Christianity needs a church with teeth

What is the church to you? Do you go to church to feel closer to God? Is it your sanctuary in a world that’s hurtling deeper and deeper into hell? Does the church make you feel safe?

What if I told you the church isn’t the church? That it can’t functionally act as the body of Christ. Not anymore, at least.

If the church can’t even keep its holy sacraments in order, then what can it realistically accomplish otherwise?

The church today is nothing more than a pretty ornament on a burning Christmas tree.

It exists as it does today to make people feel good. To provide for them a sense of spirituality they yearn for.

But what is spirituality? It means absolutely nothing. It’s a vague, ambiguous cloud of nothingness. It’s a feeling you feel when you tell yourself Jesus lives in your heart.

You wonder why the moral foundations of the world are crumbling? It’s because the church serves as little more than a refuge from a world falling apart. It’s seen as a place of escape rather than the institution of power and influence.

But the church was never supposed to be a retreat. The church was meant to engage with the real world, to shape it, to transform it. God isn’t some ambiguous feeling of connection or an abstract concept. Jesus was the word made flesh, not a disembodied notion of spirituality. The church was meant to operate in the here and now, not hover above reality in some ethereal sense of well-being.

Historically, the church had teeth. It wielded power — not just spiritual power, but real, tangible authority. Popes used to coronate kings, crowning monarchs as divinely sanctioned rulers. This wasn’t limited to the Roman Catholic Church, either; patriarchs in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches did the same. The state was dependent on the church for its legitimacy, and its doctrines and edicts carried real weight. When the church spoke, it wasn’t a suggestion. It was the voice of authority.

Compare that to today. If a man finds himself served with divorce papers by his wife, what does the church do? It offers prayers, maybe a referral to a good lawyer. But where is its power? Where is its authority to stand against the chaos of the modern world?

As a professor of political theory, Dr. Stephen Baskerville aptly points out in his interview with YouTuber Hannah Pearl Davis that the church today is incapable of providing solutions to the very real crises its members face.

Instead of a priest and his parish showing up to a divorce court and demanding legal standing to object to and prevent a divorce, it merely offers prayers to the soon-to-be separated parties. And if the church can’t even keep its holy sacraments in order, then what can it realistically accomplish otherwise? It’s become toothless.

This decline from authority to ornamentation is at the heart of why our society is crumbling. The church has abdicated its role as the moral and spiritual backbone of civilization. It has retreated into vague notions of spirituality and feel-good sermons, rather than engaging with the world and asserting its rightful place within it.

Until the church reclaims its authority — until it once again becomes the church — it will remain nothing more than a relic of what it was meant to be.

The question isn’t what happened to society. The question is: Why did we separate the church from society?