By Conlan Salgado
Written by Conlan Salgado
“There was a remarkable man. Some people even called him a superman. He believed in God, but in the depths of his soul he preferred himself”—a Short Story of the Anti-Christ by Vladimir Soloviev
The modern world is presumably soulless, so it is in the depths of something else—our depravity, perhaps—that we prefer ourselves to God. In the postmodern society, this preference has taken the odd form of replacing good works in the religious sense with social reform in the sense of policy; no doubt the most cynical would say that God cannot be believed in, so we must have faith in each other, or in science, or in progress.
Since Covid made it impossible to trust the first two, and the 20th century made it impossible to hope in the third, we ought at least to consider recalling God from His exile.
Those who have been on a political high (including myself) since President Trump’s victory may resent what I say when I suggest that the only way to save America is to replace “good policy” with good works on a wide range of issues, most especially local—county and city—ones.
I am hardly the first person to observe that the political movements of our times have distinctly religious stakes (blissful existence or miserable extinction), and a clearly religious set-up.
Their adherents say: There are actions we are obligated to perform, a lifestyle we must follow, and if we don’t we will perish.
There is always a mythos of original wrongdoing in justifying these universally obligatory actions or lifestyles:
America was founded on racism. . .
Israel was founded on land theft. . .
Our society was founded on patriarchy. . .
History was founded on the perspective of the powerful. . .
First world wealth was built on third world suffering. . .
Systems of capital are always built on defrauding laborers of their wages. . .
Why such a preoccupation with original sinning? Well, Marx declared that the communist acknowledged the need to overthrow all existing social conditions, which is impossible to justify unless a society is corrupt in all dimensions from the beginning. If a society is unjust not merely because a bad man seized power, or institutions atrophied, but precisely because it was built to preserve and excuse injustice, then reform is not possible. Destruction is necessary.
Reform is only possible if there is an archetypal or institutional innocence or goodness to recover, which has been consequently obfuscated and maimed. Therefore, the story which begins with the sins of our ancestors is a prelude or preface to total revolution.
The Christian story does not begin with sin; rather, it begins with God creating, and after each act of creation, condoning it by contemplating it as “good.” The Genesis narrative, if read carefully, can seem to be drawing a connection between God seeing goodness in every aspect of the world and then making the decision to place man in the world. Hence:
“. . . And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”’
It was after God saw the world as good that he placed man in the world.
Yet, when a leftist studies the creation of anything—our country, our system of law, our system of economics—he annotates each and all with the phrase “and he saw that it was bad.”
Indeed, if we understand Genesis in the way I’ve proposed, we also understand the deeply anti-human agenda of the left. According to the creation tales of the Religious Left, it is bad for man to be placed anywhere; it is bad for man to be situated historically, socially, economically, familially, religiously. . . in much the same way as it would have been a misfortune for man to be in the world if God had first observed, “and it was bad.”
Since history, country, family structure, class, economy are unjust, it is an evil for a person to be positioned with respect to any of them. This is also how the Religious Left has instigated and exacerbated a meaning crisis, since without history, tradition, country, family, class, or wealth, a man has no resources left to make meaning, no vantage from which to consider his life meaningful.
In such a paradigm, alienation is the first step on the road to salvation. To be abandoned by everything is the initial measure in the process of redemption. To take everything from someone else is in the canon of the Religious Left, the most charitable action, since it is the beginning of the salvific enterprise.
If you are apt to wonder why your government and your institutions have been hellbent on confiscating your children, your sense of pride in your country, your faith in good fellowship, your generational wealth, your ability to own property—well, then, you likely have not considered with enough perspicacity the creation myths of the Left, nor appreciated the religious insights extracted therefrom.
The Left cannot save (ahem, overthrow) society if there is sufficient attachment to it.
PART II
As the Enlightenment swept across Europe, faith and the churches receded. Perhaps surprisingly, Christian intuitions about the human person did not, at least not immediately.
After Christ, there are only Christian truths or Christian heresies, and the Enlightenment is certainly the latter.
Consider human equality, which finds its first and most eloquent expression in Paul’s passage from Galations 3:28:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Is it not the eery motto of transgenderism that “there is neither male nor female”; was it not the noble slogan of the abolitionists that “there is neither bond nor free”; was it not the supposed shibboleth of the Civil Rights movement that “there is neither Jew nor Greek”, black or white—for all are one in . . . . . . .
WHAT?
This is usually the moment when leftist do-good movements crumble into anarchy and violence. What are we to be one in, without Christ?
The men of the Enlightenment hardly knew, but pretended to, and the scientistic and materialistic bravado of secular modernity lasted just long enough to usher in the most murderous of all centuries—the 20th.
