The varieties of MAGA experience

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

The Department of Making Colonialism Great Again has decided to eliminate the PC nonsense of allowing people to claim membership in dozens of crazy religions that believe crazy things. Henceforth our Warfighters will have to choose from a greatly reduced menu, most of the items on which are some variety of Christianity:

• Agnostic (AN)
• Baha’i faith (BH)
• Buddhism (BU)
• Christian – Assemblies of God (AG)
• Christian – Baptist (BA)
• Christian – Brethren (BR)
• Christian – Catholic (CA)
• Christian – Church of Christ (CC)
• Christian – Church of God (CG)
• Christian – Church of the Nazarene (CN)
• Christian – Episcopal/Anglican (EA)
• Christian – Evangelical (EV)
• Christian – Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW)
• Christian – Lutheran (LU)
• Christian – Methodist (ME)
• Christian – Non Denominational (ND)
• Christian – Orthodox (OX)
• Christian – Other (CO)
• Christian – Pentecostal (PE)
• Christian – Presbyterian (PR)
• Christian – Quaker (QU)
• Christian – Reformed (RE)
• Christian – Scientist (SC)
• Christian – Seventh Day Adventist (SA)
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (CJ)
• Hindu (HI)
• Islam (Muslim) (IS)
• Judaism (Jewish) (JU)
• No Religion (NR)
• Other Religions (OR)
• Sikh (SI)

That’s twenty-one varieties of Christianity, while religions that are famous for not having sectarian quarrels of any kind, like Islam and Judaism, very sensibly are limited to one variety each.

This list has already produced some recognition among our Mormon brethren that leopards can get quite hungry, as they have found themselves ejected from the community of Real Christians. I confess to having only Ariana Grande voter levels of knowledge of Mormon theology, or theologies, (I have, however, been a big fan of the Emperor of Beaver Island for about three decades now, ever since one of my brothers was in a band called King Strang, which alerted me to James J. Strang’s glorious if brief reign). A quick internet review informs me that the problem here seems to be that the Mormons are more or less Arians, in that they deny the consubstantial nature of the Trinitarian union, which apparently, at least according to Pete Hegseth’s pastor, expels them from legitimate Christendom. He also believes women shouldn’t vote, btw. Utah’s senators are all upset about this of course, (the Mormons aren’t Christians part, not the women can’t vote part).

This little incident, symptomatic of so very many things at the moment, reminded me of the following observation from Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” in which Borges points out that any classification of the things that make up the universe is ultimately arbitrary, since we do not know what the universe is:

The Bibliographical Institute of Brussels also resorts to chaos: it has parceled the universe into 1,000 subdivisions: Number 262 corresponds to the Pope; Number 282, to the Roman Catholic Church; Number 263, to the Lord’s Day; Number 268, to Sunday schools; Number 298, to Mormonism; and Number 294, to Brahmanism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and Taoism. It also tolerates heterogeneous subdivisions, for example, Number 179: “Cruelty to animals. Protection of animals. Moral Implications of dueling and suicide. Various vices and defects. Various virtues and qualities.”

The essay ends with a marvelous quote from G.K. Chesterton, which always makes me smile whenever I recall its existence. I reproduce it here in a fuller version:

Every time one man says to another, “Tell us plainly what you mean?” he is assuming the infallibility of language: that is to say, he is assuming that there is a perfect scheme of verbal expression for all the internal moods and meanings of men. Whenever a man says to another, “Prove your case; defend your faith,” he is assuming the infallibility of language: that is to say, he is assuming that a man has a word for every reality in earth, or heaven, or hell. He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest; he knows that there are abroad in the world and doing strange and terrible service in it crimes that have never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened. Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.