The Post-Christian Condition
More sentiment, more spectacle, more fillers, and more AI slop
A dear friend recently complained that I use the term “post-Christian” too loosely and that I apply it to everything until it explains nothing. He had been raising theological objections to dispensationalism, and I told him, with perhaps more impatience than the conversation warranted, that I could not bring myself to care, because the entire dispute was post-Christian theology, and I would rather spend my time on other things. He wanted to know what I meant. I found myself unable to explain it quickly, which is usually a sign that something needs to be written down.
“Post-Christian” is not a label I apply to content — to this position or that doctrine. It names a condition that precedes and shapes ideas before they get to announce themselves. The question is not which specific things qualify as post-Christian. The question is what kind of world makes all of these things possible.
I am entirely indifferent to these theological debates. But I am very interested in their form and in the world that produced them.
The post-Christian condition is something far more interesting and more difficult than atheism. It is a dead Christianity, a sealed tomb in which the stone doesn’t roll and nothing but the stench of death fills the air. What follows is an attempt to describe it as I see it.
Tendencies or Phases?
The post-Christian condition should not be strictly seen as a chronological period with a specific start date but as a continuous process of the decomposition of Western Christianity as it historically existed, with identifiable tendencies, none of which has clean boundaries with the others, all of which are recognizable as configurations of the same decomposing substance.
The first of these phases or tendencies, the Exit of the Biblical narrative, is something far more radical than the mere relocation of Christian concepts into secular containers — which is how the standard secularization narrative describes it, and which is itself a post-Christian self-description that understates what actually happened. What started to decompose in the Exit were not merely theological ideas but entire structures of human psychological and spiritual experience — structures that Christianity had organized, disciplined, and given their specific form over centuries, and which, when the totality collapsed, did not disappear but were set loose, seeking new objects, new channels, new organizing boundaries, new forms of satisfaction, and in doing so producing what understood itself as modern or secular new modes of being human in the world, which were in reality various reconfigurations of the decomposed element of the Christian psychic and social structure. My refusal to call these formations modern or secular rather than post-Christian is not a pedantic terminological quibble — it is my refusal to accept the patient's self-description as the diagnosis, which is precisely the error that makes the condition invisible to itself.
Romanticism was the first, and remains the most consequential and important, such a new-old mode of being. It is not a literary movement or an aesthetic preference but the eruption of the Christian structure of longing into the aesthetic domain after its older channels were closed. Christianity had organized the constitutive human desire for communion with something infinite and real — the desire that Augustine described as the restless heart — through specific disciplines, specific sacramental channels, specific eschatological hopes that gave the longing its object and its form.
When those methods were closed, the longing did not end with them. It survived intact, even more radicalized, as a structure of experience, and attached itself to whatever the post-Christian condition had left available: landscape, feeling, the interior life, the beloved, the artwork itself. The Romantic poet reaching toward the sublime in nature is not making an aesthetic choice but doing what the mystic did, with the only materials remaining. And because those materials cannot bear the weight of what is being asked of them — because no landscape, no feeling, no human beloved can really deliver the infinite union the Christian structure of longing was organized to seek — Romanticism is constitutively melancholic, constitutively unsatisfied, forever reaching and never arriving. Romanticism is not a temperamental preference shared by a group of hypersensitive poets, though it was indeed vulgarized into that. It is a Christian longing for the infinite surviving the collapse of the ground that gave it its proper object and its proper discipline, and finding nothing adequate to attach itself to.
Vitalism is the same structure in revolt against itself — where Romanticism had aestheticized the longing, dwelling in the melancholy of its own depth as a substitute for what was lost, Vitalism refused the substitution, demanding life directly rather than its elegiac shadow. It operated at the level of the will rather than the imagination — the post-Christian eruption of the Christian sense that life is animated by a force, into a rational structure that has officially closed the world through which that sense was originally organized. Bergson’s élan vital, Nietzsche’s will to power, Lawrence’s blood-consciousness — these are attempts to recover the sense of life as genuinely alive, as participating in something real or real in itself, within a condition that was increasingly dead. The vitalist reaches for life-giving reality because post-Christianity has an atmosphere of a graveyard.
But the most consequential displacement of all is the elevation of art itself to the status of a privileged port through which man touches the infinite. This is not a natural development of aesthetic theory, and it could not have happened in a non-Christian world, because the very structure of feeling it is displacing is specifically Christian in its form and its intensity.
What the Exit produced, in other words, was not a secular culture that had abandoned the sacred but a culture that had displaced the sacred onto every available finite surface: nature, feeling, the beloved, the artwork, eventually politics, sexuality, and the body itself — and was then compelled to discover, repeatedly and without being able to learn from the discovery, that no finite surface can bear that weight of our longing.
The crucial feature is its confidence: it genuinely believes that the wine can be held without bottles without loss and that the theological ground of these concepts is separable from their content. Liberalism inherits universal human dignity and the primacy of conscience, maintaining both while amputating their metaphysical root, and proceeds in good faith for several generations before the internal contradictions begin to make themselves felt and reveal its arbitrariness.
The second tendency runs through the active attempt not merely to relocate Christianity’s functions but to overcome the entire structure. From Schopenhauer’s diagnosis of the will as suffering, through Nietzsche’s revaluation of values, through the French poststructuralists of the twentieth century, all share the confidence that a genuine overcoming is possible, that new values can be founded beyond the Biblical horizon.
What this tendency persistently fails to notice is that its aspiration remains structured by the grammar it is trying to escape. Nietzsche’s child, who creates new values from innocent play, is the secular myth of prelapsarian innocence. Eden without God, the Second Adam without the Cross. The Ubermensch who has overcome guilt and resentment is a Christian eschatological figure with the theology removed. The overcoming did not, ironically, overcome. It merely performed an overcoming while remaining inside what it was overcoming, which is perhaps part of what the madness at the end was about.
