Is "Christian Adjacent" Good Enough?

Some initial thoughts on the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference

The A Team - Ayaan and Konstantin

If the culture does not exactly return to Christianity, is “Christian adjacent” a good enough landing spot instead? Is an inculturated, broad, general approval good enough?

I reckon we’d take any port in a cultural storm at the moment. But what would that look like? Should we settle for it - again?

I asked that question of best selling author Rod Dreher - of The Benedict Option - at a small pub in London the other night, at an UnHerd-hosted event for Aussies, on the eve of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference.

The trip’s been great. The conference is fine. It’s fun. It’s fast. It’s not that furious despite the protestors bleating a rather disappointingly lame “Fascist!” as we walked into the Olympia Conference Centre.

Call me ungrateful, but if I’m going to a conservative conference I want some Antifa bloke in a mask spitting venom. Mind you, it’s too hot in London for a mask never mind a keffiyeh. They all looked like they needed an ethically prepared vegan sandwich and a cool drink.

The trains are late or not running because of the oppressive heat. And it is oppressive. I’ve lived most of his life in Perth, Australia, and it’s right up there with the meanest February desert heat of that city.

But back to the conference, and the question. There’s a strong sense at ARC that we need some reconstruction after the deconstructionist decades (centuries) that have piled up like so much guano.

And the speakers - so far - have been probing what it might mean to rebuild. The conversation has been around the possibility of new institutions, a regathering of what we have lost, and a call for a conviction against the craziness that is churning our culture.

And we are being churned. Just as the conference began the UK Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer was toppled, in what will be a vain attempt at yet another reset for a country that is fast running out of peaceful options.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is convinced that what made the West great, and in turn what was lacking in the places she once belonged to, is the fruit, freedoms and faith of Christianity.

Matthew Syed of The Times is one of my favourite journalists.

To which Rod Dreher would add one more “F” - the facts.

That was where my question to him was going. Is it good enough in the West to say that the Christian ideas are good ideas that work, rather than good news that happened and has implications?

Rod says not on your life! His latest work is focussing on the hard push to the fascist right among young men in particular in mainstream political life in the USA.

And he attributes that in part - in my understanding - to the forms of godliness without its power. Oh there’s power alright, it’s all that is left, isn’t it? Isn’t that what Foucault would tell us? Isn’t that what the progressive Left, in its deadly dancing death spiral with radical Islam is all about?

Rod’s concern is that the truth of the Christian message is essential to keep it from going somewhere darker. The resurrection really had to have happened. The Christian message works because it’s true. And in that sense Rod is a different beast to historian Tom Holland.

In a memorable exchange with Australia’s iconic musical artist, Nick Cave, recently, Cave asked Holland if he was a Christian. Holland’s posh reply was that his most intense spiritual experiences had involved the Christian faith.

To which Nick, in his sly gothic manner, responded “Yes, but to be a Christian you have to believe in the resurrection.”

Rod says the same. And, like Cave - whose own bitter experiences have boiler-plated that reality into his life - the central thesis of “suffering” in the story is, if you like, its temper valve.

And it’s empowering value. Hope is embedded in the reality of the resurrection. ARC is all about reconstruction, and that’s a good thing. But we are on about resurrection.

And of course Christians need good, solid non-Christian co-belligerents alongside them - the “Christian adjacent” types who we can just sense admire the fruit of the West that was birthed from Christianity.

In the end though, I think it is the truth of the gospel, and only that, that will give us not the optimism, as Rod said, but the hope, that God can yet grant our Western culture some grace in the future.

“Christian adjacent” is fine, maybe better, indeed better, than the current cultural slop we are being served up. But it’s not enough.

And Christian adjacent did not birth this long, astonishingly peaceful (all things being considered) safety net thing we call Western Civilisation. A safety net so recently despised by so many in the confident, misplaced, assertion that they can replace it quite readily with another vision of human flourishing that won’t lead to a slaughter house.

The truth, when it comes to building a society, it boils down to a choice between two operating systems: Either the king you gather around your vision dies for you, or you die for the king you gather around.

I know which I’d rather choose. And the happy fact is that the king who died for me, also rose again. That gives me hope, not optimism.

Two observations to finish with. My son came with me on this trip and he’s loving it. We went to St Paul’s as we must. I decided to climb the 528 stairs that take you first to the wondrous whispering gallery and its seven stations which explore the stunning paintings of the story of St Paul in Acts:

The sheer magnitude of the dome refuses our attempts to give it scale in a photo

I then - despite my fear of heights - too the plunge (argh did I say that?) and climbed to the very top and went outside for the view of the city, marvelling that poor-benighted religious people who should have made way earlier for progressives, could come up with a building such as this.

I could scarcely look over the edge for fear. What must those pre-industrial era builders have experienced with their platforms and hand-constructed scaffolding?

And my son? Stayed safely below.

When I eventually descended, 1056 steps below, I found him sitting gazing in wonderment (as he’d been doing for almost half an hour) at this:

“Is this the original?” he asked, almost in disbelief, “I just didn’t think it would be here.”

We sat for a few moments more, soaking in the quiet truth of this stunning piece by William Holman Hunt, based on the verses from Revelation 3:20 directed towards the Laodicean church.

While I was seeking loftier goals, my son - like Mary - had sought out the greater thing.

The passage is both a stern rebuke and a gentle, but stern imploring, of a proud, arrogant community that has lost its bearings, yet thinks it has everything. The famous weed and bramble-riven door is locked from the inside.

Laodicea believes it has everything. Their king reminds them they have nothing without him. There is Jesus or there is - ultimately - nothing.

Perhaps that’s where we are culturally in the West. We’re rich, we’re proud, we’re building our own identity, all off the back of a common faith. The fruit of the gospel without the roots.

But here’s a word of warning to the West that wants Christendom back, but not the Christ of Christendom.

The Laodiceans were ever so “Jesus adjacent”! Hey he’s just on the other side of the door for crying out loud! But never so far from him nonetheless, as his warning to the community goes on to indicate.

Christianity is not here to give you its ideas, or impart its wisdoms. It comes into the cultural door with the risen Christ or it does not come in at all. Reconstruction is merely optimistic, but only resurrection has hope.