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Let's Talk About: Cursed Objects

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ACERCA DE ESTE EPISODIO

A Christian builder in Texas prays over every house he puts up and stamps John 3:16 into the driveway. A family member rebukes your depression in the name of Jesus. A Congolese aunt tells you not to buy that carving: it's demonic and it can hurt you. Ethnic cleansing in medieval Spain. Ngofeen and I originally sat down to walk from the Black Plague to the eve of the Reformation, and instead we spent an hour on this: what makes an object, a word, a country, or a body tainted, and who gets to decide?

This is the fourth conversation in our series on when white people stopped dancing. Something critical clicked for me this time around. Contamination logic is the hinge. It runs from Pentecostal missionaries in Ghana turning old gods into demons, to Ferdinand and Isabella telling Spanish Muslims and Jews to convert or leave, to a ballet teacher saying keep your hips square, to a man who has to do an elaborate handshake before he's allowed to hug his friend.

In this episode:

-Why we open in 2020, and what the pandemic can and can't tell us about the plague

-Pentecostalism as both the most spiritually aggressive and the most anti-traditional Christianity at once, and Birgit Meyer's Translating the Devil

-Scripture citation as spell-casting, and what apologetics has in common with a curse

-Ngofeen redecorating his bedroom door with raffia and nails, and what his aunties would say

-Paul on meat sacrificed to idols, and whether intention permanently taints an object

-The Reconquista, 1492, and why Spain arrived in the Caribbean already unable to see what was in front of them

-Columbus is the '90s: Luther in 1517 and Columbus in 1492 are the same twenty five years, not two separate histories

-The body as a history book, and reading white evangelical worship gestures as appropriated Black movement

-Ngofeen on the exhaustion of proving you are not a tainted object

-Why congregational singing might be the cry of a person who can't be touched

Mentioned

Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (1999)

If you missed registration for my class "The Body of Christ Keeps the Score" and want to be kept in the loop for the next time it's offered, head to https://bradleymelle.com/course and join the waitlist!

New here? Freestyle Theology reads the history of Christianity through trauma and the body. Not just what people believed, but what happened to them, and what it did to how they move.

Sociedad y cultura
Religión
Espiritualidad
Historial
Religión y espiritualidad
Cristianismo
Filosofía
Inglés
Estados Unidos
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TRANSCRIPCIÓN 🔗

