A Realist Diagnosis of the Culture War

'The West is split by a new cosmology or religion, pitting a faith in Divine Retribution against a founding faith in Divine Redemption, those who trust a Providential Creation versus those who evangelize a Universal Catastrophe.'

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Woodward

The West is split by a new cosmology or religion, pitting a faith in Divine Retribution against a founding faith in Divine Redemption, those who trust a Providential Creation versus those who evangelize a Universal Catastrophe.

We’re now embroiled in a culture war, yet the insurgents’ purpose and origin remain obscure. A random collection of identity activists, with mutually hostile identities (LGBTQ+ for Hamas) seeks to suppress our existing social relations in the name of a racial, religious or sexual eminence. They’re joined by a crowd of jeremiahs, panicking over climate, viral, or economic catastrophes. More broadly, a third of American college students suffer anxiety disorders; suicide is the primary cause of death for males 18-35, and we face an epidemic of gender dysphoria. Strangest of all, this demolition seems to have the legal and economic support of the “system” it seeks to destroy.

Yet, a single worldview or cosmology unites all this mayhem: the current reality is unlivable. Social relations once normal are seen as oppressive. Every vague disaster is an existential threat. Existence is Meaningless, Malicious, and Ugly. And this psychotic pessimism about daily life—an expectation of a Cosmic Reckoning—is fed by a public bureaucracy and media, chanting statistical catastrophes and enforcing sacrificial disaster prevention programs as public penance.

All this might surprise the still-breathing heirs of Western civilization, nurtured in a vaguely Christian culture, and blithely assuming that life is essentially True, Good, and Beautiful. The old consensus trusted, “The Heavens proclaim the Glory of the Lord.” The new faith proclaims, “Humanity defiles the Heavens”—in one way or another. The West is split by a new cosmology or religion, pitting a faith in Divine Retribution against a founding faith in Divine Redemption, those who trust a Providential Creation versus those who evangelize a Universal Catastrophe.

Reaching for a Realist Analysis

Now, the diagnosis of our malaise has previously focused on two narrower causes, the administrative and ideological, the materialistic and idealistic. On the one hand, critics like James Burnham, Christopher Lasch, and Thomas Sowell have long decried the rise of the New Bureaucratic Class, unshackled dangerously from democratic control. Other commentators, like Patrick Deneen, Allister McIntyre, and Charles Taylor, focus on dogmatic liberalism’s idiotic anthropology, arguing that public individualism breeds religious indifferentism, then moral relativism, then Modern egoism and Post-modern psychosis. Yet neither cause seems decisive.

On the one hand, for over a millennium, Christian yeomen, tradesmen and merchants always pushed back against State intrusion. Why would once-free citizens now surrender to the revenuers? On the other hand, only one strand of constitutional liberalism—call it Lockean—evangelized mechanical materialism. Many faithful Christians, like Washington, Adams, Lord Acton, Cardinal Newman and Orestes Brownson, saw a narrowly political liberalism as most friendly to the needs of a free, Christian society, open to—indeed, constantly requiring—free evangelization. Even dogmatic Masons like Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin saw popular Christianity as crucial to the survival of the Republic. If materialism was only one of many democratic-republican movements, how did the materialists succeeded in challenging a popular and highly successful Christian culture? Cut to the chase: was there a failure in evangelization?

It will help to “connect the dots” between the bureaucratic and philosophic diagnoses of this new religion. Platonic political science stresses the unity of the regime, the coherent human character of sovereign offices. Visible offices, occupied by particular sorts of rulers, will enforce any people’s common necessities, and in doing that, they publicize a universe of a certain moral character. There was no distinction between Church and State in Antiquity, so they saw that any particular regime always imposed its own universal cosmology. A warrior regime (like the Samurais) sees the whole cosmos as a glorious battleground for a glorious death. Oligarchic regimes (like the Carthaginians) sees the universe as a treasure vault for profit-margin larceny. So, if we now have a Bureaucratic regime, is this new regime itself importing this new faith in a Catastrophic Cosmos? Does it thereby undercut any distinction between Church and State?

