June-July 2022
Lord of the World
Reflections on Dystopian Literature
In the ages of faith a very inadequate grasp of religion would pass muster; in these searching days none but the humble and the pure could stand the test for long, unless indeed they were protected by a miracle of ignorance. The alliance of Psychology and Materialism did indeed seem, looked at from one angle, to account for everything; it needed a robust supernatural perception to understand their practical inadequacy. - Lord of the World (by FR. ROBERT HUGH BENSON, 1907) |
For whatever reason, I have been fascinated by the dystopic for as long as I can remember. Certainly, that says something about me. But it also says something about our age because dystopic fiction has become a very popular genre. Whether by movie (e.g., 28 Days Later, World War Z, Planet of the Apes, The Terminator, The Matrix, Gattaca or The Postman (yes, I like that one too), television series (e.g., The Walking Dead or The 100) or novels (e.g., We, Canticles for Liebowitz, 1984 or Brave New World), apocalyptic fiction has always riveted me.
Dystopian Themes
The popularity of the genre must be driven by an existential pessimism regarding the uncontrollable pace of change that marks the modern world. Revolutionary and systematising political ideologies that have marked the twentieth century undoubtedly play a substantial part in the prevailing hopelessness of our era. Developments such as nuclear and biological weapons, environmental calamities, computers and artificial intelligence, and a greater global interconnectedness all fuel a distinct and uniquely modern fear of what comes next. Thus, exponential technological growth and the arrival of totalitarianism are both real and colourful in our imagination. For good reason, we fear that we cannot control the future because all of these things now appear to have a life of their own. What’s more, in a 24/7 infotainment environment heighted by social media, all of these fears are magnified and shared with an unimaginable speed. In one way or another, there is a looming sense that we are on borrowed time: we are close to the midnight on the apocalyptic clock, and it could strike at any moment.
There is something also deeply misanthropic about dystopia. That man, the Prometheus that he is, is finally going to get his comeuppance for his warmongering, environmental disregard, cravenness and stupidity. All dystopias have a twinge of justice as applied to man. He is getting, or so it seems, what he deserves for stealing fire from the gods.
There is always a moral and spiritual component to dystopic stories: difficult moral choices and the harrowing confrontation with death and dehumanisation on an enormous scale. Most are reduced to two types of motifs: post-nuclear worlds and post-pandemic worlds. There is something, at least in some of us, that is fascinated by imagining a world in which we are the survivors of something terrible. What would we do, what would the world look like, or how would we survive? Perhaps dystopic work reflects a human need for the heroic in an age that does all that it can to eviscerate the ideal of the hero.
There are also dystopic works that are decidedly on the totalitarian side of the genre: the imagining a future in which inhabitants are enduring a world in which their individuality and autonomy have been totally and definitively stripped. Perhaps it is because we value our sense of personal freedom as a type of god today, at least in the post-Christian West, that these dystopias, which are essentially politico-horror stories, are popular.
Great dystopic storytelling has certain characteristics. As a future-oriented type of fiction, it must preserve some form of link between who we are now and what we become in the dystopic landscape. If the jump between now and the future is too great, it doesn’t work. True, the world constructed may be fantastic and imaginative, but we have to be able to imagine ourselves getting from here to there with our psyche and emotions intact.
Second, there must be an overarching moral to the dystopia – a “meta-story” – that justifies the dystopia itself. In virtually every type, man is being punished but the reason for his punishment varies. Whatever the evil man is being punished for in the new dystopian world, it often glues the story together; explaining why the characters are what they are. This is always the special teaching aspect of dystopia. If the “sin” of man is environmental degradation, the world and future men are punished by environmental disaster. If the “sin” is man’s senseless proclivity to make war, the world and future men are punished by nuclear war. If the “sin” is man’s refusal to protect freedom from those who would take it from us, the world and future men are punished by an often imaginable totalitarian regime that reduces men to meaningless cogs or numbers.
Third, all dystopias involve some aspect of flashback as if they teach, impliedly, that we live today in times that are favoured and which will soon be taken away. The world as it was (or, as it is now) is always more than merely an important backdrop. Typically, it is the normative and referential “home” for the characters who are enduring something terrible in the future. Every dystopia then has another implied moral that is part and parcel of its DNA – appreciate and protect your world today.
Dystopias are often incredibly imaginative. It is the creation of a vivid world that is different in every conceivable way except that we men are present within it. In that sense, dystopias are related to science fiction but with a greater moral component.
