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Is he the messiah? (Credit: Mary Turner/Getty)
Is he the messiah? Or just a very naughty boy? Since Russell Brand found Jesus he hasn’t stopped talking about it, whether on TikTok, or Tucker Carlson’s live show, or while baptising other men in a lake while clad only in his tighty-whiteys. Then, over the weekend, he and Jordan Peterson led a crowd of 25,000 outside the Washington Monument in the Lord’s Prayer as part of the Rescue the Republic gathering.
Perhaps it’s all showbiz. Or perhaps all these putative messiahs are signs of the End Times. Certainly the idea that the American Republic needs rescuing at all — let alone with prayer — suggests there’s an apocalyptic mood afoot. Last Sunday, even Donald Trump — not renowned for his piety — got in on the game, posting the Catholic prayer to St Michael on X.
Beneath all the internet showboating, a deeper vibe shift is under way in the relation between men and religion. For a long time, this relation has been shaky, with the “feminisation of Christianity” a longstanding complaint and amid a deluge of books on why men are quitting church. Now, if St Michael is triggering controversy on Trump’s X account, this is part of a larger picture: the return of Christianity in a masculine key. And it isn’t just celebs and politicians: last week, The New York Times reported that young men are turning to the Christian faith in markedly greater numbers than young women, who are more likely to embrace the fluffier doctrines of progressivism.
What is happening? Is this just another aspect of the more widespread politicised sex war? Perhaps this contributes, but I think it goes deeper. Two interlocking patterns are contributing to the new macho Christianity: firstly, that the world in general is growing more disorienting, extreme, and uncanny. This is spurring a widespread sense of existential spiritual conflict, in which post-war Christianity simply doesn’t cut it any more. And, secondly, young men conditioned by video gaming to pour all their energy into dematerialised battles have responded to this new disorientation, by extending their interest in ideational war beyond gaming to the fabric of reality itself.
It was Friedrich Nietzsche who kick-started the modern backlash against Christianity, claiming in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) that it was a creed of slaves which exerted a stifling, feminising downward pressure on individuality, energy, and self-confidence. Three decades later, the First World War drove many ex-soldiers to agree with him that “God is dead”. But it wasn’t until 1945 that this germ of mass unbelief flowered in earnest, in the mushroom-clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki: world-shattering events that, as the Catholic writer Ronald Knox described at the time, felt for many like the decisive triumph of secular science and a Godless universe over the divine and loving order of Christian tradition.
If the atom bomb seemed, to Knox, an existential threat to faith, it also seemed for many to represent the end of war. How could war even start, between industrialised nations, when its conclusion might be another Hiroshima? Under the shadow of mutually assured destruction, then, both Christian belief and the value of “manly” courage and martial vigour came to seem as though they no longer had anything to offer the world. Amid the smoking civilisational rubble this left us, it seemed to many as though the only safe place for Christians to stand was not for anything that might raise an enemy against you, but on the side only of peace, welcome and safety, and the deification of “the vulnerable” and “the marginalised”.
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SubscribeI think the answer is simple. You can not defeat something with nothing. The West faces existential threats to its foundational values both from the Islamists and the neo-Marxist Woke. Both want to destroy our traditions of liberty and Christian values.
Weak chested “enlightenment values” are utterly insufficient to stop them. Christianity though, in its traditional guise is perfectly suited. It stopped the Islamists at Tours and Lepanto, and it defeated the Marxists in the Cold War. John Paul II, Reagan, and Thatcher were not products of feminized Christianity.
A lot of people are realizing that if we want to put up a fight for Western values we need a real faith to unite us. Not mewling platitudes that will be twisted against. Christianity is our only option as a civilization. Even formerly committed atheists like Hirsi Ali and Dawkins have realized it.
Can ‘realizing that if we want to put up a fight for Western values we need a real faith to unite us” actually give rise to real faith?
This is very much the point. What MH describes sounds so very ‘performative’ and once that’s understood, suddenly the entire edifice of faith hoves starkly into view – as a mechanism of first of all survival and ultimately of authoritarianism – of the control of populations, one against another.
When the West thought it’d ‘won’ post Reagan/Thatcher, it was of course wrong. Those of us who wish to see a more enlightened humanity with a true spiritual dimension might view the return to the old religious paradigms as such a backward step, another huge error of human judgement, in seeking to follow the ‘old ways’ without any true belief, simply as a means of regaining civilisational ascendency. That, of course, would only lead to even greater conflict with a more advanced technological twist, which could indeed if we’re not careful lead to a true “end of history”.
Understanding ourselves, our origins and our spiritual dimension without the scourge of religion is – and will remain – the only possible way forward. I’ve argued this consistently in Comments, and this article by MH highlights the stupidity of belief systems with their recourse to ‘demons’ and ‘angels’ and also why people succumb to such beliefs.
A thoughtful and insightful reply.
I’ll push back here: Religion is no intrinsic scourge, the gathering and ritual can be healthy and sane. It is the sectarian self-certainty and readiness to kill in the supposed name of God that corrupts and pulls us back into the muck of the bad old days. That negative aspect also prevails among the worst secular ideologues, who make their isms into a de facto bad religion.
I don’t think religion and spirituality are as separate, much less as mutually exclusive as some claim. Religion without heart and gut is dead; spirituality all the way out of its head or with no foot on the ground is equally lifeless.
I appreciate your pushback. I don’t find spirituality “with no foot on the ground” at all lifeless – just the opposite. I find it the only true form of human involvement with the world around us, very much grounded, and without any need for either the invocation or even concept of a deity.
This isn’t arguing against your point, just clarifying it for those of us who can find our way to that understanding. How i wish we all could do so.
Fair enough. I’d also modify my phrase to: spirituality that never puts a foot on the ground (that is, walks its talk) becomes lifeless.
We live among and by power of still mysterious forces which we should, in my view, maintain a certain humility and respect toward—but we needn’t be “spooked” by them.
I take far more interest in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than any supernatural or otherworldly aspect of the Bible. Same goes for Gautama Siddhartha and Buddhist scriptures, though I confess I feel a stronger pull toward Jesus, sinner though I remain.
Oh no! A sinner, why? That sounds so harsh and judgmental, because if you feel that way about yourself chances are you feel that way about others.
I’m sure he does. Everyone’s a sinner, even you!
I beg to differ and I find you calling me a sinner rather offensive. It’s a religious way of thinking and I don’t think that way.
I don’t throw around the term too often, but like Andrew D says, at a basic level I do feel it’s true of almost everyone who’s ever lived. And I think it’s especially ok to admit that about oneself, though not to wallow in it or overlook the good that’s in all of us too. If I werent capable of improvement I’d be rather harsher and more judgmental than I am now—in fact I was when I was younger. The human condition is one of imperfection and struggle, but that needn’t lead to harsh judgment or judgmentalness.
Another thing: I’m very nice on certain days, but quite moody. I also diagnose myself with a decent heart overall, but I wasn’t born that kind. I’ve had to learn and develop some of the compassion I do have, though you have argued it’s either inherited, or not. 😉
Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear you feel that way, AJ. Actually, I’ve said the capacity for empathy is inherited. Compassion can be developed.
You needn’t pity me, if that’s what you mean by “feel sorry”. But you can if you want to.
I appreciate your distinction of terms, though I remain convinced that there is some major overlap between compassion and empathy. And I agree there is also much inheritedness.
Well said.
Thank you Clare. Nice to hear from you.
It’s always nice to hear from you with your well-balanced perspective on life.
With respect to your well articulated points I believe you are often speaking at crossed purposes with your interlocutors on these questions.
