*
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cyclical theories of history, like occultism, were all the rage. René Guénon, Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler: the bookshelves were groaning with them. It was obvious enough, in the shadow of the Great War, that something was ending, and the most perceptive observers could see, in the rise of occultism and sexual libertinism, technological warfare and globalised capitalism, Marxism and fascism, what it was: the values and the heritage of the old Christian West. Religion as a way of seeing had been supplanted by a can-do materialism, which sought to transform reality through ideology, technology and science. God, as Nietzsche’s madman had yelled before Nietzsche himself did, was dead. The modern West had killed him.
Oswald Spengler, on the other hand, was not so sure. Like Yeats, the German poet-historian saw history as a series of cycles. His mega-study, The Decline of the West, which became an unexpected bestseller across Europe in the aftermath of World War One, detailed the rise and fall of various global cultures, the latest of which — ours — he called “Faustian culture”. Faustian because it had made a deal with the devil, which was now, according to Spengler, about to come due. The West had triumphed in the goal it had set itself: corralling matter through science and technology. We had become masters of the material realm and had conquered much of the world, but like Faust we had sold our soul for it. “We are the hollow men,” intoned T. S. Eliot, a traditionalist disguised as a modernist. “We are the stuffed men.” He had it right. You can be both at once.
By the time Spengler was writing, he was already clear that all of the theoretical edifices constructed by the West to replace its old sacred order — which mainly manifested as political ideologies — had failed. Beginning in the 21st century, he predicted, the grandchildren of the revolutionaries and the rationalists, adrift in a failing materialist culture, would begin to seek succour in another place entirely:
“The age of theory is drawing to its end. The great systems of Liberalism and Socialism all arose between about 1750 and 1850 … Belief in programme was the mark and the glory of our grandfathers — in our grandsons it will be proof of provincialism. In its place is developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger, whose task will be to found a new hither-side that looks for secrets instead of steel-bright concepts.”
The West’s gyre was ending, said Spengler. Exhaustion and decline would follow, but the failure of both technology and ideology would prompt a turn back towards the spiritual. “Before us,” he declared, “there stands a last spiritual crisis that will involve all Europe and America.” Beginning in the 21st century, this would manifest as what he called a “second religiousness”. The Faustian West would experience a religious resurgence. Spengler predicted that it would begin around now.
What if a human being is not primarily a rational, bestial or sexual animal but in fact a religious one? By “religious” I mean inclined to worship; attuned to the great mystery of being; convinced that material reality is only a visible shard of the whole; able across all times and cultures and places to experience or intuit some creative, magisterial power beyond our own small selves. There is, after all, no current or historic culture on Earth that is not built around God, or the gods. None, that is, apart from ours.
If this is true, then it would make sense that the collapse of the false picture painted by the age of “science and reason” — mind-body dualism, religion as evidence of superstition or stupidity, the ability of ideology or technology to create paradise on Earth — would bring about a return to the mean. And if the mean is what we might call a religious sensibility, then a resurgence of religion itself would be very much on the cards.
I think there is a good chance that, beneath all of the surface culture war battles, below the arguments about free speech and democracy, coursing below all of these necessary and inevitable cultural strains and tensions, this is already happening. It could be that Spengler’s second religiousness is already here.
*
If this is so, what shape will it take? Many different shapes, probably, and all at once, with the first being an old and a familiar one. In recent years, more and more people have begun to notice that, as the tide of Christian culture has receded in the West, the place seems in some way to be re-paganising, and that as it does so it is offering up a new set of sacred values. What might those values be? We could start with nature worship, self-worship, and a sacrificial attitude to disposable human lives. Then we could combine these with the increasingly obvious religious vision of the Silicon Valley crowd, with their AI Gods and pursuit of silicon transcendence. Add it all up and we can make out the dim shape of the second religiousness in what passes for the cultural mainstream: self-creation in a Godless, genderless, borderless, natureless world of all-seeing living machines. Welcome to the silicon paganism of the 21st century.
In response, we are now beginning to see a resurgence in genuine religion. Personally, and anecdotally, I am noticing this everywhere. In American Orthodox churches bursting with young families. In atheists or neo-pagans suddenly becoming Christians (I plead guilty). In my own speaking events about Christianity, which are suddenly inexplicably popular, and not because of me. Others I know report the same thing: for the first time in a long while, people are beginning to take faith seriously again. Actual religion — the thing that was supposed to die a slow death at the hands of reason — is emerging slowly from the shadows as the new paganism takes hold.
But as Spengler himself warned, there is no guarantee that a “second religiousness” will be an entirely benevolent thing. Knowing what we do of human history, in fact, we can pretty much guarantee that it won’t. There have always been two kinds of religion, or perhaps two ways of responding to religious teachings. There is the internal or mystical response, and then there is the worldly or political one. In Christian terminology, we might call these the way of the world and the way of the kingdom. Christ taught that the path home to God — which is the path to the true self — is a narrow one, and that few ever find it. He also explained that God was to be found not in the clouds or in the stars, but in every human heart. The Christian Way, as its first followers referred to it, is in other words a path of internal transformation — what the Orthodox call the “unseen warfare” that goes on in the heart every minute. The battle between the way of God and the way of the world: every religion I know of teaches some version of this.
Being human, though, we like to take these teachings and overlay them onto the world. In Christian history, this has often taken the form of crusading — sometimes literally — to transform the kingdom of Man into the kingdom of God by force. Unfortunately, since the people doing the crusading have not first fought their own unseen war to transform themselves, they end up falling into a neat little trap set by the devil, and transforming the Church into an instrument of repression, or simply a vehicle for worldly political activism. This can apply equally to liberal Christians who want to remake the Church in the rainbow flag-bedecked image of the “social justice” Left, and to conservative Christians who want Jesus to lead their battle to defend “faith, flag and family” against the woke libs.
Currently, this trend is manifesting most obviously in the form of a “cultural Christianity” promoted by anti-woke public figures on the Right. In this reading, the Christian Way is a weapon which can, in the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writing here as a recent convert, “fortify us against our menacing foes”. Ironically, this spiritual-warfare-as-civilisational-warfare attitude is most obvious at present in the rise of the violent Islamism which so frightens Hirsi Ali, and with good reason. The nervousness with which Europeans have been shopping in their Christmas markets this month is testament to the reality of the violence which some people think God will help them justify. The warning should be clear.
If all of this is part of the second religiousness, it won’t work: or at least, it won’t take us any closer to God. Religion, despite the many calcified failures of its history, is not at root a weapon in anybody’s culture war. Religion and culture reign in separate domains. A faith wielded as a stick with which to beat the “cultural Marxists” will end up being as empty as the consumer void it seeks to challenge, and potentially as toxic. C. S. Lewis had already spotted the trap more than 60 years ago: “Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.”
What Lewis is describing is Christ’s narrow way: the path of the Desert Fathers rather than that of Emperor Constantine. The divine irony is that it is only by walking away from the world that we have any chance of changing it. The future, though, like the past, will probably offer up both paths. We should expect a second religiousness to lead to new Desert Father-like movements, away from the world and into the wilderness, and at the same time give us more openly religious conflict in the public sphere. The two have always been related. The original Desert Fathers, back in the 4th century, fled to become hermits in the sands of Egypt in part to escape the newly civilised version of the Christian faith, which had recently become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity and Empire have never mixed well. When God came to Earth, after all, He turned up as a barefoot carpenter, not a proconsul, and he had nothing at all to say about politics, despite living at a time of deep political ferment in an occupied nation. He had bigger fish to fry. I think we should assume He knew what he was doing.
*
Western culture seems in many ways to be visibly collapsing before our eyes. Our nations, our family structures, our communities, our assumptions, our ecosystems: everything is under strain, under attack or bursting at the seams. What is the cause? Is it mass immigration? Is it post-modern relativism? Is it the woke Left? Is it the far-Right? And what is the solution? Is it a robust defence of “enlightenment values”? Is it writing free speech into law? Is it border control? Is it even more YouTube videos?
I think that all of this is just a form of temporary displacement activity. I think the real story is that our religious sensibility is slowly revealing itself to us again, emerging blinking into the light; our instincts are trying to return to their source. On some level we perhaps know this, but we are holding it off as long as possible, because to turn around and look into the light would be to accept that our whole culture has been trailing down a dead-end road since the Enlightenment. We can’t look at that fact, so we look at absolutely everything else instead. But the confrontation can’t be put off forever.
The biggest lie my culture told me was that matter was dead, along with God, and that humans could reason their way to freedom. Reason has its uses — it is a gift we are given, and we should wield it, like technology, as wisely as we can. But at root, humans are fundamentally spiritual animals. The future is not atheists in space. The future, like the past, will be religious. Even the the rationalists and the soldiers-of-Enlightenment are wobbling on the ground from which they once scoffed so proudly at the babushkas and the saints. It may be that the new gyre is beginning, quietly, to turn.
Our crumbling culture can be so hard to navigate. Religion can be hard to navigate too. But maybe Christmas can help us understand what it is, and what part of us it services. Religion is not, as atheists often assume and I once assumed too, a set of beliefs to be adhered to, or arguments to be made and defended. It is an experience to be immersed in. The orthopraxy reveals the orthodoxy. Fasting makes no sense until you fast. Praying is meaningless, even embarrassing, until you start to pray. If the Christian path is straight and narrow, we can do nothing but try to walk it, even if we keep falling off. God makes no sense until you start to talk to him. Then, strangely enough, all sorts of other things start to make sense too. It is hard, if not impossible to explain, and yet it is the simplest thing in the world. We have always done it. We always will.
I remember the first time I tentatively stepped into an Orthodox church to attend a Divine Liturgy. I had no idea what to do, or what to expect, or whether I even really wanted to be there. From the outside, to the Western mind, it all looks intimidatingly Byzantine — not to mention extremely long. But something happens when you stand, immersed in it all. You come to feel as if you are being carried down a great timeless river to an almost unfathomable destination that you could never reach on your own. But of course, you are not on your own. Not now. You will never be on your own again. You have come home.
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SubscribeMr. Kingsnorth is a fine and interesting writer and I always enjoy his articles. I want to believe his argument that religious belief is again asserting itself, that a new gyre is forming, because that is an encouraging possibility. But I’m not quite sure.
Mr. Kingsnorth wrote, ” But at root, humans are fundamentally spiritual animals.” I’m tempted to revise that sentence: “But at root, humans are fundamentally animals.” And like most animals we flourish in groups, not alone.
Perhaps what Mr. Kingsnorth is observing is people rejecting both the atomization of modern society, with its emphasis on the supremacy of the individual, and the doctrine of multiculturalism which, in essence, tells us identifying with a specific group is wrong and we must all conform to a homogeneous, global culture.
Perhaps people are doing what human beings have always done and are strongly identifying with their own tribe, typically based on shared culture. Religious observance might be one way of affirming a group identity without necessarily having true religious belief. How many people go to church as much for the camaraderie and socializing after the service as for the religion itself?
I hope Mr. Kingsnorth is right because his idea probably leads to better outcomes than mine.
I don’t know, the human brain is insane both intellectually and emotionally. AI is just a conglomeration of intellectual data from the collective hivemind but it will never be as emotionally variable and adaptable as human beings.
But to your point about humans being just another animal. Personally, I don’t buy the transitional species argument. I get it. I just think it relies on weak science like anthropology and is rampant speculation. I struggle to buy any science that wholly relies on recreating the past. Live Science like chemistry and physics is at least testable and relatively apolitical.
Think about climate science. It’s wholly based on a speculative global history of planetary heating. The same “experts” telling everyone humans are a transitional ape species are the same smug, triple boosted “humanitarians” claiming the earth is facing impending doom from climate change due to cow farts and gas powered cars.
If this is your true opinion (the last paragraph) then why not try even for your own sake?
Like all human activity, it will be a waste of time.
I have enjoyed Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s and now Mr. Kingsnorth’s courageous public testimonies of faith. And I appreciate Mr. Bryant for his humble acknowledgement that their worldviews lead to “better outcomes” than his. Perhaps he will someday find his way home too.
I have found mine in a different vein of Christianity. Its focus is not on the Trinitarian dogmas of the Nicene Creed, formulated by 300 all-male bishops in the fourth century, but on the two Great Commandments that Jesus emphasized: love of God who created us and “our neighbor as ourselves.” This is the spiritual heart and soul of religion for both Christians and Jews. This is what a traditionalist like Kingsnorth and a progressive like me share. This deserves to be called “true religion.” Anyone who can accept and live by this simple formula, or even try to live by it, will arrive at a “better outcome.”
Is the West really gravitating toward a new age of religion? I think it is, not only because it is dawning on people that life without religion is increasingly unbearable as one ages, but because more and more hints of transcendence are surfacing. Visions reported by dying people are turning up everywhere, and spirits like those described by Yeats and his wife are prompting us to take seriously the world we will enter at death.
The old materialism seems to be slowly dying. Scientists studying the near-death experience tell us that the brain doesn’t produce consciousness; rather it is the instrument that the conscious self uses to generate our experience. At death the self doesn’t cease to be but only lifts off from the old shell with its dying brain into a spiritual afterlife.
It used to be popular to pooh-pooh such a vision as superstition. But evidence is mounting that the reverse is true: Kingsnorth and Ali are the new prophets, Dawkins and Hitchens the old and fading.
Or in Hitchens’ case, a dead prophet already in the stage of beginning to be as forgotten as A.J. Ayer, the British philosopher who was the Dawkins of his time. Stricken with pneumonia, the eminent atheist got himself to a hospital in time for his heart to stop and he was clinically dead for four minutes. During that time he became aware of a pulsing red ball, very bright, which he interpreted as the engine of the universe. Revived, he later was honest enough to tell the story, but said his views about the hereafter had not changed except for a little bit. Eben Alexander, a Harvard-trained neurosurgeon. was felled by a rare virus that brought him to the edge of death. His best-selling Proof of Heaven is an absorbing read.
Hypoxia?
Of course. His views have not changed ‘a little bit’ as far as I am aware.
There is no answer and it will never be found.
There have been out-of-body accounts that ended too fast for hypoxia to be the explanation. I know of a soldier thrown from a crashing helicopter who had an OBE, told the ‘beings’ he wanted to return, and came to in time to save the pilots from drowning.
Was he given an OBE for that?
Rubbish!
^Thank you for your cogent and reasoned reply.^
Your point of view brings Pascal’s wager to mind.
Why is Paul Kingsnorth courageous in his ‘public testimony of faith’? This is neither North Korea nor 2014 ISIS territory. Your language suggests Christians are persecuted in our society. Do you believe this to be the case?
Starting to be.
Christians are more likely to face ridicule in western society. That can be harder to deal with than persecution.
Yes.
I think the courage lies in putting out his thoughts and having his words ruthlessly scrutinised by intelligent sceptics. He is being as transparent as he can possibly be so that there is little misunderstanding about what he is trying to articulate. There is no recourse to sophistry to defend an argument that is really just a means of shoe horning in some activist agenda. Any writer who does this is courageous, whatever their actual views. This is especially courageous where those views are not fashionable.
