I want to discuss an article that Johnathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of England, has written. It is worth reading the entire thing. But firstly I want to talk not merely about the tribes of the Jews, but the tribes of the liberals. For if the Jews are primarily a tribe passing through, sojourners and strangers, they are faithful to their reading of Moses.

But they went liberal. The Liberal Judaism is now in two groups: israeli and becoming religious, or Western, decadent and dying. As such, they are an example: not to follow, as liberals have, but to avoid.

And here I approve of Sacks. He understands what Alaister McIntyre wrote: the liberal project has failed. So let’s quote him.

So first of all, let me analyse what is happening. The simplest answer I can give is that the West had three master narratives which we have held since the 17th or 18th century. Today, they have all broken down. Those three master narratives are, first: the world is getting progressively more secular. Second: the world is getting more Westernised. Third: to survive in the contemporary world any religion has to accommodate to society. It has to go with the flow. Those three stories have held for four centuries. But today each one of them is breaking down.

Let us take them one by one. The secularisation thesis has been functioning for four centuries. It has four dimensions, one for each century. First of all came the 17th century, which saw the secularisation of knowledge. In science, there was Newton. In philosophy, there was Descartes, both of whom were not irreligious or anti-religious. They were very religious indeed, but they sought to base knowledge on non-doctrinal foundations. That’s the essence of Newtonian physics and Descartesian philosophy.

In the 18th century came the secularisation of power, in two great revolutions, the French in 1789 and, before that, the American in 1776. But the 18th century saw for the first time the separation of religion and power, or, as it was put in the United States, between church and state. The 19th century saw the secularisation of culture. People built concert halls, art galleries and museums as a way of encountering the sublime without necessarily going to a house of worship. They were substitutes for the church.

The 20th century, beginning in the 1960s, saw the secularisation of morality, as the West broke free from its traditional Judaeo-Christian ethic, especially in relationship to the sanctity of life on the one hand and the sanctity of marriage on the other. However, four centuries of secularisation lead us to expect that the process will continue. But it isn’t continuing because in the 21st century we are seeing, at least in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, the world getting more religious, not less. We have begun an age of desecularisation.

The second metanarrative was Westernisation. It said that any country that wants to enter the modern world has to become Westernised. That too has been true for four centuries, but today no longer, because what we’re seeing is four very ancient civilisations that had been eclipsed by the modern age suddenly returning with a vengeance. By that, I mean China, India, Russia and Islam, whether in the Sunni form in Saudi Arabia or the Shia form in Iran. All of those cultures believe that tomorrow belongs to them, not to the West. So, that’s the second master narrative — Westernisation.

The third was accommodation. That is, that any religion to survive in the modern world has to accommodate and adjust to the wider society. Today, the opposite is the case. For the last half-century, it has been conservative churches and Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox synagogues that have been growing faster than liberal ones. In Islam, it is the radical forms of Islamism that are flourishing, while the more moderate forms are in decline. In each case, what we are seeing, and what we haven’t seen for four centuries, is not religion as accommodation, but religion as resistance. It’s not religion making its peace with the world, but religion opposing the world, challenging the world or simply withdrawing from the world. These are not small developments. Half of the world is getting less religious. Half of the world is getting more religious and the tension between them is growing day by day. That is cultural climate change and it’s the biggest thing to happen, certainly in the West, since the great wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Johnathon Sacks, Cultural Climate Change

The half that is getting less religious is in a virtue spiral. This has led to despair, and a mutually reinforcing hatred of nature and love of decline and death. From a pragmatic point of view, their policies are a failure, and the only argument they can produce is ad hominem or emotive.

For they have forgotten that without vision the people perish.

The analysis of Sacks was irritating to the progressive, for he predicts their failure: this is a fairly safe bet as he lives in a society that is fracturing under cultural lines.

But then he tries to get an accommodation with Puritans on the idea of covenant. And it fails. Because Jews, like Catholics, are not puritans. His own words show that without faith, societies fail, and the content of the faith matters.

So we’ve gone through the three categories. You lose your religion. You begin to lose your families and the will and sacrifice to have children.

You begin to lose strong communities and you begin to lose the covenantal bond of society itself, this society of “we the people”. If I am right, huge consequences follow. It turns out that Western freedom, the thing that was born in England in the revolution of the 1640s and in America in 1775, is not the default setting of the human condition. It turns out to be the highly specific outcome of a particular Judaeo-Christian tradition. You won’t find its exact parallels anywhere else.

Holland, of course, was also part of that covenant, but very few other countries. It was Puritan or Calvinist in origin and then subsequently modified by figures like Spinoza in Holland, John Locke in England, and later by Jefferson and his friends in America. That is a very, very special kind of freedom.

Johnathon Sacks, ibid

What Sacks is trying to do is hack the tolerance inherent in the nation state — which was a compromise built on the ashes of a century of religious conflict — to allow his tribe to survive. But he has the honesty to acknowledge this. He has some humility.

The post modern tribes, however, show no gratitude. And their hatred will help them build their hell. For the next generation they have no interest in.