Thursday, 22 January 2026

Sturgeon's Law again - or, is Romantic Christianity *necessarily* just-another liberal apostasy?

If Romantic Christianity is an insistence that the individual (rather than any external authority, such as a church or a prescribed-interpretation of Scripture), and his deepest intuition (rather than e.g. "evidence" or "reason"), ought to be ultimately responsible for his Christian belief...

Then is this not just-another version of the kind of liberal-apostasy - just another attempt to create hedonic or socially-advantageous wriggle-room from the obvious and necessary truths of [insert favoured church or tradition]?


The best answer is not-necessarily, but sometimes, yes... it is bound to be. 

Especially when that individual attempts to impose his own personal intuition on "other people" in some kind of general, quasi-institutional, of self-advantaging fashion.

But even when an individual is going his best, the actual practice of Romantic Christianity will sometimes or even mostly be contaminated by the basic nature of this reality we all inhabit: which is undercut by entropy and permeated by evil.    


After all - so far as I can see - some version of "Sturgeon's Law" seems to apply almost everywhere - in the sense that in any category of phenomena involving people: most of that category is "more or less" crap

But the proper question is in that word "necessarily": the question of whether Romantic Christianity must be from-it-nature merely wriggle-room liberalizing-apostasy?

Because even if Romantic Christianity is, by the nature of all mortal earthly things, mostly crap; this is compatible with it being at its best actually good and true. 


I would first say that RC does not have to be, ought not to be a liberal apostasy; and that Romantic Christianity can instead be a genuine, positive, really new (and better!) way of being a Christian: a more authentic and divinely-approved way of "following Jesus".

   

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