Schools, Shootings and Stuff

 

In the days since the shooting spree at Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia the legacy media in Canada which is overwhelmingly liberal and the neoconservative alternative media have been spatting over the incident.  The source of the contention is primarily the fact that the eighteen year old male who killed himself, a couple of relatives, and six people at the local high school and wounded several others, seems to have thought himself to be female.  The legacy media appears to think that publicizing his state of confusion would instigate a wave of hatred toward people who mistakenly think that they are not of their biological birth sex.   This is pretty much typical of their level of mendacity and stupidity.  The alternative media such as Juno News which Candace Malcolm rebranded her True North News around this time last year has done a fairly decent job of exposing this duplicity.  I acknowledge this with reluctance because I have been loath to give them credit for anything since the rebrand for while True North and Ezra Levant’s similar Rebel News have always been too Americanist and too Zionist for the liking of this Tory (High Church royalist), they have been absolutely intolerable for the past year as they have continued to embrace the MAGA movement long after it degenerated into a dangerous leader cult.

 

In my opinion the transgender angle is the least interesting facet of the Tumbler Ridge incident. (1)  About the only interesting thing about transgenderism is the question of who is crazier, the boy who thinks he is a girl, the girl who thinks she is a boy, the boy or girl who thinks he or she is something different altogether, or the people who think that the appropriate way to handle the previous is to indulge the fantasy to the point of insisting that everyone pretend the fantasy is reality or even trying to force reality itself to conform to the fantasy.  I’m inclined to think that the answer, if not six of one, half a dozen of the other, is that the last group is the craziest.  In my lifetime we have come to this point from one in which ninety-nine times out of a hundred if a girl said she was a boy or a boy said he was a girl, it was a short-lived phase which the parents might humour rather than indulge until it passed and if it didn’t would only then take it seriously which meant finding the kid help in adjusting to reality than trying to force reality to adjust.  I think everybody involved in this farcical phenomenon should be made to read Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and George Orwell’s 1984 and asked where they see themselves in these stories.  If necessary, this should be repeated until they get it right.  Of course, these are all stories with which they would already be familiar had they been properly educated, but I am getting ahead of myself.

 

Every time incidents like this occur, politicians of all stripes and their partisans in the media seek to politicize the narrative in a way that benefits them and their party’s clients.  In the midst of this a number of important questions are asked and while it is difficult to extract the questions and proffered answers from the politicization process it is vital that it be done.  The most important of the questions are “Why did this happen?” and “What can be done to prevent this from happening again?”  Clearly, any answer given to the second of these questions must depend upon the answer given to the first.

 

The first question is actually several different questions rolled into one.  The person asking it could be asking what are the circumstances which brought about this particular incident and this can only be answered by looking at the motivations of the perpetrator and the specific circumstances which led to their development.  He could also be asking, however, why incidents of this general nature occur.  Someone asking this question in this way is looking for things that are common to most or all such shootings sprees.  One example of asking and answering the question in this manner is that of the North American liberal.  She will often answer the question with “guns” and use this answer to bolster her call for further gun control measures as the solution to the problem.  The flaw in her reasoning is that while guns are indeed common to all mass shootings their role in each of these shootings is that of the instrument not that of the agent.  The agent controls the instrument and not the other way around.  A better answer to the question asked this way is that suggested by Peter Hitchens years ago, that drug abuse is the factor that is both common and causal.  Tumbler Ridge was not an exception to this, the perpetrator was a frequent user of mind-altering drugs.

 

Let us consider this with specific application to school shootings.  While the first school shootings on record were in the nineteenth century, they were quite rare, with the exception of the 1960s, until the 1990s.  In the 1990s a wave of school shootings began that has yet to abate with each successive decade seeing a larger number than the previous.  The drug factor is at least a partial explanation for the temporary spike in the 1960s.   It undoubtedly a factor in the later wave as well.  The 1990s was the beginning of the opioid crisis in the United States, coming immediately after two decades in which the American government was heavily pushing the “War on Drugs.”  The drug crisis has escalated alongside the school shooting crisis.  Perhaps more significantly, the 1960s, apart from the rise in drug abuse associated with hippie culture, was the first decade in which methylphenidate was administered to children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and the 1990s was the decade when this really caught on.  Indeed, this entire growing wave of school shootings has coincided entirely with a period in which either a) the number of cases of children with ADHD has skyrocketed, b) doctors have become better at diagnosing ADHD or c), the option preferred by skeptical cynics like myself and Peter Hitchens, doctors, under pressure from the companies that produce methylphenidate, have recklessly been making diagnoses of ADHD and writing prescriptions over ordinary childhood rambunctiousness and have gotten away with it because parents and teachers have been to quick to pass off dealing with the children under their care when they act up to the medical profession.

 

The drug factor, however, is not the whole story.   We have considered two ways in which the question “Why did this happen?” can be asked, both of which focus on the perpetrator.  The question can also be asked with an eye on the schools in which case it could be paraphrased “What happened to the schools that they have become places where these shootings are likely to occur?”

 

The answer is that over the last century they have largely ceased to be places where education in the traditional sense of the word takes place and have become something else entirely.  What that something is could be described as factories that turn out diploma-holders on the assembly-line principle.  Alternatively today’s schools might be described as laboratories for the experiments of professional educators on the students, their Guinea-pigs.  Either description is of an institution that has a dehumanizing effect on those who go through it.  This is the opposite of what traditional education is supposed to do.  Traditional education was designed to humanize people, to take the barbarians or savages we are each born as, and civilize us.

 

By the time Hilda Neatby wrote So Little for the Mind in 1953, a devastating critique of the direction Canadian education was headed due to the influence of the rotten ideas of John Dewey from south of the border, North American education had already largely become the experimental laboratory of the professional educator.  Dewey’s vision was of an educational system in which professional experts would accomplish progressive social engineering by indoctrinating children with liberalism.  In this education pretty much reached the terminus of the downward path upon which Joseph Lancaster had set it and on which it had previously been advanced by Horace Mann. (2)  In the decades since Neatby’s book (3) the restraining influences on the educational experts of the remnants of traditional education were gradually removed as the courts, first in the United States then in Canada, removed the Bible and prayer from the schools, and the control of local school boards themselves controlled by the parents of students was leached away by state and provincial educational authorities.  As this happened, the professional educators grew increasingly to resent parental attempts to influence the education of their children, just as their, that is the “experts’” ideas of what ought to be taught became increasingly cockamamie and screwball.

 

By the 1990s, especially in urban areas, the schools had become so dehumanizing and spiritually dead that this combined with the new fad of doping kids with methylphenidate to treat the condition of childhood (especially boyhood) to produce the ever growing wave of school shootings.

 (1)   An interesting, although entirely unimportant aspect, is that the school where the shooting took place actually has “Secondary School” in its name.

(2)   It was greatly assisted down this path by the achievement of the “universal education” plank of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.  As with most of Marx’s bad ideas, liberalism and especially American liberalism, was far more effective at putting it into practice than the actual Communist movement.  Universal education is a bad idea for a number of reasons such as, but not limited to, that it involves the state confiscation of what is the natural property of the parent and it requires dropping the standards of education to a lowest common denominator.

(3)   In 1947, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote an essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” which points out the path back to sound education.