Your own circumscribed definitions of ‘belief’, ‘religion’, and ‘faith’ are not ones that many Christians would assent to, or even recognise as consonant with the terms as they are understood by Christians themselves.
The idea that one ‘chooses’ to believe or not and that ‘sincerity of belief’ exists somehow in proportion to how far it is automatic and untroubled by doubt – is a chimera of the scientistic mind.
In the Christian understanding ‘Faith’ and doubt are not opposed. They are, to borrow from Blake, ‘woven fine’. One believes so that one may understand. One lives in a certain way so that the Truth one has turned to face can manifest iself.
This is only as ‘performative’ as, say, love is. The performance and the spiritual state are ‘neither confounded nor divided’. That is why the metaphor of ‘love’ is so linked to the Incarnation and to the in-dwelling of the Holy Ghost.
Again, these may be words and ideas that make you uncomfortable but they are how the Christian thinks and speaks.
When you speak of religion as “a mechanism of first of all survival and ultimately of authoritarianism” you must be aware that these ideas are not sui generis themselves. They have a known philosophical parentage – in Enlightenment Radicalism and it’s brain-child Marxism. The mechanistic-systemic language you instinctively employ, the very words you use, are sadly today how the Feminist understands marriage and the ‘hetero-normative family’.
It only remains to be acknowledged that the word Faith, like so many key Christian concepts, has lost it’s proper meaning through common usage. It is a question of trust, not proof.
“faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” Faith exists out of time. It involves the inversion of cause and effect because its evidence is made it’s hypothesis.
There is a rich literature on the subject, going back to through Anselm of Canterbury to Augustine and ultimately, os course, to Isaiah.
“Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam“
Absolutely spot-on.
That’s all very well as long as you keep it to yourself and don’t inflict it on others.
Precisely. That’s largely the issue with all religions; indeed, a characteristic of them and their adherents.
What are we doing here, if not inflicting our rival faiths on others?
Subjecting ourselves to the terrifying reality of differing viewpoints?
Its so scary to see the projected madness so common to our age.
Two things that are not “woven fine” are “proper meaning” and “common usage” In what world or ‘sphere’ then does the former have any purchase on reality when it is very language usage that generates this?
What an interesting and thoughtful response. You have piqued the interest of this atheist; I read your reply several times and am interested to learn more.
“Little doubt; little faith.
Great doubt; great faith”
Faith to those who introduced respect for reason and later science to us… medieval monks and scholars, define faith rightly as the “reasoned assent of the will”. The enlightenment garbage if find heaped and tossed about so blindly is really scary for the profound ignorance it manifests. The Protestant Reformation and “enlightenment” reductio ideologies… like marxism and philosophical materialism literally define what “stupid” means.
Religion is not for control in the sense that you mean it, it is merely susceptible to that. The scourge you mention may be the scourge of control? Anyway, are you godly or demonic or stupid yourself, to look down so archly on people and their stupidity?
You make excellent sense.
Well said
So strange to see this in print. You are simply detailing the radical incoherence of materialist philosophical errors as philosophers like Peter Kreeft and Ed Feser (a former atheist) can show almost anyone not too far gone down the path of radical incoherence.
Yes, I believe it can. When you come to understand how powerfully Christianity has shaped the best civilization that ever existed, and how it points out the way to the best way to live as an individual, and community, you’ll probably conclude that it’s true.
We have fallen down a philosophical pit. It is actually quite easy to prove the existence of an infinite BEING as necessarily underlying and making possible, finite beings like us. We blinded ourselves in philosophy by losing sight of Aristotle and Aquinas’ solid depiction of what is and change. Potency and act. Form and Matter. Essencen and Existence. They are true and necessary categories for rational being. And the existence of God that virtually all of mankind believes in (PEW R) is easily demonstrable once we step back from the absurdities of Ockham’s nominalism and Hume’s bogus “explanation” of causation which is anything but. We have to return to sanity. Yes. Sanity.
Religious mumbo-jumbo will not get us anywhere. Retreating into superstitiopn is exactly what Islamists want us to do. very misguided thinking here.
Would Buddhism be good enough?
OK, from the downticks I guess that Buddhism is no good, so which Christianity is correct? The differences, surely, are based on interpretation of the bible and the Catholic/Protestant rift has always been the meaning of Christ’s blood in the performance of the Mass/Eucharist.
Where I live, for historical reasons we are big on chapel versions of Christianity*. There are Methodist/Baptist/ Episcopalian chapels on almost every main thoroughfare, although many are closed. The ‘normal’ religion is the Church of Wales which is allied to the CofE. Then there are people who knock on my doors and they interpret the Bible in a different and extreme way – Jehovah’s Witnesses and very occasionally Mormons.
Catholicism surged when Poles invaded the UK and has returned to quiet ways when the Poles have returned to Poland.
I argue with my wife about these different versions. She is Church of Wales but she does admit that feminists have taken over, some bibles has God as a she, the vicar is a she. They organise craft fares and bring & buy sales. Almost no men attend and the wardens are all members of the WI (don’t know what it’s called now).
I, personally, am against the extreme versions of the Bible, like Jehovah’s Witnesses because I think that they’re just people laying down laws. Finally, Catholicism is difficult because it’s members believe that The Pope should advise them on all aspects of life. Btw, the latest problem in Catholicism – a big problem – is that the priests want to address their flocks by facing them as they speak. The traditionally Catholic way during Mass is that the priest should face the altar when speaking. Many have been sacked and excommunicated. Can we take this seriously.
* In South Wales as people surged into the area to work in the mines in the 1800s, the C of E didn’t react quickly enough to fill the religious void. Local ‘priests’ set up makeshift chapels and things went from there.
May i suggest you may have taken the wrong starting point. You have set out looking for an association or organisation which can meet your own, quite legitimate, conceptions of what a church should be, do, and believe. But Christ asks you to begin with humility, and start in another direction – by examining your own conscience, and confessing your own sins. Then the way will begin to become clear.
There is only one Christian church – which is the mystical body of Jesus Christ, composed of the blessed company of all faithful people and in which, through hope, we are heirs of the everlasting kingdom.
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away”.
I find that personal prayer accompanied by a scrupulous attention to that distinction between what belongs to God and what belongs to me, as a sinner, to worry about and control, renders most worries about churchmanship less pressing.
There is much that goes on in my own worldly corner of the Universal Church that profoundly troubles me – until I recall my own sins.
As George Herbert so well said –
“The humble soul compos’d of love and fear
Begins at home, and lays the burden there,
When doctrines disagree.
He says, in things which use hath justly got,
I am a scandall to the Church, and not
The Church is so to me.”
Thank you very much for your comments, I found them both moving and helpful.
I think the real division in the Christian Church is between the New Testament (Christianity, based on Christ’s teaching and the God of LOVE) and the Old Testament (pre-Christian, based on the history and wrathful god of Judaism).
Christ taught that one doesn’t need the Church to talk to God (the Church of the time killed him for that). Where the Church has value is in concentrating many like minds towards a given objective (in the church service), in serving the community (by providing a healthy focal point and coordination of people’s efforts) and in missionary work overseas to help communities in other countries (in both spiritual and practical purposes).
Not really. I practiced it for many years before understanding its limitations. A godless form of self-help which on transplantation to the West tends to get short of its useful aspects of self discipline and ethics. Just look at the connivance of year average Western “Buddhist” with the horrific extent of abortion ( generally eschewed in all traditional forms of Buddhism.
As with Christianity, every Buddhist practice is not equal, which I suspect you must know. The Engaged Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hahn, emulated by the Christian MLK Jr., energized the faith and took it out of the far-off monastery or self-help realm.
