Why Christianity is The Foundation of Society
A Response to Academic Agent
‘Christianity is a non-factor in the fate of civilisations,’ Academic Agent argues in his recent article. ‘The nature of our struggle is political,’ he says: Christianity ‘is and will always be neutral’. Indeed, he asks, if 79.5% of the United States is Christian and Christianity is the solution, why isn’t it solving anything? And why, if Christianity is so important, did Thomas Carlyle think the West was in decline as far back as 1850?
But really the decline of the West started much further back than that — precisely when Christianity began to decline during the Reformation, which was liberalism in religious form, and the West lost the Social Kingship of Christ. This concept is unfamiliar to many people, so this article aims at outlining some fundamental concepts related to it.
The Spiritual is Supreme
The tradition of Christian political theory is opposed to three main errors:
Absolute liberalism said that the Church doesn’t even have the right to exist unless the civil power concedes it.
Qualified liberalism allowed for 'a free Church in a free State’: practically, an emasculated Church granted only the freedom the State decides.
Regalism made the exercise of all the Church’s social powers depend on the consent of the civil government.
In contrast to all three of these errors, the traditional view as articulated by Aquinas is that “the king must be subject to the dominion and government administered by the office of the priesthood.” (De Regno) Temporal goods must be subordinated to eternal ones, and God’s right to be honoured by every natural society means all temporal powers must be subordinated to the spiritual power.
Daniel 7 depicts temporal power not subordinated to the rightful spiritual power as a destructive wild beast because it can’t guide man to his supernatural or even natural end:
‘I beheld in the vision of the night, and lo, a fourth beast, terrible and wonderful, and exceeding strong, it had great iron teeth, eating and breaking in pieces, and treading down the rest with its feet: and it was unlike to the other beasts which I had seen before it, and had ten horns.’
As the Catholic Catechism puts it (CCC 2244),
‘Only the divinely revealed religion has clearly recognized man’s origin and destiny in God, the Creator and Redeemer. The Church invites political authorities to measure their judgments and decisions against this inspired truth about God and man: societies not recognizing this vision or rejecting it in the name of their independence from God are brought to seek their criteria and goal in themselves or to borrow them from some ideology. Since they do not admit that one can defend an objective criterion of good and evil, they arrogate to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny, as history shows.’
Accordingly, Boniface VIII’s dogmatic bull Unam Sanctum stated that ‘the spiritual power must institute the earthly one and judge it if it be not good; thus with the Church and the ecclesiastical power is fulfilled the prophecy of Jeremiah, Behold, I have set thee today over nations and kings (Jer. 1).’
Is 49:23 expresses the same principle: ‘And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and queens thy nurses: they shall worship thee with their face toward the earth, and they shall lick up the dust of thy feet.’
But what about rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s? It’s a common misconception that Christianity separates Church and State. It maintains a distinction, not a separation, as Aquinas explains:
‘Spiritual as well as secular power comes from the divine power. Hence secular power is subjected to spiritual power in those matters concerning which the subjection has been ordained by God, namely, in matters belonging to the salvation of the soul. Hence in these we are to obey spiritual authority more than secular authority. On the other hand, more obedience is due to secular than to spiritual power in the things that belong to the civic good. For it is said Matthew 22: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. A special case occurs, however, when spiritual and secular power are so joined in one person as they are in the Pope, who holds the apex of both powers (qui utriusque potestatis apicem tenet), that is, spiritual and secular. This has been so arranged by Him who is both Priest and King, Priest eternal after the order of Melchisedech, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, whose dominion shall not pass away, and his kingdom shall not be destroyed for ever and ever.’ (Scriptum super Sententias, II dist. 44, exposition of the text, ad 4.)
The pope, then, is the ‘apex’ of temporal power — above any other sovereign. In 1155, for example, Adrian IV’s Bull Laudabiliter assigned lordship over Ireland to Henry II of England since Ireland was ungoverned. This was required for ‘enlarging the borders of the Church, setting bounds to the progress of wickedness, reforming evil manners, planting virtue, and increasing the Christian religion.’
