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Notes -
Love Thy Neighbor Unless They're in the Outgroup
I’m told the denomination my family has been a part of for generations is “Missionary Oriented.” We support and fund full-time professional missionaries. Anyone who’s been in it for a few generations seems to know someone - if not be related to - a missionary who served in Swazila - oops, sorry - Eswatini or more recently Papua New Guinea, or PNG as the missionary kids call it.
Twenty-odd years ago I took a world religions course that had a requirement to visit other religious services. One week we went to a Hindu temple. A few of us stood in the back and observed while the vast majority of my fellow students danced and chanted in front of literal idols. The next class, one of the students who had stood with me in the backs asked how we could not feel absolute sorrow for the Hindu children being led astray in that environment. The professor berated him for being closed-minded. The man stood up and walked out of class and never came back.
The other day I had dinner with a different man who came up a few years after me. He went to seminary, took a church in a small rural community, and the Red Tribe scalped him. If he still identifies as Christian it’s only nominally: “When my faith was strongest God abandoned me.”
Then there’s this story from NPR: A queer Methodist minister didn't feel safe at an Idaho hospital; their conference won't return to Boise next year. I have always judged the United Methodist Church as a Christian denomination, but I never felt real contempt for them until I saw this kind of cowardice. Mary Moffat Livingstone died of disease at 41. Damien De Veuster’s flesh literally rotted off his living body. Countless others suffered and died in pursuit of their faith. These United Methodist clergy will not go to Idaho because of microaggressions.
I have less contempt for the actual heresies of the progressive theologians inside my own denomination than I do for the cowardly Motte and Bailey they played for decades. They helped destroy the pastoral pipeline. Modernity did most of the grinding, but those worms didn’t help.
All these bleeding hearts with endless empathy for the “fargroup” cannot stand to be near their actual neighbor. My denomination trains people to go into some of the most culturally distant places on earth, yet it could not prepare a young man to minister in the culture of rural Nebraska.
This pattern has been covered before in the classic I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup.
For the first time in my life I look forward to going to church. Per capita, it may have the most influential and connected congregation in the denomination, including several theologians and family members of people at the highest levels of the church hierarchy. The pastor is Blue Tribe, but that’s not surprising as that’s the pipeline. The leadership of the whole denomination is Blue Tribe. And it’s worked out very well for my pastor, as he probably also pastors one of the most Blue Tribe churches in the denomination.
My denomination does not seem lost to me. Despite being Blue Tribe and bamboozled for decades by the Mottes of the progressives, the church has now stripped multiple heretical theologians of their ordinations. As a true progressive in my congregation discusses if we really need Paul, my Blue Tribe pastor politely says, “Sorry, we settled that one a long time ago.”
So I sit here enjoying my pastor’s deep sermons and going to small group at the house of one of the denomination’s theologians in the cool part of town, and I wonder if I am a detestable cowardly worm. I have harbored plenty of ill will toward the progressives - what they have done to Christianity and to the church my family has been part of for generations. It has probably crossed into hatred. Still, I keep mulling a question: is there any more convenient mission field than the outgroup? Paul says not to associate with any so-called brother who is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler… “Remove the wicked man from among yourselves.” I’m not sure that applies to disagreements over refugees and welfare.
My denomination, like many, is shrinking in the developed world. I am sentimental, I do not want it to schism and die, or just fade away. Maybe I can at least slow the fading if I can help mend some of the tears.
The Culture War is so toxic because everyone is a theocrat. An old now defrocked classmate of mine rails to his hundreds of thousands of followers about the dangers “CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM!” while preaching the enforcement of his own version of Christian morality with the dog-whistle: "Jesus says love thy neighbor." By which he means state-enforced welfare and socialism.
War is violence; we tag “culture” onto “war” to differentiate it from literal war, but the reality is we’re still trying to wield violence at arm's length. What if they gave a culture war and no one came? You can love your neighbor by actually helping them yourself. You can persuade, organize, and gather as many people as you want to voluntarily sacrifice their own time and resources for the vulnerable.
But now I’m just preaching my own political philosophy as if it were the moral one… is it my idol?
This post motivated by me planning on grabbing coffee with my pastor and chatting with him as he is taking on a bigger roll in the church
"Everybody is theocrat" is the something that many people only recently realized. Everybody knows that politics is downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of of theology. If it will not be a Christian theology that is going to be informing the culture, then it will be something else. There is no "separation of state and religion", all policies are based on morality and ideology of decision makers. Everybody was culture warrior even before, even if they did not think it was so. They were like fish that were not aware of the water they swim in. Your regular grandma did not read Augustine, she probably could not formulate elaborate theological arguments, but she knew what is a man a woman or what is marriage based on age old culture influenced by specific ethos. Not in her wildest dreams did she imagine that this could ever become a question, nobody was prepared to defend such a basic thing. Not anymore, people are no longer seeped in the same water and we see this interaction real time - at home, at work and also in church.
However there is a huge shift even with your friend. No matter what his supposedly heretic theology is, he can just go out there and say that whatever policy he prefers is purely because Christians like him want it. This claim itself fries brain of many secular people - no, there is no need to couche this argument in some secular language that by itself is seeped in utilitarianism or harm reductionism or some other type of moral philosophy. No, my Christian sect wants this and we want it because it is our moral preference. It is the only justification (in scripture, tradition or whatever) that is fully sufficient for us to pursue this specific policy.
