So secular have we become that in about ten years, nearly half of those who used to attend church, temple, or synagogue, have found other gods. In Europe’s march away from an Almighty over the past hundred years, Americans have somehow not noticed what such “progress” has gained for them.
All of this must warm the hearts of Progressive strategists as they work to make the state a better god than the Eternal One, a god that bestows favors, monies, free stuff, and rights to bully others while taking away our natural law liberties.
Once, we rallied ‘round a flag to set men free, the song said, as we “builded Him an altar in a thousand dews and damps.” Faith and freedom go hand in hand, our Founders—and all of us used to understand—but what ‘ol time religion would we seek today?
We cannot cling to one in which slavery and violence are seen as blessed by God, and nearly all of us shun a belief set claiming a right to slaughter those considered infidels. Surely, we can allow no religion to be a klaxon for racial supremacy. It’s discomfiting to admit, however, that bigotry, intolerance, and ignorance seem to have travelled well from those historic generations to our own, and in some quarters, they still infect everyday life.
On the other hand, that ol’ time religion had something we desperately need today—a notion of boundaries, of lines we oughtn’t cross. Some needed to be challenged, of course, and we survived to right ourselves, struggling always for greater civilization. Today, however, Progressives push us to live as a nation without borders, without social boundaries of any kind, which is to say we would become no nation at all. The present nation-rending discord should convince us a society with limitless freedoms is little different than anarchy.
Before the Ten Commandments, the world had little codified order. There was the fabled Code of Hammurabi, but earlier attempts were ad hoc kingly rules having little to do with a moral order. What Moses presented to the Jews was a set of rules—several hundred, actually—that allowed the people to exist in some semblance of moral harmony. Yet, while Moses was on Sinai, the people fell to Mammon, the false god.
Mammon could not provide what the Commandments did, the bedrock foundation for western civilization’s common and black-letter law. Over the centuries, we have been attempting to civilize ourselves—ever so slowly—with the Commandments as our compass. Though we have often been less than noble in our quest, can anyone imagine society without, “Thou shalt not kill”? Can we think of ourselves without another commandment, the one to love thy neighbor?
Some want to do more than imagine it. Over the past, say, seventy-five years, there’s been a slow, steady erosion of our foundational norms as Progressives succeed in moving us closer to the abyss, an anything-goes void where their form of fascism will fill the vacuum. President Trump was not incorrect when he said the next icons to fall would be Jefferson, then Washington. Eventually, Progressives will get to Lincoln, after the Alt-State—the media, academia, Hollywood—indicts him for his more inelegant statements about race. What will happen to “In God We Trust” on our currency? To, “So help me, God,” in our courthouses?
Yet, Alt-State Progressives will never attack Margaret Sanger for her truly racist “Negro Project” in the 1930s, or for her Klan speech(es) in the 1920s. Will they ever censure Wilson and FDR for their racist inclinations? Will they vilify the Clintons for having certified DOMA, until it was inexpedient to do so? Will they disown an Obama who incited more racial discord than David Duke could ever have done? Will they condemn pronouncements of white-hatred from self-appointed spokespersons of other races? Those would be inconvenient truths, but the most inconvenient truth of all is this: Progressive thought-leaders thrive on discord and do whatever they can to foment it.
Just as some argue Obamian excesses gave the pendulum it’s counter-swing to Trump, the Berkeley-Middlebury-Academic fascistic excesses helped pop the pimple of white supremacy. Today’s Mammons of endless entertainment, mind-numbing political nastiness, fake news and fake history, of rampant secularism, indulgent excess, electronic gods and goddesses, all ensure our careen to oblivion will be one we will not notice—until it’s too late.
We are better with boundaries—and yes, borders—which lay bare hypocrites who pretend to justice while abominations like third-term abortion, Benghazi, Sanctuary Cities, and other official lawlessness are excused in the swamp of governance. If only we could live in a time where people do not inflict their aberrations on the populace, where daily work is an expectation rather than an exception.
The alternative is the real Ol’ Time Religion—that faith in freedom from a loving, but unforgetting Almighty God who wants us to become the most civilized people an ordered liberty allows, where we live free of racial and religious discord, where the commandments anchor us in a truly just society.
What’s at stake is our still fledgling struggle toward true civilization. The alternative is a desperate reach toward a “New & Improved” fascism against which revolt is inevitable. In this one nation under God, we have been nurtured to build that City on a Hill, and one can only hope the Almighty hasn’t decided the better alternative is, “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”