A HT to From
Bitter Waters to Sweet for this one.
Paul Kingsnorth has a piece at First Things called “Against
Christian Civilization”. He mentions Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa) a
Native American man who trained in medicine and became a Christian and spread
the Gospel. Eastman recounted sharing
stories about Jesus with an older Native American man who, reflecting on those
stories, said that Jesus sounded like an Indian and not a white man. So, dear readers, when James Cone suggested
Jesus was Black this observation that the Jesus of the Gospels was not a
middle-class or well-heeled white American man was not exactly daring or innovative.
It’s a sentiment that has run through American thought for centuries. Kingsnorth quotes Eastman as reaching a
radical conclusion late in his life:
It is my personal belief, after
thirty-five years experience of it, that there is no such thing as “Christian
civilization.” I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed
and irreconcilable, and the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion
is essentially the same.
Now I do wonder about that, to be honest, and while I’ve
seen cases made that the Jesus Way and Native American traditions have a lot of
overlap a la Randy Woodley I could grant the point was made by Paul at Athens
when he saw the altar to the unknown god.
I still hesitate to say that overlap is the same as identity. Nevertheless, I am curious to read
Eastman. Skepticism about “Christian civilization”
is something I can register agreement with even if I have some doubts about
other things.
I had managed to go my whole life having not heard of
Eastman but a few of his books are available at Project Gutenberg. One of his relatives was a Presbyterian
minister and now seems good a time as any to point out that there have been
Native American Presbyterians just as there have been black Presbyterian
ministers such as Frances Grimke (HT to Daniel Kleven who
has blogged about the minister). I
have said and written this a few times but, as I get older, I have become more
and more grateful my exposure to the Reformed traditions of Christianity came
from my Native American dad rather than my white mom (of Okie stock). Kingsnorth
has done me the favor of introducing me to someone I’m going to have to
read. I still have a couple of Richard
Twiss books I’ve started but not finished yet.
Moving along ..
Kingsnorth mentions several approaches to Christianity and
one of them is what he describes as civilizational Christianity, which we could
probably as easily call “Christendom”. Christianity is like cultural broccoli
and is good for you and there are even types of atheists who are persuaded that
what is best about the West has in some way descended from Christian
traditions. There are also men who have
books to sell about being grown-up who extoll the wisdom of the Bible from a
Jungian approach. No surprise who swiftly
shows up when this topic is broached:
…
The best-known current proponent of
civilizational Christianity is the psychologist and pundit Jordan Peterson. For
Peterson, Christianity is a Joseph Campbell–style hero’s journey, one specially
designed for young men. In his short film “Message to the Christian Churches,”
Peterson lays out his civilizational program and challenges the faith to keep
up. Christianity, he tells us, in an echo of Ali’s argument, offers “a
psychological approach to our ancient stories” that can help us oppose what he
calls “an extremely damaging ideology.”
This ideology, predictably referred
to elsewhere as “cultural Marxism,” tells us that Western culture is an
“oppressive patriarchy,” that “human activity is fundamentally a
planet-destroying exercise,” and that “damnable male ambition” is the root of
the problem. Some of these fanatics, he tells us, believe that there should be
“extreme limits on our wants, even on our needs.”
Extreme limits on our wants!
Whatever would the Desert Fathers say?
Peterson goes on to lay out his
case for the defense of civilization, which he defines as “a society centered
on the encouraging, adventurous, masculine spirit.” The Christian Church, it
turns out, exists to encourage this spirit. It is, he states,
there to remind people, young
men included, and perhaps even first and foremost, that they have a woman to
find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to
conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter, terrible catastrophe of
life to face stalwartly in truth, devoted to love, and without fear.
Do you see anything missing in this
list of what the Church ought to be doing? That’s right. It is Christ. It is
Jesus. He gets not one mention. Not in the entire video. Neither does God the
Father. Neither does the Holy Spirit. Instead, Peterson’s civilizational Church
is to be a self-help club for young men. It is to be a cultural institution,
fighting back against the woke and the “bloody Gaia worshippers” and the
feminists and the life-sapping cultural Marxists. It sees life as a
catastrophe, and the correct response to that catastrophe as masculine
conquest. What Jordan Peterson wants, in other words, is a church that looks
like Jordan Peterson. “You’re churches, for God’s sake!” he exclaims at one
point, in the only mention of God in the entire film. “Quit fighting for social
justice! Quit saving the bloody planet! Attend to some souls! That’s what
you’re supposed to do!”
…
It was brought to my attention a while back that Jordan
Peterson’s daughter apparently took a shine to the preaching of Mark Driscoll,
which got mentioned by Aaron Renn at his Substack. Renn seems to not have
an entirely cohesive or coherent take on Driscoll. Maybe Renn doesn’t know that Josh McPherson
has been in Mark Driscoll’s orbit for a decade? To say this:
… Howerton’s missiology sounded a
lot like the old Mark Driscoll, and it struck me that Driscoll had a ministry
similarly named the Resurgence. While Driscoll is out of favor with many today,
he was undeniably successful in center city Seattle in an environment that was
probably negative world avant la lattre.
