The Vagabond King

Further thoughts on the idol of civilisation

Recently I wrote about silence, and how it had crept up on me. When God appeared to the Prophet Elijah, he came not in fire, wind or earthquake, but as a ‘still, small voice’ after all these things had passed¹. ‘The peace of God, which passes all understanding’², is how St Paul described it. Words, of course, can never reach the source.

I had thought for a while that I should respond to some of the responses to my October Erasmus Lecture, published last month in First Things as Against Christian Civilisation, but the desire to say something has competed with the desire to say nothing at all. It still does. There have been a lot of reactions, though. Almost daily, since giving the talk, I have received emails thanking me for it. People say they are grateful to have been reminded that as Christians we are supposed to be focus on trying live a Christ-like life, rather than getting ourselves tangled up in the worldly business of war, politics, culture and the rest.

The essence of that talk was two-fold and quite simple, at least in theory. You can see me discussing it, and its implications, with Jonathan Pageau in the film above. Firstly, it was a critique of the rising tide of ‘Christian civilisationism’, in which people hijack the Christian faith as a political instrument. Many of the people doing this do not believe in the Christian story, but find it useful in their ongoing battle to gin up ‘the West’ and defend it against whichever forces, within and without, they feel are bringing it down.

That leads on to the second point. When we look at the life and teachings of Jesus, we see him issuing us instructions which are precisely the opposite of those we would need to follow to do such a thing. Western civilisation at present is built upon valorising the Seven Deadly Sins - and arguably the very institution of civilisation itself, defined as a society built around urban life and settled agriculture, requires us to do a lot of things that Christ explicitly told us not to. A civilised, urban culture requires the accumulation of wealth, the colonisation of people and lands outside its orbit, ongoing warfare and an inevitable divide between rich and poor. I wrote about this a couple of years ago, with reference to the work of James C. Scott and Jacques Ellul, here.

The point of the talk, though, was not to argue that civilisation per se is a bad thing. Though this is the side-argument that many critics have since focused on, it was incidental to the main point. The main point was to suggest that, in Ohiyesa's words, 'Christianity and modern civilisation are opposed and irreconcilable.' In his 1986 book The Civilisation of Christianity, Catholic priest and theologian John L. McKenzie put the same point even more sharply. ‘There is a deadly and irreconcilable opposition between Western civilisation and Christianity,’ he wrote, ‘and one of them must destroy the other.’ If that’s true, then wielding the Christian faith as a weapon to defend this thing called ‘Western civilisation’ is a lost battle from the start. Our culture may have been nominally Christian five hundred years ago, but for a long time now it has been the culture of the Enlightenment, of modernity, of the Machine, of Mammon. It valorises not God but the world.

Naturally this argument has drawn out some disagreement. Podcasts and articles have appeared refuting my talk, and making counter-arguments of their own - see, for example, here, here, here and here. Some of these employ straw men, some misunderstand my argument or misrepresent me (accidentally or deliberately), and some include fair responses which I should consider. I’m glad to have started a conversation, and I’m quite happy to have my words picked over. If my talk does nothing else but help some people to question the ‘Christian civ’ narrative when it pops up, then it will have had the desired effect.

And it is popping up, with more and more frequency. Most recently it has popped up in the US government, whose new president believes that God saved his life in order that he could Make America Great Again.³ What might this God-given task involve, you ask yourself? Well, ‘the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons [and] will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.’

Hey, it’s what Jesus would have wanted.

The president’s new sidekick (until their inevitable falling out) is Elon Musk, transhumanist, wannabe Mars invader and self-described ‘cultural Christian’. Musk, who has twelve children with four different women, one of whom he named ‘Techno Mechanicus’, believes that the Way is not Sigma enough. ‘Unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish,’ he has stated. What he means here by ‘Christianity’ is not clear. Perhaps he means ‘Western culture’, or possibly ‘American culture’, or possibly ‘capitalism’ or possibly ‘technological progress’ or possibly all of them at once. What he doesn’t mean is ‘the actual teachings of Christ’. The richest man in the universe, after all, probably doesn’t want to pay close attention to Jesus’s views on that particular subject.

