Statue of Don Felix Sarda y Salvany. Photograph by Josep Renalias.

The good Dr. Don Felix Sarda y Salvany (1844-1916) was a Spanish Catholic priest and writer from Spain’s Eastern region of Catalonia. His scribal tenacity was impressive; the Don was the editor of the Catholic weekly journal La Revista Popular for more than 40 years, and in the years leading up to the start of the civilization-ending First World War, he published a twelve-volume series titled Propaganda catolica (“Catholic Propaganda”), dryly described by an unknown Wikipedia contributor as “a vast collection of short books, pamphlets, articles and conferences.” The Italian historian Roberto de Mattei says of the Don Sarda: “[he] was a popular priest in Spain at the end of the century and was considered exemplary for the firmness of his principles and the clarity of his apostolate.”

(I note here wryly that my Google Chrome browser attempts to correct the word ‘apostolate,’ describing [among other things] organized religious works, to the word ‘apostate,’ describing a religious defector.)

According to the Spanish Bibliography of Reference, the Don exercised an “apostolate of immense efficiency and resonance.” His writings against the growing liberalism of 19th century Europe achieved some level of notability after a series of Spanish political fiascoes from 1868-1874 that began with a liberal revolution and deposition of the ruling Queen Isabella II, followed by a short-lived monarchy under the Savoyard Prince Amadeo, followed by his own deposition and a similarly short-lived Spanish Republic that ended in 1874 when the original Queen Isabella II’s son Alfonso XII was restored as King of Spain in a military coup. Three coups, two monarchies, one republic, and all back to square one in just six years — politics today just isn’t as exciting as it used to be. But I digress.

I will here provide a choice quote of the Don’s so that the reader may be sufficiently intrigued to studiously follow the forthcoming backstory and analysis (my highlights in bold):

 “The theater, literature, public and private morals are all saturated with obscenity and impurity. The result is inevitable; a corrupt generation necessarily begets a revolutionary generation. Liberalism is the program of naturalism. Free-thought begets free morals, or immorality. Restraint is thrown off and a free rein given to the passions. Whoever thinks what he pleases will do what he pleases. Liberalism in the intellectual order is license in the moral order. Disorder in the intellect begets disorder in the heart, and vice-versa. Thus does Liberalism propagate immorality, and immorality Liberalism.” (Liberalism is a Sin, Ch. 26)

During the 1868-1874 interregnum, the Catholic Church in Spain suffered a number of blows to its status, especially due to the short-lived First Spanish Republic that moved to establish a secular state. While Catholicism retrieved its status as the state religion of Spain after the restoration of the monarchy under Alfonso XIII in 1874, the sense of spiritual decay that had gripped Spain since the 18th century continued unabated. Yale historian Noel Valis describes a “a growing alienation from the Church,” and refers us to the observations of a Protestant chaplain in Spain Hugh James Rose, who dedicated an entire chapter of his 1873 book on the country to the “Decay of Faith in Spain.” Choice observations of Rose’s: “The Church of Spain … is an institution which has lost its hold on the masses, both educated and uneducated … [there is in the Spanish] a sense of spiritual drift, of having come unanchored from their religious moorings.”

It is in this context that Don Sarda’s magnum opus was released, the 1886 book Liberalism is a Sin, which was subsequently reprinted up to twenty times by 1960. Salvany, who believed liberalism “is the burning issue of our century,” found a quick rebuttal to his work by the liberal-leaning Catholic intelligentsia — both pieces were submitted to the Roman Catholic Church’s Sacred Congregation of the Index (the successor institution to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum — List of Prohibited Books). The Congregation’s secretary ruled soon after in favor of Salvany, finding errors in the rebuttal and “uncharitable insinuations” about the good Don.

To illustrate the then Church’s zealous and masculine dismissal of liberal protests, I will excerpt the secretary’s letter to the liberal Bishop who ordered the rebuttal:

To The Most Rev. Jacobo Catala Et Alboso,

Bishop of Barcelona

Most Excellent Sir:

[…]

D. Felix Sarda, merits great praise for his exposition and defense of the sound doctrine therein set forth with solidity, order and lucidity, and without personal offense to anyone.

[…]

The same judgment, however, cannot be passed on the other work, that by D. de Pazos, for in matter it needs corrections. Moreover, his injurious manner of speaking cannot be approved, for he inveighs rather against the person of D. Sarda than against the latter’s supposed errors.

[…]

Therefore, the Sacred Congregation has commanded D. de Pazos, admonished by his own Bishop, to withdraw his book, as far as he can, from circulation, and in the future, if any discussion of the subject should arise, to abstain from all expressions personally injurious, according to the precept of true Christian charity; and this all the more since Our Holy Father, Leo XIII, whereas he urgently recommends castigation of error, neither desires nor approves expressions personally injurious, especially when directed against those who are eminent for their doctrine and their piety.

[…]

Fr. Jerome Secheri, O.P.
Secretary of the Sacred Congregation Of the Index.

