| | For subscribers | August 11, 2023 | |
 | | Alain Pilon |
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The doom of the Nazis versus the resilience of Christianity |
After last week's newsletter made the case for the wickedness of Stalinism and the virtues of early Cold War anti-Communism, I thought I might get dragged into a weekend social media debate about Marxism-Leninism. Not so. Instead, I managed to entangle myself in an argument about a different totalitarianism-related question: whether the destruction of Hitler's Germany was a true and righteous judgment of Almighty God. |
That question came out of two discussions of far-right politics — one occasioned by Graeme Wood's Atlantic profile of Bronze Age Pervert, the pseudonymous author and online personality who is a leading voice of "vitalist," or Nietzschean, or, if you prefer, simply fascist thought online; the other by revelations about the writer Richard Hanania, who has admitted to (and apologized for) a youthful career as a pseudonymous scribbler for racist publications. |
The style of far-right thought involved in both stories takes Western decadence as a given, while arguing that Christianity is a weak vessel for any kind of cultural revival. Its big idea is that a conservatism that looks to classical and pagan sources, and embraces some kind of racial identitarianism could be more, well, vital in its engagement with the times. |
A version of exactly this argument floated around the platform X, formerly known as Twitter, and when someone demanded a rebuttal, I dashed off a pair of posts: |
I suppose one response is to note that the last attempt to refound European civilization on the basis of classical-Teutonic heritage and eugenics led to unspeakable atrocities and the total destruction of the European heartland. The decay and decadence of Western Christianity makes the return of right-wing Nietzscheanism inevitable. But Christians can say with some warrant that God's judgment on that project is evident already. |
These posts are minor entries in the widening debate over what conservative Christians should make of an emergent pagan or post-Christian right — in all its various forms, materialist and mystical, populist and intellectual, from extreme characters like Bronze Age Pervert to more mainstream figures, like Jordan Peterson, who seem to wobble on the edge of Christian faith. I've offered my own comments on our possible pagan futures, including in an argument earlier this year about euthanasia with Hanania himself (who I think remains an exemplar of a pagan libertarianism, whatever you make of his claim to have evolved into a neoliberal), but there's much more that could be said. |
But I want to take a slightly different direction here, because my post about God's purposes and the Nazi Ragnarok inspired a couple of tart rejoinders from Bronze Age Pervert himself. "If God's judgment is loss in a war or at hand of brutal persecutors, does this mean you think God judged Jesus to be bad and the Romans to be good?" he asked. And then, "does the 30 Yrs' War toll therefore reflect God's judgment on a Europe that was too attached to religion?" |
The first question is easy to brush aside, because obviously Christians think that the way to understand God's judgment on Christ's life and message is in the light of his resurrection, not just his death on Calvary. There was a war on Holy Week and Jesus won is a crude statement of the Christian message, but not an inaccurate one. And if you want to frame it in terms of a conflict between Rome and Christ, the Roman Catholic especially will argue that the war in question ended with Constantine's conversion rather than the crucifixion, with St. Peter's Basilica standing as a victory monument. |
But the various crises and disasters in the Christian world since then, the Thirty Years' War very much included, don't admit of that kind of tidy interpretation. At the same time the serious Christian can't just wave away the question, because we're obliged to believe that history reveals providential intentions and designs. |
Indeed, while allowing for the complexity of debates about what God wills as opposed to what God merely permits, providentialism is basically inescapable once you posit a divinity who made the world and acts in history. Which is why providentialist interpretations endure among the most liberal Christians as well as the most traditional, with both progressive and conservative theologies justifying themselves through readings of the "signs of the times," the seasons of history, the action of the Holy Spirit and the like. (And, of course, many theoretically secular worldviews are possessed of the same providentialism in disguise.) |
The more absolutely certain these interpretations, the more dubious. Discerning God's intentions across an individual lifetime is hard enough; discerning them across the arc of history should be done with maximal humility. |
But (humbly, humbly) I do, in fact, have a view of what the Thirty Years' War and its consequences suggest about God's actions in the modern world. And also of how that case study differs from the Nazi example — starting with the fact that Christianity was not destroyed in the 1600s, the pope did not commit suicide in a bunker while Rome collapsed around his head, and Christian ideas and Christian leaders were not remembered as icons of absolute depravity in the decades and centuries that followed. |
