From Post-Christendom to Christendom

Secularists and Neo-pagans hate Christianity so violently not just because they hate its message. They hate it because they know that it creates an entire world that they hate.

Dear friends and supporters,

Christians today sometimes hear and use the word Christendom, almost always, it seems, in a negative light. Christendom was a time (so the narrative goes) when Christian rulers persecuted unbelievers, when church and state were unbreakably united, when slavery was rampant, and when moralist hypocrisy was everywhere. Secularists from the French Revolution down to today as well as Anabaptist Brian McLaren and the Reformed theologian David VanDrunen are all enemies of Christendom. The contra-Christendom cadre is diverse indeed.

A more accurate and less tendentious description was that it a time in Western civilization from roughly the 5th to the 18th centuries when the Christian Faith dominated all of life, not just the church. Architecture and art and education and law and music and politics and science were all rooted in what we nowadays term a Christian worldview. Society itself was justified by appeal to the Christian Faith. Nations waged war (rightly or wrongly) in the name of Jesus Christ. The Christian Faith was not a religion you adopted as one among many “options.” You were born and baptized into, lived and loved and worked and played and died within a Christian society. Your life was enveloped in a Christian milieu.

The Boon of Christendom

Christendom, despite obvious imperfections, bequeathed breathtaking treasures to our civilization. To the ancient world, and on into the medieval and early modern world, it gifted the dignity of human life, the exaltation of women, the purification of sexuality, the rise of science, the elevation of labor and vocation, the liberation of economics, the spawning of political liberty, and the abolition of slavery. Christendom transformed and elevated our world in the most foundational ways. It’s simply impossible to consider Western civilization apart from Christendom, for the two were virtually synonymous.

The Loss of Christendom

And now Christendom is gone. Nobody reading these lines has ever encountered Christendom. It’s utterly foreign to us. It’s so remote from Christians that it’s hard even to convey it in categories we can readily grasp. Just as our forebears would find it utterly incomprehensible to think about what Christianity would look like in a secular age, so we find it nearly incomprehensible to think about what Christianity would look like in a Christian age.

Long before our lifetime, the West gave up on Christianity, so even we Christians aren’t aware of the cultural capital we owe to Christianity. It’s not possible to conceive of the West without the influence of Christianity. Our civilization, though now secular and pagan, is unthinkable apart from Christianity.

(continued below)

---

How Christians lost Christian culture, the high price we've paid for losing it, where we stand today in our own culture, and finally what we can (and must) do to create Christian culture today and tomorrow.

Get the book here.

---

(continued)

The Legacy of Christendom

I’ve sometimes been asked to address the legacy of Christendom, and it’s important to be precise in what we mean by this

The problem of meaning

The expression “legacy of Christendom” could be interpreted to mean that Christianity leaves a legacy called Christendom, which is true. Or it could mean, the legacy that Christendom itself leaves. That latter point is one I want to expand on. What exactly is the legacy of Christendom? Christendom is not identical to Christianity. Christendom is what a culturally dominant Christianity looks like. It’s possible to have Christianity without Christendom (that’s what we have today, in fact). But it’s not possible to have a full-fledged Christianity without Christendom. That is to say that the Christianity of our times is not full-fledged. In losing Christendom, we have lost a particular kind of Christianity.

The legacy of Christendom is much harder to identify than the legacy of Christianity. We know that Christianity has impacted our world in the ways I’ve described. But how has Christendom impacted our world that is no longer Christian? That’s a harder question to answer. Christendom is an entire way of thinking and living socially. That way is gone. But does Christendom still impact our world? I suggest that it does.

Post-Christendom

We hear the term “post-Christian” a lot these days. I would prefer to use the term post-Christendom. It’s not Christianity that’s behind us, but Christendom. I offer three observations about our post-Christendom world.

Apostate

First, our post-Christendom world is genuinely apostate. Notice that I didn’t just say that a mass of individuals is apostate. I said our civilization is apostate. This is historically unprecedented. It’s true that civilizations have turned away from God. The Old Testament and the rest of human history are littered with examples of this apostasy. What we have not had examples of is Christian civilization that has entirely turned its back on Christianity. Christendom was established from about the 5th century in the West. It survived until approximately the 18th century. It has gradually diminished and is now gone. In other words, we have gone from pre-Christendom, through Christendom, to today’s post-Christendom. We are living in historically unprecedented times.

