Christianity in America, Part Three: Faith in a Darkening Age

Looking around at the world today, it’s easy to despair. Things aren’t going too well. The pillars of religion, representative government, and the human drive for freedom that uphold Western civilization seem to be in retreat everywhere.

Christians and Jews are being targeted everywhere, whether in increasingly not-so-isolated attacks in Europe or wholesale genocide in Africa. Europe is being thoroughly routed under the merciless advance of Islam, and what remains of European “leaders” are currently tussling for the role of chief Kapo in an effort to be killed last.

Russian imperialism proceeds apace, fueled by the megalomania of a dictator for whom half a million casualties barely elicits a yawn, and aided and abetted by American isolationists who insist, as they did in the 1930s, that it’s “none of our business.” The Cuban government defiantly persists. China sits back and patiently waits.

Here at home, we possess an overwhelming advantage in military superiority with which to defeat Iran. The Iranian government possesses an overwhelming advantage in political will with which to defeat the Great Satan. It’s clear which of those two advantages will decide the war. Just like it did in Afghanistan. And Vietnam.

And those on the far left in the West, the radical feminists and LGBTQ++ crowd who would suffer far more brutal tortures than any of the rest of us at the hands of our enemies, are the same ones cheering for their victory.

And then there is the domestic situation. While conservatives, and indeed most Americans, simply want to be left alone to live our lives, leftism is a 24/7 occupation. Everything is viewed through a totalitarian lens of an oppressor/oppressed intersectional hierarchy. Nothing can be allowed to exist in a non-political sphere. Not holidays, not sports games, not anything. And for those of us who don’t operate this way, the constant bombardment is exhausting.

But that’s the point. It’s meant to wear us down. It’s meant to drive us to eventually give in, if nothing else than to just shut them up. But leftists never shut up. Give them an inch of your freedom, and they’ll demand a mile on which to build a gulag. It feels like we are losing our country, our culture, and our national soul.

And maybe we are. Leftists are adept at gaslighting, and have always operated on the premise that the more Orwellian the lie, the more its adherents will enforce it.

Hence, we hear the most lockstep sheep bleat about freethinking.

We hear the most pampered people in history complaining about want and need.

We hear the freest people in history dare to claim they’re oppressed.

We hear people disguising envy as equity, resentment as reparation, merit as bigotry, and achievement as injustice.

We see the most protected people on earth biting the hands that protect them.

We hear people who have never shed a drop of sweat from physical labor insist they speak for the working class.

We witness the breakdown of civil society that results from people who think free speech is violence, and that violence is free speech.

We live in an age of increasing social restriction, where there are “alliances” instead of genuine friendships, and where there is no escape from political propaganda.

We stand at the pinnacle of scientific achievement. There have never been more creature comforts, more security, and more choice than we have now. Yet people are isolated. People are encouraged to distrust family and friends. People disappear into their phone screens. People take pills to cope, not with the pain, but with the emptiness. People retreat into either nihilism or into low-grade, vulgar sensualism.

People have no meaning.

And people with no meaning make decisions that have no meaning, except for two reasons:

Which is why a stranger randomly attacked and poured acid on a Savannah mom, resulting in severe burns over 50% of her body. And why a career criminal brutally beat a 75-year-old Seattle woman in her face with a spiked stick, resulting in the permanent loss of one of her eyes.

And why, three days before Christmas, a Florida man, murdered his wife for not wanting to watch an NFL game, and then shot his stepdaughter in the face before turning the gun on himself. And why a Utah woman locked in a bitter custody dispute chose to shoot and kill her 11-year-old daughter (and then herself) rather than let the court grant the father additional custody rights.

And why a Florida woman shot and killed her two children and then herself while the father was out of the country and wasn’t able to stop it. And why a Shreveport man shot and killed eight children, seven of whom were his, in a domestic dispute that ended with him getting killed by police in a shootout. And why a Washington man beat his 4-year-old son to death and then buried the body in a garbage bag underneath the house.

The aforementioned examples are just a small sample of an obscenely large pool of examples. Some were black, some were white. Some were rich, some were poor. Some had criminal histories, some did not. Some were planned, some were spontaneous. There is no underlying pattern to any of these horrific crimes except one: The assailants felt that other people were merely vessels through which they were allowed to vent their rage, their resentment, their “lived experience.”

Rest assured, this is exactly the type of chaos that the left wants. They despise the nuclear family, they despise our religion, and they despise the happiness and meaning they provide us. Leftists either can’t fathom why these things make us happy, or they can fathom it but just can’t get it themselves. So that means they won’t let us have it either.

These are dark times indeed, and the shadows continue to lengthen.

So what do we do? How do we, as God-fearing Christians and Jews, respond to this cultural onslaught? Salvation will not come when we vote the “right” people into elected office, or move to a safer neighborhood, or get into a better university, or form a better military alliance. I’m not dismissing the importance of these things to us, but from the standpoint of an infinite Creator, they barely qualify as fleeting.

Perseverance in the face of suffering. Courage in the face of mockery. Clarity in the face of deceit. Humility in the face of arrogance. Forgiveness in the face of persecution. And most important, faith in the face of disbelief. These virtues are religious in nature, and are honored almost exclusively by religious people alone. And these are the virtues that will keep us on track more than any temporal victory.

Remember that our faith isn’t rooted in an expectation of a pain-free life. God isn’t a genie who grants us wishes, and He isn’t a showman who obediently performs miracles whenever we feel He hasn’t proven Himself enough to us. Our faith is rooted in a desire to be closer to God through devotion, prayer, self-betterment, and the struggle against pride, from which all sin and disbelief derive.

Jews, find your way through your desert and back to the Promised Land.

Christians, pick up your cross and bear it.

If God is the center of your life, then it’s less of a burden to accept that there is a season to everything, including nations and civilizations. Again, I’m not saying we should just step aside and let the Red-Green Alliance destroy what our forefathers bequeathed us. We should fight the good fight. But I’m also saying that there will eventually come a day when this great experiment in democratic republicanism comes to an end. And on that day, it will be better to suffer for your faith in God rather than to deny Him in public, betray Him for silver, or gleefully persecute His followers, just so you can cling on for a measly few more years. And how utterly meaningless would those years be.

In the words of Viktor Frankl, “Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

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