I previously wrote that I voted for Trump because my faith requires winning.
Now let me start to flesh out exactly how I think Trump can help us Christians "win." Let's start off with our flagship sociopolitical cause: abortion. Thanks to The Donald, we may finally have an opportunity to honestly and objectively discuss the whole abortion issue as an economic problem.
Abortion is fundamentally a function of economics. In the first place, notwithstanding the untold tens of thousands of abortions that take place even among the relatively well-off, let's not fool ourselves: stats all across the board show us that not only does abortion disproportionately impact poorer minority and working class communities, especially women and their partners from broken families (itself largely a consequence, in part, of poverty), but historically the rate of abortions has correlated quite well to the business cycle, i.e. it's been higher during recessions and lower during booms. Intuitively, this makes perfect sense.
But even beyond this, intuition and experience tells us something much deeper: even where no clear imperative for abortion might exist, a woman or her partner (or both) may choose to end a pregnancy merely for the sake of their own comfort and convenience.
And there's the rub: in our hyper-materialist consumer culture - of which even Christians are more a part of than we'd like to admit - the pro-life argument boils down to asking free individuals to choose a lower "standard of living" in the conventional economic sense.
Sounds pretty straightforward in theory - after all, that's why we evangelize - but let's not forget that this evangelism also entails actual material and monetary assistance.
And on the whole, we as a society - even we as Christians - have provided nowhere close to the scale and level of financial largess necessary to make the kind of massive dent in the abortion rate that we still think could be achieved by legislation.
It's great to be "pro-life" intellectually and morally; it's a lot more painful to our collective pocketbook to actually pay for the room and the resources that new life demands.
So that's where Mr. Trump comes in. He sees abortion as merely a symptom of the real issue - a materialist culture that can't deliver on its promises of prosperity for most ordinary folks anymore. Either we change our materialism or we actually deliver on prosperity.
Given that the pro-life movement is overwhelmingly white middle class, I don't see how the former is feasible: nobody's asking us to literally follow the footsteps of St. Francis. By default, that means we should focus on making life better and easier for the less fortunate. It's time for our elected representatives to be "pro-life" not merely with letters to prevent destructive decisions, but with the purse to make the alternatives more attractive.
Friday, May 6, 2016
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Why I voted for Donald Trump: my Christianity requires winning
I understand the disappointment, even disgust of many of my fellow American Christians at the stunning victory of Donald Trump, the narcissistic reality-TV playboy, over sincerely faith-led candidates like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
But this morning, I heard on the radio a guy from Gaithersburg (where I work) who pretty much summed up the reason that potentially millions of pro-life, conservative and Christian Americans already have and probably will cast their ballot for Trump: we need to start winning again.
This particular guy said that Cruz was his favorite, but he voted for Trump because Trump will give us one small victory at a time so that, eventually, we can actually elect someone like Cruz.
Now, Cruz may not be your personal best idea of a conservative Christian pro-life candidate, but just substitute whoever else that happens to be, and you still get the gist.
For me, as soon as I got over Trump's chauvinism and petulant immaturity - both of which I still think to be genuine personal characteristics that he must constantly master within himself - it became pretty clear just why he was the only logical choice.
The bottom line is, conservatives and Christians have suffered such a crushing string of defeats in the 21st century - primarily in the culture wars, which then naturally translated into ever greater political and legal setbacks - that we've developed a "sore loser" complex which blinds us to the need for an actual strategy to win.
This complex - which can easily be exploited by the evil one - has pushed us in recent years into ever more all-out, all-or-nothing battles against the forces of the left and of secularism that even we ourselves know have already been decisively lost in the realm of public opinion.
It's high time we quit the pitiful rear-guard harassment of trying to preserve the "Judeo-Christian" nature of our public spaces and institutions when even we can't deny that they've long since been reduced to little more than a hollow veneer - lone islands of exclusive dogmatism in an ocean of postmodern universalism.
Trump is an insurgent, and we are looking at fighting an insurgency. We can't count on the conventional or mainstream tools and institutions to change the prevailing culture back to where it should be. In the last decades of the 20th century, the left waged a constant insurgency - a counter-cultural movement of exceptional depth, scope, and intensity - and it finally succeeded so thoroughly that after 2000, it acquired the wherewithal to start going mainstream and conventional with its demands and goals, as its dominant ideology eventually acquired ever more teeth and muscle within the normal channels of political and socioeconomic power.