Unique

Second, this means that we lack precise historical precedents for addressing our civilizational apostasy. Some might suggest that we go back and act as the early apostles and prophets did. This approach is both understandable and mistaken. We must always base our actions on the inspired words of the biblical prophets and apostles, but we don’t live in their historical situation. They were living in a pre-Christendom world, not a post-Christendom world. We must adopt their truth, but we need not — and should not — adopt their strategies. We must think very hard about how to re-Christendom (notice I did not say re-Christianize) the world.

Opportunity

Third, and finally, because the influence, though not the reality, of Christendom survives, we still faintly enjoy some of the benefits of Christendom. They’re usually not evident to us as such. Think only of marriage. Today we’re fighting the redefinition of marriage, and it’s easy to get discouraged at our cultural and legal losses.

But let’s remember that it’s marriage we are fighting for, and marriage is a divine ordinance. We’re not fighting to establish a divine ordinance. It’s been established from creation. We’re fighting to re-establish an ordinance that our world simply cannot live without, one woven into its very cosmology. This fact puts our task in a more optimistic light. We can’t ultimately lose the battle for marriage simply because marriage is a divine ordinance woven into the very cosmos itself.

Dr. Peter Jones has ceaselessly reminded us that our culture is shifting from secularism to paganism. We call it neo-paganism, because it’s not precisely the paganism of old. It’s a paganism self-consciously rejecting Christian truth. It’s the paganism abandoning Christendom. It’s post-Christendom paganism. Unbelievers could never simply restore the pagan world. They can only hope to restore a world in which paganism must always look back on Christendom. This means that neo-paganism must always account for, and react against, Christendom.

Think about it this way. The apostles were offering a message sharply contrasting with the message of ancient pagan world, but we are offering even more. We’re not just offering the contrasting Christian message (the gospel), which is the foundation. We’re offering the contrasting Christian world, civilization, and culture. We’re offering a Christian message to a world that was Christianized. We’re introducing not just Christianity. We’re reintroducing Christendom.

Conclusion

Our civilization was structured by the Christian Faith and the Bible. As much as secularists and neo-pagans may deplore it, they can’t simply unmake it. They hate Christianity so violently not just because they hate its message. They hate it because they know that it creates an entire world that they hate.

Our job, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is to rekindle, recover, and remake that world; Christendom.

---

Will you consider a tax-deductible donation to CCL via PayPal or Venmo? Or mail a check to CCL, Box 100, Coulterville, CA 95311. God uses you to keep us going — and expanding.

---

Personal

We’re back in the Deep South, and the For God and Truth Conference in Decatur, AL (Pastor Ernie Yarbrough) starts this Wednesday night. The conference streaming option is available here.

I hope next Friday to post an update for 2021 CCL symposium in San Francisco on December 4.

Next Sunday, August 8, I’ll be preaching at Trinity Free Presbyterian Church.

I plan to see many of you soon.

Yours for Christendom,

Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership

---

---

Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory

We’re hearing a lot of talk about Critical Race Theory (CRT) capturing our universities and even elementary schools. Many Christians (and others) aren’t aware that CRT is simply the racial component of Critical Theory developed by early Western (Cultural) Marxists in the Frankfurt School emerging in Weimar, Germany and later migrating to the United States, where its exponents infected an entire generation of college students. The 60’s radicalism and today’s Cultural Revolution are largely the consequence of Critical Theory.

Here’s my lecture on Critical Theory at the 2019 Runner Academy for my friends and colleagues at the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

---

Christendom is the Solution

Man cannot forever endure confusion, even cultural confusion dominating the West. He longs for certainty and coherence. Today, the new developing consensus is secular and Neo-pagan: cancel culture, Black Lives Matter, homonormativity, and statism. This evolving consensus, if successful, will brook no dissent.

The only viable alternative is a new Christian cultural consensus.

This book is about launching that consensus.  

You can get the book here. Please consider getting a copy and recommending it to others.

---

More great stuff:

The Center for Cultural Leadership site is here.

My Amazon author page (print and digital) is here.

You can find my sermons and lectures at my YouTube channel.

Sign up to get my blog updates here.

Here’s my Twitter feed.

If you want to get the free exclusive hard copy publication Christian Culture, please send me a Facebook private message.

The CCL phone number is 831-420-7230.

The mailing address is:

Center for Cultural Leadership

P.O Box 100

Coulterville, CA 95311

---