What is Faith?

What is Faith?

Aug 27, 2025 | Epistemology - Trust

Seems like a simple question, right? Especially because everyone, Christian or not, seems to think they know the answer. I’ll get to that and what I think it means, but the inspiration for this post comes from the 19th century Danish Christian philosopher and writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), often considered the father of existentialism. I’m reading one of his books, Fear and Trembling, and it’s mostly inscrutable to me. Dude thinks way too much. No wonder he’s considered one of the founders of modern existentialism, a navel-gazing philosophy that broods on the conundrum of existence while being immersed in subjective emotions and thought. In the book Kierkegaard uses the word faith a lot, but never bothers to define it, and I’m sure most readers of Kierkegaard never question what it means either.

This word and the question is important to me because in a way it was the inspiration for my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent. I read an article in 2015 by a young woman who grew up in a solid Christian home, was involved in her church’s youth ministry, went off to college and promptly abandoned Christianity, becoming, as she writes, an agnostic. This ticked me off because I believed that would never happen to my children. I taught them all their lives that we believe in Christianity because it’s the truth, and that’s the only reason. The truth of Christianity, or not, didn’t seem to occur to this newly minted agnostic, that maybe truth is the only issue that matters, not how she feels. I was going to write a blog post, but then thought, why not write a book! I wanted to figure out exactly how I worked to ground my kid’s in their faith so they would never consider leaving it, and as adults they haven’t.

As you can see from the last sentence, the word faith can have different meanings based on how it’s used. Faith in that context is a synonym for Christianity. In another context If I say, “You just have to have faith,” we’re not quite sure what it means; faith in what? If it’s to an athlete, the person is being exhorted to believe in, to trust, their talents or abilities or training or experience, whatever it is that made them a winner in the past. The person using the word has in mind what it means, and assumes others share that meaning. That gets to the heart of the issue, as we’ll see. In fact, at dictionary.com there are seven definitions of the word, one of which is why I wrote the book—belief that is not based on proof. In our secular age, most people using the word in a religious context use it this way, even some Christians. This is convenient for atheists and agnostics, like the young lady above. I can guarantee that she was under the impression she left something that required “faith,” Christianity, for something that did not, agnosticism, not realizing she was simply leaving one “faith” for another. And that, as we’ll see, is the issue.

It All Comes Down to Epistemology
This word, which few people know, is the philosophical study (ology) of knowing (epistēmē in Greek). Philosophers have debated what we can know, or not, since antiquity. That’s a long time to debate knowing! It seems like a simple concept, right? I either know or I don’t. Not so fast. Think about when your Uncle Bob the skeptic comes over for Thanksgiving and asks, “How do you know that?” to everything you say, he’s basically saying we can ’t know anything at all. That is called skepticism, the idea that knowledge or knowing is not possible. Everything is basically guesswork and speculation. It appears humble on the surface, but it contradicts itself. If I say I can’t know anything at all, how do I know that? I’m asserting I can know that I know that. It violates the first law of logic, the law of non-contradiction, something all of us should have learned in middle school, but alas haven’t. The father of logic, Aristotle, taught us that A cannot be non-A. For example, “It is raining and it is not raining” can’t be true. It contradicts itself. So, skepticism can’t be true, ergo (therefore), we can know. Even though there were skeptic philosophers in the ancient world, it’s become especially problematic in the modern world. Why is that? Descartes, of course.

If you’re familiar with my work, this won’t surprise you at all. I’m sure at this point you’re tired of my blaming Descartes for everything. The reason this 17th century French philosopher is the father of skepticism is because of his search for absolute certainty, and his assumption it could be attained. Big, huge, mistake. He began his search doubting everything he could doubt, and found the only thing he couldn’t doubt was himself; he concluded, I think therefore I am, cogito ergo sum in Latin. Thus began rationalism, the idea that our knowing is possible by reason alone, God and revelation not required. As a pious Catholic he didn’t reject revelation, but the rationalism he inspired most definitely did.

This birthed what we know as the Enlightenment, and that ruined everything. I always overstate that because it wasn’t all bad, just mostly bad, especially because it gave rise to secularism, or that it was possible to run a society without God. Scottish Philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) took rationalism to its logical conclusion by proving there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience, what is called empiricism. Experience, Hume argued, can’t know anything outside of itself, so knowing is not possible. If you start with self, self is all you got. He found it depressing that skepticism was inevitable, and given he was not religious, revelation was not an option. Sadly, Descartes and Hume, with a dash of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud thrown in, is the depressing dead end worldview of modern man.

Hume was probably agnostic but was a functional atheist, which was controversial in his day. In fact, he was rejected as the chair of philosophy at the University of Glasgow due to his religious views. His contemporary, French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), was likely the one who make who made atheism culturally palatable in the West. His poem on the great Lisbon earthquake in 1755 that killed upwards of 40,000 people was the first work in Christian history to put God in the dock, on the stand as we now say. To his questions, we or God can offer no answers:

Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

The growth of atheism was what turned faith into a question because as this movement of rejecting God grew throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, atheists assumed they were rejecting faith. It was only “religious” people who required faith, which came to be defined as belief without evidence. When the so-called New Atheists exploded on the scene in the first decade of this century, these twin ideas of religious people requiring faith, and faith defined as belief without evidence, became their mantra. To them it was axiomatic that since they didn’t believe in God, they didn’t need faith, but all human beings live by faith.  

There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Only the most hardcore arrogant atheists will make that argument today. It’s too obvious to even mention that if someone doesn’t believe in God that itself is a belief, but since Voltaire it was assumed atheists had no need for faith. I’m sure I’ve known this all my Christian life, but when I came across a book with the title, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, I realized just how much faith is required to believe there is no God. Talk about a leap of faith! Yet, most people, Christians included, persist in identifying people as believers or unbelievers. The word believers referring to Christians is common in the New Testament, but everyone then and since knows this refers to Christians. In our secular age, the word believer, or unbeliever, is problematic because it allows secular, irreligious people to think belief or faith is something only religious people need, but they don’t. But secular people are every bit as religious as Christians; only the object of their faith is different—everyone lives by faith.

What do I mean when I say everyone lives by faith? Again it comes down to epistemology, and the nature of our knowing. Some years ago I took a trip to where I was born and raised in southern California to see family and friends, and I got into interesting conversations with two friends who are self-described agnostics. Many Christians would describe them an unbelievers. I realized something as I thought back on these conversations. My interlocutors believed they couldn’t know the religious stuff I was talking about with any certainty, so I sensed they think why bother with it at all. Their objection to Christianity is rooted in epistemology! They probably wouldn’t even know the word, but there it is, nonetheless.

Most people assume knowledge is limited to what is empirically verifiable, or empiricism. It seems obvious to them that what we can see, feel, taste, touch, and hear is more knowable than that which is not available to our five senses. Scientism, that the only valid knowledge comes through the scientific method, and skepticism, are based on such assumptions. In this context you can understand why such people would think faith is believing without evidence, that faith is a religious construct, and doesn’t apply to the atheist or agnostic. This mentality, and it is widespread, is the fruit of secularism, the notion that life at its most basic level is irreligious. People tend to assume there are basically two ways to live. Some people are religious, and others are not religious, and never shall the two meet. In fact, they are the same person! Every person is religious because every person lives by faith because every person is finite, limited in every way imaginable. Faith is required for human beings to exist. What do I mean by that?

The word finite defines everything about us. Our ability to know is limited because we are limited, and these limits of our knowledge apply to everything. That doesn’t mean we can’t know, can’t have real knowledge, justified true belief as the philosopher’s would say, but that we can only know so much. Faith is that which fills in the gaps in our knowledge. The examples are pretty much endless because we use faith continuously just to exist without going crazy. One of these happened just this morning as I write. I saw a hot air balloon not far from our house, which is faith in action. Does that person know the air pumped out by the flames will continue to keep the balloon afloat? Of course not! But he has good reason to believe it will because it has before. Faith, therefore, is trust based on adequate evidence. Trust fills in the knowledge gap, if you will. How as Christians should we think about knowledge and knowing?

The Bible and Knowing
The case for knowing is easy to make biblically. A word search at Biblegateway. com shows that know and its variations is used upwards of 1,200 or 1,300 times in the Bible. The idea that knowledge is problematic for human beings is foreign to the biblical worldview. And we can have confidence that our knowing is rooted in what is actually there, or the real.

Next we must connect our understanding of epistemology to anthropology, our understanding of man (anthropos in Greek) or human nature. For the Christian this is critical. Man, male and female, was created as Genesis 1 tells us, “very good.” God is emphatic on this point. In the account of creation God declares six times that his handiwork is “good,” and tops it off declaring it all “very good” only after he created man. But something happened that marred that goodness; we call it the Fall. It was at this point that knowing became problematic for the human race.

The Bible, however, never stops affirming the possibility of knowing and knowledge, but as Paul said, “now we see through a glass, darkly” (I Cor. 13:12, KJV). Our knowing like everything else is marred by sin. We call this total depravity, which doesn’t mean God’s image in us is totally corrupted, but that every part of our being is tainted by sin. We are at once noble and disfigured. Good and evil comingle in our being, and who is not aware of that regardless of what they believe. Sixteenth century Reformer John Calvin speaking of the Apostle Paul’s understanding of sin asserts:

that the corruption subsists not in one part only, but that none of the soul remains pure or untouched by that moral disease. For in his discussion of a corrupt nature Paul not only condemns the inordinate impulses of the appetites that are seen, but especially contends the mind is given over to blindness and the heart to depravity.

Our fallen state is cause for epistemological humility, a phrase I am extremely fond of. While our knowing is real, it is limited by our sinful nature and our finitude, but on biblical presuppositions there is no justification for skepticism. We can know things because we are created in God’s image in God’s world. Calvin further makes the point that skepticism is not warranted:

[W]e see implanted in human nature some sort of desire to search out the truth to which man would not at all aspire if he had not already savored it. Human understanding then possesses some power of perception, since it is by nature captivated by love of truth.

Seventeenth century mathematician, physicist, and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal put similar thoughts in a much more poetic way:

What kind of freak is man? What a novelty he is, how absurd he is, how chaotic and what a mass of contradictions, and yet what a prodigy! He is judge of all things, yet a feeble worm. He is repository of truth, and yet sinks into such doubt and error. He is the glory and the scum of the universe!

A biblical anthropology is consistent with what we experience of human nature. All of us, if we are honest, can see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in even the best human being, but especially in ourselves. Even though we are fallen, however, God has made it possible that we can have significant confidence in the knowledge we possess, even though such confidence is never absolute. Thus the necessity of humility and faith to fill in our knowledge gaps.

Reason Isn’t Enough
The second poison Descartes and the Enlightenment gave us after a presumption of absolute certainty, is that reason is the only means of knowing, as if knowing could be reduced to the laws of logic. That would be like thinking human beings can experience the world with only one of their five senses. Os Guiness in his book, In Two Minds: The Dilemma of Doubt & How to Resolve It explains the helpful idea of limits:

Christianity is second to none in the place it gives to reason, but it is also second to none in keeping reason in its place. We never know the value of a thing until we know it’s limits. Put unlimited value on something and in the end you will exhaust it of all value. If we forget the limits of a thing, we fly in the face of reality and condemn ourselves to learn this simple ironic lesson: More without limits is less; less with limits is more.

Reason by itself, without revelation, is something like colorblindness. It can learn, apprehend, and know things, but it can never fully define these for what they are because only in Christ do all things hold together (Col. 1:17). This makes more sense if we think of universals and particulars, puzzles and puzzle pieces. Without God in Christ, who is the ultimate universal, no particular can be defined in its fullness, for what God created it to be, its telos, or purpose. To truly know even in our limited fashion, we need to have the ultimate puzzle picture, the biggest of big pictures that gives meaning to it all.

Much of what we “know” is not the result of some kind of logical process, a syllogism, or rigorous inductive reasoning. What we “know” can’t be proved in the final analysis. Rather what we “know” must be accepted by faith, which is warranted trust based on what we consider adequate evidence. When we get right down to it, faith, and the acceptance of its inevitability in life, is to pay homage to our finitude. But human beings are not fond of admitting their limits.

This refusal to accept our created nature makes perfect sense in light of what we read in Genesis 1‑3. We learn that our Creator is God and that we are not (shocking to some, I know). Our fall from our esteemed created state was instigated by the temptation of wanting to be like God, to usurp His place as the one who defines reality. The insistence that we ought to have absolute certainty and that we can reason our way to perfect knowledge, is an indication that we are by nature rebels who refuse to accept that we are contingent created beings. We are dependent on God, as the Apostle Paul told the Greek philosophers in Acts 17, for life, breath, and everything else. That pretty much covers it all! Therefore, go and live by faith.

