Anders Breivik as a Pragmatic Agnostic

July 27, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

Stephen Prothero writes at CNN that when ideas accomplish positive change, we speak of the power of ideas, but when ideas “do things we do not want them to do, as in Oslo,” then we pretend that ideas are powerless.  The contention that Anders Behring Breivik’s actions “had nothing to do with his Christian faith or his anti-Islamic ideology” is, according to Prothero, “wishful thinking of the most dangerous sort.”

I agree with Prothero that Christians should be mindful of the uses to which their ideas will be be put, and should examine the resources within the Christian tradition – its scriptures, its history, its thought – that can be assembled into a case for violence against the innocent.  Christians should have the humility to confess that they are not immune to criticism and to look for faults within themselves and their tradition.

The problem, in this case, as Prothero would have seen with a careful reading of Breivik’s manifesto, is that Breivik had no Christian “faith” to speak of, and the “ideas” that most influenced him were not Christian in any sense of the term.  Prothero makes no reference to Breivik’s insistence that he is not a “religious Christian” with a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, or to Breivik’s confession that he has no confidence that God exists but chooses to believe in God and the afterlife in order to give himself the courage for action.  Yes, Breivik appropriated the title of the Knights Templar, but it’s to Christianity’s credit that he could not find modern Christian precedents for the kinds of acts he wanted to commit, but had to reach back over seven centuries to a repudiated series of military ventures in which Christian Europeans sought to secure the safety of Christians and ultimately recapture the territory of the Holy Land.

This is one critical difference that explodes any simplistic moral equivalency between “extremist Christians” like Breivik and Islamic Jihadists.  While Breivik cites numerous Bible verses in his manifesto, he employs those verses in a way that no significant theologian or church authority has approved for centuries.  There is a kind of liberal Christian who is deeply committed to the proposition that conservative Christians are just as dangerous as al-Qaeda, but when they are pressed for equivalents to 9/11 they have to reach back centuries to the Inquisition and the Crusades (which they portray in exaggerated and decontextualized forms), or else they refer to the actions of Timothy McVeigh, or the Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph, or the Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn, who are all expressly non-Christian.

My point here is not to indict Islam, but to note how the liberal illuminati seem incapable of distinguishing between ancient military conquests that were justified by a pre-modern way of thinking abandoned centuries ago, or individual madmen who resided in Christian cultures but were the opposite of devout believers, and (alas) the legions of pious Muslims whose acts of terrorism are supported by a vast infrastructure and celebrated by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Imams throughout the Muslim world.

So, yes, as I noted yesterday, Christians should be the first to self-examine and self-criticize when someone perpetrates a terrorist act in the name of “our Lord Jesus Christ.”  But this does not mean that they should allow themselves to be slandered or lumped in with Imams who use their Mosques to recruit young men for the Jihad against the Great Satan.  Christians should present the facts.

And the facts in this case are pretty compelling.  So compelling, in fact, that the attempt to smear conservative Christians with the blood of the 85 children (at last count) that Breivik slaughtered is morally appalling.

Breivik explicitly denies that he is a “religious Christian.”  He admits that he does not possess what most evangelicals consider essential to faith: a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, which means a life of devotion, a life of seeking Christ and seeking to be like Christ, a life that honors what God revealed in and through Christ and accepts and celebrates the grace of God and forgiveness of sin that were made available to any person who would trust in them.  Rather, Breivik possesses the husk without the kernel, the cultural residue of faith and piety without the faith and piety that gave them life and direction.  He is not even sure that God exists, but chooses to believe in God and the afterlife (if this is any kind of belief at all) in order to give himself courage in the face of the dangers of his terrorist act.

What exactly, then, is Breivik’s “Christianity”?  He cares not for Christ or Christianity, but for Christendom.  Rod Dreher gave perhaps the best definition I’ve seen so far.  Breivik, he says, “sees the faith much as the Nazi leadership did: as a European tribal religion that can be instrumentalized to provide the basis for an ethno-cultural war against the Other.”  The Nazis were not fond of what Breivik calls “religious Christianity.”  Hitler, rightly, did not believe that “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” would suit his purposes.  Personal devotion, a living and breathing relationship with a God who is Love and a Son of God who teaches the love of enemies, does not “instrumentalize” well into the wholesale slaughter of Jews, gypsies, political prisoners and Christian resisters.  Neither does it instrumentalize into the murder of 85 innocent children.