While “science” is often present in dystopic fiction (e.g., computers, nuclear weapons, or artificial intelligence), the difference between “science fiction” and “dystopic fiction” is one of emphasis. The former is concerned about new worlds or new creatures – about space, aliens or time – in a future which isn’t necessarily bleaker or more disciplined. The latter may have some of those aspects but the nub of every dystopic story is a future world undone by something, and the people who live within that new and catastrophic world.
Sometimes the genres collide but what marks dystopia is its necessary darkness and pessimism, as well as its focus on this world transformed and destroyed. But for a dystopia to be a dystopia as we now understand, it must relate not merely to speculations of the future, it must be a drama that (i) takes place in the future, (ii) which is worse, by whatever measure, than the world we live in today and vividly described, and (iii) involves characters attempting to survive and make sense of that future, degraded world.
Dystopia and Religion
What is interesting about the genre, which has exploded in recent years, is that it is new. For whatever reason, men did not write such future-oriented tragedies before the beginning of the twentieth century. There is significance in that fact. It says something deep and profound about our age.
That dystopia as a genre is very new and growing is even more significant when you consider that nations have confronted dystopic realities since human societies began: plague, pestilence, annihilation, and war are common features of world history that are normative and cross-cultural. Yet, man never took it upon himself to imagine, for example, a group of survivors in a post-Bubonic plague world; or even a group of outlaw Christians surviving in a post-Christian age in which, for example, Islam was imagined to have prevailed over the West. How many distinct nations have stared at the abyss of extermination – and later seen it come to pass – and yet its writers and wise men never bothered to fantasise about the world on the other side? For whatever reason, we today are fixated on those themes in a way that differentiates us from all past generations.
Obviously, man’s preoccupation with faith – and his subsequent apostasy in the West – explains a lot about the dearth of dystopic themes in the past. Indeed, dystopia as a genre came into being at almost the same time that faith, at least among the intellectual classes, was lost. That speaks to the fear felt by thinking men about a world without faith. While we are in historically uncharted territory, it seems obvious enough that when a society removes God from the public square, as we have in the West, it removes Him privately from the hearts of those men who live in that society.
To live in an atheistic age then is to live in an age in which man is naked, as he was in the Garden after the Fall. For such men there is no recourse to God – not even in the sense of an efficacy in prayer and supplication. No, our age is marked by an intense and grinding loneliness; an existential meaninglessness and foreboding. After all, what are men to do in an atheistic world other than try to stave off death until they rot into nothingness.
Thus, dystopia is intimately related to man’s audacious step into the void of atheism. And when he is left exposed and vulnerable by his own defiant exercise of the will, his inner being, his soul, like a canary in the coal mine of eternity, finds a voice in the dread and horror of his choice. And so dystopia is the literary working out of the folly that is man’s emancipation from God. Even modern man, the most insolent of creatures, appears to know that he will destroy everything if left to his own devices.
Simply put, religion and dystopia do not mix: unless the villains of new dystopic worlds create new religions (based upon the old religious themes) that oppress men with superstition. Even decidedly “secular” dystopic stories cannot avoid types and motifs of faith. They are everywhere if you look for them, since man is not ingenious enough to imagine good and interesting literature without an appeal to moral absolutes. And moral absolutes, in one way or another, speak to a power that transcends man’s autonomy.
Dystopia, as a new type of fiction, must nonetheless trade on these moral realities in order for men to find solace and meaning in them. God is always lurking in dystopic fiction. He is always there even if the authors wish to excise Him from the plot. The “meta-meta story” in dystopia is always man’s inability to live in harmony with God and his neighbour and to live as a faithful steward of creation. The themes of revelation are also there: something that transcends natural religion. For example, one cannot help but see many Christian parallels and themes in The Matrix, such as messianism, resurrection and the nature of the demonic (in the computers themselves).
Setting aside inevitable religious or conventional moral themes, the genre is generally hostile, at least overtly, to the expression of traditional religion. But that superficial hostility is useless in obscuring the real dilemma of man. And the very genre itself bespeaks the horror and powerlessness of the institutionalised atheism of our age.
Dystopian Founders
Many have traced dystopia – identifying this or that author as the first to “invent” dystopia as a genre. While some authors in the latter part of the nineteenth century touched on dystopic aspects, like H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, the first truly dystopic novels were The Iron Heel published by Jack London (more famously the author of Call of the Wild) and Father Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World – both published around 1907.
