To Win or Die with Europe

Although underreported, it is now clear that the United States has shown far too little concern for the civilian casualties of Iraq. Should this surprise us? How can a nation that has so little respect for its own peoples’ desire for a secure homeland have any respect for another peoples’ homeland.

Every American of European ancestry is told from the first hour of his birth that he has been born into a unique nation. His is a proud inheritance. Is it really? It doesn’t seem that way to me. I’m proud of the Christian inheritance my ancestors brought over from Europe, but I’m not proud of an anti-nation that respects creed over blood, religious diversity over Christianity, freedom over virtue, and the power of government over the hearth.

Despite the fact that we are told we don’t need a homeland founded on a common faith and common ties of blood, many American Europeans still long for one. It is not possible to completely kill the yearnings in a European heart. I know I have always longed for a homeland, which is why I suspect I have always been in sympathy with the Southern side in the Conflict between the States. There was a real sense of the homeland in the Old South. Thomas Nelson Page suggests a reason for this:

The difference between the Southern civilization and the Northern was the result of the difference between their origins and subsequent surroundings.

The Northern colonies of Great Britain in America were the asylums of religious zealots and revolutionists who at their first coming were bent less on the enlargement of their fortunes than on the freedom to exercise their religious convictions, however much the sudden transition from dependence and restriction to freedom and license may in a brief time have tempered their views of liberty and changed them into proscriptors of the most tyrannical type…

The Southern, on the other hand, came with all the ceremonial of an elaborate civil government—with an executive, a council deputed by authorities at home, and formal and minute instructions and regulations.

The crown hoped to annex the unknown land lying between the El Dorado, which Spain had obtained amid the summer seas, and the unbounded claims of its hereditary enemy, France, to the North and West.

The Church, which viewed the independence of the Northern refugees as schism, if not heresy, gave to this enterprise its benison in the belief that “the adventurers for the plantations of Virginia were the most noble and worthy advancers of the standard of Christ among the Gentiles.” The company organized and equipped successive expeditions in the hope of gain; and soldiers of fortune, and gentlemen in misfortune, threw in their lot in the certainty of adventure and the probability that they might better their condition.

Under such auspices the Southern colonies necessarily were rooted in the faith of the England from which they came – political, religious, and civil. Thus from the very beginning the spirit of the two sections was absolutely different, and their surrounding conditions were for a long time such as to keep them diverse.

--The Old South

So, in Page’s view the North was settled by Europeans with utopian notions and a willingness to impose those notions on others, and the South was settled by adventurous (but less discontented and quarrelsome) Europeans more in tune with the ancient rhythms and evening lingerings of Europe. Certainly that generalization doesn’t apply to every individual (Washington Irving, born in New York City, for instance, was not a utopian), but I think Page’s assessment is essentially correct.

And our current American oligarchy, instead of encouraging white American school children to feel connected to the land of their ancestors and to their ancestors’ faith, teaches them to despise their European inheritance. It’s small wonder that white adolescents grow up without any sense of racial pride and see nothing wrong with mixing their blood with that of blacks. In fact they see it as a positive good because in doing so they are killing their European blood ties.

I’ve written about H. V. Morton on several occasions because I love his books. During a time (1920 – 1950) when other European intellectuals were traveling to the Far East or Africa looking for something novel and exciting, Morton traveled through Europe and wrote about his travels because he correctly saw that the history and the people of His continent were the only really interesting history and people to write about. And that history has been suppressed by the Gingerbread House technique. “The great satanic wisdom of American totalitarianism is this: if you ban the old books and the old traditions, the people might still love them enough to fight for their restoration. But if you give them a gingerbread house to munch on and coat the older books and traditions in monkey vomit, the people will joyfully let the old books remain unread and the old traditions die.”

