I wouldn’t much like to live in like Dar-ul-Islam, but Dar-ul-Liberalism simply doesn’t work in the most basic ways:
- Record Number of Women Childless. We aren’t reproducing.
- Trouble ahead for babies of divorce. When we do, things don’t necessarily go well.
- Unmarried America. And big business is OK with it.
Our rulers may be on Darwin’s side, but Darwin, I’m afraid, can’t return the favor. If Western man can’t restore Christendom, he’s likely to end up with the stripped-down form Pim Fortuyn objected to that caught on further East. The paradise of juvenile sex that at bottom Fortuyn stood for just isn’t in the cards as a workable society.
I disagree with how the
I disagree with how the question is formulated. It should not be “how can Western man restore Christendom,” but rather “how can Christendom restore Western man?”
Attempts to adapt to the modern world have proved ruinous for Christianity. But those pursuing a course of adaptation do have the stronger argument on one subject: change is necessary. Christianity no longer influences the modern mind as it used to. Change will come. Rather than adaptation, however, it must be structured along a course of organizing against the modern world, and also of presenting a more advanced morality than the modern view is capable of.
Also, the enemies of Christianity must be clearly identified. The modern world still generates new religions, but they are as different from medieval religions as Islam or Buddhism are different from the nature cults of more primitive ages. I would use the term ‘ideologies’ to describe modern religions. Communism certainly counts, but a better example might be the modern worship of diversity and absolute equality. The model of an authoritarian educational experience coupled with information control is no longer a workable method for preserving structures of thought. These replacement moralities, or ideologies, that we see today are powerful because modern information technology and modern media allow them to divest themselves of many of the trappings that were necessary for religions in the past, and yet still spread themselves.
I am not saying that Christianity should transform itself into a “modern religion”—that would only be a mockery. But it does need to take advantage modern methods. If modern ideologies invade the public schools, Christianity needs to find ways of invading the public schools. It needs to conquer the modern media. It needs to establish itself as a dominant way of thinking about moral problems. Any schoolchild can rationally analyze a moral question based upon on an idea such as radical equality (and every schoolchild is often forced to). This simplicity of rationalization is another way that ideas spread in modern information societies. Christianity needs to find equally powerful ways of inserting itself into the discussion.