Christian leadership—meaning clerics and commentators of both the
Catholic and Protestant varieties—all too often reveals itself to be of the world.
Speaking as a practicing Roman
Catholic, this is a sobering truth with which to reckon.
But it’s true all of the same.
Between
genuine Christianity and what I will henceforth refer to as Big Christianism
or, alternatively, the Christianism-Industrial-Complex (CIC), there is all of
the difference.
For
at least three reasons, “Big Christianism” is an appropriate term for the
phenomenon under consideration.
First, Christianism, being
an ism, is an ideology, a
theoretical abstraction designed to impose upon the ever-flowing currents of
everyday life a straightjacket of sorts comprised of its own principles and
dogmas. Unlike Christianity, which is a way of life inasmuch as the Christian’s
love for God is supposed to inform every thought, word, and deed, Christianism
is a set of principles or rules, of proverbial boxes to be checked by its
adherents.
Second, the intellectual
construction that is Christianism is a political ideology.
It is essentially but a version of our contemporary secular culture’s
prevailing Zeitgeist. That is, it is Political Correctness. It is
leftism, specifically, what is commonly referred to as “Cultural Marxism,” but
with this crucial difference: Christianism supplies to the reigning orthodoxy a
theological pretext. As such, a “good” Christianist is one who subscribes
to Politically Correct positions on those issues to which leftists attach
significance.
Christianism, to put it
simply, is of the world.
Third, precisely because
Christianism is ubiquitous, with untold numbers of clerics, academics, and
writers from across the denominational divide deriving from it enormous benefits
in affluence, fame, and, crucially, the semblance of
virtue, it is indeed “Big,” an
industrial complex.
So,
how can we distinguish a Big Christianist from a Christian? The list of
features below is admittedly impressionistic, but it suffices to bring into
focus a picture of the Big Christianist, the purveyor of the
Christianism-Industrial-Complex.
(1)Fundamentally, Big
Christianism has little use for the Bible. Granted, he or she will make
selective references to Scripture when it is thought that such passages could
be spun in such a way as to advance, or at least not impede, the leftist agenda
for which Big Christianism provides theological cover. Yet, generally
speaking, the Bible, precisely because it is among the most
politically incorrect books that has ever
existed, is clearly not a thing to which Big Christianists want their
constituents paying particularly careful attention.
Because the Bible, in
affirming the creaturely status of the
world, affirms the existence and omnipresence of an omnipotent and
omnibenevolent God, it just as resoundingly underscores the objectivity of value: good, evil, truth, beauty,
justice, piety—these are real features
of the world. They are neither subjective experiences within the eye of
the beholder nor the conventions of culture.
This means that the cosmos,
courtesy of the Supreme Person that authored it, is intrinsically “discriminatory.” The universe, nature, or
whatever other terms we choose to ascribe to reality discriminates.
This
is unacceptable from the standpoint of the Big Christianist, for being that Big
Christianism is but another species of leftism, the Bible, given its normative,
theocentric vision of nature, threatens the left’s agenda to fundamentally
transform Western, Euro-Christian civilization. The inclusivity to which
Big Christianists pay rhetorical homage and for which they push at the cost of
relativizing (at least in practice, if not necessarily in theory) the
differences in belief and conduct between individuals and cultures is impossible
to reconcile with the Biblical portrait of reality.
The Bible also affirms, or at
least permits, other things, like slavery, patriarchy, war, and nationalism
that Big Christianists prefer not to acknowledge. It condemns
homosexuality, to say nothing of insisting that marriage is an inherently
heterosexual union. And the Bible leaves no doubts that: (a) there really
are wicked people; (b) God despises the wicked; and (c) God reserves the
ultimate punishment for the wicked.
God, far from being inclusive, is resolutely exclusive when it comes to, not those to whom He
extends the invitation of eternal life, but those upon whom He will ultimately
grant it.
These
are viewpoints that Big Christianists either ignore or attempt to reinterpret
away.
