You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt.
Leviticus 19:33-34.
This comes out on a Sunday morning.
Faithful Catholics are going to Mass today, as required by the Church, or went last night. These are the readings for the day, which will also be read in some "main line" Protestant Churches that use the Catholic lectionary:
Reading 1
Nehemiah 8:2-4a, 5-6, 8-10
Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, which consisted of men, women, and those children old enough to understand.
Standing at one end of the open place that was before the Water Gate, he read out of the book from daybreak till midday, in the presence of the men, the women, and those children old enough to understand; and all the people listened attentively to the book of the law.
Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that had been made for the occasion.
He opened the scroll so that all the people might see it— for he was standing higher up than any of the people —; and, as he opened it, all the people rose.
Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people, their hands raised high, answered, "Amen, amen!" Then they bowed down and prostrated themselves before the LORD, their faces to the ground. Ezra read plainly from the book of the law of God, interpreting it so that all could understand what was read. Then Nehemiah, that is, His Excellency, and Ezra the priest-scribe and the Levites who were instructing the people said to all the people: "Today is holy to the LORD your God. Do not be sad, and do not weep"— for all the people were weeping as they heard the words of the law. He said further: "Go, eat rich foods and drink sweet drinks, and allot portions to those who had nothing prepared; for today is holy to our LORD. Do not be saddened this day, for rejoicing in the LORD must be your strength!"
Reading 2
1 Corinthians 12:12-30
Brothers and sisters: As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit.
Now the body is not a single part, but many. If a foot should say, "Because I am not a hand I do not belong to the body, "it does not for this reason belong any less to the body. Or if an ear should say, "Because I am not an eye I do not belong to the body, " it does not for this reason belong any less to the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as he intended. If they were all one part, where would the body be? But as it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I do not need you, " nor again the head to the feet, "I do not need you." Indeed, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are all the more necessary, and those parts of the body that we consider less honorable we surround with greater honor, and our less presentable parts are treated with greater propriety, whereas our more presentable parts do not need this.
But God has so constructed the body as to give greater honor to a part that is without it, so that there may be no division in the body, but that the parts may have the same concern for one another. If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy.
Now you are Christ's body, and individually parts of it. Some people God has designated in the church to be, first, apostles; second, prophets; third, teachers; then, mighty deeds; then gifts of healing, assistance, administration, and varieties of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work mighty deeds? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret?
Gospel
Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21
Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us, I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received.
Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news of him spread throughout the whole region. He taught in their synagogues and was praised by all.
He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord. Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
He said to them, "Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing."
Faithful Orthodox using a different calendar will hear three readings as well, those being John 20:19-31, 1 Timothy 1:15-17 and Matthew 15:21-28.
Donald and Melania Trump, and their son Barron, aren't going to hear any readings today, as they're not going to Church. Melania is a non observant Catholic (her marriage to Donald Trump is invalid in the eyes of the Church) and Trump is from all observances non religious, in spite of Evangelicals having proclaimed him, with no evidence to support it, a man of God.
I find myself in a peculiar situation, in that as a Catholic who firmly believes that Episcopal holy orders are "completely null and utterly void", I'm rising to defend an Episcopal Bishop, and moreover one that I don't really know about in general.1
Moreover, as a Catholic who also believes that women may not be ordained to the priesthood, I'm rising to defend a female Episcopal cleric.
And in doing this, I'm recalling a homily delivered by a local young, highly orthodox, Catholic priest, that the being the "four things God hates homily".
Let's start off by recalling that, highlighting the part that applies here:
Because I've referenced it more than one time, but apparently never posted it (cowardice at work) I'm going to post here the topic of "the four sins God hates". I'm also doing this as I'm getting to a political thread about this years elections and the candidates, in the context of the argument of "Christians must. . . " or "Christians can. . . "
First I'll note using the word "hate", in the context of the Divine, is a truncation for a much larger concept. "Condemns" might have been a better choice of words, but then making an effective delivery in about ten minutes or less is tough, and truncations probably hit home more than other things.
Additionally, and very importantly, sins and sinners are different. In Christian theology, and certainly in Catholic theology, God loves everyone, including those who have committed any one of these sins, or all of them.
This topic references a remarkably short and effective sermon I heard some time ago. The way my 61 year old brain now works, that probably means it was a few years ago. At any rate, it was a homily based on all three of the day's readings, which is remarkable in and of itself, and probably left every member of the parish squirming a bit. It should have, as people entrenched in their views politically and/or economically would have had to found something to disagree with, or rather be hit by.
