{"id":2005,"date":"2019-08-25T17:46:10","date_gmt":"2019-08-25T21:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=2005"},"modified":"2019-08-25T17:46:10","modified_gmt":"2019-08-25T21:46:10","slug":"big-christianism-christianism-industrial-complex-vs-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2019\/08\/big-christianism-christianism-industrial-complex-vs-christianity.html","title":{"rendered":"Big Christianism, the Christianism-Industrial-Complex vs. Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christian leadership\u2014meaning clerics and commentators of both the Catholic and Protestant varieties\u2014all too often reveals itself to be of the world.<\/em><\/p>\n

Speaking as a practicing Roman Catholic, this is a sobering truth with which to reckon.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s true all of the same.<\/p>\n

Between genuine Christianity and what I will henceforth refer to as Big Christianism or, alternatively, the Christianism-Industrial-Complex (CIC), there is all of the difference.<\/p>\n

For at least three reasons, \u201cBig Christianism\u201d is an appropriate term for the phenomenon under consideration.<\/p>\n

First, Christianism, being an ism,<\/em> is an ideology<\/em>, a theoretical abstraction designed to impose upon the ever-flowing currents of everyday life a straightjacket of sorts comprised of its own principles and dogmas. Unlike Christianity, which is a way of life inasmuch as the Christian\u2019s love for God is supposed to inform every thought, word, and deed, Christianism is a set of principles or rules, of proverbial boxes to be checked by its adherents.<\/p>\n

Second, the intellectual construction that is Christianism is a political <\/em>ideology. It is essentially but a version of our contemporary secular culture\u2019s prevailing Zeitgeist.\u00a0 That is, it is Political Correctness.\u00a0 It is leftism, specifically, what is commonly referred to as \u201cCultural Marxism,\u201d but with this crucial difference: Christianism supplies to the reigning orthodoxy a theological pretext.\u00a0 As such, a \u201cgood\u201d Christianist is one who subscribes to Politically Correct positions on those issues to which leftists attach significance.<\/p>\n

Christianism, to put it simply, is of the world. <\/em><\/p>\n

Third, precisely because Christianism is ubiquitous, with untold numbers of clerics, academics, and writers from across the denominational divide deriving from it enormous benefits in affluence, fame, and, crucially, the semblance<\/em> of virtue, it is indeed \u201cBig,\u201d <\/em>an industrial complex.<\/p>\n

So, how can we distinguish a Big Christianist from a Christian?\u00a0 The list of features below is admittedly impressionistic, but it suffices to bring into focus a picture of the Big Christianist, the purveyor of the Christianism-Industrial-Complex.<\/p>\n

(1)Fundamentally, Big Christianism has little use for the Bible. Granted, he or she will make selective references to Scripture when it is thought that such passages could be spun in such a way as to advance, or at least not impede, the leftist agenda for which Big Christianism provides theological cover.\u00a0 Yet, generally speaking, the Bible, precisely because it is among the most politically incorrect <\/em>books that has ever existed, is clearly not a thing to which Big Christianists want their constituents paying particularly careful attention.<\/p>\n

Because the Bible, in affirming the creaturely<\/em> status of the world, affirms the existence and omnipresence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, it just as resoundingly underscores the objectivity<\/em> of value: good, evil, truth, beauty, justice, piety\u2014these are real <\/em>features of the world. \u00a0They are neither subjective experiences within the eye of the beholder nor the conventions of culture.<\/p>\n

This means that the cosmos, courtesy of the Supreme Person that authored it, is intrinsically \u201cdiscriminatory.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>The universe, nature, or whatever other terms we choose to ascribe to reality discriminates.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

This is unacceptable from the standpoint of the Big Christianist, for being that Big Christianism is but another species of leftism, the Bible, given its normative, theocentric vision of nature, threatens the left\u2019s agenda to fundamentally transform Western, Euro-Christian civilization.\u00a0 The inclusivity to which Big Christianists pay rhetorical homage and for which they push at the cost of relativizing (at least in practice, if not necessarily in theory) the differences in belief and conduct between individuals and cultures is impossible to reconcile with the Biblical portrait of reality.<\/p>\n

The Bible also affirms, or at least permits, other things, like slavery, patriarchy, war, and nationalism that Big Christianists prefer not to acknowledge.\u00a0 It condemns homosexuality, to say nothing of insisting that marriage is an inherently heterosexual union.\u00a0 And the Bible leaves no doubts that: (a) there really are wicked people; (b) God despises the wicked; and (c) God reserves the ultimate punishment<\/em> for the wicked.<\/p>\n

God, far from being inclusive, <\/em>is resolutely exclusive <\/em>when it comes to, not those to whom He extends the invitation of eternal life, but those upon whom He will ultimately grant it.<\/p>\n

These are viewpoints that Big Christianists either ignore or attempt to reinterpret away.<\/p>\n

