Christianity as antidote to managerial liberalism

If politics is downstream of myth, the West must recover the only mythic grammar it still possesses.

Written by The Westering Sun.

I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division ... When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, “It’s going to rain,” and it does. And when the south wind blows, you say, “It’s going to be hot,” and it is. Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time?
—Luke 12:49–56

Bo Winegard recently argued that the West needs a ‘mythopoetic Christianity’, liberated from the constraints of narrow empiricism and able to transfigure reality through symbol and ritual. This essay agrees, while pointing to an inexorable conclusion: that Christianity is not just important for Western renewal, but the only surviving symbolic grammar capable of sustaining the West as a civilization.

This claim does not rest on religious preference or aesthetic nostalgia. It follows from political realism: from working with the materials that history has left us. And only Christianity has the scale and depth to rebind the West.

The modern West speaks in a managerial idiom that presents itself as neutral. In practice, it is a means of social control, which dissolves inherited loyalties and renders people interchangeable and replaceable. If you compete inside this framework, you have already conceded defeat.

Renewal will not come from policy papers or clever arguments. It will begin where power always begins: with the speech, symbols and rites that turn atomized individuals into the first-person plural.

Attempts to arrest Western decline have almost all operated within the managerial frame, at the level of policy, procedure and electoral strategy. But this is to fight on the regime’s chosen ground. The same strategies have been foiled, subverted or co-opted time and again. To repeat them now is not hope but criminal folly.

The managerial regime does not just govern through votes and laws. It governs by monopolizing the myths and idioms through which people interpret reality. This “neutral” discourse thwarts opposition before it begins. The true foundations of power are pre-political: language, symbol, myth and attachment. Until the West reclaims those, no political project will find lasting success.

The real struggle for Western renewal must take place at the level of culture. This means returning to affective speech: the language of loyalty, identity and belonging. Reason has its place in practical affairs, but it cannot be the foundation of political legitimacy. For every civilization except the modern West, legitimacy has rested on attachment, not syllogism.

Recent political insurgencies have shown both the fragility of the managerial regime and the power of linguistic defiance. When figures like Trump speak outside the liberal-rationalist register, they puncture its aura of inevitability. But charisma alone cannot rebind a people. Without a deeper mythic foundation—a symbolic language that binds us into a common destiny—such episodes risk becoming a mere phase rather than the beginning of restoration.

The return of myth

It would be absurd to try to invent a symbolic language from scratch. The West already possesses one: embedded in its history, rich in parable and metaphor, capable of speaking across generations, and still sheltered under the legal protections of religious freedom.

For over a thousand years, Christianity provided the West’s symbolic grammar: a shared imagery of loyalty, sacrifice and destiny. To speak of reviving it now is not nostalgia but tragic realism: the only way to escape managerial rationalism and re-inhabit the order that first made the West a people.

Managerialism rules not only by atomizing, but by sabotaging the emergence of coherent myth among the West’s core population. It is conceivable that new myths might arise around class struggle or nationalism, but they would lack the depth to bind the West across generations or the authority to restore its lost purpose. Only Christianity still possesses the capacity to reconstitute the West at civilizational scale. We just need to take it back.

Its advantages are decisive. Christianity is already embedded in Western consciousness; it resonates through ritual and story; it can be used by anyone, regardless of wealth or standing; it has some legal protection, making suppression costly; and it naturally calls forth loyalty, sacrifice and devotion—the residues that sustain group cohesion and elite formation. Above all, it disrupts liberal-rationalist discourse by forcing a return to pre-rational forms of belonging.

James Burnham observed that the myths that weld a people together must stir their deepest sentiments while directing their energies toward the solution of real problems. This is never achieved by syllogism or proof; only through intuition and symbol. That is the logic of political realism: myths endure where policies fail, because only they can channel sentiment into durable cohesion.

Christianity is not just one faith among many. It is a social technology—at once shield and sword, binding individuals into community and laying the precondition for elite renewal.

From vessel of continuity to shield and sword

Language does not just communicate information; it creates worlds. Émile Durkheim showed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that religion is not primarily about explicit belief but about symbol and ritual. Through such rites, people experience what he called ‘collective effervescence’: the sense of being bound into something greater than themselves.

Christianity exemplifies this principle. Its parables, sacraments and liturgy have for centuries bound the West into a common order. This makes Christianity more than a collection of dogmas: it is the structural logic of Western civilization, the language through which it has historically represented itself.

Other forces shaped the West, but only Christianity carried it across time as a coherent civilization. Its decline is therefore not simply the loss of faith but a rupture in civilizational continuity itself. Reviving Christian language restores that continuity while arming the West with a grammar the managerial order cannot withstand. Even without widespread assent to doctrine, its recovery offers meaning beyond bureaucracy and consumption, and independence from the sterile discourse of liberal rationalism.

More importantly, it opens the path to elite renewal. A new aristocracy of purpose will not emerge from policies or abstractions, but from thick, symbolic identity-forging speech. This strategy places the regime in an inescapable predicament. To suppress Christian speech is to violate its own legal order, provoking backlash. To tolerate it is to concede a rival symbolic order that restores hierarchy, identity, and myth. Either way, they lose.

Sceptics may object that mass secularization makes the strategy impossible. But this assumes faith means verbal assent to propositions, as if belief were a scientific claim. What matters most is form and feeling: the experience of being moved and bound into a whole by shared language, rhythm and ritual. Even among those who profess unbelief, many are still stirred by hymns or scripture, because the affective-symbolic structure works long after rational belief has departed.

The goal, then, is not an instant return to dogma but the pragmatic restoration of Christian language as a living social force. By re-saturating the Western imagination with that language, the conditions would be created for an organic return to faith.

Some will object that without literal assent to the doctrines of Christianity, the faith will lack the power to inspire loyalty or solidarity. But the power of Christianity never lay in historical verification. It lay in its power to galvanize attachment through symbol and ritual. That is why it shaped a thousand years of Western history.

The doctrines do not need to be accepted as scientific facts to move men; they move more deeply precisely because they generate meaning and loyalty. The urge to parse the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection as “historical events” in the modern sense was itself an eighteenth-century invention. Before that, Christians did not frame miracles as empirical claims to be tested against reason, but as mysteries embedded in liturgy and art—lived truths rather than lab reports.

Even when belief was professed, what truly moved people was not verbal assent to propositions but the attachments those propositions activated: loyalty, sacrifice, courage, mercy, hope. For more than a millennium, the Christian mysteries bound the West because they were lived as symbols, not because they were verified as facts. They can do so again if their language once more saturates our imagination.

The way to resurrection

Today, mainstream Christianity—Protestant and Catholic alike—has been captured by liberal-rationalist discourse. It preaches a self-destructive altruism that corrodes the very foundations of Western life. Some, following Nietzsche, conclude that Christianity itself is the cause of this weakness. But what has decayed is not Christianity as such, but its managerial counterfeit. A return to traditional Christianity would not sap strength but restore it.

The Christianity that built the West was the faith of warriors, kings and fathers of nations. Unlike the simulacrum that now wears its name, this was not a theology of surrender but of dominion—of self-mastery, duty, and the sacred bonds of kin and country. This is why Christianity, rightly understood, is the only counter-revolutionary force left. It alone can bind the peoples of the West into something greater than themselves and supply the sacred core around which a true aristocracy of purpose can form.

If we try to picture the rebirth of Christian language, we glimpse something almost unimaginable: a world of transcendent purpose, high fertility, high-trust communities and renewed art and culture. A world where the future inspires not dread but anticipation.

This essay is adapted from one published on The Westering Sun.

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