"The West is Dead": Paul Kingsnorth and the L.A. Fires

"And after the fire, a still small voice." 1 Kings 19:12

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Hi everyone. I apologize for not getting a post out last week. A couple of events—one personal, one public—converged to derail my writing focus. On the home front, a close family member had a medical emergency that required all our prayer and attention (thankfully, he’s pulling through now, praise God.) The other event that consumed my attention was the massive devastation of the Los Angeles wildfires, only 70 miles north of my current home and close to where I grew up.

Either of these events alone would have been enough to impress upon me the fragility of existence and the precariousness of the way of life we often take for granted, but experiencing them simultaneously was unsettling, disorienting me with grief and uncertainty. The past week revealed how deeply I depend on uninterrupted routines and creature comforts for peace and security—something I’ll need to work on.

Which brings me to the main point of this post: it is precisely the disruption of an established way of living that leaves many people today feeling unmoored. Whether due to the erosion of civic values, the gradual decay—or sudden devastation—of communities, or the inversion of long-held beliefs and traditions, the pace of cultural change in modernity is unprecedented, leaving many struggling with existential uncertainty.

“Against Christian Civilization”

This dismal state of affairs undergirds Paul Kingsnorth’s critique of Christian civilization in the recent Erasmus Lecture for First Things. Kingsnorth writes on faith, technology, and the spiritual chaos of our times in his popular Substack, The Abbey of Misrule. Watching the video of his address as parts of L.A. literally burned to the ground was a distinctly dystopian experience.

The thrust of Kingsnorth’s argument is that the civilization of the West is dying (or already dead). Christianity may form the basis of that civilization, but the efforts to use the faith to save or rebuild are doomed. He calls this approach civilizational religion and attributes it to thinkers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson:

Since Christianity was the basis of this “Western” culture of ours, and since this culture is now sick or even dying, the way to revive it must be to revive Christianity—not so much as a religion, but rather as a social glue, or even as a weapon. What we need…is a return to something called “Christian civilization”—regardless of whether the Christian faith is, in fact, true.¹

Kingsnorth argues that this logic is problematic because it instrumentalizes faith to achieve worldly ends. “Civilizational Christianity puts civilization first and Christianity second,” he observes. “Its proponents are less interested in whether the faith is actually true or transformative than in what use it can be to them in their ongoing culture war.”²

He believes this agenda is doomed because the values of modernity are fundamentally opposed to true Christianity. To demonstrate, he considers how contemporary culture sizes up the seven deadly sins—pride, greed, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth—and concludes that not only does it not censure these vices, it actively promotes them as stimuli of economic growth. (I think our friend Dante Alighieri would agree!)

L.A. Fires and Civilizational Decay

Love it or hate it, Los Angeles has long exemplified the “civilized decadence” Kingsnorth laments. Growing up 45 minutes north of Malibu in the 1980’s, I saw L.A. as an urban behemoth—a smoldering heap of contradictions where Hollywood celebrities and the wealth of Bel-Air coexisted with Skid Row, gang violence, and constant smog and gridlock.

Viewing the apocalyptic destruction of the wildfires, it’s hard to avoid seeing a fitting symbol of civilizational decay. One thinks of Nero and the Great Fire of Rome or Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire, particularly the fourth painting “Destruction” of an opulent city in flames. Yet I hesitate to make a facile symbol of this tragedy. Watching neighborhoods and businesses reduced to ash, I’ve had to examine my media consumption in light of Walker Percy’s sharp satire in Lost in the Cosmos about our tendency to “secretly relish” other’s tragedies, whether from envy, entertainment, or misplaced justice.³

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire 4: Destruction, 1836.

Still, the L.A. wildfires underscore the unavoidable tension between civilization and nature—between “subduing the earth” and stewarding it. They also highlight the hubris and greed of certain (which is not to say all) politicians, planners, and developers. Similarly, Kingsnorth tallies the mixed results of modern society:

In the red column…human civilization has ravaged God’s creation…created vast inequalities of wealth, and [waged] warfare on a previously unimaginable scale. In the black column, [it] has created vast wealth and allowed us to visit the moon and extend our lifespans…⁴

Metanoia and the Task of Rebuilding Culture

As the flames still rage in L.A., is it too early to think about rebuilding? Perhaps my real question is lurking behind a metaphor: How do we rebuild a civilization in ruins?

