Religion and Revolution: Christopher Dawson and the “Great Awokening”

Yuval Levin has likened the so-called “woke” cultural revolution, also called the “new social justice movements,” to a religious revival: it “deploy[s] some of the forms of religious moralism without content—at times almost literally the liturgy without the theology . . . through acts of performative outrage against oppression.” José Gomez, Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, has similarly called these movements “pseudo-religions, . . . even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs.”

Others, less friendly to religion, call this “Great Awokening” religious because, they say, it adheres to “a whole series of mythological and supernatural beliefs,” such as “that a person can change their sex by simply identifying as the opposite sex.”

These commentators are not the first to note that this-worldly political movements often have a religious spirit. Almost a hundred years ago, the English scholar Christopher Dawson warned Europeans and Americans that their civilization’s endemic political crises were the effect of a profound spiritual crisis. This turbulence would never be resolved, he counseled, until westerners returned to the religion that had created their civilization: the Christian faith.

Dawson, though a Christian himself, based his argument not on the Bible, Church councils, or any purported revelation, but on facts of history, sociology, and anthropology. To this day there remain few analyses of the relation between religion and civilization as learned or profound as his. Although he did not live to see the cultural instability of our time, his insights provide invaluable guidance as we try to find a way out of it.

Religion, the Basis of Culture

Dawson was born and raised in late Victorian England, when many Englishmen believed, like Edward Gibbon, that religion tended to impede the development of civilization. Dawson saw things very differently. He argued in his second published work, Progress and Religion:

It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and culture. The great civilizations of the world do not produce great religions as a kind of cultural by-product; in a very real sense the great religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest. A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.

Religion drives a civilization’s achievements not just in spiritual matters like religion and morals but material ones, too, like technology, economics, and politics. In the case of Europe, the primary engine of social development has been the religion of Christianity, above all Catholicism. This is true even of apparently anti-religious movements like revolutionary France, the communist Soviet Union, or classical Marxism:

For what [Dawson asks,] was that social revolution in which [Marx] put his hope but a 19th-century version of the Day of the Lord, in which the rich and the powerful of the earth should be consumed and the princes of the Gentiles brought low, and the poor and disinherited should reign in a regenerated universe?

The same post-Christian zeal lives on among today’s neo-Marxist woke. 

But how did an apparently anti-religious political movement acquire a religious spirit? The real question, Dawson suggests, is how any human movement could not be religious, since the desire for God is man’s deepest instinct.

Our scientific culture’s “empirical materialism” is an aberration in human history, he points out. Historically, man has understood his environment as “a living world of mysterious forces.” In his first stages of development (as one Victorian anthropologist observed), man views “matter [as] only the extreme low form of spirit,” and relates to God in a very direct and personal way. His first recourse in his material needs is not to technology, but to divine aid. Often he imitates the natural process associated with his need: to pray for success in gathering food, he blows seeds to the four corners of the earth. Only later does he discern the principles of agriculture and develop it into a science. Even then, that “science” is conducted within and from a thoroughly religious perspective: in the ancient Near East, for example, farming was not merely a means of mass nutrition, but primarily a “mystical drama, annually renewed, of the Mother Goddess, and her dying and reviving son and spouse.” Political science likewise grew out of sacred rituals of rulership: a king in Mesopotamia was not merely a temporal leader, but “the priest and religious head of his people, . . . the minister and interpreter of the divine will.”  

A theocracy such as this was the normal culmination of human societies—as in ancient Egypt, China, India, or the Mayan civilization of the Yucatan. In them the individual experience of God faded away, as each person was subsumed into the sacred order of the state. These societies were externally highly organized, able to produce astonishing feats of material engineering in service of the divine, but they were inflexible and eventually fell prey to invaders. During those crises, cultural elites tended to blame their defeat on their neglect of the internal, moral ordering of their souls to the divine. Thus began the first large-scale spiritual reform movements. Reacting against the previous focus on ritual, religion became hyper-spiritualized, stressing the mystery of the divine and often despising human reason, as in Upanishad Hinduism, Taoism, or Buddhism. Societies came to view material social development as pointless, and settled into static ways of life that might have lasted forever. The West took a different path, as Platonic Greek philosophy questioned social custom precisely through reason. Yet over time the Greco-Roman culture, too, succumbed to the East’s radical, anti-rational mysticism, in Gnosticism and various mystery cults.

