Sunday Sermon

[M]

Source; https://patriotcommandcenter.org/forum/sunday-sermon-1

Source; SNGLR

AEI’s survey of some 5,500 Americans of various ages examined the sexed breakdown of which Americans are leaving churches of every denomination to identify as “disaffiliated.” For Generation Z the majority of disaffiliated are female by 8 percentage points.  Nearly two-thirds of Generation Z women in the cohort disagreed with the statement that “most churches and religious congregations treat men and women equally.”

There are many problems, of course, with letting the opinion of modern irreligious women override centuries of Christian theology. But interestingly, is how neatly this picture maps onto another interesting development in our modern era, that of feminized higher education.

To be a Christian in America today is undeniably low-status, and all the more so if one ascribes to any form of orthodox theology. Young women leaving church might be doing so due to a staunch commitment to egalitarianism, but more likely they are leaving because of a more general sense that church is not cool.

Most young women, and indeed most young adults today, are more readily shaped by peers and power than by deeply held moral convictions. This squares with the education trends, too: The atmosphere on most campuses is not merely irreligious, but often anti-religious. Students have great negative incentives to leave the faith while pursuing a degree. This might begin at the peer level, but it is also often advanced by faculty and staff, since the general milieu is one which views religion, especially Christianity, as a belief system opposed to intelligence. As it turns out, young men are developing parallel status quite comfortably, and quite without regard to what young women think of them.

It should be obvious here that the conclusion is unmistakable that the education to be found in most institutions of our day is not worth a fraction of the tens of thousands of dollars too many have paid for it. If the result of education is not increased humility, wonder, and curiosity, of the same sort that drove men and women to God in earlier eras, we can safely assume that they are not being taught much of worth.

Another piece worth considering in this puzzle is happiness. Religiously affiliated Americans are, apparently, happier; they are also more likely to be married, and less likely to get a divorce, which factors probably contribute to that happiness. Happiness is an ambiguous term, and very poorly measured by surveys, and it is worth asking, as Nic Rowan did recently, whether “happiness” is the point. Nevertheless, the term used by sociologists is helpful for a broad-brush analysis of something that Christians themselves have never needed a survey to understand: That is, young women leaving the church are trading it for a worse life, not a better one.

It is right to look at these trends and have pity. In terms of status, education achievement, and religion, there exists a real gender gap. One half of young Americans are less likely to be brainwashed, less likely to take on enormous debt for a job, and more likely to find purpose and satisfaction in religion. The other half are women.

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“Churches played a leading role in ending aristocratic privilege in the U.S. and were the principle vehicles through which the common people have been drawn into the process of shaping American society.”—(R.W. Fogel)

“In just over a century Christians have gone from being the center of American culture to its margins.”—Rod Dreher

The early Christian philosopher Abelard found that most theological and philosophical debates are hampered by the confusion over the meanings of language, terms, and ideas. And, like any good student of debate knows, defining those things is necessary for a sound debate. One such thing is knowing that it’s both impossible and absurd to have points of view on relatively complex issues expressed in short, single sentences. To do so is to suffer from the poisoning of debate we are experiencing in general in our society today. To properly debate complex issues, which religion truly is, requires a subtle and involved intellectual and rational approach. A debate using simple emotional constructs, such as sound bites or bullet points, will only provide, as St. Augustine pointed out, evasive answers for already obscure doctrine.

That point is necessary in order to explain why the following is being presented in order to address the premise that organized religion in the U.S. is under a concerted effort by Neo-Liberalism to be deliberately dissolved, specifically, our Judeo-Christian based religions, and in particular Catholicism. Most of the principal institutions of our society have turned against Christian belief and morality. The Catholic Church itself seems to be in a sort of identity crisis and not offering clear and strong guidance, even to her faithful. America's thin Christian veneer is being stripped away by the combination of Marxist materialism and neo-liberalism’s relative, nihilistic autonomous humanism.

“Modern atheism is really atheism against Christianity. The only God it seriously bothers to deny is the monotheistic, eternal and personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” –Richard John Bauhaus. The reason for concern is that it can be firmly presented that the belief and maintenance of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, for the individual, as both the basis and cause of Western societies' civil designs (resulting in the most benevolent form of society ever to exist) is in direct proportion to the health and popularity of Judeo-Christian philosophies.

