Seeking a Christian State?

There are certainly madder ideas.

Feb 02, 2024

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Believe it or not, there are bright young professionals in Ottawa who aspire to be something other than bureaucratic drones, if you know where to find them. I discovered some last week. They meet monthly under the guidance of the Rev. Dr Andrew Bennett, who once upon a time was our Religious Freedom Ambassador. Those were the days when Canada still knew what religious freedom is and had such an office. Anyway, I visited them at Cardus for a quodlibet and I will share here some of the questions raised and answers attempted. These are musings, however, and no more than that, which I beg the reader to bear in mind.

Does desiring a better country mean seeking a Christian state?

My answer to this first question is dialectical. It begins with “No, it doesn't.” For the better country in question is a heavenly one, in the sense that the city of God comes down from above rather than arising from below through political elbow grease. It is the work of God, not the work of man. Or rather it is the work of the God-man, who has already done the heavy lifting and deep cleansing; and of the Spirit of God, who is at work preparing citizens of that country and willing subjects of that sovereignty.

No one else can do what needs to be done; nor can anyone prevent what God has determined to do. The Spirit broods over the dark waters, over the chaotic sea of nations, until the command is given, “Let there be light!” And behold, there is light, light and vision.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”

Those who look for no such world, and those who fancy they are building it themselves, are both making an enormous mistake. The “realist” and the utopian are both confused. There will be such a world, but they cannot build it. They can only anticipate it and bear witness to it. If, that is, they discover faith.

That said, my second response to this question is an enthusiastic “Yes”—if by a Christian state we mean a secular arrangement in which the state serves, modestly and dutifully, a citizenry in which there is some consensus about Judaeo-Christian principles of justice, peace, and the common good. A society that knows such a consensus is an excellent thing, even a wonderful thing, and certainly a very useful thing. It mans the lighthouses that prevent the ship of state from running aground in the storms that rile the sea of nations. It is capable of staffing bridge and wheelhouse, and the lesser but crucial stations, with people of clear vision and good character.

If ever we had that consensus, however, we do not have it now. Moreover, we cannot hope to have it now, save by way of repentance and revival. Churches and synagogues should be pursuing that prayerfully. They should be pursuing it with great earnestness. Let them read their scriptures with ears that hear. Let them read, too, the opening book of The City of God, in which, following the sack of Rome by Alaric, Augustine points out to his co-religionists that the innocent have been punished with the guilty because the innocent are not entirely innocent. Both have suffered because the former did not confront the latter with their sins and, just so, invite them to repentance. They were too busy going along to get along, and getting along so as to make social and financial headway, having invested too much in temporal goods and not enough in eternal goods.

It may be that things are so far gone in our own time that, only through some sudden disaster that strips us of our pride and complacency and cures the madness that has descended upon us, will we see such a consensus emerge. Be that as it may, what has descended upon us is no eternal day of light and life. It is what the prophets called a day of the LORD, a day of judgment, a day of confusion and strife, a day when madness lays waste both society and state.

We are mad in matters of money, which we print freely or distribute digitally to give the illusion of wealth, while pursuing policies that destroy wealth. What's left of our wealth is being concentrated in the hands of a few, the better to frustrate and torment the many. Our “philanthropy” may be generous but it is not generosity. To a very large extent it is manipulation. Indeed, the more prominent the philanthropist, the more likely that philanthropist is a warmonger, whether literally or metaphorically. And wars are seldom just, though just wars are precious. Most often they are exercises in the libido dominandi and in filling, rather than depleting, the coffers of those who instigate them. Sometimes, of course, they are just convenient distractions. War itself can be camouflage, one kind of madness hiding another.

We are mad also in matters of science, which we claim to follow while not following. The truth about the last four years, which is really a truth about the last hundred years, is beginning to emerge. Eugenics and malgenics are peas in a pod. Biodefence and bioterrorism are indistinguishable. Medical science has been militarized. (Of this militarized “medicine” masks are the reservists’ regimental badge.) As often as not, however, the truths glimpsed are quickly obscured again by the fog of war, or by some new pseudo-scientific talisman that is thrust upon us to distract our attention.