Christianity’s Spiritual Revolution

That the West did not fade away into sterile solipsism was due to a humble people who defied the previous pattern of man’s religious history. Ancient Israel was materially insignificant compared to Egypt, Babylon, or Persia; yet this remarkable people outlived their higher-achieving neighbors. They even attained a level of spiritual development like that of India or China: they, too, believed in a God utterly beyond human comprehension, who demanded that each individual lead an upright life. But like less developed cultures, they retained the belief that God was not a remote, impersonal Brahman or “Heaven,” but a person actively interested in their history, steering it to a preordained end. When she seemed to have been finally conquered, Israel defiantly came to believe that God would soon rescue her and raise her above all the nations on earth, through the Messiah. 

Out of this religious ferment came Christianity, which brought the moral and religious ideals of Israel to the whole world. In its founder, Jesus of Nazareth, who claimed to be God himself, the apparently contradictory strains of man’s religious experience—his reverence for God’s infinite otherness with his desire to conform himself perfectly, both mind and body, to that Other—were reconciled in a way that not just the people of Israel, with their peculiar history, but every human being could experience: 

[T]he Absolute and the Finite, the Eternal and the Temporal, God and the World were no longer conceived as two exclusive and opposed orders of being standing over against one another in mutual isolation. The two orders interpenetrated one another, and even the lower world of matter and sense was capable of becoming the vehicle and channel of divine life.

By introducing divinity into perfect union with humanity, Jesus confirmed the fundamental value of the individual person as greater than that of the state; yet in redeeming man from sin, he made possible the development of human society well beyond man’s earlier achievements. Thus was conceived the greatest reform movement in history, “a new movement of regeneration and progress.” Far from seeking to dissolve man and his history into the otherness of God, like the earlier spiritual movements, Christianity aimed at affirming and redeeming man—“the deification of human nature by its participation in the Divine Life.”

It took centuries for this spirit of reform to become fully manifest. In its beginnings, Christianity’s life was dominated by Byzantium, which retained strong elements of the eastern mysticism that downplayed the importance of history. But this extreme otherworldliness did not penetrate the West. And when, in the eleventh century, the western patriarch, the pope, attained a critical level of political independence (from the dukes of Italy and the German emperor) and moral seriousness (thanks to the moral reform of the clergy, led by the monks of Cluny), a new civilization appeared, determined to advance man’s spiritual and material progress.

As Dawson describes in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (and as Tom Holland describes in his recent book Dominion), the popes cleaned up corruption among the clergy, checked the brutality of princes, and sponsored the creation of universities and mendicant orders—international institutions that integrated Christian spiritual ideals with the on-the-ground reality of people’s lives. Universities revived among elites the dormant western tradition of philosophy, whence “Europe derived the critical intelligence and the restless spirit of scientific enquiry which have made Western civilization the heir and successor of the Greeks.” The mendicants, epitomized in Francis of Assisi, took the spirit of reform to the common man, by spreading piety focused on the suffering humanity of Jesus.

In this way, the medieval popes forged a society with internal cohesion even greater than that of the archaic theocracies or of any state. In a continent of small, weak duchies, “[t]he only true citizenship” became “membership [in] the Church,” which “involved a far deeper and wider loyalty than . . . allegiance to the secular state.” But this was not actually a theocracy as in ancient times, because the “material and spiritual aspects of life” were not “fused in a single political order.” It was something new in history, an “organized spiritual society, which could co-exist with the national political units without either absorbing or being absorbed by them.” It demonstrated that it was “possible to reconcile the existence of national independence and political freedom . . . with [a] wider unity of . . . civilization.” More importantly, it showed that any civilization

is essentially a spiritual community [that] transcends the economic and political orders. It finds its appropriate organ not in a state but in a Church, that is to say a society which is the embodiment of a purely spiritual tradition and which rests, not on material power, but on the free adhesion of the individual mind.

In this way, the Middle Ages began to achieve a new kind of union of spirit and matter, religion and science, faith and reason, that revealed new possibilities for human fulfillment and freedom. It raised men’s expectations for the happiness they could achieve—not just in heaven but on earth—and laid the groundwork for modernity’s later achievements in politics, science, and economics.

From an Age of Faith Based on Reason to an Age of Reason Based on Faith

But starting around the year 1300, the medieval cooperation between faith and reason began to break down.

The mendicant orders, despite constant efforts to recall the Church to its spiritual mission, proved unable to keep the papacy from becoming “secularized by the growth of wealth and political power.” Popes began to seek not just spiritual but temporal authority over all Christendom, and thus to fuse church and state, as though to establish a theocracy even vaster than the theocracies of ancient times. Eventually, the papacy came to behave as just another secular kingdom, enmeshed in the power politics of Europe. “Henceforward during the later Middle Ages the reformers”—such as John Wycliffe, William of Ockham, and finally Protestants—“were predominantly anti-Papal in spirit.”  

