I'm Christian, sort of, and I've not been shy about talking about that here. As some sort of Christian, therefore, I've wasted far too much time wondering about what contemporary Christians really believe—that is to say, what the loud and obstreperous Christians believe, the sort of Christians whom you're likely to run into on the Internet. Before the advent of social media, I encountered such Christians on Usenet and on mailing lists, for I was once trying to participate in the C. S. Lewis fan community, which is dominated by evangelical fanatics. It was a real problem to me: thanks to Lewis and Chesterton and other writers, I had become sympathetic to the idea of Christian conversion in the early 2000s, but I had extreme difficulty in making myself feel any sort of kinship with the kind of person who was most likely to announce themself as Christian and admirer of C. S. Lewis. Wasn't believing in an infinitely unknowable God supposed to confer some sort of...oh, I don't know how to put it exactly...some feeling that it's not possible to know everything in the universe? Some appreciation that you can't even tell what's going on in another person's soul? Some flippin' humility? I'm reminded of the conventional wisdom about how going into space and seeing the Earth from far away is supposed to make people feel smaller and more humble, but obviously that doesn't always happen. Somehow, I converted to Christianity anyway, but I didn't stay in the fold for very long. The apparent smallness of Christianity, or at least that fraction of Christianity that loudly advertised itself to the world, baffled me. You'd think that being in touch with unfathomable divine mysteries would broaden minds and perspectives, and that's not what I was seeing at all. So I kept asking myself, what did these people actually believe?
cw: discourse on normality and its reactionary political implications
I suspect that the real answer all along was a very simple one: they believe in nothing. Well, not quite nothing, but they believe in something that's very close to nothing—a sort of shapeless, chaotically defined void that seeks to be filled, and that void is Normal. The hardcore Christian God-botherers, I suspect, don't even really believe in God or Jesus or Christianity per se, but they believe in Normal, and their idea of "normal" contains a simulacrum of Christianity because that's what they've grown up surrounded with. I arrived at Christian conversion only after a lot of mental struggle and asking myself "how much doubt about Christianity am I prepared to live with?" but the hardline Christians, the politicized Christians, simply accept their faith and their salvation as a matter of course, like it was a permanent feature of the landscape of Normal.
Normal seems like a possible explanation for the spectacularly successful doublethink you get from hyperpolitical reactionary figures—propagandists and pundits and even literal politicians—who stubbornly insist that they're apolitical, even though their days are entirely consumed by harping on political matters and proclaiming their ideological objections to every single tiny thing that irritates them. These people aren't political and ideological, in their heads; they're normal, and "normal" excludes politics. To be "political" or "partisan" is to be abnormal and wrong, hence there's no way that (say) Matt Walsh can be political, because he's too normal to be political, according to the prevailing logic of Normal. I suppose that if you ever could force a definite answer out of any of these people to the question, "How can you say you're not political when you only ever talk about politics?" they'd claim that they have no choice, because their enemies are "political", and therefore they must react in kind, but they don't intend to be political and anyway it doesn't stick to them. Their armor of righteousness and salvation keep them forever clean of politics and ideology and other abnormalities, and thus we're all forced to deal with the apparent absurdity of a Christian career politician who claims to have no political opinions...only normal ones.
Normal can only be maintained by destructive means. If a normal person meets someone they disagree with, for whatever reason, that person must necessarily be abnormal, and therefore whatever they believe must also be abnormal and therefore excised from the normal person's life. I'm reminded of an astonishing thing that fascıst microcelebrity Mike Cernovich advertised on Twitter a short while back: he bragged about taking ayahuasca (appropriating and abusing sacred Indigenous hallucinogens is a heck of a wealth flex when you think about it) and getting a grand epiphany from it: music with lyrics was evil, corrupt mental programming imposed by woke songwriters or some such nonsense. It was an appalling bit of "wisdom" to boast about, but typical of the sort of conceptual policing that's required to maintain one's sense of Normal. It's like Cernovich couldn't feel normal, liking the same sort of music that "degenerates" were known to like, and therefore (with the help of an expensive drug experience) he simply threw it all into the trash. Normality must always be pristine, clean, free from corrupting influences.
How does one fight an amorphous protean nothingness like Normal? We're afflicted with some normality ourselves. Some residue of Normal clings to us, and probably there's vast pits and chasms filled with Normal in the Pnictogen Wing's murky headspace. Dealing with the "real world", as we're forcing ourselves to do better, requires suffocating immersions in Normal. But more to the point...how do you get people to stop believing in it?
~Chara