I am torn. The internet discourse is simultaneously ridiculous and important. If you talk like internet people about internet things in real life, most people will think you’re a literal crazy person. The vocabulary, the slang, lingo and concepts that mark you as one of those in the know, the personalities who are revered . . . it’s a bit much even when you’re in it. Step away for a few days and you might be aghast at yourself.
The manner of discourse is also bizarre. It’s very binary. You are for this or against it. Depending on where and with whom you’ve staked your claim, you can be ostracized completely for a difference of opinion. Knives will come out from strangers whose faces and real names you’ve never known, and vice versa. You are their enemy now. Things are either 0 or 1, and so are you.1
It’s tempting to dismiss it all as meaningless noise. But there’s a catch: today’s “crazy people” are tomorrow’s thought leaders. Today’s wild ideas are tomorrow’s intellectual underpinning. For better or for worse, this is where all of the energy is. The excitement. The new thinking. I’ve seen this happen too many times before to not want to be at least a small part of it. At the very least, engaging in the discourse means you are ahead of the curve. I used to say “Real life is Twitter + 5 years,” which I guess now is “X + 5 years,” which sounds like a bog-standard algebra equation, so let’s say “Substack + 5 years.”
This gives me hope and concern. See, dichotomies. I’ve already expressed my consternation at the rapidly growing anti-Christian animus among those I consider to be intellectual allies. The faith has been blamed for the woke or whatever you want to call it, which blows my mind because for my entire life those are the same people actively and deliberately trying to belittle, mock, and destroy the faith. They haven’t done it yet, but they never stop trying. At least when it’s known enemies doing it, it’s easier to fight back. Not so much when it’s friends.
I recently finished Tom Holland’s Dominion, an excellent survey of Christianity’s impact on the world. Holland writes popular history books for the laymen, but doesn’t skimp on the meaty analysis, and his prose is fantastic.2 One thing I’ve noted after reading several of his books is that he likes tying disparate threads together to create his theories of what happened, and why. Most make sense.
However, Holland is an atheist. He’s not an obnoxious Hitchens/Dawkins atheist—Holland considers himself a cultural Christian and he recognizes the faith’s central role in creating the world he enjoys living in, but he has some of the same blind spots I see among the internet types I associate with.
First, regarding homosexual acceptance. In a section about German psychiatrist and author Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, who apparently coined the terms homosexual and heterosexual, Holland conflates Krafft-Ebbing’s call for compassion and acceptance of homosexuality as a broad Christian acceptance, merely because (a) Krafft-Ebbing apparently approved of homosexual monogamy, and (b) Krafft-Ebbing was Catholic. This misses the faith’s standpoint on homosexuality entirely. Being monogamous or promiscuous isn’t the point. That’s not where the church views the sin. Amazingly, Holland seems to replace Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and the writings of St. Paul with Krafft-Ebbing as the church’s stance on homosexuality. I found this an odd conclusion.
I say “seems to” because Holland what Holland attempts to convey is that only in a Christian culture could such compassion and understanding exist. I get this. But this doesn’t make Krafft-Ebbing the authority on Christian dogma, nor does it make Holland. It never appears to cross Holland’s mind that Krafft-Ebbing’s belief was wrong.
Christianity’s innovation is in not commanding sinners to be harassed, persecuted, or killed. That Christians haven’t always lived up to this at all times throughout history just makes them fallen human beings. We’re all sinners in need of repentance. We need to worry about the beams in our own eyes first, and also be aware that how we judge other people—which is okay to do!—will be the standard by which we are judged.
Anyway, this post isn’t about gays. June was last month. All I’m saying is that while you can “blame” Christianity for controlling people’s more violent instincts, I argue that this is not a bad thing in all respects.3
And then there’s Holland’s chapter on wokeness, where he seems to make a huge rookie mistake. Yes, Holland describes his subjects’ scriptural errors, but he also approvingly accepts their conclusions without pushback.
Of course, these are two verses used to “justify” wokeness as Christian. First, there’s Galatians 3:28:
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
This does not mean that all distinctions among the people be abolished and humanity smushed into a gray goo—which would he antithetical to the lessons of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis:
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.
The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
- Genesis 11:1-9
So this is in the Old Testament, i.e., the histories and prophecies of the Hebrew people before the coming of Christ. Nothing in the New Testament, i.e., the four Gospels and later letters of Christ’s apostles, abrogates or contradicts God’s fears of what evil a “one world” type of humanity could do. This is why the globalists and globalism are antithetical to Christians and Christianity.
What St. Paul means in Galatians is to reiterate what Christ said, but in plainer terms than the Lord, who was fond of speaking in parables: that one’s race or sex had no bearing on salvation.4 That globalists and progressives take an entirely different view of this one particular verse doesn’t make them right.
Next, the other common verse bandied about by the “woke = Christianity” bridge comes from the mouth of our Lord and Savior himself, from the Gospel according to St. Matthew:
So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.
Matthew 20:16
What does this mean? Does it mean that the weak should be exalted and placed in power over the powerful and strong, who should be cast down? Should all be leveled into gray goo? Does this mean Europe must throw its borders open and negate its culture and its people because a little boy drowned in Turkey?
Of course not. That’s not only silly, but it’s ahistorical and ascriptural.
Here’s the full parable:
For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard.
And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard.
And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the marketplace,
And said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way.
Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise.
And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle?
They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.
So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first.
And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny.
But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny.
And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house,
Saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day.
But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny?
Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee.
Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?
So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.
- Matthew 20:1-16
Very different in context, right? What the Lord is saying is that, no matter when one is called to the Lord, if one earnestly repents and believes, they are equal in heaven with those who believed from the get-go. It’s similar to the parable of the prodigal son. “First” and “last” don’t refer to one’s place in life, but one’s place in time. Claiming this endorses race communism or biolenninism or whatever misses the point so hard they can feel it in space.
It’s not Christianity’s fault that people with little to know biblical knowledge twist scripture and present heretical understandings as doctrine and dogma. But it is Christians’ for not understanding our own faith and transmitting it to subsequent generations. This is why we have to call out these heresies whenever we see them.
Dogma is good. One man and his Bible is not a church unto himself. All interpretations of scripture are not equally valid. The Bible is not a living, breathing document, and nor is it the sum total of Christianity. But I digress.
A final note about the discourse surrounding this issue: many on the anti-Christian right despise the fact that early Christians toppled and desecrated ancient idols and statues and temples. I too lament any loss of history, but those things weren’t history at the time. Also, every single conqueror or conquering ideology, if it’s serious about maintaining power, destroys what it replaces to some degree. It’s about asserting dominance. Don’t try to pretend that if you and your ideology win, you wouldn’t topple the enemy’s statues and desecrate the enemy’s idols, physical and intellectual.
While there was some idol desecration, rumors of early Christians indiscriminately destroying libraries and causing the “dark ages” or whatever are greatly exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated. Christendom, in fact, preserved the legacy of antiquity and attempted to harmonize it with Christian teaching. So a lot of what’s still here is still here thanks to Christians. This myth that Christians, particularly in the medieval period (the so-called “dark ages”) embarked on an indiscriminate burning spree of ancient texts is just that: a myth. Holland rightly calls this out as Protestant reformation-era and later enlightenment-era propaganda.
Anyway, Dominion is another great book by Mr. Holland that does a lot right, my nitpicks aside. If you’re interested in the broad history of Christianity’s impact on the West, Dominion is an excellent starting point. Just be aware of some of the leaps in logic he makes.
And now, back to the discourse.
- Alexander
Thank you for reading another post in defense of religion. I appreciate everyone’s readership as we continue to grow this audience. Please, if you enjoyed this post, share it and like and comment, check out my books on Amazon, and throw a few drachmas in the tip jar over at Buy Me A Coffee. God bless.
There’s also no shortage of people ready and willing to tell you that you’re wrong, and stupid, for the most innocuous of things. I stopped grillposting when a flood of anger dorks started telling me I wasn’t spicing my meat right or whatever. Not worth the effort.
I’ve also read his Persian Fire, Rubicon, Dynasty, and Millennium, and I highly recommend them all.
I lament and fundamentally reject the modern hippy dippy misunderstanding that Christians need to be total pushovers in the face of those who hate us, because Jesus just, like, wanted us to be nice, man, which is like the whole message of the Bible. Just be nice!
Shut up.
The prior understanding was that only Jews were saved. Christ expanded this to the entire world.
> ... for you are all one in Christ ...
- You might think of it, also, like this:
Identity is fundamentally hierarchical. *I* myself am part of a family; my family is part of a community; community, a county (or whatnot), etc etc etc.
- A properly constituted identity doesn't obliterate what is below it. (It is self-destructive for me to tyrannize my flesh, or a city to subvert the families that belong to it.)
- N.B.: I distinguish between "tyrannizing" and "correcting". The latter is done for the good of the inferior.
- You might conceive of some "highest identity" that is capable of uniting all peoples without obliterating them. We say that Christ is that highest identity.