Our country is being torn apart by thugs and mobs who feel they've nothing to lose, and who are unwittingly aided by police who're too quick to use unnecessary force, politicians who're too reluctant to use necessary force, a media that seems intent on fanning the flames, and a generation of "snowflakes" eager to destroy careers and lives of anyone who transgresses their delicate sensibilities.
Why has this all come upon us? The great Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn posed that question during his Templeton address in London in 1983. Why, he asked, were the Russian people visited by the human pestilence that followed in the wake of the Russian revolution, the rise of Joseph Stalin, one of the most horrific butchers ever to disgrace the planet, and the unimaginable terrors the Stalinist communists perpetrated upon the people, first in Russia, then in the broader Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and large swaths of the third world?
Solzhenitsyn said this:
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened."
Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
A society which has forgotten God no longer has any basis for objective moral behavior. To paraphrase John Adams, the second president of the U.S., "Our system of government was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
When God goes, so, too, go all moral constraints on the consciences of the people. Sometimes the people don't immediately realize that they're no longer tethered to a moral law, but once they do, murder, destruction, theft and tyranny often follow, at least they did in France and Russia. The masses become ungovernable, tyrants seize power, freedom is quashed, and the people are crushed under the tank treads of their "liberators."
It's a recurrent theme. Plato described it in his Republic 2300 years ago. It happened not only in 18th century France and 20th century Russia, it happened in dozens of other countries, great (China) and small (Cuba), throughout the twentieth century.
The French and Russian revolutions, like most left-wing revolutions, were self-consciously atheistic. Enormous efforts were made to wipe out Christianity, which was seen as the real enemy because the church was the only institution which had, among other things, the standing to compete with the state for peoples' allegiance and the moral authority to condemn the atrocities perpetrated by the French Jacobins and the Russian Stalinists.
In our own time the Christian church is still considered to be the enemy by the left, and for much the same reason. The secular power-brokers in our society have decided that God has no place in our public life and should have scarcely any place in our private life.
Our elites in the media, Hollywood, the courts and the academy have labored assiduously to make Him irrelevant, but what the apostle Paul said of men in his letter to the Galatians applies as well to whole societies: "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap."
We are today reaping the fruits of a century or more of attempts to reduce God to a non-entity. Our contemporary urban Jacobins are not interested in dialogue. Some of them would be quite happy to burn our cities to the ground and cart all dissenters off to the guillotine, gulag or firing squad.
The only thing stopping them is their lack of power and that may be a merely temporary limitation.
That may seem too strong, too alarmist, to some readers, but I'm reminded of Elie Wiesel's great book Night in which he recounts the sad tale of many Jewish families who refused to believe that they were in any serious danger from the Nazis. They couldn't imagine the horrors to which they would be subjected in a few short months, they passed on the opportunity to flee and were totally unprepared for the holocaust when it broke upon them.
When people - like the Nazis, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Antifa, etc. - no longer believe that they're accountable to God, when they no longer believe that they have a divinely-imposed duty to love their neighbor and their ideological enemies, then many of them will believe with Lenin that what's moral is whatever promotes the revolution and what's immoral is whatever hinders it.
Once that's granted it follows that anything at all, no matter how ghastly or bestial, is justified if it promotes the goals of those who are willing to burn everything down to create their idea of a new social order.
Luckily, we today have some advantages that the French and Russian people did not. We live in a democratic republic, not an aristocracy, we have an armed citizenry, we have a tradition of freedom, we have a president unlikely to try to appease the anarchists, we have social media that can get truth out to the masses in a timely manner, but we could conceivably lose all of those advantages almost overnight.
Those who consider themselves liberated from the religious superstitions of their grandparents, who are unconstrained by a belief that they're accountable to God for what they do, are waiting for that to happen and actively working to make it happen.
One irony of this, if the experience of the French and Russian radicals should repeat itself, is that those who make it happen will be among the first to find themselves sacrificed to the exigencies of the revolution they created. Leftist revolutions always wind up eating their own.
When God goes, so, too, go all moral constraints on the consciences of the people. Sometimes the people don't immediately realize that they're no longer tethered to a moral law, but once they do, murder, destruction, theft and tyranny often follow, at least they did in France and Russia. The masses become ungovernable, tyrants seize power, freedom is quashed, and the people are crushed under the tank treads of their "liberators."
It's a recurrent theme. Plato described it in his Republic 2300 years ago. It happened not only in 18th century France and 20th century Russia, it happened in dozens of other countries, great (China) and small (Cuba), throughout the twentieth century.
The French and Russian revolutions, like most left-wing revolutions, were self-consciously atheistic. Enormous efforts were made to wipe out Christianity, which was seen as the real enemy because the church was the only institution which had, among other things, the standing to compete with the state for peoples' allegiance and the moral authority to condemn the atrocities perpetrated by the French Jacobins and the Russian Stalinists.
In our own time the Christian church is still considered to be the enemy by the left, and for much the same reason. The secular power-brokers in our society have decided that God has no place in our public life and should have scarcely any place in our private life.
Our elites in the media, Hollywood, the courts and the academy have labored assiduously to make Him irrelevant, but what the apostle Paul said of men in his letter to the Galatians applies as well to whole societies: "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap."
We are today reaping the fruits of a century or more of attempts to reduce God to a non-entity. Our contemporary urban Jacobins are not interested in dialogue. Some of them would be quite happy to burn our cities to the ground and cart all dissenters off to the guillotine, gulag or firing squad.
The only thing stopping them is their lack of power and that may be a merely temporary limitation.
That may seem too strong, too alarmist, to some readers, but I'm reminded of Elie Wiesel's great book Night in which he recounts the sad tale of many Jewish families who refused to believe that they were in any serious danger from the Nazis. They couldn't imagine the horrors to which they would be subjected in a few short months, they passed on the opportunity to flee and were totally unprepared for the holocaust when it broke upon them.
When people - like the Nazis, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Antifa, etc. - no longer believe that they're accountable to God, when they no longer believe that they have a divinely-imposed duty to love their neighbor and their ideological enemies, then many of them will believe with Lenin that what's moral is whatever promotes the revolution and what's immoral is whatever hinders it.
Once that's granted it follows that anything at all, no matter how ghastly or bestial, is justified if it promotes the goals of those who are willing to burn everything down to create their idea of a new social order.
Luckily, we today have some advantages that the French and Russian people did not. We live in a democratic republic, not an aristocracy, we have an armed citizenry, we have a tradition of freedom, we have a president unlikely to try to appease the anarchists, we have social media that can get truth out to the masses in a timely manner, but we could conceivably lose all of those advantages almost overnight.
Those who consider themselves liberated from the religious superstitions of their grandparents, who are unconstrained by a belief that they're accountable to God for what they do, are waiting for that to happen and actively working to make it happen.
One irony of this, if the experience of the French and Russian radicals should repeat itself, is that those who make it happen will be among the first to find themselves sacrificed to the exigencies of the revolution they created. Leftist revolutions always wind up eating their own.