Readers may be aware that I have started attending church of late. This is not because I am any sort of moral or decent person; it has more to do with a promise that I made several years ago, which I intend to keep. The one thing that stopped me from stepping into a church much earlier was my deep-seated concern that I would walk into a church that teaches the Gospel of Nice, rather than the Gospel of Christ.

I was right to be concerned.

This week I had to miss Friday Mass at the church near my workplace due to, of all things, a dentist’s appointment. There was a time when the choice between a semi-annual tooth-cleaning and a chance to attend Friday Mass would have been an absolute no-brainer – I would have taken the dentist’s chair over the church’s pew, every single time.

Actually, today it still is a no-brainer – in the opposite direction. But I digress.

I was really rather looking forward to going to Sunday Mass at the Catholic church about 10 minutes’ walk away from where I live. I got all dressed up for church – a proper shirt and suit, because I guess that this is what one is supposed to do when going to the House of the Lord. (Mind you, I’m going on an understanding of what “going to Church” means that is probably about fifty years out of date.) I arrived at the church right on time for the beginning of the 7pm Mass.

It was not very long before I realised that I probably was not going to fit in too well.

Americans used to take church attendance very seriously. To be as fair as possible, in large parts of the country, they still do – just drive out to rural New York or Vermont, or, heck, just about any part of Texas outside of Dallas and Austin, and you will see people dressed up in their Sunday best, worshiping quietly and reverently before the Lord.

However, the church that I went to, though ostensibly Catholic and obviously very well maintained as part of a wealthy neighbourhood, was rather less strict in terms of dress code than I had expected. Other than the chap singing the hymns, I was the only one there that had bothered to dress up.

Oh well, never mind all of that, if people want to turn up to worship the Lord in ripped jeans and faded shirts, then that is their business and not mine. I sat quietly and listened to the prayer service – done, unfortunately, in the vulgate and not the original Latin. I am reliably informed that the latter, more ancient tradition, is quite something to behold.

Everything seemed fine, more or less. And then the pastor – or whatever it is that Catholics call the priest, I am unfortunately rather ignorant in this regard – got up to deliver a sermon.

I listened, first with shock, then incredulity, then growing anger, as the pastor preached the Gospel of Nice.

The sermon concerned the need for an “uplift”, for the betterment of people’s moods due to the freezing cold of winter and the terrible recent news of the mass shooting in Florida. It then meandered into a glowingly approving description of the ways in which the students of that afflicted high school had organised a national walk-out on March 14th and a march on Washington, D.C., to demand an end to gun violence.

Before the sermon had taken place, a reading from the Gospel of Matthew was performed – it was the passage relating to The Transfiguration. In his sermon, the pastor asserted that Jesus was always open and welcoming to everyone and never treated anyone badly and always wished peace upon everyone.

I listened with growing rage as this blasphemy in the guise of a sermon was given to a crowd of parishioners who were quite obviously a racially and ethnically “diverse” bunch of uniformly-minded liberals. A few minutes later, I got up and walked out, infuriated by what I had heard and unable to stand the stench of sulphur any longer.

I do not intend ever to go back. I will not set foot inside a “church” that preaches such heresy.

Now, at this point, the Churchians always react with shock when a shitlord like me says such things about their chosen way of expressing their faith. They point to various passages in the New Testament that show Christ as some sort of long-haired live-and-let-live hippie who just happened to perform miracles and was, like, totally the coolest dude who ever lived, y’know.

I must apologise here to the real Christians out there for presuming to lecture anyone about the true nature of the Christian faith. But as surely as I know anything, I know this:

That is NOT Christianity.

Christianity is not about being “nice”. The early Christians were not viciously and relentlessly persecuted because they were “nice”. They were not captured and enslaved and thrown into Roman circuses to be eaten alive by lions for being “nice”.

