A Non-Sectarian Guide to Our Cultural Crisis

To many Americans, Christians complaining about our culture sound whiny, self-interested, and sectarian. We yell, “Fire! Cultural conflagration!” Our unbelieving neighbors sniff and wonder why they can’t smell smoke. To their ears, our critiques of culture take this form: Christians used to be in charge; we aren’t anymore; we’d like to be again; if you don’t want us to be in charge, you don’t know what’s good for you, because it is good for everyone if we’re in charge.

And that looks for all the world like a naked power play.

Against Nature

Christian analysis runs deeper than that, and Christians shouldn’t be overly worried if no one listens. Being ignored puts us in the good company of Israel’s prophets: with Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John, and Jesus. Yet some self-diagnosis is warranted. Is our message failing because it’s offensive or because we’re doing it badly? We need to ponder how we might express our anxieties about the world in ways that resonate in the wider culture. Can we convince unbelievers that we are heading to a precipice?

I think the answer is yes. Consider this as a starting point: Our culture’s experiment in post-Christian civilization doesn’t rest on a renewal of the forms and principles of pre- or non-Christian order. Rather, it rests on explicit renunciation of those forms and principles of order.

We have not only self-consciously rejected Christian versions of social order; we have renounced principles of order that until recently were thought by everyone to be inescapable, natural, universal. We haven’t slipped into forgetfulness of these principles of order. We have actively, zealously expelled them as a thing unclean.

Outside of Christianity, “nature” has provided a stable standard for social and moral life. “Live in accord with nature,” said many ancient philosophers, however they might have defined nature. Sometimes nature was a cruel Mistress, as some thought it natural that certain people be slaves, that women be treated as defective men, that the high-born remained at the heights. Yet nature provided the strong pillars on which many empires rested—in the Mediterranean world, in the Far East, in the ancient civilizations of Africa and Latin America.

No longer. Civil and aeronautic engineers still submit to the contours of “nature and nature’s laws,” but we have created zones of social life where the human will rules unchecked. In those zones, nature is plastic, subject to our whims and desires, moldable to our wills. Sex is, as always, a handy barometer: Now we can become either sex we please, invent our own, change sex three times before lunch. We haven’t forgotten nature. We’ve rejected it, and we defend this willfulness.

A World Without Authority

Every functional society requires authority. Decisions have to be made, and someone has to make them and follow through and enforce them. Yet our civilization has carried on a war against authority.

“Grow up,” said Kant, and he meant “Outgrow your inherited tradition.” By the 1960s, college campuses were full of unwitting Kantians doing a collective thumbs-down, or worse, to authority. Everyone has always known that authority can be abused; today, many believe that authority is abuse. The notion that someone else can tell me what to do, that someone else might have a claim on me or my body, is anathema. Again, we haven’t slipped into this. We decided against authority, and we’ve defended our choice.

Shakespeare saw it coming. In a famous passage from Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses says that a world without “degree”—without hierarchy and authority—cannot be a human world. We end up wolfishly devouring one another, devouring ourselves.

Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.

Self-restraint and self-control have been principles of order in non-Christian societies. Think of the Stoic heroes of apatheia, the self-restraint of Romans, the inhuman control of Buddhist and Hindu holy men. Self-control has been a basic expectation of daily social life. If your neighbor can’t keep himself from desiring and taking your land, your house, your wife, your daughter, what kind of society can we have?

Today, though, in many areas of social life (sex again!), self-restraint is not a value at all. The self-restrained person is regarded as unhealthy. The whole person goes for what he wants, follows his dream, grabs for the gusto.

Empty Freedom

Behind all of this is a perverse, empty understanding of freedom. Freedom is no longer directed toward any good or end. To aim freedom at a target would limit freedom. Our freedom is no longer freedom exercised within certain moral constraints. In sexual mores, in intellectual life, in the arts, freedom means liberation from all constraint.

Of course, this doesn’t ultimately work. We cannot live without constraints. We cannot help but establish ends for our action. We cannot avoid adhering to and pursuing some good, or something we consider good. We cannot abolish rules. The same college students who resist limits on their sexual lives scream in outrage when a referee makes a bad call, or when someone makes a member of a minority feel uncomfortable.

We end up schizophrenic, simultaneously resisting and insisting on rules, simultaneously celebrating unrestrained freedom and erecting iron cages. We cannot live without authority, without norms, but we fool ourselves into thinking that we are absolutely free, that our freedom doesn’t have to be oriented in any particular direction, that it doesn’t have to be aimed at any particular good.

This should convince unbelievers that we are heading to a precipice. Many others have observed the same things. Our anxieties about the world resonate in the wider culture.

In the end, though, this cannot be an entirely non-sectarian analysis, because the choices we face are the choices left to us by Jesus Christ. We now face a choice between Christ and nothing, because Christ has claimed everything so that renouncing him can only be nihilism. As David Bentley Hart put it, “The only cult that can truly thrive in the aftermath of Christianity is a sordid service of the self, of the impulses of the will, of the nothingness that is all that the withdrawal of Christianity leaves behind. The only futures open to post-Christian culture are conscious nihilism, with its inevitable devotion to death, or the narcotic banality of the Last Men, which may be little better than death.”

If that choice doesn’t alarm our contemporaries, we may indeed be preaching to the deaf and doing signs before the blind.