As a child, growing up in a religiously conservative community, it seemed like I heard a lot about “moral relativism.” That’s less of a thing now. The new hated foe is “expressive individualism,” and though I’m pretty sure these villains are consanguineous, it’s interesting to think about what changed across those decades. Both are firmly contra natura (opposed to nature). Both have something to do with the moral chaos that, it often seems, perpetually threatens to overwhelm our civilization. At the core of each is the declaration, “Not Thy will, but mine be done!” Still, there are some differences.

I think in the 80s and 90s though, conservatives worried that morality was becoming optional. This was the era of “defining deviancy down” and Broken Windows Theory. Conservatives looked at the world and saw people cheerfully chucking moral standards and obligations whenever it suited them: getting divorced too much and for trivial reasons, skipping church to watch football, heading back to work while their children became “latchkey kids.” This was offensive, but not especially confusing. It just looked like people were allowing their baser impulses to take over their lives.

Today’s world is zanier. Now religious conservatives wonder: Have most people even heard of moral standards? Are there reasons for the insane things they do, or has the public square just devolved into a frenzied cultural mosh pit? What is even happening right now?

We moved from moral disapproval to incredulous gaping. It’s very relevant, of course, that the world became much more online in this period, which in general made people weirder, more performative, and hungrier for attention and novelty. Familiar, garden-variety failings like extramarital affairs were replaced by males winning girls’ athletic competitions, a robust community of “furries,” a booming “SatanCon.”

Today’s post is on expressive individualism, because I’d hate to be out of date. Don’t get complacent, though, Moral Relativism! I’ve got my eye on you too. Traditionalists have been watching this problem for awhile.

This is autopsy week, in which we consider different explanations for the death of Christendom. So let’s call this “the cancer diagnosis.” Rebellion against nature is a problem that’s been with us (and perhaps growing?) for awhile. It’s not a sudden shock, like the sexual revolution, though the sexual revolution may be among its evil fruits. That at any rate is clearly the opinion of today’s primary witness, Carl Trueman, author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

Trueman’s book traces the West’s slow slide from “morally serious and grounded in objective truth” to the fantastical funhouse that we live in today. For him, this is primarily a philosophical journey, starting in the 18th and 19th centuries with Rousseau and the Romantic poets, prophets of “authenticity” and the search for the inner self. Next he covers Darwin and Marx, who dismantled Aristotelian-Thomist teleology and replaced it with a reductive, materialist paradigm. Nietzsche declared that “God is dead” and urged people to reinvent meaning and morality on their own terms. Then Freud and the Frankfurt School elevated sexual identity to the forefront of the modern imagination, paving the way to gender ideology but also teaching people to view psychological validation and subjective well-being as life’s primary goals. At this point, the old Christian paradigm is so far behind us that people can’t even really make sense of it.

Trueman doesn’t incline to “death of Christendom” language, but his narrative is easily mapped onto that template. He takes it that the pre-modern world had a kind of internal cohesion and integrity, which has been lost today with catastrophic effects. The book is offered as an explanation of how that happened. The “Christendom” of this view has a strong metaphysical element. Trueman does make use of Charles’ Taylor’s concept of the “social imaginary,” the widely-shared assumptions that shape our experience of the world. But the crucial shift seems to happen first and foremost on the level of metaphysics (or rather, metaphysical beliefs). At the core of modern pathologies is the denial of objective realities: truth, family, the body, nature, God.

This has deep implications for identity politics, which is clearly one of the things Trueman is most anxious to explain. People’s identities used to be rooted in ties of blood and objective moral requirements handed to them by the Church. Today they venture forth on adventures of self-discovery and decide that their men trapped in women’s bodies. Objective reality has left the building, leaving us at the mercy of malevolent ideologies and our own fevered imaginations.

Trueman’s book is subtle and interesting; my rapid gloss certainly doesn’t do it justice. He engages thinkers seriously, making careful and sincere efforts to understand their concerns. He has a gift for making hard concepts understandable to a general audience. And it’s clear that his diagnosis has much merit. Modern people do have a way of treating truth as an optional thing, very much to their own detriment. The connections Trueman draws to gender ideology and identity politics are plausible. And yet.

Trueman’s Rise and Triumph does have a significant shortcoming, relevant to our purpose here at Christendom Reborn. Throughout the book he tightly connects the search for the self with the flight from reality, juxtaposing the “my will” of the benighted modern with the “Thy will” of the faithful Christian (grounded in truth, tradition, and the Almighty). Much of what he says about this seems right, but I still find myself with a rather important question. Don’t Christians also believe that individuals are precious and unique? That God loves us in that uniqueness, and may have specific work for us as individuals, not per se derived from our bloodline, class, sex, race, or other readily discernible characteristic or earthly connection?

Trueman suggests that pre-modern humans didn’t need expressive individualism because they comfortably drew their identities from connections of blood, soil, tribe. But now remind me: Who was it that called for us to “hate” our father, mother, spouse, children, and even life itself? Was that Freud? Nietzsche? Oh wait, no. That was Jesus.

If we keep tracing expressive individualism back past the eighteenth century, past the Middle Ages, back into the ancient world, we may find ourselves pointing the finger at… Christians. In a very real sense Christianity created this “problem.” It’s one of those things that can happen when you start telling people that God is love.

The moral here is not that expressive individualism is really healthy and fine. Much of it is deeply pathological, especially in its modern “expressive” form, which does very much trend towards novelty and self-invention. Trueman supplies valuable insight into those pathologies. And of course, he’s not wrong. Many of the moderns do want to expunge God from the picture and re-invent the world in their own image.

But it might still be true that the self is genuinely complex and interesting, that plumbing those depths is sometimes worthwhile, and more generally that what we perceive as “flights from objective truth” may really be, or be a consequence of, a sincere effort to understand realities that are more complex than previously understood.

If that’s true, it might be that effective solutions will require better and more complete answers to the relevant questions.

All right, Moral Relativism. You can come out of the corner and play for a few minutes, but let’s have no funny business! I’m still watching.

Come back tomorrow for a discussion of liberalism and its attendant evils.

It’s autopsy week at Christendom Reborn, in which we call a range of witnesses to testify as to who killed Christendom? Today we have two witnesses: Louise Perry and Mary Eberstadt. Their culprit is the sexual revolution. At the risk of getting too cute, you might say that this is the “blunt force trauma” account of the death of Christendom.

Perry makes an interesting witness. She started as a critic of the sexual revolution, then came to see Christianity as the primary bulwark against the evils she was describing, then started going to church, initially as a “cultural Christian.” She now calls herself a Christian, full stop. But that’s a recent development. In a way, Perry has backed into the mantle of Mary Eberstadt, who spent years exploring the consequences of the sexual revolution. Eberstadt’s How the West Lost God (2013) was particularly significant for our purposes, advancing the controversial thesis that secularization was actually downstream from the sexual revolution, not the other way round.

No doubt they’d still have disagreements, but Perry’s recent Wall Street Journal piece, “Christendom Is No More,” certainly made me think of Eberstadt. They approached from different directions, but ultimately converged on similar ground.

On this view, “Christendom” clearly doesn’t mean the same thing that it did for Greengrass: the pre-modern, European world in which faith, social life, and geopolitics dovetailed in a mutually reinforcing matrix. His account of the collapse ends at Westphalia, in 1648. Both Perry and Eberstadt are fixated on a 20th-century turning point. Even so, there may be a sense in which this “Christendom” is derivative on Greengrass’. The geopolitical reality may have crumbled long before the Summer of Love, but perhaps Christianity’s moral consensus outlived it, maintaining its inertia among ordinary people who ignored the crazed intellectuals, weathered the political transitions, and continued marrying and raising families for several more centuries. Then came the sexual revolution. And the jig was up.

To understand how this happened, it’s useful to reference what religious conservatives like to call the “Iron Triangle.” (This is not to be confused with the political “iron triangle” involving committees, bureaucrats, and lobbyists.) In a traditional Christian society, sex, marriage, and babies are understood to go together. They’re a package deal. Having sex outside of marriage is discouraged and socially stigmatized; marriage itself is understood to entail fidelity and permanence; and married people are expected to be open to nurturing children, the natural fruit of a sexual relationship. When these three things are firmly bound together, that creates an internally stable matrix that gives women needed support and protection, children intact families, and men powerful incentives to channel their energies in constructive directions (instead of being predators or antisocial loners).

What happens when we break the triangle, hoping to disassemble and recombine? Well, it’s unstable. Things fall apart. Eberstadt essentially sees artificial birth control as the bomb that blew up this salutary arrangement, tricking people into thinking that because fertility was now voluntary, it would be fine to start thinking of the three defining elements of the Iron Triangle as a pick-a-mix, not a set package. That went very badly, much worse in fact than anyone expected. It set off a disastrous chain reaction, destabilizing marriage, which destabilized family life, which destabilized Christianity, which destabilized the West. That, in a nutshell, is how the West lost God.

Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, the book that put her on the map, was not written from a Christian perspective, so she doesn’t use the term “Iron Triangle,” but her concerns easily fit into the model. She argues that changes in sexual mores have been specially disadvantageous to women, tossing them into a callous, depersonalized meat market where they are easily reduced to sex objects. She too sees artificial birth control as the main thing that “tricked” us into jettisoning a time-honored set of assumptions and practices that we needed far more than we realized. For her as well, the pill ends up becoming the malevolent thread that unraveled the West.

