The “Last Supper” or Dionysian Café tableau at the opening of the Olympics generated much heat and even a kind of apology from Olympian leaders amid the obfuscations of global elites: Nothing to see here, move along.
The scene was designed to promote the tolerance and diversity that the new world order of the global West encourages, the digital peasantry was told, with a sneer at the indelicacy of deplorable Christian dissenters. If it offended, we are sorry, but it was unintentional, and not even what you saw.
The “if offended, sorry” formula was one I learned as a newspaper reporter years ago in Chicago in the days of analogue technology. But the gaslighting (you didn’t see this) is a new twist, a digital Jedi mind trick.
The whole incident reminds us of what traditional Christians face today in the global West: Less the politics of sexual and racial revolution, or even a philosophy or ideology of the same, and more the cultural propaganda of a replacement religion suitable for a world managerial system, which because of its Eurocentrism must place local Christian tradition under its feet.
It’s impossible to imagine the Olympians (running one of the great institutional networks of secular globalism) putting on a display that offended Muslims, let alone meeting accusations of blasphemy in such a case without being totally abject in resulting apologies and reparations. They would be too afraid and it would be off-mission. The mission involves canceling Christian anthropology not in sync with the pan-sexualism of LGBTQIA+ and the super-racialism of “voices of color” in their context of the lingering cyber-glow of a degenerate West. The new religion jumps out of “old Christendom” like a drag queen leaping from Miss Havisham’s crumbling wedding cake in Dickens’ Great Expectations. No one is surprised or charmed, and the banality of the evil may be a saving grace for the resistance.
This new established religion is not atheism per se. It involves reimagining paganism as a type of re-enchanting techno-magic for tired global civilization. It’s not the disenchantment of the world regretted by traditionalist writers of the past, but attempted re-enchantment. Its ultimate embrace of the demonic limb-rending Dionysian ethos implies still some preoccupation with the divine, albeit hostile. It is gnostic in the sense of old Christian heresy as being both elitist (traditional faithful are seen as wrong-history-sided deplorably déclassé and un-expert un-privileged) and instrumentalist in its view of the body in abstract terms of skin color and favored sexual-stimulant orifices as means for social control via those categories of consumerist careerism.
In this reincarnation of paganism, the conformist and consumerist self-created identities of hyper-racialism and pan-sexualism ascribe absolute fluidity to any spiritual limits on identity even while essentializing and circumscribing identity in totally materialistic ways. Nietzsche might be pleased at the get-up-and-go will-to-power of it all, while reserving his inclination to make fun of its myopic revolutionary-bourgeois urge to clean the global society’s house in a way that (to use a biblical analogy) makes room for more demons than before.
Mystical “voices of color” meld with the voices of those feeling sexually oppressed but who are not to be repressed, in an homogenized new dominant culture that seeks to call “halt” to the tragic cycles of history. The new religious-social vanguard finds career success, neat political packaging, and an eschatology of pleasure for its revolutionary Linked-In accounts. Beneath, however, lies the dangerously rising undertow of an unmoored mob mentality (fueled by self-will) in an era of incredible surveillance and control technologies. Not to mention proliferating nuclear weapons.
Elon Musk in a recent viral video exchange with Jordan Peterson asserted that the trans pan-sexual craze as applied to children (decoupling youth from traditional families and faith) is a woke virus. But it’s only one variety. The whole Western cultural pandemic on display at the opening Olympics ceremonies is akin to the flying monkeys of nightmarish scenes from The Wizard of Ox, trying to pluck away Generations Z and Alpha.
Such new religious spirit in its rejection of objectivity both distracts from and confuses many global problems, from concern with medical pandemics (see the increasing inability to assess such threats objectively, as in the cloud of mystery remaining over Covid shutdowns, vaccines, and origins in China); to security (neglect of the U.S. southern border, the disastrously led American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the vanishing Secret Service at Butler, PA). Then there is the threat of nuclear annihilation (the blind man’s bluff of American policy in Ukraine, the Middle East, and East Asia), with comic relief from the U.S. presidential race (with both sides arguably featuring different types of identitarianism, in which explosive remnants of “common sense” about an impending regime of childless cat ladies teeter on the edge of the chasm of the binarized uniparty).
The new paganism of self-fashioned, fluid, yet essentialized, identities would cancel the U.S. Declaration of Independence’s phrase supporting “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” governing what Lincoln inappropriately called “one nation under God,” whose independence John Adams wrote was once founded on “the general principles of Christianity.” In the U.S. (a global imperial center oddly at once both a progenitor and previously a partial holdout with regard to the new religion), it seeks to overwhelm remaining constitutional constraints, such as the Senate filibuster and the Senate’s very composition, checks and balances with divided powers, the existence of the Electoral College, and the traditions of the Supreme Court. These all serve as remnant mechanical reminders of the limits of mortality on the secular corporate-state system and of the source of “unalienable rights” in the Creator, which have no place in the celebration of pride and passion in the new paganism. There will be no “humility month” under the new regime, unless it is enforced bondage for dissenting traditional Christians.
The erosion of first principles for the American republic needs mourning not as part of attempted erasure of the Enlightenment, but as an apotheosis of the latter in Frankenstein-like terms. Decoupled from traditional Christian family, the country as republic stumbles like a headless leviathan, a giant zombie of self-will merged into online conformities, as John Quincy Adams warned it would without that family model. A vague national idea alone can’t awaken the gnostic sleepwalker of the globalized American Leviathan, without embodied memories of home rooted in Christian faith.
The civilizational crime scene glimpsed at the Olympic opening like a quick lightning flash revealed the cosmic Black Hole in the middle of old Christendom as defined by Europe, outside the neglected and vilified Byzantine civilizational zone of the Orthodox Church. The Western problem began with the over-rationalism of the filioque and its wandering into the idea of created grace, ultimating in an instrumentalist will and world of hyper-individualism bound to a digital hive-mind. The Olympic opening exposed for a moment the yearnings unmoored at the heart of high-tech hipstery cultural Marxism: Where is the meaning, where is the heart? Where is my smart phone? The late Dartmouth poet and professor Donald Sheehan said the lesson of the great novels of Dostoevsky (a writer obsessed with the advance of nihilism in the West, and prophetic of our time) was the need for self-emptying in Christ rather than self-assertion. We have the latter today in spades, a surplus of cultural amphetamine greater than our massive fiscal debts. But where is the real love, of loving our neighbor more than ourself in Christ?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his The Gulag Archipelago, in the section “The Soul and Barbed Wire” summed up three basic principles of Bolshevik atheism that permeated its prison camps (a model for Hitler) and larger society, which oddly mesh with the self-assertion of today’s secular globalism on display at the Olympics opening:
- Survive at any price. The ends justify the means, even the death of others.
- Only material results matter. Two wrongs can make a right.
- Adherence to the “permanent lie.” Don’t disturb the virtual reality in which we all supposedly must swim, lest you disturb your career and loved ones.
These rules guide today’s global neopagan-neocolonialism under the banner of social justice. “Love is love” flatlines as self-love, while the revolution has become live-streamed on the finest of tech devices, resonating deeply into the echo chambers of our brains and bodies. Expressing self-will for power means submitting to the new secular high-tech mass as a rite. It is like, in Christian philosophical terms, a parody of sobornost or mystical unity, but enervated as being outside the Church as the Body of Christ, and in a dark mist like the sorceror Bar-Jesus who sought to block St. Paul, unable to see. This headless horseman of the Apocalypse rides helter-skelter astride the globe, or at least claims to do so.
We are left with the Body of Dionysius at the globally live-streamed Olympian rituals. We are mesmerized. We applaud Olympic achievements even if we object to the ceremonies. We have learned to love Big Brother, whose off-screen Dionysian maenads would tear apart our children. Online we live in a demonized version of Creation we look right through without seeing.
But history rolls on and the live-streamed revolution will not be the last word. Thank God.
