The whole woke thing, the CRT, that’s the critical race theory, and the transgender movement, and the 1619 project, which is a bunch of lies, right? All of that is its own religion. And Christians have to wake up and understand we are at war. It’s a war of two religions, the Judeo-Christian religion, and the other religion, which is the antithesis of that in every way, shape or form.
John Zmirak
I agree with every word that Michael Brown wrote condemning Alt-Right intolerance. I’ve written for many years about the evils of racial narcissism. I’ve noted how Alt-Right spokesmen endorse even the vilest evil on earth today — abortion — for crank “eugenic” reasons. These are not good people. We should flee their evil company.
Nor should we ever abandon Christianity’s bone-deep universalism. I’m a Celtic Slav. My ancestors were tree-worshiping pagans. So I am grateful to the Jews for passing on both the Law and the Gospel. I wouldn’t want them locking me out because I lack father Abraham’s chromosomes.
Each of us faces temptations of tribalism or simple, ugly bias. Both reject the love of neighbor that Jesus demands of us.
Who Feeds the Alt-Right? The Christian Left.
But I’d like to put Dr. Brown’s comments in perspective. I would like to explain: Why are some otherwise sensible Christians tempted by Alt-Right stances, to the peril of their souls? To do that, I must point to other, subtler, more insidious errors. Most of those tempted to Alt-Right heresy are driven there as a violent over-reaction to globalism and multiculturalism.
Heresies usually come in pairs — each one equally far from the truth, but in opposite directions. Each claims to “cure” the other. That’s how they worm their way into our hearts. The Monophysites denied that Jesus has a human nature. They thought this the only way to nail shut the door against the Arian heresy. (Arians denied Our Lord’s divinity.) And so on, through the centuries.
Globalism and multiculturalism don’t lurk in dank corners of Twitter and 4chan. They strut around Harvard Yard. At Brussels and Davos, they’re the official party line. They infect the counsels of bishops and evangelists. These errors get funded by George Soros, and praised by secular media. They’re spread by the same bureaucrats at the United Nations and the European Union who fight the Church on life and marriage. Who threaten its basic freedoms. These errors serve secular culture as a new, post-Christian religion.
Globalism: A New Creed for Post-Christians
Don’t take it from me: It was gay liberal Catholic Andrew Sullivan who pointed out that this movement acts like a self-righteous, intolerant creed. Another name these errors go by is the wonkish-sounding “Intersectionality.” Here’s what Sullivan says of it:
“Intersectionality” is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it’s a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. —
It is operating, in Orwell’s words, as a “smelly little orthodoxy,” and it manifests itself, it seems to me, almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained — and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., “check your privilege,” and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.
Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners. It has an idea of virtue — and is obsessed with upholding it. The saints are the most oppressed who nonetheless resist. The sinners are categorized in various ascending categories of demographic damnation, like something out of Dante. The only thing this religion lacks, of course, is salvation. Life is simply an interlocking drama of oppression and power and resistance, ending only in death.
A Workplace-Safe Religion
Multiculturalist globalism is as worldly as — and not a whit more humane than — the paganized “German Christianity” that the Nazis foisted on Germans. But it has its hooks deeply sunk in “Mainline” Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. Preaching it won’t get you banned from social media. Or silenced on campus. It might even get you a job writing manifestos for bishops.
Want to start a career as a successful public speaker? Get certified somehow as a specialist in countering “white male privilege.” You could tour Christian campuses for the rest of your natural life. You’ll never encounter a heckler. Even bigots who oppose you will likely be shamed into silence.
Multiculturalist globalism is every bit as worldly as — and not a whit more humane than — the paganized “German Christianity” that the Nazis foisted on Germans.
Meanwhile, fair-minded intellectuals like Charles Murray get driven off campuses by gangs of hooded rioters. Critics of mass Muslim influx into Europe get imprisoned, fined, or silenced on social media. But Muslims who favor sharia, or blacks who call for white genocide, sail smoothly along with the Zeitgeist.
Addled Christians mistake multiculturalism’s fashionable teachings for the Gospel’s real implications. Church leaders encourage this, if they crave the love of the worldly. So (unlike Dr. Brown) they loudly and exclusively condemn heresies like racism and xenophobia that are already widely despised. They treat these as burning issues that threaten millions.
