Occupy Wall Street as an Heretical, Medieval Cult

If you check out the coverage of Occupy Wall Street from conservative sites like Big Government, America Spectator and The Weekly Standard, instead of relying strictly on the mainstream media, it becomes clear that there are three main groups of people involved in the uprising:

1. There are relatively ordinary people, especially idealistic young people, with cell phones, high student debts and often no job. They have been taught in university that capitalism is evil, socialism is benign and communism badly misunderstood. They don't have a clue what really is wrong or how to fix it. They are the focus of the mainstream media, however, because they seem like a group that a large number of independent voters can relate to.

2. There are street people, petty criminals, mentally disturbed people and sexual predators mixed in among the others and causing havoc. Here is a "rap-sheet" for OWS, a compilation of stories about various crimes committed or alledged against people involved in the anti-capitalist movement. No wonder the latest poll shows the growing unpopularity of OWS; its approval rating is not down to 30%.

3. There are ideologically aware, left-wing agitators who range from the Communist Party, the Democratic Socialists of America to union organizers, environmentalists, and anarchists. Here are their signs from the Occupy Oakland general strike march. See here, for example, and here, or just google "Democratic Socialists of America + Occupy". They are using the naive "dupes" for their own ideological purposes.

Absolutely nothing new has been said by the OWS movement. It is important to realize that it is just rehashing the same old anti-capitalist rhetoric the kids learned in university classes from tenured, aging hippies like Bill Ayers who have been predicting the imminent collapse of capitalism - any day now - since the 1840s.

If anything coherent is behind OWS it is Marxism in its most day-dreamy, extreme, religious form. Marxism is actually nothing new in Western culture. It is another expression of millenarian cults that have risen up periodically with a radical message that society is corrupt and the end of the present order is near since the 13th century.

Norman Cohn's book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, is not about Marxism. But it is essential for understanding Marxism. (I scored a copy of the 3rd edition for $4.00 at the Trinity College booksale a couple of weeks ago, thus enabling me to remove it from my Amazon cart.) Originally published in 1957, this remains the only book on its subject: "the tradition of revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism, as it developed in western Europe between the 11th and 16th centuries." (p. 9)

Chapter 6 deals with "The Emperor Frederick as Messiah" and discusses the emergence of the heretical thought of Joachim of Fiore, which was a forerunner of Marxism. Cohn writes:

In the course of the 13th century yet another kind of eschatology appeared alongside the eschatologies derived from the Book of Revelation and the Sibylline Oracles - alongside them at first, but soon blending with them. The inventor of the new prophetic system, which was to be the most influential one known to Europe until the appearance of Marxism, was Joachim of Fiore (1145-1202). Ater many years spent in brooding over the Scriptures this Caliabrian abbot and hermit received, some time between 1190 and 1195, an inspiration which seemed to reveal in them a concealed meaning of unique predictive value. (p. 108)

Joachim forecast a new interpretation of history as consisting of three stages: the age of the Father (or Law), the age of the Son (or Gospel), and the age of the Spirit, which "would be to its predecessors as broad daylight compared with starlight and dawn, as high summer compared with winter and spring." (p. 108) Whereas the first age had been the age of fear and the second of faith and filial submission, the third would be an age of joy and freedom when all men would know God directly. The world would be a vast monastery in which all men would contemplate God mystically and ecstatically.

Cohn points out that the long-term influence of Joachim's vision can be traced right down to the present day, most clearly in the 19th century 'philosophies of history' of Schelling, Ficte, Lessing and Hegel, as well as in Auguste Compte's ideas and the Marxist scheme of primitive communism, class society and a final communism "which is to be the realm of freedom and in which the state will have withered away." (p. 109) Cohn also points out that the idea of the "Third Reich," first coined in 1923 by publicist Moeller van den Bruck, would not have had the emotional resonance it had in the European mind if it had not been for this "phantasy of a third and most glorious dispensation" which had "entered into the common stock of European social mythology." (p. 109)

Marxism stands in a long tradition of millenarian movements that range from the "children's crusades" to the Taborites to Thomas Muntzer and the millenarian cults in the English revolution like the Levelers and the Diggers. (I'm leaving out far more than I'm mentioning.) As such, Marxism is, for all its scientific pretensions, essentially an irrational, mystical, millenarian cult. It is eschatology for those who have lost their orthodox, Christian faith.

Occupy Wall Street is thus a dream come true for historians and anthropologists who want to study an actual contemporary example of one of these social movements in the form of living, breathing, 'true believers' rather than in dusty historical records.

In the 13th century the mainstream Church followed Thomas Aquinas in his orientation to Augustinian orthodoxy and rational (Aristotelian) science rather than Joachim and his mystical anarchism. The Church has been on the side of science and reason ever since, whereas Marxism stands in the tradition of the irrational, mystical, cultic, free-spirited, perfectionism and millenarianism stretching back centuries.

In the final analysis, it is not possible to reason with those who believe they have received a Divine revelation not accessible to most ordinary people and who believe they are on the cutting edge of history, which is about to be transformed into the kingdom of God. Like the Iranian mullahs and Adolf Hitler, the Marxists believe that no act of violence is unthinkable when the result is going to be the kingdom of God on earth!

Christianity, on the other hand, teaches that Divine revelation coheres with natural law and reason and therefore can be debated, discussed and understood by all who wish to engage in study and dialogue. Marxism, by way of contrast, like all heretical cults, requires the sacrifice of the intellect, the acceptance of secret revelation and irrational belief in the goodness of man, the imminence of the millennium and the need for purifying, revolutionary violence as the doorway to utopia.

It is little wonder that people who believe such things had to be suppressed by force by the public authorities in previous centuries and it is likely that free and rational societies will need to defend themselves against the forces of lawless disorder again in the future. We would do well to heed the warning from the OWS Oakland sign: "We came unarmed, this time."

Will a culture sunk deep into postmodern relativism, sexual promiscuity, hedonistic materialism, uncontrolled public debt and declining educational standards be able to muster the strength to resist the anarchistic cultists? And will it be able to do so without falling into tyrannical dictatorship? Do we have it in us to overcome another Nazi death cult without losing democracy?

These are the questions that should preoccupy all of us today.

Islam and Religious Freedom: It is Time to Face Some Unpleasant Facts

Further to the last post, this article by Andrew G. Bostom in American Thinker, points out what serious observers of Islam have always known: namely, that the barbaric penalty of death for apostasy is deeply rooted in Islam and not merely an aberration embraced by a few, fringe, fanatical groups. What this means is that Islam is not compatible with natural law, Christianity or the Western secularized human rights tradition.

This is a serious issue that many politicians and left-wing secular and religious activists refuse to tackle honestly.

Will Mainstream American Islam Condemn Pastor Nadarkhani's "Apostasy" Death Sentence? Where is CAIR? Where is the Islamic Society of North America? - snip -

Thus far mainstream American Muslim advocacy groups-notably the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) have failed to condemn Pastor Nadarkhani's heinous death sentence. This dereliction of basic moral duty by CAIR and ISNA, so vocal in highlighting the slightest perceived "violations" of Muslim rights here in the US, demonstrates that the continued failure of Islam to uphold basic freedom of conscience extends beyond the "Near East," to Muslim communities across the entire world.

