Where Have All The Christian Soldiers Gone?

The abject failure of the Christian church in America is astounding when you compare the church today with Americans from 70 years ago.

This essay on the condition of Christianity in America is so succinct in it’s indictment – that to ignore it is to invite the judgment that is for certain coming upon the House of God in this country.  As I have stated before, in the context of the bible and our military: a military that is not bound by the bible and Christian principles is a military that can be used to crush righteousness and impose wickedness.

 

Onward Christian Soliders? Not Likely

George Tate was in the US Army in World War II. He served in a unit that was establishing communication lines across the Himalayas.

George’s son, Sid is a parishioner, he said about his Dad, “His plane was riddled with enemy gunfire going in, and as I understand it his job was conducted in an active combat zone. He received the Bronze Star, which was the military’s 4th highest award:  Awarded to ‘any person whom while serving in with the United States military after 6 December 1941, that distinguished himself or herself apart from his or her comrades by brave or praiseworthy achievement or service. The act justifying award of the medal must be performed while fighting an enemy of the United States, or while involved in conflict with an opposing/foreign force.’ ”

Sid sent me this snapshot  of the opening pages of his Dad’s government issued WW2 G.I. Bible.

Note the beautifully written letter from the occupant of the White House. It is simple, dignified and full of an assumed faith, shared hope and noble spirit.

Imagine such a letter being written today by the present occupant.

It’s impossible.

The following preface pages offered manly Christian advice for soldiers going into battle:

See how it is assumed that the soldiers first of all, know what the Christian virtues are, and secondly, that they have an interest in pursuing them. They live in a moral universe. It is assumed that a man will be seeking to be the best man he can be–not just the richest man he can be. It is assumed that the soldiers will understand this moral quest, and even if they dismiss it, that they will at least know that they are dismissing something which is great and good.

Is such an awareness alive in our society today? I don’t see it.

Should the armies of the False Prophet Mohammed advance, and should we need to go into battle would we be able to summon the same Spirit of noble Christianity in our country today? I doubt it.

What strikes me about this artifact from the second world war is that this Bible was issued to the troops without question. It was seen to be part of their equipment and to be accepted by all with an open heart and mind.

This indicates that the whole population understood that the moral battles were also spiritual battles, and if there was a spiritual dimension to war, then there was also such a thing as spiritual warfare. Soldiers were expected to be equipped physically but they were also expected to be fit morally and spiritually.

Millions of young Americans went into battle across the world from a country that was truly Christian in its worldview and self understanding. They were not all knights in shining armor, they were a band of sinners, but they had a shared underlying faith and set of moral values. They understood that they were engaged in spiritual as well as physical warfare.

Furthermore, they were clear about their objectives. They were faced with an overwhelming and clearly evil force and they rallied to defeat it.

In the intervening seventy years our moral fiber has been so weakened by wealth, decadence and self indulgence that it seems unlikely not only that such a noble letter would be written from the White House, but that our own people would be able to respond with anything like the simple, noble spirit evidenced by this soldier’s Bible.

Our country has suffered from a severe disintegration of our faith so that many no longer believe in the spiritual dimension of evil nor do they believe in the concept of good and evil at all. Instead “evil” is what does not work and “good” is what works. There is no need for virtue in utilitarianism.

We are also reeling from a moral revolution so destructive that we still cannot understand its final implications.

I’m talking about the sexual revolution of the 1960s. What came along with the pill was not just illegitimacy, abortion, divorce, pornography and sexual disease. The other destruction was the erosion of the moral sense. For most men the first and most pressing area of self control was to control the sexual drive. With the pill and anti bionics that was gone.

Once that area of life no longer needed to be controlled why control anything else? The rampant sexuality brought on rampant greed, rampant violence, rampant self indulgence, rampant gluttony, rampant drug use, rampant alcohol abuse. Why control oneself at all? There was suddenly no motivate to achieve virtue. Why should one seek to be virtuous unless one retained some sort of religious faith, such an ambition was pointless.

The men who fought were our fathers and grandfathers. They were manly, simple, strong and good. They were good and they are gone. What would those young men have thought of the state of our nation today? Abortion on demand? Same sex marriage? Sex education for first graders? “Transgendered” men dressing as women and having an operation to become women? Women priests and homosexual priests? Those who survive must be horrified. Those who have gone would ask if this is what they fought and died for.