Perry spent years working in a rape crisis center. She’s very attuned to women’s sex-specific vulnerabilities, which stem from the fact that their bodies are ordered towards pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding. Men don’t have those challenges, but they do have robust sexual appetites, which means that sex is grossly inegalitarian by nature, not merely by social convention. When young people are habituated to see “consent” as the only requirement for licit sex, it is women who suffer the most; they don’t have enough leverage to secure the support they need from men, who often prefer to satisfy their sexual appetites with undemanding, low-commitment relationships. In short: without the protections of the Triangle, women easily get exploited and victimized. So do children. And the men often end up as predators or disaffected losers, doing drugs or playing video games all day.

After her first breakout book, Perry began exploring the “sexual revolution” ethos more expansively, considering the ways in which it was catalyzing a brutal process of “repaganizing.” She’s thinking about Tom Holland and the terrors of a post-Christian world. She worries about other vulnerable people, such as the elderly, who are casually tossed to the side. Her Wall Street Journal piece brings this all back to a very Ebestadtian place: Christendom is over. The chain reaction initiated by the pill has leveled Christ’s realm here on Earth.

I find much to admire in both Perry and Eberstadt, and I think it’s clear that the sexual revolution has indeed factored heavily in the West’s (and the world’s) present malaise. It’s also central to Christianity’s present struggles. Both of these writers have helped me to think more deeply about those connections. I do think they may be a little too focused on artificial birth control as the weapon that bludgeoned the West into decrepitude, and I worry that this can obscure some other crucial pieces of the story.

Most of all, I worry that that oversimplification trends very easily into despair, perhaps more despair than the real situation warrants. If a revitalized culture requires us to “roll back the sexual revolution,” the prospects seem quite bleak. Thus far, religious conservatives’ efforts to do that have been spectacularly unsuccessful. We’re nowhere close to banning artificial contraceptives or ending no-fault divorce. Apparently we can’t even ban mail-order abortion pills (or at least that’s been an uphill battle).

I myself, to be clear, fully embrace the traditional Christian view of sexual morals. Including the condemnation of artificial birth control. And this is not merely an academic position for me. Have I mentioned that I have five children? Enough said.

Except, perhaps it is not enough said, because my own experience, living in the Iron Triangle for twenty years, suggests a couple of things. Committed marriage is a very good thing. It supplies a sound foundation for a well-lived life. But, it doesn’t really resolve all the difficult social questions that perplex us today. It doesn’t tell us what roles men and women should play, in the household or society at large. It doesn’t yield a rich anthropology of gender, or a delightfully harmonious theory of sexual complementarity. Traditionalists love to try to build elaborate theories of gender on that basic framework, but those theories tend to range from “somewhat true but lacking nuance” to “clownish and absurd.” And here’s the thing about bad and clownish theories: they don’t win converts. Only the already-converted will take them seriously.

I myself tend to see the formality of the Iron Triangle as a feature more than a bug. Its logic doesn’t demand that we accept any hackneyed stereotypes about women. It doesn’t dictate any clear division of labor, within the home or outside it. It leaves plenty of space for us to continue to learn new things, about men and women, what they’re capable of and how they best thrive. That’s potentially very good for cultural adaptation. But the bad news is that the Iron Triangle can’t be viewed as a magic bullet solution to the confusion and social chaos of our time. It helps! But this era would have required a lot of adaptation and re-negotiation of roles, with or without the pill. And if we want to lead people back to that arrangement, we need to fill out our anthropology

An expanded anthropology is all the more crucial because artificial birth control was just one of many technological and cultural shocks that rocked the world in the 20th century. There were many other changes too, including:

– Massive increases in material wealth

– A huge upswing in mass education

– Tremendous expansion of both global markets and communication technology

– An information-based economy in which (among other things) women were in a much stronger position to compete

– A more rarified and diversified labor market, which spread opportunity more widely

Work and education in the 20th century became a source of status, identity, and opportunity for more than just the elite. In what imaginable world were women not going to want some share in that? But as women’s horizons changed, that was also going to change their relationship to men, their children, each other, the world. Ties that once bound, often ceased to bind. And of course, this is just one of many ways in which tectonic social, political, and technological changes have transformed our planet over the past century. So let’s be realistic here. This was never going to be easy.

The “blunt force trauma” narrative captures some important truths. The sexual revolution was indeed hugely consequential, and in some ways traumatic. We’ve learned some new things over the past century about women, men, sex, and family, but some we might reasonably prefer not to know.

I won’t ask anyone to celebrate the sexual revolution, as though decades of previously-unimaginable social breakdown are a worthwhile price to pay so that women can be aerospace engineers. My appeal would simply be this. Don’t give up too soon. Give Christianity time to formulate better and more complete answers to the hard social questions of our time. The underlying principles of Christian sexual ethics are still very sound, and the world clearly still needs them, but application is difficult in rapidly-changing circumstances. Also, it’s just reality that under conditions of general chaos, good insights will inevitably get intermixed with unsightly reactionary currents. We’re seeing a lot of that now. But that’s part of the process too! You can’t figure this stuff out in a day.

Christendom took a hard hit from the sexual revolution. It’s been painful, but I don’t think the blow was terminal. The process of recovery might even validate the old adage, “Whatever doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger.”

Over the first couple of weeks of Christendom Reborn, I’ve taken a couple of stabs at answering the question: What is Christendom? I’m a philosopher by training, so I love those definitional questions. However, anecdotal experience suggests that they aren’t always great for generating discussion. The best conversation-starter is not “what is Christendom?” but “What destroyed Christendom”? It’s a commonplace that it’s dead, or very nearly so. But people can still get very energized by the question of why and how that happened.

That is interesting in itself, no? By most operative political definitions, Christendom is pretty cold in the grave. Last week I discussed the historian Mark Greengrass, who marks Westphalia as the end point. That was in 1648. Why are we still so eager to autopsy something that bit the dust in 1648? Other endpoints could be defended of course, but if you’re looking for a time when the Church’s political relevance was robustly and uncontroversially recognized across much of the planet, you’ll be going back several centuries no matter how you slice it.

Admittedly, there’s a certain sort of egghead who just loves to debate sweeping civilizational questions, from the rise of Persia to the fall of Rome. But that’s kind of a niche thing. “What happened to Christendom?” is still an open, painful question for more than just History Channel addicts. People still feel that loss.

There are understandable reasons for that, which can’t be reduced to mere nostalgia, nor to some intemperate Christian desire to control and dominate. We perceive, correctly, that Christianity demands some form of political expression. We see that there is a relationship between the ground-level struggles of our churches (loss of members and cultural space, internal loss of cohesion) and the struggle to find an appropriate cultural and political identity for Christianity in a pluralistic and increasingly globalized world. Those reflections naturally lead the mind back towards “Christendom.”

Once a person begins thinking in those terms, it quickly becomes apparent how our raging culture wars can be understood as part of an ongoing struggle between Christianity and rival worldviews (among them, its own “bastardized” offspring). When that battle becomes heated, and particularly if it seems to be turning against us, we again don sackcloth and mourn the death of Christendom.

I’m not mocking anyone here. It’s not always bad for people to think in epic-narrative terms. There is a real sense in which we, as Christians but also as human beings, must fight perpetually for the very survival of our civilization. Anarchy and barbarism are never quite as far away as we like to think, and sometimes it’s good to recapture that sense of urgency. But there are also real hazards to the despair narrative (as I’ve mentioned already) and yearning moodily for the spires of Christendom is a great way to set off along that despondent path. (We’re not sure what Christendom actually is, nor what it would mean to recover it. All we clearly know is that we’ve lost it and it’s probably never coming back.)

One of the major goals of Christendom Reborn is to pull people out of that unhappy space. Therefore, I will dedicate this week to analyzing the autopsy reports. If Christendom is dead, who killed it?

Tomorrow I will consider the answer with the most street-level retail value among religious conservatives: the sexual revolution. Our civilizational chaos springs from moral chaos, at the heart of which is sex. Of course it’s really not all about sex, because once we start plumbing those waters we find ourselves grappling with all sorts of thick moral concepts: love, dignity, social cohesion, moral responsibility, family, fidelity, the care of the weak and innocent. Here I’ll talk about Louise Perry, an atheist-turned-Christian who certainly appreciates the deeper moral and social implications of the sexual revolution. In addition to being an insightful social critic, she also (conveniently!) just wrote a piece titled, “Christendom Is No More.” I’ll talk about that.

Wednesday I will turn to expressive individualism and the collapse of authority in the West. This is clearly a real problem for churches, and no one understands the point better than Carl Trueman, whose Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is a perfect expression of this particular “autopsy report.” The concerns he raises are certainly real and serious, and yet, his prognosis is too bleak. I’ll explain why.

Thursday is about liberalism, illiberalism, and Patrick Deneen’s histrionic thesis. That should be a fun day.

I’ll end the week on a more poetic note, thinking about our “disenchanted” modern world and why so many people are confident they don’t want to live in it. Paul Kingsnorth is a particularly dramatic example, so I’ll dip into his Against the Machine and explain why I prefer Gerard Manley Hopkins.

As a final reminder, I now have a Weekly Digest option, perfect for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the Substack Era with its constant flood of emails. If you flip over to that, you will only receive one weekend update on our activity here at Christendom Reborn, though naturally we’d love to see you here at the site anytime.

