Media, Meaning, and the Long Road from the Printing Press to the Digital Medieval

Written mostly by my Ai agent - concept from and edited by myself

A lot of people assume that when Christianity starts to feel implausible, the problem is belief. Wrong doctrines. Weak arguments. Bad theology.

For many of us, the problem wasn’t belief at all. It was fit.

We still believed the claims. We just couldn’t inhabit the world those claims were supposed to describe. The modern way of knowing—get the right ideas into your head, assent sincerely, and you’re done—felt increasingly thin. Not false. Thin. Like a map that could no longer carry the weight of the territory.

What eventually became known as “TLC jargon” didn’t emerge because people wanted novelty or complexity. It emerged because a generation realized it couldn’t think its way back into faith. It had to relearn how to perceive reality.

This wasn’t a theological revolt. It was a crisis of attention.

Jordan Peterson: Story as Structure, Not Decoration

For many, Jordan Peterson was the doorway—not because he offered clean theology, but because he named something everyone felt but couldn’t articulate: reality is not experienced as raw data. It is experienced through story.

Postmodernism wasn’t entirely wrong in noticing this. Human worlds are structured by narrative. Meaning precedes analysis. And in the West, the narrative substrate holding civilization together is the biblical corpus, whether one believes it or not.

“Maps of Meaning” mattered because it re-legitimized religion as a civilizational operating system rather than a private hobby. You could criticize it, reject it, or reform it—but you could no longer pretend it was irrelevant.

Peterson also cracked open a cultural space where people disillusioned with progressive moralism could take religion seriously again without collapsing into reactionary politics. That mattered more than most people realized.

And beneath all of it was a moral claim that landed hard: voluntary self-sacrifice is the path out of chaos. That may not be full Christian proclamation, but it resonates closely enough with the Cross to reawaken moral seriousness. It certainly did for me.

From New Atheism to Evolutionary Seriousness

Around the same time, figures like Bret Weinstein helped normalize a new disposition: religion might be adaptive. Not merely delusional. Not merely obsolete. An evolved response to recurring human problems.

Even when framed in evolutionary terms, this was a massive shift away from the New Atheist mood. Religion was no longer treated as intellectual embarrassment. It became something that demanded explanation rather than dismissal.

This shift created the conditions for serious conversation rather than constant debunking. It allowed people to take religion seriously before they were ready to believe it was true.

Printing, Propositions, and the Long Drift from Embodied Knowing

One piece often left unnamed is the role of media in shaping how we know.

The modern West did not arrive at propositional, abstracted faith by accident. It emerged from a technological singularity: the printing press.

The press stabilized texts, standardized doctrine, accelerated literacy, and made Scripture widely accessible. The Reformation could not have happened without it. Luther’s critique, Calvin’s systematization, and the renewal of preaching and catechesis were inseparable from print culture.

But Luther and Calvin were not moderns in the way we are moderns.

They still inhabited an embodied, ritualized, cosmological world. Time was thick. The calendar mattered. Place mattered. Propositions were recovered within a sacramental ecology of meaning. Print amplified theology, but it had not yet severed it from formation.

That severance came later.

As print culture matured, the West internalized a new form of meta-cognition: reality could be analyzed, explained, debated, and mastered at a distance. Meaning became something you thought about, rather than something you were inducted into. Sincerity migrated inward. Faith became something you held rather than something you inhabited.

Descartes did not cause this shift; he named it.

By late modernity, the church had unconsciously adapted itself to this posture. Sacramental scaffolding was stripped away, leaving propositions unsupported by practices capable of carrying them.

Ironically, this success of print-based cognition produced skepticism. When belief is reduced to ideas alone, those ideas must justify themselves endlessly. Once plausibility structures disappear, belief becomes brittle.

The end of secularity does not look like a return to medieval ignorance. It looks like exhaustion.

The Original Corner: A Space for Reconstruction

Out of this exhaustion emerged what many think of as the original “This Little Corner”: not a church, not a movement, not a replacement for ecclesial life—but a conversational commons.

It became a safe haven for Christians and Jews trying to process the Peterson phenomenon, the meaning crisis, and the growing sense that modernity had hollowed out our capacity to recognize meaning as real.

Paul VanderKlay played a crucial role here. He functioned as a Christian synthesizer—confessionally rooted, shaped by Keller and Lewis, yet willing to host atheists, mystics, Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, and skeptics without collapsing differences. Christianity was treated as true, but people were treated as human.

The Corner wasn’t ecclesial—but it was formational. And that distinction mattered.

Pageau: Symbol Is Real, and Reality Scales

Jonathan Pageau intensified the conversation by reintroducing something modern people had forgotten how to see: reality is symbolic all the way down.

Symbols aren’t “just metaphors.” They are patterns that connect levels of reality. Meaning is woven into creation. The world is not flat. A table can be a table and also be a fractal echo of an altar—not poetically, but ontologically.

This medieval insight, grounded in Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, re-enchanted the world without collapsing into occultism or fantasy.