We're already in a post-Christian or even anti-Christian world. The longer we refuse to face this reality, the longer we'll lose.
I won't get into the particulars here of how I think a Trump presidency will help our cause. But for now, consider Mr. Trump a messenger more than any inkling of messiah: the message he sends is that any morality - or Christianity, specifically - that doesn't prioritize winning, if even winning only small and piecemeal in the beginning, is doomed to irrelevance and extinction.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
A sea change is occurring in the world today...
It would appear that under Pope Francis, the Church is acknowledging that popular opinion in western society has become so alienated by the legalistic efforts of conservative churches and political authority to uphold traditional morality, that Christians now urgently need a whole new framework to engage a culture that is steadily becoming more and more hostile to their values and worldview.
This is really a bad time to be a rigid traditionalist with old-fashioned notions of "God, honor, and country." In a sense, the world has simply passed them by - the world they speak of preserving and reviving has, in very important ways, already ceased to exist.
In its place, we have a global market economy where everything and everyone is basically commoditized into some monetary value, where even longstanding national borders are being rendered largely irrelevant by the demands of corporate profits, and where governmental and official institutions may claim to represent the will of the people as much as they want, but in practice must resort to playing catch-up with a tiny professional/managerial elite on the payrolls of multinational conglomerates.
We all uphold this system far more than our misgivings about it allow us to recognize.
What is really happening, under the radar screen of experts, is that western Christendom's materialist heresy - ultimately borne out of the Protestant Reformation, which in turn spawned the secular tsunami of the Enlightenment - is reaching its logical 500-year conclusion. It has flourished for this past half-millennium because that's how long it has taken to spread worldwide to a degree that allowed it to both conquer the western hemisphere and also fundamentally shake up the venerable Asiatic civilizations of the eastern hemisphere.
The nihilism that an essentially materialist worldview - even one that has so successfully cloaked itself with Christian belief for so long - simply cannot be averted. Modern Christendom has become a victim of its own success: by liberating the sphere of human material activity so dramatically, it has unleashed a beast that, despite its constant efforts to restrain it, progressively and inexorably becomes less and less manageable to any degree whatsoever, to the point where it devours the master who created it.
This is really a bad time to be a rigid traditionalist with old-fashioned notions of "God, honor, and country." In a sense, the world has simply passed them by - the world they speak of preserving and reviving has, in very important ways, already ceased to exist.
In its place, we have a global market economy where everything and everyone is basically commoditized into some monetary value, where even longstanding national borders are being rendered largely irrelevant by the demands of corporate profits, and where governmental and official institutions may claim to represent the will of the people as much as they want, but in practice must resort to playing catch-up with a tiny professional/managerial elite on the payrolls of multinational conglomerates.
We all uphold this system far more than our misgivings about it allow us to recognize.
What is really happening, under the radar screen of experts, is that western Christendom's materialist heresy - ultimately borne out of the Protestant Reformation, which in turn spawned the secular tsunami of the Enlightenment - is reaching its logical 500-year conclusion. It has flourished for this past half-millennium because that's how long it has taken to spread worldwide to a degree that allowed it to both conquer the western hemisphere and also fundamentally shake up the venerable Asiatic civilizations of the eastern hemisphere.
The nihilism that an essentially materialist worldview - even one that has so successfully cloaked itself with Christian belief for so long - simply cannot be averted. Modern Christendom has become a victim of its own success: by liberating the sphere of human material activity so dramatically, it has unleashed a beast that, despite its constant efforts to restrain it, progressively and inexorably becomes less and less manageable to any degree whatsoever, to the point where it devours the master who created it.
Thursday, October 23, 2014
America's most urgent need? A sexual counterrevolution!
Speaking as one who has been miraculously delivered from a 14-year addiction to at least daily masturbation, I must say that what this country needs so desperately is a sexual counterrevolution.
There will be no renewal of the Judeo-Christian faith in America without a "re-Puritanization" of our sexual ethics. Traditionalists in this country who lament the inexorable advance of the general sexual anarchy in society since the Sixties would do well to consider just how badly they and their brethren have failed to stem the tide of corruption of sexuality within the church.