One of the most revealing portions of the manifesto comes when Breivik’s imagined interlocutor asks him what a person must believe in order to take up arms alongside his reconstituted Knights Templar.  You must be, he says, “a practising Christian, a Christian agnostic or a Christian atheist (cultural Christian).”  Since he has already identified himself as a cultural Christian and not a Christian atheist, it may be inferred (though this is not entirely clear) that he is a “Christian agnostic.”  The “cultural factors,” he says, are “more important than your personal relationship with God, Jesus, or the holy spirit.”  In fact, Breivik speaks admiringly of “Odinists,” or Neo-Pagans who honor the ancient Norse gods, because this is a part of the Nordic cultural heritage.  One should prefer Christianity at least as a cultural matrix, he says, due to “pragmatic considerations.”  Only the the cross and only the Christian church (of which, in its present form, he is intensely critical) have the symbolic and ecclesial power to bind Europeans together in their battle against the Muslim threat.

As a cultural Christian, I believe Christendom is essential for cultural reasons. After all, Christianity is the ONLY cultural platform that can unite all Europeans…As for secularism, are there any strong uniting symbols at all? I think not. In order to protect your culture you need, at the very minimum, strong, uniting symbols representing your culture. In this context, the cross is the unrivalled [sic] as it is the most potent European symbol.

Being a Christian can mean many things, Breivik says.  It can mean that “you believe in and want to protect Europe’s Christian cultural heritage.”

It is not required that you have a personal relationship with God or Jesus in order to fight for our Christian cultural heritage and the European way. In many ways, our modern societies and European secularism is a result of European Christendom and the enlightenment. It is therefore essential to understand the difference between a “Christian fundamentalist theocracy” (everything we do not want) and a secular European society based on our Christian cultural heritage (what we do want).

So no, you don’t need to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus to fight for our Christian cultural heritage. It is enough that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian-atheist (an atheist who wants to preserve at least the basics of the European Christian cultural legacy (Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter).

Indeed, in his account of the secret meeting that reconstituted the Knights Templar, the largest contingent is “Christian atheist.”

Why the self-appointed guardians of nuance want to ignore these facts — that Breivik was no kind of Christian in the ordinary sense, but more like an agnostic committed to Christian symbols for pragmatic reasons — in their rush to portray Breivik as a “Christian fundamentalist” or “Christianist” (which Andrew Sullivan uses to associate Breivik with conservative American Christians), is a question well worth asking.

But one thing Breivik gets right.  Secularism is fragmenting and hard to hold together in any coherent or animating vision for life, and multiculturalism in its current form is failing both the immigrants and those who have been residents for generations.  Breivik sought to retain the most outward cultural forms but not the living essence of Christian faith.  His fundamental impulses are areligious.  He found no inward guidance or transformation in his cultural Christianity, only symbols and structures he thought he could repurpose for violent ends.

It’s not wrong to ask the question, “To what extent was Anders Breivik a Christian and to what extent did this shape his deeds?”  The answer is that he was not a Christian at all, unless we make Breivik the authority on what the term means.  But we should go on to ask, “To what extent was Breivik the inheritor of an inward secularism dressed up in the outward trappings of a long-since-abandoned Christian faith, and to what extent did this shape his actions?  If he had inherited not just the fossil of faith, but the living reality, would it have stopped his hand?”

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Morning Links: Obama's Crumbling Base, Rod Dreher, Andrew Ferguson, Scot McKnight, and Higher Education

July 26, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

In the News

1.  ”New Polls Confirm Obama’s Democratic Base Crumbles.”  Michael Warren comments.

2. Andrew Ferguson with a rather devastating portrait of Jon Huntsman.

3.  Why are conservatives such a minority at so many graduate schools?

4.  Rod Dreher with an excellent piece on Anders Breivik and his “Christianity,” which makes some similar points to my own article.

In the Pews

1.  Scot McKnight on “Labeling the Norwegian Killer.”  I don’t disagree that the insanity of a mass-murderer typically puts him beyond normal categories like “Right” and “Left,” or “Christian” or etc., but (1) I do think it’s important to make the case that Breivik is not a Christian by any remotely plausible definition of the term, and (2) sometimes it’s legitimate to look into the ideology, religious or otherwise, that motivated and undergirded the act.  In fact, if you begin by making the case that people such as Breivik are beyond categorization, this will come across as special pleading.  I think you should first make the case that he is not Christian, and then make the case that the categorizations that apply to sane people do not apply to unhinged, immoral monsters like Breivik.  In some cases, you will find a legitimate (and yes, I understand that defining that term here would be difficult) ideology underlying a madman’s actions, and that ideology should not be held accountable.  In other cases, however, there are ideologies and movements that have strong trajectories toward violence, and that needs to be recognized.

On another note, apparently the maximum sentence Breivik could receive, in the Norwegian justice system, is 21 years.

2.  Ron Sider writes in Christianity Today on why you should not give to beggars on the street.  I often do give, but Sider, who is about as pro-social-justice as you can get, makes a good case.

3.  This from New Yorker magazine is clearly a skeptical, unsympathetic-outsider take on The King’s College in NYC, but it does raise some troubling questions concerning whether Dinesh D’Souza is proving too divisive for the school and might lead to faculty defections.  A story-line to watch, perhaps.

What I find irritating about the story are all the little allusions and insinuations.  Take the following:

Smith and Dantzler take me to their dorm on Ludlow Street. Like dorm rooms everywhere, Dantzler’s smells of pizza boxes and unwashed socks. There is no King’s meal plan, Smith explains, so “the wealthier kids go out a lot, and the rest of us eat ramen and paninis.” (A female ­student later tells me that some young men at King’s have a different strategy: They gather in the women’s dorm and ask the ladies to cook for them.)

You see?  Class- and gender-based discrimination!  The writer doesn’t have to make the point explicitly, but of the thousands of details he might have noted, you can be sure he noted these for a reason.  And we can be pretty sure what the reason is.  The fact that this sort of thing happens at colleges of all stripes all around the country — I saw it all the time at Stanford, where I was an undergrad — is apparently irrelevant.

BONUS: You might enjoy this video responding to the claim that the Jesus of the gospels is a “Recycled Redeemer,” a composite of other, mythical stories.  (HT Francis Beckwith)

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Was Anders Breivik Really a Christian?

July 25, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

What do we do with the fact that Anders Behring Breivik — the perpetrator of a terrorist attack in downtown Oslo and the mass murder of children on the nearby island of Utoya — identifies himself as a Christian?  How do we make sense of the fact that he refers three times in his “European Declaration of Independence” to the “Lord Jesus Christ”?

1.  First, before we say anything else, absolutely the first response of every Christian without exception must be unqualified condemnation of the horrific, disturbing, and profoundly sinful actions Breivik took last Friday.  As I’ve written before, on occasion I’ve been frustrated when moderate Muslims fail to condemn acts of terrorism as loudly and unequivocally as possible; yet I understand how Muslims resent that the American public associates them with terrorism and looks to them for a response.  The implication is that the moderates are somehow accountable for the actions of the fringe, and it’s incumbent upon them to distance themselves from the madmen who detonate school buses and attack summer camps.

I too resent the implication that I have to offer some sort of account for Breivik’s action.  It should be abundantly clear that I have nothing to do with him.  And yet – and yet – I do need to condemn his actions.  Every Christian does.  Every person of good will does.  An act of such extraordinary moral monstrosity must, before anything else, be buried beneath an avalanche of condemnation.  Christians should always be humbly willing to examine whether a cancer might be growing within their midst, a cancer that is hidden within the body because Christians assume that everyone in their community shares their best intentions.  Extremists arise everywhere, and we ought not assume that our ranks are free of them.  So let us respond with the moral clarity to call evil evil, and the humility to examine the record and consider whether our actions or inactions, the things we’ve said or left unsaid, could have contributed to the worldview of the madman.

2.  Second, we should clarify precisely what kind of “Christian” Anders Breivik is.  Because, as it turns out, he’s not much of a Christian at all, at least by ordinary definitions of the term.

Anders Breivik

Raised in a secular household, Breivik went from “moderately agnostic” to “moderately religious” and was baptized and confirmed in the Norwegian State Church at the age of 15.  He is consistently critical of the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church (which he thinks has served its purpose and should reassimilate into the Catholic Church, in order to give a united front against Islam), as he believes both have abdicated their responsibility to defend Christian subjects against an Islamic invasion.

Then, square in the middle of his sprawling 1500-page manifesto, in a section (3.139) entitled “Distinguishing between cultural Christendom and religious Christendom,” Breivik himself tells us what kind of Christian he is.  He argues that the inheritors of western Christendom are all, whether they like it or not, cultural Christians.  Some are liberal cultural Christians, engaged in a massive act of cultural suicide by facilitating Islam’s demographic conquest of Europe.  Others are conservative cultural Christians, such as himself, who have recognized the threat of Islamicization and the infection of a weak and accommodationist “cultural Marxist multi-culturalism” in the elite sphere of European society.  Conservative cultural “Christians” should arm themselves for the new Crusade to reassert Christian cultural hegemony and drive the Islamic threat from European lands.  As for religious Christians:

If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.

Well, no, actually it doesn’t make you a Christian.  Most believers – liberal and conservative alike – decry the notion of “cultural Christendom,” or the theory that a person could be Christian by participating in the outward forms of Christianity while abandoning its inward beliefs, values and relationships.  Breivik several times asserts the superior authority of logic and science, and clarifies his commitment to “Christendom” as a monoculture, not “Christianity” as a life of personal devotion to Jesus Christ.  Breivik does not see himself as a follower of Jesus Christ, but as a Crusader defending Christendom from Islamicization.  He does not defend Christianity as a system of beliefs, stories and existential commitments; he defends Christendom as his own side in the clash of civilizations.