In the works of the great novelists of the late eighteenth century and the entire nineteenth century, the villain is often an Uncle Silas type. He can ape the Christian forms because he has a superior intelligence, but his heart belongs to Satan. But so long as Christian principles rule society, the Uncle Silases have to keep their hatred of Christ and Christians a secret. Now, however, Uncle Silas no longer needs the mask; his type now rules. And they are not going to permit a bred-in-the-bone Christianity to surface again. They will permit Church-on-Sunday/Mass-on-Sunday Christianity to exist because that type of Christianity generally supports Uncle Silas-demonism. And when it doesn’t, it is ineffectual because it is not integral. A true bred-in-the-bone Christianity is rooted in European history, European traditions, and European blood. If white European Americans were actually exposed to that type of Christianity, the Uncle Silases would once again be on the periphery of society instead of at its center. It’s not a spirit of our “democratic humanity” that we need. White people need a spirit of clannishness. When the fiery cross appears high on the mountain top, we must rally to it. And then, man to man and “in the van,” we’ll win or die with Europe.

The Gathering

Time rolls his ceaseless course. The race of yore,
Who danced our infancy upon their knee,
And told our marveling boyhood legends store,
Of their strange ventures happ’d by land or sea,
How are they blotted from the things that be!
How few, all weak and wither’d of their force,
Wait on the verge of dark eternity,
Like stranded wrecks, the tide returning hoarse,
To seek them from our sight! Time rolls his ceaseless course.

Yet live there still who can remember well,
How, when a mountain chief his bugle flew,
Both field and forest, dingle, cliff, and dell,
And solitary heath, the signal knew;
And fast the faithful clan around him drew,
What time the warning note was keenly wound,
What time aloft their kindred banner flew,
While clamorous war-pipes yell’d the gathering sound.
And while the Fiery Cross glanced like a meteor round.

--Sir Walter Scott in The Lady of the Lake (Canto Third)

My Little Welsh Home

I am dreaming of the mountains of my home,
Of the mountains where in childhood I would roam.
I have dwelt ‘neath summer skies,
Where the summer never dies,
But my heart is in the mountains of my home.

I can see the little homestead on the hill;
I can hear the magic music of the rill;
There is nothing to compare,
With the love that once was there,
In that lonely little homestead on the hill.

I can see the quiet churchyard down below,
Where the mountain breezes wander to and fro,
And when God my soul will keep,
It is there I want to sleep,
With those dear old folks that loved me long ago.

-- W S Gwynne Williams

Westerns

The Western has been called America’s finest, most original contribution to the world. I would concur. The American West has fascinated such diverse poetic talents as G. K. Chesterton and Dylan Thomas.

Living under a demonic government of the Deists and for the capitalists, Americans had to go West if they wanted to get a whiff of free air that was not already owned by the robber barons. Father Luigi Ligutti describes in his book Rural Roads to Security how this Western escape valve was lost:

The entrance of women into the industrial field tended to reduce the wages of men, since men were no longer the sole support of a family; the idea of a family wage for the head of the family was slipping to that of a mere individual wage in competition with women and children. Still labor was not at once shackled by this condition. There was still a possibility of escape, and when escape is possible, liberty is not dead.

Harold Faulkner gives the alternative when he writes: As long as public land could be had at nominal cost, “wage slavery, in the sense that there was no escape, did not exist. If times were hard and wages low, the worker could always go West.” (Faulkner, Harold, American Economic History, 3rd Ed. New York: Harper, 1935.)

After 1850, transportation underwent marked improvements. Steam railroads increased 300 per cent between 1850 and 1860.

With steam transportation established, the factory system began that forward leap which continued, with but brief lulls during the great panics, through the remainder of the century.

This twofold development, growth of factories and improvement in transportation, was directly instrumental in changing from bad to worse the conditions of labor. Wages tended to become standardized at a minimum, since goods from one city were brought into competition with the same type of goods from another city. Price plus quality capture the market. By established custom the necessary curtailment was taken from wages. Transportation and growth of factories also made profitable the subdivision of labor, thereby creating vast numbers of detail jobs, simple enough to be classed with unskilled labor and each paid the correspondingly lower wage.

The specialized capitalist, alert to the possibilities of saving by division of production, concentrated industry in fewer and larger plants. Labor, long below the ability of housing itself in health and decency, huddled more densely in the industrial tenements. This urbanization of population paralleled the concentration of industry and was, in greater part, due directly to it.

