Apocalypse Immediately!
... or How to Scroll Down
“I’m not Google”, I often have to tell my studenets. And, “Scroll down. It’s not hard. You can do it with your thumb. Scroll down.”
In my online Homeschool Connections high school course Living Scripture, my students are supposed to read various selections from the Bible every day (Monday through Friday), watch a video commentary of mine on the readings and then submit a question or a comment based on the readings and my commentary.
Here’s the Lazy Man’s Way of doing these assignments (i.e, the way much of the class prefers to do them). Don’t actually do the readings or watch the videos. Or, if you do, don’t engage with what’s being said, just ask some stupid question, like: “Where is the Red Sea?” Or, if there’s a Bible verse that confuses you, and you know you’re supposed to look individual verses up on biblehub.com, go ahead and look them up, but don’t scroll down. There’s a ton of information on every verse in the Bible at biblehub.com, but you have to do the exhausting work of scrolling down. Yikes! Actually scrolling down!
In other words, simple laziness. It’s a teenage thing. It’s a human thing.
But if the above are examples of simple teenage laziness, expecting to open your mouth and have Mr. O’Brien regurgitate into it while you sit in your nest and collect grades that mean nothing, then what’s the adult version of this?
I would call it Immediacy.
My last two posts have been about grace, and one of the things that got lost in the shuffle is the difference between the Protestant and Catholic notions of grace. Speaking in general, for Catholics grace is mediated. For Protestants, grace is immediate, in both senses of that term: grace is both instantaneous and direct (without a middle man or a communicating agent; not-mediated: im-mediate): it is immediate in time and immedate in space, without mode of conveyance.
How does this play itself out in the Revivalist Catholic Cult? Well, take the Pro-Life movement.
Michael W. Cuneo writes in Catholics Against the Church …
Many anti-abortionists could only deal with the issue by primitivizing reality - by conceiving abortion in starkly moral terms - and hence were unprepared to analyse the objective, structural conditions of Canadian society that contributed to the escalating abortion rate. … [They were] fervent Catholics who had invested pro-life activism with apocalyptic meaning. They were not simply concerned … with winning the issue, but also with playing out a personal drama of salvation.
The “apocalyptic meaning” that these anti-abortion Catholics Cuneo is describing assign to their pro-life identity is one of immediacy. They are apocalyptic because the apocalypse is beyond compromise; beyond disappointment; beyond mediation. The apocalypse is a time when we are “face to face”, when there are no means, no middle ground, where the end is in sight and we have arrived. Time and mediation end at the apocalypse and everything is immediate. Apocalypse Now is eternally Now.
And this short-cutting of reality is reflected in their notion of grace.
But the implications of enthusiasm go deeper than this; at the root of it lies a different theology of grace. Our traditional doctrine is that grace perfects nature, elevates it to a higher pitch, so that it can bear its part in the music of eternity, but leaves it nature still. The assumption of the enthusiast is bolder and simpler; for him, grace has destroyed nature, and replaced it. The saved man has come out into a new order of being, with a new set of faculties which are proper to his state; David must not wear the panoply of Saul. Especially, he decries the use of human reason as a guide to any sort of religious truth. A direct indication of the Divine will is communicated to him at every turn, if only he will consent to abandon the 'arm of flesh'-Man's miserable intellect, fatally obscured by the Fall. If no oracle from heaven is forthcoming, he will take refuge in sortilege; anything, to make sure that he is leaving the decision in God's hands. That God speaks to us through the intellect is a notion which he may accept on paper, but fears, in practice, to apply.
A new set of faculties, and also a new status; man saved becomes, at last, fully man. It follows that 'the seed of grace', God's elect people, although they must perforce live cheek by jowl with the sons of perdition, claim another citizenship and own another allegiance. For the sake of peace and charity, they will submit themselves to every ordinance of man, but always under protest; worldly governments, being of purely human institution, have no real mandate to exercise authority, and sinful folk have no real rights, although, out of courtesy, their fancied rights must be respected. Always the enthusiast hankers after a theocracy, in which the anomalies of the present situation will be done away, and the righteous bear rule openly. Disappointed of this hope, a group of sectaries will sometimes go out into the wilderness, and set up a little theocracy of their own, like Cato's senate at Utica. The American continent has more than once been the scene of such an adventure; in these days, it is the last refuge of the enthusiast.
And so, for members of the Cult of Trump, this explains the mistrust of reason, the rejection of experts, the disdain for the effort involved in “scrolling down” and actually fact-checking something on your own. Thus the “hankering” after a theocracy. Thus the contempt for “them”, since they are not enlightened and have no right to govern or vote (and we’d rather not “live cheek by jowl with the sons of perdition” anyway). Thus the eagerness of MAGA Republicans to destroy as many institutions as they can: government, schools, the legal system, law and order, etc. - all of which are “conveyors of grace” (so to speak), means to ends, the imperfect and winding roads of incremental advance. Thus the Apocalpyse. Thus the immediate.
It used to be that research had to be done by getting in your car and driving to the library, looking things up in card catalogues and back-of-the-book indexes. Now we can Google something, pull up a website and use our thumbs to scroll down.
But why bother doing all that work? There must be a shorter way around it, right?