Not of this World

Navigating Changing Cultural Pitfalls

Major turning points in a cultural zeitgeist don’t come around too often. Ideas that would have once been considered fringe or even scandalous ten years ago are being openly discussed and even highlighted in mainstream media. Ten years ago to earn the label of “racist” was practically a death sentence for a professional, but today more and more people are not only admitting their natural in-group preferences but even proudly display them. Not that long ago the gay lobby at the height of their power were untouchable, but today I regularly see non-anonymous writers and influencers calling the adoption of children by gay couples what it is- legalized child trafficking.

The world of 2025 is not the world of 2015.

I don’t want to be hyperbolic. I do believe we still live in crazy-world. I think there is so much excitement over the quick action of the Trump administration because our society reached a point so beyond absurdity that any change in the right direction appears as a huge victory. It’s easy to get a little carried away. In my recent essay Ode to Power invited some disagreement when I proposed that the return of political leaders enthusiastically wielding their powers is a good thing for the world in general. And while perhaps what I wrote will age poorly, at least for now I stand by the main point of that essay.

But some commenters such as

Paul Kingsnorth

raised counter points in the comments that can’t be ignored, not if we are going to make any genuine change in the world.

Lets assume for the sake of argument that the new American regime is genuine, they are truly fighting against the neoliberal cabal and are seeking to move in a new direction. Trump and Elon are trustworthy, and really represent an alternative elite coalition that will promote vaguely traditional (at least by the modern American definition) ideals.

If this is true, is it not then possible that the pendulum is going to swing so far in the opposite direction from “woke” that we end up in nothing but a new kind of dystopia? A dystopia where everything is “based”, we’re constantly “owning the libs”, and the very idea of empathy becomes something only for women and the effeminate? We laugh at the delusion of “Handmaid’s Tale” fear-mongering types, but is it entirely impossible that a dark chasm exists on the far end of the right as well as on the left?

Could idols not be made out of things that are “right-coded” such as masculinity, power, nationalism, economic growth, or “traditional values”? Is it not said that absolute power corrupts absolutely?

It would be hard to argue that this is not at least possibility. There is absolutely a way that our current story could play out where the new right-wing movement is a Trojan horse that leaves us even more spiritually bankrupt than we were in 2015. At least our current enemies are blatantly, identifiably evil. Such times have been before, and tyrants are not and never have been an odd thing to find in this world.

Certainly Christians, and for that matter all men, should be wary of power in the wrong hands.

But it cannot simply be power itself that is the problem. We can easily find many examples in history of good kings who wielded their power well. Kings and emperors that are considered great precisely because of how strongly they wielded their power. We need look no further than the lives of many saints to see this exemplified.

If there is a spectrum in the Christian life, St. Constantine perhaps represents one end while St. Anthony of Great represents the other. St. Constantine is an example not just of a Christian living in the world, but of possessing and using near absolute power in it. St. Anthony was one of the desert fathers and spent years of his life as a hermit before becoming a leader of other monks and many stories tell of his extreme ascetic accomplishments. Constantine and Anthony were contemporaries and yet lived starkly different lives. There’s even a story that the emperor once wrote to St. Anthony, who being not particularly excited by this honor, wrote back a response simply reminding Constantine to focus on the world to come more than the glories of this life.

We all fall somewhere on this spectrum, and while it is easy to see the wisdom in the approach more natural to you, it is often hard for us to appreciate those living so differently from us.

And yet the lives of the saints show us that despite the common thread of Christ, there is no one correct way to be a Christian in any given place and time. And likewise, there is no one approach to living in the world that will suit every given time and place in history. Different situations will suffer from different woes, and they will require different responses.

What we know for certain is that Christ told his disciples not to be of this world, and he promised them great struggles and terrible persecution.

If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

- John 15:19

But this teaching is hard to understand. What does it actually look like to be “not of the world”. If it means that all Christians should be hermits and monks, it would be a simple answer. But we know this must be untrue. The Orthodox Church considers both the ascetic life and the glories of Byzantium to be the heights of Christian expression on Earth. As with many things in Christianity the truth is found in paradox.

