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They may not want to do that, just like the Essenes before them preferred not to secede territory to the Pharisees, and Jesus wanted his own nation to find agreement with him, and Mary didn’t want to flee to Egypt under Herod… but their wishes don’t factor in at all, only the will of God. They had to do what was necessary. Any good Christian must ultimately capitulate to reality: “yet not as I will, but as [God] wills.”
Not Amish. I had used Amish as an example of growth, but the subculture to copy would be Hasidim. The Hasidim can live in the middle of NYC and yet retain complete cultural sovereignty. They have their own rules, their own courts, their own ambulance service, their own local police; the politicians know they blockvote and come to their communities to make a speech every election cycle; they lobby fiercely for their own issues; they hire in-group; they have the highest birth rate in America; their schools barely teach English. Rather than technological proscription, the Hasidim simply have their own phones with only certain app permissions. And having millions would make this process much easier, not more difficult; you can spread out your centers in culturally influential places.
I've actually proposed this sort of model to Christians of my acquaintance before, and have gotten three general replies:
that even this much separation from the mainstream constitutes an abdication of the "Great Commission" (and that, therefore, the Amish aren't Christian at all)
that they can't emulate the Hasidim, because they're not Jewish — meant in two rather different ways:
2.A. that pulling off that sort of community — particularly the "their own rules, their own courts, their own ambulance service, their own local police" stuff — requires fundamentally immoral and "scummy" tactics which they could not countenance, as only the Jews would ever stoop to such depths.
2.B. that pulling off that sort of community requires a tolerance from the broader system which is extended only to Jewish groups — to a great extent because they can accuse their critics and opponents of antisemitism — while Christians attempting the same would find no such leeway.
I’m not convinced by those replies. Re: 1, the early Christians themselves abstained from participating in normative Jewish life, and the Roman Christians abstained from the Pagan civic rituals which defined mainstream Roman life. They formed their own schools based on Christian teachings. Even if we didn’t have this historical example, an insular community may do a better job at securing and promoting Christianity than a lukewarm, mainstream Christianity. The Great Commission is time neutral — it took Lithuania 1400 years to become Christian. And a Christian has an obligation to love God, which means surely he has an obligation to develop a community which permits the most love of God.
Re 2A: we are lucky, because the original founding document of America recognizes that God provides the right to freedom of association and freedom of religion. What better way to practice these rights than to worship the one who provides it?
Re 2B: America’s lax tolerance of this is because the community is insular and skilled at politicking. When you organize 200,000 men hierarchically, who all believe the most important thing in their life is the protection of their community, they are able to accomplish great things.
Critically, it was the very abstention of the early Christians from public life that, ultimately, led to their success -- while there were certainly some failures to communicate doctrines like the eucharistic presence (leading to claims that Christians were slaughtering and eating human babies) and universal fraternity (leading to non-Christians seeing Christian spouses calling each other "brother" and "sister"), there was also a sense in which the strength and conviction of the early Christians impressed the Romans. Later on, Christians whose theology spared them from the fear of death worked in hospitals treating the sick, which astounded the Romans who abandoned the plague-ridden. It was these things that the later Christians could point to and say, "look how impressive we are, you should adopt our belief system."
This co-existed, of course, with attempts at public preaching. You've got to do both. You can't abandon the public spectacle of St. Paul, but you must, you must, embrace the cloistered enlightenment of St. John. Any form of Christianity that embraces one while rejecting the other becomes imbalanced.
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And notably the much softer Gab-style parallel society is not taking off like an arrow.
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