I know. I know.

There are wonderful, strong and good fighting men and women in our armed forces today.

I also know that much of the rot in our country today was brought about by the very men who returned from the second world war and pursued a path of greed, self indulgence and worldly power.

Nevertheless, this artifact from only seventy years ago reminds us where we were and how far we have fallen.

This is the Muslim criticism of our culture: that we are the Great Satan: we are decadent, immodest, sexually depraved, twisted, fat, complacent, immoral, violent and cruel. They see that we kill our unborn, divorce our wives, rape our children and murder one another in the streets. That’s how they see us. Are they completely wrong?

In one of the other front pages we see the Lord’s Prayer one the left hand side and well known Christian hymns on the right.

The first hymn listed is “Onward Christian Soldiers…Marching as to War…with the cross of Jesus going on before.”

Onward Christian Soldiers today?

Not Likely.

The Bulldozer Morality of the MarxoFascist Left

Raw emoting rage, stoked by Utopian Leftists will leave nothing but ruin in it’s wake, and they will think they do service to their moral superiority.

 

This essay by Daniel Greenfield is perfectly spot-on in it’s analysis of the zeitgeist of the Marxofascist Utopian Leftists that easily capture the emoting class of America that no longer thinks or knows our history.  It needed to be reblogged here.

On reading his excellent illustration of what we face in America, a bulldozer of vapid redefined morality, I cannot help but think of the scripture that Jesus warned would take place upon His followers at the close of the Age:

 They will put you out of the congregations, but an hour is coming that everyone killing you will think to bear a service before God. John 16:2

Without citing scripture, Greenfield illustrates with scalpel precision, the bulldozer morality of those who would subjugate you.  He points out perfectly that those who see you as evil, think they are serving a higher morality.

All the Morals of a Bulldozer

Daniel Greenfield

To be genuinely outraged about something, you need to actually believe in something. Without principles, outrage is just tactical anger, or bullying in plainer language. Principles, values and codes are universal. That is if you are angry about a dog being mistreated by riding on top of a car, then you should at least be equally angry at dogs being eaten.

If a man shooting another man after a confrontation and not being charged for it angers you, then it should anger you regardless of the color of his skin. For that matter if racism or sexism offends you, then it should offend you regardless of whether it is directed at a woman or a black man who is a liberal or a conservative.

It’s child play to notice that the game doesn’t work this way anymore. That the media engages in displays of tactical anger, serious-face inquiries into issues that they are concerned about only when they benefit their side, manufactured outrage that is not based on any deeply held beliefs, but only on the need to score some points.

If Republicans seem slower on the uptake, it’s because their ranks tend to be stocked with old fashioned types who even in their more liberal incarnations still try to maintain consistent values. The mindset that that they confront is alien to all but a few of their opposition political operatives. It is a mindset devoid of any values, operating on a Pavlovian reflex that reacts to talking points without framing them in any larger context.

Media moral bullying follows this course, raising issues that they pretend are vital principles, but stop being so the moment they no longer benefit them. The iron clad value of a moment ago is discarded into the trash a second later. The serious faces relax, the twitter accounts go dead and all the attention is refocused on some truly important issue, like the next iPhone.

It’s not entirely cynical, though it mostly is. The people behaving this way have lost the ability to recognize enduring abstract principles that have an existence beyond their emotions of the moment. They don’t live by rules, rather rules live by them, if they are angry, then their anger is a moral issue, if they are not angry, it isn’t. Emotions are the only moral barometer that people who cannot see beyond the self have.

That makes them natural bullies, their shows of outrage lifting their anger up to self-righteousness. Their tactical anger is part pretense, part real, and even they don’t really know the difference anymore. They have been taught that their momentary moral tantrums make them good people, they have not however been taught to be good people. They believe that they are right because they are angry and that they are angry because they are right. It’s an attitude you can see in traffic arguments, in divorce court and on the evening news.