With levels of porn use (which is typically accompanied by masturbation) at shocking epidemic levels among Christian men (30-50 percent in one recent survey) and even mini-epidemic levels among Christian women (up to 20 percent), how in the world can we expect to witness to the virtue of chastity?
We Christians must take a long, hard look beyond the veneer of these problems to see the root cause: a general lack of faith in the sufficiency of God alone to satisfy our deepest relational needs and longings.
Few single Christians take their relationship with God deep enough in prayer and fasting to seriously consider lifelong celibacy as an option - even though Scripture itself testifies that this is in fact the most blessed lifestyle (St. Paul to the Corinthians). Many if not most young Christians marry at least in part to relieve and contain sexual urges that they're resigned to otherwise going wild.
While this difficulty of celibacy has always existed in the history of the church, it is deeply compounded today by a culture that glamorizes the image at the expense of the substance - a culture that is more at home in the church than we as Christians often realize. Our whole megachurch and Billy Graham crusade-style evangelical Christian culture - for all its value - is not conducive to encouraging young believers to walk slowly and silently with the Lord, as opposed to aggressively pursuing spectacular ministry success that would merit a Christianity Today or Relevant magazine article.
Young Christians have mastered the art of compelling persuasion, powerful worship experiences and spiritual encounters: they have not grasped that true sanctity can only be attained through constant fasting and self-denial of both physical and psychological appetites. And of course, of all these appetites, the desire for sexual intimacy is the crown.
We live in an age where you can get spiritual highs and good feelings from yoga for a monetary fee that seems so much lighter than the moral demands of Christianity. Until Christians figure out how to abandon their feel-good-about-oneself spirituality and replace it with an austere neo-Puritanism, epitomized by a new repression of sexual passions, we will continue to lose ground in the ongoing culture war.
There will be no renewal of the Judeo-Christian faith in America without a "re-Puritanization" of our sexual ethics. Traditionalists in this country who lament the inexorable advance of the general sexual anarchy in society since the Sixties would do well to consider just how badly they and their brethren have failed to stem the tide of corruption of sexuality within the church.
With levels of porn use (which is typically accompanied by masturbation) at shocking epidemic levels among Christian men (30-50 percent in one recent survey) and even mini-epidemic levels among Christian women (up to 20 percent), how in the world can we expect to witness to the virtue of chastity?
We Christians must take a long, hard look beyond the veneer of these problems to see the root cause: a general lack of faith in the sufficiency of God alone to satisfy our deepest relational needs and longings.
Few single Christians take their relationship with God deep enough in prayer and fasting to seriously consider lifelong celibacy as an option - even though Scripture itself testifies that this is in fact the most blessed lifestyle (St. Paul to the Corinthians). Many if not most young Christians marry at least in part to relieve and contain sexual urges that they're resigned to otherwise going wild.
While this difficulty of celibacy has always existed in the history of the church, it is deeply compounded today by a culture that glamorizes the image at the expense of the substance - a culture that is more at home in the church than we as Christians often realize. Our whole megachurch and Billy Graham crusade-style evangelical Christian culture - for all its value - is not conducive to encouraging young believers to walk slowly and silently with the Lord, as opposed to aggressively pursuing spectacular ministry success that would merit a Christianity Today or Relevant magazine article.
Young Christians have mastered the art of compelling persuasion, powerful worship experiences and spiritual encounters: they have not grasped that true sanctity can only be attained through constant fasting and self-denial of both physical and psychological appetites. And of course, of all these appetites, the desire for sexual intimacy is the crown.
We live in an age where you can get spiritual highs and good feelings from yoga for a monetary fee that seems so much lighter than the moral demands of Christianity. Until Christians figure out how to abandon their feel-good-about-oneself spirituality and replace it with an austere neo-Puritanism, epitomized by a new repression of sexual passions, we will continue to lose ground in the ongoing culture war.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Salvation is NOT by faith alone!
I converted to Catholicism because I no longer believed that my salvation could be secured by "faith alone."
Instead, I had to accomplish an actual work - by my own free will - to cooperate with God's mercy and grace that were given to me, in order to not continue a dreadful pattern of wrecking His salvation with my habitual sins.
Specifically, I had to stop masturbating. The only way I could do this was by physical mortification - sleeping on the floor, which I do to this day (with some lapses).
This is the paradox of authentic Christian salvation: it is truly God alone Who saves, but He cannot do it without our cooperation. In my experience, faith is not merely an assent to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, but it entails an important "work" on our part - namely, genuine sorrow for and repentance from sin. We all have to reach a point where we would rather die than commit the same grave sin again, and thus resolve to do everything in our God-given power to avoid such sin or even its near occasion.
This is serious, serious hard work: it's not as simple as making a personal resolution. It requires radical measures: I mean things like cutting off your Internet access for 6 months so you won't look at pornography again.
Now, of course, we should never confuse the means with the end. Some people won't have to sleep on the floor, or cut off their Internet for a while, in order to come to the same place: a deep loathing of one's sexual impurity. But the underlying basis for every path of deliverance from sin is the same: it must fully involve one's free will in the pursuit of a holy hatred for the filth that is sin and, on its flip side, a holy flame of love for the beauty of sanctity.
How, then, can be we sure (or more sure) that we have truly been saved? Only when not even a hint of adultery, fornication, or any kind of sexual deviance, no matter how seemingly trivial, can ever hold any sway over our souls for more than a few tense moments.
Because once in Heaven, we will see chastity and unchastity plainly for what they really are: the former a glowing young virgin of indescribable pulchritude and fragrance, the latter a horrid-looking, putrid old witch.
Instead, I had to accomplish an actual work - by my own free will - to cooperate with God's mercy and grace that were given to me, in order to not continue a dreadful pattern of wrecking His salvation with my habitual sins.
Specifically, I had to stop masturbating. The only way I could do this was by physical mortification - sleeping on the floor, which I do to this day (with some lapses).
This is the paradox of authentic Christian salvation: it is truly God alone Who saves, but He cannot do it without our cooperation. In my experience, faith is not merely an assent to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, but it entails an important "work" on our part - namely, genuine sorrow for and repentance from sin. We all have to reach a point where we would rather die than commit the same grave sin again, and thus resolve to do everything in our God-given power to avoid such sin or even its near occasion.
This is serious, serious hard work: it's not as simple as making a personal resolution. It requires radical measures: I mean things like cutting off your Internet access for 6 months so you won't look at pornography again.
Now, of course, we should never confuse the means with the end. Some people won't have to sleep on the floor, or cut off their Internet for a while, in order to come to the same place: a deep loathing of one's sexual impurity. But the underlying basis for every path of deliverance from sin is the same: it must fully involve one's free will in the pursuit of a holy hatred for the filth that is sin and, on its flip side, a holy flame of love for the beauty of sanctity.
How, then, can be we sure (or more sure) that we have truly been saved? Only when not even a hint of adultery, fornication, or any kind of sexual deviance, no matter how seemingly trivial, can ever hold any sway over our souls for more than a few tense moments.
Because once in Heaven, we will see chastity and unchastity plainly for what they really are: the former a glowing young virgin of indescribable pulchritude and fragrance, the latter a horrid-looking, putrid old witch.
Friday, August 1, 2014
Christ is Mary concealed, Mary is Christ revealed
Today is the feast day of my patron, St. Alphonsus Maria Liguori (1696-1787), Doctor of the Church and renowned moral theologian and Mariologist. This after the yesterday's (July 31) memorial of another great saint, St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuits.
Both had a great love for the Virgin Mary, as all Catholics should aspire to.
The glory of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is this: that Almighty God took the form of human flesh and blood through a young virgin, and just as He first entered His creation through this virgin, so He also decided to channel all of His mercy and grace to the human race through this virgin, and very deliberately kept her hidden from her own beneficiaries!
Mary is the most exalted of all creatures, because it is exclusively through her that the eternal mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is unveiled to the Host of Heaven.
Christ is Mary concealed, Mary is Christ revealed.
Everything that any sincere soul comes to know about Christ will inexorably point that soul to the conclusion that He is a Savior of boundless mercy, whose compassion always overrules His anger. And, any and every personal experience of this unfathomable Divine Mercy of Jesus is a most sublime invitation to get to know the wellspring of tenderness from whose form He received His own - Mary.
The blessed soul who takes Mary for her mother and comes to know her will then find that she is a sheer abyss - a sea, or "Maria", as she is so fittingly named in the Latin tongues - of adoring contemplation of the two holiest mysteries of Christ's redemption, namely the Incarnation and the Passion. This is the pearl of greatest price! For the aim of the Christian life is, in the words of St. Paul, "to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified." Mary is both the gateway to this magnificent discovery and the discovery in itself!