WEBVTT
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Hey everyone, welcome to the new episode of Freestyle Theology.
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I'm your host, Dr.
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Bradley Melle, historian of Christianity and culture.
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So this week I'm back with Ngofeen for our fourth conversation.
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And I just want to tell you up front that this one did not go where we planned it to go.
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But I ended up loving where it did go, and I think you will too.
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So in this conversation, uh, just so you know, we open in 2020.
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The pandemic, the conspiracy theories, George Floyd, the election, all of that.
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And that's not just opening banter.
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You don't have the wrong episode.
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Talking about COVID and its aftermath is the closest that we can get to imagining the kind of things the plague did to real people.
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So here's where Ngofeen and I are in the history right now.
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In the last few episodes, we've been sitting in that stretch between roughly 1350 and 1500.
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That's the poly crisis where everything is falling apart.
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And this episode was supposed to be the one where we walk right up to the edge of the Reformation.
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And we do get there eventually.
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But first, we get completely waylaid by witchcraft.
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And that unexpected detour ends up taking us somewhere critical.
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There's a single word that ends up holding this entire conversation together, and it keeps coming up again and again in different contexts, and that word is contamination.
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What makes a thing tainted, and who gets to decide?
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We ask that question over and over, but we didn't notice that we were doing it until the very end.
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You have contamination at the level of an object, a statue or a flag.
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You have it at the level of a word.
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We talk about this whole style or tradition of Christianity where you cite the verse that you say the Bible reference out loud, like you're casting a spell.
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You have it at the level of a country, because that's what the Spanish Reconquista and Inquisition were all wrapped up in.
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A land contaminated by Jews and Muslims, who were then forced to either convert or leave.
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And you have it at the level of the body.
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Hips, touch, dancing, nakedness, Europeans encountering indigenous and African peoples and seeing them and seeing in them the contaminants that they feared in themselves.
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We talk about a Christian home builder in Texas, who prays over the houses he builds and puts a stone with John 316 in every driveway.
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We talk about Pentecostal missionaries in Ghana, who tried to get rid of the old gods, but ended up preserving them by turning them all into demons.
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Ngofeen tells this story about redecorating his bedroom door with raffia and nails.
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He's borrowing a motif that he discovered from Congolese figures that he saw in a museum collection, and he reflects on what his family, what his aunties would say about that.
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When we get to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 and look at what the Reconquista trained Europe to do when it encountered difference.
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I also tried to make clear, and I just want to say it here as well.
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Columbus accidentally stumbled upon the Caribbean in 1492.
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Luther nailed the theses to the cathedral door in Wittenberg in 1517.
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So that means in in if we translate that to our time period, that's like the thing with Columbus happens in 1992 and Luther happens in 2017.
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That's the distance.
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They're very much the same era.
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But what we tend to do is file those as two separate stories, two separate histories.
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The Reformation over here and colonization over there.
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But they're occurring in the same 25-year period.
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And I think a lot of what we get wrong about this period comes from splitting them apart.
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You have to do that work to keep bringing them back together.
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Somewhere in the second half of our conversation, it gets really real.
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Ngofeen says something about how much energy he has to spend proving that he's not a tainted object.
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And then the whole conversation stops being about medieval people, stops being about history, and starts being about real people right now.
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So if you've ever been on the receiving end of that, of being looked at or seen as a contaminant, if you've been the thing that's needs to be kept out so everyone else can stay clean, I think this that con this conversation will be for you.
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One of the things that Ngofeen and I are doing in this series is the thing I do, which is reading church history through the body, through trauma, through what actually happened to real people and not just what they profess to believe.
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My class, The Body of Christ keeps the score, is going now.
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We've got two different cohorts.
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If you were interested, but you weren't able to register this time around, you can go back to my site, bradleymelle.com/ course, and it'll automatically take you to a wait list now.
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So head over there if you want to be in the loop for the next time.
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I offer that look into the dysfunctional family history of Western Christianity.
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All right, that's enough from me.
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Here is this week's conversation.
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I would say very common sentiment after the pandemic is like I kind of cite things that I've said.
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I kind of feel like the pandemic like changed me.
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I feel like I became more introverted after the pandemic.
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I feel like I was like doing more stuff before the pandemic, and then like the pandemic, like, and then you know, like you hear about all the kids that who were like in school during the pandemic, and that like messed them all up, and like we'll figure out what happens to them probably in like 10 years.
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Like, we're there's you know, um, and then all the parents who are having to parent at home and work, everyone's just like exhausted, and like again in the American pandemic summer of 2020 is like the pandemic and then Black Lives Matter, George Floyd's death.
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So you're just like societal, sort of like um, you know, um, quickly followed by the 2020 election, um, just which feels like a little bit of a reprieve um to people like me, um, but also this looming fear of like things are clearly not fixed.
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And and hearing all the conspiracy theories bombarding you every minute of every day, and you know people sort of with like the election stolen, the election stolen, and like you can feel the fabric of society starting to kind of dissolve.
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Yes, yes.
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Um, the conspiracy theories, the also to go to the pandemic, the like we don't need the vaccine, use this.
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Um, there's so many different iterations of like, no, no, no, no, no.
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If you just like eat more organic, or no, if you meditate, or no, this is about God's judgment, you know, all of these things, and this is only a certain segment of the population, but certainly if you live in New York City and you're a millennial, um the looming climate change, you know, over top.
00:07:05.040 --> 00:07:11.199
And so, really, from there, actual conversations I'm having with friends are like, do we even want to have kids?
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Like, do we want to bring kids into this world?
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Is it ethical to bring kids into this world?
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Very um existential conversations ratcheted up in 2024 by the election of Donald Trump for the second time, and really uh, really no longer niche conversations about like the state of big words like democracy, fascism, like real big things that if I can make a historical record for someone researching a hundred years from now, we were feeling it all.
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We were feeling it.
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We were actually having questions in real time about like, are we gonna be okay?
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Is this the end?
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Um, is the planet gonna burn up anyways?
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Does anything matter?
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All of that.
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That's very 2020.
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It's a 2026.
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So imagining a society-changing pandemic that affects everything, uh, 700 years ago.
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Um the world is slower, I can only imagine that the impact is seismically huger on magnitudes greater, you know?
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And the the material, uh, like foundational architecture of like the meaning of life was also more like limited.
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So, you know, you're when you just listed, you know, meditate or we're talking you're you're talking about like pharmaceuticals, you're talking about all these multiple different traditions, sources of wisdom, right?
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That a medieval person did not have.
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They would have had their local traditions, their stories, and I'm not saying that they this is in no way an attempt to dehumanize, to be like they had less human material.
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No, it's just was more concentrated, and then you had the the Christian material mediated through this by that point ancient institution.
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Yeah, yeah.
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At that point, we're talking about like uh it's over a thousand years old, which is like for forever.
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Exactly.
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That's basically forever.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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That's further back for for them than they are for us.
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Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
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What they're their processing of the plague is also being done with more limited containers.
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Yeah.
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Like they can't just say maybe God's not real.
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That that isn't really entertained.
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Maybe I don't know, you can't know in people's private thoughts, but generally you find evidence of that, and that's not what people are.
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They're like, Well, wrath makes more sense.
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While we would probably say something way more to the effect of like, well, maybe there isn't any moral, like loving God behind things, anyways.
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Right, right, right, right, right, right, right.
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The um the 21st century mid-2020s mind I would say broadly, but I live in one of the world's metropolises, will say something like what's happening just remo it's uh it is both a discouraging and encouraging.
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It depends on how you look at it, and it's very varied for people.
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Um the everything that happening is happening, the polycarsis reminds us of the fact that ultimately we're just atoms spinning around, and like the universe doesn't like care, there is no universe that cares about you.
