That's burned into my subconscious, from before I started school.
But when I was a young Catholic conservative, and Nate has spoken of the same things among Protestants in the Antipodes, it was all envisioning *us* as being the victims, like the Jesuit martyrs or in the gulags or in some future dystopia.
At some point - and it seems to have really attained escape velocity at the end of the 80s/early 90s, but I'm not exactly sure where the turn came (though in the US it seems to have gotten a strong push at Thomas Aquinas College in California) where it went from a Martyr mentality to a Crusader mentality. The Crusader Ideal was always there, don't get me wrong. Lots of romance about Acre and paiens en tort, Chretiens en droit and Roland and Richard etc. But it wasn't a *realistic* dream to us, whereas people were always getting arrested in China or Russia for their religion, and having their right to profess their beliefs taken away here (so we were always told in our conservative newspapers) so it seemed quite plausible a future.
Somewhere along the line, the black helicopter/blue helmet crowd ended up in our spiritual bomb shelter, and there was a fusion/convergience of memes, and the result was books like MacFarlane's Pierced by a Sword (available on Amazon, the quantity sold claims are a joke, I knew people involved in the distribution, they gave it away and claimed it as sales) and the Left Behind series, which is actively militaristic, as opposed to This Present Darkness, which was full of martial-arts combat - but only between angels. Ordinary Christians just Suffered Nobly.
And now the pro-active, "preemptive counter-martyrdom" Crusader mentality is in full swing. I saw it as it was going on, in pieces and bits, but I didn't understand it as a threat until it was too late (and nobody would have believed me, at the time, even if I had.)
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The Blood of Martyrs is the Seed of the Church
Date: 2005-03-01 06:28 am (UTC)But when I was a young Catholic conservative, and Nate has spoken of the same things among Protestants in the Antipodes, it was all envisioning *us* as being the victims, like the Jesuit martyrs or in the gulags or in some future dystopia.
At some point - and it seems to have really attained escape velocity at the end of the 80s/early 90s, but I'm not exactly sure where the turn came (though in the US it seems to have gotten a strong push at Thomas Aquinas College in California) where it went from a Martyr mentality to a Crusader mentality. The Crusader Ideal was always there, don't get me wrong. Lots of romance about Acre and paiens en tort, Chretiens en droit and Roland and Richard etc. But it wasn't a *realistic* dream to us, whereas people were always getting arrested in China or Russia for their religion, and having their right to profess their beliefs taken away here (so we were always told in our conservative newspapers) so it seemed quite plausible a future.
Somewhere along the line, the black helicopter/blue helmet crowd ended up in our spiritual bomb shelter, and there was a fusion/convergience of memes, and the result was books like MacFarlane's Pierced by a Sword (available on Amazon, the quantity sold claims are a joke, I knew people involved in the distribution, they gave it away and claimed it as sales) and the Left Behind series, which is actively militaristic, as opposed to This Present Darkness, which was full of martial-arts combat - but only between angels. Ordinary Christians just Suffered Nobly.
And now the pro-active, "preemptive counter-martyrdom" Crusader mentality is in full swing. I saw it as it was going on, in pieces and bits, but I didn't understand it as a threat until it was too late (and nobody would have believed me, at the time, even if I had.)