A few days ago, I sat down with my friend Jared Morningstar to ask him some questions about Islam.

It was a follow-up to my earlier conversation with Jacob Kishere seeking ways for Christianity to grow “beyond itself”—not by rejecting the Christ impulse but by trusting it to guide us into more open and pluralistic forms of love and life.

Mario Spassov posted a series of critical responses to my dialogue with Jared, which you can watch below:

Mario polemically refers to Jared and me as atheists. If “theism” is defined narrowly as scriptural literalism or assent to a single tribally authorized picture of God and the afterlife, etc., then sure. I grant that plenty of fundamentalists will refer to anyone who steps an inch outside their narrow dogmatic frame an “atheist.” But Mario knows better, so I feel that his use of the label is neither accurate nor helpful. There is a long, culturally generative lineage of mystical and philosophical theisms (apophatic and cataphatic) running through Catholic and Orthodox sources, through Protestant mystics, and well beyond Christianity into the wider delta of perennial grammars of Spirit. My own theological orientation belongs to that family far more than it resembles either modern secular atheism or modern supernaturalist fundamentalism. Mario insists I have more in common with people like Sam Harris and Yuval Harari than I do with most theists. But I am not sure about that. Unlike Harris and Harari, I do not think meaning and value are useful fictions in an uncaring universe, nor do I see ideals like human rights as reducible to social constructions. I have explicitly criticized Harari’s nihilism. Value-experience is woven into the fabric of cosmogenesis, not tacked onto it as a late, optional human story.

When I said that a dialogue like the one I had with Jared may only be interesting and accessible to something like 10% of the population, that wasn’t a gesture of exclusion but an admission of the limits of effective communication. No one can speak to everyone at once, and not every conversation can carry the whole public at the same time. Our aim was diplomatic: to model how an anarchic Christian and a progressive Muslim can speak theologically without collapsing into culture-war reactivity or reducing politics to the friend/enemy division. I’m open to dialogue with anyone, including people with whom I have profound political and religious disagreements, and I have engaged figures on the hard-right directly. For example, these posts on Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes:

I’ve even spoken directly with white nationalists like Eric Orwoll (who visited me in Berkeley back in 2015 to discuss our shared interest in Plato) and Keith Woods (who apparently appreciated my work on Whitehead), admittedly initially agreeing to do so before I knew much about their politics. I had to pull back from further engagement when it became clear that their online followers (particularly Woods’) could not stomach good faith disagreement with someone of Jewish descent.

While I’m obviously not politically conservative, I do not recognize in myself the generic liberal atheist progressive that Mario takes himself to be criticizing. But my purpose in seeking dialogue across difference isn’t memetic murder. I refuse to join Mario in the zero-sum social warfare frame that he’s apparently embedded himself within. Politics is not just war by other means but a laying down of weapons to attempt the difficult work of composing common worlds together using words. None of this means I refuse to take a principled stand or withhold criticisms of those I disagree with, but I try not to demonize anyone (though I admit it is difficult when they rush to demonize me, eg, in the way Woods’ followers did by reducing my cosmopolitical ideals to my Jewishness). I try to read reactionary political actors as symptoms of a diseased social organism.

If liberal progressivism has a shadow, it’s not merely that it’s unconsciously tribal. It’s that it often pretends its sacred ideals—cultural freedom, political equality, economic solidarity—can withstand the winds of social change without being rooted in transcendent ideals of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. These ideals can endure only when they’re lived as more than institutional procedures, when they’re grounded, pluralistically but genuinely, in Logos, in Spirit, in the imago dei depth dimension of our shared human beingness.

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Ep.236 - Jesse Meets WNYC's On The Media