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<\/a><\/p>\nYesterday I posted about a critique of contemporary culture by Paul Kingsnorth.\u00a0 In trying to learn more about him, I came across his website<\/a>, which includes \u201can essay-length account of my journey from atheism to Orthodox Christianity, via Buddhism<\/a>, witchcraft and other strange twists.\u201d<\/p>\n Kingsnorth<\/a> is an award-winning British novelist, the author of the Buckmaster Trilogy, three experimental novels that range from 1066 to the 31st century.\u00a0 He has also published non-fiction books on the environment, globalism, and culture.<\/p>\n Last year he was baptized, following his conversion to Christianity.\u00a0 In his essay The Cross and the Machine<\/a>, he tells how that happened.<\/p>\n He describes his childhood in a secularist home, where he learned a little about Christianity in school but felt that \u201cobviously\u201d it couldn\u2019t be true.\u00a0 He liked to visit church buildings, where he and a friend would sometimes write blasphemous statements in the visitors\u2019 book, and he became acquainted with two kinds of Anglican vicars, the fusty old moralist and\u2013even worse\u2013the trendy youth pastor.<\/p>\n He was a teenaged atheist, but he felt something transcendent in nature.\u00a0 He became a radical environmentalist.\u00a0 Convinced that human beings need limits, as all religions taught, he decided to give them a try.\u00a0 It never occurred to him to consider Christianity, which \u201cobviously\u201d isn\u2019t true, on his 40th birthday he went on a meditation retreat in the mountains and turned to Zen Buddhism<\/a>.\u00a0 This was helpful to him, but he came to realize that he craved worship<\/em>.\u00a0 So he joined a Wicca coven, which is, he reasoned, a pagan nature religion.<\/p>\n Then he had a dream about Jesus.\u00a0 He started meeting Christians, and friends he didn\u2019t know were Christians started talking about their faith.\u00a0 \u201cIt kept happening, for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerving. I turned away again and again, but every time I looked back, he was still there. I began to feel I was being . . . hunted?\u201d<\/p>\n As he was headed to a witchcraft ritual, he suddenly felt sick and dizzy.\u00a0 \u201cI had an overpowering feeling that I should not go into the temple,\u201d he writes. \u201cI felt I was being physically prevented from doing it. Someone had staged an intervention.\u201d\u00a0 Then at a concert at his son\u2019s music school, \u201cI was overcome with a huge and inexplicable love, a great wave of empathy, for everyone and everything. It kept coming and coming until I had to stagger out of the room and sit down in the corridor outside. Everything was unchanged, and everything was new, and I knew what had happened and who had done it, and I knew that it was too late. I had just become a Christian.\u201d<\/p>\n None of this is rationally explicable, and there is no point in arguing with me about it. There is no point in my arguing with myself about it: I gave up after a while. This is not to say that my faith is irrational. In fact, the more I learned, the more Christianity\u2019s story about the world and human nature chimed better with my experience than did the increasingly shaky claims of secular materialism. In the end, though, I didn\u2019t become a Christian because I could argue myself into it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true. The Angelus that was chiming in the abyss is silent now, for the abyss is gone. Someone else inhabits me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n He came to realize that, in the words of the Irish writer John Moriarty, \u201cThe story of Christianity is the story of humanity\u2019s rebellion against God.\u201d\u00a0 And that \u201cOut in the world, the rebellion against God has become a rebellion against everything: roots, culture, community, families, biology itself.\u201d\u00a0 But, he concluded, \u201cThe Cross holds the key to everything. The sacrifice is all the teaching.\u201d<\/p>\n He knew he needed a church and found one in the Romanian Orthodox Church.\u00a0 Here, he says, \u201cI found a Christianity that had retained its ancient heart\u2014a faith with living saints and a central ritual of deep and inexplicable power. I found a faith that, unlike the one I had seen as a boy, was not a dusty moral template but a mystical path, an ancient and rooted thing, pointing to a world in which the divine is not absent but everywhere present.\u201d<\/p>\n My description does not do justice to Kingsnorth\u2019s account of his spiritual pilgrimage.\u00a0 Please, read it<\/a> yourself.<\/p>\n Those who wish to evangelize today\u2019s secularists, especially those who are \u201cspiritual but not religious,\u201d would do well to study this testimony closely.\u00a0 Notice what in Christianity resonates with him and his utter lack of interest in watered-down, liberalized version designed to reach someone like him.\u00a0 But especially notice that God Himself was hunting him down.\u00a0 We often assume that winning converts is all on us, as if God isn\u2019t active in creating faith.\u00a0 Yes, Kingsnorth came to Christianity largely by experiences, but, as in the Book of Acts, these led him to the Word of God and to the Sacraments, where he found the substance and the reality of faith.<\/p>\n I wonder if he or someone like him had stumbled across a Lutheran congregation, would he find that \u201cancient and rooted\u201d quality that he found in Romanian Orthodoxy, that \u201ccentral ritual of deep and inexplicable power,\u201d which must refer to Holy Communion?\u00a0 Lutheranism teaches that Christianity is no \u201cdusty moral template\u201d and that \u201cthe divine is not absent but everywhere present.\u201d\u00a0 Are we conveying that to the \u201cspiritual but not religious,\u201d or are those facets of our heritage what we are covering over in a vain attempt to attract them?<\/p>\n I haven\u2019t read Kingsnorth\u2019s novels yet, but I plan to, though they may reflect the earlier phases of his spiritual journey.\u00a0 I think I\u2019ll start with the last one, Alexandria<\/a>, published the year before his baptism.\u00a0 I\u2019ll report on them if I have something to say.\u00a0 Many of his essays are at his website<\/a>, as well as links to his books, poetry, and Substack subscription.<\/p>\n He\u2019s someone to watch, a tuned in 21st century artist reached by Christ.<\/p>\n\n