A Dangerous Pastime

No.232: October 11, 2024

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, so please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books, a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

LeFou, I’m afraid I’ve been thinking
—A dangerous pastime—
I know.
(Beauty & The Beast)

Dear Friends,

Jonah Goldberg is thinking dangerous thoughts.

He is thinking about religion. Deeply so. In a recent G-File, which is normally a fairly light-hearted take on current events littered with ribald jokes and hilarity, he instead wrote 3,600 very serious words on Christianity and civilization. If you are a Dispatch subscriber, you can read it here. I hate that the essay is paywalled but, as I know all too well, writers have to make a buck. But it makes it hard for me to interact with because I have to summarize it.

Which turns out to be difficult. Here’s a shot at it: Religion, specifically Christianity (with a healthy shoutout to its Hebrew roots) undergirds our entire civilization and underwrites its most cherished institutions and ideals. It does little good to complain about that or wish it was otherwise or to try to rewrite history. You can say that our ideals and institutions can be grounded in something other than Christianity (e.g., “science,” “reason”), but those efforts are dubious, at best, and an intellectual dead end, at worst. Also, what happened happened. And we cannot even at this juncture oppose Christianity without presupposing its own framing of our world. We can call it out for hypocrisy, of course, which can be measured in metric tons, but hypocrisy for what? Not living up to its own ideals. Christianity sets the frame and mirror used by its own detractors and even, as Tom Holland argues, provides the intellectual and moral weapons they wield against it. Goldberg writes:

Even the supposedly religion-free zones of modern life—science, law, Harvard faculty meetings, etc.—would not exist but for the Judeo-Christian foundation they stand upon. If a religion-free society is a garden, you can pluck virtually any flower from the soil and find long religious roots dangling below. (Indeed, to strain the metaphor further, some of the plants in the garden are more like potatoes or turnips than flowers in that they’re nearly all religious root, with the bits breathing secular air little more than a hint of what lurks below.) Human rights, universal equality, the sovereignty of the individual, higher education, and scientific inquiry—even the idea of secularism itself—are products or byproducts of Jewish and Christian thought.

Modern science is largely the invention of Christianity (flowing from the “Abrahamic revolution”). The concept of human equality is the fruit of Christianity. Freedom of conscience comes from guys like Aquinas and Luther. Goldberg wants everyone to come to grips with this fact:

I suppose it’s possible that there could have been an alternative timeline where we got driverless cars and microwave ovens, democracy and the Bill of Rights, without Abraham and his theological progeny. But the indisputable fact is that we didn’t. [….] Just as the life you’ve already lived—so far—can’t be changed, so too with all the lives that came before us. The past only happened once. There are no do-overs. Sure, you can rewrite the past, but the rewrites don’t change the reality. The culture we have is a culture created by religion and, occasionally, by opposition to religion (but even that opposition gives religion a major role in the process, like an activating agent or the sand that prompts the oyster to make a pearl). And that goes for atheism and science as much as it does for literature and music. The rights you enjoy today were put on paper by a bunch of men who believed those rights stemmed from the fact that we got them from a “creator.” That may bother you, but the facts don’t care.

Now, he doesn’t think this proves Christianity or disproves atheism. It is obviously possible to enjoy the fruits of religion without subscribing to it. But one should at least recognize what one is doing: enjoying the fruits while claiming to reject the vine. And one ought to own up to the fact that there aren’t many (any?) other plausible vines from which one obtained the fruits.

This is all just a setup for the real subject of the essay, in which Goldberg contrasts two “visions” of the world: the “utopian” and the “tragic.”

The utopian vision looks at the perfect ideal, the ultimate destination of humanity, holds it up against the past, and finds the past a bitter disappointment. To some extent, that’s fine. A lot of the past was really, really awful. Disease, war, torture, misery, brutality, ignorance, and poverty have been the norm of human existence far longer than they’ve been the exception. Where the utopians go wrong is thinking that the eminently flawed institutions of the past were the problem, rather than efforts toward the solution.  They start with a vision of the perfect, then fault human institutions and systems for falling short of the ideal. 