Don Sarda had the full backing of the Roman Catholic Church of the late 1800’s, and his works built on the Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors) issued by the Holy See under Pope Pius IX in 1864, which condemned, among other things: pantheism, naturalism, absolute rationalism, socialism, communism, and modern liberalism. This is all relevant to the crux of this entire piece, which finally manifests itself: that the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany, and his contemporaries in the Catholic world, were not just potentially in agreement with the tenets of the nascent neoreactionary school of thought (more introduction to it can be accessed here, here and here), but fully paleo-neoreactionaries, a clumsy description which we might condense into reactionaries, with the understanding that our contemporary neoreactionaries are rediscovering reactionaries and applying their insights to the chaotic world of 2015 (hence, neo-). I will now highlight several key tenets of the 21st century neoreactionary school of thought that were articulated nearly word-for-word by the 19th century Don, and, crucially, firmly defended by the Catholic Church at the time, as illustrated above. There are far more instances of overlap that I will go over comprehensively sometime over the next 1-2 weeks on my personal blog, Ara Maxima, but these three will suffice for now.

1. To Hell with the journalists.

The contempt that most Westerners hold for the “mainstream media,” and the much deeper contempt that neoreactionaries hold for journalists themselves is rooted in a very real and consistent tendency for journalists to style themselves as heroic investigators of dark secrets held from the masses for illicit gain, but to act in reality as left-wing propagandists advancing a uniform agenda of feminism, multiculturalism, LGBT-ism, and a myriad of other -isms through a long-cultivated routine of mental gymnastics and/our outright fraud. The result is a “mainstream media narrative” divorced from reality to one degree or another, useful only to leftists (Don Salvany’s “liberals”) for political purposes — namely, attacking and crushing with overwhelming propaganda the rightist resistance they invariably face.

“Here are theoretical and practical Liberals. The first are the dogmatizers of the sect—the philosophers, the professors, the controversialists, the journalists. They teach Liberalism in books, in discourses, in articles, by argument or by authority, in conformity with a rationalistic criterion, in disguised or open opposition to the criterion of the divine and supernatural revelation of Jesus Christ.” (Ch. 9)

“Amongst Liberals we must not forget to include those who manage to evade any direct exposition or expression of the Liberal theory, but who nevertheless obliquely sustain it in their daily practice by writing and orating after the Liberal method, by recommending Liberal books and men, measuring and appreciating everything according to the Liberal criterion, and manifesting, on every occasion that offers, an intense hatred for anything that tends to discredit or weaken their beloved Liberalism. Such is the conduct of those prudent journalists whom it is difficult to apprehend in the flagrant advocacy of any proposition concretely Liberal, but who nevertheless, in what they say and in what they do not say, never cease to labor for the propagation of this cunning heresy. Of all Liberal reptiles, these are the most venomous.” (Ch. 9)

“And all this comes of a foolish desire to be estimated Liberal. Insane illusion! The usage of the word Liberal makes the Catholic who accepts it as his own one with all that finds shelter in its ominous shadow. Rationalism is the toadstool that flourishes in its dark shades, and with Rationalism does such a journalist identify himself, thus placing himself in the ranks of the enemies of Jesus Christ!” (Ch. 13)

2. To Hell with the “moderates.”

A more niche contempt held by the modern Dissident Right at large — including the gamut of neoreactionaries, monarchists, paleoconservatives, white nationalists, New Rightists, identitarians, right-libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, radical traditionalists and so forth — is the contempt for the mainstream right-wing political forces that exist in every Western country but act as little more than controlled opposition for the zealous Left, making loud noises in parliament halls but inevitably and invariably capitulating to the Left’s demands, only to style themselves as the vanguards of the old order a decade later — but not the primordial rightist order, but the 10-year-old new order of the Left!

“This class has not fully penetrated into the domain of truth. That they will ever enter the city of light depends upon their own sincerity and honesty. If they earnestly desire to know the truth in its fullness and seek it with sincere purpose, God’s grace will not fail them. But they are in a dangerous position. On the borderland between the realms of light and darkness, the devil is most active and ingenious in detaining those who seem about to escape his snares, and he spares nothing to retain in his service a great number of people who would truly detest his infernal machinations if they only perceived them. His method, in the instance of persons infected with Liberalism, is to suffer them to place one foot within the domain of truth, provided they keep the other inside the camp of error. In this way they stand the victim of the devil’s deceit and their own folly. In this way those whose consciences are not yet entirely hardened escape the salutary horrors of remorse; so the pusillanimous and the vacillating, who comprise the greater number of Liberals, avoid compromising themselves by pronouncing themselves such openly and squarely; so the shrewd and calculating (according to the measure of expediency—how much time they will spend in each camp), manage to show themselves the friends and allies of both; so a man is enabled to administer an official and recognized palliative to his failings, his weaknesses and his blunders. It is the obscurity that arises from the indefiniteness of clearly defined principles of truth and error in the Liberalist’s mind that makes him the easy victim of Satan. His boasted strength is the very source of his weakness. It is because he has no real solid knowledge of the principles of truth and error that he is so easily deluded into the belief of his own intellectual superiority. He is in a mental haze—a fog which hides from him the abyss into which his vanity and pride, cunningly played upon by Satan, are invariably drawing him.” (Ch. 8)

