The Modern Age, the zeitgeist of which has long been known as liberalism, has driven the wedge of secularism between much of the society, culture(s) and civilization of what was once Christendom and the Christian faith and religion. If the influence of liberalism extended only to the temporal this would be bad enough but it has permeated the Christian Churches and sects as well. Over the last century and a half the word liberal developed a special connotation in the Churches and sects where it denoted people who saw the narratives of the Bible as belonging to the same category as Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales, that is to say, stories valued for their utility in teaching life lessons to children rather than for their truth, people who saw no inconsistency in calling themselves Christians and going to church every Sunday even though they did not believe in the supernatural assertions made about Jesus Christ in the ancient Creeds. Liberals, in the theological sense, often cloaked their unbelief in ways they thought were clever. For example, they would say that they believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ “in the sense” that He lived on in the hearts of His followers. This meant that they did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ as that phrase had been understood by everyone from the Apostles through the middle of the nineteenth century, i.e., that Jesus Christ, after He had been crucified and buried, returned to life in His body, left the Tomb, and walked and talked among His disciples again, before ascending physically to Heaven. Perhaps the theological liberals thought that those who continued to hold to this traditional belief in this traditional understanding were so much less sophisticated than themselves that they, the traditionalists, would never catch on to how this re-interpretation of the event made their profession of belief into one of unbelief. If so, theological liberals are well-named for that is the same attitude that more generic liberals take to non-liberals in general.
In his Christianity
and Liberalism (1923), J. Gresham Machen, then Professor of New Testament
at Princeton Theological Seminary, contrasted traditional, orthodox,
Christianity with theological liberalism and drew the inescapable conclusion
that they are two separate religions.
This same assessment was more recently asserted by retired Anglican
priest Rev. George Eves in the title of his Two Religions,
One Church. Indeed, it
has long been a bit of a puzzle as to why liberals continue to see themselves
as belonging to the Christian faith. A
partial answer can be found by considering the matter in terms of the
Aristotelian distinction between essence and accidents. Orthodox or conservative Christians
consider the articles of faith in the ancient Creeds to be the essence of
Christianity. This is true even of conservative
Protestants who belong to non-liturgical, non-sacramental, sects who might shudder
at that wording as being too “Catholic” for their liking. The doctrines that they regard as essentials
or fundamentals of Christianity rather than distinctions of their denominations
are ones that either can be found as articles in the Apostles’ and Nicene
Creeds or which express the basic unspoken belief underlying the Creeds that
the Christian Scriptures are authoritative special revelation from God. Fundamentalism, for example, in its original
form - an inter-denominational co-operative effort of conservatives fighting
the encroaching liberalism - identified “five fundamentals” as being
particularly under attack by liberalism at the time and as forming a basis for
their contra-liberal ecumenical efforts.
Originally taken from a 1910 Presbyterian declaration, these have been
formulated in a myriad of ways, each slightly different from the others, but
basically, the first is a strongly worded affirmation of Scriptural authority,
usually using words like inspiration or inerrancy, and the other four are
affirmations about Jesus Christ all of which can be found in the articles of
the Creeds – usually His deity, Virgin Birth, Resurrection, and Second Coming. This can be criticized from a more
conservative or orthodox position as being too reductionist – the Apostles’
Creed, the simplest of the ancient Creeds, famously consists of twelve
articles, one for each of the men from whom its title is derived – but my point
is that conservatives, whether traditionalist or “fundamentalist”, all
recognize the articles that make up what we call “the faith” as essential to
Christianity. Liberals, by contrast, see
all such articles of faith more as Aristotelean accidents, external trappings
that can be discarded without altering the essence of Christianity.
The conservatives, obviously, are right. One of the things that has made Christianity
distinct among the religions of the world from the very beginning is that
Christianity, more than any other religion, is a faith, a community held together by a set of common beliefs and
defined by those beliefs. This is true
even if we limit the comparison to the monotheistic religions that look to
Abraham as a spiritual patriarch. What
is believed is and always has been far more important to Christianity than to
either Judaism or Islam. It is
ludicrous therefore to take that which has historically defined Christianity
and make it out to be her disposable outward trappings rather than her very
essence. It becomes even more ludicrous
when we turn to the question that necessarily arises out of this observation
about liberalism, the question of what they regard as the essence of
Christianity, if they see the articles of faith as her accidents.
The answer, of course, is that for liberals it is
Christianity’s ethical or moral message that is her essence. Note that the first obvious immediate effect
of making Christianity into an ethical message cloaked in the external
trappings of a supernatural belief system is to radically decrease the
difference between Christianity and other religions. This is so for two reasons. The first is that which we have already
observed about Christianity being distinct from other religions, even the other
Abrahamic monotheistic religions, in prioritizing belief. In Christianity what is believed comes
first, what is done comes second. In
every other religion what is done takes precedence over what is believed. A theory of Christianity that makes her
ethical message her essence and her article of faith her accidents eliminates
this distinction. The other reason is
that Christianity’s ethical message has never been her most distinctive element. In explanation, let us start by limiting the
comparison to the Abrahamic monotheistic religions and more narrowly to
Christianity and Judaism. In His
ethical teachings, that is to say, His teachings that pertained to how people
were to behave and live their lives, Jesus Christ taught the Mosaic Law as an
absolutely authoritative text. While
this is often missed by those who superficially read the “ye have heard it
said…but I say unto ye” contrasts in His most famous Sermon and gloss over the
warning He gave at the beginning not to take His words as contradicting and
setting aside the Mosaic Law, it is nevertheless the case. The difference between the ethical teachings
of Christianity and the ethical teachings of Judaism could be said to be the
difference between the Mosaic Law as taught and interpreted by Jesus Christ and
the Mosaic law as taught and interpreted by the rabbis (originally the lay
teachers of Pharisees, a sect within Second Temple Judaism the clergy of which
were the Levitical priests, these took on a more clerical role in post-Temple
Judaism). Without wanting to make this
difference less than it actually is, for most of the last two thousand years
had you told either Jews or Christians that the most important and essential
differences between the teachings of their two religions lay in the realm of
ethics they would have thought you belonged in a nut house. Broadening the comparison, while certainly instances
can be pointed to where different religions take opposing positions on
particular ethical issues, a good case can be made that of all the different areas
that religious teachings address this is the one where they have the most in
common. See the appendix to C. S.
Lewis’ The Abolition of Man (1943).
That liberalism’s making Christianity’s ethical teachings into her
essence and her articles of faith into her accidents radically reduces the
difference between Christianity and other religions is something that is
appalling to Christians who believe in Him Who said “I am the way, the truth,
and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” and of Whom St. Peter
said by the power of of the Holy Ghost “Neither is there salvation in any
other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we
must be saved” but appealing to religious liberals qua liberals. Liberalism,
not just religious liberalism but liberalism in general, has long been obsessed
with the idea that it can create a better world in which all people live in
peace and harmony and that differences between people – originally and
especially religious, but also differences of race, ethnicity, sex, etc. – are
stumbling blocks on the path to this man-made Paradise that they need to clear
out of the road. Even today’s “woke”
left, which on the surface seems like a movement deliberately trying to do the
opposite of this, to create a world of disharmony and strife by magnifying said
differences to the nth degree, is, in fact, another variation on this same
liberal theme, one that is distinguished by the tactic it shares with Nazism
and Communism of othering and scapegoating, of placing all the blame for
disharmony and strife and basically the world being anything other than an
earthly Paradise on specific groups, religious (Christians), racial (whites),
etc.
Liberalism, as argued three paragraphs ago, is wrong that
Christianity’s ethical teachings are her essence rather than her articles of
faith. This error is compounded by the
fact that religious liberalism’s ethical teachings are radically different from
what Christianity has taught about ethics and morals for the last two thousand
years. Liberalism explains this by
claiming that Jesus Christ’s original ethical teachings were corrupted by His disciples
and especially by the Apostle Paul into something that conformed more closely
to those of Judaism and/or the Greek philosophers. The only historical evidence we have,
however, is of the Jesus Whose teachings as recorded in the Gospels harmonize
with those of St. Paul in his epistles, and not of the hypothetical Jesus with
radically different teachings postulated by liberalism.
Exactly what liberalism claims the “true” ethical teachings
of Jesus were has changed over the course of the century and a half that religious
liberalism has been afflicting the denominations of Christianity. Generally, however, the values of the
ethical teachings of religious liberalism’s “historical Jesus" line up
closely with those espoused and promoted by political liberalism at any given
moment in time. This has remained constant, even though the
values that political and religious liberalism promote together frequently
change. There is one other constant,
however, and that is the idea that Jesus’s teachings essentially boil down to “be
nice to each other”.
This particular idea requires special attention because a)
it has spread beyond the kind of religious liberalism described above and can
be found espoused even by some who would usually be considered conservative or
orthodox and b) it correlates with a problematic phenomenon in the broader
society. This is the phenomenon in
which such an exaggerated value is placed on such things as being positive and
non-confrontational, always smiling and acting cheerful, and the like, that
they either a) hinder or outright prevent a host of other things of equal or
superior value, such as truth and honesty or b) serve as an outward, superficial,
mask of thoughtfulness towards others behind which those who are exceptionally self-centered
and who delight in controlling and/or hurting others hide. Feminist writers – I think that Elizabeth
Hilts, the author of a series of books giving exceptionally bad advice to women
was probably the first – have been referring to this phenomenon as it pertains
to the first of the two identified drawbacks at least insofar as it affects
women as “toxic niceness” for decades. Such
writers, in my opinion, speak from the perspective of a repugnant solipsism that
tends to blind them from seeing anything outside the perceived victimhood of
their own sex and which renders their idea of which truths are suppressed by
excessive niceness highly inaccurate.
Nevertheless, since the phenomenon is real and affects both sexes rather
than merely the one, we shall borrow their term for it as a better one could
hardly be coined. We shall concentrate,
however, on the second drawback.
That toxic niceness, this cult of excessive and unbalanced positivity,
can serve as a cloak of hypocrisy over a particularly vicious form of nastiness
is quite evident. Indeed, it is almost
axiomatic to say that the sort of people who are always acting upbeat, who
always wear a big smile plastered on their faces, who try never to say anything
that isn’t positive turn out, if you get to know them at all, to be the biggest
jerks and jackasses. Who is not
familiar with the kind of person who smiles and acts like your best friend to
your face but who stabs you the moment your back is turned? Or the sort of person who never confronts
anybody, who never goes to someone and says “Hey, I have a problem with what
you just said/did”, and who may sometimes go around bragging about what a
non-confrontational person he is, but who is constantly running with complaints
about everyone to those in positions of power and authority as fast as his tale
can tattle.
Here in the Dominion of Canada we have in recent decades allowed
toxic niceness to permeate the culture to the point that we are all suffocating
from it. My province calls itself “friendly
Manitoba”, an expression that can be found on the license plates of our
automobiles. Yet Winnipeg, the city in
which I live is a city in which it is notoriously difficult to change lanes
when you need to do so because other drivers will speed up or slow down –
whichever it takes – to prevent you from doing so. Just last week I heard a radio station, I
forget which one, in which an advertisement referred to our city as the place
where turn signals are optional. In
Winnipeg, if you signal that you need to change lanes and there are vehicles behind
you, they will immediately pull into the lane you wish to move into and speed
up – all without signaling themselves – so that you either have to aggressively
beat them into the lane or wait for them all to pass you, even if this means
missing your turn or illegally brining your car to a stop in the middle of the
street. This is one of the most
inconsiderate, jerkish, ways of driving that can be conceived short of
something criminal and cartoonish like driving down the sidewalk and stamping
out a tally of the number of pedestrians you knock down on the side of your car. Yet it is typical of the drivers in the
capital of “friendly Manitoba”. This
example is topped, however, by that of the current Prime Minister of Canada who
could be said to be the poster boy for toxic niceness. He won his first election on a platform of
empty positivity which he contrasted with the supposed negativity of the
previous government. He borrowed the
phrase “sunny ways” from Sir Wilfred Laurier as his motto. He carefully crafted this image of a
smiling, upbeat, positive person who is all about caring and listening and
being inclusive. Beneath it all,
however, he quickly proved to be a truly nasty jerk and bully, a real υἱός τῆς κῠνός with an abnormally low level of
toleration for those who disagree with him, who saw the caring and compassion
of other Canadians as a means for him to exploit to rob Canadians of their
basic civil rights and liberties and seize more power for himself.
These examples from the broader culture and society show how
beneath an excessive emphasis on being nice the worst sorts of nastiness can be
hiding. What is true of toxic niceness
in the broader culture is also true, perhaps even more so, of the reduction of
Christianity or at least her ethical message to the idea that we ought to “be
nice”.
How anyone ever got the idea that Christianity was all about
being nice is beyond me. Those who use
the word “Christlike” as if it were a synonym for “nice” are especially
befuddling. Have they never read the
twenty-third chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew in which the dear
Lord gives a harangue, almost the length of the chapter, directed against the
scribes and Pharisees in which He repeatedly calls them “hypocrites” “fools” “brood
of vipers” and the like, likens them to “whited sepulchers, which indeed appear
beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all
uncleanness” and threatens them with hellfire and damnation? Ironically, if any of the sort of people I
have in mind were to hear anyone today talk like this the first thing they
would say would be that he is not being very “Christlike”. It does not seem from this chapter that being
nice was top priority with the Lord Jesus.
Nor would the incident recorded two chapters previously in which, having
arrived at the Temple after His Triumphal Entry, He overturned the tables of
the moneychangers and dove merchants and drove them all out (St. John in his
Gospel records a similar incident that took place prior to the start of Jesus’ preaching
ministry in which He drove the merchants out of the temple with a scourge)
suggest that following Jesus’ example means being nice all the time.
Jesus did not tell His disciples to be nice, a word that
does not appear in the Authorized Bible and which in other versions appears
only in the Old Testament in reference to things, words, and situations rather
than people. Indeed, the very appeal of
niceness to so many today, whether they be professing Christians or just
members of the broader society, is that unlike those things which Jesus did
enjoin upon His disciples, such as a righteousness that exceeds that of the
scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 5:20) and to love one another (Jn. 13:34), niceness
is neither difficult nor does it cost its practitioner anything. It is the ideal virtue for the virtue signaler,
the sort of person who likes to go around showing off how good of a person he
is with cheap, shallow, and empty forms of goodness that either come with no
cost or have a cost that he can easily export to others, in order to gain the
praise, credit, and applause of other people.
The sort of person, in other words, who does the same thing Jesus
rebuked the Pharisees for doing in Matthew 23:4-5.