Bound in Love

It’s always important to remember that God wins. So if we stay close to him, we win also. But the battle continues to be fought even inside the church. Judas was not the last betrayer. Arius was not the last heretic. It is precisely within the church that we are meant to fight a zealous and determined battle for truth and goodness.

So while we need to of course fight external enemies of the church, and we need to fight against internal agents of the enemy inside the church, the primary arena of spiritual battle is the struggle within ourselves against darkness in our own minds and hearts. Our most pressing practical concern in waging the spiritual battle is to ask how we might be more deeply converted in thought and action to the truth of Christ and become even more free from the false Gospels that surround us.

A different Gospel

The most obvious expression of the disease of progressive religion inside the church is found in those who profess to be Christian but have abandoned key doctrines of the faith and have embraced some form of the neo-Gnostic gospel of personal self creation. When we encounter these people in the church we need to understand that they are no longer Christian in any meaningful sense even as they continue to use Christian language and maintain membership and even positions of responsibility within the church. Most of us are not in a position to seriously address this problem, and God is probably not calling us to this fight. We need to recognize that we can easily be distracted by it from the more pressing battles that are closer to our own homes. But we need to be able to see it for what it is.

The temptation to pride

The classic picture of the prideful person is the arrogant type who strives the earth with his nose in the air, paying little attention to the needs of others and thinking himself better than the rest of the world. Most modern people are not prideful in that sense. Most people in the modern age struggle with low self-esteem, and we are easily wounded by negative opinions from others, and we can become obsessed with the desire not to offend anyone. This sounds not like pride but humility. But at the same time, we are fallen due to defiance towards things divine. It is pride that tells us that we should follow the world’s advice that we can choose our own existence, choose our own morality, decide for ourselves the meaning of life and do not need recourse to a creator. This is an odd combination and it points to a key challenge for Christians in our time: how to stir up courage, confidence, and ideals on the one hand, and on the other how to regain a humble and more honest stance toward God.

Soft pedaling the fall

Serious Christians do not usually explicitly deny the doctrine of original sin, but under the pervading pressure of progressive dogma, the reality of being fallen and the consequences that necessarily stem from that reality often cease to operate as living truths for us. We can unconsciously assume the progressive dogma that people are fundamentally good. The church teaches that people are fundamentally good and that they are made in the image and likeness of God, but it insists that we wounded that goodness through the fall.

Acknowledging the reality of the fall, and letting that reality be at the forefront of our minds as we go through our day, is the path of humility. We’re not saying that we are worthless piles of trash, but we are acknowledging the deep and lasting wound that we all carry. Paradoxically, acknowledgment of the wound ennobles the effort to walk and grow in spite of it, to overcome it by making our peace with it and finally turning it over to our Creator.

Forgetfulness of the Cosmic Order

Christians have been taught that God created an ordered, harmonious universe, and we know it is filled with meaning. Liturgy aligns us with that order of love and truth. Our relations with one another are intended to replicate and participate in the inner life of the Trinity. We understand that the tragedy in which we have all been implicated has much to do with our race’s unwillingness to embrace God’s divine order. We know that the only way to make the world a better place is to come back to a proper relation with God and creation.

Under a constant barrage of neo-Gnostic denial of God as author of creation, we can allow our vision of the cosmic order to get blurred. We can subtly accept the notion that we will find happiness by constructing our own world of meaning. We won’t be able to fight off Progressive appeals to self-creation and self-definition. Think about the challenge of speaking the truth in the face of transgenderism, which says the sex of the person and that person’s gender do not have to be the same because they can define themselves however they want.

Christians who experience their faith as a burdensome set of arbitrary rules that restrict human freedom are easily pulled from orthodoxy toward neo-Gnosticism. In fact, God gives us rules to protect us rather than to hinder us, but rules are presented by Progressive religion believers as part of the old oppressive structure that must be destroyed so that a new world order can take shape. The Church’s rules on chastity are given by the God of life so that we can use our sexuality according to his intention, but the sexual revolutionaries presented them as harsh restrictions on our freedom to enjoy pleasure.

The Myopia of Secularity

Since we are earth-bound and only live 70 or 80 years on average, we can lose sight of the breadth of the Church. Our time on Earth is a time of preparation for our real life. It can only be fully understood in that context. Since modern Progressives do not account for an afterlife, this life is all that there is. Heaven is reached during our lifetimes, according to them.

It is easy for Christians to get caught up in short-sightedness in a culture that is present-focused. Under an assault of sensual and informational distraction, we can be caught by the illusion that puts physical health ahead of spiritual health. We can be afflicted by the blindness that views human suffering and tragedy in this world as final and irreparable. It can lead us to retranslating the Gospel into a temporal recipe book for worldly problems of injustice and poverty.

If we succumb to this pressure, we can lose our confidence in the afterlife that lessens our fear of death. Christians know that Heaven or Hell awaits every person at their death, but Progressive religion puts the focus on this life because it denies the reality of eternity. The calm and courageous witness of Christians facing death for their faith was one the most powerful tools of conversion in the Roman empire. Many martyrs were followed by their jailer who converted on the spot seeing the peace with which the Christian faced torture and execution. Progressives dismiss these stories as ancient myths.

The Utopian Drift

What makes Progressivism utopian is not the Big Rock Candy Mountain but their belief that there is no moral wound in each human heart that tends toward evil, and therefore the possibilities for human betterment have no intrinsic limit. There is nothing stopping us from reaching perfection. Specialized knowledge will fix things:

• psychology fixes the interior world
• sociology will give us peaceful human harmony
• political science will end war
• economics will eradicate poverty
• technology will make life easy
• medicine will make life painless and long

Politics is the way to these utopian ends, so politics is all-important for neo-Gnostic Progressives. It is the main arena of religious warfare, the key battleground for gaining control of the levers of power that will allow the implementation of proper knowledge for the saving of the planet.

Christians know that politics fixes things to a limited degree because the world is fallen and cannot save itself. Progressives think this is childishness. Under the influence of the utopian drift, we can come to expect things to go basically well for us, and we can grow shocked and surprised when they do not. We can unconsciously come to believe that the moral problems of humanity are solvable by human effort.

The lure of the silver bullet

The mechanistic and simplistic approach to human life and human problems of Progressivism can seep into the consciousness of Christians, who can then become vulnerable to constructing spiritual techniques of various kinds that will guarantee the desired Christian outcomes. We can slip into the false search for just the right program that will solve the problems of the Church or the world.

Seeing the world with dualistic eyes

The progressive religion sees two radically distinct kinds of humans: the good people, or those who have embraced the correct progressive dogma, and the evil people, or those who are standing athwart the progress of humanity. Lately that second group has been called deplorables.

Christians who live in a progressive religious environment can become infected with the same dark dualistic error. Whereas Christ tells us to take the evil people and convert them, the progressive faith says they should be discarded because they are unfixable. Within the church we can come to think that if we could just eradicate those bad people from the church, we would finally become the pure and holy body we wish to be. Think of the contrast between the Pharisee who prays thanking God that he’s not like the other guy and the tax collector who prays with humility. When Jesus tells that parable, he is clearly telling us that we should be like the tax collector rather than like the Pharisee. The progressive religion is filled with Pharisees.