All of these people in my different feeds talk about how they are "Christian" or "Catholic." When pressed, they'll reduce their position to some idea that has nothing to do with what a fundamentalist Christian or Catholic literally believes. It's like some sort of anti-secular contrarian take while also being a type of conformist signaling. Like, who else could you be talking to other than the people in the group who also think it's cool to be fake Christian?
Las Lajas Sanctuary - Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA
Justin Murphy has commented on this general theme a bunch. He's argued that you can deconstruct religions into ideologies born from older languages that lacked some of the clarity our modern language provides us with. I like this angle and have argued from a similar line before but without emphasizing the passage of time. My position is that people existing simultaneously suffer from misunderstandings that are tied to the same phenomenon of diverging languages. In a later conversation, Justin reduces Christianity to the idea that all you have to do is try to find out what is true as passionately and unconditionally as possible, and do whatever that truth tells you to do. Justin calls himself Christian in this context, but it's such a generally applicable concept that it converts the majority of humans into Christians regardless of where they derived that value. Ben Shapiro has made a similar argument about Judaism. His claim was something like "all of Western culture stands on the shoulders of Judaism." Similarly applied to justify the proposition that if you were Western then you are closer to Judaism than you think.
This idea of taking ancient ideologies and stripping away all of the baggage in order to reference one of the useful aspects of the ideology is hard for me to follow. It's okay to just say there are core principles of Christianity that you find brilliant. This is literally true about virtually every ideology. There is usually something worth understanding and maybe even embracing. But I'm not sure exactly where acting like you belong to the real cult that you are definitely not in comes from. The entire game of exchanging ideas is about realizing the value in different aspects of well-articulated interpretations of already existing ideas. The idea that Christianity has any claim on unconditionally pursuing truth, even if it were literally the first to make such a claim, is a weird interpretation of ideology. I don't see us applying a similar approach to other ideologies that we only adopt a portion of. Like, I'm not a Jainist when I don’t kill a spider. In fact, I developed this behavior of not killing insects when I was very young, far before I’d ever heard of Jainism. Maybe religion is just one of the OG identity games, so it's at the top of the stack of identities to over-apply in ironic ways or something, and this is some kind of performance art. Maybe religions have more of a normative forcing function than other ideologies, where it’s more common to identify as X if you identify with it at all. Maybe it’s just people seeking clean identity signifiers across the board and Christian is one of many labels they are applying to themselves.
On the other hand, there is something extraordinary about the ability to map modern concepts onto mythologies that front ran us by thousands of years. It's really fucking cool to imagine that the pursuit of harder truths is uncovering some of the deeper truths embedded into our myths that were effectively discovered via different means. But I'd also argue that what you are doing when you overfit labels like Christian, as discussed above, is just misusing what seems to be a very rare skill. Mapping secular ideas on top of religious ideas means you are a conceptual translator. You think in abstractions that enable you to speak both secular and religious languages, which are just different lensings of the same concepts backed by different vocabularies. In this context, calling yourself Christian is to obfuscate that you have the faculties to parse all of this narrative confusion, effectively adding more complexity to the narrative of what Christianity is.
For example, if I'm talking to my secular friends, I might say I believe in some kind of "God" and then describe the terms of the God that I don't think my secular friends can object to. It's more interesting, and ideally, if I do a decent job, it brings them closer to the center of the false dichotomy of belief in God. This pays homage to the beauty in overlaying these ideas without pretending my positioning is compatible with Christianity or any other theism. If I go home to the midwest, I won't say that I believe in God explicitly because it means something else to them that is harder to work backward from. I will try to explain some of the same mapping techniques that I find compatible with their more literal belief system, similarly to bring them towards the center. But the general usage of "God" is very high variance in these two settings as is something like Christian.
I think there are at least two possible authentic and maybe subconscious goals behind this kind of convoluting of terms. The first is searching and identifying principles that help provide forward-looking meaning. The second is belonging to a group that shares the same values. In theory, we can apply these concepts outside of a literal religious context since we are just talking about the accruing of values. Everyone accrues values from more places than just the church, so referencing the church explicitly and losing the clarity of the point is working against yourself. I recently visited some friends in the midwest and found everyone reciting lines from Happy Gilmore. I've found this very common across the United States consistently over the last 15 years for males that are currently between 28-38 years old. Even if you haven't seen the movie, you've probably heard friends use dialogue from it enough for it to be a clear meme in your mind. So in the context of "I'm Christian" in this not-so-Christian way, the idea is that many people in my generation are Happy Gilmore-ists. This is to say we've derived some sort of meme culture and comedic values from that movie, which is widely shared across the broader society.
From here, what other works would I add to a collection that represents the values that my friends and I share? Which works unknowingly built some subset of our value sets via modes of entertainment? It's a type of real-time, decentralized bible defining that I'm talking about. So instead of an old all-encompassing text, why not have a set of works that fit the same meme of a religious text while catering to this idea that there are legitimate core principles of insight for groups to rally and unite around in much of the content that we consume? An exercise to follow up with would be stringing together ~10 pieces of content that I think make up a good starting base for my secular bible.
Finally, I've tweeted a lot about NFTs being cults and holders needing to get religious about the projects they are joining. So how about a DAO that manages its secular bible via valid governance mechanisms? We vote to add content we've already consumed and in the future when we think something new is a significant value provider we can add it to the list. If we change our mind about a piece of content, we can vote to remove it. Network Spirituality in the form of a decentralized organization that manages its core guiding philosophy over time. Want to join our cult? This is our bible. Do you want to discuss these ideas with us? Then this might be the right community for you to join, engage and shape.
Existing discord groups around NFT collections are already a type of cult, but they are generally organized around different verticals, like the art or investing or whatever else. But they are certainly aimed at community and belonging just like religions are. The downside is they are usually coupled and dominated by a form of speculative gambling which is sort of hollow in comparison to parsing through meaning with your peers. I think prioritizing these verticals in the context of a DAO is to effectively modernize the church and move it into the metaverse.