Breivik demonstrates no belief in the deity of Christ, in part because he’s not really sure that there is any God at all.  Although he says that those who live “under full surrender with God the Father” will receive his “anointing” for battle, he also says that belief in God is a crutch in the face of death.  He writes:

I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person as that would be a lie. I’ve always been very pragmatic and influenced by my secular surroundings and environment…Religion is a crutch for many weak people and many embrace religion for self serving reasons as a source for drawing mental strength…Since I am not a hypocrite, I’ll say directly that this is my agenda as well.  However, I have not yet felt the need to ask God for strength, yet…But I’m pretty sure I will pray to God as I’m rushing through my city, guns blazing…

Breivik describes how he will be on a steroid rush in the midst of the attack, listening to his iPod (perhaps Clint Mansell’s Lux Aeterna, he says), in order to ward off fear.  He explains that he chooses to pray and believe in God in order to overcome the fear of death.  He recommends other martyr-crusaders do the same, as religion is “ESSENTIAL in martyrdom operations.”

So, while it was obviously wrong for some commentators to rush to the assumption that this attack in Norway was perpetrated by a Muslim, it is a dramatic mischaracterization to say that it was perpetrated by a “Christian fundamentalist.”  He might have been a “cultural Christian” by some definition, and a political fundamentalist, but he was certainly no “fundamentalist Christian.”  It’s important to be clear: by almost every definition, Anders Behring Breivik was no Christian at all.

3.  Finally, Christians should consider how they can build relationships of mutual respect and understanding across religious boundaries, and should understand the distinction between cultural and religious differences.  Breivik is critical of George W. Bush, among others, for saying that our war is not with Islam.  Yet Breivik’s atrocity illustrates the wisdom and the importance of this approach.  As a matter of fact, there may be a sort of implicit, long-term struggle underway between different cultures and different civilizations, in the way that cultures and civilizations evolve and grow or else fade into obscurity.  Yet this is not remotely the same thing as a religious war, and what is emerging may minimize cultural differences and let the truly religious and spiritual differences come through more clearly.

Christianity is not a cultural system.  In fact, in those cases where it has become so intertwined with a culture that the two cannot be separated, this is inevitably to the detriment of Christianity.  Christianity is fundamentally a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, a community and a way of life, all wrapped up in historical, moral and theological beliefs, values and commitments.  These things are not culture and civilization.  They shape culture and civilization.  They ground and judge culture and civilization, and they can be expressed in a variety of cultures and civilizations.  But if we grow committed to the culture and civilization, while the faith and spirituality are hollowed out of them, then we worship empty idols.

All of the western monotheistic traditions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – have violent elements in their sacred texts and histories, bloodstained threads that run through the tapestries of their stories.  Christianity and Judaism had largely excised or decisively reinterpreted those elements by the time of the Enlightenment.  It’s telling that Breivik had to look back to a medieval order (the Knights Templar) to find a version of Christianity that would arm and equip him for a battle with Islam.  But even as we encourage those remaining pockets of extremists within contemporary Islam to reassess and reinterpret the violent threads in its scriptures and stories, we need to make sure that no one else, like Breivik, draws those violent threads out of Christianity and leaves the rest behind.  If Breivik had been a “religious Christian,” and not merely a “cultural Christian” who chose to honor the most violent strains of Christendom’s cultural history, it almost certainly would have prevented him from taking the actions he took.

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Morning Links: Anders Breivik, "Sister Wives," Amy Winehouse, and the Beach Boys

July 25, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

In the News

1.  The attack in Norway was horrific, with an explosion in town to attract the interest of police and then a wanton slaughter of the children of the elite on an island summer-camp.  Anders Breivik was driven by a sort of “crusade” on behalf of Christian society.  And Norway police arrived 90 minutes after the firing began.

2.  Same-Sex Marriages Begin in New York.  Meanwhile, Jonathan Turley, attorney for the family of Kody Brown, the “Sister Wives” family that is challenging anti-polygamy laws, refers to the legalization of same-sex marriages in making their case: “They want to be allowed to create a loving family according to the values of their faith.”  My own report on sexual vs. religious freedoms appeared in World Mag.

3.  Amy Winehouse’s downward spiral, through alcohol and drugs, to an early death.

In the Pews

1.  I did not have the chance last week to point out Campus Crusade’s name-change to “Cru.”  A case of political correctness run amok, or a wise recognition that the word “Crusade” is needlessly offensive?  I choose the latter.

2.  The Beach Boys = Pro-lifers?  Perhaps so.

3.  Andrew Brown argues that Breivik was not a Christian so much as an anti-Islamist.  This will require further comment.  Was Breivik really a Christian?  More soon.

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