Is Orange the new Red?

Do you remember the story of Jacobo Árbenz?

 

Árbenz was elected the president of Guatemala in 1950 and entered that office early in 1951.  His primary policy and the focus of his presidency was agrarian reform.  What this meant was that large sections of farmland that were currently not under cultivation were expropriated by the government and handed over to poor farm workers.  To Americans this smacked of Communism and certainly there was a resemblance in that the redistribution of wealth was involved.  There were also differences in that unlike Communists Árbenz compensated the large landowners whose property he seized and that, unlike in Communism, the seized land did not become communal property but remained private, albeit redistributed to a larger number of owners.  Somewhat ironically his program lined up, in desired outcome albeit not in means, with that of the literary group known as the Vanderbilt Agrarians or Twelve Southerners whose 1930 anthology/manifesto I’ll Take My Stand inspired Richard M. Weaver whose 1948 Ideas Have Consequences sparked a renaissance of Burkean thought in the historically liberal United States of America.

 

Among those for whom the similarities between Árbenz’ version of agrarianism and Communism outweighed the differences was the United Fruit Company which had something of a monopoly on the banana trade in that part of the world – Guatemala was a “banana republic” in the literal sense of the term – and from whom much of the redistributed land was seized.  The company lobbied the American government to intervene and plans were drawn up to do so in the last days of the administration of Harry Truman.  It was during the presidency of Truman’s successor, however, Dwight Eisenhower, that the Árbenz government was toppled in 1954.  Eisenhower’s Secretary of State was John Foster Dulles who had previously been the United Fruit Company’s lawyer.  His brother Allen, whom Eisenhower named director of the CIA, oversaw the coup, and also had connections to United Fruit.

 

Needless to say the Eisenhower administration, especially the Dulles brothers, and United Fruit all portrayed the CIA coup as an action taken to prevent the Communist takeover of Guatemala.  Ironically, however, of the two presidents involved in this story, it was Dwight Eisenhower, not Jacobo Árbenz who was most likely an actual Communist.

 

Robert W. Welch Jr., who after his retirement from his career as America’s Willy Wonka had founded the John Birch Society to combat Communism in 1958, in 1963 privately published a book entitled The Politician.  The book, which grew out of a letter that Welch had privately circulated a decade earlier, has remained in print and was given the subtitle “A look at the political forces that propelled Dwight David Eisenhower into the Presidency.”  Welch argued that Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”.  Russell Kirk quipped in response “Ike’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer” and quoting this witticism became William F. Buckley Jr.’s stock response to Welch’s allegations. The editor of National Review had broken ties with Welch and the JBS, ostensibly over the book although more likely over the society’s opposition to the Vietnam War.  While Kirk had undoubtedly coined a clever phrase, Buckley’s use of it was a way of avoiding having to answer Welch’s actual case against Eisenhower.

 

Of course, someone could argue that no such answer was necessary because when it comes to allegations the burden of proof is on the accuser and Welch’s evidence fell short of being the definitive proof that, say, a leaked copy of the Communist Party membership roll with Eisenhower's name on it or the testimony of ex-Communist Party members that he had been active at their meetings, would have been.  In McCarthy and his Enemies (1954), however, Buckley and his brother-in-law Brent Bozell had examined the cases of those whom Senator Joseph McCarthy had named and showed that if it could not be proven that each of these was a card-carrying Communist it could at least be demonstrated that there was cause in the vast majority of the cases for flagging the individual as a potential security risk.  If Buckley had applied this same standard to Welch’s book, he would have found it less easy to dismiss.

 

It was not merely that Eisenhower had made a couple of bad decisions here or there that one could argue had in some way or another been to the advantage of the Soviet Union.  He had a consistent pattern of acting in ways that primarily benefited the Soviets, a pattern established before his presidency, even before the Cold War itself, in World War II.  About a year or so before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (sic), Eisenhower had been brought to the attention of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by his daughter after she had attended a party in which the young officer had filled her ears with gushing, sycophantic, praise of her father.  FDR, note, wore his pro-Communism on his sleeve, having been the first American president to recognize the Bolshevik government, having recalled an ambassador who told the truth about conditions in the Soviet Union and replaced him with one who sent back lying reports about the paradise that Stalin was creating and whose equally deceitful memoir became the basis of a vile pro-Stalin propaganda film that FDR ordered made, who believed that he and Stalin had such an affinity that he would be easily able to manipulate the Soviet dictator (the reality was the other way around), and whose bureaucracy was so filled with Communist agents in extremely high positions that had Joseph McCarthy been a senator at the time instead of an air-force tail-gunner and had he made the same allegations he would make during the 1950s and on the same scale, he would have been guilty of grossly underestimating Soviet influence in the American government.  FDR’s government advanced Eisenhower through the military ranks far more rapidly than his skill or experience supported.  The rate accelerated after the United States entered the war and half a year later he became commanding general of the American army’s European Theater (sic) of Operations.  A year and a half later he was named Supreme Allied Commander. 

 

By the time the United States entered the war, Hitler had already broken his pact with Stalin and launched Operation Barbarossa, and so the Soviet Union was now one of the Allies as well.  Stalin requested that another front be opened up as soon as possible to relieve the pressure on the Russian army and this was not an unreasonable request under these circumstances.  Prior to D-Day, however, there was much argument over where that front should be.  Sir Winston Churchill wanted a Mediterranean invasion that would approach Germany through Italy and the Balkans.  Eisenhower and his superior, General Marshall, however, backed Stalin’s demand that the second front be opened up in France.  The Americans and the Soviets won out in the end, but the success of the Norman invasion does not prove them to have been right.  One of the reasons Churchill wanted a Mediterranean front was to prevent, or at least lessen, one of the less pleasant consequences of the Allied victory, namely the fall of Eastern Europe into the hands of the Soviets. 

 

While Eisenhower’s insistence on France in itself does not prove that he wanted Eastern Europe to fall behind what Churchill would soon dub the “Iron Curtain” his subsequent actions did nothing to clear him of the charge.  After D-Day, Eisenhower’s “broad front” strategy prevented commanders who wished to move faster and end the war quicker, most notably General Patton, from doing so.  In Patton’s case, he cut his fuel supplies in August 1944 and then ordered him to assume a defensive position. If Eisenhower had other motives at the time than slowing the Western Allies so the Soviets could advance from the East this cannot be said of what happened when the fall of Germany was imminent in April 1945.  At this point Eisenhower halted the Western Allies at the Elbe River and called up Stalin and told him to take Berlin.  While Eisenhower claimed that this is what had been agreed upon prior to the invasion, Churchill disputed this claim.  Eisenhower had received requests from German cities that lay in the path of the Red Army asking that they be allowed to surrender to the Americans instead.  Eisenhower denied these requests, much like the civilian government of the United States denied the surrender requests that Japan had been sending General Douglas MacArthur for over a year before the United States committed the single greatest atrocity of the war when she dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

 

Meanwhile, discussions were underway as to the next steps to be taken after the war was won.  In 1944, a proposal for imposing a Carthaginian peace on Germany was made.  It was called the Morgenthau Plan after Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury under whose name the initial proposal was distributed, although Morgenthau’s assistant, Harry Dexter White was the brain behind it.  White, who would later dominate the Bretton Woods Conference that gave birth to the IMF and the World Bank, was identified by both Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley as an informant of the Soviet spy rings they had been associated with.  These allegations were verified quite early and the post-Cold War publication of the Venona Project findings and the opening of the Soviet archives have established the matter beyond a reasonable doubt.  The Morgenthau Plan, if it had been enacted, would have left Western Europe much more vulnerable to Soviet invasion.  While Eisenhower would downplay his connection to the Morgenthau Plan later, Welch cited Morgenthau’s former assistant Fred Smith, as identifying Eisenhower, who hosted Morgenthau and White on 7 August, 1944, as having “launched the project.” 

 

Welch also quoted Eisenhower himself, from his memoir Crusade in Europe (which was ghost written for him by Joseph Fels Barnes, an American journalist who had been the American director of the Institute of Pacific Relations, a think-tank that served as a Communist front, and who had been named as a Communist by Whittaker Chambers), as having said at that same meeting “Prominent Nazis, along with certain industrialists, must be tried and punished.  Membership in the Gestapo and in the SS should be taken as prima facie evidence of guilt.  The General Staff must be broken up, all its archives confiscated, and members suspected of complicity in starting the war or in any war crimes should be tried.”  This, was eventually acted out at Nuremberg.  At the Tehran Conference, when Stalin and Roosevelt made ghoulish remarks about a post-war “victor’s justice” involving the summary execution of random German officers, Churchill walked out in disgust (it was Stalin, not the American president who went after him and appeased him with the excuse that Solomon put in the mouth of the “mad man who casteth firebrand, arrows, and death”) and after the Nuremberg Trials his son Randolph, speaking in Australia called the executions of the German officers murder and said “They were not hanged for starting the war but for losing it. If we tried the starters, why not put Stalin in the dock?”  This was not a popular opinion then and it is less popular now in this day and age in which questioning the received account of the other side’s atrocities in that war is absurdly treated as a crime itself but the Churchills recognized what we have allowed to sink into Orwell’s memory hole, that putting those you have just defeated in war on trial before a newly created court that could not possibly have any legitimate jurisdiction was not in accordance with the principles that, however often they may have been ignored, have informed our civilization’s ideas of law and justice since classical antiquity although it fits quite neatly into the Soviets’ barbarous idea of justice.  The American who was most outspoken in expressing this forgotten truth at the time was Senator Robert. A. Taft of Ohio, the son of former American president William Howard Taft.  The story of his bravery on this occasion can be found in the final chapter of Profiles in Courage, ghost-written for John F. Kennedy by Ted Sorenson.  Senator Taft, incidentally, was Eisenhower’s chief rival for the Republican Party’s nomination in the election that put Eisenhower into the White House.

 

The most inexcusable of Eisenhower’s war-era pro-Communist activities, however, was his involvement in the forced repatriation of refugees from Communism.  This is often called “Operation Keelhaul”, which is the title of the fourth chapter of Welch’s book as well as of the book-length treatment of the matter by Julius Epstein, although as an official designation this name was more limited in scope, applying to a specific set of operations that were carried out for about a year after the war, while the entire program of repatriation to the Soviets began before the war ended and extended, in some cases to as late as 1949.  Count Nikolai Tolstoi entitled his excellent book about this matter Victims of Yalta.  The whole sordid affair, however, went far beyond what was agreed upon at Yalta and, indeed, began in 1944 before the conference had even taken place.  By the time it was over, up to five million ex-patriots of Soviet-occupied territory, including territory that had only just become Soviet-occupied in the war, were turned over to the Red army to face torture, the prison and labour camps administered by GULAG, and death.  Nor, as Eisenhower apologists have been known to claim, were these all or even primarily, Russians who had defected to Hitler’s army (in the case of those who did meet this description, American Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew, one of the more responsible negotiators, in the talks leading up to the Yalta agreement pointed out that to meet Stalin’s demands would violate the Geneva Convention which required that these, captured in German uniform, be treated as Germans).  They included people from lands that Hitler had captured who had ended up in his camps, from which they were “liberated” only to be surrendered to Stalin.  They included soldiers who, individually or as bands, had fought in the war alongside American and other Allied forces, but for all that were turned over to Stalin’s army at his request, by Eisenhower’s orders.  They included patriots from the countries that the Red Army overran on Stalin’s march to Berlin who had put up a fight against the Soviet takeover but, before their countries fell, surrendered to the Americans instead only to be turned over the Soviets by order of Eisenhower.

 

From all of this, which pertains only to Eisenhower’s actions as a military commander and of which I have given merely a small sampling of what Robert Welch provided in the first five chapters of his eighteen chapter book, it should be evident that Buckley’s own standard concerning the Joseph McCarthy allegations as articulated in Buckley’s own book, had been met by Welch with regards to Eisenhower.  Indeed, suppose one was trying to prove the opposite of what Welch claimed, trying to demonstrate that Eisenhower was a solid anti-Communist.  The evidence is far less abundant, to put it mildly.  Eisenhower claimed to be anti-Communist in his run for the American presidency but that took place long after the time when openly hug-a-Red types like FDR could be elected president four times in a row.   The Cold War was underway and anyone hoping to win had to present himself as an anti-Communist.  Eisenhower basically claimed to be an anti-Communist by association by making Richard Nixon, whose anti-Communist credentials as the investigator in the Alger Hiss case were impeccable, his running-mate.  Apart from his association with Nixon, the strongest evidence for Eisenhower’s anti-Communism was his deposing of Árbenz who, as we have seen, was not a real Communist and who was removed for reasons that had nothing to do with real anti-Communism. Outweighing this phony example of Communist-toppling is another example of regime change from the same era.  From 1957 to 1959, the Eisenhower administration, including the same Dulles brothers who pushed for the removal of Árbenz pursued a policy of weakening the government of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and supporting the revolutionaries.  Dulles’ CIA even provided training and arms to the revolutionaries.  Ezra Taft Benson, leader of the heretical Mormon sect and Eisenhower’s Agricultural Secretary, tried to persuade the Eisenhower administration to abandon its support for the revolutionaries and the deaf ears he kept encountering eventually persuaded him of the truth of Welch’s thesis.   In 1959 the revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro, came to power and declared their allegiance to the Soviet Union.  For a book length account of the American government’s responsibility for this outcome see The Fourth Floor: An Account of the Castro Communist Revolution, the memoir of Earl E. T. Smith, who was the American ambassador to Cuba during the period of the revolution.

