A before-church reflection

. . . during one of the most raw and ridiculous junctures post-America and the post-West have experienced in their long decline

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Once again, it’s Sunday morning, and, after the day’s first reading roundup, three cups of coffee, and a walk through the neighborhood, I’m ready to write a Precipice post, but have to keep an eye on the clock, because I have to allot time to get cleaned up and get to church.

I’m trying my best to stay true to what it says on the Precipice About page - to offer you readers a forum for exploring the grounds for hope.

But such grounds cannot be discerned by insipid platitudes or solutions that take less than everything going on into account. Just because we’re called on to be innocent as lambs does not absolve us from the other part of that commandment - that we be streetwise as serpents.

For instance, we’d better not be tepid in what we have to say about the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. Rod Dreher commendably isn’t. (Now - and this is indicative of the layers one has to parse in the Gordian knot that is the West today - I have problems with Dreher’s fascination with the Orban regime in Hungary, but I don’t doubt his core faith. When he consults his Christian moral compass on matters like this, he’s generally spot on.)

Director of the opening ceremonies was the gay French theatrical director Thomas Jolly, who told British Vogue:

… there is “room for everyone in Paris. Maybe it’s a little chaotic, it’s true, but that allows everyone to find a place for themselves.” The opening ceremony will be a success, Jolly says, “if everyone feels represented in it.”

Right, except for Christians, whose most sacred moments must be mocked for the sake of queer inclusion . . .

. . . another shocking image from the opening ceremony, us[es] the decapitation of Marie Antoinette to illustrate “the quest for liberty”. She stands in a window of the Conciergerie, a revolutionary-era prison where she was held for a time before being guillotined. . .

. . . the severed head chants, “All will be well” before a heavy metal band, Gojira, begins to play . . .

They played a metal version of “Ça Ira” — “all will be well” — an anthem of the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette is said to have played the melody of the song in better days, before it became the setting for lyrics celebrating the Revolution. How sinister it was to feature the severed head of Marie Antoinette singing this song, from a window of the prison where the Revolutionaries held her before her execution.

This is all satanic. You know that, right? Straight-up satanic.

And have you noticed that you don’t hear the word “gay” much anymore? It seems that it’s getting supplanted by “queer.” I have never gotten a straightforward answer to what the difference is. Of course, “queer” used be a derogatory term, and then seems to have come to mean some special attitude an in-group of homosexuals has toward its sexual orientation - a badge, a vehicle for preening.

And let’s stop it with the business about how the drag queen portion of the opening ceremony was really a celebration of Dionysius and the Greek roots of the Olympics. The halo over the drag queen sitting in the central place at the table kind of gives that game away. And Christians, from Andrew T. Walker to Bishop Robert Barron readily picked up on the odor wafting off the Paris display.

You don’t need me to tell you that a sizable portion of Christians have concluded that, by golly, the answer is to fight, to reciprocate the savagery of the nihilists.

That’s what has made them invest their hopes in a figure like this:

The former president, who will face Kamala Harris in this November’s race for the White House, was speaking at an event organised by the conservative group Turning Point Action in Florida.

He said: ‘Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.’

Trump added: ‘I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.’

And they swallowed it enthusiastically.

They’ve somehow reconciled their belief that he can lead an American spiritual renaissance with his routine utterance of venom like this:

[In[ a clip of Trump speaking with "Fox & Friends" on Thursday morning . . . he said of Harris that "I'd love to be nice but I'm dealing against real garbage."

Do I sound hopelessly Pollyanna-ish if I point out that Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, Jefferson, Adams, Lincoln, Washington, even FDR, would have never let loose with that kind of rhetoric?

Now - ah, more layers of the Gordian knot to slice through - I hold Kamala Harris in pretty low regard. As much as her suddenly giddy minions want to keep any mention of the Willie Brown affair that launched her political career out of the conversation, it’s out there. But more to the point, her full-throated support for universal health care and the Green New Deal, her backing of bail for Black Lives Matter rioters, and her self-congratulatory preening about the death and devastation in Gaza since last October, all of which could be stopped in a heartbeat if Hamas would give up all its Israeli and US hostages and dismantle itself, make clear who she is.

But, to wander across the aisle again, the Trumpist “Right” has its own morality-level problem when it comes to foreign policy. The idea that supporting Ukraine’s effort to pry off Russia’s brutal grip is a waste of time and merely buying yachts for oligarchs has become mainstream in the Republican Party. Between that and the Very Stable Genius’s they-took-our-chips-industry-so-any-protection-of-them-against-mainland-China-will-be-transactional stance toward Taiwan, we can see that an understanding of how the eighty-year-old rules-baed international order has kept us from incinerating ourselves has given way to an “America First” position that has yet to prove its coherence.

Well, it’s getting on toward 9 o’clock. I’d better tie this together.

I’ll enter the sanctuary with my bulletin and communion kit, and hopefully the music will be skewed a bit more toward actually theologically substantive hymns and less toward endless repetition of pedestrian attempts to express adoration. The sermon will be good, as our pastor’s always are. We will hear of congregants’ health problems and pray for them. These are good people, with thick relations among them, some going back many generations. Taking good care of each other is a top priority.

And they evangelize. The congregation supports a number of missions in various places. around the world. They help addicts with recovery houses and jail ministry. They provide Christians in Third World countries with refuge from authoritarian harassment. They help refugees from the above-mentioned Ukraine.

But I have to wonder, is that the extent of what Christianity - the real deal, not the crap the Trumpists on the one hand, or the love-is-love bunch on the other side, spew - can do in 2024? Are we not called upon to win souls, and not just dig people out of the sludge left behind by the relentless culture deluges of our time?

Do I know what that something more looks like? No, I don’t. I’m not that far along on my faith journey.

I hope I’ve at least been honest here, if not exactly helpful.

But it sure is time to put away childish things.