Religious Materialism
Article by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative
Religious Materialism
W.H. Auden — gay, Christian, and one of the greatest poets of the 20th century — from an essay about Christianity and art:
As soon, however, as materialism comes to be regarded as sacred truth, the distinction between the things of God and the things of Caesar is reabolished. … [U]nder religious materialism, everything in life is, ultimately, serious, and therefore subject to moral policing. It will not tolerate what it knows to be evil with a heartless shrug — that is how life is, always has been and always will be — but it will do something which the pagan world never did; it will do what it knows to be evil for a moral purpose, do it deliberately now so that good may come in the future.
Under religious materialism, the artist loses his personal artistic liberty again, but he does not recover his sacred importance, for now it is not artists who collectively decide what is sacred truth, but scientists, or the scientific politicians, who are responsible for forming mankind in the true faith. Under them, an artist becomes a mere technician, an expert in effective expression, and who is hired to express effectively what the scientist-politician requires to be said.
By “religious materialism,” the poet means materialism taken as a kind of religion. He anticipates wokeness. There can be no frivolity in the Kingdom of Wokeness. Everything is deadly serious. I’m in London this weekend, and had a conversation with a lawyer who was telling me shocking things going on here in Great Britain, compelled by the government and all the captured institutions. The conversation was on background, but the things he told me startled even someone like me, who is not easily shockable about this stuff anymore.
The lawyer told me about one of his friends who lived under Soviet communism, and who said that she is watching a version of that take form here. He brought up a prominent UK university that requires all applicants for academic jobs to file a parallel application listing their commitment to Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity. The emigre from Eastern Europe told the lawyer, “This is exactly what the Party used to do. You had to proclaim your political loyalty before you could be considered for a job anywhere.”
Our institutions have been captured by soft totalitarians. Later today, I have to give a Live Not By Lies talk to a group of young Christians about how to live in these times, under these conditions. Last night, I talked to a different figure active in public life in Britain, a Catholic who explained to me how he sees some form of the Benedict Option as the only possibility for those who want to pass the faith on to their kids. He told me that he and his wife are part of a group “of about fifteen Catholic families, maybe only one of whom have read The Benedict Option, but all of whom are now trying to move to live closer together, to form a community, because we know that’s the only way we are going to be able to raise our kids in moral sanity.”
I get this more and more, a version of, we thought you were alarmist when your book came out, but now we’re having to live the Benedict Option. Christians (and Jews, and Muslims) had better understand that we are all in the middle of a religious war with zealots who don’t recognize that their materialism is religious. They believe they are neutral, and hide their own zealotry and bigotry from themselves. The artists politicize their art, because politics are sacred to them.
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