The redemptive rhythm of history [Book chapter 1]
Christendom is not just about popes and crusades. It is the lodestar of a Christian dialectic of history. In resistance to its sacralised violence, we find glimpses of redemption.
This post is part 3 in the summary of Security After Christendom (Wipf & Stock, 2024): an imaginative precis of chapter one, “Imagined Histories”
Anders Breivik called himself a knight of Christendom and justified his terrorist attack on Norwegian government buildings and killing of 69 young people on the island of Utoya in 2011 as a crusade. Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kiril have sought to sacralise the new Russian empire-state and its invasions of Ukraine in terms of the idea of the “Russian world” and “the spiritual choice made by St Vladimir” a thousand years ago. Donald Trump has been supported by overwhelming numbers of conservative evangelicals in the United States to Make America Great Again.
Such ideas of Christendom are not merely idolatry according to orthodox Christian beliefs, they are central to contemporary history and security. They were instrumental in Europe’s largest recent terrorist attack, the onset of its most significant war since 1945, and in the turbulent politics of the world’s most powerful state. The notion that Christendom is history is belied by them. The idea that it reached its height in the period of Latin Christendom and the Crusades in the high Middle Ages and has now been succeeded by a secular age – advanced or accepted by most historians and social scientists - is implausible. Christendom was once born and is now in retreat on a global scale by any objective measure. But as an imagined community – for that is what it is – it lives on causing great ruptures and violence. As Graham Ward notes, Christendom is, “an ideology only partially realised and internally contested”.
As we discussed in part 2, Christendom – a community where church and government entwine – first began to be imagined by some bishops as the church grew in the second and third centuries. It’s “moment” of origin came with Constantine’s conversion and the Edict of Milan (313CE) which allowed some freedom for Christians in the Roman empire. By the fifth century Roman soldiers were required to be Christian and St Augustine was writing a political philosophy of the new phenomenon of a Christian empire. The Constantinian shift was dramatic as prior to that a rapidly growing church had been pacifist. The martial church of Christendom would now see growth via conquest and, though Rome would decline, many other Christian empires followed. While the New Testament church was radically inclusive (of Jew and Greek, of slave and free), Christendom has always been imagined as exclusive (of Jews, of other cultures), hierarchical, and imperial.
This meant that Christendom was from its very outset plural and diverse rather than singular. It grew strongest in the East rather than in the Latin church. Justinian’s sixth-century Eastern Roman Empire was imagined as “symphonia” between church and government. Perhaps the most enduring Christian theocracy was the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. Many modern Eastern Orthodox communities continue this way of thinking today in “ethnophyletist” terms where nation and church are imagined to co-constitute one another. (While many orthodox leaders may oppose the practice of “Russian World” by Putin-Kiril, they don’t object to the principle). In contrast, Christendom imaginaries arose later and became unpopular earlier in the West. Until 1000CE, Western Christendom was “the Christianity of the peripheral zone”, according to the historian Peter Brown.
By 2000CE, it appeared that Western Christendom was returning to the periphery as church growth and Christian political influence increased in the East and South but declined in the global West and North. But the Western secular age which has grown since at least the sixteenth century can easily be misunderstood and must be caveated in two important ways. First, it faces countervailing trends in every generation including Christian nationalisms in places such as Hungary, Poland and the United States which seek to recentre their states not on a universal Christian identity but a distinctly national set of Christian values. Second, the secular age is a post-Christendom age in that it grows out of the conditions of individual liberty and the decentering of the church from state that emerged in Christendom.
Herein lies what we may call the redemptive rhythm of history. According to the Christian narrative, Christ overcame not only sin and death but all powers and authorities – specifically those of the greatest polity of the day and perhaps all time, the Roman Empire. His victory was complete in heaven but merely provisional on earth. Christ’s political action was found in his apartness from to these authorities; they sacralised themselves in their centres while He dispersed the sacred by spending his time with and finding holiness in the poor, the sick and the children. While the Romans and pagans of that age had no conception of civil liberties and social justice, the secular age practices them because of the precedent established by Christ. By this account, secularization is not anti-Christian but is the product of the radical Reformation’s challenge to the claims to authority, hierarchy, and exclusive salvation in Christendom.
The radical reformation did not come out of nowhere but was the product of iterative decentering trends against Christian empires by those within Christendom. These decentering movements often involved movement, migration, and exile -such as to the monasteries, the New England colonies or the micro-Christendom principalities of early modern Europe. For every official church of empire, there was a radical tradition rebelling against empire’s abuses. The church insofar as it was allied to the imperial centre defended slavery, conquest, and extractive economies; but insofar as it was opposed to the centre - in a radical monastic order, sect or nonconformist church – it was the means by which conquest was undermined, slavery defeated, and new frontiers of inclusion were breached.
The historical sociologist Michael Mann explains the “Christendom dialectic” as the contradiction between transcendence (the power of the cross) and immanence (the power of the sword). The medieval doctrine of the two swords – of church and king – was a Christendom ideology which sought to resolve the dialectic. But this is unstable because the transcendent cannot be contained within the “immanent frame”. The tension is universal and transhistorical, arising with the resurrected Christ and driving history forward. The sociologist David Martin defines it as “the Christian dialectic”, which is, “a continuous dialectic whereby the sword turns into the cross and the cross into the sword”. And yet this turning into is never complete.
The tension here is Augustinian and dialectical. In theological terms it is between earthly and heavenly cities. In Christendom historical terms, any reasonable reading must make this distinction between its centring forces (allied to power, sacralising itself, exploiting the poor) and decentring forces (opposing power, desacralizing itself, enabling the poor). The church is both the problem and the solution. As the problem, it is Christian – and we must not simply deny its claim to Christianity – as the anti-Christ is Christian. As the solution, it decentres itself from power and speaks from and for the margins of the world. It is a redemptive force to the extent that it is held in constructive tension with secular power. Neither the extremes of the sacralization of the secular (centred Christendom) nor the complete rejection of the Christian (militant secularism) create a stable order. The tension is necessary for the rhythm.
This Christian philosophy of history provides us with a different kind of temporality to that of the Constantinian rise, Latin heights, and modern fall of Christendom which is found among most of its apologists and critics alike. This account is inadequate in that, although it allows some room for providence, its eschatology is especially thin and potentially violent. A new Christendom must necessarily be imposed by force, against the majority, including most Christians, who rightly stand against it. By contrast to such affirmation of violence, a dialectical account allows us to recognize a rhythm in history where decentering tendencies are doing work to limit violence and the excesses of political power in Christendom.
So, where are we now in this rhythm of history? Martin identifies four waves: Justinian’s empire, the crusades and the high papacy, the protestant reformation, and, lastly, nineteenth and twentieth century evangelicalism. These are “successive Christianizations followed or accompanied by recoils”; each “overlapping the others, and each creating massive wakes which are still with us.” We appear to be entering another period of recoil and wake. But the fourth wave was never more than subcultural as the Christian was nested in the secular. Indeed, if one follows Martin’s four waves, we can see that they become more and more decentred from power and thereby increasingly secular. This is no tragic repetition but iterative waves of Christianization progressing towards the secular age.
Most Christians – including Charles Taylor, the author of The Secular Age – experience secularization as disenchantment and “loss”. Breivik, Putin and some of Trump’s evangelical supporters resist this loss with violence. Many of these Christian nationalists and advocates of a new Christendom imagine themselves not dialectically but apocalyptically. They are not wrong -historically and eschatologically – that our destination is the apocalypse (not the popular vision of Armageddon but a great unveiling). But they are surely wrong about their own place in the narrative. In the apocalypse, they see themselves as part of the army of Christ, however, in the terms of Revelation (Apokalypsis), they resemble the anti-Christ. They masquerade as saviours while they strike a note of discord in Christ’s redemptive rhythm of history.
The recoil against the fourth wave of Christianization is not perhaps primarily found in the radical gender activists, “woke” intellectuals, and post-humanists – typically targeted by conservative evangelicals – but with powerful conservative evangelicals who claim to be the last defenders of Christendom. The anti-Christ thinks it is Christ and does everything to imitate Christ. It is precisely those that hold to a centred conception of Christendom, who call for an American crusade, and who explicitly merge cross with sword, who are the anti-Christs of our day.