Labor declined rapidly, losing not only ownership of tools, productive property, and control of conditions of labor, but also home ownership as well. Company tenements, company stores, company commodities were being provided, but in a very inadequate manner, and under circumstances that left only a shadow of liberty or recognition of rights on the side of the working people.

Another factor that greatly stimulated urbanization of population was the rapid disappearance, since 1880, of desirable western land obtainable on easy terms. During the first half of the nineteenth century public land of rare quality was limitless and given on terms that were meant to be an invitation and reward for settlement. Little or no capital was required to secure and work a claim. The disappearance of such public land closed a safety valve of escape from the city and dammed the floods of immigrants in the already close confines of industrial cities. [Emphasis added]

Urbanization, so rapid and so concentrated, created a host of social and economic problems. Of these the most tragic to human freedom was the increasing depth of helpless surrender to which an ever greater and greater portion of the nation's citizens was reduced, succumbing to the unscrupulous and liberalistically sanctioned avarice of the "robber barons." Labor had become depersonalized as regards the relations of employer and employee. Corporate ownership and control lodged in the hands of a relatively few. These few, interested primarily in greater profits, better business, and more production, neither saw nor cared to see the laborers, nor still less the slums in which they existed. Public opinion protested, and government took action again and again, but the philosophy of wealth continued unconquered and almost unquestioned except in subconscious thought, and the conditions of labor, even though improved, lagged behind that of the favorites of fortune as far as ever.

When one couldn’t escape to the West anymore, to live a life uncontaminated by capitalism, one could at least dream of a different world in the movie theaters of America. The code of chivalry might be dead in the land of the robber barons, but it still existed on the silver screen when Roy Rogers, Gary Cooper, and Wild Bill Elliott rode the range.

Walker Percy, in his novel The Moviegoer, describes the feeling many of us have felt when viewing one of the clean and pure Westerns of the pre-1960s:

Fort Dobbs is good. The Moonlite Drive-In is itself very fine. It does not seem too successful and has the look of the lonesome pine country behind the Coast. Gnats swim in the projection light and the screen shimmers in the sweet heavy air. But in the movie we are in the desert. There under the black sky rides Clint Walker alone. He is a solitary sort and a wanderer. Lonnie is very happy. Therese and Mathilde, who rode the tops of the seats, move to the bench under the projector and eat snowballs. Lonnie likes to sit on the hood and lean back against the windshield and look around at me when a part comes he knows we both like…

Clint Walker rides over the badlands, up a butte, and stops. He dismounts, squats, sucks a piece of mesquite and studies the terrain. A few decrepit buildings huddle down there in the canyon. We know nothing of him, where he comes from or where he goes.

A good night: Lonnie happy (he looks around at me with the liveliest sense of the secret between us; the secret is that Sharon is not and never will be onto the little touches we see in the movie and, in the seeing, know that the other sees—as when Clint Walker tells the saddle tramp in the softiest easiest old Virginian voice, “Mister, I don’t believe I’d do that if I was you”)…

The cinematic Western thrived in the 1930s and 1940s in the form of the B-Western. B-Westerns vary in quality. I favor the ones that feature a hero with a moral code written in his heart over the preachy sheriff ones, but the worst B-Western is better than the most critically acclaimed modern movie about a lesbo-policewoman or a sensitive young student who fights a one-man campaign to end hatred and bigotry in the South.

The essential thing in the B-Western and in the good A-Westerns is that the hero supports the code. And by ‘code’ I do not mean the motion picture code; I mean the code of chivalry. The weak, the poor, the mothers, the fair maidens, and the farmers are defended against the barbarians and the chestless, villainous, capitalist masterminds who live to plunder, rape, and murder.

John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), starring John Wayne, was the first A-Western made. (By A-Western, of course, I mean that the movie was a main feature and not just a second feature or Saturday matinee.) The A-Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s that followed generally reinforced the code, but the A-Western heroes of those pictures were more rough-hewn and more flawed than the B-Western heroes and often had to grapple with personal demons as well as with bad guys.

