The “Cringe for Christ” Heresy: Sincerity Without Truth
[Pillarcatholic] portal promotes a dangerous Modernist principle: that subjective sincerity in religious expression supersedes objective truth, reverence, and the immutable laws of worship. The article, “Cringe for Christ,” advocates for embracing awkward, emotionally charged, and liturgically irreverent displays as a superior form of witness, framing restraint and traditional decency as a failure of nerve. This is not a call to heroic virtue but a capitulation to the naturalistic, sentimental religion condemned by the pre-Conciliar Magisterium.
Reduction of Faith to Subjective Emotion and “Vibes”
The author describes a visceral reaction of embarrassment (“secondhand embarrassment”) to a pastor’s emotive, jazz-handed rendition of “Were You There?” and liturgical dancers in polyester. Instead of recognizing this as a legitimate defense of the sacred against the profane, the author creates a new category, “Cringe for Christ,” to pathologize that very defense. The core principle is stated explicitly: “Sincerity is more important than good taste. Virtue over vibes.”
This is a fundamental inversion of Catholic order. The Summa Theologiae (II-II, Q. 145, A. 2) teaches that decorum (seemliness) is a part of the virtue of temperance, governing outward actions to be fitting to the circumstance. Reverence in worship (religio) is a theological virtue demanding the highest decorum. The article dismisses this as mere “good taste” or “vibes,” reducing the entire moral and liturgical life to a binary of internal sincerity versus external form. This is pure Modernism, which Lamentabili sane exitu (Pius X, 1907) condemned in Proposition 26: “Dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief.” Here, ” sincerity” is the new “practical function,” making the objective form of worship (the “vibes”) irrelevant.
The False Dilemma: Sincerity OR Reverence
The author posits a false dilemma: one must choose between “sincerity” and “good taste.” This is a rhetorical trap. The pre-Conciliar Church never taught that external reverence conflicts with internal sincerity. The two are inseparable in true Catholic worship. Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quas Primas (1925), on the Feast of Christ the King, establishes the foundation: the kingdom of Christ is “primarily spiritual and relates mainly to spiritual matters” but demands a public, ordered, and solemn recognition. The liturgy is not a platform for personal emotional exhibition but the “public veneration of Christ the King” conducted with majestic rites that lift the mind to God. The author’s example of the pastor “roaming the apse” and making “jazz hands” is the antithesis of the solemn, God-centered worship Pius XI describes. It is the triumph of the individual performer over the mystery being celebrated.
The article’s application to social justice protests—singing “Ho-o-o-o-o-ld on” outside ICE agents—further exposes the error. The principle is applied to any cause the subjectively deems worthy. This reduces the Faith to a generic universalism of “sincerity,” stripping it of its supernatural object: the honor and glory of God, the reparation for sin, the propitiatory sacrifice. The Syllabus of Errors (Pius IX, 1864) condemns Error 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.” The “Cringe for Christ” principle is the pastoral, sentimentalized application of this error: it removes the exclusivity of Catholic worship and replaces it with a universal standard of “authentic” (i.e., emotionally unguarded) expression, whether in a Catholic church or at a political protest.
Omission of the Supernatural and the Sacred
The gravest accusation is the article’s total silence on the supernatural ends of worship. There is no mention of:
- The Sacrifice of Calvary: The Holy Mass is the unbloody re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice to the Father. It is not a venue for personal emotional display. The rubrics of the Traditional Mass, with their precise prayers, orientations, and silences, are designed to obscure the priest and focus on the divine action. The “cringe” reaction to irreverence is, in fact, a subconscious defense of this sacred reality.
- The State of Grace: Worship must be performed in a state of grace. Emotional excess can often be a sign of disordered passions, not sanctity. True virtue is measured by conformity to God’s law, not by the intensity of one’s trembles.
- The Final Judgment: Pius XI in Quas Primas warns rulers that Christ “will very severely avenge these insults” when His royal dignity is forgotten. The article’s framework has no room for this terrifying objective reality. Worship is about human authenticity, not God’s honor and justice.
This omission is symptomatic of the post-Conciliar “Church of the New Advent,” which has systematically evacuated the supernatural from its practice. The “Cringe for Christ” mentality is the perfect pastoral tool for this: it validates any emotionally felt action as “sincere” and therefore “virtuous,” regardless of its objective conformity to divine law or liturgical tradition.
Modernist Roots and Conciliar Fruit
The principle is a direct fruit of the Modernist synthesis condemned by St. Pius X. Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907) describes the Modernist: “He will begin by philosophizing… he will maintain that the external works of religion are of little account… that the religious sense… is all that matters.” The “Cringe for Christ” article does precisely this: it demotes “external works” (liturgical decorum, traditional hymns, reverent posture) and exalts the “religious sense” (subjective sincerity, emotional authenticity).
Furthermore, it embodies the conciliar revolution’s obsession with “authenticity” and “participatory” worship, where the community’s subjective experience becomes the measure of the liturgy’s value. The Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), while speaking of “active participation,” was interpreted to mean emotional and communal engagement, often at the expense of sacred silence, Latin, and the priest’s distinct role. The “liturgical dancers” and emotive pastor are the logical conclusion of this hermeneutic.
Exposure of the Apostate Mentality
The article’s concluding application to protest songs reveals the ultimate destination: the Faith is made subservient to a pre-existing political and social agenda. The “worthy cause” of the protestors is assumed. The “Cringe for Christ” principle is a tool to overcome Catholic social teaching’s nuanced, hierarchical ordering of goods (the supernatural end of man > the common good of the state) in favor of a simplistic, sentimental alignment with any perceived underdog. This is the “option for the poor” stripped of its properly Catholic content and reduced to a vague solidarity with the emotionally expressive.
This mentality is apostate. It severs the radical, supernatural demand of the Gospel—“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself” (Matt. 16:24)—from its objective content. Self-denial is not about suppressing “good taste” for a cause; it is about conforming one’s entire being, including one’s aesthetic sensibilities, to the law of God. The article’s “Cringe for Christ” is actually Cringe from Christ’s Law, which demands that we worship God “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24), where “truth” includes the objective, revealed forms of worship.
Conclusion: A Call Back to Tradition
The “Cringe for Christ” principle is a poison. It teaches the faithful to distrust their healthy, traditional instinct for reverence and to embrace liturgical abuse and emotional exhibitionism as virtue. It is the final stage of the Modernist infection: having destroyed the objective content of faith and worship, it now pathologizes the remaining immune response—the sense of the sacred that recoils from the profane.
The only response is a return to the immutable Tradition. The Traditional Latin Mass, with its silence, its Latin, its priestly orientation, its precise rubrics, is the antithesis of “cringe.” It is the Church’s solemn, unchangeable, and supremely sincere worship of Almighty God. To feel “cringe” at its irreverent parody is not a failure of nerve but a working of the Holy Ghost preserving a remnant of Catholic sense. The authentic “Cringe for Christ” is the horror felt by the true Catholic when witnessing the sacrileges perpetrated in the name of a false, sentimentalized religion. We must reject this new “virtue” and cling to the “one faith, one Lord, one baptism” (Eph. 4:5) and the one, true, and unchangeable worship that flows from it.
Source:
'Cringe for Christ' (pillarcatholic.com)
Date: 25.02.2026