In a previous Catholic Stand article, “When the Needle on the Spiritual Tank is On ‘E’”, I said I hoped to explain more fully my decision to retire the “culture warrior” writing persona. And in fact, I did give a little more explanation in a post on The Impractical Catholic which published the day before. The first reason is personal: the “culture warrior” role puts enormous strain on what little charity I possess, leading me to rash judgments and detraction of others, both sins against the Eighth Commandment (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church §§ 2477-9). But the other reasons have to do with the changing nature of the culture war, changes which force me to conclude that American Christians need a different strategy just to survive let alone overcome.
The Culture War: America’s Post-Christian Future
To begin with, the culture war is not finished. However, the struggle is now over the shape that post-Christian American culture will take. “Post-Christian” means that Christianity has lost its ability to dominate or define the political and social life of the Global North. Other worldviews and ethical imperatives are displacing those of Europe’s and America’s Christian inheritance. “Nones” now make up almost a quarter of the population, with over a third of millennials reporting unaffiliated. While belief in God remains high, younger Americans are leaving organized religion and turning to various forms of “do it yourself” spirituality. And for the first time, people are becoming less affiliated as they age.
Worse, Christian doctrine has been losing coherence for five hundred years. Decades of education “reform” and centuries of philosophical degradation have taken their toll on the American intellectual base, transforming our children into cultural and political zombies, generally leaving American Christians more vulnerable to theological corruption via ideology. In the last fifty years, American Catholics have shown themselves as prone to “cafeteria Christianity” as any Protestant, particularly rejecting religious doctrine wherever it conflicts with secular ideological dogma. The fragmentation of the gospel message into dozens of competing “truths” presents Christianity to the non-Christian world as a muddled, self-contradicting, unattractive mess.
As a result, confessional Christianity holds no apparent superiority in the millennial mind to a moralistic therapeutic deism with Christian symbols stuck on it like so many decals. However, the biggest single cause of our loss of adherents is our own behavior: “the tree is known by its fruit” (Matthew 12:33). All too often, we are known as Jesus’ disciples not by our love for one another (cf. John 13:34-35) but by our incessant, fratricidal bickering, our scandalous behavior, and our loud, judgmental denunciation of everyone who doesn’t conform to our code. Writes Evangelical Benjamin Sledge:
Whatever influence Christians used to have, much like a parasite trying to reconnect to its host for fear of dying, many Christians are thrashing about trying to create waves and convince people they are relevant within our culture. But sadly, instead of men and women looking like Jesus we sure have a lot of talking heads. We sure have a healthy dose of condemnation in our ranks. We love being “right” instead of the hard task of humility.
The Culture War: The End of the “Religious Right”
How do these facts influence the political outlook?
Properly speaking, the Church is “conservative” only so far as she zealously guards the truths of the faith from corruption and makes such changes as she does cautiously. Indeed, if the goal of conservativism is to protect the status quo, with all its injustices intact and rationalized — to “[stand] athwart history, yelling Stop,” as William F. Buckley, Jr. wryly put it — orthodox Christianity is not conservative. Beyond that point, however, trying to cram Christian doctrine and its social implications into a box defined by secular ideology, whether it’s labeled conservative or liberal or libertarian or progressive/socialist, is not only fruitless but misguided and corruptive.
Nevertheless, the ideological center of the last three generations has been moving steadily to the left over the years. Programmed by the Culture of Death’s dominance in education and culture to prefer liberal/progressive values, they reject confessional Christianity’s insistence on traditional sexual morality. As confessional Christianity became more identified with secular conservativism (the “Religious Right”), Gen-Xers and millennials moved more to the left. However, the culture war has been framed in terms of “conservative vs. liberal” for so long that religious conservatives ignored the rise of right-wing libertarianism, which tends to hold views on sexual morality similar to liberals’.
In 2015-6, the “Religious Right” lost its hold on the Republican Party. The dominant faction became the alt-right, described by Peter Beinart in The Atlantic as “ultra-conservatism for a more secular age. Its leaders like Christendom, an old-fashioned word for the West. But they’re suspicious of Christianity itself[] because it crosses boundaries of blood and soil.” French Catholic writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry reports that the Christians who supported Trump in the primaries were overwhelmingly non-churchgoers. The nomination of Donald Trump and the “Religious Right” leaders’ eventual submission broke the hold Christian conservatives had held on GOP politics since 1980. The “Religious Right” is now a spent force.
Where Are We Now?
To sum up: The blue tribe has been slowly shucking its Christian clothing for the last century. The libertarianism, ethnonationalism, and laissez-faire economics of red-tribe politics need no Christian doctrine to sustain them, and may even gravitate more naturally to “the cruel gospel of the proud atheist Ayn Rand” (Gobry). For a time, both tribes will continue to treat the self-identified Christians in their ranks as useful idiots. However, if liberal Christianity “as a ‘project’ and a theology … is doomed to oblivion” (Patrick J. Deneen), so too is conservative Christianity, as young red-tribe zombies discover they can take their secular ideology straight up, without a religious mixer.
Furthermore, so far as there is a strategy, it seeks merely to (re-)impose Judeo-Christian morality via control of the government. However, the culture that could sustain such laws has been almost entirely eroded and replaced by the Culture of Death over the last one hundred years. Moreover, the implicit idea that we could “make America Christian again” through force of law is not only futile but a dangerous misdirection of effort. Jesus did not enjoin us to “take control of all nations, compelling them to obey all I have commanded” (cf. Matthew 28:19-20).
In other words, we aren’t just losing the culture war. We’re being sidelined in favor of worldviews that are at best tolerant but leery of Christians and at worst hostile to Christianity. We’re on the defensive, fighting off zombie hordes; yet we have no coherent strategic goals, no real unity, and no effective leadership. It’s one thing to demand we keep fighting. It’s another to demand that we keep fighting in a way that allows the zombies to set the agenda and the tempo of the war, tacitly ceding them the initiative. To remain on the defense is to invite eventual, annihilating defeat.
If you’re not alarmed, you’re not paying attention.
Strategic Withdrawal
When you’re losing a battle or a war, at some point you may have to withdraw the bulk of your forces to prevent their destruction; in a word, retreat. But you don’t retreat merely to lick your wounds and hide from the enemy. You retreat to rebuild and resupply your forces, as well as to prepare counteroffensive operations, such as insurgency and sabotage. In fact, many times in military history numerically inferior forces have set up the appearance of retreat in order to lure an overconfident attacker into a trap.
Such thinking is behind Rod Dreher’s recent book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, based on a controversial series of articles for The American Conservative that Dreher has been writing since 2013. The name is misleading, as the “Benedict Option” requires neither monks nor monasteries nor the Rule of St. Benedict. Using the examples of communities like Front Royal, Va., and Ave Maria, Fla., Dreher argues that Christians need to consciously build religiously coherent enclaves at least partially insulated from the current culture in order to build a new, authentic Christian social order from the grassroots up.
Dreher’s “Benedict Option” has been widely (and wrongly) interpreted as a call to surrender to the Culture of Death, to hide in the catacombs and await the next dark ages. As my Catholic Stand colleague Joe Bissonnette put it, “… if we are to act as if the war is lost, that is, surrender, we ourselves will be lost.” However, our current strategy, so far as it is a strategy and not merely blind reactionary thrashing against the zombie hordes, is doomed to failure. Moreover, we are in as much danger of losing ourselves from too close association with the CoD zombies on the right as we are from the zombies on the left.
Summary
The only way we can “make America Christian again” is by making Americans disciples. To bring America back to God, we have to go back to grass roots, starting with families, neighborhoods, and local communities, working from the bottom up rather than trying to impose it top-down. Prosecuting the culture wars in the manner we’re doing now merely distracts time and energy from the New Evangelization and ecumenism necessary to rebuild Christian culture in America. Creating intentionally religious enclaves may not be a perfect solution, but it is better than doing the same things over and over again in the hope that “this time, we will succeed.” That way lies ruin … and getting our brains eaten.
Noah didn’t wait until the flood was up to his neck to build his ark, and neither should we. We will still need to fight — not to hang on desperately to the tattered remnants of a romanticized past, but rather for the time and space to build an authentic Christian future. But we need Christian culture warriors less than we need Christian culture builders. For the culture war has largely left us behind.