She is so completely and perfectly united with her Divine Son that, even though few Christians are aware of it in this life, in Heaven the fullness of revelation will be none other than the fact that she is both the source and summit of our glorification, because that glorification is precisely our mystical bond to the Body and Blood of her Son - the fruit of her womb.
Both had a great love for the Virgin Mary, as all Catholics should aspire to.
The glory of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is this: that Almighty God took the form of human flesh and blood through a young virgin, and just as He first entered His creation through this virgin, so He also decided to channel all of His mercy and grace to the human race through this virgin, and very deliberately kept her hidden from her own beneficiaries!
Mary is the most exalted of all creatures, because it is exclusively through her that the eternal mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is unveiled to the Host of Heaven.
Christ is Mary concealed, Mary is Christ revealed.
Everything that any sincere soul comes to know about Christ will inexorably point that soul to the conclusion that He is a Savior of boundless mercy, whose compassion always overrules His anger. And, any and every personal experience of this unfathomable Divine Mercy of Jesus is a most sublime invitation to get to know the wellspring of tenderness from whose form He received His own - Mary.
The blessed soul who takes Mary for her mother and comes to know her will then find that she is a sheer abyss - a sea, or "Maria", as she is so fittingly named in the Latin tongues - of adoring contemplation of the two holiest mysteries of Christ's redemption, namely the Incarnation and the Passion. This is the pearl of greatest price! For the aim of the Christian life is, in the words of St. Paul, "to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified." Mary is both the gateway to this magnificent discovery and the discovery in itself!
She is so completely and perfectly united with her Divine Son that, even though few Christians are aware of it in this life, in Heaven the fullness of revelation will be none other than the fact that she is both the source and summit of our glorification, because that glorification is precisely our mystical bond to the Body and Blood of her Son - the fruit of her womb.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Pope St. John Paul II, pray for Ukraine, Russia, and Germany!
Exactly 100 years ago this Friday, August 1, Germany declared war on Russia to mark the start of the cataclysmic First World War (1914-1918), fittingly dubbed the "suicide of Europe" by then-Pope Benedict XV.
As it was then in the Balkans, so it is now in Ukraine: it is the relationship between Germany and Russia that holds the peace of Europe at stake.
If and when the East German-trained KGB agent Vladimir Putin, God forbid, does invade eastern Ukraine, it will only be because of a dramatic personal falling out he would have suffered with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Russian-speaking East German expert on the Soviet Union. The two have been likened to a married couple who have grown accustomed to each other's tricks and traps: should they actually divorce, the consequences would be catastrophic.
How fitting it is that Pope St. John Paul II, though he lies at rest in Rome, has his relics scattered throughout his native Poland, at the crossroads of the historic German and Russian empires: this battle to somehow reconcile East and West in Ukraine is truly his.
At the heart of the whole Russo-Ukrainian conflict is the ancient split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches: the millennial (1054 AD) division that he said was his greatest suffering as he neared the end of his life. (He had actually visited Catholic shrines in western Ukraine when it was part of interwar Poland.)
Pope St. John Paul II, pray for Ukraine, Russia, and Germany!
As it was then in the Balkans, so it is now in Ukraine: it is the relationship between Germany and Russia that holds the peace of Europe at stake.
If and when the East German-trained KGB agent Vladimir Putin, God forbid, does invade eastern Ukraine, it will only be because of a dramatic personal falling out he would have suffered with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Russian-speaking East German expert on the Soviet Union. The two have been likened to a married couple who have grown accustomed to each other's tricks and traps: should they actually divorce, the consequences would be catastrophic.
How fitting it is that Pope St. John Paul II, though he lies at rest in Rome, has his relics scattered throughout his native Poland, at the crossroads of the historic German and Russian empires: this battle to somehow reconcile East and West in Ukraine is truly his.
At the heart of the whole Russo-Ukrainian conflict is the ancient split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches: the millennial (1054 AD) division that he said was his greatest suffering as he neared the end of his life. (He had actually visited Catholic shrines in western Ukraine when it was part of interwar Poland.)
Pope St. John Paul II, pray for Ukraine, Russia, and Germany!
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