Masks and the Masks of God

Last updated on: August 16, 2020 at 5:07 pm By Gene Veith

During this coronavirus epidemic , we are preoccupied with masks: having to wear them, hating to wear them, trying to breathe through them, resenting them or grudgingly accepting their necessity. One of the worst things about our time of masks is what Milton, lamenting his blindness, said that he most missed: being able to see the “human face divine” (Paradise Lost, III, 44).

But our mask-consciousness today is an occasion to talk about vocation, which Luther described as a “mask of God.”

My friend Cheryl Swope sent me a link to a sermon that her pastor, Rev. Charles Henrickson, preached on the subject. It’s an outstanding sermon on vocation. Read it all, but here are some excerpts. From “Masks of God” (Matthew 14:1-21):

The other day I went to the grocery store, and of course when I went in, I put on a mask. The other shoppers were wearing masks, the store’s workers were wearing masks, the cashiers–everybody was wearing a mask. Well, I had just paid for my groceries and was finishing loading my cart, when I heard the cashier greet the lady behind me. It was obvious he knew who she was, but at first she did not know who he was. She said, “Oh, I didn’t recognize you behind your mask.” And I thought to myself, “Thank you! You have just given me the introduction for my sermon this Sunday!”

“Oh, I didn’t recognize you behind your mask.” You know, I think that’s often what we ought to be saying to God: “I didn’t recognize you behind your mask.” Because that’s how God operates to provide for us and care for us, and we don’t recognize that he is the one blessing us. Behind a mask, so to speak. In other words, God blesses us through other people he puts in our lives. God uses those people to be the channels of his blessings toward us, but he ultimately is the source of those blessings.

Take, for example, the groceries I bought at that grocery store. How did those groceries get into my cart? They didn’t just drop down out of heaven and land in front of me. No, there was a whole string of people leading up to me getting my hands on those goods. The farmer who planted and harvested the crops or raised the chickens. The truck driver who delivered the goods to the plant for processing, and another truck driver who drove the goods to the store. The stocker and the pricer at the store. And then that cashier with the mask on who checked me out and put the food in the bags. All of these people were masks of God, each doing their job, with the result that I was able to put food on my table. The source of blessing was God, and God delivered the blessing to me by operating behind those masks. . . .

Masks of God: That’s how God operates to get his blessings to our doorstop and into our hands. Luther was the one who came up with this term, “masks of God,” to describe how God provides for us. In his commentary on one of the Psalms, Luther writes: “God could easily give you grain and fruit without your plowing and planting. But he does not want to do so. . . . What else is all our work to God–whether in the fields, in the garden, in the city, in the house, in war, or in government–but [that] by which he wants to give his gifts in the fields, at home, and everywhere else? These are the masks of God, behind which he wants to remain concealed and do all things.” Again, Luther says: “No doubt God could create children without man and woman, but he does not intend to do so. Rather he joins man and woman to make it look as if man and woman do the procreating. Yet he, hidden under this mask, is the one who does it.”

Do you get the concept? God is the one blessing us, and he does it through people. And it’s good for us to recognize this and to give thanks to God as the source and giver of the gifts. God is working behind his masks. . . .

Now if God is using other people in order to bless you, guess what? Maybe he is using you to be a blessing to others. You are called to be a mask of God, a channel of his blessings, in your various vocations: husband, wife, father, mother, citizen, neighbor, employer, employee, and so on. Whatever your calling in life, God will use you to be his mask. Be alert for those opportunities. As a husband, how can I be a blessing to my wife? As a parent, how can I be a blessing to my children? As a church member, how can I be a blessing to my congregation and my fellow church members? Are there ways, even without being asked, that I can take the initiative and act in service to others, to be a channel of God’s blessing to them? That is the most beautiful mask you can wear!

[Keep reading. . .]

Rev. Henrickson goes on to relate all of this to Christ. In the feeding of the 5,000 Jesus performs the miracle with the loaves and fishes, but He gives the task of feeding the multitudes to His disciples. Christ gives His gift of salvation by means of parents who bring their children to church and by means of pastors whom Christ uses to convey His Word and Sacraments.

It isn’t just about our wearing masks, though that can be a way to love and serve our neighbors (the purpose of every vocation), even though we dislike doing so (our self-denial and cross-bearing in vocation). What we need to realize is that we are the masks.

HT: Cheryl Swope

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

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Progressives Canceling Each Other

Last updated on: July 16, 2020 at 4:54 pm By Gene Veith

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The senior curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art gave a presentation on his plans to diversify the collection by seeking out more art by women and minorities. He concluded his talk by remarking, “don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.” For saying that, he was branded a “white supremacist.” He lost his job.

A few weeks ago, an editor at the New York Times lost his job not for his own opinions but for allowing a conservative U.S. senator to express his opinions on the op-ed page.

Now another New York Times opinions editor, Bari Weiss, has resigned, due to harassment from colleagues who are attacking her for being “centrist.” From her resignation letter:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.

She asks the publisher, to whom her letter is addressed, how he could let this happen. She says that she is convinced that most employees at the Times are not like this, but that they are cowed into submission and silence. She castigates the prevailing mindset as violating the very nature of journalism. She cites the lessons of the 2016 election, in which the nation’s leading newspaper was taken completely by surprised by the election of Donald Trump, whose supporters the paper takes no interest in trying to understand. She writes,

But the lessons that ought to have followed the election — lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society — have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Some prominent liberals and progressives have concluded that the cancel culture has gone too far, and 150 of them have affixed their names to “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published in Harper’s Magazine. After the obligatory denunciation of President Trump and the
“illiberal,” “intolerant” climate associated with him, the letter says that we on the other side must not become illiberal and intolerant ourselves (my bolds):

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

[Keep reading. . .]

The list of signatories includes feminist icon Gloria Steinem, the pioneering linguist and hard-left activist Noam Chomsky, the Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, the Islamic fatwa target Salman Rushdie, the author of the Harry Potter books J. K. Rowling.

The reaction? Social media wrath, indignation from other prominent progressives, and cancel culture outrage! Which, of course, prove the letter’s point.

The signers who had impeccable progressive credentials were nevertheless pilloried for their guilt by association. Signers of the letter should be punished, some said, not so much for their opinions but for the opinions of the other signers. Some of these people who signed this document–for example, J. K. Rowling–have said that men who identify as women are still men! Such “transphobia,” said one trans individual, “makes me feel less safe.” Another attacker said, “i really wonder if some of the people who signed this thought long and hard about whose names they’d appear next to.” At least one signer retracted her signature and abjectly crumbled when faced with the behavior she had just criticized. “I did not know who else had signed that letter,” she said. “I thought I was endorsing a well meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming. I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company. The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.” She wanted to associate with that “good company,” not a bad person like the author of the Harry Potter books!

Robby Soave in Reason Magazine, notes the repeated theme in such cancelation frenzies of people “not feeling safe” when certain ideas are stated, as if speech were a type of violence. The invocations of “safety” remind him of the Committee of Public Safety, which took charge of the French Revolution in 1793. In the name of “safety,” the committee launched the reign of terror, which swept up those accused by the mob and sent them without trial to the guillotine. Things aren’t that bad, of course, Soave says, but the mindset is instructive. He calls it the 1793 Project.

I would add that Robespierre, who led the Committee of Public Safety, became a victim of the frenzy that he himself unleashed, as his fellow Jacobins turned on each other for alleged lapses of ideological purity. Robespierre’s head ended up in the same basket as the monarchists and Christians he had guillotined.

Something similar happened in the Russian revolution with the assassination of Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky and in the Chinese cultural revolution with the Red Guard purges of Communist party officials who were deemed not radical enough.

Again, we are nowhere near that revolutionary dynamic in which the revolutionaries start destroying each other. But there is a lesson here for progressives, as well as conservatives and everyone else. As Christians know, no one can pass a purity test.

Illustration: “The Execution of Robespierre,” by Unknown author / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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On Disbanding the Police

Last updated on: June 16, 2020 at 3:01 pm By Gene Veith

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The revulsion against police brutality against black people–sparked by the killing of George Floyd–has inspired calls to defund and even to disband the police. That can have a whole spectrum of meanings and possible consequences.

The City Council of Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by a police officer, has voted unanimously to disband its police force. Exactly what that will entail has not yet been made clear.

Some cities have disbanded their police force in the sense of firing everybody and replacing them with other officers. That is not disbanding the police, as such.

Some municipalities have dissolved their city police forces out of financial considerations, leaving the county sheriff’s office to take over law-enforcement responsibilities. That isn’t disbanding the police either.