Christians, Christianity, are definitely being percecuted for their beliefs nowadays.
For example, try to espouse the Christian belief of marriage being only between a man and a woman, or that there are only 2 genders and you will understand the persecution.
Keith, if you hang around universities and places the university class like to inhabit, you’d soon realise Christians are routinely derided. Nothing will be said to anyone’s face, but it’s regarded as a preventable mental illness that reflects badly on their broader character. They won’t be invited to au fait dinner groups.
the god-thing is not a being that needs love brother – we are supposed to love ie want the best for – each other -because we are all PART of the god-thing. The sooner we all realize this the better………………
What ‘evidence’? You are spouting nonsense.
Secularists are always surprised when they learn that I go to church regularly because it makes me happy and not to accumulate brownie points with God.
Worship, whether in church or alone often lifts up my spirit so that my mind is flooded with joy. A few times there have been mystical experiences
On a Sunday three weeks ago, for instance, after listening to an interesting sermon about people being healed by Jesus’ power these days, I accepted the pastor’s invitation to come forward for prayer. Since having had a recent Covid shot I had been feeling down and hoped it might give me a boost.
Standing before the pastor I surprised myself by blurting out: “I love Jesus”. As he prayed over me I felt wonderfully filled with happiness. Then I walked away in a blissful daze. I had to sit down for the next 20 minutes and every time I repeated in my mind the words “I love Jesus”, I had to smile and my heart felt like it was leaping for joy.
Since becoming a born-again Christian in 2001 my life has improved 100 per cent. I know, without a doubt, that there is a meaning to this life, and it is to be found through a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Men talk too much
“Visions reported by dying people are turning up everywhere,…”
Do you think, perhaps, that social media has anything to do with this?
He’s right. Humanity is inherently religious. If you take away formal religion, we worship something else. That’s what woke culture is. That’s what environmentalism is. There are two man categories that the philosophers recognized, and they serve as two primary categories of all philosophy: Universals and Particulars. Plato being recognized as arguing for universal truths, and Aristotle for particulars. In the West Aquinas got the philosophers accepted into the universities again, and the West became Aristotelian with Christianity providing the universal (transcendent) truths. When I say truths, I mean that it was accepted as common ground between both atheist and theist alike. It’s just that the atheistic side that over time stripped it all of its miracles and transcendence into a set of useful assumed truths. All the way into modernism and then postmodernism where there is simply different forms of nihilism. They’re still religious, but it’s just redirected into some other private secularized religion. David Zahl does a good job of pointing this out in his book “Seculosity”.
Why do you think that everything is a ‘religion’. People have always had group preoccupations to the point of absurdity.
We, the spiritual, are leaving you behind. A new paradigm is emerging.
Hardly new.
Human beings are not fundamentally animals. We attribute meaning by way of symbolism. Animals don’t do this, and can’t because they can’t wield language like we can. My dog can learn one-way stimulus response relations so that I can say “walkies”, then grab the lead and take him for a walk; and in the future he will associate “walkies” with an impending walk. I can not say to him “this is walkies” whilst we are walking, or “this was walkies” after a walk and expect him to understand that “walkies” means “we are going for a walk”. We attribute meaning to events not as stimulus-response relations like animals but through myriad relational ‘frames’ of contextual associations made of symbolic structures – words. This means we can speak to one another and convey deep meaning. Downside is we can also experience existential dread, longing, and post traumatic stress amongst other painful examples of the human experience.
Secondly we will do things to benefit out-group individuals. An animal will never lay down their life to sage that of another animal which competes for resources and for the opportunities to pass on their genetic code. Human beings will do exactly this, and consider it the greatest form of love.
This is memetics- humans are cultural animals. Humans only sacrifice for out-groups because our cultures tell us to. Humans before the advent of pro-social religions didn’t do this.
That’s not true. Archaeologists find evidence that cave dwellers in long long ago made a sledge to pull a crippled child around and other evidence of care for less able people. People have always been kind and generous hearted. And cruel and selfish. And contradictory.
The crippled child was a member of the in-group, the tribe; “UnHerd Reader” was speaking of sacrifices for out-groups.
The biblical exhortations about having mercy on the stranger and outcast–in addition to the poor, widowed, and orphaned–are a few thousand years old now, likely with much more ancient antecedents.
Attempts to make human tribal insularity and lack of compassionate outreach into Nature’s Truth reveal more about the likely motives of the individuals advancing such claims, than they do to establish anything that’s true about the history and evolution of human behavior.
Universalism has become prestigious .Or so-called universalism . Look at the Queers demonstrating on behalf of Hamas . Hamas are devotees of hard core Islam and approve of their prophet’s military conquests of unbelievers . Nor do they tolerate homosexuals .
In the name of universalism and anti-colonialism queer activists abhor the secular liberal state of Israel . Hatred of Israel binds queer activists together as much as hatred of queers (and Israel) binds together the true followers of Hamas .
Cultural misconceptions generate in-group self -identification as much as or more than shared genes .
The mongol army is outside the gates of the city and the citizens prepare for a siege . The bishop decides to send the Khan the keys of the city to demonstrate the superior ethics and universalism of his religion . Greatest form of love ?
Only a very small minority will respond as you allege. If they consider this the greatest form of love, then they are narcissists.
I’ve seen evidence that elephants will attempt to save their comrades. Even saw it once with a group of wildebeests.
I agree with much of that. I’d sum up my sensibility as understanding what the writer is getting at, having experienced much of the same dislocating processes, both external and internal, from my mid-teens onwards.
Through this though, a different way of being has emerged, and it’s neither materialistic or religious. It’s certainly spiritual, and i really couldn’t care less if some take issue with that.
It’s just a little bit too comfortable or comforting, to reach back towards old “solutions”, even those adapted for our era, which is redolent of a changing epoch. I’d challenge the author by asking “…and what if we’re now experiencing something else entirely?” We can’t undo technology, but nor should we worship it or tremble before it. In fact, we shouldn’t worship anything. It’s really just not necessary. We can love, and try to live in a communal sense with our “tribe”, which may allow and include newcomers who wish to join us, but other tribes are not our enemies; we should seek to neither conquer nor give way.
Above all, we should seek to understand ourselves. The each and every heartbeat the author writes about, the ‘narrow way’ of Christ even, but without the worship or the dogma.
Well said. I admire this passage in particular:
‘We can love, and try to live in a communal sense with our “tribe”, which may allow and include newcomers who wish to join us, but other tribes are not our enemies; we should seek to neither conquer nor give way’.
Having been raised by parents who were ex-Catholics and hippies (in my early years), I only came to religious texts as an inquiring late teenager. I felt in my blood, bones, and what I’d call my soul, that there is genuine wisdom and inspiration in parts of the Bible. And in parts of the Dhammapada and Bhagavad Gita. In Meister Eckhart and CS Lewis too. And, without doubt, in many books and faith traditions I’ve read little or nothing from, and may never do.
To admit the obvious: The parts of the Bible that I consider most inspired or enduring are not authoritatively so. I think there is indispensable incomparable power in the Gospels, but I no longer take an exceptionalist stance on that. Others may find stronger inspiration or something more resonant elsewhere, in writings that have an inspired wisdom, morality, or other spiritual character.
Not everything placed under the banner of religion–whether redeemed by perceived spiritual merit or not–is nonsense. Not all of it is worthwhile. Baby vs. bathwater. These categories needn’t include the same parts or aspects for every person, Some are more drawn to ritual and community. Some will try to remain “congregations of one”. We can, to an extent, choose our “tribe”, or reject all views that don’t come from our own heads. But not without a cost, and prospective reward, either way. (I do think Churches of Self are bound to crumble). The road back home beckons, but it is not the exact same path for all of us.
I don’t know man, if we are animals then we have managed to exhaust the definition of our essence which means total manipulation/control is possible and secondly if we are mere animals, a product of bottom up evolution, than this does not take into account the telos that has to come from somewhere other than the said bottom up direction. Work of Michael Levine in biology and limb regeneration for example convincingly shows that bottom up emergence makes good sense only if it is matched by top down emanation and that the neatest theory explaining it is Platonic. Go figure ! Anyhow it seems that there is a way more to the nature of reality then the evolutionary theory can capture!
We are not mere animals. Some non-humans aren’t either.
Fair point!
Probably some good insights here. But I’m not sure Christians throughout the ages simply all had ‘true religious belief.’ Although the social imaginary/ conceptual world they lived within set a lot of parameters, faith has always involved a lot of uncertainty, negotiation of self-doubt, and an element of people just being sociable in their communities.
I am reminded of the diaries and letters of 18th century Royal Navy sailors. We presume then to be a much more pious Christian era, but the contemporary record shows most of the sailors shunned religion. Trapped on the same hulk for months, religious services were stripped of any fresh social contact. Many sailors looked for any excuse to avoid the compulsory Sunday assembly.
The institution of the Royal Navy seemingly supplanted the need for religion amongst many of its sailors. The Royal Navy offered social order, social occasions, and a group identity to belong. Only spirituality was not offered by the Royal Navy, and many sailors decided to go without this.
So while order, social occasion, and belonging are seemingly things many do need, these sailors were definitely not spiritual animals. Our modern selves are probably a lot closer to Royal Navy conscripts than the aristocracy whose lives dominate literature from the period and inform much of what we think about our forebearers.
“Rum, sodomy and the lash”, what more could one want?
More of the first one, less of the last two?
I would opt for the sodomy, but skip the rum and the lash.
“Tradition?” replied Churchill, “the traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy and the lash.”
Flora Thompson in her fictionalized remembrance of life in a village of mostly agricultural labourers recorded that no one went to church. One family,not Anglican but Baptists went to a nearby Chapel every Sunday and were lovely people but everyone else in the village was,not hostile,but indifferent. The men wanted to relax on their day off. That was how it was all over England in reality,a lot less pious than we are told.
One certainly hopes that in that so called exceptional USA they don’t declare an Amerikan Christian religion that all citizens must belong to or convert..
Religion(sic) does that means more ages of war.
Yes humans regressing to animals.
If one cannot determine right and wrong by one self …
That is prevented by the first amendment to our Constitution.
He is wrong. He only talks about the Christian religion,
The Gyre can be variously interpreted, even from a religious point of view.
It could the cycles of geomagnetic reversion
https://medium.com/@jeffmiller_14689/the-distractive-temporariness-of-human-overpopulation-031d534c4cda
Or it could be an iteration of panarchy theory
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10013239/#:~:text=Panarchy%20theory%20focuses%20on%20the,2014)
which explicitly grapples with systemic dynamics of change, including the possibility of collapse and the emergence of novel systems and the recognition that there can be high uncertainty associated with a new system trajectory during the reorganization phase (Allen and Holling 2010).
Either would aptly describe the Book of Revelations that is being implicitly referred to by Paul.
Perhaps humans are sensing we are nearing the end of a cycle, whether geomagnetic or panarchical and as a result are turning to “God”.
“humans are fundamentally animals”. Whether this is technically true or not is less interesting than the universal phenomenon of acting like we don’t believe that. Even the delusion of uniqueness would in itself be a phenomenon that animals are, by definition, incapable of.
I wholly agree about our yearning for collective unity in our tribes and the great harm the new hooman right/progressive emphasis on the individual has inflicted. But multiculturalism does not insist upon a single unified ‘Pepsi’ Global Citizenry. It is an ideology which asserts that within any native culture cannot assert any supremacy over foreign/non -native cultures. It has a racial hierarchy – a pyramid of virtue – established by Equality Laws which elevates and privileges non white groups (victims of imperialism/white male patriarchy) above the oppressor tribes of white Western nation states. So there is no unity within global multiculturalism at all. It is a divisive racial ideology.
J Bryant says “doctrine of multiculturalism which, in essence, tells us identifying with a specific group is wrong and we must all conform to a homogeneous, global culture.”
On the face of it, left unmodified, this isn’t a convincing proposition. No, the idea is that the Western liberal elite, who, by multiculturalism, curate the neutral grounding space (the table upon which all is played out) of the multicultural state, sit above and beyond the charming little ethnic cultures they love to adore. The ethnics are supposed to enact their cultures with interesting little restaurants and their part in state-funded multicultural festivals and whatnot, i.e. things the “non-cultural” elite like, and it’s the *elite* who belong to their own frequent flyer homegenous global culture; as I say to curate the theme park state in which dear little pocs and vulgar lower class whites (the bete noir of the brahmin whites) can run around, under the supervision and guidance of the global brahmin class.
All good thoughts. There is a universal confusion among highIQ agnostics between transcendence, the religious texts, and the local church.
Transcendence is irrefutable if you have the humility to accept that we know almost nothing about the world around us. How does a plate of food become a drop of blood? We have absolutely no idea, so to suggest we have unbraided the concept of transcendence and found it implausible is hubris.
The great religious texts attempt to create architypes that support the idea of transcendence via story telling.
Last, the church is a place for like-minded people to come together and form a tribe. With that comes a hierarchy and power structure.
My highIQ agnostic friends start and end with the “hypocrites” at church on Sunday morning, which completely misses the point.
I love so much of what Paul Kingsnorth says and I am delighted that he has become a Christian and appears to describe his conversion as “coming home”. Truly wonderful and heart-warming! In the spirit of knowing the joy and freedom that truth brings, I want Paul Kingsnorth to have a deeper joy, if I may be so bold, which means I must challenge one or two of his points or assumptions as I understand them.
I want to say that for Christians, and Jews too, time is linear: it is going somewhere. To say that time is going in spirals or not going anywhere at all is not Christian: it is pagan or Eastern. Christians believe that history was decisively divided into two by the Christ event, and that Jesus’ physical resurrection means that we have hope: we have hope that the future will be better than the past, and yes, we have hope for ourselves that what has separated us from God, is now dealt with and we can spend eternity with him. So, for Christians, this hope drives us to engage with the world and we genuinely believe that, within certain limits, there can be real progress and that the world can be a better place. This axiomatic belief, along with others that include the precious value and equality of every individual before God and the law, has been the reason why the west is where it is, and why, for a large part, it has provided more for the thriving of individuals than other cultures. As Christian belief wanes, the first thing surely to wane with it, will be hope and the belief in genuine progress.
