The Prophet Matt Walsh & "Church of Cowards"

When I saw the title "Church of Cowards, I guessed that Matt Walsh was going to let Bishops and other clergy "have it." While he seemed to take one swipe at Pope Francis, he actually focuses on calling all of us to an accounting before God.

Early in the book, Walsh intimates that our seemingly easy acceptance of astronomical divorce rates betrays our self identity: "How odd this is for a Christian country, the heathens note, considering that the Christian Lord and Savior expressly forbade divorce" (p. 2). Doesn't this betray our defense of the sanctity of marriage/family?

We in the U.S. are intensely ignorant of the sufferings of Christians elsewhere: "the extermination of Christians in the East is ignored by American Christians and the church in this country just as completely as it is ignored by the media" (p. 15). We absolutely need to speak up in defense of the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of marriage/family: "A warrior for Christ who cannot be shamed into silence, cannot be intimidated, cannot be made to conform, cannot be controlled by earthly forces, is a nuclear bomb in God’s holy arsenal" (pp. 20-21). Instead, "we have built a nice, comfortable raft of self-deception, and upon it we are floating gently, gently, gently into Hell" (p. 25). "A reverent and devoted faith is militant, aggressive. It relentlessly pursues God and rejects with great prejudice all that does not come from Him" (p. 54).

It is my suspicion that men are particularly turned off by preaching that emphasizes "feelings" at the expense of courageous Christian witness; "The Gospel of Positivity is everywhere in our culture—preached from the pulpit, extolled on television, celebrated in popular songs and movies. It can be detected in subtler forms whenever one Christian rebukes another for speaking seriously about sin, Hell, death, suffering, or some other challenging topic" (pp. 56-57). "Christians are not often exhorted to courage, chastity, fidelity, temperance, and modesty anymore. Those virtues require action and sacrifice and intention and thought and sometimes pain" (p. 111). Do Catholic priests fully realize that (at least for the laity): "The fight to be forthright, chaste, modest, courageous, and pure in this decadent and decaying culture is constant, exhausting, and often quite confusing" (p. 123).

In an otherwise great book, I was disgusted by Walsh's thoroughly disrespectful use of the term "morons" (p. 65).