Christ is not an ideology

A colleague scolded me recently for my argument that any attempt to reconfigure the culture must avoid being a pretext for smuggling Christendom back into the story.

“I happen to like Christendom,” he protested. “The great art, the great literature, the great works of Christendom are exactly what this culture needs.”

I told him he was, at best, indulging in an understandable, if unhealthy, nostalgia or, at worst, indulging in something unwittingly destructive: the reduction of Christ to ideology, to Christism. Such a reduction would destroy the Christian faith itself.

My case is made, I argued, by what has happened in Quebec over the last half-century, and particularly what happened in 2014. The Parti Quebecois’ horrific Charter of Values, thankfully defeated robustly in the spring provincial election, was a grotesque example of terminal-stage Christism. It was the debasement of Christ to a repressive political fiction.