C.S. Lewis, Bronze Age Pervert, & Christian Unseriousness
Or why Lewis might have criticized hysterical online Christians more than BAP
There’s been an awful lot of Christian handwringing in recent weeks over Internet figures like Bronze Age Pervert, Zero HP Lovecraft, the Tate brothers, & their leagues of anonymous alt-right co-conspirators & followers. This comes in the wake of newly strengthened media attention on these social media-connected cohorts and their leaders. Especially Bronze Age Pervert, as one major mainstream publication after another publishes one unserious hit piece after another on the man. Like The Atlantic’s “How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right,” which has only a partial understanding of how we got where we are & no idea what the future should be.
Now, I am not, myself, a close follower of BAP & his students. I am just barely too old to appreciate their memes, their particular esoteric brand of dark humor, & their simplistic Internet-speak. Besides, as a happily married husband & father with a good job, fulfilling masculine relationships in offline life, & satisfying hobbies indoors & outdoors, I am not constantly desiring for the same kind of fulfillment many of these always-online young men need but can’t find. Of all of those guys, I think I am most sympathetic toward L0m3z, especially after he worked with editor Justin Lee to clarify “What Is the Longhouse?” in a good First Things essay. I have also been keeping an eye on the Passage Prize he runs, which aims “to revive the tradition of poetry, visual art, & fiction among the online Right” through an annual arts collection that actually pays its contributors well, better even than many of the high-profile literary publications do.
Progressives & other Lefties obviously hate the likes of BAP, so their flood of silly pretend essays about him isn’t surprising. I guess the Christian pearl-clutching shouldn’t surprise me either, but it is unfortunate that the attention usually comes from unserious Christians who refuse to look realistically at the many issues young men are facing, or it comes from well-meaning, sentimental Christians who can’t take the cultural ebbs & flows seriously. There are also, of course, the many Christians who are more enchanted by the niceness of contemporary liberals than they are by the loud-mouthed but serious conservative factions, especially those of the European varieties.
Most of the online Christians talking so negatively about the alt-right these last few weeks can’t seem to understand why guys like Bronze Age Pervert have charmed so many young men. They see BAP & others appealing to pre-Christian, Pagan values (often informed by a sort of neo-Nietzscheanism, more often than the regularly leveled accusation of neo-Nazism at least) of strength, power, preference for one’s own race, & masculinity, & when they notice this, they immediately feel that their Christian beliefs conflict. Why, they ask, are young men turning into Pagans rather than Christians? It’s a really urgent issue apparently!
It is an urgent issue. But not for the reasons progressives & Christians keep writing about. Young men keep getting turned onto BAP & others like him because they desire to live in a good society. But since American Gen Xers & their children have lost sight of what a good society means in the wake of their parents’ countercultural revolutions, young men are having to relearn it.
To have a healthy society means human beings bound together in relationships with each other where adults have & take care of children & adult children care for their elderly parents. Where adults protect the children & save them from savageness & barbarism, guiding them through the fluctuations of life & providing them with the means to flourish—to have love, spouses, procreation, friends, & meaningful work. Where both male & female children, adults, & the elderly all have a chance at contentment, purpose, & dignity. Where government, law, & leaders all share these concerns first & foremost. But BAP & his avid followers understand we do not have a healthy society.
Christian writers like Ross Douthat are prone to believe these young men ought to be turning to Christianity, & they say things like Douthat did last week on Twitter in response to the Richard Hanania outrage:
I suppose one response is to note that the last attempt to refound European civilization on the basis of classical-Teutonic heritage & eugenics led to unspeakable atrocities & the total destruction of the European heartland.
The decay & decadence of Western Christianity makes the return of right-wing Nietzscheanism inevitable. But Christians can say with some warrant that God's judgment on that project is evident already.
Or, as I keep seeing people scream online, “Oh, no! Help! The online pagan right influencer bros are coming!”
More sober & contemplative thinkers in the twentieth century saw this day approaching. Nietzsche of course. Strauss. Winston Churchill. To name a few. But here’s one thinker all Christians seem to appreciate these days, yet who, we can guess, would not have been as hysterical about the development of a coalition of Pagan-leaning young men: C.S. Lewis.
