Human Conversion in The Digital Age
e-Platforms & Christian Youtubers | Pt. II
This post is the second in a series on Human Conversion in The Digital Age. To read Pt. I you can click here.
Fast forward to 2015, and after years of working various blue-collar jobs and bumming across the US, I am now attending a small liberal arts college in my hometown. Reality TV star, real estate tycoon and all-around con man Donald Trump is running for president, and everyone is laughing for different reasons. He tweets a lot. Meanwhile, every other young man I know is inexplicably watching three-hour long Youtube videos of Joe Rogan musing from the depths of a marijuana cloud about what would happen if you gave a troupe of chimpanzees DMT while some poor beleaguered astrophysicist struggles to maintain his bearings. Young people are dying their hair bright colors, seemingly making them increasingly upset. Video games are getting more realistic.
Bolstered by the 24-hour news coverage of his enemies, Trump wins the Republican nomination by presenting himself as in direct opposition to everyone and everything thrown at him. More laughter. The legacy media apparatus assures the American people that there is no way this guy could lose to arguably the most unpopular politician in the world, Crooked Hillary Clinton.
I went to bed one night as someone with a lifelong, almost principled disinterest in current affairs and woke the next morning astonished to discover that current affairs were, suddenly, rather interesting; after months of being reassured that a Trump presidency was impossible, The Donald had become the first post-modern president of The United States of America.
Trump had tweeted his way into the White House.
The haters and losers seethed. The online ones certainly did. From observing the media, I would have expected rage or the weeping and gnashing of teeth the day after the election from the student body at my little liberal arts college. From my somewhat detached perspective, there was a feigned somberness on campus for a few days but no one seemed that upset.
Born the year Bush senior was elected president, I was nearly a decade older than the youngest freshman, a considerable but seemingly non-alienating difference. But I was struck and genuinely alarmed by the marked difference in demeanor between myself and the faculty on the one hand and the Zoomer student body on the other.
A noticeably flat facial affect was common. While one can expect 18 and 19-year-olds to be a bit clueless, their ability to perform the most basic social norms was often comically absent. Of course, they were mostly on their phones. There were exceptions. I was on the soccer team and my teammates were energetic, suitably inappropriate, and genuinely fun to be around. The theater kids I got to know shared these qualities, which I chalked up to how they constantly flopped onto each other in class, in the hallways, and, I have to imagine, in the dorms. These young people still had a connection to the body.
Smartphones were ubiquitous. I got my first flip phone when I was 18, and my first smartphone at 25. And then I too willingly became swept up in the algorithms. Youtube was my “poison” of choice.
Amidst the chaos of the new Trumpian public square, another character appeared onscreen. The now infamous Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian professor and clinical psychologist, came to public attention through the culture war, specifically through his recorded refusal to adhere to a linguistic shibboleth surrounding gender pronouns which he posted to Youtube. He shot to prominence soon afterward when his backlog of college lectures on the intersection of psychology and mythology became popular, particularly among young men.
In the spring of 2017, this self-professed agnostic, who cites Jung as his preeminent influence, began a lecture series on the book of Genesis. Despite his heterodox views, Christian and secular viewers alike resonated with what they saw as his honest grappling with the Biblical narrative that Peterson rightly claimed undergirds Western civilization.
Whatever one thinks of Peterson, he was the first public figure since Hitchens to initiate a large-scale public discussion around religion. Unlike his British predecessor, Peterson was far more mythologically literate and, while more than capable as a debater, remained open to dialogue.
Talking heads became concerned that this “alt-right” figure was another sad symptom of a larger plague. With the rise of arch-pugilist Trump through the platform Twitter, the digital technology meant to further strengthen the grip of the legacy media and their allied elites suddenly, painfully, could no longer be considered an unqualified good. It was raining anonymous frogs and the Egyptians were none too pleased. The rhetorical insult stick Hitchens used to beat those stupid Fundamentalists over the head was now used by the POTUS against experts, newscasters, and celebrities alike. Even worse, people who drove trucks were laughing and cheering him on! “Trump isn’t very nice! He’s stupid!" (and likely evil) became the new mantra.
But far more than Trump or Peterson, I would become interested in the individuals who stepped into the conversational space opened up in the wake of Peterson’s biblical lectures.
