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Ah yes, the story of Ryland Grace, the man whose existence throughout the story constitutes an undeserved favor to others and who ultimately has to decide freely whether or not he must sacrifice himself utterly in order to deliver the entire human race from disaster after they put him to death. The man whose sidekick is a "rock". Yeah nothing Christian to see here, pure coincidence. I guess the characters literally talking about God didn't lay it on thick enough.
You just think it doesn't because you are as a fish asked about water. What water?
"Forget about the industrial-scale killing of unborn children, parades devoted to sodomy and sexual deviance, pornography, breakdown of marriage rituals - the third biggest movie of the year's main character's name has Grace in it and he has to consider whether to sacrifice himself or not!'
Huh?
I confess I haven't read the book or watched the film, just skimmed the plot on wikipedia. But it's not exactly the Sistine Chapel! Looking at the themes, I see scientific materialism ranking ahead of Christian values.
The water I'm swimming in sure looks like it's about 98% iron oxide.
Go watch Mikhail Romm's Nine Days in One Year or Klushantsev's Road to the Stars and come back and tell me Project Hail Mary is a story of scientific materialism over Christian values.
Personal drama about redemption, survival and self sacrifice don't suddenly become something else because they drape themselves in soft-scifi technobabble.
Nor, frankly, does cultural influence work in the sort of all or nothing way you seem to imply. Post-Christian cultures are still determined by Christianity in the same way that post-Roman cultures are still determined by Roman influence. Cultural power reaches far further than naive notions of theocratic imposition, that it is a loose binding makes it no less scary a binding: rejection of the frame is still in the frame.
The Japanese routinely make stories that contain no Christian influence, but they're only able because it's not a core part of their civilization. Westerners don't have this luxury. The secular world you might want to see as separate does not contain a lot of mythic alternatives for artists to draw from. Either because the Catholic Church removed them in the high middle ages or because like Marxism they're themselves successors of Christian mythologies.
So Piss Christ is Christian art then? As far as I'm concerned, it's an insult dressed up as art. Defacing a Koran isn't Islamic art, no muslim would think that, they'd get really angry about it. Marxism may descend from Christianity in some respects but Marxists hate Christianity and work around the clock to undermine and suppress it as shown from when they get any scrap of power and usually start killing nuns and closing churches. It's not really Christian. Is /r/atheism Christian? Many users were Christian at one point. But it isn't a Christian website.
Cultural power is a kind of power, it has an effect on the world. Where is Christianity's cultural power? Are we getting new words from Christianity? Or just a sea of old words, old words that people can barely define anymore? Prelate, deacon, abbott, cardinal - even educated people might not know what they mean. When's the last time anyone went to a conventicle?
Power is about making things happen. What has Christianity made happen recently? You're saying that everything in Western civilization is drawn from Christianity in some respect and alluding to extremely broad ideas like redemption, survival and self-sacrifice (notably shared by other cultures that never heard of Christ). But what specifically has happened recently as a result of this power, tangibly? Gay marriage, pride parades, a tonne of porn everywhere, women wandering around with buttocks visible through some skimpy hot pants, a fountain of materialist greed in everyone's social media, gluttony, envy, sloth, revenge and more aborted kids in the last 60 years than died in every war in human history?
Where is the cultural power going exactly, what is it doing?
There are no live controversies about saying the lord's name in vain, only saying 'nigger'. What does that say about cultural power?
Christianity doesn't even measure up to long-dead religions in this respect. Drawing from pagans today: Age of Mythology, Titan Quest, God of War, Hades, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Jotun, Northgard, and The Banner Saga. Valheim. The Pharoah Series. The Witcher.
Drawing from Christianity today: Darksiders, Diablo and Dante's Inferno + maybe the Binding of Isaac which is anti-Abrahamist.
Both pale in comparison to thematically modern stories about man and technology which gives us huge rich veins of sci-fi, robots, ray guns, flying machines, totalitarian states.
What else could it possibly be? Iconoclasm is still, ultimately, a form of respect for the power of the idol. True contempt is indifference.
Since 2024 even Richard Dawkins calls himself a Cultural Christian. All the parts of New Atheism that aren't ex-muslim apostates are so pretty much. And Old Atheism was so self evidently.
No, it's also about making things not happen. Which is mostly what cultural victory is about. Long settled arguments about things you don't even think about like whether children owe anything to their parents, whether individuality has any value, whether you should obey the law or your own internal morality first or whether humans can be property.
People say Tradition has no power, and then go on to not do all the things Tradition managed to eradicate.
Where is the power of Christianity? In that a lot of the things you list as contrary to its doctrine are still viewed as either outright sins or objects of moral debate. A civilization without this influence simply does not ask such questions.
It is waning though, you are right about that. Time makes everything diminish. And Western civilization is old now and far into its second barbarism. But just because power wanes doesn't mean it ceases to exist as a factor. The Romans still have eminent effects on us down to how we record time itself, never mind half of the world's laws.
Almost none of these are actual pagan stories full of pagan virtue though. They're Christian subversions. God of War was almost so explicitly.
The stories that actually extol pagan values are few and far between, and almost all of them are products of Nietzscheans like Milius or Coppola who are still haunted by the corpse of God despite their best efforts to transcend him.
To be the most valiant opponent of something is to be its strongest proponent. Someone who isn't irremediably a son of Abraham would simply not think about him at all. Not make endless art about his mythology.
Gaze into the Abyss and it gazes back into you. Black Sabbath is Christian Rock.
Which are all still derived from a cultural substrate. A setting is nothing but set dressing for themes. Which are in turn simply expressions of a worldview. All art is propaganda for something as Orwell famously said.
The Soviets had scifi stories that weren't about Christian themes, or at least not so directly since those values were still filtered through Marxism and irrigated by non-western cultural input like Cosmism. Even China today exports award winning scifi that works from its own cultural lens.
But the West can't run away from its own shadow. It is futile to try.
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