By way of contrast,

[t]he tragedian starts from the premise that the natural state of man is awful and looks to find the aspects of institutions and systems that incrementally improved the human condition. […] For our purposes, the tragic vision is premised on the fact that human nature is flawed. But also that human nature has no history. What I mean by that is that while societies change, the building blocks of society—human beings—stay constant. We can get better—or worse—at making cathedrals and skyscrapers, but the bricks never stop being bricks. If all of our memories were wiped clean tomorrow, we would revert back to the same factory (or creator) installed software we were born with. It would be a long and bloody time before we held another election, filmed another movie, or played another game of football.

Now, he thinks “tragic” vision is a flawed term. He really thinks this is the vision of gratitude. Gratitude for the institutions, ideas, and rules (i.e., traditions) that have lifted humanity—imperfectly, yes—out of brutal savagery and poverty. Atheists and rationalists like to think that reason is opposed to tradition; on the contrary, reason is itself a tradition. One that cannot, on its own, divorced from the broader religious tradition from which it emerged (i.e., Christendom), deliver similar results—or at least hasn’t yet. He doesn’t talk about this, but the Enlightenment philosophes thought the ancient Greeks and Romans were a society of “reason” in this sense, but they didn’t actually know very much about what those societies were like. Human rights? Dignity? Equality? Pretty laughable.

Referring to a podcast interview he did with noted atheist (and, strangely, now mystic) Sam Harris, Goldberg writes that “Harris would have us believe that [universal human rights and dignity] can be discovered through reason and the tools of science alone.” The problem is that it isn’t true. Lenin, Mao, and eugenicists all justified their butchery by way of “reason” and the “tools of science.”

Many atheists object to such examples, arguing that their vision recognizes the innate worth of all humans as a fundamental tenet. But does “science” really provide evidence for that? Ultimately, it depends on how you define “worth.” Science can give you a long list of different definitions, but it can’t settle the question. All people aren’t equally intelligent, healthy, strong, attractive, etc. You can say these things don’t count, but why? Science can’t tell you; it can only measure the things it can measure, and maybe provide you with some cost-benefit analysis about the trade-offs.

Ultimately, Goldberg observes, rationalism, scientism, utilitarianism, and so forth, are all committed to their own “leaps of faith”—the very thing they claim not to need.

But Goldberg notices a deeper problem with Sam Harris’s view of the world. Harris thinks there are better ways than religion to achieve “transcendence.” Psychedelic drugs and meditation, for instance. But Goldberg wants to know: transcend to what? From where?

If this is all there is, there’s no there there to transcend to. It’s just more of the same. If we’re all just meat and neurons, transcendence is entertainment. Harris argues that we should create secular forms of ritual to capture the affections and attachments our evolved religious instincts desire. We don’t need God to make funerals and weddings meaningful, he argues. Putting aside the fact that we’ve had secular funerals and civic weddings for centuries, he’s right. 

But what’s the point of the rituals in the first place if there’s no notion of something beyond, something transcendent? Feed the dead to the dogs or the crops and be done with it. Rituals don’t need God to be irrational. Science can’t give us a more rational reason to respect and mourn the dead, it can only offer a rational description of why we do it. Genetics can explain—or rather, offer an explanation (why we feel love)—but it can’t explain love.

Utopians seem like the optimists, but Goldberg thinks it is really the pessimistic view. Making the “perfect” the enemy of the good is the more pessimistic vision “because it has little gratitude for the work that went into achieving the ‘merely’ good. The eutopian [i.e., “good,” not “perfect” place] recognizes that the good things we have involved huge amounts of toil and sacrifice, trial and error.” Our traditions and dogmas are not hindrances to progress, as the atheist would have it, but more like

pitons in the granite cliff that humanity has been climbing for millennia to get away from the muck and mire from whence we hail. We hammer these spikes into the rock and use them to get a little closer to the good, to a summit of ideals we will never fully reach.