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Like, we're here for a finite period, and hopefully we make the most of it.
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Right.
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You know, um, and there's very I mean I think there's a lot of iterations of that.
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There are Christian iterations of saying the same thing.
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I actually call it Christian nihilism, it's something I've talked about before where it's just like it it's magical thinking, it is like it doesn't matter what happens.
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God will snap his fingers and make everything magically better.
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So it doesn't matter, and I I I try to show um that that's fundamentally no different than nihilism.
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It just injects a yeah, it injects it's not hope.
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That's not what it is, it's like it's fantasy, and they're different.
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I've been thinking about how much of this is not the reformed kind of Christianity.
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The reformed Christianity prizes intellectualism, it's like very the value is a clear mind that thinks logically.
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Um which I am also grown up in uh Southern Baptist Christianity, which is not that kind of Christianity.
00:12:01.919 --> 00:12:12.879
That Christianity, I call it, I call the Reformed Christianity, I I say if uh Christianity were a high school, um Reformed Christianity would be the English teacher.
00:12:12.879 --> 00:12:16.480
Um Southern Baptist Christianity would be the football coach.
00:12:16.480 --> 00:12:26.080
Southern Baptist Christianity is very um it's very it has class distinctions in it, but it's very like let's save souls.
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Let's save souls, let's tell the truth, let's um it's kind of a kind of masculine, courageous, you know.
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At least it it projects that.
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It projects that it projects that, yes, exactly.
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Um but I think inside of that Christianity and inside of other pockets of Christianity, it's also a Christianity that I see a lot on social media, is there's a Christianity that's very I see it in African Christianity a lot.
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I find it I find it to be very witchcraft.
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Here's what I mean.
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I saw a reel yesterday that was a builder, a Christian builder, like house builder, architect builder type in like Texas.
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He's a Christian builder, and you know, the videos were of him praying over these new builds that he does.
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So he's like in the house, the builders are there, and he's there praying, raising his hand, praying over the house, praying over the people who are gonna live there.
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Um, which feels like both reformed and evangelical kind of uh uh-huh.
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And then it's like every home that I build will always have John 3.16 inscribed in the drive, in the driveway.
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You know?
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It's a mixture of the sort of like we're gonna tell the truth, but also this thing I find deeply in my mind, I'm like, this feels so medieval because it's like it's like a if we inscribe this rune, it will cause a spell and it will protect the home.
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It's very African in that like a very, you know, very African and also black church parts of black church Christianity will do things like, you know, uh, you say something like, um, oh, I'm so depressed, and your African parent will be like, I rebuke that in the name of Jesus.
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Um, because it's very, it's it's interestingly like incredibly mystical, sacred.
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It feels like spells.
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Like words are spells, and so if you use the Christian words as counter spells, then we'll all be protected.
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Yeah.
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And I almost find it, I'm like, oh, that doesn't seem like Christianity.
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That kind of seems like just like replace like you know, replace witch with pastor, you know what I mean?
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Or not even witch is a is the a reductive term, but like it's spells, you know what I mean?
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And I find that so fascinating because I'm like, huh, you're against witchcraft, you practice uh a curse-based Christianity that seems about getting the exact combination of things right.
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Eye of new, toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog.
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It's a quote Macbeth.
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I don't know.
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It's so interesting.
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Do you have a thought about that at all?
00:15:01.360 --> 00:15:13.039
It's a tangent, but like it made me when I've been thinking about medieval Christianity and sort of the the relationship between the medieval Christianity of like the church and then the practices of local practices.
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I'm like, this actually seems kind of like that.
00:15:16.399 --> 00:15:18.159
I have I have so many thoughts.
00:15:18.159 --> 00:15:21.679
I'm happy to like talk about this only.
00:15:21.679 --> 00:15:24.159
Okay, I have so many thoughts.
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I when I was doing this, is kind of digging back into my I like when I did my um doctorate.
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I did I studied indigenous peoples and Christianity, um, especially in the 20th and 21st century.
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So not as much like the more common stuff that's studied, like the mission history from 1600, 1700s.
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I I had to know that, but I wanted to know the more recent stuff, you know, with the advent of Pentecostalism, and there's a whole literature on indigenous uh spirituality and Pentecostalism.
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And then I also did I did my minor concentration in African history, kind of looking at the same things.
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Because I had done my master's in African colonial Christianity.
00:16:17.600 --> 00:16:18.960
Well, I didn't know that.
00:16:18.960 --> 00:16:21.120
Okay, okay, okay, wow, okay, okay.
00:16:21.360 --> 00:16:34.639
I shifted into the indigenous history before my doctorate because uh partially because I was like, I live in Canada, this is a real thing, and I should stop, it should stop being invisible to me.
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Uh like the largest indigenous community reserve uh reserve is just 20 minutes from my house.
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And I actually ended up working there, had a job there.
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I worked at a museum there, and so I I shifted my attention, but a lot of the concerns were kind of similar.
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So I ended up I read quite a bit actually about witchcraft and about modernism and witchcraft and Pentecostalism, and Pentecostalism, which is probably the tradition that you're most encountering when you're talking about spells and stuff, because it made itself very much available to that reality.
00:17:17.599 --> 00:17:23.680
The spiritual is not far away, it's not superstition, it's right here.
00:17:23.680 --> 00:17:43.200
And yet, simultaneously, very, very anti anything non-Christian, more anti-non-Christian than the more modernist Christianity that's like, well, that stuff's not real, but we're not going to demonize it in the same way.
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It's more like let's that's the influence of the Enlightenment and rational Christianity, too.
00:17:48.400 --> 00:17:50.160
Where it's like right, right, right, right, right.
00:17:50.160 --> 00:17:59.279
The stuff's not spiritually real, it's it's the markers of inferior culture, yeah, yeah.
00:17:59.279 --> 00:18:01.599
Lower on yeah, yeah.
00:18:01.599 --> 00:18:12.960
So it's interesting, like Pentecostal African Christianity or Pentecostal indigenous Christianity, in some ways are very in touch with the traditional.
00:18:12.960 --> 00:18:14.960
Uh-huh.
00:18:14.960 --> 00:18:19.680
And yet are also the strongest opponents of it.
00:18:19.680 --> 00:18:20.480
Yeah.
00:18:20.480 --> 00:18:34.400
I remember reading this book by Birgit Meyer called Translating the Devil, and it was a book looking at like pentac the growth of Pentecostal Christianity among the uh Iwe people in Ghana.
00:18:34.400 --> 00:18:35.279
Ewe.
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Awe?
00:18:36.000 --> 00:18:37.359
Awe, yeah.
00:18:37.359 --> 00:18:40.319
The Awei people in Ghana.
00:18:40.319 --> 00:18:46.640
And it was pretty fascinating because what she she's like an anthropologist historian.
00:18:46.640 --> 00:19:09.440
So what she showed was that in their attempt, the Pentecostal missionary attempt to sort of make Christianity legible, what they ended up doing was preserving all the old gods and spirits and kind of entrenching them, except now they were evil.
00:19:09.440 --> 00:19:31.200
So while an earlier kind of European colonial mission would have attempted to kind of eliminate belief in those spirits and gods and what whatever names are appropriate for these entities, um Pentecostal Christianity preserved them, enshrined them, and turned them into devils.
00:19:31.200 --> 00:19:39.039
And so that always captured the contradiction to me within Pentecostalism.
00:19:39.039 --> 00:19:47.680
Um and I I don't even fully know what what to think of that.
00:19:47.680 --> 00:19:55.680
Like to demonize someone's tradition that has been part of who they are for centuries is wrong.
00:19:55.680 --> 00:20:01.519
That is losing a library, that's burning Alexandria.
00:20:01.519 --> 00:20:07.920
Every time an oral history is eliminated, that's like burning a library of Alexandria.
00:20:07.920 --> 00:20:11.119
Um, we should be as devastated.
00:20:11.119 --> 00:20:14.480
Uh we all lose.
00:20:14.480 --> 00:20:31.359
But at the same time, like also I'm I'm wondering maybe what you think of this, like the spell casting, that sort of practice, whether it's done in the name of Jesus or it's done in traditional name, like is there wisdom in that?
00:20:31.359 --> 00:20:32.960
Is that good?
00:20:32.960 --> 00:20:35.359
Is the point to not do that anymore?
00:20:35.359 --> 00:20:37.759
Or is that just a colonized mentality?
00:20:37.759 --> 00:20:38.480
I don't know.
00:20:38.640 --> 00:20:42.000
Yeah, I definitely can't say I definitely can't say there's not wisdom in it.
00:20:42.000 --> 00:20:46.319
That that feels like the first you know thing to throw out is being like it's unwise.
00:20:46.319 --> 00:20:48.720
That seems like impossible that it's unwise.
00:20:48.720 --> 00:20:55.039
But I think it's um I mean, first it's perplexing to me.
00:20:55.039 --> 00:21:03.680
Classic example as the kid of people who grew up in a colonized country in Africa.
00:21:03.680 --> 00:21:12.000
Um here I am in 2026, and I want to I thankfully have like exposure to my parents.
00:21:12.000 --> 00:21:19.119
I never met my grandparents, but I have like, you know, uh some knowledge of where I'm from.
00:21:19.119 --> 00:21:22.319
My family still lives there, um, you know.
00:21:22.319 --> 00:21:30.880
But I, as an artist, want to use my raw material culturally in my artistic practice.
00:21:30.880 --> 00:21:48.559
Part of that raw material is the one that I got here in North America, and part of it is the raw material that I got um from Congo because I believe that the raw material of a culture isn't just the land, but it is the ways in which you are raised.
00:21:48.559 --> 00:21:55.279
And I was raised in the ways that are Congolese, even if you know, moved in a different continent.
00:21:55.279 --> 00:22:03.119
You go to Congo, feels like first time Congo thinks, uh I know many other people will recognize this of their respective cultures.
00:22:03.119 --> 00:22:06.319
You go to the market because you want to get souvenirs.
00:22:06.319 --> 00:22:12.079
You went, you you finally went to the place, you know, and you want you want to take something home with you.
00:22:12.079 --> 00:22:22.160
So you go to the souvenir market, and the tchotchkis that you can buy are often um old gods, right?
00:22:22.160 --> 00:22:28.400
So in the 1800s, they're like replicas of of uh things that were gods.
00:22:28.400 --> 00:22:38.319
So you get this conflict that happens, and it kind of depends on what kind of Christianity your relatives are from.
00:22:38.319 --> 00:22:44.559
The ones that are from this more Pentecostal Christianity will be like, don't buy that thing.
00:22:44.559 --> 00:22:50.480
Those are demonic, those are literally old gods, and we're Christians now.
00:22:50.720 --> 00:22:58.000
Can I just ask, if you have that in your home, can it like manifest malevolent?
00:22:58.559 --> 00:23:00.400
Yeah, yeah, that's why you don't buy it.
00:23:00.400 --> 00:23:02.720
That's why it can actually harm you.
00:23:02.720 --> 00:23:04.319
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:23:04.319 --> 00:23:05.599
Don't yeah, exactly.
00:23:05.599 --> 00:23:06.799
Don't do that.
00:23:06.799 --> 00:23:08.960
Um, and you shouldn't have that.
00:23:08.960 --> 00:23:19.200
Um, there's also in Congo a Christianity, I would say this is more my dad's family's Christianity, is a little bit more like it's a historical object, like it's fine, you know.
00:23:19.200 --> 00:23:32.880
Um, but there is that sort of strain that says you have to think for the the new generation like me, they're like, I want to use my cultural materials.
