Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.  Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

Alert: In May of 2015, I became aware of indications (and here, here, and here) that Liberation Theology is a disinformation active measure of the KGB … and, one presumes, its continuation under the name FSB.  I am inclined to credit these indications.  Therefore, although the this essay, on so-called Liberation Theology, dating from 2008, does not cover that aspect of the phenomenology of Liberation Theology, which, along with KGB/FSB, is referenced below, bear in mind that I would have treated of it approvingly had I known or guessed about it then.  I should have.  Notwithstanding that lapse of mine, the essay stands.

In Honor Of My Countrymen
Who Fell In Battle …

 

Long noted is the fact that, long since, so-called mainline churches — Protestant, Anglican, Reformed — in the Americas and Europe are hemorrhaging members.  The phenomenon traces more or less easily from just after World War I.  The rate slows a bit just after World War II — in the Americas — and then increases relentlessly in and after the 1960s.  In the Americas slower than in Europe, but the phenomenon is the same on both continents.

Today most professed Christians are not church members or not church participants.

Now nearing the record book is a one-hundred-year arc of hemorrhaging their membership by so-called mainline churches.

Why?

The Roman Catholic Church, with regional exceptions, experiences the same phenomenon through the later years of the same time-frame, though with less rate of speed and with small-to-large reversals of the phenomenon here and there, such as appears to be happening today in the USA and possibly Italy.

Why?

Because the churches went Pacifist.  They promoted disarmament.  Which is to say, they went Red.  In fact, the churches succumbed to active measures created by Cheka/NKVD/KGB/FSB.  These successor organizations, with a constant mission to disrupt political, moral and economic proceedings of especially the USA and Europe, pitched to church leaders — clerical, professorial, monastic, medical — that Christianity is Socialist and Socialism Pacifist.  They eisegeted parables and sayings of Jesus the Christ to make their point.  They excelled at special pleading and other forms of deception.

Taking an enemy country pacifist — disarmed — by penetrating her religious organizations, is a clever prelude to looting and controlling that country.  As go religious organizations, so go schools.  And as go schools, so go politics.  So it is spoken, so it is done.  Give KGB credit for effective professionalism: in the 21st Century, who needs an army, after all; are we not better than that now?

(Today another voice intones the same mawkish blandishments in the Americas and Europe: Caliphists.  I wonder why.  No, really, I do not.)

So-called mainline church leaders took the bait with ease and even eagerness.  By the 1960s, mainline churches and their seminaries and colleges were in a position to support — and did support — further KGB active measures directly disrupting political, moral and economic processes and policies in the USA and Europe.

Roman Catholic leaders — clerical, professorial, monastic, medical — mostly resisted, or at least resisted longer and more strongly, the hullabaloo that Christianity is Socialism and Socialism Pacifist.  This accounts for the slower and smaller hemorrhaging of members from the Roman Catholic Church compared to that of the Protestant, Anglican and Reformed churches.

Notwithstanding, since the 1950s Roman Catholic leaders are beset with their own version of the Cheka-made active measure to identify Christianity with Socialism, Pacifism and now even Leninism.  It came from Roman Catholic professors and monastics in South America who had been bent by KGB.  Those professors and monastics named their creation Liberation Theology (as if there is another kind).  Exemplars in the USA include the Berrigan brothers and their orders, certain orders or convents of nuns and a large number of Roman Catholic secular professional laity.  A famous late-life Roman Catholic pacifist was Bishop Fulton Sheen, effectively exiled by his peers for his persuasion.

The Roman Catholic Church as a whole has never been amenable to pacifism.  The same cannot be said of the so-called mainline churches.

During the 1960s, USA Protestant, Anglican and Reformed ecclesial academics adapted Liberation Theology — Christianity as Socialism/Pacifism/Leninism — and called it Black Theology or Black Liberation Theology and Feminist Theology or Female Liberation Theology.

Jim Cone brought Black Liberation Theology to The Union Theological Seminary, NYC, the year I graduated at that institution. Beverly Wildung had brought Feminist Liberation Theology there earlier but was not open about it until Cone arrived.  She was graduate assistant in Paul Lehmann’s course in Systematic Theology the year I undertook it.  Our text was John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (also here). We read it through.

The double fiction is that Christianity is Socialism and Socialism Pacifist.  This was the Cheka/NKVD/KGB/FSB blandishment in active measures that succeeded in disrupting Protestant, Anglican and Reformed churches and to some extent the Roman Catholic Church.

Their clamor against the death penalty, their agitation for abortion and their agitation for queers contributed to membership hemorrhaging at Protestant, Anglican and Reformed churches.  But these are not the main reason for that.  The main reason is, they went pacifist.  Which is to say, they went Red.  Which is to say, they undertook to assist Soviet state security bend and subvert USA national life and security to Soviet/Russian advantages.

Pacifism is a legitimate personal choice.  Laws recognize that legitimacy.  However, it is not a legitimate public choice.  An individual has authority to not defend their self.  No individual and no group has authority — nor can — to compel an individual or a group to not defend themselves.  Pacifism is a legitimate choice for an individual and has no further legitimacy.

Church leaders accept from Cheka/NKVD/KGB/FSB active measures — aka Red subversion penetration — a double lie.  First, that Christianity is Socialism.  Second, that Socialism is Pacifist.  So their members leave.  Who in their right mind would not?

Today, Red-diaper babies and Red-diaper grand-babies affix hands to mechanisms of government, ecclesia, academe and media in Europe and the Americas.  They eisegete especially the parable of the good Samaritan to perpetuate lies their parents and grandparents learned from Soviet state security starting almost a hundred years ago.  The lies help to keep their hands affixed: Socialism is Christianity, Pacifism is Morality.

That being so, it is also true that deformations of Christianity purporting that Christianity is pacifist live in the USA since before her founding.  Two, to be precise: Unitarianism and Quakerism.  Harvard and Haverford.  Both deformities also anticipate the fiction that Christianity is socialist.  In addition, North America hosts self-organizing experiments in utopian, pacifist communalism.  Social reform it has been called.  A double example is New Harmony, Indiana, where my theological mentor, Paul Tillich, rests In Memoriam.

The War To End All Wars was a pacifist slogan, a lie on its face proved so by its eating.

War is the father of all things.  Love is the mother of all things.  Neither that father nor that mother chooses not to defend their self.

The Church is neither Socialist nor Pacifist.  She has been neither ever.  The Church is the Spiritual Community fulfilling and transcending the dialectics and ambiguities of history.  Her churches’ members will return when their leaders — clergy, professors, monastics, physicians — restore Christianity to pews, pulpits and prosceniums.

Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God

Update I: Dezinformatsiya

Update II: Political correctness is disinformation (dezinformatsiya) (and here) to camouflage truth.  It descends from operations Cheka and its successors call aktivni meropriyatiya (Активные мероприятия, active measures).  From the phrase Latinate media take the designation activist.  An activist to them is a saint.  More political correctness.  A dissident, by contrast, as per Cheka indoctrination, is an enemy of the state/media — in which reposes ultimate authority — suitable for torture and execution.

Update III: Related, a superb treatise by Joseph Buttom, The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline

Update IV: Related, Dieterich Bonhoeffer on religionless Christianity (religionsloses Christentum).

Update V: Muslim Brotherhood Overruns National Cathedral in DC, and even more breath-taking moral equivalence/superiority here

Update VI: My Last Sermon: Christianity Free Of Religion

Update VII: A primer on Red subversion.

Update VIII: George Will on Fox News Special Report, 18JUN15, re Laudato Sii:

When [the Pope] comes to the US he should notice something about American religion.

As he leads the Catholic Church into greater and greater political activism and congruence with political fashion, he should notice that the mainline Protestant churches have done that well in advance of him, and the result has been more and more empty pews.

Related 1: Steven Hayward at Power Line: Jesus Christ, Climate Scientist, also The Pope’s Encyclical (1).  John Hinderaker writes his thoughts.

Related 2: Ryan T. Anderson: Pope Francis’ Encyclical Is About More Than Climate Change.

Update IX: Sabeel: Liberation Theology, Anglican Edition, spouts in Gaza and the West Bank.  Two thoughts: (1) “I seen me an Arab, I seen me a Gaza and I seen me a West Bank, but I ain’t never seen me a Palestinian or a Palestine.” and (2) “I ain’t never seen me no liberation theology that was Christian.”

Update 10: Why The American Church Should Go Off The Grid

Update 11: What Really Happened At Synod 2015?

Update 12: France’s Catholic Revolution

Update 13: What About Syrian Christian Refugees?

Update 14: But the churches are NOT ethical authorities: Of Money And Morals

Update 15: How Churches Die

Update 16: Back to Canossa, only now it is the Pope standing bare-headed in the snow begging forgiveness from the ChiComs.

Update 17: Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo: ‘China is the best implementer of Catholic social doctrine,’

Update 18: This British Vicar has figured it out: Christian Life In Exile

Update 19: In 1965 Life Magazine Showed That Life Begins At Conception

Update 20: How Far Should Churches Go to Appeal to Men?

Most successful way to appeal to both men and women: Male only church leadership.

Men love to belong to male dominated organizations.  On the other hand, women love to belong to male dominated organizations.  Don’t believe me?  Have you ever thought it was odd that women always want to belong to men’s business organizations, men’s career fields, men’s social clubs, men’s athletic clubs, etc., but men avoid women’s organizations.

I once attended a large and rapidly growing conservative Lutheran congregation which had a male-only leadership.  I was astounded by two things.  First, board and congregational meetings were more calm, to the point and productive than any church meetings I have ever been to.  In three years, I never heard someone said, “Well, I feel . . .”  Second, it had the strongest bunch of women I have ever known in any church I’ve ever attended.  Having men in visible, public leadership roles and the women in deeply influential, behind the scenes roles worked very well for that congregation.

I suspect the church’s acquiescence to feminism in the sixties and seventies badly damaged it.  As men fled the church, the church did not become larger.  It did not even get more women members because as the men left, the women follow them out the door.  The more women want to be in charge, the more men leave.  The more men leave, the more the women leave because an organization is only valuable to them if there are lots of men in it.  It’s deeply ironic, isn’t it?

Update 21: Bishop nixes Nicene Creed at Epiphany Mass to avoid offending unbelievers

Update 22: The Babylon Bee: Episcopalians Confused By Strange Book Trump Brought To Church

Update 23: Don Surber: Why people leave the church

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA