Christianity and civilization are allies, not enemies

In his 2024 First Things Erasmus Lecture, “Against Christian Civilization,” Paul Kingsnorth rightly reminds Christians that, if they want to change the sinful state of the world, they must start by changing themselves. Conversion of heart—not a new crusade, nor Christian nationalism—is what we need. Political power and revolution are not proper to Christ’s Kingdom; the only violence conversion requires is to one’s own pride, by free response to God’s grace.

Kingsnorth further reminds contemporary Westerners that their civilization would never have come to be without the nourishment of Christian truth and charity. As British historian Tom Holland and others have recalled, modern science would not have gotten off the ground unless a critical mass of people believed that matter was suffused with the divine wisdom of its Creator; and democracy would never have expanded beyond a few, sheltered city-states into a mighty global order, unless the powerful of the world, bowing before the God become a human infant, learned to bow before the dignity of each of their fellow men.

Yet for as long as Western civilization has depended on the Gospel, it has also lived in tension with it.

Christianity powered the West’s scientific and humanitarian achievements, but it also called those achievements into question. Kingsnorth believes this tension stems not from the misuse of the institutions of civil society, but from their very nature. “When we read the life of Jesus of Nazareth,” he claims, “it is impossible not to see a man who was, in some fundamental sense, uncivilized.” He counseled people to “give no thought for the morrow;” “to give everything away,” because “the rich . . . could never attain the Kingdom of Heaven;” “never to resist evil;” even “to hate our own parents.”

Kingsnorth concludes that the Gospel opposes not only modern Western civilization but all human civilization: “Every single one of [Christianity’s] teachings, were we to follow them, would make the building of a civilization impossible.”

This is not rhetorical hyperbole: “Christianity and modern civilisation,” and “all civilisation,” are “opposed and irreconcilable to the Gospel,” Kingsnorth says, “unequivocally.” Christianity’s laws of love are “designed to kill you;” this is why “we hate them,” because they are “radically unworldly.” “How I hate them,” Kingsnorth says. “Sometimes I can’t look at them, or at myself in their shadow.”

I submit that a Christian can and ought to agree with Kingsnorth’s argument up to the last point. While it is true that the Kingdom of Jesus Christ “is not of this world,” it is made for the world, and the world for it. The world’s confrontation with the Gospel requires it to change, but not in the radical way that Kingsnorth thinks.

 

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Loves natural and divine

The Bible contains many passages that support Kingsnorth’s argument for radically unworldly faith, but others complicate it.

Jesus says, “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, . . . he cannot be my disciple.” But Christians have traditionally understood that Jesus here uses the word “hate” hyperbolically (not literally), as Semitic cultures of his time often did. After all, Jesus also chastises the Pharisees for suggesting that a man who has given his life to God ought not support his father and mother materially, “thus making void the word of God.” Moreover, he said he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and high in the list of the law’s commandments is “Honor your father and mother.

Some of the very passages Kingsnorth alludes to contradict his reading of them. He claims that Jesus says “repeatedly” that the rich could “never” get into heaven. But that is not true in Christ’s dialogue with the rich young man, who refused to give his possessions to the poor. Jesus says not that the rich can “never” attain heaven, but that “it will be hard” for them to do so. And although “[w]ith men this is impossible, . . . with God all things are possible.”

Some people take Christ to mean that God helps those who, like Francis of Assisi, give themselves up to beggarly poverty. But Jesus could also mean that, with God’s grace, people can live with wealth in this life and be saved. Such was the case of Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. He lived with great wealth and power, but detached from them, so that he could give them up (along with his life) when in conscience he could no longer follow the king’s commands.

As a Christian statesman, More would have disagreed with Kingsnorth’s claim that Christ “did not tell us to be responsible citizens.” The very words of Christ are otherwise: “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” By God’s will there are things that belong to the temporal order—that which is Caesar’s—by right, just as there are things that belong to the spiritual order.

The Gospel tells us to “seek first the Kingdom of God” and to “love the Lord your God with all your heart,” but it also tells us to “love your neighbor,” those who are close to us. Our neighbors include not just the poor who share our humanity, but more importantly our family, our fellow citizens, our governors, and those we meet in all other institutions of society. Love of neighbor is more natural to us than love of God and is the latter’s model and prerequisite; hence the Apostle John’s warning: “He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.”