The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity is a fairly old book by now, but it made real waves when it was first published in 2002. Jenkins, a historian and religious studies professor (and sometime criminologist!) argued that Christianity was undergoing a massive demographic shift, such that it would in the middle-term future be viewed primarily as a phenomenon of the Global South. African Christianity, in particular, was experiencing massive growth when the book came out, which has not slowed in the interim. There are a lot of African Christians now! In 1900 there were probably around 10 million; it’s probably over 700 million today. Africa is now the continent with the most Christians; Sub-Saharan Africa alone is home to nearly a third of the globe’s Christian population. That’s a huge deal. It’s easy to understand why Jenkins concluded that Christianity was dying in the West and coming to life in the South, passing the Christian torch to the Africans.

Obviously some parts of the book are dated now, but I still find it exciting and thought-provoking. It’s wonderful to reflecting on what God might be doing in the Global South, and when I thumb Jenkins’ book, I find myself wanting to drop all my other projects for a month or twelve just to read and explore this phenomenon more. In the big picture, it seems that once colonialism collapsed, Christianity started sweeping the continent, a bit like Europe in the Dark Ages. Incredible! Politically and economically, Africa is the least-thriving continent on Earth right now, but as we know here at Christendom Reborn, Christian faith can be transformative in all sorts of ways. Maybe we will over time see an energized “new Christendom” emerging from a different corner of the world. A hopeful thought indeed.

Jenkins has a lot to say about ways in which the Global South’s expression of Christianity differs from the European kind. Most of it’s just very interesting, and hardly any of what he said gave me pause, in a “do I really want these to be my co-religionists?” sort of way. I will say that as a cradle-Catholic-turned-Anglican, Jenkins doesn’t show a very nuanced appreciation of the complexity of maintaining orthodoxy and orthopraxy within a global Church; though he acknowledges in principle that the questions can be hard, he seems to default overwhelmingly to allowing local populations to adapt Christianity as they will. That’s not always the right choice, nor is it right to see every “crackdown” on non-approved teachings or practices as an example of cross-cultural misunderstanding or intolerance. I do think the Church sometimes needs to crack down on heretics, but right now I would say: Start with the Germans! I’m not that worried about the Africans. Of course, I also recognize that if a “new Christendom” did start to emerge, it would inevitably mean some new and thorny theological, liturgical, or geopolitical controversies. Fine! Bring it on. All things considered, those are good problems to have. (And yet… let’s not plunge back into the Hundred Years’ War. Hold that thought.)

It’s an interesting thing. Writing almost a quarter-century ago, Jenkins predicted that Christian faith would come over time to be seen as a South American and African phenomenon, in much the way it once appeared to be primarily European. (“Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe.”) Meanwhile, white and Western Christians would become eccentric oddities (like Swedish Buddhists, perhaps). He doesn’t exactly give a timeline, though he throws out the number “50 years” in a few places as a benchmark. And I do remember people talking about this in the 2000s, as though our discovery of the Global South meant that Everything Was About to Change. But here we are, almost to the halfway to the 50-year mark, and though I’m aware that African Christianity is still growing (and happy about it!), I must acknowledge that this has almost no discernible impact on my own religious life. Jenkins did a good thing by putting African Christianity on our radar, but his global prognosis is more questionable, for a very simple reason. Christian faith isn’t dying in the West.

I’m not suggesting African Christianity has no impact here. I’ve encountered the occasional African priest in the United States; I know they’ve been helping making up for our own deficit in priestly vocations. That’s much appreciated! And the subject of African Christianity does pop up occasionally when there’s a conclave or other major “faith event.” Those exchanges tend to be quite amusing, as the conservatives champion the (morally traditionalist) Global Southerners, while progressives hem and haw about whether people from Africa are quite ready for global leadership. But we all have a chuckle and then the news cycle turns, and I likely have no reason to think about African Christianity for a few more years. I fully believe that it’s transforming lives, communities, a whole continent! But not mine. At least not yet.

Faith isn’t a zero-sum game, of course. There’s not a thing wrong with it spreading across Africa even as the West rediscovers its Christian roots. I’m very much in favor of that! What does it mean for global Christianity, though? That might be rather complicated, for reasons that The Next Christendom doesn’t fully appreciate.

As amazing as it is to watch Christianity take root in a new place, we should realistically recognize that this continent, as it modernizes, will surely face some challenges relevantly similar to the ones we’ve struggled with here in the West. It would be nice to help them learn from our mistakes, and yet we ourselves are still struggling to do that, as evidenced by the fact that over-excited traditionalists sometimes seem to look on Africa as a land of unbroken innocence that can Just Say No to liberalism, relativism, indifferentism, feminism, expressive individualism, materialism, free market capitalism, and any other benighted “isms” of the godless West, and live the Christian faith as it was meant to be. I’m… pretty sure it’s more complicated than that.

Africa is going to follow the West’s political and economic path in ways that also redefine their way of life. They want to. And there are many excellent reasons they should. But there will be challenges that Western Christians, having lived with these “new things” for so much longer, might sometimes understand with more depth. We can learn from each other, of course! But recent history suggests that rapid modernization can be hazardous, and it would indeed be quite nice if Western Christians could use their experience to help Africans avoid catastrophic blunders like the Hundred Years’ War.

In short: conservatives and traditionalists sometimes daydream about a resurgent Africa swamping the global Christian community and giving us a kind of “do-over,” a chance to chuck our least-favorite elements of modernity and run the experiment again. But even though we should keep watching the Global South with sympathy and interest, we also need to keep working our own problems. For our own children’s sake, but also for the sake of other Christians across the globe. Europe may not really be “the faith” but it did instantiate the faith in ways that were especially transformative for the entire planet. As the more direct cultural inheritors of that legacy, this may still be our torch to carry here in the West. At least for awhile longer.

Here at Christendom Reborn I will be thinking more about Christianity in the West, most obviously because it’s what I know. But I wanted to discuss Jenkins’ book right now, to make clear that I am thinking about Christianity as a global phenomenon, despite my relative ignorance of its non-Western forms. I am excited by the possibilities of a Christian Global South, but I also feel that our responsibilities as Western Christians are if anything intensified by that phenomenon. Looking at the last century (for instance, the devastating impact of communism) it’s pretty clear that bad Western ideas can do a great deal of harm when they hit less-developed nations whose cultural “antibodies" aren’t developed enough to resist. Might a shared faith be a promising conduit for helping our coreligionists avoid those kinds of tragedies?

I’ve spoken in fairly vague terms in this post about “hard challenges” that we’re grappling with here in the West. Next week I’ll put more flesh on those bones! It’ll be Modern Maladies and Heresies week at Christendom Reborn. I can’t wait.

Christian Smith’s Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America made me sad. Not really for the reasons it was supposed to make me sad. It doesn’t please me, of course, that organized religion has been declining for several decades. Churches have been closing as once-thriving congregations peter out. Since the mid-twentieth century, each generation has been less observant than the one before, both squishier on Christian orthodoxy and less likely to attend church. That’s all quite depressing, but, I was already aware. Old news.

What made me sad was the way that Smith himself seemed to have given up completely on institutional faith. Not personally perhaps, but as a cultural force. Institutional churches will never again shape America or the West. Despite that very bleak diagnosis, however, the mood of this book is not so much sad as sour. Some writers on this topic try to draw out the human dimension, crack a window of hope somewhere, or strategize about best-case scenarios. Smith seems almost to take a grim pleasure in his role as Prophet of Doom. One strange segment of the book bombards the reader with a rapid-fire barrage of metaphors, all reinforcing the basic point that It’s All Over. Institutional faith is compared throughout to archaic devices: typewriters, rotary phones, record players. Smith regularly references the “cultural zeitgeist,” a foe that is at once vague and (apparently) utterly unstoppable.

In short, Christian Smith wants everyone to understand that worshiping God in a traditional church will soon be a personal eccentricity, like an enduring attachment to vinyl. Moral Therapeutic Deism has won.

It would be foolish to deny that the numbers from the last half-century are bad. Christians have recently (and rightly) been celebrating an uptick in conversions, but thus far these are a drop in the bucket after decades of hemorrhaging membership. In Smith’s view, this is a consequence of a culture deeply shaped by technology, relativism, expressive individualism, anti-institutionalism, and a preference for personally tailored forms of spirituality. In such a world, set liturgies or catechisms will naturally be rejected in favor of buffet-style religion, presented as an option menu or choose-your-own adventures. Modern people want their faiths to cater to personal feelings and individualized needs. Smith anticipates that Americans will remain “spiritual” in some sense, flitting perhaps from Transcendental Meditation to Marie Kondo to a New Thought church or neo-pagan community, but whatever the latest fad, they’re exchanging credo for volo. They don’t want to be straitjacketed by inflexible moral codes or ancient liturgies.

So, thus far at least I do agree with Smith. He doesn’t think we should find too much hope in the fact that many, perhaps most, “dechurched” Americans (one-time churchgoers who no longer attend) still have neutral-to-positive feelings about institutional faith. It is interesting of course to learn that most former churchgoers aren’t intensely bitter, so much as apathetic. They don’t hate Christianity; they just got busy and didn’t make time for it anymore. Quite often there are some other relevant circumstances: they moved, dislike a particular pastor’s preaching style, or felt socially awkward in a particular congregation. So they stopped coming and then just didn’t get around to finding a church they liked better. To some, like Evangelical writers Jim Davis and Michael Graham, this seems like good news. If ex-churchgoers aren’t actively hostile to the faith, they might be lured back. Have more parties! Invite people to dinner! Be friendlier!