Pageau also said something painfully practical: go to church. Don’t just watch videos. Don’t just think harder. Submit to a form. Let the pattern work on you.

That sentence quietly separates people who remain in endless discourse from those who actually re-enter religious life.

Vervaeke: Why Meaning Collapsed

John Vervaeke supplied what had been missing: a cognitive explanation for why meaning collapsed in the first place.

Human beings are flooded with information. At every moment there are near-infinite possible interpretations of reality. Vervaeke calls this combinatorial explosiveness. If nothing constrains it, cognition fragments.

To survive, the mind must perform relevance realization—the ability to intuit what matters now, what can be ignored, and what deserves attention. This is not logical. It is participatory. It is trained through ritual, habit, and shared forms of life.

Modernity dismantled those training systems.

Religion was reduced to belief. Ritual dismissed as empty repetition. Formation collapsed into information transfer. We kept propositions and lost patterns.

The result was not enlightenment. It was meaning collapse.

The Four Ways of Knowing

Human knowing is ecological:

Propositional — knowing that

Perspectival — knowing what it’s like

Procedural — knowing how

Participatory — knowing by being

Historic Christianity always engaged all four. Modern evangelicalism often collapsed faith into the first alone.

Recovering the others produces an ecology of practices—prayer, sacraments, fasting, singing, silence—not as aesthetics, but as necessities.

This is why so many drift toward liturgical forms. Not for novelty, but for coherence.

Christianity Beneath the West

Tom Holland’s work reinforced this entire trajectory by showing that Western moral intuitions—human dignity, equality, compassion, concern for the weak—are not self-evident products of secular humanism. They are downstream of Christianity.

The West did not reason its way into these values. It was formed into them.

You cannot simply subtract Christianity and keep the moral world you prefer. The language of human rights, individual worth, moral outrage at oppression, and even the assumption that history bends toward justice all presuppose a Christian moral grammar.

The West is living on inherited Christian capital, whether it acknowledges it or not.

That realization matters because it restores Christianity’s plausibility at the civilizational level, not merely the personal one. Christianity is not just a private belief system competing in a marketplace of ideas. It is the deep architecture that made the moral intuitions of the modern West intelligible in the first place.

When that architecture erodes, moral language does not disappear—but it becomes unstable, performative, and increasingly coercive.

After Postmodernism

Metamodernism entered the conversation as a description of the emerging mood. After postmodern cynicism, it becomes possible to move again—without naivety—between premodern, modern, and postmodern frames.

Not to collapse them into one.

Not to pretend their tensions don’t exist.

But to integrate them in perspective.

This is what the Corner has been practicing informally all along. A refusal to return to premodern ignorance. A refusal to remain trapped in modern reductionism. A refusal to live permanently inside postmodern suspicion.

Integration without naïveté.

That posture explains why people can take science seriously, symbolism seriously, doctrine seriously, and ritual seriously—without needing any one of them to annihilate the others.

Myth, Story, and Return

Finally, myth re-enters—not as falsehood, but as narrative grammar.

Pageau’s universal history conversations, the work of mythic storytellers like Martin Shaw, and the many quiet journeys back into historic churches all share the same arc: myth restores meaning, but liturgy stabilizes it.

This is where Pageau’s core insight matters: symbolism does not “mean” something because we assign meaning to it. Symbolism happens.

Symbols emerge when patterns of reality, perception, and participation align. They are not arbitrary signs pointing elsewhere. They are real because they participate in the structure of reality itself.

A king is symbolic not because we imagine him to be so, but because hierarchy actually organizes reality.

An altar is symbolic not because it represents sacrifice, but because sacrifice is written into the grain of existence.

Bread and wine become sacramental not because we think hard enough about them, but because God meets us through material reality when we participate as we are given to participate.

Symbolism, in Pageau’s sense, is not decoration layered on top of the world. It is what becomes visible when reality is lived in its proper order.

This is why myth alone cannot sustain people indefinitely. Myth opens the imagination. Liturgy trains the body. Sacrament anchors the symbol in time, place, and community.

People come for the story.

They stay when the story points them back to embodied practice.

In Short

The jargon didn’t arise to obscure truth. It arose because many of us discovered that belief alone could not carry the weight of reality.

Meaning had to be recovered as something enacted, embodied, and shared.

And once that happens, “go to church” stops sounding like a platitude and starts sounding like wisdom.

Transjectivity and Sacramental Reality

Modern thought splits reality into objective facts and subjective meaning. Meaning becomes optional.

Vervaeke rejects this. Meaning is transjective—arising between persons and world through participation.

This is where sacramental ontology becomes inevitable.

A sacrament is not magic. It is not mere symbolism. It is a transjective event: God acting through material reality in a way apprehended only through embodied participation.

Bread and wine are not less than bread and wine.

They are more—because reality is layered and ordered toward communion.

Sacraments train relevance realization.

They constrain combinatorial explosion.

They stabilize meaning across generations.

They teach the body what the mind alone cannot hold.

The Medium Is the Message: Electracy and the Digital Medieval

Marshall McLuhan warned that media do not just carry content—they restructure consciousness.

