I’m beginning to understand something that has to do with the recurring one-versus-many conflicts I’ve encountered in recent years, with the enforced submersion into collective groupthinks which now replace race, gender, national origin (re-named “ethnic identity” due to collectivization along lines other than nationality), and religion, and we must now add one’s preferences in sexual activities as an “identity”; i.e., do you prefer multiple (simultaneous or serial) partners, single partners of the same sex, opposite sex, partners who are children—and that just refers to partner-preference, not to type of activity. At the same time that all types of imaginable activity become identity-markers, the high-speed drive to eradicate all other identifying lines into one great big androgynous Humanism religion can make us downright dizzy in its vortex. It has become impossible to read or to watch or to listen to the news. Everything is reported along groupthink party lines.

 To make matters worse, this cyclonic urge toward eradication of individuality, which wears the disguise of “tolerance” has invaded the Church. I’m told now that love of neighbor is love of God. I’ve been told that “God” is “community.” Read this and other high-sounding pronouncements according to the meaning as it’s actually played out: Love is God. And there is no God except community = We are God.

The speed at which we move toward John Lennon’s imagined paradise is, as I said, dizzying. The tolerance police are hard put to keep pace and have to play constant catch-up: Paula Deen made a racist joke thirty years ago; she is utterly destroyed. The CEO of Mozilla donated $1,000 six years ago to a campaign in California to ban legalization of same-sex marriage. He’s been forced to resign. The mayor of New York tells the country that if they disapprove of same-sex marriage, they’re not welcome in that state. Stay out. Likewise, the mayor of Chicago. If you are identified as “conservative,” you will be investigated by the IRS. And on and on; social media are weapons to be used against deviant thought, while the actual expression of any differing opinion is “hate speech,” a crime punishable by law. Freedom of speech is irrelevant when freedom of thought is prohibited. Freedom of religion is irrelevant when freedom to practice one’s faith is illegal.

Somehow, we all knew this was coming. We all knew it would invade the Church, too. Philosophy became pop-psych; art became pop-culture; love became pop-sentimentality; virtue became pop-righteousness. The tide of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” rises and consumes everything in its path with a cry of “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” and so we drown in a tidal wave where “ignorant armies clash by night.”

I think it’s time to disengage, to withdraw. It’s time to separate, detach, and to untangle the second commandment from the first, for there can be no we at all—unless there is first I Am. There is no love apart from its source—which isn’t us.