Jeepers, where does the time go? I had no idea it had been so long since I’ve written anything here; I’ve been distracted with what’s known as “IRL” stuff (which, I suppose, is not altogether unhealthy).
Among the things I’ve been doing has been reading a lot. Right now I’m re-reading a book called The War For Righteousness, by Richard Gamble, which is about American Progressivism in the run-up to the First World War. (I re-read books a lot, because it often takes me at least two readings to really “get” a book: once to get the idea, and a second time to pick up the details in context.) Gamble’s book examines the Protestant “New Theology” of the time, and the extent to which the line between the temporal and secular was erased by a crusading American intellectual clergy determined to build God’s Kingdom right here on Earth. (If this sounds familiar, that’s because all that’s changed has been the gradual washing away of all trace of a transcendent God, and the replacement of the pastors of influential churches by the secular clerisy of our modern-day Cathedral.) Here’s a passage that gives some of the flavor of this excellent book:
The doctrine of divine immanence, like the developmentalist theory of history, was inseparable from the progressive clergy’s rejection of Augustine’s two cities. Their consolidation of the City of Man and the City of God into one holy metropolis united the work of man and the work of God; it fused politics and religion into a single redemptive work. As historian Arlie J. Hoover noted in his comparative study of the British and German clergy during the First World War, the doctrine of immanence verges close to pantheism, and thus “the cleft between sacred and secular is bridged; every secular pursuit becomes ipso facto a service to God, including love of country.” Moreover, to the immanentalist mind, “culture is merely a continuous demonstration of God’s will for mankind.” By placing God within the historical process and by universalizing the kingdom of God, Hoover continued, “immanental theology practically erases the distinction between the two cities.” While this confusion might seem to have been an inconsequential by-product of the progressives’ untethered imagination, its implications both for the church and for civil society were profound. To combine the two citizenships is to venture to build the City of God through human agency, to assume the place and activity of God Himself, to presume to know His will and conceive of oneself as the instrument of that will. Fusing the two cities can lead, in principle and in practice, to political absolutism by enlisting the transcendent order into the service of the secular state. In its most extreme expression, as philosopher Eric Voegelin noted, this fateful tendency appeared in modern totalitarianism. In these political movements “the Christian faith in transcendent perfection through the grace of God has been converted—and perverted—into the idea of immanent perfection through an act of man.”
By the time America entered the war, a belief had taken hold throughout the powerful institutions of the day that America was, quite literally and explicitly, bound to take on the redeeming role of Jesus Christ in the world’s affairs — that is, to redeem the world by suffering and bleeding for it. Saving individual souls was out; saving the whole of this fallen world was in. (We’re still at it.)
Read the book; it will help you understand the current era.
I’ve also been busy working in the mixing room here, which gobbles up a lot of time. (I’m mostly retired now, and had thought I would just putter at leisure on my own musical diversions, but outside projects do keep coming in from time to time, and what’s the point of having a well-equipped studio in the basement if I’m not going to put it to productive use, doing what I do best?)
I’ve also got little to say about current events, which I’ve been paying as little attention to as possible. With regard to Ukraine in particular, I can’t see enough through the fog of propaganda (and neither can you!) to warrant much of an opinion about what’s been happening there, other than to say that I think the late Stephen F. Cohen was completely right about the catastrophic unwisdom of our stance toward Russia over the past thirty years or so, and that this whole thing could easily, and very productively, have been avoided altogether.
So, please forgive me if you’ve been coming round here looking for something interesting to read, and I’ll try to be more productive. I don’t want you to leave empty-handed, though, so here’s a meaty (and provocative) little item, the gist of which is this: everything that most people think they know about “green energy” is wrong.
Back soon.
