Nick Routledge@nick_routledge
Reply to @MassimoFaggioli

@MassimoFaggioli Political messianism is simulated eschatology without the actual Event, the consecrated derangement of powers and principalities wearing a cross. Antichrist is precisely this: Christ’s names, Caesar’s methods—sacro-political mania claiming salvific power without the Paschal path.

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Nick Routledge@nick_routledge · 22 Oct 2025

@ThinkingFaith end/ Populist escalation isn’t just institutional strain; it’s a crisis of desire. A polity habituated to scapegoating cannot self-redeem by technique. The Paraclete universalizes that unveiling in history. A reconciliatory mimesis interrupts, rather than “wins,” escalation.

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The Gospel alternative to scapegoating and political violence Tweet: Girard went further. Scapegoating isn't just a social reflex; it is the blind consecration of violence through collective (often religious) denial—the counterfeit holiness hiding evil: the false sacred. That's the fundamental lie the Gospels unmask: evil wears a halo. 1 John 3:8 Quote tweet: 2/ The scapegoat mechanism works because it obscures this fundamental matrix of being. In that concealment, no logic of justice appears more unified or self-justified—and no desire more blind to its own hostility—than the sanctioned violence of the false sacred cloaked as true. 1/ Evil's perverse capacity lies in its powers to camouflage the 'false sacred' as true - as something like common sense, justice or wisdom (2 Cor. 11:14). Whether in forms conscious or unconscious, secular or religious, “The ability to disguise sin defines Anti-Christ." (Illich) ‘The final enigma of history is therefore not how the righteous will gain victory over the unrighteous, but how the evil in every good and the unrighteousness of the righteous is to be overcome.’ [Quotation from Reinhold Niebhur’s The Nature of Destiny and Man: II Human Destiny] [“The ways of history do not lead directly upwards to the Kingdom of God, they pass by way of the final unveiling of the anti-Christ who conceals himself under] the last mask to be stripped away - the mask of what is good and what is Christian.” - Von Balthasar

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Quoted byRT @nick_routledge: @jonmsweeney We can go further. James 2:19: "the devils also believe [in God]." Saying “Lord, Lord” is easy, but belief that does not unmask the false sacred is one of its most pernicious disguises, closer to demonic assent than to the holiness it names. Hell is full of accurate theologians.Quoted by@jonmsweeney We can go further. James 2:19: "the devils also believe [in God]." Saying “Lord, Lord” is easy, but belief that does not unmask the false sacred is one of its most pernicious disguises, closer to demonic assent than to the holiness it names. Hell is full of accurate theologians.