The Rule Most High

On spiritual hunger, Christian nationalism, forgotten wisdom, addiction, and the Golden Rule we keep pretending to rediscover.

Something strange is happening in America.

While cable news shouts about white Christian nationalism, school board battles, drag queens, collapsing institutions, and whichever outrage is currently profitable enough to dominate the algorithm, millions of younger people are quietly wandering into spiritual libraries their parents were warned never to enter.

Not necessarily because they hate Christianity.

Not necessarily because they reject God.

And certainly not because they are all nihilists.

Something more complicated is happening.

They are hungry.

Hungry in the old way.

Hungry in the way human beings become hungry when the official answers begin sounding strangely rehearsed.

Hungry in the way people become hungry when spiritual authority begins feeling too entangled with political grievance, consumer identity, culture war performance, and institutions that speak endlessly of love while behaving with increasingly selective compassion.

And so the wandering begins.

One person discovers the Tao Te Ch’ing and finds a philosophy built on softness stronger than force, humility wiser than domination, emptiness richer than excess.

Another finds the Book of Enoch and realizes there are entire spiritual histories left outside familiar Christian teaching.

Someone else wanders into the Kybalion, Hermetic traditions, or the Sefer Yetzirah, peeking into mystical frameworks that suggest reality may be stranger, more interconnected, and more symbolic than literal modern religion often permits.

Others explore Wicca, animism, pagan revival traditions, indigenous philosophies, contemplative Buddhism, meditation, ecological spirituality, or what some call natural Satanism - not devil worship, but symbolic rebellion against authoritarian dogma, emphasizing autonomy, inquiry, and responsibility over inherited obedience.

And yes, some wander badly.

Spiritual hunger can make people vulnerable to charlatans, pseudoscience, manipulative gurus, ideological cults, aesthetic spirituality, or endless self-help consumerism dressed up in sacred clothing.

But that does not make the hunger fake.

It makes it human.

The question worth asking is not:

Why are younger generations abandoning institutional religion?

The deeper question is:

Why are so many people looking elsewhere in the first place?

The Church of Certainty

Institutions crave stability.

That is not evil.

A religion without coherence becomes chaos. A spiritual tradition without continuity dissolves into private improvisation. Communities need shared language, shared ethics, shared stories, and boundaries sturdy enough to survive generations.

But institutions also develop another instinct:

self-preservation.

And over time, self-preservation can quietly replace truth-seeking.

Questions become threats.

Ambiguity becomes dangerous.

Mysticism becomes suspicious.

Curiosity becomes rebellion.

Complexity becomes heresy.

This is not unique to Christianity.

It happens everywhere humans organize around power.

Religious institutions simplify because simplification governs more easily.

The problem begins when simplification becomes paternalism.

When institutions stop saying:

Here is wisdom.

and begin saying:

You are not capable of wrestling with complexity.

The Books They Told You Not To Read

Take the Book of Enoch.

Many Christians grow up never hearing of it at all, despite the fact that parts of Enoch are explicitly referenced in the New Testament. The Epistle of Jude appears to quote Enoch directly.¹

And yet, for most Western Christians, Enoch exists somewhere between rumor and conspiracy.

Why?

Because canon formation is messy.

The Bible did not descend from the heavens pre-bound in leather with chapter headings and devotional footnotes. What became canon emerged through centuries of argument, politics, theology, regional variation, institutional conflict, and practical concerns about coherence.

Some texts were embraced.

Others were rejected.

Some were considered useful but non-canonical.

Others were excluded because their cosmology, mysticism, or theological implications raised difficult questions.

The Book of Enoch survived most visibly within Ethiopian Orthodoxy, where it remains part of canon to this day.²

That matters.

Because it reveals something uncomfortable:

The spiritual map many Western Christians inherit is not the only map Christianity ever possessed.

The same is true of Jewish mysticism.

Many people raised in highly literal forms of religion discover the Kabbalah and experience something bordering on existential whiplash.

Wait.

There are mystical traditions?

Symbolic readings?

Numerical systems?

Esoteric frameworks?

Meditative structures?

Layered meanings?

The Sefer Yetzirah - one of Judaism’s earliest mystical texts - approaches creation itself through symbolic language, letters, and cosmological relationships that feel worlds apart from modern religious reductionism.³

Likewise, the Tao Te Ch’ing whispers a truth many modern Western institutions seem incapable of hearing:

That forcing reality often weakens us.

