The Strange Survival of Conservative Christianity

 From The European Conservative:

Of special significance is Christianity’s proposal of the possibility of redemption. This is a concept alien to much of modern society. The attitude of conservative Catholics towards the former National Front activist Joseph Pearce, or another ‘ex-gay,’ Michael Voris, baffles many secular people. Aren’t these ‘bad’ people, according to Christianity itself, they ask? They aren’t bad people, is the reply, because they have turned away from their old life, embraced the faith, and written and spoken about it to boot.

By the same token, the secular Left appears to take the view that it does not really matter if good people—that is to say really Good People—do bad things because they are Good People. If President Obama bombs civilians in Afghanistan or locks migrant children in cages, it doesn’t amount to anything of significance because these actions do not reveal his character. The world is divided between people who are basically Good and people who are basically Bad. Misclassification is possible, as Harvey Weinstein—once regarded as Good, now revealed as Bad—discovered. But, like finding out that you were ‘assigned the wrong gender’ at birth, the necessary correction is backdated. If it turns out that you are Bad now, it follows that you always were.

To this simplistic picture the ideology of wokeness has added an extra element: the purity spiral. If you want to be recognised as Good and stay that way, you have to demonstrate not an absolute but a relative moral worth: your moral superiority to others.

First, you have to be among the earliest and the harshest to condemn deviations from woke doctrine; second, you must espouse the most extreme statements of woke principle. The first is only possible if there is a steady supply of denunciations; the second is only possible if there is a steady supply of new principles, of escalating absurdity. Purity spirals are unsustainable in the long term, but while one of these spirals continues, rehabilitation is unthinkable: the opportunity to denounce someone for past sins is just too valuable—for anyone caught up in the spiral—to forgo. (Read more.)

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