Episode Details

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

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

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

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

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

Go deeper: The Reformation

Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
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Key Takeaways:

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

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