On October 9 I highlighted a Free Press piece called “How intellectuals found God,” which I now see is part of a series of pieces on that site touting the benefits of religion. One of the intellectuals highlighted was Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer who found the “right” religion—Romanian Orthodox Christianity—after going through a long search to fill the God-shaped hole in his being. He had previously investigated Zen Buddhism and even Wicca before he was baptized as a Christian. He’s quoted in the Free Press explaining his conversion to Peter Savodnik:
When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a “rational choice.”
“If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that,” he said. “How does that happen?”
“The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”
He said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”
Now, in this new piece (Sept. 13), also in The Free Press, Kingsnorth himself dilates on his choice, excoriating the West for embracing materialism and for filling the “God-shaped hole” (henceforth GSH) with dollars (capitalism) rather than the divine. He sees a decline in our internal well being and morality since 1500, leading one to believe that he’s an opponent of progress.
I’m not going to take this apart as I suspect somebody else will; I want only to give some quotes from the article itself showing the recent trend to embrace Christianity (why not Judaism?) as a personal palliative.
As the Free Press notes, this is a book excerpt:
From AGAINST THE MACHINE: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth, published by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Paul Kingsnorth.
Headers are mine, while Kingsnorth’s words are indented:
We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. Clearly for Kingsnorth, Genesis is a very serious metaphor for the downfall of humanity:
So we eat the fruit, and we see that we are naked, and we become ashamed. Our mind is filled with questions; the gears inside it begin to whir and turn and suddenly now here is us and them, here is humanity and nature, here is people and God. We can never go home again. We fall into disintegration and out of the garden forever. Armed angels are set at the gates. The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.
The earth is our home now.This earth is a broken version of the garden, of our original integration with creator and creation. On Earth we must toil to break the soil, to plant seeds, to fight off predators. We will sicken and die. Everything is eating everything else. There is war and dominion and misery.
There is beauty and love and friendship too, but all of it ends in death. These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we know no other means to escape from our exile. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. We forget the creator and worship ourselves.
. . .The path back to the garden can only be found by giving up the vainglory, the search for power and the unearned knowledge which got us exiled in the first place. The path is the path of renunciation, of love, and of sacrifice. To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.
This raises two questions. How does Kingsnorth know there’s a god? Presumably he’d say, as he did in the earlier piece, that he gets God vibes:
And how does he know that Christianity is the right religion—the true faith that must be embraced to earn everlasting life( “we have to go through the cross)? I don’t know the answer, but if you have to go through the cross, most of the people on earth are doomed to hell.
Our civilization has gone downhill for the last 500 years. In this Kingsnorth is truly anti-Whiggish, and presumably a bitter enemy of Pinker, who maintains that in nearly all ways—well-being, health, morality, reduced violence, etc.—we are better off now than in 1500. Or would Kingsnorth prefer to live in, say, 1350. I’d seriously like to know the answer:
Now imagine that a whole culture is built around this story. Imagine that this culture survives for over a thousand years, building layer upon layer of meaning, tradition, innovation, and creation, however imperfectly, on these foundations.
Then imagine that this culture dies, leaving only ruins.
If you live in the West, you do not have to imagine any of this. You are living among those ruins, and you have been all your life. Many of them are still beautiful—intact cathedrals, Bach concertos—but they are ruins nonetheless. They are the remains of something called “Christendom,” a 1,500-year civilization into which this particular sacred story seeped, informing every aspect of life, bending and changing and transforming everything in its image.
This clearly implies that the “good” Christian culture disappeared about 500 years ago.
But wait! There’s more!:
Post-Enlightenment “morality” was no substitute for a higher purpose. If the correct path for society or the individual is based on nothing more than that individual’s personal judgement, then who or what is to be the final arbiter? Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it—without, in other words, a sacred order—society will fall into emotivism, relativism, and ultimately disintegration. This was MacIntyre’s prediction. It’s starting to look like he was spot-on.
Every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu, or Taoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.
This is a puffball; although atheistic societies, like those in northern Europe, don’t seem to be bereft of meaning and purpose, Kingsnorth can always say that, well, those societies are behaving using the legacy of Christianity. But given that there is substantial overlap between humanism and Christianity, that is not convincing. Plus, how, exactly, does Kingsnorth (or we, for that matter) decide what God’s “instructions” are?
There is no social unity or morality in the West without Christianity.
In his book Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War II, the medieval historian Christopher Dawson explained it like this:
There has never been any unitary organization of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity. . . . Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.
