Christian Nationalism?

The subject of “Christian Nationalism” has been much discussed as of late.  A friend and classmate from my theological studies in Otterburne in the 1990s has been decrying it all over social media.  His assessment of it relies upon the acceptance of a number of axioms that progressives regard as self-evident but which I correctly consider to be bunkum.  Needless to say I do not share his perspective.  My rejection of my friend’s fatally flawed opposition to Christian Nationalism should not be taken as an endorsement of it.  Quite the contrary.  Recently, the administrator of an Anglican social media forum opened a discussion thread on the subject.  This essay is for the most part an expansion of my response.

 

To answer the question of whether or not nationalism can be Christian in any real, orthodox, sense, we need to first determine what nationalism is.  The best way that I know to do this, is by distinguishing nationalism from something much older than nationalism with which it is often confused.  That something is patriotism. 

 

Patriotism belongs to the category of natural affections.  Think of the love that under ordinary circumstances a child feels for his parents and a parent feels for a child.  These are natural affections, loves that unless something happens to impede them, everyone naturally develops.  The love of home, which the late Sir Roger Scruton called oikophilia, is another such natural affection and one that is very similar to patriotism.  Patriotism derives its name from the Greek word πατρίς (πάτρα in some dialects, such as Homeric Ionic) and its Latin cognate patria, both of which mean “native land” or more literally, since they are themselves derived from the word for father, “fatherland.”  Patriotism is the affection, attachment, and love that one feels for one’s homeland, one’s country, as naturally as one loves one’s parents and offspring.

 

Patriotism, like all natural affections, has been regarded as good and virtuous from time immemorial.  To illustrate, consider the thirtieth verse of the first book of Homer’s epic Iliad which is the verse in which the word πάτρα appears for the first time in Homer.  This appears in the portion of the poem where Homer is providing the background story to the wrath of Achilles which brought all sorts of nastiness upon the Greeks from his breech with Agamemnon until their reconciliation after the death of Patrocles at the hands of Hector which is the main theme of the epic.  Chryses, the priest of Apollo, has come to the Greek encampment to buy the freedom of his daughter whom Agamemnon holds as a war prize.  His graceful address and his offer of an extremely generous ransom has won over all the other Greeks but infuriated Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and Argos and general leader of the Greek expedition against Troy.  Agamemnon responds with an extremely rude and ill-tempered speech in which he orders Chryses away from the encampment and the ships, warning him that if he catches him there again the symbols of his priestly office will not protect him.  Then, to add insult to injury, he adds in verses twenty-nine and thirty the following:

 

τὴν δ᾽ ἐγὼ οὐ λύσω: πρίν μιν καὶ γῆρας ἔπεισιν

ἡμετέρῳ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ ἐν Ἄργεϊ τηλόθι πάτρης

 

This means “but your (daughter) I will not release, until old age finds her also, in our house in Argos far from her fatherland.”  The insult extends into the next verse where it gets much cruder and Agamemnon’s speech into the verse after that but we have arrived at the point. 

 

The words τηλόθι πάτρης, “far from her fatherland” are intended as a particularly cruel twist of the knife here.  Obviously, Agamemnon was going out of his way to say that he will do the exact opposite of what Chryses had requested, but in stressing the distance of his palace from the girl’s homeland he was also saying that he will inflict upon her what he and all the Greeks were themselves suffering at that point in time.  The Iliad is set in the last year of the ten year siege of Troy.  The Greeks had been τηλόθι πάτρης themselves for a long time and were feeling the effects of it, as Agamemnon’s speech as a whole and the bitter strife that would soon thereafter divide him from Achilles demonstrate.

 

Homer’s ability to communicate this in this way rests upon the common understanding between him, his hearers, and his readers down through the generations, that one’s πάτρα is to be loved and cherished and that to be far from it is misery.  

 

So again, patriotism is a natural affection, a feeling of love akin to love for one’s family and home.  This has many implications.  One, is that patriotism has nothing to do with how you think your country compares to other countries.  Patriotism may incline you towards thinking that your country is the best in the world but it is never based on thinking this.  The patriot loves his country because she is his and not because he thinks her to be better than such and such other countries.  Patriotism has nothing to do with whether or not one’s country is “great.”  While children often go through a “my dad can beat up your dad” phase they ordinarily grow out of it.  Someone who persists in talking this way into adulthood does not demonstrate a healthy filial affection but rather a case of arrested development.  The same applies to love of country.

 

From this implication, we can infer further that patriotism is not naturally bellicose.  Since love of country, like love of family and home is natural to humanity, and since it is not based on concepts like “greatness” that measure one’s country against others, it is not threatened by other people loving their other countries nor does it impel one to threaten others.  Patriotism is a great motivation to fight defensively in war, that is to protect one’s country, but it is no motivation to wage aggressive war against others.

 

Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century lexicographer, famously said “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” (1)  James Boswell, his biographer, from whom we have the account of this and Dr. Johnson’s other table-talk, immediately after recording it explained “But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.” (2)  The conversation took place in 1775 in the midst of the controversy that would lead to the American Declaration of Independence the following year.  The year previous, Dr. Johnson had expressed his thoughts on the American rebels-to-be and their gripes in a pamphlet entitled The Patriot.  There is little doubt as to who the scoundrels were to whom Dr. Johnson referred.

 

Although Boswell put it in terms of real versus pretend, patriotism, and this was not a wrong way of describing it, from the standpoint of hindsight it could be said that what had occurred was the emergence of a new thing which was not patriotism as we have described it but which had not yet been given a name of its own and so for a time it shared the name of the age old love of country.   Did Dr. Johnson himself see that there were now two things sharing one name?  In his Dictionary he defined patriotism as “Love of one’s country; zeal for one’s country.”  Most likely he meant this as a single definition, certainly in The Patriot he spoke in Boswell’s terms of real versus pretend, but it is interesting that the two phrases from his definition could be taken as defining the two different “patriotisms” of the time.  Zeal is not the same thing as love.

 

The American Revolution was a war cast from the mold of Lucifer’s rebellion against God.  So was its antecedent, the Puritan rebellion against Charles I, but Crowell et al., had wrapped themselves in the hypocritical piety of their legalistic Calvinism.  The propagandists of the American Revolution such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine (“the infidel Paine”) whose minds were steeped in the skepticism and deism of eighteenth century philosophy had no such recourse and so justified their actions by appealing to the ideals of “Enlightenment” liberalism, a philosophy born out of explicit rejection of the Christian faith of the civilization of the age that preceded the Modern.  Since such justifications had little popular appeal in a day in which the Age’s retreat from Christianity was still in its early years – past infancy, not quite in adolescence yet – their cloak when taking their ideals public was patriotism.  It was not the age-old natural affection patriotism but the new thing that had not yet come into its name but was still borrowing the name of the old patriotism and so rightly decried as a pretender by Dr. Johnson and Boswell.  The term that would become its name was around - Johann Gottfried von Herder had used it in a treatise in 1772 – but had not yet become attached to the thing.  In the French Revolution, born out of the same false ideals as the American and in which the bloody fruit of those ideals was much more naked, opening the eyes of Dr. Johnson’s friend Edmund Burke to the nature of these “armed doctrines”, the name and the thing would find each other.  That name is nationalism.

