Freestyle Theology

Bradley Melle
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Christianity
  • Updated Weekly

The church that shaped you came from somewhere. Usually somewhere older, stranger, and more wounded than anyone ever told you.Freestyle Theology is a podcast about the history of Christianity, and about what that history did to people's bodies, families, and nervous systems. Bradley Melle is a historian of Christianity with a PhD from the University of Toronto, where he studied the entangled history of Christianity, colonialism, and Indigenous peoples. Every week he and his guests take one question and walk it back as far as it goes.When did white people stop dancing? Where did Hell actually come from? How did the church get so good at finding enemies? What did plague do to the western imagination? Why do purity, punishment, and control keep resurfacing in the same places, century after century?The method here is simple: Approach the dysfunction you see with curiosity. Then go looking for the catastrophe that formed it.These aren't lectures. They are conversations with people who know things, and love to wonder and wander. That's the freestyle part.For anyone rethinking faith, anyone deconstructing, anyone who left the church, anyone still in it and quietly wondering, and anyone who just wants to understand how the West turned out like this. Wondering freely, out loud.

  1. 2d ago

    Let's Talk About: Unearned Grace, Unearned Power

    In 1778, a watchmaker's son (who bought his way into the French nobility) wrote something that French students still have to learn for their exams. A servant, alone in the dark, rails at the noble count he works for: “What did you do to deserve all this? You went to the trouble of being born, and nothing more.” Eleven years later, the French Revolution began. In this conversation, Ngofeen Mputubwele and I start at 1789 and work backward to figure out how Europe got there. Ngofeen knows the 1700s as a classical singer, through the operas and novels he's had to learn inside and out. I (Bradley Melle) know it through church history. So, we come at the same century from very different directions. One word – the word we circle around through this entire conversation - hit me hard this time: Grâce. For French nobles, grace meant poise. The way you walked, the way you talked, the way you held your body. And you supposedly had it just by being born noble. But "grace" was also the word at the centre of the Reformation. God’s grace given to people who hadn’t earned it. So what happens when a society's theology and its class system run on the same word? We follow that question from Luther siding with the princes in the German Peasants' War, to the moment the noble ideal moved off the battlefield and into the body, to A Tale of Two Cities, plantation fortunes, and today's billionaires. And right at the end, we realize the First Great Awakening is happening in this exact same century. Our journey continues. In this episode Why Napoleon called The Marriage of Figaro “the revolution already in action”How French nobles displayed their status through the body, and why "grace" was the key word from 1500 to 1789Three very different meanings of grace in Christianity: Roman patronage, God's mercy, and elegant movementHow Reformation theology fed the German Peasants' War, and why Luther sided with the elitesThe difference between calling people "savage" and calling them "primitive," and why the civilizing mission's goal for Indigenous peoples was the Christian peasantHow being noble stopped meaning being a warrior and started meaning control of the bodyUnearned grace, unearned power, and whether anyone can earn a billion dollarsThe violence underpinning noble wealth, from plantation fortunes to "God blessed this nation"Why the wild early years of evangelicalism belong in this storyChapters [0:08] — Intro [3:52] — The Marriage of Figaro, a revolution before the revolution [5:35] — 1789 and the death blow to the civilizing mission [6:59] — Wigs, lace, and Beaumarchais buying his way into the nobility [10:40] — Figaro's monologue: you went to the trouble of being born [13:33] — Don Giovanni: I don't want to serve anymore [15:10] — The guillotine, and spotting a noble by the way they walk [17:54] — Grâce, the operative word from 1500 to 1789 [20:00] — Three meanings of grace: Roman patronage, God's mercy, graceful movement [22:50] — Pastors, the Greek, and the word "demure" [25:29] — How does God's grace connect to aristocratic grace? [26:16] — Luther, the German Peasants' War, and a revolt that rhymes [31:21] — The Dutch Revolt, iconoclasm, and getting rid of carnival [33:59] — Savage versus primitive [35:57] — The goal was a Christian peasant [37:02] — A dissertation on bon air et bonne grâce [40:06] — When being noble meant being a warrior [41:44] — From the battlefield to manners, music, and dance [44:45] — "Original brutishness": the body becomes the battlefield [46:05] — Cherubino gets an army [48:22] — They didn't earn it: unearned grace and unearned power [53:15] — The Restoration, the Sun King, and Versailles as Mt. Olympus [55:42] — Can anyone earn a billion dollars? [57:42] — A Tale of Two Cities and the disturbing carriage scene [1:00:37] — Genteel on top, violence underneath [1:04:07] — "God blessed this nation" [1:04:35] — Why are white people so lame…? [1:06:18] — Beaumarchais wants a plantation in Saint-Domingue [1:08:36] — Wrapping it up: the fight moves into the body [1:12:29] — The 1700s is when evangelicalism begins [1:15:18] — Outro Mentioned Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni Rossini, The Barber of Seville Verdi, Don Carlos Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility Mark Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education of the Court Nobility, 1580–1715 H. Daniel Zacharias, “GraceLand: The Land as Relational Gift in the Bible” Mickaël Bouffard-Veilleux, "Le bon air et la bonne grâce: Attitudes et gestes de la figure noble dans l’art européen (1661-1789)" The Gilded Age (HBO) Jonathan Edwards and the First Great Awakening Free course: Ancestral Trauma in the Church, at bradleymelle.com/free Freestyle Theology is a podcast about Christian history, psychology, and the body, exploring power, grief, colonialism, and the faith people inherit.

