Blood Up to the Horses' Bridles
Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, June 18, 2010
So what do I mean by mere Christendom exactly?
I mean a public and formal recognition of the authority of Jesus Christ that repudiates the principles of secularism, and which avoids hard sectarianism and easy latitudinarianism both. Easier said than done, but there it is. That is what we have to do, and we have to do it because secularism has run its course, and does not have the wherewithal to resist the demands of radical Islam.
It is possible to argue for this without supporting an "established church," which -- in the form of tax revenues -- I do not support. But in order for this to happen at all, the Church must be established, in the sense that the magistrate has the responsibility to recognize her, convene synods and councils to seek her council, and to listen to her. The magistrate himself has the responsibility, as a public figure, in the discharge of his office, to believe in Jesus, Lord of heaven and earth.
How this could possibly be done is quite tricky, but again, there it is. Different nations would receive "baptism" differently, but in our political tradition it would be by means of something like referencing the truths of the Apostles' Creed in the Constitution. That would make me happy, for starters. In short, I am arguing for a Christian America. I am not arguing for an America that is nominally Christian. I am arguing for this because Jesus rose from the dead, and this trumps any briefs that the ACLU might be able to file.
We have been so well catechized by our secularist masters that the mere assertion of this causes us to start freaking out, anticipating a regime of Reformed ayatollahs, ready to chop off infidel heads at the slightest provocation. Let us leave aside for a moment the fact that this is exactly the kind of rule we will get if we don't discover something with enough backbone to withstand radical Islam. Leaving that aside, we still have to answer the worries caused by the secularist catechism.
They have told us, ad nauseam, that our people were racked with bloody religious strife, back in the times of the 30 Years War, and when we had exhausted ourselves fighting over arcane religious dogmas, the secular state finally arose, and delivered us all from this kind of folly forever. These are the gods who brought you out of the land of Egypt. Yay.
The problem with this take is that it is simply not true. That fighting was caused by rise of the secular state, and was not in any meaningful sense a religious war. If it really had been religious strife, then what are we to make of the Catholic/Protestant alliances in it, and in the fact of Catholics fighting Catholics?
This is not to say that religous conflict is an impossibility -- people are people, sinners are sinners, and one of the things we do is fight. But the notion that secularism has any virtue in it capable of stopping our bloodletting is beyond ludicrous. Consider the twentieth century, the century of secularism, the century of blood. If we didn't know better, we might say that the 20th century was straight out of the book of Revelation, with blood up to the horses' bridles.
Here is a thought experiment for you. Take a couple of princes from 17th century, one Catholic and one Protestant, and both of them experienced soldiers. Show them, in a vision, the battle of the Somme, the bombing of Dresden, the battle of Midway, the Great Leap Forward, the gulags of communism, and the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. These men would be, in turns, appalled, thrilled, horrified, and appalled some more. But they wouldn't laugh at you until you mentioned that all this was a small price to pay for the deliverance from blood that secularism was providing.
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