Kingsnorth’s Radical "Protestantism”

In defence of Christian civilisation

Kingsnorth: a truly English name, to conjure the Berenician shades of royal Oswald and Oswiu; a name to match the enviable work of The Wake. Yet its bearer’s sympathy for kings is strictly spiritual. For earthly kings, he cares rather less. Like the Puritan before him, Kingsnorth owns one king alone, and Him the Christ. The kings of men are not Christ’s analogues but His usurpers.

“Do we want civilization,” he asks, “or do we want Christ? What if we can have only the one or the other?” The question is rhetorical, the presumed answer clear. Christ and civilisation are antitheses. To follow one is to reject the other. They are rival masters, and woe on him who tries to serve the two.

This dualistic principle governs Kingsnorth’s recent diatribe for First Things, Against Christian Civilisation. It is an ascetic principle of sorts, grounding Kingsnorth’s quietist distaste for politics and technology. But despite his newfound profession of Orthodoxy, it is a principle closer to the Puritans and Levellers than to the Hesychasts and Stilites he admires.

Hesychast or Puritan?

The difference is that no Hesychast or Stilite ever thought the whole world should become Hesychasts or Stilites. The cenobites and hermits, among them the desert fathers whom Kingsnorth invokes, knew that they were only part of the cosmos, with their own particular vocation within the whole. The overall vocation of the cosmos catholic encompassed many other such particularities: the vocation of the fisherman, the merchant, the mother, the blacksmith, the soldier and even, yes, the king. The monk or nun is one, albeit vital, part of the cosmic hierarchy, but no replacement for the whole.

The Puritan instinct, on the other hand, is to make all men Puritans; the Leveller, to level everything. Their vision is total and undifferentiated. They reject hierarchy in favour of the atomising equality of anarchy. Kingsnorth himself was once an anarchist, and old sympathies linger. He sees the radical asceticism of the desert father or the Irish monk and wants to apply it universally. Henceforth, there will be only man and God, all our apparatus of clumsy civic mediation condemned to the flames.

Eden or Jerusalem?

Our rebellion against the true king began in Genesis. Kingsnorth riffs on Genesis 3 and the fruits of Cain’s first city:

When we disobeyed, what happened? Farming happened. Work happened. Hunting happened. Metalwork happened. Murder happened. Cities happened. Civilization happened. It was all a deadly result of our Fall.

All of this is true - until the last sentence. Murder, surely, is a result of the Fall, and deadly. The rest was not caused by the Fall, but precipitated and corrupted by it. Kingsnorth’s first and damning error is to suppose that Eden was meant to be our perpetual state. This fails to account for the trajectory God planned from Eden to the new Jerusalem. To paraphrase St Irenaeus, the sin of the Fall was not eating the apple, but taking it before God deemed it ripe enough, or better, deemed Adam ripe enough for the apple.

The City of God is not an accident of the Fall. The calamity was that the infant man ate adult food. It made him sick. But the food itself was good. The wisdom of God and knowledge of the angels is good. But it was imparted too fast and apart from the proper divine order. The sin of Tubalcain the artificer was not the use of technology, but its unconsidered use, its use without due discernment. He learnt it from the whispers of impatient demons rather than by mandate to the angels.

Consider the alternative, that instead of the city and civilisation, we remain in tribal collectives of some kind. Would the local collective make its own computers, on which Kingsnorth propagates his work? Perhaps the point is that we should learn to do without those, but would it even manage a printing press, or paper mill? Are books a deadly result of the Fall, to be despised? Is music, also in the list of the Cainites’ civilised accomplishments? Would the collective make medicine and eyeglasses, or were myopics like me meant to grope our way dimly through the world until we die young in some unseen hole? Would such localism offer the means to enhance crop yields in the third world and to feed the poor, or are we all Malthusians now?

To curse or to take pride?

Kingsnorth scorns such petty practicalities. They must be subordinated to the higher principle, an argument which has echoed through history in various guises, such as this one:

Set up and defend only the institutions that are of God. Count as precious only that which is good and right, only that which can be found in the pure, clear Scriptures. Then reject, hate, and curse all proposals, all words, all opinion, and all institutions of all men, including your own.