  2. Sep 8

    Let's Talk About: Purity

    The Reformation is usually taught as liberation. Throwing off the shackles of the past. But it's better understood as a purification project. And purification projects rarely end well… This is our sixth conversation together, and here Ngofeen and I finally arrive at dance. It also goes somewhere neither of us really expected: what did it cost to be trained out of feeling? Ngofeen and I get into why revelry and purification both “feel good” but run on completely different machinery. Why colonization was the ultimate dopamine high, and why revelry could never compete with it. Why medieval Catholicism was never simply pro-body, and why Carnival was always a negotiated compromise. And why the body, specifically, is where purity always aims its sharpest attacks. If your theology allows you to switch off your senses, something is wrong with your theology. A missionary standing in the Congo watching forearms get cut off. A person holding others in slavery for sixty-five years and sleeping through the night just fine. Christians drowning Anabaptists over baptism. An internal alarm should have been screaming, and it wasn't. I have to quote Ngofeen here because he was so on point: “I’d rather listen to my feelings, because you weren’t listening to yours and you had slaves.” In this episode: The Reformation as a purification project, and why Ngofeen never heard it framed that way in Reformed spacesRevelry and purification as two different kinds of pleasure, and what carnival was actually forColonization as peak achievement, and why that high beat everything elseThe Counter-Reformation, the Council of Trent, and the Catholic purity projectWhy the Fall isn't a satisfying answer to why the body is suspect"You should move, not be moved," and what the drum does to a bodyCollective effervescence, worship music, and the one hour a week you were allowed a bodyFeelings as a sense rather than a verdict, and curiosity instead of "just stop it"Ballet as a totalizing system: five positions, elbows off the table, nobility posing in fourth position in their portraitsWhy the problem isn't order, it's totalizing order, and why we need porousness insteadThe immune system as a model for a tradition that can actually learnRelating to the Bible as a wise elder rather than a commanding emperorWhy purity projects are self-consuming, and how you end up with seventy people who think they're the only “real” ChristiansChapters [0:08] — Intro [8:37] — We've reached dancing. It only took 1,500 years [9:42] — The Reformation as a purification project [14:12] — Drain the swamp, DOGE, and what gets thrown out [16:42] — Revelry, carnival, and the medieval hangover [17:29] — Two kinds of pleasure: oxytocin and dopamine [18:55] — The New Year's purge, and why it feels righteous [22:00] — Carnival as the peasant's whole reason for being alive [24:18] — Trent, the Jesuits, and the Catholic purification project [26:00] — Colonization as peak achievement, a high revelry can't compete [30:00] — Why anyone in Geneva would listen to Calvin [33:00] — Drowning the Anabaptists [35:00] — Carnival as a workable compromise, and clergy asking everyone to reel it in [36:16] — Why is the body the target? Purity culture and Pride Month [39:31] — The dinner table, and why bodily activity used to be neutral [41:00] — Why "the Fall" isn't a satisfying answer [43:30] — Christianity is not enough as is [45:18] — Where the dance question has really been pointing [47:45] — Collective effervescence, worship music, and one hour a week with a body [51:10] — "You're just doing it for the high" [51:43] — You should move, not be moved [52:38] — What percussion does to a body [53:18] — The hatred of the body is a hatred of its power [54:22] — Jealousy, anger, and Dr. Phil advice [57:22] — Leading with wonder, and how much the body knows before you do [1:02:25] — Feelings as a sense, not a verdict [1:05:58] — The smell in the fridge, and questions instead of judgments [1:07:00] — Ballet as a totalizing system of order [1:11:30] — Order versus totalizing order [1:13:01] — The immune system, porousness, and what a tradition needs to survive [1:19:03] — Paul, the body, and reading scripture as a wise elder [1:21:43] — If your theology turns off your senses [1:25:39] — Three hundred years of mastering your feelings, and what it cost [1:28:15] — Dehumanizing language as anesthetic [1:29:34] — Jesus's method: relate to everyone as neighbor [1:33:46] — Purity projects consume themselves [1:36:35] — Reflecting on the series so far [1:37:39] — The correction: they didn't stop in the 1500s, they stopped in the 1960s [1:42:37] — Next week: the French Revolution Mentioned Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets Norbert Elias on the history of manners The Council of Trent The Anabaptists Chesterton's fence Free course: Ancestral Trauma in the Church, at bradleymelle.com/free Freestyle Theology is a podcast about Christian history, psychology, and the body, exploring power, grief, colonialism, and the faith people inherit.

