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.
Even the most obtuse dissident must admit that the Woke Cult’s ascent coincides with the West’s dechristianization. Their continued hatred of the Gospel reveals them as dupes of the same forces that back the Wokeists.
Since abandoning Christ led us straight to Clown World, re-embracing Christianity is the cure for the Woke plague. But the resurgent idolatry afflicting the Right – whether in the form of ancestor, tree, or state worship – keep many from making that conclusion.
After all, the Bible has strong words against smoking party drugs and hiring prostitutes.
Instead of submitting their appetites to the only faith with a proven track record against spiritual threats to the West, nuPagans hang their hopes on utopian fantasies of restoring America’s pre-1965 demographics while keeping post-1968 morals. But the idea that a godless white majority will prevail where a white Christian majority lost is just dumb.
Any serious student of history knows that Christianity is an essential pillar of Western civilization. But Satan loves tempting God’s people to sin and then accusing us of hypocrisy. No one would fall for the nuPagans’ grift if every Christian lived Christianity. That scandal has given many who are otherwise sympathetic to Christianity second thoughts.
Hang out on Christian Twitter, and you’ll soon encounter statements like “Child trannies have me convinced that demons are real, so there must be a God. But every Christian sect seems woke, cucked, or cringe. If only there was a based Church!”
Such laments betray the same shallow, consumerist attitude that underlies nuPagan attacks on the Church.
Liberal democracy promised everyone unrestricted license. So personal preference became the sole standard used to judge everything, including religion.
You see it in the phrase “marketplace of ideas.” Liberalism frames politics as the same kind of consumer choice as shopping. Material preferences are enshrined as absolutes, so everything is politicized and commodified.
That is the tainted ground from which the Woke Cult grew. Genuine dissent can’t take root there.
The only fruitful way to approach religion is with intellectual honesty. If one is serious about seeking truth, he must acknowledge that truth isn’t up for grabs. Truth binds the conscience, and betraying that truth is intellectual treason.
That’s the real hypocrisy.
Even pagan LARPers heckle the Woke Cult over the same intellectual sloth, and rightly so.
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 nuPagans and rad trads go wrong is in treating religion as a tool to achieve political ends. That inverted view is why the former can swallow nonsense about St. Paul starting the Church to undermine Rome, and the latter think a faux pas from the Pope disqualifies the Church.
Christianity is a revealed religion. And it’s not like 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 cringe political takes or annoying personality.
Nor would your classmates’ personal lives keep you from joining the only class that taught skills vital to your success in life. The Church’s teachings are even more indispensable. Because not only do they teach us how to live life, they alone enable us to attain eternal life.
One of those teachings happens to be, “Take the beam out of your own eye first.” If you think you’re enlightened enough to condemn a two-millennia-long religious tradition based on the current leadership’s politics, you should join so you can go to confession.
From a based church, Lord deliver us!
“Happy, hopeful, and practical”
With the disappearance of subcultures and hobbies in a shared society, it appears that a lot of folk have moved on to filling such holes with more the wrong things instead, such as their politics and religion. They need to feel hip in everything they do, and be validated by whatever online clique they want to get in with. This is yet another backwards aspect of clown world that comes from taking things out of place.
There is a lot of mockery in regards to “Pronoun in Bio” types on Twitter, but little attention paid as to the reason it is silly. A biography is supposed to define who you are, not what you affiliate with or what you consume. Too many people define themselves by their clubs and teams, and not by who they actually are or what they do.
I have to say a lot of this contributes to the rampant alienation today when no one seems to know what it even means to relate to someone else unless they are on the same “team” as they define it. This is how so many can’t even imagine sharing a Thanksgiving meal with a family member that voted wrong.
It’s going to take a long time to steer out of this tailspin.
Ys replaced authentic religion with hobbies. Now Zoomers are replacing hobbies with religious enthusiasms. Indeed, Satan sends errors in twos.
