last decade has seen more of that in the United States than, than certainly the eighties, nineties.
And aughts did, and, and there certainly is a, a sense of belonging of participating in something big and meaningful at the same time. If you, if you were to say. You know, what, what have, what have been the longer term effects of movements of mass protests in the United States in the last decade or so?
It's not clear to me that there have been big
Luke Bretherton: much
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. That they've achieved their ends, right?
Luke Bretherton: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And then, so, so recently you, you know, you'll be aware of, of roughly what's happening in, in Minneapolis, which the kind of. The response of a good portion of the citizenry. There has been o oftentimes talked about as protest, but, but takes a, a, mostly, a rather different form, which looks like the kind of neighborhood, basically neighborhood based action, the walking kids to school, things of that sort.
I've heard it described as better classified as organizing than, than protest.
Luke Bretherton: Right.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I know that your, some of your earlier work was on community organizing and kind of its relation to Christianity, relation to it, and vice versa.
Luke Bretherton: Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I don't expect you to, to be able to comment on Minneapolis. Right.
You're, you're not there. You haven't studied it or anything like that, but, but I wonder if there is a meaningful distinction Yeah. Between kind of modern mass protest movements and organizing and what that distinction is and why it matters for Christian life.
Luke Bretherton: Right, right. Right. Yeah. No, that, that's a, that's a great question.
I think, so there is a classic distinction in community organizing circles between mobilizing and organizing. So mobilizing is what we might call the, um, kind of the, the mass march. You, you mobilize people, they turn out on the street, but actually the, the relations between them are very thin around a single issue.
When the issue goes away, that people dissipate and so that they, you generate a crowd and that crowd then marches and projects. It's often unclear whether that mass mobilizing, uh, is linked into any broader transf political program effort. So the contrast here would be civil rights movement is the kind of classic kind of paradigm of where organizing and mobilizing to the March on Washington is a kind of instance of mobilizing mass mobilize people together, but it's also got dense, thick.
Decades long forms of organizing connected into it. And so these two things have tended to come unstuck. So you have one set of people doing mobilizing and another set of people doing organizing over the past decade, particularly since kind of Black Lives Matter one, there's been a lot of. Thinking about, well, this doesn't work.
And, and then I think particularly in the wake of the failures of the Arab Spring. Yeah, where you saw, again, mass mobilizing and then it was completely, mostly, I think Morocco would be the exception, was overturned by smaller elites or ERs or dictators getting in, getting into power. And so there was a lot of soul searching after that.
But what was actually achieved, can you do anything with mass mobilization now? I think David Gray died a few years ago now. Anthropologist has this book called Direct, direct Action. It's kind of ethnography of mostly, mostly forms of anarchist groups. I think he makes a good point in that about even in, in, in the march, in the mass mobilizing march, there is a certain discovery of agency.
You Yeah. The chant goes up. You, you, you have a sense of. Your capacity to act in a world in which it's constantly, if you're working in the call center, if you're working, you're just subject to social media feed or whatever. You don't, you feel very, you feel a passive consumer of decisions elsewhere or content made elsewhere.
So the physical act of coming out together, there is a certain realization. I don't want diminish that, but I do think I'm drawing on the kind of work of people like Ella Baker and others. If, unless that's connected into more localist organizing efforts, it's always gonna be a kind of flash in the pan and that, and then can often set up terrible cycles of you feel like, well, there were a million, we saw that the absolute classic version of this was the, which is going back a long time now.
But the largest March, single march in human history was the anti-Iran war March. So this is a long time ago now. And, uh, and it led to nothing, nothing, nothing did. And that again, that was one of those moments, a lot of people went, well, hang on a sec. Like, how can it be that we had millions and millions and millions of people out in the street that nothing changed?
The women's March will be another one more recently. But, so I think the, the, that. The ways in which organizing and mobilizing can go together is key. Now why? Why does it matter Christian life? I think it, it matters because it goes back to this question of agency and how, what it means to be made in the image of God and to both enable, how do we both realize our own personhood with and through others.
And also create material and social conditions in which all people, regardless of situational or station or whatever, they're like are able to realize their agency with others. And I think that's where organizing. Is very key because it is this more localist form and people, it's often critiques, man, castells have this critique about 20 years ago of organizing.
It's too local. This this a kind of familiar critique of organizing. It doesn't scale. Yeah, scale is the only thing that matters or it's not. That was back in the days of globalization and when that was the thing. No longer a thing. But I think it misses that always misses the point. It's not about scale because that is the metric of effectiveness and efficiency.
