And You Thought Christendom Was Bad?
No. 64: July 2, 2021
Dear Friends,
To begin with, how about some odds and ends:
The heatwave continues, and so also the corresponding battle with the sun over the dominion of my grass. I think there are still signs of life, but I read this morning that city officials are contemplating water restrictions if these drought conditions continue further into the summer. That’s a rarity around here.
In other offbeat Montana news, the feral swine problem on our northern border has some people on edge. Yes, I know that to my readers in large metropolitan areas like New York City this will seem like a dispatch from another planet, but there’s a massive swarm of wild pigs just over the border in Alberta. They’re not nice and cute. Not pink little piggies with curly tails. They form a marauding horde that destroy farmland and and livestock. They breed at what seems an impossible rate, and once they take up residence they are extremely difficult to eradicate (ask Texas).
I am glad to see that the policy is that landowners can shoot them on sight, no questions asked, but also disappointed at the State’s legalese about how this is “discouraged” and that you should “call the authorities.” I’d rather Montanans just use their independent judgment. The rule should actually be, frankly, that you are required to shoot a feral hog anywhere, anytime, on anybody’s property. I don’t know the downside: you’re not going to make them extinct, and they are delicious. Set up a State program (I think there’s a legitimate government interest here) with local butchers to donate the meat to food banks for lower income households.
Anyway, my typical answer to the “Why do you need an AR-15?” question has been, “I need it for unforeseen circumstances, not the foreseen ones.” But now I’m going to add: “What, do you think I’m going to kill a wild boar with my bare hands?”
And You Thought Christendom Was Bad?
It was not very long ago that the “new atheism” was in its heyday. Christopher Hitchens was the toast of the intelligentsia for loudly proclaiming that “religion poisons everything.” Richard Dawkins was taken seriously when he described religious people as having a biological defect—a mental illness. These champions of free-thinking and Enlightenment were pretty cock-sure that all could be made, and kept, right if we could just get rid of all the old religious superstitions.
Times have changed. Hitchens has met his maker, and Dawkins’s pompous arrogance has made him something of a laughingstock in his own tribe. Andrew Wilson has penned a wonderful essay describing a very new and very different and very welcome phenomenon: atheist intellectuals who openly wonder if we need Christianity to keep and preserve all that we hold dear.
If you thought Christendom was bad, wait until you see what comes next. Actually, we are seeing what comes next, and it has these intellectuals pretty nervous. Rising nationalism, tribalism, racism, post-truth intellectual and cultural totalitarianism, rejection of free speech, assembly, religious exercise—put succinctly: the dissolution of the entire liberal order. It is fascinating to watch the “we don’t really need Christianity to undergird our liberal values” crowd suddenly flip 180-degrees and start writing that maybe, just maybe, on second thought, Christianity was a bit more important to our civilization than we initially thought.
Think of it as a “Chesterton’s Fence” experiment writ large. In a famous passage Chesterton spoke of a certain reformer who did not see the need for a particular fence in a field, and thus purposed to tear it down. To this man, Chesterton said, No! First tell me why the fence was erected in the first place; only when you see and understand the need may you then tear it down. It’s a brilliant illustration. Just because you don’t see the meaning or utility of something doesn’t automatically mean it doesn’t have meaning or utility. And the way of wisdom is to understand exactly what it is you are tearing down.
Christianity is the fence that Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al. sought to tear down. What’s the need for all this mumbo-jumbo superstition about an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent sky-god? They thought it of little consequence if they “kick God upstairs and out of sight” (as Stanley Fish put it) and keep all the good things: rule of law, equality, democracy, individual freedom, and dignity of human life. But what if Christianity’s relation to all the good things is not a mere accident or coincidence? What if all the good things are good things—and, more importantly, we believe them to be good things—precisely because of Christianity? Historian Tom Holland thoroughly gets it in his book, Dominion. In a very real sense, he argues, we are all Christians. Our deepest values are formed and shaped by the Christian gospel whether we realize it or even like it! Let me put the question another way: Can the fruits of Christian civilization long survive without their theological roots?
One of the figures highlighted in Wilson’s article is Niall Ferguson, the celebrated Scottish historian (and husband of the estimable Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Ferguson has been an outspoken atheist (and thus materialist), which explains something I’ve noticed in his brand of doing history: he has a marked tendency to argue that material conditions produce historical change rather than—or maybe just far more—than ideas. More specifically, religious or theological ideas.
