Saturday’s NYT included a Ross Douthat column entitled “Does God Control History?” I couldn’t wait to read it. How the hell does he know? Is he now a prophet instead of a pundit?
The column was a response to social media posts by a prominent pagan right-winger who calls himself Bronze Age Pervert which ironically attacked Douthat’s providential views by asking why God willed the outcome of the Thirty Years War. Douthat acknowledges that the Thirty Years War put an end to the concept of a unified Christian Europe, but argues that the history of Christianity after that is one of success, not failure, due to the spread of the religion all over the world. In his eyes, therefore, God may not necessarily be on the side of the current individual Christian institutions, but He is definitely still a Christian himself, and He works to further the cause in our material world every day.
Douthat would have been wise to go old school and rely on St. Augustine’s “The City of God,” which was written at the time of the fall of the Christian Roman Empire to pagan barbarians and which argued that the state of the world at any given time is not particularly important to God’s purposes. Alternatively, he could have gone full Book of Job on Bronze Age Pervert and asked him where he was when the world was created. Instead, he came up with a Christian providential rationalization that was pretty lame.
The debate between prominent Christian and pagan reactionaries is of considerable interest to those of us who follow the extreme right, albeit from as great a distance as possible. I will have two more posts on this subject in the coming days.