I don’t know entirely what to make of the “He Gets Us” ads, several of which featured during the Super Bowl. I admire the sponsors’ goal: to make the Person of Jesus central again to discussions of Christianity. Too often, we end up debating secondary or tertiary details of moral implications of sophisticated doctrines with people who are struggling with basic religious truths. Or recovering from abusive family situations that scandalized them against faith. Or who’ve been floating downstream like dead salmon into mindless leftist puritanism.

For my own part, I too often realize that the question I’ve tacitly been asking myself is “What would Charlemagne do?”

Or Constantine. Or the emperor Heraclius. And admirable as those Christian statesmen were, they’re not so relevant now. At least, their attempts to advance and preserve Christian civilization, while worthy, have limited application at the moment. As grand as Christendom was, it ain’t what it used to be.

Anodyne Woke Slogans and Immigration Pyramid Schemes

Large parts of it have vanished. Other sectors have degenerated into a post-apocalyptic hellscape — for instance the Catholic Church in Germany, which is panting after approval from sexual degenerates, and gagging on government money. Our Church here in America more and more resembles an immigration pyramid scheme, plus a gay employment agency, with a nagging “Catholic problem.”

Too many Protestant churches are hanging up rainbow flags, remaking themselves into sappy social clubs that offer weekly emotional uplift and anodyne Woke slogans. Or worse, straight-up anti-white race baiting we might expect from Hutu churches in Rwanda before the genocide.

So yes, a focus on Jesus would seem to be in order, provided we see Him clearly and fully, as my colleague Tom Gilson does in his marvelous book Too Good to Be False. Or as G.K. Chesterton does in The Everlasting Man.

A New Gospel Is the Product of an Antichrist

It is not merely useless to proffer a Christ who’s slimmed down, tattooed, and painted to match the culture. It’s toxic. It’s precisely what St. Paul warns us against, when he speaks of a “new gospel” preached by the Enemy. So let’s pray that a worthy effort at relevance and reaching people where they are doesn’t degenerate into something much, much darker.

As pro-Christian secular historian Tom Holland showed in his masterful book Dominion, Christianity forever altered culture. It made impossible a return to the ancient, straightforward cruelty of the Spartans and the Romans. (Inspired by the real implications of Darwinism, the Nazis tried that and failed.) Instead, attempts to replace, pervert, and persecute Christianity will come in disguise.

The Cult of Victimism

They will accept a version of Christianity, tap into what they pretend is its “real, essential” message. They’ll just lie about what that message was. Then they’ll take that “core” which they’ve allegedly discovered and use it as a bludgeon to beat the Church to death — and persecute Christians with a clear conscience, convinced that they’re just rebuking Pharisees, as Jesus did.

The new gospel of the Antichrist is simple: Victims are good, and victors bad. The point of Jesus’ life wasn’t that He was the incarnation of God, come to establish a new Covenant replacing Abraham’s. It wasn’t to die for our sins, then rise from the dead. It wasn’t to found a Church that took up the mantle of the Jews, extending their intimacy with God to the whole human race.

Nope. The point was that He was weak, and the Romans were strong. That He was marginalized, despised, rejected, and finally put to death by a mighty empire ruled by straight white men who built statues of themselves outside gorgeous Classical buildings.

So the “real” Christian message is that we must embrace everyone who’s despised for any reason at all, fetishize people on the margins while demonizing the mainstream, dismantle every empire, seize power from straight white men, tear down all the statues and build hideous modern structures. Then we’ll be just like Jesus … or at least we will be “like God,” as the Serpent once promised Eve.

Blessed Are the Groomers

“Real” Christianity of this ilk will therefore welcome drag queens to show up and groom our children. It will actively prefer illegal immigrants to impoverished U.S. veterans. It will treat every effort to advance our nation’s interests as a type of idolatry. It will enshrine reverse discrimination forever, and treat “Diversity” as an end in itself. It will indeed tear down our statues, bulldoze our elegant buildings, and put up monstrous, dehumanizing structures devoid of any sense whatever that man is capable of nobility.

And the adherents of this false religion will be proud of themselves, as proud as demons were on the first Good Friday of what they thought they had achieved.

I’ve written here before that many Christians are falling into this new, diabolical cult out of lethargy. Others lapse into it from fear — they see that authentic, orthodox Christianity is increasingly illegal, despised, mocked, and treated as “extremist.” So they move as automatically as a herd of timid rabbits away from danger.

They seek to repackage Christianity to match what our post-Christian, Antichrist culture is willing to accept. They claim that Jesus was a “refugee” or a victim of capital punishment, as if that set him apart in any way from billions of other people over the centuries. It doesn’t. If He wasn’t the incarnate God who rose from the dead, then His life is just a sad story from a long time ago. If He was the incarnate God, then we must reckon with what He said and what He told us to do. That included preaching true morals and setting up a Church that didn’t take its orders from the State. Not even the State of California.

There’s No Escape, So You Might as Well Fight

I’m grateful to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for making the future clearer. Having watched the Woke-friendly ads that ran at the Superbowl, she wasn’t impressed. She didn’t care that the producers had bent over backwards to reach today’s Progressives where they are. Instead she sneered and threatened, as the New York Post reported:

“Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign,” the New York Democrat wrote in a tweet.

Have you got that, timid Christians? The poster girl of Woke big government regards Christianity itself, the preaching of Jesus, as “fascism.” No matter how you dress Him up, she hates Him. And she hates us.

We might as well be true to ourselves and the Gospel, because dressing up in the rags of post-Christian leftist religiosity won’t protect us. Whether or not “He Gets Us,” she’s coming to get us.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”