Author: Guy Mystic

Somewhere along the way, we mixed up masculinity and patriarchy. It’s one of the most consequential category errors, and both sides of the culture war are making it.

They are not the same. Masculinity is a set of traits, dispositions, and ways of moving through the world that have been associated with men, but not exclusively, across history and culture. Patriarchy is a system of institutional power in which men, as a class, hold authority over women and marginalized groups through law, economics, religion, and social custom. One is a collection of human qualities. The other is a political arrangement. Confusing them is like confusing ambition with capitalism, or devotion with theocracy. The qualities can exist without the system. The system weaponizes the qualities, and acts like it owns them.

This distinction sounds simple. Holding it in practice, in the current cultural moment, turns out to be very hard. And the failure to hold it is doing damage on all sides.

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What men have been

The content of masculinity has never been fixed. What it means to be a man shifts across centuries, cultures, and social classes, and that variability is itself evidence that we are dealing with something culturally shaped, not biologically determined in any simple way.

Go back to Homer. Achilles, the archetype of the Greek warrior ideal, was not a stoic tough guy. He was fierce, yes, and lethal. He was also capable of devastating grief, wept openly for his dead companion Patroclus, and pulled out of battle not because he was afraid but because he felt dishonored. Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who spent years working with Vietnam veterans, read The Iliad as a manual for combat trauma and found it eerily accurate.1 The ancient Greek masculine ideal included emotional depth.

Then there is the Stoic tradition, which ran alongside the warrior ideal in Greek and Roman culture. Marcus Aurelius, one of the most powerful men in his day, spent his evenings writing a private journal reminding himself not to be seduced by power, not to act from anger, and to treat everyone he encountered, including slaves and enemies, with justice. For the Stoics, the measure of a man was not how many people he could command but how much sovereignty he held over his own interior life.2 Self-mastery, not mastery over others.

Medieval chivalry gets mocked now as a fantasy, and its application in practice was often brutal and hypocritical. As a code, though, it wove together the capacity for violence with obligations of restraint. The knight was supposed to be strong enough to hurt people and disciplined enough not to do it without cause. Historian Ruth Mazo Karras has shown that the chivalric ideal was, in large part, the Church and the aristocratic order placing institutional brakes on male aggression, not celebrating it unconditionally.3

The Victorian era gave us “muscular Christianity,” the idea, associated with writers like Thomas Hughes, that physical courage and Christian moral virtue were not in tension but were expressions of the same thing.4 Theodore Roosevelt’s “strenuous life” philosophy carried similar notes into the American context: vitality, civic courage, and willingness to bear hardship, framed as masculine virtues that had nothing to do with keeping women down.5

The through-line across all of this is something worth noticing. Courage, loyalty, protection of the vulnerable, willingness to carry burden, emotional depth, self-discipline, civic engagement. These are human virtues that got culturally coded as masculine. They got assigned to men in ways that were often unjust to women who possessed them equally. The problem with that injustice is not the virtues themselves. The problem is the exclusion.

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What is patriarchy?

Patriarchy is something more structural than a set of traits. It is institutional power, codified and enforced.

In ancient Rome, the patria potestas gave the male head of household legal authority over everyone in it, including, in early Roman law, the power of life and death over his children. This was law, written down, enforced by courts.6 Greek society confined women to the domestic sphere, the oikos, while reserving the public political world, the polis, for male citizens. Aristotle provided the philosophical justification, arguing that women were naturally less capable of rational deliberation and should therefore be governed by men.7 What is characteristic of patriarchy as a system is exactly that move: taking a contingent arrangement of power and calling it nature.

Throughout medieval and early modern Europe, women had no independent legal personhood in most jurisdictions. They existed in law as daughters, wives, or widows. The Church read its scriptures to say that this was God’s design.8 These were institutions, with teeth.

Patriarchy was not simply men doing whatever they wanted. It was a system that constrained men too, through a different set of mechanisms. Men who failed to provide, to protect, to exercise authority over their households were shamed, sometimes legally penalized. Patriarchy drafted masculinity into its service, demanded a particular performance of it, and punished men who didn’t comply. This is the key insight we tend to miss. Patriarchy used masculinity. It did not invent it, and it does not own it.

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We ended up mixing these two things together

The conflation is mostly a product of the second half of the twentieth century, and it happened for understandable reasons.

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, published in 1949, argued that “woman” had been constructed as the subordinate Other to man’s dominant Self, and that the whole vocabulary of femininity was a cage built to keep women in their place.9 That was a genuine insight. It opened a harder question, though: if femininity is a patriarchal construction, is the masculine/feminine distinction itself suspect?

Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics in 1970 pushed further.10 Millett argued that gender itself was a political arrangement, that masculine and feminine traits were not neutral but expressions of a power hierarchy. She read Norman Mailer and Henry Miller not as aberrant misogynists but as representatives of what masculinity looked like under patriarchy. The analysis was sharp. This marked a transition in perspective: rather than viewing specific masculine behaviors as tools of patriarchy, masculinity itself began to be seen as inherently serving patriarchal ends.

Andrea Dworkin took it further still in the 1980s, arguing that masculine sexuality itself was structured around domination.11 This was a controversial position even within feminist thought, and many feminist thinkers rejected it as its own kind of essentialism. But it circulated, and it moved the needle.

The sociologist R.W. Connell gave a version of the conflation its most influential formulation with the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” in the 1990s.12 In Connell’s actual argument, hegemonic masculinity referred to the culturally dominant form of masculinity in a specific historical context, and Connell was careful to note that other masculinities existed alongside it, some subordinated, some complicit, some resistant. The concept was meant to be historically situated and precise.

In its popularized form, the precision got lost. “Hegemonic masculinity” became, in common usage, something closer to “masculinity tends toward domination.” And when the phrase “toxic masculinity,” originally coined in the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement of the 1980s to describe specific dysfunctional patterns, began to be applied to masculine norms generally, the slide was largely complete.13 The message many men received was not “some expressions of masculinity are harmful” but “masculinity is the problem.”

The internet era clamped the confusion in place. Progressive online spaces increasingly treated any positive account of masculinity as ideological cover for misogyny. Reactionary spaces treated any critique of patriarchy as an attack on men. The middle ground, where someone could say “I think domination is wrong and I also think courage and protectiveness are real virtues,” became almost impossible to occupy without getting fire from both directions.

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Enter the Manosphere

If the progressive conflation produced confusion, the reactionary one produced something more dangerous: the Manosphere.

The Manosphere is not a single thing. It covers a range of communities with different concerns and different degrees of toxicity, and flattening them into one block would repeat the same sloppy thinking.

The Men’s Rights Activist (MRA) movement started with some grievances. Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, published in 1993, pointed to things that were genuinely being ignored: high male suicide rates, bias against fathers in family courts, the fact that men die at work at catastrophically higher rates than women.14 These are legitimate issues. The MRA movement, however, largely abandoned engagement with these structural problems and migrated online toward communities organized almost entirely around resentment of women and feminism.

The pickup artist (PUA) world of the early 2000s, made famous by Neil Strauss’s book The Game, reframed relationships between men and women as a competition requiring technique and manipulation.15 The underlying philosophy was a crude Darwinism: women are hypergamous status-evaluators, men are genetic competitors, and anyone who tells you different is lying to you. Romance, real mutuality, genuine care, these didn’t appear in the framework except as tools to deploy tactically.

The Red Pill community on Reddit synthesized MRA grievance and PUA technique into a broader worldview claiming to show men the truth about sexual reality that feminism had buried.16 It borrowed selectively from evolutionary psychology, treated certain contested hypotheses about female behavior as settled fact, and offered men a explanation for their pain. The explanation was distorted. The pain was real.

At the extreme end sit the incels, the involuntary celibates, some of whom have translated sexual frustration into a totalized ideology of victimhood and female culpability. That ideology has produced violence. Elliot Rodger’s 2014 killing spree in Isla Vista, California, was preceded by a manifesto that read like a logical conclusion of incel thinking.17

And then there is Andrew Tate, the former kickboxer turned media personality who became arguably the most globally visible Manosphere figure. Tate is not confused about what he is selling. He explicitly embraces patriarchal dominance as a positive value, treats wealth and sexual access as the correct measures of masculine worth, and built a media empire around getting that message to young men via TikTok and YouTube before his bans from platforms. His arrest in Romania on charges including human trafficking did not noticeably shrink his audience, which is its own kind of data.

What ties all of these together, across their real differences, is the same equation the progressive side makes, just reversed. Progressive: masculine traits are patriarchal instruments, therefore suspect. Manosphere: patriarchal arrangements are the expression of masculinity, therefore sacred. Same conflation. Opposite verdict.

Here is what makes this worth taking seriously rather than just dismissing: the Manosphere rose in response to these conditions. Men in Western countries are now significantly underrepresented in university enrollment and completion. Male suicide rates remain far higher than women’s. Economic dislocation has hit working-class men in manufacturing particularly hard, and the social supports available to men in crisis are thin.18 These are not imaginary grievances. Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution scholar wrote a whole book, Of Boys and Men, arguing that male struggles are systematically underacknowledged and deserve serious policy attention.

The Manosphere captured that pain and gave it an explanation: feminism did this to you, and reclaiming dominance is the answer. The explanation is partly accurate (structural changes have genuinely disrupted certain male roles) and mostly destructive (the prescribed response makes things worse).

What is striking, when you look at what the Manosphere actually teaches, is how little of it resembles the masculine ideals it claims to recover. The Stoic tradition, which Manosphere figures like to invoke, was about governing your own passions, caring for your community, and treating external status markers, wealth, reputation, sexual conquest, as irrelevant to genuine virtue. The Manosphere inverts all three. It cultivates resentment rather than self-governance. It atomizes community into sexual competition. It makes status display the whole point. It is masculinity as brand, as product, as identity kit, rather than as character developed through practice and choice. You can buy the terminology, alpha, beta, Chad, red-pilled, and the community belonging, without doing any of the actual work.

Sociologist Michael Kimmel calls the animating feeling behind much of this “aggrieved entitlement”: the sense that the world has been rearranged to take away something that was owed to you.19 Virtue and entitlement are not the same thing. Virtue is built through effort and demands ethical constraints. Entitlement requires only the assertion of what you’re owed and the identification of who’s blocking it. The Manosphere deals almost entirely in entitlement while dressing it in the language of virtue.

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This confusion costs everyone

The conflation of masculinity with patriarchy, operating simultaneously in progressive and reactionary culture, creates a set of impossible positions.

Men who have genuinely internalized egalitarian values, who do not want to dominate anyone, who believe in women’s full equality, find themselves without a vocabulary for their own experience when masculine identity and patriarchal structure are treated as the same thing. The message they receive is that their masculinity is the problem, and the only clean options are to repudiate it or to defend it reactively. Neither option is honest.

Bell hooks, who was nobody’s apologist for patriarchy, argued in The Will to Change that the feminist project was not the elimination of masculine virtues but their liberation from the service of domination.20 She thought patriarchy damaged men as well as women, and she thought the response was reformation, not rejection. She also thought men were capable of that reformation. That is a more demanding and more respectful position than the conflation allows.

Philosopher Catherine Keller has written about how Western culture has falsely wired strength to domination and vulnerability to weakness, such that the critique of dominance feels like a critique of strength.21 It isn’t. Courage is real. Protectiveness is real. The willingness to bear difficulty for others without complaint is real. These things don’t require women’s subordination to exist or to matter. They have existed without it, across many cultures and many centuries. Historian David Gilmore, surveying masculine ideals across dozens of cultures, found that some version of the expectation that men demonstrate courage, provision, and protection was nearly universal, including in societies with far less gender hierarchy than the modern West.22 That is a reason to take masculine virtue seriously on its own terms.

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How to get this right

My argument is that masculinity, in a non-patriarchal key, is a historically variable but coherent cluster of traits and practices associated primarily with being a man: physical courage and the willingness to bear risk for others, protectiveness toward those who are vulnerable, directness in conflict, the capacity to carry hard things without falling apart, a kind of care that expresses itself through doing. These traits are not exclusively male. They do not require anyone’s subordination. They can be, and are, practiced by men in relationships, families, friendships, and institutions organized around genuine equality.

Patriarchy is the system in which those traits, and others, have been conscripted into the service of dominance, with women’s strengths systematically devalued. The critique of patriarchy is a critique of that conscription, that system. It is not a critique of courage or strength or care.

Holding this distinction clearly means something for how we talk about gender. It means that calling out patriarchal structures does not require treating masculinity as the enemy. It means that defending masculine identity does not require defending male dominance. It means that a young man who is trying to figure out what kind of man he wants to be deserves a real answer to that question, one that doesn’t come packaged with the demand that he dominate or the suggestion that his identity is inherently suspect.

A young man can be fully and unapologetically themselves as a man without requiring anyone’s subordination to hold it together and is one of the things the current cultural moment most needs to hear, and least often does

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A Pastoral response

Based on what you just read, if you’re a man sitting with it, turning it over, feeling something loosen slightly in your chest, I want to stay with that feeling for a moment before we move on.

Because here is what I have noticed in the past twenty-odd years: the men who seek help carrying the most damage are not, on the whole, the ones who tried to dominate everyone around them. They are the ones who were handed a story about what a man is, discovered they couldn’t live inside it, and then spent the next decade or two concluding that the problem was them.

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The story we were given was always too small

The conflation of masculinity with patriarchy did not begin in the 1960s. It runs much deeper than second-wave feminism or internet culture wars. In the Christian tradition that shaped Western culture most profoundly, the conflation was built into the furniture. Headship theology, the interpretation of Pauline texts as prescribing permanent male authority over women in home and church, became so thoroughly identified with Christian manhood that many men experienced any loosening of that authority as a spiritual threat. To be asked to share power felt like being asked to stop being a man and, for those who had woven their faith around that identity, to stop being a faithful one.

What process and open relational theology offers here is not a patch on the existing framework. It is a different framework altogether, one in which the whole premise gets reconstructed from the ground up.

As I understand the Whiteheadian vision of reality, the fundamental unit of existence is not substance but experience, and the fundamental character of that experience is relational. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything that is, is constituted by its relations to everything else. God, in this vision, is not the unmoved mover sitting above creation and issuing commands. God is the most relational reality there is, present to every experience, responsive to every creature, affected by every joy and every suffering in the world. The divine nature is not power-over but, as open relational theologians like Thomas Jay Oord have argued at length, something closer to uncontrolling love, a love that creates space for genuine freedom and genuine response rather than commanding compliance.23

This matters for masculinity because the dominant Western theological image of God has been irreducibly patriarchal. The Father. The King. The Lord. The one whose authority flows downward and whose will is to be obeyed. When that image saturates a culture’s deepest assumptions, it naturalizes a particular version of masculine identity: the man who is strong is the man who commands, provides, and does not need. Strength is defined as self-sufficiency. Vulnerability is coded as weakness, as femininity, as something to be overcome.

Open relational theology breaks that chain. If God’s own nature is characterized by genuine vulnerability, by the capacity to be affected, to receive, to be moved by the world, then vulnerability is not a deviation from strength. It is a feature of the most fundamental reality there is.

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What this means for men

I want to be concrete, because theology that doesn’t land in actual human bodies isn’t doing its job.

The man who cries at his child’s school play is not failing at masculinity. The man who says “I was wrong” in a marriage conflict, fully and without qualification, is not weak. The man who asks for help when he is drowning, who admits he doesn’t know something, who sits with a friend’s grief without trying to fix it, who is physically tender with the people he loves: none of these are surrenders of manhood. In a relational ontology, they are expressions of the deepest truth about what it means to be a creature made for connection.

The man who has been told otherwise, and most men have been, is carrying something he was never meant to carry. The pastoral task is not to add a gentler set of rules on top of the old ones. It is to help him set down the weight.

The central argument is that courage, protectiveness, loyalty, the willingness to bear hard things for others: these are human virtues, not patriarchal instruments. I want to add something. These virtues are not specifically masculine in the sense of being male property. They are human virtues that men are called to, as men, in the particular embodied and relational situations of their lives. The call is real. The content of the call is shared with every other creature who has ever been asked to be brave, faithful, and present.

What patriarchy did was take that call and add to it, you must be dominant. Your worth depends on your control. To receive care is to be diminished. Open relational theology strikes the amendment. The call remains.

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The Manosphere, with a pastoral sensitivity

We need to be fair to the Manosphere’s underlying pain. I want to be fair to it, and then honest about where it goes wrong at the level of the spirit.

The men drawn into these communities are, very often, men who are genuinely suffering. The suffering is real. The isolation is real. The sense that the cultural scripts they were handed have been revoked without replacement, that they are being told their instincts are toxic without being given anything to do with their energy and their longing, that is a pastoral emergency. Dismissing it accomplishes nothing.

What the Manosphere offers these men is a story. You were made for dominance, the world has cheated you of it, and the path back to yourself is through reclaiming it. That story has the structure of a redemption narrative. It has a fall, a diagnosis, and a way of salvation. This is part of why it is so effective and part of why it is so dangerous. Redemption narratives are spiritually potent. When they are built on a false account of what was lost, they lead men deeper into the wound rather than out of it.

What was lost, for most of these men is belonging, purpose, the sense that they matter and that their capacities are needed. These are genuine human needs. They are met by genuine community, meaningful work, and the experience of being loved and known.

Andrew Tate sells a product that promises self-mastery but delivers self-performance. There is a Stoic vocabulary in the Manosphere, but it is a Stoicism evacuated of its actual content. Marcus Aurelius was working on his own character in private, with no audience. Tate’s whole operation requires an audience. The performance of invulnerability is a defense against the terror of being genuinely known. Pastorally, that terror is the thing that needs to be addressed, not encouraged.

Process thought offers a particularly useful diagnosis here, the error of treating an abstraction as if it were the real thing. The Manosphere commits a version of this with masculine identity. It takes an abstraction, dominance, and treats it as the concrete substance of manhood. Real men, in their actual relational lives, are far more complex, far more vulnerable, far more interesting than the abstraction allows. The abstraction is a simplification that feels like clarity. It isn’t.

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The harder pastoral question

I want to name something that was gestured toward but didn’t quite land, which is the question of formation.

One can make the philosophical argument that masculinity and patriarchy are distinct until you are hoarse, and you will not change very much. The argument is true and necessary. It is not sufficient. What forms men is not argument. Men need practice, community, story, and the particular people who model something worth becoming.

The great failure of progressive culture, in my observation, is not that it made the wrong argument about masculinity. It is that it largely stopped offering formation. It became expert at critique and thin on positive content. You cannot ask men to lay down a defective story without offering a better one, and the better story has to be embodied somewhere, in actual communities, in actual relationships, in men who are visibly living it out.

This is where the spiritual community, when it is functioning, has something irreplaceable to offer. The community that takes seriously the call to form people in virtue, that holds men accountable to genuine care and genuine courage, that creates space for men to be honest about their failures without those failures becoming their identity, that tells a story about manhood rooted in the character of a God who is strong enough to be vulnerable, present enough to be affected, loving enough to give freedom rather than demand compliance.

That community exists in pockets. It needs to exist widely. The cultural moment is asking for it more urgently than it has in a long time.

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A final word

If you are a man who has felt the squeeze of the conflation from either direction, told either that your masculine instincts are suspect or that they can only be satisfied through dominance, I want to say something directly.

You are not the problem. The story is the problem. Your desire to be strong, to protect, to provide, to matter, to be needed. They are human virtues that have been badly served by the options currently on offer. You deserve a better story that asks you to become more fully yourself, in relation to others who are doing the same.

That story is available. It has been told before, in fragments, across centuries. The project of telling it again, clearly, for this moment, is one of the more important things any of us could be doing.

Something is happening in theology. This week, these four writers Sheri Kling, Ilia Delio, Thomas Jay Oord, and Tripp Fuller have each, from their own angle arrived at a similar message. The human project cannot survive on the terms it has been operating. And these are not the only voices I have heard this week with a similar message. Their diagnosis might not be unique or surprising. The prescription isn’t necessarily unique either, but seems almost unattainable in our current global environment. What is required is a revolution of orientation. The revolution they are describing is love as the actual structure of reality and the only viable basis for human civilization going forward.

This is is a metaphysical, therapeutic, and political claim.

Ilia Delio says: “New transcendentals are forming beyond the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful of the classical tradition. AI invites us to consider creativity, experience, and complexity as the transcendentals of a noospheric age—though these three alone will not hold. They cohere only when held by a fourth: communion, love as relational wholeness, the integrating force without which any symbolic container eventually splits under its own weight, as the mid-century container did. The mind urged on by the heart, and the heart kindled by an ineffable power of love: this is what allows a noosphere to hold.”

Thomas Jay Oord says: “The Ever Creator theory, by contrast, says God can’t prevent evil singlehandedly. This God isn’t omnipotent, at least not in the usual meanings of that word. I call the Ever Creator’s power “amipotent,” which is the power of uncontrolling love. Through uncontrolling love God always creates out of or alongside creatures and creation.”

Sheri Kling says: “In a relational, evolving world, questions of war and justice cannot be answered by control and domination, but only through the lens of love, relationship, and what makes life possible.”

Tripp Fuller says: “This matters enormously for the nonviolence argument. The incarnation is not God overriding the world from outside. It is God’s patient, persuasive, self-investing love arriving at its most concentrated historical expression. The mode of the incarnation is itself a form of nonviolence. God does not coerce the world into producing Jesus. God invites, accompanies, sustains, and finally meets the world in the one whose faithfulness makes that meeting visible. What is disclosed in the incarnation is not an exception to the metaphysical structure of the cosmos. It is its intensification.”

To me, these four voices form something like a diagnosis and a prescription that cannot be separated. The diagnosis: we are living inside cosmological, political, and spiritual frameworks that were built on the assumption that reality is fundamentally about power, control, domination, and the management of competing forces. That assumption is at best incomplete and at worst just false. The prescription is love. Love as the framework. Love as the relational medium in which genuine existence becomes possible at all.

The word radical is needed here. Radical means going to the root. What these theologians seem to be saying is that the root of reality is love, and that any civilization, any theology, any politics that is not organized around a radical commitment to love is building on sand and the water is already rising.

This is not comfortable theology. Oord’s amipotent God will disturb everyone who has used divine sovereignty as a way of deferring human responsibility. Delio’s noospheric vision will disturb everyone who wants to inhabit the old containers without the relational integration that alone keeps them from shattering. Fuller’s incarnation-as-nonviolence will disturb every Christian tradition that tries to make peace with redemptive violence. Kling’s insistence that war itself is a failure of relational imagination will disturb anyone still betting on domination as a path to security.

Disturbing people is what prophets do. Prophets are always radicals.

What would it mean to take these voices seriously? These can’t be interesting theological proposals, we need a kind of urgent reckoning their language implies. It means asking, what does love as the structure of reality require here? Not love as simple compassion. Love as the architecture. Love as the epistemology. Love as the politics. Love as the only honest account of how a universe built by an amipotent, relational God is actually held together and co-creating where it is going.

We are being urged, from multiple directions at once, that this is the moment to experience what love actually is.

Because our very lives depend on it.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that follows religious deconstruction. Not of isolation, but of having lost a world. The doctrines that organized reality, the community that made sense of suffering, the God who held the whole thing together has become unavailable. And what is left is not freedom, exactly. It is ontological rubble.

Most of the guidance available to those in this condition moves in a couple of directions. One says: you were right to tear it down, now one learns to live without the structure. Uncertainty is the terminal condition. Release the need for coherence and embrace the contradiction. The other says: what you destroyed was a distortion, but the real thing is still available for you to believe again. Neither of these is complete. Deconstruction is not merely the discovery that meaning is constructed. It is the discovery that certain ways of holding meaning are doing violence to the fabric of experience.

What follows draws on Alfred North Whitehead, not because Whitehead is a required authority, but because his thinking offers a metaphysics that is honest about the complexity of experience, that refuses closure, and that takes the aesthetic and value seriously as features of reality rather than something we project onto it.

What Deconstruction Did

Deconstruction, in the sense most people who have been through it mean, is not primarily an intellectual achievement. It is a felt experience. The framework that once made reality coherent stops working. Prayers feel hollow. Doctrines feel like arrangements of words. The community becomes a place where honesty is dangerous. What collapses is the structure that makes certain propositions feel like reality. And then ontological shock hits.

Jim Palmer’s fantastic article, drawing on Jacques Lacan, describes the God-position. Where the psyche finds the promise of coherence. His great insight is that this structure does not disappear when religious belief is abandoned. It relocates to science, politics, identity, or the self. They begin functioning in the same way the old way did with offering certainty and punishing doubt.

This is an important insight. And if the God-position keeps reinstalling itself, the question is not merely to hold it more loosely. We can go further and ask whether there is anything the God-position is pointing toward. Beneath the institutional distortions, the power arrangements, and the psychological defense mechanisms is something actually there? Whitehead’s answer is yes.

Reality Is Not Neutral

The first thing Whitehead’s philosophy offers to someone emerging from deconstruction is reality is not a blank, neutral field onto which human beings project meaning. It is, all the way down, a field of experience, value, and creative becoming.

This sounds abstract, but your intuition feels each event of experience. When you are genuinely moved by a piece of music, there’s something more than neural firing. When you recognize that a particular action was wrong, something is registering in you more than cultural conditioning. When you stand in front of something beautiful and feel, something is touching you that is not simply your own need for belonging.

Whitehead takes these experiences as data about reality. His argument is that experience, in its most basic form, is what the universe is made of. Experience is the fundamental character of what happens when anything at all occurs. Every event in the universe, at whatever level of complexity, involves some degree of reception of what has come before, some degree of creative response, and some contribution to what comes next. At the level of human consciousness this becomes rich, reflective, and deeply felt. At simpler levels it is thin and largely automatic. But the basic structure of reception, response, and contribution runs all the way down.

What this means for someone rebuilding after deconstruction is that you are not a subject stranded in a world of objects, trying to generate meaning in a neutral universe. You are a highly complex event in a universe of events, each one of which involves something of value that has a deep resonance between you and the nature of what is real.

The Transcendentals, Recovered

Three concepts that wisdom traditions have carried, though sometimes poorly, become available again in a different form.

Truth, in this framework, is not a possession. It is a relationship between a proposition and the actual world. To let what is actually there register on you, rather than filtering everything through a prior narrative that decides in advance what can be seen. This is harder than it sounds. Every system, set of prior commitments, every community creates a kind of perceptual inheritance that shapes what is to be noticed. Whitehead calls the way each event in the universe actually feels and is shaped by what has come before it, prehension. The question of truth becomes the question of how accurately, fully, and honestly, we are receiving the world as it actually is.

The person who has been through deconstruction has, in a sense, had a violent lesson of having a framework that filtered out too much, that could not receive all the data that was needed. What deconstruction opens is the possibility of a more honest relationship with reality. One whose prehension is not filtered by particular conclusions, but is more willing to be surprised, challenged, and changed by what is actually there. That is not the loss of truth. It is a more serious pursuit of it. Similar to what Palmer refers to as symbolic sobriety.

Goodness, in this framework, is not a rule from an external authority. It is a response to the value of what is real. Because reality is constituted by events that each have their own degree of experience, their own interiority, their own stake in becoming. Beings have genuine worth that is not assigned by a social contract or decreed by a divine command. It is intrinsic. To act with goodness is to act in a way that is responsive to honor their reality rather than reducing them to an instrument, an obstacle, or a symbol.

For someone whose moral framework was built on authority this can feel, at first, like the ground is disappearing. But most people find that their deepest moral intuitions were never really about an authority above them. They were about the reality of the people in front of them. Deconstruction strips away the authority facade. And intuition reveals that people matter, that suffering is real, that cruelty is wrong regardless of who does or does not command it. Whitehead’s metaphysics gives that intuition a philosophical home by grounding value in the structure of reality itself.

In most intellectual traditions, beauty is treated as the most subjective of the three, dismissed as taste, projection, or feeling. Whitehead insists it is the most fundamental. Truth is seen as secondary to beauty. Beauty is what happens when the complexity of the world is received and held together in a way that honors both its unity and diversity, when many things are felt and integrated without any of them being flattened or lost.

