Doctrine encrusting the lava of rebellion

The Transition #7

Part One: The Transition
Part Two: The Sacred Fetish of Academic Freedom
Part Three: The Times They Have Changed
Part Four: The 2020ers
Part Five: Thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character
Part Six: The New Magisterium

The generation who entered old age in the early 21st century have lived through a social revolution unlike any other in our civilisation. Over the course of six decades morality has been upended, and an entire religious framework has given way to a new order. It is a transformation with only one real parallel, the Christianisation of Rome,

French philosopher Chantal Delsol, describing the moral upheaval of our time as ‘repaganisation’, characterised Christianity’s takeover of Rome as a ‘normative inversion’, with the new rulers esteeming what the pagans despised and condemning what they enjoyed, especially in sexual matters. It was a cultural revolution, like our own, and also produced a period of relative tolerance. During the fourth century, as increasing numbers of Rome’s elite converted to Christianity, there was a moment of relative co-existence between the two worldviews. Neither religion was powerful enough to crush the other, and no religious authority was able to compel the individual as they would a century before or a century after.

To those who live through this sort of transition, it appears like a society that is becoming more permissive, when in reality one moral order is replacing another. This was true of late 20^th century, when it appeared that a more tolerant and moderate culture was emerging. In the late 1990s David Brooks had observed in Bobos in Paradise that ‘Whereas the old Protestant Establishment was largely conservative Republican, the new Bobo establishment tends to be centrist and independent. In 1998 the National Journal studied the voting patterns of America’s 261 richest towns and discovered that they are moving to the centre.’ But, as it turned out, and Brooks wasn’t to know any more than anyone else, it just appeared that way because these elite communities were abandoning the old faith for the new; they would continually move, not to the centre, but to a new progressive faith which they adopted with a vehement certainty.