Heresies Considered

By Rodney Rios

Heresy is a terrible word, a terrible thing, as Saint Thomas More tells us in the film A Man for All Seasons. The heresies of our age are sexual and related to gender. All heresies promise some sort of liberation from the stifling constraints of Christian Morality, or to purify it. They all make the central issue of their heresy a rejection of Christian Truth.

What is heresy then? Heresy is, as the English historian Hilaire Belloc explained, “the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein.” In other words, the introduction of some contradictory idea into Christian Morality that denies an essential element of the faith while pretending to leave the whole intact.

As Peter Kreeft has explained in his books, the world always changes its heresies; it is only the Catholic Faith which remains constant and has taught the same truths since its founding. Heresies, by their nature, depend on the mood of the age. History gives perspective and guidance; knowing history and having a good background on Christianity we can identify what heresies are. There are many types, Bishop Athanasius Schneider has made the world a favor by compiling them in one of his books, and they vary throughout the ages. For instance, in the fourth century it was Arianism, in the thirteenth the fashionable heresy were the Albegensians, at one point it was the denial of the Supremacy of the see of Saint Peter, and at other times naturalism and rationalism. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth, the heresies were racial and scientific. Yet since the sixties, the popular heresies have been mainly sexual and remain sexual to this day.

The central point to notice is that heresies seem, at every stage and in every time, to be the “new” thing that will destroy the Christian Religion. At their apogee, they seem to destroy all in their wake and, through revolutions, they seem to be unstoppable. This is, however, incorrect. Heresies slowly lose their force, and, as the English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton wrote, men can only evade the truth for so long. Eventually truth reasserts itself. That is why even the heresies of our times, which to many traditionalists might seem to be unstoppable, will eventually die out and be substituted for new ones (if I were to guess, trans-humanism is likely the next great heresy).

To state it again: We live in a time of heresy and rejection of the Christian faith and Christian morality. Oftentimes modern peoples pretend heresy is purely an intellectual phenomenon, a curiosity without any real world implications. But, if we look at the decline of the family and the social contagions that have spread since the arrival of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, we see the effects of our age’s heresies. Modern peoples might not realize it, but the consequences of heresy are prevalent throughout our society.

Consider how in modern times we have rejected the sacramental idea of marriage, leaving broken families throughout our society, out of wedlock births, the extermination of millions Americans due to abortion. This not only destroyed human life but also led to the collapse of entire nation’s demographics leading in turn to a justification for mass migration. We have redefined marriage and lowered it to only a contract (what a sad view of love), we flirt with eugenics through in vitro fertilization, contraception, genetic manipulation, stem cell research, cloning, and even the attempts to transcend mortality.

Furthermore, we have rejected the Christian foundations of the American Republic, banished God from our schools and have atrocious rates of lack of family formation, filled with the abandonment of the elderly who never had children or big families, the eventual push for a great expansion of assisted suicide, the dumbing down of our culture, an epidemic of loneliness amongst our young with symptoms of abuse, suicide and, the utter disregard of healthy sexual behavior leading to the objectification of women in levels never before imaginable, the sale of women’s womb and children through surrogacy, and all the other countless man-made horrors beyond all previous expectations. R.R. Reno, Editor of First Things, deems it the “war on the weak.”

The collapse of traditional morality and norms have created a class of youngsters which, as Victor Davis Hanson has noted, do not become moderate and conservative since they do not develop the duties and obligations of building families and owning property which naturally lead to conservatism.

Traditional morality calls on us to live outside ourselves, to be out there in the world and recognize we are not the central figure in the world. The total autonomy of the individual is the presupposition that leads to the belief that the individual can have or not have children as he wishes, that sexual activity is purely for the pleasure of the individual, that the individual constructs his truth or that he or she alone decides what to do with his life, that he can reconstruct his gender based on his own feelings, etc. That “atomistic individualism,” as Russell Kirk calls it, is the central error of our times since at least the Enlightenment.

Once people accept this view by abandoning a belief in God, it is no coincidence that, as Belloc also notes, people abandon Christian Morality. This is what secularism is at its core: the placing of man at the center of all, independent of the Creator. That is, in a few short words, the Sin of Pride which was the Sin of Adam and Eve. The rules of Christianity only make sense to a society that believes. If they don’t believe they will find traditional morality to be meaningless obstacles in the way to full gratification of your desires. “My truth” is the absolute guiding principle that secularism breeds, and inevitably, leads to Libertarianism and Liberalism. It is why a God-less conservatism will always degrade, without a belief in transcendent morality, into mere delayed progressivism.