Smith is less sanguine, essentially reasoning that churches are fighting a losing battle if people care so little about them that they’ll shrug and wander away at the slightest provocation. Christian communities aren’t perfect! They’re made up of fallen humans, like other communities. If people aren’t willing to live with that, a few more potlucks or game nights probably won’t make that big of a difference. I’m inclined to agree.

But I don’t agree that expressive individualism and neo-pagan cults are simply our culture now. Smith likes to say that “deep culture matters,” and I agree. But those things are not deep! There are, to be sure, some ways in which modernity has changed human beings and our way of experiencing the world, and Christianity must adapt in certain ways, to speak to people where they presently are. But the idea that new-age fads could take the place of institutional religion seems fanciful. They don’t have helpful answers to hard questions. They can’t supply meaning and order to people’s lives. They don’t bridge the gap between past and future, as a healthy and fruitful tradition must do. Shallow things don’t stand the test of time.

Occasionally, when a very picky child refuses to eat anything nutritious, a good strategy is simply to wait until he gets hungry enough to eat what’s on offer. Eventually it will happen. Nobody dies on hunger strike in protest of eggplant parmesan. Admittedly, a parent would normally refuse the child cookies or candy in the interim, and we cannot ban “junk food” spirituality to prevent Americans from choosing self-help fads or feel-good pseudo-faiths over more spiritually nutritious alternatives. After awhile though, even kids get tired of trying to live on candy. Are Americans really such a frivolous people that we’ll try to survive endlessly on cookies? I don’t believe it.

Anyway, that’s how I’m placing my bets. When shallow do-it-yourself spirituality fails to supply needed answers, direction, and healing, I think many will search for better alternatives. Seek and ye shall find.

Of course, there’s an underlying assumption there: That Christianity does, in fact, have “the goods.” That’s central to the project of Christendom Reborn. I do think we have what modern people most need, so, we should tell them. Like Jesus instructed us to do.

Of course there are some places in the world where Christianity is already growing like gangbusters. That’s tomorrow’s topic. Stay tuned for a discussion of Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom.

Yesterday I talked about Rod Dreher, a Christian who sees darkness and godlessness falling on the West. Tom Holland, by contrast, is a kind of noble pagan who thinks that Christ has already won the culture wars so decisively that it’s hard for us even to notice. Christianity is in the water we drink and the air we breathe.

It’s an odd pairing, perhaps. But this can happen. Holland was an unbeliever for many years; he now goes to church and refers to himself as a “cultural Christian,” but is still accustomed to looking on Christianity from the standpoint of an outsider who suddenly realized he might be a bit of an insider. He tells the story in the introduction of the book, explaining how his younger self was fascinated by ancient empires and bored by Christianity. Many years later, after writing several bestselling books about Rome, Persia, and the ancient world generally, he realized that he didn’t reallywish to live in a harsh, pitiless pagan world. And a second thing became clear to him too. It was Christianity that had saved him from that fate. Jesus’ message of mercy and love tamed the pagan monsters, and the free societies of the West grew from that soil.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to remind Christians how strong our position really is. Winston Churchill referred to these sorts of people (including himself) as “flying buttresses” supporting the Church from the outside. Holland plays a similar role, or at least he has in recent years.

He testifies to an important truth: Christ’s cross changed world history. As a pagan historian he looks at this-worldly impacts, not other-worldly, telling the story of Christianity as he understands it in his bestselling book, Dominion. The road Holland walks is well-trodden (at least to the intellectual historian’s eyes), but it’s none the worse for that, especially because he, as a popular historian of antiquity, is such a very credible witness. In the ancient world, strength was celebrated and weakness despised. Jesus, as a god who submitted himself to torture and death for the sake of contemptible sinners, flipped that value system entirely on its head. He moves through Christian history, watching each civilization struggle with the radical implications of this view, showing how our own assumptions about justice and goodness flow from that effort.

The book ends in the modern era with Holland arguing that even secularism and its various offspring are really in many ways the descendants of Christianity, perhaps best understood as “modern heresies.” Some people found that view daring and (possibly) offensive. It had been my basic paradigm for years before I read Dominion, so naturally I was very pleased to find it in a widely-discussed bestselling book.

Needless to say, my project is very harmonious with Holland’s view. He’s a historian and I’m a trained philosopher, so our perspectives are a bit different, and I think it will be possible here at Christendom Reborn to explore Christianity’s resilience and dynamism with a bit more clarity and precision than Holland typically offers. He “argues” mainly in narratives; sometimes it’s good to make arguments. I want to drill down a bit and consider more explicitly how Christianity facilitated a rich intellectual tradition, a new kind of political tradition, and the humanistic ethos that is most centrally important to Holland.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that he and I see similar things. When I wrote last week that “expansive human understanding, freedom, beauty, human dignity, virtue, love” are rightly seen as some of “Christendom’s most precious fruits,” that was a Holland-esque sort of claim. He also shares my interest in the question, “Can these exquisite flowers survive and flourish outside the hothouse of medieval Christendom?” Holland knows that Christianity is the rootstock. He sees that neo-paganism (think “cruelty of the revanchist right”) and postmodernism (think of the insane excesses of the woke left) are to some extent the result of that tradition eroding, and in other ways less-than-lovely mutations of it. He knows too that secular humanism is a thin, inadequate substitute.

However, as someone who has struggled with belief, he also struggles with the question of whether Christianity can recover. He knows of course that the roots run deep, and that Christianity’s dynamic power is immense. It seems possible to Holland nevertheless that Christianity’s resources could be spent down to the point of bankruptcy. This may be the point at which an actual believer’s view will be sunnier (or more naïve?). I have a lot more confidence that Christianity can still come out smiling, a point I plan to argue in this space. As much as I appreciate the value of the flying buttress, it is both fascinating and sometimes a bit frustrating to see a writer like Holland come as far as he does and not quite be able to persuade himself: Maybe this myth is so powerful because it’s true?

Come on in, Tom Holland. The water is warm!

At least, I’ve found it to be so. Not everyone agrees with that though, which will lead us to the next post. Come back tomorrow for a cold bucket of ice water from sociologist Christian Smith.

Realistically, I couldn’t go too long without saying something about Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. No doubt people were already thinking about it last week when I discussed “despair books” and my frustration with them. Dreher’s book was clearly the flagship of that fleet. He wouldn’t like that, but it’s just the truth.

I still have some praise for The Benedict Option. More on that soon. First, allow me to present my (totally unsubstantiated) theory of Dreher. I think he read the Lord of the Rings as a boy and really, really identified with the character of Frodo. So powerful was Frodo’s influence on the young Dreher’s mind that he got trapped in a kind of Tolkien Doom Loop, in which the only narrative he can fully process is that of a “little person,” innocent and humble of heart, trying desperately to preserve the good in the face of colossal evil. No matter what happens in the world, the country, or Dreher’s own life, he will always in some sense be a hobbit journeying towards Mount Doom.

As a writer it’s worked out for him. Many people today do feel like hobbits picking their way through Mordor, and Dreher is very good at creating a sense of solidarity in the journey. On the level of social criticism, the Tolkien Doom Loop is a serious limitation. LOTR is a wonderful epic series, but that narrative isn’t always the right one for describing every situation.

The Benedict Option contains a lot of solid life advice. Its best feature, which really is rather wonderful, is a lively and attentive documentation of ways in which Christians are building the Kingdom on a grassroots level, pouring their energies into thriving communities instead of fulminating fruitlessly over the culture wars. That’s inspiring, and deeply harmonious with my goals here at Christendom Reborn. Dreher recognizes that this work can be both joyful and, in its way, innovative, and he sees the contrast between that fertile terrain and the appalling rage-scape that is (too often) our public square. I have met people who mentioned Dreher as one influence that persuaded them that there are times for focusing on work, family, community, and faith, and leaving the world to sort itself out. That’s wise. And it’s not necessarily tantamount to “giving up.” Our families and communities may become the seeds for wider-reaching cultural renewal. Dreher understands that too; indeed, it’s the main point of his monastery metaphor.

Unfortunately, once one moves beyond that straightforward application, Dreher’s thesis doesn’t make much sense. Certainly many Christians today have a strong feeling of impending doom, which makes the “new Dark Age” idea evocative, but it doesn’t actually capture our situation at all well. Indeed, it’s a very funny metaphor for a man deeply concerned about the collapse of Christian faith. This was arguably the period, more than any other, in which the West became Christian. How do you think we got from “warring pagan tribes” to the almost-uniformly Christian Europe of the 11th and 12th centuries? There was a lot of evangelization and cultural dissemination. A huge amount of it happened in the “Dark Ages.”

Dreher glosses over this with multiple references to “barbarians” and to the Benedictines preserving pockets of order and “teaching people to pray.” Sure, they did that. The Benedictines were great. But the Gospel was also being spread far and wide in this era, and not primarily by Benedictines sitting in monasteries. As Dreher repeatedly notes, their defining charism was to stay put. That’s not great for teaching, preaching, and evangelizing. The Benedictines inspired and influenced wide-ranging efforts to spread and preserve the faith, but the vanguard of the missionary effort included Anglo-Saxon institutionalists like St. Boniface, ethereal wandering Celts like St. Columba, and of course the Franks and Carolingians who conquered Gaul and Christianized it (unfortunately sometimes at sword-point). The latter also precipitated the famous “Carolingian Renaissance,” without which the Benedictines would have had considerably less success in their own efforts at cultural preservation.

