CHAPTER 2

The Roots of the Crisis

On a warm evening in the late autumn, a recently retired woman sits on the front porch of her neighbor’s house, talking about the ways of the world. It is two weeks before the Trump-Clinton election, and everything seems to be going to pieces, the neighbors agree. How did our country get to this place? they wonder. Both of the women are working class by culture, but thanks to economic and cultural changes in the mid-twentieth century, they are now entering their golden years as members of a modest middle class. America has been very good to them and their families.

Yet neither woman is confident about the future for their grandchildren. One tells the other that in the past year, she has gone to six baby showers for young women in her family and social circles. None of the expectant mothers had husbands. Some had more than one child out of wedlock. The gray-haired women know what poverty and insecurity are like, and they can’t believe that these young women would bring children into the world without fathers in the home, given how much more likely children in those situations are to be poor. And where are the fathers, anyway? What is wrong with young men these days?

These women are pro-life Christian conservatives who would never countenance abortion. They would rather see babies born than exterminated in the womb, no matter what the cost. Still, the normalization of having children outside of marriage is hard for them to take. In the 1940s, when they were born, the out-of-wedlock birth rate among whites was 2 percent. It is now nearly 30 percent (the overall birth rate to unwed mothers is 41 percent).1 “It’s like the whole world is coming apart,” sighed one of the women.

“I’m glad I’m not going to be around to see it,” said the other.

Those women aren’t imagining things. Their whole world really is unraveling. Political scientist Charles Murray documented it in his aptly titled 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010. Murray focused his study on the white working class, but the social and cultural trends that have undone them are not confined to whites alone. Nor were the 1960s the beginning of our unraveling, though they were a turning point. We are living with the consequences of ideas accepted many generations ago, and as a result of those decisions, we are losing our religion—a far greater crisis than merely losing the habit of churchgoing.

The word religion comes from the Latin word religare, meaning “to bind.” From a sociological point of view, religion is a coherent system of beliefs and practices through which the community of believers know who they are and what they are to do. These beliefs and practices are held to be rooted in and expressive of the sacred order both grounding and transcending existence. They tell and enact the story that holds the community together.

The loss of the Christian religion is why the West has been fragmenting for some time now, a process that is accelerating. How did it happen? There were five landmark events over seven centuries that rocked Western civilization and stripped it of its ancestral faith:

This outline of Western cultural history since the High Middle Ages admittedly leaves out a great deal. And it is biased toward an intellectual understanding of historical causation. In truth, material consequences often give birth to ideas. The discovery of the New World and the invention of the printing press, both in the fifteenth century, and the invention of the birth control pill and the Internet in the twentieth, made it possible for people to imagine things they never had before and thus to think new thoughts. History gives us no clean, straight causal lines binding events and giving them clear order. History is a poem, not a syllogism.

That said, outlining the role ideas—especially ideas about God—played in historical change gives us a conceptual understanding of the nature of our present crisis. It’s important to grasp this picture, however incomplete and oversimplified, to understand why the humble Benedictine way is such a potent counterforce to the dissolving currents of modernity.

The people of the Middle Ages lived in what philosopher Charles Taylor calls an “enchanted world”—one so unlike ours that we struggle to imagine it. We in the modern West are on a distant shore, and the worldview of our medieval ancestors is over the horizon, far from view.

Medievals experienced the divine as far more present in their daily lives. As it has been for most people, Christian and otherwise, throughout history, religion was everywhere, and—this is crucial—as a matter not merely of belief but of experience. In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. The division between them was thin and porous. Another way to put this is that the medievals experienced everything in the world sacramentally.

We associate that word with church and rightly so. Baptism is a sacrament, for example, as is Communion. These are special rituals in which God’s grace is present in a particular way, effecting a real transformation on those participating in it. But sacramentalism had a much broader and deeper meaning in the mind of the Middle Ages. People of those days took all things that existed, even time, as in some sense sacramental. That is, they believed that God was present everywhere and revealed Himself to us through people, places, and things, through which His power flowed.

The power of sacred places and the relics of saints had such potency to the medievals because God wasn’t present in a vague spiritual sense, like a butler watching silently over a manor house. He was there, writes Taylor, “as immediate reality, like stones, rivers, and mountains.”2 The specific sense in which He was present was a mystery—and a source of speculation and contention even back then—but that He was truly present was not disputed. The only reason the material world had any meaning at all was because of its relationship to God.

Medieval man held that reality—what was really real—was outside himself and that dwelling in the darkness of the Fall, he could not fully perceive it. But he could relate to it intellectually through faith and reason, and know it through conversion of the heart. The entire universe was woven into God’s own Being, in ways that are difficult for modern people, even believing Christians, to grasp. Christians of the Middle Ages took Paul’s words recorded in Acts—“in Him we live and move and have our being”—and in his letter to the Colossians—“He is before all things and in Him all things hold together”—in a much more literal sense than we do.