Notwithstanding transparent last minute Iranian efforts to recast the criminal proceedings against Pastor Nadarkhani with allegations of-what else-"Zionist conspiracism," or other trumped up charges, a translated Iranian Supreme Court brief from 2010 (obtained by CNN from the American Center for Law and Justice, and translated from its original Farsi by the Confederation of Iranian Students in Washington) makes plain that apostasy is the sole charge.

Mr. Youcef Nadarkhani, son of Byrom, 32-years old, married, born in Rasht in the state of Gilan is convicted of turning his back on Islam, the greatest religion, the prophecy of Mohammad at the age of 19...He (Nadarkhani) has stated that he is a Christian and no longer Muslim...During many sessions in court with the presence of his attorney and a judge, he has been sentenced to execution by hanging according to article 8 of Tahrir Al- Wasilah (a book on Islamic Law, Sharia, authored by Ayatollah Khomeini as a guide for Muslims)

The quintessence of a contemporary Shiite pronouncement on apostasy in Islam (which cites Khomeini's treatise extensively) appearing in Kayhan International, March 1986, stated openly

In Islam, apostasy is a flagrant sin and guilt for which certain punishments have been specified in Shari'a (Islamic law). Apostasy means, to renounce the religion or a religious principle after accepting it. In other words, one's departure from Islam to atheism is called apostasy. A person who abandons Islam and adopts atheism is called an apostate . . ...Apostasy is the escape from the pattern of creation and nature and that is why the word "voluntary" has been adopted for such an apostate...Can the penalty of escaping from the path and pattern of nature and creation be anything other than annihilation? This is the same thing that has been crystallized in the penal code of Islam. The anti-apostasy punishments of Islam are proper laws to rescue mankind from falling into the cesspool of treason, betrayal, and disloyalty and to remind the human being of his ideological commitments.

Iranian apostasy law is consistent with mainstream Islam's rejection of freedom of conscience since the 7^th century advent of the creed, through the clear modern dictates of the global Muslim umma's religio-political hierarchy as put forth in the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, signed by all 56 member nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (now the Organization of Islamic Cooperation).

• Koranic verses, such as 2:217 and 4:89 and their classical, mainstream exegeses by seminal Koranic commentators such as Baydawi (on 4:89: "Whosoever turns his back from his belief [irtada], openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever ye find him, like any other infidel") and Qurtubi (on 2:217: "Scholars disagree about whether or not apostates are asked to repent. One group say they are asked to repent and, if they do, they are not killed. Some say they are given an hour and others a month. Others say they are asked to repent three times, and that is the view of Malik [founder of the Maliki school of Islamic Law]..It is also said they are killed without being asked to repent.")
• Muhammad is reported to have sanctioned lethal punishment for apsotates in the two most important canonical hadith collections, i.e., Bukhari and Muslim, and the Muwatta of Imam Malik:

Bukhari, volume 9, #17-Narrated Abdullah: Allah's Messenger said, "The blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that I am His Messenger, cannot be shed except in three cases: in Qisas (equality in punishment) for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse and the one who reverts from Islam (Apostate) and leaves the Muslims."

Bukhari, volume 9, #57-Narrated Ikrima, "Some atheists were brought to Ali and he burnt them. The news of this event, reached Ibn Abbas who said, "If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah's messenger forbade it, saying, "Do not punish anybody with Allah's punishment (fire)." I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah's Messenger, "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him."

Muslim-Chapter 6: WHEN IT IS PERMISSIBLE TO TAKE THE LIFE OF A MUSLIM, Book 016, Number 4152: Abdullah (b. Mas'ud) reported Allah's Messenger as saying: It is not permissible to take the life of a Muslim who bears testimony (to the fact that there is no god but Allah, and I am the Messenger of Allah, but in one of the three cases: the married adulterer, a life for life, and the deserter of his Din (Islam), abandoning the community.

Muwatta of Imam Malik, #1410-"Zaid b. Aslam reported that the Apostle declared that the man who leaves the fold of Islam should be executed."

• There is also a consensus by all four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (i.e., Maliki, Hanbali, Hanafi, and Shafii), as well as classical Shiite jurists, that apostates from Islam must be put to death. Averroes (d. 1198), the renowned philosopher and scholar of the natural sciences, who was also an important Maliki jurist, provided this typical Muslim legal opinion on the punishment for apostasy: "An apostate...is to be executed by agreement in the case of a man, because of the words of the Prophet, 'Slay those who change their din [religion]'...Asking the apostate to repent was stipulated as a condition...prior to his execution."
• The contemporary (i.e., 1991) Al-Azhar (Cairo) Islamic Research Academy endorsed manual of Islamic Law, Umdat al-Salik (pp. 595-96) states: "Leaving Islam is the ugliest form of unbelief (kufr) and the worst.... When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostasizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed. In such a case, it is obligatory...to ask him to repent and return to Islam. If he does it is accepted from him, but if he refuses, he is immediately killed."
• The equivalent, gravely negative implications of the OIC's Sharia-based Cairo Declaration are most apparent in its transparent rejection of freedom of conscience in Article 10, which proclaims: "Islam is the religion of unspoiled nature. It is prohibited to exercise any form of compulsion on man or to exploit his poverty or ignorance in order to convert him to another religion, or to atheism." Ominously, articles 19 and 22 reiterate a principle stated elsewhere throughout the document, which clearly applies to the "punishment" of so-called "apostates" from Islam: "[19d] There shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Sharia.; [22a] Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Sharia.; [22b] Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Sharia.; [22c] Information is a vital necessity to society. It may not be exploited or misused in such a way as may violate sanctities and the dignity of Prophets, undermine moral and ethical values or disintegrate, corrupt or harm society or weaken its faith."

The universality of these Islamic attitudes affects Muslim communities in the West, including North America. Syed Mumtaz Ali, the late architect of Canada's Sharia (Islamic Law) tribunal, and law professor Ali Khan, for example both have openly advocated extending Islamic apostasy laws to the West. Mumtaz Ali, in a disturbing essay, affirmed the traditional Islamic legal viewpoint that apostates must "choose between Islam and the sword," arguing further that if Canada were to act in accord with its own Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Canadian government must grant the country's Islamic community authority to punish those Muslims who apostasize, or malign their faith.

Muslim immigration to the West is creating a Fifth Column within our culture that is dedicated to destroying our freedom. We all know that many Muslim immigrants come here because they want the freedom the West has to offer and they are welcome. But those who seek to bring Sharia Law with them should not be granted the privilege of being allowed to come and live here.

Any Muslim who wishes to immigrate to the West should be required to renounce the intolerance of Sharia Law and refused entry if they choose not to do so. It is their choice; no one is pressuring them to come here in the first place. If they prefer to live in a country where freedom of religion does not exist, let them do so.

The Labour Party Advocates Buying Off the Barbarians: The Decline of the Welfare State Enters a New and Dangerous Phase

The world has watched the horrifying pictures from London the past few days of mostly black young people rioting. It looked amazingly similar to the mostly white young people rioting a few weeks ago in Vancouver. There were no chants or homemade signs and no leaders giving speeches, yet the BBC, in a classic example of media manipulation of public opinion, called them "protesters."

