Christianity and existential freedom

The ‘quiet revival’ throws into relief the strangeness of post-Christian liberalism

Near the beginning of CS Lewis’s science fiction novel, Perelandra, the narrator has agreed to help a friend who is mixed up in a complicated story involving space travel and demonic, alien beings. As he is walking to this friend’s house, he has a dread of getting drawn into the story himself.

“I suppose everyone knows this feeling of getting ‘drawn in’ – the moment at which a man realises that what had seemed mere speculations are at the point of landing him in the Communist Party or the Christian Church – the sense that a door has just slammed and left him on the inside.”

Given that most of Lewis’ admirers today are American conservatives, I wonder what they make of this passage: ‘the Communist Party?!’ But as someone who was attracted to communism as a young man, I believe I know exactly what Lewis had in mind, and how it might apply to the church. It’s that vague, slightly unpleasant suspicion that these people might be right. And if they’re right, I might have to do something about it. In his memoir, Lewis described himself immediately after becoming a Christian as ‘the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England’.

Teampall Mholuaidh (St Moluag’s Church), Lewis, Scotland

In the early part of the 20^th century, many idealistic young people in Britain were drawn, unhappily or otherwise, to the futuristic promise of communism or to the other-worldly call of the church. And, by then, ‘becoming a Christian’ was perhaps no more natural a step than becoming a communist, especially for someone of Lewis’ class and temperament. Hence, the feeling of being drawn into something on the other side of a door one need not even have gone through.

Peering into the wardrobe

Very conventional 21^st century wisdom has it that both communism and Christianity have been roundly discredited. And what still passes for communism today is not at all like what attracted me thirty-odd years ago, when – for the blink of an eye – the demise of the Soviet Union made something called ‘real communism’ seem to some of us more rather than less plausible. But Christianity has a much longer history of decline and backsliding, resurgence, rejection, revival and ridicule. If Christianity is true, God seems to like it that way.

Over the past century, Christianity has become even more optional than it was in Lewis’ day. Perhaps for the first time, in the 20^st century West it became possible to go through life as an atheist without ever really thinking about it. That’s not to say atheists are not thoughtful, but it’s a long time since it took intellectual courage to come out as one. By contrast, for some time now, becoming a Christian has meant not only believing something most people in our society do not, but believing something that respectable opinion sees as a relic of the past. A little knowledge of Christianity acquired in the form of children’s stories even serves as a kind of immunisation against mature belief in adulthood.

So, if there is indeed a ‘quiet revival’ today, people aren’t wandering through the door without thinking about it. Like Lewis, they are driven by their own speculations, their suspicion that there is something there. What is it? When you take away the baggage of heritage and tradition, what does anyone see in Christianity? What did they see before all that?

My novel, The Pictish Princess, is set in 8^th century Scotland partly because I’m fascinated by the other end of the story. By then Christianity was more or less established – this is about a century and a half after Columba – but it was still relatively new. Certainly, it was not anything like national heritage; neither Scotland nor England existed as nations. And it would have coexisted at least with a folk memory of the old religion, whatever that was. (In the novel, I speculate shamelessly.)

In that respect, it might have been similar to Christianity in parts of modern Africa, rubbing shoulders with animism, or certainly the memory of animism. Christians sometimes worry about the faith being corrupted through syncretism, unduly influenced by traditional beliefs. But there is another side to this. I wonder if Christianity is not sharpened by proximity to such beliefs. Certainly, the dynamics will be very different from those operating in the post-Christian, secular West.

For a start, few people in Africa have any trouble believing in the supernatural. More provocatively, just about everyone in Africa knows there is a supernatural realm. The question is how to stand in right relationship to it. Christianity and Islam stand out by being monotheistic, but an intuition of something like a supreme being is often found even in what we think of as polytheism or paganism. So, the existence or otherwise of God is not a major point of contention. And if you’re not hung up on that, you are in a much better position to recognise what really makes Christianity different: it’s the claim that the supreme being took human form and died to put us in right relationship with himself.

