Deacon Kyle Eller: What a Christian civilization meant and could mean

Mere Catholicism 

In this moment of history, with divisions blossoming into what increasingly feels like a clash of civilizations playing out both on a global stage and within our own society, I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s distinctive about Christian civilization. 

Let’s dispense with an objection. If you follow the news, you may have heard the term “Christian Nationalism.” As with many such terms these days, its meaning often depends on who’s using it. But sidestepping debates over the historical understanding of the First Amendment and disingenuous people using the term simply to demonize people who want to do things like outlaw abortion, more level-headed users of the term seem to have in mind individuals who want to impose some kind of authoritarian theocracy. 

What I’m talking about is not that, and in fact has about as much to do with that as the Sistine Chapel has to do with some shady televangelist. I’m talking about Christendom, the civilization that built Notre Dame and Chartres and wrote the Divine Comedy and Bach’s B Minor Mass and Macbeth, the civilization that gave us universities and hospitals and the Magna Carta and the Summa Theologica. The civilization that bequeathed to the world human rights, including the right to religious freedom. 

Both as Americans and as Catholics, we are rightly wary of imposing our beliefs on others. We make our own the words of Pope St. John Paul II: “The church proposes; she imposes nothing.” 

But sometimes we have become so imbued with relativism and indifference that we forget even to propose it. Or perhaps, in the face of people who disagree with us, we have become too cowardly to do so. 

Yet when we consider concretely what Christian civilization proposes, we have no cause for shame. We should be proud to propose these things as a gift to an unbelieving world. They have a whiff of the divine about them. 

Begin with Christian anthropology, the Christian understanding of the human person. We hold that the human person is an embodied soul, each individual, without exception, a deliberate choice of God, made good in his own image and likeness, loved all the way to the cross despite our sins and failings, and therefore bearing an unfathomable dignity, at every stage of life, whether we’re rich or poor, man or woman, no matter our skin color or cultural heritage. 

At the same time, we are inherently social creatures. We are meant to come to be within a natural family, the most basic and irreplaceable “brick” with which society is constructed, mother and father joined in lifelong marriage cooperating in God’s work of creation and given the lifelong task of loving and teaching and supporting their children, as well as each other. Through this relationship we enter a whole web of relationships — extended families and neighborhoods and towns and parishes and softball leagues and PTAs and all the rest, all the way up to countries and cultures and finally the whole human race, one extended family from which no one is excluded.  

Within this tapestry each individual’s unique gifts and talents and ways of seeing the world find their full meaning.  

There are opposing views to this vision. For instance, some believe your skin color or sex make you more or less human. Some, in a modern twist, believe they may make you an oppressor or victim. Some people believe only certain human beings have inherent dignity that demands respect. Some even believe that no human beings do.  

Should these falsehoods daunt us, prevent us from upholding human dignity or the universal brotherhood of the whole human race? I would argue that their ugliness provides ample reason to proclaim these things more boldly. 

Likewise there are those who believe the family as God has created it not only is not an essential institution which society should privilege and protect but is, in fact, a form of oppression that should be deconstructed and ultimately discarded.  

But isn’t it evident to anyone with eyes to see that these efforts have been a disaster for society, fostering not only material poverty, especially for women and children, but alienation and isolation and loneliness and distrust and despair? 

I’d argue that societies which uphold virtues like honesty and courage and humility and justice and chastity and commitment, while also recognizing human frailty and fostering mercy and reconciliation among people when we fail, are better for human flourishing than a “dictatorship of relativism.” 

I’d argue a society that pays particular attention to the poor and vulnerable is better than one that ignores them. I’d argue a society that holds even the powerful or those facing unscrupulous enemies to the moral law is better than a society where might makes right or where the ends justify the means. 

We could continue in this vein down a very long list, but you get the idea.  

Someone might object that, historically, Christendom generally did a pretty rotten job of living out those values. Maybe so. Although it’s difficult to generalize about 2,000 years of history, no Christian can be surprised at the universality of sin. 

But I’d argue that even a halfhearted and hypocritical adherence to these principles is better than their denial. A society that lives out these ideals badly is preferable to one which rejects them. 

The great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton, in 1929, wrote that the modern Western world was “living on its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom; including, of course, many truths known to pagan antiquity but crystallized in Christendom.” 

In the ensuing century that capital has been fully spent, our society no longer meaningfully Christian and often overtly hostile to that heritage. 

We should unapologetically propose, once more, a civilization founded on these principles, which are the only ones that can truly make for peace and human progress. 

Deacon Kyle Eller is editor of The Northern Cross. Reach him at [email protected].