Desert Encounters: Evolutionary Culture and the Christian Message | thebereancall.org

Desert Encounters: Evolutionary Culture and the Christian Message

September 8, 2023
Carl Teichrib

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Carl is a researcher, writer, and lecturer focusing on the paradigm shift sweeping the Western world, including the challenges and opportunities faced by Christians. Over the years he has attended a range of internationally significant political, religious, and social events in his quest to understand the historical and contemporary forces of transformation – including the Parliament of the Worlds Religions, Burning Man, and the United Nations Millennium Forum.

Carl’s biases are transparent: he embraces an evangelical Christian perspective, is pro-liberty versus politically imposed equality, pro-individualistic versus consensus collectivism, and pro-free market.

Carl’s website: www.gameofgods.ca

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Transcript:

Rob: Okay, Carl’s gonna open with a one-minute long video to set up his talk. It’s a one-time only, so if you’re out eating peanuts, you might just miss a great one-minute video. So, Carl Teichrib is cuing it up.

Carl: Yep, hang on…

Rob: Hang on, he said.

Carl: All right! Okay, hang on…beautiful. And start.

[Video plays]

Carl: So, have you seen them? Have you seen them? They’re in Walmart, they’re at the gas station, they’re in your community. As I was driving across, beginning on Monday, to drive to Oregon from Indiana, I ran across them in Illinois. I drove past them in Iowa. Going through parts of Nebraska and Wyoming, I repassed them. I am taking a little bit of a longer route for personal reasons, because I wanted to see some country, and I am going through northern Nevada. And then angled this way up from the south to the north to Bend. And I was passing them coming down! Now, I know what to look for. I know what to look for, because I’m part of their culture, in the sense that I intersect with their world. And of course I’m talking about those who are going to Burning Man, which begins officially on Sunday morning. And as Bend, Oregon is the northern gateway for those coming through from Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, they’re all right now funneling through your town. And so I find this to be a treat, because I give this lecture all over the place, because the culture I’ll be talking about, the movement that I will be discussing, and the worldview behind it is certainly global in its orientation. But this is extra special, because it’s here! It’s right here. And it’s all the way down your West Coast and into Nevada and the surrounding states.

So this afternoon, I want to give you some insights into a movement that is all around you. It may be part of your family, it may be part of your community. I want to give you insights into that movement and into that worldview. I want to add a biblical perspective to it, and then in the hopes that you will actually walk away not just simply with more information, because we can have information overload, but that you’re actually encouraged, that you can go and approach these people and begin having conversations. Because guess what? They’re your neighbors. They’re your family, maybe.

So let’s dive in a little bit. I’m gonna give you a little bit of background on myself, kind of just open this all up. We’ll end up jumping into some of the cultural dynamics behind this, diving into the 1960s. We’re gonna be looking at all kinds of things.

So a little bit about myself: I live in rural Manitoba. This is where I grew up, out in the prairies. I feel really good in the prairies. Driving across Wyoming was like, oh, it was awesome! Nebraska, loved it! It was fantastic. I feel like I’m at home, just with more hills! I’ve been engaged in researching global transformation since 1992 and full time since ‘97. From ‘97 to 2001, Gary Kah invited me to come to Indiana to be a part of his team as his director of research. And so I helped him in that capacity, and I still assist with his research work. 

Then I was freelancing from 2001, and for a time I had my own publication called Forcing Change examining the social, cultural, political, and religious forces of change, and how it’s impacting the Christian community. And by the way, at the end of this presentation, I’ll give you a website where you can go to download all of the archives of that magazine.

And then I am the author of the book Game of Gods: The Temple of Man in the Age of Reenchantment. And this book has a chapter dedicated to this cultural movement and its larger implications. 

I also teach a modular course on secular and pagan trends at Miller College of the Bible. So you’re getting a little glimpse, just a sliver, of what my 50-60 students per course have to endure for 20 hours. It’s great! We have a good time. Trust me, it’s actually a lot of fun. But it’s heavy duty stuff.

So yesterday I brought forward the subject of oneism versus twoism, and I’m just going to remind you of that. The dominant position in the world, the dominant perspective, is this idea of oneism: God, man, and nature sharing the same essence. The biblical view is, “No, God is separate, distinct, holy.” And we’ll look at a few Bible verses that point to this fact. 

Doctor Peter Jones has done a remarkable job of giving this model, and it’s a model that we have used extensively dealing with our pagan culture. Peter Jones puts it this way: “If God and nature make up reality, then all is two, and everything is either Creator or creature. On the other hand, if the universe is all there is, then all is one.” And of course, how you answer this will determine so much: ethics, morality, law, governance, religion, you name it. Even your work ethic. 

So my class has to go through a little bit more complicated of a diagram than this, but you get the point. And just keep this in your back pocket. In fact, I hope it will stay in your back pocket. Something to remember: religion, which is man’s relationship to God, very simply defined, religion informs philosophy. Philosophy is nothing more than man’s understanding of reality, or the grasping to understand reality. Philosophy informs art and culture, which is nothing more than man’s expressions of reality. And then this informs politics–simply put, man’s relationship to man. So if you get the top part wrong, the rest of it cascades down. Hmm! Sounds like today.

So, yeah, we’ve got it wrong, don’t we? We have a oneist perspective and that shapes it all. Yes. And yet when we look at the Bible, we see that God is Other. He is distinct. He is exalted. Psalm:113:4-6: “The Lord is high above the nations, his glory above the heavens. Who is like the Lord our God? Who dwells on high? Who humbles himself to behold the things that are in the heavens and in the earth?”

First Chronicles 29:11-13: “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness, the power, and the glory, the victory and the majesty. For all that is in the heaven and in earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head over all. Both riches and honor come from you, and you reign over all. In your hand is power and might. In your hand it is to make great and to give strength to all. Now therefore, our God, we thank you and praise your glorious name.”

Notice this cause and effect that’s happening? We recognize our Lord is the One who is the King! He is the One who sets all things. He is above heaven, above earth. And so our response should be now praise! Praise should be pouring out from us, ‘cause we realize, Yes! We know who our Creator is! We know who He is!

Revelation:4:11: “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power…” Notice why: “...for you created all things, and by your will they exist and were created.” It really is about the question of the creation-Creator distinction, which is why Romans 1 really is the passage for our age, and we should probably go into it at some point. But you need to come and sit in my 20 hours of lectures for that, I guess.

First Timothy 1:17: “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God who alone is wise be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” 

So there’s no confusion, there should be no confusion for us as Christians, no confusion, in terms of who we look to. We look to the Creator, we look to God, we look to Jesus Christ, the Maker of heaven and earth. And we don’t bow our knee to creation, whether it’s to man or to nature or to something that we build, art, or any type of devisings. 

And then of course we see Colossians, and I gave this passage yesterday, but it’s a good reminder: “For by him [speaking of Jesus Christ] all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers.”

By the way, every knee will bow, okay? We just take that to mean ourselves and maybe our neighbors around us. No! Every knee will bow, and that means the very principalities and powers of this world, even in the spiritual realm, they bow. You bow in love, they bow in judgment. So why are you afraid? Think about it. 

“All things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things, and in him all things consist. And he is the head of the body of the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he may have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in him all the fulness should dwell, and by him to reconcile all things to himself by him, whether things on earth, or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of his cross.”

Did you notice all the different things that are taking place here? He has to use nature and he has to use our work and he has to use our righteousness…no, no, no! Nothing! It’s all Him. All Him. 

