They have a deep love for Christopher Columbus, which is either odd or ironically appropriate considering how much they hate the America he’s mythically credited for starting. They love Orthodox and Anglican people insofar as they can appropriate them. They claim to want to unite the Anglicans, Orthodox and Catholics into one Church under a “sacred Byzantine, English, and Roman Patrimony,” and their only plan to do so is a resolution to protect “the Tridentine Latin Mass.” Why they think the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite is in danger, and what it has to do with the Eastern churches who have never practiced such a thing, is beyond me. I don’t like the sound of it at all.
I began having flashbacks to my own childhood, reading the Counter-Revolution’s website– but for once they were hilarious flashbacks, not the traumatic kind. I laughed until my sides split. I knew immediately that these were teenagers who had been homeschooled, almost certainly with the horrendous Seton Home Study School as I had been. Their stilted essay-writing style, their naivete, their bad theology and worse poetry, their unconscious racism and misogyny, their fondness for a glossy idealized version of a monarchy, their belief that they themselves could immanentize the eschaton and that that would look like a human empire– all of this could have been me, nearly twenty years ago. But I didn’t have a website to my name. I didn’t even have an AOL account for instant messages in those days. How times have changed.
What happened?
How did this sheltered, insular, juvenile daydream become a movement which my friend informs me has “thousands of followers?” There are nearly five thousand people in their facebook group, and surely not all of them are trolls.
What is the appeal of half-baked wannabe fascist movements in Christian trappings?
I think there is a perpetual temptation among Christians to want to make the return and reign of Christ something immanent, something we can fully understand– a human thing in a Divine veil, to paraphrase the Counter-Revolution. To take that dreadful, beautiful, impossible Mystery–Charity beyond all telling, Mercy beyond all reason, perfect Justice the like of which we can’t begin to imitate, Love that unites every diverse human being into one mystical Body without losing our selfhood– and make it something human. Christ is a human, and He is coming again in glory to judge the Living and the Dead. We will all see that day, as lightning appears from one end of the sky to the other. But it’s not going to look like a human kingdom. It won’t look like the Roman empire, or the Holy Roman empire, or a homeschooler’s idea of what Columbus and the Medicis were really like. It will be infinitely more and infinitely better.
But humans don’t want to have anything to do with the Infinitely More and Infinitely Better. We want things we can understand, master and manipulate. We want gods that are smaller than we are and can be hoisted on human shoulders. So we take a crystalized moment in time, viewed in retrospect through rose-colored glasses, and decide that that must be exactly what God had in mind. Our culture is sinful insofar as it deviates from the Holy Roman Empire, or from the Medicis, or from 1492. The sins of Charlemagne, Maria Di Medici and Christopher Columbus must be liberal propaganda, for we believe such folk heroes to be without sin. And suddenly, our God is no longer Christ but this or that weird quasi-historical idol.
We try to recreate this ahistoric mishmash on earth, and suddenly we’re homeschooled teenagers playing at fascism– or real fascists.
The Catechism states that “the Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement.” And Christians must resist the Antichrist, whether he comes to us dressed as a modern politician, an idealized portrait of a king, or a flock of nauseated two-headed birds that make you feel like Tippi Hedren.
There is only one Christ, and this isn’t He.
Him we must follow with our whole hearts, leaving childish things behind.
(image: A still from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
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