Believing in the God You Just Vomited

One of the most tragic spiritual deformations of our age must be the transformation of religion into an exercise of sentimentality.

“The love of God is demanding, which is why people don’t want the real love of God. They want the nice, slushy chocolate human substitute. Let’s all just swim in chocolate until we fall into Hell.” - Bishop Richard Williamson.

I grew up in the world of Pentecostal Protestantism, and for years I remained blind to the obvious: everything—literally everything—was built upon emotion. The entire religious edifice rested not on doctrine, not on truth, not on the intellect moved by grace, but on the unstable quicksand of feelings. If you “felt” something, then “the Spirit moved.” If you didn’t feel it, then the Spirit must not have shown up. Religion was reduced to inner vibrations and mood swings.

Music was the engine that drove this experience. A few fast, drum-heavy songs would whip the congregation into what could only be described as a semi-frenzy—this was “praise.” Then came the inevitable slow, breathy, sentimental number, designed to tug at tear ducts and soften defenses—this was “worship.” (Yes, I know…You can smack me on the way out..). Only after the emotional temperature had been properly elevated would the preacher ascend the stage. His task? To build yet another emotional crescendo, to manipulate the crowd’s psychological state until the pressure reached its peak. And right on cue, soft background music would begin again, creating the perfect atmosphere for the “altar call.” (And do I have to point out there was no altar?). It was a formula—predictable, mechanical, and astonishingly effective at producing feelings. Many of these pastors and their congregants were extremely sincere and didn’t even realize they were engaging in this.

But emotional religion has a fatal flaw: it never satisfies. Feelings fade. Highs collapse. The “mountain-top experience” lasts only until the next morning—sometimes only until the end of the song. And so the congregation demands a fresh high every Sunday. The music team must innovate, the preacher must exaggerate, the theatrics must intensify. Everything must escalate. If the emotional hit falters for even one service, people walk out muttering that “the Spirit just wasn’t there today.”

This, of course, is what fills the vacuum left by the absence of real doctrine. Protestantism—having severed itself from dogma, from the sacramental life, from the teaching authority established by Christ—has no choice but to appeal to the emotions of the “seeker.” Without objective truth, all that remains is the quest for a feeling. In this way, Protestantism becomes indistinguishable from the surrounding culture: an endless hunt for stimulation under the dictatorship of pleasure.

And this cultural disease is no accident. We live in a world-system—the matrix of the Antichrist—where people are conditioned from birth to believe that pleasure is the highest good, and discomfort, sacrifice, discipline, or suffering are evils to be avoided at all costs. When this mentality infects religion, the result is catastrophic. Emotionalism becomes not only the substitute for truth, but the enemy of it.

This hedonistic creed is especially rampant among the young, though by no means confined to them. The philosophy of “do whatever feels good” has become the rotten foundation of modern civilization. It drives consumerism, demolishes objective morality, poisons education, corrupts relationships, and—most tragically of all—it has infiltrated the Catholic Church.

Yes, since 1962, when the architects of the New Religion discarded Catholic dogma and objective truth in exchange for sentimental humanism and feel-good relativism, they set the Church on a path of self-destruction. Under the banner of their Modernist idol—the god of experience, the god of emotion, the god of perpetual aggiornamento—they replaced substance with sensation, doctrine with ambiguity, sacrifice with celebration, and truth with… feelings. (Or as I like to call them, the feelies or fuzzies)

Today we are witnessing the final stage of that revolution in what is now known as the Synodal Church: a democratized religion in which everyone is encouraged to “discern” according to what “feels right,” to “journey together” in a collective emotional haze, and to “listen to the Spirit”—which somehow always speaks in perfect harmony with the spirit of the age.

I simplify? Perhaps. But why complicate what is plainly evident? Emotionalism is the new “Christ”, and the Modernist Synodal Church has crowned it king.

