Here I will break a first rule of politics by asserting, for the first time, an attempt at a complete, positive vision for our future. This is an attempt to lay out a vision that bridges the divides of the broad “Right,” while simultaneously retaining founding presuppositional metaphysics and raising ourselves above the threshold of strategic victory.
This violates a rule because this will be divisive. However, what I have learned recently is that the dialectic will expose all divisions, and seek to negate us - best to work out a solution now, to hell with the consequence. Put on them big-boy/girl pants and prepare to take a bit of offense.
You see, as I have said many times before, the internal logic of societies tends to work themselves out towards their logical conclusions over time. That’s true of Catholicism, of Protestantism, of Islamism, of Communism, and so on. That was the fall of Athens, as it was the French Revolution. The actions of most individuals most of the time is guided by their foundational beliefs about what is true, and what is good – this is their ontology, epistemology, sociology, and ethic. In turn, all of these things are informed by presuppositional metaphysics, i.e. those items of foundational belief and faith that are arrived at not on the basis of logic, but taken as self-evident, or simply true on their face. It is those things which a critical mass of people believes, based in faith, within each society that will, ultimately, steer that society for better or worse.
When America was founded, it was unambiguously a Christian nation – this is true despite the broad beliefs present among the founders, which also included Unitarianism, and Deism. This is wholly true as these beliefs of the founders did not exist in a vacuum – out of place and time. They existed in the Protestant context of America, with primarily English stock, in the tradition of the Reformation and that part of the Enlightenment in keeping with that tradition – namely, that of Locke. We did not go the way of Rousseau and the “cult of reason” – we rejected this ideology.
Foundational to the Reformation and Enlightenment tradition within American presuppositional metaphysics is the fact – not opinion, or an instruction, but fact – that no man can be forcibly converted to Christianity. This is a tenet of Calvinism known as total depravity. According to this doctrine God the Father must first intervene to turn the heart of a man towards Christ before that man can, himself, be a true Christian. This makes it impossible and heretical for any man to attempt to forcibly convert another – only God can turn mans “heart of stone” to a “heart of flesh,” and it would be against God Himself, a heresy, for a man to coerce another to faith. This doctrinal understanding removed any concerted Christian opposition to the freedom of religion as outlined in the First Amendment. This was, in fact, the philosophical source for that clause guaranteeing the free exercise of religion – that’s right, the basis of Freedom of Religion was Christianity.
Now, that right to free exercise of religion is not unlimited – it is itself subject to natural law and the higher ethic thereof. For instance, a great many cultures based in other metaphysics make allowances for murder under circumstances of “dishonor.” Some make exceptions for rape under the rubric of “war brides,” or religious prisoners. It has been taken for granted that American metaphysics are a human universal when in truth they are absolutely not. The Trojans killed their disabled infants in a eugenics program (eugenics was outlined by Plato, as an aside). Romans fed people to lions for entertainment. Communists murdered hundreds of millions for being “enemies of the people,” or, more correctly, enemies of their utopian dreams and grift. All these things could be classified under the “free exercise of religion” when placed in their broader context, but they are not to be practice in America under penalty of law. There is no right to practice, within America, those foreign religious practices that are so antithetical and subversive to the American metaphysic that they present a threat to it.
Now, people can choose, individually, to accept the presuppositions of the American founding with, or without, being professing Christians. However, the failure to recognize, in a social capacity, that the American metaphysic is rooted in Christianity, coupled with the drift of a critical mass of Americans away from Christ, necessarily results in the undermining of those metaphysics, at which point the only move available to avoid conflict is to simply assert a “neutrality” that never existed in the first place to make room for “multiculturalism,” which is to say surrender. America was never neutral in application of its presuppositions and law. It is not neutral now that the foundational metaphysics of America are Marxian (or neoPlatonic, or esoteric, or whatever). It punishes its enemies.
A nation grounded in Christian metaphysics can withstand nonbelievers who, nonetheless, carry on with compliance to the laws rooted in that metaphysic, but a nation adrift on the sea of relativism that has achieved that critical mass necessary to delegitimize the whole of the law will never find any option but submission to the zeitgeist – there is no way forward without, once more, recognizing the Christian basis of the American founding, and there is no reason to fear tyranny in so doing, but there is every reason to fear tyranny if we do not.
There are many people who want you to fear this idea. They promote the dialectical political warfare operation known as “Christian Nationalism,” which is only in part an operation. The reality is the term “Christian Nationalism” is undefined and utilized as a “floating signifier.” This is a political warfare concept where a label that has a nebulous definition is slandered and coded as “evil” (taboo, and outside the Overton Window) in order to apply it to any variety of political opponents at opportune times to negate their political will. They’ve done the same thing with the word “racist,” where they changed the understood, reasonable definition into something only definable, and therefore only operational by and for Leftist “experts.” These political warfare operators want you to believe that the future will be some sort of dystopia of forcible conversions, wars of fire-and-maneuver between sects, blasphemy laws, and on and on towards tyranny. Nonsense.
Some have voluntarily adopted the term “Christian Nationalism.” Among them are those who are simply both Christians and Nationalists, some are Theonomists, Postmillienialists, and other flavors of theologically informed political activists, and others have adopted the term as enemies of the Right in order to assist the Left in making the term toxic. There is, however, no broad consensus within Christianity in America to turn the American government into what reasonable persons would call a “theocracy.” That simply isn’t going to happen. What the vast majority want is simply a return to Constitutional principles and public (read: government) respect for their religion, traditions, and ethics.
Further, it is only under this paradigm that freedom is even possible. This is the case because it is only this particular set of metaphysical presuppositions that affirmatively lays out the good, transcendent ethic on which America was founded while simultaneously affirmatively placing many elements of governance outside of the authority of the civil government – this is liberty. The reason is that the American Reformation and Enlightenment tradition recognizes that there are multiple spheres of governance, with the civil government being only one – the other two being family and Church – each with a limited range of authority, yet all institutions falling under the sovereign authority of God (again, it is not the job of government to enforce this outside of that narrow prescription of authority delegated to it).
Freedom is not possible under any other paradigm because, as all prominent, right-thinking theologians and philosophers have noted from Nietzsche to Aquinas, mankind requires a transcendent ethic. Why should anybody do anything you or I say if all we have to appeal to is our own authority? Who the hell am I to lay down my own ethic? Why would anybody follow such a thing? The only conceivable reason is force of arms, which lends to the principle rejected by the American tradition: “might makes right.”
The major competitors to the Christian metaphysic either, as in the case of Communism, openly reject and invert the Christian metaphysic to disastrous effect, or, as in the case of Libertarianism, seek to make taboo the subject of presuppositional metaphysics and thereby deny that religious basis from which they borrow their own ideas. Really, what the hell is the NAP (Non-Aggression Principle) if not an appeal to presuppositional metaphysics for which they cannot claim a transcendent basis and is, therefore, no more than “might makes right” for he who never questions his own moral superiority (or, perhaps, that of Ayn Rand’s)?
No manmade negotiated settlement of such a nature will ever suffice towards long-term harmony and liberty. No transcendent ethic but that which America was founded on will suffice either. All other roads lead to tyranny. Revival, in the Church, family, and civil spheres, or bust.
I do not disagree. Getting there is an entirely larger conversation. To be short, it will take not only a cultural Renaissance over the course of numerous generations, it will require a nearly complete destruction of our current systems. Down to the dry bones.
Examples of 'civil spheres'?