I think that’s a really fine analogy. But it presupposes that there is a transcendent good and that we can, in fact, approach it. The million dollar, uncomfortable question looms nearer and nearer all the time: is that transcendence, that “good,” real or simply a useful figment of our imagination? It’s a theme with which Goldberg ended his book Suicide of the West. He argued that in order to conserve the beneficial ideals and values and institutions of civilization (which we now seem to have fully admitted are Christian ideals and values and institutions) we need a return to something like “God-fearing.” We need to at least act like we believe in it.

It strikes me that this is exactly what Sam Harris is saying by other means, and the very thing for which Goldberg is criticizing him. We need to project some kind of transcendence. We should ask Goldberg the same questions: transcend to what? From where? Both are operating as if the transcendent is some kind of virtual reality. How long can we wear Apple VisionPro™ goggles and keep the reality question at arm’s length? Don’t get me wrong: I am on Team Jonah Goldberg here. But I just honestly think he is flirting with things that require more … conviction, shall we say? That said, I couldn’t agree more with his summation:

[E]verywhere I look, right or left, up and down, I see people who think the nation they’ve inherited is something to resent. The sense of entitlement—the very opposite of gratitude—derives from various forms of utopianism, including the personalized version of it we might call narcissism. After all, not all utopianisms are about creating a perfect world for everybody. Some people just want a perfect world for them or their tribe. Regardless, the utopians see all that is good as contemptible in the reflection of their personal idea of perfection. All the work that went into getting us here is taken for granted, and the prosperity and freedom we enjoy is proof that ‘the system’ has failed them because it hasn’t provided them with enough, while it has provided others too much. Systemized envy is a metastasizing cancer in American life eating holes in our souls. Science cannot fill such voids, but religion can. And so can a little gratitude for the difficult slog and sacrifice made by others to get us here. 

But I do not merely want to summarize Jonah Goldberg’s thoughtful musings. As a theologian, I would like to make a contribution to this debate over civilizational cartography, the “to where” and “from where.” For the sake of discussion, let’s all agree that the starting point is brutal tooth-and-claw savagery—the “estate of sin and misery,” the Westminster Shorter Catechism calls it—and the end point is “blessedness,” for lack of a better term.

Here’s a critical ontological and ethical question: is the misery baked in from the beginning? Is misery the created design, just “the way things are”? Or is the misery itself an aberration? “The tragedian,” Goldberg writes, “starts from the premise that the natural state of man is awful and looks to find the aspects of institutions and systems that incrementally improved the human condition.” But what if “awful” isn’t the natural state of man? What if awfulness is actually unnatural? You see, pagan philosophy as exemplified in Greek thought, most stridently in all forms of Gnosticism, insists that creation itself is defective. Misery is “natural” because the material world is intrinsically miserable. The evolutionary view, to which Goldberg routinely defaults, is a variation on this theme. The world as such is “red in tooth and claw.”

Here is a different—and thoroughly revolutionary—take: “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and through sin, death …” (Rom. 5:12). What if the misery entered the world? What if it isn’t the intrinsic design? What if it is an invader? Well, now, that changes the contours of the cartography in profound ways, not to mention the entire plot.

The discussion will go round and round in meaningless circles so long as the Fall (the “estate of sin and misery”) is presumed to be the same thing as Creation. You see, if sin and misery is the natural condition of the human race—meaning, the created design—then we have no reason to believe we can transcend it at all. Why would the thought ever even occur to us that we could or should? We wouldn’t have an innate sense that anything is wrong or unjust. It just is. Without theodicy (an account of evil) all this talk about transcendence breaks down into meaninglessness; transcendence is lacking altogether or the transcendent is just as evil and miserable as we are (See: why the Greeks kept arriving at an ignorant or malignant Demiurge).