As an Evangelical > Orthodox convert, my experience at my parish in ROCOR is that a lot of guys show up as Based Reactionary Dude, but go one of two routes:
– They drop out when it becomes apparent that they can’t really get away with, exactly as you said, treating Christianity as a means to an end, and they see that Orthodoxy is way too hard to simply treat as eating at your preferred “restaurant” of Christianity;
– or, more commonly, losing interest in some sort of perceived political solution, acknowledging our society is way past the point of some sort of based political movement fixing it, in favor of focusing on their spiritual life and more immediate sphere of influence, like guiding their family. This is how it went with me.
In my case, I already had extreme disillusionment with the Glories Of Western Civilization, AKA Mvh Naked Statues And Classical Mvsic, so it wasn’t a big step to get over the political aspect. This probably started over fifteen years ago when I was in college and read about ancient near east social context stuff (honor/shame, ritual purity, etc.), which exposed many aspects of the Evangelical faith as hopelessly anachronistic, and planted in me a seed of skepticism that my particular cultural heritage was the be-all-end-all. Even more since at the time I was studying Japanese language and culture quite intensely.
So in the last decade when memelords extolling how Hitler Was The Real Hero After All or we were all going to be saved by becoming Calvinist Postmillennial Dominionists, or the Traditional Latin Mass, it all just struck me as various flavors of mythologizing one’s perceived cultural heritage or something like it in an effort to make sense of the collapsing present state of the world. I could see the appeal but I didn’t exactly find it convincing. Yes classical music is really nice and all, but a lot of the rhetoric seemed to come down to just reverting to an earlier stage of modernity that, like you said, generally involves earlier-stage demographics with modern degenerate morals.
Loathe as I am to admit it, Western society isn’t ready for any kind of serious Christian revanchism. Since going back would just lead us here again, we have to take authentic Christianity forward.
Quite so. We converted Europe by means of preaching and miracles. We won’t get it (or anywhere else) back until we have those things again.
Healing miracles have not been stock in trade of Catholicism since the 800s (when Europe was invaded by Vikings and Moors), though pilgrimage sites like Canterbury and Lourdes did manage to take up a tiny bit of slack. This was what the Charismatic Renewal was meant for, but it degenerated into old ladies flocking to gifted speakers to ‘get prayer’ for their knees (they seldom came for the talks, but queued out the door for the prayer ministry afterwards). Cor et Lumen Christi struggles on regardless.
There’s a tension between observing “things were better before” and “we cannot go back to before” but I think you’re right that authentic Christianity can only respond by moving forward. It’s another “et et” moment. If we look to the past only, we almost risk concluding God can’t sort this out, or “Make all things new,” to quote the last chapter of the Apocalypse of St John. GK Chesterton’s reminder the Church keeps facing certain death then rising anew, while the thing than seemed to kill her actually dies, seems perpetually timely.
I agree. It’s also easy to mythologize a particular period in history just because we were spiritually better off then than now in many ways, but even if it were possible, just turning back the clock wouldn’t magic all the problems away. There were problems with the 19th/18th/11th/choose your century Church too, and just aping the actions or trappings of a prior century wouldn’t help. For an example close to my own heart, our understanding of Scrupulosity and mental illness has greatly increased over the last 50 years, and just deciding that we should just blanket-revert to the pastoral style of (say) 1700 would leave people like me in the lurch, as the era’s lack of knowledge on how Scrupulosity worked meant that the standard pastoral guidelines for those days often ended up making the lives of the Scrupulous a living nightmare (for instance, in the time of St. Alphonsus Liguori, the common practice was for a priest to defer absolution in Confession if he wasn’t certain about the condition of the penitent – and given the immense anxiety, doubt, and uncertainty generated by Scrupulosity, this meant that in practice most sufferers simply felt an even worse rejection in the Confessional). We should take what’s good in the modern Church and take that through to the future, while rectifying what’s wrong (insofar as we can, of course – it’s God who ultimately protects the Church, after all).
