Stop Talking about "Christian Nationalism"
Plus, what patriarchy misses and dopamine obscures.
Welcome to Three Things.
This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.
Goodness is More Interesting Than Patriarchy
Kirsten Sanders on The Women Are Up To Something
Four women born between the First and Second World Wars dared to look at the horrors of the twentieth century and think relentlessly about goodness. They did this in the philosophy departments of Oxford University. Challenging their male colleagues at nearly every turn, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgely reinvigorated a field called virtue ethics. The key question for these women was, What sort of persons should we be and how should we live?
In reviewing a recent book about them, theologian Kirsten Sanders highlights what they were not interested in:
It is quite interesting that the women of Oxford find patriarchy so uninteresting. These women were able to focus their lives on truth telling without speaking much at all about their experience of being women, and with nearly no reflection on any systems that inhibited their truthtelling.
They were seldom interested in power. Of course they stewarded the power that they had as they filled the chairs to which they were assigned, but “power” as an abstract concept seemed uninteresting to them. What was more interesting was agency, which each of them did indeed have.
Sanders’ reflection on “the women of Oxford” is filled with details about their particular lives, choices and answers to the question of goodness. As a theologian, however, Sanders returns to what this quartet of philosophers might be able to teach us about the life of the church today.
What recent focus on “patriarchy” attempts to demonstrate are the ways that the "tradition" or "church practice" is stacked against women's involvement in the maintenance and repair of the local church or local institutions. But such accounts of patriarchy demonstrate little curiosity about a) the way individual women navigate these things and b) whether patriarchy is an adequate definition (and what it precisely means).
This view to the prevalence and all-encompassing effects of patriarchy does indeed seem to be the conclusion of many recent books on the topic. Whether or not such an evaluation is descriptively adequate, what such a definition lacks is any interest in virtue and the irreducibly particular forms it takes in the individual lives of women. Where virtue and the impressionistic creativity that it demands brings to the table is a consideration of real life, and only real lives can be good or holy ones.
Read The Women Were Up to Something over at In Particular. The book about the women of Oxford is The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics.
Stop Talking About “Christian Nationalism”
Michael Wear on what it really is
We need to stop talking about “Christian Nationalism”. It has become a meaningless, pejorative term that obscures more than clarifies. “The problem with what is being referred to as Christian Nationalism is not that it’s too Christian or that it is too pro-America,” writes Michael Wear, “but that it is neither.”
What we do need to start talking about, Wear suggests, is Political Therapeutic Deism:
Political Therapeutic Deism is a system of beliefs which invoke religious terms for the purposes of affirming one’s politics. It includes beliefs like:
God is on my political party’s side.
My views on political issues are a leading indicator that I am a true Christian.
My actions in politics are justified in light of God’s general approval of my politics.
I do not understand how other “Christians” could vote for my candidate’s opponent.
It is clear and obvious which political issues are most important to God.
Political Therapeutic Deism makes sense of why we’re seeing sorting in churches by politics, over and above theology or other factors. It makes sense of why we’ve seen steep declines of religious affiliation among Democrats over the last several decades, and why growing numbers of Trump supporters identify as evangelical, even if they don’t share evangelicals’ theological beliefs. It makes sense of political scientist Michele Margolis’s contention that politics shapes our social identities and that partisan forces are responsible for shaping religious divides along partisan lines.
Read Political Therapeutic Deism at Mere Orthodoxy for further help in questioning an unhelpful concept. For more from Michael Wear, check out his book The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.
Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet
Ted Goia and Michael Sacasas on “Dopamine Culture”
“The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction.”
So wrote cultural historian Ted Goia in a February post that nearly broke Substack. He went on:
Instead of movies, users get served up an endless sequence of 15-second videos. Instead of symphonies, listeners hear bite-sized melodies, usually accompanied by one of these tiny videos—just enough for a dopamine hit, and no more.
This is the new culture. And its most striking feature is the absence of Culture (with a capital C) or even mindless entertainment—both get replaced by compulsive activity.
We sometimes call it doomscrolling; Goia calls is TikTok depression, Silicon Valley zombification and, most notably, Dopamine Culture. It makes tech companies rich, but users pay the price. As Goia writes, “Some companies get people hooked with pills and needles. Others with apps and algorithms. But either way, it’s just churning out junkies.”
Or, in visual form:
Goia’s post resonated with over 5,000 users who liked it and is still generating discussion. But tech writer
suggests that the dopamine and addiction framing might be inadequate and counterproductive. It potentially paints us as “hapless individuals at the mercy of large tech companies” when what really might be going on is much deeper. For instance:We can’t envision life beyond our devices. Our “addictions” might actually be compulsions borne of a “poverty of concepts.” What might happen, for example, if we took regular walks without them?
The problem isn’t just with tech companies. The problem is the perennial human tendency to resist solitude and turn away from “duties, responsibilities, and obligations we ought to be more vigorously pursuing.”
Even deeper, when we scroll we are not simply machines searching for pleasurable inputs. We are human creatures enacting an inbuilt longing to know and to be known. But our devices “discourage the labor that would transform information into knowledge and connection into relationship.”
All of this combined with the reality that we live in a cultural situation where it is increasingly taboo to say No to anything.
Read Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet over at
for a fuller exploration of these themes. For an accessible Christian treatment, see Andy Crouch’s brilliant book The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World.
Glad to see someone interacting with Goia. I pondered his article too, nearly used his big fish illustration for a talk I gave on walking and spirituality, but it didn't sit right with me. I had to question whether we're heading toward a dopamine addiction. I agree the discussion about our aversion to solitude seems more to the point.