Have you ever wished you could take all those pieces of information about a certain subject floating around in your brain and compose a cogent, powerful argument to neatly summarize your convictions? Well, when it comes to explaining why our culture is where it is, and why the church is so impotent and even complicit in the fall, English writer Paul Kingsnorth has done that for me. How the West Lost Its Soul on the Free Press website is a sober minded look at the implosion of the western culture, with the subtitle of the article summing it up: We’ve abandoned the founding religious story that has sustained us for 1,500 years. The result is the greatest age of abundance we’ve ever known—and a complete lack of meaning.
Kingsnorth starts at the beginning, in the garden where “We forget the creator and worship ourselves,” and brings us to the Good News of Christ; salvation for the lost. “The path is the path of renunciation, of love, and of sacrifice. To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.” And upon the cross, Kingsnorth reminds us, our culture was built. The west “is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a sacred order constructed around this particular religious story.”
All that we take for granted—-freedom, the value of the individual, the ability to use our talents to improve our lives—-comes from this Christ-centered foundation. “The point to focus on is this: that when a culture built around such a sacred order dies then there will be upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics right down to the level of the soul.”
Kingsnorth dissects the reason for the rot, but his conclusions don’t fit nicely in the evangelical box. Yes, he slams the relativism and loss of truth from the left, but also says the right has a lot of blame to bear. “ ‘Woe to you who are rich,’ said Jesus, in one of many blasts against wealth and power in the Gospels. ‘Greed is a sin against God,’ wrote Thomas Aquinas. Not anymore. Now our economy runs on greed, and it laughs in the face of any foolish and unrealistic romantic who rejects it.”
The worship of self and idolization of freedom in all aspect of life didn’t start in the 60s….at least not in the 1960s. Contemporary critics, such as Carl Trueman and Christian Smith, have traced the decline of our culture from Rousseau through the Enlightenment to the present day, Kingsnorth, who just a few years ago was baptized in the Romanian Orthodox Church, keeps drawing us, all of us believers, back to creation and Christ’s time on earth to make sense of the world we inhabit. Unlike those who hold out for another revival, Kingsnorth explains why he doesn’t see that coming around the corner. His is not a simplistic overview, nor is he a bomb-thrower gleefully blaming and shooting at the “others”.
This is not a simplistic or hopeful essay, but I highly recommend it to better understand how our culture got here and why we’re not going back. “We are not in an existential fight for the future of ‘Western civilization,’ Kingsnorth explains. “Western civilization is already dead—and both sides of the current ‘war’ are reacting, in their own particular ways, to the vacuum that has replaced it—a vacuum which something must come to fill.”