If you’re against abortion don’t have one, as simple as that.
That is quite stupid, whether you agree or not. It’s like saying if you are against slavery, then don’t have a slave.
That might be a very good first step.
John Adam’s didn’t have slaves, then prepared his gifted son to pursue abolition of slavery. Truly we need to pursue the abolition of child sacrifice. If “shout your abortion!!!” Followed by “if I didn’t have that abortion I wouldn’t have such a nice house and a great job” doesn’t give you pause, maybe it’s time for you to view an actual abortion (all that tearing limb from limb while a confined little person tries in vain to get away might move your heart). Until you remember the nice house and the great job. Oh, and let’s not forget the mani/pedis, the cocktails, the shoes, the creepy boyfriends. We don’t need to do this.
Yes, definitely.
Don’t be silly there is absolutely no comparison and I really can’t be bothered to explain the difference.,
The similarity is the question of what counts as a human being with rights. I am not saying that abortion opponents are right, but to meet their arguments about the rights of unborn /fetuses as if it was just a question of personal preferences is stupid in the same way as consider the question of slavery as a question of personal preference. There are many good arguments for abortion rights, specifically focusing on women’s autonomy over their bodies, but to meet the objection that it also involves another beings autonomy as if it was only a question of personal preference is not serious.
Surely not a bad idea though?
I agree.
Hi Michael, we used to walk slowly round the same shrine room, many moons ago.
Good question. While well known for their peaceful disposition, many are also adept at martial arts and can look after themselves.
I largely agree. It is no coincidence that Israel is currently fighting an existential war against Shia Islam, supported by Christian countries.
There’s a philosophical argument that everything turns into its opposite. You can see this more easily in the example of “barter” becoming “money” becoming “credit” (i.e. from concrete goods into a thing that doesn’t exist).
You can argue that the faith of Christianity eventually became the reason of Enlightenment. You can argue that Capitalism eventually became Communism (in certain parts of the world at least).
You can now argue that Christianity has cycled through Enlightenment, Capitalism and Communism into “Nice Consumerism” – a land of plenty where people are only allowed to be nice to each other. But the land of plenty is getting threadbare and the mechanics of being ‘nice’ have resulted in divisive and authoritarian power plays – and this has undermined the long march to Utopia.
So if a more ‘muscular’ Christianity is flexing its muscles that is perhaps a result of previous iterations? ‘Nice Consumerism’ would have you believe that ‘God is Love’ but I suspect the original face of Christianity was ‘God is Respect’. Perhaps it is becoming more obvious that there really are sheep and goats?
The original face of Christianity is unchanged. It’s called Orthodoxy, and it’s mostly unknown in a West that’s been dominated by Catholicism, which, indeed, is the origin of the dialectical cannibalisation you mention. All these self-centred, self-serving, proud ideologies have their root in the Pope cutting the West off from the Body of Christ.
You don’t need to suspect what the original face of Christianity was. Go to your local Orthodox parish and see it for yourself.
Isn’t the original face that of Jesus of Nazareth, who opposed every orthodoxy of his time?
He didn’t oppose orthodox Judaism. He said he came to fulfil every last word of it.
But he opposed most orthodox practitioners, and made glosses upon and even direct changes to received scripture (“You have heard it said that __, but I say unto you _”). Hardly a conformist or staunch literalist.
He spoke, of course, like one who has authority, not as the scribes and Pharisees do. And the people were astonished at his doctrine.
And then to transcend it, utterly.
His legitimacy was grounded in the orthodoxy, but his teaching was radically different (the spiritual God of LOVE, not the materialistic wrathful god).
Actually, it might instead have begun with credit, that then turned into money, and then degenerated into barter.
At least, that is what David Graeber argues in Debt: the first 5000 years.
Opposites are extremes. And in fleeing from one extreme, humanity has great difficulty in identifying the mid point and stopping there, instead tending to stray towards the opposite extreme. A prime example is the way Russian communism provided a breeding ground for nazi fascism and many people then veered back again towards communism, which then gave birth to McCarthyism.
In fleeing from the totalitarian far left trend given wings by the pandemic,we have to beware of the lures of serious fascism (not the ‘fascism’ currently attributed to anyone to the right of the political centre) and religious extremism.
The recurrent and persistent failure of Christians, both ‘cultural’ and creedal to grasp the metaphorical and spiritual nature of the Christian ‘struggle’ has ever been the broad way to Gehenna. And needs must it be so –
“And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive”
For all this talk of St Michael’s noble deeds, sincere Christians would do rather better to remember the ear of Malchus –
“Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?”
At the centre of the gospel is an inversion of the fleshly hierarchy of power. That is the entire point of Christs message, that is the un-expected solution and the whole essence of His fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies.
Yet time and time again Christians reach for the sword of Simon Peter which Christ has expilicitly told them to put down, thinking it is precisely the thing God is asking of them.
What do people think Christ offers his followers? Is it ease and the fulfillment of their earthly aspirations?
“Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you:
But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy”
I’m in primary agreement with your challenging post. Many honor Jesus of Nazareth with their lips, while their hearts remain far from him; we don’t need a return to that form of traditional, literalist faith. Many feel the first inspiration, or even the insistent calling. But few will take up the cross and follow. Nor can that be expected of most sons, daughters, or householders.
Who among us can honor this teaching:
Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you
What you have observed so well in life was drawn for us first by Christ Himself in His Parable of the Sower.
“…he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”
Amen. I’m still praying for an abundant and wholesome late harvest. I’ve already had the shallow ground shooting up too fast and the rocky ground experiences.
May the force be with you!
An interesting rejoinder to the impractical notion of equal outcomes.
Just a personal view but ‘hard teachings’ like these shouldn’t be a barrier to engaging with Christianity. When read in context, they come from where Jesus challenges followers who show signs of complacency, or understanding his teaching to be of another set of rules, the practice of which will set them apart.
The message is broadly: “..you want to know the ‘rules’…well how do you like them apples?”
So everyone is in the same boat and there’s no achievable exam grade that will put you in a different one. Nevertheless, continue to live by faith…
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me…for my yoke is easy and my burden is light
I agree there are different levels of appeal, and that one needn’t take the hardest, narrowest path to find guidance and solace in the gospels.
After all, he addressed the multitude largely in parables, that they might learn even without catching on to the full power of the message.
I think you are overreading that passage. Jesus doesn’t say that he who live by the sword is damned to Gehenna, and he’s not shy about saying that in other places. All he’s saying is if you live that way, you’ll die that way.
Small o, orthodox, Christian faith has never been pacifist. I doubt you know better than the Church Fathers.
Thank you for your challenging and informed response.
I am actually not a pacifist by inclination or persuasion and i would be interested and grateful to read anything you could share that might have lead you to speak with such assurance on the question.
Equally, I am no great scholar of the Church Fathers, however I cannot see that they were either unanimous or programmatic on the subject. Certainly not until Augustine. It strikes me that many of the Fathers of the Early Church – Marcellus, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and others, in fact looked at the Scriptures and preached what we might call a kind of Chrisitan Pacifism – although the term is an anachronism.
The very early Ignatius of Antioch said “Nothing is more precious than peace, by which all war, both in heaven and earth, is brought to an end.”
Hippolytus of Rome went so far as to excommunicate the solidery “Any catechumen or believer who wishes to become a soldier must be dismissed from the church because they have despised God.”
Origen (if you accept him as Patristic) added “we no longer take swords against a nation, nor do we learn anymore to make war, having become sons of peace for the sake of Jesus, who is our Lord.”
