Andrew Breitbart, an American journalist and political commentator, claimed that “politics is downstream from culture,” by which he meant that politics arises from and is heavily influenced by the culture within which it is practiced. That is often the case, but a deeper analysis of the source of not only politics, but of culture itself, is found in the work of several thinkers from the twentieth century, including Russell Kirk, an American political philosopher. Kirk asserted that culture grows out of cult or religion, and he cited other prominent writers who made the same claim:
From what source did humankind’s many cultures arise? Why, from cults. A cult is a joining together for worship—that is, the attempt of people to commune with a transcendent power. It is from association in the cult, the body of worshippers, that human community grows. This basic truth has been expounded in recent decades by such eminent historians as Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee.
Once people are joined in a cult, cooperation in many other things becomes possible. Common defense, irrigation, systematic agriculture, architecture, the visual arts, music, the more intricate crafts, economic production and distribution, courts and government—all these aspects of a culture arise gradually from the cult, the religious tie.
Thus, Kirk and these other thinkers would have agreed with Breitbart that politics is generally downstream from culture, but they broadened and deepened this claim by noting that culture, in turn, flows from the religion or theology of the community. Thus, politics is downstream from culture, but culture is downstream from theology.
One of the crucial implications of this causal sequence is that if a community’s religious belief decays, sooner or later, both the culture and the politics that had been derived from that religion will decay as well. Speaking over thirty years ago, Kirk rightly claimed that precisely this decline had already occurred to a significant extent in Western civilization:
What ails modern civilization? Fundamentally, our society’s affliction is the decay of religious belief. If a culture is to survive and flourish, it must not be severed from the religious vision out of which it arose.
Unfortunately, matters have only gotten worse since Kirk made this observation, as the general decline of religious faith in the West has continued apace. We have continued to sever our society more and more completely from the “religious vision out of which it arose,” which was fundamentally a Judeo-Christian vision. But the damage done by this disconnect has also been exacerbated over the last several decades by an additional, but related, factor: the growing rejection of the anthropological as well as theological vision out of which our society arose. Several contemporary thinkers have pointed to this crisis in anthropology, in addition to the crisis in religious faith, as another foundational cause of civilizational decline in the West, including Eric Zemmour, Carl Trueman, Paul Kingsnorth, and R. R. Reno.
Of course, the rejection of our founding anthropological vision is closely related to the rejection of our founding religious vision, since a society’s conception of human nature typically flows from its theology (or lack thereof). In the West, the traditional view of human nature has been based on the description found in Genesis 1:26-27:
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness . . .” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Many people in the West have rejected this conception of human beings as having been created imago Dei, in the image and likeness of God (often because they have rejected God himself). This rejection of the imago Dei has had many deleterious consequences for Western culture, including the radical devaluing of human life, confusion about the definition of and differences between males and females, confusion on the part of adolescents and young adults regarding their identity, and increasing confusion about the origin and nature of human rights, just to name a few.
All of these consequences are, in one way or another, illustrative of the ways in which the deterioration of a society’s foundational anthropology and theology can result in a significant deterioration in the politics and culture of that society. But let’s focus on the example of the contemporary conception of human rights.
If a community’s religious belief decays, sooner or later, both the culture and the politics that had been derived from that religion will decay as well.
In the West, the traditional view of human rights has, of course, been based on the anthropological/theological claim that all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God and have been endowed by God with specific rights. This claim was given iconic expression in the American Declaration of Independence’s assertions: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But in recent decades, much of the political discourse regarding human rights has ignored or rejected the anthropological and theological origins of our modern conception of human rights, treating such rights as a purely secular concept arising from purely human sources. As Michael Ignatieff put it, “secularism has become the lingua franca of global human rights.”
If anyone doubts this, he need only reflect on Senator Tim Kane’s assertion last year that human rights come from government and not from God:
The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law. . . . And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.
This, from one of the US senators from Virginia, the home state of the author of the Declaration of Independence.
This secularization of the concept of human rights has led, among other things, to the formulation of some newly conceived “rights,” such as the so-called “right” to procure an abortion, also expressed more euphemistically as a “reproductive right.” The “right” to kill one’s child was certainly not a right that Thomas Jefferson would have had in mind when he referred to the unalienable rights with which the Creator has endowed us, much less one that the Creator himself had in mind when he created us.
Tracey Rowland has noted the problems that arise when human rights are touted in a culture that does not recognize human dignity and the divine origin of those human rights:
Rights themselves mean little if they are not operating within a culture that respects human dignity, and human dignity is most respected in cultures that contain some understanding that human beings are made in the image of God or, at least, that human life is in some sense sacred.
Politics and culture in the West have decayed as fast as they have because we have largely rejected not only the theology but also the anthropology upon which Western civilization was built, the anthropology and theology provided by our Judeo-Christian heritage.
And yet, there is encouragement to be found in the fact that this gives us two fronts, both theological and anthropological, on which we can work in our efforts to revitalize Western culture, and also in the fact that these two fronts tend to be synergistic in the sense that progress in recovering one of them can contribute to progress in recovering the other as well.
To paraphrase Russell Kirk, if Western culture is to survive and flourish, we must recover both the religious vision and the anthropological vision out of which that culture arose.