The Dark Ages are truly “dark” in one sense: Because literacy levels were low, we don’t know that much about them. Sources are few and thready and it’s hard to know what life was like for ordinary people. Pagan and Christian customs and beliefs were clearly butting up against each other, but this also seems like an age in which ground-level devotion was fairly intense. In any case though, Christendom clearly emerged from this period very deeply steeped in the faith. So… is this what Dreher sees ahead? A period of political fragmentation, material poverty, and intense religious devotion?

I’m guessing not. And though I don’t like to be an obsessive literalist, it just doesn’t seem to me that The Benedict Option does much to sharpen our appreciation of what lies ahead. It just runs through a familiar litany of culture war complaints, stoking his readers’ existing sense of catastrophism without doing much to sharpen or distill it. Insofar as Dreher does supply an explanation of our present malaise, it’s the familiar narrative about philosophical nominalism and the replacement of a grounded metaphysics with epistemology and emotivism. (Basically, we used to believe in Objective Truth and Goodness, and then we became relativists.) That’s a classic conservative take, and there’s some truth in it. But those problems have been developing for centuries. What’s new?

Dreher’s “Benedict” narrative clearly resonated with many people, but in the end it does almost nothing to illuminate our real problems. Sure, we’ve got some! But show me the generation that didn’t. I can tell you this much: we’re definitely not late-antique Christians hiding from barbarian warlords in a newly fractured Europe. Our anxieties, resources, and responsibilities are all completely different.

That leads us to the most serious problem with Dreher. He tends to drag people into his Tolkien Doom Loop. The Benedict Option left readers utterly confused and divided about most of the questions that matter (What are the main threats? What can we do about them? What larger goals are worth pursuing?) but it solidified their confidence on one point: Life as we know it is about to go up in smoke. We’re in freefall here, people.

People in that head space don’t see much value in workaday prudential reasoning. You don’t worry about the electric bill or the overdue library books when a meteor is about to hit the Earth. I worried when this book was released that it would exacerbate traditionalists’ already-prevalent tendency to spin off into various forms of revanchist radicalism. A decade later (almost), I wish I could say that those fears now look foolish and paranoid.

Christendom Reborn is in this sense the antithesis of The Benedict Option. I do agree that ground-level cultural rebuilding is vitally important. But where Dreher warned Christians to prepare for a long existence at the margins, I want us to rebuild the city with every expectation that we’re going to live in it.

That will lead us straight into Tom Holland’s Dominion. Sunnier skies forecast for tomorrow.

Welcome to Book Week! Last week I laid some groundwork for Christendom Reborn. This week I’m offering commentary on five different books, using them to illuminate the dimensions of my own project. I’m starting with Mark Greengrass’ Christendom Destroyed, which is possibly the least famous in this week’s line-up, but deserving of the honor because it inspired the title of this Substack.

Published in 2014 as part of the Penguin History of Europe series, it is a 700-page tome on the political upheavals of the sixteenth century. Greengrass covers plenty of ground. If only I were one of those people with a good memory for historical details, I could know a lot about early modern Europe right now. But despite the wealth of data, the book’s organizational principle is delightfully simple. In the period between Martin Luther’s 95 Theses and the Treaty of Westphalia (Greengrass’ boundary markers, as it were), people living in that chunk of land west of Asia stopped thinking of themselves as denizens of “Christendom” and instead began feeling like “Europeans.” Their dominant religious, geopolitical, and cultural paradigm was shattered in a surprisingly short period. The book is meant to explain why it happened.

Guess what? It wasn’t just one thing. Christendom was hit with a massive collision of forces in that period. Perhaps that sounds obvious, as indeed it really should be, but monocausal explanations of modernity are so remarkably common (whether that’s “science” or “philosophical nominalism” or “the breaking of the Church’s tyranny”) that it’s genuinely satisfying, and enlightening, to read a book that lays out a range of pressures that caused the medieval system to buckle.

One of Greengrass’ idiosyncratic (but oddly brilliant) quirks is an obsession with weather. He goes on at length about climates and biomes, considering their effects on building patterns, settlement patterns, agriculture, and trade. The major takeaway though is that immediately after a major population boom in the 15th century, the “Little Ice Age” (which was particularly brutal in the late 16th century) led to failed harvests and a gutted European economy. The result was famine, plague, political unrest, and a lot of soul-searching about why exactly God was so angry with the world. This, we should note, was an entirely external factor that destabilized standing cultural and political arrangements, fed into stronger and more centralized states, and intensified the Wars of Religion. (You might think of those as a kind of continent-wide witch hunt. Everyone was convinced that the other side’s heresy and corruption had precipitated the scourge.) I mentioned last week that the thriving Christendom of the High Middle Ages was in some respects a “hothouse flower.” That idea probably drew something from Greengrass, who showed how the world literally got colder in the early modern era, leading to a host of new problems for Christendom.

The Reformation was obviously a significant factor too, and Greengrass discusses it at length, in conjunction with the printing press. The pairing seems specially significant to him. The spread of ideas is good in many ways, but bad for maintaining a unified authority and shared worldview, and it’s widely recognized that Protestantism, with its love of personal Bible-reading, tended to raise literacy rates wherever it spread. Of course, scientific discovery and global exploration added still more new influences and ideas into the mix, putting further pressure on the old paradigms. Christians care about truth! Science and exploration pushed their horizons in some exciting ways. But when you’re flooded by too many new truths all at once, it can be a little disorienting, and cultural and political upheaval may be the result.

Eventually, of course, the Wars of Religion became so absolutely devastating that some sort of truce was clearly necessary. That happened at Westphalia. Affirming the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (”whose realm, his religion”), European nations largely accepted that Caesar would take the reins moving forward, leaving behind the complex balance of political and ecclesial forces that defined the Middle Ages. Political “Christendom” faded as people instead learned to think of themselves as Spaniards, Frenchmen, Swedes, or Danes.

It’s a complicated, messy picture, and yet for me the overarching narrative had a clear discernable shape. In the early modern era, the world just “got bigger” in lots of ways. The old “Christendom” couldn’t quite hold it. There really are many ways in which Medieval Christendom was sheltered; its climate, geographical location, geopolitical positioning, and ideological homogeneity all staved off certain pressures (for a time) and facilitated a remarkably cohesive social world. There’s a lot to love about that. But when those protective walls crumbled, that system was inevitably going to break down in some dramatic ways. We ended up with… nations-states. We still have those. Have you noticed that they’re under a lot of pressure nowadays? Hmm.

I’m not predicting the sudden demise of the nation state, but two things do seem true to me. 1) Nation states are not serving us as well as they used to, either in a practical sense or as a primary source of identity. 2) Unlike in the 16th century, Christianity seems reasonably well positioned to answer important questions and supply some foundational principles, supportive of civic peace and prosperity.

That does get me to wondering. Is it possible in the foreseeable future that even non-Christians might want Christianity to be a more visible unifying or identity-forming force, and even in some ways to have more political relevance?

We’ll pick up there tomorrow with Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option.

On Tuesday I addressed the question: Why Christendom? Today I will look at the second word in my title. In what sense is Christendom being reborn?

If we take “Christendom” to be something like “Christ’s Body considered in its political aspect,” there is a sense in which it is perpetually being reborn. As I never tire of observing, the Christian tradition is continually growing, changing, and adapting. It doesn’t really make sense to identify any particular period as either a “golden age” or a time of utter ruin. Every era wrestles with problems that will not be resolved until the next one. “Good times” can breed decadence and “bad times” greater fidelity. And so on. The Church is always “moving forward” in one way or another, and usually also declining in some respect.

Nevertheless, I think it may be possible in a few succinct paragraphs to draw out the aspects of Christian political history that can make clear the sense in which I see Christendom “being reborn.” In fact, I can summarize my grand narrative in a few sentences. The early Christians devised strategies for living transcendent Christian truths in a fallen world, which they continued to develop through the Middle Ages. Modernity “broke containment” and we’ve now spent a few centuries wrestling with the hard truths and slippery falsehoods that fell out of that upheaval. But at this point, Christians have already done a significant amount of rebuilding. We’ve reached a point where we can see how the old strategies, redeployed in situation-appropriate ways, can still work for us.

Let’s begin at the beginning. First, the early Church. Some people obsess over this period, which I fully understand because it is quite thrilling to imagine a time when it was unambiguously daring (even life-threatening!) to join the Jesus Movement. Who doesn’t cherish the wild, creative energy of those early Christian days? Desert hermits! Virgin martyrs! People standing atop pillars! The sheer concentration of philosophical genius in this period is astonishing, and who isn’t delighted by the thought of mixing it up with St. Justin Martyr or St. Irenaeus at the coffee and doughnut hour (or ancient Christian equivalent)? I can sort of sympathize with those funny people who argue that Constantine was the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity.

I don’t agree, though. And the early Christians were clearly grappling with real challenges, even beyond the lions. It’s worth reflecting on these for a moment, because I think we have inherited them to some extent, perhaps more here in the West than in the Global South even though the latter are far likelier to find themselves in mortal peril on account of their Christian faith.

Viewing the matter in a certain light, one can start to understand why the Romans found the Jesus Movement so outrageous. Lofty Christian principles didn’t translate all that easily into practical patterns of life. The Christians’ philosophy seemed crazy and their worship practices suspicious. They claimed to be loyal citizens but refused to worship pagan gods, which to the Romans made little sense. But the universalism and radical charity were, if anything, even more outrageous. Christians believed, not only that everyone mattered, but that anyone at all (women! slaves! anyone!) could be issued a special God-given assignment that overrode ordinary civic or pious obligations. This just looked like a recipe for chaos. You can’t build a whole society of desert hermits and virgin martyrs.

