So Jesus also suffered outside the city to make his people holy with his own blood. So let us go to Jesus outside the camp, holding on as he did when we are abused. Here on earth we do not have a city that lasts forever, but we are looking for the city that we will have in the future. Hebrews 13:12-14
Within the Republican Party Christianity is being weaponized, as either the means of establishing a Christian civilization, or as an instrument by which Christians, at least a few, might manipulate the masses. The former notion, of establishing or “recovering” a Christian civilization is the well-known stance of Steve Bannon (the ideologue behind Donald Trump), who maintains that “we” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or be overrun by dangerous outsiders who will impose a different identity upon us.[1] The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical religion runs from Ronald Reagan, Pat Roberson, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, but in Trump and company it has taken on a more virulent form, with its heightened rhetoric against immigrants, people of color, and notions of civilizational war.
JD Vance however, falls into the second category in that his is not the goal of Christian civilization, but is aimed at a ruling elite (perhaps Christian) taking power. Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel and a student of the work of René Girard, converted to Catholicism, after hearing a lecture by Thiel and recognizing through the work of Girard, that his life was given over to mimetic desire and competition (the heart of Girard’s theory). In this talk, as described by Vance, Thiel described the coming reality of future Yale graduates: “We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness.”[2] Vance came to recognize that raw ambition and mimetic desire were the driving force in his life: “The end result [of all this competition] for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.” That realization brought a change of heart: “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things.”[3] He even describes how he and his friends used to find a scapegoat to abuse, whether consciously or unconsciously, yet it is clear that his conversion, and entry into politics has not ended his scapegoating but simply redirected it. Now he cynically deploys what he formerly counted as sin, for the greater good. His attack on Haitian immigrants, which he acknowledged was a fiction, is useful for garnering political support. As he put it on CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He counts himself a Christian, but his Girardian Christianity presumes society will continue to operate through mimetic desire and scapegoating, and if Christians are to rule (to accomplish good), they must deploy this mechanism (evil?) to their advantage. As Ward describes, “Vance is consciously stoking the conflict to promote cohesion among his native-born political base, even if doing so results in real threats of violence against Springfield’s non-native population.” In this, he is following Thiel, for whom Girard has provided an insight into how to manipulate markets and politics, not so as to follow Jesus, but to gain the upper hand in the rivalries constituting culture. The Jesus stuff pertains more privately and locally, but at the level of culture and civilization many Girardians eschew the notion that Christianity can serve as cultural or social foundation. Culture is built upon scapegoating and sacrifice, and Christians, presumably a Christian elite, can only deconstruct and manipulate this reality.
However, even in the former category of those promoting Christian civilization, the deployment of Christianity is no less instrumental and cynical. Jordan Peterson, among the most well-known promoters of Christian civilization, is unique in that he makes no pretense of being a Christian. In his “Message to the Christian Churches,” he describes the key role churches can play in fighting the culture wars, especially on behalf of young men (presumably white) who are made to feel the brunt of cultural guilt. He characterizes this cultural moment as the war against boisterous male children playing with toy guns, competing against one another, and the demeaning of patriarchal male dominance (which he seems to promote). He sees the attack on masculine exercise of power, the war against marriage, the presumption that healthy human activity is despoiling the planet and that human wants and needs are to be curbed, as leading to docility (the feminine?). All of this, in his picture of political correctness, is blamed on healthy male competition, pursuing the masculine virtues, or the masculine spirit of adventure (which Peterson encourages). Peterson names Derrida’s attack on the logos or logocentric society (seeming to confuse Derrida’s phallocentric logos with Christian Logos), equating the enemy with politically correct anti-masculinity, a bloody Marxism, or the work of deconstruction. He notes that the church needs to steer young men back to the adventure of life, to find a woman, to care for a garden, to build an ark, to conquer a land, to build a ladder to heaven, to make a more abundant life. The church he notes, may be rooted in the dead past, but nonetheless there is wisdom to be found in this tradition – the primary thing is not personal belief, but duty to the past, and the broader community of family, city, and country. So, the church must target young men and revitalize a masculine form of civilization.[4]
As Paul Kingsnorth notes in a talk at First Things, the one thing left out of Peterson’s recommendations is Jesus Christ, and of course along with Christ the virtues of humility, peacemaking, giving up worldly possessions, love of God and enemies.[5] He cites the passage in James, “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days” (James 5:1-3). As Kingsnorth describes, what is encouraged could be equated with the seven deadly sins. Pride in masculine acquisition (greed), an open allowance for sexual desire (lust), and acknowledgement of mimetic rivalry (envy, wrath), all topped off with industrious leisure (sloth). Civilization clearly precedes the particulars of Christianity, Christian teaching, or Christian notions of redemption in Peterson’s formula. Christianity is an instrumental means to engage in the culture wars, and in Peterson’s description, Christ does not enter into the discussion at all.
