The only true resistance

From "After the Fall" by Michael Hanby:

...[O]nce real transcendence is eliminated or suppressed, political order itself becomes the transcendental horizon, assuming sovereignty over nature, truth, and morality—over anything that would precede, exceed, and limit it. Politics then becomes “the matter of ultimate concern,” even for those who strive to prevent the ultimacy of politics. The political order becomes that to which all meaningful (i.e. public) arguments are referred....

“There is nothing like a good shock of pain,” writes C.S. Lewis in The Silver Chair, “for dissolving certain kinds of magic.” If there is hope to be found in this painful political year, it is in the fact that the spell which liberal modernity has long cast over the Christian imagination might finally be starting to dissolve.... The fundamental question in the wake of that dissolution...is not whether we can rebuild conservatism or renew the moral foundations of civil society, but whether we can find our way to the fullness of the transcendent faith with all that this implies, and live in the light of a truly eschatological hope. A terrifying hope, perhaps, but it is the only true resistance to the tyranny of a suffocating immanentism and all we really have to give to a political order that wants nothing from us but capitulation. Such a gift requires a less political and more mystical Christianity, and a Church that is not simply less worldly, but properly other-worldly.  [more]

After the Fall | Michael Hanby | First Things