They didn’t, though. Over time Christians developed strategies for making transcendent truths livable. These can be helpfully understood with reference to the “three keys” outlined in yesterday’s post. In a sense, these are strategies for bringing transcendent truths into the realm of the real (and fallen). The early Christians bridged faith and reason, developed sound dogma, and laid the foundation for a rich philosophical tradition. They learned to put some space between the Kingdoms of God and man, enabling the faith to survive across multiple political upheavals. Meanwhile, they also developed an intricate social infrastructure, which gave form to Christian universalist commitments without devolving into anarchy. (Defined vocations were a key element of this.) Medieval Christians really did live in a world that reflected and reinforced a Christian worldview on many levels.

Why couldn’t it last? I’ll say more about this on Monday when I pick up Mark Greengrass’ Christendom Destroyed, but a short list of reasons: the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the printing press, the Wars of Religion, global exploration and trade. And okay fine, philosophical nominalism may factor somewhere. But we really shouldn’t blame everything on William of Ockham. Metaphysics matters, but it’s also true that Medieval Christendom was, in a geopolitical sense, a bit of a hothouse flower. It was wonderful in its way but not built to withstand that barrage of external pressures.

So what happened after that? That’s a long conversation but let’s begin here.

I sometimes feel that the world has been asking the same plaintive question for the past half-millennium, in different ways and different words. Can we still have nice things, or not? The “nice things” I have in mind are Christendom’s most precious fruits: expansive human understanding, freedom, beauty, human dignity, virtue, love. Can these exquisite flowers survive and flourish outside the hothouse of medieval Christendom? Of course, the moderns have built and enjoyed a great many nice things, and yet they always feel fragile and ephemeral. There is also a deep sense, at least in the West, in which modernity’s fruits are still the fruits of the Christian tradition (or at least from Christian rootstock). It’s unclear how much can survive a radical loss of contact with the source, which is a reasonable reason why rapidly declining religiosity provokes the kind of panic and despair I discussed in Wednesday’s post.

Reflect back for a moment, though, on the early Christians, grappling with enormous, lofty ideas in a fallen world that seemed extremely hostile to them. No doubt the whole thing seemed wildly impractical, but, spurred on by a zeal inherited from the Apostles, the early Christians cultivated strategies to make those lofty truths livable. Over time, they remade the world, stamped with Christ’s image.

Today’s problems feel larger in scope, because they are. It’s a bit crude, but perhaps not totally unhelpful, to think of the early moderns unceremoniously ripping the training wheels off the medieval design. In describing the matter that way, I don’t mean to patronize, for instance, the Scholastics, who I love very ardently. I simply mean this.

The medievals had certain advantages (from the standpoint of building a cohesive Christian world) that could not last. Their world was relatively homogenous, with the flow of information limited by hard practical constraints. For us, pluralism is just reality; a cacophony of views and perspectives bombards us daily from all sides. A mature Christianity should be “up to” that challenge, but the medievals were largely sheltered from it, which enabled them to develop many of the rich resources they bequeathed to us.

Those early Christians did in fact care about reconciling their theological views with science, but there wasn’t nearly as much science to reconcile back in the day. Now, the treadmill just seems to keep moving faster, as new scientific breakthroughs keep pushing new metaphysical and moral questions to the fore. God’s creation is amazing; we should welcome the opportunity to take stock of it more fully. But it’s hard. And perhaps there is a very real sense in which this expanded technical knowledge makes the world feel less “enchanted.”

Political upheaval was certainly a reality of the pre-modern West, but everything moved a lot slower in those days. The God-and-Caesar debates of the Roman and medieval ages were fascinating and often very sophisticated, and I’ll say more about them in future weeks. But in those days human freedom was preserved to a great extent by some stringent constraints on what a centralized state could realistically do. The dimensions of today’s political controversies are starker, and the risks graver. It’s not strange at all to feel nostalgia for the medieval hamlet, even if they didn’t have top-notch healthcare.

Finally, pre-modern Christians believed that God could call any person to a unique and particular task, but let’s be honest. Most people were farmers. They married and raised kids, who were also farmers. Organic pre-modern life patterns were disrupted in certain ways by Christianity, but the disruption of our own time is on a different scale. Questions of vocation, purpose, and proper social relations have all become extremely complicated.

So we have some big questions to answer. The project feels daunting, because it is. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that there are a whole lot more of us today to work on it. Modern Christians also have the benefit of a thick, long-developed tradition from which to draw wisdom and nourishment. We can do this. We’re already doing it. Tradition supplied the tools, and now we do the work of rebuilding Christian societies, “scaling up” the old version to fit new realities.

That wraps up the first week of Christendom Reborn! I hope I have succeeded in laying a basic framework for the project. Next week will be a book week: Each day will feature a recent book along with my commentary on it. You can see how I view my project in relation to Tom Holland’s Dominion, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option, or Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom. Thanks for reading! Stay tuned.

Yesterday I noted that Christianity, as a religion, has dramatically exceeded early expectations, surviving much longer and spreading much further than anyone in the first or second centuries would have imagined. It is a basic premise of Christendom Reborn that we can, at least to a great extent, identify certain big-picture features of the tradition that explain this resilience. Today’s post lays out, in very foundational form, what I see as the three keys to Christianity’s immense dynamism.

My explanation will not boil down to “God’s grace” or “Christ’s redemptive sacrifice,” though I do firmly believe in those things. I should be clear though that if I stick primarily to the realm of natural reason, that is not because I am even slightly embarrassed to affirm my belief in grace, revelation, Sacraments, miracles, angels, saints, demons, and the like. I simply think there can be value in applying our rational powers to important questions. For one thing, it makes it easier to talk to non-believers. It can also supply some check on the natural human tendency to confuse our own hopes and anxieties with God’s immortal will. We should never suppose, of course, that natural explanations replace transcendent ones, as though the story of David and Goliath could somehow be spoiled by an explanation of the mechanics of a slingshot. All things are held in the providence of God.

I have just 500 words left, so I’d better get started. The first key to Christian resilience is the bridging of faith and reason. You can instead say “the Christian philosophical tradition” if you just like that lofty sound, but I think it makes sense here to stress “faith and reason.” It shows what’s at issue.

Religion acquaints believers with important truths, helping them to live better (truer!) lives. It has a wonderful capacity to preserve and transmit wisdom over time, serving as a kind of repository of human insight. Inevitably though, every faith will at some point encounter speed bumps: times when new discoveries or widely held opinions run contrary to whatever the community holds to be true. What then?

There are a few options. One is to adapt the faith to the new thing. Alternatively, new discoveries or views can be rejected in favor of tradition. Both courses can be appropriate at times, but each has its pitfalls. A faith that adapts too easily will tend to dissipate into the surrounding culture, while one that consistently rejects new things will veer into fundamentalism and find increasingly divorced from reality. The best solution is a well-honed dogma, shaped and defined by a rich philosophical tradition. I will return to this point in the near future, with a devote a week to discussing Christianity’s Philosophical Toolkit. For now, let’s move on to God and Caesar.

Although the Israelites had some interest in making Jesus a king, he repeatedly insisted that he wasn’t that kind of king. This was a significant thing, in an era when religious and political authority did tend to be closely conjoined. From the beginning, then, Christians had some sense that God’s authority and the state’s were meant to be separated, although the ground-level reality of this has always been quite messy and complicated. Where the story of Christian philosophy often seems graceful and inspiring, Christian political history looks more like a never-ending wrestling match. Nevertheless, it has long been understood that some separation was required, and this point has been vital to Christian resilience, and transformative for the history of the West. There will be much more discussion of this point in coming weeks.

Must be brief now. You could call the final key “Christian personalism.” If you prefer just “love,” that’s okay too. From the beginning, Christians have believed that God is love, and that every human being is precious and unique, made in God’s own image. To the ancient world this view was as insane as it was beautiful. I’m not always sure we understand it much better today. And yet, this aspect of the Christian tradition is the most compelling, defining, and utterly transformative for every society that has fallen under Christian influence. Love does win, though not always in the ways people expect.

That was 700 words on the dot. Victory! I will have much more to say about all of these in coming weeks. Still in framing mode for now. Come back tomorrow for my super-sonic dash through Christian history, which should at least serve to clarify why this us living through a “fulcrum moment” in which Christendom is being reborn.

I think it’s time to say a little more about my motivations for starting this project. Actually the immediate spur was a crash-and-burn job interview. But I’m not telling that story today. Today’s theme is despair literature and how I got thoroughly fed up with it.

I’m thinking especially about anti-modern despair, built on the conviction that the contemporary world is so broken, so depraved, and so uncompromisingly hostile to tradition (particularly Christian faith) that we cannot really live in it. Dramatic action is absolutely required. We must retreat to catacombs, build bunkers, stage revolutions. Until modern errors are utterly vanquished, repression will always be just around the corner, cultural hostility will inevitably intensify, and Christianity will perpetually struggle to survive. Modernity and Christianity are implacable enemies whose differences cannot be resolved.

Now, truthfully, I myself am far from satisfied with modernity. I’ve been a religious conservative more or less my entire life, so the culture war ethos is quite familiar, and I certainly do believe that our culture has some deep problems. I’m reasonably well-versed in the conservative/traditionalist critiques of modernity, from Ideas Have Consequences to After Virtue. I accept, in fact, that conservatives and traditionalists have a time-honored duty to go on explaining What’s Wrong With the World, and that those explanations will typically be reiterations of the basic point, “We think we can jettison tradition without cost, but that’s not actually true.” I’m not scornful of that endeavor. It matters.

