Christianity and Civilization

The room was overflowing, the applause thunderous. Novelist, activist, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth delivered a galvanizing Erasmus Lecture in late October. It was one of the most bracing and exciting in our long series of Erasmus Lectures. I’m delighted to publish “Against Christian Civilization” in this issue.

Kingsnorth is a talented writer. But there are further reasons why his voice wins applause. And these reasons illuminate and clarify something about the strange and daunting times in which we live.

Kingsnorth’s writing features a strong current of censure and condemnation: nature desecrated, an economy feasting on greed and lust. The Machine is Kingsnorth’s image for today’s relentless empire of dominion, the effort to bring everything under the rule of man, to make the entire world serve our purposes. It’s billed as a humanitarian project, an expression of the modern “religion of humanity.” (Daniel J. Mahoney recently wrote a fine book on this topic, The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity.) Francis Bacon was one of the early architects of the Machine. He argued that reason’s purpose is to torture nature’s secrets out of her so that they might be used for the relief of man’s estate. Although the intention is philanthropic, the upshot is dystopian: a world of insatiable wants that impel us to destroy all limits. We construct and fuel the Machine because it promises to make us gods—a goal that requires us to transform everything into a resource, including our humanity.

One might think that such dire talk would make Kingsnorth off-putting. Perhaps it might have in decades past, when we had confidence in progress. But not so today. Many of us suspect that our troubles run deep, even as we are discouraged from thinking too much about how broken things are. For such people (and I count myself among them), Kingsnorth’s unsparing observations about contemporary society are welcome. He has the courage to see and say what we half-know but shrink from admitting.

Allow me to give an example. The use of reproductive technologies is accelerating rapidly. These procedures include the selection of embryos based on genetic testing. Although we prefer to think otherwise, it is glaringly obvious that doctors, public health officials, insurance companies, the Gates Foundation, moralists, and not a few church leaders—the Machine—will nudge more and more couples into artificial means of child production so as to prevent birth defects and thus reduce human suffering—the supreme imperative of the humanitarian religion of humanity.

Although Kingsnorth does not address IVF and related technologies in his Erasmus Lecture, he challenges the grip of the Machine. He helps us confront an all too likely future. Just as failure to use contraception has been disparaged as “unplanned parenthood” among the poor, natural means of reproduction will be condemned as irresponsible among the wealthy. But we are not undone by our situation, bad as it might be. Kingsnorth is not a prophet of doom. We have a place to stand. St. Paul mocked the world’s pretensions. Tribulation? Distress? Persecution? Famine? Peril? The sword? “In all these things,” Paul instructs us, “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). Christ has overcome the world. As we cleave to him, we pursue the victory of endurance.

Kingsnorth often returns to the deepest source of human freedom: It is always possible to do as God commands. St. John Paul II identified this foundation of freedom in Veritatis Splendor, perhaps the most important and lasting encyclical of his long pontificate. The martyrs and the saints witness to a perfect freedom, which is available to us as well, even as we stumble and fall. As Jesus teaches, with God all things are possible.

In “Against Christian Civilization,” Kingsnorth underscores our freedom in Christ by emphasizing Jesus’s most demanding strictures. Love your enemy. Do not resist evil. Sell all that you have and give to the poor. These are imposing demands, which can be met only by someone with Christlike holiness and purity of heart. It’s humiliating to acknowledge how lacking we are in those qualities. But it’s also ennobling to know that we are called to labor in the Lord’s vineyard as knowers and doers of his Word. We have it within our power to resist the Machine’s dominion. This does not mean victory, at least not as the world defines victory. Rather, freedom in Christ allows us to sustain our humanity, even as the world becomes more disordered and inhuman.

I share Kingsnorth’s judgment that the pillars of Western civilization are crumbling. Our institutions seem exhausted. Our political culture is strangely supercilious and hysterical. The globalized market economy universalizes the vices of the West while undermining our virtues. Demographic change has accelerated.

Kingsnorth urges us to avoid regarding Christianity as a “tool” to fix these problems. His message is straightforward: Beware seeking Christian renewal in order to revitalize Western civilization. Wise counsel. Our faith seeks union with God in Christ, not the success of a cultural-political project.

Nevertheless, I am an American citizen, formed by Western civilization. I have natural duties, including the duty to seek repair when repair is needed, to buttress columns when they are wobbling. Fulfilling these duties is no more a betrayal of Christ than are my efforts to be a good husband and father. What’s decisive is the order of our loves. Our earthly ties and affections, even the most intimate and wholesome, must be subordinate to our love of God. As Jesus warns, to follow him we must be prepared to hate our mother and father, brother and sister. The same holds for Western civilization.

I do not agree with every aspect of Kingsnorth’s assessment of our situation. I am less suspicious of cities, which can be places of grandeur and community, not just rapacious exploitation and sterile individualism. Everything produced by man after our primordial sin in Adam has two aspects, one noble and capable of being ordered toward love of God, the other base, seducing us toward love of self. This is true even of the sword. Jesus warns us that living by the sword will be our undoing—and St. Paul teaches that the sword is the divinely ordained instrument for the restraint of evil. As St. Augustine recognized, in this life the City of God and the City of Man are intermixed and intertwined.

Still, Kingsnorth is surely right in his main points. As a friend once forcefully put it to me, “Our Lord did not die on the cross in order to establish Western civilization!” And Christ certainly did not promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against the United States of America.

As the classic gospel song puts it, “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger / Traveling through this world below.” So, yes, we should be good citizens and promote the politics and policies we think best. “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7). And in these efforts in the world, let’s keep the final lines of that old-time song in mind: “I’m just going over Jordan / I’m just going over home.” Blessed is the warrior who fights for the future of Western civilization knowing that his endeavor is subordinate to the spiritual struggle for the future of his soul.