In today’s post-secular world, dialogue gives way to violence, compassion to euthanasia, and political justice to the pursuit of economic profit. Such a world has drifted not only from its Christian roots but also from the very foundations of human dignity. This stark diagnosis leaves little room for dispute, yet it poses a pressing challenge to the Church: how can humanity be renewed on Christian foundations across politics, economics, culture and every sphere of society? To consider these questions, we spoke with Dr John Milbank, one of the leading authorities on faith in the post-secular age. Widely recognised as the founder of »Radical Orthodoxy«, Milbank is an Anglican whose Anglo-Catholic convictions often echo Catholic social teaching — a kinship underscored by his recent participation in the Summer School of the Economy of Francesco in Split.
—Poetry is not necessarily impractical: it simply points to a mode of practice that is not purely technical. Our current economy is based on technical transformation, and technical transformation is essentially instrumental: it enhances our control over our bodies, other people, and nature, but it does not provide us with an aim for this control. By contrast, writing a poem or creating a community does not aim at control, but at well-being and harmony. It is not contractual, but covenantal. Pope Francis sought to resituate the technical within the poetic, insisting that our relationship to nature is not one of exploitation, but of stewardship. Our covenant with God extends to a covenant with all human beings and the whole of creation. This covenant should be reflected in the way we do politics and economics.
Instead of stressing individual rights and freedoms, we need to emphasize reciprocal justice and care. Instead of debating the respective illusions of the free market or of total planning, we need to focus on dismantling the current sinister corporatism rooted in a fusion of free market liberalism and total government power. This model—so evident in China and the USA—warns us that the division between the political and the economic is artificial. Whether the economy is harnessing politics or politics is enslaving the economy, without virtue as their basis, they are destined to stifle not only the social dimension but also the common good.
The dominant managerialism has made us all suspicious of our leaders and of leadership itself. We hate leaders today and dream of bringing them down or limiting their power. But every system needs a leader. Whether it is a king or the president of a democratic government, this is true. Similarly, the role of the elite never disappears; and it is an illusion that meritocracy solves this truth in the best manner.
Authors such as Michael Young and Michael Sandel have warned that people who rise to the top sometimes lack any sense of inherited responsibility. They feel they deserve the privileges and honours assigned to them. I am not arguing for inherited aristocracy, but for questioning the value we ascribe to wealth or celebrity. I am arguing for a culture that honours a virtuous exercise of talent—for a return to the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Thomistic ideal of virtue or human flourishing as the aim of the political process.
Politics demands more than liberal tolerance and freedom of choice: it demands virtuous education and virtuous practice. Because if politics is not about promoting virtue, then it is about promoting vice. With the vanishing of Christian culture and the classical legacy from which it grew, the liberal assumptions embedded in our society have blurred the line between the legal and the criminal, »mafiaizing« society. That is why it is acceptable for us today to have criminals in charge, but unacceptable when a politician appoints a friend. For us, politics is no longer about extending friendship, as Aristotle said, but about distributing power.
Without belief in the soul, there can be no rational political debate; for materialism, democracy becomes a theatre of pretence. If there is no realm of the psyche—the soul—that leads to the realm of nous—intelligence—how can there be a political realm at all? Even the word »economy,« oikonomia, can be understood as the distribution of spiritual goods within the physical realm. From this perspective, the issue is not immersion in the secular or opposition to it, but the subordination of the secular to the spiritual destiny of humanity. Christians are called to lead the world, but to lead it out of the world.
There are many ways this can be accomplished—whether through the constant liturgy of monks or the full secular engagement of lay religious movements. Yet in a post-Christian world, we must avoid retreating into traditionalist fantasies, often combined with excessive politicization. The culture wars are not the Church’s fundamental issue: the spiritual fight for eternity is. The only thing that continues even when bombs are falling and walls are collapsing is our worship, not our culture.
What can Croatia learn from British discussions on the legalization of the »polite, liberal Holocaust«?
Some might see in that position a call to step back from political life. But does every meeting of politics and faith have to amount to politicization?