Nevertheless, over the last decade or so I became increasingly disillusioned with the wave of despair literature that seemed to wash over the Christian world. It was panicky and hyperbolic, heavy on alarmism but light on logic. Unoriginal, too, forever trumpeting familiar anti-modern critiques as though they were newly discovered. Alienation is a serious modern problem! Secular governments tend to be suspicious of established religious faiths! Bad things happen when liberty devolves into license! Yes, well done, modern political commentators. You’re killing it.

Bad and unoriginal books are hardly a new thing. The demoralizing part, though, was that people seemed to be reading them and, well, becoming demoralized. I could see in my own networks of friends and acquaintances, where everyone wanted to discuss the Benedict Option, whether liberalism was failing, how many more years until we were worshiping in the catacombs. Unbalanced books were creating unbalanced conversations and expectations. They weren’t harmless.

In the end, my real issue with the despair books wasn’t that they were hard on modernity but that they seemed soft on Christianity. They were tapping into, and even selling, the palpable fear that Christianity simply might not be able to survive under modern conditions, or at least that it was likely to be driven to the far margins for the foreseeable future. It all started to feel unseemly. Self-indulgent. Pusillanimous. Christianity historically has weathered many tectonic changes, adapting itself to all sorts of conditions. Should we maybe we should give it a bit more credit?

As a child I loved the story of David and Goliath. This is a perennial Sunday School favorite, of course, but to me the best part wasn’t actually the giant killing. It was earlier in the story. David is sent by his parents to bring food to his older brothers, who are soldiers in the Israelite army. He happens to arrive on the scene in time to see Goliath emerge and issue his challenge: “Who is brave enough to fight me?” The Israelites cower. David is furious and ashamed. “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine,” he thunders, “That he should defy the armies of the Living God?” I loved that line.

It haunted me as the despair books (and articles, and podcasts) piled ever higher. First they became tiresome, then they started to make me mad. Why are we cowering like this? Do we really think that our faith can be defeated so easily? Are we the ones who think that God is dead?

I appreciate that this criticism can be applied unfairly. I have already acknowledged that it is often necessary to critique modern errors; I have certainly done so in my own published work. No doubt I have myself been guilty of “cowering” at times. Past a certain point though, it just becomes lazy and self-indulgent. We’re past it. I’d say we’re miles past it.

I started thinking about Christianity’s long and complicated history, and the many lessons it could offer. Every day, the despair books felt more and more parochial. And in my mind, a new question began to formulate.

We’ve read a million explanations for why Christianity is declining. But let’s try asking a different question. Why is it still here?

It would have been startling to practically everyone in the first few centuries who had even heard of Jesus. To the Romans Christianity looked like a bizarre, marginal splinter sect of Judaism. Christians themselves, meanwhile, clearly expected in the early days that Christ would return quite soon. Two thousand years later, the world is still here, Rome has long since fallen, and two and a half billion Christians are walking the earth. What would the ancients have thought if you’d told them that?

The rise and fall of multiple empires. Scores of heresies and other philosophical errors. Plagues, famines, natural disasters, invasions, tyrants, revolutions, totalitarian repression. Christianity has come through all of this, and remains the world’s most global faith, but we think gender ideology may be the death of us?

I don’t mean to trivialize contemporary problems, but if you’re tempted by the doomer script, it’s worth spending some time thinking about Christian resilience. What explains it? If Christianity could survive all those things, maybe it’s better equipped for present challenges than we sometimes think.

So that’s where I’ll pick up tomorrow: the three keys of Christian dynamism. I will tell you, in very basic outline, what I see as the secrets of Christian survival.

The term “Christendom” carries a lot of baggage. There’s no getting around it. There’s a certain romanticism to it, but it also summons visions of knights and crusaders, crown-and-altar alliances, inquisitors rooting out heretics. I could play innocent and insist that I only want to bring souls to Jesus, but by naming my Substack Christendom Reborn, I clearly imply that my project has political dimensions.

It does. In a sense. But we need to think carefully about the term “Christendom” and what it truly implies.

First, the obvious question: Am I looking to join forces with integralists, the Christian Nationalists, and other neo-militants who have recently called for a more muscular and illiberal form of Christianity? Is Christendom Reborn just my own spin on Andrew Isker’s “Bonface Option”?

It definitely isn’t. As will become clear over time, I have serious reservations about postliberalism, especially the crude efforts to revive time-rejected (as opposed to time-tested) forms of Caeseropapism. You will never catch me trying to restore Habsburgs to power or calling for a new crusade. Buzz off, Protestant Franco.

Now, of course, I could just be choosing a provocative title as a clickbait stunt. So alright fine, you caught me. I did consider “A Staid and Carefully Reasoned Case for Christian Stability,” and decided it sounded too boring. But that’s not really the main thing.

If we dig into the history and etymology of it, Christendom truly means “the realm that Christ judges.” A dom is a statute or legal judgment (think of the Domesday Book), so Christen-dom is really the judgment of Christ, or, to widen the lens slightly, the realm under his jurisdiction. That raises further questions insofar as Christians believe that all realms are, in some very real sense, under Christ’s jurisdiction. Presumably the idea is something like this: those realms that recognize Christ’s jurisdiction are part of “Christendom.” They place themselves under his judgment.

In its earliest usages it seems to have referred primarily to the Mystical Body of Christ, a sacramental order. You entered “Christendom” individually; baptism was the door. Across the Middle Ages the term took on other connotations, getting sucked into complex political-theoretically debates about two kingdoms, two swords, the meeting points of powers and principalities. It’s unsurprising that that happened because there was at that time a geographical part of the world that had a pronounced Christian identity and culture. That was “Christendom.”

So what does this mean today? Aren’t “Christian realms” a thing of the past? Isn’t it nostalgic, imperialist, illiberal, or in some other way problematic to yearn for “a Christian society”?

Possibly. It might depend on what we take that to imply. Medieval Christendom undoubtedly had some features that we can’t (and shouldn’t try to) reproduce. It was geographically bounded and “blessed” (though it often didn’t feel that way) with a neighbor possessed of its own robust political theology. That naturally reinforced Christians’ sense of collective identity. Ideas didn’t spread so easily in those days, so Medieval Christendom was far more homogeneous than any modern society can reasonably be. These are features that can’t, or at any rate shouldn’t, be recovered. Though there have been modern attempts to create that level of ideological/creedal uniformity within a society, they’ve all been extremely ugly. Let’s not go there.

Ugly forms of caesaropapism rise out of the grass, which doesn’t please me at all, and yet here’s the thing. It’s not wrong to feel some desire to build “a Christian realm.” Of course Christians want to live in societies that are friendly, not hostile, to their faith. They are right to see, too, that modern secularism very easily bursts through formal political-theoretical barriers and becomes hostile to them, almost (it sometimes seems) the very second it ceases to be actively friendly. We still have a few old-school liberals promising neutral forms of “tolerance”, but they seem to be a dying breed and their promises haven’t amounted to much. There has to be another option.

Let’s return to “Christendom.” Could “Christian realm” be understood in a way that points to a this-world political reality that neither rejects pluralism nor opens the door to repression? It would have to combine a large number of flourishing Christian communities and institutions with many of the defining components of liberalism. But mightn’t that be possible in a society in which the laws, political structures, and cultural conventions reflect a Christian worldview and Christian influence on some deep level. The structure and rhythm of a society could be non-accidentally harmonious with Christianity in ways that don’t call for secret police or laws against heresy. If that sounds far-fetched, reflect that most of Western Civilization has effectively been “Christian” in this broad sense. (I realize that not everyone will find that reassuring.)

If that is the sort of “Christian realm” we want, there are significant implications for would-be cultural reformers. Rebuilding Christendom may not be a question of asserting control but rather of addressing evident problems using the resources of our own tradition. If we can generate fruitful solutions from within a Christian framework, modern societies will move in a broadly Christian direction without trespassing on anyone’s rights or freedoms.

The “New Christendom” I hope for would certainly allow Christians to live their faith freely and openly, building communities and institutions and exerting their influence on law and culture as free citizens. But Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others would also be free to do that, and I hope that their contributions would be welcomed, and that they would be valued and respected as fellow citizens. I understand that this will sound Pollyannaish to many people, both traditionalists (who see a certain friend-enemy approach as necessary for survival) and anti-traditionalists (who assume that political manifestations of Christianity will always become repressive). I accept your skepticism, and mostly just ask you to hang in with me for awhile and let me try to convince you.

Partly, I can be relatively cheerful about pluralism because I do have a fairly high respect for other world religions. I’ve known a lot of Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, and my general feeling is, “Yes, I can live with these people.” But it also reflects my evaluation of Christianity. If our faith is a great as I think it is, we should have some confidence in our ability to hold our own in a diverse society.

To skeptics, I would also ask: If happier alternatives to Intractable Metaphysical Conflict might be available, isn’t the possibility worth exploring?

The word “Christendom” also raises some interesting questions about identification and how we think about ourselves. As Christians in the West today, does our membership in the Kingdom of Christ mean something to us, and how does our sense of that relate to our earthly citizenship? If Christian culture and identity become much more robust, will non-Christians be in danger of becoming marginalized or scorned? I’ll return to those questions next week when I discuss Mark Greenglass’ fascinating book Christendom Destroyed.