 

The name nationalism is obviously derived from the word nation.  The word nation comes ultimately from the Latin verb nascor “be born” through its third principal part natus sum, “have been born” (3).  Natio, the noun derived from this verb could mean the act of birth but it also mean a tribe, kin group, or people united by a common birth or line of descent.  It carried this second meaning but not the first into Modern tongues like English where it became nation.  Here we see an indication of a divergence from patriotism.  Patriotism is love directed towards one’s country – a place.  Nationalism is – something, we will consider what momentarily – directed towards one’s people group.

 

This difference should not be exaggerated. The closest natural affection to patriotism is the love of home.  This too is a love of place.  Home, however, is the place where your family is.  Love of family and love of home cannot be separated and similarly patriotism is not a love of the land considered abstractly apart from the people and institutions and way of life. 

 

That having been said, the history of nationalism shows that this difference is important.  If patriotism is the love of home writ large, as in Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” account of it, nationalism is tribalism writ large.  While there is something to be said for the group loyalty of tribalism, that aspects of it need to be suppressed for there to be the rule of law and order necessary for civilization is the fundamental message of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.  It is also the reason for various provisions of the Mosaic Law, most obviously the refuge cities.  This is good reason to be wary of something that is basically tribalism but with the tribe the size of a Modern nation.

 

The history of nationalism demonstrates that it does not belong to the same class or category, natural affections, as patriotism.  From the beginning nationalism has been characterized by a belligerence towards others.  In the American Revolution, when it was still going under the name it borrowed from true patriotism, the belligerence was directed towards the larger society, the British Empire, of which it had been a part.  In the French Revolution, the violence initially directed against the society’s own traditional institutions and upper classes quickly turned on anyone suspected of disloyalty to the Revolution and its leaders and as this “Reign of Terror” started, Revolutionary France declared war on its neighbours who had militarized their borders in an effort to contain the revolution.  While the Reign of Terror ended with the arrest of Robespierre and the dawn of the Thermidor Reaction in July 1794 neither the wars nor the nationalism impelling them ceased with it and a general who had won his initial fame in those wars would before the eighteenth century ended launch the first of the serious of conquests which along with his simultaneous rise to power in the civil government would twice make him Emperor of France.  Among Napoleon’s generals, at least according to a play from the 1830s, (4) was a man named Nicolas Chauvin who refused to give up Napoleon’s imperial cause even after it was clearly over and Napoleon dead, and whose name became synonymous with an imperialistic nationalism that sees other peoples as existing only to be crushed, conquered and subdued by one’s own (although from the second wave of feminism in the middle of the twentieth century it has come to be more commonly used for males with enough self-respect not to buy into feminism’s lies but not enough sense to be subtle about it).  

 

A century after Napoleon’s death an Austrian-born German nationalist would become the leader of a small German socialist party to whose name he would attach the German word for nationalist.  As leader of the National Socialists, he began his rise to power by exploiting Germany’s grievances over the loss of World War I and promised to restore Germany to her glory by building a Reich that would last a thousand years.  Shortly after having won the office of Chancellor in 1933, he secured himself in that office by declaring a state of emergency after an arson in the Reichstag (German parliament building) and using the emergency powers this granted him to transform his office into that of a dictator and Germany into a single-party totalitarian state that resembled nothing so much as the Soviet Union which the Bolsheviks had created in Russia.  Hitler remilitarized Germany then began seizing territory such as his country of birth, Austria, which had historically been German-speaking but never part of the Germany that Otto von Bismarck had forged under the Prussian House of Hohenzollern (at the time she was the centre of her own empire under the Hapsburgs), by bullying and threats and exploiting the fact that the other powers were desperate to avoid the outbreak of a second war.  Then, having made a pact with the Soviet Union to divide Poland between themselves, he invaded that country, launching World War II in which he, like Napoleon before him, conquered most of Europe, before repeating Napoleon’s fatal mistake of trying to seize Russia.

 

Hitler’s nationalism was particularly belligerent against other peoples because it was wed to his belief that the races of humanity were locked into a Darwinian struggle for existence that was a zero-sum game (5) in which there could be only one winner.  While this was unique to National Socialism, in its three centuries nationalism in general has consistently demonstrated a hostile attitude towards other nations that is far removed from the irenic love of country that is true patriotism.  One final detail about Hitler deserves mention here.  On 19 March, 1945 as the Red Army was rapidly approaching Berlin while the American commander disgracefully held back the Western Allies, a little over a month and one week before he and his bride ended their lives in his bunker, Hitler issued the “Destructive Measures on Reich Territory” decree, ordering the destruction of the civil infrastructure of Germany.   Fortunately for the Germans, Albert Speer made sure this insane “Nero Decree” was not carried out.  Hitler had ordered the Germans to reduce their own country to the stone age in order to spite the Russians, but by this point in time he was convinced that the Russians had won the Darwinian struggle and that the Germans, having failed him, had lost and were not worthy to survive.  A nationalist could come to this horrid conclusion.  A patriot never could.

This is because patriotism has nothing to do with how one’s country and her people compare to other countries and other people.  It is a love that comes naturally.  Nationalism is concerned with how big and strong and powerful and great its country is and if its country fails the nationalist can easily turn on it as Hitler turned on Germany at the end.  Nationalism is not a love, a natural affection at all.  It is an ideology, a zealous commitment to the idea of one’s country as the greatest and best.  The nationalist will demand that his country be made great again.  Love, however, “envieth not…vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” (6) The patriot loves his country as she is and if he is a Christian patriot will be far more concerned with his country’s goodness than her greatness.

 

Nationalism then is an artificial substitute for the natural love of country that is patriotism, a substitute that could only have been produced in the Modern Age.  This is because it is the product of the Modern idea of democracy.  The emphasis in the previous sentence is on the word Modern.  Modern democracy is not the same thing as the democracy of ancient Athens.   Nor is it the democracy that is an aspect or element of the traditional institution of parliament that developed long before the Modern Age, although it has grafted itself onto that democracy and corrupted it.  Modern democracy is an idea that comes from Modern liberal philosophy, which philosophy was thought up by Modern men thinking Satan’s thoughts after him. 

 

We have already touched on this in discussing the American Revolution and the origins of nationalism.  Satan became Satan by rebelling against the Sovereign King of all His Creation, God.  He was so full of himself, so proud of his own beauty and other fine qualities – gifts God had given him – that he thought he ought to rule the universe instead of God.  Modern man looked around at Christendom, the Christian civilization into which he had been born, and thought that he could think up a better way of organizing things that would eliminate most or all of human suffering, and rebelled against the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of Christendom.  The semi-Pelagianism that had crept into the Western Church towards the end of the Middle Ages which the Reformation in its theological reforms sought to correct was perhaps the initial impetus for this kind of hubristic thinking, although the Calvinists, the most Augustinian of the Protestants at least in their own conceit, were the first of the Modern rebels.  Pelagianism was the early heresy that rejected Original Sin.  A firm grasp on Original Sin is a preventative for thinking that humanity can achieve its own salvation by political means.  In the Fall, man lost the Paradise in which he had been placed at his creation.  Paradise awaits man, redeemed by God through Jesus Christ, after the Second Coming.  In between, as we struggle against our own sinful tendencies, there will be no elimination of the suffering that is born out of our fallen sinfulness but which, having been borne by Christ Himself to the cross, is the path down which we are called to follow Him.  This does not mean that we are not to try to alleviate the suffering of others, to the contrary, just as He healed the sick and made the lame to walk and gave the blind their sight, so we are commanded to do good to others. (7)  It means that we are not to think that by doing so, much less by outsourcing this work to the government, we can eliminate suffering and create a Paradise in this life.

