Who wins the war — Part II: Why did Christianity get so big, and why is it now failing?
Hint: attack the inside
In the last post I asked: who wins the war? as an abstract question. Today, I’ll try to get into the rise and fall of the Christian faith. Did Christians fail their faith, or did their faith fail their religion?
How do you maintain a coordination mechanism/system? I’ll posit that the Christian principle is to always attack the inside and show grace to the outside. Christ was more critical of the Pharisees and the temple than he was of the outsider who was ignorant. He was kind to the prostitute who was nearly stoned and critical of the priests who took tithing far too seriously. He was obedient to secular authorities that forced him to carry his cross and yet he drew the money changers out of the temple.
The insight here (at least in my opinion) is that you can never fully get rid of the internal conflict after victory. Instead of looking for enemies from without to begin with, you start by looking for enemies within. Doing this is clearly a dangerous game. Take this too seriously and you becomes the USSR, and start sending people to the gulags. Do it the right-wing way and you turn Jews into smoke. The enemy could be your sinful heart, or could be some group of Christian heretics. If so, does this mean we’re seeing the beginning of the end for Christianity? Was the Protestant Reformation a mistake? — I sometimes wonder. You never begin by conquering your enemy directly. Instead, you conquer yourself first, and make yourself a perfect instrument. You don’t fight the secular authorities. Instead, you fight the religious ones from the inside. You purify the coordination mechanism, and this is how you prevent religious extremism. You take your violent and aggressive impulse and direct it inward, and especially at the extremist jihadist types. If you succeed, you’re no longer herding cats.
To create the greatest army, you first have to conquer yourself. You self-domesticate. You turn your aggression towards the church itself. You stop being a slave of your passions so you can become a better cog in a machine. You become the perfect slave. The coordination system sees all the intellectual violence while the rest remains still like a lake surface on a warm summer day.
The ramifications here are vast. For one, it means Christians should not be arming themselves or protesting against secular authorities for almost any reason. The primary thing they should fight for is their own faith, and their right to practice it. They should take the vaccine even if they can prove that such vaccines cause autism and miscarriage. They should be willing to bear the sins and mistakes of the world just as Christ has. That is the true meaning of the cross. Their authority doesn’t come from being right, but from being the ultimate bearers of all the mistakes of the world. Instead of being the last to take the vaccine, they become the first. They should allow others to attack them and they should not return violence, and especially not the way that Kyle Rittenhouse has. If anything, Christians should sacrifice themselves and hold our their hand even as it’s bitten off.
If this view is correct, then 1) I’m a much worse Christian than I thought. After all, I took the wait-and-see approach with the vaccine, I stocked up on food, and I bought a rifle amid the George Floyd riots. And 2) there is hope for Christianity after all. George Floyd (for whatever you might say about him) still died in compliance with authority — and while his neck was under the knees of police. He died in submission to authority, and not in an overt act of rebellion against it. This kind of Christianity is more radical than anything I’ve heard preached from a pulpit — and even more radical that the Christianity of the right-wing God, guns, and country types.
Maybe this kind of Christianity sounds a little crazy, but this very principle is what allows corporations to work, and the same principle that gives governments their authority. A modern government commits itself to its citizens no matter who they may be. A corporation commits itself to the interests of its shareholders and cannot fire them as it can with its employees.
This is also the kind of faith that St. Augustine argued for in the City of God:
“If any such women have suffered the violence of barbarian lust. they will not blame God for allowing it, nor will they believe that God makes light of such crimes. He allows them, but no one can commit them with impunity. The truth is that in the mysterious justice of God the wickedness of desire is given rope, as it were, for the present, while its punishment is plainly being reserved for the final judgement.”
“Christians have no authority to commit suicide in any circumstance”
The point St. Augustine makes in these quotes and in others is that turning the other cheek is not merely a technique to get a specific result. Your reward is in heaven. And while you’re on Earth, you bear all the crimes of the world that you can.
You’re pointing to something extremely important in this piece, which I would summarize as “the ontological necessity of nonrational responsibility,” which can be associated with sacrifice, forgiveness, and the like. Without “nonrational responsibility,” the world breaks, but it’s very reasonable not to practice it, because, after all, it’s “nonrational”…Anyway, just wanted to say that what you’re getting at here is big. Well done!