We cannot simply say the answer is either total detachment in the desert or establishing a new totalitarian Christendom, no matter how comforting either idea may seem to us. It may be impossible to determine the “correct” response from Christians towards any government at any time, because to be “against the world” will often look quote different. The Royal Path may change in many ways depending on the vices and virtues of the age you find yourself in.

The one thing we can say for certain is that Christ’s command to love God and our neighbor more than ourselves is the solution to becoming “not of this world”. This is unfortunately far too difficult for most of us to practice or even comprehend (at least speaking for myself), and so it is hard to suggest it as as practical answer.

So what to do in the present moment?

For decades (perhaps longer) the West has been run by a neo-liberal bureaucracy and a managerial elite class who wholly despise the Church and all it stands for. They have gutted the morality of the West, imposed sexual perversions on our children, and have turned native peoples into hated minorities in many of their own cities. It is clear many of them want nothing less than total domination over every human being on Earth. And so in recent years Christians and the rising dissident-right have becomes close allies against all of this.

But if the pendulum swings too far, it is entirely possible that we will see a time where a “right-wing” government hates Christians just as strongly as the previous neo-liberal establishment did. We should remember that both fascists and communists persecuted the Church in their own ways.

This is where I believe the disagreements in my earlier post arose. One group of people looking more at the present situation, and the other looking forward at a dark possible outcome of the current cultural trend. Is it good or is it dangerous to see a President throwing his weight around, and the people enthusiastically supporting him? Do we participate wholeheartedly in the anti-woke pogrom or stand naysaying on the sidelines?

The true answer is probably “neither”… and probably that both sides are right in their own way.

Frankly, I am more on the side of supporting the new dissident right, as is probably obvious. Something has to change. The world order in place ever since the end of WW2 and perhaps even earlier needs to be broken. People everywhere are desperate for an end to a world where “nothing ever happens”, a phrase used to describe the recent decades where the rule of neo-liberal tyranny seems totally unbreakable and glimpses of hope are brutally dashed.

I just had my first child. I want her to live in a world where things happen again. Where good things have at least a chance to happen, even if bad comes with it. I want anything for her other than the slow spiritual death of the banal, meaningless brand of dystopia that has been pushed on the West for far too long. I like seeing the Trump administration use its power freely and enthusiastically not due to any particular fondness for him or his cabinet specifically, but because it is freeing up the culture for other, perhaps more genuine actors to make a difference. I want a less monopolized world. Even if Trump is no savior, I truly believe what we are seeing right now is better than the alternative. With such examples in the lives of the saints such as St. Constantine and many others, I do not think we can be so disparaging of the use of power- though we should always be wary of it.

I am happy to admit that I would rather face the problem of normal tyranny than the inhuman, unnatural dystopia we’ve been living under. Maybe some will still disagree with this feeling.

And yet I will not disregard the fears of those on the other side. I do not want to see the West react so strongly against the woke-world-order that we simply trade one set of idols for another.

What I do think is to let reservations about what could be distract us from addressing the actual problems of our day is a mistake. Even if it is a possibility, an excessive swing to the right is not yet our problem. We have to fight the actual battle before worrying about the next. We have to keep up some amount of hope that things can be changed for the better, that good times can come again.

We have to flow with the times we are given. Just as saints have had to walk their own paths while contemporaries walked wholly different ones, in one era Christians will have to combat one thing, and in another will we combat another. There are an infinite number of pitfalls a civilization can fall into, and so there must also be an infinite number of ways that Christ calls us to be “not of this world”.

And if that seems like an impossibly difficult thing, I think that is because it is. The Christian mission has always been seemingly impossible. I think that may be the whole point. Defeating the world defies all logic and all the laws of nature. It is a wholly super-natural mission. Today we may need to set up kings to set the world aright, and tomorrow they may need to be overthrown again. The narrow path is a strange one.