The assertion that Christianity is no good because it led to Wokeness misses the point so badly it isn't even wrong. Christianity led to EVERYTHING. The words I am typing, the alphabet I am using, the electricity in the wires and chips that make this computer and internet work, the concepts we use to have these conversations, ALL OF IT, our entire civilization, is rooted in two thousand years of Christianity. Even the arguments and vocabulary used to attack Christianity are derived from Christianity. Trying to rewind the movie two thousand years to the misty woods of Northern Europe and recreate a Norse pagan world, or whatever other juvenile nonsense people claim to derive from Nietzsche, is a non-starter. Childishly, some people imagine themselves as Conan, crushing their enemies, etc. No. A return to a barbaric, pagan order would lead to nothing but misery. These current cultural and political issues have to be addressed and resolved with the tools our own cultural and political history provide, and they should be sufficient, particularly where the woke ideology is so utterly at odds with reality that it will not be sustainable for any length of time.
Thank you for an excellent essay. Please allow me to add one important detail.
"Christ allowed Himself to be killed in order to descend2 into the underworld, the resting place of the dead, which is commonly called Hades. In order to descend, one must be human, so God became man both to teach humanity more directly and to go down to Hades and free the souls there, including the first humans, Adam and Eve."
This is absolutely true. But He did more than just 'allow' Himself to be killed. He chose the most excruciatingly painful death imaginable in order to share in the suffering of every human being from the beginning to the end of time. In so doing, He gave meaning to suffering. He made it possible for us to join our suffering to His, because there is nothing we can suffer that He has not already suffered. By our suffering, united with his, we are purified. By this purification we obtain eternal life. That is a large part of what His redemption is about.
Hi Alex, Nietzsche of course was the one who leveled this attack in his "On the Genealogy of Morality" that what he called slave morality was directly attributed to Christianity. Tom Holland writes that in Christianity “every human being had been made equally by God and endowed by him with the same spark of reason.” Or as Substacker Brett Anderson states,
"That “spark of reason” was intimately tied up with notions of moral equality. The connection of ideas goes something like this, in the form of a syllogism:
If divine soul = reasoning capacity
And moral equality = equality of souls
Then moral equality = equality of reasoning capacity"
Therefore, following this logic to its conclusion, the belief becomes everyone has equal inherent reasoning capacity except for the -isms and -phobias holding back equality: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. It wasn’t a large jump for Unitarians to drop their belief in God to become tabula rasa blank-slatists.
I don't blame Christianity for this -- it was a huge, radical innovation to give the slaves, the women, the poor, the children spiritual equality that were denied to them under Hellenism, and one can argue (as Tom Holland does) that doing so was a good thing, but modern egalitarianism does trace directly back to this original transvaluation of values.
The phrase “spark of reason” is not scriptural or theological. And not all people are endowed with it, certainly not to the same degree, and there are people who are born brain damaged, or are in a state of dementia, or who are born with birth defects, who don’t even possess reason. They’re still human. so the spark of reason isn’t the sole criterion for humanity, or the value of a human being. People of value, because they are made in the Imogen likeness of God. Their equality, before God is the equality of all created things before the infinite. Nothing in Christianity says the people have equal endowments of intelligence, virtue, physical, strength, talent, or that they are blessed with similar circumstances at birth, since it’s clearly the case that they are not. Equal dignity and equal value has nothing to do with people having equal outcomes in the practical affairs of life. It does mean that they should have equality before the law, political terms. And that everyone should be treated with a basic level of human decency and dignity. Current ideas actually go the other way, and say people have different value based on innate characteristicsthat they didn’t choose and which are unchanging.
Hi Contarini, Plato’s interpretation of Logos, which had an enormous impact on Christianity and formed a cornerstone of the religion, made it clear that reason was associated with divinity. Blogger Brett Andersen explains, quoting theologan William Inge: “Platonism is part of the vital structure of Christian theology….[If people would read Plotinus, who worked to reconcile Platonism with Scripture] they would understand better the real continuity between the old culture and the new religion, and they might realize the utter impossibility of excising Platonism from Christianity without tearing Christianity to pieces.”
Here's a long quote from Holland on the egalitarianism underlying Christianity:
"I would say to look at the most obvious one because it's the symbol of Christianity, if you look at the cross, it’s such an odd thing to have as a focus of veneration, and to have as a fundamental symbol of civilization. Because a cross is a symbol of torture. And to the Romans it was an emblem of their power to torture to death their inferiors. So crucifixion was inflicted on those who opposed Roman power in the provinces. But it’s also the paradigmatic fate that is visited on slaves who rebel against their masters. And everyone who’s seen Spartacus remembers the rows of crosses lining the Appian way. It’s a billboard advertising the ability of Rome to crush rebellion by the weak, and therefore it serves as a symbol of the powerful over the powerless. Christianity absolutely upends that it says the cross is a symbol of the powerless triumphing over the powerful, the slave triumphing over its master, of the victim triumphing over the torturer, and this is such a radical notion its hard to express how radical it is. And the idea that the last shall be first, that there is inherent dignity and value and power in being a victim, this is something that would have been utterly bewildering to the Romans. And it takes a long time for first the Roman world and then the world of the Germanic conquerers in the west and so on to properly synthesize and understand it. And thats why I think in a way we are so habituated to it that it takes an effort to understand just how weird and strange that idea is.
And its why actually I think the modern who has most profoundly and unsettlingly understood just how radical that idea is, how radical the idea that the cross of all things should become the emblem of a new civilization was a man who was not just an atheist but a radically hostile anti-Christian atheist Frederick Nietzsche, and Nietzsche said this is a repellant thing. Nietzsche identified the power and the glory and the beauty of classical civilization and he thought that Christianity was notoriously a religion for slaves and he saw in the emblem of Christ nailed to the cross a kind of disgusting subversion of the ideals of the classical world, privileging of those who properly should be ground beneath the heels of the mighty, and he saw it as a kind of sickness that then infected the “blonde beast”, that this primordial figure of the warrior gets corrupted and gets turned into a monkish figure who’s sick with poverty and sympathy for the poor and the oppressed, and Nietzsche thought it was disgusting. Now those ideas, however vulgarized, of course feed into a very septic subject which is fascism.
Fascism, I think, was the most radical revolutionary movement that Europe has seen since the age of Constantine. Because unlike the French Revolution, unlike the Russian Revolution, it doesn’t even target institutional Christianity: it targets the moral/ethical fundamentals of Christianity. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution are still preaching the idea that the victim should be raised up from the dust and that the oppressor should be humbled into the dust; it’s still preaching the idea that the first should be last and the last should be first just as Christ has done.
The Nazis do not buy into that. The Nazis buy into the Nietzschean idea that the weak are weak and should be treated as weak, as contemptible, as something to be crushed….
Atheists of today [like Richard Dawkins et al]… they are basically Christians. Nietzsche saw humanists, communists, liberals—people who may define themselves against Christianity—as being absolutely in the fundamentals Christian, and I think he is right about that because I think that in a sense atheism doesn’t repudiate the kind of ethics and the morals and the values of Christianity."
Goodness, Nietzsche and Holland must have missed the part about Church supporting a hierarchichal society based on the divine right of kings.
Christianity is not and never has been egalitarian. Aquinas affirmed that all creation exists in a hierarchy of being with no two places being equal and none left empty. And Paul teaches in 1 Cor. 15:41 that "There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory."
Hi Brian, scriptural support for this position includes, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last" (Matthew 20:16). “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28 NKJV), "Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant" (Matthew 20:26-28), and “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him” (1st Corinthians 1:27)...
You are just spinning your wheels with all the proof texting. That Gospel, for instance, proves that the Church does in fact have ministers and chiefs with definitive authority.
It just so happens that I am a religious authority. So if you were anti-egalitarian and pro-hierarchy, you as a layman would defer to my authoritative interpretation.
Neo - I read each of these quotes in the context of their bible verses; in context, your argument falls flat. Not saying that the ratchet effect hypothesis doesn't hold water, it does. Am saying that Christianity is about fallen humans seeking to realize God's kingdom on earth. A kingdom where the strong and the weak, the wise and the foolish, the rich and the poor, all find ways to coexist in harmony by discerning and choosing good over evil as they progress through time.
Alexander addresses it. Modern Egalitarianism is due to secular mangling of Christian belief. That's the only connect. It's also not Christian as a result.
>Do you know what I really think it is? I think it’s that too many want freedom from consequences. Hedonism and materialism are just more fun.<
I agree this is the root issue for many. Some people want to be free to have casual sex, do drugs, watch porn, practice abortion if they don't feel like having a kid right now, etc. These people seem to think that there is a perfect moral belief system out there with no trade-offs, a world where they can have their "fun" and also things don't go to shit because of it, if only everyone else (such as those annoying, prudish Christians) would get with the program.
They hate being steelmanned because an incorrect position can't be saved by steelmanning. Pinning it down in its strongest form is a step toward destroying it.
No, lies succeed when they are vague and ever-shifting, avoiding the baleful rays of logical consistency.
Christ is freedom. Plain and simple. The idea that Jesus encouraged compassion to the point of learned incompetence is not a story I’ve read. Also his miracles are miracles. Simon’s boat didn’t overflow with fish that other Jews had to sacrifice. Christ’s generosity cannot be fully understood by us but we do know one thing. Simon didn’t say, “Hey, can you come back next week when I need more fish?” He recognized the Messiah and became a disciple—meaning it’s unlikely Jesus’ point was to give until people were helpless and weak.
Jesus did not come to Earth to end poverty or punish the rich. He came to save our souls and to give us the power to be free of Satan and other demons. He came to give us everlasting life and to make us invincible spiritually. This whole recent discourse about Christianity on Substack proves that assembling logical arguments that flow together without fallacy and knowing what you’re talking about is two different things.
Let me give you a quick example of why the church seems to fake and gay.
This morning I check my inbox and I've got a message from the Archbishop about "Juneteenth".
You remember that fake holiday they made up during the Summer of BLM, when people rioted over the overdose death of a thug while we were told going to church was killing Grandma.
The bishop can't even pass over it without mention. He must remind everyone that Catholics are the true Black Lives Matter supporters.
I just can't imagine a vitalist take on this "holiday" that had anything but scorn. At a certain point you just say "you know, if your going to be such a fucking asshole about it maybe your life doesn't actually matter, I don't have to take your crap".
Proud Catholique here, and if I may there is a reason Orthodoxy and Catholicisme are brothers and in my eyes mostly the same religion just one is Greek the other Latin. You always nail it Alexander.
I think "woke" is an attempt to bring morality back into the Universities without bringing in Christianity. But Jesus is what makes us one. So its not working.
Great post. A big problem with the "based pagan vitalists" and with everyone blaming Christianity for our current woke mess, is that they are echoing arguments that have been made specifically to deflect blame onto Christians and away from the real source of a lot of these bad woke ideas. Even if it were true (which it isn't) that Christianity produced a fertile field of useful idiots "open" to wokeness, it would still be true that non-Christians were the ones propagandizing all the wokeness in the first place.
> At the end of the day, Christianity, and religion generally, provides an immutable standard by which human behavior shall be judged. Absent something objective and immovable, you get subjective standards which can change at any given moment. If a society decides that it wants to reimpose slavery or allow sex with children, what do you do to stop that if you have no objective standards of goodness or truth or right? You don’t. Unless you stake a claim. And where does that claim come from? And what is to prevent someone else from staking a different claim should circumstances change?
Some people seem to think they can be right-wing atheists. How do you get to hierarchy and order without standards? How do you get standards without immutable TRUTH?
> I know what is good when I see it. (search it!)
Is that their standard? Looks pretty slippery to me.
I’m quite sympathetic to the Christian worldview versus the vitalist engagement farmer.
That said, it does seem to me that Christians have a very hard time coherently standing up to the special pleading of the weak.
For nearly all of human history the weak were so weak that cutting them some slack wasn't much of a threat on the margin. The world was so nasty, brutish, and short that being a little less nasty was almost always an improvement.
