TRANSCRIBING A LECTURE can be difficult, translating an interview into text is often far harder. Among other things you never know how someone whose words you try to take down would have done that themselves, especially when they are a master writer and thinker. But I decided to go on to provide some more stable form of what was said in that interview I excerpted on the fly yesterday. You should go listen to the interview, starting at about minute six will get you into this section.
No, I mean but this is this is the rising [situation]. . . I've I [hear] this all the time. I mean this talk now of young men gravitating to the church.
Well, a lot of them are gravitating there for politically reactionary reasons that this is like, this is this isn't Islam. This isn't secularism which "has disappointed me because I'm an incel."
You know that I I'm not I want to make that clear. I'm married.
And they're embracing Christianism — to use a phrase that was popular in Russia at one time — rather than Christ.
And this is very much a part of this this surge towards the right wing that we see going throughout the [world].
I've met a number of young . . . there are others who are very sincere. Don't get me [wrong] . . . (cross talk) No, no, that that there is always the person that whose motives are good. It's just the motives are confused.
That's why I want a discrimination between fidelity to this ideal of Christendom and fidelity to Christ. Many who go in, these young persons, who are being drawn back to Orthodoxy or Catholicism or want Christ but the two things are still united in the minds of a lot of them.
And then there are real culture warriors who, you know, who if they could like . . . I don't know, they might have tattoos of crusader crosses on their on their chests. And and that's actually the most dangerous temptation at the moment is not certainly not from atheists.
It's from a certain kind of reactionary traditionalism that prefers, as Peter Thiel put it, the Christ of Constantine to the Christ of Mother Teresa.
He was saying that is something desirable. He prefers the Christianity of Constantine to that of Mother Teresa. Well, as Elon told us, you know, empathy is a sickness.
I don't know that it can be put better than that, the Christianity of Constantine as opposed to that of a Mother Teresa - I will remind those who absorbed the late Christopher Hitchens' debunkery of Mother Teresa that he ended his days, though a famous ex-Trotskyite neo-atheist, as a proponent of the worst of that Constantinian tradition, a crusader of the Bush II regime's Iraq crusade (some of the stupider among them were stupid enough to call it that in public, as if that was likely to go over well among those the neo-cons needed to make common cause with if their oil grab - he was an open advocate of taking the oil - and pro-Israel gambit was going to work).
I also remember that in his obituary of his fellow Nation columnist, the then dying, himself, Alexander Cockburn noted that Hitchens was notably stingy to beggars and the indigent. He said that if he were dying in the gutter and had a choice between the Hitchens approach and that of Mother Teresa, at least the nun would give him a bowl of soup and other material aid.
And that has been characteristic of way, way too much of Constiantinian "Christianity"* that morphed into that very distortion of the Gospel of Jesus into its opposite in feudalism.
I would get into some of the low-lights of that in such things as Augustine's late works and the disastrous effect that those had on later Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist - and from there the current and putrid heresy of dispensationalist hooey, but that would take a series longer than my several on Darwinism's consequences and the current one I'm still working on against the Supreme Court's Marbury usurpation.
I go back to Senator Warnock who put it so well when, during a committee hearing, he said he was a "Matthew 25 Christian." One who takes seriously the commandment of Jesus that what we do for the least among us we do for God - the least including more than those he included in the saying, the hungry, the homeless, the sick, the prisoner, and would certainly include the alien living among us - he said that most strongly in some of his most pointed and inclusive parables - and what we fail to do FOR THEM we fail to do to God.
The disaster that the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of Rome, of other countries, and of particular denominations of Christianity was that it made the religious authorities and traditions collusive with the secular states which are certainly not likely to follow the teachings of Jesus, the Prophets (talk about your savage protest poets) the Law and the Epistles. There was a reason that a combination of state powers and colluding religious authorities killed the Prophets and Jesus and James and Peter and Paul (by the best evidence we have of their ends) and why what they taught cannot ever be entirely compatible with any form of government yet devised by human beings - though I hold out some hope for a truly egalitarian democracy - and why those lists of modern day apostate "pastors" I listed are some of the least convincing in their professions of Christianity but who fit in so well with the distinction that David Bentley Hart makes between the Gospel and the pseudo-Christian ideology of "Christianism."
* And an enormous part of secularism, the Fabian distortion of socialism, much of Marxism, as well as capitalism.
