The Winter of the West & The Rise of 'Civilisational Christianity'

Keep watch on this emerging trend

The Lay of the Land

Is Western civilisation in its winter season—preparing for an inevitable death? Is its demise and the resulting anxiety contributing to an uptick in spiritual and religious interest in the culture at large? How does the emerging trend of ‘civilisational Christianity’ factor into this equation?

There’s been an explosion of commentary on a seeming shift in the cultural zeitgeist that many are sensing: an unexpected and renewed openness to faith. Religion itself just might be trending again, causing many to quote Matthew Arnold’s poem about the ‘sea of faith’ and its ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,’ whose tide might just be turning. It’s been over a year since Ayaan Hirsi Ali publicly embraced Christianity, causing a buzz over her and other public intellectuals’ conversions, all stirring into what feels like a current of religious reawakening.

Personally, I have experienced this apparent shift first-hand in countless conversations here at the University of Oxford, something I’ve written about more in-depth in a forthcoming article, where I also expound on some of my own estimations of why this might be happening (i.e. the meaning crisis, a feeling of fragility and disillusionment amidst cultural chaos, losing trust in institutions, longing for community in urban isolation, hyper pluralism, a need for moral structure, and spiritual hauntings occurring due to rampant secularism). While my own excitement is hard to contain, there’s a looming shadow side to this phenomenon which I’d like to explore here—that of ‘civilisational Christianity’.

In what follows, I plan to briefly outline this development through key figures and the ideas they are pushing into the public square, which are actively shaping cultural discourse and culminating in a highly interesting narrative which has captured my attention for the last year. But honestly, I’m getting a bit drained from reading articles on this topic, so writing this helped me process what I’ve observed and sort through my hopes for the next phase of this cultural conversation. Writing this post also solidified a kind of measured optimism inside me. While I’m eager for a new dawn of religious belief and am living in some sort of expectant state, my hesitations about certain directions within this apparent resurgence of spiritual interest continue to multiply. Enjoy this long-form pub-style riff on the topic. Here’s a small table of contents to guide you through:

• The Justin Brierley Thesis: Why Faith Is Trending Again

• The Jordan B Peterson Phenomenon: Meaning Over Modernity

• The Tom Holland Train: Embracing Christianity’s Unseen Legacy

• The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Effect: Preserve Western Civilisation

• The Elizabeth Oldfield Approach: Revitalise Christian Community

• The Paul Kingsnorth Alternative: Keep Christianity Weird

• Reclaiming the Lifeblood of the Christian Story

The Justin Brierley Thesis: Why Faith Is Trending Again

For close to 20 years, Justin Brierley hosted apologetic conversations about faith between atheists, Christians, and those of other worldviews on Premier Unbelievable. It’s within this context that he began to note a change in the conversations he was moderating. Where before, he observed an antagonism toward the Christian faith, which has been smugly at home within academic and professional circles for the last several decades, more recently, he noticed a different posture emerging—one of oppeness. While this peeking spiritual interest may include the phenomenon of Gen Z’s heightened receptivity to New Age TikTok spiritualities, it goes well beyond it. People seemed willing to give organised religion a second look, growing tired of the New Atheist movement’s obsession with rationally dismantling its doctrines and casting it solely as a social ill on society responsible for 9/11, colonialism, imperialism, and many other ‘isms’. This hunch drove him to write his book and podcast series titled ‘The Surprising Rebirth of the Belief in God: Why new atheism grew old and secular thinkers are considering Christianity again’.

The burgeoning meaning crisis is apparently setting in and taking centre stage, radically altering people’s religious questions. Instead of concerns about truth, doctrine, and reliability, the topics of purpose, identity, and meaning have found their way to the forefront—and religion undeniably speaks to each of these, and in ancient ways, often more coherent than self-made moralities and modern institutions. Brierley has put language to this shift, which has been a very helpful tool for myself and others; follow along his ongoing podcast series for his more detailed analysis.

The Jordan B Peterson Phenomenon: Meaning Over Modernity

The young men have flocked in fandom, and the Christian publications have not stopped rolling pieces off the press to understand this: how does Jordan Peterson fill up stadiums of thousands of young people to talk about responsibility, meaning, and the Bible? This Canadian psychologist and academic has become a cultural force through his keen diagnosis of modern society: individualism, hedonism, and ideological rigidity fail to address fundamental human needs and are letting people down. Like so many other members of the Daily Wire media conglomerate, he has also risen to fame through his flagrant rejection and attack on ‘wokeism’ (content which I have become completely exhausted by—can we get on with it?) which he perceives as weakening the West’s cultural narrative through constant self-critique of its history and values.

