This is the last of a six part series examining religion and politics before the next Presidential election.
We beseech thee also, so to direct and dispose the hearts of all Christian Rulers, that they may truly and impartially administer justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of thy true religion, and virtue.
A response in the service concludes this round of thought about my vote in the up coming primaries.
Priest: Give peace in our time, O Lord.
Response: Because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou O Lord.
Who does not want peace?
We pray for the ideal and prepare and long for the day when it will come.
Peace is good and the ultimate state that all Christians long to see reign in the entire cosmos.
We do not, however, live in the ideal though we long for it.
Christians could never vote for a jingoist or militarist who delights in war. We could not vote for a leader that confuses any external cause with the internal war of the soul. In the same manner, we cannot be naive enough to vote for the pacifist. The pacifist is so inward turned that he forgets that some evils manifest themselves externally. The militarist thinks the present fight is eternal, the pacifist that the fight is over.
Christians should not vote for a man who knows God is on our side, but must look for leader like Abraham Lincoln who, by pursuing justice, tries to put the nation on God’s side.
Of course, there are two wars. The vital one for the Church is the spiritual struggle. It is the war with two clearly drawn sides, but this internal struggle does have external manifestations.
Internal (spiritual) peace is difficult enough in our time. There is a constant struggle against our own internal wickedness and vice. The Church is the Church militant.
It is even less likely that most will see long periods of external peace in a wicked world. The children of this age will cut corners and bring on their culture of death. In the short term, they will always seem more powerful, wiser, than the children of the age to come. The good state will side with the culture of life, eager to turn swords into plowshares, but knowing that if Jesus has not yet returned that this will never be possible.
There is no end to history in sight until the clouds be rolled back as a scroll!
There is a hope for brief passages of honorable peace in the interludes of conflict, but the response of the people (”there is none that fighteth . . .”) shows that it is only a fool or a coward who expects to see it.
We pray for peace tomorrow, but arm for battle (spiritual and temporal) today. In the spiritual realm, the Christian must find a true Church fighting the demons of our age and not giving in to them.
The bad news is that cosmically we are at war. Our God is a God of War with an army commanded by Michael the Archangel. Note that the old response to the prayer implies this . . . the pew sitters wish for peace because only the Lord fights for them in this Age.
Any temporal war is always an imperfect image of that greater war. There is never a side that is perfectly just or a side that is perfectly wicked. Lincoln, a very wise leader, knew this. He wished in his great civil war to be on the Lord’s side . . . and did not have the temerity to believe that he could count on God being on His side.
He knew that both sides had their vices and their virtues. His Second Inaugural is a perfect statement of this truth. The cosmic battle has clear sides, the external fights of our age do not.
How could Lincoln lead the horrible struggle of the Civil War? How could the knowledge of temporal imperfection on both sides not stun him into inaction? Lincoln could act because he had low expectations. The cause of the South had some merit, but fundamentally stood for disunion and slavery. Whatever the demerits of the North, it was (perhaps narrowly?) much better for it to win.
The conflict was irrepressible, the nation could not expect to be both slave and free. It had to be won humbly, quickly, and with maximum force.
A victory is always followed by a hush as evil regroups. Again the true evil of the world is spiritual, but it uses human means. We defeated Hilter (the most monstrous manifestation of evil in his age) to face the Communists. The center of the culture of death in the world moved from Berlin to Moscow . . . where it had been welcome since 1917.
Stalin was worse for the Church than Roosevelt . . . both men had their vices, but surely the genocidal maniac in Moscow was worse than the randy old politician on the Potomac. As a result, the faithful churchman had to pray for a Truman, an Eisenhower, or a Kennedy who (for all their many faults) recognized this evil. There was surely no perfection in Cold War American, but also no Gulag Archipelago.
The most obvious example in American history was the righteous cause of the Union in the Civil War.
Whatever the faults, the Christian could see His righteous sentence in the camps of the Union Army. His truth was using the Grand Army of the Republic. We could sing the Battle Hymn as citizens and as Christians without too a sneer, because we knew Mr. Lincoln understood our imperfections and “had malice toward none” and “charity toward all” . . . even as he executed a fearful justice on the slave states with the greatest army the world had ever none.
In the battle with radical Islam, it is easy enough to see demerits of the Free World. We have our vices . . . and the traditional Christians know the wickedness our state tolerates better than most.
But it is easy to see that “true religion and virtue” have a much better chance to flourish under the Constitution of 1789 than under Sharia.
I am looking for a Lincoln in the next election . . . who loves our enemies while he executes justice. He longs for unconditional surrender on their part so peace can be (however briefly) restored.
Far from a cry for some socialist state power to bring us bread, land, and peace then this prayer hopes for the brief interludes of honorable peace.
Sadly, the most famous use of this prayer politically was by Neville Chamberlain after he sold out free people to Hitler at Munich. He came waving an agreement with that vile man proclaiming that he had found “peace in our time.” This Chamberlain peace was popular, but it brought only more struggle. It assumed that “not fighting” was a real option.
