Last week, late-night host Steven Colbert became an unemployed late-night host, recording his final show on CBS after weeks of encomia from the entertainment elite (including Jesuit-at-large Fr. James Martin, who praised Colbert as one of the “best Catholic evangelists” despite the latter’s… unorthodox take on the afterlife).
But a more interesting Colbert story (to me) got snagged by my algorithms a couple of months ago, when it was announced that the Tolkien uber-fan had been tapped to co-author the screenplay for a planned Lord of the Rings sequel film.
The news spurred unease from the Tolkien faithful, already shell-shocked from Hollywood’s abuse of the IP in the Hobbit trilogy and Amazon’s Rings of Power series. But what none of the chatter seemed to mention was this: Tolkien already thought of a sequel idea, but passed.
In a letter to a friend dating to 1964, Tolkien explained an idea he’d entertained but rejected as “sinister and depressing”: a century after the events of The Lord of the Rings, a “secret Satanistic religion” corrupts the kingdom of men, with even the children “playing at being orcs.”
Fans of the Professor’s work will find this theme familiar. For Tolkien, life on earth is a cycle of decline, conflict, and temporary renewal: a “long defeat,” punctuated by moments of redemption, that will not end until Christ’s return. The evils of history will repeat, or at least rhyme, until the final victory.
It’s not hard to look at the news today and find examples of this repeating cycle of evil. I can think of four areas where old enemies, once subdued, are growing in power again—as the men of the West look on with approval, playing orc.
1. Communism. For a century this ideology has been an intractable enemy of Western civilization. Blood-soaked persecutor of Christians; hostile rival to the family; eraser of history, tradition, and the transcendent; hater of everything that is naturally (because it denies natures) human and beautiful. As backward on the theoretical principles of liberty and property as it has been on the practice of delivering material prosperity.
Yet more than a third of young Americans today now declare a favorable view of Marxism, with nearly two-thirds approving softer terms like “Democratic Socialism.” The election of an openly socialist mayor of New York, the world’s most nominally capitalist city, has punctuated a swell of Gen Z support for state ownership, forced equity, radical secularization, and other Marxist concepts.
2. Sexual deviance. Among the revolutionary accomplishments of early Christianity was the replacement of pagan sexuality—in places predatory, infecund, deeply misogynistic, and generally unrestrained—with a new ethic tied to marriage, fidelity, exclusivity, and respect for life. No longer was the body for pleasure alone, because it was a temple of the Spirit. No longer could women be used and abused, because they deserved to be loved as Christ loved the Church.
Fallen human nature being what it is, of course history is full of failures to live to the new Christian standard. But today the standard itself is threatened from within. False prophets on pulpits and political soapboxes proclaim that they support abortion, sodomy, transsexual mutilation, and other atrocities not in opposition to faith in Christ, but because of it.
3. Paganism. Chesterton famously observed that “Paganism was the biggest thing in the world, and Christianity was bigger, and everything since has been comparatively small.” But the pagan gods—demons, as some Church Fathers thought—haven’t gone away. And Westerners, despite being baptized, are increasingly looking back at them with longing.
Some of them are doing this under the guise of New Age spirituality in all its varied forms: worshiping the earth, the self, nebulous concepts of universal energy or higher beings. But some are now skipping homemade spirituality and jumping right back to invoking the old gods by name: Zeus and Athena, Odin and Thor, druidic nature-spirits and Celtic goddesses.
4. Islam. The Church’s great enemy, the followers of Mohammed, have more than once come within a hair of snuffing Christian civilization for good. Yet even as they have escalated their historic antagonism through militant depredations in Africa and Asia—and cultural encroachment mixed with terrorism in Europe and North America—somehow they have garnered a new measure of sympathy and even admiration.
Anti-Christian leftists reflexively side with Muslims (as the enemy of their enemy?), or pity them as oppressed victims. Right-wing influencers speak glowingly of Muslim culture; some even imagine a coming alliance of Catholicism and Islam against Protestants and (natch) the evil Zionists. Within the Church, progressive pastors and activists who gush over interreligious dialogue with Muslims find themselves strange bedfellows with tradition-minded Catholics who admire what they perceive as Islam’s strict moral and theological discipline.
Four old orcish foes, newly rehabilitated. The long defeat continues. May God grant us more redeeming moments before the end.