Post-Christian Christianity: On the Conscription of Christian Language and Symbolism (Well-Tempered, Apr 28, 2026)
The term needs a little unpacking. For centuries, Western societies have been recasting ideas with distinctly Christian roots—for example, human dignity, care for the poor, the equality of all before God—as self-evident, universal truths. That process, described so well by Tom Holland in Dominion, was a kind of intellectual plagiarism: Christian convictions were reshaped, repurposed, and often detached from the doctrines that undergird them. If plagiarism is a form of flattery, then this has been a kind of backhanded tribute. Christian ideas endured because they couldn’t easily be discarded even by Christianity’s fiercest critics. In that sense, Western secularism has been defined in part by the ghosts of its Christian past.
Post-Christian Christianity moves in the opposite direction. It’s less concerned with Christian beliefs and doctrines than with the signs by which it is recognised. It understands the power of symbols and slogans in a crowded public square, and so it reaches for Christian language and imagery as instruments—useful, adaptable, and readily deployed in the service of political ends. Instead of Scripture shaping its vision of reality, a prior framework—often nationalist, or more loosely ideological—selects and selects and arranges Christian elements to support its own claims. Christianity, in this register, becomes primarily a branded resource to be exploited: less a faith to be lived than a rhetoric to be wielded.
liberalism requires the substance of Christianity; Post-Liberalism just the trappings.