Don't Think About The Roman Empire
No.210: May 10, 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 customarily a paid subscription feature, but today there is no paywall. 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.
Dear Friends,
A few months ago there was a strange “meme” trend on social media. It started with someone commenting something like, “If only women knew how many times a day men think about the Roman Empire…” That led to legions (ahem) of young men admitting—no, bragging about—how often they think of the Roman Empire.
I am not sure why, exactly, but one imagines they admire the picture they have in their minds of what Rome was like in its glory days. Strong, courageous men (think: Gladiator); a well-ordered, well-governed society with a Great Man at the helm of it all; the age of great philosophers, historians, artists, playwrights, statesmen, and rhetoricians. There is some kind of deep romantic longing for Rome (and whatever they think it represents), particularly in younger right-wing men. Some of it was all in good fun, I’m sure. The meme was amusing. I like Gladiator as much as the next guy. For others, I am not so sure. It is atavism, which is the mirror opposite of utopianism. Instead of imagining a golden age in our future that we are working toward, an atavist imagines there was a golden age in the past we are devolving from.
I do not think it was merely a silly meme. If you spend any time at all in the Christian Nationalist or National Conservative circles on social media you will see that a huge number of participants anonymize themselves with Greco-Roman names like AugustusDeciusTrajanSomethingOrOther242173. They love using meme images with a Roman aristocrat delivering a sarcastic one-liner to some cartoon caricature of contemporary “woke” society. For some, at least, this is serious.
But it isn’t harmless. Much of this romanticism about antiquity on the radical right finds its source in a manifesto written by Bronze Age Pervert, a self-proclaimed anti-Christian Nietzschean who longs for the recovery of classical paganism and all that it entails. Like Nietzsche, Bronze Age Pervert thinks Christianity is what caused all the world’s problems in the first place. And as fringe as a name like that sounds, you should know that his manifesto, The Bronze Age Mindset, has been remarkably influential in right wing circles, feted by Michael Anton at Claremont and reportedly read by numerous Trump staffers. I know you don’t want to have to go read Bronze Age Pervert, so Andrew Sandlin did it for you and wrote an extremely helpful guide. (I suspect he took a long shower afterward.) I recommend you read it; this essay will probably make a bit more sense if you do.
At the risk of sounding like I am changing the subject, one of the things I’ve noticed throughout my life is how easily Christians are enticed to emulate the world. It is a topic worthy of its own essay, but for now: when the pagan world wildly succeeds at something, some Christians will not be far behind with their own version of it. It is a real inferiority complex. I first noticed it in my youth with the Christian music industry. It wasn’t just that rock music was popular and so Christians got into rock music. A particular musician was popular, and Christian music labels would immediately wheel out the Christian version of that popular musician, right down to the sound of the band and the timbre of the singing voice. Among other things, it was such a disservice to the Christian artist, who was probably an excellent musician in his or her own right, but the label made them obvious copycats—which was, in turn, a disservice and disrespect to the original artist.
Examples? By mid-1992 Seattle grunge band Pearl Jam’s debut album, Ten, was a wild commercial success. Lead singer Eddie Vedder had a unique voice and singing style that would become legendary. The very next year, Christian band Third Day appeared on the scene, and lead singer Mac Powell mimicked Vedder’s voice and style down to the slightest details. It was super cringe, but at least now all the evangelical kids had a Pearl Jam knockoff to whom they were allowed to listen. And I hate to say it because Lauren Daigle seems like a lovely person and is incredibly talented, but vocally she is an obvious Adele copycat. I find this kind of thing distasteful, but also mostly harmless. There’s no real shame in Third Day or Lauren Daigle sounding like other artists; in Nashville every single artist seems to sound exactly like every other artist nowadays.
But this cultural envy can and sometimes does entail more than just mimicking a clothing style, a sound, or a musical genre. It can adopt an entire worldview.
This week Neil Shenvi published a lengthy review of Andrew Isker’s The Boniface Option, a book I have referenced before. Isker is quite a ringleader and rabble-rouser (on “X” he is without peer in that respect) among the Christian Nationalist crowd. The Moscow, Idaho folks have platformed him on a number of occasions, and Doug Wilson wrote a positive review of The Boniface Option, which began: “Let us begin with the bottom line. This is a good book.”
Shenvi’s review is excellent, admirably (if overly) charitable, and I want to call your attention to his opening line:
Andrew Isker’s The Boniface Option is a blistering 160-page diatribe against “Trashworld” (p. xi, 8, 28, 29, 30, etc.) and its “fake and gay” (p. xi, xii, 29, 31, etc.) inhabitants, the “small-souled bugmen” (p. 14, 17, 18, 39, etc.) who want to indoctrinate you and your children into “globohomo” (p. 15, 18, 19, 68, etc.)
Colorful language! Colorful language borrowed directly from Bronze Age Pervert. Just like the Christian kids once got themselves a Pearl Jam they could listen to, now they’ve got a Bronze Age Pervert they can read. It’s got all the same features, and the timbre and style of the voice is identical: praise for the wisdom of pagan antiquity, glorification of masculinity and physical strength, disdain for women (no voting for you!), and all-out spittle-flecked rage about the supposed dystopian hell-hole we inhabit. But, Mom, the guy is a pastor. It says so right here! Pleeease can I buy it?
In Wilson’s review, he writes:
The weak parts of [Isker’s] book are those few places where he tags certain things as part of Trashworld that in my view aren’t necessarily part of it at all (e.g. suburbia, seed oils, industrial food production), and in not cautioning enough against the globohomo narcissism that our modern fitness mirrors tend to reflect.