The first sin was an easy one that seemingly everyone agrees is horrific, but which in fact people excuse continually, murder.
Murder is of course the unjust taking of a life, and seemingly nobody could disagree with that being a horrific sin. But in fact, we hear people excuse the taking of innocent life all the time. Abortion is the taking of an innocent life. Even "conservatives", however, and liberals as a false flag, will being up "except in the case of rape and incest".
Rape and incest are horrific sins in and of itself, but compounding it with murder doesn't really make things go away, but rather makes one horror into two. Yes, bearing a child in these circumstances would be a horrific burden. Killing the child would be too.
The second sin the Priest noted was sodomy. He noted it in the readings and in spite of what people might like to say, neither the Old or New Testaments excuse unnatural sex. They just don't. St. Paul is particularly open about this, so much so that a local female lesbian minister stated that this was just "St. Paul's opinion", which pretty much undercuts the entire Canon of Scripture.
A person can get into Natural Law from here, which used to be widely accepted, and which has been cited by a United States Supreme Court justice as recently as fifty or so years ago, and the Wyoming Supreme Court more recently than that, and both in this context, but we'll forgo that in depth here. Suffice it to say that people burdened with such desires carry a heavy burden to say the least, but that doesn't make it a natural inclination. In the modern Western World we've come to excuse most such burdens, however, so that where we now draw lines is pretty arbitrary.
Okay, those are two "conservative" items.
The next wasn't.
That was mistreating immigrants.
This sort of speaks for itself, but there it is. Scripture condemns mistreating immigrants. You can't go around, as a Christian, hating immigrants or abusing them because of their plight.
Abusing immigrants, right now, seems to be part of the Conservative "must do" list.
And the final one was failing to pay workmen a just wage. Not exactly taking the natural economy/free market approach in the homily.
Two conservatives, and two liberal.
That's because Christianity is neither liberal or conservative, but Christianity. People claiming it for their political battles this year might well think out their overall positions.
As I noted, two conservative items, and two liberal.
No murdering, no sodomy, no abusing immigrants, and no cheating people on their pay.
A homily nearly guaranteed to make everyone uncomfortable or angry.
Seems like everyone claiming to carry some sort of Christian banner in the deep Trump camp is only comfortable with one of those, now days.2
Bishop Budde directly addressed Donald Trump, and for that matter J. D. Vance. You may have read what she said, but invoking the Jimmy Akin Citation Rule, you'll let you hear it for yourself.
This is homily is profoundly Christian. There's nothing in it that any Christian can condemn. So why are people condemning it.
Well, because it is profoundly Christian. She asks for mercy for the different, downtrodden, and immigrants.
Gasp!
Donald Trump, who is trying to yank citizenship from the "natural born", is taking exception to a Christian cleric's plea for mercy for everyone his policies impact.3 4 Of course, he also ignored her comments about calling people names, accusing her of not being "smart", a frequent accusation by Trump (who might not be comfortable with his own smarts).
Well, this gets directly at the hypocrisy of some supporters of Trump who continually evoke religion, and particularly those who are in a certain evangelical camp.
For years now, we've been told by these people, including a fair number of clerics, that Trump, who has no discernable connection to any religion as an adult, doesn't seem to practice any religion, who is a serial polygamist with a horrific history towards women, and who is a member of the class that Christ warned less of a chance of getting to Heaven than a camel through an "eye of a needle", was a "Godly man".
This has been a complete fraud. There's no evidence that Trump is religious. He attended Church only fourteen times during his first term of office. He was confirmed a Presbyterian when he was young, a denomination he says he's no longer part of, but John Calvin would give him a dope slap for his personal conduct if he came back from the grave.5
What they really mean is they see him as somebody who going to restore and invoke a certain John Brown view of muscular evangelical Christianity. Their religion is heavily mixed with right wing politics, and they see themselves as leading a march out of a metaphorical immoral Kansas.6 Trump is just, in their view, a God sent vehicle to get this done.
Put another way, as I've mentioned before, they see Trump as a sort of Cyrus the Great.7 They don't care that he isn't a Christian, as he's going to back their "Christian values".
And their values, frankly, express a deficit of Christianity.
This is something we've seen before in the United States and it dates back, really, to the country being a protestant nation founded by migrating, and often dissenting, protestant sects. If you looked at the "Pilgrims", for example, they really weren't all that nice. Oliver Cromwell's Calvinism formed a background to a lot of the early religious history of the US, and Cromwell definitely wasn't nice. Indeed, he ended up being so hated in his own country that the location of his head remains a secret, something imposed to prevent people from digging it up in anger.
