Chantal Delsol & Christianity’s End
by Rod Dreher, The American Conservative:
Ms. Delsol’s ingenious approach is to examine the civilizational change underway in light of that last one 1,600 years ago. Christians brought what she calls a “normative inversion” to pagan Rome. That is, they prized much that the Romans held in contempt and condemned much that the Romans prized, particularly in matters related to sex and family. Today the Christian overlay on Western cultural life is being removed, revealing a lot of pagan urges that it covered up.
To state Ms. Delsol’s argument crudely, what is happening today is an undoing, but it is also a redoing. We are inverting the normative inversion. We are repaganizing.
Caldwell, summarizing Delsol, says that whatever emerges from the end of Christianity as the West’s religion will not be atheism, but something else.
So if another civilization comes to replace Christianity, it will not be a mere negation, such as atheism or nihilism. It will be a rival civilization with its own logic — or at least its own style of moralizing. It may resemble the present-day iconoclasm that French commentators refer to as le woke.
Christianity produced some hard-core moralizers, but it also contained within it ambivalence, e.g., the teaching about turning the other cheek, and loving one’s neighbor. More:
See also: Half of young people in England and Wales say they have no religion, from Evangelical Focus
The number of people who define themselves as Christians in England and Wales has fallen to 51%, a 8% decrease since the 2011 census.
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