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at how we are to engage as truth tellers, telling the truth of who Jesus Christ is and who our Lord and Savior is to a pagan culture. There are three primary models of outreach in the New Testament. And this is important to work through, and we’ll just do it briefly.

So model number one is the appeal to scriptural authority. It’s exhorting and teaching specifically to those who make a claim that they have a foundation in Scripture. The best example is Jesus when He’s talking to the religious rulers of His day, and even to His own disciples, when He’s saying to them, “Have you not read?” It’s an appeal back to scriptural authority, because that’s where you’re making your claim, let’s reel you back in and land on this for a while. And so this is our model inside the church because, I hate to say it, but it’s true: our church is a mission field. It might even be the most difficult mission field we are facing, okay? That is our model for our own churches.

Model number two is the recognition of the personal, and it’s seasoned both with truth and grace. Again, Jesus Christ is our example. To the sinners, He goes to those who are maligned, mistrusted, and shunned. He dines with tax collectors. He spends time with those who are considered by the culture around them to be unworthy. He goes to the woman at the well and He makes it very clear: “I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” And if you notice, especially with the woman at the well, He enters her territory, and He spends time with her, and He engages in a conversation where He probes in such a manner that it compels a conversation and brings it back around to Himself. But He’s not condemning her. She’s condemned already. 

We forget that little piece of John:3:17, okay? He’s come into the world, and now He is coming to save the world because we are condemned. He’s not coming to condemn the world, we are condemned. And so that’s the approach Jesus is taking with the woman at the well. It’s a beautiful example.

And then model number three is the model that we’re going to find ourselves using more and more, and that is to acknowledge God as Creator, to be ambassadors for Christ in what is essentially a pagan culture. So Paul and Barnabas in Lystra in Acts 14 is a good example. He makes it very clear: “Look, we serve the living God, not your gods of nature, not your idols of stone and wood. We serve the living God, the One who made heaven, the earth, the seas, and all things in them.” A very strategic approach: to juxtapose their worldview against the biblical worldview. 

So what now then shall we be, seeing as we are living in a very challenging time? Well, 2 Corinthians 5 tells us what we are: “Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God were pleading through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God, for he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”

Notice this is not a metaphor. This is not a metaphor. Paul uses other descriptive language describing the Christian walk. He talks about us running the race, to be like an athlete. He talks about us being as a soldier, or a farm laborer. We understand that. I grew up on a farm, I’m like, “Yep, I get this!” I’m not a very fast runner anymore. I used to be a pretty speedy guy, especially when somebody was mad and I was scared. But we all get the metaphors! This is not a metaphor. You are an ambassador. 

Audience: Praise God!

Carl: Right! So the question has to be asked: what does an ambassador do? Has anybody here, and I’m hoping there might be a hand or two up, I ask this question all the time, very rarely do hands go up–has anybody here spent time rubbing shoulders with the diplomatic community? Anybody? You’ve spent time over coffee with ambassadors, you’ve listened to them, you’ve interacted? Anybody? No, okay. One hand, one hand. Perfect. Okay, thank you, two! So how do you know what an ambassador does? 

Audience member: Represents his country.

Carl: Represents his country! There’s a little bit more to it. Years ago I had the opportunity of spending an evening listening to the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. This is right after 9/11. And it was in Chicago, and the US ambassador was describing his task to us, and it was remarkable! I walked away from there going, “I get it now! I get it now!” So I placed this within the context of our “Christianese,” or our Christian language. First, this is what you are. You are the official and legal–we forget that part often–we are the official and the legal representatives of Jesus Christ here on earth. There is no calling higher than that. Period. It is not what you are becoming. Mm-mm. It is what you are. Are you living it now? That’s the question. 

So you represent your government to a foreign land, and the foreign land is all around you. An ambassador has to take the time to know his king’s power and position, because now you represent his interests and not your own. You make sure that your interests align with his. The ambassador to Saudi Arabia made that very clear. 

We also need to work now to understand the customs and the culture of the foreign land that we find ourselves in, a very, very important part of what an ambassador does before he ventures into that foreign field. And again, the ambassador to Saudi Arabia made that very evident. 

Noting this: that you are set apart from that culture, you are…how does that go? “You are in the world, but not of the world”? Hmm? You are set apart from that culture, but you cannot be uninformed as to how that culture operates. And there are two reasons: one, so that you can effectively communicate your king’s message to that culture; and second, and this is an important part of the diplomatic community as well, so you can alert the rest of the diplomatic community to the challenges that are now bumping up against the king’s message. Hey, hey, there’s danger! Hey, there’s things coming that you all need to be aware of. Be on guard. Set your hearts, stand on the firm foundation. So this is what you are, folks. Literally what you are.

A great example is found in Acts 17. Turn to it in your Bibles to Acts 17. We’ll read this, because this is by far, I think, the most important model of how to engage in a pagan culture as ambassadors for Christ. And Paul really brings this forward for us. So we read verses 16-32, and that way I can skip some of the very difficult to pronounce names. 

“Now, while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over to idols. Therefore, he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with the gentile worshipers, and in the marketplace daily with those who happened to be there. Then certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered him, and some said, ‘What does this babbler want to say?’ Others said, ‘He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods,’ because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the area of Pagus, saying, ‘May we know what this new doctrine is of which you speak? For you are bringing some strange things to our ears. Therefore we want to know what these things mean.’ For all the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing. Then Paul stood in the midst of the areopagus and said, ‘Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious, for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: ‘TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore, the one whom you worship without knowing, him I proclaim to you. God, who made the world and everything in it, since he is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands, nor is he worshiped with men’s hands as though he needed anything, since he gives to all life, breath, and all things. And he has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwelling, so that they should seek the Lord in the hope that they might grope for him, and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring. Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought to not think that the divine nature is like gold, or silver, or stone, something shaped by art and man’s devisings. Truly these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has appointed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom he has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising him from the dead.’ And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, while others said, ‘We will hear you again on this matter.’”

We read that, and I don’t think we quite grasp the tension that’s in the air around this situation. So Paul is in the heart of the Greco-Roman pagan worldview. He’s in Athens, and he is spending time giving a survey of the community, so to speak, and he recognizes their spiritual situation, and he engages with the Jewish and Gentile believers. Then he encounters the philosophers and is taken to the council. Now, he’s taken to the council of the areopagus, and the council of the areopagus is literally the philosophical religious judges of the city. And he is now being examined. He’s not just having a casual conversation. They are probing him. In fact, there’s a long history with this council, and this council arises out of pagan mythology and they are the gatekeepers for the city. If Paul fails here, he’s toast. And so now he has to give an account. But it’s not just that, there’s a backdrop behind him, because the areopagus is a shoulder of the hill that’s attached to the acropolis, and on top of the acropolis is this massive temple of Zeus, the temple of Athena, the temple of Nike. So the backdrop is not palm trees and, you know, nice placid waters. No, it is the most dominant pagan temples that oversee the city. And there stands Paul in front of these judges, giving an account in the heart of paganism. That’s the context.

Intimidating? Yeah. I would think so. And so he launches into the gospel by leveraging their own culture, and uses this monument that he sees to the “unknown God” as a door to begin having a discourse of who this God is. And notice he’s presenting the character of God, the character of this true God, that He is the Creator, He is distinct. He is juxtaposing, and he knows he’s juxtaposing it, against their world view, and this is to the ears of the council. This would be revolutionary. This would be completely revolutionary. 

And so he presents repentance and judgment, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and he understands their worldview enough that he quotes their own philosophers to them. Paul is a learned man, and so he is demonstrating that as he is making his case.

What’s the response? It’s the same response you’re gonna get. Some are gonna mock you, others are gonna say, “I wanna hear more.” And some may even come to Christ, because it’s the Holy Spirit that changes the hearts, not our persuasive arguments. It is the Holy Spirit. Paul is just a messenger, as you are as well.

So we’re gonna shift gears a little bit. We want to go into our modern context before we jump into transformational culture specific to Burning Man. But if you’re part of my class, you would have to know this for the exams. Again, it’s actually a little more detailed in my class, so we could divide up the last roughly 1500 years or so into four major epochs. And in fact, the last–the three major epochs we’ll be dealing with are all relatively new. 

So the first one is the Christendom, the era or what we would call Christendom–church influence over state and culture, however that may look. There was a Christian ethos of sorts in terms of institutions and ethics, and God’s Word was applied in life, even though, of course, there were lots of gatekeepers to that.

And then the era of modernity begins in roughly the 1700s as we now begin to reject the church. We begin to reject God’s Word. The Reformation did wonderful things, but at the same time, it also shook up the questions of authority too. And so modernity comes into play as now man looks for the reasoning behind science, the omnipotence of human reason. And we see materialism and science rising as king, and with it eventually comes Marxism and socialism and positivism. The list goes on. We see a church-state separation, and by church, I’m not talking about the Roman Catholic Church here, I am meaning that general ethos. There is now a division between the Christian worldview and what the state and culture does. 

And then postmodernism, the 1960s until now. Modernity did not give us some good results. It gave us the atom bomb. It gave us World War I, the first industrial killing field where 7,000 men a day were slaughtered for four years. And so there’s a very unique cultural situation that happens during the ‘60s. If you were a young man in the ‘60s, and some of you were, I was just a little shyster. If you were a young man in the ‘60s, your grandfather very possibly fought in World War I. Your dad may have been in World War II. Your uncle or older brother may have been in the Korean Conflict. Your friends, and maybe you, were in Vietnam. 

And so there was a period, especially within America’s cultural life, where your world was rocked. Really, the whole world was rocked. Asia was leveled. Europe was leveled. But by the time the 1960s come around, there is this sense of an–almost an urgent rejection of modernity and what it did. It gave us Auschwitz. It gave us all kinds of things that we realized had stripped humanity of our soul. But we were not gonna go back to say, “Jesus is our King.” No, no, no, we will now have nothing but questions. We question authority, but we don’t want and we don’t desire answers. And so we enter this realm of what we call postmodernism. No absolutes, no frameworks, questions with no real answers. Now it is a vacuum of meaning and purpose. And at the same time, a new way of thinking is birthed to fill that vacuum. It begins in the ‘60s as well, but by the year 2000 it really starts to blossom all on its own, and it’s called “reenchantment.” It’s not a word I made up. Reenchantment is this idea that now we can find a sense of purpose and wonder and mystery by looking at the cosmos and being part of a collective. The experience of “we,” not just “me.” And it becomes the age of oneness. 

So this was published by Stanford University Press, 2009. The title of the book is The Reenchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age. It’s not a book on spirituality, these are secularists. But this is what they were already working through. All the italics are in the original. “If the world is to be reenchanted, it must accordingly be reimbued not only with mystery and wonder, but also with order, perhaps even with purpose. There must be a hierarchy of significance attaching to objects and events encountered. Individual lives and moments within those lives must be susceptible again to redemption. There must be a new, intelligible locus for the infinite. There must be a way of carving out within the fully profane world a set of spaces which somehow possess the allure of the sacred. There must be everyday miracles, exceptional events which go against and perhaps even alter the accepted order of things. And there must be secular epiphanies, moments of being in which, for a brief instant, the center appears to hold, and the promises held out of a quasi-mystical union with something larger than oneself.” 

We could close this talk right here, because I just described Burning Man. Completely. 

So is reenchantment the New Age? No, it’s the outgrowth of it, and the New Age actually could be placed within it. The New Age movement tended to focus on the self, self-realization, self-actualization, awakening your divine self. Reenchantment says it’s about the “we.” Your purpose and meaning is found in the group in this sense of a communal experience. And so we seek that with our now…our experiences with nature, and now the self is being absorbed and finding new meaning and purpose within the wholeness of a community. So it’s viewed as social, communal, and spiritual, and we feel our oneness.

So let’s go to the 1960s. I don’t remember it! I was too young. Okay? I was born in ‘68, so I just…I’m there, but not. So my friend Roger Neill writes this–he was there, he was part of it: “In the 1960s a revolution had indeed taken place, a revolution in mind and praxis that changed the course of modern history. A cultural and political earthquake took place in the West. I am of that generation that got shaken. The true aftermath of that earthquake wasn’t experienced at the time,” and that’s really an interesting thought. I know there’s some folks in here just based on your demographics, you were part of the shaken crowd too. “The true aftermath of that earthquake wasn’t experienced at the time. We are experiencing it now.” Absolutely correct. What was planted in the hearts and minds in the 1960s and early ‘70s has now come to a full blossoming, a full maturity. This is what we are now living and experiencing combined with everything else as well, from our digital technologies to our…I mean, the list goes on. But we are now living this out in real time. The revolution has come home.

So the ‘60s and the ‘70s, of course, mind and spiritual expansion via psychedelics, and we’ll just touch on this, though we could go into that with quite some depth. Eastern spiritual ideas of course were being absorbed into the culture in a significant way. Westerners would go East to India to go sit at the feet of gurus. And then the gurus came West and set up shop just north of here, right? Right? Yes! Yes, and you all became part of that wonderful big industry of spirituality. And we were sold yoga, and transcendental meditation, and we had a new spiritual industry.

Woodstock, which, by the way, we just had the anniversary a couple days ago, was an aquarian exposition, and other ecstatic and social experiences were taking place: The Human Bean in San Francisco, the Monterey Pop Festival, the Acid Test that took place up and down the US West Coast. Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters got in their fancy painted bus and became the Johnny Appleseed of LSD, spreading the gospel of psychedelics from here to New York City and back. That was your world. That was what was happening. That was the shaking. World peace, the antiwar movement, all this comes into perspective. And of course, we reject biblical norms, authority and truth claims. It’s free love, right? Free love. 

Communal living and new ways of social experiments come into play. Postmodernism begins to creep into the culture as we now ask those big questions: Is there meaning and purpose? And as a burgeoning techno-digital industry that’s taking place walking hand in hand–and this is really interesting; we can’t get into it, not today–but it walks hand in hand with the counterculture, primarily through Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, and all kinds of other funky things that were taking place. And that comes right back to where we are today.

So the 1980s and the ‘90s, this all begins to be lived out. We have the human potential movement and humanist psychologies. It dominates our sense of being “express thyself, accept thyself, esteem thyself,” right? That’s what we’re taught, even from the pulpit. At the same time, there’s an eclectic spiritual movement combining Eastern beliefs, occult concepts, and human potential, and it’s become known as the New Age movement. And it’s a new spiritual industry for a self-actualizing generation. And we eat it up like candy, and our corporations adopt it, and all of a sudden it’s in our education field. 

At the same time, in the 1980s, especially in the early to mid 1980s, new pagan festivals and events are taking shape. Starwood, pagan spirit gathering, which is a huge event that still happens in the US Midwest.

