Discussion of Bentley Hart's "Orphic cult" quote

Faith & Science Conversation
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I thought of my theology nerd friends here reading this essay.
It’s a very informed disscussion of Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s assessment of American Evangelical Christianity in this quote from Commonweal:

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.”

The author of the Substack essay, Shawn Patrick Connelly, draws some interesting parallels and throguh lines between the Orphic cult of ancient Greece, Christian Gnosticism, Augustine, and modern American Evangelicalism in order to understand a little better how we got where we are with Christian nationalism and authoritarian megachurch pastors enforcing extreme patriarchy.

It was pretty informative and interesting and I recommend it to all of you who like discussing the East/West divide in Christian history, the anti-intellectual, anti-scholarship bent of mainstream Evangelicalism, and the negative influence of Greek dualism in Christian eschatology.

Here’s a pull quote:

The body and the world are problems. Mainstream evangelical eschatology, particularly in its dispensational form, teaches that the world is not going to be renewed. It is winding down. The Rapture is, without exaggeration, the most Orphic idea in American Christianity: souls of the initiated extracted from corrupt matter before final destruction. Creation is not redeemed. It is discarded. The world is a burning building and the point is to get out before the roof falls.

And then there is Hart’s “cult of Mammon,” which is not incidental but structural. When salvation is organized entirely around individual benefit, when the whole religious enterprise reduces to securing your personal escape and optimizing your standing before God, spiritual and material prosperity become logically equivalent. Both are individual goods. Both are what you receive for being in right standing with the cosmic order. The prosperity gospel is not a corruption of American evangelicalism. It is precisely how American evangelicalism was designed.

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Love it. Reminds me of how N.T. Wright opened my eyes when reading Surprised by Hope years ago, after a lifetime in evangelical churches.

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That makes me think of how a Lutheran pastor/priest from the U.K. who’d settled in Missouri went to the National Association of Evangelicals and afterwards commented that they weren’t very evangelical.

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Interesting parallel here… because it has often struck me as odd that a religion that follows a man who emphasized “storing up treasure in heaven” instead of on earth would be such fertile ground for teachings involving financial and material prosperity. But the “individual benefit” narrative does help that make sense. It’s also a formula that other aspects of evangelicalism follow without it being obvious. I saw someone describe Joshua Harris’s “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” philosophy as the “sexual prosperity gospel” and now I can’t unsee it. And yet many who aligned with that would have called out Joel Osteen-style financial prosperity as “unbiblical,” but the thread of that idea moves through more than just money.

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And then the “Dobsonesque” parenting prosperity gospel of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Common theme here anyone?

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I don’t know–in a measure, we all hope that doing the right thing will be healthy for us. One of the warps of democratic society seems to be that in order to get us to do the right thing, we have to be convinced that it’s the best thing for us. That’s a bit in contradiction to the scene in the Garden of Eden–the placement of a “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” with out a clear selfish reason to follow the rules about whether or not to eat that fruit. Whether it’s allegory/myth or not, there is a lot to muse about there, I think.

In contrast, I enjoyed David Platt’s book, “Radical,” which he noted was the opposite of the Constitution, that we should not be chasing our own happiness as the ultimate goal.

Thanks.

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Yes, that came to mind too. And for a lot of these things, the authors assured readers that they would experience benefits from “following the program” but a lot of those were way down the road. So many people went years without holding the teachings up to any real-world measuring sticks because results were supposedly not going to come until well after certain milestones had been hit. And some financial prosperity gospel schemes were similar… results were always “right around the corner" if you followed the system correctly. Sounds very similar to the “pie in the sky” view of heaven too. You have to suffer first, then you’ll get a reward. But if people begin to expect renewal in the here and now, the teachings will be forced to meet some kind of reality-based metric that many of them actively tried to avoid confronting.

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Thanks for sharing that. I’m in danger of continued revelry of confirmation bias here as I took it in. I was glad the substack author took the time to acknowledge her (our) own potential roles as keepers (free disseminators, really) of elite, dispensed knowledge around this stuff, and her answer to that that, then, which makes a distinction between educated scholarship freely sharing of itself, vs. cult leaders building a controllable power structure for themselves.

To me the question isn’t “Is this true” of American religion, but rather “how could it not be true?!” Given what we see of where it’s gone today, it’s pretty hard to argue against this as we all see and smell the rotten fruit all around us.

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# Politics for Losers

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The essay was interesting to read. I look USA from outside (North Europe), so I can only evaluate what is ‘broadcast’ to outside. The essay is polemic and targeted against a particular group (some American evangelical churches, practices and thinking) but inadvertently, it also hits against trends and practices that can be seen widely in Western Christianity and partly also in the Eastern Christianity.

The essay criticized the Hellenistic/Platonic thinking in Western Christianity, the thinking of Augustine and “a priestly class with enormous authority over access to saving knowledge … the religious specialist controls access to the truth, and the community’s access to God runs through him“.