In the past, Southern "evangelicals" were often backers of segregation. Carrying forward to the current times, they see many of the descents from Christian moral standards, such as the intrusion of homosexuality into society in general and the pulpit in particular, as abominations. At the same time, however, they continue to see things that they've widely accommodated as not much of a problem, at least not openly. You aren't going to hear, for example, any evangelicals condemn divorce. Locally I know at least two people who "lived in sin" and were really active members of a major evangelical church. I've sort of known one person carrying the banner of Christian morality who is married to a divorced woman who is herself extremely right wing, which while common in the US, is something Christ specifically prohibited.
You really don't get the pick and choose option here.
The New Apostolic Reformation has embraced Trump in spades. They feel that he'll, to put it in an old fashioned fashion, drive the Sodomites from the land and restore and impose a Evangelical Christian order. A lot of them seem perfectly comfortable with policies that will hurt, at a human level, a group of people who are largely darked skinned, even if they don't hold personally racist views.
To be perfectly fair, a lot of American Catholics, completely dim on the nature of the New Apostolic Reformation, are going right along with this and supporting it, so we are far, far from being free of accusation here ourselves.7b
That fact in and of itself will have some infesting implications. The Episcopal Church is a "main line" Protestant religion that was once a major force in the country, but which accommodated itself to an ever growing list of things Christians have always considered sinful. In the 1930s the Anglican Communion remained so close to Christian tradition, and close the Apostolic Christian tradition at that, that it caused a king to resign his thrown over divorce. Now it doesn't worry much about divorce and is okay, in many places with homosexual "marriage". Hence the accusation of "woke" aimed at the Bishop, even though she did not say a single thing that could be regarded as being woke in her homily.
I note this as Hispanics have come into the country they have been attracted to protestant and quasi Christian faiths in some numbers. This isn't hugely surprising, even though the majority of Hispanics are cultural, if not practicing, Catholics, as these faiths seem more "American". It's notable that in the novel, but not the movie adaptation of it, The Godfather Michael Corleone figure was disappointed when his protestant wife converted to Catholicism and started raising the children in that faith, as he hoped that they'd be members of the more "American", at that time, Episcopal Church. Indeed, Catholics aspiring to be in the upper middle class in fact often did that until the 1960s, when Kennedy made being American and Catholic seemingly okay.8
In reality, it never actually became okay, as the Church will not accommodate itself to the culture of anyone nation, something that became increasingly obvious after 1973's Roe v. Wade decision.
It's been noted that Hispanics voted for Trump in large numbers this last election, a shift in political alignments that we predicated here quite awhile back. That reflects their cultural conservatism, which is to say that it reflects their cultural Catholicism.9 What they probably were not ready for is the degree of outright hatred a significant number of the Maga crowed have to anyone who isn't a White nominal protestant. This started to become evident when Anne Coulter, a serious Presbyterian told Vivek Ramaswamy recently that she'd vote for him, but he isn't white. Indeed, he's an Indian American Hindu. Ramaswamy got the message and bailed out of the doggy agency, realizing that there was no future for him there. He's going to run for the Governorship of Rust Belt Ohio where voters will likely inform him that he's not white, as its okay apparently to say that once again.
Indeed, there are a lot of under the breath mutterings about Usha Vance who isn't white, and who is a Hindu. Oh my.
Chances are good that the Trump interregnum will have an impact on the Evangelicals in a major way, starting with this. There isn't really a home in a lot of those churches for Christians who hail from a culture that didn't arise in Great Britain during the English Civil War. When the disaster of Trump blows up, it's going to take the wind out of the sails of a lot of things associated with his movement, and most likely a lot of Hispanics out of the pews.
To be a real Christian, of course, has always meant that you didn't have a home in the world, and it still does. It has also always meant that you'd be hated. People want to hear that they can get rich on Earth and that its a sign of approval from Heaven. They want to hear that some people don't really count, up to the point of their deaths, whether that be through neglect or judicial execution. They want to be told that unnatural sexual unions are hated by God, but shacking up and affairs, as long as the plumbing is correct, aren't really a big deal. They want to be told they can pay as little to their employees as they can get away with, and that's just God's plan. And they want to be told they can hate the stranger, even the infant ones, if they weren't born in the right place.
They want "Christian values", as long a they weren't the ones Christians were martyerd for, and they're easy to do. They're okay with the Sermon on the Mount, as long as it doesn't mean they really have to go to Church to hear it, and can stay home and watch football.
Now, does this apply to all Evangelicals? Certainly not, and not by a long shot. About 80% of white Evangelicals voted for Trump, but not all of them hold such views by any means. 58% of Catholics voted for Trump, that being a majority. A lot of that may be explained in both instances by Democrats hugging the bloody body of abortion, which should be a lesson to them and one which we warned here was a mistake to do. And quite frankly much of what has come about was due to the developments brought about by Obergefell, which we warned would occur.10
So, horrified by a moral decay that became obvious with Obergefell, but having accommodated itself to a flood of moral decay that came before that, the American Civil Religion turned to an irreligious man who has no capacity for deep thought at all and who started whining, but only after some of his backers whined first, that a "woke" minister was interjecting religion into politics.
Politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related. We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect, and our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they're sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order to survive.
Ronald Reagan.
Footnotes:
1. The phrase is from Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Apostolicae Curae holding Anglican ordinations to be invalid.
I'm not hostile to Episcopalians, I'd note, I just agree that Pope Leo XIII was correct. Apparently a lot of Episcopalians have over the years as there's been efforts to convey validity by cross ordinations from other churches that can demonstrate Apostolic succession, something the Methodist have done as well. Some Anglican male priests do have valid holy orders, however, particularly if they were formerly Catholics.
2. Trump reinstated the death penal for certain Federal offenses. The Catholic Church generally takes the view that its obsolete and while the state is allowed to impose it under certain conditions, those conditions no longer exist in the modern world.
3. This is clearly a legally deficient argument and has been stayed by a court.
4. Of interest, already there's been arguments that Trump's proclamation also deprives Native Americans of citizenship, a nasty shocking proposition. This because Trump's AG office holds the view that birthright means "subject to the jurisdiction" of the US.
Of interest, if that's correct, Ted Cruz is not a U.S. citizen. He was born in Canada.
5. Presbyterians do allow for divorce, as a last resort, in cases of adultery, which Trump has experience with, or abandonment.
6. Catholics that have been backing this best fear, as this camp is traditionally highly hostile to Catholicism, and many of its members wouldn't regard Catholics as Christians at all, even though Catholics are the original Christians.
7. This analogy really fails. Cyrus the Great wasn't a bad man, in the context of his times and station. He wasn't Jewish, and of course he lived well before the time of Christ, but he was charged with freeing the captive Jews under his dominion.
That's why some Evangelical Christians see Trump as a Cyrus. Cyrus enormously benefitted the Jew, but he wasn't Jewish. So, to those in the New Apostolic Reformation, Trump will be a Cyrus who lets them bring forth a new Evangelical Protestant nation.
Well, Cyrus would regard Trump as a pussy. Moreover, Trump is just making us look like clowns and stands a much better chance of tainting Evangelical Christianity irredeemably.
7b. Having said that,yanking the citizenship of the native born was the topic of an address by Catholic Cardinal Cupich.
He's not alone in this. Other US Catholic bishops have made statements on this issue, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned Trump's actions on immigration as well.
The Church does not maintain there should be "open borders", as some on the far left do. Rather, it holds that immigration should be governed by four principles:
First Principle: People have the right to migrate to sustain their lives and the lives of their families.
Second Principle: A country has the right to regulate its borders and to control immigration.
Third Principle: A country must regulate its borders with justice and mercy.
8. There was also a trend like this that followed World War Two with some returning US servicemen joining the (ironically) Lutheran Church as well as the Episcopal Church which seemed more American and local.
While widely missed, there's a counter trend today with young conservatives and traditionalist joining the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and some very devout Evangelicals joining the Orthodox Church after being exposed to the early history of the Church.
9. I've already seen one video clip by a Hispanic Trump voter horrified over the deportations, claiming he promised to do no such thing.
No he didn't. But this is an interesting example of how people convince themselves a politician holds their own views because he holds some views that they like.
10. We specifically stated:These justices have perhaps assumed too much if they've assumed that they can now act so far that Marshall would be horrified, and I'd be surprised if, long term, this decision doesn't either mark the beginning of a Cesarian court and a retreat of American democracy, or the point at which the roles of the Court began to massively erode in favor of a more Athenian democracy.
Indeed I tremble for my country when reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
An item from Cowboy State Daily columnist Dave Simpson (who is not from Wyoming, like so many of Wyoming's far right are not):
Dave Simpson: Wyoming Paid Us To Cut Dead Trees
Within the column:
Apparently California hasn't had the good sense to encourage landowners to clear their land of the brush that went up in flames around Los Angeles last week, taking 24 lives and destroying 12,000 homes so far. One report explained that landowners clearing brush could be fined for killing rare, protected plants.