3.  Demotism

Demotism, the idea that a ruler must rule “in the name of the people,” is a malady of civilization omnipresent in the post-Enlightenment period: the three great dragons of the 20th century, capitalism, communism and fascism, all ostensibly ruled “by the will of the people,” a stark contrast to the aristocratic monarchies of Old Europe which ruled not “by the will of the people,” but “by the will of God.” The idea of demotism is a uniquely neoreactionary insight, which the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany foreshadowed heavily in this excerpt on the differences between Catholic and secular governments, and their relationships to monarchical and republican governments. Don Sarda’s point seems to be that the crucial worth of a government lies not in its constituted political form i.e. whether it is republican or monarchical, but rather in its agreed-upon basis for legitimacy — the people, or God? Couldn’t an absolute monarch be a demotist, and wouldn’t this constitute a problem? And couldn’t a republican government consist of ardently religious aristocrats sharing a divine right to rule over the masses? There is ample room for debate here.

“A government, whatever be its form, is Catholic if its constitution, its legislation, and its politics are based on Catholic principles; it is Liberal if it bases its constitution, its legislation, and its politics on rationalistic principles. It is not the act of legislation—by the king in a monarchy, by the people in a republic, or by both in a mixed form of government—which constitutes the essential nature of its legislation or of its constitution. What constitutes this is whether it does or does not carry with it the immutable seal of the Faith and whether it be or be not conformable with what the Christian law imposes upon states as well as upon individuals. just as amongst individuals, a king in his purple, a noble with his escutcheon or a workman in his overalls can be truly Catholic, so states can be Catholic, whatever be the place assigned them in the scale of governmental forms. In consequence, the fact of being Liberal or anti-Liberal has nothing whatever to do with the horror which everyone ought to entertain for despotism and tyranny, nor with the desire of civil equality between all citizens; much less with the spirit of toleration and of generosity, which, in their proper acceptation, are Christian virtues. And yet all this, in the language of certain people and of certain journals, is called Liberalism. Here we have an instance of a thing which has the appearance of Liberalism and which in reality is not Liberalism at all.

On the other hand, there exists a thing which is really Liberalism and yet has not the appearance of Liberalism. Let us suppose [i.e., imagine] an absolute monarchy like that of Russia, or of Turkey, or better still, one of the conservative governments of our times, the most conservative imaginable; let us suppose that the constitution and the legislation of this monarchy or of this government is based upon the principle of the absolute and free will of the king or upon the equally unrestricted will of the conservative majority, in place of being based on the principles of Catholic right, on the indestructibility of the Faith, or upon a rigorous regard of the rights of the Church; then, this monarchy and this conservative government would be thoroughly Liberal and anti-Catholic. Whether the free-thinker be a monarch, with his responsible ministry, or a responsible minister, with his legislative corps, as far as consequences are concerned, it is absolutely the same thing. In both cases their political conduct is in the direction of free-thought, and therefore it is Liberal. Whether or not it be the policy of such a government to place restraints upon the freedom of the press; whether, no matter under what pretext, it grinds its subjects and rules with a rod of iron; a country so governed, though it will not be free, will without doubt be Liberal. Such were the ancient Asiatic monarchies; such are many of our modern monarchies; such was the government of Bismarck in Germany; such is the monarchy of Spain, whose constitution declares the king inviolable, but not God.

Here then we have something which, without seeming to resemble Liberalism, really is Liberalism, the more subtle and dangerous precisely because it has not the appearance of the evil it is.” (Ch. 12)

Without regard to political or religious identity, I recommend all sane men take a day or two to carefully read the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany’s Liberalism is a Sin. Filled with biting commentary, no-holds-barred reactionary criticism, and such ardent and unforgiving opposition to the leftist-liberal movement that would make the staunchest Ultramontane blush, the entire text is available for free online at this link. Go, young men of the post-modern world: let your ancestors’ spiritual guides’ teach you the real things that they’ll never teach you in school.

The post Enter the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany: Liberalism is a Sin appeared first on Social Matter.

I’d like to begin by proposing the following: in any society, religion’s role is to make truth-claims which result in certain actions being considered right and good, and others being considered wrong and bad. Questioning the common religion is considered subversive (or at least something no one respectable does) because the implication is that you are justifying bad actions and attacking good ones. This guiding role is the defining core of how religions operate on the social level.

Now I’m sure that objections to that definition are already coming up. After all, it seems rather broad. Many things could come under that definition. Isn’t that exactly how ideologies operate as well?

Yes, yes it is. But we’ll get to that part in a moment. Let’s start by examining a common neoreactionary claim: namely, that the ideology of social progressivism acts as a religion.

Now that seems a bit unwieldy. First of all, most religions include gods and divinities in their truth claims. How can a system which makes no reference to gods act like a religion? But in fact, not all religions depend on gods either. Buddhism, for example, is recognized by everyone as being a religion. Yet it functions without the need for gods. In particular, belief in a creator God was rejected by the Buddha and his successors as being based in delusion. Now the fact is that many Buddhist cultures do include worship of a variety of deities. However, these deities are usually local in nature, and Buddhism was incorporated into these practices. The fact that no single god appears across Buddhism should be enough to show that no god is essential to Buddhism. Buddhists do not reject the possibility of higher dimensions and beings, but these too are considered to be subject to Karmic law. In fact, Buddhist writings warn that gods, when worshiped, may simply contribute to the attachment which binds humans to this world. While no particular god is held to be real or not, they are at worst a mere distraction from the path to Enlightenment. Thus we see that gods, while common, are not a necessary feature of religion. So progressivism is not barred from acting as a religion by not claiming any gods.

