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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I think you significantly underrate the extent to which the ideals of social equality and universal brotherhood are based on Christianity. Most of the stuff conservative Christians like, property, patriarchy, patriotism, tradition, family, virtue, sexual continence, aren't actually Christian.

I've seen the argument made (though I don't recall where) that one of the central tensions when thinking about Christianity is that much of the writings about Jesus in the Gospels, and the immediate social movement around Jesus, were expecting an immediate end of the world and Apocalypse, and thus insist on a kind of intense radicalism that is wholly unsustainable in any kind of longer lived community. And then, even by the time of Paul, the fact that the imminent Apocalypse hasn't shown up yet starts being more and more disruptive to making a church with any kind of continuity, and so much of the work of Paul was to reformulate Christianity into a faith that could grow and maintain its own communities through time and space, which required dampening a lot of the especially radical Christian tendencies and shifting them from a material interpretation towards a more spiritual one.

At least by this kind of argument, this is why, when Christian sects show up insisting on returning to the roots of Christianity and ditching everything other than the actual words and actions of Christ, they generally end up burning out in a decade or two at best, or else they age past their radical phase and revert to more sustainable, less radical social forms.

But if you're sympathetic to this kind of radicalism, you end up having to say, for example, that the writings of Paul (which is to say, a large chunk of the New Testament) aren't really Christian. Which some people kind of implicitly do! But certainly for a lot of people, a definition of Christianity probably ought to include the writings of Paul and all the early church traditions.

And then someone else might very well argue that the tension between the unwavering apocalyptic, unsustainable idealism of Christ, and the "how do we live in the world and keep this ship afloat through time and space" concerns of Paul and the early church is itself, in fact, at the very core of Christianity. The pulls of both idealism and pragmatism / sustainability both serve extremely important functions in the world, with different people needing to steer towards one or the other at different times and places.

I've seen the argument made (though I don't recall where) that one of the central tensions when thinking about Christianity is that much of the writings about Jesus in the Gospels, and the immediate social movement around Jesus, were expecting an immediate end of the world and Apocalypse, and thus insist on a kind of intense radicalism that is wholly unsustainable in any kind of longer lived community.

I think this is pretty unambiguously true, but it includes Paul, who apparently expected the end to come very shortly, and said things like:

I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.

He also suggested people not even get married, and only grudgingly sanctioned marriage as a necessary evil to prevent "burning with lust," hardly conducive to family formation.

He may or may not have mellowed out later, depending on whether you believe all of the letters attributed to him were written by him.

I do agree this is a fundamental problem at the heart of Christianity though. It is a faith that was never. meant to be a civilizational faith which has been jury-rigged into just that. All it really takes is for someone to look around at all the kings and princes, and then look at the New Testament, and say, "hey, wait a minute, this isn't what Jesus taught!"