Reginald Pole, the last actual Archbishop of Canterbury, in case you were wondering.
There hasn't been a legitimate one since, in absolute terms.
Showing posts with label The Reformation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Reformation. Show all posts
Friday, October 3, 2025
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
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.
Labels: 1940 Wyoming Legislature, 1941, 1970s, Blog Mirror, Evolutionary Biology, Long Posts, Marriage, Monday at the bar, religion, Sex, Sexual Revolution, Social Issues, Sociology, The relationship between men and women
Labels: Agrarianism, Commentary, Conservatism, Democracy, Distributism, Illiberal Democracy, Liberal Democracy, Liberalism, Populism, Progressivism, William F. Buckley
Labels: 2020s, 2022, Christian Nationalism, Conservatism, Illiberal Democracy, Liberal Democracy, Liberalism, Politics, Populism, trends
Sunday, September 21, 2025
CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 103d edition. Missing the obvious demographic aspect of the story . . ."Wyoming Churches See Revival, Shakeup After Charlie Kirk's Death"
The Cowboy State Daily claims:
Wyoming Churches See Revival, Shakeup After Charlie Kirk's Death
What's the real story?
Do it yourself and Evangelical Churches saw a boost in attendance, and it will be temporary, as in probably over by today.
Protestant "mainline" churches, of which Kirk had been a member, saw nothing going on. The same is true of the Catholic churches, which have been increasingly packed in a way that can't be ignored, and which Kirk was clearly evolving towards.
Does this tell us that the far right Evangelical Churches are particularly tapped into the American mindset? Not really. But it does tell us that far right Evangelical Protestantism is particularly, and indeed oddly, aligned with MAGA.
Long term, this will mean for it, what being aligned with the Confederacy in the South meant for the Episcopal Church in the South, but even more dramatically.
Evangelical Protestantism, in its far right wing form, is dragging Evangelicalism into what theologically and politically untenable position. Trump isn't Charles Martel, holding back the Saracen hoards. This will pass and people's head will begin to clear up. When they do, the close association of right wing Evangelicalism with Trump, including the downright goofy occasional statements by some of its leaders about Trump being Divinely appointed, will have the effect of damaging Evangelicalism as a whole.
The far right Evangelical Churches, which make up only a portion of Evangelical Churches, are telling people what they want to hear. That works only as long as people aren't being hurt by what they hear. The truth of tends to hurt.
One thing most Evangelicals won't be hearing are today's readings in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, which are:
Reading 1
Amos 8:4-7
Hear this, you who trample upon the needy
and destroy the poor of the land!
"When will the new moon be over," you ask,
"that we may sell our grain,
and the sabbath, that we may display the wheat?
We will diminish the ephah,
add to the shekel,
and fix our scales for cheating!
We will buy the lowly for silver,
and the poor for a pair of sandals;
even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!"
The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob:
Never will I forget a thing they have done!
Reading 2
1 Timothy 2:1-8
Beloved:
First of all, I ask that supplications, prayers,
petitions, and thanksgivings be offered for everyone,
for kings and for all in authority,
that we may lead a quiet and tranquil life
in all devotion and dignity.
This is good and pleasing to God our savior,
who wills everyone to be saved
and to come to knowledge of the truth.
For there is one God.
There is also one mediator between God and men,
the man Christ Jesus,
who gave himself as ransom for all.
This was the testimony at the proper time.
For this I was appointed preacher and apostle
— I am speaking the truth, I am not lying —,
teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
It is my wish, then, that in every place the men should pray,
lifting up holy hands, without anger or argument.
Gospel
Luke 16:1-13
Jesus said to his disciples,
"A rich man had a steward
who was reported to him for squandering his property.
He summoned him and said,
'What is this I hear about you?
Prepare a full account of your stewardship,
because you can no longer be my steward.'
The steward said to himself, 'What shall I do,
now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me?
I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg.
I know what I shall do so that,
when I am removed from the stewardship,
they may welcome me into their homes.'
He called in his master's debtors one by one.
To the first he said,
'How much do you owe my master?'
He replied, 'One hundred measures of olive oil.'
He said to him, 'Here is your promissory note.
Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.'
Then to another the steward said, 'And you, how much do you owe?'
He replied, 'One hundred kors of wheat.'
The steward said to him, 'Here is your promissory note;
write one for eighty.'
And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.
"For the children of this world
are more prudent in dealing with their own generation
than are the children of light.
I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth,
so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.
The person who is trustworthy in very small matters
is also trustworthy in great ones;
and the person who is dishonest in very small matters
is also dishonest in great ones.
If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth,
who will trust you with true wealth?
If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another,
who will give you what is yours?
No servant can serve two masters.
He will either hate one and love the other,
or be devoted to one and despise the other.
You cannot serve both God and mammon."
No health and wealth gospel there.
Last edition:
CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 102nd edition. Short attention span and a Ballroom Blitz*. And self sabotage.
Sunday, September 14, 2025
Sunday, September 7, 2025
A little noted trend. The Bride of Christ.
While the news likes to report on the decline in membership in "organized faith", or whatever, the Catholic Church in the United States will grow this year, and not through births, but through conversions.
More people are entering it, than leaving it.
The Catholic Church also now has more adherent faithful in the United Kingdom than the Church of England.
Secular France, but the First Daughter of the Church yet, is seeing a Catholic revival.
Scandinavia, a bastion of Protestantism, and then of secularism, is seeing a Catholic revival. Small in overall numbers, it isn't in terms of what it represents.
Something, clearly, is going on.
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Best Posts of the Week of January 19, 2025. The Death of the United States as a great nation.
A monumental week, which will go down in history in which a free people formalized the inauguration one of the worst leaders imaginable, and passed from a great nation, into just another country. Far from "Mak[ing] America Great Again", America was rendered embarrassing, pathetic, and dangerous to humanity.
There will be no coming back form this.
That the United States would not be a great nation forever does not surprise me. I have, after all, a sense of history. I just didn't expect to see such a dramatic end to its greatness in my own lifetime
Nor did I expect to see it go from great, to weird, such as happened to Reformation England.
Such a sad ending.
January 19, 1825. The reason that today is Tin Can Day.
Blog Mirror: Remarks of Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, regarding immigration at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City
Wednesday, January 1, 2025
New Years Day. Looking at 2024 through the front of the Church doors.
I noted in our post New Year's Resolutions for Other People, sort of that we weren't going to post resolutions, but we did have some comments. That's true here as well.
New Years Day is the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God, a Catholic holy day of obligation. Like a lot of Catholics, I went to Mass last night.
I didn't go last night as I intended to go whoop it up on the town.1 I've never been big on celebrating "New Years" anyhow, although we did last night with family and sort of extended family, as we have a at this point another person in the second half of their twenties whose pretty much incorporated into the family, but not officially or by blood. Anyhow, it was pretty low key and I was in bed before midnight. I think last year I made it to midnight to observe the fireworks some neighbors set off. This year I did not. I'm amazed that the same people, who really like fireworks, set them off again, as we've had hurricane force winds for the past day or so.
Anyhow, the reason I'm posting this comment is due to a particularly troublesome year for American Christianity in 2024.
American Protestants don't like to believe it, but the United States is and has always been a Protestant Country. It's so Protestant, that the Protestants can't recognize that, and even people who claim to have no religion at all are pretty Protestant. Even a lot of Catholics are pretty Protestantized and I've known some fairly secular Jews who were fairly Protestant.
Protestantism is a pretty big tent, with there being all sorts of tables within it, and with some of the tables really not liking others. For much of the country's history the Episcopal Church was the dominant Protestant Church, which made a lot of sense. The Episcopal Church is, of course, part of the Anglican Communion and the English descent is dominant in American ancestry. Supposedly this is 26% of the population now, but that figure is probably inaccurate by at least half simply because people whose ancestry stretches back away have simply forgotten it and is not celebrated the way other ancestral inheritance is. I'm of overwhelming Irish ancestry but even I have a little English ancestry of the Anglo Norman variety, brough in through Ireland.
Anyhow, as in the 18th Century most residents of British North America were from Great Britain, most were members of the Church of England, outside of Canada, where of course they were French and Catholic.
The Episcopal Church has never been in the only Protestant Church in what is now the US, however. Right from the beginning there were bodies of dissenters from the established church who came here to be able to practice their faith without being molested for it. That doesn't mean they were keen on others practicing their faiths, and they often didn't tolerate other Protestants at all. But they were there, and that gave rise to a sort of rough and ready loosely organized Protestantism in some regions, particularly the American South. These groups really prospered following the American Civil War as they hadn't gotten behind the war the way Southern Episcopalians had. These groups really spread across the nation following the 1970s. Looking back, its amazing to realize that growing up I knew exactly one Baptist kid (he's now a Lutheran) and the three big Protestant churches in this category didn't exist here. Wyoming is the least religious state in the US, but at that time almost all the Protestants I knew were Lutheran or Episcopalian. I knew a handful of Methodists and of course Mormons, but Baptists or Assemblies of God? Nope.
So what's this have to do with 2024?
The Election of 2024 saw a really strong association of Evangelical Christianity, which is very much an American thing, and the vote. It's distinctly different than anything that's occurred before.
Evangelical Christianity has been nationally significant in elections since at least 1950 or so, but it wasn't until 2024 that the "Christian vote" meant the Evangelical vote outside of the American South. Because they are fractured, they are not the largest Christian body in the country. Oddly enough, while 67% of the population self identifies as Christian, and something like 44% identify as Protestant, Catholics are the largest single denomination.
The back story to this however is that the Reformation, which started in 1517, is ending.
The Reformation was able to start in the first place due to a large element of ignorance. This can't be said of Luther, who wasn't ignorant, but who was opinionated and wrong. Luther opened the door, however, to people like Calvin, Zwingli and Knox who were fundamentally ignorant in certain ways.