But for as scandalous and politically intolerable as these perspectives
are for the Big Christianist, none is as unacceptable, none is as big of a
threat, as the Biblical portrait of Christ.
(2)The Big Christianist’s (ad
hoc) approach to Scripture is, in effect, implicitly Marcionist. Marcion of Sinope lived during the
second century in Rome, and the heresy that has been forever named after him is
the doctrine that the God of the Old Testament is a fundamentally different God
than that of the New. The True God, he maintained, is the God of Jesus
Christ.
Big Christianists hold
something like this view. Only the God of the
Christianism-Industrial-Complex is a gross distortion of the God that is
revealed in the pages of the New Testament. The Jesus that it has created—a
nonjudgmental, passive, live-and-let-live, unconditionally accepting 1st century
liberal hippie who was crucified for no reason other than that he preached
universal love—is a politically-advantageous fiction that permits the CIC to
achieve three goals:
First, such a Jesus—let’s call him “Fake Jesus”—is wholly vapid. As
such, Fake Jesus permits Big Christianists to make any number of uses of him
for their own purposes. For example, since Fake Jesus never discriminated
against or passed judgment upon anyone, and since we are supposed to emulate
Fake Jesus, this means that those of us who inhabit the West should allow to
settle within our countries theoretically limitless numbers of human beings
from anywhere on the planet, and irrespectively of whether their customs and
traditions are antithetical to our own.
Or,
since Fake Jesus unconditionally accepted everyone, regardless of how they
conducted themselves, and because we are supposed to be like Fake Jesus, the
creators and sustainers of reasonably decent, safe, and clean communities must
permit the construction of “homeless” shelters within those communities.
When
a proposition, like the proposition regarding this fictional depiction of
Jesus, is sufficiently vague, it can all too easily be conscripted into the
service of any number of policies.
Second, Fake Jesus is so boring that it is
utterly impossible for him to lend offense to anyone who
may consider occupying a place in any Big Christianist churches. Big
Christianists, after all, don’t want to scare off any potential tithers.
They believe, understandably, that Fake Jesus is their insurance against this
occurring.
After
all, what remotely decent human being could take offense by a character, like
Fake Jesus, who only preaches unconditional love and who will eagerly, happily
embrace anyone and everyone irrespectively of what they’ve done, what they
continue to do, and whether or not they repent of their sins? In fact,
Fake Jesus isn’t concerned about repentance of sin simply and solely because he
doesn’t acknowledge the concept of sin.
Sin is a religious notion. Fake Jesus, however,
hasn’t any use for “organized” or “institutionalized religion.” He is, at
best, “spiritual.”
As
such, Fake Jesus makes everyone feel good about themselves—irrespectively of
how wretched they are.
Thirdly, Fake Jesus enables Big Christianists to not only fatten their
coffers, but to accommodate the world in
that he provides them the opportunity to ignore the real Jesus.
While Jesus did indeed
instruct His disciples to cultivate the supreme excellence of agape, of love for all, between the Carpenter of
Galilee and the imposter that Big Christianism has put in His place there
exists an unbridgeable gap.
Jesus demanded of His
followers that they “love one another,” but this injunction needs to be
understood in light of, not just the context provided by the New Testament, but as well that of the Old Testament.
Jesus
was anything but the “meek and mild” nice guy—Fake Jesus—that Big
Christianists, non-Christians, and anti-Christians make Him out to be. He
wasn’t nice at all. In fact, if Jesus wasn’t who He claimed to be and who
the Apostolic Fathers insisted He was, then Jesus was the most obnoxious of
jerks, a man whose ego was as immense as His psyche was deluded and His
temperament was volatile.
Jesus repeatedly self-identifies
as the God of the Bible, of the Hebrew Scriptures, the same God that demands
undivided allegiance from the human beings who He created and upon whom He has
visited unrelenting, homicidal, and, in some instances, genocidalviolence for turning away from Him.
The
God who flooded the Earth, destroying the vast majority of people and animal
species, is the God that became a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
The God of the Old Testament who
annihilated whole cities, and who ordered the annihilation of still other
cities—of men, women, children, and livestock—is one and the same God who was
born of the Virgin Mary.
When God became a man in
Jesus, He did not cease being the “jealous” God feared by the Israelites and
Israel’s enemies. No, if Jesus’s demands could be said to differ from
those made by Yahweh it is only to the extent that they were arguably more austere than those issued by God in the Old
Testament:
Whereas God spoke mostly to
the Jews in the Hebrew Scriptures, in Christ He puts Jew and non-Jew alike on
notice that either they accept Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, or
else… they die.
Big
Christianists are apoplectic over Donald Trump’s tweets (while, tellingly,
maintaining a deafening silence in the face of the toxic sewage that daily
spews forth from not just mostly black rap “artists,” but as well from
Democratic politicians and anti-Trump activists who have normalized obscenity
and even violence against the President and his supporters). Yet the
manner with which Jesus dealt with His opponents makes the roughest of the
President’s tweets sound like Mr. Rogers.
With unmitigated conviction and
white-hot passion, Jesus not only referred to His adversaries in the ugliest of
terms, but blasted them with the severest of charges to their faces. He
also promised them—indeed, threatened them—with eternal damnation, agonizing
pain and suffering without end.
And He did so routinely.
Jesus also likened a woman
who came to Him for help to a dog, for she was a non-Jew, a Gentile, and, from
His perspective as a Jew, non-Jews were inferior as Gentiles to Jews. That the woman’s faith
in Jesus ultimately prevailed upon Him to heed her request does not change two
politically-incorrect facts regarding the God-Man:
(a)Jesus recognized distinctions
between, not just individuals, but groups: Jesus, in
other words, practiced discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and religion;
(b)He was willing to suspend
His “ban” on Gentiles, but if and only if they were willing to “assimilate”
themselves to Him. Only if “the dogs”
were willing to abandon those of their beliefs that were at odds with the Truth
of which Jesus claimed to be the Incarnation and embrace Him as the only
alternative to eternal perdition would He rescue them. If not, then He would follow
the course of action that He would later prescribe to His disciples for when
their testimony to the Gospel fell on deaf ears: Jesus would shake the dirt off
of His sandals, move on, and never look back.
Yet it wasn’t just Gentiles
who Jesus took to task. He eviscerated His fellow Jews qua Jews, hurling epithets, allegations, and
threats of unprecedented violence, of “wailing and gnashing of teeth,” that
would be sure to secure a place today for anyone who said so much as an iota of
this on one of the “Hate Watch” lists of the Anti-Defamation League and the
Southern Poverty Law Center.
Jesus, like His Apostles who
placed the lion’s share of guilt for His crucifixion upon the collective
shoulder of “the Jews,” can only be viewed as the most virulent of “anti-Semites”
from the vantage point of these Hate Seekers.
However,
Jesus could be pretty merciless toward His closest friends, prospective
followers, relatives, and…well, pretty much everybody.
Jesus
regularly pulled no punches when chastising His apostles for their weaknesses
in understanding and faith, exhibited what can only strike us as stone-cold
indifference to the pain endured by a man who didn’t want to follow Him until
after he buried his dead father, and in effect denied His own family.
Jesus used force to drive
the money-changers from the Temple and commanded His disciples to obtain
swords.
The God of the New Testament, like the God of the
Old—i.e. Jesus—is violent.
The Carpenter from Galilee, in
featuring such activities as war and slavery in His parables, never condemned
these universal institutions. Nor, for that matter, did He condemn
“racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “Islamophobia,” “xenophobia,” “nationalism,”
“misogyny,” “global warming,” and whatever other unforgivable isms and phobias
can be found in the leftist’s catalogue of mortal transgressions.
It is undoubtedly because of this that
Big Christianists prefer to drop Him down the memory hole and, instead, promote
a fictional character, Fake Jesus, that is more conducive to the ends of the
Christianism-Industrial-Complex.
Jack
Kerwick [send
him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple
University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He
is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey
and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith
& Culture.