00:23:32.880 --> 00:23:44.960
If I were a European artist, I would, as an artist, would be going back and looking through museum exhibits, seeing what kind of motifs people use, flipping them, remixing them.
00:23:44.960 --> 00:23:50.960
And if I follow this kind of Christianity, it says I can't have access to these things because they're demonic.
00:23:50.960 --> 00:23:56.079
And I'm like, I don't like that that cuts off my ability to use these materials.
00:23:56.079 --> 00:23:58.240
As a very, very practical, practical example.
00:23:58.240 --> 00:23:59.359
I'm living in a new apartment.
00:23:59.359 --> 00:24:00.559
I moved it in February.
00:24:00.559 --> 00:24:03.039
Um, I always think a lot about interior design.
00:24:03.039 --> 00:24:12.319
And I was like, I get very bored by the fact that when you want to make something African in a home, the way that you do it is by putting some masks up on a wall.
00:24:12.319 --> 00:24:15.200
It's African now, a mask, which is fine.
00:24:15.200 --> 00:24:22.400
It's not not African, but like I'm an artist and I feel like part of big art making is like being creative and like flexing like innovation or whatever.
00:24:22.400 --> 00:24:23.359
So I'm like, okay.
00:24:23.359 --> 00:24:39.359
So literally what I do, what I did, this is maybe like a month ago, I went to a museum exhibit of like a British museum, looked up the Congolese artifacts that they had, looked through them to be like, ooh, what motifs can I try to incorporate into my home that don't feel cliche?
00:24:39.359 --> 00:24:49.680
One of them is we have these um these little gods, they're these little like little figurines, and they have nails all in them, like nails and screws.
00:24:49.680 --> 00:24:52.640
And so a thing that I did, and they're usually like made out of wood, stuff like that.
00:24:52.640 --> 00:25:00.880
The thing that I did is you look at my bedroom door, I took a bunch of raffia and wood, and I was like, why should I have a white bedroom door?
00:25:00.880 --> 00:25:03.039
I'm gonna do something that's more interesting.
00:25:03.039 --> 00:25:11.119
Took a bunch of raffia, kind of rattan, put it on it, put wood into the door, and then um and then I was like looking at some Indian doors.
00:25:11.119 --> 00:25:12.720
I was like, Oh, this is pretty common in Asia.
00:25:12.720 --> 00:25:15.279
You have a wooden door with like sort of decorative motif.
00:25:15.279 --> 00:25:24.319
Um, and then I'm like, I'm gonna get a bunch of nails and nail them into this thing so it looks like that figurine motif.
00:25:24.319 --> 00:25:30.160
If I were talking to like one of my aunts, they'd be like, What are you doing?
00:25:30.160 --> 00:25:34.880
Like you're playing with absolutely, you know?
00:25:34.880 --> 00:25:38.640
Um, and and I don't even want to like, I don't want to even sensationalize that.
00:25:38.640 --> 00:25:46.079
Like, I think even in the US, you would have Christianities that are like, that stuff is not to be played with.
00:25:46.079 --> 00:25:58.799
I find it very interesting because you see this a lot in uh YouTube format that I absolutely hate is uh the Jubilee video, which is like one person surrounded by 20 people and they're debating, and it's like an atheist surrounded by 20 Christians and they debate.
00:25:58.799 --> 00:26:00.079
Oh, I hate that too.
00:26:00.079 --> 00:26:09.599
Um, but you'll there's one in particular that I watch, it's like a spin-off of Jubilee, and you'll see it's the Christian, the atheist is in the middle, and then it's the Christian surrounding.
00:26:09.599 --> 00:26:12.559
And I know this because I know it from apologetics.
00:26:12.559 --> 00:26:20.480
You'll see it's very important to them in their communication of Christianity to cite scripture and say the name of the scripture.
00:26:20.480 --> 00:26:34.559
Matthew 14, 31 says, Luke 2, 15 says, and it is that spell mentality because it's this idea, it's from apologetics, it's this idea of like, you know, the word splits, you know, the word of God splits bone and marrow, that thing.
00:26:34.559 --> 00:26:38.640
So even if I just say it, it's like causing a change.
00:26:38.640 --> 00:26:53.200
And I don't want to say that that's not wise, but I also want to say that like I don't think it's good to have that kind of it just feels real dicey to me.
00:26:53.200 --> 00:27:07.119
It's a weapon, it's a weapon, and it also I feel like it turns raw materials like speech or nails into um it's almost like they're only tainted and they're no longer things made by the creator.
00:27:08.400 --> 00:27:17.279
It sounds weirdly like this is such a backwards way to get there, but it almost sounds like you're describing an idol.
00:27:17.279 --> 00:27:18.799
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:27:18.799 --> 00:27:26.480
But an idol as a bad thing rather than an idol as like, hey, that's this actually wasn't an idol.
00:27:26.480 --> 00:27:28.160
You called that an idol.
00:27:28.160 --> 00:27:33.119
In the you know, but you're you're saying, I don't know, that's really interesting to me.
00:27:33.119 --> 00:27:43.599
It's like you're talking about a tainted object that's used to harm or dehumanize or shut people down in some way.
00:27:43.599 --> 00:27:52.000
I wonder if in some ways that's that's what some of the authors were getting at with what an idol can do.
00:27:52.000 --> 00:28:03.200
It's like, you know, yeah, as opposed to what it later, how it has easily become, you know, especially with the colonial mentality, what those people do is idol worship.
00:28:03.200 --> 00:28:04.880
What we do is not.
00:28:05.119 --> 00:28:06.400
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:28:06.400 --> 00:28:18.799
I think there's something about it that just feels and I I do feel comforted because it feels like this is uh as old as the New Testament thing, because for them it was like the like, should we eat the food sacrificed to gods or whatever?
00:28:18.799 --> 00:28:21.839
It's fundamentally like, is that thing tainted or is it fine?
00:28:21.839 --> 00:28:37.200
You know, and kind of like the I don't know if consensus is the right word, but at least like the place that I feel like Paul ends at is like it's fine, but like also like if people are super sensitive to that, then you should be aware of it.
00:28:37.200 --> 00:28:40.640
It's sort of like it's actually fine, but if it bothers people, chill out, you know.
00:28:40.880 --> 00:28:46.160
It's like a diplomatic response, but you know that Paul knows it doesn't matter.
00:28:46.400 --> 00:28:48.160
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
00:28:48.160 --> 00:28:54.160
I think that when you make the thing tainted, you like lose the idea that like I'm like, didn't God make this thing?
00:28:55.039 --> 00:29:02.000
And so like humans tainted it irreparably, and it turns our intentionality into its own magic.
00:29:02.000 --> 00:29:10.720
So it's like if I intend this to be like my intention creates what the object is, right?
00:29:10.720 --> 00:29:19.519
So it's like I like for Paul, let's say, yeah, a person's intentions seem to matter the most to him.
00:29:19.519 --> 00:29:26.319
If yeah, if you intended this object for worship of another god, it's forever tainted and needs to be destroyed.
00:29:26.319 --> 00:29:36.000
And you can be like, okay, I get the logic, but that is going to that can so easily just mutate out of control.
00:29:36.000 --> 00:29:37.759
Yeah, yeah, right?
00:29:37.759 --> 00:29:39.359
Yeah, totally, totally.
00:29:39.359 --> 00:29:48.720
And then there's sacred in again, just from the Christian perspective, there's sacred objects, which are the same thing, just good magic.
00:29:48.720 --> 00:29:57.039
You know, for Catholics, obviously, there's a lot more sacred objects, but even for Protestants, they still exist.
00:29:57.039 --> 00:30:01.920
They the way they talk about like the land of Israel is very medieval.
00:30:01.920 --> 00:30:08.000
It's like it sounds like a relic that this physical object mediates spiritual power.
00:30:08.000 --> 00:30:17.279
For Catholics, it could be like the bones of this saint or this thing touched Thomas Aquinas' cloak or whatever, and that's its own thing.
00:30:17.279 --> 00:30:26.319
And then for Protestants, it's like, well, the Shroud of Turin really is like an imprint of Jesus' body, and it's like they're getting into relic territory again.
00:30:27.359 --> 00:30:34.400
And this does bring us back into that road of like getting to the Reformation because it's such a curious.
00:30:34.400 --> 00:30:43.920
I'm thinking about a thing that you messaged yesterday of like sort of the things that have stuck with me are maybe some of the better parts of the Reformation.
00:30:43.920 --> 00:30:56.400
I find I find it's such a curious the the relationship between um a sort of American conservative Christianity and the physical nation state of Israel.
00:30:56.400 --> 00:31:13.680
I find it such a curious thing because as a person who was raised in a bunch of different Christianities, but was particularly adulted and matured in this reformed thing, I go like the whole point is that it's not about the physical land.
00:31:13.680 --> 00:31:16.160
Many tongues, tribes, nations.
00:31:16.160 --> 00:31:17.680
So how could it be about this land?
00:31:17.680 --> 00:31:20.640
It's not about the land, it's not about the physical land.
00:31:20.640 --> 00:31:22.240
So why would it be about the land?
00:31:22.480 --> 00:31:22.720
Right.
00:31:23.200 --> 00:31:24.480
How could it be about the land?
00:31:24.480 --> 00:31:26.559
Like, isn't that the whole point of the thing?
00:31:26.559 --> 00:31:41.680
We architected a whole system of thought that tells us that this and this is less reformed and more like um missionary evangelical, like uh campus ministry, but like we would have the traveling team come to campus.
00:31:41.680 --> 00:31:57.759
The traveling team came once a year, and the traveling team they would do this talk that was just about how it's been about the nations plural since the beginning of the scripture from Genesis all the way through the nations, not Abraham and that place, but like he always wants to reach the nations.
00:31:57.759 --> 00:32:07.680
But but as all the chaos has happened in the 1300s and society has fallen apart and huge social changes now.
00:32:07.680 --> 00:32:16.960
People, um, people the uh people can move to new cities that are burgeoning, the lords have less power than they used to, all this stuff is happening.
00:32:16.960 --> 00:32:26.000
One of the things in response is like it's sort of like, okay, how do we live in this new world and sort of like re we gotta re we gotta like re-zip things up, you know?
00:32:26.000 --> 00:32:40.319
And the solution is multifold, but one is that the governments themselves become more um rigorous and centralized.
00:32:40.640 --> 00:32:56.640
That king now is not just archlord, but king, and increasingly invested with more and more and more power until you get to uh a Louis the Fourteenth, where like I am the law, I am the state.
00:32:56.640 --> 00:32:58.880
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:32:58.880 --> 00:33:04.400
And his yeah, his pronouncements literally encode law as he goes.
00:33:04.400 --> 00:33:10.319
Like that's we we tend to think of that kind of like that's medieval, but that's not medieval.
00:33:10.319 --> 00:33:24.640
That is a modern-ish response to the breakdown that you're highlighting that starts with the black plague, which I think is a good, a good way to start to understand it.
00:33:24.640 --> 00:33:38.960
Then a lot of what follows um, especially if what follows the war era, 1550 to like 1648, of constant re-emerging religious war, is after that.
00:33:38.960 --> 00:33:42.640
Um, you really do see like, well, what are we gonna do now?
00:33:42.640 --> 00:33:44.160
Like, where do we go from here?
00:33:44.160 --> 00:33:45.519
We can't go back.
00:33:45.519 --> 00:33:52.000
We've we've keep trying to go back, and we keep on we've reached an impasse, irreconcilable differences.
00:33:52.000 --> 00:33:58.640
There is no reconciliation there's between Protestant nations and Catholic nations.
00:33:58.640 --> 00:34:17.760
Actually, the very fact that I'm saying it like that nations, Protestant nations, Catholic nations, what that shows you is that they're not willing to let go of the kind of political arrangement of Christendom, where you have a society that is Christian in law, right?
00:34:17.760 --> 00:34:22.639
It used to be Christendom was unified by one church.
00:34:22.639 --> 00:34:31.039
Following the wars of religion, now what you really see is the creation of mini Christendoms, national Christendoms.
00:34:31.039 --> 00:34:34.800
So if we can't have one church, at least England will have one church.
00:34:34.800 --> 00:34:42.559
If we can't have one unified Christian population, then at least France will be Catholic, Spain will be Catholic.
00:34:42.559 --> 00:34:49.920
Germany's a mess because it had hundreds and hundreds of states, little tiny principalities.
00:34:49.920 --> 00:34:55.119
Um, and so each one of them would choose are we Protestant?
00:34:55.119 --> 00:34:58.239
Are we a Protestant principality or a Catholic one?
00:34:58.239 --> 00:35:02.559
Um, but the assumption was still Christendom.
00:35:02.559 --> 00:35:08.159
The assumption wasn't, well, what if the thing that's so obvious to us?
00:35:08.159 --> 00:35:23.840
What if some people are Protestant and some people are Catholic, some people are neither, some people are something else, and you find a different thing to ground your national belonging in.
00:35:23.840 --> 00:35:27.599
But that's exactly what the early secularists are doing.
00:35:27.599 --> 00:35:39.920
Most of them are Christian themselves, but they're saying, like a John Locke is a committed Protestant, but he's saying we need to have some new framework.
00:35:39.920 --> 00:35:43.599
And his answer is tolerance.
00:35:43.599 --> 00:36:04.880
But what that and then what that does though is it's like it displaces religion as sort of the grounding of who you are, and increasingly it shifts it towards the nation, the national identity, and not just the local, because you know you said the nation, you mentioned the nation in in the Bible.
00:36:04.880 --> 00:36:09.360
Yeah, like that would be much more like what we would think of as a tribe.
00:36:09.599 --> 00:36:11.280
Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right.
00:36:11.280 --> 00:36:11.440
Right.
00:36:11.760 --> 00:36:14.320
A small, not a nation state, not a kingdom.
00:36:14.320 --> 00:36:31.199
And then you have, we still haven't gotten to this and I don't know, the the colonial, what the colonial thing does, one of the things it does at in Europe is it enriches them and it intensifies competition between these new now rival Christendoms.
00:36:31.199 --> 00:36:35.920
