Only a forceful reinvigoration of Christianity stands a chance against the pretender faiths of our time.
Only a forceful reinvigoration of Christianity stands a chance against the pretender faiths of our time.
T he Easter season is an apt time to revisit the Acts of the Apostles, the New Testament chronicle of the early actions of Jesus’s followers after His resurrection. A striking passage from Acts finds the Apostle Paul — once a persecutor of Christ’s followers, now their fervent advocate — in Athens, the wellspring of classical antiquity. Paul is brought to preach in the Areopagus, for centuries the center of civic life in the city. He describes God by quoting a Greek poet — “in him we live and move and have our being” — and professes the truth of the Resurrection. For this, he is mocked by some, believed by others, with still more left wanting further explanation.
Much has changed since then. A small band of put-upon Christians outlasted the empire in which they emerged — and many other empires besides. Yet in the West today, Christians can, in some ways, find much to relate to in Paul’s circumstances. Over the past few decades, Christianity has both retreated from the public square and from mass culture and been pushed from them. Its once-venerable pillars in this country have atrophied. Catholics continue to disaffiliate, and many Protestant denominations can barely be distinguished from unbelief. “The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God,” Whittaker Chambers, an early editor at National Review, wrote in Witness in 1952. William F. Buckley Jr. believed that Chambers was susceptible to “Spenglerian gloom.” But, on that score, things since then have undoubtedly gotten worse in the West.
It is said that nature abhors a vacuum; man’s soul abhors it even more. Thus, into this spiritual vacuum have poured all manner of pretender faiths. It is impossible to understand the rise of “wokeness,” the totalistic vanguard of the modern Left, otherwise. Then there is “vitalism.” As defined by John Ehrett in American Reformer, it is
a call for the deepest possible return of all: a breaking of the fetters of secular liberalism and Judaism and Christianity alike, a recovery of a more elemental way of being-in-the-world. The nostalgia of neo-vitalism is for humanity’s most ancient days: for blood and war and shamans and the fierce exultation of the kill.
The most prominent exponent of vitalism today is Costin Alamariu, a Romanian political-science Ph.D. (Yale), who goes by the moniker “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP). As BAP, he is the author of Bronze Age Mindset, an intentionally provocative, discursive, and ungrammatical “exhortation” outlining his thought. In two previous essays, one in the Daily Beast and one in National Review, I described the work, attempted to explain the origin and nature of its popularity, and assessed it critically.
What should we make of Alamariu and the vitalists? Ehrett’s answer seems to be: take them seriously. Alas, in his view, “traditional” (his quotation marks) conservatives have failed at this task. Including me: Linking to and citing one (though not the other) of my essays on this topic, Ehrett labels it “decidedly mediocre” and “banal” because I do not take Alamariu’s vitalist claims “seriously in the first place, except as heresies to be driven from the fold.” Ehrett would have readers believe I am some milquetoast guardian of the status quo known as the “liberal-democratic order.”
He should read me more closely. In the National Review article he cites, I concede that modern society suppresses “the authentic expression of masculine virtue” and that conservatism has failed in many respects. In my Daily Beast article, which Ehrett curiously does not cite, I similarly faulted the Left for its suppression of the same, as well as for its routine abuse of accusations of racism and sexism and its longtime campaign to drive Christianity from the public square. All of these trends laid the groundwork for something like vitalism to flourish; in the lattermost case, especially, “for a left that has long disdained the influence of Christianity on the right’s politics, Alamariu is the ne plus ultra of the need to be careful what you wish for.” And I called for “a positive and distinctly American vision of a free and virtuous society that mollifies young right-wing discontent” — not some half-hearted rearguard action defending the way things are now. I am interested in something far deeper and more meaningful than defending “liberal democracy,” at least not in that term’s modern, shallow connotation.
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Ehrett might appear to be on more solid ground in his contention that I take for granted things that my antagonists reject. “What good is a critique that circularly assumes its own normative values — theological commitments, principles of movement conservatism, or whatever else — and complains that those values aren’t attained?” he writes. Yet concerning the first, Ehrett does the same, but elliptically and unconvincingly. And he offers nothing concerning the second.
In his attempt to engage the vitalist challenge “on its own terms,” Ehrett proceeds to Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he calls the vitalists’ “leading light.” He decides vitalism must be answered on “the terms of human life.” That is: “What would it mean to pursue such a life, such a return, such a transcendence of the mundane?” It is his belief that this is a literary question and that it requires a literary answer. He turns to two books: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein. His most relevant conclusions from these analyses are (from the former) that “the fierce exultation of premodern days cannot be reclaimed through a forgetfulness of what happened after, when a transcendental moral order was discovered,” and (from the latter) that “awareness of mortality, of the brute finitude of time” can never be “unthought.”