That softness is not weakness.

That power without humility destroys itself.

That the deepest wisdom often arrives through surrender rather than conquest.

In a civilization obsessed with domination, metrics, certainty, branding, ideology, and performance, the Tao can feel like finding cold water in the desert.

And then there is Mithra.

Or rather, Mithraism.

The ancient mystery religion centered around Mithras - popular especially among Roman soldiers - continues to fascinate seekers because it reminds us that ancient spiritual life was far more pluralistic, symbolic, ritualized, and psychologically rich than simplified Western narratives often suggest.⁴

People are not discovering these traditions because they are rebellious for rebellion’s sake.

They are discovering them because institutional religion often stopped sounding alive.

Too many churches became political theaters.

Too many pulpits became ideological sorting machines.

Too many spiritual leaders learned to perform outrage better than compassion.

Too many institutions confused certainty for wisdom.

And eventually, people begin wandering.

Not because they hate faith.

Because they miss mystery.

Christian Nationalism and the Seduction of Power

This is where things become uncomfortable.

Because Christianity itself is not the problem.

Power is.

Or more specifically:

The temptation to use spiritual authority as political machinery.

White Christian nationalism deserves serious scrutiny not because Christians are dangerous, nor because patriotism is inherently sinister, but because history repeatedly shows what happens when religious identity fuses with political grievance.

Faith becomes tribal.

Compassion becomes conditional.

Enemies become spiritually convenient.

And moral complexity gets flattened into:

Our side good.

Their side evil.

Christian nationalism, in its broadest form, frames America as fundamentally Christian in identity and frequently implies that preserving national order requires privileging a particular moral, religious, or cultural hierarchy.⁵

That tension becomes difficult to ignore when many movements invoking Christian values appear increasingly aligned with political aggression, grievance politics, performative cruelty, or strongman aesthetics.

And yes:

The strange relationship between Donald Trump and segments of American Christianity deserves examination.

Not mockery.

Examination.

Because it reveals something psychologically fascinating.

Trump - a man whose public persona has long revolved around wealth, ego, spectacle, dominance, sexual scandal, branding, retaliation, and self-mythologizing - somehow became, for many, a symbolic defender of Christian morality.

That paradox should make thoughtful people pause.

This is not a left-wing argument.

Nor is it an anti-Trump argument.

It is a moral consistency argument.

How did humility become optional?

How did mercy become weakness?

How did cruelty become charisma?

How did “love thy neighbor” become so negotiable?

How did we arrive at a place where entire political identities can seem more animated by punishment than compassion while still claiming the mantle of Christ?

Many conservative Christians would answer:

Because they feel besieged.

Ignored.

Mocked.

Marginalized.

And that feeling deserves honest consideration.

People who feel spiritually or culturally cornered often seek defenders.

That is profoundly human.

But fear has always been vulnerable to manipulation.

And institutions - religious and political alike - know this.

If outrage becomes your organizing principle, eventually compassion becomes an inconvenience.

If fear becomes theology, love shrinks.

And if power becomes sacred, the Golden Rule becomes surprisingly difficult to recognize.

The Rule We Forgot

Perhaps the strangest thing about modern religious conflict is that most major traditions already solved the central ethical problem.

We just keep pretending they did not.

Christianity:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.⁶

Judaism:

What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.⁷

Islam:

None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.⁸

Buddhism:

Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.⁹

Confucianism:

Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.¹⁰

Taoism bends toward harmony.

Indigenous traditions often emphasize reciprocity.

Mystical traditions across cultures repeatedly dissolve ego into interdependence.

Different vocabulary.

Different stories.

Different rituals.

Remarkably familiar ethics.

Which raises a difficult possibility:

Maybe humanity has not suffered from lack of wisdom.

Maybe we suffer from selective obedience.

Because the Golden Rule is inconvenient.

It restrains vengeance.

It complicates ideology.

It humbles certainty.

It demands imagination.

You cannot easily demonize people if you sincerely attempt to imagine yourself inside their suffering.

And that makes it politically inefficient.

Which may explain why so many leaders prefer outrage.

Outrage mobilizes faster than empathy.

Fear organizes faster than love.

Rage monetizes better than humility.

And tribal identity sells better than mutual dignity.

The Rule Most High is difficult precisely because it asks something costly of us:

To remain human while disagreeing.

To refuse cruelty even when cruelty feels emotionally satisfying.

To resist becoming the monster we claim to oppose.

Addiction, Identity, and the Strange Comfort of Remaining Broken

Now we arrive at dangerous territory.

Because addiction touches real pain.

Real grief.

Real bodies.

Real funerals.

Real wreckage.

This section deserves tenderness.

And honesty.

Twelve-step recovery programs - especially Alcoholics Anonymous - have helped millions of people. That deserves respect. For many, AA provides community, accountability, language, spiritual grounding, and enough structure to interrupt destructive cycles that might otherwise destroy lives.

To dismiss that outright would be arrogant.

But difficult questions are still worth asking.

One of them is this:

At what point does healing become possible only when identity changes?

AA famously encourages people to continue identifying themselves as alcoholics or addicts, even decades into sobriety.

You may hear:

“Hi, I’m John, and I’m an alcoholic.”

Twenty years sober.

Thirty years sober.

Forty years sober.

Still:

alcoholic.

For many, this framework protects humility.

It prevents overconfidence.

It reminds them of vulnerability.

And perhaps it saves lives.

But for others, a different question quietly emerges:

What happens when recovery itself becomes an identity trap?

What if constant rehearsal of brokenness accidentally strengthens attachment to the wound?

Psychology increasingly recognizes the role of self-concept in behavior. People often become what they repeatedly believe themselves to be. Narrative identity matters.¹¹

This is not magical thinking.

It is neurological.

Behavioral.

Cognitive.

Human.

If someone says:

I am broken forever.

their nervous system often organizes around that belief.

But if someone eventually reaches:

I was addicted.

I healed.

I chose differently.

That chapter no longer governs me.

something shifts.

This is not denial.

It is authorship.

Not everyone should leave recovery language behind.

Some people genuinely need lifelong accountability.

Some benefit deeply from permanent vigilance.

And addiction can absolutely remain dangerous even after long periods of sobriety.

But surely the deeper goal of healing is not eternal self-identification with collapse.

Surely recovery hopes for a moment where someone no longer merely manages suffering, but actually lays it down.

Where the mantra becomes:

That was part of my story.

It is no longer the center of who I am.

Perhaps spirituality matters here because so many traditions point toward transformation.

Christianity speaks of rebirth.

Buddhism of liberation from attachment.

Taoism of returning to harmony.

Mysticism across traditions repeatedly suggests:

You are not your wound.

You are not your compulsion.

You are not the worst thing you have done.

And maybe that matters.

Because a society addicted to grievance may be practicing the same confirmation bias.

A nation endlessly rehearsing injury may become unable to imagine healing.

Political tribes now speak like wounded addicts protecting identities built around outrage.

Religious groups rehearse persecution.

Progressives rehearse victimhood.

Conservatives rehearse cultural dispossession.

Everyone is bleeding.

Everyone insists their wound is the only real wound.

And meanwhile, compassion suffocates beneath competitive suffering.

The Young Are Not Leaving God

This is where older generations often misunderstand what is happening.

They say:

Young people are abandoning religion.

But that is only partly true.

Many are abandoning institutions.

Many are abandoning certainty.

Many are abandoning performance.

Many are abandoning spiritual gatekeepers who seem increasingly political, punitive, manipulative, or disconnected from lived reality.

But curiosity?

Curiosity is alive.

Perhaps more alive than it has been in generations.

Meditation is growing.

Interest in contemplative spirituality is growing.

Mysticism is growing.

Interest in comparative religion is growing.

Ancient texts are circulating again.

People are studying:

• Taoism
• Hermeticism
• Stoicism
• Buddhist philosophy
• indigenous ecological wisdom
• Kabbalah
• apocryphal texts
• meditation
• consciousness studies
• ritual
• symbolism
• ancestral traditions

Sometimes wisely.

Sometimes foolishly.

Sometimes beautifully.

Sometimes commercially.

But the hunger is unmistakable.

The irony is painful.

Because many institutional religious leaders respond not with curiosity, humility, or dialogue - but panic.

Fear.

Condemnation.

Control.

Which only deepens the wandering.

Because the young can smell performance.

They know when someone is selling certainty they no longer fully believe themselves.

And they are increasingly unwilling to accept:

Don’t ask questions.

Especially in an age where entire spiritual libraries live one search away.

