You cannot save Christian heritage without Christianity
What the Amsterdam church fire reveals about the hollow heritage obsession of secular people
This essay is about why secular people cannot preserve Christian heritage while rejecting Christianity. Culture is inseparable from the spiritual. You cannot have Gothic architecture without Catholic theology, Latin mottos without believing them, feast days without fasting, or Christian civilisation without Christ. Secular heritage lovers have turned churches into museums, nightclubs, and apartments. Better to burn a church to the ground, than further desacralisation.
On the night of the 1st of January the Vondelkerk (a former church) in Amsterdam burned. Within hours, secular Amsterdammers flooded social media with grief about ‘our heritage’ and their ‘cultural tragedy’… by the kind of people who never attend Mass and give a €1 donation once every few years.
But the building that burned was not a church anymore. It only has the shape of it. In 1979 the Diocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam sold it for 1 guilder to a real estate investor. And was foll…