It was not a political event; it was post-political. The police don't know what to do because the politicians who give them orders don't know what to do. In fact, the politicians are basically irrelevant at this point. They certainly have contributed to the problem by enacting policies whose effects were to destroy the family, make an entire underclass dependent on the state and replace education in the classical sense with group therapy. But they are irrelevant because, although their policies can tear down and destroy public morality and family structures, what was destroyed cannot be replaced by public policies. As Christopher Dawson said with reference to the fragility of culture, what took 1000 years to build can be destroyed in a few days.

Nihilism is not pretty. When the masses take Bloomsbury moral relativism seriously the results are ugly. When religion is scorned, Christianity is oppressed, hedonism is celebrated and freedom redefined down as licentiousness, one simply has to expect riots like these ones.

There came a moment in the history of the Roman Empire when the Roman political elite knew that they could not afford to pay for enough legions in enough different points along the borders of the empire to defeat militarily the barbarian tribes because there were too many tribes in too many places. They then switched strategies and moved from trying to crush them with military might to trying to buy them off.

In the following clip, Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of Labour is on TV with Michael Gove of the Conservative Party. With the riots still going on she can't resist criticizing the coalition for spending cuts as if there was a link between the cuts and the riots. Gove is furious and doesn't let her get away with it. Now, he was legitimately angry at the way she sought to score cheap political points out of a human tragedy and appear to justify, at least in part, the actions of the mob. But there is a deeper point to be taken from her comments. I'd say she represents the political establishment that is frightened by the mob and wishes to do whatever has to be done to buy them off. She is the voice of the Generation of '68 that is all out of ideas and does not know what to do. She tries to come off as righteously indignant, but doesn't quite manage it.



I would suggest that Harman is the face of the liberal welfare state establishment that is now tottering precariously under the weight of its own contradictions. The European superstate is going broke and its leaders are desperately afraid of democracy lest the voting public demonstrate its disagreement with their Utopian statism.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the American Left couldn't have picked a less auspicious moment to try and sell voters on what a swell idea it would be for the US to undergo "fundamental transformation" in order to become a European-style social democracy. The next election will likely bury the Left for a generation in the US; whether or not it is too late for the UK remains to be seen but portents are ominous.

The problem with barbarians is that they cannot be bought off for long. Why in the world should they behave nicely in order to be paid by the State to sit on their hands when they can simply take what they want whenever they want it? Have they not been educated in school to indulge their sexual desires as soon as puberty hits? Is that not the point of liberal sex education? "Just use a condom dear and have a nice time." Having learned that delayed gratification is not cool, why not smash that window and take the wide screen TV right now? If you are taught that you are entitled, how do you know when to draw the line? Who knew that there were lines?

The supposedly liberal, (but really creeping socialist), big-government, high-tax and spend, welfare states of the modern West have created a dependent underclass of barbarians by policies that undercut the family, eviscerate education of discipline and promote moral relativism and an entitlement mentality. Now the problem is what to do with them.

What is truly sad is that left-wing politicians like Harriet Harman actually are shocked because after all they have done for young people, these young people act like this. But they are so trapped in their own, little worldview bubble that they have no way to make sense out of the world as it crumbles around them. They can give no rational account of the problem except to say: "We need to spend more, drive the country deeper in debt, double down on multicultural relativism and demonize Christianity, traditional morality and the inculcation of self-discipline even more." Any other ideas? Didn't think so.

It is apparent that President Obama is, like Harman, totally bereft of ideas. During the debt ceiling debate the purported "adult in the room" was reduced to preaching class warfare and making partisan speeches with an eye to his re-election campaign when the country teetered on the brink of a shutdown (it was never even close to default). In this clip, Republican congressman Lankford offers up a great quote. With reference to Obama's class warfare rhetoric in his debt ceiling speech carried live on national TV on July 29, Lankford said: "It felt like he was saying grab your pitchforks and run to a rich guy's house and take his stuff because he's the problem or she's the problem." It comes early in this clip.



In the UK there was almost 14 years of this same class warfare rhetoric from the party in power and the Coalition is only mildly more conservative; in many ways it carries on the same line. And of course the establishment of the British welfare state has been an on-going project for over 60 years. The US may a little way to go before its capital erupts in flames but if the anti-rich rhetoric continues it is inevitable that the same thing will happen in the US as has happened in Canada and the UK.

Lankford sounds prophetic; Obama sounds desperate. Harman sounds scared. There is the progression for you.

It is pitiful and tragic. We shall all pay the price for a half century of creating an entitlement mentality in young barbarians whether we were in favor of it or not.

World History Instead of Western Civ?

Further to my last post, I note with sadness but not surprise that my former university, Crandall University in Moncton, NB, has replaced its first-year Western Civilization course with a World History course. Here are my musings on that event.

What is world history anyway? I teach a Christianity and Culture course in which I teach the rise and fall of Western civilization. It is a fourth year course that builds on our first-year Western civilization courses. Teaching Western civilization in a Christian liberal arts college is a natural thing to do because the West arose as a result of the powerful flowing together of Greek philosophy, Roman law and Biblical revelation. Because these currents allowed people to discover truth, modern science was made possible in this civilization (and nowhere else on earth). Many other great and glorious things were also inspired by Christendom: classical music, natural law, English parliamentary democracy, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, free enterprise, individual liberty and the list goes on.

Modernity is both an era and a project. Central to Modernity has been the failed Enlightenment Project in which a noble, but doomed, attempt was made to preserve both science and morality without revelation. The culture of death into which late modern, Western culture has fallen and the crisis of truth which characterizes the post-Enlightenment West is stark testimony to the fact that Christianity is the soul of the West and Western civilization minus Christianity is a declining and decaying civilization rather than a dynamic and growing one. Christianity is the central narrative that makes sense out of Western civilization.

But what narrative makes sense of world history? Augustine wrote a world history in City of God, but he fashioned most of it out of salvation history. If you reject salvation history - which goes without saying in the late modern West for getting rid of Western civilization courses is one of the final steps in turning your back on the Christian West - then how do you make sense of the history of the world?

It seems to me that there are two options: (1) the modern one and (2) the postmodern one.

The modern option is to pretend that the Enlightenment is not a failure and to use a "cave man to space man" narrative to show that progress occurs by the shuffling off of religion and superstition and the embrace of science. This approach would best be described as "Scientism" the belief that science explains all and is totally sufficient for the good human life. In this narrative Richard Dawkins stands at the summit and peak of all human evolution. (Shudder!)

The modern option, however, is less intellectually compelling with every passing year. The Enlightenment has failed and morality has been reduced to emotivism - as writers as varied as C. S. Lewis, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Bentley Hart, Benedict XVI, Christian Smith, Walker Percy and Aldous Huxley agree. Nietzsche has not been answered and his disciples dominate the humanities and social sciences in the late modern university. Relativism, existentialism and the will to power are now the prevailing winds. Hitler lost the war, but the philosophy that drove him survived and flourished. Eventually, it will likely triumph.

Late modern man has lost his confidence in philosophical realism and thinks that morality cannot be derived from reality itself. It is only a matter of time before a similar loss of faith in mathematics occurs. Already Aristotelian logic is out the door. In the social sciences the idea of mathematically describable laws of nature are in question. Can science itself survive much longer?