The Tests of Hyper-Protestantism

 

I have addressed various aspects of the problem of Hyper-Protestantism in several essays over the last few years.  I distinguish Hyper-Protestantism from ordinary Protestantism as being that which goes beyond rejecting and opposing errors that are distinctly Roman and rejects things that are genuinely Catholic as well.  That which is distinctly Roman is taught, practiced, or otherwise held only by the Roman Church, that is to say, the communion under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Rome who is more commonly called the Pope.  That is genuinely Catholic which is the common heritage of all Churches that descended from the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem.  In the fifth century, St. Vincent of Lérins identified three tests of Catholicity that have been widely accepted ever since – Antiquity, Universality, and Consent.  The test of Antiquity means that to be considered truly Catholic something must have demonstrably been part of Christian faith and practice, at least implicitly, since the earliest centuries.  The test of Universality means that something that only ever caught on in one region of the Church or something that became dominant throughout the Church for a limited period before being finally rejected cannot be considered Catholic, but only that which can be found throughout all the ancient Churches in all places and times.  The word consent does not today ordinarily mean what it does in St. Vincent’s test.  The test of Consent is the official approbation of legitimate Church authority.  If something is taught throughout the writings of the Church Fathers, was defined and defended against error by the Church in council, especially an ecumenical council (at the time St. Vincent wrote the Council of Ephesus had just brought the number of these to three, the first two having been Nicaea I and Constantinople I in the previous century, by the  end of the fifth century Chalcedon became the fourth ecumenical council, and three others Constantinople II, Constantinople III, and Nicaea II were generally recognized before the Great Schism at the end of the first millennium), or can otherwise be shown to be “official” Church teaching or practice  it passes the test of Consent.

 

To give a specific example of the difference between that which is Roman and that which is Catholic look at the doctrine of Purgatory and the practice of praying for the faithful departed.

 

Purgatory is a Roman doctrine not a Catholic doctrine.  The Church of Rome teaches it dogmatically, but the other ancient Churches do not.  Since neither the Oriental Orthodox Churches (Coptic Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, etc.) which rejected the Definition of Chalcedon of 451 and so broke with the rest of the Church nor the Assyrian Church of the East which rejected the condemnation of Nestorius in 431 teach Purgatory, this demonstrates that it was not received doctrine prior to the fifth century.  Some specific Eastern Orthodox leaders have taught it, but the Eastern Orthodox Church as a whole has rejected it, and it was a bone of contention during the reunification talks at both the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence (1438-1445).  Clearly, therefore, Purgatory was not accepted as doctrine by the Catholic Church prior to the Great Schism (1054).    In the Church Fathers, the closest thing to it is found in the writings of Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa.  These, however, were talking about hell, which their doctrine of Apokatastasis (final universal reconciliation for all) required that they interpret as something similar to what Rome would later call Purgatory. Apokatastasis was formally rejected by the Church in the fifth ecumenical council in the sixth century.  The doctrine of Purgatory, therefore, is distinctly Roman and not genuinely Catholic. 

 

This is not the case with the practice of praying for the faithful departed, however.  It is attested to since the earliest centuries, and an example of it may very well be found in the New Testament itself in II Tim. 1:18.  It is practiced not only by the Church of Rome but by the ancient pre-Reformation Churches that reject Purgatory, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East.  The sixteenth century Reformers who thought it to stand or fall with the doctrine of Purgatory were clearly mistaken. It passes at least the tests of Antiquity and Universality.

 

This brings us to the question of whether there are any tests that we can apply to Protestant doctrines, positions, customs and assertions to determine whether they are Hyper or not.  The answer is yes.  Since St. Vincent offered three tests of Catholicity, I shall identity and discuss three tests of Hyper-Protestantism although more could be listed.  The rejection of things that are Catholic by St. Vincent’s definition as well as those that are distinctly Roman is the definition of Hyper-Protestantism and not one of the tests.

 

The first test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Catachresis.  Catachresis means the misuse of terms.  The specific example that is involved in this test is the pejorative use of the word Catholic.  Or, to approach it from another angle, the use of the word Catholic to mean that which is Roman.  This second wording is, perhaps, the better of the two because it reveals how Hyper-Protestantism actually betrays a principle of the Reformation.  The Roman Church claims that St. Peter was given jurisdiction over the Apostles and therefore over the whole Apostolic Church and that this jurisdiction was passed on to his successors in the bishopric of Rome, making the bishop of Rome the universal Patriarch, and the Catholic or whole Church co-extensive with his jurisdiction.   In other words, the Roman Church claims herself to be the Catholic (whole) Church.  The Reformers disputed this claim in the sixteenth century, as did the other four of the ancient patriarchates when the East and West mutually excommunicated each other in 1054.  Since one of those patriarchates is that of Jerusalem, which clearly has the better right to be considered the Mother Church than Rome, and another of those patriarchates is Antioch, which St. Peter also held before that of Rome, and yet a third is Constantinople which itself had claimed universal jurisdiction in the sixth century to have its claims – and all claims of universal jurisdiction – rebutted by Gregory I of Rome, using the same arguments that would later be used against his successors – Rome’s position is built on a foundation of quicksand.  Hyper-Protestantism’s use of the word Catholic, however, conforms to Rome’s position, not that of the Reformers

 

The second test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Misprioritization.  This is the elevating of Protestant doctrines to a level of importance higher than the faith common to all Christians as confessed in the ancient Creeds.  There is a secondary type of misprioritization in which even lesser doctrines (eschatological schemes, specific understandings of predestination, and the sort) are elevated above the core truths of the Reformation.  It is the first type that we will focus on here. 

 

There are various ways in which this done.  A common one is to threat the doctrines of the Reformation as if they were incapable of being distorted through exaggeration into heresy.  By contrast, the defenders of orthodoxy in the early Church recognized that any truth could be distorted into heresy by exaggeration and that the path of orthodoxy was the path of balancing and harmonizing different truths.  In those days, the main contested truths had to do with theology proper, the doctrine of God, especially the doctrine of the Trinity, and Christology, the Person of Jesus Christ.  The true and living God is One.  He is also, in a way different from the way in which He is One, Three.  If the Oneness of God is exaggerated, you get Judaism, Islam, and Unitarianism.  If the Threeness of God is exaggerated, you get polytheism.  The orthodox truth lies in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which harmonized and balances the Oneness and Threeness of God.  If you exaggerate the deity of Jesus Christ, you get such things as Docetism, the idea that Jesus’ humanity was just an appearance and had no material substance, or Apollinarianism, the idea that the divine Logos took the place that is filled by the human mind in other men, making His humanity incomplete.  Conversely, Jesus’ humanity can be exaggerated to as to deny or diminish His deity in ways such as Adoptionism (the idea that He was a man who became God at some point such as His baptism) or Ebionism (the idea that He was merely the greatest of all prophets rather than God Incarnate).  The orthodox truth is that He is fully God and fully Man.  The fifth century demonstrated that this was susceptible of further distortions by exaggerating either His two natures (so as to make Him two Persons occupying the same body, the Son of God and the Son of Man, which is the heresy called Nestorianism) or the unity of His Person so as to deny His two natures (such as in Eutychianism in which Jesus’ humanity is swallowed up into His deity so that only the latter remains) requiring the clarification of the orthodox doctrine of the Hypostatic Union in the Definition of Chalcedon.

 

Now think about that.  If such truths as the Oneness of God, the Threeness of God, the deity of Jesus Christ and His humanity, the Unity of His Person and His two natures can and have been each distorted by exaggeration into heresy, would it not be elevating the doctrines of the Reformation far above these truths to pretend that they cannot be similarly distorted?  Furthermore, would it not be precisely this sort of distortion to say, for example, that Churches which confess the orthodox truths of the ancient Creeds are not expressions of Biblical Christianity because they do not affirm the Reformation doctrine of justification?  Especially if in making such a statement all the ancient Churches are lumped in with Rome even though the worst errors that the Reformers opposed with regards to justification (that the works of sinful human beings have merit in God’s eyes, that they can have merit above and beyond what is required by God, that the keys involve the right to distribute or even sell for a profit this supererogatory merit, etc.) are ones that Rome alone among the ancient Churches fell into.

 

The answer to both of these questions is yes.  Moreover, it needs to be recognized that the Reformation doctrines are particularly susceptible of being exaggerated and distorted into heresies because of the way they are formulated.  Keep in mind here that the Five Solae are not a sixteenth century formulation but a twentieth century formulation read back onto the sixteenth century.  It was first formulated by German Roman Catholic liberation theologian Johann Baptiste Metz in 1965 but caught on especially among Calvinists who found a five point summary of the Reformation appealing because it made Calvinism (famously summarized in five points, those articulated in the canons of the Synod of Dort in the second decade of the seventeenth century which responded to the five points of the Arminian Remonstrance) seem more normative of Protestantism in general. It should also be noted that one of the Five Solae, Sola Gratia, is not a Reformation distinctive but is a Catholic doctrine recognized as such universally since the (regional) Council of Carthage’s condemnation of Pelagianism was confirmed the third ecumenical council and that the Five Solae do not include the doctrine of assurance which was at least as important to the sixteenth century Reformation, especially the Lutheran side, as any of the Solae.  Nevertheless, Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide were both indisputably central to the Reformation.  Both doctrines, defined properly, are sound.  The Latin word Sola, however, and its English equivalent “alone” is not a word that usually marks a doctrine as having been carefully formulated with an eye to the balanced truth of orthodoxy.

 

Consider Sola Scriptura.  The expression was first used by Dr. Luther just prior to the Diet of Worms (1521) where he famously took his stand on the doctrine. As Dr. Luther used it, however, it did not mean anything remotely close to what later Protestants, especially the Hypers, have taken it to mean.  Dr. Luther taught the Sufficiency, Primacy and Supremacy of the Scriptures, not the idea that each Christian should get his faith and practice directly from the Bible and only from the Bible with no regards whatsoever to what previous Christians have said, thought, and done individually or as the Church.  The expression “Sola Scriptura”, however, especially when not used in a full sentence such as “The Scriptures alone are infallible”, easily suggests this idea of the go-it-alone Christian.  Ironically, it contradicts the very authority it is intended to uphold for Scriptures themselves, St. Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians specifically, contain the instruction “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:15).  The traditions, i.e., that which has been passed on or handed down, which they have been taught, are what Christians are instructed here to stand fast and hold, whether the transmission is oral (“by word”) or written (“our epistle”) which latter category is the Scripture, the very designation of which means that which is written.  Note that the Scripture in this verse of the Scriptures is very much not “alone.”  Far better than this expression for explaining the Reformation teaching would be to employ the expressions the Sufficiency, Primacy, and Supremacy of the Scriptures.  Either Primacy or Sufficiency would be a better summary of all that Dr. Luther and the Reformers intended than that most insufficient word “Alone”.   Article VI of our reformed Anglican Church is not entitled “The Scriptures Alone” but “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation.” It asserts “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” (1)

 

Sola Fide, understood correctly, is merely the doctrine St. Paul taught in the fourth chapter of Romans, that being righteous in the eyes of God is a gift God gives by His grace and that for it to be such it has to be by faith and not by works.  St. Paul did not contradict St. James who says that justification is by works but he explained St. James, who does not use the word “grace” in the relevant portion of his epistle, to not be talking about justification before God (Rom. 4:2).   The Reformers were right to re-emphasize St. Paul’s doctrine to correct the heavy over-emphasis on works in late Medieval Roman theology.  Note, however, that St. Paul was able to articulate this doctrine without using the word “alone”.  Note also, that when St. Paul identified the Gospel that he preached, he did not say that it was the doctrine of justification but that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of eyewitnesses enumerated by the Apostle (1 Cor. 15:3ff).  Since this is included in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, confessed by all the ancient Churches, and is indeed, central to it, it cannot be legitimately said that the Church ever “lost” the Gospel as is claimed by the idea of restorationism which is common to all the heretical sects that evangelicals grew accustomed to calling cults towards the end of the last century.  Neither Dr. Luther and his associates nor the English Reformers (or the more responsible among the Swiss Reformers) were restorationists but the door which let restorationism and Hyper-Protestantism in was opened by referring to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification, re-articulated with the word alone, as being itself the Gospel.  (2)

 

 

The third test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Mendacity.  Hyper-Protestantism is willing to sacrifice truthfulness to the cause of opposing Rome. While some of the better known examples of this predate the internet, the internet meme has greatly exacerbated this tendency of Hyper-Protestantism.  In the last couple of months I have seen Hyper-Protestant memes attacking the Roman Church posted to social media on a daily basis.  I don’t remember a single one of them that did not make some irresponsible and easily rebuttable claim or another.

 

One of these, from a Baptist source, made the claim that the Scriptures do not teach that Mary is the New Eve, that this claim comes from late Medieval Scholasticism, and was invented for the purpose of supporting Rome’s doctrine about Mary being the Co-Redemptrix.  This was a particularly remarkable example because rather than mixing one or two errors into what was otherwise correct this meme did not get a single thing right. 

 

Mary is contrasted with Eve in this way by St. Justin Martyr in Dialogue With Trypho 100 and by St. Irenaeus of Lyon in Against Heresies 3.22.4.  These are both second century sources, written in approximately 150 and 180 respectively.  This identification of Mary with Eve was raised again by Tertullian, the first major theologian to write in Latin, in a treatise written against the Docetic arguments of the Marcionites and Valentinians in the first decade of the third century, On the Flesh of Christ, 17.  It was also one of several Marian themes that appear in the writings of Origen, the most important theologian of the early Alexandrian Church, who was about thirty years younger than Tertullian.  Origen, in whose writings the first extent use of the word Theotokos can be found, wrote about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary and explored the parallels between her and Eve in the commentaries and expository homilies he wrote and gave after his relocation to Caesarea Maritima in 231.  The theme of Mary as the New Eve is also prominent in the homilies of Origen’s most celebrated student, St. Gregory Thaumaturgos, who was born a couple of years after Tertullian wrote the work mentioned above and became Bishop of his native Neocaesarea later that century.  See, for example, the first three of the homilies in the collection Four Homilies, which three have the common topic of the Annunciation and the homily on “The Holy Mother of God, Ever Virgin” which is extent only in Armenian rather than Greek and in which the comparison/contrast between Eve and Mary opens the homily. In the centuries that follow this theme can be found in the extend works of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and basically all the major Church Fathers.  It was a common Patristic idea long before there was any such thing as Scholasticism.

 

Moreover, the idea is derived directly from the Scriptures.  In Genesis 3:15, the first promise of the Messiah in the Old Testament, the expression “the woman” appears.  In the context of Genesis 3, “the woman” has to be Eve.  The Seed of the woman, Who is prophesied to crush the head of the serpent, however, is Christ, so “the woman” of this verse also has to be Mary.  This one expression “the woman” has, therefore, double reference to Eve and to Mary.  We find this again in the twelfth chapter of Revelation.  The woman there is identified as Mary by the fact that she gives birth to Christ (vv. 4-5).  The chapter also, however, stresses the enmity between her and the dragon (vv. 4, 6, 13-17) and when it identifies the dragon the wording points directly back to Genesis 3 “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (v. 9). Revelation 12, therefore, places this woman who gave birth to Christ, Mary, in the role of Eve, whose enemy is the serpent.  The identification of Mary with Eve is also the significance of Jesus’ addressing His mother as “Woman” in John 2:4 and 19:26. (3)  In Genesis, this is what Adam calls Eve when God first makes her (Gen. 2:24) and what she is called throughout the Creation/Fall narrative until after the curse, when her name Eve is used for the first time (Gen. 3:20).

 

Note that the New Testament basis for identifying Mary as the New Eve comes from the writings of St. John the Apostle.  This is itself significant because St. Irenaeus grew up under the teaching of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, himself a direct disciple of St. John.  St. Justin Martyr, while not among the direct disciples of St. John in this same way, incorporated Johannine themes into all his writings, wrote and set Dialogue with Trypho in Ephesus, the city where St. John had spent most of the latter part of his life, and is the earliest witness to the Johannine authorship of Revelation.  The earliest Church Fathers to speak of Mary as the New Eve were directly influenced by the Apostle whose New Testament writings provide the Scriptural basis for this idea.

