I was inspired to write this piece by a little book I’m re-reading by Malcolm Muggeridge. He gave a talk about the end of Christendom in 1978, the year of my new birth, for the inaugural address of the Pascal Lectures at the University of Waterloo. I just did a quick search and found the lectures continue to this day, and some are even available on YouTube. Christendom is a topic of some consternation and much ambivalence for many modern Christians. There is even a contingent who believe it was all downhill for civilization and the church when Constantine the Great converted to Christianity in the early 4th century. That’s overstating the case, but they are not fans of “Christendom.” The reason in their minds, as far as I can tell, is that Christendom confused the kingdom of God with the state and earthly power. That’s not good. Their answer is some kind of Pietistic two kingdoms Christianity, a complete “separation of church and state,” in the mystical words of 20th century secular American jurisprudence. The phrase, as most know, originated with Jefferson, but was made unquestionable doctrine in Everson v. Board of Education (1947).
Their assumption is that Christianity and the state are mutually exclusive, in Augustine’s phrasing, confusing the City of God with the earthly city of man. The spiritual life of the Christian, they believe, has nothing to do with the messy machinations of distributing power through governing. We’ll parse that out below, but there is a growing contingent of Christians of all theological stripes, I among them, who believe not only was Christendom a good thing, but that it is our God-ordained job to return the West to its Christian roots.
I became familiar with Muggeridge (1903-1990) in my early Christian journey, probably because of the influence of Francis Schaeffer who widened the scope of my vision of the Christian life to all of reality. I was born-again into a kind of fundamentalist Pietism in which I experienced Christianity as a dualism, the spiritual stuff in one sphere, and non-spiritual everywhere else. I was never overtly taught this, but it was the Christian water I swam in. When Schaeffer came along, all of a sudden thinking about how my Christina faith applied to society and civilization became extremely important to me. I’m sure when I saw the title of this little book I needed to know exactly how and why Christendom came to its end. I always wanted to see Christianity once again esteemed and influential in society, but my eschatological assumptions were not consistent with that aspiration. That was The Late Great Planet Earth 70s and 80s, and things were getting so bad Jesus was certainly coming back soon. That, however, was never God’s plan, that this fallen world would grow increasingly worse and he would rescue us from the destruction. Quite the opposite in fact.
Because of Schaeffer and my expanding Christian worldview, I was committed to seeing Christianity make a comeback in Western society, but the odds were daunting. The reason this little book fascinates me now is because in the milieu of the late 1970s and 80s, Christianity was pretty much done. We were now clearly the underdogs, even if vestiges of Christian influence hadn’t completely disappeared. Muggeridge was a keen observer of the dissolution of Christianity’s influence in Western culture. He was a one-time atheist and a successful journalist who expressed his thoughts in “stinging wit and elegant prose.” For a time in the 50s he was the editor of a British satirical magazine called Punch. As a professional observer of the human condition, like C.S. Lewis, his atheism wasn’t able to explain what he saw and experienced of life. He embraced Christianity later in life, and at the age of 79 he and his wife were received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1982.
The Boomers as the Fulcrum Generation
Muggeridge’s perspective on Christianity and civilization is fascinating to me because looking back over the decades it now fits so well. At the time it was depressing. I’m more grateful than ever for the exact timing of my birth and the period of history God chose me to live in, even if I have to endure the insults of the boomer haters. In Acts Paul tells us this is no accident, for any of us:
26 From one man he made all the nations of mankind, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.
I was born in 1960 into an American culture that would soon become the maelstrom known as “the 60s.” The further I go up the mountain of age, I can look down upon the plains of my life in hindsight and see the flow of history more clearly than when I was living through it. History is like that. Nobody save God knows where it’s going or what it means when they are living through it. I’ve thought and written a lot about the flow of history and ideas and how they develop over time. It’s an endlessly fascinating topic to me. I recently wrote a piece about my supposedly benighted generation, and as I was writing I realized something I hadn’t considered before. The boomers are the fulcrum generation in Western history, a kind of pivot-point around which modern history has turned. Our boomer role in the modern world has been to experience the fulfillment and death of one world, secularism, and the transition to another. We’re not sure what that transition will bring, but in my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, I argue in detail that secularism is either dead, or on its last legs, showing its age, and like the Berlin Wall circa 1989 ready to fall. The boomers were the first and last fully secular generation. How did we get there?
