Someone in the comments of my previous article, “Roman Catholicism is the source of damage in our culture today”, suggested that I was “sounding like the Westboro kooks who think they're the only 20 people who are pure enough to be saved”.
I assure you that I am not intending to sound this way. I’m not going to be like Martin Luther, throwing ink wells at the devil in his room, and nor am I going to go into screeds about “know nothings”.
Instead I am taking seriously some of the things that the Roman Catholic Church officially says, the way they have positioned themselves “in the world”. I’m looking at their history, and political philosophy and I am trying to understand how this country, a mere 30 years after the fall of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, can have so many agitators working to implement socialism today.
It’s “white European males” who find themselves at the bottom of all the “intersectionality” charts these days – It is “white European males” who are said by those on “the left” to be responsible for most of the evils in the world. I look at Roman Catholicism, which undoubtedly, for hundreds of years, was the primary intellectual environment for “white European males”, and I’m saying to myself, “I wonder if there’s a connection”.
With all of this in mind, I am an enthusiastic Trump voter who believes that the left/right divide has aligned itself on the person of Donald Trump, precisely because Trump is not an ideological person. He calls himself a “counter-puncher”, and it is purely an act of Providence, I am sure, that the United States finds itself today with a “political left” that is almost wholly united in its zeal against Trump.
So the “conservativism” that we see in Trump is almost purely a response by him to “counter-punch” against “the political left”, which at a political level includes virtually all Democrats, some “NeverTrump” Republicans, and some high-minded Christians who will never vote for someone who is less pure in his personal life than, say, John Piper. And which, at a cultural level, includes the news media, most colleges and universities, lots and lots of younger people who are just caught up in “the spirit of the age” (which is largely embodied by “wokism”).
In 2016, I had many conversations with fellow Triablogue writers, to the effect that Trump wasn’t conservative, that he would show his liberal side. And he has done so with his recent pronouncement that he is the most “gay-friendly” president in history – a thing that makes me cringe, but I try to understand it in context.
With that said, I still think voting for Trump is the best way to address the most immediate problems that we face today, particularly in the US. While it’s a big world, and there are many “enemies” (including Islam, Communist China, biological warfare, nefarious former KGB agents, and even mere apathy) I think “wokism” (which I am using as a catch-all phrase to include its intellectual parent, Marxism, and its like-minded relatives that we know as “Critical theory”, “Cultural Marxism”, Critical Race Theory”, “intersectionality”, “anti-Racism” “cancel culture”, and things like that), is the greatest threat to our country today.
And again I say this from the perspective of a Christian, “in the world but not of the world”, looking at what I can do, in the Romans 13 sense, “Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities”, in a land in which “we the people” are tasked with something like “self-government” through institutions that have been set up to function in a realm where concepts of “Republic” and “democracy” are in the forefront.
I’m not going to claim I have all the answers here. I have a lot of questions. I’ve haven’t written much lately, but I’ve been reading a lot, and I want to share what I’m learning.
We live in a culture where “white European males” are the ones who have come out at the bottom of the intersectionality charts. They and their paternalism are seen to be the greatest evils that the world is facing today.
There’s a saying, I don’t know if it’s true, that “a definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again, and expecting different results”. If that’s the case, it doesn’t seem to me that we want to move back in the direction of Roman Catholicism, and in fact, while we want to look for Christian solutions, we certainly don’t want, moving forward, to repeat the mistakes of the past.
