Instrumentalising Christianity
always fails
I always appreciate reading something that articulates things I have been thinking but have yet to get around to/found a way to articulate myself; even better if they do it far better than I would.
That’s how I felt reading this post by Carolyn Morris-Collier:
It seems to put its finger on the pulse of a number of ‘currents’ or ‘threads’ and pulled those threads together into a coherent whole that made sense of a lot of things I’ve been feeling and things I’ve been reading. The small ToC at the start of her essay is helpful too, as are the links to a number of important essays throughout. And in what follows I’m just going to make some observations:
Jordan B Peterson:
I have not read any longer content from Peterson, haven’t watched much of his material, have generally not engaged with it. I know enough about Peterson to know that I won’t appreciate it, will find myself hostile to its overall project, and I don’t exist in a context where I actually need to spend my time engaging it (if I did, I would). But I have read more than a few pieces on Peterson to make sure I’m aware of what’s going on there. And it consistently puzzles me, not in a “I don’t understand this” but in a “Really?” kind of way, when I hear people, specifically Christian men, resonate with Peterson and be warmly positive about his position.
And the reason for that puzzlement, and opposition, for me is the same - Peterson represents to me something profoundly unChristian. He’s not Christian, his message is devoid of Christianity, and what he offers us, especially when it sounds most like Christianity or borrows the language of Christianity, is precisely counterfeit. In Kingsnorth’s essay/speech, worth reading for its own content, he cites Peterson’s vision of why Christianity exists:
there to remind people, young men included, and perhaps even first and foremost, that they have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter, terrible catastrophe of life to face stalwartly in truth, devoted to love, and without fear.
And Kingsnorth is correct to point out that there is no mention of God, Christ, or anything Christian in all that. It’s a plant-based meat substitute, if you like. The more like meat it tastes, the worse that is if you are actually trying to eat meat, not plants pretending to be meat.
Peterson, I think, is a problem for Christianity more broadly because of what Morris-Collier calls the Tom Holland Train:
“If your pastor hasn’t cited Tom Holland’s book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind in a sermon this year, then you might not be listening closely enough.”
I also haven’t read Holland’s book. I was inured against doing so by hearing it quoted so-often by, frankly, the smug references to it as “look, a non-Christian historian traces all the good things in Western culture and civilization back to Christianity!” I’m sympathetic to that argument, but I also feel incredibly (i) squeamish at the way sometimes Christian authors and speakers appeal to a non-Christian to gain credibility in this way, “Look, even an unbeliever backs this point up!”, (ii) know that doing broad-sweep history is very likely to do disservice to the trees for the sake of painting the forest.
Morris-Collier’s essay has part of its genius in the way that she not just ties the threads together, but lays them out in a logical sequence. Which is why going from Holland to talk about Ayaan Hirsi Ali is so effective. Because Hirsi, at least as far as public discussion of Christianity goes, exemplifies a kind of ‘logical consequence’ to Peterson + Holland. That is, Christianity becomes ‘collapsed’ with “Western Civilization”, and subordinate to it. Hirsi’s embrace of Christianity is because it provides a metaphysical metanarrative that can sustain Western Civilization, over against the alternatives (which are in 2024 always ‘Cultural Marxism’ and ‘Islamism’).
Elizabeth Oldfield’s writing is worth its own read too, but Paul Kingsnorth’s is worth dropping everything to read: Against Christian Civilization. And within that essay, I think he identifies my greatest misgivings about this cultural moment and especially how the political right uses Christianity. I do think there are other, different, dangers from the political left, but they are very different in shape.
And my mind often circles back to listening to a friend recently who has shifted well to the right, and the kinds of mental frames that he has that justify seeing a right-wing, MAGA-ist authoritarianism and culture-war mentality as the best, and only, option for Christians.
It’s this line of thinking: that the “West” is the best civilization to ever emerge, that it’s founded on Christian beliefs, that we are in a time of moral and cultural decline, and that what we need is an assertive and aggressive return to patriarchy, masculinity, anti-wokeness. And in all this Christianity is instrumentalised. What I mean by that is that Christianity itself is hollowed out of its content, and becomes a kind of cultural cipher. A way of speaking and acting and cultural scripts that make it both (i) impossible to think of Christianity as something other than a form of cultural conservatism, (ii) render it as a system of morality and a culture, rather than a highly radical religion based on repentance.
Kingsnorth’s essay is worth the read. I think Jesus’ teachings continually, in fact always, cut against the grain. And yet we are always swallowing them up, digesting them into something more palatable; serving up regurgitated food that tames down his critique of our world.
