Nevertheless, however fervently Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox writers called nihilistic Christendom back from the abyss, theirs remained little more than a cry in the wilderness.
The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars, by John Strickland
Communism and liberalism (of a sort) came out of World War Two as victors. Communism would fall first, at least its Soviet incarnation. Liberalism would limp along, albeit that limp grew increasingly more noticeable over time.
Secular ideology was not the solution; utopia, whether communism or liberalism, was a failure. While many Christians continued to pursue utopia, there were those who saw the problem clearly. Nicolas Berdyaev would write:
“…what is taking place in the world today is not a crisis of humanism (that is a topic of secondary importance), but a crisis of humanity.”
It was a process of dehumanization in all phases of culture and social life; most importantly, the dehumanization of moral life. Man ceased to have any value at all; to be powerless and to be replaced.
Referring to C.S. Lewis:
To confront this development, the Oxford literary scholar and accidental theologian wrote a book with the dystopian title The Abolition of Man (1943).
Man was reduced to instinct, and he was allowed only his rational mind to confront this life. In other words, men without chests.
T. S. Eliot would write (sounding a lot like Doug Wilson):
“…we must abandon the notion that the Christian should be content with freedom of cultus…. The Christian can be satisfied with nothing less than a Christian organization of society.”
Not that every member of society need be a Christian, but it would be a society that the natural end of man is acknowledged for all, with the supernatural end of beatitude for the Christian.
Absent this, in other words, and continuing down the slide of secularism, totalitarianism was the likely outcome. Yes, perhaps a soft totalitarianism, but it would be totalitarianism nonetheless.
Stalin was out, Kruschev was in. Although a true believer in communism, he at least toned down the actions of the police state within the Soviet Union. But it remained totalitarian.
Liberalism fared little better; this was even anticipated by many. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World offered a picture of this illiberal future dressed in liberal garb. Totalitarianism was the inevitable destiny for the West:
“The quaint old forms – elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts, and all the rest – will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism.”
Yes, the forms remain: we still pretend to hold elections, pretend that there is a Supreme Court that applies justice, pretend that our parliament represents us and upholds the Constitution. But it is all a façade, a Potemkin Village of governance.