This has direct consequences for how we relate to other people. To perceive another human being in their beauty is to receive them in their full complexity, to let their irreducible particularity register on you, to resist the reduction of them to a type, a category, or a function in your story. And this is what deconstruction, at its best, makes possible. The return to the complexity of actual experience, before a framework decided what it meant.

God After Deconstruction

The question of God does not need to disappear after deconstruction. It changes form.

Whitehead’s God is not the omnipotent sovereign who decrees and controls. That God, for most people who have been through serious deconstruction, is unavailable and the philosophy here would suggest that unavailability is a reasonable response. The old projection of the God-position onto ultimate reality is a way of making the psyche’s drive for total coherence into a cosmic other.

The God available after deconstruction, in a Whiteheadian sense, is something different. It is the source of the initial aim in every event, the ground of all possibility, and is the lure of each moment toward its greatest possibility without determining the outcome. This is not a God who guarantees results. It is a God who is genuinely affected by what happens, who suffers with what suffers, who delights in what flourishes, and whose power is of the possible not the inevitable.

Many people who have left institutional religion find that their intuition has always felt a presence that is not dominating but accompanying, not demanding but inviting. Whitehead did not invent that intuition. He gave it a philosophical framework that does not require you to check your experience at the door.

What Reconstruction Is Not

As Palmer says, it is not a return to certainty. He is right that the God-position may keep trying to reinstall itself, and a process-informed reconstruction has to stay honest about that. The metaphysics on offer here is itself provisional, an available account of experience, but not a final revelation.

What it offers is a framework that is adequate to the complexity of experience, that does not require you to suppress what you actually feel and know in order to maintain it. It gives you philosophical grounding for the moral and aesthetic intuitions that survived your deconstruction because they were always pointing at something real rather than constructed.

In a sense it’s not a reconstruction at all. It’s perceiving the reality that has been there the whole time, just waiting to be seen.

There is a kind of numbness that precedes violence. Not the numbness of ignorance, exactly, but something more like the numbness of reduction, when another human being stops being perceived in their full complexity and becomes, instead, a symbol, a threat, a problem to be solved. This perceptual collapse is not merely a psychological event. It is a spiritual one.

We are living through a moment when the preconditions for that collapse are everywhere visible. Not only in the obvious theaters of geopolitical tension, but in the texture of ordinary cultural life. In the way we consume information, perform identity, and relate to those who differ from us. Something is failing at the level of perception itself. To name what that something is, we need to recover a the transcendentals.

The transcendentals — truth, goodness, and beauty — are not decorative concepts. In the long tradition of philosophical and theological reflection that stretches back to Plato, they describe the fundamental structure of reality. They are not values we project onto the world. They are what the world is when we encounter it honestly. To perceive truly is to receive reality as it is. To act with goodness is to act in a way that honors the genuine value of what is there. To recognize beauty is to be arrested by the irreducible complexity and worth of what stands before you. These three are not separate achievements. They belong together. When one collapses, the others follow.

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We are witnessing their coordinated collapse. And no method in modern life has accelerated that collapse more deliberately, or more skillfully, than the art of propaganda.

Truth, in the current cultural environment, has been largely replaced by narrative management. This does not mean that no one believes anything. People believe intensely within their bubbles, and with great passion. It means that the question guiding public discourse is no longer “what is actually the case?” but “what story best serves our side?” Information becomes ammunition. Evidence is selected, shaped, and deployed not to illuminate but to persuade. Propaganda has always understood this. Its genius, from the poster campaigns of the First World War to the algorithmic content ecosystems of the present, is not the lie, lies are fragile and easily exposed. Its genius is the selective truth, the image stripped of its context, the grievance amplified until it drowns out every other signal, the partial picture presented with the confidence of the whole. It’s a systematic habit of objectifying reality, of treating the world as raw material for the construction of preferred fictions. When truth becomes a tool, the capacity to genuinely receive the world as it is begins to atrophy.

Beauty has suffered a parallel fate. Spectacle has taken its place. Beauty involves receptivity and the willingness to be addressed by something outside yourself, to let its complexity register on you, to be changed by the encounter. Spectacle works in precisely the opposite direction. It is beauty evacuated of the demand for response, beauty is rendered for consumption. Propaganda has always been in the business of spectacle. The Nuremberg rallies were not ugly events, but rather, by every aesthetic measure, overwhelming. Leni Riefenstahl’s camera found genuine grandeur in them. That is precisely what made them dangerous. They offered the experience of beauty, the soaring music, the geometric precision of massed bodies, the sense of belonging to something vast, while systematically destroying the conditions for genuine aesthetic receptivity. They trained participants to feel without perceiving, to be moved without being opened. Contemporary propaganda has refined this further. The aesthetics of violence, the reduction of human faces to pixels, the transformation of suffering into shareable content are not failures to find the beautiful. They are the active replacement of beauty with its counterfeit. And the counterfeits are not neutral. They train perception. They habituate us to encountering the world without being affected by it. They make us, in the precise sense of the word, aesthetically numb.

Goodness, meanwhile, has been quietly redefined as dominance. The question “what is the right thing to do?” has been increasingly displaced by the question “what would a strong person do?” Propaganda accelerates this shift with particular efficiency, because its fundamental message is one of threat and rescue. A propaganda system needs an enemy and not just a competitor with differing goals, but an existential threat. This menace serves to validate your own virtue with stark contrast. The enemy is not merely wrong. The enemy is dangerous, subhuman, corrupting. Goodness becomes the will to eliminate the threat. Care, restraint, and the recognition of the enemy’s humanity are reframed as weakness, naivety, or even collaboration. When goodness collapses into dominance, the other person ceases to be a moral subject whose wellbeing places claims on you. They become an obstacle, a mere category.

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Now consider what happens when these three failures converge on the question of war.

War requires, as a psychological and cultural precondition, the dehumanization of the enemy. This is not incidental to war, it is constitutive of it. Soldiers have always known this, which is why every military culture develops rituals of reduction. The enemy is given a name that strips them of individuality, their suffering is categorized as acceptable, their deaths are rendered in the language of statistics and objectives rather than loss. What propaganda adds to this ancient dynamic is scale and speed. It industrializes the perceptual habits of war and distributes them to civilian populations before the first shot is fired. We rehearse the reduction of the other in peacetime. We flatten them into an image that can be hated, feared, or dismissed. We do it with the effortless fluency of people who have been trained, by years of spectacle and narrative management, to receive the world that way. By the time war begins, the hardest perceptual work has already been done. The person has already become a symbol. The symbol must be wholly destroyed.

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This is where the language of beauty becomes not merely aesthetic but urgent.

To perceive another human being in their beauty is not to find them attractive or agreeable. It is to receive them as irreducibly complex, as a center of experience and value that cannot be collapsed into a narrative about them. It is to have your prior categories interrupted by the sheer fact of their existence. This kind of perception is what the philosophical tradition calls aesthetic receptivity, and it is the enemy of war. Not because it makes conflict impossible, genuine conflicts of interest and value are real, but because it makes the particular barbarism of war, with its systematic reduction of persons to targets, psychologically and morally untenable.

Propaganda knows this. Which is why every serious propaganda apparatus targets aesthetic receptivity directly. It does not simply argue that the enemy is dangerous. It trains you to stop seeing them. It replaces the complex human face with the icon, the archetype, the cartoon. It fills the perceptual field with images designed to close rather than open, to confirm rather than interrupt. The sophistication of modern propaganda lies precisely in how seamlessly it accomplishes this through the ambient, continuous, algorithmically personalized curation of what you see, hear, and feel. The result is a population that has lost, or is losing, the habit of being genuinely arrested by the other. A population that encounters the world through the filter of pre-formed images rather than direct perception is not an accident. It is the intended product designed to numb the senses.

The capacity for genuine perception is not automatic. It is cultivated. It depends on habits of attention formed over time, through practices that keep the full reality of the other in view. With the need for practices like genuine listening, art that resists easy consumption, and religious formation that insists on the sacred worth of every person. When these practices are healthy, they create a culture of perception, a shared ability to see each other with accuracy and depth. When they erode, what replaces them is not neutral blankness but a trained incapacity, a tendency to encounter the other as symbol rather than person. Propaganda finds it, cultivates it, and puts it to use.

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A theology attentive to this moment will not be content to condemn war in general while leaving the perceptual habits that enable it untouched. It will ask harder questions. It will ask what it means to cultivate beauty, a beauty as a practice of genuine receptivity. It will ask what forms of community, worship, and attention make it possible for people to go on seeing each other as irreducibly real. It will take seriously that propaganda is not merely a political problem but a spiritual one. A problem that is an assault on the image of God in the other. It will insist that these are not luxury questions for times of peace but urgent questions for times of crisis, because the path to war runs through the imagination before it runs through any battlefield.

The transcendentals belong together and fall together. They can also be recovered together. The recovery of truth as an encounter with reality, of goodness as a responsiveness to the other’s worth, of beauty as a receptivity to the other’s complexity are one project. It is deeply spiritual. It requires different habits of perception, formed in community, over time, against the grain of a culture that profits from our numbness. It insists we move against the grain of a propaganda apparatus whose continued operation depends on our numbness, never recovering the ability to actually feel.

War is a failure of beauty, is a metaphysical claim. The violence we do to each other in armed conflict is always preceded by the violence we do to each other in perception. When we accept the reduction of the complex to the safely simple, we are accepting the image for the person. To work against war is to work for the recovery of genuine sight. And propaganda’s great lie is that such recovery is naive. We answer that lie by insisting that the real world is precisely what propaganda prevents us from seeing, a world populated by actual persons, each one a center of irreplaceable worth, each one created in the image of God.

