by Rt Revd Alan Wislon, Bishop of Buckingham and Canon Rosie Harper – Guest Editors of ViaMedia
Jayne Ozanne has made quite a success of this blog. Last year it had over 150,000 hits, an average of 12,500 a month — quite a congregation. So we were slightly daunted but delighted when she invited us to be guest editors for the next two months.
We’ve invited a variety of people, some more and some less familiar . Our own passions are around Human Rights, Equality and Safeguarding, but we gave everyone the simple brief of speaking about something that really mattered to them. The next one will be by Andrew Lightbown who is moving from the Church of England to the Church in Wales. A challenging read -especially on the first day of General Synod!
Just as we were writing this introduction a new story was breaking about Spotify.
Joe Rogan has a recent podcast on Spotify with anti-vax guests. There was huge kickback. Music legends Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, amongst others, wanted Spotify to take down Joe’s material. They threatened to withdraw their music. Who could resist their power?
Spotify could, and started taking down Neil Young’s material instead. What on earth was going on…?
We had never heard of Joe Rogan. The Times has called him a “chaotic, fanatically curious, conspiracy-obsessed, hench, pot-smoking, woke-baiting broadcaster-cum-comedian-cum gonzo public intellectual.”
The same review called him “one of the most influential people alive,” the most highly paid broadcaster in history. Surprisingly, his Podcast is worth far more to Spotify than Mr Young or Ms Mitchell, iconic though they may be.
Joe Rogan produces 200 podcasts a year for $100 million. In 2019 200 million people downloaded them each month. The average age of his demographic is 24.
He seems to be communicating with people the Church can’t, anyway. We thought we’d investigate — what’s the appeal? Twenty minutes of catchy tunes and a little libertarian rant on the side?
The Average length of a Joe Rogan Podcast is two to three hours. Wikipedia says he is obsessional about Stand up Comedy, Martial Arts, Hunting and Libertarianism. Rather counter intuitively, he endorsed Bernie Sanders during the 2020 Democratic Party primaries. What?
We though we’d pick one of his podcasts with a pin. What was there to learn about martial arts, hunting and comedy?
Our pin landed on Podcast 1739 (November 2021). Joe talked for 135 minutes with Philip Goff, associate professor in the department of Philosophy at Durham University. They discussed the nature of consciousness and the need for a new philosophy about it. What?
11 million people tuned in, and although the guest list, one guest a podcast, includes Fighters, Comedians and Eat-what-you-kill hunters, it also includes, er, philosophy professors. His most recent guests were Valentine Thomas (former lawyer and financier turned free-diver, spear fisher, chef and author) Jordan Peterson (celebrity psychologist) and Professor Robert Epstein (Senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioural Research and Technology, who specialises in analysing how social media affect elections).
You have to give it to Joe, he has broad and wide interests. Much as we suspect we would disagree with him about just about everything, narrow he ain’t. He has even apologised for the anti-tax podcast and promised to research his guests better in future. He doesn’t seem to feel the need to be defensive.
Oh dear. We were all prepared for superficial populism, but his conversations, each with a single guest for 2-3 hours, seemed to be packed with provocative brain food.
There’s a painful contrast between his operation, its reach, its breadth and, surprisingly, its depth, and most of the Christian stuff out there. The Church seems to assume a moral high ground, a notion that it is inherently interesting in itself, and a habit of assuming Daddy (and it usually is Daddy) knows best. Its default habit is to tell you what to think, rather than stimulate thinking. It only feels comfortable if it can control the narrative. It deals in certainty. It looks down on intellectual curiosity. That is “secular.”
We have no idea what St Paul discussed with the philosophers on Mars Hill but suspect the conversation had broader bandwidth than much Christian discourse today. It went beyond “how to be a Christian and really efficient at recruiting people,” or “why Christians should be nice to one another,” as gripping as those subjects may be for insiders.
Strangely enough the Bible is packed with deep wisdom for everyone not just true believers. So, for that matter is the teaching of Jesus. Unfortunately many Christians seem live on the infant food St Paul regretted having to feed his friends in Corinth.
Via Media is partly about expanding bandwidth. Rowan Williams, when he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, suggested the mission of the Church of England was to engage with the imagination of ordinary people in a new way. Back in the day Sidney Carter, the radical hymn writer, said he went fishing with question marks for hooks. Like Jesus.
Joe Rogan clearly does. Why can’t we?
Any thoughts?