It is, by Ehrett’s reckoning, impossible to “return” to the pagan past longed for by Alamariu and other vitalists because it is impossible to reconstruct anything as it once was; men are conditioned by the present, the moment they inhabit. Ehrett quotes Hans-Georg Gadamer, a student of Martin Heidegger, on what Gadamer called the “historicity of our being.” Whatever one’s flights of historical fantasy, it is impossible, Gadamer argued, to “forget one’s worldview and language-view.” That impossibility makes any kind of restoration “futile,” because “what is reconstructed, a life brought back from the lost past, is not the original.” Thus, for Ehrett, “there can be a refusal” of one’s present tradition, “but never a forgetting.”
This insight is most relevant, for Ehrett’s purposes, for Judeo-Christianity, which provides the superstructure of the modern world. “One can never unthink the modernity, and the Jewish-Christian tradition that undergirds it, from which one’s quest begins,” he writes. Thinking himself to have successfully historicized the Bronze Age Mindset out of existence, Ehrett concludes:
A great shadow falls over the new vitalism, in which the twin notions of guilt and mortality coincide, these biblical truths that have been passed down through the Jewish and Christian tradition that first rendered the ancient thought-worlds questionable. Tartt and Bellow, if they show nothing else, drive home that truth with penetrating force.
The vitalists may rage, but they cannot escape the snare. After the interruption of the cross of Jesus Christ, there can no longer be a Bronze Age Mindset. Not anymore.
Thus does Ehrett, along a circuitous path, assume some of the very foundations he accuses me of taking for granted. So, if our differences are merely rhetorical, then it seems fair to assess the merits of his approach.
It seems a flimsy foundation from which to call vitalists to something better. Might they not have greater success as the cultural inheritance of Christianity continues to atrophy? Will but a diluted memory of Christianity manage to guilt those who reject it back into its fold? I have less confidence in this than Ehrett does. Could not Christianity itself, even if — as I hold it to be — true, suffer the kind of diminution that makes its cachet not widespread but niche? If Gadamer’s insights apply to an irretrievable past, could they not also apply to the once-Christian past of a post-Christian future?
Such a fate, which could await us if we assume that Christianity cannot fade from its place in our culture, is an ominous prospect, especially when one considers, as Miles Smith recently argued, that Christianity “was very much the source of our particular American civic virtue.” It is not enough, therefore, to rely on the accumulated capital of our civilization, which is being drawn down by liberalism itself. Nothing but a forceful reinvigoration of Christianity will do.
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Of the many ways this can be achieved, the pro-life witness of Christianity is among the most prominent. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, the great victory of the pro-life cause, is in danger of becoming a mere prelude to defeat. In too many places, at the state level, pro-lifers are being out-funded, out-messaged, out-organized, and, as a consequence of the previous three, outvoted by a Left that treats abortion in a manner the Canaanites would have recognized.
And what has been the response of certain “vitalists” to this? To heap scorn on the pro-life cause. Recently, one of their number noted that on a pro-life website the image of a black baby accompanied an article announcing that abortions have drastically decreased in several states with bans. “Interesting photograph,” he wrote. “Catholic bros are you sure this is what you want?” Following the cavalcade of affirmative retorts to this, Alamariu went on a tirade whose vitriol rivaled, even surpassed, anything he has issued against the Left (with some shopworn Malthusianism thrown in for good measure). He accused “the religious Conservative Intralexuals and Activists — the Pharisee faction” — of straining to appear “antiracist . . . for the left.” He called them “religioncucks” whose movement is distinct from “the real right wing awakening of around ten years ago, which is scientific, nonreligious, aware of the primacy of biology, and understands the danger of the Global South” — i.e., its supposedly “inevitable” overpopulation threatening or otherwise affecting Western nations.
By contrast, religious conservatives are “totally unprepared” to deal with this “problem” by virtue of being hamstrung by the belief that “all life is holy.” Alamariu gave us a taste of his ideal just before these broadsides, when he praised as the source of ancient Greek society’s strength “its attention to citizen quality not quantity, to limiting numbers, and to eugenics.” The “superfluous billions” of modernity, on the other hand, “have no future, their lines will disappear.” The above reference to eugenics is characteristic for Alamariu, who has fantasized about rebreeding “the original Aryan race, or as close an approximation as possible, through some kind of a Platonic Lebensborn program.”
As is the anti-Christianity. He finds Christianity (and Judaism) guilty of “suppressing the natural spirit of man,” and believes that the former “may have begun as the same faith that originated Buddhism, or perhaps Zoroastrianism” and that “its central figures, such as Saint Augustine, were probably made up.” It’s not surprising that a pagan would try to erase Augustine from existence, as he had the pagans’ number, condemning their “stupid and monstrous idols” and “impure and obscene plays.” The mocking of “the Pharisee faction” also does not surprise. “Phariseeism” is in Bronze Age Mindset the preferred term of belittlement for morality; its author counsels readers (at least those who can handle it) instead “to descend into a floating world of complete vice.” The only thing that might surprise a reader of Bronze Age Mindset is that Alamariu has gotten so incensed by the pro-life cause that he has discarded his counsel that “offending Christians in political movements is stupid, when they’re one of the last bastions against a common enemy.”
