the new testament in its world video lectures

How can conservatism guide us when there’s nothing left to conserve? Ours isn’t the first such moment. Our historical moment exposes the limits of conservatism. We’ve become something else, something monstrous. Eliot had sound reasons to say the West was still Christian, on the grounds that “a society has not ceased to be Christian until it has become positively something else.” We’ve long since passed that point. Our institutions and cultural norms are shaped by a deliberately non-Christian, often an anti-Christian, vision of reality. Yet we aren’t floating in an ambiguous liminal space either. Even much of the church has adjusted to cultural currents.

It’s hard to identify a single sector of Western society where the Christian convictions and instincts that Kingsnorth rightly identifies as the core of the West survive. In such a world, Kingsnorth asks, What’s to conserve? His sobering answer is: “Nothing.” We “have to dig down to the foundations” and, above all, to pray.Īn extreme diagnosis? I think not.

“The chickens of modernity, which the West created and exported, have come home to roost, and we are all increasingly covered in their guano.” Our post-human, post-natural, post-truth, post-Christian world has succumbed to the temptation of the serpent. Melting since the Enlightenment, the West is today an “unsettled world,” where “the notion that the West is declining, collapsing, dying or even committing suicide is reaching a crescendo.” Many propose to shore things up, but Kingsnorth regards these efforts as superficial. Writing at UnHerd earlier this week, Paul Kingsnorth gives a dismal prognosis for Western civilization.

The new testament in its world video lectures