It’s never
completely safe to be a Christian in this world. In my recent Sunday Snippets post [here] I briefly discussed the
plight of Christians in Iraq, who are facing brutal persecution at the hands of
ISIS, an armed movement embracing a particularly virulent strain of radical
Islam. I illustrated the post with the Arabic “N”, with which ISIS terrorists
target Christian homes, and which has since become an emblem of solidarity and
a badge of honor for Christians around the world.
The Fall of Rome |
That explicit
identification as Christians, and with other Christians, is vitally important. I
made the point the week before [here]
that radical Islam would pose little threat to “a Christendom united in Faith
and fortified with Prayer”. Unfortunately, what had been Christendom is rapidly
de-Christianizing, which creates a twofold threat, both from within and from
without. The external threat, a
radicalized and aggressive Islam, still looks fairly distant to those of us in
the United States; it looks a lot more formidable in Europe. There, a growing, poorly assimilated, and
increasingly alienated and hostile Muslim population is combining with the forces
of societal destruction under the guise of “multiculturism” to attack the very
basis of historic (which means, essentially, Christian) European culture, as
described by Joseph Pearce in a piece that is appearing on Life Site News [here]. The article is well worth reading in its
entirety; the best summation of Pearce’s point comes in a quote from actor John
Rhys-Davies, who played the dwarf Gimli in the screen adaptation of J.R.R.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
Rhys-Davies says: “I think that Tolkien says that some generations will
be challenged, and if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose
their civilization”. Since the actor
first spoke these words several years ago, the concrete evidence of their truth has been
rapidly multiplying, and so although the multi-culti wrecking ball pounds on,
an increasing number of Europeans are starting to see multiculturalism for the
civilizational suicide that it is.
To those of us in
the United States, events in Iraq can seem very far away, especially now that
there are no longer many of our countrymen serving there under arms. The incidence of jihadism here can be seen as
sporadic, with only a few serious incidents (9/11, the Fort Hood Massacre), and
the local Muslim population is still quite small and has shown only scattered
signs of radicalization – so far. The
heedless dismantling of our culture from within, however, proceeds apace. I’ll provide just two recent examples. First, the College Board, which through the
content of its Advanced Placement (AP) exams determines the curriculum of
thousands of high school classes around the country, has come with a new AP
American History [article here]
course that omits great Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther
King, jr. Instead it emphasizes
impersonal “historical forces” - and not so much those familiar to earlier
generations of students like the development of democratic institutions and
religious tolerance. From the Fox News
article:
“ . . . you’re not going to find
Thomas Jefferson and the House of Burgesses and the cradle of democracy
either,” said Larry Krieger, who retired in 2005 after more than three decades
in the classroom. And finally, you’re
not going to find Benjamin Franklin and the birth of American
entrepreneurialism . . . what you’re going to find is our nation’s founders
portrayed as bigots who developed a belief in white superiority . . .”
The article adds that students will find, overall, “a
narrative laden with tyranny and subjugation.”
As if it’s not enough that individual classes are convincing young
people that their country is and always has been irredeemably corrupt, we now
have entire schools dedicated to the purpose – at your expense. We now have “social justice” charter schools
[here], government schools
funded with taxpayer money. And while
the term social justice has an honorable origin in Catholic social
teaching, it has long since been hijacked by the left. No, the students at these schools won’t be
studying Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, they’ll be training in “social activism”, a.k.a.
leftist political agitation. All of
which means that in certain localities in the United States we’ll have the
curious phenomenon of the government expending public funds to set up public
schools dedicated to training young people to tear it all down.
Tearing it all
down is the program of the cultural and political left, whether we’re talking
about multi-culturalism, the redefinition of marriage, revisionist history, or
Robin Hood economic activism. They don’t
even pretend anymore to have a coherent positive vision of what might replace
all the institutions they seek to eradicate.
Not that it would help much if they did: every attempt to build a
society hatched in the brains of men (e.g., the French Revolution, Soviet
Communism) on the ruins of those that had developed over time in response to
the real needs and experiences of human beings has been a disaster. Bloody, inhuman disaster, such as is still
playing out in North Korea. In similar
fashion, the man-made religion of Islam has had a track record over the past
millennium and a half of spawning anti-human horrors such the one currently on
display in Iraq. The most profound
and radical revolution in human history, on the other hand, was the
transformation of the Greco-Roman civilization by the unlikely spread of Christianity. It was no mere human idea, but the revelation
of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ that subdued “the glory that was
Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome” (props to Edgar Allan Poe). And notice that the Church didn’t destroy and
replace the institutions of the Roman Empire, but rather “baptized” them and made
them the bulwarks of a more humane culture [for more on that, see here]. When Rome did fall to invaders from the
North, the Church worked the same transformation on the newcomers.
And now here we
are in a society that wants to do away with both the Church of Jesus Christ and
the institutions passed on by our ancestors.
Do we really think that the empty shell that will be left can stand
against the legions of the New Caliphate, or any other motivated and determined
conqueror from without or within?
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