Your personal attitude to that “living faith” is beside the point here. So, come to that, is the entirely legitimate question of whether “Christendom” was even Christian much of the time. The point to focus on is this: that when a culture built around such a sacred order dies then there will be upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics right down to the level of the soul. The very notion of an individual life will shift dramatically. The family structure, the meaning of work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to kin to responsibility to duty: Everything will be up for grabs.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued in his classic work, After Virtue, that the very notion of virtue itself would eventually become inconceivable once the source it sprung from was removed. If human life is regarded as having no telos, or higher meaning, he said, it will ultimately be impossible to agree on what “virtue” means, or why it should mean anything. MacIntyre’s favored teacher was Aristotle, not Jesus, but his critique of the Enlightenment and his prediction of its ultimate failure were based on a clear-sighted understanding of the mythic vision of medieval Christendom, and of the partial, empty, and over-rational humanism with which Enlightenment philosophers attempted to replace it.
If you think that there is no source of virtue or morality without religion, you’re wrong. You don’t have to rely on God’s dictates (the absolute WORST way to determine what’s good), but on reason and humanism. After all, the Islamic or Hindu notions of virtue are very different from those of Christianity. And all of them differ from secular humanistic morality. We haven’t abandoned the notion of virtue; we’ve simply abandoned the dumb notion (whose dumbness was first realized by Plato), that virtue comes from obeying what we think God wants. Islam generally regards the murder of apostates, atheists, or nonbelievers as a sin worthy of death. Is that the kind of religious “virtue” we want? I won’t go into the numerous dictates in the Bible that we now see as immoral (God ordering the murder of entire non-Israelite tribes, for example), but I’d like to see Kingsnorth discuss them. But I am sorry to say that I won’t be reading his book; this critique is based solely on the Free Press article.
Materialism, money, and capitalism have brought society so low that we’re doomed. We have no source of morality and everything is permissible. Shades of Dostoevsky!:
In the West, the final taboos are falling like ninepins, and from all across the cultural spectrum the effects are being felt.
If you’re broadly socially conservative, the questions are coming at you in a rolling barrage. Why should a man not marry a man? Why should a man not become a woman? Why should a child not have three fathers, or be born from a uterus transplanted into a man’s body? Why should the state not assist people to commit suicide?
Things are not much better, though, for those on the left who are concerned about the destructive inequalities created by the modern economy. “Woe to you who are rich,” said Jesus, in one of many blasts against wealth and power in the Gospels. “Greed is a sin against God,” wrote Thomas Aquinas. Not anymore. Now our economy runs on greed, and it laughs in the face of any foolish and unrealistic romantic who rejects it. The shaky binding straps with which medieval Christendom kept the traders, the merchants, and the urban bourgeoisie tied down have long since broken, leaving us with no better argument against rampant greed and inequality than against total sexual license or the remaking of the human body itself.
If you knock out the pillars of a sacred order, the universe itself will change shape. At the primal level, such a change is experienced by people as a deep and lasting trauma, whether they know it or not. No culture can just shrug off, or rationalize away, the metaphysics which underpin it and expect to remain a culture in anything but name—if that.
When such an order is broken, what replaces it? The end of the taboos doesn’t bring about some abstract “freedom”; it strips a culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but once the formal architecture is gone too, there is an empty space waiting to be filled—and nature abhors a vacuum.
. . . This has been the terrible irony of the age of reason, and of the liberal and leftist theories and revolutions which resulted from it. From 1789 to 1968, every one of them ultimately failed, but in destroying the old world and its sacred order, they cleared a space for money culture to move in and commodify the ruins.
. . . We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self.
From this we can discern that Kingsnorth thinks that gay marriage and assisted suicide are wrong, and perhaps transgenderism as well. As for a child having three fathers, well, that’s not yet possible; we’ll deal with that issue when it becomes a possibility. The man is not only an Orthodox Christian, but akin to a fundamentalist Southern Baptist.
Kingsnorth winds up harping again on the GSH, which apparently used to be filled until about 1500, but now is stuffed with only money, and we lack all meaning and purpose since we abandoned Jesus:
What if we are in that passage now? It would explain the strange, tense, shattering, and frustrating tenor of the times. It would start, too, to get to the heart of what we are lacking, for we modern creatures are people with everything and nothing all at once. We—at least if we are among the lucky ones—have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and roots.
You may remember that in 2018 I asked readers what gave their lives meaning and purpose, and although we have a biased sample of nonbelievers here, people confected meaning and purpose post facto: they did what they found gratifying, and then said that was their meaning and purpose. Presumably Kingsnorth would hate that because it doesn’t involve Jesus.
