“No Man is an Island”

James Dobson passed away on the 21^st of August this year.  When I heard the news it was the first time in years I had heard his name.  The last time I heard his radio program, Focus on the Family, was probably in the 1990s.  Dobson was a prominent evangelical leader, although he was a psychologist by profession rather than a minister.  His father, James Dobson Sr., had been a minister in the Church of the Nazarene, one of the Wesleyan Holiness denominations, as had his grandfather and great-grandfather.  Dobson initially achieved celebrity status among evangelicals for advising parents to avoid the culture of permissiveness encouraged by the majority in his chosen profession and raise up their children with boundaries and discipline.   His first book, Dare to Discipline (1970) which is probably still his best known, was, as is evident from the title, on this subject.  In the decades since, he fought on several other fronts although   generally those which pertained to the type of issues that are categorized as moral and social, in the emerging culture war as it was dubbed in the early 1990s (1) around the time I first heard of him.

 

I first heard of Dobson’s passing, not through the news, but through a social media post by a former classmate with whom I had attended Providence College (formerly Winnipeg Bible College, now Providence University College) in the mid to late 1990s.  This post, and several others from the same former classmate whose name out of charity I shall omit, thoroughly disgusted me.  He did not merely disregard the ancient proverb de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est but went out of his way to do the very opposite of it.  He took hearty delight in Dobson’s death and was positively rejoicing over it. 

 

I was reminded of this by the reaction of several American leftists to the murder of Charlie Kirk yesterday.  Kirk, the 31 year old founder and director of Turning Point, USA, was shot in the neck on stage during a question and answer session at an event at Utah Valley University.  He died from the wound later in the afternoon.  Kirk belonged to the Calvary Chapel Association, a Pentecostal group that separated from the Foursquare Gospel and from which the Vineyard movement would later separate.  Like Dobson, he had been a culture warrior.  Since youth was his target audience he made a lot of use of social media, he had a podcast and as of earlier this year a televised talk show.  He was also the author of a number of books.  He is probably best known, however, for going to university and other campuses and promoting his own views by, among other things, challenging overconfident progressive students to informal debates.

 

I am not going to reproduce the responses of the leftists here.  Chaya Raichik has reposted several on her Libs of Tiktok account on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the link to which you can find in the footnote. (2)   These are generally social media posts, exalting in Kirk’s assassination in a way similar to how my former classmate rejoiced over Dobson’s death.  In the news media, progressive commentators have made remarks to the effect that Kirk brought it on himself by the views he held and expressed.  Matthew Dowd, for example, said that Kirk’s “hate speech” had brought about “hateful actions” which remark itself brought about Dowd’s termination as a commentator on MSNBC.

 

You would think that liberals and leftists would take a break from accusing others of “hate speech” for basically saying things, usually true, about groups they think should be protected from criticism, when in the act of making remarks that essentially excuse a murder.  You would be wrong. 

 

I am not going to pretend that I was a big fan of Charlie Kirk.  The principle of de mortuis nil nisi does not require that. I agreed with him on most of the issues the liberals and the left hated him over – he was anti-abortion and anti-birth control, pro-gun, anti-CRT and DEI (Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), etc.  He had all the qualities, however, that I had found obnoxious and grating in American Republicans even before the MAGA movement degenerated into a deranged personality cult.

 

One of the more obnoxious of those qualities was the assumption that everyone was either an American Republican or some kind of liberal, leftist or progressive.  Watching the disgusting manner in which people in the latter categories have been celebrating Kirk’s murder makes me all the more glad that this assumption is entirely baseless and false.  As a Canadian who finds the thought of his country become further Americanized utterly repugnant and as a dyed-in-the-wool monarchist and royalist I could never have any sympathy with American Republicanism but I have far less sympathy with the kind of politics that teaches people to be so totally devoid of class as to celebrate the deaths of their political opponents.  Liberalism and leftism are beneath contempt.

 

I direct any liberal or leftist who may have come across this essay to the poem by John Donne from which the title has been borrowed.   The third and final is the operative stanza. Now let us conclude with the traditional Requiem prayer for the late James Dobson and Charlie Kirk.  Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

 

 

 

 (1)   The culture war itself, and the expression “culture war”, had both been around much longer, but it was in the early 1990s that the expression became attached to the thing itself as a kind of semi-official label.

(2)   https://x.com/libsoftiktok

This Fifth of November

 

Today is the Fifth of November, which means that it is Guy Fawkes Day, the day to remember the nefarious Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which seditious recusants conspired to blow up King James I (VI of Scotland) as he opened the next session of Parliament with a speech from the throne in the House of Lords.  The plot was foiled when Guy Fawkes was discovered guarding the gunpowder, King James went on to reign for another twenty years in which with his authorization an English translation of the Bible that has never been surpassed was produced, and ever since effigies of Fawkes have been made and burned on the bonfires celebrating the defeat of the plot.

 

It is also the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.  Which means that our small-r republican neighbours to the south will be deciding today whether they want a big-R Republican or a big-D Democrat for their next president.  George Wallace used to say that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between the two.  If that is still true today, there doesn’t seem to be many Americans who think so because their country is more polarized today than at any point since the election of their first big-R Republican president sparked the powder keg that blew up into the internecine war that remains to this day the bloodiest in their history.

 

I don’t really have a dog in this fight.  For one thing, I am a Canadian not an American.  For another, I don’t believe in elected heads of state.  I am of the firm conviction that earthly governments should represent the government of the universe in Heaven which is headed by the King of Kings.  All republics, democracies, and presidents are therefore illegitimate in my opinion.   

 

If someone were to ask me which of the two candidates I like better as an individual person and which of the two has, in my opinion, the better ideas and policies, my answer to both questions would be Donald the Orange.  There is not really any contest there.  The Democratic candidate, currently J. Brandon Magoo’s vice-president, belongs to the category of politician that I despise the most.  Lest you think that to be a comment on her sex or skin colour, I will add that our own much loathed prime minister, Captain Airhead, who is white, at least on the rare occasion when he is not wearing blackface, and male, or so I am told, belongs to the same category.  That is the category of empty-headed, arrogant, jackasses who like to boast about how much more compassionate and caring they and their sycophants are than everybody else while doing their worst to screw the largest number of people over, who are endlessly apologizing for the sins of those who have gone before them while never acknowledging any wrongdoing on their own part, and who attach themselves to every radical fad manufactured by academia or the mass media, no matter how inane.  Liberals.  Progressives.  Leftists.  I can’t stomach any of them, and to be clear that this is not a partisan matter, even though the party Captain Airhead leads is entitled “Liberal,” I am referring to small-l liberals who can be found in every party.  While Donald the Orange is a liberal too, his liberalism is the liberalism of fifty years ago, and liberalism has been getting consistently and progressively worse each generation ever since the start of the Modern Age.