The internet has made secrecy impossible.

You cannot meaningfully hide the Book of Enoch anymore.

You cannot erase comparative religion.

You cannot prevent someone from reading Lao Tzu at 2 a.m.

You cannot stop a teenager from discovering Ethiopian Christianity, Zen Buddhism, indigenous cosmologies, mystical Judaism, contemplative prayer, or symbolic readings of scripture.

Nor should you want to.

Because a faith too fragile to survive questions was never very strong.

The Mountain Nobody Owns

Imagine spirituality as a mountain.

At the base stand billions of people.

Christians.

Muslims.

Jews.

Buddhists.

Taoists.

Hindus.

Atheists.

Humanists.

Pagans.

Mystics.

Skeptics.

Seekers.

People wounded by religion.

People healed by it.

People still searching.

Each group stands on a different side.

Each path looks different.

The terrain changes.

The language changes.

The rituals change.

The symbols change.

The songs change.

The clothing changes.

The architecture changes.

And because each group sees only their side of the mountain, many become convinced:

Ours is the only path.

Some even insist:

Everyone else is dangerous.

Or deceived.

Or evil.

Or damned.

But higher up something curious begins happening.

The paths begin resembling one another.

Compassion appears.

Humility appears.

Responsibility appears.

Surrender appears.

Wonder appears.

Mercy appears.

Interdependence appears.

Ego softens.

Certainty loosens.

Cruelty begins feeling incompatible with wisdom.

And eventually, if one climbs far enough, something quietly unsettling emerges:

The similarities become harder to ignore.

Not identical.

Never identical.

Differences matter.

Truth claims matter.

History matters.

Practice matters.

But the deeper moral architecture begins sounding strangely familiar.

Treat people well.

Resist greed.

Practice humility.

Care for others.

Avoid cruelty.

Be honest.

Do not worship power.

Protect the vulnerable.

Love more than you punish.

Leave the world gentler than you found it.

Suddenly, the mountain no longer looks like competition.

It looks like perspective.

And perhaps the greatest spiritual mistake humans make is assuming our position near the base gives us authority to speak for the summit.

The Rule Most High

This is where many modern arguments collapse into absurdity.

Because once you have seen enough traditions, enough philosophies, enough broken institutions, enough hypocrisy, enough beauty, enough saints, enough frauds, enough suffering, enough healing, enough sincere believers, enough false prophets, enough wounded seekers, and enough ordinary people quietly trying their best, something becomes increasingly difficult to deny:

No tradition has a monopoly on goodness.

No ideology has a monopoly on compassion.

No political tribe owns virtue.

No church, temple, mosque, lodge, coven, monastery, philosophy department, podcast, meditation retreat, or influencer platform has cornered the market on wisdom.

And no movement - however loudly it claims moral superiority - becomes immune from corruption once power enters the room.

That is the lesson history keeps trying to teach us.

Religious institutions drift.

Political movements drift.

Governments drift.

Communities drift.

People drift.

We begin with ideals.

We end up protecting machinery.

And somewhere along the way, we forget the thing that made the whole effort worth protecting in the first place.

Christianity forgets Christ.

Politics forgets people.

Activism forgets compassion.

Religion forgets wonder.

Spirituality forgets responsibility.

Freedom forgets duty.

Tradition forgets humility.

Progress forgets wisdom.

And every generation eventually faces the same terrible question:

What have we accidentally begun worshipping instead?

Power?

Certainty?

Identity?

Fear?

Control?

Outrage?

Belonging?

The performance of righteousness?

Because none of those things save us.

And none of them love us back.

Trump, Chaos, and the Strange Mirror

Here is where honesty matters.

Donald Trump did not create America’s spiritual contradictions.

He exposed them.

He became, intentionally or not, a mirror.

And mirrors are upsetting.

For many Americans, Trump represented disruption.

A battering ram against institutions they felt had ignored, mocked, abandoned, or betrayed them.

For others, he represented narcissism elevated to political theology.

Cruelty normalized.

Truth bent around charisma.

Power detached from restraint.

Both perspectives deserve examination.

But the more interesting question is spiritual:

What did his rise reveal about us?

Why were so many people willing to overlook contradictions that once would have seemed morally disqualifying?

Why did some Christians reinterpret humility into aggression?

Mercy into weakness?

Truth into strategic loyalty?

Character into tribal convenience?

