How to Be a Non-Ideological, Feel-Good Religious Person
How to Be a Non-Ideological, Feel-Good Religious Person
This week, I've been thinking about the meaning of "gay," feel-good productivity, and the difference between ideology and empirical thinking.
Since it’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s, here are three things I’m thinking about, topics that may inspire future full-length essays.
The first one is the meaning of “gay,” the next frontier in my ongoing engagement with the question of homosexuality and the Christian life. The second is the inspiration and encouragement I’ve been receiving from Ali Abdaal’s new book, Feel Good Productivity. The third is the difference between ideology and empirical thinking that I’ve been trying to formulate. Enjoy!
What Does “Gay” Mean?
The other week, I had an interesting Twitter interaction with Grant Hartley. I argued that “same-sex attracted” (SSA) and “gay” were synonyms. As a result, Christians shouldn’t have a preference between the two, allowing people to admit that they are gay, if they are.
Grant pushed back, arguing that “gay” is a term with more of a cultural and historical significance, rather than a mere report of one’s sexual orientation (like “homosexual” or “same-sex attracted”). He mentioned, and I also highlighted, the unique convergence between his view and what I often hear from “Side Y” folks: that “gay” is a loaded term that means a lot more than that one is same-sex attracted.
Here was our conversation, and I’ll comment more below:
Recently, Colton Beach, another first-time Revoice attendee this year, was interviewed by Preston Sprinkle, and it was one of the best interviews I’ve heard on the celibate (chaste), gay Christian issue. Colton is also a continual source of one-liners about this debate on Twitter. He also recently published a brief Twitter essay in which he asks whether “Gay Christian is an Oxymoron?” There, while he mentions the history of the word “gay,” he echoes my argument that the colloquial usage of “gay” in our culture is as a synonym for “same-sex attracted,” or “homosexual,” a reference to one’s sexual orientation, rather than to anything additional.
(He also had a recent essay about “Positive Experiences as a Gay Man in the Conservative Church,” and another, “Barriers to Discipling Gay People in the Conservative Church.”)
In my arguments so far, I have argued that “gay” is simply a reference to sexual orientation and that sexual orientation is not a concept or a social construct, but a real psychological phenomenon in the world. This dovetails with my realist and externalist views that the meanings of our words are exhausted by the things they refer to, rather than bearing additional layers of meaning, sense, or baggage. Grant (and Colton) may be correct that the word “gay” has this additional cultural history, however, with Frege, I would distinguish the baggage, the feelings, and the impressions people have when they hear the word from its actual meaning, which is a reference to the property of being homosexual in one’s sexual orientation.
I believe this is the next subject for a lengthier analysis in my ongoing essays on same-sex attraction. After the experience of self-publishing, I am thinking that the essays on same-sex attraction alone could be compiled into a resource for Christians.
Feel-Good Productivity
One of my latest favorites on YouTube is Ali Abdaal. Abdaal is a twenty-nine-year-old YouTuber in the UK who relatively recently left his stable career as a doctor to go full-time on YouTube. His content is focused on productivity, and his business is doing $4 million in revenue a year.
His new book, Feel Good Productivity, came out yesterday, and he’s started a bit of a podcast tour.
I’ve been loving his interviews. His message is simple: Productivity should feel good. His interview with Chris Williamson is a good place to start because of Williamson’s relentless positivity.
But his interview with Ryan Holiday of the Daily Stoic was enlightening because of the contrast it showed. In many ways, Holiday and Abdaal agreed. Holiday was honest about the limitations and balance having children brings to life, for instance. Abdaal mentions that he, though not yet married or expecting any children, has been reading parenting books, and thinking about the chosen constraints children bring to life.
At a certain point in the interview though, Holiday stands up for the Stoic ideal of buckling down and grinding through difficulty. Abdaal’s emphasis is more Epicurean, the simple, happy life. We work better when we do work we enjoy or make our existing work into something like an adventure. In the title of another interview, “hard work is overrated.”
Abdaal contrasts the hard work and grit that it takes to be a “hero” with the joy and lack of anxiety required to be a pleasant normal person. It feels to me like one of the elements of transition from a man’s 20s to his 30s is switching from the “hero” mindset to the normal man (dad) mindset.
Abdaal has also been helpful to me in explaining the role of a social media personality, something I think about even in writing this on the internet at all. Abdaal encourages us not to strive to be “gurus,” especially those of us who are young and would only feel impostor syndrome doing so. Rather, think of yourself as a “guide.” You are two steps ahead of someone out there, someone who would appreciate hearing your perspective to be led the next step or two of their own path.