Emotionalist “Catholicism,” Modernism, and Its Protestant Roots

One of the most tragic spiritual deformations of our age must be the transformation of religion into an exercise of sentimentality. Catholicism, for many today, has ceased to be a matter of divine revelation to which the intellect submits, and has instead become a therapeutic pastime marked by emotional stimulation, personal interpretation, and interior “warmth.” One sees this everywhere: the replacement of the Crucifix by the smiley face, the supplanting of the martyrs by the guitar-strumming “leader of worship” or DJ Priest, the Hillsong protestant gigs during Mass, and the exchange of dogma for subjective feeling. An emotionalist pseudo-religion that tears the Faith from its supernatural foundation and drags it down to the instabilities of human sentiment.

The Catholic Faith has always insisted that belief is, first and foremost, an act of the intellect. St. Thomas Aquinas expresses the Church’s perennial position with crystalline clarity when he writes that “faith resides in the intellect” (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 2, a. 9). For St. Thomas Aquinas, faith is an intellectual act of assenting to divine truth at the command of the will, which is moved by God’s grace. It does not reside in the emotions—those flickering, unreliable movements of fallen human nature which change not only day by day, but hour by hour. Pope Leo XIII encapsulated this truth with admirable succinctness when he wrote: “Faith does not rest on emotion, nor on a blind movement of the will.” His words alone, if taken seriously, would be enough to topple the entire modernist project.

The emotionalist mentality so prevalent today is not a trivial spiritual defect; it is the root of modern confusion. Modernists, spiritual enthusiasts, and theological revisionists promote the idea that religion must be “experienced” emotionally to be real. If the feelings disappear, they assume something must be wrong—not with themselves, but with doctrine, liturgy, or tradition. They proceed to reshape the Faith to fit their moods, like a man reshaping his house every morning because the sunlight falls differently.

But as the great mystical doctor, St. John of the Cross, warns: “Feelings are not to be trusted.” They are, in fact, often spiritually dangerous. The devil himself can mimic consolations to deceive the unwary. St. Teresa of Avila likewise instructs souls to distrust tears, sweetness, and the rush of interior excitations, for the true test of spiritual advancement is the growth of virtue, not the fluctuation of sentiment. The saints understood that emotional religion is a snare, because it shifts the foundation of one’s faith from God’s truth to one’s own psychological weather.

Modernists know this as well—which is precisely why they attempt to build their new, counterfeit religion upon emotion. St. Pius X, the Church’s greatest diagnostician of heresy in the modern age, explains in Pascendi that for the Modernist, “faith is nothing else but a sentiment arising from the need of the divine.” This is the modernist creed in its essence: God exists because I feel He does; the Church is true because I feel attached to it; doctrine is valid because it fits my emotional experience. And when those feelings evaporate, the modernist simply revises doctrine, rewrites Scripture, reinvents morality, and declares that the Church must “update” itself to—what else?—his shifting emotional needs.

Dogma, for the Modernist, becomes symbolic poetry, metaphors of inner sentiment, subject to change as feelings evolve. Pius X exposes this with merciless clarity when he notes that Modernists consider dogmas to be mere “symbols of religious feeling,” and therefore “mutable and relative.” This mentality explains everything about the modernist revolution in liturgy, catechesis, morality, and Church governance. One need only consider the transformation of the liturgy after the mid-20th century: Gregorian chant, designed to calm and elevate the soul, was replaced by pop rhythms crafted to excite it; silence was displaced by chatter and applause; reverence by theatricality. Emotional stimulation became the object of worship rather than the accidental byproduct of true devotion. A Mass designed to sanctify was replaced by a service designed to entertain—because emotional religion requires emotional stimulation, and nothing stimulates more quickly than music, noise, and spectacle. In this way, the liturgy became the modernists’ Trojan horse.

It is no coincidence that modernism is essentially Protestantism dressed in Catholic vocabulary. St. Pius X himself said that the Modernist “treads the path of Protestantism,” and history confirms it. Protestantism was the first great experiment in replacing the objective authority of the Church with the subjective authority of personal feeling and private interpretation. The Protestant says, “I read the Bible and I decide.” The Modernist says, “I had a religious experience and I decide.” In both cases, the final arbiter of truth is neither Scripture nor Tradition, but the individual’s interior sentiment.

Pius XI condemned Protestant emotionalism in Mortalium Animos, noting that they reduce faith “to a blind emotional impulse.” Modernists do exactly the same thing—though with more footnotes and fewer revival hymns. Protestants paved the way by treating doctrine as flexible, subject to reinterpretation according to one’s inner sense of what seems spiritually fitting. Modernists merely took that principle and applied it within the Church, thereby corrupting Catholic theology from the inside. But whether outside or inside, the error is the same: truth becomes a function of feeling, and the will of God becomes indistinguishable from the will of man.

The instability of emotional religion is not merely theoretical; it is observable. A faith rooted in emotion cannot endure temptation, dryness, persecution, or even simple boredom. When the emotional consolation fades—as it always does—such a faith collapses. This is why Protestant denominations splinter endlessly, why modernist theology changes with the fashions, and why emotionalist Catholics drift from one spiritual fad to another. By contrast, the Council of Trent teaches that faith is the acceptance of divine revelation “not because it appears true or feels true, but because God has revealed it.” This kind of faith is unshakeable. Emotional faith is not faith at all; it is mood dressed up in religious vocabulary.

Against all this stands the unchanging Catholic tradition. The Church has always taught—clearly, consistently, unwaveringly—that truth does not depend on how one feels about it. St. Francis de Sales destroys the sentimentalist approach with surgical precision when he writes that true devotion “does not consist in tingling sensations,” and Pius XII echoes the same principle when he teaches in Humani Generis that the Christian life is “not guided by emotional impulse but by Christ’s doctrine.” To be Catholic is to believe because God has spoken, not because one’s feelings have been temporarily uplifted.

Sentimental Catholics seek warmth.
Traditional Catholics seek truth.
Only one of these paths leads to salvation.

Bishop Richard Williamson on Emotionalism in Modern Catholicism

Few contemporary churchmen have spoken as sharply or as relentlessly about the danger of emotionalism in religion as the late Bishop Richard Williamson (1940-2025). In conferences and sermons over the years, this giant of the Faith has returned again and again to what he calls the central error of modern Catholic consciousness: the replacement of God with feelings, of revelation with sentiment, of faith with inner experience.

In two of his conferences that I consulted for this essay—frank, vivid, and unsparing—he describes modernism as nothing less than the divinization of the human heart’s fluctuations. The modernist, he argues, does not say that God speaks to man; rather, he says that man generates God from within himself. As he explains:

“God, miracles and revelation don’t exist outside of me or come from outside of me… They must come from within. It’s logical. Starting from crazy premises, you arrive at crazy conclusions.”

This is the principle of vital immanence—the conviction that religion originates not in God’s self-revelation, but in the immediate life of the human subject. Because religion exists, the modernist concludes that it must stem from the human heart. Feelings therefore become not merely part of religious life, but its source and its rule. “Religion,” Williamson says mockingly, “comes from the needs of man’s… oh, how lovely… heart feelings. Feelings! Catholicism is little feelings.”

The contrast he draws with true Catholicism could not be more severe. He points especially to the mystery of the Cross, where Christ’s human emotions were pushed beyond all natural consolation:

“What were the feelings of Our Lord on the Cross? ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou abandoned Me?’ Did He really think the Father had abandoned Him? If He had, He’d have gotten down from the Cross. No—He stayed because it isn’t feelings.”

Christ redeemed the world by fidelity, not by sentiment; by obedience, not by emotional tranquility. If the Cross teaches anything, Williamson insists, it is that feelings cannot govern religion.

From this foundational error—the relocation of God from heaven into the depths of human subjectivity—flows a grotesque inversion of the entire supernatural order. Williamson illustrates this with a striking, deliberately shocking caricature of modernist “revelation,” in which the believer confronts the historical Christ, feels stirred interiorly, and then projects his own emotional need outward. In his unforgettable description:

“My insides vibrate… I vomit God. I vomit the object of my faith all over the poor phenomenon… My God is now in front of me, and I believe in the God that I have just vomited.”

This diatribe is not meant simply to shock, but to reveal the inner logic of modernism: man feels something inexplicable, calls it “God,” and then worships what he himself has produced. Revelation becomes a psychological event. Faith becomes emotional projection. Supernatural truth becomes a circular process beginning and ending in the self. “It’s horrendous,” he says, “but that’s what modernism is.”

