“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
I’ve spent a lifetime trying to convince myself that Christianity is true simply because I want the Jesus described in the Gospels to be a real person. I understand the general trends and teachings of the church and how Christians in general try to ‘fix’ what ails the world, relationships, and our various and conflicting attempts to engineer our eschatological destiny. We are geared to make things happen. In my lifetime, the political force of the ‘Christian Right’ has poisoned the message of the gospel, polluting it with pious nonsense, pecking orders, and filled it with the hatred of ‘perverts’ and rebels. The strategic teaching from the collective pulpits has steered the ‘light of the world’ into blind authoritarianism as the ‘answer.’ This is no accident as it emerged out of the coupling of new technologies with gross arrogance and pompous confidence of those claiming a direct phone-line to God and access to a lot of money. I fail to see how Jesus’ teaching supports the way the church largely does business today. The process of making a monster involves the unification of top-down deception from those who seek profit and power, systemic manipulation by various ideological apparatuses which train the masses to recognize the ‘appropriate’ enemies, and the self-delusion of the masses to believe that they are free. Laziness, and the lack of the recognition of the need to escape, greases the wheels of the monster-making machine.
I understand that the average Christian is just doing what they’ve been taught to believe is their duty in relation (and in balance) to the obligations expected of those lower down in the social order. Jesus, to my recollection, did not seem to concern Himself much with climbing social hierarchies, obtaining political power, and with the condemnation of sinners, yet Christian teaching often revolves around hierarchy, and the contentious categorization regarding the social tolerability of certain sins. (Any debate in response is often cast aside as an attempt at ‘sin-leveling.’) Building upon this base, the teaching from the top is that we Christians ought to take dominion over basically everything—this is a huge part of the new gospel. (The documented evidence to this new gospel spread by all the religious frauds and showmen, their lies and desires, is massive and out in the open. This is no secret, but they are strongly protected by the shield of faith.) Consider the words of Pat Robertson…
“God’s plan is for His people, ladies and gentlemen, to take dominion. . . .What is dominion? Well, dominion is Lordship. He wants His people to reign and rule with Him. . . but He’s waiting for us to. . . extend His dominion. . . .And the Lord says, “I’m going to let you redeem society. There’ll be a reformation. . . .We are not going to stand for those coercive utopians in the Supreme Court and in Washington ruling over us any more. We’re not gonna stand for it. We are going to say, ‘we want freedom in this country, and we want power. . . .'”
The word from which ‘dominion’ is translated, transliterated as ‘Radah,’ has been subject to debate over the originalist understanding as to the type and degree of this dominance. Robertson voiced a very authoritarian interpretation of the word, and mandate, which is the direction the church has taken into the realm of politics—to make America great again. Do not suppose that individual churches are immune from the overall push of literally billions of dollars of expressed media power over time; as I’ve been repeating like a broken record, if you want to put butts in pews and money in the collection plates, the one who wants to preserve his job must not seriously cross the will and teachings of the big boys. So, we talk about ‘big faith’ and other ‘fill-in-your-own-meaning’ lazy talk while other players, looking to make a buck, complicate the whole mess by engineering an electronic drug, using AI to keep ‘engaging’ content in front of our eyes, to keep us pressing the buttons because every time we press the button our lords make money. We are the ever present ‘product’ to be exploited in the never-ending information war.
Our ‘natural’ propensity to organize ourselves into affirming echo chambers has been amplified to the Nth degree by algorithms designed to keep us outraged by anything other than the fact that we are being immorally and emotionally manipulated by big players for big money. I’m still trying to fight my way out of the trap that a good percentage of us do not realize the extent to which we are being pawned. Whatever ability we had in the past to listen to people who differ from us, and learn from them, is being destroyed by outrage itself—the church is committed to the call to charge. We are now in the next ‘Babel’ event—war is upon us. No one is immune.
We have so many factions now, it seems the chance for reunifying is extremely remote since we’ve engineered a very effective means for keeping each other at each other’s throats. Yet, from the pulpit, I’ve heard that God has mighty plans for His church, implying that we can manage these factions by force, even as, since the time Robertson made his declaration of God’s Will, religious institution membership percentages of the American population has plummeted from the mid 70’s to 47% (and still dropping) today. I fail to hear anything from the pulpit seriously asking why. (The typical reason involves a claim to a general increase in wickedness. How convenient. Or is it?)
