Musings Of An Indie WriterSunday, February 24, 2008
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: Christianity, Freedom, And The World Crisis
I felt slightly strange writing the title above. It's uncomfortably close to something C. S. Lewis derided in The Screwtape Letters. All the same, it's the proper title for today's Rumination, as I hope you'll soon see.
The germ of this piece is twofold: first, an exchange I had with another blogger, which culminated just today. It seems that the proprietor of that site considers whatever pleasure he gets from deriding religious belief to be of greater importance than its effect in turning religious persons against his political views -- libertarian views. I could be wrong about that -- I've bent considerable effort toward showing him the harm he's doing to our shared political cause -- but to what long-term effect, I cannot say.
It is historically well established that whatever degree of political freedom any people anywhere enjoys today is due primarily to the efforts of Christians to win it. Christians have always been the overwhelming majority of the "free world." The United States, the world's sole remaining repository of anything resembling a free society, is 74% Christian according to the latest census. An atheist who fails to appreciate this is missing a very important piece of the human puzzle. An atheist who grasps this reality, but who nevertheless indulges in gratuitous contempt toward religious Christians, has put his own sense of intellectual and / or emotional superiority ahead of the well-being of freedom and the defense of the Rights of Man.
It's almost inescapable for a sincere Christian to be well disposed toward freedom -- freedom being understood politically, as the confinement of government power to the protection of life, liberty, and property. After all, Christ Himself stood against the use of force to punish sin:
And everyone went to his own house. But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Now early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people came to Him; and He sat down, and taught them. Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, they said unto Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. “Now Moses, in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned. But what do you say?” This they said, testing Him, that they might have something to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down, and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear. So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” And again He stooped down, and wrote on the ground. Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the oldest, even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had raised Himself up, and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” [The Gospel According To John, 7:53 - 8:11]
He rigidly separated temporal from spiritual authority:
And they sent unto Him certain of the Pharisees and of the Herodians, that they might catch Him in talk. And when they were come, they said unto Him, Master, we know that Thou art true, and carest not for any one: for Thou regardest not the person of men, but of a truth teachest the way of God: Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? Shall we give, or shall we not give? But He, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye Me? Bring Me a denarius, that I may see it. And they brought it. And He said unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto Him, Caesar’s. And Jesus said unto them, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s. And they marveled greatly at Him.” [The Gospel According To Mark, 12:13-17]
He proclaimed the end of the authoritarian Levitical Covenant:
And behold, one came and said unto Him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And He said unto him, Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but one, and that is God. But if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He said unto Him, Which ones? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. [The Gospel According to Matthew, 19:16-19; emphasis added by FWP]
And made the most penetrating of all statements about the primacy of truth:
Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed in him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. [The Gospel According To John, 8:31-32]
It is essential to human flourishing that men be free: politically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. No other faith has ever promoted human freedom as Christianity does; indeed, most other faiths are explicitly hostile to freedom, or at best lend it no support. To claim to be a devotee of freedom, yet to indulge in the belittlement of Christianity, for any reason or none, is to do severe harm to one's own espoused cause.
Alongside that, I was terribly disturbed to encounter this pessimistically toned piece at Gates of Vienna:
[Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary of Britain in 1914] did, however, leave us with a statement which became an epitaph for Europe prior to 1914. Just before the war began he said to a friend, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”He was quite right; the lamps were not re-lit within his lifetime, nor within the several lifetimes that have elapsed since. In fact, it is doubtful that they can be rekindled in time to illuminate a continent that could recognizably be called “Europe”.
The Great War gutted the vital core from Europe. Western Civilization still manages to lurch along, but its beating heart no longer resides within Europe....
Civilization will collapse piecemeal and in slow motion, but collapse it will....
2009 is one possible candidate. The Treaty of Lisbon will go into effect then, and the EU will begin the formal integration of its member states into a single “soft totalitarian” regime which will gradually become harder.
The new Wahhabist state in the Balkans will be a year old.
500,000 more immigrants — mostly Muslims — will have arrived in the UK, and 250,000 more native Britons will have departed.
Dozens of additional young women will have been flung from balconies in Sweden by their male relatives.
Pakistan will have seen another year of seething, intrigue, and assassination.
The United States will be on the verge of pulling its troops out of Iraq under President Obama…
Yes, we live in increasingly interesting times.
The jackpot may be delayed a little while longer; after all, it may take until 2012 or 2015 until the Iranians have a fully deliverable nuke. Pervez Musharraf may yet avoid the car bomb with his name on it for a while longer. The “youths” of the Parisian banlieues may not storm nearby bourgeois neighborhoods for a couple more years.
