Cosmology, Democracy, and the Spirit of the Earth: Talking Process-Relational Political Theology with Tripp Fuller and Aaron Simmons

I joined Tripp and Aaron to discuss the changing role of religion in public life in our tumultuous political moment. We were discussing my lecture offering a Whiteheadian process cosmological response to Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism.

“Between Earth and Empire: Cosmopolitical Democracy Beyond the Liberal Horizon“

When Tripp asked how a process philosopher might begin thinking about something that Whitehead doesn’t explicitly spend much time on—democracy—I found myself both challenged and energized. While it’s true that Whitehead is not known for sustained political theorization, it would be mistaken to say he had nothing to offer. In Adventures of Ideas, he tracks the gradual ingression of the ideal of freedom from Plato’s Academy to women’s suffrage and beyond. Even more suggestively, in Process and Reality, we find ontologically provocative hints about what democratic life might mean within a cosmos conceived relationally and organismically as a “democracy of fellow creatures.” Whitehead speaks not to parliamentary structures but to a deeper metaphysical pluralism, one that acknowledges the intrinsic value of every being and their creative participation in the ongoing evolution of God and the universe.

Ontology, I believe, matters profoundly for politic, especially in the Anthropocene. If we take that term seriously—not as a settled scientific epoch but as a signal flare for our civilizational crisis—it names the disturbing fact that human activity now shapes geochemical and meteorological conditions on a planetary scale. We don’t control the weather (though some imagine we might), but our influence on Earth’s future is now on par with tectonic plates. Whitehead offers us tools to think with in this situation: not only his critique of the bifurcation of nature, but his processual account of causality, complexity, and relationality. These are indispensable for understanding the science of climate systems and feedback loops, but even more crucially, they help us imagine new forms of societal coordination. Because even if we possess actionable scientific knowledge, without political organization—and, indeed, without shared meaning—nothing will follow. Knowledge alone does not suffice. We need a motivating metaphysical vision.

That vision must allow us to relate to the Earth not as a system, but as a living being. The notion of “system” is too dry, too abstract. It suppresses the felt resonance of the more-than-human world. We must begin to see ourselves as living amid societies of creatures—not only human, but vegetal, microbial, planetary. Whitehead’s use of “society” is broad and generative; he applies it to all sorts of collectives, from subatomic to cellular to galactic. This provides conceptual scaffolding for imagining a politics that extends care and participation beyond the human realm, one that truly enacts what politics ought to be: the art of making worlds together.

This leads us, perhaps surprisingly, to Carl Schmitt. Studying Schmitt is even more awkward than studying Heidegger. The stakes are clearer, more brutal: Schmitt explicitly justified Hitler’s extrajudicial killings. And yet he exposes the internal contradictions of liberalism more directly than most of its defenders. When an enemy reveals your weakest point, you’d do well to pay attention.

In the early 20th century, liberals and communists alike tended to treat technological progress as inevitable and value-free. But as Marshall McLuhan would later demonstrate with eerie precision, media technologies reorganize the human sensorium. They alter not just the content of communication, but the very structure of meaning. The printing press catalyzed the Protestant Reformation. Radio, as Hitler knew, could create a mass mind. Television brought an era of consensus—however mythic—while social media has shattered any shared epistemic framework. Everyone is now a journalist—or no one is. We drift in fragmented information ecologies, algorithmically sorted into tribes.

In this context, AI becomes not simply another tool, but a theological phenomenon. Many in Silicon Valley turn to the occult, demonology, or science fiction to frame the intelligences they are helping to birth. They don’t fully understand how these systems work. The Frankenstein myth has come to life. And the machines, shaped by the myths we’ve projected onto them, are beginning to perform accordingly.

This too is metaphysics. Schmitt shows us that liberal values like human rights cannot stand on procedural or institutional foundations alone. Even Rawls concedes (albeit in a footnote) that the idea of human dignity requires metaphysical grounding in a natural law tradition. Legal systems exist to defend rights they did not create. Governments are instituted not to manufacture values, but to protect those already assumed. If we believe in democracy, in justice, in freedom, we must give these beliefs roots. Otherwise, they will be displaced by whatever ideology—economic or technological—fills the vacuum.

