The previous post, We can expect a repeat of 2020 is contained indirectly in John Daniel Davidson's article at The Federalist entitled America's Conflicts Are Not Primarily political or Ideological, But Religious. For if Americans were still mostly Christian, the majority would recognize the profound immorality of election fraud. It might be done, here and there, but it would surely be punished.
The thesis of Davidson's article is that the principles upon which our nation was founded are Christian. The claims made in the Declaration of Independence are Christian claims. They cannot be understood in any other context. In our current situation, where there are so few believers, and where paganism is taking hold, there cannot remain an "America" as founded.
The conflicts roiling American society today are not primarily political or even ideological, but religious.
America is supposedly a secular country, with separation of church and state, free exercise of religion, and so on. Yet we find ourselves in the middle of what amounts to a religious war. How could this be?
Because America, like all nations, is founded on religious claims, and relies on those claims for its coherence. We’ve long been accustomed to talking about America as a “propositional nation,” a phrase taken from Abraham Lincoln’s famous line in the Gettysburg Address that America was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
...snip...
And this is true. But nearly everyone who says America is a propositional nation is wrong about what the proposition is. America is not a collection of Enlightenment tropes at the intersection of Locke and Rousseau, a grab bag of philosophical sentiments about the rights of man. America is the creation of Christian civilization.
The proposition at the heart of America, undergirding our nation’s existence, is not just “all men are created,” but Christianity and all that comes with it. Without Christianity, you don’t get free speech, liberty, equality, freedom of conscience. All of it relies on the claims of the Christian faith, none of it stands on its own.
When speaking of the "belief" that our founders had, I mean more than intellectual assent that there is a God. Even the demons have that. What I am speaking about here is a profound trust in God, the Creator of all things. He to whom the founders placed their trust and vowed their lives and their sacred honor. Without a trust in God, the entire enterprise collapses.
...A few months ago the famous atheist Richard Dawkins wondered aloud in an interview why his own country, England, could not just go on having “cultural Christianity” without actual, believing Christians. He said he liked the cathedrals and the Christmas carols, and would like to enjoy them without the bother of actual Christianity. He wants fewer believing Christians and more cultural Christians.
It never occurred to Dawkins that you don’t get to keep the culture without the cult. The sad spectacle of modern England should suffice to prove the point. If there is no one to worship in the cathedrals, they will become concert halls or, in England’s case, mosques. If no one really believes what the Christmas carols proclaim, eventually people will stop singing them.
The same goes for us here in America. The American proposition that all men are created equal is a religious claim, specifically a Christian one. Not to belabor the point, but the American founders only ever believed that all men are created equal because they believed that we are God’s children, created in His image. Our entire system of government flows from that belief; without it the whole system collapses.
So, what happens when America is no longer a Christian nation? It does not become a secular nation where nobody has a belief in a god. There really are no true atheists. People may not worship a god per se, but then they worship themselves, their money, their identities. No, instead, the demons of old come in and take over. The new paganism may not look like it did in ancient times, but the ancient gods are returning, nonetheless. Recently, a statue of the goddess Asherah appeared at Houston University. But what can we expect when women are worshipping abortion?
So the Christian retreat in the West heralds something both new and old: a de-Christianized political order emerging from the ruin of Christendom. What comes at the sunset of the Christian era rises up from the distant past, appearing in new guises and names but nevertheless heralding the return of a pagan order, one based not on the reality of Christ but on the raw power of His fallen angels. Under its banners march the old gods, the lesser deities and principalities that were original enemies of Christ’s church since the beginning of time.
To fight this new paganism, Christians in America will have to shed the false notion that their religion is a purely private matter, that there must be a “wall of separation” between our religion and our politics. We have to argue, without apology, that public life in this country should be shaped by Christian morality and ordered by its dictates, as it was for most of our civilization’s history.
Indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment