Is Paul Kingsnorth against Christian Civ or Industrial Christianity?

Industrial Christianity is Hard to Avoid

In my recent videos I’ve been processing the rise and fall of the Emergent movement.

Richard Beck

wrote some outstanding pieces on that in March of 2024.

The Emergent movement first split off the Young, Restless and Reformed movement before many of its participants dissolved into either deconstruction of the mainline. The context of it eventually set into motion the Orthodox moment that we are seeing today. Some call it the “Peterson to Pageau” pipeline.

Lately I’ve been shopping the neologism of “Metagelical” because of how much of the Evangelical ethos has come to absorb the behaviors of many who have enthusiastically pursued and Orthodox, traditional Roman Catholic or Anglo-Catholic revival. So many of these impulses were manifest in the early days of the Emergent movement.

The Emergent movement grew out of the inability of the Seeker movement to move from its focus on the Baby Boomers to Gen X.

The Seeker movement attempted to repackage “the Gospel” as if it were a brick but to deliver it with new embroidery. Messages focused on wisdom literature so that the suburban megachurch could gain credibility with struggling suburbanites in order to finally deliver their payload, which was often just another rendition of the Four Spiritual Laws, the Roman Road or Evangelism Explosion.

The Emergent movement were grappling with post-modernity and didn’t simply accept that Gospel brick. The Young, Restless and Reformed would repackage and elevate “The Gospel” with a dramatic Substitutionary Atonement emphasis, sharpened by the ongoing work of many like Tim Keller and John Piper.

The Emergents that would drift left or towards deconversion would turn against Substitutionary Atonement (often with hit lines pioneered by the New Atheists) and pursue music, liturgy and more recent theological trends that were found among Mainline churches but not in their former evangelical spaces.

In a part of the story I have yet to tell the work of Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke and Jonathan Pageau would address many of the philosophical concerns beneath the Emergent angst and begin moving some to the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic churches.

These changes don’t happen simultaneously nor serially for all. Seeker and church growth methods still play well in many places and with many people while others are finding treasures in the old rooms of requirement in Catholic or Orthodox storehouses.

What doesn’t play with many who have taken another look at Christianity is what I would call Industrial Christianity. Jordan Hall nicely notes that the scaling involved decouples Christianity from trust, care and relationships. Christian Baxter calls these “the gears of Isengard”.

Paul Kingsnorth lit the tinder of the pushback to the anxiety over the quest for the renewal of Christian Civilization in the West with his Erasmus lecture.

I’ve seldom seen one lecture have legs this long in the hyper-church of YouTube Christian thinky-talky. There have been many pushback videos and even some walk-back comments.

I think the question is poorly framed. Although the “Christian Civilization” question is very much of the moment right now,

Paul Kingsnorth

’s real foe is “the Machine” . All of his visiting wells and pushing back on techno-fixes for raping the natural world are motivated by what infuriated the Ents. Paul’s business is with Isengard.

Industrial Christianity remains with us, and it might be the case that Civilizational Christianity draws it forth from Christian leadership inevitably.

The City Four-Square that descends with the White Rider haunts those who long for the garden. What is often forgotten is that the Garden too is also a version of Civitas. Gardens have hedges, pruners, and boundaries. Our first parents were exiled from it into the field, where they had to contend with frustration in bringing forth fruit from the soil and the womb.

In this dispensation, before the descent of the City of God we must make our peace with the imperfect lest we succumb to even more destructive purity spirals. The monastic movement itself was an industrialization of poor St. Anthony.

It is so often the case that those who “want to get away from it all” can’t help bringing much of what they want to get away from with them.

The scriptural copyists themselves were industrialists to the degree that their creativity was curtailed in the service of replication fidelity.

Orthodoxy in America will now be subject to all of the same industrial temptations of its Catholic and Protestant siblings. They were plenty civilizational in the old countries and plenty industrial. They might shun the Willow Creek Association but the young bearded Orthobros load Hallow on their smartphones and observe Exodus90 fasting as advertised on the Daily Wire channel. Industrialization isn’t just a modern phenomenon.

Paul Kingsnorth hurling rocks at Orcs with axes is undoubtedly part of God’s calling on his life. His speech resonated with many but also draws out many of the conversations we need to be having. May God bless his restless soul as we together await the Return of the King.

I’ll be in conversation with Paul Kingsnorth, Martin Shaw, Fr. Paul Murry and Fr. Conor McDonough in Galway Ireland on February 2 2025. I’m sure we’ll continue this conversation there. Some tickets still available.