In a disturbing sequence at the beginning of The Northman, Robert Eggers’ brutal new Viking revenge epic, a group of ecstatic berserker warriors raid a Rus village. The carnage that follows is realistically portrayed. At one point, the film’s protagonist, Amleth, played by Alexander Skarsgård, rips an enemy’s throat open with his teeth.
After the raid, all but a handful of adult villagers – thought to be healthy enough to survive the winter as slaves – are rounded up and locked in a house, including the children. Two berserkers casually toss torches onto the thatched roof while those trapped scream and beg for their lives.
That’s pretty much the whole movie, and it’s actually not fun to watch. But amid the mud, smoke, carnage and intricately rendered scenes of pagan witchcraft, we get a harrowing glimpse of pre-Christian Northern Europe. Whatever else Eggers tries to do in The Northman, he makes no effort to gloss over the breathtaking violence and ruthlessness of Viking culture.
In fact, it’s hard to get through the film without feeling a deep sense of relief that Norse paganism has been supplanted by Christianity. The Catholic monks who ventured into Scandinavia in the tenth century brought with them a radically new religion that proclaimed something revolutionary to the pagan spirit: a loving God, created man in his own image and endowed every human being with intrinsic worth, even the weak and powerless – slaves, women, children.
Eggers probably didn’t intend it, but “The Northman” is a powerful reminder that Western civilization arose directly from Christianity and depends on it for its vitality. Had the Catholic Church failed to convert Europe, the continent would have descended into paganism as surely as did the indigenous cultures of America. There would have been no Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas Aquinas, no Magna Carta, no philosophy or theology, and no American foundation.
All this to say: Today we live from the interests of Christianity and draw from the faith that lifted the West out of paganism. Our civilization, with its insistence on individual rights and due process of law, enumerated powers and the rule of law, is based above all on a specifically Christian understanding of people, society and the cosmos. This is what John Adams meant, for example, when he said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is totally inappropriate for someone else’s government.”
Noting this also means acknowledging what should be obvious by now: interest is running out. We are no longer a “moral and religious people” and there is a real danger that without Christianity our civilization will wither and die along with our system of government.
That doesn’t mean we’re going back to pre-Christian paganism, berserk raids on hapless villages, and the demonic rituals of pagan seers. But post-Christian societies will begin to lose those ideas and principles that set Western civilization apart from the rest of the world, and everything that came before it—things like freedom of speech and conscience, inalienable rights, the equality of men, the consent of the governed .
In fact, this process is already underway. Consider just one example from February, before Russia invaded Ukraine, when the world’s attention was focused on Canada of all places. There, under the guise of health and safety, a supposedly liberal government carried out an unprecedented and appalling crackdown on peaceful protesters and their families.
Nothing could have better illustrated the corruption and decay of a once tolerant and free society. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the epitome of an enlightened liberal, showed us what kind of tolerance we can expect from post-Christian liberal governments in the West.
Peaceful protesters have not only been arrested, their bank accounts confiscated, assets frozen and legal defense funds blocked. They were told their livelihoods would be taken away, their trucks and licenses confiscated. At one point, government bureaucrats threatened to take their children away if they didn’t comply. The message from Trudeau’s administration was clear: shut up and go home, stop protesting, or we’re not just going to arrest you, we’re going to ruin you completely.
I thought of those Canadian families as I read an essay by Francis Fukuyama in the Wall Street Journal last weekend about how the world is “clearly moving toward equality and freedom” and that despite some setbacks, liberalism will eventually prevail. He brushes off the massive counter-actualization of communist China, where a decidedly illiberal modern civilization has taken root, and tries to comfort his readers with empty platitudes about “history’s progress toward justice.”
Nowhere in his lengthy essay, however, does Fukuyama mention Christianity’s role in creating and maintaining the liberal principles that he believes will somehow endure of their own accord. He either doesn’t know or refuses to admit that our entire conception of justice and liberty springs from the Christian religion, without which they become mere justifications for brutal tyranny.
His mistake – a mistake shared by all our liberal elites – is to attribute the success of Western civilization to the progressive improvement of human nature and the advances of modern technology. But human nature has not improved. It’s fixed and fallen, and that will never change. We are all berserkers in some way. We always have been.
But Christianity has given us a way out through the suffering and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christianity heralded the possibility of redemption of our fallen nature and conversion to a “more excellent way,” the way of love, which is Christ and His Kingdom. All the progress we’ve made since then is the result of this even more brilliant journey. If we abandon it, as we are doing now, a post-Christian civilization awaits us that is every bit as brutal and violent and unjust as the pre-Christian world of The Northman.
John Daniel Davidson is senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, the New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.