Christendom's Autopsy

What Chantal Delsol's "The End of the Christian World" Reveals About Our Cultural Moment

This is a guest post by James Wood.

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When Aaron Renn first outlined his “negative world” thesis, I was drawn to it because of my long engagement with discussions about the demise of Christendom. Renn’s framing succinctly captured a crucial stage in the transition toward a more fully post-Christendom society within a major Western nation.

Around the same time, another work by an author of a different Western nation was published which explored these themes on a broader scale. Chantal Delsol is a prominent French philosopher and historian. In 2021 she wrote one of the most provocative books on the topic of the post-Christian West that, while it has received lots of attention and critical acclaim, has yet to be translated into English. In La Fin de la chrétienté (The End of the Christian World, or The End of Christendom) Delsol provides a penetrating autopsy of the civilizational death facing the West today.

Since the French Revolution ushered in a civilization that explicitly rejected Christian assumptions, Western nations have been successively abandoning their Christendom heritage. According to Delsol, Christendom lasted for sixteen centuries (starting with the reign of Theodosius, emperor from AD 379-395), had come under threat with the Enlightenment, and was completely undone in the second half of the twentieth century. The era that we are living in is post-Christian, but not post-religious. Besides contributing a deep analysis of how we got here which takes into account developments across centuries, Delsol also offers a uniquely insightful lens on where we are at this moment. The post-Christian world is not ending up in atheistic nihilism, as many had assumed; rather, it is re-paganizing.

Delsol's work is valuable to North American audiences because of how it intersects with other important discourses. First, it aligns with Renn’s argument about the public rejection of Christianity and traditional moral norms, though Delsol extends the historical analysis much further back. Second, her re-paganization thesis reinforces the arguments of Joseph Bottum, Steven D. Smith, Tara Isabella Burton, and Louise Perry about the surge of new forms of immanentized religiosity. Finally, Delsol’s arguments also anticipate the “re-enchantment” discourse (which I will discuss a bit more below). While Delsol excels at diagnosing how we arrived at this moment, her predictions for the future and prescriptions for Christian engagement are less persuasive. Though she claims her goal is merely descriptive, she frequently offers implicit judgments and explicit proposals that warrant critique.

For the remainder of this review, I will first outline Delsol’s compelling arguments about the historical trajectory leading to our current moment, then conclude with a critique of her views on the path forward.

Delsol argues that Western nations are undergoing a revolution in two fundamental domains: the normative and the ontological. Our moral precepts and vision of reality are being inverted, returning to patterns resembling the pre-Christian era. The “normative inversion” refers to the progressive rejection of Christian ethics in areas such as abortion, sexuality, marriage, and suicide. The dominant moral framework now prioritizes individual autonomy, limited only by technological capabilities.

This “normative inversion,” Delsol contends, is rooted in an “ontological inversion.” The post-Christian imaginary spurns Truth and transcendence—rejecting any dualism that suggests a higher reality beyond this life. Fullness must be locatable here. Yet, rather than embracing atheistic materialism, many seek spiritual fulfillment within immanence. This has led to a resurgence of “re-enchantment,” though one that deliberately excludes a transcendent deity or eschatological hope. According to Delsol, the loss of transcendence has rendered Christian morality implausible in the modern imagination.

Despite this radical shift, remnants of once-Christian culture persist. This idea is not new. Authors like Friedrich Nietzsche, Tom Holland, Glen Scrivener, and Joseph Henrich have similarly argued that the post-Christian West is indelibly marked by Christian principles. Delsol, furthermore, engages one of the more critical analyses on this borrowing, known as the “Böckenförde paradox.” The German professor of constitutional law and student of the intersection of religion and politics penned this famous aphorism: “The secularized liberal state lives on presuppositions that it is not itself able to guarantee.” The basic idea is that modern secular orders which reject their religious origins, are dependent upon the religious heritage and the illiberal sources that they reject. Many take from this that such orders are hypocritical, thieving “parasites,” whose days are numbered. Delsol pushes back against this assessment. She thinks that this prognosis is too cynical and argues that such value borrowing is a natural feature of civilizational transitions. Therefore, there is nothing strange going on here. In fact, this parallels the earlier inversion in the West—which was Christendom. What we are facing today is “the inversion of the inversion.”