Shouting “Fire” in a Flooded Theater
And that makes Screwtape smile. Remember how he boasted:
We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.
In fact, the loudest anti-racists in the churches often gladly embrace the opposite errors. As answers to white racism and xenophobia they demand crippling white guilt and de facto open borders — even to millions of angry, intolerant Muslims. No wonder some people who reject the multiculturalist heresy are tempted to lurch to the other evil extreme.
Christians who are too attached to their race or nationhood are like the Pharisees. But globalists are Sadducees.
It’s our job as Christians to strike a moral balance. Not to moralize and grandstand, in the hope that the secular left will pat us on the head. And no, not to blindly embrace a pagan error, just to tick off the liberals.
Christians who denounce President Trump over immigration typically condemn all restrictions or limits. They don’t argue that our quotas are too low, or that our enforcement methods need improvement. They spastically denounce every attempt to get our nation’s borders under control. But you never hear them criticize nations in Latin America or Africa that also patrol their borders and limit immigration. Racism is a weird kind of sin, which only white folks can commit.
The Only Thing Worse than a Pharisee
Let’s put this issue in stark New Testament terms. Christians who are too attached to their race or nationhood are like the Pharisees. They have taken things that are genuinely good and made of them a fetish. They’ve mistaken traditions of men for the law of almighty God. They dimly feel that their identity alone — say, as a law-abiding middle class white person — somehow counts for them as a virtue. (Just so, some Pharisees waved off Jesus’ call to conversion because they were “children of Abraham.”) Jesus fulminated against the Pharisees, but He bothered to preach among them. However misguided, at least they were making an effort.
But globalists are the Sadduccees, to whom Jesus barely spoke — even when they put Him on trial. The Sadduccees collaborated with the Roman pagans to keep their hold on power. Just so, the globalists work with anti-Christian, anti-democratic Leviathans like the UN and the European Union to silence the voice of voters. They take their coins not from Caesar but from Soros.
The comfortable, sophisticated Sadduccees sniffed after Roman globalism. Much better than the narrow, “bigoted” nationalism of the Pharisees. Just as the Sadducees waved off large parts of the Jewish scriptures, the globalists shrug at life, sexual morals, and religious freedom — which just happen to be the issues over which the wealthy and the worldly now hate the Church.
So please, for the love of God, avoid the Alt-Right and its minions. But to solve the Alt-Right problem, you need to strike at its roots: It’s an inchoate, angry reaction to a powerful, slippery heresy that preens as a winsome angel of light.
This liberal theme on sex and gender follows no logic. The arguments for each do contradict the other. There's none more foolish than those who choose to remain blind.
This is about breaking down family structures, breaking down all traditions simply because the liberals have decided it is a threat to their "be gay agenda". The next generation of kids are being brainwashed... in school, in movies, on television...
next you will see straight people being accused of "hate" simply because they choose not to have relationships that counter their preferences. Already transgenders are up in arms- when men they chase find out about their gender reassignment - often these men detangle themselves and break up the "relationship"... what utter nonsense !
You are absolutely correct that Justice demands the punishment fits the crime. In human terms, that's why there are human laws that deal with the crimes of man. However, human punishment has no bearing on the soul of the individual. Human justice cannot punish the soul, only the body. Therefore, human justice is incomplete.
The reason eternal torment is necessary is for the soul. When we sin, not only is it usually a mental and/or physical act of defiance towards God. It is also a spiritual act of defiance towards God. It's "I don't need you to tell me how to live my life, my soul is fine on my own". That's the sin Adam & Eve committed against God in the Garden and why the spiritually died that day. At the end of life, the soul lives on and it would seem that as it was in physical life, it is in physical death. If it accepted Christ's gift of salvation, then it is spiritually reborn and lives forever, glorifying Christ. If it did not accept Christ's gift of salvation, then it is spiritually dead and forever curses Christ.
[On Stephen King's "It"]
Think of the razor-like teeth of Pennywise the clown tearing off the arm of little Georgie. That’s a powerful metaphor for the actions of an abortionist.