So you have like England versus Spain, right?
00:36:35.920 --> 00:36:43.440
And they're both out in the world trying to it's like the project gets out of control.
00:36:43.440 --> 00:36:48.880
They want as much land, as much wealth, as much power that they can extract from the other peoples of the world.
00:36:48.880 --> 00:36:50.559
It doesn't matter what they have to do to get it.
00:36:50.559 --> 00:36:55.039
Because if Spain's gonna do it, well then England has to step up.
00:36:55.039 --> 00:36:58.800
And if England's stepping up, then France is like, hey, what about us?
00:36:58.800 --> 00:37:02.880
Yeah, and you get the whole impu competitive empires.
00:37:03.119 --> 00:37:03.679
Yeah.
00:37:03.679 --> 00:37:22.559
What can you take me to um the the factory that was really, really salient for me that has stayed in my head was canon and how canon uh meant your old castle doesn't work anymore, and so we need new ways of fortifying, we need better armies, you get the centralized thing.
00:37:22.559 --> 00:37:29.920
Um can you take me to the moment where and you know now we're spending that m uh we're spending money rebeautifying Rome?
00:37:29.920 --> 00:37:33.440
Indulgences are like up, get the premium package.
00:37:33.440 --> 00:37:38.800
That period where we right when we're gonna shift into this massive change of reformation.
00:37:38.800 --> 00:37:42.719
Can you take me to there and sort of um body it?
00:37:43.039 --> 00:37:48.719
Because we're gonna shift to reformation and colonization, yeah.
00:37:48.719 --> 00:37:49.679
Right?
00:37:49.679 --> 00:37:54.239
Like that's the same the stuff that happened in like the 90s is still pretty.
00:37:54.239 --> 00:37:56.960
We were it's not like ancient history at all, right?
00:37:56.960 --> 00:37:58.400
It we might be shocked sometimes.
00:37:58.400 --> 00:38:01.199
We're like, that was that, that was 30 years ago, right?
00:38:01.199 --> 00:38:02.719
Or that was like 40 years ago.
00:38:02.880 --> 00:38:04.719
Right we had that shock, yeah, yeah.
00:38:04.880 --> 00:38:10.239
Yeah, but we uh it's still us in some ways.
00:38:10.239 --> 00:38:16.800
Yes, the way that like people who lived in 1850 are not us, right, right, right, right.
00:38:16.800 --> 00:38:26.159
It's like us in the 90s.
00:38:26.159 --> 00:38:29.679
Oh wow, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.
00:38:29.679 --> 00:38:37.199
Luther Luther nails the theses to the wall, the door of the Cathedral of Wittenberg in 1517.
00:38:37.199 --> 00:38:49.840
And in 1492, so 2017, 1992, Columbus um stumbles accidentally upon the Caribbean.
00:38:50.320 --> 00:38:51.519
Uh okay, okay.
00:38:51.519 --> 00:38:55.599
Caribbean is like the Caribbean is the uh the Columbus is the 1990s.
00:38:55.599 --> 00:38:58.800
Columbus is the 1990s, reformation is the now.
00:38:58.880 --> 00:38:59.440
Okay, okay, okay.
00:38:59.440 --> 00:39:02.159
Okay, oh wow, okay, okay.
00:39:02.159 --> 00:39:10.559
And it's it because that because the history is bifurcated there, we it's it is very hard to keep together.
00:39:10.559 --> 00:39:19.440
You we always tend towards, okay, so what happened in Europe, and then someone else will be like, hey, well, remember like colonialism, or like, okay, that's a separate history.
00:39:19.440 --> 00:39:20.559
It's not.
00:39:20.559 --> 00:39:25.440
It's part of the same exact time period.
00:39:25.440 --> 00:39:30.719
Um, so it becomes difficult to we always have to we have to keep putting them back together.
00:39:31.039 --> 00:39:31.199
Okay.
00:39:32.000 --> 00:39:42.480
The wealth that that you start to see proliferate in Europe comes from, is extracted from the peoples of the like other the non-European world.
00:39:42.480 --> 00:39:48.480
Um, now the Reformation is something of a regional conflict at first.
00:39:48.480 --> 00:39:55.920
If it had happened like 300 years earlier, it probably would have just been stamped out as a heresy pretty quickly.
00:39:55.920 --> 00:40:01.119
But things are different, things are changing uh and shifting.
00:40:01.119 --> 00:40:13.039
But Luther ends up getting the protection of his prince of Saxony, and that's like the his the prince of Saxony is kind of like a mini Constantine.
00:40:13.039 --> 00:40:20.800
So it's like the prince is going to support Luther, and without that protection, the whole thing would have not wouldn't have happened.
00:40:20.800 --> 00:40:29.199
It would have been stamped out as a heresy, he would have been burned at the stake, and it would have been more of the same in a way, but that's not what happened.
00:40:29.199 --> 00:40:37.199
So you wanted me to get to Reformation and like those that Reformation colonial sistering, you know.
00:40:37.199 --> 00:40:38.079
Yeah, yeah.
00:40:38.079 --> 00:40:45.599
It's another one of those things where there's there's so many different components that no matter what I say, someone would be like, Well, what about this?
00:40:45.599 --> 00:40:47.039
And it's like, yeah, that too.
00:40:47.039 --> 00:40:49.039
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:40:49.039 --> 00:40:49.840
That too.
00:40:49.840 --> 00:40:58.000
But um, you know, the the colonial venture, sorry, it wasn't even supposed to be a colonial venture of Columbus.
00:40:58.000 --> 00:41:06.400
It was because, like I said in the previous episode, the Silk Road gets blocked by the Ottoman Turks.
00:41:06.400 --> 00:41:11.360
Um, exactly how that those blockades worked, I don't really know.
00:41:11.360 --> 00:41:16.079
I just know that the economic pressure was immense.
00:41:16.079 --> 00:41:19.440
There was huge incentives to get to Asia.
00:41:19.440 --> 00:41:22.800
It's it's giving it's giving a straight of whore moves.
00:41:23.280 --> 00:41:24.880
It's giving absolutely.
00:41:24.880 --> 00:41:35.039
Can we get it lower somehow?
00:41:35.039 --> 00:41:37.679
That's exactly what it is.
00:41:39.199 --> 00:41:48.159
And there's probably you know, business-minded people out there thinking, how do we you know we can't go through Hormu, so where are we gonna how can we profit off this?
00:41:48.480 --> 00:41:49.679
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:41:49.920 --> 00:41:54.400
And this is sponsored by the king and queen of Spain.
00:41:54.400 --> 00:42:03.679
They are riding high because in 1492, a few months before Columbus's commission by them.
00:42:03.679 --> 00:42:04.719
Can I say it?
00:42:04.800 --> 00:42:05.599
I think I know what happened.
00:42:05.599 --> 00:42:06.400
I think I know what happened.
00:42:06.400 --> 00:42:13.840
I want to enjoy I think they I shouldn't be excited because this is a history of people died, but I'm excited that I know.
00:42:13.840 --> 00:42:21.119
I think they officially won the Reconquista, like they did, they got Spain back from the Muslims.
00:42:21.119 --> 00:42:24.559
All this is an air quotes, not actually Islamophobic.
00:42:24.559 --> 00:42:30.960
Um, but they they were like, We they've been here since the 700s, that's like 800 years.
00:42:30.960 --> 00:42:33.760
You got the numbers right, you got the dates right.
00:42:33.760 --> 00:42:40.960
That's also forever, and they finally they're like, We kicked them out, and now we're Spain, right?
00:42:41.760 --> 00:42:59.760
And the various kingdoms, the medieval kingdoms in Spain, like uh, you know, Catalan and Navarre, the different ones, Aragon, they're all unified now through a marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and now we're one Spain.
00:42:59.760 --> 00:43:02.000
We we completed the crusade.
00:43:02.000 --> 00:43:02.639
That's what it is.
00:43:02.639 --> 00:43:05.440
We we and the Reconquista is a crusade.
00:43:05.440 --> 00:43:12.960
We we've been working at this for 800 years, piece by piece, and we finally did it.
00:43:12.960 --> 00:43:16.159
Uh-oh, we still have all these Muslims and Jews living here.
00:43:16.159 --> 00:43:17.360
What do we do with them?
00:43:17.360 --> 00:43:19.519
Well, they have to convert.
00:43:19.519 --> 00:43:23.840
Now, if they do convert to Catholicism, we don't trust them.
00:43:23.840 --> 00:43:31.039
They're crypto Jews and crypto Muslims, they're secretly practicing their their old religion, you know, behind closed doors.
00:43:31.039 --> 00:43:36.320
So if you hear anything, if you hear anything or smell anything, you tell us.
00:43:36.320 --> 00:43:43.840
And the Spanish Inquisition, that's its main job, is to find the people who are secretly heretics still.
00:43:43.840 --> 00:43:47.199
If you don't convert, you have to leave.
00:43:47.199 --> 00:43:48.880
So it's one or the other.
00:43:48.880 --> 00:43:59.599
I know you guys um for most of the Middle Ages, people who lived under Islamic control, they didn't do that, but you could still be Catholic.
00:43:59.599 --> 00:44:01.760
You could be Jewish.
00:44:01.760 --> 00:44:04.960
Now you would be taxed more heavily.
00:44:04.960 --> 00:44:06.559
It wasn't pleasant.
00:44:06.559 --> 00:44:11.599
You were a second-class citizen, but you could continue to practice your religion.
00:44:11.599 --> 00:44:14.320
But with the new Catholic powers in town, no.
00:44:14.320 --> 00:44:20.000
So they're riding really high, euphoric, like nationalist euphoria almost.
00:44:20.239 --> 00:44:20.559
Yeah.
00:44:20.559 --> 00:44:21.199
Yeah.
00:44:21.519 --> 00:44:26.000
So they're like, we can tackle this problem of the Ottoman Turks.
00:44:26.000 --> 00:44:27.920
We'll beat them at their own game.
00:44:27.920 --> 00:44:29.840
We don't, we won't go fight.
00:44:29.840 --> 00:44:32.800
We tried that in the past and it didn't go well.
00:44:32.800 --> 00:44:36.320
We we've been developing naval technology that's allowing.
00:44:36.320 --> 00:44:37.679
We saw the Portuguese do this.
00:44:37.679 --> 00:44:43.360
It started to let them go down the coast of West Africa as early as like the 1450s.
00:44:43.360 --> 00:44:47.039
So we gotta do that too.
00:44:47.039 --> 00:44:51.760
Um, Portugal doesn't become part of Spain, it remains independent.
00:44:51.760 --> 00:44:55.519
It could have been a Spanish kingdom, but uh that's its own history.
00:44:55.519 --> 00:44:56.400
That I actually don't know.
00:44:56.639 --> 00:44:57.280
I saw a thing about it.
00:44:57.280 --> 00:45:01.440
They essentially they did their own mini Reconquista earlier.
00:45:01.440 --> 00:45:03.760
Unify and we're like, we'll get them out of here.
00:45:03.760 --> 00:45:05.360
We're making the kingdom, they're out.
00:45:05.360 --> 00:45:06.960
Okay, we're our own country, Portugal.
00:45:06.960 --> 00:45:10.800
Yay! So they just like did it.
00:45:10.800 --> 00:45:13.360
We're like, we're we can't wait for everyone, we're gonna do it here.
00:45:13.360 --> 00:45:18.960
Now we're own country, you guys Spain, what thing that will eventually become Spain, you guys deal with it when you deal with it.
00:45:18.960 --> 00:45:19.519
Oh, you're done?
00:45:19.599 --> 00:45:21.280
Okay, well, we've been done for a while.
00:45:21.280 --> 00:45:23.679
And that's that's exactly it.
00:45:23.679 --> 00:45:29.519
And uh very much like whatever the opposite of being landlocked is they're they're sea locked.
00:45:29.519 --> 00:45:31.280
Yeah, like so.
00:45:31.280 --> 00:45:34.559
Oh yeah, so you need the you need uh yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:45:34.559 --> 00:45:41.760
It's like if we want to build wealth, we either have to get out into the ocean or we're or not we're done.
00:45:41.760 --> 00:45:43.199
Like there's nothing we can do.
00:45:43.199 --> 00:45:43.760
Yeah.
00:45:43.760 --> 00:45:48.480
So we're small, so they go, all right, we're gonna go south.
00:45:48.480 --> 00:45:52.880
They stumble upon the Canary Islands, they start exploiting that.
00:45:52.880 --> 00:45:58.400
Like Portugal is the beginning of the colonization, this economic incentive, right?
00:45:58.719 --> 00:46:05.119
I mean, even the the the the the Portugal history doesn't get told or I didn't learn it.
00:46:05.119 --> 00:46:16.719
It's not like this whole the the uh the national narrative or the sort of like historical narrative, um, the thing that we absorb, as like the Portuguese exploring being related to Islam in any way, like religion.
00:46:16.719 --> 00:46:26.400
Because it is, because like the reason why they're able to be like now we're gonna go out is because they got they kicked out air quotes trigger warning islamophobia.
00:46:26.400 --> 00:46:29.039
Um they they kicked out the Muslims.
00:46:29.039 --> 00:46:34.159
That's what lets them be like, okay, now we're we're all our own place, yeah.
00:46:36.559 --> 00:46:50.320
Very much, and you're defined by your you're defined by your opposition to the other, and there's no there's no more iconic other in Western Christianity than the Muslim.
00:46:50.320 --> 00:46:52.480
It is their arch other.
00:46:52.480 --> 00:47:04.239
And so defeating them, you know, an Islamic population and expelling them or forcing them to convert, that's kind of like that's the euphoric high of the crusader.
00:47:04.239 --> 00:47:06.880
It's what they fantasize about.
00:47:06.880 --> 00:47:11.440
So yeah, and now it's like it's it's like proto-nationalism, right?
00:47:11.440 --> 00:47:23.280
Because it's not the nationalism that's our what like articulated later on, where the nationalism almost is like the religion, but it's it's it's like earlier form.
00:47:23.280 --> 00:47:39.920
So yeah, Spain goes out, the these same two characters, Ferdinand and Isabella, um, sponsor this Italian well Genoese explorer to find uh a way, a way to a way to Asia.
00:47:39.920 --> 00:47:46.880
Now the Portuguese are already going south, they're already sticking their claim on we could go around Africa, we think.
00:47:46.880 --> 00:47:50.400
Yeah, we have no idea how big this thing is at all.
00:47:50.400 --> 00:47:55.199
We know just the coastline of the far northwest.
00:47:55.199 --> 00:47:56.079
Yep.
00:47:56.079 --> 00:48:01.519
And they have no idea what they're in for for just how enormous this continent is.
00:48:01.519 --> 00:48:02.960
Yeah, yeah.
00:48:02.960 --> 00:48:08.000
Spain, Columbus says we can get there going west.
00:48:08.000 --> 00:48:15.280
He's technically not wrong, uh, but they have no idea what how long that's gonna be, right?
00:48:15.280 --> 00:48:21.440
Yeah, and so hitting the Caribbean initially, like initially, we also forget this.
00:48:21.440 --> 00:48:34.400
You know, Columbus is this enshrined, bizarre figure in America, where it's like he had nothing to do with United States in any way, not not it had nothing to do with North America in any way.
00:48:34.400 --> 00:48:39.760
I understand the symbol, but it's the Caribbean that he lands in.
00:48:39.760 --> 00:48:53.760
So if you're looking at it through Spanish eyes, it's either like an island that's in India or getting close to Asia, or it's it's like the Canary Islands.
00:48:53.760 --> 00:48:59.840
They don't know that there's these two gigantic continents beyond it.