Meanwhile, this month sees the second coming of Jordan Peterson’s ARC conference in London. The ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’, which is guided largely by right-liberal establishment types with large media profiles, is what we might these days call ‘Christian-coded’, but its stated aims, again, seem to have very little to do with Christ. ARC wants a ‘unifying story’ for the West, a focus on family and community, the promotion of ‘free enterprise’, and some nice, responsible discussions about resource extraction and the importance of growth. Some of these may be good things, and there are some good people involved in the project - including Jonathan Pageau, whose work I admire. Still, what is being promoted here is not Christianity, or even ‘Christian civilisation.’ It is the needs and desires of liberal, Western modernity: the creed of Faustian man. The Christian faith, where it appears, is entirely secondary to the project of renewing Western politics and culture.

This is not surprising. Jordan Peterson’s idiosyncratic definitions of God - ‘something like the spirit of hierarchical harmony’, or ‘the benevolence that shines through the good father’, or ‘the call to adventure’ - describe a deity built for psychological or social utility, and his angry anti-woke, anti-green politics make clear what his idea of a ‘responsible citizen’ is. But Jesus didn’t come to Earth to teach us how to be ‘responsible citizens’, of any political stripe. Responsible citizens don’t leave their own fathers unburied. They don’t hate their own mother and father, or give away all of their wealth, or compare the religious authorities to whitewashed tombs full of rotting flesh. And they don’t usually end up being crucified.

In fact, Christianity was, from the very beginning, a deeply irresponsible faith: a challenge to the world and its values. The Romans certainly saw it as uncivilised; that’s why Nero used so many responsible citizens as human candles. That’s why Christ’s followers were poor, and spent their time with the poor and the despised. It’s the same reason that Christians continue to be persecuted and killed today the world over, from Nigeria to China to the Middle East. They were not out to build or defend some earthly civilisation. Neither were they out to demolish or undermine one. The question was simply not relevant to the work of following Christ where he was leading them.

Christianity is, and always has been, a radical counter-culture. God’s wisdom, as St Paul tells us, is foolishness to the world, and we see this in the teachings of Jesus. Giving away wealth we have worked hard to earn; allowing our enemies to mock or strike us; leaving our homes and families behind for a promise of paradise instead; refusing violence; loving our neighbours and enemies; understanding that our true neighbours may not be our own kin but strangers or foreigners - none of this makes sense on an everyday level. But it is no good claiming that such instructions are somehow ‘not to be taken literally.’ We surely have to take God incarnate at his word - and then figure out what it means for us in our lives. However that plays out, it seems clear to me that there is no way to live such teachings at the centre of a worldly culture. This is why Christians have always been outsiders - even when ‘Christianity’ was nominally in power.

Many of the people who are critical of such views believe that I am a naive newcomer who doesn’t understand the Bible or the faith well enough to comment. I am also, according to some of them, a Rousseau-ian Romantic, a Tolstoyan anarchist, an Anabaptist, a hippy, a primitivist, a ‘Trojan Horse’ within Christianity, and an opponent of organised religion. It is to be hoped that as I grow in the faith - assuming I don’t jump ship to become a Druid or something - I will come to see that Christianity is, in fact, a tool for the creation of worldly civilisations, the coercive subjugation of the enemies of Christ and the promotion of the ideas of Roger Scruton and Milton Friedman. After all, as one critic pointed out, if we don’t create wealth, how are we going to distribute it to the poor?

Sheesh. Give me Tolstoy any day of the week.

But I mustn’t be unfair. I think that some of my critics have a point - and the best point they have is the one laid out by Peter Leithart in his response to my lecture. Leithart is a cautious proponent of civilisational Christianity, which he believes has a Biblical mandate in the Genesis instruction given by God to humanity, to ‘make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground’. Leithart is defending what we might call the ‘from the Garden to the City’ narrative, in which humanity was always destined to plunge into its civilisational project, the endpoint of which will be the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’, God’s version of what a good civilisation should actually look like. ‘Heaven is a city’, Peter Leithart wrote in an email to me. I’ll admit that the thought makes my blood run cold.

