Against Syncretism, For Christians Building Like Christians

Paul Kingsnorth recently delivered the annual Erasmus Lecture with First Things at the Union League in New York. It was a barn burner.

The transcript will be coming in time, I'm sure, so when it publishes you'll want to read it. Until then, you can always watch Kingsnorth deliver it. The lecture begins around the 28 minute mark.

Kingsnorth's thesis, in short, is that Christians err when they seek to build or restore "Christian civilization" as a response to cultural chaos. The proper response to cultural chaos for the Christian is not to seek to "restore civilization" but rather simply to do what Jesus told us to do. Jesus did not call on us to build civilizations; he called on us to follow him—and many of his commands are not terribly conducive to the building of civilization. Indeed, it is striking that if you look at many of the great purveyors of "Christian civilization" it is virtually impossible to tell from their life that they are personally Christian. In one passage of the lecture, Kingsnorth quotes Ohiyesa, a 19th century Sioux Christian who published under the name Charles A. Eastman making this very point:

I confess that I have wondered much that Christianity is not practiced by the very people who vouch for that wonderful conception of exemplary living. It appears that they are anxious to pass on their religion to all other races but keep little of it themselves.

Kingsnorth then summarizes the transformation that took place in Ohiyesa, quoting him from near the end of his life when he said:

It is my personal belief, after 35 years experience of it, that there is no such thing as Christian civilization. I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable. 

Why work to save or rebuild such a thing then? Kingsnorth says the only answer can be "we shouldn't," and if we do, he warns us, we will confuse "civilization" with Christ and construct a syncretistic, idolatrous political system that knows as little of Jesus as the marauders who uprooted Ohiyesa and his people centuries ago.

In an especially searing (and entirely accurate) line Kingsnorth, who spent some considerable portion of the lecture critiquing Jordan Peterson, noted that Peterson's address to the Christian church said nothing about God or Jesus or the Gospel. It was a call to churches to become syncretistic, ultimately. The most biting line came when Kingsnorth remarked that "what Jordan Peterson wants, in other words, is a church that looks like Jordan Peterson." His observation that Peterson's only mention of God in the message was a third commandment violation was also equal parts devastating and on point.

Thinking beyond the work of Peterson, it is not at all hard to recognize the truth of Kingsnorth's claims. What many of the defenders of Christian civilization want is quite obviously not Christianity, as five minutes spent observing their own conduct will make plain. They want a syncretistic, watered down Christianity that does not threaten or challenge their desired political policies or preferred vision of society. The irony of this, which Kingsnorth doesn't address but seems obviously true to me, is that the endgame of their syncretistic approach will be irrelevance, for the Trump campaign's intellectual base is far closer to the transhumanist world of Peter Thiel, Malcolm and Simone Collins, and Elon Musk than it is the reactionary patriarchalist world of the Christian nationalists.

If there is a hole in Kingsnorth's remarks, I think it is this—and I will risk being impolitic here in order to make a broader observation about what I increasingly suspect may be the origins of that gap. An Eastern Orthodox friend, a married father with several young children, once remarked to me that he desires to be holy and so he reads the Desert Fathers on holiness. But what he finds when he reads them seems to be "you need to move to a desert, adopt strict ascetic practices, and pray all day and you will become holy." Which is fine if that choice is available to you. But what if it isn't? What if you have people depending on you to provide for their livelihood, such that you have to work a regular job, earn a paycheck, keep a home, and all the rest? What then?

One answer, one I heard offered by a Catholic friend once, was "well, do the bare minimum you need to in your work in order to provide for your family. Then spent the rest of your time praying, fasting, and so on." Unsurprisingly, Calvinist that I am, I don't find that answer terribly satisfying either. But it brings me to the question I have for Kingsnorth—and Ryan T. Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center asked something very similar at the end of the question and answer time: Yes, it is absolutely correct that there are Christians who make an idol of "civilization" and adopt syncretistic accounts of the Christian faith to accommodate their political idolatries. No one serious is questioning that. But what is the alternative? Does the renunciation of syncretistic attempts at civilization renewal also mean the renunciation of the pursuit of temporal, creaturely goods altogether?

Kingsnorth conceded some ground in his response, granting that the creation of things like hospitals is obviously a good thing, while noting (rightly) that even hospitals can be turned toward bad ends. Yet from his remarks earlier it is hard to see how to sustain even that claim: Earlier in the lecture Kingsnorth suggested that everything from agriculture to the construction of large buildings is a consequence of the Fall. I've heard such arguments before and can agree with them to a point—I named one of my kids after Wendell Berry, after all.