Western Exceptionalism versus the Oriental Norm

First we must grasp the incomparable genius of Western Civilization, Western Exceptionalism. Our earliest cultural ancestors, on the one hand, were Greek militiamen, fighting back nameless Persian masses and vaunting the excellence and ingenuity of each. We also harken back to the exiled Israelites, weeping by the rivers of Babylon, clinging to the Torah, and taking fully upon themselves the burden of a personal covenant with the Living God. Purely culturally, Athens and Jerusalem were joined in the Christian Gospel with Roman universal citizenship and rule of law. So our mongrel civilization always celebrated the inborn dignity, freedom and ingenuity of each and every human being, however humble. This West (now embracing Korea and Japan) has always resisted Oriental Hordes without and Despots within. So to defend the West—contending Christian doctrines aside—we must understand the Oriental, spiritually and culturally.

The inner dynamics of the bureaucratic regime were first analyzed by the Marxist defector Karl Wittfogel in his “cancelled” masterpiece, Oriental Despotism (Yale, 1962). In 500 pages of dense political science, Wittfogel reveals that, globally throughout history, the end-game of any fully developed imperial economy has always been Totalitarian Bureaucracy. Left to its own devices, any unfettered State ultimately absorbs its entire Society. It absorbs all private property into the public domain, mutates all private enterprises into public works, and reduces its subjects to numbered, anonymous work levies and military drafts. Barring a natural or military disaster, Oriental Despotism is humanity’s natural political destiny. The State’s absolute power naturally evangelizes a purely rationalistic, mechanistic, and impersonal universe, a Religion of Cold, Grinding Cosmic Gears. And that merciless cosmology in turn legitimates the State’s absolute power. In our own eyes, we become as inconsequential as ants in an anthill, and docile.

Within a mechanistic cosmology, Oriental Despotism assumes priestly authority, wielded by astronomer priests, like the Babylonian Magi, Egyptian priests, or Chinese philosophers. At its best, Chinese Confucianism embraced a mutually responsible religion of ancestor worship, yet its cosmology remained abstract, impersonal, and frozen in time. At its worst, Mesoamerican public works were devoted to greasing the cosmic gears with human blood, blood from tens-of-thousands of real people, sacrificed to the insatiable Aztec butterfly god. Today, this priestly authority is wielded by Islamic Mullahs and ideologues of Marxist or Maoist historical science—thus four million Ukrainians butchered in Stalin’s industrial Five Year Plan, or forty million killed in Mao’s Great Leap Forward—the broken eggs of inedible omelets.

Only rational human beings, prostrate beneath a merciless universe, could be slaughtered with the fatalistic docility of the Aztecs’ victims. Over a four-day festival, forty thousand real human beings are marched up Tenochtitlan Temple, to have their hearts ripped out, and their gaping bodies flopping down the pyramid’s sides and baptizing it in blood. And nobody resisted. Such are the Gears of a Merciless Cosmos.

Yet bizarrely—this is the scary part—such bureaucratic dominion arises naturally in constructing and operating ordinary public works, like China’s great irrigation canals (hence Wittfogel’s term, “hydraulic societies”). Wherever bureaucracy absorbs human enterprise, as Thomas Sowell says, “procedures are everything; results are nothing.” Human cost remain numbers, as with Stalin’s playful quip, “one death is a tragedy; ten thousand deaths, merely a statistic.” Today, a similar dehumanizing authority is enjoyed by public health administrations, like the British National Health Service: statistical science reducing personal care to anonymous herd management.

Perennial Loving Society versus Temporary Coercive States

So, the real mystery is not the challenge of a Total State to Christian Society, but how Western Exceptionalism happened in the first place. Other civilizations rise and fall with their regimes. Yet somehow, a free, more-or-less continuous Christian Society has managed to endure half-millennia each of Roman emperors, German warrior chiefs, feudal aristocrats, and oligarchic parliaments. How did a Christian Society survive, massage and humanize such diverse masters?

How? Christianity first clearly distinguished the things of God from the things of Caesar. The Church proclaimed a universal and voluntary culture of supernatural love, as distinct from and superior to the local and coercive justice of natural necessity. Throughout our first two thousand years, the Church always evangelized with visible services of love—educating, nursing and sheltering—respectful of Caesar, but regardless of his sometimes antisocial coercion.