Medieval man did not see himself as fundamentally separate from the natural order; rather, the alienation he felt was an effect of the Fall, a catastrophe that, as he understood it, made it difficult for humans to see Creation as it really is. His task was to join himself to the love of God and harmonize his own steps with the great cosmic dance. Truth was guaranteed by the existence of God, whose Logos, the divine principle of order, was made fully manifest in Jesus Christ but is present to some degree in all Creation.

Medieval Europe was no Christian utopia. The church was spectacularly corrupt, and the violent exercise of power—at times by the church itself—seemed to rule the world. Yet despite the radical brokenness of their world, medievals carried within their imagination a powerful vision of integration. In the medieval consensus, men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.

The medieval conception of reality is an old idea, one that predates Christianity. In his final book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis, who was a professional medievalist, explained that Plato believed that two things could relate to each other only through a third thing. In what Lewis called the medieval “Model,” everything that existed was related to every other thing that existed, through their shared relationship to God. Our relationship to the world is mediated through God, and our relationship to God is mediated through the world.

Humankind dwelled not in a cold, meaningless universe but in a cosmos, in which everything had meaning because it participated in the life of the Creator. Says Lewis, “Every particular fact and story became more interesting and more pleasurable if, by being properly fitted in, it carried one’s mind back to the Model as a whole.”3

For the medievals, says Lewis, regarding the cosmos was like “looking at a great building”—perhaps like the Chartres cathedral—“overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony.”

The medieval model held all of Creation to be bound in a complex unity that encompassed all of time and space. It reached its apogee in the highly complex, rationalistic theology known as Scholasticism, of which the brilliant thirteenth-century Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was the greatest exponent.

The core teachings of Scholasticism include the principle that all things exist and have a God-given essential nature independent of human thought. This position is called “metaphysical realism.” From this principle comes what Charles Taylor identifies as the three basic bulwarks upholding the medieval Christian “imaginary”—that is, the vision of reality accepted by all orthodox Christians from the early church through the High Middle Ages:

These three pillars had to crumble before the modern world could arise from the rubble, Taylor says. And crumble they did. It did not happen at once, and it did not happen straightforwardly. But it happened. Theologian David Bentley Hart describes the transformation as opening an “imaginative chasm between the premodern and modern worlds. Human beings now in a sense inhabited a universe different from that inhabited by their ancestors.”4

The theologian who did the most to topple the mighty oak of the medieval model—that is, Christian metaphysical realism—was a Franciscan from the British Isles, William of Ockham (1285–1347). The ax he and his theological allies created to do the job was a big idea that came to be called nominalism.

Realism holds that the essence of a thing is built into its existence by God, and its ultimate meaning is guaranteed by this connection to the transcendent order. This implies that Creation is comprehensible because it is rationally ordered by God and a revelation of Him.

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork,” says the Psalmist. The sense that the material world discloses the workings of the transcendent order was present in ancient philosophy and in many world religions, even nontheistic ones like Taoism. Metaphysical realism tells us that the awe we feel in the presence of nature, beauty, or goodness—the feeling that there must be more than what we experience with our senses—is a reasonable intuition. It doesn’t tell us who God is, but it tells us that we are not imagining things: something—or Someone—is there.

Aquinas puts it like this: “To know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching.” Through prayer and contemplation, we may build on that intuition and come to know the identity of the One we sense. For example, the yearning for meaning and truth that all humans have, says David Bentley Hart, “is simply a manifestation of the metaphysical structure of all reality.”

But if the infinite God reveals Himself through finite matter, does that not imply limitation? Ockham thought so. He denied metaphysical realism out of zeal to protect God’s sovereignty. He feared that realism restricted God’s freedom of action. For Ockham, if something is good, it is because God desired it to be so. The meaning of all things derives from God’s sovereign will—that is, not because of what He is, or because of His participation in their being, but because of what He commands. If He calls something good today and the same thing evil tomorrow, that is His right.

This idea implies that objects have no intrinsic meaning, only the meaning assigned to them, and therefore no meaningful existence outside the mind. A table is just wood and nails arranged in a certain way, until we give it meaning by naming it “table.” (Nomen is the Latin word for “name,” hence nominalism.)

In Ockham’s thought, God is an all-powerful entity who is totally separate from Creation. God has to be, taught Ockham, or else His freedom to act would be bound by the laws He made. A truly omnipotent God cannot be restrained by anything, in his view. If something is good, therefore, it is good because God said so. God’s will, therefore, is more important than God’s intellect.