[On Donald Trump]
He’s married to an immigrant. Intellectually speaking, from a logical continuum, you can’t have a child who is from an immigrant mother and be anti-immigrant. So it’s just intellectually naive. Right?
[On that photo of the preachers praying over Trump]
It just stirred the devil and his crowd up — Satan doesn’t want sanctity of life. He doesn’t want religious freedom and the power of the free pulpit in America. Satan wants to stop the advance of freedom and persecute people and kill, steal and destroy. It’s disheartening. I didn’t expect this much vileness, depravity and darkness.
If you think (and you’d better) that your soul matters enough to Satan that he will bother to send you a tempter, just imagine the horde he dispatches to batter the president.
One of our nation’s two political parties is now completely dedicated to a fundamental evil. Abortion is even worse than segregation. (Democrats defended that for 100 years). It’s on the level of slavery.
Look below at Jenny's comment. She's the one that got me banned from ChristianNewsNetwork for calling her the God-hating spiritually-dead child of wrath and troll that she is.
Ain't it just grand that CNN bans Christians while letting that stuff run rampant.
Also, while it is true that we are no longer under the Law today, those who are not in Christ are still under the Law. The ONLY reason that Homosexuals and Adulterers are not put to death is because of the laws of this country and our command to obey them unless they specifically require us to sin against God. Lessening the penalty for Homosexuality does not require that. Ergo, those countries that do have the Death Penalty are no less just than we.
(in response to a defense of same sex marriage)
"STDs are far more prevalent in the gay community than hetero-sexuals. It's an invalid comparison. Plus, marriage means one man and one woman, and if people actually stuck to that, you have virtually a 0% percent chance of getting any STDs."
"it is agreed by all medical and health care professional that orientation is not related to a child's postnatal social environment."
Well, that's just a verifiably proven outright lie. So much for your book. Ah but we all know what you're response will be. That by "all" you mean all those who are "credible" according to YOU because they agree with your fallacious POV.
There is NO such thing as a "sexual orientation" toward anything other than the "orientation" God gives all people. The truth is Same-Sex Attraction (SSA) is NOT the same as "sexual orientation". Just another lie to perpetuate your Liberal agenda.
But hey, thanks for publicly displaying that you and UC Davis think one putting their opinions into a published book and giving it a fancy name somehow makes that "facts".
Of course, you won't be intellectually honest enough to admit that.
I see the liberal, secular feminist and the homosexual/transgender ideologies running smack into each other like bulls. The losers in this bloody clash? There will be many, but let’s talk about the most ironic losers: women.
Neither ideology respects true femininity and the beauty of womanhood. Both want to empty it of its gift and uniqueness.
Both have created a caricature of woman. Both exploit what they find useful about the female body and shun the rest. Both have reduced womanhood to only the parts that serve their agenda.
Both the modern, perpetually-contracepting woman and the transgender “woman” are sterile. The former disdains her natural fertility and procreative nature, going to great lengths to quash the nuisance; the latter insists he doesn’t even need fertility to be a woman.
The transgender ideology insists that a man can, through chemical and surgical means, simply “transition” and become a woman. Poof! It’s magic!
Gender is supposedly “fluid” now and a meaningless social construct at that.
But hold on, not so fast!
The transgender movement insists there is a distinct difference between the male and female brain; between the male and female soul. Those who “transition” are considered trapped in the wrong body — the dissonance between how they feel and think and their genitals is proof. Yes, they say, being male or female obviously matters, and there are clearly important differences.
We’re told that “men” have menstrual periods now. “Men” have abortions, too. (So much for the shiny trophy of “women’s reproductive freedom.”)
Even the liberal feminist theme show, favorite of college students everywhere, The Vagina Monologues, is now sexist and insensitive because it excludes those “women” who don’t have a vagina.
I can’t believe I even wrote the preceding paragraphs in earnest. It all sounds insane. It is insane.
In 2015, it’s just a matter of adding or removing pieces and parts, like playing with Mr. Potato Head. Or Mrs. Potato Head. (How long before that toy becomes just Potato Head Person? Any bets?)
I’ve had enough of misappropriated womanhood.
