Christendom and the moral order of nations
G. K. Chesterton once remarked that “it is impossible to have a nation without Christendom; as it is impossible to have a citizen without a city.”1 At first glance the statement appears exaggerated. Christendom, at least as a visibly unified civilization, had already disappeared long before Chesterton wrote those words. Nations plainly continued to exist, and some became more powerful than ever. Yet Chesterton was making something more than a historical observation. He was making a metaphysical one.
A nation is a people whose distinct identity can be affirmed precisely because it exists within a wider moral order that also affirms the legitimacy of other peoples. To affirm one’s own nation as a nation is already to affirm a wider order in which nations as such possess legitimacy. This is why Chesterton distinguished nationalism from tribal self-assertion. Nationalism, in his older sense, implied a “law of nations.” It meant that peoples possessed a rightful place within a larger moral order.
Christendom supplied that order. It united Europe without abolishing distinctions. France remained France, Poland remained Poland, England remained England, because each participated in a higher spiritual and civilizational reality that transcended them without destroying them. Christendom made plurality intelligible.
Once that higher order disappears, political life begins to oscillate between two unstable poles: empire and tribe. Either unity is imposed through administration, ideology, market power, military force, or some other techne, or society fragments into rival identities and competing grievances. The center cannot hold because the center was never merely procedural. It rested upon a theological and metaphysical order.
Babel, Jerusalem, and the crisis of modernity
Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical Magnifica humanitas gives this insight a new urgency. Although occasioned by artificial intelligence, the encyclical is ultimately about the human person and the conditions necessary for authentic human flourishing. The encyclical frames the modern crisis through the biblical contrast between Babel and Jerusalem. Babel represents unity without God.2 Its builders possess a single language, a common technical capacity, and a unified direction. Yet their unity is one of self-assertion, animated by what Nietzsche would later exalt as der Wille zur Macht, rather than communion.3 They seek to make a name for themselves through power and coordination. Their project ends not in harmonious communion but in confused fragmentation.
Jerusalem, by contrast, is rebuilt through an ordered communion of distinct persons, offices, and responsibilities. Nehemiah directs and coordinates the work under legitimate authority, while families, artisans, priests, leaders, and laborers each contribute according to their respective roles. Unity is achieved neither through uniformity nor through the dissolution of order, but through the harmonious coordination of differentiated participation in a common good under God.4
This distinction between Babel and Jerusalem illuminates the predicament of modern civilization. Artificial intelligence is not merely another technology requiring regulation. It reveals with unusual clarity the spiritual and anthropological crisis already present within the modern West. We possess unprecedented powers of coordination, communication, prediction, and control, yet we increasingly lack agreement about what man is, what freedom is for, and what constitutes the common good. The crisis is therefore deeper than politics. It concerns the very structure of reality and the human person’s place within it.
The metaphysical grammar of communion
At the heart of Leo’s diagnosis lies an implied foundation: reality is constituted by complementary principles that possess meaning only in relation to one another. This helps explain why the encyclical repeatedly insists that the principles of Catholic social doctrine must be received together rather than treated as competing alternatives. Modern civilization repeatedly severs these co-principles, absolutizing one while rejecting the other. Rather than a hoped-for liberation, the result is distortion. What appears throughout Catholic social doctrine is therefore not an arbitrary collection of teachings but the social expression of a deeper metaphysical order.
Classical Christian thought understood reality through complementary principles: form and matter, soul and body, unity and plurality, act and potency, person and communion.5 These are not competing forces within a zero-sum system. Each possesses meaning only in relation to the other. To isolate one from the other is not to preserve it but to deform it. The theological ground of this vision is the doctrine of the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are neither isolated individuals nor dissolving manifestations of a monadic unity. God is perfect unity in real distinction. The Trinity provides the archetype for this unity in distinction that marks all created reality; therefore, it is neither pure sameness nor chaos. Creation bears an analogical trace of this order. Reality is participatory and relational. Relation is therefore not merely an external connection among otherwise self-contained beings, but one of the ways finite beings are ordered toward fulfillment in communion. Things possess integrity through ordered participation in a larger whole.