But for as scandalous and politically intolerable as these perspectives are for the Big Christianist, none is as unacceptable, none is as big of a threat, as the Biblical portrait of Christ. <\/em><\/p>\n

(2)The Big Christianist\u2019s (ad hoc) approach to Scripture is, in effect, implicitly Marcionist<\/em>.\u00a0 Marcion of Sinope lived during the second century in Rome, and the heresy that has been forever named after him is the doctrine that the God of the Old Testament is a fundamentally different God than that of the New.\u00a0 The True God, he maintained, is the God of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

Big Christianists hold something like this view.\u00a0 Only the God of the Christianism-Industrial-Complex is a gross distortion of the God that is revealed in the pages of the New Testament. The Jesus that it has created\u2014a nonjudgmental, passive, live-and-let-live, unconditionally accepting 1st<\/sup> century liberal hippie who was crucified for no reason other than that he preached universal love\u2014is a politically-advantageous fiction that permits the CIC to achieve three goals:<\/p>\n

First, such a Jesus\u2014let\u2019s call him \u201cFake Jesus\u201d\u2014is wholly vapid.\u00a0 <\/em>As such, Fake Jesus permits Big Christianists to make any number of uses of him for their own purposes.\u00a0 For example, since Fake Jesus never discriminated against or passed judgment upon anyone, and since we are supposed to emulate Fake Jesus, this means that those of us who inhabit the West should allow to settle within our countries theoretically limitless numbers of human beings from anywhere on the planet, and irrespectively of whether their customs and traditions are antithetical to our own.<\/p>\n

Or, since Fake Jesus unconditionally accepted everyone, regardless of how they conducted themselves, and because we are supposed to be like Fake Jesus, the creators and sustainers of reasonably decent, safe, and clean communities must permit the construction of \u201chomeless\u201d shelters within those communities.<\/p>\n

When a proposition, like the proposition regarding this fictional depiction of Jesus, is sufficiently vague, it can all too easily be conscripted into the service of any number of policies.<\/p>\n

Second, Fake Jesus is so boring that it is utterly impossible for him to lend offense to anyone who may consider occupying a place in any Big Christianist churches.\u00a0 Big Christianists, after all, don\u2019t want to scare off any potential tithers.\u00a0 They believe, understandably, that Fake Jesus is their insurance against this occurring.<\/p>\n

After all, what remotely decent human being could take offense by a character, like Fake Jesus, who only preaches unconditional love and who will eagerly, happily embrace anyone and everyone irrespectively of what they\u2019ve done, what they continue to do, and whether or not they repent of their sins?\u00a0 In fact, Fake Jesus isn\u2019t concerned about repentance of sin simply and solely because he doesn\u2019t acknowledge the concept of sin.<\/p>\n

Sin is a religious<\/em> notion.\u00a0 Fake Jesus, however, hasn\u2019t any use for \u201corganized\u201d or \u201cinstitutionalized religion.\u201d\u00a0 He is, at best, \u201cspiritual.\u201d<\/p>\n

As such, Fake Jesus makes everyone feel good about themselves\u2014irrespectively of how wretched they are.<\/p>\n

Thirdly, Fake Jesus enables Big Christianists to not only fatten their coffers, but to accommodate the world in that he provides them the opportunity to ignore the real <\/em>Jesus.<\/p>\n

While Jesus did indeed instruct His disciples to cultivate the supreme excellence of agape, <\/em>of love for all, between the Carpenter of Galilee and the imposter that Big Christianism has put in His place there exists an unbridgeable gap.<\/p>\n

Jesus demanded of His followers that they \u201clove one another,\u201d but this injunction needs to be understood in light of, not just the context provided by the New <\/em>Testament, but as well that of the Old <\/em>Testament.<\/p>\n

Jesus was anything but the \u201cmeek and mild\u201d nice guy\u2014Fake Jesus\u2014that Big Christianists, non-Christians, and anti-Christians make Him out to be.\u00a0 He wasn\u2019t nice at all.\u00a0 In fact, if Jesus wasn\u2019t who He claimed to be and who the Apostolic Fathers insisted He was, then Jesus was the most obnoxious of jerks, a man whose ego was as immense as His psyche was deluded and His temperament was volatile.<\/p>\n

Jesus repeatedly self-identifies as the God of the Bible, of the Hebrew Scriptures, the same God that demands undivided allegiance from the human beings who He created and upon whom He has visited unrelenting, homicidal, and, in some instances, genocidal<\/em> violence for turning away from Him.<\/p>\n

The God who flooded the Earth, destroying the vast majority of people and animal species, is the God that became a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.<\/p>\n

The God of the Old Testament who annihilated whole cities, and who ordered the annihilation of still other cities\u2014of men, women, children, and livestock\u2014is one and the same God who was born of the Virgin Mary.<\/p>\n

When God became a man in Jesus, He did not cease being the \u201cjealous\u201d God feared by the Israelites and Israel\u2019s enemies.\u00a0 No, if Jesus\u2019s demands could be said to differ from those made by Yahweh it is only to the extent that they were arguably more <\/em>austere than those issued by God in the Old Testament:<\/p>\n

