Today Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin and Chad Pecknold have a terrific essay up at The American Conservative that you should read.
There are some who have been wish-casting about the world becoming “post-Christian,” but this isn’t really possible. There’s something permanent about Christianity as a well-spring of political renewal, and as we see with the negative influence of ersatz versions of civil religion, you really need the real thing for it to work.
The authors write:
“The thoroughly anti-gnostic Augustine, moreover, viewed Catholic cultural Christianity as an elongation of the Incarnation. It was its incarnational, anti-gnostic realism about our social and political nature that lent the Christian order of Europe its radiant vitality, its longevity and strength. The sacramental imagination illumined culture with a vision of God’s active presence in time: in sacraments, in material culture, in feasting and fasting, in the structure of time itself. The result was a culture that can be inhabited and enjoyed even today.
The same couldn’t be said for deracinated, gnostic deformations of Christianity. These can’t sustain a true cultural Christianity, precisely because both the “Christianity” and the culture it engenders are immaterial, disembodied, individualistic—which is to say, perfectly suited to liberal order.”
Read the whole thing here.