These co-principles are not merely complementary but asymmetrical. Throughout the metaphysical structure of finite being, one principle frequently serves as actuality, form, end, or integrating measure, while the other remains the indispensable condition through which that actuality is received and expressed. This deeper metaphysical pattern is reflected most concretely in the human person, a seamless unity of body and soul.
Because the spiritual soul is the form of the body and orders human life toward truth, love, and communion, principles arising more directly from the spiritual dimension of the person possesses a certain priority as ends, while those associated with individuation, particularity, and material existence remain necessary conditions for their realization. Thus, truth orders love, love guides freedom, and communion perfects individuality.6 Yet this priority does not negate the complementary principle. Rather, it preserves the proper order by which both attain their fulfillment. The Christian tradition therefore seeks neither the absorption of one principle into the other nor their separation, but their harmonious integration according to the order inscribed in creation itself.7
The key to understanding Catholic anthropology and social doctrine is that the common good is never in opposition to personal communion. It is the social form of communion itself. Persons cannot achieve fulfillment in isolation, nor are they absorbed into a collective whole. Rather, they flourish through participation in every aspect of life that authentically unites them to others while preserving their distinct dignity and responsibility. Catholic social doctrine is rooted in a vision of reality that resists reduction to a set of policy preferences. The Church’s social principles are intelligible only because they arise from a prior, Trinitarian understanding of the human person, communion, and the common good.
Social doctrine presupposes this theological vision and the metaphysical account of reality that flows from it. Its principles are not detachable political preferences capable of indefinite rearrangement. They are mutually implicating truths grounded in the nature of the human person and the common good. Magnifica humanitas states explicitly that solidarity, subsidiarity, social justice, the common good, and the universal destination of goods must be understood together in their complementarity.
This point is decisive because solidarity and subsidiarity must not be mistaken for Catholic accounts of political left and right ideologies. They are co-principles, in W. Norris Clarke’s formulation. Each loses its meaning when severed from the other. As the common good toward which social life is ordered, solidarity possesses a certain teleological priority, while subsidiarity preserves the concrete persons, families, associations, and communities through which that common good is actually pursued and realized. The universal destination of goods affirms that creation is ordered to the good of all, while private property entrusts persons and families with the stewardship through which that shared good, and their own fulfillment, is best realized because it maximizes the participation of persons and increases the opportunities for concrete acts of love.
Solidarity without subsidiarity tends toward collectivism. Persons, families, churches, voluntary associations, schools, and local communities become increasingly absorbed into administrative structures that displace their proper responsibilities. Subsidiarity without solidarity tends toward fragmentation and isolation. Economic and political life become dominated by private power, while intermediary institutions weaken and the vulnerable are left exposed.
The same pattern appears elsewhere. When private property is severed from the universal destination of goods, it degenerates into possessive individualism. When the universal destination of goods is severed from private property, it degenerates into coercive collectivism. Freedom severed from love dissolves into self-creation and the deformation of the person. Authority severed from truth becomes domination. Nation severed from Christendom becomes tribe. Universality severed from particularity becomes empire.
When co-principles are severed
Modern political ideologies repeatedly pursue one pole while rejecting the other as a threat to their preferred vision. Yet because these co-principles derive their meaning from their relation to one another, the rejection of one inevitably destroys the other. What replaces it is not the authentic co-principle but a deformed substitute that expands beyond its proper limits and becomes destructive. This dynamic helps explain the otherwise puzzling convergence of radical individualism and expanding technocratic control within contemporary society.
Modern progressivism often exalts autonomy in matters of identity and self-definition while simultaneously extending administrative systems of regulation and ideological enforcement. This appears contradictory only if one assumes that radical autonomy produces strong and self-sufficient persons. In practice, detached individuals become increasingly dependent upon centralized systems to secure recognition, regulate social relations, adjudicate conflicts, and stabilize communal life.
The body itself becomes central to this conflict because it confronts the modern will with givenness. Sexual identity is not merely one political issue among others. It has become decisive because the human body testifies that freedom is not self-originating. The contemporary struggle over sex and identity, therefore, reflects a deeper struggle over whether human nature possesses intelligible form.
The same logic appears in the economic sphere. Market absolutism detaches property and exchange from solidarity and the common good. Economic life becomes increasingly impersonal as economic power consolidates in ever larger institutions, further removed from families, local communities, and intermediary associations. Persons are treated primarily as producers, consumers, or units of labor within systems ordered chiefly toward efficiency and accumulation. Family life, local community, and civic trust weaken under these pressures.