 

The Modern idea of democracy, again as distinct from the ancient idea of democracy and the democracy that developed historically as part of our traditional parliamentary system, comes directly from liberalism’s belief that it can create an earthly Paradise and that it is justified in following Satan’s example of rebellion in order to do so.   The constituted authorities, the king and the Church, should have eliminated human suffering and made a Paradise.  That they didn’t do so means they need to be torn down and replaced with government by the people in whom sovereignty will now be vested.  That is the idea of Modern democracy, although liberals rarely put it so starkly, and it is utterly Satanic. It is also the idea that had to be thought first, before that artificial inferior substitute for patriotism, nationalism, could arise.  The sovereign people of Modern democracy is the nation of nationalism.

 

Nationalism then, in its historic sense, belongs to the Modern Age’s revolt against Christianity and so can hardly be called Christian.  There is a question, of course, as to whether what those who call themselves Christian Nationalists today mean by nationalism is nationalism in its historic sense.  Just as the first nationalists called themselves patriots so there have been those who have used the word nationalism to mean something closer to patriotism.  From what I have seen of self-designated Christian Nationalists this is not the case with them although that doesn’t immediately translate into their nationalism being the historical type either.  They have taken up the label of nationalist in reaction against the post-World War II movement towards re-orienting everything to an international or global scale with which they associate the increased secularism of the era.

 

While I am in complete agreement with their opposition to secularism and also detest the general way in which the world has been re-organizing itself since World War II, I do think that the Christian Nationalists have overlooked a number of things in coming to their position.  Secularism, while it has gotten much worse in the post-World War II era, is not the product of that era.  The first secular country was the United States of America (8) and the second was the French Republic formed in the French Revolution.   Secularism was joined at birth to nationalism. 

 

Also overlooked is a fact pertaining to progressive liberalism’s aggressive push after World War II to dissolve national identities, or at least those of the civilization formerly known as Christendom, both by submerging them in larger identities and breaking them down through large scale immigration.   While this is on the surface obviously an overreaction to Hitler, on a deeper level, one of which the progressive liberals themselves are almost certainly not consciously aware, an attempt to fill a void created by Modern liberalism.

 

In Christendom – Christian civilization – allegiance was not directed inwards, towards the people as a group, but upwards, ultimately to God in Heaven, but along the way to the sovereign, the king, in the civil sphere, and to the Catholic – universal – Church in the religious sphere, which spheres while distinct, overlapped.   

 

The king in Christendom, whether he reigned over a single realm or a vast empire, was what he is in the New Testament – God’s minister, to whom Christians are commanded to submit and to honour (1 Pet. 2:13, 17) and for whom they are commanded to offer supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks (1 Tim. 2:1-3). (9)  As God’s minister, he represented in the civil sphere that was his realm, the universal government of the King of Kings, which is a much higher sense of representational government than that of representational democracy. 

 

The Church was called Catholic for a number of reasons, the one of which that is germane in this context being that she transcended the boundaries of realm, empire, and nation and was a universal institution that was one wherever she was found.  In every kingdom and empire, she had One Lord in the sense of a divine Master higher than any earthly authority.  No matter where she was she confessed One Faith in the words of the ancient Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  Anyone from any country anywhere in the world could join her through her One Baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  While this concept did not disappear in the sixteenth century Reformation at the beginning of the Modern Age, neither did it pass through that period unscathed, especially in external practice.  On both sides of the Reformation divide, other things came to took precedence over the aforementioned matters in which the unity and Catholicity of the Church are to be found. (10)  A tremendous blow was dealt to the external unity of the Church and in the separation that followed, between the followers of the papacy and the Protestants, between the Lutherans and the Reformed, and between all of the above and the myriad of smaller separatist groups, each communion developed an inward gaze in which its own identity and distinct doctrines were regarded, in practice at least, as more important than the One Lord, Faith, and Baptism.

 

Mercifully, the office and institution of king survived the Modern Age in several countries, including my own, and forces aligned against the Catholic Church will, as Christ has promised, never prevail.  The position of both king and Church was weakened from what it was in Christendom, however, by the spread of the now ubiquitous notion of popular sovereignty and the fracturing of the Church into denominationalism which both involved a re-orienting of the gaze away from that which is higher, upward, and beyond, internally towards self, albeit in these examples the self of the group rather than of the individual person, the inward focus on which was also developing at the same time, all of these in accordance with the general shift from the theocentric outlook of Christendom to the Modern anthropocentric one.  It is that which pulls us out of ourselves and directs us to that which is higher and beyond ourselves that civilizes us, however, and this general inward reorientation of outlook of the Modern Age, by weakening these upward influences has created a vacuum into which different types of civilization-threatening barbarism enter.  The extreme nationalism of the World War II era was one such barbarism.  After the war, progressive liberals, realizing the need for a higher allegiance but, being progressive liberals, unwilling to turn to God, king, and Church, attempted to create various artificial substitutes in international, regional, and even world-level associations, organizations, and quasi-governmental bodies, but the soulless, toxic, bureaucratism that accompanied these at every level proved this to be but another form of barbarism.

 

So-called Christian Nationalism is a response to this other type of barbarism.  Unfortunately, it is no solution because it is enmeshed itself in the Modern way of thinking that produced the problem.  This is evident, not merely in its embrace of nationalism, the Modern artificial substitute for natural patriotism.  It is also evident in the kind of Christianity that it weds to nationalism.  While not all Christian Nationalists are evangelicals the form of Christianity that went into making Christian Nationalism is evangelicalism, not as Dr. Luther and the Reformers used this word nor as it was historically used in the Church of England nor as it is used in Europe today, but evangelicalism in a distinctly North American sense of the word, which evangelicalism, for all that it has to commend itself, has a very unhealthy tendency to confuse Christianity with Americanism.  Americanism, however, is a variant of liberalism, the ideology that drives the Modern Age’s movement away from God and Christianity. 

 

Nationalism, we observed earlier, is tribalism writ large, and tribalism is very much an apt description of Christian Nationalism’s approach to the various social, moral, and cultural problems that have arisen in our countries due to the transformation of Christendom into secular, liberal, Western Civilization over the course of the Modern Age.  That approach is to treat these as battlegrounds in a power struggle between groups, with our group, Christians, on the one side and some other group or groups on the other side, and to regard the government as an instrument (and an instrument in battle is called a weapon) with which to defeat the other group.

