THROUGH THE ESTIMABLE columnist Michael Sean Winters, I found out about a recently published book that asks if the West is reverting to paganism in the supposed death of Christianity. The linked-to NYT article says, with me breaking in for comments:
Many Americans have a sense that their country is less religious than it used to be. But is it really? The interplay among institutions, behaviors and beliefs is notoriously hard to chart. Even if we could determine that religious sentiment was in flux, it would be hard to say whether we were talking about this year’s fad or this century’s trend.
"Many Americans" mistake appearances for the real thing, the margarine of "religion" of "Christianity" for the real thing. Journalism and the scribbling professions encourage that substitution. "Death of Christianity" is the bread and butter of many a person in the scribbling and academic rackets.
I remember my intense skepticism when, in the late 1970s the fad for people declaring themselves to be "reborn" was presented by the media as being a huge resurgence of "Christianity" in the United States. Having grown up a Catholic and, at that time, a self-declared agnostic, not as a Christian, I'd say that such stuff is constantly in flux and as is the nature of things in flux, making a definitive statement about it is a. unlikely to be accurate and b. unlikely to even describe the state of affairs that will last, indeed, it's probably already unlike what it was when you made what you think was an observation of it. I doubt that anyone who even sincerely was and remained an honest Christian during this entire time has not had their beliefs in anything but a state of fluctuation for the entire time. To describe the ideas, the beliefs, the life experience that informs them in any fixed way is to distort or falsify the ongoing nature of all of those. That is an error of thought that precedes all of those problems with scientific modernism I have been so critical of here.
Or perhaps we are dealing with an even deeper process. That is the argument of a much-discussed book published in Paris this fall. In it, the French political theorist Chantal Delsol contends that we are living through the end of Christian civilization — a civilization that began (roughly) with the Roman rout of pagan holdouts in the late fourth century and ended (roughly) with Pope John XXIII’s embrace of religious pluralism and the West’s legalization of abortion.
From what we can know of that enormous period of time I'd like to know exactly what stretch of it does anyone believe the nominally Christian West was actually governed by the teachings of Jesus? The entire period of monarchies which claimed to be led by "Most Christian Princes" were better characterized by a continuation of the culture and practices and legal systems of the preceding pre-Christian epoch than anything based in turning the other cheek, selling all you had and giving the money to those who wouldn't repay it, to the least among us, or any of the other commandments articulated by Jesus.
I will be the first to note that there was much actual improvement when the Gospels, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets entered into the imaginations and beliefs of at least some of the baptized pagans which Soren Kierkegaard suspected most nominal Christians are. Christianity even has had some, limited and various but consequential influence on laws and legal systems in the alleged Christian period of Europe and the Americas. But that has certainly not anywhere swamped either the traditional remains of paganism or other counter-forces that have arisen since then, the "enlightenment" slammed here foremost among those.
The past isn't what it used to be and it never was, my skepticism about figuring out the cultural identity of the fleeting present is as true about any generalization made about the past, especially a period of one and a half thousand years.
There's a reason that the problem with Christianity is its absence, not its practice.
The book is called “La Fin de la Chrétienté,” which might be translated as “The End of the Christian World.” Ms. Delsol is quite clear that what is ending is not the Christian faith, with its rites and dogmas, but only Christian culture — the way Christian societies are governed and the art, philosophy and lore that have arisen under Christianity’s influence.
To mistake the trappings and decorations for feeding the poor, clothing the naked, treating the ill, visiting the prisoner, etc. is to ignore the substance for the appearance.
That is still quite a lot. In the West, Christian society is the source of our cultural norms and moral proscriptions, not to mention the territory of our present-day culture wars, with their strident arguments over pronouns and statues and gay bridegrooms and pedophile priests.
For the most part, Ms. Delsol rues what is being lost as Christian civilization ends. Yet her arguments, though they are strong and pointed, are almost secondary to the tone of the book, which is a model for polite engagement with hotly contested subjects. A beneficiary of the trends she deplores — say, an atheist, a feminist, a transgender person, a Muslim immigrant — will likely recognize the world she describes as the world he lives in.