Artificial intelligence and the machinic person
Magnifica humanitas is particularly perceptive on this point because it recognizes that technological power now frequently belongs to private actors whose influence exceeds that of many governments. This danger is easily missed when concern about power is focused almost exclusively on the state. Private technological systems increasingly shape communication, labor, visibility, memory, commerce, and public discourse itself. This may appear to enlarge freedom. Yet when private technological systems are governed chiefly by profit and efficiency, they can form users to experience themselves as isolated, dependent, and anxious, even while promising connection and empowerment.
Artificial intelligence intensifies this condition because it operates at the level of mediation. It does not merely add tools to human life; it increasingly structures how persons encounter reality. Systems governed principally by efficiency, profit, or ideological conformity inevitably tend to reshape the human person according to those same criteria.
Whatever capabilities such systems may acquire in the future, the more immediate danger is that human beings will increasingly be treated as machinic: collections of preferences, data points, risks, outputs, and behavioral patterns to be managed and optimized. This is why truth is politically indispensable. A society cannot endure on procedure alone. Democratic life presupposes that truth is more than preference and that the common good is more than the temporary equilibrium of competing interests. Once truth is reduced to narrative, utility, or administrative consensus, political life becomes a struggle for control over the mechanisms by which reality is interpreted and communicated. This logic is already becoming dominant in contemporary political and social discourse.
The consequences are now evident throughout the West. Institutions lose legitimacy while bureaucratic administration expands. Public discourse becomes increasingly tribal even as technological systems become increasingly centralized. The family weakens while the state and market absorb functions once carried by local communities and intermediary institutions. Digital technologies promise universal connection yet intensify isolation and social fragmentation.
The afterlife of radical individualism
It must not be supposed that the tribalism that still exists is a waning remnant of the premodern world. It promises to be the afterlife of radical individualism. Human beings cannot live as isolated wills. When family, Church, nation, and shared moral order weaken, persons seek belonging elsewhere. If genuine communion disappears, tribal identities emerge in its place.
The resulting tribes can become ruthless in protecting their own hegemony, especially when their unity is supplied less by shared loves than by ideology. This is evident across political, economic, and cultural movements that define themselves by opposition to rival accounts of social order.
Chesterton recognized this danger when he warned against people becoming enclosed within their own self-understanding. A nation must be rooted and particular, but it cannot become merely esoteric or self-enclosed. It must remain intelligible within a wider moral order. This is why Chesterton’s observation about nation and Christendom remains relevant. The question this presents for the West is whether any civilization can preserve genuine plurality without a transcendent source of unity.
The modern West has attempted several substitutes: markets without morality, rights detached from the human nature that grounds them, democracy without truth or virtue, technology without wisdom, and diversity without shared ends. Each attempts to preserve fragments of the Christian inheritance while severing them from the metaphysical order that once gave them coherence. Without the transcendent Source of unity, the very plurality modernity prizes loses the principle that allows difference to remain ordered rather than antagonistic.
Recovering the center
The Christian proposal is not nostalgic. It is realistic. In Magnifica humanitas, Leo gives renewed urgency to a warning that has grown steadily clearer across recent papacies and became especially insistent under Francis: the technological question is finally an anthropological and spiritual question. Artificial intelligence has intensified this older crisis and made it far more difficult to postpone. We must accept that the human person is not pure will, consumer, data point, or administrative subject. Man is created in the image of the Triune God. He is embodied, relational, ordered toward truth, capable of communion, and responsible for others. His dignity transcends the state, the market, and the machine.
Only such a vision can explain why freedom need not destroy authority, why communion need not erase personhood, why nations need not become idols, and why technological progress must remain subordinate to human dignity.
The center cannot hold where the center is denied. And the center is not moderation, procedural neutrality, or managerial compromise. The center is reality itself: a created order participating analogically in the God who is perfect unity in real distinction. Babel remains a permanent temptation, and modern technology has made it newly plausible. Yet Jerusalem remains possible as well. In invoking Jerusalem, Leo is not proposing the theocracy that modern sensibilities fear. He is urging the patient rebuilding of common life under God.
That rebuilding will require more than regulation, though regulation will be necessary. Regulation will serve human flourishing only if it begins from the good of the human person and the common good, subordinating lesser goods such as profit, convenience, efficiency, and pleasure to the dignity of the person. Market forces and human ingenuity have their proper place, but they cannot deliver human flourishing when severed from truth, wisdom, and the common good. Rebuilding and the wisdom to implement workable regulation will require the recovery of the metaphysical grammar by which persons, families, communities, and nations can remain distinct without becoming enemies and united without being absorbed. Catholic social doctrine provides the most complete expression of this grammar.
Chesterton was right. Without Christendom, the nation becomes unstable because the very meaning of nationhood depends upon a higher order of belonging. More fundamentally, every social order becomes unstable when the complementary principles that constitute reality are severed from one another and from the transcendent source that gives them their unity. Pope Leo XIV extends the warning to the technological civilization of our own age. Without God, our towers will not reach heaven. They will only scatter us again, and this time the scattering will be amplified by powers Babel could never have imagined.
Endnotes:
1 G. K. Chesterton, Irish Impressions (New York: John Lane Company, 1920), 135.
2 I use “unity without God” to reflect the theological essence of the argument, even though Magnifica humanitas used the phrase “without reference to God” to describe the problem of Babel’s fundamental orientation. Some may take exception to both of these renderings of the pericope. In using my rendering, I am not claiming an equivalence to today’s “technological paradigm” and that of the builders of Babel. The biblical text does not suggest they denied God’s existence or consciously excluded Him from their thinking. Genesis shows that the people of Babel attempted to secure unity, permanence, and glory through human self-assertion rather than through receptive dependence upon God. The builders sought to “make a name for ourselves” (Gen. 11:4), grounding their common life in human achievement and power. In this sense, Babel becomes enduring type of societies that seek their unity principally in human projects rather than in the transcendent Source. Read in this light, Magnifica humanitas’s description of Babel as a project undertaken “without reference to God” should be understood not as a denial of the historical meaning of Genesis, but as an application of its theological logic to contemporary forms of practical secularism, in which God may not be explicitly rejected but He is effectively rendered irrelevant to public life.
3 Nietzsche’s phrase der Wille zur Macht (“the will to power”) denotes the fundamental impulse toward self-assertion and the expansion of power that he regarded as underlying both individual and cultural life; see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. R. Kevin Hill (London: Penguin Classics, 2017).
4 The Catholic tradition has generally understood authority and participation as complementary rather than opposed. Shared responsibility does not replace legitimate authority but ordinarily operates through it. Read in this light, Magnifica humanitas’s emphasis on participation is best understood as describing the manner in which authority enables the coordinated pursuit of the common good.
5 The complementary principles discussed in Catholic social doctrine should not be understood as isolated political or economic categories. They are social expressions of deeper metaphysical and anthropological structures. Classical Christian thought recognizes complementary principles at multiple levels of reality: one and many, act and potency, form and matter, intellect and will, soul and body, each reflecting in its own manner the unity-in-distinction that finds its archetype in the Triune God. These principles are mutually implicating but not merely symmetrical; often one serves as actuality, form, end, or integrating measure. See W. Norris Clarke, The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), chap. 10, where Clarke summarizes finite being through an ordered hierarchy of interrelated co-principles.
6 The language of order, guidance, and perfection is intentional. Truth serves as the measure of love because love is fulfilled only when directed toward what is genuinely good. Love gives freedom its proper orientation because freedom reaches its perfection not in self-assertion but in self-gift. Communion perfects individuality because persons attain fulfillment through participation in relationships of truth and love. These relations reflect, analogically, the deeper order of reality itself and ultimately the Trinitarian archetype in which distinction and communion are perfectly united.