The spread of cheap printing and ultimately the Internet makes ignorance on some things much more difficult to retain. For centuries bodies of Protestant Christians held to sola scriptura and a belief that they were like the first Christians, even though there's always been Christian texts dating back to shortly after Christ's crucifixion.2 Now, all of a sudden, anybody can read them. This has in fact caused a pronounced migration of really serious sola scriptura Christians to the Apostolic Churches, as well as a migration by serious "mainline" Protestants. Some bodies at this point, like very conservative Anglicans and Lutherans, are mostly Protestant out of pure obstinance.
The ultimate irony of all of this is that the mainline Protestant churches have collapsed in many places. Part of this is due to the massive increase in wealth in the western world which has hurt religion in general, but part is also because it gets to be tough to explain why you are a member of one of these churches if you can't explain a really solid reason to be, as opposed being in an Apostolic church.
At the same time, and not too surprisingly, similar forces have been operating in the Evangelical world in the US. As already noted, quite a few serious Evangelicals are now serious Catholics or Orthodox. Others, however, have retreated into a deep American Evangelicalism that is resistant to looking at the early Church, even though they are aware of it. This is rooted, in no small part, to the go it alone history of these bodies.
At the same time that this has occurred, the spread of the American Civil Religion has grown which sort of holds that everyone is going to Heaven as long as they aren't bad. Serious Catholics and Orthodox can't accommodate themselves to that but Evangelicals have attempted to, while at the same time realizing it really doesn't make sense.
Obergefell, as we noted, was the watershed moment. At that point, Christians of all types were faced with realizing that the US had really strayed far from observing its Christian origins, or at least the Christian faith, with there being all sorts of different reactions to it. In Catholic Churches there was the realization that we really hadn't become as American as we thought, and we weren't going to. Trads sprang up partially in reaction with now every Church having its contingent of Mantilla Girls giving an obstinate cultural no.
In Evangelical circles it helped fuel a militant conservatism that expresses its most radical nature in the New Apostolic Reformation which believes that we're on the cusp of a new Apostolic age, which will be Protestant in nature, and more transformational than any prior Great Awakening. They believe that the United States is charged with a Devine mission and some have concluded, as unlikely as it would seem from the outside, that Donald Trump is an improbable Cyrus the Great who will bring this about.
The support of Southern Episcopalians for the Southern cause in the Civil War damaged in the South to such an extent that the non mainline churches, like the Southern Baptist, came up as a major force after the war. The Baptists and Protestant itinerant preachers had warned during the war that wickedness was going to bring ruin. It seemed that their warnings were proven by the results of the war. Episcopal linking to a wicked cause diminished their credibility.
Donald Trump is not Cyrus the Great. Mike Johnson is not standing in the shoes of Moses. This will all have a bad end. Or it might. As noted, the Reformation is dying and in some ways this is the last stand of it. Those linking their Christianity to a man like Donald Trump are pinning their hopes, and their faith, on a weak reed. The question is what happens when it breaks and how much damage has been done, including to Christianity in general, in the meantime.
Moreover, the question also exists if you can claim to bear a Christian standard while not observing parts of the faith that are established but uncomfortable, let alone contrary to what is now so easy to determine not to be part of the early faith. Can those who clearly don't live a Christian life really be the shield wall against decay?
Footnotes:
1. As with my observation on Christmas in The Law and Christmas, being a Catholic puts you in a strange position in regard to the secular world, or rather the larger American culture. Lots of people start celebrating New Years pretty darned early on New Years Even, which means as an employer you start to get questions about whether we're closing at noon and the like, pretty early on. And also, while in the popular imagination people hit the bars at night, quite a few people have celebrator drinks here and there by late morning in reality. If your concern is getting to a vigil Mass soon after work, you aren't one of those people. And if you are one of the people hitting Mass in the morning, you aren't having a late night.
2. Sola scriptura never made sense and is obviously incorrect in that the New Testament itself mentions traditions outside of the written text. But the Bible, moreover, which is the scripture that "Bible Believing" Christian's look to is the version that was set out by the Catholic Church as the Canon of Scripture. Nowhere in the Bible does is there a Devine instruction as to what books would be included in the Bible.
Indeed, this position is further weakened in that Luther put some books he personally didn't like in an appendix, and later Protestants removed them. That wasn't Biblical. Moreover, the Eastern Orthodox Bible contains the Prayer of Manaseh, I Esdras, II Esdras, III Maccabees, IV Maccabees, Odes, and Psalm 151 and the Orthodox Tewahedo biblical canon some pre Christian Jewish books the others do not. While Catholics can explain why the books they include in their canon and can explain the relationship to the other Bibles, Protestant "Bible Believing" Christians flat out cannot. All of the texts in the Orthodox Bibles are genuine ancient texts without dispute. Moreover, there are early Christian writings which are genuine that are wholly omitted from any Bible. The Sola Scriptura position just accepts the King James version of the Bible on the basis that it must be the canon on a pure matter of faith, which is not relying on scripture alone.
Related thread:
Virgin Mary Mural in Salt Lake City
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