By the way the genie is already out of the bottle even on religious front - even discounting the fact that progressives moved the needle for society to accept their religious doctrine of let's say that a man is a woman as state policy. This is however more visible as they embraced Muslims into their coalition. For example schools should have halal food. Not because it is good for environment or that it is cheap or anything like that. Our Muslim voters want it and that is why we will deliver it. It is purely formed by their preference informed by their religion and no other tortured secular justification needs to be done anymore. But this was always so, we only pretended that these utilitarian justifications were morally and theologically neutral, as if history ended and secularists were just independent arbiters in safari full of religious animals. This veneer was already broken, especially by progressives who were able to smuggle increasingly insane moral prescriptions under secularist or "liberal" framework. This only shows that secularists have no better justification for "good" or "bad" policy than any other group, because what is good and bad is subject to moral philosophy and theology. Secular liberalism, intersectional progressivism, Christian socialism, political Islam - it is all just ideologies based on specific moral and theological framework that fight for influence and power.
Only if you have an overly broad definition of theology and religion. I know many people on the right like to categorize Wokeism as a theological/religious movement but then they immediately balk when you ask what base theology did Wokeism form from. So either every collective philosophical movement really just tickles the religious part of the human mind and is consequently a "theology", or you have a much stricter definition of "theology" and then no, not everyone is a theocrat.
Wokeism = Secular Christianity. Scoop out the Holy trinity and you get the logical conclusion of championing the meek, the downtrodden, the oppressed.
This isn't true, though. Wokeism has a lot of similar principles, but it also attaches to it its own set of faith-based claims about reality. That's what makes so many people call it a religion (including myself, as far back as 2015 back when it was just called "social justice" - though, quite honestly, this should have been obvious even as far back as the late 00s, by my estimation), rather than merely an ideology. Its core tenets rely irreducibly on faith to support claims about how certain individuals are oppressed by other individuals in society.
I probably should rephrase that Wokeism isn't the same thing as Christianity. Wokeism is a genealogical descendant of Western Christianity. It's core theological morality is very Christian in nature. In a way that cannot be said of other religions even other Abrahamic religions. The concept of Original Sin, The Confession, Repentance, The emphasis of the sanctity of the meek, it's universalism, etc. Christian slave morality is a direct ancestor of identity-based oppression morality. There is a distinct status inversion to Christianity vs the older European Pagan religions, and the Eastern religions. Core Christian symbolism is literally God suffering on the cross and being holy for that sacrifice. The apparently humiliated and defeated victim can possess supreme moral status, while worldly authorities can be radically mistaken about who is righteous. Now the structural oppressor–oppressed components are substantially Marxian in nature, but breed that belief system with other religions and you would not co-evolve to Wokeism. The Eastern religions are easy to ablate out. Islam, sharing many moral beliefs with Christianity still does not contain the moral primitive of original sin nor does it's central sacred narrative place God himself as the humiliated, tortured, and executed victim.
A good chunk of those can be found in pagan religions, though.
Let's take Communism: capital is the original sin, confession/repentance is done through continual revolution, the meek are the workers, Comintern are the missionaries, etc.
Woke, same thing: ability is the original sin, confession/repentance is done through continual humiliation, the meek are the disabled, USAID are the missionaries, etc.
So while I do think it presses the same moral buttons as Christianity (or perhaps more relevantly, Islam) does/did in the average follower (which is what I think people actually mean when they say it's a religion), I don't think it's actually a proper descendant.
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Yes. It does rely heavily on unproven claims and implications such as all differences in crime sanctions arising from police forces who simply hate dark skin, etc.
It also wants you to label huge groups as 'oppressors' with a very broad brush and claims that the individuals inside those groups cannot be legitimate victims, so feel free to tread on them. Jesus wouldn't approve of group identity based discrimination and revanchism.
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Most Motteposters grandmothers will be of the Silent Generation, which is the generation that effectively invented modern divorce. Your regular grandma grew up in a society where marriage was for life, but participated in the process (1/4-1/3 of the time by frivorcing her husband herself, but in almost every case by treating her contemporaries who did so as respectable women making a praiseworthy life choice) of making it for as long as both members of the couple still feel like it. Almost nobody complained - and in particular the social conservatives who should have done mostly didn't. (Reagan signed no-fault divorce into law as governor of California).
If your grandma actually did something to preserve the age-old view of marriage, then she was an outlier, not a regular grandma.
Sure, I do not even deny it, the point being that it is not some conscious choice, but slow changing of culture. For instance silent generation grew up in schools where crosses, framed ten commandments or morning prayers were the norm even if not many of them consciously thought of it. Now those are often outright banned by the very same silent generation, but there are progress flags and Earth Day and other such things in schools instead. It is change in culture and ethos.
I like the way James Lindsay explains it in the form of various philosophical systems where theology is the grounding pilar, it is fundamental meta-narrative that determines the ultimate nature of reality, truth, and human purpose. Theology synthetizes other particular philosophies such as cosmology, epistemology, anthropology and sociology. So for instance Christians have God at the center of their theology, this informs epistemology through divine revelation and empirical observation of God's creation, man is created in image of God, Christian virtue ethics is objective morality based on God's commandments. I think he compared it to Marxism which views Man (species being) at the center, epistemology is based on your standpoint in class and other hierarchies providing you with unique insights, nature of man is as social being that is entirely shaped by material conditions etc. These are incompatible philosophical systems.
Using Scott Alexander's language, Culture War is Conflict Theory all the way down especially with such radical differences on basic things like ontology, epistemology or ideas of how society should function. Somebody will be in charge, if not you then somebody else that may have vastly different philosophical system which will seep into culture and ultimately politics. Mistatke theroy is just camouflage, you take the dominant theological/philosophical system as given, an then argue as if progressives and classical liberals or Christian nationalists or Islamists are just mistaken in how their policy proposal will bring about "greater good". But in reality you are just theocrat for your own system and view other competing systems through that prism. Mistake theory is luxury to be indulged for debates inside this philosophical system where people are theologically aligned.
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