Keeping Tradition Alive

Only One Place Still Can

Recently, I published several critiques of my church’s new catechism on Twitter. This church, the LCMS, is an old denomination going back 176 years and has seen many changes since. This new catechism would have furthered these changes, capitulating to the Satanic framing of the modern world, but thanks to a combined effort of laymen and clergy, this catechism has been temporarily withdrawn and will be subjected to review.

While there are many conclusions to draw from the events of this last week, one conclusion is particularly important but extremely easy to overlook. While this could later be entirely repudiated, a major church body seems to have now reversed its slide into worldly modernism. While those unconnected to the story may think “so what”, just step back for a moment and consider the context. Here we have a major institution (vitally important to me and many others) that has put up resistance to the seemingly constant slide leftward. An institution has finally said “enough”!

And consider the even broader context. The fact that this can still happen irrefutably proves that we have institutions that are not entirely captured. Perhaps they are partially captured or trending in that direction, but they are not so far gone as to be unsalvageable.

Step back further and take in the even broader context. Some churches are still fighting this battle. Corporations, governments, militaries, schools and universities, political parties and interest groups, all have already lost this battle and succumbed to extremely worldly evil, but not churches, at least not yet. And not just any churches, but specifically American churches have resisted this full-scale assault for a while now.

The other Western churches have entirely failed and need to be cleansed. The real ones that are left are a tiny minority in nations that used to be almost entirely Christian but became complacent. The non-Western churches that so often get touted as traditional have yet to face this evil as a whole. Some of these churches outside the West have already fallen to other assailants than the kind we see in the West (the syncretism of Christianity with local paganism in parts of South America, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa comes to mind), but most are yet to encounter the insidious, nigh-undetectable force that is incremental modernism.

The American churches, however, still fight. The story of the LCMS and the catechism is just one example, sure, but many other bodies are currently experiencing similar development, and instead of merely bowing to the world’s tyranny, many American Christians are fighting back. Despite my disagreements with them, this whole battle has been playing out for decades in a slightly different form in a denomination that was written off at the time, the Southern Baptist Convention¹. These two examples should be more than enough proof to even the most cynical among us that we can, in fact, rectify our institutions and then, eventually, our culture.

The fact that this is happening in America is no coincidence either. Realistically looking at the state of Western Civilization, America is the only place left that can fight for and sustain a traditional society. Of all the people of the West, Americans are still the only unfashionable people who still hold profound, real conviction through faith in God. Despite the many errors that I could find in the confessions of those Americans, they are still leagues ahead of Europeans, Australians, Canadians, and any other vestiges of West, whose people largely fall somewhere between total scorn for Christianity or viewing it as a curiosity, trying to intellectualize the religion to be used as a utility.

Being the shining city upon a hill, even when everywhere else is dark, is our heritage, after all.

To rephrase, Americans are the only ones that can uphold a traditional Western society, because Americans are the only ones that still cling with genuine fervor to the beliefs that allow Western society to exist. Americans will not simply uphold and defend Western society because it is good or efficient or whatever else. Rather, Americans have to uphold and defend Western society because it is a natural consequence of the faith which those gallant hardliners so stubbornly hold.

1. As a general rule in American Christian culture, major cultural divisions will start first in one of the larger denominations and very slowly spread to the others. In this case, the modern/traditional dividing of a church over abortion played out early in the Southern Baptist Convention.