Showing posts with label Protestant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Protestant. Show all posts

Monday, December 22, 2025

If you are an Apostolic Christian, and aren't worried yet, you ought to be. Or maybe not. Or maybe.


The Defense Department hosted a Christmas service at the Pentagon.

Now, if you are an Apostolic Christian, as the overwhelming majority of Christians around the world are, or if you are a member of a Protestant denomination that is closely based on the Catholic Church, or which even thinks that they are part of it, this service will come across very strangely.  But, as I've noted before, this is a Protestant country and a Protestant county in which the strains of Puritanism are deep.

The services of the Apostolic Faiths, i.e., the Catholics and the Orthodox, go back to the very origins of Christianity.  The Didache was written within a couple of decades of the Crucifiction and it shows Christians doing what Apostolic Christians do right now, which isn't a surprise to Apostolic Christians but which can come as a rude shock to Protestants.  The writings of the Church Fathers do the same.  If you read these text and remain a Protestant, while cutting a little slack for High Church Anglicans and conservative Lutherans, it's just a wilful decision to ignore the first 1,500 years of Christian practice.

But most people don't read those things and so they're going with what they learned as kids, or what they've sort of picked up, no matter how in error or ignorant it may be.  John Calvin, who influenced the Puritans, was flat out demonstrably wrong (and frankly not a nice guy) but most people don't know that if they're in one of the churches influenced by him, and for that matter they don't even know who John Calvin was.

The Puritans, because they were religious dissenters from the Church of England, which had militantly broken off from the Catholic Church in order that King Henry VIII could pursue a string of hopefully fertile bedmates, was not only pretty ignorant, but obstinately so in many ways, as it had a history of fighting with the Established Church.  The Church of Scotland was somewhat as well, particularly in its American form.  All of these churches have declined enormously in Europe while Catholicism has increased, reclaiming lost ground, but in the US their descendants are pretty numerous and strong.

Most Protestants aren't "Evangelical Protestants", but Evangelical Protestantism is really easy for people who want to be Christians without a whole bunch of Christian theology, want to escape the personally difficult aspects of Christian theology, or who just know that there's truth in Christianity and don't know where to go.  The do it yourselfism in them is pretty strong, and some, but not all, of them are pretty good at pointing out the sins of others while simply ignoring their own favorite  ones.  There's a host of ministers in this camp that are personally wealthy or who are married and divorced, and who have even engaged in affairs.  Flat out ignoring the Christian injunction against divorce and remarriage is pretty much the rule in most Protestant communities and it obviously is in some Evangelical ones.  Paula White is on her third husband, for example.  Joyce Meyer on her second.  Missouri pastor Rich Tidwell is a polygamist.

The point isn't to debate on all these topics, setting aside polygamy, Protestant denominations do not have, I think, the process of annulment, which can be controversial in the Catholic Church, and their ministers do not take vows of poverty, but rather the pick and chose nature of things is a problem, and it'll turn on Catholics and is already starting to.

The New Apostolic Reformation is an aggressive backer of Donald Trump and its openly a backer of Americanism.  Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, is clearly aligned with the movement, and it's pretty clear that Secretary of Defense Hegseth falls in this camp.  Hegesth is practically the poster boy for ignorance in this category as he's festooned himself with tattoos that recall the Crusades while not realizing at all that Crusaders would have regarded him as a heretic.  But there he is, all emblazoned with sayings and symbols that properly belong to the Apostolic faiths, while living in what they'd all regard as an irregular marriage.

The same week that the Pentagon service occured Chip Roy took a direct swing at Catholics.
A lot of good Americans give their money to Catholic charities thinking they're helping people, and it turns out they're a part of a vast leftist network that is being used to undermine our country. 

Whether it's the open borders, Soros DAs, Arabella, or the 'Islamification' of Texas and this country—it's organized, and this is one example. Look at the Medicaid fraud up in Minneapolis. It was going to Somalis, and it was literally billions of dollars.

This administration is rooting it out; Congress needs to do more. That's why I called for a special select committee to follow the money of these radical groups. We need to do it.

Roy, who lives in Austin Texas, is a Baptist, something that isn't surprising both because the Baptist are a large Protestant religion in the United States and because Texas is part of the "Bible Belt" where the Southern Baptist are particularly strong.

The Baptists are not part of the New Apostolic Reformation as a rule and have a very large set of differing beliefs on different topics. The reason to note this, however, is that Roy's statement really brings out a certain strain of Protestant Anti Catholicism that's very deep in the country's history.  Setting aside any one thing he's complaining about, a strain of it is that Catholic charities don't seem to care very much where people come from.

And that's because Catholics aren't not supposed to view the world that way.

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. 2 Corinthians 10:3 They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven

Letter to Diognetus.

