DAVID BENTLEY HART is a master speaker and writer and thinker so I should have guessed he'd be the one who would provide the term I've been searching for since before the turn of the millennium and the idea put succinctly to talk about the pseudo-Christianity that is flourishing and has been promoted by the media since at least the rise of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart . . . Paul White, Robert Barron, etc.
Here is how he starts this more than excellent interview.
Rainn Wilson: What do you hope for the future of Christianity as a whole?
David Bentley Hart: I'm hoping for vast historical failure, which has already happened. But I mean, as long as the temptation of power, the discourse of rescuing civilization in which we love the preeminence of the throne and altar accommodations of the great age of Christendom more than we love the humility and kindness and compassion of Christ.
I mean, look, we have people in the American, Christosphere - I don't know what to call it - colluding with a government that that is, you know, torturing, abusing, the stranger in our midst or even the right.
Sure. Well, I mean, what's Matthew chapter 25 What does Christ say?
I mean, it's precisely these persons where you'll find me. "As much as whatever you do to them, you've done to me."
I mean that and if you want to love Christ according to Matthew 25, you had better love the the little 5-year-old boy in the bunny hat who was taken away to a hellish prison. You should love all these people whom uh whom I is and and the DHS general are abusing and arresting and and tormenting and making, you know, the the objects of hatred.
I want to see the whole project of Christianism of Christendom. collapse, collapse under its own weight in an absolute abject historical failure so vast that the very words Christian civilization will have to be nothing other than soup kitchens. . . .
I was listening to a discussion by a specialist in the recently excommunicated cult of SSPX, the followers of Marcel Lefebvre, the "trad-catholic" cult who said that his ideology was the bizarre neo-medievalist, French monarchist fascism that wants to revive the French monarchy and reestablish the system of king-church collusion, destroying democracy and reestablishing that kind of feudalism. Exactly what the trad-caths of the United States claim they want to establish here with a Republican-fascist president and their christianist fascist "church" becoming the state religion and, no doubt, money flowing to them. If you think that's far fetched, look at who is sitting on the Court and running the other two branches these days. Only watch out when the various factions of christianism with a financial interest in looting the treasury start fighting among themselves. Pete Kegbreath will be ordering the military to put his racist, misogynist, christianist "pastor" in charge and the lunatics of the Pentachostalist factions, the Southern Baptists, the neo-Calvinists and the trad-caths all want preeminence and the biggest cut for themselves.
The trad-catholics are struggling to maintain and set the remnants of the long tradition of Catholic feudal distortion up over the Vatican II Church that was, itself, a part of a long, more than century long effort to reform the Church, starting with Leo XIII. There has been nothing more pressing within the Catholic Church than to reestablish it as a Christian Church, suppressing those centuries of distortion under feudalism and, I say, the nationalist garbage of the late 18th through 20th centuries. Nationalism has a lot more in common with feudalism with a gloss of late 19th century biological romanticism which - by the way - also infects a lot of the alleged liberalism and leftism that has failed to win against it.
I completely endorse this.
. . . That's where you would like to see Christianity end up in the future is people that would remain behind.
Yeah. I want to see the last illusory traces of Christendom, the last temptation of the sword rather than the cross just utterly destroyed by historical misfortune.
And we may be heading heading there. I'm very hopeful at that. But of course we may take the world out with us. That could be a bit of an inconvenience.
Here's the whole thing.
I'm glad to see that DBH is looking so much better these days after his long illness.