The Problems with Cultural Christianity

“In this respect, it is not a defense of Christianity but its final undoing: the subordination of eternal God to the human, all too human need for reactionary political order and tribalistic identity.”

Introduction

“The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism—no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality.”

– Søren Kierkegaard

Post-modern, neoliberal societies have been defined by tremendous instability. Demographic change, geographic shifts to urbanization, the decline of rural communities, and partisan media have all generated a sense that everything sacred and solid is vanishing into thin air. For many traditionally marginalized groups, this created new opportunities to agitate for social change and inclusion. Women, LGBTQ individuals, and ethnic minorities rallied to advance their interests and often succeeded in gaining unprecedented levels of recognition in liberal law. However, at the same time, neoliberal societies became defined by tremendous economic inequality and job precarity, with power and wealth flowing to the top percentile—all while it became tremendously clear that political elites increasingly spoke for Wall Street rather than the demos. By the time the twinned recessions of 2008 and 2020 followed each other with quick succession, it had become clear that this particular logic of economic governance had run its course and would take a great many of the egalitarian and democratic reforms of the Great Society era with it.

One of the most unusual features of our post-modern culture has been the emergence of reactionary movements that unreflectively mirror the characteristics of their progressive counterparts. What I have called post-modern conservatism is the product of a late neoliberal environment, where the traditional sources of self and social identity that many people relied upon were corroded by these profound socio-political, economic, and technological transformations. While this corrosion produced emancipatory opportunities for many, conservative personalities responded with anxiety and even apocalyptic dread that the culture was slipping away from them. But the response was rarely to interrogate the deeper structural reasons post-modern cultures emerged (figures like Patrick Deneen being a notable exception). Instead, 21st century post-modern conservatism became defined by the very culture it sought to reject. It embraced a fixation on identity and epistemic skepticism that accompanied an agonistic politics, which saw the whole world as a conflict between a valiant “us” and a dangerous and destabilizing “them.”