Here’s Eric Voegelin writing about our current times, sixty years before they became current …
Justin [St. Justin Martyr] started as an inquiring mind and let his search, after it had tried the philosophical schools of the time, come to rest in the truth of the gospel. Today the situation is reversed. The believers are at rest in an uninquiring state of faith; their intellectual metabolism must be stirred by the reminder that man is supposed to be a questioner, that a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a "good Christian" but is a questionable man. And we may supplement the reminder by gently recalling that neither Jesus nor his fellowmen to whom he spoke his word did not yet know that they were Christians—the gospel held out its promise, not to Christians, but to the poor in the spirit, that is, to minds inquiring, even though on a culturally less sophisticated level than Justin's.
He concludes …
For the gospel as a doctrine which you can take and be saved, or leave and be condemned, is a dead letter; it will encounter indifference, if not contempt, among inquiring minds outside the church, as well as the restlessness of the believer inside who is un-Christian enough to be man the questioner.
For me, a lifelong questioner, at least one question has been answered, after years of not wanting to face the answer. If faith in the gospel is not motivated by the loving longing for the “answer to the enigma of existence”, and motivated by a commitment to living that answer with humility and charity, the gospel and this faith become not only a dead letter, but a deadly letter. Christianity becomes, as I’ve said before, a club you join to beat other people over the head with.
And, yes, I’ve been naive in thinking that the most visible manifestation of Christianity was really anything other than this, but here’s a Super Catholic author, writing in 2003, back when I believed that these people meant what they said. He is describing those who reject God and who busy themselves with rationalizing their sins …
Lying becomes a craft. For example, you discover that a great falsehood repeated over and over works even better than a small one. Nobody can believe that you would tell such a whopper; therefore, you have a motive to make every lie a whopper. This technique, called the Big Lie after a remark in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, is not a monopoly of dictators, or even of politicians; probably no one uses it in public life before he has practiced it in private. Our American variation on the Big Lie works by numbers instead of size. If you lie about everything, no matter how small, nobody can believe you would tell so many lies. The whistleblowers exhaust themselves trying to keep up with you, and eventually they have blown their whistles so many times that people think they must be the liars. By the time a few of your lies are found out, the virtue of honesty has become so discredited that no one cares whether you are lying or not: “They all do it.”
Irony of ironies! In less than twenty years after these words were written by this Ostentatious Christian, the hallmark of being an Ostentatious Christian had become endorsing both the Big Lie and the Big Liar.
The fact that I won’t do either, and point out how hypocritical it is for them to do it, has gotten me shunned from my former groups of friends, their apostolates and even any acknowledgement from them that I exist.
They stand condemned by the very things they claim to believe: especially their claim that God is Truth and that everyone who is of the truth hears the shepherd’s voice, the voice the poor in spirit have been seeking. The witness of the Lovers of the Lie is a witness against themselves. The stones they throw against others end up crashing through their glass houses and boomeranging back against them.
They continue as though they do not see this. They act as if it’s still 2003 and they haven’t been exposed and found out. They even feel vindicated by the Big Liar’s win and the collapse of the culture of truth they claimed to be trying to restore.
And yet there remains, outside of this insidious cult, this cult that has all the answers, (even if the answers are Big Lies) - and yet there remains “man the questioner”.
But, as I say, at least one of our questions has been answered.