Move Along People, No Demons to See Here

By John Zmirak Published on November 27, 2019

The admirable apostle and gifted writer Eric Metaxas found himself blasted in The Atlantic magazine for warning (along with Franklin Graham) that we face spiritual warfare. Right here, today. Principalities and powers line up in the skies like waves of Nazi bombers over Warsaw. They’re ready to scorch us with their vast cosmic intellects. Strafe us with scorn. Hammer us day in and out into apathy, even despair.

Should they succeed, as seems likely by any human calculus, our country will truly fall. Not the Church, which cannot quite fail. But our country, the place where we and our descendants are going to have to live. Or from which they’ll flee as refugees. You know, the way Christian Syrians now are fleeing the al Qaeda terrorists unleashed by our NATO frenemy Turkey.

The Gates of Hell Can Prevail Against … America

It can happen here. In fact, we may be just one election away. Every nation that fell had a tipping point, a point of no return where the rot set in at the roots. Where the institutions got captured, the mandarins took foreign bribes, or the families just decided it wasn’t worthwhile having children. Let foreigners come and replace us, for all we care. Lots of luck living in this dump. Think of once-idyllic California, metastasizing and spreading, from sea to shining sea.

Christ never promised us that America couldn’t collapse. Or decline irretrievably, become a place where tiny circles of godless, God-hating oligarchs hoard most of the wealth and all the power. Where coastal elites live in gated communities, remote haciendas, or a few urban enclaves, and the rest of us wait for their orders. (And occasionally engage in futile riots or counter-productive revolutions, where when we meet the new boss, he’s the same as the old boss.)

Maybe It’s Time to Give Up

Most countries in the Americas match that description. Most nations and empires in history have as well. Our Anglo-American Republic has been one of the outliers, the odd exceptions. And half the country, along with its intellectual classes, seems tired of swimming against the stream. Isn’t this American experiment in ordered liberty exhausting? Wouldn’t you rather just rest? Put all this ideological, religious, and cultural division behind us?

That’s easy to do. Just sit back, give up, and let the best people from the right schools take things in hand. Let the NeverTrump elites in the GOP reassert themselves, to keep things coolly bipartisan. Just see how smoothly and efficiently they stymied the president of the United States for three long years, when the mob voted wrong in 2016.

And imagine how quickly they’ll right things when they have a free hand again.

A Nice, Tidy One-Party State

They’ll marginalize and silence the troublemakers. They’ll steamroll over the awkward residues of the past, and pave it in seamless asphalt. Soon outrageous, offensive stances won’t trouble us. They’ll just be illegal, as dissenting opinions are in much of Western Europe. We’ll see social harmony and orderly development. You know, as they do in China.

We are deep in a spiritual war, veiled by a thin veneer of politics. We’re nearing Dunkirk, with our backs against the sea.

The churches will play along, if they know what’s good for them. They’ll hang up their hemp rainbow flags, bowdlerize their bibles to clip out the ugly, outdated passages. They are already learning how to be more Christian™ than Jesus. Soon they’ll move past him. Get over their preoccupation with that ancient moral teacher, who died so tragically young that we’ll never know how his mature thinking would have flowered. Or maybe we do. President Buttigieg will certainly offer us some insights.

Churches that cling to old, unconstitutional prejudices? They’ll be taxed like Nevada brothels, and policed like dangerous cults. Their members will lose their guns to “Red Flag” orders, and their kids to social services at the first unfriendly phone call. They’ll shrivel and fade.

“Go Home, Noah. It’s Just Climate Change.”

Who wants hear all that? Seriously?

Eric, when you went on the air with Franklin Graham to warn us about all this, you must have known better. You were asking for a backlash.

Don’t you realize that we’ve got lawns to mow? Dog photos to post? Those football games and back episodes of World’s Dumbest Partiers aren’t going to watch themselves. Sure, we have to vote, and we have to pick sides in the next election. But let’s not get carried away. This present darkness may be spreading, but convenience stores still sell Bud Light.

It’s not as if the left thinks cross-dresser abortion parodies are hilarious. Or as if they were dressing up pre-teen boys like female hookers and parading them at gay bars. Or forming national lynch mobs for 17-year-old pro-lifers.

Nobody’s bringing sex offenders in drag to read to children at libraries. Or calling for orthodox Christian churches to be targeted and taxed. Using the media to demonize and local governments to ban Christian restaurants that give to the “wrong” charities. Letting judges linked to the abortion industry imprison journalists who try to expose its cannibalistic practices.

The left doesn’t want to declare our borders meaningless, so it can stuff the rolls with endless new supplies of welfare-hungry voters. Democrats aren’t calling to rip up the Electoral College, so that three or four rich leftist counties can dominate the country. Nor are they using lies to destroy everyone whom Trump appoints to any public office or court. Or trying to imprison the key people who helped him get elected.

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If we accepted that all, or even most of that were happening? Then we’d see that we were deep in a spiritual war, veiled by a thin veneer of politics. And we’d see that we’re nearing Dunkirk, with our backs against the sea.

We’d have to admit that as sovereign citizens, we have a far greater burden than ancient Romans, medieval peasants, or voteless campesinos. Each American citizen would be forced to face his own role in all this chaos, evil, and strife. His solemn, historic responsibility in the eyes of God to fight it. And who wants to think about that?

For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6: 12)

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration.

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