The rigorously orthodox Tertullian himself said “First, can any believer enlist in the military? Second, can any soldier, even those of the rank and file or lesser grades who neither engage in pagan sacrifices nor capital punishment, be admitted into the church? No on both counts”
The context of course is Pre-Constantinian but therefore all the more relevant and challenging for us as Christ’s Religion once again relinquishes the Civil Sceptre in the West.
I don’t have the books at hand. Obviously St. Augustine is the golden source on just war theory. Here are a couple of factoids though from memory.
1) In Luke, during the Passion and the betrayal of Judas, Jesus explicitly tells his disciples to buy swords. That’s not the act of a pacifist.
2) Jesus violently attacks the moneylenders in the Temple, whipping them. Again, not behavior you’d expect from a pacifist.
3) The early Church included Roman soldiers, including the Centurion mentioned in the Gospels. The issue with soldiers was not their profession of arms, but the fact that they had to participate in pagan sacrifices as part of their military ritual. Many, many of these Christian soldiers were martyred.
4) Finally, St, Michael the Archangel is explicitly called out in Revelations for having waged war against Satan and the fallen angels.
Yes, I’ve encountered those interpretations before and I’m afraid they have not convinced me so far.
One has to be very careful with the Gospel of Luke in particular. ‘Misunderstanding’ is almost the characteristic theme, running right through it and one must tread carefully lest one makes the same errors the Apostles did who constantly heard but did not understand what Christ was saying.
“We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.”
Peter and Simon take literally Christs instruction to ‘buy a sword’ when his meaning is spiritual and ethical – prepare for the persecution to come.
All this, it strikes me, is made clear in Ephesians 6:10-18 when the metaphor of the ‘Armour of God’ is spelled out in great detail.
The continuous tradition of the Church Fathers, East and West, is that Christianity is not pacifist. In the early days it may have acted that way, because it had no hope of fighting Rome, but once you have a Christian society, pacifism makes no sense.
What’s the point of building a Christian society, and evangelizing people, if you won’t resist an enemy who attacks? If Christian hadn’t fought the Muslim invasions, there would be no Christians today.
Interesting list, thank you. The trouble with the Ante-Nicene Fathers’ views on military service is that there was pretty slim likelihood that any of them was going to have to serve in the Roman army or to fight. There are of course a few counter-examples (e.g. Marcellus the Centurion, a relatively authentic martyr of the Great Persecution), but for the most part the authors you ciite were learned civilians living comfortable lives in Mediterranean cities well away from the Rhine, Danube and Persian frontiers where the army was deployed keeping them safe. You can line up Cadoux’s work on Christian pacifism against Harnack’s Militia Christi and a consistent doctrine fails to emerge.
The Church went through its Dark Ages, when appalling violence was inflicted in the name of Christianity. The newer Islamism still hasn’t grown out of that, so we can be understanding, while still refusing to tolerate it.
The ethical warrior who fights for what s/he believes in is usually considered a heroic figure. But they are unlikely to die a peaceful death. That’s often part of the altruistic sacrifice.
This confusion is caused by the misleading inclusion of the Old Testament in the Christian Holy Bible. The OT talks about the wrathful god who chose a tribe and encouraged it into asserting itself within the region by armed means. That of course doesn’t sit well with the teachings of Christ about a spiritual life guided by the God of LOVE that is the foundation of true Christianity.
At the same time, one can see the attraction of the OT ways in dealing with the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and crime in general (organized or not).
Thankyou Arthur
Surely Christianity can only help us if it is true in an absolute sense!?
Please explain that exclamatory plea!?
If Christianity is not true (absolute rather than relative truth) then it is a hoax.
It’s not a binary question. The key features of Christianity…truth, peace, mercy, justice…are always questionable in human affairs. Pilate asks Jesus ‘what is truth?’ and receives no answer because God’s truth, peace etc passeth all understanding,..
So until we can see clearly, as per Corinthians, we get by with faith, hope and love.
Has it?
Neither Ali or Dawkins have said that.
Mary, I think more than “young men conditioned by video gaming” is afoot, but I understand your confusion.
As Christianity recedes, the West returns to worship of the fertility gods. For example, Keir Starmer.
Starmer is a Fertility God? Who knew?
I think the meaning is fertilizer.
Those characteristically have a sinister companion, greedy and venal, somehow showy and shadowy at the same time, partly an adviser, partly an enforcer, and certainly not a fertiliser. Lord Alli is under investigation for failure to register his interests correctly.
For my part, I find it difficult to imagine a couple trying to conceive a child praying to Starmer.
Quite. Seems like a guarantee of sterility! ;o)
Comes across to me as the god of bureaucratic mediocrity.
but with a plunging birth rate
Too deep for me.
Perhaps it’s all showbiz.
That’s all Brand is, Mary. He doesn’t have a sincere bone in his body.
I agree, he’s just bandwagoning yet again.
And he’s gone to the US because he knows if he tried all this in the UK he’d be laughed out of the theatre. I can’t help but feel very cynical about all these internet hucksters, including Peterson who can’t seem to decide whether he’s a Christian or not – kerching!
I don’t know them personally, but when it comes to sincerity I think there’s a world of difference between Peterson and Brand.
Though I would offer him a warning that tangling with the living God might well bring him more than he bargained for
The least feminized Christianity is the original issue: Orthodox Christianity, which somehow or other Mary Harrington does not mention. Even the Latins, who at Vatican II essentially gave up on ascetic discipline by abolishing their Friday fasts and watering down Lent, have the bearded-lady “I trust you Jesus” pictures. We Orthodox still depict Christ as the enthroned Pantocrator, hand raised in blessing, but stern. We still keep fast days and fasting periods with serious dietary restrictions which all-told cover almost half the year. The little Orthodox community in Kansas I serve as a subdeacon has a large number of mostly male converts and catecheumens who are soldiers at a nearby military base or recently discharged soldiers, converting from the Latin church, various forms of protestantism, neo-paganism, and even satanism. The author Frederica Mathewes-Green, the wife of an Orthodox priest, commented on Orthodox churches being full of enthusiastic male converts, dragging their slightly bewildered wives with them, which is certainly what things look like in the Antiochian Archdiocese of which both her parish and my little chapel are a part.
Christ is risen!
Much of that sounds like cleaning the outside of the cup—which won’t cut it with any good homemaker.
Soldiers and police forces are probably the people most in need of belief in a loving God. And their front line experience probably presents the greatest challenge to that belief.
This is a very US-focussed article. In the rest of the Western world, people have largely moved on from religion. That is not to say there aren’t still religious people, but religion itself isn’t really the focus of public consciousness.
Good comment. Could we imagine Two-Tier finishing his speech with ‘God bless the UK’? The USA is the centre of demonstrative Christianity – you can’t just have a religion, you have to do and say things to prove it.
Yes, I’ve often wondered why the US has evolved differently to the rest of the Western World in this regard.
It’s because of the conflation of the idea of divine providence (at work in the journeys and survival of early religious settlers) with that of American exceptionalism.
I think the Victorian leaders of the British Empire were similarly inspired.
Indeed. Religiosity is a nightmare here in the US. And churches don’t pay taxes. That includes Scientology. It’s all so hypocritical. I make a point of saying I’m an atheist just to let people know what an atheist is like. It takes courage to “come out” here in the Midwest. Not that I was ever anything but one, being a Brit.
Yes, it is hard to imagine the US having an openly atheist President, whereas Australia has had a number of openly atheist PMs.
So true, it will never happen. But Australia hasn’t yet had a female Prime minister has it? Hopefully, we’ll beat you on that one and I suspect Kamala is a closet atheist.
I’d be more concerned about getting a decent leader into office, rather than worrying about their sex and ethnicity.