 

Interestingly, this way of looking at things has certain things in common with the thinking of the progressive liberals who abhor Christian Nationalism.  Progressive liberals as well, and all the more so the more the progressive takes dominance over the liberal in their thinking, tend to see everything in terms of power struggles between groups.   For Christians, however, this way of looking at things ought to be anathema.  Eph. 6:12 tells us that our struggle in this world is not against other people, but against the spiritual powers of darkness in this world.  Moreover, in this the Christian Nationalist approach bears more than a passing resemblance to the error at the heart of all progressive thinking, the belief in a political salvation.  Indeed, I would say that the resemblance to progressive salvation-through-political-means is far deeper than whatever surface similarity there may be between the Christian Nationalist idea of the role of government and the classical Tory view, of necessity more reactionary than conservative in the current political climate, that in my view is the closest thing there is to a translation of orthodox Christianity into the language of civil politics.  Where Christian Nationalism and Toryism bear a superficial resemblance is that we both reject the liberal notion of the separation of Church and State.  This liberal idea, the root from which all forms of secularism sprang, began as an argument for limiting the powers of the State but inevitably became an argument for limiting the influence of the Church while exponentially expanding that of the State.  Classical Toryism rejected this idea as an assault on the order of Christendom in which the king and the Church had distinct roles, distinct tasks to do, distinct spheres in which to do those tasks, and distinct powers with which to do them.  The king was not the instrument of the Church, he was to do his job rather than the Church’s. The Church was not the instrument of the king, she was to do her job rather than the king’s.  If both did their jobs well, it would work for the good of the other, because ultimately their roles, tasks, spheres, and powers came from God and were complementary.  Christian Nationalism, by contrast, which, incorporates liberalism through the Americanism it blends with its Christianity, rejects liberalism’s separation of Church and State, not in favour of the old order but of one in which the State is the instrument of the Church.

 

This has further diminished the Christianity of a movement, the Christianity of which was already diminished by being blended with Americanism.  The attitude that is visibly on display in the movement looks a lot more like hubris than humility.  Apart from being the very opposite of Christ’s own example and what He enjoins upon His followers and apart from being utterly unappealing and ugly in itself, this is counterproductive if we regard one of the challenges that Modern liberal secularism has created to be the re-evangelism of our civilization.  Look back to the early centuries of the Church when, facing the hostility of both the culture of the pagan Roman Empire and of those Jews who did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah, the early Christians first set about the task of evangelizing the ancient world.  They did so, not by political activism and organization, but by imitating Christ’s example and obeying His command to take up their cross in humility and follow Him to the point of martyrdom.

 

In Canada as in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth Realms, I have said often in the last few years that we are fortunate to have as our hereditary Sovereign a man who chose to modify his coronation service so that being welcomed into Westminster Abbey with the words “Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings” he responded with “In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served but to serve.”  I have noted the huge contrast between this and the attitude of the egomaniacal narcissist around which the MAGA cult, which overlaps Christian Nationalism to a large degree, especially in the United States, is centred.  Last week, as Western Christians celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and as Eastern Christians on the Julian calendar entered their Holy Week in preparation for the celebration of the Resurrection, and as the aforementioned Yankee narcissist thought it appropriate to mark the occasion with a threat to destroy an entire civilization in war, (11) many infected with the Christian Nationalism we have been discussing attacked His Majesty in a most unchristian manner.  As the king himself was observing the Sacred Triduum from the Maundy Thursday service at St. Asaph Cathedral in Wales to the celebration of Easter in the traditional Matins service at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, these “Christian” Nationalists attacked him for not recording a video Easter message.   The words “not recording a video” are the operative words here.  He did issue an Easter greeting on the social media platform formerly known as twitter.  He wished Christians around the Commonwealth a “Happy Easter” and gave the simple but powerful message “He is risen!”

 

The controversy was entirely manufactured on the part of His Majesty’s “Christian” critics. Although he recorded a video for Easter last year, it has not become an established royal tradition for the monarch to do so as it has to record one for Christmas.  The king’s critics complained that he had sent a message to Muslims wishing them a happy Ramadan and accused him of everything from abandoning his role as Defender of the Faith to being a crypto-Muslim.  Anybody who took the time to compare – in good faith, mind you – what the king said to his Muslim subjects and what he said at Easter this year and last, would recognize that the fundamental difference between a greeting addressed to Muslims and a Christian message such as “The abiding message of Easter is that God so loved the world — the whole world — that He sent His Son to live among us to show us how to love one another, and to lay down His own life for others in a love that proved stronger than death” from last year’s video or this year’s more simple “He is risen” shows the utter stupidity of these accusations and conspiracy theories.

 

Through all this His Majesty has shown a far better understanding of how a Christian king ought to act towards his subjects of another religion than how these “Christians” have shown of the honour and submission Christianity requires of us towards our temporal king regardless of his personal religion.  The title “Defender of the Faith” was originally conferred on the king for writing a treatise defending the seven sacraments against the criticisms of Dr. Luther in his Babylonian Captivity.  Within the same reign, it was redefined to mean one who defended the Church in his realm against foreign claims of jurisdiction, including that of the foreign power that had bestowed the title in the first place.  Over the course of the century that followed it came to include the defence of the reforms made to that Church in subsequent reigns.  Today, His Majesty’s critics think that it should be given a tribalistic interpretation that has little if any connection to its historical development and which is fundamentally at odds with the basic nature and duty of the office of king, to reign over his realm from a position above partisanship representing law and justice for all.  Whatever corrections from the standpoint of orthodox theology, His Majesty’s views of the relationship between Christianity and other religions might be better off for, they are far preferable to those of the critics who interpret any remarks about Islam that are not bellicose and condemnatory as “promotion” or “preference.” (12)

While not all of these critics would identify as Christian Nationalists they are generally people who have allowed the Christian Nationalist perspective to influence their thinking just as Christian Nationalism has allowed the fundamentally anti-Christian Modern ideologies that it has embraced to warp its version of Christianity.  Followers of Christ should avoid such a movement.  We should love our countries as patriots, honour, pray for, and submit to our earthly king if we are fortunate enough to have one as Scripture enjoins, place the orthodox faith of the Creeds of the early centuries when the Church was undivided ahead of sectarian emphases on lesser matters that pit Christian against Christian and Christians against everyone else in “struggles against flesh and blood”, and take up our cross and follow our Lord’s example of humility rather than hubris.

 

(1)  It is usually misquoted with the definite rather than indefinite article.

(2)   James Boswell, Life of Johnson, April 7, 1775.

(3)   This is a deponent verb – it doesn’t have the regular active voice forms, and has only three principal parts, the third being what would be the fourth in a regular verb (the perfect passive participle).

(4)   Charles-Theodore and Jean-Hippolyte Cogniard, The Tricolour Cockade, 1831.  Whether Chauvin existed or was a fiction created by the Cogniards is a matter of dispute.

(5)   In game theory a zero-sum game is one in which the gains of the one player equally match the losses of the other player so that together they cancel each other out to produce the net sum of zero.

(6)   1 Cor. 13:4.

(7)   Compare the works which Isaiah prophesied that Christ would do Is. 61:1-3 with those for which Christ said He would reward His sheep in Matt. 25:34-40.