  3. Sep 1

    Let's Talk About: 1500s Minimalism

    Rip up the linoleum and there's beautiful hardwood underneath. Restore the original windows. Strip the paint off the trim. Look how much better this house is without a thousand years of junk piled on top of it! That's Ngofeen's working image for the Reformation. But what happens when you throw out things you actually needed? And the floor starts giving you splinters. Then one day you need the printer you gave away. This is our fifth conversation, and we've reached the 1500s. Ngofeen spends the hour asking me a version of one question, and eventually he renames it. He says he's not going to call it "civilizing" anymore, he's going to call it "taming." Why were European Christians so desperate to tame themselves? Why was their memory of what they "used to be" so abhorrent to them? We explore a winding labyrinth of answers. This period doesn't have a clean causal chain, and anyone who hands you one is selling the era short. I also left in a few minutes of us just talking about ourselves before we started. It helps explains why the two of us ask the questions we ask. Some of what we get into: Luther as Augustine all over again. One man in crippling private pain finds a way out, and then his experience becomes the template everyone else is expected to reproduceNgofeen translating Luther's whole crisis into 2026 therapy language, and it fits exactlyWhy Eastern and Western Christianity split, using an argument from Peter Brown: in a world with an emperor, you can imagine a God who cancels every debt at once. Lose the empire and that stops making senseThe Irish penitentials, a tariff schedule for sin, and why the post-imperial West was so hungry for oneMedieval theology as common law, accreting case by case from a knight who cut off another knight's armWhy I think hierarchy is a trauma response that got encoded as naturalThe Great Dying, and the fact that Europeans had exactly one category for interpreting mass death, because they'd just used it on themselvesWhat the doctrine of discovery actually wasThe Portuguese kneeling before the king of Kongo, and the way things could have goneWhen "love your neighbour" turns into locking someone in a cageAnd the question we hand to next week: behind European court dance, strings. Behind African dance, the drum. Timestamps [0:08] — Intro [4:49] — Three languages before you try, and the World Series that's only the US and Japan [7:32] — Campfire Christianity, the Moravians, and getting pulled into the evangelical cyclone [11:28] — Conversation five: the fall of Constantinople and the blocked road east [15:39] — Belching at the medieval dinner table [18:28] — The Reformation's new demand: look inside and scan [20:39] — Luther's ledger, and the pressure valve opening [24:16] — What Luther sounds like in therapy language [29:20] — Why the late medieval system had turned toxic, and the new burden that replaced it [31:53] — Dung covered in gold [33:00] — Augustine as skeleton, and the gaps he left for everyone else to fill [35:59] — Torts class, precedent, and theology as common law [39:16] — Peter Brown and the God of amnesty: why East and West diverged [42:00] — The Irish penitentials, and de-romanticizing the Celtic church [44:32] — Ngofeen's first job at Subway, and what tradition actually is [48:07] — The Reformation as an HGTV renovation [51:12] — Splinters, the printer you gave away, and Chesterton's fence [55:16] — Turning inward, the nation-state, legibility, and taxes [59:00] — Hierarchy as a traumatic response [1:02:57] — "I'm going to call it taming." Why did you need to stop being what you were? [1:03:44] — The Great Dying, read through the Black Plague [1:05:00] — The Kingdom of Kongo and the Portuguese on their knees [1:09:56] — The doctrine of discovery [1:12:00] — "Are these people even human?" and Las Casas condemning the conquistadors [1:15:05] — The belch, the fart, and the dancing body [1:18:07] — Strings and drums [1:21:09] — How the Catholics got on board: Trent, the Jesuits, "we'll play, but we're going to win" Mentioned Peter Brown on sin, forgiveness, and the post-imperial West Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets Chesterton's fence Bartolomé de las Casas Jan Hus Free course: Ancestral Trauma in the Church, at bradleymelle.com/free Freestyle Theology is a podcast about Christian history, psychology, and the body, exploring power, grief, colonialism, and the faith people inherit. Next week, conversation six, where Ngofeen tells me what the dance question has been standing in for all along.