Now, every political regime is rightly coercive. The legitimacy of the State’s rule is established precisely by the enforcement of its laws or rule of law. A State that cannot enforce its laws is no State. In its core duties of necessity—defense, public justice and true public works—rulers must act with protocols necessarily mandatory, categorical, and budgetary. Such is the rational State.

On the other hand, the humanitarian aspirations of a family, clan or free Society—teaching the poor, nursing the sick, and sheltering the homeless—are essentially services of love, meant to nurture or restore each unique person in human dignity, free agency, personal ingenuity and loving community. So charitable services must be voluntary, discerning, and sacrificial. In other civilizations, families and clans see these as the duties of natural kinship. Within a Christian culture, the Society at large, God’s family, seeks to nurture or restore each human as a unique child of God, an Imago Dei, as distinct from ruling citizens en masse. Such is the loving Church.

In Oriental Despotisms, enterprises that the West now calls social services—educating, nursing and sheltering—are unknown. Public education is reserved for the priests and minions of the regime. So, in modern Marxism, professional education is reserved for party members, and everyone else is condemned to menial labor. When it comes to nursing and sheltering, anyone lacking a nurturing family or protective clan wanders alone and dies in a ditch, like babies today, abandoned in the gutters of Chinese streets or waste barrels of Western public hospitals. Across history, only Christianity has educated, nursed, and sheltered the poor, lonely and homeless, as a free, visible society, voluntarily and sacrificially committed to the freedom and dignity of each human person, “made in the image of God,” in a Creation of Truth, Goodness and Beauty.

Free Christian society first offered hope to a world governed by ruthless malice—malice we still find hard to believe, despite the evidence of our eyes. This visible, hope-filled society first came in the form of cheerful, psalm-singing martyrs in the Roman Coliseum. This visible society also came in the form of lonely monks or missionaries, wandering into Saxon, Hindu or Maoist villages. It came in the form of a tiny band of Conquistadores, liberating the butchered tribes of the Aztec empire. It can come in the form of the independent schools and charities of a Christian Society, respected by its democratic-republican regime. But it cannot come—spoiler alert—as “program delivery” by a State bureaucracy, pretending to educate free citizens. A State enforces its will on Society with justice that is mandatory, categorical and budgetary. The Church offers its hope to each unique person with charity, love that’s voluntary, discerning, and sacrificial.

Earning Independent Moral Authority

As the bedrock foundation of Western Exceptionalism, the Church earned its independent moral authority and the plausibility of a nurturing Creation with its free and sacrificial services of love. So, when neo-pagan Emperor Julian the Apostate, grandson of Constantine, tried to turn back the clock and restore the old paganism, he discovered that the Church’s charity put it beyond his political control: “Those impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also,” he whined. “Welcoming them into their agapae, they draw them as children are drawn with cakes.”

The Church’s services of love are its most visible, evangelizing offices, and they have always been challenged by its political masters. So, it has had to adapt its visible witness, its own “offices,” to particular political challenges. However—a big “however”—the tension between its sovereign duties in love and the State’s urgent duties in law has never—and can never—be settled categorically. Any constitutional resolution must subordinate one to the other, corrupting both. For the Common Good, a pragmatic State must surrender final moral authority to the Society. In charity, the Church must resist coercion, temptations to punish every sin as a crime.

Over time, the healthiest political solution, best for both, has been benign neglect, like the benign and neglectful American First Amendment. And the healthiest religious solution has been impartial prophetic judgement. Sometimes that prophetic impulse has been politically and morally justifiable, like the Abolitionist campaign, criminalizing the sin of slavery. Sometimes it is politically and morally unjustifiable—and disastrous—like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s campaign for Prohibition, criminalizing drunkenness. And clearly, at different points through history, both State and Church have been sinned against and sinning.

But again, how was Western Exceptionalism imbedded in our culture? It takes centuries to embed universal ideals like Hellenic heroism in a civilization. Herein lies the tale: the culture of loving hope was embedded in the West by spontaneous, voluntary monasticism. It’s always been known that the monasteries preserved the learning of antiquity, yet secular historians assumed they were stupid peasants, ignorant of what they copied. More recently, however, historians like Christopher Dawson, Lynn Whyte, Kenneth Clarke, Rodney Stark, and Tom Holland are proving that those poor but loving monks built the cultural foundations of a future Christian civilization.

In the fifth century, the Western Church suffered its First Apocalypse, losing its demographic race to revive the dispirited, depopulated Empire. For its next 500 years, it was swamped by wave after wave of brutal Germans, Huns, Muslims, and Vikings. Communications and trade died. Pax Romana collapsed into crumbling cities and isolated villages. Yet a Christian society of love could survive even where only “two are gathered together.” Floating above the endless poverty, chaos and violence, a totally fragmented Church shrank to “silent men…clearing forests and draining swamps” (Dawson). The Rule of St. Benedict, voluntarily embraced, united ora et labora, eight hours of work and eight hours of prayer. Its mandate was hospitality, with Pax carved over each rough gate. Any lonely and hungry soul, any Imago Dei, was free to enter, eat in the refectory, sleep on a cot and worship in the chapel. If sick, they’d be nursed in the infirmary. When healthy, they’d work in the fields alongside the monks. The monks survived the violence by being useful, freely offering loving service even to brutal warrior chieftains.

With loving service—voluntary, discerning and sacrificial—the monasteries implanted deeply into the culture the axiom of personal human dignity, and more, norms of voluntary association, personal initiative, and subsidiarity—the proper autonomy of even peasant families and menial trades. Working in their fields, learned monks modelled the nobility of manual labor, upending Antiquity’s aristocratic contempt for work. Unlike the ancients, they valued created matter as such, material Creation, inspiring technological innovation like crop rotation, stock breeding, water power and clocks. Most bizarre, they finally taught reverence for women and chastity as manly virtues to the sons of brutal warriors—something totally mind-boggling to an Achilles.

Starting about the year 1000, the socially unified Church, firmly grounded in its worship, free education, nursing, and shelter, inspired an explosion of historically unprecedented free cities, guilds, universities, cathedrals, pilgrimages, music, and art—what became the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, or what Kenneth Clark (Civilization) calls the Great Thaw. Its moral authority and Peace of God ran from Portugal to Prussia, restraining the cheerful brutality of its princes. And finally, the States were getting their acts together. With the Peace of God at home and Crusades abroad, the growing States were beginning to defend their borders, enforce justice, encourage commerce and gather taxes.

Loving Universal Witness versus Compelling National Babble

Yet inevitably, prosperity tempted ambition, both clerical and aristocratic. Henceforth, the wrestling match between Church and State would never cease. Given more virile national governments, princes, merchants and poets naturally became partisans of their native languages and customs, pushing back against the Latin Church. Bishops and monastic abbots had become feudal lords, and feudal lords likewise controlled clerical offices or benefices, further confusing secular and sacred authority. By 1300, the one Church and many States were battling openly over public revenue. The Roman hierarchy, now hugely wealthy, sank to vulgar power politics, especially in Italy and Germany. It thus squandered its real moral authority. So in 1520, a religious and political schism tore the West, splitting the Latin Renaissance and German Reformation, tragically dividing the Church’s universal witness. Since then, Divided Witness has crippled the Church’s universal loving service with theological tribalism.

The Church’s Second Apocalypse was sparked by Luther’s 1520 Letter to the German Princes, urging them to seize their local churches. They were delighted. The resulting Apocalypse burned for over a century, with the Schmalkaldic War, Dutch Eighty Years War, Spanish Armada, English Civil War, Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and cataclysmic Thirty Years War, killing over four million Germans, half of some provinces. Called the Wars of Religion, they were truly Wars of Nationalism. Alliances cut across the theologies, Catholic-Lutheran-Calvinist-Zwinglian, each prince stoking religious fanaticism in his own service. The carnage ended only with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) enshrining Cuius regno, eius religio, “Whose reign, his religion.” This put the princes happily in command of the local splinters of the universal Church. The United States, founded entirely by dissenting sects, became the sole exception.

