Christianity, it seemed, had no need of actual Christians for its assumptions still to flourish. Whether this was an illusion, or whether the power held by victims over their victimisers would survive the myth that had given it birth, only time would tell. As it was the retreat of Christian belief did not seem to imply any necessary retreat of Christian values. Quite the contrary. Even in Europe — a continent with churches far emptier than those in the United States — the trace elements of Christianity continued to infuse people’s morals and presumptions so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists, and those who never paused so much as to think about religion.
— Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
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The same is true of the theory of natural law: roughly speaking, the belief that our moral obligations to our neighbors and to other persons are true, and not only right and binding, because they were written on our hearts by God. Many popular writers like [George] Will, but many academic scholars too, are afraid that morality will be smashed to atoms if natural law ceases to be credited; and they are therefore even willing to cultivate orthodoxies they do not share, as a superstitious outwork of faith. The mistake of such writers is that they underrate the inertia — or, to put it more eulogistically, the interest in order, and the attachment to a common routine — which may be inseparable from human life under every form of government except the most extreme tyrannies. It follows that our moral obligations to one another may not require the aid of natural law theories, any more than the making of fire required the aid of the phlogiston theory. If this is so, what Will takes to be the core of a tradition of conduct, and therefore the foundation of the free polities of the West, is in fact as dispensable as the Gothic convention of flying buttresses.
— David Bromwich, “Moral Education in the Age of Reagan,” Politics by Other means: Higher Education and Group Thinking
April 13, 2021 @ 1:41 pm
Looks like Tom Holland’s book is available in paperback now, so I’ll probably get a copy.
The trouble, I think, with Christian ethics continuing to operate in a post-Christian society is not so much our ignorance of their origin but the de-coupling of those ethics from any very deep meditation on our fallen nature and the insidiousness of sin. The traditional Christian understands that, though we might see incomplete promises of it here and now, heaven is necessarily something that only happens beyond this world. The post-Christian espouser of inherited Christian ethics is too often consumed with zeal to “immanentize the eschaton.” Which, to make a big generalization, is pretty much the trouble with all leftist political movements since the French Revolution, right?
April 13, 2021 @ 8:48 pm
Right. I remember being deeply struck years ago by that characteristic of progressivism, the relentless striving after heaven on earth, even when it means taking a detour into hell. The striving itself is the point, I think.
In general, I’m mainly interested in the philosophical/theological arguments surrounding this theme. Too often — and to his credit, Holland doesn’t do this at all — “Christian ethics in a post-Christian society” is treated sort of like hypocrisy, incoherence, or intellectual cowardice. “If you throw out the baby Jesus, you have to throw out the bathwater too!” I disagree, and I think there are plenty of “reasons” to continue behaving in a more-or-less Christian way, even if one disbelieves in God/the soul/the afterlife, etc. (though I would add that reason is not and should not even be the primary consideration here). I may be missing something obvious, but I don’t find any contradiction in being a non-believer and still holding a “tragic” view of life which is, for all practical intents and purposes, indistinguishable from a Christian one. I may not call it original sin, per se, but I would agree from both experience and introspection that the default setting of human nature is mostly to be lazy, petty and weak, and occasionally actively malevolent. I think intellectuals, as is their wont, make far too much out of the need for theoretical foundations and intellectual consistency here.
Maybe most of all, I think it’s simply a fact that for whatever reason, more and more people are finding it impossible to believe in the literal truth of Christianity, and so I would like to see more people grappling with the implications of that in a way that doesn’t become either rah-rah cheerleading for the atheist enlightenment to come, or wallowing in pointless nostalgia on Dover Beach. If this is the world in which we find ourselves, what are we going to make of it?
April 14, 2021 @ 12:37 pm
“I think intellectuals, as is their wont, make far too much out of the need for theoretical foundations and intellectual consistency…”
I agree. Speaking as a Catholic, it can be frustrating to see secularists zealous for an ethics the origins of which they don’t acknowledge (or, often, understand), but suggesting they embrace the faith for the sake of intellectual consistency doesn’t work. I doubt there’s such thing as a truly intellectually consistent person, anyway. We grope our way by feel more often than not. The best I think Christians can hope for in the post-Christian world is what you point to: a vaguely Christian ethics tempered by a sort of stoic realism about our nature.