False Idolatry in Christian Context

 I am writing a piece of reflection I didn't want to have to address, but it is becoming evident that it has to be addressed.  When we invest god-like reverence and devotion to concupiscent human beings, we commit a form of idolatry clothed in "Christian" language.  What I have seen indicts both Protestant Evangelicals and Catholics, as both are guilty of doing this in different contexts.  Unless it is corrected and understood for what it is, I fear that any potential for evangelization and conversion of others is in jeopardy.  I am going to address both of these separately, and then bring it all together.

On social media, I read a news story that radical Jewish settlers in Israel pepper-sprayed a 9-year-old Armenian boy named William just for riding his bike.  When I read that, I was immediately heartbroken - who would do this to an innocent child??  And in Israel?? You sort of expect ISIS or Muslim Brotherhood terrorists to do things like this, but these are supposedly Israeli Jews who committed the act.  The mother of this child said the boy is traumatized and is terrified of Israelis now, and I can see why - getting a dose of potent capsaicin in your face for nothing tends to do that, and for a young kid like him it is even more devastating.  This story prefaces the first form of idolatry I wanted to talk about, and I am about to ruffle some feathers with this one.

I myself have both Sephardi Jewish and Armenian forebears, so what I am about to say here I am not doing in pleasure at all, but rather just extreme disappointment.  For the majority of my life, I have always been a firm supporter of the state of Israel, and even seen the Jewish birthright to the land as a legitimate and historical claim.  I still do, and that has not changed any.  However, there are other people in that region who also have a birthright too, and I have been a long-standing supporter of the rights and legitimacy of indigenous Christians in that region too.  In all honesty, these two things are not supposed to conflict, but they often have - there are some indigenous Christians who do harbor a historic anti-semitism, and there are also Jews who hate Christians, and both are wrong.  That is a problem that is not going to be resolved overnight in all honesty, and it does cause me some distress knowing it is happening.  However, in perhaps one of the most ignorant and stupid forms of idolatry, we enter the territory of "Christian Zionism," and this is where I want to go.  The problem here is not with Christ-hating Jews, nor is it with antisemitic indigenous Christians - it is with American Evangelical Protestants who seem to be too stupid to know better about the history and demographics of the region, and hence "Christian Zionism" has become an idolatrous cult to some of them.  So, let's attack this first.

Christians in the Middle East are our brothers and sisters in Christ, and as such they constitute a large number of traditions and religious communities - some are Protestant, some are Catholic, and some are Orthodox.  These communities of Christians have been there for centuries, some even going back to the very birth of the Church.  Many of them are also distinct ethnicities in themselves as well as being distinctly Christian - you have Armenians, Assyrians, Maronites, Copts, Rums (Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox and Catholics who are not ethnically Arab), and communities of long-established ethnically Arab Christians as well.  These communities have deep roots, rich traditions, and many have maintained their faith in the face of numerous persecutions over the centuries.  Yet, American Evangelical Protestants are ignorant of them.  I have a good friend in Florida whom I have known since my college days.  He is the son of a conservative Lutheran minister who was involved in the earliest days of the Charismatic movement, and due to that he tends at times to be a bit hyper-charismatic in his expression.  Although he is well-meaning, he is also woefully ignorant being much of his worldview is shaped by televangelists on TBN and Daystar.  And, yes, he is a "Christian Zionist."  When we were talking about Israel one day, I mentioned to him that we need to also be supportive of indigenous Christians in the area, and he mistakenly thought I was referring to Messianic Jews!  He knew nothing of the ancient Christian communities in the region (despite the fact that his late sister-in-law was an Arabic-speaking Palestinian Christian - note that irony!) and like so many others who think like him, he was even somewhat dismissive of them.  That, my friends, is the idolatry of "Christian Zionism," and let me explain how that works.  The modern "Christian Zionist." fueled by the ignorant rantings of idiots like John Hagee and others on religious TV, considers Israel and every Jewish person to be perfect for some reason - everything they do (even when blatantly wrong) is ordained by God, and must be treated like a living Scriptural writ.  Therefore, that verse in Scripture that says "touch not my anointed" is taken so far out of context that it almost sounds like a foreign religion, and indeed it is.  "Christian Zionism" is not support for the Jewish people, nor is it support for the right of Israel to exist.  One can completely support Israel's right to exist, and respect Jewish people, without being a "Christian Zionist."  And, criticism of a bad Israeli policy or of the behavior of an individual Jew as a person subject to personal accountability is not antisemitism either.  Jews, just like every other human being on earth, are in need of Christ too, and they must accept him to be truly saved and offered eternal reward in heaven.  Jews individually can be bad people (look at George Soros - perfect example - as well as very left-leaning actors like the late Rob Reiner), and this bad behavior can be condemned without laying it on every Jewish person alive.  "Christian Zionism" in contrast sees this differently - the true devotee of this nasty cult will actually say that Jewish blood supersedes Christ's Atonement, and if a person who espouses that view is claiming to be Christian, they are in heretical territory with that.  For a person like John Hagee, an evil man like George Soros can get a free pass into heaven for having the right DNA, but a true saint and Doctor of the Church like St. John Chrysostom is condemned to hell because they are not "part of the tribe."  For the "Christian Zionist," the Jewish person and the state of Israel become an idol, molded in their vision of perfection and thus every time a Jewish person does something good or bad it is considered a perfect act.  This denigrates Christ, the true Jewish Messiah, and it makes Israel the "god" instead of him.  It is because of this "Christian Zionism" must be rightly rejected, and no sincere Christian should embrace it because it is a different religion.  You cannot be Christian and a "Christian Zionist," and it is totally possible to support Israel's right to exist and the dignity of personhood of a Jewish person while also acknowledging them as being like the rest of us, sinners in need of God's grace.  "Christian Zionism" then has become a golden calf to some sectors of American Evangelicalism, and has raised itself up as a counterfeit of actual Christian faith.  But, lest you think American Evangelicals are the only problem, there is an equally disturbing trend among American Catholics in particular as to confusion about what Papal infallibility really is.   

