Catholic and Enjoying It!
“It does not occur to them that the causes they defend, such as the belief that marriage is an indissoluble sacramental union between a man and a woman, are just as threatened by the bourgeois TLC reality show commodification of marriage represented by these ‘artisanal’ cake shops as they are by Chuck and Larry’s impending nuptials. How many of these stalwart defenders of Christian mores would refuse to bake a cake for a man on his second or third marriage, in defiance of the plain word of scripture?”
The spectacle of the Christianist bowed down in adoration to the multiply-married Trumps, Limbaughs, and other serial polygamists while talking about gay marriage as some kind of existential threat–and doubling down on Pope Francis and Amoris Laetitia with lies that he means to somehow subvert the Tradition is one of the many ways in which the Christianist simply makes himself incredible to the world. The Party of Personal Responsibility is simply absurd in its witness to the world.
There is no world in which it is possible to live as both faithful Christians and McMansion-dwelling suburbanite commodity fetishists who just happen to spend their Sunday mornings doing something other than watching ESPN or eating brunch.
Or, to put it another way, you cannot serve God and Mammon–a passage cut from the Christianist Trumpian Bible with more ruthlessness than Jefferson hacked apart the New Testament.
Taking up our crosses involves something far more radical. Just how radical will only become clearer in the years to come as the seemingly inexorable forces of capital and exchange continue to erode the hills we were all supposed to die on according to the Susan B. Anthony List, and the things we believe sound increasingly mysterious, even wicked, to the rest of the population.
Christianism is incredible for a simple reason: Christianists not only do not believe the gospel, they are at open war with it. Francis is credible as a Christian because his life is plainly inexplicable apart from a living trust in Jesus Christ and his gospel. Christianists are incredible because their witness is plainly explicable as a pursuit of power, wealth, and sex in defiance of what Jesus said and modeled. Christianists tell themselves that “the world” does not believe them because the world is heathen. But the truth is the world does not believe them because they adore a sex predator and lie for him in order to have power. And Christianists devote their time to slandering good pope Francis–because he exposes their works to light.
God bless him!
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