This sounds like angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff, but its importance cannot be overstated. Medieval metaphysicians believed nature pointed to God. Nominalists did not. They believed there is no inner meaning existing objectively within nature and discoverable by reason. Meaning is extrinsic—that is, imposed from the outside, by God—and accessible to humans by faith in Him and His revelation alone.

If this sounds like plain good sense to you, then you begin to grasp how revolutionary nominalism was. What was once a radical theory would, in time, become the basis for the way most people understood the relationship between God and Creation. It made the modern world possible—but as we will see, it also set the stage for man enthroning himself in the place of God.

Ideas don’t occur in a vacuum. As C. S. Lewis put it, “We are all, very properly, familiar with the idea that in every age the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted Model of the universe. But there is a two-way traffic; the Model is also influenced by the prevailing temper of mind.”5 Nominalism emerged from a restless civilization whose people were questing for something different. The Middle Ages were an age of intense faith and spirituality, but as even the art and poetry of the fourteenth century showed, humanity began turning its gaze away from the heavens and toward this world.

After Ockham, the so-called natural philosophers—thinkers who studied nature, the precursors of scientists—began to shed the metaphysical baggage bequeathed to them by Aristotle and his medieval Christian successors. They discovered that one didn’t need to have a philosophical theory about a natural phenomenon’s being in order to examine it empirically and draw conclusions.

Meanwhile, in the world of art and literature, a new emphasis on naturalism and individualism emerged. The old world, with its metaphysical certainties, its formal hierarchies, and its spiritual focus gradually ceased to hold the imagination of Western man. Art became less symbolic, less idealized, less focused on religious themes, and more occupied with the life of man.

The Model shuddered under philosophical assault, but horrifying events outside the world of art and ideas also shook it to the core. War—especially the Hundred Years War between France and England—wracked western Europe, which also suffered a catastrophic fourteenth-century famine. Worst of all was the Black Death, a plague that killed between one-third and one-half of all Europeans before burning itself out. Few civilizations could withstand those kinds of traumas without tremendous upheavals.

For all these reasons, the Model broke apart. Metaphysical realism had been defeated. What emerged was a new individualism, a this-worldliness that would inaugurate the historical period called the Renaissance. The defeat of metaphysical realism inaugurated a new and dynamic phase of Western history—one that would culminate in a religious revolution.

Renaissance and Reformation

Renaissance is a French word meaning “rebirth.” It refers to the cultural efflorescence that accompanied the West’s rediscovery of the Greek and Roman roots of its civilization. It is important to note that the term was not applied to the period bridging the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era until the nineteenth century. It contains within it the secular progressive belief that the religiously focused medieval period was a time of intellectual and artistic sterility—a ludicrous judgment but an influential one.

Nevertheless, the Renaissance does mark a distinct change in European culture, which shifted its focus from the glory of God to the glory of man. “We can become what we will,” said Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), the archetypal Renaissance philosopher. It was not an open form of satanic defiance—indeed, Pico uttered that famous line in an oration in which he cautioned against abusing God’s gift of free will—but those words express the Renaissance’s optimism about human nature and its possibilities.

What was being reborn in the Renaissance? The classical spirit of ancient Greece and Rome, which had gone into eclipse following the fifth-century collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the subsequent advent of the Christian medieval period. While the late medieval period concentrated on the rediscovery of Greek philosophical texts, Italian scholars of the fourteenth century led the way in reviving ancient literature and history. “Man is the measure of all things,” said the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, in a line that also described the spirit of the new age dawning upon Europe.

Renaissance humanism began to consider the world through classical insights and emphasized the study of poetry, rhetoric, and other disciplines we now call the humanities. Though humanist culture was not as narrowly focused on the faith as its medieval predecessor, it was by no means anti-Christian. The Renaissance brought into Western Christianity a greater concern for the individual, for freedom, and for the dignity of man as bearing the image of God.

Medieval Christianity focused on the fall of man, but the more humanistic Christianity of the Renaissance centered on man’s potential. Christian humanism was far more individualistic than what came before it, and it sought to Christianize the classical model of the hero, the man of virtue. Scholasticism emphasized reason and intellect as the way to relate to God; Christian humanism focused on the will.

The danger was that Christian humanists would become too enamored of human potential and man’s capacity for self-creation and lose sight of his chronic inclination toward sin. This was a temptation to which the Italian humanists were particularly susceptible. They were all too pleased to cast off the sackcloth and ashes of medieval asceticism and revel in the glory and vigor of the sensual life. Not so with the humanists of northern Europe, who were more modest in their piety and restrained in their optimism about human nature. They were more drawn to Scripture than to philosophy and were concerned primarily with reforming the church toward a more rigorous morality and a more democratic religious life. They viewed with skepticism, even disdain, the sensuality that had overtaken European life, especially in the church.