4 Comments
You certainly are widely followed Malcolm:
https://westernrifleshooters.us/2022/04/07/but-but-but-the-warmingzzz/
Well, it’s all relative…
Your mentioning of Gamble’s work Malcolm inspired me to pull it off my shelf, a book I ordered a few years ago upon the urgings of a John Lukacs book review. Definitely many of the Protestant liberals of the epoch as the Hillsdale historian amply depicts maintained a shallow version of theology, and much else besides. Consider just two whoppers as these: Yale Divinity president Charles Brown, who argued that the least Christian country Germany had done the most to cause the war and the most devout one England had done the most to prevent it. (If memory serves just two decades later C.S. Lewis in his famous wartime broadcast talks on the radio that formed the basis of his work “Mere Christianity,” bluntly stated that basically his country was no longer made up of a Christian people.) Or the reverend Leighton Parks, who said after the Lusitania incident, “Let our brother, Germany, be unto us as a heathen, one who has cut himself off from the congregation of Israel, and a publican.” The Achilles Heel of this cohort was so mindlessly conflating Christianity with democracy, with the nation and state, with “international brotherhood,” or more colloquially with the notion of just being a good, ethical person.
Still, in my mind one should be cautious in simply equating this generational thinking of the second decade of the twentieth century with the wokeness we perceive all around us today, although to be sure many analogies can be made. For one, these Protestants were surely of a much higher moral and spiritual caliber than the Nikole Hannah-Joneses, the Robin DiAngelos, who combine radical “fractalist” ideologies with a most vapid narcissism and self-interest. While the former’s faith might have been much more watered down than traditional orthodox belief, it’s still more substantive than much on offer in modern times. And their messianism was not utterly without foundation – no serious Christian would deny, after all, the need of bringing about the kingdom, a very incarnatory concept that inevitably has implications in national politics, in civil society, and even in events abroad (for the latter simply contemplate the likely largely pagan but nonetheless Christian-influenced Churchill and his Manichaean rhetoric during the second world war).
There’s a fine peroration in “Moral Man and Immoral Society” (1932), written by the Lutheran Reinhold Niebuhr who more than any other American theologian deplored the conventional Christian liberal piety of the mainline churches (the Reformed Swiss Karl Barth probably best achieved this task in Europe – “One doesn’t speak about God by saying ‘man’ with a loud voice”). He captures the paradoxical dilemma well, I think: “[Last sentence of penultimate paragraph] We cannot build our individual ladders to heaven and leave the total human enterprise unredeemed of its excesses and corruptions.”
“[Final paragraph] In the task of that redemption the most effective agents will be men who have substituted some new illusions for the abandoned ones. The most important of these illusions is that the collective life of mankind can achieve perfect justice. It is a very valuable illusion for the moment; for justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul. Nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ The illusion is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticisms. It must therefore be brought under the control of reason. One can only hope that reason will not destroy it before its work is done.” Unsurprisingly Martin Luther King was powerfully influenced by the paradigm expressed above, and adopted it for the civil rights movement.
Thanks for this substantial comment, Jason.
One thing that must be remembered is that present-day wokeness is a confluence of two powerful currents: not only the secularizing and temporalizing Christianity of Protestant Progressivism, but also the Marxism that entered American universities when the founders of the Frankfurt School, disappointed by Germany’s failure to adopt Marxism after the first World War (and then fleeing for their safety in the 1930s) came here seeking to find a new energy-source for revolutionary action (which they later found in, among other things, the black-power and feminist movements of the 1960s). Today’s cancerous cryptoreligion is an unholy hybrid of both: taking its religious energy from its Christian roots, and its sullen, victimological ideology from Marx and his Frankfurt disciples.
Oh, absolutely. At least these Progressive Christians still believed in something higher than Man, even if Heaven had already been shot down from the sky, and belief in the actual existence of God already beginning to be leached away altogether.
(I like “fractalist”, by the way; I’ve been using that metaphor myself, in this context, for nearly a decade.)
You wrote:
I’m inclined to disagree here; I think that for many Christians the world is simply a fallen place, and quite beyond redemption by the efforts of fallen Man. That would not be to say that one shouldn’t live by Christian principles, but I think it was rather a modern innovation to imagine that men, rather than Christ alone, could perform this redemptive miracle — and for some Christians I think it would seem quite a sinful puffing-up of our own importance, perhaps even a putting of ourselves on the same level as God. The business of Christianity, for most of its history, has been the saving of souls, not the saving of the world. (But, of course, once everything is secularized and the transcendent has ceased to be real, then there’s nothing left to save but the world, and nowhere else to put one’s religious zeal. Enter Wokeness.)
Here’s Robert Reilly, discussing this in his book America On Trial: