If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.
John 8:36
Perhaps it’s trite to say this, but 2020 has been a very dark year in the formerly Christian West. Here in the United States, we’ve experienced months of violent rioting.
Marxist and racist rhetoric targeting white Americans pours forth from government, academia, churches, the mainstream media and businesses. Indeed, such rhetoric has become a commonplace in 2020 America. And those who advance such ideas, far from being condemned in the public square, are lauded as courageous truth tellers.
Aggressive homosexuals have managed to push their agenda to the point that simply denying there’s such a thing as same-sex marriage, or that a man can become a woman, can get a person in a world of trouble both politicly and professionally. A recent story in New York Magazine reveals how normalized homosexual practice has become in the United States. The story claims that, “roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT.” If true, then a large minority of American young women have “chang[ed] the natural use into that which is against nature.” Can such a civilization long survive?
In their response to Covid, federal, state and local governments have routinely trodden underfoot what were, until very recently, thought inviolable personal liberties. No let up to the lockdowns is in sight either. In fact, governments throughout the West seem prepared to crank up their violations of personal freedom and property rights with ever more stringent lockdowns. These lockdowns, supposedly designed to fight the spread of Covid, represent, in the view of this author, the imposition of arbitrary government on the formerly free nations of the West. If those who have imposed these lawless restrictions get their way, arbitrary lockdowns, mask requirements, travel restrictions, immunity passports and forced vaccinations will become a permanent way of life.
Then there’s the matter of the presidential election, just nine days away as of this writing. Americans are faced with choosing between two leading candidates. One, the corrupt, semi-senile, Roman Catholic Joe Biden – Biden most likely is a Trojan Horse for the Democrats to smuggle in the Monstrous Regiment in the person of the radical progressive and highly immoral Kamala Harris – and two, Donald Trump, who, for all his imperfections, manages to get some things right, holding to something like a traditional American understanding of personal liberty and economic freedom. Naturally, the corrupt national media blindly supports Biden and shows open disdain for Trump and his supporters. The winner for most exceptionally egregious example of media bias is NPR, which has, so far, refused to cover the explosive Hunter Biden email story linking Joe and his son Hunter to shady foreign dealings in Ukraine and China. NPR’s Managing Editor for News dismissed the Hunter Biden story, writing, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.”
Indeed, America, and the West more broadly, seem to be at a major inflection point. If present trends continue, it’s hard to see how Western Civilization survives much longer, if it isn’t already dead, except in remnant form.
Ron Paul’s Liberty Repot YouTube channel is consistently one of the best sources to learn the philosophy of liberty. Here’s a link to the episode I refer to in my podcast https://youtu.be/JpaLrSrS4RQ.
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The Post published two more stories related to the first. You can read them here and here.
If true, and it is the opinion of this author that the emails are genuine, the revelations in these stories ought to be enough to force Joe Biden’s resignation as Democratic presidential candidate. Not that this will happen. It almost certainly will not. But in any nation where a Christian view of right and wrong holds, using one’s official position to enrich oneself at the expense of the nation one is supposedly serving is not only a sin, but a crime.
Public officials on the take is one of the chief characteristics of corrupt nations. Speaking of the degeneracy of Judah in his day, the prophet Isaiah wrote of the nation’s political leadership, “Your princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes, and follows after rewards” (Isa. 1:23). In times past, Isaiah tells us, Jerusalem, “was full of justice.” But now it was corrupt. It had become a sort of banana republic.
Much more could be said on the topic of corruption, both of Joe and Hunter Biden and of government In the United States more generally, but that is not the main focus of this post, so I will leave it at that.
Getting a bit closer to our main topic, receiving almost as much attention last week as the Hunter Biden stories themselves was the blatant censorship of them by the major social media companies. For example, the main Twitter account of the New York Post (NYP), the newspaper that broke the stories, was locked, as was the account of President Trump’s press secretary and that of the Trump campaign itself, all because they shared links to the first of the stories released on Wednesday, October 14.
Facebook likewise made it difficult to share the link on its platform. Andy Stone, a former Democratic political operative and current Facebook employee, tweeted, “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
So, we have a former Democratic operative working to reduce the distribution of a story unfavorable to Joe Biden on Facebook. No election interference to see here!
Of course, Twitter’s and Facebook’s quick actions to suppress and discredit the Hunter Biden story should surprise exactly no one, given the blatant attacks on free speech from the social media companies in recent years.
Although censorship in various forms had been going on for some time previously, it was in August 2018 that the social media giants really raised their game. Most notably with the banning of Alex Jones from all the major social media platforms in the course of one or two days early that month.
Since that time, the purges have not ceased. Just last week there was another wave of purges from YouTube, with several established and large channels being removed as if they never had existed.
As with the recent revelations about Hunter Biden and how he leveraged his connection to his highly placed father to enrich himself, much more can be said about the censorship problem on the social media platforms. But as this also is not the main focus of this post, I likewise will pass over commenting further on this matter for now.
As the title of this post suggests, the main focus of this post, and likely the next few posts, will be on making the Christian, Biblical case for free speech.
Pope Francis, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, waves to the crowd on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 24, 2015, as they stand on the Speaker’s Balcony on Capitol Hill, after the pope addressed a joint meeting of Congress inside. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
“I will venture to make some specific predictions…The alliance between neo-evangelicals and Romanists in the Culture Wars will…result in the election of our second Romanist president.”
In April 1927, The Atlantic ran a story titled “An Open Letter to the Honorable Alfred E. Smith.” It’s a remarkable letter, the sort of thing one would never see today from any publication of national note. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a supposedly Christian publication running such a piece in 2020.
The letter is remarkable in that it openly questions whether Al Smith, a leading contender for, and eventual winner of, the 1928 Democratic presidential nomination would be able to support and defend the Constitution of the United States in light of his Roman Catholic faith.
The open letter, written by attorney Charles C. Marshall, raised a number of important points, asking how Smith could reconcile the political and economic pronouncements of the Roman Church-State (RCS) with America’s Constitution.
Time does not permit me to go through all of Marshall’s arguments, but the following two paragraphs are representative.
It is indeed true that a loyal and conscientious Roman Catholic could and would discharge his oath of office with absolute fidelity to his moral standards. As to that in general, and as to you in particular, your fellow citizens entertain no doubt. But those moral standards differ essentially from the moral standards of all men not Roman Catholics. They are derived from the basic political doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, asserted against repeated challenges for fifteen hundred years, that God has divided all power over men between the secular State and that Church. Thus Pope Leo XIII, in 1885, in his encyclical letter on The Christian Constitution of States, says: ‘The Almighty has appointed the charge of the human race, between two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human things.’
The deduction is inevitable that, as all power over human affairs not given to the State by God, is given by God to the Roman Catholic Church, no other churches or religious or ethical societies have in theory any direct power from God and are without direct divine sanction, and therefore without natural right to function on the same basis as the Roman Catholic Church in the religious and moral affairs of the State. The result is that that Church, if true to her basic political doctrine, is hopelessly committed to that intolerance that has disfigured so much of her history. This is frankly admitted by Roman Catholic authorities.
“We will not stand for any attacks against Judge Barrett’s faith,” said Donald Trump at the recent Al Smith Dinner. He told his hearers that “Judge Barrett is a “proud graduate of the University of Notre Dame [Our Lady] Law School,” and described attacks on her faith as “anti-Catholic bigotry.” The President went to state that our nation is strong, because of Catholics and people of all faiths.
Coming from the President, none of this is surprising or even particularly disappointing. Donald Trump is not himself a Christian, so it’s to be expected that he would not understand that the Roman Catholic Church-State, far from being a source of American strength, has worked for over 200 years to undermine our Protestant republic. Given the sorry state of America in 2020, it appears that Rome’s efforts have largely succeeded.
In truth, it was the Biblical, Protestant faith of the American colonists that would go on to shape the political institutions of the United States, which from its inception was a constitutional capitalist republic. “Constitutional capitalism,” as John Robbins correctly noted in Ecclesiastical Megalomania, “is a social consequence of the theology of the Reformers.” Contra President Trump, it was not “people of all faiths” that made America strong. To the degree “people of all faiths” follow the teachings of their religious traditions and reject what the Bible teaches about politics and economics – the politics of the Bible is limited, constitutional government; the economics of Scripture is free market capitalism – to that degree they are a source of weakness, not strength.
The Roman Catholic Church-State, as the largest religious organization in the United States, is the source of a great deal of anti-Christian political thought and action in this country. To say this is not, as the President states, “anti-Catholic” bigotry, but a necessary conclusion drawn from the study of Scripture.
In 1884, Presbyterian minister and Civil War veteran Dr. Samuel D. Burchard famously called the Democrats the party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion.” He was right then, and he is right today. Indeed, the Democratic party has been one of the primary mechanisms Rome has used to advance its anti-Christian Social Teaching in the United States.
Given Rome’s deep philosophical opposition to our republican institutions, it would be foolish for any American Protestant to put aside his concerns about putting Roman Catholics in positions of political authority. This is not to say that a Roman Catholic magistrate cannot faithfully execute the American law, but Rome’s hostility to republican government and claims of ultimate political, religious and moral authority means that a Roman Catholic official will, of necessity, find himself constantly having to choose between two masters, the Constitution and the pope.
In last week’s post, we looked at this problem in some detail. This week let us look further at Amy Coney Barrett’s religious affiliation, this time with an ecumenical charismatic group called People of Praise.
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