Et tu, Mayberry?

Just recently I took a couple of friends to visit old hinterland haunts in upstate N.Y., places I used to visit on vacation or when house sitting. At issue are one-horse towns in rural Delaware County, which went for President Trump in last year’s election by almost 60 percent. It’s not the kind of place you’d expect to find an ex-Catholic church painted lavender-purple (pictures below) and flying the Jolly Roger “Pride” flag. But there it is, right on St. Hwy. 30 in the bucolic little Town of Roxbury, N.Y.

It was a church I believe I might’ve attended one or twice during better days, and its sexual devolutionary transformation seemed quite scandalous. After all, the structure still looks like a church, with its stained-glass windows and a cross carved into its foundation. Interestingly, though, I didn’t find any significant news stories about it. So I did some digging.

After a couple of phone calls and much research, I learned that the building had been the home of the Our Lady of Good Counsel Mission Church, opened in 1925. It was closed reportedly in 2011, due to the declining attendance that has plagued American churches generally. But, I thought, shouldn’t the Albany diocese have ensured it wouldn’t fall into the hands of someone who’d use it to advance degradation?

As you may know, purple has long been symbolic of homosexuality and sexual devolutionary activism (no, don’t call it “LGBTQ+”; control the language of the debate). And the “Pride” flag—which I’ll call the Sin flag since pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins—speaks for itself. It really does seem as if a message is being sent:

This is our victory over Christianity in this little corner of the world.

After all, upon completing a conquest, the vanquishing force will typically hoist their flag over their new territory.

The good news, I finally learned, is that the Albany diocese may not have to confess any sin of omission. It turns out that it sold the structure to some individual who later flipped it to its current owner, an artist of minor fame named Brian Tolle. Yes, Tolle has a male “partner” and, unsurprisingly, they came from New York City. He now uses the ex-church as his studio and named it Roxbury Abbey.

I emailed Tolle and asked him, among other things, if his church makeover symbolizes the aforementioned victory. He hasn’t responded.

In fairness, though, Tolle doesn’t seem like any kind of aggressively anti-Christian activist. As he said of his acquisition of the church in a 2016 interview:

We didn’t sell anything. There are people in the community that went to this church not too long ago so we didn’t want to be disrespectful in any way. All of the pews were donated to local people. We gave anything religious back to the catholic community, for example, the parish in Margaretville, where many of the Roxbury people moved to, lost their baptismal font in one of the floods, so we had a perfectly good baptismal font here that we had no use for, so we donated it to that parish.

So Tolle doesn’t seem like a person of ill will and does have his virtues; he’s just being what he is. But that’s the point here: The lesser aspects of what he is isn’t what America was when it rose to greatness. And even if his church makeover isn’t a spiking of the purple football, it reflects our slouch toward Gomorrah. Faith has long been dying in our country and has been replaced by materialism, hedonism, narcissism, relativism, nihilism and perversion.

And in Roxbury, a place where people used to worship the living God now reflects a dying civilization. The local people don’t seem to trouble much over this, either. Another structure down the road in Roxbury is also flying a Sin flag; this, in a town of fewer than 2,300 people, where bears sometimes roam.

This said, even if the bell Tolles for Western Civilization, don’t think it tolls for Christianity. For example and unbeknownst to most, Catholicism is actually growing worldwide at a rate slightly faster than that of population growth.

This is partially why, professional demographers tell us, the world is poised to become more religious over the next few decades, not less. Unfortunately, the opposite may be true for the United States, and that is a problem. For as our second president, John Adams, warned in 1798, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Know this, too: We will never, ever be able to MAGA as long as we are the “other.”

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