In 1637 a pious Catholic Christian, René Descartes, wrote a philosophical work in which striving for certainty in an increasingly skeptical age, he decided to doubt everything. He discovered the only thing he couldn’t doubt was his existence in the form of his thinking, reflected in the phase Cogito Ergo Sum, or I think therefore I am. I’ve mentioned this a million times, it seems, in my own writing, because it was the beginning of the so-called Enlightenment. Descartes’ perspective came to be known as rationalism, and eventually Western intellectuals thought they could figure life out and conquer reality with reason alone and without God. Revelation was no longer required. In due course secularism arose, which is the idea that a society could be run without reference to God at all. Secularism eventually dethroned Christianity in the mid-20th century in the decade into which I was born. The baby boom generation became the first in Western history to grow up with the effects of Christianity as a declining force in the culture.
When the boomers were born (1946 to 1964) most Americans thought of America as a Christian nation and the American people as a Christian people. Kennedy’s assassination on December 22, 1963, seemed to usher “the 60s.” Up to that point, America had been living in post-World War II prosperity and naivete, confident in America’s inherent greatness. No obstacle seemed too great for America to overcome. Then in a moment everything seemed to go to hell. Along with other technological and cultural changes, the invention of the pill in the early 60s allowed the boomers to become the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll generation, with a large side of protest thrown in. God only got in the way. Some hippies got religion in the 70s, but the generation as a whole became increasingly God-less. In the early 2000s, the “New Atheists” came on the scene with some very old arguments, and became a cultural phenomenon. It was the first time in history that Christianity was portrayed as not only morally suspect, but positively harmful. What we came to call woke, cultural Marxism, began to permeate the culture with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. From that point on when boomers were at the commanding heights of American government and culture, secularism was now the boss and Christianity a nuisance, or at best an irrelevance. Muggeridge was amazed at where this dissolution of Christendom was coming from:
Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes. Christendom has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elites. Our barbarians are home products, indoctrinated at the public expense, urged on by the media systematically stage by stage, dismantling Christendom, depreciating and deprecating all its values. The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.
I wonder what Muggeridge would think looking back at this first three decades of the 21st century. I’m sure words would not be able to handle his level of incredulity. Even the dissolution of the 70s could not prepare someone for the age of woke.
Many of us were surprised at how quickly this seemed to happen, but this had been developing since 1637. Secularism at its strongest, however, was revealing its weakness. The Berlin Wall metaphor is a favorite of mine because while seeming impenetrable and eternal, we discovered it was made out of papier-mâché. It like secularism and wokeness was built on lies, and nothing built on lies can endure. At the moment of its greatest triumph during the Biden years woke, boomer excess, and government overreach, think Covid, were waking up tens of millions of Americans to The Truth.
Christendom’s Fall is the Requirement for Its Rebirth
Looking at the wreckage, Chicken Littles fail to consider a fall is often an opportunity for rebirth, enabling the realizations required for renewal and change. It’s not unlike an addict who has to hit rock bottom before he walks through the door of an AA meeting. Muggeridge saw it the same way:
For it is in the breakdown of power rather than in its triumph that men may discern its true nature and in an awareness of their own inadequacy when confronted with such a breakdown that they can best understand who and what they are. . . . So, amidst the shambles of a fallen Christendom, I feel a renewed confidence in the light of the Christian revelation with which it first began.
Reading his talks you might think him a pessimist—he can come off like a curmudgeon—but he assures us he is not; he sees hope coming out of the wreckage. Later in assuring us “Christ’s kingdom remains,” he affirms the necessity of the disaster for its renewal:
Indeed, it can be seen more clearly and appreciated more sharply by contrast with the darkness and depravity of the contemporary scene.
