The Prologue to Our Misery
The greatest recent event—that “Atheism is dead,” that the rejection of the gods has ceased to be believable—is even now beginning to cast its first shadows over the West. For the remnant, at least, whose eyes are strong and sensitive enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set just now. However, it may be said that the event itself is much too great, too distant, too far from the comprehension of the many, even for the news of it to be thought of as even having arrived yet, not to speak of the notion that many people might know what has really happened here, and what must collapse now that this paradigm has been undermined—all that was built upon it, leaned on it, grew into it; for example, the whole of modern Progressivism.
It began with a creeping sickness within academia in the 1960s. Christianity was the laughing stock of the intellectual world. No serious or sophisticated person believed in any sort of god. Logical positivism was ascendant: anything that could not be observed was not worth discussing. Then Alvin Plantinga showed us all that the minds of others are unobservable, and—fools that we were—we were dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the cave of positivism and into the world of the realists: there really are things out there that are real, even if we can’t observe them with all of our technological marvels. With a single publication, Plantinga had undone 200 years of philosophy; but more than that, he created a beachhead through which the Christians could reassert their presence within the Ivory Tower of academia. You can still see them there today if you know where to look.
Many have not seen this: they have not been looking, and why should they? This is not the sort of progress upon which utopia is built. Plantinga triggered a regress—no, a restart! Suddenly, academics had to take their Christian colleagues seriously again. Suddenly, Christians had grown-up responses to the challenges posed by Atheism. The New Atheists had a promising strategy in response: do not engage them. Mock them. If you cannot mock them, ignore them. This is a problem that will go away on its own. But then the New Atheism died, and she shall be the first in a very long list of casualties unless we can halt the creeping of this shadow.
There has been some progress, to be sure. For the most part, the Christians more often than not fought each other in the Culture War of the West, and American conservatism is nearly dead—or at least lost her identity—and with it, vast swaths of the Evangelical movement have turned septic. The sex scandal surrounding the Christian preacher Ravi Zacharias caused many to question the legitimacy of Christianity and her standard-bearers. The Great Apostasy among many young pastors and worship leaders was thought by many to be the final gasp of Christianity’s fight for dominance. That leaves only one problem left to solve:
The death of Atheism.
Christians nowadays are of new stock. These ones do not run away at the first sign of resistance. A Latter-Day Saint or a Jehovah’s Witness will politely move on if you express disinterest—or simply ignore them—but the Christians? They do not merely answer: they challenge. They are so bold as to use the methods of their enemies, examining an argument for any weakness, and then deconstructing the entire thing piece by piece. Philosophy—which we also thought long dead—has become a huge obstacle for opponents of Christianity. Philosophy demands that we slow down, that we carefully examine our beliefs. This is a clear barrier to progress. Every day that utopia is not realized is one day too late, and philosophy would hinder our progress still.
We thought we could make logic dependent on the content of our claims, but it would not bend. Never has there been a more rigid system of thinking. Some thought to abandon it wholesale, but that would be to betray all the efforts of the New Atheists, who prized logic and reason above all else. Progressives began to realize, slowly, too slowly, that they have painted themselves into a corner. They tried to feed the Christians mercury, not realizing how much of it they were getting on their own hands.
The Christians saw it before anyone else did, and they also knew of the wisdom of Napoleon: never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake.
The new rebel in our time is a skeptic and will not entirely trust anything, and therefore he has no loyalty and he can’t even be a revolutionary. The fact that he doubts everything, and he must doubt everything, bars his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine, and you can’t believe in a moral doctrine if all things are meaningless. The modern revolutionary doubts not only the institution that he denounces, but the doctrine of moral truth by which he denounces it. As a politician he will cry out that a war is a waste of life, yet as a philosopher he has to admit that all life is a waste of time. A Russian philosopher denounces a policeman for killing a peasant, and then in his other writings proves by the highest philosophical theory that the peasant should have killed himself. A scientist goes to a political meeting where he complains that we are treating native peoples as beasts, and then he goes to a scientific meeting where he proves that we are beasts.
In short, the modern revolutionary, being an infinite skeptic, which he must be, is always engaged in undermining his own mind. In his books on politics he attacks persons for trampling on morality, but in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on persons.
Therefore, the modern rebel has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything.
—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy