Christian revival is no surprise in an age of public shaming
“At its best, Christianity is not a moralistic religion — in other words, it does not place the expectation of perfect behaviour at its core. It is repentance and reconciliation, not respectability, that are central to the internal logic of the faith. The Christian moral system is also coherent and predictable.” - Unherd
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I hadn’t looked at at this way, but the author’s argument, in different words, is that Christianity is gracious (as in, characterized by grace) and modern Western culture (left and right; there is no difference anymore on that axis) is not.
Some more…
Modern secular morality, by contrast, is extremely censorious and has a strongly arbitrary element, as we have seen in the last decade or so of “cancel culture”. People have been subjected to storms of anonymous criticism, resulting in lost jobs and lost livelihoods, with no clear limiting principle and no real interest in proportionality. To make matters worse, this is all highly impersonal and offers no clear pathway for restoration and forgiveness. Were those who loudly condemned Professor Tim Hunt, or Danny Baker, or the scientist Matt Taylor, interested in those men having a way back to the good graces of official opinion? It seems unlikely.
So much of this activism has a hard political edge, too. The grimly fanatical climate activism that we have seen in the last few years makes revolutionary demands, and is unconcerned with the compromises and concessions to humane individualism that characterise normal human political life.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I've been suspended and kicked out of social media groups a few times over the past few months for anodyne comments questioning the category of "non-binary" (an expat group), and pointing out that attacking authors as "bigots" for merely holding conservative views is the technical definition of bigotry (a fantasy/sci-fi group).
Keep in mind I attacked no one and my comments even received a decent amount of support (probably part of the problem).
My absolute favorite, though, was several years ago. A guy who ran a rather high profile, international education blog came out with a post attacking an international Christian school for refusing to hire LGBTQ+. A big story at the time. I and a few others in the comments defended the school and he locked the comment section, claiming that he had evidence that I was a "sock puppet" account of the same person as the others, trying to hijack his comment section. I emailed him and asked him why he was lying about me, but of course received no reply.
Anyway, these sorts of things have never happened in a Christian social media group (including here!), even when things have gotten quite sharp or heated.
No question in my mind who the truly "tolerant" ones are.
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