In this episode of the Gnostic Warrior Podcast, I have the honor of interviewing American philosopher and theologian Carl A. Raschke. Raschke is a Past Chair and Professor of Religious Studies Department at the University of Denver, specializing in continental philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the theory of religion.

He is an internationally known writer and academic, who has authored twenty books and hundreds of articles on topics ranging from neoliberalism, postmodernism to popular religion and culture to technology and society.

Please watch the video podcast below on Youtube or listen/download the audio podcast above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXozM5sg0uE

Carl's most recent books include Neoliberalism and Political Theology: From Kant to Identity Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Postmodern Theology: A Biopic (Cascade Books, 2017), Critical Theology: An Agenda for an Age of Global Crisis (IVP Academic, 2016), and Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2015).

He is also Senior Editor for the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory and Senior Consulting Editor for The New Polis. From 2016-2018 he served as managing editor for Political Theology Today (currently Political Theology Network).

Join Carl for discussions on philosophy at TheNewPolis.com

To find out more about Carl Rashke and his great work, please visit his website.

Or by email - carl.raschke@du.edu

Carl on Satanism;
There was a whole PR campaign to try to sanitize what was happening, and I was the target of a lot of these groups because I had the kind of intellectual authority. Satanism was not my thing. I knew a lot about it. I'd heard a lot about it on the ground, the narrative that let's call the PR campaign, which is pushed by, I would say, less than reputable academics who were just kind of in it to protect themselves and protect their research clients.

I'm not saying there was necessarily a thing corrupt about it, though. There have been rumors that occasionally there were, you know, it's, it's, it's kind of like the tobacco industry, you know, tried to tell you, you know, in the early days, you know, tobacco is not as harmful as they're saying. So what they did was they got the road authorities together, and they created this narrative.

That Satanism was a panic, you know, based on the idea of a moral panic, that term was posed by a guy. I can't remember his name, but it was called satanic panic. It came out in the nineties. It was a sociological term that basically tried to look at the whole phenomenon as if it were just a bunch of spooked out people who didn't really understand what was going on, who were panicking.

I mean, that's totally false because the thing emerged kind of organically and slowly the go back to Satanism mean. There is no such thing as Satanism per se. Just like there is no such thing as Christianity per se, but that's, that was always the argument. You're talking about Peter Gilmore, by the way, when you mentioned the church of Satan, did you?

I had a kind of debate with him on the TV back in the early nineties. There have been all sorts of schisms and arguments, and everybody was calling themselves Satanists.

Etiology there that there must be this pure thing, purity you call Satanism, which you know, is being slandered and abused and blah, blah, blah. And you know, so the whole thing was just, you know, literally a shit show. Uh, and, uh, I got caught up in the middle of that and the book I didn't expect that I was just trying to honestly write from, uh,