American Christianity

2,662 words

The strange sight of the Pope, on the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, welcoming eight North African children sporting T-shirts boasting, “welcome, protect, promote, and integrate” rather summed up the dismal state of the leadership of the faith that some say was once the embodiment of Europe. To try and understand the seemingly endless treason of the post-Renaissance Church requires an attempt to trace back how this ever-quickening mania for a new people and for a new world, united by one religion, began.

From an American point of view, our friend Charles Krafft could write on his Facebook page that “the problem started when they dropped anchor at Plymouth Rock,” and that:

The Southern people warned others about the radical utopians of New England, and even went to war to get away from them, but to no avail. Now all Americans, not just Southerners, are subject to the whims of “those people” and their never ending mission to recreate, not only America, but the entire world in their bizarre sanctimonious image.

Canadian writer Salem Goldworth Bland had the Pilgrim Fathers leaving the Old World just as the Church was transitioning from its Imperial aristocratic status to the newly-forming bourgeois Teutonic church, with its emphasis on freedom and the rights of individuals. “Those people” had rejected the hierarchy of church and state and brought to the New World a desire for “just and equal laws,” which, having written them into their Mayflower Compact, set the template for the future. The colonial Southerners, who were descended from the Cavaliers, leaned more towards the old, aristocratic world.

The old aristocratic Church developed by the Latins lasted from the eighth until the sixteenth centuries, and, having survived enemies from within and without for eight hundred years, was transformed when the developing middle (or trading and manufacturing) class of Germany, Holland, Switzerland, England, and France burst forth in the form of the Teutonic church. This church, with its emphasis on the bourgeois, heralded the capitalist phase in Western development, and lasted until the First World War, when the labor phase began. America never really knew the old aristocratic Church, but went straight into the spinoffs of the Reformation; such is America’s fate.

The developing middle class looked on with envy at the amount of wealth tied up in ecclesiastical buildings and estates; they resented the control which the bishops of the old Imperial Church had over them; and they resented, too, the Church’s unyielding stand on charging interest. These ambitious burghers reshaped Christianity to suit their needs. Bland described them as “superficially intelligent, alert, watchful, ambitious, pushful, courageous, energetic, industrious, self-reliant, independent, freedom loving, intensely individualistic.”[1] The new religion exalted the rich man, but was detrimental to the social order. It also lacked humility and pity – but these two virtues were not required in the business struggle, and devoid of its feminine helpmate, Protestantism “has been militant, dogmatic, self-reliant, in a word masculine.”[2]

America was born during the Teutonic phase of Christianity, just when “the exaltation of the individual began. It was born of individualism and glorifies individualism. It affirms the right and duty of individual judgment, the supremacy of the individual conscience, the privilege of individual access to God,”[3] which has led both to many a strange cult and made America famous for its rugged individualism. Teutonic Christianity was incompatible with the Latin Christianity and its Episcopalian hierarchy, but the newly-forming American Christianity had not yet fully arrived when Bland was writing in the 1920s. He regarded this new form of Christianity as one that did not look for the end of the age, but believed in this life and its glorious possibilities. This new Christianity believed that it “possesses the power to leaven all the relations and institutions of civilization. It believes that the fulfillment of our Lord’s Prayer, that God’s kingdom may come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven, rests with the church.”[4] The Christianity chosen to fulfill this mission was socialism, which Dr. Walter Rauschenbusch introduced into the churches when in 1893 he wrote, “the only power that can make socialism succeed, if it is established, is religion.”[5] According to Methodist Bishop Garfield Oxnam, Baptist minister Dr. Rauschenbusch saw Jesus Christ not as one who came to save sinners, but as someone who had a “social passion for society.”[6] However, he knew that the congregation would not accept socialism, so he addressed it as the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Socialism had slithered into the churches and displaced the original faith. No longer was it man who fell, but God, as his coming down to us as a man is now regarded. Man’s upward journey to his true self was now beginning as he realized that he should ignore the Bible and trust the voice of God within himself. The new theology regarded “all mankind as being of one substance with the father so of course there is no far-off Judgment Day, no great white throne, and no Judge external to ourselves.”[7]

Another influential New Theologian was the Reverend A. J. Campbell, who also regarded Christianity as the theology of the movement to bring in the ideal social order around the world.[8] The boundary markers, once removed, allowed the restless currents of the world to sweep through America.

