Modernists now decide that "Christian identity" is evil
Father de Sinety attacks “Christian Identity”: The new fashionable peril
After populism, now “Christian identity” has become suspect. In his new essay, Father Benoist de Sinety claims he doesn’t want to “judge,” only to “warn.” But behind the pastoral precautions and calls for dialogue lies an implicit indictment of those who still believe that Christianity cannot survive without memory, without roots, and without civilization.
The book’s starting point is skillful. In “The Cause of Christ: The Gospel Against Christian Identity,” Father Benoist de Sinety begins with a personal confession: his limitations, his vulnerabilities, the social decline of the priest, the disappearance of a sociological Christianity. The tone is human, almost Augustinian. He evokes family lunches, scouting, generations united around a shared Catholic culture. Then the narrative gradually shifts toward a central thesis: the main danger today is not so much the disappearance of Christianity as its potential co-opting for identity politics. This is where the problem begins.
For this opposition between Christ and Christian identity rests on a profound ambiguity. Christianity is universal, certainly. But it is also necessarily historical and incarnate. The Word became flesh, not an abstract concept. Every lived faith produces a civilization, a culture, customs, a collective memory, symbolic forms, a shared imagination. To deny this dimension paradoxically amounts to disembodying Christianity itself. Joseph Ratzinger reminded us in Faith, Truth, Tolerance that a faith without cultural roots always ends up dissolved in modern relativism.
Benedict XVI also denounced this “self-hatred of the West” which leads Europe to view its own Christian heritage as a permanent historical failing. And Saint John Paul II wrote in Memory and Identity: “A nation exists ‘through’ culture and ‘for’ culture.” In other words: there is no transmission without a shared memory.
Yet Father de Sinety’s text operates through successive insinuations. After mentioning young people searching for meaning, he denounces “buccaneers” exploiting religion for political or identity-based ends. Then, immediately, Alfred Rosenberg, “Aryan Christianity,” “German Christians,” Hitler, and Nazism appear. The rhetorical device is transparent. He never explicitly states that contemporary defenders of a Christian identity resemble the excesses of the 1930s. He simply suggests a logical similarity. The conflation is vague enough to be dismissed, but clear enough to produce its moral effect. Yet, historically, this comparison is extremely shocking.
National Socialism was not an exacerbation of historical Christianity but an attempt to substitute a pagan and racial form for Christianity itself. Rosenberg specifically criticized Christianity for its biblical universalism and its Jewish roots. The Nazi project was not an excessive “Christian identity”; it was an undertaking of racial de-Christianization. Equating any Christian civilizational consciousness today with a potentially “pre-fascist” tendency is therefore less a matter of historical analysis than of intellectual intimidation.
The most surprising thing, however, remains what the book does not say.
For where, ultimately, does this “identity awakening” that Benoist de Sinety describes with concern come from? Why are young Catholics today rediscovering the liturgy, the tradition, the rootedness, the Christian roots of France or Europe? Why is this quest for historical continuity reappearing precisely now?
The book almost never asks the question.
At no point does Father Benoist de Sinety, parish priest of Saint-Eubert in Lille, despite being on the front lines of the community divisions, cultural tensions, and migratory upheavals now affecting many French neighborhoods, seriously examine the link between this reaffirmation of identity and the profound transformation of the national landscape under the influence of mass immigration and the visible expansion of an increasingly assertive Islam in the public sphere. At no point does he seem to consider that many Catholics might experience a sense of civilizational fragility or cultural dispossession. At no point does he truly seek to listen to those he implicitly identifies as tempted by an “identity-based” Christianity. This is undoubtedly the central contradiction of the text.
Father de Sinety constantly advocates listening, dialogue, and understanding fears, but this empathy seems to have very precise boundaries. It readily extends to the social margins, but much less so to Catholics attached to the historical and cultural continuity of their civilization.
As is often the case in certain contemporary pastoral approaches, compassion appears universal until the question of identity arises. The paradox is all the more striking given that the Church has never existed without an identity. Even the first Christian communities defined themselves as a distinct people, bearers of a memory, a liturgy, and doctrinal and moral fidelity. Christianity has never been a mere spiritual emotion floating outside of time. Saint John Paul II forcefully reminded us of this: “The future of humanity depends on culture.” And one might add: it also depends on the capacity of peoples to transmit their identity. Christianity has shaped Europe, its law, its anthropology, its relationship to the individual, to human dignity, to freedom of conscience, to the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal. To say this is neither to idolize a race, nor to sacralize a nation, nor to betray the Gospel. It simply consists of recognizing a historical fact.
Finally, it is difficult not to smile at certain contemporary pronouncements against “identity-based Christianity” when they come from the very person who, on December 9, 2017, transformed the Madeleine church into a vast media and sentimental spectacle for Johnny Hallyday’s national funeral. That day, under the watchful eyes of 24-hour news channels, giant screens, cameras from around the world, and the entire Parisian political and artistic elite, Father Benoist de Sinety, then Vicar General of the Diocese of Paris, found, according to the press, “the right words” to celebrate the popular idol. “Enter into the light, Johnny Hallyday, a light, a fire that never goes out,” he declared in a homily that instantly became a viral media event.
A curious conception, nonetheless, of the danger of the spectacularization of religion: when the church becomes the national backdrop for the secular religion of show business and collective emotion, there is no apparent concern about the blurring of lines, no denunciation of cultural “buccaneers” or symbolic exploitation.
Even more surprising, this implicit indictment of “Christian identity” appears at Grasset, a publishing house now part of Vincent Bolloré’s editorial empire, whose crusade against the very idea of Christian civilization or against European cultural roots is not known to be well established. This is undoubtedly a pre-existing policy, predating the publisher’s shift in editorial direction. There seems to be little other explanation… Let’s just say that by constantly suspecting any assertion of identity, a segment of contemporary Catholicism ends up casting suspicion on the very idea of civilizational transmission. And perhaps this is the true issue at stake in Benoist de Sinety’s book: not the defense of Christ against ideologies, which would be legitimate, but the growing difficulty for a part of the Church in publicly acknowledging that Christianity still has the right to be a collective memory, a living culture, and a civilization.
Needless to say Father de Sinety wanted to start his murder of Christendom by killing off the Latin Mass. Stories here
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