The End Of A World, If Not THE World

And: Good Vibrations; Race In Publishing; Another Thing About Enoch Powell

Several of you have sent this blockbuster piece Aaron Renn published in his newsletter. Thanks, but I saw it, because I subscribe (and so should you). It’s as good as you say. The author is John Seel, an Anglican who attends a Presbyterian (PCA) congregation. You might have seen or heard him a while back on Aaron’s podcast. He argues that the world is going through a 500-year shift — one that the church has to prepare for. It starts like this; the boldface emphases are his:

We are not talking here about the accumulation of incremental changes, but the wholesale changes of assumptions, global actors, and personal experiences. We are facing a paradigm shift—the likes of the fall of Rome (475 AD), the collapse of Constantinople (1453 AD), and Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521 AD).

The issues facing the church are significantly deeper and longer lasting than the shift from a Neutral to a Negative World. We are shifting from a Negative World to an outright hostile world.

This hostility is not conscious or explicit but implicit, not personal but foundational, and not political but cultural. It is an invisible hostility that makes it even more dangerous. This makes the new social reality the church is facing far more significant than we have previously imagined.

The first step is to wake up to the depth of the situation facing the church and to get our diagnosis aligned to reality. In this process of diagnosis, you cannot trust the mainstream media or the normal purveyors of academic insight as the elite culture is complicit and sometimes even the source of the disease.

There are four primary shifts that we are currently facing as believers: from Christian to post-Christian, from classical liberalism to Nietzschean nihilism, from Global West to Global East, and from Enlightenment rationalism to post-Enlightenment re-enchantment.

Though my name doesn’t come up in his short piece, Dr. Seel, an Evangelical, has more or less summarized the message of The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies. And in this paragraph, he argues for the importance of my message in Living In Wonder:

Shift Four: Enlightenment Rationalism to Post-Enlightenment Enchantment. Finally, we are rejecting forms of Enlightenment rationalism in favor of a more enchanted form of spirituality. This is a big threat to the evangelical church as it is largely the stepchild of the Enlightenment.

Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin writes, "The churches of Europe and their cultural offshoots in the Americas had largely come to a kind of comfortable cohabitation with the Enlightenment, and there did not seem to be any contradiction in the combination of modern education, medicine, and technology with the proclamation of the gospel."

With the rejection of the Enlightenment rationalism with its association with secularism and disenchantment, has come the rebirth of a wide variety of older and new forms of enchantment, i.e., neo-paganism and the occult. The church will need to counter the orientation toward dark enchantment with a God-infused enchantment.

If we react to the rise of the occult with more rationalism, more courses on apologetics and worldview, more abstract dogmatism, we will miss an opportunity and be further marginalized culturally.

Elsewhere in the piece, Dr. Seel writes that the West is tapped out:

Shift Three: Global West to Global East. The combined reality of these first two shifts is the growing global awareness of the spiritual and political demise of the West. This was illustrated for the world to see in the decadence associated with the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympics. The West is no longer seen as a desired model for the rest of the world.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed (paywalled) by an American conservative who just spent the last year in Hungary, in which she ferociously faults Viktor Orban’s government for its outreach to China. I share some of her concerns — and so do many other conservative Hungarians — but what she misses is that Orban has apparently lost faith in the West’s ability to survive. She does note that, but in passing. In fact, it’s a much bigger deal than she indicates. I don’t have insider knowledge here, but it seems to me that Orban believes his task is to secure a future for his people, as a people. He looks around Europe and sees in country after country, nations led by people who are pursuing policies — especially with mass migration — that can only lead to the dissolution of those nations as distinct peoples. Furthermore, he sees nations that have, to use Dr. Seel’s words about Western civilization:

Moreover, the foundational basis of society, namely traditional marriage, has been rejected. The fruit of marriage, namely the procreation of children, has also been rejected. Replacing these historic foundations to social life is an unchecked hedonism reinforced by a world without boundaries, that is unchecked license.

