Recognizing Christianity’s Evil Twin

Gargantuan errors seem to require great innate intelligence. There is no such thing as fool-proofing something; fools are far too ingenious. No system of thought is so balanced that a talented mind can’t tinker with it and throw it insanely out of whack. And yet, it seems that every mad genius makes a compelling argument about something because, well, he or she is actually right.

Thus it is that, from a certain angle, in dim enough light, modernist secular social justice (MSSJ), to the uncritical mind, may look a bit like Christianity, and is supported by seeming virtues that are drug analogs of Christian virtues.

Modernist secular social justice has a centuries-long pedigree that includes errant, Godless thought from multiple disciplines, a pedigree beyond the scope of this article. One of MSSJ’s most notable and notorious brands is Marxism. Due to that namesake’s reputation for lethal side-effects, the parent ideas continue to be employed without the brand label, but practitioner and practice are easily recognized by their toxic tools: the evil-twin virtues they cultivate and propagate.

Virtue. It’s not a word often heard these days, relegated to the same dustbin as the word morals. And perhaps you may find that, as you delve deeply into the subject, you have difficulty understanding the differentiation between virtues, gifts, and fruits; indeed, some entities may show up on multiple lists. For this discussion, we lay those nuances aside.

From the pulpit we hear about the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity, virtues instilled sacramentally by the grace of God; virtues that are easy to talk about because they are easily misrepresented, and the heresies of 3,500 years of salvation history have supplied us with a myriad of misrepresentations to accommodate our life-style choices.

Let’s examine those misrepresentations, those evil twins. Faith’s evil twin is certainty, a pseudo-religious/secular fideism—picture a bumper sticker that says, (insert ideolog, ideology, or science of choice) said it; I believe it; That settles it!

And then there’s hope’s evil twin: expectation. Hope makes no demands and has no expectations, only a sublime trust in ultimate fulfillment: the invincible glow of existence under the protective wing of infinite good. Expectation, on the other hand, fosters entitlement and envy.

Charity’s evil twin is duty. This impersonal Kantian philosophical disaster insists that positive action be driven not by charity but by necessity, and inevitably devolves to a sort of amoral empathy, a deep deference to fellow humans who find their identities in their urges. In Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI writes,

Part of Marxist strategy is the theory of impoverishment: in a situation of unjust power, it is claimed, anyone who engages in charitable initiatives is actually serving that unjust system, making it appear at least to some extent tolerable. This in turn slows down a potential revolution and thus blocks the struggle for a better world. Seen in this way, charity is rejected and attacked as a means of preserving the status quo. What we have here, though, is really an inhuman philosophy. People of the present are sacrificed to the moloch of the future—a future whose effective realization is at best doubtful.

How about the gifts of the Holy Spirit? Wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord? What are their unlikely likenesses? The following borrows heavily from Catholic Answers, which, in turn, borrows heavily from St. Thomas.

Wisdom. Terminology for wisdom’s evil twin varies somewhat with the zeitgeist, but currently is obviously wokeness. Of wisdom the dictionary says: The ability to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting; insight. From a Christian perspective, the last word in that definition, “insight”, is the most relevant because Christian wisdom is a gift and goes beyond sound judgment based on accrued life experience. It gives us the ability to judge human affairs according to divine truth.

Wokeness, on the other hand, is neither a gift of the Holy Spirit, nor a intragenerational lesson from the ancient school of hard knocks, but rather is lazily adapted from an intelligentsia narrative that makes the followers of such feel superior by goading them to judge everyone else—it’s just another not-so-novel nasty Gnosticism: that condescending glow of inner-circle special knowledge. Wisdom does not gloat; wokeness is gloat.

Understanding. Christian understanding is an attribute of wisdom—that is to say that in addition to choosing Godly courses of action as provided by wisdom, understanding is a gift of penetration, so to speak, into the mind of God. Similarly, counsel is walking with God, allowing one to be directed by him in matters necessary for one’s salvation. If either of these has an evil twin, it would be presumption—the delusion that the ideas that frame the spirit of the age are born of the greatest wisdom that humanity has ever wielded.

Fortitude denotes a firmness of mind in doing good and in avoiding evil. Its evil twin is domination born of herd consensus.

Knowledge is the gift of the Spirit that enables just action. Knowledge’s evil twin is the ever-popular, marvelously-myopic consensus.

Piety is worshiping and revering God and paying due duty to all men on account of their relationship to God, the Latin pietas denoting the concept of patrimony (honoring God, ancestral heritage, and country). Concerning both piety and fear of the Lord, MSSJ’s sole, lame effort to mirror these virtues is the dictate to follow the science—indeed, to pay it homage (and, in the process, deify humanity).

What about the derivatives of the supernatural—the practical, moral virtues—those virtues where the supernatural rubber meets the naturally rugged road? A priest preaching about them from the pulpit might find himself with a lot of time on his hands. Sidelined. Removed from active duty: Canceled.

