Post-Christian Pagan Conservatism Seeks to Make a World Safe for Rapists

Just some little snapshots from the world of MAGA:

I sometimes suspect that the day will come when the Catholic Church will be vilified by the MAGA cult, not for protecting pedophiles, but for “persecuting” them. If the Cult can rehabilitate the J6 pack of pedophile orcs into patriot heroes and send the DOJ to rend and tear rape victim E. Jean Carroll in reprisal for punishing the Rapist-in-Chief, I see no reason why they will not try to rehabilitate the Epstein wolves too. The misogynist predators in the Cult won’t rest till they have imposed a “sensitive reappraisal” of every rich and powerful predator and torn their garments about how the Catholic Church let “woke liberals” intimidate them into “denying men’s natural needs”.

Twenty years ago, the Church’s spectacular failure could be attacked and the Church called to reform precisely because of the success the Christian tradition has enjoyed in making a Christian sexual ethic a thing taken for granted as normal. That ethic, while always imperfectly lived, nonetheless deeply ingrained into the western mind a revulsion against exploitive power dynamics and predator/prey sexual relationships that would have been incomprehensible and opaque in Rome or Sparta. As Tom Holland says in DOMINION:

As captured cities were to the swords of the legions, so the bodies of those used sexually were to the Roman man. To be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as inferior: to be marked as womanish, barbarian, servile. While the body of a free-born Roman was sacrosanct, those of others were fair game. ‘It is accepted that every master is entitled to use his slave as he desires.’ Nero, by depriving the aristocratic women who worked at his parties of the inviolability that was theirs by right of law, was certainly—even if only for one night—making scandalous play with the Roman class system; but not with a far more fundamental proposition. In Rome, men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of a road as a toilet. In Latin, the same word, meio, meant both ejaculate and urinate.

To the presumptions that underlay this, however, Paul brought a radically different perspective. ‘Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?’ So he had demanded of the Corinthians. How could any man, knowing his limbs consecrated to the Lord, think to entwine them with those of a whore, mingle his sweat with hers, become one flesh with her? But Paul, by proclaiming the body ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit’, was not merely casting as sacrilege attitudes towards sex that most men in Corinth or Rome took for granted. He was also giving to those who serviced them, the bar girls and the painted boys in brothels, the slaves used without compunction by their masters, a glimpse of salvation. To suffer as Christ had done, to be beaten, and degraded, and abused, was to share in his glory. Adoption by God, so Paul assured his Roman listeners, promised the redemption of their bodies. ‘And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.’ The revolutionary implications of this message, to those who heard it, could not help but raise pressing questions. In the cramped workshops that provided the Hagioi of Rome with their places of assembly, where they would meet to commemorate the arrest and suffering of Christ with a communal meal, men rubbed shoulders with women, citizens with slaves. If all were equally redeemed by Christ, if all were equally beloved of God, then what of the hierarchies on which the functioning of even the humblest Roman household depended? Paul, in giving his answer, betrayed a certain ambivalence. Certainly, he refuted any notion that the divine justice promised to those baptised in the name of Christ might be determined by their rank. ‘God,’ he declared firmly, ‘does not show favouritism.’ All were equally redeemed from the servitude of sin and death. The master of a household was no more or less a son of God than his slaves.

That mustard seed of human dignity would bear spectacular fruit in time, fruit that is now so commonly assumed to be the natural order of things that we take it for granted that it could never be otherwise. Thus do successful revolutions (and no revolution in human history has been more successful than the Christian Revolution) most display their success by being assumed by their heirs to have always been The Way Things Should Be.

But the post-Christian conservative paganism of the kind Trump (and his apostate MAGA admirers) represent is a full-throttle attempt to return to that ancient Roman world when a man felt a perfect right to “relieve himself” with any social inferior. It seeks to create a world in which such calls to reform as we heard 20 years ago are first funny and, in the end, incomprehensible. And diabolically, it seeks to use a very selective reading of the Christian tradition to overturn that tradition. It is heard in the preaching of swine like Mark Driscoll, who defines women as “penis homes”, and in the language of the Rapist-in-Chief himself who called critics of child rape “stupid,” “foolish,” and (most tellingly) “weaklings” for demanding transparency on the Epstein Files.