Thinking about the Norway Butcher

There’s been much bustle this past week as those eager to use the Norway Butcher as a club against Christians have made much of his loony Templar mysticism and sundry invocations of Christianity. The Andrew Sullivans of the world see in him the incarnation of the Christianist, which is a sort of swear word meaning “Christians who say things I dislike”.

Conversely, Christians have been scrambling to say, “He was not a real Christian”.

I don’t think this is particularly profitable. Rather, I think it obvious that he was somebody who regarded himself as standing within the Christian tradition–and somebody who had no idea what that tradition was about. He was, in short, a secular messianist with a demented politicized vision of Christianity. In many ways, he espoused standard issue neocon boilerplate about Israel, the Muslim menace, securing the borders, and all that sort of stuff. Meanwhile, he give little evidence that he, you know, believed in Jesus or had any notion of Christianity as something other than a socio-demographic bloc. Like Timothy McVeigh, his real religion appears to be pride:

I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person, as that would be a lie. I’ve always been very pragmatic and influenced by my secular surroundings and environment. In the past, I remember I used to think: ‘Religion is a crutch for weak people. What is the point in believing in a higher power if you have confidence in yourself!? Pathetic.’ Perhaps this is true for many cases. Religion is a crutch for many weak people, and many embrace religion for self-serving reasons as a source for drawing mental strength (to feed their weak emotional state [for] example during illness, death, poverty etc.).

But that religion of politicized neocon pride did, in fact, clothe itself in various Christian regalia as it set about the cold-blooded murder of a bunch of kids. That’s not an indictment of Christ or the Faith, but it is a warning shot–92 warning shots, in fact–that we should really shy away from conflation of the faith any secular messianic political ideology.

And that for two reasons. First, because enemies of the Faith (such as Andrew Sullivan) will quickly seize on such confusions to attack the Church) and (far more gravely) because people who cannot tell the difference between faith and ideology will say deeply wicked things in order to try to distance themselves from people who listened to them more fanatically than they had intended.

Case in point: the phenomenally hypocritical Glenn Beck, who greeted the news of the slaughter by comparing the victims to Hitler Youth (because they were at some summer camp run by a political party), while ignoring his own political summer camp for youth.

All this sort of repulsive gamesmanship in defense of one’s political tribe overlooks the central thing for Christians: namely, that the Norwegian butcher represents not Christianity (that is, the Catholic faith), but a politicized secular messianism that is a parasite on the Christian faith. In short, a heresy. It is Christian in that is it not Jewish, Zoroastrian or Buddhist heresy. But as his contemptuous remarks for Benedict demonstrate, it is a “Christian” belief only in the sense that he is a xenophobe who loathes what he perceives as not Purely Norwegian. Christianity is vaguely identified with pre-modern Norway, so he decorates himself in it and opens fire.

I think in such cases, it is better to speak of a “bad Christian” than say he is “not really a Christian”. Outsiders to the Christian world quite naturally react to this the way they react to “This has nothing to do with Islam!” when some nutjob cries “Allahu Ackbar!” and blows up a schoolbus. Of course it has to do with Islam! And of course this monster has to do with perverted Christianity.

The sensible thing to note is not that this guy has nothing to do with Christianity, but that Christianity wants nothing to do with him. After his slaughter, there were no Christians dancing in the streets of Colorado Springs, Wheaton or Rome, celebrating a blow struck against the secular Satan. Significantly, the only people to eagerly celebrate the slaughter were Muslims. No Christians wanted to touch this monster with a barge pole.

In the end, the Faith has nothing to apologize for in this guy, though some Christians who cannot separate their faith from neocon ideology might want to rethink their secular messianism lest it encourage another of these nutjobs.