Tuesday Miscellany: Wars and Rumours

I sat down in my study this morning in a bit of a state, a bunch of things belligerently crashing around in my head. So, I decided to try to give them some shape. Or at least to let them out. It gets crowded and unruly in there.

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Paul Kingsnorth is quickly taking up residence in my category of “people who I’ll read anything they write and listen to anything they say.” I’m sure he’ll be delighted to learn this—it’s a very exclusive category. His 2021 article “The Cross and the Machine” is one of my favourite conversion stories ever. His path has wound through the bored religious apathy of childhood, a more determined atheism in young adulthood, a deep love of ecology and environmental activism, Zen Buddhism, Wiccan paganism, and pretty much anything else he could take for a spin.

All this gradually gave way to a cracking open to mystery, to something “out there,” something other. He recognized a deep spiritual hunger. He longed to worship. Something was calling him, but he didn’t know what or who. Eventually, Jesus just kicked down the door and invited himself in. The story is fascinating and worth reading in Kingsnorth’s own voice (see link above).

At any rate, over the last few years Kingsnorth has become one of the more eloquent and incisive cultural commentators out there (at least in my view). He is relentlessly critical of the ways in which technology and unrestrained capitalism are reshaping our world and human nature itself, turning us into programmable machines. He remains passionately committed to this wild world that God has made, to an appreciation of place and patient attention, to that which does not come to us mediated through wires and signals and screens.

And he has become a compelling apologist for Western culture and tradition, for the religious impulses and “moral bones” that underwrite it, for an approach to the world characterized by gratitude for that which is received, rather than an impulse to tear down in search of utopia.

I started listen to a recent lecture of his while breakfasting and shaving and ironing this morning. At one point he said something that stopped me in my tracks. He said,

I think of some of my elderly neighbours where I live in rural Ireland, in their eighties and nineties now, this generation that had to do everything by hand if they did it at all, and sometimes I go round and visit them and we sit and talk, and none of them talk about their “identity.” If I were to sit and try to talk about their “identity” they would have no idea what I was talking about. Because they actually have one.

I came to the conclusion that you only need to talk about your identity if you haven’t got one. And at the same time, you only have a “culture war” when you no longer have a culture.

Is Kingsnorth overstating things here? Perhaps (although I’m inclined to think not by much). But I’m definitely going to spend some time thinking about those last two sentences. Something rings pretty powerfully true there.

Those two sentences sent my mind, for some reason, off to Genesis 3, to Adam and Eve in the garden. The first humans take the forbidden fruit. They want to be “like God,” knowing good and evil apart from God. Or at least imagining that they know it. God goes looking for them, as God does. “Where are you?” he asks. Adam responds, pitifully, “I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

I’ve long interpreted this fear and shame as owing to a sudden awareness of physical vulnerability or embarrassed awareness of the human body. But maybe those first humans were also “naked” in the sense of “exposed.” They no longer knew who they were. They had to start hiding and making it up.

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Speaking of culture wars, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been at the heart of them for some time now. Her path, like Kingsnorth’s, has covered a fair bit of terrain. A refugee from Somalia, a former Dutch politician, a one-time adherent to the severe and uncompromising version of Islam preached by the Muslim Brotherhood, later a convinced atheist after 9/11 (and a much celebrated one by the New Atheists of the early 2000s!). She has never been afraid to step into the fray.

She’s also a recent convert to Christianity. Which is, well, surprising. The Egyptian intellectual Hussein Aboubakr Mansour said that “Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s announcement of embracing Christianity is one of the biggest pivotal moments culturally since 9/11.” Again, perhaps an overstatement? I don’t really know. But her conversion narrative is a fascinating one.

Unlike Kingsnorth, Ali’s embrace of Christianity doesn’t seem to be animated by a relentless spiritual hunger or a desire to worship. It seems more of a conversion to a culture than anything. Here’s how she puts it:

Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation…

We can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Well. Not exactly Charles Wesley’s “strangely warmed heart.” Can one “convert” to a cultural argument? Does a recognition and appreciation of Christianity’s role in shaping a desirable moral, cultural, and political scaffolding count as a “conversion?” Has Ali bent the knee to Jesus or Tom Holland’s Dominion here?

It’s a risky and probably misguided business parsing the stories of others and how they tell them. And Ali does say that she found “life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive.” She clearly sees in Christianity a response to deep questions of the meaning and purpose of life. To which I obviously say, “Yes and amen!” But again, as far as conversion narratives go, hers is certainly unique and fascinating and worth pondering further.

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Finally, from the culture wars to the regrettably and damnably real wars. Like many, I’ve spent the last month or so poring over all things Israel and Gaza. What can one say? My heart aches and breaks for all the needless suffering, the indiscriminate slaughter, the savagery that seems to know no limit, the grinding hopelessness of it all. I’ve read countless articles, watched videos, listened to hours of podcasts, all in search of… well, in search of what, exactly? Understanding? Fortification? Ammunition in the sad slot of the culture wars that this real war is taking?

I’ve been thinking about two things in light of my own (and many other’s) insatiable need to understand what’s going on in Israel and Gaza and to “convert” others to their viewpoint.

First, there’s Alan Jacobs reminding us that it’s not very good for our souls to be hourly tethered to the news (on Israel and Gaza or anything else):

It’s important to remember this: businesses that rely on constant online or televisual engagement — social media platforms, TV news channels, news websites — make bank from our rage. They have every incentive, whether they are aware of it or not, to inflame our passions…

“We have a responsibility to be informed!” people shout. Well, maybe… But let me waive the point, and say: If you’re reading the news several times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stimulated.

Yes, guilty as charged.

Second, and far more importantly, I’ve been pondering the words of Jesus himself. In a passage surely given to some fairly wild speculation and over-interpretation over the years, Jesus says this:

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains (Mat. 24:6-8).

Leaving aside any eschatological dimensions to this passage, it’s fascinating what Jesus doesn’t say here. He doesn’t say, There will be wars and rumours of wars and nation will rise against nation, so make sure you have your peace position ready to articulate or that the activist machine is ready to engage or to make damn sure you know whose side of the war you’re on!

What he says is, “see to it that you’re not alarmed.”

Huh.

I’m not sure what you would say, but an absence of alarm is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think about how the Christian world (left or right) is responding to wars and rumours these days.

But maybe it should. Jesus, frustratingly, doesn’t get political about the wars. He simply assumes they will always be. Nations and kingdoms will rise up against each other until the end because that’s what they have done since Adam and Even forgot who they were and since their sons started to stain the soil red. These are, Jesus incredibly says, “the beginning of the birth pains.” Something new will be born apart from our agitated and endlessly destructive efforts. We will, finally, be overruled.

Feature image source.