As Catholic/Christian morality declines in any society, that society begins to break, as we saw above. The result is that the community of souls that the English statesmen and political philosopher Edmund Burke described, the starting point of conservatism, breaks apart. No longer is society a unity and trusteeship between the past, the present and the future. Instead, the present generation claims for itself the maximum of pleasure and satisfaction it can acquire. As Patrick J. Buchanan explained, “the cycle is inescapable: when the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, and the people die.”

Now we see how heresy, when widely practiced and mainstreamed, is corrosive and destructive to the social fabric. As Catholics apologist G.K. Chesterton said, “the Christian religion has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.” Regardless, as Belloc further explains in his history of the great heresies, there always comes a point when the following happens: “Now against the great heresies, when they acquire the driving power of being the new and fashionable thing, there arises a reaction within the Christian and Catholic mind, which reaction gradually turns the current backward, gets rid of the poison and re-establishes Christian civilization. Such reactions, begin, I repeat, obscurely. It is the plain man who gets uncomfortable and says to himself, “This may be the fashion of the moment, but I don’t like it.” It is the mass of Christian men who feel in their bones that there is something wrong, though they have difficulty in explaining it. The reaction is usually slow and muddled and for a long time not successful. But in the long run with internal heresy it has always succeeded, just as the native health of the human body succeeds in getting rid of some internal infection.”

In short, normal men and women, separated from the odious seduction of heretical fashion so prevalent among the elites, reject the heresies and revolutions and, almost always, move in a counter-revolution. That is the nature of the culture war we live in.

Since the sixties, at the latest, the Cultural Revolution has sought to destroy traditional morality at all costs in the name of some abstract human liberation. These heresies have been, for the most part, sexual. Our society’s obsession with Sex is the defining characteristic of the heresies of the age. Sex without love and responsibility is the call of the revolutionaries. It is the basis of radical feminism, which seeks to abolish all distinctions between men and women. It explains why so many young women base their entire political beliefs on the issue of abortion, why gender ideology revolves almost exclusively around the reverence of homosexuality. It is why the entire identity of the Left in modern times is all about transgenderism, LGBT rights, and abortion; with a few other issues thrown around. The catalyst of these heresies was contraception. As Pat Buchanan wrote, “Historians may one day call ‘the pill’ the suicide tablet of the West.” It allowed sex to be separated from its responsibilities, and by that it opened the door to disorder and from there all other heresies of the progressives entered the political arena and the social mainstream.

The culture war, then, is not a distraction from governing. Man is more than economics, man is spirit and body as the Church teaches and conservatism believes. Therefore at the very center of our political struggles there is a battle between questions of how men should live. The fight is between truth and error, tradition and progressivism, faith and unbelief, the dignity of the human person vs. atomistic autonomic individualism.

In a way, the entire history of the Right since the sixties, and of the Catholic Church since the French Revolution and perhaps ever, is to arrest the decline of Christian Civilization by defending the dignity of mankind to live not as beasts enslaved to their passions, but as free self controlled, virtuous beings. To live as Saints. The two views are irreconcilable; they are at the very core of human existence. As such, the battle will go on forever, for that is history and that is the role of the Catholic, the Christian and the Conservative: to fight for Truth and human dignity. As Saint John Chrysostom remarked: “Do not think that you are destined for easy struggles or unimportant tasks; you are the salt of the earth.”

The victory of one side entails necessarily the defeat of the other. Though the revolutionaries, heretics and progressives do not intend it, do not know or don’t believe it, their victory would entail the destruction of their country and the dissolution of society. Not to mention the immeasurable quantity of human suffering caused by the materialistic life. Children never born, families broken, people searching desperately for meaning, becoming numb to their dignity by becoming slaves to drugs.

That metaphysical struggle is why politics cannot avoid being cultural. Again, it involves questions essential to human nature and existence. It involves the questions of who we are, how we should live and how (and what) we should worship. Since man is spiritual and created by God for a particular end, when heresies become widely practiced, they, by necessity, lead to decline. As such, Russell Kirk’s maxim explaining that conservatives must fight every age for their principles is, assuredly, correct. Therefore, do not fear the culture war fellow traditionalists, embrace it! As Pope Saint John Paul II told anticommunists in Poland fighting against a different kind of evil, “Be not afraid.”