Perhaps due to simple ignorance, Wilson displays no cognizance that all of this, from “trash” to “bug men” to “seed oils” and fitness, comes directly from the pen and worldview of an anti-Christ would-be pagan shaman. These “few things” are not incidentals as if Isker is just a run-of-the-mill germaphobe, has a few weird peccadillos about soybeans, or suffers from a food allergy exacerbated by industrial food production. Andrew Isker is—and it has to be self-consciously—marketing a “Christian” version of Bronze Age Pervert, right down to the weightlifting and longing for the antique world of Rome.
Do you know who else thought about the Roman Empire many times throughout the day—actually, all day long, every day of their lives? The radical Enlightenment philosophes of the 18th century—guys like Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and, of course, Edward Gibbon, who wrote The Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon would fit right in today wouldn’t he?
If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.
Gibbon was a fantasist to think Rome was ever the “most happy and prosperous” time in human history. Don’t you love his “without hesitation”? For him, Rome was the utopian golden age, and everything had gone south since the advent of Christianity. That was the whole Enlightenment project: the recovery and rebirth of ancient classical paganism, which Christianity had allegedly ruined. Bronze Age Pervert, like his hero Nietzsche before him, is a Johnny-come-lately.
And their atavism is precisely why the philosophes particularly loved a Roman satirist named Juvenal. Already in the second century A.D. he saw Roman glory fading. Among other things, “superstition” and “religion” (including Christianity) were ineradicable from the “ignorant” populace and it was spoiling the great and mighty pagan empire built (supposedly) by critical reason.
Let’s take a careful look at Peter Gay’s assessment of Juvenal in his The Enlightenment, Volume 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (p.116):
Juvenal’s Satires were widely quoted and freely imitated in the eighteenth century, which appreciated Juvenal’s fertile gift for epigram and his critical freedom. But if Juvenal’s Rome had been all of Rome, the Empire would have collapsed three centuries before it did. His portraits are caricatures: his poems are dominated by conventional themes and his observations distorted by fierce prejudices. Juvenal is ridden by nostalgia; he is an ideologist for rural simplicity and antique toughness. The great Third Satire is a savage libel on urban life, a version of Vergil’s Georgics in acid; the sixth, the longest, best known, and most vituperative, lavished the most extravagant invective on the new woman, railing with as much venom against the female who aspires to culture as against the female who murders her husband for the sake of a lover; his other satires lament the disappearance of the old Rome: what, he asks rhetorically, what would the sturdy farmers, the brave soldiers who died at Cannae, have said to Imperial corruption, the influx of Orientals, perfumed perverts, insolent modish women?
Hmm. Let’s walk through that again carefully and itemize it.
Caricatures of present reality distorted by fierce prejudices
Ridden by nostalgia
Ideology of rural simplicity and “antique toughness” (physical strength)
Savage and “acid” libel on urban life
vituperative and extravagant invective on the “new woman”
Venom against women who aspire to culture
Anger at government corruption
Anger at immigration (“Orientals”)
Anger at “perfumed perverts”
Anger at insolent, modish [fashionable] women
Why, we are reading about Andrew Isker and all his friends! These things are all they write about and precisely how they write about them. An exaggerated caricature (“Trashworld”); rural, simple life; weightlifting; the supposed “gynocracy” and feminism (women aspiring to culture); government corruption; icky immigrants, and sexual perverts (“gay and fake,” “globohomo”).
Shenvi writes:
[W]e need to ask whether it’s healthy to feed ourselves on a homogeneous diet of revulsion and disdain. “Hate the sin; love the sinner” is a cliché in many Christian circles but it’s a cliché rooted in biblical principles (Matt. 5:43-48, Luke 6:27-36, Rom. 12:19-20). Yes, “loving your enemies” includes warning them about their sin. But “love” cannot and must not be limited to warning them about their sin. After all, the fruit of the Spirit is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control” (Gal. 5:22-23). The fruit of the spirit is not “loathing bugmen, mocking Trashworld, and calling things fake and gay.” Even pagans can do that; Jesus expects more of his followers (Luke 6:32-36).
Even pagans can do that. It isn’t just pseudonyms that Andrew Isker and his friends are borrowing from the ancients. They are mimicking pagans, not Christ; there is nothing uniquely Christian about either the mode or the subject matters about which they write. They are modern-day Juvenals. Or should I say juveniles? It’s the same word, from the Latin juvenalis, meaning “youthful.” I wrote truer than I even knew when I called their project “A Children’s Crusade.”
They aren’t just aping Juvenal and his acid, worldly rhetoric. They are aping the same Enlightenment revolutionary project that brought the world the 18th century French Revolution. Oh, they will say their aims are far different than Voltaire or Gibbon and the rest of the flock of philosophes, but they all have in common that they think their age—the modern one—is an intolerable “Trashworld” that needs burning to the ground and they all look to the recovery of the golden age of pagan antiquity as an alternative. Andrew Isker is sprinkling some “Christianese” onto the message of Bronze Age Pervert (the name sort of gives it away). Stephen Wolfe would welcome and celebrate a modern-day Caesar with open arms so long as he shared his xenophobia.
Would-be Christian “intellectuals” viewing ancient Rome with admiration the way Juvenal thought of old Rome—worse, viewing ancient Rome the way Voltaire or Gibbon thought of Rome—okay, even worse, viewing ancient Rome the way Bronze Age Pervert thinks of Rome tells me at least this:
Thinking about the Roman Empire often throughout the day is apparently hazardous to your mental and spiritual health.
Read the book of Revelation. It tells you what Almighty God thought about the Roman Empire.
Thank you for reading The Square Inch Newsletter! Have a wonderful weekend, hopefully toga-free.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Courageous and incisive, Brian. Bravo.