Unlike the avowedly atheistic Soviets, the WWII-era Nazis didn’t bluntly try to suppress Christianity. Rather, they sought to reinvent it for their own purposes, conjuring up something called “Positive Christianity,” which held that Jesus was a Nordic character persecuted by a Jewish establishment.
Those National Socialists and their particular perversion of faith are gone. But the viewing of Christianity as an impediment to power, and the consequent desire to twist it for one’s own ends, lives on. Enter actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner.
Reiner, best known for playing Michael “Meathead” Stivic on hit ’70s show All in the Family, has collaborated with a director named Dan Partland to create a documentary titled God & Country (February 16), which sounds the alarm about so-called “Christian nationalism.” He also was just interviewed by Newsweek on the subject.
Now, never mind that even liberal USA Today, in a Friday article, informed that Christian nationalism’s power and popularity are grossly exaggerated, with only five percent of Americans self-identifying as Christian nationalists. The exaggeration is convenient and is, on certain Machiavellians’ part, by design. A bit as how British mothers would keep their children in line by saying “Be good or Nappy will get you” even long after Napoleon’s death, the appeal “Be good and support us or ‘Christi-nationy’ will get you” is the use of fear to marshal support.
Of course, trying to seize and distort Christianity is nothing new, even in America, but there does appear to be a renewed push in that regard. Just consider that during “the Super Bowl, a very well-funded group ran an ad showing conservatives abasing themselves before leftist victim classes, with the tagline ‘He gets us,’ with the ‘He’ referring to Jesus,” writes commentator Andrea Widburg. “The message was clear: Whatever traditionalists say about Christ’s teachings is wrong. Leftists are morally and doctrinally correct, and it’s time for Christianity to get with the program.”
And because these “Christian Reinventalists” (of which Reiner is one) “are leftists first and religious…well, not at all, no matter what they call themselves, their goal, as with all leftists, is to change what it means to be religious,” Widburg points out. “The moral precepts of the Bible … must be rewritten to accommodate their true theology, which is wokism.”
This brings us to Reiner’s Newsweek interview. “Distilled to its essence, it really does boil down to saying that Trump is a bad man, the Christians who support him are bad people, and these same Christians are not only probable white supremacists, but they don’t understand Jesus’s message,” Widburg also relates. “And what was Jesus’s message?”
After saying in the interview that Christian nationalism “seems completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus,” Reiner the theologian explained:
“Jesus was about peace and love and helping thy neighbor and those less fortunate than ourselves. And I thought that was something that we should all aspire to. So to me this movement is going totally opposite the teachings of Jesus.”
Oh, it’s not that Reiner doesn’t have compassion for us less-evolved, poor benighted traditional believers. In fact, you “have to have sympathy for those people,” he also told Newsweek. “And you have to say, I’m sorry you feel empty, lost, or whatever, and you chose this direction because it seemed like the right thing to do.”
Yes, interestingly, that’s precisely how we may view you, Mr. Reiner!
In reality, Reiner’s anodyne touting of “love” is a popular sentiment today, oft heard from not just politicians but pulpits. Unless I missed it, however, no great anti-love movement is afoot, replete with protesters waving placards reading “Down With Love!” This is an area of the broadest consensus, with everyone from desert mystics to deacons to demagogues espousing the virtue.
But this is much like a financial advisor merely counseling, “You have to make money!” without offering any specificity for doing so. The correct (though lowbrow) response is, “Well, duh!”
Likewise, the real debate here isn’t over love, but this:
What constitutes loving behavior?
Does it mean encouraging sexual license or restraint, bigger government or smaller, centralization or subsidiarity, absolute or only conditional respect for life, racial chauvinism or unity, or religiosity or secularism? Does it mean telling a sexually confused boy that he really, truly can become a girl or that he will only really, truly become a eunuch?
Without providing specifics, anodyne calls for love are at best a dodge, at worst, demagoguery, geared toward either avoiding difficult issues or demonizing difficult opponents.
Speaking of the latter, what motivates this Christian “Reinventalism” — or, to be precise, this effort at destroying the faith — is older than the faith itself: sin.
First there’s power lust. Politically aware leftists well know that traditional Christians (not Reinventalists) don’t vote for them and that the state’s laws can’t be preeminent in the people’s hearts and minds if God’s laws are. But then there’s what someone close to me once called “designer religion.”
True spiritual journeys involve recognizing the existence of Truth, seeking it, and then conforming your life to it no matter what it demands or where it takes you. Christians may call this “Picking up your cross.”
Designer religion involves saying, “This is the lifestyle I want to live [translation: These are the sins I want to commit]; now let me find a ‘faith’ that will accommodate it.” It’s like seeking a golf instructor who won’t change your bad technique but endorse it.
For the sin-addicted know that Christianity not only condemns their sins, but transmits the actual knowledge that their sins are “sins” and not just “lifestyle choices.” They don’t like the message — and thus want to kill the messenger.
In reality, if these Christophobes honestly examined their “love,” they’d learn it was a cover for hate and that in accusing Christians of the latter, they were projecting. This is an old story, too. The Romans called the early Christians “haters of humanity” because those believers wouldn’t participate in their pagan festivals. But who was the last man standing?
Today’s bottom-feeding lion-feeders can “go Roman” on Christianity, and very well may, but it is they who will go the way of the Romans.
