Future tense, IV: America & the angels of Sacré-Cœur

I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions . . .

—Joel 2:28

From the outside, Montmartre’s Sacré-Cœur Basilica presents something of an aesthetic problem. It is a striking edifice, needless to say, soaring up as it does at the very summit of Paris, a bright white riot of demi-ovate domes and cupolas, elongated arches, and intrepidly clashing decorative motifs. But it is also very much a product of its time, with a little too much fin de siècle preciosity about it. If one views its alleged fusion of Romanesque and Byzantine styles at a sardonic slant, it can look suspiciously like a meretricious pastiche, full of late Romantic medievalist and orientalist clichés. Contemplated at a distance, under the Parisian sky, it all sometimes seems not so much an organic expression of the spiritual aspirations of French culture as a patently synthetic memorial to them, concocted from equal parts morbid nostalgia and sugary fantasy.

On the inside, however, it is very different: more austere, more a matter of softly golden stone and muted sunlight.

On the inside, however, it is very different: more austere, more a matter of softly golden stone and muted sunlight. There is, admittedly, that huge, hideous mosaic from the 1920s in the apse (a titanic Christ with a gilded heart, flanked by the lesser colossi of the Blessed Virgin and St. Michael, all three towering over a scampering horde of mitered and haloed imps), but otherwise the interior is genuinely, if somberly, beautiful. And one feature of the vault can produce an effect that is truly sublime. There are four large stone angels with outspread wings, carved in relief, one each, in the pendentives below the central dome. When one enters the basilica out of bright daylight, however, they are not immediately visible, but remain hidden in the shadows below the ring of windows at the dome’s base. It is only as one’s eyes adjust to the light that they emerge, all at once, from the darkness. If one is unprepared for it, it is a startling experience, even slightly terrifying; for just a few seconds, one senses the advent—and the gaze—of immense and numinous presences.

At that moment, any lingering aesthetic reservations can be set aside. However dubious certain features of its design may be, there can be no doubt just then that Sacré-Cœur does authentically express something of the genius of French Christian tradition. Ultimately, it is all a question of causality. Obviously, those angels looming so magnificently overhead are there as a result of the material and efficient causes that went into the building’s planning and construction: Travertine limestone, bricks, sculptors, Paul Abadie, money, the political tensions of the Third Republic, and so on. But, in another sense, it was the angels who summoned the basilica into being; they provided the final and formal causes that raised it up out of the substrate of mere unformed matter. Were it not for the transcendent longings they embodied, or for the ecstatic creativity those longings once evoked, there would be no church there at all. And one knows this, however fleetingly, in the instant of their apparition.

After all—and this is a truth so certain that only the most doctrinaire Marxist or lumpen British atheist could deny it—the structure of culture is essentially an idealist one, and a living culture is a spiritual dispensation. A civilization’s values, symbols, ideals, and imaginative capacities flow down from above, from the most exalted objects of its transcendental desires, and a people’s greatest collective achievements are always in some sense attempts to translate eternal into temporal order. This will always be especially obvious in places of worship. To wax vaguely Heideggerean, temples are built to summon the gods, but only because the gods have first called out to mortals. There are invisible powers (whether truly divine powers or only powers of the imagination) that seek to become manifest, to emerge from their invisibility, and they can do this only by inspiring human beings to wrest beautiful forms out of intractable elements. They disclose their unseen world by transforming this world into its concrete image, allegory, or reflection, in a few privileged places where divine and human gazes briefly meet.

Such places, moreover, are only the most concentrated crystallizations of a culture’s highest visions of the good, true, and beautiful; they are not isolated retreats, set apart from the society around them, but are rather the most intense expressions of that society’s rational and poetic capacities. And it is under the shelter of the heavens made visible in such places that all of a people’s laws and institutions, admirable or defective, take shape, as well as all its arts, civic or private, sacred or profane, festal or ordinary. This is a claim not about private beliefs, or about the particular motives that may have led to any particular law or work of art, but about the conceptual and aesthetic resources that any culture can possess or impart, and those are determined by religious traditions—by shared pictures of eternity, shared stories of the absolute. That is why the very concept of a secular civilization is nearly meaningless.