7 This essay can only sketch this relation. The complementary principles of Catholic social doctrine are not merely prudential or political categories but reflect deeper metaphysical and anthropological structures within created being itself. In particular, the relation between communion and individuality, solidarity and subsidiarity, and the universal destination of goods and private property may be illuminated through a more extensive account of relation, participation, and ordered co-principles rooted in the body-soul unity of the human person and ultimately in the Trinitarian archetype. A full treatment would require a separate, more academic study.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
In 1942, Father William J. Ferree, S.M., published his doctoral thesis, “The Act of Social Justice,” an analysis of the means by which Pope Pius XI hoped to realize the vision of Pope Leo XIII for the restructuring of the social order. Ferree summarized this in his pamphlet “Introduction to Social Justice” (1948), https://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/introtosocialjustice.pdf, and at the time of his death in 1985 was working on a manuscript, “Forty Years After . . . A Second Call to Battle,” which I am currently editing and completing. In “Forty Years After” Ferree — who consulted on the 1987 U.S. Bishops’ pastoral “Economic Justice for All” (and was relegated to a footnote and all his recommendations ignored) — wanted to explain a possible means to implement Catholic social teaching without committing injustice by integrating CST with the economic justice principles and financial techniques developed by Louis O. Kelso with Mortimer J. Adler. A summary of this effort to combine theory and practice is presented in “Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person” (2020), https://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/FIN-EconPersonal_Formatted-24-1223.pdf, a short book I and Dawn K. Brohawn wrote at the behest of some Vatican officials, and which was recently translated into Spanish by Dr. María Teresa Rosón de Pérez Lozano of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires. Currently we are engaged in organizing an Initiative on Economic Personalism in response to Pope Leo XIV’s call in “Magnifica Humanitas” for each of us to “do our part.”
“for the restructuring of the social order.”
What exactly does this mean? How was this supposed to happen? Who was going to effect it and what sort of authority or power was to be granted to those engaged in the restructuring? How was the change to be sustained?
Short answer: Father Ferree’s pamphlet, “Introduction to Social Justice”: https://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/introtosocialjustice.pdf
Long answer: Father Ferree’s doctoral thesis, “The Act of Social Justice”: https://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/The-Act-of-Social-Justice-150dpiavg.pdf
Overall summary: the short book, “Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person”: https://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/FIN-EconPersonal_Formatted-24-1223.pdf
In-Person tutorial: sign up for the ten-week “Justice University” course when it is again scheduled; it’s free, but a little time-consuming. Keep an eye on the CESJ website for the next series, http://www.cesj.org
My questions were rhetorical; but in my cursory review of your links, I don’t see a clear method of how this will happen without ceding enormous power to some authority answered.
I did notice that you and your co-author wrote this:
“A limited economic role for the State, so that economic
power resides in all the citizens and the State remains economically dependent on its citizens”
This is precisely the opposite of what has been occurring; an increasing number of citizens (and noncitizens) are dependent on the state for conspicuous, direct and significant benefits. Dependency is a known means of control of the masses and it is no accident, since the ruling class has been studying “panem et circenses” (Juvenal) and a “thousand subterfuges” (Talleyrand) for a long time at “elite” schools in an effort to acquire, maintain and enhance political control. “Nudge” is the most recent work in this genre.
I also found this: “Since specifics will rely on the conditions and needs of a particular culture and people, we cannot say with absolute certainty what final
form these levers of change should take.”
Completely absent from this is any recognition that you might incur disagreement, either ideological or from those parties whose power, status and wealth would be disrupted.
When you are presenting a subject, you often don’t have time to address what others think is wrong about it. With limited time and space, it’s difficult enough to get your own point across. Critics can take care of themselves and ask about specifics rather than vague generalities, if they choose.
Do you not have a few short answers to a few simple questions?
Your first link is to a ‘pamphlet’ some 81 pages long. Your last link is a 10-week course which is of course more than “a little” time consuming.
If you can say nothing in a precis, does that suggest something about the book, the thesis, the course, the 81-page ‘pamphlet’?
Why did the vaticanistas ignore your work?
Sorry about giving the full answer. Here’s the short one: the social order needs restructuring to provide the proper environment within which people can become virtuous. That requires power. Power follows property. The rest is explanation.
One more question: How does economic personalism differ from Boff’s liberation theology and Lenin’s socialism?
From my brief reading it has elements of Distributism (associated with Belloc and Chesterton) and Solidarism (Heinrich Pesch). Pesch committed his ideas to something like 19 volumes and any realistic person realizes no business is going to be regulating itself according to that lengthy a tome, especially when he died 100 years ago.
