Is a Western return to Christianity possible?
In my e-mail to David Warren about his article where he said discouragingly that the post-Christian West is incapable of dealing with Islam, I wrote:
But I want to say to you that it’s not so bad. Seeing the truth is good, it means we can start dealing with realities instead of killing ourselves by imagining that our mortal enemies can be our friends. It means recognizing that the “post-Christian West” is indeed incapable of dealing with Islam. That is not bad, it’s good, because the more people who realize this, the more chance there is that the post-Christian West will repent and cease being the post-Christian West.
VFR reader Douglas disagrees:
You write, “The post-Christian West will repent and cease being the post-Christian West.”
For that to happen, the “post-Christian West” would have to revert to being the “Christian West.”
There are several assumptions built into that possible move. The first one is that Christianity is “native” to the West, that it should be the normal expression of the West’s sense of transcendence. But Christianity lost its standing as the intellectual ideology or cultural philosophy of Western civilization in the 19th century (eg. Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud, etc). This is reflected quite strongly in academic environments.
As well, Christianity lost its space within Western culture as the sole definer of private or subjective transcendence in the 1960’s. People turned towards other forms of personal transcendence (Zen-Buddhism, existentialism, the Beat Generation, etc).
Churches themselves, for example the Episcopalian Church in the U.S., have steadily distanced themselves from a core dogma that defines Western tradition in recognizable Christian terms.
Thus I don’t see any means possible for a “return” to a Christian culture in the West. Institutionally such a move would be check-mated by organizations such as ther ACLU. Personally the Western ego would have to undo two centuries of ideological conditioning.
Probably nothing substantial exists any longer inside the Western identity. The sole definition possible to Western man is an “I am not”—eg. “I am not Islamic” or “I am not Communist” or “I am not a bigot” or “I am not a racist.” However there is no “I am” available…
My reply:
Each of the Douglas’s factual assertions is correct. Yet he is falling into the same fallacy that others have made when they say that a Western recovery is impossible: “We can’t resist liberalism, we can’t assert Western identity, we can’t do x, y, or z, because PC will stop us.” But, as I’ve pointed out before, all the changes I’m urging start from the assumption that of course liberalism and PC now control our society, but that we are looking forward to the end of liberal rule. As we are now there is no hope. But we are not going to stay as we are now. One way or another, the modern liberal order is going to die or be abandoned, partly as a result of our resistance to it. The nay-sayers assume the permanence of liberal and PC rule. Given that assumption, of course there is no hope.
In the same way, Douglas points out all the ways that the West has ceased to be Christian, and concludes that he doesn’t “see any means possible for a return to a Christian culture in the West. Institutionally such a move would be check-mated by organizations such as ther ACLU.” He is assuming the permanent dominance of the very regime that must be overcome. So he’s given up the war before it’s even been started.
Part of this misconception comes from seeing the world in terms of externals instead of in terms of truth: our external society is overwhelmingly liberal, therefore nothing can be done against it. But from an internal perspective, if one person or ten people or a thousand people can see through the falsehoods of liberalism, then millions of people could see through them; if a few thousand people can reject the liberal lie of cultural and racial sameness, then millions of people could see through it. The world is ruled by mind. If a truth exists, and if some people can see that truth, then others could see it too.
By the same token, it is the case that real Christian experience has declined and that the West has to a great extent ceased to be Christian; certainly the public culture of the West has ceased to be Christian or even to embody Judeo-Christian moral norms. But that is not an argument against Christian truth; it is an argument against the people and the churches and the society that have failed to understand and live Christianity. If the living truth of Christianity can be re-discovered in one or a thousand or a million souls, then it can be re-discovered in millions and tens of millions of souls and become again the effective religion of the West. It is a change that must take place in us as individuals, as communities, and as a whole society.
I am not predicting such an outcome. I am saying that it is possible, and that I believe in it and hope for it.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 16, 2006 09:09 AM | Send