It seems that every practical or moral virtue has an evil twin, something that gets away with masquerading as a virtue so long as you don’t observe it too closely or do any critical thinking about it.

Concerning justice, the Catholic Encyclopedia says:

Justice, an essentially moral virtue, regulates man in relations with his fellow-men. It disposes us to respect the rights of others, to give each man his due. Among the virtues annexed to justice are:

religion, which regulates man in his relations to God, disposing him to pay due worship to his Creator;

piety, which disposes to the fulfillment of duties which one owes to parents and country (patriotism);

gratitude, which inclines one to recognition of benefits received;

liberality, which restrains the immoderate affection for wealth from withholding seasonable gifts or expenses;

affability, by which one is suitably adapted to his fellow-men in social intercourse so as to behave toward each appropriately.

Justice’s evil twin is none other than equity, that which is, as often as not, the most unjust thing imaginable (a book-sized subject too large to address here). Equity has deep synergy with the evil-twin virtue expectation and its children entitlement and envy.

We have already discussed piety as a gift of the Spirit, leaving us to consider just three of justice’s “annexed” virtues: gratitude, liberality, and affability.

MSSJ makes no attempt to create an evil twin for these attributes of justice. For the MSSJ warrior, gratitude is a capital sin, something held in contempt. “We didn’t ask to be born!” is MSSJ 101. Only the collective, which secures our equity, garners anything vaguely resembling respect, but never gratitude! And giving what is due is duty, not liberality, and the very suggestion of liberality as a virtue is an insult to equity. And affability? Of what potential utility would it be to the MSSJ world view? None. Modernist secular social justice is neither social nor just.

In a Crisis article titled “Marxism and the Gender Revolution” Paul Krause explained the connection between Marxism and the war on gender with his discussion of Marx’ book, The German Ideology, which went largely undiscovered until the twentieth century. Written in 1846, it was unpublished until 1932.

In it Marx sets up the theory that all inequity begins with gender, that the family is essentially a system of slavery based on the innate division of labor, and that equity can only be achieved through, to quote Krause, “the androgenization of human nature, wherein the sexual difference between man and woman is abolished.”

One can quickly see that a world view with no use for gratitude, liberality, or affability would provide the perfect ambiance for the entirely loveless relationships that would result from the devastation of the family. In her book, School of Darkness (1954), regarding her expulsion from the Communist Party and thereby the loss of nearly all of her close former friends, Dr. Bella Dodd writes:

What I had failed to understand was that the security I felt in the Party was that of a group and that affection in that strange communist world is never a personal emotion. You were loved or hated on the basis of group acceptance, and emotions were stirred or dulled by propaganda.

Sound familiar? When the MSSF tribe cancels one of their own, there is no love lost.

MSSJ has no need for the wonderful, practical virtue of forbearance. Of it the dictionary says: Tolerance and restraint in the face of provocation; patience; The act of giving a debtor more time to pay rather than immediately enforcing a debt that is due. It’s the forgive-us-our-debts-as-we-forgive-our-debtors virtue. It’s a biggie.

What is the evil twin that’s replacing it? Tolerance—well, sort of. It sounds so nice. How can tolerance be forbearance’ evil twin?

In the manufacture of a mechanical component, the blueprint will add a tolerance to a given dimension: limits as to how far from ideal that particular aspect of the part can be while still allowing the part to function properly.

Tolerance is limits. Tolerance without limits is license, and selective tolerance fosters persecution.

Diversity, often touted as a virtue, is neither virtue nor vice, it is merely descriptive of a relative reality. To say that your workforce is diversified is not to make a value judgement one way or another. Still, diversity also gains the forbearance’ evil twin status by its association with tolerating the intolerable. Like unlimited tolerance, uncritical diversity fails the basic task of differentiating good from evil.

Christian virtues, on the other hand, are not tolerated. They oppose the evil twins and therefore their very real contribution to diversity is not honored by diversity mongers.

Here’s the lineup:

To give Karl Marx’ evil genius credit where credit is due, he saw human free will as the cause of all of mankind’s woes, and he was right. His goal was a system that would nullify free will and reduce us to comfortable, content beasts. Clearly, as with most MSSJ purveyors, his understanding of human anthropology was practically non-existent, evidenced by his tragic error in dismissing concupiscence. Such a system is, by nature, self-defeating: Complex, convoluted political systems are incapable of being maintained by beasts.

1. K. Chesterton, the perennial nemesis of MSSJ entitlement, wrote and spoke relentlessly of gratitude (and children!):

When we were children, we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

And my favorite:

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Happiness doubled by wonder!

Perhaps gratitude is the most primal of all virtues; it is certainly the most metaphysical—the starkest bulwark against the evil-twin phenomenon. To be sure, its absence leaves an immense, gaping, anthropological, we-didn’t-ask-to-be-born abyss.