Yesterday we had a few requests for a definition of “Churchianity”:
Is there anywhere on this blog where you define “Churchian”?
– MS
I too would like a definition of Churchian. Could you cover that in a future post?
– Jaypo
While I have frequently alluded to it, I have not addressed Churchianity directly on this blog before. In part, that is because I am loath to play Christian Police, a role for which I am ill-suited spiritually and temperamentally. I wish to stress that I cannot, and will not, be the judge of whether anyone is a genuine Christian or is a mere Churchian instead; that determination is well above my pay grade. It does not fall to me to even be the judge of my own Christianity, as we are all fallen and none of us know whether we will be saved or we will be one of those from whom Jesus will turn and say “I never knew you.”
In this, as in all things spiritual, we see as though through a glass, darkly. And yet, we are also given eyes and wit and perhaps even a modicum of spiritual discernment, so if we cannot judge another man’s soul, we can certainly judge institutions by their actions and intellectual concepts by their consequences.
I gave the matter a fair amount of thought when writing Chapter 9 of Cuckservative, “Christianity and Cuckservativism”. As my co-author, John Red Eagle, is agnostic, the task of addressing that particular topic naturally fell to me. I go into considerably more detail in the book, particularly concerning how Churchianity relates to various trends that have swept the American churches, but a few excerpts from it should help provide a better understanding of what Churchianity observably is before we attempt to define it.
Many churches have reduced Christianity to the parable of the Good Samaritan, to such an extent that their religion could be more reasonably described as Good Samaritanism than Christianity. And while they subscribe chiefly to salvation through works and societally-approved attitudes rather than faith, they nevertheless possess complete and utter faith in the intrinsic goodness of foreigners.
Churchians (for it would not be strictly accurate to describe them as Christians) are liars and deceivers. They worship the god of Babel, not the Christian God. They serve the world, not Jesus Christ.
But where does this religious obsession with improving the world through works come from, when it has been absent from Christian theology for the greater part of two thousand years? Indeed, the entire conceptual core of Christianity is fundamentally based on the nature of the world not only being fallen and imperfect and ruled by an immortal spirit of evil, but remaining that way until the Son returns, the Prince of the World is cast down, and the Kingdom of Heaven is established.
Justice, in both Greek philosophy and proper Christian theology, is “rectitude of the will”, as can be seen in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, specifically Secunda Secundæ Partis, Question 58, Article 1. And in the Christian sense, rectitude of the will is defined by conformity with God’s will, which can be debated, but being immutable, is assuredly not defined by the ever-mutating social justice narrative.
So social justice Christianity, or Good Samaritanism, or Churchianity, all amount to the same thing: a false form of Christianity that cloaks itself in Christian rhetoric while denying both the conceptual core of Christianity and the fundamental nature of the justice to which it nominally dedicates itself. And these false forms all flow from a concept that is considerably newer than Christianity, although it is related to an older religion.
The term tikkun olam is from the rabbinic literature known as the Mishnah, which dates back to 1492 and is believed to come from an oral tradition that may be as much as a thousand years older. It appears in the phrase mip’nei tikkun ha-olam “to indicate that a practice should be followed not because it is required by Biblical law, but because it helps avoid social disharmony.”
The phrase is often translated as “for the sake of the healing of the world”, which is why the expression appears in English as a directive to “heal the world” or “fix the world”, but a better translation is “for the sake of the perfection of the world”.
In other words, the cuckservatives and other Churchians have elevated a literally extra-Biblical post-Christian concept that flies directly in the face of genuine Christian theology to a super-Scriptural level, then used it as the basis to judge both members of the Church and the Bible itself!
So, we can summarize all of this with the following definition:
Churchianity is social justice-converged pseudo-Christianity that cloaks itself in Christian rhetoric and trappings, follows the world rather than Jesus Christ, and seeks salvation through works instead of faith.
And if I can say this without sounding too eschatological, I expect it, or something very like it, will be the seed of the religion that worships Antichrist in the place of Jesus Christ.