Christianity Beyond Itself

My Dialogue with Jacob Kishere

Transcript by ChatGPT:

Host (Jacob Kishere): All right, welcome to Sense Space. Really, really happy to be joined today by Matthew Segall. Matthew has been connecting with a number of my friends and sister projects in the Lial web, like Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal, Tim Adalin’s Voicecraft, John Vervaeke, and Brandon Graham Dempsey. He’s really shown up for this conversation around metamodern Christianity, among many other topics. He’s an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, which I could not think of a cooler sounding academic program. I think I’m going to have to look into that further myself. But it’s great to have you today, Matt, and to be launching this new series, this new inquiry. I’ll say more about that, but it’s great to have you here.

Matthew Segall: Yeah, I really appreciate the invitation, Jacob, and I’m honored to kick off this new series of dialogues that you’ve planned. Let’s get into it. I literally live for these types of conversations, so let’s do it.

Host: Alleluia! This one has been marinating for a long while. It feels like it’s very much a lived inquiry, something that I’ve been walking for the last few years. I’m keen to begin, but I’m also feeling that it’s a patient, slow journey, and these dialogues may occur over many years. I’ve just completed a series on wrestling with Christianity, and I’ve called this one Christianity Beyond Itself. That notion, for me, holds a really interesting position of being in Christianity, in relation to Christianity, but also being in and in relation to something beyond Christianity, and then being in a process that kind of moves between them. There’s a kind of Trinitarian flow, I feel, contained in that notion of Christianity Beyond Itself, because it’s always taking me to the question: "What is that thing beyond?" But it’s not just about going beyond; it’s kind of coming back to Christianity. This really draws upon my journey in relationship to Christianity.

I grew up in a Christian church in the UK. My dad was regularly MCing as a minister and a Christian counselor, and I was around a lot of young Christians and a lot of prayer when I was younger. My dad burned out from church leadership dynamics, and I went on to being agnostic and atheist in my teens until discovering LSD at the age of 19 in San Francisco, where you are now. That unfolded a period of exploration that was really in no explicit way in relation to Christianity—it was in the context of intentionally exploring psychedelics and meditation. But lo and behold, to bridge a very long journey, I found myself drawn back and drawn to a degree of wrestling with Christianity and a search to find the babies in the bathwater that had been thrown out. A lot of others have been on that journey, or not on that journey, but sort of awakening to that being relevant to them in recent years. This is definitely a collective phenomenon.

I think it’s enormously important to create a space, particularly in the space of dialogos, which is so suited for an exploration of the unknown—what this can be as a journey, as an inquiry. Much more to say, but I’d really love to touch on Christianity as an evolutionary phenomenon, particularly in light of the work of Teilhard de Chardin, and also how these visions of a church—a body of community that is able to both hold some essence of Christ-consciousness, of a Christ spirit, but is not dogged in the same kind of way—can move beyond the mental walls of Christianity as a set of ideas and a cultural, communal conditioning. So with that, Matthew, I’d love to hear where you’re at with Christianity Beyond Itself, metamodern Christianity, and how the metaphysical Christ is fitting into your intellectual and spiritual journey.

Matthew Segall: Yeah, I appreciate that framing, and I love this title, Christianity Beyond Itself. It immediately reminds me of something that one of my major philosophical influences, Alfred North Whitehead, says in a little-known book he wrote called Religion in the Making. He’s comparing Christianity and Buddhism, among other things, in that book and says that while they both share a desire to understand metaphysically the mystery of our existence, they seek a rational account. Whitehead thinks that’s important for the evolution of religion—that it should eventually arrive at a place where it’s trying to understand logically and scientifically the experiential basis that might be in revelation or might be in some kind of numinous experience, what have you, but to really rationalize that. He says, though, that what makes Christianity unique is that it’s really a profoundly transformative experience seeking a metaphysics, whereas he thinks Buddhism is more of a metaphysics seeking translation into culture. It’s an oversimplification, of course, but it strikes me that Christianity, as a religion, caught fire 2,000 years ago and spread quite quickly and dramatically.