Because we’re fallen people in a fallen world, it’s easy for men to lose sight of their calling as spiritual heads of their family and raising them in accordance with the Gospel. It may not be as immediately entertaining as war gaming on Twitter with your fellow anons about how we’re going to install a new Constantine but it will bear better fruit.
I was born into the Orthodox Church, where I reman, and there are few things I can’t stand more than the “based” online recent concert hyper-political orthobros. They’re so embarrassing. I think most of them have other issues that the church should help them with, but in my observation they use it as an excuse to hate women and gain internet clout by being self-appointed arbiters of the “true faith” is.
“That’s because you don’t have the nous, bro. You sound like someone who’s a member of OCA or should I say, “OCgay.”
I’m paraphrasing everyone’s favorite perpetually online orthobro,
Oh, I’m even worse! Not only am I in the Greek Orthodox Church, but I’m an ETHNIC CRADLE. Also, I’m married TO A WOMAN and have children. Clearly, I’m not really Orthodox bro.
“Sounds like you’re not being charitable. Maybe you need a little nuance.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmgwFzcqg2o
Lofton’s voice needed work but the content is spot-on.
The second the Dyer impression comes on, I lost my shit. “Papal clown masses, dude.”
I post this with affection, mind. I’m a big Lofton fan. I don’t really like Dyer but he showed up in the comments and was a good sport.
Excellent essay. I find myself unwelcome in the “Let’s use religion to builder a better society.” By religion they mean of course, “Get people dumber than me to pray to the Thor I saw in the Marvel movies.” In the TLM circles, I can only find myself repeating in so many words: “Get over X issue. The Church is where Peter is and where the Church is where God is. And maybe if Jesus died for you, you can take people receiving on the hand and “On Eagles Wings” Let’s see if we can get our saint on here.”.
Modernity has introduced 3 concepts, however, that make staying Christian harder. The first one is that sort of charitable indifference that all dogs go to Heaven. It’s everywhere in the Church. Bishop Barron, as well meaning as he is, is exhibit A. Why show up if God is just handing out participation prizes and hugs at the end of our lives?
Another is that almost compulsive need to make the modern Jewish nation out as Christians who forgot their New Testament. They are not. I am listening to Father Mike Schmitz (excellent overall by the way) in the Catechism in Year. I find myself over and over again saying: the moderns are not the pre-Christ group. There is an apparent attempt at charity that leads ultimately to a free pass on a group historically hostile to Christianity.
EM Jones gets in a lot of trouble for his thoughts. You can argue he’s too focused on the particular issue. But he’s not wrong in his history, even if anyone is correct on his hyper focus. His view is entirely Catholic on the subject. Just like “All dogs go to Heaven”, there’s sense with current widespread sentiment on the topic is that the Church doesn’t particularly matter. It also leaves us open to worshipping their nation instead of Our Lord. I know it seems far fetched, but that actually seems to be happening in a few evangelical circles.
Lastly, is the ahistorical emphasis on “racism” within all Christian circles. Jesus doesn’t say to worry about racism anywhere in the Gospels. He even seemingly indulges in it, although it’s a test of faith when He does it. Indeed the history suggests it’s entirely a modern 20th century virtue, the virtue of the virtue less. Unfortunately, many otherwise orthodox Christians will include it as the 11th commandment, applicable to all secular governments and their border policy, when they wouldn’t dream of insisting on making sodomy illegal again.
In that it’s hard to appeal to especially the groups of people who believe that Christianity is the suicide of nationhood. What counter example can I give them, other than a history that most modern Catholics want to pretend never happened? When we have only Cardinal Sarah saying the hard things about net effect of open borders in the West, that’s a bad sign. It needs correction, which is not happening yet. So yeah, I end up hanging out with the TLMers the nuPagans, etc because I’m seeing something that does need changing. And offending them all. 🙂