On Christian Civilization

Paul Kingsnorth Becomes a Christian

Throughout the short time since I started Chorus of Union, I have mentioned my religious faith several times, and God a few more times than that, but in this particular essay I am writing, for the first time, from a specifically and deliberately Christian perspective. I found it challenging, writing phrases that I have, in some cases, never written before like "found Christ" or “came to Christ.” For my secular and/or non-Christian readers, I hope this isn't too much of a turnoff, nor seen as an attempt to prosthelytize--not that I don't think prosthelytizing isn't important to Christianity-it is; nor because I think there is something wrong with it-I don't. It's more because I don't think my faith is at all strong enough, nor am I qualified, to try and convince anyone of belief in my (mostly) chosen faith. Take this essay as one directed at addressing Christian concerns in the modern discourse, though I do think I address larger issues that put it within the scope of Chorus of Union if you read to the end.

I don't know if this is a tone and perspective I am going to adopt for the future. At the moment I have no plans to. But being a Christian is a part of my life that is increasing in importance, and that may be reflected in my essays down the road.

I first read Paul Kingsnorth in 2012 thanks to my wife, who sent me the essay Dark Ecology, published in Orion magazine. At the time I was going through a philosophical transformation I was not even aware of, as I watched my civilization begin to entangle itself in a new technological dependency with the rise of social media. Civilizations are always dependent on technology to thrive. One could even argue that all human cultures are as well, whether they meet the definition of civilization or not. However, with the advent of social media, high speed internet, smart phones, etc., the spiritual and interpersonal, the essentials of an individual’s community, rather than society writ large, were being disrupted by technology. I observed this in my life, in my student’s lives, in my friends’ and colleagues’ lives. Suddenly, it wasn’t that my food was moving from farm to global market to processing plant to container ship to port to supermarket to my pantry; it was my friendships instead that were in motion: from keyboard to screen to GUI, to fiber-optic cable, to server, to modem to GUI to screen, to other friend’s eyeballs.

Our religions were similarly being interrupted, not because they hadn’t already been in decline in our society, which was obviously true going back to the 1960s--arguably much further than that–but, what replaced religion was moving from the so-called “new age religion” explorations of the Boomers to a pseudo-political tribalism defined by ritual virtue signaling and trolling take-downs from an increasingly atheistic educated urban class, of which I was a part. Just as suddenly as the relationship shift, people’s political lives were taking on a religious tenor, and people’s personal lives were increasingly negotiated via digital interactions.

Starting around 2012, I began to notice this phenomena in a fuzzy way, but Kingsnorth wrote about it with great clarity. The Dark Ecology essay clarified the causes and state of the way things were changing and sent me down a path of the thoughts of other writers and thinkers who had been seeing what Kingsnorth and I had been seeing, only much earlier than I imagined. E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Ivan Illych, C. S. Lewis, Emerson and Thereau and others had been paying attention to The Machine long before I was born, and I credit Kingsnorth for being a continuing voice in this chain of watchmen and oracles, warning us of our self-destructive technological mania.

In the time since I read Dark Ecology, Kingsnorth himself transformed from dedicated activist to Orthodox Christian. I was born and raised in the Orthodox Church, but spent much of my adolescence into my thirties alternately skeptical or hopeful, until returning to my faith, almost reluctantly, and certainly slowly, in the last fifteen years. Kingsnorth and I have a convergent storyline in some ways, and it’s been a pleasure and a comfort to read him, even when what he says can borderline on the apocalyptic, and even when we deeply disagree.

This is one of the latter times.

God’s Love

The argument over Christianity’s place in civilization starts in Kingsnorth's recent Erasmus Speech for First Things called Against Christian Civilization. He then joined Jonathan Pageau on the podcast The Symbolic World to speak on it further, and has just recently released a response to many of the critiques he has received. I have read through these texts and listened to the podcast several times to try and formulate my response, and I will try and give Kingsnorth as much credit as I can, because I think he has a lot of important and relevant things to say about the world.

However, ultimately, I am disappointed in these two bits of writing and the conversation. Because these pieces (speech, discussion, essay) are rooted in stated theological claims, they include implied theological claims. This is Kingsnorth’s view of a Christian life as he understands it so far in his years since conversion. I hope to critique with love, because, well, that’s where this all starts, with a very serious question that I have for him: where is God’s love? Nowhere in the three pieces, with all of Kingsnorth’s talk about what Christ demands of His followers, is there mention of the love He has for us. In the most recent response piece, Kingsnorth derides “the world,” its “worldly culture” and continues to punish the idea of civilization as being inherently anti-God. And yet he forgets that “the world” is a paradox, two worlds in one: a world that is fallen, and the world that is good, and that God loves. Can we remember John 3:16? “That He so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten son. . .”? God’s love trumps all in Christianity. Our love, and what to do with it, is the overriding instruction of Jesus of Nazareth, and we know it because Christ tells us so in Matthew 22:34-40:

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

These two passages are the Rosetta Stone of Christian law. God loves us all equally and without favor, we who are made in the image and likeness of God, fallen though we may be. It is we who sin, breaking each other and ourselves; it is we who war and steal and rape and kill and murder and destroy the environment and misuse Christianity–all of that is true. But God loves us all the same, and is always there ready to forgive.

