Christianity and secular radicalism

There are right-wing as well as left-wing opponents of Christianity. Right-wing opponents—exemplified by the European New Right—blame Christianity for the universalism and radical egalitarianism they believe are destroying the West.

Even if it is those things that are to blame for the current state of the West, the complaint is misplaced. Europeans have been looking for rational universal principles equally applicable to all since the pre-Socratics, and composing utopias since Plato. It has in fact been part of the role of Christianity in European civilization to reconcile that native rationalistic and universalizing tendency with an appreciation for the value of particular irreplaceable concrete things.

Christianity does not flatten things out and make them all conform to one abstract schema. The meaning of the doctrines of Creation and Incarnation, after all, is that God made the here-and-now in all its particularity, called it good, and became physically present in it. Without some such doctrines to limit its inherent universalizing tendencies, it’s unlikely that Europe can avoid utopianism and the destruction of its inherited societies and peoples in the name of abstract idealism or the needs of power. The wars of the last century and the present EU suggest that getting rid of Christianity has only made European secular utopianism more destructive. Why think that’s a coincidence?

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