 

I am not going to venture a predication as to the outcome.  Under ordinary circumstances I would say we will know the results tomorrow.  The precedent of the last American presidential election, however, advises against saying any such thing.

 

God Save the King.

The False Climate Religion

 

Through science, technology, and industry we have achieved a very high standard of living, measured in terms of material prosperity, in Western Civilization since the beginning of the Modern Age and especially the last two centuries.    Prosperity in itself is not a bad thing.   We have a tendency, however, in our fallen sinfulness to respond to prosperity inappropriately.   The inappropriate way to respond to prosperity is to look at it with self-satisfaction, thinking that it is due entirely and only to our own effort and ingenuity, and to forget God, from Whom all blessings flow, as the doxology says.  There is a lot of sin in this attitude, especially the sin of ingratitude.   This sin is an invitation to God to take away His blessings and curse us instead.     It is a sin of which we have been most guilty as a civilization.   That we have been so guilty and have forgotten our God is evident in how we now refer to ourselves as Western Civilization rather than Christendom – Christian Civilization.

 

The appropriate thing for us to do would be to repent.   These familiar words were spoken by the Lord to King Solomon on the occasion of the completion and consecration of the Temple but the message contained within them is one that we would do well to apply to ourselves today:

 

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. (2 Chron. 7:14)

 

Now, imagine a man who in his prosperity becomes self-satisfied and forgets God.   His conscience keeps nagging at him but unwilling to humble himself, pray, seek God, and repent, he misinterprets his guilty feelings and concludes that his prosperity is the problem and not his ingratitude and his having forgotten God.   In an attempt to assuage this misdirected guilt, he decides to sacrifice his prosperity to an idol.   He does so, however, in such a way, that it is his children more than himself who end up suffering.

 

What ought we to think of such a man?   Does he deserve commendation for trying to make things right, albeit in an ill-informed and ineffective way?   Or does he deserve rebuke for piling further errors and sins upon his initial sin of forgetting God?

 

“Thou art the man” as the prophet Nathan said to King David in 2 Samuel 12:7 after telling a story that prompted the king to unknowingly condemn himself in the affair of Bathsheba.   Or rather, we all “art the man”.   For this is precisely what we as a civilization have done or are in the process of doing.

 

For centuries, ever since the start of the Modern Age, Western Civilization has been turning its back on its heritage from Christendom.   Indeed, the conversion of the Christian civilization of Christendom into the secular civilization of the West could be said to have been the ultimate goal of liberalism, the spirit that drove the Modern Age, all along.   The liberal project and the Modern Age were more or less complete with the end of the Second World War and since that time Westerners have been abandoning the Church and her God in droves.    In the same post-World War II era we have reaped the harvest in material prosperity sown through centuries of scientific discoveries.   These were made possible because at the dawn of Modern science people still believed in the God Who created the world and that therefore there is order in the world He created to be discovered.   This is the basis of all true scientific discovery.

 

Collectively, we feel guilty for abandoning God, but we have not been willing, at least not yet, to return to Him on a civilizational scale.   Sensing that we have incurred divine displeasure, but not willing to admit to ourselves that our apostasy from Christianity and forgetting the True and Living God is the problem, we have instead blamed our material prosperity and the means by which we attained it.   By means, I don’t mean science, which we have been so far unwilling to blame because we have transferred our faith in God onto it and turned it into an idol, but rather our industry, aided and enhanced by science.    

 

Just as we have transferred our guilt for having forgotten God in our material prosperity onto the industry that we put into attaining that prosperity, which so laden with transferred guilt we usually call capitalism after the name godless left-wing philosophers and economists gave to human industry when they bogeyfied it in their efforts to promote their Satanic alternative, socialism, the institutionalization of the Deadly Sin of Envy, so we have transferred the sense of impending judgement from God for abandoning Him, onto industry.   We have done this by inventing the crackpot idea that such things as burning fuels to heat our homes in winter, cook our food and get about from place to place, and even raising livestock to feed ourselves, are releasing too much carbon dioxide, methane, etc. into the atmosphere and that this is leading to an impending man-made climate apocalypse in which temperatures rise (or plummet depending on which false prophet of doom is talking), polar ice caps melt, the coasts are inundated from rising sea levels, and extreme weather events increase in frequency and intensity. 

 

To prevent this climactic apocalypse, we have convinced ourselves, we must appease the pagan nature deities we have offended with sacrifice.   We must sacrifice our efficient gasoline-powered vehicles and agree to drive ridiculously expensive electric vehicles, even when travelling long distance in Canada in the dead of winter.   We must sacrifice heating our homes in winter and grow accustomed to wearing enough layers to make Eskimoes look like Hawaiian hula girls in comparison indoors all winter long.   We must sacrifice the hope of affordable living and watch the cost of everything go up and up and up.   We must sacrifice the future of the generations who will come after us

 

Those of us who express skepticism towards all this are mocked as “science deniers” even though this new false religion is not scientific in the slightest.   Carbon dioxide, which is to plant life what oxygen is to ours, treated as a pollutant?   The seas rising from all that floating ice melting?   You would have to have failed elementary school science to accept this nonsense.   It is certainly incredible to anyone with a basic knowledge of history and who grasps the concept of cause and effect.   The Little Ice Age ended in the middle of the nineteenth century.   When an Ice Age ends a warming period begins.   This is one of the causes of the boom in human industry at the end of the Modern Age, not its effect.   It is a good thing too, for humans, animals, plants and basically all life on earth, because live thrives more in warmer periods than colder ones.  Anyone who isn’t a total airhead knows this.

 

Speaking of total airheads, Captain Airhead, whose premiership here in the Dominion of Canada was already too old in the afternoon of his first day in office, has been using that office as a pulpit to preach this false climate religion for the duration of the time he has been in it.   Recently, in response to his popularity having plunged lower than the Judecca, he granted a three year exemption on his carbon tax for those who heat their homes with oil, which, as it turns out, benefits Liberal voters in Atlantic Canada and hardly anyone else.   Faced with demands from across Canada that he grant further exemptions, he has so far resisted, and with the help of the Lower Canadian separatists, defeated the Conservative motion in the House, backed by the socialists, for a general home heating exemption.   Hopefully this will speed his departure and the day we can find a better Prime Minister to lead His Majesty’s government in Ottawa.  The point, of course, is that by granting even that partial exemption, for nakedly political purposes, Captain Airhead by his actions admitted what he still denies with his words, that the world is not facing imminent destruction because of too much carbon dioxide.

 

Captain Airhead’s climate religion and its doomsday scenario have been proven false let us turn to the words of St. Peter and hearing what the true religion has to say about the coming judgement:

 

But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.  Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?  Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.   Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless.  (2 Peter 3:7-14)

 

It may be today, it may be a thousand years from now, we don’t know, but when God has appointed it to happen, it will happen, and there is nothing we can do that will prevent it.   Instead of trying to do the impossible, prevent it, we should rather prepare ourselves for it, by doing what the Apostle recommends in the above passage, the avoidance of which is as we have seen, the source of this false climate religion.   For if we turn back in repentance to the God we have forgotten, we can look forward to His coming again in fiery judgement with faith and hope and peace and sing, in the words of gospel songwriter Jim Hill:

 

What a day that will be
When my Jesus I shall see
And I look upon his face
The one who saved me by his grace
When he takes me by the hand
And leads me through the Promised Land
What a day, glorious day that will be!

 

 

 

  

 

Toxic Niceness and the Corruption of Contemporary Christianity

 The Modern Age, the zeitgeist of which has long been known as liberalism, has driven the wedge of secularism between much of the society, culture(s) and civilization of what was once Christendom and the Christian faith and religion.    If the influence of liberalism extended only to the temporal this would be bad enough but it has permeated the Christian Churches and sects as well.   Over the last century and a half the word liberal developed a special connotation in the Churches and sects where it denoted people who saw the narratives of the Bible as belonging to the same category as Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales, that is to say, stories valued for their utility in teaching life lessons to children rather than for their truth, people who saw no inconsistency in calling themselves Christians and going to church every Sunday even though they did not believe in the supernatural assertions made about Jesus Christ in the ancient Creeds.   Liberals, in the theological sense, often cloaked their unbelief in ways they thought were clever.   For example, they would say that they believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ “in the sense” that He lived on in the hearts of His followers.   This meant that they did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ as that phrase had been understood by everyone from the Apostles through the middle of the nineteenth century, i.e., that Jesus Christ, after He had been crucified and buried, returned to life in His body, left the Tomb, and walked and talked among His disciples again, before ascending physically to Heaven.   Perhaps the theological liberals thought that those who continued to hold to this traditional belief in this traditional understanding were so much less sophisticated than themselves that they, the traditionalists, would never catch on to how this re-interpretation of the event made their profession of belief into one of unbelief.   If so, theological liberals are well-named for that is the same attitude that more generic liberals take to non-liberals in general. 

 

In his Christianity and Liberalism (1923), J. Gresham Machen, then Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, contrasted traditional, orthodox, Christianity with theological liberalism and drew the inescapable conclusion that they are two separate religions.   This same assessment was more recently asserted by retired Anglican priest Rev. George Eves in the title of his Two Religions, One Church.   Indeed, it has long been a bit of a puzzle as to why liberals continue to see themselves as belonging to the Christian faith.   A partial answer can be found by considering the matter in terms of the Aristotelian distinction between essence and accidents.    Orthodox or conservative Christians consider the articles of faith in the ancient Creeds to be the essence of Christianity.   This is true even of conservative Protestants who belong to non-liturgical, non-sacramental, sects who might shudder at that wording as being too “Catholic” for their liking.   The doctrines that they regard as essentials or fundamentals of Christianity rather than distinctions of their denominations are ones that either can be found as articles in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds or which express the basic unspoken belief underlying the Creeds that the Christian Scriptures are authoritative special revelation from God.   Fundamentalism, for example, in its original form - an inter-denominational co-operative effort of conservatives fighting the encroaching liberalism - identified “five fundamentals” as being particularly under attack by liberalism at the time and as forming a basis for their contra-liberal ecumenical efforts.   Originally taken from a 1910 Presbyterian declaration, these have been formulated in a myriad of ways, each slightly different from the others, but basically, the first is a strongly worded affirmation of Scriptural authority, usually using words like inspiration or inerrancy, and the other four are affirmations about Jesus Christ all of which can be found in the articles of the Creeds – usually His deity, Virgin Birth, Resurrection, and Second Coming.  This can be criticized from a more conservative or orthodox position as being too reductionist – the Apostles’ Creed, the simplest of the ancient Creeds, famously consists of twelve articles, one for each of the men from whom its title is derived – but my point is that conservatives, whether traditionalist or “fundamentalist”, all recognize the articles that make up what we call “the faith” as essential to Christianity.  Liberals, by contrast, see all such articles of faith more as Aristotelean accidents, external trappings that can be discarded without altering the essence of Christianity.

 

The conservatives, obviously, are right.   One of the things that has made Christianity distinct among the religions of the world from the very beginning is that Christianity, more than any other religion, is a faith, a community held together by a set of common beliefs and defined by those beliefs.   This is true even if we limit the comparison to the monotheistic religions that look to Abraham as a spiritual patriarch.   What is believed is and always has been far more important to Christianity than to either Judaism or Islam.   It is ludicrous therefore to take that which has historically defined Christianity and make it out to be her disposable outward trappings rather than her very essence.   It becomes even more ludicrous when we turn to the question that necessarily arises out of this observation about liberalism, the question of what they regard as the essence of Christianity, if they see the articles of faith as her accidents.