 

 

Heritage America or America as an Idea

Heritage America or America as an Idea

Aug 20, 2025 | America

In case you hadn’t noticed from my surname with all the vowels, my heritage is Italian, Sicilian to be exact. It became a topic of debate on Twitter when someone wondered if I could be an American. The question is, what is an American and how does one become one? The answer isn’t as simple as you might think.

Most normal people don’t spend time interacting with strangers on social media, so they might not know of the concept of heritage America or Americans. It’s a reaction to the left’s globalism and open boarders fetish, and their aversion to nations, but especially nationalism. Since Obama and the push of globalists throughout Europe to allow unfettered immigration into their countries, much of it illegal, there has been an understandable backlash. Brexit in the UK in 2016 and Trump later that year in America were part of that backlash. The concept of Christian nationalism is also a something that vexes people on the left and right alike, although for different reasons. Ever since a certain little man with a mustache terrorized Europe in the name of National Socialism, Western cultural elites have had an aversion to nationalism of any kind. A phrase I’ve heard used to tar the heritage America types is ethno-nationalist, and that apparently is not a good thing. “Blood and soil” is another phrase that’s apparently not good.

Something else giving rise to a heritage America movement is, “America as an idea,” something that has been popular among conservatives since the movement started in the 1950s. It goes back to Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address when he began his historical speech with these eloquent words:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

 In other words, America is the “proposition nation,” which proposition goes back to Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In 1776 this was a radical notion because the only self-evident truth up to then was that no men were created equal, be that in class or station or talents or intelligence or ambition, or any number of other things. In due course equality became not only a basic American assumption, but a right. To even question it was to be un-American. The left turned it into egalitarianism, an obsession to make all people equal through the force of law. Whatever the details, they now call it equity. In due course America as an idea was accepted as axiomatic.

The conversation on Twitter I had on this topic came from someone who posted a link of Ronald Reagan saying something that offended him:

Anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American…This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness.

With a predictable slap at boomers, he said this made Reagan a “full blown globohomo,” or a global man. I know, this is a strange thing to say of the President whose slogan in his campaign against Jimmy Carter was, Make America Great Again. Yes, Trump took it from Reagan.

I responded that my grandfather had come from Sicily in 1912 at the age of 16, pushed by his mother because she wanted him to have a better life than being a peasant in Sicily. When he eventually started a family he would not speak Italian in his home because he was a proud American. Then my Twitter friend asked this question.

Why/how was he an American?

I’ll confess that the old Italian blood got boiling on that. Somewhere in my mind I thought, how dare you question the patriotism of my grandfather, that somehow because he wasn’t born here, or whatever, that he wasn’t as American as anyone else. I replied and finished with this:

Who qualifies to be an American and when to the “heritage America” crowd? I’m sympathetic to you guys, but it does get annoying after a while.

Then he followed up with another question:

If he went to Kenya and did the same, would he have been Kenyan?

Seriously? He’s comparing America to Kenya? Is he implying that America isn’t unique? Isn’t in some way different than every other country in the world? That all nations are just nations? This is when I knew I had to write about this and figure out why this annoyed me so much, and at the same time why I see value in this idea of heritage America.

I’ll share my conclusion before I make my case. The reason people from all over earth can come to America and become Americans is because America is both an idea and a heritage to be lived and embraced, and assimilation makes all the difference. My grandfather couldn’t do what he did in quite the same way in any other country on earth.

What Makes America Unique
When I use the word unique, I use it technically as defined, “existing as the only one or as the sole example; single; solitary in type or characteristics.” There is not, and has never been, a country, a nation like America, truly a novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages—a phrase included on the Great Seal of the United States, designed in 1782, and on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill. Few people, if any, would question this, but America’s uniqueness isn’t just because of ideas in a document declaring American independence from England. This gets to the heart of the matter.

Lincoln in 1862 said that America is “the last, best hope of earth,” a quote Reagan often used during the Cold War. Mere ideas don’t do that, don’t create a nation drawing people from all over the earth for 250 years, as Emma Lazarus wrote, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” A phrase that captures this is one our leftist countrymen loathe: American exceptionalism. To them it reeks of xenophobia, as if pointing out the obvious makes us fearful of “the other,” of those culturally different from us. That word culture is the issue. Let’s see what created the unique American culture and identity, and continues to this day.

English settlement and the origins of the American consciousness, began with Jamestown and Captain John Smith in 1607, but really picked up steam with the great Puritan migration to New England from the 1620s through the early 1640s. John Winthrop, who settled Massachusetts Bay Colony, modern Boston, in June 1630, was part of this migration. Winthrop, like all Puritans, believed the God of the Hebrews and their Savior was a covenant making God who promised faithfulness and blessing if they remained committed to obedience and His glory. As he penned the famous words, if they were faithful, “we shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” And if not, they “shall be made a story and byword through the world.” The founders echoed the Puritans that this experiment depended on the blessing of obedience to God, and curses if not. In fact, various studies have shown the Bible is the most quoted book of the Founders and the founding generation, Deuteronomy being one of the favorites, especially chapter 28 of the blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience.

But it wasn’t just Puritans and New England. America wouldn’t have become America if its development had not happened exactly the way it did with a variety of types of British peoples moving so far from home confronting the daunting American geography, a situation unique in the history of the world. This is wonderfully  captured in A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. They masterfully tell the story of how these circumstances are without parallel in history, how a new world was forming a people whose character, mentality, and vision was forged for liberty and self-government in an unforgiving land of boundless opportunity far from their motherland.

I would add, without the specific Protestant versions of Christianity they all embraced to one degree or another, America doesn’t happen. Here is a quotation from A Patriot’s History to emphasize the ubiquity of Christianity in the American consciousness of the eighteenth century. Writing about something every colonial settler and western pioneer understood:

[C]haracter was tied to a Christian tradition, which was then tied to liberty through a widespread acceptance of common law, and liberty to property—preserved and protected by titles and deeds and, soon, by a free market. All four were needed for success, but character was the prerequisite because it put the law behind property agreements, and it set responsibility right next to liberty. And the surest way to ensure the presence of good character was to keep God at the center of one’s life, community, and ultimately, nation. . . . It went back to that link between liberty and responsibility, and no one could be taken seriously who was not responsible to God. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” They believed those words.