While rejecting Christian dogma, the rationalist accepted without question the goodness of caring for the poor, obeying one’s father and mother (i.e. preserving the integrity of the family), keeping certain aspects of the world holy (if not the Lord’s day, then nature or human agency), not coveting one’s neighbor’s goods (a fine euphemism for private property), and not coveting one’s neighbor’s wife (a fine euphemism for monogamy).
Even the most virulent of 20th century ideologies—Marxism—was a giant Christian heresy. The best shortcut to understand Marx is first to take Christ’s beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. Then remove heaven and spirit, since Marx was both an atheist and materialist, and voila! Blessed are the poor, for theirs is a kingdom.
Incidentally, that is the whole of Marx’s philosophy, and stripped of its spiritual insight, the beatitude becomes remarkably stupid. After all, there is nothing particularly blessed about material poverty, nor any reason why such a state should give one moral advantage over the materially wealthy, except in the context of Christian theology and logic. Stripped of its proper context, Marxism transforms a Christian beatitude into a secular curse.
Furthermore, the modern world learned from Christianity to tell the story of persecution from the view of the victim, unlike Pagan mythology, which always sided with society (an essential idea of Rene Girard’s).
By the early 1900s, the leftover Christian belief of the early enlightenment was completely dissipated, and the modern world, while not capable of relinquishing the hold that Christian morality had on the human psyche, no longer found it possible to believe in anything other than political endeavor.
Many secular theorists thought the following:
God, His followers, and His Church had failed to care adequately for the poor, abolish injustice, usher in kindness and an era of peace, cure the sick, raise the dead.
God was like a great intellectual; His ideas were magnificent but His practical impotence in the face of the world’s evil was inexcusable. Feeding the hungry was wonderful, but why were there so many poor people after two millennia of Christianity? Why so much death, illness, suffering, inequality? Was history itself not an indictment of God for His ineffectualness?
Systematically, Christian moral dicta were transformed into political programs.
Feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless were finally realizable with the welfare state. The peacemakers would finally be blessed AND EFFECTIVE through the means of free trade and international institutions. Loving thy neighbor would become the law of the land with the demise of slavery, Jim Crow, structural racism, and social discrimination. There would be no male or female, but only oneness in equality before the law.
We who live in the 21st century are witnesses of the failures. Each political program meant to finally produce “peace on earth, goodwill towards man” beckoned forth a movement radical and iconoclastic.
One man’s free trade cost another man’s livelihood, factory job, American dream. One peacemaker’s vision cost many mothers their sons and daughters. One bureaucrat’s agenda of state-sponsored charity cost many states their independence, many men their jobs, many children an in-home father.
All of these blueprints failed and destabilized society in new and profound ways for one simple reason: The government cannot give grace. It cannot make men good, much less supernaturally good.
It is only natural to discriminate, hate, covet, steal, hoard, fight. It is supernatural to love one’s enemies, live in peace, be kind indiscriminately, give generously, turn the other cheek.
Instead of grace, the government has other people’s money to disperse, and the power to coerce. It has used both liberally in trying to re-engineer human nature to behave, to embrace Marxism, transgenderism, equity, and gay rights.
Whereas grace compels the soul from within, the government compels the body from without.
Whereas a community of saints, or monks, or nuns, can live communally, sharing everything—another name for coveting nothing—they can only do so by the grace of God.
Marxist governments forbade the coveting of anything at the point of a gun. It is after we understand that Christian morality is only possible through grace, rather than through government threat that we come into the fullest comprehension of Christ’s rebuke of Peter:
“Put your sword back in its sheath. Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”
What is this powerful command except Christ forbidding his disciples to make his great, saving work a political project, implemented through political means?
The government should certainly pursue what is right and just. But the solution to poverty, loneliness, drug abuse, psychologically wounded children, and the infirmities of human nature have never been permanent, though they have always been the same: human virtue, cultivated by grace.
The men who destroyed our world believed in the spirit of progress, though in their derision of “myths” and tall tales, they failed to perceive that the original zeitgeist—the Spirit which first hung over the chaos and transformed it—was the Holy Spirit.
When God made man, he gave him power over the birds, and beasts, and flowers, and fields, and even over himself, but not over his companion, Eve. This could be easily interpreted as a political statement, but I prefer it to be a comment on the equality and privacy of the human spirit, which cannot be raised up or coerced by either government or state policy. It is only the free action of grace and the companionship of another spirit which can do so.
Christ’s sayings translate poorly into policy memos. It is an immoral thing to tell a man defending his country “put your sword back in its sheath.”
Undoubtedly, there are even good people who mistake Christ in this manner. I have noticed enthusiastic right wingers who declare, “Christ is King”, and believe themselves to have made an interesting and deep political observation.
Christ is indeed King!
Nevertheless, I hope they’ll excuse me while I go cheer on my American President.
Sourced from PRICKLY PEAR