In the past 20 years or so, the object of the Papacy in the Roman Catholic Church tends to focus on the person rather than the office, and a confusion of sorts seems to have generated among some laypeople in the Church about this.  I don't believe that even the most radical sedevacantist would deny the validity of the Papal office - that is a See that was established by Christ himself, and is a historic episcopal chair of the Church.  However, what many lay Catholics fail to understand is that the person who sits on that chair still is a human being, and is subject to the same concupiscent nature to sin and other human limitations as the rest of us.  The first point here to establish is that neither the office or the person is God, and therefore neither are entitled to any type of worship.  You respect the office, and if the person sitting on the chair in that office is sincere and faithful to Church teaching, then you honor the person with the respect they deserve.  But, due to the fact that the human holder of the office is a mortal, sinful man, does that mean that he all of a sudden assumes some sort of "holy immunity" if he openly defies 2000 years of Church teaching?  The answer to that is simple - NO!!!  The sitting Pope has a responsibility to uphold historic Church teaching and to make sure that the Church maintains its integrity as an institution.  When a Pope fails in that role, he essentially is forfeiting his office if it is on such a scale that it brings scandal and schism to the Church.  So, with that in mind, let's look at the Papacies of Leo and Francis in recent years.

Francis instituted what is called the "Synodal Church," which supporters tout as being the fulfillment of the legacy of Vatican II.  However, having studied the Vatican II documents myself in my Master's program, I see little resemblance.  For all the criticisms of how Vatican II has been implemented over the decades, the documents for the most part have many good things - they addressed true reform, which is necessary at times, and they also affirmed the continuity of the faith.  The problem with many of the documents - in particular Gaudium et Spes - is that they often have ambiguous language embedded into them by what I believe were the periti who served as advisors to the Council Fathers - these periti included questionable figures such as Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx, both of whom had some questionable ideas.  While these periti could not overtly include their own visions of the Church, they were able to nonetheless exert influence by inserting ambiguous language that can be interpreted by anyone essentially any way they chose.  And, that is where some modernist ideology entered the discourse, and it is what informed even future Popes like Francis and Leo.  Therefore, I don't even think it can be justified by just identifying these modernist things as "the spirit of Vatican II," as I really don't think that was the real spirit of Vatican II - it is more an issue of implementation due to taking liberties with certain ambiguities in the Council documents.  This of course creates a problem for the Vatican bureaucracy - how can you, for instance, try to profess that "there is no salvation outside the Church" when at the same time you have some people taking ambiguities in documents like Gaudium et Spes to say that "all religions lead to God?"  You can't have both!  And, as for the definition of the Church, why is it that often many of these Vatican officials have more empathy with liberal non-Catholic hierarchs like the liberal Archpriestess of Canterbury, and then don't extend the same charity to either the SSPX or Protestant Evangelicals?   And, therein lies a problem with some Catholics creating a "Pope-olatry" that is at odds with the official teaching of the Church, and this in turn makes the current person sitting on the Chair of St. Peter an idol.  This is where we want to go now.

