Out of the Ashes

Merry Christian Warriors

A timely manifesto for our age has just come off the press.  Written by Anthony Esolen, it is entitled Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture [Washington DC: Regnery Publishing/Salem Media Group, 2017.]  It is unfortunate that the sub-title refers to rebuilding American culture; it makes the book appear parochial.  In fact, it is not.  Maybe the publishers can come out with a more universal sub-title such as Rebuilding Christendom in editions published for the non-US market.

In any event, this book is worth a careful read.  It calls for Christians in all their associations (family, schools, businesses, communities, and churches) to commence rebuilding Christian civilization amidst the growing piles of rubble that litter our landscapes.  We are living in a time when Unbelief is moving rapidly to integrate into the void.  The Death Star nature of neo-paganism is destroying pretty much everything it comes into contact with.   It is time to come down off our own local ash heaps, and begin rebuilding God's Kingdom--as He has commanded.

First a Grand Caution.  Esolen is not interested in starting an organization, a movement, a pressure group, a programme, or any "some such".  The Kingdom of God cannot be built by human programmatics.  The United States has seen its fair share of superficial programmes or organisations--all of which have come and gone--and are now largely irrelevant.  We are thinking of "movements" like The Navigators, Campus Crusade for Christ, the Charismatic movement, Gerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, and so forth.  All of these promised much, but over and over again were too simplistic, too truncated.

Rather, we are thinking of a true bottom-up Reformation which cannot be structured and organised from the top down.  The participation of every Christian in such labours is fundamental to the faith: it is the Great Commission in action.

Esolen gives us a couple of examples of the root-and-branch Reformation which is required.  Firstly, we must see Unbelief and its poisonous fruits as they really are.  Here is his description of the horrors of abortion--which in our day is all the more diabolical because it has become a commercial transaction.

At the 2016 national convention of a major political party, the crowd cheered wildly when a woman stood before them and bosted that she had snuffed out the life of her child in the womb.  Avarice, you have met Lust already.  Now meet Murder. . . .

It is intellectually and spiritually incoherent to believe in the innocent play of children when you are willing to sacrifice them upon the alter of your ambition, your avarice, your lusts, or your convenience.  You cannot suppress the reality of the child without amputating your humanity and searing the wound with bitumen and pitch.

The ancient Carthaginians used to make little babies "pass through the fire to Moloch," as the Scriptures say.  Some historians used to accuse the Carthaginians' perennial enemies, the Romans of fabricating the charges, but they can do so no more.  We have uncovered a great necropolis near Carthage filled with ones, the little bones of babies.  The Carthaginians were not an especially bloodthirsty people.  They were businessmen: Chesterton imagines them as Victorian bankers in black frock coats and top hats.  That is the point.  The Carthaginians served up their children to Moloch because they believed that the fertility god was economic in the most exacting sense: if you want bountiful harvests, you had better give up some fo the products of your own fertility.  It was an exchange; it was what went on at the Wall Street of Carthage.  If you were rich, you could buy the baby of a poor woman and claim the sacrifice as your own.

We do the same.  We kill children for the sake of a richer paycheck, a nicer house, a nifty vacation to Cancun, a college degree, admission to the bar; or to avert having to stretch the paycheck, to sell the second car, to forgo the vacation, to drop out of college, or, as a feminist writing once put it, shuddering in disgust, to buy extra-large jars of mayonnaise at Costco.  . . . Have we forgotten what life is for?  [Esolen, op cit., p. 165,6.]

We will give one more taste of Esolen's book in the attempt to persuade you to secure a copy, read it, and pass it around.  The first chapter is entitled, "Giving Things Their Proper Names: The Restoration of Truth-Telling,"   in which he argues that virtually the entire edifice of Unbelieving culture is now given over to lying.

It isn't just the sheer multitude of lies, or their weight, like a mudslide rumbling down the side of a two-mile-high volcano.  It is that we really do not expect people to do anything but lie.  As I write these words, Hillary Clinton, probably the most vulgar, insecure, vindictive, and malevolent human being ever to be nominated by a major party for the presidency, seems to have a better than even chance of winning the office.  That is despite a long career of lying in the most outrageous and the pettiest of ways. Perhaps her most stunningly inhuman lie came--for she has been lying for so long, it is hard to attribute conscious agency to her--came, I say, on the morning after the murders of American diplomats in Benghazi, when she gave the mother of one of the murdered soldiers a straight liik ans assured her that  a certain insignificant filmmaker in California, who she knew had nothing at all to do with the attack on the consulate, would be brought to justice.  How you do that to someone who has just lost a child, I do not know.

Her mendacity is not really in dispute.  It isn't just the people who oppose her who say she lies.  Her supporters know it well, too, and don't care, because they want the things that her lies are meant to secure for them.  She is their liar.  [Ibid., p.18.]

It's time to stop lamenting the ash heaps on every side.  It's time to stop sitting in the ashes, using potsherds to scrape away pus from the suppurating sores.   It's time to come off the ash heaps and start rebuilding.  Think of Theoden coming out of Meduseld into the light of day.  It is the duty of every Christian, every Christian family, school, church, and association.  We must build root and branch.  From the bottom up.  No more lipstick on the pig, to use President Obama's ill-meant analogy.

Esolen's book will help us recover the Spirit of the merry Christian warrior, and provide many ideas about what needs be done.