Rather, what was broken in the 17th century was a certain idea of Christendom, a certain kind of political-religious unity — and I think a serious Christian has to see in that breakage some kind of divine judgment on the Christians fighting to sustain that order. |
Not necessarily a judgment on the idea of such an order, which would be the liberal-providentialist position — that Christendom had to die so a superior and more secular civilization could replace it. But certainly a judgment on the fratricidal and ruthless ways that both Catholics and Protestants tried to sustain their competing visions of a Christian order. I obviously think the Catholics had the better theological arguments, but God in his wisdom permitted neither side to claim a certain victory, ensuring that any future Christendom would have to be rebuilt along very different lines. |
It could have been otherwise; indeed, just the example of England's religious history shows various ways that providence could have made things smoother for the Catholic side: Catherine of Aragon could have born her husband a male heir, Mary Tudor could have had a child, she and Cardinal Reginald Pole need not have died together (on the same day!), the Spanish Armada could have triumphed. Even much later on (as I wrote in one of last week's columns), with better luck and better weather the Jacobite rebellions might have succeeded. One need not claim certainty about God's purposes to see a repeated closing-of-the-door to certain kinds of Catholic restoration in this story. |
But not, crucially, a closing of the door on Christianity itself. From different quarters — Christian and pessimistic, secular and triumphalist, now pagan and anti-Christian — there is an account of modern history that conflates the crackup of Christendom with the decline of Christianity. It assumes that modernity as a whole has to be either a totally wrong turn (the Christian pessimist's perspective) or a wrong turning that Christianity is responsible for and can't save us from (the right-wing pagan brief) or else a glorious path toward enlightenment that renders traditional Christianity irrelevant (the secular optimist). |
Yet for Christianity, the modern era is actually two stories intertwined: a story of conflict and failure and disappointment for many Christian institutions, their division and their weakness in the face of other powers, woven together with the story of the Christian religion's resilience and global spread. Whether or not liberal modernity represents a "metaphysical catastrophe" (to pluck a phrase from one of its eloquent religious critics), it has created a world civilization in which the Gospel has been preached in the far corners of the planet; in which there are today, according to one study, 2.6 billion Christians; in which, amid a long-running crisis for Western Catholicism, more young Catholics attended the just-completed World Youth Day in Portugal than inhabited all of medieval Rome and Paris and London put together. |
The extraordinary reach of global Christianity is part of what makes me skeptical of full declinist narratives from my fellow believers and more inclined even toward certain kinds of techno-futurism, against interpretations of the late modern world as an engine of disenchantment or a soul-devouring machine. |
At the very least, insofar as the core commandment of the risen Jesus — go and make disciples of all nations — has been fulfilled by and through our high-tech and pluralist modernity, any providentialist reading of that history cannot be simply negative. And the fact that so much that's negative has also befallen the Christian churches in that time suggests the nuanced Christian response to Bronze Age Pervert's challenge: Christianity's claim to enjoy more divine favor than 20th-century fascism rests not on the absence of justified chastisements or purifying defeats, but on the faith's spread both in spite of and through these experiences, its resilience in spite of what its leaders often seem to deserve. |
But give Bronze Age Pervert this much: Our era is clearly allowing unexpected space to old alternatives to Christianity, of which his vitalism may be the most illiberal but definitely is not the strangest. What does providence have in mind with these developments? Ask me again in a hundred years. |
The industry's pursuit of I.P. at the expense of originality has all but trained younger audiences not to expect novelty or surprise at the multiplex, assuming that they're going to the theater at all. Hollywood has never been known for overestimating the audience's intelligence, but it's hard not to wonder how it is supposed to be inculcating a love of cinema in children — that is, future moviegoers — when the splashiest films on offer are explicitly buckets of regurgitation. … Trends in television are no less dispiriting, with networks soliciting "visual Muzak," as some in the industry have put it. The TV writer Lila Byock told my colleague Michael Schulman this spring that the streamers are most eager for "second-screen content": shows to have on in the background while the viewer presumably scrolls through their phone. In a recent interview, the actor and director Justine Bateman said that network notes now request that shows be less engaging so that distracted audiences won't lose track of the plot and turn them off. |
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