 

The answer, of course, is that for liberals it is Christianity’s ethical or moral message that is her essence.   Note that the first obvious immediate effect of making Christianity into an ethical message cloaked in the external trappings of a supernatural belief system is to radically decrease the difference between Christianity and other religions.   This is so for two reasons.   The first is that which we have already observed about Christianity being distinct from other religions, even the other Abrahamic monotheistic religions, in prioritizing belief.   In Christianity what is believed comes first, what is done comes second.  In every other religion what is done takes precedence over what is believed.   A theory of Christianity that makes her ethical message her essence and her article of faith her accidents eliminates this distinction.   The other reason is that Christianity’s ethical message has never been her most distinctive element.   In explanation, let us start by limiting the comparison to the Abrahamic monotheistic religions and more narrowly to Christianity and Judaism.   In His ethical teachings, that is to say, His teachings that pertained to how people were to behave and live their lives, Jesus Christ taught the Mosaic Law as an absolutely authoritative text.    While this is often missed by those who superficially read the “ye have heard it said…but I say unto ye” contrasts in His most famous Sermon and gloss over the warning He gave at the beginning not to take His words as contradicting and setting aside the Mosaic Law, it is nevertheless the case.   The difference between the ethical teachings of Christianity and the ethical teachings of Judaism could be said to be the difference between the Mosaic Law as taught and interpreted by Jesus Christ and the Mosaic law as taught and interpreted by the rabbis (originally the lay teachers of Pharisees, a sect within Second Temple Judaism the clergy of which were the Levitical priests, these took on a more clerical role in post-Temple Judaism).   Without wanting to make this difference less than it actually is, for most of the last two thousand years had you told either Jews or Christians that the most important and essential differences between the teachings of their two religions lay in the realm of ethics they would have thought you belonged in a nut house.   Broadening the comparison, while certainly instances can be pointed to where different religions take opposing positions on particular ethical issues, a good case can be made that of all the different areas that religious teachings address this is the one where they have the most in common.   See the appendix to C. S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man (1943).

 

That liberalism’s making  Christianity’s ethical teachings into her essence and her articles of faith into her accidents radically reduces the difference between Christianity and other religions is something that is appalling to Christians who believe in Him Who said “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” and of Whom St. Peter said by the power of of the Holy Ghost “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” but appealing to religious liberals qua liberals.   Liberalism, not just religious liberalism but liberalism in general, has long been obsessed with the idea that it can create a better world in which all people live in peace and harmony and that differences between people – originally and especially religious, but also differences of race, ethnicity, sex, etc. – are stumbling blocks on the path to this man-made Paradise that they need to clear out of the road.   Even today’s “woke” left, which on the surface seems like a movement deliberately trying to do the opposite of this, to create a world of disharmony and strife by magnifying said differences to the nth degree, is, in fact, another variation on this same liberal theme, one that is distinguished by the tactic it shares with Nazism and Communism of othering and scapegoating, of placing all the blame for disharmony and strife and basically the world being anything other than an earthly Paradise on specific groups, religious (Christians), racial (whites), etc.

 

Liberalism, as argued three paragraphs ago, is wrong that Christianity’s ethical teachings are her essence rather than her articles of faith.   This error is compounded by the fact that religious liberalism’s ethical teachings are radically different from what Christianity has taught about ethics and morals for the last two thousand years.   Liberalism explains this by claiming that Jesus Christ’s original ethical teachings were corrupted by His disciples and especially by the Apostle Paul into something that conformed more closely to those of Judaism and/or the Greek philosophers.   The only historical evidence we have, however, is of the Jesus Whose teachings as recorded in the Gospels harmonize with those of St. Paul in his epistles, and not of the hypothetical Jesus with radically different teachings postulated by liberalism.

 

Exactly what liberalism claims the “true” ethical teachings of Jesus were has changed over the course of the century and a half that religious liberalism has been afflicting the denominations of Christianity.   Generally, however, the values of the ethical teachings of religious liberalism’s “historical Jesus" line up closely with those espoused and promoted by political liberalism at any given moment in time.   This has remained constant, even though the values that political and religious liberalism promote together frequently change.   There is one other constant, however, and that is the idea that Jesus’s teachings essentially boil down to “be nice to each other”.  

 

This particular idea requires special attention because a) it has spread beyond the kind of religious liberalism described above and can be found espoused even by some who would usually be considered conservative or orthodox and b) it correlates with a problematic phenomenon in the broader society.   This is the phenomenon in which such an exaggerated value is placed on such things as being positive and non-confrontational, always smiling and acting cheerful, and the like, that they either a) hinder or outright prevent a host of other things of equal or superior value, such as truth and honesty or b) serve as an outward, superficial, mask of thoughtfulness towards others behind which those who are exceptionally self-centered and who delight in controlling and/or hurting others hide.    Feminist writers – I think that Elizabeth Hilts, the author of a series of books giving exceptionally bad advice to women was probably the first – have been referring to this phenomenon as it pertains to the first of the two identified drawbacks at least insofar as it affects women as “toxic niceness” for decades.   Such writers, in my opinion, speak from the perspective of a repugnant solipsism that tends to blind them from seeing anything outside the perceived victimhood of their own sex and which renders their idea of which truths are suppressed by excessive niceness highly inaccurate.   Nevertheless, since the phenomenon is real and affects both sexes rather than merely the one, we shall borrow their term for it as a better one could hardly be coined.   We shall concentrate, however, on the second drawback.

 

That toxic niceness, this cult of excessive and unbalanced positivity, can serve as a cloak of hypocrisy over a particularly vicious form of nastiness is quite evident.    Indeed, it is almost axiomatic to say that the sort of people who are always acting upbeat, who always wear a big smile plastered on their faces, who try never to say anything that isn’t positive turn out, if you get to know them at all, to be the biggest jerks and jackasses.   Who is not familiar with the kind of person who smiles and acts like your best friend to your face but who stabs you the moment your back is turned?   Or the sort of person who never confronts anybody, who never goes to someone and says “Hey, I have a problem with what you just said/did”, and who may sometimes go around bragging about what a non-confrontational person he is, but who is constantly running with complaints about everyone to those in positions of power and authority as fast as his tale can tattle.   

 

Here in the Dominion of Canada we have in recent decades allowed toxic niceness to permeate the culture to the point that we are all suffocating from it.   My province calls itself “friendly Manitoba”, an expression that can be found on the license plates of our automobiles.   Yet Winnipeg, the city in which I live is a city in which it is notoriously difficult to change lanes when you need to do so because other drivers will speed up or slow down – whichever it takes – to prevent you from doing so.   Just last week I heard a radio station, I forget which one, in which an advertisement referred to our city as the place where turn signals are optional.  In Winnipeg, if you signal that you need to change lanes and there are vehicles behind you, they will immediately pull into the lane you wish to move into and speed up – all without signaling themselves – so that you either have to aggressively beat them into the lane or wait for them all to pass you, even if this means missing your turn or illegally brining your car to a stop in the middle of the street.    This is one of the most inconsiderate, jerkish, ways of driving that can be conceived short of something criminal and cartoonish like driving down the sidewalk and stamping out a tally of the number of pedestrians you knock down on the side of your car.   Yet it is typical of the drivers in the capital of “friendly Manitoba”.   This example is topped, however, by that of the current Prime Minister of Canada who could be said to be the poster boy for toxic niceness.   He won his first election on a platform of empty positivity which he contrasted with the supposed negativity of the previous government.   He borrowed the phrase “sunny ways” from Sir Wilfred Laurier as his motto.   He carefully crafted this image of a smiling, upbeat, positive person who is all about caring and listening and being inclusive.   Beneath it all, however, he quickly proved to be a truly nasty jerk and bully, a real υἱός τῆς κῠνός with an abnormally low level of toleration for those who disagree with him, who saw the caring and compassion of other Canadians as a means for him to exploit to rob Canadians of their basic civil rights and liberties and seize more power for himself.