Once religion is reduced to feeling, doctrine can no longer be stable. Dogma becomes, in his words, “a mere inadequate symbol” of inner sentiment, something that must evolve whenever emotions do. The modernist, he explains, judges doctrine by whether it resonates with his interior state:

“My feelings are the measure of dogma, not dogma the measure of my feelings.”

Thus, since feelings constantly change, dogmas must constantly evolve. This, Williamson argues, is why modern liturgy so often descends into theatrics. It is not that the new rites are designed to honor God, but to stimulate the congregation’s emotions. He recounts, with a mixture of humor and sorrow, one particularly absurd example from the United States:

“The parish priest… gets on a motorbike and rides up the aisle on Palm Sunday, just like Our Lord entering Jerusalem on a donkey. The congregation goes, ‘Oh, I feel Palm Sunday now!’ Next year he’ll come swinging in on a trapeze. You know—this is madness.”

Here again the problem is not merely bad taste but inverted theology: if feelings are at the center of religious life, then worship becomes entertainment and the sanctuary becomes a stage.

For Williamson, the consequences go far deeper than cheerful liturgical gimmicks. Emotionalism, he warns, leads ultimately to the abolition of the supernatural. If religious truth is nothing more than the emotional life of the believer, then grace collapses into psychology; the sacraments become symbolic gestures of self-expression; Scripture becomes a treasury of stories that “feed my religious gut”; and the Church becomes a democratic assembly of people with similar spiritual sensations. In such a system, nothing from above binds man; instead, man binds himself to the idol he has created.

He states the conclusion starkly:

“All supernatural emanates from nature… There’s nothing truly supernatural in the Catholic religion… It’s all just my product, the product of my insides.”

This, for him, is the ultimate blasphemy of modern emotionalism. It denies the objectivity of God, the reality of grace, the authority of doctrine, and the transcendence of revelation. It replaces the living God with the instability of human sentiment.

The true Catholic faith, by contrast, is founded upon realities that come from outside the human person—realities revealed by God, upheld by reason, transmitted by tradition, and sanctified by grace. Feelings may accompany these realities, but they cannot replace them. As Williamson summarizes with characteristic bluntness:

“The reality does not go by feelings.”

In an age in which Christianity is increasingly reinterpreted as therapeutic affirmation, emotional self-discovery, or psychological uplift, the late, good Bishop Williamson’s call was and is countercultural and deeply traditional. Faith, he insisted, is not an echo of the human heart but a submission to the divine mind. And unless Catholics recover this conviction, they will continue to drift into a religion that is comforting, expressive, and devoutly sentimental—but no longer Christian.

If the Church is to recover from the modernist infiltration of sentimental pseudo-religion, Catholics must take concrete steps. The first is to relearn the Faith—real catechesis, grounded in doctrine and not in psychological uplift. The second is to return to the liturgy that forms Catholics in reverence and objectivity rather than emotionalism. The third is to reject modernist language that treats dogma as something to be reinterpreted according to “experience.” The fourth is to practice asceticism, the surest cure for the illusion that feelings are reliable. And finally, Catholics must immerse themselves in pre-conciliar magisterial teaching.

In the end, every soul must choose. Christ or emotionalism. Doctrine or sentimentality. The Cross or comfort. The Church or the age. The sentimentalist religion of modernism does not produce saints. It produces spiritual consumers who chase emotional highs and crumble at the first sign of sacrifice. Christ did not say, “My feelings shall not pass away,” but “My words shall not pass away.” Catholics who base their faith on those words—on truth, not emotion—will remain firm when the storms come.

And the storms are here.

“Woe to the sentimentalists! As the chickens of men’s unprecedented wickedness come home to roost in this close of our accursed century, such self-comforters will have to step up their willful blindness to keep pace, until nothing but a miracle can open their eyes, and miracles are owed to none of us.” – Bishop Richard Williamson

(NB: The two sessions of the doctrinal conference on Pascendi which I reference, took place in Cork, Ireland in 2019. It consisted of seven sessions and can be found here. It is a treasure chest of truth, and Bishop Williamson was in top form throughout. I highly recommend it)

Our Lady, Co-redemptrix, pray for us…

Our Lady, Mediatrix of all Graces, pray for us…

Viva Christo Rey!

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