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/.
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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