It wasn’t barbarians at the gates that caused the downfall of one of the world’s greatest empires but the uncivilized savages within that led to the slow decline of Rome.
The glory that was Rome eroded with the weakening of its culture, its institutions and its way of life. How could the empire exist when the people could no longer define what it meant to be Roman?
Now, Western civilization is under siege by woke barbarians.
At the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, organizers thought it appropriate to have drag queens parody Leonardo Da Vinci’s Renaissance masterpiece The Last Supper, which depicts Christ’s final meal with his apostles.
The Conference of French bishops was appalled. “This ceremony has unfortunately included scenes of derision and mockery of Christianity, which we very deeply deplore,” it said in a statement.
Thomas Jolly, the ceremony’s artistic director, said the show was about subverting French stereotypes and highlighting the country’s constant re-examination of its values and identity.
Having drag queens openly mock Christianity is certainly subversive, although Jolly’s flagrant pandering to this woke nonsense is also odious and not a little annoying.
In response to criticism, he said, “In France, people are free to love how they please, are free to love whoever they want, are free to believe or not believe.”
Ironically, Jolly was very close to echoing St. Augustine’s words, “Love and do what you will.”
But Jolly was being disingenuous because freedom of belief and the freedom to choose who to love were not the values on display. What Jolly was showcasing was a direct attack on Christianity, a tawdry insult to those who practise that faith.
It was also an attack on Western foundational values because “the West” is built on the bedrock of Christianity.
“To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions,” wrote historian Tom Holland in Dominion, How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.
Even arch atheist Richard Dawkins acknowledges the enormous legacy Christianity has bequeathed to the world.
“I do think we are culturally a Christian country,” he said earlier this year about Great Britain. “I call myself a cultural Christian.”
However, increasingly, Christianity isn’t just a dirty word, it’s positively poisonous.
In Canada, 85 Catholic churches and many other Christian buildings have been set on fire or vandalised since May 2021, according to the Catholic Civil Rights League. The attacks started in response to the controversial finding of, what was initially reported as 215 suspected graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Three years later, no bodies have been found and the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation recently referred to “anomalies” rather than graves.
So Jolly is just the latest person to jump on the anti-Christian bandwagon, although one wonders whether he would be so brave as to attack Islam in the same way.
In 2015, 12 people were slaughtered by gunmen at the Parisian offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for the crime of depicting the prophet Mohammed in cartoons.
Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, told The New York Times that the motive was clear: “trying to shut down a media organization that lampooned the Prophet Mohammad.”
By lampooning Jesus, Jolly is also highlighting a different set of values than the cardinal virtues espoused by Christianity. Instead of temperance, justice, prudence and fortitude, the artistic director appears to champion wanton excess, narcissism, exhibitionism and lubriciousness.
Jolly’s new values would have us shun virtue for vice, to embrace the ignoble, the gawdy and the facile. They also have the air of the superficial worthy of Groucho Marx’s famous line: “These are my principles and if you don’t like them … well I have others.”
William Bennett, secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan, pointed out in his work, The Book of Virtues, that people talked about having values “as if they were beads on a string or marbles in a pouch.”
Morality and virtues, he said, were not “something to be possessed, but as the central part of human nature, not as something to have but as something to be, the most important thing to be.”
The mockery at the Olympics isn’t an earth-shattering blow to Western civilization or Christianity but it is an insidious reminder that virtues once held dear are under attack and cannot be taken for granted.
And for all of Jolly’s subversion, his lascivious exhibition was joyless and soulless.
He would have done well to ponder Paul’s words to the Philippians: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things.”
Rome wasn’t built in a day and the West won’t fall in 24 hours or because of Jolly’s Olympic-sized faux pas. But the barbarians are here. Can we instil in them our Western-Christian values? Or are we all doomed to wokeism?
National Post