Good grief.
Here in Wyoming, we made our places less prone to fire.
Too bad California didn't encourage landowners to do the same.
They're paying the price now.
What a massively ignorant and mean thing to say.
The replies on twitter, at least, were not clueless:
Stephanie Hewitt@Stephhewitt1 2h
But even with thinning the forest, the Snowy Range would not survive with hurricane force winds during a forest fire. Stop the grandstanding.
Indeed the recent fire in Albany and Carbon Counties more than proved that.
Buckwild @veedawhoo 3h
Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back chiefš
Exactly.
Traveler@JuniperMesa 1h
Fill Sky will massive amounts heat trapping gases, catastrophically overheat Planet = catastrophic climate change, Aridification, Megadrought, FireStorms gone Runaway, beyond Apocalyptic self reinforcing feedback loop, not "potential", Rocky Mountain Ecosystem, not built for heat
And right again.
Of course, as Simpson, who actual Wyomingites would not regard as a Wyomingite (you have to be born here or in a neighboring state, wondering in as an adult doesn't count), is from the far right, and as a far right migrant who didn't grow up here with winters were real, probably is in the climate change is a fib category.
It isn't.
The old saying is "paybacks are a bitch".
How naive and clueless can a person be to not realize that an urban fire.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
Raymond Chandler, Red Wind: A Collection of Short Stories
The fires were driven by Santa Ana winds, strong, extremely dry katabatic winds that originate inland and affect coastal Southern California and northern Baja California.
Chandler wasn't kidding. They're something else, and indeed "Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks."
I fear that Wyoming is about to get a real dope slap.
California contributes five times more to the Federal coffers than it receives.
Then I rapped upon a house with a U.S. flag upon display
I said, "Could you help me out, I got some friends down the way"
The man said, "Get out of here, I'll tear you limb from limb"
I said, You know, they refused Jesus, too, " he said, "You're not him
Get out of here before I break your bones, I ain't your pop"
I decided to have him arrested, and I went looking for a cop
Bob Dylan 115th Street Dream.
Wyoming receives more than it gives.
Sitting there smug with a 307 beer can isn't going to change that.
And we have disasters, including fire related disasters, every year.
This year, the Hageman homestead was burned in one such fire.
Guess the Hageman's didn't know enough to clear the underbrush?
I suspect nobody is going to say that.
And if the fires return here next summer, and its been a very dry winter, what will people who hold such mean spirted views say?
And will Wyoming, which had its hand out for disaster relief in 2024, be too embarrassed to ask for it in 2024. Simpson speaks for a common view here, and the GOP is threatening to hold disaster aid to California up. Indeed, our Senator, in his new whip role, has hinted at that.
Nature and events have a terrible way of humbling the arrogant.
Every proud heart is an abomination to the LORD; be assured that none will go unpunished.
I didn't go last night as I intended to go whoop it up on the town.1 I've never been big on celebrating "New Years" anyhow, although we did last night with family and sort of extended family, as we have a at this point another person in the second half of their twenties whose pretty much incorporated into the family, but not officially or by blood. Anyhow, it was pretty low key and I was in bed before midnight. I think last year I made it to midnight to observe the fireworks some neighbors set off. This year I did not. I'm amazed that the same people, who really like fireworks, set them off again, as we've had hurricane force winds for the past day or so.
Anyhow, the reason I'm posting this comment is due to a particularly troublesome year for American Christianity in 2024.
American Protestants don't like to believe it, but the United States is and has always been a Protestant Country. It's so Protestant, that the Protestants can't recognize that, and even people who claim to have no religion at all are pretty Protestant. Even a lot of Catholics are pretty Protestantized and I've known some fairly secular Jews who were fairly Protestant.
Protestantism is a pretty big tent, with there being all sorts of tables within it, and with some of the tables really not liking others. For much of the country's history the Episcopal Church was the dominant Protestant Church, which made a lot of sense. The Episcopal Church is, of course, part of the Anglican Communion and the English descent is dominant in American ancestry. Supposedly this is 26% of the population now, but that figure is probably inaccurate by at least half simply because people whose ancestry stretches back away have simply forgotten it and is not celebrated the way other ancestral inheritance is. I'm of overwhelming Irish ancestry but even I have a little English ancestry of the Anglo Norman variety, brough in through Ireland.
