Lux Lucet

Shortly following the Brexit vote – for those not up on the various and sundry “-exits” that have dotted the news landscape over the past couple years, Brexit refers to the June 23rd vote in Great Britain where the British voted to exit membership in the European Union – James Traub, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) penned an article for Foreign Policy, the CFR’s journal of opinion, in which he said some things that got regular folks – that is to say, non Master of the Universe types who aren’t in the CFR – a little excited.

Traub’s piece, amazingly titled “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” was a manifesto of sorts, a call to arms to rally the elite to man the barricades against the populist “ignorant masses” in Great Britain and elsewhere who had the unmitigated temerity to reject the globalists’ program of onerous bureaucracy, subsidized mass immigration, and crushing taxes all which are imposed by unelected and unaccountable elites.

Around the same time as Traub penned his charming diatribe, German President Joachim Gauck decided he’s like to audition to play the part of the 21st century’s Marie Antoinette. Gauck said, “The elites are not the problem, the people are the problem.” Now keep in mind that it is elites such as Gauck and German Chancellor Angela Merkel who have mass-imported radical Muslims, not a few of whom have raped, hacked, mass shot and suicide bombed their way through the once peaceful streets of the German nation.

And as if it were a small thing to subject the German people to an onslaught of jihadist criminality, Gauck and company think the German ought to foot the bill for their scheme as well.

And yet, when Germans get a little upset at having to pay for the destruction of their own country, it’s the German people who have the problem, not the “elites” who foisted the mess on them.

Other examples of the growing Western Oligarchy could be enumerated. And things have gotten to the point where mainstream columnists and publications are taking note. Peggy Noonan wrote about this phenomenon in a recent Wall Street Journal column titled “How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen.” Noonan succinctly summarized the attitude of the new globalist elite thus,

From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.

And it’s worth asking, where does this type of thinking come from? Why is it that just now it seems more and more those in power lord it over those who are not, even in the West, even in the United States?

The answer is not a hard one. The rise of oligarchy in the West was preceded by the collapse of Christianity in the West. Contrary to what we are taught in school, Western Civilization is the result of the widespread preaching of and belief in Gospel of Justification by Faith Alone at the time of the 16th century Reformation. And it is the disappearance from the West of the faith once delivered to the saints that has led to the ongoing collapse of its civilization.

The very idea of government as a servant is a Christian idea. Consider what Jesus told his disciple about secular political theory, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those who exercise authority over them are called ‘benefactors’ ” (Luke 22:25). It is characteristic of sinful man to set up arrogant, unaccountable governmental structures that oppress the people while exalting the reputations of the rulers.

Medieval Europe under the popes was a perfect example of the what Christ was talking about when he describes the world’s leaders as “lording it over” the people. And it was the Reformation, following Christ’s words that he who governs is to be as him who serves, that ended this form of government in the nations to which it came.

Were there no Reformation, there would be no United States of America. John Robbins makes this point in quoting Leopold von Ranke, who said of Calvin that he was the “virtual founder of America.”

The decline of Christianity and the rise of oligarchy are but two ends of the same teeter-totter. If there is any hope of beating back the encroaching darkness overtaking the West, it lies in the same means that were used five-hundred years ago, the rejection of logical contradictions, the acceptance of the Bible alone as the Word of God, and widespread preaching of and belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Nothing else will do.