While the culture war heated up, I continued my studies in English and digital media while spending most of my spare time investigating historical Christianity. Though I had some familiarity with the text of Scripture and the more esoteric forms of Christianity such as Blake’s, Swedenborg’s, or The Golden Dawn, I only had the faintest grasp of what professing Christians actually believed. I had always been a voracious reader, but between 2015-2019, armed with my new portable computer (my smartphone), I found myself sucked into the aural-visual space of Youtube.
Fast forward to the tail end of my undergrad degree, I began attending a nearby Orthodox parish (actually, the first parish I attended turned out to be a schismatic Old Calendar group, but that’s another barrel of fish). I won’t go into the soap opera level story leading to this unexpected outcome. However, if I had to describe my conversion in one word, it would be traumatic.
In the summer of 2019, when I first sat down with my now priest and laid out my life story, at one point he asked me what I had been reading and watching. I recall mentioning Fr. Seraphim Rose, Dostoevsky, and Kallistos Ware, all pretty standard fare, and then three Youtubers: Orthodox artist and storyteller Jonathan Pageau (he had heard of him and liked his work), Orthodox apologist and comedian Jay Dyer (heard of him, didn’t know his work but had heard mixed reviews), and Christian Reform Church minister Paul Vander Klay (never heard of him).
Looking back, the time I spent on Youtube with these three men, their work, and the online communities surrounding them had the most significant impact in the years leading to my conversion.
Christians of Youtube: Pageau, PVK, & Dyer
Of the three, I first came across Jonathan Pageau when a video popped into my Youtube feed titled The Metaphysics of Pepe on Jordan Peterson’s channel. That video was instigated by a slew of online poasters pointing out that he sounded like Kermit the Frog (he does). Peterson had known Pageau before his status rocket and knew he was a symbolically savvy individual.
Pageau explained that the frog is a liminal figure inhabiting both land and water and that the online Right, marginalized in the digital public square, identified with this frog figure because they were at once the purveyors of mocking humor usually associated with chaos, as well as the advocates, however crude, of those traditional norms that were now considered deplorable. ‘Oh ok, cool. There’s a kind of Robert Bly thing going on here,’ I thought. Pageau went on to connect the frog phenomenon with the prophet Elijah who mocked the prophets of Baal as part of his mission to restore order to Israel.
Following this appearance, Pageau created his own Youtube channel from his home in Quebec after a flood of requests for symbolic analyses reached his inbox. The son of a Baptist pastor, Pageau is an adult convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity who, together with his brother Matthieu Pageau had developed a symbolic lens of seeing the world through the study of the Church Fathers and ancient rabbinic texts.
He made connections between the patterns found in The Bible and the patterns found in our day-to-day experience, often drawing examples from popular films, fairy tales, and the most mundane examples from everyday life, such as shaking hands.
His Youtube channel features such titles as: Adam and Eve…and Batman, Star Wars: The Last Jedi | Dismantling All Order, and Symbolism in Shrek | When the Marginal Wins.
Over the next few years, it became harder for me to dismiss the connections he helped me make between the patterns found in Scripture and those I found in reality as mere esoteric hermeneutics. An Orthodox icon carver, he wove together the language of iconography, church architecture, stories of dog-headed saints, and the writings of the Church Fathers into a coherent tapestry, strange as it was beautiful. I remember thinking, “if only this were true.”
Similar to my experience upon first encountering Blake, this lens for seeing the world made intuitive sense to me, although I wouldn’t have been able to explain it to you if you had put a gun to my head. Unlike Blake, this was not the limit-smashing self-made spirituality of the lone artist, but a hierarchical world of sight, smell, sound and touch, filled with angels and demons and which included and was as accessible to the babushka as much as the philosopher. It was a world I could inhabit, not one that required my own creative or imaginative faculties. I will not attempt to explain this way of seeing the world as text is not the ideal tool for explaining it, and frankly, I’m not that good at explaining it.
In Christian Roy’s article Marshal McLuhan and Eastern Christianity: Probing an Interface with the Symbolic World in Mind he notes that Pageau’s form of cultural criticism “has taken an essentially oral, dialogical form in the neo-acoustic environment of electronic social media” and that “these new media retrieve certain features of pre-print and even preliterate cultures, e.g., in that their information overload favours instant symbolic pattern recognition over sequential dialectical exposition.”