The event that is supposed to have sparked this is quite bizarre on many levels. I mean, there are mythical motifs that you can see repeating—the dying and rising god and these things—so it’s not totally out of the blue. But the idea that God actually becomes a human being, is crucified, dies, and then resurrects in bodily form—it’s a kind of bizarre story, and yet somehow it reaches people and is so transformative that it eventually challenges an empire to the point where the empire has to rebrand itself to deal with the issue. And we get this institutionalized form of Christianity: first the Catholic Church, then the Anglican Church, and then the proliferation of thousands of little churches in the U.S. For me, coming to Christianity somewhat late in life—not being raised as you were in a church context, though my mother is quite religious in a kind of evangelical way, but she didn’t have the structure of a church to help guide her—it was more that she had an experience of Jesus when she was young. She would go to church and wanted to bring me to church as a kid, but it wasn’t really a structured experience for me.

Her way of relating to the tradition wasn’t for me, and so as a teenager, I really turned in the opposite direction to science and became quite an obnoxious, materialist, atheist type of 14-year-old, parroting Richard Dawkins and other figures like that. It wasn’t until my late teens that I started to gain a different perspective, both from some of the reading I was exposed to by a high school teacher of mine—I read some Carl Jung and gained a deeper appreciation for the psychology of religion and what motivates people to want to think in these ways and to take seriously the story of Jesus Christ. And then, yeah, it was a psychedelic experience, actually, and I’ve written a little bit about this. After I had been exposed to some broader perspectives, like Asian religions, and got really interested in Buddhism, I had still rejected Christianity. But as a 19-year-old at the time, thinking of myself as a Buddhist, trying to practice meditation and really get serious about this spiritual transformative process, I ate maybe three, three and a half grams of psilocybin mushrooms one night. I was in my room, planning on journaling, maybe listening to some music, and within 45 minutes, I had this—it's hard to describe—an encounter with the Christ being. It shocked me. I was not expecting that.

I could go into more detail around that, but let’s just say it was this powerful, very unexpected encounter. I can use Jungian language to describe it as the archetype of the self, if that helps people understand, but it really did feel like the face of Christ as I imagined it, or as my unconscious constructed it, or maybe this real spiritual being decided to pay me a visit. At the time, it felt like that—it felt very real. In retrospect, I can put it in archetypal, psychological terms just to communicate about it, but that led me on a very different journey. I began looking again at the history of Christianity and the history of mysticism in the West, and this more esoteric reading that I continue to study and appreciate today. The challenge, though, is dealing with all the ways that the institutionalization of this teaching and this being—the Christ—has, I think, to some degree, obscured the significance of this event, the Incarnation.

In other ways, though, the structure provided by these institutions is very important, but I’ve found it important to be able to refer to the Christ being as something that’s not simply reducible to a particular religion. As important as the historical continuity and inheriting the memory, teachings, and rituals are—and I don’t mean to dismiss all of that—I also think it’s very easy to dilute the significance of this ontological power. You can call it love, if you don’t want to use the word Christ, but the name is less important to me. There is this real being, I think, that I have felt and do feel, and you don’t have to be a Christian to feel that. I think that’s a subtle point, a subtle distinction to make, but it becomes really important when we start to think about, in a metamodern context, how to be pluralistic in our affirmation of a particular tradition, even though it might seem like we’re choosing one tradition over another.

I’m still very committed to pluralism, and Buddhism is still an important source of orientation for me, even after this experience and this coming back around to really look again at the history of Christianity and to try to relate to this Christ being. I still struggle with how to language this. Hopefully, what I’m sharing here is coherent as a launching point, but it’s very interesting to notice, now in the last several months or six months or so, how many public intellectuals are converting, public figures converting to Christianity, and sometimes more orthodox forms of it. I’m not always sure to what extent it’s a sort of reactionary movement back to a premodern understanding versus a potentially metamodern understanding of what religion even is and how we integrate these things culturally, socially, and politically. But something is happening, and I’m very interested in being involved in the conversation as we sort out what that is.

For me, this conversion experience—because it was something like that—happened when I was 19, back in 2005. I didn’t talk much about it because it was kind of awkward. Now, at least in our little corner of the internet, it seems cool again to be Christian, but that wasn’t the case 20 years ago. It’s interesting times.

Host: No, it was not, yeah. Wow. I’m really glad to root this conversation in direct experience. I want that to be a key piece underlying whatever kind of conceptual formulations we throw up to helpfully navigate this. I resonate deeply with the confounding quality of discovering Christ without being Christian, without being converted to Christianity. Possibly being completely… I think for me, the notion of "Christ consciousness" was really helpful at a time when I was exploring consciousness. I was interested in Buddhism, or at least exploring meditation practice deeply. The "Christ consciousness" idea helped me have a more pluralistic bridge because it took away some of the particularity of Christ as king and Christ as savior, and Christ as the only one. It asked, "What if this Jesus person was someone who had attained Christ-nature, in the same way that the Buddha-person attains Buddha-nature?"