The second big objection is that religions are defined by making metaphysical claims. They claim to interact with a spiritual realm and have rituals. Ideologies don’t make any such claims, unless they’re religious in nature already like Islamism is. Progressivism in particular claims that one should tolerate all beliefs. Progressives hold a diversity of political opinions and religious views. Now it’s true that religions do make metaphysical claims (or at least assumptions). Ritual and action defined by spiritual intent is central to all religions. But to what extent does this impact how religion operates as a social phenomenon?

One example worth looking at is the practice of Shinto in Japan. On the one hand, 64% of Japanese don’t believe in God. On the other hand, 80% of the population reports taking part in rituals which descend from the animistic beliefs of ancient Japan. Buddhism is another major Japanese religion and we saw above how it views the worship of gods. In modern Japan, people accept varied and contradictory views about the spiritual world with which the temple priest is said to interact. Nevertheless, a huge majority of the society is still united by this religious tradition. Hinduism also was home to a huge variety of metaphysical philosophies. Some of them preached that the world was united in an underlying spiritual unity; others preached atheism and matter as the only reality. The rituals of Indian gods united a society which differed in their interpretations of those rituals. In ancient Greece, peasants who believed in the real power of Zeus and philosophers who most certainly did not attended the same temples. Even Christianity, where unity of belief is far more important, has tremendous philosophical diversity. The Catholic Church claims both the humanist Erasmus and the arch-reactionary anti-humanist Joseph de Maistre in its ranks. Now progressivism is an ideology, not a religion as such, and its claims aren’t spiritual in nature. That’s why people from a variety of religions can profess to it. But religious believers can also argue and contradict each other all they like, so long as their views don’t contradict the core beliefs of the religion. Neither religion nor ideology depends on total metaphysical agreement in order to unite a society.

So what sort of agreement do they depend on? Well, as we saw above, what unites Shinto, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism is that each of them operates in society through certain rituals, creeds, and ideas. Specifically, certain behaviours, actions, and attitudes become considered desirable. If a religion becomes institutional and widely recognized, adherence to these norms becomes a necessity for social respectability. Personally, I prefer thinking of them as memeplexes. A memeplex is a system of memes (ideas or behaviours) which is internally consistent and self-reinforcing. Memes compatible with the system become selected for, while those incompatible with it are rejected. In daily life, this means that certain behavours become socially respectable and others cause one to be ostracized. Some ideas and attitudes are good and proper, others are bad and dangerous. In Catholic Spain, piety toward God was praiseworthy. In Communist Russia, it was considered superstitious and condemned. Spain operated on one memeplex, Russia on another. In modern Russia, protecting the traditional Christian form of marriage is viewed by many as patriotic. In more and more of the West, it’s condemned as bigoted and loses people jobs. Now Russia’s memeplex has changed, and I’ll make the case below that the West operates on yet a third one.

This is the form of agreement which is essential in religion. Humanists and anti-humanists are both present in the Church because the memes they propagate are not incompatible with Christian doctrine. Ritual, not belief, is the essential core of Shinto, which is why atheists, Buddhists, and pantheists can all take part in them. In the same way, you can be a social progressive and be a Christian, atheist, or Jew. You can be in favour of intervention in Iraq (like Obama/Clinton) or against it. But you can’t reject the idea of equality. You must accept the idea that religion has no place in the State. A modern progressive probably can’t oppose gay marriage and still claim the label either. That’s because both religion and unbelief can be compatible with the progressive memeplex. Progressive arguments can be formulated for both intervention and non-intervention in Iraq. But egalitarianism is a fundamental meme within progressive ideology. Therefore, anti-egalitarian ideas are incompatible with it. Remember, not every individual in a society needs to accept these norms. Many times, it’s actually hard to see that there’s an orthodoxy at all. That’s because we think on a very marginal level. Actions and ideas get condemned because “everyone knows that that’s bad”, not because “that’s contrary to our memeplex.”. But enough people do act and think similarly enough that society develops certain recognizable norms.

Bolsheviks smash icons at an anti-religious demonstration; memetic war in action.

This is where we finally come to the question of non-religious memeplexes. What happens when a formal religion stops being the dominant cultural force? The promise of secularism has always been that religion would play no part in affairs of state. French and Turkish secularists go even further and demand the expulsion of religion from public life, including in dress, which is why they ban burkas. During the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, religion was purged from the state. The communist ideology was officially atheistic and anti-religious. Russian Orthodox Christianity had been an important source from which Russians derived their values, worldview, and attitudes about morality. With it purged, an opportunity emerged to see what would replace religion. Of course, it was Communism that replaced it. It was pretty effective at doing it too. Communism makes claims about reality (atheism, materialism) and creates a historical narrative (class struggle). It even has a vision for the future (proletarian revolution, the classless society). With these two elements, it could determine which actions were right and which were wrong. Those actions which contributed to the Revolution and worked toward equality and worker solidarity were good and praiseworthy. Those actions which supported the capitalists and the reactionaries – and eventually anyone who wasn’t the Bolsheviks – were bad and punished. Communism informed which actions were desirable. Communism was the framework within which respectable debate occurred. Communism was the ideology which you had to accept to become socially respectable in the USSR. In other words, Communism replaced Christianity as the overarching memeplex. Communism didn’t just purge Christianity; it replaced it as the working paradigm of society. It usurped the role of religion in society because it shared so many of its features.