But if sin and misery is an interloper, an invader—if our subterranean memory or intuition of distant Eden is more than a mere dream—it means that creation itself is susceptible to redemption. If sin entered, it can also exit. If it invaded, it can be expelled. If it wounds, the wound can be healed. If it isn’t the ontological substance of the thing, it can be destroyed without destroying the thing. Harris and Goldberg are talking about Creation (from where?) and Consummation (to where?), but the Bible and Christian theology gave us Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation. Those two middle terms cannot—or should not—be evaded. It is the very beating heart of the entirely exceptional religion we are discussing at the moment. At the center of it is a man on a cross.

Can sin really be forgiven and erased? Can corruption be made pure? Can “crooked timber” be made straight? Can the dead really be raised? Does the stone roll away or does it cover the mouth of the tomb forever? Does darkness and misery have the first and the last word—or is it a second and, more importantly, penultimate word?

I interrupted Paul a moment ago. Actually, he characteristically interrupted himself and went on a digression about transgression and law. But he picks it up again:

For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

This is a teleology. This is a “to where”—or, more accurately, a “from where” only time runs backward: “on earth as it is in heaven.” The “provision of grace” and the “gift of righteousness” (justice) is through the one man, Jesus Christ. For Paul, the “then and there” of the coming age enters into the “here and now” of the present age not through Marxist revolution (i.e., Eric Voegelin’s “immanentizing the eschaton”) or transcendental meditation or psychedelic drugs, nor even through the strivings of human civilization hammering pitons into the granite cliff of history, but through this one man, risen from the dead. The “pitons”—the ideals, institutions, and rules Goldberg cherishes are what Oliver O’Donovan calls the “crater marks” of the Christian gospel. They are not tools moving humanity toward blessedness; they are the marks of a blessedness already given. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace toward men on whom his favor rests” was not a smarmy Hallmark greeting from the angels at Christ’s advent. It was the announcement of the inauguration of a new world order. The very one about which we are talking, pondering, and marveling.

And Paul says that the “Spirit of him who raised him from the dead,” who makes us dead to sin and alive to God in the here and now, will also raise our mortal bodies and is, in fact, the down-payment of the consummate inheritance to come. No pagan fatalism; no never-ending cliff-climb to some doubtful destination; no virtual reality goggles or make-believe. Redemption is not only possible, but an actuality that happened in human history, the aftermath of which is so undeniable even secular intellectuals in just the last week, over two thousand years later, are noticing it everywhere and wrestling with its implications.

Herman Bavinck summed it all up in not only classic Augustinian fashion (Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation) but in a beautifully Trinitarian way: “The essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that the creation of Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God, and re-created by the grace of the Holy Spirit into a kingdom of God.”

We enjoy the civilization we do because people lived that and believed it. They didn’t build those cathedrals simply because they were pretty. The prospects of maintaining civilization while keeping the question of its truth at arm’s length seem to me quite dim. It cannot be kept hypothetical forever. Goldberg is fond of pointing out that the weeds will fight back and overtake a neglected and uncultivated civilizational garden; we need more people to really believe with deepest conviction in the cultivated garden and in its ultimate cultivator, who happens to be the one who made it all in the first place and is redeeming it. In his famous memoir Witness, Whittaker Chambers maintained that the power of communism “baffles the rest of the world” because

in a large measure the rest of the world has lost that power [which is] the power to hold convictions and to act on them. It is the same power that moves mountains; it is also an unfailing power to move men. Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die—to bear witness—for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it. It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind.

A lukewarm or hesitant faith is no match for its utopian visions.

David Bahnsen and I once wrote a review of Goldberg’s Suicide of the West at National Review and observed: “‘the miracle’ [of Christian civilization] is not good just because it worked. It worked because it is good, and it cannot be good devoid of transcendent purpose.” I would simply now modify it a bit: Christianity is not true in the sense that it worked at building a more just and prosperous civilization and helped humanity claw its way out of the muck and mire; it “worked” because it is true.

The “good news,” as it turns out, is exactly that.

---

Thanks for reading The Square Inch Newsletter. Have a wonderful weekend!