Which is back in the old progressive story to be told. What really matters is rational administration, effectiveness, efficiency, as we know, actually, you can be very effective and bit efficient and it's unbelievably dehumanizing. The Nazis were very effective and efficient. You know, it doesn't make it good.
Demeaning purpose, character questions has to be in and in organizing it. The issues are important and you need to win some battles. Crucial thing. It's about leadership development and the development of people. Um, and so just to do one story when I was organizing in London 20 years ago now, but I remember one particular, there was a, there was a global chain of, of kind of, they produced more in, in American terms, but it's called Westfield.
They've few very big ones in London. I'm not sure they're in, in in America. And in, in West London where I lived, shepherd Bush, there was derelict. I grew up in that area, derelict for most of my life, and they were, they were gonna, they were planning a Westfield. Block of social housing that overlooked it very tragically.
Recently one of 'em got burned down, the Grenville fire was there. Oh,
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: wow. Yeah.
Luke Bretherton: Was that area. And there was this young girl, just mid-teens from a local Catholic school and we were at a community organizing meeting and she said, what are you all gonna do about Westfield? And none of us really thought about it.
We learned like, well, cranky, yeah, we, no, what are we gonna do about like, anyway that, that instituted this kind of conversation and campaign. And about five years later, I remember sitting in a, in a assembly of West London citizens and we had the kind of global director of Westfield on the stage and theirs is now, she was at university.
Kind of young woman pinning this global director of Westfield about how was he gonna, were they gonna have living wage jobs, apprenticeships, and how they gonna contribute to the schools? And rather than this kind of extractive spaceship landing and sucking wealth out, how was it going to contribute to the people and welfare of that place?
And it was amazing. And I, I thought, yeah, she's. That process of seeing her discover her agency and leadership and capacity. Now, we did actually get some amazing wins with with Westfield, but that really wasn't the point. That wasn't the main thing. It was that a group of people who didn't think they could act in the world, discover their leadership and their potential and in very real ways, not in a kind of ana dime.
Use a terrible slur kind of Chick-fil-A leadership academy type way, which doesn't really connect to it like it's, it was actually real things happened in the world Yeah. That were existentially important for a lot of people, and so that she then still lives in the area. She could walk around. Yeah. I, I changed this world like that.
That's an amazing, that that's an extraordinary feeling and a very real way in which she is then able to. Per person would in and through others and have a sense of agency in the world. And I think that's organizing the, the campaigns and issues and the wins are important, but they're not as important as the it.
It's primarily, and this is Salinsky going all the way back. Salinsky is very clear on this in his writing. It's first and foremost about the people. And so often, and I think this is another contrast with mobilizing and I think it's. Can be very problematic is it's too often actually a about the program and then the people are simply campaigned for
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: people are means, yeah.
Luke Bretherton: And it says instrumentalizing and it quickly burns people out because they have that slight high of the march, nothing happens and then they, they kind of get burnt out and depressed and like, well I can't. So it diminishes their sense of agency 'cause it's a kind of sugar rush agency can be, unless it's tied into richer patterns of organizing.
Organizing is a kind of thick, it's like a meet and two veg kind of agency that's vegan casserole kind of agency. I, it, it, it, it's this far more resilient, sustaining. And nourishing, I think, over, over the long term and, and therefore the thickening of the social fabric. And that's how, that's the primary metric.
But it course, it's in, in kind of foundation world, which wants to measure everything in kind of quantitative terms. Qualitative differences are very hard to grasp, and so somehow don't count as real. And yet we all know. We all know the difference between an area with thick trust and an area of thin trust.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Well, Luke, thank you so much for the conversation. It's been great talking with you and, uh, hope to do it again.
Luke Bretherton: Indeed. Really great to be with you. Thank you.
Evan Rosa: For The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Luke Bretherton, interviewed by Ryan McAnally-Linz Production Assistance by Noah Senthil. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online faith.yield.edu and life.Worth.Living.yield.edu.
On both of these websites, you can find. A variety of resources to help people envision and pursue lives that are worthy of our humanity. If you're new to our show, remember to hit Subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss our next episode. And if you've been listening for a while, please consider this request share one of your favorite episodes.
Maybe it's this one. Maybe it's another recent one. Bring it up. In your next conversation, tell your family and your friends post it online. Every little share helps, not just to grow the show, but to embody its mission, which is to pursue a life that's worth living together. Thanks for listening, friends, we'll be back with more soon.