You will only see Peterson dressed in a suit embodying his professor/mentor/father aesthetic. His three-hour-long conversations and lectures positing more traditional and conservative values have captured millions who are hungry for in-depth content with an academic edge, defying the stereotypes that young people’s attention spans only allow them to consume information in bite-sized videos via TikTok and that they are helplessly progressive leaning. Peterson has tapped into a host of suppressed longings and sentiments of the younger generation, making him one of the most influential thinkers in the world.

I bring him up in this narrative for a two-fold reason. Firstly, the traction that his lectures on Genesis received only confirms Justin Brierley’s sneaking suspicion that people are indeed open to religious content in fresh ways. Secondly, his body of work and what he has come to represent culturally is a good introduction to the shadow side of this trending religious interest—that of civilisation motivations.

When we think about Christian revivals like the Great Awakenings and the Billy Graham crusades, these movements were ‘Evangelical’ in nature. While also laden with cultural agendas, they centred around the personal spiritual life. While Peterson is calling on young men to take individual responsibility for their own lives and also putting forth the religious worldview as a highly relevant story on which society should be anchored, he is certainly not calling for personal conversations oriented around reconciliation or communion with God.

Luke Bretherton takes up this topic in his brilliant essay for Comment Magazine, where he writes, ‘To convert for the sake of holding on to a prior cultural form—or as a way to make it great again—is to undergo conversion without repentance.’ As a conservative academic, Peterson is quite concerned with the preservation of Western civilization, as Bretherton points out. This, of course, is not in itself negative. Parts of this endeavour to revive the beauties of the Western canon, history, and value set could have healthy outcomes. But the downside I am highlighting here is that within these cultural dialogues, Christianity and Western Civilisation begin to be oddly thrown around as synonyms… and I think this is in part thanks to a dear and hilarious historian named Tom Holland.

The Tom Holland Train: Embracing Christianity’s Unseen Legacy

If your pastor hasn’t cited Tom Holland’s book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind in a sermon this year, then you might not be listening closely enough. The beloved host of The Rest is History churned out a thick piece of writing and research with a roaring thesis: the West has Christianity to thank for almost all of its proudest values—human rights, care for the poor and vulnerable, and equality. Some readers revelled in the irony of many of the progressive and secular left’s dearest-held virtues actually hailing from the person of Jesus, who flipped the social hierarchy of the world upside down. Holland sweeps through history, crafting a compelling case that the West was directly cut from the cloth of Christianity.

While this realisation is certainly a thrilling one—religion, Christianity specifically, remains relevant and still shapes the contemporary person’s perceptions and actions—whether they like it or not. As someone who has been in the social sciences, I am used to the mainstream narrative of Christianity as the cause of wars and misogyny. Dominion gave me confidence, grounded in countless specific examples throughout history, that Christian communities have been consumed with caring for the underdog for millennia. A small feeling of pride wells up in you while you read it.

Yet there are a few downstream effects that give me pause. Firstly, this has led to a moment when Christianity and Western Civilisation are often being used as cognates in conversations. While the West is rooted in Christian foundations, Christianity is not dependent on the West—and is, of course, rapidly expanding in the Global South (and in urban spaces in the West due to migration from these locations as well). Furthermore, the very many ‘un-Christian’ moments in Western history also distinguish these concepts as two separate entities.

Secondly, there’s a certain self-satisfied response that some Christians have developed from Tom Holland’s findings in Dominion—which can seem like a giant pat on the back. Besides building the courage of Christians and reminding them of their most lasting legacy and unique calling, namely, to radically love and care for the world around them, I worry it has instead been taken as an ego boost. With a dose of complacency and insularity, it quickly becomes a moment to sit back and say ‘I told you so’ or ‘You’re welcome’ to society rather than propelling Christians towards further action and opening their arms to a culture that might just currently be more receptive to them than usual.

As this story moves forward, it is important to note one other point that Holland has been insistent on: the West has grown weak because it has tried to cut itself from its Christian origins. But like a ‘snipped flower’, as Holland often says in his public speaking engagements, the West cannot survive without its moral foundations.