This is what I mean by “the necessity of religion”. Human beings are social creatures. In order for meaningful communication to occur, we need some measure of common understanding. If we can’t agree on what actions are good and bad, we cannot act together. If we can’t decide which goals are worth pursuing, we can’t move forward. In order to answer those questions, we need to have fundamental values which we hold in common. Some system of fundamental and assumed beliefs and attitudes has to arise, or else society faces internal conflict and disintegration. The promise of secularism was that no religion should dominate that agreement. But if not religion, then what? France and Turkey answered that question by imposing modern Republican values, secular to the point of being anti-religious. If your religion or culture conflicted with those values, the expectation was that you conformed. Among the younger generation, progressivism is flexing its muscles as well. Here’s a short list of people who have felt the effects by being rejected from the sphere of respectability. Universities in particular have experienced shifting norms. The “safe space” ideology, which prizes tolerance and acceptance above dissent and argument, has caused politicians like Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be blocked from speaking on campuses, which should now be safe spaces in and of themselves. But political activism does not a memeplex make. After all, the point of a dominant memeplex is that it is accepted by society at large. The Millennial generation is probably the best example of what happens when progressive values become the new norms. Millennials have a tendency to be apolitical, but as a whole are extremely socially progressive. If you reflect those values, most Millennials will support your actions. If you don’t, most Millennials won’t. If Millennials are roused to action by conservative attacks on our rights (birth control), but acquiesce to progressive ones (banning speakers with the wrong opinions), which side will win out? Not even God is immune. This might be the defining force which has allowed the ideologies above to override concerns about “free speech” or “open debate”.

This is where neoreaction asks an uncomfortable question: what happened to all that freedom?

“Oh, make sure you tell them I only mean free from federal restriction. Corporate and media censorship is still cool.”

After all, the goal of liberalism was to create a society where freedom of thought and expression was encouraged. Wasn’t that the point? Weren’t we meant to be beyond having the state impose its values on people? Wasn’t questioning orthodoxy something to be celebrated? With the memeplex idea, it’s easier to understand the shift. When a memeplex becomes culturally dominant, it becomes more and more difficult to empathize with those who disagree with it. After all, those who think or act differently from the memeplex are bad. Now, when society is divided 50-50 between those who believe in traditional Christian morality and those who don’t, each side has a choice: demonize half the population or just say “fine, but you shouldn’t impose that on other people”. If only 5% of the population believes that premarital sex is sinful or that valid marriage must occur between heterosexuals, then it’s easier to demonize them for holding the belief at all even when they pose no threat. When hippies were a derided minority, social progressives believed in freedom of speech at a cultural level, not just a political one. After all, it’s no fun getting fired because you want the troops back from Vietnam. But in our day, progressive rhetoric has changed. Now the goal is to restrict where free speech should apply to the legal minimum. In other words, as a memeplex becomes dominant, freedom becomes less important and uniformity increases. As it becomes institutionalized, it’s necessary to agree with the memeplex in order to be respectable. Even parents face these questions. Parts of the Chinese community in Vancouver have opposed cultural progressive influences in schools. The position of the schools is that children have to learn about things like LGBT issues somehow. The hidden assumption is that these programs will help them learn the right mindset. The good mindset. The mindset of decent and respectable people. Someone’s orthodoxy has to win out.

This is what neoreactionaries mean when we say that social progressivism acts as a religion. As time goes on, certain memes triumph in the culture wars. The first shift in attitudes is slow. The sexual revolution faced tremendous cultural barriers and it took decades to see values change. Gay marriage, on the other hand, was first legalized in 2001 in the Netherlands; only 13 years later it is anathema to oppose it. We live in an age where this paradigm now informs the values of our generation. Its fundamental claims of equality and personal freedom are more or less unquestioned. It informs our actions as well. To support the next big Cause is good, and proof of your tolerance and open-mindedness. To practice a religion with traditional values is acceptable so long as you don’t contradict the overarching narrative. To actually challenge that narrative is something only bigots, reactionaries, and basement dwelling virgins do. (As an aside, a good rule of thumb about what beliefs are respectable is to see which shaming language is okay to use.)

Like the Russians a century ago, this generation in the West has experienced the victory of a new memeplex. What makes this memeplex fundamentally different is that it doesn’t claim the authority which religion does, or even like other political ideologies do. It insists that tolerance and personal freedom, free from judgement, are the Most Important Thing. Can’t we all just get along? But this is a delusion. In order for societies to function, commonality of values and visions must exist. Even a society which values tolerance above all else draws the line somewhere. Inevitably, certain ideas win out. Certain attitudes gain cultural dominance. Others become unfashionable, disrespectful, or outright heretical. Only bad people say or do those things. True, the new memeplex isn’t necessarily a religion, united in a single institution. But when all is said and done, when new orthodoxies are in place and new groups of heretics are shamed, purged, and punished, the only major difference is that the Church knew what it was.