Philip Mauro, who wrote the brief for William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes Monkey Trial, was yet another who was of the opinion that socialism was the chosen vehicle to solve our great modern problem: the maldistribution of wealth. The lawyer was not in favor of socialism himself and, quoting from the writings of Gaylord Wilshire, declared that the trusts being formed in the late nineteenth century would eventually mate into one huge trust: a trust of trusts. Wilshire, a lifelong socialist, wrote in his journals that “the perfect relation of perfected man to a perfected universe is the birth of Superman. The striving for this is Religion. It is the true worship of God.” This nineteenth-century American socialist, in setting the seeds for today’s open border policy, also wrote that “[m]an must be united to humanity in an organization at once perfectly democratic and perfectly autocratic. With this advent all humanity will be at one with God, and every man will be a god.”[9]

The idea that socialism is a religion has some foundation in fact. In 1880, L. B. Woolfolk said that “[n]o great cause has ever triumphed in Modern Times without the advocacy of the pulpit.”[10] While H. G. Wells was writing in 1908 that “the ideas of democracy, of equality, and above all promiscuous fraternity have certainly never really entered the English mind,”[11] the clergy was attending the Pan-Anglican Conference in London, which advocated “the social mission and social principles of Christianity should be given a more prominent place in the study and teaching of the church.”[12] Meanwhile, in New York, over two hundred ministers signed a declaration binding them to the principles of socialism. The energy had gone out of theology and into politics, which gave a religious zeal to the reorganization of society. The promised reign of justice and brotherhood through an economic system leading to a huge, worldwide, all-embracing system was in full bloom. By 1953, the Ford Foundation’s President, H. Rowan Gaither, could claim that “the Ford Foundation’s personnel are continuing to operate under directives from the White House to so alter life in America as to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet Union,” and today it’s not uncommon to spot antifa types sporting hammer-and-sickle tattoos.

This American Christianity, with its disdain for priests, was “deeply and intensely democratic.”[13] The laity was to have a larger and more practical role, while the national consciousness of the country was to reject rule by outside influences. America was to stand supreme. The internal structure of Christianity shied away from division and isolation, and sought a greater unity with a strong leadership. Bland foresaw a growing role in the new church for organized labor, which only needed to be spiritualized so as to become the same as the coming true and indigenous Church of America. Bland quoted an unnamed Frenchman who summed up this nascent American Christianity as being both a positive and a social religion. The Americans, the French observer said, “make fraternity the actual form of which is social solidarity, the essence of Christianity.”[14] Additionally, the religion was moral, and it was observed that good people professing the same faith are governed by the same rules of conduct. When this developing American Christianity blossoms, in his view, it will have a simple, brief, and intelligible creed. Membership will only require a belief in Jesus Christ, and the emphasis will be on brotherhood.

As enthusiastic as Bland was for the American Church, he suspected that it would be superseded by Great Christianity, which would be a blend of the aristocratic Church, the Teutonic, the American, and the Russian, but that the leadership would be African. He regarded the peoples of the West, especially the Anglo-Saxon and the Teutonic, as weak, and that “the white races, in comparison [to the Negro], are old, vigilant, suspicious, anxious, care-worn.” His beloved African “race is the one race which has by nature the spirit of Him who came not to be ministered unto but to minister.”[15]

My copy of Bland’s The New Christianity, purchased in a used bookstore, had been discarded from the Vancouver School of Theology, so it is no surprise that the seminarians over the last hundred years or so have had a high regard for the Dark Continent, which the author thought stood preeminent in suffering and in service. “All other races love to rule,”[16] he wrote, which the instructors inculcated into the seminarians, and he added:

. . . the greedy, ambitious spirit of the Western nations were never contented, their delight in to-day always poisoned by the fear of the fascination of to-morrow, is far from the spirit of Jesus. It may be that the white man [he crowed] will yet have to sit at the feet of the black, and that, when Christ is glorified, it will be that race that has, beyond all other races, trodden Christ’s path of suffering and service which, beyond all others, will be glorified in Him.[17]

As far-fetched as this seemed in 1920, many readers will be familiar with the photos of the current Pope washing and kissing the feet of black African refugees in the manner of the Plebeians kissing the golden slippers of Julius Caesar. Meanwhile, inside the Vatican, Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson is a nominee for the next Pope. For eight years, he was the President of Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, until 2017, when he was named President of something called the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development. This spiritual leader has called for taxes on financial transactions, a central world bank, and a global public authority.