This is also to say, incidentally, that a culture’s greatest source of strength is a source of considerable fragility as well.

This is also to say, incidentally, that a culture’s greatest source of strength is a source of considerable fragility as well. When the momentary thrill induced by the angels of Sacré-Cœur subsides, what remains is merely a certain poignancy: the realization that the emotional power of those figures, insofar as it cannot be accounted for merely by a trick of the light, emanates entirely from the past.

It has nothing to do with the future. Given the late date of the basilica’s construction, and given the realities of modern France, it is impossible not to see that splendidly overwhelming but very temporary act of disclosure as a valedictory performance, a last epiphany before a final departure, at the end of a cultural history that now shows no capacity for renewing itself. Civilization is a spiritual labor, an openness to revelation, a venture of faith, subsisting to a great degree on things no more substantial than myths and visions and prophetic dreams; thus it can be destroyed not only by invading armies or economic collapse, but also by simple disenchantment.

All of which brings me to my topic: the uncertainties of the American future and the possible role religion may or may not play in that future. If it seems I have taken a rather roundabout approach to the issue, my earnest defense is that, to this point, I have been talking all along about America; I have simply been doing so sub contrario. American religious life, in all its native expressions, is so odd and paradoxical that it is often most easily approached indirectly, stealthily, from behind, as it were; and, to my mind, one of the best ways of doing this is to begin one’s approach from France. The contrast is so edifyingly stark. So much of what historically made France a great nation is all but entirely absent from America, while so much of what has made America a great nation is all but entirely alien to France, and it may be the case that many of the principal weaknesses of each are among the other’s principal strengths.

This is not, of course, a comparison between two distinct civilizations—at least, not if one uses that word in its grandest, most inflexible, and haughtiest sense. America’s chief originality lies in the political, social, and economic experiment that it undertook at its founding, but it is a very young nation, and delightfully diverse, and its culture is largely a blended distillation of other cultures. Often blamelessly derivative, but also often shamefully forgetful of even the recent past, it is a nation that floats lightly upon the depths of human history, with sometimes too pronounced a sense of its own novelty.

So, obviously, there is no American equivalent of Sacré-Cœur: some consecrated space haunted by the glories and failures of a deep past, ennobled and burdened by antique hopes and fantasies, emblematic of an ancient people’s whole spiritual story, but also eloquent of spiritual disappointment and the waning of faith. There are places of local memory, especially in the South, but their scope is rather severely circumscribed. America’s churches, when they are not merely serviceable clapboard meetinghouses or tents of steel and glass, are mostly just imitations of European originals: imported, transplanted, always somewhat out of place. They tell us practically nothing about America itself, and even less about whatever numinous presences might be hovering overhead.

Yet those presences are there. There may not be a distinctive American civilization in the fullest sense, but there definitely is a distinctly American Christianity. It is something protean, scattered, fragmentary, and fissile, often either mildly or exorbitantly heretical, and sometimes only vestigially Christian, but it can nevertheless justly be called the American religion—and it is a powerful religion. It is, however, a style of faith remarkably lacking in beautiful material forms or coherent institutional structures, not by accident, but essentially. Its civic inexpressiveness is a consequence not simply of cultural privation, or of frontier simplicity, or of modern utilitarianism, or even of some lingering Puritan reserve towards ecclesial rank and architectural ostentation, but also of a profound and radical resistance to outward forms. It is a religion of the book or of private revelation, of oracular wisdom and foolish rapture, but not one of tradition, hierarchy, or public creeds. Even where it creates intricate institutions of its own, and erects its own large temples, it tends to do so entirely on its own terms: in a void, in a cultural and (ideally) physical desert, at a fantastic remove from all traditional sources of authority, historical “validity,” or good taste (Mormonism is an expression of this tendency at its boldest, most original, and most effervescently vulgar). What America shares with, say, France is the general Western heritage of Christian belief, with all its confessional variations; what it has never had any real part in, however, is Christendom.

