I’m too old to become a fanboy of anything really but I fear it may be happening. Every now and then you find some thoughts and ideas that really spark within you. But when those ideas are written with verve and some wildness then those ideas can really start to crackle and fizz like a high voltage wire with electricity surging through it. Contained. Dangerous. Lively. Deadly.

That’s something of what I feel as I’m discovering the essays of Paul Kingsnorth. I begin them relaxed and by the end it is if someone has injected caffeine straight into my frontal-lobe (I don’t think that can actually be done). I’m not the only one. Rod Dreher goes giddy every time a new essay comes out. My friend Liam Thatcher has taken note too.

I happened to read two of his essays today and both are excellent. You should probably his account of his conversion to Christianity first.

I went searching, then, for the truth. But where to find it? Elders, saints, and mystics are notable these days for their absence. In their place we are offered a pick’n’mix spirituality, on sale in every market stall and pastel-shaded hippy web portal. A dreamcatcher, a Celtic cross, a book about tantra, a weekend drum workshop, and a pack of tarot cards with cats on them, and hey, presto: You’re ready for your personalized “spiritual” journey. On the other side, you will find no exhortation to sacrifice or denial of self, and certainly no battered and bleeding god-man calling you to pick up your cross and follow him. No, you will find instead the perfect manifestation of everything you wanted in the first place: the magnification of your will, not its dissolution. Expressive individualism disguised as epiphany, the reaching prayer of a culture that doesn’t know how lost it is.

The Cross & the Machine

Read the whole thing. Paul finished his essay with this:

In the Kingdom of Man, the seas are ribboned with plastic, the forests are burning, the cities bulge with billionaires and tented camps, and still we kneel before the idol of the great god Economy as it grows and grows like a cancer cell. And what if this ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through? As we see the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over ­humility, separation over communion, the stakes become clearer each day. Surrender or rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the Cross or the machine. We have always been ­offered the same choice. The gate is strait and the way is narrow and maybe we will always fail to walk it. But is there any other road that leads home? 

The Cross & the Machine

What struck me here was how similar this was to Walsh & Keesmaat and their critique of empire. Which brings me to Kingsnorth’s second essay (which I actually read first), The Dream of the Rood.

He begins with a fantastic telling of the creation story as he teases out what is going on in our civilization just now. Or the crumbling ruins of it. Because the Christianity that undermined the Roman Empire became the empire. The subversive rabble became Christendom.

And it really was everything. No aspect of daily life was unaffected by the story: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the very notion of individuals, with ‘God-given’ rights and duties; the attitude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe – its structure and meaning, and our human place within it. 

The Dream of the Rood

But what has undone Christendom and laid a mighty axe at its roots is The Machine a.k.a global capitalism.

The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as it colonises everything from the way we eat to the values we teach our children. Cut loose in a post-modern present, with no centre, no truth and no direction, we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers before the monstrous idol of the Machine.

The Dream of the Rood

He then says, and this really struck home, “But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.”

And we do! And that is the problem with the church in the West. We are taking our instructions from the Machine or the Empire. We are living lives by their rules and not by ours. And we have to find a way to change that.

Which brings us full circle, because this is precisely the empire that Walsh & Keesmaat want to subvert in our day. And to do that they look back to the New Testament and the book of Colossians. What goes around has indeed come around.