The 'Church' Without Christ 

Part 2 of 2

   Radical Americans have the same spiritual anxieties, made all the more desperate by their lack of actual religion. They seek constant assurance that they hold the right attitudes and take the right positions. 

   They are, in essence, heirs of the Social Gospel movement, with all the old religion stripped out: the Church of Christ without Christ.

   I think about "white guilt" as the idea of original sin with God removed, cancel culture as Christian shunning with the church removed, and radical environmentalism as the Apocalypse with the Second Coming erased. 

   Think about the unending riots in Portland, the mad politics of autonomous zones in Seattle, the bullying of restaurant goers, the confrontations with passersby, and the rest. 

   The key is discerning the unfocused religiosity in it all. Antifa and Black Lives Matter are filled with spiritually anxious people, desperate to make their lives meaningful. Agitators traveling from protest to protest. The mad escalation is religious rebellion against the sinful world, following out its inescapable logic. 

   We are watching a vague and dangerous hunger for the world to be changed, with anarchist utopia imagined to lie just a little push ahead - needing just a little apocalyptic revolution and social reversal. Needing just a little blood. 

Professor, Dakota State Univ.