While a majority of Americans practice Christianity at home, our rulers submit to a heretical secular religion. And they’ve taken pains to make sure Christians’ beliefs have zero impact on public life. You can safely call for an innocent child to spend the rest of his life behind bars, but refusing to partake of Death Cult sacraments is grounds for losing your livelihood.
This power imbalance is by design. Enlightenment thinkers made no secret that hamstringing Christianity was the whole point of Liberalism.
Liberal professions of faith always contain a bit of irony, because Liberals must enforce an ironclad set of morals while denying that there are right and wrong answers. The foundational assumption of Liberalism is that freedom is absolute. It reduces all values to preferences, and claims its only rule is that no one may impose one’s preferences on another. That maintaining such an impossible standard requires greater tyranny than any imposed by the most decadent French nobles goes unmentioned.
Most people don’t notice that Liberalism is a particular belief system with its own quirks and flaws. Even most Western Christians are so immersed in a Liberal worldview that they take its basic assumptions for granted. But this is an intellectual blind spot that non-liberalized Christians can exploit.
All species of Liberal–be they Progressives, Libertarians, or Conservatives–are so conditioned to accept unlimited freedom as a basic premise that they don’t know how to react when someone questions it. Try asking any of the three kinds of Liberal, “What good does your proposed policy serve?” Watch him sputter.
Some among the Libertarian subspecies have tried to answer that freedom itself is inherently good because the freer people are, the happier they are. Like all utopian ideologies, this one falls apart on contact with reality.
Suicide rates serve as effective shorthand for a people’s misery. If Liberals are right, and freedom produces happiness, we’d expect Russian suicide rates to climb under communism and fall after the end of the Soviet Union. Instead the exact reverse happened.
The truth is that freedoms aren’t self-necessary. Every freedom has a proper end, and the intrinsic value of its end determines the conditional worth of that freedom.
This is why every right has a reciprocal responsibility. The Framers of the US Constitution gave a nod to this reality in the Second Amendment. The freedom to own guns exists to obtain the greater good of security. This relationship inescapably implies a duty on the part of gun owners not to wreak mayhem. Only the Second Amendment states what its enumerated right is for, but using the same interpretive key, it’s not hard to see the duties implied by the others.
As Clown World slouches on and suicide rates in the US rise, we get a different picture than Liberals paint of what really makes people happy. Turns out that unbounded, undirected license isn’t the key to a thriving, fulfilled life. What people want is order–the kind of order those old Christian rules and values used to provide.
Christianity creates the conditions within which people can flourish. That’s a good indicator that Christianity is right about human nature. It’s only natural that people would hunger for a Christian order, despite the Liberal worldview they marinate in.
I’ll close with the prophetic words of Benedict XVI:
But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
A little bit of Macross, a little bit of Dune, a leavening of Gundam, and a whole lot of mecha action.
If you haven’t read it already, I strongly recommend the following essay by Urban Hannon: https://thejosias.com/2022/06/16/the-politics-of-hell/
How are you meant to trust your neighbor if you have nothing in common with him, if you cannot connect in any way? How are you meant to have a relationship with another if there is nothing to bond over? How do you feel like you belong in a society that doesn’t care if you destroy yourself? How do you put faith in institutions that do not listen to you, yet assert control over your every move and decision? How do you trust anyone that sees you as little more than a cliché or a statistic?
You can’t, and we are seeing that right now as suicide rates rise, general hostility and dehumanization goes up, and tribalism splinters into cartoon-levels of separate factions over even slightly varying views of philosophies as if Atheism+ is the end goal. None of this is sustainable, but we keep on with it regardless.
All of this is thanks to the cult of individualism, sold to you as bootstraps, standing on your own two feet, and making your own way, all things which are a distortion of a reality that was able to happen because societal trust and community existed in the first place to allow you to go off on your own and put trust that others would give you that chance to begin with. Individualism has never made anyone successful, just as community never has. It is both working together, and only when we stop worshiping one over the other will that ever change.
But, hey, if we were worshiping the right thing to begin with, we wouldn’t be here to begin with.
The error at the heart of Libertarianism is that individualism is the antithesis of collectivism. Instead, 20th century history shows us that it’s a divide-and-conquer strategy that makes atomized individuals easier to assimilate into the NPC hivemind.
As you pointed out, the real cure for collectivism is solidarity balanced with subsidiarity in a tradition shared with one’s neighbor.
This line is sublime, “As Clown World slouches on…” It describes everything perfectly. We slouch on, not knowing where, but probably into the Abyss.
I try.
Good post. I was listening to someone describe the absurdities of the US Navy’s Zumwalt program yesterday, and all I could think is, “What this whole thing needs is a King.” Slouching and stumbling through Clown World indeed. What the hell was the point of it all?