Given their simultaneous publications, it is clear that neither London nor Benson relied upon the other in inventing the genre, as it were. In which case both deserve the credit for devising it. This raises a common and controversial problem in dystopic literature: copying of ideas of an earlier author. It is not clear, for instance, whether George Orwell's 1984 was influenced by Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin's earlier dystopic novel, We. Yet we might look differently at Orwell and 1984, at least in terms of its genius and imagination, if we saw it as a plagiarism of an earlier Russian work.
While very different books with different morals, the reality is that Benson’s work is closer to “traditional” dystopia than Jack London’s book, involving as it does more of the required elements of dystopia. In any event, it is enough to say that both men are entitled to claim not merely the imagination necessary to invent a new literary genre but also the invention of a genre that itself is predicated upon an incredibly imaginative mind. In that sense, both were doubly imaginative and indeed prophetic of the horrors that the twentieth century and beyond would soon usher in.
Perhaps because many today, especially most of the literary world and the people who like dystopic fiction, imagine a world in which Christianity is destroyed as utopic – and not dystopic – Benson consistently is denied credit for having possessed the imagination to create it. If you “google” the history of dystopias, rarely, if ever, is Benson mentioned. For a generation of dystopia-lovers, it must be difficult to attribute the creation of their favourite genre to a Catholic convert and priest who wrote a great and deeply spiritual dystopic novel that describes a world in which the Antichrist establishes a one-world government and destroys the Catholic Church. Similarly, the legions of mostly secular fans who love the Lord of the Rings series are just as embarrassed and chagrined when they learn, if they ever do, that J.R.R. Tolkien, the super-imaginative author of that series, was a devout Catholic convert. Some things, at least for atheists, will never compute.
For myself, it is a source of pride that even a seeming secular genre that is wildly popular today was created by a Catholic priest and convert. We give credit where credit is due and Fr. Robert Hugh Benson deserves his. Not only was he a man of great and sensitive faith, but he is also the father of the most dominant literary genre today. Moreover, his first dystopia depicted Holy Mother Church as the future victim, the villains as non-believers, and the “sin” being punished as apostasy itself.
Lord of the World
As already noted, most dystopias are set in the distant future; often hundreds of years from when they were conceived. As such, there is an element of futurism in all dystopic works. What that means is that the author must apply all of his imaginative skills to conceive of what the future world will be like. In totalitarian dystopias in which there isn’t a natural or man-made disaster, technologies are expected to continue to advance, and the author’s challenge is to imagine things and processes not yet known. In disaster dystopias, man in the future is often returned to a more primitive state of technology or knowledge. Either way, man is somewhat different than he is today.
What is interesting about Fr. Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World is that even though it is set one-hundred years out from when Benson wrote it, it is now, for us anyway, a commentary on the world in which we live. In other words, Lord of the World is the rare dystopia in which we have lived past the date in which dystopia was to have taken place.
As a totalitarian dystopia, Benson’s work is an imagined future society of ever-increasing technological feats, and Benson does well in part to conceive of things that were to come: passenger air travel, enhanced and instant communication, weapons of mass destruction and even the widespread use of euthanasia.
But Benson’s book is not ultimately one about depictions of the future for the sake of imagination of the future. While clever, Benson never overwhelms us with the advanced nature of his future world. Indeed, there is an odd continuity between his world then existing and the subsequent world he created. What we can say about Benson is that his work is a spiritual and political work that just happens to leverage the dystopia type that he was inventing. More than that, it is an extremely well written novel.
I seldom recall prose so eloquent and captivating as Lord of the World. I have written elsewhere about the incredible writer we lost when Benson died in his early forties at the height of his literary powers. Alone, the craftsmanship and skill of the author makes Lord of the World a pleasing book to read.
The Church, globalisation, religion
Lord of the World is a century or so beyond Benson’s own time: the early 2000s. As a book that is centred on the rise of the Antichrist, it is preoccupied with religious themes and the forces arrayed against faith. The Church in Benson’s making is fascinating for how different it is from our own.
Obviously, in Benson’s timeline, there was no Second Vatican Council, there was no aggiornamento. Indeed, Benson’s Church in the early 2000s had doubled- and tripled-down on proclaiming the hard truths to which Benson was accustomed. Perhaps, writing in the midst of Saint Pius X’s pontificate, Benson could not imagine that the leadership of the Church would become so wobbly and infused with the very worldly spirit that Benson later attributes to its eventual destroyers. It is no small irony that the villains in Lord of the World sound very similar – perhaps even less bad – than the “humanitarian” bishops and cardinals we now call our own.