World history in the second, postmodern option is basically nothing more than, in the words widely attributed to Henry Ford just "one damn thing after another." That is, there is no meaningful narrative that connects the dots and gives meaning to the myriad of interesting but essentially unrelated details. Nominalism applied to history is not a pretty sight, as Richard Weaver shows in his classic: Ideas Have Consequences.

World history is not the study of one particular culture with all its strengths and shortcomings. It is the study of everything. And everything, strictly speaking, cannot be studied without reference to Biblical revelation. There is no way to give world history meaning without understanding it in an Augustinian manner as the history of God's fallen creation in the process of being redeemed.

But when a culture decides to abandon its own history the chances of it embracing Biblical revelation as the key to understanding world history are slim. An Augustinian course in World History would be welcome, but I'm not holding my breath.

Progressives versus Conservatives: What is at Stake?

Last evening, I was reading Peter Hitchens' The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost Its Way, and I found his assessment of the current political landscape to be well-stated. He stresses that the concept of "Right" and "Left" in contemporary politics is, in a way, obsolete. He is not so much calling for an abandonment of these categories, however, as for their re-definition. He overstates his point for effect, but I think it is a valid point:

"Conventional Wisdom's biggest single mistake is its thought-free, obsolete idea of Left and Right. This still relies on categories and symbols which were dead long ago, and only kept from decomposing by the refrigeration of the Cold War: capital versus labour, state control versus free enterprise, NATO versus the Warsaw Pact, 'democracy versus Communism', the stuffy censoring establishment versus the vibrant, unconventional fringe. These deserted battlefields have little to do with the real divisions which now exist between idealist, optimistic 'progressives' and anti-utopian, pessimistic conservative. Capital and organised labour combine against small business to favour regulation and globalism. Trades Unions long ago abandoned shop-floor struggles, and now mainly act as lobbies for more spending on the public sector where most of their members now work. they also range themselves with multinational corporations in campaigns for globalist and regulatory policies. The NATO alliance symbolizes this survival of outward forms, despite the shrivelling away of the conflict that originally created them." [my bolding]

Hitchens is quite correct to point out that the key ideological divisions that dominate contemporary politics are not easy to define using the labels of the past. Western politics has undergone a fundamental lurch to the left, which has turned the center into the right-wing and all but destroyed the old center.

The old center was political liberalism undergirded by the influence of Christianity on the majority of the population. Political freedoms could be extended because people had some capacity for self-discipline because of their religious training. Thus, Christianity made modern, liberal democracy possible. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition of parliamentary democracy, common law and limited government (which started with the limitation of the power of the monarch), the human race reached the highest pinnacle of human freedom in the whole of human history.

Think about that for a moment. We are talking here about past accomplishment, not future aspiration, about concrete reality not Utopian dreams. Western civilization is unique. No other civilization in history ever had such prosperous and free citizens of all social classes. This is not open to debate; it is historical fact.

The role of Christianity in this cultural accomplishment was crucial. As Alexis de Tocqueville famously said of the American constitution: this constitution was made for a religious people and is suitable for no other. Religion makes democracy safe. Democracy without the moral restraints of religion, the civilizing influence of the family and the self-discipline that arises from the fear of God, is dangerous, Utopian, oppressive to minorities and destructive of order.

You can have secularism or you can have democracy; you can seek both but you will lose one or the other eventually.

It is ironic that the most radical, forward-thinking, optimistic people in the world - political liberals - are now considered to be conservatives. And it is ironic that people like Peter Hitchens can casually label us who are conservatives as "pessimistic." It is ironic because we are actually extremely pessimistic about human perfectibility while simultaneously extremely hopeful about human possibilities because we take seriously both man's glory as a creature made in the image of God and also his fatal flaw as a creature fallen into sin. If this realism seems like pessimism it is only so in comparison to the naive, unrealistic, one-sided optimism of Utopian progressivism.

Progressivism is more than Marxism, although Marx and Rousseau are the main sources of progressive ideas. Progressivism is an umbrella movement that includes many streams and variations on a theme. From Fabian socialism to Communism to Dewey's pragmatism and the Social Gospel, all forms of progressivism have one thing in common: they reject the Christian doctrine of original sin. So the argument over whether Obama is a socialist or not is quite irrelevant. We know he is a Progressive and that is all that matters.

Sometimes they see man as an angel; other times they see him as an animal. One moment they revel in the thought of social engineering to create Utopia and the next moment they engage in eugenic methods by which they label some humans as sub-humans. They are perpetually extremists as they swing wildly back and forth in their estimation of the value of human beings.

The Christian doctrine of original sin, which presupposes the creation of humans as good and as in the image of God, allows for a balanced view of human beings that sees them as good, but fallen, creatures and as capable of great good, yet in need of redemption. This kind of balanced view of human potential was the basis of Western civilization and the denial of the Christian doctrine of original sin by Rousseau, Marx, Dewey, Nietzsche, and so on, will bring about the destruction of the West.

Progressivism is not about progress, but about regress. It regresses back before Christianity to a worldview that has no place for sin, redemption, grace and God. It could be said to be "half of Christianity," in that it is a doctrine of heaven without a doctrine of hell or judgment. It is a doctrine of redemption without a Redeemer. It is a doctrine of man which fails to take into account the fact that man is a sinner.

What is at stake in the battle between Progressivism and Conservatism? Merely the preservation or destruction of our civilization. In the name of Utopian dreams, Progressives are busy undermining the foundations of civilization including Christianity, the family and traditional sexual morality. In the name of "Progress" they would undo the basis of freedom and justice.

Only conservatives think that limited government the rule of law, individual liberty, free enterprise, traditional morality, the family and free speech are worth conserving. Let us be honest: any form of "Progressivism" that sets its face against these beautiful and good things will not lead to progress but to the abyss.

Geert Wilders Speech in Rome: Facing the Potential Fall of the West Without Giving Up Hope

Andrew G. Bostom at American Thinker Blog reports on a speech given yesterday by Geert Wilders entitled: "The Failure of Multiculturalism and How to Turn the Tide." Bostom writes:

Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders made a seminal address yesterday evening (March 25, 2011) at the Annual Lecture of the Magna Carta Foundation in Rome, Italy.

As is his wont, Wilders presentation moved far beyond the timorous platitudes about the most obvious (and dangerous) failures of cultural relativism belatedly echoed by Western European leaders Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy, and David Cameron. Wilders demands that the West acknowledge the jihad-both cultural and military-being waged against it openly and incessantly by institutional Islam, Muslim nations, and the global umma. The Ducth Parlaimentarian concludes his eloquent and informative speech by insisting that four concrete measures must be taken immediately, quoting Ronald Reagan, so we can "...act today to preserve tomorrow."

When was the last time you actually heard somebody defending Western civilization as the highest and most advanced civilizaton in history? Yet, as a matter of objective fact, it is. We are throwing away a glorious heritage for a mess of multicultural pottage. Here is the beginning of the speech:

Signore e signori, ladies and gentlemen, dear friendsof the Magna Carta Foundation, molte grazie. Thank you forinviting me to Rome. It is great to be here in this beautiful city which for manycenturies was the capital and the centre of Europe’s Judeo-Christian culture.

Together with Jerusalem and Athens, Rome is the cradle of our Western civilization – the most advanced and superior civilization the world has ever known.

