I’ve been reading religious tradcon stuff lately, and it’s been making me impossibly angry in a way that very little else does, and I think I’ve finally put my finger on why:
It’s the monstrous, self-aggrandizing impiety.
Funny, I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis lately, and it’s your position that strikes me as monstrously impious.
So, to start with: you’re 100% correct about Lewisian Christianity being diametrically opposed to the thing at which I’m gesturing here. Lewis talks endlessly, in basically all his theological writing, about God being the wellspring of health and happiness and all-desirable-experiences in the world – and about godliness being the habit of aligning yourself with the natural laws and systems that will produce joy – and about wickedness specifically being a sort of perverse pride that drives people to cut off their noses to spite their faces, to reject their own welfare and fight for their own misery for (what amount to) stupid reasons.
(This is The Great Divorce in a nutshell: “Some people are literally so crazily egomaniacal that they would rather suffer forever than allow God to make them well, despite God’s infinite willingness to do that, and we should hold this against them rather than holding it against God.”)
And this is certainly the philosophical tradition within which the feelings of the tradcons are resonating. It’s the philosophical tradition that roots most modern Western Christianity with any pretensions to intellectual sophistication, as far as I can tell.
It strikes me as, well, impious. You can make of that whatever you like, I guess.
To some extent, it strikes me that way because of the faith tradition in which I was raised, and its attendant forms of casual chauvinism. Y’know: Lewisian thought is for lame casuals who have to be bribed with warm fuzzies in order to do their duty, those who truly honor their Lord spare no thought for their own well-being when they do so.
To a greater extent, it strikes me that way because of the epistemic contortions that Lewisian philosophy allows and demands. Everyone wants health and happiness and meaning. If your way of staking a claim to those things involves calling upon the alleged prime telos of the universe…well, there’s an enormous incentive to decide that the prime telos of the universe wants the same things that you independently want for other reasons. This taps into a lot of things that, from a secular intellectual perspective, I can’t help perceiving as wicked sins. It’s a really good way to blind yourself to the truths of reality, and indeed to your own psychology; it sends you down a spiral of ignorance. It is also a kind of defector’s move in the game-theoretic politics of human coexistence, in that it places your needs on a metaphysically higher plane than your opponents’ needs.