Paradise Cancelled: Unveiling the False Promises of a Secularist Utopia

We live in a world gone mad. This madness was foreseen a century ago by the Irish poet William Yeats in The Second Coming: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. We need to understand what happened.

In Paradise Cancelled, Anthony Schratz does precisely that by first analyzing the intellectual and spiritual foundations of the Christian worldview and those of the postmodernist worldview (which he calls “Expressive Individualism”), and then explaining why it is impossible for those two worldviews to coexist peacefully.

The Christian worldview described by Schratz is in all respects consistent with the Magisterium. It proclaims that the universe was created by a transcendent Being infinitely good and powerful, a God who is also a Trinity of persons rooted in a communion of love from which issued the universe and man. It also proclaims that God created man in His image and likeness, calling him to heavenly bliss with Him after a virtuous life on earth.

Man has a material and mortal body, which makes him a part of nature like other animals. But, unlike the latter, he has been created “in the image of God”, which means that he is endowed with an intellect enabling him to grasp universals and immaterial realities, and a free will that allows him to choose freely between good and evil, i.e., to obey or disobey his Creator.

Having chosen to disobey the Creator, Adam and Eve brought sin into the world. This is what is called Original Sin. The Christian worldview is incomprehensible without this doctrine of Original Sin. Although we still have remarkable faculties, we are inclined to use them for evil. Deep down, we know there is something wrong with us. We are born without divine life in the soul because the human life we inherited from our first parents is “disconnected” from God. The result, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously put it, is that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but right through every human heart”.

Since man is unable to remedy this evil with infinite consequences, only a divine intervention could reconcile him with his Creator. Thus, God promised a Savior who would restore him to his original friendship. God appropriated a people who, strengthened by the Law and prophets, were to prepare mankind to receive that Savior. After revealing Himself to men through the prophets, God revealed Himself to them by taking on their human nature, which gave rise to a new Covenant between God and man. This Covenant is represented by the Church, which continues the work of redemption by proclaiming that only Christ can lead us to eternal happiness.

All this implies that the Church has a very specific understanding of human nature. It teaches that our primary end is the imitation of and incorporation into Jesus Christ, that is, human virtue and divine holiness. Christ in effect redefined the meaning of life by showing that it is ordained not to wealth or pleasure but rather to self-giving and sacrifice. Because the human heart cannot be easily reconciled to such teaching, the Church is often misunderstood, feared or persecuted.

The Church teaches that the natural law (or moral law) is inscribed on the heart of man. It tells us what we must do and avoid to achieve our end, which is holiness. The natural law can be compared to a user manual, that is, the set of instructions and information a human being must have to live according to his nature. A thing is not good or bad because of what the natural law says about it. It only tells us what is right and wrong in the light of the great givens of human life. It is constitutive of our nature and accords with our end. Therefore, natural law is absolute, objective, and universal. It does not depend on our feelings or intentions.

In short, the Christian worldview is an anthropology centered on Christ. Anthropology asks: what is the meaning of life? The answer is not an idea, but a person—Jesus Christ! God made flesh!

The competing worldview is what Schratz refers to as “Expressive Individualism”, otherwise known as “wokeism”, critical theory or, more generally, postmodernism. It asserts that the universe is governed by man, not God. Its motto is that of Protagoras, for whom man is the measure of all things. It contradicts that of Plato, for whom God is the measure of all things; hence the impossibility for the two worldviews to coexist peacefully.

The distinguishing feature of this competing worldview is its emphasis on personal autonomy.

More specifically, it does not admit of any higher authority, religious or otherwise, to whom we are accountable. It denies the existence of any sacred order or, indeed, of any permanent truth. We are therefore required to choose our own values and lifestyles. Human nature is not a given we inherit, but a kind of modeling compound–a sophisticated kind of Play-Doh—that each one can manipulate as he pleases.

The most complete expression of personal autonomy is the LGBTQ+ ideology that belies the biological foundations of the male-female couple and the family. It aims to replace them with a purely subjective conception of sexuality and gender designed to abolish the traditional family.

The most eloquent expression of this gnostic-like sense of personal autonomy was perhaps expressed in the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, which defined this autonomy as follows: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”. In short, there is no transcendent meaning to life.

One of the great merits of Cancelled Paradise is the clarity with which it shows the inner contradictions of Expressive Individualism. It highlights the intolerance of those who hold that worldview towards those who do not. Like all past ideologues, whether Marxist, Fascist or Maoist, they consider all their opponents as pathologically irrational, homophobic, transphobic, sexist or racist. All these so-called “deplorables” ought not to be tolerated because they threaten the advent of the secular paradise that self-appointed enlightened Expressive Individualists (also known as progressive liberals) seek to establish. And if these deplorables ever invoke their right to free speech, they are told that there is no such thing as a right to “hate speech” and that to oppose Expressive Individualism is to engage in hate speech.

Another important merit of Paradise Cancelled is that it addresses directly what Christians should do in the present predicament. It asserts that there is no political solution to our existential crisis and that the solution is essentially spiritual. That is what Jacques Maritain wrote in Integral Humanism, when he called for a “New Christendom”, one to be founded on “a new style of sanctity, which one can characterize above all as the sanctity and sanctification of secular life”. That is what the Second Vatican Council reminded us of when it proclaimed that all Catholics—lay people as well as clerics—are called to be saints in the middle of the world. That is what Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI asked for when they proposed a new evangelization. And that is the answer to Yeats’s claim in The Second Coming that the Christian era is terminated.

In short, the Christian worldview can defeat its secularist counterpart only if you and I become saints. In today’s parlance, that means becoming “weird”, as one well-known public figure recently found out. That happens to be also how Christians living in the Roman Empire were viewed. They were witnesses to Christ in a pagan world that in many ways resembled our own.

Paradise Cancelled: Unveiling the False Promises of a Secularist Utopia
by Anthony Schratz, 
True Freedom Press, 2024
Paperback, 151 pages