Do Not Be Like Them

Gay Marriage Hubbub and the Cult of Mercy

In March, the Vatican stunned the world by re-affirming a position they’ve held for hundreds, if not thousands, of years: they will only bless hetero marriages, not homo ones. The modern twist, of course, is that they not only won’t throw gays off rooftops for the lols, but they’ll in fact welcome gays into their sanctuaries and even pray for them.

Our friends in the media were predictably stunned. Noted theologian Don Lemon admonished the Church on national TV:

I respect people’s right to believe in whatever they want to believe in their God. … Many churches need to re-examine themselves and their teachings because that is not what God is about. God is not about hindering people or even judging people. … so I would say to the Pope and the Vatican and all Christians or Catholics or whomever, whatever religion you believe… go out and meet people and try to understand people and do what the Bible and what Jesus actually said, if you believe in Jesus, and that is to love your fellow man and judge not lest ye be not judged [sic].

When it comes to God and Christianity, I can’t say for sure what I believe. I’m a gay man and I question everything, so being a degenerate heretic is kind of baked into the cake (a cake that I’m not going to force anyone to bake for me, by the way!). But I find that a lot of Christians have a sort of “Buddy Christ” faith: bumper sticker bromides like “love your neighbor” and “judge not lest ye be judged” comprise their theology. They leave out “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword” (Matthew 10:34). They start with “Jesus forgave a prostitute” and forget his “go and sin no more” (John 8:11).

This strain of milquetoast Christianity is called moralistic therapeutic deism (MTD). Coined in the early 2000s by sociologists Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist, the term refers to a set of prevailing religious beliefs among teenagers at the time:

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Keep in mind, MTD is not really an -ism per se. It’s the result of cultural drift, evolution of the memeplex. A society as wealthy, prosperous, globally-dominant, and safe as ours has been for 100 years has no felt need for strict moral and ethical rules because our prosperity fills the gaps. We have a cushion, we have a vast social safety net that catches us when we make mistakes and fall as a result. Like any organ that no longer serves a purpose, strict doctrinal adherence atrophies, becomes vestigial, evolves out of the organism. We’ve all been progressives for a century at least, and the telos of progressivism is God’s kingdom on earth without God, the city on the hill, utopia, universal liberal democracy and freedom from sadness and want. We live in a progressive a-theocracy, in which mercy is the only real norm: to be held accountable and take responsibility and accept the consequences of our decisions – ie, to be measured against an ideal, to be judged for falling short of it – is to be bigoted, outmoded, unloving, on the wrong side of history.

A society of mercy sounds nice, doesn’t it? You’re perfect just the way you are, the mercy-culture says. Just do what makes you happy, be authentic, don’t judge, take it easy. Everyone’s doing it. Like Buddy Jesus, the purveyor of mercy is alluring and seductive. He promises that you can break the rules, sometimes big ones – just not the Woke ones – and you’ll be fine. You have a safety net to fall into. You’ll be loved anyway. Swapping out your slacks for sweatpants is great until you realize you can’t fit into the slacks anymore. But then you get to end up on the cover of Cosmo and be called “healthy.” It’s a fantastic cycle.

Or is it a spiral? The problem is that mercy is a form of covenant-breaking. Civilization, aka peace and order in human affairs, does not arise naturally. Human life is not guaranteed; nature doesn’t care whether we live or die. Sure, we get together into tribes. But order in those situations results from might, not conceptions of right or human dignity. Human dignity and human rights are as artificial as the stuff that sweetens woka-Cola. You might have the same rights in civilization as you do on a desert island, but if the tribe on your island doesn’t care about your rights – well, good luck bemoaning the injustice of it all.

Human life on earth requires covenants great and small – with each other, that we will work to provide, that we will have each other’s backs – and with the earth – that we will till the soil and live by the sweat of our brow. Mercy says that you can break your covenants, because there’s always enough capital stock or other people to make up for it. And sure, you can get away with covenant-breaking for a while. But do it too much? Or if everyone does it?

Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ant is illustrative:

One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bit to eat.

“What!” cried the Ants in surprise. “Haven’t you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all summer?”

“I didn’t have time to store up any food,” said Grasshopper. “Food was plentiful and I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone.”

The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust. “Making music, were you?” they said. “Very well, now dance!” And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work.

