Did the Anti-Ice Invasion of Cities Church Confirm the Dying or the Staying Power of Christendom?
Aaron Renn’s designation of our time as “negative world” for Christian believers seemed to hammer yet another nail into Christendom’s coffin. Identification as Christian is more likely to jeopardize rather than to advance one’s social and material prospects in America today. Surely the anti-ICE invasion of Cities Church, a Southern Baptist congregation plunked down in the snowy tundra of St. Paul, only adds to the evidence of Christianity’s rapidly approaching demise. Or does it?
With his 2019 book Dominion, British historian Tom Holland, deftly but with devastating effect, pitched a monkey-wrench into the works of breezy, commonplace, cock-sure pronouncements of Christianity’s death pangs. The sages and seers of culture have yet to fully reckon with Holland’s findings. The upshot of Dominion’s sweeping counterintuitive claim is this—we in the west, believers and unbelievers alike, remain far more Christian than we realize—and there’s probably not much anyone can do about it in the near term.
The desecration of Cities Church’s worship service last Sunday provides an unusually propitious test case for Holland’s thesis. Consider this harangue hurled at worshipers by a white anti-ICE protester.
“. . . all these comfortable white people . . . you listen to a man wearing a suit. Did Jesus wear a suit? Did Jesus profit off the word? No! Jesus would die with any of [those Somali and Latino neighbors] . . . You are a fake Christians. . . . You’re sinners. You’re pretending to be Christians, but we know you live an easy life. . . . [The pastor] wears a suit and tie and hangs out with Christy Noem. How is that a Christian?”
A nationwide avalanched of outrage at the protestors poured forth from Christian leaders. But Louisiana pastor Rodney Kennedy applauded them and insisted that “MAGA churches are not being persecuted for righteousness but for not loving their neighbors.” The protesters, “are like Jesus cleansing the Temple.”
Far from suggesting Christianity’s weakness, the protest notched another installment in the long history of Christian vitality in the west. People fight about what matters most to them. For more than a millennium-and-a-half, conflicts between evokers of the name of Jesus have repeatedly drawn and redrawn the map of western civilization, sometimes bringing empires and nations great and small to their knees. Do we need reminders? The Thirty Years War, the Hundred Years War, the American Civil War—combatants on all sides waved the Bible in the faces of their opponents; all invoked the name of Jesus for their cause. Where Christendom still draws breath, rival warrants for moral outrage cannot compete with Christianity. Nor did such rival warrants surface at Cities Church last Sunday.
The hegemonic moral triumph of Christianity in the west displays itself in both the familial character of its great convulsive conflicts and in its subconscious power, justifying Holland’s insistence upon Christianity’s reign, “whether we realize it or not.” Upstart proselytizing unbelief is on the wane—Christopher Hitchens is gone, Richard Dawkins, stubborn atheism notwithstanding, laments the loss of Christian civilization’s gifts to him, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson up and converted. Of the so-called four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse, only Sam Harris still manages to defiantly wave the anti-Christian atheist flag with much fervor, but even he can’t resist talking to Christians.
Only Christianity’s wayward children have posed seemingly existential threats to Christendom. Islam, claiming Abraham as father and Jesus as a great prophet, conquered a great swath of what had been Christendom, evoking the Crusades. Only the fierce resistance of Charles Martel managed to stop Islam’s march into western Europe, confining Muslim conquest to the Iberian peninsula. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, the two greatest atheists of the nineteenth century, envied Jesus Christ. Nietzsche thought he understood just the sort of civilization that had to emerge where God was dead, murdered by a modern world where no turn-the-cheek Christianity could possibly withstand the attraction of the Supermen to come. Marx loathed Christ and Christianity like the Devil himself. But like the Nazarene’s nemesis in the wilderness, Marx leveraged the Christian language of love, mercy, and justice to temp Christ’s followers. The great civilizational conflicts that ensue in the west play out on Christian battlefields, not in enlightenment-besotted classrooms. Satan draws from the Bible, not from pagan philosophers and not from common sense, to attack Jesus.
The more insightful and effective opponents of Christianity tend to grasp better what a political, cultural, and spiritual hegemon they are up against. They reach for and target what they perceive as Christianity’s most potent deliverables to the west—the family, monogamy, justice, mercy, and love—and attempt to either besmirch them or claim them as their own. Better evidence of Christianity’s weakness would be anti-ICE protesters’ nonchalance over a couple hundred Southern Baptists worshiping on a cold Lord’s Day in the Upper Midwest—not a frantic, ranting mob spewing the name of Jesus at the Jesus-worshipers before them. Christianity’s strength tends to reduce her enemies to moral parasites.
The warrants Aaron Renn adduces to justify his designation of our cultural moment as an unprecedented “negative world” for Christians remain formidable and convincing. Widespread Christian self-censorship alone confirms the shift from positive to negative world. But do not mistake North America, where D.L. Moody and Billy Graham held forth, for North Africa, where Augustine of Hippo and Tertullian of Carthage once preached. The Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah had tongues cut out of Christian mouths in 11th century Egypt. Ethiopia saw its share of such anti-Christian tongue-ectomies as well. But last Sunday, neither the screamers nor the screamed-at wanted praise for Jesus removed from their own lips.
Socialist Zohran Mamdani placed his hand on the Koran, not the Christian Bible, at his swearing in as New York City’s new mayor. Democrats attend church and identify as Christians far less than do Republicans and Independents. Failure of a US president to end a State of the Union address with the words “may God bless the United States of America,” would fortify negative world considerably. But for now, even Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi priest-shop for liberal vicars willing to commune them despite their pro-abortion politics.
Does reversion by progressives to the name of Jesus Christ when morality and justice animate their ire against America portend the future failing or flourishing of the gospel of Jesus Christ between these two great oceans? Only time will tell. But so long as the most vociferous haters of America and of most of its Christians cannot stop their mouths from pronouncing the name of Jesus Christ with approbation, the crafting of eulogies and calendaring of a funeral for Christendom might have to wait for a bit.
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