The Future Of Progress
Consistent & passionate Protestant critiques of revolution are often hard to find (unless you want to slog through RL Dabney). The scholar Harry Van Dyke informs us, however, that there is a Dutchman swift with his words:
“We are living in a condition of permanent revolution ... revolutions are here to stay and will grow much worse in scope and intensity unless men can be persuaded to return to Christianity, to practise its precepts and to obey the Gospel in its full implications for human life and civilized society. Barring such a revival, the future would belong to socialism and communism, which on this view were but the most consistent sects of the new secular religion. To Groen, therefore, the political spectrum that presented itself to his generation offered no meaningful choice. In terms of his analysis, the ‘radical left’ was composed of fanatical believers in the godless ideology; the ‘liberal centre,’ by comparison, by warm believers who warned against excesses and preached moderation; while the ‘conservative right’ embraced all those who lacked either the insight, the prudence, or the will to break with the modern tenets yet who recoiled from the consequences whenever the ideology was practised and implemented in any consistent way. None of the shades or “nuances of secular liberalism represented a valid option for Christian citizens.” Groen called for a rejection of the entire available spectrum of political positions, calling for a “radical alternative in politics, along anti-revolutionary, Christian-historical lines.”
What is so extraordinary about this man is that the condemnation is so utter, the anathema so final, the execration so complete. And yet he is Protestant. We have managed a Lord Acton or two, but hardly anything approaching the Catholic apostles like de Maistre, apart from some semi-heretical literary figures. According to Groen van Prinsterer, one cannot be Christlike & embrace liberalism. And liberalism is now triumphant everywhere, except a few dark corners of Asia, where dark strongmen attempt to retain what is left of the remains of the day.
In our hour of greatest triumph, all across the West, the intelligent men huddle in ivory conclaves, “fumbling in the dark and flirting with desperate measures because they know anything else is hopeless” [attribution and wording goes to anonymous poster]. Philosophers like Giorgio Agamben and Karl Schmitt have explored the concept of “political emergency”, and it seems that the modern world has become practically a never-ending one, approaching Orwell’s “eternal war in Africa” which would distract the masses from their own benignantly cancerous society.
And what is the Protestant rejoinder to this? Alistair McGrath (in his latest and greatest) believes that existential and formless Third World evangelicalism is the wave of the future. The Emergent Church wants us to get tattooes tattoos and learn the ways of the streets in order to engage the culture “at point blank range”. The Catholics in America have all but become Protestant themselves. And men like RL R.L. Dabney (another prophet of “what would happen”) are relegated to the ash heap of history by those who can afford to ignore the dead. I doubt anyone has heard of Prinsterer.
Progress has radiated irradiated the world like a neutron bomb, and in the midst of it, civilized man turns upon his bed of nails in horror. To quote Adorno, “‘In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” When the devil says you’ve gone too far…
Yet America’s Church, by and large, believes still in the concepts and civil religion promulgated by our Founders, who were Enlightenment men to their core, despite their residual prejudices in favor of the faith of the fathers. Is it too much to ask from our modern Church a condemnation of Liberalism and Modernism as clear cut as Van Prinsterer’s, one which is intelligent, and does not propose to replace Satan with Molech or Baal? For that is what those who oppose conservatism to liberalism are generally doing. The leadership is promising a Third Way that retains the evangelical “core”, while the rank and file still think we can go back to the little brown Church in the wildwood, where running water and electricity are more important than what is done in the temple of God, and where manly virtue is eviscerated in favor of the “sexless vices and virtues of the meeting house” (R-Huessy).
Before one can slay a dragon, one must stand the vigil. Before one can call the thunder one must wield the lightning. Where are those who have stood the vigil? Where are those who have taken heaven by storm? What did Saul do after his blindness at Damascus? He humbled himself and went to those who feared him to beg their prayers. He was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but went to deserts in Arabia to pray and to fast and to relearn his faith. He most certainly did not clap himself on the back, fill himself with cheap optimism, and promote a third way which would harmonize Baal and Jehovah.
Richard Weaver also warned us,
This brings us to the necessity of concluding that the upholders of mere dialectic, whether they appear in this modern form or in another, are among the most subversive enemies of society and culture. They are attacking an ultimate source of cohesion in the interest of a doctrine which can issue only in nullity. It is no service to man to impugn his feeling about the world qua feeling. Feeling is the source of that healthful tension between man and what is—both objectively and subjectively. If man could be brought to believe that all feeling about the world is wrong, there would be nothing for him but collapse.
Modern Christianity has sought to unlearn what it means to “feel along the lines of the heart” this world, this man, this God. It has instead offered to give us something to occupy our private leisure time and our subconscious, which must stay very still and quite in the mechanistic, Gradgrind world of machines that makes us all “bricks in the wall” of the new pyramids of Pharoah.
In the teeth of this, cry the prophets.
Thou shalt not worship other Gods.
In the teeth of this are the words of our kings of old.
Carry the scepter like a cross, wield the cross like a sword.
In the teeth of this cry the poets.
There is something far more deeply interfused.
In the teeth of this, our Churches are endeavoring to fill the buildings and help their members cope with the modern world of liberalism by offering counseling about acceptance and love, not only of “individuals”, but of the entire matrix which has created such an aberration and sustains it. The self grows greater by denying itself, and reaching outside itself to something greater. It is in fact an ironclad rule that this will occur, and “Hecular Sub-mannism” merely makes sure this clandestine reach will be conceived of in a materialistic fashion and will be outstretched towards the mysterious “We” embodied in the massive will of the peoples expressed through democracies. It is this pinch of incense to Caesar, this offering of the infants to Molech, which our Churches have embraced.
(Dyke, 1989)