The Reformation might have been a fraternal debate in a socially unified Church, but it plunged into tribal warfare. Christians were accustomed to balancing the demands of parallel sacred and secular authorities, given duties toward both. But political fealty was defined by sacred oaths, so few could imagine any diversity in faith. Then, as the blood dried, the ascendant State attracted a new class of public intellectuals like John Locke, faux clergy buzzing, “Religion is too fanatical to be allowed in public debate.” Ordinary pastors and priests still served in teaching, nursing, and sheltering, but denominational leaders were agents of their regimes, compromising Christianity’s universal moral authority. Faithful Protestant and Catholic clergy launched spectacular global missions, seeding mankind’s distant future, but these were all-too-easily smeared as “Western imperialism” by native elites. Meanwhile, national churches slid into a not-so-slow death spiral.

Soon, turncoat bishops (like Talleyrand) were evangelizing the French Revolution. Given its surviving dissenters, England briefly enjoyed a Methodist revival, shaming its oligarchs into outlawing the slave trade. But Lutheran bishops were seduced by Hegelian nationalism, and with almost Aztec docility, their flock marched into the world wars. Witness endured among a few, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Fr. Titus Brandsma, martyred by the Nazis. But the West’s stormy marriage of universal charity and local patriotism was supplanted by domestic abuse, national or international socialism. The Church’s third Apocalypse is called the 20^th Century: 100 million defenseless citizens slaughtered by their own governments, building a Heaven on Earth.

The one exception in this age of national churches was the West’s youngest shoot, the United States: American Exceptionalism within the Western Exceptionalism. The American Republic was founded by dissenting denominations, deeply suspicious of State power—Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, Methodists and independent Episcopalians. So American Society viscerally refused to establish a State church. The First Amendment is arguably the most practical political accommodation with a Christian society, founded on services of love. Believers like John Adams clearly saw the utility of Locke’s constitutional devices, while ignoring his crass anthropology. Even skeptical Masons like Thomas Jefferson saw that America’s political freedoms depended entirely on its Christian society, especially the free, local and parent-led education of its citizens in Christian moral virtue, human dignity and self-government.

However, this political resolution placed on the Church the urgent duty of evangelizing Society, generation after generation, in Christian freedom—while resisting the temptation to employ State coercion. So, for example, following the Second Great Awakening, the Abolition movement prophesized powerfully about the Imago Dei in black slaves, but its political argument was the Declaration of Independence. Then two generations later, a militantly Christian Prohibition movement, seeking to eradicate drunkenness, imposed a coercive constitutional amendment on the wider society. Squandering Christianity’s moral authority, this succeeded only in supplanting relatively benign beer halls with bootleg gin, speakeasies, the Mafia, and the Roaring Twenties,

The American Exception and the Treason of the Clerics

So today, since Christianity outlived so many different coercive regimes, why is American Christian Society now challenged by a Bureaucratic State? As Plato taught, regimes fall only when their own officers betray their faith. Again, regimes fall only when their own officers betray their faith. America’s Christian society was betrayed by Progressive clerics, downloading their charitable duties—first and most crucially, education (1900), but then later, shelter and nursing—onto the public bureaucracy, in the name of the State’s greater expertise and revenue.

Faced with massive Irish, German, Mediterranean and later Slavic migrations, by the late-1800s, Protestant clergy and politicians turned to government to solve the problem of the poor Orthodox and Catholics. Through the lens of militant Reformation tribalism, they saw the newcomers, not as fellow Christians with diverse teachings, but as alien pagans, an urban mass, equipped for neither republican citizenship nor an industrial economy. With compassion, perhaps, they argued that “All citizens have a right” to public education, and schools are the most important “public works.” In that enterprise, they backed Progressive pedagogues like Horace Mann and John Dewey, and they rode the cultural wave of President Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton University and son of the founder of the segregationist Presbyterian Church—PCUS. The Christian dissidents of the Founding were now the expert, administrative elites of Progress.

A testimony to its resilience, Christian culture endured four generations of state education, even while cities, industries, cinemas and taxes burgeoned. Progressive pedagogy could not be content with Abraham Lincoln’s education in virtue and citizenship—Aesop’s Fables, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare and the Bible. Dewey’s purpose was training a skilled work levy for the industrial economy. So long as public servants themselves remained few and culturally Christian, and so long as they minded their political masters, they restrained themselves as servants of a free society, not its rulers. But State schools were now the Progressive “cuckoo in the nest,” destined to expel all the Christian social service “chicks.”