We are witnessing this kind of politicization because people recognize that the collapse of Christianity brings with it the collapse of Christian values. This is especially true of mercy and respect for unborn and elderly life. Devoid even of respect for natural law, our society is drifting toward a suicidal culture, a form of paganism unmatched by any barbarism. More and more Christians realize that it is impossible to prevent this within a neutral, secular political realm. In that sense, a new Christian politics is unavoidable; but I favour a kind of »Left Integralism«—a system in which the Church exercises not direct political power, but persuasive authority.
In the quite recent modern past, the association of Christianity with the Right was not automatic. It is a consequence of the rejection of the cultural secularism found on the contemporary Left. Yet Catholics cannot pretend that the economic secularism of the right is not equally problematic, often now mutating into a new form of authoritarianism and nationalism that instrumentalizes religion.
Yes, Christians must strive for a culture oriented to Christian norms and truth. But that means norms right across the board, including the ones of economic justice and subordination of national to universal human interests. It does not only include issues of sex, gender, life, and death, even though these are also crucial. Christians must also not lose hold of the »priority of the spiritual« – an ultimate concern with the salvation of every soul and of every soul in communion with every other soul, beyond the bounds of this world. Ultimately, the Christian test of the political is whether it assists the salvific process or not.
The replacement of conversation by the exchange of abuse and worse by violence is a catastrophe. Although I do not share most of his views, Charlie Kirk, to be fair to him, tried to promote calm debate. I think that Christians can achieve that by shifting the terms of current discourse and showing that the real issues and differences are not always engaged.
The different combinations of opinion concerning Ukraine and Gaza are, for example, showing how irrelevant the traditional fault-lines of left versus right now truly are. The liberal versus postliberal faultline is perhaps more fundamental, but Christians need to be aware that postliberal should not mean »national conservative«. The latter is genealogically but another version of liberalism with its adulation of absolute sovereignty both as a salve for its own individualism and yet as individualism writ collectively large on the global stage. Christians need to talk about how we can really put the social before the economic and the political at local, national, and international levels.
Religions are born in a moment of crisis, when the need for radical change becomes apparent. But often the real crises are not those the media focuses on. That is why Christians should help to form a different communications network. Before the printing press, the main way people learned about events was through sermons; and we must revive the power of the pulpit.
Instead of being just another front of cultural revolution—which will eventually pass—or a weapon for defending political ideals—which will collapse sooner or later—the pulpit should become a privileged space for Church social teaching, for rigorous ethical analysis and profound theological vision. Too often, the congregation hears a sermon about crises from the daily news while burdened by crises in their families, workplaces, and neighbourhoods that go unmentioned by our priests.
In a time when Christianity is declining and its influence is waning, a faith that fashions supposed »antitriumphalism«—which essentially sacralizes failure—is a very poor faith. If the revelation of the Bible is the ultimate truth, then theology must be humble before it, but not before everything else. This does not mean theology can answer every question. But it can have a transformative effect on other discourses. This is because—unlike other sciences—theology is not about anything in particular: it is about God, and therefore about everything. I do not believe in strict boundaries between theology, philosophy, and religion; I believe in a Christian-informed philosophical discourse that includes history, literature, art, and other fields. These have been modes of doing theology since its inception.
Philosophy and poetry are connected in the broadest sense as two halves of the same picture: philosophy seeks to see all the finite embedded in the infinite, and poetry seeks to see the infinite reflected in the finite. If everything originates in an act of divine creation, then the creative must lie at the centre of philosophical and theological vision, as Alfred North Whitehead suggested. From that perspective, it becomes clear that our society has not forgotten being, as Heidegger claimed—we have forgotten creation: the contemplation of divine creation and the continuation of it. If everything comes from nothing, then nothing within the created order is stable: everything is constantly fading into nothing and coming into being again. The past no longer exists, and yet we live only within its remains, as if on a vast archaeological site. This accords with Augustine’s musical sense of time: passing away, it sounds the praise of the Creator.
All creation is a perpetual liturgical chant, calling us to live liturgically as well. But it is hard to live time liturgically when we are constantly consulting our phones amid a flurry of timetables, impossibly connected to everything in the world all at once. To me, liturgy is theurgy: an act of transforming everything through the power of the divine descending into our lives. We need to reinvent our use of technology so that it enables us to anticipate the eschaton: to heal the world not by our own powers, but in synergic cooperation with God. This is the kind of renaissance modern Christianity needs—and needs to offer to the world.