But some people are advocating the actual elimination of the police. In a report on the subject, journalist Scottie Andrew cites the desire for reform that “ends the culture of punishment in the criminal justice system.” He tells about the work of one such organization:

MPD150, a community advocacy organization in Minneapolis, focuses on abolishing local police. Its work has been spotlighted since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis Police custody.

“The people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises,” the organization says.

Rather than “strangers armed with guns,” the organization says, first responders should be mental health providers, social workers, victim advocates and other community members in less visible roles.

It argues law and order isn’t abetted by law enforcement, but through education, jobs and mental health services that low-income communities are often denied. MPD150 and other police abolition organizations want wider access to all three.

This seems to be what the Minneapolis City Council has in mind. Andrew quotes a member of that council:

City council member Steve Fletcher, in a Twitter thread, said council members are discussing “what it would take to disband the Minneapolis Police Department and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.”

“We can totally reimagine what public safety means, what skills we’re recruiting for, what tools we do and don’t need,” he wrote. “We can invest in cultural competency and mental health training, de-escalation and conflict resolution.”

We blogged about the police vocation and the difference between police officers who fulfill their calling to love and serve their neighbors by enforcing the law, and those who violate their callings by harming and mistreating their neighbors, as opposed to upholding the police motto “to serve and protect.”

But these proposals come out of a completely different worldview. Are human beings moral agents responsible for their actions, so that committing a crime is a moral offense that society needs to be protected from? Or are human beings not responsible at all for what they do, so that those who commit crimes are themselves victims of the society?

Is a murderer someone who should be apprehended, by force if need be, and punished? Or is the murderer mentally ill, in which case he needs to be dealt with by a “mental health” expert instead of a SWAT team. Or did the murderer kill because he was the victim of social injustice–formed by economic hardship, a dysfunctional family, and cultural mistreatment, all of which fueled his rage and provoked his violence–in which case he needs to be dealt with by a social worker, with the larger imperative of changing the social problems that are causing murderous behavior.

In the traditional mind-set, attention would focus on individual police officers, with the view of identifying and punishing the “bad cops,” while still respecting the vast majority of “good cops.” But the collectivist mind-set that sees bad behavior as “systemic” blames all police officers as a collective group.

Thus, activists speak of “the myth of the good cop.” As one explained, “The phrase ‘good cop’ is an oxymoron. There is no morality in choosing to work in the field of state-sponsored violence.” The pop culture has long portrayed police officers as heroes, but is now pulling back from that, with TV networks cancelling long-running programming. (No, Paw Patrol has not really been cancelled, but the cartoon that includes a dog in a police uniform did come in for criticism for promoting “the good-cop archetype.” In the words of the New York Times, “‘Paw Patrol’ seems harmless enough, and that’s the point: The movement rests on understanding that cops do plenty of harm.”)

So while the anti-police activists call on eliminating “the culture of punishment,” that only applies to individuals. The police as a whole should be punished. This is the logic behind the “defund the police” movement. Already, sixteen of the nation’s largest cities, including Los Angeles and New York, are responding to the protests by slashing police department budgets. Thus, police who never committed misconduct are being punished for the crimes of a few, even though the funding cuts mean less money for training, supervision, and more minority hires.

The big question is how these proposed alternatives would deal with violent criminals. If an active shooter starts killing school children, a 911 call will bring a social worker? Would that save lives or cost lives? Would a mental health counselor be able to stop a terrorist?

Most proposals to eliminate the police would make use of community members to protect each other. So untrained members of the public would face down threats to the community? We are talking about vigilantes? Such as those responsible for lynchings?

Most progressives don’t like the Second Amendment or the idea of a citizenry armed for self-defense. But that would be the first and totally justifiable result of eliminating the police force, on a scale that rivals the “Wild West.”

Eliminating law enforcement officers would result in a reversion to privatized justice, from the reimposition of revenge codes to private security armies. Criminal gangs already enforce revenge codes with their drive-by shootings, and they would certainly rush into the void left by the police to enforce rough justice and impose their own brand of social order.

Wealthy individuals and organized groups would pay for their own security details. We can see what that looks like in Mexico, for instance, where drug dealer armies battle private armies, with innocent men, women, and children caught in the cross-fire.

The police profession may need to be reformed and even be policed. (Don’t activists want the perpetrators of the George Floyd and similar homicides punished? Or do they too just need to see a mental health counselor or social worker?) But that does not mean condemning all police officers and denying the existence of any good police officers.

