A Cut Flower Civilization

There's an interesting essay at Mercatornet by Jonathon Van Maren in which he observes that a number of atheist writers are lamenting the loss of Christian faith in our culture and lamenting, too, some of them, that faith seems to elude them.

Here, for example, is the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson:

“I was brought up an atheist—I didn’t become one,” he said. “I regard atheism as the religious faith I happened to be brought up in.

It is, of course, as much a faith as Christianity or Islam—and I have the Calvinist brand, because my parents left the Church of Scotland. I was brought up, essentially, in a Calvinist ethical framework but with no God.

This had its benefits—I was encouraged to think in a very critical way about religion and also about science, but I’ve come to see as a historian that you can’t base a society on that. Indeed, atheism, particularly in its militant forms, is really a very dangerous metaphysical framework for a society.”

“I know I can’t achieve religious faith,” he went on, “but I do think we should go to church. We don’t have, I don’t think, an evolved ethical system. I don’t buy the idea that evolution alone gets us to be moral.

It can modify behaviour, but there’s just too much evidence that in the raw, when the constraints of civilisation fall away, we behave in the most savage way to one another. I’m a big believer that with the inherited wisdom of a two-millennia old religion, we’ve got a pretty good framework to work with.”

Van Maran comments that "For one of the most prominent historians in the world—himself an agnostic—to say that we should go to church is rather startling, but Ferguson’s sentiments also appear to be part of a growing trend."

Ferguson certainly isn't alone:

The late philosopher Sir Roger Scruton began attending church himself despite struggling with belief, regularly playing the organ at All Saints’ in Garsdon. His secular friends say his faith remained cultural; other friends were not so sure.

What we do know is that he thought Christianity was in many ways the soul of Western civilisation, and that the uniquely Christian concept of forgiveness was utterly indispensable to its survival.

Scruton’s friend Douglas Murray, the conservative writer who was raised in the Church before leaving it as an adult, has occasionally referred to himself as a “Christian atheist.”

In a recent discussion with theologian N.T. Wright, he described himself as “an uncomfortable agnostic who recognises the virtues and the values the Christian faith has brought,” and noted that he is actually irritated by the way the Church of England is fleeing from its inheritance, “giving up its jewels” such as “the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer” in exchange for progressive pieties.

“My fear is that the Church is not doing what so many of us on the outside want it to do, which is preaching its gospel, asserting its truths and its claims,” he said. “When one sees it falling into all the latest tropes one thinks well, that’s another thing gone, just like absolutely everything else in the era. I’m a disappointed non-adherent.”

Murray believes that Christianity is essential because secularists have been thus far totally incapable of creating an ethic of equality that matches the concept that all human beings are created in the image of God.

In a column in The Spectator, he noted that post-Christian society has three options. The first is to abandon the idea that all human life is precious. “Another is to work furiously to nail down an atheist version of the sanctity of the individual.”

And if that doesn’t work? “Then there is only one other place to go. Which is back to faith, whether we like it or not.”

On a recent podcast, he was more blunt: “The sanctity of human life is a Judeo-Christian notion which might very easily not survive [the disappearance of] Judeo-Christian civilisation.”

Van Maran goes on to describe the musings of social scientist Charles Murray, an agnostic, historian Tom Holland, author of the 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, and psychologist Jordan Peterson, all of whom seem nostalgic for a faith they either abandoned or never had.

Most people who have left the faith, I've always suspected, simply didn't want it to be true.

There are some, of course, who've had unpleasant interactions with the church, others who are repelled from faith by an intimate experience with grief and suffering, and still others who believe that Christianity is somehow intellectually disreputable, but for many I think their refusal to believe is based on a desire not to have to conform their lives to what they see as a stringent sexual morality.

Here's a question to pose to an atheist acquaintance: If you were confronted with overwhelming evidence of the truth of the Resurrection of Jesus and/or the existence of a personal God would you consider it an occasion for rejoicing or would it make you depressed?

The person may not have sufficient insight into his or her own motives to answer truthfully, but if they do their answer might reveal much about the wellspring of their unbelief.

The writer Christopher Hitchens once said that he would be very depressed if he discovered that Christianity were true, and Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously admitted that he didn't want theism to be true. I don't think these men are unusual in this regard.

Van Maren alludes to this attitude when he writes that,

Not so long ago, the atheists who retreated to their Darwinian towers and bricked themselves up to fire arrows at the faithful wanted to be there. Their intellectual silos were a refuge from faith because they didn’t want Christianity to be true.

They hated it and thought we’d be better off without it.

Now it seems a lot of intellectuals have come to the realization that their naturalistic worldview offers no support for any of the things they cherish. Neither human rights, human dignity, human equality, objective morality, nor free will, to mention just a few examples, can be defended as anything other than arbitrary preferences if naturalism is true.

Naturalism is a worldview that offers a humanity thirsting for living water a cupful of dust. A civilization built on the aforementioned principles cannot survive without the faith from which those principles arise, anymore than a tree severed from its roots will continue to thrive.

Thankfully, a lot of bright people are, if belatedly, coming to realize this. Van Maren concludes with this thought:

The survival of Christianity is essential for the survival of the West. The bad news is that this realisation comes when the day is far spent.

The Good News is simpler. “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each of them Christianity has died,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man. “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

Read the rest of the article at the link. It's quite good.