Hey, Let’s Build Another Tower of Babel, But — Hear Me Out — Let’s Do it on Sand

In this morning’s issue of The Brew, I briefly tossed off a thought that deserves to be developed:

Post-Christians want a peaceful, tolerant, rules-based society — but they want it for free, without paying the price that our ancestors did to build up ordered liberty: embrace self-restraint, respect the Natural Law, and view the human person as the image and likeness of God.

So instead of building on that solid foundation, Leftists scramble to punish and silence people they identify as threats.

In fact, it isn’t just Leftists who do that. People with no solid core of unassailable principles to rest on are doomed instead to make every decision on the primitive distinction of “friend or enemy”: Is this guy part of my faction? Is he a threat to me? If so, I’ll try to destroy him — no questions asked.

Getting Out of Blast Range

That’s how Establishment conservatives reacted to the rise of a genuine political genius in the form of Donald Trump. Outlets such as National Review and public figures like David French might have chest-thumped about “timeless principles” of conservative political philosophy, but in cold fact they were desperately compromised by their visceral need to remain in the “mainstream” and appear respectable to unsympathetic Leftists in powerful institutions. They saw that Trump and his backers were getting sprayed with radioactive hatred and wanted to make bloody sure they themselves were out of the blast radius.

As the Left shifted the Overton window of respectable opinion further and further each year, such conservatives duly followed. Some online wags created a drinking game, downing shots whenever NR published its predictable “Conservative Case for …” whatever the Left was demanding at the time — be it same-sex marriage, transgenderism, or gun control. Any sellout of core beliefs was better than the prospect of getting relegated to “the fever swamps” of “extremism.” Let the borders stay open and the country be overwhelmed, or the January 6 protestors rot away in solitary confinement, or Americans get locked in their homes and out of their churches. Whatever — just so long as our enemies at the FBI, Google, Harvard, and the New Yorker don’t lump us in with the “crazies.”

Pathetic. So what are the principles we need, to save us from becoming spastic marionettes dancing on the strings of whatever principalities and powers are currently in the driver’s seat of our culture? How can we divert our fellow citizens from the West’s current doomed project, of building a multicultural “tower to Heaven” on the shifting sands of sentiment, moral panic, and raw cultural power? 

Truths of Revelation and Reason

There are two different sets of such principles, actually, and it’s crucial we hold onto both. The first are the most obvious: We must hold firmly to the vision of man as the image and likeness of God — an anthropology totally undermined by Darwinian materialism. Without this view of man, none of our constitutional principles, laws, or even social customs make sense. If we’re just tragically brainy primates, then the whole notion of “unalienable rights” is absurd. The same goes for the “due process of law” and even basic courtesies such as keeping bearded weirdos in drag out of women’s locker rooms.

This high vision of human nature comes from divine revelation, but its moral implications can be understood by Natural Law. God wrote them on our hearts so we’d be without excuse. On some level, the pagan Romans who cackled while slaves fought to the death in the Colosseum knew that they were engaging in something evil. They just preferred not to think about it. So did the Aztecs who tore the hearts out of war prisoners, then consumed their bodies for protein. So do the modern Americans who post ultrasounds of the unborn babies they want and abort the ones they don’t.

We must cling to such theological precepts and avoid falling into pagan traps like radical nationalism or racialism that are incompatible with knowable truths about the human person — such as our equality before God.

Truths of History and Experience

But there’s a long list of natural truths, which we learn not by abstract reflection, but inherit as traditions or cull from the lessons of history. Among these prudential truths are maxims like love of family, love of country, the right to own property, and respect for our ancestral heritage. Rudyard Kipling, in one of his greatest poems, called these truths “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” Here are few representative lines from that poem:

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

Too often high-minded people focused on theological truths neglect such humble, crucial facts about our fallen human nature and how it operates. So they turn into deluded, even dangerous Utopians who support suicidal policies such as limitless immigration from alien, hostile nations.

Is It Selfish for Me to Have Children?

Let me illustrate this point with an anecdote. I knew a brilliant, kind-hearted woman, the daughter of a major conservative scholar. She was happily married with two beautiful children. When the subject came up of having any more, she confessed to me that on some level she felt guilty giving birth to children of her own when there were so many children out in the world who needed loving homes. Wouldn’t it be morally better to forego having more children and instead go adopt the neediest?

I told her that this was insane, an example of Christian sentiments unhinged from the basic realities of human nature as God made it, creating a new Gnostic religion. You’re supposed to want your own children, and you’re supposed to love them more than little theoretical strangers you’ve never met.

Another example: While talking to a famous Catholic author and theologian, I raised as an example of theological absurdity this idea: Imagine someone could prove to you that Jesus had commanded universal celibacy — that every human being should follow His example. If you really became convinced that this was the message of the Gospel, what should you do? The theologian hemmed and hawed, then finally said, “We should obey it.”

I told him that if Jesus had contradicted His Father (who ordered us to multiply) on something this central, we would know the man for a fraud, as the enemy of the human race and not its Savior. 

The bottom line: If someone tries to convince you that the Gospel demands the impossible or the absurd, that it completely contradicts the commands God gave in the Old Testament, you can be immediately sure of two things: 1) the argument is false and 2) the person making the argument is de facto an enemy of Christ. Whether he realizes it or not, he’s trying to drive you out of the Church by painting it as a civilizational suicide cult.

And that’s why I’m not listening to Pope Leo XIV or his bishops when they demand that Western countries open their borders. If Christianity taught that, or universal celibacy, or pacifism, I’d know it to be false. And I’d persecute it myself.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.