For tomorrow though, I’ll add a new layer to this dialectic by looking more closely at Christian “despair literature” and explaining how I plan to flip that script.

What to say at the birth of Christendom Reborn?

It’s a project long contemplated, but as this is its first public outing, I should probably begin by explaining what I intend to do. Will it involve torture devices? Crossbows? A holy war against the Muslim world?

It will not. I’ve got some hang-ups about torture and conquest. My goal here is to persuade readers that Christianity, far from fading and failing, is poised for a phase of revitalization and growth. After many fragmented years, the pieces are starting to come back together. This isn’t going to be a quick process, but nevertheless, it’s happening. I fully expect Christianity to have as deep an impact on the third millennium as it has on the previous two.

These aims are not modest. There’s definitely a risk of overpromising and underdelivering. Nevertheless, here I go, with an approach that can be outlined in three key points.

First, I wish to explore the question of why Christianity has been such a remarkably successful faith. Because it has been astonishingly successful, not only surviving two millennia but spreading across the entire earth, making billions of converts, transforming cultures, and directing the course of world history. No other faith in history has had equivalent impact; only a few come anywhere close. Christianity has demonstrated an unparalleled capacity to translate its core truths across every historical, linguistic, or cultural barrier. Given the anxieties of the present moment, I think it’s worth asking: Why can it do that? How does Christianity work?

Next, I want to consider how Christianity’s time-tested, historic strengths may be used to address contemporary challenges. It seems to me that Christians are living today with an oppressive sense of being trapped between two unhappy alternatives: we can double down on traditional but increasingly archaic patterns of life, or “adapt” our way into cultural irrelevance. But even though I understand why it feels that way, I see this as a false choice. Historically, Christianity has been extremely good at adapting to new cultural and political circumstances, and it’s managed to do this without losing hold of that vital core of orthodoxy. I think we can do it again. In fact, we need to, and not just for our own sakes. The world desperately needs the resources that Christianity possesses.

Finally, I think the growth and adaptation we need are already well underway, and I’d like to showcase examples. To my eyes, fruitful growth can be seen all over the place, in many forms. I see it on the intellectual front, as Christian thinkers translate Christian wisdom into modern language, and apply it to new problems. I see it in institutional breakthroughs, as Christians experiment with new schools, organizations, grassroots associations of all kinds. Perhaps most inspiring to me are the developments I see within people’s families or personal lives, as Christians figure out new ways to keep the faith and thrive. As a practicing Catholic with many connections to different churches and religious communities, I see innumerable signs of budding life, and to me, the contrast between that ground-level dynamism, and the rushing torrent of rage and despair that is our political discourse, is a constant source of fascination.

Of course, political brokenness is a feature of the world generally, not just the Christian world. And I’m not suggesting that it’s mainly Christians’ fault. We do seem pretty immersed in it though, which in my estimation has often deterred healthy forms of growth and adaptation. Politicians have strong incentives for stoking rage and despair, presenting their rivals as the problem and themselves as the solution. That doesn’t encourage resilience, adaptation, or imaginative problem-solving. It encourages frustration, despair, countless hours wasted marinating in rage-bait.

I’m not promising to fix our broken politics. There will be quite a lot of “political” content on this site, but mostly on the level of theory. I’ll be thinking out loud about liberalism, nationalism, God and Caesar, religious freedom, civil and political rights, the public square. I have a lot less to say about particular politicians, parties, or campaigns. Though I definitely think we should care about the health of our political order, I also think we’re living through a kind of “fulcrum moment” in which many problems feel insoluble simply because adequate solutions haven’t yet been devised. This can happen. The human race has passed through many such historical choke-points. Over time a new equilibrium is found, insoluble problems turn out to be soluble, and the world keeps turning. In the meanwhile though, we should keep working the problems without allowing our fractured politics to define us, or deter us from helping to revitalize our culture on other levels. Sustainable political reform may well be downstream from other forms of growth (social, intellectual, spiritual) that we can absolutely advance from wherever we presently stand.

A few final notes before wrapping up for today. First, Christendom Reborn was conceived as a companion to a book project that I’ll say more about in time. To start though, it’s enough to say that these initial weeks will be dedicated to framing out the space to be explored in the book, setting up a dialectic. After that I’ll make forays into all sorts of related subjects, while using the site to capture stray thoughts, lateral insights, and worthy quotations that I run across in the course of my research. These will generally be short posts, not lengthy essays. I’ll post links to my longer published works. But I’ve been a freelance writer for 13 years (keeping the lights on and the tuition paid through commissions) so I have pragmatic instincts here: if I’m lavishing hours or days on a 2500-word missive, I want a check.

A quick preview of coming attractions:

Tomorrow I will address a major elephant in the room: Christendom. Why would I be looking to rebuild Christendom as opposed to just Christian faith? Given the shape of our recent politics, some readers will understandably see a dark, authoritarian shadow hanging over a project with this title. We should talk about that.

On Wednesday I’ll discuss the flood of “despair literature” that has inundated the Christian world of late. And explain how I plan to flip the script on the doomers.

Thursday will address the core question: What are the key features of Christianity that explain its incredible longevity and dynamism?

Finally, on Friday I will give a brief, reckless, wildly oversimplified overview of Christian history, which should at least have the benefit of clarifying why I see this as a “fulcrum moment.” This should help address the question: In what sense exactly is Christendom being reborn?

Next week will be Book Week. (I’ll probably repeat this exercise periodically.) Each day I will discuss a fairly-recent book, and locate my project in relationship to it.

We’ll go from there.

This first post is a bit of an occasion for me, so it feels fitting to end it with a prayer. Here’s the one I pray every time I sit down to write:

Concede mihi, misericors Deus, quae tibi sunt placita, ardenter concupiscere, prudenter investigare, veraciter agnoscere, et perfecte adimplere ad laudem et gloriam Nominis tui. Amen.

(Grant, O Merciful Father, that I may ardently desire, prudently examine, truthfully consider, and perfectly accomplish what is pleasing to Thee for the praise and glory of Thy name. Amen.)

It’s St. Thomas Aquinas’ prayer for students and scholars. I always try, as far as possible, to keep the Angelic Doctor on my side.

The absolute number of Catholics remains level, largely because more Catholics are dying than are being baptized. Among adults though, it looks like more people are converting to Catholicism than leaving it. And many dioceses are reporting a significant uptick in people joining the Catholic Church just since 2024. The Archdiocese of Newark reports a 72 percent increase in adult conversions over the past three years. Similar spikes have been reported in Cleveland, Portland, Ore., Cincinnati and many other dioceses.

Read more at America

This is vintage Chesterton: witty, memorable, charmingly self-deprecating. Just two lines into the book, he already has readers fully engaged, hungry for further explanation. It’s a great lead-in to Orthodoxy, but also to Chesterton’s work more broadly.

Read More at L&L

Starting this year, any US citizen under 18 qualifies for a 530A “Trump Account,” sometimes referred to as a “Kid IRA.” Parents, grandparents, or other loved ones can contribute up to $5000 per year, which will be tax-deferred until the child turns 18. The money will then be available to the child for major life events, such as going to college, buying their first home, or starting a small business. For babies born between 2025 and 2028, there’s a special bonus; the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025provides for a $1,000 gift from the Federal government, deposited as “seed money” for newborns. The goal, ostensibly, is to ensure that every American child, from the day of birth, can “own a piece of the American dream.”

Read more at L&L

Read more at NR

U.S. fertility is at a record low. Young adults are delaying marriage and childbearing, and a growing share are opting out of marriage and family all together. At the same time, the cost of raising children continues to rise, and concerns about economic challenges now outweigh cultural ones in public opinion when Americans are asked about the issues facing families today. We are entering an age with much more uncertainty toward the things we used to be sure of: Getting married and having children. There has been an increased interest among conservatives in a more active and affirmative family policy, the question is: Can government help? This talk brings together Patrick Brown of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Rachel Lu, Associate Editor of Law & Liberty, for a conversation on the contemporary challenges to family formation and flourishing. Together, they will explore the economic, cultural, and moral factors influencing family decisions today, and consider the benefits and costs of expanding the state's role in supporting family formation. The discussion will be moderated by Wendy Wang, Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Institute for Family Studies.

Watch now

This kind of question defies easy answers. There is a certain beauty in the clear, durable answers of the Catechism (“to know him and to love him and to serve him”), but deeper understanding is really the work of a lifetime. Catholics can use tradition to make sense of life experiences, and experience to help to understand that tradition more deeply. Not everyone today is grounded in that kind of tradition, and those who are not often approach expansive questions in a more à la carte fashion, seeking wisdom where they can find it and experimenting with possible answers. The television series Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s latest creation, shows us a typically modern protagonist wrestling with life’s defining questions, using the limited spiritual resources available to her. Most fascinating of all, it contrasts that character’s efforts with those of a devout Catholic. It’s a gripping story that may also contain some clues as to what modern people want from Catholics.

Read more at WoF

I admit that things could be worse. Our recent adventures haven’t been nearly as exciting as the ones in 2020. During the George Floyd riots, the chaos spilled over noticeably into surrounding neighborhoods, with columns of black smoke visibly rising into the sky, presumably from burned buildings and cars. Casual vandalism and looting took their toll on the neighborhood until “Black Owned Business” signs started popping up in the windows of the small businesses. Who knew we had so many?

Read more at L&L