As Westerners, we share the same Judeo-Christian culture. I am from the Netherlands and you are from Italy. Our national cultures are branches of the same tree. We do not belong to multiple cultures, but to different branches of one single culture. This is why when we come to Rome, we all come home in a sense. We belong here, as we also belong in Athens and in Jerusalem.

It is important that we know where our roots are. If we lose them we become deracinated. We become men and women without a culture.

I am here today to talk about multiculturalism. This term has a number of different meanings. I use the term to refer to a specific political ideology. It advocates that all cultures are equal. If they are equal it follows that the state is not allowed to promote any specific cultural values as central and dominant. In other words: multiculturalism holds that the state should not promote a leitkultur, which immigrants have to accept if they want to live in our midst.

It is this ideology of cultural relativism which the German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently referred to when she said that multiculturalism has proved “an absolute failure.”

My friends, I dare say that we have known this all along. Indeed, the premise of the multiculturalist ideology is wrong. Cultures are not equal. They are different, because their roots are different. That is why the multiculturalists try to destroy our roots.

He compares the situation in Europe today to the fifth century when Rome fell to the Germanic barbarian invaders:

In the 5^th century, the Roman Empire fell to the Germanic Barbarians. There is no doubt that the Roman civilization was far superior to that of the Barbarians. And yet, Rome fell. Rome fell because it had suffered a loss of belief in its own civilization. It had lost the will to stand up and fight for survival.

Rome did not fall overnight. Rome fell gradually. The Romans scarcely noticed what was happening. They did not perceive the immigration of the Barbarians as a threat until it was too late. For decades, Germanic Barbarians, attracted by the prosperity of the Empire, had been crossing the border.

At first, the attraction of the Empire on newcomers could be seen as a sign of the cultural, political and economic superiority of Rome. People came to find a better life which their own culture could not provide. But then, on December 31^st in the year 406, the Rhine froze and tens of thousands of Germanic Barbarians, crossed the river, flooded the Empire and went on a rampage, destroying every city they passed. In 410, Rome was sacked.

The fall of Rome was a traumatic experience. Numerous books have been written about the cataclysmal event and Europeans were warned not to make the same mistake again. In 1899, in his book ‘The River War,’ Winston Churchill warned that Islam is threatening Europe in the same way as the Barbarians once threatened Rome. “Mohammedanism,” Churchill wrote – I quote – “is a militant and proselytizing faith. No stronger retrograde force exists in the World. […] The civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.” End of quote.

Churchill is right. However, if Europe falls, it will fall because, like ancient Rome, it no longer believes in the superiority of its own civilization. It will fall because it foolishly believes that all cultures are equal and that, consequently, there is no reason why we should fight for our own culture in order to preserve it.

This failure to defend our own culture has turned immigration into the most dangerous threat that can be used against the West. Multiculturalism has made us so tolerant that we tolerate the intolerant.

Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: Our opponents are keenly aware of our weakness. They realize that the pattern which led to the fall of Rome, is at play today in the West. They are keenly aware of the importance of Rome as a symbol of the West. Over and over again they hint at the fall of Rome. Rome is constantly on their minds.

But he argues that the threat today is much worse than in the fifth century. Whereas the barbarians envied and assimilated to the culture of Rome, Islam seeks to destroy and supplant it.

Having destroyed Rome, the Germanic tribes eventually tried to rebuild it. In 800, the Frankish leader Charlemagne had himself crowned Roman Emperor. Three hundred years later, the Franks and the other Europeans would go on the Crusades in defence of their Christian culture. The Crusades were as Oriana Fallaci wrote – I quote – a “counter-offensive designed to stem Islamic expansionism in Europe.” Rome had fallen, but like a phoenix it had risen again.

Contrary to the Barbarians which confronted Rome, the followers of Muhammad are driven by an ideology which they want to impose on us.

Islam is a totalitarian ideology. Islamic Shariah law supervises every detail of life. Islam is not compatible with our Western way of life. Islam is a threat to our values. Respect for people who think otherwise, the equality of men and women, the equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals, respect for Christians, Jews, unbelievers and apostates, the separation of church and state, freedom of speech, they are all under pressure because of islamization.

Europe is islamizing at a rapid pace. Many European cities have large islamic concentrations. In some neighbourhoods, Islamic regulations are already being enforced. Women’s rights are being trampled. We are confronted with headscarves and burqa’s, polygamy, female genital mutilation, honour-killings. “In each one of our cities” says Oriana Fallaci, “there is a second city, a state within the state, a government within the government. A Muslim city, a city ruled by the Koran.” – End of quote.

Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: The multiculturalist Left is facilitating islamization. Leftist multiculturalists are cheering for every new shariah bank, for every new islamic school, for every new mosque. Multiculturalists consider Islam as being equal to our own culture. Shariah law or democracy? Islam or freedom? It doesn’t really matter to them. But it does matter to us. The entire leftist elite is guilty of practising cultural relativism. Universities, churches, trade unions, the media, politicians. They are all betraying our hard-won liberties.

He quotes Merkel, Cameron and Sarkozy, who all have recognized the failure of multiculturalism and rightly points out that they have no answers, no program, no alternative. They are caught in the trap of relativism out of which multiculturalism springs. So he offers his own program of action:

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for change. We must make haste. Time is running out. Ronald Reagan said: “We need to act today, to preserve tomorrow”. That is why I propose the following measures in order to preserve our freedom:

First, we will have to defend freedom of speech. It is the most important of our liberties. If we are free to speak, we will be able to tell people the truth and they will realize what is at stake.

Second, we will have to end cultural relativism. To the multiculturalists, we must proudly proclaim: Our Western culture is far superior to the Islamic culture. Only when we are convinced of that, we will be willing to fight for our own identity.

Third, we will have to stop Islamization. Because more Islam means less freedom. We must stop immigration from Islamic countries, we must expel criminal immigrants, we must forbid the construction of new mosques. There is enough Islam in Europe already. Immigrants must assimilate and adapt to our values: When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Fourth, we must restore the supremacy and sovereignty of the nation-state. Because we are citizens of these states, we can take pride in them. We love our nation because they are our home, because they are the legacy which our fathers bestowed on us and which we want to bestow on our children. We are not multiculturalists, we are patriots. And because we are patriots, we are willing to fight for freedom.

Let me end with a final – and a positive – remark: Though the situation is bad and multiculturalism is still predominant, we are in better shape than the Roman Empire was before its fall.

The Roman Empire was not a democracy. The Romans did not have freedom of speech. We are the free men of the West. We do not fight for an Empire, we fight for ourselves. We fight for our national republics. You fight for Italy, I fight for the Netherlands, others fight for France, Germany, Britain, Denmark or Spain. Together we stand. Together we represent the nations of Europe.

I am confident that if we can safeguard freedom of speech and democracy, our civilization will be able to survive. Europe will not fall. We, Europe’s patriots, will not allow it.

I do not know of anyone else who sees the danger to the West in such a clear way, yet does not despair but declares that there is hope for the West. Wildeers is the Churchill of the 21st century. The question is: "Will Britain follow him?" because if even Britain will turn around and take a stand, Europe could be saved.

Read it all here, at Wildeers' website.