The scientific numbers do not matter as much as the management of the perception of what is happening. An aggressive understanding of the concept of dominion, which functionally requires hierarchy, provides the means to effectively convince the remaining parishioners that all is well with us, and our mission, as evidenced by the pushback from the wicked forces of Satan; just stay the course, work harder, and have faith in God and in your leaders. Through this patriarchal system, with its ‘purity culture’ cover, we have created a system through which everyone of lower status is being denied a voice by those of higher status. Racism? Sexism? Terrorism? Injustice? Genocide? I don’t know what you are talking about… (Maybe people are tired of this?) Gaslighting requires the perception of hierarchy.
Denying the legitimacy of voice (to the ungodly) is a very effective, primary, and justified weapon in the Christian Right’s arsenal. Since our leader’s do it without much question and/or challenge from their own, as they’ve taught the rabble that they, the elite, police themselves (pointing to this or that scripture to prove their position to the faithful as that is enough to keep the little people on board,) the ordinary folk do not concern themselves too much with the reality and/or ‘rightness’ of the process either; it is just assumed that it is justifiable so that they may win a war for God. This provides convenient flexibility for defending our own sense of comfort and stability.
For example: ‘I don’t know what you are talking about because it doesn’t say that in my Bible.’ As the chosen know the will of God, who is supreme, those am haarets (as in Ezra-Nehemiah) who reject ‘God’s will’ are assumed to be of lower status and thus (like Sanballat and Tobiah) are denied an audience. In all the noise, it seems nobody listens much anymore—the ‘status’ problem, as taught from the pulpits and in celebrity culture, is why. Status is very important in determining the legitimacy of biblical interpretation. This posture works beautifully to provide the righteous cover for things we don’t want to confront or even consider. In our minds, this is war. (Is this what Jesus taught us to think?) The Culture War has reached such a level of absurdity that even a book with no mention of LGBTQ issues is silenced because it has rainbows in the illustrations.
The troublesome, lower-status person or group is silenced—for their own good and the good of society. With the ‘test of faith,’ one can make up literally anything (in alliance with their chosen prophet, whom they’ve been trained to obey through copious amounts of religious advertising bolstering the authority’s credibility,) and feel completely justified, in faith, in that they are correct and doing God a solid. It’s a great recipe for authoritarianism—which is what we have the Christian mob clamoring for right now. (The free folk are hornet pissed about this right now as well. I certainly feel trapped in anger.) The ‘Seven-Mountain-Mandate’ wolves love this. Indeed, this arrogant, godless, philosophizing, self-righteous blow-hard is telling you that this recipe for the good life is horrifyingly destructive and that most people have no idea that it is a serious problem—much less grapple with how we’ve incorporated the practice of both denial and raw exercise of favored political power into our daily lives. We have no idea that we are being played by people who, most disturbingly, have convinced themselves that they are on a mission for good and God.
For example: Moms for Liberty, a rapidly growing Republican Party funded inroad back into the hearts and minds of suburban mothers, are the victims of the Controllers (refer to C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man) who’ve cleverly designed, through AI direction and amplification in social media, and in televised political theater—the embarrassing spectacle displayed in the Jackson confirmation hearings is an excellent example) a strawman version of Critical Race Theory to which the mothers, in the righteous defense of their children, can become both angry (hence not prone to think about the larger picture) and mobilized (hence effective in getting the right people elected.) Invoking the words of Dr. King, our Controllers, playing on our ignorance of intellectual history, twist those words and shove them into an entirely different reality. The originalist (that is, understanding what Dr. King meant to say at that time; ‘patriots,’ for example, seem to be very concerned with the ‘original intent’ of our founding fathers,) understanding of those words is not even considered simply because it is not useful in the ‘Save America’ project.
