This article first appeared on The Stream.
One of the things that the Left fears, so much as to be prudent enough rarely to allude to it, lest it expose its own weakness, is that Western peoples might one day reclaim their Christian heritage—their true Christian heritage, not the “Doormat Christianity” variety that was manufactured, nurtured, and led by subversive leftist elements, wolves in sheep’s clothing, seeking to undermine the West’s Judeo-Christian ethos.
Consider the anti-Christian hit piece on the rosary that recently appeared in The Atlantic. Many have rightly condemned it as a pathetic smear against Catholics. Even so, the fears expressed within it, while exaggerated, do touch onto a certain truth: though the Left and all of its depraved elements have little to fear from Christians waging a physical “holy war” against them, they do have to fear the resurrection of the “church militant,” defined as “the Christian church on earth regarded as engaged in a constant warfare against its enemies, the powers of evil.”
This comes out clearly when The Atlantic complains of “social-media pages … saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (‘God wills it’) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants.”
The Left fears such images precisely because they invoke something innately appealing. For example, the eight men profiled in my new book, Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam, not only carried the rosary into war, but most of them sacrificed their lives—though they were emperors, kings, and lords who had much to live for—fighting in defense of the Faith.
These included Godfrey of Bouillon, a wealthy duke who forsook his many possessions in Europe to take the cross and fight for the cause of Christendom during the First Crusade; El Cid, who almost singlehandedly stopped and even turned the tides against the jihadist infiltration of Spain; Richard Lionheart, a king who nearly lost everything—and complained to God in Job-like fashion—in his attempt to liberate the Holy Land; Ferdinand III, the Castilian monarch who spearheaded the Reconquista and liberated Spain from Islamic tyranny; Louis IX, the French king and tragic hero who, never once complaining, sacrificed all that was dear to him in the cause of Christ; John Hunyadi, Hungary’s champion who fought both the jihadists and their elitist Western collaborators; Skanderbeg, the Albanian Braveheart who abandoned a life of wealth and honors to fight and die alongside his countrymen in the name of freedom; and even Vlad the Impaler—Hollywood’s bloodsucking “Count Dracula”—who defended his kingdom against Islamic invasions, including by fighting fire with fire (that is, impalement with impalement).
The contagiously inspiring image invoked by these men who boldly and unapologetically sacrificed everything to defend their faith is precisely what the Left does not want today’s Christians, of whatever denomination, to recollect as part of their heritage, a thing available to them to emulate in times of crisis.
Incidentally, one need not be Catholic—I’m not—to be inspired by or associate with the aforementioned men and their self-sacrificial commitment: plenty of Orthodox and Protestant Christians also sacrificed much in order to defend their faith.
At any rate, from here, one realizes why, for decades, all departments in service of the Left—from the public school system to Hollywood—have done everything in their power to 1) emasculate men and 2) present “good” and “true” Christianity as being nothing more than a welcome doormat (the antithesis of church militant).
Thus, the powers-that-be have idolized the effeminate and extolled the homosexual; they have portrayed sword-waving women as the true and only embodiment of courage, heroism, and self-sacrifice; they have demonized true masculinity—without which civilization perishes—as “toxic”; and, most insidiously, they have depicted any Christian who wishes to do anything other than “turn his other cheek” as being hypocritical, cowardly, greedy, self-serving, oppressive, etc.
One can go on and on as to how the Left has done everything, subtle and increasingly not so subtle, to neuter men, but the point should be clear: the first and foremost enemy of any one or thing—in this case, the Left—is men. As such, teaching men not to be men has been one of the most strategic ways to defeat men. Little wonder the lgb-whatever agenda has been to infiltrate and indoctrinate the minds of children—whether through schools and libraries, or television programming and books for children. While that agenda is dark on several fronts, one of its chief goals is to strip boys of their latent manhood while they’re still young and pliable—nipping them in the “bud,” as it were, so they become compliant in adulthood.
Before closing and for the record, I am not here glorifying or calling for any physical militancy. After all, and unlike the aforementioned Defenders of the West, who had no choice but to fight, today’s Christians need not take up arms in a physical manner.
Rather, if today’s men were simply to reclaim their manhood and start behaving like men—and, most importantly, believe in a Cause greater than themselves—all of the insane ills plaguing Western society would dissipate like vapor.
All you have to do is read the Old Testament to know God is not a pacifist. Many times he was angry with the Israelites because they feared going to battle with pagan nations who greatly outnumbered them. When they approached nations where they were outnumbered but held a faith in God, they usually prevailed.
Exactly, assuming they deserved G0d’s protection. We have to earn it. But it’s worth working for.
The Hebrews won because of acting like true men. Western men must fight the Evil Left and Jihad and bring back the Church Militant to fight and destroy Evil.
We will be doomed if Satin wins.
Great piece. Yes, men of all faiths, and that includes my Jewish brothers and sons, must behave like men. There is something more important than whatever one is doing now, assuming that one is not figuring out what is more important and doing it. Some things are worth dying for, but some even more important things are worth living for.
The 9/11 hijackers behaved like Manly Men did they not? If by “manly” you and Mr. Ibrahim mean brave and fearless, fighting, dying, and sacrificing themselves for a Cause greater than themselves, dying for the FAITH, then every Muslim Jihadist is a very admirable and heroic Manly Man.
So were the German Nazis.
So men here should become passive and let those other manly men defeat us. We will feel so morally superior!
No, not at all, that’s not what I’m arguing.
Rational, secular, earthly values are worth selfishly living for, selfishly fighting for, and even selfishly dying for. Rational values are what a rational manly man lives for, fights for, and dies for. All other so-called “values” are not values but anti-values.
The true Christian, the serious Christian, who understands the full context of Christian theology, and dedicates himself completely to that theology, is not fighting for his life on earth, earthly values, earthly pleasure, earthly happiness, or earthly life. He understands completely and devoutly that this life on earth is insignificant, a fallen world, an inferior place, a punishment for Original Sin. His divine, otherworldly, supernatural task and duty is to seek salvation through Jesus Christ by serving Jesus Christ by self-sacrifice, self-denial, self-abnegation, and renunciation for God and neighbor. And thereby maybe receiving God’s grace after he dies and being permitted to enter Christian Eternal Utopia — Christian Heaven. That, dear modern Christian is the true Christian theology and world-view. That dear modern Christian is not a recipe for staying on earth and fighting for earthly values like the United States of America and selfish, materialistic, Capitalism.
The truly devout Christian is not John D. Rockefeller, it’s Mother Teresa, living a devout life of renunciation for the Kingdom of Christ after death by living a life of self-sacrifice for God and neighbor.
The pursuit of liberty on earth, life on earth, and happiness on earth, are not Christian values, or Muslim values, not when both religions are taken seriously, completely seriously. When both religions are taken seriously what you get is 9/11 or the Christian Dark Ages.
You are most assuredly not a manly man.
” I don’t recognize any such absurdity as service to my country. I recognize a moral responsibility to my freedom and liberty and the freedom and liberty of those I love.” — THX 1138
You are the essence of the weak selfish little weasel. But your obsession with Nazis is always interesting.
Depends on the cause. Fighting to protect the judeo-christian civilisation is a valid objective. Fighting to subjugate peoples to the tyranny of a totalitarian ideology or of a fascist government isn’t.
Manly virtues weren’t the Christian virtues during the 1st few centuries of Christianity, when Christians were cowering in caves waiting for the second coming clinging to the feminine theologic virtues of “faith, hope, and charity”.
The word virtue, like the word virility, comes from the Roman word for man, “Vir”. Our founding fathers read Cicero to understand these manly virtues. It was when the Christians were finally willing to fight and assume their civic duty that Constantine legalized Christianity. A more manly religion was born, which we on the right would recognize as Christianity today. From Ambrose to Aquinas, Cicero’s influence help reshape the religion. John Adams modeled his life on Cicero, who was his favorite Roman author.
We need the more secular manly virtues of our Greco-Roman heritage. These are called the cardinal virtues in Catholicism. The left only sees the theological virtues, not the fighting virtues that since Constantine have been incorporated into the religion.
The Christians cowering in caves actually took Christianity seriously unlike today’s Christians who drive to Church in their Cadillacs and then go play a hole or two of golf. Christianity when taken seriously leads to the tyranny of theocracy and a Dark Age of Unreason, but that’s an inconvenient fact that Mr. Ibrahim wishes to evade.
“What were the practical results of the medieval approach? The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art; he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as “the lust of the eyes.” Unlike many Americans today, who drive to church in their Cadillac or tape their favorite reverend on the VCR so as not to interrupt their tennis practice, the medievals took religion seriously. They proceeded to create a society that was anti-materialistic and anti-intellectual. I do not have to remind you of the lives of the saints, who were the heroes of the period, including the men who ate only sheep’s gall and ashes, quenched their thirst with laundry water, and slept with a rock for their pillow. These were men resolutely defying nature, the body, sex, pleasure, all the snares of this life — and they were canonized for it, as, by the essence of religion, they should have been. The economic and social results of this kind of value code were inevitable; mass stagnation and abject poverty, ignorance and mass illiteracy, waves of insanity that swept whole towns, a life expectancy in the teens. “Woe unto ye who laugh now,” the Sermon on the Mount had said. Well, they were pretty safe on this count. They had precious little to laugh about.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
Quite true. The Dark Ages and feudalism doesn’t have much appeal. Raymond has it all wrong. The left doesn’t fear religion, they fear reason. They don’t have reason and reality on their side. They welcome religious opposition as it is easy to dismiss and the young today are doing just that. With a religious opposition they can pretend that reason and science are on their side. They can only get away with that if we fail to expose their sham.
A true Christian is also a sinner. A repentant sinner, but still a sinner. Until we pinch ourselves and it doesn’t hurt.
“Be strong and show yourself a man” –1 Kings 2:2
“Be alert, stand firm in the faith, act like a man, be strong” –1 Corinthians 16:13
The Lord saw that there was no justice,
and He was offended.
He saw that there was no man–
He was amazed that there was no one interceding (Isaiah 59:15-16)
Because there was “no man” to take up the responsibility of a man:
Youths oppress My people,
and women rule over them.
My people, your leaders mislead you;
they confuse the direction of your paths. (Isaiah 3:12)
…
The Lord also says:
Because the daughters of Zion are haughty,
walking with heads held high
and seductive eyes,
going along with prancing steps,
jingling their ankle bracelets,
the Lord will put scabs on the heads
of the daughters of Zion,
and the Lord will shave their foreheads bare. (Isaiah 3:16-17)
…
Your men will fall by the sword,
your warriors in battle.
Then her gates will lament and mourn;
deserted, she will sit on the ground. (Isaiah 3:25-25)
So it will be in America because “there was no man.”
Then once God’s punishment has completed its purpose, the few men left will arise and be found, and women will be once again be grateful for men:
On that day seven women
will seize one man, saying,
“We will eat our own bread
and provide our own clothing.
Just let us be called by your name.
Take away our disgrace.” (Isaiah 4:1)
In the meantime, cowardly men will die and arrogant women will be disgraced until the men left will know why God created them male and rise to show themselves as men.
Correct and exactly prophetic.
“Rather, if today’s men were simply to reclaim their manhood and start behaving like men—and, most importantly, believe in a Cause greater than themselves—all of the insane ills plaguing Western society would dissipate like vapor.”
Selflessness and self-sacrifice are evil.
The man who believes in and fights for a Cause greater than himself and greater than this life, his personal and individual life on earth, becomes a deadly psychopath. The 9/11 hijackers believed in, were fighting for, and died in an act of selfless self-sacrifice for a Cause greater than themselves. They were men who sacrificed their lives selflessly for Allah and an imaginary, delusional, After-Life in a Supernatural Utopia. Their leader even packed his wedding suit for the Cause higher than himself and his life on earth. The only life there is.
The German Nazi was a man who believed in a Cause greater than himself — the Fuhrer and the Aryan Race. He killed and died in an act of complete self-sacrifice for a Cause greater than his self and his personal and individual life. He killed and died selflessly believing that somehow he would live on through the Aryan Race. He was selflessly wrong; he and his loved ones simply died and were heard no more.
The selfless, self-sacrificing, man who looks for a Cause greater than himself to sacrifice himself for, always transforms himself into a mindless, selfless, self-sacrificing, destroyer and killer. He transforms himself into a selfless, mindless, puppet and zombie.
“Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice….
The concept of faith does not pertain to the content of a man’s ideas, but by the method by which they are to be accepted. “Faith” designates blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof. It is obvious, therefore, why Nazi (and Fascist) leaders insist on faith from their followers. “Faith” writes Hitler, “is harder to shake than knowledge…. I have followed the [the Church] in giving our party program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism or attack on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it….
Selflessness in the sense that oneself does not matter, the feeling of being expendable, was no longer the expression of individual idealism but a mass phenomenon.” – Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”
“How little the masses were driven by the famous instinct for self-preservation” observes Hannah Arendt, a life-long student of the totalitarian phenomenon, noting the modern Europeans’ passive, unprotesting acceptance of disaster, their “indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes….” “Compared with their nonmaterialism, a Christian monk looks like a man absorbed in worldly affairs.” “The fanaticism of members of totalitarian movements,” she adds, “so clearly different in quality from the greatest loyalty of members of ordinary parties, is produced by the lack of self-interest of masses who are quite prepared to sacrifice themselves.”…
He was a faithful Kantian, Adolph Eichmann told his Israeli judges. In all his bloody career, he said, he had helped some Jews only twice, and he apologized for these exceptions. “This uncompromising attitude toward the performance of his murderous duties,” writes Hannah Arendt,
“damned him in the eyes of the judges more than anything else, which was comprehensible, but in his own eyes it was precisely what justified him, as it had once silenced whatever conscience he might have had left. No exceptions — this was the proof that he had always acted against his ‘inclinations’, whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his ‘duty’.”
Most Germans, Miss Arendt observes, “must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom… But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.”
A nation taught, in the name of morality, to reject the pursuit of values can reach no other end-of-trail. Men without values are zombies or puppets — or Nazis.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End Of Freedom In America”
Selflessness and self-sacrifice are evil. — THX
You are the embodiment of evil. The idea of risking your life to help anyone that is in desperate need is loathsome to you. You see yourself as infinitely more valuable than that of anyone else. You are hiding behind the whore of Satan who wouldn’t risk her life for anything, especially you.
I expect you will never fight for a cause greater than yourself.
I’ll tell you what they fear, they fear GOD! “The devil knows his days are short and is filled with a terrible resolve.”
What was Christendom (Christians dominionizing government and society on behalf of their King) in early 1600s America has tragically devolved into mere four-walled, statin-glassed, pewtrifying Christianity.
The bulk of today’s alleged Christians are best depicted by Christ in Matthew 5:13 as salt that’s lost its savor, good for nothing but to be trampled under the foot of man. But all is not bad news in this in that a good foot stomping tends to bring back some of the saltiness.
Time to get salty again and start working toward taking dominion back from the secularists, non-Christians, and anti-Christs.
See our dominion packet, made up of the following four books:
1) Law & Kingdom: Their Relevance Under the New Covenant
2) The Romans 13 Template for Biblical Dominion: Ten Reasons Why Romans 13 is Not About Secular Government
3) Ecclesia vs. Church: Why Understanding the Difference is Critical to Our Future
4) A Biblical Constitution: A Scriptural Replacement for Secular Government
All four books can be found for free on our Online Book page at Bible versus Constitution dot org.
I’ve read these articles before. They all overlook the siege of Vienna in 1683 and Sobieski’s victory over the Turks, effectively ending their incursion into Europe. Until Angela Merkel invited them in.
Malays are pussies.
Good article. It makes me realize I’m not doing enough.