Velvet Imperialism

Under these signs, conquer.

Now that I’ve laid down some real estate here at Christendom Reborn, I’m moving into Phase Two of the project. It’s time to get more serious about questions like: In what sense is Christendom “being reborn”? Do I have any grounds for all this exploding optimism?

I do. I’ll sketch the outline over the next two weeks. Then, with the main storyline established, I’ll start venturing off on some fun side quests, which will hopefully build back into that central line. (Can you tell that my kids had me playing Zelda this weekend?)

I’ll describe the new schedule at the end. As a quick reminder though, you can also sign up to receive only my Weekly Digest, with links to all the week’s major posts at Christendom Reborn. Email volume can become overwhelming! I understand!

Let’s get to today’s subject: The case for a new Christendom.

To a great extent, my optimism about Christendom comes down to this. The world has real problems. And I think we can solve them. At any rate, we’re better positioned for it than anyone else.

A quarter-century ago, as a college student at Notre Dame, I spent a semester abroad in Jerusalem. In the churches and holy sites, we were constantly being reminded of a principle that seemed to govern local affairs: If you wanted to control a sensitive area, you had to take care of it. Whoever cleans or maintains an area gets to lay claim to it. Sometimes this creates problems, most famously in the case of the “immovable ladder” in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which must apparently stand fixed for all time because control of this important church is such a sensitive subject among different Christian sects. A simple act of moving a ladder is viewed as an aggressive act of Church Imperialism.

That’s not terribly uplifting (pun intended), but there’s something in it that the West needs to grasp. He who cares for the Earth, inherits it. Do you want to perpetuate your own ideas and traditions? Influence the culture more? Have a say in the future your children and grandchildren inherit? Then build things. Take care of things. Solve problems. Think of it as a kind of “velvet imperialism.” You don’t have to conquer people (in a coercive way) if your ideas and innovations are so good that they simply want to share in what you have.

The West’s culture wars have been raging hot for many years, which means there are quite a few things that Christians (especially the devout and tradition-interested kind) now reflexively see as “enemies,” evidence that their faith is deeply and perhaps incontrovertibly at odds with the modern world. Last week, for “Autopsy Week,” I examined four different accounts of how Christendom crumbled, all of which have real currency in conservative and traditionalist spheres. The format was a bit playful, but I didn’t raise these “autopsy reports” simply to mock them. They all contain significant elements of truth. I just think it’s worthwhile to assess what traditionalists view as “areas of deep tension between faith and modernity” before trying to shift that paradigm.

The sexual revolution did destabilize society in some truly harrowing ways. The shift from a pre-modern, metaphysically grounded worldview (built around God, nature, and objective truth) to a more modern one (in which self is centered and man is the measure of all things) has indeed unmoored us in very consequential ways. Modern states, built on that too-thin metaphysical foundation, do have a tendency to tack towards totalitarianism, viewing God and tradition as unwelcome competitors in the struggle for power. And yes! Modern people are alienated! Technology, rarefied labor, globalization, bad ideology, cheap sex, cheap entertainment, and endless synthetic substitutes, have all left modern people drifting and atomized, making it harder all the time to attain and appreciate such fundamental goods as family, faith, nature, honest work, and community.

My core argument though is that seemingly-insoluble problems may sometimes become more soluble if we stop looking for a dangerous malefactor to be eliminated, and instead approach the problem from another angle. What challenges has our contemporary situation created for everyone that have not yet been adequately solved? What resources does Christianity offer for addressing them? Are there places where we, as Christians, are uniquely situated to work the problem?

In some cases, it may just take time to show the world that Christian solutions can work. Patience is important! And yet, I think it’s about more than just patience. My sense (admittedly anecdotal) is that the religious conservatives of my late-20th-century childhood did largely believe that patience would win the day for them, especially with respect to “moral relativism” or the sexual revolution. If the libertine left remained sad and childless while we were happy, productive, and fecund, we and our offspring would surely be the last men standing, right? (I used to hear people say things like this in Sunday School.) It hasn’t quite gone as anticipated, which I think is surely one reason certain subcultures are far more sympathetic to despair narratives than they used to be.

But at the risk of repeating past mistakes, I still think the sound money is on Christianity as the hardiest survivor. It’s just going to take a little more work and adaptation than, say, Moral Majority social conservatives anticipated.

To make this case, I will return over these next few weeks to a concept I’ve touched on already: the Three Keys of Christianity. I think these are crucial for understanding Christianity’s core strengths, and my next three essays will accordingly be dedicated to unpacking each one.

The first key, faith and reason, will be the topic of Wednesday’s essay. Philosophy has been an immense asset to Christians across the centuries, and far from being dated or anachronistic, it’s desperately needed today. Historically, its great strength has been synthesis. I don’t mean that in a Marxist or Hegelian sense. Christian thinkers in their best moments have excelled at incorporating “facts on the ground,” the world as we find it, into a sweeping transcendent vision of God’s providential plan and man’s immortal destiny. This is really an amazing gift, and incredibly relevant in our time.

