Quoted here:
Additionally, Kirk noted in the summer of 1942, the only Christian body that seems to approach the truth and rigors demanded of Christianity is the Catholic Church. “The closer it comes,” he continued, “the further I draw away from it.” He admired Christ as a person, he continued, but “I abhor his doctrines. Christianity is truly a religion for the expropriated.” When pushed to the quick, Kirk turned to the humanism of Harvard scholar Irving Babbitt. Babbitt’s philosophy offered more rigor and discipline than Christianity, as it contained “a ruinous moral laxity, a sort of indiscriminate sentimentalism.” Christ and Christianity simply could not live up to the highest standards of the good life. In this, Kirk sounds much like the Romans who were appalled that Christians admired King David and, thus, believed it a lesser religion.
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Reading this in the summer of 2014 brings to mind the Russell Kirk of 1985. That summer while reading Paul Elmer More with him in Boulder, Colorado, he asked me what I thought of More. I remember telling him I thought More's ideas repulsive, as More would doubtlessly think mine. Kirk just smiled that wide-eyed grin of his.
