The Return of Evil

Are you philosophically prepared?

I may be on my way to becoming a better Christian. Up until this point I have been the beneficiary of a pilgrim’s haphazard education in various sects of Christianity, and while I’m a confirmed Episcopalian, the best I can muster is a deep and abiding respect for Christian ethics. But like Spinoza, I don’t do worship. So I’m always of a mixed mind when I am asked or commanded to bow my head in prayer. I’ve heard thousands of prayers in my life, but very few make me stand at attention ready for action. So it is a question for me, of membership in the saggy and sorry excuse for the Body of Christ that some disrespectfully call ‘god botherers’. There’s a little bit of truth in that epithet. Institutionally, is Christianity a force for good? If so, how is that manifest in the US? When’s the last time you heard a credible moral argument win in public debate? I don’t think Team Christian USA is winning.

On the other hand, there has been a second epiphany I have stumbled over in this 21st century AD. It comes in the form of (duh) reading some actual theological history. In rapid succession I recently finished Dominion by Tom Holland and Paul: A Biography by N. T. Wright. One of the things I have previously struggled to do is to get some tangible understanding of the differences between the various Protestant splinters off the Catholic Church, the church of Christendom. I have not been able to get sufficient answers, but in these two books, I am getting to the juicy richness of what we in America often glibly speak of in terms like Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment. But I think that we Americans have, especially those enamored with the shiny surfaces of our secular disciplines have lost the deeper plot. I say this as a former Republican, appalled but not astonished by suspect Trump selling his version of The Holy Bible. WTF?

On the one hand there is the excuse of the ‘spiritual’ which is little more than a declaration of the self as a human being and not a dumb animal or robot. Of course we experience the numinous. Of course we are attracted to fill in the blanks of our lives. Everybody does that. The excuses for expressly not being religious are obvious as well. Free individuals resist cults. There are almost no ways for us to be deeply informed about the aspects of Christianity that are not expressed in cult-like ways. That is the fault of our boring mediocre media companies and their drone-like journos - you know the sort. So that’s all of our problem. One does not have enough time, at least I don’t, to systematically attend 50 different churches and evaluate whether or not they:

• Get it.

• Make it real beyond their doors.

So this is my confession. So many churches feel like cults. After all, how many parishioners do the pilgrim thing? Christianity seems very weak in American practice, and despite the fact I know that there are sterling individuals of faith on whom I can rely, I don’t necessarily trust their churches. And I don’t trust their interpretations of the Bible, not that I have interrogated them deeply - I’m not that cynical. This is why I am so fortunate to have discovered these two scholars. By accident? By providence? At least I pay attention, unlike the MSM.

Considering the mainstream on other hand there are those who’ve taken the opposite of Pascal’s wager, they’ve taken Nietzsche’s wager. They live the uncomfortable life of skepticism ranging from the glib snark of agnostics, to the fearful uncertainty over ‘raising a child in this chaotic world’ to a practiced recital of witch trials, torture and pedophilia laid specifically at the feet of Christianity. As if those crimes are the most significant things it has accomplished on this planet. I’ve been an apologist, I suppose, without ever bothering to say exactly what that means. I’ve kept it simple. God is the Universe. Religion and science both aim to humbly discover and obey the rules, whereas technology and magic take them for granted and implement man’s will to mystify and subjugate other men. Does it make your knee jerk that I don’t say religion mystifies and subjugates man? Maybe you’ve become an apologist for the secular side. How often do you eschew the privileges of space-age technology? You know what the rocket science was for don’t you? Can you spell ICBM? I knew you could.

How To Believe In God

What I am beginning to understand is what makes Christianity so special that it has lasted so long and been so compatible with that which is not cult-like in practice. Nothing has spoken to that so much for me as Wright’s biography of the Apostle Paul. I’ll get into that later, after I’ve read all of the books (both Paul’s and Wright’s).

What is pressing today, aside from the recent moral defaults in this great secular nation, can be summed up quite simply.

If your worldview does not account for evil, you need to rethink it.

I am faced with the lacuna of proper democratically motivated and protocol compliant cosmopolites like me who are ill-prepared to expect and deal with chaos, disorder, destruction and evil from godless commies or the man on the street. In other words when George Bush declared that there was an Axis of Evil, their reaction was a dismissive shrug, and mine was an increased focus on geopolitical affairs. I’m not talking about the Progressives who want to live in a postmodern economy and culture where anything and everything can be creatively manufactured and monetized. I’ve got their number. I’m talking about those who aren’t all the way Left but trying to save the remnants of the liberal order. Those very same ones who claim respect for Enlightenment Liberalism and scientific rationality. I know you. I see you. I respect you. I’m like you. But you don’t see evil. Therefore you will be late. Free speech is a necessity of liberty, but that pen doesn’t have a chance when swords are picked up. You all think about creeping fascism but you take the paradox of tolerance only halfway. The point is to violently arrest violent intolerance. When they came for the Jews you didn’t speak up because you didn’t have a rifle. You and I are both lacking that level of conviction, but I’m trying to really deal with evil, now.