Renaissance Rome was a cesspit of vice, and the corruption reached far beyond the papal court and the Vatican walls. Many bishops were despised for their worldliness, while drunken and ignorant parish clergy, indifferent to the Gospel, were disrespected by their angry flocks. As the church hemorrhaged spiritual and moral authority, the clamor for change rose. But the Renaissance popes, prisoners of their own greed and tastes for opulence, refused to listen. They thought what they had would last forever.

It took an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther to shatter their illusions—and with it, the religious unity of the West. The Reformation, as we call the revolution he started, was not the first protest movement against Catholic Church corruption, but it was the first to hack at the theological and ecclesiological roots of Roman Catholicism itself.

Luther built his revolution not only on protests against church corruption but also on theological and philosophical developments that had already occurred within Latin Christianity. In 1517, Luther proclaimed his “Ninety-Five Theses” questioning the sale of indulgences, a feature of the Catholic penitential system that allowed the living to buy relief for relatives believed to be suffering punishment in Purgatory.

In fact, Luther aimed his formidable rhetorical cannon at Rome’s entire structure defining sin, forgiveness, and ecclesial authority. In 1520, the Vatican excommunicated Luther for refusing to recant his belief that Scripture alone—as distinct from Scripture and the authoritative interpretation of the Roman church—was the source of Christian truth. Thus was the Protestant Reformation born.

Though there was a great deal of local diversity across Catholic Europe, fidelity to the Roman Catholic institution and its authority to proclaim objective religious truth had been a unifying principle. The Reformation destroyed that unity and stripped those under its sway of many symbols, rituals, and concepts that had structured the inner lives of Christians. Reformation-era Christians—Protestants—would no longer bow before what the Reformers believed to be superstition and idolatry. Scripture was their only authority in religious matters.

The question immediately arose: whose interpretation of Scripture? No Reformer believed in private interpretation of Scripture, but they had no clear way to discern whose interpretation was the correct one. The Reformers quickly discovered that casting off Rome’s authority solved one problem but created another. As historian Brad Gregory puts it, “Because Christians disagreed about what they were to believe and do, they disagreed about what the fruits of a Christian life were.”6 And so it remains in our day.

Because religion was inseparable from politics and culture, the Reformation, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, quickly led to a series of savage wars that shredded Europe. To be fair, the Wars of Religion were as political, social, and economic as they were religious. But the religious basis for the wars caused weary European intellectuals to explore ways of living peaceably with the schism between Rome and the Reformers.

The Dawn of the Enlightenment

The Scientific Revolution indirectly suggested a possible way out.

Even as the Wars of Religion raged, science made rapid advances. The Scientific Revolution was a roughly two-hundred-year period of staggering advances in science and mathematics that began with Copernicus (1473–1543), who showed that the earth was not the fixed center of Creation, and ended with Newton (1642–1727), whose breakthrough discoveries laid the foundation for modern physics. The era overturned the Aristotelian-Christian cosmos—a hierarchical model of reality in which all things exist organically through their relationship to God—in favor of a mechanical universe ordered by laws of nature, with no necessary grounding in the transcendent.

Most leaders of the Scientific Revolution were professing Christians, but the revolution’s grounding lay undeniably in nominalism. If the material world could be studied and understood on its own, without reference to God, then science can exist on its own, free of theological controversy.

This practical proposition allowed science to develop unhindered by metaphysical and religious suppositions. Science focused on facts about the material world that could be demonstrated, and it had an empirical method of testing hypotheses to prove or disprove their claims.

And science worked, in practical ways. Sir Francis Bacon, an important late Renaissance philosopher and founder of the scientific method, famously said that scientific discovery ought to be applied “for the relief of man’s estate”—that is, to improve the lives of humans by reducing their pain, suffering, and poverty. This was a turning point in the history of ideas. The natural world was to be taken no longer as something to be contemplated as in any way an icon of the divine, but rather as something to be understood and manipulated by the will of humankind for its own sake. In this way, the Scientific Revolution further distanced God from Creation in the minds of men.

The Scientific Revolution culminated in the life and work of Sir Isaac Newton, a physicist, mathematician, and unorthodox Christian who fabricated a new model of the universe that explained its physical workings in a wholly mechanical way. Newton certainly believed that the laws of motion he discovered had been established by God. Yet Newton’s God, in contrast to the God of traditional Christian metaphysics, was like a divine watchmaker who fashioned a timepiece, wound it, and let it carry on without his further involvement.

The explosion of science changed Western epistemology, the study of how we know what we know. Aristotelian science, which dominated the Middle Ages, was based on metaphysical concepts about the essential nature of things. The new science jettisoned the metaphysical baggage and reasoned from empirical observations alone. Philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) would change the approach to the epistemological question even further. Whereas Bacon said we should develop models by reasoning from empirical observation, Descartes took a more purely rationalistic approach.

Descartes taught that the best method was to begin by accepting as true only clear ideas that were beyond doubt. You should accept nothing as truth on the basis of authority, and you should even doubt your senses. Only those things of which you can be certain are true. And the first principle of all under this method is, “I think, therefore I am.”

That is, the only thing that cannot be doubted is one’s own existence. That is the foundation of all other thought, according to Descartes, who in this way made the autonomous, thinking individual into the determiner of truth. Descartes was a rationalist but not a moral relativist—indeed, he considered himself a faithful Catholic whose mission in part was to reconcile science to faith.

What Descartes did—and what makes him the father of modern philosophy—was to invert the medieval approach to knowledge. To the Scholastics, reality was an objective state, and humankind’s role was first to understand the metaphysical nature of reality. Only then could humans begin to explore knowledge of the world and everything within it. Descartes, on the other hand, began all inquiry with radical subjectivity, declaring that the first principle of knowledge was that the Self is conscious of itself.

Descartes’s philosophy opened the door to the world-changing project dubbed “the Enlightenment” by its cheerleaders, eager to contrast it to the supposedly dark days when revealed religion had its death grip on the Western mind. At its core, the Enlightenment was an attempt by European intellectuals to find a common basis outside religion for determining moral truth. The success of science led moral philosophers to explore how disinterested reason, which was so successful in the realm of science, could show the West a nonsectarian way to live.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment sought to use reason alone to establish a new basis for political and social life, one that was separated from the past. They tried to create a secular morality that any reasonable person could understand and affirm, and they believed that this was possible. They also advocated science and technology as a way to impose man’s rational will upon nature, and they extolled the freely choosing individual.

For our purposes, the Enlightenment matters because it was the decisive break with the Christian legacy of the West. God, if He was mentioned at all, was not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but the nondescript divinity of the Deists. Deism, a rationalistic school of thought that emerged in the Enlightenment, holds that God is a cosmic architect who created the universe but does not interact with it. Deism rejects biblical religion and the supernatural and bases its principles on what can be known about God—the “Supreme Being”—through reason alone.

Most of the American Founding Fathers were either confessed Deists like Benjamin Franklin (also a Freemason) or strongly influenced by Deism (e.g., Thomas Jefferson). Deism was a powerful intellectual force in eighteenth-century American life. John Locke, the English political philosopher whose teaching was a great influence on the American founding, was technically not a Deist—his belief in miracles contradicted the Deists’ watchmaker God—but his philosophy was strongly consonant with Deist principles.

Locke believed that the autonomous individual, born as a blank slate, with no innate nature, is the fundamental unit of society. The purpose of the government, according to Locke, is not to pursue virtue but rather to establish and guard a social order under which individuals can exercise their will within reason. Government exists to secure the rights of these individuals to life, liberty, and property. The authors of the Declaration of Independence changed this formulation to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” a phrase every American schoolchild learns in his civic catechism.

The U.S. Constitution, a Lockean document, privatizes religion, separating it from the state. Every American schoolchild learns to consider this a blessing, and perhaps it is. But segregating the sacred from the secular in this way profoundly shaped the American religious consciousness.

For all the good that religious tolerance undoubtedly brought to a young country with a diverse and contentious population of Protestant sectarians and a Catholic minority, it also laid the groundwork for excluding religion from the public square by making it a matter of private, individual choice. In the American order, the state’s role is simply to act as a referee among individuals and factions. The government has no ultimate conception of the good, and it regards its own role as limited to protecting the rights of individuals.

When a society is thoroughly Christian, this is an ingenious way to keep the peace and allow for general flourishing. But from the Christian point of view, Enlightenment liberalism contained the seeds of Christianity’s undoing.

In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked:

We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.7

Adams understood that liberty under the Constitution could only work if the people were virtuous, restraining their passions and directing them toward the good—as defined, presumably, by Adams’s rationalistic religious belief. Fortunately, having gone through the First Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, America was strongly Evangelical, and citizens had a strong shared idea of the Good and a shared definition of virtue. Unfortunately, this would not last.

Democracy, Capitalism, Romanticism: The Calamitous Nineteenth Century

In the middle of the eighteenth century, new technological breakthroughs began to give man unprecedented power over nature. This led to an explosion in manufacturing and commerce, which brought revolutionary changes to society. The socially stable way of life based on farming and crafts came to an end. Peasants moved en masse to cities, where they became workers in the new factories. The social hierarchies of the traditional family and village began to dissolve.

