Worse than Infidels: Christian Aspirational Aping Of Elite Oikophobia As Apostasy

Love in the Oikos:
The First Practice of Christian Religion: to Reject the Oikos is Apostasy.

The habitual rite of the Human-Rights Religion worships it's own god in place of God. It's god is also praised as "love": the love that leaps over one's own for others -- neglecting one's own family, nation, church, neighbors, friends -- love only outside one's own "oikos."

Do not join this anti-oikic apostasy for it worships a deformed god of deformed love with a deformed gospel:

"we can have a family of man if only we will pay no special regard to our own families." "we can have perfect limitless love if only we will eradicate all particular local loves." "we can have the perfect nation by ignoring our own, negating our nation."

The god whom they worship is no father and offers to save mankind without a son because it does not inspirate all relationships; it destroys local relationships rather than growing larger loves from within them. And, this god itself does not offer any special relationship, only commands that we do not form a special relationship with any god, any family, any nation. All gods, all families, all religions, all nations, all are to be treated by you equally; that is, equally abolished as an object of special duty, equalized into the homogeneous whole. The yoke is light; give up special labors for one's own; stop prioritizing one's own over another. In return, individual rights.

"Oikos" is the Greek term used in Scripture to mean several related things. By expanding metonymy, it signifies a house, a household, a family, like the blood line of David, or an ethnic nation, like Israel. Paul, for example, speaks of practical love for kin and family in terms of care for oikos and failure of oikophilia (practical love of family) as apostasy (faith denial):

1Ti 5:8 If any one does not provide for his own, and especially for his own family [oikos], he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Paul says neglect of the oikos is Christian apostasy, rejection of one's faith, and leaves one worse than one who does not believe.



Paul's teaching that love of one's own, especially one's own family, is essential to faith may strike even some Christians as counter-intuitive. Surely, Christians believe in a universal duty of love to all mankind, (philanthropy is the old term for this)? Surely, we all become one nation under the universal kingship of Christ and one family under God the Father. All that's true, but there is no conflict.

Properly flowing from the love of God, philanthropy and oikophilia are not in tension as they seem to the world. The universal love of Christians is ordered so as not to destroy the primary duties of love owed to one's own and one's oikos. Rather, the Christian's love for mankind is inspired by his love for his own oikos. The Christian is inspired to imitate the divine love between God the Father and God the Son; in the divine oikonomy, he recognizes the revelation implicit in the ready love between human fathers and sons. Knowing the love of the Father and the Son, Christians cannot be loveless to their own fathers and sons but increase in love to them. Seeing that the Father loved the Son first and the Son the Father first, we do not doubt that our own love of our own will pour over into love of others outside our oikos. But we also do not doubt that a love unlike God's that leaps over one's own children and parents is not a love from God or for God.

In this way, we understand how the first expression of Christian religion, as a response to God, is to take care of one's own.

1Ti 5:4 But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God.

We also learn how to care for others outside our own oikos by learning to take care of our own oikos.

1Ti 3:5 For if a man know not how to rule his own house [oikos], how shall he take care of the church of God? 

We owe love to all, but there is an order to our duties especially emphasizing doing good to our own families and church, which does not conflict with doing good to all but rather reinforces it:

Ga 6:10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family [oikos] of believers.

For the Christian, beginning with care of one's own, one's oikoi of family and nation, one's church, is the necessary step to love of mankind. To love and imitate the Father who loves the Son, to love and imitate the God who loves his own oikos (as the church is called), to love and imitate the Bridegroom who loves His ecclesial bride, requires that we first serve our own children, oikos and brides. Love of oikos is so basic to God and so essential to what trust in Him requires that to neglect one's own, especially one's oikos, is to "disown the faith" and to become "worse than the unbeliever."

By contrast, "xenophobia" is the great sign of unbelief for the Human-Rights Religion (for fun, let's call it "the HoRroR"). Xenophobia is what the world calls special concern for one's own, one's family, one's church or one's nation. The Horror teaches serving one's own especially is a sign of hatred to others, rather than the starting point of all real universal love.

Unlike the Christian faith, the proponents of the Horror say nothing of our special duty to our own, especially our oikos. They don't speak of a child's human right to be raised by his own married father and mother. They don't lament the rise in illegitimacy and divorce-deprived children living with only parent. They don't speak of a human right to marital fidelity against adultery and other betrayals, or work to develop the special love of one man for one woman. They don't praise and support a wife's love of her own husband or children. They complain if too many women are out of the wage-slave workforce raising their own children and supporting their own families. They complain if it is to hard for a woman to divorce her husband. They complain about presumptions that children are best off with their own parents and define the "best interests" of children in distinction from their relation and duties to their own parents. They don't praise nations that look after their own.They seek to split peoples loyalty to one another in favor of global governance. They despise national citizenship and love "global citizenship."

We see the evil of denying orderly prioritization of love when our ruling cosmopolitan elites across so many nations daily justify neglecting and disadvantaging of their own peoples' interests by labeling any privileging of one's own nation as "xenophobic." Actually, it would be just as appropriate to say that they follow an absolute ethic of oikophobia. (Oikophobia is simply the descriptive complement of xenophobia; it is dislike of one's own leading to favoring strangers over one's family etc.)

Even Christians, following the elite example and aspiring to gain status from the elites by aping it, are coming to confuse the appropriate order of love, thinking that it is a duty to help strangers before one's own family and nation. There is a duty to help strangers, but it does not compete as a rival to the duty to one's own. Every man is a neighbor who is owed love, but this love begins by serving my own, especially my oikos. We are all prone to ape the manner of the rich and powerful who make a show of putting their own neighbors last. But it is sad to see some Christians abandoning the teachings of Scriptures to adopt the oikos-hating ethos of the world.

This news story, for example, of the Vatican's taking Muslim refugees to Italy instead of Christian refugees from the same camp fleeing Muslims illustrates this spirit, though one hopes the story is more complicated than presented. With the media in view and the goal of shaming the EU to take in more Muslim refugees, it is better symbolism for the Vatican to take Muslims over Christians. To make a good news story, one understands the necessity. Surely, one sees the work of a Good Samaritan more clearly because a man from Samaria does not share the religion or ethnicity of the injured Jew whom he helps. If one would appear as a Good Samaritan, then it is better to help those of another religion. But Jesus did not teach that aid should be given first to those outside one's household when those inside are also in need. To the contrary, he excoriates those who use religion as an excuse to violate their first duties to their own:

Mr 7:9 And he said to them: "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! 10 For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother,' and, 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.' 11 But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban' (that is, a gift devoted to God), 12 then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother.  

This is the Horror's pharisaical essence. "We cannot help our own because our Horrible god demands that we give up what is owed to our own for the Horror." But God has commanded a hierarchy of love, i.e. a holy (hieros) order (arche) of love. The Horror's hatred of hierarchy is a hatred of God's commands in favor of a hypocritical universal love of man that allows those who yield it to deny what is owed to those nearest to them. As with the Pharisees whom Jesus condemns, the Horror's ethic allows those who practice it to benefit themselves for they are able to extract more advantage for themselves by holding as Corban what they really owe to their own parents and children.

In the place of a hierarchy of loves, beginning and ending with God and expanding ever outward from one's own oikos to mankind, the Horror insists on un-ordered equality. In practice, we see that the Horror does not increase love but increases its own power to suppress particular loves in favor a hypothetical universal love that never arrives. If there is to be a true secular human-rights movement, i.e. one that is not a covert idolatry of human power and hatred of real love, it must begin in the way the Scriptures teach by opposing the laws and policies that destroy particular loves instead of growing them. Until then, we should fight the Horror.