In one sense, this is not at all surprising. America was born in flight from the Old World’s thrones and altars, the corrupt accommodations between spiritual authority and earthly power, the old confusion of reverence for God with servility before princes. And, as a political project in its own right, the United States was the first Western nation explicitly founded upon principles requiring no official alliance between religious confession and secular government. Even if this had not been so, the ever-greater religious heterogeneity of America over the course of its history would surely, sooner or later, have made such an alliance absurdly impractical. And so, in fact, America was established as the first truly modern nation, the first Western society consciously to dissociate its constitutional order from the political mythologies of a long disintegrating Christendom, and the first predominantly Christian country to place itself under, at most, God’s general providential supervision, but not under the command of any of his officially recognized lieutenants. The nation began, one could argue, from a place at which the other nations of the West had not yet arrived.

In another sense, however, when one considers the result, it is all rather astonishing. America may have arisen out of the end of Christendom, and as the first fully constituted political alternative to Christendom, but it somehow avoided the religious and cultural fate of the rest of the modern West. Far from blazing a trail into the post-Christian future that awaited other nations, America went quite a different way, down paths that no other Western society would ever tread, or even know how to find. Whereas European society—moving with varying speed but in a fairly uniform direction—experienced the end of Christendom simultaneously as the decline of faith, in America just the opposite happened. Here, the paucity of institutional and “civilizing” mediations between the transcendent and the immanent went hand in hand with a general, largely formless, and yet utterly irrepressible intensification of faith: rather than the exhaustion of religious longing, its revival; rather than a long nocturnal descent into disenchantment, a new dawning of early Christianity’s elated expectation of the Kingdom.

I should, I suppose, avoid excessive generalization on this matter. Just about every living religion has found some kind of home here, bringing along whatever institutional supports it could fit into its luggage. Many such creeds have even managed to preserve the better part of their integrity. Still, I would argue (maybe with a little temerity), such communities exist here as displaced fragments of other spiritual worlds, embassies from more homogeneous religious cultures, and it is from those cultures that they derive whatever cogency they possess. They are beneficiaries of the hospitable and capacious indeterminacy of American spirituality, but not direct expressions of it. The form of Christianity most truly indigenous to America is one that is simultaneously peculiarly disembodied and indomitably vigorous, and its unity is one of temperament rather than confession. The angels of America have remained, for the most part, unseen presences, unable or unwilling to emerge from their hiddenness into the open visibility of a shared material or intellectual culture; and yet, perhaps for this very reason, they have also retained the sort of terrible force that their Old World counterparts lost some time ago.

They may, therefore, be very clever angels. Never coming out of the shadows in great national churches, or dancing attendance on kings, or lending much of a hand in civil government, they also never risked being weighed down by human political history. Because they never revealed themselves too carelessly to the eyes of faith, they also never exposed themselves to the scornful gaze of disbelief. France’s angels, by contrast, had for centuries been perceived as complicit in the injustices of the ancien régime, and so could hardly claim immunity when the old order fell, or escape the resentments and skepticisms that that order had bred. But America’s angels have kept their mysterious transcendence intact to this day, and with it their power to inspire spiritual longings, even of the most extravagant kind.

None of this is to say, however, that American society has somehow really succeeded in erecting a partition between its religious and its civic identities. Cult and culture are never separable, even if their relation does not involve any explicit union between a particular religious body and the power of the state. American spirituality may be particularly rich in those kinds of devotion that are most elusive of stable institutional form: enthusiasm and ecstasy, apocalyptic mysticism and gnostic individualism, dreams and visions. But, even so, America is—as much as any nation has ever been—its religion, and its greatest cultural virtues and defects are all bound up with the kinds of faith that flourish here.