Anyhow, as in the 18th Century most residents of British North America were from Great Britain, most were members of the Church of England, outside of Canada, where of course they were French and Catholic.
The Episcopal Church has never been in the only Protestant Church in what is now the US, however. Right from the beginning there were bodies of dissenters from the established church who came here to be able to practice their faith without being molested for it. That doesn't mean they were keen on others practicing their faiths, and they often didn't tolerate other Protestants at all. But they were there, and that gave rise to a sort of rough and ready loosely organized Protestantism in some regions, particularly the American South. These groups really prospered following the American Civil War as they hadn't gotten behind the war the way Southern Episcopalians had. These groups really spread across the nation following the 1970s. Looking back, its amazing to realize that growing up I knew exactly one Baptist kid (he's now a Lutheran) and the three big Protestant churches in this category didn't exist here. Wyoming is the least religious state in the US, but at that time almost all the Protestants I knew were Lutheran or Episcopalian. I knew a handful of Methodists and of course Mormons, but Baptists or Assemblies of God? Nope.
So what's this have to do with 2024?
The Election of 2024 saw a really strong association of Evangelical Christianity, which is very much an American thing, and the vote. It's distinctly different than anything that's occurred before.
Evangelical Christianity has been nationally significant in elections since at least 1950 or so, but it wasn't until 2024 that the "Christian vote" meant the Evangelical vote outside of the American South. Because they are fractured, they are not the largest Christian body in the country. Oddly enough, while 67% of the population self identifies as Christian, and something like 44% identify as Protestant, Catholics are the largest single denomination.
The back story to this however is that the Reformation, which started in 1517, is ending.
The Reformation was able to start in the first place due to a large element of ignorance. This can't be said of Luther, who wasn't ignorant, but who was opinionated and wrong. Luther opened the door, however, to people like Calvin, Zwingli and Knox who were fundamentally ignorant in certain ways.
The spread of cheap printing and ultimately the Internet makes ignorance on some things much more difficult to retain. For centuries bodies of Protestant Christians held to sola scriptura and a belief that they were like the first Christians, even though there's always been Christian texts dating back to shortly after Christ's crucifixion.2 Now, all of a sudden, anybody can read them. This has in fact caused a pronounced migration of really serious sola scriptura Christians to the Apostolic Churches, as well as a migration by serious "mainline" Protestants. Some bodies at this point, like very conservative Anglicans and Lutherans, are mostly Protestant out of pure obstinance.
The ultimate irony of all of this is that the mainline Protestant churches have collapsed in many places. Part of this is due to the massive increase in wealth in the western world which has hurt religion in general, but part is also because it gets to be tough to explain why you are a member of one of these churches if you can't explain a really solid reason to be, as opposed being in an Apostolic church.
At the same time, and not too surprisingly, similar forces have been operating in the Evangelical world in the US. As already noted, quite a few serious Evangelicals are now serious Catholics or Orthodox. Others, however, have retreated into a deep American Evangelicalism that is resistant to looking at the early Church, even though they are aware of it. This is rooted, in no small part, to the go it alone history of these bodies.
At the same time that this has occurred, the spread of the American Civil Religion has grown which sort of holds that everyone is going to Heaven as long as they aren't bad. Serious Catholics and Orthodox can't accommodate themselves to that but Evangelicals have attempted to, while at the same time realizing it really doesn't make sense.
Obergefell, as we noted, was the watershed moment. At that point, Christians of all types were faced with realizing that the US had really strayed far from observing its Christian origins, or at least the Christian faith, with there being all sorts of different reactions to it. In Catholic Churches there was the realization that we really hadn't become as American as we thought, and we weren't going to. Trads sprang up partially in reaction with now every Church having its contingent of Mantilla Girls giving an obstinate cultural no.
In Evangelical circles it helped fuel a militant conservatism that expresses its most radical nature in the New Apostolic Reformation which believes that we're on the cusp of a new Apostolic age, which will be Protestant in nature, and more transformational than any prior Great Awakening. They believe that the United States is charged with a Devine mission and some have concluded, as unlikely as it would seem from the outside, that Donald Trump is an improbable Cyrus the Great who will bring this about.
The support of Southern Episcopalians for the Southern cause in the Civil War damaged in the South to such an extent that the non mainline churches, like the Southern Baptist, came up as a major force after the war. The Baptists and Protestant itinerant preachers had warned during the war that wickedness was going to bring ruin. It seemed that their warnings were proven by the results of the war. Episcopal linking to a wicked cause diminished their credibility.
