Trust Not in Princes
A warning against God-forgetfulness
My wife and I were driving in Idaho not long ago—just for the pleasure of it, wicked folk that we are—when we espied a sign bearing a contemporary paraphrase of the two great commandments. "Welcome to Trump Country," it read. "Love God, Guns, Family, Freedom, and your Neighbor."
Now, I'm not against anything mentioned in that list. I even stopped in at a gun shop to look at hunting rifles. But I'm certainly against the list itself, which borders on blasphemy. The living God cannot be put in a list!
The first great commandment is drawn from the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: the LORD your God, the LORD is One! And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might.” The second is to love your neighbour as yourself, helping him or her, body and soul, on towards the God who is thus to be loved.
The jumbled paraphrase on the sign, however well-intentioned, is not a means of remembering God but of forgetting God, who is all good and deserving of all our love, as the act of contrition says. It is precisely because he is worthy of all our love that he cannot be a mere item in a list of loves.
Moreover, to say of a place that it is God's country is one thing, though in truth every country is God’s country, for God made heaven and earth, determining for all peoples their “allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they might seek after him.” To say of a place that it is Trump country is quite another thing, even if it contains an allusion to the defence of boundaries and borders. The counsel of Psalm 146 is neglected:
Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no help.
When his breath departs he returns to his earth;
on that very day his plans perish.
Trump country, I fear, is “trust in princes” country, where every man is his own prince and Mr. Trump a prince because he promises to recognize that. If so, that also is a serious form of God-forgetfulness. We ought rather to say with the psalmist:
Happy is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the Lord his God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them;
who keeps faith for ever.
It does often seem that even those who profess to remember God have forgotten God. That evening, in a hotel in Nelson B.C., we watched Mr. Trump's convention speech. He himself, we learned, had remembered God, when he survived the shot that bloodied his ear on 12 July. His breath did not depart, his plans did not perish. He survived, he said, because God was on his side.
Like his whole rambling speech, that too was something of a jumble, even if we detect in it a trace of the psalmist’s faith. For there can be no question about God being on his side. That was determined two millennia ago in the womb of Mary. God is decidedly on his side, just as he is on Mr. Comperatore's side, the fireman who died that day. The pertinent question—the first question that should have occurred to Mr Trump—is whether he is on God's side, the way a man should be and, in Christ, can be; indeed, had better be, if he means to die in a state of grace.
No one, I suppose, expected Donald Trump to follow John Paul II's example, running to Mary to place the spent bullet in her crown. Someone did prompt him to acknowledge the Nativity of Mary on 8 September, which he did with a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe. One hopes the acknowledgment was sincere and not just a nod to the Hispanic voter.
Enough of Trump and Trump country, however. What about the church of Jesus Christ, which stands at the heart of God's country, that through it “the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places”? For it seems that even the princes of the church have become God-forgetful.
Not all of them, of course. We had the privilege yesterday, at McGill, of a visit from a former prefect of the Holy Office, who gave a lecture on the philosophical failings of the West, as it declined from theism to pantheism to deism to atheism, and on the deleterious cultural effects of that decline. Something Cardinal Müller made quite clear in the Q & A that followed—and no, it was not I who asked the question—is that he was distressed by the practical atheism of many church leaders. Leaders, for example, who during the covid period did just what they were told to do by western regimes such as that of Trump and Biden.
To be more specific, they closed their churches for months at a time, supposedly for the greater good. But what greater good is there, in this God-forgetful world, than the churches of the living God joyfully worshiping God, while actively caring for the bodies and souls of their neighbours? Thus are the great commandments fulfilled. Yet princes of the church capitulated to secular princes who presumed to suspend those commandments, condemning people to live alone, pray alone, suffer alone, die alone.
Do not let the implication, the perfectly obvious implication, escape your notice! If the great commandments can be suspended by human governments, those governments are greater than God himself, or whatever it is we call “God.” That is God-forgetfulness on a grand scale. It is indeed practical atheism.
Practical atheism is just what we now expect from secular governments, which through a perverse notion of secularity have carved out for themselves a God-free zone for their own dominion. It is no surprise that, in that ever-expanding zone, they themselves should play at being God. But that ecclesial government should concede such a zone—what a travesty!
The first great commandment is not a commandment to individuals only. It is a commandment to the whole people of God, to the holy nation created by covenant with God. Loving the LORD God is a public affair. It is a liturgical affair, the highest work of the people. The role of man in creation, as Genesis 1 already makes clear, is to be the liturgical animal, returning praise to God, with the holy angels, on behalf of all creatures.
Hence also the command, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy." When all but a few churches are content to be locked and shuttered, whether for fear of death or for fear of man, something has gone very badly wrong.
I do not say that man is a liturgical animal only. He is also a political animal, yes. Politics, rightly practiced, is a noble art. Conducted on the principle of subsidiarity, and kept to a modest scale, it has, even among fallen creatures, a reasonable hope of success so long as it rests on the foundations provided by natural and divine law.