The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s was another powerful influence on the social and political life of Americans for it drove the implications of Christianity deep into the American consciousness. Robert Curry in his book, Common Sense Nation, Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea, agrees: “the Great Awakening prepared the way for the American Revolution in too many ways to be counted.” Pulpits across America, influential in a way modern Americans can’t comprehend, were aflame with justifications for liberty and revolution. Americans as Englishmen saw their rights earned centuries before being blithely discarded by the British government. None of this was in the realm of abstract “rights” intellectual conservatives love to argue about. In other words, it wasn’t just about an idea, a mere proposition. It was real, boots on the ground, everyday living as self-governing people before God who granted them the liberty to live their own lives.

Americans were eminently practical people, including its intellectual leaders. Russel Kirk also shows how the founding was not merely an idea, or some abstract intellectual debate about “natural rights.” In his book, The Roots of American Order he writes :

When educated Americans of that century approved a writer, commonly it was because his books confirmed well their American experience, justified their American institutions, appealed to convictions they had held already: with few exceptions, the Americans were not fond of intellectual novelties.

Yoram Hazony in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, confirms this, asserting that America emerged from “a century and a half of civil social order in North America and more than seven centuries of British experience.”

America is also a common sense nation. America’s intellectual class was as dialed in to Enlightenment ideas as anybody could be at the time, but the ideas coming from Europe would take on a distinctly American cast through the influence of scholars and clergy who brought ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to colonial America. These ideas combined with the unique circumstances and the Founders’ genius, allowed them to create something entirely new in the history of the world. The primary influence of the Scots on Americans was Thomas Reid and what came to be called Scottish common sense realism. This philosophy was a pushback against more abstract and speculative philosophical ideas of the time.

People, especially Americans, were hungry for the real, and common sense realism gave it to them. Simply, it states we all have innate ideas that can be known and don’t have to be taught to us. As esoteric as this may sound, it had world transforming implications for the America of the late eighteenth century and its politics, grounding human knowing not in isolated human reason, but in moral sense. One more thing is critical to the American common sense state of mind, probably the most unique idea of the founding argued initially by Locke—popular sovereignty. In societies previously, only the ruling elite were seen as capable of ruling the common people. That all radically changed in America as stated by Robert Curry:

Here then is the rock upon which the Founders will build their idea of republican self-government: because a person who is capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life is capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are self-evident, self-government is possible. . . . [Because] the rightful purpose of government is securing its citizens’ unalienable rights, government is necessarily limited government, limited because its reach is defined by the vast field of liberty reserved for the citizens.

Vast field of liberty, I like it! The Founders could make such arguments because of the Hebrew and Christian idea of a personal Creator God of Scripture and man made in His image everywhere assumed and taught in American culture of the time. Not to mention the Christian England and common law tradition bequeathed to the Founders since Alfred the Great, and these ideas developing over centuries.

The Scot’s had other practical influences on America’s founding, including in the development of how people thought of government. According to Curry:

John Knox, the Martin Luther of the Scottish Reformation, founded the Presbyterian Church in 1560-1561. Long before the Founders began to make their argument for popular sovereignty, Knox preached popular sovereignty as a matter of doctrine. Political authority, Knox taught and the Presbyterians believed, ultimately belonged to the people. According to Knox, the people had the right to choose those who would manage their political affairs, and it was the people’s right to remove them at will.

The church, or as the Scottish called it, the Kirk, from the beginning was a representative system of government, unheard of in the world up to that time. The entire way the Kirk was managed was representative from top to bottom. Curry adds:

Both the doctrine of popular sovereignty and a functioning representative governing body that embodied the doctrine of popular sovereignty were unique to Scotland during the time.

Knox also laid the theological foundations for the right of Christians to resist wicked rulers. Most Christians at the time believed it was morally wrong to revolt against the king. In fact, many people called it a Presbyterian revolution.

Lastly, the variety of types of British peoples who came to carve out new lives in the vast wilderness of America all brought Protestant Christian convictions with them, including how their churches and communities should be governed. The Puritans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists who then came to America brought these ideas with them and they eventually made their way into the consciousness and government of Americans.

America: Both an Idea and a Heritage
As I said above, these two perspectives on America are not contradictory or mutually exclusive, and they are what make America truly unique among all the nations of the world. Pat Buchanan, who has been right about these things for a long time, encapsulated why the heritage piece of the equation is the priority:

It is not true that all creeds and cultures are equally assimilable in a First World nation born of England, Christianity, and Western civilization. Race, faith, ethnicity and history leave genetic fingerprints no ‘proposition nation’ can erase.

This is not to say one has to be of Anglo American descent to be allowed to live in America and be considered an American, or none of my family and millions like us would be American. This is because the propositions of America’s founding promise are in some sense to “all men,” as long as they are willing assimilate to Anglo, Christian, American culture. It’s also why people from all over the world can come here and if they fully participate in the spirit of America, what we call assimilation, can become Americans. If they are not, mere citizenship will not make them Americans. This twofer, if you will, is why we can’t just export the Constitution to another country, and it become like America with the same blessings of liberty, order, and prosperity.   

The unique American DNA consists of ideas stemming from our experience as a people over several hundred years. Think of those who first migrated to America prior to the Revolution. They were 3,000 miles from home and had a vast hostile continent to tame. That meant they needed to be a self-governing people who valued their independence and be willing overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges against insurmountable odds. These historically unique circumstances seemed to be made for an Anglo-Saxon people who had been schooled for 500 years in Anglo idea of the rule of law since Magna Carta in 1215 through the Glorious Revolution in 1688. America’s founders were as steeped in this history as they were of Ancient Greece and Rome, and Christianity. All of these ideas seeped into the American psyche to make the most exceptional nation the world has ever known.

The power of the two together, ideas and heritage, are what allowed America to endure endless waves of migration over two centuries and maintain its unique identity. Globalist Democrats and their leftist base despise that because they despise America as founded. Opening our boarders to multitudes of illegal immigrants who have no desire to assimilate, or even understand it, is a strategy form them to take down what is truly unique about America. They want to turn it into America the unexceptional. Thank God for Donald Trump who in 2015 was the only politician, Democrat or Republican, willing to call this out for what it is, the desire to destroy America. In addition to halting illegal immigration as he has done, we also need to significantly limit legal immigration, as we did prior to 1964. As great and unique as America is, it can only handle so much cultural assimilation and not turn into something different. Every American needs to be a heritage American.

