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Being Catholic #373: The Future of America After Christianity · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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Again, that's 309-807-2427.
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And I said we're going to have a great show for you today. We're going to talk,
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well, I'm going to answer a letter that came in.
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And then after that, we're going to talk a little bit about America after Christianity.
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But before we start, I'll turn this over to my wife, Lynn. Hi there.
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Well, we're waiting for the conclave to start to replace our Pope.
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And we need everybody to be praying.
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I think those cardinals are going to need a good dose of the Holy Spirit to
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get them to wake up and smell the roses, I guess. It's...
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We're at a really teetering point, I think, in society and in the church, too.
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We need to get on a more level playing field or something.
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We've got to get some leadership that can stand up to the devil, right?
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Yeah. So pray, pray, pray.
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And today, Bob's going to be reading about, talking about how things are falling
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apart, you know, in the country and in the church, and it's all to what?
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Due to what? Our lack of trust in God, and that's what it comes down to.
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Our lack of belief in Christianity.
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Christianity built our society, our world, after the Roman Empire fell,
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and we've turned our backs on it.
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And the one thing I'd like to remind you of in Romans 1,
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very strongly talks about the power of God in salvation to everyone that has faith.
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And you have to have that faith if you want to be saved, if you want your society
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to run well. You have to have faith.
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Everybody has faith in something.
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Everybody has a,
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It's written in the heart of all human beings. God said that,
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I believe it was in Ezekiel. Excuse me.
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And also in Romans it says, The righteousness of God is revealed through faith, for faith.
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It is written, He who through faith is righteous shall live,
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for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men,
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who by their wickedness suppress the truth.
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For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
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Ever since the creation of the world, His invisible nature,
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namely, His eternal power and deity has been clearly perceived in the things
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that have been made, so they are without excuse.
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For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to
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him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.
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Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal
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God for images resembling mortal man, birds, animals, reptiles, or themselves.
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For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions.
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You know, not going to believe what I created. You're not going to believe that
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I created it. You're not going to believe anything I say.
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So have it your way, is what he more or less said.
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He gave them up to dishonorable passions. This is Romans here.
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Their women exchanged natural relations for the unnatural, and men likewise
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gave up natural relations with women, and were consumed with passions for one another.
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This is, look around our society today, what do you see?
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They kick God out of the schools, the old saying or joke, you know, and what have we got?
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What do you call those guys that come in dressed as women and tell stories to
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little kids and dance and all that? What do you call them?
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With the drag queen story on it? Yes. Yes.
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It's, you know, that's one example of what's going on.
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The offering of our unborn to evil, we're killing them.
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That's another thing. And these are not little things. These are very big things.
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And what's another one?
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Where what about our young people, very young kids, are being mutilated because
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they happen to think they're a boy or a girl?
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And, you know, it's just, does anybody have an inkling of how painful those surgeries are?
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I mean, these parents have got a screw loose ball, I can say.
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It's really, to put a child through all that, we're going to have to pay the
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price, and that's coming.
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So that's my little soapbox for today, Bob.
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Well, that's a good introduction, really, to what I'm going to talk about,
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America After Christianity, that we're going to get into.
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Before I do, I'm going to read an email that came in from a Dave.
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And I want to apologize for this because
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this email came into our computer back here almost a month ago and at the time
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we were going through quite a few things and we missed a show or two and we
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had a lot of family things going on and we had a lot of email that we just didn't
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get to and was left in the computer.
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I thought you got it, you thought I got it and it was just there And so this
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person did take the time to send an email in, and he signed his whole name.
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I'm just going to use his first name, Dave, because I don't know whether or
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not he would want his whole name to be used on the air.
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And of course, if a person wants it, he could indicate that he wants it to be used.
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But I just wanted to let people know that this person certainly signed it.
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He wasn't anonymous. us, and I'll read the email, and then I'll address it,
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and we'll go into America after Christianity.
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But it says here, subject, Bob Johnson's latest podcast on judicial system.
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Message, Bob, you're ranting about our judges.
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Show how ignorant you are of our American system. In case you have forgotten,
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we operate free of religious persecution under a system of laws.
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Just because you, EWTN, GOP, Trump, and the Catholic Church doesn't get its
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way is the exact reason our founding fathers made our country free of religious influence.
