Twisted tongues: Salt of the earth

“But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?
It is no longer good for anything,
except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”
— Matthew 5:13

Salt is valuable. It is a commodity because it can disinfect, preserve, enhance flavor, and prevent slipping.

Thus, in both a Christian and political context, it can avert moral decay, promote customs and social mores, enrich the senses, and grip people to tradition and faith, thus, averting injurious deeds. Does this sound like the U.S. to you? Or American Christianity, for that matter?

I bring this up in regards to my last Twisted tongues blog, in which the Orthodox Church of America referenced the previous bit of Scripture, Matthew 5:14, in a letter to President Trump.

So, this verse at top is the a priori to that oft-quoted “city on a hill” verse. It is the context needed to foster deeper biblical understanding of what the Apostle Matthew was trying to convey.

And this brings me to another message made recently from the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the U.S. Here’s an excerpt.

A common refrain among Christians is “Don’t be too political. It’s so worldly.”  Yet, this statement is precisely political, but without saying, “Hey, here’s our stance, y’all. Like it or lump it.”

I’d almost rather bishops just come out and be unapologetically progressive. At least then we non-leftists would know exactly where we stand within the Church. Will all the Orthodox John Pipers please come forward?

Of course, an outright stated Church policy must be backed up by Christian teaching. It would have to be in line with Apostolic tradition and contained implicitly in Scripture.

But the above statement, like so many Church pronouncements, is just a blending of secular dogma interspersed with Christian morality. It’s more vague PC jargon or even covert leftist platitudes, and less timeless moral truth.

To me, denouncing “shootings” means guns are bad. “Hospitality” means unchecked mass immigration, demographic replacement, lawlessness, further erosion of common beliefs, and increased division. Religious “solidarity” means coexist, Islamization, and ecumenism.

“Abhorrent discrimination and prejudice” means they are pushing the false narrative that Nazis are running amok. And the touted “diversity” of host city Cleveland in a statement from the opening reception of the assembly means POC get a pass, but “white people got work to do,” as the “relevant” folks like to say. They virtue signal for the failed system of multiculturalism and pretend it has something to do with pan-Orthodox unity.

From where does touchy-feely Western Christianity come? An esteemed philosopher and faithful Orthodox Christian I know said it smacks of a “Christian universalism,” a brand of theology claiming that salvation will eventually be extended to all human beings.

This school of thought tends to downgrade particularisms like family, tribe, community, and country. It views them as draining energy and diverting attention away from a greater collective goal of global Christianity and a more inclusive Church, no matter the cost. Truth becomes collateral damage.

Christian universalism is born of “liberal universalism,” which is a form of nihilism, he explained. In fact, an early proponent of this ethical theory, radical utilitarian William Godwin, often spoke that his personal responsibility to children everywhere rivaled that of the obligation he had to his own children.

(No wonder Godwin’s own daughter, Mary Shelley, penned “Frankenstein” as an ode to the broken and grievous relationship she had with her father. Having early-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft as a mother probably didn’t help matters much either.)

And this kind of humanist “universal” approach to ordering society on a worldwide, mass scale has crept its way into much of Christian ecclesiology, heresy by heresy, schism by schism, denomination by denomination, and cuck by cuck, till we often have a tradition-rooted Christianity seeming more like progressive activism.

It’s a feminized theology which is solely Western, as the Christians in the East would laugh at such capitulation to the secular, resist such acquiescence to the humanist, and mock such concessions to the globalist. (And they do, in fact, which is one of the reasons Russia and its renaissance of tradition and faith is branded evil by the “enlightened” West.)

Rightly so, much of the Eastern Church sees it as weakness and defeat, not courage and unity. An effete ecumenism which will not preserve, but rather, will destroy.

While America’s “high churches” canonize pagan degenerate Matthew Shepard and entomb his remains in the National Cathedral, the Russian Orthodox Church grants sainthood to a true martyr, Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who died at the hands of the godless Bolsheviks.

What the hell happened to the once firm-in-their-convictions American people? They may be a lost cause, but what about the otherwise steadfastly traditional Christians? Why do they so easily succumb to the infection of political correctness?

Where is our St. Ilia of Georgia, a faithful hero who will speak up for the borders, language, and culture of his people against an invading threat? Or our St. Genevieve of Paris, who will rally the citizens of her homeland to defend against the attack of conquerors like Attila the Hun?

As always, twisted tongues and bad history lay at the core. So, let’s break down some of this “rhetoric for continuing revolution,” as M.E. Bradford would call it.

Take the Statue of Liberty and the poem “The New Colossus.” Written in 1883 by Jewish progressive and radical Georgist Emma Lazarus, the sonnet was cast onto the pedestal of the monument in 1903, some 20 years after it came to NY Harbor.

In it, Lazarus refers to America as the “Mother of Exiles” and “From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome,” helping to shape “the nation of immigrants” ethos. And as always in American Christianity, such historic inaccuracies eventually become Gospel issues, further deforming the body politic and the faith.

Lazarus’ powerful prose is especially suspicious when you realize that she was a forerunner of Zionism, advocating for the establishment of a Jewish state for “her ancient people” in Palestine. She was an activist for Jewish rights in New York and worked for improving the welfare of indigent Jewish immigrants.

Huh, peculiar that Lazarus used America as a refuge for homeless Jews while also working toward creating a Jewish homeland. Does Israel take in the “huddled masses” or the “wretched refuse?” Of course not.

Do Zionists champion for me and my non-Jewish people? What about my homeland? What about my tribe? Nary a peep.

Not only has this social-justice creed been misappropriated and shamefully elevated to that of a founding American principle, but Christians often use it as a decoy in their refugee shell game, confusing the kingdom of God here on earth with the godless state. Seems to be a habit these days.

Just like Lazarus and her Zionist acolytes, the canonical bishops don’t seem too compassionate about the displacement of my family‘s culture, our ancestral home, our freedoms, our humanity, our language, our traditions, our history, our symbols, our civil rights, or our safety. Where are our angels unaware?

Too many Christians take malevolent mistakes, veil them in spirituality and patriotism, and then foist them on to the masses through law, regulation, continued cultural degradation, miseducation, warfare-ism, and the Social Gospel, of course. And anyone who dissents from the globalist program is chastised as a worldly trouble-maker. Interesting how that works.

In my opinion, the New Colossus, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Pledge of Allegiance, and other twisted-tongued dogma result from a diseased blend of, among other things, historicism and Straussian philosophy. Together, they take us from federalism to mass democracy.

And then from a sovereign nation-state to the border-less, culture-less, amorphous blob we now call ‘Murica. She is an idea. A “proposition nation” as spelled out in my Beacons of Light blog. An empire fighting “humanitarian” wars to spread “democratic” ideas abroad and ensure them here at “home.”

Historicism is a form of moral relativism. It’s an embodiment of nihilism, which says there are no objective truths, and it seeks to destroy tradition, history, and social norms. Its aim is to conquer nature and subjugate man through value-free degeneracy and hedonism.

There is no right or wrong, except what they decide is just or unjust, of course, always doing so on a sliding and ever-changing scale. History is used as a weapon by defining an idea as appropriate or worthy only within the context of the historical moment. We might call this leftism.

Whereas Straussian thought stems from philosopher Leo Strauss, who saw modern America as a positive good. A noble government based in natural law and civic virtue, meant to benefit and make happy and free all people. You know, universal suffrage and democracy and other shenanigans counter to Founding principles.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
— H.L. Mencken

Many Straussians, like late historian Harry Jaffa, see the U.S. as a regime expressly fashioned to ensure equality. They say the pinnacle enlightenment idea of classical liberalism is egalitarianism, whose seed was planted by the Founders but did not blossom until Saint Lincoln’s divinely inspired “Gettysburg Address” and his ultimate defeat of those pesky sovereign states down South.

In fact, many disciples of Jaffa liken his book “Crisis of the House Divided” to be the most important Lincoln book ever published and liken it to Plato’s “The Republic.” It establishes Lincoln as the greatest statesman ever, asserting that the beginning of real America lay with him. Kinda like how some Protestants don’t think legitimate Christianity began until Martin Luther came on to the scene.

The quest for this illusory equality – that unattainable, dystopian religion that’s tearing America apart – then became biblical-like revelation to be aptly sought, coerced, regulated, meted out, and administered on an unequal basis through the central authority. Wow, what a boon for liberty!

This is one reason the South today is still so maligned, even among people who don’t identify as leftists. We might call this neoconservatism, or most of the Republican and Democrat parties, or liberal Judeo-Christianity … or just the mainstream. “There is no issue of States’ rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights,” Lyndon B. Johnson once opined.

But this could just as easily be a tweet from the Pope, your pastor, your priest, followers of historicism or Strauss, or any American these days, Christian or otherwise. And any and all measures needed to ensure this globalist, universal goal should be employed. Despite the fact it’s a lie, and despite the fact it will hurt the very people it claims to want to help.

We can throw many other ideologies into the mix, such as the Frankfurt School and the Gramsciites (cultural Marxism), critical race theory and Yankee puritanism (anti-whiteness), feminism and anti-hegemony (anti-male, anti-family, and anti-West), but they’re all just two sides of the same leftist coin.

Funny thing is that no matter how godless these belief systems may be, each still depends upon a Christian worldview to buttress them. To attempt to help people, right wrongs, treat people fairly, or better someone’s or society’s lot, there still needs to be a moral metric.

As Strauss wrote about Frederich Nietzsche, the highly influential German philosopher often associated with nihilism and atheism, he believed “our own principles, including the belief in progress, will become as unconvincing and alien as all earlier principles (essences) had shown themselves to be.”

In other words, progress will out-progress the previous progress. (If that doesn’t describe post-modern America, I’m not sure what does.) He continued, “The only way out seems to be … that one voluntarily choose life-giving delusion instead of deadly truth, that one fabricate a myth.”

The myth is “life-giving” because it is popular. Mainstream. Fashionable. Easy. Pushed by everyone from soccer moms to corporate dads. Hot babes to “relevant” bishops. Church-going folks to Antifa freaks. They know the delusion can be deadly if revealed.

But it is truth and tenacity which are the salt – the virtuous, gripping, and restorative antidote to the maddening myth-makers and their dangerous delusions. We can either be the salt and counter the faulty premises and secular slipping, or be thrown out and trampled under foot. I choose the former. I pray you do, too.