Christian culture is under fresh attack. Those striving to preserve old Christian institutions, to maintain the Bible and Church traditions as a common cultural reference point, or to use scriptural ideas to influence society’s laws and ethics, regardless of whether society still possesses an underlying faith, are facing censure.
This new assault has not come from the usual suspects: Islamists, secularists, decolonisers or the woke left. Instead, the latest cries against Christian culture are coming from Christians themselves.
The faith of Christ’s apostles was active. Its ethic was constructive
The charge has been led by Paul Kingsnorth, the writer, environmentalist and former journalist, who was baptised into the Romanian Orthodox Church in 2021. In a recent lecture given in New York, he berated the concept of Christian culture, and indeed Christian civilisation.
For Kingsnorth, Christianity and civilisation are a contradiction. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is spiritually beneficial about this “Western civilisation” – or any civilisation?’ God, he observes, made man ‘to inhabit a garden, in communion with all life’. Yet, after Eden, everything went downhill. The development of culture was the fruit of disobedience. After the Fall came farming, work, hunting, metalwork, murder, cities, and eventually civilisation.
All these, says Kingsnorth, ‘take humanity’s gaze’ from God ‘and redirect it towards themselves’. When God sought to intervene in the person of Christ, walking ‘among us as a poor man preaching renunciation and love’, he was well received by the ‘weak and the despised, wandering in the desert and the countryside’. But when he goes to Jerusalem, ‘to the city, to the civilised centre, it tortures and kills him’.
Civilisation is hostile to Christianity and is the cradle of every sort of sin: gluttony, lust, economic growth. The teachings of Christ – ‘love your enemy… give away your wealth’ – are likewise completely set against accommodation with the world we know.
‘Christianity is impractical,’ insists Kingsnorth, ‘intolerable… terrifying, and it is designed to kill you.’ It is only those on the margins who have exhibited a true understanding of the faith which merits our emulation: ‘the mystics, the ascetics, the hermits of the caves, and the wild saints of the forest and the desert’.
Kingsnorth lambasts those such as Jordan Peterson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for attempting to uphold Western society and cultural order. Such people put sinful ‘civilisation first, and Christianity second’. They are ‘less interested in whether the faith is actually true or transformative, than in what use it can be to them in their ongoing culture war’.
In the Easter issue of The Spectator, Rowan Williams echoed this critique of Peterson. Speaking to the Mary Wakefield about his cultural Christianity, Willams commented, ‘At the end of the day, the cultural Christian thing misses out on the excitement of Christianity – the life. You are not called on to admire Christianity, you are called on to love God, and there is all the difference in the world between those things’.
Other Christian commentators, speaking less gently than Williams, have likewise castigated those such as Richard Dawkins, Douglas Murray and Elon Musk, who promote cultural Christianity without confessing the faith. Owen Anderson, writing in the American Reformer, excoriated conservative thinkers and politicians ‘who speak highly of the Bible but show no saving faith’. They are ‘worse than the radical left’, encourage ‘dullness toward our plight as sinners who need Christ’ and at worse promote ‘outright hypocrisy’. The Minneapolis preacher John Piper has been even more clear: ‘Millions upon millions of cultural Christians, by definition, are in hell today… Perhaps your parents or grandparents.’
One wonders, however, how much the most devoted have owed to those of little faith. The mystics and ascetics revered by Kingsnorth frequently had their quiet hermitages and oratories thanks to the toil of temporal rulers, and a culture which respected those who withdrew for prayer.
Many of the country’s great spiritual visionaries – Dame Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, the monastic author of The Cloud of Unknowing, the cleric Thomas Traherne, the poet Henry Vaughan – relied on the protection of rich patrons, the shelter of long-established monasteries or the order of the church to give them room for their spiritual endeavours. Without the security and peace vouched by an albeit imperfect and sinful society, their vocation to the mystical path would have come to nothing, and their examples would have been unknown.
Yet the more fundamental critique of Kingsnorth must begin with his conception of the faith itself. Christianity, as he says, is certainly revolutionary. It calls us to see an equal dignity in every person, made as they are in the image of God. It reminds us not to seek salvation in earthly things or temporal glory, but to follow Christ who, as St Paul said, ‘took upon him the form of a servant… humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross’. But although revolutionary, the faith offers no licence to leave earthly desolation in its wake. ‘Destroy this temple,’ said Christ, ‘and in three days I will raise it up.’ ‘Upon this rock,’ he said of St Peter, ‘I will build my church.’
The faith of Christ’s apostles was active. Its ethic was constructive. Although it grew in prayer, it urged them not to withdraw from the world, but to travel, preach, and bring new believers into association. St Paul’s time was spent, ‘In journeyings often, in perils of waters [and] robbers’ and above all the daily ‘care of all the churches.’ The congregations to which he ministered were an arena to cultivate a new ethic which was ‘not conformed to this world’ but which sought to transform the lives of the faithful and the world itself. Within their congregations, the faithful learned to be ‘kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love… Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit…’ and then to bring such ethics to the world at large: ‘Provide things honest in the sight of all men… live peaceably with all men… overcome evil with good.’
If anything, Christ and his successors were building a new culture: a matrix of sayings and then scriptures, liturgy (prayers and hymns, baptism and the eucharist), shared customs, ethics and a way of life. From these beginnings came the great and still developing corpus of Christian culture. In the British isles, this is everything from the devotional poetry of Milton and Donne to the music of Tallis and Byrd and the great tradition of English hymnody, the art of the Book of Kells to Graham Sutherland and Stanley Spencer, the architecture of our cathedrals and parish churches, the preaching of a Wesley, the call to pilgrimage of John Bunyan, and the omnipresent power of the King James Bible.
The development of this culture was not an idle endeavour or self-indulgence. It not only brings together and supports believers in understanding and observing their faith, but is also a means of evangelism. When at its strongest, it also plays its part in changing wider society. The best example of the flourishing of Christian culture in Britian was during the evangelical revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ubiquity of the Bible, preaching, devotional tracts and hymn singing helped to create converts, and then to generate an atmosphere in which the reform of society became possible: Wilberforce and abolition of slavery, the foundation of the great charities such as Barnardo’s and the NSPCC, more humane care for the destitute, orphans, the old, infirm, those with disabilities, wider access to healthcare, campaigns against endemic drunkenness, human trafficking, child labour and sexual exploitation, duelling, corruption in politics. Christian culture led not to a Gomorrah, as Kingsnorth sees it, but a civilisation where those vices were forced into retreat.
If anything, Kingsnorth’s claim that true Christianity cannot be found in the structures of society and civilisation, but only in the rebellious individual on the margins owes more to modernity than the faith’s ancient beginnings. At the Last Supper, Christ washed the feet of his disciples and set an example of fellowship and service, in which, even after his departure they would always mystically draw on his presence. The greatest of those ascetics and visionaries knew that as much as they withdrew from society to focus on the contemplation of God, they still owed a Christian duty to society. Julian of Norwich, although a cell-bound hermit, still readily dispensed spiritual advice to pilgrims. The seventeenth century mystical poet and clergyman George Herbert, although struggling with God in his private writings, still felt obliged to be the most active man in the parish.
Well into the last century, the notion of fellowship found practical expression in thousands of church societies for everything from the mutual relief of poverty, to football and needlework. It was the dizzying change of the 1960s, which privileged immediate personal satisfaction over slow collective endeavour, which unravelled such societies and the idea that they might offer spiritual wisdom in shared life. Spirituality moved from being a corporate practice to a matter of individual consumerism.
Even if the revolution of the 1960s has depleted the faith which underpins the artefacts of Christian culture, it would be folly to wish these artefacts away from public life. If the echo of scripture proclaiming man made in God’s image dissuades a politician from supporting assisted suicide, if the shelter of a parish church or the sound of evensong reassures those weary of bean-counting modernity that there is something more to existence, if the strains of a half-remembered hymn from childhood prompt someone to charity or to listen to the still small voice of calm, why would the Christian not care for Christian culture? It is a kindly light amid the encircling gloom, which at worst can still improve the lot of man, and at best bring them back to the faith it proclaims.
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