sent to me by Howard Sutherland about the arrest of some Christians for displaying statements from the Bible at a homosexual celebration, the following exchange occurred:
LA to HRS:
Two thousand years ago, Christians were thrown to lions in the Colliseum. If we see what’s happening now in that context, it’s not so strange or shocking or weird; it’s pagan society persecuting Christians.
HRS to LA:
There is a difference. In the Roman empire, Christianity was a provincial cult trying to establish itself. (That it succeeded is miraculous in itself). Christians were a minority, and persecuted for declining to acknowledge the emperor’s divinity. Today, Christianity is being singled out for persecution in a country that was founded by Christians, on explicitly Christian principles, and that is still overwhelmingly Christian (at least nominally) in population. Christians aren’t a persecuted minority—they are almost everybody. It may be true that the most vehement anti-Christians in America are Jewish (joined by ever more Mohammedans), but anti-Christianism could get nowhere without the active and passive support of legions of Christians. At least Roman Christians did not persecute themselves. We do.
LA to HRS:
But I guess my point is that, in terms of prevailing (liberal) standards, Christians ARE a minority today. PC is the ascendant global faith, just as Rome was the global ecumene.
HRS to LA:
True enough, alas. I wish I knew how we managed to lose it so completely. If we could ever figure that out, we might have a hope of getting at least some back.
LA to HRS:
One way of putting it is that it happened through the majority ceasing to believe in itself and to behave as a majority, and giving minorities the moral advantage over themselves. This needs to be reversed. The majority still has the power to lead, if it will believe in itself and assert itself, and then the minorities will become minorities once again instead of acting as the majority, which they began to do when they moved into the vacuum of power that was left by the majority retreat.
To put it another way, it happened through people subscribing to and surrendering to liberalism. Liberalism was never adequately fought. Its basic premises were never sufficiently identified and challenged.
For example, when I first heard about and wrote about multiculturalism back in 1989 (I’m going to re-print that article soon at VFR), I understood immediately that multiculturalism meant the end of America, that it represented a principle antithetical to America. Other people thought, “Well, multiculturalism is a nice idea, but it goes too far, it will balkanize us, it will divide us into groups, blah blah …” Yes, it would divide us into groups. Conservatives grasped that much. They didn’t grasp that it was antithetical to our nation itself. And so they didn’t oppose it as it needed to be opposed. Do know that there has never been a grass roots conservative organization opposing multiculturailsm?
Why? Because the conservatives themselves didn’t really believe in our nation and the majority culture that defined it, therefore they didn’t recognize the threat posed by a principle antithetical to our majority culture and our nation. They defined our nation in liberal terms, as equality, freedom, and tolerance, or they defined it in modern conservative terms, as family values, national defense, free enterprise, and gun rights. But they didn’t define the nation as a substantial entity. And because they didn’t define it as a substantial entity, they couldn’t conceive of a threat to it as an entity.
So, the simplest answer to the question, “How did we lose it?”, is: We lost our nation (along with our majority culture, and our majority Christian religion) to leftism because we had already re-defined it in terms of liberal or conservative abstractions.
This is why I chose amnation—American Nation—as my domain name. It is the sense of the nation as a substantive entity, a collective being larger than its members. This is not some fascistic exaltation of nation and ethnos and culture, it is an ordinary sense of our country and peoplehood that Americans used to have but have lost. It is modernity’s destruction of any larger collective identity that has opened us to all the other destructions. So we have to try to reverse this whole course and to start asserting, against the dominant powers, that which should never have been given up.