The Gospel of Jesus would be far, far more in line with treating all of those so named with the decency which has only recently started, in fits and starts and entirely imperfectly in the post-WWII period. I have said that much as I deplore the origins of the Anglican tradition with Henry VIII, the Tudors, the Stuarts, etc. in the later 20th century to today it has been more Christian, in much of it, than it ever has been. It is certainly far more Christian today than it was in the 18th and most of the 19th century when it was, almost thoroughly an appendage of industrial age British capitalist feudalism. Like the equally pagan periods of the Papacy, the hierarchy and so most of the Roman Catholic Church, during its long and ambiguously moral history, it contained people who took the Gospel of Jesus seriously. The same is true for most of the Christian denominations that writers and scribblers and social-scientists love to characterize in a way that crushes a view of their diversity.
To take only two of those categories, there are vigorous and living and important Christian feminist and LGBTQ people who are some of the most important thinkers AND MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL DOERS* attempting to live their lives according to the teachings of Jesus and who evangelize to convert others to their most Christian and most "non-evangelical" points of view and points of departure. I think some of the most vigorous signs of the living vitality of Christianity are found in Christian feminism, in what is so often called Queer theology. There is a lot of that which I think is wrong, some of the most paid attention to is the kind of religious attention getting that I found distasteful in the writing of the late Bishop John Spong. But that's going to be true of any period of any of this.
No one should ever go far into reading, thinking or writing about Christianity more certain of themselves and proud of themselves than they first went into it. Anyone who doesn't come out of it questioning themselves, their expectations and conclusions - temporary as those are bound to be - hasn't really been doing it the right way. The same is true to a lesser degree in history or other huge, person surpassing subjects.
I think anyone who chooses to attempt to make a study of or a general statement about any of this should start with the knowledge that they are biting off more than anyone can chew.
I'm not worried about the future of Christianity. I believe it was the late Shaker Sister Mildred Barker who, when asked if she was worried about the likely extinction of the Shaker religion said she wasn't because it was the work of God and that that would continue. She wasn't stupid, she knew that hers would almost certainly be the penultimate period of the United Society of Shakers at Sabbathday Lake, the last active Shaker community. Last I looked they were down to their last three members. Christianity didn't end with the extinction of the Ebionites or other early sects of it or the original Jerusalem Church that Paul talked about. I think that Christianity, the belief in the Gospel of Jesus, the teachings of his followers, those who take it seriously and live their lives that way to the imperfect best of their abilities will not end.
The extent to which doing unto others as we would have them do unto us, to loving God according to the Jewish creed and our neighbor as ourselves (the only creed Jesus is ever quoted as requiring) is expressed in the watered-down general culture is the extent to which decency, equality and democracy are possible. Democracy, in the modern egalitarian understanding of it, is not a gift from the pagan Greeks, it is a modern development of an understanding of the Law of Moses and the Gospel of Jesus. It is an imperfect human attempt to approximate something less dangerous than monarchy or other forms of gangster-oligarchy and to make something in the imperfect human terms that is closer to the entirely not-of-this-world Kingdom that Jesus announced as a possibility, perhaps one that is inevitable as creation continues. It's that which I am in deepest fear for under the neo-pagan-"enlightenment" negation of everything Jesus taught. Especially that which is called "Christian."
* This article which was posted as I was writing this is exactly relevant to that point and to the anti-Christianity of much of hierarchical "Christianity" including Catholicism. I think for Christianity to flourish in the churches, where it so often doesn't, much of "Christianity" will have to leave it. Much of official, hierarchical, empowered "Christianity" left the church or never entered it to start with.
Jesus said those who do the will of God are his brothers and sisters, etc. Not those who uphold dogma, doctrine and man-made laws and regulations. Churches have mostly been about those other things.
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