Tag: Churchianity

Churchianity

Jon Del Arroz’s new book, Churchianity: How Modern American Churches Corrupted Generations of Christians, is out today. The Foreword was written by a certain dark lord of your acquaintance. It’s a pretty long one, as these things go, so I’ve broken it into two parts, the second of which will run tomorrow.

Churchianity: The Great Apostasy

The modern Church in the West stands at a crossroads, though many of its congregants appear blissfully unaware that they have already chosen a wide and easy path to Hell. What passes for Christianity in the twenty-first century would be unrecognizable to the Church Fathers, incomprehensible to the medieval scholastics, and abhorrent to the Reformers. We are witnessing nothing less than the attempted replacement of Christianity with its heretical doppelganger: Churchianity.

Churchianity is the systematic subordination of Christian doctrine to the prevailing ideology of social justice. It is the elevation of worldly concerns above spiritual ones, the replacement of timeless Biblical authority with the dynamic mainstream Narrative, and the transformation of the Church from a beacon of eternal truth into an echo chamber for Earthly politics. Most damning of all, it represents the complete inversion of Christianity’s fundamental premise: instead of being in the world but not of it, Churchianity insists on being entirely of the world while maintaining an increasingly unconvincing veneer of theological legitimacy.

Churchianity is not just another in the long line of traditional doctrinal disputes. This is apostasy wearing a clerical collar, heresy draped in liturgical vestments, and blasphemy proclaimed from ten thousand pulpits every Sunday morning. The tragedy is not that wolves have entered the sheepfold—Jesus Christ himself warned us they would come. The tragedy is that the sheep now bleat in self-righteous pride as they are led astray by those who seek to destroy them.

At its core, Churchianity represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of both God and man. Whereas Christianity proclaims the fallen nature of humanity and the absolute necessity of divine redemption, Churchianity preaches the perfectibility of man through political correctness. Whereas Christianity promises the Kingdom of Heaven, Churchianity prioritizes earthly justice. And whereas Christianity demands repentance from sin, Churchianity demands repentance for a whole host of invented man-made sins, including failure to adequately genuflect before whatever victim class currently sits atop the intersectional hierarchy.

The mechanism of this theological perversion is breathtakingly simple: take any Biblical command, strip it of its soteriological context, and reinterpret it through the lens of contemporary social justice politics. “Love thy neighbor” ceases to be about individual charity and becomes a mandate for open borders and mass immigration. “Care for the poor” transforms from personal almsgiving into advocacy for higher taxes, foreign wars, and welfare states. “Welcome the stranger” transforms from basic hospitality into a divine command to facilitate the demographic replacement of the nation.

This hermeneutical vandalism not only does violence to individual verses, but to the entire Biblical narrative. The God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, who commanded the Israelites to maintain their distinctiveness among the nations, who confused the languages at Babel to create the nations—this God is reimagined as a cosmic social worker whose primary concern is ensuring equal outcomes across all demographic categories. The savior who said “My kingdom is not of this world” is recast as a proto-hippie community organizer whose death was not intended to atone for personal sins, but for 17th-century colonization.

No Christian Church has shown itself to be completely immune to this subversive contagion. The Roman Catholic Church, which for centuries stood as a bulwark against heresy, now finds itself led by clerics who are more concerned about climate change than for the salvation of men’s souls. The current occupant of Peter’s throne speaks more passionately about carbon emissions than abortion, more forcefully about income inequality than sexual morality, and far more frequently about migrants than martyrs. The Church that once launched the Crusades to defend Christendom now declares it a moral imperative to welcome to the West those who would see every cross destroyed and every cathedral burned to the ground.

The Anglican Communion, already weakened by its centuries of compromise with secular authority, has completed its transformation into the Conservative Party at prayer—if the Conservative Party were still conservative and one could find a Tory who was not Hindu, Muslim, or Jewish. Canterbury’s pronouncements are all-but-indistinguishable from Guardian editorials, complete with the requisite hand-wringing about colonialism, slavery, and the urgent need to make monetary reparations for crimes committed by people long dead to people who were never wronged.

The mainline Protestant denominations have fared even worse. The Lutherans who once thundered “Here I stand” now whimper “Here I kneel”—before every fashionable cause and politically correct crusade. The Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians compete to see who can more thoroughly repudiate their theological heritage in favor of sexual perversion, rainbow flags and moral relativism. These churches have hemorrhaged members in recent decades, not because Christianity is dying, but because Churchianity offers nothing that cannot be found in a political party or a gay disco.

Even the evangelical churches, which initially resisted this insidious corruption, have begun to succumb. Megachurch pastors discover that sermon series on “social justice” fill more seats than expositions of Romans. Youth pastors find that endorsing movements like Black Lives Matter provides them with more social cachet than leading Bible studies. Entire denominations that once prioritized evangelism now prioritize “racial reconciliation,” which in practice means white self-flagellation and endless apologies for nonexistent sins neither committed nor inherited.

CHURCHIANITY by Jon Del Arroz is now available in ebook and paperback from Amazon from Rislandia Press.

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MAILVOX: In Defense of Doug Wilson

In response to a previous post on the anti-nationalist evangelical pastor, a reader submits what he believes to be a defense of the fraudulent Boomangelical:

Firstly, I acknowledge your critiques of Doug, and recognise that he has some enormous Boomer tendencies. 

But. 

