The Evangelical Church Needs Cultural Christianity

Once one has accepted divorce and artificial birth control, as most Evangelicals have, it is extremely difficult to be a cultural conservative. 

From The European Conservative

By Erik Dahlberg

Cultural conservatism—especially the traditional view on familial piety—is a condition of the Gospel’s intelligibility.

It has been the habit, since at least C. S. Lewis, of English Evangelical Christianity to emphasise the gulf between itself and what has been called, under various terms, ‘[merely] cultural Christianity’ or more rudely ‘politics and the world.’ In The Screwtape Letters, it is the danger of “Christianity and the Cause,” as in Mere Christianity, it is the hard distinction between ‘merely nice people’ and ‘Christians.’ To translate this into the vernacular, Evangelical Christianity is uneasy with cultural conservatism. Those within its fold who are debilitated by cultural conservative persuasions routinely muzzle themselves, not for fear of rebarbative liberals but out of the sincerely held view that all energies directed in the advance of cultural conservatism are, ultimately, idolatrous. They distract from the well of life.

To be sure, one must give the point its due. Cultural conservatism—which is to say, according both to believers and non-believers, more or less, cultural Christianity—is not sufficient for salvation, if there is such a thing. And, if Christianity is true, this makes belief in (or, in older language, on) Jesus a rather good idea. What I want to argue in the following essay is that cultural conservatism is, in important senses, a condition of the Gospel’s intelligibility.

Conditions of Intelligibility

Pivotal to my argumentation—to my sense of what ‘conservative’ means—is the traditional view on familial piety. I chose this as a focus because of its centrality both to conservative political theory and to Scripture’s intelligibility. Authority is understood, on the conservative account, as not only real—that is, as distinct from mere power—and as other than merely elective. Elective authority—whether from the ‘social contract’ making a people of a crowd or ‘consent’ turning good from evil—is not the core of the state; for the conservative, it is natural authority. This natural authority is understood, classically, in terms of the father of a family. Natural law theorists have tended—even when not speaking of the family per se—to invoke its language over the king or the state; for example, Cicero writes: “Our country did not give us birth or rearing without expecting some return from us.” Concomitantly, the conservative must also defend the reality of love from the conceptual encroachment of lust, much the way they must defend authority from the conceptual encroachment of power. Pivotal to these notions—as shall be addressed—is the idea of man as a thinking being, the thoughts of whom are irreducible to forces (unlike animal sensations, which are reducible thus). Love and authority are natural but delicate intellective objects, the loss of which empties the state and the Gospel of intelligibility.

It is my contention that Christianity, too, cannot be more than weakly grasped without this traditional view. That is to say, the natural sentiments of familial piety—sprung in the soil of parental love—are necessary to fully understand the Gospel. That is because in the familial concepts of ‘father,’ ‘brother,’ ‘wife,’ ‘husband,’ etc., are contained the essence of ‘love,’ ‘authority,’ and the relations of life. These are only available, moreover, on the assumption of the existence of the free, uncaused person—the subject within such relations. I summarise this as the certainty that man thinks.

It must be stressed that I am not saying that those without the good fortune of growing up in healthy, loving families cannot understand, let alone adopt, Christianity. I am saying that to properly conceive of God as like a father requires familial piety, but such piety need not necessarily spring from one’s own family. It is quite possible to love imagined things and to long for—in full understanding—relationships one has never enjoyed.

The Decline of the West: Swansongs and Duplicity

One of the curious paradoxes of the past 150 years or so is that commentaries on the collapse of the West, in their various forms and iterations, have tended to consider Christianity, as in some tragic sense, a condition of the West’s flourishing, if not its survival altogether. Contributing to the tragic tenor, many of these writers have not been Christians, but the argument is still made, in different ways and at different pitches, by figures as various as Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Arnold, Spengler, Scruton, Kołakowski, Patočka, and even popularly by the likes of Tom Holland and, at times, Jordan Peterson.

A curiosity is that the Christians themselves have, in the (English) Evangelical quarter, not returned the favour. Those who talk of the decline of the West are not Evangelicals. If one goes to an Evangelical Church and speaks of the collapse as something one ought in any meaningful way to fight or mourn, one will find oneself accused of ‘worldliness.’ Those within the congregation who are tempted to feel in mourning censor themselves. Most Evangelicals, however, reject the language of ‘decline of the West’ wholesale.

In the Evangelicals’ defence, if one were to ask Matthew Arnold, Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, Kołakowski, etc. whether one ought to become a Christian, the answer would be more or less in the affirmative. If, however, one were to ask them why they were not Christians, one would be met with—to be a little unfair—high-sounding excuses. I cannot help but sympathise with the Evangelical side here, since the message does seem to be that typical conservative slogan:

This is a very good idea for society and for you, but I am too complicated—too tortured—to make the eternal movements myself. I do not have the ‘gift of faith.’ (Ephesians 2:9-10, Conservative Commentator edition)

Slavoj Žižek has noted the duplicitous nature of many Left-Liberal sorts who sing of the ‘naturalness’ and ‘nobility’ of Native American life. Similar nonsense is presently being wheeled out in Australia, where sentimentality for the Aboriginal population is being used to advance liberal politics through a permanent investiture of legislative power. It is, of course, mighty coarse to say aloud that Native American or Aboriginal life is inferior to the civilisation of the West, but it is completely insane to forget it. Žižek, with diplomatic playfulness, brings this out. Nobody in New York who sentimentalises Native American tents and Kevin Costner’s ‘going native’ (in Dances with Wolves) actually wants to live like a Native American. Nor, dare one say, do too many Native Americans.

Christians—and especially the low church, I suspect—are the Native Americans of conservative circles.

More needs to be said, however. It is my firm belief that the (non-Christian) cultural conservatives do have a real point, to which the low church, on the whole, is quite deaf.

A Doctrine of England

The Evangelical Church is, I fear, losing its stomach. Dispatches from the American New Calvinists have—no doubt by virtue of their thought’s ready dovetailing with force-o-philiac attitudes latent in modern Darwinism or Marxism—quite destroyed any remaining burden to think. Man becomes a pleasure-seeking cow, whose ultimate pleasure lies in the warm bath of God—an object not of thought but of sensation, as man qua rabbit luxuriates in the custard robes of divine grace.

There is evidently a lack of confidence in the Evangelical Church, and such is the principal occasion of my writing. Are the traditional attitudes to marriage—and, therewith, to authority, and therewith to political thought—bankrupt, as our liberal age clamours? Is there not something grotesque in ‘the nuclear family,’ in ‘traditional marriage’?

Perhaps God is only a ‘Father’ in a very specific, very technical, very academic sense. Perhaps husband and wife are to be partners.

In my view, the lack of confidence in the traditional forms bears a dependent relationship to the philosophical temptation of determinism. God ceases to be grasped through the dim mirror of human natural relations and becomes the sensuous, custard pie of the utopian state. Concomitantly, the idea of ‘God’ comes to subvert that of the father.

Confidence in the Gospel

The Gospel declares that the sense of the cosmos is personal. Its sense is Christ, the Logos, the personality to and with and for whom all things are made. And in men and women, made in God’s image—as respectively the glory of God and the glory of man—made a little below the angels, are found the gardeners of the world. The world is to be tended to and stewarded under the happy gaze of the Lord.

In our sinful weakness, we and I have departed from life and gone astray as sheep fleeing their shepherd in perversity. Our sin, however, has been deliberate, and our return—where it is being accomplished—is likewise deliberate. Man—the infernal, noble beanbag—thinks. Men built Auschwitz, and men liberated it as action born of thought.

Thought is not a dispensable feature of man but a necessary one. Love, too, is a matter of thought. Only through thought may one draw the distinction between animal association and human relations. The friend provides serotonin, economic support, and opportunities for further association. This much is true in the animal world as in humans. However, one does not say that a rabbit has ‘friends.’ A rabbit cannot think. It can appreciate a warm bath, but not a Georgian townhouse. The world is full, for the human being, not of things ‘crunchy’ and ‘moist’ (as for the caterpillar), but of (thoughts of) obligation, love, disdain, guilt, and relief.

The man who seeks in others serotonin, economic support, and opportunities for further association will have some trouble finding them. At the very least, he must pretend to have another purpose if he is to be successful. To see a person under the concept ‘friend’ is to think of them as, in some regard, an end in themselves: a continuous relation in which temporary imperatives arise, such as: I must help Larry find his bicycle; I must apologise for embarrassing him; I should quite like a pint tonight with Larry.

A great deal follows from such reasoning, such as that human beings have ‘history.’ Rabbits have only ‘natural history.’ ‘History,’ then, becomes a texture of human decision and reasoning. ‘History’ is unintelligible except as a record of reason. Of course, the force-o-philiac thinker does not believe in history, whether he is a Marxian, Darwinian, or John Piper and Co. ‘History,’ for such, becomes a cipher for the deeper movements. Concomitantly, they don’t believe in man qua thinking being—that is, man doesn’t actually do anything. Crucially, they cannot then unproblematically uphold the traditional view of the family and therewith of human relationships. And without such—without thought and love—‘authority’ becomes unintelligible, as ‘fulfilment’ and ‘happiness’ must degenerate into mere ‘pleasure.’ Determinism is the accomplice of anti-conservative political thought.

To be a thinking being—a being with Reason—is to be afflicted and blessed with the question of what to do, rather than simply how to get warm. The answers historically given—in the ancient world, at least—have been to serve the Good of something else. This something else hasn’t varied altogether much: the elders of one’s family; one’s city; the gods. Piety for such things has been natural to the pagan world. Freedom, in short, consists of obedience to authority. Needless to say, this is genuine authority; it is marked by love.

From such premises does the Gospel reason. Man comes into the world wrapped in the swaddling clothes of familial, civic, ancestral, and spiritual relations. In the light of which, the world is to be understood. The web of familial pronouns in Scripture—brethren, sisters, father, mother, husband, wife—envelopes not only the Church but God Himself in His Trinitarian love. Recognition of this point has been tacit in, for example, Hegel, for whom the family serves as the conditional grounding of all understanding thereafter.

The validity of such relations—that is to say, the legitimacy of their assumed weight—is presupposed throughout Scripture. They provide the grammar of the cosmos. To be sure, Christ is not one’s earthly relation. And yet, Christ is known therethrough:

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)

It is utterly pivotal to recognise that God is not the same as an earthly authority. The Christian has ‘faith’—which is to say, he follows—someone who is, in an important sense, not here. Nevertheless, the weight of such relations of piety is assumed in their employment through analogy. The man who already hates his father, mother, wife, and children will not understand what Jesus says. God the ‘Father’ and Christ the ‘Son’ will be unintelligible to him. He will not understand authority.

One might gloss over the point as follows: Jesus is declaring Himself to be the Good of all things. The existing relations of obligation—of father, city, and local deities—find their completion in Him. For in Christ, do all things hold together. Parts of classical philosophy (such as Plato’s dialogues) reflect this concern: the need for a single Good to give meaning to existing obligations. What is of interest to me in this article is the affirmation that Scripture gives to the traditional forms of life. The family is not abolished by Scripture (unlike in Plato), but given direction:

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. (Ephesians 5:25-27)

There is, then, an integration in the Gospel of the traditional forms of life with the Trinity. There is a concomitant transformation of the traditional forms, but not an abrogation. In consequence, Paul can still write:

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. (1 Timothy 5:8)

It follows, from my argumentation—should it be sound—that confusion and embarrassment about traditional forms will, concomitantly, entail confusion and embarrassment about the Gospel. Such forms, qua conditions of intelligibility, must be upheld lest the Gospel fall into obscurity. The Christian must, in large part, be a cultural conservative.

The Antinomy of the Gospel

In conclusion, I would like to detract somewhat, albeit not in the direction whence I have advanced. The criticism of anti-traditional sensibilities ought not flow into a mere affirmation of the traditional. There is a grave danger that I should be heard as advocating for a kind of gym-bro, Freikorps Gospel, the movements of which are masculine. Here, the Evangelicals are right to sense, in their apparent admirers amongst the cultural conservatives, a false friendship. Christianity is otherworldly, and by such lights it is the faith of the desert dweller and the poet, as it is the faith of the parental father and the soldier. Conditions of intelligibility, as I have called familial pieties, are not the same as—that is, are not—the Gospel. One might gloss my whole point as a warning against the errors that dovetail the force-o-philiac philosophies common since the mid-19th century. This understanding negates human relations and thereby obscures God in like manner.

Erik Dahlberg was a military engineer of Stormaktstiden, the Swedish “Era of Great Power.” But despite his exploits, including the daring march across the frozen Sound to take Copenhagen in 1658, he never wrote for The European Conservative. The Dahlberg you have just read is in fact a Cambridge student expressing political opinions from the safety of his nom de guerre.