00:48:59.840 --> 00:49:06.719
I mean, the whole mythology of Columbus is is really weird, like really weird.
00:49:06.719 --> 00:49:10.159
But uh that's they that's what they end up with.
00:49:10.159 --> 00:49:15.119
There's there's new material, and it's going to have a cascade of effects, of course.
00:49:15.119 --> 00:49:17.039
When you say material, what do you mean?
00:49:17.039 --> 00:49:26.159
You know how I was saying before the medieval person experiencing the black plague has certain limited containers that they have to work with.
00:49:26.159 --> 00:49:35.679
Local tradition, Christian theology, and what the colonial period's gonna do is continually open up new, more.
00:49:35.679 --> 00:49:41.519
There's more, there's more, there's other people, there's different languages, there's other ways of being human.
00:49:41.519 --> 00:49:51.760
There's these people aren't Muslims, they're not Christians, they're not uh they're they're not they're like they call them heathens, they're pagans, and they're remembering their their ancient past.
00:49:52.079 --> 00:49:52.480
Uh-huh.
00:49:52.480 --> 00:49:55.920
The Europeans are remembering their ancient past when they say pagans or heathens.
00:49:56.159 --> 00:49:56.400
Yeah.
00:49:56.559 --> 00:49:56.880
Uh-huh.
00:49:57.280 --> 00:49:58.639
And I mean those words, right?
00:49:58.639 --> 00:50:01.840
Like heathen is a very Anglo-Saxon word.
00:50:01.840 --> 00:50:02.239
Yeah.
00:50:02.239 --> 00:50:05.360
And it it's like it feels like it's from Lord of the Rings, right?
00:50:05.599 --> 00:50:06.239
Totally, totally.
00:50:06.320 --> 00:50:06.480
Yeah.
00:50:06.480 --> 00:50:08.320
And it just means people of the Heath.
00:50:08.320 --> 00:50:14.880
So people of the like living on the hills outside of the like the uncultivated land.
00:50:14.880 --> 00:50:24.639
So it carries this connotation of like there's the town that's more Roman, where we grow food.
00:50:24.800 --> 00:50:35.440
We have like an agricultural, and then there's people on the Heath who are, you know, the barbarians, the lesser, they're I always come in with my little it's giving zingers.
00:50:35.440 --> 00:50:37.440
It's giving, it's giving redneck.
00:50:37.440 --> 00:50:39.760
Like it's giving, like I love it.
00:50:39.760 --> 00:50:50.079
That's exactly who live out there, and you're like, ah, yeah, like yeah, we don't there's they don't have anything to offer us.
00:50:50.239 --> 00:50:54.159
If anything, if anything, they should be like come like us.
00:50:54.400 --> 00:50:55.599
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:50:55.599 --> 00:50:56.079
Uh-huh.
00:50:56.480 --> 00:51:09.199
But that very thought, the fact that it's natural and casual, and so just of well, it wouldn't it be better for them to become like us, to kind of do things our way, that is the colonial way.
00:51:09.199 --> 00:51:11.599
That's what it is.
00:51:11.599 --> 00:51:25.599
Uh, and the other word is Pegan, which is very much the same thing, it's just the pagani, which was that's a Latin word meaning like the rustic rural folk, so it's very similar.
00:51:25.599 --> 00:51:37.440
Uh they were probably still living in villages, so it's not as it's not as they're not barbarians, uh-huh, but they hold on to their old traditions and they we have less influence over them.
00:51:37.440 --> 00:51:40.960
Because Christianity for a long time was a urban religion only.
00:51:41.199 --> 00:51:48.159
I was gonna say it's so urbanist, it's basically like the you know, the enlightenment is in the city, and if you're not in the city, you're kind of trash.
00:51:48.480 --> 00:51:48.800
Yeah.
00:51:48.800 --> 00:51:57.920
And see, like in the enlightenment, if you're in this, if you're in the rural, if you're a rustic person, that means you're you know, pretty committed to the Catholic Church.
00:51:57.920 --> 00:51:58.639
Uh-huh.
00:51:58.639 --> 00:51:59.039
Uh-huh.
00:51:59.039 --> 00:52:06.639
And then this is a phase where it's like you're you're not committed to the Catholic Church, you're not up with the times, you're committed to the old ways.
00:52:06.880 --> 00:52:08.239
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:52:08.239 --> 00:52:10.159
So he leaves.
00:52:10.159 --> 00:52:19.199
I I I have it's such an exciting moment of the story, and you I can imagine an alternate version.
00:52:19.199 --> 00:52:30.320
I'm sure many someone's written a short story on this, but like he arrives at the Caribbean, and it could be you just said there's a more people and more people and more people.
00:52:30.320 --> 00:52:39.280
It could actually be like, whoa, like there's so much it could be like there's so much to learn.
00:52:39.280 --> 00:52:41.280
Like, what what tell me?
00:52:41.280 --> 00:52:45.199
Like, you know, it could be so endlessly like opening.
00:52:45.519 --> 00:52:57.599
I know, I know that and I mean the fact that that wasn't even really an option shows you so much about like this.
00:52:57.599 --> 00:53:17.840
Is why when I I talk about church history, and you could do the same thing for Western history more generally, like through the lens of trauma and the nervous system, you're like, why weren't we we know that a person who is healthy is open, has an open heart and an open mind.
00:53:17.840 --> 00:53:24.639
And and I mean the fact that evangelicals have tried to demonize the open mind so much that it's like a bad thing.
00:53:24.639 --> 00:53:38.320
It's like a posture of openness is so essential to any kind of love of neighbor, but it requires you to not kind of have the conclusion pre-installed, like you already know the person.
00:53:38.320 --> 00:53:39.760
That's what judging is.
00:53:39.760 --> 00:53:45.119
It could have been this, isn't romantic, it just it could have actually been beautiful.
00:53:45.119 --> 00:53:48.960
I I one for some reason this phrase always sticks in my head.
00:53:48.960 --> 00:54:00.400
I heard some I don't know where it just at some point in my studies I read something that said, you know, for the first time in 10,000 years, the two hemispheres of the earth were reconnected.
00:54:00.400 --> 00:54:12.400
Because they truly were not connected at all for 10,000 years, except for the little weird Viking stint up in up in Greenland and Newfoundland.
00:54:12.400 --> 00:54:25.840
But and I the thing is you still have this enormous exchange of products, of ideas, of animals, of foodstuffs called the Colombian Exchange, right?
00:54:25.840 --> 00:54:38.400
Um all this the riches of North and South America totally transform life in Eurasia and Africa, with like especially food.
00:54:38.400 --> 00:54:44.960
All the animals from Europe come to the Americas, they kind of destroy it, actually.
00:54:44.960 --> 00:54:47.039
They're a part of colonization.
00:54:47.039 --> 00:54:54.800
Uh that's a much less, much less uh their nutrition decreases, you know, in the Americas.
00:54:54.800 --> 00:54:57.360
But yeah, it could have been something totally different.
00:54:57.360 --> 00:55:07.039
But the fact that it they immediately went to work categorizing, slotting these this new material into old categories.
00:55:07.440 --> 00:55:17.440
But why why I feel like I missed why that is the framework of the hierarchy, right?
00:55:17.440 --> 00:55:27.199
So like we were in medieval times, we got out, we're centralizing things, um, the reformation is about to happen, it hasn't happened yet.
00:55:27.199 --> 00:55:34.639
Um, why are we going into the Caribbean and being like, ah, you're less?
00:55:35.760 --> 00:55:42.559
Well, it's a I I love doing like this kind of question where it's like, no, zoom in, zoom way in.
00:55:42.559 --> 00:55:44.239
Like, what's the synapse?
00:55:44.239 --> 00:55:45.119
Yeah.
00:55:45.119 --> 00:55:51.840
So what you're what your the Europeans that are there in the Caribbean are bringing with them.
00:55:51.840 --> 00:55:56.239
This is why the Spanish conquist uh reconquista matters.
00:55:56.239 --> 00:56:00.719
Within the Christian mindset, the other is a threat.
00:56:00.719 --> 00:56:16.559
The other is a threat to proper religious practice, the other is a threat to salvation, the heretic within must be expunged because the community is in danger.
00:56:16.559 --> 00:56:23.840
The other is the Muslim, the conqueror of the false god who's the like ugly shadow version of us.
00:56:23.840 --> 00:56:27.920
They must be expelled or convert.
00:56:27.920 --> 00:56:43.519
And I mean, the Christian fear and just not even fear, the Christian refusal to have to accept difference as existing and continuing to exist permanently.
00:56:43.519 --> 00:56:46.400
That's a huge part of like the course I teach.
00:56:46.400 --> 00:56:57.280
Because that history is goes back to being an embattled persecuted minority with walls that separate you from the dangers out there, the Roman persecutor.
00:56:57.599 --> 00:57:02.559
It's interesting because you you could argue that the making you a cur persecuted minority could make you open, right?
00:57:02.559 --> 00:57:03.360
I know.
00:57:03.360 --> 00:57:09.280
You could go, you could take the classical American example where you're like, well, all of us others should stick together.
00:57:09.280 --> 00:57:11.760
And oh, you're a new other, join the club.
00:57:12.159 --> 00:57:12.800
Right.
00:57:12.800 --> 00:57:19.199
While also being extraordinarily segregationist, you're that kind of other.
00:57:19.599 --> 00:57:20.880
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:57:20.960 --> 00:57:21.280
Totally.
00:57:21.280 --> 00:57:23.039
You're out entirely, right?
00:57:23.039 --> 00:57:24.000
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:57:24.000 --> 00:57:28.719
It's like who counts as a legitimate other?
00:57:28.719 --> 00:57:32.639
And in America, that becomes based on whiteness.
00:57:32.639 --> 00:57:45.199
No matter what Irish and Italian people say, they had their white card, and pretty quickly after they came, they were able to trade it in, trade their Italian card in for their white card, or right?
00:57:45.199 --> 00:57:46.159
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:57:46.159 --> 00:57:52.159
They still had a Catholic card, so that wasn't good, but eh, we can look past that.
00:57:52.159 --> 00:58:18.400
So I guess what what what really like what this gets to is like we have these tribalistic evolutionary defaults that we is very deep in inside of our bones because of ancient traumas that are way, way we so far away we'll we could never know what actually happened, but they live inside us, they kept people safe.
00:58:18.400 --> 00:58:19.360
That is true.
00:58:19.360 --> 00:58:35.280
This is the one like this just the again, the the theologian in me is like, how does what the person of Jesus and his earliest followers, how do they engage with our default boundary-making architecture?
00:58:35.280 --> 00:59:00.000
Well, I mean, if you look at Paul not through some of the modern lenses, but as the weird, chaotic community-building guy he was, he was like all about that you tear down the typical boundary markers of gender, of uh ethnicity, of religion, of class.
00:59:00.000 --> 00:59:08.000
And I just I know if he was living now, the obvious other one is sexual orientation.
00:59:08.000 --> 00:59:11.039
Paul would I just I know it.
00:59:11.039 --> 00:59:14.000
Like he he would see he's already breaking all the boundaries down.
00:59:14.000 --> 00:59:19.280
We have this other one, and he'd be like, Well, of course, there is neither gay nor straight.
00:59:19.280 --> 00:59:25.199
I know a lot of people would not agree with that, but I just I feel like the spirit of Paul would be about that.
00:59:25.199 --> 00:59:44.480
But so that's why like what I try to explore is if you have that, if that's your tradition, Jesus and Paul, the community builder, break down walls, center people who aren't supposed to be centered, stop playing by the rules of who you're not supposed to who you are and who you're not supposed to associate with.
00:59:44.480 --> 00:59:50.480
Then why does Christianity become such a militant wall builder?
00:59:50.480 --> 00:59:58.719
Why must anyone who comes in like go through a re-engineering process to become you?
00:59:58.719 --> 00:59:59.599
Right?
00:59:59.599 --> 01:00:02.800
That's why I can't explain that in just a few sentences.
01:00:02.800 --> 01:00:07.280
It does take an entire course or book, which I'm also writing.
01:00:07.440 --> 01:00:10.639
So yeah, yeah.
01:00:10.639 --> 01:00:14.239
I just have like an emotional reaction to be honest.
01:00:14.239 --> 01:00:38.159
Um I think I am spending so much energy to say or prove um that I that I am an equal human being.
01:00:38.159 --> 01:00:41.440
That I am not a tainted object.
01:00:41.440 --> 01:00:45.679
I has many levels.
01:00:45.679 --> 01:00:57.840
I um of I grew up with my dad saying, you know, the Europeans came and they said that we were savage because we ate with our hands.
01:00:57.840 --> 01:00:59.840
There's those eyes.
01:00:59.840 --> 01:01:15.199
There's the um when I'm in an Uber and a police officer flashes his lights and pulls over the Uber, I am viscerally worried.
01:01:15.199 --> 01:01:24.719
I'm worried both for the non-white driver because immigration, and I'm worried that I might die.
01:01:24.719 --> 01:01:29.920
It is not um, it is actual.
01:01:29.920 --> 01:01:32.400
What happens is police pulled us over.
01:01:32.400 --> 01:02:07.360
I immediately call one of my friends just to be like, hey, or text to be like, hey, this is what's happening, you know, so this is another I that I'm like, we are also uh whatever it is, we we are also full humans, and then you know, this level of the desires that you have and that your body has are tainted and tainted in that Pentecostal way that we were talking.
01:02:07.360 --> 01:02:34.239
You get too close, we need to like cast a spell, we need to like pour a circle of salt around you, we need to like keep you away, because it's not just you're sinful, it's that like you will poison the and always I'm always trying to break cliches in language, so I'm always trying to find ways of saying things that doesn't use the fixed category, just so it can like sort of refresh the language.
01:02:34.239 --> 01:02:45.760
So the desires that I have, you know, we have the Augustan tradition, so we're saying like those desires are evil and fallen, but it's not just that.
01:02:45.760 --> 01:02:59.119
Everyone knows it's not just that, it's that those desires are particularly um tainted, and if it comes near us, it's Raycon, it's Reconquista.
01:02:59.119 --> 01:03:02.960
Like we gotta like get we gotta you have to eliminate that.
01:03:02.960 --> 01:03:11.039
That's why you can get angry when you see just take the normal rainbow flag, let alone the like you know the ones that reflect intersectionality.
01:03:11.039 --> 01:03:18.480