And in 1993, Parliament of the World Religions gives Wicca and witchcraft a platform, and validates and projects it as a new religious movement. Of course, we have green politics that come into play, and there’s another little sub movement that almost all of us just didn’t know about, or we ignored because a bunch of crazy kids, and that is a new form of music and cultural experience comes in as we now combine our digital technology to our ecstatic social experiences through techno and rave. And so techno and rave moves from Goa, India, and plants itself hard into Israel, sweeps through Europe, lands back here in the US, specifically into California and actually, the Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas. And there (in Dallas especially), that’s where ecstasy is introduced to the rave culture, and a whole new movement emerges as you feel on the dance floor like you’re one with everything, and your system is flooded with dopamine, and you now have that ecstatic encounter. 

At the same time, there’s a little happening that’s taking place on the California West Coast, a little group called Esalon that was started in 1962. They were kind of the intellectual engine of the counterculture. They were the birthplace of bringing the human potential movement right into the heart of American mainstream. And you could go and spend time soaking in the hot tubs and in the pools. Maverick theologians showed up. US Army officers would spend time there. The Intelligence community was there. For a while in the 1980s, they were the conduit,  a backdoor channel between the Soviet Union, between the KGB, the State Department, and the CIA, and were part of bringing Yeltsin to America. Really crazy history, like, really crazy stuff.

So Esalon is there, and it really helps to start fashioning and shaping this idea of a religion without religion. That’s what you are, America: you’re all religious without a religion. 

Two workshops from the 1990s bring home this idea of reenchantment. This is taken from their catalog. “Is information immortal? What unexplored realms of spirit will we encounter with amazing new forms of computer and electronic hypermedia? New myths will be needed. New mysteries will be encountered. How can ancient models of mind such as shamanism, Hinduism, or Voodoo help us comprehend silicone-based consciousness? Why are neuroenhancers crucial tools for so many computer innovators? Can human beings share an erotic relationship with a machine being? Are earth spirits at play in fields of photons and electronic spin? A neo-psychedelic subculture is coevolving with new technologies to reveal glimpses of exotic futures.”

That’s a mouthful right there, isn’t it? Wow! But that is reenchantment. 

And then for their 1996 workshop, Technoshamanism: Total Immersion in Spiritual Technology. “To wholeheartedly embrace technology may be the only way to partake in the next phase of human evolution. Participants will experience brain machine, the internet, computer fractals, virtual reality, tarot, astrology, I Ching, through computer programs, chaos math, hemispheric alignment audio, video games, and given new media. The workshop will explore the technovision quest and evaluate it as an adjunct to more traditional spiritual practices. The weekend will conclude with a technopagan rave dance. Participants are encouraged to bring at least one item of technology.” This is 1996, I can just imagine, you know? Your 10-pound car telephone, and 30-pound laptop, right? We laugh at this now, because you all probably are wearing two or three items of technology, and if you’re not, your kids are, and your grandkids certainly are. My goodness, have we come a long way, baby!

So Jimi Fritz, who is really an interesting character–he’s a Canadian, or lived in Canada for a time–writes in his book Rave Culture, “On the West Coast [speaking about the US West Coast] the ethos of the rave scene blended nicely with the hippie mentality and values that have been well-established in California since the ‘60s. In no time at all, the spiritual aspects of rave culture were enhanced and amplified by a new generation of techno hippies. From California, raves spread eastward back across America, and in a remarkably short time, every state in the Union had been exposed to this new cultural sensation.”

Jeet-Kei Leung from Vancouver is part of the–kind of the intellectual energy behind what’s known as transformational festivals, and he’s done a number of very interesting documentaries and programs on this movement, this subculture that really is a part of your West Coast culture. This is truly a West Coast phenomenon. It blossomed across the US and in other parts of the world. This is what he said regarding what was taking place in the late 1990s when they were doing their outdoor raves I think in the Mojave Desert: “Wiccan, pagan, New Age, and ecofeminist influences saw us intuitively timing our gatherings with the full moons, the solstices, honoring them with some kind of ritual, opening circles, closing circles. In this way, there was a realignment with natural and cosmic cycles, a tuning in with the mother, a reconnection and a restoring of a relationship full of honor. As urban technological humans, we had stumbled back upon the most ancient of tribal rituals.”

This takes us now into the heart of transformational culture, or what also could be described as evolutionary culture. And it is a sense of oneness. It is a feeling, and with it comes a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging, as you will see as we go through the slides. And yes, I’ll be taking you to one particular event which is happening–starts on Sunday. 

But there’s a range to these festivals, a range to this cultural expression. It’s not just simply Burning Man–far from it! This just simply happens to be the mothership, that’s all. There are full-blown pagan gatherings and pagan festivals–Starwood and Pagan Spirit Gathering, one example. Music and art festivals that are meant to just make this more than a cultural–oh, pardon me, more than just simply a concert experience, but a full-blown immersive reality. Ness Creek and Bonnaroo, two examples. 

Hindu and yoga festivals…I am thankful for Hindu and yoga festivals, because it strips away the idea that it’s just for exercise, because they’re very, very clear about this is oneness and spirituality. Thank you! Interesting how in the West we’ve appropriated their spiritual worldview, or we’ve bought it, pardon me. And then we of course converted it into exercise.

If I told you, by the way, that, you know, if you went to the mosque three times a week, and bowed to Mecca, it would be good for your mental health, would you as Christians be doing this? No, no. But we seem to have not much of a problem with incorporating vedic positions in our yoga poses. And…yeah. I won’t say more. You all know. This is where we’re at, isn’t it? Yeah. We’ve incorporated Eastern spiritual practices into our Christian community, and we are doing what Israel did at the base of Mt. Sinai. Truly. It is syncretism. 

And then, of course, we have full on transformational events. And Burning Man doesn’t like to call itself that, but it is that. And so we’re gonna be diving into this a little bit more.

So 2013-2016, I was deeply entrenched in trying to understand how this culture is moving, where it’s projected, how it’s gonna kind of advance itself. And I’m a little bit late to the game as a Christian researcher on this.

By the way, there’s not many others who’ve dived into this realm. I knew already by the year 2000 there has to be a cultural expression. Look, if there’s a political expression of oneness, and there is through world government, and there is a religious expression through the Parliament of World Religions, interfaithism, and a technological expression through transhumanism, then there has to be a cultural expression. It just makes sense. And so it took me a little while for me to all of a sudden engage my brain and go, Hey! You’ve got to do some digging, Teichrib. And so from 2013-2016, I spent a lot of time pinning, finding the locations of these events, and then pinning them on a map of Canada and the US. It’s very telling, because you can see where those lines of influences are, where those hotbeds are: US West Coast, the Austin-Dallas region of Texas…oh! There we go. Phew! And so there are 256–pardon me, 265 pins on that map. You can actually bore down in and some will open up to more pins, and I have every one of them labeled with the event, some of the history. It was quite the undertaking. And by the middle of 2016, I was overwhelmed. I had 50-80 more pins to put on, another 50-80 more events to vet. I’m like, no, you know, I think I’ve spent enough time to give you a visual to be able to say this is not fringe. 

So what are these–what are these events? Well, they are a container, a space to explore sexuality, new spiritual ideas, and to find yourself. They are participant driven. There are no spectators. You are an active participant in this happening. It’s a place so that you can find yourself. You will be reassembled. You lose yourself in the moment, you’re stripped away of your ego and your sense of who you are, and you are now being reconstructed by the purpose and the experience of the event. And then it becomes a new homeland. “Welcome home” becomes your identity. 