We used to call them “godless communists” during the Cold War, at least, in the barracks, over beers.
Yes, Julia Gillard was PM of Australia. In fact, I think she was one of the atheists.
It hasn’t. Christianity still plays a very important part of life in the parts of Latin America that haven’t been subjugated by communist totalitarianism.
I’d be thrilled if mainstream US Christians were more about the doing than the saying.
Through multiple charitable groups doing what the federal govt can’t or won’t, they ARE engaging in the doing. It’s happening through organizations like Samaritan’s Purse, Mercury One, and others while Joe Biden basically tells the affected to go to hell, the money has run out because Ukraine is a higher priority.
I was making a generalization about mainstream American Christians—among whom I count the Charismatics that include a few of my extended-family loved ones—not saying they are ALL just talk. Far from it. Churches do far more good than their knee jerk opponents want to admit.
I will note that Joe Biden, with all his faults and frequent, visible anger, is some kind of genuine, churchgoing Christian.
Many on the other side of the issue, as well as certain game-playing conservatives, say Biden hasn’t approved enough aid for Ukraine, nor fast enough.
With rare exceptions like the stimulus checks Trump gave out—a correct decision in my view but one that put a major hurt on the federal budget—there never seems to be enough money to help those affected most.
That’s true of Democratic leadership too. But it’s truer of Republicans, generally speaking. Where’s all the voluntary, individual charity libertarians like to reference in the abstract?
Where’s all the voluntary, individual charity libertarians like to reference in the abstract?
I already mentioned two groups that rely on voluntary participation – Mercury One and Samaritan’s Purse. Whether libertarians are involved is immaterial. The groups are acting. Entities like the so-called Cajun Navy in the South also jump into the fray, sometimes at personal risk, to help people they do not know.
Yes, ok. What is material and relevant to your assessment is your exclusive mention of Biden as blameworthy for (I’m inferring) widespread economic woes and projection of a “go to hell” attitude or response onto him. Based on what by the way? And how was that relevant to the initial topic? No matter, I like to pivot too:
Tell me what legislation or relief the purse-holding Republican House will let pass under any Democratic president, in their current “Party of no! plus MAGA” incarnation. Or what relief they have proposed themselves.
With no Help for unwanted children woman are forced to have. They’re against abortion but also welfare.
Maybe people should only bring children into this world if they can afford to raise them properly?
Biden is irrelevant. Given the state of his mental faculties, it clearly hasn’t been him who has been running the country the last 4 years. The question is, who has been running it, since Kamala doesn’t seem to have the capacity for such a task. She also comes across as a figurehead and if she wins in November it obviously won’t be her running things as of 2025.
You should try Brazil, where the people are groaning under the world’s heaviest tax burden yet the president and his spendthrift wife go gallavanting around the world, renting entire floors in luxury hotels. As in his first two terms, Lula has spent far more time out of the country than in it. Like so many fake ‘leaders of the people’, he relishes in enjoying the fruits of luxury his power gives him access to.
Yes. What I meant was different. You can’t just be Christian, you have to tell people about it. If you don’t say it you are offending them.
Well I admit I deliberately pivoted from your point. While your statement is an exaggeration, it’s quite true that high office is hard to attain without some form of declared Christianity, all the more so for all elected presidents to date. Even an 18th century deist like Jefferson would make reference to the Bible and God, and Madison, a likely deist, wrote in an 1825 letter: “Belief in a God All-powerful, wise & good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources […]”
I guess that’s Americans for ya! Still, at that time their British counterparts were usually quite demonstratively theistic too. When did that stop over there, 1950ish?
The ‘revolting’ sixties, imho
‘Aint that the truth!! Love is action.
Amen to that!
I wonder if Sir Keir is really the thought-through atheist he claims. Just as US politicians have to say they are Christians, left-wing politicians here have to claim to be atheists. To do otherwise, in both cases, is career suicide.
Doesn’t Sir Keir belong to a liberal synagogue (his wife being Jewish – but Christianity is also Jewish!)
TTK is an atheist and it shows.
Religion has many faces. What is the difference between neomarxists or climate hysterics and the taliban ? None. All are bent on the destruction of traditions which they believe are a threat to their religion’s supremacy. They all are totally convinced to be the bewarers of truth itself and everybody else is some sort of satanic agent. Wake up.
The first two aren’t actually going to kill you if they think you are an unbeliever?
Are you quite sure of that? ;o)
With respect, London – the presumptive future of my country made manifest – is the most religious city in the United Kingdom. Two thirds of Londoners describe themselves as religiously observant. Anyone who has passed through Brixton on the Lords Day or Edgeware Road on Ṣalāh al-Jumuʿa can tell you that the demise of God has been greatly exaggerated.
We do not recognise it because it does not conform to our expectations of how the future was supposed to go, but there it is.
I appreciate that many people in the UK are personally religious, but religion is no longer at the centre of the nation as a whole. Same here in Australia.
That’s one of the things that makes Australia a delightful place to live. My family lives there and I’ve been there many times.
You seem to be very sure when speaking for the entire nation in this thread. I thought diversity was supposed to be the prevailing credo in the UK now?
My point is this – what religion is Starmer? The answer is “Who knows, who cares”. That is not the case in the US.
How has moving on worked out for them? In one nation after another, the same political upheaval is occurring as the US is seeing. Multiple nations have their version of Trump. Meanwhile, you are importing people for whom religion is very much a focus of public consciousness, people who are willing to force that dogma onto you.
I can only speak personally on that one. Both my parents were religious at some point in their lives, and my mother remained so to the end of her life. I often went to Church with her, but decided at a very young age that there was nothing in that place for me, and accordingly there was never a time at which I could accurately be described as “religious”. It is working out just fine. I have no regrets, and were I to drop dead immediately on completing this post, I’d be fine with it.
Pascal’s Wager might be relevant!
I don’t think so. If the Christian God exists, and is as he is described by the modern Church, I want no part of him.
That doesn’t address the question Alex asked, Martin.
I can only speak from a “local” perspective. it’s working out really well for us Australians.
So true.
The very visual and lived experience of people in Britain and across many Christian heritage countries is one of moral, democratic and physical decline. This is creating a huge void which commercialism and capitalism cannot possibly fill and so men are turning back to Christianity where many are finding substance, purpose and a sense of belonging to something way beyond this shallow world.
Good luck to those who manage to find substance, purpose and a sense of belonging in Christianity, but frankly, that isn’t going to happen for most of us.
My wife has found this. When you work you have a sense of purpose and rhythm in your life but when you retire that purpose disappears.
Way ahead of you there! I’m never going to retire! It would be the death of me!
Because your job defines you?
No, because I don’t have anything else I particularly wanted to do from 9-5 on weekdays. I tried having 6 months off about 10 years ago, but I hated it. Before you jump in and say that I must be a workaholic who has no life, I should say that I take four overseas holidays a year, and am in a gigging band that has just put out an album of original music.
Yes, it’s on YouTube Music, Spotify and similar. The band is called AYA, and the album is called “Spirit Calling”. If you want to start with what would have been the “single” back in the day, that would be “Frank” (which is about Frank Zappa). The droning instrument in all but one track is the digeridoo.
Retiring from one thing doesn’t mean you can’t find purpose in something else.
I find purpose in any number of things. It’s just that they aren’t “9-5 on weekday” things.
Retirement means doing far more as a human being that you ever managed as a ‘worker’. Notwithstanding the plethora of (former) work relationships, retirement offers opportunities to be part of real community, if you simply take the plunge. So get out, meet people, join a good church, embrace U3A, help others, volunteer, build things, get people round, drink coffee (with others), organise events, go to events, re-connect with friends from decades back. Welcome to retirement.