You see that rainbow flag, you're living in sort of um in that uh uh witchy world.
01:03:18.480 --> 01:03:29.679
That flag, you gotta, you gotta, you need to burn it, you need to physically burn it, you need to get these simple, you need to all of that, and then it's ultimately about those people with those desires, you need to get them away.
01:03:29.679 --> 01:03:42.000
Um and I guess I feel like if you could only this isn't true, but like, if you could only understand how we got here.
01:03:42.000 --> 01:04:02.400
Um, if you could, and particularly as someone who was raised in the way of Jesus, you go, and I was doing this in the early on in the early 2010s, being like, We're talking about the woman at the well and saying Jesus told her, you know, no go and no long no no longer sin or whatever.
01:04:02.400 --> 01:04:11.599
But like, we're not talking about the fact that he's talking to this woman who is a Samaritan and clearly breaking ethnic and gender barriers.
01:04:11.599 --> 01:04:22.079
That's like, and when Peter's like, let me pull out my sword, Jesus is like, No, let me heal this guy's ear, everyone calm down.
01:04:22.079 --> 01:04:30.320
That's not what we're doing here, you know, Jesus is very just like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
01:04:30.320 --> 01:04:49.360
Um, and I think as we continue to near these things about the body and the movement and the civilizing mission and all that stuff, um, I really am so moved by this principle that I encountered where the body is um a site of history.
01:04:49.360 --> 01:04:50.960
It is a history book.
01:04:50.960 --> 01:04:56.639
The body itself is a history book, not metaphorically, um, not metaphorically, actually.
01:04:56.639 --> 01:05:01.920
Like if you study the body of people over time, you learn their history.
01:05:01.920 --> 01:05:04.320
I think about this, I swear I think about this all the time.
01:05:04.320 --> 01:05:14.880
I was watching an Instagram reel yesterday, and I was watching these white guys, white Christian rappers, not even rappers, white Christian guys who were doing like this guy Forrest Frank.
01:05:14.880 --> 01:05:22.800
He's like very cool in the evangelical world of like he's a Christian, white straight guy doing like kind of rap adjacent infused music.
01:05:22.800 --> 01:05:24.480
He's very popular on Instagram.
01:05:24.480 --> 01:05:36.480
Um, and I was watching him and his friend Jake doing a concert, and they're there, and you see them handling the mic like this, like, oh, oh yeah, yeah.
01:05:36.480 --> 01:05:38.159
This is the body language.
01:05:38.159 --> 01:05:42.559
And for me, I watch it and I'm like, you see that that's black motion, right?
01:05:42.559 --> 01:05:49.280
Like these gestures are not the gestures of like a white person of suburbia.
01:05:49.280 --> 01:05:56.320
And so I'm like, well, literally, I look at your movement and I see the history, and I don't even experience it as like an anger.
01:05:56.320 --> 01:05:58.719
I'm like, it's so fascinating.
01:05:58.719 --> 01:05:59.760
Like the what.
01:05:59.760 --> 01:06:16.480
And like if you were if I were doing like if I were being a historian, I'd be like, okay, so what this tells me is that there's some sort of relationship between the black population and the white population in the United States of America, such that the black forms of movement eventually seep into the white forms of movement after a certain number of years.
01:06:16.480 --> 01:06:20.719
And you're like, huh, you can like literally decode the history, you know?
01:06:20.719 --> 01:06:21.440
Yeah.
01:06:21.440 --> 01:06:45.760
Um just I think um I think the thing that fascinates me in particular is that maybe I think it's just that like, oh, you don't understand how like these stories that we have carry our entire like philosophy of people being others.
01:06:45.760 --> 01:06:47.920
Cinderella, I said this last time.
01:06:47.920 --> 01:06:58.960
Like that little little story is carrying the this whole thing, and then you when you look at it, then you can sort of be like, then you can be like, oh, do I like that?
01:06:58.960 --> 01:07:08.239
Or would I rather have the alternate uh encounter with the new world where you're like you move differently, teach me about it?
01:07:10.480 --> 01:07:11.280
I don't know.
01:07:11.280 --> 01:07:20.000
No, you do that is that's this is the legacy that that left behind in real people.
01:07:20.000 --> 01:07:34.400
Um and it's like, are we going to keep repeating it again and again, letting it mutate a little bit so that it it doesn't resemble the pat like what it used to look like, but it's just the same thing again.
01:07:34.400 --> 01:07:42.400
Um there's so there there's too much like we we have to talk again because I mean I assumed that was gonna happen.
01:07:42.400 --> 01:07:42.960
Yes.
01:07:42.960 --> 01:07:55.840
Because like this notion that you so powerfully described of contamination, well, in your case, being the contaminant.
01:07:55.840 --> 01:08:04.719
I look at it and I can I step back and I'm like, oh, how did Christianity come to be so contaminant focused?
01:08:04.719 --> 01:08:13.280
Again, the the the Jewish uh background was one of a lot of contaminants, right?
01:08:13.280 --> 01:08:25.439
It was all about like purity and contamination, less about like even and that wasn't as much about moral and immoral, it was about contaminants that could be things that we're like, oh that's weird.
01:08:25.439 --> 01:08:27.039
Why is that a contaminant, right?
01:08:27.039 --> 01:08:31.680
Jesus seemed to really truly go against that in particular.
01:08:31.680 --> 01:08:33.760
Like touching leper.
01:08:33.840 --> 01:08:34.960
He's like touching leper.
01:08:34.960 --> 01:08:35.600
Leper.
01:08:35.600 --> 01:08:36.720
Okay, well you're contaminated.
01:08:36.720 --> 01:08:39.119
He's like, ah, you know, yeah.
01:08:39.119 --> 01:08:53.600
Or or or the simple, like, even even a little bit more metaphorical, but the like I love I love this moment in the Jesus stories where it's like the like, what should we do if a Samaritan gets injured on the Sabbath or whatever?
01:08:53.600 --> 01:08:54.720
Should we help him?
01:08:54.720 --> 01:09:04.159
You know, because if we're breaking the Sabbath, or maybe it's just like should a person I forget if he's Samaritan or not, but like, should we help the person on the Sabbath that's gotten injured?
01:09:04.159 --> 01:09:07.439
Oh, Dicey, you're gonna get contaminated.
01:09:07.439 --> 01:09:12.560
And Jesus is just like, um, yeah, you should help the person.
01:09:12.560 --> 01:09:14.399
What are we talking about?
01:09:15.680 --> 01:09:18.960
And then it's like, I'm gonna go touch a dead body now to show you.
01:09:19.600 --> 01:09:20.479
Yeah, yeah.
01:09:20.960 --> 01:09:43.439
Like, and then that act, that act of violating the boundaries that we put up to touch the person, like whatever you think about whatever you think about what happened, something life giving occurs.
01:09:43.439 --> 01:10:00.800
Touching, breaking the boundary, reaching beyond, like through it and touching the person, like life is activates, you know, whether it's a real miracle that actually changed a person's biochemistry.
01:10:00.800 --> 01:10:11.279
I know I know enough that the world, I know enough about the absolute absurdity of being alive that I don't instantly go, well, that of course didn't happen.
01:10:11.279 --> 01:10:15.680
I have enough magical thinking that I go, why not?
01:10:15.680 --> 01:10:16.399
Did it?
01:10:16.399 --> 01:10:17.119
I don't know.
01:10:17.119 --> 01:10:18.239
I don't know.
01:10:18.239 --> 01:10:21.920
I kind of think I'd like that to be true.
01:10:21.920 --> 01:10:24.319
And hope is very similar to belief.
01:10:24.319 --> 01:10:29.600
What you hope is true is very similar to what you do believe, what you trust, right?
01:10:29.600 --> 01:10:42.560
Or if you just look at it metaphorically, just say you do, something there's an exchange of life that that re-al re-alives people when you reach through those boundaries, right?
01:10:42.560 --> 01:10:46.399
And I don't know.
01:10:46.399 --> 01:10:51.920
One other thing, I I just you know, you mentioned that uh the go and sin no more.
01:10:51.920 --> 01:11:04.880
And I when now when I when I come across that verse, when I come across reading it or hearing someone say it, I think you were desperately, frantically searching for a verse like that.
01:11:04.880 --> 01:11:15.039
You have made that verse, you have poured all of all of your like religious, Christian, everything into that verse.
01:11:15.039 --> 01:11:20.800
It is the load-bearing verse of of your New Testament, which is so ironic because it's it's one.
01:11:20.800 --> 01:11:24.000
Everything else Jesus does is perverse.
01:11:24.000 --> 01:11:25.520
I don't think people realize that.
01:11:25.520 --> 01:11:26.880
They're like, it was offensive.
01:11:26.880 --> 01:11:36.319
No, it was perverse, it was wrong, it was immoral when Jew and Gentile in Paul's little weird communities ate together.
01:11:36.319 --> 01:11:37.680
That was perverted.
01:11:37.680 --> 01:11:42.159
It wasn't just not done in polite society, they didn't have polite society.
01:11:42.159 --> 01:11:43.840
That's what you're talking about.
01:11:45.119 --> 01:11:46.239
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:11:46.640 --> 01:11:50.960
It was perverted, and that's what it made people's stomach turn.
01:11:50.960 --> 01:11:52.880
Disgust was activated.
01:11:52.880 --> 01:12:00.479
So that goes sin no more is like I can just imagine a religious conservative or something just fine, uh breathing a sigh of relief.
01:12:00.479 --> 01:12:03.279
Finally, that's what we can say to prostitutes.
01:12:03.279 --> 01:12:07.600
That's what we can say to everybody else, you know?
01:12:07.600 --> 01:12:09.600
We can just say go and sin no more.
01:12:09.600 --> 01:12:12.560
Phew, then we re-establish the status quo.
01:12:14.479 --> 01:12:25.680
I think a a final thought of mine is um of this section of this episode is um is um just that touch place that you're at in the touch-giving life.
01:12:25.680 --> 01:12:45.119
I think um I want to posit the theory that the civilizing mission slowly and then totally robbed Europe of its access to touch.
01:12:45.119 --> 01:12:53.199
Why Cinderella, because Cinderella is just the is just the placeholder uh for Bel Air, Bonne Grasse, whatever.
01:12:53.199 --> 01:13:01.119
It is a philosophy of movement and emotions that is about control.
01:13:01.119 --> 01:13:11.520
Like it's not even mythologically about control, it just is about control, it's about like controlling your passions, which is harkens back to our friend Augustine, who's North African, which is interesting.
01:13:11.520 --> 01:13:14.880
Um, but like it's about this rain.
01:13:14.880 --> 01:13:22.800
It's all about even like it's about taking um sandpaper and smoothing.
01:13:22.800 --> 01:13:25.359
That's what the the thing is.
01:13:25.359 --> 01:13:32.800
The the dance that you look at as the like peasant dance is like what's peasant-y about it, it's wild.
01:13:32.800 --> 01:13:36.399
Uh, real, real specific, real specific.
01:13:36.399 --> 01:13:39.039
Your hips are moving.
01:13:39.039 --> 01:13:48.479
The European balletic, Cinderelli style is fundamentally about keeping your hips square.
01:13:48.479 --> 01:13:56.000
I swear, if you watched my ballet lessons and you heard how many times a teacher says, Don't move your hips, don't move your hips, don't let your hip go up, don't let your hip go up.
01:13:56.000 --> 01:13:57.439
This is fundamental.
01:13:57.439 --> 01:14:01.359
It's the fundamental like part, it's where the legs come out of.
01:14:01.359 --> 01:14:02.720
Keep it square.
01:14:02.720 --> 01:14:05.119
It shouldn't move, it shouldn't go like this ever.
01:14:05.119 --> 01:14:07.279
It should be square, you know.
01:14:07.279 --> 01:14:13.680
The things that you're seeing in the rustic dance of Europe, and then you're seeing in Africa, and you're seeing all these other places.
01:14:13.680 --> 01:14:24.319
One of the fundamental things, you know, this they talk about it all the time when they go to Africa, is that they're like, their hips are moving, their hips are moving, their hips are moving, you know.
01:14:24.319 --> 01:14:29.119
And I think you hear this sort of social consensus right now.
01:14:29.119 --> 01:14:31.840
People are fighting about how to talk about it.
01:14:31.840 --> 01:14:34.960
You know, some people call it male loneliness epidemic.
01:14:34.960 --> 01:14:38.000
Some people are like, that's like an artifist.
01:14:38.000 --> 01:14:41.199
Um, and I hear sort of like I hear that.
01:14:41.199 --> 01:14:59.119
Um, but I think I always I think about how, in order for men to have contact in 2026, but especially in the early aughts, you must do a ceremony to remove the contaminating nature of male touch.
01:14:59.119 --> 01:15:01.279
There's a ceremony you must go through.
01:15:01.279 --> 01:15:02.640
I can't hug you.
01:15:02.640 --> 01:15:05.920
I first need to do a fist bump and then pull it into a hug.
01:15:05.920 --> 01:15:07.439
That's our ceremony.
01:15:07.439 --> 01:15:12.800
I can't hug you, I need to do an elaborate handshake and then we can hug.
01:15:12.800 --> 01:15:21.119
Um, you have to male touch is um is suspect.
01:15:21.119 --> 01:15:34.720
Um and yet um there's no avenue for uh this embodied connection.
01:15:34.720 --> 01:15:41.439
If leprosy was holding it back 2,000 years ago, now it's like the civilizing mission and all that stuff around it.
01:15:41.439 --> 01:15:43.600
You need to like stay apart.
01:15:43.600 --> 01:16:03.279
And so then it's why uh the it's why, for instance, like a rave, a wedding party, these moments of dance end up being imperfect ways to pierce through and be like, oh, we get to touch.
01:16:03.279 --> 01:16:17.760
Whether that's like touch, touch like this, or if it's a line dance and you're all just sort of like communally moving together, but it's like a it's like trying to pierce, it's like a a pen piercing through a balloon, it takes a while before it like actually bursts, you know?
01:16:17.760 --> 01:16:23.600
It's like the dance is this thing that lets us be like, oh, we can touch again.
01:16:23.600 --> 01:16:28.960
Because the touch brings like this like life thing, especially because there's been a barrier.
01:16:28.960 --> 01:16:36.720
This barrier says, like, men can't do this, Europeans can't do this, civilized people can't do this, wise people can't do this.
01:16:36.720 --> 01:16:41.760
But like our bodies are all being like, ah, I need to be in connection with people.
01:16:41.760 --> 01:16:46.640
Yeah, and we have all these other vehicles that we're like trying to like band-aid.
01:16:46.640 --> 01:16:49.520
We're like, all right, uh, hook up app, whatever app.
01:16:49.520 --> 01:16:54.319
And I and and like as a queer person, I'm not I am not opposed to like alternate modes of relationship.