The same was true in politics. The American Revolution in 1776 overthrew monarchy and established a constitutional republic. The far bloodier French Revolution of 1789 was much more radical, attempting near-totalitarian refashioning of French society in the name of republicanism. Its terror ended in the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, who restored order, but the violence unleashed by the revolution and its ideals rocked Europe for the rest of the century. It shook monarchies and established orders, using the ideals of liberty and democracy to batter older authoritarian structures.

Around the same time, artists and intellectuals began to rebel against Enlightenment reason and the effects of the Industrial Revolution. The Romantics, as they were called, found many aspects of the new rationalist, mechanized society distasteful but had no interest in returning to the Christian world. They prized emotion, individuality, nature, and personal freedom.

They advocated an ideal of the heroic, creative individual, one who rejects the strictures of society, one who follows his feelings and intuitions. For the Romantics, meaning and release from the ugliness of modern society was to be found in art, nature, and culture. Theirs was a primitivist reaction against the cold rationalism of the preceding age.

Though a man of the Enlightenment era, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) became the father of Romanticism. Rousseau advanced the idea that man is born naturally good but is corrupted by society. From Rousseau came the modern notion that the freer a society is, the more virtuous it is. The people, in expressing the “general will,” are always right.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat traveling through America in 1831–32, observed Rousseau’s egalitarian ideals in practice. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville concluded that democracy was the future of Europe, but observed that with its drive for equality, which entailed making standards relative to the majority’s will, democracy risked eliminating the virtues that made self-rule possible. Democracies will succeed only if “mediating institutions,” including the churches, thrive.

In the nineteenth century, intellectual elites understood that the world around them was quickly fragmenting. “All that is solid melts into air,” said Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848), which accurately observed that the Industrial Revolution had destroyed old certainties. Writing a generation after Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche understood natural selection to mean that there is no divine plan guiding man’s development. It is random, based on the survival of the fittest. Nietzsche drew on Darwin to formulate a philosophy extolling strength and the individual will.

“God is dead, and we have killed him,” said Nietzsche, stating a blunt truth about the West’s nascent atheism. Matthew Arnold captured the spirit of the age in these lines from his 1867 poem Dover Beach:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Despite the disillusionment of artists, philosophers, and other culture producers, the nineteenth century was a time of great religious fervor in England and America. The Victorian era in England stretched from 1837 until the turn of the twentieth century and featured a popular Christianity that was muscular, moralistic, and disciplined. It was notably civic-minded, with a strong emphasis on social reform. This reformist Evangelicalism spread to the United States, sparking the Third Great Awakening, which brought explosive growth in Protestant churches and laid the groundwork for the Social Gospel movement. Rising European immigration brought Catholics pouring into American cities by the hundreds of thousands.

The important changes, though, took place among the cultural elites, who continued to shed any semblance of traditional Christianity. In America, from 1870 through 1930, these elites worked what sociologist Christian Smith terms a “secular revolution.” They harnessed the energy and tumult of industrialization to remake society along broadly “progressive” lines.

The effects of this progressive movement on American religious life were vast. It began the long liberalization of Mainline Protestantism by infusing it with a passion for social reform, over and against personal piety and evangelizing. Progressives turfed the Protestant religious establishment out of universities and other leading cultural institutions. It pushed religion to the margins of public life, advocating science as the primary source of society’s values and as a guide to social change. Within Christianity, it replaced the religious model of the human person with a psychological model centered on the Self. And progressives’ political ardor for greater democracy and egalitarianism found expression in church life by eroding the authority of the clergy and Scripture.

The twentieth century arrived amid a wave of optimism about the West’s future. It was a time of hope and faith in progress. The dream came to a catastrophic end in 1914, with the outbreak of the deadliest war the world had ever seen.

The Triumph of Eros

The mass savagery of World War I, four years of grinding combat that consumed the lives of seventeen million soldiers and civilians, shattered European ideals and dealt a mortal blow to what remained of Christendom. The war’s aftermath accelerated the abandonment of traditional sources of cultural authority. Sexual morality loosened. New styles of art and literature arose, making a conscious and definitive break with the discredited values of the prewar world.

Western civilization had been abandoning Christianity for quite some time, but it still had a sense of progress and purpose to unify it and to give its people direction and order to their lives. None of that progress—scientific, technological, economic, political, or social—prevented Europe from turning itself into a charnel house.

This was the period in which the West moved from what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “solid modernity”—a period of social change that was still fairly predictable and manageable—to “liquid modernity,” our present condition, in which change is so rapid that no social institutions have time to solidify.8

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, found his true genius not as a scientist but as a quasi-religious figure who discerned and proclaimed the Self as a deity to replace the Christian religion. Yet Freud’s immense cultural authority depended on his role as an icon of science. Among secularized elites, who disseminated Freud’s views widely through mass media, Freud’s vision had the force of revelation precisely because elites believed it to be scientific.