In a post called “Negative World
Missiology” invites the question of how successful Driscoll ultimately was
here in Seattle. He resigned amid controversy in disgrace. 41 former Mars Hill elders have publicly
agreed he is not fit for pastoral ministry. He was accused of plagiarism by
Janet Mefferd on air and Warren Throckmorton chronicled the case for how and
why those allegations had substance.
Driscoll decided to quit rather than comply with a restoration plan he
was offered by his Board of Advisors and Accountability. Seattle has gone on in the last ten years as
if Mars Hill never happened. The man who
boasted that Mars Hill was gunning to take over Christian radio left Seattle
behind and the influence of Mars Hill on Seattle musical culture is probably negligible
at best.
What men like Driscoll and Peterson have in common is they
are selling scripts of adulthood, manhood particularly. Act Like a Man: 9 Ways to Punch Life in the
Mouth got published earlier this year, after all. Renn has
noted that Dalrock and others from the manosphere have lambasted Mark Driscoll
for, of all things, pandering to feminists.
Decades ago Driscoll would have been likely to joke that
VeggieTales isn’t exactly cutting edge cultural production. Now he’s stoked to show off hanging out with his
buddy Eric Metaxas. He’s been on the train of “Have kids. One of
the best ways to affect the culture is to overwhelm the future with who you're
sending into it. The rainbow people don't multiply much (besides STDs) with
their Romans 1 lifestyle.” Renn
seemed to grasp that figures like Driscoll tell men to “man up” but that
doesn’t bring with it any power to do so.
Chris Rosebrough, Lutheran that he is, said that Mark preaches Law
rather than Gospel. The older the man
gets the more his message seems to be of a piece with what Kingsnorth calls
civilizational Christianity. When Pastor
Mark joked he started a fertility cult ten years ago I couldn’t laugh because
it seemed like maybe he was really serious behind his joke.
This kind of civilizational Christianity is Christendom
2.000 and its Gospel is a flipped script.
The script can be thought of in terms of a bromide, no single snowflake
feels responsibility for the storm. The admonition of men like Peterson and
Driscoll before him and probably Douglas Wilson before them is to take up the
claim and tell each snowflake “Be the storm!”
Men, you are not the problem...
rather, God intends for you to be a
part of the solution. This book will teach you how to architect your life to be
the leader God intends you to be. It doesn’t matter where you are starting –
single, married, father, husband, or grandpa – "Act Like a Man" will
show you how to use the Father’s instruction to build a life that’s a blessing
to your family and legacy.
The obvious nature of simple script-flipping could be more
obvious than in “How
Toxic Masculinity Can Save the World” from December 6, 2024.
If young men can “activate” they can change the world, eh? Maybe
these men are supposed to be the activated charcoal which absorb poisons in the
stomach of the body of “civilization”? Well, Driscoll tweets out the big pep
talk soundbites via X but among leaders and church planters back in 2007 he had
a notoriously different appraisal:
https://joyfulexiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/preaching-paul_edits1.mp3
Here’s what I’ve learned, you, you
cast vision for your mission and, if people don’t sign up, you move on. You
move on. There are people who are gonna die in the wilders and there are people
who are gonna take the hill. That’s just how it is.
I’ve observed this guy for decades and the difference
between the pep talk he shares on X and what he has been known to say to a
group of leader-insiders behind closed doors is stark indeed. I’ve known men
who Driscoll threw off the bus and ran over with the bus that used to be called
Mars Hill Church. Even if he hadn’t said and done all those things that got him
in trouble, there is a foundational lie at the core of his pep talk about how
toxic masculinity will save the world and it’s not necessarily anything to do
with what is toxic or what counts as masculinity. It’s something more mundane observed by the
author of Ecclesiastes about how the race is not to the swift nor victory to
the strong nor riches to the wise but time and chance happen to them all. Most
guys are not gonna take that hill, whatever be the hills Mark Driscoll wants
taken. The social psychologist Roy
Baumeister wrote in his book Is There Anything Good About Men that the
foundational aspect of men and manhood with respect to societies is that men
are disposable. Men can be (and are) sacrificed for the sake of grand causes
and legacies. I
had some thoughts about that back in 2011.
The guys spouting off about “civilization” aren’t talking about the
oracle to the eunuchs in Isaiah 56. The mimetic desire cultivation industry
goes hard when saving civilization is what is at stake.
In my own reading from my sprawling list on the development of demonology in Western Europe I noticed a convergence of stringent cessationism with postmillennialist eschatologies seemed to be the seedbed for super-apostasy across four centuries. In other words if you want to look at where a nexus of cessationism and postmillennialism has gone over the centuries since the Puritans New England and England hardly look like paragons of piety in 2024. Doug Wilson types have to rely on a surmise of revivalism but how many revivals and Great Awakenings have we had in the US since Edwards? Right, and how pious are those regions a few burned over districts later? The trouble is that people who are for "Christian Civilization" now in 2024 seem to have given away the nature of their game in terms of the cultural renewal they keep beating the drum about rather than something like how discipleship in the teachings of Christ is important whether or not America ever becomes great again.
2 comments:
"Every man longs for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.”
So it's taken 23 years to go mostly full circle, although a friend once said that Peterson in his cultural commentary mode sounded like the kind of religious nut you find in small town Alberta.
that which has been will be again ...
and of the writing of books there is no end ...
I could just stick with Ecclesiastes and probably should. :)
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