NO MATTER WHAT monks and nuns did, they were always human, sinful, frail, and struggling towards God. There's something about that persistence that's quite admirable and inspiring. There's something about that dedication in the face of failure that's quite beautiful. And there's something about these lifetimes of selfless efforts in the medieval monastery that feel quite foreign to our modern sensibilities.

In a recent semester, I held my final class for my Medieval Christianity course at Brooklyn College. For our last session, we reflected as a group on medieval Christianity's uses and misuses since 1500. We read about how contemporary American white supremacists, German Nazis, and the planters of the American South all used roman-ticized notions of the Middle Ages to better model the world order that they hoped to effect. But of all the things we read, the students were most interested in the idea of “neo-medievalism,” an international relations theory that, in some iterations, envisions a new globalized world order that is post-nation/post-sovereign states, and is instead organized by a universal political organization parallel to that which was organized by the Church in western Christendom. How international relations theorists characterized (or, perhaps, mischaracterized) the medieval world was less interesting to my students; what preoccupied them was the question of what could possibly serve as “Christendom,” as a universal, overarching system, in our contemporary world?

After spending some minutes recognizing that post-medieval religious confessionalization made religious unity impossible in the contemporary world, the students then spent the rest of the class period marveling at how the only unifying principle that could potentially invoke universal loyalties in the world of the 2020s was money. Capitalism had replaced Christendom in their minds; money had become the principle that sparked every political and personal decision in their view. “Because money doesn't tell you how to live your life the way the Church did,” one student said, “the morality of our society—our purpose for living—is completely messed up.” The students then had a litany of examples of how money had eroded the moral compass of actors large and small: from the United States trading with countries who violated human rights, to cults of celebrity being more important than “truth,” to “everyone's obsession with superficial stuff on social media,” the students began to articulate a listlessness that overwhelmed our classroom.