Today is the Feast of St. Nicholas, a saint wreathed round with more than his share of legends, some of which are lovely, some of which are odd, and some of which feed currents less than healthy in Christian circles.
I mean, I get it. This is pretty funny.
But at the same time, a lot of militant Christian types are in no need of saintly sanction for their already violent impulses, particularly in an hour in US history where the worst Christian in the Church are talking as though “DEUS VULT!” is the proper response to the fascist GOP and its fascist leader’s calls to overthrow democracy and weaponize the state against the millions of people they hate.
(More evidence, by the way, that Herreid’s Law holds true: Every person on line who represents themselves with Knight/Crusader/Paladin imagery is invariably a kook.)
So, truth always being a purgative against legends that have stopped being funny and begun to be licenses for scary people to do evil things, here is a conversation I had a few years ago on my old podcast “Connecting the Dots” with my buddy Rod Bennett on the false legend of St. Nicholas punching out Arius.
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Watching “TED LASSO,” I was bemused to see this actor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Mohammed, whose name must be the most magnificently ecumenical combo (at least as between Trinitarians and Unitarians/ Arians) since the “Orange Catholic Bible” in Frank Herbert’s “DUNE”.
Close second is Catholic saint Padre Pio being played in a biopic by an actor named “Shia” (LaBeouf).
And yeah, Herreid’s onto something. The Prot male equivalent is those who put Cromwell or other puritans as their avatar. Although there are Evangelicals who like the Crusaders too – perhaps exposed too much Soeur Sorire at an impressionable age.
The female equivalent is announcing on your social media bio that you are “[a] Daughter of the King”. Christianity as a chance type be a purty, purty princess…
I know someone, trained as a veterinarian, who’s ended up specialising in euthanizing beloved family pets. They don’t like to talk about their day job, let alone brag about it. If they were to proudly adopt “Dog/ Cat Terminator” or suchlike as their online handle, they’d rightly be side-eyed.
> The female equivalent is announcing on your social media bio that you are “[a] Daughter of the King”. Christianity as a chance type be a purty, purty princess…
That was completely unnecessary and uncalled for. You’re taking a very shallow and patronizing view of a very complex issue and you’re oversimplifying it to “women ☕”.
“Daughters of the King” is a women’s ministry that upholds the value of women and their vocations. Treating it like some vapid Christian beauty parlor is disingenuous. It oversimplifies a very complex issue with Christian wives who are treated like slave labor by their husbands due to a very crude reading of Ephesians 5:22nn, and who were coerced into believing that Christianity means having to eschew their femininity.
Am unsure where you got “oversimplifying it to ‘women'” given I also mentioned the males who think hundreds of times a day about the (Holy) Roman Empire or who LARP Cromwell or Calvin. I’ve never come across a male proclaiming himself (on a social media profile otherwise indistinguishable from a secular influencer’s) to be “Son of The King”.
I am basing that on a lot of social media profiles where it often sits alongside a number of other interests, activities and identifications that are… more Kardashian than St John Cassian in their priorities. But you are right, it is unfair of me to say it is always shallow and no doubt it often serves a good purpose. (Ie, the very point of Mark’s original post here).
Daughter of the King is a quote from Psalm 45.
Here’s a different, hopefully clearer, way to word it:
Grammatical person of the verb matters.
Ie, there’s a significant difference between reassuring someone “You are/ she is a daughter of the King” and proclaiming yourself “I am a daughter of the King”.
We see this elsewhere, eg, “I am very humble” vs “You are/ she is very humble”, or “I should be canonised as a saint” vs “You/ he should be canonised as a saint”. (That’s using “saint” in the Catholic sense, of course, not in the Protestant and still less in the Mormon sense).
Reminds me of a comment in Ronald Knox’s Belief of Catholics – that the phrase “to be in invincible ignorance” has no first person 🙂
Yes, that nails it nicely!