Cut Flowers

The British atheist and writer Douglas Murray is, like Richard Dawkins, what some have called a "cultural" Christian. He doesn't believe that Christianity is metaphysically true, but he recognizes that Western civilization was built upon a Christian worldview and cannot survive without it. We are, he says, a "cut-flower" civilization:

There is this idea that Western civilization’s like a cut flower and you can look at it and enjoy it, but it’s going to die… So how do we make sure that it isn’t a cut flower? The answer to that is that we find the seeds that planted the flowers and we reseed the land… That doesn’t mean the dogmatic Christianization, or some people might like to go that route, but it does mean a recognition of the wellspring… nothing good can come without that. We will simply be a flower that withers and dies.

The problem with this, as Margaret Clark writes in a piece at Redstate, is that we simply can't have the cultural flower without the spiritual root.

Clark quotes historian Tom Holland, another British atheist and author of the much-praised book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Holland says that whether we like it or not, all the goods we take for granted in the West - freedom of speech and religion, hospitals, orphanages, welfare for the poor, universities, human equality, human rights - were birthed in the womb of biblical Christianity.

Holland writes:

People in the West, even those who may imagine that they have emancipated themselves from Christian belief, in fact, are shot through with Christian assumptions about almost everything. . . All of us in the West are a goldfish, and the water that we swim in is Christianity, by which I don’t necessarily mean the confessional form of the faith, but, rather, considered as an entire civilisation.

Clark adds this:

Holland’s book focuses much on the idea in Christianity that “The last will be first and the first will be last.” He argues that this thought in the Roman empire, which was known for its brutality and dominance, was so radical and repulsive that it shocked the world and subsequently turned the pages of history and society as we know it in a completely different direction. He argues that all modern concepts of human rights stem from this idea.

What value does a human have? A woman? A person of the LGBTQ community? A person of a different race? A person with a disability? A person who believes differently than you?

Christianity is the only belief system that protects all human life with the utmost dignity and honor — even to lay one’s life down for your enemy. As it shocked the Romans, it can still shock us in our divided country today. Christianity doesn’t just go against the grain; it rewrites it altogether.

If the great nation of freedoms that we have today can be owed to Christian visionaries, where does that leave us in one of the most secular times of our country’s history? Like the flower [cut from its root], we may be able to play the part for a time, but without the roots, we cannot survive. Our concept of human dignity without the roots of the Bible can leave us with good intentions but no compass.

She's right. To borrow an analogy from Tolstoy, we're like children who pluck a flower from its root, stick it in the ground, and expect it to flourish.

Having abandoned Christianity, moderns are terribly confused. We no longer agree that this, the greatest nation ever to grace the planet, is worth defending. We can no longer say why humans are special or why they have rights. We can no longer talk about objective moral right and wrong and can't define what we mean by evil. For that matter, we can't even define what a woman is.

A culture this rudderless and adrift is rapidly approaching the sunset of its existence.