Living in a Conviction-less Age

'[W]e pretend that we can have the world and Christ. This comfort has led us into a void of our own conviction-less faith. Catholics were all too agreeable to give up Mass for Covid.'

From Crisis

By Constance T Hull, MST

Christians’ lack of conviction was the catalyst for Christ being removed from the cultural throne of the West. Instead, we have accepted a bland, banal, suburban counterfeit that requires very little sacrifice or suffering.

Some of the most intuitive and fascinating writing about the state of the world can be found among recent Orthodox Christian converts. Many of these writers lived as seculars or pagans, so they can grasp at a deeper level the undercurrents of our culture and present moment. Paul Kingsnorth, who was heavily involved in environmentalism and spent time as a Wiccan, is one of those converts. 

In a recent article on his Substack, The Abbey of Misrule, Kingsnorth wrote about the re-paganization of the West, which he argues is not here yet because we are in a moment of what he calls the Void. There is no set god that sits on the throne of our culture at this moment because there is a transition taking place. We are not quite pagan or atheistic because those who adhere to these belief systems lack conviction. There is no skin in the game, so to speak. They back down when any sacrifice for their paganism or atheism is asked of them. Kingsnorth writes in his essay “Into the Void”:

It is not, I would say, any kind of ‘age’ at all. It has no shape. It has no centre. Nobody sits on its throne. It is, taken in the round, simply a vacuum. There is nothing here at all.

It is a void.

So this is what I have taken to calling the time we live in now, here in the post-everything West: the Void. The Void is an empty space. There is no god here, of any shape. Deicide has dealt with that.

The Void is our new Colosseum: both bounded and empty, a place of entertainment and terror. In the Void, nothing is real, nothing has meaning, and nothing leads us in any direction but inward. When we get there, all we find is our passions, and they drag us in every direction we can think of. We have no idea who to turn to for help, and despair rises all around us as a result. In this culture, Satan is cool, but not because we believe in him: precisely because we don’t. In the Void, we all hate Christianity, but not that much. It is barely worth hating. Nothing much is worth hating, or loving anymore.

In this temporary moment of the Void, there is no real conviction in anything. A lack of belief leads inevitably to indifference, but this godless throne will not remain so for long. Humanity rarely stays in states of indifference for long and instead will choose a new god for the throne of the West. The indifference toward Christianity will shift to greater and greater hostility in the years to come.

I agree with Kingsnorth’s assessment of the Void we currently find ourselves in, but it is time to engage in a serious examination of conscience on the lack of conviction Christians in the West also live. Growing up in the United States, and having attended Mass in parishes across the U.S. and parts of Europe, I have repeatedly witnessed a deep lack of conviction.  

We as Christians have failed in our evangelical mission. Our lack of conviction was the catalyst for Christ being removed from the cultural throne of the West. Instead, we have accepted a bland, banal, suburban counterfeit that requires very little sacrifice or suffering. Like our pagan and atheistic counterparts, we are not willing to sacrifice or suffer for our beliefs.

If there is one way to best describe Western Christianity, it is to say it is Cross-less. We have chosen a prosperity-gospel, moralistic, therapeutic, deist counterfeit. We believe that the Gospel does not require much of us. We can still live our worldly, consumer-driven way of life. We can go to our suburban parishes, pat ourselves on the back, and pretend that we are living the fullness of the Gospel. After all, the Lord wants us to be comfortable and have good things, right?

“In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

“So, therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:33)

These are two examples among many. The Lord tells us we are not greater than the Master. Our Master died on the Cross for our salvation. We are called to live crucified lives each day— without counting the cost—in the hope that we will spend eternity with Him and bring countless others with us. Nowhere does Christ tell us we get to live in comfort. I am as much to blame as anyone else. For years I didn’t grasp how radical the Gospel calling is for each one of us. I still fail daily to live it. 

How many of us sitting in the pews understand this truth? Our brothers and sisters in Christ in places like Nigeria, Pakistan, Haiti, and elsewhere live each day with the threat of violence—and, in many cases, martyrdom. They risk life and limb to be fed by the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Meanwhile, Western Christians cancel Mass on federal holidays because state-mandated days off are more important than the public celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass; or we cancel if there is a threat of snow. My spiritual mother and father grew up in Poland under the Soviet Union. They quite literally went to Mass, with two small children, while tanks were parked outside of the church. Would we do the same? 

Day in and day out, we pretend that we can have the world and Christ. This comfort has led us into a void of our own conviction-less faith. Catholics were all too agreeable to give up Mass for Covid. The most important thing we do—celebrating Mass—became non-essential, while abortion clinics and liquor stores remained open. Years later, we are still justifying our self-imposed exile from the Real Presence while unborn babies were being slaughtered. We are unwilling to sacrifice to follow Christ, but we imagine that all of us would bravely endure martyrdom if it came.

The odds of this being true are slim given fallen human nature, history, and the Passion narratives. St. John was the only apostle to remain at the foot of the Cross. He was able to do so because of a very deep prayer life that gave him the charity and fortitude to endure the horrors of watching his Beloved Savior die. The others ran when the Lord’s hour came. True, they all died as martyrs later, but we like to ignore the fact that when the time of Our Lord’s death arrived, his closest friends abandoned Him. How can we possibly believe we wouldn’t do the same? How could we think so when we are willing to sacrifice so little right now? 

Western culture is experiencing a void because we lack conviction. The Void is waiting to be filled. The answer should be that Christianity will once more seek to lead people to Christ, but too many of us lack conviction. Our leadership has abandoned us for their own lack of conviction. Any member of the clergy who refuses to rock the boat and call us to do the same has misunderstood the calling of the Gospel and has chosen a counterfeit. Christianity without conviction and sacrifice is not Christianity. It is a counterfeit, a fraud.

Our lives look no different from our contemporaries. We blindly follow the increasingly technocratic leaders of our nations. We watch the same trashy television shows, ignore the Satanic messages in pop culture, seek comfort, lead consumer and materialistic lives, and have abandoned any semblance of asceticism. Our prayer lives have been overtaken by social media and binge-watching television. Catholics cannot be expected to attend Mass twice a week for more than a small handful of days a year. Why should the world take us seriously when we don’t take our Faith seriously?

I am asking myself these questions as much as anyone else. I am a product of my culture; and the more I look to Christ’s example, the more I see how incompatible postmodern values are with the high calling of the Gospel. We are, quite literally, slaves to comfort and consuming. I am a slave too. Everything around us leads us to live for the passions rather than the Lord. All this comfort and counterfeit Christianity is responsible for the Void that is in our culture. We will never be able to re-evangelize the West until we are willing to get rid of our own false idols and acknowledge how we have utterly failed in our mission to lead people to Christ.

This is a bitter pill to swallow. Many will find it too harsh. But if we do not begin to examine our failings and the counterfeits we have embraced, then our culture will replace the Void with something much more sinister. There is a growing mainstream movement of Satanism. And Europe has opened its borders to Islam, which has subsumed every culture it has conquered. Our culture is turning from indifference toward Christianity to open hostility. The Void will only remain for a short moment in history because nature and the preternatural abhor a vacuum.

The only way forward is through heroic Christianity that embraces the Cross. Suburban parishes of comfort and a superficial veneer must die away. We can no longer pretend like checking off Sunday Mass is discipleship. The only option is to embrace the Gospel in its fullness: with the joys and sufferings. A crucified ascetical Church will lead souls to Christ. A Church that looks no different from the world is a waste of people’s time—which is why they either don’t come, or they don’t stay. Will we start to live with conviction? Or will we continue to watch our culture be overtaken by darkness, with little concern on our part because we prefer our material comfort to Christ?