If anything, we are, in a distinct sense, living out a more dystopic time because at least the Catholics in Benson’s imagination had some cardinals and Popes who loved them and preached without fear. We live with men in robes but no faith. It may have been too much to imagine our liturgy, our doctrine and our religion corrupted by faithless fathers; to picture a fifth column within the Church gaining power and attempting to destroy her from within. The hell that is ours, therefore, is actually worse than the imagined hell in Benson’s mind.
Unlike the humanitarian corruption of the Church in the wake of Vatican II, a feature of Benson’s future Church is its continued historic antagonism towards democracy. How very far from the modern embrace of the fullness of secular humanism and democratic “values” in the guise of Americanism. Today, even “conservative” bishops are likely to pose the mild request that we receive tolerance in the guise of “religious liberty.” The idea that civil society ought to reflect the Truth – that Christ should reign in our countries as much as He reigns in our hearts – is a bridge too far for virtually every churchman.
But in Benson’s imagination, our Church called out democracy for the vapidity that it is. It continued to cast its lot with the uncrowned monarchies of Europe and the nobles that were bound up with them. In Benson’s world, modernity existed side-by-side with an anachronistic zone of resistance to everything that modernity promised. In his world, there was still a sovereign place to live as an unapologetic Catholic, as that term had been understood throughout Christian history. Today, in the real world, that is true nowhere. The best we can get is a relative lack of molestation. That’s it. Indeed, one reads Lord of the World and is amazed to imagine that something like real, contemporary Catholic men could exist. If only.
In Benson’s world, there is a type of globalising, but it is different from ours. In some ways, our globalists have been more successful in destroying the notion of national sovereignty, yet less successful in achieving ostensible political unity. While there is something like a quasi-European Union in Benson’s world, it seemed to have less power than today’s EU.
In Lord of the World, the earth is essentially divided into three zones of influence: The East, Europe and the Americas – and these zones were often on the brink of war. Again, our elites have achieved a more lasting global peace between major powers (thanks, in part, to nuclear deterrence) but our world is more fragmented and fraught, to a much greater, more tumultuous and pervasive extent.
While the world in Lord of the World has modernised and secularised – the only remaining religious competitor is Catholicism. Obviously, Benson did not appreciate that secularism would unleash a proliferation of religious and “spiritual” movements, nor did he appreciate that Islam would remain powerful in men’s hearts. The collapse of organised Protestantism, while not as great as Benson predicted, has occurred. Yet our Catholic Church, given its love affair with the same modern forces that collapsed Protestantism, was in no place to benefit from its collapse as it does in Benson's novel.
Two protagonists
The action in Lord of the World takes place between two men – an American, Julian Felsenburgh, and an Englishman, Fr. Percy Franklin. Eventually these men assume historic roles in the most unexpected ways: Franklin becomes Pope, and Felsenburgh becomes “President” of the world and the Antichrist (although Benson ever expressly identifies him as such).
Epic stories that attempt to capture epochal phenomena are very difficult to pull off. The author can often get lost in the detail of his epic. Yet Benson manages to tell a story of epic world forces in a way that never relays so much information as to make the story unmanageable or totally beyond belief.
The story is told through Percy (directly as if he represents the man of Christ in and among his people) and Felsenburgh, who takes virtually no part in the action directly. The story of Felsenburgh and his ascent are told through Oliver Brand, a member of the British government, and his wife, Mabel Brand. To add an irony to the rivalry, Percy is Felsenburgh’s doppelgänger – both young men prematurely grey in the temples.
Felsenburgh is a youngish political figure from the United States who is inserted into the story as the peacemaker between the three political forces in the world, whose victory in achieving peace is hailed as the dawn of a new peaceful era. He is adroit and unobtainable. Benson makes clear that one never knows from whence he is coming or going. Offers that pour forth from countries to take power are repeatedly rebuffed until he finally accepts the Presidency of Europe, which, in turn, eventually flowers into the Presidency of the world. (It is notable that Benson still fixed Europe as the centre of the world; the fulcrum of power).