The late University of Pennsylvania sociologist Philip Rieff described our contemporary world in this manner: "No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of sacred order. There, cultures have not survived. This kind of society where the notion of a culture that persists independent of all sacred orders is unprecedented in human history."

In the past cultural conflicts were between competing sacred symbolics. Not so today. What makes our contemporary culture war distinctive is that it is a negation against all sacred orders and the verticals in authority that mediate the sacred to society.

When trying to understand Orban’s thinking, I keep going back to what three Ugandan Catholic parliamentarians told me three summers ago: that China is making dramatic inroads in Africa because unlike the US and Europe, they don’t demand that the Africans violate their cultural traditions by accepting LGBT and population reduction as conditions for aid. It’s not that the Chinese are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. All they want is the allyship of these countries. If you live in Hungary, as I do, and you see how the US and the EU are constantly bullying this country about LGBT and migration, you can understand why Orban would think the way he does.

The point is that the West really is falling apart. I say this not to support Orban’s China turn — as I said, I have serious concerns about it, given what Communist China is — but rather to explain why a Western Christian like Orban would conclude that his people have a better shot at a stable future for themselves with China than with the nations to which they are historically tied. It’s an appalling situation, but for heaven’s sake, look around you! Like I said in yesterday’s newsletter, many conservatives are thinking as if it’s still the 1990s, and all that’s necessary is to double down on the things we believed back then.

The Democratic National Convention this year featured a mobile clinic offering free abortions and vasectomies to those who want them. They actually held a party-sanctioned event in which organizers boasted that under Harris, the state will promote total sexual freedom (“In this election, we are not going to lose our right ... to f**k whoever the hell we want.”)

Do I need to go on? No, I don’t. Y’all read this newsletter; you know where I stand. And you don’t have to say, “But Trump!” to me; I fully recognize that he too is a sign of our general decadence. I’m so blackpilled that I’ll vote for the candidate that doesn’t despise people like me. That’s the best we can hope for in the Year of Our Lord 2024. The issues I’m talking about here go far beyond Trump vs. Harris. We are talking about civilizational collapse. I don’t mean a collapse in the material structures of civilization (though that too may happen). I’m talking about the end of a civilizational order that emerged in the Middle Ages, and that has burned itself out.

Chances are most of us, our at least our descendants, will still be here. So then what? This is what John Seel wants us to think about. This is what my work has been about for most of my adult life. It’s what Living In Wonder is about, ultimately. It is time to wake up to reality!

One more thing: Dr. Seel talks about “looking East” toward the future, because the decadent West has exhausted itself. Living In Wonder is my most affirmatively Orthodox Christian book. I do not write as an Orthodox apologist, and have taken care to write The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies for small-o orthodox Christians within what Hans Boersma calls “The Great Tradition” (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant). It’s been a delicate thing to do, because I don’t want to pretend that I think all the traditions are equally true. They couldn’t possibly be. Yet the threat all of us face is the same, and we need to figure out ways to work together in true charity and brotherhood, learning from each other, to get through what is here, and what is to come.

In that sense, I offer insights and practices from the Christian East to help re-enchant the spiritually dry Christian West. Though it’s not a book of apologetics, I would be happy if everybody who read my book would come to Orthodoxy. That’s not likely to happen, but the point is, there will be things non-Orthodox readers will learn from this book and its discussion of the Orthodox way of being Christian that will help them deepen their own Christian walk, within Protestantism or Catholicism. For example, the Jesus Prayer, a cornerstone of Orthodox spiritual practice, can be prayed by faithful Evangelicals and Catholics alike. I hope that this book will open the minds and hearts of my brothers and sisters in the faith to the treasures of Eastern Christianity, which has preserved the enchantment that has largely evaporated in the post-Enlightenment West, and is eager to share the gifts of our tradition with God’s family.

One of you readers who sent me the Seel piece asked me how do we live enchantment in daily life, not just as a theoretical idea. Ah! It’s in the book! I don’t want to give too much away in this space, because I have a book to sell. I do want to assure you, though, that Living In Wonder is full of practical counsel.