For many years, the really strong Protestant religions in the US were the "mainline" Protestant faiths, of which the Episcopal Church was the strongest.  None of the Mainline Protestant Churches was friendly with the Apostolic Churches, but they ironically all had connections to it, with the Presbyterian Church having the fewest.  In truth, in spite of the Black Legends of the Reformation they'd spread, they all worried about how they were viewed by the Catholic Church, accepting large elements of the Church's views as correct, and particularly worried about whether they had Apostolic Succession, strongly suspecting themselves that they did not.  People have spoken much about the decline of Christianity in the West, but they've missed two elements of that story to a significant degree, one being that the Catholic church was persistently attacked by Protestant governments during and after the Reformation, and that this yielded to attacks by left wing secular governments thereafter.  The Catholic Church nonetheless endured in spite of all of it, and its' rebounding from that assault.  The Mainline Protestant Churches, however, are simply dying of their own accord.

All along there's been a strain of loosely organized Protestant churches that fall outside of the Mainline churches.  The Mainline Protestant Churches did not worry much about them, but as time has gone on, and the impacts of the death of the Reformation and the cultural revolutions of the Baby Boomers have played out, those churches have grown and are particularly infused with the American Civil Religion, which many barely churched Americans are as well. The New Apostolic Reformation is just a sliver of that set of beliefs, but Apostolic Christians should be concerned.  The Apostolic Faiths are growing in the US right now as people turn towards the truth, but this administration is infused with the NAR which leads to events like this.  Recognizing the Christian origins of the United States is fine, and saying something prayerful at the Pentagon in this season is as well.  But a performance such as this, combined with rumblings from somebody like Roy, should worry us.  Christianity is not an American thing.

Or, perhaps, something else is going on.

The Apostolic Faiths are growing and converts from Protestantism are part of the reason why.  The Mainline Protestant Churches are dying.  Evangelicalism remains strong, but things like this show the marked contrast with the Ancient Faith.  This may all be part of the death of the Reformation playing out before us.

There remains a danger in all of this, however.  There are prominent Apostolic Christians in the National Conservative/Christian Nationalist camp.  People like R. R. Reno, Rod Dreher and Kevin Roberts are founding members, and J. D. Vance is the most prominent politician who travels in that camp.  The views that the backers of people like Mike Johnson and Pete Hegseth hold are not necessarily friendly towards Apostolic Christians at all.  While people in the Reno/Dreher/Roberts camp may rejoice as the seeming defense of Christian values by the administration (and I'm not sure that at least Reno and Dreher, the latter of whom has declared Trump unstable, hold that view), it's making common cause with people who are either inherently hostile to the Apostolic Faiths or, in the case of Trump himself, deeply immoral.  Being such a fellow traveler rarely works out and we'll be turned on.

Related threads:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 103d edition. The tragic co-opting of death and politics.






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Monday, December 8, 2025

A Holy Day of Obligation Plea for the Common Man, and some other thoughts.

Today in the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a Holy Day of Obligation for Catholics.

Almost every weekday Catholic holy day I think about posting something like this, and then never do.  But on this occasion, I'm going to.

I don't resent the holy days, and indeed, it would be wrong to do so.  But, in this very localized post, I don't like the way that the parishes handle scheduling Masses for them, or at least I'm whining about it.

Indeed, as this one follows a Sunday, I was hoping the feast had been transferred so there would by no obligation, but it wasn't.

Catholics are required, under the pain of mortal sin, to attend a Mass for a holy day of obligation, assuming that it's possible to do so.  What I think is the case is that sometimes the Church doesn't take into account the daily lives of Catholics, at least here, to make it a bit more easier to fulfill that obligation.  Or maybe it figures that it being difficult is part of the point, I'm not sure.  

Anyhow, what the situation is, is as follows.

Like a lot of Catholics in this region, I worked on Saturday.  I took time out of my work day, however, to go to confession.  I went, and then went back to work.  The confession schedule at the Church I normally go to makes getting to confession very easy.  There's confession on Saturday mornings at 8:00 a.m. On First Saturdays there's a Mass at 9:00 a.m., although I don't attend it.  There's confession again at 1:30 p.m.  The two other parishes have confessions at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday.  One parish has confession on Sunday at 4:00 p.m. and again on Wednesday evenings, and the big across town parish has confession on Thursday evening.  So every parish is making it easy to get to confession.

It's easy to get to Sunday Mass as well.  One parish starts its vigil Mass at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday.  The other two are about 6:00 p.m., I think.  Masses resume at the big parish at 8:00 and run them through the day with two of the three concluding with Masses in the evening, with the earliest being 5:15 p.m.

So far, so good.

All the parishes have weekday Masses, which is where this begins to break down in my view.  

