Point of No Return

A friend wrote to me recently to tell me that another friend had told him that he thought the travesty that played out in the Manhattan courtroom of Judge Juan Merchan last week marked a point of no return in our nation. My friend wondered if this characterization of those unfortunate events was an exaggeration. I replied that I wasn't sure whether it was or not.

I said that I don't know if we've passed the point of no return, but I think our nation is surely in a place of grave peril. The left has shown itself willing to resort to the same perversions of the judiciary that Marxists regularly employed in the former Soviet Union and wherever else they've acquired power. It's their modus operandi.

Once we've abandoned God, as the left has done, there's no longer an objective right and wrong to guide us and therefore all that remains is a "whatever works" pragmatism. There's nothing wrong, on this view, with perverting or ignoring the Constitution if it advances the prospect of reaching one's political goals.

If the law stands in the way of ridding the country of Trump, then so much the worse for the law. If they can get away with what they've done in New York, if it costs Trump the election, then everything goes, the Constitution will be effectively dead, and we'll find ourselves immersed in a Hobbesian struggle for power in which there are no longer any constraints.

The idea that we can dispense with Christianity and go on living in some Enlightenment paradise is an absurd delusion, but it's a delusion that seems to be rapidly metastasizing in our culture. In the introduction to his new book, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, John Daniel Davidson writes,

As Christianity fades in America, so too will our system of government, our civil society, and our rights and our freedoms. Without a national culture shaped by the Christian faith, without a majority consensus in favor of traditional Christian morality, America as we know it will come to an end....

There is no secular utopia waiting for us in the post-Christian world now coming into being, no future in which we get to retain the benefits of Christendom without the faith from which they sprang. Western civilization and its accoutrements depend on Christianity, not just in the abstract, but in practice.

Last week I wrote about historian Tom Holland's idea of a "cut flower" civilization in which the cultural "blossoms" we value are cut from their Christian roots. A cut-flower civilization can't survive and one of the first blossoms to wither and die is the rule of law.

We witnessed the rule of law flouted last week in Manhattan and if it's allowed to stand I fear that my friend's friend will have been proven right.