He has a growing appeal to disaffected young evangelical men (of whom I belonged). He spearheaded an enormous push towards Classical Christian schooling, founded on Western Civilisation (including the Greco-Roman underpinnings). It’s a huge movement, that is reintroducing the youth to the Good, Beautiful, and True. They have cleaned up church liturgy, and recaptured theological maximalism, with many offshoot ministries pushing phrases like ‘Rebuilding the New Christendom.’ This is all important foundational work to waking up Christians. It has led to me creating a homeschool co-op teaching the Classical method, and we are exposing our children to the glorious things that the Christian West has to offer. 

Ministries like G3 ministries are on the warpath against ‘kinism’ which has significant sway over the Reformed Conservative movements. Guys like Doug want more mainstream appeal, so they have opted to go soft on the racial issue. They have ousted guys like Thomas Achord, which shows they mean business. 

But it is worth noting that there are more guys like Thomas Achord in these organisations who will eventually start speaking out. The time doesn’t seem to have come for that yet. 

I’m sure you’re aware that racism is perhaps one of the most unforgivable sins in the Evangelical church and will get a robust and powerful reaction from the Evangelical base (especially the Boomers). He is pushing young men in the right direction, and Christian Nationalism, as promoted by Stephen Wolfe, is gaining significant traction. 

I will first note that this is precisely the same defense that is regularly offered up on behalf of other gatekeepers like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, and also of books like the Harry Potter series. Don’t criticize the obvious errors and the demonstrable falsehoods when they are otherwise doing so much good? Don’t you understand that if they tell the truth instead of lying, they won’t be able to reach as many of those who need the truth? Isn’t it better that they read godless tales of evil being portrayed as good than not read at all?

And the answer is no. This is a false, pernicious, and fundamentally short-sighted perspective. It is less a defense than an attempt to negotiate a guilty plea in exchange for a lesser penalty.

Racism, as coined, properly defined, and practically applied today, is not and has never been a sin. The Churchians like Wilson are speaking with forked tongues when they a) define it falsely and in a way that no one actually applies it, and b) therefore falsely claim it to be a sin.

The reader claims Wilson spearheads “a huge movement, that is reintroducing the youth to the Good, Beautiful, and True”, but that is obviously false because nothing that is build on a foundation of lies and sand will stand. The fact that Wilson and company “want more mainstream appeal” and that they “mean business” is not an argument for them, it is evidence against them. By that standard, Joel Osteen and Russell Moore are role models for the modern Evangelical.

It’s great that people are being inspired to homeschool, regardless of whether the inspiration comes from a Churchian evangelical or a Buddhist hippy. But there is no truth in Doug Wilson or in any other so-called “Evangelical” who preaches the Gospel of Civil Rights instead of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and who teaches from To Kill a Mockingbird and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings instead of the Bible.

Let me be perfectly clear: No one who advocates equality of any kind, and no one who is a civic nationalist of any variety, and no one who falsely asserts that which is not a sin is a sin, should ever be considered a genuine or reliable advocate of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, no matter what their other positive attributes might be.

Because liars cannot, and will not, defend the truth. They will always produce one reason or another for refusing to do so. And if you are foolish enough to trust or follow a liar, you will come to regret it, as all of you – and readers here should recall, the vast majority of you – who used to lionize Jordan Peterson and consider him to be a great intellectual champion should know.

PS: Stephen Wolfe’s Christian Nationalism is fake nationalism. It’s a religious form of civic nationalism that substitutes Christianity for US citizenship. He’s just another gatekeeper.

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Faux Christian Nationalism

Douglas Wilson can’t give up his Boomer addiction to Enlightenment ideals:

A summary of Doug Wilson’s argument in “Mere Christendom” insisting that the Magistrate should not enforce blasphemy laws.;

As a theonomist Wilson believes in “the need to restore the Bible as the quarry from which to obtain the needed stone for our foundations of social order” (149), he strongly argues against state imposed punishment for blasphemy. He reminds us that “those who want the government to have the right to kill blasphemers are also asking for the government to have the right to kill those who rebuke their (the government’s) blasphemies” (157), and “When you give the state power to punish a blasphemer, you are giving the state the power to blaspheme with impunity” (171). Wilson argues that inherent protection of free speech by limiting the state’s power “is the theo-political genius of Christianity” (171). He argues that “The founding of our nation really was exceptional, because the men who drafted our Constitution knew that American politicians, taking one thing with another, would be every bit as sleazy as the same class of men from any other clime” (201).

There are political wolves in sheep’s clothing just as there are religious wolves in sheep’s clothing. Evil men are going to do what evil men do, regardless of what good Christian men do. We already know, we have a massive surfeit of knowledge, of what happens when Christian men do not enforce Christian societal norms.

What this reveals is that Wilson is more dedicated to his Enlightenment ideals than his Christian ideals. I have no doubt that he is also an ersatz nationalist, which is to say, a common Churchian civnat who makes positive noises about tribes and nations, but as with blasphemy, refuses to acknowledge the right of the state to enforce the nation’s will.

The protection of free speech has literally nothing to do with Christianity, much less represents its “theo-political genius”. That is pure bafflegarble worthy of Jordan Peterson his own babbling self. Free speech is just another false virtue no more worth of state protection than equality, diversity, anti-racism, or the free movement of peoples.

Iron Ink is correct in his dismissal of Wilson’s Churchian drivel. “Rev. Wilson’s operating principle at work here is: give no one the power for good if they can use it for evil. Which of course reaches beyond absurd into the zip code of Nutville.”

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