The James Bond franchise has given us a lot of late.
We have Spectre-like globalist institutions with Bond villains threatening to “penetrate ze cabinets”. We have wars on terror, and bioweapons that take the form of vaccines. We have the deep state and all its works. We have media moguls bent on evil domination. We have Russian oligarchs, and oligarchs with American addresses. Blurred baddies. Extra-government villains. Bad actors on the inside, who might look, superficially, like our defenders.
We have existential threats aplenty, despite the end of the Cold War in 1989. The clash of civilisations depicted by Samuel Huntington has dispatched the comfortable “end of history” narrative of the neo-liberal Francis Fukuyama. But Huntington didn’t see half the threats we now face. We may still need Bond, after all. (Yet now Bond, like Agatha Christie and so much other literary fare, is woke. Alas).
One of Bond’s classics was the late Michael Apted’s 1999 effort The World Is Not Enough.
The title is suggestive, and suddenly germane to our current existential crisis. Many of those who don’t believe in a god or the afterlife have, now, suddenly, a sense of the end times. Or at least that something monumental and unnerving is afoot. Global war is threatened. The nuclear option is in play. The Covid plandemic has produced a whole class of conspiracy researchers. Very few, now, trust in government. Some have rediscovered belief in the transcendent. Equally, the war on the west, palpably felt by many non-believers and fellow Judeo-Christian fellow travellers (like Douglas Murray), has caused a shift in the tectonic plates. Existential threats will do that. Perhaps the gradual realisation that our temporal powers are utterly corrupt, liars, and self-serving oligarchs, has moved the needle back from reflexive belief in human-generated utopias towards the Great Other, beyond the grave.
When the purveyors of a humanism that promotes man-as-god hit the wall, what is left for those who invested all in them? When human, mini-me gods jump the shark, an increasing number of people recognise the utter folly of it all. The latest tower-of-Babel effort, was, of course, the Paris Olympics. A real ah-ha moment for many.
There are those who believe in the Christian God who will be rolling their eyes at all the recent angst and anxiety. As well they might.
But there is, suddenly, a new class of nervous nellies, with one eye on the eternal. Donald Trump, post-shooting, is invoking Almighty God. Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk are having Christian “moments”.
US psychologist and media personality Jordan Peterson acts “as if” God exists because, for him, it provides meaning, purpose and order. Some see political value in Christianity. Dawkins values it as “a bulwark against Islam.” Musk thinks it can increase birthrates and prevent population collapse.
The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, just announced that he’s a “big believer in the principles of Christianity” and “a cultural Christian.” Musk’s reasons are moral and political – he believes Christianity can boost both happiness and birthrates.
Musk joins many Western conservative thinkers troubled by a rapidly changing world. Some of these thinkers have embraced Christianity to combat these changes. Yet they often struggle to accept Christianity’s central supernatural claims, like Christ’s resurrection.
In conservative intellectual circles, the receding tide of Christianity is turning. For some, the appeal is aesthetic. The prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins, calls Christianity’s core claims “obvious nonsense”, but he still identifies as a “cultural Christian” because he enjoys hymns and cathedrals.
Others see moral value in Christianity. The British conservative commentator Douglas Murray calls himself a “Christian atheist”, rejecting key Christian beliefs, but valuing its moral ideas like the “sanctity of the individual.” US psychologist and media personality Jordan Peterson acts “as if” God exists because, for him, it provides meaning, purpose and order.
Some see political value in Christianity. Dawkins values it as “a bulwark against Islam.” Musk thinks it can increase birthrates and prevent population collapse.
When writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted to Christianity, she cited political reasons, claiming Christianity was the only way the west could combat “wokeness”, Islam and authoritarian regimes. She later clarified: “I choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead”, yet added, “what is even more real for me is the wisdom in that story, the morality.”
Richard Dawkins, of all people! Christianity-lite, maybe. We are in unchartered waters, it seems. A crisis moment for our way of life. Elon shed tears. Maybe they are all strategic, Christian fellow travellers?
Is it a Pontius Pilate moment? I don’t know who this guy is, but, heck, I am worried. What if it is true, what He says?
There has always been a pact between true believers and sympathetic fellow travellers. Humans are good at forming convenient collabs. Certainly, in democratic politics.
Perhaps Paris 2024 might be a pivot-point, cringe-worthy as it has proven to be. The lights went out, after God was mocked. Except for the peak of Montmartre, where, in the Sacre Coeur Basilica, the lights still shone. Oh! It was quite the image.
Humans will always jump the shark. It is never a good look, of course, when it occurs. Self-serving, self-obsessed, hedonistic, postmodernist, libertine wankery tends to turn off the sensible centre. Overshoots will do this. But there may be much more than that in play, on this occasion.
Christian evangelists, like Bishop Barron, are currently out there, swooping in on Paris as an opportunity for a renewal of muscular Christianity. Christianity-heavy. A teaching moment. They sniff an opportunity, and they might be right.
Normally, when Christians are confronted, they retreat to prayer and charity and good works and living better lives. I sense, here, something a bit different. There is an urge to push back. To fight. Fight. Fight. As The Donald said, immediately after the bullet grazed his right ear. Bishop Barron hints at a loud response. Loud.
The great unwashed, the low-information classes that make up the majority of our world, utterly unformed in civilisational virtue and values, may look at Paris and say – whatever. Some, though, might be thinking, WTF? Where there are those who question the direction of travel, perhaps not even knowing just why they are questioning it, there is hope. They might even be thinking, the world is not enough.
The world is run, as they say, by those who turn up. It might just be time to turn up, right about now.
Paul Collits
30 July 2024
‘The war on the West’??? The West are the only ones pushing war and will get us there sooner than most think…. The West is run by clowns desperate for war.
The one obstacle for all these suddenly Christianly people is Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, Messiah, Saviour. But baby steps, the Holy Spirit can break through. God has a plan and is in control no matter what the oligarchs and leaders of this present world think. The power outage after the blasphemous opening Ceremony is a case in point. And it wasn’t reported.