God and Secular Political Authority
Note, however, that even ‘secular power comes from divine power.’ In Rom. 13:4, for example, St Paul calls the Emperor Nero θεοΰ διάκονος, ‘minister of God’. Unlike the contractual theories of the state advanced by Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke, Christian political theory regards the state as natural. As Leo XIII explained (Libertas, 21),
‘It cannot be doubted but that, by the will of God, men are united in civil society; whether its component parts be considered; or its form, which is authority; or the object of its existence; or the abundance of the vast services which it renders to man. God it is who has made man for society, and has placed him in the company of others like himself, so that what was wanting to his nature, and beyond his attainment if left to his own resources, he might obtain by association with others. Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority.’
He also expressed this thought elsewhere (Immortale Dei, 6):
‘Nature and reason, which command every individual devoutly to worship God in holiness, because we belong to Him and must return to Him, since from Him we came, bind also the civil community by a like law. For men living together in society are under the power of God no less than individuals are, and society, no less than individuals, owes gratitude to God who gave it being and maintains it and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings’.
St Pius X, too, echoed it in his Vehementer Nos (letter to the French bishops):
‘The Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private worship, but also a public one.’
As St. John Chrysostom explained in On Romans, Homily 21, however, this is not saying every ruler is appointed by God:
‘I am not now talking about individual rulers, but about authority as such. My contention is that the existence of a ruling authority - the fact that some should command and others obey, and that all things not come about as the result of blind chance - this is a provision of divine wisdom.’
It is in this sense that ‘those subject to authority should regard those in authority as representatives of God, who has made them stewards of his gifts.’ (CCC, 2238) And so ‘hallowed, therefore, in the minds of Christians is the name of public power, in which they recognize some likeness and symbol as it were of the divine majesty, even when it is exercised by one unworthy.’ (Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, 9)
However, as Benedict XV observed (Ad beatissimi apostolorum, 11),
‘Sad experience proves that human authority fails where religion is set aside. The fate of our first parent after the Fall is wont to come also upon nations. As in his case, no sooner had his will turned from God than his unchained passions rejected the sway of the will; so, too, when the rulers of nations despise divine authority, in their turn the people are wont to despise their authority.’
Divinity and Degeneracy
The spiritual, then, is not only the apex of temporal power: secular power derives from it. This is why the idea of Christianity being a non-factor in the fate of civilisations is not just wrong but the opposite of the truth. Indeed, a society wills its own demise by rejecting Christianity:
‘As there is nothing good in nature which is not to be referred to the divine goodness, every human society which does its utmost to exclude God from its laws and its constitution, rejects the help of this divine beneficence, and deserves, also, that help should be denied it. Rich, therefore, and powerful as it appears, that society bears within itself the seeds of death, and cannot hope for a lengthy existence.’ (Leo XIII, Nobilissima Gallorum Gens, 2.)
Christianity is in fact the purpose of civilisation:
‘According to Christian teaching, man, endowed with a social nature, is placed on this earth so that by leading a life in society and under an authority ordained of God he may fully cultivate and develop all his faculties unto the praise and glory of his Creator; and that by faithfully fulfilling the duties of his craft or other calling he may obtain for himself temporal and at the same time eternal happiness.’ (Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 118)
Hence why, as Pope John XXIII put it in his first encyclical, Ad Petri Cathedram: ‘There is one truth especially which We think is self-evident: when the sacred rights of God and religion are ignored or infringed upon, the foundations of human society will sooner or later crumble and give way.’
As he wrote later,
‘We consider that we should remind Our sons that the common good has to do with the whole man, that is, with his needs of both body and of soul. Therefore, the rulers of the commonwealth should take thought to obtain this good by suitable ways and stages, and so, while keeping to the right order of things, they must supply the citizens with goods of the soul along with goods of the body.’ (Pacem in Terris, 42)
St Augustine, in the City of God II. 20, vividly described a society aimed at pleasure and possessions because its rulers ‘inveigh against the Christian religion’ and don’t seek virtue. They ‘are nowise concerned that the republic be less depraved and licentious.’ Indeed, ‘the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures.’ And these are ‘the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures.’