One parish has a morning Mass at 6:30 a.m., way early.  Another one has daily Masses at 9:00 a.m..  Not so early.  Another has one at 8:30, but today, on the holy day, that's been moved to 9:00 a.m.

I used to attend daily Mass. . . at noon. The downtown parish, which has a morning Mass at 6:30, had one at noon as well.  It was well attended in relative terms.  It was also quite short, as the two Priests who conducted the Masses (they now have one) knew that almost everyone there represented foot traffic from downtown.

Okay, so what is the problem?

This is.

I could have made the Mass last night, the vigil Mass.  I thought about it.

But I also attended Mass at 8:30 in the morning, and then headed out to look for elk on my one day off.  It's not so much that Mass twice in one day is too much, but for people who have a single day off, and that's a lot of people around here, what that effectively does is to devote the entire day to Mass.

There is something charming about that, and I think some people do that very thing.  But for a feral person like me, bookending the day that way means that pretty much the rest of the day is lost.

To add to it, while I did bet back in town in time, on this day, like a lot of Sundays in the fall and winter, that would have put me in Mass wearing tiger stripe cargo pants. . . which would look a bit odd.

It might be possible for me to make a 6:30 a.m. Mass, but it would be pretty difficult.  I'm usually still downing coffee at 6:30 a.m. and my days are really long.  If I did that, particularly because of that location, I'd be at work before 7:30 and therefore be putting in a default 12 hour day with no break, most of the time.  

And when I had school age children here at home, it was an absolute impossibility.  When we still had a dog here, which we did until quite recently, it would have been as well, as my long suffering spouse, who has the temperament of a grizzly bear if she's awakened early, and who is not Catholic, would have had to been poked awake. 

And 6:30, frankly, is absurdly early.  Is there a reason this can't be 7:30?  A 6:30 Mass will draw people, but it will tend to draw the retired elderly who don't have much else to do at that hour and who have given up sleeping, as the elderly tend to do.  I know that, as in spite of my whining here, I'm always up early.

I have, I'll note, attended that Mass when I had no other choice.  I frankly was darn near asleep, but it was interesting as I sat right behind two young women who were friends, one of whom was a trad, sort of combining a mochila with a leather skirt, and the other who was wearing street clothes.  My guess is that they were on the way to high school or community college, probably the latter.

I'll also note that when I made that 6:30 a.m. Mass it was before they were worried that I might have intestinal cancer and then thyroid cancer.  My stomach has never been the same and mornings is generally where that shows it.  Enough said.

I'm grateful that there are two parishes with evening Masses I can make, although I with the one that has 5:15 Sunday Masses still had a holy day mass at that time.  Now it does not.  It's 6:00 holy day Mass is a Spanish Mass, which is also fine, so I suppose the time was moved to accommodate Spanish speaking Catholics on their way home from work.

What I really wish, however, is that one Parish had a noon Mass.

Any Mass after 8:00 on a weekday really isn't very well scheduled to accommodate working people, or students, in this region.  When I was a student, I was nearly always at school by 8.  I'm nearly always at work by 8, if not 7.  By the end of the day, I'm nearly always beat down and just want to crawl home (a coworker who occasionally does the "let's go get a beer" nearly always gets the reply "I just want to go home).  I'll make one of the evening Masses, but I'll be pretty worn out by that time.

A noon Mass would be ideal. And not just for me, but for others like me, who work in town.  The downtown noon Mass was great, as I could and did walk to it, but I could drive to any of them.

I know, in no small part due Fr. Joseph Krupp's podcast, that Priests are grossly overburdened, so I shouldn't be complaining at all.  But I am a bit.  Masses at 8:30 or 9:00 can only be attended by people, for the most part, who aren't working, and who don't have children.  Masses at 6:30 will probably only be attended by the elderly and the other very early risers, who can accommodate getting something to eat thereafter.

For most working people these just don't work.  Noon won't work for everyone either, but it'll work for some who might otherwise have a difficult time going.

*************************************************

While waiting for Confession to commence on Saturday, I was stunned to find a large crowed of people in the Church.  It soon was obvious it was a Baptism, and had just concluded.

Quite of few of the men were wearing hats, with at least one wearing a cowboy hat. This is inside the church.

I've grown used to declining clothing standards, and frankly I'm not exactly that well dressed most Sundays.  But wearing hats indoors was something I was taught to never do as a child.  In the service it was normally absolutely prohibited.  "Is your head cold?" was a question addressed in the form of a snarl by sergeants to enlisted men who forgot to remove their hats.

Now people wear hats indoors all the time.  I don't like, and I still don't.  I never see Catholics do that inside of a church, if they are men (and for that matter its pretty rare with women), so my presumption is that these were people who were largely unchurched.

************************************************

In looking for Mass times, I looked to see what was offered by the by The Ukrainian Catholic Church's mission to Casper.  I suspect they don't have a service today, but looking up their information is always a problem.  I don't know if its because its a small community and they know what they're doing, and therefore don't feel that they need to publicize it, or if its something else.

The Eastern Rite churches of the Catholic Church are growing, and it'd behoove them to at least make the dates and times of their services known, I'd think.  So far they've also been holding services in non Catholic buildings, which I also don't get.  I don't know what's up with all of this, if anything at all, but here I wish that they'd make use of one of the Catholic Churches and make it easier to find out when they're holding services.  

***********************************************

It's interesting, at least to me, to note that the word holiday obviously comes from Catholic holy days.  Most of the original holidays were in fact holy days and in Catholic countries, that's still very much the case.

This is a Protestant county.

That gives rise to part of the problems noted.  The US has a hardcore Protestant Work Ethic pounded into the culture by the Puritans, who got it from Calvin.  It's part of the crappiest aspects of Americans culture.  It doesn't add a day to our lives, probably shortens them, and makes them a lot less enjoyable. 

Calvinism, from which that comes, really has threads of steel throughout the culture.  John Calvin was a fun sucker, but he believed in work in a major way.  He also believed that being well to do showed that you were probably amongst the elect.  The Puritans themselves were big on the marital act, but by the time of the English Civil War prominent Calvinist in England figured that if they were well to do, that was proof enough they were amongst the elect, and so pick up a mistress on the side was okay.  

You can see a lot of that in the culture today, particularly amongst those in power.  People don't mind the concept of telling you to work harder while the engage in serial polygamy.  It's strong in the American Civil Religion and some strains of Evangelicalism as well, where some "faith leaders' who have had morally dubious lives see nothing particularly disturbing about that.

The culture lost a lot in the Reformation. 

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Finally, this is not only holy day, it's a feast day.  The difficulty of getting to Mass will take away from the feasting aspect of it, as will the fact that in a Puritan Protestant county we're not supposed to be feasting on a Monday.  Everyone has to be at work again, bright and early in the morning.

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Thursday, October 23, 2025

Friday, October 23, 1925. Stray dog, beer and Billy Mitchell.

Dog: 

Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Today -100: October 23, 1925: Of invasions, discre...: War of the Stray Dog News: Greece invades Bulgaria, occupying posts and shelling villages (well, at least one village). Greece, claiming Bu...

Billy Mitchell's troubles hit the front page. 

Beer in Chicago did as well.


Delegates to a Congregationalist convention posed for a photograph.

Last edition:

Thursday, October 22, 1925: Follyology?

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Sunday, October 19, 2025

How Super Bowl LX should be informing American Catholics why the populist far right will betray them as soon as it gets a chance.

Last weekend we ran Catholic Ross Douthat's interview with Doug Wilson.  In his interview Douthat kept trying to pin Wilson down on whether there was a place for Catholics in Wilson's vision of a Calvinist theocratic United States. Wilson came down on yes, but he hedged his bets a fair amount.

The real answer to whether members of the New Apostolic Reformation feel that was has been provided by Super Bowl LX.

I don't like football at all.  I won't be watching the halftime game which I always find to be much like professional football itself, grossly overblown.  But it does provide a weathervane to the culture.  The music associated with professional football shows very much who football feels to be the up and coming audience.

The performer chosen was "Bad Bunny".

Bad Bunny is one Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio.  He was born in Puerto Rico.  He sings in Spanish.

Well the late Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA is having none of it.  It's going to offer its own  “All American Halftime Show”.

Oscasio is an American.  Puerto Ricans have been since March 2, 1917.  They're fully American, and frankly, Puerto Rico ought to be granted statehood, there being absolutely no good reason for it not being a U.S. State at this point.  And, Oscasio is a Christian.  He's a Catholic, whose mother is apparently very devout.

Here's the thing.  Turning Point USA is exhibiting a populist far right Freudian Slip.  Some members of the organization are just too ignorant to know either of these points, but some know them and don't believe that Puerto Ricans are "real" Americans, or that Catholics are Christians.

The last point is particularly ironic.  Lots in the Evangelical far right like to say they're "Bible Believing" Christians, by which they mean sola scriptura Christians. Sola Scriptura is itself Biblically indefensible as St. Paul informed the Thessalonians that they should stand firm in the "traditions" that they had been brought, indicating that there were in fact traditions already.  We know now what those traditions were, as Christians had been writing many of them down in other texts  that didn't end up in the Bible almost from the very beginning.  But more ironic yet is this, the Bible is a Catholic book.

