There is very little “decent middle” left in American life. The store of shared values between faithful Christians and everyone else is shrinking by the day, as the cultural left escalates its demands and dares more degrading and ruthless tactics. As we learned this week while that appalling mass shooting unfolded in California, Christians cannot even tweet that they are praying for the victims, without being answered by profane, hateful sneers from gun grabbers and abortion fans — or being rebuked by a Democrat Senator.

Pro-choicers could barely hide their disappointment that the (Muslim immigrant) shooters were not targeting abortionists. Having searched for any thinkable connection between the facility that was attacked and the abortion industry, Bloomberg Business was reduced to tweeting that the shooting happened “less than two miles away” from a Planned Parenthood clinic. Of course, in the leftist dystopia that is the State of California, there may be no city area that is more than two miles from a lucrative abortion business, but never mind about that.

In Colorado Springs we saw how the media toy with tragedies. Robert Dear is a deranged loner who lives in an unheated shack, is into marijuana and sadism and has been busted for leering in neighbors’ windows and shooting their dog. But when he fires wildly in the vicinity of an abortion clinic, he is a “white Christian terrorist” who has been goaded by the “irresponsible rhetoric” of the pro-life movement into violence. All this on the strength of a single, anonymous report that he muttered “no more baby parts” during a lengthy police interrogation.

Interesting, isn’t it, that we heard nothing else about what Dear supposedly said? Only four words leaked out. Why do you think that is? Did he even say them at all? If Dear was ranting to the cops for several hours, we deserve to hear the rest of it. Was he also talking about the Freemasons and the Reptilians, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? The suspect is apparently a paranoid schizophrenic, who used to warn his neighbors to line their ceilings with metal so that the Feds couldn’t read their minds. But when he goes postal and murders three people, including a pro-life Christian deacon deputy, we’re supposed to blame the Catholic bishops, the Southern Baptist Convention, and little old ladies who pray outside abortion clinics on wintry Saturday mornings.

Now pro-choice writers like Katha Pollitt and Damon Linker are suggesting that pro-life speech itself is a kind of “trigger word,” which goads people to acts of terrorism because — well, it tells us things that are terrible, that a million children each year are murdered in America, and their body parts sold for profit. Never mind that such statements are true; making them is provocative and dangerous.

No doubt, very soon, as the graduates of “safe space” universities move into positions of power, they will try to make such speech illegal — in much the same way that leftist elites in Europe have made criticism of Islam and mass immigration punishable by imprisonment. A leading presidential candidate in the Netherlands is currently on trial for such a thought crime.

America is ripping in two like a poorly sutured wound, and it’s not the fault of Christians or conservatives. We haven’t been shoving forward, trying to impose theocratic laws or puritanical norms on anyone else. Instead, we have simply been trying to hold on to our beliefs, defend the helpless, and raise our families in peace. It’s the left that has decided to junk the meaning of marriage; to invent a new victim class in the form of “transgenders”; to demand that people stop using male and female pronouns; to actively discriminate against persecuted Christian religious refugees in favor of Muslim economic migrants; to impose abortifacient insurance mandates on every employer in America; and on and on we could go. They will not let us opt out, they will not leave us alone, until we kneel before Caesar.

Halting the Drift Toward the Cliff

Apart from standing firm in our churches against liberalizing leaders who would water down the Gospel to lease a few years of peace, what can we do?  We have learned that groveling before the culture’s idols of “tolerance” and “compassion” will only ratchet up demands for further compromises, until we have nothing left but the empty shells of churches, which implement federal contracts for welfare programs and send their gelded leaders to be lectured to at presidential prayer breakfasts.

We cannot take back control of the universities, the corporate boards, the billion-dollar foundations and media corporations that are backing the marginalizing of Christians. But we still have the right to speak and the duty to vote, both in elections and in primaries. It’s impossible for the left to bypass all principled conservative politicians if they are winning, and impossible to marginalize the most powerful man in the world, the U.S. president. The sheer symbolic power of having a solid, fearless believer elected to that office would make an enormous difference in protecting religious liberty.

In 1979, conservative, pro-life views were almost as marginalized as orthodox Christianity is today. The election of Ronald Reagan changed that. It forced the media to treat his views with something like decent respect, and gave courage to millions of us to climb out of our bunkers and speak our minds. We need a nominee this year who will fearlessly speak his own, and defend our freedom; who will run a rigorous and disciplined campaign, and take the White House. Then from that bully pulpit he can insist that our views, the beliefs on which America was founded, may not be shamed into silence.

We must break with our longstanding policy of cringing beside the establishment table, begging for scraps. The greatest leverage we have in America, sadly, is in the primaries; every day after the nominee is chosen, it diminishes. The pressure from establishment donors and campaign professionals to tack to the “center” is already strong; once the votes in Iowa and Alabama are counted, it will become enormous. And as we saw, the “center” is not what it was even in 2007; candidates deemed “electable” and “mainstream” by the media aren’t worth electing. They won’t take risks to help us. The status quo in our country is morally intolerable and politically unstable. It will either break sharply to the right or continue drifting inexorably to the left, but it cannot hold.

We need a candidate who isn’t pandering to us or placating us, but who is fundamentally one of us. He needs the backbone to stand up for us, along with the experience, intellect and savvy to make our case to the country. Given the massive forces ranged against us, nothing less will keep our freedom safe.

On the bright side, remember how weak Hillary Clinton is as a candidate and how thoroughly she has committed herself to Obama’s pro-Muslim policy. Given the tragic likelihood of more Islamist attacks against Americans, this year might be our best opportunity since 1980 to elect a genuine leader. It might also prove our last.

Yes, holding out for a serious conservative nominee in 2016 amounts to a “Hail Mary” pass. That’s what you do when you have no ground game, you are six points behind, and it’s fourth down, fourth quarter, with less than a minute on the clock. Given the state of the culture, we don’t have the option to punt.

Politics can’t change everything. It can’t replace prayer, or make up for our own lack of virtues. But it can protect us from persecution, defend our human rights and leave the world a freer and saner place for our children. We owe them nothing less.