The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Effect: Preserve Western Civilisation

This elegant and highly controversial woman recently graced Oxford with her presence at a lecture series, making her usual splash. It took several hours in the pub afterwards with friends to debrief and debate all that was said. If you haven’t heard of this salient figure, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist, author, and scholar who entered the international stage for her outspoken critiques of Islam and her advocacy for women's rights. Her life journey—from being raised in an Islamist family in Somalia to adopting New Atheism to becoming a member of the Dutch parliament—has been extremely intriguing to the public eye. She’s a flamboyant fan of the values and efficiency of the West, a fellow woke-basher with Jordan Peterson and crew, and a fierce champion for free speech. As someone born and raised in the Global South, she shares about moving to the Netherlands and being shocked that transportation worked and the police weren’t corrupt. She basically acts like a giant pat on the back to the West—advocating for America and Europe to embrace cultural pride (even affirming a cultural superiority compared to the rest of the world, in her self-proclaimed informed opinion as a former outsider) and to stop being so apologetic about Western heritage.

After growing up in the shadow of radical Islam, she became a poster child for the New Atheist movement, which flourished post-9/11. Just over a year ago, she publically converted to Christianity in an article published on UnHerd titled ‘Why I am now a Christian Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war’. Her dear old friend and world-famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, does not agree with the spiritual or metaphysical nature of her conversion but has shockingly taken to calling himself a ‘cultural Christian’.

Her own rhetoric about her conversion has been fascinating and boils down to two key reasons. Firstly, she has been open about how she struggled with deep depression during her years as an atheist, ultimately finding it an unbearable philosophy to live by. She turned to Christianity for spiritual consolation and meaning. Yet secondly, and to pick back up with our storyline, she is unblushing about her instrumentalisation of the Christian faith as a means to win the culture wars. Hear her explanation from the UnHerd article below:

“And so I have come to realise that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope…Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?”

While all believing Christians would be thrilled to hear that God and the church have carried Hirsi Ali through a kind of dark night of the soul, there’s something eerie in her statement—speaking of two menacing foes. Her message throughout her talk at Oxford was simple: The West has grown weak and is in danger from (1) Woke-ism and (2) Islamic immigration. Bolster the West. But how?

As a formerly religious person, she understands the power of religion as a vessel to organise and unite communities, to instill and pass down value sets, and to rally people around a shared social narrative. In her opinion, institutions like academia, the media, and the government have been corrupted by leftist ideologies. She joins the chorus of voices, anxiously asking, ‘What cultural narrative will hold the West together? What institution can rescue it?’. Her answer has predominately been Christianity. Suddenly, the Christian faith seems to her like a formidable weapon with which to galvanise, unite, and fight Islam, which she considers as confidently blossoming in the US, UK, and EU. I don’t think it is a coincidence that her public conversion came right after October 7th. Below is a quote from the lecture delivered at Oxford, titled ‘Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Irreconcilable Values of Islamism and the West,’ where she seamlessly minces both the spiritual and civilisational catalysts for her conversion.

“Only an equally convincing story to marshal the spirits of those in the West to defend their tribe and traditions will work. Christianity pulled me through a period of deep despair. Perhaps it may redeem our depressed West too.”

To Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christianity may just be the golden ticket to restoring the West, crystalising the rationale behind a budding cohort promoting a new kind of ‘civilisational Christianity’.

Personally, I am highly alarmed by the fear-based, civilisational, and oppositional use of Christianity—especially because I believe that Christians and Muslims share a noteworthy amount of overlapping ethical commitments in the public square and may actually be natural allies to together oppose more progressive policies and ideas around gender, family structure, and sexual ethics. While Hirsi Ali critiques Islamism—defined as the political and ideological expression of Islam—she often fails to distinguish between Islamism and the beliefs and practices of the majority of Muslims in the West—people who share strikingly similar agendas as social conservatives. Therefore, I heartily disagree with her rhetoric used to demonise and other-ise Muslim migrant communities. This is in part due to her argument’s blindspot but also because myself and many other Christians do not see our faith as a mere civilisational force but as a vibrant and living tradition, balancing love and truth while moving towards the fringes instead of cultural power.

The Elizabeth Oldfield Approach: Revitalise Christian Community

Elizabeth Oldfield

, Former BBC broadcaster and director of Theos Think Tank, now hosts the Sacred Podcast and resides outside of London, running a ‘micro-monastery’. Oldfield is hell-bent on restoring communal life and spiritual practices from the Christian tradition in the context of our fractrued and isolated times. She is consumed with the topics of spiritual formation and fostering dialogue across differences. She has become a voice I continually look to due to her bravery in promoting the Christian faith, but in her winsome way that holds a posture of absolute affection, curiosity, and reverence for the Other.

