Thus, I suggest, have extremist #Christians unwittingly committed themselves to a kind of death-spiral of ever dwindling #faith in anything that's genuinely sacred or preternatural, anything that's genuinely outside of themselves. They decry the evils of The World, the perils of solipsism and "moral relativism", and yet they themselves seem like the chief victims of these things. The mainstream political sort of #Christian is apt to be extremely worldly, devoted to purely secular occupations like grubbing for profits and popularity and political power, and yet they cling stubbornly to a purely self-serving sort of faith which tells them, "You're not REALLY a part of that worldly corruption. You're something different, something special underneath the worldly clothing."

I think you can perhaps guess why such Christians are quietly obsessed with idolization of knighthood: they can imagine that their business-clothes and secular jobs are merely an armor, an invisible and invincible barrier between themselves and the worldly corruptions of money and power.

(cont'd)

The extremist Christian secretly screwing with some patient's medical records, or trying to get people fired for the sin of being "woke" in some way, or denying service to a perceived enemy of the faith from behind a drugstore counter, doesn't think of themselves as what they are, i.e. someone betraying the public's trust or doing crimes for shady personal reasons. They see themselves as undercover heroes, as commandoes for Jesus, as sacred paladins venturing out into the squalid heathen wastelands and striving to safeguard civilization and its godly values.

But I'm straying from the specific point I wish to make about how such Christofascists have come to see health in general. In their need to feel as if they see the principles of their faith reflected in the concrete world all around them, they have come to equate sickness, especially mental illness, with sin and diabolism.

(cont'd)

This tendency has long been evident in "Western", i.e. post-Roman Christian, societies in Europe and her various colonies. #Christians have never lived at ease with a purely abstract notion of sin and damnation; too frequently they're driven to wanting concrete evidence that someone is ontologically a sinner, intrinsically damned. That craving for proof of damnation takes innumerable forms, of course, such as Christian misogyny, which is currently fashionable in right-wing Christofascist politics. Only men can be trusted with leadership and decision-making, say the beardy hypermasculine #Christian evangelists such as Dale Partridge and Eric Conn: women are intrinsically erroneous, it says so in the Bible.

(According to my own Christian values, literally every human being is intrinsically erroneous—the most general possible interpretation of "original sin"—but in practice, many Christians prefer to think that there's only certain people who do all the sinning.)

(cont'd)

But disease and insanity have been especially tempting concepts to equate with sinfulness, for a great many #Christian fanatics, because these are things that can afflict someone who once was healthy and sinless. Contracting a disease or developing a mental disorder gives them a way of explaining temptation in a manner that doesn't encourage them to think about their own tendencies to be tempted. Others make the mistake of getting sick or going mad, but the good and pure person, the person of pristine health and sound "genetics", they remain untouched by sin and the wiles of the Devil.

It's been no help whatever, of course, that writers of Christian apologetics such as G. K. #Chesterton and the obnoxious #CSLewis have freely appealed to analogies involving health and sanity in order to justify their own zeal for proselytization.

(cont'd)

Chesterton, straining to explain himself to a possibly disbelieving audience in his monumental but highly problematical book Orthodoxy, appeals to Hanwell (q.v. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Bernard%27s_Hospital,_Hanwell still in operation under the aegis of the National Health) as a worldly analogue to Hell. To go to Hell is to go to Hanwell, suggests Chesterton, quite forgetting that Hanwell was only a Hellish place because of the incompetence and venality of the people who saw fit to incarcerate people in such a cesspit.

It was ALWAYS possible to do better than Hanwell, but polite English society was quite inured to the notion that mental asylums were little more than dungeons in which to throw "mad" persons. By equating Hell with Hanwell, Chesterton was unwittingly coöperating with that social failure; he was, as the kids say it, normalizing the notion that insane asylums ought invariably to be nightmarish.

(cont'd)

And that is precisely why the #Christian invasion of #health care, especially in #MentalHealth, is such a dangerous thing. The people who have wiggled themselves into gatekeeping positions in hospitals and asylums and substance-abuse treatment (and a myriad other institutions which give them life-and-death power over sick and vulnerable human beings) have a primary goal for being there, and it's NOT helping people. They're wanting, above all, continued and constant validation of their own repellent belief system. They want to assure themselves that indeed the world is divided between Heaven and Hell, even if they have to send people to Hell all by themselves.

They wish to act, in other words, as angels and demons. They have the cheek to suppose they can compartmentalize their demonic decisions safely away from their angelic ones—if, indeed, ANY of their decisions can be said to be on the side of the angels.

(cont'd)

I am reminded of the characterization of Kingpin in the superb #Spiderman film Into the Spider-verse, in which Liev Schreiber voices a cold and sarcastic corporate boss who nevertheless believes that his "true" self is the loving family man, seen only in luminous flashbacks to his supposedly happy marriage—a marriage which ended all at once when his wife stumbled in upon Kingpin locked in deathly battle with Spider-Man. Stunned to see this hidden side of her husband she flees with their son in a panic, and fatally smashes up her car.

Spider-Man's fault, right? That's how Kingpin sees it. He'd had his life safely divided, like Dr. Jekyll thinking he can let Mr. Hyde do all his sins for him, and Kingpin blamed Spider-Man for upsetting the balance, for destroying the vision of future happiness in which Kingpin had gotten away forever with deceiving his wife about the true nature of his business affairs.

(cont'd)

That's roughly how the terminally worldly and treacherous #Christians, who all imagine themselves as secret soldiers for Jesus as they squirrel themselves away in corporate and government and academic bureaucracies, cooking the books and doing special favors undercover in order to bring the Lord's Kingdom just a little bit closer, feel about their own lives. They break rules and cheat money and betray people and it's never crime to them, it's some other thing that they feel entitled and empowered to do, because they have faith and belief.

They're only cheating and betraying the Bad People™, who deserve it anyway. Their REAL self is radiant with Christian virtues. It's only the corruption of the world which somehow forces them to have this secret other life, in which they routinely do questionable things which absolutely must never be found out, because that would be like handing Satan a victory.

(cont'd)