Christianity in it's pure, strong form (Catholicism, but also its cousins Orthodoxy, Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism) is in agonistic contest with four worthy adversaries who are formidable because each is itself a perverse, heretical offshoot of Christianity. Each grasps and exaggerates valid elements of the true Gospel but contaminates it with evil elements to create a toxic, virulent, powerful and evil kingdom.
To be sure, the Kingdom of God, proclaimed by Jesus and the Church, is not synonymous with any particular social order, culture or government. It lives with, within and against every social order. Every particular social reality...family, culture, club, parish, school, bowling league, political party...is finite, fallible, vulnerable to the Kingdom of God and that of the Evil One. The Catholic Church left us by Jesus (and in varying degrees related Churches) is blesssed with the abiding presence of Christ by virtue of its efficacious sacramental economy and inerrant magisterium, but in its human dimension is vulnerable to all evils. In fact, because "corruption of the best is the worse", it may be in some ways more prone to evil.
Certain regimes and organizations are particularly evil: think Hitler and Stalin. Others, in Camelot-fashion, can embody...imperfectly, temporarily and provisionally...a high order of goodness: I think of the original Benedicines, Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits; 13th century Europe; and the surge of life in post WWII USA.
Currently, the West (Americas and Europe) is largely impotent before militant Islam (the shameful withdrawal from Afganistan), imperialist Communist China and the expansive fascism of Putin because it is invoved in a brutal culture civil war between authentic Christianity and Cultural Liberalism. The government of the USA at the moment rests in the hands of a handful of octogenarian cultural liberals (Pelosi, Biden, Sanders) who have embraced the cult of sexual sterility, identity politics, deconstruction of gender, bio-techno-authoritarianism and cling to power with a narcisstic obsessiveness when they should have handed such to their children (and now their grandchildren) decades ago.
The Church herself has been immensely weakened and polarized by the crusade of Pope Francis to align her with Cultural Liberalism by downplaying truths around marriage, family and unborn life and embracing the agenda of climate change, immigration and the death penalty. The Church is in exile, like the Jews in Babylon... homeless, powerless and vulnerable. We are in a terrible vocation crisis, with many of our priests coming in as missionaries from Africa (the hope of the future) and elsewhere.
It is worth considering how each of the antagonistic "kingdoms" is in fact a heretical, derivative, perverse and disordered outgrowth of Christianity.
Cultural Liberalism, including its disguise in progressive Catholicism, presents itself as a more enlightened, up-to-date Christianity in its "love" for the victim, especially the persecuted minorities and the LGBTGQ community. Rene Girard taught us how the Gospel transfigured religion from a mechanism of sacrificial scapegoating of a victim into compassion for the victim in the person of Jesus Christ. Liberalism exaggerates that dynamic; disconnects from tradition, the natural order and Church authority; and creates a new religion out of a fetish with alleged victims (BLM, LGBTQ), rescapegoating Church tradition as imagined strawman of privilege, whiteness, heteronormality, and such.
Islam is a form of Arian Christianity whereby Mohammed and his followers accepted much of what is best in Judaeo-Christianity (fervent monotheism, the moral code of the commandments) but rejected what didn't suit them (the divinity of Christ, his salvific death, forgiveness of the enemy)and combined it with a warrior ethos of violence and permission for polygamy/misogyny.
Communism is the atheistic, materialitic version of Christian salvation history. The inevitable dialectic of conflict between oppressor/oppressed becomes the efficacious process of final salvation. It is a heightened form of concern for the poor elevated into an idol, with all the violence and sacrilege that flows from such depravity.
Neo-Fascism, as a crude, anxious, angry nationalism, in the person of Putin (or the milder, narcissistic, incompetent and more harmless Trump)often seeks to align itself with a form of traditional Christianity or Catholicism. We saw this in Franco, Diem and a host of Latin American authoritarians. It is capable of harnessing the energies of the faith against its enemies (Communism, Liberalism, Islam) into a fearful, xenophobic, ethnocentric, reactionary irrationality. This last is the least toxic of the four as it preserves more of authentic Christianity. But again, "corruption of the best is the worst" so it is itself a powerful, toxic temptation.
Embattled, vulnerable and threatened as we are, what is our plan?
I again recommend a combination of the "Benedict Option" of Dreher and the "Christian Strategy" articulated inFirst Things by Adrian Vermulle: the two are in tension but not contradiction and nicely complement each other. The first movement is one of retreat, to consolidate ourselves, in our immediate families and closest communities. By the second, we engage with the broader society in very targeted and specific ways, in the manner of Daniel, Esther, Joseph of Egypt. We avoid the contaminated identification with any specific party or ideology, retaining a certain transcendence and freedom, even as we eagerly serve the common good, protect our interests, and collaborate with the doing of good even with our ideological adversaries.
I cite as an embodiment of these two movements our Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett. She is, in my view, the best political event in the USA in the last 50 years. She is a woman, a mother, an adoptive mother, Catholic, charismatic, pro-life, brilliant, independent of party and ideology, gracious and charming. She grew up and lives within a charismatic, Catholic comminity which exemplifies the Benedict Option: evangelical, communitarian, counter-cultural, passionate, "thick" Catholicism. At the same time she has studied and taught at Notre Dame, one of the most prestigious universities in the nation. She is "in this world" but "not of it." She is an inspiration and a source of great hope. She may well play a historic role in the near future in overturning Roe. She is our Ester, our Judith!
May our Lord bless her, her family and community, her work at this important position!
May He lead each of us to retreat to prayer, worship, family and community; and to re-engage our culture with wisdom, zeal, compasson and courage!
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