These two commandments are included in Against Christian Civilization. But Kingsnorth doesn’t end there. He lists these laws, but he also adds to the list, using his own rhetorical flair:

Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. Love God. Do not resist evil. Lay down your life for your friends. Rule by serving. Give away your wealth. Let the dead bury the dead. We have our orders. And how we hate them.

Putting a pin in that last bit, in the interview with Pageau, Kingsnorth insists on the rule to “not resist evil” twice more, while in his most recent piece, he adds to the list of imperatives with the dictum to hate our own mothers and fathers.

These “orders,” as he puts it, are not coequal. First, the passage of not resisting evil is ripped from its context, one must assume deliberately. Matthew 5:38-39:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

It is very clear that tit-for-tat vengeance is what is being addressed in this dictum. I do think it is worth thinking about beyond that context, and I wonder often if Christ is advocating for pacifism. I asked my priest about it, and he reminded me that we need to return evil with love. This isn’t easy to understand either. I’m not sure what the church fathers have to say about pacifism, but when I think of the Primary Commandments, I can’t help but feel compelled to defend others, especially from violence. Yes, I can turn my cheek if I am struck (though I have failed at this many times), and I can try and respond with love, but if someone strikes my neighbor, I see nothing that compels me to stand by and watch. I can read it both ways, but when I see the world around me, while I can try and endure evil towards me, responding only with love, I will continue to resist evil when directed at my neighbors. This is a real struggle in a world filled with bullies willing to harm others for selfish gain, sadistic satisfaction, or any number of other reasons. Whatever the answers to these questions that I struggle with, I don’t see where Kingsnorth has offered explanation or reasoning for his implied interpretation of this conundrum, decontextualized as it was. I do see, however, the picking up of a subtle point of moral theology out of its original context and a reshaping of it into a rhetorical weapon. As he does with “let the dead bury the dead.” This is Christ’s reply to a man who He calls to follow Him. The man wishes to bury his father first before following Christ. The context is all important, and the sense of this passage and others as underlining that loving God and your neighbor is more important even than the trappings of familial duty. Does Kingsnorth suggest that we dump the bodies of our parents in the streets? I’m going to guess not. Taking difficult passages like these at face value, without a reasoned explanation isn’t illuminating, it’s destructive.

Finally, the hating of one’s parents demands thought and also context. That passage is more challenging than Kingsnorth even lets on when taken in its original complete form. Luke 14:26 reads: “If any man come to Me and hate not his father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.” Could it mean that Jesus is telling us to hate? Really? Quite clearly He has told us above all to love. Perhaps in the context of the Primary Commandments from Matthew we can read something a little more nuanced–though it was spoken with great rhetorical force–to not let the relationships we inherited before we came to Christ keep us from loving God, our neighbors, and as many others as we can. Who, after all, imposes more unfair loyalty love tests on us than our own closest loved ones–the love that draws us away from God and each other is the trap against which this passage warns.

Time and again, Christ challenges us to contemplate God, to be loving and kind to each other, to try and expand out our love for all men as God does, and time and again, it is complex and challenging, and in need of careful consideration. Time and again, Kingsnorth wields these passages like bludgeons, stripped of their context, and uses them to beat the strawman of Western Civilization he’s built, but more on that in a moment.

The theology of Kingsnorth, I think, is best understood in these terms, because of that passage's last line from the First Things speech: “And how we hate them.” In the interview with Pageau he frames it similarly: “The more Christian I become the more Christ is inside me bashing away–churning things around, the more that becomes painfully apparent. So that’s the paradox we’re all living in as Christians.” But it’s not a paradox if we remember God’s love. It is with God’s love that these commands are understood. Christ knows we will fail, He knows none of us are without sin, He knows we cannot possibly fulfill these commandments; without Christ’s love it would be mere cruelty. With Christ’s love it is for us to struggle and strive and ask forgiveness when we miss the mark.

To be totally honest, Paul, I don’t hate them. I feel challenged by them, and work hard to understand them, hopefully achieve them where I understand them, and ask forgiveness when I fail. Hating them would seem to me to be missing the challenge they represent. And I don’t feel Christ bashing away at me: when I feel him, he is holding me with one hand as he beckons me towards His love with the other. After a lifetime of doubt and skepticism and arrogance and self-importance, I’m relieved to be where I am, and I feel humbled by knowing that I’m failing all the time, as we all are, to be without sin. Maybe I’m doing it wrong? Yes, as Kingsnorth continually says, these are impractical, impossible demands, but it is only in light of God’s love that they make any sense. I ask again: where is God’s love in Kingsnorth’s theology?

Furthermore, that God’s love is universal for all of humanity is perhaps the most revolutionary of all of Christ’s teachings, and has reshaped the world, the West particularly. When looking at Rome–Christianity’s birthplace–and its culture, and nearly all other cultures, in comparison to Christian Civilizations that rose after Rome’s fall, one of the most important distinctions is that of God’s (or gods’) favor, and where and why it is bestowed. Success on earth was seen, until Christ, as a just reward from the supernatural; be it Jupiter, Karma, or the approval of one’s ancestors, the unseen power of the divine was (and in many cultures, still is) thought to bless people in life and make them successful. The inverse was also taken to be true–one's karma was at fault, one’s ancestors were angry, one’s gods were unsatisfied–if one is poor or downtrodden or meek or persecuted for righteousness. I know Kingsnorth understands this; he is a student of history and even mentions Tom Holland’s Dominion in his Erasmus Lecture, where this point is laid out quite well. In contrast, Jesus preached that all of humanity has equal access to Divine Grace, regardless of station, sex, ethnicity, or ability. God’s Love is for all of us, if we choose to accept it. Which leads me to Freedom.

Freedom

One of the defining features of non-Calvinist Christianity is free will. Christianity must be chosen, forgiveness must be sought, there is nothing about Christian faith that can or should be coerced or bribed or demanded. Nearly every story of a Christian martyr is about resistance to coercion—one could even say non-retributional resistance to evil, by repaying it with good. The martyrs faced coercion to speak words that are lies, to worship deities that they did not believe in or follow, to proclaim a loyalty they did not feel, to marry someone they did not love, or marry at all against their will—these are the stories of so many of the early saints when Christianity was illegal in the Roman Empire. Freedom of conscience, and the freedom to speak truly as they saw it, to rule their own lives, to follow Christ together peaceably, this was the crux of nearly every martyr’s life for nearly three hundred years. The Roman Empire was not a paragon when it came to preserving the virtue of freedom for its people. Being, like most civilizations until the 19th century, a slave-based empire, freedom was only accessible if you were a wealthy, high-born, male citizen. Latin Rights could be extended to non-ethnic-Romans, provided they were high-born, wealthy, male, and useful to the ethnic-Roman elite, but that was the extent of the Pax Romana’s magnanimity.

One of the triggering factors for the martyrs beyond simple resistance to the evil coercions imposed by Roman culture was that many spread the word of God without apology. It’s certainly why most of the disciples were martyred, including Sts. Peter and Paul. Speaking the truth in spreading the word is also one of Christ’s dictates to us, although being able to do so legally was not possible till the year 313 with the Edict of Milan. Christians should speak the truth, the word, spread it, and give others the possibility of choosing to become Christian or not, freely, of their own volition.

The track record on that historically is not so good. East, West, anywhere you go in Christendom, Christians have warred with, for, over, and because of religious differences–politically motivated schisms, excommunications, and anathemas; inquisitions, forced conversions, and pogroms all taint the history of Christendom, of that there is no doubt. Christianity has always been a part of, or within some form of civilization, born at the crossroads of Eurasia, and passing through multiple rising and falling empires, whether dominant or subservient to cultures within which Christianity existed. It would always be caught up in the ebb and flow of the tides of history. Indeed, it didn’t take more than two hundred years for Christianity to go from illegal to tolerated to the state religion to the preferred and favored faith, to something of an oppressive and coercive faith for what was left of the Pagans in the Roman Empire. During this period, Christians across the empire went from hiding their worship in secret locations, homes, and catacombs, to razing Pagan temples, or seizing them and converting them to churches. Blood sacrifice, the central act of worship for Pagans, was made illegal very early on, mass burnings of Pagan texts took place, and forced conversions occurred, to say nothing of riots between Orthodox and Arian Christians that killed thousands, sometimes in the streets of Constantinople itself. The freedom that Christians had once longed for became second to politics and power, and to many, zeal overrode Christ’s Primary Commandments. That freedom to choose, to excercise our God-given free will, was no longer the center of Christendom. A condition that would remain that way for a thousand years in our Civilization.

Civilizations evolve so much, sometimes in different directions simultaneously, that they can defy simple definitions. One of my chief objections to his original essay was how Kingsnorth cites some scholar’s views on what Christian Civilization actually is, narrowing it down to a Western Civilization that he can manage. In his most recent response piece he claims to have been made a straw man by critics, and he may be right, but starting with the Erasmus Lecture he builds to straw man the entirety of Western Civilization. He seemed unaware of this even as he wrote in preparation for it: “But what is this ‘West’? Well, it depends whom you ask. A liberal, a conservative, a reactionary, and a Marxist might give very different answers.” Indeed, if you ask an anarcho-primitivist, they might have a perspective as well. I noticed that Kingsnorth decided not to ask Nial Ferguson on the right or Brian Redhead on the (very far) left what they thought. He might have asked Marx or Hitler, both creatures of the West who lost their own arguments years ago about what the West was and should become. He might have chosen Lincoln or Churchill who won their arguments–at least in their time. Kingsnorth chooses instead other definitions that aren’t wrong per se, simply incomplete, missing the bigger picture of the West, and of Christian Civilization’s place within it, which is that the West is an argument over which of its many overlapping properties are ascendant at any given moment, Christianity being one of the most central of those properties. Christianity is, however, one of many contenders engaged in the great debate about what we were, are, and will become in the West.

I think it is fair to say that there are few competing strands that if pulled from the warp of the West, it would cease to be the West, and I think it’s also fair to say that Christianity is one of those few strands. Both Marx and Hitler tried to rip Christianity from the West–and thus threatened the annihilation of the West itself. Lincoln preserved Christianity, while Churchill remains more ambiguous to our eyes with regard to whether his faith or his empire came first. I don’t know if that makes the West a “Christian Civilization” or not. I tend to think yes, but as I said, it’s an argument, one I don’t believe Kingsnorth is engaged in understanding. Instead he chose a definition that served his purposes, then imbued that deeply debatable framework with a specific set of characteristics, all of which Kingsnorth objects to with no counterbalancing consideration of aspects of the West that might be redeeming.

In the interview Kingsnorth says that people who defend Christian Civilization speak as if they “talk like this seem[s] to be defending Enlightenment values, actually–they are defending liberalism, democracy, capitalism.” But then in his recent post he says: “Our culture may have been nominally Christian five hundred years ago, but for a long time now it has been the culture of the Enlightenment, of modernity, of the Machine. . .”

These are lists of aspects of The West that are in conversation with myriad other aspects of the West. I would like Kingsnorth to clarify which Enlightenment he means, French or Scottish, and which aspects are so hateful to Christianity that the entire movement makes that list of anti-Christian elements of the West. When looking at American Civilization, I see not the venal Trump who Kingsnorth holds up as the representative of my culture, but the Constitution's guarantees of freedom pulled from the best aspects of the Christian-dependent elements of the Enlightenment. In the interview, when he mentions my culture, it is with a sadly stereotypical dismissiveness-in-passing I’ve heard several times from some British intellectuals, mentioning its “craziness of 10,000 Protestant sects a minute popping up in America because no one can agree on what the Bible means.” But did he ever stop for a minute to consider why that is? A Constitutional guarantee of freedom of religious practice means we Americans have real choice—a thousand years of coercive Christianity came to an end. Americans were the first people on earth to have the legal freedom to choose Christ, or not, without government oppression. A choice Europe and Britain couldn’t sort out in their governments until long after it would have done any good—like, perhaps helping to prevent the Holocaust. And what of the freedom to spread the word of God to all who have ears to hear and eyes to see? Where else in the world can that be found? Now that England, for example, imprisons silently praying Christians for standing in front of Abortion clinics, and other categories of speech that cause “psychological harm,” whatever that means, are criminalized, a dedication to the freedom to speak the truth as one understands it is only found in America (for now).

If you want to allow people to read and preach the word freely, and offer them the choice to choose Christ, 10,000 Protestantisms is the price you have to pay–and they have something to offer us fuddy-duddy old Orthodox Christians too, tangled as we are between the staleness of our ethnic tribes seemingly stuck in the old country, and the waves of zeal from the recent sea of new converts. Evangelicals are always hanging in the background, challenging us with their rock-bands and praise songs, daring us to hold to the Liturgy, to tradition, to the old teachings, showing our substance in the face of glitz and fashion. But at least our people, man and woman alike, have a choice! A free choice that Paul Kingsnorth himself made while living under the protection of the West’s laws that the United States Constitution pioneered and that our father-country, England could only poorly mimic, and it seems quite easily and quickly to have nearly abandoned. During his life in the West, Kingsnorth climbed a Western ladder of legal protections, hard won and at great price, to find Orthodoxy, and while I don’t think he’s trying to pull that ladder up after him, he seems content, even happy, to watch it burn. Without much gratitude for that essentially Christian gift of Western Civilization, Kingsnorth encourages us to yield the field, seeking out instead only the Christianity of monastic life, and let whatever civilization that follows possibly take that choice away from his children and grandchildren.

Freedom is not free, it comes with costs. Not just the 10,000 sects, but that the temptations that enfold us and penetrate our minds; the myriad interpretations of Christianity are lures from the usual Calvinist variety to the satanic Prosperity Gospel preachers to the progressive-hippie-post-modern-Jesus churches with their left-wing political flags. It is hard to be Christian in America–you have to really want to live as a Christian. The temptations are many and the consequences are light. It often feels like we live in the desert of our cultural decline, something Kingsnorth and I agree on entirely. But to live as a Christian in this world requires some appreciation that the choice was ours to make. The questions of interpretation–such as that raised by pacifism–we struggle with even when we can benefit from the Church Fathers’ teachings. But being able to ask and answer those questions without coercion is in the US a gift from the West that comes from the teachings of Christianity. If the only good that came from the The West as a Christian Civilization is codifying in law the freedom of conscience, speech, association, and choice to worship, as per the Enlightenment's interpretation of God’s universal love of all mankind, then isn’t it worth considering that The West isn’t entirely antithetical to Christianity?

No, Kingsnorth tells us, because Charles Eastman said so. In Kingsnorth’s original speech, the entirety of Christian Civilization from across centuries of time and wide spans of geography and numerous diverse cultures is negated on the word of a single man who acts as a spokesman for proper Christianity as the single focal point of our sympathies, and who is given the voice of wisdom. Eastman was an impressive man from his works and efforts in this life, but in the speech, his claim to wisdom is presented merely by his birth as a member of the Santee Dakota tribe of the Sioux Nations.

Charles Eastman was born Ohiyesa, but chose a Christian name that, as far as history is concerned, remained his name till his death. However, Kingsnorth only uses his Christian name once, instead electing to refer to him by the birth name. Eastman went by both names, but white Christians, like Kingsnorth and myself, referred to him by his Christian name for most of his life. His tribe, the Santee Dakota, were originally from the upper peninsula of Michigan, till a century-long war with the Ojibwa (Chippewa) peoples ended in their displacement to Minnisota and the Dakotas, where they in turn displaced the Indian tribes that were already there; the Crow, Kiowa, Pawnee, and plains Apaches among others are all peoples driven from what the Sioux still claim is their native land. Santee means “knife” in English, and the Dakota, like all of the Sioux, were feared by their neighbors long before white Americans got to the region in any serious numbers. Four Santee were responsible for starting the violence of the Sioux War in 1862 with a massacre of five settlers not living on Santee land, including a 15 year old girl. That war saw the Sioux ravage the settlers of Minnesota, massacring over 500 white men, women, and children, before they were defeated in a battle by the US Army. Of the 150 Santee Dakota warriors that were taken prisoner and given death sentences, Linoln pardoned 112.

I doubt Kingsnorth knows this, as he has probably absorbed the romantic primitivist mythology most Europeans absorb when it comes to the history of American Indians. This can be seen by his continued use of Charles Eastman’s birth name throughout his original speech, instead of his chosen name. Charles Eastman is a name that doesn’t have the mystical gravitas that Ohiyesa does. Charles Eastman is a suit-wearing Physician educated at a preparatory boarding school, Dartmouth College, and Boston University’s medical college; Ohiyesa is a mystic Indian with a headdress at one with the earth and sky. Charles Eastman founded YMCAs for Indian groups and helped found the Boy Scouts of America for all American boys, Ohiyesa chants with eagle feathers around a bonfire drawing wisdom from ancient ceremonies. Charles Eastman became and stayed a Christian even when he learned that Christian Civilization doesn’t make men good, doesn’t reverse the fall; Ohiyesa condemns Christian Civilization long before we were born. His disappointment is clearly a part of our story here in the United States, and I will not trivialize it. The treatment of American Indians by my government is one of our great shames, and any Christian should be rightly vexed by this sad, yet complicated history–but in no way should it imply that the Sioux are any example of how to run a society.