 

On 3 January, the American air force bombed Venezuela while a team of American agents infiltrated the country, captured its president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and removed them from Caracas to New York where they were charged with various crimes having to do with narcoterrorism.  When I heard the news, Guatemala in 1954 came immediately to mind. 

 

In both incidents, the American government removed the president of a Latin American country.  Both times they justified their actions by accusing the removed president of the greatest evils of the day – Communism in the case of Árbenz, narcoterrorism in the case of Maduro, although defenders of the American government’s actions also frequently call Maduro a Communist.  In the case of Guatemala the American government’s real motivation was the economic interests of United Fruit.  In the case of Venezuela, it was, as the American president openly admits, all about the country’s oil which had been nationalized by Maduro’s predecessor.  In both cases, the American president was himself likely a Communist.

 

In 1987, Donald Trump visited the Soviet Union, ostensibly to make a deal to build a hotel in Moscow.  Alnar Mussayev, a Kazakhstan politician who served in the KGB during the 1980s, claimed last year that Trump had been recruited as an asset by the KGB during this visit and given the codename “Krasnov”.  While Trump’s political opponents, the Democrat Left, have been accusing him of being a Russian puppet for years, Mussayev’s claim is somewhat different.  When Hilary Clinton, et al., accused Trump of being controlled by Russia, they were thinking of Russia as a nation, a post-Communist country which, in their eyes, had gone down a dark path since the break-up of the Soviet Union.  The KGB, however, was not merely a Russian national agency, but a Communist agency.

 

It is 2026 now and the Soviet Union has supposedly been gone for thirty-five years.  I stress the word “supposedly.”   In his 1995 book The Perestroika Deception, Anatoliy Golitsyn warned that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a façade intended to lull the West to sleep as a late stage in a long-term Communist strategy of deception thought up decades earlier.  The Communist Party and its KGB enforcers remained firmly in charge, Golitsyn argued.  As crazy as this may have sounded, the credibility of the book was greatly enhanced by Golitsyn’s earlier, 1984, New Lies for Old, which also warned of a long-term strategy of deception thought up by the Communists in the late 1950s.  This book contained many predictions, most of which were fulfilled by the early 1990s.

 

The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, had been a career KGB agent before the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and his entry into politics.  That he has been in charge of Russia, alternating as prime minister and president, for the past quarter century, adds further credibility to Golitsyn’s claim that the KGB, and the Communist Party behind it, remained in power after the supposed Soviet breakup.  If Mussayev is right about Trump, then Communism once again has an agent in the White House, as it did at the time Golitsyn says the Communists agreed upon this strategy.  The difference is that at that time, Communism was regarded as a serious threat, today it is regarded as a thing of the past, a defeated foe, making a Communist agent in the White House that much more of a threat.

 

Of course, even if Mussayev was talking out of his rear end and Trump is not a KGB chess piece in a game the Communists have been playing since the 1950s, he is still the world’s biggest jerk.  This is another thing common to him and Eisenhower.  Suppose Welch’s interpretation of Eisenhower’s actions was as off-base as Buckley and Kirk claimed it was.  He still ordered the forced repatriations to the Soviet Union.  He still supported the revolution that put Castro into power.  Communist or not, he was a real bastard.

 

Maduro may very well be as bad as Trump’s zombie cheerleaders claim him to be.  Indeed, I’d be surprised to hear that he wasn’t.  That does not make the Trump administration’s actions right.  The United States does not have some kind of universal jurisdiction to act as policeman, prosecutor, judge and executioner for the entire world.  Nor should her acting like she does be tolerated by the rest of the world.

 

One of Krasnov’s predecessors, John Quincy Adams, while serving as James Monroe’s Secretary of State, famously declared “America does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”  While Adams’ idea of a United States that minded her own business rather than everyone else’s was not absolute – it was not until a couple of decades later that he repudiated his belief in the repugnant doctrine of Manifest Destiny, i.e., America’s supposed destiny to subjugate everyone else in this hemisphere to the rule of the United States, and then, for reasons other than that he perceived the inconsistency between this and his nobler idea of a United States that minded her own business – it remained influential into the first half of the twentieth century.  World War II was believed to have killed it, nailed its coffin shut, and buried it. Adams’ words, however, were revived after the end of the Cold War by those who thought that the United States should roll back her military presence throughout the world and who rejected George H. W. Bush’s vision of a “New World Order”, announced in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, in which the United States would lead a coalition of nations in policing the world against actions such as Hussein’s. 

 

These were generally those on what passes as the Right in the United States – the United States having been founded on the ideology of liberalism by deists who rejected everything the real Right stood for, i.e., royal monarchy, an established Church, and the rest of the institutions and order of pre-liberal Christendom – who dissented from the neoconservatism that had come to dominate the American Right by the end of the Cold War.  A note to readers from my own country, while we use “neoconservative” to refer to Canadian “conservatives” who define their “conservatism” in American terms rather than those of the more authentic Toryism of our own country and the larger British Commonwealth, in the United States “neoconservative” refers to a group of pundits, who had been part of the New York Intellectuals in the period leading from the war into the second half of the twentieth century and as such had been on the Left with views ranging from those of FDR type New Dealers to Trotskyism, who in response to the development of the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, realigned themselves with the American Right.  This American neoconservatism blended what was basically a Manichean view of the world as a battleground between the forces of Good and a reified Evil with a Nietzschean view of “might makes right.”  Practically, however, its ideas were that the rest of the world was entitled to American liberal democracy, that the United States had the duty to provide the rest of the world with American liberal democracy, whether they wanted it or not, even if it took all of America’s bombs and bullets and boots on the ground to do so, and especially if it meant regime change in a country whose government Israel wanted removed.  This belligerent and ignorant hawkishness became even more pronounced as American neoconservatism entered its second and third generations.  Those who quoted John Quincy Adams in response to the neoconservative takeover of the American Right were called paleoconservatives (Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Thomas Fleming, Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Gottfried, et al.,) and paleolibertarians (Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul, et. al.,) and when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States the first time this was widely regarded as a victory for them and a defeat for the neoconservatives who generally opposed Trump.