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By your standards, Trump and religious organizations should be making the rules
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and not necessarily following established laws as guidelines.
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Okay, well, I think you misinterpreted somehow what I was saying.
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So I will go ahead and let my response be this.
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From the very beginning, when our Constitution was first framed by the framers
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of the Constitution, there were arguments, pro and con, over whether it should be adopted. Okay.
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And there were a number of people, they were called the Anti-Federalists,
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who were not in favor of adopting the Constitution. They thought it gave the
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federal government far too much power and for other reasons.
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But one of the reasons that they were against adopting the Constitution is that
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several of them and other people along the way back at that time between then and now,
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long before there was any EWTN,
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long before there was any GOP, and long before Trump or the Republican Party came along,
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and certainly before the Catholic Church certainly had any influence whatsoever
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in our country, these people were already voicing the same objections that I
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was talking about, Dave.
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And those objections were that the Constitution invited a judicial tyranny.
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And Robert Yates was one of the Anti-Federalists who made that charge,
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and there were many others that did.
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And it's not hard to see. And they charged that you had three branches of government,
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the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.
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The judicial was actually the weakest of the three.
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But they charged that what would happen is the judicial would grow into the strongest of the,
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and democracy would be destroyed by the judicial constantly moving in and doing
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what only the executive and the legislature should do for themselves.
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And so this charge was made long before I ever came along and made it, Dave.
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It was made by people long before me.
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And did it turn out to be true? And if we take a look at our country and how
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it's operated, it certainly did.
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Take a look at the last 50 years and almost all of the major changes in our
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Constitution and the major changes in our laws and so forth have been made through the courts.
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And these courts, in effect, have been legislating, not just interpreting the
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law, which they were supposed to.
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And as I pointed out last time also, Thomas Jefferson himself was in an argument with the judiciary.
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And he told them to stay out of his lane. He said, stay out of the executive business.
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He said, that's my business and not yours.
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And he threatened them. He threatened that if they didn't mind their business
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and stay out of the executive business,
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that just as the executive and legislative branch were the branches that brought
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the judiciary into existence, they could get rid of them. And he threatened to do it.
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And so they did sort of temper themselves.
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But over time, of course, they reasserted themselves, and it's going on to this
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very day, and a lot of people besides myself, besides the Catholic Church,
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and besides the GOP and Trump made these charges.
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And this is something certainly that I didn't invent and hasn't been invented recently, Dave.
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But I do thank you for writing your letter or sending this in to me.
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You've taken the time to do it. And thank you.
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You also signed your name in full, and you deserve an answer,
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and that's the answer that I'm giving to you.
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And the fact is that Christianity does have a lot to do with our nation,
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and I'm going to go into that in this article here that I'm going to read,
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America After Christianity.
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Neo-Pagan's Dark Enchantment by John Daniel Davidson, and this appears in Touchstone magazine.
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And John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist and author of
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Pagan America, The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come.
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This article is based on his talk at the 2024 Touchstone conference,
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Life and Death in a Negative World.
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And I think it speaks a lot to this issue as well.
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And the fact is, is that when the framers framed the Constitution back at that time,
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even some of the framers who were atheists, such as Thomas Jefferson or deists, such as James Madison,
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these people still lived in a Christian milieu.
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They lived and breathed, in effect, in air or water, you might say,
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that was totally Christian.
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They took for granted all the Christian principles and ethics and so forth around
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them, and they probably couldn't have imagined the kind of world that we live in today.
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They probably didn't dream, even though when they put in the establishment clauses
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that have watered down religion in America,
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they didn't dream that Christianity played such a strong role in keeping the principles of American.
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Government and justice alive and in being, and didn't realize that watering
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down Christianity was also going to water down those things.
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And this article here addresses that, and so that's what I'll get into.
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I'm Eric After Christianity, Neo-Pagan's Dark Enchantment by John Daniel Davidson.
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And we won't get into it very far.
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In fact, actually, I'm going to stop right here and take a break,
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and we'll come back to it and read it in the next few sessions.
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So I hope that gives you an answer, Dave.
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There have certainly been many, many, many people long before me or the Republican
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Party or the Catholic Church or anything else that have criticized the Constitution,
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and have been opposed to putting it in force, said that it gives the government
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too much power, and they did predict that it could lead to a judicial tyranny.
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And if anyone has looked at what's happened over the last 50 or 60 years,
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we can see that there has been a problem with the courts, and many presidents
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have wrestled with that problem.
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And I'm, yeah, okay, I might add very shortly here that you're welcome to let
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us know what's on your mind.
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Yes. You know, want to send a memo or whatever on the email,
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do so. And again, I apologize for getting back to you so late because this is
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just something. Oh, we've had a death in the family.
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We had a lot of things going on, and the email got lost. We got picked up here.
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I hope you're listening, but if you're not, at least we're answering your question
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for other people out there.
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And we do thank you for sending in your feelings and your opinion.
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So we're going to take a break here. So stay with us.
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We'll be right back. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic
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Spirit Radio. We're back from our break, and we're going to be talking about
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America after Christianity and what it means for the country.
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And I'm reading from an article here by that title, America After Christianity, by John Daniel Davison.
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And he's a senior editor at The Federalist and the author of Pagan America,
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The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Ages to Come.
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And so we'll read from that article and his feelings as to what will happen
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as Christianity has really ended in the United States.
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He says here, Archbishop Fulton Sheen declared in a 1974 television address
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that we are at the end of Christendom, which he defined as economic,
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political, and social life as inspired by Christian principles.
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That is ending, he said. We've seen it die. A quarter century later, Pope St.
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John Paul II said, Even in countries evangelized many centuries ago,
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the reality of a Christian society, which, amid all the frailties which have
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always marked human life,
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measured itself explicitly on gospel values, is now gone.
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However debatable Sheen's assessment was 50 years ago, or John Paul's was in
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2001, it is undeniable today.
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Christendom is gone. Whether we realize it or not, the West has entered a new post-Christian era.
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What does that mean exactly? To begin with, it means Christian morality will
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no longer shape our public life.
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It also means we will no longer desire or seek out Christians for positions
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of leadership in society.
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In fact, we will consider sincere Christians to be bigots and fascists,
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unfit for positions of public trust.
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And we are finding accusations like that made already, I believe,
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if you pay attention and watch what's going on.
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This opinion has already been widely adopted by the mainstream left,
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and on certain subjects it is now being adopted by the mainstream right.
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In sum, the dechristianization of America means that the mainstream culture
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in our country will not simply be secular or neutral toward Christians,
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it will be actively hostile towards the Christian faith.
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If a dechristianized America is hostile towards the Christian faith,
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it will also be hostile toward those ideals and principles that are derived
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from and dependent on that faith.
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And I've said on this program over and over that the West was Christianity is
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what built Western civilization.
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And without it, Western civilization will die.
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And America certainly depends on all the principles and tenets of Western civilization
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to arrive at the principles of its government and the principles under which
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the people in America live.
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He goes on here, he says, that are derived from and dependent on that faith,
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things like freedom of speech and religion, government by consent, equality under the law.
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Basic human rights, all of these things that we take for granted will go by
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the wayside because they all depend on a Christian nation.
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None of these things will be tolerated by post-Christian cultural and political order.
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They will disappear along with Christendom. They are already disappearing right
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before our very eyes, and if you look carefully around us, you can see that they are.
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Most people in the West today do not realize this or do not accept it.
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But it is happening all the same. Therefore, our task is, first,
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to accept that this sea change is happening,
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indeed, that it has already happened, and second, to persuade others of the
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reality of our situation.
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Only then can we begin to think clearly about what is to be done about it.
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There is a historical comparison that might help us wrap our minds around this.
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In The Final Pagan Generation, historian Edward Watts writes that Romans,
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born in the first quarter of the 4th century AD, were the last cohort of Roman pagans.
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These Romans were born into a world in which most people believed that the pagan
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public religious order of the past few millennia would continue indefinitely.
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They were the last Romans to grow up in a world that simply could not imagine
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a Roman world dominated by a Christian majority.
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In other words, they were sort of like us today.
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They were living in a world that was changing, yet they expected the world to
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continue to be what it had always been from the time that they were young and
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the time that they grew up in it.
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When their world finally collapsed, they were old men who did not realize that
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for most of their lives they had been living in a social and religious order
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that was disappearing forever.
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The oldest members of this generation were born into an empire that had never
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had a Christian emperor and had actively suppressed Christianity and viciously
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persecuted Christians.
