8-1-11<\/p>\n
As I write this, as you read this, the \u201cdebt deal\u201d \u2013 negotiations about the debt ceiling, the possible national bankruptcy, the gargantuan deficits, problems with the onerous tax code \u2013 are being solved. Or not. Or there will a crisis in the markets soon. Or not. Or America\u2019s credit rating will be downgraded. Or not. If so, it will have long-term toxic consequences. Or not. Forget my dateline \u2013 I am certain that if you read this 10 years hence, or 25, the problems and the arguments and the crisis will be little changed. Except, perhaps, for the worse.<\/p>\n
At best, the solutions of this \u201cdebt crisis\u201d \u2013 and I don\u2019t know the details, even if an agreement is signed; and I wonder whether the negotiators themselves really will understand what they hammer out \u2013 will be a tip-of-the-iceberg tinkering with numbers that represent a fraction of the problem. The monster has a foot in the door, and maybe we will clip a toenail. The choices in this crisis are like many of the choices in this contemporary world, this Brave New World, the post-modern and Post-Christian era: the choices being Bad and Worse.<\/p>\n
So the long, gray twilight of interminable foreign wars, foretold by George Orwell and so many others as hallmark of national decline, will be reflected in endless scenarios of edge-of-the-cliff, floating over the waterfall, brink-of-disaster financial wars. To acknowledge such things is not to trust God less. He can ache for revival in our land, but it is not in His nature to force it. He will bless it, of course, if we bring it about.<\/p>\n
To acknowledge such things, however, is to trust, not doubt, the Word of God. These types of events are prophesied in His Word, and have preceded the destruction of every civilization the Bible, and history books, have ever discussed. \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism\u201d does not mean that we are somehow excepted from judgment, from the consequences of our own actions.<\/p>\n
The blooming flowers of the Enlightenment (whose leading lights like Isaac Newton in science, and Johann Sebastian Bach in the arts, were devout Christian) and Constitutional Republicanism were beautiful and hearty in mankind\u2019s garden for a time. Then the noxious weeds of Marxism, Darwinism, and democracy spread, seeking to choke out what they may. We are seeing them succeed, for most peoples are now complicit in the New Age proposition that the state can be God, that the state can play the part of God, that they state can judge like God, that the state should compel its subjects to a) subscribe to certain beliefs and b) respond to the state\u2019s requirements anent those beliefs.<\/p>\n
Literature\u2019s grand portrait of the mordant but prescient skeptic, Vanya Karamazov, spoke the truth to our own times \u2013 Dostoyevsky saw it coming \u2013 “If we regard God as dead, anything is permitted.”<\/p>\n
Implicit in the US and Europe today is the idea that there is no God. Oh, the modern State says, if you want to believe in a God, we will allow you to. Within limits. Never in history has there been such a complete but bloodless invasion and surrender of a culture. Western Christians have tossed away their crowns and affixed shackles to themselves in only a few generations.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the reminders of the real<\/em> New World Order will grow grimmer and closer to home every single day. The evidence is no longer abstract or theoretical. It is becoming things like deciding between medical bills and mortgage payments; like daily news stories of Christian persecution home and abroad; like a runaway ruling class harassing us in myriad ways. Once we worried about planes being hijacked to Cuba; now we fret about politicians hijacking our future.<\/p>\n More than a century and a half ago, the greatest American songwriter wrote a song, Hard Times, Come Again No More<\/em>. It was not the most famous of Stephen Foster\u2019s many popular tunes\u2026 but it has grown to have tremendous impact in our day. It has been recorded by a wide variety of singers and choirs, in different styles. Curiously \u2013 or not \u2013 it has taken on the status of an anthem in Ireland. Foster is being claimed as Irish-American, although he was born outside Pittsburgh. But we are happy to share him: this song, especially, speaks these days to our common reactions to hard times and hard news.<\/p>\n The Irish, put down for so long in their history, had a brief period in the sunshine with the \u201cCeltic Tiger\u201d of a business boom. Now the Irish are laid low again \u2013 economically if not in spirit, for I have been there and have seen certain seeds of rebirth. Even as the Church reels from shameful scandal, there is a revival afoot in small and home churches.<\/p>\n It is not pessimistic, not even fatalistic, but provides a sort of therapy to identify with the poor and downtrodden, and to know where we might be coming from<\/em>\u2026 if we are, somehow, able to revive ourselves. This video is of the Irish singer Tommy Fleming singing Hard Times<\/em> to an enormous auditorium. Watch the audience, more than him: holding hands, swaying, smiling \u2013 leave it to Irish to make an anthem of a dirge.<\/p>\n \u201cHard times, come again no more\u201d? You know, this is at base not an economic question, but a spiritual one. Its answer is still ours to make.<\/p>\n +++<\/p>\n