And the “neighbor” to whom we are closest, over whose destiny we have most power and responsibility, is our own soul. Hence the model of love of neighbor, and therefore of love of God, is our love for our own happiness: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Our natural loves, and the social institutions that flow from them, do not oppose the Gospel. They are part of what Christ came to redeem and fulfill by grace. As C. S. Lewis reminds us in The Four Loves, grace builds on our natural loves, it does not supplant them; indeed, those who neglect human love cannot love God fully.

The vocation to civilization

Of course, grace must also heal our natural loves, because they are unreliable and often wicked, as Kingsnorth reminds us. The question is whether wickedness belongs to our nature of itself, or by accident.

The Bible’s answer is the latter, as we see in the creation story of Genesis. God created man to be at peace with himself. The reason why history has gone otherwise is because of the original sin. Kingsnorth claims that “civilization happened” then as sin’s consequence: farming, work, hunting, metalwork, cities, and (placed on par with these) murder – “It was all a deadly result of our Fall.” But the Biblical text says otherwise: God “put [man] in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it;” God told man to “fill the earth and subdue it,” having “dominion” over it and “every living thing” in it. All of this was before the Fall. God’s plan “in the beginning” was that man would both love God and cultivate civilization, taking the raw material of the world and drawing out its possibilities.

What the Fall added to man’s life was not civilization but civilization’s corruption. Sin created not work but the pain—the “toil” and “sweat”—that is now permanently associated with it. The reversal of the Fall by the New Adam, Jesus, does not do away with civilization; Christ restores civilization to what God intended it to be from the start, suffused with the grace of charity: a “civilization of love,” as recent bishops of Rome have called it.

Those bishops used that phrase to summarize important parts of the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, especially the documents Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae. That gathering of Christian leaders, reflecting on Christianity’s experience with modernity and its amazing political and technological progress, saw in that progress an authentic fulfillment of man’s vocation from God, “a sign of God’s grace and the flowering of His own mysterious design.” Indeed, “men are not deterred by the Christian message from building up the world, or impelled to neglect the welfare of their fellows, . . . they are rather more stringently bound to do these very things.”

The monks whom Kingsnorth credits with founding Europe were themselves engaged in such works, because they recognized civilization to be an ally of the Gospel. They cultivated learning to preserve and understand fully both Scripture and the writings of the earliest bishops of the Church—Augustine, the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, and dozens more. The vast writings of these fathers of Christianity could not be understood completely except in light of the ancient Greek and Roman culture—and its languages—that they shared. In the Peace of God movement, monks and other medieval Christians promoted temporal order because they recognized with Paul that, although martyrdom will always appear in the history of the Church, ordinarily God desires “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life.” Civilization is the circumstance under which most men are “to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”

A rotten tree does not bear good fruit

The evils of Western civilization, or of any civilization, are not intrinsic to it; they are the result of its misuse: rather than using the world as matter for our worship of God, we use it only for ourselves. Even in institutions where evil seems to predominate, there is good, since everything that exists is “good,” as the Creator declared.

This goes even for the economic life that Kingsnorth finds so odious. Most businesses have succeeded, and still do succeed, not only from the desire for wealth, but also from an ambition to “fill the earth and subdue it:” to unlock the possibilities of matter through engineering and science, which is a vital part of the common good in our material world. It is little wonder that, in their retirement, many successful entrepreneurs give their money away: their desire to improve the world continues even after they hand over the reins of business to others.

The problem with riches is not the riches themselves, as Kingsnorth suggests, but that men hold on to them, as the Apostle James accuses the wealthy of doing: they keep “treasure in the last days,” as though it could bring final happiness, rather than using what they can spare for further economic development or philanthropy. If there is less charity in the free market than there should be, the solution is not to condemn the market but to better evangelize the people who participate in it.

The same goes for other institutions. One cannot agree with Kingsnorth that sin is “the very basis of [the] existence” of “our entire civilization.” A rotten tree does not bear good fruit: a society that produces life-saving medical advancements, democracy, the worldwide abolition of slavery, and the near-elimination of grinding poverty cannot be evil through and through. But if we want to preserve those fruits, we may need to re-fertilize their tree with the Christian soil in which it took root.

To find God in the world we need to flee not the world but evil. The mission Christ left his followers, to help him redeem mankind, is not as hard as Kingsnorth fears. It does not require literally hating one’s parents or life. It does not require living in destitution; although God might call a few to that as a witness to the fact that this world will pass away. All it requires is that change of heart to which Kingsnorth exhorts us: to see the world through God’s eyes; to do things with a new spirit, a new purpose; not merely for ourselves, but for God in whom our natural loves find fulfillment.  


Are Christianity and progress always going to be at loggerheads?   


John Doherty is director of finance at The Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.

Image credit: the Angel on Ponte Sant Angelo in Rome / Wikimedia and New York skyline / Bigstock


 

Showing 10 reactions

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  • Rob McKilliam
    commented 2025-02-08 11:45:35 +1100
    Mr Fedders
    You assert that “Belief not enquiry” is a Christian maxim.
    I have never heard that, or indeed. anything like it. I think you are completely wrong.

    My understanding is that Christianity promotes completely the opposite, eg: “Seek and ye will find;” Matt 7:7-8.

    My understanding is also that the whole concept of worshipping and loving God is an exhortation to learn more about our existence.
  • mrscracker
    Thank you for sharing that Mr Cook.
  • Michael Cook
    commented 2025-02-07 10:39:47 +1100
    Hullo, Mr Bunyan,

    Thank you for your comments. But I believe that you are badly informed. You may have missed a number of stories in Mercator about the phenomenon of abuse in public schools. This is not a secret, but most media outlets have not investigated the issue.

    Take, for instance, this paragraph from a Mercator story.
    ““Passing the trash” is “a shockingly frequent phenomenon in America’s public schools,” according to a 2023 study by the Defense of Freedom Institute. It also cites research by Billie-Jo Grant (Link below) in which she found that abusive teachers will be passed to three different school districts before they are fired or charged by police and can have as many as 73 victims.”
    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10538712.2018.1483460
    https://www.mercatornet.com/why_aren_t_governments_tackling_the_epidemic_of_sexual_abuse_in_america_s_public_schools

    I don’t know where you are located, but in Australia, the same phenomenon exists in state schools: abuse, transfer, abuse, transfer, abuse, transfer. To say that this is a problem unique to the Catholic Church is deeply ignorant:
    https://www.mercatornet.com/a-horrifying-report-on-sexual-abuse-in-chicago-public-schools-sank-without-a-trace-last-week-why
    https://www.mercatornet.com/the_window_is_opening_to_show_the_shameful_record_of_state_schools_on_sexual_abuse
  • Paul Bunyan
    commented 2025-02-07 10:19:50 +1100
    mrscracker, public schools do not systematically hide, move and protect predators. Churches are notorious for doing so. Churches care more about their “good image” and converting people to their religion more than they do about alleviating suffering.

    That’s a horrendous moral foundation. It also explains why they want people to have children they can’t afford or look after. They should be focusing on making life better for everyone who is already here.
  • mrscracker
    Mr. Bunyan, I could copy & paste statistics showing that many more public school employees abuse minors than Catholic hierarchy do but I’m not sure any data will convince those who have an axe to grind against religious institutions.
    From the studies done on sexual abuse amongst Catholic clergy the overwhelming issue involved adult males preying upon adolescent boys & young men.
    True pedophiles, as opposed to other sexual predators, are primarily attracted to prepubescent children & are less likely to be same sex attracted. The only real pedophile I’ve known was a married man with children & a grandchild. Until his arrest & conviction he was well respected in the community. Marriage is not a cure for deviancy but it can be used as a cover.
  • Emberson Fedders
    commented 2025-02-05 17:02:21 +1100
    “Christianity powered the West’s scientific and humanitarian achievements…”

    It really didn’t. Indeed, Christianity with its maxim of ’Belief, not enquiry" probably delayed the Renaissance and Enlightenment by centuries.
  • Paul Bunyan
    commented 2025-02-05 10:10:16 +1100
    That’s nonsense, mrscracker. If you can back up your assertion, I would love to see some sources.

    No institution has been responsible for as much institutional and consistent child rape than the Catholic church. Celibacy is unhealthy. For everyone who isn’t asexual, suppressing natural and healthy sexual desires (the ones that involve informed consent between adults) only leads to mental instability and harmful behaviors.
  • mrscracker
    Mr. Bunyan, you describe fallen human nature and the history of virtually every institution, both secular and religious, where adults come into contact with vulnerable young people and minors.
  • Paul Bunyan
    commented 2025-02-04 22:35:43 +1100
    Institutions that are responsible for hundreds of thousands of child rape cases throughout hundreds of years are not allied with civilization or compassion.

    Especially when they continue to hide predators and refuse to co-operate with the authorities and bring them to justice.
  • John Doherty