The Zombification of Culture
How we preserve the outside of our culture, while the inside remains empty.
A 13th-century Dominican cathedral in Maastricht is now a bookshop.
The vaulting is still original. The stone is intact, and TikTokkers post it under the caption ‘hidden gem.’ A neo-Gothic basilica in Tilburg sells furniture. One in Utrecht became a gym. Another in Maastricht became a luxury mansion.
The Diocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam announced in 2022 that 60% of its remaining churches would close within the next 5 years.
And Cardinal Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht, had predicted a decade earlier that two-thirds of all Catholic churches in the Netherlands would be shut by 2025.
He was right…
At least one-fifth of the Netherlands ~6,900 church buildings have already been turned to secular use. The number of parishes dropped from 1,525 in 2003 to 760 by 2019. Meaning that more than half of them were lost… in just 16 years.
That is 1 or 2 parishes A WEEK. While Roman Catholics are still the largest religious group at 17% of the population, just 2.7% actually go to Mass weekly (2022 figures).
The ruins of a Catholic society are still standing. But the soul that once filled it is long lost. And the question is IF and WHEN it will return.
I live in The Netherlands, but this is not solely a Dutch problem, or a real-estate problem. When you stop at the church building you will miss the pattern. See… the same operation has been performed on breweries, libraries, on universities, on local newspapers, on craft workshops, and every institution that once answered to a calling more ancient and higher than itself.
The self-destructing mechanism is identical in each case. And James Burnham identified it in 1941... when it was already happening… The church closures are simply its most photogenic result in Western countries.
‘You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis. No one, ever, will prevail against your Faith, beloved Brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day.’
— Saint Athanasius
In his book The Managerial Revolution, Burnham argued that capitalism was NOT being replaced by socialism. What replaced it was something much worse: a class of credentialed managers whose power is not derived from owning things, but from administering them.
An owner had a stake in the thing itself: the quality, continuity, or the particular purpose. But the manager only has a stake in the Moloch that manages it. If he finds another job, it is not passed on like it used to… Stewardship and mangerialism are not the same interest, since they produce entirely different decisions and results.
An owner of a regional brewery in 1920 answered to the taste of his town. The family recipe was local, the water locally sourced. The clientele knew who he was and would tell him, in person, if his beer was shit.
What he transmitted was external to him and older than him: the tradition of the brew, the expectation of the customer, the reputation of the house. He could not reassign his brewery to a different purpose without destroying what made it valuable in the first place.
AB InBev today controls approximately 500 beer brands globally and roughly a quarter of the world beer volume. It acquired Goose Island in 2011, Devils Backbone in 2016, Wicked Weed in 2017. The branding is retained, the names survive, and its labels still carry the founding story, the year of establishment, the portrait of the founder.
But what a globo corp like AB InBev strips is the soul, and an owner who answered to a local standard. What replaced him is a portfolio manager in a big city whose job is to optimise margin across 500 SKUs.
The beer that reaches the glass may be technically identical, but the mechanism of the institution that produced it is not. The form only performs the heritage. The content or soul: the particular accountability, the local standard, the owner who could not sell without destroying, has been stripped.
This is Burnham’s mechanism applied to a pint of ale. The manager does not hate the brewery. He simply does not answer to what the brewery was built to serve.
Apply the same logic to a diocese. The bishop who built the church in Utrecht in 1895 was accountable to a sacramental purpose older than himself. The building solely existed to house the Mass and Tabernacle. His parish existed to form Catholics. Every decision that was measured was external to the institution: the liturgy, the faith, the community that the Church did not invent and could not revise. The building was non-fungible because its purpose was non-negotiable.
Now consider the diocesan property manager in 2024. He is not a villain per se. He is a professional administrator whose job is to balance a portfolio of assets against a set of institutional costs.
The buildings are liabilities unless they generate revenue. The dwindling congregations cannot cover maintenance. The bishop, himself a manager of a managed institution, approves the sale. So the church becomes a restaurant, a house or office. The asset is monetised to fund a system that cannot sustain itself with donations.
The purpose it was built to serve is not on the balance sheet. It does not even come to mind.
The dioceses simply no longer answer to the purpose the church building was built to serve.
Protestants understood this first, which is why their buildings convert more easily. They have no sense of sacrality. A church is not consecrated or blessed in their traditions.
Protestants never assigned sacrality to matter itself. The church was just an assembly hall for preaching. Multifunctional use was always theologically coherent for a tradition that located the sacred in the Word rather than in the altar and the tabernacle. When their denomination shrinks, the building follows without remainder.
‘If the Catholic Church in Her Tradition brings forth life, the modernist church is a desert that kills everything that it touches.’
— Monsignor Michael Goldade, SSPX
In the Catholic case this is structurally different. The church is not a container for a community. It is an ordered space built to house Jesus Christ in the Tabernacle, and a specific act of worship: the Holy Mass. The community does not ‘own’ a church, nor can they revise that mission.
The building is oriented east because the liturgy is oriented toward the returning Christ. The nave is proportioned as it is because those proportions were understood to participate in a created order no architect invented. The stone, the glass, the acoustic volume: all of it was built in service of worship practices that pre-existed the building and was supposed to outlast it.
So when a Catholic church becomes a pancake restaurant, something different has occurred than when a Methodist hall becomes a community centre. The sacramental geometry has been severed from its function. And only its form survives as surface.
The content has been extracted. And what the building was built to be: a non-fungible container of sacred practice, has been converted into what Burnham’s managers required it to be: a fungible asset in a portfolio. This is what the zombiefication of culture is: we keep the corpse, but strip its soul.
Sold-off churches are a palimpsest: scraped or washed off their initial content, so that it can be used again. Yet, the ghost of the original will always remain: it cannot be wiped out.
A palimpsest has the earlier text still faintly visible underneath. The Dominican cathedral in Maastricht is a palimpsest: The vaulting is intact, the orientation toward the east is intact, and the proportional system that once ordered bodies in prayer is intact.
Underneath all of it, faintly readable to anyone trained to see it, is the earlier purpose: the Mass, the Breviary prayers, and a monastic congregation answerable to a standard it submitted itself to.
The zombified purpose: café, bookshop, gym, law firm is written over it. The form now only performs cultural heritage. It is the same as the studio loft in an old factory. When your grandfather walked across a city he could recognise the purpose of a building. Today a building can be literally everything.
This is not a metaphor, but is the pattern itself. And it appears wherever a managerial class has displaced the owner who answered to a purpose.
Between 2009 and 2019, more than 320 local newspapers closed in Britain. By 2019, only 142 out of 380 local authority districts still had a daily local paper, down from 209 in 2007. Those that survived had, in the words of former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, been ‘rolled up into conglomerates with little true feeling for the communities they serve.’
The masthead survives, the name survives, and maybe even the building (where there still is one) survives. But the editor who knew the names of the councillors, who had covered the town for twenty years, who understood what the readership would and would not tolerate is gone.
Replaced by a content manager (probably with leftist or immigration background) operating across twelve titles from a regional hub. It has the form newspaper, but the content is wire copy, gaslighting and advertorials. The earlier text still faintly visible in the nameplate.
The university follows the same pattern. The Bologna Process of 1999 standardised degree structures across 48 European countries in the name of mobility and employability. The ancient universities of Bologna, Leiden, and Paris retained their names, their buildings, their ceremonial dress, their centuries-old founding charters.
What the process installed inside them was a credit-transfer system designed by administrators for the convenience of administrators. The four-year formation that once produced the best theologians, jurists, and classical scholars was reorganised into stackable modules assessable by outcomes frameworks.
It still looks like a university, but the calling it once answered to: the formation of a particular kind of person by a particular tradition of thought, has been replaced by the standard of the credential market.
‘We must build while others tear down. The collapsed citadels must be rebuilt, the bulwarks of the faith must be reconstructed; first of all the Mass of all time, which produces saints; then our chapels, our monasteries, our large families, our enterprises faithful to the social doctrine of the Church, our politicians determined to carry out the policy of Jesus Christ — this is an entire fabric of Christian social life, Christian customs, and Christian reflexes that we must restore.’
— Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
Archbishop Lefebvre understood how tradition (in the widest sense) was deliberately torn down. His worries did not only touch on theology or liturgy, but at problems on a civilisational level.
He was not speaking about modern architecture. What he spoke about was the system that produces modern architecture. He sproke about how liturgy and formation produces a parish, and how that parish produces the craftsmen who produced the building. It all connects. And when one chain is weak, the rest will follow.
Architecture and art are the last visible outputs of a living chain. When the chain breaks: when the parish dies, the brewer answers to a globo corp, when the editor answers to a content factory, and a university to the credential market, only the façade remains.
When not demolished for new project, the stone building outlasts the faith community, the founding family, the local editor, the lecture tradition, and the civilisation that erected all of them.
Yet… it will be downgraded legible shell. Europe’s skylines still read as European, because its silhouettes are still Gothic and Baroque and Romanesque. A pub in the UK signs still carry the name of the founding family. The Italian university still confers (some) degrees in Latin. The local Bavarian newspaper still prints the name of the town.
But underneath all of it, across thousands of converted buildings and hollowed institutions from Maastricht to Edinburgh… and even Melbourne and Quebec. The earlier soul is only faintly visible to anyone who knows how to read it.
We are living in a scenery for a civilisation that no longer knows what any of it was for.
Europe will soon be nothing but a more eleborate version of the Epcot in Walt Disney World Orlando, Florida (United States)…
Europe as a theme park will not lack history, but nothing about it is ‘alive’ anymore. It is all for Instagram and Pinterest vibes… Because no one inside of the theme park still answers to the societal standard that produced it.
Both the problem of, and solution against the Zombification are local… Yet the scale of Zombification is not local. It is the operating condition of Western culture.
What remains is a scenery of palimpsests, performing heritage from the outside, but having discarded the culture that made it real.
To help us counter the Zombification from my humble position I will give you the three conditions that distinguish a living institution from a preserved shell. And how to apply them to anything you encounter, from a parish to a brewery to a university.
You will find them in your inbox next Saturday July 25th 2026.
—Robbert
I liked after reading "How we preserve the shell of our culture, while the inside is emptied.", because it is so true, and also applies to Vatican2-supporting pseudo-'conservative Catholics', which with their 'sound, moderate, well judged' habitus, with or without traditional-looking mimicry (there was also the 'reduced to the essential' argument of the Bauhaus/brutalist style, some people are very straightforward in their reaction, others when confronted with things first have the need to consider if they are not valid approaches before they can dismiss them) had me duped at certain crucial stages of my life. Now I am looking very much forward to reading the rest.
Bravo Robbert, well said.
We all sit back and watch the metamorphosis, but few of us understand the cause. Why? Because the zombification of the culture has changed us too.
Once too many people began noticing, they began to drug us. Tranquilizers, Prozac, and now Marijuana upon request keep us dull, and prevent us from caring. Our souls are being ripped out, too, unless we wake up and realize what is being lost.