 

The End of Christendom: Its Demise and Rebirth

The End of Christendom: Its Demise and Rebirth

Aug 13, 2025 | Western Civilization

I was inspired to write this piece by a little book I’m re-reading by Malcolm Muggeridge. He gave a talk about the end of Christendom in 1978, the year of my new birth, for the inaugural address of the Pascal Lectures at the University of Waterloo. I just did a quick search and found the lectures continue to this day, and some are even available on YouTube. Christendom is a topic of some consternation and much ambivalence for many modern Christians. There is even a contingent who believe it was all downhill for civilization and the church when Constantine the Great converted to Christianity in the early 4th century. That’s overstating the case, but they are not fans of “Christendom.” The reason in their minds, as far as I can tell, is that Christendom confused the kingdom of God with the state and earthly power. That’s not good. Their answer is some kind of Pietistic two kingdoms Christianity, a complete “separation of church and state,” in the mystical words of 20th century secular American jurisprudence. The phrase, as most know, originated with Jefferson, but was made unquestionable doctrine in Everson v. Board of Education (1947).

Their assumption is that Christianity and the state are mutually exclusive, in Augustine’s phrasing, confusing the City of God with the earthly city of man. The spiritual life of the Christian, they believe, has nothing to do with the messy machinations of distributing power through governing. We’ll parse that out below, but there is a growing contingent of Christians of all theological stripes, I among them, who believe not only was Christendom a good thing, but that it is our God-ordained job to return the West to its Christian roots.

I became familiar with Muggeridge (1903-1990) in my early Christian journey, probably because of the influence of Francis Schaeffer who widened the scope of my vision of the Christian life to all of reality. I was born-again into a kind of fundamentalist Pietism in which I experienced Christianity as a dualism, the spiritual stuff in one sphere, and non-spiritual everywhere else. I was never overtly taught this, but it was the Christian water I swam in. When Schaeffer came along, all of a sudden thinking about how my Christina faith applied to society and civilization became extremely important to me. I’m sure when I saw the title of this little book I needed to know exactly how and why Christendom came to its end. I always wanted to see Christianity once again esteemed and influential in society, but my eschatological assumptions were not consistent with that aspiration. That was The Late Great Planet Earth 70s and 80s, and things were getting so bad Jesus was certainly coming back soon. That, however, was never God’s plan, that this fallen world would grow increasingly worse and he would rescue us from the destruction. Quite the opposite in fact.

Because of Schaeffer and my expanding Christian worldview, I was committed to seeing Christianity make a comeback in Western society, but the odds were daunting. The reason this little book fascinates me now is because in the milieu of the late 1970s and 80s, Christianity was pretty much done. We were now clearly the underdogs, even if vestiges of Christian influence hadn’t completely disappeared. Muggeridge was a keen observer of the dissolution of Christianity’s influence in Western culture. He was a one-time atheist and a successful journalist who expressed his thoughts in “stinging wit and elegant prose.” For a time in the 50s he was the editor of a British satirical magazine called Punch. As a professional observer of the human condition, like C.S. Lewis, his atheism wasn’t able to explain what he saw and experienced of life. He embraced Christianity later in life, and at the age of 79 he and his wife were received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1982.

The Boomers as the Fulcrum Generation
Muggeridge’s perspective on Christianity and civilization is fascinating to me because looking back over the decades it now fits so well. At the time it was depressing. I’m more grateful than ever for the exact timing of my birth and the period of history God chose me to live in, even if I have to endure the insults of the boomer haters. In Acts Paul tells us this is no accident, for any of us:

26 From one man he made all the nations of mankind, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.

I was born in 1960 into an American culture that would soon become the maelstrom known as “the 60s.” The further I go up the mountain of age, I can look down upon the plains of my life in hindsight and see the flow of history more clearly than when I was living through it. History is like that. Nobody save God knows where it’s going or what it means when they are living through it. I’ve thought and written a lot about the flow of history and ideas and how they develop over time. It’s an endlessly fascinating topic to me. I recently wrote a piece about my supposedly benighted generation, and as I was writing I realized something I hadn’t considered before. The boomers are the fulcrum generation in Western history, a kind of pivot-point around which modern history has turned. Our boomer role in the modern world has been to experience the fulfillment and death of one world, secularism, and the transition to another. We’re not sure what that transition will bring, but in my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, I argue in detail that secularism is either dead, or on its last legs, showing its age, and like the Berlin Wall circa 1989 ready to fall. The boomers were the first and last fully secular generation. How did we get there?

In 1637 a pious Catholic Christian, René Descartes, wrote a philosophical work in which striving for certainty in an increasingly skeptical age, he decided to doubt everything. He discovered the only thing he couldn’t doubt was his existence in the form of his thinking, reflected in the phase Cogito Ergo Sum, or I think therefore I am. I’ve mentioned this a million times, it seems, in my own writing, because it was the beginning of the so-called Enlightenment. Descartes’ perspective came to be known as rationalism, and eventually Western intellectuals thought they could figure life out and conquer reality with reason alone and without God. Revelation was no longer required. In due course secularism arose, which is the idea that a society could be run without reference to God at all. Secularism eventually dethroned Christianity in the mid-20th century in the decade into which I was born. The baby boom generation became the first in Western history to grow up with the effects of Christianity as a declining force in the culture.

When the boomers were born (1946 to 1964) most Americans thought of America as a Christian nation and the American people as a Christian people. Kennedy’s assassination on December 22, 1963, seemed to usher “the 60s.” Up to that point, America had been living in post-World War II prosperity and naivete, confident in America’s inherent greatness. No obstacle seemed too great for America to overcome. Then in a moment everything seemed to go to hell. Along with other technological and cultural changes, the invention of the pill in the early 60s allowed the boomers to become the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll generation, with a large side of protest thrown in. God only got in the way. Some hippies got religion in the 70s, but the generation as a whole became increasingly God-less. In the early 2000s, the “New Atheists” came on the scene with some very old arguments, and became a cultural phenomenon. It was the first time in history that Christianity was portrayed as not only morally suspect, but positively harmful. What we came to call woke, cultural Marxism, began to permeate the culture with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. From that point on when boomers were at the commanding heights of American government and culture, secularism was now the boss and Christianity a nuisance, or at best an irrelevance. Muggeridge was amazed at where this dissolution of Christendom was coming from:

Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes. Christendom has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elites. Our barbarians are home products, indoctrinated at the public expense, urged on by the media systematically stage by stage, dismantling Christendom, depreciating and deprecating all its values. The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.

I wonder what Muggeridge would think looking back at this first three decades of the 21st century. I’m sure words would not be able to handle his level of incredulity. Even the dissolution of the 70s could not prepare someone for the age of woke.