Years ago, as an aid to teaching undergraduates and a partial remedy to the boredom of the lecture hall, I devised a needlessly florid typology for describing the various shapes taken by modern Western nations in Christendom’s aftermath and the various ways in which Western societies have gathered up the fragments of the old concords between church and state. As a mnemonic device for my students, it was a ghastly failure, but, as a useful oversimplification, it was a spectacular triumph (which makes it baffling that, with the exception of a partial reference to it in an article in The New Criterion some years back, I have never thought to put it in print until now). I told my students to think of modern Western nations, and of their diverse attitudes towards the social and political remains of the old Christian order, under three figures—pseudomorphs, exuviae, and poltergeists—and I proposed, as an example of each type respectively, the Soviet Union, France, and the United States.

Pseudomorphism—for those who have not recently leafed through manuals of crystallography or volumes of Spengler—is that process by which one crystal assumes the alien shape of another, through chemical or molecular substitution, or by being forced into the space evacuated by its predecessor. It seemed to me an elegant metaphor for the way that, for instance, Soviet political culture had supplanted the late Russian version of Byzantine Caesaropapism not just by dissolving the latter’s basic forms, but by trying to colonize them from within: in place of the old authoritarianism, a new absolutism, with a more comprehensive state apparatus and a more fanatical intolerance of heresy; in place of Eastern Orthodoxy’s emphasis upon eternity within time and the light of the Kingdom amid history’s darkness, the Soviet faith in the providential sovereignty of material dialectic and the ineluctability of the socialist utopia; in place of the ethereal gold and temperas of Byzantine iconography, the shrill vermilion and lifeless opacity of Soviet realist portraiture; in place of the relics of incorruptible saints, Lenin’s pickled cadaver in a glass box; and so on.

Exuviation, on the other hand, is the shedding of skins or shells, and exuviae are what are sloughed off.

Exuviation, on the other hand, is the shedding of skins or shells, and exuviae are what are sloughed off. The image works especially well if one thinks of those translucent integumental husks that cicadas leave behind them, clinging tenaciously to the bark of trees. It is an apt metaphor for all those enchanting vestiges of religious tradition found in societies that, like France, have lost the faith so thoroughly that even the passion of revolutionary impiety has long since subsided. There the remains of the old order are reduced to ornamental souvenirs, the lovely traces of vanished dream-worlds; they just linger on, quietly, in old buildings, museums, tastes, customs, the calendar, turns of phrase, shared stories, a few legal traditions, a few moral premises, a few imperturbable pillars of cultural sensibility, but everything that once inhabited, shaped, and animated them is gone. They are exquisitely dead. They can excite indifference, tender memories, casual contempt, but rarely love or belief. They have become elements of a general aesthetic and moral atmosphere, and nothing more.

As for poltergeists, there the image is less obscure. Everything I have already said about American religion explains the metaphor: a force capable of moving material realities about, often unpredictably and even alarmingly, and yet possessing no proper, stable material form of its own. American religion lacks the imposing structures of culture, law, and public worship that Christendom evolved over the centuries, but its energy is almost impossible to contain. It has no particular social place, and yet it is everywhere.

If this typology, however, seems a little too dainty or a little too neat, it might be better simply to talk in terms of the relative vitality of (excuse the postmodern fillip here) “force and structure” in a nation’s religion. Soviet society, by grotesquely inverting rather than destroying the religious grammar of Russian culture, showed that both the spiritual and the institutional aspects of Russian Christendom, however diminished at the time of the revolution, still had a little life in them. The serene urbanity of today’s French secularism, the pragmatic laicism of French republicanism, and the relaxed anticlericalism of French society as a whole testify to French Christendom’s absolute dormancy in all its aspects. In the case of either nation, though, religious force and structure persisted or declined more or less together. In America, by contrast, as happened nowhere else, they suffered a schism, fairly early on, whose result—or, at any rate, sequel—was that religion’s public structure was shattered, but the force contained within it was released.

One might have expected that a spirituality without the tangible support of civic religion would disperse over time, but perhaps the passion of faith often thrives best when it is largely unaccommodated, roaming on its own in wild places. After all, when one considers the first three centuries of Christian history, when the faith had no such support, it may make perfect sense that, in the wake of Christendom’s collapse, the forms of Christianity that would prove most lively would be those that possess something analogous to the apocalyptic consciousness of the earliest Christian communities: their sense of having emerged from history into the immediacy of a unique redemptive event; their triumphant contempt for antique cult and culture; their experience of emancipation from the bondage of the law; their aloofness from structures of civil power; and their indifference to the historical future (for the present things are passing away).

There may even be some advantage in the absence of strong institutional organization, at least in certain circumstances. It may well be that the translation of Christianity’s original apocalyptic ferment into a cultural logic and social order produced a powerful but necessarily volatile alloy. For all the good that this transformation produced in the shaping of Western civilization (which no sane person could deny), it also encumbered the faith with a weight of historical and cultural expectation wholly incompatible with the gospel it proclaimed. Certainly Christian culture has excelled, as no other ever has, at incubating militant atheisms and even self-conscious nihilisms, and this may have something to do with its own innate tension between spiritual rebellion and social piety. Perhaps the concrescence of Christianity into Christendom necessarily led in Europe, over the course of centuries, to its gradual mortification, its slow attrition through internal stress, and finally its dissipation into the inconclusiveness of human history and the ephemerality of political orders. The relation between force and structure had become so hardened by the end that the one could not escape the fate of the other.

History is not created by historical consciousness, after all.

Whatever the case, the American religion somehow slipped free from this story before it reached its dénouement, and so it is not inextricably entangled in the tragic contradictions of historical memory. At its purest, in fact, it is free of almost all memory, and so of all anxiety: it strives towards a state of almost perfect timelessness, seeking a place set apart from the currents of human affairs, where God and the soul can meet and, so to speak, affirm one another. For a faith so thoroughly divorced from history, there is no set limit to the future it may possess. And if, as I have said, culture is always shaped by spiritual aspirations, this all has a very great bearing on what kind of future America might possess. History is not created by historical consciousness, after all; the greatest historical movements are typically inspired by visions of an eternal truth that has somehow overtaken history. This is simply because a people’s very capacity for a future, at least one of any duration or consequence (good or bad), requires a certain obliviousness in regard to time’s death-bound banality, a certain imaginative levity, a certain faith. The future is often the gift of the eternal.

I have gone some distance, I suppose, without offering some specific example of this “American religion” I keep referring to. This is because I really do understand it as something intrinsically impalpable and shapeless: a diffuse and pervasive spiritual temper rather than a particular creed. But, for clarity’s sake, I may as well admit that I regard American Evangelicalism in all its varieties—fundamentalist, Pentecostal, blandly therapeutic—as the most pristine expression of this temper. I say this not because of Evangelicalism’s remarkable demographic range, its dominance in certain large regions of the country, or its extraordinary missionary success in Latin America and elsewhere, but simply because I am convinced of its autochthony: it is a form of spiritual life that no other nation could have produced, and the one most perfectly in accord with the special genius and idiocy, virtue and vice, of American culture.

Whatever one’s view of Evangelicalism, only bigotry could prevent one from recognizing its many admirable features: the dignity, decency, and probity it inspires in individuals, families, and communities; the moral seriousness it nourishes in countless consciences; its frequent and generous commitment to alleviating the sufferings of the indigent and ill; its capacity for binding diverse peoples together in a shared spiritual resolve; its power to alter character profoundly for the better; the joy it confers. But, conversely, only a deep ignorance of Christian history could blind one to its equally numerous eccentricities: the odd individualism of its understanding of salvation; its bizarre talk of Christ as one’s “personal Lord and savior”; its fantastic scriptural literalism; the crass sentimentality of some of its more popular forms of worship; its occasional tendency to confuse piety with patriotism.