Running through both of these tendencies and intensifying dramatically after 1945 is a distinct yet crucial formation that deserves its own name: the Negative Age. The overcoming of Christianity, taken seriously by actual political actors rather than philosophers, produced the catastrophe it produced — a fact the post-war West could not process as mere political failure. It processed it instead as a metaphysical catastrophe requiring a metaphysical response, which it could only generate in the post-Christian mode, which is to say: by negation. Hitler became the secular anti-Christ and The Holocaust became the unrepeatable atrocity around which all subsequent moral reasoning, organizes itself in reverse — “Never Again” as the negative absolute, the singular evil that grounds the ought by telling you only what you must never be.
Adorno could say, “Hitler has imposed a new categorical imperative on unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen,” or that “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again.” And from this single negative boundary—the Holocaust as absolute evil, man as anti-Imago Hitler—one can build a negative theology around historical catastrophe, and entire moral systems could be constructed: human rights, minority protections, queer rights, the discourse of otherness and victimhood as the only possible source of moral authority. The Jew as paradigmatic victim provides the only stable ground available to myths that rejected all external grounds.
This is the structure of Christian moral theology — the absolute, the unrepeatable event, the obligation that flows from it — operating without Christian ontology. It is functional for perhaps two generations and carried, in the past tense, genuine moral seriousness. But negation is not a telos, and “not Hitler” does not answer the question of what to do, who to be, how to live. As the negative formation slowly exhausts its capacity to orient positive life, its grammar metastasizes — everything becomes Hitler, everyone becomes a Nazi — until the original referent is buried under the weight of its own metaphorical extension.
What we are living through now is the latest phase of the post-Christian condition: the Recoil. This Recoil is not a recoil from the post-Christian condition itself — nobody in the Recoil has actually seen the condition clearly enough, yet, to recoil from it as such. It is a recoil from the discovered dependency. The post-Christian condition slowly realized that the goods it claimed as its own achievements of prosperity, democracy, freedom, rights, human dignity, and the will to defend civilization were never its own production. They were borrowed capital, running on the Biblical substrate, and it had been spending down for two centuries without being able to reproduce it. The Recoil is the moment the account approaches zero, and the response is a desperate attempt at refinancing — reaching back toward Christianity, or what they imagine Christianity to be, to extract from it one more round of civilizational credit, to graft the goods back onto the root they were cut from.
The conservative and evangelical rise of the 1970s was the first tremor — the substrate population that never fully completed the Exit reasserting itself politically. 2000s New Atheism was something more interesting: the Enlightenment loyalist faction of the Recoil, men who understood the social emergency clearly enough to defend Western inheritance against Islamic terrorism, Saddam, and the left, but who refused the Christian option on principle, insisting that Enlightenment reason alone could secure the goods without restoring the root. It was the most intellectually honest, albeit delusional, and most structurally doomed position available — clear-eyed about the threat, constitutionally blind to the dependency. It collapsed quickly and completely, as it had to.
What followed was the full inventory of dissolution: wokeness, mass migration, demographic collapse, speech policing, Islamism, radical feminism, radical gender ideology, anti-science ideology, ecological apocalypticism, open borders, political instability — the fruits of two centuries of spending without replenishment arriving all at once and threatening Western economies, politics, and physical safety. So, now come the calls for reconversion, figures reaching back toward Christianity as a civilizational immune system, a technology for recovering what is visibly failing. We must return to being Christian if we are not to be destroyed, so runs the idea.
These calls are sincere and in some respects perceptive. They are also, hopelessly, still post-Christian, for exactly the same reason that the Exit was post-Christian: both evaluate Christianity by something other than its truth. The Exit said Christianity fails by the standard of Reason. The Recoil says Christianity succeeds by the standard of civilizational utility. Neither is actually alive. Both are still operating within the decomposition, reaching for the bottle after the wine had already spilled.
Thus, for the time being, we are stuck in this condition. What does this condition look like, then?
World Made Kitsch
The tendencies described so far are the intellectual and political history of the decomposition, the story of what happened to Biblical theological ingredients at the level of ideas and power. But the post-Christian condition is not only, and not mainly, lived at that level. Intellectuals are often completely oblivious to how ideas actually work. It is primarily lived in the texture of ordinary daily experience, in what people make and consume and celebrate and mourn, in how they decorate their ceremonies and what they expect from their art, and why they cry at the things they cry at. It is, to a large degree, experienced through what they see, the sequence of images that flow into people’s eyes. And at that level — the level of daily aesthetic and ritual life — the decomposition takes a specific and recognizable form, which is kitsch.
Kitsch is not a problem of taste, but the very cultural form of the post-Christian condition.
I’m sure that for some, to say the defining aesthetic category of modern aesthetics is kitsch is perhaps to make a banal observation. But it is important to emphasize that I do not believe that kitsch is primarily or only a problem of taste. It’s not just merely a descriptor for the cheap or the sentimental in the age of industrial mass production. It is the aesthetic regime the post-Christian condition necessarily produces when the human animal, still structured for transcendence, still reaching for myth, still requiring ceremony that points outside itself, is left with nothing but its own reaching.
Once upon a time, beauty was epistemically downstream of goodness: you perceived the beautiful because there was something really good there to perceive, a genuine contact with reality, traces of an actual encounter with the structure of things. The icon derived its power from its transparency to what it pointed at. Art’s greatness was inseparable from its subordination to something that exceeded it.
Kitsch inverts this relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical. The emotional effect — the feeling of beauty, sublimity, grief, moral inspiration — becomes the primary, if not only, consideration of a work of art. It is no longer evidence of contact with reality. It substitutes for reality. The moral claim is validated not by its correspondence to anything true but by its affective register: does it move you? Does it produce the right feelings? Then it is working correctly. And what is contemporary moral, spiritual, and political discourse if not this structure — the insistence on the primacy of feeling, the translation of every ethical question into a question of emotional effect, the treatment of being moved as itself the criterion of being right?