In Donald Trump’s third bid for the American presidency in 2024, however, he had the support of these same neoconservatives.  This, as became evident before Trump was even inaugurated the second time, signalled that The Apprentice, White House Edition, 2.0 would be very different from the original and not in any way that could be described as an improvement.  In the new iteration Trump has been acting as if he were elected president of the world rather than merely of one country and that the rest of the world has to bow to his wishes or be forced to do so either by his preferred means of economic force, such as tariffs, or if necessary by more conventional military means.  The only county he does not seem to think he has the right to boss around is Israel, the very country the American neoconservatives place at the top of their pecking order above their own.

Let us now return to the thesis I have been suggesting in this essay.  It was never very likely that the Communist Party would achieve its goal of world-wide Communism by means of the Soviet military.  The establishment of a world-wide Pax Americana under the United States as the sole superpower, however, was a likely outcome of the Cold War and it might serve Communism’s end better than the Red Army ever could if the break-up of the Soviet Union was the elaborate ruse Golitsyn painted it to be and if a KGB agent recruited in the perestroika and glasnost phase of the Communist strategy were to become the American president as it entered its end game.  Should someone raise the objection that it makes no sense for an extremely wealthy businessman like Donald Trump to be a Communist agent, I would answer that such an objection displays ignorance of the history of Communism.  From 1848 when wealthy cotton merchant Friedrich Engels co-wrote the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx to 1917 when the Bolshevik Revolution was financed by German and American bankers (see Anthony C. Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution) to the very end of the Cold War it was always capitalist money that kept Communism afloat.  Has not the open policy of the People’s Republic of China for decades been to finance Communism with capitalism?

 

We have become too used to thinking of Communism and capitalism in terms of the Cold War paradigm which portrayed them as enemies that are each the polar opposite of the other.  In such a paradigm it would be difficult to explain the thinking of the American president just prior to the Cold War.  What made FDR so naïve when it came to Stalin?  It was his conviction that despite the differences in state structure and economy, the United States and the Soviet Union were ultimately on the same side and not just in the sense that they were both at war with the Third Reich but in the sense that they were both Modern countries to whom the future belonged as opposed to older powers whose day had passed into which category he placed the other Allied powers.

 

From the perspective of those of us who are still Tories, who still cherish what the original Right stood for, who still believe in kings, orthodox Christianity, the Church, roots, tradition, honour, loyalty, chivalry and all the old pre-mercantile virtues, FDR’s point of view was in a sense more correct than that of the Cold War paradigm.  This correctness did not lie in its more positive assessment of Stalin and Communism, but in its identifying the Modern spirit of progress that united the USA and USSR as outweighing the differences between their economic models.  We, however, would say that what FDR celebrated, we decry because this Modern spirit has been the enemy of all we hold dear for centuries.   Communism is more open and upfront about this hostility, being officially atheist rather than merely officially secular, but this arguably makes capitalism the more dangerous of the two.  Capitalism is better as an economic model because it is not based on calling what is protected as a good by God’s Law, property, an evil, like Communism is, but both systems openly worship and serve Mammon. 

 

Trump’s critics on the Left typically liken him to Hitler.  Of course they have been doing this all along and they do this to everybody.  The comparison, therefore, had more weight to it when it was made this week by podcaster Joe Rogan.  The thing about Hitler is, while most contemporary thought likes to imagine that it was Nazi distinctives, things which set Nazism apart from other systems like Communism, that made it so bad, the reality is that it is the much larger group of areas in which Nazism was indistinguishable from Communism – a totalitarian state that governed by fear enforced by secret police and prison camps, etc. – that made it so bad, which is something Sir Winston Churchill certainly understood.  Rogan compared ICE, the immigration enforcement agency of the Department of Homeland Security, to the Gestapo.  He could have added the Cheka, the NKVD, or any other of the various incarnations of the Soviet secret police.  The comparison is quite valid.  An organization empowered to hide behind masks, stop individuals in their daily lives and demand to see their papers is behaving exactly like these Nazi and Communist agencies.   Granting an agency powers of this sort seems to be more designed to harass and intimidate American citizens than to deal with the very real immigration problem the United States, like other Western countries, faces.  It was George W. Bush rather than Trump who created ICE, but the sort of disregard for the rule of law and reasonable limitations on powers that Rogan was commenting on is increasingly characterising the second administration of the man who only a few days ago told an interviewer that his own morality was the only limit on his power.

 

From a sound Tory perspective, it is not that this sort of thing has finally come about in the United States that is surprising so much as that it took so long for it to happen.  The American Revolution was based on the same toxic notions that Edmund Burke rightly referred to as “armed doctrines” when they were shortly thereafter re-used to produce the French Revolution which very quickly brought about the Reign of Terror.  T. S. Eliot wrote in 1939 “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”  Today they will have to make do with Krasnov the Orange.

New Year, Old Tory

The twenty-fifth year of the third millennium went by rapidly and once again we find ourselves on the Kalends of January.  In 45 BC, Julius Caesar having revised the Roman calendar to approximate the solar year, the Kalends of January became New Year’s Day for the first time.  It was not regarded as such in Christendom for much of the Medieval period until in 1582 AD Gregory XIII corrected the Julian calendar with the one that has born his name ever since in the West.  This ultimately had the effect of restoring the status of 1 January as New Year’s Day although, unsurprisingly when you consider that at the time Gregory was correcting the calendar he was also conspiring against Elizabeth I, Lady Day on 25 March remained the civil New Year’s Day in the realms of the British Sovereign until the change was made legal and official in 1751.  On the Church Kalendar, of course, 1 January, the Octave Day of Christmas, has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord.

 

Each year on this date I write an essay giving an overview of where I stand in my political and religious convictions.  This is something that I borrowed, with a few modifications, from the late Charley Reese, who was a long-time op-ed writer for the Orlando Sentinel with a thrice-weekly column syndicated by King Features. Reese recommended the practice of a yearly “full disclosure” column to other writers although other than myself the only writer I know of to have picked up the practice is Baptist preacher Chuck Baldwin. 

