The Political is the New Spiritual
What god and institutional racism have in common
I don't think I'll ever forget the day when my high school physics teacher, a gruff woman with a caustic sense of humor rumored to carry a handgun in her purse to school, ranted to the class about the alternate physical dimension in which demons and angels wage an incessant war. We would call these other dimensional creatures "aliens," she argued, but the Bible informs us of their spiritual nature. Her lecture put in the most literal way possible a point often made vaguely by the religious authorities within my adolescent orbit. I believe her ravings about the physicality of spiritual forces ended up contributing to her firing, but, looking back, I appreciate her efforts to rectify a genuine philosophical dilemma. The problem she addressed with alien demon spirits would come to haunt me not long after I completed her class.
The problem is ontological in nature; it pertains to the fundamental compositional elements of reality and how they relate to each other. Now, I'm not sure whether the average person socialized in a Christian religious tradition divides reality in the way I am about to describe or to what extent my understanding of this apparent division represents idiosyncrasies of the Southern Baptist theology. If I had to guess, it is a common, albeit unarticulated, belief among most Christians. The crucial ontological question asks In what way does the spiritual exist? If the spiritual realm exists in a sui generis manner, if its building blocks are fundamentally distinct from and irreducible to those constituting other dimensions of reality, what does that imply about reality's nature?
I propose most Christians, and most followers of Abrahamic religions for that matter, implicitly or explicitly segregate the universe into (roughly) three layers: the material, the mental, and the spiritual. The material realm includes organic and inorganic materials including rocks, trees, organs, fire, and oxygen molecules; the mental realm houses things like abstract numerical concepts, shapes, expectations, and beliefs; and the spiritual realm is reserved for those objects and forces which pertain to a religious narrative like, in the Christian case, God and Satan, demons and angels, heaven and hell, souls, and so on. The things in each dimension are theorized to exist in sui generis way. The mental may be thought to derive from the material via processes of emergence (e.g., synapse firings produce thoughts, but to suggest thoughts exist in the same way as synapses firings or "are" synapse firings is to miss that a thought is more than the sum of its parts). However, the spiritual is theorized to exist in a wholly distinct manner, its material composition entirely mysterious and, yes, alien.
While believers point to traditionally existing things as evidence of God's existence, they usually do not suggest that such things comprise God or are literally part of the substance which God is. The material comprising God and God's fellow spiritual realm dwellers under this rubric is necessarily an immaterial material. There is no available type of matter from which spiritual objects can emerge in the way mental objects emerge from the substances in the material realm. Everything in the spiritual realm can only exist in a way which defies any conceivable criteria of "existence" for all that which can be said to "exist" is composed of some kind of observable material with spatiotemporal properties. God, demons, souls, and the rest cannot be made of such material or they would have been discovered among us. The existence of angels and their kin is thus necessarily a kind of a non-existent existence; they exist but in a manner which flouts any usable definition of "existence" for they are composed of material which is not "material" in any usable sense of the term.
I struggled for what felt like an eternity to figure out what it meant to "believe in" the existence something which necessarily does not fulfill any conceivable interpretation of the term "exist." What bothered me the most was the fact that other people believed in things I knew could not exist even in the non-existent-but-still-existing manner I believed God did. Scientologists "believe in" Xenu, something which definitely does not exist in any way including the impossible-but-necessary one. That their belief in nothing compels Scientologists, that they are capable of feeling as real that which cannot possibly be, that they are able to point to an experience and call it an encounter with an impossibility...what does that mean for belief? If they can feel their belief in an object which does not exist and therefore cannot not "make itself known" to them, what are they encountering? In my experience, people who grew up in a secular environment often do not understand why this line of questioning is so profoundly vexing. They have not experienced what it is like to "believe in" something to which a non-existent existence is consciously attributed. The self-awareness that what you are desperately trying to feel as real can only exist in a way nothing else that is real possibly can produces a very special kind of psychic turmoil that perhaps must be confronted to be comprehended.
The breakthrough for me, which entailed the instant expansion of my category "religious" to encompass many of the ideas typically designated as political, arrived when I realized that I conceptualized many of the things in the mental realm in the same way as I conceptualized objects in the spiritual realm. The only difference was that I did not 1) regard the mental objects as necessarily living a non-existent existence or 2) label them as spiritual/religious. In my head, these abstractions floated around just like spirits. Their invisible, non-material essences inhabited visible structures, animating them and determining their futures. These powerful yet inchoate forces governed human reality behind the scenes. My not calling them spirits did not mean they did not exhibit all the characteristics of spirits, it just implied I lacked an awareness of their spiritual nature.
I am talking about forces like science, social justice, institutional racism, supply and demand, whiteness, wokeness, capitalism/socialism/communism, toxic masculinity, culture, gender, neoliberalism, and discourse. Whether these terms refer to spirit-like objects depends on who is using them. Many people, for instance, have only the vaguest sense of what institutional racism is. When they talk about "institutional racism," they describe its societal role and impact in the exact same kind of way as the average Christian talks about the social manifestations of the forces of evil or spiritual warfare. To them, institutional racism is effectively a spiritual or immaterial essence which inhabits and animates organizations as though driven by a will of its own. But "institutional racism" does not always refer to a spiritually structured concept in someone's head. Many people who employ the term use it to refer to concrete types of organizational procedures which effectively, but not explicitly, systematically bias outcomes such that one race is more likely to receive favorable outcomes than another. Again, I am not proposing the term "institutional racism," as I understand it, refers to a spiritual force, but that certain people understand the term to mean something which takes the form of a spiritual force. Just like how different people understand the term "God" to name wildly different sorts of things, people understand stereotypically political terms in idiosyncratic ways. Our modern political predicament is partially due to our collective failure to interrogate our own and others' understandings of allegedly political terms.
Two interconnected factors which determine whether the referent of a term (i.e., the concept denoted by its linguistic signifier as conceptualized by the speaker) likely possesses spiritual characteristics are 1) its level of generality and 2) the degree to which it is disconnected from material objects and causal mechanisms. Someone can talk about the "forces of capitalism" at a general level while still conceptualizing these "forces" as the manifestations of specific businesses practices, state regulations, institutionally reinforced cultural beliefs about freedom as choice access, and so on. Someone else can use the term in a manner wholly detached from these mechanisms. They can talk about "the forces of capitalism" while imagining a sort of ambiguous mind virus of uncertain origin that makes people care more about money than others.
When it dawned on me that I related to many objects and forces in the mental dimension in the same way as those in the spiritual, I lost myself for some time to a crushing existential uncertainty. Ontological dysphoria plagues many religious people striving to believe that which they consciously attribute a non-existent existence. People do not often experience this existential burden when analyzing their relationship to "political" ideas, but they should. They should because these ideas, while labeled differently, are not psycho-structurally different from the ones they call "spiritual." The absence of individual crises in this area belies the social emergency: The war of spiritual ideas now wages under the guise of political debate.
Spirituality is dead, long live spirituality.