This isn't a matter for debate.  It just is.  We know how the books of the Bible came about, who wrote them, and what they believed.  There was, at the time, just one "holy, catholic and apostolic church", and that was the Catholic Church.  You can add the Orthodox churches to this list today as they directly descend from it.  But in a strict sense, members of various Evangelical churches don't fit into this category.  Indeed, fear of not fitting into it by various Protestant groups has lead some of them to claim membership all along, such as various branches of the Lutheran, Anglican and Methodist churches. They don't dispute that the Catholics and Orthodox are direct descendants of the original Catholic Church, and indeed, they agree that the Catholic Church is the uninterrupted Christian church that Christ founded.  Evangelical churches that don't hold that view are frankly ignorant on this point.

But they are persistent in their ignorance.  So much so, that many of them don't believe that the original Christians, the Catholics, are Christians at all.

We put the Bible together, and the New Testament was written by inspired Catholic authors, but they ignore that.

As I've noted before, and as Wilson conceded, this is a Protestant nation and moreover Wilson was also right that it was founded as a Calvinist one.  That's a major reason that for much of this country's history the Irish, Italians, and other Catholics were detested and even regarded as a separate race.  It's part of why Hispanics are regarded as a separate race today.  Stripped of his fishing tackle piercings, Bad Bunny could look like a Spanish Conquistador. . . not a "Pilgrim".   

Something about the election of Barrack Obama really brought out latent racism in this country.  The Obergefell decision really unleashed a deep dormant conservatism in the population, but one that followed the American Civil Religion rather than real Christianity.  The New Apostolic Reformation took advantage of that and has been advancing its cause under the radar, until recently, when it started doing it more openly, although still not so openly that the fact that we're in the midst of a Christian Nationalist coup right now is appreciated.  Quite a few conservative Catholics, not really well schooled in what far right Evangelical Christians believe, or just badly catechized themselves, have joyously gone along with it, as it seems to address, and to some degree if fact addresses, the cultural rot that has set in, in the Western world.

But it will catch up with us.

Welcome back to the Ghetto.
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Friday, October 17, 2025

Saturday, October 17, 1925: When two ride one horse.


Hasan al-Kharrat' rebels entered Damascus.
Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Today -100: October 17, 1925: When two ride one ho...: French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand says the Locarno Conference lays the foundations for the United States of Europe. Hurrah! In Locarn...

This item contains an interesting one one regarding modification of the wedding vows in the Episcopal service. 

"What a Protection Electric Light is" advertisement for Edison Mazda . The Saturday Evening Post, October 17, 1925.

 


Last edition:

Friday, October 16, 1925. The Locarno conference ended with several agreements in place and an atmosphere of optimism.

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Sunday, October 12, 2025

Christian Nationalism vs Clown World | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat


Very interesting interview.
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Sunday, October 5, 2025

Death of an Evangelical. On Charlie Kirk's Protestant American legacy

Almost (well probably all, up until now) of the religion blogs linked in here are Catholic.  There is, of course, a reason for that.  I'm a Catholic.   

Anyhow, I recently put in a blog link to a protestant (Episcopal) one as it's a really broad blog.  It does have religious content, of course, but a lot more.  Anyhow, in its religious content is this item:

Death of an Evangelical

On Charlie Kirk's Protestant American legacy

I think this may sum up Kirk's religious legacy as much as anything.

I've noted that it appears that Kirk was headed towards Catholicism, and he was.  What I didn't know is that he'd lead his wife away from it.  This is more of a problem for her soul than for his, but it would appear that she was coming back, but hasn't quite made it yet.  She likely will.  Jewish novelist Herman Wouk noted in his novel The Caine Mutiny, about the young WASP Naval officers love interests that lapsed Catholics, such as the love interest, had a way of suddenly and devoutly returning to the Faith.  I've noticed that in people I've known myself.  Catholicism is the original Christian religion, and frankly it's hard not to accept that the more you know of it, which is why entire "Bible Believing" Protestant churches will convert when they go down the road of really studying the Faith.

Anyhow, there's been a bit of an effort, an innocent one, of some Catholics to basically claim Kirk as almost a Catholic.  I don't know how far down that road he'd gotten. He was traveling it, but if we're honest about it, and we should be, his legacy, because it was cut short, will be an Evangelical Protestant one.  

And that's why his death has become such a huge deal in this political climate, where as others would likely not have been.





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Friday, October 3, 2025

Reginald Pole, the last actual Archbishop of Canterbury, in case you were wondering.

There hasn't been a legitimate one since, in absolute terms.

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Sunday, September 28, 2025

A Protestant Dominionist Dictatorship brought to you by Project 2025 and the New Apostolic Reformation or the End of the Reformation?

When Trump was elected President, people, for the second time in a row, thought "oh he won't be so bad".  

He's been as bad as expected, and worse.

