You’ve covered a lot of ground, but always with a consistent theme.
Dreher: Which is?
Douthat: Doom. The decline of America, the decline of the West, maybe the apocalypse, the Book of Revelation.
Dreher: Yeah. Mama says: We in Revelations.
Douthat: That’s right. This is a touchstone. So we’re going to start with your most consistent form of pessimism, which is the idea that the decline of Christianity, the religion that both you and I share, will be bad for America, bad for everybody, bad for the world.
Talk to an audience that isn’t Christian, or is lukewarmly Christian. Why should people in that category worry about what comes after a Christian culture?
Dreher: Well, I would direct them to Tom Holland’s great book from a few years ago, “Dominion.”
Tom Holland, secular liberal English historian, set out to tell the story about how the Christian faith made the Western world. In the book, Tom says — and says it better than anybody I’ve seen — that everything that he valued as a secular liberal came out of Christianity and nothing else. He talks about the idea of equality, the equality of everyone before the law, human rights — all of these sorts of things that secular liberals take for granted, we wouldn’t have them if it weren’t for Christianity.
That is not a reason to convert to Christianity. But Ross, we have been living in the West on the fumes of Christianity for a long time, and now we’ve pretty much gotten to the bottom of it, and we can see the outlines of what a truly post-Christian society is like. If people think that it’s going to be this happy, clappy, new atheist, everyone’s nice, “we’re not bothered by God anymore,” they sure have another thing coming.