The gospel as liberation

That means Christianity is not about placating the gods or earning God’s approval; the emphasis is on gratitude rather than supplication. Christians are commanded to love God and their neighbour, but what this means is not spelled out or enumerated as it is in Judaism or Islam. (Jesus’ injunction to forgive one’s brother ‘seventy times seven times’ is surely not meant precisely.) It is left to ‘good faith’ in something like the existentialist sense. Of course, the Ten Commandments still apply, and various churches make more prescriptive demands, but none would claim that obedience earns salvation. Christianity teaches that Jesus did the saving, setting Christians free to obey joyfully rather than fearfully (at least in theory).

The result is an historically unprecedented level of existential freedom. And a dizzying sense of liberation surely underpins much of what we might call Christian civilisation: from soaring cathedrals and cantatas to the demand for political equality and self-government. It is also no coincidence that it is within Christian civilisation that non-belief first began to seem plausible to so many. In retrospect, it seems a short step from ‘Jesus has set me free’ to ‘I just am free’. Indeed, atheism has been described as a Christian heresy, even if, unlike other heresies, it furiously denies its parentage.

Indeed, in the post-Christian West, the gospel has, for a long time, fallen flat. If someone comes out with the evangelical cliché, ‘Let me tell you about Jesus’, we think we’ve heard that story. But we have heard it, so to speak, from the other side of the door. On this side, existential freedom is taken for granted, and there is no need to be reconciled to God or the universe. In that sense, we are very different from those encountering Christianity as a relatively new doctrine, whether in Dark Age Europe or modern Africa. It’s wrong to imagine, as people sometimes do, that post-Christian societies are re-paganising. As CS Lewis insisted in a 1954 lecture: ‘A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce’.

I think the point is there’s a loss of innocence. Christianity changes people and societies. And in leaving it behind, those changes are not completely undone. Certainly, post-Christian liberalism is not at all like anything that existed before Christianity (or that has emerged without its influence). And I think the difference is that existential freedom, now secularised in the belief that ‘what matters is being a good person’ – but divorced from any substantive idea of what a good person is or why. To most humans who have ever lived, this would seem a very suspect idea.

For most of my lifetime, there was a background assumption that it didn’t matter because the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. That’s a phrase with Christian origins, but in its secularised form it seems to mean something like, ‘stay on the right side of history – whatever that is – and you can’t go far wrong’. It’s bound up with a belief that moral progress runs in parallel with scientific and technological progress. That belief now seems as dated as any dusty religious doctrine.

If there is indeed a quiet revival of Christianity, perhaps it’s not so much that people are being ‘drawn into’ something like CS Lewis a century ago, or at least not in the same way. Of all the explanations for increasing church attendance, the least plausible is that the churches are doing an amazing job of attracting people. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say some people have been left cold by secular society and are unable to take its ideas seriously. A door has slammed shut leaving them on the outside. And they are looking for somewhere else to go.

Pick a door

Christianity is not the only option for those unconvinced by post-Christian liberalism. Islam is an obvious one. Even if few convert to Islam from outside, that fact that new generations even in the West stick with the religion, or even double down in defiance of the secularisation thesis, has to be accounted for. The secularisation thesis assumed post-Christian liberalism would sweep all before it. But to many brought up in a more demanding religious tradition, the tilt to moral relativism does not appeal at all. It is not mere inertia that keeps them where they are.

Another option, especially appealing to the children of political liberals, is the politics of woke. As I wrote in a previous essay about the idea of woke as a religion: ‘Having lost faith in the idea of steady progress, “social justice warriors” did begin to resemble religious zealots in their determination to “call out” injustice and demand a reckoning. Lacking (or rejecting) any inherited means of overcoming oppression, the movement is far more moralistic than political.’ Unmistakably post-Christian, woke is anything but liberal.

A third option, associated with the online right, is a kind of sub-Nietzschean worship of power. This might look like the closest thing to paganism on the horizon, but there is something irredeemably kitsch about pseudo-paganism in a post-Christian culture. Conan the Barbarian did not dress up as Conan the Barbarian.

In fact, the people closest to the actual spirit of paganism are perhaps those turning to Christianity as their ancestors once did, because they find they can no longer take its legacy for granted. Of course, we should not assume all ‘seekers’ are looking for the same thing, let alone that they’ll find it. What’s clear is that they sense there is something wrong with the world to which the world does not have an answer. Who can blame them for trying doors?