But the lamps are definitely being extinguished. You can see them winking off one by one.
Turn the last one out when you go, would you?
To read such sentiments from Baron Bodissey, one of the staunchest of the Blogosphere's freedom commandos, is beyond upsetting. It makes this narrow-gauge campaigner wonder if the world's been turned upside-down.
Despair, like a strong sense of confidence, is always misplaced. A man mired in despair has resigned as director of his own life, conceding his future to the whims of external forces. Political, economic, social, and demographic despair are no more worthy than the spiritual kind. They surrender our hope in the future to the legions of darkness.
Despair is not a manly attitude; surrender to "fate" is not manly behavior. How could any American feel that his society is headed inexorably into totalitarianism, whether the Islamic kind or any other? How could he maintain his own self-regard after such a surrender?
It's not easy to hope against the currents. But neither is it easy to assess the currents precisely, especially in these days of "advocacy media." Our Old Media have a pecuniary interest in frightening us; they believe, not without reason, that it helps to sell newspapers and air time. Though their editorialists insist that we're obligated to tolerate a creed that refuses to tolerate anyone outside it, their "reporters" provide us as much scare material about that creed as they can amass. Whether these two tendencies are truly in opposition to one another is hard to say. The Swedish minister who argued that non-Muslim Swedes must be accommodating to Muslims so that, when Muslims are a majority of Swedes, they'll be "nice" to the remaining Swedish non-Muslims, might have grasped the logic of the thing better than I, no matter how far off the target his recommendation seems.
Let's remember that Muslims, though globally numerous -- about 1.3 billion by most estimates -- are still a small, economically weak minority within the nations of the West. The threat they pose to our freedom and our institutions derives entirely from their militancy. Christians, Jews, and Amiable Agnostics could match that militancy. If we retain our belief in the rightness of human freedom, we will match it, and the followers of the murderous, adulterous, pedophilic Prophet Muhammad will come to rue the day they invited our ire.
The world is in crisis. It's not the first time, of course, but this one is qualitatively different from any other since the Industrial Revolution.
Governments are a large part of the problem, in that they've largely abdicated their responsibilities to protect those over whom they claim jurisdiction. To add injury to injury, they mulct their subjects so severely that many of us have little left beyond the necessities after the taxman has departed. Thus, governments cannot be counted on to withstand the Muslim diaspora-jihad in our interest -- especially considering how useful a tool that jihad has been for inducing fear and submissive acquiescence in private citizens.
Anyway, an army is not the proper tool with which to face down the Islamic tide. Islam is a diffuse threat; it must be met with a diffuse defense: a people in arms. But to animate an adequate mass of Americans to become such a people once more requires an ideal around which they can rally. Freedom is such an ideal...if they can be taught to love it again. And so is Christianity.
Please don't mistake me. I'd be the last person on Earth to argue that one should become a Christian for its utilitarian value. But one consequence of modern "education," which too many Americans have suffered, is the demotion of their faith to the status of a superstition useful for keeping the kids in line. It doesn't matter, the modern cant runs, what you believe, as long as your creed helps to maintain social order.
Incidentally, that's the "logic" wardens have followed in opening the gates of their prisons to Islam.
It does matter what you believe. It also matters how ardently you believe it, and what you're willing to do in its defense. Muslims' political gains in the nations of the West have flowed from their ardency about their thoroughly unwholesome creed. Yet they're only a few percent of the population of Europe, and a bare 1% to 2% of the population of America. What could an energized Christian population, alive to the danger to itself and its nation, do in response?
But we won't rise to the challenge by proclaiming that "the lamps are going out."
Let it be remembered that hope is one of the three theological virtues enjoined upon all Christians. In its original theological application, it's about hope of the next life and trust in the mercy and goodness of God. But hope is also a temporal virtue: the deliberate entertainment of the notion that there's a way to make things better than they are. It is never so important as in the deepest darkness, when all seems lost and nowhere is there a light to steer by.
Christ would be clucking at us for our malaise. Despair, He would remind us, is the antithesis of hope, the denial of all He taught. He would ask us where our manhood has gone, why we might think we have a right to anything, life and freedom included, that we're unwilling to fight for. Did He not tell His disciples that "If any man among you hath no sword, let him sell his cloak and buy one" -- ? Did He not go to His death willingly, specifically so He might rise from it and bestow eternal life and hope upon Man? Given what He endured for our sakes, how could we abandon the field to our enemy without doubling our fists, crying challenge, and giving him the best that's in us?
"Art dogs," he thundered, "or men? Ball-less wonders, castrates all? Hear me! Form ranks!" [Frank Yerby, An Odor Of Sanctity]
May God bless and keep you all.
