If Christians are ever going to be Christians again we need to remember that we see things other people don’t see and hear things that other people don’t hear, and live accordingly, worrying less about whether or not people agree with what we see and hear and much more about what we say and do in the limited time we are given.
In the past Christians would instinctively protect the innocent and the weak, regardless of what the naturalistic and faithless world thought about the matter. We would inform laws according to the rule of ultimate good, while not persecuting the ignorant because of their ignorance. We were never particularly prone to be conciliatory toward people of a merely Natural mind. We would have never allowed people to strip the laws of their ordained purpose of protecting the innocent and punishing evil simply because some people can’t tell the difference between good and evil anymore. And we would never have elected people to hold public office that we knew were faithless, because though they may use our words, they cannot understand them.
There was never a need to create a law to prevent faithless people from holding public office; we were wise enough not to elect such people. That was the expression of our God-given right to self-determination in politics. Why elect someone to office that does not believe in our God-given right to self-determination because they do not recognize the God who created that right—or something just as bad, possibly worse: and that is to elect someone who believes in no God that we recognize? It’s not that we don’t recognize everyone’s right to run for office; we’ve simply forgotten our duty not to vote for them because they are opposed to our most fundamental understanding of who and what we are and what are purpose is in this world.
It is inherently self-destructive to the Christian, their societies, their children, and their beliefs, to be neutral on any matter of faith or practice, especially politics. Politics is the rule of the community, and community is part and parcel of the expression of the Christian life. As such, a Christian that is not “political” is no Christian at all, because a political life is one that expresses care and concern for the larger community. A Christian that cares only for himself is a contradiction in terms.
We are committed, commanded, demanded, ordained to give ourselves for others in every way and at every opportunity. To abandon the community to merely Natural man is an act of the gravest betrayal against Christian love. Who will teach our community right from wrong? Who will guide them in the truth if we do not? Will we give over our friends and neighbors to the rule of those who believe that the entire content of human experience and community is explicable in terms of an accidental arrangement of atoms? Will Natural man instruct us in moral behavior by a worldview that provides no ultimate purpose and no meaning beyond today’s fleeting Natural lust?
How dare we forget how to be Christians! How can we surrender the world without a fight to predators who would consume our friends and countrymen? How shall men and women live without the infusion of goodwill and reason attributable only to the insight of a Spiritually informed people?
Every corner of the world, including our own, will descend into the madness of Hitler, and Stalin, Pol Pot and Alexander if we fail to remember the duties of our faith. There will be no measure of evil, but only the power of one man’s arm against another. The pedophile will become the norm, as he was in ancient Greece, and as he is becoming in the West even now. Sexual purity will be explained away as the dying trace of a once living Christianity. Kings will reign again as agents of innovative laws according to the unconstrained dictates of their own unquestioned will. Half the world will be slaves, so that the wolves of the other half may devour them. Women will be bought and sold as chattel, because there is no Naturalistic way to justify the rights of women, for in fact there is no Naturalistic way to justify any rights for anyone at all. It takes the insights of a Spiritually informed person to see the right and wrong that provide the philosophical capital for “Rights.”
We have no right to abandon our posts. We retain a righteous charge to fulfill in this present Dark Age a duty of love, even when the Church has become the darkest of all places.
Christopher Neiswonger