I don’t know that I’m necessarily in the same place now, but at that time, that was a really helpful piece—it was an opening notion. I think for people who are outside of any Christian context, that can be a really useful puzzle piece. But then, getting to the point two years ago, after having been curious, founding solace in churches—I often meditated in churches—I had this experience during a period of crisis and a relationship breakup. These kinds of visions came through to me, in my closed, third-eye space, of this obvious Christ-Jesus person. A sense of great peace came with that, and that for me was inexplicable and strange, but it occurred a number of times, particularly during very difficult times of struggle, or in prayer, just having during that period a number of occasions of feeling a presence coming. Just the encounter, the vision of the face, was so beyond mystifying that it saturated the whole experience I was in and immediately transformed it.

It’s very clearly not just an idea of a person, or an idea of an encounter. It’s an encounter with something real and numinous. That’s my experience, and it’s not conditioned by a particular theological stance. I wasn’t following a specific Christian path at that point. For me, that notion of encounter has become a really key piece of what I feel Christianity Beyond Itself is holding or occupying—this ontology of encounter, to be in relationship with the unknown, to be in relationship with something or someone or a world that is beyond our own. To come into relationship with God more deeply, I feel I have to be open to encountering something beyond myself. I have to make space for that. When I feel into the quality and flavor of a lot of contemporary Christianity, there’s more of an ontology of propagation. There’s more of a missionary posture—a sense of listening as a positional role to provide care, rather than truly entering a space where I could be fundamentally transformed by the dialogue or encounter.

That’s the dialogos space. That’s the space of real encounter for me. I wasn’t planning this prior, but I see a connection between the capacity to have the direct encounter with the numinous Christ and the openness to the encounter with the stranger, with the other. My ability to do that is kind of a practiced ability. If there were a lot of people doing that together in a body, in a community, what would be the characteristics of that in relation to something beyond itself, compared to saying, "We have a good message, and we want everyone to join and participate in what we have"? It’s all love and welcome, but that welcome is conditioned upon joining a particular vibe that we’re creating inside the church.

Matthew Segall: Yeah, on the "Christ consciousness" approach to this as a way of languaging and understanding it in a more inclusive way, I can resonate with that. But something that’s become an increasing source of tension for me is the direct experience of Christ. It overwhelms our attempts to form the right propositional beliefs, as if the most important thing is to accept the creed and dogmas, and then you’re saved. The direct encounter with the numinous is so far beyond what we can put into words. It’s the Logos—it’s all the words and none of them.

But there’s the other side of this. Beyond just the direct experience, what about the action that experience is supposed to inspire? There's a Christian theologian and mystic, Richard Rohr, and I read this beautiful piece he wrote about an experience where he was on the subway, and all of a sudden, every other person became the crucified Christ—the suffering God. He saw Christ in the face of everyone and realized how much responsibility we have to one another. It gets us out of ourselves. What do we do with this experience? I think the import of it is to transform the world, at the very least the human social situation. How do we view each other, particularly those we might call our enemies? There are some rather disturbing lines in the Gospels—disturbing because we think, "Wait, what? That doesn't seem like something I can handle." When Christ says, "Only those who hate their families can follow me," it sounds radical. But I think what he means is that love needs to go beyond the blood bonds we automatically feel and include the entire human community. That sounds nice on paper, but actually doing it is very hard and painful. It requires a great deal of self-sacrifice.

As a finite human being, I often feel ill-equipped to actually follow through with what the experience of the Christ calls me to do or imitate. So dialogos becomes essential because we have to talk ourselves into this in a sense. Talk can be cheap, though. I think of what Paul says: "If we don’t have love, all our words are like clanging cymbals." How do we transform the experience and the beautiful thoughts we have into actions that bring more love into the world? We have real social, economic, and political problems to address. We need love to bridge cultural differences and resolve these issues. We’ll need intelligence and practical know-how to build systems that actually address it all, but it starts with this ability to love our enemies. Living in a big city, especially in the Bay Area—in Oakland and San Francisco—I encounter homelessness every day, and I can feel my own inadequacy in knowing how to respond. Something in me calls out to help those who are addicted to drugs and sleeping on the street, but another part of me is afraid. Another part wonders, "What am I supposed to do? Invite this person to sleep on my couch? What can I really do in this situation?" It’s painful. So the translation between the direct experience and the consciousness of love, into action that would transform the world, is difficult. It’s something I personally struggle with.