The second peace for which we pray is the peace of the Church of the saints and martyrs. It is the peace that recognizes the constant struggle for holiness this side of Paradise.
This is a hard path and few will follow it. In this next presidential election, we must look for a leader who understands this hard path. This person will not has as his or her goal paradise on earth, but allow the liberty for Christianity to flourish.
Ideally, he will be a man of character on this difficult path himself. Fortunately, no matter the outcome of the election, we are likely to be able to continue the long, dialectical road ourselves. Liberty is under assault, but it will last for a time. . . enough time for us to choose to follow the hard road.
Thankfully this path is still there for all to follow. Any of us can follow the logos at any time. It requires little or no money and the books are freely available in public libraries and on-line. Intelligent design resources are one internet search from a desktop. The time to act is now, before the undermining of Christian understanding of the sciences and first principles are utterly undermined.
As I prepare to vote, I must mostly be intent on strengthening this non-state infrastructure of philosophic and religious people. It is not the President who will do the great work, but the people. The great work is multi-faceted. The state is not the main ground, but it is important.
I am looking for a candidate who understands that he is main goal must be to do no harm.
In the meantime, I must not give way to despair. We always seem to be losing in each age, but it is always to something new.
Christians sense they are losing their cultural heritage. The surrounding secular culture is intentionally destroying their Hebrew, Greek, and Christian heritage as quickly as possible.
Fortunately we are still free to save this heritage. The “West” cannot really die for it is a set of ideas not dependent on any one people, country, place, or time. Times have been darker than this in time’s past and God has had mercy on Christendom and this is a good ground for optimism. God is in control and the truth is very powerful. However, God need not save this nation or this manifestation of the West.
This is not a call for complacency, but optimistic action.
The ideas will endure, but this moment of freedom and opportunity need not do so, since God allows us to cooperate with Him in His work. If our generation fails, then it will be left to other generations to bemoan the broken ruins of culture left to them and begin again. Given the great heritage of freedom, science, and prosperity left to this generation such a prodigal waste of a culture would be a great sin.
The alternatives to our imperfect, but still viable civilization seem worse than our present state. We seem caught between extremist religions and fundamentalist secularism. One potent irrational religion is a radical form of Islam which rejects the West. Of course, Islam itself has not always been hostile to Greece and Rome. From architecture to education, it was happy to appropriate ideas from the Christian Byzantine Empire. There is hope there.
The Byzantines represented one of the high points of the fusion of Greek, Roman, and Christian ideas. They managed to maintain education, government, and theology at a very high level for almost one thousand years. To the extent that the harsh desert religion of Mohammad was softened by contact with Byzantium, Islam became capable of appropriating some of its benefits.
Other threats from religion include a revived irrational paganism of the sort one finds in the “metaphysics” section of a local American bookstore. Some of this paganism is present in the humanities departments of American universities, but it is mostly an anti-intellectual phenomena.
On the hand, there is the threat of persons who can see nothing in the universe but “matter and energy in mindless motion.” Secularism dominates most Western universities. By philosophical rule, no scientist in good standing is allowed to consider Mind as a cause within scientific theories, only “natural” causes are allowed. This methodological naturalism does not logically entail that the scientists must believe only in matter and energy in mindless motion, but in most people that is the effect. It is natural to look for a consistent manner of looking at the world. Most scientists move from methodological naturalism on Monday to a spirit numbing naturalism on Sunday.
The good news is that the West has faced a worse two front war and prevailed. In the last century, Western men defeated Nazism and Communism. In many ways, Nazism and Communism represented specific forms of the irrational religion and secularism faced today. Fortunately most of the common men of Europe and North America were still trained in the simple precepts of traditional Western culture. Both the Nazis and the Communists, enemies of traditional Western civilization, were defeated. Nazism was repudiated by cultural leaders. Oddly, the Communists have maintained some sympathy in the intellectual classes. In the United States secularism with utopian tendencies has maintained a grip on the educated and in popular culture..
Why have we forgotten the horrors of the Gulag, Cambodian killing fields, and death camps of China so quickly? One way to begin to reframe the issue is force the modern intellectual to repudiate the racist blood-mysticism of Nazism and the totalitarian materialism of the Soviet Union.
The experience with Communism should teach an important lesson. In the eighties many traditional Christians were discouraged. Being a vocal anti-communist was not considered intellectual respectable. Some conservatives felt like they were on the losing side of history, that Communism would sweep everything that opposed it. Ronald Reagan was different. He believed that error could not long prevail. He had a well thought out faith in the truth of Western values that was combined with optimism. His was not a faith of bunkers and food stored in basements against nuclear winter. Reagan believed the West was facing an intellectually bankrupt foe and he acted on that belief. Working together with a new Polish pope and his best ally, Britain’s Thatcher, he helped bring about the end of Soviet Communism. The West’s victory was spectacular and unexpected. No one thought the Soviet Union would collapse so quickly, not even many who agreed with Reagan ideologically.
Traditional Christians must regain confidence in their ideas by arguing our case with the knowledge that history is on our side. Jesus is Lord.
The rebirth of Western Christian civilization can occur with similar joyful optimism. The foe is not flesh and blood but defeated principalities and powers. This defeated Satanic order has no chance and no hope. Unless Christians demand immediate victory on our own timetable, there is every reason for hope. This next election is not the end of anything . . . but just another phase in the long pilgrimage.
We pray for peace in our time . . . and pass the ammunition. We recall that we are first pilgrims and Churchmen, but remember that in this age we are also citizens called to learn through the lesser love patriotism.
In the order of Heaven, I am King Jesus’ man . . . in the order of America I am a citizen of a Republic looking for a good leader.
In deep way then I put little faith in politics for cultural renewal. Most of this work is the job of the individual, the family, culture, or the Church. We do not need massive state power to do much of this and in fact state power is likely to be our foe in it.
Our job is to look for a leader who will praise the good and punish the wicked . . . and to a great extent leave the family and Church alone to do their jobs.
We don’t need a political leader to bring this optimism to the Church, but it would be wonderful if our next President brought optimism to the White House.
This is possible for a leader like Reagan, because he does not expect much of the state. It was enough for him that the Federal government defeat our external foes and allow maximum liberty (those tax cuts!). As a result, he was not overwhelmed by the complexities of the problems of our age. A president like Jimmy Carter (a more orthodox Christian, but a worse leader for our Republic) had an expansive notion of what the state could do so that the smallest wickedness in the most remote corner of America would keep him awake at night. The leftist must be a pessimist or irrational. The cancer of evil is too diffuse and too integrated into our culture for the huge single blade of state power to cut it out.
I pray our next President does not want to use his power to bring perfect health . . . but merely ward off outside invaders (best he can) and do no harm to us. This seems possible. We want then a militantly merciful man like Lincoln with the optimism of Reagan based on a limited view of what the state can do.
If we demand less of the state, expect less of it, then we can demand less of our President.
Our central hope is not built of the Republican candidate for leader of the Republic, but on King Jesus. The problem is that the state has grown so swollen that it easily become entangled in our business. We should look for the candidate of character, optimistic, able to protect us in the War of Cultures, and eager to leave us well alone.
Not Relying on the State: Building a Liberated Christian Infrastructure
Traditional Christians should stop propping up any parts of the system that ignores or despises them. There are better places to put their children and their money. Parents must demand a classical and a scientific education for their children. If public schools will not provide it, then Christians must start their own schools or home school. Many Christians have done this, but been discouraged when immediate change did not occur. The dominant culture is a powerful force still and attacking it is difficult. However, my brother and I were the products of this first wave of Christian school education in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. My children will be part of bigger, even better educated wave for the twenty-first century. Even a small percentage of well educated students that endure the blandishments of a decaying American culture will be agents of transformation.
The same strategy of providing an alternative culture applies even more to college and university education. If the goal is to create ladies and gentlemen, it will not occur in schools where there is no core curriculum, ethical standards are low, and science is not free. The state governments cannot decide on common governing values, let alone produce an education centered on character training. Both Athens and Jerusalem unite in saying that a well educated man must be a virtuous man. Traditional education is not job training, for which any school is uniquely unfit, but soul tending.
This is why I am quite optimistic about the future. All I fear is that the state and the elite will clamp down on liberty to save their fading power, since the use of power is the last refuge of an establishment which is losing. Christian and home schools need not close public schools in order to prevail. If left alone and run on truly classical lines, then they will become the model. Our goal should be to be left alone until our alternative lifestyle undermines the status quo completely. If persecution is limited to name calling on secularist blogs and in secularist universities, then all is well.
The period of decay is almost over as the first generation to reject the classical, Jewish, and Christian roots of the culture die out. This first generation of post-Christians functioned fairly well, since though they rejected their roots, they only moved only a way from them. It was not the first generation of revolutionaries that destroyed Russia completely, but the second and third. By the time the Revolutionaries reached old age, the great-grand-children of the October Revolution were surrounded by almost total dysfunction. This dysfunction was supported by alternating terror and treats. The United States is moving into the most dangerous period as it transitions from the enthusiasm of the secular revolutionaries to the burned out supporters of the status quo. A strong and resolute counter-culture cannot fail in this circumstance, though it might produce some martyrs.
The saddest thing would be to sell out directly before the revival of the West! There must have some poor soul that joined the Communist party at great moral cost in 1989 out of terror for his career only to have the Party collapse the next month! The same thing often happens as men sell their birth right for a bowl of bean soup and then are denied even the soup. The old ways are reviving and all we must do is carry on.
I look for a President so steeped in the old ways, a man of piety, gravity, and dignity, who will so maintain the Constitution of 1789 that this reformation from below can take place.
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A while back, we enthusiastically linked our way through a six-part series of posts by the head of the 
In that place where religion and politics intersect, Jerry Falwell was a trailblazer. Can't say I always agreed with him, but on balance I think he did more good than bad. He certainly did the hard work that was a large part restoring the voice of faith in politics.
