Christianity, paganism, liberalism

Here is a comment I just posted at Conservative Swede, who has been doing a great deal of thinking about the connection between Christian ethics and the contemporary pathological form of liberalism.

I don't agree that the problem with Christianity/liberalism is that it is an ethical system shorn of its religious component. Primitive Christianity—the Christianity of the Roman Empire—certainly had a religious centre, but it was also other-worldly, concerned with individual salvation rather than the welfare of the political community, and anti-militarist. This point is made in a book published in 1994, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity by James C. Russell, which is very pertinent to the subject you are discussing (and also contains pointers to a lot of relevant scholarship on the subject). Modern liberalism may in essence represent a return to primitive Christianity on the ethical level . . . . CONTINUE