 

In the preface to his For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays in Style and Order the poet and critic T. S. Eliot described his general point of view as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.”  I have frequently made use of these words of Eliot, in which I find an echo and an update of Dr. Johnson’s famous definition of a “tory” in his Dictionary, as an outline for explaining my own views.  This is because each of these things – classicist, royalist, Anglo-Catholic – is an expression in its own realm of culture, politics, and religion, of the same attitude of belief in order, respect and reverence for tradition, history and prescription, skepticism towards and wariness of novelty and innovation, and outright antagonism towards the prejudice in favour of the fashionable, up-to-date, and modern common to all forms of progressivism, and this attitude has been mine by instinct my entire life. 

 

The late Sir Roger Scruton said that conservatism is more an instinct than an idea and I fully agree although I prefer to call myself a “Tory” or a “reactionary” rather than a “conservative.”  I would be fine with the word “conservative” if it was understood to mean what Scruton meant by it.  His book The Meaning of Conservatism was first published in 1980, at the beginning of the Thatcher premiership in the United Kingdom and the Reagan presidency in the United States to explain what conservatism really is and that it is not the ideology of the market and individualism that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took it to be.  In this continent, at least, his message fell on deaf ears and “conservatism” has largely been used as a synonym for Thatcherism/Reaganism since the 1980s, although in the last decade, due to the political career of the current occupant of the White House, it has taken on the new meaning of populist-nationalism in the United States.  This is not, in my opinion, an improvement, for while I am against many of the things Krasnov the Orange purports to be against – wokeness, narcotics, a soft, weak, and indulgent approach to violent crime, national character changing mass immigration, and other things like this – I am no fan of populism and nationalism.  Populism is the instrument of demagoguery and nationalism, unlike patriotism, which is the instinctual and virtuous love of country that ordinarily is the natural extension of love for family and home (think of Edmund Burke’s famous remark about the “little platoons”), is an ideology that makes an idol out of the nation.  It is worth observing here that the most prescient warning ever written against the existential threat that a liberal attitude towards mass immigration poses to the civilization formerly known as Christendom, the 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, was not written by a Trump-style populist-nationalist but by the late Jean Raspail, a (Roman) Catholic royalist like the late John Lukacs and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose writings informed my thoughts on the matter of populism and nationalism and whose example inspired me to wear as a badge of honour that favourite label of opprobrium of the progressive left, “reactionary.”  What makes the replacement of Thatcherism/Reaganism with populist-nationalism even worse is that the MAGA movement has degenerated into a dangerous leader cult centred around an egotist with a messiah complex.   No, Thatcherism/Reaganism was much to be preferred over this, just as Scruton’s “sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created” is to be preferred over Thatcherism/Reaganism.

 

While I would like to say that what Americans, conservative or otherwise, do is their business and none of mine, unfortunately what goes on down there affects us up here.  I am a Canadian.  Many, after saying that, would add “a proud Canadian” but since I don’t like using the name of the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins in a positive sense, I will say “a patriotic Canadian” instead, in the sense of “patriotic” explained in the previous paragraph.  I was born in rural Manitoba, raised on a farm between the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in southwestern Manitoba, studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College (at the time it was called Providence College and Theological Seminary) in Otterburne, Manitoba, and have lived in Winnipeg ever since.  As a patriotic citizen of the Dominion of Canada, as is still the full title and name of this Commonwealth Realm, I am also a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III, as I was of his mother, our Sovereign Lady of Blessed Memory, Queen Elizabeth II before him.  Since I am a few months away from completing my fiftieth year, I grew up in the period which began when everyone who considered himself a conservative in Canada would have said Amen, or some secular equivalent, to the sentiment just expressed but which saw the rise of a “neo-conservatism” that looked to American “conservatism” – which is really classical liberalism – rather than British Toryism, as its guiding light.

 

When I was eight years old, Brian Mulroney led the old Conservative Party, to which the unfortunate modifier “Progressive” had become attached, to an historical landslide victory.  Four years later he would win another majority government but this would be the last time the old Conservatives won a Dominion Election.  The previous year, the Reform Party of Canada had been formed and in 1993 most of the traditional Conservative voters west of Upper Canada switched to the Reform Party.  I was in my senior year in high school at the time and not yet old enough to vote but early in my college years at Providence I took out a membership in the Reform Party.  Under Brian Mulroney, I felt, as did so many others, the Conservatives had ceased to be the party of Sir John A. Macdonald and in this I believe my assessment was right at the time. 

 

What I had not yet come to see, was that the Reform Party was not a step back from the direction in which Mulroney had been leading the party, but a huge leap forward down the same path.  The Reform Party maintained that the Mulroney Conservatives had gone astray by being less than sufficiently supportive of free market capitalism and by being too prone to compromise with liberalism on social issues such abortion.  Indeed, the Reform Party’s avowed social conservatism was its biggest drawing factor for me.  In Canada in the 1980s a significant shift towards liberal attitudes and positions on social, moral, cultural, and religious matters had begun, two to three decades after a similar shift had begun in the United States.  This shift has been ongoing in both countries ever since and the primary driving force in it, at least as far as popular attitudes goes, is the American popular entertainment industry.  While Mulroney had the misfortune of being prime minister at the time this shift was becoming disturbingly noticeable he could not fairly be blamed for it.  As far as government involvement in the shift goes, the biggest contributions were the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, an imitation of the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982, both introduced by the Liberals in the premiership of Pierre Trudeau.  It was the Charter, introduced at the very end of the Trudeau premiership, which empowered the Canadian Supreme Court to act in the way the American Supreme Court had been acting since the 1950s.  In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck the existing laws against abortion from the Criminal Code in Morgentaler v. The Queen.  Mulroney failed to get new Charter-Compliant abortion restrictions passed but he was also the last prime minister to try.  I am not trying to defend Mulroney, of whom I had grown as tired as everyone else by the early 1990s, so much as to make the point that on the issues that attracted me to it, the Reform Party was mostly empty talk.   In reality, of course, Mulroney’s single biggest defection from Macdonald Conservatism was his signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  The Reform Party, with its look-to-America neo-conservatism, wished to move even further in this direction, which was, ironically enough, a move in the direction of the founding platform and philosophy of the Liberal Party.  Or perhaps it is not that ironic.  Reform was the name of the movement in the pre-Confederation to Confederation era, that became the Liberal Party.