Western civilization's creed or identity is one that includes images of perfection and transcendence, that honor the integrity of God-given limits, derived from both Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian thought. They have provided indispensable ground for individual freedom. Civilization rests on mutual self-control that springs from inner checks and balances on conduct and appetite, which flow from a shared vision. In turn, that rests on a shared understanding of human nature, which entails a shared religion. Religion is the ontological foundation of civilization.  "The absence of God, when consistently upheld and thoroughly examined, spells the ruin of man in the sense that it demolishes or robs of meaning everything we have been used to thinking of as the essence of being human: the quest for truth, the distinction between good and evil, the claim to dignity, the claim to creating something that withstands the indifferent destructiveness of time."—L. Kolakowski

The reason for neo-liberalism’s attack then is due to the fact that Western-civilization’s organized religions do not agree with Neo-Liberalism's core belief. That being the celebration of the self, as the determinate of all values, which means of course the consequent relativism of all values. By believing that the self is the center of ultimate concern (which is radically different from Christianity’s belief, or even representative democracy’s belief centered on societal-based individualism), Neo-Liberalism believes to uniquely hold the "idea" as to how life should be. Subsequently, its philosophy culminates in requiring a complete and total singular view. Neo-liberalism therefore, in short, cannot tolerate any view but its own! And it acts like the political animal it is; it employs government and its power to enforce its will on any non-complying populace.

neo-liberalism uses the power of government in attempt to create its “vision” of a single community with its proscribed values and enforceable understandings of how communities of all descriptions should be organized. This undertaking is certainly anti-democratic and anti-community. That’s not important to neo-liberalism though since its goal is to make society in its image, largely regardless of the process, which requires ignoring the placing of limits on the powers of the sovereign.

neo-liberalism has abandoned Classic-Liberalism’s understanding that government authority itself is the problem for freedom of the individual, and that the sovereign therefore has to be constrained (and its powers divided). neo-liberalism’s change in the way we’re governed overlooks the consequences of the awesome and structurally unchecked power of government, that neo-liberalism has built. In fact, Neo-Liberalism itself fails to recognize that this power has fallen into the hands of political movements working in pursuit of objectives often quite inimical to the very "fuzzy" goals neo-Liberalism justified the expansion of government power for in the first place. And these movements are even effectively stripping local government of the structural ability to resist further centralized government takeover.

The continuing growth of the power of the government must unavoidably have a single national set of values, along with all the enforcement apparatus that it will inevitably entail. Therefore religion, that holds to different values & different levels of authority automatically becomes a threat to pervasive government, and is therefore considered a threat to Neo-Liberalism’s implementation apparatus. Natural rights, as presented in Christianity and preserved in particular in the Catholic Church are incompatible with strong state power, and at odds with neo-liberalism. This form cannot abide well with the concept of universal rules to determine right or just choices, where specific cases are judged by general and abstract rules or principles known before the fact. The trend therefore is to replace natural rights with doctrine that depends on the context of the situation. This of course destroys the ability to know before the fact what is right or just, but supports neo-liberalism’s celebration of itself.

Why is organized religion a threat? Organized religion is for many the most common experience of community. It provides meanings that enrich the lives (and souls) of the faithful. It encapsulates the traditions of the past and all of the knowledge included within, for the benefit of the future. The meanings organized religion discovers and assigns to life may be radically distinct from those that are assigned by the government. And they may require allegiance to a belief or entity that is in conflict with the political sovereign.

One must not confuse the requirements of Christ with those of the political environment, though, importantly, they are often combined. Through the political we reflect on how we live together. And that is also a proper concern for Christians. Certainly the absence of Christian ideals in the body politic, or rather the notion that man can create his own order, fashion his own paradise, or build a universal utopian pursuing society, has resulted in the massive human holocausts of the past two centuries. Freedom, order and the commonness of the human condition, unavoidable conditions involved with a healthy free society, are fully addressed by 2 centuries of Catholicism. And both freedom and order find their impetus in law. And law, which without reason cannot stand, finds that Catholicism provides the tightest explanation.