You may have included this in one of your broad terms, but I would like to specify one very valuable use of the knowledge and experience acquired over a career and that is teaching, which could be local or in a Third World country that has special need of such things.
That’s why so many retirees turn to volunteer work.
Exactly!
The same thing that has always happened with religion – people controling other people with a fantasy construct.
That doesn’t mean no good can come from it, many will find happiness and contentment.
Others will view it with a cynical eye and see it for what it is – the biggest grift of all time.
Similar to the controlling fantasy construct coming from Ed Miliband, in fact.
Nobody comes close to seeing something for all of what is truly is with “a cynical eye”. That’s just yet another cloudy lens—a very common one.
“All seems that the infected spy / As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye” —Alexander Pope
I don’t actually think there is anything wrong with taking cynical approach to religion, especially organised religion.
I prefer to read across different religious cultures and time periods, see what is similar between them, what is different and why people decided that worship of God/ God’s was something that was necessary in the first place.
Christianity for example, is relatively new in the grand scheme of things. It seems to me an eclectic mix of various influences from across the middle east. The religions and alchemists of ancient egypt for example influenced people like plato, who spent twenty years studying philosophy in egypt I believe, his work then influenced various writers in Western cultures including Seneca who’s writings are thought to appear in parts of the bible for example, he was alive around the same time as Jesus was said to be alive, and his stoic teachings were highly influencial at the time. Christianity can be a bit stiff, and there is a rift now between science and religion that didn’t really exist in the way it does now, I have been reading alchemical works from the 16th – 17th centuries and they combined the study of science with the study of religion.
Science is today’s cynical approach in some ways but it could be used to investigate the existence of say God, or a consciousness that you could call god, things like the measurement problem, time crystals and black holes and dark matter all defy the laws of quantum physics and even subjected to the most cynical examination can not yet be explained by science.
I don’t have a problem with Christianity, but I find the Bible hard work, and rather convoluted, the hermetica, the tao and the works of people like plato and seneca can be clearer, easier to digest and quite a lot less bossy. What is common between them is the idea of balance, duality in everything and the idea of being a good citezen in order to keep the whole of society healthy. Mary I feel gets a bit lost talking about angels and demons, I feel she makes religion sound a bit like it’s for crazies, which is shame. I understand why the cynical comments.
I agree that Harrington takes a condescending and dismissive view of religion. A reductive one too. Cynical? Probably; just about all the elements are there.
I think you may be overlooking the distinction between skepticism and cynicism. If not, I think outright cynicism may guard against credulity and getting scammed, but it also preemptively shuts out much of the beauty in people, things, and ideas.
You miss my point. The point is that even the most cynical person cannot dismiss the fact there are a number of things that science has to tried to explain, but can’t.
My post was written quickly so it’s a bit pants – the hermetica had an enormous influence on the Greeks and the in ancient Rome too, also on the alchemists that I’m reading about at the moment, it is in texts like these and in the works of people like seneca that you will find the roots of Christianity, these texts can be considerably less abstract than the bible and easier to read. Everyone on here seems either very dismissive of religion or entirely hung up on Bible verse, I feel like that’s a bit of a shame. Mary has failed to recognise that angels and demons are also a reflection of the idea of duality in everything that is a reoccurring theme in many ancient religious texts – I find it very frustrating to be honest. It’s a narrow minded piece.
I chose not to engage with what you identify as your main point, in part because I had already overshared even by my standards on this comment board—but here I go again…
As it happens I fully agree with you there, and sometimes quote Hamlet in this vein: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Of course in Shakespeare’s time “natural philosophy” was the prevailing term for what we call science. For instance: Science has attempted or presumed to “explain away” consciousness itself, unsuccessfully.
I also agree in part with your assessment of the Bible. However, as you know the Bible is not a single work but several dozen now bound together in one codex. I don’t assign the same depth nor sacred weight to every line of all its books, written by many hands—however divinely led or earthbound—across many centuries.
Kings and Chronicles, let’s say, seem to contain little with the power of Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, or Isaiah. That’s putting aside the Gospels themselves, which I do hold in special reverence, but not as literal, infallible truth in every verse.
Some parts of the Bible are bossy, and some of its sermons are preachy (imagine that). But Ecclesiastes has a comparatively detached and Classical tone, and the Psalms contain notes both of ecstasy and soulful self-searching. Genesis in particular has much in the way of superb and concise old-fashioned storytelling. What’s the tone of the Bible? Almost anything you can think of. Its variety would probably be even more exhaustive if some of its historical editors and censors hadn’t been so prissy. (Then again, it’d also have more dull and obscure parts).
And I agree about Harrington. She’s better at showing balance and respect when there’s nothing beyond the empirical or falsifiable to consider. When she kept using the Briticism “barmy”, my eyes glazed over a bit.
*Lastly, I also take an interest it the Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, and Dhammapada, to name three “extra-canonical” texts.
No wonder, then, that Gen Z men are returning to religious practice: with div > p > a”> div > p > a”> div > p > a”> div > p > a”>over 90% of them raised on video games
First of all the figures don’t seem to point to that. Females aren’t too far behind in activity. Nor do I really believe them. 90% of young men 16-24, and 58% of men 65 and older. That sounds absurd.
But besides that, this might be a return to Christian beliefs, but those beliefs that young men supposedly return to are the ‘peace, welcome and safety, and the deification of “the vulnerable” and “the marginalised”’ that the church took up as a way to make itself relevant in a world turning away from it. It was window dressing. Jesus is not God. God is the ultimate force and to truly believe in God is to fear him. Russell Brand, I’m pretty sure does not tremble at the thought of God reviewing his short and shallow life.
The return of the demons is us. It’s always there. Belief in God was to accept that and to know it and live with it an attempt to overcome it. These boys, supposedly, returning to that are not confronting this idea, they’re looking for a mother who will soothe them in their worries, worries that have never been any different from generation to generation.
Mary says “I don’t blame those young men who read the signs and portents, and conclude that the world really is stranger than the moderns thought and maybe gods and demons actually are real.”
I don’t believe that’s what they’re doing, It’s an interesting angle from MH but it doesn’t add up, They have never had any experience of gods and demons to even feel a shiver down their spine. Technology might be a handy metaphor for the things that bend us out of shape, but it’s not the cause or the evidence of our demons.
These boys have no idea of who they are, what they should be or what they could be. They will drift into anything that warms them.
Bit dismissive, i thought.
With the internet, fashion spreads so quickly that you no longer see it as a fashion. Could we be talking about the fashion of the moment – especially for younger people, meaning in this case less than 60 years old?
Surely (I am no expert) having a faith is more than seeing a video on YouTube and then meeting your friends for a discussion about it.
Thoughts and ideas are very different to ‘faith’, which embodies confidence and trust.
It is still a mystery why so many ‘feminists’ are embracing or allying with a religion where women are defined to be worth half a man.
so many ‘feminists’ are embracing or allying with a religion
I didn’t know that. What do you mean by “so many “feminists”? And why the quotes?
Anything is considered better than “Uptight White Suburbia who hates things that are different”. Anything to “Stick it to Daddy/consumer materialist society”.
What, Islam?
Makes about as much sense as all the LGBT+ who are supporting Hamas – a gang who would push them off buildings if they showed up in Gaza.
There again, to what extent is Moslem misogeny supported by their womenfolk. One would suspect it would be hard to sustain if they were all against it (regardless of the threat of violence – aren’t they the ones who prepare the food?).
Very nice thank you. I’m not sure I fully agree with the thesis, but very interesting nevertheless.
