Saturday, March 23, 2019

Christian as Identity - Part III

I will put on my ignorant, fevered, paranoid Christian hat here. My only defense is that I think I am correct.

I think the attacks on Western Civilisation are largely attacks on Christ. Not entirely.  I think people do genuinely care about colonialism, for example. And I acknowledge that Jesus is not the place people start complaining.

Yet they go there so quickly if you let them keep talking, and when they think there are none but themselves around it's even quicker.  I don't think people admit even to themselves that it's Jesus they are after - most people like Jesus in some way.  It's the references to forcing their religion and suppressing the native religions, or the hypocrisy of churches and missionaries, or Christian privilege in America.  Because we all remember the long sordid history of England making all of India and Rhodesia become Christian, and when the Puritans made the Narragansetts go to church. Plus, they know so many missionaries first-hand. And of course, references to The Crusades, The Inquisition, and the Salem Witch Trials get thrown in quickly. I have posted and reposted on the Big Bad Three, and noted with amusement that Obama making a prejudicial American cultural comment in 2015 figured in then as well. I will be revisiting Salem shortly, BTW, having just discovered how many ancestors were involved with the episode.

Even a lot of feminist, LGBTQ, and ethnic complaints, though they are founded on legitimate concerns and are likely quite sincere, leak out in time.  I think the Christian-as-identity people may sense that in some way, as Mark Studdock did in That Hideous Strength, being asked to stamp on a figure of Christ.  Even though not a believer, something held him back. Now that I have taken tthat example, I recall that both Lewis and Chesterton also believed attacks on Western Civilisation were attacks on the faith. It's like I got the idea from them originally.  Rather than make the two paragraph argument I just did, it likely would have been better to just write "Lewis and Chesterton thought so."

It is one of my long-held beliefs that people eventually say what they really mean.

(Late tomorrow I will repost these with different time stamps to put them in old-fashioned order rather than internet order.)

1 comment:

james said...

"I don't think people admit even to themselves that it's Jesus they are after - most people like Jesus in some way"

Almost everybody likes Jesus so long as he doesn't make demands. We can skip past his demands, so long as other people don't keep bringing them up.