Like well trained Oceanians, it depends on audiences in colorful Keffiyah scarves and ironic t-shirts who rise eagerly for the daily Two-Minute Hates, shouting against racism, patriarchy, carbon, oil, corporate personhood and logos, gun rights, animal testing, heteronormative bathrooms and any of the endless list of things to be outraged by, without the ability to apply their denunciations to a moral code.

Oceanian propaganda was deliberately inconsistent so that none of its citizens developed a consistent code that might allow them to judge the system even by its own rules. Left-wing talking points tend to be like that, consistently inconsistent, willfully senseless, cultivating an instinct for mob rage, for hours of political analysis, but no steady rules of conduct that would apply to the analyzers.

The only consistent principle that we are good and they are bad. If you understand that Republicans are racists, that a cabal of corporations, zionists and christian fanatics are plotting to take over the country, and that they hate anyone who is different from them, then you have all the context that you need to understand the liberal message. Without that it’s gibberish. With it, it’s simplistic but comprehensible propaganda.

Boiled down to its essence, the liberal message is that we are good people, because they are bad people. The new Democrats sticker which reads, “Not a Republican” aptly sums up this void. It follows that good people cannot be bad and that bad people cannot be good, and once you accept this message, no further ethics or morals are needed. The very goodness of your side is all the moral code you need.

Identity politics substitutes for a moral code, not so much racial politics as racial tolerance politics which holds that liberals are more ethical, because they are more tolerant, better people because they care. The only crime they are ever guilty of is caring too much. Even the Communists and the terrorists were just too outraged by all the capitalism, racism and zionism, and had no choice but to start shooting and starving people.

It’s possible to spend years immersed in this swill without realizing that none of it is moral or ethical, that it’s “They are bad, we are good”  blaring from every radio and television set. Morality and ethics is about principles that apply across the board. When your only principle is that your group is good and your enemies are bad, then not only are you devoid of morals and ethics, but you are incapable of recognizing immoral and unethical behavior except with a gut instinct that your ideology has trained you to discard.

Cognitive dissonance sets in over everything from Communist gulags to Occupy Wall Street rapes, if things aren’t supposed to happen, then they never did. When the ideological good confronts the real world bad, either ideology dies or morality dies. Historically it’s more often been the latter than the former. Just ask one of the good Nazis or good Communists who had decent home lives, loved their children and pets, and kept on believing in everything except right and wrong.

When you take a bulldozer to traditional values, what takes its place is bulldozer ideology, the expedient virtue of bulldozing things and the virtue of whatever rises in their place. Once you believe in the bulldozer, then you must also believe in whatever mess follows in its wake, otherwise you are forced to take a long hard look at the virtue of the bulldozer. And once that happens, you are one step away from becoming a reactionary clinging to traditional values.

What has grown in the wake of the bulldozer is bulldozer ethics, situational ethics that justify the virtue of bulldozing things as a vital moral principle, disguising their appeal in calls to fairness, justice, decency, tolerance and a thousand other virtues that they never practice across the board.

Bulldozer values call forth explosive faux moral tantrums at anything that stands in front of the bulldozer. These tantrums can be seen on the late night news, on the front page of the New York Times, which long ago stopped relegating its moral tantrums and special pleading to the editorial page, on liberal blogs and a thousand other places. They don’t however represent moral or ethics, only the virtue of the bulldozer– the virtue of power.

The country must know about Romney’s dog riding on top of the car. Why? Because it shows that Romney is a bad person. They must not know about Obama eating dogs, because it might make him ‘wrongly’ seem like a bad person. The only consistent value here is that of the bulldozer. Obama is driving the bulldozer, and so he must be protected, just the same way that the media protected Clinton in his own private war on women and their right to say no to being groped or propositioned, because back then he was driving the bulldozer. When Clinton briefly got in the way of Obama’s bulldozer, then the media bulldozed him.

There is genuine anger over Romney’s dog on their side, not because they care about dogs, though they often do, in the same detached way that they care about the Third World, but because they already believe that he is a bad person. Any anecdote that makes him a bad person feeds their anger. It isn’t an outrage based on principles, but on their burning hate for anyone who stands in front of the bulldozer. They already know that all such people are bad, any story that reinforces this feeds into an existing anger, much the same way that people who hate Jews, Christians, the Chinese, women or dog owners feed off selective incidents that fit their narrative. And they mistake their shoddy bigotry for moral outrage.