Take the movie Naked Spur, starring Jimmie Stewart, for example. In that movie the male protagonist, played by Stewart, tracks and captures a wanted killer. Stewart’s character had been cheated out of his ranch by a faithless finance while he was away fighting the war. He is determined to get the money to buy another ranch even if it means buying a ranch with blood money. But by the end of the movie in the final showdown with the forces of evil, Steward relents and renounces the blood money, thus maintaining the code.

With very few exceptions, the A-Western hero of the 1940s and 1950s maintains the code. But in the 1960s the code has broken down. Instead of watching Randolph Scott standing tall and declaring, “There are some things a man can’t ride around,” we are treated to a new type of Western. In this Western there is no Christian knight, which is what the cowboy hero was, a “knight without armor in a savage land.” There are now only social commentary movies which demonize the white man and deify the Indian (Soldier Blue, Little Big Man, etc.) and existentialist clap-trap from Italy with anti-heroes such as Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef.

There was, of course, one who took exception to the anti-hero Westerns of the 1960s, and that was John Wayne. He took the code into the 1960s and the 1970s with him. There is an interesting story that illustrates this point. When Don Siegel was directing the final showdown scene in The Shootist (1976), John Wayne’s last movie, the script called for Wayne’s character to shoot one of his antagonists in the back. John Wayne refused to do it. Siegel told him that Clint Eastwood had done it when he, Siegel, had directed Eastwood. John Wayne replied, “Well, I don’t do it.” The script was rewritten to accommodate John Wayne. A minor difference? No, ‘it’ makes all the difference in the world.

John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, Roy Rogers, Joel McCrea, and countless other Western heroes represented a proud, long line of men who supported the code, the code of great knights, swashbucklers, and saints. That code is gone now. Not even our Christian leaders would recognize it, and if they did they would condemn it. But the code existed, and the American Western is one of our reminders that it did once exist.

I have many favorite Westerns. There is The Searchers, Big Jake, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, all starring John Wayne. And there is The Garden of Evil and The Hanging Tree, starring Gary Cooper. And the list goes on: Night of the Grizzly with Clint Walker; Fort Dobbs, also with Clint Walker; The Tall T with Randolph Scott; and South of St. Louis with Joel McCrea.

But the finest and purest of all the Westerns is Shane. In almost every other Western the hero gets to ride off into the sunset with the heroine as his reward for virtue and valor. And there is nothing wrong with that. But the character Shane rises to an even higher level. He rides off alone, having faced and killed the villains, to save a family whose joys he cannot share and a way of life for farmers whom he cannot join.

I used to tell my students that we all, as we are growing up, have a Shane in our mind’s eye. The pity is that most of us replace Shane with the image of Mr. Wall Street or Mr. Go-With-the-Flow. “Such heroes as Shane are only for storybooks; they are not for real life,” the ‘mature’ adult says. Ah, but they are for real life, at least the only real life that matters.

The Whiteman Unchained – Breaking the Chains of Democracy

There was an excellent article published in Middle American News (April 2007) by Chilton Williamson, Jr., titled “Our Rulers Are Choosing a New People.” Mr. Williamson’s point was that the reason our rulers do nothing about the Mexican invasion is because they want a new, nonwhite populace that will be “more docile, more pliant, more rulable.” He makes the distinction between a people with a tradition of government and a tradition of being ruled: “suffice it to note here that the Third World immigrants, coming as they do from ungovernable countries, are themselves ungovernable. And being ungovernable, they can only be ruled – unlike the majority of the U. S. population, which can still remember what real government is like, and should be.”

Mr. Williamson is certainly correct in his assessment. So wither do we go and what do we do? Magazines like Middle American News and The Truth At Last usually confine themselves to getting the information about the Third World invasion out to the public. It is helpful to get the information, but unfortunately the writers for these various publications have no solutions to suggest other than political ones. They want us to vote for anti-immigration candidates and to write protest letters and sign petitions. Those type of measures work when those who govern have not declared your race of people as non-people, but when you have been declared a non-person no candidate will be permitted to run who represents your interests and no letter you write or petition you sign will be taken seriously. There is no solution to the white man’s dilemma within the confines of democratic government.

