By Glen Scrivener, TGC. (Photo: Greg Jewett/Unsplash)
he future of the West depends on finding a third way. That was the message I heard twice in one week from two historians. Neither was evangelical or American. They weren’t thinking in terms of the U.S. two-party system. Yet both cast the West’s options in terms of a third way that transcends cultural binaries. Their analysis went deeper than politics. Rather, they engaged at the level of mythology: the stories we’re told of our common life that orient us morally and spiritually. These narratives are the true competitors for our affections and a third way emerges when we contend with these stories.
Future 1: Post-Christian Progressivism
On the TRIGGERnometry podcast, Konstantin Kisin asked Dominion author Tom Holland to put on his “futurist hat.” Kisin asked Holland a version of the question “Which way, Western man?” and Holland answered with three scenarios he foresees for Britain.
The first scenario is what Holland described as “post-Christian Paddingtonism.” This view, inspired by the Paddington Bear books, presents Britain at its cuddly best: welcoming the immigrant bear from Peru and celebrating the triumph of kindness. Paddingtonism is a kind of Christian-inflected progressivism divorced from its distinctively Christian origins.
Holland likens this kind of progressivism to a spacecraft that has become airborne through the booster rockets of Christianity:
It’s like the head of the rocket has gone through the atmosphere. Everything else underneath it has been jettisoned and now it’s got the power to blast through the solar system. And all that . . . “nonsense” about the Bible and Jesus and the church . . . it’s gone. . . . We have now blasted out and we’re going forward. The secular principles—the liberal principles—are sufficiently self-evident and [they] will sustain the future evolution and development of our society for decades and centuries to come.
Future 2: Postwoke Backlash
The second scenario is a strong reaction against Paddingtonism. Holland explains,
Another option which the history of the 20th century suggests is that the default assumption among humans is that strength and might is right. Power does have a glamor and this is what Nietzsche predicted. He said when Christianity goes there will be this great convulsion and . . . terrifying powers will emerge. And of course [Nietzsche] was right because they emerged in the form of fascism. And fascism and Nazism cast such a shadow over us that we’ve lived in their shadow. . . .