My last blog picked up on the widespread talk of Christian revival in this country, and discussed how true revival is far broader than the usually-held idea, recalling the Great Awakening, of big meetings accompanied by spectacular spiritual and/or psychological phenomena. As was actually true in the eighteenth century too, the key thing was a general realisation that the current religion was failing, and a God-given hunger directed at biblical salvation in Jesus. The rest was contingent detail.
In other words, a sceptic would be able to point to sociological problems as the cause, and they would be wrong, but only in their excluding God’s oversight of sociological matters. One can see a comparable pattern in any such spiritual awakening. For example, the early gospel spread quickly amongst Jews, and then Gentiles, in the first century. In part that was because there was credible witness that Jesus Christ had indeed risen from the dead, and that his Passion was a solution to human needs. But it is also true that there was a particularly acute popular awareness of those human problems amongst the Jews through the oppression of Rome and the corruption of the Temple and synagogue, which had awakened Messianic longing; and among the Gentiles, I suppose, because of the emptiness of pagan religion and social evils. God creates truth, but he also creates the hunger for truth.
One thing to note about this early spread of Christianity is how it did not just bring resurrection life to all classes of men, women and children, but began to transform culture in every way social, political and intellectual. The last is what I want to focus on today. Christianity changed the world, as historians have increasingly been documenting against the old Enlightenment myth, after Edward Gibbons, that it caused the degeneration of an exemplary civilisation. Societal transformation is likely to accompany true revival in our times, too.
Every day, it seems, brings a surprising new story of conversion to Christianity or, at least, embracing “cultural Christianity.” Even Richard Dawkins, one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheist movement, has acknowledged the superiority of Christian culture if only it didn’t insist on God. In his case, although his primary contrast is with Islam, he seems to embrace Christian values, as Christian, rather than simply regarding them as the lesser of two evils.
Well now another former champion of New Atheism, James Lindsay, has publicly abandoned that superior philosophy and now regards the Bible as a profound book to be taken very seriously. You’ll remember that the watchwords of the “Gnus” were their overt mockery of Christianity and its “Sky Pixie,” its “Jebus,” and so on, and their sense of intellectual superiority, referring to themselves, without embarrassment, as “Smarts.”
Those watchwords, in and of themselves, pretty much disqualified New Atheism before it died its inevitable death, but I remember, in my years discussing evolution and origins, that James Lindsay was one of the frequent opponents of all theistic ideas, and one of the most intellectually able. More recently, he’s become an ally in the culture wars, being one one of the best analysts and demolishers of woke ideology and its socialist roots. In the linked video you’ll see he’s wearing an anti-Communist T-shirt. But to see him pointing to the Bible as a major source of wisdom for our times is a great surprise to me, and yet another symptom of that massive new shift towards Christianity in society. Like his interviewer, Justin Brierley, I only hope and pray that Lindsay will eventually have the courage and honesty to discover the divine source of that wisdom.
Seeing that interview led me to realise that, although there is a bitter war ongoing in which Christianity is still the political and social underdog across most of the world, it has suddenly become the holder of the intellectual high ground. Think of its rivals.
Atheism, so recently vibrantly dominant amongst the most educated in New Atheism, has by that very prominence had its profound weaknesses publicly exposed. It would seem to be atheism’s failure to address human needs or satisfy our longings that, many say, has caused much of Generation Z to abandon it and seek spiritual satisfaction in church. Along with declining atheism goes the materialistic naturalism that underpins so much of the recent Western worldview: evolutionism is beginning to seem culturally more implausible even as the ID movement and the Third Way folks demonstrate its evidential insufficiency.
The progressive woke movement briefly became culturally dominant, thereby showing that Enlightenment rationalism could not be taken for granted. The world has seen since COVID that “objective” scientists are as willing as anybody else to sacrifice truth for ideological expediency (or for money, sex and power – who would have pictured Stephen Hawking as a buddy of Jeffery Epstein?). But as an intellectual system most people with half a brain, though not footballers or politicians, have long since seen through wokeism. And that should be unsurprising, not just because claiming to be born in the wrong body makes no sense, but because the progressive response to any counter-argument (such as the recent Supreme Court affirmation of biological reality) always leads to violent protests and death-threats, not logical refutation. That is because the whole Progressive system, like the Hypercharismatic cults, is based on feelings, and despises the intellect.
The same goes for New Age, which whilst never a serious contender for cultural dominance, nevertheless probably has more underground adherents amongst the great and good than we realise. For example, there does seem to be more than a rumour of occultism underlying the elite child-sex trafficking rings like Epstein’s. But whilst Parisian philosophers like Sartre or Foucault might have sympathised with paedophilia, it cannot be succesfully defended intellectually, any more than Aleister Crowley made a good rational apologetic for his magick. The very existence of Satanism illustrates that New Age is essentially transgressive, so it cannot form a coherent mental system.
That leaves Islam as the most prominent religious alternative to Christianity. And once more, its current promotion in the West, bringing it out from the exotic orient into the spotlight, has only served to expose its intellectual weaknesses. Scholarly research has demolished its historical foundations (simultaneously with Christianity’s overcoming two centuries of destructive criticism of its own), and Islam’s scholars are seen to preserve it only by the suppression of free enquiry. Furthermore, Islam’s blaming Western colonialism for its lack of technical, scientific or social progress doesn’t hold water. It is not mediaevalism, as such, that has held it back, but the lack of the stimulus Christianity gave to intellectual life, even in mediaeval times.
What else is there on which to base our culture’s thinking? It seems that ideologies come and go, but that Christianity always carries the seeds of renewal within it, once the weaknesses of its rivals become clear. I remember learning that way back at university, when my Christian philosopher friends were well able to see the weaknesses in the dominant materialist arguments. It just took the captured majority a long time to catch up, as it has taken bright chaps like James Lindsay, and others, decades to begin to emerge from darkness into the light that has been there all along.
Why, do you suppose, has society repeatedly kept turning back to darkness? The Gospel would appear to explain that too.