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They would die in an empire that would never again be ruled by a pagan emperor
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and would never again publicly support the pagan sacrifices.
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Temples, and festivals of the old Roman order.
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They did not see Christendom coming, and when it came, they could not believe
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it would transform their world forever.
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And I think this is the same thing that is happening and going on now.
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We can't see, but that our world is becoming less and less Christian,
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and that Christianity is dying before our very eyes, and our civilization is
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starting to die and change with it.
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It behooves us to think of this generation now, not because our Christian faith
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is at risk of the same fate as Roman paganism,
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but because we are at risk of making the same mistakes the final pagan generation did.
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Assuming that our society and civilization will long survive cut off from its
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source, which has always been the Christian faith, alive and active among the people.
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As Christianity fades from public life in the West, something else will take its place.
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Something else is already taking its place. And we can see we're becoming more
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and more pagan in our society as things go along.
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This new post-Christian era in the West is best understood as a re-paganization.
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That is, paganism returning in a modern form. You might call it neopaganism
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for a technological and digital age.
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Why paganism? Because once we reach the end of secular materialism,
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which we have indeed reached,
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some form of paganism, or at least of the pagan ethos, is the only alternative to Christianity.
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And what do we mean by pagan? It can be a vague term and perhaps misleading.
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The return of paganism does not mean we will see a return of its ancient forms.
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No temples to Zeus or Apollo will be erected in Times Square.
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It will take a contemporary form, one befitting our postmodern age of re-enchantment.
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For example, consider the exploding popularity of witchcraft influencers on TikTok and Instagram.
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Older people might scoff at this, but they shouldn't.
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The degree to which social media really does influence and shape our culture
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today cannot be overstated.
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Witchcraft is often presented, especially to young people, as a means of empowerment and identity.
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You might call it therapeutic witchcraft. If you look for it online,
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you will find it everywhere.
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Or to take another example, Consider our shifting rhetoric about abortion.
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At the time of Roe v. Wade, the justification for abortion was that the unborn
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child was just a clump of cells, and ending a pregnancy was no different from
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getting an appendectomy.
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Advances in medical technology in the 1980s and 1990s soon rendered that justification untenable.
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So then we were told that abortion was an unfortunate reality of the modern
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world, which, as long as we were going to allow it, should be safe, legal, and rare.
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Today, we no longer bother with these polite fictions.
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About 10 years ago, pro-abortion activists coined the phrase, shout your abortion.
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Women were told that they should not be ashamed of killing their unborn child,
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that abortion was a positive good, that there should be no social stigma attached
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to it, and that, in fact, it was something to shout from the rooftops.
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Given the state of medical technology today, there can be no reasonable debate
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about the humanity of the unborn.
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They are human beings. They are alive.
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They can feel pain. They can even express preferences for certain kinds of food.
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No one today pretends that unborn children are merely clumps of cells,
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and yet our cultural consensus is that they can be killed with impunity.
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Having fought a civil war to eradicate slavery, we have come around that last
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to embracing a new form of it.
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And just think of that. I mean, these are people.
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These are human beings. And yet we can cut them up in pieces,
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suck them up with suction machines and so forth, and treat them in any way we wish.
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And take a look at what's happening to children in this country.
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Take a look what's starting to happen to the less powerful and the weaker.
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We have 350,000 kids that came into this country illegally and are now missing.
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We don't even know where they are. And we know a lot of these kids are being
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trafficked and they are being used for all kinds of sexual perversions and so
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forth and living horrible lives.
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And yet we're putting up with this and we're becoming more and more hardened
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and a nerd to it. And we're taking a look at human beings in a way that this
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country never looked at humans before.
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At one time, we said everyone is, all men are created equal and endowed by their
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creator with certain inalienable rights. This is what our founders said.
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Some of them may have been agnostics or atheists.
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Nevertheless, that's what they still said because they lived in a Christian milieu.
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And they, for the most part, went along with the idea of the imago Dei,
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that is, the human being made in the image of God and therefore every human
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being having a soul with the same dignity as any other human being,
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regardless of how high-born or low-born they were or how powerful they were.
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This, back in the time of Christianity boiling up out of the Middle East,
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is what turned the whole world upside down.
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You have to remember, as Rome was falling and the world turned dark,
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it was Christianity that brought in the light and rebuilt civilization.
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It was Christianity that brought in science.
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It was Christianity that brought in libraries and universities.
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It was Christianity that began to look at the universe as being governed by
31:41
laws that were equal everywhere and so forth.
31:44
Four of the major cathedrals in earlier times were actually astronomical laboratories.
31:51
People could form astronomical experiments.
31:54
And this whole idea about Galileo is a lot of nonsense. That was mostly political.
32:01
And it certainly wasn't that the church was against science.
32:05
The church supported science, and it supported science for a long time.
32:09
And without the church, there would not have been the science that we have today.
32:14
And at one time, it was a church that almost excelled in every area of science.
32:18
So it was Christianity that brought all of the reason and so forth and it banished
32:23
all of the superstition of the previous pagan eras and brought in the idea that
32:29
people had a certain dignity before the law.
32:33
It was Christianity that the church itself that provided one of the shelters
32:39
from the state. You had the church as opposed to the state and the state as opposed to the church.
32:46
When both of them were ruling in their own areas, it provided a tremendous amount
32:52
of freedom to live under.
32:53
The church having given protection from the state and the state having given
32:58
protection from the church.
32:59
It was something that worked out in Western civilization as in no other civilization before it.
33:05
And then with the Christian idea of a sane and reasonable universe with a sane
33:13
and reasonable God and man made in that image, it changed the whole paradigm of the world.
33:18
And it did things that no other civilization have ever accomplished or ever did.
33:24
No one today pretends that unborn children are merely clumps of cells.
33:28
And yet our cultural consensus is that they can be killed with impunity.
33:33
Again, we believe that in order to vindicate the rights of women,
33:37
an entire class of people must be denied all rights, including the most basic right to life.
33:44
Put bluntly, abortion today is not just a new form of slavery,
33:48
it is also a new form of human sacrifice, which has always been a feature of pagan societies.
33:55
At its most basic, paganism means not Christian or even anti-Christian.
34:02
Indeed, the pagan worldview is an almost perfect inversion of the Christian one.
34:08
Instead of a transcendent, almighty God ruling over all his creation,
34:15
the pagan mind posits a multitude of imminent gods populating our world in the here and now.
34:22
And what that means by imminent, it means finding power in God in the worldly things around us.
34:31
Instead of objective morality based on a givenness of creation and a fixed moral
34:37
order, the pagan ethos demands moral relativism.
34:41
And we have more and more of that today, moral relativism.
34:45
People don't ask themselves where it comes from and why it exists.
34:51
And the reason is, is because Christianity is receding and making room for the
34:57
moral relativism that Christianity actually overcame and banished.
35:02
And it is coming back into the world again, into our Western world again.
35:07
Instead of objective morality based on the givenness of creation and a fixed
35:11
moral order, the pagan ethicist demands moral relativism appropriate for a world
35:17
where what is right and true is always contingent,
35:21
contingent on something else, on who you are, on how high-born you are, and so forth.
35:28
Instead of seeing each person as a creature with inherent dignity created in
35:33
the image and likeness of God and therefore equal in his human nature before God,
35:38
the pagan believes in natural and fundamental inequality and sees no reason
35:43
why the strong should not rule over and exploit the weak.
35:47
We're going to have to stop here and take a break. So stay with us.
35:50
We'll be right back. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston
35:53
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You have blessed your church through the life and ministry of your faithful
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If it be according to Your will, for the honor and glory of the Most Holy Trinity
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic
38:12
Spirit Radio. We're back from our break.
38:15
We're talking about America after Christianity.
38:18
And we're talking about the changes in our society coming about as Christianity
38:23
has died and is fading away from our society.
38:28
And we're talking about the fact that under Christianity, we had this idea of
38:33
all things, all men are created equal, equal people.
38:38
The image of God, the imago Dei, made in the image of God, equal in the image
38:43
of God, equal in their souls, and so forth.
38:45
Instead, returning to the earlier
38:47
pagan concept that some people are more powerful than other people,
38:53
instead of objective morality based on a givenness of creation and a fixed moral
38:59
order, the pagan ethos demands moral relativism, appropriate for a world where
39:04
what is right and true as contingent.
39:07
Instead of seeing each person as a creature with inherent dignity.
39:11
Created in the image and likeness of God, and therefore equal in his human nature before God,
39:17
the pagan believes in natural and fundamental inequality, and sees no reason
39:22
why the strong should not rule over and exploit the weak, and that's becoming
39:27
more and more the case in our society.
39:30
The strong and powerful are naturally superior to the weak and powerless,
39:34
and it is therefore fitting that they should rule over them.
39:38
Indeed, the idea that the weak and powerless count, that they have equal dignity
39:43
with the powerful, is a uniquely Christian idea.
39:47
You will not find it anywhere in all the long annals of the pagan past.
39:53
And you can go back and look at every society in the past before Christianity,
39:57
and you'll never find this idea that somehow all men are created equal,
40:02
that all men are equal before God,
40:05
that all men are made in the image of God and have souls in the image of God,
40:10
and therefore have certain inalienable rights.
40:13
They're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that can't
40:17
be taken away from them, and so forth.
40:20
This was all taken for granted by the founders of our society.
40:24
They didn't even think Think about it. They lived in that Christian milieu.
40:28
By that time, Christianity had already established these principles.
40:32
They simply took them for granted and enshrined them in the new constitution
40:38
and the new country that they were forming.
40:41
This is why pagan societies, if they are advanced, eventually take the form
40:46
of slave empires, ruled by a priestly class that practices some form of human sacrifice.
40:53
And when Christianity came into existence, the priestly class didn't do this.
40:59
The priestly class were supposed to be and pledged to be servants of the people.
41:04
Sometimes, of course, that was violated, given the fact that man is prone to go downhill.
41:12
But the point is, is that was the premise that Western civilization was built on.
41:18
And that was the premise that eventually prevailed.
41:21
This is true across vast expenses of time, geography, and culture.
41:26
From Babylon to Carthage, to the Vikings of Northern Europe,
41:30
to the Aztec and Incan empires of the Americas, the most advanced pagan cultures
41:36
might have looked different outwardly, but at their core, they were the same.
41:42
It was only ever the encounter with
41:44
Tristendom that put an end to the depredations of these pagan empires.
41:48
It was not the mere passage of time.
41:51
Mankind could not and did not evolve its way out of pagan slavery and human sacrifice.
41:58
Only Christ could show the way out. We delude ourselves today to think that
42:03
mere technological advancement or scientific knowledge will foreclose for us
42:08
the kinds of pagan sacrifice,
42:10
mutilation, and depravity that mark the ancient world.
42:14
Those things are, after all, coming back now in new and ghastly forms.
42:20
And I think here probably what he's referring to is the transgender movement,
42:25
and the transgender movement is very, very persistent.
42:29
The election of a president or a particular party in power or the ruling of
42:36
a Supreme Court or some other court's rulings and so forth are not going to
42:41
stop the trend that we see happening.
42:43
There's a push more and more for these ghastly things such as transgender that
42:50
practice on children are becoming stronger and stronger.
42:56
And people, for example, right now there's a problem out in May,
42:59
are resisting the government's effort to end this practice.
43:05
So it might end for a while, but it'll spring back up again.
43:09
All of the pagan things are springing back up again.
43:12
These things are, after all, coming back now in new and ghastly forms.
43:17
And no, they will not disappear because of an election or an executive order.
43:22
So, we're not going to be saved by a particular president, a particular party,
43:29
or a particular court ruling.
43:32
That's right. Until you change your heart and come back to God,
43:37
there'll be no change. That's true. For the good.
43:41
What the return of the pagan ethos should tell us is that we have gotten something
43:44
very wrong about the trajectory of Western civilization.
43:48
It should be clear by now that our de-Christianized society will not be an era
43:53
of secular liberalism, marked by ever-expanding personal freedom and autonomy,
43:58
tolerance, and a spirit of live and let live.
44:01
For generations now, we have been taught that secular liberalism is a natural
44:06
successor to Christendom.
44:08
The Enlightenment, we were told, gleaned all it could from medieval Christianity,
44:13
and shedding its superstitious beliefs in an invisible God and an enchanted
44:18
cosmos, set humanity on a course of rational progress, the goal of which was to master nature,
44:25
overcome the frailties of human nature, and create a paradise on earth.
44:29
To the extent Jesus Christ and his gospel had a role to play in this endeavor,
44:35
it was merely to point the way toward a universal morality, discoverable through
44:39
human reason and achievable through rational choice and governance.
44:44
Secularism, a concept inherited from those superstitious medieval Christians,
44:50
would become the organizing principle of liberal politics.
44:53
The secular era reposed its confidence in science and scientific materialism
44:59
as our sole source of knowledge and insisted that a kind of priceless Christianity
45:05
would be sufficient to maintain the liberal order.
45:08
But it did not work out that way. What began in the 17th and 18th centuries
45:14
as a project to free us from the shackles and superstition of religion would
45:19
end in the 20th century with the wholesale slaughter of millions and the creation
45:24
of the most tyrannical regimes in human history,
45:27
regimes that purported to be guided by science, rationality,
45:31
and cold, hard materialism.
45:34
I'm sure he's talking here about the Nazis and the communists.
45:37
And where it did not produce such regimes, such as here in the West,
45:41
it would produce a culture of empty consumerism, family disintegration,
45:47
mass abortion, sexual confusion, isolation,
45:51
irreligion, hedonism, and despair.
45:54
And that's what we're seeing a lot now.
45:57
It turned out that liberalism, itself a product of Christian civilization,
46:01
could not survive cut off from its source, which has always been Christianity.
46:07
What has become obvious here at the dawn of the 21st century is that we in the
46:13
West have been living off the capital of Christendom,
46:16
drawing down the deposit of our Christian civilization without replenishing
46:20
it, and now that capital is gone.
46:24
So no, the future of the post-Christian West will not be secular,
46:28
and it will not be liberal, nor will it be atheist or materialist, at least not wholly so.
46:34
Materialism and atheism, we can already see, fail to give man the spiritual
46:39
sustenance that by nature he requires.
46:42
Having banished and supposedly advanced beyond the Christian religion,
46:47
we are now busy finding a new one to fill the vacuum at the heart of our civilization.
46:52
We are, in short, embarking on a great re-enchantment. But re-enchantment in
46:58
this context mostly means a dark enchantment.
47:01
The old gods are coming back, under new names and in new forms.
47:06
Of course, they never really went away. They just hid themselves while we labored
47:11
under the delusion that we had outgrown and banished them, having evolved to
47:16
understand the world in strictly materialistic scientific terms.
47:20
The old gods, we thought, were merely the simple stories humanity told itself
47:25
in its childhood, just as the Christian story was the fiction we told ourselves in our adolescence.
47:32
A fully mature civilization had no need of these things.
47:36
We had seen through them and realized at last that the only true things,
47:40
the only real things, were those that we could measure with our instruments,
47:45
the things we could quantify.
47:47
But we were wrong. It turns out that the rationalist, materialist worldview
47:52
leaves us cold and unfulfilled, just as the pursuit of wealth and comfort leaves us unsatiated.
47:59
We desire a connection to something real, and we sense, on a deep level that
48:04
the spiritual world is real, and it is real.
48:07
That's one thing the pagan world and Christendom have in common.
48:11
But having lost our Christian faith and searching now for some kind of enchantment,
48:17
we are walking blindly back into the pagan past with all its blood and fire and violence.
48:23
The re-emergence of the pagan ethos, then,
48:27
has consequences for us that go beyond the ruin of individual lives,
48:31
because it is wholly incompatible with something like American constitutionalism
48:37
or the American Republic.
48:39
To understand why, it is necessary to recognize that the American proposition
48:45
that all men are created equal is a religious claim, and specifically a Christian one.
48:53
And that's what we have to recognize.
48:56
And it was the The Christianity that built Western civilization and led up to
49:03
the point where the founders of America could enumerate principles like all
49:10
men are created equal because they could rely on the Christianity that made it possible.
49:16
That is to say, the American founders were not secularists. They only ever believed
49:21
that all men are created equal because
49:24
they believed that we are all God's children, created in His image.
49:28
Our entire system of government flows from that belief.
49:32
Without it, the whole system collapses. The idea that every person is in some way sacred,
49:38
bearing the imago Dei, is self-evident only to a moral conscience formed and
49:44
awakened by the teaching of of Christianity down the millennia.
49:48
Teachings we Christians believe came from Christ himself.
49:52
The American founding is therefore not comprehensible in strictly secular, rationalist terms.
49:58
Our nation begins with a proposition about the nature of God and man.
50:03
On this very basic level, America is a Christian nation.
50:08
When you make that statement, all men are created equal, you're making a statement
50:12
about God, and you're making a statement about man, and you're making a statement about the relation,
50:18
and you're making a statement that can be backed up by the people that live it.
50:23
But when that Christianity is gone, that statement me is meaningless.
50:28
But if that proposition is discarded or denied, as it has been in our time,
50:35
then whatever comes after it isn't America.
50:38
It might call itself America. It might even deploy the familiar vocabulary of
50:43
rights and liberties, but it is not America.
50:47
Liberalism's claims about human
50:48
rights and dignity are empty without the religion from which they sprang.
50:53
The idea that we can have one without the other is a pernicious delusion,
50:58
and the sooner we rid ourselves of it, the better.
51:01
Put plainly, we are either going to be a nation based on Christian claims about
51:05
what man is and how society should be ordered in light of that,
51:10
or we are going to revert to a societal state that existed before Christianity,
51:16
one based on pagan claims about man that posit a very different vision of how
51:22
a nation should be ordered.
51:23
The context, then, is not between secularism and Christianity,
51:28
or liberalism and Christianity.
51:30
Secularism and liberalism were both creations of Christendom,
51:34
and as Christendom fades, so lay.
51:37
There will simply be no basis for their claim of human equality and dignity,
51:42
just as there was no basis for such claims in pagan Rome.
51:45
The contest is between a pagan vision of the world and a Christian one,
51:50
And the proposition at the heart of the pagan vision is that all men are not created equal.
51:56
They are not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
52:00
It's a proposition that comes from an order pre-Christian order.
52:04
It declares that some men are by nature slaves and some are masters.
52:09
Inequality is inherent in our nature and therefore should be reflected in our government and laws.
52:15
Having rejected Christianity, what can we in the West assert over and against
52:20
these pagan claims? Nothing.
52:22
To fight the return of paganism, Christians in America will have to shed the
52:26
false notion and race for too long in the West that religion is a purely private
52:31
matter, that there must be a wall of separation between our religion and our politics.
52:36
And I have said on this program over and over and over that Western civilization
52:41
was not built with a separation of church and state.
52:45
It was built with a distinction between the church and the state,
52:48
a distinction where there were two powers, the church and the state.
52:53
We have to argue without apology that public life in this country should be
52:57
shaped by Christian morality and ordered by its dictates, as it was for most
53:02
of our nation's history.
53:04
Without the Christian faith, alive and active among the people,
53:08
There can be no American republic because there can be no basis for the proposition
53:13
at its heart that all men are created equal.
53:18
That proposition, to be clear, requires Christianity and all that comes with it.
53:24
If we want to save our republic then, we'll have to become a Christian people once again.
53:29
It won't be enough to win an election or secure a favorable Supreme Court ruling
53:33
or cobble together a majority coalition in Congress. it will require a reconversion
53:39
of the American people and a refounding of the Republic.
53:43
And we have to be realistic. This is not going to be accomplished in the lifetime
53:48
of anyone alive today. It will take generations.
53:52
That means we have a hard road ahead, but this is not a counsel of despair.
53:57
The only sound basis for hope in this situation is to be honest about what has
54:02
happened and what must be done now.
54:05
Without a public life shaped by Christianity, there can be no American republic.
54:10
Cut off from our Christian faith, our civilization is died.
54:14
Take a look around you and you'll see that that is true.
54:18
All men of faith know that our civilization is died. and anyone with eyes to see knows it.
54:25
That is the plain truth which deep down all men of faith and good will know to be true.
54:31
So be it, as A. G. K. Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man.
54:36
Christendom has had a series of revolutions, and in each one of them Christianity has died.
54:43
Christianity has died many times and risen again, for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.
54:50
And we better pray that that God can find his way out of the grave again,
54:55
or there is no hope for our nation.
54:57
St. Michael, the archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the
55:02
wickedness and snares of the devil.
55:04
May God rebuke him and humbly pray, and do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host,
55:09
by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all evil spirits who wander
55:14
through the world through the room of souls. Amen.
55:18
You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston. On Catholic Spirit
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