We live in a summer of plenty. Technology has advanced and made food and leisure plentiful. Most people get by without knowing where their food comes from. Most people don’t know how their machines work, how their houses are built or heated, what keeps their phones connected to the digital mesh that encircles the planet and connects us lonesomely to each other. We have internalized an ethic of unaccountability, of universal mercy, of moralistic therapeutic deism, of “it’s someone else’s problem,” of “the culture will be there to pick up my slack.” But fall, and winter, are coming. The culture won’t be there for long, especially if we continue this anarcho-tyrannic trajectory in which good people are oppressed for not wearing masks while resistance-LARPers loot and burn cities with nary a tut-tut from the authorities.

Decadence and Dissolution and the Real Rebellion

Conservatives have successfully conserved nothing. It’s a cliche at this point that conservatives are progressives from 15 years ago. The culture and all our institutions are dominated by the Blue Team. As key voices on the right whine feebly about leftists’ lies and hypocrisy, the left advances and secures power by promising the world to an expanding voter-base who believes the world can be given to them. “Facts don’t care about your feelings” smooshes limply against a people whose “feelings don’t care about your facts.” The Red Team’s one disruption to the system was actively resisted by the system – his own administration! – his whole presidency. It’s not clear that the Red Team will ever be allowed to hold cultural or institutional power again. As far as I can tell, they’re they outer party – the token resistance to the inner party, allowed to exist merely to give the illusion of choice.

Amid this orgy of borrowing against the future, of seizing power and enforcing technocratic whims on an unsuspecting populous and spending spending spending – in short, of democracy doing exactly what democracy does, which is to buy votes, to appeal to the gluttonous hedonic mob at the bottom of the pyramid – conservatives do exactly what the mercy-cult tells them to do: whatever feels good, even if it means breaking covenants, of spending your principle, of playing music and ignoring the approaching winter.

Marcus Aurelius, the last of the good Roman emperors, wrote that the best vengeance against your enemies was not to be like them. I’m no moral purist – far be it from me to tell you how to live – but it seems to me like a whole lot of conservatives behave like progressives outside the voting booth. And the voting booth is the least important place to practice your principles.

The “Wealth and Power” types made a big show of being the resistance while Trump was president. The left likes to pretend that it’s the real underdog – that the Neo-Nazi takeover of the planet is always just around the corner. But the left is the hegemony: the mercy-cult is the law of the land, the moral landscape, the firmware installed in your brain. We live in a culture that encourages decadence and dissolution, that says “you’re perfect just the way you are,” that wants you to enslave yourself to pleasures and expedience. Being disciplined, having self-respect – these are the real rebellion. The world hates men who behave like kings and warriors. “Stoic” is the only really bad word, because it is part of the word-cloud of toxic masculinity. But amid the suicide of the West, to be stoic may be the only way to survive and not let the world break you.

Epictetus, a Roman stoic, a slave, someone whom Marcus Aurelius studied, wrote a small volume called the Encheiridion – the Handbook – in which he laid out how a wise man can live a good life. I came across a passage in it that spoke to me about how we ought to conduct ourselves amid collapse:

So decide now that you are worthy of living as a full-grown man who is making progress, and make everything that seems best be a law that you cannot go against. And if you meet with any hardship or anything pleasant or reputable or disreputable, then remember that the contest is now and the Olympic Games are now and you cannot put things off any more and that your progress is made or destroyed by a single day and a single action. Socrates became fully perfect in this way, by not paying attention to anything but his reason in everything that he met with. You, even if you are not yet Socrates, ought to live as someone wanting to be Socrates.

You – we – I – cannot put things off any longer. Start solving your problems today. Start small, as small as you have to, just as long as you’re moving in the right direction. Resolve your emotional traumas today. Develop self-love and self-respect and self-discipline today. Start storing your grain for winter today. Stop putting it off, because the act of “putting things off” shapes who you are.

The West is collapsing because we have wandered into a social imaginary of “it’s okay, someone else will take care of it, someone else will be responsible, someone else will uphold the covenant with the world.” We have taken shortcuts and broken the covenants that undergird civilization itself. If the men of Thoreau’s time lived lives of quiet desperation, then the men of our time live lives of flamboyant dissipation. We live weak, flabby lives at the expense of who we could become if we weren’t merely the sum of our vices and addictions.

Rebellion means that you must refuse your daily dose of Soma. Take your life seriously – aspire to an ideal. You can be Christian if you want, but, as Jordan Peterson puts it, live as if you believed in God. Live as if your life matters, and that it is precious, and that human life can amount to more than being a part of the slobbering mob. Start today. Start now. We’re out of time.