I realized something last night. I was on a Christian radio show, trying to make sense of liberal elites in the U.S. who apparently have a death wish. The list is long, and the symptoms are all too familiar. Think of each of the following groups or institutions:

• Liberal Methodists trying to impose same-sex marriage and gay pastors. They know that every denomination that has traveled this road is dying. They know that their churches are dying, while the faithful African branches are thriving. But still they persist. Even now that they’ve lost their church-wide vote, pro-gay leaders are scheming for the next chance, and the next chance, to drive out orthodox congregations and seize their church properties.
• Liberal Catholic religious orders like the Jesuits, or among women, the Sisters of Mercy. They know that their doctrinal flabbiness, declining intellectual standards, and embrace of the LGBT agenda correlate with the end of vocations. With empty seminaries and plummeting numbers. Yet they persist, and try to spread their heresies throughout the Church. The first pope in history from the dying Jesuit order has cracked down — on faithful, traditional orders. I visited a once-thriving Jesuit seminary in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. It’s now the Culinary Institute of America. Instead of Christian liturgies, its exquisite gothic chapel now hosts cooking demonstrations, on a stage where the altar once stood. On the grounds lie the body of Rev. Teilhard de Chardin, the gnostic prophet who many think single-handedly converted his own Jesuit order from Catholicism. How fitting that the Creature Who Ate the Jesuits is buried at a cooking school.
• Progressive elites in Europe and America. They see that feminism and the Sexual Revolution are wiping out every society that embraced them. Not one developed country in the West apart from Israel has a replacement-level birthrate among native citizens. Even the U.S. only avoids shrinking into negative numbers by importing Third World immigrants. But these elites won’t rethink the ideologies that are killing off our countries. Instead they double down. Why settle for abortion, when you can have infanticide? For euthanasia of the terminally sick, when you can impose it on the mentally ill? For acceptance of homosexuality, when you can insist on the full-on delusion of transgender ideology?

Arrest “Misgendering” Moms, But Welcome Back ISIS Terrorists

Yet each of these groups, and those who dance to their tune, shares one more opinion in common. They are outraged at efforts to keep out millions of Islamic immigrants. The very same people who lie, cheat, and steal to drive out orthodox members of Christian churches, demand that we welcome millions of orthodox Muslims. These elitists get precisely the same self-righteous quiver in their voices when they report a Catholic mom like Caroline Farrow to the police for “misgendering” someone … and when they defend the influx of sharia adherents who favor throwing homosexuals off rooftops. These people who want to see Tommy Robinson imprisoned for breaching the peace want to welcome back ISIS fighters from Syria.

We wear ourselves out pointing up such inconsistencies. And we may be wasting our time. Consider that possibility.

Half in Love with Easeful Death

What if progressives on some level knew perfectly well that their policies and ideologies are completely unsustainable? They aren’t blind, and most aren’t stupid. They’re capable of reading facts and statistics, and learning from history. They know that importing millions of sharia adherents into nations with negative birthrates won’t result in social justice, women’s equality, sexual freedom, or any of the other bromides they chew on. How could it?

What if the left, secular and religious, is simply in love with destruction? Earthly life without a vital faith in God and a sense that our suffering means something is not worth living. Or so they may think. It’s certainly not an attractive enough proposition that millions of people will make sacrifices to have decent-sized families. Instead, they might find slogans about “climate change” and “population growth,” and use them as excuses. But really, they experience life as a kind of curse, and don’t want to pass it on.

They particularly despise the West, the Church, the market, and everything else they see around them. They hate the heritage of their ancestors, and don’t plan to leave descendants. Such people view America and the West as Samson did the hateful pagan temple that imprisoned him. So they want to pull it down around their ears. Or at least leave behind them nothing but scorched earth and shrieking muezzins.

What if they’re like the drug addict who has given up hope of ever getting clean, and instead keeps upping his doses, half-hoping to hasten the end? What if when they see those angry Saracens waving black flags and chanting in Arabic, they don’t see a threat but a promise? A euthanasia doctor who will put an end to their pain … and who will make life good and miserable for the real Christians left behind? 

What if the whole of leftism today is not a Utopian fantasy, but a coldly realistic plan for murder/suicide, like a truck-bomb aimed at a barracks full of Marines?

Things suddenly make a whole lot more sense now, don’t they?