Many of us were surprised at how quickly this seemed to happen, but this had been developing since 1637. Secularism at its strongest, however, was revealing its weakness. The Berlin Wall metaphor is a favorite of mine because while seeming impenetrable and eternal, we discovered it was made out of papier-mâché. It like secularism and wokeness was built on lies, and nothing built on lies can endure. At the moment of its greatest triumph during the Biden years woke, boomer excess, and government overreach, think Covid, were waking up tens of millions of Americans to The Truth.

Christendom’s Fall is the Requirement for Its Rebirth
Looking at the wreckage, Chicken Littles fail to consider a fall is often an opportunity for rebirth, enabling the realizations required for renewal and change. It’s not unlike an addict who has to hit rock bottom before he walks through the door of an AA meeting. Muggeridge saw it the same way:

For it is in the breakdown of power rather than in its triumph that men may discern its true nature and in an awareness of their own inadequacy when confronted with such a breakdown that they can best understand who and what they are. . . . So, amidst the shambles of a fallen Christendom, I feel a renewed confidence in the light of the Christian revelation with which it first began.

Reading his talks you might think him a pessimist—he can come off like a curmudgeon—but he assures us he is not; he sees hope coming out of the wreckage. Later in assuring us “Christ’s kingdom remains,” he affirms the necessity of the disaster for its renewal:

Indeed, it can be seen more clearly and appreciated more sharply by contrast with the darkness and depravity of the contemporary scene.

In 1978 that contrast had yet to fully play itself out, and that became our opportunity for rebirth in the 21st century. It looked bad in the 1970s, but we hadn’t seen anything yet. Most Americans were too “fat and happy,” as we say, to question the dominant narratives of secular culture until the gift of Covid. I know, it certainly didn’t appear to be a gift at the time, but many now see it as a turning point of historical proportions. I’ve come to call it the neutron bomb of truth. Looking back in hindsight, I now see Covid coming after, in Jefferson’s words from the Declaration, “a long train of abuses and usurpations.”

My red pill journey started with Trump, but Covid revealed the true nature of The Matrix, and many more people woke up because of that. All of a sudden, it seemed, people started questioning everything that until then appeared “just the way things are.” For those of us who lived through decades of Christendom’s demise, there was finally hope that secularism might not be so dominant after all. As Covid wore on, and especially with “the election” of Biden, I kept hearing and reading of an awakening, and this was happening over a wide array of issues, medical, political, geopolitical, cultural, historical, and yes, spiritual, everything. I believe all of the previous issues point to the latter because underlying all of them is a search for truth, and truth has metaphysical and spiritual implications because of He who is the Truth.

I argue in my book that we are in the midst of a third Great Awakening, but one unlike the previous two. The first and second awakening happened in Christian cultures where the assumptions of the Bible and Christendom were taken for granted. Those assumptions create what in sociology is called a plausibility structure. Those are the ideas and beliefs a people take for granted as true, in the phrase I used above, as “just the way things are.” They are not questioned unless the foundations of civilization are falling apart, and it only becomes clear what those questions are, and their implications, in hindsight. We are only seeing now what in the fog of war was confusing and perplexing, but appear as necessary to get us  to the revealing point. This point, it should be unnecessary to mention, is only the very beginning of a very long journey. It requires going back, as I explain in my book, so we can find our way forward. I like what Doug Wilson calls our goal, Christendom 2.0.

What Exactly is Christendom?
That question is best answered by explaining what it is not. For that I go back to Muggeridge:

Christendom, however, is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men. It bears the same relation to the everlasting truth of the Christian revelation as, say laws do to justice, or morality to goodness, or carnality to love—if you like, as Augustine’s City of God to the earthly city where we temporarily live. 

The two cities, and the relationship between them, is the confusion that causes so many Christians to embrace secularism and the myth of neutrality. When secularism developed in the 17th century as a reasonable response to the wars of religion in Europe, there arose the idea that government can be a neutral arbiter of all religious belief, and that no one religion can be priviledged in a society. It took centuries to fully develop, but by the mid-20th century pluralism became the default understanding of religion among Western cultural elites, even though such a thing doesn’t exist, in spite of all the protestations to the contrary.

The City of God, as Augustine argued, exists in the human heart, as does the earthly city. One of those two human hearts is going to determine, as Muggeridge calls it, “the administrative power structure,” and the basic assumptions by which it is run. That means these are deep and broad cultural issues, specifically which moral foundation is going to drive what the society believes. Vishal Mangalwadi states an unalterable fact of existence in his insightful work, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

This is undeniable, but secularism is built on its denial. Every society is built on its laws, and all laws rest on assumptions of “a final source of authority.” The reason Christendom flourished for so long is because it’s assumptions rested on a Christian and biblical worldview, the only source for true societal flourishing. When the West rejected that it didn’t move to some neutral place where law and government became the umpire who just calls balls and strikes. There has to be a strike zone before the ump can call balls and strikes!

If you’re dubious about my assertion about neutrality being a myth, and you’re convinced a secular society where true religious pluralism is possible, boil the question down to the individual. Can a person live without ultimate moral values that determine right and wrong? Does not each person have to decide on what basis they make decisions about what is right and wrong? And who sets those standards? If you say the person, that means each person can set their own moral standards, and you have a recipe for societal chaos and anarchy, which sets up the inevitability of tyranny. There will be order in a society one way or the other. Secularism is basically man-made moral standards, determining right and wrong without reference to God and Scripture. As we saw clearly in the last several years, secularism leads to tyranny because there is no check on government, no higher standard to which government is accountable. For the person and the society, the question always comes down to “the final source of authority.” Christendom 1.0 got it right, if not in all the particulars. We have a chance to improve on that, going back to find the way forward.

 

 

The “Nazi” Label as a Rhetorical Kill Switch and Cultural Marxism

The “Nazi” Label as a Rhetorical Kill Switch and Cultural Marxism

Aug 6, 2025 | Culture

The first part of this title came from a post I saw on Twitter by Joel Webbon, a pastor from Texas and leader on the dissident right, or New Christian Right, or whatever one calls that these days. Sadly, he was referring to other people on the right who use this “kill switch” to try to discredit and shut down conversation about possibly uncomfortable issues. Joel’s description of this rhetorical sleight of hand comes from a friend on Twitter:

It dehumanizes. It demonizes. It’s meant to silence, to isolate, to destroy reputations, and ultimately to frighten the next man in line from ever speaking up.