(8)   Progressive liberals in my country, Canada, both amuse and disgust me when they say foolish things about secularism distinguishing us from the United States.  Secularism is the American tradition, not ours.

(9)   These instructions from SS Peter and Paul, were not written to Christians living under a Christian king, the king in question was the Roman Caesar and specifically Nero whose reign encompassed the period in which the Apostles were writing. 

(10)                       On the one side, they doubled down on their insistence that the papacy was given universal jurisdiction over the Church that had previously played a role in dividing the Eastern Church from the Western Church.  By declaring the Church to be absent where the jurisdiction of the pope is not acknowledged, they elevated the papacy above the One Lord, Faith, and Baptism.  On the other side, the doctrines that would later be somewhat inaccurately summarized as the Five Solas, were similarly elevated.

(11)                       This man, who regained his office as head of the New Rome and its beastly empire in a campaign that saw him take a gunshot to the head, drop to the ground as if it had taken him out, then, since it had only grazed his ear, bounce back up fighting (Rev. 13:3), has since outdone this by posting a blasphemous picture of himself as if he were Jesus on the Eastern Pascha (Easter) of the Julian calendar.  This was done in the midst of a controversy between himself and the current Roman Patriarch over the pope’s opposition to his war in Iran.

(12)                       His Majesty’s critics have circulated a meme quoting a speech he gave as Prince of Wales in 1993.  The meme is rather mendacious as it implies the words are recent.  The quotation, “More than this, Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost” should be read in the context of the entire speech entitled “Islam and the West”.  In that context, it is about the pre-Modern holistic – he used the word “integrated” - view of Creation.  In the same speech, and shortly thereafter, he said “At the core of Christianity, there still lies an integral view of the sanctity of the world, and a clear sense of the trusteeship and responsibility given to us for our natural surroundings.”  Note how he said the West “gradually lost this integrated vision of the world”.  It was “with Copernicus and Descartes and the coming of the scientific revolution”, in other words, the very anthropocentric view of the world succeeding the theocentric view of pre-Modern Christian civilization that I have criticised as liberalism repeatedly in the text of this essay. 

 

While some might not like the way he treats the pre-Modern integrated view of Creation as common to all religions, I would point out that Christianity’s claims to uniqueness have never rested on this point, but upon God’s having visited His Creation in a unique manner by becoming Man in the Incarnation, and upon His having accomplished the salvation of the world from human sin through His having died for us and rose again, none of which is questioned or even the matter at hand here.  That all religions contain truth, is in fact, the teaching of orthodox Christianity.  This is because religions are derived from natural revelation (the kind St. Paul talks about in the first chapter of Romans).  Christianity’s claims to uniqueness pertain to special revelation, the historical special revelation of the Gospel. 

 

St. Justin Martyr in the second century argued that the Divine Logos, which in the preamble to St. John’s Gospel is identified with God and specifically the Person of the Trinity Who became incarnate as Jesus Christ, had planted seeds of Himself throughout the nations prior to His Incarnation, that these had born fruit as philosophy, and that to the extent the ancient philosophers followed the Logos they could be regarded as Christian.  The opposite view, that pre-Christian philosophy contained nothing of value to Christianity could also be found if inconsistently practiced, most notably in Tertullian, but it is difficult to read the New Testament in the original Greek and side with Tertullian. 

 

Where I would respectfully disagree with the speech, which remember was given over thirty years ago, is that, while his overall argument that no one group has a monopoly on either truth or extremism is substantially accurate, the idea of holy war is, in my opinion, more integral to the essential theology of Islam than most other religions.  His Majesty did say, at the beginning of those remarks, that he was not an expert on the subject, however, and I would point out that those who are so quick today to jump on anything positive said in the direction of Islam usually do so for reasons that are less rooted in the differences between Christianity and Islam than they are in the United States’ post-Cold War conflict with the Islamic world.  This conflict arose in part out of the United States’ arrogant belief that she could do whatever she wanted anywhere in the world with impunity, in part out of the United States’ being the spearhead of Modern, materialistic, liberalism, in part out of her having armed and trained the more militant factions of Islam to use against the Soviets in Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War, and in part by much of Christianity in the United States having been deformed by heretical notions, such as the idea that the religion which shares a common pre-Gospel history with Christianity but which is explicitly built on the rejection of Jesus as the Christ, the Middle-Eastern state constructed by adherents of which religion has a vested interest in destabilizing the countries mostly populated by Muslims in the region, is owed some type of allegiance by Christians.

Crime And No Punishment

 

I recently returned to Winnipeg after visiting my father on his farm where the radio is constantly tuned to 880 CKLQ the country and western station out of Brandon.   On the morning of the day I drove back they played a familiar classic by Merle Haggard, “Mama Tried”.   The song is semi-autobiographical, written in reflection on the time the to-be country star served in San Quentin for an attempted robbery in Bakersfield.   I say semi-autobiographical for while Haggard did indeed reach the age of majority in prison the sentence he was serving was nowhere near as severe as the lyrics suggest:

 

And I turned twenty-one in prison doin' life without parole
No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied
That leaves only me to blame 'cause Mama tried

 

When I listened to these familiar words again this time it occurred to me to wonder what on earth someone would actually have to do to be sentenced to life in prison without parole while still a minor.  Even in 1957 when Haggard was convicted it would have had to have been a lot more than what he did.   California was not as crime-friendly then as it is today but they would not have locked a minor up and thrown away the key for an unsuccessful break and entry in which no one was hurt, not even with all of his priors.  His actual sentence was fifteen years of which he served three.   Today, it is highly unlikely that anyone in any jurisdiction outside of Texas would receive such a sentence for a similar crime.

 

All across North America today, both in the United States and in my country, the Dominion of Canada, major cities have seen a massive rise in violent crime especially in, but by no means limited to, their downtown, core, neighbourhoods.   More than one factor has contributed to this urban crime crisis, of course.  One of the disturbing aspects about the crisis is that “unprovoked random attacks” by strangers, i.e., when someone you don’t know from Adam comes up to you and assaults you for no discernable reason, which were previously very rare, have spiked and account for a huge percentage of the crime wave.   Two explanations for this jump to mind.   The first is the vast increase in mental illness over the last three years induced by idiotic governments forcing people into social isolation for long periods of time in a failed and absurd attempt to protect them from a respiratory disease that in most cases had only mild symptoms and from which the vast majority fully recovered.   The second is the increase in drug abuse, particularly of paranoia-inducing substances like crystal meth, which is partly due to the same thing that caused the uptick in mental illness, but which is also the result of stupid politicians having prioritized in their drug policy the making drug use safe for users over the safety of others who might be harmed by drug-induced violence.

 

These factors, while they help account for random stranger attacks, do not in themselves explain the larger urban crime crisis.   Another factor that significantly contributes to the overall rise in urban crime is the soft-on-crime attitude promoted by the sort of people who like to think that being forward-minded, progressive, and liberal amounts to being enlightened and that they are therefore more enlightened than others.  This attitude has in recent years been translated into various sorts of bad policies that are often described as “catch and release” or “revolving door”.   These include sentences that are too short or too soft, parole being too easily obtained and too early, and, more recently, pretrial release being too easily obtained even with multiple prior convictions.   This latter, due no doubt to its relative novelty, is the most discussed at the moment.   In several American jurisdictions liberals have demanded and sometimes obtained the elimination of cash bail either entirely, as in Illinois as of New Year’s Day this year, or for all but the most heinous of crimes, as in New York four years ago.   In Canada, criminal law falls under the jurisdiction of the Dominion government, even though in practice its day to day administration is carried out by the provinces, and so provincial premiers and legislatures cannot enact such policies within their own provinces the way American state governments can.   Not that any of the current provincial premiers would want to do so.  In January of this year all provincial and territory premiers signed a letter unanimously calling on the Dominion government to enact bail reform of the opposite sort to that of the just mentioned Illinois and New York examples, the toughening of bail laws to make it much harder for a repeat offender or one likely to repeat, to be released back into the public.  Unfortunately, the Canadian politicians most in sync with American liberals in their thinking on this matter happen to be the ones in power at the Dominion level.  

 

In 2018, while they still had a majority government, the Liberals introduced Bill C-75 which passed Parliament the following year.   Bill C-75 contained a number of amendments to the Criminal Code and related legislation such as the Youth Criminal Justice Act.   While I consider most, if not all, of these amendments to be bad, they fall into three categories.   The first is those which are bad for reasons that are not germane to what we are discussing here, such as the lowering of the age of consent for anal sex.   The second consists of amendments that limit the traditional rights of Canadians when accused of crimes.   Examples include the near-elimination of preliminary inquiries (intended to speed cases through the court system this has the opposite effect and so infringes on the right to a speedy trial), the abolition of peremptory challenge in juror selection (this infringes as it was intended to do on the defense’s right to exclude those prejudiced against the accused from the jury system), and allowing police to testify via affidavit (this infringes on the right of the accused to confront and cross-examine his accuser).   What needs to be said about these amendments is that while they do not err in the direction of being soft-on-crime in the sense we have been discussing (1) they are not legitimate steps in the opposite direction either.   There are a lot of people who confuse the rights of the accused with soft-on-crime but they are very different.   The rights of the accused are there to protect the innocent from the abuse of the criminal justice system.   They may, at times, result in a guilty person getting off, but they are based on the traditional conviction that for justice to fail in this manner is to be preferred over it failing by punishing the innocent, a conviction that is right and Scriptural (see Genesis 18).   Soft-on-crime policies do not protect the innocent from wrongful accusation but are rather about lighter sentences for criminals that disregard the safety of the public.   The third category consists of amendments of the soft-on-crime type.   Examples of this include the hybridization of offences and the related reduction of sentences and, most relevantly, the amendments to the bail provisions of the Criminal Code.  The stated purpose of the bail amendments was to make the earliest possible release the default outcome of an arraignment rather than detention, with fewer conditions and less requirements of cash, bond, or other surety.   In other words it was very similar in intent to Cuomo’s experiment in bail elimination in New York around the same time.

 

It was similar in effect too and one consequence of that was the aforementioned unanimous letter by the premiers demanding that the Dominion government walk this back and make bail harder for repeat violent offenders.   In May, David Lametti, who lamentably holds the portfolio of Minister of Justice and Attorney General in His Majesty’s government – lamentably because he has shown in numerous ways, the most recent being his favourable attitude towards criminalizing disagreement with the obviously distorted and easily debunked false official narrative about the Indian Residential Schools, that he ought not to be put in charge of the penalty box at a hockey game, much less the Ministry of Justice -  responded to the premiers’ demands with Bill C-48 which proposed further amendments to the bail system.   Unfortunately, but sadly not unpredictably, the “reform” that stands out the most is itself an egregious error of the sort contained in the second category of bad amendments in Bill C-75.   This is the proposed reverse onus for repeat violent offenders.   In other words, someone previously convicted of a violent offence, arrested a second time, would have to prove that he should be granted bail, rather than the Crown having to prove that it should be denied him.   This is something that all the Justice and Public Safety Ministers – Dominion, provincial, territorial – called for when they met in Ottawa in March.   Admittedly, this is a lesser offense against the principle of the presumption of innocence than reversing the burden of proof when it comes to guilt in an actual trial would be, but it still offends against the principle, opening the door for worse such offences.   Indeed, an examination of Bill C-48 demonstrates that most of the proposed amendments are merely different variations on the idea of reverse onus.   With all the possible ways out there of toughening up our policies towards crime without violating even in minor ways the ancient and sacred principles like the presumption of innocence that protect us all from abuse of the criminal justice system, this was the best the provincial governments could recommend and the federal government could come up with?

 

What is behind this push to implement policies that turn dangerous criminals back out into the streets as quickly as possible and to meet complaints about how this undermines public safety not by walking back said policies but by eroding the rights of the accused and the principles that underlie them?

 

We might say that it is an inversion in the priority of sympathies in which some people sympathize more with those who commit crime than with those who are its victims.    This inversion manifests itself in a number of different ways.   One of these is the liberal’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy and right of defending one’s self, one’s loved ones, and one’s property from criminals.    Look at the current uproar over country and western singer Jason Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town” and the accompanying video.  The song’s lyrics talk about violent urban crime such as sidewalk assaults, carjacking, liquor store robbery, etc. and challenges the thugs who do these sort of things to “try that in a small town”.   Sniveling idiots like Sheryl Crow have accused Aldean of “promoting violence” in the song and worse idiots have accused him of promoting “lynching” on the flimsy grounds that one had apparently taken place a century ago on the popular filming location where he shot the video.   To normal people, the person who sucker punches someone on the sidewalk, the carjacker, and the liquor store robber are guilty of criminal violence, and someone fighting back in defense of himself and his community is using legitimate force.  The distinction is lost on liberals – and people who whatever their politics have had their minds and souls destroyed by being brainwashed with human resources and public relations “education” – who use the word violence to describe people who exercise their God-given right of self-defense to repel criminal assaults with force but avoid using this word for the criminal assaults themselves.  While this inversion would not be a wrong answer to the question, it is a description of the problem rather than an explanation for it.

 

We could say that it is a result, intended or otherwise, of sixty to seventy years of liberal and progressive crusading against discrimination.   The population of prison inmates looks very different from the general population.   This may be true of economic status.   The imprisoned are far more likely to come from poverty than from wealth.   Note, however, that the poorer outnumber the richer in the general population in any society.   It is certainly true of race.   In the United States the black percentage of the prison population is far higher than the black percentage of the general population.   In Canada this same disparity exists between the representation of North American Indians in the prison population and the general population.   By contrast, in both countries, the percentage of Asians in gaol is far lower than in the general population.   It is also true of sex.   Indeed, here the greatest disparity is to be found.   In Canada, women represent on average about five percent of the incarcerated.   In the United States it is higher, about eight to ten percent.   In both countries, however, men are vastly overrepresented in the prison population if the basis of the comparison is their representation in the general population.   Even though the disparity with regards to sex is much, much, greater than the disparity with regards to race, and greater still than the disparity with regards to economic status, it is never alluded to by those who demand the criminal justice system be reformed in a softer-on-crime way because it is unfair.   Neither do they reference Asian underrepresentation.   This is because both of these facts go against their narrative in which society and its structures are biased against women rather than against men and in favour of whites against all other races.   Indeed, when it comes to the huge disparity with regards to sex, this not only goes against the narrative it rebuts it entirely.   The reason men comprise ninety percent or higher of the prison population is because men commit ninety percent or higher of the crimes that land one in gaol.    There is not really much of a dispute about this.   Discrimination in the system, therefore, is not the cause of male overrepresentation in the prison population which is not really overrepresentation when the basis of comparison is what it should be, the percentage of males in the general population who commit crime.   This suggests that something similar could be argued for the overrepresentation of blacks in the American prison population and of Indians in the Canadian prison population, a suggestion supported by the underrepresentation of Asians in the prisons of both countries, which can hardly be explained by a racial bias that favours whites against all others, and by statistics gleaned from the victims of crime as to the race of the perpetrator.   Liberals and progressives treat any suggestion that the races overrepresented in the prison populations of Canada and the United States are not overrepresented when contrasted with the percentages of each race among the criminal perpetrator population rather than the general population, no matter how backed by facts and data that suggestion may be, as arising out of racism.  Their actions, however, and the policies they support demonstrate that they do not really believe this, that on an unspoken level they acknowledge it, but in their need to be seen and to see themselves as sympathetic with American blacks, Canadian Indians, and, to switch to the economic status category, the poor, they blame the larger society for this.   This makes them, of course, vulnerable to all the ugly accusations they hurl against others.   Blaming the larger society for the overrepresentation of American blacks, Canadian Indians, and the poor is to deny agency to blacks, Indians, and the poor.   Furthermore, justifying being soft-on-crime in the name of being fair to these groups, overlooks the fact that they are also overrepresented among the victims of crime.   This is a fact that goes hand-in-glove with these same groups being overrepresented among the perpetrators of crime because the majority of crimes are in-group rather than perpetrated by members of one racial or socioeconomic group against members of another.   Therefore, it is favouring soft-on-crime policies that is discriminatory against these groups, because even if American blacks and Canadian Indians are represented among perpetrators of crime at a higher percentage than they are represented among the general population, the majority of these groups are not criminals and all members of these groups, here including the poor, are at a higher risk of being the victims of violent crime than the general population, and so need the protection of hard-on-crime policies more.   However, liberalism and progressivism’s misguided, ill-informed, and myopic crusade against discrimination, while it may explain the shape of the arguments currently used by soft-on-crime liberals and the policies they currently support, it does not explain the origin of their way of thinking.

 

This is so because liberals have been soft-on-crime for a lot longer than they have been obsessed with discrimination.   In the “Enlightenment”, the seventeenth and eighteenth century movement away from the light of orthodox Christianity into the darkness of the superstitious idolatry of science and materialistic reason that took Puritanism, the anal retentive form of Calvinism and transformed it into liberalism, the anal retentive form of secular agnosticism, the early liberals decided that traditional criminal justice was barbaric and cruel both in its penalties – death for capital crimes like murder, corporal punishment, fines, public humiliation, exile and such for lesser crimes – and its underlying theory – that by breaking the law, criminals incurred a debt to society which they had had to pay.   In place of the older penalties the early liberals wanted incarceration to become the default penalty for crime which they achieved in the nineteenth century.   In the traditional system gaol was merely for holding the accused until trial, long term imprisonment was reserved for political prisoners.   Punishing people for their crimes, the liberals said, was not justice but revenge.  This is nonsense.  In all the ancient accounts of the origins of the traditional criminal justice system, from Aeschylus’ tragedic account of the origins of jury trials in his retelling of the myths of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes in the Oresteia to the account of the establishment of refugee cities in ancient Israel in sacred Scripture, the criminal justice system was not based on revenge but implemented to curb the lust for revenge and protect societies from out of control cycles of vengeance.   Although obviously, for criminal justice to do this, it must legitimately satisfy the need which blood vengeance seeks to satisfy in an illegitimate manner – unsuccessfully as its tendency to get out of control indicates – there is a careful and clear distinction between the two.   In revenge, a wrong doer’s debt is owed to the victim or his kin, and they exact it from him to the extent that they are able and that they themselves see fit.  Under justice, the debt is owed to the laws of society, it is not exacted by those with a personal stake in the case but by the lawfully appointed court and its officers, guilt has to be investigated and established and the accused has the right to present his own case, and the law places limits on the penalties that can be exacted.   The Lex Talionis – “an eye for an eye” – whether enshrined in the Code of Hammurabi or the Law of Moses is in its fundamental nature, a limit on the penalty someone can be made to pay for injury to another.   The principle underlying it is that expressed by Cicero in De Legibus III.4, noxiae poena par esto, more commonly remembered as the Roman legal maxim culpae poena par esto which means “let the punishment fit the crime” (or “offense” in Tully’s wording).   By treating the traditional system of criminal justice as being the very thing it was designed to limit, prevent, and replace the liberals committed a most impious injustice against multiple generations of their ancestors stretching back to antiquity.   They argued that making a criminal pay for his offence must not be the goal of the criminal justice system, that the only acceptable goals were deterring others from committing similar crimes and reforming or rehabilitating the criminal.   This was the original liberal soft-on-crime attitude.

C. S. Lewis answered this earlier version of the liberal soft-on-crime attitude in an essay entitled “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” that was originally published in The Twentieth Century in 1949 and later included in the collection of his essays posthumously edited and published by William Hooper as God in the Dock in 1976.   Lewis clearly felt very strongly on the matter – he alluded to it in later essays, asked T. S. Eliot to write an essay about it in a letter in 1962, and included a discussion of it in his novel That Hideous Strength.   What made Lewis’ response so interesting is that he based his case against the progressive view to which he gave the name found in the title of his essay and his defense of the traditional view on the argument that the progressives’ humanitarian theory failed on the very point on which it claimed superiority over the traditional view, that is, treating offenders in a humane, dignified manner.   Its advocates think it “mild and merciful” but in reality it “disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end”.   Removing the concept of “desert”, i.e., the offender getting what he deserves as punishment for his crime from the picture, removes “the only connecting link between punishment and justice” so that without retributive justice, rehabilitative justice is not justice at all.   By treating crime as essentially pathological and the courts and prison system as essentially therapeutic, the progressive humanitarian theory opens the door to excessive punishment by transferring the decision as to the fate of the convicted into  the hands of “technical experts” trained in “special sciences “which “do not even employ such categories as rights and justice”.   These, since they are operating under the idea that they are curing the criminal rather than punishing him, are not bound by the limits which justice places on what punishment can be exacted from a criminal and will keep on until they are convinced he is cured.   Lewis argued that this theory made it possible for good men to act “as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants” or “even worse” because “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive” since “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience” and while they “may be more likely to go to Heaven” they are also “likelier to make a Hell of earth”.   Lewis argued that far from being “humane” the system advocated by the progressives in the name of humanitarianism treated law breakers as less than human.   This seems indisputable.  The traditional system treated the criminal as responsible for his actions and so owing a debt the payment of which squared the criminal with the law and society.   The progressive humanitarian system denies responsibility to the criminal and keeps his crime dangling above his head forever as the experts who “cured” him keep perennial watch lest he have a “relapse”.