Print culture trained abstraction, linearity, and interior belief. Digital culture does something else entirely.

Gregory Ulmer names this new regime electracy.

Electracy privileges image, affect, simultaneity, networked identity, mythic patterning, and participatory meaning-making. Knowledge becomes associative, ambient, symbolic.

This is why the digital world feels medieval.

Memes function like icons.

Platforms resemble fiefdoms.

Narratives outrank arguments.

Belonging precedes belief.

Scholars call this neomedievalism. The internet does not extend modernity. It dissolves it.

But electracy without formation produces chaos. Superstition. Conspiracy. Aestheticized nihilism.

The digital retrieves the medieval without discernment.

Sacramental Ontology as the Only Stable Answer

Sacramental ontology is not a preference. It is the only metaphysic robust enough to withstand electracy without collapsing into fantasy or control.

Sacraments bind symbol to reality.

They constrain meaning without flattening it.

They train attention non-algorithmically.

The irony is sharp: the most technologically advanced age in history is rediscovering that it needs medieval wisdom in order to survive itself.

This is not regression.

It is retrieval.

Not a return to superstition, but a return to sincerity—a way of inhabiting the world where belief, body, practice, and truth cohere.

In Short

The jargon didn’t arise to obscure truth. It arose because belief alone could not carry the weight of reality.

Meaning had to be recovered as something embodied, enacted, and shared.

And once that happens, “go to church” stops sounding like a platitude and starts sounding like wisdom.

Christianity in Transition

disclaimer* this is an essay contrived with ai from a transcript of my contributions from Philosphy Portal, where he invited me to represent a perspective from the TLC for his year in review for his Christianity in Transition series. You can get the whole conversation at the link at the end. I left em dashes in…

Much of the current conversation about Christianity assumes we are watching either a collapse or a revival. Decline versus renewal. Deconstruction versus return. But I don’t think that frame really captures what is happening.

What we are living through is not primarily a theological crisis. It’s a formational transition—a shift in how belief is recognized, transmitted, and trusted as the dominant medium of culture changes.

Christianity isn’t losing truth. It’s losing fit.

For centuries, Christianity operated within a literate world. Belief was stabilized through texts, institutions, sermons, catechesis, and slow generational transmission. Authority came from continuity—doctrine preserved over time, offices handed down, practices repeated. Arguments mattered because people were formed to receive them.

That world is no longer the one forming most people.

We now live in a compressed, electrate environment shaped by images, edits, cadence, affect, repetition, and presence: liturgy. Meaning is not primarily evaluated propositionally but perceptually. People don’t ask first, “Is this correct?” They ask, often unconsciously, “Is this person paying attention? Are they honest? Do they seem real?”

That doesn’t mean truth has changed. It means the conditions under which truth is recognized have.

This shift explains why generational differences feel so stark. Many Gen Xers and Millennials were still formed by literate institutions—churches, schools, denominations, books. Gen Z, by contrast, is being formed inside digital systems where authority emerges from tone, consistency, vulnerability, and endurance rather than credentials or formal office.

Younger people are not necessarily less serious. In many cases, they are more serious. But they are serious in a different register. They are trying to discern what is real in an environment saturated with performance.

This is also why certain figures loom so large in our moment, often in ways that confuse older frameworks. Dangerous or polarizing personalities are not powerful primarily because of the ideas they hold, but because of their media fluency; and in this case their level of “Electracy”. They understand how formation works in an electrate environment. They train perception, belonging, and certainty long before doctrine ever enters the picture.

Avoiding these figures or dismissing them as fringe misses the point. They are symptoms, not causes. They reveal a vacuum of formation—places where young people are hungry for meaning, clarity, and coherence, and are finding it wherever it appears most legible.

Neither of the dominant Christian responses has been adequate.

Liberal Christianity tends to respond with statements, denunciations, and moral clarity expressed in literate forms—press releases, essays, institutional language. These gestures often fail to form anyone because they don’t address how people are actually being shaped.

Reactionary Christianity, on the other hand, often mistakes certainty, hierarchy, and confidence for truth. It provides clarity without patience and order without love, collapsing symbolic depth into domination.

Both sides argue about what should be believed while largely ignoring how belief is being formed.

At some point, the question has to change.

Instead of asking who is right or wrong, conservative or progressive, institutional or anti-institutional, we have to ask: how do we know what is real at all?

For me, the answer isn’t found in moments of intensity or conviction. It’s found across time.

What is real is what survives failure.
What is real is what can be tested by forgiveness over ten or fifteen years.
What is real is what endures repair—marriages, families, communities, institutions that don’t disappear when people fall short.

Christianity, at its best, has never claimed to be true because it is persuasive in the moment. It is recognizable because it remains after things break. After enthusiasm fades. After certainty collapses. After we disappoint each other.

That’s a very different kind of truth claim.

It doesn’t panic when mediums change.
It doesn’t need to dominate the algorithm.
It doesn’t require constant affirmation.

