The Central Bigotry of the Left

Whittaker Chambers—a Quaker—wrote to William F. Buckley in 1956 that “There is only one fully logical conservative position in the West—that of the Catholic Church.”

This may explain why a central cause of the modern left is destroying the Catholic Church above all other nodes of opposition to secular leftism. I know I am not the first to suggest that anti-Catholic bigotry is one of the few kinds of bigotry the left approves.

The latest example of this impulse is found currently in The Atlantic:

How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal. . .

The militarism also glorifies a warrior mentality and notions of manliness and male strength. This conflation of the masculine and the military is rooted in wider anxieties about Catholic manhood—the idea that it is in crisis has some currency among senior Church figures and lay organizations. . .

There’s much more in this vein, and the complete article doesn’t get any better at any point. One wonders if the author (“Daniel Panneton is a writer based in Toronto, Canada”—I’ve never heard of him either) has ever pondered the “Knight of Faith” of the middle ages, or the 19th century hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which liberal Protestant denominations have been trying to strip out of their hymnals. It is astounding that an article this bad appeared in the once-respectable Atlantic.

Turns out there’s already a meme inspired by The Atlantic:

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