Kitsch is also the condition of the false myth trying to touch the real myth — and knowing, at some subterranean level, that it is false. This is why historicism, in the sense of the sentimental appeal to past histories, real or invented, and romanticism, in the sense of appeal to the profundity of experience, are two typical characteristics of kitsch. This produces kitsch’s characteristic escalation: more sentiment, more spectacle, more grandeur, because the ground that would produce a genuine connection with reality is absent, and so the feeling must be generated by force. Unreality enforced through art becomes the art form of a deeply neurotic world. This is why so much contemporary life feels simultaneously over-stimulated and hollow. It is masturbatory in the worst possible sense. Regular masturbation at least has the consolation of a fantasy, while much of contemporary culture is masturbation to the idea of masturbation.
I’m talking here about the cross around the neck of the hip-hop star with no relationship to the crucifixion, or the Beatles on a pilgrimage to India, shopping for transcendence with the same seriousness and the same fundamental unseriousness with which one might shop for furniture. Of the entire wellness industry, the epitome of kitsch, which offers the pastoral and contemplative functions of religion stripped of any claim about the actual structure of reality. The false myth does not stop reaching for the real myth because it cannot: the structure of the reaching is built into the human animal, and no Exit, however confident, has succeeded in rebuilding that animal from the ground up.
More than simply bad art or cheap aesthetics, our kitsch is the romantic impulse, the genuine human reach toward the infinite, toward beauty that exceeds the finite, toward myth that touches reality, attempting to satisfy itself through finite and rational means, which is to say, through systematic production of the desired effect. It is an industrialization of romanticism, the longing for transcendence converted into a process of consumption. And because the means are finite and the impulse is not, the only available compensation is escalation — more sentiment, more spectacle, more intensity, more volume. This greater and greater falsification of life produces the characteristic trajectory of never-ending sentimentalization, the endless inflation of feeling that is kitsch’s signature and its confession simultaneously. The confession being: it is not working. It was never going to work. The infinite cannot be delivered through finite means, and the attempt to do so does not satisfy the impulse but aggravates it, producing not fulfillment but a neurotic cycle of stimulation and renewed hunger. Hunger for the life that is being falsified.
This is kitsch as a structure of death-avoidance — not the overcoming of death but escape from the reality of death, which is something entirely different and something far worse. The world of lip fillers, of stretched skin and lifted chins and reconstituted faces, of the aging body desperately performing its own youth — this is not vanity in the old sense. It is kitsch, quite literally, in flesh: the finite and rational means deployed against the infinite demand for vitality, the manufacturing of the effect of life where life is diminishing. It is as much kitsch as it is dead. It escapes nothing. It is the stench of death wearing the appearance of its opposite, which is the post-Christian condition’s most intimate and most literal self-portrait.
Kitsch and Modernism
Now, in the standard account of art history, aesthetic modernism was supposedly a revolt against the flood of kitsch unleashed on the world by late romanticism. I must insist, as I like to do, that the standard account is itself a piece of modernist self-mythology, a variant of kitsch, and it needs to be exposed.
The modernist aesthetic and kitsch are not opposites but the same formation operating at opposite temperatures, with different degrees of self-consciousness, sharing the identical structural problem: the self-referential loop, the gesture that no longer points outside itself, the form that has lost its content and can only make that loss its content. The difference between them is one of register, not of kind. Kitsch fills the form with the feeling of having content — it substitutes the sensation of transcendence for transcendence, the emotion of meaning for meaning, and does so even with enthusiasm.
Modernism makes the empty form itself the subject, turns the loss of content into the only remaining content—kitsch at a lower temperature. But the husk that knows it is a husk and makes its huskness into art is not less of a husk. It is more completely one, because now even the awareness of the condition has been folded back into the condition and aestheticized, foreclosing the one thing that awareness was supposed to make possible — a genuine reckoning with what is lacking and why.
If Kitsch confuses the aesthetic with the ethical by taking the latter for the former, the feeling of depth substitutes for depth itself, modernism makes the opposite error: it takes the ethical for the aesthetic, turning the acknowledgment of meaninglessness into an artistic program, an endless lecture that demands attention and seeks to make itself the object of pleasure rather than any aesthetically pleasing form.
Thus, modernist aesthetics is a highly refined entertainment that lectures you, in the most pedantic and controlled manner possible, that nothing means anything — and expects you to find this enjoyable. Which is kitsch’s essential operation performed with maximum theoretical sophistication.
Thus, in the last analysis, both kitsch and modernism are dead and deadening. It is art whose only object is itself. The former attempts to collapse the infinite into systematized, hence necessarily closed, compositions. The latter orbits itself, making the void its only subject and the orbiting its only method. Both are sealed tombs filled with the stench of death.
Modernist painting then became meta-painting — about the surface, the gesture, the act of painting. Modernist cuisine becomes the deconstructed dish, the performance of its own making. Modernist fiction narrates the impossibility of narration. In each case, the outside referent has been evacuated, and what remains is the lecture about the activity itself, which then becomes both subject and object.
The link between modernism and kitsch becomes most visible in the domain of ritual and ceremony, because it is there that the reversal of the original order is most clear. Pre-modern ritual did not accumulate its authority through mere performance. It accumulated it through participation in something prior to and larger than the performance, something whose reality the ceremony was answerable to.
One would never think this needs to be said, but in the age when the Latin Mass is basically Instagram reels fodder, the Mass was never about its emotional effect, and the liturgy was never about displaying its own beauty. These were genuine transactions, and their power was inseparable from their self-effacement. The moment the Mass becomes an aesthetic experience to be curated and shared, it has already become its own opposite, spectatorship, which is to say, kitsch.