The post A Faith By Any Other Name appeared first on Social Matter.

After 300 youth waited in line to be led to Christ in a service in May 1974, Hybels and other leaders began dreaming of forming a new church. They surveyed the community to find out why people weren’t coming to church. Common answers included: “church is boring”, “they’re always asking for money”, or “I don’t like being preached down to.” These answers shaped the group’s approach to the new church.

If you want to sell more product, then giving your customers what they want is bound to be a successful strategy. And if you’re selling Jesus, why let accidental aspects of Christianity get in the way of his essence? Our small, introverted, and pietistic Bible Fellowship church was about to undergo a massive transformation in the direction of seeker sensitivity. Twenty-four years later, the results of this transformation live on in one of the most hip and relevant churches Lynchburg, Virginia has to offer. And in the evangelical Mecca of Lynchburg, home of Liberty University, becoming that is no small achievement.

A Brief History

The search for relevance did not begin in 1974 with Bill Hybels and his fellow “youth group” leaders. Evangelical Christianity has never not been a search for relevance—a way of taking the Gospel message of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ, uncluttered by cultural baggage, directly to the people—often anti-intellectual, embarrassing, and decidedly unprogressive cultural baggage. There is a reason that the 95-year-old Billy Graham, confidant of many Presidents, remains one of most admired, well-respected figures down to this day, whereas the name “Bob Jones” is an epithet: He never let political controversy get in the way of the message of Jesus. Graham was an anti-communist when it was popular to be one, and he was a social justice warrior when it was popular to be one.

Another way to put that would be: Billy Graham never let the message of Jesus get in the way of political controversy. And if getting folks to “accept Jesus into their heart as personal Lord and Savior” really is tantamount to the Great Commission—Jesus final command to his disciples to go and teach all nations—then there’s not a thing in the world wrong with it: Jesus… with no strings, no Church, no culture, no normative practice attached.

Religion has been historically a cultural anchor. Yet the Evangelical form of Christianity denies this. Not really so much denies it, as it deems cultural anchorage as unimportant relative to the weight of carrying out the Great Commission. In simplifying the Gospel Message down to a core of propositions to believe, in making the process of conversion as simple as responding to an altar call and praying the Sinner’s Prayer “Just give me Jesus” is a profoundly invigorating principle for church growth. It is immediately and almost infinitely adaptable. If “Christian Rap” is going to fill the pews, so you can give them Jesus, why should some old fuddy-duddies stand in the way? If pews are too old-school, why not “do church” in a comfy movie theater instead?

The formula works. America is among the most “church-going” first world nations, and it leads the first world in moral and cultural bankruptcy.

About that cultural anchor…

Evangelicals and Mindedness

As Mark Knoll noted almost 20 years ago, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Knoll was wondering why Evangelicals contribute so little to intellectual scholarship and high culture and how his Evangelical brethren might turn that trend around.

I think the problem goes deeper than Mark Knoll wished to probe: There really isn’t much of a single, univocal Evangelical Mind. It isn’t that Evangelicals are stupid. It is that their system of religious thought doesn’t lead to many broader cultural implications. What clear implications does “leading people to accept Jesus into their heart and pray the sinners prayer” have upon the role of women in society? Upon traditional family structure? Upon free trade? College education? Suburban sprawl? Media Influence? Foreign Aid? Immigration? Support for Israel? Revolution in the Ukraine? The Role of Religion in Public Life?

“Just give me Jesus” is quite indifferent to all of those… “Just give me Jesus” doesn’t even very much care about what type of church you go to… so long as you go… to one that feels right… to you.

So the endless search for religious relevance in America has led to a prevailing religious expression described in 2005 by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism—a form of Christianity so devoid of normative content as to be indistinguishable from baptized narcissism.

Oprah Winfrey didn’t become a billionaire by building railroads or cornering the market on crude oil. And Bill Hybels and the host of mega-church pastors like him didn’t build their massive ministries by anchoring the Christian faith in traditional culture.

America is “deeply religious,” yet on-demand abortion and gay “marriage” are the (presumptively settled) Law of the Land. America fills her pews like no other nation on earth, yet the Overton Window glides ever leftward. And lest anyone think I’m picking only on Evangelicals, please understand that this tendency to strip the gospel message down to make it palatable for the broader culture has thoroughly infected the entire social order. Even non-religions like my local public radio station are getting in on the act. Making a message culturally relevant—whether that message be about Jesus or democracy or condom-use or toleration of sexual minorities—has become indistinguishable from plain old American cultural hegemony.

In spite of Evangelicalism’s low-brow status, we’re all Evangelicals now.

So how about that cultural anchor?

Let’s unwind this. That seeker-sensitive church growth ideas work is undeniable… for some values of “work”. But is that the work that Jesus intended the Church “Christian Community” to do when he gave the great commission? Or does “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” mean more than kneeling to pray the Sinners’ Prayer under the maudlin strains of Just As I Am? What is it exactly that we are to “teach all nations”: Be nice and feel good about ourselves?

