I would like to start off this article by recalling an exchange of words that I had last year with Connor Grubaugh of First Things:

First Things:

“One might wonder how Wallace’s racialized Christianity could possibly account for the New Testament, among other notorious sticking points of the faith. But to assert orthodox doctrine against Wallace’s heresies would be useless. His private dialectic, congregation of one, has transcended the old creeds. Wallace wants to show that Christianity and the alt-right are compatible, not by declaring a new racist orthodoxy, but by denying that Christian faith is incompatible with anything at all.”

The American South has been Christian for four centuries and for around 350 years of its existence was based on white supremacy. The Southern Baptists only discovered that “racism” was a sin in the 1990s. In the 19th century, Catholic poets like Father Abram Ryan celebrated the Confederacy long before the invention of “racism” around the 1920s.

“In Wallace’s view, Christianity always follows the dominant culture. The mainline American churches once accepted slavery and segregation, but now they denounce them. They once rejected abortion, divorce, and homosexuality, but now they accept them. Wallace’s conclusion: “The churches accommodate and echo whatever is the political mainstream.” For the moment, they “are conforming to political correctness in condemning the Alt-Right as uniquely evil,” but in the long run, “the Alt-Right shouldn’t get hung up on being anti-Christian because Christianity is infinitely malleable. There is tremendous irony here. Wallace appears to believe that Christianity lacks any truth conditions whatsoever—that it is devoid of content, a mere vessel of empty signs and symbols, to be filled with foreign substances and remolded to suit them. It’s an old wineskin, the civil religion of the Enlightenment, to be filled with the new wine of identity politics. Wallace thus places himself in the same camp as progressive evangelicals, sex-positive Episcopalians, and every other liberal Protestant who preaches a liquid creed. For all of them, there is nothing stable at the heart of Christian faith, no set of propositions that must be judged true or false, no substrate of apostolic tradition or spiritual authority sustaining the Church through the ages; there is only that fickle goddess History, leading a perpetual process of discernment and evolution according to the self-loving demands of the “present.” Whether one uses this “infinitely malleable” Christianity to serve a liberal or a reactionary agenda is largely beside the point. ”

Does Christianity follow the dominant culture?

Is Christianity historically embedded in time and therefore influenced by contemporary trends or is it an eternal unchanging orthodoxy? Has it always been like this?

Let’s take a look:

Matthew Schmitz is back with another devastating take:

“Withdrawing man, family and state from the beneficent and regenerating effects of the idea of God and the teaching of the Church, has caused to reappear … in a manner ever clearer, ever more distinct, ever more distressing, a corrupt and corrupting paganism.”



—Pius XII, 1939 — Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) November 28, 2019

“Withdrawing man, family and state from the beneficent and regenerating effects of the idea of God and the teaching of the Church, has caused to reappear … in a manner ever clearer, ever more distinct, ever more distressing, a corrupt and corrupting paganism.”



—Pius XII, 1939 — Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) November 28, 2019

The second “no less pernicious” error was “contained in those ideas which do not hesitate to divorce civil authority from every kind of dependence upon the Supreme Being.” — Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) November 28, 2019

In Pius’ view, “Once the authority of God and the sway of His law are denied in this way, the civil authority … puts itself in the place of the Almighty and elevates the State or group into the last end of life, the supreme criterion of the moral and juridical order.” — Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) November 28, 2019

Pius traced the rise of racial hatred in part to the fact that “dependence of human right upon the Divine is denied … appeal is made only to some insecure idea of a merely human authority, and an autonomy is claimed which rests only upon a utilitarian morality.” — Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) November 28, 2019

If Pius is right, battling racial hatred requires reviving the law of universal charity founded in the kingship of Christ. — Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) November 28, 2019

Pius traced the rise of racial hatred in part to the fact that “dependence of human right upon the Divine is denied … appeal is made only to some insecure idea of a merely human authority, and an autonomy is claimed which rests only upon a utilitarian morality.” — Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) November 28, 2019

If Pius is right, battling racial hatred requires reviving the law of universal charity founded in the kingship of Christ. — Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) November 28, 2019

Notice how Jorge Bergoglio is full of all the same wisdom on “ecological sin” and the Pachamama earth goddess idol as Greta Thunberg. Similarly, Bergoglio and the Archbishop of Canterbury share the same opinion of the sin of homophobia. The Church of England recently argued that centuries of Christian anti-Semitism led directly to the Holocaust.

Racism?

Homophobia?

When did those things become sins anyway?

Pius XII was merely reflecting the secular culture of his own time.

The term “racism” was first used in the English language in 1936. It was only in the years immediately prior to World War II that “the domestic ideal of racial tolerance, necessitated by the demands of fighting fascism, becomes the “American way.”

In 1938, the U.S. Department of the Interior under Harold Ickes produced the first of 26 episodes of American All, Immigrants All, which was broadcast on the CBS network, which celebrated the contributions of immigrants and non-Whites in America. The American Anthropological Association unanimously passed a resolution condemning racism for the first time. The Carnegie Corporation commissioned the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to write a comprehensive study of American race relations that became his famous book An American Dilemma.

Pius XII said nothing about race in 1939 that wasn’t already being said in Look, Life, Time, Fortune and in The New York Times. It was only in the years between 1935 and 1945 that American racial attitudes were transformed and that “racism” went viral and became stigmatized. This was entirely driven by the geopolitical context of World War II. We’re watching it happen right now again in the Catholic Church with climate change and homosexuality. Pachamama is being integrated into Catholicism through the novel idea of “ecological sin.”

A decade from now, Catholic conservatives will be posting their pronouns in their Twitter profiles and telling us that “transphobia” is a sin and that it is “orthodoxy” and that it has always been this way since Christ was crucified. They already tell us that you can’t be a White Christian (strangely, being a black Christian is fine) because of political correctness and multiculturalism. I intend to spend the next decade documenting their Pope’s transition.

Note: There is nothing new here when you think about it.