Monday, March 16, 2009

Imagine America After the Dreams of the Left Have All Come True

  • Imagine an America with its military budget reduced by 95%.
  • Imagine an America with no Republican Party, but instead with another mainstream party slightly to the left of the Democratic Party and with a socialist third party that regularly gets 20% of the popular vote.
  • Imagine an America with a government health care plan for everyone.
  • Imagine an America with no National Rifle Association, no National Religious Broadcasters Association and no Southern Baptist Convention.
  • Imagine an America with very little Christian TV and radio and only a tiny handful of Christian colleges and universities, all of which are poorly funded and/or unaccredited.
  • Imagine an America with legalized same-sex marriage and no privileging of heterosexual marriage in any way.
  • Imagine an America with abortion on demand fully paid for by the government available in every hospital.
Does this sound to you like the dreams of Sojourners, the Episcopal Church and other left-wing religious lobby groups all come true? Their rhetoric insists that these changes would make America more just, more humane and more biblical. They speak of these changes in hushed tones as "too good to be true" and sadly unlikely to come to pass because of the Religious Right, the Pope and other such obstacles to Progress.

Does this sound like Canada? Actually, it is an accurate description of Canada. I live in Canada, which is to say that I live in what the US left thinks of as the Kingdom of God. But I have no illusions about this being the Kingdom of God, just as the citizens of Moscow knew that the USSR was not the socialist utopia beloved in the imaginations of Western leftist intellectuals. I know that Canada is a lonely, materialistic and cynical society. We still have poverty. We still have injustice. We still have a population that knows not God. Material deprivation with religious faith is a much more human way to live that material abundance with no religous faith; Western leftist intellecutuals simply do not understand this basic fact of life; it they did they would care about things they don't care about now.

Be careful what you wish for America; you just might get it.

My problem with left-wing Christians is not that they are too ambitious and have plans that are too big. It is that their vision is too small and too obviously derived from the empty liberal individualism of the non-Christian society around them. It is not biblical enough, not humanist enough, not radical enough and, frankly, not worth getting worked up over, i.e. not that important.

The United States of America is a diverse, dynamic and lively country, which is sinking into the culture of death but is not quite there yet. It is the last place in the Western world where a significant minority of Christians still oppose abortion, the sexual revolution and other deadly manifestations of consumerism. The dreams of the Left, if acheived, will only take America down into the degradations of the culture of death. America today is like Gondor, still holding out but weak in her leadership and judged to be ripe for conquest. America after the dreams of the Left have come true will be what Gondor would have been had the quest to destroy the ring failed.

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