The Church has been fighting a losing battle in the West over culture, belief and ethics. But rather surprisingly, there are reasons for thinking this may be the moment for a fight-back; a re-energising of the Church’s conviction that Truth matters and the cost of rejecting the Christian vision of truth and ethics has been fatal to alternative narratives.
Much of the recent damage to the Faith came at the hands of “the Four atheist Horsemen of the apocalypse” who waged a rhetorical campaign of scorn with great effect at the turn of the millennium.
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett were skillful, clever and angry at God. They did a great deal of damage to the whole concept of religious belief and chipped away with forensic destructive skills at the foundation of Christian culture on which the West was built. They believed they were the future.
And yet, a few years later, and much to everyone’s surprise, things have begun to look rather different.
They had no common solution to offer once they had, as Nietzsche foresaw, “killed God”.
A few powerful Christian voices were raised in reply. William Lane Craig was very effective as has been Bishop Barron. To everyone’s surprise, including his own, Jordan Peterson has taken much of the world by storm. It’s hard to resist such a gifted and intellectually competent agnostic psychologist telling you that Christianity and the values it espouses all work. And not only do they work, they work much better than the competing alternatives.
But there is a new development, and although a few wise and perceptive people may have foreseen it, it comes as some surprise.
Relativism has been one of the most effective weapons against the claims of Faith.
So, in the view of the new culture, the Church had views and values that were no better or worse, no truer or more valid than any other view, but they came with a special taint of belonging to an organisation that had a long history of abusing its power. Progressive secularists were delighted that Christian morality had lost its power over the hearts and minds of those who shaped society.
But in a recent podcast conversation between three prominent secularists, who were reviewing the swift change of the map of the moral landscape, there was a sudden change of tone. They began to ask the critical question: “had the present chaos of relativism been caused by the expulsion of Christianity?”.
Konstantin Kisin and his co-presenter Francis Foster – former stand-up comedians once cancelled turned YouTube stars – were interviewing Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked online. He was a former Trotskyist who has become of the county’s foremost political critics. They were charting the emergence and direction of cancel culture and reflected with surprise what appeared to them to be both a new enigma and dilemma.
Their world was one in which they had celebrated the new supposed freedom of women and gay culture. They thought it irreversible. So, they admitted they were astonished that both women and gay teenagers were being suddenly and unforeseeably freshly oppressed by the latest expression of progressivism, the trans movement.
If all progressive change was good, on what grounds could they resist or challenge the new trans activism which was so antipathetic to orthodox feminists like JK Rowling and Germaine Greer whose cause had been politically sacred for decades?
Faced with a clash of progressive sacred ethics, how were they to choose between them?
Rather like a chess game in which the capture of a pawn proved to be so exciting and enervating that they had failed to think ahead, they found themselves in ethical check; or was it check mate?
As Konstantin Kisin observed, having as they thought eradicated misogyny and homophobia in the 70’s and 80’s, the trans movement has not only rehabilitated misogyny, but teenagers who would have otherwise simply been gay have instead had medical intervention and hormonal correction to eradicate their homosexuality.
A wholly unexpected insight presented itself. A new realisation dawned as if for the first time: “If this new development is counter-enlightenment, what does this tell us about the role of religion in society? Maybe we were too quick to throw away the religious traditions?”
Kisin summarised, “We are all searching for meaning and purpose, a sense of what is right and wrong, true and false. To the extent that that can be achieved without religion, we can get behind that. But the problem is once you have taken God off his pedestal, who gets to decide what is true?”
This argument with secular humanists has a long pedigree. The humanists refuse to acknowledge any inbuilt moral incapacity in humanity, either in perception or action; and they repudiate the recognition of evil.
The Church has always taught that humanity acts as though it has some inbuilt flaw, some poor element of coding in our software that dooms it to violence, selfishness and the service of naked power. We used the theological term “original sin” to describe it.
(One of the most effective commentaries on human nature was William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’. He exposes with devastating clarity the superficiality of culture and the danger of a relapse into brutality.)
In the face of the history of human brutality, the ovens and the Gulag of the Twentieth Century, Humanists cling to the pious hope that education will put things right.
Richard Dawkins’ attempt to write an alternative moral code to the Ten Commandments in his book “The God Delusion” produced only the most simplistic and shallow truisms.
But beyond the pressing evidence of original sin there is the unacknowledged problem of evil.
Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the inability of revolutions to sustain their vision and explained why.
One of the most profound philosophical commentators of the twentieth century, she identified the prevalence of evil. Famously she observed that the banality of evil meant that evil took place not in monstrous contexts mainly, but in the everyday commonplace complicity of ordinary people.
She was excoriating about the inbuilt failure of revolutionary movements, observing that revolutions always devour their own children; as if they constituted gigantic Lava streams on whose surface the actors were borne along for a while, only to be sucked away by the undertow of an undercurrent mightier than they themselves.
As woke culture begins to devour its own children, this may be the moment for the Church to re-enter the public conversation and pose again the central question the progressives have suddenly stumbled on: “once you have taken God off his pedestal, who gets to decide what is true?”
(Screenshot of Konstantin Kisin and Frances Foster on their podcast Triggernometry)
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