 

Lewis’ answer to the humanitarian theory, since it addresses it on the level of its fundamental injustice, is an answer that would stand even if the experiment in “curing” criminals had been one hundred percent successful.   The experiment has not been successful.   It has rather proven to be a colossal failure.   Yes, people have gone to prison and come out reformed.   Merle Haggard, referred to at the beginning of this essay, is an example.   His reformation in San Quentin, however, had less to do with the prison’s rehabilitation system working than with its retaining part of the older retributive system.   California did not abolish the death penalty until 1972.    Haggard was sent to San Quentin while Caryl Chessman was serving his last days on death row there before his execution in 1960.   Chessman’s early life, with the experience of being in and out of detention, initially for petty crimes, later for more serious ones, mirrored Haggard’s in some ways.   Later, however, he had been convicted of the “Red Light Bandit” crimes, a series of robberies and rapes that had taken place in the Los Angeles area in 1948, and sentenced to death.   By Haggard’s own testimony it was the experience of being caught brewing liquor in San Quentin and sent to “the shelf” – a row of solitary confinement cells in the same part of the prison as death row – where he saw Chessman, awaiting his execution, and this scared him straight.    He was rehabilitated in prison, but not by the prison, at least not in the direct sense that liberal supporters of the rehabilitation theory had in mind.   Others have entered prison and for various reasons – being further corrupted by worse criminals themselves, being hardened by prison culture and as a necessity for survival, etc. – have ended up worse than when they went in.   According to a research summary entitled “The effect of prison on criminal behaviour” published by Public Safety Canada in November 1999 which looked at 50 studies involving 300 000 offenders “None of the analyses found imprisonment to reduce recidivism”.

 

The liberal and progressive attitude towards how society should deal with crime and criminals has consistently been based on the conceit that their ideas are more “humane”, “enlightened”, “kind”, “compassionate”, et cetera ad nauseam than anything that preceded them no matter how ancient and time-tested-and-proven.   Initially, this manifested itself as the idea that it is more “humane” to treat criminals as rats in a social experiment in rehabilitation in prison laboratories than to treat them as men, responsible for their actions, who owe a debt to society and society’s laws.   Later, as the progressive conceit evolved from an attitude of superiority to the past and the civilization we have inherited from it to one of hatred for said past and civilization, it manifested itself in the idea that the criminal is the true victim, the real blame belongs to civilized society, and so civilized society must be made to pay rather than the criminal, who should be released into the rest of society as soon as possible with as few conditions as possible.   The progressive mind has proven remarkably resistant to the abundance of evidence demonstrating these ideas to be the very opposite of “humane” and “enlightened”.   For people who are always shooting their mouths off about their “compassion” and demanding that various groups be made “safe” from words and ideas that offend them they are extremely blithe about how their absurd policies make everyday life less safe from the threat of actual physical harm due to violent crime in our cities.

 

Ultimately, the liberal and progressive conceit goes back to the superstition they imbibed during the period that would more appropriately called the Darkening rather than the Enlightenment.   Having transferred their faith from the True and Living God to the idol of science, they no longer recognized that the True and Living God, in Whom both Perfect Justice and Perfect Mercy are untied without compromise, has delegated authority to two earthly institutions, to one of which He gave a sword and charged it with the exercising of Justice, to the other of which He gave a pulpit and an altar and charged it with bringing His Mercy and Grace to people all of whom are offenders under Divine Law.   The State, consisting of the king and his ministers, an earthly depiction of the government of the Universe, God as King of Kings, served by His ministers in Heaven, for which reason king-headed government is the only legitimate form of the State, was given the sword of Justice, but Justice that was to be tempered with Mercy, for which reason kings and the courts that act in their name have always had the power of clemency and pardon.   The Church, consisting of the Apostolic priesthood and the congregations of baptized Christians they shepherd, brings God’s Mercy and Grace to the sinful world by preaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments.   While the Church’s ministry is primarily one of Mercy and Grace, as the State’s ministry is primarily one of Justice, just as the State must temper the Justice it exercises with Mercy, so the Church’s Apostolic leadership has been given the keys – the power of excommunication – to exclude from the ministration of Grace those who defiantly persist in rebellious and open sin until such time as they repent.   No longer recognizing the God from Whom the authority of Church and State alike are derived, liberals and progressives reject the Church and have replaced divine Mercy and Grace with inferior human substitutes the burden of distributing which they have placed on the State, the divine authority of which they have sought to replace with democratic power, the power of the mob.   Idols always fail those who worship them, however, and it has become abundantly clear that liberalism’s efforts to create a new justice superior to the old and more merciful after cutting itself off from the Source of true Justice and Mercy have failed and unleashed upon our civilization the opposite of both Justice and Mercy.

 

It is about time that we as a civilization turned our backs on liberalism forever and returned to the True and Living God, Who is Merciful and Gracious to all who turn to Him in repentance and faith, but has given to the State the sword to punish crime and expects it to be used for the safety of us all.

 

(1)   The elimination of peremptory challenge in jury selection is not “soft-on-crime” in the sense of making it easier for someone who has committed a crime to go unpunished or with insufficient punishment.  It was included in Bill C-75, however, because the Prime Minister and his Justice Minister at the time – Jody Wilson-Raybould - were outraged that a Saskatchewan farmer was acquitted for using lethal force in defending his farm against an Indian youth who was on the farm for criminal purposes.   Indian groups decried the acquittal as racist because they thought they should have been represented on the jury, apparently failing to understand that one purpose of jury selection is to keep people prejudiced against the accused off the jury and that since a larger percentage of their own end up before judges as the accused than their percentage in the general population it is very much against their own interests to make it harder to do this.   To make it clear, imagine the situation in reverse.   Imagine that some young white idiot went onto a reserve with evil intentions and got himself killed.  Then image that the Indian that killed him was charged with manslaughter or murder.   Then imagine that whites had shown up for the jury selection process making racially charged statements against the accused and were rightly excluded for prejudice against the defendant.   An all-Indian jury acquits the defendant, and the parents of the white kid slain, backed by the organized white community, denounce the outcome and demand that in all future trials where the accused is Indian and the victim white, they be guaranteed spots on the jury.   If you can see what is wrong with the demands of the whites in that scenario, understand that the exact same thing is what was wrong with the demands of the Indians in the real scenario. The real outrage in the affair was that the farmer was charged in the first place.   This was an assault on the right of self-defence for the purposes of appeasing a group that was practicing the very racism of which it was accusing others.   Attacks on the right of self-defence are a different form of “soft-on-crime” since it is against crime, especially violent crime, that this right is exercised.   As for the Prime Minister and Wilson-Raybould, they should have both been required to step down out of office after making their disgraceful remarks in which both were guilty of political interference in a matter of criminal justice, ironically, the very issue over which the two would shortly thereafter find themselves in conflict in the SNC-Lavalin affair.