A large segment of the politically aware American demographic is wondering, nearly every day, "what on Earth is going on here" as the Trump administration does something odd day after day.1 A second group, his core MAGA adherents, ignore the oddities and assume that a lot of the nonsense about lurking Marxist must be true, and assume that Trump is doing what needs to be done to save the Republic.

Well, Trump is demented, which explains a lot. But there's something else going on. And that something else is Christian Nationalism with a strong Protestant Dominionist focus.

Round Head flag, English Civil War.  Takinginterest01, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. There were several varieties of this standard, as there was no standardized Parliamentarian flag.


Trump himself isn't really a sharp enough tool in the shed to do what's occurring. quite frankly, and at any point in his life, he probably wouldn't be interested enough to care anyway, as long has people are praising him and he seems to be getting what he wants..  To the extent he has any deep thoughts at all, and he likely doesn't, many of his real thoughts and desire run contrary to much of what's occurring.  Trump, after all, is nothing much more than a wealthy playboy.  He likes money, women, and has bad taste. M'eh.

But Trump was savvy enough to know he needed muscle and backing to get into office and moreover back into office.  The intellectual muscle has been provided by far right populist, Protestant Evangelicals and their fellow travelers, the latter of which will live to regret ever being associated with the movement.  Trump supporting Catholics are going to come to particularly regret traveling on this bus.  

We've often said here that the United States is a Protestant country, culturally.  It's so Protestant that people who aren't Protestant often are, culturally. Right now we have a really good example of that in the form of Stephen Wright, who is Jewish by heritage and perhaps by practice, but who in views is a raging Calvinist.  It's pretty easy to find run of the mill, and even some non run of the mill, Catholics in the Trump fold who likewise culturally looked not to Rome, and not even to Luther, but to John Calvin.  

The very first religiously significant group of English colonist in North America were religious dissenters, something very much worth remembering. The Puritans were Calvinists, not members of the dominant and official religion of England, the Church of England.  Their landing in 1620 came in the context of an ongoing struggle in England over what England was to be, in terms of its faith.  The Anglicans were in control at the time the Puritans left for North American shores and they were also suppressed for their religious radicalism in their native land.  England was now solidly Protestant, sort of, with latent Catholicism seemingly having been beaten down with the peasants losing the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, but whether England would be radically Calvinist or sort of looking back at its Catholicism with the Church of England had not been determined.  That question would provide much of the background to the English Civil War in which the parliament sought to depose an Anglican king, while being lead by a Calvinist who would be declared the Lord Protector.  Ultimately, Calvinism didn't sit well with the English, and while parliament won the war, the crown would be restored and playboy king seated on the throne, who would convert to Catholicism sometimes prior to his death.

Calvinist would flee to North America upon the crown being restored.

The early English colonies in North America were frequently religiously intolerant.  They were commonly sectarian and aggressively enforced the religion of their founders.  The Puritans did not come to North America for religious freedom in the manner in which so often portrayed in grade school when I was a kid, but rather to avoid suppression under the crown and enforce their version of Christianity where they lived.  People living in Puritan colonies had mandatory worship requirements at the local Calvinist church.  It's not as if, if you lived in one, you could sit that out, or for that matter declare that you were a Catholic and would worship elsewhere.

Mary Dyer, a Quaker, was executed in Massachusetts for preaching her variant of Protestantism in that colony.  


Christian Dominionist look back to the Puritans and the 1600s for their concept of what the state should be like.  Not to the 1770s to 1790s.  They may not all do so consciously, but they do.  When they say that the United States is a Protestant nation, they mean its a Puritan one.

We all know, of course, that 1st Amendment protects the freedom of worship. That text states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
When that law, and that's what it is, was added to the Constitution in 1791 the infant United States was much different that the loose group of sectarian colonies of the 1600s.  Indeed, the mother country itself was much different than the one that had fought the English Civil War.  Having endured that experience, and with its own history of sectarianism, what the drafters of the Bill of Rights wanted was to avoid there being a Church of the United States, which if it had been created, would have been a branch of the Anglican Church.  The amendment protected the right of various people to worship as they saw fit, or not at all.  Modern conservatives have decried the Courts for decades about this amendment being misinterpreted, but it isn't.  The Bill of Rights inserted religious tolerance ito the law.

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that the country remained a Christian nation.   Other religions made an early appearance, setting aside native religions, very early on, but they were a distinct minority.  A Jewish house of worship existed in New York, for example, as early as 1654.  But overall, non Christian religions were practiced to a very small degree.  And early patterns of settlement meant that the sectarian nature of the colonies continued to reflect itself into the early 1800s, and even into the mid 19th Century, although patterns if immigration began to heavily impact that, particularly the immigration of Catholics, who were largely detested by everybody else for a very long time.  Be that as it may, American culture reflected Protestant Christianity well into the 20th Century and still does today.