Another line from Abdaal that pops up in the interviews is to be, rather than serious, sincere. Often we procrastinate or get anxiety about productivity when we are taking our task - and ourselves - too seriously. The solution is not to be cavalier, but to substitute sincerity for seriousness. I found this helpful a couple weeks ago when I approached five highly competent academics to defend my dissertation prospectus. I realized that there would be no help in putting on a pretense of being smarter than I am; the best result, and the lowest anxiety, would come from committing to be sincere, which means revealing one’s imperfections, but putting other people at ease.
To my mind, this mindset around productivity and seriousness is part of a change from the Puritan work ethic in general, and the academic, status-driven mindset in particular. I also think it’s part of a more forgiving and gentle Christianity.
In my own life this year, I’ve done some work in counseling to overcome anxiety about “productivity” that I have often felt. (It’s discussed in the interviews at some points as a distinct kind of anxiety.) Strikingly, some people have expressed being impressed with my productivity this year. I can assure you that I was much busier, and perhaps more productive during my master’s and Ph.D. coursework. However, a significant Substack output, a conference presentation and a prospectus have come this year from a writing habit largely focused upon doing two hours of deep work (writing) five days a week (and on average, probably only four). This has felt like accepting a limitation and settling for a rather small amount of work in total. However, I have found that there is about an hour of preparation, and probably another hour of wind-down just to complete those two hours of writing well.
In a way that contradicts the Puritan work ethic, this work schedule has more or less been what “feels good.” I’ve tried working less - and sickness or fatigue sometimes ensures that I work less. But working less doesn’t feel as good. I’ve tried working more, but I can’t sustain it. The following day, my brain is fried, and I end up working less to make up for it.
It’s pretty classic for graduate students and academics to struggle in these ways. But I’ve been grateful to find a level of peace with my level of “productivity.” The work is creative, and it can’t be forced. At the same time, some of the most productive results come from when one is lying in bed or staring out a window. I can’t say that I know how to apply these insights to all professions, however, I think all of us could use a dose of feel-good productivity.
Order the book here. (I have! Mine’s arriving today by 10 pm.)
Ideology Versus Empiricism
I recently wrote on Substack Notes about the difference I see between ideological and empirical thinking:
To illustrate, for several years, I’ve been trying to process all the events and ideas related to sexual and gender ideology, race, and “wokeness.” One critique I hear, largely from secular critics of wokeness, is that it is a kind of religion or ideology, in a negative sense. Unfortunately, I see a lot of the same features of ideology, and “religion” in the bad sense, in certain Christian circles and intellectual approaches. These groups - like Christian coherentists, presuppositionalists, or worldview-ists - tend to offer the following criticism of “woke” ideology: “This ideology is incorrect according to our ideology. Adopt our ideology instead of that ideology!”
But the very problem seemed to be ideology itself! Adopting “Christian ideology,” rather than basing belief on empirical evidence, is not the right path. Accordingly, as a religious person, the question is whether Christianity can be something other than a religion or ideology.
What is ideology? I think that ideology is a kind of shortcut for thought, adopting a general model of the world, and trying to fit everything into that model. Ideology often has a deeply moral component in that it inspires action and sorts the world into good and evil with clarity and obvious distinctions. The obvious danger of ideology on the epistemic level is that the world is a complex place and cannot be known to conform to our model of thought in every case.
The criticism often comes that everyone has an ideology; we can’t do anything but that. That could even be one way to read the divide between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. Several years ago, the two had a series of discussions in which Harris argued for an objective/scientific basis of morality in empirically-verifiable standards of well-being. Peterson argued that not even Harris could claim to be free of moral beliefs distinct from science, however. Harris’s conception of the two poles of human subjective experience, the height of joy and the depth of suffering, which provide us with a topology of the “moral landscape,” is not itself a deliverance of scientific method, but a narrative, even an eschatology. Peterson was defending the ineliminability of narratival and religious thought.
Nevertheless, I want to be able to argue that we should both escape Harris’s critique of religious, i.e., ideological moral thought (like that of the Taliban) and embrace a religion in Peterson’s sense. Unsurprisingly, I’m enjoying Harris and Peterson’s recent conversation: “Jordan Peterson & Sam Harris Try to Find Something They Agree On.”
On a related note, Peterson will be speaking in St. Louis on Valentine’s Day, so you can guess who I’m bringing to hear him speak! That experience should inspire an essay or two.
Happy New Year!