At the moment it is undeniably true that Donald Trump is the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination for President. Though portrayed as anti-establishment, Trump has throughout his life supported the elitist faction’s agenda in every area of policy. Reason and common sense support the assumption that the supposedly contrary stances he has suddenly taken on the issue of illegal immigration are nothing but campaign rhetoric. He’s running a con, aimed at exploiting the angry frustration stoked by bipartisan betrayals of the sovereignty, security and economic interests of the American people. That anger has been brought to fever pitch by Obama’s open importation of Islamic Jihadists into America’s hinterland, preparing the way for terrorist events that will justify the abridgment of constitutional liberty. That abridgment will mark the permanent consolidation of elitist faction tyranny, already well under way.
In the 19th century Alexis de Tocqueville accurately foresaw the impact of the egalitarian moral ethos Christianity empowered. It did so especially in the countries in Europe and North America, where it prevailed, for a time, against ancient paganism and the modern rejection of all forms of Divine authority. He saw it producing a rising tide of democracy, overthrowing the oligarchic forms of government that had prevailed in human affairs since time immemorial. As the 20th Century moved into the full light of day, the United States became, and until recently remained, the leading edge of that democratic surge.
But as the 21st century moved from advent into dawn, all that began to change. The fall of the Twin Towers marked the dramatic opening of the final crisis of America’s apparently successful experiment in self-moderating democratic government. Whether from opportunism or design, it offered the ideal pretext for the adverse tide of oligarchic ambition to begin offensive operations intended to bring that experiment crashing down.
Remember, the individual freedom that liberty encouraged unleashed the genius of modern empirical science, producing technological fruits beyond the expectations of its progenitors, though not beyond their fond ambitions. Those fruits generated enormous wealth. The libertarian economic environment has now allowed that wealth to concentrate in the hands of an ambitious few.
The technological “miracles” of modern empirical science lent enormous authority to the views and dispositions of the faction they comprised, which they used to challenge, in every respect, the predominance of the Christian understanding. In the course of the twentieth century every pivotal concept of that understanding was assaulted. Guilt and shame were cast into perdition. The soul was reduced to the shadowy penumbra of underlying material forces. Even the sense of self-identity cited as the distinguishing hallmark of being human dissolved, as it were, into a meaningless stream of material events, with no intrinsic worth, no order except what appeared in consciousness after the fact.
However, this denial of the significance of human beings was itself a side-effect of the real objective, which was to deny the significance of being itself, except as the register of the forces whose interactions produced, by rules no more than probable, the only semblance of order (or is that “only the semblance of order”) in the universe of human experience. Thus being was banished in the name of “existence.” The latter became the sine qua non of “reality,” even for those who still purported to think “philosophically” and ponder the significance of being itself. In the name of existence, human being became “being there,” though with what import God only knows, once what is there has been denied its self-sufficient basis in being itself as such.
But all the pseudo-philosophizing of the 19th and 20th century idealists, phenomenologists and existentialists had only one thing in view, though only the German Schopenhauer and his rebellious Nietzschean progeny openly admitted it: power, encompassing of course the present sense of its futurity that goes by the name of “will.” Get past the abstract linguistic and logical trappings of Hegel and his rebellious Marxist progeny, and their “historicism,” be it spiritual or material, is also nothing more than this. It is said that Socrates brought philosophy down from the heavens. Well, the 19th and 20th centuries’ betrayers of Kant’s pious philosophic hope were all determined to call it progress as they opened and paved the intellectual highway that would extend that downward journey into hell.
In terms that proved very practical for the fate of humanity, the United States of America posed an obstacle to that hellishly “progressive” agenda. At least, it did so as long as the ontology of it, in respect of God’s authority, maintained its sway over our national soul. For those who do not easily see the connection thus observed, suffice it to say that the idea of right and justice, endowed by God, requires the existence of self-sufficient being, being that owes nothing to existence because it is the seed of all that is, producing and containing it forever.
On account of this way of understanding things the power that proves itself by existential means has no means to test the being responsible for existence. So the very idea of “proving” the existence of God is a self-evident absurdity. Rather the burden of proof is on those who would prove the existence of science on any basis that denies the prior claim of being itself, since without asserting that claim nothing can be spoken of in thought, to include the word (‘nothing’) that purports to speak of its negation.
In the wake of South Carolina’s primary results, many Christians, particularly among evangelicals, are expressing their dismay at the support their fellow Christians are apparently giving to the evidently hollow (from Christ’s perspective) candidacy of Donald Trump. When Trump self-sufficiently declares that whenever he sins he simply fixes what’s wrong, and “God doesn’t enter into that picture,” the very idea of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, and indeed the whole import of Jesus’ life and ministry, becomes superfluous. Yet when Christ says “no one comes to the Father but through me” He proclaims Himself to be the one thing needful, which no success of human power and will can ever replace.
Of course, all too many Christians see no relation between their choice for President and their faithful representation of Christ (“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus”). They have accepted the specious doctrine of separation that breaks the link between the vocation of Christ and their vocation as citizens of the United States. Yet was it not Christ, speaking to God His father, who said “Not my will but thine be done”? Was it not the Founders of our country who made that same acknowledgment of God’s supremacy the basis for the idea of right, rights and the just use of government’s power, from which our Constitution is derived? Doesn’t that acknowledgment inform the soul of our existence, which is to say, the essential rule that governs our mind and moral will?
The false doctrine of separation is what leads otherwise professing followers of Christ to think that, when they go into the voting booth their Christian conscience has no place, so that “God doesn’t enter into the picture.” Yet there can be no picture of the United States without reference to God. For the union and sovereignty of the people of the United States are, in principle, derived from the authority of God. That authority determines the standard of right that unites our goodwill and the just powers of government derived from our consent.
Despite this truth, at the national level America’s Christian voters are content to support candidates, and continue their participation in a partisan sham, that at best evokes the name of God in order to get votes and at worst denies and seeks to banish the power of God when it comes to the essential character of the American republic.
This is the true cause of the crisis that now threatens to bring that republic to an end. Where politics is concerned, it involves their apostasy from the faith they profess. In a country that cannot sustain itself apart from God and His Creative and Incarnate Word, too many believers are willing to divorce their citizenship from the faith that requires them to acknowledge God’s ultimate rulership of all things, including human affairs.
Thus they sunder what, by God’s Providence, America’s founders joined together. Thus they close the conduit of God’s Grace that is supposed to flow from the hearts of Americans strong in their faith to the benefit of the nation into which they have been seeded, by their acceptance of Christ, in order to grow and bear good fruit in the practice of true and rightful liberty.