A Christian Revival? Or a Retreat into the only Available Comprehensive Doctrine?

Baptism grows in France and America

Christianity is a very well-engineered religion. I do not completely believe in its metaphysical claims, but I believe in the justice its story codifies. In Jerusalem, 2000 years ago, a freethinking man was unjustly tortured. As he dragged the cross past the temple and the judge, Pontius Pilate and the money changers must have gloated. “He is getting what he deserves.”

The stubborn belief that what happened next was the most untamable breaking of a corrupt moral order, the defiance of the Roman Empire and of the litigious, rule twisting Sanhedrin of Judaism, is a life sustaining belief. It is a glorious story and has inspired many of the greatest works of European and American art.

The engineering of the religion is beautiful. It gifts all its followers with a resource for self-esteem. Namely, that we are made in the image of God and are his manifestation on earth. We carry his sacred soul with him, in a small form. We are also inoculated against pride by this story. We will only remain in favor with God if we make him look good here on Earth. If we treat his other creations well. If we acknowledge that we are lucky to be here. If we thank Him for putting us here and thank our fellow men and women for making our short stay on Earth so pleasing.

He Lives by Charles Vaughn

The Flattening and Disenchantment of the World

Since the 1960s, secularization has relentlessly pushed aside the old hierarchies, virtues, and moral rules of the Christian society that previously reigned in Europe and North America. Christianity is a prescription designed to help the family live even without a benevolent, generous state. “The greatest responsibility goes to your family and your neighbors.” That is a principle of Christianity. This begats a hierarchy, parents above children. Parents own their children and teach them in the traditions which they prefer to pass on. The hyper liberalism that has prevailed democratically and bureaucratically in the West since the 1960s believes that the government has the right to reach into the family, between parent and child, and reeducate children. For the modern left, traditional or free-thinking parents are a menace. They may not be up to date on the latest theories of child development. They may not be letting children choose their own gender and self-define in a vacuum of absolute freedom.

One reason for this was that liberalism, a doctrine of pluralism and tolerance, became an activist crusade to tear down even legitimate hierarchies and traditional arrangements. Often, the reason given for this dismantling was human failure within institutions.

“Marriage and religion have such noxious histories" is a common refrain from anti-religious flatteners of the past. This is a lie. It is the central lie at the center of the postfeminist, liberal young women's worldview. The noxious histories are stories of human failure, not of failed institutions, like church and Matrimony. Those institutions endure because they give people a language to love each other and love a platonic life-giving thing called God. Those institutions can be filled with good people anytime a young person wants to fill them. Any time.

The toppling of Christianity as a doctrine and way of life tolerated by the urban conditioners in our modern liberal societies was quickly followed by an attempt to downsize its influence. One latent strand in liberalism is the impulse to make all societal communities equivalent. Liberals don’t want to offend the newest group of migrants or the newest social justice craze. And so they deemphasize, problematize and desacralize iconic moments in their own country’s’ or their own peoples’ history. They need to shrink Christianity and the majority ethnic group. Make it out to be just one of many groups and traditions in the countries’ history. that will allow sufficient room for new traditions, or for the weaponization of climatism and social justice activism as para-religious belief systems.

This splitting of man and woman from the ideals and roles they once played lead to loneliness, stress, and social disfunction. Use of pharmaceuticals for mental illness skyrocketed. In 2000, Robert Putnam published “Bowling Alone.” It sketched a portrait of a society full of lonely, stressed people. They did not have institutions which gathered them and welcomed them. The single mom working at a library, living in a suburb outside of Cleveland. The 32-year-old man working as an architect in Amherst, MA. They needed to put extraordinary effort into finding a group of people with whom they could bowl, play pickleball, knit, discuss books, watch a movie, get coffee, etc. This atomization has gathered a pace since then. My generation (the under 30s) has grown up in a gig economy and many are politically radicalized. This leads to stress and to auditing others for alignment with political and social beliefs.