Kingsnorth writes that Eastman “believed that the new America needed an indigenous soul, and that his people could help provide it.” His use of the word “indigenous” is illustrative as Indian Tribes still largely refer to themselves as “Indians.” Only Western Intellectuals favor the term “indigenous,” imagining an offense not given by the older term. Then Kingsnorth quotes Eastman: “I have come to the conclusion that this Jesus was an Indian. He was opposed to material acquisition and to great possessions. He was inclined to peace. He was as unpractical as any Indian and set no price on his labor of love. These are not the principles upon which the white man has founded his civilization.” This passage shows me only that men of great worth and accomplishments can be wrong. It is easy to be inclined towards peace when one has already lost the great war, but I wonder what the Crow and the Kiowa would say to a Dakota about that when facing the driving might of the Akíčhita, the warrior caste of the Sioux Peoples. It is necessary and practical to minimize possessions when one is living a nomadic life, but acquisition of large herds of horses–often stolen from other tribes–and domination of large swaths of land taken from other tribes wasn’t anything the plains Indians shied away from when the opportunity presented itself. Practicality takes on different meanings in different cultural contexts, and it was certainly practical for the many tribes to acquire firearms and horses (bred for domestication by many Afro-Eurasian civilizations over thousands of years) whenever possible, abandoning the bow and spear and walking. There are many founding principles of “white men’s” civilization, but Eastman misses, at least in this one quote, the principles that educated him, and brought him in, gave him the position and power to do the good work that he did all his life. On Eastman’s final point, it should be noted that the Sioux War of 1862, in which Eastman’s father fought, was not without provocation. The Indian Bureau was not fulfilling treaty obligations to provide limited foodstuffs because the American Civil War created shortages, and that coupled with a crop failure on Santee Dakota lands led to the Indian response: to go to war by massacring mostly unarmed civilians. It’s also important to remember that the reason why Custer’s Last Stand at the Little BigHorn on the battlefield Kingsnorth himself visited, a battle that included many Santee, was a complete massacre. The Sioux, unfettered by Christian morality, didn’t take prisoners or give pardons, but they did mutilate their fallen enemies, taking noses and ears and scalps, often from living men left to die slowly from their wounds, eaten alive by crows and vultures under the hot sun of the open plains. By the example of Eastman’s own people, Jesus was no Indian.

To continue to be a purveyor of this gross romantic view of the American Indian as somehow noble savages dedicated to the oneness of nature, living in peace and harmony with all living things, simple, guileless, and somehow more moral than we are, is to do them no favors. They were and are human, with a wide variety of complex, beautiful and exquisite cultures that prove they too were made in the image and likeness of God; they are also just like the rest of us in that they are just as fallen, just as capable of great evil.

Charles Eastman did not take scalps. He walked a path many of us Americans walk between our ethnicities and our civilization. I watched my Grandfather navigate the last decades of his life as a Cypriot immigrant to his beloved adopted country, balancing his Greek-Cypriot self with his American self. I’m sure at times it was a struggle, but American Civilization made room for him. As it did for Charles Eastman, who worked with governments and lawyers and presidents to improve the lives of his people, and many other peoples who a generation before would have been his sworn enemies–all Indian reservations were improved from Eastman’s efforts, and from his biography it's clear he was a tireless advocate for equal rights for all Americans, Indian or not. There’s that pesky word, “rights,” straight from the Enlightenment. At the end of the day, though Ohiyesa might have doubted the Christianity of his adopted civilization, he never gave up the fight to improve his civilization from within, using the mechanisms of that Civilization as his tools. Somewhere Charles Eastman must have understood that there are no rights, no human rights, no rights of man, without God and Christ, and the universal love of which they are a perhaps poor, but noble reflection.

Christianity?

Part of the ongoing set of questions for me is what is Christianity? What exactly is a Christian? Charles Eastman wasn’t Orthodox; he was part of just one of the 10,000 Protestant sects we have here in America. Paul Kingsnorth considers Eastman a Christian, however, regardless, as do I. But when is a Christian a Christian? All of the time? Some of the time? When he or she is at church? When they are at home? Does Ayan Hirsi Ali get to be a Christian regardless of her reasoning? Having read her work over the years, I think we might be inclined to give her the time to explore what that means. For those that claim kinship to Christian Civilization, even if we consider them wrong, can we not afford them the opportunity to move towards faith, and make common cause with them where appropriate. Ross Douthat has written an excellent piece in The Free Press making the argument that even a clumsy start to exploring what that means is worthwhile.

From the time that Peter and Paul argued over circumcision through the theological disagreements that led to the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea, through the many schisms that followed, including the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation, The First and Second Great Awakenings, etc. etc., down to today, the question of what a Christian is and isn’t has been central to Christian thinkers through time. I am certainly not qualified to cast judgments of others’ claims to be Christian. I am a Christian, but it took me three decades to say it out loud without apology.

