A quick critical look at post-Christian Righteousness
I don't think we're so different after all
Western society used to be a Christian society, and now it no longer is. Christianity still exists, there are still Christian people and Christian organizations, but Christianity itself is no longer baked into the foundation of society in the way that it once was.
It used to be the case that the default, background understanding of human society was Christian. Christianity was the horizon of existence. There was no ‘outside’ Christianity to compare it to - there were the heathen Greeks and the heretics of others societies, but they were all tragic predecessors or evil outsiders. To exist was to be a creation of God, to be a part of His grand and unfathomable design.
Then the Reformation happened, followed by the Enlightenment. “Religious toleration” had to be invented after a bunch of bloody wars between the Catholics and the newly-stable Protestant countries. ‘Pure Reason’ was invented as a goal and ground of human thought, and belief in God was demoted. It used to be the case that God was something that founded all life and thought, but now God was something that could be believed in (or not) depending on whether or not rational thought supported that belief.
In Modernity Christianity exists as a choice that an individual can make or not make, a sort of lifestyle preference that makes no claims on the lifestyle preferences of other people.
As a non-Christian, I’m happy about this. I don’t want to take it for granted and see myself as enjoying some sort of historical inevitability or eternal superiority to the old ways of existing, but all the same this situation strikes me as preferable from my situated vantage point. That said, as Christianity has faded from its old position, many of its social and psychological patterns have been picked up by other belief systems. The political right very consciously wants to return to the old way of existing, where True Religion is baked into the fabric of reality and nobody questions it because questioning it is literally unthinkable. What interests me more are the patterns on the political right, especially those in Marxism and the post-Marxist Left that holds a lot of cultural sway in America today.
Marxism, like Christianity, is a story about incarnation, salvation, and apocalypse. Both systems see humanity as fallen, alienated from our true natures and in need of salvation. In Christianity, God incarnates Himself as human to overcome this spiritual alienation between humanity and God, delivering us from Sin and bringing about the end of days. We are called to cultivate a Christ-Consciousness, a transcendent awareness of our spiritual nature and conscious submission to the will of almighty God. In Marxism, the revolutionary dynamics of history incarnate themselves in the proletariat, the universal emancipatory social class. We are delivered from our alienation by destroying Capitalism, the artificial source of all human suffering. We come to see how we have let ourselves be dominated by rules that we ourselves invented and then pretended were something natural. We are called upon to cultivate a Class-Consciousness, a revolutionizing awareness of our class-system nature and deliberate liberation of the exploited working class. Once we bring this about then history will end in Communism, a utopian society where all strife and suffering has melted away.
This didn’t work out, for reasons I’ve written about elsewhere. The Soviet Union was a disaster and Capitalism evolved, both providing more for people than Marx expected and getting shored up where it fell short through the modern welfare state, so the inevitable revolution didn’t shake out.
The post-Christian structures, though, have remained.
The ‘original sin’ has shifted from ‘Capitalism’ to ‘Oppression’ in general, an amalgamation of racism, sexism, ableism, etc-ism. We all bear the stamps of this original sin and must spend our days purging ourselves of this sin as hard as we can and scolding the sin of others and condemning the modern world as founded in sin and soaked in sin to this day. All sins relate to all other sins - there are infinitely many ways to fail to fulfill the will of God, and there are infinitely many ways to enact Oppression. A professional caste of sin-identifiers has arisen - where before we had priests to raise our sin-consciousness, today we have activists to raise our oppression-consciousness. Before we went to church to be scolded for our sins, today we go to social media to watch people scold the viewer for partaking in oppression. Where before someone would declare their sins in front of the church to be seen as more holy, today we have white people calling white people white as an insult in order to be seen as more anti-racist. People still condemn themselves to gain status, people still condemn this sinful world, people still turn to a caste of sacred sin-knowers to torture them and promise relief at the same time. The utopian hope of Marxism is gone, replaced with pure disgust, pure negativity, endless despair.
I say all of this as someone who broadly aligns with and agrees with progressive ideals. I do think that social problems are real, and also that activist psychology is a part of those problems. I say that as a de-convert from the post-Christian righteousness of activism. I look back on myself from those days, as someone furious and repulsive and miserable and ineffective, and wonder what I could have done differently. Trying to understand myself from the outside, and trying to offer others like me an opportunity to understand themselves from the outside, is the best place where I know to start.