How Things are Supposed to Work

The 800 pound (363 kg) gorilla in the room is that Christianity is supposed to affect the culture. Christianity admixes with genetics and environment and other memetic residues to produce certain kinds of culture. Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism produce different kinds. Everyone expects this. And what kind of culture is American Christianity producing today? One in which “Gay Marriage” can go from a funny joke to a self-evident sacred right in less than a generation. An entire generation of “Youth Pastors” is quite busy making Jesus look incredibly cool and could not be reached for comment.

Forgive me, but I don’t think that’s how Christianity is supposed to work for meaningful definitions of “work”. Well, why the hell not? The first reason is theological: Go ye therefore and teach all nations presumes a position of cultural superiority. Christianity is not just a propositional gloss that can be painted over an extant, formerly pagan culture, leaving it unchanged (except that now they’ll get to go to Heaven when they die). Certainly Christianity can add local customs to its own nature (cf. pagan winter solstice and spring equinox customs), but it cannot water down its universal call to repentance and holiness and kinship within the Church.

When it does, it ceases to be authentic Christianity. The relevance-minded Christians who imagine Jesus’ Great Commission as being about just getting people to pray certain prayers therefore sell the real gospel short. Conversion is a lifelong result of a lifelong commitment to a lifelong process. The signs of true spiritual conversion may be seen far more clearly in the reduction of various social pathologies than in the number of hands raised “with every head bowed and every eye closed”. Faith without works is dead.

The second reason I believe that Christianity drives culture is historical. Christianity came and changed the course of empires. Kings and princes and emperors once depended upon the Christian Church for their legitimacy. In return for the favor, secular rulers enforced Christian norms in their domains. For example, when the faith spread to England, cousin marriage soon died out and that nation experienced dramatic growth in well-being and collective power. Christianity played a crucial role in establishing science, the university system, modern economic and legal practices—virtually everything we associate with Christendom.

The End
Whenever Christians try to make their religion hip and relevant to the wider culture, it reveals instantly a wider culture that wears the pants in the relationship. Christianity adopts the role of the supplicating special pleader. It is not a masculine Christianity. It reduces religious practice to a source of entertainment or therapy–at most a curiosity to place alongside all the accouterments of a life otherwise untouched by its life-giving, culture-bestowing essence. You might get attendance figures or increased donations, but you’ll never get a transformed culture. You’ve already given that up as unnecessary cultural baggage.

So the question really never was how to make religion relevant to culture, but how to make culture relevant to religion. If people cannot make themselves relevant to religion, then the problem lies with them… and, by the way, they know it. Whosoever is the coolest doesn’t need to qualify himself to others. If you are tempted to attend a church growth conference that conflicts with your first wedding anniversary, just say “No”. Please stay home and cherish the company of your wife instead.

The post The Search for Religious Relevance (or How I Missed my First Anniversary) appeared first on Social Matter.

States ordain and employ many of these secular priests, although those priests tend not to obey a strict orthodoxy. Whereas churches once monopolized functions such as charity, marital counseling, and the guidance of wayward children in the past, all of those functions have been subsumed by the state through it’s various psych- functions. Rather than identifying themselves based on their place or characteristics within society, many young people enjoy identifying themselves and others in terms of the most fashionable psychological disorders as defined by the state’s priests.

What disorders are fashionable is as dependent on Pfizer’s latest marketing initiative as it is on the latest raft of problems identified by education consultants and bureaucrats.

This isn’t a particularly unique insight, as historians have written about the continual conflict between secular authority and religious authority for a rather long time. European history in particular is largely the history of conflict between those poles. Given that the trend in European cultures since even before the Reformation has been for secular power to subsume more and more religious functions, it makes some sense that this has happened. When people have a problem in their lives, especially in the urban centers of power, they go to a shrink and not to a priest. Further, a judge can and does often command counsel by a state-ordained priest and not a religiously-ordained one as a ‘soft’ sentence.

Machiavelli’s perspective on the proper relationship of religion to the state was that the former ought to be an implement of the latter. Today, we learn to count the state religion as a ‘science,’ because we often conflate ‘science’ with things that are not actually science because that practice has accumulated so much credibility since the industrial revolution. In the US, a state religion would also be illegal, whereas a religious order that claims to be a branch of medicine slips in through a loophole.

Unlike most other state religions, at the heart of the theology of the mind is a sense of the divine mystery of the unconscious mind, plus some belief in the capacity of drug companies to balance the mysterious humours of the brain with the close cooperation of doctors. This is a religion with strictures and methods that change every several years or so, often radically, with entire categories of theology inverting themselves in periods less than three decades long.

What is interesting is that, while virtually no one believes in God as an active force in the world with the same fervor as the typical 16th century man, belief in the theories of the psychologists (or at least a particular branch of psychological heresy, of which there are countless) comes natural to the modern educated man. To claim otherwise, at least in an urban setting, is to attract more negative attention than claiming atheism would.

Unlike most other political religious systems, psychology puts the individual at the center of worship. Past religion concerned itself with the glorification and appeasement of the gods, or at least that of a particular man-god. The modern religion wants you — yes, you! — to be happy, for some value of happy, whatever happy really means.