Of course, we believe that the most important change which enables progress, is a change of heart, a thinking differently (repentance) and the contrition that goes with it. We believe in the Kingdom of God coming and for God’s will to be done “on Earth as it is in heaven”., albeit against a backdrop of war, suffering, waste, perplexity, want and general evil and brokenness. The Kingdom of God is not “of this world” as Jesus said to Pilate, but it is for this world.. So, while the talk of a “gyre” is possibly true in part (no person can deny the rising and falling of systems and world views), the most fruitful picture is found in a dream recorded in Daniel chapter 2 of different regimes in his image of statue made of successive materials: gold, silver, bronze, iron and clay. “Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were all broken to pieces and became like chaff on the threshing floor in summer. The wind swept them away without trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth”. Christians thrill to the knowledge that the future is glorious and have an internal witness of this hope they carry around with them. That is why we do what we do – not so much the love we have, but the hope we have. Also, incidentally, this “forward lookingness” Christians have means that Christans will adopt technology and drive its development too. (It is believed that the first adopters of the codex rather than the scroll were Christians in Alexandria).After all, humans are tool makers and we shape and fashion things. But it is clearly paramount we do not confuse technological advance with real progress which is a change in the human heart, the light of Christ recognised and embraced, love increasing, justice and peace established, the Kingdom of God growing. It is paramount too that we act in a way to safeguard this wonderful sacred planet, marvelling at its beauty and the one who lent it to us.
What a beautiful comment!
“To put career before family. To accumulate wealth as a marker of status. To treat sex as recreation. To reflexively mock authority and tradition. To put individual desire before community responsibility. To treat the world as so much dead matter to be interrogated by the scientific process. To assume our ancestors were thicker than us.”
Admirable captures the essence of our current era!
You are joking!.Stay home.OK. Wear a mask! OK. Jump! How high! Obey The Science and Your Betters. Happy too,don’t like thinking for myself anyway.
Here in the RC corner, there has been in the last decade a growing swell of attendance by people of all ages, many families with young children, at the traditional Latin Mass. The ancient ritual laced with Gregorian chant, handed down over 1,500 years, and centered on the actions by the priest at the altar mostly conducted in silence, lifts the minds and hearts of the congregation in worship of the Creator, in thankfulness for the profound teachings and redeeming self-sacrifice of Christ, in trusting presentation of personal needs to a loving God, in joy through the infusion of the Holy Spirit. The senses are engaged by the nobility of the architecture, the beauty of the ordered and crafted furnishings, the stately choreography of priest and acolytes together with the prescribed movements of the congregation, the timeless chant and faith-filled hymns. Within community, there is expansive space for interior reflection. Within repetition, there is ample room for the Divine to touch individual hearts. This is the traditional Catholic Latin Mass.
And this is the form of Roman Catholic worship that the current Vatican regime is actively suppressing. A staggering and historic scandal, and yet, just so, possibly a sign that the tide must soon sweep away that rejection, that a collapse of the attempt to recreate the Roman Catholic Church in the postmodern image is imminent.
I have seen no reason why Damian Thompson’s gloomy predictions would not come to fruition. I am not RC (CoE) but am hopeful that Latin Mass congregations can maintain themselves until a new pope is coronated. However, is there any indication that the next pontiff will be any more amenable to them? Having only really read and listened to a pessimist like DT it is hard to imagine the next will be anything other than Francis’ creature due to the college of cardinals being now skewed in that direction.
Just because the cardinals were appointed by Francis, doesn’t mean they’ll vote for someone like him — all the cardinals in 2013 had been appointed by Benedict or John Paul II, and we know how that election turned out. The impression I get is that a lot of senior churchmen are kind of annoyed at Francis’ “make a mess” approach, so I expect the next pope to be a relatively bland “centrist” (insofar as such a term makes sense in a Church context) who won’t rock the boat too much.
That is me
I sometimes wonder if the pope is not possessed by Satan.
Is the Pope Catholic?
I love the beauty , grace and effect of the Latin Rite, but our church has determined that we won’t ask the people of Asia and Africa to first learn Latin and Greek before becoming Catholic. The church exists to serve God and neighbor. I get the real sentiments and values, but the Second Vatican Council and the Primacy of the Holy See are the foundation of our faith. To Catholics only the pope gets to be pope. We have a duty of conscience. Maybe Jesus knew what he was up to. Thank God for the papacy.
You don’t actually need to know Latin or Greek to attend a Latin mass. Latin was, after all, the Church’s main liturgical language down to 1969, a good millennium and a half or so after most people stopped being able to speak it.
It appears he acknowledges that for a decent culture to survive, religious or not, the ideological death cult that is Islamism must be erased from society.
I am an atheist with no doubts, but I don’t think Islam is unusual amongst religions. All religions are death cults at heart – Christianity openly and emphatically so – in the obvious sense that they make promises about death not being the end of any individual mind.
Where are the Christian hordes refusing to assimilate, creating zones policed by biblical law, and talking of death to nonbelievers?
Oh, Idaho?
You live on another planet. And after this pathetic attempt at a joke, there is nothing left except treating YOU as a joke.
I think to be categorised as a “death cult” there probably needs to be a death wish on your own part and a readiness to inflict death on those who fail to conform to your beliefs. Some past Christians(in name anyway!) met the latter criterion, but I can’t think of any examples of the former. The nearest would be a preparedness to die rather than recant, but that’s rather different to a desire to die.
In other words, religions are life cults.
Atheism is the death cult. It believes that, in Stalin’s words, “Death always has the last word.”
Exactly the opposite. God is REASON.. why the universe is intelligibly ordered and why reasoning works. Your free will and mind’s ability to grasp fully determinate universals and work with non material things show you have something about us transcending death. Materialists are the death cult.
Assisted dying or State Murder is a Death Cult. It is also a repackaged and rebranded Nazi idea,a shiny painted t**d.
And no doubt you have irrefutable evidence for that? Or is it that yours is just another belief system.
The author and I are about the same age and I can identify completely with the world of his youth. Another story I grew up absorbing reflectively but which turned out to be an utter lie: that the US is Britain’s friend.
I grew up in that postwar narrative of thinking we were buddies forever, brothers in arms due to what we’d been through together in WW2. Now I look at the States and think at most, they are an ally but definitely no friend. The best thing that I can say about American hegemony these days is that it’s the best of what’s on offer. My admiration for the place has receded significantly.
Katharine, I am a thorough Yank. Born and bred in the Western U.S. But I understand what you are saying and can see why you don’t think of us as your friends. And American foreign policy has been dreadful for quite a while now. But I see us, not as enemies, but as alike. As I read Unherd, it seems to me that a lot of what is wrong in America is plaguing the U.K.–and Europe as well.
You are 100% correct. American wokeism and toxic race politics is poisoning many other countries.
If it means anything to you, as an American my admiration for my country has also receded significantly. I admire what America once was. America has morphed into an entity I can no longer recognize or admire.
The USA has lost its ideals and substituted opinions and ideology for them. It’s all very sad.
We used to be. Both British culture and Christianity was referenced in a lot of 1970’s tv. Diversity is not a strength.
Don’t worry it is in terminal decline and heading towards civil war and partition.
Mr.Kingsnorth includes the Enlightenment in his list of things to blame for our present predicament, and adds the usual derogatory reference to Dawkins et al. Why would belief in a fantasy world be better than rational enquiry, unless you were ‘childlike’?
Shorter article (no AI involved): “The Enlightenment (good in parts) is fading and a New Romanticism (bad in parts) is rising.”
The reality of the universe we find ourselves in doesn’t meet the requirements of our ‘elite’ thinkers.
and, as Dawkins pointed out – it is faith which allows “good” people to do very bad things.
Anyone who knows any history at all is well aware of that – but what it proves is ‘Corruptio optimi pessima’. Faith (whether religious or secular) can lift a person to the heights of virtue, but also cause them to act like devils.
Faith in Communism killed many millions.
But it’s SO ANNOYING the killer is always an ugly weirdo who nobody likes ie ME. Except once found it never is. He ( rarely she) is that lovely neighbour who always had a pleasant word for everyone,kept themselves to themselves but was never objectionable,the face of a monster screams the tabloid,but the face is perfectly pleasant ,indeed attractive,you’d get in conversation with this bloke in a pub or even,ooh err,accept a lift home in the rain. Nice,good people do BAD things because that’s everybody
Communism and fascism killed more people in one century than Christianity did in twenty.
Is it necessarily simply ‘belief in a fantasy world’ or is it a vehicle for human truths — or at least ‘wisdom’ and a tried and tested social guide –through parable and religious practise/ orthopraxy? Are religious observance and rational enquiry mutually exclusive? Empirical observation reveals that they aren’t! Don’t Dawkins and Hitchens have something of the tone and character of vain Christian evangelists themselves? Aren’t most western values part of a cultural inheritance which has been uniquely shaped and moulded by centuries of Christianity, including other syncretic elements? Did New Atheism really escape/ transcend this cultural inheritance?
Thankyou for your well made point. Mr. Kingsmith seems unappreciative of Enlightenment values, and I even agree with him that Dawkins can be infuriating when he sets out to so carefully correct our silly selves, but I can’t see how any heartfelt mysticism can ever be anything except rhetorical, even metaphorical, when compared to systematised realistic and thus testable applied knowledge. Science is simply the most important thing that mankind has ever done!
Yes, science will destroy humanity.
Back in the 1990s when Yugoslavia broke up and all the factions started sticking it to each other yet to us they all looked the same it was a shock to realise we were seeing a place where The Enlightenment never happened. OK maybe some intellectuals but mostly the people had pre-enlightenment and semi-feudal mindsets,not that this impeded them from using high tech,they had oldy fash ideas,not stupidity. So,all the garbage Clinton + Blair etc were spouting was nonsense to those people as they’d not had two hundred years of Enlightenment ideas being imposed on them whether they liked it or not.
To that I would say, Imagine music… is it math or mystic; science or spirit? The scientific AI will make something emulating music but will it be fulfilling? To whom? For how long?
I am not pretending I know the answer.
I don’t believe the ‘world’ is flat.
I did enjoy Mr Kingsnorth’s proposition, respectfully.
Yet, science has not been able to answer any of the same basic questions that humans struggle with, such as where we came from or why we are here. (And please don’t tell me about the theory where two big rocks of unknown origin collided in space and set into motion life as we know it. Or the one about single celled creatures evolving in the sea, eventually inhabiting land and evolving into human beings, who build airplanes and rocket ships.) I’d rather stick with my religion, thank you.
Or what is human consciousness.
“Science is simply the most important thing that mankind has ever done!”
Is it? Or is formulating “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or the negative version “Do not to others what is hateful to yourself,” or perhaps “Love your neighbor as yourself”?
Science cannot provide an “ought”, or a “why” (in an ultimate sense), only a “what” and a “how”, and it is very good at doing that.
It is a curious thing that that we are able to do it so well, if as the materialists hold, our minds are simply computational systems that evolved to solve survival problems on the African savanna. Easier to understand why we are good at science if there’s something about us described, at least poetically, if not literally, in the phrase, “Come let Us make Man in Our image and likeness.”
Of course, maybe you’re right, maybe the moral dicta are all actually of divine origin and not something we did.
He’s pointing to a wicked dilemma. All of our most Enlightenment cherished values come with a price tag – most obviously they represent a degree of social complexity that is inseparable from a level of energy/material throughput that may well in the end destroy the biosphere. The individualism and mobility destroys family and play -bound community, and makes us even more dependent on the high energy systems of the market – and the state, which are more or less one thing (the state depends on fiscal flows from the market). The disenchantment makes us unhappy and destroys meaning. Adorno and Horkheimer already drew out the paradox of an Enlightenment rationalism, materialism and universalism which allowed the trains to arrive on time at Auschwitz.
So the question is whether Enlightenment values can be reconciled with environmental restraint and a world of meaning and conviviality. It doesn’t seem likely.
The Enlightenment was a product of Christendom. Modern individualism is a perversion of the Imago Dei – as Tom Holland has demonstrated with rather magnificent acumen. Without Judeo-Christianity there is no sacral individual – and certainly no liberalism, no Dawkins and no Hitchens. But the religious view is communitarian. The astonishing aspect of the Jewish and Christian vision is the extent to which this idea of a distinct self made in the image of GOd can be reconciled with what Owen Barfield called ‘final participation’ – a recovery of that supreme togetherness with each other and with the divine….but without losing the individual in a kind of oceanic dissolution (as in Buddhism or Hinduism and pre-CHristian paganism) …This vision is of individual liberation through constraint….through self restraint. We get a hint at this in a happy marriage, parenting and some better than me in a life of service to the community…. The problem is of course negotiating this holistic …’complete act’ (Andrew Willard Jones’ term)…in which there is no experiential or subjective distinction between religious and spiritual activity, family, and ‘secular’ politics. We are a long way from that….and it is probably impossible…WHo knows?
But it’s difficult to disentangle Diderot, Kant and Descartes from Dr Strangelove. I think that to paraphrase Thomas Sowell, the problem with Dawkins and HItchins – as with all the warriors of Enlightenment (including those on the dark side) is that they are always looking for ‘solutions’ (and sometimes ‘final’ solutions) This is the hubris of humanism. But as Sowell points out again and again, there are no solutions – only trade offs.
And maybe there never was a problem or issue in the first place but if you’re “selling” solutions,you need problems.
The Enlightenment has become the bad boy for those seeking something transcending reality. It did not derive from Christianity (though some of its adherents will claim it did), but was a reaction against it. Blaming all of our present day ills on the Enlightenment is like blaming mathematicians for the misuse of statistics.
Have you read Tom Holland’s Dominion? Highly recommend. Also Strickland’s Age of Paradise series. The Enlightenment is an integrated part of the whole history of the West, not some reactionary “better” separate from it.
I haven’t read Holland’s book but do remember a conversation he had with A C Grayling on the same topic. In essence, Holland believes that buying a Leica camera instantly makes you a great photographer. Simply by coming after something doesn’t mean you derive from it. But if you insist it does, then the faults of the Enlightenment must rest with Christianity.
Based on this example, logic and analysis are not strong points of what you mean by “the Enlightenment.”
Only filthy rich people can afford to think like you do,all dismissive and snooty.
Merry Christmas!
Peace and grace to you.
It is SO typical of New Atheism to equate “the Enlightenment” with “rational enquiry,” and so ignorant.
See this lecture by Ian Hutchinson of MIT: https://youtu.be/BIX9MGtVU2c?feature=shared&t=175
Belief in a “fantasy world” is not better than rational inquiry, but belief in a transcendent Ground-of-Being inaccessible to rational inquiry, along with rational inquiry within the bounds to which it is applicable, is far, far better than rational inquiry alone.
One of the Fathers of the Church, we Orthodox call him “St. Gregory the Theologian”, the Latins and Anglicans call him “St. Gregory of Nazianzus”, said, “In as much as we exist, God does not exist. In as much as God exists, we do not exist.” Dawkins et al only see our existence, and rightly conclude there is no mere entity with the attributes we Christians ascribe to God. The logic-puzzle God of the philosophers is a snare and a delusion both to science and to faith. One of the basic principles of Orthodox Christian theology is that there is no likeness whatsover between the created and the Uncreated. It is for that reason that we try not to make positive statements about God, but theologize only by denying false ideas about Him.
Interesting point. Your position reminds me of the increasingly complicated theories put forward by the Earth-Centric believers to maintain the idea that humans are at the centre of the universe and therefore special. Making God slippery will certainly make it harder for atheists to keep up, but I find that accepting physical reality as all there is, to be like waking after a night of dreaming. And also an excellent foundation for a sane and stable life (especially in the postmodern West).