Mary, you’re a smart lady, but I get the sense that your determination not to appear “barmy” (i.e. to lose the support of certain right-thinking atheistic/agnostic types) is holding you back. Why do I say this? Because you never once in this article give a reason why the spiritual perspective is insane – you just play to the gallery and assert that it is.
Demons are real. Yes, that truth might be frightening at first, but once you accept the spiritual nature of existence, everything makes much more sense. Not to mention the fact that the He who makes the demons tremble, our Lord Jesus Christ, is equally real.
You are still trying to appear respectable in the eyes of the world. This is, with the greatest respect, a fool’s game. It would be far better to just admit you’re a Christian, that you reject the devil and all his works and ways, repent, and be baptised. And stop trying to analyse ongoing events through the very worldly paradigm that has failed us so comprehensively: for instance, with your torturous argument about video games.
“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.” John 15: 18-19
Agree. The idea should be to give both/all sides of an argument and let the readers decide. She is a God on UnHerd but here she is guilty of playing to the audience.
Not only are they real, but AI may well be giving them a sort of “portal” to come into our world. Like one big high-tech Oujia board.
What better way to invade our world than through an AI system that we are already expecting to think independently of its programmers?
Awesome article! You’ve really outdone yourself Mary. Though not so sure Nietzsche kick-started the rise of militant secularism. The rationalist materialist egregore was gathering strength from as early as the 16th century. A century before Beyond Good & Evil, militant atheists were banging the ‘Religion is a form of social control’ drum, saying things like ‘Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.’ It did indeed take WWI & WW2 to trigger a sharp decline in church attendance in some parts, but the numbers had stayed relatively high more due to social inertia & absence of modern entertainment tech. A Secular Age by Charles Taylor is maybe the best book for tracking the centuries long process of disenchantment, and the slow rise & later relative exhaustion of anti-clericalism. Even by 2007 Taylor has already discerned that the rationalist egregore was over a century past its peak of spiritual strength, and that the future struggle would be not against atheism but against dangerous forms of faith. As Steiner put it, the brief materialist interlude was helpful in that it allowed mankind to experience full freedom of thought. Even when atheism was at its peak of power Romans 8:28 applied. In the struggles to come, die hard anti-clerics are likely to be even more helpful though unwitting allies to the righteous.
Tom Holland also addresses the decline of the church in his excellent book, ‘Dominion’.
Thank you, will try to read that if time allows, have enjoyed other work by TH.
Discussion is invaluable in helping people to position their own feelings within the general morass.
If the C of E stopped banging on about gay marriage and transvestite vicars and slavery and instead went back to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer they would find they had the last word in manly liturgy bound up in a single volume.
We posit both atoms and demons for the same reasons – to make sense. Sometimes one makes more than the other.
There’s nothing macho about it at all – it’s the usual American snake oil types worshipping at the altar of Mammon. There’s a sucker born every minute! Kerching!
So what were the likes of Brand, Peterson, Brett Weinstein, Tulsi Gabbard, Jimmy Dore, and other speakers selling in the transactional sense of the word?
Themselves. Brand by name brand by nature. The American church has deep pockets. If Brand wants to proselytise why not do it in atheist England? Ah, well…
How could war even start, between industrialised nations, when its conclusion might be another Hiroshima?
A substantive question amid the theorizing. Let’s ask the likes of Biden, Starmer, and others in the NATO orbit who seem intent on doing just that.
They know not what they do?
It’s the only logical conclusion I have.
It is a very dangerous game of brinkmanship.
How anybody can seriously conceive of ‘winning’ a nuclear war is insane, as all the evidence of war shows that everybody loses, even if some lose more than others.
God may not exist, but man’s need of him must…
The link between what the author witnesses and the video games is quite forced.
UnHerd has much too diverse and heterogeneous an audience for vague musings about religion to be heard in the same key — so I will limit my comment to wondering why Mary would date Christianity’s retreat from the public sphere to Nietzsche. There were prominent and influential philosophers, theologians and other intellectuals attacking traditional orthodoxy for decades before Nietzsche. Schleiermacher, for instance, died ten years before Nietzsche was even born.
Very much so. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), as one more example, said about as much as he dared against the origin and spread of Christianity—and he said a lot!
Feminization of Christianity is not new, it is original. As other religions became more available in Europeanized cultures the 1960’s, feminized Xtn became one of the issues that drives people into the Heathen revival. You can see this by comparing the Nine Noble Virtues with the Ten Commandments. For example, hard work and courage are not in the Ten Commandments.
The religious texts of the Abrahamic ‘god’ are mishmashes of folk history, mythology, storytelling, invention, and observations of what was thought to serve primitive societies or those who want to dominate them; by turns ignorant, incoherent, inconsistent, indecipherable, contradictory, and wrong; selected, curated, edited, translated, interpreted, and changed to suit the author; and adopted, adapted, franchised, and imposed by the ‘owners’ to serve their own or their organisation’s interests. They purport to be the revelations and messages to mankind of a god with up to 3, mutually exclusive and quite different, personas and messages, which show no knowledge or understanding on the part of the originator of its ‘creation’ beyond what would be known and understood by the societies of the time, and revealed to a tiny and remote fraction of mankind. Considering that if god decided to reveal himself, and tell humanity what he wanted, it would be the most momentous events in human history. You’d think that a god worthy of the name would make a better job of it, wouldn’t you?
I welcome all this, as signs of the times, evidence of the last days. (I think we’ve been in “the last days” since the Ascension.)
My biggest worry about Russell Brand et al is that he is completely sincere, but doesn’t give himself enough time to grow into a mature Christian, off camera. (Thinking of you, Kanye.)
Genuine movements of God and the heavenly host are long, messy, complex, and multifaceted. Rabbit trails lead some off into the weeds. It will all sort out. The most important stories will not happen online. Live it out locally.
There are forces at play that we do well to recognise for what they are.
The materialistic scientism of this present age is accelerating towards self destruction. It does all seem very bleak and, indeed, very sinister.
The route through is going to be messy and it will become a real test of faith rather than a test of human ingenuity and human moral courage. Christ will not allow these dark powers to combine with human rebellion and destroy his world. Either they will be restrained or there will be a decisive divine intervention.
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin …..
As Timothy Gordon wrote, since the Prot. Reformation and horribly named “enlightenment”, we dumped actual intelligible causality in Aristotle’s Act and Potency, Form and Matter, leaving only unintelligible matter. So now we ask, “what is a woman?” Change is the actualization of a potential and indeed we ARE actual and potential. Causation is being acted upon. Hume couldn’t see this with his disastrous unempirical empiricism. In the immediate here and now one must posit a Pure Act with no potential requiring actualization… BEING… God… to make sense and indeed render anything intelligible. We must return to the sane metaphysics of Aquinas whose “form and matter” was the bedrock of western sanity , philosophy and science in our first universities. Peter Kreeft is an excellent easy read philosopher as is Ed Feser, Timothy Gordon and others. And of course we are free willed rational beings… what spiritual actually means… in existence that is at its core spiritual. Final Cause is reality. Why we are moved to love and know and see beauty, truth and justice. And as to a spiritual source to evil, a demon? Of course. Rational free willed beings can only be moved by something equally rational and free willed. But we are made in the image of Pure BEING. Why our universe is intelligible and investigable by reason. Say your prayers and buckle up. And learn some philosophy. The sane stuff! Cheers
Sorry but this is trash. Learn what an egregore is before you bandy around the word. Do some digging. Interview James Lindsay. He’s a fundamentalist type. That’s interesting. I say this as a born again Christian who owns a lot of Alice A. Bailey (and Theosophy) books. The IDW; The UFO stuff; So much is hidden beneath the surface of these movements. Write a book not an article. George Adamski! Desmond Leslie! Ask Unherd for an advance. Good luck!
