Empty Autonomy and Its Soul Hunger

This is an audio essay from my SubStack, Process This. ⁠You can head over here to read or watch the entire essay.⁠

In this episode, we explore Paul Tillich's largely forgotten 1933 work The Socialist Decision, written as Hitler rose to power and costing Tillich his professorship and homeland. Here, I explore what it reveals about the current crisis of American Christianity. Tillich argued that authentic human existence requires holding two roots in tension: the "powers of origin" (belonging, tradition, community) and the "prophetic demand" (justice, critique, openness to the stranger). When we collapse into one or the other, we get either authoritarian tribalism or rootless abstraction, and Tillich saw both failures at work in Weimar Germany. The parallels to our moment are striking: white Christian nationalism offers powerful symbols of belonging without prophetic self-criticism, while progressive Christianity has often provided critique without the embodied community and sacred symbols that move the human heart (something I explored here in The Perfect Storm). Tillich's prescription—what he called "theonomy"—charts a third way: a faith rooted in Scripture, sacrament, and particular community yet free because all these point beyond themselves to a God no finite form can capture.

This essay was inspired by two recent Substack posts from two of my regular reads, Tony Jones’ What the Hell is Going On and Robert Wright’s Some useful Trump-Hitler comparisons (in light of Minneapolis and Venezuela). Tony ends his post by saying, “I don’t know what will replace Christendom as our moral framework... Some days — and today is one of those days — I fear that we’re too fragmented to come back together under any single umbrella of morality.” Tony and I had a rather lengthy text exchange about it, and in it, I said, “It seems as we lose the cultural and ethical inertia of Christendom, Evangelicals get mean, and Mainline Protestants turn to vapid nostalgia.” As I was doing dishes and ruminating, I thought of Paul Tillich’s The Socialist Decision, an often-neglected work, and found it helpful in processing the current moment. What sparked it? Robert Wright’s measured and provocative reflections on useful Trump-Hitler comparisons. If this essay is interesting, then check out all three.

I hope you enjoy it and consider supporting my work by joining 75k+ other people on ⁠⁠Process This⁠⁠. If you want to ⁠⁠read or watch the essay, you will find it here⁠ ⁠on SubStack.

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