Unfortunately, in our God-forgetfulness we have departed those foundations. Our positive law is becoming incoherent, unreliable, cruelly constrictive, frequently immoral. When it ignores, not only its own constitutional principles, but the basic law of God, it becomes blasphemous. The rule of law gives way to rule by fiat. Reason gives way to coercion. A realm is constructed by and for the man who is on God’s side only in the perverse sense that he puts himself in the place of God. He decides to remake everything, even his own nature. He will no longer be male and female. He will no longer be body and soul. He will no longer be the bearer of an inalienable dignity of which he is steward, not author.
The princes of this realm—this pathetic realm of practical atheism, this realm in which evil is called good and good evil—want us now to trust them implicitly. They ask us to place all our confidence in them as they assume authority over the whole creation. All God's country, they fancy, will soon be theirs. They will be masters of the vineyard. To those lesser beings who have not attained the heights of deification, they will themselves assign times and boundaries. They will measure them (as the cardinal said) by their own quantitative values. They will give them digital identities and digital dollars, tagging them as they do deer or fish. They will collect their biometric data, the better to track, trace, and control them. They will mine them for data at every turn, so as to keep feeding those magical AI machines that live on data. The mess their mining leaves behind, their lawyers will find a way to clean up.
These princes are not stewards of creation's praise for the God of gods. They are not neighbours to their fellow men. They certainly are not gods. They are but mortal men, rapacious men, who, as another psalm says, suffer no pangs of conscience.
They are not in trouble as other men are;
they are not stricken like other men.
Therefore pride is their necklace;
violence covers them as a garment.
Their eyes swell out with fatness,
their hearts overflow with follies.
They scoff and speak with malice;
loftily they threaten oppression.
They set their mouths against the heavens,
and their tongue struts through the earth.Therefore the people turn and praise them;
and find no fault in them.
And they say, “How can God know?
Is there knowledge in the Most High?”
Such men suppose God himself to be forgetful, but he is not. He will see that they fall into their own pits, the pits they have dug for others. Yet the psalmist himself is nearly seduced by them and contemplates joining them—until he betakes himself to the temple sanctuary, there remembering God. Then he foresees their doom. Then he understands how beastly he himself was becoming, and how short-sighted, when he trusted in princes rather than trusting in God.
Solzhenitsyn, with great urgency, warned us in our own time against God-forgetfulness, and the gulags to which it leads.
If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: “Men have forgotten God.” The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.
Will we stay the course of practical atheism, or will we repent? “Let us ask ourselves,” said Solzhenitsyn:
Are not the ideals of our century false? And is not our glib and fashionable terminology just as unsound, a terminology that offers superficial remedies for every difficulty? Each of them, in whatever sphere, must be subjected to a clear-eyed scrutiny while there is still time. The solution to the crisis will not be found along the well-trodden paths of conventional thinking. Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth.
To remember God is our most urgent spiritual need. It is our most urgent ecclesial task. It is also our most urgent political necessity. Neither the “God and guns” of Trump country, nor (much worse) the Moloch worship of Harris country, can save America. Only a sincere return to the living God can do that, for any country. Otherwise the trajectory we are following will lead exactly where Solzhenitsyn told us it will lead. As Cardinal Müller put it last night, it will lead to hell on earth, as in some places it already has.
News today of an apparent second assassination attempt on Mr Trump suggests that the Trump Derangement Syndrome one encounters nearly everywhere is, on the fringes, manifesting as lethal violence. But it is already, even at the centre, a kind of intellectual and moral violence.
I've been following Peter Kwasniewski for a while now. He might suggest that we are now reaping the whirlwind of godlessness from what was sown by Paul VI and left unchecked by JPII and B16 (and indeed Cardinal Mueller?) when they deemed it right and just to destroy and/or acquiesce in the destruction of the central work of God bequeathed to we the people of God by God incarnate and by the working of the Holy Spirit in the bosom of the Church over the course of her first 19 centuries -- that is, 'the Mass of the Ages.' I don't know what you think about that, but I wonder if that's what we should perhaps principally have in mind with the notion of 'remembering God.'
Politically speaking, it appears that both Harris and Trump are Moloch worshippers, Donald just a tiny bit less extreme than Mamala. (She's apparently a true fanatic, while he's merely an unprincipled narcissistic opportunist.)
As for trust not in princes, I tend to think this means trust not in politics at all. The foreordained fate of the city of man is in God's hands. Our task as Christians is not some kind of promethean neo-Pelagian crusade to save the city of man -- and I'm certainly not implying that we are are permitted to be politically indifferent -- but to remember that it is God who has indeed doomed the world to destruction, and that friendship with the world is enmity with God. Certainly those are principles of Christian faith from which the prelates of the Church seem to have silently and not-so-silently apostatized.