The Depression’s welfare revolution arguably kicked a momentary market crash into decade-long stagnation. Having argued, “People have a right to education,” Progressive clerics now argued, “People have a right to food and shelter.” Then in the 1960s, an ever more ambitious medical industry argued that funding a healthy labor market would bring vast economic advantages; and BTW, “People have a right to health care.” Nobody asked whether Christian duties of education, nursing and shelter could translate into a coercive political rights. The propaganda has been so effective, it’s hard to realize today that such a “right” is inherently self-defeating, mutating into docile public dependency.

Free Witness versus the Bureaucratic Bubble

Diagnosis: the Coercive State cannot enact the Christian loving services of teaching, nursing and sheltering. In the attempt, they become horribly perverse: mechanical training, animal husbandry and herd control. Yet, like medieval popes, America’s mainline denominations squandered their real moral authority in politics. Confident of their authority over the State, and dismissive of the newcomers as truly Christian, American Protestantism abandoned its loving duties in the name of justice. Services once voluntary, discerning, and sacrificial—most crucially, education—came under public management—mandatory, categorical, and budgetary. Captive in the Bureaucratic Bubble, they became insulated from the real financial and human costs of their myriad protocols.

In the Sixties, with dozens of administrative and cultural devices, the Bureaucratic dominion of justice began to filter most tragically into the family. This End Game supplanted the happy Christian expectation of loving mutual service with the discontents of a contractual exchange. Spouses became increasingly isolated as the contracting parties in categorical and budgetary relationships, further obscuring the Imago Dei with the lens of statistics and cosmic indifference.

Prescription requires two new discussions, first on the character of a post-Christian bureaucracy, and second, on building a new domestic culture of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. However, the new, contentious issue of Christian Nationalism may need clarification here. A nation is a shared language group, society, and historical cultural education. In that precise sense, the United States is indeed a Christian nation. If it ceases to be so, it ceases to be. However, there is an enormous rhetorical problem with the terminology of Christian Nationalism.

Nationalism is a political ideology, invented by the demonic G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel asserts that mankind’s supreme moral purpose is found solely in the power and glory of their nations over other nations (Philosophy of History).This tribal Statism corrupts the happy, natural passion of Patriotism, love of one’s own. In the name of transcendent history, Hegel denied any perennial moral authority beyond empire itself. This cosmology was inspired by and then legitimized the monolithic Prussian state school system, the Volksschule, training docile cannon fodder for the slaughter of the 20^th century. And it gradually spread throughout the West.

Ideological Nationalism is a rank denial of the Imago Dei, the “inalienable rights” endowed by “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Therefore, calling the United States a Christian nation may be precisely correct, but the effort to renew the free moral authority of its Christian Society might more accurately be described as Christian Patriotism. However, that rhetorical ship has already sailed, so little may be expected from now tweaking its rudder.

A Christian State is almost a contradiction in terms, because the imperatives of universal love and local necessities will always remain in tension. In charity, a Christian private citizen can choose sacrificial pacifism, but in justice, a Christian statesman has no right to make that choice. Pragmatic legislators, ruling for the social good, will respect popular religious holidays, charities and cultural norms as their natural duty. They must suppress inevitable attempts by their own officers to bully private citizens. But likewise, a just State must suppress inevitable attempts of Church leaders to employ State coercion for their own agendas (like Prohibition—squandering their moral authority). In the end, renewing a Christian nation depends on free, sacrificial evangelization—evangelization previously weakened by Divided Witness and betrayed by ambitious mainline denominations.

A new evangelization must come in services of love, voluntary, discerning, and sacrificial—and cutting across denominational lines. Arguably, this has already begun. The Bureaucratic culture is undermining itself, by undercutting the natural family, the most fundamental aspiration of human nature. So the family has become the new “office” or visible witness of a Providential Creation, with broadly Christian homeschooling, charter schools, pregnancy care centers, and family counselling agencies. As the Christian family recovers itself in the Progressive rubble, we will find once again that demographics is destiny, that “the meek will inherit the earth.”

The featured image is “La muerte del General Venancio Flores” (1868) by Juan Manuel Blanes, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.