We are mad, likewise, in environmental matters, having developed a severe carbon dioxide phobia. Who does not see what is happening? After a year of pandemic fear, “safe and effective” became the soothing mantra. Now all is doom and disaster again. Public and private entities announce that “the climate crisis is here!” And indeed it is, if what is meant is a renewed climate of fear in which men can be persuaded to do the very opposite of what is in their best interests. Better, they are told, to starve in their own homes than to permit grain to grow in sunny fields or cows to fart in open pastures. The end of farming, especially independent farming, will be the salvation of the world? That is the same as saying that the end of eating will be the cure of all that ails you.

We are mad in matters of immigration, as Tucker Carlson reminded us in his recent visit, though those orchestrating this are not altogether mad. Indeed, they are acting quite strategically. Replace the existing population, which is passably cohesive and self-sufficient, with a new population lacking both qualities; the latter will be dependent upon you in ways the former is not. That is not rocket science or even climate science. It's as risky as riding a rocket, but it makes sense if you want to convert democracy into plutocracy, a free society into a fully domesticated one. When I left London for Montreal, I could already see that it was the strategy Blair and Brown and Mandelson were following. What I didn't yet see was that it was being coordinated internationally, that a war on multiple peoples and nations was under way.

We are mad also in matters of sex. For a time we were encouraged to experiment sexually at every opportunity. Now we are told to deny the existence of sex itself. Biology is a social construction! Put tampons in their washroom and men will learn to menstruate. That’s quite an experiment; either that or an admission that some “men” are not men, though apparently we would like to see more of them, even in the military.

Why are we in receipt of such manifest nonsense from our political masters? Because the denial of sex is necessary in order to complete the demolition of the family as "the natural and fundamental group unit of society," which is what that quaint old document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, calls it. On this feature of our madness a few further remarks before resuming the course of my argument, for it matters much to my argument.

Some of you will know that, over the quarter-century since I returned to Canada, I have spent a good deal of time fighting on this front. Work on the covid front (from late March 2020) interrupted that, but it was not altogether unconnected. It quickly became evident that governments on both sides of the pond were following a “Lock ’em down til you can shoot ’em up” strategy, and that behind that strategy were other less obvious strategies, to which the public was falling prey. It also became evident that the chaos being sown by covid and covid policies served to undermine further, and quite dramatically, what stability was left in our society. Would that have been the case were our society not already teetering on the brink of moral exhaustion and psychological collapse? And what had brought it to the brink? The assault on the family, together with the militant secularism supposedly operating in defence of “multiculturalism.”

Perceptive people could see this coming a century ago. Even before the Great War, the very idea of the family was coming under suspicion, not merely through an excess of devotion to individualist philosophies or for the sake of advancing some hitherto forbidden sexual agenda, but also to pluck up the family as the root of moral and political authority. For it is precisely the family—the natural family that is both procreative and educative, hence guardian of the nation's morals—that most stands in the way of those who want a revolution. The family is ground zero. Every functioning family is a miniature freedom convoy that must be crushed if statism is to prevail.

Among our own contemporaries, one man who understood that was William Gairdner. Besides being a successful Olympic athlete, an equally successful doctoral student in literature and philosophy at Stanford, then a teacher at York University, chair of the Gairdner Foundation and founder of Civitas, Bill Gairdner was a prolific and powerful diagnostician of cultural decay, writing penetrating works such as The Trouble with Canada and The Trouble with Democracy and The Book of Absolutes. He died on 12 January. If a serious obituary has been written, I've yet to see it, but I trust it's coming. [update: a reader points me to this by Tom Flanagan]

One of his most important works is a massive tome published by Stoddart in 1992 called The War against the Family: A Parent Speaks Out on the Political, Economic, and Social Policies that Threaten us All. Its first chapter is titled "The State vs. the Family." The managing editor of Stoddart when that book appeared was Donald Bastian. Last October, alas, we lost Don also, at a somewhat younger age. May they both rest in peace.

Under his own label and auspices, Don later published a slim volume of mine, for which Bill kindly wrote a foreword, though it was scarcely more than a footnote to his own pioneering work. By that point, publishers had to be still more careful what they published and authors what they wrote. I thought I couldn't go wrong beginning with Rousseau, so I called it Nation of Bastards. It appeared in 2007. Here is Bill’s foreword, in which he captures, incisively and eloquently, the essence of the argument and of our common struggle.

