Christ Against Babel: The Return of Identity
Constantin von Hoffmeister
Eurosiberia
France, once the altar where saints tread barefoot through vineyards reciting Ave Marias to stone cathedrals, is now a haunted tabernacle filled with absence. What used to be blood and water now is empty wine bottles and shopping malls. From 94% of French children baptized within three months of birth in the early 1960s to only 12% of Catholics attending weekly Mass in 2023, the collapse is apocalyptic. The Christendom of Clovis and Joan recedes, its bones picked clean by consumerist crows. God no longer walks here because His people have shut their doors. At the same time, the land becomes foreign to its children. Babel returns, once a myth now a demographic. “The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low” (Deuteronomy 28:43). This curse has taken root. A people who forget their God forget themselves.
To be Christian is more than soul-deep. It is blood-deep. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) — an embodied presence rooted in time and soil. There is no love of Christ that is not also love of place. Christ walked the dusty roads of Galilee, not some celestial nowhere. Identity is an altar, a liturgy written in flesh and custom: repeated gestures that sanctify the ordinary, flesh-colored acts of living — bread broken, wine poured, tongues singing in ancient dialects. Catholicity is universality, yes, but always incarnated. The Holy Spirit fell on different men in different tongues (Acts 2), not on ghosts. Rootlessness is not holiness. It is an illness, a dislocation from both heaven and earth.
What they call “diversity” is many colors pressed into one pale sameness. Miscegenation as dogma, the forced union of unlike things under threat of moral exile, is not love. It is Babel’s revenge. The tower is rebuilt with ideologies that declare difference a sin. Yet the God who made the leopard and the lamb delights in difference rightly ordered. “Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with divers seeds” (Deuteronomy 22:9). Not because God hates mixtures but because each thing has its time, its telos, its mystery. The homogenized man is a neutered man, a blank slate for the global demigods. When all are mixed, none remain. This is not love. It is obliteration.