Host: Yeah, it strikes me that what’s present here in relation to the Christ or mystical experience is true of the psychedelic experience as well. The integration of those experiences is something that huge swathes of people are experiencing now. That Christ experience is kind of a seed, at least that’s how it feels for me. I’ve had many transformative experiences, but I’ve never been completely transformed by them. It feels more like a depth charge at the bottom of my psyche that then has to ripple through for months and years. It’s something I can very slowly start to remember at an embodied level. Can I occupy my reality from that standpoint? I think things like prayer are very tried-and-tested ways to do that, if approached at an essential level.

What’s interesting is that a lot of my Christianity is inseparable from what I’ve learned from psychedelic experiences, particularly experiences with ayahuasca in the last couple of years. In that space, I’ve had realizations that suggest to me, at a felt level, that I’ve experienced many different lifetimes. There’s an "I" within me that shows up in many different lives, circumstances, and qualities of suffering. In addition to that, there’s this mysterious theological unfolding toward a realization of a Christ reality. Whether that actually occurs in every lifetime, I don’t know. Maybe it takes many iterations.

I find myself more drawn to the homeless, even though I haven’t been striking up conversations with them. But my sense of care has shifted. When I walk and see someone, I’m drawn to them. There’s a silent blessing I sometimes send. This brings us back to Christianity, which has given people the propensity to approach and engage with others. The very thing that’s been the root of many people’s trauma—Christianity’s issues with boundaries and its often overly-missionary posture—is also what allows it to penetrate social norms and not be confined by them. That same impulse allowed my dad, when I was growing up—much to the cringe of my siblings and me—to have these intuitions about praying for random people in public. He’d get a strange feeling, and then somehow he’d end up in a personal encounter with a stranger, offering to pray with them.

This raises the question for me: It’s not just love, but also courage. It’s not just death of the self, again and again, but also the self becoming greater and more courageous in each rebirthing process. How can it have the strength of will and the ability to make interventions on behalf of love in one’s life as they arise? There’s a need for courage and a deep resource, but how to be resourced in that without being dogmatically closed or erotically ignorant of boundaries?

Matthew Segall: Faith does breed confidence. The general public consciousness in this late-modern, postmodern culture is more relativistic by nature. We’re much more comfortable with the attitude of, "You believe what you believe, and I’ll believe what I believe." So when someone comes at you convinced that what they believe isn’t just a belief, but a truth, it can grate against that relativism. When a Christian says they want to pray for you or worries you’re going to hell, it crosses boundaries because we’ve become comfortable in a relativistic stance. Yet, when someone has faith and says, "Hey, you should probably know about this because it might affect you," it can be unsettling.

In the case of your dad’s practice, it sounds like most people were receptive. Maybe that speaks to his personality and the way he offered it. There are people near the lake where I live who set up loudspeakers and preach, and it doesn’t seem to draw much interest. It takes a lot of confidence to do that, though, and it really cuts against our comfort with agnosticism. Yet, there’s a danger in the posture of standing on neutral ground as if there’s no transcendent truth, as if there’s nothing beyond our projections. That’s troubling because I think there is something to be known about the spiritual dimension of reality, about death and what happens afterward. While I don’t claim to know with precision, I do think we can know. I’m increasingly frustrated with the attitude that we can’t know. This is a dereliction of our human instinct to respond to the mystery of our existence with wonder and curiosity. We should be responding to it with an open heart. Instead, our culture encourages intellectual and moral laziness because we don’t want to offend others.

I don’t believe in a literal hell, but I do think a life lived out of alignment with love could be a kind of hell. There may be a purging process after death, where we relive our lives and see more clearly the effects of our actions and inactions. That could be painful. So, I understand why some people are driven by a sense of urgency to share their faith, though I’m not someone who likes to shout in the streets. Yet, these are urgent questions, and I’m glad there’s increasing openness to having these conversations. There’s no neutral ground here—we’re all alive, making decisions, and affecting others. We’re all going to die. Each of us plays a role in the evolutionary process of the universe, and the aim seems to be beauty, love, and deeper communion. Every day, with each decision we make, we either further that process or hold it back.

I feel our species is in a time of tremendous distraction. While we like to say we’re in a scientific age, knowing more about the universe than ever before, we’ve forgotten so much of what earlier cultures recognized about the moral dimension of reality. We have a truncated vision now, and it’s been shaped by consumerism and materialism. There’s a great urgency, and while I consider myself relational and socially aware, I also feel it’s important to disrupt our habitual patterns of thought and action. So, I’m always looking for provocative ways to do that, ways that draw people in rather than push them away.

Host: I want to pick up on that idea of neutral ground. On the level of each individual, I agree that just living in a secular, pluralistic, relativistic universe isn’t a neutral claim on reality—it’s a claim that there isn’t anything more. Everyone is asserting something, even if they say there’s no metaphysics beyond their experience. But for me, I think of sense space as trying to create or be present to a kind of vibrant emptiness, where these conversations can occur. It’s not a neutral ground, but it’s also not heavily conditioned toward any particular direction—conversationally or ontologically. I’m equally interested in the people who are moving in the direction of secular atheism or "Game B," as I am in those who are experiencing a Christ awakening or wrestling with Christianity. And I’m just as interested in those currently inside Christianity who are seeking to break out of the limiting matrix they’ve come up within. There are people who have a sense that there is something more for them personally on their soul's journey, and it’s not happening inside the social construct of church. There's something more beyond that. So, I feel there’s this middle space I’m trying to open, which isn’t about moving people in one direction or another, but about holding space where all of it can be explored together. It’s about drawing on direct experience and acknowledging that there are realities to be realized, contingent on our level of understanding and capacity to integrate them into our hearts, minds, and bodies. It’s self-evident that these experiences reveal deeper realities. I do believe that the gifts contained in these plant medicines are portals to the Divine—or they can be, if approached in a certain way.

We’re in a crisis moment, or some sort of vast change, and the way evolution shows up is often through everything falling apart, coming to the end of days. There’s a necessity for deep, collective resourcing to address that, and that resourcing has to go deeper than globalized forms of organization, politics, or ideology. It has to touch on the common soul, this animating spirit that Teilhard de Chardin talks about so poetically. Christianity is a huge piece of that, but it's currently beneath the surface of our collective awareness in the West. How can we be rooted down sufficiently to branch into the next phase if we are in denial of the entire architecture that has been underneath us? This whole way of life—these spiritual technologies and resources that are still very present—has wisdom that was practiced and upheld for centuries, but there's also human pathology wrapped up in it.

The question for me is how we participate in the process of tapping into what was important and what still lives there, in this new context that is intrinsically and unchangeably pluralistic. There’s no way to recede into a premodern Christianity where we don’t have to encounter the Muslim, the Buddhist, or the atheist. That encounter is going to be there, and we don’t know how to deal with it yet. But I think the key to beginning to address that is having the capacity to come to a place of healing and a felt sense of wisdom, which doesn’t require such a constricted mental landscape. I feel that kind of posture might allow us to begin answering how a Western person can take responsibility for their lineage, honor it, and integrate it, while also embracing these ancient and new gifts that are here at this time because we need them. The masculine Christianity we’ve inherited is not fit for the global ecological crisis we’re facing.

We can’t just have the Great Father—we need the Great Mother too. And for many people, that comes through more animistic, pagan, and plant medicine kinds of experiences. There’s a deep reconciliation needed there, even within the underbelly of Christianity.

There’s a lot to do. I’m thankful it’s not entirely our responsibility to do it all ourselves, but at least we’re not alone in it.

Matthew Segall: I like the way you responded to my comment about no neutral ground. Your phrase, "vibrant emptiness" or "openness," captures something important. That’s not neutral—it’s a stance, a posture of openness to transformation by something greater than yourself. And that’s a significant stance on what’s real and possible.

The metaphysical neutrality I was referring to is more about the posture of some who take pride in being agnostic, as if being neutral is more rational. A kind of smug atheism, where people believe we can only know what empirical science tells us, and anything beyond that is nonsense—that frustrates me. But it’s becoming less pervasive than it was maybe a decade ago because even scientists are acknowledging the limitations of that perspective.

