Why Christian Culture Matters

And: Pints With Dreher; Why Won't Men Work?; Shteyngart's Sartorial Schlong

Inside the Cathedral of Cordoba, built as a mosque in 8c by the Islamic conquerors.

I finished this morning, on my daily walk, Robert Louis Wilken’s brilliant The First Thousand Years: A Global History Of Christianity. A passage in the latter part of the book, in a chapter on Spanish Christians living under Islamic rule, leaped out:

Although there was no overt persecution of Christians, they were burdened by onerous taxes, hemmed in by Muslim laws (on marriage, for instance), and stifled by government decrees, such as the ban on building new church buildings. As in other lands the Muslim rulers insisted on having a say in the appointment of bishops and had to approve requests to hold a council.

As the decades passed the necessary accommodations to Arab culture led to greater assimilation of Christians into Muslim society, and in turn this led to a spike in the number of conversions. At first there was only a trickle, but as the society changed, Arabic became the lingua franca, and Muslim institutions matured, Christians found it more tempting to convert. As the generations passed the cumulative effect of conversions, especially in the cities, became more evident, and in the tenth century the number mounted. By the twelfth century Muslims had become the majority. This pattern was not unique; it is documented in several other Christian lands that came under Muslim rule.

Why did this strike me? Because it shows how Christianity can be assimilated out of existence even under conditions of no real persecution — simply by social and cultural pressure. In that section of the book, Wilken writes of the measures Christians living in al-Andalus took to strengthen their identity as a people apart from the dominant social and political order. Those who did not, eventually yielded to the social pressure, and converted to Islam.

This is not a fact about Islam, per se, but about how people behave under social and cultural conditions. We Christians in the West have been living with this sort of thing for well over a century. It’s why I wrote The Benedict Option: as a warning to my fellow believers that unless we establish a stronger sense of our identity as Christians, and incorporate that into our lives (not just the thoughts in our heads), we will capitulate to secularism. There is no such thing as a neutral public square, not really.

In his final chapter, Wilken makes a point that summarizes the general thrust of his book:

Christianity came into the world as an ordered community and made its way as a corporate body with institutions and offices, rituals and laws. Christianity is inescapably social. Its spread among new people had little to do with the conversion of individuals and everything to do with building a new society. Many of the people who became Christians were illiterate; conduct and practices were the coin of the realm, less so preaching or doctrine. What Christianity brought could only be realized in the building of a “city,” to use Augustine’s apt metaphor in his book The City of God.

If the peoples of the early Church, and indeed for the first millennium of Christianity, had thought of their faith as nothing more than a matter of individual conversion and private piety, the faith would have been stillborn. The fact that so very many Christians in our time and place regard the faith that way says a lot about why it is fast fading in the face of an aggressive secular culture that knows very well what it believes, and is confident in asserting its prerogatives. Personal piety is necessary, but not remotely sufficient.

My own next book project will be about the culture of Christianity, and the necessity of reclaiming it in a vigorous way. I finished the first draft of the proposal last night, and am now refining it with my literary agent. Once I have sold the book to a publisher, I will tell you all about it. I can say this much: what I saw, heard, and felt at the recent pilgrimage to Chartres filled me with great hope for renewal, and gave birth to this book idea. I don’t yet know when The Free Press will publish my piece about Chartres, but I’ll certainly let you all know when it’s out.

The Full ‘Pints With Aquinas’ Interview

Here it is. I really loved talking with my Catholic brother in Christ Matt Fradd. It’s three hours long, so gird yer loins, brethren and sistren:

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