But the big question here is why did the Free Press once again publish a piece saying that the West has lost its way, and we need to reclaim religion to get back on the tracks? This may be part of a greater phenomenon connected with social discord in the last few decades, but whatever is happening, it seems to be a trend.
It’s not secularism that has caused the West to “lose it’s soul.” It’s the anti-West, anti-enlightenment ideology that much of the intellectuals have adopted. (I originally said ‘the left’, but it’s never been just on the left.)
This guy has quite the imagination.
I think that this recent supposed swing toward religion is just a local twerk. It, too, will pass.
Why, millions in the West worship Muslims (Not Islam, but the followers of it.) and abjure the White Demons.
I think you misspelled the technical term for the rate of change of acceleration. 🙂
What caused the new popularity of religion? Covid, sure. My sense is more than that: the banality, or worse, of today’s culture, which begets anxiety, hopelessness….
I just want to see a panel discussion, moderated by someone like Bill Maher. On it, I want to see an atheist, a prominent Roman Catholic (like Ross Douthat), a prominent Protestant, and a prominent Muslim.
And then, Maher just goes down the line on the specific doctrines. He asks the Protestant why he rejects the Deuterocanonical books in the Roman Catholic Bible. He asks the Christians if they believe Mohammed ascended to heaven on a winged horse. He asks the Muslim if he believes that Jesus was born of a Virgin, rose from the dead, and is the Savior of all Mankind. He asks the atheist if he believes any of these claims.
In other words, we just lay bare the fact that different faiths make contradictory claims about reality. That is the anchor point of this entire discussion, and someone like Maher will not let them get away with denying this. Religious people squirm out of this point by grossly overstating areas of agreement, thus pitting all “people of faith” as a united front against nonreligious people.
Then we go into the reasons for these claims. We lay bare how different faiths will selectively use reason to rebut the doctrines of other faiths, but not their own. We lay bare the fact that different religions cannot deny that they use “faith” to plugs gaps in logic and evidence, but cannot explain why their faith is supposed to be the governing one over others to resolve contradictions in faith-based claims.
Properly moderated by someone who is smart, knowledgeable about religion, and tough, such a discussion should illuminate for any intelligent viewer the fact that religions are entirely human constructions with no support for their contradictory supernatural claims.
Perhaps because they want to promote Christianity. Why shouldn’t they? Was there an understanding that they should not? Was it supposed to have a secular bias? I don’t know anything about the publisher, and that’s why I am asking.
Maybe some people like a simple set of rules by which they can live; rules to tell them what’s good and what’s bad; rules to give them a unifying culture to help them resolve the us-versus-them issue.
Questioning the foundations of one’s thinking comes at a cost if the foundations are what gives one comfort and security.
But I wonder what Kingsnorth sees as an ideal. Would challenging Christianity be a bad thing? Should such attempts be suppressed? Is he not a proponent of free inquiry?
If one’s thinking is done using a faith based algorithm because it provides you with certainty and comfort then anybody who challenges the basis of your thinking is seen as challenging your certainty and comfort, not the basis.
And if there are enough of you then religious strife is bound to follow. Sometimes within your faith, sometimes outside it.
Absolutely. That’s what happens when one hangs one’s cultural self-esteem on superstition. Intellectual progress, which can challenge the superstition, becomes a threat.
Let’s not forget that early Roman Christianity suppressed all other forms of Christian worship as well as that of other gods. Church leaders were interested in power & wealth, & used religion as a cudgel to control the nobility & peasants to gain both. Plagues were, in a sense, welcome as they could twist them into arguments that they were punishments for not obeying Church dicta. After 500 CE, science was suppressed because rational explanations diminished the Church’s power. To an extent, the Reformation was a breath of fresh air.
What garbage. During the “golden years” of Christian civilization, Christians participated in the Spanish Inquisition, Crusades, and other barbaric acts, Even Christianity itself refutes his thesis: Christians have, on the average, become less vile over the years.
Good gawd! And Bari use to be, not so long ago, a nice, bright, normal little jewish girl. What the hell happened? Too busy growing the business to show a little sechel?
Did you see last week tonight with John oliver yesterday. He did a fantastic story on the free press
Well he did one mainly about Bari Weiss. He is funny, but he does not like her.
Imagine a TV station where everyone is John Oliver. That’s the BBC.
What the West has lost is its identity. More than our source of meaning and morality, Christianity was our identity for more than a millennium. Can Western countries remain Western without its identity? I don’t think so. The most likely scenario is that some Europeans countries will become part of the Islamic world in this century. The UK first.
I for one advocate filling our GSH with an actually western (as in, western hemisphere) deity.
Too long has Huitzilopochtli been starved. The current troubles are undoubtedly a sign that unless we strengthen our faith in Huitzilopochtli again, the world will surely end. The sun will go out, and earth will become barren.
Let us all embrace a truly American, a truly western spirituality, and offer Huitzilopochtli the gifts and honors he has missed for so long.
Jerry: I think this probably isn’t exactly what you were trying to express…
Re how an intellectual can find God, I recommend the Acme Deadfall Godfinder — dig a hole, then wait for God to fill it.
And re the end of civilisation as we know it — the Gods and Fates have retired to the old-gods home and abandoned us; we’re all we’ve got, like it or not. They say that growing up is hard to do / We’ve all been there, we know that it’s true.
And re Western culture, the Greeks and Romans seem to have managed a pretty good job of it; consider the Christian West’s re-naissance. Even Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes makes more sense than this guy appears to.
And re “the universe itself will change shape” — no, we’re not remotely that important.
And finally, re why the Free Press once again published a piece saying that the West has lost its way — it’s a popular something to fill space during the current and pending chaos.
Lord he doth sound like a fire and brimstone preacher. It is so dreary, so hopeless, so familiar. I think the Enlightenment was the beginning of a great flowering of Western civilization; he thinks it is the beginning of a great decay.
I haven’t read Kingsnorth’s book, but I was disappointed that his essay in “The Free Press” nowhere credits Philip Rieff, who is probably the most distinguished social theorist in the last fifty years to have explored this idea of culture being built around a sacred order. Some of you might recall Rieff as the soon-to-be University of Chicago professor who wed his seventeen-year-old bride Susan Sontag.
Sontag probably contributed much to the style of Rieff’s “Freud: The Mind of the Moralist” (1959), which remains in print. His 1966 “Triumph of the Therapeutic” has a cult following in some sectors of the political right, principally because it predicts much of the culture that followed and continues to this day. Rieff then largely retreated from writing, busying himself with his teaching at Penn, sallying forth with a diatribe in 1973 against his “Fellow Teachers” but mostly leaving his pen quiet. I mention him because he was a Jewish scholar, likely an agnostic. He emerged from his decades of near silence to write “My Life Among the Deathworks,” which was published shortly after he died in 2006. (Two additional volumes in the Sacred Order/Social Order trilogy followed.) For anyone looking to explore the broader theme that Kingsnorth addresses without sorting through his religious attachments, I strongly recommend it. But it is not an easy read, despite the clarity of its prose.
In this final major work, Rieff depicts three types of culture, what he calls the first, second, and third world cultures. The first is pagan; the second include those which derive from monotheism, but not exclusively. The third world is emerging as our own. (That word play is characteristic of Rieff.) James Davison Hunter, a professor at UVa, characterizes in his introduction to Rieff’s book the third world culture: “In contrast to the metaphysics of first and second cultures, which posit a world beyond the visible and an authority beyond the self, third cultures make no such claims. In their radical skepticism, third world cultures exist primarily as negations of second cultures; negations of their sacred authorities and their various doxa. Put differently, third cultures transliterate no sacred order into social order but instead propose a world in which there is no truth and no sacred order, only fictions and various rhetorics of power and self-interest . . .”
“This means, among other things, that inherited moral constraints are read as social constructions that have no status in being beyond what is given by the interpreter of those constructions. It isn’t as though everything is permitted in the third world culture, but rather that interdictions of second world cultures and taboos of firsts are replaced by endlessly contestable and infinitely changeable rules.”
Like Kingsnorth, Rieff begins his book in the garden, but that of James Joyce: “Let there be fight? And there was.” I’ll end it there, other than to say that exploration of the nature, creation, and death of culture needn’t be a religious quest. Neither does a concern for what this experiment might bring. There is no going back, only through. The [disenchanted] world is too much with us now.
I wish we could send him back to 1350 for a couple weeks, then let him decide which timeline he’d prefer, then or now. He clearly doesn’t seem to know much about the past if he thinks it was so great.
I haven’t heard of Kingsnorth before, but the fact that he has embraced Orthodoxy is no surprise, given his beliefs. I once had the task of editing an encyclopedia of Greek culture and thought, and I don’t think I’ve ever come across a group of people who take themselves quite so seriously, or who are so pompously disdainful of the “shallowness” of western thought (which to them encompasses not only Protestantism but the whole edifice of science and the Enlightenment) as Orthodox churchmen and theologians. They make Catholics look like amateurs.
If I have to choose a religion, I think I’ll go with the gods of Mount Olympus. Gods with actual human failings, who spend their time down here messing with mortals. And best of all, we get to enjoy the smell of roast lamb as a form of worship.
Happy, Bari?