Is God a culture warrior?
Conversions, Christophobia and ‘Civilisational Christianity”
Note: this post is unusual in that I’m speaking pretty directly to Christians about getting our own house in order. I know you come from all kinds of perspectives, spiritually and politically (which delights me) - if this particular essay is not your jam, you are still so welcome here and normal content will resume shortly.
Those of you in the UK might have noticed a change in the cultural mood music around Christianity lately. I worked on BBC religion coverage then led a religion think tank for fifteen years. The overarching narrative was of decline. Not so any more. Not because the data around affiliation have changed (though there are some indications we may be at the bottom of the curve1), but because of the discourse. Public figures have ceased to pour scorn on the very idea, and are instead making positive noises. Some, including former New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have converted. Joe Rogan has announced “we need Jesus”, Russell Brand has been baptised. Even Nick Cave has written a rock-gospel album.
There has been (what is at least perceived as) a right-ward trajectory2 in many of these stories. As this Vanity Fair piece spelled out, most public US converts to Catholicism are conservative, and many caught up in culture war dynamics. After (very) conservative commentator Candace Owens converted:
A bonanza of speculation arose about who might be next: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Trump himself? By early spring… LifeSiteNews was publishing articles on “why ‘culture warriors’ should convert to Catholicism.”
The UK is not, of course, the US. For a long time I believed we were inoculated against a hyper-politicised form of Christianity, partly because of this report which I commissioned in 2013. It concluded that the heritage of religious believers being active across all major political parties, combined with the shared national institutions of the BBC and the established church had protected us against a home grown “religious right”. I no longer think that heritage is a strong enough bulwark. At various events recently I have been surprised to hear Christian audiences enthusiastic about the idea of Christianity as a strong civilisational combatant against the ‘evils of Islam’ and ‘the religion of woke’3. Many of the questions were about how “we Christians” (there was not an acknowledgement that anyone else might be in the room) could “grow a backbone”, claim back our proper place and win this civilisational war. This disturbs me.
It might be helpful for me to show my own cards here, as you try to work out mentally which box I fit in. (Don’t worry, we all do this. Homophily and the friend/enemy distinction go deep). I am not disturbed by people becoming Christians who are conservative, or becoming more conservative because they have become Christian. My tradition does not point straightforwardly to any modern political outworking, so I mainly find myself politically confused. Christian Humanism (distinct from secular humanism) maps pretty closely onto my intuitions, but doesn’t give you political prescriptions. I know I am a communitarian, committed to relationship as the fundamental human good, and that my tradition puts lot of emphasis on the protection of the vulnerable, but I find thinkers all over the political compass working out these values in healthy seeming ways. Much more importantly, I find people embodying them in their neighbourhoods who would vote for a range of parties. For a while I thought I was a post-liberal, but now I don’t think we can ever be post anything. We just accumulate layers of stories like sedimentary rock. Whatever Wendell Berry is? That is me.
Giving that it isn’t just political tribalism (though I’m sure there is a dash of that), and that I unashamedly rejoice when anyone comes to know they are loved by God, I have been trying to discern what is disturbing me in some of these tides. I’ve landed on three interconnected things:
A lack of hospitality to those who are not conservative, amongst whom I am also seeing a huge upswing in spiritual openness.
Politics driving metaphysics.
Contempt for the outsider
1) The exclusion of other demographics
My vocation is a strange one. I am an “out” Christian who spends most of her time in circles with those who are not. My work on The Sacred means people know I will be curious and open to their values, stories and commitments before I ever assume the right to talk about mine. I also, through some accident of biology, have a face that makes people feel safe to tell me things. In our little community house we say “the face happened”, a shorthand for “I met someone at a conference/at the swings/on the bus and they unburdened their soul to me”. Some of you might also have this particular gifting, and honestly it’s a privilege. I am terrible at small talk so I much prefer hearing about metaphysical yearnings than kitchen renovations anyway. These moments of being trusted are precious.
All this means I am privy to a shift in the spiritual atmosphere, and not just among those with traditionalist political intuitions. Last year I did this lovely interview with Richard Spoor, who is perhaps South Africa’s preeminent human rights lawyer, champion of the labour movement and scourge of multi-national mining companies. In more cerebral circles, philosopher Philip Goff has recently announced his conversion to (a heterodox version of) Christianity after years as one of the world’s leading proponents of Panpsychism. Next year Lamorna Ash, who is the most extraordinary writer, has a book coming out called Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, which tracks this upswing in spiritual yearning and outright conversion among Gen Z and younger millennial people, many of whom lean progressive. I’m reading a preview and it’s wonderful. You should preorder it.
These are public examples of scores of private stories. Friends who have spent their whole lives working on climate change or refugee rights, friends who have been deep in what is often awkwardly lumped into “new age” pursuits, all getting interested in religion more generally and Jesus in particular, quietly, in closed rooms. The taking of psychedelics is often named as a factor, hence my interest in them.
It is notable that far fewer of these people feel able to go public. Converts on the “right” often accrue social acclaim for turning to religion. Not so everywhere. It takes courage to confess to being “christian curious“ for these tribes. It is hard in particular for educated, feminist women (i.e. many of my friends) to believe that an interest in Christianity wouldn’t entail submitting to being a second class citizen, and tolerating sexual predators to boot. For queer people, and those with queer friends (i.e. a large proportion of Gen Z) the negative associations are obvious.
If the public conversation continues to conflate an interest in religion with a particular part of the political compass all of this is unlikely to change. We get interested in things because of people we trust, who are generally people who remind us of ourselves. The current lopsided presentation reinforces social permission structures, which closes down imaginative possibilities.
2) Politics driving metaphysics
Politics gets dangerous when it becomes sacred to us, not an outworking of our values but the centre of identity. The institutions of the church have found a truly astonishing range of ways to be terrible over the centuries, often when they have allowed themselves to be used as a tool in a political programme. Jesus is no soldier in your civilisational army. He is too wild for that, too prone to call everything, including me, into question. Attempts to tame this story and deploy it for a win against the bad guys feel idolatrous, indeed heretical.
Those who self describe as progressives are not immune to this (one US friend left their Episcopalian church after the forth sermon in a row on gun control). Giving knee -jerk lip-service to every culturally fashionable cause is a temptation there. However, it is also visible in the linking of conservative political views and Christianity.
is deep in the data for the US, and you can get an idea from his excellent Religion as Cultural and Political Identity: Republicans like the idea of religion without the actual religion. This tweet is the TL; DR:
Among never attending Democrats, the share who say that religion is not important at all was 62% in 2008. In 2022, that had risen to 70%. The share saying it was very important dropped from 8% to 5%. That’s kind of how we should assume this should work. Never attenders shouldn’t think that religion is important.
But that logic does not apply to never attending Republicans. In 2008, 48% of them said religion was not important at all. In 2022, that number had dropped to 40%. In 2008, 29% of Republicans who never attended religious services said that religion was “somewhat” or “very” important to them. In 2022, that share had risen to 38%.
To me, this is very tangible support for the idea that the average Republican likes what religion means, but does not necessarily want to participate in it….
My bias is that I believe that religion is a net positive for a functioning society. I’ve been clear about that for quite a while now. But there’s a huge caveat when it comes to that assertion. Religion is a net positive only when people actively engage in all the aspects of religious life - including regular corporate worship.
Burge is pointing to a “Christianity” without the practices of corporate belonging alongside people Not Like Me. These shared institutions help tame our homophily. Showing up week after week alongside people Not Like Me continually complicates the friend/enemy distinction (or it should). Christianity without any corporate practice is not just theologically incoherent but potentially dangerous. It’s the corruption of something holy to an identity marker wielded in tribal warfare. It is rampant in the US, and I fear it’s coming here.
in his lecture Against Christian Civilisation put this phenomenon of non-practicing Christianity as identify marker squarely in his sights. He was particularly condemning of Jordon Peterson, one of the most influential proponents of a “civilisational Christianity” which to many of us seems less about following Jesus and more like a political project:Peterson's civilizational church is to be a self-help club for young men. It's to be a cultural institution fighting back against the Woke and the bloody Gaia worshippers and the feminists and the life-sapping cultural Marxists. It sees life as a catastrophe, and the correct response to that catastrophe as masculine conquest. What Jordan Peterson wants, in other words, is a church that looks like Jordan Peterson4.
3) Contempt for the outsider
You can hear in there a familiar tone as Kingsnorth channels Peterson: “bloody Gaia-worshippers” “life-sapping cultural Marxists”. This contemptuous and hostile posture towards ‘outsiders’ and those who disagree seems antithetical to the Christ who was mainly interested in the outsider. Whoever was on the margins, the other side of purity lines, he went towards.
This antithetical tone is often combined with an adolescent desire not just to win but to “destroy them”. This is both a YouTube debate bro term but also not that far from the literal truth. America at least is experiencing truly horrifying levels of what is termed “Lethal Mass Partisanship”: 20% of Americans — between 45 million and 50 million people - say they would be fine if a substantial number of people who support the other party died5.
How could this ever be a legitimate outworking of “love your enemies.. pray for those who persecute you….bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse6”. Sure, sometimes cultural critique is called for, but Christians are told to focus more on on the plank in their own eye than the speck in their neighbours. Judging others is usually displacement activity for dealing with our own darkness.
In the New Testament’s most famous cross cultural engagement, St Paul did not name-call7. He listened, learned and then treated his audience with respect. This is just basic Communications Theory. We are not easily persuaded by messengers we think hate us, funnily enough. Too much of the tone creeping into UK Christian conversations seems not driven by neighbour love, but something not far off the opposite. It made me think that the heretical disease of Christian Nationalism, in a strange Christian Identity politics form, had finally reached these usually mild old shores.
In this piece published by Comment Magazine recently Prof Luke Bretherton puts some of these trends in historical context. He helpfully zooms out, putting this wave of conversions in historical context. In the early 1900s several French largely non-practicing Jewish and Protestant intellectuals converted to Catholicism. Philosopher Jaques Maritain, later famous for his influence on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was one of them.
“Like Hirsi Ali, after examining atheism and other modern philosophies, he became disillusioned by the meaninglessness each of them seemed to offer. Such was his despair that along with his wife Raissa (who was born Jewish), he considered suicide. After encountering the work of philosopher Henri Bergson, but more influentially, through reading Thomas Aquinas he and Raissa converted to Catholicism and were baptized in 1906.”
His initial expression of this conversion was a surprise to me:
“[he] became involved with Action Française…, a royalist, reactionary, anti-democratic group, many of whose members went on to become fascists and leading figures in the Vichy Government that collaborated with the Nazis.”
Bretherton’s analysis is that Action Française were keen on “Christianity” as “a means of securing French civilization against the rot within and the threat without” (is this ringing any bells?).
They do not appear to have been so keen on Christ himself, who identified with the last and least, the alien and stranger, the meek and the merciful. Bretherton calls Christian Nationalism “christophobic” in its desire for the cultural forms over the central figure. This figure inconveniently commanded his followers to love not just their neighbours (and it seems clear from the Parable of the Good Samaritan that he did not draw narrow geographic or racial boundaries around this category), but also their enemies.
Maritain was part of this group for a number of years, but after it was condemned by the Pope and through friendships with theologians he moved in an entirely different direction. (You might like to read my post Friendship is my Theory of Change later.) This moment, which Bretheron terms a second conversion, marks
“a switch from a defensive posture marked by a narrative of decline centered on the fate of Europe [you could sub in America, or Britain, or The West], to a Christ-centered story in which the fate of humanity and what it means to be human is at stake.”
The temptation of tribalism in our time is hard to resist, caught up as we all are in an information environment actively trying to form us towards it. It is easy to believe the lie that the “other side” are not just wrong but evil. Again, those who lean progressive are far from immune to this. Contempt towards of people who hold traditional views is rife. I hope those of of us who call ourselves Christians can resist these temptations, even as we celebrate every single person who comes to know grace. I pray we can hold fast to the universal hope of a wide-open gospel, a Love which while we were enemies, did not reject us, pour contempt on us or go to civilisational war with us, but came to meet us and made us friends.
Gen Z are the least hostile generation to the idea that religion has things to teach us, for example.
The Left-Right thing is obviously a massive oversimplification but a version of this post which used more precise language became bogged down in political philosophy so just go with it if you can.
I also share concerns about the extremes of identity- led political movements and the graceless atmosphere they are too often associated with, but I can’t help but note the irony of Christians pouring scorn on this element of “woke” while pursuing what is essentially a Christian Identitarian project.
https://www.deseret.com/education/2024/09/24/new-york-times-columnist-david-french-tells-byu-students-to-face-political-division-as-christ-would/
Matthew 5:43, Romans 12:14
The sermon on Mars Hill, in Acts 17:22-31 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2017%3A22-31&version=NASB
Well, first off, thank you. I am one of those Americans who is, I am quite certain, in the crosshairs of the lowercase-c christian nationalists. When I say it is truly frightening to live in America, I am not exaggerating. The Christ I worship and adore is the Christ who wept on hearing of Lazarus's death and the Christ who, while angry, was also saddened that the pharisees wanted so little, so much less than what He was offering. This image of a Man who is so near and so transcendent is not an attractive image to millions of people who claim to have God on Their Side. Do these people frighten me? Yes, a little. Sometimes a lot. What do I do about them, about their ideology? I do what is hardest for any mortal to do: I remember I am dust. But mostly these people sadden me in their so-little desires. They want their Strongman to lead them. And that is all. Theirs is not a rich and full desire for wholeness nor holiness. They have gotten what they want, but I know (for it is not only written in the Word but it is written in Reality) that it will not satisfy, for nothing outside of Christ himself is able to do so.
But I digress. I have been a Sacred Podcast listener since the Pandemic and have grown to rely (perhaps too much) on it and Theos's voice(s). It is so difficult to find such voices here, now, that I truly treasure them when they speak. Thank you.
Thank you for this insightful post. It bubbled up many thoughts and issues for me. I’m a Brit but long term US resident, thinking of returning to the UK within the next 5 years. Im a mother of three almost adult American boys. I’m a theology graduate did nothing in that field professionally and who finds herself ever increasingly alienated from Christianity. Your article brought both clarity to my concerns and hope for a way to show up. I felt called out for my own bias but in a more positive way. You are probably the only overt Christian (living) writer I currently read. Thank you for providing some threads for me to hold on to and ponder. Please continue. The world (my world?) needs this measured view.