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.
