God, Carts, And Horses

In honor of the inaugural celebration of Annual Write About Religion Week here at our internationally renown e-magazine, I thought I’d do just that: sit here and type up some of my thoughts on faith and identity. The problem with that plan, though, is that I have neither the expertise nor the vocation to preach on such topics with any sort of authority. But I hope you won’t hold that against me. Instead, for your part, you just take whatever haphazard theological propositions this post includes with the necessary grains of salt. I, for my part, will try to stick to observations commensurate with my layman status. And we’ll get through this together.

A few months back, I came across an interview of Richard Dawkins in The Spectator. It was an interesting interview and it made the rounds on our side of the internet, most likely because it left the reader with an impression that Dawkins, one of the famous Four Horsemen of New Atheism, was getting a little, well, meditative in his old age. A lot of that aggression, a lot of that derisive certainty that characterized his earlier works was absent. He even spoke a few words in defense of those vile, Christian superstitions that he had spent a career trying to stamp out. At one point, he went so far as to call himself a “cultural Anglican,” which seems at a significant tonal remove from “anti-theist.”

(Here, you can cue the chorus of victorious Moldbug readers: “ See?! We told you so. It was the Protestants all along! Down with secular Puritanism!” C’est la vie. I can only recommend you do what I do during these triumphal processions. Smile politely and let them pass on by. The Yankees you will always have with you, proselytizing one wild idea or another. It’s in their nature.)

The interviewer eventually draws out from Dawkins that what he likes about Anglicanism are the cultural aspects of it. Dawkins likes the language of the King James Bible, which he (and any other literate English speaker) considers a valuable linguistic heritage. He likes the evensong and the sounds of church bells in the country. He likes the time and the place that Anglicanism created, that historical moment. These various aspects of the church he grew up around, in his view, are as English as a “cricket match on the village green.” They are what he would feel deprived of if tomorrow the entire denomination vanished from the face of the earth.

What Dawkins essentially recognizes here is that Christianity formed much of the Englishness that he loves. And therefore he doesn’t want to see the practices and products of that Christianity disappear entirely, even though the metaphysical content of the religion repulses him. Parts of his community, of his boyhood memories, of his personal identity would disappear with them.

I feel for him. I think that’s legitimate anxiety, especially in a nation where the fastest-growing religion builds mosques and not quaint rural chapels. The problem, though, is that he wants to have it both ways. He wants to go on enjoying all of the things that Christianity creates: architecture, music, ritual, language. But what he’s made his name doing is attacking what Christianity consists of: a faith in God and a belief in the Incarnation. Now maybe he’s right and those are “fairy tales.” Or maybe he’s wrong and they’re cosmologically accurate. But the point is that Christianity itself consists of a truth claim. It consists of the belief there is an Almighty God and that he revealed himself to the world through Christ and his Word. It doesn’t consist of evensongs and bells, as pleasant and as they may be.

It is a strange position that Dawkins finds himself in. He hates the thing itself, but he loves the downstream effects of the thing. He wants his Englishness to remain, but he also wants to dispel one of the notions that gave it life in the first place. I would humbly suggest to him that one can only attack the goose for so long before the golden eggs start appearing less and less frequently. But what do I know?

In any case, I don’t want this week’s installment to consist solely of an attack on poor old Mr. Dawkins. Especially since this phenomenon isn’t limited to aging New Atheists pining for yesteryear. People on both sides of the aisle sometimes fall into this type of thinking. It’s a sort of mercenary approach, or at least a cart-before-the-horse one. They begin to conceive of religion as a mechanism for producing (or reproducing) one’s preferred national character, forgetting that, while producing a national character is something religion does, an institutionally formalized faith in a higher power is what religion is.

For example, look across the pond at the European New Right or at various flavors of neopaganism in America. A lot of these people are identitarians, tribalists, and ethnonationalists, people with whom I have no general beef, especially compared to the multicultural liberals they’re fighting to displace.  Many of them value the brave Viking spirit of old in the same way that Dawkins values the evensong. They want to retain it. Or they want to revive it. They want the courage back, the martial prowess , the willingness to defend one’s kith and kin. And so they go about crafting ash spears and drinking mead and invoking the dread name of Odin at midnight of the winter solstice. But my guess is that they will be frustrated in these efforts and, the old Viking bloodlust won’t materialize. Not because a belief in Odin never inspired Norsemen to go forth and die gloriously in battle. But because they don’t believe in Odin. So no matter how assiduous they are in their rituals, what they are ultimately doing is playacting, not serving the Allfather like their distant warrior ancestors.

To bring it closer to home, you can observe a similar pattern in neoreactionary circles, where the overnight converts are to Catholicism. These young men don’t admire heathenry so much as they admire Christendom, and they want the order and the beauty of that Christendom back. They want a civilization once again capable of producing cultural artifacts on the order of illuminated manuscripts, cathedrals, chivalry. They prefer the throne and altar, not the nihilism of modernity, not a gradual replacement by foreigners, and not the crass anti-hierarchy of democracy. But to what extent does the Catholicism of today replicate the Catholicism of Europe’s yesteryear? Can they know, can anyone alive know, what Godfrey of Bouillon believed about God as he stepped out of his siege tower onto the wall of Jerusalem? Or are they simply affecting a Crusader aesthetic? And is it possible to have a meaningful version of the latter without first having the former?

Now none of this is to disparage Catholicism (or, for that matter, neopaganism). I admire Catholicism in a way that scandalizes my Southern Baptist family, and I believe with Chesterton that the heathen Europe of ancient times can be “remembered without dishonor.” It’s just to argue, with all due sympathy toward Dawkins, that you never really get to pick and choose what you want to keep from a tradition of belief that is no longer extant, whether that tradition is mid-20^th century Anglicanism or Norse paganism or feudal Christianity. Once you lose the thing itself, you lose the culture it sustained.

There were historical antecedents to whatever moment you look back on fondly. But there were also antecedents of faith, which were just as determinative. So I would say that if you really want to make a run at doing your forebears justice, start there. Not with the accidents of their religion. Not with their outward works, their music, their rituals, their ways of speaking, their aesthetic. But with the substance of their religion. With their faith. With a prayer, perhaps, to the same God that they believed in.

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