It’s totally fuct in the head and hard as hell to unravel and understand. Most of them just go along with it, unthinkingly.
They are led by a few ideologues who HAVE thought this stuff through. How they got this twisted makes sense when you think about Christianity’s development over the last 2000 years.
I have many Christian friends -fine people- but there is always something a little off about them. They don’t go around talking about the rapture. Wouldn’t be friends with them if they did. But what are they thinking? Every church is different. Some don’t talk about this crap at all. I didn’t in my Presbyterian upbringing. But many do talk about the second coming, incessantly. So there is a lot of twisted up stuff happening, still. We will see another William F. Buckley before too long. Who do we have right now? Falwell and Osteen?
I have been trying to find the context of when Buckley used this phrase, because I am curious if he was specifically referring to communism (which the right often critiqued with religious parallels) or just garden-variety welfare. And I can’t find it anywhere it’s referred to thousands of times and yet the original context seems lost and buried; all the search results are of the variety of “he popularized Voegelin’s phrase” without ever saying exactly when or where that started, or describing their own theory of what was meant by it. Oddly frustrating.
The slogan “Don’t immanentize the eschaton” means “don’t try to bring about peace, justice, tranquility, and social equality in the material world. Those things are best left for the world that is yet to come.”
It’s a high falooting way of saying “Fuck you, liberals, I got mine!”
Yyyyyyup. And the more I think about this, the more I realize the confusion is all theirs. They don’t know what to make of social justice. Their myths tell them the world has to devolve into complete chaos before judgment day. And yet the slow march of progress towards racial, sexual and gender equality exists. And it means more people are freer than they ever have been. But, to them, this can only represent their version of approaching the end times. And so there is a cognitive dissonance built in, and I think they resort to this high falutin doublespeak because their tortured souls are backed into a logical corner. In order to continue their way of life, they have to believe extreme absurdities. Does that remind you of another, similarly behaving group? Or groups? Religion will be our downfall as a species. It’s completely batty.
When I hear of these devout religious people, this sentence always pops into my head, “Don’t you recognize a bullshit story when you hear one?”
Not to go all #notall but I was raised hardcore christian and I never heard anyone go all in on this apocalyptic stuff. The end times was not really discussed much, even in (looking this up now) Matthew 24 it gets a little apocalyptic but the focus was always "don’t worry about the end times, we can’t know when judgement day is; the important thing is that you are personally ready:
And I never heard anyone really take Revelations all that seriously literal; I think a fair number of christians discount it as “well, it’s ineffable but that’s god for you, lol”.
Where in the world/country were you raised? I’m in the South. All I have to do is turn on the radio and tune into a Baptist station for my daily dose of the afterlife and some bible thumping. However, I was raised in the West, and as I said, Presbyterian, and so this stuff was an academic exercise in theology, at worst. And at best, like you said: not discussed.
My Christian background was that my parents shopped around for the church they liked the most and then became members there - so they weeded out (but would never condemn) the church’s that loved that shit. My aunt in NC definitely is in a Presbyterian church that is political and talks like that, but I never experienced it in Presbyterian or Methodist churches that I regularly attended in NC, OH, and MI. I’ve heard a lot of stories, but little personal experience.
It seems like if you get involved in the church enough to go to regional/state/national meetings of the church you come back with some stories of looney toons Christians.
The Presbyterian church I was in was highly progressive for its time. There was a group of elders who stood up to the pastor a lot, trying to torpedo his inititives. But he was skillful in persuading them and the rest of the church to do an amazing thing: open up the church itself, as in the buildings and grounds and events to a large group of Vietnamese and other southeast Asians who were a church but had no building.
He brought them in to have a second service (in Vietnamese language) and use our church as if it were their own, and integrate into the congregation, eventually becoming part of everything. Their stated goal, however, was that they wanted their own building, not to simply integrate with everyone else in the existing church. They did get their own church building a few years later.
This was something most people never thought the elders would go for. The deacons were in favor, but deacons were a much younger group of people in their 30’s and 40’s. I made many Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian friends that way, and we hung out at youth group all the time, & a few went to my school. This would never have happened if the church was all fire and brimstone. I felt sad when they announced their new church, felt like re-segregating in a way, since suddenly their presence at all church functions was greatly diminished. I was so young that I was not aware of any people really in favor of getting rid of them, but I bet there were a few.
To me, that’s the purpose that church should serve: community. All this other junk about the afterlife and the end times, to me, is a complete fabrication unworthy of airtime. But there it is. It does get a lot of airtime in a lot of places.
Extremist religion in the US would not have grown into such a problem if the ratbag bigots couldn’t hide behind the deference shown to “ordinary” Christians. The failure of supposedly decent Christians to clean house and resist the evil in their midst is a disgrace.