Professor Farrow has rendered us all – Christians, non-Christians, agnostics, and yes, even atheists – a public service in publishing this little book. It is a call to action from a deeply aggrieved soul who loves his country even as he mourns it; for, as argued here, our once peaceable kingdom has become a nation of increasingly autonomous individuals severed from the oldest and most important forms of human legitimacy – political, legal, biological, and moral.
Such a heartfelt cry in the Canadian conceptual wilderness reminds me of nothing so much as the many booklets, pamphlets, and tracts published by private Canadian and American citizens during recent centuries, prior to the rise of the homogenized public orthodoxies now suffered on mass publics by mass media. There was a time when concerned citizens took up such writing as a moral and political duty (often at their own expense) in order to ring the change of their most passionate ideas on the public forge. It is a rousing thing to see it here.
In the variety of essays presented, readers will sense the main themes soon enough. Of greatest import, perhaps, is that of the gradual insinuation of state control into the heart of family life, marriage, and the traditional parent–child relationship, all achieved by a species of legal legerdemain that Farrow reveals in intricate detail. What is clear by the end is that none of this would have been possible but for the fact that modern democratic states, so eager to de-legitimize their own religious and moral traditions in the name of equality, have settled on what they believe to be a neutral and tolerant secular ground that in fact operates as a new, this-worldly religion. It is a false political religion that can only sustain itself by demanding the substitution of merely legal relationships for the important biological ties that bind. The recent substitution of the phrase “two persons” for “a man and a woman” in the ancient definition of marriage is the most shocking example. With one stroke this revision has successfully removed procreative biology as a condition for marriage, in order to accommodate and equalize the “marriages” of homosexuals. It is a delight to see how Farrow delicately eviscerates the law and the language surrounding this fateful metamorphosis, showing it to be far from neutral.
Never far from view, either, is the author’s justly damning critique of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), especially with respect to section 15, on so-called equality rights, which are now used far too often as a battering ram to bring down social and economic policies that for good reason were created to protect and privilege human relationships once considered essential to the very survival of society. After pondering Farrow’s essays, readers will be pardoned for thinking that there has likely never been as vicious and thoroughgoing an attack on marriage and the family in the name of equality since the days of the French Revolution.
Certainly the most poignant and important concern of this little book – it ought to concern every caring citizen – is the manner in which the interests of children have been shoved aside to accommodate our new state religion and the demolition of marriage it has required. I don’t like the term “rights” at all, for it too is all too often found severed completely from its essential link to obligation. But if there was ever a natural right to be found, it must surely be the right of all children, wherever possible, to know and be raised by their own parents. This book reminds us how, as a nation, we have cavalierly eliminated this universal right of children, merely to satisfy the desires of a small minority of adults who repudiate mutual procreation altogether.
Nation of Bastards explains how the state has commandeered the institution of marriage, how against all truth and logic our courts have declared public morality to be a private matter, and therefore how even human dignity – a concept deeply rooted in our demanding religious and moral tradition – has been thrown overboard in favour of the embarrassingly simplistic and unsatisfying idea of personal autonomy.
I close by saying that I hope the publication of this book will encourage more of the same, because we are presently living in a period of national Denkverboten, as the Germans have called it – the official forbidding of thought. All Canadians feel this worm at work in their hearts whenever they have the urge to speak the truth but keep quiet out of fear.

I have omitted the last line, which is another expression of gratitude, since Bill is the one really deserving of gratitude. When we are not grateful—or not grateful enough to speak up, following his example—sometimes it is because we do not understand what by now we ought to understand, what he tried to help us understand: the fate of the nation hangs on the family.

Nietzsche complained that we do not yet grasp what we have achieved by killing God. We still cling to notions of the dignity of man, for example, that cannot possibly survive the deicide. Neither, I think, do we quite understand what we have achieved by killing the first institution established by God—marriage, the marriage of a man and a woman. We are all bastards now, wards of the state, and we are treated as such. That is what we have achieved. Unfortunately for us, the state is now a Juju state, ready to sacrifice one citizen for another, or even for a non-citizen, so long as it serves the interests of those in power.

To talk of a Christian state under such conditions, even to talk of a state based on natural law and the fundamentals identified in Gairdner's Book of Absolutes, is like talking about lost Atlantis or Númenor. The decline of the West looks increasingly like a complete collapse of the West. But if you ask me, not whether I think such a state attainable or recoverable, but only whether I think we would benefit from having such a state, the answer, I repeat, is Yes. And if you press me as to whether we should work toward it, despite past failures and present conditions, the answer again is Yes.

We must work soberly, but urgently. We have no alternative. Tectonic plates are shifting beneath us, pulling us apart. Storms are building such as we have seldom, if ever, seen. Those who have the kind of faith lauded in Hebrews 11 will not panic. Nor will they neglect their obligation to love their neighbours as themselves. They will work alongside them for the sake of the earthly city, while encouraging them to seek citizenship in the heavenly, in that city of eternal peace which will never collapse or sink into the sea. They will say with the psalmist, taking the same comfort, that

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

But how are we to work in and for the earthly city? Serving the needy in our communities is the most fundamental task, but there is also political work to be done. Surely we must resist the surveillance state. (As a small token of resistance I politely decline to use facial recognition cameras, explaining that I have no wish to aid or abet the Sinicization of the West.) We must demand the demilitarization of medicine, which is becoming a primary site of scrutiny. We must push for the rolling back of rapacious “green” policies, the securing of borders against illegal immigrants, a moratorium on mass immigration, more prudent (and less ideological) aid to poorer countries. In all those other things that concern us—bureaucratic sprawl, unbalanced budgets, lack of accountability from public officials, even election officials, and the endless warmongering—we must take counsel together. Above all, we must fight to take back our schools and universities, our hospitals and hospices, our accrediting and grant agencies, which the de-colonizers are still busy colonizing. Alternatively, and perhaps more realistically despite the many legal and financial hurdles, we must demand the right to dig new wells, to create parallel institutions. For those that exist now were once the work of our own hands.

All this is important, all this is necessary, though demanding is one thing and achieving another. But, even if achieved, or partly achieved, it is not enough. We must also contest the secularism of the public sphere, calling it out for what it is: theology by sleight of hand and, embryonically, a new religion. There has never been a religionless society or a religionless state, nor ever shall be. The a-theology of secularism is still theology, albeit an intellectually thin sort of theology that cannot hide the deep moral corruption it engenders. Into the void created gushes a highly volatile mixture of scientism and socialism, the synthesis of which produces a violently utopian mindset, a Marxist religion totalitarian in spirit and ruinous in practice. That religion is in every way the enemy of the family.

We cannot avoid fighting the war over the family, however we may feel about fighting a war over religion. “The truth,” says Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, “is that only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the state.” That is exactly right. So if we want to put a stop to the political revolution that is under way, we will have to put a stop to the sexual revolution as well, which is now in its anti-sex phase. But we will not succeed at any of that without repentance and the sacrificial sort of evangelism that leads to repentance. There can be nothing approximating a Christian state without something approximating the Christian citizen.

It is by reason of abandoning both God and the natural family that we are now witnessing in the public sphere a veritable tsunami of betrayals that is sweeping away, not just religious freedom, but all freedoms. When the one God is denied, and the gods of hearth and home are routed, when even the churches and synagogues betray their responsibility—a betrayal to which Gairdner drew attention in The War Against the Family—what is left but servitude to the demons who have stirred us to this madness? Bring on the pride parades, trailed by the breast-binders and ball-cutters, escorted by the Child Protection Services of the Juju state. Bring on the hate-crime squads and the official censors. Expand the army of digital trackers and bring to heel the dissidents. This is Our Democracy, don’t you know?

Well, if I am not arrested in mid-sentence, the next question I shall speak to can be addressed rather more calmly. It concerns the differences between those whom Bruce Pardy calls Virtue People and those he calls Freedom People, and the dilemma he raises as to whether they can work side by side against the madness I have been describing. How far Bruce would agree with my description of that madness here, or with my resolution of the dilemma in Part Two, I will not venture to say. Among my own readers, as among his, there will surely be differences of opinion, but no Denken verboten.

Denken verboten! Of that the last few years have given us our fill, have they not? Let us not fall, then, for the old canard that talk of a Christian state, or of the virtues prized in a Christian society, tends inevitably to narrowness of thought and restriction of liberty. Not when the secularist state, the putatively religionless state that is more and more openly on the side of the demons, has shown itself ever so much more adept at that. Not when it deploys every device it can muster, every low trick and high-tech wizardry, to conduct its cultural and political Blitzkrieg. Let us not go silent when charged with being “far right” by fascists on the left. Let us show, rather, the courage of our own convictions. For biblical religion is neither left nor right. Nor, God forbid, is it centrist; it does not belong to the broad way that leads to destruction. It is, as I intimated at the outset, eschatological. Its eschatology is what lends it its cutting edge.