Oldfield recently wrote a post titled ‘Is God a culture warrior’ on her Substack, outlining many of the same concerns and sources I have presented in this post as well. She, like Justin Brierley, recognises a deep and fresh sense of spiritual interest among her friends who are across the political spectrum. As a note, Oldfield is especially tuned into understanding those of her friends who are of a more progressive orientation: deeply engaging with the anxieties and opinions of those concerned with the woes of capitalism, the climate crisis, and the apocalyptic nip in the air. Oldfield notes an incongruency between those who are interested on the left and those who are interested on the right:

“These are public examples of scores of private stories. Friends who have spent their whole lives working on climate change or refugee rights, friends who have been deep in what is often awkwardly lumped into “new age” pursuits, all getting interested in religion more generally and Jesus in particular, quietly, in closed rooms…It is notable that far fewer of these people feel able to go public. Converts on the “right” often accrue social acclaim for turning to religion. Not so everywhere. It takes courage to confess to being “Christian curious“ for these tribes.

While there may be social incentives for those on the right to convert publically, frankly, those on the left just face more risk for being interested in Christianity. Therefore, while the phenomenon of increased spiritual curiosity may feel like it has a rightward curve, it could just be that we are seeing far conservative conversions more publically. Elizabeth reminds us that this exciting moment of faith momentum need not be co-opted by political agendas. There’s a bigger and more important picture. God is at work across political divides and, as she says, is himself ‘a Love which while we were enemies, did not reject us, pour contempt on us or go to civilisational war with us, but came to meet us and made us friends’.

Elizabeth points us back to a more Christocentric way. One consumed with a deep love for those around us, instead of empire-building. She advocates for us to welcome the spiritual longings of those in our life on the right and the left, to not fall into tribalism, and to build strong, durable, and inviting communities (not oppositional civilisations) grounded in daily Christian practices to hold us through what seem like dark times ahead. She hearkens back to the ethos of the early church expressed in Acts 2: ‘They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul.’

The Paul Kingsnorth Alternative: Keep Christianity Weird

Finally, we turn to the wide-eyed figure of

Paul Kingsnorth

. He’s a former environmental activist turned writer/poet who is one of modernity’s biggest critics, condeming its industrial and ideological excesses. His recent lecture with First Things, titled ‘Against Christian Civilisation’, is the single most important resource I’ve encountered this year. There’s no need to read this post if you listen to it; he covers all the bases. Now, let’s turn to his outspoken critique of ‘civilisational Christianity’ and to the alternative path forward he presents.

In the lecture, he identifies five different approaches towards religious belief: scientific athiesm, liberal relativism, serious religion, cultural religion, and civilisational religion. He claims that the final one, or the subject at hand, usually surfaces ‘in times of upheaval or crisis—seeing that the culture is in trouble and understanding that a particular religion was at its heart. The civilizational religionist seeks to use religion to rebuild culture regardless of its truth’. Like a prophet, he goes on to proclaim that this ‘might appear to be a superficially attractive narrative, but I think it's a deadly mistake’.

Kingsnorth reflects on the lecture in a recent Subtack post called ‘The Moses option’. Here’s a lengthy but helpful quote:

‘In my recent Erasmus Lecture for First Things magazine, I argued against one response to the Void that is growing in popularity: a certain type of ‘civilisational Christianity’, which sees the Christian way as a useful ‘story’ with which to ‘defend Western civilisation.’ This project seeks to use the ministry of Jesus to promote values which are directly opposed to those he actually taught us to live by. Some of the people pushing this supposedly ‘muscular’ brand of the faith are Christian, but many others are agnostics who see the Christian faith as a mythological prop with which they can support their favoured ideologies, be they liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, ‘the Enlightenment’ or whatever. Whether or not the Christian religion is true, in this argument, is less important than whether it is useful. This is, in other words, just another breed of activism, and it is still at heart a secular project.’

If Elizabeth Oldfield is highly concerned with the tribal and other-ising nature of ‘civilisational Christianity’, Paul Kingsnorth here expresses deep worry over its spiritual bankruptcy, being merely a ‘secular project’ or another form of activism. With Kingsnorth, I agree that we need something much more potent. We need to be truly connected to the spiritual realm, revived by the wild and unexpected presence of God Himself. A ‘civilisational Christianity’ simply can’t provide this.