There are major conundrums that a purely empirical, mathematical approach can’t resolve for us. I think that's why we’re seeing an increasing openness to spiritual conversations. Still, that posture of metaphysical neutrality has been harmful, as it dismisses whole realms of human experience and knowledge.

Listening to your further reflections, I’m reminded of something both Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Rudolf Steiner said in their own ways—that the impact of Christianity on humanity has barely begun. Both foresaw a future in which the influence of the Christ impulse would draw humanity toward a deeper communion. They envisioned a time when no individual human being would be able to encounter the suffering of another without feeling it as their own. This is a vision where the Christ impulse continues to evolve humanity, deepening both our individuality and our interconnectedness. Teilhard called this Christogenesis, the process where we become more individuated and yet more unified in our love and consciousness. Your pain becomes my pain, and vice versa.

Taking the long view, the influence of Christianity may not even be called Christianity in the future. It’s the impulse of freedom and love that’s continuing to shape humanity. What many don’t realize, especially in the progressive movement, is that much of the moral impulse behind social justice comes from Christianity. We’re living in a time where progressivism is, in some ways, Christianity without God. The values that drive progressive movements—care for the marginalized, the emphasis on human dignity and individual rights—are largely rooted in the Christian tradition, though it’s rarely acknowledged.

At the same time, Christianity has also been co-opted by movements like Christian nationalism or prosperity gospel in the U.S., which distort the teachings of Christ in dangerous ways. But the deeper evolutionary process, the one guided by freedom and love, is still happening. We can either participate in it or resist it.

Host: That’s wonderful. That’s another key tension I identify—the split between contemporary conservative Christianity and the progressive LGBT movement. We can’t address that split without recognizing, as you said, that Marxism and social justice movements have Christian roots. There’s something that needs to shift to get beyond the current gridlock. Part of that shift might be a transformation of how Christianity relates to the erotic and the body.

Right now, it feels like there’s a space that queer people and those celebrating life’s erotic aspects can’t find within the traditional church. This tension is very alive. It feels like we’re in this gridlock where progressive movements profane religious imagery, reducing the sacred to something they can mock or critique. But there’s more going on here. It’s not just about one side versus the other—it’s about how we can transform what Christianity itself means in this pluralistic, post-secular context.

There’s also a deep reconciliation needed between the horizontal work of recognizing and alleviating suffering and the vertical work of dealing with the past—the trauma that’s been passed down collectively. We can’t just respond to what's happening now without dealing with the historical traumas that are still active within us. This is something I’ve learned from Thomas Hübl’s work on collective healing. He’s developing a new science of collective healing, which isn’t explicitly Christian, but could be seen as doing the work of Christ in its own way.

I keep thinking about how the work of Christ is both horizontal and vertical. It’s not just about addressing present-day suffering; it’s about healing the deeper historical wounds that are still with us. If we think of Christianity as having "died" in some sense, there’s the possibility of a resurrection—the ultimate expression of its spirit. But that resurrection has to happen on top of the collective nightmare of the 20th century, the wars, and the genocides. There’s some Christ-like force that’s needed to send our consciousness down into the darkest corners of human experience, and that work demands an extraordinary resource of spirit. Without it, we disassociate from the trauma and the pain. I feel like that’s where we are collectively—we’ve been on such a difficult journey that we’ve had to disassociate from much of it because we didn’t have the collective resources to face it at the time.

I’m bringing through these huge, galactic-sized chunks of thought, and I’m hesitant to try and land too much of it in one conversation. But I wanted to bring those pieces forward because they touch on what you’re speaking to.

Matthew Segall: Yeah, and to say a bit more about this idea that contemporary progressivism is Christianity without God—without that vertical dimension, there’s a risk of externalizing evil. There’s this fantasy that we can eliminate evil by getting rid of the bad people, the capitalists, or whatever external enemy we identify. But what the Christ consciousness offers is the realization that evil is within each of us. It’s the projection of that evil outward that actually plays the devil. The idea that if we get rid of the "others," we’ll have some kind of utopia is dangerous and ultimately false. That’s how revolutions can go wrong. You end up with new authoritarians in charge, and the oppression just takes a new form.

Eric Voegelin has this great phrase, "immanentizing the eschaton," which people often misunderstand as a good thing. But it’s actually a warning against trying to bring heaven to Earth through political or social engineering. It’s the idea that you can achieve spiritual transformation through political means, which doesn’t work. Of course, we want to bring more love and justice into the world, but that comes through the exercise and cultivation of freedom and love, not through imposing a partisan political project or ideology.

If we miss that, we risk trying to externalize and project evil onto others, which only leads to more division and conflict. Whether it’s reactionary conservatives or progressives doing this, it leads in a very bad direction. Christ's message teaches us to look inward and recognize the capacity for evil in ourselves. Only then can we truly love our enemies and transform the world.

Also, let’s remember, Jesus Christ was not a Christian. The religion that formed around him came later. The early Christians weren’t as patriarchal as the Roman Catholic Church became. When the Roman Empire started to lose political power, it co-opted Christianity and institutionalized it, distorting the message. But there are resources within the Christian tradition—figures like Sophia, the wisdom literature, and the veneration of Mary—that challenge patriarchy.

Mary, especially in the global South, has become such a powerful figure for many Catholics, often more important than Christ himself in some communities. There’s syncretism happening, where indigenous traditions and Catholicism mix, creating something unique. So even within the history of Christianity, there’s a tension between patriarchal structures and the more feminine aspects of the divine. Pope Francis has done important work around ecology, but there’s still more to do in terms of gender and equality.

Carl Jung once said that the assumption of Mary—the recognition of her significance—was one of the most important developments in Christianity, because it reintroduced the feminine divine. We need more balance in Christianity, and I think it’s happening slowly, but there’s still a long way to go.

Host: I know we’re approaching the end of our time, but there are so many branches opening up here. I’ll just note them for future inquiries. The question around colonization, for example, has been very alive for me recently. I’ve spent a lot of time in Latin America this year, and you can feel the presence of Mary everywhere. Even in the most obscure villages, there’s often a small shrine to Mary. There’s a sense of blessing and protection around her presence. Personally, I’m more glad that she’s there than not.

I’m also fascinated by the phenomenon of Catholic shamans and the blending of Catholicism with indigenous shamanic practices. The narrative around colonization is so reductionistic, and there’s a lot more complexity to explore about what it means. Yes, there’s the clear version of colonization that happens at the point of a rifle, but there’s also something more subtle that occurs when two cultures meet and mix.

If you truly believe something is true and beautiful in your heart, and you engage in sharing it with others, at what point does that become colonization? When is it an imposition, and when is it a genuine exchange? There’s a valorization of pre-Christian societies as utopian, as if they had no agency or interest in engaging with these new ideas. It’s a much more complicated dance of shadow and light throughout history. We need to make space for that complexity.

That brings me back to the key question I’m still struggling to articulate: In this space of encounter, this Christianity Beyond Itself, how do we know where colonization really lies? Where does it exist energetically, at the level of encounter? Can Christ himself be a force of decolonization, since Christ transcends concepts, mental frameworks, and divisions between tribes and groups? Could the Christ impulse actually decolonize our minds because it’s so far beyond those separations?

That’s a controversial and complex question, but I think it’s one we need to unravel. And I think that kind of work can only happen in a space that’s neither secular progressive culture nor traditional Christian culture. It has to be this third space, where new channels can form between these separated realities. Only then can we start to feel less friction and more of a sense of common soul and shared reality.

Matthew Segall: That’s a huge question about colonization, and I think we’d need a few more hours to dig into that properly. But I think a simple heuristic is the distinction between force and freedom. Christ can’t be forced on anyone; that’s not how it works. The only power Christ has is love, and love doesn’t impose itself. If it’s about force and power, it’s not truly Christian. It’s colonization. But if it’s about giving people the freedom to encounter the Christ impulse within themselves, then it’s decolonial.

There were certainly friars and monks who came with the Conquistadors to genuinely learn from indigenous cultures and find ways to blend their traditions with Christianity, without imposing it. There’s a distinction there between the conquerors who sought gold and power, and those who were trying to create a syncretic path forward. It’s a messy story, and we’d need time to explore it fully, but that distinction between force and freedom is central.

Host: Matthew, it’s been fantastic to have you on the podcast today. I really appreciate you coming through. I loved the depth and pace of this conversation, and you’ve confirmed for me that this is a gargantuan conversational pilgrimage I’m embarking on. I’d love to have you return as this series unfolds.

Matthew Segall: My pleasure. I really appreciated this opportunity and look forward to seeing how the series unfolds as well.