Philip Mauro, in his Climax of the Ages (1910), could write of his suspicions that there was a single movement throughout the whole world; that “there suddenly occurred the simultaneous uprising of mysterious forces . . . pressing eagerly and enthusiastically in a common direction.”[18] Half a century later, confirmation came in the form of Georgetown University Professor and insider Carroll Quigley, who emphatically stated in his opus magum, Tragedy and Hope, that “the powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.”[19]

The origin of this impulse came from (or had its first success in) the East India Company, which, under the genius of Clive of India, rose to political power and began its quiet and gradual appropriation of land until the Sepoy Revolt of 1857. An important principle learned from India was that it is “more profitable to own lands and till them with pauper labor, than to buy the products reared by the free natives of the soil.”[20] The British East India Company also prospered as a result of the expanding British Empire taking possession of the trading posts of its rivals. Woolfolk related how the Jews, who were more economical than the British aristocracy, gradually bought up the stock of the world’s most successful company and became the money kings of the world.[21] Its founders may have been displaced, but the driving force remained, and the money kings rode the wave into power.

Reading the tea leaves usually leads to supercilious assumptions, but it is reasonably safe to say that today’s Church of the mixed multitude has deployed socialism as its weapon of choice. Christ’s discarded doctrines were replaced by the principles of humanism to such an extent that in 1908, the Harvard Theological Review could publish Dr. George Gordon’s The Collapse of the New England Theology. The old faith had been turned on its head, and the doctrine of the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ became “the worst blasphemy ever offered to the Most High.”[22] Dr. Gordon would also state that “[h]umanism is our greatest word, because it covers the greatest fact we know, the phenomenal world of man.”[23] Alexander Del Mar may have hit the nail on the head when in 1899 he wrote that “man will not worship a god who is either above or below the poise of his own comprehension,”[24] for that seems to be the direction in which we are heading.

Catholicism, too, is changing as the effects of the American Reformation cross back across the Atlantic to affect religious thinking there. The Pope recently ignored Thomas Aquinas, in whose Summa Theologica (Pt. II, Q. 12, A. 1, Obj. 2:) he wrote “that if anyone were to . . . worship at the tomb of Mahomet, he would be deemed an apostate,” but Pope Francis cheerfully did so at the mausoleum of Muhammad V in Morocco. This same Pope is holding The Amazonian Synod to establish the most radical version of Liberation Theology: the so-called indigenous and ecological theology. According to The Remnant Newspaper, a preparatory document for the synod is to reinterpret the whole Church from an “Amazonian” perspective. Apparently, this new perspective is intended to usher in a greener Church more sensitive to environmental needs environment and Mother Gaia while respecting the sensitivities of “minorities,” racial and otherwise.

The powers-that-be would appear to be planning for those over whom they rule the simple rustic lifestyle inspired by St. Francis of Assisi, but as Guillaume Faye wrote, “global economic growth is soon going to shrink because of physical barriers”[25] anyway, and that our present “concept of underdevelopment is unfair and stupid.”[26] Faye’s version of the future – which would see a small, technological elite being supported by a larger, rustic, pastoral population – may be creeping in through channels he never quite envisioned. But the fly in the ointment for the coming super-brotherhood of man is that white people are viewed as an obstacle to the coming New Order, with its new, all-embracing religion. And, unfortunately, the hatred emanating towards whites is not limited to the higher echelons of the Church, as Professor Ricardo Duchesne recently found out at the University of New Brunswick.

Notes

[1] Salem Goldworth Bland, The New Christianity (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1920), p. 86.

[2] Bland, p. 140.

[3] Bland, p. 115.

[4] Bland, p. 120.

[5] Edgar C. Bundy, Collectivism in the Churches (Wheaton, Ill.: The Church League of America, 1958), p. 101.

[6] Bundy, p. 97.

[7] Rev. R. A. Campbell, The New Theology (London: Chapman & Hall, 1907), p. 213.

[8] Philip Mauro, The Number of Man (London: Morgan & Scott, 1910), p. 80.

[9] Mauro, p. 221.

[10] L. B. Woolfolk, The Great Red Dragon (Cincinnati: George E. Stevens, 1890 reprint), p. 249.

[11] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 10.