In fact, on my way here, I passed a van going through, I think it was Illinois, and it had the Burning Man symbol on it made with tape, and it just said, “Welcome home!” And I’m like, yep, I know! I know exactly who you are. I know it. 

And it’s a lived utopia, the way reality should be. Jeet-Kei Leung puts it this way: “It’s not just the idea of the world we want to live in, it’s the actual experience.”

So I’m giving you lots of theoretical, because I have to. It may be very new to you. And in all of this, this is part of what’s known as transformational encounters, and these are the components that make it work. There’s a lot of whimsy, a lot of play, and along with that comes this sense of communitas, an organic feeling of oneness with each other. There’s a sense of “I’m now sharing an experience with everyone around.” It’s an ecstatic group encounter. 

There are temples and sacred spaces. It is a spiritual experience. Yoga, energy healing, shamanism, plant medicine, psychedelics, it’s all part of it to some extent. Workshops and group discussions, you’re gonna be going to lectures. It’s not just simply listening to music, but music’s there. Usually EDM and trance, but there’s bluegrass and all kinds of other musical expressions. Music is just simply the conduit to get people to come, and becomes part of the experience. But there’s all kinds of musical expressions.

I was at the…I was at Burning Man during the build week in 2019, which was really interesting. I was there four days ahead of time, so I was watching the city being built. And there were camps that were playing, and it drove me nuts, 24 hours of Christmas music. And I’m like, No! Just no! Stop! You know? Please!

Another camp played Abba round the clock. My wife loves Abba. I’m like, No, no, no! Not 24 hours for, like, days on end. So yeah, interesting.

Harmony with nature, visionary and interactive art. Art becomes a point of introspection and finding your own illumination. It teaches, it speaks, it preaches. Art is really important. We have missed this as Christians, unfortunately, but art is really important, because it is an expression of worldview, of what we believe. 

And all this is radical tolerance, nonjudgmental. It’s a journey, it’s a quest, and you shed your limitations. By transgressing norms, you transform. It goes back to the Garden. Transgress God’s law, transform into God, because you will be as God. 

So we’re gonna be wrapping up this section very soon. Jeet-Kei Leung says this: “No less profound is this emergence of a new type of spiritual culture in these festivals, a spiritual culture completely uninterested in charismatic leaders, dogma, or doctrine. Where ritual does not require that we surrender our autonomy as critical thinking individuals, but instead arises as the shared acknowledgement and honoring of our sacred experience together.”

Event organizer Leana Sunnunda puts it this way, and she nails it, because this goes back to Dr. Peter Jones’ model of oneness versus twoness: “That’s what established religions have done,” and she’s speaking about Christianity. “It’s said God is separate, God is other, God is outside of you. And this is what I think has been the great fall from grace is humanity disconnecting from the experience of spirituality. Part of what we are doing at these gatherings is regaining our natural, intuitive wisdom, and redeveloping this deep experience of the divine.”

She gets it, just reversed from the biblical worldview. 

So my first one I ever attended was back in 2015 in an itty bitty bush rave and transformation festival out in a gravel pit in Manitoba. I was there doing social surveys, because how are you gonna get to know a culture unless you begin to seriously interact? And I do do surveys. I’ve done a survey earlier this summer at a regional Burn in Alberta. Anybody want to come with me next week? I have 500 surveys to fill out. I need help. Thank goodness I have two friends coming from Alberta that are gonna give me a hand. That’s research, folks. That’s research.

So I had some good questions for them. I had a series of categories that they could work through, including what was your past religion, and now what is your present religion? Half identified as past Christian and now identified as Buddhist, or New Age, or transhumanist, or atheistic, or agnostic, etc. 

To the statement “God is separate from nature and me,” all who religiously identified disagreed with that. So in other words, God, nature, and man are one. 

“Humanity is valued above nature.” Most disagreed. And “Earth is a living organism,” the majority agreed.

So on my way to Burning Man in 2017, I smoke a deer in Idaho, and I total my truck. And I think the Idaho speed limit is, what, 85 miles an hour? And I have a philosophy of speed limits: it’s the lower limit, so I smoked it going faster, I know that. And it was at night. And the police officer that came and helped me get things sorted out–a wonderful, good man, fantastic guy. We had good conversations, and I had him fill out one of my surveys. 

[audience laughs]

You know, why not, hey? Got nothing else to do waiting for tow trucks! So he filled out the survey and, you know, you would think police officer, conservative, yada yada. Nope, he fit this as well. He fit this as well. 

So I surveyed a regional Burn in Ponoka, Alberta, and Ponoka, if you folks don’t know maybe where Ponoka is, it is cowboys and oil derricks, stampedes–it’s cowboy country. And there’s a thousand Burners who gather just outside of the little town of Ponoka. So I surveyed in 2017, and again, I surveyed just a few weeks ago. I attended back in mid-June. And again, God is not separate from nature and me, we are one, we are all connected, I was a Christian, now I’m this, this, this, or that. The education levels are very, very interesting. Lots and lots of college grads, many with Masters, some with doctorates. These aren’t kids. I mean, I have kids here on the picture, but for the most part these are not kids. 

So in 2017, I asked, “Why are you attending?” “Friends and connection.” “Give and receive joy.” These are just the things that people wrote. “Open my mind to love myself.” “Make a sacrifice to the archgods.” I thought that was interesting. The lady that was camped right beside me, she says, “I’m here because I want to be with my daughter.” And asked, “What was her religious category?” she wrote down in the other section, “Brokenhearted.” These are people, flat out. They’re people. 

So in 2003–pardon me, 2023–this year, this June, I asked, “How was this event transformational?” These were the responses I got: “A safe space for self expression.” “I feel so accepted to be me without fear.” 

And it’s a really interesting eclectic people that we would say are more marginalized with more mainstream. 

“It’s the experiences beyond the normal routine.” “It’s a space for genuine conversations.” 

Actually, yeah, we’ve had some of the best conversations at these events, because people are going to have encounters. They want to talk! They want to spend time! They’ve gone outside of their norm. Let’s talk, let’s have those conversations!

So these are the responses, and in all this is this new sense of wonder and purpose in the festival. In fact, I was told this flat out in 2017 by a couple, “The festival is our church.” 

So now let me take you in our remaining moments–I know we have till…well, we’ve got till 6:00, right? So let me take you to the mothership. We’re gonna go to Burning Man just down the road, and already the people are gathering. Thousands and thousands are coming as they are building and setting up camps, and on Sunday morning, I will be heading in as well. I’ll be leaving here earlier tomorrow morning. I have to go get more supplies. I go down to Cedarville, California, where a good friend of mine, Bob Worley, who came with me to the Burn in ‘17 and ‘18 is providing a bunch of material. We’ll be getting stuff prepared. Sunday morning I go into the desert, and then my crew from–pardon me, from Alberta will be joining as well.

So this is a city. This is what it looks like–80,000 people converging. In the center of the city is the “man,” and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s okay. You will by the end of it. And then further out where you see the lines kind of connecting in that arc, you see that larger structure, that is the temple. So this is the crossroads of reenchantment. It’s a place for social reconstruction. It’s a place where we talk about technology and digital creation. Lots of talk of cryptocurrency, deep ecology…it’s all religious pluralism. And in the middle of all this, you can do outreach, and we’ll be talking about that in a moment.

So some history, some background: began with a gentleman by the name of Larry Harvey who experienced San Francisco’s Summer of Love. And with a handful of a few friends, he burned a nine foot effigy on Baker Beach in San Francisco. And it was during the summer solstice, and the sun was going down, they threw some gas on this crudely constructed effigy, had some beers, lit it up, “Yayyy!” And of course it’s a fire, so people kinda gather around, and it was all it was meant to be. And about 35 folks show up, and they went, “Hmm, yeah, this kinda feels neat!” And so they did it again the next year. And then the Cacophony Society, an underground art and cultural guerilla movement, heard about it, news spread, and by 1990, 500 people are in attendance at the beach, waiting for the man to burn. And the cops show up, and the cops aren’t showing up because they’re there to stop the event because they’re doing something illegal, they’re there because you don’t have a permit. Right? It’s bureaucracy! That’s all we really care about–bureaucracy! 

So Cacophony Society says, “We know a place in Nevada that nobody’s gonna bother us. It’s on federal land, and it’s the Black Rock Desert, and it’s inhospitable. And we can burn there.” 

So attendance in 1997 reached 10,000. The temple was introduced in the year 2000. By 2010, population had exceeded 50,000. The man, in 2014, stood at its tallest at 105 feet. The attendance from 2019–pardon me, should say 2017-2019–is 70,000-plus. And then during Covid, they had virtual burns, and I attended those virtual burns, and they were actually very well done. Folks who built it understood it. And of course they would, because as you’re gonna see, this is Silicon Valley’s event. In fact, all of you are, in a way, connected to the Burner community, and you’ll see why in a moment. 

Burning Man is built off of 10 principles: Radical inclusion–nobody is supposed to be left out. It’s all inclusive. 

Gifting–there is no buying or selling, there are no booths or no exhibitors set up. There are no vendors. Everybody’s gifting to each other. I’ve got shirts given to me, lots of grilled cheese sandwiches. Elon Musk is known for giving out grilled cheese sandwiches at 3 in the morning. I was at some camp standing in line, and I got grilled cheese sandwiches and I found out it probably was Elon’s spot. I didn’t know at the time that he did that. Handful of drugs, handful of weeds…you get the stuff and you accept it graciously, and you dispose of it privately if you’re not gonna use it. I’ve got some cool shirts though out of the deal, and other stuff that just went into the garbage can. That’s just the way it is! It’s gifting, and everybody’s doing that to each other, including gifting hugs. Lots of them. 

It’s an interesting group. It’s decommodified, so hey, if you’re bringing in a, you know, a U-Haul trailer, you’re supposed to cover up the logos, and sometimes it gets very creative. 

Radical self-reliance–you bring all your own stuff in, you pack all your own stuff out. Nothing’s provided for you except for porta potties. 

Radical self-expression–you are supposed to now live yourself out, and it’s also communal. There’s civic responsibility. You’re part of a larger group.

Leave no trace–really interesting. There will be a team left afterwards, in the following two weeks, and they will be literally foot by foot going through the whole grounds and cleaning every piece up, and they do. Their permit depends on it.

And then participation–you’re not there as a spectator. You are involved.

And then immediacy–you’re in the moment. Do it.

So Larry Harvey said this about Burning Man: “This may be the essential genius of Burning Man: out of nothing we created everything.” Yeah, you all know where that goes, right? Yes.

So Burning Man is a container to explore art and creativity, new senses of community, spirituality, sexuality, and consciousness. And that’s the man standing in 2014. It’s big. 

So there are approximately 80 regional Burns around the world. Canada has a few of them. South Africa has a big one. New Zealand, Australia, China has one. Israel has an interesting Burn called Midburn, and there they burn an effigy of Adam and Eve. And it has also spun out many, many, many other similar events that are of like mind. And this is the cutting edge of culture, and the cutting edge of digital culture.

Now, there’s a reason I have Google up there. The very first Google doodle–you all know what a Google doodle is. Let’s say you go at Thanksgiving, you get on Google, and there’s apple–you know, pumpkin pie, and turkey. That’s Google doodle. That’s the first one, 1998, fall of 1998. This time of year, 1998. 

The Google team, they’ve got this new idea, this new search engine that they’re about to launch. They go to their attorneys and say, “You know, we need to incorporate, we need to build this company.” They hang up their shingle, though, on their webpage. It’s that. And they’re saying to the whole of Silicon Valley, “We are Burners first.” And I cannot remember the amount of money they lost by saying to their attorneys, “You deal with it, we’re gone. We’re going to the Burn.” That’s how important it was. So much so, that Google over time would develop their own inhouse videos for how their employees can begin to train and think through what it means to go to Burning Man. They even ran shuttle buses for a while, and would put Burning Man art pieces, and they still have that ethos at Google headquarters. 

So important is this, that Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, the man who made it into the global powerhouse it is today, as the story goes, he received his position because he’s the only one that had Burning Man on his resume. And then he was taken to the Burn to see how he would handle the experience. If he could get the chaos and see the connections that are unfolding in what looks like from the top down chaos–if he could understand that, he could get the perspective of what Google is doing.

Google’s not the only one. Second Life, the most successful virtual reality environment that was birthed in 2003 was inspired by the 1999 Burn. Google Maps–who here uses Google Maps? I use it–actually, I’ve used it twice today: to find my hotel and to find this church, back and forth, back and forth, because I still haven’t got the town figured out yet. That was beta tested at Burning Man. 

Who here uses Google? You are indirectly Burners. Kind of wild to think of, isn’t it?

So engrained is Silicon Valley to Burning Man that when HBO came out with their series Silicon Valley, Elon Musk was there for the opening of the program, of the show. And as it goes, he chastised the producer and those involved in the production of the HBO series Silicon Valley, because he found out that not any of them, not one of them, had ever been to Burning Man, and he was very clear: “If you don’t understand Burning Man, you don’t understand Silicon Valley. Your show is a sham.” Fascinating.

So in 2017, this is what Larry Harvey said about that year’s theme, Radical Ritual: “The moral of our theme, in fact, was that it doesn’t really matter what you believe, it’s what you experience. The whole point this year was to convince people that Burning Man is a spiritual movement. It’s not a religion, but is a spiritual movement, and you know it when you see it.”

So I’m gonna give you a couple of quick videos, just because you need to have some visual of what this looks like. And the videos are, for those who know, Burning Man is a clothing optional event. The videos are clean–no worries.

[audience laughs]

Man: It’s been called a social experiment, post-apocalyptic training. Some call it home. A temporary city emerges in the desert once each year. No status, no government, no currency. A society focused on the individual. One week celebrating humanity, expression, and collaboration. A pilgrimage to disconnect, to look inward, and to explore the self. No inhibitions, no judgment, no rules. 

By the end, art and buildings will be burnt to ashes. No trace of them will be left until next year, where it will be rebuilt again. 

One by one they arrive into dust storms and scorching heat. The city has been constructed and dismantled over 30 times entirely by its attendees, a community eager to reconnect, to explore, to build what their imaginations can conceive. Thousands of strangers come as they are and share what makes them unique. 

This experiment isn’t about discovering a supreme being. It’s about discovering what’s supreme in ourselves, a recalibration of the spirit, a reminder to step outside our bubbles, put down our screens, and rediscover ourselves above the noise. To surrender, let go, and cocreate a world together. 

