Last week I wrote two columns in support of Judge Roy Moore’s candidacy for the U.S. Senate in the ongoing Alabama GOP special primary election, one at barbwire.com and a related piece for wnd.com. Judge Moore came first past the post in the vote on Tuesday. Alabama GOP voters will be asked to decide whether Moore or second-place finisher Luther Strange will face Democrat Doug Jones in the special general election balloting in November.
Though Judge Moore’s success in the first round of balloting was accurately foreshadowed in polls, I thank God for it. The people of the United States are now deeply in the throes of a battle for our very existence as a nation. Many signs indicate that we are losing that battle, because even the judgment of those most sincerely dedicated to our survival is too much affected by the fatal corruption of heart and spirit everywhere in evidence. Against those signs, however, I believe Judge Moore’s candidacy is a token of God’s goodwill. It presently offers Americans of good faith the best and only proven opportunity to raise up a reliable champion to stand against this tragic fate.
In preparing this article, I revisited Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 commencement address at Harvard University. It’s worth re-reading in its entirety. But, along with what I wrote last week about Judge Moore’s public service, the following few excerpts may help my readers understand why I think Judge Moore’s candidacy is a truly Providential opportunity to sound a clarion call to action, aimed at reviving the moral will and spirit of our nation.
Very well-known representatives of your society… say: We cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus, we mix good and evil, right and wrong, and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned world strategy. There are no other criteria. Practical or occasional considerations of any kind will inevitably be swept away by strategy. After a certain level of the problem has been reached, legalistic thinking induces paralysis; it prevents one from seeing the size and meaning of events….
— no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal….
[W]e turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Mere freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones…
However, in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice… State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic…. [M]an’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century’s moral poverty….
[W]e have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.
If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history… It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge: We shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.
Others have rightly summarized the core of Solzhenitsyn’s speech in simple terms: “We have forgotten God. Our only hope lies in remembering Him.” Every GOP voter in Alabama who believes that this is true now has a moral and spiritual obligation to vote for Judge Roy Moore in the upcoming GOP run-off election. Every such American, wherever they are, should do whatever they can to support him. What what other American in our public life has honored God by making choice of loss—as Jesus did upon the Cross; as we are called to do who profess to walk in His way?
Twice, by his deeds, Roy Moore has eloquently preached God’s first commandment of love by example of self-sacrifice, as Jesus did. Is there anything our nation truly needs more than to receive this Gospel of loving obedience to God? Now, by their vote, the people of Alabama can be the instrument of God that raises up his lamp to shine out in the U.S. Senate. From there, by God’s good will, it may enlighten the politics of our nation and through our nation, the world. This is not a promise Judge Moore makes with his lips. It is a promise God has already fulfilled in his life. As with Christ’s offer of salvation, there is only one question left to our good will: Will we accept the Providential challenge, and thereby begin a great revival of our good conscience as a nation?