This Is Bigger Than a Culture War: Blame Michel Foucault – The American Spectator

I recently read a conservative writer who opined: “We have lost the culture wars” (not in the pages of The American Spectator, by the way). The author’s announcement was a veritable white flag, a signal that we conservatives should do something more productive with our time than fighting against tearing down the statues erected by our ancestors in more clear-thinking days. It was an unnecessary and unhelpful concession that admitted culture is now firmly under the control of revolutionary leftists. I thought I heard the writer saying, “Okay. We had a few wins, but overall, we have lost. Let’s get on to more substantive matters at hand.”

I understand the feeling. But that is all it is: a feeling. We are not in a culture war, nor have we been. Culture is an expression of ideals. Culture is symptomatic and only occasionally the first mover of ideas. No, we are not in a culture war; we are in an ideological struggle for the Judeo-Christian religion. (READ MORE: Education Has Reached Peak Absurdity, But There Is Hope)

Dr. Tom Holland wrote convincingly in his modern masterpiece, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (2019), that Christianity is the unit of measurement for all other ideas. Holland, a Cambridge classics man who once preferred to say that the West was forged on Greek democracy and Roman order, came to see the overwhelming truth of the ages: Western Civilization is attitudinally, and decidedly, Christian. That is not to imply that other ideas can’t compete. But for Holland, they can’t win. One’s idea is said to be “competing” or “alternative” just because Christianity exists.

Holland’s thesis seems at odds with the philosophical insights of Charles Taylor. One cannot help but agree with Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), in which he argues that there has been a fundamental shift in worldviews leading to excarnation — an antonym that Taylor uses to mean the hollowing out of the Imago Dei to Christ’s incarnation, which restores humanity. Once again, the antonym exists because the relative comparison rules.

But Holland’s thesis holds. Secularism derives its meaning from the presence of Western Christianity. In fact, because of the nature of the “Christian revolution” (reinforced by the Reformation and deepened by English-speaking Puritanism, the English Civil War, the Victorian British Empire, and the incomparable success of corporate chaplaincy that accompanied global expansion, the “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,” and — no small thing this — the founding of the United States of America), all efforts to install a new philosophical foundation must first successfully deconstruct the teachings of Christ, which turned the world upside down. Behind the presenting issue of the nightly news reports of “culture wars” lies the real issue, a vile serpent giving off the reedy rattle we mistake as culture. The real issue is deconstruction.

One of the most pervasive intellectual minds of the twentieth century shapes our world like few others; Michel Foucault (1926–1984) knew something about deconstruction. Foucault, a French social critic often pinned as a structuralist philosopher, was a postmodern writer and professor at the Collège de France and was the ablest disciple of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) — the enigmatic, mentally unstable genius who understood that Christianity was the enemy, a system of faith that he believed was “hostile to life.” Nietzsche (despite opportunities to learn from Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Søren Kierkegaard) retreated into a deeper and darker opium-fog existence. His last works were intended to affect the “Revaluation of All Values.” (READ MORE: Paganism and the Culture Wars)

Nietzsche’s philosophical proposition that “God is dead” needed a firmer intellectual fabric on which to build. His final works were dedicated to replacing Christian propositions with the “immoralist” ideology he held. Notable in the collection of what became posthumous publications (by his sister) was his identification of “power” and “the will” as the sentinel forces upholding Christendom in the West. What Nietzsche could not do (his own will and nascent powers broken by madness, syphilis, and drug abuse), Foucault mastered.

Foucault’s theme of “deconstructing everything” arises from his study of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of things and his “perspectivism” (maintaining that truth is grounded in one’s perspective on events, not the events). Foucault began an ambitious campaign of writing, using the fields of criminology, sexuality, and literature to battle against what he called “regimes of truth.” Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France were immensely popular, but his lasting influence was sealed during his time at Berkeley.

The “Theater of the Absurd” troop, which included Irish playwright and Nobel prize-winning author (1969) Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), sought to declare madness as a preferred state to the powers of rational conformity. The Nobel Committee cited Beckett “For his writing which — in new forms for the novel and drama — in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.” 

Of course, to elevate humanity by declaring it useless is hardly inspiring — unless, of course, you are Michel Foucault. Thus, the avant-garde stage and literature (e.g., the nonsensical Waiting for Godot) became confederates with the philosophers in the nuevo-European Enlightenment (viz., postmodernity) campaign to deconstruct the sources of Western power — namely, Christianity. 

Foucault’s intellectual wrecking ball is made from the smelted metals of Nietzsche’s perspectivism but swung with a stronger and strategically more lethal accuracy and velocity. Through addressing what he saw as moral power centers in the Western institutions, viz., Christian teaching, Foucault not only knocked down some load-bearing walls in the City of God but left instructions on how successors could finish the job.

How successful was he? You know about “gender fluidity?” Foucault. Normalization of homosexuality? Foucault. Same-sex marriage? Yep. You guessed it, straight from the Foucault playbook. From immigration (Foucault wanted to see the English-speaking nations lose their hegemonic grip, and what better way than advocating borders as arbitrary tools of power to dismantle a Christian idea of nationhood?) to early childhood education, the drumbeat of creaturely anarchy goes on. (RELATED: On LGBTQ Suicides, Emotional Blackmail, and Inconvenient Facts)

None dare call this a culture war. Culture wars can be forsaken. Certain cultural imperatives are so subjective that we might say, “This isn’t a hill to die on.” And that is precisely what the opponents of Western civilization want. They are nothing if not brilliant at reframing the question. To wit, there is no culture war. We are in a battle for the soul of Western civilization.

Despite the best endeavors of a radical leftist ideologue such as Michel Foucault, Christianity remains. The freedom won by Christ and divinely planted in the hearts and minds of our people will not go away. And what is the trajectory for this battle for the mind? I believe Saint Paul put it best: “But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20 ESV). Such optimism born of promise is enough to make the most cynical conservative sing, “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Michael A. Milton (Ph.D., Wales) is an American Presbyterian minister (PCA), colonel, U.S. Army ret., with advanced degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Knox Seminary, and Erskine Seminary, and a post-doctoral higher-education teaching certification from Harvard. He writes on theology and public policy from his home in western North Carolina.