From Prufrock

 Good morning! Paul Kingsnorth gave this year’s Erasmus Lecture in New York. It’s called “Against Christian Civilization,” and it has now been published in the January issue of First Things:

What is this “West”? Well, it depends whom you ask. A liberal, a conservative, a reactionary, and a Marxist might give very different answers. But let us, instead, ask a historian. In his book Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after the Second World War, the medievalist Christopher Dawson offered his definition: ‘There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity. . . . Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.’

The West, said Dawson, was a religious construction. Specifically, it was a creation of the Roman Catholic Church. This is the only reason we talk about a “West” at all. But this claim immediately raises a question. If the Christian faith is the basis of Western culture, what happens when that faith retreats—or is rejected? We know the answer, because that rejection, or retreat—what the poet Matthew Arnold called the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “sea of the faith”—has been going on perhaps since the Renaissance. As we survey the twenty-first-century landscape, at least in Western Europe, we can see that our founding religion is now defunct as a guiding force and a cultural glue.

A question logically arises from that observation: Is the decline of Christianity responsible for our current malaise? Is our lack of faith at the root of our loss of confidence and the ensuing inversion of our old values? The answer to this, in one sense, is obviously yes. As another historian, Tom Holland, demonstrated in his book Dominion, it was Christianity that formed the Western mind. When such a sacred order dies, there will be upheaval at every level of society, from politics right down to the level of the soul.

This, I think, is where we are. And I am hardly the only one to have noticed. In fact, almost everyone who is paying attention has by now noticed. Some of those people, in response, have come to a conclusion: Since Christianity was the basis of this “Western” culture of ours, and since this culture is now sick or even dying, the way to revive it must be to revive Christianity—not so much as a religion, but rather as a social glue, or even as a weapon. What we need, we increasingly hear from many different quarters, is a return to something called “Christian civilization”—regardless of whether the Christian faith is, in fact, true.

At a certain level, this might appear to be an attractive narrative. But I believe it is a deadly mistake.

It’s a bracing lecture. You can also watch it here.

Link