In 1978 that contrast had yet to fully play itself out, and that became our opportunity for rebirth in the 21st century. It looked bad in the 1970s, but we hadn’t seen anything yet. Most Americans were too “fat and happy,” as we say, to question the dominant narratives of secular culture until the gift of Covid. I know, it certainly didn’t appear to be a gift at the time, but many now see it as a turning point of historical proportions. I’ve come to call it the neutron bomb of truth. Looking back in hindsight, I now see Covid coming after, in Jefferson’s words from the Declaration, “a long train of abuses and usurpations.”
My red pill journey started with Trump, but Covid revealed the true nature of The Matrix, and many more people woke up because of that. All of a sudden, it seemed, people started questioning everything that until then appeared “just the way things are.” For those of us who lived through decades of Christendom’s demise, there was finally hope that secularism might not be so dominant after all. As Covid wore on, and especially with “the election” of Biden, I kept hearing and reading of an awakening, and this was happening over a wide array of issues, medical, political, geopolitical, cultural, historical, and yes, spiritual, everything. I believe all of the previous issues point to the latter because underlying all of them is a search for truth, and truth has metaphysical and spiritual implications because of He who is the Truth.
I argue in my book that we are in the midst of a third Great Awakening, but one unlike the previous two. The first and second awakening happened in Christian cultures where the assumptions of the Bible and Christendom were taken for granted. Those assumptions create what in sociology is called a plausibility structure. Those are the ideas and beliefs a people take for granted as true, in the phrase I used above, as “just the way things are.” They are not questioned unless the foundations of civilization are falling apart, and it only becomes clear what those questions are, and their implications, in hindsight. We are only seeing now what in the fog of war was confusing and perplexing, but appear as necessary to get us to the revealing point. This point, it should be unnecessary to mention, is only the very beginning of a very long journey. It requires going back, as I explain in my book, so we can find our way forward. I like what Doug Wilson calls our goal, Christendom 2.0.
What Exactly is Christendom?
That question is best answered by explaining what it is not. For that I go back to Muggeridge:
Christendom, however, is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men. It bears the same relation to the everlasting truth of the Christian revelation as, say laws do to justice, or morality to goodness, or carnality to love—if you like, as Augustine’s City of God to the earthly city where we temporarily live.
The two cities, and the relationship between them, is the confusion that causes so many Christians to embrace secularism and the myth of neutrality. When secularism developed in the 17th century as a reasonable response to the wars of religion in Europe, there arose the idea that government can be a neutral arbiter of all religious belief, and that no one religion can be priviledged in a society. It took centuries to fully develop, but by the mid-20th century pluralism became the default understanding of religion among Western cultural elites, even though such a thing doesn’t exist, in spite of all the protestations to the contrary.
The City of God, as Augustine argued, exists in the human heart, as does the earthly city. One of those two human hearts is going to determine, as Muggeridge calls it, “the administrative power structure,” and the basic assumptions by which it is run. That means these are deep and broad cultural issues, specifically which moral foundation is going to drive what the society believes. Vishal Mangalwadi states an unalterable fact of existence in his insightful work, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization:
Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.
This is undeniable, but secularism is built on its denial. Every society is built on its laws, and all laws rest on assumptions of “a final source of authority.” The reason Christendom flourished for so long is because it’s assumptions rested on a Christian and biblical worldview, the only source for true societal flourishing. When the West rejected that it didn’t move to some neutral place where law and government became the umpire who just calls balls and strikes. There has to be a strike zone before the ump can call balls and strikes!
If you’re dubious about my assertion about neutrality being a myth, and you’re convinced a secular society where true religious pluralism is possible, boil the question down to the individual. Can a person live without ultimate moral values that determine right and wrong? Does not each person have to decide on what basis they make decisions about what is right and wrong? And who sets those standards? If you say the person, that means each person can set their own moral standards, and you have a recipe for societal chaos and anarchy, which sets up the inevitability of tyranny. There will be order in a society one way or the other. Secularism is basically man-made moral standards, determining right and wrong without reference to God and Scripture. As we saw clearly in the last several years, secularism leads to tyranny because there is no check on government, no higher standard to which government is accountable. For the person and the society, the question always comes down to “the final source of authority.” Christendom 1.0 got it right, if not in all the particulars. We have a chance to improve on that, going back to find the way forward.
Recent Comments