As far back as St. Paul, it was recognized that if Catholicism were to survive, if its truth were to be maintained, it had to be a uniform system. Otherwise the Church would splinter, the message would be garbled and the faith distorted. It would become just another variant and never would survive through time. That would be no simple thing given human nature’s perchance for cults, myths and paganism. Thus as St. Ignatius pointed out, Catholicism needed a church that had authority, teaching and tradition, being stubborn in its defense. That policy kept the faith alive through persecutions, schisms, and wars, outlasting every empire, constitution and most philosophies.  But one example is nationalism, since the reformation the enemy of Catholicism, putting tribalism and its manufactured religions ahead of the universal claim of Catholicism. In this case it is the office of the Pope who, throughout history, is the most consistent opponent of absolute power of the state.

neo-liberalism however arrogantly assumes most religious-believers are mindless to the point of blindly following the dictates of their "church" rather than acting through the voluntary rational acceptance of the tenets of the faith, aspects that render them subversive to Neo-Liberalism’s sovereignty. And when those aspects cannot be denied, it is then that they provide justification for the need of the Neo-Liberal to construct governmental barriers to the expression and promotion of religion, since its success may undermine the neo-liberal agenda to enact their mechanisms. Mechanisms which call for a larger political entity, which Neo-liberalism assumes is more capable of making better decisions than the individual, the family or the community. (As an aside, think about that contradiction. The larger the political entity, the more likely it will be that its power will be in the hands of fewer and fewer logarithmically more powerful individual(s). Is that not the definition of elitism, of tyranny, or the loss of freedom? Isn't that the very opposite of what Neo-Liberalism, on the surface at least, claims to stand for?).

While it is true that the U.S. Constitution states quite clearly that one cannot impose one's moral understanding on another through the coercive use of government apparatus, it says nothing about protecting the ability of a religious community to convey its truths to its own members. Realizing this, Neo-Liberalism is aggressively targeting religious communities to undermine their survival. This is precisely because the community is defenseless, blocked from acquiring protective political power by the U.S. Constitution, having neither rights nor venue to act.

Protecting the freedom of religion means nurturing the ability of the religion to survive, which means, at a minimum, not treating religious entities worse than non-religious ones! Remember, religion is the only sphere that the U.S. Constitutional singled out for special protection against all forms of government intrusion. Constitutional scholars indicate that the original intents of the wording of our 10 Amendments did not say religion could not appear in our public political life, but rather that no government support, or hindrance, of any or all religion, should occur. It was beyond the purview of government as to its practice----government was supposed to be neutral.

Yet, neo-liberalism today, at best, seems oblivious to the procedural negative their interpretation of the law imposes on the people in organized religions. People who find their expression of themselves in and through their religion are being denied the means to express and nurture it. An obvious example of this can be found extensively in our public school system today. Religion deals extensively with morality. And democracy is a disaster if its citizens are morally obtuse. Yet the neo-liberal today attacks the morality of religion by promoting something called "value-free education". Which is an obvious myth! Value free guidance is not only false but impossible. Education, by its very nature, does indeed inculcate values. Behavior without values, by saying what matters without why it matters, is pointless, even self-defeating. neo-liberalism despises religion precisely because it talks about right and wrong, it discusses morality in order to develop what we can hold in common, and so we can function in a free society without government regulation and control of everything.

Religion threatens the Neo-Liberal agenda. If religion overcomes the stereotype the Neo-liberal has to some degree successfully assigned it, that of the religious person as some sort of close-minded automaton, it will become clear that there is no valid evidence that government is any less likely to make reprehensible decisions, or any more beneficial. Then the fact that the Neo-Liberal's Emperor has no clothes becomes evident. And only organized religion has the discipline, knowledge, will and resources to engage in such a task. The question that remains is, do all levels of its membership have the resolve?

“Theology is like a map…if you do not listen to Theology…It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ideas…for a great many ideas about God are simply ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected…it is the simple religions that are the made up ones…We have never followed the advice of great teachers…Christian theology, and quantum physics, are both…hard, complex, dry and repellent.”---C.S. Lewis

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