Holland’s central thesis is that the West, despite its loss of faith and abandonment of religious ritualism, remains nonetheless thoroughly Christian. That modernity (and even post-modernity) as it is commonly understood in the West is a product of Christian assumptions not necessarily shared by other civilisations and that these continue to inspire and inform its contemporary moral precepts and social mores. [...]
When Nietzsche declared God to be dead he was declaring in effect, that everyman (and woman) was henceforth their own god. It is a message that in the one hundred and twenty years since his passing has been embraced with alacrity across Western Europe. While, as Holland points out, Nietzsche had lamented that Christianity’s sternutatory pollen still afflicted European noses back in the late 1800s, were he a witness to our current post-modernist era I suspect his mood would be far more upbeat.
Leo Strauss, the famous 20th century political scientist, saw in the artistic output of a civilisation the reification of its philosophical underpinnings and where once this had a distinctly Christian radiance today it carries the aura of…well nothing. In the words of Douglas Murray, the renowned neoconservative author: [...]
Today, as Western birth rates plummet (based upon distinctly un-Christian assumptions and attitudes) and its nations find themselves in the grip of a collective neurasthenia induced by the massive and sudden collapse in faith, the clamour amongst the Muslim multitudes for the revival of the Caliphate – for the restoration of the City of God and for His Will to be done on Earth as it is in Heaven – grows ever stronger. In an irony befitting of a Biblical parable, it is Muslims today who lay far more an authentic claim to the legacy of Jesus (peace be upon him) and Paul, than the average ‘Christian’ European or American.
[Ok, so I've finally published my musings on @holland_tom's latest book Dominion (it was recently released in paperback). It's long (9700 words) but of all my blog posts over the years I really do recommend you read this one.] https://t.co/24lzETkuKY