It’s fair to say that I still get twitchy when I hear the phrase ‘dominion mandate’. Here my critics are correct to say that my background as an ecocentric greenie with anarchist leanings has not yet been thoroughly purged. I hope it never will be. Though my worldview is no longer ecocentric (it’s Logocentric instead) neither am I remotely comfortable with what humans have done with their ‘dominion’. ‘Taking the whole sweep of biblical history into account,’ writes Leithart, ‘the human vocation is the edification of earth, the erection and curation of garden-lands and garden-cities.’ Well, maybe - though this does rather valorise, or even justify, the Fall of Man. But even if Leithart is right, his rather appealing vision of an ‘edified Earth’ studded with nice garden cities is not where we are - or where we are going. We have not edified the Earth; we have mostly wrecked it, and we’re not finished yet.

Still, Leithart must be right when he says that we were not meant to remain innocent in Eden forever. The Orthodox understanding of what humanity was meant to do with that ‘knowledge of good and evil’ is that we would be given permission by God to eat of it when we were ready - which is to say, ready to be deified ourselves. In the garden we were as children: not yet ready for the challenge that knowledge would bring. And so, when we experienced it unprepared we fell into the world, where we proceeded to build towers, cities, armies, weapons and all of the other bent and corrupted things that will inevitably stem from an undeified mind attempting to take upon itself the mantle of God.

As I said in my discussion with Jonathan Pageau, we would all probably agree that humans are builders. Tool-making is what we do, and we can never sit still. Even the most ‘primitive’ tribe builds usually quite sophisticated mythical and cultural worlds, and is adept at living within and manipulating its environment. There is no escape from this: it is what we are. The question of whether it has to lead to what we would today call ‘civilisation’, and if it does, whether that ‘civilisation’ can ever be Godly, is probably where Leithart and I part ways.

Leithart believes that God made what he calls a ‘geopolitical promise to Abraham.’ But I don’t see any geopolitics anywhere in the life or teachings of Jesus, and trying to follow those teachings is all I want to do at this point. Almost daily I ask myself how. I have the practice and teachings of my faith to guide me on that question; and whatever else I am, I’m just an ordinary Orthodox Christian. One reason I became Orthodox is that the heart of this faith is not to be found in the legacy of Imperial Byzantium but in the spirit of the Desert Fathers, the hesychasts and the saints of the prisons. I don’t think many of my critics really understand Orthodoxy; but the life and teachings of, say, St John Chrysostom, St Isaac the Syrian, St Moses the Black or modern saints such as St Porphyrios or St Nektarios are more than enough to refute some of the cruder arguments for a ‘muscular Christianity’ that the Internet is currently coughing up.

If you were of the world, says Jesus to his followers towards the end, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.⁴ Here we all are, sojourners in this place for a while. My understanding of this, drawn from my half-decade immersion in Orthodox Christian theology and practice, is that our work is not to smash our enemies and build a heavenly kingdom on Earth with swords, laws and the glorious power of the free market. It is to seek theosis. Everything Christ teaches us is a clue as to how we can get there. As he repeatedly insists, unless we slough off all our worldly attachments - to wealth, to culture, to power politics and, yes, even to civilisation itself - we will remain in the mire and never get home.

But how are we to actually do that? The monastics offer one answer, but most of us will never be monastics. Maybe, then, we can look instead to the example of the simple followers of God in the world. Take America’s newest, and so far only female, saint, Matushka Olga of Alaska. Here is a description of her work during her lifetime:

“She's the first saint who didn't go on a great missionary journey, didn't publish any theological books, had not become a nun or a monastic, had not been martyred for the faith … She's proof that as long as you're true to your Christian calling, living a good Christian life even in the humblest circumstances, as we could certainly say hers were, that's good enough.”