To Freud, religion was nothing more than a man-made mechanism to cope with life and to manage instincts that, if allowed to run free, would make civilization impossible. Western man had lost God, and with that a sense that there was a higher authority to give life ultimate meaning. But man had to get on with life somehow.

Freud’s answer was to replace religion with psychology. In his therapeutic vision, we should stop the fruitless searching for a nonexistent source of meaning and instead seek self-fulfillment. The pursuit of happiness was not a quest for unity with God, or sacrificial dedication to a cause greater than oneself but rather a search to satisfy the Self.

In the past, a person looked outside himself to learn what he was to do with his life. But in modernity, when we know that religion and all claims to transcendent values are an illusion, we must look into ourselves for the secret to our own well-being. Psychology did not necessarily intend to change a man’s character, as in the old Christian therapies of repentance as a step toward conforming to God’s will, but rather to help that man become comfortable with who he is.

Sociologist Philip Rieff, the great interpreter of Freud, described the shift in Western consciousness like this: “Religious man was born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased.”9

The 1960s were the decade in which Psychological Man came fully into his own. In that decade, the freedom of the individual to fulfill his own desires became our cultural lodestar, and the rapid falling away of American morality from its Christian ideal began as a result. Despite a conservative backlash in the 1980s, Psychological Man won decisively and now owns the culture—including most churches—as surely as the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, and other conquering peoples owned the remains of the Western Roman Empire.

In 1966, at the beginning of this new age, Rieff published a study called The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, a book that still stuns with its prescience. In it Rieff, an unbeliever, argued that the West, amid unprecedented liberty and prosperity, was going through a profound cultural revolution. It had not become atheist, but it had spiritualized desire and embraced a secular “gospel of self-fulfillment.”

Most people understood that Western culture had been slowly moving away from Christianity since the Enlightenment, but Rieff said the process had gone much farther than most people realized.

In Rieff’s theory of culture, a culture is defined by what it forbids. Each culture has its own “order of therapy”—a system that teaches its members what is permitted within its bounds and gives them sanctioned ways to let off the pressure of living by the community’s rules, which are traditionally rooted in religion. Moreover, the asceticism in a culture—that is, the ideal of self-denial—cannot be an end in itself, because that would destroy a culture. Rather, it must be a “positive asceticism” that links the individual negating his own particular desires to the achievement of a higher, positive, life-affirming goal.

The main thing that helps a culture survive, Rieff wrote, is “the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood.” A culture begins to die, he went on, “when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.”

In other words, the Judeo-Christian culture of the West was dying because it no longer deeply believed in Christian sacred order, with its “thou shalt nots,” and it had no way of agreeing on the “thou shalt nots” that every culture must have to restrain individual passions and direct them to socially beneficial ends. What made our condition so revolutionary, he said, was that for the first time in history, the West was attempting to build a culture on the absence of belief in a higher order that commanded our obedience. In other words, we were creating an “anti-culture,” one that made the foundation for a stable culture impossible.

That is, instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a culture built on a cult of desire, one that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions, as we self-directed individuals choose.

“Eros must be raised to the level of a religious cult in modern society, not because we really are that obsessed with it, but because the myth of freedom demands it,” says political philosopher Stephen L. Gardner. “It is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes he affirms his ‘individuality.’ The body must be the true ‘subject’ of desire because the individual must be the author of his own desire.”10

The Romantic ideal of the self-created man finds its fulfillment in the newest vanguards of the Sexual Revolution, transgendered people. They refuse to be bound by biology and have behind them an elite movement teaching new generations that gender is whatever the choosing individual wants it to be. The advent of the birth control pill in the 1960s made it possible for mankind to extend its conquest and subjection of nature to the will to the human body itself. Transgenderism is the logical next step, after which will come the deconstruction of any obstructions, in law or in custom, to freely chosen polygamous arrangements.

Sure, there will be costs to extending the Sexual Revolution. We saw them in its first phase. The 1970s, the so-called Me Decade, was when the 1960s came to the rest of America. The divorce rate, rising in the 1960s, mushroomed in the 1970s. Abortions skyrocketed. But there was no going back. The new order found its constitutional confirmation in the Supreme Court’s 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey decision reaffirming abortion rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the pro-choice majority, explained (no doubt unintentionally) how the Sexual Revolution depends on a radical, even nihilistic, conception of freedom:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

Here is the end point of modernity: the autonomous, freely choosing individual, finding meaning in no one but himself.

