Protected: The Upside Down World of Seminary: Spiritual Autobio 11

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Christianity is Culture is Christianity

And culture is the cultivated garden of the shared beliefs of a people. God made our first father a gardener and co-creator, and the pinnacle of our human gardening and creation is Western civilization.

Thank you Christianity.

The British poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) most succinctly described the reality of Christianity as Western civilization:

Yet there is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and that way of life is also its culture…. It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have—until recently—been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning…. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.[1]

And Christianity is just about all went, in the West.

What replaces Christianity once it’s wiped out? Well of course, the anti-civilization that will make the return of Christianity the most desirable, delicious prospect anyone could imagine.

God has not allowed so much glory and beauty to redound throughout the European continent for millennia just to let it all get flushed into non-existence. I refuse to believe it; there must be a future for a Christian Europe. I will pray and live for that future.

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[1] T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), 29, 126.