The political or cultural Christianity that he speaks of that is on the rise is only natural. He is right however that humanity needs religion, because you need some sort of universals in a culture to give meaning to the particulars.
Nietzsche recognized this in terror when he wrote that God is dead, and we have killed him. Though he was an athiest himself, he realized that any culture needed common and accepted universal truths to provide meaning to particulars of life or there would be chaos. For example, what is a man and what is a woman? What is marriage? What is faithfulness and why would you want to be faithful? If there are no universal truths to give the particulars meaning then a man or a woman are just social constructs. They are like programmable placeholders that can be swapped out at will. However in practice we find that this leads to chaos. Which is where Western culture is headed. So the smart people who don’t really have much to do with God “internally” as Kingsnorth notes, at least want the whole Christianity thing established externally, for the benefits of Western culture not collapsing and eating itself.
Nietzsche went a different route. He replaced the universals with “human excellence”. Hitler loved that, and yet militarized it. That’s the ultimate expression of what is both attractive (everything of human excellence) , with the most repulsive and evil (forced down the worlds throat at the end of a gun, with the wrong kind of people exterminated). A people who consider themselves God’s chosen and operated accordingly inside of the culture obviously was a problem for him and the world of human excellence he wanted to make. What sort of people are the “useless people” that the World Economic Forum has denoted? What makes people useful and useless in the eyes of globalist elites? That’s what we’re looking at, either them, or whatever we replace them with… What kind of world do we want to live in?
A thoughtful and profound article. It’s become increasingly clear that people have a God-shaped space within them which needs to be filled. If it isn’t, it leads to para-religious displacement activities that have a remarkably consistent narrative, which runs as follows:
1. An original sin…
2. …leading ultimately to a punitive and imminent apocalypse that involves one or more of the Four Horsemen.
3. A diminishing chance of averting the forthcoming apocalypse, that demands eye-watering sacrifice from those groups considered most responsible for the original sin.
4. No absolute guarantee this sacrifice will be successful.
5. Increasing sanctions against those who question this narrative.
6. A priestly cohort of believers who take part in an arms-race for purity and punish heretics with ever-increasing zeal, particularly those within their ranks.
Any of the last century’s great events show a remarkable conformity to this framework.
The Cold War provided a tailor-made imminent nuclear apocalypse; and it’s interesting to see what happened after the perceived threat of a massive nuclear exchange went away. In Britain, we had a series of small crises, all of which fitted well into the central quasi-religious narrative described. BSE. Foot and mouth. Global warming. And the original sins of colonialism and slavery. Covid.
I believe that man’s need for God creates a clamouring hunger within him when it’s not met: one that he will do almost anything to satisfy. We can fill this gap with all sorts of fantastical and whimsical rubbish providing that it fits a particular narrative, and this leads us into some bizarre places.
As GK Chesterton observed: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything”
Si evidentiam requiris, circumspice.
Anyone quoting that old Chesterton chesnut should be made to quote it endlessly for the rest of their lives, until it drives them insane.
It’s got human spirituality the wrong way round. God was invented, by humans, to try to explain what the rise in consciouness seems to demand. The human spirit (which each of us as individuals feels) can be experienced entirely without recourse to a God.
But life can’t be experienced at all without the benefit of a creator, whether as a random or purposeful Miracle.
Experiencing a liturgy is one thing, reciting the Nicene Creed is another. It starts with “I believe”, not “I immerse myself into a narrative”
Reciting the Nicene Creed *is* immersing yourself into a narrative if it is anything at all.
Yes, if you believe it in the first place. Shouldn’t you believe in what you profess believing?
I do agree, but sometimes coming to faith is a process rather than a crisis.
Indeed. The Creed begins with the Beginning, centers on the story of Jesus, ends with the end of history. What is that, if not a narrative?
Very learned piece, but turning our backs on the world will just resign it to forces that will come and force us to live by their standards. If we don’t like those standards, it’s incumbent on us to fight back, because they won’t just let us walk away.
Mr Lee, your brilliantly perceptive comment presents the “dirty little (not-so) secret that exposes the conundrum of the “Love your neighbor as yourself” pablum. Although there may be an afterlife from a loving God, we must live in this wholly fallible material world of sin and corruption and error. There are humans who seemingly cannot help but wreak havoc on others. What do we do about that? Place our heads in the lions mouths in the arena? Watch as innocents are slaughtered? Who referees the chaos? How do we maintain even the most simplistic order? I live in the US and am over 75 years old. “By the grace of God (????)” I am relatively safe and sheltered and protected. That does not seem to be the lot of most of my 8+ BILLION neighbors. I pray for at least some of them and fear the others. The greatest abandonment of spirituality today is the inability to know what to do about “pain,” both our own and that of others, physically, mentally, and spiritually. What do we do? Prayer alone does not seem to suffice, especially if we pray to different gods for different outcomes. I am troubled by my own inability to find comfort in any of this exploration. But I know I must try every day to find a shard of wisdom. Best wishes.
Well said Mr Dzurak. The Christian ethic of turning the other cheek and accepting all on the basis that we could be entertaining angels potentially reduces Christians to helpless herbivores in a world of meat eaters. The expression ‘pathological compassion’ has lately appeared in print. Maybe, people more versed in biblical exegesis and Christian practice than I could offer some guidance on this one.
As an English sauvage du nord, allow me to have a pop?
‘Turn the other cheek’ is perhaps more useful as an aid to understanding the nature of the person who spoke that line, than as a principle of national policy. To become a disciple of that one is to be a walker on the narrow path, a member of the city in the city (as China Mieville might have it).
The alternative, which the line assaults, is ‘an eye for an eye’ – the principle on which all of our, ironically traditionally ‘Christian’, visible ‘worldy’ cities are built on.
There may – – just may – – be a middle way: A living way to intuit in which particular circumstance to ‘turn the other cheek’, or conversely to take up arms – –
‘ To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?’
The middle way? Chivalry.
Ay, there’s the rub.
Thinking…thinking…hmmm Good. Thank you.
PS nice to see reference to China Mieville. I do enjoy his unusual prose style.
A beautiful article. Thank you.
What did Jesus of Nazareth say came out of the human heart? Sweetness and light? Deceitful above everything else, it’s never going to be a path to the ‘true self’, if such a thing ever exists.
It is always necessary to remind the evangelists of JW.org when they get out the Scriptures and start quoting chapter and verse that few people under the age of 40, and certainly almost none of the youngest adults, know the first thing about the Bible. Or indeed anything about the Church.
A simple example of this. On visiting St Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC, my young male relatives, all under the age of 40, didn’t take off their hats, as anyone from the older generations, even if not churchgoers, would have known to do.
If there’s a rough beast, it’s the Almighty God-State. More petitions are addressed to this deity than used to be addressed to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the UK, we are all Citizen NHS.
C S Lewis was making the observation that religion, especially Christianity, wasn’t, as he put it, ‘a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop’. The man who became bishop of Durham in 1901 wrote as early as 1894 that in England Christianity had, even at that date, largely become no more than social improvement under the auspices of Christ.
The Apostle Paul warned his colleague, Timothy, that there would come ‘formidable seasons’. Being seasons, they occur at intervals. In them, the ‘weather’ is the world’s old evil increased to a greater degree than usual. But it’s not the end of days.
Christianity isn’t a religion. It’s a Person.
Christianity is a relationship with Jesus Christ based on love, kindness and hope.
In some of the comments, it becomes clear why so many atheists are not content with their view but feel the need to degrade the other side – The militant atheist is the mirror image of the zealot.
Each is so convinced that he is right that the other can’t just be wrong, he is illegitimate and must be attacked. There is a reason it’s called faith. If you know, you know. If not, then carry on and leave folks be.
The carbonized pot calling the smudged kettle black .
No camp has a monopoly on the “need to degrade the other side”.
True. I’d even say that militant atheism is often outright zealotry: intolerant of other views and characterized by unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility of error.
We ought to tread a bit more lightly when it comes to people’s faith, or lack thereof.
Sermons and de-mystifications both have their place, but much of this talk starts out proud and petty then goes downhill from there.
I was not made to attend two hours of lectures from atheists each week as a child, nor submit to a wide range of atheistic rituals; nor to study atheism in school for an hour a week for 8 years; my gay friends were never told by atheists that their sexuality was wrong and damning. I could go on, and on.
That could change. It did in China and Russia for several decades. Non-religious zealotry can be every bit as severe, even murderous, as its disowned religious cousins. Sometimes more so.
Fair point. Surely thouh there is a middle ground. One where religion is not officially banned, or rather usurped by a new religion, where the religious are free to practice, and the non-religious are free to critique….oh wait…!
Ha! It’s almost as if we already have the world we need, but just don’t recognize it or know how to take full advantage of what we already have– for now.
Fair point(s) on your side too. Merry Christmas.
Probably not Merry Christmas, maybe happy winter? He’s not celebrating it lest he be a hypocrite.
Wrong again; and despite the title, ‘Christmas’ has as much, probably more to do with pagan and humanistic culture/history than Christianity. Early Christianity being often rather clever in co-opting pre-existing traditions, hence the number of churches built near ancient Yew trees (an indication of a pagan site).
Need to get Mr Kingsnorth writing here more often. I am not sure that clicking on his name reveals his entire back-catalogue (old phone may have something to do with it) but it couldn’t hurt.
While Kingsnorth is clearly on his own, admirable path and I would wish him well in this personal journey there is a missing strand to his professed beliefs. In the West there is no indigenous Orthodox church as currently formulated. The practices and traditions of Eastern cultures (primarily Greek rather than Antiochene or Alexandrian) are thus imported wholesale and packaged as a church for a distinct community – Romanian/Russian/Serbian etc. towards which a convert gravitates. Unfortunately, outside of the community in which it is based the bounds for evangelism in each church are limited (scripture read in an often archaic form of language for instance) and none other than the Russian has any recent and widespread missionary history to draw upon. This is not a criticism, just that for orthodoxy to flourish in the West it needs some local flavour and grounding which is not evident to other Christians at the moment (let alone the wider public). At present the orthodox “revival” has more to do with recent immigration than swathes of people converting. Similarly among those who convert there is a sense of a detatchment from mainstream culture more reminiscent of anabaptists than the Desert Fathers – escaping with their family as Mr Kingsnorth has done rather than from their family as monks/nuns do. Perhaps this is the way for orthodoxy to work in a Protestant christian cultural context but I am not so sure. There is a definite feeling of a calvinist “elect” which is at odds with Orthodoxy’s universalism.
In another essay on Irish/British Christianity in the pre-conquest period the author gave a glimpse of another, more interesting future for Orthodoxy; of a re-enchanted landscape with connection to the people. That vision seems to have faded in favour of an easier, more Western and more worldly one.
Check out his substack, the Abbey of Misrule.
The shape of small-o orthodox Christianity that flows from our past in this place is not monolithic, not having a single name or path, and so it’s unlikely that the continuation of its flow into the future will look monolithic either. But it can still exist even though it might not have a label; parts of the CofE (miracle of miracles!) and baptists can still count as tributaries and the modern independent reformed city churches are nimble enough to contribute to the flow positively. Without a (big-o) Orthodox tradition, we must take what we can from what is available and attempt to follow where God leads. Surely God will provide.
Really appreciated that.
Now however I might rationalise some potential benefits I cannot return to the full faith of childhood. Yet each Xmas as I take an aged Mother to her Church, sit with her quietly, amongst a diverse community who share a faith while an almost timeless service is conducted, one feels that sense of ‘coming home’ to something one has long rejected. What on earth is it? Is it simple nostalgia and rose-tinted memories or is there something else pulling?
Perhaps it’s just that hour of calmness and reflection having a mediative, dare I say it ‘mindfulness’, impact? But maybe it’s a little more than that.
The Church has moved too. Not just do I look around and see a congregation from all parts of the world sharing an ancient tradition, but the teachings seem to be gradually shedding the elements the man from Nazareth never extolled. Perhaps it too, as the Author implies, is finding it’s way back slowly but surely.
There is enough wisdom in the world, thanks. Start with Marcus Aurelius and follow your nose from there. Whilst I have a renewed appreciation for the messages of some bible stories thanks to Jordan Peterson, it still isn’t true and never was. I won’t sacrifice my intelligence for any sense of belonging and would not trust anyone who expected that from me. I haven’t found a satisfactory explaination for why your family, friends and your contribution to society through your work isn’t enough for people to make a good, happy and honest life.
Modern secular people see themselves as the apex of civilization and insight, with a touching belief in inexorable Western Progress. Now we all have presuppositions that we hold as axiomatic. But moderns, while glibly relativizing those of everyone else, are strangely oblivious to the relativity of their own.
Am I missing something here? I thought being a Christian meant believing that god sent his son to earth, was crucified and rose from the dead. I don’t believe in either of those things ie god or rising from the dead. I do believe in much of what I regard as Christian philosophy eg love your neighbour etc. I think Christianity has evolved over the centuries to be the kind, tolerant state it is in the Western world. It certainly did not seem kind and tolerant in the past. Islam does not seem to have evolved in this way (& may have a detrimental effect on our Western society). Both this article & the earlier one by Ayeen Hirsi Ali ( why I am now a Christian) seem to suggest that Christianity is preferable because it is tolerant and ‘kinder’ or purely to fill a ‘spiritual’ need rather than a belief that it is actually true (eg walking on water, feeding the 5000 etc)
There are more interesting truths than objective truth said a former Bishop of Edinburgh.
This is where a lot of folk fall down before they start in trying to understand Christianity. The Bible isn’t necessarily literally factual, much of it is written in parables. Whilst there are many unegotiable elements, if you try to disprove any individual occurrence using modern scientific principles you aren’t going to get too far.
Leave modern rationalism at the door and you can start the journey whilst looking for deeper meaning.
The new religion of Wellbeing hasn’t abolished fast before the feast, merely inverted it. We binge in the month leading up to Christmas, then fast for a month afterwards (‘Dry January’).
Mr Kingsnorth seems happy with concept that, through Jesus, God has shown us the only true and difficult path we should all seek to follow. I confess I have some problems with that.
First, because God’s chosen means of delivery of this message was so parochial and exclusive of others – indeed even 2000 years later it has not reached or been accepted by the great majority of the peoples of the world, who are still not Christian and show little sign of ever being such. .
Second, because Christianity avers that man is made in the image of God and that our God and King demands our explicit, unquestioning and continuous worship of Him and His truths as “revealed” to us in holy texts over 2000 years ago. Except for the purpose of restraining thought and promoting humility, why? Is that really the stance of a loving father?
Third and finally, I have a big problem with the very masculinity of the Christian God – and of so many other gods. If anything raises my suspicions it is that.
I truly wish there was a loving God who made sense of everything and afforded we mortals heavenly redemption, but I fear He is a man made myth. A myth used over the centuries, by those who would seek to govern us, in order to help bend us to their will, sometimes for good purpose but mostly not.