When I was growing up my civic teachers were fond of repeating the quote, “Democracy is a terrible form of government, but all the others are so much worse.” But experience gives the lie to that oft-repeated assertion. I have no romantic attachment to the age of hereditary monarchies. The monarchial eras were depressing spectacles of bloody reign changes and bloody wars, but there was nowhere near the bloodshed in the monarchial wars as there was in the democratic wars, and no matter which side won, puritan or cavalier, at the end the nation remained white and Christian.

Now, we can’t suddenly turn a switch and go back to a non-Parliamentary, hereditary monarchy (even though I am a direct descendant of Charlemagne and am willing to take the job), but we can start thinking about working outside the framework of democratic government.

Democratic government is no longer a means to an end in the countries of the West. It is the end. Democratic government is the secular Zion that all mankind is supposed to be moving towards, but George Fitzhugh’s caveat should be heeded: “We are the friend of popular government, but only so long as conservatism is the interest of the governing class.” In the Northern part of our nation it is doubtful if conserving (and what else is there to conserve but Christian civilization) was ever the goal of the governing class. And in the Southern half of our country, conservatism ceased to be the interest after Reconstruction ended. During Reconstruction, the white ruling class was an unrecognized ruling class, but it was still a white Christian ruling class. But the unfortunate re-enfranchisement made the Southerners subject to the very un-conservative Northern governing class. That class’s complete triumph was completed during the ‘integration by bayonet era’ of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Even if one disagrees with me about when our ruling class ceased to be conservative, and of course I use ‘conservative’ in the European sense of the word, not in the liberal capitalist sense, he surely must see that at the present date our ruling class has ceased to be conservative. And he must see, as Chilton Williamson has pointed out, that white Christians are the enemies of the American ruling class. They have declared war on us.

Now, of course we don’t have the power to mount a conventional war against the reigning American oligarchy, but we can start looking at ourselves as a conquered people under alien rule. It is ironic that the most law-abiding people in the United States, Christian white people, should also be the most disenfranchised. This has to stop. We are certainly more disenfranchised then the men who screamed, “Taxation without representation is tyranny.” And yet we fly the flag and obey the law. White people should not serve in the capitalist military, they should not honor the capitalist flag, and they should seek to undermine every major institution of American culture by any means at their disposal. They must stop being passive observers of the American oligarchy’s atrocities. The abortion issue is a case in point: I fully support the actions of Paul Hill, the preacher who shot an abortion doctor and his assistant as they walked to their jobs at the abortuary. However, very few of us have the courage for that type of martyrdom. I know I don’t. But there are plenty of things one can do, if one steps outside the parameters of the democratic oligarchy, to undermine the ruling class, although we do have to divest ourselves of the notion that it is white people who must obey the law.

In my twenties (I’m in my fifties now), I was a member of a group of people who met in front of an abortion clinic to protest what was going on in the clinic. Near the clinic was a bench with an advertisement for Planned Parenthood. A member of our group remarked that the advertisement was disgusting. And of course we all agreed with him. I then made a tactical error. I told the leader of our group, a dignified elderly gentleman, that I planned on coming back in the evening and destroying the bench. He was horrified. “You shouldn’t break the law,” he intoned, and he informed me he would report me to the police if I did. Do you see a disconnect there? After centuries of “abiding by the law,” white people have an instinctive horror of doing anything outside the law, even if that law has severed all ties to Christ and bound itself to Satan.

Once we divest ourselves of the notion that obeying the law is an absolute good, a whole vista of opportunities opens up in regard to protecting our borders and in protecting our homes. It took the Spaniards 770 years to rid their country of the Moslems, who are now returning. But they made a vow that they would “fight to the knife.” We need to take a similar vow.

Shakespeare is the supreme poet of the West. He speaks to us still, reaching out over the years as if the years were only a few short days. In Hamlet he depicts a young King, a legitimate King, who has a quite natural horror of shedding human blood. But as the full meaning of kingship and kinship comes upon him, he courageously, despite augury, does what needs to be done. He realizes that he cannot turn to anyone else to “set it right.” He is the legitimate king. If he won’t fight for legitimacy, who will?

