Dover Beach

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This article from Paul Kingsnorth is so on target that I am tempted to copy and paste the whole thing into this post for you to read. Instead though I’ll post a taste of it, and hope that you will want to click on the link below and read it all at First Things here.

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“When we read the life of Jesus of Nazareth, in fact, it is impossible not to see a man who was, in some fundamental sense, uncivilized. He did not tell us to get good jobs and save prudently. He told us to have no thought for the morrow. He did not tell us to generate wealth, so that economic growth could bring about global development. He told us to give everything away. The rich, he said repeatedly, could never attain the Kingdom of Heaven. He did not tell us to defend our frontiers, or to expand them. He told us never to resist evil. He did not tell us to be responsible citizens. He told us to leave our dead fathers unburied and follow him instead. He told us to hate our own parents and to love those who hated us. Every single one of these teachings, were we to follow them, would make the building of a civilization impossible.

What we are really hearing about, then, when we hear of defending or rebuilding “Christian civilization,” is not Christianity and its teachings at all, but modernity and its endgame. It is the idol of material progress—the progress that has shredded both culture and nature—which is causing such grief everywhere. “Christian civilization” is not a solution to this; it is part of the problem. And when actual Christianity is proposed instead, the response is so often the same: Oh yes, that’s all very well, you fundamentalist—but what practical use is it?

The answer is: None. Christianity is impractical. Impractical, intolerable, and awful, in the original sense of that word. It is terrifying, and it is designed to kill you. This is because the values of God and the world are inimical, as we are told repeatedly by Christ and all the saints. This, surely, is the beautiful mystery at the heart of this thing. God is not mocked. His wisdom is foolishness to the world, and vice versa. What this means to us is that our “civilizational war” in the name of Christ will fail, because Christ does not fight wars other than those that go on in the heart.

The essence of civilizational Christianity is the reshaping of this radically unworldly faith for very worldly ends: the defense of a certain kind of culture. The gospels become a weapon with which to fight a culture war in a collapsing civilization. But confusing the Christian way with the way of that civilization is a fatal error.”

Paul Kingsnorth

READ MORE HERE

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