 

Not only does this meme illustrate the lackadaisical attitude towards the truth, at least where Rome is concerned, on the part of Hyper-Protestants, (Luke Skywalker’s line from The Last Jedi, “Amazing, every word of what you just said was wrong” could have been addressed to it), it also illustrates the fittingness of the expression “Hyper-Protestant.”  By accusing an idea, which the slightest amount of real research would have revealed to date to the earliest centuries of Christianity, to have been ubiquitous among the Church Fathers, and to be based in Scripture itself, of having been developed late in Church history to support the least defensible of Rome’s Marian terminology, one never formally dogmatized and which Rome has recently taken steps to walk back, Hyper-Protestants go well beyond what the sixteenth century Reformers themselves had to say against Rome with regards to Mary, which really wasn’t all that much.  Indeed, most of the Reformers, certainly the Lutheran and English Reformers, but even the fathers of the Reformed tradition including Calvin himself, would have to be classified as rank Mariolators if we were to go by the standards of Hyper-Protestantism.

 

As noted earlier, this characteristic of Hyper-Protestantism predates the internet meme.  The late Jack T. Chick, the fundamentalist Baptist publisher from Los Angeles famous for his cartoon tracts – small, rectangular booklets, which tell a story in comic-book style that leads up to an evangelistic appeal – saw his credibility take several blows in the last decades of the twentieth century when he repeatedly published or distributed testimonies/exposes that proved incapable of withstanding serious scrutiny as to their truthfulness.  While not all of these pertained to the Roman Church, the most notorious example was his publication of the testimony of Alberto Rivera, who claimed to be an ex-Jesuit and on the basis of whose testimony, he accused the Roman Church of being behind everything from the creation of Islam to Nazi Germany to the decay of morals in the late twentieth century United States. 

 

Evangelist Ralph Woodrow wrote “It puzzles me how some can be so fanatical against one set of errors—or what they perceive to be errors—only to develop greater errors: becoming judgmental, hateful, and dishonest”.  Woodrow wrote this in the context of explaining why he had withdrawn his best-seller, Babylon Mystery Religion, widely distributed by Chick, from circulation.  His book had drawn its inspiration from The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, a nineteenth century minister of the Scottish Free Church (Presbyterian) that tried to trace everything in Roman Catholicism that could not be found in the pages of Scripture (and much that could) back to Nimrod (who built the Tower of Babel/Babylon, the cult of whom Hislop claimed to be the original template of all paganism).  Woodrow, after prayerfully re-examining Hislop’s book and checking its sources, withdrew his own book and wrote The Babylon Connection? a book length rebuttal of his own previous book and his primary source.  A shorter version of his critique of Hislop’s methodology appeared in the Christian Research Journal.

 

With the Vincentian tests of antiquity, universality, and consent, something has to pass all three to be genuinely Catholic.  With these tests of Hyper-Protestantism, Catachresis, Misprioritization and Mendacity, passing any one of them indicates an infection.  Passing all three indicates that the theological disease has reached an advanced stage.

 

(1)   Article VI is quite lengthy, but the first sentence as quoted in the text of this essay is the full content of the Article as far as explaining the subject in the title goes.  The remainder of the Article is a clarification of what is meant by “Holy Scripture”.  Here too, the Article is worded so as to assert only what all Protestants can affirm and not the more extreme position which became more common starting in the seventeenth century.  The canonical books are listed for both Testaments, and the deutero-canonical books are also listed of which the Article merely says “And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”  The more extreme version of Protestantism says that these books have no place in the Bible whatsoever, warns people against reading them, and says that they were added to the Bible by the Roman Church in the Council of Trent.

 

This, however, illustrates the third test of Hyper-Protestantism, the devaluing of truth.  It is common today for Roman Catholic apologists to accuse Protestants of taking books out of the Bible, and of Protestant apologists to accuse the Roman Catholic Church of adding them.  Neither of these is entirely right, although the Roman Catholic accusation is closer to the truth.  The deutero-canonical books are, for the most part, (2 Esdras, called “The Fourth Book of Esdras” in Article VI, is the exception) books found in the Septuagint, the Greek translation that the Church received as her Old Testament from the first century but which were never included in the canon recognized by rabbinic Judaism.  If the Roman Catholic Church had “added” them in the sixteenth century, we could expect that Churches that broke fellowship with Rome earlier wold not include them in their Bibles.  This is not the case.  Generally, the further back the schism, the more the deuterocanonical books you find in the Bibles of the other Churches.  The Eastern Orthodox Church which broke with the Roman Catholic in 1054 has 3 and 4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151 in its Bible.  The Oriental Orthodox Churches which broke with the Chalcedonian Churches in the fifth century has these and, in the case of those which use the Tewahedo Bible (Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches), Enoch and Jubilees.  The Assyrian Church of the East which uses the Syriac Peshitta as its Bible includes most of the same deutero-canon as the Roman Catholic Church plus Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Manasseh. 

 

What happened in the sixteenth century was that both the Roman Catholic Church and the early Reformers, shifted books from category to category in the Bible.  Dr. Luther left the deuterocanonical books in the Bible but shifted them out of the Old Testament and into a section unfortunately labelled “Apocrypha”, inaccurately using a term that the Church Fathers applied to a different set of writings altogether.  The same was done in the Authorized Bible in 1611 and Article VI reflects the thinking behind this.  The deuterocanonical books are not “canonical” in the sense of being the “canon” or “rule” by which doctrine is proved, but they are not “non-canonical” in the sense of not being included in the Bible altogether.  What the Roman Catholic Church did at Trent was to shift these books into the “canon” in the sense of doctrine-proving books.  The other ancient Churches, while regarding these books as part of the Old Testament, had never regarded them as being equally canonical in this sense.

(2)  Once something other than the Gospel preached by St. Paul, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures is identified as the Gospel, even if it be St. Paul’s own doctrine of justification, so as to make the claim that all the Churches that confess that Christ, the second person of the Trinity, incarnate as the God-Man, died for our sins, and was buried, and rose again don’t have the Gospel  if they don’t have that doctrine in its Reformation reformulation, the door is opened to making this same claim about another doctrine so as to exclude others who do also confess the doctrine of justification in its Reformation formulation. 

 

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Calvinist Baptist preacher of the nineteenth century, is frequently quoted as having said “Calvinism is the Gospel, and nothing else.”  Other Calvinists have identified the “doctrines of grace” as the Gospel.  These, however, are doctrines pertaining to predestination, a matter about which God keeps His own counsel and which is hardly of the essence of the kerygma His Church is charged with proclaiming to the world.  

 

Recently a Calvinist Baptist friend posted to social media an excerpt from John Wesley’s writings in which he referred to himself as “almost a Christian”.  My friend used to this to try and argue that Wesley was never a Christian and that the Gospel he preached – Wesley was an Arminian – was not the real Gospel.  I had to rebuke him and point out that it was quite clear, even from the excerpt from Wesley that he had included in his post, that the revivalist was talking about his life prior to Aldersgate (where, at a meeting of the Moravians in which Dr. Luther’s preface to Romans was being read, he testified “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”)

(3)   Jesus also addresses the Samaritan woman, the woman caught in adultery, and Mary Magdalen as “woman” but there was nothing unusual about these instances.  This was not rude in first century Palestine the way it is in the English-speaking world of our day, it was closer to addressing a woman as “ma’am” in our culture.  Jesus’ addressing His mother this way was unusual, however. St. John records Jesus doing so twice, at the very beginning of His ministry and the very end.  The first of these is at the wedding of Cana, where Jesus performed His first miracle.  St. John tells us that this occurred on “the third day” which was to the last of the four days in the previous chapter as the Sunday on which Jesus rose was “the third day” to the Friday on which He was crucified, making this the sixth day.  This, coming as it does at the start of a Gospel which begins by pointing back to Genesis and Creation, is evocative of the sixth day of Creation, the day in which God created man “male and female” and Adam named Eve “woman”.  At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus’ addresses Mary as “woman” again and tells her to “behold thy son” as He instructs St. John to “behold thy mother”.  Here too is an allusion to the first woman who at the end of the Creation/Fall account in Genesis is given the name Eve because she is the “mother of all living.”   

The Canadian Right Needs to Reclaim its Roots and Stop Looking Southward for Inspiration

Over the past couple of weeks I have observed much online discussion among my countrymen over the recent drama in Davos over matters such as Krasnov the Orange’s threat to seize Greenland from Denmark by military force, Prime Minister Blofeld’s Churchillian oratory, and other related incidents that were I to list them all, the list would probably be as long as I intend this essay to be.  What follows is for the most part an expansion of a post on a social media platform that I had started to write until I realized that I didn’t wish to commit the time that would be necessary to following through if I got involved in the debate in that venue.  The particular debate was between Krasnov’s zombie cheerleaders purporting to be Canadian “conservatives” and Liberal Party supporters who think maintaining their party in government perpetually is necessary to protect Canadian sovereignty against American encroachments upon the same.

 

Before proceeding, a few observations are in order.  The first is that there will be some overlap between this essay and the previous two.  The second is that the most vocal among Krasnov’s “Canadian” zombie cheerleaders seem to be the Alberta separatists.  All that I have to say about this group in particular is that while they claim to speak for all of their province, I have too high a regard for the province named after Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter than to believe it to be entirely populated by inbred, knuckle-dragging, troglodytic, ass-tards as would have to be the case for these to be their legitimate spokesmen.

 

Now, let us turn to the subject of this essay which is that both groups, Krasnov’s zombie cheerleaders and Liberals who think their party to be the great defender of Canada and her ways, are wrong.  I have addressed the title to the Canadian right because, as unlikely as they are to listen to a word I have to say, I would consider trying to persuade such a lost cause as the Grits a violation of Christ’s command to not cast our pearls before swine.

 

First of all the Liberal Party has been the party of Americanization throughout all of Canadian history.  Confederation united the provinces of British North America into a single Dominion – a word chosen by the Fathers of Confederation from the Bible and given a meaning that is essentially the same as “Commonwealth Realm” today – and the Fathers of Confederation, led by the old Conservatives, recognized the biggest threat to the Confederation Project to be the United States and her dream of “Manifest Destiny.”  The Liberal Party, organized out of the pre-Confederation Reform movement which had considerable ideological overlap with the classical liberalism that the United States had been founded on, opposed the efforts of Macdonald’s Conservatives in the Dominion’s first quarter century to build a national economy strong enough to resist the economic pull of the United States, which Macdonald correctly saw as a stepping stone to the cultural and eventually political subjugation of Canada to the United States, and promoted free trade with the United States.  In 1891, when Sir Wilfred Laurier openly campaigned on a free trade – it was called reciprocity at the time – platform, an intellectual associated with his party, Goldwyn Smith published a book arguing that Confederation was a bad idea and that Canada should join the United States.  Freer trade with and closer ties to the United States were the consistent policies of William Lyon Mackenzie-King, Liberal party leader and Canada’s longest serving prime minister.

 

Second, the Liberals, although they underwent a significant change in policy under the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, never abandoned their essential nature as the party of Americanization.  Under Pearson and especially Trudeau, the Grits moved much further to the left than they had been, something that occurred again when the second Trudeau led the party, but they remained the party of Americanization even when they were mouthing left-wing slogans that in popular culture are often associated with an anti-American outlook.  The simple fact of the matter is that the leftism of the Liberal Party has always had a “Made in the USA” stamp on it.

 

Allow me to prove that point.

 

Americans, especially the Republicans, frequently accuse Canada (and Europe) of being “socialist.”  While there are other factors, such as, in the case of Canada, the supply management system (which is susceptible to criticism, but would more accurately be called a form of cartelism than socialism), the primary basis of this is the extensive network of social security programs often called “the welfare state”.  In the Great Depression, while it was the Conservatives who introduced relief measures towards the end of the Bennett premiership, the Mackenzie-King Liberals upon their return to government in 1935, after negotiating a trade agreement with the United States, began to implement measures based on the “New Deal” programs that FDR had introduced in the United States in the early 1930s.  Later, LBJ would expand the American welfare state as he introduced policies aimed at redressing social ills that went far beyond the poverty and unemployment targeted by FDR’s “New Deal.”  LBJ’s policies were dubbed the “Great Society” from speeches he made including this phrase as his goal and when Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson as Liberal leader and prime minister a few months before LBJ’s presidency came to an end, he began introducing a similar welfare state expansion.  In seeking the Liberal leadership, he used the expression “Just Society” to describe what he sought to achieve.

 

In 1977, Trudeau introduced the Canadian Human Rights Act, a poorly titled bill because it had nothing to do with limiting government power and protecting people against the abuse of the same, which is what is usually suggested by the expression “human rights.”  This piece of legislation did quite the opposite of that.  It empowered government agencies created by the act, to investigate (Human Rights Commission) and adjudicate (Human Rights Tribunal) complaints about discrimination in personal transactions in everyday life.  Since it was classified as civil rather than criminal law, charges under this act do not have to meet the high standard of proof in criminal law (guilty beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt) although the act allows for penalties that far exceed what is normally allowed in cases of civil mitigation.  Although written as if any discrimination on a forbidden basis (race, sex, etc.) was prohibited, i.e., both white against black and black against white, the unwritten understanding by which the system actually operates is that it is entirely one way.  The worst clause in the bill, Section 13 which defined language communicated, originally over the phone, later extended to include all electronic communication, that was “likely to” expose someone protected against discrimination to “hatred or contempt”, as itself an act of discrimination, was repealed in 2013 and the Liberals have been trying to reinstate it ever since.  The CHRA, and its counterpart in the UK which Keith Starmer has been so egregiously abusing as of late, were both inspired by an American bill.  Specifically, the bill was the US Civil Rights Act of 1964.

 

Allow me a side note in this paragraph. This US Civil Rights Act was the chief accomplishment of the man the United States celebrated last Monday in a holiday signed into law by Ronald Reagan despite the fact that the FBI records on the man are so damning that they were long ago placed under a seal that doesn’t expire until next year.  Of course, what is known about him without access to those tapes is bad enough.  He was a total fraud in every possible way.  “Dr.” – he obtained his degrees through plagiarism – “Martin Luther” - his birth name was Michael - King Jr., was a Baptist minister who denied all the articles of the Christian Creed and who surrounded himself with Communist agents like Jack O’Dell and Stanley Levinson and called himself a Marxist.  The standard answer on the part of his cult of fawning adorers, which is much larger than that of Krasnov because it includes the whole of the left as well as the type of supposed “conservative” that rallied to Krasnov’s support when he abandoned everything that made him a fairly decent president in his first term and took to pissing all over every other country in the world except Israel in his second, whenever these things, and the failings in his, that is King’s, personal life which are likely what most of the FBI recordings pertain to, come up is that these cannot detract from the man’s accomplishments.  Those, however, like his degrees and his name, are fake.  His entire reputation is built on his career as an activist opposing segregation.  Segregation, however, was dealt a legal death blow in 1954 when the American Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.  King’s career as a civil rights activist, at least as far as his being in the public spotlight goes, began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott the following year.  Segregation, in other words, was a dead foe already at the time King’s public crusade against it began.  His chief accomplishment, the aforementioned Civil Rights Act, did not end segregation.  It did exactly what its imitations in Canada and the UK and elsewhere in the Western world did, sans the speech clauses.  It was a terrible law, not a good one.

 

Canada, like the United States, and indeed all of Western Civilization experienced a shift towards social liberalism after World War II.  A number of factors contributed to this.  This was the period that saw the explosion of new communications technology that altered how popular culture was created and transmitted.  Prior to the development of what Richard Weaver called “the Great Stereopticon”, popular culture was fundamentally conservative due to tradition being its primary instrument of transmission.  Afterwards, however, as popular culture was replaced with “pop culture", a commodity produced for mass consumption in the factories of Los Angeles, California it became the instrument for the rapid dissemination of liberal attitudes on culture, religion, sex (both the thing and the act), and the like.  Demonstrating the truth of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message”, even television shows as far back as the Andy Griffith Show, which would be almost universally regarded as conservative by today’s standards, were used to preach messages that subtly subverted traditional ways in a way that was a step towards the “woke” liberalism of the present day.  Watch the show, starting at the beginning.  You will not need to go beyond the tenth episode of the first season before my point will have been made. 

 

The spread of Hollywood “pop culture” and its liberalizing message throughout Western Civilization was, of course, facilitated by the United States’ having assumed the position of first power in the West as a result of the two World Wars and the necessities of the Cold War which commenced almost immediately upon the end of World War II.  It should be observed here, although this pertains more to Europe than to Canada, that American assistance in rebuilding after World War II was tied to the acceptance of Americanizing propaganda.  While obviously this was more the case in militarily occupied former Axis countries where the Americanization was introduced under the guise of denazification, it was also part of the package of assistance to war-devastated Allied countries.  Remember that in the muddled thinking of the American government of the 1930s and 1940s, Nazism and European traditionalism, although they had little to nothing in common except an opposition to Communism, were frequently confused, although the American government of those days did have a considerably clearer understanding of the relationship between the founding American ideology and Communism than American governments of subsequent decades.

 

This was a huge factor in the European shift to the left after the war.  While American neoconservatives like Leo Strauss (What is Political Philosophy?) and Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) attributed the shift to the left in American culture to the influence of ideas from European philosophy, a thesis of which American paleoconservatives like William Lind (Marxifying America) and Pat Buchanan (The Death of the West) offered a rather more accurate version (hence its being dubbed a “conspiracy theory” by the ADL, $PLC, and other members of what Murray Rothbard called the Smearbund) in which the European neo-Marxists who fled to America during the ‘30s and ‘40s influenced the left-ward movement of post-war American academia, that the influence moving in the opposite direction has contributed more to the kind of leftism prevalent in the last part of the twentieth century moving into the twenty-first has been persuasively argued by American paleoconservative Paul Gottfried in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy (this book especially, but see also the entire trilogy of which it is the middle volume).

 

If you consider the different movements that made up this shift to the left throughout Western Civilization it is evident that they spread out from an epicentre in the United States.  The second wave of feminism, the wave which introduced the demand for the legalization of abortion, for government provided day care (the idea behind which was that it is better for strangers to look after young children than for mothers to stay at home rather than rejoin the workforce as soon as possible after birth), and the like began in the United States with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and the founding of NOW a few years later.  True, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in 1949, but this was hardly a movement starter since, unlike Friedan’s mass-marketed for popular consumption, best-seller, the half-crazed existentialist musings of Sartre’s long-suffering love-slave was written for an academic audience.  Let us also not overlook the strong likelihood of American government involvement here.  When Ms. was founded in 1971 one of its many co-founding editors and the one with which the publication was most associated in the popular mind was Gloria Steinem.  I call her “the Spook Bunny” in allusion to her previous positions as a cocktail waitress in Hef’s New York club (as research for an article, she was already a journalist) and, more relevantly to the point at hand, a CIA operative. 

 

However, the real clincher of the overall argument is that by far the most effective instrument of accomplishing the ends of second-wave feminism was not the activist movement itself, whether in the less radical version organized by Friedan, more radical version represented by Steinem’s journalist, or totally nutbar version found in the women’s studies departments of universities, but in an ally that successfully marketed feminism’s ideals and values by not presenting them as angry demands even if it was not always recognized as an ally by feminism.  The year before Friedan’s book was published, Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl became a best-seller and in 1965 she became editor-in-chief of Hearst media’s Cosmopolitan.  She gave it a total makeover into the magazine it has been ever since.  What is not always recognized is that Cosmo as Brown remade it became essentially the women’s counterpart to the magazine Hugh Hefner had founded in 1953.  The reason this is not always recognized is because Hefner illustrated his magazine with erotic nude photographs placing it, correctly enough, in the category of pornography in a public mind that has always been reluctant to admit that almost 100% of literature mass-marketed to adult females is pornographic, albeit verbal more than visual.  If you look at the message preached in the two publications – and, as I have said before the message of Hefner’s magazine has always been the most dangerous part, so that ironically, somebody who actually does “read it for the articles” is more likely to have his mind polluted than somebody who just looks at the pictures – Brown’s message to women is the exact complement of the “Playboy philosophy.”  Friedan, who did recognize this, failed to see that Brown, preaching to women “you can have it all” (career, sexual freedom, etc.), was accomplishing her, that is Friedan’s, ends far more effectively than Friedan ever could, by her more attractive packaging and larger platform. 

 

Note that whether marketed to males or females, the Playboy/Cosmo philosophy was a fundamentally American message.  It was not thought up by agents of international Communist disloyal to the United States (Friedan, as Daniel Horowitz later revealed, hid her Marxist past when presenting herself as a typical American middle-class housewife, but no such claims have ever been made to the best of my knowledge against either Helen Gurley Brown or Hugh Hefner, nor would they have been remotely credible if they had been) but by individuals who embodied capitalism and the American dream and who had no qualms about tying their message of sexual liberation to both of these things. 

 

Americanism – or at least Yankeeism, the culture of the American northeast that crushed the rival culture of the American south to become the ruling culture of the entire United States in the 1860s, more about which will be said later – began life its life as a secularized Puritanism, and while Puritanism’s reputation is that of a strict, Pharisaical, killjoy moralism with the world’s largest pole stuck up its rear end, which it was, it was also a revolt against the traditions and order of Christendom which were usually firmly grounded, both on the Bible and the Church’s interpretation of such on the one hand and human nature and common sense on the other.  Before it was secularized, Puritanism was the rejection of anything in Church tradition that could not be shown to be explicitly spelled out in the Bible as an offense against Christian liberty which rejection the Puritans translated, without noticing the irony, into harsh rules against these traditions, which, like the celebration of Christmas, were usually joyous ones.  As it transitioned into its secular form, Puritanism rejected traditional Christian rules limiting the pursuit of wealth so as to constrain the vice of avarice, most conspicuously the rules against usury, and so paved the way for capitalism.  The sexual revolution was merely the next logical step in the path of secularized Puritanism, the rejection of traditional rules limiting the pursuit of sexual desires.  It is all wrapped up in that phrase “the pursuit of happiness” that Thomas Jefferson substituted for “property” in the three basic rights recognized both by the Lockean liberalism Jefferson obtained the concept from and by Tory jurist Sir William Blackstone. All that was needed for it to enter this phase was the pseudo-scientific justification provided by American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s research in the South Pacific (later debunked by New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman) and the attempts by notorious American quack sexologist Alfred Kinsey, to pass off the findings of research done primarily with prostitutes and prisoners as representative of the larger population.

 

If, as I have just shown, second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution of which second-wave feminism could be regarded as a manifestation, began in the United States and spread throughout the rest of Western Civilization, this basically establishes this to be the case with the post-World War II shift towards social liberalism in general for, with the exception of the American Civil Rights movement, all the other movements within this shift took their cues from either the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, or the American Civil Rights movement.  The gay rights movement, for example, which took its cues from all three, began with the demonstrations and riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in Manhattan in 1969.  I give this example, both because many, probably most, of the other movements in the general shift to the left are either variations of it or closely enough related to be included in the constantly expanding alphabet soup umbrella designation and because American conservatives often portray this as being particularly and distinctly un-American.  I don’t know who they think they are trying to kid.  Although I have refused to watch it since it started cheering on Krasnov’s threats against my country, before that it seemed like every second guest on Fox News was gay.  San Francisco, the last time I checked, was in the American state that was governed by Reagan at the time the city first gained its reputation as the world capital of this sort of thing.  Fran Lebowitz, whose witticisms I have always appreciated even if her political and religious views couldn’t possibly be further removed from my own, basically summed up the matter when she said “if you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would pretty much be left with Let’s Make a Deal.”

 

One of the primary instruments for the spread of social liberalism in both the United States and Canada has been judicial activism.   In some cases, traditional laws were liberalized by legislation.  This is how the liberalization of divorce law was accomplished.  Here in Canada, this started in 1968, the transition year between the Pearson and Trudeau premierships, when the Liberals passed the Divorce Act.  This made divorce more easily accessible after a marriage had effectively already broken down as evidenced by three years separation.  The following year, the Family Law Act introducing no-fault divorce (the most liberal kind) was signed into law in California by, interestingly enough, Ronald Reagan. Other states followed suit over the course of the following decade.  Also interestingly, New York was the last state to go fully liberal on this.  In Canada, the 1968 Act was amended to allow no-fault divorce by the Mulroney Conservatives in 1986.  The difference seen here between what jurisdiction divorce law falls under in the two countries, the federal Dominion in Canada versus the individual states in the United States, partially explains why liberalism has historically preferred the courts to make this sort of change in the United States. 

 

This aspect of the matter is further illustrated by the difference in how liberalism accomplished the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples in both countries.  In this case, it was accomplished by legislation at the Dominion level in Canada but by the Supreme Court in the United States.  Liberals in both countries first attempted to achieve this goal piecemeal, state by state in the USA, province by province here, but in the end relied on federal legislation here and on the Supreme Court in the United States. 

 

This was one of the very few instances where Canada anticipated the United States in a move to the left (in terms of changes to the law, that is, see the Lebowitz quote above and the paragraph in when it is found).  More often than not, the social liberal changes were made in the United States long before they were made in Canada.  Prayer and the Bible were banned from public schools in the United States, for example, in Supreme Court rulings in 1962 and 1963, in which years my parents were 12 and 13.  The Upper Canadian Court of Appeal did not rule against mandatory prayer in school until I was 12 in 1988 and while this became the precedent that gradually spread through the provinces the 1988 ruling affected only the one province at the time.  When I was in high school in rural Manitoba in the early 1990s the Lord’s Prayer was still recited – those who objected to participation, were allowed to leave the classroom – and it was not until two years after I graduated that the practice was discontinued throughout the Dominion. 

 

This is not merely one big post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The reason this happened so much later in Canada than in the United States is the same reason why the Canadian Supreme Court ruling of Morganthaler v. The Queen happened in 1988, over a decade later than its American equivalent Roe v. Wade.  The reason is that prior to 1982 the courts simply were not available to Canadian liberals as a weapon in the same way they were available to American liberals.  1982 was the year that Pierre Trudeau repatriated the British North America Act of 1867 – renaming it the Constitution Act of 1867 – and added to it the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  This entire incident is glorified in the Liberal Theory of Canadian History, that Canadian version of the Whig Interpretation of History that Donald Creighton derided as “the Authorized Version”, which, contrary to Canada’s true history, depicts Canada’s story as virtually identical to America’s story – an emerging nation, breaking from the mother country and forging a new identity for herself on the basis of a rejection of the past – but accomplished diplomatically rather than by violence.  By contrast, Canada’ true story is that of a country built on the opposite foundation to that of the United States, by retaining ties to the mother country and accepting and incorporating the past.  I mention this because it is relevant to the overall point.  In the immediate context the point is that the Charter empowered the Canadian Supreme Court to act in the same way as the American Supreme Court.  The US Supreme Court had already been given the power to strike down laws older than itself by the American Constitution in the eighteenth century, although it was the amendments to the American Bill of Rights that the Republican Party forced through in the Reconstruction period that provided the court with the tools it used for this purpose in the second half of the twentieth century, especially after Earl Warren was named chief justice by Dwight Eisenhower (about whom, see my previous essay “Is Orange the new Red?”).

 

To summarize, the Liberal Party of Canada when during the Pearson-Trudeau premierships it pushed Canada in the direction of the new social liberalism that was spreading throughout Western Civilization in the post-World War II era primarily through the medium of American pop culture manufactured for mass consumption in Hollywood, it did so with legislation inspired by American precedents, the Canadian Human Rights Act, an imitation of the US Civil Rights Act, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, an imitation of the American Bill of Rights designed to give the Supreme Court of Canada the same powers to undermine tradition that the American Supreme Court had been exercising long before 1982.

The Liberal Party, therefore, when it took a massive leap to the left in the 1960s and 1970s and pushed Canada in the same direction, remained the party of Americanization that had been from Laurier to Mackenzie-King.  It remained the party of Americanization during the premiership of the second Trudeau, Captain Airhead.  Captain Airhead often seemed like he spent more time in the United States than in Canada, was a strong believer in free trade, and being incapable of original thought, was basically an imitator of the forty-fourth president of the United States, in whose second term in office, Captain Airhead became leader of the Liberal Party and then prime minister.  He heavily subsidized the far-left Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which was founded during his premiership on the model of the American Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), which provided the start-up funds.  CAHN specializes in the same kind of smear tactics its American parent and counterpart engages in.  It claimed that concern about the erosion of personal rights and freedoms and their constitutional protections during the Bat Flu scare was an extremist position and branded the Canadian Red Ensign, which was baptized our flag in the blood of the Canadian soldiers who died fighting for God, King, and Country against Hitler, a hate symbol.  That is the sort of idiocy one can only expect from an organization whose founding chairman was Bernie Farber. 

 

The only reasonable conclusion from all of this is that the Liberal Party does not deserve the trust of Canadians, especially when it comes to dealing with the threat of an American takeover.

 

Let us turn now to the Conservatives. 

 

Canada’s original Conservatives fought against the forces that sought to pull Canada closer to the United States and Americanize her.  Confederation took place in the years immediately following what is conventionally called the US Civil War, although it was not a war between two factions for control of the same country, as is usually what the expression “civil war” denotes, but rather a second war of independence on the part of eleven states who declared their secession from the United States after the election of the first Republican president.  In this second war of independence, those fighting for their secession lost as the Republican government in Washington waged total war against those who by their way of thinking were still their own countrymen to prevent them from leaving.  It is most unfortunate that in the last couple of decades, there has been a push to suppress all discussion of this conflict other than the naïve narrative that reads it entirely through the lens of the toxic American racial politics that was a very predictable by-product – or perhaps, primary product – of the mass media manufactured Civil Rights Movement, led by the phony discussed in the side note several paragraphs back.  At any rate, the war ended with the triumph of the Republican north and when the first Republican president was assassinated and replaced by his vice president, a weaker man than himself, he was dominated by the far more radical Republicans who controlled Congress.  In British North America, the triumph of the Union represented a threat, a threat that the same Republicans who had just so mercilessly consolidated their own power by subjugating their own countrymen would turn their sights northward and once again try to take Canada by force of invasion as the United States had attempted in the War of 1812.  One of the purposes of Confederation, which was led by Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservatives was to protect against this threat.  As Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald implemented the National Policy, a policy of protecting new industries and investing in infrastructure, of which the most obvious example was the construction of the Canada Pacific Railroad, so as to build a strong national economy on east-west internal trade that would make for greater national unity and resist the economic pull of the United States.  Resisting Americanization and being in general very wary of the United States, remained official Conservative policy from Sir John A. Macdonald through to John G. Diefenbaker.

 

Unfortunately, in the 1980s the Conservatives abandoned their essential nature as the party of resistance to Americanization and standing for Canada’s own traditions when, under the leadership of Brian Mulroney, they negotiated the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  By doing this, they betrayed the historical essence of their party in a way that the Liberals, the party of Americanization, never had.  The result was that they became a second Liberal Party, a Liberal Party lite, and hence a redundancy.  The Reform Party which was organized in the late 1980s as a Western protest party criticized the Mulroney Conservatives for being just this.  Unfortunately, although this criticism was correct, they did not understand their own criticism.

The Reform Party, which merged with much of the old Conservatives to form the Canadian Alliance in the late 1990s, failed to see that it was by signing the Free Trade Agreement that that the Conservatives betrayed their essential nature and became a second, redundant, Liberal Party.  The Reform Party, which took the name of the movement that gave birth to the Liberal Party of Canada, was in favour of free trade with the United States and wanted more Americanization not less.  Consider their position on Senate Reform.  All that would be needed to make the Senate function much better and as intended by the Fathers of Confederation, would be for the nomination of whom the Crown appoints to the Senate to be taken away from the prime minister, the rest of the Cabinet, and anyone who sits in the Lower House and given to a nomination committee to which the provincial governments appoint the members.  This would fix the main problem with the Senate as it currently stands while preserving it as the same body established in 1867.  The Reform Party, however, demanded that the Senate be remade on the Triple E model, which would essentially remake it into the image of the American Senate.

 

The Reform Party was a populist party that considered itself to be small-c conservative and to be exerting a right-ward pull to counter the left-ward pull of the Trudeau era Liberals in a way the old Conservatives had failed to do.  The problem with that is that they took their entire idea of what it means to be “conservative” or on the “right” from a country that was consciously built on the ideological foundation of liberalism and which never had a “right” in the truest, political, sense of the term.  The United States was founded in a left-wing revolution.  There is no other kind of revolution, the right’s response to revolution is found in the words of Joseph de Maistre, “What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.”  The quotation comes from Maistre’s Considerations on France, written, like Burke’s Reflections, in response to the French Revolution, which was born out of the same ideas and in some cases with the support of the same individuals – Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette are the obvious, but not the only examples – as the American Revolution.  The term “left” first took on its political sense in the French Revolution when it was used of supporters of the revolution based upon where they were standing in the French Chamber of Deputies.  Similarly, “right” first took on its political meaning, basically the continental equivalent of what had been called Toryism in England for over a century at this point in time, in the French Revolution based upon where the opponents stood.  The “right” in North America at the time of the American Revolution, were the Tories, the Loyalists who, persecuted by the triumphant revolutionaries, fled the new republic and became the first English Canadians who a century later, along with the French Canadians who had been spared going through the French Revolution by having been ceded to the British Crown at the end of the Seven Years’ War and were at the time more to the right than the English Canadians, founded the Dominion of Canada on a foundation of preserving and adapting the old order.

 

When something that called itself a “right” emerged in the United States in the period between the two World Wars, it did not stand for the things the right had historically stood for in Europe, which can basically be summarized as the political and religious heritage of pre-Modern Christendom, but was basically eighteenth century liberalism protesting against how twentieth century liberalism was moving away from its roots and converging with Communism, or at least socialism.  This first American right, similar if not entirely identical to what is called libertarianism today, was correct to be alarmed at the direction in which liberalism was moving, although the new liberals had a better perception of the related nature of liberalism and Communism, both of which grew out of Modern man’s turning away from the older order of Christendom and embracing abstract ideals which, while not all necessarily bad in themselves – “freedom” and “equality” were the main two such ideals, and while “equality” is a perversion of the good that is “justice”, “freedom” is itself a good (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn has shown how, contrary to Modern assumptions, the two are contrary to each other and cannot be maximized at the same time) – in the hands of both liberals and Communists, became what Edmund Burke called “armed doctrines”, destructive weapons to be used by ignorant revolutionaries against the old order.  FDR, therefore, was correct to see America’s founding liberalism and Communism as being on the same side of history, although his opponents in the first American right were correct to see that what that side was moving towards was the opposite of the Golden Age of Utopia of which FDR dreamed.  In 1948, ideas from the more authentic European right entered the American right when, in response to the development and employment of the atomic bomb – something that the American right of the 1940s unanimously condemned as atrocious – Richard Weaver, wrote Ideas Have Consequences, tracing the moral, intellectual, and civilizational decay that could lead to such a monstrous occurrence, back through the centuries to Occam’s nominalism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  Except that his title, chosen by his editor rather than himself, stuck around as a slogan, Weaver’s influence on the American right was short-lived.  Today, his most obvious intellectual heir in the United States is Wendell Berry, the poet, novelist, and organic farmer from Kentucky, who defies categorization as “left” or “right” in either the American or the proper sense of these terms.  Meanwhile, the American right has abandoned his abhorrence of the atomic bomb and of America’s wartime use of it, an abhorrence shared by Russell Kirk (“we are the barbarians within our own empire”), Colonel Robert McCormick, Henry Regnery, and basically by everyone on the American right prior to William F. Buckley Jr., for the lunatic position that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “saved lives” (the reasoning used to arrive at that absurd conclusion is easily rebutted by the testimony of General Douglas MacArthur if anybody wishes to look into it).

 

In other words, although the American “right” from its beginnings in the first half of the last century has never been a true right but rather a form of liberalism, the original American right-liberalism prior to William F. Buckley Jr. was preferable either to the mainstream of American liberalism which was moving left-ward or to the mainstream American right after Buckley became is self-appointed gate-keeper.  It is not, however, to the original American right that the Reform/Alliance looked for its definition of “conservatism” but to the Buckley brand, and especially to the later editions of that brand which incorporates every sort of vile argument for the United States going around the world, shaking it member in the face of every other country, and whacking them over the head with a stick, to prove how big and powerful it is. These arguments are fundamentally at odds with orthodox Christianity.  They include the view of good and evil of the Manichean heresy (formed in the early centuries of the Church by reading Christianity through the lens of Eastern dualism), as reflected in Hollywood movies and comic books.  They also include “might makes right”, an ancient notion revived by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, the refutation of which notion as expressed by Thrasymachus by Socrates in Plato’s Politeia (misleadingly translated “The Republic”) was a basic foundation stone of civilization, ancient and Christian.

 

Even, however, if those who saw the Conservative Party moving towards liberalism under Mulroney had looked to Robert Taft, John T. Flynn, William Henry Chamberlin, and Albert Jay Nock rather than William F. Buckley (at best) and Rush Limbaugh for their ideas of what conservatism is it would have been a mistake on their part.  True Canadian conservatism, as expressed in such neglected volumes as John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown, John G. Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure, the essays of Stephen Leacock, the histories and essays written by Donald Creighton and W. L. Morton, the philosophical treatises of George Grant, and in the family saga of novels about the royalist, Anglican, Whiteoak family of Jalna written by Mazo de la Roche the most read Canadian novelist of the 1930s, whose books remained extremely popular well past her death in the early 1960s, is more authentic, being a Canadianized form of British Toryism, itself an early form of the European right, which stood for the order and heritage of Christian civilization, for kings and the Christian religion and the Church against Modern rationalistic and liberalizing tendencies.  This is the well of inspiration from which a movement that wished to exert a pull to the right in Canada to counter the leftward pull exerted by the Americanizing Liberal Party and the liberal drift in the Conservative Party, should have drawn.   You cannot counter a “Made in the USA” left-liberalism, with a “Made in the USA” right-liberalism, that has no roots deeper than the origins of liberalism in the early Modern era, and it is foolish to try to do so when you have available a domestic Toryism, which had absorbed some of classical liberalism but still had roots that extended back to pre-Modern Christendom, to utilize instead.  Attempts to counter the “Made in the USA” leftward pull of the Liberal Party, with a “Made in the USA” “conservatism” will only further the leftward drift of the country.

 

God Save the King!