 

These examples from the broader culture and society show how beneath an excessive emphasis on being nice the worst sorts of nastiness can be hiding.   What is true of toxic niceness in the broader culture is also true, perhaps even more so, of the reduction of Christianity or at least her ethical message to the idea that we ought to “be nice”.  

 

How anyone ever got the idea that Christianity was all about being nice is beyond me.   Those who use the word “Christlike” as if it were a synonym for “nice” are especially befuddling.   Have they never read the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew in which the dear Lord gives a harangue, almost the length of the chapter, directed against the scribes and Pharisees in which He repeatedly calls them “hypocrites” “fools” “brood of vipers” and the like, likens them to “whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness” and threatens them with hellfire and damnation?   Ironically, if any of the sort of people I have in mind were to hear anyone today talk like this the first thing they would say would be that he is not being very “Christlike”.   It does not seem from this chapter that being nice was top priority with the Lord Jesus.   Nor would the incident recorded two chapters previously in which, having arrived at the Temple after His Triumphal Entry, He overturned the tables of the moneychangers and dove merchants and drove them all out (St. John in his Gospel records a similar incident that took place prior to the start of Jesus’ preaching ministry in which He drove the merchants out of the temple with a scourge) suggest that following Jesus’ example means being nice all the time.

 

Jesus did not tell His disciples to be nice, a word that does not appear in the Authorized Bible and which in other versions appears only in the Old Testament in reference to things, words, and situations rather than people.   Indeed, the very appeal of niceness to so many today, whether they be professing Christians or just members of the broader society, is that unlike those things which Jesus did enjoin upon His disciples, such as a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 5:20) and to love one another (Jn. 13:34), niceness is neither difficult nor does it cost its practitioner anything.   It is the ideal virtue for the virtue signaler, the sort of person who likes to go around showing off how good of a person he is with cheap, shallow, and empty forms of goodness that either come with no cost or have a cost that he can easily export to others, in order to gain the praise, credit, and applause of other people.   The sort of person, in other words, who does the same thing Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for doing in Matthew 23:4-5.

 

When He comes again in His glory to judge both the quick and the dead, what will He say to those who are promoting toxic niceness in His name?

The Left Abandons Liberalism

A criticism that I have frequently made of mainstream conservatives is that they no longer stand for anything with which Modern liberals would not wholeheartedly agree and which in many if not most cases was originally a liberal idea.   I most recently made this criticism in my annual essay for New Year’s Day explaining my own views, which I prefer to call Tory, because they stress affirmation of institutions such as royal monarchy and the Church as well as beliefs such as the orthodox Christianity of the Apostles’ Creed and ideas which go back to ancient times and predate Modern liberalism.   I have never meant by this criticism that the things for which conservatives still stand are bad in themselves, merely that there are other, older things, which are more important and ought to be recognized as such by those who wish to distinguish themselves from liberals.     This distinction is a very important one because without it, criticism of contemporary conservatism for making its focus primarily or entirely the defence of ideas that have their origins in liberalism could be construed as suggesting that every idea that liberals have ever had is wrong or bad.   Liberalism, I would say, has been wrong a lot more often than it has been willing to admit, has been very wrong in generally regarding itself as immune to the sort of analytic criticism it levels against its rivals, and most wrong in its assumption that there was little to no worth in anything that was around prior to itself.   To say that it was always wrong about everything, however, is to commit the equal and opposite error to that greatest of liberalism’s errors, and the events that have unfolded south of the border since Epiphany illustrate just how erroneous it is.   That which is called “the Left” sprang historically from the same sources as liberalism – the Puritan revolt against the orthodox Church of England and the Stuart monarchy, Modern philosophical rationalism, Kantianism, to name but three – and through much of their history the Left and liberalism have walked similar paths, so much so that in many periods, including that of my youth, their names have been used interchangeably as if they were completely identical.   Last week, however, the Left revealed just how much it has parted ways from historical liberalism.   It would appear that there is now not the slightest vestige of liberalism lingering within it, merely the totalitarianism that had previously reared its head in the Cromwellian Protectorate, the French Reign of Terror, and in every state unfortunate enough to be taken over by the Bolsheviks.   Utterly illiberal, it tolerates no divergence from its thought and mercilessly persecutes all who dissent.

 

The word liberal is derived from the Latin adjective liberalis.   My pocket Collins  Latin Dictionary defines this word as meaning “of freedom, of free citizens, gentlemanly, honourable, generous, liberal; handsome”.   Turning to Charlton Lewis and Charles Short for a more extensive definition I find that they begin by relating the word to the shorter root adjective liber (long i, with a short i it becomes the noun meaning book) and thus gives as its first meaning “of or belonging to freedom, relating to the freeborn condition of a man”.  The second definition is “befitting a freeman, gentlemanly, noble, noble-minded, honourable, ingenuous, gracious, kind.”   I will not cite all the sub definitions given for the second, just B. 1., which is “Bountiful, generous, munificent, liberal”.

 

The short version of all of that is that for the ancient Romans, the adjective liberalis first designated the condition of being free rather than a slave, and in its secondary connotations denoted the kind of character and behaviour that the Romans saw as being appropriate to someone with free status, e.g., graciousness, kindness and generosity.   Before it came to be used as a political label the English word liberal was pretty much an approximation of its Latin ancestor.   This gives us something of an idea of what those who originally applied this term to themselves as a political designation must have thought of themselves.    Frankly, I am of the opinion that they thought far too highly of themselves and this term is singularly inappropriate for the heirs of the religious fanatics who murdered King Charles I, outlawed Christmas, stripped the Churches of artwork and music, shut down the theatres, and imposed Sabbatarian restrictions so severe that they would have made the Pharisees of old blush and of the Manchester plutocrats who enclosed the commons, legalized usury, and drove the peasants from the countryside into the cities to subsist on servile labour in ugly, smelly, factories.   To be fair, a similar analysis of the Latin root of conservative would suggest that in its political usage it refers to everything those so designated have failed to accomplish.

