Writing in First Things (“Against Christian Civilization,” January 2025), Paul Kingsnorth proclaims an essential truth: the Christian faith must not be instrumentalized, and must not be made into a mere tool used in the defense of any earthly social order. The temptation to this misuse of the faith is particularly powerful, Kingsnorth observes, in times of apparent social decline—such as the present. He is to be commended for exposing some recent manifestations of the error of mere “civilizational Christianity” and for reminding us that Christians must hold their faith as true and good, and not simply as useful.
Kingsnorth also, however, makes a much more far-reaching argument about the relationship of Christianity to civilization. Here he mixes his key truth with some serious errors which call for correction. Most of his mistakes arise from a persistent spirit of exaggeration and a failure to make the distinctions necessary to do justice to the issues with which he grapples.
Is Modern Civilization Worth Defending?
“Our work,” Kingsnorth announces, “is not to ‘defend the west.’ That’s idol worship. Our work is repentance, which means transformation.” Of course, any serious Christian will agree that a sinner’s personal repentance is more important than his defense of any worldly civilization. It does not follow, however, that a call to defend the West is a manifestation of idol worship. Christians may legitimately defend some earthly arrangements—and in some cases may have a duty to defend them—on the understanding that they are good and worth preserving and without mistaking them for the supreme good. A Christian citizen who wishes to preserve the civilization to which he belongs is no more guilty of idolatry than a Christian father who wishes to protect his family from worldly ruin.
Nevertheless, a call to defend one’s civilization might be, if not idolatrous, wrong in another way—for example, if that civilization is so bad as to be not worth defending. This seems to be Kingsnorth’s view of “the West.” Modern civilization, he says, has as “the very basis of its existence” the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth.
This radical critique will resonate with earnest Christians, who cannot help but see and grieve the many evils that mar our society. At the same time, a spirit of charity—or rather of simple justice and honesty—requires us to reject it as an exaggeration. There is no doubt a lot of sin around. But alongside it we also find many innocent and even meritorious activities. If we look we will see many of our fellow citizens getting married and having children, working in honest occupations, and even performing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy—in many cases not thwarted but assisted by the institutions of our civilization. Despite its many failings, our civilization includes, after all, many institutions, both of the state and of civil society, that provide assistance to those in need—that feed the hungry, house the homeless, provide medical care to the sick, comfort the sorrowful, and counsel the doubtful.
In Defense of Christian Civilization
Not content with his rejection of modern civilization, Kingsnorth pushes his argument into even more radical territory. “All civilization,” he asserts, is “opposed to the Christian Way.” According to the Bible, Kingsnorth contends, human beings were made to live in a garden, not in urban centers that depend on surplus wealth and that foster unnecessary desires. Therefore, any attempt at Christian civilization is a ruse or a delusion.
In service of his astonishing thesis, Kingsnorth sketches a set of contemporary attitudes toward religion. The various postures include “serious religion”—the adherents of which sincerely believe their faith and think it the most important thing in their lives—and “civilizational religion,” pushed by those who seek to use religious belief, “regardless of its truth,” to prop up a teetering social order. This typology is too simplistic for theoretical precision and too neat for real life.
Kingsnorth overlooks the very obvious possibility of people who combine aspects of these two attitudes—that is, people who sincerely believe in the Christian revelation and, at the same time, value it as a civilizing force. This position is not just a concept but a fact of human history. Sincere Christians today must feel a debt of gratitude to those of past generations who transmitted the faith down through the centuries. That work of transmission was done largely—perhaps almost exclusively—by people who both believed in the faith as divine revelation and felt an obligation to try to build Christian civilization.
In Kingsnorth’s view, our Christian ancestors could not have fully understood the religion they were handing down. Real Christianity, he says, is a “radically unworldly faith” that “civilizational Christianity” perverts by turning it to “very worldly ends,” like “the defense of a certain kind of culture.” In this view, we have to pity (at best) all those nuns and countless other ordinary Christians who spent their lives teaching children not only the faith, but also to read and write, to grasp the fundamentals of math and science, and to know and cherish the histories of their nations. They thought they were living out a dignified Christian vocation, but it turns out that they were really just the dupes or accomplices of a fundamentally mistaken and morally bankrupt project known as “Christian civilization.”
Civilization and Historic Christianity
In announcing Christianity’s incompatibility with civilization, Kingsnorth implicitly claims to have noticed a vital truth of the faith that was somehow overlooked by most of the great teachers of Christianity for most of Christian history. This is a rather dubious proposition. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, accepted Aristotle’s view that human beings are made by nature for civilized life—that is, for life in the polis or the city. And Thomas was certainly also a defender of Christian civilization.
But then maybe Thomas was deceived and was teaching a Christianity that had been distorted by the social and political arrangements that dominated the Middle Ages. We might, then, seek an older, purer, and more Kingsnorthian anti-civilizational Christianity in, say, the teaching of Saint Augustine of Hippo. If we do so, however, we encounter the work of a man who dedicated his considerable energies and abilities not only to defending the faith as true but also to defending it as compatible with orderly civilization. Augustine took up his mighty pen to write his greatest work, The City of God (not, by the way, The Garden of God), to refute those who claimed that the rise of Christianity was responsible for the fall of Rome. In making his defense, Augustine made a point of showing his readers that the Christian faith supported moral standards that made for a civilization superior to that of pagan Rome.
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