And so it is with the white Christian remnant. We are the legitimate heirs of the civilization of Europe. If we won’t fight for it, who will?

Again, a direct military confrontation is out of the question. But a commitment to look beyond the confines of democratic government is a necessity. If anti-immigration candidates appear, we can certainly support them. But ultimately, it is not from the ruling, democratic oligarchy that we can get help. We will remain a conquered people if we expect aid from that quarter.

None of us know exactly where the lines of our will and God’s grace meet, but one thing is certain: If we don’t venture forth against the dragon, God cannot aid us in the battle. So far, the multi-cultural dragon is undefeated because he has yet to be challenged. I refuse to believe he is invincible.

Not Wise Enough

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit.

--Twelfth Night

Imus was one of liberaldom’s court jesters. But a court jester must observe the "mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time…” This Don Imus most certainly failed to do. If he had been a wise court jester he would have known:

1) Black people can say anything they want to say about white people, no matter how mean or derogatory, but white people are absolutely forbidden to say anything remotely mean or derogatory about black people.

2) When black people want to break a color barrier by joining an all-white country club or by entering an all-white beauty pageant, there is no such thing as color. We are all equal. But when a white person makes a joke in poor taste about black women just as he does about white women, then there are black people and there are white people. And the tasteless white prankster is punished.

3) Rule three will help the court jester to adhere to rules 1 and 2: White is evil and black is good. Keep that simple fact before you, Mr. Court Jester, and you will be able to perform safely in the great American Babylonian court.

Addendum: My standards of decency are in line with the Victorians, so 99% of Don Imus’s shtick was outside of my acceptable range, but it was truly disgusting to see politicians to whom he had kindly given air time completely turning on him. And for what? For a tasteless remark about black women that didn’t even rate a 2 on the 1-10 tasteless meter compared to remarks he had made about white Christians. And the irony is that Imus is a black-worshipping heathen like all the rest of the liberals who have condemned him.

Thor's Challenge

Reading Laurel's recent post mentioning her Scandinavian background put me in mind of Longfellow's poem, "The Saga of King Olaf." Longfellow is out of fashion these days because his poetry is understandable and Christian, but I read this recently to my children and they enjoyed it.

It begins with a challenge from Thor:

Thou art a God too,
O Galilean!
And thus single-handed
Unto the combat,
Gauntlet or Gospel,
Here I defy thee!

The Christian King Olaf accepts Thor's challenge:

There he stood as one who dreamed;
And the red light glanced and gleamed
On the armor that he wore;
And he shouted, as the rifted
Streamers o'er him shook and shifted,
"I accept thy challenge, Thor!"

A good read.

The Empty Tomb

It seems that almost every Easter season nowadays we are treated to a movie whose basic theme is that the Christian faith is a humbug. This year, the movie was a "documentary" that shows us the human remains and burial place of none other than Jesus Christ. Caiaphas and the Jewish leaders, who had more than a passing interest in producing Christ's corpse, couldn't find the body, the Romans couldn't find the body, but some 21st century docu-dramatists did discover the body. Amazing!

Of course if the makers of the documentary or the troglodytes who financed it were really interested in going over the actual case for the physical resurrection of Christ, they could read a book called Who Moved the Stone? by Frank Morison. Morison started out as a prosecutor determined to prove that the story of Christ's resurrection was nonsense and ended up as a witness for the defense.

I have an impression, not solely dependent upon this isolated passage in the gospel of the Hebrews, that as dawn approached in that quiet garden, something happened which caused one of the watchers hurriedly to awaken his companions and to proceed to a closer inspection of the tomb. It may have been only the stirring of the trees, or the clanging of a gate in the night breeze. It may have been something more definite and disquieting, such as that which later shook and utterly humbled the proud and relentless spirit of St. Paul. 'He appeared to Cephas... then to the twelve... he appeared to James... last of all, as unto one born out of due time, he appeared to me.' Did He appear also in the first instance to 'the servant of the priest'?

If that were so, then we should indeed have stumbled, almost unconsciously, upon the true answer to one of the profoundest questions which has engaged the thought of the Church from the time of the Early Fathers to our own--viz. why it was that, despite the wavering of tradition concerning the locality of the Appearances, the disciples were so immovably convinced that the Resurrection itself took place in the early hours of Sunday morning.

There may be, and, as the writer things, there certainly is, a deep and profoundly historical basis for that much disputed sentence in the Apostles' Creed--'The third day he rose again from the dead.'

But Mr. Morison was a man with a respect for truth and not simply a huckster out to cash in on the anti-Christ market.

It wouldn't do a bit of good though to place Who Moved the Stone? or some other similar work in the hands of the docu-dramatists. In fact, it would do little good if Christ appeared in their living rooms. They have lost what Henri de Lubac called a "taste for God." They are not open to any proofs which might indicate that on the third day He did indeed rise from the dead.

We have all lived with the Christ-hating liberals so long now that we take them for granted, like an old set of deck chairs. 'They've been there for ages -- I can't think of a time when they weren't there.' But when you think of the liberals' passionate hatred of the Christ story, it does seem strikingly odd. Why would a person prefer to believe in a meaningless impersonal universe rather than in a personal God who promises eternal life? There is a mystery there, the mystery of the human personality. Why do some choose hell? C. S. Lewis's description of the dwarfs who refuse to be "taken in" by Aslan (in Chapter 13 of The Last Battle) is one of the best descriptions I have ever read of the defiant satanic spirit that says, 'I refuse to see the light lest I be forced to serve the light.'

There will always be the defiant dwarfs. We can't convert them, we can only do battle with them. And we must do battle with them for the sake of those who are under their influence, not because they are of the dwarf's party, but because they have not been exposed to any view of existence but the dwarf's view of existence.

The sightless, empirical view of existence represented by the dwarfs is the reigning orthodoxy of the modern age. It was once a minority viewpoint at the periphery of Christendom, but now it is at the center. I know I certainly imbibed the dwarfish viewpoint when I was growing up. By the time I was nineteen, my beliefs coincided with those of Frank Morison prior to his conversion: I had a deep, illogical respect for the person of Christ but could not believe in the resurrection because it was unscientific. But the blinders came off when the poets of Europe taught me to see through and not with the eye, or to put it more bluntly, when I learned that scientific thinking was not thinking at all.

Science is a very narrow field of study. It encompasses only the material world. So if you scientize thought, you will confine human thought to the barriers of the material world. Yet, in the modern world the label "scientific" automatically confers a legitimacy to one's studies or one's thought that would not be conferred if the thought was not scientific. It's a closed circle. Thought that is not scientific is viewed as not genuine and is then disregarded. In addition, any critic of the scientific mode of non-thought is not taken seriously. And the temptation, for someone of religious faith, is to couch one's defense of the Faith in material terms so that one can be taken seriously by the enemy. But of course this plays right into the enemies' hands. You have placed yourself in the position of the woman who was asked by Winston Churchill, "Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?"

"My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course…"

"Would you sleep with me for five pounds?"

"Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?"

"Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price."

How often do we do this -- accept the enemy's scientistic view of the world and then try to argue within the enemy's parameters? The 'women in the military' issue is a case in point. The Christian against the use of women in the military often uses the empirical, scientistic defense against the enemy because the enemy will not listen to any other argument. Indeed in the enemy's world there is no other argument. But what happens when the poetic or metaphysical argument is abandoned? Defeat is the result:

Christian: "Studies show that women are not as strong as men."

Scientized Man: "Strength is not the primary asset of the modern soldier. Besides, with training women can perform up to and above the minimum strength requirements that the Army maintains for men."

I don't have to go through the whole gamut of assertions and counter-assertions. You've heard them all. The argument always ends up as a victory for the materialists, even if he is wrong in all or most of the particulars. He wins because the debate has never left the scientific or material realm.

Let's look at an even more pertinent case, the case study of the pro-lifer vs. the pro-choicer.
The pro-lifer has all the material arguments on his side, so he uses them. He shows the pictures of the baby from conception to birth. Behold, it's a living, human being. And yet the pro-lifer loses; abortion remains legal. Why doesn't the scientific, rational materialist accept realistic proof of the humanity of the child in the womb? Because the rational, scientific view of the world is not reality-based. It is an alternative religion. The scientific rationalist is more of a mystic than a Christian. He is constantly making mystic leaps of faith. He leaps over the hurdles of the obvious reality-based differences in sexes, and he leaps over the even more imposing, reality-based hurdle of the living child in the mother's womb. He's a regular leaping Lena.

Now, if one makes the argument in the case of women in the military that it doesn't matter if a woman is 220 pounds worth of Amazonian muscle and a man is 160 pounds of mediocre manhood, the man should fight and not the woman because women are meant, by God, to be the gentle nurturers and givers of new life, one will lose the debate with the materialist. And if one makes the case in the pro-life/pro-choice debate that innocent human life is sacred because it is created in His image, one will also lose the debate with the rational-scientific man. But in both cases the metaphysical argument is the argument that should be made, first, because it is the true argument, and second, because it will clarify the Christians' position vis-à-vis the scientific rationalist. The materialist is not someone a Christian can debate; he can only be fought with. Someone morally obtuse enough to send women into combat and to murder innocent babies is certainly not somebody with whom one can dialogue.

The scientific materialist is always a Gnostic. Because he sees no animating, spiritual principle in the physical world, he sees no connection between the world of sense and the world of the spirit. The physical world exists only to serve the abstracted mind of the post-Christian scientific man. Thus a woman's breasts, for instance, are simply mounds of flesh. They are not, by virtue of their ability to produce milk, signs of God's intent that those who give life and nurture life in its early stages should be closest to babies during those early years. "Caring for children is merely a physical function," says the rational materialist; "A man can be a nurturer in those early years, after birth of course, just as easily as a woman."

And because the scientistic man views the world of sense as inanimate matter only, he places no significance on events that take place in that world. Nor does he view people who inhabit that world as individual personalities. The events and the people only exist to be manipulated and subjected to the mind of scientistic man. He can make scientific documentaries about the fiction of the resurrection because he doesn't feel any obligation to connect events that take place in the world of sense to any kind of reality. The concept of truth, the type of truth that is seen through and not with the eye, is alien to the scientific, rational man. He cannot see. What does St. John tell us? "And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not."

All the various churches have condemned the documentary, but aren't they acting a bit like the girl who allows every liberty but the ultimate one? Beginning with Aquinas and continuing on through the later scholastics and the Protestant theologians, the Christian intellectuals have been systematically scientizing Christianity. Christ is no longer the animator of the material world; He is now viewed as part of that world. Even He, according to the modern Church, must bow to the scientific laws of nature, as the Greek tragic hero ultimately had to bow to the three sisters who controlled the strings of fate.

Is our life a fairy tale or is it not? The message I hear from the Christian Churches is -- Maybe. Yes, in any mainstream church you will hear the proper words. But don't you get the impression that the hierarchy of the Christian churches is much like the Russian communist hierarchy was in their latter days? Members of the hierarchy had to mouth the communist party line because their jobs depended on it, but they really had lost their belief in communism. Does that sound too extreme? I don't think so. Where your treasure lies, there lies your heart as well. What do our clergy cherish? Do they spend their time, like St. Paul, preaching Christ crucified, Christ risen? No, they largely spend their time talking about racial integration and the glories and wonders of the noble black savage. This is because they must fill the void created by their acceptance of the scientistic view of religion. If no definite scientific conclusion exists about Christ's resurrection then the Christian faith must be held in abeyance until science gives a definitive verdict on it. And in the meantime the clergy will preach the glories of blackness crucified and blackness risen from oppression.

But we, Christians of the post-Christian era, do not have to bend our knees to black idols or wait for the verdict of scientists before we worship the risen Lord. In the real world, the fairy tale world of the vagabond King from Nazareth, the verdict has already been given. And that verdict says that on "the third day He rose again from the dead."