 

That having been said, there is much to appreciate in the ideas put forward in the book which more-or-less defined liberalism when it was at its best in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.   No, I am not referring to John Locke’s Two Treatises, which in its response to Sir Robert Filmer provides us with what is perhaps the earliest example of mere contradiction being taken for refutation or debunking, the phenomenon that has become the working principle of news and social media “fact checkers”.   Locke’s book contains only one worthy idea and no, it is not his bastardization of Thomas Hobbes’ concepts of the “state of nature” and “social contract” but his idea of the basic rights of life, liberty, and property.  This, however, as Sir William Blackstone later demonstrated, was present in Common Law long before Locke.   The book that I am talking about is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859).   It is an argument for the need for restrictions and limitations on government to protect the freedom of the governed.   While it contains much historical nonsense and Mill makes the repugnant false ethic of utilitarianism the entire foundation of his argument, a great deal of what he says about freedom and limited government has merit.   Freedom of thought or opinion, Mill argued, was the most fundamental freedom of all, and attempts to suppress opinions, even ones that are entirely false, by limiting freedom of speech, are always bad.

 

Clearly, the present day Left is light years removed from Mill on this matter.

 

That this is the case has been evident for quite some time.   For decades the Left has favoured legislation prohibiting what it calls “hate speech”.   “Hate speech”, as the Left uses it, has never meant speech that actually expresses hatred, such as, most obviously, “I hate you”.   Indeed, there has never been a “hate speech” law passed to the best of my knowledge under which someone could be charged for saying “I hate you”.   What the Left means by “hate speech” is speech that they consider to be “racist” or “anti-Semitic” or “anti-immigrant” or “xenophobic” or “sexist” or “homophobic” or “transphobic” or characterized by any other such weaponized word that they have coined to refer to ideas and opinions with which they disagree.   The Left considers “hate speech” to be a form of violence and supports this contention by comparing it to incitement.   There is no substance to this argument, however, because “hate speech” laws do not merely commit the redundancy of prohibiting people from explicitly suggesting, encouraging, or calling for violent action towards the groups they wish to protect which sort of thing was already covered by existing incitement laws that were are far superior to “hate speech” laws because they protect everybody and not just select groups.   Rather, they prohibit the communication of information and opinions, whether true or false, that reflect negatively on protected groups in a way that might, possibly, inspire someone to commit a criminal act against them.   For all their denials – “hate speech is not free speech” – their support for this kind of legislation is clearly a rejection of Mill’s case against the suppression of thought and opinion and an embrace of a form of thought control, one which has only gotten more totalitarianism since the Left first proposed it.

 

Although this is directly related to another way in which the Left has left liberalism behind, that is, in its abandonment of the arguments against racism, especially of the de jure discrimination type, which became prevalent about sixty years ago and which were grounded in liberalism in favour of an aggressive “anti-racism” that is actually itself racism against white people, I wish to devote an entire essay to this point and shall defer further discussion of it until that time.  What I would like to point out now is how the Left has expanded the flawed reasoning by which it equates speech it considers to be “racist”, “sexist”, etc. with violence into all-purpose argument for suppressing any information and opinions which contradict its own narratives.

 

In the aftermath of what transpired in Washington DC on Epiphany, the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives in the United States has for a second time voted for Articles of Impeachment against the current president of the American republic, a man whom the Left hates like it has hated no other political leader before him.    Last time, they accused him of colluding with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.   This time, they are accusing him of inciting an insurrection by claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him.    Tempting as it is to focus on the glaring hypocrisy, especially since insurrection more accurately describes the BLM riots that the Democrats and the Left in general have turned a blind eye to or endorsed out of their refusal to accept Trump’s election of four years prior, the point is to be found in the fact that in nothing Donald the Orange said, either on social media or in the address he gave to the throngs who showed up to the massive rally before the Washington Monument to show their support, was there anything that could legitimately be considered incitement.   Not when incitement is understood, as it traditionally has been, to take the form of “I want you to do X” with X being some form of violent or criminal behaviour.   The Left here is applying the same kind of bad reasoning that underlies its support for prohibiting “hate speech” – “saying Y about Z could make someone angry against Z and if someone is angry against Z he might turn violent against Z, therefore saying Y about Z should be considered the equivalent of indictment and banned” to justify suppression of a completely different kind of opinion.  

 

The Big Tech companies that control the largest social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, marching in step with the Democrats – or rather it was more like the other way around – threw the President of the United States of America off their platforms, using the same faulty justification, and then proceeded to purge their platforms of thousands of his supporters as well.   Then, having basically told thousands of people “if you don’t like our rules, go to our competitors”, they immediately proceeded to attempt to drive those competitors, such as Twitter competitor Parler, out of business.  When the internet first went online, many had seen it as a way of escaping the near monopoly on the sharing of information that the Left, which already dominated the major news and entertainment media corporations, possessed.   Now, however, with Big Tech controlling most of the platforms that people have come to regard as a kind of public forum, aligning itself with the Left, purging its platforms of those who dissent from the Left and ruthlessly eliminating competitors that allow for more freedom of thought, the Left is seeking to make its control on the sharing of information and opinion absolute and total.

 

Clearly, the Left has completely abandoned the liberalism of men like J. S. Mill in substance and spirit, and if it continues to maintain any sort of outward pretense of liberalism, it will be out of either sheer hypocrisy or an utter lack of self-awareness.

 

As many problems as there are with a conservatism that offers nothing but (classical) liberalism, it is to be preferred a billion times over a Left in which nothing of liberalism, neither its freedom nor the generosity and munificence to which it seems to have aspired in naming itself liberal, remains.

The White Inferiority Complex

 

For decades, hurling the epithet “racist” was the liberal’s go-to method of acknowledging anyone who disagreed with him from a standpoint somewhere to his right. In this same period this method served its purpose of discouraging disagreement with progressive liberalism well. Those who belonged to the mainstream of whatever was considered to be conservatism at the time, which was generally what had been considered liberalism a decade or so earlier, were, for some reason that has never really been explained, particularly sensitive to this accusation, and every time the liberal used this dreaded word they would rush to be the first to throw whoever was on the receiving end of the accusation under the bus. 

Eventually, however, this word lost most of its bite. It had simply been used too often and against too many people. When everyone is a racist, nobody is a racist, and people stop caring when you call somebody a racist. While it made something of a comeback this year, when used with the modifier “systemic”, for a few years now it has been largely replaced in liberal usage with “white supremacist.”

