With Trump, America Inaugurated a Return Not to Faith, But to Reason
In this January 1977 file photo, cult leader Jim Jones shakes hands with leftist black pastor Cecil Williams.
The second inauguration of President Donald Trump, after he won a total of three U.S. elections, was not quite what I might dream of. But that’s because my dreams entail the coronation of a Habsburg to reign over a tolerant but decisively Christian empire.
Indeed, after the band finished playing “Hail to the Chief,” I switched from X’s coverage of the livestreamed swearing-in ceremony to a YouTube clip of “Zadok the Priest” played at Westminster Abbey:
God save the king!
Long live the king!
God save the king!
May the king live forever!
Amen, amen, amen, alleluia, amen.
But as the Stones say, you can’t always get what you want. We’re not in a land of Handel and Habsburgs, but of John Philip Sousa and Trumps. And while that may not be perfect, it’s still plenty good enough.
Let’s talk about what’s “good enough,” especially by the standards of what we’ve been subjected to over the last four years: the squalor, lies, perversion, and tyranny that have been forcibly injected into our every national orifice since the Democrats and the Deep State seized power in 2020 and effected the closest thing to a fascist dictatorship our country has ever seen.
Common Sense or Logos?
What’s good enough for now is the “common sense” that Trump triumphantly pointed to in his rousing inaugural address. Because that “sense” has another, more resonant name: We call it “Reason,” and know thanks to St. John the Evangelist that Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity, was the Logos by which the entire cosmos was created.
We know that the Book of Nature is one of two sources of God’s self-revelation to His creatures. As Stephen Meyer documents in The Return of the God Hypothesis and Rodney Stark proved in The Victory of Reason, modern science was only made possible by the serene Christian conviction that a rational God made the world, and made our minds to know it. The late, much-lamented Pope Benedict XVI, in his Regensburg Address, argued that Greek philosophy came about as part of God’s Providence, as part of the preparation for the Gospel: God wanted us to hone our intellects so we could contemplate the mysteries of His nature.
Our republic was declared independent in 1776 out of respect for the truths of “Nature, and Nature’s God.” We boldly declared as “self-evident” the natural rights which in fact Western man had only come to know over centuries of argument, conflict, and strife. Our Constitution was framed, after long debates, to frustrate tyranny and protect the claims of minorities thanks to the deep historical knowledge of our founding generation: In documents like the Federalist Papers, they cited precedents ranging from Greek and Roman republics to medieval peasant revolts and Renaissance despotisms, learning from failures and citing modest successes to build a framework of ordered liberty that could endure — a republic, if we could keep it.
The Spittle of Marx and de Sade
By contrast, the Left rejects reason and heavily censors science because it is fundamentally a crackpot religious movement, a cargo cult cobbled together from broken pieces of churches and Gospel passages torn out of context, congealed with spittle from Karl Marx and the Marquis de Sade. Leftists can’t tell you what a “woman” is, but they do know that white men are villains for oppressing those elusive creatures. Democrats don’t want our kids studying history, but they do know that history’s arc bends their way and that our churches and institutions belong on its trash heap.
The cult of antichrist can’t abide Reason because (like Faith) it’s of God.
No rational, disinterested person would conclude that it’s in a country’s best interest to open its borders, demonize its majority, discourage childbearing, outsource its industries, meddle in endless foreign wars that offer no hope of victory, surgically mutilate its young people, and abort its babies. Those are religious stances, taken by demons out of hateful rebellion against Creation and the Creator, which fill the God-shaped hole in the hearts of jaded reprobates.
“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: Male and Female” pic.twitter.com/j9hsAg4Z9S
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 20, 2025
And they will gladly ruin their own lives and ours to serve these inverted dogmas. Like Jim Jones’s disciples in Guyana, they would make us martyrs. How else to explain Gov. Tim Walz’s wife sniffing gleefully the fumes from a burning Minneapolis? Or networks like CNN reporting with a straight face that the George Floyd riots were “mostly peaceful” against the backdrop of flaming storefronts? Or the Biden regime tapping a mentally ill crossdresser to serve (in drag) as Surgeon General? These aren’t cool-headed agnostics, but members of a cult.
Donald Trump just smashed their idol, like St. Boniface hacking down the Saxons’ sacred oak.
Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Buchanan Vindicated
As the last days of his presidency dribbled down, Joe Biden pardoned mass murderer Anthony Fauci, carefully dating the document to the time when Fauci’s research for creating COVID first began. Biden pardoned his criminal family members and his collaborators in lawlessly imprisoning January 6 protestors. Those were all in his rational, if profoundly corrupt, self-interest. 
But one of his gestures in particular spoke to the post-Christian fanaticism that he served (and maybe shared): his toothless, useless declaration that the dead, rejected Equal Rights Amendment is in fact part of the U.S. Constitution. Some leftists hoped that this legal dodge, if obeyed by the U.S. Archivist, would somehow shoehorn into our nation’s highest law code a provision which voters refused to ratify.
The great Phyllis Schlafly’s populist revolt against that delusional amendment really was the start of the movement that decades later elected Donald Trump. (Second only to that were the two presidential runs of the great American patriot Pat Buchanan, who was comprehensively vindicated by Trump’s historic comeback.) The ERA was another deeply religious document, which out of blind faith rejected the evidence of our senses — which is that men and women are profoundly different, and deserve different treatment in recognition of that fact. The willful denial of biology that began with the ERA was always going to lead to the transgender madness of the last few years, as Schlafly prophetically warned to elite catcalls and scorn.
Donald Trump, in his inaugural speech, pointedly rejected such post-Christian superstition, announcing that the U.S. government from that moment on will recognize only two sexes: the ones that actually exist. Focus on the Family President Jim Daly recognized the importance of Trump’s gesture, noting:
In the very first chapter of Genesis, we read that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Any revolution of common sense must include an acknowledgement of this fundamental truth. While we’re disappointed that it’s even necessary, we’re grateful that on his first day in office, President Donald J. Trump has prioritized this reality by issuing an executive order restating the obvious.
By embracing the “obvious” over the demonic, the rational over the preternatural, Trump gave us all one more sound reason for hope.
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.