Leftist Culture as Conversionary Sermon
Morale will continue until the beatings improve
Back in the sixteenth century, when the Catholic Church finally began to respond to the onslaught of the Reformation, one of the things it began to do was crackdown on any sort of deviation from Catholic orthodoxy. This is what led to the formation of the Jewish ghettos in places like Rome and Venice, in order to separate Catholics from the purportedly unhealthy influence. But the Church went farther than this. In the late 16th century, it made attendance at sermons for Jews mandatory. Every Saturday—during the Jewish Sabbath— they were subjected to sermons by friars and other preachers, detailing how awful their religion was and why they should convert to the true faith.
As you can imagine, these enforced sermons resulted in precious few conversions. Mostly, they just pissed off their intended audience. The seventeenth century English diarist John Evelyn, who went to one of these sermons while in Rome, recorded that the Jews hissed and jeered at their unwelcome homilist. But these “conversionary sermons” as they are called served other, secondary purposes: they reinforced the status of Jews as outsiders and inferiors in a Christian society, subject to the arbitrary whims of their social betters. They were also a means of reaffirming the rightness of Christianity (Catholics and even visiting Protestants often attended these sermons).
I am a Roman Catholic, so such episodes in the history of the Church are depressing to contemplate, but I having been coming back to them in my mind lately, as I ponder the state of American and Western culture at this hour. The emergence of “woke” ideology in American society, dating from around 2012 or so, has sharpened my mind in regard to noticing patterns, not just in political discourse, which is kind of my “expertise” (God help me), but also in the arts and entertainment.
People of a traditional cultural bent have noticed for decades now the recurrence of certain tropes on television. One example is the pathetic loser father figure, who often is outwitted by his kids or dominated by his wife. Another, famously originated with the TV show Will and Grace, is the '“presentable” gay figure, which helped normalize homosexuality. That these patterns are no accident, if not deliberate, is an unavoidable conclusion: the cultural left has known it possesses the power to shape the public imagination, and is not shy about using it.
But it seems to me things have ramped up considerably in the past decade plus, in line with the political upheavals the country has experienced. Take, for example, television commercials. I don’t watch TV much anymore, but when I watch with my father, he points out how often minorities, especially African Americans, appear in commercials as wealthy, stable, intact families. The fact that poverty and fatherlessness are the realities for a considerable number of African American families never enters the picture. That appears to be by design.
Or consider the long running television show Law and Order: SVU. The show has been on the air since the late 1990s, and two of its stars have been on the show from the beginning, so it makes for a good test case. I have a digital antennae which allows me to view a handful of channels, one of which re-airs a different show for several hours each day. I have been watching the show (it airs on Saturdays), and there is a clear change in the one of more recent episodes as opposed to earlier seasons.
To be sure, the show, which is a police procedural centered on a “Special Victims Unit,” meaning victims of sexual crimes, has been slightly to the left of center for its entire existence from the beginning, as most Hollywood productions are if they have any discernible cultural slant. But episodes from recent seasons appear to more fully exemplify the patterns I have already identified, of denying or erasing unpleasant realities.
Several episodes I have watched recently provide plentiful evidence of this, but one in particular stands out to me. In it, a woman who is a decorated Army Ranger returns from her tour of duty, and her fiancée throws a welcome home party for her. She is found later that evening in a park, beaten and raped. After searching for most of the episode, the detectives discover it was actually her fiancée who raped her. When they come to arrest him, they discover that the ranger beat them to it, and they find her sitting atop her fiancée, pummeling him half to death before they pull her off of him.
Perhaps you noticed a slight incongruence in my laconic description of the episode? Yes, I am aware the Ranger lady might have been taken by surprise when she was raped, but the disjunction between her turning from brutalized victim in the beginning to righteous avenger who brutalizes her attacker by episode’s end is all too noticeable. This kind of trope is old hat by now and has been deployed many times in our entertainment industry, but there is something so perfectly on the nose about this episode—perhaps because the show is titled “Special Victims Unit,” for that is what the Ranger character is, a “special” victim. She is both a Powerful Womyn and Sacred Victim all at once, the innocent prey of The Patriarchy (TM) and its Righteous Judge, Jury and Executioner simultaneously.
Pretty much all of American “culture” is now a “Special Victims Unit” writ large, and this sort of twisted idea is what fuels our current World War T. You must publicly admit men can be women or vice versa or be cast into the outer darkness. But beside being a sort of paraliturgical phenomena for the younger generation of leftists now taking power in our “consciousness” making institutions, episodes like the one sketched above serve the other purposes of conversionary sermons: to reaffirm the “woke” and remind normies of their inferior status. The same effect was surely intended by the recent proclamation of “Trans Easter” by the president, announcing a special day to recognize “trans people” on Easter Sunday. It hardly matters if it was intentional, because the point is the same either—a new god with a new holy day has replaced the old one.
These seemingly disparate events are all of a piece with the 2+2=5 logic which appears to be the order of the day for late stage liberalism or whatever you want to call it. This type of willful irrationalism on the part of the dominant belief system in our society (liberalism or progressivism) looks like a sign of decay to me, as if the ruling class is no longer certain of itself and needs to prop up its authority. It reminds me of the vogue for theological voluntarism at the end of the Middle Ages, when Martin Luther could laud God’s ability to contradict Himself with perfect glee.
It seems to me a sign that a very powerful belief is losing its grip through oversaturation; liberalism is at least as dominant now as Catholicism was then, if not more so. Hence contemporary culture seems to have become one extended conversionary sermon. The main difference is that the Church set aside one day a week for this, while the continuousness and ubiquity of the left’s ongoing digital Parish Mission is unprecedented in terms of its ability to penetrate people’s minds. There is also the difference in content: Catholicism meant to uphold tradition in an era of upheaval, to promote the status quo. Our current occupiers of the commanding heights of culture propagate a revolutionary message which is intended to invert hierarchies, even as the inverters rest their claims to power on such inversions. Thus even when something watchable falls through the cracks, it matters little, since everyone knows the text of the sermon by now, and can repeat it from memory.
Rome’s conversionary sermons remained in place until 1847; no dominion is everlasting, except for that of The King. For the foreseeable future, however, our leaders of culture will continue to hector us with professions us victimhood while stomping on anyone who refuses to acknowledge their powerlessness. In other words, morale will continue until the beatings improve. QED.