By trading the worn out “racist” for the fresh “white supremacist”, liberals exchanged an insult that had lost most of its meaning through overuse for one that was more powerful than the original had ever been, but in doing so they made themselves look absurd. For one thing white supremacist has a much narrower range of meaning than racist, with connotations of ideology, zeal, commitment, and activism that the word racist does not. There are very few actual white supremacists left and when liberals try to use this expression in the way they used to use racist they invite ridicule upon themselves. 

There is another aspect to the absurdity of the charge of white supremacism being flung around like so much monkey excrement. It is quite evident to anybody with open eyes that if any sort of bad racial thought presently infests the minds of the white people of Western Civilization it is not a sense of superiority over others, much less a feeling of supremacy over others, but rather a sort of inferiority complex. 

What other explanation can there be for the fact that even though the United States, after its Supreme Court abolished all de jure discrimination against blacks, established de jure discrimination against whites in 1964, and Canada, the United Kingdom, and all other Western countries decided to follow this foolish American precedent, and for over a generation anti-white discrimination has been the only established racism in Western Civilization, nevertheless white people have been willing to affirm the proposition that Western countries are “white supremacist” and that they therefore enjoy “privilege” on the basis of their skin colour? 

How else do we explain all the white people who are enthusiastic supporters of Black Lives Matter? BLM, despite the organization’s innocuous if also truistic and banal name, is not about a positive agenda of promoting the security and well-being of black people. Abortion rates have been disproportionately high among black people for decades, but BLM couldn’t care less about all the black lives lost to abortion. They are, in fact, allied to the pro-abortion, feminist cause. Nor does BLM care about all the black lives taken by black perpetrators of violent crime. Blacks are overrepresented among both the perpetrators and the victims of violent crime in general, which has been the case for as long as statistics have been kept about this sort of thing and shows no sign of ceasing to be the case any time soon, and this overrepresentation is even larger for homicide. The inevitable and natural corollary of this is that blacks are also overrepresented among crime suspects, arrests, convictions, and incarcerations. The black lives lost to black crime are not black lives that matter to BLM. BLM cares only about blaming the overrepresentation of blacks among suspects, arrests, etc., on the racism of white police. For this is what BLM is truly about – spreading hatred of police officers, Western Civilization in general but with a focus on the United States, and especially of white people. 

It makes about as much sense, therefore, for white people to support BLM as it would for black people to go around wearing white robes with pointy hoods. Yet this year, in which BLM has, ahem, removed its mask and revealed its true colours like never before, it would have been difficult not to notice the prominent participation of whites in the record-breaking wave of race riots and the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoist assault on historical monuments and statues. That is even without taking into account the lionizers of BLM and its cause among white newspaper and television commentators, white university professors, white clergymen, white corporate executives, white celebrities, and white politicians. 

There is a name for this sort of inferiority complex. It is called liberalism. While there are many different liberalisms with many different meanings, the one that I have in mind here is that of the liberal whom Robert Frost defined as “a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Although I must say that when the poet penned that worthy diagnosis it probably never occurred to him that the disease would progress to the point where those infected actively take up arms against their own side. 

This, however, is the stage of the condition in which we find ourselves today and it may very well prove to be the terminal stage. 

Today, whether they seriously believe it to be true or not, a sizeable portion of whites are willing to affirm that racism is a moral offence for which light-skinned people of European ancestry bear a unique guilt, that they are guilty of it even if they are not conscious of having thought a racist thought, said a racist word, or committed a racist act, that this unconscious racism supposedly built into the very fabric of society is worse than the overt racial hatred that is often directed against whites by blacks and others with an anti-white axe to grind, and that it is their moral duty, therefore, to express contrition or shame whenever any non-white person chooses to take offence at something they have said or done or merely the fact that they are living and breathing, and to ignore or excuse explicit expressions of racial animus directed against them, even when these are violent in tone. 

Western liberalism has clearly undergone a mutation from when its humanitarian and universalist ideals merely generated a blindness to the legitimate particular interests of Western nations and peoples. It now actively opposes those interests. 

Think about the implications of the ubiquitous calls to end “systemic racism.” Many, perhaps most, white people have been jumping on board this bandwagon. Perhaps they do not understand that “systemic racism” is a technical term, from neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory, and that it designates this idea of an embedded racism which all white people and only white people are guilty of whether they are conscious of racist thought and actions or not. Perhaps they think it means institutional policies and practices that explicitly discriminate on racial grounds. If the latter is what they think, however, then they are mistaken if they think that racism of this sort, other than the kind that is directed against them, exists in Western countries today. This crusade against “systemic racism” in the Critical Race Theory sense of the term can only have the result, if successful, of making the explicit discrimination against white people that has been institutionalized in all Western countries since the ‘60’s and ‘70s of the last century, worse. 

There is a far worse manifestation of this mutant strain of the liberalism virus. Taken together, a number of liberal policies that have been in place in most if not all Western countries for over four decades, constitute an existential threat to white people. One of these policies is the use of large scale immigration from non-Western countries to offset the declining fertility that has been produced by, among other factors, the anti-natalism of social liberalism’s pro-contraception, pro-abortion, views. The result of this policy having been in place for decades has been the massive demographic transformation of Western societies to the point where in several countries that in living memory were almost entirely white, whites are on the verge of dropping to minority status. When you add to this the introduction in the same time frame of the aforementioned anti-white institutional discrimination, and the vilification of whites in the news media, popular education, and the revisionist educational curriculum, what you end up with is a recipe for a sort of self-inflicted genocide. Indeed, for decades now, Critical Race Theorists such as the late Noel Ignatiev have couched their anti-white ideas in explicitly genocidal language such as “the abolition of the white race”. When called out over this they have defended their rhetoric by saying that the “white race” they are talking about is a social construct, but their arguments have a rather hollow ring to them when we consider that these people would be the first to cry genocide if the same language were used about any other race and that the activist movement that has been built upon the foundation of their theory has translated such rhetoric into even cruder terms and actions that are not so easily explained away. These same people insist that “it is okay to be white” is a dangerous and offensive racist slogan. 

Yet despite all of this, liberalism has been largely successful at convincing a large segment of the white population to regard anyone who dares to speak out against this suicidal combination of policies as being a bigger and more real threat than that combination itself. Indeed, there are several liberal organizations in North America that do nothing else except identify those who speak out against white liberalism’s racial suicide pact and wage a campaign of character assassination against them. 