Matushka Olga, the first saint from the Yup’ik people of Alaska, lived a quiet, humble life as a midwife and the wife of a priest. That was all - and yet that ‘all’ was everything. It was more than I will ever do. It was what Christianity, in one of its purest forms, is supposed to look like.

I understand that people want to live in good cultures. So do I. And I do believe in Christian cultures: I think they can be real, if temporary and imperfect, things. The question is how they are created. A culture is not the same as a civilisation. The latter is built from the top-down, by the use of coercive power. The former emerges from the bottom-up, from a combination of what I call the Four Ps: people, place, prayer and the past.

After my talk in October, a woman came up to me and we got talking. She said something then that I think I’ll always remember. ‘It’s a good thing that the Gospels were written down so early, during the lifetime of those who knew Jesus,’ she said. ‘Because otherwise the later Christians, the comfortable ones, would certainly have censored them. They’re just too disturbing.’ I’ve thought about that a lot since. Sometimes I think that if there’s one person we Christians really can’t stomach, it’s Christ. He ruins everything.

Perhaps arguments like these come down in the end to what kind of Christ we see. We’re all familiar with statements like ‘Jesus is Lord’ or ‘Christ is King.’ But what sort of lord? What sort of king? I see a kingship which turns all worldly notions of power upside down. Nietzsche thought that Christ, and by implication Christians, were weaklings for this reason - and in worldly terms, Jesus’s earthly kingship was indeed a complete flop. He ended up abandoned by all but twelve of his followers, and after his death even they wondered why they had wasted their time following him. But then came the event which turned all power on its head; the event which painted in entirely new colours everything he had been saying about sacrifice, ruling by serving, self-emptying and leaving behind the values of the world.

What sort of king is this? A wanderer king, a peasant king, a desert king. A king who rules by serving, a king who washes the feet of his subjects. We all know the stories. Christianity turns power on its head. This is not the same as rejecting power. It is, instead, transforming it. God’s power is not human power. Our petty little attempts to impose our will by dominance, force and violence mean nothing to the Father, who scorns them. Power is wielded through love; power is wielded through sacrifice. There is something vast and oceanic about it. It is what greatness actually looks like.

I can write these words, but I’m not sure I really understand them. I certainly don’t practice them - and yet, sometimes, in a split second of time, there will come a moment when, in fact, I do. Just for a second, in prayer or in everyday life, something will happen and the veil will twitch and I will see what all of this really means and how I can live it. Then it falls away again, and so do I. But it happens. It is possible. We’re back to that silence again. The silence that comes after the fire and the earthquake, and which can never be attained with swords, arguments or theology.

Let me end on the advice of a monk. Archimandrite Chrysostom, Abbot of the Monastery of Faneromeni in Naxos, warns in a recent piece of writing about the danger of confusing the ‘road’ of life with the ‘homeland’ it leads to. ‘If my ultimate destination is power,’ he writes, ‘whether individual or collective, and my daily concern is worldly power and hegemonies, then I have misidentified the road with my homeland, leaving myself immobilised and trapped in a specific kilometre of the national or provincial road, unforgivably myopic.’

Do we want to be stuck on a provincial road, myopically waving our swords around? Or do we want - in silence, in stillness - to keep walking until we reach the end?

What destination does this road lead to?

And who is this Man we follow down it?

Christ is not established anywhere; He becomes a stranger, a beggar, and a ‘vagabond,’ writes John Chrysostom, to teach us that no ‘institution’ of the present is eternal, that His kingdom is neither of this world nor imposed on this world with worldly weapons.

Amen to that.

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I’m sure we will be exploring these questions further at our day-long event in Galway next weekend, with Paul Vanderklay, Martin Shaw and others. A few tickets remain.

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1. 1 Kings 19:11-13

2. Philippians 4:7

3. You can even buy a special patriotic Bible to commemorate the occasion. Who said that God and Mammon don’t mix?

4. John 15:19