In the modern world though things are pretty chill for the weak. They have political power. They get massive government benefits paid for by others at the point of a gun. “Be more generous to the weak” just seems way past its ideal spot in a lot of places.
There are times in the modern world when I would prefer the based “who fucking cares about your fucking bullshit”. During COVID I would have preferred “we aren’t shutting down society so a few old sick people can live slightly longer”. But lots of Christian’s told me that was mean, and my church even stopped giving mass for along while. Maybe Christian’s were no worse on this than others on this, responses seem to cross the gamut, I just found the whole “empathetic” sentiment for favoring slightly delayed death over living baffling. I’ve never understood people who want to rot away in nursing homes either.
Rather then go down some list of where sympathy for the weak has gotten out of hand I would just note that the modern world is vastly different then the first 2000 years or so of Christianity and there is no reason to believe that it wouldn’t manifest itself very differently under these different circumstances.
More people need to read the book of Revelations if they think Christ is weak and passive. C.S. Lewis once compared this fallen world to a city under siege. The Lord is waiting, allowing the defenders to give up and cross battle lines. But once he’s ready for the final assault, those who stubbornly cling to their sin and do the bidding of Satan will not be spared.
The Pancrator of Sinai is one of my favorite icons. The mirror image one side his mercy, the other side representing his justice and strength.
People miss also the fact that Christ, God incarnate himself chose the saving actions over what someone of true power could of done. If Christ was not God, then the sacrifice would mean little because he was never a threat to begin with...
The assertion that Christianity is no good because it led to Wokeness misses the point so badly it isn't even wrong. Christianity led to EVERYTHING. The words I am typing, the alphabet I am using, the electricity in the wires and chips that make this computer and internet work, the concepts we use to have these conversations, ALL OF IT, our entire civilization, is rooted in two thousand years of Christianity. Even the arguments and vocabulary used to attack Christianity are derived from Christianity. Trying to rewind the movie two thousand years to the misty woods of Northern Europe and recreate a Norse pagan world, or whatever other juvenile nonsense people claim to derive from Nietzsche, is a non-starter. Childishly, some people imagine themselves as Conan, crushing their enemies, etc. No. A return to a barbaric, pagan order would lead to nothing but misery. These current cultural and political issues have to be addressed and resolved with the tools our own cultural and political history provide, and they should be sufficient, particularly where the woke ideology is so utterly at odds with reality that it will not be sustainable for any length of time.
What an outstanding post man, Im going to have to save this and bring it out every year the new batch of 19 year olds discover Nietzsche.
Thank you for an excellent essay. Please allow me to add one important detail.
"Christ allowed Himself to be killed in order to descend2 into the underworld, the resting place of the dead, which is commonly called Hades. In order to descend, one must be human, so God became man both to teach humanity more directly and to go down to Hades and free the souls there, including the first humans, Adam and Eve."
This is absolutely true. But He did more than just 'allow' Himself to be killed. He chose the most excruciatingly painful death imaginable in order to share in the suffering of every human being from the beginning to the end of time. In so doing, He gave meaning to suffering. He made it possible for us to join our suffering to His, because there is nothing we can suffer that He has not already suffered. By our suffering, united with his, we are purified. By this purification we obtain eternal life. That is a large part of what His redemption is about.
Time to flip the script:
The origins of “wokeness” aren’t in Christianity, they are in atheism. And in the West particularly, in anti-Christianity.
I think it’s good to remember that “wokeness” isn’t just an organic symptom of decay, it is a weapon designed for the purpose of destroying a culture.
Truth
This
Hi Alex, Nietzsche of course was the one who leveled this attack in his "On the Genealogy of Morality" that what he called slave morality was directly attributed to Christianity. Tom Holland writes that in Christianity “every human being had been made equally by God and endowed by him with the same spark of reason.” Or as Substacker Brett Anderson states,
"That “spark of reason” was intimately tied up with notions of moral equality. The connection of ideas goes something like this, in the form of a syllogism:
If divine soul = reasoning capacity
And moral equality = equality of souls
Then moral equality = equality of reasoning capacity"
Therefore, following this logic to its conclusion, the belief becomes everyone has equal inherent reasoning capacity except for the -isms and -phobias holding back equality: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. It wasn’t a large jump for Unitarians to drop their belief in God to become tabula rasa blank-slatists.
I don't blame Christianity for this -- it was a huge, radical innovation to give the slaves, the women, the poor, the children spiritual equality that were denied to them under Hellenism, and one can argue (as Tom Holland does) that doing so was a good thing, but modern egalitarianism does trace directly back to this original transvaluation of values.
The phrase “spark of reason” is not scriptural or theological. And not all people are endowed with it, certainly not to the same degree, and there are people who are born brain damaged, or are in a state of dementia, or who are born with birth defects, who don’t even possess reason. They’re still human. so the spark of reason isn’t the sole criterion for humanity, or the value of a human being. People of value, because they are made in the Imogen likeness of God. Their equality, before God is the equality of all created things before the infinite. Nothing in Christianity says the people have equal endowments of intelligence, virtue, physical, strength, talent, or that they are blessed with similar circumstances at birth, since it’s clearly the case that they are not. Equal dignity and equal value has nothing to do with people having equal outcomes in the practical affairs of life. It does mean that they should have equality before the law, political terms. And that everyone should be treated with a basic level of human decency and dignity. Current ideas actually go the other way, and say people have different value based on innate characteristicsthat they didn’t choose and which are unchanging.
Hi Contarini, Plato’s interpretation of Logos, which had an enormous impact on Christianity and formed a cornerstone of the religion, made it clear that reason was associated with divinity. Blogger Brett Andersen explains, quoting theologan William Inge: “Platonism is part of the vital structure of Christian theology….[If people would read Plotinus, who worked to reconcile Platonism with Scripture] they would understand better the real continuity between the old culture and the new religion, and they might realize the utter impossibility of excising Platonism from Christianity without tearing Christianity to pieces.”
Here's a long quote from Holland on the egalitarianism underlying Christianity:
"I would say to look at the most obvious one because it's the symbol of Christianity, if you look at the cross, it’s such an odd thing to have as a focus of veneration, and to have as a fundamental symbol of civilization. Because a cross is a symbol of torture. And to the Romans it was an emblem of their power to torture to death their inferiors. So crucifixion was inflicted on those who opposed Roman power in the provinces. But it’s also the paradigmatic fate that is visited on slaves who rebel against their masters. And everyone who’s seen Spartacus remembers the rows of crosses lining the Appian way. It’s a billboard advertising the ability of Rome to crush rebellion by the weak, and therefore it serves as a symbol of the powerful over the powerless. Christianity absolutely upends that it says the cross is a symbol of the powerless triumphing over the powerful, the slave triumphing over its master, of the victim triumphing over the torturer, and this is such a radical notion its hard to express how radical it is. And the idea that the last shall be first, that there is inherent dignity and value and power in being a victim, this is something that would have been utterly bewildering to the Romans. And it takes a long time for first the Roman world and then the world of the Germanic conquerers in the west and so on to properly synthesize and understand it. And thats why I think in a way we are so habituated to it that it takes an effort to understand just how weird and strange that idea is.
And its why actually I think the modern who has most profoundly and unsettlingly understood just how radical that idea is, how radical the idea that the cross of all things should become the emblem of a new civilization was a man who was not just an atheist but a radically hostile anti-Christian atheist Frederick Nietzsche, and Nietzsche said this is a repellant thing. Nietzsche identified the power and the glory and the beauty of classical civilization and he thought that Christianity was notoriously a religion for slaves and he saw in the emblem of Christ nailed to the cross a kind of disgusting subversion of the ideals of the classical world, privileging of those who properly should be ground beneath the heels of the mighty, and he saw it as a kind of sickness that then infected the “blonde beast”, that this primordial figure of the warrior gets corrupted and gets turned into a monkish figure who’s sick with poverty and sympathy for the poor and the oppressed, and Nietzsche thought it was disgusting. Now those ideas, however vulgarized, of course feed into a very septic subject which is fascism.