Notwithstanding all of the above , the Christian demand that we all should love one another is a very fine one, and I will pray again this Christmas Day that it could be so.
I found a rising need for a meta narrative for life that was greater than the survival of a species in the least painful way possible. Nietzsche said that in the absence of a heaven, God’s shadow would persist in various, fervent political and social causes, all oriented towards producing some sort of utopia on earth. And wasn’t he exactly right?
Maybe my search for a meta narrative was prompted by what the sociologist Reith recognised as an inbuilt demand to acknowledge the sacred. (Or words to that effect.) But whatever the reason, I found myself sticking at the same points as you and finally wondering if it was all just wishful thinking. As I was once a scientist of sorts, I came at it from a pragmatic direction. Is there any scientific indication that there could be a God? My greatest initial inspiration was John Lennox – professor in Mathematics at Oxford. He wrote a book – God’s Undertaker, Has Science Buried God? It covers the question of a designer universe, the nature and scope of evolution, the origin of life ( we haven’t a clue, read also the world’s greatest nano chemist James Tour) and irreducible complexity etc. etc. And if that isn’t enough you can get into the nature of consciousness and the quantum brain with physicist Sir Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hammeroff.
I came to the conclusion that there is definitely something else at play in this universe. The nature of the something else?
Ah, well …
That’s a well-argued case, to which i’d simply add: why should this “something else at play” be worshipped; or even more pertinently, need to be worshipped?
Acknowledged, yes; worshipped, on what grounds?
I agree
Simply from the point that we are and life is and that is a miracle. Gratitude to be life rather than not- life brings up worship for the power that has made that possible.
I think Mr Jackson makes a good point about gratitude but, yes, gratitude falls short of worship. However, this is an article on Christianity so worship is inevitably involved. I do agree with Mr Kingsnorth that there is evidence of a return to the type of spirituality that involves a connection with the numinous. However, people are not necessarily coming to it in the same way as he is. A lot of the younger generations are fans of people like Eckhart Tolle and Rupert Spira, and are taking a more Buddhistic route, which seems to involve connection but not worship. There is guidance on behaviour in the Buddhist path i.e. right thought, right action, generosity of spirit and a distinct effort to sideline the ego in search of ‘enlightenment’.
Eventually there is a feeling of a benevolent presence that knows and helps one make peace with the problems and the pain of existence. Though there is a concomitant sense of connection to all that is, that’s not to say, Mr Webb, that there is any full comprehension of eternity because, as far as I know, there isn’t. Our sons assure me of all of this but I seem to be a basic model that has to just plough through the books, getting excited that the quantum brain offers hope and scope for the survival of a consciousness. (For persistence of the individual consciousness I was impressed, and not a little surprised, by Jim B. Tuckers Return to Life. Dr. Tucker is the associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia.)
Thank you. I am more or less with you Glynis – and maybe we Earthly primates are the only ones thinking about this stuff – but somehow I doubt we are unique in the Universe – and that is when I bump into my difficulty in comprehending eternity. Maybe we just have an accept somethings are and always will be beyond our comprehension.
“Third and finally, I have a big problem with the very masculinity of the Christian God – and of so many other gods. If anything raises my suspicions it is that.”
Jesus elevated the status of women and children in a society in which both were ignored or treated as second class citizens. He reached out to women who were in need and “unclean”, just one of many examples:
Mark 7:25-26 & 30 In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an impure spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
Women were the first witnesses to the Risen Christ:
Matthew 28:8-10 So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
Other examples:
Luke 18:15-16 People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
Matthew 23:37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.
Patricia, Thank you. I do appreciate that Jesus treated women well and gave them proper respect but my point rather is that in the Christian religion God is clearly male – and it confuses me that God is given a sexual orientation. Surely the supreme being which created man and woman is neither of these. Isn’t this an example of men making God in their own image? Jesus of course had to have a gender whilst he lived in earth – but why God?
Christianity doesn’t believe God to be masculine – but it does believe that we should refer to God as masculine.
Otherwise we would end up worshipping the Earth Goddess – which is a stagnant, cruel faith.
God’s wife is Sophia.
What about a spiritual / cosmological approach which avoids the easily disprovable notions of, on one side, the all powerful creator God which cares for humans and, on the other side, the science-worshiping atheists who deny the existence of anything not accepted by the majority of scientists this month AND any reported experiences they don’t have themselves?
Souls are in. So are near death experiences as being pretty much what they seem to be. Likewise the existence of things which share our time and space but which are difficult or impossible to discern with current experimental techniques, but which explain our brain and body’s connection to whatever souls etc. are made of. ESP and psychokinesis are seen as evidence for linkages to that stuff of astral bodies, souls etc.
So far, this is compatible with monotheistic religions, but they are obviously false for numerous reasons, not least that any such all-powerful creator God which really wanted humans to understand, and even worship, Him, She or It, would do a much better job of enabling us to learn what we need to do this than the current religions provide: a perplexing jumble of scripture, prophets, the occasional savior and reports from people having genuine mystical experiences of the other side, but which they try to understand and describe within the confines of whatever religious framework they grew up with. This leads to thousands to millions of incompatible interpretations, despite the sincere efforts of all to find the truth by such means.
The high but repeated unfulfilled hopes and expectations monotheists have of their God lead to the need for end of days. This was first reasonably fully developed by the Zoroastrians and then adopted by some Jews Jesus learned from. Long experience of underperforming God leads to the certainty of Him implementing an an apocalyptic end of the world, where all is made good forever, to make up for his heart-wrenching failure to help those who most need it, no matter how hard they pray. Coming real soon now . . .
With the atheists running a mile or two one way and the mass spiritual marketplace folks running the other, aghast at the suggestion that their lifelong fantasy of a personal relationship with the super-father Big Boss is wishful thinking, how many people are left? Its not difficult to extend the framework to recognise prayer and numerous spiritual experiences, including occasions of profound illumination and feelings of Love and Oneness with All, to envisage that we all – and surely, in degrees, non-human animals – have souls and so have kind of existence after our physical bodies kark it – with us all actually being part of a broader, likely well beyond Earth, distributed, rather than centralised and hierarchical, non-physical and so (from our current perspective) spiritual network or whatever. (85 words, but who’s counting?)
This accounts for numerous genuine experiences, but this broad spiritual network or whatever is not the creator of the Universe. It does not have the power to intervene. It responds to prayer as best it can and can guide us if we listen. How it emerged is as much of a mystery as how *anything* emerged.
There’s no obvious reason why this should be worshiped – its something we are part of. It is not a “magisterial power” many people are so keen to have on their side. (What is it with all these creator of the Universe Gods expecting us to prostate themselves in worship?)
Why is there anything at all? We will never know. Time, dimensions, forces, energy and energy congealing as matter? We have no idea whatsoever how these came into being, nor any clue as to what could have given rise to them. Some aspects of standard physics – the wavelike properties of matter – while being easy to describe mathematically, are extremely hard to understand even regarding what it _is_, let alone what might give rise to it. This is the most complex and beguiling aspect of the known physical world. It gives rise to resonances which cause electrons to settle into what can most easily be described as stable orbitals. This leads to atoms and molecules as an emergent property of this wavelike stuff, electromagnetism and the protons and electrons. The same mechanisms surely give rise to nuclei and to the fundamental particles of matter as energy somehow ties itself into knots.
Profound mysteries about origins are no barrier to tentatively hypothesising the existence of anything at all, since we are have no hope of understanding the real origins of any fundamental aspect of the well-known physical world.
This doesn’t rule out the idea of a creator God. (The wavelike properties of matter are an argument for a particularly inventive such creator.) But any such God obviously doesn’t care a rat’s arse about humans or any other species, individually or collectively (the dinosaurs were having a perfectly good time) – and we would still have the problem of what could give rise to that God.
The Big Bang Theory is a creation myth prompted by the inability to explain the redshift of light from distant galaxies except by Doppler shift. Such redshift in sparse plasma is not so hard to understand when we forget about photons and imagine light as classical waves, coupling some of their energy and so momentum to electrons, and the electrons not giving it all back as the light passes, since that temporary momentum contributes to them colliding with protons (this is all in the inter galaxy cluster plasma, about one electron and one proton per cubic metre, moving with temperatures in the hundreds of millions of K) and so carrying some of that momentum in different directions as well as giving some of it to the proton. Physicists can’t imagine any such tired light mechanism with photons (particles, packets of energy, quanta) – but photons are a mistake.
The fact that the redshift of light from galaxies correlates roughly with their apparent distance, as inferred as from their observed brightness, indicates that either a broad tired light mechanism in the inter cluster medium or the BBT’s Doppler shift is responsible. The fact that quasar inferred distances, from observed brightnesses, does NOT correlate with redshift shows that a lot of this redshift is happening at a greater rate per unit distance in the more concentrated plasma near the quasar. This reasonable argument for the existence of tired light redshift is one of many disproofs of the BBT which astrophysicists should pay more attention to.
Morality can be part of all this – the distributed spiritual realm is not all sweetness and light. We can try to be in accord with what we judge to be the good part, broadly compatible with the most generous of Jesus’ moral and social teachings and examples, with some human limits regarding turning the other cheek to serial killers. But there’s no need for team Good on the other side to be a centralised entity with a personality and hierarchy, any more than its is among sentient creatures here in our physical lives. There’s surely bad-egg influences out there and the trick is to discern the character of whatever we might imagine is whispering to or urging us within our own mind.
This rather undramatic hypothesis is not of much interest to most folks, who are accustomed to Big God, with a booming voice, telling us all what to do. There’s no obvious need for ritual and none for a church. Too much doubt and nuance for most people.
Sounds like you want a God who is just like you. At that point then, who is the god?
Steve, I really don’t want that (I truly know how awful that would be!) – but my point is that I sense that, in Christianity, mankind has created a god in man’s image. This is not to say there is not some supra natural power – but that I have doubts that it is like us – and certainly regarding sexual orientation.
When the Office for National Statistics released the Census 2021 data on ethnicity, religion, national identity and language, one of the headline-grabbing findings was that England and Wales are no longer majority Christian countries, with a fall of 13 percentage points – from 59% in 2011 to 46% in 2021 – in those claiming a commitment to Christianity.
Is this really a fall? When I was young and had to fill a form about my religion I used to say C of E, just so I didn’t leave an embarrassing gap. Now I leave the gap but without the embarrassment.
In the 2021 census people magically dropped English as an identity from the 2011 census to become British just because they changed the order of the tick boxes.
In the last census, online,I a non churchgoer ticked the Christian box as it was the closest to where I am,my friend then with no access to WiFi did her form on my tablet. A regular church attender,she ticked the “no religion” box. Doesn’t that say a lot.
In fact it does. You’re my new favorite poster here.
Merry Christmas, or other Holiday Cheer.
Well, it certainly raises the question why people like you two bother to participate in a census.
If Joseph had had the same attitude he wouldn’t have gone to Bethlehem. Interesting to consider how different the world might have turned out.
Interesting Spengler quote from Ferguson – the revival he saw coming was not the cosy Oxford world of C.S Lewis but a world of the Caesars reborn
❝Spengler is now seldom read; his prose is too turgid, his debt to Nietzsche and Wagner too large, his influence on the National Socialists too obvious. Yet with his idiosyncratic seasonal theory of cultural rise and fall, he expressed better than almost anyone that inter-war revulsion against all that had been achieved by the West before 1914. ‘The last century’, he wrote, ‘was the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money. But in this century blood and instinct will regain their rights against the power of money and intellect. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them.’ This was not a bad prediction❞
Ferguson, Niall. The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (p. 867). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
‘our whole culture has been trailing down a dead-end road since the Enlightenment.’ What?
I loved this piece! I became a Christian when I was 33… i think he’s right. I see a lot of the youngsters in their twenties and thirties looking for spiritual meaning…they may call it different things, usually the universe or as in AA a higher power but they are also arriving at churches wanting a sense of belonging and purpose that a purely material life can never give them. I believe as Paul does that we humans all have a spiritual dimension…
While I fully agree with Mr Kingsnorth about the primacy of the ‘inner warfare’, he seems to be suggesting in his enthusiasm for the Desert Fathers and asceticism that Christians should be be withdrawn from this world and take no part in, for example, the ‘culture war’.
It’s certainly important not to fall into the trap of making religion a subordinate instrument in promoting some secular purpose or ideology, but the biblical picture seems to be of this world as a battleground between good and evil in which the ‘children of light’ are certainly called upon to be fighting the powers of darkness. And that must surely mean actively opposing things like wokery and ‘cultural Marxism’ (judged evil by their fruits).
Christianity is profoundly material in its commitments and outworking. God took on our human condition.
I do feel that the author is correct in that we are coming round to more religiosity in modern times but do not agree that this is necessarily positive. It seems to me that religion is a bug (or maybe a feature, depending who you ask) of human intellect.
My now wife and I had to attend church in the lead up to our wedding and sadly she feels there is some value in continuation of attendance now we are married. The congregation are lovely and, typically there are many wealthy types there but I am amazed at the delusional stories they tell each other about how they found god, how he talks to the them and the blind acceptance of arcane rituals and stories, many co-opted from earlier pagan rituals 2000+ years ago. I am in no doubt they genuinely believe this stuff despite obvious intellect.
I feel like the boy in the Emperor has no Clothes, except if I pointed out how nonsensical it all was, no one would listen. I have therefore come to accept that:
a) I am in a small minority who does not think particularly religiously
b) I am however not entirely immune to religious thinking myself (my faith in humanity, science, free markets and speech could be classed as such)
c) I must constantly guard myself from exceptionalism but it is hard given that most people around seem to exhibit a kind of mass psychosis
I wonder, if and when we create a true AGI, if its brain is modelled after our own…if it will either invent its own religion or accept one of ours. Perhaps religion is the unfortunate side effect of intelligence and the enlightenment dream is but a dream.
I thought Klara and the Sun dealt with this very well. Is the robot’s self created religion a bug or a feature?
Cheers for the tip off, hadn’t realised Kazuo Ishiguro had done this one. Will check it out, thanks!
Did your wife understand that you were an atheist when she married you? How can you be compatible with such a divide?
Does your God ever change his action in any way as a result of your prayer? Was He doing the wrong thing before He heard you? Does He do the wrong thing maliciously, or does He not know what you know?
Consider the possibility that it is the very act of prayer which changes you. God does not need our prayers, but we need to pray. Prayer is not a transaction, Humanity is not merely Homo Sapiens but also “Homo Adorans” .
You have to find out for yourself.
Praying isn’t about trying to change God’s mind, so that his will aligns with ours. It is quite the opposite.
Your lack of belief is no less than another form of religion.
There are dozens of religions, and I assume that you don’t follow all of them. You doubt lots of religions, and I doubt one more than you do.
It wasn’t profound when Ricky Gervais said it, and it doesn’t get better on repetition.
Doubting is easy, skepticism is easy, cynicism is easy. But they end in meaninglessness and nihilism, if you have any intellectual integrity at all. Nothing means anything, nothing has value, nothing is worth preserving. I defy you or anyone to defend a contrary claim.
In 1952 Albert Einstein was asked by a Princeton doctoral student what was left in the world for original dissertation research? Einstein replied: “Find out about prayer.”
You mistakenly assume assume all prayer is about requests to God. Prayer can be praising the Lord and thanking Him for s many blessings and mercies.
I am a fan of Kingsnorth. However I don’t really get his religious prescription. It seems to be quite narrow and personal, whereas perhaps what we need is something more socially cohesive.
How did religion work out for us in the past?
It certainly unified societies, unfortunately in the service of monotheistic capatilism that we spread over the surface of the globe and delivered us to here. Christianity would need to be heavily repurposed to meet my needs. There is so much very painful baggage that for me cannot be simply overlooked .look at the countries that are theocracies now like Iran.
It seems to me that religion developed alongside and enmeshed in the state that adopted it .
Is Kingsnorths religion just another lifestyle choice?
Or is belief in a divine creator and an afterlife an evolved trait in humans. Extant perhaps because it confers resilience in times of hardship?
Christendom existed longer than capitalism has. Historical Orthodoxy for 1000 years before the Great Schism, and then in the East since. Capitalism, about 400.
“Christianity would need to be heavily repurposed to meet my needs.”
It already has been; that’s the problem.
Look, the history of Christianity is full of unseemly events. But it has a great explanation for those too. So the question is then what better story we have on offer. Not in theory, but in practice.
Beautifully written, beautifully argued, and true. Thank you sir.
Welcome home Mr Kingsnorth. Happy Christmas!
Outstanding piece. So many bits that could be quoted back with personal insights. Like other comments I enjoy Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s articles but do not recall another by Mr. Kingsnorth’s standing out so much as this did. Bravo!…and Merry Christmas!
Also, I’ve never been able to believe in something that evidence and reason don’t support, regardless of whether I’d like to believe it because it makes me feel good, or because it would make it easier for me to find friends.
When it comes to Christianity or any other religion centred on belief in a benevolent, omnipotent creator God, the problem of evil has always been the ultimate stumbling block. Theodicy has been such a fruitless exercise, it seems to me. The arguments that many lave lauded as the most sophisticated or the most convincing have always fallen flat, and depend on at least one weak assumption that there’s no reason to accept.
In sum, I’ve always been far more comfortable in simply saying ‘I don’t know’ if there’s no convincing evidence or argument for something being true. I just can’t choose or pretend to believe in something. Belief, to me, is a reaction, not a choice.
Sometimes believing in untrue stories allow people to accomplish things (both ‘good’ and ‘bad’) that would otherwise not have been possible. Therefore do these false ideas do not have value?
Evolution does not select for the ability to view reality as it is. Seeing falsehoods often confers evolutionary advantage. See Donald Hoffman for more info:
https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is?language=en
Everything has a place and a use, both truthhood and falsehood.
When it comes to belief, the value of the story just doesn’t come into play. Same goes for evolutionary advantage or lack thereof.
If I hear an account of how a crime was committed, for example, and if believing and saying that a certain person did it would make me feel better because I don’t like that person, and convicting that person of the crime would support some apparently beneficial social or political narrative going on at the moment, I just wouldn’t believe in their guilt – in fact, couldn’t believe it – if I was aware of exculpatory evidence. And if I once believed that person was guilty because all the nice people said so, but I became aware of exculpatory evidence, I would stop believing in that person’s guilt, even though it’s evolutionarily advantageous to keep believing in it because, say, it makes me part of the more successful and numerous in-group. I wouldn’t choose to stop believing in that person’s guilt, it would happen spontaneously.
Richards Dawkins has stated that he doe not believe in anything he can’t see, hear or touch. Yet he admitted some time ago in a Sunday Times article that he believes in love.
Rather illogical, surely?
“Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible, receives the impossible.”
And that’s been my experience since becoming a Christian 22 years ago.
“I’ve never been able to believe in something that evidence and reason don’t support”
Of course you do. Everyone does. Everyone has axiomatic beliefs. You’re just not used to thinking of yours in that way.
I get your point – I could have clarified that I was talking about beliefs associated with the big truth claims, or systems of belief of the sort Kingsnorth is talking about. And when it comes to reason and evidence, like all of us, I do of course rely quite heavily on secondhand reason and evidence in areas where I have little to no expertise, such as medicine, physics, various technologies, etc.
But I have long been in the habit (which made me a very annoying child with my endless questions, as my long-suffering father could attest) of assessing my axiomatic beliefs, but as with everyone, there are so many that I’m quite sure I won’t be able to interrogate them all. So my statement was based on the reason-and-evidence approach as habit, not a perfectly applied principle.
Stimulating. But surely we should focus here on the New hyper secular Equalitarian/Progressive Religion that – 30 years in – is debasing our culture and society? Not the Old Faiths which have rotten away, the death knell of the CofE being their adherence to State lockdown law & general knee bending to progressives. The post 90s Progressive/Equality Faith has quasi religious roots in communisty Christianity. Its arrogant followers behave like the Calvinist ‘Elect’ – seeing themselves as morally pure and the rest of us (those hostile to Net Zero, BLM, Islamist rage, DEI positive discrimination, mass migration/open borders) totally unworthy of redemption, worthy only of contempt and hatred as we saw in the Brexit Civil War. This is a new State Religion, its human rights laws pumping out the poisonous virus of a new Me not We narcissistic culture of grievance, victimhood and entitlement. These Young Doctors who are letting the sick suffer this Xmas are kin to the cold eyed Red Guards of China 68, drunk on their warped sense of entitlement moral virtue as well as greed. Social media has reinforced fearful groupthinking devotion to DEI, CRT Climate Change Palestine amongst our captured craven political and cultural Elite – the new Hollow Men/Women. We exist like the Soviets in the 1980s in a societal Traumazone, teetering on edge, needing something Big to shake off this appalling new faith. But what might that be??
Reading the comments I am reminded of what the ancients intuited and the Age of Reason refused to know, the story of the Tower of Babel, not as source of languages, but rather the consequence of faith in one’s reason. It is hard to remember that from a reasoned perspective the human is a relatively fur-less bipedal primate convinced that the gland in his scull, given time and effort, will grasp everything.
I agree with so many points in this article and disagree with many as well. For example “ He turned up as a barefoot carpenter, not a proconsul, and he had nothing at all to say about politics.” Except to render unto Caesar, or “the government is on his shoulders”, and more. But I don’t want to see Christians return to cowering when asked about their faith. The Scopes Trial and Darwin did more to silence the church hammering us with so-called reason and so-called science as if science and reason were devoid of faith. We need to bring our faith out of the closet and NOT back into caves in the desert.
Yes, when Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s,” he forever limited the reach of Caesar.
It was a profoundly political statement. Empires rise and fall and they have claims on us to the means for the maintenance of at least minimal standards of justice. But they have no ultimate authority. God can always say, No.
All this ”western culture is coming to an end” is just convenient defaitism for the spiritually lazy. We we are now living in is just a rearrangement played out before the approaching of a new age.
Returning to the old ways of worship is a step backwards. But in one sense the Bible is right:
”For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.”
There aren’t really any new ways of worship.
And in any case, the old ones are the best.
This because..?
All you need is love?
It’s clear reading the British liberal press that 35-55 year old centrists need something to replace Christian democracy. Looking at The Observer on a rare UK visit, there are no beliefs of any conviction whatsoever at on display apart from the bizarre faith-based argument that now is the time to send Ukraine even more weapons.
This age group is too old for the gender religion and unsure about what to do about tax and Soviet-styled public service bureacracies like the NHS. And they don’t have the certainty of the Babyboomers with their life’s cause to enrich and enjoy themselves, perhaps because these are no longer such obvious possibilities.
A conversion to Roman Catholicism or Baptist Christianity is really the only way forward for a now stale middle-aged left-liberalism.
Or just kick consumption and progress centred lifestyles into the long grass and embrace a faith such as Orthodoxy.
Now THAT is liberating.
It is very very hard to be an atheist and face some very very unpalatable truths. Perhaps the most difficult reality is that you must think for yourself…very hard work…. there is no escape into magical thinking that saves you from reality. or having to think. There are no pat answers. And you will die.. nothing can help you pretend differently. You and those you love are not safe… no special pleading in prayer can change some magical spirts mind about events which are overwhelming you. There is no excuse for evil… no payback for it in an afterlife.
The compensation… you are free.
Substituting the evils in existence for the evils created by religion itself is not a sane option.
The responsibility….. we must act ourselves to make life a good life for all.
I miss the old atheists.
They made arguments. They understood and respected their intellectual rivals. They weren’t so arrogant and ignorant about the basic arguments involved. They didn’t try to kill the conversation with assertions like “Magical thinking!” and “Pat answers!” and “Evils created by religion!”
I respect them.
I enjoyed reading Kingsnorth’s essay very much and it has many good to excellent insights, but he often argues against caricatures of people who don’t believe in God or god(s). Much of this is understandable given the way many prominent atheists have sneered at religion in ungenerous and counterproductive ways – and many have failed in their commitment to empirical inquiry by ignoring or dismissing the evidence that religion and spirituality fulfill the needs of many humans in non-negative ways.
But Christianity never gave me the comfort or sense of meaning that it gives Kingsnorth or many others, nor did prayer. Some religious music can nearly get me there, such as hearing Mahalia Jackson singing ‘He Must Have Known.’ (I’ve always found Gregorian chants and Latin mass ponderous and depressing, for some reason, from the time I was a child; I grew up in a devout Roman Catholic family.) And though, for quite some time, I wanted to be a believer so badly, and prayed long and hard in my grief at the death of a loved one, I never found solace, no voice spoke in my heart, nothing. Many respond to this kind of experience by saying ‘well, you didn’t pray right, you didn’t really want to believe,’ etc etc. You’d expect, however, that if there’s a deity out there, and the salvation of your soul is on the line, they’d help you out a bit if you’re trying but somehow failing to do it right.
In any case, I wholeheartedly agree that humans find much more joy and meaning in immersion in something bigger than themselves, that self-love and self-care are ultimately unsatisfying on their own. I can’t think of a single selfish person that is happy or flourishing in the long term. I find meaning and satisfaction in loving and serving my family, friends, community, humanity, and in other living things (in that order), and in sharing in the creative processes that our endlessly fascinating species is constantly engaged in, be it creating things myself (art, writing, singing, etc) or enjoying others’ creations (reading, listening to music, theatre, etc).
Well said. Human creativity is itself a means of reaching out to the world beyond the self, and for those who wish to do so with serious intent, an exploration of “otherness”, i.e. how the boundaries between the self and the external world are intertwined. The means to do so change with the passing of each era, and as long as human beings survive, will continue.
We can relate to cave art from tens of thousands of years ago. What we do now is essentially no different.
“,,,the ages stood before me
Unadorned by the fanciful attire of men
And shivering in the truth of nakedness
Revealed, the myth of progress, and i cried;
Destroyed, the gates of heaven, and i laughed;
Cast snowflakes into hell, which failed to melt
Whereupon, the voice of man and his commandments
Amid the beauty of the universal silence
Broke forth into his long cacaphony of lies
Which strain the groaning library-shelves of history”
Mr Kingsnorth “gets it”. I appreciated his putting Christianity in cultural settings through the flow of the last 150 years (and more) of history. Rightly this is not an apologetic or defence.
“Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
Kingsnorth’s biography suggests an unassuageable need to believe – always asking the wrong question, I’m afraid. All cultures have had religion; none of them can possibly be true. The need to believe in unseen powers is a property of human nature. The so-called spiritual emotions of fear, awe and submission in a cathedral are essentially the same as those experienced by our prehistoric or even prehuman ancestors in a thunderstorm. Transformed, such feelings may become “spiritual” love of the unseen power and a motive for right action in the world. Fine, but we should remain sceptical of those who insist their experiences of this type are the only true guide to life. Kingsnorth’s wider thesis of religious revival is deeply disappointing. We already live in a world of empty cults. Better to let go of them all than praise new ones. Let go, and join the dance until it’s your turn to rest.
Thank you.
An excellent read.
Outstanding. That’s my candidate for essay of the year, maybe of the decade.
I applaud this article. Kingsnorth shares his very personal spiritual story and it was very enlightening to read. It is said nature abhors a vacuum, hence the concept of the “God shaped hole”, first invented, like so many other elements of our culture, by an enlightenment philosopher, Blaise Pascal. If indeed, humanity possesses such a thing, a spiritual need, it explains a great deal of our modern experience. People try to fill it with woke philosophy, social justice, environmentalism, scientism, etc. Perhaps, if these things endure long enough, they will themselves be called ‘religion’, though I’m skeptical of that, as they all seem far too transient, too dependent on current conditions that change as easily as the wind. Flighty insubstantial philosophies for flighty insubstantial people.
I’ve always been a rationalist myself. I prefer Plato to Aristotle. The former sought truth through pure logic and thought to deduce it from first principles, while the latter used nature and the physical world to inductively discover the truth. Plato’s philosophies can still be studied to understand the mind, logic, and philosophy itself, while Aristotle drew a bunch of conclusions about how the world worked and basically all of them were wrong, at least according to the science I learned in school, which itself came from more modern empiricists. I don’t know how this happened or how it held on for so long, but somehow western culture decided collectively that the same basic method that led Aristotle to all the wrong ideas would lead them to all the correct ones. I have a few guesses how this happened but they mostly come down to herd behavior and how people collectively tend to behave very differently than individual persons and reinforce one another’s ideas whatever they happen to be.
The failure of the enlightenment and the current juncture we find ourselves at comes as no great surprise to me. It seems actually rather obvious. Considering how many different religions, philosophies, and cultures have existed, the human mind is remarkably flexible. Certainly it is flexible enough to disagree on just about anything. Two people can witness the same event and have different and contradictory recollections of it. In order to resolve this, we simply keep asking more people and declare what they find in common to be the truth. This is how police interrogate witnesses, how historians compare sources to decide what the ‘history’ is, and how all of science is conducted. That there is no logical reason why people collectively should be more likely to be correct about anything never seems to occur to anybody. In fact, it’s often the case that people acting collectively tend to be more, not less, prone to certain errors. I think it’s related to how humans are primarily social creatures and the reason I see it is because I lack whatever trait is responsible for that collective instinct. Whatever the reason, when everybody can speak and think for themselves and be heard, it makes every bit of sense that the notion of ‘truth’ is muddied quite a bit.