I am frequently tempted to describe it as a kind of “Christian Bhakti,” a pure ecstatic devotionalism, as opposed to those more “Vedic” forms of Christianity that ground themselves in ancient traditions. Much of American Evangelicalism not only lacks any sense of tradition, but is blithely hostile to tradition on principle: What is tradition, after all, other than man-made history, and what is history other than exile from paradise? What need does one have of tradition when one has the Bible, that eternal love letter from Jesus to the soul, inerrant, unambiguous, uncorrupted by the vicissitudes of human affairs? In some of its most extreme forms, Evangelicalism is a religion of total and unsullied reverie, the pure present of the child’s world, where ingenuous outcries and happy gestures and urgent conjurations instantly bring forth succor and substance. And, at its most intensely fundamentalist, so precipitous is its flight from the gravity of history into Edenic and eschatological rapture that it reduces all of cosmic history to a few thousand years of terrestrial existence and the whole of the present to a collection of signs urgently pointing to the world’s imminent ending.

Now, I know I am describing only a few extreme variants of only one variant of Protestant Christianity in America. I might point out that I am also, however, describing acute forms of a spirituality whose chronic forms can be found liberally distributed throughout America’s religious communities, even in certain circles within American Catholicism, Judaism, mainstream Protestantism, and elsewhere. That, though, is of only passing interest. My central claim is that what one sees with particular clarity in Evangelical piety is a deep spiritual orientation that both informs and expresses the American mythos: that grand narrative, going back to colonial times, of a people that has fled the evils of an Old World sunk in corruption, cast off the burden of an intolerable past, and been “born again” as a new nation, redeemed from the violence and falsehood of the former things.

It is not difficult, of course, to enumerate the weaknesses of a culture shaped by such a spiritual logic.

It is not difficult, of course, to enumerate the weaknesses of a culture shaped by such a spiritual logic. It is a spirituality that, for example, makes very little contribution to the aesthetic surface of American life. This is no small matter. The American religion does almost nothing to create a shared high culture, to enrich the lives of ordinary persons with the loveliness of sacred public spaces, to erect a few durable bulwarks against the cretinous barbarity of late modern popular culture, or to enliven the physical order with intimations of transcendent beauty. With its nearly absolute separation between inward conviction and outward form, it is largely content to surrender the surrounding world to utilitarian austerity. It could not do otherwise, even if the nation’s constitution were not formally so secular. It would not have the imaginative resources. It is a religion of feeling, not of sensibility; it might be able to express itself in great scale, but not as a rule in good taste.

It is, however, a religious temperament wonderfully free of cynicism or moral doubt, and so it may have a singular capacity for surviving historical disappointment and the fluctuations of national fortune. Its immunity to disenchantment seems very real, at any rate. It may, in fact, grow only stronger if the coming decades should bring about a decline in America’s preeminence, power, international influence, or even solvency. Whatever the case, it is unlikely to lapse very easily into a decline of its own, or vanish into some American equivalent of the spiritual exhaustion and moral lassitude of post-Christian Europe.

For myself, I should confess that I approach the relation between America’s cultural and religious futures with an insoluble ambivalence. This is, in part, because I have no emotional investment in America’s pre-eminence among modern powers. Our geopolitical ascendancy during the latter half of the twentieth century was very much an accident, and not a very pleasant one. It was the result of the country being dragged back into a history of which it had taken leave centuries before, and into the psychotic savagery of mid-century European affairs, and into a global ideological struggle for the future.

It would not be any great tragedy if all of that should now prove to have been a very transient episode. In relative terms, American prosperity and power will remain formidable enough for some time, and I cannot see why anyone should fret over anything as intrinsically worthless as global “leadership.” The question that should concern us, it seems to me, is whether in years ahead America will produce a society that has any particular right to a future. By this, I mean nothing more elaborate than: How charitable and just a society will it be, how conscious will it be of those truths that transcend the drearier economies of finite existence, and will it produce much good art? And all of that will be determined, inevitably, by spiritual forces.

