For me, the challenge in converting to Judaism from Christianity was convincing myself that, actually, the Pharisees were the good guys in the Gospels and Jesus some delusional hippie. After living in San Francisco and witnessing the triumph of progressive politics there, it was easier to make that mental turn: I wasn’t abandoning Catholicism, but the secularized Christianity that had elevated the worship of hippie delusions into the law of the land and had spawned wokeness as its afterbirth.
Public life in the West these days is a feverish cycle of figuring out which divine victim to elevate, and which world-saving millenarian “current thing” to embrace this week. It’s the secularized sequel to Christianity with all of the grace, chastity, and virtue stripped out leaving only the faith in a victim-prophet and in an imminent apocalypse that will right all wrongs and initiate the Kingdom of God on Earth.
More and more, secular modernity looks like a shaky edifice of convoluted fantasies built over an abyss, and I for one am tired of pretending to take it seriously.
Deranged bouts of apocalyptic fervor are what Christian societies do when they panic (and Jewish ones too occasionally), as true during the Crusades as the less violent online crusades of today. Seattle’s CHAZ mayhem during the “mostly peaceful” summer of 2020 is of a piece with the Münster Rebellion of 1535 that left that city a violent circus. White privilege as original sin, climate change as eschatology requiring repentance, public acts of repudiation and penance that would top The Scarlet Letter … the Christian parallels are almost nonstop.
If you think this argument is a stretch, consider whether nations in the Islamic or Asian worlds occupy their national dialogues with which class of divine victimhood to revere this media season. It’s an absolutely fish-in-water thing you can’t see until you’re outside of it, and then you see it everywhere.
There are of course purist Christian revolts against this latest optimized-for-virality version of Christianity, otherwise known as wokeness. But the trad Christians and woke progressives don’t actually disagree on the dominant moral narrative for our lives, they simply disagree on who to cast in the starring role.
! Commonplacing
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