By noting all of this, I am, Ehrett might say, once again simply trying to drive heresies from the fold. But what would he do? Take this blatant challenge to Christianity lying down? I am not so inclined. He faults my earlier critique as “merely a bleat of protest against a tradition” not my own. Can he manage so much as a “bahhh”?
But fine: Let’s leave Christianity aside for a moment. Might we wonder about a “vitalism” that ranges itself in opposition to life (in Latin: vita)? It seems curiously focused not on life as a principle but on the idea that certain lives are inherently better than others. As I have noted, “at the root of Alamariu’s worldview is a dark vision of the future in which his followers, whom he describes as ‘superior specimens’ in need of ‘space,’ ‘wipe away’ our ‘corrupt civilization,’ and unleash their vengeance upon the ‘lower types of mankind,’ or ‘humancockroach’ who have repressed them.” For further clarity, let’s quote Alamariu’s vision of “true justice” in full:
the zoos opened, predators unleashed by the dozens, hundreds . . . four thousand hungry wolves rampaging on streets of these hive cities, elephants and bison stampeding, the buildings smashed to pieces, the cries of the human bug shearing through the streets as the lord of beasts returns.
Woe betide those “vitae” who do not accord with such schemes. They would undoubtedly fall victim to the depredations of the so-called vitalists in their desired future, just as they are considered apparently unworthy of life in the present.
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Ehrett is right about one thing, however: It’s hard truly to escape the Judeo-Christian framework. But the possibility of sin would be an important part of even an attenuated version of that framework. And the Bronze Age Mindset demonstrates one of the clearest sins imaginable. Alamariu most succinctly defines it as the desire “to be worshiped as a god!” In this sense, it is identical to what Chambers, in Witness, identified as the central conceit of the communism from which he believed God delivered him: “It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind.”
To worship oneself as a god is an invitation not to vitalism but to onanism: to selfishness and to self-indulgence. It is, at best, a superficiality of life well lived and, at worst, a cruel, sterile mockery. In which context it is of interest to note not just Alamariu’s condemnation, in Bronze Age Mindset, of women as a malign force who “drain” men of their “vital essence,” but also his criticism of the female form as “undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged” and fundamentally “unaesthetic.” Not exactly “male and female he created them.”
On the political dimensions of vitalism, Ehrett is significantly silent. For all their masculine pretensions, the vitalists have effected a separation of their version of the contemplative life from the virtuous life. This is the context in which to consider, for example, Alamariu’s view that a family is “the end of a man” and limits his ability to serve the “higher cause” to which he calls readers in Bronze Age Mindset. Whatever that higher cause is, it seems to have little to do with the manful work of living virtuously in the world today.
If I cannot help but to return to the Christian worldview in my attempt to respond to vitalism, it is not simply because I am trapped in its snare. It is also because the two things are incompatible — unless the Christianity one offers in its stead is the historicist, lukewarm variety that Ehrett seems content to rely on. Such a Christianity bears more resemblance to the zeitgeist that Whittaker Chambers believed had let communism prosper. Though it may not have been communist itself, it was “so dazzled by the logic of the materialist interpretation of history, politics and economics” that it could not grasp the only alternative: faith in God.
Even if this milquetoast Christianity managed, just barely, to overcome materialism, it would run the risk of transforming into what N. S. Lyon describes as “only a ‘Christianity of Care’—i.e. a wholly feminine Christianity.” Such a Christianity would not only falter before the woke pretender faith of our day; it would also find no appeal among anyone tempted by vitalism. More good will come of the drawing of clear lines than of weakly condescending to paganism of any variety. If that leaves Christians, in an increasingly pagan age, once again in the position of Paul, so be it; Easter reminds us that the Resurrection remains true — even if the work of revitalizing Christianity today might require an approach different from the one Paul took in the Areopagus, with an emphasis not only on the truth of the Christian faith but also on its muscular application.
Today, that will require active, virtuous living, in both the private and public spheres, against modern paganism. An example from early Christian history shows what that meant in the past. In the late 4th century A.D., not long after the Roman emperor Julian attempted to suppress Christianity, a group of Christians gathered in the Serapeum, a pagan temple in Alexandria, to reassert their faith. In this temple’s center stood a statue of a god holding a three-headed serpent. Damaging this statue, it was said, would return the universe to primordial chaos.
I leave it to Senator Josh Hawley to relate what happened next:
One soldier stepped forward carrying an axe. All we really know about him is what the historian Rufinus tells us, that “he was better protected by faith than he was by his weapon.” But at that moment, this man made a choice to challenge the powers and principalities of his age. . . . He climbed a ladder to the top of the statue, lifted his battle-ax, and with all his might, drove it home. Onlookers reported that as the blow fell, the god’s jaw broke away, and as it did thousands of rats came surging out of its rotten insides.
What we need today is another — doubtless very different — version of this. Not a lukewarm Christianity. And not a “Bronze Age Mindset.”