Detached from the institutional Church that was its natural home, the spirit of reform decayed into what Dawson, in Understanding Europe, called “an intensive process of revolutionary criticism.” In the French Enlightenment and Revolution, reformers attacked even the Christian beliefs in the Incarnation, Redemption, and all spiritual reality, on which the very ideal of reform was based. Yet reformers continued to cling to transcendent ideals (the universal rights and dignity of man, the inevitable triumph of good over evil in history) even as they rejected their transcendent metaphysical premises. Whereas medieval reformers strove to harmonize their faith with reason, the Enlightenment was driven by a will to believe in two rationally irreconcilable principles: the transcendent morality of progress and anti-transcendent materialism. Thus Dawson agrees with Augusto Del Noce that the self-proclaimed Age of Reason in fact became the most radical Age of Faith.

A mere will to believe could not sustain such an impossible alliance; the logical contradiction within the movement of secular reform naturally resulted in an interminable cycle of political violence. The French Revolution did away with Christian culture, but the hard reality of building a replacement culture called forth the Machiavellian political realism of Napoleon, which gave rise to a new bourgeois, ever more materialistic order in nineteenth-century Europe. This new status quo was punctuated by smaller outbursts of revolutionary idealism, until Marxist and fascist ideologues of the early twentieth century succeeded in ousting bourgeois society in many countries, replacing it with their new utopian visions. Unstable utopianism, however, almost immediately called forth the brutally realist totalitarianisms of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

From there we can extend Dawson’s analysis into our own time, with help from Del Noce. Having experienced the violence of fascism in World War II, and of communism soon thereafter, realists in the West, at the start of the Cold War, blamed totalitarian violence on the quasi-Christian idealism of previous reform movements. Many religious people, having also been traumatized by the War, were ready to believe that religious zeal was intrinsically violent. Thus materialists could slowly capture institutions of culture, education, and even religion with perhaps the most unspiritual reform movement in history. Philip Rieff called it the culture of the therapeutic; Del Noce called it “the affluent society.” As historians like Alan Petigny have documented, the apostles of material well-being convinced millions to seek solutions to their spiritual problems, not first through religion and secondly through science (like rational economic planning and psychotherapy) but the reverse, an approach that effectively supplanted religion with materialism. This silent revolution produced an anti-idealistic culture that provoked a counterreaction of idealism, in the youth-driven cultural revolutions of 1968. But the leaders of that revolution—cultural Marxists like Herbert Marcuse—still accepted the materialistic cult of well-being, only they extended it into the realm of human sexuality. Hence their young followers, the baby boomers, readily assimilated back into the therapeutic, affluent society after graduating—albeit with a libertarian sexual ethic—and settled down into a comfortable “bourgeois bohemian” existence.

That most recent status quo called forth the latest outburst of idealism: the woke movement. These youth were raised in the soul-deadening, atmosphere of the post–Cold War era, over which the baby boomers presided. This was a highly “extroverted” society, to use Dawson’s language, that gave little thought to feeding the inner life of young people’s souls. Therefore youth looked for God (without realizing they did) and fell for a false substitute: the social justice movements of critical Marxism. The destructive violence and aggression of wokeism are, as Dawson said regarding previous such movements, “the direct result of the starvation and frustration of man’s spiritual nature.”

Escaping Extroverted, Secular Theocracy through the Recovery of Interior Life

What then might Christopher Dawson say about wokeism were he alive today? Perhaps that, like all secular revolutionary movements of the modern age, it is a religion in denial. It looks for final happiness in this life, as though there were “no heaven, . . . / No hell below us, / Above us only sky,” as one of its prophets has said. But the happiness it seeks is out of proportion to—and (in vain) tries to reject—the bourgeois materialism that is natural to the ways of this world.

It abhors complacency in the status quo of prosperity; it seeks to reform the world according to ideals that call the individual to live for something greater than himself—justice, equality, and other ideals that only make sense in a transcendent framework. This is the revolutionary spirit of the Gospel, an echo of the irruption into the world of the God-man who raised man’s sights above cynical, worldly “realism” to the spiritual ideals of heaven. For that reason it is also a movement of faith: it believes in the possibility of perfect justice in this life, in spite of the manifest obstacles to it; it lives from “the conviction of things unseen,” as the New Testament says, a future not yet realized.

But the similarities between Christians and the woke end there. For while Christians believe they must be ready “to give the reason for the hope” that they have, the woke, with their thorough rejection of transcendence, and thus of truth, cannot give such a reason, and they see no need to do so. Their faith is merely a choice, utterly indifferent to reason. Anti-woke secularists are therefore right to call the woke position irrational (although being another form of materialism, anti-woke secularism does not hold up to rational scrutiny either).