And that’s the real strategy. The left used to do this, but now the neocon right has adopted it. “We’ll smear you as a Nazi, and everyone else will take the hint.”

I’ve only been active on Twitter (X for the purists) for the last year and a half, and this kind of stuff only started popping up in the last year or so. We lived through peak woke during the Biden administration. Which is why it’s disconcerting, now that Trump has started the process of cleaning our societal house, to see people on the right use the same cancel tactics the left uses to stifle dissent and limit the scope of acceptable discourse. One phrase, for example, that annoys me because it is doing exactly this is “ethno-nationalism.” There are some who argue that an ethnic monoculture, i.e., not “diverse,” is better for societal flourishing than a cultural United Nations. I’ve read and listened to their arguments and find them plausibly persuasive, but when others call them “ethno-nationalists,” the implication is . . . Nazi! White supremecist isn’t far behind. They, it is implied, should be shunned. Uh, no they shouldn’t. Sure, some on the outer edges, the fringe, should be identified as lines must always and will be drawn in any society, but the Nazi line is weak and almost never justified.

I responded in a comment that it’s a shame most people have no idea where the rhetorical effectiveness of this “kill switch” came from, but I will tell you. It’s a tactic the left has used since shortly after World War II (and even some prior), and yet another of the woeful consequences of what Pat Buchanan called an “Unnecessary War.” (If that triggers you, I would suggest you read Buchanan’s book, Churchill, Hitler, and /The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Agree or not, his case is not a frivolous one.) Let’s see how we got here.

The Post-World War II Consensus
Seeing fascism as a phenomenon of the right is part of what some of us see as the toxic stew of the “post-World War II consensus.” I’ll get to that below, but we need to address this so-called consensus first. Worldwide tyranny and totalitarianism were the great fear coming out of the war, and the Western nations were united in their commitment to not allow its worldwide expansion. The Soviet Union, a product of the first Great War, which gave us the second, ended up dominating much of the world anyway because of Allied incompetence or treachery, take your pick. The Cold War was the result. Godless communism was the great enemy of the time, and there was a consensus for transnational cooperation to keep it at bay. Only Ronald Reagan thought Soviet Communism could be defeated, and it was. Another area of consensus is that fascism in the form of Nazism was the apotheosis of evil in the modern world, the apex of the apex, top of the mountain, never matched in the history of the world, and to be avoided at all costs. In this consensus it is assumed fascism is a phenomenon coming from the cultural and political right, and few question that. All agree, though, it must not be allowed to fester, thus the “rhetorical kill switch.”

Liberal democracy is also an unquestioned good in this consensus, and this is true on the left and right. I realized I was a conservative in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and I had no idea the conservative movement was a liberal movement. None, and for decades. I knew there was “something rotten in Denmark” for a long time, but I couldn’t identify it. All conservatives did was lose. At best, conservatism was committed to slowing down the gains of the progressive liberalism of Democrats since Woodrow Wilson, but reversing it didn’t seem to be part of the plan. Oh sure, they talked a good game, but when push came to shove, they didn’t do anything. I had learned about William F. Buckley and National Review magazine back at the beginning of my conservative journey, and he was a hero of mine for 35 years, then he wasn’t. In the very first issue of the magazine in 1955 he wrote of the mission of the magazine and by extension the fledgling conservative movement, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” At best conservatives became those who pleaded, “Please slow down a little.”

I struggled wondering in my disillusionment exactly what I was politically  if I wasn’t a conservative. Maybe a libertarian? I quickly realized that was basically evil; choice as the ultimate good is a stupid moral standard—one that leads to destruction. Thankfully, a New York billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star came down an escalator on June 16, 2015, to save me from myself. It just took a while to realize God had put my political salvation in the most unlikely package. Over the Trump years I’ve come to realize the conservative movement is basically filled with liberals in skirts, just another form of modern liberalism, classical liberalism some call it, but one that believes in tradition. Most conservatives buy into the secular political and cultural order just as much as liberals and most are not all that different than liberals. They all believe in the secular myth of neutrality, that pluralism is a positive good, and that no one religion should be privileged in government or the public square, including Christianity. The phrase Christian Nationalism is anathema to them, and a Christian nation an oxymoron. One of my favorite conservatives in the world actually said that, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, and I challenged that in a post last year. And they all believe fascism comes from the right.

I have discovered through my MAGA journey what I am politically, thanks in large part to Steve Bannon. I would now call myself a Christian populist-nationalist conservative who is deeply suspicious of the post-World War II consensuses. This also includes the accepted narratives of 20th century wars. I would again highly suggest Buchanan’s Unnecessary War, and at least you’ll know there are valid questions about the narratives, agree or disagree.

Because of Trump I began to question many things, and because of Covid came to question everything. I am determined not to turn into a cynic, which I believe is sinful, but to have a healthy skepticism about everything. Writing my last book I learned about the true origins of “the Nazi kill switch,” and it puts into perspective experiences those of us on the right are all too familiar with.

Adorno, Marcuse, Anti-Fascism, and Repressive Tolerance
We have cultural Marxism to thank for “the Nazi kill switch.” It goes back to the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920s which migrated to America prior to the war. The Marxist intellectuals in this movement realized traditional or “orthodox” communism based on class oppression wasn’t working, so a change in tactics was required. The primary insight of the cultural Marxists wasn’t that “orthodox” Marxism didn’t bring the fruit of revolution Marx promised, but that the revolutionary consciousness required would clearly not arise spontaneously; it must be assiduously cultivated via culture. They recognized Western societies produced cultures almost completely resistant to revolution. Marxist revolutionary consciousness had to find its way into the worldview of the average prosperous Westerner, and that could only happen through the transformation of the culture. Thus in due course arose the strategy of the “long march through the institutions.”

One of the cultural Marxists, Italian Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), had developed the concept of “cultural Hegemony,” meaning the dominance of one group over another through cultural norms. This dominant position of a particular set of ideas leads to them becoming commonsensical and intuitive, especially traditional religion, and cultural Marxists were determined to take it all down, replacing specifically Christian and capitalist ideas with Marxism. Marxist revolutionary consciousness would then “naturally” develop, or what we know today as woke. The effectiveness of this strategy is remarkable, and through it we have “cancel culture,” only certain accepted speech can be tolerated. This mentality has been endemic to the left, but it took a while for the “long march” to make it widely acceptable in Western culture. We largely have Adorno and Marcuse to thank for that.