This began to break down, as so much in our modern culture has, in the 1960s with the Baby Boom generation. Baby Boomers, or at least many of them, outright rejected many of the basic tenants of Christianity and brought in the really loose cultural Christianity, although with a leftward tilt, that we see today.  One religion was a good as another, Christianity was basically "be nice".  The warnings that St. Paul had given in his letters were ignored. 

Things decayed.

On this site we've tracked some of that decay.  While not meaning to spark a mass debate, we've noted the erosion of hetrosexual religious standards starting in the late 1940s and which were in full bloom before the Baby Boom generation with the massive success of Playboy magazine, and the concept of the loose moral big boob dimwit and sterile "girl next store", who was always ready to have sex. By the 1960s the erosion was becoming generational.  By the 1970s it was becoming part of the culture and homosexuality began to openly emerge.  Marriage started taking a big hit by the 1980s, with divorce becoming increasingly common by the late 1970s  A culture in which divorce had been hard to obtain had evolved into one where marriage wasn't necessary at all, and ultimately into one where same sex couples could marry, the original meaning of marriage having been pretty much lost.

Enter (Evangelical) Christian Dominionism.

In 1975 Evangelicals Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright had a meeting in which they claimed to receive a divine message related to the culture.  They were shortly thereafter joined in their infant movement by Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer..  They claimed a mandate from the Devine to invade and achieve dominion over the "seven spheres" of society identified as family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government.  The New Apostolic Reformation is informed by this movement.  And this is the Evangelical wing that is active in the Trump Administration and which have heavily influenced Christian Nationalist.

Dominionist, no matter what they may say, are not democratic.  They are part of the Illiberal Democracy movement, and in the United States, they are the very core of it.  Believing that the culture has been hopelessly corrupted in the seven spheres, they do not seek to convert by example, but to seize control of the culture, force a reformation of it, and bring about a Puritan nation on the model, sort of, of the original Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Puritan flag of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

This heavily aligns with the concept of Illiberal Democracy.   You can have a democracy, the Dominionist and Illiberal Democrats hold, as long as it fully accepts the predominant cultural world outlook.  No countering that is allowed.

Now, something careful observers will note is that this movement is now all over the European world.   And some of the early Christian Nationalist are most definitely not Evangelical Christians.  R. R. Reno is a convert to Catholicism from the Episcopal Church.  Patrick Dineen is a Catholic, although he's notably moved away from the Republican Party and is now openly part of the American Solidarity Party.  Rod Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism and then converted to Orthodoxy.  He's also now moved on from the Republican Party to the American Solidarity Party.  The head of the Heritage Foundation, which is responsible for Project 2025, is Kevin Roberts, who is Catholic.  And of course, J. D. Vance is a Catholic convert.

How do we make sense of this?

Well, one way in which we can makes sense of this, although not in the case of Dineen, Reno or Dreher, is to admit that a large segment of Catholics are heavily Protestantized, although this notably excludes younger Catholics and recent converts who most definitely are not.  Gen. Jones Catholics and Gen. X Catholics were often very poorly catechized and therefore you can find quite a few who have gravitated to the far political right and who will state very Evangelical views of things which they have picked up from it, sometimes theological views that  Catholics don't hold at all.  Boomer Catholics went through the entire Spirit of Vatican Two era and are sometimes pretty beat up by it, and the younger ones experienced the Kennedy betrayal of religious adherence which caused many Catholics to follow suit.  Some Boomer Catholics were on the very liberal Church end as well to the irritation of nearly everyone else in the Catholic sphere, who are glad to see their waning influence, but who contributed to the atmosphere the same way that poorly catechized late Boomer/Jones/Gen X Catholics were, but with a certain added massive whineyness on some occasions.

Anyhow, while it happened later than the birth of the Dominionist movement, intellectual and younger Catholics have moved towards an increased conservatism for quite some time, and it is now really visible in the Church.  Overall it's a very good development, because it's so Catholic, and it reflects the view expressed in the letter to Diognetus more than any Seven Mountain tract.  But the decay in the culture, which is particularly evident from the much more informed Catholic perspective, has caused some intellectuals, notably Dineen, Reno and Dreher, to despair of the culture and, in the case of of all three, to openly maintain that liberal democracy is an experiment that has failed.2

They aren't dominionist, however. They're more in the nature of Catholic Integralist, a movement that long predates Christian Nationalism or Dominionism.



