Among higher minds it is de rigueur to mock the declarations of conservatives who think the salvation of the West lies in a religious reawakening. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London in February was ridiculed in the British media for its focus on the need for a return to “Judaeo-Christian traditions”. In identifying a crisis in religion as the root of Western disorder, however, the right – not for the first time – is ahead of the game. The fundamental fact of the age is the passing of liberal humanism, whose dwindling adherents grimly hang on to their mouldering creed for fear of something worse.
Their fears are understandable. Secular liberals have always been cultural Christians. When they rejected Christian belief, they did so in the innocent certainty that Christian values would be preserved. The canonical liberal John Stuart Mill believed Christianity and his “religion of humanity” were morally equivalent, writing in Utilitarianism (1861): “In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility.” Before Mill, English liberalism – the creed of free expression defended by Milton in Areopagitica (1644) – was grounded in a Christian idea of freedom of conscience. After Mill, liberalism itself became a religion, based, as he put it in On Liberty (1859), on faith in “man as a progressive being”.
Like liberals today, Mill could not conceive that rejection of Christianity would bring a celebration of cruelty and the reinvention of slavery, as it did in Nazism. But once Christianity is rejected, what reason is there for expecting Christian ethics to survive?
In his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019), the classical historian Tom Holland showed how Western societies are “still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions”. Modern liberal values are a by-product of a movement led by a charismatic Jewish prophet that upended the values of the Greco-Roman world. With its story of the son of God broken on a cross, Christianity brought about an ethical revolution. Not the most powerful or intelligent but the lowest and most oppressed became the touchstone of morality.
Astutely, Holland recognised that woke hyper-liberalism is not an assault on Christianity but an impoverished and extreme version of it. Emptied of Jesus’s gospel of forgiveness and Augustine’s acceptance of original sin, woke is a religion of merciless punishment of anyone who refuses to bow to the latest fashion in victimhood. (In the US, woke’s affinities with Puritanism are unmistakable.) If Western civilisation is in decline, it is not because Christianity has been forsaken. Instead, the West’s founding religion has mutated into an anti-Western progressive ideology.
Consider the response to the new regime in Syria. The government of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa – otherwise known by Abu-Mohammed al-Jolani, the jihadist nom de guerre he used when affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State – announced itself with a fanfare of promises of equality and inclusion. If this was a PR operation, it worked. Western leaders such as the European Commission president, Ursula van der Leyen, have endorsed Al-Sharaa’s agenda for a unified, inclusive Syria. The likelihood of any such future must be close to zero. Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny was based on mass slaughter, industrial-scale torture and drug money. Yet not everyone welcomed its fall. For Shia Alawites such as the tyrant himself, Druze, Kurds, Christians and other groups, Assad’s secular dictatorship offered protection from death at the hands of jihadist militias. The inescapable implication of its collapse is ethnic-sectarian warfare and another round of mass killing, which is now under way.
Western liberals are irresistibly captivated by echoes of their own rhetoric, especially coming from the mouths of their enemies. An earlier generation swallowed the line that Lenin and Stalin were Fabians in a hurry and Mao a misunderstood agrarian reformer. In the days after the fall of Kabul, the Taliban presented itself as a moderate, modernising regime – an image many in the West were happy to accept. Less than four years later, the Taliban oversee a society in which women are forbidden to speak in public.
A hollowed-out Christian myth of universal redemption regularly turns Enlightenment rationalists into useful imbeciles. If history consists of irresolvable value-conflicts, there is no hope of political salvation. Tyranny is succeeded by anarchy and peace achieved through injustice and repression. Civilisation and barbarism succeed one another in an unending cycle. In pre-Christian antiquity, this was a commonplace. For post-Christian humanists, it is an intolerable truth.
The right may be correct in thinking that Western disorder is ultimately religious in origin, but it is too simple to suppose that deliverance for the liberal West can be found in a Christian revival. Some – including, if press reports are to be believed, King Charles before he became supreme governor of the Church of England – admire Eastern Orthodoxy because it is relatively untouched by wokery. It was English Protestantism that produced Milton and Locke’s classical liberalism, but the Christian churches of the 21st-century Anglosphere are strongholds of hyper-liberal moral enthusiasm. Following the resignation of Justin Welby as archbishop of Canterbury in November last year after widespread criticism of his failures in leadership, the Church of England lacks any moral identity distinguishing it from the fashions of the age. Much the same is the case for Western Christendom more generally, with the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Francis mirroring the confusion of the zeitgeist rather than offering a coherent alternative to it. Where they are not captured by hyper-liberalism, the churches are directionless. For anyone who believes the West is suffering from a civilisational malady, this kind of Christianity is a symptom of the disease not a cure for it.
In the US, in and around the Trump administration techno-futurists rub shoulders with Christian revivalists, Catholic converts such as the vice-president, JD Vance, and traditionalists such as Steve Bannon, who has returned to an anti-modern Catholicism sharply different from that of the present Pope. Sub-Nietzschean cults of manly beauty and misogyny flourish in the back offices of the White House. America is in the throes of a spiritual upheaval that will leave the country unrecognisable.
The most obvious contradiction in Maga is between oligarchical libertarianism and national populism. Whatever Bannon may say, the beneficiaries of Trump’s policies will not be the working stiffs who voted the president back into the White House. Economic failure may seal Trump’s fate. Yet there will be no reversion to liberal humanism as America’s public philosophy. Latter-day disciples of the social reformers John Dewey and Corliss Lamont are a bewildered, cognitively challenged remnant, deafened and silenced by a cacophony of strange gods.
The decline of mass secular ideologies has not dented elite faith in science. Rather, science has become a channel for millenarian religion. Elon Musk’s enterprise of colonising Mars is an eschatological project, aimed – as he has repeatedly declared – at averting human extinction. (Musk’s underlying pessimism about the human future on Earth is worth noting.) Like the cosmist movement that flourished in late-19th and early-20th century Russia – a comparable period of spiritual frenzy – he views space travel as a route to immortality for the species.
Many of the tech bros are investing in research they believe offers escape from the inevitability of biological death. This is not a goal that Christians – for whom immortality is the God-given birthright of every human being – would pursue. Techno-immortalism is the creed of a few, requiring money and resources most people will never possess. While the super-rich curate their surgically enhanced and genetically modified bodies to postpone dying, the rest eke out their brief lives in despair. The species bifurcates into two, with different and unequal destinies. It is hard to think of a prospect more at odds with the Christian message.
The tech oligarchs’ acceptance of inequality has something in common with the cod-Nietzscheanism that thrives in sections of the online American right. The Nietzsche that is in vogue is a caricature of the actual thinker. In one of his first works, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), he used the distinction between Dionysian vitality and Apollonian order to examine the decline of Western culture. He praised Ancient Greek drama for making the most terrible experiences into life-affirming art, which veiled the truth without denying it. The modern West was committed to “Socratism” – the project of replacing myth with an Apollonian life based on reason. The outcome would be an age starved of meaning, which would inevitably turn to new myths.
It was a prescient observation. Nietzsche himself found the tragic vision of pagan religion unendurable, using his later work to promote the absurd Übermensch, a hipsterish version of which has been reborn in the online fever-swamps.
Trump’s America illustrates Nietzsche’s diagnosis. The “singularity” hypothesis – the point at which advances in different sciences will come together in an explosive convergence, with technology overtaking humanity – is a materialist rendition of the history-ending rapture in Christian fundamentalism. Knowledge may indeed advance in this way, but human behaviour will not greatly change. A fragmenting global order will leave new and old weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a multitude of states, terrorist groups and apocalyptic cults. Nude sunbathing – one of the fads of the new Nietzscheans – may be tricky in the irradiated dusk of a nuclear winter. The narcissistic faux-paganism of the online right is, like liberal Christianity, a sign of decadence rather than a remedy for it.
In Europe, including Britain, the chief beneficiaries of the eclipse of humanism are Islamism and ethnic nationalism. Woke is not a sustainable successor ideology. Hyper-liberalism is still deeply embedded in our ruling institutions; but for most of its followers it is a career strategy, and the institutions – universities, quangos and the like – are unlikely to survive coming fiscal crises intact. Suppressed in the Gulf States and other Muslim-majority countries, radical Islamist movements spell the end of the British experiment in multiculturalism and French republican laïcité. Just as globalisation was supposed to spread “democratic capitalism”, mass immigration was meant to result in conversion to liberal values. The opposite is happening. In a generation or so, if current trends persist, an Ottoman-style millet system – in which different religious communities are governed by their own laws – may coexist uneasily with nationalist governments. A Europe of equal freedom for every religion, under a rule of law that applied to all, would soon be a distant memory.
At the same time, Europe could become a zone of Russian and Chinese influence. Vladimir Putin’s assertions about Russia being an integral civilisation are spurious; the reality is a ramshackle, rusting multinational empire. But in a Dionysiac age driven by unruly passions screened out from the Socratist world-view, reason is harnessed to dreams and nightmares, and Putin’s deployment of a carefully calibrated realpolitik to recreate an imaginary “Russian realm” poses an acute danger to European security. China has been systematically expanding its presence in the Balkans, Hungary, Greece and the UK, among other countries. Avoiding entanglement in unproductive wars while rapidly building up China’s military forces, Xi Jinping’s foreign policy embodies a type of rationalism containing no trace of neo-Christian sentiment.
As well as being a return to geopolitics, the ongoing global convulsion is an episode in the history of faith. Advanced thinkers treat religion as a weapon in the battle for power. It is being used in this way, as it always has been, but it is also a body of myths that enable human beings to make sense of their lives. With the decay of their myth of progress, liberal humanists have ceased to comprehend the world around them. When they say “we” can overcome its problems, they invoke a collective agency that does not exist. When they tell us there “must” be global cooperation, it is themselves they are struggling to persuade. Their “optimism of the will” is a displacement activity, while the readiness with which they embrace their enemies is a confession of exhaustion.
The irreplaceable value of Judaeo-Christian religion is that it taught its practitioners how to live with insoluble dilemmas. So, too, did pagan tragic art. Politics was not the pursuit of earthly salvation but a succession of expedients for coping with evils that cannot be eradicated. Unless the sense of reality preserved in these traditions can somehow be retrieved, the West is destined to stumble from one fantasy to another until, perhaps with relief, it surrenders to barbarism.
[See also: The magical thinking behind European unity]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025