AKA the Great Awokening.

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Here is a stream-of-consciousness article by a very intelligent person.  Much wrong in it, but also much right.

The basic sound idea is that American Christianity had a complex of basic ideas that crossed traditional denominational boundaries.  Think something like Mere Christianity but even less creedal than that.  And that Latter-day Saint Christianity was an expression par excellence of this American religious basis.

And that a new religion arose many decades ago (she blames the closing of the frontier) and is now at the point of mass conversion.  Call it progressivism or woke-ism.  It has reached the stage where it is successful enough that it now characterizes the prior religion and its icons as devils and demons and tries to smash them.  Hence things like the 1619 Project and tearing down statues of Thomas Jefferson.  While, in contrast, laying wreaths at the feet of Martin Luther King.

Clearly a religious act, once someone points it out to you.

As far as this goes, its correct.  A new religion is on the rise and we don’t recognize it mainly because it has developed camouflage against some of the more obvious and traditional markers of conventional religion, such as calling their meetings services, their rites sacraments, and their deities gods.  But the map is not the territory and changing the markers affects but does not eliminate the underlying reality. (From this standpoint it is interesting that the Book of Mormon, written for our day, says that there are basically only two churches.)

Which  means that we are in the position of late-Roman pagans, or of Christians after the Arab Muslim conquest.

Which is why it is so disturbing when you see  BYU enthusiastically adopt progressive religious tropes and institutions like ‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion,’ and ‘the marginalized.’  The concepts themselves are not per se wrong.   But so what.  Neither would it be wrong for a Coptic Christian, for example, to say that their Muslim overlords had some good insights into the oneness of God and to spend a lot of time preaching and writing about the oneness of God, without any qualification or anything to distinguish it from the Muslim teaching.  Not per se wrong, divorced from context.  But the context is everything, and everyone knows that these halfway steps mean.

It is very disturbing to see Church  magazines and even Church leaders adopt the same language.  It is an advanced stage of dhimmification–you know you are really and truly subject to a hostile power–when your leaders feel forced to adopt the language of the dominant religion in hopes of avoiding persecution.  That is a bad sign; some might say that it is a bad sign of the internal state of the Church, but that is NOT what I am saying, I am saying it is an objective indicator from a secular, historical perspective of how bad the external situation h as become.  Think the ‘islamizing’ Iconoclast controversy in Byzantium.  Whether or not iconoclasm made sense, the fact that it became a powerful trend at all is strong evidence the Byzantines felt the wind was at Islam’s back.

More tomorrow on what she gets wrong, and why its interesting.