I cannot reach my friends and family members who are trapped in a silo. I am lost to them. And in talking with them they refuse to discuss reality on realty's terms, unwilling to accept even a commin set of facts.
And my heart breaks because I love these folks. Mere aquaintances or frenemies one can write off, to an extent. But people you love immersed in a cult, that's another story.
I just shared these thoughts with a couple of social media friends:
To say that Christianity in the United States is a dumpster fire is to understate the terribly high level of willful ignorance, siloed thinking, and marriage with alt-right politics that has taken place.
While I seldom listen to Catholic radio now, I did listen for 15 minutes in the car this morning and it was long enough for me to hear the host tell listeners that the National Catholic Reporter are "the bad guys," and the National Catholic Register are the good guys.
On previous segments I have listened to, I have heard similar disparagement of America Magazine, Commonweal, Crux and even the Vatican News Service. It is no secret that EWTN media, and its radio affiliates, have long promoted so-called trench cultural warfare, in which entire swaths of Catholic and other Christian thought and discourse are written off as "liberal" or somehow heterodox.
Sadly, I wish I could see a light at the end of this tunnel. But these EWTN affiliate voices, and other ultra-conservative Christian media outlets continuously assert that they are the arbiters of the parameters of Christian doscourse. Those outside these narrowly defined parameters are heretics or worse.
And so on a continuous basis, Catholic and other Christian leaders and organizations who advocate for social justice, open-mindedness, compassion, tolerance, anti-racism were also characterized as "bad guys," and on the wrong side of "the culture war." This morning's program tossed out the term demonic quite--well--liberally. The merest hint of liberal Christianity was denounced as "demonic" and doing Satan's bidding.
Wow.
Just wow.
Yeah, that's really creating a situation where dialogue seems impossible.
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