As Christians in today’s cultural climate, we are, perhaps, just as submerged in snowflake ideology as any liberal. The predominant theme is that we are all unique, special, needed, necessary, valiant, courageous, beautiful, unstoppable, and otherwise “super.” From the pulpit, it’s a little more dressed up. A typical three-point sermon could be something like:
1. We are each a special creation.
2. We can do anything through Christ.
3. Now be a World Changer!
*Do not add depth. Do not collect $200.*
It honestly doesn’t matter how many verses someone can pile onto the sermon. It is a vain effort at legitimizing a liberal belief that we are all equal, that we are all able to be described as each enticing adjective that our hearts so desire, and each of those adjectives will be defended till death do they and their owner part. Obese, you say? No! I’m independently managing my nutritional needs, and each of my rolls are as beautiful as the next! Sheltered, you slander? Why, I courageously stand on the street next to my fellow champions to protest each attack against human rights that I see!
In the process, what we witness is the complete degradation of any meaningful word. What is beauty? What is courage? What is necessary? What is terror, even? All things have become relative, for both the modern “church” and its anti-Christian neighbor, the liberal. There can be no defining these things, for they imply the very antithesis of their doctrine – discrimination.
I have seen students at a relatively “conservative” Christian university stand proudly behind painted signs that read, “Discrimination is not a Christian value.” This is the Christian version of higher learning, yet it’s nearly a mirror of the liberal ones.
Why bother trying to please God, then? If you can be a foul, ill-tempered glutton and still be shuffled along to Heaven, why not be a hedonist?
But we are seeing the answer to this question, aren’t we? The modern “church” is in its death throes, convulsing spasmodically. Churches would rather invest in colored lights and professional backdrops for the stage than spend five minutes discussing the role of discrimination, nationhood, and generational mindsets in keeping a healthy church body. All of those things sound scary to people who view everyone as equal, a nation as a set of lines on the map, and children as a suggestive part to a marriage.
There is a 2004 children’s movie called The Incredibles that has been mostly forgotten today. If you haven’t seen it, it follows a family of superheroes who have to deal with trying to live a normal life. There are some really interesting lines and themes in this movie, though, and they strike a chord with some of the issues plaguing the West today.
The “Supers”, as they are called, were daily saving the world from villains and thieves when Mr. Incredible, a muscular, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed European… I mean man… saves someone from attempted suicide. To his surprise, this person sues Mr. Incredible. In the courtroom, Mr. Incredible yells, “I saved your life!” and the man responds, “No! You botched my death!”
Isn’t that just the attitude we get, though, when trying to converse with those who promote Cultural Marxist Christianity? While our hope is to see the restoration of the Church and the returning of morality, we are treated as criminals for wanting to stop the demise. We want equally yoked marriages and the pews scream “RACIST!” We seek the better welfare of our own kin, and the congregant who sees a neighbor in a Somalian now views us as freshly-sworn-in Nazi members.
It is an amazing thing to stand back and observe, to be honest. Like a psychiatrist in a lab coat, we can walk around the rec room of the world’s asylum, jotting notes, thanking God that we drive home each night. However, if we relegate ourselves to only jotting notes, or only reading the jotted notes of other note-jotters, we tend to fall prey to our own weaknesses – namely, navel-gazing and purity-spiraling.
To return to the film: as time progresses, Mr. Incredible, who is now a father of three and working a terrible insurance job that robs him of his masculinity and sense of purpose in life, chooses to spend his free time staring at his wall of memorabilia from The Glory Days. His wife, “Elasti-Girl”, stuck with disobedient children and a disconnected husband and father, is exasperated.
I find this a pertinent lesson and reminder for those of us facing the challenge of living as a traditionalist Christian family in today’s climate. We can swing rapidly from bitterness to exasperation, wishing at one moment that we could at least attain a level of social morality that could be found in some certain time period and at the next moment wishing that we could taste steak again, as Cypher so aptly put it in The Matrix.
But in the meantime, the best thing that requires our energy and devotion is our family – their wellbeing, their growth and expansion, and the solid formation on which they are to stand.
To conclude: the nemesis of the movie, named Syndrome, has been exterminating all of the Supers one by one. His goal is to create a weapon that only he, with his technology, can destroy. The best line of the movie belongs to him when he states that he will sell his technology to everyone so that “Everyone can be super! And when everyone’s super… no one will be.”
We aren’t all super. My goodness, it isn’t a complicated thing to understand. We aren’t all beautiful, smart, ambitious, or creative. And with the “church” teaching its patrons that we are, what follows is the melting of Christianity into the World – the very thing we are instructed to be apart from.
I’ve found the return to normalcy – the normalcy of promoting large and healthy families, wives that manage the home, and husbands that lead rather than be cuckolded – is our version of being the unseen “superhero.” Earlier this year, the whole world supposedly celebrated International Women’s Day, and yet the only women I saw being celebrated were those serving minorities, those who did not fit traditional beauty standards, and those who spent more time outside of the home than inside tending it. It is, yet again, the idea that we are all special simply because we ARE. “I think, therefore I am perfect.”
We have to fight this. We have to fight against the elimination of definitions, boundaries, and hierarchy by embracing the very definitions that make us who we are. As no one can serve two masters, so also no one can be both synonym and antonym. No better group is better poised to fight it than we, who can actually acknowledge our personal limits while simultaneously seeing the strengths of the group as a whole.
As the Western church dies and turns to entertainment as a form of recruitment, we must ever cling to Truth, the definition of it, and the teaching of it to our children.
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