Fascism, I think, was the most radical revolutionary movement that Europe has seen since the age of Constantine. Because unlike the French Revolution, unlike the Russian Revolution, it doesn’t even target institutional Christianity: it targets the moral/ethical fundamentals of Christianity. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution are still preaching the idea that the victim should be raised up from the dust and that the oppressor should be humbled into the dust; it’s still preaching the idea that the first should be last and the last should be first just as Christ has done.
The Nazis do not buy into that. The Nazis buy into the Nietzschean idea that the weak are weak and should be treated as weak, as contemptible, as something to be crushed….
Atheists of today [like Richard Dawkins et al]… they are basically Christians. Nietzsche saw humanists, communists, liberals—people who may define themselves against Christianity—as being absolutely in the fundamentals Christian, and I think he is right about that because I think that in a sense atheism doesn’t repudiate the kind of ethics and the morals and the values of Christianity."
From: https://youtu.be/c0gsPo2ilj8
Goodness, Nietzsche and Holland must have missed the part about Church supporting a hierarchichal society based on the divine right of kings.
Christianity is not and never has been egalitarian. Aquinas affirmed that all creation exists in a hierarchy of being with no two places being equal and none left empty. And Paul teaches in 1 Cor. 15:41 that "There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory."
Hi Brian, scriptural support for this position includes, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last" (Matthew 20:16). “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28 NKJV), "Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant" (Matthew 20:26-28), and “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him” (1st Corinthians 1:27)...
You are just spinning your wheels with all the proof texting. That Gospel, for instance, proves that the Church does in fact have ministers and chiefs with definitive authority.
It just so happens that I am a religious authority. So if you were anti-egalitarian and pro-hierarchy, you as a layman would defer to my authoritative interpretation.
Neo - I read each of these quotes in the context of their bible verses; in context, your argument falls flat. Not saying that the ratchet effect hypothesis doesn't hold water, it does. Am saying that Christianity is about fallen humans seeking to realize God's kingdom on earth. A kingdom where the strong and the weak, the wise and the foolish, the rich and the poor, all find ways to coexist in harmony by discerning and choosing good over evil as they progress through time.
Alexander addresses it. Modern Egalitarianism is due to secular mangling of Christian belief. That's the only connect. It's also not Christian as a result.
A few years back Kevin Dolan (Bennet‘s Phylactery) provided an interesting rebuttal to the sklavenmoral thesis, I think you might find it interesting.
https://extradeadjcb.substack.com/p/the-lord-jesus
Appreciate your work btw. Can’t say I always agree, but it certainly gives me a lot to think about
I will check it out, thanks Stephen.
Yeah, but having a spark of divinity doesn't equate to a certain equal level of intelligence, so
Good point. Each person has the agency and ability to choose for themselves what they do with that spark.
>Do you know what I really think it is? I think it’s that too many want freedom from consequences. Hedonism and materialism are just more fun.<
I agree this is the root issue for many. Some people want to be free to have casual sex, do drugs, watch porn, practice abortion if they don't feel like having a kid right now, etc. These people seem to think that there is a perfect moral belief system out there with no trade-offs, a world where they can have their "fun" and also things don't go to shit because of it, if only everyone else (such as those annoying, prudish Christians) would get with the program.
They hate being steelmanned because an incorrect position can't be saved by steelmanning. Pinning it down in its strongest form is a step toward destroying it.
No, lies succeed when they are vague and ever-shifting, avoiding the baleful rays of logical consistency.
Christ is freedom. Plain and simple. The idea that Jesus encouraged compassion to the point of learned incompetence is not a story I’ve read. Also his miracles are miracles. Simon’s boat didn’t overflow with fish that other Jews had to sacrifice. Christ’s generosity cannot be fully understood by us but we do know one thing. Simon didn’t say, “Hey, can you come back next week when I need more fish?” He recognized the Messiah and became a disciple—meaning it’s unlikely Jesus’ point was to give until people were helpless and weak.