It is not obvious, however, what those forces will be, or what they will bring about. It is very much an open and troubling question whether American religiosity has the resources to help sustain a culture as a culture—whether, that is, it can create a meaningful future, or whether it can only prepare for the end times. Is the American religious temperament so apocalyptic as to be incapable of culture in any but the most local and ephemeral sense? Does it know of any city other than Babylon the Great or the New Jerusalem? For all the moral will it engenders in persons and communities, can it cultivate the kind of moral intelligence necessary to live in eternity and in historical time simultaneously, without contradiction? Will its lack of any coherent institutional structure ultimately condemn it to haunting rather than vivifying its culture, or make it too susceptible to exploitation by alien interests, or render it incapable of bearing any sufficiently plausible or even interesting witness to the transcendent . . . ? And so on and so on. There is much to admire in the indigenous American religious sensibility, without question, but also much to deplore, and there is plenteous cause for doubt here.

Is the American religious temperament so apocalyptic as to be incapable of culture in any but the most local and ephemeral sense?

Still, the worst fate that could befall America, one far grimmer than the mere loss of some of its fiscal or political supremacy in the world, would be the final triumph of a true cultural secularism. I know that there are those on both the left and the right who still believe in the project of an “enlightened” secular society; some—curiously ignorant of pre-modern and modern history alike—actually cling to the delusion that secular society on the whole is a kinder, fairer, and freer arrangement than any known to earlier ages. And, then again, one does not need to be quite that credulous to be profoundly grateful (as I am, for instance) for the dissolution of the old alliance between religious orthodoxies and the mechanisms of political power. Nevertheless, whatever one may say in favor of secularism’s more agreeable political expressions, its record to this point, as an ideology or a material history, has been mixed at best: monstrous warfare, totalitarian regimes, genocides, the inexorable expansion of the power and province of the state, the gradual decline of the arts and of civic aesthetics . . . It can scarcely be taken very seriously as the model of what a society ideally ought to be.

Even when it is not breeding great projects for the rectification of human nature or human society—not building death-camps or gulags, not preaching eugenics or the workers’ paradise—the secularist impulse can create nothing of enduring value. It corrupts the will and the imagination with the deadening boredom of an ultimate pointlessness, weakens the hunger for the good, true, and beautiful, makes the pursuit of diversion life’s most pressing need, and gives death the final word. A secular people—by which I mean not simply a people with a secular constitution, but one that really no longer believes in any reality beyond the physical realm—is a dying people, both culturally and demographically. Civilization, or even posterity, is no longer worth the effort. And, in our case, it would not even be a particularly dignified death. European Christendom has at least left a singularly presentable corpse behind. If the American religion were to evaporate tomorrow, it would leave behind little more than the brutal banality of late modernity.

In the end, though, on the matter of religion and the American future, I am certain of very little. I know only how unprecedented and hence unpredictable our historical situation is. The angels of Sacré-Cœur are now, for the most part, sublime symbols of an absence; once images of a seemingly inexhaustible supernatural source of cultural possibility, they have become little more than ironic evocations of a final cultural impotence. They were raised aloft in the fading twilight of a long, magnificent, and terrible epoch, during which a glorious vision of eternal splendor was given profuse and enduring concrete form, but they were not the harbingers of a cultural renewal. America, by contrast, has never known either that glory or that failure. Our angels continue to move in their inaccessible heavens, apparently still calling out to mortals, still able to provoke our sons and daughters to prophesy, our old men to dream dreams, our young men to see visions. So who knows? Perhaps the quieter strengths they impart to our culture—its deeper reserves of charity and moral community, the earnestness of its spiritual longings, its occasional poetic madness—will persist for a long while yet, and with them the possibility of cultural accomplishments far more important than mere geopolitical preeminence. There is, at any rate, some room for hope.

David B. Hart’s most recent book is Atheist Delusions (Yale).

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 30 Number 4, on page 4
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