NOVAE MILITIAE

Superb post and commentary at Auster's blog: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/008683.html

Some excerpts:

TYhis is an absolutely fundamental point that Christians must understand. The original teaching of Christianity as presented in the New Testament is about how to live in what Jesus called the kingdom of heaven. It is about the individual soul's relation with God through Christ. It is not about the political organization of society. The New Testament simply assumes the existence of political society and goes on from there. Because Christianity is not, like orthodox Judaism and Islam, a complete recipe for this-worldly existence, Christians must "render unto Caesar," a non-Christian basis of authority. Christian society is thus more complex--more differentiated, to use Eric Voegelin's term--than any other. It is multileveled, mediating between the pole of the Christian, spiritual realm and the pole of political and cultural existence in this world, which does not come from Christianity itself. If the society loses its this-worldly pole it will go out of existence. This is the reason why Christian society is the most risky and most dangerous type of society, the most open to catastrophic derailment, such as the derailment of modern liberalism. Yet Christianity's this-worldly "lack," which makes Christian society so vulnerable in comparison to the religiously structured society of traditional Judaism and Islam, is also the thing that, by requiring Christian society to be multileveled in order to function in this world, makes it the fullest and truest articulation of the human soul, extending downward to the apeirontic depths (the many) and upward to transcendent spiritual truth (the One).

Historical Christianity included the Old Testament as part of its scripture. This was a non-Christian source that provided the sense of living in this world as a community of people under God, a sense that is not provided by the New Testament. Thus Protestants, including the people who created America, were able to build strong national societies because they based themselves heavily on the Old Testament with its powerful sense of a people under God.

The non-Christian source that supplements pure Christianity doesn't have to be the Old Testament. It could be classical philosophy or Greco-Roman culture or Germanic barbarian nationhood or feudalism or English nationhood or the American way of life or any number of other sources. It could be the traditional Catholic Church, which provides a template for this-worldly society. The Roman church of course carries the traces of its days as the official religion of Rome, and the Catholic liturgy also has deep roots in the ancient Jewish temple service.

People who try to form their practical ethics on the basis of a pure Christian teaching inevitably go gnostic. Look at the evangelicals today who have turned into globalist open borders wackos. Look at how the Christian traditionalist writers at What's Wrong with the World have articulated a single, pure, all-ruling moral ethos against "killing the innocent" that in certain circumstances, e.g., if enemy invaders included innocent hostages in their ranks, would require a "morally pure" people to allow their enemies to kill, defeat, and enslave them. Some morality!

Christianity is at the center of our culture, but is not the totality of it. People who make some unmediated version of Christianity the totality of their view of culture and politics become a danger to their society.

(I made a similar point in 2003 and re-linked it in 2005.)

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/008660.html

Frankly, I hope I see the tipping point in my lifetime.  Liberalism will be dead, but a New Crusade to save the West will have to be the order of the day.  It won't be pretty, but at least we'll have a shot at staying free.

And yes, with the commentors, I believe the same crisis will face America if we continue on our present course.

Liberals are so idiotic on so many levels.  They'd be funny if they just weren't so damned dangerous.