One of the worst effects of the current anti-police backlash is that it is demonizing men and women who really do, routinely, risk their lives to protect the public. Police officers across the country, stung by the new lack of respect and their portrayal as villains no matter what they do, are resigning. Calls for police reform include hiring more minority officers, but how can that happen in a climate that condemns black police officers as “class traitors”?

Photo by San Francisco Foghorn via Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0 License

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Not Just Teaching but Living Western Civilization

Last updated on: May 31, 2020 at 6:04 pm By Gene Veith

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Nathanael Blake at the Federalist has written a perceptive essay entitled If We Want Western Civ Revitalized, We Can’t Leave It To Universities, with the deck, “We should be less concerned with getting elite universities to rededicate themselves to teaching the Western heritage, and more focused on making Western culture a reality in our lives.”

Conservatives often call for universities to teach more or require more Western civilization courses. But we should not want today’s academic establishment to teach Western civilization. Their approach will be to attack our cultural heritage, presenting it as nothing more than racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive white privilege, with nothing positive to offer people today. This is completely wrong, but this is the impression students often get from their superficial survey courses.

It is, however, true that students need help and background to fully understand and appreciate the Western classics. And higher education is where this can be learned.

There are colleges, such as Patrick Henry College, that take Western civilization seriously. And even the big established universities generally have illuminating old-school scholars. So I do favor the study of our intellectual and cultural heritage in colleges. It’s just more difficult than it used to be, and students need to take more effort in ensuring that they are getting what they need from their classes.

But Mr. Blake makes a further point in his essay: There is a difference between knowing about something, and living it. This is certainly true, he says, of religion. It is also true of civilization. You can know about it–knowing the history, the major figures, the great works, the important ideas–without drawing on those treasures in your own life and being part of this continuing tradition.

Realize, though, that Western civilization is not one thing. Humanists tried to create a “canon” of “Great Books” and “Great Ideas.” Notice the religious language, referring to the books that constitute the Bible. The Humanists–who are now as out of approval in the Academy as Christians–thought that these wonderful human achievements could function as a secular Scripture. They can’t. Western thought contains many different movements, schools, styles, and ideologies. There is nothing monolithic about it. Some of it is consistent with Christianity (or freedom and democracy), some emerged from Christianity (or freedom and democracy), and some is actively hostile to Christianity (or freedom and democracy), though in many different ways.

We do have “Great Books,” “Great Ideas,” “Great Minds,” “Great Discoveries,” “Great Music,” and “Great Art” in our heritage. What makes them great, though, is that, for one reason or another, they stand the test of time. We can still appreciate, learn from, and draw from them in our own lives today.

These Great Works are better, by just about any measure–more entertaining, more involving, more stimulating, more valuable, more enjoyable–than the typical fare from our small, parochial slice of time. This is important for those of us who don’t necessarily agree with the dominant ideas and values of our time, since drawing on the treasures of our past can counter-balance them and give us alternative ways of thinking and feeling. (Read C. S. Lewis’s On the Reading of Old Books.)

So we should take advantage of this heritage. Let me suggest some ways of doing that. First of all, let your enjoyment be your guide. Some books we read because they are good for us, but when just getting started “living” our civilization, you can let your inclinations be your guide. And don’t think you have to give up your contemporary fare. Just because you will develop a taste for Bach doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to give up your favorite radio stations. C. S. Lewis, in the essay I linked to, said that while it’s a good idea to read one old book for every modern book, if that’s too much, you can read one old book for every three modern books. If that’s too much, go for less. But try these enduring works from the past.

Listen to classical music.

Start with Bach and Mozart. It’s not slow. It’s not boring. It’s highly rhythmic and will get your juices going. You and your family, including your children, will enjoy it. Once you get used to it, you will acquire a taste for it. You can still listen to your pop songs, but after awhile, you will prefer the good stuff.

Read classic books.

If you like romance novels, read Jane Austen, starting with Pride and Prejudice. If you like mysteries, read Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. If you like military sagas, read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. If you like humor, read Jonathan Swift’s unexpurgated Gulliver’s Travels and Mark Twain’s early travel narratives Innocents Abroad and Roughing It. If you like weird, funny, experimental, off-the-wall stories, read Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy. If you want to become wholly absorbed in a book that can change your life, read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.

If you like theology, read Augustine’s Confession and Luther’s Commentary on Galatians.

If you are interested in politics, read The Federalist Papers.

If you like history and period pieces, read a book from that period, which will put you inside another place and time. All of these books will lead you to more books by the same or similar authors.