It also tells “The logic is identical to what the Orphic priests were selling: a specific transaction, correctly performed, secures your status and changes your eternal destination.“ The criticism is targeted against the evangelical practices, like the ‘Sinner’s Prayer’, and the revivalist use of the term ‘born-again’ but the same logic applies as well to the baptism as done by the old churches - a specific transaction, correctly performed, etc…

The essay is polemic but it hopefully inspires thinking about the tension between the teachings of Jesus and the practices in our religious environment. Not everything we have heard and are experiencing in our church is what Jesus and his apostles were teaching.

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I appreciated how it was clear the author had read and studied a lot, but he managed to present eveerything in a pretty concise and accessible way. I think the observations on the roots of the physical/spiritual divide are really useful for thinking about many issues that are currently hurting people in churches and that we talk about here; climate change denial, vaccine hesitancy, science defunding, abuse coverups, even current events like Christians supporting revoking USAID and building concentration camps. A lot of it comes down to thinking prayer and “spiritual warfare” are more effective solutions than medicine and all that matters is saving souls so people can go to heaven when they die.

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You’re right to smell a rat. Its name is capitalism. Jesus shows us a better way.

I’ve felt that way for years, starting with realizing that Adam Smith had no confidence in capitalism because it is inherently inimical to free markets and to freedom.

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I’ve noticed this sort of thinking a lot as I’ve tried to rethink faith. There are so many important things we want to focus on outside of ourselves, but because of the individualistic, self-preserving “center” that Shawn Connelly identified in popular Christianity, so many people are going to battle the fears and habits they’ve been given for many years. When you’ve been trained to seek individual salvation for yourself (or, at least, pursue an individual relationship with God), it’s not easy to reorient your mindset off of your own preservation.

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To play “devil’s advocate” here (maybe literally!) on behalf of American evangelicalism, I could hear some of the few-remaining biblically literate ones perhaps mounting a response something like this: Sure, there is lots of Hellenistic influence in Christianity! That doesn’t mean that many of those belief structures couldn’t have been redeemed (or ‘baptized’ if you will) into early Christian thought! C.S. Lewis certainly thought that some early Pagan influence ought to rightfully be paid its due for truths that were later recognized and adopted into Christian thought. So just because we can find similar occult structures or practices doesn’t mean that all such thought need be discarded.

Of course, far be it from present-day evangelicals around here to appeal to Lewis about anything. I’m pretty sure he would long ago have become persona non-grata to them for being way too intelligent and well-read.

That said … there doesn’t seem to be any coherent rebuttal to Wright’s (and others’) biblical take-down of the Platonic gnosticism that is now so entrenched in U.S. churches here.

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I don’t see this individual as getting Augustine right.

Augustine is the hinge. The most influential theologian in the Western tradition, he was a Manichaean for nearly a decade before his conversion, and Manichaeism was another heir of the same Orphic-Gnostic stream, built on a sharp dualism between light and matter, spirit and flesh. His mature theology rejected Manichaeism formally. But Platonism remained his intellectual atmosphere, and Platonism had its own very uneasy relationship with the material. Plato’s philosopher ascends away from the cave, away from the shadowed world of matter, toward the eternal forms. Augustine’s great line, “our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee,” is genuinely beautiful, and it is also a profoundly Platonic formulation. The soul’s longing is figured as ascent, as a weight pulling upward against the drag of concupiscence and embodied life. The Hebrew instinct was different: creation pronounced good, history as the arena where God is actually at work, the body as the site of resurrection and not merely its obstacle. In Augustine, those emphases recede. Individual soul-destiny moves toward the center of the story.

Augustine spent much of his converted life arguing against the Manichaeans and defending the goodness of creation. For example, in dealing with evil Augustine saw it as a privation of good (Privatio Boni). Evil is not a real thing or substance. Thus, the body and all physical reality is good.

The drag of concupiscence is actually a defect in our will and concerns the disorder of human desire in loving lower goods over higher goods.

The author says “history is the arena where God is actually at work” but this recedes in Augustine. Isn’t this what City of God is all about? History moving towards a climax under God’s providence. His opponents thought history was cyclical and meaningless. Augustine argued against this in a work considered his magnum opus where he is reputed to have invented the western view of linear, purposeful history.

In Augustine the body as the site of resurrection recedes? In City of God (XXII), Augustine defends the physical resurrection of the body against the mockery of the Platonists like Porphyry.

The repose of the soul is not a disembodied state but in the resurrected body in a new heavens and new earth. Augustine thought the Platonists were the closest to Christianity but they couldn’t get there. He used an analogy of them being on a hilltop and seeing the land of peace but having no road to it. That road and repose comes via the incarnation and God descending into the dirt of human history.

I have to question whether or not this author has ever read Augustine. Modern Christians often like to claim “Hebrew good Greek bad” and try to blame him for perverting or throwing off the Church in some way. This is not wise. Augustine baptized Greek philosophy to defend Hebrew theology and he did it against a very tough crowd. Of course, it was Aquinas that brilliantly fused the thoughts of Christian theology (significantly influenced by Augustine) and Aristotle together.

I find that author writes a lot but says very little of substance. Much of it is of the same quality as the bad evangelical arguments it critiques. If you agree with what he writes you will like it. If you don’t, well, there really isn’t much presented to argue with. It’s just off the cuff opinions.

Vinnie

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Polemic writings tend to simplify matters in order to hit something that the writer thinks is wrong. It is both a strength and a weakness.
It is a strength in the sense that the message becomes clear and understood. The core message is not lost among everything else. That seems to be needed in the context of the essay.
A weakness is that the simplification may cut too many corners. If we analyse all the sentences, we may find much where the writing does not tell the whole truth and may give wrong impressions. In most interpretations, there is something good (or strong) and something bad (or weak). Polemic writings often skip the strengths to attack the weaknesses.

The writing needs to be understood in the correct context. It is not a criticism of Western Christianity, it is a criticism of certain type of thinking within American churches. I think the value of the essay is in that it makes some potential weaknesses in that context visible. For Christians living in other contexts, reading the essay is like reading a letter to someone else. It is not written to us but we may use the essay as input that might reveal weak points (or strengths) in our context.

Those points where we agree with the writer probably do not give us anything new - those just strengthen our opinions. The most valuable points for us are those where we disagree. Some may just skip the claims or points where we disagree but we could benefit from the disagreements if we would stop to think. The disagreement might force us to clarify to ourself why we disagree. We may have good reasons to disagree but it may also happen that our justifications are not as strong as we hope. We tend to see the side of matters that supports our worldview but we may be blind to the other side that does not support our way of thinking..

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Indeed, It would have been good to hear more about this from the sub stack author. And it spurred me to search out Hart’s original essay which the sub stack post drew from. Maybe a poster has understandably not gone into too much depth, but surely the original scholar himself did? Perhaps so, (I would say probably so in Hart’s case) - but that point must remain speculative to me, at least on the basis this article of Hart’s which I don’t think mentioned Augustine even once. (To be fair I only gave the article one hasty read-through). Most of Hart’s powder and shot was spent reviling the American health care system and how dysfunctional it is compared to nearly every other health care providing nation. I guess the sub stack poster wasn’t too keen to dwell over much on Hart’s socialism (“Three Cheers for Socialism” is the title). Most American readers won’t even make it past the title. And even the mentions of the Orphic influences on American Christianity are just a scant few sentences. If you read what the sub stack post quoted of Hart, then you saw nearly everything Hart even said about it at all (at least in that 2020 essay).

I still think it’s a pretty interesting direction to explore, though, and I would read with interest if anybody delved more into how Augustine may or may not have been the bridge for all that, and how pivotal (in both good or bad ways) that may have been for how Christianity developed.

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I don’t know who the Substack author is but he identifies as a recovering evangelical and a lover of beer and big questions so that makes me like him more.

Hart is a legitimate and credentialed philosopher. I think he held a position at Notre Dame. I really wouldn’t expect him to get Augustine so wrong. Maybe the author is paraphrasing something he didn’t fully understand. Or maybe his evangelical roots told him Hebrew good Greek bad and he hasn’t had the time or desire to do any real digging in this issue. Old beliefs and misinformation die hard.

This is not to underscore any of his points outlining problems with modern evangelicalism, but he certainly is very questionable when it comes to church history. He was hurt by the evangelical mindset (as so many of us were) and this is part of the coping process. I don’t really think there are any logical arguments here but I try to avoid what I see as excessive “evangelical bashing.” I just don’t see it as helpful and some very good ones are dear friends, extremely charitable people and shouldn’t be defined by their wooden literalism on a few beliefs (whether religious and political). If I adopted this practice then I would not only marginalize them but automatically think anyone pro-choice is a murderous monster and terrible human being. I’d have no neighbors and only enemies and they are much harder to love. It’s not a good way to live.

He didn’t simplify Augustine. He butchered him.

Vinnie

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You were doing so good until this line, I was all ready to like the post. Why? Why make such good points and then close by being smug and condescending like you are the only smart person in the room?

I thought the author was less trying to characterize Augustine on some kind of binary and more tracing pagan streams of thought that Christians have been encultured in that keep creeping in to their postures, even if the tenets of their doctrines refute them. That’s just how human brains work. It’s why you can take a person out of fundamentalism and turn them into an atheist, but they bring aspects of their fundamentalist thinking to their non-belief in subconscious ways.

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I think what originally interested the author was the fact that reprints of the Hart quote omit the word “orphic” because it is so obscure. So he wanted to take a look at how exactly “orphic” was an accurate description of American evangelicalism and why. That was the thesis.

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