Felsenburgh's political rise parallels the growth of a new fully humanist and atheistic religion, in which man is singular and centre, and Felsenburgh its messiah. What Benson describes in Felsenburgh’s ascent to earthly and religious power defies ordinary belief, since nothing in the story seems sensible in the way that he assumes these powers and role. However, what Benson appears to be driving at, and which is entirely believable, is a type of mass-psychosis: a cult of personality that takes hold without the clumsy Soviet placards. People seem to believe in him because they want to: they invest their hopes for a better world by abdicating their sense of reason.
The cult of the new religion – replete with festivals of man, maternity and the like – seems very much drawn, at least for Benson’s imagination, from the French Revolutionary government’s attempt to replicate religion in the Cult of the Supreme Being. Both Benson and the French Revolutionaries assumed that man was naturally religious and had a deep desire to worship. Donning his best imitation of Maximilian Robespierre, Benson imagined a French Revolutionary Religion 2.0 that would improve upon the dismal failure that was version 1.0. And, at least in the book, Benson’s new humanitarian religion is gloriously successful and meaningful to its new adherents.
That part, I confess, seemed less believable because I don’t sense the natural religiosity in man that Benson perceives. When I look at contemporary man – secularised and materialised – I see no longing for worship in him. I do not think that the Antichrist will need to ape Christian worship in order to succeed. Men already worship themselves and do so without corporate worship. It is, by its nature, an isolated and atomising cult. Perhaps both Benson and Robespierre were simply too close to man formed and inculturated by centuries of Catholic worship such that they assumed this was man in his natural state – when in fact he had been super-naturalised for almost two millennia.
Where Benson was deadly accurate, however, was his appreciation of what the new religion would promise: that it would be based upon socialism and worldly peace; the death of “I” and the beginning of “we.”
As such, the individual spirit and especially the dissenting individual spirit must be crushed to make way for the utopia to come; the world promised by Christ without Christ. A brotherhood of men – atheists and materialists all of them – it will only believe – and only proffer for belief – that which man can see and touch. The Antichrist appears to be that man in the future who will definitively deliver both peace and socialism to the world, which is exactly what Felsenburgh delivered in Benson’s world. Moreover, the Antichrist will need to convince no one to stamp out the last domains of a retrograde faith – a virus – that threatens the world’s arrival at this utopic point in history, just as Felsenburgh did not need to convince anyone in Benson's world. The destruction of the Catholic Church was seen as the natural progression of history which was, in Lord of the World, working out its final form through Julian Felsenburgh.
By contrast, Fr. Franklin, the embodiment of the Church and also youngish, is given responsibilities far beyond his years. We meet him as a sort of Vatican diplomatic agent who reports on the political and religious situation in England. In this capacity, he is called to the confession of an elderly woman who wishes to die in the “old” religion (i.e., Catholicism) and happens to be the mother of one Oliver Brand, a British government official. Mr. Brand and his wife, Mabel, are incredulous at the old woman’s desires, and Mrs. Brand does all that she can to convince her of the ridiculousness of the “old” faith (but to no avail).
Before Fr. Franklin can continue his priestly work with Mr. Brand’s mother, Mr. Brand and his wife arrange for her to be euthanised; a theme that runs throughout the book. While Benson did not imagine widespread abortion or homosexuality (or “trans-sexuality”), he was able to see how the man who sees himself as radically autonomous – and, in that sense, divine in his own right – will flee unnecessary suffering that takes place in a death not of his own making. The euthanasia that pervades Lord of the World works on several levels: solidifying man’s belief in his own autonomy and the fact that the world, so conceived, ultimately becomes a world dominated by death.
Through the Brands, we see in microcosm the world’s infatuation with Felsenburgh. They are intoxicated by what he promises and portends. And they, like the rest of seeming humanity (except the recalcitrant Catholics), greet his arrival with an almost religious fervour. While the Brands personify the personal capitulation of human beings to Felsenburgh, the official capitulation to Felsenburgh is seen through Mr. Brand and his government.
In the Brands, Felsenburgh captures modern, secular people. They aren’t evil or immoral. They care about the world and man’s place in it. They just don’t believe in God. And, at least in Mr. Brand, that disassociation with God enables him to accede to and rationalise the wholesale death and destruction of the Catholic remnant.