Another example of this instrumental deployment of Christianity on behalf of civilization is from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who describes her “conversion” to Christianity from atheism as a necessity to equip for “civilizational war.”[6] She describes her passage through radical Islam to atheism, and then to Christianity, with the last being motivated by concern for engaging in the war for civilization. The threat of “great-power authoritarianism and expansionism” from the Chinese Communist Party, Putin’s Russia, and the rise of global Islamism, threatens the West ideologically and morally. As she says, “The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Though her faith may be sincere, she expresses the key motive of her Christianity as civilizational. Afterall, “We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools.”[7] Much as Vance is willing to engage in violent scapegoating for pragmatic purposes, pragmatism and civilizational survival are key to Ali.
Of course, this instrumental deployment of a civilizational Christianity has nothing to do with the actual Christian faith. Christ is not on the side of this sort of civilization or culture, which is seen as foundational and in which religion is simply a support. God and Christ are not on the side of kings and cultures, but these are consigned to the Evil One, who is the power behind the throne (in Luke 4:5-8 the devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms in the world and says all these kingdoms “have been handed over to me, and I give them to whomever I wish” and Jesus does not challenge his claim). As Kingsnorth points out, there is a good argument to be made that Jesus should have taken the deal. Why not rule, so as to bring about a more benevolent state, and as with Vance to do good for the poor, or with Thiel so as to bring about a more successful technological innovation, or with Peterson to combat political correctness, or as with Ali, Bannon and Trump, to combat other civilizations. Politics for the greater good, Christian civilization, Constantinianism, world peace through greater strength, feeding the poor on the leftovers of an over-abundant wealth, isn’t this worthwhile, or could it be that the Devil is wrong? Perhaps he is not wrong, in that he has a winning formula, but wrong in that this is not the plan of God for his people.
God is not to be found among the powerful, the cultural elites, the men of war, or in the stability of culture, but he came as a poor carpenter, and associated with the poor and the sick, mostly avoiding the centers of power, and was crucified outside the city in the name of a civilization already failing (and which like all human civilizations was bound to disappear) . As the verse of the epigraph indicates, those who follow him are to imitate this humble life-style, leaving everything for his sake, and taking up the cross of affliction outside the camp (the circle of civil powers). The choice is between the logos and city of man (civilizational Christianity or Constantinianism) or the Logos and communion of Christ (outside the city).
[1] See my piece running this down, “Have the Dark Ages Returned?” Here
[2] JD Vance, “How I Joined the Resistance: On Mamaw and becoming Catholic” in The Lamp (Issue 25), https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-i-joined-the-resistance
[3] Ian Ward, Politico, 09/18/2024 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/18/jd-vance-springfield-scapegoating-00179401
[4] See the talk here https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/blog-posts/article-message-to-the-christian-churches/
[5] https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/against-christian-civilisation-ea2
[6] Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Why I am now a Christian: Atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war” in Unherd (November 11, 2023), https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
[7] Ibid.