They were persecuted because the Christian faith is the most radical re-thinking of the balance of power between Man, State, and God that has yet been posed. Instead of a religion preaching deference to the power of the State, Christianity teaches that there is a Power above the State, which answers to no instrument or organisation of Man.

Christianity is not about being tolerant and accepting of everything. Christianity is not about being welcoming to one and all. Christianity is never about submitting to violence and evil and hoping and praying that the Lord will simply deliver us from it without us having to lift a finger.

Christianity is about a ceaseless and terrible struggle against an immortal, prideful liar, who fancies himself the Prince of this world.

Christianity is about taking a stand against evil, in all of its forms, and resisting to the utmost the attempts of evil men to usurp the kingdom of God.

Churchians try to counter this by talking about how Christ told his followers to “turn the other cheek”, and about how “the meek shall inherit the Earth”, and how He sent his followers forth to be as sheep among the wolves.

That is NOT Christianity.

When Christ told His followers to turn the other cheek, He did not mean that they should be passive in the face of evil. His instruction was an act of pure defiance: He was giving His persecutors and His disbelievers a message that could not possibly be more clear. “Do your worst. Strike me again – I will NOT yield.”

Churchians, usually desperate at this point, try to talk about how Christ eschewed violence and converted through performing miracles of love, compassion, and healing. They argue frantically that Christ accepted all who came forth to listen to His ministry, and that He did not distinguish between Jew and Gentile.

That is NOT Christianity.

Christianity is about the Divine becoming flesh and blood in a land ruled by evil. It is about the ultimate sacrifice of redemption. It is about a miracle that destroyed, once and for all, the hold that Death has always had over Man. And it is, in the final analysis, about a covenant that the Lord Himself has made with each and every one of us – to give us strength, wisdom, guidance, and life everlasting if we take on the very, very hard task of obeying His Laws.

Moreover, Churchians rather conveniently forget that the Big JC had no problem whatsoever with picking up a whip and driving the damn moneylenders OUT of His Father’s temple. They somehow develop severe amnesia when reminded about the fact that Christ stated plainly that it is not right to take the bread of His wisdom and throw it to the dogs – and in that same passage He also happened to mention the fact that He was “sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”, not to all the world of the Gentiles.

And in all of that guff about non-violence and acceptance, Churchians must perform positively sinister acts of mental dexterity in order to forget that Christ told His followers in the Garden of Gethsemane to sell their cloaks and purses and buy swords. They seem to be in an awfully big hurry to gloss over the fact that He stated plainly that He came not to bring peace, but a sword, to set brother against brother and father against son. He told his followers to be as “subtil [wise] as serpents and as innocent as doves”.

The Churchian heresy against the Word is an outright abomination. I will never listen to such bilge again, nor will I ever bow my head before a Churchian pastor who values “peace” and “tolerance” and “diversity” over what Christ actually said again.

I am not a Christian – for the umpteenth time. But it saddens and disgusts me to think that I seem to know more about what Christianity is and could be than those who have followed for most of their lives this blasphemous perversion of the True Faith that we call Churchianity. That pathetic and weak-kneed mockery of the righteous Word and Law of the Lord is directly responsible for some of the greatest catastrophes to befall Western civilisation in all of its long and once-proud history.

The Church has continued to back off and retreat in the face of the greatest and most terrible of its many heresies. Where once the Holy League provided the final defence against the heresy of Islam, today the Church cannot seem to welcome “immigrants” from Islamic lands fast enough. Where once the Church resisted with all of its might the faithlessness and godlessness that has brought the West to its knees, today its own leaders seem all too keen to ignore the very idea of God-given rights and concomitant responsibilities.

Christianity is the West. Without a strong, masculine, resurgent Christianity that reveres God and His immortal Law, the West is doomed and all of the great good that it has done for the world will disappear with it.

Never again will I tolerate such blasphemy. Never again will I allow the Churchians to teach me a false gospel that runs so plainly counter to everything that Jesus actually said.

Never. Again.