For me, Pageau facilitated a series of epiphanies that put the role of art in its proper place: not as a mere individual expression that is an end in itself, but as the ability the artist possesses to help knit a community together through various forms of craftsmanship. At its highest levels, the artist helps to reveal the sacred.
On top of that, as someone coming from what I would now consider an occult background, I had always been struck by how so many modern Christians seemed oblivious or disinterested in the middle realm of angels, demons, saints, djinns, fairies, etc. Pageau’s engagement with this realm laid the groundwork for what the popular podcast The Lord of Spirits has now taken head on—the mythological backdrop of the cosmos from a Christian, specifically Orthodox, perspective.
The next channel the algorithm fed me was the then bushy-bearded Paul Vander Klay (PVK), who pastors a small Christian Reformed church in Sacramento, CA. He is the most prolific and insightful commentator on what would become “the Peterson phenomenon.” Drawn by Peterson’s ability to do what Christian ministers have been unable to for decades (make former and non-Christians reconsider the value of the Christian faith), he began a commentary series on Peterson’s Genesis lectures. True to the Protestant work ethic, PVK began pumping out nearly daily one to three-hour videos, using Peterson’s Biblical series as a springboard to slowly chew on various religious, philosophical, and historical factors and questions, drawing from a host of sources both past and present, from St. Augustine to C.S. Lewis to contemporaries like Pageau or cognitive scientist John Vervaeke.
Though a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary, and thus firmly in the Reformed protestant tradition, his videos, which are themselves a collage of videos, continue the medieval project of synthesis; he is part of a committed albeit small minority of online commentators who are struggling towards a new model that can synthesize and encompass the multiplicity of our present time. Unlike many online commentators, he possesses the ability reach across sectarian divides and even engage with truths that on face value pose a threat to his own worldview. I’ve found few individuals online with his mixture of gregariousness, an openness to learning and criticism, as well as the ability to model productive dialogue.
This comfort in dialogue partly stems from having a rooted tradition from which to explore. A third-generation Dutch Reform minister, he has something few Americans possess, a serious and engaged multi-generational religious continuity.
Both he and Pageau have spent several years in missionary work in third-world countries. These experiences afford a certain distance when analyzing or contextualizing current trends. But perhaps PVK’s most significant contribution has been his ability to foster relationships through sustained dialogue with those from other traditions. The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, a former colleague of Peterson at the Univeristy of Toronto, along with Pageau, have formed a friendship with the affable and open pastor, the three of them even meeting recently in person to discuss what Vervaeke has called The Meaning Crisis.
One staple of PVK’s channel is the recurring “Randos” slots where anyone can sign up for an extended conversation with him over Zoom. These conversations are often with people struggling in one way or another with faith. Many conversations make it onto the channel while many stay offline for personal reasons. I’ve spoken privately with him myself, and I think he is a genuine mensch. When discerning the faith, seeing a Christian modeling fruitful ways of relating to the world goes a long way.
Enter the dread Jay Dyer, aka the meanest man in Christian apologetics. He’s been called a conspiracy theorist, a snake oil salesman, a real jerk, and my favorite, a KGB sorcerer. I first encountered Dyer on Warski Live in the heyday of bloodsport-style internet debates. He was debating an atheist, JF Gariepy, on theism. I recall JF invoking a hypothetical alternative universe occupied by self-determined meat machines to support his materialist worldview. The majority of the debate was Jay pointing out the impossibility of anyone living out such a worldview. The debate essentially was won when JF snapped at the host and admitted he wasn’t making his own arguments. They were just a chemically determined process.
Dyer is often criticized for being too severe, rude, uncharitable, or just plain “extreme.” This could be for arguing with clergy, calling an argument “low IQ and lame,” or making a two-hour video refuting what to a layman would seem a minor theological issue. Dyer takes seemingly minor theological matters as seriously as fans of what he calls sportsball take their favorite teams (if you’ve met a dedicated sports fan, you know there are really no minor issues). On the other hand, he is characterized as an unserious character, in part due to his forays into comedy (many of his impressions actually are funny: Zizek is my favorite) and his, at times, expressionistic online presentation, influenced in part by the unofficial Dyer channel mascot, Nicholas Cage. He is also dismissed for his “conspiratorial” analysis of geopolitics, i.e., the convergence of NGOs and the tech and entertainment industry with various intelligence agencies. While Pageau will analyze films from a more phenomenological perspective, Dyer will more likely analyze films with propaganda in mind.
