Church Shopping

The Devil springs his most vicious attacks on the Church during two seasons. In Lent, the mainstream media overflows with pop pseudohistory books by fedora-tier academics pushing crackpot theories about Jesus. You might catch a talk show with one grifter claiming Christ was a failed rebel who got executed and eaten by dogs for his trouble, another who has solid proof Jesus survived the crucifixion and founded a dynasty with Mary Magdalene, and a third who insists Our Lord never existed. Despite holding mutually contradictory theories, the hucksters gladly table their differences to mock and slander Christ.

The Advent season, in which we now find ourselves, draws all the usual suspects out of the woodwork to attack the same target from different angles. The same shopworn memes about Christmas having pagan roots pop up year after year, despite how easy they are to disprove.

With the rise of dissident politics have come renewed assaults on Jesus from the right. The intersection of LARPy neopaganism and crude race worship has produced a small yet stridently single-minded contingent of screwballs bent on taking out their racial animus on the Church.

Wiser heads have pointed out that the marked tendency of Christ’s enemies to attack His flock from opposite ends of the same issue only bolsters the Church’s claims. Normal people who hear the Woke Cult decrying Hitler’s Pope while paranoid wignats denounce Christendom as a Jewish plot understandably find Christians’ account of themselves more reasonable.

The wignats’ quixotic charge on Calvary, when even the most obtuse dissident must admit that the Woke Cult’s ascent coincides with the West’s dechristianization, reveals them as dupes of the same forces that back the Wokeists. Since abandoning Christ led us directly to Clown World, it stands to reason that re-embracing Christianity is the cure for the Woke plague. But the wignats’ own religion–a primitive form of ancestor worship that replaces God with the state–won’t let them make that conclusion.

After all, the Bible has strong words against smoking street drugs and committing adultery with in-laws.

Instead of subordinating their appetites to the only faith with a proven track record against the ills now besetting the West, the wignats hang their hopes on utopian fantasies of restoring America’s pre-1965 demographics while keeping post-1968 morals. Never mind that their  biting accusations of Christianity’s failure sink twice as deep into whites’ ankles. The idea that a godless white majority will triumph where a white Christian majority lost is as dumb as it sounds.

Most historically literate people realize that Christianity is an essential pillar of Western civilization. But Satan’s role as our accuser means he loves tempting God’s people to sin and then calling us out for hypocrisy. No one would fall for the wignats’ spiel if every Christian lived Christianity. That scandal, in its various forms across Christian sects, has given many who’re sympathetic to Christianity pause.

Hang out on Christian Twitter, and you’ll soon come across seekers saying, “The Death Cult’s enormities have me convinced that demons are real, so there must be a God. But every Christian denomination seems tainted with some flavor of wokeness, cuckery, or cringe. If only there were a based Church, I’d join in a heartbeat.”

Such statements betray the same shallow, consumerist attitude that underlies wignat attacks on the Church. Modern liberal democracy and capitalism promised everyone unlimited license. Individual preference became the measure of all things, including religion. You see it in the phrase “marketplace of ideas.” Liberalism frames politics as the same kind of consumer choice as shoe shopping. Material preferences are enshrined as absolutes, so everything is politicized and commodified. That is the tainted ground from which the Woke Cult grew, and the wignats’ ambitions will be choked if they try to plant in it.

The only fruitful way to approach religion is with intellectual integrity. If one is serious about seeking truth, he must acknowledge that the truth is not up for grabs. When someone finds a truth, it binds his conscience. Infidelity to that truth incurs guilt of intellectual treason. That is the real hypocrisy of which Wokeist posturing is a mere straw man.

A man who learns that 1 + 1 = 2 yet denies it in public rightly comes under scorn. This defining Western standard of morality is informed by Christianity, whether anyone likes it or not. Politics is downstream from culture, and religion is culture concretized. That is why anyone who presumes to pass judgment on the Church from a political standpoint commits the same offense he denounces.

Where both the wignats and the fence-sitters go wrong is in viewing religion as a tool to achieve political ends. That backwards perception is why the former can swallow the line that the Apostles started the Church to undermine Rome, and the latter think that a gaffe by the bishop of Rome disqualifies the Church.

Christianity is not primarily a mystical tradition. It is a revealed religion whose membership criteria are definitional. And it’s not as if she tries to keep that revelation secret. If you’re convinced that Christianity’s essential doctrines are true, you are intellectually and morally bound to become Christian. 1 + 1 = 2 regardless of your math teacher’s political takes or grating personality.

Nor would the composition or personal lives of your classmates keep you from joining that class if it were the only place that correctly taught skills essential to your success in life. The Church’s teachings are even more indispensable since they not only teach us how to live life, but without them no one can attain eternal life. One of those teachings happens to be, “Take the beam out of your own eye first.”

If you think you’re moral and enlightened enough to pass judgment on a sophisticated religious tradition’s entire 2000-year history, you should join so you can go to confession.

Goes beyond theory into action

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