Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
In order to better understand the robust staying power of the populist and nationalist narrative in democracies across the West, I have lately been reading some of the culturally conservative thinkers whose ideas have found widespread resonance in today’s politics.
Among the most clearly articulated case I’ve run across is “Return Of The Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism and The Future of West” by R.R. Reno, published in 2019. Reno is the editor of First Things, a journal of religion in public life.
Reno’s central argument is that the “open societies” of the modern liberal West, cultivated in reaction to the horrors of the 20th century associated with the “closed society” experiences of fascism and communism, have over-corrected in the other direction. The embrace of all manner of openness — from the free trade and lax borders of globalization to abortion, same sex marriage and gender fluidity — has strayed so far from the traditional values that once loyally bound people to each other and their homeland that we are facing “a crisis of solidarity.”
It is thus no surprise to Reno that so many people, adrift and dislodged from any sense of belonging and belief that once gave larger meaning to their lives and held society together, are seeking a “return of the strong gods” of family, faith and nation. We see this particularly in Italy, Hungary, Austria and America, but also in France, Germany and elsewhere, including quasi-Western Russia.
As a converted Catholic, Reno sees a return to the solidity of tradition and solidarity embodied in the Christian lineage of the West as the way forward. In his view, the open society ethos in America has resulted in a “de-Christianized” elite that is “culturally detached from the people they lead,” including many who fill megachurches every Sunday.
What has ignited the culture wars, Reno said in a recent interview, is that “the post-Christian sensibility” of secularized elites “treats all economic and social problems as symptoms of a ‘closed society’ that needs further deconsolidation and openness. But as we head into the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is more and more obvious that our problems stem from too much fluidity and an overstretched social fabric.”
As Reno sees it, the dominant “weak gods” of excessive tolerance and inclusion unbalanced by the “strong gods” of family, faith and nation have created a vacuum that the human need for meaning and belonging will fill one way or another.
For Reno, it is the unmoored soul that is most worrisome. “What I’m concerned about in our society is the extent to which we have become atomized and people are isolated and they lack the ballast. They’re not anchored,” he says. “And as a consequence, they can be swept up into ideological fevers. And I think that’s one reason that political passions run so hot.”
He goes on: “In my book, ‘Return of the Strong Gods,’ one of the reasons that I think it’s important for us to try to cultivate the unifying strong loves that unite people together is that people are going to find some way. And if we don’t provide our country with noble loves, then perverse and destructive loves will arise from the darker forces of our society.”
Enter The Demagogues
Certainly, Reno has touched on a condition of our times by identifying the sentiments shared by a multitude of constituencies that drive populist politics. And he is right to worry that, as is happening, demagogues will exploit widespread alienation and disaffection not by plying a message of “strong loves,” but by dividing the body politic against itself, spewing hatred, not least toward the included and tolerated who had been shut out by the confines of traditional authority.
In pre-war Germany, the philosopher Martin Heidegger also identified a vacuum of meaning in modernity that “forgot Being.” We all now know how his call to recover grounded authenticity in the strong god of the “Volksgeist” ended up.
Reciprocal Ballast
To avoid a repeat of history, politics in the West today must stop pitting “deplorables” and “decadents” against each other in enemy camps and acknowledge the need for a reciprocal ballast in cultures that are neither fully modern nor still firmly rooted in traditional ways.
That cannot mean overthrowing secular liberalism or maligning faith, but what the contemporary German philosopher Jürgen Habermas proposes: “opening” open societies to what he calls the “saving translation” of religious values that to this day continue to “nourish” secular norms.
For Habermas, secular reason may derive from the metaphysical foundation of religious belief, but departs from it even as it “appropriates” it. “It is true that the work of appropriation transformed the originally religious meaning, but without deflating or weakening it in a way that would empty it out. The translation of the notion of man’s likeness to God into the notion of human dignity, in which all partake equally and which is to be respected unconditionally, is such a saving translation. The translation renders the content of biblical concepts accessible to the general public and people of other faiths, as well as to nonbelievers, beyond the boundaries of a particular religious community.”
In an exchange with Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict, Habermas wrote that “while the state must retain its secular character in democracies, secular society must be open to religious influence. Secular citizens are obliged not to publicly dismiss religious contributions to political opinion and will formation as mere noise, or even nonsense, from the start. Secular and religious citizens must meet in their public use of reason at eye level. For a democratic process, the contributions of one side are no less important than those of the other side.”
In diverse societies, culture wars can never be decisively won. They can only ever reach the peaceful tension of a modus vivendi or fall apart altogether.