In Lewis’s essay “Is Theism Important?” from God in the Dock, Lewis wrote:
When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, “Would that she were.” For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin. The Christian & the Pagan have much more in common with one another than either has with [secular post-Christians].
In one of his collected Letters, Lewis expounded further on these thoughts:
Regarding the moral condition of our times … I think this: Older people … are always “praisers of times past.” They always think the world is worse than it was in their young days. Therefore we ought to take care lest we go wrong. But, with this proviso, certainly I feel that very grave dangers hang over us. This results from the apostasy of the great part of Europe from the Christian faith. Hence a worse state than the one we were in before we received the Faith. For no one returns from Christianity to the same state he was in before Christianity but into a worse state: the difference between a Pagan & an apostate is the difference between an unmarried woman & an adulteress. For faith perfects nature but faith lost corrupts nature. Therefore many men of our time have lost not only the supernatural light but also the natural light which Pagans possessed.
But God, who is the God of mercies, even now has not altogether cast off the human race. In younger people, although we may see much cruelty & lust, yet at the same time do we not see very many sparks of virtues which perhaps our own generation lacked? How much courage, how much concern for the poor do we see! We must not despair.
Another letter, to his friend Don Giovanni Calabria:
What you say about the present state of mankind is true: indeed it is even worse than you say. For they neglect not only the Law of Christ, but even the Law of Nature as known by the Pagans. For now they do not blush at adultery, treachery, perjury, theft, & other crimes, which I will not say Christian Doctors, but the Pagans & Barbarians have themselves denounced. They err who say: “The world is turning Pagan again.” Would that it were! The truth is, we are falling into a much worse state. Post-Christian man is not the same as pre-Christian man. He is as far removed as a virgin from a widow…. there is a great difference between a spouse-to-come & a spouse sent away.
So it seems that Lewis observed a similar hysteria in his day too, & found the fear ridiculous. His conclusion was that, if a form of Paganism were to rise, at least the Pagan has faith & beliefs & might possibly be convinced to convert those beliefs into Christianity, whereas the post-Christian person has no true religious beliefs at all & is not even open to discussing the reality of belief. We might also extrapolate this a bit & say that many Christians in the post-Christian era hold religious beliefs, but only formally, & do not hold them as a reality in their lives. They live their lives as if they are the secular post-Christians, not Christians holding every part of their existence to a Christian standard.
For those of us who are Christians but wish to take seriously the situations young men face today, we must abandon hysteria about boys reading BAP’s Bronze Age Mindset or checking out Andrew Tate & turning into Pagans. Instead, we must work toward providing the young men in our lives with the things a good society should provide them with, & which Biblical Christianity does indeed espouse.
As I said in a recent essay, we could keep failing & try to maintain a common conservative view that things are mostly getting worse so let’s just stand athwart history yelling, “Stop!” We could keep trying to recreate a supposedly better recent past (Reagan! Bush!) where we can, & otherwise impede progress where possible so we won’t run off the road quite as quickly. We could keep fighting a losing battle & accept the losses, settle for whatever scraps of the past our oppressors will let us keep.
Or we can take the Postmodern Conservative view, where we must seriously consider the truth of our situation & how to move forward, given that our current situation isn’t going away. We can aim to move beyond modernism & into a spiritual, humanistic, & realistic approach, where there are absolute realities binding the universe, human beings are the most important creation, the soul is the essence of the human being, humans have a responsibility to act virtuously, & men have duties they must live up to. Because if we as Christians do not take this approach, young men are left with the choice of either bowing to a nihilistic progressivism that doesn’t consider them important or finding their way into a new Paganism.
Really good. This is what people should be taking away from the situation, instead of trying to gloss over the reality these young men face and trying to coopt them into some kind of Trad movement where they sacrifice themselves for nothing.
You have to offer these men something, which the trads don't do. To often the trads think they can use the same sales pitch as marines, the few, the proud. But there's no actual status there, no winning.
Winning is either having a family or having a victory. All the trads offer is a sacrificial altar at which young men get to be the sacrifice.
Fine work, Ethan!
Not OT, but one step to its side: have any of you read the newer Metaxas book "Letter to the American Church"? https://www.alibris.com/Letter-to-the-American-Church/book/51660332?matches=18