The Conversion of Jordan Hall: Reflection and Significance

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/emerge/episodes/Jordan-Hall-Converts-to-Christianity-e2f6sut/a-aatod0v

Last night I came across a podcast episode titled “Jordan Hall converts to Christianity.” And listening to the podcast today, I found it every bit as profound and intentional as one might expect from Jordan. It’s difficult to describe how significantly this impacts me and my position towards Christianity and the Church. 

For me, Jordan embodies the sort of clear, concise and rigorous thinking I aspire to, combined with an open frankness and deftness at shifting perspectival positions which I feel resonant in my experience. I have found this to be true in watching him engage with others, learning from him at a distance, and in the personal interactions I have been privileged to have with him. I also find most of his analysis of the world to be striking in its clarity and insight. I have watched his attempts to cultivate response to the Meaning Crisis with something like aspirational curiosity. He has clearly attempted to arrange his existence toward and around the best future he can see, and in the first part of the episode he explicates very clearly the recurring failure to which these projects fell. Ultimately, he seems to have found the home he has been searching for in what sounds like the most basic goodness of a country church. I’m not sure what denomination; with a careful ease typical of Jordan, he eschews recommendations as to intra-faith squabbling. 

As the crisp ringing of a church bell on a still night after a winter snow, the core message strikes home: Humility. Jordan discusses the necessity of suffering through his own failures at the “neophilic” attempt to build a new Civium to save the West, and how this brought him finally to the realization of his arrogance and dropped him into Humility. Particularly striking to me were the chain of events drawing him finally into a church. It wasn’t being convinced of grand theological insights, or the stunning beauty of a cathedral. It was people. Just straightforward, good people who have a real community and welcomed him and his family. As a final existential contrast: an AI conference in San Francisco to see the best modern secular technocratic anti-religion could offer, with its attendant personal hellscape. Upon returning home from this event, a visit from a local church elder and embedding into a community of real worship became an entirely new way. And, if I’m hearing right, the need to build something new melted away at the realization that there is already a Church pursuing, well, call it Game B, call it the Kingdom of Heaven. But it is not yet finished, and it is in dire need of deeply rooted revival.

It will remain to be lived how this will impact my story relative to Christianity, but there is no mistaking that it already has. For my part, it seems the Church has gained a warrior of tremendous capacity, and there is no doubt she will need many more to bear through this Winter whose first storm, I’m afraid, is still in its approaching phases. It seems to me that for most of us in This Little Corner who find ourselves outside the church, the reasons are much more personal than anything else. It’s not so much the ideas, dogmas, tradition or liturgies that bother us, it's the trauma to which we all have been subject via authority figures externalizing the paroxysms of a dying dogma in the throes of a postmodern seizure. To me, this movement from one of the clearest thinkers (who has been decidedly on the secular, or naturalist, side of TLC), presents all of us with a pregnant moment of question. It is not an intellectual question, but as all the good questions are, an existential one: how shall we then live?