Philosopher Charles Taylor describes the cultural mindset that has captured us all:

Everyone has a right to develop their own form of life, grounded on their own sense of what is really important or of value. People are called upon to be true to themselves and to seek their own self-fulfilment. What this consists of, each must, in the last instance, determine for him- or herself. No one else can or should try to dictate its content.11

Of course every age has had its morally lax people, and people who have forsaken ideals and commitments to pursue their heart’s desire. In fact, every one of us Christians is like that at times; it’s called sin. What’s distinct about the present age, says Taylor, is that “today many people feel called to do this, feel they ought to do this, feel their lives would be somehow wasted or unfulfilled if they didn’t do it.”

What is “it”? Following your own heart, no matter what society says, or the church, or anybody else. This kind of thinking is devastating to every kind of social stability but especially to the church. The church, a community that authoritatively teaches and disciples its members, cannot withstand a revolution in which each member becomes, in effect, his own pope. Churches—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—that are nothing more than a loosely bound assembly of individuals committed to finding their own “truth,” are no longer the church in any meaningful sense, because there is no shared belief.

In this sense, Christians today may think we stand in opposition to secular culture, but in truth we are as much creatures of our own time as secular people are. As Charles Taylor puts it, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” We may deny that God is dead, but to accept religious individualism and its theological support structure, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, is to declare that God may not be quite dead, but he is in hospice care and confined to the bed.

Let’s review a timeline of how the West arrived at this blasted heath of atomization, fragmentation, and unbelief.

Fourteenth century: The defeat of metaphysical realism by nominalism in medieval theological debates removed the linchpin linking the transcendent and the material worlds. In nominalism, the meaning of objects and actions in the material world depends entirely on what man assigns it. War and plague brought the medieval system crashing down.

Fifteenth century: The Renaissance dawned with a new, optimistic outlook on human potential and began shifting the West’s vision and social imagination from God to man, whom it saw as “the measure of all things.”

Sixteenth century: The Reformation broke the religious unity of Europe. In Protestant lands, it birthed an unresolvable crisis in religious authority, which over the coming centuries would cause unending schisms.

Seventeenth century: The Wars of Religion resulted in the further discrediting of religion and the founding of the modern nation-state. The Scientific Revolution struck the final blow to the organic medieval model of the cosmos, replacing it with a vision of the universe as a machine. The mind-body split proclaimed by Descartes applied this to the body. Man became alienated from the natural world.

Eighteenth century: The Enlightenment attempted to create a philosophical framework for living in and governing society absent religious reference. Reason would be the polestar of public life, with religion—considered a burden from the Dark Ages—relegated to private life. The French and American revolutions broke with the old regimes and their hierarchies and inaugurated a democratic, egalitarian age.

Nineteenth century: The success of the Industrial Revolution pulverized the agrarian way of life, uprooted masses from rural areas, and brought them into the cities. Relations among people came to be defined by money. The Romantic movement rebelled against this alienation in the name of individualism and passion. Atheism and Marxist-influenced progressive social reform spread among cultural elites.

Twentieth century: The horrors of the two world wars severely damaged faith in the gods of reason and progress and in the God of Christianity. With the growth of technology and mass consumer society, people began to pay more attention to themselves and to fulfilling their individual desires. The Sexual Revolution exalted the desiring individual as the center of the emerging social order, deposing an enfeebled Christianity as the Ostrogoths deposed the hapless last emperor of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century.

The long journey from a medieval world wracked with suffering but pregnant with meaning has delivered us to a place of once unimaginable comfort but emptied of significance and connection. The West has lost the golden thread that binds us to God, Creation, and each other. Unless we find it again, there is no hope of halting our dissolution. Indeed, it is unlikely that the West will see this lifeline for a very long time. It is not looking for it and may no longer have the capability of seeing it. We have been loosed, but we do not know how to bind.

“To light a candle is to cast a shadow,” said the writer Ursula K. Le Guin.12 The shadow of the Enlightenment’s failure to replace God with reason has engulfed the West and plunged us into a new Dark Age. There is no way through this except to push forward to the true dawn. We who still hold the golden thread loosely in our hands must seize it more tightly and cling to it for future generations, or it will be torn from our grasp.

Christians know that there is one light that the darkness can neither comprehend nor overcome, and it is that Light to Whom we must return if we are going to make it through this time of trial. This is the Light, Jesus Christ, who illuminated the monasteries of the Middle Ages and all those who gathered around them.

The Benedictines had no secret teaching. They had what they still have: the Rule, which shows how to order one’s life to be as receptive as possible to God’s grace, both individually and in community. As we await a new Saint Benedict to appear in our quite different time and place and teach us how to reweave the tapestry of our Christian lives, let’s make a pilgrimage to Benedict’s hometown and spend time with the spiritual sons of the saints, who, in defiance of all modern expectations, are living simply but abundantly, guided by the timeless teaching of the old master.