Progressive culture in full-scale rebellion against God

One of the aspects of developing the venture of Catholic Unscripted, that I didn’t expect was the way in which people have begun to write electronic letters in response to things that we say online.

Some of these take the form of comments on the YouTube pages and others are sent by email or through some of the other channels.

As well as making new friends, it’s a very cheerful reminder that we are all sharing a journey of discovery in the faith.

I’ve found it very exciting and cheering in the depths of the end of January to look forward to some of the things that we have planned later on in the year, since it will allow us to meet some of the people we share this journey with in person.

We have two upcoming events in London, one in March and another in June and our visit to Chicago in April.  Details of these will be shared with you all this month.

Part of what we see ourselves doing, especially since we are involved in trying to rescue Catholic education from the influence of secularism is to become more skilful at deconstructing, the whole woke agenda.  That means learning what we can of it, as the whole agenda develops and envelops the Church.

An example of this took place in South Carolina a week or so ago.

A friend that all three of us share is Calvin Robinson. He got into terrible trouble – and found himself cancelled half way through a conference he had been invited to speak at.  A few weeks ago,  at an American conference when he was asked to talk about critical theory, some of his audience found what he had described to them to difficult, they cancelled him half way through the conference.

He had taken the subject seriously, and went back to the roots of what has gone wrong. He identified the prime driver as feminism.

And he described how once feminism has entered the church, following  it, there flowed a wholly new and different way of looking at life. It imposed the filter through power relations, instead of the life of the Trinity, and how that perverted everything, downstream in the life of faith.

The life of the Trinity is about self-giving interdependent love. The icon by Rublev is particularly helpful in allowing us to trace the gaze of love between three figures, who, nonetheless derive from the one.

And if love is self-giving then power of course is control, which is the opposite of love.

And it’s precisely this intensification of power that becomes control that feminism smuggles into Christian theology and relations.

Once you’re looking through the lens of power, everything is different.

I was completely astonished when I heard an intelligent Anglican clergyman internet blogger  talking after the Calvin Robinson speech crisis, and describing Jesus as ‘’the first feminist.

This involves such a foolish conflation and contradiction of categories. It took me some while to wind up my jaw from the floor, where it had dropped.

What happened in response to Calvin’s speech and analysis  was that the room was full of feminist Anglican clergy. They went ballistic when he described the feminism that generated their vocation as the entry point of woke politics. They walked out, and then collectively demanded he be silenced; which kind of proved his point. Especially since the whole conference have been called together to practice the principle of speaking the truth, together in love, and particularly celebrating the two integrities, as they called it, of the traditional and progressive camps.

Of course, you can’t have ‘two’ integrities. But even that has been lost in the attempts to, square the circle.

And perhaps the under-informed Anglican commentator had made a mistake, because people don’t really know what feminism is.

Feminism is in fact a historically and philosophically complex phenomenon.

It’s not easy to find time to do all the reading one wants to do to keep up with the fast pace of an argument in our society, so I am especially grateful to hear people more expert than me offer a brief synthesis of complex ideas.

I was especially glad to discover that one of our recent allies in the culture wars turns out to be an ex-lesbian academic called Mary Harrington who is just about to publish a new book on the conflict between feminism and progress.

I listened to her, explaining the ideas to some more of our cultural allies, the two hosts of trigonometry.

She suggested in a highly provocative and colourful phrase that the whole threatening advent of trans humanism was actually began with the contraceptive pill.

I’m particularly interested in this because it took me a very long time to get over the propaganda society had immersed me in, about both the pill and abortion.

One of the reasons why I was so pleased to become a Catholic was to discover, much too late in my life, the clear, theological and philosophical, thinking about both the pill, and the disaster of abortion.

And of course, that’s what propaganda is supposed to do. It’s supposed to stop you thinking.

The contraceptive pill is the first transhumanist piece of medical technology because it presented a radically different paradigm for what medical technologies should do.

Up until this point, medical technology set out to resist disease and make us well. It played a reactive role to illness.

With the pill it becomes a proactively  transformative agency instead.

 It turns the woman into a machine that has sex without biological consequences.  This constitutes the  first but enormously significant step away from her womanhood which was predicated on her fertility and child-bearing.

‘Cyborg woman’ as Harrington described her,  was the first step towards stripping both men and women of their God-given identity.

And who could have guessed that only decades later, as we have discovered this weekend, that a progressive politician would have raised demands for people to be able to change their sex after their death.

It becomes clearer as the arguments develop that progressive culture is in a full-scale rebellion against God’s revealed intention for us. And what we face now is at one level just an ideological continuation of the disastrous breach in mutuality that the Fall initiated between the sexes. Healed through the second Adam who found incarnate life through the obedience of the second Eve, we as Catholics are reaching out to our neighbours in two ways.

We are trying to find the best words we can to call them into the forgiveness of God and the re-creative world of forgiveness and spirit; and to warn them of the deception of the false promises made by the anti-god ideologies which offer so much and deliver so little.

Finding the friendship and skills of my two colleagues, Mark and  Katherine, and discovering that we all share the same vocation and apostolate has allowed us to share in what God has given each of us in a way that enriches what we have to offer.

It allows us to have conversations, make discoveries and enjoy the encouragement of friendship and exploratory faith which it is a great privilege to share.

Thank you for joining us in this shared aim to refresh and renew the Church, win souls for Christ, explain the beauty and mystery of the Catholic Faith.  We look forward to meeting as many of you as can make one of our live events this coming year.