As it coincidentally happens, just this week Westminster Seminary’s international journal of Reformed theology and life, Unio Cum Christo (Union With Christ), published an essay of mine relating to this exact topic and in which Dr. Ferguson makes an appearance: “Gratitude Needs a Giver: Why Political Science Needs Intelligent Design.” (You can’t read the essay online, I’m sorry to say—these kinds of journals need subscriptions and purchases to stay afloat. You can subscribe to the journal at that link, if it interests you.) Suffice it to say, I am delighted to learn that Niall Ferguson is well-aware of this fundamental tension in his thought; even more that he has the intellectual honesty to realize that perhaps Christianity (ideas!) undergirds the Western liberal order far more than he heretofore realized.
That essay is in large part an extended reflection on Jonah Goldberg’s excellent-but-flawed book, Suicide of the West. Jonah’s first sentence of the book is, “There is no God in this book.” It’s a methodological move; he wants to defend Western civilization without recourse to religion or theology. I’m critical of that approach, to be sure, but I also note with some satisfaction (I’m a theologian, after all) that, try as he might, he could not keep God out of the book. In his final chapter the pretense falls away completely: what we really need is a return to “God-fearing” because religion really does seem to provide existential benefits the liberal order seems to need.
In our co-authored review of Jonah’s book at National Review, David Bahnsen and I responded this way:
[Goldberg] explicitly acknowledges that the miracle will not be preserved without God, or at least “acting like” there is a God. But a widespread effort to pretend to believe in God will not stave off suicide. Mind tricks or figments of the imagination are not sustainable foundations for individual belief, much less a thriving, virtuous culture. Goldberg essentially admits that defending the Western miracle cannot be done without belief in God. But our beliefs are not based on mere rhetoric; it is not all “talk, talk, talk” or “stories we tell ourselves” or playacting. It is because God is real, and in him is the real providence and the real purpose by which the miracle can be sustained. Our civilization cannot be defended without telos, and our belief in that telos must be real, not a ponzi-like imitation of belief.
Don’t look now, but there seems to be a small movement of public intellectuals beginning to take that a bit more seriously. May their tribe increase!
For myself, I’m content to be really old-fashioned: without minimizing or ignoring its sins and imperfections and falling short of its ideals and slowness to reform, Christendom—the widespread cultural and institutional embrace of Christian norms, values, and practices—is a solution, not a problem.
Miscellany
Over at The Atlantic, Tim Alberta has a terrific article on a Michigan State Senator under fire for his role investigating election fraud claims. It’s really worth your time (especially if you’re still on the “Stolen Election” bandwagon; time to step off).
Every question you ever had about feral swine is answered by Texas A&M.
If you need weaponry to protect yourself from the coming swine invasion, I’m a big fan of Grey Ghost Precision. Good luck finding one—that backorder is going to be a long wait. I know a guy who, for a charity event, took his GGP to a ranch in Texas where they shot feral pigs from helicopters. I asked him how many they got. “Oh, probably around a thousand.” Yeah, I know. Amazing.
Last week I mentioned Winston Smith’s departure from Mumford & Sons. Former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss interviews him on this lengthy podcast.
Keep Miami’s families and first-responders in your prayers, after their tragic building collapse. Just try to imagine this:
“A City of Miami firefighter found the body of his own daughter Thursday night as he was searching through the debris of the Champlain Towers South collapse.” Awful — my heart hurts. https://t.co/o886EbDh55THE LATEST: Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava confirmed Friday that the body of a Miami firefighter’s 7-year-old daughter was recovered Thursday night, as well as the body of one other victim of the Surfside building collapse. https://t.co/MSLKuZv12m
WPLG Local 10 News @WPLGLocal10
I was sorry to hear of the passing of Donald Rumsfeld, a lifelong devoted public servant. A lot of people hated his guts, and he surely wasn’t beyond criticism. But he wasn’t the heartless ogre people politically needed him to be. My brother Dan, serving in a combat support hospital in Iraq, sent home a letter on Christmas Eve, 2004, personally vouching for that fact. Powerline blog published it and it went viral. I’m happy to report that the injured soldier mentioned, Rob, one day years later emailed me because of that blog post and wanted to get in touch with my brother to thank him. He recovered and is, last I heard, working in law enforcement.
I’ll close out with a band that’s completely new to me: Mandolin Orange. Great sound and interesting songs. Here’s their Tiny Desk Concert:
I must remind myself to keep coming back to this substack, this was so good. Thank you, Dr. Mattson!
A year and a half after you write this, and Atlantic now has think pieces about how Mike Pence saved the USA. And those, only a couple years after their think pieces about how he was a theocrat for following the Billy Graham rule.
Christendom is working! Lone theocrats are saving the world.
Didn't realize Ferguson and Ali were a couple. Ferguson should tackle the question of the root cause of the Great Enrichment. No way he can remain atheist if he looks into that long enough.