Paul Kingsnorth: “Against Christian Civilization”

In October 2024, writer Paul Kingsnorth delivered the 37th Erasmus Lecture to the Christian community associated with First Things magazine. After I read it, I could not help but wonder what the audience in attendance at this lecture thought about what Kingsnorth said, especially the part about his criticism of Jordan Peterson, Christian nationalism, and those who defend the West.

The title of his lecture was “Against Christian Civilization.” Here is a taste:

…Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse are globally famous now as men who refused to surrender their worlds. Less famous is Charles Alexander Eastman—or, to use the name he was given by his people, the Santee Dakota, Ohiyesa. Ohiyesa was just eighteen at the time of Custer’s Last Stand, but his life was in some ways an illustration of the conflicting forces of the time.

A Native American whose white grandfather was a former U.S. soldier, he grew up learning the traditional ways of the Dakota Sioux. When he was a teenager, however, his father, who had been sent to an internment camp for his part in an uprising against the whites, returned wearing a suit and tie and professing a new faith. His father instructed Ohiyesa to Europeanize in order to succeed in the new world that was rising around them. The Indian’s job now, Ohiyesa’s father said, was not to submit to reservation life, but to succeed on his own terms in white society. Sending his son off to an American school, he told him, “It is the same as if I sent you on your first warpath. I shall expect you to conquer.”…

Ohiyesa also became a Christian. In his autobiography, The Soul of an Indian, he writes movingly of the horrors that so many so-called Christians imposed on his people, and of how, nonetheless, the path and teachings of Jesus spoke to him as true. In his autobiography, he tells of how he traveled around to meet many of his own people as a Christian missionary, telling the stories of Jesus and explaining the values of the faith. At one such meeting, an old man, after a long silence, stood up and replied to him. “I have come to the conclusion,” said the old man, “that this Jesus was an Indian. He was opposed to material acquisition and to great possessions. He was inclined to peace. He was as unpractical as any Indian and set no price on his labor of love. These are not the principles upon which the white man has founded his civilization.”

And this:

It might at this point be worth asking what a “civilization” actually is. It is generally defined as a way of living based around the civitas—the city. Like most people at most times, we probably assume that our way of life is normative and will persist. But it is worth noting that for 99 percent of human history, we have not been “civilized” at all. For most of that time, we were closer in our lifestyles to the picture painted of the Garden of Eden. Only in the last ten thousand years, in selected regions of the planet, has an urban way of living, constructed around settled agriculture, cities, states, and economies of accumulation and surplus, arisen. Only in the last hundred years has this model gone global. Given the record of past civilizations, there is no guarantee that this model will continue into the future.

When we look at the results of this development, we would have to say that the verdict was mixed. In the red column, we can see that the spread of human civilization has ravaged God’s creation in an unprecedented fashion, just as it has created vast inequalities of wealth and warfare on a previously unimaginable scale. In the black column, we can see that civilization has created vast wealth and allowed us to visit the moon and extend our lifespans—although, according to anthropologists, only to the length that pre-civilized hunter-gatherers were enjoying anyway.

But what does any of this have to do with the Christian Way? With a God who made us to inhabit a garden, in communion with all life? A God who walked among us as a poor man preaching renunciation and love? What, actually, is spiritually beneficial about this “Western civilization”—or any civilization? After all, Babylon and Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, were as civilized as the ancient world got.

And this:

What we are really hearing about, then, when we hear of defending or rebuilding “Christian civilization,” is not Christianity and its teachings at all, but modernity and its endgame. It is the idol of material progress—the progress that has shredded both culture and nature—which is causing such grief everywhere. “Christian civilization” is not a solution to this; it is part of the problem. And when actual Christianity is proposed instead, the response is so often the same: Oh yes, that’s all very well, you fundamentalist—but what practical use is it?

The answer is: None. Christianity is impractical. Impractical, intolerable, and awful, in the original sense of that word. It is terrifying, and it is designed to kill you. This is because the values of God and the world are inimical, as we are told repeatedly by Christ and all the saints. This, surely, is the beautiful mystery at the heart of this thing. God is not mocked. His wisdom is foolishness to the world, and vice versa. What this means to us is that our “civilizational war” in the name of Christ will fail, because Christ does not fight wars other than those that go on in the heart.

The essence of civilizational Christianity is the reshaping of this radically unworldly faith for very worldly ends: the defense of a certain kind of culture. The gospels become a weapon with which to fight a culture war in a collapsing civilization. But confusing the Christian way with the way of that civilization is a fatal error.

Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. Love God. Do not resist evil. Lay down your life for your friends. Rule by serving. Give away your wealth. Let the dead bury the dead. We have our orders. And how we hate them. How I hate them. Sometimes I can’t look at them, or at myself in their shadow. And so we twist them. We—all of us—use them to justify war and resistance and politics and wealth and power and all the human things that these orders instruct us to walk away from. Oh, yes, I know he said that, we tell ourselves, but he really meant this.

But what if he meant what he said, and we don’t like it? As the Western collapse progresses, we all face a question: Will we follow our orders? Or will we twist them, again, to justify our role in a coming war?

Read the entire piece here.