It simply keeps showing up.

So the question facing Christianity right now isn’t whether it can win cultural battles or reclaim influence. The question is whether it can continue to be a place where reality can be tested over time—where truth is not merely asserted but lived, repaired, and recognized long after the noise passes.

The medium is changing.
The forms are shifting.

But what is real does not need to be optimized to survive.

link to Philosphy Portal’s Christianity in Transition Panel Discussion: https://philosophyportal.online/the-portal-year-end-2025

Some of the first music I was exposed to as a child were that of Amy Grant (Fat Little Baby) and Steve Green (People Need the Lord). My parents had a readical transformation in faith from prodigals to returning home to the faith of their families in the early 80’s. We had the ABC’s of scripture around our dinner table for scripture memory when I was 3 and 4 years old. I still remember the most important one according to my dad: “Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right” (Ephesians 6:1). We didn’t learn Ephesians 6:2: “and this is the first command with a promise, that you will live long if you follow this command” — paraphrase of course because I didn’t memorize that one when I was 4. Never figured out why my dad wanted us to learn that verse… I digress.

In middle school I was only allowed to listen to Christian music pre-middle school that was late Petra and early DC Talk. When I was ten my mom gave me Skillet and Bleach’s first albums, and if you had those you are truly OG.

When I was 15 I picked up a guitar in the year 2000, and couldn’t decide which direction to go: Creed or Chris Tomlin? Since my voice sounded more like a girl than a man still, Chris Tomlin and Chris Carrabba (Further Seems Forever and Dashboard Confessional) won the day. I quickly latched onto the modern worship wave sweeping the nation through movements like Passion and Hillsong United.

Music and songs moved from the campfire to the amphitheater, and as they made their way into sanctuaries designed for the voice and acoustic instrumentation like organ and piano, the sanctuaries began to transform into performing arts centers and amphitheaters depending on the size and what stage of church plant start-up you were in.

If Chris Tomlin was the telos of campfire songs on stage — think 3–4 chords on acoustic guitar with simple melodies — Hillsong United transmuted the movement into Delirious?/U2/Coldplay/Foo Fighters/Jimmy Eat World in church. Electric riff-driven and the trap drums as the foundation — using digital delay as the simulacrum of natural reverb — stadium rock was married to worship in ways that had not happened.

I could keep going on these illustrations related to Bethel/Jesus Culture’s contributions evoking spiritual eros into the scene, or how Planetshakers used pop music’s mechanisms to capture an energy that is hard to describe, or how Elevation married all this to East Coast rock sensibilities and later Gospel music through Steven Furtick’s engagement with Black church preaching culture and gospel music’s relationship to rock and roll and the church.

On the flip side of this movement were the more Reformed or theological versions happening simultaneously: Sovereign Grace, Mars Hill, the Gettys. And though these movements look or sound distinct, within them is a telos that has to do with reach, scale, and live production that is then laid back over, on top of local ecclesial bodies that in many ways the spirit of these songs and movements didn’t quite make sense, which is why certain versions of “contemporary worship” in church have been a big turn-off — unless you can capture the true spirit of these songs in their ontological form, which is arena/performing arts center, they ultimately fail to achieve the desired technical or produced outcome.

So this is where Evangelicalism finds itself in relationship to classical Protestantism and certain parts of Catholicism. And why Eastern Orthodoxy, that is the most stringent on liturgical continuity (though obviously has its own weaknesses in how those are translated in different contexts), seems like the only lifeboats in the onslaught of what Jordan Hall calls the Technotheocracy.

I peaked in this movement in 2016 before my life collapsed. Members from my old band now sell out arenas with Christian music’s biggest names and are in executive creative positions in divisions of top record labels, or play consistently in the Nashville country music scene. This spirit has a telos.

I have come to a place where I do not reject certain ways in which this culture and spirit formed me, as it is inextricably tied to who I am as a person and how I was formed spiritually and religiously as a Christian. But I have since hopped off the trend train related to CCM/worship culture and from my vantage see it as closely aligned with transhumanism in its relationship and dependence on what calls the machine.

Why do you need bodies when you can consume your worship from Apple Vison Pro or Screens and AirPods? What makes meeting together fundamental? Is it only a relational ontology for gathering as in Acts? Because can’t you do that too in the Metaverse: modern worship, preaching, and small group in the metaverse? Yeah, no problem! Or is there a reason more sacred that ties us to this world and to each other? Is there a law, or a deeper magic found at a stone table, at an altar that calls us to more than only relationship but into communion with God and to one another: The Sacrotheonomy — a life of communion held together by cruciform faith of Word and Sacrament.

If you find this topic fascinating watch my recent conversation with Courtney Trotter Phd student at Beeson Seminary as we tackle this difficult topic.

Disclaimer* I used ai for grammar and spelling check only, and had it leave a few of my original typos.

Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age (2007), describes how we moderns live in what he calls the immanent frame — a time where transcendence is obscured, where faith itself has been pressed into contestation, and where the air is thick with what I call the secular fog.[^1] It is not that God is absent, but that we struggle to perceive His presence through the haze of disenchantment.

When I was 31, my life collapsed under the weight of my own self-sabotage — a fractal betrayal of self all the way up and down the stack. Collapse, circa 2016: I lost ministry, I nearly lost my marriage, and the “systems” I’d trusted — the church-growth pipelines, the conferences, the Big Eva strategies — all felt like wax melting away beneath the heat of iconic truth. If I’m honest, I was living inside what I would only much later learn to name: a world where metrics and platforms are mistaken as the presence of God.

When everything fell apart, it wasn’t metrics or strategy that met me. It was an encounter at the altar. I saw Abraham’s dagger raised above Isaac outlined in a shock of lightning, and in that moment the Logos cut through me too. The Word of God exposed me, demanded truth, and called me to die. The practice of confession as a return to an altar of communion became not just a ritual but a rescue, and the intimacy of true relational communion held my faith and my marriage together when nothing else could. Word and Sacrament together — dagger and altar, Logos and Eucharist — began to reorder my life back into the intimacy of communion.

Almost immediately after my collapse, a strange algorithmic rabbit trail led me to Jordan Peterson. At first, he appeared through the political controversies swirling around him, but it was something deeper in his work that seized me — his explorations of meaning. He was the first to help me begin to understand what had happened in that vision of Abraham’s dagger.[^2] Looking at the story psychologically, he gave me categories to process why that encounter at the altar struck with such existential force. His lens opened space for me to see the knife not just as terror, but as truth cutting through illusion.

Many years later I discovered that I was not the first to see this tension. In the 19th century, John Williamson Nevin had fought against an earlier form of the same thinness that coerced me. In The Mystical Presence (1846), he warned that revivalism and church-growth methods reduced Christianity to “excitement” and “technique,” collapsing divine presence into human manipulation.[^3] His counter-vision was that the church is an organism, not a voluntary association — a body whose life flows sacramentally from Christ himself.

Nevin’s colleague Philip Schaff, in The Principle of Protestantism (1845), framed Protestantism not as a negation of Catholicism, but as a stage in the organic development of the one church. Catholicism, he said, carried the institutional and sacramental life; Protestantism brought the gift of Scripture and subjective freedom. But the telos was not rivalry — it was eventual synthesis, a higher unity in Christ.[^4]

Through my encounters with Jonathan Pageau, I began to see the gift and symbol of the divine beauty that Eastern Orthodoxy had been protecting across centuries. The way beauty, liturgy, and sacrament interwove in his vision confirmed for me that the treasures of Word and Sacrament were never meant to be torn apart, but to converge in a fuller witness of Christ’s incarnate presence.[^5] I had the distinct honor of attending a Divine Liturgy at Paul Kingsnorth’s church in Galway, Ireland, on my journey to Jordan Peterson’s ARC conference,[^6] with digital pastor Paul VanderKlay and itdhi sharnike Martin Shaw — an journey all of its own that I wrote about in my last article. https://christianbaxteryt.substack.com/p/midwest-estuary-the-homecoming

There across the ocean, in a small gathering of Christians, in the middle of John Chrysostom’s Divine Liturgy, as the gospel of St. Luke and the story of the Prodigal Son were read aloud in broken English through a thick Romanian accent, I wept. I wept at its truth and I wept at its beauty — the love of the Father transcending everything. I had been a Protestant at the far reaches of the evangelistic telos, and in that moment the Father was welcoming me home. Always a son, but not always in communion — there under the view and witness of my older brother, the Orthodox Church. And though I was not in that fractal layer of communion with them, I communed: with those men, and with that church, and in the life of Christ.

That vision struck me again when I heard Pageau tell Matt Fradd on Pints with Aquinas that the gift Protestants bring to Orthodoxy and Catholicism is their knowledge of Scripture. If Protestants bring the Word, Catholics bring the Sacraments, and Orthodoxy brings the Beauty, then Schaff’s dream of convergence already flickers to life — the secret sauce flowing both ways, toward a shared telos of communion. I had reached for this in my first conversation with Karen Wong on her podcast The Meaning Code, in an episode titled “Can the Telos of Worship Build a Meaningful Bridge Between Religious Traditions?” (2025).[^7] It might go without saying that the two most prominent Orthodox priests on YouTube both came out of the Reformed tradition.

Recently, in conversation at MidwestEstuary, Jordan Hall gave me the word for the false world I had been trapped in: Technotheocracy. It clarified everything. Technique masquerading as theology. This crystalzed a part of a conversation we had had a year prior where I outlined church growth startup culture as “The Gears of Isengard”

This spirit was made most manifest in the Acts 29 movement and the players it supported and gave birth to. I once attended one of their conferences where a prominent leader from an East Coast megachurch told all the lead pastors and executive pastors that every pastor or staff member has a number: 100, 350, 500, 1,000. And that number was the size of church they had the gifting or ability to manufacture out of their innate charisma. Of course it wasn’t phrased that way, but you get the point. The pastor of the church that hosted that conference took his life several years later, after his own version of self-sabotage ended his ministry there.

