“I happen to like Christendom,” he protested. “The great art, the great literature, the great works of Christendom are exactly what this culture needs.”
I told him he was, at best, indulging in an understandable, if unhealthy, nostalgia or, at worst, indulging in something unwittingly destructive: the reduction of Christ to ideology, to Christism. Such a reduction would destroy the Christian faith itself.
My case is made, I argued, by what has happened in Quebec over the last half-century, and particularly what happened in 2014. The Parti Quebecois’ horrific Charter of Values, thankfully defeated robustly in the spring provincial election, was a grotesque example of terminal-stage Christism. It was the debasement of Christ to a repressive political fiction.
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