There is a lot of talk in my corner of the interweb about the need to build 'alternative institutions' - and that from these we can fight, and eventually beat, the global totalitarian atheist-leftist System.
The trouble is that this strategy has been tried, pretty thoroughly - and failed.
In the evangelical Protestant churches (especially in the USA) from the 1960s onward, in response to influential theorists such as Francis Schaeffer, there was a pretty determined attempt to develop churches that provided a range of services - including education from schooling through to colleges and universities.
Such churches, with such ideals, were the major growth area of Christianity in The West over the past half-century - and the only kind of Christian church capable of attracting and retaining men and young people in significant numbers; and of providing a parallel economy and employment.
I was a member of this kind of church that grew greatly over forty years, to provide a wide range of activities and children-youth activities through childhood and extending into college - the church also tried to start a school, but was thwarted by the UK educational bureaucracy.
Indeed, the Mormon church developed many alternative institutions, starting in the middle 19th century - and (in its heartlands) provided a very impressive 'parallel social world' of church-run activities of many kinds - from cradle to grave.
And, of course, the Roman Catholic church had centuries of experience developing 'alternative' social structures in the West - with religious orders and secular priests providing an apparently autonomous personnel, schools and colleges, social clubs and a multitude of other activities and employments. Almost - it seemed - a parallel world...
Therefore, the situation was that many Christians of many kinds - right up into the new millennium - really thought they already had a set of alternative institutions.
The problem is that such alternative institutions became corrupted and converged; and when it came to 2020 and the demonic coup - the evangelicals and Mormons alike eagerly, enthusiastically, obeyed the rules designed to destroy the Christian churches.
Instead of (as people like me had hoped they would) providing a strong communal basis and support for resisting and maybe overcoming anti-Christian pressures from the mainstream...
Instead of this, and after decades/ centuries of hard work in building them; when times got really tough and they were most needed - the alternative institutions turned out Not to be 'alternative' after all!
Just, after all, different 'flavours' of the same universal institutional convergence onto the global-left-totalitarian agenda.
So I hold out no optimism for new alternative institutions as a strategy for prosecuting the spiritual war of these times.
It is easy to say that future alternative institutions will retain their purity and independence in ways that the evangelicals and Mormons failed to do; but the multiple pressures on any institution that must function in the context of a globally-hegemonic secular-left bureaucracy and mass media are greater now than they ever have been.
And the problems of trying to grow social institutions in a world where left-secular assumptions are ever more pervasive and extreme are also worse than ever.
And there are fewer Christians who even want these things than ever before - as demonstrated by their mass compliance with the anti-Christian (anti-human) policies advocated by their corrupted leaderships.
I don't see the prospects for genuinely alternative Christian institutions in 2022 as being any better than they were in the past decades; when this strategy was tried and comprehensively failed.
Being realistic: quite the contrary.
The same options as ever remain for Christians institutions whether churches or alternative social groupings of of other kinds: stay pure... but small, weak and outside of the society (if that is indeed allowed - which is increasingly doubtful)...
Or else grow ... but by compromising with 'the world', and at the cost of creeping corruption and self-subversion - tending always towards assimilation with the goals of Systemic Evil, sooner or later.
