{"id":60759,"date":"2022-06-06T06:00:56","date_gmt":"2022-06-06T10:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=60759"},"modified":"2022-06-03T14:22:02","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T18:22:02","slug":"the-opposite-of-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2022\/06\/the-opposite-of-christianity\/","title":{"rendered":"The Opposite of Christianity?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I stumbled upon a remarkable article at the contrarian website Unherd<\/a> entitled\u00a0 The Anti-Christ now rules us all.<\/a>\u00a0 It\u2019s by a remarkable writer, the novelist Paul Kingsnorth, whom I will blog about tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Marshaling a number of other writers\u2013whom I also want to track down\u2013Kingsnorth offers a penetrating critique of contemporary culture, in terms I hadn\u2019t thought of before.\u00a0 In using the loaded word \u201cAnti-Christ,\u201d he is not identifying some villain of the last days, but rather arguing that the Christian influence on civilization is giving way to its opposite<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n

The essay defies summarizing.\u00a0 You need to read it all.\u00a0 What I am going to do is encourage you to do that by quoting some of the article\u2019s provocative passages:<\/p>\n

Presenting disorder as order and truth as lies \u2014 this, wrote [French mystic Ren\u00e9]\u00a0Gu\u00e9non, was the way that Satan rolled. The \u201cmore or less direct agents of the Adversary\u201d, he explained, using the Biblical name for what Europeans would later come to call the Devil, always aimed to invert reality. Right is wrong, black is white, up is down, there is no truth, do what thou wilt<\/span>: this has always been the Adversary\u2019s line, and today it is prominent in all quarters.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

The twin revolutionary engines of the postwar era, [the Italian thinker Augusto Del Noce<\/a>] suggested, were scientism and sex. The first usurped the role of religion and culture, reducing all life to the level of the measurable and controllable. The second, via the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the resulting \u201cpermissive society\u201d, unleashed a radical individualism cored around sexual desire, which would lead to the fragmentation of everything from nationhood to the family \u2014 but leave capitalism and its attendant class, the bourgeoisie, intact.<\/p>\n

Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. Del Noce\u2019s prediction, made decades ago, was that the end result of modernity\u2019s revolutions would be the rise of a \u201cnew totalitarianism\u201d. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth. Ironically, wrote Del Noce, \u201cthe rejection of authority, understood in its metaphysical-religious foundation, leads instead to the fullness of \u2018power\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

The new totalitarianism, suggested Del Noce, would \u201cabsolutely deny traditional morality and religion\u201d, basing its worldview instead on \u201cscientistic dogmatism\u201d. It would negate all \u201cspiritual forces\u201d, including those which, in the 1930s, had been used to resist the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin: \u201cthe Christian tradition, liberalism, and humanitarian socialism\u201d. It would be a \u201ctotalitarianism of disintegration\u201d, even more so than Russian communism, which had presented itself to some degree as a continuation of national tradition. This time around though, \u201cthe complete negation of all tradition\u201d, including that of \u201cfatherlands\u201d \u2014 nations \u2014 would lead to rule by the only large institutions still standing: global corporations.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

What Anti-Christ wants is the opposite of transcendence. If the coming of Christ represents the transcendent breaking into the temporal in order to change it, then His opponent will herald a world of pure matter, uninterrupted by anything beyond human reach.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people \u2014 they must be superseded, improved, remade.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Inverting reality.\u00a0 Scientism reducing all reality to what we can measure and control.\u00a0 Unleashing radical individualism built around sexual desire, fragmenting the family.\u00a0 Rejecting all authority and replacing it with the raw power of totalitarianism.\u00a0 Rejecting all traditions, including those of nations, leaving intact only global corporations.\u00a0 Immanence replacing transcendence, channeling it so that we<\/em> try to build our own heaven and we<\/em> try to remake humanity.<\/p>\n

Strong charges, but they explain a lot.\u00a0 And if inverting the Christian worldview causes such catastrophes, that makes a good case for the validity of that worldview.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow, I\u2019ll post about how the author of these critiques, Paul Kingsnorth, came to realize that, not just intellectually, but in a personal faith in Christ.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Illustration:\u00a0 Anti-Christ, fresco from Osogovo Monastery,\u00a0Republic of Macedonia, <\/a>by Edal Anton Lefterov, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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