 

As my five years in Otterburne drew to a close, the old Conservatives and the Reform realized that their competition would keep the Liberals perpetually in power and a “Unite the Right” movement arose which after a first partially successful attempt finally merged the two parties into the current Conservative Party early in the new millennium.   My membership ran out shortly before the final merger took place and I let it expire without renewing it.  The result of the merger, I correctly anticipated, would not be the restoration of the party of Macdonald and Diefenbaker, but would be more likely to combine the elements I liked the least in the two parent parties.  This marked the end of my getting involved in the partisan aspect of politics, at least as far as the positive side of joining and promoting a party goes – I have no intention of ever letting up on bashing the Liberals and the New Democrats – and eleven years ago, after Stephen Harper with the support of Captain Airhead decided that the privacy of Canadians needed to be defenestrated in the name of importing America’s War on Terror into Canada, I declared my intention to follow the example that I had long admired of Evelyn Waugh, who stopped voting around World War II “on grounds of conscientious objection”, because the Conservatives had failed to turn the clock back even a second in all the years he had voted for them and if he continued to do so he would be “morally inculpated in their follies” and would have “made submission to socialist oppression by admitting the validity of popular election if they lost” and declared that except in a case where a moral or religious matter is at stake, he would no longer presume to advise his Sovereign in her choice of ministers.  In practice, however, some circumstance, such as in one instance a friend and colleague running as the Christian Heritage candidate in my riding, has always come up to thwart this intention.

 

I have explained why I am not a “Big-C Conservative”, that is, a partisan of the Conservative Party.  While the customary expression in Canada for those who are to the right in their political philosophy but not partisans of the Conservative Party per se is “small-c conservative”, as I already said in the fourth paragraph of this essay my preference is for the term “Tory.”  Since this term is used in Canada for Big-C Conservatives in the same way Grit is used for Big-L Liberals, I need to clarify that I am using it to allude to the predecessor of the Conservative Party.  In Britain, the supporters of the king and of the established reformed Church of England in the English Civil Wars in the seventeenth century were called Cavaliers and Royalists and after the Restoration of the monarchy and the Church those who continued to fight for their cause in Parliament rather than with the sword came to be called Tories.  Tory, therefore, has long struck me as being the most appropriate terms for someone who, like myself, for whom that sentiment or instinct in favour of the good things that are easily destroyed but hard to create that Scruton called conservatism, takes the form of those three more precise words from T. S. Eliot. 

 

Since I have already stated that I am a loyal subject of His Majesty I will start with the “royalist in politics.”  I have been this by instinct my entire life.  The institution of royal monarchy represents tradition, continuity, the weight of prescription, authority as opposed to power, and what G. K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead” which is the only kind of democracy worthy of the accolades with which the baser type is showered in progressive thought.  Unlike the grassroots, bottom-up, democracy of populism which exerts a downward, levelling, force on a society, royal monarchy is an elevating influence and the virtues it inspires among the subject-citizens of the realm(s) over which it reigns are the older and better virtues of honour, loyalty, and duty rather than the mere commercial virtues inspired by classical liberalism and republicanism.  A president, or whatever term is used for an elected head-of-state, cannot properly do the task for which he was elected, being the representative of the whole of his country, for, as is evident among our neighbours to the south, eventually “he’s my president, although I didn’t vote for him” is replaced with “not my president” which in turn devolves into the civil war like partisanship that has been on display since at least 2008 and has been growing with intensity with each successive president ever since.  A king, by contrast, can not only do this task since he does not owe his office to popular and therefore partisan election, but the much more important task of representing within his realm(s), the government of the universe as a whole.  While this is how I articulate my royalism today, I have felt it by instinct my whole life, and it gets stronger with each passing year.  I am very grateful to be in a country whose hereditary head-of-state entered his Coronation service declaring that in the name of the King of Kings and after His example, he came not to be served but to serve, rather than in the country that choose for its own head of state a boorish and belligerent narcissist who crawled forth from sludge that backed up from the toilets in hell and whose cult of followers are so delusional that some of them have blurred the huge difference between him and the King of Kings.

 

T. S. Eliot called himself a “classicist in literature”, but here I would substitute the term “culture” for “literature.”   Culture, in the broader sense of the term, refers to everything that human societies pass down through instruction, training, and education rather than genetically through biological reproduction, everything that we make and do, the participation in which shapes and defines who we are as societies.  In this sense of the word, we speak of cultures in the plural and of specific cultures.  It is a concept closely related to that of tradition and the two can be either used interchangeably or distinguished by saying that tradition is the method – the handing over or passing down from generation to generation – and culture the content.  Classicism has reference, however, primarily to the term in a narrower sense.

 

Culture in this narrower sense is difficult to define but I would describe it as that, within culture in the broader sense, which, like the institution of royal monarchy as discussed above exerts an elevating influence on the larger culture and on society and civilization, at least when it is doing what it is supposed to do.   All human activities that must be learned and especially those that involve the making of something are broadly called arts.  Within this larger category, we distinguish a smaller by the addition of the definite article, and one of the uses of the word art in the singular with neither definite nor indefinite article is to designate that something that sets apart “the arts” from “arts” in general.  “Art”, however, is even harder to define than “culture.” “The arts”, of which literature is one, can be regarded as either building blocks of the higher culture or the medium by which it is transmitted. 

 

Classicism takes its name from classical antiquity, that is, ancient Greco-Roman civilization, although it is well to remember Stephen Leacock’s wise observation that Greek and Latin are “a starting point for a general knowledge of the literature, the history, and the philosophy of all ages.”   In its most general sense, it is the approach to high culture and the arts that stresses external standards that are objective and universal.   The classicist recognizes that the arts are governed by rules, although classicism need not imply a rigorous legalism.  Classicism, for example, would not censure Shakespeare for not strictly adhering to Aristotle’s three unities (time, place, action), although it would perhaps say that he earned the right to set these aside when warranted by having first mastered them.  A century ago it was generally thought of as the polar opposite of romanticism, the highly individualistic approach that stresses inner inspiration.  Today, cultural and artistic subjectivism has been taken to extremes much further than romanticism proper was ever willing to go.  Today, for example, it is not uncommon to find “art” produced in explicit repudiation of Beauty, which classicism and romanticism both recognized as the end to which art aspires.

