The Antichrist of Social Justice

Tom Holland's book, Dominion, clearly establishes that Christ's death radically changed the ancient world. No longer could the Tyrannosaurus rex approach of the ancient empires, whose modus operandi was to despise the weak and praise the strongest, be practiced openly. Rene Girard argues that instead, power must now be disguised with some Christian virtue. This is what he takes to be a central meaning of Antichrist: something that tries to appear like Christ, but is inwardly demonic. 

It should go without saying that the secular world displays antichrist characteristics all the time, but most clearly and recently in the form of social justice (or responses to COVID). This takes the form of elevating the care of some particular group and identifying the source of the oppression, then seeking to eliminate it. This is scapegoating, loading one group of people with collective sins (real or imagined) and immolating them to remove their oppressive influence. It is clear that that power move is to destroy a particular group, and usually it is easy to find self-interested motives for the move in question, for it solidifies the power of the adjudicating group.

The continual temptation for Christians is to identify with the virtue being paraded and to tacitly or explicitly accept the solution proposed by the secular world. This is perhaps an unfortunate consequence of reducing Christianity to a system of ethics, and leaving out all metaphysics. Ultimately, metaphysics is about how fact and value, meaning and matter, heaven and earth connect. 

However, the modern world is defined by not seeing matter as having meaning, but only utility. Thus meaning, value and heaven are disconnected from fact, matter and earth in the modern world. Because there is no real connection, meaning is taken to be arbitrary, which we see in the dominant artistic philosophy of postmodernism, while in the STEM world modernism has the upper hand. Under this rubric, it is very difficult to understand what something like masculinity is like, because you are only looking at a set of arbitrary moral principles, because they are not connected to reality, but are simply so because God said so. 

Ethics must instead be seen as articulations of how the world exists, and only part of how being patterns itself. If ethics is only a part, though an important one, of being, it becomes clear that what will cause being to continue to exist defines ethical principles, rather than the other way around. And ultimately, the final goal or telos of the existence of being is theosis, becoming God to the capacity that a being is able to.

Therefore things like sex, masculinity, national identity etc cannot be defined them by their adherence to certain moral principles. Instead, they are patterns of how the world manifests itself, that is, continues to exist. 

We cannot accept the secular account of how particular groups can continue to exist, that is, by negating other aspects of the world through scapegoating (scapegoating is solved by communal confession in the liturgy, in which we sacrifice ourselves for others, rather than the other way around, as Christ did). Instead, the solution is to see that being has patterns that are not arbitrary, and these are preserved in the stories and rituals of the Church. When we inhabit these modes of being, we will be able to see Antichrist when he appears, and respond appropriately.