Middle Class Christianity

I guess it was a good thing to despair a bit, because it made me think about theOchlophobist, and upon googling, I found out he was blogging again. This is a good thing:

There was a lady in the village who died last week at the age of 104. Her Calvinist great grandson, who my wife went to school with, said she had "gone into the arms of Jesus." Usually I don't like to think of Calvinists being saved (I prefer the blessed irony of the confident in God's particular favor being damned, yes, I'm an asshole), but I figure if you suffered 104 years on this miserable ball of dirt Jesus at least owes you a hug, so I won't curse the man's prayer.

From The End of Summer.

Anyway, I started thinking him because he's smart enough to be plagued with the disease of Marxism, an honest strain, not that zombie variety you find among the bureaucrats. Marx, if my Austrian interlocutors are to be believed, believed in poly-logism. This essentially consisted of each class having its own logic. There is only one logic, anything looking like a different logic would be, at best, an erroneous system of thought. Mises went and sorted this whole thing out in his serious, methodological way, and I suppose this was necessary back in the day when middle & upper middle class people were constrained the lack of contraception and the massive scam that is modern academia.

There is no poly-logism, but there seems to be poly-emotionalism. 80% of Catholic Youth apparently leave the Church. Why?

Youth leave the Church because they have not encountered Christ and His love. Period. That’s the answer. Being Christian entails the passionate desire to be with God forever. That’s what the Christian desires more than anything else. God. To be with the One that loves you more than any other.

I don't believe this. I think a lot of the youth feel Christ's love. They feel very loved, especially if they are pretty. What they do not see is how to get on about the business about being an adult in this world. St. Paul's advice, despite waxing euphoric about the joys of being single for the Lord, was to marry them, and if you get into 1st Timothy, you'd begin to realize he wouldn't be sending young single women to college, nor to the missionary fields for that matter. Women, according to St. Paul, are saved through motherhood.

Meanwhile the men have their own hard time trying to find a decent job with which to provide for a family in the first place. They also tend to get browbeaten from the pulpit sometimes. Clergy have figured out that women have money and tend to stick around to network even if they don't really care about Christ, so many pander to them. And, besides, men have not developed a sense of solidarity, so one can very often pick on men without incurring the ire of other men.

The modern Christian response to this seems to be evangelism. It ceases to look like people going out and bringing Christ to other people after a while, and suddenly it looks like a bunch of middle class folk going out and saying, "hey, be like me!" This doesn't work. Very few people raised on Natural Light and/or malt liquor feel comfortable at your wine tasting. But lets face it, you don't actually invited them to your wine tastings, do you?

In Marx's day, this class generally settled down and had a passel of children. The men might have to get married in their 30s and 40s if they needed to secure provisions, but the women were largely married in their teens and twenties. The focus was having children. Marx could be forgiven for thinking there was a poly-logism, since he wasn't faced with such clear evidence as we have today. The middle class killing itself, refusing to give up the scam foisted upon them. Their numbers shrink continually. Their own children take a dive of the end of the socio-economic pier. In many cases, including the Catholic case, they seem to be committing suicide rather than stop compromising with this crazy modern world.

I don't know. I've got some sort of cold/cough, and whatever it is effecting my mood at the very least. Obviously, I am not a Marxist. I just think Marxists are really good at seeing class stuff, and I am rather despairing right now of seeing genuine change. Maybe it's like Cuba- no real change until what they call the 'special period', when they starved, after the Eastern Bloc shut down and stopped sending them supplies. Up till then it was all industrialization, and then they had to change. Of course, a lot of people had to starve too. And they are still plagued with the Revolution.