That work begins in the ordinary, daily, countercultural practice of actually seeing the people right in front of us

Something happens at the edge of ordinary experience that performance culture cannot account for. A person sits with someone who is dying and finds themselves undone by a love they did not know they carried. Another person, in a moment of crisis, perceives something about a distant friend that they could not have known by ordinary means and is right. Someone returns from the threshold of death with a sense of having been held by something vast and unconditioned, and finds that their reality has lost its grip. A father looks at his child and is seized by a tenderness so complete it feels like an encounter with the ground of being.

These are not marginal experiences. They are among the most commonly reported and most deeply transforming events in human life. They arrive from outside of the perceived self, and demand a response that no performance can fake.

They are also, in the deepest sense, experiences filled with value. They are moments in which the interior life is summoned and reveals the quality of one’s character

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The culture I’ve described in recent articles has produced a particular kind of person who is highly skilled at managing impressions, accumulating credentials, and projecting dominance or competence on the social environment. This person may be genuinely talented. They may even, by many conventional measures, be successful. It is a person who would likely miss a depth experience described above. What is in question is whether they can be present enough to an experience with any perceivable depth to recognize it.

This is core to the character crisis. It is not simply that people are making choices contrary to human flourishing. If they’re living in a framework structurally incapable of relational and experiential depth that’s an interior life incapable of character. You can’t be truly generous if generosity is content for an audience. You can’t be truly courageous if courage is a brand. You can’t be truly compassionate if compassion is a transaction.

From an open and relational perspective, every moment of experience at every level of reality, is constituted by its feeling-responses to the world. What a thing is, at its most fundamental level, is the quality of its response to what it is received by its experiences.

The self, in this framework, is an ongoing creative project, a series of responsive occasions in which the world is taken up, felt, evaluated, and woven into each new moment of experience. Character is the habitual depth and quality of our creative response. Virtue is the cultivation of prehensive sensitivity, the expansion of the self’s capacity to feel and respond to the world with greater depth, greater inclusion, and greater fidelity to what is genuinely valuable.

In contrast, the performance self is contracted. It has narrowed the range of what it allows itself to actually experience and feel. Dominance cultures, including the manosphere cultures void of feeling. They are cultures where feelings are ignored and systematically suppress the prehensive range that would make a moral life possible. In this framework, empathy and its suppression is not strength, but a kind of blindness.

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Ontologically challenging experiences can address that blindness.

As alluded to earlier, experiences at the edge of ordinary frameworks, near-death experiences, altered states of consciousness, and encounters with the sacred that arrive unbidden and uninvited, are interesting because they challenge performance based and materialist metaphysics.

They are experiences of expansion. They break the contracted self open. They present the person with a reality that exceeds their accepted framework and that makes demands on the interior life that no amount of status or achievement can answer.

The near-death experiencer who returns speaking of a love that held them at the boundary of death is not immediately marketable. The person who has genuinely felt, across distance, the distress of someone they love is not performing. The mystic who has encountered the lure of the divine toward what is genuinely good and beautiful, has been addressed by something that performance has no category for.

These experiences function, phenomenologically, as interruptions of the performing self. They are moments in which the world presses through the armor of the performing ego, reaches through the liminal and touches the interior. What answers that touch is character and the quality of the response depends on the depth available when no audience is present.

These experiences are unusual but illustrate how they crack open the window into the moral and spiritual formation of a person. The person who has had such an experience and finds it transforming is someone whose prehensive range has been forcibly expanded. They have felt something real that was previously outside their contracted awareness. That expansion needs to be understood and integrated as a moral and spiritual opportunity for character development.

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Open and relational theology, rooted in process metaphysics, offers a framework for understanding these experiences and how they can help form the moral maturity that can be applied to our character crisis.

In this framework, God is not the commanding sovereign who imposes virtue from outside as prescriptive dogma. God is the one who continually offers to each occasion of experience the call of the best possibility available in the moment, the call toward what is genuinely good, genuinely beautiful, and genuinely true. Maturity is the deepening capacity to receive and respond to that call with greater fidelity. It is not compliance. It is creativity.

Character formation occurs when one’s experience opens them toward genuine goodness, whose responses are trained over time to feel more widely and whose capacity for greater creative integrity leads toward the good that is available in each situation. Values once discarded are embraced with eagerness.

Empathy is viewed as a foundational capacity because it is a basic form of prehension of another’s experience. A culture that trains its young men to suppress empathy is not training them to be stronger. It is training them to be fake, less present, and incapable of the relational depth needed for a genuine human life.

Humility is now the accurate perception of one’s own place within a web of relations that one did not create and cannot control. It’s part of a theology with the metaphysical grounding for why and how reality works. Where the self finally opens and discovers a universe that includes all possibilities.

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What does this mean for the person who wants to serve as a guide in this cultural moment?

One must first genuinely inhabit their own interior. Not perfectly. Not without failure. But seriously, over time, with the willingness to be changed by what they find there. This is the only authority that can speak to the longing for the character that lies beneath the performance. Beneath the loud proclamations of dominance and success lies something less glamorous but more real, an unmet need for connection and care.

The guide must be prepared to receive all experiences and especially the disruptive and unusual as occasions for creative change. When someone comes having been broken open by an experience they cannot categorize, the guide who has a theological framework wide enough to receive that experience without either dismissing it or inflating it can help that person understand what has happened to them as an invitation to deeper formation. The experience is not the destination. It is a disruption of the contracted self, and the task is integration.

The guide must consistently model and reframe what maturity looks like. In a culture that has redefined maturity as achievement, independence, and dominance, the guide must hold open a different image. One must be able to model how one has been genuinely changed by their encounters with the world, how failures teach them, how they embrace an extended range of what they can feel, how they have learned that their deepest identity is relational rather than transactional. Open and relational theology provides the metaphysical ground for how this orientation of the self is oriented by its relations, and the mature self is the one that has learned to inhabit those relations with integrity.

The guide will also name the spiritual poverty of the performance self without contempt for the people trapped within it. The young men being formed by dominance culture are not villains. They have been offered up impoverished experiences by the cultural environment that surrounds them. The lure of genuine goodness has not ceased. It has been obscured. Our task is a re-orientation that helps people see and hear, beneath the noise of the performance economy, the persistent and patient call toward a fuller and more genuine human life.

It may seem that I may believe an unusual experience is needed in order to shock one out of their performance reality. I don’t, rather the above are examples of experiences where an increasing number of individuals seem to be presenting with them. As such, they provide opportunities to introduce an interiority, a metaphysics capable of expanding what’s possible beyond the performance culture.

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The hiddenness of moral character is not permanent. And what is required for its recovery is not a return to older forms, many of which carried their own distortions. I’m proposing a retrieval of what was genuinely true in our wisdom traditions and creatively setting them in a theological and metaphysical framework more applicable to the present moment.

Open and relational theology, with its insistence that reality is fundamentally relational, that God calls rather than compels, and that moral maturity is an expansion of prehensive depth rather than the enforcement of external compliance, offers such a framework. It can speak to the person formed by performance without condemning it. It can honor the hunger for authenticity while directing it toward a deeper and more genuine form. It can be ready to accept with special care the one whose performance self is broken open by an unexpected experience.

Open and relational character formation and development is worth creating. We seek to keep it alive in a culture that has forgotten its depth. It is a slow, unspectacular, irreducibly relational, and important work for those willing to take it up.

These are additional musings from my viewing of The Manosphere. (Initial thoughts here.)

Moral Character We Stopped Pursuing

Something has disappeared from our cultural conversation, and I fear many have not noticed it is gone. The aspiration to moral character, the ancient and enduring conviction that becoming a person of genuine virtue, is a central project of a human life. Rather than an aspiration, it appears to me to be actively ridiculed, or dismissed as naive. What was once the definition of maturity has become an object of contempt.

And I’m not trying to be a moralist or even to impose a certain dogmatism. Rather I’m attempting to appeal to a basic sense of human decency that appears to have vanished.

The Disappearance

In 2012, researchers1 found a significant and consistent decline in the use of words related to moral excellence. General moral terms such as virtue, decency, and conscience appeared with diminishing frequency across the century. Of fifty specific virtue words examined, including honesty, patience, and compassion, seventy-four percent showed a statistically significant decline in usage. The overall finding was that moral ideals and virtues had largely waned from public conversation.

Language matters. When we stop using the vocabulary of virtue, we gradually lose the capacity to think in terms of said virtues, to recognize it, to aspire toward it, or to even name its absence. We do not simply misplace the words. We misplace the realities they represent.

Virtue ethics was a dominant moral framework for centuries, but as its popularity has waned they have been replaced by a preoccupation with productivity, achievement, status, which are the measurable skills one brings to the marketplace. In The Road to Character, David Brooks suggests we’ve replaces what he names the “eulogy virtues,” the qualities that define a person at the deepest level, the ones spoken of when a life is finally assessed in full.

The digital revolution added to the transformation. Social media provided narcissism with an architecture perfectly suited to its ambitions. Every platform rewards performance. The self is curated, not cultivated. The search for approval replaces the invisible work of becoming. Social media as a place for self-promotion, puts people under constant pressure to perform and compete, leaving no time to cultivate a character with depth.

The mental space once occupied by moral struggle has become occupied by the struggle to achieve.

Maturity Redefined

We once understood that maturity accompanied moral achievement. I was taught the mature person is not defined by wealth, status, or the accumulation of experience alone. The mature person is also evaluated by the degree to which they had cultivated a practical wisdom, the capacity to discern what is good in complex situations. This vision included human flourishing. Which is the development of virtue with deeply developed character traits. The wise elder, across virtually every traditional culture, was wise precisely because they had labored over their character. They had faced their failures, learned from moral struggle, and emerged with something solid and trustworthy. I recall this developmental value being highlighted with a citizenship grade in elementary school.

Maturity linked inner formation with outer life. A mature person was someone who had been shaped by years of integrity, compassion, courage, and humility. In a very real sense, our abandonment of character is illustrated by institutionalizing our wise elders.

Maturity today is defined by financial independence, social confidence, or professional achievement. The inner work, the slow and often painful cultivation of character, has no obvious metric and no obvious reward in the marketplace. So it has been set aside and today’s moral maturity is emulated by characters in movies like Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street.

When modern culture banishes words like virtue, character, evil, and vice, it does not make life any less moral. It merely obscures the inescapable moral reality of life with a new language.

The Ridicule of Seriousness

What is distinctive about our current moment is the active mockery of those who take moral character seriously. To speak of virtue in many spaces is to risk being labeled moralistic, judgmental, naive, or culturally retrograde.

Modern society can seem hostile to the concept of virtue because it challenges the hyper-individualism on which it runs, using the term “virtue signaling” as a pejorative. Genuine virtue appeals to a set of principles greater than the individual. In a culture that has made the self the final arbiter, any claim that character should be cultivated or that maturity involves adherence to standards, sounds like an imposition.

Men who speak of honor, integrity, gentleness, or the cultivation of virtue are often met with dismissal. The cultural spaces that present themselves as guides to masculinity tend to regard such language as weakness. Empathy is re-framed as manipulation. Humility is re-framed as defeat. The result is a generation of young men who have been handed an impoverished map that confuses dominance with strength and emotional flatness with maturity.

What’s Next

We must refuse to be embarrassed by the vocabulary of character. Using the language of virtue, of formation of the inner life, and of moral aspiration is needed. It is counter cultural in the most important sense. It keeps alive a way of speaking about human life that the dominant culture has largely abandoned, and which people, particularly young people, are starving for even if they do not know it.

It is important to model what needs to be taught. The insight that virtue is not just about the individual but about the integration of action, emotion, and understanding within a supportive social context remains foundational. The formation of character requires witness as much as instruction. People need to see the virtues lived, not just explained.

One must recover the connection between moral formation and genuine human flourishing. The great traditions understood that the cultivation of virtue was not a burden imposed but the path to the fullest human life. People need to understand that integrity, compassion, and humility are not constraints on flourishing. They are its substance.

Further, character does not develop in isolation. The virtuous person does not resist emotional responses but develops emotional responses appropriate to the situation, a process requiring practical wisdom within community support, exemplars, and cultural practices that reinforce virtuous behavior. This is where community and mentoring relationships carry important weight. The formation of character needs a community of practice, people who are committed to the same aspiration and who hold one another accountable to virtuous ways of living.

Finally, we have to be honest about the cost of this work. There are obligations in our relationships that require character. This is a harder message in a culture that has made the self its highest value. It requires guides who have walked this path long enough to speak of both its difficulties and rewards with honesty.

The Aspiration We Must Recover

Moral character as the aspiration of mature humanity does not need to be a relic of the past. I believe it is a perennial truth that we can honestly live with, understanding the consequences of having abandoned it.

The ridiculing of moral seriousness, the inversion of virtue and vice, the reduction of maturity to performance and achievement need not be the final condition.

My goal is not to moralize but to call people to an aspiration I believe they carry within them, even when they cannot name it. The hunger for integrity, for relationships, for a life of reflection, these do not disappear because the culture has stopped honoring it. It has gone underground, but surfaces as restlessness, as a sense that something essential is missing.

That restlessness is an invitation to the oldest and most serious work of being human.

Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere (Netflix, 2026) is an uncomfortable viewing. Not because it is poorly made, but because it is a mirror. It holds up a reflection of something many people have sensed but struggled to articulate. He shows how we are living through a systematic inversion of moral values, a cultural moment in which what was once recognized as wrong is not merely tolerated but actively celebrated.

It’s not just the spectacle of misogynistic influencers performing dominance for their audiences, but there’s a deeper and more disturbing fact that the performance works. It attracts millions of followers. It generates wealth. It shapes the moral imagination of an entire generation of young men. And it did not arrive from nowhere. It didn’t emerge from a vacuum. It was cultivated, systemically, by conditions that were years in the making. Social media didn’t birth it. Social media did give it a megaphone.

The Architecture of Inversion

Moral inversion is not the same as moral disagreement. People have always held different values. What we are witnessing now is something structurally different. We now have a system in which the virtues are reassigned. Empathy is rebranded as toxic. Cruelty is reframed as honesty. Contempt for women is presented and accepted as wisdom..

The manosphere operates as a profit-driven network that weaponizes misogyny and so-called traditional values to shape young audiences. It teaches boys that their worth is conditional and earned through dominance while demanding girls and women accept inequality as natural. This is a structured teaching, and it has found a vast and willing audience.

What makes this inversion so potent is that it arrives dressed in the language of authenticity. These influencers are not presenting themselves as villains. They are the only ones willing to tell the truth. In a culture that has grown suspicious of institutions, that posture has enormous appeal.

The Roots

The manosphere is a varied group of online communities that includes men’s rights activists, incels, pick-up artists, and fathers’ rights groups. While the specifics of each group’s beliefs sometimes conflict, the general ideology centers on the promotion of masculinity, antifeminism, and misogyny. Its roots can be traced as far back as the backlash to second-wave feminism in the 1970s. While the internet did not create these ideas, it did accelerate their diffusion and sharpen their edges. Milder and older communities gave way to more extremist ones that are more toxic and misogynistic than the ones they displaced. We are watching a radicalization pipeline that has been widening and deepening for a while now.

The Wound

I have heard it argued that what prepared the ground for the manosphere was the slow dismantling of the economic conditions that historically gave working-class men their social identity. The neoliberal restructuring of Western economies across the 1980s and 1990s gutted manufacturing, eroded unions, and replaced stable industrial employment with service work. Men whose sense of worth had been organized around providing, being breadwinners in a cultural script that was never questioned, found that script suddenly gone.

Downward mobility, inflation, wage stagnation, underemployment, burnout, housing insecurity, the rising cost of education, and the atomization of the individual compelled to spend increasing time isolated and online were all contributors. Neoliberalism hollowed out social infrastructure and shifted the burden of care onto private households and individuals. Libraries closed, youth clubs vanished, secure work deteriorated, and care became hidden and privatized. Collective institutions dissolved and people searched for new communities of meaning. For many young men, those communities were waiting for them online, already built, and already offering explanations for their pain.

The explanation was personal and gendered. It blamed women and feminism for taking what was rightfully theirs. Their anger, rather than being directed at the system that produced their insecurity, was redirected toward women, minorities, and anyone else made to seem responsible for their pain. This redirection is its core function.

You Have No Value

A painful moment in the documentary involves a young fan meeting one of the influencers. Asked what he has learned from the content, the fan responds that as a man you are born without value and must build it. The influencer, far from correcting this, affirms it, claiming that women are born with value through beauty but that no one is simply going to invite a man anywhere just because he exists.

That’s right, a young man has been taught, and has gratefully accepted, that he arrived in the world worthless. And the person who taught him this is considered a role model.

This is moral inversion at its most devastating. The idea that a child, any child, is born without inherent worth is not edgy philosophy. It is a wound dressed as wisdom. It creates men who are perpetually anxious, performing, and convinced that they are one mistake away from worthlessness. That anxiety does not produce strength. It produces cruelty toward others to deflect from the cruelty they carry toward themselves.

Empathy as Enemy

One of the clearest signs of moral inversion is what happens to empathy in these spaces. Empathy, the capacity to perceive and share in the experience of another person, is one of the oldest moral achievements of human civilization. Across vastly different religious and philosophical traditions, the cultivation of empathy has been understood as foundational to ethical life.

In the manosphere, empathy is pathologized. Feeling for others, especially feeling for women, is framed as submission, as a failure of masculine self-possession, as a trick played on men to make them controllable. The warrior ethos these influencers promote is presented not as a trauma response but as clarity, as the mature recognition of how things really are or should be.

The mindset of trusting no one and expecting no help is not reflective of the world that most of us live in, nor would want to live in. It is a survival strategy that has been mistaken for a philosophy.

When empathy is toxic, the moral ecosystem cannot sustain itself. Care for the vulnerable becomes sentimentality. Accountability becomes weakness. The capacity for genuine relationship, built on mutual care, becomes incomprehensible and unrecognizable in a moral world where connection is reframed as a trap.

The Political Archetype

The manosphere has a political mirror. Understanding how misogyny became normalized in mainstream culture requires attending to what kind of behavior public life has been repeatedly modeled and left unpunished.

The emergence of a political archetype, most clearly embodied in Donald Trump, demonstrated on a mass scale that dominance over women carries no political cost. Bragging about sexual assault did not end a presidential campaign. What that moment signaled to millions of observers, particularly younger men ready to swim in manosphere content, was not simply that the behavior was tolerated. It was that the behavior was rewarded. The lesson taught that cruelty toward women is compatible with the highest offices. Accountability is optional. Consequences accrue unevenly, and those with sufficient cultural dominance are exempt from them.

Politics and the influencers are not separate phenomena. They are mutually reinforcing. Each legitimates the other. When political culture celebrates aggression and treats empathy as weakness, it accelerates the manosphere. Impunity, modeled at the top, becomes a moral permission structure that filters down through every layer of culture.

The Algorithm

What is new about this moment is not the existence of misogyny or the posturing of insecure men. Those are very old features of human social life. What is new is the infrastructure. Influential figures perpetuate symbiotic cycles of security and insecurity through the content they produce, amounting to something like a protection racket in which thought leaders maintain and grow an audience from whom they extract material, social, and political resources.

This is a business model disguised as a movement. The influencers are not ideologues in the traditional sense. They are entrepreneurs who have identified a market of frightened, lonely young men and sell them a product. They buy a story about why they feel the way they feel, and a hierarchy they can climb to feel better. Influencers use provocative or controversial statements, they spread widely on social media, and then monetize it with courses, private memberships, coaching programs, and lifestyle brands that promise financial success and improved relationships.

The algorithm rewards engagement, and nothing drives engagement like outrage, contempt, and the addictive pleasure of feeling superior. This means the moral environment in which millions of young people are forming their values is not a neutral space. It is an environment engineered to amplify moral inversion. Cruelty goes viral. Empathy dies. The platform’s economic logic and moral logic are perfectly aligned.

The Cost

There is a theology at work in moral inversion, even when it does not use theological language. Every moral framework rests on a picture of what a human being fundamentally is, what we owe one another, and what makes a life go well. The manosphere’s picture is bleak. Presenting humans as fundamentally competitors, relationships as fundamentally transactional, and meaning as fundamentally a function of status.

This picture produces a particular kind of suffering. Beneath the proclamations of dominance and success is something far less glamorous. These men are in desperate need of care and support, and are the ones least likely to recognize it. Their armor becomes a prison. The performance of invulnerability makes genuine connection impossible. And the young men who have absorbed these lessons find themselves alone inside an empty story.

The moral cost is not only personal. A generation of boys taught that empathy is weakness and dominance is virtue will carry those lessons into every relationship, institution, and community they inhabit. The young men seek community and belonging, but when entering manosphere environments, their loneliness transforms into anger as they embrace a misogynist worldview. What begins as loneliness and legitimate confusion ends as hatred. Not because men are inherently hateful, but because the cultural infrastructure that used to catch them has been dismantled.

The Reorientation

Diagnosing moral inversion is easier than reversing it. The forces sustaining it, algorithmic, economic, psychological, and political, are formidable. Still, the diagnosis is not without hope.

Moral inversion thrives in a vacuum. It recruits where genuine formation is absent, where boys are not taught that they matter inherently, where strength is never modeled as something that includes tenderness, and where communities of care have failed to show up. The manosphere’s appeal lies precisely in its ability to fill a vacuum with certainty and belonging, however distorted.

The answer is not simply to debunk influencers, though that has its place. It is to rebuild what the inversion has hollowed out. We must have communities where empathy is practiced as strength, where worth is not earned through dominance, and where young men are told, clearly and repeatedly, that they arrived in this world already valuable.

That is a moral, pastoral, and ultimately theological task. Our theology must offer particular resources that insists that reality is constituted by relationships of genuine mutual influence, that the divine works not through coercive power but through the patient, persuasive love that leads toward greater wholeness, and that every human being is born already received and valued by a creator who is affected by what happens to them. A theology of that kind is not soft or sentimental, it is a direct challenge to the manosphere’s metaphysical foundations.

The mirror that Inside the Manosphere holds up is not comfortable. It should not be. But discomfort, honestly faced, is where genuine moral transformation begins, and where the long work of true community becomes possible.

Two people I respect, recently released thoughts about prayer (The Reason Prayer Feels Impossible and I Don’t Know How to Pray Anymore…) It got me thinking. Do I pray? If so, what does it look like? What does it mean to me?

In the past I found prayer confusing or hollow. I think that’s because the way most of us were taught to think about god (I use lower case “g” to distinguish my view of god as different from classical theism) makes prayer hard.

I used to think god had the whole story written. And if that’s right then prayer was just going through the motions. But I don’t think that’s true. I believe the future is genuinely open and not just to me, but to god too. That means when I pray, it actually matters. I’m not agreeing to something predetermined. I’m introducing something real into a real conversation.

I think god moves through love and influence. God’s not a master puppeteer pulling strings. So now, prayer isn’t me trying to convince some all-powerful other to override the system for my benefit. I’m joining a collaboration, a relationship. I’m paying attention and joining in co-creating the reality that’s unfolding moment to moment.

My desires, my intentions, my showing up are all inputs. They shape what’s possible. Not in a magical or transactional way. God’s responding to what’s actually going on. When I pray, I’m part of what’s happening, even your prayers.

It used to wreck me when prayer went unanswered. I would put a token in the prayer machine and nothing happened. I’ve now found peace in the idea that god isn’t controlling every event. Everyone has freedom, even god. God doesn’t micromanage, and sometimes god doesn’t get what god wants either. What a strange thought! But it feels more honest.

I believe god genuinely feels things. Prayer has stopped being a ritual and is now a relationship. I show up angry, confused, grateful, silent or completely lost, and god is actually moved by all of that.

So yes, I pray. Is it important? Sometimes.

Part One: The World We Are Losing

A diagnostic portrait of western liberal pluralism and the fifty-year unraveling that has led us here.

I was born into a time where there was a wager at the heart of western liberal democracy. It bet that a modern society could hold together people of genuinely different convictions, backgrounds, and interests through a set of shared commitments and civic institutions. It was, in its best moments, an almost impossible and yet fragile achievement.

The postwar decades, roughly 1945 through the early 1970s, saw that wager at its most confident. Across the United States, Western Europe, Canada, and Australia, a broad embedded liberal consensus held where mixed economies were regulated by the state, welfare was a basic social contract, strong labor unions served as counterweights to capital exploits, a handful of broadcast networks and mix of major metropolitan and local newspapers provided a shared message, and a civic nationalism contained most conflicts without tearing things entirely apart.

What made this work was a structural feature where a working-class Catholic in Pittsburgh might share economic interests with a Black Baptist in Detroit while differing sharply on cultural questions. A small-business Republican in Ohio might share religious values with a Southern Democrat while disagreeing entirely on labor policy. These cross-cutting identities made political coalitions inherently unstable, and therefore dependent on negotiation, compromise, and the recognition that the person across the table held a genuine piece of the truth. No single identity mapped cleanly onto a single tribe.

That structural feature is now, in most respects, gone. And its loss is the hinge on which everything else turns.

Our political tribes have become functional gods, idols that promise ultimate belonging and righteousness while delivering only reaction, resentment, and mutual anathema.

The Great Sorting

Beginning in the 1970s, a series of forces began to sort American and western society in ways that progressively replaced cross-cutting structures with aligned ones. We moved into a world in which every identity marker lines up on a side of a single cultural fault line.

Economic restructures led to the move. The stagflation of the 1970s opened the door to the neoliberal revolution associated with Thatcher and Reagan. Deindustrialization hollowed out working-class communities across the Midwest as well as parts of England and Germany. The social infrastructure including, unions, churches, civic associations, and stable employment collapsed. This left populations with grievances that loosened the anchors to traditional institutions, and provided for mobilization along entirely new lines.

Geographic sorting then accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s. The educated and the youth migrated to cities and university towns. The less mobile, older, those more rooted in place and tradition remained in rural and small-towns. By the 1990s, Americans were increasingly living among people who shared their ideologies, losing the daily friction of differences that had historically served as democratic moderation.

The partisan realignment completed itself across this period, where ideology, religion, geography, education, and race all pointed in the same direction. The cross-cutting quality disappeared. The table that liberal pluralism required, a shared table at which disagreements could be negotiated, was removed.

The Digital Rupture

If the sorting of the postwar years created the kindling, the digital revolution provided the ignition. The collapse of the shared media landscape was perhaps the most consequential structural change of the recent era. The time of three television networks and major metropolitan newspapers was not perfect. But it created a common informational world. Citizens across the political spectrum were at least starting from roughly the same set of facts, even if they interpreted them differently.

Cable news in the 1990s began fracturing this. Fox News, launched in 1996, was based on a model of explicitly partisan news as an entertainment product. It was enormously profitable, widely imitated, and deeply corrosive to a shared informational commons. Social media completed the transition. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their successors are attention-maximizing machines. Years of research have confirmed what is intuitively obvious, that outrage and fear drive engagement far more effectively than nuance and complexity. The algorithm does not care about democratic health. It optimizes for engagement, and it has discovered that the most reliable way to keep people engaged is to make them angry at and fearful of the other.

What We Lost

Trust, that which allows strangers to cooperate.

A good-faith disagreement, assuming that opponents act from genuine conviction.

The willingness to be changed by an encounter with difference.

The shared horizon of hope where the arc of history bends toward greater inclusion.

What makes the polarization different from ordinary disagreement is that the two coalitions now inhabit different factual universes, not just different interpretations of shared facts, but different accounts of what is happening. Institutions have lost legitimacy and raw power has filled the vacuum. The game has become zero-sum. If my side loses, the system is corrupt. For large portions of the population, identity expression and tribal signaling is more important than the pursuit of collective goods through negotiation. One has to own the opposition and resist the existential threat they represent.

This is a crisis of relation. And that is precisely why a philosophy that places relation at the very heart of reality has something irreplaceable to say about it.

Part Two: Process Metaphysics and the Wound

Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism names our polarization with uncommon precision, not as a moral failure, but as a metaphysical one.

Alfred North Whitehead understood reality as a ceaseless flow of events or actual occasions. These are momentary pulses of experience that come into being by inheriting the past, responding to a creative lure toward novelty, and then perishing to become data for the next moment’s becoming. At every scale, reality is constituted by this rhythm of inheritance and creative advance.

Reality is fundamentally constituted by events and relations, not by fixed substances. Every actual entity becomes what it is by prehending, feeling and taking into itself, the reality of others.

Healthy societies exhibit the creative advance, a dynamic tension between conformity (inheriting and honoring the past) and novelty (transcending it toward a richer experience). In my opinion, what we are witnessing in our polarization is a pathological bifurcation of this rhythm. One cultural vector grasps the pole of conformity, tradition, continuity, and inherited identity. Another grasps novelty, liberation, transgression, and revision. Both are abstracting one pole from the necessary tension of the creative advance. Each has mistaken a partial truth for the whole.

The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

Whitehead’s diagnostic tool for our moment is what he called the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, which is the error of treating an abstraction as if it were the concrete reality. Our polarized ecosystems have become engines for manufacturing abstractions, “the Left,” “the Right,” “real Americans,” “the elites”, and then making these abstractions our reality.

People no longer encounter one another as relational experiences. The algorithm, the talking head, the influencer, these are abstraction machines. They strip the occasion of its depth and feed us a caricature. When you relate to an abstraction rather than a person, you cannot genuinely prehend them. You cannot feel the feeling. Empathy collapses. Prehension disappears. There is no relation, no community.

We have forgotten that we are constituted by our relations. The polarized self, certain, bounded, is a metaphysical fiction.

The Impoverishment of Prehension

For Whitehead, every actual occasion prehends, feels and takes into itself, the reality of others. This mutual immanence is the metaphysical basis of community. We are, at the most fundamental level, constituted by our relations. Liberal pluralism at its best was an achievement precisely because it created conditions for wide and rich prehension, exposure to difference, encounters with otherness and an enlargement of experience.

Several forces have inverted this. Filter bubbles and algorithmic sorting have narrowed the field of prehension. We increasingly feel only those occasions that confirm our existing patterns of response. It’s mere repetition without creative transformation. Digital mediation constrains the depth of prehension. Our mediated interaction strips away the causal efficacy. We can’t feel the weight of another’s reality. We are left with surface signals lacking the deeper mode of experience that grounds understanding.

The result is a society of negative prehensions. Each side is excluding the feelings and perspectives of the other. This is more than disagreement. It is a metaphysical rupture in social solidarity.

Adventure and Anesthesia

Whitehead identified adventure as the willingness to entertain ideas that disturb settled patterns and essential to vitality. Its opposite is anesthesia, defined as the deadening of experience and the retreat into the comfortable and familiar. The outrage and tribal signaling may feel like passion, but they are the passion of repetition not adventure.

True adventure requires the courage to genuinely entertain the possibility that the other is partly right and that one’s own worldview is incomplete. Our polarized neighbors have anesthetized themselves against this risk. The entertainment-outrage complex is a machine for producing the feeling of intensity while aborting the adventure of genuine novelty. It is a counterfeit.

The Decay of Living Symbols

Civilizations are sustained by living symbols, symbols that genuinely connect the community to depths of value and meaning. When symbols decay, they become mere banners of tribal identity. “Freedom,” “justice,” “democracy,” “family”, these were once living symbols capable of drawing people into shared pursuits of values. They have been drained of their depth of reference and repurposed as tribal insignia.

The deepest diagnosis is this, we have forgotten that we are constituted by our relations. Our mediated self is certain and bound in a metaphysical fiction. It is a creature that cannot actually exist in a real world. Our task is to recover the truth of our relational nature, and to build a different kind of common life.

Part Three: Open-Relational Theology

Process and open-relational theology pastoral vision for living differently in a polarized world.

In process and open-relational theology, drawing on Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb Jr., and Thomas Jay Oord, God is not the omnipotent sovereign who unilaterally controls history from above. God is supremely relational and lures all creation toward greater beauty, truth, love, and complexity. God’s fundamental mode of action is persuasion, not coercion. The divine initial aim is offered to every actual occasion as an invitation toward the richest possible realization of value. This invitation can be refused. Creaturely freedom is real, not performative.

This is the important theological frame for our moment and our polarization is not God’s will. It is happening within a world God created with freedom, and therefore risk. The deep longing for meaning, identity, belonging, and justice that drives our passion is God-given. The divine eros is within every human heart. What our polarized culture has done is take that eros and redirect it to tribalism. The passion is real. The spiritual hunger is God-given. But it has been captured by systems that are algorithmic, economic, and political. They are coercive rather than persuasive. They offer the feeling of ultimate meaning but actually close people off from the divine lure of openness and love.

In theological terms, our political tribes have become functional gods. They are idols that promise belonging while delivering only reaction and resentment.

The Closed Self as Sin

Open and relational theology insists that persons are relational beings. We are, at the most fundamental level, constituted by our relations, to one another, to creation, and to God.

The polarized self is a theological distortion. It is a self that has drawn a hard boundary around its community of concern and practices systematic exclusion of the other’s reality. This self equates certainty with faithfulness and mistakes ideological purity for holiness. This is, in a sense, a form of sin. It’s an ontological refusal of relation. It is the creature asserting a kind of false sovereignty. “I will define reality on my own terms. I will not be changed by relation with the other. I will not be lured beyond my present worldview.”

A God Who Suffers

Open and relational theology offers something that purely philosophical thought cannot fully articulate. That is, God is not a detached metaphysical principle. God feels this polarization. And Charles Hartshorne’s doctrine of divine passibility applies here. God genuinely experiences the world. What happens to us happens to God. Every act of dehumanization, every moment of willful blindness to the suffering of the other, every ugliness in public discourse is prehended by God in all their full emotional weight.

God grieves our polarization not as an abstraction but as a parent grieves the estrangement of beloved children. The divine experience is one of suffering the loss of what could be. This is not a God who punishes from outside. It is a God who feels the cost from within, continuously, and who nonetheless goes on offering to every occasion the aim toward something better.

Pastoral Praxis

Process and open-relational theology points to a way of life and hints at practices that embody its metaphysical and theological commitments. What follows are suggested practices rooted in the diagnoses made above.

Learning to Feel the Other’s Feeling

If our crisis is fundamentally one of impoverished prehension and if we are failing to genuinely take the other’s reality into ourselves, then the central spiritual discipline of our moment is cultivating the capacity to actually feel what the other feels. We are called to a disciplined, embodied practice of exposure. It means seeking out the particular stories of those whose experience differs from ours, not to debate or convert, but to be changed. Churches, civic organizations, and community groups that create spaces for this kind of encounter are doing important spiritual work.

Naming the Idols

The prophetic tradition in scripture was more than about moralism. In process-relational terms, the prophets were mediators of the divine aim into specific historical situations. They felt God’s feeling about the distortion of justice and the reduction of persons to their economic utility. Prophetic preaching in our moment must name the idolatry of the tribe. It must call out the elevation of partisan identity as a concern with the same honesty the prophets brought to the idolatries of their own day. This includes naming idolatry where it appears within the preacher’s own community. Prophetic speech that only condemns the other side is not prophecy. It is recruitment.

Harmony of Contrasts

Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God was a social vision. He was a community organizer around the divine character of an uncoercing, other-regarding love, where the boundaries of concern are always being enlarged. It is where enemies are prayed for and where the marginalized are seen and cared for. It is a community whose internal life enacts a different logic. The deepest calling of the church in our polarized moment is to be a place where the full humanity of opponents is fiercely protected. Where we listen as a spiritual discipline. We don’t need a false unity that erases difference, we need a community that holds difference without violence. The harmony of contrasts is sacred.

Resisting the Abstraction Machines

The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness names the damage done by our media environment. The pastoral response is the recovery of a deliberate, counter-cultural commitment to relating to actual persons not ideological types. This means reducing one’s consumption of media whose primary product is the abstraction and demonization of the other side. It means embodied encounters with neighborhood associations, local congregations, and civic organizations that require sustained face-to-face engagement across differences. The local is the site where the feeling of prehension has its deepest and most transformative quality.

Holding Hope

God’s consequent nature offers a profound eschatological resource for exhausted people of good will. Nothing is lost to God. Every act of bridge-building requires costly empathy. Embracing differences and seeking out loving encounters is participation in God’s life. The practice of love helps avoid being swallowed by the noise of the culture wars. Open and relational theology does not promise that God will fix our polarization. God cannot do that without destroying the freedom that makes love possible. God never stops offering the lure toward a richer and more loving community that is real and woven into the divine life.

Practice of Complexity

Adventure identifies the willingness to entertain ideas that disturb patterns that need to be perturbed. This is a spiritual practice. It requires the willingness to approach even familiar positions with an openness to being surprised. This means reading the best arguments of those with whom you disagree. It means holding our convictions with eschatological humility. Our current view remains partial and is subject to God’s ongoing creative lure. Complexity is a mark of faithfulness to the lure of adventure.

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Our polarization is, at root, a spiritual crisis. It is a widespread refusal to hear the divine lure toward love. The response is the spiritual practice of repentance. One that turns from the anesthesia of our current culture and turns toward the reality that we are made for relation. This isn’t easy. God meets us in the face of our enemy. The creative advance toward a relational life is a participation in the very life and love of God.

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I am an armchair process thinker. I may have used process concepts incorrectly and am willing to accept any and all critiques of my use or misuse of them. Please feel free to put them in the comments.