From Psyops to Reality: Why the Sacramental Life Endures

Modernity is a salesman with a crooked smile too many of us can’t stop staring at. It knocks on the door of every nook and cranny of society, including the Church, promising relevance, growth, and cultural respectability. Doing so sounds noble, but all it amounts to is rotten goods that produce equally rotten fruits: relativism, compromise, idolatry–all of which cook down into the same poison of self-worship. It has become so very obvious through those electronic screens we trust with our lives, our souls, our very basis of reality.

We are being mind-controlled. We know it from past psyops, but when new stories hit the airwaves we run back into the cage, the echo chamber, and call it fighting evil.

The Church and its sacramental life are not just consumer inventions. They are the way to encounter God and his Son, in addition to the Holy Ghost of course, in the tangible way Christ himself knew we would need. One need only look at “Doubting” Thomas, he who claimed he’d need to place his fingers inside his Master’s wounds before he would believe he was risen, to recognize God’s understanding of his own creation and the mind. Instead, however, because we understand the “news” as any- and everything coming through those screens, and moreover believing much or all of it indiscriminately based on our tribal preferences, we are sucked into a seeming reality we are actually creating for ourselves. We are trusting stories and screen characters not because they are necessarily the truth, but because the argument is coherent and logical–indeed, even dipped in the honey of Biblical teaching much of the time.

The elephant in the room remains, however. Who is God, when so many different people use some version of the Christian message to speak of him?

With such an understanding, again, the best way to encounter God is through the tangible sacramental life. The sacramental life refuses the salesman’s pitch, holding fast to Christ’s revelation that cannot change, the liturgy steeped in ancient human custom that cannot lie, and the truths that cannot be traded away for applause, likes, or clicks.

Or in a nutshell, a feeling of belonging to the group. And any group, as long as they are saying what we say, will do.

Slap on a Bible quote and voila, you’ve got it. Christianity.

Except, no. That’s not Christianity, and all one must do is recognize how many different individuals and groups are doing it today to recognize the deception.

Doctrinal truth is not a poll-tested slogan. It isn’t determined inside another controlled election that we vote harder and harder for every two years. This is where freedom of speech and democracy–even the term “Republic”–become tantalizing counterfeits for Christ’s actual commands. Christ didn’t ask Peter to take a survey of Judea before declaring, “Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”  The sacramental life takes that promise seriously, insisting that the faith handed down through the ages is not a wax face to be reshaped by a CIA insider for psyop purposes. It is not based on the whims of 2025 but on a granite foundation. What was true yesterday is true today. What was true through the centuries going back to first century Christianity is true today.

If it isn’t true today, it was never true at all. But if that’s true, there are entire passages and books of the Bible that would need to be eradicated from memory. Christ’s own commands would have to be eradicated from memory.

Maybe that is the point of all this confusion. Have we considered that? Do we know what the Noahide Laws are? Have we played out in our minds where all of this chaos and censorship and religious relativism could lead in a world that does not at all recognize Christ as King, or even God in his Triune Reality?

Just asking.

The liturgy itself reveals this. I cannot speak for Orthodoxy, which I have been studying more since I’ve formed a bit of an online friendship with a fellow Hayride writer, but I see in the Traditional Latin Mass (and all those recognized for legitimate reasons at the Council of Trent in the 1500s) that it does not flatter us. It does not sway to our clapping hands or silly shouts. It is worship directly in line with the offerings and sacrifices to God that humans have understood for millenia.

It’s just not with animals anymore and hasn’t been since Christ’s death and resurrection.

What the traditional liturgy does–the sacramental life in general–is humble us. It is not a performance for the people but a sacrifice offered to God in the geographical direction Christ ascended and where we Christians have believed he would return for two millenia now. Its silence, its reverence, its orientation toward eternity all remind us that we are not the center of the universe. What we see through those screens are not the center of the universe. No one person, no matter what the story is, is not the center of the universe. Politics take on the face of theater. Christianity takes on the same face when we have thousands and thousands of different definitions of the very word itself.

The State manufactures narratives to keep the public in a constant state of mental chaos so that every second of every day they’re chasing “the truth” when there never was any intention to lead us there. It is all distraction. Distraction from reality. Distraction from God. Distraction from the New Covenant commands enunciated by his Son.

