CC: The De-Germanization of Late American Christianity

Gregory Hood wrote a terrific article over at Counter Currents last month, entitled “The De-Germanization of Late American Christianity,” which I somehow managed to miss.  I seek to rectify that situation by posting an excerpt from it now.  The article discusses how far modern Christianity has fallen and, although long,  it is definitely worth the read. Modern Christianity (if it can even be termed Christianity any more) has degenerated from the foundational worldview of Western civilization, where Europe was synonymous with Christendom, down to a minimalistic personal decision and mishmash of emotions  This is not to demean personal salvation in any way, but the fact that the modern church feels that this is the only thing which is at all important just shows how utterly intellectually impoverished and in lockstep with the anti-Christian secular culture the church has become.

After all, if both established Protestant and Catholic churches were false, then belief in national destiny is “idolatry” and the only thing that matters is an individual decision whether to accept Christ in the manner prescribed by 20th and 21st century Low Church Protestantism. Comfort frees Christians of Hitler, but they must also relinquish the entire Christian heritage of Europe as equally false and “man-made.” But this implies that every national heritage, ancestry, nation, and community is equally artificial and of no importance. The only thing that matters is making the correct choice as an individual — and hopefully, convincing as many others as possible to do the same. Regardless of one’s religious beliefs on the matter, from a worldly perspective this transforms Christianity from a bond of community into a centrifugal force that rips nations apart in both the past and present.

Nor is Comfort unique or even particularly important in this regard. Take for example John Piper, an important figure in modern American Christianity. He was born in the American South before the “Civil Rights Movement” of the 1960s, into a culture far more Christian and in line with what most would consider “traditional moral values.” However, it was segregated. This is so overwhelming to him that he felt the need to make a short film, Bloodlines, denouncing the Southland and weeping about the joys of a superior Christian community built upon the choices of random people around the world. Going further, he even argues that God actually prefers interracial marriage, and to prove his anti-racist bona fides, adopted a black daughter specifically because the thought of her kinky hair and dark skin made him happy. As a recently retired pastor of a mega-church in Minneapolis, he can look back with pride now that the South has been destroyed, Christianity has been all but driven from public life, and local residents in his new community can enjoy enriching criminal gangs and vibrant group assaults from Somalis imported by mainline Protestant denominations.

The Asia Times’s “Spengler” (a pen name for the Jew David Goldman) writes that “Within the European frame of reference, there is no such thing as American Christendom — no centuries-old schools of theology, no tithes, no livings, no Church taxes, no establishment — there is only Christianity, which revives itself with terrible force in unknowing re-enactment of the past. It does not resemble what Europeans refer to by the word ‘religion.’”

This is now becoming explicit with popular Christian pastors such as Mark Driscoll denying that Christianity (which is to say, modern American evangelical Low Church Protestantism) is a religion at all. A Christian mulatto on YouTube has created a spoken word video entitled “Why I hate religion but love Jesus,” which has close to 21 million views. At the heart of all of this is the idea that peoples, institutions, cultures, and even families are all artificial and of no importance compared to the individual making the correct choice regarding the divinity of Christ. . . .

Denied the right to nationhood themselves, the American religious right aggressively and even militantly champions the culture, the government, and even the military of a foreign power. Perhaps even more incredibly, white evangelicals have fetishized blacks to an extent that only Hollywood celebrities can rival, as a way to display their superior commitment to egalitarianism. While evangelicals often speak about an “adversarial culture,” the truth is that there is no significant difference between a John Piper or a Sandra Bullock. . . .

When an isolated and powerless congregation really does challenge liberal beliefs, such as by banning interracial marriage, all the power of the system (and all of the other churches) join together to crush them and force adherence to the only dogma our society really cares about. Properly channeled, supervised, and controlled, American Judeo-Christianity is the tonic that lets the dispossessed white cultural conservatives accept what is being done to them, and gives them a foreign culture to study and defend rather than their own.

The atheist’s nightmare may not be a banana, but Judeo-Christianity is a nightmare for the contemporary West. Millions of American Christians recognize that there is something deeply wrong with what used to be their country, but they are being rallied to fight against the supposed proto-Nazism of Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin in the name of the Hebraic savior “Yeshua.” A people cannot survive with a spiritual outlet, and Judeo-Christianity has been all but designed to fulfill the existential longings of a shattered country without upsetting the system of control. Not only is this form of faith “man-made” and indeed a religion, it is a custom-made creed necessary to uphold the power structure.

 

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