We All Have a Dogma in this Fight
by Tom Bartlett
I’m going to confess something about myself that even my family doesn’t know. I am a member of the “Rolling Stones” fan club. Curiously, I often end up clashing with my fellow “Stoners” because most don’t share my views. The greatest source of tension appears to be that others in the club enjoy their music, collect their memorabilia and tend to show a keen interest in upcoming events, concerts and details about their lives. I personally find Mick Jagger’s voice to be abrasive and torturous. I could count the songs of theirs I can tolerate on one finger and have never owned any of their music or attended one of their concerts. In fact, if I inadvertently hear one of their songs assault me over the airwaves, I will turn it off.
Despite your opinion of my assessment regarding what I subjectively deem to be their shortcomings, should my views exclude me from identifying myself as a fan? If I am lying about my opinion of their music, then I could be easily classified as a devotee who absurdly takes pleasure in making false claims about my true allegiances. On the other hand, claiming to be an enthusiast with contempt for the stated object of my affections could justly be deemed not simply inconsistent, but incoherent. In my case, alas, I confess, I am not a fan.
“The secular left has long insisted on the “separation of church and state” and, in so doing, pretend that this means that Christians in political office uniquely need to not allow their faith to influence their policies in office. ”
The furor from the political left over Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court was presaged by the grilling she underwent, after three years earlier when she was named to serve on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. During this process, Democrat Senator, Dianne Feinstein famously quipped to Barrett, a Catholic, that “the dogma lives loudly within you.” In addition to being a respected jurist, ACB is the married mother of five, with one child having Down Syndrome and two other children adopted from Haiti. Senator Feinstein herself identifies with the Jewish faith and graduated from a private Catholic high school.
The senator was not the only one to express trepidation over Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court and, in fact, Barrett only won the nomination because of the Republican majority in the Senate at the time, as not a single Democrat voted for her. Presently, the Democrat House Leader (Nancy Pelosi) and former Vice President now occupying the office of the presidency, Joe Biden, both claim to be Catholics. In Canada, Justin Trudeau, like his father before him, touts his Catholic convictions as well. Considering we have been warned about the threat of a theocracy, one might imagine that we now are at a greater risk of reaching such a tipping point than ever in the history of North America. A Catholic takeover is underway in plain sight, yet no one is sounding the alarm. Why is that?
The secular left has long insisted on the “separation of church and state” and, in so doing, pretend that this means that Christians in political office uniquely need to not allow their faith to influence their policies in office. They warn that to do so would risk the nation devolving into a dystopian “Handmaid’s Tale” where the women not burned at the stake as witches are forced to give birth to a brood of children and have dinner waiting along with the patriarch’s pipe and slippers. What is truly disturbing is that so many professing Christians participate in this charade by trying to set themselves apart from this cartoonish representation which is being exploited to obliterate Christian influence altogether.
The reason that the “Catholics” in the Democrat party react to Amy Coney Barrett’s brand of Catholicism like Dracula to a crucifix is that this is how they react to anyone sporting a crucifix. Barrett takes her faith seriously while they adopt theirs as an affectation that serves as a political ploy to dupe gullible believers who have no understanding of it means to be a Catholic. The irony is that the Democrats are far more aware they are lying than the professing believers who fall for this rope-a-dope. To claim to be a believer while trying to purge any vestige of Christianity out of the culture is no different than my analogy of being a Rolling Stones-hating fanboy. To insist that Christian values should not influence one’s political or social attitudes is to violate half of the greatest commandment – to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Furthermore, to order society in contravention of biblical teaching is also a failure to love your neighbour as yourself.
“To hold opposite convictions on moral duties while claiming to observe the same faith indicates that: one or both sides is lying, the identity itself is meaningless, or the teachings are hazy and unclear. ”
The “Christianity vs Catholicism” debate aside, contrasting these disparate “Catholics” demonstrates that the terms are losing their meaning. To hold opposite convictions on moral duties while claiming to observe the same faith indicates that: one or both sides is lying, the identity itself is meaningless, or the teachings are hazy and unclear. The crux of the matter is establishing what is the source of authority guiding the convictions.
