With the rise of the Nones and declining church attendance, cultural commentators talk about the post-Christian world. They’ve said we traded pews for podcasts, liturgy for logic, and scripture for science. Our modern liberal landscape presented an obsession with victimhood, a demand for universal human rights, and a pursuit of social justice. All of it supported by a purity culture that would rival any religious purity doctrine. Out of this context came a reaction that I talked about in That Damn Shadow.
In the past week, three separate podcasts have mentioned Tom Holland’s 2019 book, Dominion. He posits that rather than being post-Christian, the West is saturated by Christian assumptions. To Holland, the modern liberal is a Christian atheist swimming in a sea of theological concepts they no longer recognize as such.
Holland’s begins in the world of Antiquity. The gods favored the Caesar, the Achilles, the aristocrat. Pity was not a virtue. Weakness was a defect.
Then came the Scandal of the Cross. According to Holland, the Christian revolution flipped the script. By having faith in a God who died the death of a slave, culture adopted a radical new perspective. The victim embodied the divine. As Holland notes, it firmly moved the West from a Shame Culture (where external perception is everything, ) to a Guilt Culture (where the law is written on the individual heart).
A primary figure in Holland’s narrative is Friedrich Nietzsche. Holland uses Nietzsche as the model of the Honest atheist. If you kill the Christian God, you cannot logically keep Christian morality. For Nietzsche advocacy for the victim, the belief in universal human rights, the pursuit of social justice has no basis if the Christian God is dead.
Critics argue that Holland creates a binary choice: you are either a Christian or a nihilistic brute and ignores other secular thinkers like Hume or Mill who argued that one can ground morality in reason, empathy, and the social contract without needing a deity to back it up.
While Holland views modern secularism as a heresy of Christianity, A.N. Whitehead’s process thought offers a more optimistic counter-critique. And I admit I may be moving from an historical to a metaphysical perspective. However, I make this transition in light of often forgetting “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” We all have a metaphysics, we aren’t always aware of it or willing to make it explicit.
Process theologians argue that history isn’t just a lingering echo of the Cross. Instead, they see the emergence of the secular as a creative evolution. The divine lures us toward justice moving beyond the walls of the church.
In a universe where values are fundamental, we aren’t trapped in a 2,000-year-old story. We become participants in an unfolding process where truth is discovered, not just inherited. The liberal values echoing from Christianity become an expression of the values of the universe.
Does Christianity have a monopoly on these moral concepts in the West? Are we doomed to collapse if the memory of Christendom fades? Or as Process Theology suggests, if we attune to the divine lure, will we have a sturdy enough foundation to hold up the house of human rights and continue our moral evolution?