When the means of spreading information are few and there are gatekeepers, it’s easy to keep things within a range of believability. There’s little room for fringe ideas or conspiracies to propagate. When my parents were growing up, there were three TV networks, and newspapers and magazines, almost all of which were controlled by the same class of wealthy elites. Enter the Internet, and suddenly everyone has unlimited means to spread information however they want, and there are no gatekeepers. There has never been any such thing as an ‘objective’ truth that everybody agreed about, and now the Internet and the unlimited spread of ideas has made the illusion that such a thing ever existed impossible to sustain. The rest is pretty obvious. One hopes that Kingsnorth is correct, and that people self-sort into various religious groups that remain committed to peace and agree to disagree rather than follow the path of the ancient crusaders or present day jihadists, and that some semblance of democratic representative government can be maintained. The alternative is likely a struggle between rival viewpoints that only ends if and when one of them establishes a dominant position and then imposes their truth through totalitarian means, like China already has. China was in a position where they just so happened to have a governmental system and people suited for this approach, so they’ve enjoyed a bit of ‘success’ with it, such as it is. This is a large part of the reason they’re successful, internally popular, and completely unreliable and dangerous to everyone else.
From your comment — “People try to fill it with woke philosophy, social justice, environmentalism, scientism, etc.” (It being the God-sized hole in our hearts.)
Which demostrates just how deep and abiding a need man has for something to worship. If people are willing to embrace such ersatz hope to be found in the current ‘isms’ so prevalent in pop culture to put meaning into their lives, they must be truly desperate.
And this illustrates perfecty the perfect emptiness of materialism.
Indeed. Empiricism and materialism are inextricably intertwined, the former provides the logical foundation, philosophy, and methodology, while the latter provides the motivation and the means of propagation.
From a “practical’ standpoint they make a seeming-successful partnership for day to day life. But the logic is easily misled or confounded, the philosophy proves to be meaningless, and the methodology degrades over time, giving rise to all sorts of abuses.
One can certainly grasp a “sense” of the Greatness of God from observing His/Her Creation, but this is not enough to fill the emptiness in the human soul. Materialism is a failed try at defining our place in the world – just as all the governing “isms” fail to govern and instead oppress, coherce, and finally, kill.
I like Paul Kingsnorth’s writing and he describes very well the feeling that things are not as they should be in the godless West. Yet this intuition that there is a God-shaped hole at the heart of modern man somehow doesn’t convince me that this means that an actualy God exists. Nor does it make the Christian story any less implausible.
It’s all very well portraying atheists as unimaginative brains-on-legs who can’t see the spiritual wood for the material trees. But what if there are only trees? Paul’s writing should make the wood more visible to us literal-minded folk, teaching us to see the face in the autostereogram – yet somehow it doesn’t.
So how should I begin? By looking up at the heavens and feeling awe in the vast stretches of space? By watching a priest swing a thurible? In short, why hasn’t he written a ‘How to’ manual for this?
(paraphrase).when I look up on the universe,the unimaginable distances,the uncountable stars,the vast immensity of it all,- how small it all seems compared to me!
“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the descernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.” Albert Einstein.
@Keith – “In short, why hasn’t he written a ‘How to’ manual for this?”
He did. God’s Word comes to us in two ways – His Word, the Bible and His Word, Christ.
Sadly, the wisdom of God’s Word appears as nonsense to those who do not believe there is a Creator that we know/can know as God.
You say “what if there are only trees?” I ask you “what is a tree that you can see it, name it, describe it, have emotional responses to it?(appreciating it’s shade on a hot day)” How it is you have a thing we call “mind” to do all these things? All this came about ‘by accident’ ?
I am surprised that you haven’t mentioned another religion in our midst, that of islam which is now sadly becoming a shadow over domestic politics and affairs. In turn, any revival of Christian religiousity will have to contend with islam which will inevitably claim the same status
Excellent article, I would only disagree with the pessimistic tone of the headline, or that there needs to be a conflict between reason and faith. It’s possible to hold two Ideas in your head at the same time
The problem with this article is that there is zero factual basis for the author’s contention that a new religiosity is sweeping the west. On the contrary, all the polling data show a decline in belief, especially among the young. See for example the 2023 Gallup poll https://news.gallup.com/poll/511133/identify-religious-spiritual.aspx. Or see any of the copious polling data from Pew Research: https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/religion/. Unfortunately devotees of every religion expect that their truth will soon be apparent to everyone, so predictions of revival are as old as the religions themselves. Sorry, Paul Kingsnorth — your revival is not happening, nor will it.
Quite right. There is a worrying lack of lack of religious literacy among the general English population. These days there are many who would be surprised to learn that Jesus had really existed. Atheist Bart Ehrman (American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, who has written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks, and is currently the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), says “To dismiss the Gospels from the historical record is neither fair nor scholarly.” If Jesus did not exist, “the origin of the faith of the early Christians remains a perplexing mystery.”
The probability of Jesus having existed is so high, Ehrman says, that “virtually all historians and scholars have concluded Jesus did exist as a historical figure.”
Yes, but maybe Kingsworth can see things that we cannot see. After all, believers can see things that non- believers cannot see.
Rather than ‘humans are inherently religious’, it is more that a good proportion of humans are interested in what lies beyond, behind the everday preoccupations, and a subset of them go woo-woo (no problem with that so long as it’s not used to control others). Religion is an organising and branding organisation for those who like their views pre-packed, and/or those who would use these phenomena for political power-plays.
Wishful thinking. Many many more people are taking up yoga, meditation and Buddhism which are the quickest paths to self realisation and avoid to toxic indoctrination of self hatred that Christianity and the other 2 Abrahamic religions promote.
Try learning something about Christianity before you embarrass yourself. Jesus taught: “You must love your neighbor *as yourself*” Emphasis added.
Becoming a born-again Christian in 2001 saved me from drinking my life away. It replaced despair with hope. Christianity works because it changes the lives of followers of Christ for the better. It fills us with a desire to follow His teachings; it reveals to us the way to true happiness is through loving one another.
Ask Buddha what he thinks of women…
Thank you for this beautiful article from a new American reader. I am a member of one of those busting at the seams American Orthodox Churches and last night we had five young adults, both men and women, baptized into the Orthodox faith. They all have similar stories to mine which happened thirty years ago. And it’s the same story as yours. Thank you for artiulating it so beautifully. As I’m getting older, I’m constantly looking for the connection of truth and beauty and have come to the conclusion that nothing can be true unless it is beautiful. Only one of the reasons I embrace the Orthodox Church. Look forward to reading more from you!
Check out his Substack, The Abbey of Misrule. Many more superb pieces of a similar vein.
Very good piece. A couple of caveats. Aquinas’ Final Causality.. that which has brought free willed rational beings through Big Bang stardust is literally what moves us all by love. We may love small things too much and great things not enough but we are , and are defined by what we love.
I had a radical reversion experience that found me in the confessional after 15 years literally adrift, and I had the utterly unexpected and overwhelming experience of LOVE, God , out of the blue as I walked out of the old Ottawa cathedral.
And I gradually found the sanity of natural law theory derived from canon law in British society and how a Catholic rejection of cousin marriage caused the demise of tribalism and the rise of the “person” in the west alone .
And modern quantum physics has shown (Bell’s 2015) that physical determinism really is as untrue as the denial of our experienced free will and how it is that numbers are real but not physical.. rather they are the ordering principles of INTELLECT.. BEING… GOD.
The irrational fundamentalists are the dogmatic materialists and the intellectually light and not so “new” atheist crowd. If you want some intellectual grounding… go to traditional western theism.
Philosophers like former atheist Ed Feser , Peter Kreeft and others will simply blow the doors off the stumbling bumbling incoherence of postmodern madness. Oh.. and Descartes., “Cogito”? He forgot that he was thinking about SOMETHING when he secondarily became aware of it.
Get ready for realism and sanity and a cosmos literally formed by and for LOVE Himself. And of course reality is PERSONAL. How could persons formed by Him deny it coherently?
Enjoy the ride to reality.
“To reflexively mock authority and tradition”
“To reflexively mock WESTERN authority and tradition”. Fixed it for you.
Although I agree with many points written here, I think it necessary to point out that without warriors like Charles Martel and possibly Vlad Dracula we would all be praying to a different prophet today.
I squirmed when Blair tried to justify his ‘conversion’ to Catholicism, Kingsnorth’s waffling ablout how he unexpectedly became a Christian seem just as opportunistic, advocating for a lifestyle that only a very few could possibly afford (or have opportunity for) and draping himself in a belief blanket.
The way some religions are practiced can increase social and political cohesion, and provide psychological comfort. Though that is by no means universally true. But, in any case, that does not mean that God exists – which, of course, he does not.
“Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
Albert Einstein
Our culture isn’t crumbling, it is changing, as it has always done. Many people might find it bewildering, depending on their circumstances and how much notice they take. The author is delusional however if he believes the solution to this ever present concept is that the wider population is going to turn back to religion and it’s ridiculous fantasies and pernicious control structures.
Or any belief or ideology, Utopianism isn’t real either and just as delusional.
Tch Tch.
Agree 100%. If people turn to religion, which religion? If people turn to Christianity, which Christianity? I am being totally serious.
The author has faded away after youth and is looking for a raison-d’être, as we all have done. He says this himself; he has given up being anti-Establishment and now yearns to be accepted as Establishment.
How many millions of people have been massacred in religious wars?
Regarding your last question: not nearly as many as have been massacred by totalitarians, communists, and other dictators who were not religious.
Not religious in our traditional sense. But these totalitarians are worshipped by the masses and their leader is viewed as God or an agent of God or God like.
Christianity does not use pernicious control structures, such as Just say no wokeism.
A resurgence of Christianity might be good thing not least if it leads to long term pair bonding and the production of children. Without these, human nature is incomplete.
If, as Orthodoxy holds, to be Christian is to strive to become human then we can say, without contradiction, that man is religious by nature and man is political, also by nature. There is no conflict in this. To be Christian is to worship and, because Christ ‘loves the just and calls all to the blessing of good things to come’, to aspire to justice (giving others their due) is to be Christlike. This is the sphere of politics.
Mr. Kingsnorth, I am with you (on Yeats and the present moment, the false narrative, and much else), and you are entirely right to say that Christianity does not tell us that those ‘good things to come’ are chiefly on earth. But are the heavenly things not manifest on earth, imaged here? You have somehow left out of your account the beauty, which we see in godly families, of earthly blessings. The beauty of faithfully governed families and – no? – faithfully governed states.
“The path of the Desert Fathers rather than that of Emperor Constantine”? Why? Was Constantine beguiled by and corrupted by “the world” simply by governing?
There just cannot be any inherent tension between religion (love of God) and politics (love of God expressed in the manner of dealing with men).
If the terms we rely on to figure out our time edge us toward thinking that politics is sinful, capitulation to the world rather than to heaven, we will end up operating with a picture of the human drawn up by something other than (and I would say hostile to) Christian anthropology. – The isolation of politics and religion as mutually contaminating realities (concern for the purity of both) is liberalism, which has brought us the world we live in.
The world we live in is not all bad, and many of the ways it’s good result from liberalism. Christianity, tamed by the Enlightenment, no longer drives murderous wars of religion in which people from opposing Christian sects slaughtered each other – and gleefully committed pogroms against Jews as well. The empiricist side of Enlightenment thought brought us, among many things, evidenced-based medicine, so now most children survive their first five years. People want panaceas, and try to find one in Christianity, atheism, nationalism, socialism, secularism, the Enlightenment, liberalism, and so on… but there are no panaceas. By the same token, none of these are the roots of all evil, either – because there’s no such thing.
“. .and look into the light would be to accept that our whole culture has been trailing down a dead-end road since the Enlightenment. We can’t look at that fact, so we look at absolutely everything else instead. ”
C.S. Lewis compared this to “looking along something rather than looking at it.” He used the example of a beam of light in a dusty workshop. Standing in the beam of light – looking along it – you see the light and everything the light illuminates. Standing next to it – looking at it – only the beam of light itself is illuminated.
As he wrote, both these ways of ‘looking’ are legitimate and offer different views. But neither, in itself, contains the whole truth of a thing. To know that, one must look both ways. And fear neither.
The miracle of Christ is He is the light that both illuminates and is fully revealed, all at once — if you look.
I realize when writing about the political scene there must be a far right presumed to exist as a counter to the far left. What the corrupt news media owned by the plutocracy promote with that term is the image of cranks and crackpots holed up in the hills who will sometime and somehow come down with their guns to contest the progressive and radical left. It is ludicrous given how the left and its dogmas have captured and colonized nearly every strong-point of the culture, from the deep state to the academy, from Silicon Valley to Corporate America and the labor unions, from Hollywood to the woke military with its admirals and generals in skirts. The most recent chief of staff said the biggest challenge to the nation is not China or Russia but “white nationalists.” This deception is used to malign the voters and movements that are putting conservatives into office all over the world, from Holland to Argentina, or returning them to power as in Turkey. Justin Trudeau in Canada is dropping in the polls as Trump is climbing despite or maybe because of the left’s lawfare against him. The rediscovery of a primitive back-to-basics religious path through the anti-human and soulless materialism that tyrannizes us today is a seismic shift Paul Kingsnorth describes with his customary eloquence. I’m glad his speech-making schedule is so full. The word is getting out.
With the West heading rapidly for catastrophe and the failure of all its secular ideologies and beliefs, the West will soon be religious again.
I’ve got a rambly and probably irrelevant observation to make. I’m a decade before the author but yes,the “story” I lived in was pretty much as he described,and I saw myself in relation to it. It wasnt good as the media paradigm of acceptable female,ie hot young dolly bird chick,well young was the only one I could tick there. Now,wildlife programmes on TV were all strictly scientific and rational. No matter how amazing,awe inspiring,wondrous and remarkable the creatures shown and the things they did the grave narration assured us that the creatures were purely motivated by innate programming. They took no pleasure,joy,sorrow or pain in what they did,it was a vast interconnected web and operated at an unfeeling level. The cameraman filming that bewildered fluffy chick thats fallen out of the nest is not going to put it back because you must not interfere with nature’s way. In the late 1990s having not watched nature documentaries for a while I noticed a change. Animals had names, relationships,back stories,we rarely saw kills now (thank goodness) and the voice over reassured us that the camera crew rescued the lost lion cub.
Personally I find this a big improvement,my one cavil is,how do they know the big lion is called Graham,did they ask him? But it definitely shows that certain parts of the media are responding to public wishes and the changed ” story”,even while other media still deny it.
In some societies religion is divisive and destructive: look at Hindu India, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, etc. In Western societies polls uniformly show the decline of organized religion. So finding religion may be a joyful individual experience, but it is certainly not a societal phenomenon and it can actually be very destructive: just look at the Mideast.
It seems to me, Paul Kingsnorth (as well as Ayaan Hirsi Ali) finds atheism wanting because he looks for it to provide religious fulfillment.
Atheism, IMHO, accepts that religious fulfillment is not an option.
Music, I think, can fill that void.
Yes, music helps to fill the void for me.
“Religion and culture reign in separate domains.”
No. There is so much insight in this piece, but this claim is patently false. The cultus is the heart of culture. Always has been.
Kingsnorth is a new Christian, so he can be excused for gaps. That said, this is a big one. The first creed of the Church is, “Jesus is Lord!” That baby in a manger threatens Herod, threatens Caesar. Threatens all other authorities. Well they understood it.