Amoral opportunists looking to make a buck feeding the rage on certain ‘news’ networks add ‘legitimacy’ to the mountain of lies which trap us. Some of our ‘news’ is being broadcast in Russia to bolster the cause and reasoning of their dictator to proceed with his butchery—that should say something to someone with half a brain and a functioning moral compass. The moral and intellectual disconnects are simply stunning. (What gives me hope is that many are seeing through the tactics employed by the open cabal and increasing are saying ‘no’ to remaining in the cesspool of resentment and misinformation.) Truth is brutalized as the institutions which are supposed to guard the truth are being undermined constantly—and that, to me, is profoundly both sad and infuriating. The ‘pillar of truth’ (1 Timothy 3:15) is, in its complicity, behind these constant attacks.
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
― Garry Kasparov
Even more difficult to process is the thought that our shepherds, at least those in middle-management, are largely pawns. The mockable downward shift in Christian practice towards meeting our entertainment demands, the engineered pressure away from intellectual debate towards the enactment of ‘simple’ solutions through the exercise of faith, has led to a situation where the threat of personal attack is always imminent if one should cross the accepted norm within the faction—this reality forces us into literally thousands of warring interests. Those with any balls to stand up with a reasoned argument against ‘the norm,’ which would call for painful, serious self-examination are quickly pelted by the hailstorm. (I am not free to offer a specific example.) The majority (at least within your chosen faction) decides truth in what we just know, right? We’ve moved well beyond the recommended process of ‘iron sharpening iron’ (Proverbs 27:17,) an interpersonal debate towards finding truth, towards mass mobilization to require the submission of an ‘offensive’ voice which disturbs the herd.
As a result, American Christianity (at the ‘rabble’ level) is extremely shallow and reactionary—we lowly are just pawns who’ve been trained to police each other so that we may remain individual pawns. The dangerous desire for serious moral reflection, the truth of which could free us, has been beat out of us by simply teaching us to rely in faith that ‘God’ will tell your heart what you ought to be thinking, supporting, and doing. (Don’t get me wrong, many people in the church do many fine, loving, generous, and charitable things. This provides good cover for how we are being played by opportunistic religious and political forces.) The message of that ‘god’ is conveyed through billions of dollars’ worth of advertising bombarding us every day. Thus, our pulpits at least passively blind people to the fact of a large-scale, open-air, investigable by means of evidence and reason as subject to the mechanisms of principled peer-review (not this disingenuous, secret squirrel Q-anon garbage,) manipulation by very greedy people. This is tragic and evil.
Trump didn’t engineer this mess. He hasn’t built anything but rather has made a career of looting, leaving paths of destruction in his wake. (And sadly, he isn’t done.) Political hacks, social media engineers, religious charlatans, and even well-meaning evangelists molded and formed a system into which the manipulator, liar, and utterly morally void man could step up and make himself the master and figurehead by promising to slay the monsters. He tells us that we are not the monsters, but as he continues spreading the unending message of fear and resentment, he teaches us that we are in constant peril from the hordes of monsters seeking to destroy our way of life—our heritage. We need to fight to ‘Save America,’ and follow him, the (perhaps) most honest fellow God ever created, to slay all the demons who oppose righteousness. We still believe his lies as he continues to loot and destroy any common ground with our fellow human beings which may remain. There is no middle ground to be had. This land is our land, this money is our money, the ‘others’ who do not think, or look, like we do are not welcome. I do not recall Jesus teaching the way of Christian Nationalism.
We looked to destroy monsters, and by not being morally reflective and investigative we’ve become the biggest monster because of our fear of losing (the perception of) control. We’ve become the monster because we are so sure about our righteousness and heavenly mandate. We jealously guard our illusory treasures (Matthew 6:19-21) as the evidence of our divine blessing. We grasp at, and trust in, worldly power. We’ve become reviled and hated as the lower people shrink from our wrath…
What a beautiful, magnificent beast we’ve become.
“Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
In the ‘Dawn Treader,’ Eustace had to be shown (and then accept) his state before redemption could occur. Only then was it possible for him to escape the trap. Are we ready to listen to those of lower status who disagree with the certainty of our confidence? Or will we continue to rest in the illusions provided by our lords? The choice is ours.