Why Every Culture has a Cult
Paul Kingsnorth vs. the Social Kingship of Christ
In his recent article for Unherd, ‘Our Godless era is dead’,
argues that a ‘second religiousness’ is now sweeping the West — just as Spengler predicted it would. Reflecting on his experience growing up in the ‘afterglow of the Sexual Revolution’ in Britain in the Eighties and Nineties, he realises ‘there was one teaching that permeated everything. It was to treat religion as something both primitive and obsolete.’ No longer, however: religion is back.We shouldn’t be surprised. Man, as Schopenhauer said, is the metaphysical animal. Because worship is our fundamental purpose, the alternative to Christianity is idolatry, not atheism. What Kingsnorth calls ‘the silicon paganism of the 21st century’ — characterised by ‘self-creation in a Godless, genderless, borderless, natureless world of all-seeing living machines’ — is really a new form of the old, Satanic lie that ‘ye shall be as gods’. The creature will be the Creator.
Much of Kingsnorth’s analysis is accurate. Western culture is ‘visibly collapsing before our eyes’. It has been ‘trailing down a dead-end road since the Enlightenment.’ But his account is ultimately flawed because he mistakenly argues that ‘religion and culture reign in separate domains.’ Christ, he thinks, ‘had nothing at all to say about politics.’ And ‘conservative Christians who want Jesus to lead their battle to defend “faith, flag and family” against the woke libs’ don’t understand what Christianity is really about.
‘What’s the cause?’ of our cultural crisis, Kingsnorth wonders. After claiming that religion and culture are separate, he has no answer. But it’s hidden in his own article: ‘There is…no current or historic culture on Earth that is not built around God, or the gods. None, that is, apart from ours.’ The truth is that culture is fundamentally religious, and apostasy is the real reason for the West’s cultural decay.
Proteus and the Project of Modernity
Strictly speaking, however, secular liberal culture is built around the god of the self rather than no gods at all. Rémi Brague’s Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project (2018) is perhaps the best critique of the project of modernity along these lines. The term ‘project’ emerges with the Enlightenment, and Brague begins by calling attention to its etymological basis: Pro- (“forward”) and jacere (“to throw”), in Latin. Like the Tower of Babel project, modernity begins in resentment — in this case the ultimate resentment against God — and seeks to match or outdo the object of its jealousy:
‘The [modern] project entails a rejection [that] puts what it expels into the category of ‘the Middle Ages,’ understood as empty and willed as such, a universal trash can always open to new contents which even if they appear during modernity, are denounced as marking a step back vis-à-vis the project and thus as “medieval remnants.’’’
As Kingsnorth said, religion is ‘primitive and obsolete’.
Noting how Bacon called his experiments ‘fantasies,’ Brague then stresses the importance of the imagination:
‘The rise to prominence of ‘project’ is connected with a displacement of emphasis from reason to imagination in the definition of man, henceforth understood as the living being capable of conceiving possibilities.’
Whereas traditionally ‘the superiority of man had been a fact to note in a static fashion,’ then, for modernity it ‘must not only be realized by way of application but acquired at the end of a process.’ Man became a Proteus. Not only mastery of nature but, with it, mastery of human nature was the Enlightenment goal.
This, ultimately, is why transgenderism is the reduction of the Enlightenment project to absurdity: the desire for autonomy ends in the delusion of autonomy from biology. Male and female He created them? Not for modernity, Brague notes: ‘Human progress has as its goal to jettison God.’ And the reason is simple: ‘Once man understands himself as having to dominate, he must dispute the place of dominator with God.’
Ironically, however, eventually ‘man is dominated by domination’. As Brague explains, ‘emphasis on the dignity of man is only one of the themes of modern thought.’ Actually, ‘an entire tradition is bent on belittling him.’ Man, as Nietzsche, said ‘must be overcome,’ and that became a licence to kill. The “trans woman” is a form of the Nietzschean superman. Slay, queen.
Inevitably, as Brague concludes, ‘the project by which Man should dominate nature leads back to the effacement of man.’
Rational Animals
Kingsnorth misunderstands culture because he misunderstands what man is. ‘What if a human being,’ he asks, ‘is not primarily a rational, bestial or sexual animal but in fact a religious one?’ Two fundamental misconceptions are involved here, and they skew the rest of Kingsnorth’s account of society.
First, man is the rational animal. Only man is created in God’s image and possesses the spiritual powers of intellect and free will. And man is religious because he is rational. That’s precisely what religion is: man’s duty, as a rational creature, to worship God. The non-rational animals aren’t religious. Dolphins don’t do metaphysics or theology because they can’t grasp abstract concepts like truth, goodness or beauty, nor can they sin by misusing their free will because they don’t have it. Rationality and religiosity aren’t opposed: they are joined.
Second, being a ‘bestial or sexual animal’ isn’t opposed to being ‘a religious one’. Man, as Pascal said, is neither an angel nor an ape. He is bestial, sexual and also religious. Unlike the angels, man worships in a way that involves his body. He kneels to pray. He uses incense. He fasts. And God requires him to regulate his sexual conduct and raise his children in the truths of the faith in a way that no other animal does.
Thus while Kingsnorth correctly points out the Enlightenment painted a ‘false picture’ of science as rationality vs. ‘religion as stupidity or superstition,’ he paints his own false picture by describing ‘a religious sensibility’ as ‘a return to the mean.’ Religion isn’t a mean between rationality and superstition. It is rational, and God is Truth Himself.
Kingsnorth claims that ‘religion is not, as atheists often assume and I once assumed too, a set of beliefs to be adhered to, or arguments to be made and defended. It is an experience to be immersed in.’ But of course religion is a set of beliefs to be adhered to. Christians believe that God exists, that He is One, that the Second Person of the Trinity was incarnate as a man then died and was resurrected, etc. And rational arguments can be given for all these beliefs we are required to adhere to.
Calling religion ‘an experience to be immersed in’ reduces it to a mushy mess of New Age nonsense. Of course it is also an experience in addition to being a set of beliefs to be adhered to. But that experience, as Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out, is ultimately an encounter with Christ, who called Himself ‘the truth’.
The Social Kingship of Christ
Religion is ultimately social because it concerns truth, and you can’t have your “own” truth. Kingsnorth claims ‘there have always been two kinds of religion, or perhaps two ways of responding to religious teachings’: one is ‘the internal or mystical response,’ and the other is ‘the worldly or political one.’ But even the saints who apparently isolated themselves remained deeply connected to society. As a rational animal, man is also a social animal. Only a beast or a god can live outside society, as Aristotle said.
Because men as individuals have a duty to worship God, men also have a duty to worship God collectively, too, in the form of their societies. As I explained in my article on integralism for Chronicles, politics aims at directing man to his ultimate end. And since this end is eternal, temporal power must be subordinated to spiritual power. That’s the Social Kingship of Christ, and it’s been taught by popes since Gelasius I in the fifth century and ultimately goes back to apostolic teaching. As Boniface VIII’s dogmatic bull Unam Sanctam stated,
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.’
Christianity has never maintained a separation between Church and state, only a distinction. 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.)
In Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, Benedict XV wisely warned “the Princes and Rulers of peoples” against seeking to “divorce the teaching of the Gospel and of the Church from the ruling of a country and from the public education of the young.” The state has a duty to recognize and profess religion, as Leo XIII said in his encyclical Immortale Dei: it is “a public crime to act as though there were no God.”
This is often mischaracterised as a medieval idea. It’s not. From 1791 to 1947, eight of the original 13 US states had official Christian State establishments. The other five were supposed to. And not only did the First Amendment make it illegal for Congress to disestablish Christianity, but the general police powers deriving from the Tenth Amendment encompassed morality.
The Failed Experiment
1947 isn’t long ago. The Social Kingship of Christ is no fantasy: secular liberalism is the fantasy, and its death-throes are the cultural collapse unfolding before us. T. S. Eliot knew this. Most of my English Literature degree was a waste of time, but it did give me the opportunity to skip the lectures on sodomites and postmodernists to read worthwhile authors instead. Eliot was one of them, and he led me to Christopher Dawson.
Eliot knew that would happen:
“The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.”
While I was still at school, before university, my history teacher had given me Eliot’s Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (1949) to read. Acknowledging his debt to Christopher Dawson, Eliot writes there that ‘no culture has appeared or developed except together with a religion.’ In fact, a culture is ‘essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people.’ It is folly, he argues, to think that ‘culture can be preserved, extended and developed in the absence of religion.’
Here’s how his book concludes:
‘I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made.’
The West is learning this the hard way.
Similarly, Eliot’s main influence, Christopher Dawson, observed in his book Religion and Culture that ‘primitive man in his weakness and ignorance is nearer to the basic realities of human existence than the self-satisfied rationalist who is confident that he has mastered the secrets of the universe.’
Pride comes before a fall. And Dawson warned that, without religion, intellectuals are ‘unable to resist the non-moral, inhuman and irrational forces which are destroying the humanist no less than the Christian traditions of Western culture.’ In fact, they leave man vulnerable to ‘the lower depths’, where his frustrated spiritual powers ‘find their outlet in the unlimited will to power and destruction’.
Eliot, recognising the necessity of worship, said that if you won’t have God, you’ll have to pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin instead. And in Dawson’s analysis, National Socialism was ‘a new form of natural religion, not the rationalized natural religion of the eighteenth century, but a mystical neo-paganism which worships the forces of nature and life and the spirit of the race.’
As a manifestation of Spengler’s ‘second religiousness’, the resurgence of vitalism today has essentially nothing to add to this. Jonathan Bowden, for example, sounded like a hippy when summing up his credo in Why I am not a Liberal:
‘Become stronger. Move towards the sun. Become more coherent. Become more articulate. Cast more of a shadow….you’re doing it for yourself. IT comes from inside’.
It’s yet more mystical neo-paganism. And it, too, will fail.
The Futility of Retreat
Kingsnorth claims that Christianity and Empire have never mixed well, but the truth is that Empire without Christianity never endures. As Pope Leo XIII put it,
‘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.’ (Nobilissima Gallorum Gens, 2.)
That’s the West summed up. Those ‘seeds of death’ are flowering now. As Eliot wrote in the Choruses for the pageant play The Rock, ‘There is no life that is not in community, / And no community not lived in praise of God.’
Dawson, likewise, stressed that 'a society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.' And the answer is not to retreat but to advance so that the Social Kingship of Christ is reestablished because 'if the State's become too totalitarian, it's because the average Christian hasn't been totalitarian enough.’ For a start, no-fault divorce, gay marriage and porn distribution should all be illegal due to the widespread social evil they cause, nor should secular schools be allowed.