Written January 2025
I have a lot of time for Paul Kingsnorth as a writer and thinker. He’s now an Orthodox Christian but I first came across him through his book Real England: The Battle Against The Bland which was published in 2009. This was written when he was primarily an environmentalist of some sort with an overlay of atheism/wicca/paganism (he seemed to chop and change quite regularly, a proper quester!). I loved this book as it articulated lots of things I had long felt but felt unable to really express on the flattening down and homogenisation of our country and world. I’ve always loved travel and even in my short lifetime it seems very noticeable how places are just less themselves and more a sort of anywhere with the same shops, the same architecture, the same businesses, the same people with the same priorities. I saw this process close up when I lived in Egypt in the 1990s. In the space of five years Cairo opened its own first McDonalds along with a host of other US fast food chains as well as many malls, all testifying to the remorseless rise of globalisation. I think this is now a much better understood phenomenon than even a decade ago and Paul deserves a lot of credit for sticking at it and noticing. His books and articles are always thought provoking and worth reading.
Anyway, having followed him for some time I was interested to listen to his Erasmus lecture under the aegis of First Things, which is an American online magazine covering culture and religion. The title of the lecture is “Against Christian Civilization” and in it he delivers over the course of an hour or so a very interesting and engaging talk. I found a lot in it to like: there is a good analysis of the Fall and its centrality, the shortcomings of Western society, what humans are created for, how Jordan Peterson and others who appear to want Christian Civilisation without Christ or Christianity are wrong and so on. But ultimately his analysis is off and I’ll try to set out why.
Essentially Kingsnorth argues not only that Christian Civilisation should be opposed. His real argument seems to be that there never been such a thing and in fact that it is impossible. He grants a possible exception to mystics and monks living solitary lives in nature but any notion of civilisation is merely a product of the Fall and apparently irredeemable. He lists as consequences of the Fall (20:20) farming, hunting, metalwork, murder and civilisation itself. Farming is responsible for environmental degradation of all types and then enclosures, metalwork has given us the deracination of city life as well as the means for war through producing weapons. You get the picture. He is quite explicit (31:40) in believing that this is not just a product of modern civilisation, it is a production of any civilisation. I don’t want to do Paul a disservice, the lecture is spot on in many regards, particularly in identifying a life that is not centred on worship of God as fundamentally disordered, prey for the Devil and all the powers of evil in the world and ultimately doomed. But it did not ring true in its diagnosis.
Paul Kingsnorth is essentially a fundamentalist: this makes him a fantastic polemicist, and his analysis of the shortcomings of the unhappy creature that is Western Man is very strong. But fundamentalists lead their followers into dead ends and unhappiness and I fear this is where Paul is heading. He was probably a fundamentalist as an environmental activist and this now is redirected through a Orthodox spirituality. He accuses essentially the whole of Catholic Orthodox Christianity down the millennia of really picking bits and pieces that are useful from the teaching of Christ while dropping the difficult bits. But Paul himself is highly selective in his approach and seems to disregard the whole of Orthodox tradition which itself lands very firmly and clearly on the existence of Christian Civilisation as not only a real possibility but as something that has in fact existed. Monks in forests are great, and this is obviously the part of Christianity that gets Paul’s juices flowing, but they aren’t the whole thing. Christianity is greater than any single interpretation of it. Paul is a great talker but ultimately his reasoning is simply a mish mash of poorly thought through soundbites that doesn’t stand up. Is he really proposing that we should reject farming? Metalwork? Fire? Medicine? He seems to be, and so is left in the unhappy position of having to rely on the products of technological civilisation while bemoaning their impact on Creation. The parallel with the rather ridiculous and infantile Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion are strong. This is the curse of fundamentalists: they are swept along by their own rhetoric, chuck numerous babies out with the bathwater and land up in positions that don’t withstand the most cursory scrutiny. In the case of Paul he seems to have been attracted to some of the aspects of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, the creator and product of a civilisation as much as anything else, but really wanted to stay in the embrace of the crankier elements of Protestantism, which is what I think Thunberg etc really represent. He may worship in a Romanian Church but the Protestantism of the Mid West runs through his thinking like a stick of rock.
I’m very happy that I can call Paul Kingsnorth my brother in Christ, he has a huge amount to offer. But in his speech I think we see a struggle to discern his grounding in political environmentalism and Christianity. Which isn’t to say Christians should not be concerned about the environment, of course we absolutely should, but Christianity is not environmental activism. Christianity is entirely honest about Man’s broken nature and the implications for any human enterprise, but it is more than a support group for people to wallow in despondency.
So having disagreed with Paul on Christian civilisation, how should I as a Christian proceed? Well, perhaps the first step is to accept that many criticisms of Christian and Western civilisation (the two are elided and I’ll probably do the same) are fair. We have built Empires on injustice, we are arrogant, greedy and lazy, we prize wealth and will throw out community and fellow feeling to make money and increase our power. These are of course products of the Fall and are bound up in human power no matter where or when. But that’s not all there is: fallen humanity is redeemable. And it is not only redeemable at some point in the future with the second coming of Christ, though of course it takes its most complete form then. Redemption is also in part a cooperation between Man and God: we can create, grow, nurture, cooperate and build. Not perfectly and not always successfully, but it is fundamentally anti-Christian to think this is not so. When we pray at our PCC we are imperfect of course, and our meetings are often in large part unsatisfactory and frustrating. But our prayers are answered: we are working with God to create the future, even if it isn’t usually terribly earth shattering. Desmond Tutu’s part in bringing justice to South Africa was achieved through working with God. It wouldn’t have been possible without Him, Tutu would have scoffed to be told otherwise. South Africans may have made a bit of a mess of it all but that’s the deal in a fallen world. A South Africa free of Apartheid is still imperfect, in some ways may even have regressed, but more creation and building is possible and a better country can be built. Paul Kingsnorth in his talk said that his favourite quote from the Gospels was when we are told we should “be of good cheer”. Well, absolutely. But there is no good cheer in Paul Kingsnorth’s vision of the future, just the prospect of endless failure and pointlessness. We are built for better things, to build better things with our God. We will always fail at some level, we will fall short of the mark and sometimes things will go disastrously wrong. But even fallen humans are made in the image of God, we are the glory of His Creation, we are its stewards and we are called to do great things. We are not called to recreate a Christendom that has died.but we as Christians are called to be builders of civilisation. Some will do that through prayerful living in a wilderness keeping an important strand of Christianity alive and flourishing. But that can’t be all of us and we aren’t given the option to opt out en masse.