From his telling, Dyer had a long and at times torturous journey into Orthodoxy. Coming from an evangelical Baptist upbringing, he transitioned into a more intellectually robust Presbyterian-Reformed tradition as a young man, then converted to Roman Catholicism before finding his home in the Orthodox Church after a period of questioning the Christian faith. With a Master’s degree (ABT) in English and Philosophy, On paper, he is equipped to evaluate different Christian worldview claims from a propositional and experiential level.
I have heard Jay say on multiple occasions that he wished someone had provided him with the information he presented. To my mind, he is someone who, by his nature, couldn’t help but agonize over finding the truth and would like to spare others as much of that angst as possible. He has also remarked that he would prefer not to do Orthodox apologetics and instead be able to focus on more creative pursuits, but that there is a dearth of robust but inquirer-friendly information.
Although this is slowly changing, I found this to be true. This may strike one as absurd. There is, after all, a seemingly endless fount of online information on Orthodoxy. But when I began investigating Orthodoxy there were few one-stop shops or public-facing Orthodox clergy presenting detailed analysis and/or criticism of such a wide range of issues as higher criticism, the formation of the canon, sola fide, the Eucharist, apostolic tradition, etc. Setting aside the faults or merits of his approach, what he provided for me was a consistent human presence covering, week in and week out, a wide range of topics through the medium of Youtube and other social media which you could interact with, even for all the limitations inherent in that technology.
(For some perspective, Patristic Nectar, the most well-known Orthodox channel fronted by a clergyman (Fr. Josiah Trenham), began making regular content on Youtube in 2019. However, it should be noted that until recently on that Youtube channel, comments were turned off, and there are no livestreams.)
I’m not qualified to evaluate Dyer’s defense of these topics with any authority but I found many of his arguments compelling and helpful, as have many others. For instance, when my professor of religion at undergrad went out of his way in a class on the Old Testament to point out inconsistencies in the different Gospel accounts, I was familiar with his historical-critical presuppositions, their shortcomings, and could with some certainty guess at his intentions.
We should remember that in an environment characterized by information overload, in-depth analysis is deemphasized, and in turn, differences are flattened over time. It has long been lamented that the public has become less informed as exposure to information increases.
In his book The Revolt of The Elites, Christopher Lasch has a chapter titled “The Lost Art of Argument.” In it, he juxtaposes the unmediated presidential debate between Lincoln and Douglas against the press-mediated debating format of his own time, which required its participants “to rely on their advisers to stuff them full of facts and figures, quotable slogans and anything else that will convey the impression of wide-ranging, unflappable competence” and “tends to magnify the importance of journalists and to diminish that of the candidates.” In the Lincoln-Douglas debate, by contrast, “They subjected their audience to a painstaking analysis of complex issues. They spoke with considerably more candor, in a pungent, colloquial, sometimes racy style, than politicians think prudent today.”
When debate becomes a lost art, information makes little impression. Lasch sums this up nicely: "When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise we take in information passively—if we take it in at all.”
Youtube has returned debate to the public square, although mediated by the digital. The biggest drawback to the digital mediation of debate that I can see is that it is impossible to punch another man in the face through the internet, the possibility of physical assault being the best deterrent to “crossing the line.” Regardless, for all the negative aspects of Debate Me Bro culture, argumentation provides an opportunity for clarity which is sorely lacking in current public life. The online debate culture is unsurprisingly most popular with young men. And, of course, anyone today with a fully fleshed-out worldview and claims to epistemic superiority is perceived by many as offensive. But in an age that is hesitant to define what a man or a woman is, it should behoove every sane person to pause a half-beat longer before chastising those willing to draw hard lines in public.
In Pt. III we’ll look at Authority, Hard Lines, & The Winsome Wars.
Great notes on debate.