The Backward Virtues of the Kingdom of Hell

The Christian tradition teaches us that every attempt at virtue, including half-assed and dumb ones, is to be encouraged. So the child on her best behavior, trying to say the kindest thing she can think of, who tells the guest, “Gosh, mister! For a fat guy, you sure don’t sweat much!” is to be commended for the attempt, not measured by the success or failure, of her charity.

In other words, the praise Jesus gave the Widow for putting her two tiny coins in the Temple treasury had nothing to do with her success in fueling the Judean economy, but with her gigantic and sacrificial love of God.

At the same time, it is perfectly legitimate to criticize and reform the structures of sin that made certain the widow lived and died incapable of being able to have or give any more than two tiny coins. And it is likewise legitimate to critique the the structures of sin that blind people who might have far better gifts to offer in charity if they were not blinded by sin.

Case in point:

In the Old Testament, the closest the apostate northern Kingdom of Israel ever got to having a good king was Jehu, and he was a bloody-handed butcher. His chief accomplishment consisted of slaughtering the house of Ahab, including Jezebel, who had seduced Israel away from the worship of the God of Israel and into the worship of her own people’s ancestral fertility dieties, the Baals.

I am reminded of him when I observe that the Gun Cult’s closest approach to doing something right still consists only in lining the pockets of arms manufacturers and helping make sure their franchise of death, slaughter and butchery is extended to trans people.

In short, the Gun Cult is a subculture where even good impulses are perverted to deadly ends: a structure of sin that cannot do what its good members want it to do, but can only do the evil its creators have designed it to do. Like the rest of the MAGA structure of sin, it cannot be redeemed. It must be destroyed and not one stone be left standing on another, so that the people trapped in it and blinded by the backward virtues of the Kingdom of Hell might finally be liberated to act as children of the Kingdom of Christ.

That is the fundamental difference between structures of sin and structures of virtue: the former make it hard to be and do good and easy to do evil. The latter make it easy to do and be good and hard to do evil.