My final critique of Kingsnorth is related to those questions, and can also be heard in a comment he made in the interview with Pageau: “The root of Christian Culture is Christians, right, actual Christians, not probably people like me who say we’re Christians and technically are but people actually living like Christians.” What is an “actual” Christian? He gave a self-deprecating laugh when he said it, but the implications of that word are reflected in much of the speech and follow-up piece. His critique of Ayan Hirsi Ali’s Christianity in the initial speech is an example. Kingsnorth has, within his work both in these three bits of media and elsewhere, implied that only Monastics, and more specifically the Desert Fathers, are “actual” Christians, because they are the only Christians adequately meeting the demands of Jesus’ most radical teachings as Kingsnorth sees and interprets them. I am not a theologian as anyone with such expertise can tell, but I know that can’t be right.

The Desert Fathers aren’t a special order of human who are actually Christian, leaving the rest of us liars, pretenders, and poseurs. As Saint Ephraim of Katounakia said “If I read a hundred prayers in the silence of Mount Athos a day, and you, in the noise of the city, with work and family responsibilities, read three prayers, then we are in the same position.” Furthermore, we should aspire to Sainthood, but there are other kinds of Saints beyond the “Wild Saints” Kingsnorth favors (and for the record, I favor them as well, and his authorship on the “Wild Saints” I find delightful). The Saints come from all walks of life, from Emperors to Stylites, and everything in between. The Saints lead by many examples, and for certain, as Orthodox Christians their teachings are invaluable to us, and should be to all Christians. Their acts were saintly, their example important–but the Saints are not selected solely from those of the monastics who did it best, and they are no more deserving of God’s love than anyone else, and therefore we are no less Christian as we strive to love God in a manner commensurate with our calling. Monasticism is a calling, one that neither Kingsnorth nor I were given, and we have sins aplenty to be forgiven for without bashing away at ourselves by fetishizing monasticism as somehow the only one true way of the faithful. It seems to me that this narrow interpretation of living a Christian life is as much an idol as The Machine. And deciding by that narrow criteria who gets to be an actual Christian or not is certainly above our mortal paygrade to determine.

In the United States, our law protecting religious conscience and practice is, in a way, one of the most humble statements of what a civilization is and isn’t; what it can and can’t govern. I am put in mind of C. S. Lewis’ character Emeth from The Last Battle, who worships the anti-Christ character Tash, but is such a good man that it was found that he was worshiping Aslan, God, all along. Our law assumes that everyone might be Emeth, taking a neutral stance on who is or isn’t following this or that “actual” faith.

It is clear that the history of Christendom is plagued by some Christian or other saying that some other Christian or other isn’t Christian enough or at all. It seems that this is a history of that which happens whenever Christianity spreads. Naturally, as I have chosen Orthodoxy, I have an opinion on what being a Christian means, though as a Christian I must keep in mind humility, and think of Emeth, and my own lack of understanding of what resides in the hearts of my fellow men. And as an American I must refuse the temptation to impose that opinion on others through law, because I must assume that everyone might be Emeth. I must assume that the Evangelicals I engage with are as Christian as I am, even as I challenge them on Sola Scriptura or some other doctrine I disagree with and think isn’t a true Chrstian doctrine. Kingsnorth has added his name to this sad history by claiming that even he isn’t an “actual” Christian, to which I say there is an ironic truth to the idea that in so doing, he has finally become a Christian.

In the End

I agree with so much of what Paul Kingsnorth said. We Christians should be Christian first above all else. And he acknowledges that we are builders, and we must build a culture with writing and a division of labor; therefore, we must build a civilization; therefore we must build one worth building, but we Christians must keep in mind always that we are Christians first–this is the one central point I wish Kingsnorth had just come out and said without so much noise. We cannot sustain a Church without writing, books, buildings, seminaries, monasteries, etc., and hunter-gatherers, Hunter Gardners, Smallholders and Homesteaders aren’t capable of sustaining those structures. We have no choice but to be a part of a civilization.

I don’t know if, at the end of the day, the West is in decline or merely in a period of decadence, and it often feels like we are moving through the valley of the shadow of death with the Machine looming in the background. I must face that decline as a human, and build. I am an American, too, and a Greek, and the son of a Jew, and a father, a teacher, a husband, a writer, and a friend. I can walk and chew gum at the same time–in fact I have no choice in that. I fell in love, made a family, and that means taking on the responsibilities of the beauties of the world God has given me within the bounds of my Christian faith, bending as much as I can towards loving God and all humanity. I have to look at the world and see its duality, not only its evil, the realm of the Prince of this world, but also its good made by the King of All.