The Protestant Reformation came about due to a challenging of authority. Among other issues, Catholicism vested the power to establish the teachings and direction of the church into the hands of the clergy. Even though the entirety of the Old and New Testament is rife with examples of people drifting individually and collectively away from God’s instruction and engaging in outright heresies, the Catholic church maintained that granting unquestioning authority to a papacy and tradition over scripture would ensure unity and avoid the corruption of the church. Even now, Catholic leaders are attacking one another and there is no distinguishable defining characteristic that can rightly be defined as a “Catholic” value. This was Luther’s problem with the church that culminated in the Catholic/Protestant divide. This should hardly be surprising when the notion of “church authority” was birthed out of a single reference from scripture where Christ told Peter he was the rock upon which he would build his church (Matthew 16:17-19) with the implication that Peter was the first Pope. They somehow ignore Peter’s mercurial nature and the fact that literally four verses after this pronouncement, Jesus said to Peter, “get behind me Satan” (Matthew 16:23) when Peter failed to divine that Christ must give himself over to be killed so that our sins would be forgiven.
Lest we Protestants get smug; our internecine schisms were similarly assured. One of the recent highlights in the Protestant hall of shame was when a church put weddings on hold until “same sex marriage” was made legal and they could recognize a union that scripture unabashedly excludes. One is just as likely to see a self-identified Catholic or Protestant (under several possible denominational umbrellas) squaring off outside an abortion clinic with one person offering prayers, counselling and assistance while another holding a sign reading “my body, my choice” with a coat hanger in their hand and sporting a “shout your abortion” t-shirt. This is the deception that is really at work.
“One is just as likely to see a self-identified Catholic or Protestant (under several possible denominational umbrellas) squaring off outside an abortion clinic with one person offering prayers, counselling and assistance while another holding a sign reading “my body, my choice” with a coat hanger in their hand and sporting a “shout your abortion” t-shirt. ”
The remnant church (Protestant and Catholic) necessarily submits their ultimate authority to God and his written word. They don’t fall for slogans and propaganda but stay focused on what is true. They don’t fall for the fallacious claim that to dissent from a socially sanctioned value that God clearly denounces as sin is not the same as hating the sinner. In fact, to judge others hypocritically while ignoring our own deviancies necessitates that Christ will more harshly judge us. We also don’t have the right to not love or refuse to forgive anyone and we know this is not some vapid platitude but is a prerequisite to living in right relationship with our Lord. Those who set up the false dichotomy of either endorsing an action or being an agent of hate are either deceived or intentionally distorting reality.
Any Christ follower who falls for the narrative of the secular left who attempt to change the meaning of language and recast what it means to be a Christian, Catholic, or any other demographic is lacking in even basic discernment. After all, this is what these professing believers are falling for:
Being a true Christian requires that we defy God. In a recent article I wrote on my personal blog regarding election fraud in the U.S., I remarked on how social media censorship was turning evidence-based challenges to electoral integrity into an abstract idea. Instead of claiming the allegations were carefully reviewed and proven to be false, they made a blanket assertion that election fraud is rare. This was the basis for censoring anyone who dared question whether the election was stolen. This is the same principle used to fool the gullible believer. On the rare occasion secular activists go to the source to make their arguments, they always rely on out of context references, but normally they simply need to manipulate through innuendo and nuance. For example, “social justice” becomes a proxy for God’s justice while ultimately it is a call to unequal justice (aka: injustice). If the activist left that claims to be advocating for Christian values really believed Christian values support their conviction, they wouldn’t fight so hard to keep devout believers from bringing their private beliefs into the public sphere. They seek to replace God’s unwavering standards with their ethereal claim to authority.
This is not a matter of dogmatic religious intolerance vs ideologically-free tolerance, but a battle between competing dogmas. Simply consider the social values being shoved down our throats through activist left’s control over our public institutions. I am convinced that the secular left does use scripture as a roadmap for their subversive ends. After all, there would be no way of promoting ideas that so diametrically oppose the biblical stance if they weren’t intimately aware of what is taught in scripture. I dare someone to name a single value that is defended by the progressive left that, genuinely aligns with biblical teaching and is not a product of Satan’s age-old deception of “did God really say?” Given this fact, what purpose could there be for feigning a faith in God if all you advocate is in defiance of everything Christ taught?