  4. Aug 25

    Let's Talk About: Original Sin

    Most people think original sin means we're born bad. But that's not really what Augustine said. What he actually argued is stranger (and colder) than that, and I explain it in this episode: You aren't bad, you're incapable. Your will is broken at the root. You can see the good, you can want the good, and you still can't do it. Incapable of turning to God. And the evidence Augustine pointed to for that broken will is not what you'd expect... Today I'm talking with Katharyn Havey, a trauma healer and host of The Spiritual Gym, who came to Augustine backwards. Not through history, but through her clients. She kept running into the same wound over and over, and eventually went looking for where it came from. So we made a trade. She brings a working theory of unworthiness built from hundreds of hours sitting with people in real pain. I bring the archaeology: where this doctrine came from, why the Latin West couldn't stop repeating one man for seven hundred years, and how it got re-injected into Protestantism by Luther and Calvin. We also talk about the thing a lot of you will recognize immediately. That moment when someone says "you are worthy, you are powerful," and your head says yes but something deeper down says "No, wait, we can't say that..." I have that reaction on mic and try to be honest about it. Katharyn and I come at this from very different places, but the resulting conversation is rich. Timestamps [00:08] — Intro [05:00] — Why Augustine is in every conversation, whether you like him or not [05:39] — Katharyn on why her page is called "There Is No Sin" [07:29] — One man's wound, universalized into cosmic truth [09:10] — Why Augustine took over the West: lost libraries, lost Greek, one really good album [13:12] — Confessions: real beauty sitting right next to "I am nothing but dust" [15:03] — Augustine invented the self-reflective autobiography, and people felt seen [19:06] — A sample size of one [19:42] — The opportunistic infection [20:28] — The three core wounds: threatening safety, belonging, worthiness [21:44] — Luther was an Augustinian monk, and the Reformation put Augustine back in the bloodstream [26:02] — The early church as trauma context, and why undocumented people are the closest parallel [28:50] — How do you know it was "bad?" The parable of the Chinese farmer [34:44] — Jews in medieval Europe, scapegoating, and trauma passing forward [39:05] — What original sin actually is: bondage of the will, and what Augustine thought proved it [43:07] — "You are powerful" versus "you are incapable," and why one triggers the other [45:54] — The flinch: my head believes it, my body refuses it [48:42] — The heart is deceitful, and why that verse probably says something else [51:02] — The western church as a parentified child [55:45] — Praying for forgiveness with nothing to be forgiven for [57:29] — Baptism, water purification, and a much older ritual [58:39] — Did Paul invent original sin? And what Eastern Orthodoxy does instead [1:00:23] — Epigenetics, generational curses, and trauma passed through culture [1:04:02] — You know a thing by its fruit. And fruit takes generations. [1:07:23] — The cruelty of the catch-22, and how the Middle Ages spent centuries softening it [1:12:08] — Why unworthiness can feel safe [1:13:36] — Where we're picking this up next Find Katharyn Instagram: @there.is.no.sin Podcast: The Spiritual Gym Mentioned Augustine, Confessions Dan McClellan on "the heart is deceitful" The Eastern Orthodox doctrine of ancestral sin My Free course: Ancestral Trauma in the Church, at bradleymelle.com/free Freestyle Theology is a podcast about Christian history, psychology, and the body, exploring power, grief, colonialism, and the faith people inherit. Next week I'm back with Ngofeen for our fifth conversation on the history of the body in western Christianity.