Take on projects

If you want an enjoyable crash course in Western civilization, read the epics: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Virgil’s Aeneid. Dante’s Divine Comedy. Milton’s Paradise Lost. It’s all there.

For a bucket list project, read all of Shakespeare’s plays. For stories, characters, and language, they are supreme.

If you are a fan of Downton Abbey, Masterpiece Theatre, or steam-punk Victoriana, read the complete novels of Charles Dickens. They have humor, pathos, romance, adventure, unforgettable characters, life lessons, style, historical evocation, social criticism, and sheer story-telling genius.

As Mr. Blake says, all of this is at our fingertips today on the internet. Most of the works I link to can be downloaded for free on Kindle, though the free versions are not always the best translations or editions–I tried to link to good ones–and I myself like to underline passages in books that are this good.

I could go on and on, as I did as an English professor for four decades. But you get the idea. In every field, read the old books, look at the old paintings, go into buildings of the old architecture, and you will begin to “live” our civilization.

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood form PxHere

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Lessons from Roman Persecution

Last updated on: May 30, 2020 at 5:02 pm By Gene Veith

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Ancient Rome was the pinnacle of religious toleration, making a point to honor even the gods of their defeated enemies by installing them in the Pantheon. Ancient Rome had an enlightened legal system, protecting individual rights and the principles of justice. And yet, Rome made an exception for Christians, putting aside its toleration and violating its own tenets of justice to outlaw and cruelly punish the followers of Jesus Christ.

Why did Rome do that? And might today’s similarly tolerant and legally enlightened societies do the same?

The Catholic legal expert Carl Herstein has written a fascinating and important article for Public Square entitled Our Return to the Persecution of the Pre-Christian World. He examines just why the Roman persecuted Christianity and sees parallels to the growing legal challenges that Christians are facing today. He is not saying that today’s Christians are in jeopardy of being thrown to the lions or burned as torches to provide light for an emperor’s feast. He is concentrating on the laws and their rationale then and now.

I want to sum up his argument and then draw some lessons from his findings, with reference to options that Christians are currently considering about how to function in an increasingly secularist and culturally hostile climate.

Romans disliked Christians and felt threatened by them because they opposed Roman values and refused to participate fully in Roman public life. Central to the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire was political participation–running for office, campaigning, voting–but the early Christians cared little for that. Rome was militaristic and glorified war, but the Christians favored peace and often refused to join the army. Rome loved its gladiator fights and related spectacles, but the Christians scorned them. Religion for the Romans was primarily a civic matter, but Christians refused to take part, considering the civil religion in all of its tolerance to be idolatry. Christians were thus a living reproach to what Romans held dear. Of course they were hated.

What Rome wanted from the Christians was submission. Roman law demanded of the Christians, an act of obeisance to Roman values, however small. Just burn some incense to the deified Emperor. That’s all you have to do.

Herstein notes that the Romans violated their own legal principles to extort this concession from the Christians. The legal system was not so enlightened that it rejected torture, but torture was always used to force the accused to confess their crimes. Christians, though, were quite willing to confess the crime of their faith. So with them, the Romans used torture to get them to deny the crime that they were charged with. The goal of the torturers was to force the accused to deny their faith, to apostasize, whereupon they would be released.

Today’s secularist values include non-discrimination, sexual permissiveness, and the right to an abortion. Again, Christians, with their views about gender, sexual morality, and the sanctity of life do not go along with those values. But the secularists insist on submission.

Christians were tortured to cause them to recant and/or to offer the ritual sacrifices that showed their solidarity with the values of the state. So too, is the rapidly developing state of affairs today, although physical torture has been replaced with subtler means, such as economic loss, inability to pursue a trade or profession, loss of a license and even prison. The baker is not punished for having disrupted a gay wedding, but rather for refusing to design and bake a cake for it and thus affirm the values that the state has legitimated. The doctor is not punished for abusing a patient but rather for refusing to perform a procedure that takes a life but which the state decrees ought to be deemed health care.

The unlawful act is thus akin to the Roman Christian’s failure to offer incense as a sacrifice to the emperor; no one cared whether the Christian actually believed that the emperor was a god in any meaningful theological sense (it is highly unlikely that the Roman elite saw the title in much more than honorific terms), but it was seen as of vital importance in affirming the values that the state believed were important—tradition and loyalty. . . .The contemporary notion is that Christians are entitled to believe whatever they wish to believe, as long as that belief is kept private and does not prevent them from making what is, in the eyes of the government, simply a small gesture of respect for the current gods of the state.

