Among Protestant Christian sects there were several significant movements toward cooperation and even toward formal union. Many barriers between them were broken down, at least in part, by the Young Men’s Christian Association, which had been founded in the nineteenth century but which expanded very rapidly during and after the Great War. The Salvation Army, dating from about the year 1880, was another factor in the same process: it placed emphasis on spiritual earnestness, on evangelical work among the poor, and on charitable endeavors, rather than on sectarian controversies. There were also various “federations of churches,” and in Canada, after the Great War, several Protestant denominations were actually united. Such interdenominational and unifying movements were made easier by the fact that the original theological differences between the various sects were no longer regarded as very important by a large number of church members.

Some Protestants, reacting against the decline of dogma and the doubting of the miraculous and the supernatural, turned increasingly toward Christian Science or towards spiritualism or theosophy. In some countries, and especially in the United States, the current vogue of Darwinism and other theories of evolution caused a new outburst of opposition from stalwart groups of Protestants to the claims of “science,” and a stubborn reaffirmation of their fundamental faith in the literal inspiration of the Bible. These “Fundamentalists,” as they were called, were fairly numerous in several Protestant denominations, and they contested with their “Progressive” or “Modernist” brethren the control of Protestant churches, particularly the Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Baptist, and Methodist.

$7 Million in Bequests Reported

According to testimony by Cecil A. Roberts, Guyana’s assistant commissioner of crime, at a coroner’s inquest two weeks ago, letters from cult members bequeathing more than $7 million in People’s Temple assets to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were carried out of the Jonestown commune on Nov. 18 in a suitcase containing more than $600,000 in United States currency. The money was intended for the Soviet Embassy, the authorities in Guyana have said, but was abandoned by its couriers because of its weight. The money was later confiscated by the Guyanese police.

Behind the guise of religion, Mr. Jones apparently led his cult into a posture of radical Marxism, and at the time of the mass deaths, he was actively exploring the possibility of moving his commune to the Soviet Union.

On Dec. 18, the day after Mr. Roberts’s disclosure of the bequests, an employee of the Soviet Embassy in Georgetown told reporters that the Russians did not want the money. But until yesterday’s Associated Press dispatch, there had been no confirmation that the Embassy had ever received any People’s Temple funds.

The location and disposition of millions of dollars collected from members of Mr. Jones’s cult remained a puzzle for nearly a month after the bizarre death ritual.

Two South Africans who overstayed their British visas were jailed for life on Friday for the murders of two men strangled during a series of violent muggings.

Gabriel Bhengu, 27, and Jabu Mbowane, 26, will be deported after serving life sentences.

[...]

A life sentence normally lasts around 15 years.

But what Raspail doesn’t say explicitly is that the beautiful oak door SHOULD burn. It needs to burn. Its beauty is idolatrous.

Why?

Examine the teleology of the door, why it was made beautifully. The door was made within the tradition of sacred syncretism, to unify the Universal divinity of God with the local spirit of the hearth.

But then the Frenchman stopped believing in God.

Then he stopped believing in the sacred hearth and family.

And now he just has an ornate door, sitting alone, unable to explain its beauty or purpose, trying to justify its existence to desperate people in a dying society.

In other words, it’s an idol to a dead god. And idols MUST BURN. No human can tolerate the existence of such manifest desecration and be fully alive spiritually. We want to destroy these false promises that can’t be made real.

The Frenchman doesn’t have the grit to destroy the false idols of the past. The migrants do. That might be the reason the Frenchman invited them in to his country to begin with.