When your only moral value is that of the bulldozer and its destructive rampage, then you have all the moral values of your chosen instrument. The moral tantrums are destructive, rather than constructive, they never seem to fulfill their stated mission of healing America and making it a better place (unless you consider provoking multiple racist attacks over the Zimmerman case to be that) but like driving a bulldozer into someone’s house, they make them feel good.

And that is what it’s really all about. The ego. The moral power of the self. The destruction of the old by people who are convinced that they are the new order. That they are the young, even when they are old. That the destruction they leave in their wake is really construction. And that anyone who thwarts their destructive impulses is the enemy and that destroying him is an absolute good.

These are the morals of the bulldozer and the values of liberal America.

***

The Hypocrisy of the Religious Left

Saving the Soul of the Religious Left by Joseph C. Phillips A reader recently sent me an email admonishing me for not being more supportive of President Obama. For reasons that were not immediately clear, he also raised the issue of my confessed Christianity. The “aha” moment came when he asked, “Do you pray for your leader like you’re instructed in the good book?” I responded that while I have prayed for the president, I do not do so regularly. That, in his mind, was evidence of my Christian hypocrisy. This is an elementary school argument, but sadly one that is far too commonly made by the religious left and their secular allies. All Christian stumbling is demonstration of falsity; individual failure to practice principles is ipso facto proof of the bankruptcy of those principles. Sophistry of this sort allows the new left to dismiss ideas they disagree with and evidence they find inconvenient with a simple label: “religious right-wing extremist.” That sure beats actually having to make a substantive argument. What remains unclear is why the regular and unabashed support the religious left offers candidates whose policies are incompatible with or in direct contradiction to Christian principles is not more damning evidence of their Christian hypocrisy. Aside from the fact that the left takes it as a given that they are both smarter and morally superior– one answer might be that the religious left now preaches moral relativism as opposed to the objective truth of God. Not long ago I asked a black clergyman about his (and so many others) support for candidates that write and support policy inconsistent with the tenants of Christianity. He responded by asking me, “what are Christian beliefs?” His question was neither rhetorical nor was it an invitation for my definition. Sadly it was his serious contention that the “Bible is not a unitary document but a collection of books. Which one you choose to quote and live by is a result of interpretative choice.” Alas, his explanation seems inconsistent with a Christianity that worships a unified father, son and Holy Spirit; that accepts the bible as the inspired and living word of God; that views the individual books as part of a greater whole with a unity of theme and purpose and that believes the risen Christ is the fulfillment of ALL scripture. To hold that there are no true Christian beliefs just individual opinions–and all of those equally valid—leads me to guess he purchased his diploma cheaply and on-line. Of course this pastor is only one of many claiming to be independent – choosing their candidates on “the basis of intellect, moral compass, life experiences, sensitivity to ethnic diversity and a commitment to expanding the blessings of liberty” and yet somehow always votes for a Democrat. The excuse is that the hypocritical religious right – those that pray for his happy retirement and not his political success — are too busy talking about family values and not dealing with the broader moral issues of poverty, injustice and more recently healthcare. Significantly, this has led the religious left away from preaching virtue as the way in which God empowers individuals and towards locking arms with secular leftists that preach the administrative state as the anecdote to man’s falling. For the left, redemption is to be had not through personal sacrifice and struggle, but through the redistribution of resources; not through personal discipline but through mandates for equality. It is not enough to save our neighbor we must work to save the planet. And yet both spiritual redemption and political liberty are secured through individual virtue. The most important thing Christians can do is influence behavior. To be baptized is to recognize both the truth of the example and the veracity of the instruction book. Whether of the right or left if you are not talking about moral behavior — that is to say behavior that is objectively right or wrong — then you are not going to impact social issues like poverty and injustice. This is where the religious lefts relativism fails them and those they purport to champion. Issues of personal morality are important not because some of us want to limit others fun, but because some behavior – like some ideas – both undermine those institutions that shelter our liberty, and ultimately (and most importantly) move us further away from the Lord. And here ultimately is the greatest question the religious left must be prepared to answer. Do we walk by faith in the administrative state? Or do we believe in mans capacity to change his life through the grace and mercy of God?