The Fortress

Church of the Gesu in Rome, Italy

We need breaks. We need to speak freely without it being recorded. We need to remind ourselves that there are moral systems outside of those which the universalist left has made hegemonic in our schools and universities and workplaces. There are churches everywhere and so we enter them. They are around. They connect us to the past. They give us a fortress in which to rest up and plan for the battle with Islam, Chinese Communism, Leftism, Inherited Western Guilt, the clampdown on masculine “toxicity”, the weaponization of feminine caring and empathy in service of open borders and LGBTQIA+.

Religion helps us. As we enter the church, we know that others who have come, come in a spirit of humility and respect. We want to meet friends and future partners. We want to admire Renaissance art and listen to soothing organ music. We want a different order of time. We want to absorb the phenomena around us.

Young men in particular are apparently moving back into traditional churches throughout America and Western Europe. Our states have been secularizing. The reasons for this revival are numerous. We want mentors. Somebody whose job it is to look us in the face and say that they are rooting for us, rather than be invisible hiring managers which we send emails and letters to. Rather than the invisible customers we perform gig economy services for. Rather than the people who pass us in the streets, rushing onto their next meal.

But is this revival a reembrace of Christianity? Do we now believe in this? Is the great faith now part of us? Is it the language we think in, the good we are aiming at?

Or is Christianity the nearest available comprehensive doctrine? Are it’s ancient buildings the only thing we can claim as our own? The only legitimate excuse to retreat from an extractive, capitalist panopticon?

I am personally not a committed Christian yet. But the next time I move to a new city I will walk into the Catholic Church and meet those people as a new man. I will not go to the anarchist book shop or to the indie movie theater or to the neighborhood bar. This is because I want to meet others who believe we need this fortress. I want to learn from their stability and their commitment to a comprehensive doctrine.

A specter is haunting the United States and Europe. It is the specter of a legitimacy crisis, undermining the governmental, academic, and social ruling class.

This ruling class of the west have brought this crisis upon themselves. Young people are born with the common sense that they are not guilty for things they have not done and they react negatively when they are told that they are. It explains the rebellion by young white men across the western world against left-wing politics which frames them as a kind of oppressor, inheriting the supposed “oppression” which their ancestors perpetrated. It denies them a past heritage and a pride in walking through the buildings and living in the civilization and political structures which they're very ancestors, white European men, designed and built. Why would young men adhere to a moral and political order in which their identity is enough for them to be judged guilty? Why would young women who dislike the rat race, the endless push that they must apply for the thousands of scholarships out there for young women to break into tech, business, academia, accept the current order? Many young women do not want to be drafted into an eternal revenge mission against men, proving that the fairer sex too can sit in an office under fluorescent lights and sell their soul to a transnational boss. These young women dislike that and want to take some time to explore the world with friends, explore hobbies: reading, painting, geometry, math. They have interests that they don't see immediate financial and career rewards for, but which they are curious about. These hobbies are done only for a friend, for a future child, for a partner. These hobbies contain the complexity, beauty, symmetry and asymmetry of the world. So many young women also turn against this planned, confected social order.

The legitimacy crisis of the moral, legal, and political structures of the Western world is made worse because of its mindless embrace of Islam, its apology for Chinese Communism, and its general affection for any culture which is not its own. European countries and North American countries cannot close their borders, even when there is abundant evidence that the people flowing over them wish us ill. Our states cannot denounce practices in foreign countries which we would judge immoral in our own. The upper classes in America and Europe also do not practice what they preach. They are highly materialistic and stick religiously to the nuclear family. After they have broken society, discarded these norms, and propagandized children with the idea that they must re-create their identity from scratch, choosing their gender and way of life, they adhere to strict social and cultural norms in order to perpetuate their families position. This is a serious instance of hypocrisy and brings on the legitimacy crisis.

So the Christian revival may not be a considered decision. These young people do not step back and wonder if Christianity is the best software to run for the next thousand years or whether its drawbacks are sufficient enough to abandon it. These young people need a community We need justice and beauty outside of our hectic lives, moving between cities to get jobs, certificates, degrees. We simply need initiation into some institution that values us. Some institution that promises to protect us. That gives us a language to lean on. “We also constitute a group, a civilization.” The revival of Christianity comes because of the overreach of Western liberalism. This overreach has cannibalized the source code and moral code of our society itself. The post 60s left has failed to provide any coherent defense of the western tradition. And so we move back to the source. It will do for now.