The first inversion primarily took off with Theodosius, who made the Christian religion the official religion of the empire, promoting it through public power, enforcing its moral norms, and prohibiting pagan ceremonies. This led to a moral revolution: where marriage was once held in low regard and divorce laws were lax, Christianity promoted the sanctity of marriage; the practice of infanticide and abortion (at least after forty days) was condemned; suicide, which was praised by pagans in certain circumstances for the purpose of honor was universally denounced; homosexual practice which was common, was now condemned; etc. Within under a century from Constantine’s conversion to the legislative measures of Theodosius, the normative inversion was complete. Pagans pushed back, defending the “traditional order.” But by this time they were already aware that they represented a lost world, and that a new morality was enshrined at the center. Christians also understood this and identified paganism as outdated and superstitious—Christians were, in effect, “modern” in a once-pagan culture. This is a challenge to any simplistic conservatism; Christianity was at first a culturally disruptive force, while the pagans were the ones claiming to be the defenders of a threatened, and ultimately losing tradition.

Today, the West is experiencing a reversal of that earlier inversion. Divorce laws have been liberalized, abortion is widespread, suicide is back on the table as a potential good not only for the sufferer (to relieve personal suffering) but also for society (to relieve stress from the system), and homosexuality is not only permitted but celebrated while opposition is stigmatized. Though this shift has been underway for over two centuries, its acceleration in the past fifty years, particularly the past decade, has been dramatic. But Delsol seems to think that Christians today should follow the example of the defeated pagan losers of old, resigning themselves to marginalization. She argues that cultural evolution inevitably trends toward individual autonomy, unencumbered by supernatural constraints. This determinism leads to my first critique.

She is a bit too confident in her predictions. She asserts that the future is religious but not Christian and that the inversion she describes is as inevitable as the first. However, history is unpredictable, shaped by both human and divine agency. Delsol pronounces: “As far as man can see, there is no renaissance of Christendom on the horizon.” But I bet few foresaw the first one coming, either. Moreover, the “vibe shift” and the rise of the “cultural Christians” challenge the narrative of Christianity’s inevitable decline. And many such “converts” are those who have a completely different assessment of the Böckenförde paradox than Delsol. They perceive that a post-Christian future will likely not be as civilized as Delsol seems to assume. The forces of wokeness, radical Islam, neopagan vitalism, and anti-human techno-managerialism presage much darkness if not curbed by the resources of Christianity.

Delsol also presents a false dichotomy in her statements on cultural change. She argues that moral transformation requires spiritual renewal before political engagement, dismissing efforts to shape public morality through legal or institutional means. Yet she acknowledges that contemporary moral norms are enforced through state power and social pressures. Why, then, should Christians abstain from engaging these mechanisms? Delsol's argument is inconsistent: she notes that ancient morality was shaped by belief yet later claims that pre-Christian societies determined morality through state control. If modernity mirrors the latter, why should Christians refrain from leveraging public influence?

I wonder, has this French Catholic stumbled into a neo-Anabaptist quietism? Like many of those figures in that theo-political stream, she appears embarrassed by Christendom, viewing its “imposition” of morality as illegitimate. This perspective aligns with theologians like John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas. But in fact, her proposals go even further than that company would countenance. She explicitly advocates “silent witness” as the appropriate Christian approach in a post-Christian culture. Hauerwas the cantankerous prophet would never.

Now, Delsol’s strength on this point is her warning that cozying up to fascist powers, as many reactionary Christians did in their attempts to push back against the Christendom-corroding cultural waves, is not only wicked, but foolish. Instead of shoring up or restoring Christendom, it simply disgusted its remaining sympathizers. There is a parallel danger today, I believe; and we would be wise to heed her warnings which are supported by her deep historical analysis.

However, Delsol seems to have too few conceptual options at her disposal for understanding the relationship between Christianity and the public sphere. At various points it becomes clear that she thinks that we must choose between either control over society or the reduction of Christianity to a mere opinion. I wonder if her lack of familiarity with classical Protestant political theology leaves her hanging here. Her general ignorance regarding classical Protestantism is flagged early on when she says that only Roman Catholicism is a holistic religion with civilizational ambitions. This doesn’t account for magisterial Protestant political theory, with its idea of a Christian commonwealth that clearly distinguishes between the civil and ecclesiastical powers while advocating mutual support. By neglecting this Protestant tradition, she offers an impoverished view of Christian engagement in public life.

Delsol argues that modernity opposes Christianity as a social force rather than as a faith. Yet she may misunderstand both modernity and Christianity. As a guide for how Christians should navigate post-Christendom, her work falls short. However, her historical analysis remains valuable. Those more conversant with Protestant political thought can profitably build on her insights to develop strategies for faithful Christian engagement in societies that have largely abandoned their Christian foundations. Recent cultural shifts suggest that, from the human side, the future remains uncertain. Public Christianity—or Christian culture—could make a comeback. We might not be at the end, after all.

Cover image: Chantal Delsol by Elekes Andor, CC BY-SA 4.0