This is what happens when knowledge is collapsed into procedural and propositional modes, while participatory and perspectival knowing are only paid lip service, and denied any real utility.

A new friend I met at MidwestEstuary in 2025, Courtney Trotter, a PhD student at Beeson, drawing deeply from John Vervaeke, helped me see why this collapse is inevitable.[^8] Technotheocracy blinds relevance realization. When knowing is reduced only to propositions and procedures, it strips out the very modes by which we perceive the sacred. There is no space left for participatory knowing (where we indwell meaning) or perspectival knowing (where wisdom emerges from lived orientation). Without those, presence itself evaporates. What remains is only management and metrics divorced from their heritage of mystery abd metaphysics.

And after settling about from the wild ride of the embodied spirit of fellowship at MidwestEstuary a word began to take shape for me…

Sacrotheonomy.

It was born out of the fertile ground of Ross Byrd’s Parish Manifesto, his conversation with Jordan Hall on the divine economy and the commons, and Courtney’s application of Vervaeke and my incarnated experience within Big Eva. Out of these streams I began to see the shape of a life ordered by the cruciform of Word and Sacrament.

Sacrotheonomy is anti-rivalrous — it lives from the abundance of the divine economy, where trust becomes sacred again, retrieved from abstraction, and where the commons come alive once more, freed from the shackles of the technotheocracy and the spirit of fundamentalism alike, a place made of persons living in communion.

That is the contrast: not the secular fog pumped out endlessly by the smoke machine of technotheocractic spirit that pervades much of what drives Big Eva; but the true ordering of life by the fractal table of communion — Word and Sacrament together, dagger and altar, Logos and Eucharist. One world coerces vision until everything is flat and rivalrous; the other reorders life around the altar, grounded in nothing less than the Incarnation of Christ into the life of the world.

Sacrotheonomy: a life of communion held together by the cruciform of Word and Sacrament.

Disclaimer* this essay was crafted using the help of ai. I could not have brought these words together initially or as succinctly with out its help. So until it is no longer a bicycle…

Notes

[^1]: Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

[^2]: Jordan Peterson’s lectures on Genesis (2017) and Maps of Meaning (1999) shaped much of this early interpretation.

[^3]: John Williamson Nevin, The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (Philadelphia: 1846).

[^4]: Philip Schaff, The Principle of Protestantism (1845), trans. John W. Nevin.

[^5]: Jonathan Pageau, interviews, podcasts, and lectures on symbolism and liturgy (2017–present).

[^6]: Jordan Peterson’s ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) Conference, London, England, February 2025.

[^7]: Karen Wong, The Meaning Code, episode “Can the Telos of Worship Build a Meaningful Bridge Between Religious Traditions?” (2024).

[^8]: MidwestEstuary Conference, Chicago, 2025.

links

Sharing my story of Abraham’s Dagger with Ken Lowery

https://youtu.be/0MbUrTg00qo?si=uRHHHZ3eqe34Cykz

My Vlog with clips from Paul Kingsnorths church

https://youtu.be/TqSQuOwRuxA?si=58u-0YAQUttbMyv1

Can the Telos of Worship Build a Meaningful Bridge Between Religious Traditions

https://youtu.be/jh_oc9KYIGo?si=inOlmg-I6krmoQ5r

Church Growth as the Gears of Isengard with Jordan Hall

https://youtu.be/jtEkdkuJSXM?si=y9sntePVbqy0DLDd

That was the prelude.

What has unfolded is almost like a sacramental trilogy.

Part I – Pilgrimage (Baptism)

The Symbolic World Summit in Florida was my baptism.

I left Arkansas hardly believing I was about to step into a world that had existed only in my head for seven years. Then suddenly, there they were. I shook Jordan Peterson’s hand. I had a face-to-face conversation with Jonathan Pageau. And while I was there, Paul VanderKlay invited me to join him on his livestream — so I found myself reporting live from the conference to this little corner of the internet, the digital space and the embodied reality colliding in real time. I even spotted Grim Griz in the wild, living proof that even memes can incarnate.

Not long after, I found myself at a tables with Jordan Hall and Justin Wells — men who just weeks before, their digital faces had filled my monitor, digital voices in my headphones, on my own podcast just weeks earlier. Now we were breaking bread together, the digital made flesh.

This was not just a conference — it was an immersion. The people and ideas that had only existed in my mind, on YouTube, and in the symbolic imagination became embodied. Baptism is always about entering into a body, into waters larger than yourself. That weekend plunged me into a story already flowing long before I entered it, but now it was actually, really, and truly carrying me along.

I was on a classic church camp high and spiritually buzzed.

Part II – Adventure (Confirmation)

Then came ARC/Christ & Culture conferences.

If the Summit was about reverence, ARC was about risk. It was an adventure — fast-moving, high-stakes, international, unpredictable (spent the night in Ireland with my luggage trapped in London). I shook hands with both heroes and foils, found myself in rooms I could have never planned, and was graced with the choice to choose loyalty over opportunity.

This was confirmation, commissioning. A sending.

Here I wasn’t just observing, I was participating, I was playing. Like the laying on of hands, ARC pressed me into ownership of the voice I had been carrying. I took @The Corner” with me. The tests were real — of courage, discernment, and faithfulness — but so was the Spirit’s energy in fellowship.

Part III – Homecoming (Communion)

Now, the Midwest Estuary.

This gathering is different. It isn’t pilgrimage into someone else’s symbolic world, or adventure into a contested marketplace of ideas. It is communion.

Here I arrive not as a stranger seeking entrance, but as one already grafted into the tapestry. Many have already carried my voice in their earbuds, seen my face in conversation, or sat across from me on StreamYard. For some I will be a friend they’ve yet to meet; for others, a para-social familiar stranger. Either way, the belonging strangely precedes the moment.

Communion is not about aspiration — it is about presence. Shared bread, mutual recognition, life at the table. At Midwest Estuary, I don’t have to prove myself or win entry. I am here to strengthen relationships already begun, to deepen conversations already underway, and to notice how the space changes when I’m no longer standing on the edge, but somewhere the middle.

The Shape of a Journey

Seen together, this path makes sense:

• Prelude – The Leap of Faith: Responding to the call. Choosing to speak before the journey had shape.

• Pilgrimage – Baptism: from digital to embodied, seeking the sacred, consecrated as I walked through thresholds.

• Adventure – Confirmation: Tested, sent, owning my voice in risk and witness.

• Homecoming – Communion: Arriving among my own, not as an outsider but as a participant in shared life.

This little trilogy is not just travel blog — it is initiation, sending, and communion. It is the sacramental arc by which a scattered digital voice becomes part of a living body through the Fellowship of the Spirit.

If the pattern holds, then what follows Midwest Estuary will belong not to belong to me but to the communion of saints, singing the songs of ascent, as we climb higher up the mountain, coming back to the summit, yielding ourselves to this honest liturgy of meaning once more.

And even though don’t yet have the words to name all of this myself, I know enough to say it feels something like worship. And that is enough.

Disclaimer: If it’s not obvious, AI helped me craft this — and probably will into the future. I’m not much of a writer… yet.

Over the past year or so of "playing" on YouTube, I somehow LARP’d my way into becoming an actual quasi-YouTuber/podcaster—thanks to the pre-built community of lurkers, commenters, channel hosts, and, namely, Paul VanderKlay’s tending to a little corner of the internet known as the TLC (This Little Corner).

It’s real, but it’s highly decentralized and has developed from the bottom up as a digitized community of thoughtful people relating across philosophical, theological, social, and even political divides. And though it skews mostly Christian, its diversity tends to surprise many who attempt to integrate themselves into this space.

I've had roughly 100 conversations with people in this space or tangentially connected to it, as well as put out my initial 20 or so video essays outlining my framework for how I’ve been impacted by the deeper meaning-makers of the corner—Peterson, Pageau, Vervaeke, etc.

I’ve shared in various conversations and podcasts that my journey of stepping onto the internet to talk was, in many ways, the next step in a healing process. It stemmed from the destruction of my life after the betrayal of trust—within myself, my marriage, and my calling/vocation as a Christian worship pastor—leading to my being fired from the evangelical church I had helped pastor in my hometown.

I bring this up to say that my Christianity has been in transition as a result of that undoing.

Along the way in this podcasting journey, I crossed paths with Cadell, who identifies as a Christian Atheist. He stumbled upon my channel several months ago, which sparked a conversation between us and led to me hosting him on my podcast. Later, he invited me to participate in a series on his online philosophy collective, Philosophy Portal, as part of a two-part discussion titled Christianity in Transition. This series explores the changes I’ve seen and experienced in Christianity, as well as what’s been happening in my Little Corner of the Internet (TLC). And by some miracle, my schedule aligned to make it happen!

So, over the next month, 2nd-tier channel subscribers (YT- Faithful) and up on my YouTube channel will get access to this series on the Philosophy Portal Network. You can sign up here: [channel membership link].

And if you’re a 1st-tier member, consider bumping up your membership level for a month to gain access.

Huge thanks to Cadell for the opportunity to connect our networks! Below are the two podcast conversations Cadell and I have had leading up to this series on Philosophy Portal.

Hope to see you over there!

CB_YT is Headed to ARC and My First Year as a YouTuber

Legend

I want to go where the story goes. I want to keep telling myself a better story. I don’t want to just react to everyone else’s story—I want to live in the story that was made for me, maybe even for us….

If subsidiarity is real, then it’s real. And if it isn't, then I'm just a hedonist—or maybe a sadist. Or maybe there is truth to both of those statements…

The Alliance of Responsible Citizens - ARC 2025

I want to go to the source. Say what you want about Jordan B. Peterson: that he has lost his way, sold out, that his new albums don’t hit as hard as the first one, that he isn’t Christian enough yet… whatever. But many things changed culturally in 2016 directly because of him or because of things happening around him, around all of us. And they continued to change. They are still changing—like in 2020 when Peterson fell, and people like Jonathan Pageau, John Vervaeke, and Paul Vanderklay humbly rose into the salience of the moment.

