Apologizing to the Gospel

Culture

Apologizing to the Gospel

Liberals require that Christians not only apologize for their individual sins but also the message of Christianity.

Pope Francis wears a traditional headdress that was gifted to him by indigenous leaders following his apology during his visit on July 25, 2022 in Maskwacis, Canada. (Cole Burston/Getty Images)

Many Canadians felt that Pope Francis’s recent apology to the Catholic Church for their treatment of certain indigenous people was inadequate. Murray Sinclair, the lawyer who chaired Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared: “It was more than the work of a few bad actors — this was a concerted institutional effort to remove children from their families and cultures, all in the name of Christian supremacy,” reported the Washington Post.

This opinion seems to have been the default position of the whole commission. The American Conservative‘s Declan Leary observed in an article at The Lamp earlier this year that “the commission seems to oppose evangelism as a matter of principle.”

Would this view be limited to the government bureaucrats in our northern neighbour? This is an age of reviewing everything we have learned about Western civilisational heritage. The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ May 2022 “Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report,” which Helen Andrews cites in her recent TAC article on Indian boarding schools, speaks disparagingly of missionary activities among American Indians, including encouraging them to abandon their tribal religious beliefs in favor of Christianity. The Australian government has issued similar reports criticizing missions down under as being “designed to erase peoples’ cultural identity.”

Similar charges can be levelled at Christian missionaries in all parts of the world where they have done their work. “To send missionaries to Africa and Asia to convert the native people to Christianity is religious colonialism,” say even many Christians. Academics and journalists for years have discussed the resurgence of paganism among Europeans and people of European ancestry, often framed as a repudiation of the imperialist imposition of Christianity upon pagan peoples.

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Every anti-Christian, pro-pagan example offered employs the same general talking points: narrow-minded Christian missionaries since the Dark Ages have upended traditional beliefs and practices, coercing indigenous peoples to abandon their pluralist worldview in favor of the coercive monolith that is institutionalized, doctrinally intolerant and constrained Christianity. The Pluralism Project at Harvard University explains that although pagan beliefs may differ, many hold the pluralistic belief that there are multiple valid religious paths. The Pluralism Project at Harvard University continues, “Today many are drawn to Paganism because it affirms female, LGBT and queer persons

These comments speak volumes. These comments are telling. Liberals will be more open to embracing the lifestyles and beliefs of those who are more exotic and different from “Eurocentric” patriarchal norms. These are the only things that count.

Of course, celebration and tolerance are not always equally distributed within the awakened paradigm of activism. It is constantly in search for new hierarchies that can be dismantled. It can’t, frankly. It can’t be. As I have argued, every belief system that claims truth or “the good life”, is going to aim to attack and undermine opposing ideologies. Liberal paeans to disinterested neutrality, tolerance, diversity and inclusion are disingenuous in the face of mounting examples of how belligerently they seek to enervate and coerce their enemies.

This has been the case since ancient liberalism. Locke argues in A Letter Concerning Toleration that the sovereign is duty-bound to forbid and ban any doctrines that are adverse to good morals. Congress refused Utah statehood for decades after the territory had met the population requirement because of the Church of Latter Day Saints’ promotion of polygamy. The Warren Court in Sherbert v. Verner (1963) ruled that states can refuse to accommodate religiously motivated conduct if they have a “compelling interest” to do so.

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The tension, however, becomes more acute when the institutions representing our liberal regime expand what counts as “compelling interest” to such a degree that it aims to limit not only obscure religious practices like chicken-sacrificing Santeria, but the very institutions that served as an integral ballast to the entire Western political and cultural project.

As the beliefs and practices of the ersatz religion of woke, secular progressivism become more dominant in the West, the more they will be tempted to wage open war on those of traditionalist Christianity. You see early signs of this in the State Department’s truculent pro-LGBTQ+ tactics or the obsessive efforts of international organizations to push population control in Africa and India.

In the case of Christianity, and by extension Christian missionary work, our elites insist that its members must adhere to the teachings and practices of the aggressive (and self-assured!) secular regime. You can have your church, but unless it tows the line on the latest racial and sexual dogmas, it will be labeled bigoted and backwards, its adherents scorned, censured, and hopefully canceled by our elite institutions. You can have your missionary work, as long as it is focused solely on providing non-parochial medical, social, or educational services, and carefully avoids evangelization or any attempt to impose your peculiar beliefs on others. It’s called “Christian supremacy”, and it should be pushed to the outskirts with every force that the state has.

The problem, from a historic Christian point of view, is that the Gospel is supremacist. The Gospel, it and only it can communicate the whole truth about God, man, and God. Contrary belief systems are not acceptable, particularly those that threaten human dignity and freedom. This is why missionaries from Christianity have been so strongly opposed to abortion and human sacrifice. Of course, for those Christians who subscribe to natural-law theory, there is much good outside of the faith and more than enough common ground upon which to build a polis with those who do not believe in Christ or His teachings. (Indeed, Christianity has been far more tolerant of its detractors or subversives than its competitors).

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Perhaps we should not be surprised to see that our post-Christian culture exhibits an intolerant attitude similar to biblical Christianity, even if it is twisted. It’s not just the evils perpetrated by individual Christians that must be apologized for, but the very message of Christianity itself.

Such demands for apology are a sign of what’s to come, an ever-higher stakes struggle between two different visions about man’s destiny and nature. The first reminds him of his noble heritage, inborn dignity and destiny. One is an obnoxious, bizarre mimicry.

For anyone familiar with the history of the Americas prior to European settlement, or the character of northern European paganism prior to successful Christian missions, we already know enough to reject the blinkered portrayal of pluralist tribal societies living in harmony with each other and nature. Just ask all the peoples sacrificed to the gods of the Aztecs, Cahokia Mound Builders, or Vikings. Those were not years (or centuries) we should want to revisit. We should not be ashamed of trying to redeem and improve the world, sometimes with great sacrifices on behalf of many generations of selfless missionaries.

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