Donald Trump is not Cyrus the Great. Mike Johnson is not standing in the shoes of Moses. This will all have a bad end. Or it might. As noted, the Reformation is dying and in some ways this is the last stand of it. Those linking their Christianity to a man like Donald Trump are pinning their hopes, and their faith, on a weak reed. The question is what happens when it breaks and how much damage has been done, including to Christianity in general, in the meantime.
Moreover, the question also exists if you can claim to bear a Christian standard while not observing parts of the faith that are established but uncomfortable, let alone contrary to what is now so easy to determine not to be part of the early faith. Can those who clearly don't live a Christian life really be the shield wall against decay?
Footnotes:
1. As with my observation on Christmas in The Law and Christmas, being a Catholic puts you in a strange position in regard to the secular world, or rather the larger American culture. Lots of people start celebrating New Years pretty darned early on New Years Even, which means as an employer you start to get questions about whether we're closing at noon and the like, pretty early on. And also, while in the popular imagination people hit the bars at night, quite a few people have celebrator drinks here and there by late morning in reality. If your concern is getting to a vigil Mass soon after work, you aren't one of those people. And if you are one of the people hitting Mass in the morning, you aren't having a late night.
2. Sola scriptura never made sense and is obviously incorrect in that the New Testament itself mentions traditions outside of the written text. But the Bible, moreover, which is the scripture that "Bible Believing" Christian's look to is the version that was set out by the Catholic Church as the Canon of Scripture. Nowhere in the Bible does is there a Devine instruction as to what books would be included in the Bible.
Indeed, this position is further weakened in that Luther put some books he personally didn't like in an appendix, and later Protestants removed them. That wasn't Biblical. Moreover, the Eastern Orthodox Bible contains the Prayer of Manaseh, I Esdras, II Esdras, III Maccabees, IV Maccabees, Odes, and Psalm 151 and the Orthodox Tewahedo biblical canon some pre Christian Jewish books the others do not. While Catholics can explain why the books they include in their canon and can explain the relationship to the other Bibles, Protestant "Bible Believing" Christians flat out cannot. All of the texts in the Orthodox Bibles are genuine ancient texts without dispute. Moreover, there are early Christian writings which are genuine that are wholly omitted from any Bible. The Sola Scriptura position just accepts the King James version of the Bible on the basis that it must be the canon on a pure matter of faith, which is not relying on scripture alone.
Some years I post basically satiric resolutions for other people.
2024 was not a great year in a lot of ways, and 2025 promises not to be, thus making anything comedic seem rather inappropriate.
So this is a bit more serious.
The general election of 2024 was truly the worst one in the country's history. Two ancient men were offered up by the nation's two major political parties, with those parties only agreeing on the lie that you must vote for one of the two of them. The Democratic Party, which emerged for a while after World War Two as a center left party representing the working class, completed its post Vietnam War lurch to the far left and couldn't claw its way back from there. The Republican Party, formerly the party of conservatism and business, was destroyed by Donald Trump and his populist minions, a process set in motion in the 1970s and Reagan's Southern Strategy, thereby becoming a new expression of the Dixiecrats. The attack on education that began in the 1980s under Reagan seemed to bear weedy fruit as well, as middle class Americans, and some upper class Americans, grasped onto utter fictions offered up by Trump and company which promised to return the country to a fictional perfect past. Many voters, of course, felt trapped and voted both for and against politicians based on social issues which the Democrats in particular had helped bring into the forefront resulting in their defeat.
So, some serious hopes, if not resolutions.
Americans need to quit believing in something because it sounds like something they wish to be true.
We can't be an island insulated from the world. We've hoped to some degree to that since day one, but we've never been close to achieving that status. George Washington may have urged us to avoid foreign entanglements but we were involved, on an undeclared basis, in what were essentially two world wars by the early part of the 19th Century, one against France, and another against the United Kingdom and her allies. While many have long declared that "we aren't the world's policeman", if we aren't there's hardly any police at all. And if new police arise, there's a really good chance we won't like it. Our best hope, if we get to that point, is that its the combined countries of Europe, but what if, instead, its the People's Republic of China?
The internet and modern travel have shrunk the world so much that there's no escaping the impact of even minor disruptions around the globe. A war in Ukraine increases the cost of pasta in Italy and groceries, thereafter, in the US, as the most minor of examples.
