My nephew-in-law is a computer man who went to college in the late 1970s. He said the awful thing about that time was that young people were told, “It’s all over.”

The future was organizing the resources we have and reducing them so that we would do as little harm to the environment as we could. More recently, our established religion came up with a term for that: carbon count.

Carbon count is a VERY religious term. Man is innately evil. No one can live without a carbon count, precisely in the same way that no human being under our previous established religions could live without sin.

One Calvinist writer said that there were savages who rejoiced at death and mourned at the birth of a child. He said that they were right in the latter case, because that pagan child was born to be damned.

One may hear Christians saying, “Everyone deserves death,” meaning that we all deserve it, and only the intercession of Christ will save us from “”death,”” Notice I put two sets of quotes around that, because that has to be the most blatant use of a code word ever. They mean that everyone deserves Hell, compared to which death would be a mercy beyond comparison.

If you are raised in the Bible Belt the difference leaps out at you when they use that wimpy little “deserve death” bit.

Christianity rose with a preaching of the Gospel. To tell everybody that they deserve eternal agony and despair is not Good News. As Churches became institutions, here was less and less talk of Good News.
And churches that cold afford it filled up with graphic images of Hellish agony.

We have watched Progressivism do precisely the same thing. Early liberals were eugenicists and they looked to a Future of unlimited human progress. Like the early Gospel Christians, they sold Hope. As they became established their doctrine took on the color my niece-in-law suffered under.

The rule is clear enough: Growing faiths teach Hope, established faiths move toward Guilt. The early church was built on Salvation and the high morality the Church claimed. Once the Church got its privileges, the dream of rule by paragons and saints died.

So if they could not claim superior morality, the Church had to fall back on its power over Hell.

This is a conjecture, but in the case of Political Correctness it is far more obvious. Even in my lifetime Communists were claiming that their countries were catching up to the United States in creature comforts. A Workers’ Paradise was literally on the way.

Soviet Science claimed that it would conquer space beginning with Sputnik. All the inventions capitalists had claimed, all the real scientific progress that would lead to a better, more fun life, had actually been invented by Russians.

Few here even know that Progressivism was a Gospel, a Good News that would end all poverty, take us into space, and drive the Evil Ones out of existence.

Now there is no hope whatsoever in progressive or Marxist politics for things to get better for us. Now it is ALL Guilt. Now it is ALL about how we are sinning by wanting too much. Now we are all carbon producers, and our goal is to produce as little sin or carbon until we die.

It is as if, just as Saint Paul picked up the last stages of Zoroastrianism and put it into Christianity, Progressives took the last stages of Christianity and found it very useful for the last stage of their rule as the established religion which has failed.