Bari Weiss and Jordan Peterson, Preachers awaiting the Revelation of the Church to Come
The Blue church is dead. They don't want Red Religion. What's next to avoid the burn?
In today's video I begin to analyze what I thought was the excellent conversation between @jordanbpeterson and @bariweiss
I found these two to be a good pairing. They have enough agreement to not talk past each other, but they also pushed back against each other enough to produce some light. 2 hours of "why did you leave the NYTimes?" with a variety of productive rabbit trails.
Instead of doing a straight-forward whole-hog commentary video on this massive thing I decided to start at the end of their talk where you can gain the most perspective on the cultural moment these two (and many in their follows) share.
Both have pushed back hard an emergent force (more on that in tomorrow's video) that we have not yet fully named. @jordanbpeterson has called it "post-modern neo-marxism" or lately it has just gone by "wokeness".
Both see this as a corruption of an achievement in the West to develop the world they are afraid we are about to throw away. That loss has been felt personally by both in the dislocation of their personal vocational tracks now leading to new endeavors.
I think the proper level of analysis to penetrate this emergent development is that of a religion. At the end of this conversation @bariweiss goes into full zealot mode declaring that the restoration of this lost kingdom is something she will give her life for.
.@jordanbpeterson who certainly won't be outdone in mythological preaching shares with us a dream he had where he sees an aged lion that he must address with speech.
They are witnessing the death of the "blue church" not at the hands of "Red Religion" as Jordan Hall wrote about and as many feared in 2016 with the rise of Trump but at the hands of woke religion.
But "religion" was supposed to go away? Of course, @jordanbpeterson never believed this. I don't know where @bariweiss stands on that. What was clear from their talk is that neither wants to see the Blue Church go but neither can stop its decline.
What we probably need is a far better handle on what secularity is, how we got it and what its limitations are because it will be leaving us as modernity continues to recede.
Secularity is something like a bright fog. It is diluted Christianity that affords a certain helpful sloppiness in dealing with pluralism and other limitations of our grip on the world.
We stay in the fog because as a communal principality we really can't stand the full light of day and live.
There's a real grasping at language for all of us in this. I'll deal with more of this in tomorrow's video. For now I think I'll give you this excellent treatment of emergence from @PageauJonathan with @RafeKelley
Both @jordanbpeterson and @bariweiss have passion to arrest the decline of the blue church and they're not going to follow red religion but the platform echosystem has been so totally disrupted that they don't know how to found a new church.
The fog of secularity is going away. They're grasping for new religion but there is yet no emmanation of a new church for them. So they are zealots in the desert preaching by the river looking for new converts from substack and Youtube.
More on this to come as I too grope for the language, the Logos to be revealed in this moment.