We can whine about "forever wars" but the truth of the matter is that we haven't fought a substantial war since we backed out of Vietnam in 1973. Even at that, there were fewer men garrisoned in Vietnam at the height of the American involvement in the war than there were involved in the Battle of the Bulge, which of course was a single American World War Two battle. All wars are serious and horrible, but the post Vietnam War conflicts we've been in have, in real terms, been minor in comparison to anything that came after 1975's fall of Saigon.
We can't ignore the globe.
Climate Change is real and needs to be addressed basically 30 years ago. There is still time to act, but that action needs to be massive and drastic. Believing that this isn't the case is an example of willful denial of science and ultimately an act of theft, if not murder, of future generations. Denying this because my income is based on oil, and I freely concede much of mine is, doesn't change the reality.
Science of all types needs to be taken seriously. Sure, it isn't always right, but it's more often right than the ravings of somebody who bases their positions on the spouting of former Playboy centerfolds or quack celebrities.1
On this, vaccinations work. They do. If you don't want to get vaccinated, don't, but don't pretend that's because Bill Gates is looking for a way to steal your lunch.
On science, we need to comport more to nature. That includes our own natures. Poisoning the womb and murdering infants in the womb isn't "health care", its poisoning yourself and murdering your offspring. Its' deeply anti natural.
Along the same lines, there are only two genders in mammals. That's it. You, smart primate, are a member of the most sexually dimorphic species on the planet and are either deeply male or female. Those pretending otherwise as to their persons are mentally ill, either temporarily or perhaps more permanently. Society doesn't need to accommodate, in any fashion, this illness.
Homosexuality is the same, some sort of disorder, but not one that presents a societal threat through its tolerance. It does, however, due to excess accommodation. One of the world's oldest institutions, marriage, has been so damaged. But much damage had already been done to marriage due to the erosion of a serious understanding of what it is.
Of course, that was long in coming and gets to the next topic. Many societal institutions exist for the preservation and protection of society itself, not to make you "happy" or "fulfilled". Starting in 1953 we began the massive erosion of societal institutions and its been a complete disaster. There needs to be a serious effort to claw back that which has been lost, including in this area. There's no reason to tolerate extramarital procreation, whether its by some nameless drug addict or Elon Musk. Societal norms need to be restored.2
This gets necessarily to the topic of religion, which has been in the news constantly this year. It's odd if you realize that we can now so easily access early Christian texts that we can determine what early Christians believed very easily, and it often doesn't look anything like what's coming from The New Apostolic Reformation, or for that matter the "reformed" branches of the 16th Century Reformation, none of which has kept people from imagining Donald Trump as a latter day Cyrus the Great.
In 2024, when the writings of 124 AD are easily available, "religious" Americans who feel that Christianity stops at their own front door and that what they do is okay as they do it, are often far off the mark. Finding Donald Trump to be a "Godly man" with his serial polygamy and what not is absurd, but then people getting married again and again and pretending that comports with the faith also are out to lunch. It's not just Christianity, we'd note, that suffers from this.
Nature cares little if you accept nature and its doctrines. It simply gives the dope slap to those who don't. Not immediately, but sooner or later. The Populists who seized control of the country have a chance to recreate the county into what they imagine it should be, but only if they accept that. Chances are, of course, that National Conservatives will rapidly eclipse them in a year or two with Donald Trump's inevitable passing or inescapable dementia, and like it or nor, they appear to have a firmer grasp on this. People should ponder it and try to get a grasp themselves.
Part of that would be that if you feel a politician or a super rich dude has your interest in mind, or that if you believe that economics serves your own economic interest because it must, or if you feel that God abhors your homosexual neighbor but is okay with your third marriage, you need to rethink things.
Footnotes
1. Jenny McCarthy, who seems to have dropped off the public radar, was famous initially for being a brash Playboy centerfold was an early backer of the vaccines cause autism baloney. They do not. Now we see Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., backing that absurd view.
2. The other day I saw an item on Twitter in some dimwit on Twitter claiming some level of authority stated:
Taylor @taylor_vahey
waiting until marriage to have sex with someone is incredibly stupid due to the fact that sometimes two people are not sexually compatible
do not wait until you are locked in for life to find that out
That post is so moronic, on multiple levels, that it could lead to a long thread itself, but only a blistering rich and narcissistic society would even have a concept in some quarters of sexual compatibility.
Our species, homo sapiens sapiens, has gone from nearly being driven to extinction 900,000 years ago to dominating the globe. We know for a fact that homo sapiens sapiens mated with homo sapiens neaderthalensis, and we're we're learning that we, and the Neanderthals, mated with the Denisovans. Sexual compatibility doesn't seem to be a human problem.
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