A Call to Arms in the War on Christianity →
To say that Christianity is fighting for its life is not merely an understatement, it is THE understatement. The tenets of the Church are unwavering, virtuous and justly so, but Christianity is in a fight for its life nonetheless. The fight has been taken to the people, to those who believe and disbelieve, and it is they who are the battleground; riddled in corruption and mired in pestilence, they have become the place whereby all Christianity stands to fall.
The war on Christianity is rampant, unrelenting and is more apparent now than it has ever been. It is clearly evident in the Obama administration’s HHS mandate; a clear infringement on the orthodoxy of all Catholic institutions and many others. It is evident when we are just hearing reports that six religious leaders were arrested for kneeling and praying in solidarity in front of the gates of the White House. All the while for months Occupy This-or-That protestors defiled public and private property and raged a verbal and cyber war against private and public enterprises. We see it in our schools and places of employment, where we are all too familiar with the boilerplate scenarios of people being fired or disciplined for publicly praying or posting a copy of the Ten Commandments. Examples can be strewn ad infinitum. But these great, shining examples of the war are hardly the greatest in consequence. Christianity is on the decline in the United States; Christianity is virtually dead in Europe. Where is it alive in society? In Africa there were only nine million Christians in 1900, yet in 2000 that continent boasted 380 million Christians. No other place can claim such a great and vast rise in such a small period of time. The Church now maintains over 135 million members on the continent alone; and where are we? Tearing away at the fringes of our foundation by the fraying course we have undertaken by which our iniquity and impulses have nourished our appetite for the damnation of the self.
I don’t mean, singularly, eternal damnation (though that is quite the obvious outcome), what I mean to say is that we have damned ourselves in every thought and action; every choice that distances what we believe from the truth of Christianity. The pervading sexualization of society is hardly a perverse pariah that haunts our union with God; it has diminished the family; it has plagued and tarnished the purity of the individual. Everywhere we contrast reality from God and say that orthodoxy plays no role, that nothing in Christianity has set the precedent already. Hobbes’ Civil Society is in full swing and this is it: the final shudder of what it means to live.
True and devout Christians remain, constantly reaffirming their unity with the Church, but they grow in endangerment in and out of every day. They’ve come to symbolize the sheep that some skeptics have christened Christians to be; purposely advancing every cause without conflict, with ease, without a shred of the burden of the matter. Believer or not, we are all responsible for the state of Christianity. And it is in the understanding of the sheer weight and gravity of our circumstances that we must make a call for a revolution because at this very point in our society and our hearts God lays crippled under the feet of Satan. Chesterton wrote, “In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell. For the orthodox there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration.”
Revolutions are not won by mere smiles and self-congratulations; they are not achieved through the nostrum of pity either. Revolutions restore what is true and right through the rectitude of actions, the fervency of words and the refusal to submit to the perfidious temptations that come from within and without. Building is a task that can take years and every ounce of life, but destruction comes about as a result of the avarice of a single action. Only when we live in union, speak in conjunction and compel with the rawness of human emotion can we abate what is inherently evil, the things that shroud all light. Given the chance, a speck of that light can garner people, who through their own free will will walk from the encasing hands of darkness.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is our greatest ally in salvaging the sinking ship, but in its use we must remain cognizant of the fact that coercion and violation beget nothing more than a pyrrhic victory. Some have already hurt our cause by violating and disturbing without provocation, by not following the examples that were laid before the diminution of faith and morality. We can no longer wage war with malice and contempt, but rather, through the virtuousness of reasonable actions. And in those actions Divine Providence will guide us and those against us and those unaware they stand against us. While ultimately excluded, in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We might have been a free and great people together.” We may still yet, but we cannot hope to be free in this enclosed wilderness. And so, the war for restoration must be waged by us, the very people who are responsible for a need to restore. Idle no more.
-Chris