And on the other side:

Why did some critics become so consumed by hatred that compassion itself began looking na�ve?

Why did disagreement become moral contamination?

Why did ideological certainty harden into its own kind of secular fundamentalism?

Because extremism rarely announces itself.

It often arrives disguised as righteousness.

And this is where the Golden Rule becomes inconvenient again.

Can you still see humanity in people who voted differently?

Can you still imagine the fears beneath someone else’s convictions?

Can you disagree without cruelty?

Can you remain morally awake without becoming emotionally possessed?

Can you criticize without dehumanizing?

Can you protect truth without worshipping punishment?

These are not political questions.

They are spiritual ones.

And most of us are failing them.

The Coming Story of Enoch

There will be time later to go deeper into Enoch.

Because Enoch deserves its own reckoning.

The watchers.

The strange cosmology.

The moral warnings.

Its influence on early Christianity.

Its survival within Ethiopian Orthodoxy.

The unsettling realization that what many modern Christians call “biblical” is often merely what survived institutional consolidation.

That conversation deserves patience.

And seriousness.

Because Enoch asks difficult questions:

About corruption.

Power.

Knowledge.

Hubris.

Spiritual decay.

And what happens when humanity mistakes domination for wisdom.

In other words:

Questions that feel strangely relevant.

Be a Good Version of That

Perhaps this is where we land.

Not in relativism.

Not in pretending every idea is equally wise.

Not in dissolving meaningful differences.

And certainly not in spiritual consumerism where beliefs become aesthetic accessories.

But in humility.

In seriousness.

In responsibility.

In the recognition that human beings have spent thousands of years trying to answer the same impossible questions:

Why are we here?

How should we live?

What do we owe each other?

How do we suffer well?

What survives death?

How should power behave?

What makes life meaningful?

No one escapes those questions.

The atheist answers them.

The Christian answers them.

The Buddhist answers them.

The Muslim answers them.

The Taoist answers them.

The mystic answers them.

The skeptic answers them.

Even the person insisting none of it matters has still chosen a philosophy.

So perhaps the deeper invitation is simple:

Whatever you choose to be -

be a good version of that.

If you are Christian:

Practice the difficult parts.

Mercy.

Humility.

Compassion.

Forgiveness.

Neighborliness.

The inconvenient teachings.

Not merely the politically useful ones.

If you are secular:

Practice dignity.

Curiosity.

Restraint.

Humility.

Human decency.

Do not mistake cynicism for intelligence.

If you are spiritual:

Stay grounded.

Question yourself.

Do not become intoxicated with mystery.

Wonder without surrendering discernment.

If you are conservative:

Remember compassion.

If you are progressive:

Remember grace.

If you are religious:

Remember humility.

If you are skeptical:

Remember wonder.

If you are wounded:

Remember healing is still possible.

If you are recovering:

Remember your pain is part of your story - not necessarily the whole of who you are.

And if you believe absolutely nothing else at all:

At least remember this.

The world becomes unbearable when we stop imagining ourselves inside one another.

That may be the deepest wisdom hidden beneath all the noise.

Not perfection.

Not ideological victory.

Not theological domination.

Not cultural conquest.

Not purity.

Not certainty.

Just this:

Try not to become the kind of person you would fear if your roles were reversed.

Treat others as you would hope to be treated.

Protect dignity.

Practice restraint.

Choose kindness without surrendering truth.

And let compassion become stronger than tribal instinct.

Because if there is one spiritual principle humanity keeps rediscovering across continents, centuries, scriptures, rituals, philosophies, arguments, schisms, wars, awakenings, and collapses -

it may simply be this:

The Golden Rule is not childish.

It is civilization.

And perhaps, above all doctrines, above all institutions, above all ideologies, above all flags, above all slogans, above all denominations, above all spiritual performance -

it remains

the Rule Most High.

References & Further Reading

Footnotes

1. Jude 1:14-15 references Enoch directly. ↩

2. Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church canon includes the Book of Enoch. ↩

3. Kaplan, Aryeh. Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation. ↩

4. Beck, Roger. The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire. ↩

5. Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), studies on Christian nationalism in America. ↩

6. Matthew 7:12. ↩

7. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a. ↩

8. Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 13. ↩

9. Udana-Varga 5:18. ↩

10. Confucius, Analects 15:23. ↩

11. McAdams, Dan P. The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. ↩