Is modern life quietly replacing God with something else? In Episode 60 of Thinking Christian, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Farma welcome back historian and theologian Dr. Kevin Flatt (Associate Dean of Humanities, Redeemer University) to explore one of the most urgent and underexamined ideas in Christian thought today: Sacred Social Order.

Every civilization in human history — from ancient China to Mesoamerican empires to early Christian Europe — understood that human society must align with something higher than itself. That intuition isn't gone. It's been replaced. By nationalism. By progressive identity movements. By civil religion. By the cult of the individual.

In this wide-ranging conversation, James, Ashish, and Kevin map how the West lost its sacred social order, what quietly took its place, and what the Church must

recover — including a radical rethinking of time, space, the Sabbath, and Christian catechesis.

If you've ever felt like the world is moving too fast, or that something foundational has been hollowed out — this episode names what it is.

Key Takeaways:

• What "Sacred Social Order" means — and why virtually every pre-modern civilization shared it
• How secularization doesn't create a vacuum; it creates replacement religions (nationalism, identity politics, civil religion)
• Why the American founding contains an unresolved ambiguity between Christian and Deist foundations — and what happened when that ambiguity tilted secular
• How technology is catechizing us into seeing time and space as things to master, not gifts to steward
• The striking biblical parallel between Sabbath laws and land laws — and what exile means for a church that ignores both
• Why literal gardening might be one of the most counter-cultural spiritual practices a Christian can adopt today
• What a Christian catechism for our moment needs to address — and what sacred values compete against it

Get early access and a bonus with a Patreon membership.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel

To read James's article on this topic, check out his author page on Christianity.com.

📢 Stay Connected & Keep Growing!

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to Thinking Christian so you never miss an insightful conversation!

Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

What if secularization isn't the decline of religion — but the replacement of one social order with another? In this episode, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Varma sit down with Dr. Kevin Flatt, professor of history at Redeemer University and author of Secularization, Social Order, and World History, to unpack one of the most provocative frameworks in contemporary Christian thinking: Sacred Social Order.

Kevin introduces the idea that every human culture — until the modern West — has organized its life around something higher than itself. He argues that what we call "religion" is actually a uniquely Western, uniquely modern compartment, while Sacred Social Order is the operating system beneath all of culture. From there, the conversation moves through Christian nationalism, the liberal firmware of Western democracy, Philip Reif's cultural warfare thesis, and why your children's public school is not religiously neutral.

If you've ever sensed that something deeper than a culture war is unfolding — that the ground itself has shifted — this episode gives you the language to name it.

Key Takeaways:

• What "Sacred Social Order" means, and why it's a more accurate lens than "religion" for understanding culture
• Why secular order isn't neutral — it has its own values, telos, and demands on individuals
• How the Christian nationalism debate connects to identical movements in India, Iran, China, and the Muslim world
• Why Philip Reif's "third culture" thesis is partly right — and where Kevin respectfully pushes back
• Why public education is never neutral, and what Christians should really be asking about schools
• Why the gym or the yoga studio may be shaping your theology more than Hinduism is
• The Labubu doll illustration: how misidentifying spiritual threats reveals our blind spots

Get early access and a bonus with a Patreon membership.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel

To read James's article on this topic, check out his author page on Christianity.com.

📢 Stay Connected & Keep Growing!

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to Thinking Christian, so you never miss an insightful conversation!

Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Is "Cultural Christianity" a bridge to the gospel — or a counterfeit that replaces it? In this episode, Dr. James Spencer (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) and Dr. Ashish Varma respond to James Wood's widely-discussed First Things article, In Defense of Cultural Christianity. Together they unpack why calling a civilisation "Christian" when Christ is not its governing authority is not just imprecise — it's theologically catastrophic.

From the Christendom narrative and American civil religion to the habituation of virtue, abortion statistics, and a profound meditation on Pentecost in Acts 2, this episode models what serious Christian thinking looks like when it refuses to foreclose on the full authority of Jesus Christ too soon.

If you've wrestled with Christian nationalism, the "good, true, and beautiful" in culture, or what it means to vote as a follower of Jesus, this conversation is essential listening.

Key Takeaways:

• Why "a culture influenced by Christianity" is an insufficient — and potentially dangerous — definition of "Christian culture"
• The concept of "inappropriate foreclosure": closing off our understanding of the good too soon and using that partial view as if it were complete
• How Robert Bellah's concept of American civil religion explains why Christian language gets co-opted by government without actually conforming people to Christ
• Why the Book of Acts — specifically Pentecost and the Gentile inclusion — fundamentally disrupts any vision of Christianity as a singular cultural program
• The Light Bright metaphor: God is the light source; culture is the peg pattern. Christians must point people behind the pegs to the light itself
• Why policy-driven virtue formation (habituation) has measurable real-world limits — and what the abortion statistics during different administrations actually reveal
• How Dr. Varma's personal experiences — from campus life on 9/11 to being randomly selected in airports — illustrate why Wood's "civilisational benefit" narrative forecloses on the experiences of many believers

Get early access and a bonus with a Patreon membership.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel

To read James's article on this topic, check out his author page on Christianity.com.

📢 Stay Connected & Keep Growing!

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to Thinking Christian, so you never miss an insightful conversation!

Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.