Here we move into one of the solutions that Kingsnorth presents. He joins the cacophony of voices begging Christians to stay weird (or the many variations… ‘Make Christianity Spooky Again,’ ‘Keep Christianity Strange,’ ‘Make Christianity Strange Again,’ or ‘Make Christianity Strange Again’). A powerful sentiment flows out of these pieces, urging churches to stop watering themselves down and trying to make it like a Ted Talk in content and venue ambience. Give the people what they want, what they are craving and can’t get anywhere else—something otherworldly, something ancient, something alive. These voices are calling for the church to stay ‘enchanted,’ Charles Taylor’s often quoted term implying the pre-modern and medieval worldview. This orientation saw the supernatural realm as an undeniable reality, baked into their whole perception of the world, and not merely sequestered off to the ‘religious or emotional’ part of the brain. All of reality was bathed in the activity of the Otherworldly.

Tom Holland communicates this desire in the following blurb from an article by the New Statemen worth reading on this topic:

“Rather than speaking with the voice of prophecy, rather than explaining to a grieving and anxious people how the dead will rise into the blaze of eternal life, rather than proclaiming the miracles and mysteries that they uniquely exist to proclaim, church leaders seem to have opted instead to talk like middle managers,” he wrote during the early weeks of the Covid pandemic…“The future for the churches is to remind people where these ideas come from,” Holland contended. “They come from believing in mad things, that there is a God who created all human beings equally, gave them an inherent dignity because they’re created in God’s image. You know, it comes from the belief that these were taught by a guy who got nailed to a cross and then rose from the dead and offers the promise of eternal glory in life. These are obviously, objectively to a rationalist perspective, mad things. But the madness is precisely what makes them so powerful and has made them so powerful… People want the supernatural, they want the strange, they want what they don’t get out of a Labour Party manifesto.”

Paul Kingsnorth encourages us to put aside the desire to be reinstated and redignified in society as Christians. Instead, we should embrace the beautiful and unexpected and untamed version of Christianity, namely to cling tightly to the person of Christ—both in His earthly example of utter humility and His actual supernatural presence. Indeed, this has been what has sustained, nourished, and preserved the church throughout history—not sheer political power, which has actually shown to be quite a dodgy action plan. The future of the church must be rooted in our ‘mad’ doctrines, our ‘strange’ practices, and our ‘weird’ and yet intriguing insistence that the Civilisation we are trying to cultivate is actually not of this world.

Reclaiming the Lifeblood of the Christian Story

In summary, interest in the spiritual, and maybe even Christianity specifically, seems to be brewing in the culture. Thank you, Justin Brierley, for charting these developments out so clearly. Furthermore, there appear to be multiple strands of renewed spiritual curiosity, and I will crudely place them now roughly on the right and the left for this summary. One strand is deeply worried about the decline of Western Civilisation through Muslim immigration and wokeism, represented by conservative thinkers like Jordan Peterson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. To this camp, Christianity strikes them as a convenient ‘social glue’ or ‘weapon’, as Paul Kingsnorth put it, to resuscitate the West. The other, often more progressive strand, feels disillusioned by institutions and is anxious about apocalyptic times of climate change and global wars ahead—desperately seeking spiritual comfort and a stabilising worldview. These clusters of individuals are often the one Elizabeth Oldfield is more directly speaking to. Yet the mechanisms of religious belief are generally complex and multi-faceted in motivation. Therefore, these spiritual and cultural variables are most likely tangled up within each person’s ball of transcendent longings.

Might we wonder—will a more public, right-coded, ‘civilisational’ brand of Christianity squash or turn away some of the genuine spiritual hunger stirring within other camps? We don’t know and can only hope not. What we can hope is that Christians will continue to be themselves: collectively rooted in the breath-taking narratives of the bible, church tradition, and the oddities of the liturgical calendar and sacraments—fostering communities of invitation for those with burning questions, suddenly sensing something churning inside them: an age-old ache for Something More. May the radical and loving person of Jesus loom larger than a hollowing, fear-mongering, and dead-end tribalism. If the winter of the West is indeed upon us, we have something much more enduring—even thrilling ahead.

Drinking in all the oddities and beauties around me.

Warmly,
Carolyn