The rise of Hitler and National Socialism, and fascism thanks to Mussolini, was the narrative in which woke incubated. The Nazi rhetorical kill switch was already being used prior World War II as interventionists were trying to get America into the war. Since Hitler and Nazism were ultimate evil and soon to take over the world, those not sufficiently bellicose were called Nazi sympathizers. It wasn’t widespread because the vast majority of Americans had no interest in getting into another European war, but Roosevelt and his administration sure were. The war and the Holocaust seemed to prove the ultimate nature of Nazism’s evil, but that’s only because the allies and the left played down the wickedness of Stalin and communist atrocities. In a contest between totalitarian tyrant baddies, I’d vote for Stalin to get the grand prize, with Hitler getting the runner up. And one last World War II point. Hitler, despite claims to the contrary, never had designs on worldwide conquest, while Stalin sure did; it’s baked into the communist cake. The Cold War proved it. But nobody today, left or right, uses “Commie” as a “rhetorical kill switch” to stifle debate and discussion. Let’s see why.

Theodor Adorno (1903–69) – Adorno published a book in 1950 with the loaded title, The Authoritarian Personality. The default position ever since is that fascism is a phenomenon of the right, and communism of the left, a convenient distortion for our
cultural elites. Dinesh D’Souza in his book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left has a section titled, “The Deceitful Origin of ‘Anti-Fascism.’” He writes that after World War II, “Nazism became the very measure of evil. So Marcuse and Adorno knew that anything associated with Nazism or fascism would automatically be tainted. They set about putting this obvious fact to political use on behalf of the political Left.” Fascism in this distortion of reality would now be associated with capitalism and moral traditionalism, which a la Marx must be “abolished.”

D’Souza argues persuasively that Marxism and fascism are ideologies of the left, but because of Adorno they came to be associated with two different ends of the ideological and political spectrum. This has some plausibility because Hitler hated communism, but that doesn’t make National Socialism any less an  ideology of the left. In his book Adorno introduced the F(ascism)-Scale as D’Souza explains:

The basic argument was that fascism is a form of authoritarianism and that the worst manifestation of authoritarianism is self-imposed repression. Fascism develops early and we can locate it in young people’s attachments to religious superstition and conventual middle-class values about family, sex, and society.

So a la Marx, religion and the family must be “abolished.” The book and ideas were swallowed hook, line, and sinker by an already liberal academia and media, becoming the accepted perspective that fascism was a phenomenon of the right. It’s a complete lie, but that’s what Marxists do. Sadly, the right largely accepted this taxonomy, as if Nazism and communism were on opposite sides of a continuum of political totalitarianism. We should reject this, let alone use it to verbally tar and feather those on our side of the political, cultural, and religious spectrum.

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) – After the war Marcuse decided to stay in America. Adorno went back to Germany but returned to America in the early 50s for a time in order to not lose his American citizenship. Marcuse was the most significant figure to come out of the Frankfurt school. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1940 and served as an intelligence analyst for the precursor of the CIA from 1941 to 1944. After the war, he continued in that work for another agency, and then made his way back into academia. He taught at Columbia and Harvard universities (1951 to 1954), Brandeis University (1954–65), and the University of California, San Diego (1965–76), where after retirement he was honorary emeritus professor of philosophy until his death.

He is most famously known as the father of the “New Left” and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The “Old Left” were those who embraced the old orthodox forms of Marxism, and especially that as practiced in the Soviet Union. Young Marxist radicals, by contrast, were disaffected with Soviet Communism and looking for new ways to bring down the capitalist West; the cultural approach of Frankfurt would come to dominate American Marxism through the pen of Marcuse. During his time in academia, he attracted young radical disciples like Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman among many others.

Marcuse, a prolific author, wrote Repressive Tolerance in 1965. That counter intuitive title comes from his argument that tolerance is “repressive” when it tolerates ideas from the right. Written as part of a book called A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Marcuse argues that “tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving as a cause of oppression.” From the perspective of a cultural Marxist, of course it is. The perverse Marxist logic of Marcuse has to be read to be believed. In this upside down, inside out world, tolerance “actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination.” Free speech and the First Amendment are considered dangerous; a common trope on the left is “speech is violence.” If that is true, of course it must not be tolerated, and we’ll see why from Marcuse’s perspective.

Adorno allowed Marcuse to develop “the Nazi argument.” It was a diabolically genius move paying cultural dividends to this day. First Marcuse lays his cards on the table:

Liberating tolerance . . . would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the left.

Then he gives us the punch line:

In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.

It’s a short trip from this to “speech is violence,” and by definition it can only be speech from the right. This led to a common phrase the New Left used in their protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, “No free speech for Fascists.” Thus what we know as cancel culture is a necessity to keep the right from doing what Fascists and Nazi’s always do. Not cancelling people on the right and their speech would be a dereliction of duty, the First Amendment be damned. Of course, all the political violence is on the left, but that is justified violence because it’s used against the Fascist right. A group using violence today can be called Antifa, for anti-fascists, with a straight face. You can’t make this stuff up!

Now That We Know?
Since we now know where the “Nazi rhetorical kill switch” came from, can we use it in good conscience? Do threats from potential fascists and Nazi’s actually exist? Is the “dissident right” full of “angry young men” who are susceptible to the “the authoritarian personality”? While I conceded there are some angry young men who are rightly frustrated at the dominant globalist establishment manifested in the post-World War II consensus, is it valid to “cancel” them? To discredit them in a way that seeks to silence them? To ignore their concerns? Or discredit their arguments without at least understanding them? It seems to me the questions answer themselves.

When I see, for example, this tactic being use on, of all people, Stephen Wolfe, who wrote The Case for Christian Nationalism, I call garbage. I am deeply uncomfortable with the antisemitism among some of this crowd, but I’ve tried to engage with them and understand where they are coming from, while rejecting their fundamental premise that Jews are “the problem.” Outside of that, I have no problem with this slice of the conservative Christian right questioning the “consensus”, the accepted narrative of political and cultural reality since the end of the war. I myself once accepted the dominant narratives of everything from the Civil War on, then Trump. Covid then destroyed the credibility of all the supposed “experts,” and created millions of skeptics who were otherwise not inclined to question things. Even the Lord of Glory says, “Come now, let us reason together,” (Is. 1:18), so let us discuss things without assuming the worst motives of our interlocutors, and everyone will benefit as we continue bringing God’s kingdom on earth as Christ taught us to pray.