It is clear that most democratically motivated and protocol compliant cosmopolitain institutions like the Ivy Leagues and the respectable press have been besieged by the social neutron bombs of populist politics, BLM activism, woke religion, trans controversy, intersectional rubrics, cultural Marxism, and other mind viruses propagated by useful idiots, social justice warriors, fast fashionistas and the wives of zillionaires & their poetic performance avatars. Who do you think manufactures pussy hats anyway? Some of these institutions have resisted, some have been infiltrated, others have embraced the demons. And yet so many of these same institutions scratch their heads in wonder that so much of the ‘white working class’ seems impervious to these infections. Aren’t they all just the very yokels that Hilary Clinton said they are? Aren’t they all just the racist bootlicks of Trump?

Maybe we should ask some Asian-Americans. Maybe we should ask some Jews. Maybe we should ask some Christians. Maybe we should ask some Mexicans. Maybe we should ask ourselves if we have been accepting ‘diversity’ the same way the Left invented it. Maybe we should wonder why so many Americans would rather use terms like ‘Latinx’ than ‘fellow Christian’ or ‘fellow American’. Or is that too obvious?

The evil is out to get them, and so many of us can’t seem to get our finger on it. Maybe that’s because we haven’t looked deeply enough at what Paul was saying to the Ephesians when they stoned him and threw him in jail.

As a prisoner in the Lord, then, I urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling you have received: with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, and with diligence to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

I know nationalism is taking a beating in America. Some of you have immediately thought of MLK writing from jail. Was he more Christian or more American?

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Proper Christianity is an irresistible force that vibrates through immovable objects. The Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t cut it. If we are to think of America as a shining city on the hill, well that’s a Christian sentiment and MLK was all about reconciling the two. Similarly, Wright points directly to the heart of what is meant by Judeo-Christian as he invokes Paul who invited the gentiles to play nicely, even as his new club remains compatible with the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Aristotelians, and of course those wild and crazy Corinthians.

This historical depth is what’s new to my ‘Christianity’. The historical evolution of thought around perennial philosophical questions of good and evil can be very well understood by this deeper study of Christianity, which is older and more well researched than Harvard University. Thus I find that it is very useful to cite the evolution of Christianity in order to transcend the malaise of the present, and in particular draw attention the the very problem of evil. This is because I believe it is necessary to transcend the noise of that aspect of democracy whose stochastic processes are validated by populism unmoderated by principle. In other words, the court of public opinion is bound to crash against the limits of the Overton Window, and God, the Universe and the truth of wisdom (humility, discovery and reason) lie beyond that window. I’m adjusting my moral frame of reference.

If Christendom stands compliant with yet distinct from the relativistic regimes of truth sustainable by random polities, then it has that particular value, especially in the matters of moral suasion where ordinary patriotism and pledges to defend the Constitution fall short. The Constitution doesn’t stand against all evils.

Paul’s lesson is that such a Christendom is one of humanist unity and love.

Repeat that to yourself more slowly. I’ve got to believe that Paul’s humanism is more longstanding and true than anything conjured up by flaks at the World Economic Forum, the journalists at the Atlantic, the scholars at the RAND Institute or all of the PhDs at Oxford, save perhaps the best of their divinity scholars, like N. T. Wright. What we can clearly see is the caving of the respect for Jews among us Americans and that has proven for me that our institutions, by and large have failed in all but the most predictably rote dimensions. In short, they have fallen for the seductions of Old Nick. They are agents of the Devil. They are harboring evil.

Of course they will persist. They render appropriately to their respective Caesars. I need to be able to see with a better, more historically informed Christian eye, how to describe this evil, this idolatry. So even if I make some Platonic errors in describing what is Good, I’m not wrong by Popper to know and expect human fallibility, or as Christians call it, Original Sin, from which we must all be continually redeemed. Because I don’t expect institutions to be reformed commensurate with their misdeeds, and because I don’t desire revolution, I am satisfied with individual redemption. I want people to mind their souls, and I know how swiftly that can be accomplished. Christianity provides a well-understood method for people to examine their souls, and consequently clearly see their sins and failings.

The alternative is for people to not see. I think we’ve all had enough of Nazis.