Carl: But it is at night when the place comes alive, and I’ll show you just about a minute or so long video of what it’s like at nighttime.

[EDM playing]

Carl: No carbon footprint there at all, right? Generators. There’s some solar panels out there, but mostly generators. 

[EDM continues playing]

Carl: Did you see the large pyramid and all the stuff shot…it’s an amazing structure, seven stories tall. Has another two or three story-sized pyramid with a massive set of projectors. All night long it’s rolling through these crazy, crazy scenes on the sides of the building. 

Now, it all looks really fun, right? Some are saying no…it’s very interesting nonetheless! And I’ve had people go, “Wow, I’d like to come!” Fantastic! This is what you can really experience. Here’s the real Burning Man.

[Loud wind]

Fifty-mile-an-hour sand storms. Actually, pardon me–dust storms. 

[Loud wind continues]

So who wants to come with me on Sunday? I was stuck in that dust storm. That’s from 2017. We had a full on haboob where it was like something straight out of the movies–this massive wall, and then it all comes over top of you before the bottom part of the wind hits, and it was mayhem. It was just wild. And dust storms can last 20 minutes, dust storms can last 20 hours. So you all have masks, because it’s alkali dust. And by the end of it, your vehicles are covered, your stuff is ruined. It’s pretty crazy.

So 2017 was my first year. That year the man was placed in his own temple, and that is why my book is entitled The Temple of Man in the Age of Reenchantment. It is a direct reference to that.

2018, the theme was I-Robot, and if you took a look from the top down, the man stood on this great big huge cog, this large pedestal of sorts, or a gear, looking at it from the top down. And the theme I-Robot was meant to ask that question: Can man and machine merge? So it was a lot of discussions around transhumanist themes. Really interesting artwork that compelled those kinds of conversations. 

2019 was Metamorphosis, and there was a lot of meaning to this symbolism, or this structure, a symbolic meaning that goes back to Ovid’s book Metamorphoses, a classic of esoteric philosophy. What it looks like at night…most of these pictures, I mean, the place is very photogenic. 

And then on Saturday, we’ll be gathering. Not this coming Saturday, next Saturday, we’ll be gathering by the tens of thousands around a man, and it will be wild. It is a cacophony. It is…the sounds are everywhere as you have hundreds of art vehicles surrounding you, and the fireworks are spectacular, and then the man burns.

[EDM plays, crowds cheer]

Carl: What was interesting with the man burn in 2019, as you saw him fall over, that almost never happens. As it fell over, partway through, as the structure continued to burn, something collapsed and it flipped the man back upright, and the oohs and aahs from thousands of people were pretty impressive! It was like, “What just happened?” You know? The resurrection of the man, yeah! Yikes!

So this is the temple in 2017. That’s what the structure looked like: a very big edifice. I will tell you what the temple’s used for in a moment. 

2018 temple was titled The Temple of Galaxia, referring to the cosmic Gaia, the cosmic mother. Two-hundred-fifty feet wide, 65 feet tall, all constructed for the first time on site as the pieces were put together. Some really amazing engineering.

2019 temple, that’s what it looked like at night. This is how big it was. These are big structures, folks. So a lot of time and effort, big structures.

So the temple starts off as a blank slate, and this is where the humanity of the place really comes forward. It’s a blank slate. It doesn’t look like it now, but when it opens, walls are bare. And then all week long, people write on the walls, and they leave photo albums and journals and wedding dresses. And I’ve watched them bring the urns of ashes of their loved ones in. And I’ve watched marriages happen. And the place is mourning, and it is weeping, and it is a place of crying. And for seven days, it’s a 24-hour, seven-day long funeral. And so they have temple guardians who stand watch, because people break down, and people flatout lose it. It’s a place that breaks your heart as you go through and read what people are putting, because it is the pain of our human experience coming forward in the hope for some healing, some sense of wholeness, some hope, and becomes very, very raw. 

One of the first ones I saw, one of the first notes in 2017 was a suicide note. And we had a suicide in 2017. We had a man who ran into the burning of the man, and burned himself to death. I have no idea if that was his note. I don’t know. But it ended up making international news because of what transpired. 

And then on Sunday, the temple burns, but it’s a very different atmosphere. Whereas when the man burns on Saturday it’s loud and exciting and it’s a party atmosphere, when the temple burns it’s just quiet. And you’ll hear weeping, and you’ll hear crying. 

So this is some of the art pieces that you’ll encounter. The art is meant to blow your mind. It is psychologically powerful. It is often enormous art pieces. Sometimes it’s really itty bitty art pieces that you have to go and search out for, because it’s just unassuming. All kinds of things. You meet all kinds of stuff.

You have no idea what you’re gonna walk into when you go into a porta potty. That’s a porta potty. So even the porta potties can become art pieces. You walk in, all of a sudden it’s a jungle, or it’s, you know, whatever. It’s there, and people just voluntarily do this. 

I remember–I’ve had a few instances where I’ve walked out of the porta potty in the morning, and a gentleman, by the time I’ve done my business, has quickly set up a table–he’s got a tux, and he’s got toothbrushes, and deodorant, and mouthwash, and cigarettes, and all kinds of stuff, whatever you might need, and it’s all free. “Here you are, ladies and gentlemen.” And he’s just providing this as a service. It’s a very different world.

And there is one religion that is mocked, and it’s Christianity. So the Burning Man poster from 1999 where we have the man being crucified along with two thieves, that art car, at the very center, the Church…was it the Church of the Open Mind or something? I can’t remember–was parked across from us in 2017. We ended up having a lot of good conversations with those people. And then church trap…you get the idea.

And along the way as a researcher, I go to the lectures. I spend time going to where Silicon Valley is meeting, where people from literally around the world are having conversations. I mean, in 2019… we had the chief economist for the World Bank was studying what was happening so that he could take these ideas and implant them into World Bank projects. We had 52 US mayors touring the city to learn the lessons of Burning Man and take it back to your cities. We had four congressmen who were there doing the same thing. 2019, I spent two or three hours having a really good, long conversation with the European Union liaison officer to the US federal government. These aren’t kids. There are some, but these aren’t kids. I mean, you can even see by the pictures.

So as Marian Goodell, and she is the CEO now of the event, and these are just some of the pictures taken from different workshops that I’ve attended. The one on the far end, he is a world economic forum global–young global leader. That workshop was a projection of 2030, and we’re all celebrating–now we’ve arrived at 2030, and we’ve achieved our sustainable development goals, and we are now one global community, and we’re gonna have a one-world system. And so that whole evening was a pre-celebration, literally a pre-celebration, of what the world will look like in 2030 when we all reach our sustainable development goals. 

One of the workshops I attended was about two hours long. It was a really interesting conversation with a well-known individual in the crypto space, and he laid out over the course of the afternoon basically four new building blocks for a new civilization. The four building blocks are this–and he didn’t say these things directly, but this is how it came through: We are now working towards a new sense of spirituality. It’s psychedelic, it’s shamanistic, it’s mystical. We are now exploring a new social ethos. That’s being experimented with in real time at these events. We need a new form of economic governance, and this is looked at in terms of cryptocurrencies tied into a new social contract. There’ll be centralized cryptocurrencies, possibly CBDCs, that’s where we’re going now.

And how do you manage this? How do you manage all this at a global level? Artificial intelligence. So it all comes together. 