These could be Kingsnorth’s words, but were written four hundred years ago, in 1524, by founder of the Swiss brethren, Conrad Grebel. He, too, reads in Scripture a stark and reconcilable chasm between the “institutions of men” and the Kingdom of God. “Babylon and Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah,” Kingsnorth echoes the Reformer, “were as civilized as the ancient world got.” And civilisation breeds sin:

Pride is celebrated everywhere—pride in nation, status, wealth, ethnic group, identity, religion. We have a month-long festival named for it. Our entire civilization, then, not only fails to resist these deadly sins, but actively encourages them.

Rhetorical dogwhistling to ROFTers aside, this is a non sequitur. Pride is a multivalent word. The sin of pride is not the same as being proud of something, unless something is oneself. There is no sin in being proud of one’s infant daughter’s finger painting. Nor in being proud of one’s town or country, if that “pride” translates to loyalty and the social glue which makes communal life possible. There is, as J.D. Vance pointed out recently, a proper hierarchy of love, and it is right to take pride in the groups to which one belongs insofar as they accord with God’s intentions. Hence even St Paul can boast in the name of Christian and exhorts competition among disciples in zeal for the Lord. The sin of pride is the inverse of humility. But pride in belonging to something greater than oneself is a necessary part of humility, and an antidote to isolating self-regard.

Monarchy or anarchy?

Ironically, the opposition Kingsnorth establishes between God and human institutions leads him to just the kind of rugged individualism that he abhors in, among others, Jordan Peterson. He sees society and technology as obstacles between the individual and God, rather than vehicles which, however dimly, mediate God’s presence. Hence his reading of First Samuel and the Israelites’ demand for a king:

Samuel warns them that their king …will conscript their sons into war and take their daughters to be his perfumers and bakers. He will take the best crops from their fields and vineyards. He will tax them a tenth of their grain, their animals, and their servants. … The people choose one anyway, and the rest of the history of Israel plays out.

Again, this caveat is true insofar as it goes, but St Constantine, for one, may be surprised to find it read as proof-text against the institution of monarchy per se, which God permitted and blessed. At the recent coronation of King Charles, Orthodox pundits were envious that the English Church could still do what the various socialists and Soviets had long since abolished in their own native lands. The Church has always prayed for the monarch in her liturgies. Emperors and kings number among the saints in heaven. Their office is not merely an unfortunate accident of the Fall. It is analogous to the rule of God, who reveals Himself not as General Secretary or President of a people’s republic, but as King of a Kingdom. How could we understand that analogy if we had no kings ourselves? What would be our point of reference?

Kingsnorth’s reading of Samuel, too, is less redolent of Orthodoxy than of English Puritanism. Had he lived in the seventeenth century, I suspect he would have concurred with Gerrard Winstanley’s paean to Oliver Cromwell:

The life of this dark kingly power, which you have made an act of Parliament and oath to cast out, if you search it to the bottom, you shall see it lies within the iron chest of cursed covetousness, who gives the earth to some part of mankind and denies it to another part of mankind: and that part that hath the earth, hath no right from the law of creation to take it to himself and shut out others; but he took it away violently by theft and murder in conquest.

King or carpenter?

Kingsnorth’s Christ, like that of the Radical Reformers, is a radical riposte to kings and their civilisations. The King of Kings, he opines,

does not appear in the form of a king or a judge or a procurator or a wealthy aristocrat… in fact, it is impossible not to see a man who was, in some fundamental sense, uncivilized.

I wonder whether Kingsnorth is mistaking Christ here for St John the Baptist. The latter, for sure, lives a life as close to Edenic as can be found in this fallen world, living off the land among the demons and angels of the wilderness, clad in his garment of skin. But the case for Jesus as wild man is less clear. John may have been a gardener of sorts, but Jesus was a carpenter. That is, a builder, a worker, a user of tools and technology, a money-maker, a man with a house and a job: not only a product of civilisation, but a maker of it. The men He chose to follow Him were not hermits, but mostly married small-businessmen who fished not just for subsistence but for money, to support their families, and paid their taxes, as Jesus told them to. And although they laid down their nets straight away to follow Him, the rest of the Gospel makes clear that they kept taking them up again. They never stopped working. St Paul made tents and told his peers that those who did not work would not eat. The disciples were not layabouts in some hippy commune. They were pillars of a new society: a new civilisation.