 

Classicism is the expression with regards to culture, of the same Tory instinct as royalism, but of all the expressions of the Tory instinct, it is the least instinctual.  This is just what we ought to expect considering that culture itself is something that has to be instilled and learned – etymologically it means “that which has been cultivated.”  Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869) famously said that culture was “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits” and while, as with Eliot, I would extend the concept beyond literature to include, for example, getting to know the music of Haydn and Mozart as well as the writings of Homer and Plato, I think that this explains quite well what culture looks like when applied to the soul of the individual person.  We each, to put it bluntly, are born into this world as barbarians and the proper goal of education is neither to indoctrinate us into the latest progressive claptrap, as the more fashionable academic institutions have all seemed to think for the last sixty or seventy years, nor, contra those who are “conservative” rather than Tory, to fit us to earn our living as cogs in the machine that is the modern economy, but to civilize us by exposing us to this higher culture. 

 

If high culture is the getting to know “the best which has been thought and said in the world” this means that the best can be distinguished from that which is not the best, from that which is  merely the better or the good, as well as from that which is bad, worse or the worst. Such a distinction requires the external, objective, universal standards that classicism stresses. While this can mean something quite technical, like the aforementioned unities of Aristotle in the dramatic arts, in the more general sense the measuring stick is that of the goods inherent in the structure of the universe.  A classicism informed, as it ought to be, by philosophy in its highest form which is theology, with special reference to the branches of metaphysics and aesthetics, would say that the best, not only in literature but the other arts, is that which looks to and teaches us to strive for Beauty, Goodness and Truth.  When the arts do this, the higher culture they comprise elevates the broader culture because while the natural tendency of culture in the more general sense is to focus on us and our identity as societies and a civilization, this lifts us out of our focus on ourselves and directs us to goods that are outside ourselves, fixed, and universal. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth are called transcendentals because they are the properties of Being itself, and while we participate in being as created beings, He in Whose infinite simplicity Being and Essence are one and the same, as the best theologians from St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L. Mascall have explained, is God.  The best classicism, therefore, would say that the ultimate purpose of higher culture is to point us to God, which is why T. S. Eliot wrote two books arguing that religion is the heart and soul of culture.  The reason so much of the art culture of the last century has been so horridly rotten is because it has deliberately turned its back on this its ultimate purpose.

 

While this creates an opening for turning to “Anglo-Catholic in religion”, before doing so I wish to personalize my remark about classicism being the least instinctual of the three expressions of the Tory instinct.  My royalism has been life-long and religiously, as I will shortly discuss, I have been maturing towards Anglo-Catholicism since my first moment of orthodox Christian faith, but the classicism I articulated above is the result of years of reading on a subject my serious interest in which came much later in life.  It did, however, have its beginnings in that same Tory instinct.  My late maternal grandmother was a nurse by profession and a painter by passion.  My visits to her in my youth would frequently involve a painting session and a discussion of art.  Grandma specialized in painting landscapes, usually in watercolour.  Watercolour was definitely not my forte, and what I painted is best described as caricature.  Sometimes it involved cartoon depictions of politicians, but almost always it was done in a style spoofing Modern Art.  My knowledge of Modern Art was not very extensive at the time, and Picasso was usually who I had in mind.  I instinctually recognized his work as garbage made for a market of those with too much money and not enough brains and who showed it by behaving exactly like the courtiers in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  This, I would later learn, was exactly how Picasso saw his own work, just as I would learn that Modern Art contained much that was worse than Picasso, although not nearly as bad as what is to be found in the art designated “Postmodern.”.  Grandma had a collection of art books, and when she and I would discuss them, she would disparage her own paintings, in which the countryside we both knew was recognizable, as not being real “art.”  The basis of this distinction was her idea that “art” is what depicts what the artist sees internally rather than what he and anyone around him can see with his actual eyes. While I did not know enough at the time to recognize this as a fashionable idea derived from romanticism, I did instinctually, regard it as utter bunkum.  As with my instinctual negative assessment of Picasso and Modern Art, my opinion has not really changed although then it was little more than the prejudice of someone who had barely taken the first step from natural barbarism towards civilized taste, whereas now it is an opinion that is slightly more informed after years of trying, with whatever degree of success, to get to know Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said” and of reflecting on the insights of those such as Eliot, Sir Roger Scruton, and T. E. Hulme, who grounded his argument for the external rules and order of classicism on man’s limitations due to Original Sin.

 

This brings us back to “Anglo-Catholic in religion.” In previous years I have often started with this to emphasize the foundational aspect of orthodox Christianity but this year I have opted to leave the most important for last.  In my extended family, my relatives are generally either United Church – the United Church of Canada, that is, the product of the unlikely union of the Presbyterians and Methodists – or Anglican in their affiliation, with degrees of attendance varying from never darkening the door to being there every Sunday.   When I was a kid, for example, my mother fairly regularly attended the United Church in Oak River, and my paternal grandmother who lived in Rivers received the Anglican Journal with the Mustard Seed, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon.   In my childhood, both Churches were becoming increasingly plagued by liberalism in its theological sense.  This is the idea that the teachings of Christianity, at least as they were historically and traditionally understood, have been rendered, in full or in part, unbelievable by Modern “discoveries”, and so must be discarded or re-imagined in order to preserve the real “essence” of Christianity which for liberals, is usually its ethical or moral teachings, or more accurately whatever ethical or moral ideas progressivism subscribes to at the given moment, which the theological liberal deludes herself into thinking is what Jesus really meant. Theological liberalism admits of degrees and so can vary from being otherwise orthodox but rejecting the infallible authority of the Bible to basically being an atheist and completely disbelieving the Creed in its entirety but without having the decency to leave the Church.  I held this liberalism in contempt from the moment I first became aware of it which was long before I came to faith myself.  That was the old Tory instinct kicking in.

 

Therefore, when I came to faith in Jesus Christ in an evangelical conversion when I was fifteen, it was with a disposition towards orthodoxy – the truths that Christians have historically and traditionally believed and confessed – but with a suspicion of the institutional Churches that had allowed themselves to succumb to liberalism.  Accordingly, my initial expression of Christian orthodoxy was in the form of fundamentalism.  Over the course of the following decades of theological study, both formal such as in my five years at Providence and informal, my eyes were opened to the fact that the popular evangelical notion that the “real” Church is not a visible society but a convenient way of referring to all Christians in the aggregate simply doesn’t fit the way the Bible speaks of the Church and that therefore one cannot really have orthodoxy in the fullest sense without the institutional Church.  This, combined with a deepening appreciation for the Church Fathers’ work in setting the boundaries of the Apostolic and orthodox faith and defining and opposing heresy and for the ancient Creeds as the basic confessions of those truths that are de fide, along with a developing love for liturgy both for its being ancient and traditional and so the means by which the Christians of today share in the worship of the faithful of preceding ages and for its being fully participatory in a way that a streamlined service centred on the sermon (in which all but the speaker are passive), helped my orthodoxy mature into an Anglo-Catholicism.  I joined an orthodox Anglican parish about a decade into the new millennium, where I was confirmed and where I continue to worship to this day.

 

My Anglo-Catholicism, is much more the Anglo-Catholicism of the Caroline Divines, the Non-Jurors, the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth’s Theophilus Anglicanus than that of say Darwell Stone or Dom Gregory Dix, which is not to disparage these men from whose writings I have learned much.  The difference is basically that the older kind of Anglo-Catholicism did not repudiate the Reformation and Protestantism but looked, like the English Reformers to the primitive belief and practices of the first millennium and especially its first half as the measuring stick of Catholicity rather than post-Tridentine Rome.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics I acknowledge all seven Sacraments acknowledged by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches, I also acknowledge that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are Gospel Sacraments in a way that distinguishes them from the others, they are visible modes of the Gospel.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics, I acknowledge all seven of the pre-Schism ecumenical councils recognized by both Rome and the East and would go so far as to say that the theological argument of the Second Council of Nicaea is the conclusion logically required by the orthodox Christology of the first six ecumenical councils, I also understand and respect, despite my loathing of iconoclasm as boorish and philistine, the reasons why the Protestant Reformers thought the veneration of icons had been taken way too far.

 

My arrival at orthodox, Protestant, Anglo-Catholicism is not a repudiation of the steps in my Christian journey that brought me here. 

 

When I was baptized in a Baptist church about a year and a half after my conversion this did not involve the sacrilege of denying a previous, valid, baptism because it was my first and only baptism.  Being baptized in this way meant that I received baptism by immersion, and while the mode is not essential, it was definitely the preferred mode in the earliest centuries, remains the ordinary mode even for infant baptism in all pre-Reformation Churches other than Rome and, although in practice the exceptions are the rule, is the prescribed mode in the Book of Common Prayer.  Ironically, I would not have received baptism in the mode the Book of Common Prayer prescribes, had I been baptized by an Anglican priest as an infant. 

 

While I no longer believe separatism to be the appropriate way for the orthodox to combat liberalism, I remain very much committed to the position so well-articulated by J. Gresham Machen, that liberalism is a different religion from Christianity.  It is not, therefore, that I have ceased to be a fundamentalist so much as that my understanding of the fundamentals has expanded from the five, identified in the heat of conflict a century ago, to twelve, the twelve articles of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the standards of orthodoxy for basically two millennia.  I remain committed to the infallibility of the canonical Scriptures, and very much remain convinced that the Authorized Bible – the official Anglican translation – is the best English translation and will remain the best English translation not because it cannot be improved upon in theory but because in reality, to improve on the translation would require translators who were at least the equal of the Jacobean scholars and to get these we would need to get rid of the technological distractions of the present day and return to training people in the classical languages from ages four and five.   We would also have to return to textual scholarship based on faith principles – that the true text is to be found in use in God’s Church – rather than rationalist principles – that a manuscript unused and unknown to most of the Church for most of two thousand years might have the better reading, whereas textual scholarship is generally heading in the opposite direction.  What I would add to this today is that the Authorized Bible is incomplete without the deuterocanonical or ecclesiastical books from the LXX which should be restored to the place between the Testaments in which they were found in the original 1611 edition. 

 

Although my journey into the English branch of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church did not involve a period in the Lutheran church it did involve a lot of reading of Lutheran theologians, especially from the Missouri Synod – C. F. W. Walther, Francis Pieper, Pieper’s epitomist John Theodore Mueller, Robert Preus, Kurt Marquart, Herman Otten, John M. Drickamer – and my understanding of the doctrine of salvation, especially where it intersects with my understanding of the Sacraments, is largely Lutheran.  Salvation was objectively accomplished for all by the Saviour on the Cross and is given to man freely as a gift.  It is proclaimed to all in the Gospel of which the Church’s two-fold ministry of Word and Sacrament are both modes, at least with regards to the Gospel Sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  The Gospel, in both modes, is the resistible means through which God gives us the grace of salvation, faith is the hand into which He places it and with which we receive it.  The grace that sanctifies us – works in us to make us conform to the righteousness and holiness of Christ internally – is always given with the grace that justifies us – clears us of the guilt of sin and gives us the legal standing of righteousness before God, but sanctification is always based on justification, not the other way around, sanctification being, therefore God making us into what we already are because of Jesus Christ.  Our faith and hope – faith is the “substance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1) – rests on Who Jesus is and what He has done for us in the events of the Gospel, His death and resurrection, rather than on what He is doing in us, and it is through such faith resting on what He has done for us outside ourselves that He accomplishes what He is working in us..  I do not agree, however, with the Lutherans and Reformed, that the Gospel was recovered in the sixteenth century after being lost by the Church.  Justification by faith alone is not the Gospel.  To say that justification by faith alone is the Gospel is to say that our message of Good News to the world is “you only have to believe.”  To say that, however, would be actual Antinomianism, as opposed to the kind with which legalists frequently charge Christians who see God’s grace as freer than they themselves see it. The Gospel is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate, fully God and fully man, died for us and rose again.  It is confessed in each of the ancient Creeds and permeates the liturgies of all the ancient Churches, and so was never lost by the Church, although had been buried under a lot of accumulated excess baggage by the Roman branch of the Church by the sixteenth century.  Justification by faith alone is part – a part, not the whole - of the extended theological explanation of why the Gospel is Good News.   It is the claim that justification by faith alone is the Gospel and that the Church lost the Gospel, rather than the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, that has produced the sectarian separatism and the revivals of such ancient heresies as Arianism and Nestorianism that have plagued post-Reformation Protestantism.

 

These positions will no doubt seem out of step with the direction in which our civilization is heading and the spirit and fashions of the present day but that is rather the point since they are expressions of an instinctual Toryism that looks to ancient and timeless truths rather than the rapidly changing opinions of the current day.  I would not trade that Toryism for a “conservatism” with roots no deeper than individualistic market liberalism and my resolution for this New Year, as for every New Year, is to grow even more out of step with the times and more rooted in those ancient truths.

 

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!