Whereas God spoke mostly to the Jews in the Hebrew Scriptures, in Christ He puts Jew and non-Jew alike on notice that either they accept Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, or else\u2026 they die. <\/em><\/p>\n

Big Christianists are apoplectic over Donald Trump\u2019s tweets (while, tellingly, maintaining a deafening silence in the face of the toxic sewage that daily spews forth from not just mostly black rap \u201cartists,\u201d but as well from Democratic politicians and anti-Trump activists who have normalized obscenity and even violence against the President and his supporters). \u00a0Yet the manner with which Jesus dealt with His opponents makes the roughest of the President\u2019s tweets sound like Mr. Rogers.<\/p>\n

With unmitigated conviction and white-hot passion, Jesus not only referred to His adversaries in the ugliest of terms, but blasted them with the severest of charges to their faces.\u00a0 He also promised them\u2014indeed, threatened them\u2014with eternal damnation, agonizing pain and suffering without end.<\/p>\n

And He did so routinely.<\/p>\n

Jesus also likened a woman who came to Him for help to a dog, for she was a non-Jew, a Gentile, and, from His perspective as a Jew, non-Jews were inferior as Gentiles <\/em>to Jews.\u00a0 That the woman\u2019s faith in Jesus ultimately prevailed upon Him to heed her request does not change two politically-incorrect facts regarding the God-Man:<\/p>\n

(a)Jesus recognized distinctions between, not just individuals, but groups<\/em>: Jesus, in other words, practiced discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and religion;<\/p>\n

(b)He was willing to suspend His \u201cban\u201d on Gentiles, but if and only if they were willing to \u201cassimilate\u201d themselves to Him.\u00a0 <\/em>Only if \u201cthe dogs\u201d were willing to abandon those of their beliefs that were at odds with the Truth of which Jesus claimed to be the Incarnation and embrace Him as the only alternative to eternal perdition would He rescue them. If not, then He would follow the course of action that He would later prescribe to His disciples for when their testimony to the Gospel fell on deaf ears: Jesus would shake the dirt off of His sandals, move on, and never look back.<\/p>\n

Yet it wasn\u2019t just Gentiles who Jesus took to task.\u00a0 He eviscerated His fellow Jews qua Jews, <\/em>hurling epithets, allegations, and threats of unprecedented violence, of \u201cwailing and gnashing of teeth,\u201d that would be sure to secure a place today for anyone who said so much as an iota of this on one of the \u201cHate Watch\u201d lists of the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.<\/p>\n

Jesus, like His Apostles who placed the lion\u2019s share of guilt for His crucifixion upon the collective shoulder of \u201cthe Jews<\/em>,\u201d can only be viewed as the most virulent of \u201canti-Semites\u201d from the vantage point of these Hate Seekers.<\/p>\n

However, Jesus could be pretty merciless toward His closest friends, prospective followers, relatives, and\u2026well, pretty much everybody.<\/p>\n

Jesus regularly pulled no punches when chastising His apostles for their weaknesses in understanding and faith, exhibited what can only strike us as stone-cold indifference to the pain endured by a man who didn\u2019t want to follow Him until after he buried his dead father, and in effect denied His own family.<\/p>\n

Jesus used force<\/em> to drive the money-changers from the Temple and commanded His disciples to obtain swords.<\/p>\n

The God of the New Testament, like the God of the Old\u2014i.e. Jesus\u2014is violent. <\/em><\/p>\n

The Carpenter from Galilee, in featuring such activities as war and slavery in His parables, never condemned these universal institutions.\u00a0 Nor, for that matter, did He condemn \u201cracism,\u201d \u201csexism,\u201d \u201chomophobia,\u201d \u201cIslamophobia,\u201d \u201cxenophobia,\u201d \u201cnationalism,\u201d \u201cmisogyny,\u201d \u201cglobal warming,\u201d and whatever other unforgivable isms and phobias can be found in the leftist\u2019s catalogue of mortal transgressions.<\/p>\n

It is undoubtedly because of this that Big Christianists prefer to drop Him down the memory hole and, instead, promote a fictional character, Fake Jesus, that is more conducive to the ends of the Christianism-Industrial-Complex.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christian leadership\u2014meaning clerics and commentators of both the Catholic and Protestant varieties\u2014all too often reveals itself to be of the world. Speaking as a practicing Roman Catholic, this is a sobering truth with which to reckon. But it\u2019s true all of the same. Between genuine Christianity and what I will henceforth refer to as Big…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBig Christianism, the Christianism-Industrial-Complex vs. Christianity<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2019\/08\/big-christianism-christianism-industrial-complex-vs-christianity.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Big Christianism, the Christianism-Industrial-Complex vs. Christianity\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Christian leadership\u2014meaning clerics and commentators of both the Catholic and Protestant varieties\u2014all too often reveals itself to be of the world. 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