Islam, the Caliphate and the West

Andrew McCarthy is doing great work explaining to poorly educated Westerners the history, teachings, strengths and weaknesses of Islam from a Western, Christian perspective. His National Review article "The OIC and the Caliphate" is well-worth reading.

"The Organization of the Islamic Conference is the closest thing in the modern world to a caliphate. It is composed of 57 members (56 sovereign states and the Palestinian Authority), joining voices and political heft to pursue the unitary interests of the ummah, the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. Not surprisingly, the OIC works cooperatively with the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most extensive and important Islamist organization, and one that sees itself as the vanguard of a vast, grass-roots movement — what the Brotherhood itself calls a “civilizational” movement.

Muslims are taught to think of themselves as a community, a single Muslim Nation. “I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously said of his own country in 1980, even as he consolidated his power there, even as he made Iran the point of his revolutionary spear. “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah.” Muslims were not interested in maintaining the Westphalian system of nation states. According to Khomeini, who was then regarded by East and West as Islam’s most consequential voice, any country, including his own, could be sacrificed in service of the doctrinal imperative that “Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

Because of that doctrinal imperative, the caliphate retains its powerful allure for believers. Nevertheless, though Islamists are on the march, it has somehow become fashionable to denigrate the notion that the global Islamic caliphate endures as a mainstream Islamic goal.

It was only a week ago that close to 2 million Muslims jammed Tahrir Square to celebrate the triumphant return to Egypt of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a Khomeini-esque firebrand who pulls no punches about Islam’s goal to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.” Yet, to take these threats seriously is now to be dismissed as a fringe lunatic, a Luddite too benighted to grasp that American principles reflect universally held truths — truths to which the ummah, deep down, is (so we are told) every bit as committed as we are.

The caliphate is an institution of imperial Islamic rule under sharia, Muslim law. Not content with empire, Islam anticipates global hegemony. Indeed, mainstream Islamic ideology declares that such hegemony is inevitable, holding to that belief every bit as sincerely as the End of History crowd holds to its conviction that its values are everyone’s values (and the Muslims are only slightly less willing to brook dissent). For Muslims, the failure of Allah’s creation to submit to the system He has prescribed is a blasphemy that cannot stand.

The caliphate is an ideal now, much like the competing ideal of a freedom said to be the yearning of every human heart. Unlike the latter ideal, the caliphate had, for centuries, a concrete existence. It was formally dissolved in 1924, a signal step in Kemal Atatürk’s purge of Islam from public life in Turkey. Atatürk, too, thought he had an early line on the End of History. One wonders what he’d make of Erdogan’s rising Islamist Turkey.

What really dissolved the Ottoman caliphate was not anything so contemporary as a “freedom agenda,” or a “battle for hearts and minds.” It was one of those quaint military wars, waged under the evidently outdated notion that Islamic enemies were not friends waiting to happen — that they had to be defeated, since they were not apt to be persuaded."

Read the rest here.

Islam has been conquering Christian lands ever since the 8th century (eg. North Africa, Eqypt, the Middle East, Asia Minor). Charles Martel halted Islamic advancement into Europe at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD and during the Reformation the Turks were barely repulsed from Europe. Between the Siege of Vienna in 1529 and the Battle of Vienna in 1689 the tide turned with the result that Europe was preserved from Muslim rule. Taking the Iberian Peninsula back from Muslim conquest took seven centuries and was not complete until the end of the 15th century.

The question is whether Islam as a whole, or which parts of it, still holds to the ideal of the Caliphate as an alternative to the Western ideal of liberal democracy, human rights and individual freedom. There is no doubt that many Muslims, especially those educated or living in the West, have been influenced by Western ideals and there is also no doubt that the ideals of jihad, conquest, the worldwide dominion of Allah and Islamic supremacy also live on in widespread tracts of Islam. It is not always easy for Westerners to discern which geographical, ethnic and theological distinctives characterize which Islamic groups and individuals and to what extent they fall into which camp.

One implication of this is that the study of Islamic history, culture, politics, philosophy and religion is more important today than ever. Another implication is that it is naive for Westerners to project their own ideals onto Muslims as if all right-thinking people necessarily believe as we do. This is dangerous and makes us easy targets for subversion.

But when historical ignorance is compounded by naivety and a deep, pathological hatred of all things white, male, Western and Christian, we have a recipe for disastrous civilizational defeat. Make no mistake: if Islam triumphs over the West the list of good, decent, humane, civilized and life-affirming things that will disappear is a long one.

I do not think we can be conquered from without by force, not by Islam nor by any other earthly power. But I do think we can crumble from inward rot and the multicultural, liberal fascist, atheist, materialist, secularist, feminist, socialist and cultural Marxist voices embedded deeply within our cultural institutions are symptoms of a spiritual rot at the core of our civilization.

Those who care about the survival of freedom and justice and the glories of Western culture should be more concerned about the threat from within than the threat from without.

The War Against Christianity Continues in Quebec

The culture of death marches onward in Quebec and since religion is in the way it must be eliminated. Tasha Kheiridden has this article in today's National Post.

Christmas? Hannukah? Eid al-Adha? Bah humbug. In the spirit of the holiday season, the Quebec government has announced its intention to secularize daycares:

Starting in June, publicly funded daycares that teach a particular faith to their young charges risk losing their government funding.

“All questions touching the transmission of faith – that is, teaching religion itself – do not belong within the publicly funded daycare system,” Quebec Family Minister Yolande James said in an interview on Tuesday.

In other words, he who holds the purse strings calls the shots – and the government has decided that religion will get the heave-ho-ho for the toddler set. This brings home the point that if parents expect to get state subsidies, they will have to submit to state rules. Of course, if those rules are unreasonable, they should be modified. But the point is, you never know when they will become unreasonable: governments change, and a bureaucrat’s whim can become your three-year-old’s reality. . . .

If the Quebec government cut its daycare subsidy, which hit $2 billion in 2010-2011(along with many other parts of its bloated bureaucracy), it could give all citizens a tax break, thereby making other child care options – like staying home with your child – more affordable. Alternatively, it could means-test daycare subsidies to low-income parents, as opposed to making them a universal benefit, and thereby cut down on the cost of the program to taxpayers. It could also offer income splitting to families, by which parents would save money and apply it to the child care model of their choice. But then the state might see a large swath of its toddlers singing religious Christmas carols, or painting pictures of Menorahs. Heaven forbid!

It might also see a more successful, well-adjusted generation of children. In a study published in October 2010 by the Montreal-based think tank CIRANO, researchers concluded that Quebec’s emphasis on daycare has led to worse learning outcomes:

“… More preschool children are in non-parental childcare at a younger age and the intensity of childcare has increased over the years….. the evidence presented shows that the policy has not enhanced school readiness or child early literacy skills in general, with negative significant effects on the (picture and vocabulary test)scores of children aged 5 and possibly negative for children of age 4.’’

For families, choosing care free of government subsidies, or working fewer hours so one or both parents can care for their children themselves, both mean less money for other things. Of course, it also means that their children will be raised in accordance with their parents’ values, in a setting over which they have more control, and where, apparently, they learn better. The Quebec government’s latest expression of the nanny-state is a reminder that, just like with health care, there is no “free ride”. When we relinquish choice, we all pay – and unfortunately, so do our kids.

Classical Liberalism and individual choice are dead in Quebec. The province increasingly follows the European model of utter secularism as a totalitarian ideology that seeks to eradicate religion, inculcate relativism and make the State an overbearing, interfering entity with Divine pretensions.

So much for freedom of religion - at least for Christians and Jews. There is only room for one god and one religion in a secularist society and that is the religion of State-worship. Thus the idea of the West ends in the daycares of Quebec not with a bang but with the whimper of toddlers of the state bereft of their heritage, their religion and their freedom.

The Corruption of Western Universities as a Contributing Factor in Cultural Decline

Ed West, in his Daily Telegraph blog, makes the case that British universities are a threat to world peace:

Perhaps the least surprising thing about the Stockholm suicide bomber Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly is that he went to a British university. . . .

As anyone watching the disgraceful riots last week will have picked up on, violence is not the preserve of the uneducated or poor. Indeed, throughout modern history, Left-wing student movements have shown both a willingness to commit violence to get their way and to condone violent acts by others.

Rather than terrorism being a product of poverty and despair, as we’ve always been told, statistical studies of Islamic terrorists show they are no poorer than the population at large. Islamism has very little to do with “injustice” and everything to do with alienation and isolation (80 per cent of jihadis are immigrants or the children of immigrants), a thwarted sense of entitlement, idleness, and radical anti-Western politics.

Which is why British universities are, of course, the perfect breeding ground for Islamism, combining all of those things.

Read it all here.

Today's universities, generally speaking, (with honorable exceptions here and there) are mostly bastions of entitlement, laziness, drunkenness, sexual debauchery, violence and political correctness. Much of the self-loathing of people who have no moral center or purpose in life is turned into rage against "society" and its "patriarchy," "racism" and "capitalism." To think that this is not a breeding ground for hate and violence is to delude only oneself.

Jonathan Kay, in the National Post, describes a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda written by an anti-Zionist Jew named Jenny Peto at the University of Toronto's teacher's college, OISE. He writes:

By now, many people have heard of Jenny Peto — the 29-year-old anti-Israel fanatic who managed to get a Master’s Degree at OISE for a navel-gazing essay that claimed holocaust education was a tool of the Zionist war machine. Peto’s project was so offensive that she actually was rebuked in the Ontario legislature. Even ultra-politically correct diversity maven Karen Mock thinks that Peto is out to lunch. We also know that the Peto paper is littered with unsupported claims — thanks to this fine article by Robyn Urback.

But Peto is a small fish. The bigger problem here is OISE — the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, AKA UToronto’s teacher’s college — itself. For years, I’ve been hearing tales of political correctness gone amok at OISE, including radical anti-Israeli events. But it took the Peto case to really get me probing around to see what else is going on at OISE.

Someone else who’s been doing his homework is Werner Cohn, a former UBC sociology prof now living in New York. Below, reproduced with his permission, is his analysis of the 36 internet-available master’s theses that have been conducted under the auspices of OISE’s Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education department. They read like a satire of 1990s-era political correctness.

Surely, the higher-ups at UToronto know about this sort of thing. Will the Peto scandal give them the excuse they need to clean house?

Here is a brief description of one thesis cited by Cohn:

….In this thesis I will explore this ruling using a methodological approach that engages practices of: self-reflexivity; tracing historical and political genealogies; and case study analysis…. Through an engagement with transnational and black feminist theorizing, anticolonial studies, and disability studies, I will suggest that “medical inadmissibility” is one of many regulatory mechanisms that work to fashion the Canadian nation-state as white, healthy, fit, and productive.

Here is another:

This body of work endeavours to interrogate mainstream media and popular culture [mis]representations of racialized persons, in addition to the negative impact such imageries have on identity formation processes….The ultimate goal of this project is to propel racialized students to move away from the [mis]educative effects of the media, toward beginning to define themselves on their own terms.

This is left-wing politicized propaganda and it is done at a public university supported by our tax money. There is no political balance evident: no conservative faculty or research and there is not much of real relevance to actual educational theory or practice. There is just a lot of doctrinaire cultural Marxism dressed up in impenetrable jargon that defeat understanding by anyone except other cult members.

It is time to take the universities back from the left=wingers. The hard left has burrowed deep into the faculty, while their left- of-center enablers staff the upper administration. No one is brave enough to stand up to them and academic freedom is just a cloak for enforced ideological conformity. Entire departments and so-called "disciplines" should be axed and faculty hiring practices must be taken out of the hands of the faculty until the philosophical and religious views of the faculty as a whole reflects the spectrum of Canadian society as a whole. At the moment it is skewed radically and disastrously to the left and the imbalance is killing the university as a place of science, reason and wisdom.

This is the mission field Christians must enter and occupy or else watch as our culture crumbles.

Why the Tea Party Gives Hope to a Brit and a Canadian

Here is a great post from James Delingpole of the Daily Telegraph. Here is a Brit whose feelings I resonate with as a Canadian. The United States of America is not just a country; it is the embodiment of the best of Western political ideals and the home of liberty.

As Daniel Hannan, another conservative Brit, would be quick to point out: the American Revolution was a conservative revolution in favor of ideals of English freedom which were under attack by an out of touch elite. America represents the hope we all have for Western civilization and it is no wonder that the enemies of the West hate Israel and America above all.

Delingpole writes in his post "Only the Tea Party Can Save Us Now":

Arriving back at Heathrow late on Sunday night I felt – as you do on returning to Britain these days – as if I were entering a failed state. It’s not just the Third World shabbiness which is so dispiriting. It’s the knowledge that from its surveillance cameras to its tax regime, from its (mostly) EU-inspired regulations to its whole attitude to the role of government, Britain is a country which has forgotten what it means to be free.

God how I wish I were American right now. In the US they may not have the Cairngorms, the River Wye, cream teas, University Challenge, Cotswold villages or decent curries. But they do still understand the principles of “don’t tread on me” and “live free or die.” Not all of them, obviously – otherwise a socialist like Barack Obama would never have got into power. But enough of them to understand that in the last 80 or more years – and not just in the US but throughout the Western world – government has forgotten its purpose. It has now grown so arrogant and swollen as to believe its job is to shape and improve and generally interfere with our lives. And it’s not. Government’s job is to act as our humble servant.

What’s terrifying is how few of us there are left anywhere in the supposedly free world who properly appreciate this.

Delingpole laments the degradation of the once proud British Conservative Party into a party that merely advocates socialist decline more gradually.

Rarely have I felt more despondent about the world’s future than I do right now, Britain’s especially. At least when Blair and Brown were in charge, busily ruining things, there was always the consolation that soon would come the backlash which would see a decent, small-state, conservative administration regaining power and the country’s fortunes restored. This hasn’t happened. The similarities between the Eton Grocer’s Coalition and the New Labour government he ousted are far greater than the differences. All are run by a professional political mandarin class in the interests of the professional political mandarin class.

This is not a man who loves a foreign country more than his own; it is a man who sees the best ideals of his own country no longer characterizing his own country but being preserved elsewhere. He concludes:

Sure there’s no comparison (well not that much) between Obama’s US and Stalin’s Soviet Union; Coalition Britain and Mao’s China; Julia Gillard’s Australia and Queen Ranavalona’s Madagascar; sure the war we’re currently fighting doesn’t involve mass destruction like that of World Wars I and II. But it’s precisely because the ideological struggle we’re currently engaged in is so seemingly democratic and innocuous that it is in fact so dangerous. With Hitler and Stalin it was easy: the enemy was plain in view. Today’s encroaching tyranny is an of altogether more subtle, slippery variety. It takes the form of the steady “engrenage” – ratcheting – of EU legislation; of the stealthy removal of property rights and personal liberty under the UN’s Agenda 21; of the eco-legislation created by democratically unaccountable bodies like America’s Environmental Protection Agency; of the stealthy encroachment of the Big Government into the most intimate recesses of our daily lives – not just under barely disguised socialist administrations like Obama’s even under notionally “Centre right” ones such as Cameron’s or Sarkozy’s. When the Enemy is as sly and insidious as that, it’s much much harder for the increasingly oppressed populace to rouse itself to the appropriate state of alarm and rebellion.

That’s why today I say: “Thank God for the Tea Party!” Though it has been typically misrepresented by the liberal media as a rattlers’ nest of gun-toting fruitcakes who want to ban masturbation and abortion, it is, of course, nothing of the kind. It is – whatever the increasingly redundant Moonbat may claim – a genuine grass roots movement inspired by the one great political cause truly worth fighting and dying for: the cause of liberty.

Our ancestors fought and died to preserve Western freedom against the hard totalitarianism of the fascist and communist regimes of the mid twentieth century. But now we, their decadent children, are in mortal danger of surrendering to the soft totalitarianism of the nanny state. But this is to narrowly avoid Animal Farm only to fall into Brave New World.

To my American friends I would say this on election night: you won't realize what riches you had until you suddenly realize they are gone. Don't trade liberty for security; it is not a good deal.

Marco Rubio on Judges and the Constitution

Most people do not seem to understand what is wrong with President Obama's judicial appointments, including his two Supreme Court appointments, or the problem with Supreme Court decisions like Roe v. Wade. They do not understand that modern progressivism is undermining the freedom of the people and the principles of the American Founding. The very survival of constitutional, representative democracy is at stake in the debate between those who respect the US constitution and those who invent clever myths and dreamy theories of how it can be twisted to mean anything those in power want it to mean.

When Marco Rubio speaks on any subject, it is easy to understand what he means to say. This is not because he is simplistic, but because he is clear and has principles that are coherent. Here he is explaining the role of judges in the US political system.



The issue at stake here actually is similar to the problem of biblical interpretation. In both cases a party of people who are over-impressed by modernity and its naive, superstitious faith in the power of human reason want to hang on to the founding document of our culture without letting it place limits on the Utopian aspirations of human reason. So they create ingenious theories of how to make it (the US constitution or the Bible as the case may be) say whatever the elites of today wish it to say.

In both cases those who use elementary logic and who are motivated by a healthy skepticism about the infallibility of human reason are routinely mocked as out-of-date and unsophisticated. They are told that they are not "modern" enough and that there is no going back to the past. And then they undo the great Western experiment with limited government and proceed to race back to the past totalitarian, statist forms of government which preceded the rise of the West on the world stage.

Christendom is not the Problem: Triumphalism Is

In my book, Rethinking Christ and Culture, I fell into the trap of practically (not in theory, but for all intents and purposes) equating Christendom with Triumphalism.

Triumphalism is a perversion of Christendom; it is bad politics arising from heretical doctrine.

Triumphalism means the assimilation of the State into the Church in such a way that the authority of the State is wielded by Church officials to the discrediting of the Church and the detriment of society. Triumphalism arises from the fatal relaxation of the eschatological tension between this age and the next age, the age of the Kingdom of God. Triumphalism carried far enough leads to totalitarianism.

The eschatology of the early Augustine, as is shown by Robert Markus in his magisterial Saeculum: History and Society in St. Augustine, was influenced by the Eusebianism of the age of the Theodosian settlement, which fostered Triumphalism. The dominant eschatology saw the current age as "Christian Times," an era in which biblical prophecy was being fulfilled before the very eyes of the astonished world. The conversion of Rome was seen as the beginning of the coming in history of the Kingdom of God.

As Markus shows, Augustine gradually worked himself free of this eschatology in the process of writing biblical commentaries, especially on Genesis, between roughly 395 and 410 AD. Thus, he was prepared to respond to the crisis following the sack of Rome in 410 when many pagan Roman refugees flooded into North Africa blaming the conversion of Rome to Christ for the disaster.

The eschatology of the mature Augustine emphasized that we live "between the times," that is, between the first and second comings of Christ in a kind of suspension of "salvation history." This is the period of the Church evangelizing the world in fulfillment of the Great Commission, but the Kingdom which appeared in the person of the King, Jesus Christ, remains future in terms of its fulfillment. We live in the Kingdom already, yet the Kingdom has not yet fully come. So we journey through this world as pilgrims, citizens of the city of God yet still in search of that city. One day the city of God will come to earth but this will only occur after the return of Christ.

There is thus an eschatological tension in Augustine's thought between the present age and the future age, the age of the inaugurated kingdom and the kingdom come in its fullness, between the already and the not yet. Our situation is that we live after the coming of Christ and during the reign of Christ, yet not every knee bows and not every tongue confesses at this point in history. So we pray as our Lord taught us: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

Triumphalism pulls the future kingdom back into the present and supposes falsely that the rule of God is already manifest on earth through the Church. This leads the Church to suppose falsely that it has the authority to abolish the doctrine of the separation of powers between Church and State (between Priest and King) and reunite them in one sacralized entity called the State Church, which is really Leviathan.

Triumphalism is the perennial temptation of Christendom. It has reared its ugly head numerous times in the history of the West, but it represents a deviation, a perversion, a heretical degradation of the true heritage of Christendom, which deserves to be known best not for the Triumphalistic deviation, but for the doctrine of the Two that is the true fruit of Augustinian thought.

Next: Christendom is not the Problem, Secularism Is

Solzhenitsyn on How the West has Forgotten God

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was right in his famous Harvard Commencement Address, "A World Split Apart." The West is in trouble because it has forgotten God. The speech notes a number of disturbing trends in the West that are all examples of the mis-use of the gift of freedom. Then he asks if socialism might be the answer. Unsurprisingly, the answer is no.

It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world a way to successful economic development, even though in the past years it has been strongly disturbed by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of not being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. A number of such critics turn to socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.

I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich's book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in English in the United States.

Then he asks if the West is an example to be imitated and he says no, sadly it is not.

But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

Why is the West not an example? The hint is in the preceding quote: the problem is spiritual in nature. It is also a moral problem:

Very well known representatives of your society, such as George Kennan, say: we cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism's well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria. Practical or occasional considerations of any kind will inevitably be swept away by strategy. After a certain level of the problem has been reached, legalistic thinking induces paralysis; it prevents one from seeing the size and meaning of events.

Then Solzhenitsyn turns to diagnosis. What is the source of the West's moral and spiritual weakness?

How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

The West has lost its sense of man's responsibility to God.

Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer.

Solzhenitsyn argues that humanism is incoherent and untrue and that the fundamental meaning of life is religious in nature.

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it.

Man has forgotten or rejected God. That is the root source of the materialism, humanism and naturalism that degrades and demeans mankind today. The West must turn back to God or decline, decay and eventually suffer conquest by some other civilization.