However: As I listened I was taken back to my first adult encounter with the Protestant Reformers. It was in a survey course at Nebraska with Amy Nelson Burnett, a preeminent Reformation historian who, providentially, happens to be a professor at my hometown university. She introduced me to Martin Bucer. When I came to Bucer, I was, like most kids my age who had political and theological interests at the time (late 2000s) deeply taken by Hauerwas and the more generalized pop Anabaptist political theology that is downstream of him but not always very faithful to him.

Bucer was unlike anything I'd ever read; for Bucer one of the foremost goals of individual believers and of churches, in a sense, was to be the creation and preservation of Christian culture. But that wasn't for purposes of domination. Bucer was in many ways something of a proto-liberal, supporting the robust religious toleration policies of Strasbourg while also being quite permissive on divorce relative to the common views of his day. (For a time Bucer actually even allowed for the Radicals in Strasbourg to practice credobaptism within the Strasbourg state church in an attempt to maintain ecclesial unity with the Radicals.) Moreover, he was a despiser of the moral corruptions that had become the norm across huge swathes of the Roman church.

For Bucer the purpose of Christian society was Christian love; Christian society, in the words of Dorothy Day, made it "easier to be good." And Bucer's measure of judging a Christian society was not its technological advancement, its political power, or its wealth; his measure was to what degree the poor were cared for (he held that any society that tolerated levels of poverty which forced people to beg could not possibly regard itself as Christian) and whether or not the vocations that members of that society pursued were conducive to love of neighbor.

There's a passage in Instructions in Christian Love that I suspect Kingsnorth would find delightful that illustrates how Bucer thinks about the purpose of work and Christian community:

God established these two general orders, the spiritual ministry and the secular authority, in order to further the public good. They could perceptibly bring it about if they attended to their commission, but they could also irreparably injure it if they sought on their own interest. Below the aforesaid two orders are the most Christian orders or professions. They are agriculture, cattle-raising, and the necessary occupations therewith connected. These professions are the most profitable to the neighbors and cause them the least trouble. Every man should encourage his child to enter these professions because children should be encouraged to enter the best profession, and the best profession is the one which brings most profit to neighbors.

But nowadays most men want their children to become clergymen. In the present circumstances, this means to lead a child into the most dangerous and godless position. The rest of men wish their children to become businessmen always with the idea that they would become rich without working, against the commandment of God, and with the idea that they will seek their own profit while exploiting and ruining others, against the divine order and the whole Christian spirit. Encouraging youth to enter that raod is leaing them to eternal death, while the path to eternal life is only through keeping the divine commandments. And all commandments will be fulfilled in the single injunction of brotherly love, which always seeks the interest of the neighbor and not its own.

Not a passage that will warm the heart of Christian capitalists, perhaps. But certainly a passage brimming with Kingsnorthian insight, I think—and yet one which seems to see a positive place for ordinary work in the world, building and serving, for the good of neighbor. And I think having a vision like Bucer's is important, if only because I think we cannot live perpetually in an "enchanted world" as we rebel against Kingsnorth's "age of the Machine." If our only heuristic for understanding the moment is that of "enchantment" vs "machine," I fear where that may lead us.

Similar thoughts occurred to me while reading Rod Dreher's latest book as came to me while listening to Kingsnorth: I want to hear a positive account of ordinary human flourishing in temporal affairs that isn't primarily treated as a potential symptom of idolatrous mammonism or an infatuation with the material at the expense of the unseen realm.

There are forms of creaturely flourishing in matters temporal that are not simply capitulations to comfort, greed, or complacency—and yet it is not clear to me that Orthodoxy has an account of these things. I don't see such an account in Vodolazkin, at the very least, nor am I sure how it fits into Kingsnorth or Dreher's work. And that's a shame, really, because I adore so much of what I heard in the Erasmus Lecture and have been longing for a major Christian ideas outlet (besides Mere O) to say such things for ages. To have that patience rewarded with an Erasmus Lecture saying such things and saying them as strikingly and beautifully as Kingsnorth said them, was a delight.

Even so, I think if we follow the path laid out for us by someone like Bucer we can find a way to answer the dilemma of my Orthodox friend: How do you pursue holiness when "do what St Antony did" isn't a viable option? You do it through the constant seeking of the interest of your neighbor rather than your own—and finding that you can do that just as much in your work and your building as you do in anything else. For, after all, I can't help thinking of the beautiful words by another prophetic figure that Kingsnorth and I both love equally, I think:

For have I not seen with mine eyes the half-baked marriage feasts--for is not the abuse of the mortal the abuse as well of the immortal, and the abuse of life the abuse of life everlasting, and the abuse of the earth the abuse of Heaven?--for is it not upon this dust that the word and the law tread and leave their track?--and is it not upon this little that the great shall be lifted up?