Bruce Jenner gets pumped full of female hormones, has cosmetic facial surgery, gets large breast implants, hair extensions, makeup and a push-up bra, and suddenly, he is supposedly a woman. That’s all it means to be a woman: big boobs, lingerie and makeup.
Never mind that his new breasts are useless. They’re just decoration, and garish decoration at that. They symbolize a superficial “womanhood” that’s empty of meaning or purpose beyond sexual arousal.
A woman’s breasts mean infinitely more than that. The human race can credit its entire survival up to our modern era on mothers’ breasts. Mother’s milk from mother’s breasts is an integral part of being a woman, whether the modern feminist likes it or not.
The female body is gloriously designed to grow and nurture new human life. It’s an undeletable part of the female code at the deepest level. Whether our wombs ever carry a child, or whether our breasts ever nurse a baby is irrelevant to the fact that our feminine physical nature was created for that miraculous purpose. It’s inextricable to womanhood.
That is not something any surgeon can replicate with silicone, nor any doctor with artificial hormones. Bruce Jenner’s surgeon has created a mannequin, not a woman.
Adding insult to injury is the exploitation of women’s reproductive parts in the service of manufacturing children. Women are merely “ovens” used to create babies conceived without sex for the satisfaction of same-sex couples, single parents and other couples who want to “design” their child according to their specifications.
Mothers are replaced with “donor eggs” and surrogate wombs, and neither will actually have any presence in the child’s life. Who needs a mom? All that’s wanted is the raw material and the human incubator, please.
This is a profane indignity to women, to womanhood and to motherhood. It once again reduces women to parts. Parts that can be bought, rented and used to satisfy someone else’s wants. We can’t yet grow our special-ordered kids in the lab; we still need God’s equipment to get the job done, so we gotta have some wombs to use.
Those who champion abortion, free contraception, same-sex “marriage” and surrogacy are the ones always screaming that Republicans, conservatives, and especially Catholics, treat women like “breeders” without brains or any worth of their own. Ironic, eh? Who’s zoomin’ who here?
Who really appreciates the inherent, unique gift of womanhood? Those who just want to use the egg and rent the womb but refuse the mother, or those who know that a mother is irreplaceable in a child’s life?
Who really values women? Those who think plastic surgery and pills can turn a man into a woman, or those who understand the feminine genius that goes beyond boobs and makeup?
Who really respects a woman’s body? Those who believe it’s necessary to shut down her natural, healthy fertility with carcinogenic hormones, and even intentionally damage a healthy, functioning organ with crazy devices? No way. Doing damage to a woman’s health and body in the name of “equality” doesn’t sound very equal to me.
Fertility and child-bearing are part of the whole package of a woman. You can’t claim to value women, or champion women’s rights or equality and then pick her apart like you’re scouring a used car for spare parts. You can’t take what’s useful to you and leave the rest of her.
You can’t fabricate a sterile “woman” out of a man’s body and call him a woman. A woman is nobody’s Play-doh creation. She’s the marvelous handiwork of God. Her physical body, her feminine nature, her mind, her gifts and her strengths are all designed with intent and purpose by Him out of great love.
Respect the whole woman — her body, her fertility, her nature that is complementary to a man’s, her motherhood — or you don’t really respect her at all.
Sample the hate that has been spewed at the state of Indiana in the past week, and faithful Christians in recent years, by gay activists and their allies. We are “bigots,” “Neanderthals” and “haters,” whose views must be ritually rejected by anyone hoping to keep a job in today’s America — even in a Catholic high school. Where will this end? Is there a logical stopping point for this aggression, where Christians are left in peace?
History teaches that mass vilification rarely stops short of spilling blood. The French Jacobins who spent the 1780s slandering the clergy in pornographic pamphlets went on in the 1790s to slaughter Christians by the hundreds of thousands. The Turks paved the way for killing a million Armenian Christians with a wave of propaganda. The Bolsheviks followed their “anti-God” crusade of the 1920s with starvation camps and firing squads. The Communist governments of Eastern Europe obeyed the same script, as scholar Anne Applebaum documents in her sobering study The Iron Curtain. The Hutu government of Rwanda prepared for its assault on the once-powerful Tutsis by incessantly describing them as “cockroaches” on radio broadcasts, which triggered a genocide.