  5. Aug 18

    Let's Talk About: Enemies

    Let's Talk About: Enemies (with Fr. Joash Thomas) Jesus told his followers to love their enemies. Western Christianity went on to build one of the most sophisticated systems in history for finding them. That chasm is what I come back to again and again. So I sat down with Fr. Joash Thomas to talk it out plainly. We start with a question nobody really asks: Who actually counts as an "enemy?" Because it isn't the neighbour whose dog barks at 7am. It's not the guy who wants to rearrange the pews at church. It's not the commuter who tailgates  and flips you the bird. Those hokey, middle-class Christian examples are useless. Those people are your neighbours, not enemies. Joash brings in Palestinian church leaders who say plainly that the Western church has been their enemy. I bring in the early church, where the enemy was defined by belief instead of territory or ethnicity. That meant the enemy was invisible. Which meant you needed a system for finding them, fueled by suspicion and vigiliance. But that system did not get dismantled after the persecution ended. It just got more sophisticated. From there it opens up. The Great Commission as a colonial-era invention. "The world" in the New Testament read as "empire" not "society." Marx in Manchester. Haudenosaunee ceremonies that could turn a stranger into kin. Benedictines who had to open the door to anyone who knocked. St. Francis talking to Brother Wolf, and Joash getting scared of bears in Algonquin Provincial Park. Canadian Settlers who hated the forest. And then something more practical: If loving your enemy is real, it doesn't start with your abuser. Telling a survivor to do that is violent and cruel. Start with the person your culture tells you to fear. Give it time, respect, and gain knowledge. That's how you learn to love a forest, and it's probably how you learn to actually love a neighbour too. I left this one with a bigger heart. And that's always the goal. In this episode [0:24] The chasm between Jesus on enemies and the church's enemies [2:08] Who did we decide our enemies are? Barking dogs, the pews, and Munther Isaac [3:31] Middle-class Christianity and its hokey examples of sin [6:03] "You've been the enemy to us." Palestinian church leaders to the Western church [8:41] Reading the Bible with an empire-informed lens, not just a trauma-informed one [13:04] "The world" as the empire-shaped world [14:22] Two kinds of enemies, and which one you're actually supposed to start with [16:10] Converting your neighbour is treating them like a target [18:10] The Great Commission as a colonial invention [20:30] Love thy trillionaire (!?) and the universalizing move that protects the status quo [24:13] Marx, Manchester, and the opiate of the masses [27:30] Every society has enemies. Not every society builds machinery to find them. [31:22] Why the early church's enemy was invisible, and what happened after Constantine [34:51] St. Francis, Brother Wolf, and Joash's bear [41:10] Settlers and the forest. Time, respect, knowledge. [46:30] Don't start with the abuser [46:59] Celtic ancestors, and decolonization that starts with your own grandmother [55:26] Loving your enemy doesn't mean sparing them the consequences About Joash Father Joash Thomas is the author of The Justice of Jesus. He teaches at St. Stephen's University, writes the Masala Chai Theology Substack, and sits on the advisory council of the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice. The Justice of Jesus Masala Chai Theology on Substack Instagram: @joashpthomas St. Stephen's University: https://www.ssu.ca/ And if this is your kind of thing: I have a free course called Ancestral Trauma in the Church. It's the trauma approach to church history that sits underneath most of what I talk about here. Head over to bradleymelle.com/free to gain access.

  6. Aug 11

    Let's Talk About: Cursed Objects

    A Christian builder in Texas prays over every house he puts up and stamps John 3:16 into the driveway. A family member rebukes your depression in the name of Jesus. A Congolese aunt tells you not to buy that carving: it's demonic and it can hurt you. Ethnic cleansing in medieval Spain. Ngofeen and I originally sat down to walk from the Black Plague to the eve of the Reformation, and instead we spent an hour on this: what makes an object, a word, a country, or a body tainted, and who gets to decide? This is the fourth conversation in our series on when white people stopped dancing. Something critical clicked for me this time around. Contamination logic is the hinge. It runs from Pentecostal missionaries in Ghana turning old gods into demons, to Ferdinand and Isabella telling Spanish Muslims and Jews to convert or leave, to a ballet teacher saying keep your hips square, to a man who has to do an elaborate handshake before he's allowed to hug his friend. In this episode: -Why we open in 2020, and what the pandemic can and can't tell us about the plague -Pentecostalism as both the most spiritually aggressive and the most anti-traditional Christianity at once, and Birgit Meyer's Translating the Devil -Scripture citation as spell-casting, and what apologetics has in common with a curse -Ngofeen redecorating his bedroom door with raffia and nails, and what his aunties would say -Paul on meat sacrificed to idols, and whether intention permanently taints an object -The Reconquista, 1492, and why Spain arrived in the Caribbean already unable to see what was in front of them -Columbus is the '90s: Luther in 1517 and Columbus in 1492 are the same twenty five years, not two separate histories -The body as a history book, and reading white evangelical worship gestures as appropriated Black movement -Ngofeen on the exhaustion of proving you are not a tainted object -Why congregational singing might be the cry of a person who can't be touched Mentioned Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (1999) If you missed registration for my class "The Body of Christ Keeps the Score" and want to be kept in the loop for the next time it's offered, head to https://bradleymelle.com/course and join the waitlist! New here? Freestyle Theology reads the history of Christianity through trauma and the body. Not just what people believed, but what happened to them, and what it did to how they move.

  7. Jul 28

    Let's Talk About: My Origin Story (How I Became a Historian of Christian Dysfunction)

    I've never been able to explain how I became a historian of Christian dysfunction - until I sat down to record this. This week there's no guest and no lesson plan. It's just me in my office, tracing how church history went from meaning absolutely nothing to me to becoming my life's work, and how I ended up studying the church's dysfunctions instead of its glories. I go back to being a teenager sitting on a 56k modem in 1999, reading about the origins of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam for hours, while never *once* searching for the history of my own Christian faith. I talk about why evangelicalism gave me nothing but a 2,000-year blur where a story should have been: apostles, then static, then a flicker of Constantine, then static, then Luther. The Christian history I'd absorbed was nothing but decay and deviation from the pure New Testament church. There was nothing worth being curious about, so I wasn't. You'll hear about the Moravian church I grew up in - gentle, campfire Christianity - and how stadium megachurch evangelicalism came in loud enough to drown everything else out. About purity culture, about being a good kid who desperately wanted to do what was right, and about the anger I still carry from those years. And I ask the question that I can't get out of my head out loud: how much of what I called "faith" was actually just anxiety, dressed up and given a name, scanning for relief? I describe waking up every morning to pray with my feet ratcheted up tight toward the ceiling, apologizing to God for nothing in particular. I talk about seeing the same anxious energy surfacing in my daughter now, and what's different about the fact that she says it out loud. Then the turn: my history professor at Redeemer teaching Byzantine and Eastern European history. Christianity suddenly has origins, development,and  alternatives. Serbs and Croats, one people split by a line between Orthodox and Catholic. Missiology, contextualization, Andrew Walls decentring Western Christianity. My masters on Africa and colonialism, my doctorate on Indigenous peoples and the church, and not finding the beautiful diversity I went looking for but instead a machine built to re-engineer human beings. This process left me with two questions that continue to fuel my work. First: how could Christians have done that and called it God's will? And then the one I'm still living inside everyday: "Church, who hurt you, bro?" That question is why I now read church history the way I've learned to read my own body: not as a record of correct and incorrect belief, but as a record of pain, fear, and protection. Where did it start? What is it trying to tell us? If that's the kind of thing you're interested in: my free online seminar, The Traumatized Church: How Christianity's Painful Past Still Haunts and Harms, is tonight, Tuesday, July 28 at 8pm EST. Register at bradleymelle.com/learn. If you can't make it, register anyway and I'll send you the replay! Registration for the next cohort of The Body of Christ Keeps the Score - my four-week course through the church's trauma history - opens this week. Details at the seminar.