Both of those constructs idealize dispersed property ownership and ignore the fact that property requires acquired skills and disciplines to acquire, augment and maintain. Both are unacquainted with the words parvenue and spendthrift. For some people, a grant of property would be like handing the car keys and a bottle of Jack Daniels to a teenage boy-to borrow a metaphor from the late P.J. O’Rourke.
In either case, both would require a grant of absolute authority to a central authority-and that rests on three premises, first that authority will act with omniscience, benevolence and incorruptibility, second that there will be no opposition, perhaps of the kind that puts heads on pikes and third that once installed, the authority will declare it a day and cede its power. It’s all pure Utopianism.
People should remember that the term Utopia is the title of a book by St. Thomas More, describing a regimented society. Once you realize More cleverly named it “Utopia” which means “nowhere”, not “Eutopia” (happy place), you realize he employed his wry English wit to create and elaborate satire.
It’s based on natural law and the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and private property in order to empower people to pursue virtue (“happiness”). Some aspects of Liberation Theology and Leninism deny natural law based on reason guided and illuminated by faith.
Thank you, Fork, and Greaney, both. Enlightening.
Meanwhile, is the ultimate tribalism Islam and the transnational (!) umma whose insignia is the “uncreated” Qur’an? Dictated in Arabic and from outside of human history altogether—the core of which is a monolithic “monotheism” that rejects outright the relational nature of the Triune One (“nature,” what’s that?).
How does a metaphysically anchored Catholic Social Teaching (CST) dialogue with an alternative universe? Whose premise is tribal identification with a totally inscrutable and even arbitrary One? (Not consistency or complementarity, but the alternative “principle” of “abrogation”)?
T.E. Lawrence describes this ENCOUNTER:
“The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faith . . . .The Arabs said there had been forty thousand prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds [the Bedouin of the desert] could not look for God within him; he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great . . . .” (Seven Pillars of Wisdom).
Then this on METAPHYSICS:
“In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitations, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties[!], our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades[!] . . . [but then] They inhabited superlatives by choice. Sometimes inconsistencies seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity[!]”
SUMMARY: How to think about non-human AI, and the biblical Babel and Jerusalem . . . and the alternative “center” in Mecca?
To deny The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, is to deny The Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Infinite Live Between The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, Who Proceeds From Both The Father And His Only Begotten Son , Jesus The Christ, and thus deny The Divinity Of The Most Holy Blessed Trinity, The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, and thus The Author Of Our Inherent Unalienable Rights.
The Center cannot hold when you deny the very essence of The Perfect Love Of The Blessed Trinity which is why “It is not possible to have Sacramental Communion without Ecclesiastical
Communion”; For It Is, “ Through Christ, With Christ, And In Christ, Oh God, Almighty Father, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost”, that Holy Mother Church Exists.
Human society existed for 10 million years before Christ. It will continue with or without Christians .
No one claims 10 million years; and in the future without Christians, yes, then an “it.”
Jesus did wonder if He’d find any faith upon His return.
“And God Said , Let There Be Light”, And By God’s Divine Will , And God’s Divine Law, God Willed The Law’s Of Physics Into Existence.
Gerard, thank you for your comment. Human societies certainly existed before the Incarnation and will continue until the end of history. But whether you believe it or not, they have never existed and will never exist apart from Christ, whether men have acknowledged Him or not, for “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).
My article, however, is addressing a different question. It is not whether human societies can exist, but whether they can remain ordered to the common good and authentic human flourishing once the transcendent center that unites them is rejected. Mere existence is a very different thing from genuine human flourishing. Life can be very unpleasant in societies not ordered to the only Source capable of authentic human flourishing.
Christendom was unique in providing a transcendent principle of social unity capable of ordering persons, families, communities, and nations toward the common good without reducing them either to isolated individuals or to competing tribes. It grounded that unity not in blood, ethnicity, class, ideology, or political power, but in the equal dignity of every human person created in the image of God and redeemed by Christ. While Christians did not always live this out, it still provided the necessary foundation which could give rise to the fruits of Western civilization.
When that center is abandoned, societies do not become neutral or centerless. They inevitably reorganize themselves around narrower loyalties and competing identities. Much of our present political and cultural fragmentation suggests precisely such a movement. The concern of the article, therefore, is not whether society will continue, but what kind of society our children and grandchildren will inherit if the center no longer holds.