Read the Douay-Rheims version of the Old Testament in order, with Christ in mind the whole time, then read the New Testament in order with that same reading of the Old Testament in mind, and you’ll see exactly what I’m saying. You’ll see how destructively we’ve been lied to about the Bible and Christianity itself.

The version of the Bible you’re reading matters.

I’ve written before about plausible deniability, the political trick where elites arrange things so they can always shrug and say, “Well, who’s to say?” That same trick operates in “Christianity.” The modern philosophy often dilutes doctrine until it becomes optional, ambiguous, deniable.

Tradition, made visible in the sacramental life, by contrast, refuses to play that game. It names sin as sin, grace as grace, and Christ as King–without hedging or apologizing. And just as a Republic cannot survive if its leaders wink at corruption, Christianity cannot nourish souls if she trades clarity for cleverness.

History itself makes the case. The faith that built cathedrals, converted continents, and produced saints by the thousands was not the product of endless reinvention. It was tradition–unbroken, undiluted, handed down like fire across the centuries. From Augustine’s Confessions to Aquinas’s Summa, from Francis’s poverty to Teresa’s visions, the saints drank from the same well we now call “traditional.” They were not nourished by endless experiments; they were fed by the sacraments, the doctrine, the reverent liturgical worship that reached them straight from the Apostles. To cut ourselves off from that is not “progress.”

Tradition doesn’t need spin. It doesn’t need to be updated, nor should it be given its very meaning. It doesn’t shift its story every five years. It doesn’t reinvent its dogmas to please those on the right or the left. It just stands, silent and immovable, like a cathedral built on rock. And the fact that it still stands–even as secular society’s poison takes over–is itself the proof.

Ask yourself–what kind of Christianity produces martyrs eaten by lions and cooked over coals, mystics who received the bloody wounds of Christ on their own bodies, and missionaries who convert entire continents of pagans and cannibals? What kind of Christianity built universities, crowned kings, abolished human sacrifice, saved children, and baptized barbarians? Was it the ones chasing cultural trends or political street-cred, or the one anchored in timeless truth that continues to be attacked from both without and within?

Modernity promises relevance. Tradition demands holiness–and with our cooperation, delivers it.

Philosophically, the traditional sacramental life simply offers coherence in a world of chaos. In a world drunk on subjectivism, it insists on objective truth. In a culture that celebrates confusion–even on the political right–it insists on clarity. Thomistic philosophy grounds faith in reason, not in vibes or the latest poll numbers. It proclaims that nature is intelligible, that morality is knowable, that truth is binding. And here is the irony: people say tradition is rigid, but in reality it is freedom. Because when you know the truth, you are no longer enslaved to the dictatorship of feelings, fashions, or political manipulation.

We are slaves and don’t even know it, stuck inside Plato’s Cave thinking the shadows of the figures on the wall are the figures themselves.

The fruits of society are bearing this out as we speak, as those on the political right become everything they fought against when the left was demanding certain things under the fake Biden administration.

Tradition and its cathedrals–both exterior and interior–are not mausoleums of nostalgia; they are cradles of life. They are packed with young families procreating to populate heaven, they are brimming with fathers who are actually leading the home, they are marked by a reverence that refuses to bow to the culture of cheap entertainment and the mind control of cultural Marxism. The very thing the world mocked as irrelevant (and still does, to its own eventual extinction) is the one thing that continues to produce lasting faith, lasting hope, lasting love in a world gone mad with false compassion. Compare that to the political world we so often critique. Tradition and the sacramental life of grace do not bend because they do not depend on the applause of men. They are not out to secure our votes.

They don’t offer any crooked grins.

And here’s the point: if you want a “Christianity” that dances with the spirit of the age, you’ll end up with the same hollow spectacle you see in politics—a class of managers pretending to fight for you while actually serving their masters. But if you want a Church that stands as a fortress against chaos, a bulwark of eternal truth, and a lighthouse for every age–despite the never-ending infiltration of Judases Christ himself invited in–then you want the tradition Christ himself entrusted and commanded.

The sacramental life is the last stand not because it is fashionable, but because it is faithful. It is not the latest spin, but the oldest truth. And the oldest truth, like the sometimes petering rock on which it rests, can never be defeated.

And that’s because no matter what man does, no matter how many stray from Gedeon’s army, no matter how many Judases rise in the ranks, it is God and God alone who is always glorified.