In Mrs. Brand, we see something altogether different. She represents the ghost of faith still inhabiting the machine. Her enthusiasm and even hypnotic allegiance to Felsenburgh is tested by the first episodes of mass violence directed at the Catholics. She wonders out loud why the era of permanent peace and man’s universal brotherhood must be inaugurated by violence and bloodshed. The spark of humanity remains in her even if her husband is able to muffle his own at the first violent crackdowns on “non-conforming” Catholics. Her dilemma becomes unbearable when the world governments, led by Felsenburgh, order the destruction of Rome (to which the world’s remaining militant Catholics have retreated) through an air attack and a weapon that mirrors nuclear weapons.
The utter destruction of Rome is an act that her husband can still justify – and indeed vote to proceed – but also something that Mrs. Brand finds incomprehensible. After making inquiries surreptitiously with an apostate Catholic priest as to why Catholics believe what they believe, she deems them not worthy of destruction, and, instead, makes for a euthanasia clinic to end her own life. She is somewhere in between Felsenburgh and the Church – unable to embrace either and unwilling to live with the violence instrumentalised by the former to destroy the latter.
In the aftermath of the destruction of Rome and the death of the Holy Father and virtually all of the cardinals, Fr. Franklin is elected Pope by the remaining two living cardinals and takes the name Pope Sylvester III. He takes up a hidden residence outside of Nazareth and slowly begins rebuilding the Church (with some success). He decides to call something like a conclave of the remaining hierarchy, to assemble in Palestine, only to later find out that one bishop (a Russian) apostatises and reveals the planned assembly to Felsenburgh’s men.
The governments of the world decide, at Felsenburgh’s urging, to finally rid themselves of this Catholic menace. Even the apostate bishop is deemed worthy of death because of the possible chance that he might “relapse” into faith in the future. Aircraft (“volors”) arrive over Nazareth prepared to bomb them into oblivion. All the while, their movements are juxtaposed with those of the Holy Father as he presides over a final benediction: the haunting words of Tantum Ergo being interspersed with the machinations of the world against Christ and His Church.
Without gore or violence, the book ends with the simple sentence, “Then this world passed. And the glory of it.”
Refections and what ifs...
Beyond what has already been said, I find a few points of interest which still stand out. One is the idea of a militant Church in the age of apostasy. Benson’s Church, as mentioned above, was positively Tridentine in its ethos and demeanour, and certainly in its defiance. Our Church, as it endures its Passion, is much less self-confident and is wracked by internal rot and heresy among most of its episcopacy. We are now facing our worst external enemy (syncretic modernism) at the same time as we are suffering our worst internal crisis since the Arian heresy. But Benson’s retrograde Church made me wonder: had that Church persisted into our era, would it have hastened or slowed our enemies’ progress compared to our current milquetoast and feminine version? While, of course, I would rather live all my days under the rule of Benson’s Church, would stridency by the Catholic Church have made the world look better (from our perspective) than what otherwise transpired?
I think an argument can be made that militancy by Catholics would have brought about a counter-militancy in our enemies that transcended even what they managed to accomplish in our timeline. It is possible that Vatican II let the “air out of the balloon” – both for us and our enemies – and slowed things. It is likewise possible that Vatican II allowed some liberal element to remain in the Church that would have left if it had remained Tridentine and scholastic.
While Joe Biden is a vile form of Catholic by any measure, had the Church remained militant and true, would Joe Biden be a Catholic (even in name only)? And does Joe Biden being “in” the Church (though an apostate at heart) mean that the Church’s enemies must slow their attempt at destroying her outright? While I'm not sure that necessarily follows, even if it were true that one good from Vatican II was the slowing down of the eventual persecution of Holy Mother Church, it was not worth it. Better to be Benson’s fully faithful if persecuted Church than be a glorified version of the Episcopal Church that no one, including our enemies, cares about.
Although many of Benson's predictions were remarkable, if he missed the mark with some of them, it is notable that others become increasingly accurate with time.
The rate of apostasy in the West has skyrocketed in recent years and Europe is a veritable graveyard by every measure. The United States, formerly the most religion-tolerant Western country has now embraced a hard secularist and socialist tack that bodes ill for Catholics, especially given that Catholics have been mis-educated in the Faith for sixty years. Simply stated, they aren’t ready to be persecuted and many will simply walk away once the seas become even a little choppy.
This is what makes Benson’s book so intriguing: that as time passes, his world, at least in parts, becomes increasingly possible; ever more perceptible and palpable. Without doubt, Benson wrote great dystopic fiction – so great that it may actually be realised.
Saint John Fisher, Pray for Us.