  8. Jul 21

    Let's Talk About: The Civilizing Mission

    Register now for Dr. Bradley Melle's upcoming online seminar @ bradleymelle.com/learn Let's Talk About: The Civilizing Mission (feat. Ngofeen Mputubwele) What does a civilization do after everything fails? Between 1350 and 1500, the West lived through a genuine polycrisis. The Black Plague, a church with two and then three popes, peasant revolts, the fall of Constantinople, and gunpowder rendering every castle wall obsolete. In this episode, journalist, playwright, and opera singer Ngofeen Mputubwele and I finally name the thing this series has been circling: the civilizing mission. Most commonly associated with colonization, “civilizing” actually began as a massive project of “tidying up” that emerged from the wreckage of the late Middle Ages. Censuses, surnames, etiquette manuals, official languages, manicured lawns, and mandatory daily dance lessons where a sagging elbow was corrected like a moral failure. Along the way: how the Vatican held the official contract for colonial education in the Belgian Congo (Ngofeen's own family story), the man who invented "social studies" as a tool of colonial control on two continents, why the canonical Cinderella was written at Louis XIV's court (and what its actual moral is) and how the Puritan's journal of relentless self-examination is ballet performed on the soul. A traumatized civilization reaching for control in order to feel safe. Sound familiar? Topics discussed in this episode: ·       Semester recap: from Constantine to the fall of Rome to the medieval world [4:26] ·       Islam, the Reconquista, and why 1492 sent Columbus [6:14] ·       The Jesuits: the church's "shock troops" who became its most radical cultural translators including De Nobili in India, Ricci's Confucian Christianity, the Wendat missions [8:11] ·       Ngofeen's family story: born on a Jesuit mission, how the Vatican held the contract for education in Belgian Congo, and the fifth-grade ceiling unless you entered the priesthood [11:45] ·       Thomas Jesse Jones: the one man behind colonial education curricula in both Africa and Indigenous America and the invention of "social studies" [14:12] ·       The polycrisis of 1350-1500: plague, labor collapse, peasant revolts, the printing press as the first internet [23:27] ·       The Ottoman ascent, the fall of Constantinople, and the terror of the Christian nervous system [~28:00] ·       The "threshold of visibility": why the medieval church tolerated carnival, festival, and local religiosity and why that world ended [~32:00] ·       Why the church's system failed during the Black Plague and how the plague birthed individualism [38:03] ·       Avignon, three popes, and Jan Hus burned at the stake after a promise of safe passage [40:39] ·       "Make Rome Magnificent Again": the beautification of Rome, the Renaissance as post-catastrophe hope and a surprising 2026 New York analogy [44:54] ·       Indulgences as "the premium package": exploiting a traumatized population, and what Luther crashed into [49:33] ·       The Renaissance as golden-age nostalgia, not a turn away from God [52:02] ·       How civilizing colonized everyday life: the royal court, the prestige shift, and the etiquette explosion [55:51] ·       Louis XIV's system: Versailles, official French, and the academies that standardized everything including dance [58:57] ·       "Your dancing master is the most important man in Europe": Lord Chesterfield's letter to his nephew [1:01:19] ·       Walking turned out, walking like a rustic and why orthopedics was invented to fix noble children [~1:06:00] ·       Cinderella, written at Louis XIV's court: the real moral is grace [1:08:45] ·       Rustic, grace, affectation: the chart that sorted humanity [1:10:41] ·       Is Calvin's grace the same word as the court's grace? An open question we're now chasing [1:11:00] ·       The medieval body vs. the Reformation body: when going through the motions became illegitimate [1:12:50] ·       The Puritan journal and the ballet correction: self-examination at the granular scale [1:16:59] ·       Coming next week: the Reformation and a forecast of dance's death by French Revolution [1:19:26] Resources mentioned in this episode: ·       The Traumatized Church: my free live seminar, Tuesday, July 28th at 8pm EST on Zoom. Register at bradleymelle.com/learn. Replay sent to everyone who registers ·       When Did White People Stop Dancing? Ngofeen Mputubwele's play-in-progress, the origin of this series ·       Becoming a French Aristocrat: the primary-source study of aristocratic child-rearing Ngofeen references [58:57] ·       Lord Chesterfield's letters to his nephew (1768) [1:01:19] ·       Register free for The Traumatized Church: Tuesday, July 28th, 8pm EST: bradleymelle.com/learn. Live Q&A included; can't make it live? Register anyway and get the replay ·       New to the series? Start with Part 1 (Augustine and the medieval body) and Part 2 (the Black Plague and the Danse Macabre) ·       Follow Freestyle Theology on Instagram: @freestyletheology ·       Send me a message directly through the link at the top of this episode description

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5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

The church that shaped you came from somewhere. Usually somewhere older, stranger, and more wounded than anyone ever told you.Freestyle Theology is a podcast about the history of Christianity, and about what that history did to people's bodies, families, and nervous systems. Bradley Melle is a historian of Christianity with a PhD from the University of Toronto, where he studied the entangled history of Christianity, colonialism, and Indigenous peoples. Every week he and his guests take one question and walk it back as far as it goes.When did white people stop dancing? Where did Hell actually come from? How did the church get so good at finding enemies? What did plague do to the western imagination? Why do purity, punishment, and control keep resurfacing in the same places, century after century?The method here is simple: Approach the dysfunction you see with curiosity. Then go looking for the catastrophe that formed it.These aren't lectures. They are conversations with people who know things, and love to wonder and wander. That's the freestyle part.For anyone rethinking faith, anyone deconstructing, anyone who left the church, anyone still in it and quietly wondering, and anyone who just wants to understand how the West turned out like this. Wondering freely, out loud.

Information

  • Creator
    Bradley Melle
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    44
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Freestyle Theology
  • Show Website
    Freestyle Theology

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