No, I'm Not a Traditionalist.

It ticks me off that people refuse to see the difference between Traditionalism and Biblical worldview.  I kind of get it when we're talking about non-Christian folks.  But they're not where the trouble lies.

The trouble is, we haven't been bothered to separate the two.  We've been content to conflate the teachings of Scripture with Traditionalism, which is why people still think, among other things, that Christians hate women.  Um, hello?  Remember that guy Jesus chillin' with all the ladies, from the rich patroness to the prostitute?  Remember how in the Gospels the eejits who don't get it are a bunch of dudes, and the clever interlocutor, some of the few left at the cross, the one who gets to the tomb first, are women?

We're ill-equipped to encounter that nonsense.  We can't discern the absurd and wicked elements of Traditionalism because we think it's what we believe.  We've been hornswoggled by our own equivocation.

Traditionalism sucks.  Traditionalism sucks because it's an ideology that controls, that masters.  But tradition, like most ideas, is an all right servant.  Scorn for the past isn't my thing.  It isn't God's thing.  But idealizing the past, idolizing the past, that will get you nothing but 40 years of wandering in the desert while you pine for the good ol' days in Egypt, or 1955, or the Reagan years, or whatever.

We do it with politics too, we let some movement or institution or organization tell us what we believe, or at least what we can believe publicly.  Oh, you're just like us because of whatever.  Jump on board the tea party express, or the hope and change bandwagon.  Christianity is a tool that political parties can wield.  Right?

Knock it off.  The Gospel is not a talking point to be hammered on, a political agenda, a social reconstruction plan.  It's nothing to be co-opted and subsumed by a larger, another ideology.  There is no larger, no other ideology for the Christian.