Ask For The Ancient Paths

No.250: March 7, 2025

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, so please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books, a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Dear Friends,

I’d like to start by giving a short endorsement of Dr. Thaddeus Williams and to encourage you to obtain his new book, Revering God: How to Marvel at Your Maker. Pronto. I have raved about every single book Dr. Williams has written, sometimes so profusely people think I’m faking it. I am not faking it. When Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice came out, a friend wrote to me and said, “I got the book, thinking there is no way it as as good as you say it is. Well, I was wrong. It is that good.”

Just so. Revering God is his latest, and it was published last fall. Dr. Williams was unable to do the usual sort of things one does when promoting a new book (e.g., interviews, podcasts, etc.) because he was laid up after surgery for a significant injury. Now that he is recovered he’d like to make up for lost time and I will try to help him. Go. Buy. His. Book. No theologian today writes deep theological reflection combined with contemporary application to life today as well as Thaddeus Williams. His illustrations, pop culture references, along with a breezy and engaging writing style deceives readers. They might think they are reading pop religious fluff, but only when the pill goes down do you realize you’ve just swallowed chemotherapy designed to kill your sin and your spiritual apathy.

Back to regularly scheduled programming.

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I am known as someone fond of saying that we are living in “precedented times.” The past decade or so has provided ample opportunity for various figures—politicians, public intellectuals, and other grifters of all sorts—to whip people into a frenzy of panic and hysteria that the sky is falling and the earth is crumbling beneath their feet. Things are worse than they have ever been. This apocalyptic frame of mind makes one vulnerable to all sorts of wrong-headed ideas; when people are desperate, they become open to desperate measures. This is obvious in politics, of course. Convince people that the fate of the world or the country or civilization is in their hands when they fill out an electoral ballot and you can build a pretty passionate populist movement. I trust this assessment needs no lengthy justification. I grant that for some reason it doesn’t work as well for Smokey the Bear when he tells people “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.” (As the popular meme says, “That’s a lot of pressure, honestly.”) Politics and civilizational collapse somehow has more of a plausibility narrative.

The apocalyptic notion that we are living in unprecedented times colors much more than politics. The way the evangelical church in America is always inventing new and novel ways to reach people is a symptom of the mindset. The wheel must be constantly reinvented because the church is always up against something entirely new or novel. We’ve never seen this before. Quick! Invent a new strategy! An example in recent years is Aaron Renn’s now-famous “Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” model, explained more fully in his book Living in the Negative World (My review here). As I observed, while Renn uses his model for some pretty unobjectionable and anodyne ends, others are weaponizing it for more nefarious purposes. Convince people that “the times” are unprecedented and that they therefore require unprecedented measures (revolutionary actions that they euphemistically call “extra-constitutional”), and one can amass for oneself a great deal of influence, prestige, power, and—let’s not forget because a lot of it comes down to this—money.

I have written on this theme of “precedented times” in the past but was recently reminded while reading Rob Edwards’s review of Ross Douthat’s new book. Nothing in my essay today is intended as a criticism or critique of Douthat; I haven’t read the book, but the review prompted the following thoughts.

Edwards summarizes Douthat’s thesis:

According to Douthat, ‘the heyday of the New Atheism,’ with its combative attitude toward all things religious, has passed (1). Secularism, with its purely materialistic conception of the universe, has proved unsatisfying. People are ‘unhappy with their unbelief’ (2).

Several themes Douthat develops will sound familiar to readers who are also familiar with philosopher Charles Taylor (another Roman Catholic author) and his influential work, ‘A Secular Age.’ Douthat uses Taylor’s description of ‘disenchantment’ to portray the materialist’s view of the world, cut off from any supernatural influence or interaction, leaving us with a shallow existence. Under the influence of secularism, God’s presence became excluded from our ‘social imaginary,’ to use another term from Taylor.

The basic idea is that for a long time a disenchanted materialism—seen most notably in the dominance of “scientism”—culturally reigned, and that that hegemony is now fracturing before our eyes. People are unsatisfied with a world that lacks transcendence and so they are turning to all manner of “spirituality.” This is inarguably true. Take the “New Atheists” themselves. Richard Dawkins has come to appreciate the civilizational and social value of Christianity, so much so that he calls himself a “Cultural Christian.” This is barely imaginable from the man who once wrote that all forms of faith are a disease—a retrograde genetic mutation—that must be eradicated. Another of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, Sam Harris, has openly gone from hard-core scientific materialist to Eastern mystic; he is a proud apologist and salesman for transcendental meditation and other “mindfulness” practices (the subscription price seems like it might be a lucrative gig).

Then there is the fact of actual conversions amongst the formerly convinced materialists: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Niall Ferguson, and most recently Larry Sanger. And long before them, infamous atheist philosopher Antony Flew gave up on his atheism and landed on a form of Deism (which, granted, isn’t that much better.) Others, of course, are not turning to Christianity, but rather a new kind of paganism. Tara Isabella Burton writes about the mass movement of “bespoke” pagan spirituality in her eye-opening book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. And, I might note, my estimation is that for all his talk about “Jesus” and “God,” Jordan Peterson is an example of the latter category. He’s inventing his own Jungian “archetype” form of Christianity, which is just a bespoke (i.e., personally tailored) form of paganism.

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I rehearse all of this here because it gives me déjà vu. I have written about this from time to time over the past fifteen years or so, but I will do so again for newer readers.