Ep. 10 Thinking Outside the Silo: Religion and Power

In this episode of The Spirit of Revolution, I begin a mini series looking at what revolutionary movements can learn from religious traditions — starting with Catholicism.
This is not about belief, conversion, or theology as identity. It is about effectiveness.
After Extinction Rebellion took off, journalists often asked me what climate or activist books I’d been reading. The honest answer was: hardly any. What mattered more was learning outside my political silo — including from capitalist strategy, evolutionary theory, and religious traditions that have grappled with power, morality, failure, and endurance for centuries.
Here I introduce the idea of exaptation — taking elements from one system and using them in another — and explain why religious traditions are worth studying even (especially) if you are secular.
I outline some of the core philosophical and political problems Catholic thinkers like Maurice Blondel and Henri de Lubac were wrestling with:
- Action without certainty
- The relationship between the material and the transcendent
- Power, morality, and who decides
- Why neat divisions between public/private or sacred/secular keep breaking down
These are not abstract questions. They sit underneath how we organise, how we exercise power, and why movements either sustain themselves or collapse.
This episode sets up the problem. In the next episodes, I’ll look more concretely at how Catholicism navigated a historical period very similar to the one we are entering now — and what we might be able to extract and use without reinventing the wheel.
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Want to get involved? Email me at roger@rev21.earth
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