[Disclaimer : This is not an academic philosophical essay. These are a collection of the author's nascent thoughts.]
In the course of various social media exchanges, I have imprecisely used the term 'neo-platonism' to refer to the dominant undercurrent of Platonic dualism that I have come to observe in modern(ist) versions of Christianity (especially in evangelical and Protestant settings). In this note, I intend to crystallize some inchoate ideas that I intuitively grasp and allude to when I use this term. I say that my usage of this term is imprecise because, unbeknownst to me, this term already exists and is used to refer to something else.
I grew up evangelical (non-denominational and charismatic leaning). In my late 20s, I became Reformed, before moving on to high-church Anglicanism and then, ultimately, entering (or, re-entering) the Orthodox faith of my forefathers.
A dominant and overarching strain of belief, that can almost be seen as the central theme or meta-narrative, in the evangelical / Protestant traditions of my childhood is this idea that the chief end or telos of our "faith" is "salvation" -- where the former was seen as mental actions (belief in certain propositional truths and the mental act of trust in Christ) and the latter was seen as a personal and atomized spiritual-realm transaction between God and myself, involving forgiveness, removal of guilt and assurance of eternal life. All of the important aspects of faith were relegated to the exclusive domain of one's mind (subjective world) as well as relegated to an unmediated private zone where only God and one's own self were present, as purely spiritual and uncorporeal entities.
This is not to discount the vast amounts of true love and charity demonstrated by those who lived, believed and practiced this religion. However, these actions of love and fellowship and charity in the real, material world where one interacted with others (whether in the Church or in the world) were believed to be and experienced as separate from or buffered from one's own direct, unmediated, subjective mental-world faith life in God. This latter life experience was sometimes referenced as "your faith walk" or "my walk".
Towards my mid to late 20s, I began to understand this manner of thinking to be the lingering influence of Platonic dualistic thought in Christianity. Specifically, the theme of "mind/spirit is good and the body is bad" dominates large swaths of modern Pauline interpretation and hermeneutic, especially in evangelicalism.
Over the years, these intuitions enabled me to explain other phenomenon that I witnessed, such that it made sense to me. These included such things as "pray for a peace about it", "pray that I can discern God's will", "practice purity, Jesus is all you need", "just let go and let God, just trust", teaching forgiveness as mentally letting go without teaching about what restitution and justice mean and what exactly ought to be forgiven, teaching repentance as 'saying sorry and meaning it', identifying idolatry, slavery and bondage to be purely mental addictions and maladies disconnected from real-world violence, oppression and blasphemous/sacrilegous actions, etc. Even more insidious than these confused and unmoored notions is the identification of modern psychology with Christian truth. This identification is broad and multi-pronged -- from explaining away "peace" to be merely inward contentment and pscyhologized comfort to fully adopting the modern(ist) idea of saving man by re-engineering his nature using psychobabble (hypnosis) and medications (frequently referred to as "resources").
For many people stuck in these patterns of thought, as I was once, believing these untruths makes one's experience of reality worse in actuality while the mind gets more and more used to a cult-like pattern of denialism and false guilt, that one mistakes for faith and repentance. Akin to putting a lid on a volcano, these patterns of thoughts, makes one's life markedly worse (as all untruths do), instead of being merely innocuous eccentricities.
Much more recently, I had a chance to read and delve deep into the comprehensive tome 'A Secular Age', by Charles Taylor. While I cannot blanket endorse that book, I highly recommend it as a must-read for anyone interested in the topic at hand. It is masterful tour-de-force through historical anthropology and sociology of the middle ages in the West, and identifies the strains of thought leading to or distinguishing modernity from the past. Some of the book's ideas are then elaborated by Carl Trueman in 'The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self'. These two books lay out the narrative framework that would enable anyone to clearly see the domination of Platonic dualism in much of modern Christianity -- and, sadly, these currents of thoughts have also permeated outside of Protestantism and into Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
(incomplete draft)