Integralism argues that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society, wherever the preponderance of Catholics within that society makes this possible.  It formed out of the chaos of the late 19th Century in Europe and was strong in traditionally Catholic Romance language speaking countries.  It never supported the concept of a state religion, but rather subordinating the state to the moral principles of Catholicism, rejecting morality from the state, and, in its European form, favoured Catholicism as the proclaimed religion of the state

Integralism really fell away from Catholic thinking as a discussed topic after World War Two for a variety of reasons, one being that modern liberal democracies quite being hostile to religion, which frankly most had been before the Second World War.  Indeed, over time, the Church increasingly disapproved of clerics being in politics, and ultimately banned it.  But in 2014, with an essay by Dinneen, it started to reappear.  It's adherents claim that its the official position of the Church, but fail to acknowledge that on many things the church's "official" position can be pretty nuanced.  Even prior to the Second World War it had always been the case that integralist took the view that imposing a Catholic view of things on a population couldn't be done on a non Catholic culture.  In more recent years the Church has really emphasized that there's a civic duty to participate in elections, which while not rejecting integralism, does demonstrate a view accepting democracies and requiring Catholics to participate in their democracies.

The revival of integralism came about the same time, however, that dominionism started to gain steam, and for same, but not identical, reasons.  Dineen's essay came out in 2014, but the following year the Supreme Court issued the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, and just as we predicted here, thing have really gone off the rails.  Justice Kennedy's decision lead directly the populist outrage and right on to Donald Trump.

Obergefell was just a bridge too far for many Americans, but the drift towards societal libertinism it expressed had been going on for a long time.  As we've noted, you can trace it back at least to 1953 and the release of Playboy, but savvy students of culture would point out that perhaps the signs were there as early as the very first movies, which took a run at pornography right from the onset until being reigned back in.  Mass communications of all types, including mass media, had a big role in this no matter how much society attempted to restrain it.  The moral shock of the First World War lead to the Roaring Twenties which foreshadowed the 1960s, interrupted only by the economic deprivation of the 1930s and the Second World War.  At any rate, the decay had set in pretty deep even by the early 1970s.

Anyhow, Integralism and Dominionism are not the same thing. Pope Francis, noting a rising connection between Integralism and Christian Nationalist, approved a publication criticizing the drift in this direction.  Catholics getting tied up in the far right Evangelical movement's goals are going to be in for a surprise when they learn that many in that community would not even regard Catholics as Christians.  The re-Puritanization of the country would not be a good thing for Catholics, who after all hold a very broad view of Christianity rather than a nationalistic view of it, and who don't share the same millennialist views of things at all.

Dominionist, for their part, would be shocked to learn that Integralist hold a lot of things that Dominionist frankly accept as abhorrent. They may be united on abortion being evil and transgenderism being contrary to the moral law, but modern American Evangelical Christians would be surprised that the mass of the Catholic Church holds divorce to be a great moral wrong and condemns easy remarriage.  They'd also be surprised to learn that Catholics condemn sex outside of marriage, including all sexual acts outside of the unitive type, to be grave moral wrongs, and that's the Catholic concern with homosexuality.  

Rod Dreher, who seems to have joined the Christian Nationalist movement, or who had joined it (I'm not sure about his current position, given that he's a member of the American Solidarity Party), early on advocated a sort of walled in approach to societal moral decay in his book The Benedict Option.  I criticized that approach here, and he seems to have retreated from what he seemed to indicate that book espoused.  Anyhow, looking at the situation overall, this is a really dangerous moment in American history, but also one from which Western societies might emerge into something new, and better.

Much of this comes in the context of the collapse of the Reformation, and it stands to accelerate it.  At the end of the day, holding Donald Trump as any sort of "Godly Man" is absurd. The direct attack on American democracy, which is occurring as we write, is highly dangerous, but probably won't succeed.  Forces on the other side have taken forever to react, but are finally starting to, including a reassessment of the really radical and downright goofball positions the left has advocated for some time.  The New Apostolic Reformation and Dominionist movement carrying the flag is causing "Christianity" to be condemned, but among thinking Christians is causing a reassessment of the Reformation churches and a massive movement away from them back into the Apostolic fold, as the theology of the Reformation churches simply can't be defended.

Roman society was reformed by Christianity, but not by operation of law, but by operation of the faithful members of the "one Catholic, Holy and Apostolic Church".  We're in the death throws of  the Reformation, of which this is all part.  If that's right, it'll be a blessing in the end.

Footnotes:

1.  In fairness, a lot of the odd things that Trump does is because he very obviously has dementia, which nobody is doing anything about.  He's really not mentally stable enough to occupy the office he's in.

2.  Evangelicals of the far right are particularly focused on transgenderism and homosexulaity, but just completely ignore almost all of the remaining actual Christian tenants on sex.  Donald Trump, whom Evangelicals have really adopted, is a serial polygamist.  White House "faith advisor" is on her third husband.  Evangelical churches have pews fill up on Sundays with people who are living in what St. Paul very clearly condemned as states of mortal sin.

Related threads:

A Protestant Country. It's history, and what it means.







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