Why don't we simply call what is happening politically in the United States what it is? Idolatry. To see the way our president sincerely seems to trust a human institution to fix all the ills of human existence - or a vast number of them - is wrong-headed at best. At worst, it is a Romantic form of Gnostic humanism: if we can imagine the federal government spending its way to a human Utopia, we can forget all that rot about a Doctrine of Original Sin. Who needs a truly transcendent God to help us?Ah, but, do not go too close; do not look at what the Administration plans regarding the on-going atrocity of abortuarial human sacrifice. Nay, and do not read the fine print about the elderly. There must be sacrifices. All of us will be called on to make sacrifices.
The trouble is, this idolatrous project is reversing the Judeo-Christian understanding of sacrifice as self-sacrifice and self-donation. It seems to carry with it a new connotation that is a very old, very sin-filled connotation of a very different kind of "sacrifice". Whenever one attempts to create a "hybrid religion," it will, ipso facto, degenerate into another sad paganism.
Do not listen to the themes, however well presented by teleprompted rhetoriticians. Watch the structure of what is happening.
When the Judeo-Christian morality and faith are rejected, ignored, or forgotten, one must expect the inevitable slide back toward pagan indifference to the value of human life and worse: the gradual rise of the recrudescence of paganism.
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