Roman persecution of Christians was written into its laws, but it wasn’t always or consistently carried out. Much of the persecution consisted not so much official action on the part of the government but allowing the public to attack Christians with impunity. Similarly, Herstein says that the legal jeopardy religious institutions and individuals often face today is lawsuits from aggrieved parties who allege discrimination or other mistreatment, but the punitive effect of these charges is still considerable.

Read Herstein’s entire article, which includes many more details and examples. Here are some lessons that we might draw from the parallels with ancient Rome:

(1) Cultural withdrawal makes persecution more likely. Some Christians today are saying that we should respond to the hostility of the dominant culture by withdrawing from it. We have lost the culture wars, so we should just form our own separate cultures. I think highly of the Benedict Option, mostly, but we need to realize what to expect.

Cultural withdrawal makes Christians into the “other.” That will increase hostility against us, as happened with the Romans. And it happens whenever individuals and groups of people are mistreated. “They are not like us,” becomes “they are less than human,” which becomes “we can hurt them.”

Do we really think the secularists will allow us to peacefully withdraw into our own schools and homeschools, following our own pro-life practices, upholding our own families, churches, and other institutions? Notice how already homeschooling is being demonized, how even the Vice-President’s wife was smeared for teaching in a Christian school that upholds standards of sexual morality, how being pro-life is being portrayed as an evil, how Christians are being dehumanized. Laws and policies are being proposed that would punish such violations of the society’s values.

Not that Christians should necessarily flee persecution, though the Bible allows for it under some circumstances (Acts 8:1). But we must understand that separating ourselves from the secularist society will not protect us from persecution. Rather, it will probably make it worse.

(2) Our protection from persecution is our rights and liberties. Our society, for all of the secularism of those with cultural power, still has strong cultural and personal ties to Christianity. In America, Christians are not “other” to the extent they were in Rome. We have Constitutional rights to religious freedom. Our legal system offers important protections for Christians that the Roman system, for all of its virtues, did not. The secularists may hate us for our beliefs, but they cannot easily get rid of us. As long as we can, we will have to stand on those rights, litigate them, and not go away.

This is therefore not the time to fantasize about “integralism” or “dominionism” or otherwise taking over the country. There is no way in this secularist culture that Christians can implement Biblical law or set up the Pope as the temporal authority. Such theoretical dreams are not only impossible but theologically wrong, since Christianity has to do mainly with the Gospel, not the Law.

But at the same time, complete separation from politics and from the larger non-Christian society is not right either, given our vocations in the world, including our vocations as citizens.

As a group we may not rule, though individual Christians, by virtue of their vocations, may exercise political offices. But, as long as we are still engaged politically, we can have a say. We can have allies. We can be part of coalitions. Different factions might compete for our support. We would be much harder to persecute.

Painting: “The Christian Martyr’s Last Prayer” (1883) by Jean-Léon Gérôme / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Weird Christianity

Last updated on: May 14, 2020 at 3:33 pm By Gene Veith

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Some Christians, particularly younger adults, are reacting against the emptiness of secularist culture and what they see as the superficiality of American Christianity of both the right and the left by embracing “anti-modern” Christianity, with its sacramentalism, liturgies, and ancient theologies.

These counter-cultural Christians prize Christianity in all its “weirdness”–that is, its mind-blowing supernaturalism–and call themselves “weird Christians.”

That’s the topic of a long article in the New York Times, no less, by Tara Isabella Burton, who describes herself in those terms, Christianity Gets Weird: Modern life is ugly, brutal and barren. Maybe you should try a Latin Mass.

Many of these self-described “weird Christians,” who have built up a substantial presence online and on social media, have become hyper-traditionalist Catholics who love the Latin Mass, even if they can only watch it online. Some, like the author of the article, are Anglicans. As religion journalist Terry Mattingly points out in his discussion of the article, they can also be found among the Orthodox. AND, he writes, to my great amusement at reading about my church body, “There are some in the high-church congregations among the Missouri-Synod Lutherans, as opposed to doctrinally progressive Lutheran churches.”