Such was Rome, and such is much of the West today. Thus, as Leo XIII said,
‘When Christian institutions and morality decline, the main foundation of human society goes together with them. Force alone will remain to preserve public tranquillity and order. But force is very feeble when the bulwark of religion has been removed, and, being more apt to beget slavery than obedience, it bears within itself the germs of ever-increasing troubles. The present century has encountered memorable disasters, and it is not certain that some equally terrible are not impending.’ (Sapientiae Christianae, 3)
He wrote that in 1890, and history since then has proven him right. As Pope St Leo I wrote to the Empress Pulcheria, ‘Human affairs cannot stand secure, unless both the royal and the priestly authority defend the things that belong to the profession of the divine faith’ (Epistle 60, PL 54: 873-74). Hence Augustine approvingly relates how Christian princes first closed the temples of idols then destroyed them (On the City of God, 18.54).
The Idol of Race
Some thinkers, however, see race rather than Christianity as ‘the main foundation of human society’. AA stresses Jonathan Bowden’s remark that ‘race is culture, and culture is race’. He also refers to Evola’s ideas about the regression of the castes. Whereas Christianity holds that ‘all nations form but one community’ (CCC 842), these thinkers don’t: Arthur de Gobineau, another thinker AA mentions, privately abandoned his belief in Christianity. He believed that ‘the decisive factor for determining the level of a civilization is race.’ AA himself believes Christianity ‘cannot overcome the mutual antagonisms of ethnic self-interest.’
‘What,’ AA asks, ‘has Christianity done to tame the savagery of the Congo?’ This question wrongly assumes that, say, cannibalism is more savage than abortion is. It isn’t. As Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness, the West, too, is ‘one of the dark places of the earth’. The problem is not out there in the Congo. The heart of darkness is the human heart.
But AA claims there is not ‘a single genuine success story in either Africa or in South America’. Yet what counts as success? Whites forming an orderly queue for abortions? Whites sodomising each other? Whites not knowing what a woman is? Music by David Bowie, who had sex with 13-year-old groupies? If so, then Christian Africa or South America is more successful.
Nor are Starbucks or Bluetooth dildos markers of civilisational success. And neither is material luxury in general: throughout history, in fact, decadence is a harbinger of decline. As Leo XIII wrote,
‘If a city strives after external advantages only, and the achievement of a cultured and prosperous life; if, in administering the commonwealth, it is wont to put God aside, and show no solicitude for the upholding of moral laws, it turns woefully aside from its right course and from the injunctions of nature; nor should it be accounted as a society or a community of men, but only as the deceitful imitation or appearance of a society.’ (Sapientiae Christianae, 2)
The mass murders by atheist white governments in the twentieth century show the ‘cultured and prosperous life' of white culture without Christianity. The people killed by governments in the twentieth century would encircle the earth four times.
So, too, does the sad spectacle of Jonathan Bowden — shortly before having a breakdown and dying childless — clutching a rune necklace while dumbing down Nietzsche and telling people to ‘grow towards the sun’; or the sad spectacle of Julius Evola, who regarded himself as some kind of wizard, talking about how monogamy doesn’t mark ‘higher civilization’ — degenerate nonsense refuted beyond possible doubt by Unwin’s Sex and Culture.
Shut it, hippies.
In fact, Evola’s idea that ‘the bio-spirit of European man is in its warrior caste’ and that this ‘solar’ caste must dominate the ‘lunar’ caste of priests and the ‘ghastly merchant caste’ is the root of all disorder. The regression of the castes begins when any caste revolts against the priesthood. Trying to usurp the Social Kingship of Christ, it starts a chain reaction ending in barbarism.
As Paul put it, ‘the spiritual judges all things, and is itself judged by none’ (1 Cor. 2).