We are NOT going back to Christendom, God willing. But the notion that any orthodox Christianity—to say nothing of Orthodox Christianity—can be walled off from the public square is a profound misunderstanding.
That claim stood out to me as well, and is so clearly false that it weakened the piece considerably.
Great article! I think this one will make waves and rightly so! Thank you!
Kingsnorth has always appealed to me as someone who, although loosely allied with the political left at times, has eschewed it for other, perhaps undefinable, realms.
This is where I find myself: but I also would like to hear more of his thoughts on what I believe is the real essence of Christianity, and the reason I ascribe “Christian” to myself: nonviolence.
For, as a man without a political home, I’m also firmly convinced that the state (little s) is bound up in convincing itself of its own legitimacy through violence. Look no further than the horrors happening on the Gaza Strip, or in Ukraine. Indeed, America itself is built on an empire of violence, which long ago reached its zenith and is descending into its inevitable nadir.
For that is where violence always ends up–whether it is on a macro or micro scale–in a hellish, unlivable moral landscape which breeds decay.
What Christ taught was a method of resistance that for me represents a purity of thought that no other religion has mustered, and for which I’m convinced that, as a friend and wise man once said to me a few weeks ago “if we followed Christ’s examples of love, 90% of all problems in this world would cease.”
So, faith isn’t so much ritual to me as it is the basic tenets of a nonviolent way of life. If ritual upholds this way of life, so much the better, but we seem to have lost the message of Jesus many hundreds of years ago . . .
I have a great respect for Christianity. I often read the Sermon on the Mount and have gained much from it. I know of no one who has done more for humanity than Jesus. In fact, there is nothing wrong with Christianity, but the trouble is with you Christians. You do not begin to live up to your own teachings. Mahatma Gandhi.
Tolstoyan Christians and some Anabaptists are, in my view, that only ones who live up to Christ’s teachings. The mystical stuff I can do without, though. Universal love and the tenets of nonviolence? It’s the only way that humankind will have any sort of longevity. Unfortunately, I don’t think most people in the world are heeding these teachings.
“…We had become masters of the material realm.” Wait! It gets worse than that. Until recently our “mastery” was, to some degree, devoted to “betterment”. Better meds, better governance, better inter-personal relations, etc.
But in the last decade or so we’ve decided to devote ourselves to efficiency and convenience. So now we can sit on our butts and point at the things we want. Having nearly destroyed human spirituality we’ve moved on to human capability. How many people out there can even tie their own shoe laces?
“But in the last decade or so we’ve decided to devote ourselves to efficiency and convenience”. This has been “trending” for several decades.
Shoe lace-tying skill is I think very much dependant on age (i.e. which generation are we asking about?).
Really? My 2009 plate average family Korean car compared to my 2017 plate average family Japanese car is quite stark (far better safety, convenience and gadgets) and the 2023 versions are even better. Supersonic airliners are being tested right now, nuclear fusion has had numerous breakthroughs in the last 2 years alone and AI has become, in the last 12 months, something you could talk about at the bus stop and not be a science fiction topic. Visible science and technology leaps may not be leaps and bounds (70s compared to 80s, 80s to 90s for example) but technological leaps aren’t exactly linear, there are fits and starts.
With the advances in AI, fusion and robotics the next 10 years are going to get quite strange. Which is why perhaps we might see many flock back to the familiar safety of religion
I have two slightly random thoughts on the subject. Please excuse my limited ability to express myself as well as other have:
I wish more people in Western society would return to church worship. I don’t want to do that myself, as I really struggle with organised religion and man-made dogma. But I want others to! I believe Western civilisation is indeed verging on collapse, and a return to Judeo-Christian values could help turn back that slide / tide! I realise how silly and contradictory this sounds.
My personal religious position is “unsure / curious”. I do feel however that there may indeed be a God, and that I have seen inside his mind. This is in the interpretation of the mandelbrot set or equation in the form of fractal graphics. There isn’t room here to go into this, but (partly) understanding how it works, and then looking at video representations people have prepared is mind-blowing..
Lots to think about and good insight – we are indeed entering a new/old age, spiraling upward with new beginnings, which I write about in Path of Trinity: Journey into Christian Mysticism. I’m looking forward to what’s next/again!
The Kingsnorth article is entitled “Our Godless era is dead”. Suchmayvery well be a misnomer. Certainly the writer must be aware of all the Godless recent horrors in Israel and Gaza. Kingsworth holds that the feasts of Christmas are engaged in not just by Christians but all peoples. Really? Not this year.Christmas feasts and celebrations have been canceled in Israel and in Gaza who can maintain a Christian spirit and celebrate the Prince of Peace in the context of mass killing, of massive destruction.
And is it in the Christian spirit that America threatens to suspend its charity in the form of aid to Ukraine. Such is the antithesis of the Christmas spirit. Of course, the threatened suspension relates to Americans not being able to act to solve the immigration problem, the massive violation of American borders. Such inaction may very well reflect the Godlessness of America. Jesus came to savethe poor, the impoverished,the powerless. But the presence of the Prince of Peace at American borders is no where to be found.
Capitalism and nationalism is Godless which stamps out the spirit of Christmas. The core of the Christmas spirit is not celebrated in churches, but rather in massive shopping centers where the rituals of buying and selling occur.
When America was not Godless, there was no shopping on Sundays, no shopping on religious holidays.
Oh the memories live on.
But do not confuse the past with the present.
But presently I can still wish a Merry Christmas to all.
Great references for occult sources, and a very interesting article!
Reading about Christianity for the fortification against foes, the greatest irony here for me is how the aforementioned Eastern Orthodox Church survived due to Ottoman/Islamic tolerance and rule for more than 500 years.
People are looking for a meaning in life and with the decline in Christianity some have moved their religious feelings to the new religions of Climate Change or Critical Race theory/DEI/’woke’ etc.
It gives them a reason to live, a purpose in life, friendship, social groups etc.
Yes, but you miss the major sources where religious feelings flourish- concerts, music personages, eg, Taylor Swift and the millions of her Swifties, and sports. Today is Christmas Day and what are millions doing, including myself, watching NFL football.
Homo Sapiens are NOT genetically , evolutionary or biologically equipped to
Handle religion
Why because we are hard wired for two
Main areas
One of which ‘ We all need someone to Love ”
The other is
‘ And someone to Hate ‘
Should we fail to find one or both of them
Then we are wired to Invent them
And that is where Religious Zealots come in
Pure invention of the guilable
Who wins The Zealots
Who Loses eventually Humanity
Einstein Quote
‘ Having considered the great religions
I’ve come to the firm conclusion that the
Only hope for Humanity is to adopt the
Philosophy of Buddhism ‘
Note – Buddhism is NOT a religion
Of the many problems with all of this is that it’s based on a lie. Their is no sky god in fact. I will not believe in a fundamental means of pretty self-delusion or take up some artificial ritual due to some intrinsic need…
Kingsnorth touches on cultural Marxism but seems to completely lose the plot. There is indeed a return to fervent religiosity today in the West but it’s not Christianity. It’s the fundamentalist cult called wokeism. Every knee will eventually bow before it and if it doesn’t it will be made to. Our future in the West is not Christian but rather one of cultural and racial self loathing, the original sin of being born white, the sacred scriptures of critical race theory, the witch hunts for heretics such as JK Rowling, the excommunication of cancellation and salvation through the destruction of Western values and religion. Being a Christian and being awake to this evil is not to be decried.
I credit Jordan Peterson with introducing the concept of transcendence to a new generation. Going to church with grandma doesn’t inspire high IQ millennials and genZ. A discussion about transcendence and historical architypes seems to — much to the credit of those willing to watch three hour discussions among dry intellectuals. All is not lost.
This is the only article that has renewed in me a hope that all religions may eschew their accumulated “tribal fictions” in favour of the inner spiritual tradition with which they ALL began .. whether Sufism, the Kabbalah, Christ consciousness, the Dao, the Buddhist meditation techniques .. and so on and so on .. inner peace versus outer chaos and conflict that currently endangers human civilisation .. I am so thankful to you and have been inspired to further my own research
I love this essay! Thank you, Paul Kingsnorth!
Merry Christmas! I would like to believe that we are seeing a return to a belief in the Almighty and regular attendance in services and community. However, I mostly read about highly educated western single women converting to Islam.
God, what a long verbose article! Traditional religion is very obviously not reviving in the West, as falling church attendance indicates.
It also seems somewhat bizarre – and very modern – that Mr Kingnorth decided to join the Orthodox church.
hi there Paul – i spent a couple of years getting my head around ‘A Course in Miracles” – an “inspired” blueprint for the containment of the human ego so that spirituality can be pursued. I thoroughly recommend it – tho some knowledge of Christian metaphors and themes are necessary. A ‘miracle’ is defined as any moment between human souls when the ‘soul/spirituality is dominant (vs ego dominance). Having studied psychology, theology, philosophy etc etc it is the best description of spirituality in action that i have discovered – and also clear outlines why the human race is where it is – ie our primitive mortal coil was supposed to be merely a vessel to be managed whilst the more important spiritual growth was happening. As an interesting corollary that growth can only happen in a time constrained physical context. ACIM views spiritual growth as happening in any context – and perhaps moreso amongst the less ‘sophicated’ ie less ego-bound ? Its transcribing is allegedly from Jesus – viewed as an advanced soul and therefore closer to the ineffable god-thing. Our ‘journey’ in 3D ‘down here’ will continue through reincarnations until we decide we dont need to do that any more. Fascinating and well worth the effort ! It Also contains daily meditations to aid the searcher in attempting to control the very powerful primitive drives of the mortal coil plus attempting to see Reality with a capital R. Should be at least attempted by all searcher – tho is 1500 ricepaper pages of very dense material – ypu will love it !
Please don’t love me, stay away from me and my family. The performative acts were the final nail in christianity.
The zeal of the converted. Judging by humanity, if there is a higher power it is an odious being.
Don’t miss the inference of your observation. In judging humanity you define a standard, and you assume that your standard is absolute. What you have determined is that humanity is evil. Evil corrupts, it does not create, so therefore absolute good must exist for evil to exist. We know that we, being human, cannot be the source of absolute good. So a creative, absolute good exists outside ourselves. Then the question arises – if there is God, why is he silent?
Not all would say that he is silent. Francis Schaeffer suggests that God has spoken. https://www.amazon.com/He-There-Not-Silent/dp/084231413X (not endorsing Amazon..)
Hey, ChatGPT: compose a 14 word sentence that witlessly misses the point of this article and God, in the style of the unplanned spawn of a fame-drunk Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins one-night stand.
ChatGPT: “Judging by humanity, if there is a higher power it is an odious being.”
Uncanny, Vic! Now…cure death and end war for us silly Believers, won’t you, there’s a nice rational fellow… 🙂
Can you believers cure death and war for us all?
The world in 100 AD looks exactly like the world in 100 BC. Same Roman empire, war, slavery, disease, famine.
“Same Roman empire, war, slavery, disease, famine.”
Also Amphitheaters, Theatres, Odeons, Stadiums, Circuses*, Baths, and the PAX ROMANA. What more could one ask for? “Occ est vivere”** as ‘they’ used to say.
(*For Chariot racing.)
(** That is too live!)
It is unfortunate the Ampitheatres no longer exist to provide Mr Kingsnorth with the transcendant experience he craves.
Occ(idere) est vivere
Taken from the ‘Timgad’ inscription.
What are you talking about? 100 AD was one of humanity’s golden ages, as Gibbon noted – virtually the age of the Good Emperors. For a large chunk of humanity war was basically nonexistent and trade flourished. The amount of shipwrecks in the Med rises to heights not seen again for thousands of years. By contrast 100 BC was a time of state anarchy and constant wars.
Are you attributing this golden age to the effect of the Nazarene? Why didn’t the arrival of the Messiah establish a world where the lion would lay down with the kid?
100 AD may have been OK but the next 900 years were messy.
I never said that, as it would be putting the cart before the horse. The relative peace of the Principate period facilitated the spread of Christianity, which otherwise would never have been possible.
Much funnier jokes though I bet, DG. Jolly clever they may be, but athiests are invariably the least fun people at a party. PS: Also, lousy in bed as a rule.
A cheap smear lacking evidence.
Ah well, lack of evidence never stops the people who want to believe in their religion.
Evidence of the kind you mean is leading to the scientific conclusion that the earth’s population must be severely culled in order to save humankind.
AKA ‘a wee joke’, DG. You athiests, you’re so drearily…literal, entcha. Happy God’s son’s burpday mate. 🙂
They are always thinking about themselves and how they have figured everything out. This can be a disadvantage in the sack no matter how many manuals have been read.
The Great Scribe himself aside (of course), no-one in the throes of passion ever cried out ‘Oh Hitch…Oh Hitch…yes…yes…oh Hitch…YES!!!’
At least one seriously hopes not.
“And my message and my preaching were very plain. Rather than using clever and persuasive speeches, I relied only on the power of the Holy Spirit, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (1cor 2:4-5).”
It is not the “higher power” that is an odious being, but rather the creation who wants to live with pride and selfishness and not humility and genuine love.
How sad… This whole articke is based on the fantasy that being “born again” is wonderful. God will sort all. As a lifeling atheist, God doesnt exist. The Bible as with all holy books was written to keep the population at the time in its place. As a questioning 14 year old, I asked several “holy” men to explain god and religion to me. My question was “if god exists and we were made in his image, why are there so many religions in the world and ehy are we white not black”. I am still waiting fir an answer that makes sense and I am now in my 60s. The world is ingerently kind. Ordinary people are good to each other. Community exists and thrives. There has always been “evil” in the world and bad people doing bad tbings. But the majority just get on with living their lives the best they can. This might be a simpker view than most on here, but it works for me, mine and my communities and I suspect for the wider world population.
The Bible is several dozen books bound together, in no way correctly reduced to a means of social control. I don’t think you have read much of it.
I wonder why your persistent questions don’t lead to more humility around your unknowing, perhaps even a sense of sacred mystery, rather than the negationist certitude you express.
The ‘inherent kindness’ to which you refer is a product of Judeo-Christianity. For sure there is love and community in the pagan world, but you are channelling specifically Christian values and sensibilities that centre on the Imago Dei. The level of day to day cruelty – and the mentality that generated it – in pagan society was unimaginable….If you think you’re not a Christian, read Tom Holland’s Dominion or here https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unbelievable/2020/09/tom-holland-i-began-to-realise-that-actually-in-almost-every-way-i-am-christian/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/tom-holland-and-the-liberating-power-of-christianity/
God’s ways are unfathomable even to the proudest of atheists.
The higher power is God so cut some slack.
Well stated Vic. This supposed higher power has given us terrible disease and even some new born, born into illness and terrible suffering.
And you can’t think of any good things He has given us?
Barry, my reply to the atheists, who upon learning I am a Christian, always demand an answer to the question: “Why does God allow bad things to happen?”
“I can’t answer that question until you tell me why He allows good things to happen,” I reply.
Always stumps them.