Jesus did not come to Earth to end poverty or punish the rich. He came to save our souls and to give us the power to be free of Satan and other demons. He came to give us everlasting life and to make us invincible spiritually. This whole recent discourse about Christianity on Substack proves that assembling logical arguments that flow together without fallacy and knowing what you’re talking about is two different things.
Let me give you a quick example of why the church seems to fake and gay.
This morning I check my inbox and I've got a message from the Archbishop about "Juneteenth".
You remember that fake holiday they made up during the Summer of BLM, when people rioted over the overdose death of a thug while we were told going to church was killing Grandma.
The bishop can't even pass over it without mention. He must remind everyone that Catholics are the true Black Lives Matter supporters.
I just can't imagine a vitalist take on this "holiday" that had anything but scorn. At a certain point you just say "you know, if your going to be such a fucking asshole about it maybe your life doesn't actually matter, I don't have to take your crap".
Proud Catholique here, and if I may there is a reason Orthodoxy and Catholicisme are brothers and in my eyes mostly the same religion just one is Greek the other Latin. You always nail it Alexander.
I think "woke" is an attempt to bring morality back into the Universities without bringing in Christianity. But Jesus is what makes us one. So its not working.
Great post. A big problem with the "based pagan vitalists" and with everyone blaming Christianity for our current woke mess, is that they are echoing arguments that have been made specifically to deflect blame onto Christians and away from the real source of a lot of these bad woke ideas. Even if it were true (which it isn't) that Christianity produced a fertile field of useful idiots "open" to wokeness, it would still be true that non-Christians were the ones propagandizing all the wokeness in the first place.
> At the end of the day, Christianity, and religion generally, provides an immutable standard by which human behavior shall be judged. Absent something objective and immovable, you get subjective standards which can change at any given moment. If a society decides that it wants to reimpose slavery or allow sex with children, what do you do to stop that if you have no objective standards of goodness or truth or right? You don’t. Unless you stake a claim. And where does that claim come from? And what is to prevent someone else from staking a different claim should circumstances change?
Some people seem to think they can be right-wing atheists. How do you get to hierarchy and order without standards? How do you get standards without immutable TRUTH?
> I know what is good when I see it. (search it!)
Is that their standard? Looks pretty slippery to me.
I’m quite sympathetic to the Christian worldview versus the vitalist engagement farmer.
That said, it does seem to me that Christians have a very hard time coherently standing up to the special pleading of the weak.
For nearly all of human history the weak were so weak that cutting them some slack wasn't much of a threat on the margin. The world was so nasty, brutish, and short that being a little less nasty was almost always an improvement.
In the modern world though things are pretty chill for the weak. They have political power. They get massive government benefits paid for by others at the point of a gun. “Be more generous to the weak” just seems way past its ideal spot in a lot of places.
There are times in the modern world when I would prefer the based “who fucking cares about your fucking bullshit”. During COVID I would have preferred “we aren’t shutting down society so a few old sick people can live slightly longer”. But lots of Christian’s told me that was mean, and my church even stopped giving mass for along while. Maybe Christian’s were no worse on this than others on this, responses seem to cross the gamut, I just found the whole “empathetic” sentiment for favoring slightly delayed death over living baffling. I’ve never understood people who want to rot away in nursing homes either.
Rather then go down some list of where sympathy for the weak has gotten out of hand I would just note that the modern world is vastly different then the first 2000 years or so of Christianity and there is no reason to believe that it wouldn’t manifest itself very differently under these different circumstances.
More people need to read the book of Revelations if they think Christ is weak and passive. C.S. Lewis once compared this fallen world to a city under siege. The Lord is waiting, allowing the defenders to give up and cross battle lines. But once he’s ready for the final assault, those who stubbornly cling to their sin and do the bidding of Satan will not be spared.
The Pancrator of Sinai is one of my favorite icons. The mirror image one side his mercy, the other side representing his justice and strength.
People miss also the fact that Christ, God incarnate himself chose the saving actions over what someone of true power could of done. If Christ was not God, then the sacrifice would mean little because he was never a threat to begin with...