The church is only one group being exploited to impose a dogmatically held toxic ideology on all of society. When “progressives” claim to be champions of ending racism, they demand that everyone adopt their self-serving premise. Blacks are only true blacks to the extent that they conform to their engineered conventions. As such, Caucasians establish their racial-tolerance bona fides by buying into the notion that blacks are always victims and whites are always privileged – individual circumstances are irrelevant. If a white man embraces or advances their prescribed premise, they are “woke” and allies of the black community despite the fact that they say it is impossible for a white male to overcome their racist nature and position of privilege. Any black who rejects the narrative is an “Uncle Tom,” (a “step-and-fetch-it” to their white masters) or an Oreo (black on the outside, white on the inside). In short, the division is not based on race, but is used to force conformity to an ideology. The same is true when it comes to other demographics based on sex, sexual preferences, socioeconomic status, and various other categories. The common theme is that they seek to corral everyone under their anti-Christian ideology and punish all dissent. It takes a profound lack of discernment for Christians to fall for such an obvious ploy; aligning the false prophets that Christ and the epistle writers warned so strongly to guard against.
The secular progressive’s messages are full of contradictions that are easily exposed by simply adopting Jesus’s strategy of asking questions. For instance:
How is it that they can claim to know what is in the heart of an entire society based on a person’s melanin, but simultaneously insist that one can be a gender at odds with biology simply based on their subjective feelings about themselves? If denying one is a racist proves their racist tendencies, what does it mean to even make a truth claim? If all of us are tainted by our skin colour, how can we ever assert anything to be true since it is the product of our conditioning and beyond our ability to overcome? How can we know any claim is not the biproduct of racism or victimhood? If these assumptions are subjective by nature, how can they be used to make an objective truth claim?
If blacks are to see themselves as victims and women are even lower on the totem pole, why fight for women of colour to be in the workplace? Is there any point at which the success of black women will demonstrate they are no longer victims? If so, doesn’t this mean the entire argument of race-based privilege or victimhood dissolve? If reality doesn’t change a belief even when proven to contradict reality, isn’t this progressive mindset a blind faith based on delusion?
If it is meritorious to subjugate the values inherent in one’s faith, isn’t Hitler a role model for the outcome the progressives uphold? Isn’t it irrelevant whether Hitler actually claimed to be a Catholic since he certainly didn’t allow any of those convictions to guide the way he ran the country? In fact, weren’t his pursuit of socialist values, eugenics, persecution of people of faith, government intrusion into mandating what the church must do and race-based advocacy of social Darwinism very much aligned with the values that the secular left currently advocates?
If you defend abortion rights because they empower women, do you defend sex-based abortions, especially as women are more likely to be aborted in such cases? If yes, does this make you a misogynist because you don’t care about the targeting of female babies? If not, does this mean you are a misogynist because you want to take a woman’s ability to control her body from her? If abortions based on the sex of the baby is wrong, doesn’t this by extension mean that abortion is wrong?
We could do this all day. The inconsistencies and deceptions are legion, and I use that word advisedly. It is expected that anyone who rejects God will either engage in overt lies and deceptions or fall prey to them. What troubles me is how easily this is accomplished and how many professing believers are duped by such obvious malevolence. This is not about finding a compromise but drawing bold lines of distinction between competing ideologies. There is no middle ground here. We are tasked with standing in opposition to dark ideas while many are trying to find a way to compromise with those seeking our submission or eradication. It’s not simply that Christians are being told to sideline their political views, but many are now either losing our jobs, being denied employment, or otherwise are being pushed to the margins because the left demands that their dogmatic worldview be imposed on everyone. I speak from experience. The Christian not only can’t compromise with evil but can never set aside what they believe for the sake of courtesy. Light cannot coexist with darkness.
A note for believers who have bought into the lie that Christians should not engage in politics are falling for the same banana in the tailpipe logic. This too is a ploy as issues like racism, abortion, slavery, child exploitation, rape, and any other social issue is moral in nature and is merely being politicized to keep Christians from lending their voice under the guise of rising above the fray. A Christian who fails to stand against the corruption of our culture or seek a compromise are complicit in the denigration of the culture and taking sides with the God haters.