How Did It Come to This?

God Will Not Be Mocked

The West did not become pagan overnight.  Nor did it become militantly anti-Christian since Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.  These changes have been coming over three hundred years.  Christians and churches have been caught like a frog in the pot.

Many have blithely gone along thinking all was hunky dory.  But suddenly they face hostile rules, workplaces, regulations, law courts, and general public opprobrium--apparently out of nowhere--and they are confused, left staggering.  It as if they had been walking peacefully along the sidewalk, only to have someone come up behind them and smash them to the ground with a "king hit".  Where did that come from?

But in reality these changes, whilst now producing suppurating, rotten fruit, have been long in the generation and nurture.  One of the earliest battlegrounds was education.  Prior to what we call the Modern Period, education was largely the care and concern of Christians and churches.  But following the pagan "Enlightenment" and the French Revolution, education was wrested away from Christendom, and progressively placed firmly in the hands of statists.

The French and Italian branches of the liberal tradition that stems from the French Revolution treated religion as an enemy.  The German, British, and Scandinavian branch treated it as a competitor.  Later, liberals in most places gave up liberal ideas for some amalgam of Marxism and Freudianism, firmly embedded in statism.  The pure version of these doctrines, in addition to the late-nineteenth-century vitalism that merged with other elements to form fascism, have taken European souls from Christianity and Judaism.
 Indeed, all these doctrines have won converts within the walls of the churches themselves.  This unequal struggle for the souls and habits of Europeans has taken place over education, abortion, euthanasia, and the treatment of political enemies, as well as over the very place of religion in public life.  [Angelo Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p.183.]

In France's Third Republic at the end of the nineteenth century, France introduced a comprehensive secular state-run education system which was deliberately orientated to free young people from "superstition".  This model spread rapidly throughout Europe and the United Kingdom.  It was also adopted enthusiastically by some British colonies, such as New Zealand.  A secular state-run education system was hailed everywhere as an offensive weapon against religion (aka, Christianity).

Now this fruit is ripening fast.  All throughout the West we see the State pushing Jesus Christ and Christians out of public life, into private spheres only.  By "private" space is meant the home (for the moment), the six inches between one's ears, and the church building on Sundays.  But relentlessly even these final refuges are under attack.  In Germany, home schooling remains illegal--a law promulgated by the Nazis, but deliberately left on the statute books, doubtless because it was consistent with the secularist Bismark's Kulturkampf, let alone Nazi paganism.  Christian families in that country have had their children removed for the horrendous crime of homeschooling.  Similar gross injustices have been perpetrated in Norway.

Christian mores, law, standards, and morality are also under attack as being a violation of human rights.  To teach or write or proclaim such things risk being indicted as a hate crime.  Columnist and author, Mark Steyn, for example, has borne the brunt of persecution in Canada for thought crimes.  He apparently has violated the human rights of others.  To wear a cross to work as a necklace is a breach of (others) human rights.  And so it rolls.

This is fruit which has been centuries in the making.  But the weeds which bear the noisome flowers are noxious and thoroughly poisonous.

European tourists gaze at cathedrals as uncomprehendingly as they do at the pyramids, for they are equally products of alien civilisation.  In the universities, in government service, and in the prestige press, biblical religion is either nonexistent for is treated as a problematic vestige.  In its place, European governments promote a thin combination of self-worship (the very word "soul" has been replaced by the word "self") and earth worship.  [Ibid.]

The secular paganism now dominant in the West has laws and commandments, reflecting its religious beliefs.

The new religion's commandments range from the serious to the purely fashionable ("Thou shalt not eat fat, which is bad for you and the environment, nor smoke tobacco")  The serious ones begin with what can be called the First Commandment: "Thou shalt have no truck with the God of the Bible, lest he outshine thee."  Its corollary, however, is that the state outshines each of us."Hence "Thou shalt obey the state--the source of all truth, prosperity, and status."  Then follow the practical commandments: "Thy children belong in day care, thy parents in nursing homes." "Thou shalt abort", or at least speak of abortions as the ultimate act of liberation and regard denigration of abortion as heinous.  Having paid taxes, "Thou shalt struggle with all they might to get more from and through the government than thou hast paid."  Further: "Thou shalt copulate at will, counting this as thy great freedom"; "Thou shalt keep guard over they neighbor for any sign of evasion of regulations and promptly report the same."  Ultimately, "If ever thou dost doubt the authority for these commandments, remember thou that it flows somehow from our Mother Earth, our fragile planet, through Science."  [Ibid.]

These are the idiotic realities we now live with as normal.   And what of the future?  What is the eschatology of the West's secular establishment?  Where is it all going to lead?  Reading the list of commandments above now promulgated throughout the West, it does not require a glossolalic prophet to tell us what is coming down the pike.

The question is simply put: Is European secular religion willing and able to defend itself against invasion--whether that invasion comes from military attack from an external enemy, or migrating barbarian hordes?  The answer is clearly no.  As Codevilla concludes:

In a nutshell, Europe's official religion has not produced men who even think about defending themselves militarily.  For more than a century, the United States of America has provided Europe with military defense.  Had it not done so, European regimes would have been swept away.  [Ibid. p. 186.]

To which we add, since the United States is now relentlessly pursuing the same official religion, both Europe and the US will be inevitably swept away.   God will not tolerate mockery, nor those who exploit His longsuffering patience for rebellious opportunity.  Great has been, and is, our wickedness.