This brings us to cosmology. If you want to motivate people to cooperate, to coordinate their actions across cultures and generations, to share values while celebrating particularities—then you need a cosmology. One that is scientifically grounded but spiritually uplifting. One that helps our grandchildren breathe, as Tripp put it. Thomas Berry was a formative influence on me in this regard. He called himself a “geologian” and taught that ecology, at its best, is a functional cosmology. That is, a way of living regeneratively in our bioregions, because no one lives “on the Earth” in general. We live somewhere, among particular mountains, rivers, birds, and people. To relate rightly to them, we need a world-picture that reveals their intrinsic value and agency.

This is not a rejection of science but a deepening of it. Whitehead reminds us that we are ourselves ecosystems, made up of trillions of organisms, most of which don’t even contain human DNA. When we discard a piece of plastic, it returns to us through the air, the water, the food. There is no “away.” Our rituals must reflect this. Because the ecological crisis is not only scientific—it is also ritualistic. The premodern insight that ritual maintains cosmic order was not naïve. It was profound. The rhythmic course of sun and seasons depends not on our belief, but it may not be entirely immune to our behavior. Today, we’ve replaced generative ritual with repetition compulsions: shopping, scrolling, checking the markets, gambling on sports. These are the liturgies of a disenchanted world.

Whitehead’s cosmology, for all its complexity, seeks resonance between our metaphysical account of reality and our lived experience of becoming. A viable civilization must generate meaning, not just data. We need a cosmology that nourishes care, not just efficient calculation. Art, religion, and science must collaborate to attune us to the scale of the climate crisis, sensitizing us to the difference between weather and climate. The Book of Job remains one of our richest cosmological texts. God reveals that Nature is not here simply for us. It transcends our moral categories and humbles our illusions of control.

We mustn’t allow neoliberal capitalism to remain the default cosmology. It already functions as such. It fills the void when deeper questions go unasked. But it is spiritually false. It teaches that humans are cancers and that the Earth is a dead resource. In response, some forms of environmentalism have unfortunately become misanthropic, anti-human, anti-family. That is not a compelling story. We need a vision that affirms the worth of human life as part of a greater whole. Not dominators of nature, but humble gardeners.

Amid the collapse of political and economic systems, we see, in moments of crisis, our capacity for care. In the wake of hurricanes or wildfires, we remember how to help our neighbors, how to suffer together and rebuild. These are glimmers of the relational values that still animate our society beneath the noise. But the disasters are coming more frequently. And the challenge before us is to reimagine the world—not only to respond with compassion, but to prevent the next catastrophe. That’s an ontological task. It demands a reconfiguration of how we conceive value, agency, time, and community.

This is where my own spiritual path enters. I come from a mixed background: Jewish father, evangelical mother. I wasn’t raised in any one denomination, and I resisted the Christianity I inherited. But over time, through spiritual experience and philosophical reflection, I’ve come to a renewed, if unconventional, relationship with Christ.

To be “Jesus-y” in the age of Christian nationalism is complicated. But I was returning to a reimagined Christianity long before it recently became culturally “cool.” And while I don’t often call myself Christian—too many assumptions come with the term—I am drawn to the radical ferment of the first century, when many paths were still open. I’ve found inspiration in texts like the Gospel of Mary or the Gospel of the Beloved Companion. These are not just gnostic curiosities. They represent suppressed alternatives: feminine, relational, mystical, and ecologically attuned.

Mary Magdalene, the first to witness the risen Christ, represents a path not taken, a vision of Christianity that was never fully born, a tradition still in gestation. I don’t believe “Jesus Christ” must be named as such. Whether we speak of the Logos, the Buddha-nature, or the Divine Sophia, what matters is the spirit that moves through us and opens us to the stranger, to the strange human and the even stranger non-human. 

I have no denomination. I don’t know which doctrines offend or reassure. I am a process-relational thinker wandering in the theological wilds, striving to remain in wonder, searching not for definite doctrines but for “wild beasts of the philosophic desert.” But I do know this: there was a man who walked the Earth, who taught and suffered and died and lived again. He was seen, first by Her. By my lights the Spirit of the Christ Event continues to shape what it means to be human on this Earth.