Without denying that there are plenty of bad and wrong ideas out there, I often reflect: Are most modern people deeply and dogmatically mired in error? Or are they just confused? We often picture Modern Man defiantly shaking his fist at God and nature, but is that really his condition today? I think a lot of Modern Men are just desperately trying to piece together a cohesive worldview from an ocean of competing authorities, perspectives, and claims. I can’t entirely blame them for getting blown off course sometimes.

Just in my own lifetime, I think we’ve crossed a threshold beyond which ordinary people are far more burdened by the excess of information than a deficiency of it. Science and technology keep advancing in leaps and bounds; the “regular news cycle” now seems to flip roughly every 90 minutes; from every angle we’re bombarded with billboards, yard signs, television reels, pop-up windows; there are a thousand chattering voices daily trying to command, entertain, inform, or persuade us, and many have mixed or downright malevolent motives, and every individual person must somehow figure out how to function in such a world. This is hard! Modern people may be crazy in all sorts of ways, but cut them a little slack. When else in the history of the world have ordinary people been expected to sift gems of truth from such an ocean of murk?

To me, this looks like a job for some capable synthesizers. I’ll say more on Wednesday.

Next, let’s turn our attention to the present state of politics. Is anyone happy with it? Every election, we are reminded that the single biggest factor in driving votes today is “hatred and fear of the opposite party.” Clearly, all is not well.

But there are reasons. The world has become incredibly tumultuous. We’re revisiting all the big questions with tortured anxiety. There are questions about the state’s proper role, and the foundations of its authority. We’re thinking about citizenship, how it’s attained, and what obligations it entails. Is the nation-state weakening? If so, should we try to save it (and how?) or let authority devolve to other levels? How do we deal with the obvious reality that trade and technology have made our world far more “global” and interconnected, understanding that 8 billion people can’t possibly be governed by a single entity? All of these questions are extremely hard. We should note, though, that they aren’t necessarily the result of malevolent ideology. Those might play a role, but many of these challenges have been created or intensified by natural and organic developments: demographic change, growing wealth, technological advance.

Christianity is a universalist faith, but from the earliest days it has had great respect for natural community and organic human attachments. That was necessarily true, because Christianity is a religion of love, which values interpersonal relationships. Also though, Jesus insisted from the beginning that authority had to be divided, separating God and Caesar and respecting their different spheres. What that yielded, across the centuries, was a rich and sophisticated conversation about authority, jurisdiction, divided loyalties, diverse forms of citizenship, and human freedom. Christianity has already proven its ability to adapt to different political forms, but it also has resources for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of those different forms. These seem to me like very significant assets in our time. I’ll say more next Monday.

Last, but by no means least, it seems obvious that a large share of people are simply lost nowadays, struggling to answer very foundational questions, such as, “Who am I and what ought I to do with my life?” Each one of my “autopsy reports” offers some kind of explanation for why this would be so. But hear me out. Maybe it’s actually quite hard in a pluralist, globalized, materially wealthy world to figure out who one is, and how one ought to spend one’s life. Choice and opportunity are a blessing, but also burdensome. Meritocracy is exciting, but potentially crippling. Historically most people were anchored by securities we no longer have: inflexible class conventions or views about race, sex, or bloodline that just aren’t believable anymore. In some ways, it’s great that those things are gone. They were often unjust and stifling. And yet, sometimes we want them back.

What is needed at such a juncture is a richer, fuller, more developed human anthropology. What is human nature? How should we think about our similarities and differences? How should young people make decisions about their lives? What do we owe to each other? Christians don’t have complete answers to all those questions, but we have a wealth of resources to help us develop them. That will be the subject of next Wednesday’s post.

Faith and reason. God and Caesar. Love. Those are my grounds for optimism. We’ll go from there.

Just to update on what’s ahead: I’ll be moving now to a new schedule featuring new essays on Mondays and Wednesdays with shorter thoughts, excerpts, and links-with-commentary on alternate days. It seemed important to start out by laying some groundwork, but I think it’s best now to roll the major pieces out more slowly, and leave more time for discussion, engagement, and fun things like excerpts, quotes, and links.

Friday I’ll choose something from my personal archive. I may be new to Substack, but I’ve written hundreds of columns over the past thirteen years, many on relevant themes. I’ll revisit some of those.

Saturday is for the Weekly Wrap-Up. Once again, you can receive only that if you prefer!

Sunday I may offer a few more personal faith reflections. I keep the weekdays mostly in the realm of natural reason, but Sunday is after all the Lord’s Day. And I am a practicing Christian, not just a philosopher.

This email list will just get the major MWF pieces (plus Saturday Wrap-Up), so drop by anytime for the other stuff, and to participate in discussion!