Likewise, modern, secular ceremony is the exact opposite of its original form. The political inauguration, the graduation ritual, the award ceremony, the state funeral, the TPUSA spectacle — all are, often, ceremony about ceremony, a ritual about itself, the collective performance of having shared significance in the absence of anything genuinely shared or genuinely significant. Everyone present is aware, at some level, that what is being performed is performance, which produces the specific quality of embarrassment that underlies all modern solemnity — the awkwardness, the awareness that the gravity is not quite earned, that the form exceeds whatever it is now supposed to be the form of. This is the performative mode as the only available mode, and it is identical to what modernism does in art and what kitsch does in sentiment: the gesture that was once subordinated to a real presence, now circling its own absence.
In letters, too, the crisis of style is inseparable from the crisis of ideas. The era of the great novel and the great poem has disappeared even from the rearview mirror. What the post-Christian condition produces in literature is two equally symptomatic responses. The first is complete sterility — prose that has nothing to say and has stopped pretending otherwise, airless, affectless, technically correct, and spiritually inert.
The second, and by far the more dominant literary mode of our moment, which is flooding our communications thanks to AI, is densely kitsch prose: the artificially avant-garde style deployed to delude the reader into believing they might encounter real art, real ideas, real contact with reality. The syntax is deliberately fractured. Adjectives, poetic images, rhetorical figures, and metaphors are piled one on top of the other without logical or aesthetic necessity, the aim being to stun and intoxicate, to give the impression by means of a facile neglect of syntax that the reader is in the presence of genuine prose. But the aim is also to excite him superstitiously — to suggest that something is promised in the torrent of language that the language never actually delivers. Every paragraph is an attempt to construct a new myth, to find new magic in a world without magic.
Moral Kitsch
Post-Christian morality is perhaps the most consequential kitsch of all. Severed from the Biblical ground that gave moral claims their content and their limits, the Christian moral vocabulary of compassion, inclusion, the preferential option for the victim, etc., survives as pure affective currency, deployed as a mechanism for generating the feeling of moral seriousness without its substance, often for nefarious and exploitative political and economic ends.
What do I mean by post-Christian moral huckstering? I migrated to the United States from the third world in 2012. America gave me the opportunity to build a good life, for which I am genuinely grateful and which I wish many others could have. I am also viscerally opposed to mass migration from the third world, because I believe it will destroy the Western societies I came to and turn them into what I escaped from, which I want neither for my children nor for anyone else’s.
Now, equality. I believe all men are equal. But the keyword is believe, because equality is a religious mystery, or it is nothing — there is no rational, or aesthetic, foundation for it, and anyone who claims otherwise is either confused or lying. We are not all as capable, nor are we all as good-looking. The blonde beasts and nymphs are not just as beautiful as an interbred family from Third World societies, no matter how much European governments pretend otherwise. Rationally, the proposition that all human beings possess equal dignity is an affront to all sense and sensibility. No one actually believes so when they are choosing a spouse. Equality is, historically, a Jewish theological claim universalized through Christianity, and it carries the full weight of that genealogy. I know this, and I hold it anyway, not because reason compels me but because I trust a wisdom older than reason, and because I know that the man who stops believing it — really stops, in his bones — has begun the particular hubris that ends very badly, always, without exception, with death, death, and more death.
This is precisely the structure the post-Christian moral huckster exploits. The Ilhan Omars and Edward Saids are not making arguments and are not believers in the equality they invoke. They are hyenas — using the Christian moral vocabulary of compassion and inclusion as instruments of extraction, leveraging a genuine religious deposit I hold in order to induce a guilt that is recognizably Christian in structure, directing that guilt toward my acquiescence to policies that will dispossess me and my children for their own material gain. It is, in the full sense of the word, a trap. They know I cannot defend myself with reason without both abandoning the mystery and exposing myself to post-Christian accusations of racism, dehumanization of migrants, and secret Nazism. And, at the same time, they know I cannot defend myself with the mystery without conceding to their demands. If I try to call them out on their huckstering, it will become their turn to perform victimhood and outrage at my malevolent, perhaps misogynistic or racist, assault on them. Poor Omar is not being called out for being a conwoman; she is being assaulted for being a black Muslim woman. Said is not being called out as the WASP fraud he was; he is being attacked for being the voice of Palestine. In short, any attempt from me to resist will escalate and produce more sentiment, more spectacle, and more huckstering. More kitsch.
The mechanism is straightforward theft dressed in the language of justice. The huckster does not believe in equality. He believes in the guilt — the only part of the Christian moral structure that survives the removal of its theological ground and which, severed from redemption, can be escalated without limit and weaponized without accountability. This is what the entire Nietzschean revolt was against. The systematic use of equality and compassion as instruments of domination by those who had ceased to believe in anything except the power and guilt, necessarily leads to a violent reaction that brings more kitsch and more death to the world.
“What about the victims?” “What about the excluded?” “What about compassion?” — these are, obviously, not arguments. They are emotional blackmail escalations, kitsch in its most operationally powerful form, because they weaponize the genuine Christian moral feeling toward the suffering while detaching it entirely from the structure of meaning that originally gave that impulse its judgment, its discernment, its capacity to distinguish real compassion from its simulation. The result is a moral discourse that is simultaneously maximally intense and completely groundless — which is kitsch’s precise signature — and which has been one of the primary generators of political violence for over a century, because a morality organized entirely around affective escalation with no ground and no limit produces a permanent prosecution in search of victims to defend and perpetrators to destroy, the Christian guilt structure running without the redemption that was supposed to end it.
(There is a good book that remains to be written about how the religion of Islam, contrary to the German dreams, collapsed and became one big post-Christian moral hustle. The German Romantic fantasy of Islam as a vital, pre-Christian force uncorrupted by slave morality, running from Goethe through Nietzsche through Nazi pseudo-ideas, is itself a perfect instance of the post-Christian condition of death projecting its own longing for vitality onto whatever seems most foreign and therefore most untouched. The irony that Islam then proceeded to become, in its twentieth-century political forms, precisely the post-Christian moral hustle and spectacle it was supposed to save the West from. This same process was also happening, albeit at a different pace and through different means, to Judaism, with the Holocaust becoming the main theater of post-Christian moral kitschism. One reason I’m solidly a partisan of a certain kind of Jewish conservatism is that they are the only ones who understood this and rose to try to stop it. They are allied with some factions of the Recoil, but, on some fundamental level, understand they do not want to be part of the Recoil’s likely doomed desperation. The reason I like them and mostly write just for them is that they are the only ones trying to do something serious about all of this. The rest seem to have nothing to offer and just suck well beyond my ability to tolerate.)
Making Sex Kitsch
Despite what millennials were told to believe, sex has never been merely instinctual for men. It has always carried cultural, ritual, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical weight — always been the site where the body’s most immediate facts intersect with the human animal’s most extravagant demands for meaning. This is not a contingent feature of any particular culture but a universal human one: the same creature that requires myth requires that its sexuality participate in myth, that the erotic be charged with more than biology, that the encounter with another body carry the weight of an encounter with something that exceeds both bodies.
Pornography is one of the defining features of the post-Christian age and perhaps its most consequential assault on human sexuality. It is the lowest grade of eroticism — crude, rude, deformed by repression and morbidity, making no claims beyond what it is, raising no aesthetic or philosophical questions because it does not attempt to answer any. It knows what it is doing and does it without apology. It does not claim to be art, science, or a dignified endeavor. It knows what it is. This makes it, morbid and degrading as it is, one of the more honest products of the post-Christian condition.
Pornokitsch is something else entirely, and something far worse. Think of the Instagram profile of women performing desirability for an audience that is not invited to desire them — sexual in form, anti-erotic in intent, calculated for attention rather than arousal. Or Elon’s AI-generated image of the sexualized female figure with cat ears — sexuality processed so far through the kitsch machine that it has shed the biological referent entirely, desire from which the desiring body has been removed, fleshless eroticism.
Pornokitsch, thus, is a sad apology for the real thing. Its female subjects are never actually appreciated as persons — they are desired, if desire is even the right word, for their physical attractiveness alone, in the most false, morbid, and depersonalized way. In this, it is identical to pornography, only worse; it pretends to be more while delivering less.
This pornokitsch is the negation of both human sexuality and pornography simultaneously, more dishonest than the latter and less erotic than either. It commits such double negation through the aestheticization of pornography — the systematic removal of its crudeness, its realism, its biological honesty — through basically euphemistic techniques. It is both false sexuality and false porn adapted for the age of kitsch.
Pornokitsch is not confined to the visual but has now taken on a thriving literary form, marketed almost exclusively to women, with Fifty Shades of Grey as the paradigm for the billion-dollar genre it spawned. Here, the mechanism of falsification is the literary form itself. The prose, however thin, the narrative, however formulaic, the interiority, however counterfeit, provide the aesthetic alibi that separates the product from pornography proper and allows its consumption under the cover of the respectable activity of reading. The woman who would not watch pornography reads its literary equivalent because the literary wrapper transforms the nature of the pornographic slop consumed. The appearance of literature is doing precisely what the theological symbolism does in the jihadist sex-filled paradise with its virgins — sanctifying and falsifying simultaneously, elevating the pornokitsch into a register that disguises its true nature while intensifying its effect. The only thing that distinguishes it from straightforward pornography is its dishonesty.
The fantasy art of Frank Frazetta displays such formal mastery that it dispels once and for all any notion that kitsch is a matter of cheapness. It is often celebrated as a recovery of pagan vitality, a masculine revolt against the sterile modern world. His male figures have interiority, consequence, and presence as subjects. But they are not participating in a real myth — they are performing a mythic effect through the extreme exaggeration of the biological referent. The sacred is displaced entirely onto the curve of a thigh or the tension of a deltoid: the vitalist reach for life conducted through the systematic production of a visceral, almost masturbatory, impact. The Heroic is reduced to a formal arrangement of anatomy, a beautiful husk that mimics a legendary past while delivering only the temporary stimulation of the gaze. Then it strays from myth-kitsch into pornokitsch: his female figures are almost purely formal elements — compositional devices, aesthetic surfaces placed in the frame to complete a heroic geometry. She has no narrative function, no destination, no interiority — she exists to confirm the hero’s reality by having none of her own.
Here is a contemporary example of the now prevalent online amateur-produced pornokitsch, and a good measure of the distance we have traveled since Frazetta’s 1960’s. It is the turn of the male figure now to be literally faceless, reduced to a muscular shoulder and a pair of hands in service of the female’s ecstasy. This time, it is he who has no identity, no interiority, no destination. His telos is only to complete her experience. The hierarchy is Frazetta’s, inverted — which is precisely what feminism did, and which changes nothing structural whatsoever. The female orgasm has become our last post-Christian utopia, the one remaining site where the stripped bare human animal can touch something that exceeds ordinary and mundane experience. The upward gaze, the arched back, the light organized around her body — this is ecstatic iconography, the mystic in contact with the real, evacuated of every referent beyond the sensation itself. Eroticist mysticism is devotional. The object of devotion is the nerve ending of the female genitalia.
The male viewer is seeing her transcendence, and his role in the image, and by extension, his role in the fantasy, is to be the instrument through which her orgasmic transcendence is achieved, and then to witness it. This is the specific operation contemporary pornokitsch performs on male desire in its current phase: it offers the male viewer transcendence-by-proxy, transcendence experienced through the woman whose transcendence he has enabled.
The question that presses itself is whether this female orgasmic mysticism as a cultural dominant is one of the engines of the current wave of autogynephilia, the male who no longer desires the woman but desires to be the woman in the moment of her orgasm, who is aroused over the idea of occupying the female erotic postion, and which is a real engine behind the adult trans movement and male homosexuality. The faceless shoulder is already halfway there.
The clothing demands an account of its own. The fabric is vaguely antique, not specifically Indian, not specifically Greco-Roman, not specifically anything, but resonant with the aura of all of them simultaneously. It basically seeks an overall effect of the ancient. This hyper-kitsch gesture at rootedness, continuity, ritual, etc., seeks to complete the counterfeit mysticism by lending it the appearance of depth, suggesting that this ecstasy is not a momentary neurological event but the kind of event that has always been recognized as sacred by civilizations wiser than our own. It is a sad apology for masturbation. Strip the costume away, and you have an explicit image. Leave it, and you have a devotional painting. The difference is entirely atmospheric, which means it is entirely false — and the falseness is the condition of the devotion.
The jihadist promise of paradise stocked with seventy-two virgins is a uniquely lethal instance of globalized pornokitsch, smuggled and falsified this time through appeal to premodern religious and theological symbolism, which radicalizes its inherent morbidity into operational lethality through a martyrological machinery that requires actual death as the admission price to the fleshly reward. Here, pornokitsch, more than merely being a degrading and debasing force for man, becomes an engine of his criminality and murder. The escalation logic produces body counts, because the only remaining mechanism for delivering the transcendence the structure promises is the literal destruction of the body that was promised the surfaces.
Islamic pornokitsch operates inside an ostensibly sacred register while enacting the pornokitsch logic at maximal intensity. The jihadist’s virgin is the Frazetta female taken to her ultimate conclusion: pure formal surface, no interiority, no narrative function, no personhood — existing entirely as the confirmation of the martyr's heroic reality by having none of her own. She is the reward that proves his sacrifice was real, the aesthetic element that completes the heroic geometry of his martyrdom. The quantity itself is kitsch's characteristic escalation: more virgins, more sentiment, more spectacle, and more stimulation. Because the finite cannot deliver what the infinite demands, and the only available compensation is arithmetic. The martyr who cannot find the real transcendence his longing requires is offered a multiplication of surfaces instead. It is the pornokitsch solution to the problem of eternity: when you cannot give a man God, give him a payload of seventy-two approximations of the thing he was actually reaching for.
The Biblical world did not merely constrain sexuality morally but integrated the erotic into a structure of meaning that gave it weight, consequence, and a dignity inseparable from its subordination to something that exceeded it. It was the sacramental framework that made love a real participation with metaphysical content, that gave sex its gravity by placing it within a story larger than the two bodies involved. The decomposition of that framework did not liberate sexuality. It left it weightless, which is not freedom but a specific kind of impoverishment: the experience that feels like it should mean something enormous and finds nothing adequate to mean, the reach toward the infinite through the most immediate finite experience available, compensated — as always, as everywhere in the post-Christian condition — by kitsch.
The Third World’s Kitsch Machine
What globalization did to our post-Christian condition is not simply to spread it geographically, but made visible what the slow and creeping development of the condition within Western culture had partially concealed.
When the Western wedding ceremony travels to Egypt or Nigeria or Japan — the white dress, the cake, the procession, the vows mostly as an aesthetic script — it arrives stripped of the sacramental theology that originally organized it, the understanding of covenant, the specific inheritance of northern European courtship customs, the whole sediment of meaning that had accumulated over centuries and that even in its post-Christian Western form still retained some ghostly residue of its origins. What remains is the ceremony performing itself: pure ritual form detached from ritual content, the gesture with no outside referent. The transplantation made visible the separation that in the West was never quite complete, never quite clear, because the residue was still there.
My favorite is, without doubt, the military parade because it is both hilarious and unambiguous. The Western military parade has its own complicated genealogy. It is part Roman triumph, part medieval chivalry and feudal knighthood, part Napoleonic civic religion, and part nationalist liturgy, but it was always organized around some positive content, some claim about the sacred collective, whatever the particular ideology happened to be investing with ultimate significance.
When the parade travels and becomes the template for every postcolonial state’s independence day, every third-world regime’s self-display, it becomes pure theatre of sovereignty, a ceremony certifying itself, the performance of having a state rather than the expression of a state that has any genuine purpose. North Korea is the reductio ad absurdum of this logic, where the parade has become so purely self-referential that its very excess exposes the emptiness it is trying to fill — more missiles, more synchronized marching, more gigantic portraits, precisely because the ritual has no outside referent left to gesture toward and so can only intensify itself endlessly, which is, again, structurally identical to kitsch’s characteristic escalation.
Roger Scruton once observed that before the twentieth century, no African art was kitsch, and that after it, African art became nothing but kitsch. This remark, on my authority, applies to nearly all non-Western cultures (I suspect Japan and Israel have some exceptions). Pre-colonial African art was not kitsch for the same reason pre-modern European art was not kitsch: it was not trying to perform art. The modern aesthetic question of whether this is beautiful as an autonomous object to be contemplated did not organize the activity.
This is precisely why, when Western modernists — Picasso most famously — encountered African art, they experienced it as a revelation, as something with a power that their own art had lost. But what they then did with that encounter is itself the perfect illustration of the post-Christian condition’s inability to receive what it recognizes: they aestheticized it, abstracted the formal qualities, borrowed the visual elements entirely detached from its ritual ground, and produced Cubism — which is to say they turned a living art into raw material for more Western self-referential art-about-art, again. Life made death.
(The kitschification of non-Western art completes itself through a market mechanism: the Western tourist seeking to purchase an African mask “like the one that inspired Picasso” creates a demand that transforms the local craftsman from a maker of worship objects into a producer of replicas of his own tradition’s aestheticized Western reflection. The artifact now imitates the imitation.)