01:16:54.319 --> 01:17:23.680
I'm not saying that people should be in a particular thing, but like I think like there's this, you know, you there's this like we need the people, and there's just this like huge block of ice separating us, and I feel a little bit as though looking at the body can start to be like, that's where there's a reason why I think so many ex-evangelicals will tell you this the thing they miss about church, the communal singing.
01:17:23.680 --> 01:17:28.720
That's like the that's the sanctioned version of dance, right?
01:17:28.720 --> 01:17:35.680
We are being a whole body together and feeling our bodies and letting them be moved.
01:17:35.680 --> 01:17:38.960
And oh my gosh, we raised our hands, you know.
01:17:38.960 --> 01:17:45.439
Um, it's like, oh, this like weekly, like for this hour, I have a body.
01:17:45.439 --> 01:17:49.840
Oh, and then okay, now I need to go back and be like a civilized European.
01:17:50.159 --> 01:17:50.720
Right.
01:17:50.720 --> 01:18:05.520
And that actually, that's not just evangelical, like a big part of you know, the Protestant iconoclasm, the Protestant destruction of images, of stained glass, of dance, of stuff like that.
01:18:05.520 --> 01:18:08.079
The one thing that remained was singing.
01:18:08.079 --> 01:18:15.119
That's why congregational singing that that was almost like the only Protestant thing that was allowed.
01:18:15.119 --> 01:18:17.760
You could find evidence of it in the Bible, right?
01:18:17.760 --> 01:18:18.880
Or something like that.
01:18:18.880 --> 01:18:34.800
And that did like kind of all the lifting, especially when you know, and uh, you know, how there's this value placed on like people who sing loudly and passionately, even in very like restrained white congregations.
01:18:34.800 --> 01:18:37.279
It's like, okay, well, we can be loud at least.
01:18:37.279 --> 01:18:40.640
And then people and people point to it and go, like, hey, that's faithful.
01:18:40.640 --> 01:18:42.640
That's look at that person's devotion.
01:18:42.640 --> 01:18:46.479
They sing loudly in evangelical churches that say that person raises their hands.
01:18:46.479 --> 01:18:57.359
That's so we have to attach to that bodily thing um a kind of a grade of faith, because that makes it legitimate.
01:18:57.840 --> 01:19:14.560
And my experiential history, this isn't documented history, but like my experiential history of those rooms, is that that is the cry of someone who can't be touched and is so restrained that the only thing they can do is sing more loudly.
01:19:14.560 --> 01:19:16.079
It is a cry.
01:19:16.079 --> 01:19:17.920
That's actually what they're doing.
01:19:17.920 --> 01:19:20.319
It's a cry for help.
01:19:20.319 --> 01:19:23.439
And then and then, ah, okay, surface is over, service over.
01:19:23.439 --> 01:19:26.159
But now, shoot, okay, we're back.
01:19:26.560 --> 01:19:31.119
One of the things we need to, I mean, to talk about though is next time.
01:19:31.119 --> 01:19:53.760
Because we were going to talk about like how you have the Western body and then it gets exported around the world, and what's it it they for the first time are encountering, you know, indigenous and African bodies, and the the European starts doing to Africans and Indigenous people what was done to them in the civilizing process back home.
01:19:53.760 --> 01:19:54.239
Right?
01:19:54.239 --> 01:19:57.359
They start there, these things are happening kind of in tandem.
01:19:57.359 --> 01:20:10.640
But what they can also do is they can project onto black or indigenous bodies the things that they hate and fear about themselves, and they can say, hey, they do that.
01:20:10.640 --> 01:20:12.479
We don't.
01:20:12.479 --> 01:20:18.880
They dance, they're uncontrollable, they don't wear enough clothing, they're sexually perverse.
01:20:18.880 --> 01:20:26.960
And it's this way of being like, uh, we can contain these things we feel about on ourselves, we can contain it onto them.
01:20:26.960 --> 01:20:29.279
And as they do that, it's like it hardens.
01:20:29.279 --> 01:20:37.039
The more the European says they're not civilized, the more they interpret themselves as civilized, right?
01:20:37.039 --> 01:20:40.319
It's like it's happening in every single encounter.
01:20:40.319 --> 01:20:56.159
But the dance thing is huge because now you can say, like, you don't even have to say dance is what peasants do, you can say dance is what black people do, and it's what we used to do many centuries ago when we were primitive.
01:20:56.159 --> 01:21:09.680
So I don't know, just when you were talking about that, I don't know who that is, but that hip hip evangelical dude doing the black motion, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:21:09.680 --> 01:21:10.800
Forrest Frank.
01:21:11.039 --> 01:21:11.840
Forrest Frank.
01:21:12.000 --> 01:21:22.880
Yeah, that's the other thing that um the black way of moving is the is the thing that the white person hates, and yet there's something in it that they want.
01:21:22.880 --> 01:21:24.159
Yeah.
01:21:24.159 --> 01:21:30.479
And so they take it and try to sanitize it and turn it into right, yeah, yeah.
01:21:30.800 --> 01:21:34.880
Can I just ask just that part where you started?
01:21:34.880 --> 01:21:39.199
Um Portugal, Spain, boom, we're out.
01:21:39.199 --> 01:21:40.800
We're out, we're we're going.
01:21:40.800 --> 01:21:43.119
Here, there, there.
01:21:43.119 --> 01:21:49.600
I I think of it like if you ever look at those maps that show where all the flights are going at any time in any given time in the world, you know?
01:21:49.600 --> 01:21:49.840
Yeah.
01:21:49.840 --> 01:21:51.359
All the flights like that.
01:21:51.359 --> 01:21:52.239
I think of it like that.
01:21:52.239 --> 01:21:54.640
Okay, so now it's like seal has been cracked.
01:21:54.640 --> 01:21:56.079
We're going, we're going, we're going.
01:21:56.079 --> 01:21:58.399
We see the bodies, we see the people.
01:21:58.399 --> 01:21:59.039
The people.
01:21:59.039 --> 01:22:01.600
They're not Christian, obviously, they're different.
01:22:01.600 --> 01:22:02.560
Cool food.
01:22:02.560 --> 01:22:05.039
Oh, gold, nice, nice, nice, nice, cool.
01:22:05.039 --> 01:22:07.359
Um we'll take that.
01:22:07.359 --> 01:22:08.319
Yeah.
01:22:08.319 --> 01:22:13.439
Um, I guess the question is just they see an uncivilized body, is that right?
01:22:13.439 --> 01:22:14.239
Yep.
01:22:14.720 --> 01:22:22.880
They see a religious other, they see uh their own ancient past that they've been constructing, right?
01:22:22.880 --> 01:22:27.359
They're like we used to be, this developmental idea.
01:22:27.359 --> 01:22:30.880
They see nakedness, which is huge.
01:22:30.880 --> 01:22:33.279
They see people who don't put a lot of clothing on.
01:22:33.279 --> 01:22:36.560
I mean, because they live in the Caribbean, right?
01:22:36.560 --> 01:22:38.319
Or they live in West Africa.
01:22:38.319 --> 01:22:43.039
Like, it's one of the most I'm a very I'm very sensitive to like comfort.
01:22:43.039 --> 01:22:45.119
I hate it's been a my problem with style.
01:22:45.119 --> 01:22:49.439
I can't I can't seem to get a good style because I'm so obsessed with comfort above all.
01:22:49.439 --> 01:22:57.600
And I look at those pictures of people in these like thick coats in like the Bahamas, and I'm just like, I would have lost my mind.
01:22:57.600 --> 01:23:01.439
And then it's like, this is civilized, this is what you should wear.
01:23:01.439 --> 01:23:10.720
So they see nakedness, they see, and they see dances that are pretty would have been very similar to the peasant dances.
01:23:10.720 --> 01:23:23.600
They but they see those dances being um used not just for like fun, but for religious purposes, for spiritual connection, whether that's to ancestors or spirits or gods or whatever it is.
01:23:23.600 --> 01:23:37.840
Um they just they see this torrential downpour of contamination, and they also see the things in themselves that they hate, and they all of that's going on and they project it onto the indigenous body.
01:23:37.840 --> 01:23:40.079
Maybe this is a good place to kind of end it.
01:23:40.079 --> 01:24:08.159
Like one of the the strangest things you see in like Columbus and others like him is in one breath, just this obsessive admiration, uh almost like gobsmacked at the goodness of in their in this case the Taino people of the Caribbean, just an jaw-dropping generosity and kindness and goodness and peacefulness with each other.
01:24:08.159 --> 01:24:09.359
You want this?
01:24:09.359 --> 01:24:10.800
Here, it's yours, take it.
01:24:10.800 --> 01:24:16.159
And just in contrast to their own inquisitiveness, it was just astounding.
01:24:16.159 --> 01:24:34.720
And then in the next sentence, the next breath, just like talking about how they're just these vile, disgusting, lesser savages who will like, you know, all have all these fears attached to them of like what they're gonna do, you know, cannibalism, all that stuff.
01:24:34.720 --> 01:24:37.199
And you're just like, I don't know what to believe.
01:24:37.199 --> 01:24:54.880
These records are terrible when it comes to ethnography, like trying to understand what were the Tinal people like from these records, and there's something there that that's another evident key evidential piece is the romanticizing and the disgust, one breath apart.
01:24:54.880 --> 01:24:58.399
We historians don't have the tools to to understand like that.
01:24:58.399 --> 01:25:05.520
We need psychology, we need neurology, we need trauma studies to be like that's not normal.
01:25:05.520 --> 01:25:08.640
Like what what how what is this?
01:25:08.640 --> 01:25:13.680
What are you experiencing in this other person that you love and hate?
01:25:14.159 --> 01:25:15.680
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:25:15.680 --> 01:25:16.720
Great place to pick up.
01:25:16.720 --> 01:25:17.520
Great place to pick up.
01:25:17.520 --> 01:25:18.960
I mean, yeah, we got we got to the new world.
01:25:18.960 --> 01:25:21.840
We did, we did, we got we got to the new world.
01:25:21.840 --> 01:25:30.880
We got to like now we're at that interaction, and I think in a really beautiful way, that thing that you said, which is like remember, this is the 90s to the reformation.
01:25:30.880 --> 01:25:42.159
Like that this is one period, like one period, not too like you know, so like as things continue, just removing remembering to me, it's like bracketing them as the reformation continues.
01:25:42.159 --> 01:25:44.079
Remember, the exploration is continuing, yeah.
01:25:44.239 --> 01:26:04.960
Reformation, exploration, reformation, exploration, it's all like and so now that means whatever changes the reformation itself produces are gonna have a global impact because they're the European is out there now in the world, but they're still very much connected to to the home base.
01:26:04.960 --> 01:26:17.600
And so if the reformation is gonna take destroy ritual because it's Catholic and it's going to turn everything internal, that's where the location of faith is, like inside.
01:26:17.600 --> 01:26:26.000
Well, when England goes and starts colonizing, or the Dutch do, or something like that, that's gonna come right there with them.
01:26:26.000 --> 01:26:38.800
And Catholics who are on the defensive after the Reformation and trying to be much more much like scrutinize their practices much more, are gonna be scrutinizing the people they encounter more, you know?
01:26:38.800 --> 01:26:46.399
So it very quickly is not a regional dispute, it is a global event.
01:26:47.279 --> 01:26:50.079
Alright, next time we hit it.
01:26:50.079 --> 01:26:53.439
I mean, we already started hitting again, but you know, history is complex.
01:26:56.239 --> 01:27:01.920
All right, so that is what happens when we try to focus and get to the Reformation.
01:27:01.920 --> 01:27:10.960
So just to reiterate, the thing that we found in this conversation that I don't think any of either of us saw coming until we were in it was contamination.
01:27:10.960 --> 01:27:14.079
It's this thing that connects all of this history together.
01:27:14.079 --> 01:27:26.800
From an evangelical builder praying over houses in Texas to Spain expelling Muslims and Jews and not trusting anyone who did convert to a ballet teacher saying over and over again, don't move your hips, keep it square.
01:27:26.800 --> 01:27:29.359
It's this one idea wearing different outfits.
01:27:29.359 --> 01:27:32.960
The civilized body is the decontaminated body.
01:27:32.960 --> 01:27:40.640
And when you start to see that, the title of Ngofeen's play, When Did White People Stop Dancing, stops being a joke.
01:27:40.640 --> 01:27:47.279
The Euro Christian project of decontamination or civilizing wasn't just something Europe did to itself.
01:27:47.279 --> 01:27:48.720
This was exported.
01:27:48.720 --> 01:27:56.239
This same civilizing process that was done to European peasants was then done to African and indigenous people.
01:27:56.239 --> 01:28:00.800
Except now there was an extra move available, which is projection.
01:28:00.800 --> 01:28:07.039
Everything that the Euro Christian hated about and feared about their own body, they could put on someone else.
01:28:07.039 --> 01:28:11.920
They dance, they're uncontrollable, they don't wear enough clothes, not us.
01:28:11.920 --> 01:28:23.359
And the tell is right there in the sources because like I was saying, Columbus writing about the Taino as both astonishingly generous and peaceful and kind, and then in the next breath as vile savages.
01:28:23.359 --> 01:28:29.359
Historians alone don't have the tools to deal with that kind of thing, that kind of walking contradiction.
01:28:29.359 --> 01:28:32.239
That's not a normal thing for a mind to do.
01:28:32.239 --> 01:28:35.359
And because of that we need psychology, we need trauma studies.
01:28:35.359 --> 01:28:37.920
We need to say that something is is wrong here.
01:28:37.920 --> 01:28:41.039
Something doesn't make sense, something's broken.
01:28:41.039 --> 01:28:42.640
Thanks for listening today.
01:28:42.640 --> 01:28:49.119
If this one spoke to you, send it to one person in your life who might also get it, and I'll see you next time.
01:28:49.119 --> 01:28:55.279
Actually, next time, I'll be back with a new episode with my good friend Father Joash Thomas.
01:28:55.279 --> 01:28:58.640
We always have amazing conversations, and I just love that.
01:28:58.640 --> 01:29:00.239
So I'm excited to bring you a new one.
01:29:00.239 --> 01:29:04.399
The last time I talked with Joash, we we were talking about other religions.
01:29:04.399 --> 01:29:07.600
And this time we're talking about Christianity and the enemy.
01:29:07.600 --> 01:29:10.159
It was it was such a good one, and I can't wait to share it.
01:29:10.159 --> 01:29:12.560
And I'll see you with that next week.

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