In the past couple of weeks, I have had some interesting discussions with people who think that for some reason every time a Pope farts it is new Scripture or some sort of divine revelation.  For challenging them on that, I have been called "Protestant," "heathen," and "schismatic," yet all I am doing is challenging them with what the Church actually teaches.  The problem with many lay Catholics is that they are not as theologically literate as they should be, and because of that they also have a mistaken view of what "Papal infallibility" actually means.  Recently, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano wrote a lengthy book entitled The Capital Schism, in which he argues that there is a distinction between the Papal office itself and the one who currently holds it, and there are times when the person sitting in the chair may actually be a mortal enemy of the Papal office itself.   It sort of stresses what I said earlier, in that the person and the office are two different things, and a sinful man can indeed occupy the office.  When I hear uninformed lay Catholics actually say that Leo is appointed by the Holy Spirit and therefore allegiance to him must be absolute, even when he is in error, it raises concerns.  No Catholic - or for that manner non-Roman Catholic Christians like the Orthodox - disputes the validity of the Papal office.  The Eastern Churches have affirmed for centuries that the Bishop of Rome is a valid office.  However, the Christian East in particular objects to this idea of Papal primacy, because it is giving the Bishop of Rome authority he never actually had.  When that happened, problems started almost from the beginning, in that it raised the Pope to a position in which he had inflated authority, and questioning that would somehow be questioning God.  What does that sound like?  Every cult and new religious movement of the 20th century in particular has had undisputed leadership like that - Jim Jones, Warren Jeffs, Sun Myung Moon, etc., and the list goes on.  No Eastern Church patriarch or bishop claims that type of power in all honesty, and indeed, collegiality seems to be the accepted norm in all other branches of Christendom.  Therefore, it creates a sort of cult inside the Catholic Church of Papal devotees, and there is an inherent danger there - it raises a Pope to some sort of semi-divinity, and that then creates ignorance and confusion among lay Catholics who are somehow conditioned that the Pope cannot be questioned, challenged, or even stripped of his office because he was "ordained by the Holy Spirit" to have that office.  And, if you somehow differ with that interpretation, you are labeled a "schismatic," "Protestant," or worse, as I have been many times, as have Archbishop Vigano and others. So, that leads to a specific problem, and this is what it is.

When a Pope is raised to be equal to or above Christ in the latter's own Church, it means that a cult has been established around that Pope, and anything therefore he does - even if it blatantly violates centuries of doctrine and tradition - is somehow holy.  There are way too many Catholics who think like this, and it betrays their own ignorance as to what a Pope truly is as well as his actual responsibilities as a Pope.  As for the argument of "the Holy Spirit chose him," so was King Saul chosen the same way, and look what happened there - the king the "Holy Spirit chose" ended up consulting familiar spirits with a witch later.  And, even if this is the case, God may have another purpose for allowing a wicked king or an errant Pope to occupy an office - he may be using it to winnow his harvest.  Just because the Holy Spirit chooses something does not make it a blessing - at times it can be a judgment too.  So, did the Holy Spirit choose Leo and/or Francis to occupy the Papal office because they are holy men and everything they do is blessed of God?  Not necessarily - God may have bad Popes sitting on the throne of St. Peter in order to chastise his Church.  That means that perhaps we shouldn't see the Pope as a divine vessel, but rather as an instrument of judgment to separate the true Church from the false one.  God is ultimately in control of all things, yes, but that does not mean that the person God allows to occupy a position of power is somehow anointed of him - it may mean God is allowing a season of self-examination to test where his people stand.  So, don't be quick to defend a Pope when you know he is wrong just because you think "God put him there."  That becomes idolatry, and the reason that guy is sitting in that seat of authority may be to expose that idolatry rather than affirm it.  So, for those of you who think Leo is farting divine decrees whenever he drops a deuce in the Vatican commode, I would challenge you to think of this another way - and, self-examination may expose the idolatry you might be sheltering in your own soul if you think the Pope is above the Tradition and Scripture that has guided the Church for two centuries.  I think that is the point Vigano and others are trying to make too, and we would do well to listen.

These two forms of idolatry in American Christianity - the Protestant idolatry of "Christian Zionism" and the Catholic idolatry of Papal exaltation to a level the Papacy cannot claim - are why in many cases we have failed in the culture wars in the past.  When we realize that neither Bibi Netanyahu nor Leo XIV fart rainbows (and dare I add Donald Trump to that too), the sooner we come to understand that there is something greater than we can see and it should move upon us to seek it out.  May God heal our nation, but may he also help educate our people to understand that misplaced devotion in the wrong things will only end up disappointing.  Thanks for allowing me to share, and will see you next time.