Here are some excerpts from the New York Times article:

More and more young Christians, disillusioned by the political binaries, economic uncertainties and spiritual emptiness that have come to define modern America, are finding solace in a decidedly anti-modern vision of faith. As the coronavirus and the subsequent lockdowns throw the failures of the current social order into stark relief, old forms of religiosity offer a glimpse of the transcendent beyond the present.

Many of us call ourselves “Weird Christians,” albeit partly in jest. What we have in common is that we see a return to old-school forms of worship as a way of escaping from the crisis of modernity and the liberal-capitalist faith in individualism. . . .

They are finding that ancient theology can better answer contemporary problems than any of the modern secular world’s solutions. . . .

Weird Christianity is equal parts traditionalism and, well, punk: Christianity as transgressive alternative to contemporary secular capitalist culture. Like punk, Weird Christianity has its own, clearly defined aesthetic. Many Weird Christians across the denominational and political spectrum express fondness for older, more liturgically elaborate practices — like the Episcopal Rite I, a form of worship that draws on Elizabethan-era language, say, or the Latin Mass, or the wearing of veils to church. . . .

This approach to Christianity may not look or sound like the one most commonly represented in the mainstream media — which tends to focus on either politically conservative white evangelicalism or its more anodyne mainline equivalent. But it’s likely to reflect Christianity’s only viable future in a secular age: as a spiritually saturated rejection of the American political binary and the limited possibilities of a culture that denies transcendence.

Christianity, after all, has been most successful when it’s most demanding. . . .

The Weird Christian movement, loose and fledgling though it is, isn’t just about its punk-traditionalist aesthetic, a valorization of a half-imagined past. It is at its most potent when it challenges the present, and reimagines the future. Its adherents are, like so many young Americans of all religious persuasions, characterized by their hunger for something more than contemporary American culture can offer, something transcendent, politically meaningful, personally challenging. Like the hipster obsession with “authenticity” that marked the mid-2010s, the rise of Weird Christianity reflects America’s unfulfilled desire for, well, something real.

Christianity as “transgressive”! Christianity as rebellious, as “punk”! Christianity that does not conform to the dominant culture! I love that. This fits with my own spiritual pilgrimage to confessional Lutheranism, old though I am now. How the needs articulated in this article can be fulfilled in Lutheranism is the subject of my book with Trevor Sutton, Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World.

So, speaking as someone sympathetic to this movement, indeed as someone who is pretty weird himself, let me offer a friendly response to this article.

I’m glad that old-school Christianity is coming back into fashion. But beware of adopting a theology or a church practice because of how cool it is. Fashion, by its very nature, keeps changing, and what is cool at one point of time will go out of vogue a little bit later. And how counter-cultural is a religion, really, if it becomes fashionable? The whole point of classical Christianity is that it is timeless.

And don’t adopt a theology or church practice for aesthetic reasons, as a matter of taste, because you “like” it. That too is shifting sand. To be sure, beauty and sublimity are significant. We are told to “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” (Psalm 96:9; KJV). That’s different from the holiness of beauty. Look for holiness and look for truth.

I do think the “weird Christians” I’ve seen on line know that. They seem committed not just to the aesthetics of historic Christianity but to the doctrines and the morality. They are very pro-life. And yet, the article shows a political agenda too, a critique of “capitalism” and conservative Christians’ alleged allegiance to the Republican party. The weird Christians in the article want to follow Catholic social teachings and some of them belong to the American Solidarity Party, which is liberal when it comes to economics, the environment, and peace issues, but conservative when it comes to life issues, sexual morality, and family values. I would just say that any entanglement of Christianity with politics–other than the civic involvement of individual Christians in their vocation of citizenship–is likely to compromise the Church. Weird Lutheranism could help them in sorting out that issue.

Actually, ALL Christianity is intrinsically “weird” in this good sense. A God who becomes a man and who takes into Himself the sins and griefs of the world and saves us by dying on a cross and rising again? How weird is that? All Christians who affirm this supernatural faith–whether they are called Catholic, Orthodox, Confessional, or Biblical–have to be anti-modern, counter-cultural, and transcendent.

Indeed, as I blogged about last year, the evangelical Michael Frost has made the same case in his book Keep Christianity Weird: Embracing the Discipline of Being Different, as has the Southern Baptist Russell Moore in his podcast, Why Christians Must Keep Christianity Strange.

And if supernatural Christianity is “weird” by the world’s standards, from another perspective–God’s perspective, that of created reality–Christianity is normal and the world’s standards are what’s really “weird.”

Photo via PXhere, Creative Commons CC0.

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