Let’s assume Kingsnorth’s thesis is correct: the Gospel values Jesus teaches—love, humility, self-sacrifice, etc.—are fundamentally opposed to those of a progressive, capitalist, technocratic society. Furthermore, that Christianity cannot be a tool for rescuing civilization. What are we to do, then, since we must live in some sort of society?

Kingsnorth answers that our work is not to “defend the West” but to strive for repentance, meaning personal transformation or metanoia. While I agree, as a writer championing Western literary traditions, I wrestle with his implications. Fortunately, he elaborates his position in this related video with Jonathan Pageau. Here he advocates returning to Western culture’s healthier roots by rediscovering the lives of the saints and traditional fairy tales. Instead of propping up the soulless idols of modernity—mammon and progress—we can celebrate the manifold ways Christianity ennobles the culture.

Quoting fellow Substacker Hilary White, Kingsnorth reminds us: “Christian civilization is the secondary fruit of Christian mysticism.” Once again, we are confronted with an unresolved tension. The message of the Gospels is not about building this or that kind of civilization; rather it exhorts us to “change your mind, change your heart, change your way of seeing. And through that: Change the world.”⁵

Part IV of the desert and the pursuit of holiness

Heavenly Jerusalem and the Tree of Life

I realize I’m using Kingsnorth’s reflections to make an apparently weak case for how to rebuild a ruined city, whether as a metaphor for “civilization” (which is derived from the Latin word for city) or as an actual place which millions of people call home. We seem to be saying, “Forget your programs, throw out your plans—tell fairy stories instead.”

The German philosopher Josef Pieper anticipated similar criticism while writing his now-classic critique of the bourgeois world of total labor, Leisure, The Basis of Culture, following World War II. As Europe’s massive reconstruction was beginning, Pieper exhorted his readers to pause their busy activity and recall the philosophical roots of the West, which teach that restful contemplation of the highest things is essential to creating a good society.

The highest things, of course, are those which serve no utilitarian purpose; they are ends in themselves, like virtue.

At the end of his lecture, Kingsnorth invokes the biblical image of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven as the answer to our civilizational problem. The important thing to notice, he says, is that it’s given to us by God from above, not something we build, ground-up, like the Tower of Babel. And what do we find at the center of this heavenly City? Not a tower, but a tree: the Tree of Life, which was once kept from Adam in the Garden because of his disobedience, now bearing fruit and leaves “for the healing of the nations.” (Cf Rev. 22:2)

Photo by Thanh Luu

Whatever lessons the L.A. wildfires teach or strategies we’ll devise to forestall civilizational collapse, they must be rooted in humility (from humus, earth) and a willingness to listen to the “still small voice” calling us to conversion. It is by transforming our lives in relation to each other and to nature that the Kingdom of Heaven will descend on us. Only by contemplating the highest things can we find what poet E.E. Cummings called “the deepest secret nobody knows”:

…the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life…
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart⁶

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1. Paul Kingsnorth, “Against Christian Civilization,” First Things, last modified January 1, 2025, accessed January 15, 2025, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2025/01/against-christian-civilization.

2. Ibid.

3. As one of the twenty questions of the satirical self-help quiz at the beginning of Percy’s book, the reader is asked to assess how he would take the following news: San Francisco has finally been hit by the “Big One”, a magnitude 8.3 Richter earthquake with nearly 200,000 casualties. Is this tragedy:

(a) Unrelievedly bad news? How can there be anything good in such massive suffering and loss of life?

(b) Putatively bad news?…Does he take comfort in what he does not say but perhaps thinks, that it is Gomorrah getting its due, what with the gays, creeps, and deviates who must comprise at least half the casualties?

The suggestion being, that there is an aspect of our fallen human nature which, though we outwardly bemoan human tragedy, is secretly inclined to experience some satisfaction (or at least morbid interest) in the suffering of others.

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. (New York: Picador, 2000), 65-66.

4. Kingsnorth, “Against Christian Civilization,” 2025.

5. Ibid.

6. Copyright Credit: “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]” Copyright 1952, © 1980, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage.