Christianity, paganism, liberalism

Here is a comment I just posted at Conservative Swede, who has been doing a great deal of thinking about the connection between Christian ethics and the contemporary pathological form of liberalism.

I don't agree that the problem with Christianity/liberalism is that it is an ethical system shorn of its religious component. Primitive Christianity—the Christianity of the Roman Empire—certainly had a religious centre, but it was also other-worldly, concerned with individual salvation rather than the welfare of the political community, and anti-militarist. This point is made in a book published in 1994, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity by James C. Russell, which is very pertinent to the subject you are discussing (and also contains pointers to a lot of relevant scholarship on the subject). Modern liberalism may in essence represent a return to primitive Christianity on the ethical level.

There is another parallel between liberalism and primitive Christianity, too: both are the products of urban, rootless, atomized societies. Unlike Edward Gibbon, Russell does not blame Roman civic decline on the other-worldliness of Christianity. Citing Gilbert Murray (Five Stages of Greek Religion), he observes that other religions of the same period showed the same loss of hope in worldly life, despair of patient inquiry, cry for infallible revelation, and indifference to public welfare. In other words, Christian other-worldliness seems to have been a response to social conditions. It seems difficult to tell whether it was a healthy or unhealthy response.

The book's theme is that Catholic Christianity, in both Northern and Southern Europe, turned into a different, syncretic religion as a result of encountering Germanic culture: a religion that upheld pagan martial virtues in the spiritualized form of chivalry, and was capable, for example, of launching crusades against Islam. The pagan component of this religion remained strong for a long time, probably until the Reformation. It is this syncretic religion that we are thinking of when we refer to "traditional" Christianity. Our failure to appreciate this—or an active, "Protestant" aversion to syncretic religion—means that we make no effort to preserve the pagan component or to adapt it to modern social conditions. Instead we tend to look to pure New Testament ethics for guidance. Thus for example we now generally regard vengeance as an unmitigated evil, contrary, I gather, to pagan, traditional Christian, and Enlightenment ethics.

(You mention Vatican II unfavourably. Russell identifies Vatican II as the most recent attempt to de-Germanize the church, with the earlier members of this series being the Gregorian, Cistercian and Franciscan reform movements, and the Protestant Reformation.)

It strikes me that there is a kind of parallel between Christianity and Islam here. Both are syncretic religions which naturally try to reform themselves by returning to their primitive roots, but are likely to find that the results do not constitute a viable basis for a society—though for opposite reasons (excessive pacifism versus excessive aggression).

You may be right when you suggest that the whole Christian/liberal culture may be irreversibly rotting. My present view is that if there is a hope of turning back the clock it would be to some form of Christianized paganism, one that deliberately resuscitated and conserved national traditions but also took into account higher ethical requirements. The alternative of pure paganism is frightening. On the other hand, "Spengler" at Asia Times appears to think that the pagan element of European Christianity is a handicap, and that American Protestant Christianity is now the only viable form. I don't understand why he holds this view, but he has evidently thought a great deal about this difficult subject.