That this civilisation would be different from what had come before is not in doubt. But to say that is was to be no civilisation at all relies on a one-sided distortion of Christ, shared by Radical Reformers, liberals and Liberation Theologians alike. It rests on the insupportable thesis that the Apostles and Fathers did not really understand Jesus properly, but that we, millennia later, do.

Jesus did not, pace Kingsnorth, tell “us to give everything away.” He told one man to do so, seeing the hold wealth had on that man’s heart. He did not say “repeatedly” that the rich “could never attain the Kingdom of Heaven.” He said, once, that it is very difficult for the rich to enter God’s kingship, but that for God all things are possible. He most certainly did not tell us “never to resist evil.” He showed us a higher way of doing so. And if one cannot see the ironic exaggeration in a Torah-faithful Jew’s admonition not to respect but to hate one’s parents, then one would need to take sayings about cutting off one’s hands and gouging out one’s eyes literally, too. That said, a Christendom whose streets are full of blind amputees would indeed be far from the civilised society Kingsnorth purports to despise. It would also be quite incapable of self-defence.

Inversion or transfiguration?

The transformation of Christ into a revolutionary rather undermines the motivation of Kingsnorth’s entire project: opposition to what he calls a “culture of inversion.” I assume that this rhetorical flourish is not another dog whistle, this time of more Jungian timbre. He describes this idea as the “process” by which “our elites today are focused overwhelmingly on inverting the culture that we took for granted” in his youth, “turning everything on its head.”

But is this not precisely what Kingsnorth does with the Church’s understanding of Christ? Isn’t the “inversion” of civilisation exactly what he thinks Christ stands for? It is hard to see how Kingsnorth’s anti-civilisational, table-turning Jesus differs from the Jesus of liberationist, queer and feminist theologians who very much reject the late-twentieth century culture of his childhood. He is rather far from the Christ who became man that man, through His transfiguring glory, might become God.

Icon or idol?

Kingsnorth concludes that any attempt to defend western civilisation is idolatry. The sure mark of a radical Protestant is the inability to distinguish between an idol and an icon. The participatory ontology of fathers such as St Dionysius implies that the hierarchy of the world, when mediated by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, can and should be an icon of the celestial hierarchy; that, albeit dimly, “emperors and soldiers,” merchants, builders, and their families play just as much a role in the Kingdom of God as the mystics, hermits and wild saints, even if a different one. Some parts of the body may be more honourable than others, but the function of the least honourable organ is no less vital than those more highly esteemed. God’s work can be seen throughout the whole.

Kingsnorth is a likeable, knowledgable and persuasive writer on folk spirituality. His rapid trajectory from Green Zen Wicca to Orthodoxy makes for an inspirational and moving tale, and he tells it well.¹ But Christian orthodoxy teaches that grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it. This includes human nature. We are builders and civilisers not because we are fallen, but because we share in the creative goodness of the God who revealed Himself as a carpenter. It is incoherent to idealise the supposed Edenic purity of the natural world while demonising the human nature that is a part of it. Human civilisation is as capable as the rest of the cosmos of being an icon of heaven, and nature as capable as civilisation of being made an idol.

The Church’s sacred mission is to bless and offer the whole of creation, that all things, including the manmade, may be all in Christ, our God and King.²

1. Somewhat patronising sentence of ad hominem deleted, 19 February, in humility.

2. In addition, following correspondence with Kingsnorth, I do not think that he denies this, but rather maintains that one can have Christian culture without Christian civilisation. The division of these two things remains unclear to me to date. I am nonetheless grateful for his conversation. It is good that these things are being discussed, even if heatedly.