In my previous post I wrote about President Eisenhower’s farewell address, and his warning about the military-industrial complex. I argued that Christians should be concerned about such things because our worldview addresses all things, and as Americans it is our responsibility as citizens of a self-governing republic to hold accountable those who govern. It is becoming increasingly clear that the radical leftist Marxists (who have completely taken over the Democrat Party) are committed to demonizing and silencing Christians. That is most obvious when it comes to issues of sexual morality where any questioning of “the narrative” is considered akin to racism, the greatest of modern sins. The Democrats and their media allies have even come to calling Christians who disagree with them, “Christian nationalists,” and that isn’t a compliment. Throw “white” into that description, and intimations of the Klan are not far away.
I’ve tried to steer away from politics on this blog because my focus has been on defending the truth of Christianity, but I’ve come to see part of defending this truth means we must apply our Christian faith to all of life, including politics. Many Christians, like many other Americans, are not “into” politics, but politics is “into” them, like it or not. There is no escape because to the leftists who dominate the culture and the Democrat Party everything is politics; ideology is all. They are fundamentally totalitarians. As David Horowitz has famously said, “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” That means they seek absolute control over everything and everyone, including our thoughts. They will never be satisfied with anything less. That means in the current cultural and political context, we cannot be left alone and free to live our own lives. Anyone who thinks we can, is delusional. Witness the last two years of an ostensible pandemic, an excuse for totalitarians to control the masses who just don’t know any better.
We are at a point in American history (worldwide in fact) where we need to take to heart a warning attributed to Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” This is a difficult truth for most people of a conservative bent to accept because such people, me included, just want to be left alone to live our lives in peace. The problem is the leftists (aka Marxists, progressives, Democrats) will not let us do so. Their fundamentally totalitarian natures will not allow it, and thus if we do not fight them, they will in one way or another control us, and not for our good. As I said above, for them ideology is all, and only when every American embraces and affirms that ideology, will they “leave us alone.” Of course, that will never happen, thus we must fight, fight, fight! Or in the words of one of my newfound heroes of the last year and a half, Steve Bannon, action, action action!
After the election of 2020 was so egregiously stolen from President Trump, I was understandably depressed. It wasn’t too long after that distressing time that I stumbled upon Bannon’s podcast, War Room. As I’ve said many times, he got me out of the fetal position I’d fallen into, and to mix metaphors, he talked me off the ledge. One of the things I’ve most appreciated about him is something he consistently affirms that it is very easy for us to forget: we have agency. As God’s image bearers, we can influence things. He has made us responsible beings who can transform reality in innumerable ways. We forget how profound this is, and how it transformed the ancient world into the modern world. It can still transform our world; it does every day, but we’re mostly blind to the profundity of it.
That is because our tendency as fallen sinners is to plead the victim and complain. Oh, it is so much easier to complain! Easier to whine and moan and blame others or circumstances, or like Adam, blame God: the woman you gave me . . . . Playing the victim seems better in the moment because it makes us somehow feel better, that we can maybe escape the responsibility for our own lives. We delude ourselves into thinking that it, whatever “it” is, is someone else’s fault. If only that someone would change, or not do this or do that, then everything would be better. That is all smelly stuff that comes out of a bull’s rear end. To the infinite contrary, personal responsibility is freedom. In a very real way, our destiny is ours to control, and that applies on a personal as well as a societal level. However much control we actually have (ultimately, God is in control of all things), we are not pinballs knocked around by mysterious forces we cannot understand. In biblical terminology, we have wisdom from God about the nature of reality, about how things work, which is ultimately in Christ. As I recently heard Doug Wilson say, it is Christ or Chaos. That goes for societies as well as any other relationship because it goes on within all of us, one or the other.
What does all this have to do with Christian nationalism, you ask? That’s a good question, and as I seem so often to do, I spent all of this post on prolegomena (prefatory remarks, or from Geek, to say beforehand) and didn’t answer that question. I think in my next post I will define “Christian nationalism,” and why we ought to be Christian nationalists. I recently heard this short Doug Wilson responds video as he reviews a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show, which gets the heart of why I’m for Christian nationalism. He says at one point, “Christianity stands between the progressive left and their final goal which is the abolition of man, and ultimate power for them.” It’s either us or them; we win, or they do. We are in an Ephesian 6:12 existential struggle for Christian Western civilization, and I have no desire to be on the losing side. We’ll see how in America as American citizens we exercise our agency in the next post so we can be on the winning side.
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