The “Not Really Christians” Ploy

Years ago, a friend of mine took a class on the Holocaust from a rabbi at the University of Washington. There were a bunch of Evangelicals in the class and the good rabbi, in providing some historical background on the roots of anti-semitism in Europe, quoted a document reviling Jews in the most revolting terms and asked the class what they made of it.

Good American Evangelical individualists one and all, they accounted for it with one of the oldest tropes in the book. The author, they explained, “wasn’t really a Christian.”

The author, as the good rabbi then revealed, was Martin Luther. “Are you gonna tell me Luther ‘wasn’t really a Christian’?”

I point this out not to say that Catholics have no blood on their hands but rather to say exactly the opposite concerning a more current issue.

Namely, stop pretending MAGA Christians (including Catholics) “aren’t really Christians.” Of course they are. They sure as hell aren’t atheists, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Jews, or Muslims.

Catholics can pick our friends, but we are stuck with our family. Protestants can pretend that baptized persons who profess the name of Jesus “aren’t Christians”. We Catholics do not have that luxury. Our ecclesiology forbids it. Indeed, it even forbids us to say Protestants “aren’t really Christians”. If you are validly baptized and name Jesus as Lord, you are in some form of union with the Church and are, ergo, Christian, even if you think the Church is the whore of Babylon.

On the other hand, the Church believes that grace is grace, not magic, and that our yesses (and nos) to grace really matter. She does not teach “once saved, always saved” and warns (as Jesus warned) that a Christian can reject the grace of God and end up damned.

Dante, good Catholic that he was, placed many Christians in Hell in his great poem the Divine Comedy, because he understood that merely being a member of the Christian fold was no guarantee that one could not also be a mortal sinner. Significantly, he even places a Pope (Boniface VIII) there and puts him in upside down. His point (also deeply Catholic) is that while his office (instituted by Jesus Christ) remains oriented toward God (recall that in Dante’s Hell, Mt. Purgatory and, ultimately, Heaven are reached by going down to the center of the earth and then up to the other side of the earth), the man occupying the office can still damn himself by his sinful choices.

Dante is, of course, doing poetry, not prophecy in his Divine Comedy. His damned, purgatorial, and heavenly figures are not forecasts of the eternal fate of these historical figures, but living illustrations of the sins and virtues they embody (as a modern poet might use Roger Ailes to illustrate gluttony or lust, or Sr. Thea Bowman to illustrate joy). We are, in fact, not to hope for the damnation of anybody, but to love our enemies and hope for their salvation.

But neither are we to pretend that Christians who bear the fruits of Hell and not the Spirit are “not really Christians”. We are to face the fact that they are bad Christians and tell them so.

“So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way; he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your life.” (Eze 33:7–9)