In this religion, it’s not accurate to say that there is right or wrong. There is sick and healthy. When we want to say that a person is bad, we say that they suffer from a fashionable disorder of some kind. If they say something that offends our sensibilities, rather than saying that they are evil or possessed by the devil or doing the devil’s works, we diagnose them from a distance as we would imagine a respectable doctor would. A man is not ‘bad.’ He suffers from a ‘personality disorder,’ which is in turn theorized to derive from an imbalance in his humours. We know it to be so without even taking a biopsy, because we know it to be true (and we appear smarter when we speak in the psycho-medical vocabulary rather than the ‘out-dated’ vocabulary of divine religion), even if by playing doctor ourselves we undermine the authority of doctors.

The high ideals of secular humanism tend to be interpreted in tawdry ways by ordinary people. A complex, delicate theology imagined by a scholar in a controlled environment will be interpreted in a base, self-serving way on the dirty streets. A complicated theory about why pleasure-seeking is not inherently bad gets interpreted as ‘if it feels good, do it,’ and is then promulgated through pop music to be applied towards some personal devastation by a derelict who lacks the sophistication to understand its original intended meaning.

As a state religion, it’s not clear that the West’s social workers are doing its masters all that many favors. The state needs its people to be subordinate to it in order to maintain itself. A state religion that commands people to have no higher loyalty than to themselves runs at cross-purposes to itself. It can only appeal directly to self-interest, which is a very odd situation for any state to be in, and not one that bodes well for its future cohesion.

To paraphrase the Machiavellian perspective on religion, from the perspective of secular power, its purpose is to defray the cost of law enforcement, conscription, and tax collection: the three core functions of government. Another major issue of the mutations and fracture in our state cults is that no one person believes in the same thing as another person. Different aspects of the religion are concealed, obscured, inaccessible, vulgarized, or otherwise difficult to nail down. The divisions between popular left and right can also be seen in terms of religious schism. The right tends to ‘cling’ to its Christianity (Christian deism being the original common religion of the United States), whereas the left tends to embrace the new word of progress with greater fervor, discounting its Christian roots as outmoded.

The left goes farther in terms of ‘tolerance’ than Locke dared to, who argued in his ‘Letter Concerning Toleration’ that the common purpose of Christianity regardless of sect was towards the “to the regulating of men’s lives according to the rules of virtue and piety.”

Both sides studiously, legalistically discount the existence of a state religion, ignoring that no state in history has avoided having a religious basis, instead proclaiming that the modern nation-state is a unique historical construct.

To the extent that such a thing is possible, we have tested Locke’s argument, and although it seemed like a good idea at the time, the result has been the occult re-institution of a state religion that has often inverted what he would have called the Christian virtues. The attempt to bar religiously-motivated legislation did not really succeed, and has lead to much rhetorical confusion over the last few centuries. In the same way that the Puritans compelled their flock to attend public religious assemblies, so are children today compelled to attend democratic assemblies at school.

Indeed, Locke would not find the current ‘religious tolerance’ in the West to be to his liking:

You will say, by this rule, if some congregations should have a mind to sacrifice infants, or (as the primitive Christians were falsely accused) lustfully pollute themselves in promiscuous uncleanness, or practise any other such heinous enormities, is the magistrate obliged to tolerate them, because they are committed in a religious assembly? I answer: No. These things are not lawful in the ordinary course of life, nor in any private house; and therefore neither are they so in the worship of God, or in any religious meeting.

Of course, the former Christian religious institutions that we call ‘universities’ have developed a reputation that is synonymous with ‘promiscuous uncleanness.’

This radical mutation goes farther than the Reformation dared to. A state that cheers on each new heresy is not a state that is likely to maintain its cohesion (and few honest observers of American politics would argue that the American state is becoming more coherent today). Religious toleration succeeded in stemming war between Protestants and Catholics on those grounds, but those wars instead gave way to enormous global wars over ideology.

The problem with a bureaucratic religion is that it will not concern itself with solving problems, but will instead concern itself with maintaining problems for it to pretend to solve. When the religion is not at least partly independent from the state, it bears some of its own costs, so it has a natural brake upon itself. The progressive religion, being tightly integrated into the state as it is, has no mechanism to keep it oriented to reality.

In practice, the inwardly-directed religious doctrine that has developed has made it more challenging to maintain covenants of any kind, especially familial. The state religion, in fact, actively encourages and subsidizes the dissolution of families. Unfortunately for the state, however, its ability to maintain its covenants rests upon the tendency of its subjects to honor their covenants to one another and to the state itself.

Which is why the state’s agents fret about ‘unfunded liabilities.’ It is tightly bound up with religious developments in a way that Americans tend to be unable and unwilling to acknowledge.

Because the state religion has become solipsistic, it has become subversive, self-dealing, and mis-coordinated to the material needs of the state. The actual needs of state are staid: it has bills to pay and must have funds to pay those bills, it has enemies to fight, diplomatic crises to resolve, and internal disorder to police. The state religion which is supposed to support the state itself promotes strains of thought and behavior that actively impede the achievement of all of those goals.

The chaos of multicultural democracy makes it so that, at all times, almost everyone is involved in committing sedition against the state, because the concept of the state is unclear, and continually shifting, as the state’s creed shifts on a daily basis. This must lead to dissolution and conflict.

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