The globalization of Western post-Christian aesthetics then completed the circuit by turning all world art into post-Christian husk, so that the African artist trained in the Western academy now produces work that is self-consciously African, that performs its own Africanness, that displays cultural identity as aesthetic content — kitsch in the strictest structural sense, the ceremony that no longer participates in anything outside itself.
But the circuit does not simply close there. The Third World, having been kitschified, did not become a passive recipient of the condition. It became its most productive engine and the worst offender, kitsch at levels never dreamt of before. What arrives at the periphery gets processed through a world that has lost its own forms without having developed any of the post-Christian self-consciousness that in the West at least produced, however inadequately, a disgust of kitsch.
In the Third World, the output has the structure of a copy of a copy — not the Western husk performing its own huskness, but the husk of the husk, performing its own performance of the performance, in complete and earnest sincerity. And this output now flows back. The internet has made its productivity available to the whole world, and what was once a Third World degradation has become a global flood of aesthetic urban primitivity: the vape shop neon-lit baroque style.
AI tools only made this in superabundance: within months of becoming widely available, they were producing goykitsch at mass-scale — the globalized post-Christian aesthetic slop running on empty at machine speed, the Pakistani, Indian, and Arab content mills flooding every platform with compositions that have the surface grammar of something and the interior structure of pure nothing.
A Crisis of Modernity?
Someone will inevitably ask: is this not simply the crisis of modernity, the disenchantment of the secular world, dressed in grander and more theological language?
Modernity is just a word — one of the words the post-Christian condition uses to narrate itself, a kind of literature of self-mythology generated by the decomposed ingredients of Christianity attempting to give itself a coherent collective identity. The literature of “modernity,” from Hegel to Weber to the Frankfurt School, is itself a document of the condition it claims to describe: the husk generating a name for its own huskness, the sealed tomb writing its own epitaph, the self-referential literature that has made its own self-commentary into its primary and only activity.
Secularism is the same delusion from a different angle — it treats the absence of religion as neutral ground, as a zero-degree condition from which any societies might depart, rather than as the specific and historically particular name the Exit gave itself. These are the condition’s preferred vocabulary for its own self-narration.
Postmodernism as the terminal point, the zombie afterlife, of the failed Overcoming — the moment the Overcoming finally sees its own hopelessness and turns into its own parody. Nietzsche wanted to overcome through creation, through the yes-saying child, through new values founded beyond resentment. What actually survived of him was only the genealogical method — the hermeneutics of suspicion, the unmasking, the deconstruction of every claim to positive content — because even his life-affirming vitalism, which tried to escape post-Christian deadness by reaching back to pre-Christian paganism, can not help but depend on some residual Christian positivity, while the critical demolition required nothing but the will to demolish, which the post-Christian condition has in unlimited supply. Pure deconstruction without the promise of reconstruction, fragmentation without the Nietzschean confidence that something new can be built from the fragments.
It is the Overcoming admitting, without quite saying so, that the overcoming failed — that there is no innocent child, no Overman, no new values, no beyond, only the endless unmasking of every pretension to the beyond.
Postmodernism, then, is not a separate cultural phenomenon but the next literary genre in the same sequence. If modernity is the self-mythology the condition generates to narrate itself, postmodernism is the deconstruction of that self-mythology, which sounds like an escape but is not. The deconstruction of a husk is still a husk, albeit in verb form.
Postmodernism, thus, is the literary activity that deconstructs the literary genre of modernity, which means it is still inside the same literature, still producing the same self-referential commentary, just at one remove further. Modernity wrote the self-mythology. Postmodernism wrote the critique of the self-mythology. Both are the condition of self-narration narrating itself. It generates only more text, more commentary, more self-referential literature, the critique of the self-mythology becoming itself another layer of self-mythology
But another point — the one that shows why the reconception might actually necessary — is this: the Exit from Christianity was conducted entirely using Christianity’s own internal weapons. The Bible was discarded as untruthful, using the very intensity of commitment to textual truth and the letter of scripture that Christianity itself had cultivated to an unprecedented degree. The Church was discarded as oppressive, using the Christian prophetic tradition’s own denunciation of institutional power — the same tradition that runs from Amos through the radical Reformation. The liberation of man from religious authority was argued using Christian anthropology: the dignity of the person, the freedom of conscience, the individual’s unmediated relationship to truth, all turned against the institution that had developed them. The critique of glory as concealing injustice deployed the full moral force of the Sermon on the Mount against the Christian hierarchy that preached it. This was not a departure from Christianity. It was Christianity’s own internal moral logic used to consume its external forms — a self-digestion conducted entirely from within, using the tradition’s most powerful instruments against its most visible structures. There is no outside position because the method of exiting is Christian, the language of exiting is Christian, and the moral authority claimed to exit is Christian.
This is also why the aesthetic is not merely one domain among others in which the condition manifests, but the most instructive one — because it is literally visible, because the structure shows its face there with a nakedness unavailable elsewhere.
The political poster of Saddam Hussein presenting him as a savior to the masses is not kitsch in the thin sense of cheap sentiment. It is post-Christian in its compositional elements, in its implicit theological structure, and in its social and political function simultaneously — the messianic figure, the upward gaze, the crowd oriented toward a source of redemptive power, the mediation between community and the transcendent promise on which its salvation depends. These are the operative grammar of political imagination in a world thoroughly shaped by Christian soteriology, functioning at full theological charge in a context where no one can trace the genealogy.
Perhaps one of the most consequential products of post-Christian globalization, and one I have been writing about for years, is modern Islamic movements and politics — not because they represent, as they delusionaly claim, an outside to the post-Christian condition, an authentic resistance or a genuine alternative civilization, but because they are among its most complete expressions, and the completeness is visible in three distinct but simultaneous moves.