And the seeds were planted. The logoi went out. The lessons were taught: Symbols, Consciousness, Community. They spread, reaching the high-in-openness, high-in-agreeableness, low-in-agreeableness theological, philosophical, and psychological autodidacts on YouTube—where this whole thing began in the first place. Conversations happened, communities brewed, and now those planted seeds are sprouting: sprouting at ARC, the Symbolic World, the Lectern, and in Estuaries. The scene gathered underneath, in broken clock towers, on Fridays, where people on the quest for the grail country gather for hours on end—randos upon randos, just chatting. Those seeking the code beneath the code: from NorCal to the Netherlands; from Greece to China.

It is this little corner of the internet, and it is changing the world—or at least mine.

Lore

Many of the people leading ARC were impacted by Peterson’s work—or maybe more by his stance. Some people don’t have 40 hours a week to devote to post-grad/pre-grad YouTube. Rather, people gathered around his courage, even around his missteps and mistakes. Artists, theologians, philosophers, scientists, comedians, and politicians. And so, yeah, Peterson has the gold. He has the gold because he was the first to fight the cultural dragon and pierce its side. He was the first to wound it—but he did not walk away unscathed. It wounded him.

And it was not defeated, for it won’t truly be until it is defeated. It fought back. Novel Coronavirus joined forces with the Woke Marxist Mind Virus and the worst authoritarian impulses of our time. And then Peterson was gone—for two years—while "mostly peaceful" riots and wars of races raged in the "Summer of Love."

Two years.

The novel virus was the last burst of fight and foul that the dragon spat in an attempt to subdue the independent spirit of Western culture. It was a dark time. But others rose up and joined forces, and the dragon’s grip on Western civilization loosened. It, too, was defeated—forced to return to an empty, treasureless cave in 2024, but not without cost. And not without damage. Not without broken trust in every sector: faith, community, and country.

Saga

The knights of our culture now have to ask themselves: what do you do once you've won the war, defeated the dragon, and collected the gold? Do you keep fighting because it’s all you’ve known? Do you retreat to comfort and gloating? Do you assume the throne, sit on it, and grow fat in your newfound decadence and victory? Or… do you go out and rebuild the broken, battered kingdom?

Rebuilding after the war is neither exciting nor engaging. But it is right. And it is an opportunity. Do you go out among your people and face a broken reality once again? Do you lay down the sword and pick up the hammer? Put on the gloves? Shatter the fourth wall and stand by those who had all but lost hope? Can you inspire younger men once again? Can you do the harder work of rebuilding broken trust in the disenchanted?

Because there will be another dragon—possibly more vile than the first. The work never ends. Not until this world passes away.

But we are still in this world, so we still need to do the thing.

Emotional

Even in this space, in this corner of the internet, I have spent the last year meeting people, building trust, cultivating friendships, and supporting worthy causes. I know that when I showed up on this scene, trust was not given freely. But hospitality was. The invitation was always there.

I showed up on YouTube because something truly strange was happening. After watching something on a Friday morning live stream over on Paul Vanderklay’s channel, I saw a guy with a sizable following just open up his channel and let people flood in—not only to feel important but to be important. And not just to hope to be a part of something but to actually be a part of something. Something digital, yet something real.

And I was seeking to be a part of it, too.

I chased the Logos down the track. I unpacked my story in my CB_YT "A Primer" playlist. I did a speed rando with Paul. I was invited on Chad’s Friday Morning Nameless podcast. Then I started building my own conversation space—what most people call a podcast. And after two conversations, I realized: I’m going to Symbolic World. Then I got into Jordan Hall’s algorithm and had a conversation with him. Within three months of emanating into this digital space, I met Grim Griz in the wild, shared a drink and meal with Nate Hile, toured an Orthodox church with Jonathan Pageau, annoyed Richard Rohlin with my questions about universal history, shared a meal and some tears with Jordan Hall, swapped stories with Martin Shaw, and shook Jordan B. Peterson’s hand.

And the year went on.

The Journey to ARC

I took time at the end of the year to really ask myself: if I could do something truly meaningful for this channel, what would it be? What could I invest in that would bring the most value? And I quickly knew it wouldn’t be buying better gear, more books, or more digital access. It would be, again, going on another pilgrimage to the source.

So I’m going to ARC.

And I’m taking you all with me.

Channel members will have priority in the grift, so sign up for that. But also, I’ll be carrying the TLC banner for all of us—right next to Paul.

Because what business does a washed-up worship pastor, travel nurse, micro-YouTuber have being at ARC?

The answer is simple: because of this relationship I have with you guys here. Because I can. Because I want to.

So I am going.

And you’re coming with me.

See y’all there.

Yours truly,

Christian Baxter, better known as C-Bax in these here parts of the internet.

Watch the dramatized essay version on YouTube: Video Essay