Perhaps Jesus wishes He hadn’t been found by Brand or Trump.
Was this whole techno-spiritual war business was started by C S Lewis and his 1945 novel That Hideous Strength? In this story technology is joined with human biology to summon demons to assist the perfection of the human race. It was at this time that Turing wanted intelligent machines to be created for humans to learn from.
Though Lewis’s story features angels on the side of the Christian camp, the concealed framework of the story involving characters who have an exact counterpart in the two opposing camps is the – essentially non-Christian – dualism that Lewis said he always went as close to as he dared.
‘Macho-Christianity’, along with this fascination with ‘demons’, is yet another example of the diminution of faith. It occurs along with other things such as the adoption by Christians of the allegory of the long spoons: an arrangement that would have been approved of by Trotsky – if your neighbour didn’t like you, would you get your dinner?
Yet there was once a grander faith in an earlier age. The saints would sit on Christ’s throne, and be fed with the ‘hidden manna’. They would drink from the river of life that flowed from the Throne itself. They would receive – from Christ himself – the morning star and be given a new name. They would be given ‘power over the nations’ and champion them with a ‘rod of iron’. And over whom the ‘second death’ would have no power.
If Christianity is expressed as the offer of ‘join our club or die’, it would be right to decline the offer. If Christianity is blackmail and God is a gangster it would be right for all decent people to reject both. On the other hand, if Christianity is thought of this way, it may be that a person has found what they have been looking for. That is, a reason not to believe.
In his novel, Lewis include two sceptics. The one in the Christian camp is always listened to and holds an honourable position. The other sceptic is in the demon-directed camp led by an assortment of mutually antagonistic progressives who nevertheless have ‘a mysterious underlying unity’. This sceptic tries to leave and is murdered.
Lewis has his Christian hero Elwin Ransom, who he broadly modelled on Tolkien, muse that even good angels are not good company for good men. The Americans thinking that they can summon a warrior archangel who would be on their side is terribly provincial. Another example of the debasement of faith. Or the avoidance of it.
If anyone saw the Archangel buying milk in Tesco’s, do they imagine that this would be an encounter that they would regale dinner party guests with, as they might do if they met some TV celebrity? “Oh, I once saw Michael – no, not the M&S guy, the other one – and I said to him, ‘Is it really macho to drink semi-skimmed? Given the upcoming contest with the Evil One, wouldn’t a protein drink be advisable? Just saying.'”
Even the Byzantine icons of the Archangel Michael make him look rather effeminate. Might not such an encounter, whether in Tesco’s or on the battle plain, be arresting? Might it not it result in the ‘coals from the altar’ be pressed with nuclear heat against the sinning lips? Might you not be unutterably changed as that grander faith indicates?
But why should there be any objection to feminised Christianity when Christ is depicted In Revelation i.13 wearing female garb; an ankle-length garment ‘tied about the paps’?
“If anyone saw the Archangel buying milk in Tesco’s.…” That’s absurd! An Archangel would shop at Waitrose!
Haven’t read the article but a pic of Russel Brand as “macho” almost had me spray coffee out of my nose I laughed so hard.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was not a secular decision but a perfect example of your “macho Christianity”, the manifestation of a rational decision to punish Japan for the behaviour of its armed forces across Asia during the previous decade and in so doing preserve the lives of countless numbers of allied warriors and Japanese civilians who would otherwise have been lost in defeating Japan by conventional means.
However, I take issue with your term, as there is nothing macho about Christianity, which is spirituality guided by love. What you are referring to is the Old Testament attitude, which is pre-Christian and often in conflict with the values of Christianity. The perfect example today is the way Israel is deliberately and systematically going about the eradication of Iran’s terrorist puppets: Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi. And reactions to Israel’s approach reflect the moral crisis that has grown ever more intense since the end of WWII.
Back then, we were confident in the rightness of our campaign against nazism and its allies. Just as that same sense of rightness had sustained the building of the British empire on the pillar of the Anglican Church. However, as you point out, there had been a growing sense that Christian spirituality was inadequate to address the challenges of the physical world – the notorious “God is dead” syndrome. For a while, things seemed to be going relatively smoothly, based on faith in our institutions. But the widespread impression that people are flawed and a growing obsession with material wealth (to the point where some people in the USA who call themselves Christians claim that wealth is a sign of God’s favour – as if they have never read the Bible and the lessons contained therein). In this seemingly Godless world, there appear to be no consequences for bad behaviour and our most precious asset – our integrity – is sold for a false sense of fame and power. How often in the last 50 years have we heard the complaint that criminals seem to have all the rights while the taxpaying citizens seem to have none! And faith in our institutions finally collapsed during the pandemic, as the evidence built up that we had all been played for fools and our elected representatives are all in it to serve their own interests and those of powerful businesses (while much of the traditional high street was all but wiped out).
In this context, people are turning to core values for support and this is something that religion has traditionally provided, so it is hardly surprising that religion is becoming more attractive once more. However, the churches are human institutions and they have also been corrupted during the decadence that has occurred – on this point, I salute all the individuals who are seeking to make the world a better place for all, whether it be in the name of their faith or other altruistic purposes – so religious affiliation must be treated with caution and fanaticism must be rejected.
But people are still finding Christianity insufficient to deter wrongdoing and fix the most overt problems in our society. Love is the glue that sustains a healthy society, but getting there means confronting all kinds of people who refuse to collaborate or even actively seek to destroy the society. We increasingly see this problem in the criminal sphere (the days of the unarmed criminal who admits “That’s a fair cop, guv” seem distance and almost fairytale in comparison to what the police are confronting today). And most brazenly, the Hamas attack on Israel showed the face of evil for us all to see (compounded by their long prepared propaganda campaign designed to portray Israel’s reaction in the worst possible light). But Israelis are Old Testament and geared to dealing with evil as we once dealt with it in its manifestation as nazism (and fascist and communist totalitarianism).
Similarly, societies are mobilizing in the western world (especially but not only) to combat other forms of extremism that have been intruding into our daily lives. The immigration issue is particularly pertinent. I believe that humanity will one day think in “One World” terms and we will all collaborate to make life as positive an experience as possible for all. But we are still so far from being able to make that work (in 2015 – the year the immigrant crisis erupted in Europe – I calculated that if every country adopted its relative GDP proportion of the world population, the USA would have 1.63b people, the UK 271m, Germany 356m, Japan 431m, Canada 168m, Australia 140m – numbers that are impossible to contemplate) that it is impractical to even think about it yet and our present challenge, in retrenching away from globalism, is to avoid reverting to tribalism (as manifest in cliques, football supporters, street gangs, tattoos, etc.). This is a cultural issue and right now there are cultures in this world that are simply incompatible and, far from being of equal value, some are unacceptable in the western world, for the same reason that the cultural practices of human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery and other practises have been proscribed and combated over the years.
By the same token, we may not yet be ready for true Christianity, since turning the other cheek can all too easily get you exterminated, while the current consensus among homeowners – if we are honest – is that invaders can reasonably be ‘terminated’ if they represent a threat to life and limb (especially given the way the legal system is likely to put them straight back onto the streets). But for true believers, it can still provide comfort that there is a spiritual sphere where justice does prevail and the human spirit is evolving.
PS: when it comes to AI, it is probably not surprising that such extreme power as that wielded by today’s technology savants may lead them into the same sort of insane realms as lured Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot and others. After all, not so long ago the bright young things on Wall Street were calling themselves “Masters of the Universe” and AI concentrates even more power in the hands of its experts.