And finally, one other example of reenchantment–I went Reverend Billy’s famous Sunday sermon in 2017, and it was a mockery, an intentional mockery, as he now gave us a sermon that we have fired that patriarchal God who claims to know everything. Science doesn’t know everything! (That goes back to rejecting modernity.) So now where do we turn? To ourselves, and to the sacredness of the earth. The earth sustains and embraces us. Trust the earth, even in our death. Everybody say a big “Earthlujah!” And everybody goes, “Earthlujah!” Yeah…I’m gonna skip that one just for the sake of time.

So now how are we gonna respond? Are we gonna react, or are we gonna respond? Which is it? As ambassadors, what do we do? 

Audience: Respond.

Carl: Respond, thank you. If you’re a part of my class at Miller College, the very first class I give you a handout with 10 crazy YouTube videos for you to watch that are gonna shake up your worldview, and they are so in your face, it’s nuts. And I tell my class, right in the very beginning, “You will watch this tonight, and then in two paragraphs you are going to just simply react the way you would on social media.” You know? Just pbbbt! Pour it all out! Because we’re all really good at that, aren’t we? “Yeah, you’re all dummies, bah bah bah!” Lay it on the line! At the end of the week, at the end of 20 hours of lectures and some fantastic discussions, you have to go back, rewatch it. Now respond with a two-page biblical position, having good, solid arguments, and put your anger away, and just recognize that this is a worldview issue, a biblical issue. And now let’s answer the questions that are being posed by the challenge coming from those videos. 

So how do we respond to Burning Man and the culture that this exemplifies? How does Bend respond? How does this church respond? My goodness, you are in that channel. You are the conduit to the north end of the Black Rock Desert. You are uniquely positioned of all the places I’ve ever spoke, truly you are uniquely positioned. So how are you going to respond? How are you going to respond when you meet them in Walmart, or at the gas station? How are you going to respond? Will you take the time to understand their setting, their culture? You now have a glimpse of it here. 

Here’s a few ideas: Ask meaningful questions that invite a conversation. Listen to them. And then you can begin to engage with the gospel. Present the true God who is other than creation, and then engage with honesty, respect, grace, and truth. That goes a long, long ways. 

So we set up a camp at Burning Man, and the camp has a sign: “Camp of the Unknown God.” And that’s my friend Bob Worley who’s been going to Burning Man since the 1990s–he started going I think in ‘96 or ‘97. My friend Jen Wright, who is part of our group in 2018 and ‘19, and…I mean, it’s not much. We’re not much, we’re just, like, a small little group of people. We have our little camp out, and just some pictures of some of the other people in our crew–Brian and Audrey, who are meeting with me. In fact, they’re on the road right now. That’s them in 2019. And they have a booth called Talk to God, and we ran across this booth. And so Audrey picks up the phone to talk to God, because it’s hooked up obviously to some camp somewhere, and some guy answers the phone, Audrey kinda gets freaked, so she just *click*! Gone! Brian’s like, “I want to talk to God!” So Brian picks it up, and it’s a female. So Brian ends up with this big, long conversation about sin and the problems of sin, and on and on. And well, hey, why not? It’s a wide open opportunity to now have a conversation about Jesus Christ! If you’re here to mock it, we’re here to talk about it, seriously! 

2017, we had a group behind us called the Bad Catholics. It was wild. 

So these are just some pictures from some of our groups. We’ve had good conversations. We’ve had people say, “Can I come back and talk more?” 

2018 we had six people–it was probably our most productive outreach. 2019 it was a little more difficult. 2017, a lot of it was just testing the waters. But in 2018, we had guys literally moving their tents to our space, because all week long we’re having conversations, and all week long they want to learn. This gentleman right here, great guy–Adam from California. He hung out with us the whole week, and I remember–I think it was, like, a Wednesday or Thursday, Adam wanted to find out where I went late at night. All my team go to bed by, you know, midnight. Sorry, that’s when things are just coming alive, you know? I’m on my bicycle, I’m not coming back till 4 in the morning. If I’m up at 8, whatever. That’s how it’s gonna be. You live on coffee and adrenaline for nine days, more or less. So I’m like, “Come with me!” And so I was showing him all kinds of stuff, and I ended up stopping and talking to him, and just said, “Dude, what’s wrong with you? You’re at Burning Man. You have every experience, every sensual experience under the sun, and you’re hanging out with a bunch of Christians?” He’s like, “I’m learning so much from you guys.” That’s it! For Adam’s sake, totally worth it, right there.

Back to 2017, Bob and I had our little sign set up. We had our–my tent set up. In fact, that’s a decent picture of my tent, kind of. My green tent in the background. What you don’t see on the other side is in 2017 we had a fellow by the name of Paul from France. He wanted to set up his tent beside mine, and it was this little itty bitty pup tent. And so because the winds are so extreme, he wanted to use my tent as a barrier. Fantastic! No problem. Our lines crisscross, our guy wires crisscross. Now Bob and I had talked lots on the phone, but in 2017, that was the first time we ever met face-to-face the night before we drove into Burning Man, which is pretty remarkable! And so Bob and I had to spend that week just getting to know each other. So every morning, Bob and I were talking theology. We gave each other our testimonies. We shared Scripture, we went into God’s Word. We did that in the mornings over coffee. I think it was, like, on a Thursday or something, Paul comes up to us and he comes up to me and he goes, “I hope it’s all right, but I’ve been eavesdropping on all of your conversations.”

[audience laughs]

Carl: Yeah! That’s what we’re there for. Folks, they’re just–and I’ve said this so many times–they’re just people. They are your brothers and sisters in Adam. You want them to be your brothers and sisters in Christ. And they are looking for purpose and meaning. That is the intent. That is truly the intent. And purpose and meaning is found in Jesus Christ. So when you meet them on the street, and you will, when you run into them in the store, and you very well may, don’t be afraid. Maybe even come up with some strategies to do outreach. Maybe…I know some churches have talked about putting up things like–maybe like water stations or, you know, places where they can dump their garbage after they leave Burning Man, and then have the opportunity to spend time with them. Figure something out! They’re your neighbors. They’re your family. 

So what is our call? You don’t have to go to Burning Man. It’s all around you. It’s all burning. Really it is. That’s one of the great ironies of calling it Burning Man! But this is our call, right? Psalm 96 is the Great Commission wrapped up in being an ambassador: “O sing to the Lord a new song! Sing to the Lord all the earth. Sing to the Lord, Bless his name. Proclaim the good news of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his wonders among all peoples.”

That’s your job. Ambassadors, fellow members of God’s diplomatic community, that’s your job. Isaiah:12:4: “Praise the Lord. Call upon his name.” Notice what we declare: “Declare his deeds among the people. Make mention that his name is exalted.” He is other, juxtaposing the exact worldview that the world is now enmeshed in. 

So I hope this has been a bit of an eye opener. For some of you, it may be the first time that you’ve kind of encountered some of this. Ironically, you’re in the epicenter. 

If you have any questions or would like to talk to me a little bit more about this, I’ll be glad to sit down and have a conversation, because we just scratched the surface. If you want to know more, pick up a copy of Game of Gods. It is at the information little kiosk on the corner. And also I have a webpage called forcingchange.org. Those are my old Forcing Change magazine issues in PDF. Lots of other reports and articles. Datamine it. Snag it all. Download it, and then use it. There is a copyright in the sense that I have to put a little copyright symbol in. Whoopty-doo! Photocopy, do whatever you want. Pass things around. Truly, because the time is short. Yeah, amen.

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