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Paul Kingsnorth’s Erasmus Lecture, Revisited

Paul Kingsnorth’s Erasmus Lecture, Revisited

Last updated on: February 5, 2025 at 3:22 pm by Esther O’Reilly

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Paul Kingsnorth’s Erasmus Lecture, Revisited 2025-02-05T15:22:26-05:00 Esther O’Reilly

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Christianity is indeed not “a tool for the creation of worldly civilizations” or for “the coercive subjugation of enemies of Christ.” | Screenshot of the online lecture by the author.

The novelist and public intellectual Paul Kingsnorth has emerged from his media fast to post a response to the responses to his Erasmus lecture “Against Christian Civilization.” He was kind enough to include a link to my own criticism, among others, although some of what he’s written doesn’t seem to apply specifically to what I wrote.

I encourage people to have a look at Paul’s original essay in First Things as well as my full response piece, “Strangers and Sojourners.” I won’t rewrite that piece here, as it laid out my own thoughts pretty carefully, but at the risk of creating an infinite response loop, I will add a few reflections on reading Paul’s response to responses.

First, I noticed that the word “sojourners” comes up a few times in his post, which unintentionally chimes with the title I chose for my response. I shamelessly lifted it from the title of a novel by the obscure Catholic writer Michael O’Brien, some of whose work Paul might find interesting, particularly in its focus on the history of Canada’s native people. I think his best novel is A Cry of Stone, whose heroine is a poor Indian woman called by God to be a vagabond artist. Paul is very concerned to counteract the idea that Christianity is chiefly a means to some other end, or that we should think of it only in terms of a civilizational glue that will put everyone on the path to prosperity and self-improvement. The lives of the saints seem to tell a different story. I share this concern of Paul’s, and like him, I point to the legacy of those brothers and sisters in the faith who have demonstrated that it is possible to have nothing and yet have everything.

I also agree with Paul that it’s a fool’s errand to try to impose some sort of New Christian Order on our decadent society, even though it is good and right to agitate for good laws that at least begin to push some of the decadence back. Christianity is indeed not “a tool for the creation of worldly civilizations” or for “the coercive subjugation of enemies of Christ.” As I emphasized in my response to Paul, at the end of the day we are fundamentally strangers in a strange land, and our primary goal as Christians is not to wield power but to live our little lives as faithfully as we can. Paul highlights an Alaskan saint named Matushka Olga, whose quiet faithfulness serves as a shining example.

In criticizing Jordan Peterson’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), Kingsnorth also lists various things from the teachings of Jesus that it doesn’t seem like “responsible citizens” would do. Among other things, he lists calling out the hypocrisy of religious authorities. Now, I’m not sure how much exposure Paul has had to American evangelicalism, or low Protestantism in general. If he did, he would find a great many people who wouldn’t necessarily share his particular reading of the Sermon on the Mount but are all too happy to identify whitewashed tombs. The Episcopalian Church was for decades something like America’s established church, but it too has fallen into disarray and decadence amid plenty of mockery.

I myself am unsure where the whole ARC project thinks it’s going. It seems like a whole lot of hype ginned up around what’s essentially a glorified conference/networking event, which is how I intend to treat it when I attend there in a couple weeks. And Paul will get no disagreement from me on his observation that Jordan Peterson says a lot of words that persist in missing the point. However, unlike Paul, I maintain that he has good intentions and correctly perceives various pathologies in movements like woke and green which I know Paul perceives too. Properly stewarding the environment is a worthy goal, but the left seems to have a spectacular talent for coming up with “solutions” that only make everything worse and do precisely nothing to further actual environmental stewardship. More intelligent problem-solving in that area seems like it can only be a good thing. I look forward to hearing what some of the speakers on the ARC menu have to say here.

As I browsed through the comments on Paul’s post, I found someone making specific reference to my piece and suggesting that my lens might be “clouded” even though the piece was smartly written (thanks!) In my piece I’m pointing out that it’s hard to find a place for the great cathedrals in a philosophy that implacably labels “civilization” as a symptom of the Fall. I notice that Ohiyesa, a favorite Native American writer of Kingsnorth’s, particularly dislikes the idea of churches made from stone and wood as distinct from the cathedral of nature. The woman in Kingsnorth’s comments added the note that the rationale for building Notre Dame included various political considerations that were less than completely pious. My response is that that’s as it may be, but Notre Dame glorifies God nevertheless. Many enterprises undertaken for less than perfectly pious reasons can still bring glory to God. The Anglican Church comes to mind.

In any case, the Church is a house with many rooms, and we all labor away to the best of our ability according to our best understanding of the world and our place in it. I’m grateful for the discourse Kingsnorth has provoked, and for myself I continue laboring away with no grand plans for my own life except the fervent hope that I might attain a fraction of Matushka Olga’s virtue.

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