Within the confines of this civilization I live in, I have to choose: to vote or not, to write about this or not, to argue one position or another, to participate in my local government, my state government, etc., etc. Kingsnorth seems to be claiming that the only thing our civilization has to offer are “good material things.” Is it a material or immaterial thing when I was blessed by the opportunity to read brilliant men like Paul Kingsnorth on the internet? Yet, this civilization has given me so much more than material things–it has given me freedom to explore the ideas of men, and literacy to read those ideas, best friends of different faiths with whom I can debate those ideas, an education in Western Philosophy going back to the Pagans that has made me a better thinker, teacher, debater, and indeed a better Christian, and healthy children who thus far have chosen Orthodoxy for themselves, and who have every expectation of living long fruitful lives. My people are from New York, the most American of cities and arguably one of the least Christian, but even there, my civilization’s most Christian foundations provided the opportunity for my Greek mother to marry a Jewish father. America allowed for my Yankee wife to be born of Orthodox converts, for us to meet in a Church camp run by the New England Archdiocese of the Orthodox Church of America, a camp started by Archbishop Job, of blessed memory, a most beautiful man, whose influence on me in my youth may be the most important reason why I write these words. These were the non-trivial, non-material gifts of my civilization, and they are still present all around me. American Civilization (be it Western or not, Christian or not) has given me and my countrymen the tools to preserve these good and Godly things, if we have the courage and will to fight for them as Charles Eastman did, using, if at all possible, the peaceful mechanisms of our civilization.

Kingsnorth is so dead-on in his observations of everything that I resist in this modern iteration of the West. I agree completely with his assessment of the inversion of the seven deadly sins:

Pride is celebrated everywhere—pride in nation, status, wealth, ethnic group, identity, religion. We have a month-long festival named for it. Greed is the basis of our economy. Along with envy, it is the cornerstone of the idol of our time, the universally worshiped god known as “economic growth.” If we were neither greedy nor envious, the economy would collapse in five minutes. Wrath is the fuel beneath the culture wars and all of our political factions. As for lust—find me a billboard or a film or a song or a brand of shoes that doesn’t piggyback on this most primal human passion. It is perhaps behind only gluttony in its ubiquity. Even sloth has been monetized. How else could something as oxymoronic as a “leisure industry” even exist?

But I wonder why he misses the causal relationship there. Isn’t it obvious that these now celebrated sins are gaining speed, strength, and popularity in our lifetime exactly because the West has lost the thread of Christianity? So shouldn’t we become more Christian within our civilization in response?

I also want to say that here in America there is also some hope. Not in our politicians, the sycophantic Trumpies and the milquetoast Democrats, but in our culture itself there is something rising, maybe just in time? American Orthodoxy and Catholicism are experiencing a resurgence of interest and converts and attendance for the first time since the decline began in the 1960s. When one enters an American Orthodox church there are young people and young families present and growing. And families who regularly attend religious services have a birth rate above replacement in this country that is more than twice that of the non-religious, a statistic that goes back decades, and will yield very interesting fruit in the coming years as the urban elites, the most vociferous acolytes of The Machine, and most passionate advocates for its inversion of sin, die off without a next generation to carry on their ideology. Our carbon footprint as a country has effectively declined, North America is more forested now than at any time in last century and a half, there is a movement against mirco-plastics and for a new food system, the fever around gender ideology has seemed to have broken, the constant hammering at guilt-over-racism is finally fading, and there is a reenchantment around religion and a new suspicion of the now old New Atheists.

Maybe it's just my typical American optimism in response to Kingsnorth’s typical British pessimism, but could it be, that just as Kingsnorth has written about, we are living in a time when The Machine could be giving birth to the AI Beast, that the reenchantment of traditional Christianity rises up to meet it? I have not yet heard a single good explanation as to why interest in Orthodoxy is soaring–yes, this phenomena is internet driven, but the internet itself isn’t new; and yes, Covid brought people back to faith to some extent, but why the Orthodox faith with its high standards of conversion and challenging theology? As I joked with a Catholic friend of mine who asked my opinion as to why this new cultural undercurrent towards Orthodoxy is happening, I said, “Not to be funny, but, because it’s true?” Maybe. Or maybe it’s just what we need. I hope this reenchantment lasts; I hope that the Orthobros, as they are called, temper their zeal with humility; I hope the Greeks and Russians and Ukrainians and other ethnic churches maintain communion, and that the old calendarists and other schismatics return to the church in larger numbers; I hope the various Church hierarchs are guided in wisdom by God to shepherd us through. And I hope this conversation can add something of value to the moment.

.