The first move is the transformation of classical Islamic jurisprudential categories — sharia, ummah, jihad — from legal concepts embedded in a living tradition into totalizing, modern political programs. Sharia, for instance, was never a blueprint for constructing a utopian social order from the ground up through revolutionary action; that ambition belongs entirely to the post-Christian revolutionary imagination, to the same eschatological hunger that produced Jacobinism, Marxism, and every other modern political movement organized around the promise of total historical resolution.
The second move is the filling of these now-emptied Islamic surface symbols with the decomposed post-Christian elements, themselves disintegrated, radicalized, and hollowed. These are the elements the revolutionary tradition has been circulating globally since the nineteenth century — the mass mobilization of the historically oppressed, salvific collective violence, the restoration of meaning to a humiliated people through the drama of liberation, the organization of grievance into an eschatological narrative.
The third move is the aesthetic in which the compositional grammar of Christian martyrology, the sacrificial figure radiating redemptive power, the crowd organized around him as around a source of salvation, operates at full iconographic charge in a context where no one involved can trace the genealogy, producing hybrid post-Christian post-Muslim kitsch in its most structurally complete form: the aestheticization of sacrificial death as the only remaining mechanism for generating meaning, escalating in intensity precisely because, and as we explained earlier, intensity is the only compensation the post-Christian condition knows how to offer: more sentiment, more spectacle, more fillers, more AI slop, more death. The Islamists, just like the groypers, are so close to the truth yet so far. The “goyslop” they resent so much is their very own post-Christianity.
In this example of Palestinian kitsch, the same compositional structure operates six centuries apart and across a civilizational boundary, with no conscious transmission required, because the post-Christian grammar has become the invisible syntax of Muslim political, moral, and religious imagination. The heroic figure occupies the dominant vertical axis, elevated above the defeated enemy, weapon raised at the moment of climactic violence. The enemy is beneath, prostrate, the Star of David on the helmet performing precisely the function the dragon’s scales perform in Raphael: cosmic marking, the sign that this is not merely a military enemy but an ontological one, the embodiment of evil whose destruction is liberation. The sacred site anchors the background in both: in Raphael, the distant chapel; in the poster, the Dome of the Rock, the holy geography that authorizes the violence by placing it within a redemptive narrative larger than the combatants. What the Palestinian image cannot know about itself, what makes it kitsch rather than mere propaganda in the older, more honest sense, is that it is a post-Christian image; Christian in structure, revolutionary and atheistic in its content. A post-Christian image in Arabic, in front of an Islamic holy site, convinced that it is expressing Islamic resistance.
There is a further transformation, beyond the translation from a Christian to a Muslim context, that is equally significant and that also sharply marks the boundary between Raphael's non-kitsch nature and the murderously kitsch nature of the modern poster. In Raphael, Saint George is an allegory, and the dragon is interior; the cosmic enemy is a figure for the struggle within the soul, the spiritual combat that Christian tradition, from the desert fathers through the medieval mystics and Erasmus’s Christian Militant, always understood as the primary theater of war. The knight slaying the dragon is the Christian slaying the sin within himself. This is why the composition is still, ceremonial, almost contemplative: the violence is spiritual discipline rendered as a symbolic image. The post-Christian condition performs a catastrophic externalization of this interior drama. When the theological ground collapses, and the interior combat loses its object, the dragon gets projected outward onto an actual human group, the cosmic enemy becomes a political enemy, and spiritual warfare becomes revolutionary violence. The Palestinian poster, thus, is not merely Christian iconography applied to Jews. It is post-Christian in the sense of its destruction of man’s spiritual and internal life, when his interiority is evacuated, and the drama is relocated from the soul to the street.
This is what it means to say that the condition is post-Christian rather than merely secular or modern: not that Christianity is everywhere consciously present, but that its decomposed dead elements have become the invisible syntax of collective life — in politics, in aesthetics, in the structure of moral discourse, in the imagination of enemies and saviors alike — and that this syntax cannot be understood without tracing it back to the specific theological event that set it loose.
Some readers may object that I’m making things so total that nothing can escape my post-Christian kitsch. Guilty as charged! This is so much the case that any attempt to produce anti-kitsch or be “not post-Christian” today usually results in the most extreme form of kitsch, like the “trad-wife” aesthetics or “Roman Statue” Twitter accounts. These are self-conscious performances of things that do not exist and cannot be performed, which makes them perfectly post-Christian.
When one is performing the identity of someone who would never have needed to perform that identity, the performance’s content is its own impossibility. This makes it not a recovery of anything but a particularly pure instance of the false myth reaching for the real myth while knowing it cannot touch it. The self-consciousness is always the giveaway. Real identity is not self-conscious about itself for the same reason the mother tongue is not self-conscious about being a language.
Flee from death and choose life! Train your nostrils. Learn to smell. The stench of death is everywhere. Most have simply grown accustomed to it.
Final note: the main thing this essay is missing is sections on literary and political kitsch. Modern political life has become one of the largest sources of kitsch. But for the sake of length, I decided to leave it to the competent reader to develop their own understanding of political kitsch as an application of the essay’s way of seeing.
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Hussein, I’ll never not be stunned by the depths of your knowledge, thank you for choosing this career path—the world needs it!
Reading you brings many joys, but also its share of problems. Take your writing on post-Christianity — it gets me thinking, I dig deeper, do more research, think some more, and slowly my worldview shifts. Meanwhile, my friends are left behind, because they haven’t done the work. Talking to them starts to feel like trying to explain Everettian quantum mechanics to someone whose only reference point is Deepak Chopra.
The more I read you, the fewer real conversations I suspect I’ll have with the people around me. That’s not your fault. You simply reveal just how complex a beast this world truly is.