The woke also differ from Christians insofar as, refusing to acknowledge God and truth, they cannot but conceive all human life as political. In refusing to acknowledge a transcendent spiritual principle, wokeism confuses man’s interior moral life with his exterior social life, and thus subjects conscience to the coercive law of the state, with no room for real personal freedom. The woke political outlook is, paradoxically, that of the pre-Christian theocracies. And yet the leaders of those theocracies, which were explicitly religious, at least had an awe of the supernatural to check their ambitions. Today’s woke have no such reverence, except what is sublimated into the secular liturgy of performative outrage.

In all likelihood, this new, secular theocracy will not last very long. If the historical pattern holds, the woke reform movement will end up like its predecessors, settling into a comfortable new status quo, only to be upended by the next generation that will have grown up under its dominion and suffered its inconsistencies.

But those who do not subscribe to wokeism ought not to be complacent; for as the inconsistencies of secular reformism grow ever graver and more socially destabilizing, so will the reaction against it. Parents are allowing their children to be mutilated in “gender-affirming” surgeries; fewer and fewer children are growing up in the emotional security of the intact marriage of their biological parents. We can reasonably expect such atrocities to call forth rage in their victims; the resulting political chaos will make it very easy for an authoritarian regime to justify stepping in, to force things back together; and western societies will continue their long march toward becoming little different from the authoritarian states of the East, whose fate the West had seemed to escape a thousand years ago.

A new “messiah” might appear, with a new religion that will offer a transcendent meaning for people’s lives that could reground society. But it may not be a religion of the benevolent Christian kind to which the West has been accustomed; it may be consistently theocratic. Jihadist Islam, for instance, offered a strong transcendent ideal that was able to forge an empire that lasted for centuries from the Atlantic to the Pacific; some westerners in recent times have even joined movements—like Islamic State—that claim to take inspiration from it.

But there is another possibility, which is the one Dawson encourages us to hope for: that the West return to the Christian religion that gave it life, and finally end the cycle of violent political revolution. This, however, will require each of us to choose the path of conversion; only then will we begin to turn the attention of our extroverted, materialistic age back to our interior life, where God waits to meet us. Such conversion will heal the “loss of harmony . . . between the inner and the outer worlds of experience” that causes our society “to exhaust its reserves of spiritual power and makes it brittle and unstable.” That restoration of interior order will also show us how to wield the vast power of our ever-advancing technologies without becoming enslaved through them—whether by addiction to smartphones or by subjection to a surveillance state.

Secondly, we must re-educate the next generation in the western cultural heritage, from “the simplest elements of behavior or manners up to the highest tradition of spiritual wisdom.” That includes “the Christian way of life and thought,” whose perfect expression is “the Christian liturgy”—the sacraments (liturgy with the theology, to recall Levin’s comments at the start of this essay). 

Finally, we must approach our erring friends with deep faith and charity ourselves, taking “Christian teachers such as [Blaise] Pascal and [John Henry] Newman” as our models. Otherwise our efforts to spread truth will fail “to gain men’s sympathies,” and may “even [arouse] conscious or unconscious antagonism,” as many culture warriors do today. Moreover, only with charity can people maximally unite across nations and enjoy maximal political freedom and diversity; without charity, the pursuit of cultural unity will tend to produce regimes “with all the power and rigidity of a theocratic state.” This lesson of Christianity’s history is also one of the great teachings of the Second Vatican Council, whose vision for humanity’s future was aptly summarized by subsequent popes as “the civilization of love.” That phrase is no mere pious sentiment; it reflects a profound insight into human social life that Dawson would readily affirm.

Far from counseling retreat until some future cataclysm of civilization passes, Dawson urges Christians to enter society to save it—as the monks of old trekked into the wilderness to win converts—because our times are thirsting for truth:

However secularized our modern civilization may become, this sacred tradition remains like a river in the desert, and genuine religious education can still use it to irrigate the thirsty lands and to change the face of the world with the promise of new life. The great obstacle is the failure of Christians themselves to understand the depth of that tradition and the inexhaustible possibilities of new life that it contains.

We have all that we need to move forward, to heal the division in the West that began with its turn to materialism centuries ago. We must reunite faith and reason, political and spiritual society, without collapsing them together. Only such a reunification of mind and body, matter and spirit, through our free return to our spiritual heritage, will answer the perennial desires of the human heart—expressed very imperfectly in the woke movement and all the reform movements of Western history—for truth, peace on earth, and goodwill among men.

Public domain image cropped and resized