Evangelical
Protestants are mighty pleased over the ascension of Rep. Mike Johnson to the
Speaker’s chair in the US House. A
taste:
Family Research
Council President Tony Perkins, a conservative Christian activist, took to X to
express his support for Johnson's election. “Mike has been a friend for a long
time, and I believe God has answered our prayers with his election,” Perkins tweeted
shortly after Johnson was elected House speaker. “Mike will be the America
First Speaker we need and will lead with spiritual insight and political
courage. Join me in giving thanks to God and covering our new Speaker in
prayer.”
But MAGA
Mike won’t be able to ‘save America’ from his new perch in Congress. For the America they are trying to save was
doomed from the beginning. Any people
that places the freedom of the individual as the cornerstone of their societal
foundation is doomed to failure, as the centrifugal forces such a principle
unleashes tear apart all meaningful ties between people and generations.
Indeed, most
of US history is nothing more than the continued attempts to keep the
inevitable splintering from occurring – the unlawful writing of a new
constitution in 1787, the violent suppression of Shay’s Rebellion, the Sedition
Act of 1798, the several compromises over slavery, Lincoln’s illegal invasion
of the South, the immoral actions involved in the Radical Reconstruction of the
South, the federal government’s waging ‘wars of righteousness’ against other
countries (beginning with the Spanish-American War and continuing right up to
today with the Ukraine war), the murder of dissenting factions (Waco, Ruby
Ridge), the imprisonment of political protestors (January 6th), the
censorship of narratives the Establishment doesn’t like (covid, climate change,
etc.), corporations and governments forcing folks to accept wokeness, etc.,
etc.
The MAGA
Protestants believe that a renewed fidelity to constitutional principles,
especially what they call religious liberty or freedom of conscience, will
solve all ills. But
it won’t:
Despite the manifest illiberalism of the
dissenters, the old Tories intuited that subordinating religion to private
conviction after the dissenter fashion, and thereby relegating it from the
public form of the state to the subjective sentiments of the private
conscience, would lead to the kind of relativism which would fragment society
into a crowd of atomic strangers, as we have witnessed under the global regime
of liberalism. This is a point that was well argued by St. John Henry Newman in
his “Biglietto Speech,” delivered in 1879 on becoming a cardinal of the
Catholic Church, wherein he offered an apologia for the English conception of
establishmentarian Christianity, and condemned the Protestant dissenter
tradition as the true enemy of Christendom. Liberalism and revolution in
religion, Newman argued, was inherently bound up with liberalism and revolution
in politics.
Some Roman
Catholics offer better
insights than the MAGA Protestants:
. . . These duties towards God oblige, towards
the divine Majesty, not only each one of the citizens but also the civil
authority, which, in its public acts, incarnates civil society. God is indeed
the author of civil society and the source of all the goods which flow down
through it to its members. Civil society must therefore honor and serve God. As
for the manner of serving God, this can be no other, in the present economy,
than that which He Himself has determined, as obligatory, in the true Church of
Christ; and this not only in the person of the citizens, but equally in that of
the Authorities who represent civil society [From Vatican II—W.G.].
. . . The problem is not that we have an elite
oligarchy imposing its will on the majority; the problem is that human will
itself has been established and institutionalized as the ultimate authority,
both individually and politically. It is this classical liberalism, now
logically morphed into global totalitarianism—for both are grounded in nothing
but the human will detached from any publicly recognized, transcendent moral
and spiritual authority—that has invited the demons that now rule us through
their human proxies.
We
will never be able to exorcise these demons by attempting to replace them with
‘medical freedom,’ ‘individual sovereignty,’ or ‘the will of the people.’ These
are counterfeit replacements for a freedom based upon the truth about human
persons with immortal souls teleologically ordered to the natural and
supernatural good, the sovereignty of the family, the Church, and all the
natural communities that organically and corporately embody the common good and
the will of God as known through the Logos, the Tao, the Natural Law. Now, I am
a proponent of the natural, God-given freedoms and rights that legitimately
authorize the use of political, coercive power to secure and protect them. But
these freedoms and rights, properly understood as being grounded in natural and
supernatural reality and interpreted definitively and authoritatively only by
the Catholic Church, are not the same as the ‘American freedoms’ granted to us,
ostensibly, by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
Though
rhetorically our rights come from ‘Nature and Nature’s God,’ there is no
actual, historical religious tradition or institution to give determinate
meaning and theological authority to such a claim, only unreal, ahistorical,
abstract counterfeit of the actual tradition of Catholic Church. As D.C.
Schindler has demonstrated, the “god” of the Declaration is not the Christian one, but
an Enlightenment, deist, rationalist (and I would add, Freemasonic) substitute
for the actual God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of Jesus Christ. Thus, it
has only as much authority as it has rhetorical and political power. It was
quite easy for later generations of rulers to completely ignore and even reject
this artificial civil theology when it was no longer persuasive, and to replace
it with progressivism, secularism, and now Wokeism. Because there was no
universally recognized transcendent moral and spiritual authority in the
American Founding other than the Constitution and “We the People” (which meant,
in practice, the will of those empowered to represent the people—when we
actually still had representative government—and now the will of psychopathic
and Luciferian elites at war with the entire human race), American power, both
domestically and abroad, is authorized by nothing but itself.
But the
Roman Catholic system is no less susceptible to the evils of individualism than
Protestantism (who inherited that mindset precisely from Roman Catholicism), as
the Papacy itself is nothing more than the rebellion of an individual bishop
against the Orthodox Church the Lord Jesus Himself established upon the faith
of His Holy Apostles. This leads to some
truly
astounding distortions in Church life:
. . .
The rest is
at https://orthodoxreflections.com/america-isnt-dying-its-already-dead/.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!