Liberalism is usually wrong about everything and it is certainly wrong about this. The West does not have a “white supremacist” problem in this day and age. What it is suffering from is rather that many, perhaps most, white people have become infected with a sick-minded racial inferiority complex in which they regard their skin colour as a badge of racial guilt which can only be atoned for through racial suicide. You will be waiting a long time, however, for liberals to acknowledge this. That would mean admitting that liberalism is the problem. Liberals would sooner demonize all those who share their own skin colour than admit that liberalism could be wrong.

The Mask of the Beast

Every civilized society has laws which prohibit its members, or anyone else for that matter who happens to be within its jurisdiction, from murdering, kidnapping and raping other people and stealing, damaging, or destroying their property. These laws are universally considered to be just. I do not mean that every single person who has ever lived has agreed with this consensus. I mean that every civilized society, considered as a collective entity, has agreed with the consensus. Uncivilized societies and the forces of barbarism within civilization, such as the Marxist Critical Theorists who regard civilization itself as being fundamentally unjust and who would disagree with the laws protecting property, are obviously outside that consensus.

What is it about these laws which makes them just?

The classical liberal answer is that they can all be derived from the harm principle. In classical liberalism, that is to say eighteenth - nineteenth century liberalism, the securing of the rights and freedoms of individuals was made to be the sole purpose for the existence of the state. From that perspective, laws which by their very nature restrict the rights and freedoms of individuals, must be justified by the necessity which arises out of the harm done to others by the violation of those laws. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is the classic exposition of this theme. Unlike many twentieth and twenty-first century progressive liberals, who often give the impression of agreeing with the Marxists and other socialists on this matter, the classical liberals saw harm done to property as being harm done to the property’s owner.

While the harm principle was not entirely an invention of Mill or even of liberalism in general – what is arguably an early form of it can be found in the writings of thirteenth century Scholastic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas – its spread in the Modern Age of liberalism is indicative of a shift away from the older paradigm of thinking. In the older tradition, laws of this sort were considered just because the actions which they forbade were regarded as wicked. This meant more than just that these actions were wrong, although that was obviously included. It meant that they were sufficiently wrong to warrant suppression by the force of law. The difference between wickedness and wrongness in general pertained to both degree and kind, but with regards to the latter difference, the older tradition perceived in these acts a threat to the peace and security of the society as a whole and emphasized this over the harm done to the individual.

It could be argued that in theory, the older tradition would have less of a problem than liberalism with other laws, and more specifically with laws which are against acts which are merely mala prohibita, that is to say, bad or wrong because they are against the law, rather than mala in se – bad or wrong in themselves, regardless of the law. If, in the older tradition, the wickedness of an act which justifies its suppression by law is to be found in the threat to the peace and security of the society more than in the harm to the individual, then any violation of the law could be said to qualify as wicked because by breaking any particular law, it breaks the law as a singular whole, and the law as a singular whole is what maintains peace and security within the society. Those who read history through the lens of the Whig Interpretation, in which the events of the past are perceived as progressively moving towards greater freedom today and in the future, would be particularly inclined to accept this argument.

The reality, however, does not bear out the Whig Interpretation. The transition into the Modern Age which had liberalism as its zeitgeist, made government a much larger and more intrusive presence in the lives of the governed rather than less of one. I am not referring only to the hard totalitarian aberrations that arose out of the radical and revolutionary branches of Modern continental thought in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century. In the English-speaking liberal democracies, governments exert regulatory control over a far larger portion of people’s everyday lives today than they did prior to the English Civil War, much of the distinction between private and public spaces has been eliminated, and people have become accustomed to paying taxes at levels that are exponentially higher than what would have been considered unbearable tyranny prior to the Modern Age. In other words, by the standards with which the pre-liberal tradition measured freedom, we are much less free today than before liberalism.

In the last decades of the twentieth century those who attempted to argue against this conclusion pointed to areas in which they maintained there were far fewer restrictions on individual choice than ever before. Since this basically reduced to a single area – sexual behaviour and preferences – this argument had been rebutted before it was ever made by Aldous Huxley, in his 1932 novel Brave New World, which depicted a totalitarian world in which every individual’s life was planned out by the state from the moment of genetic engineering until death, and the state prevented people from rebelling against this total lack of freedom in all other areas of their lives – or even noticing it – by encouraging maximum sexual freedom – and providing them with ample amounts of a euphoria-inducing substance called soma. Today, we are less likely to hear this sort of argument, not so much because everybody has been persuaded by Huxley’s book as because sexual liberation has so obviously morphed into a form of totalitarianism that seeks to suppress all dissent from those who believe in more traditional mores.

I have often discussed how the noun in liberal democracy has contributed to this trend of maximizing government control and decreasing freedom. While small-r republicans like to blame kings like Henry VIII and Louis XIV for the omnipotent Modern state, and it is true that the centralization that these sovereigns introduced, by upsetting the more de-centralized feudal balance, contributed to the problem, this was made far worse when the elected assemblies usurped most of the royal powers. While Parliament as an institution that evolved in the pre-Modern era was a safeguard of freedom, the Modern abstract ideal of democracy is not, because the idea of popular government contradicts the idea of limited government. There can be no rational limits to government, when government of and by the people is made to be the ideal, for this eliminates the distinction between government and governed which is the very foundation upon which the idea of limiting government power rests. John Farthing was right and liberalism was wrong – freedom wears a crown.

Today, however, it is evident how the adjective in liberal democracy has contributed to the same trend. While Mill saw his harm principle as a protection of individual freedom against the encroachment of expanding government, it has become the very basis of a new totalitarianism.

I introduced this essay by talking about the type of laws against mala in se crimes such as murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery, etc. which have universally been considered to be just among civilized societies. Let us think about what the opposite of this type of law would look like. Obviously laws which are the opposite of those universally considered to be just, would be laws which, to paraphrase the Vincentian canon so as to apply it to a political rather than an ecclesiastical contest, would be considered unjust by all civilized societies in all places and all times. Such laws would not prohibit mala in se crimes, or even acts which might be considered morally neutral, but acts which are bona in se, that is good in themselves. What kind of laws might these be?

Laws against going to Church to worship God. Laws against shaking someone’s hand or cheering someone up with a hug. Laws against holding gatherings of your large extended family. Laws against meeting up with your friends in person rather than online. Laws against opening your business or going to your job so as to support yourself and your family rather relying upon the public purse. Laws, in other words, against normal, basic, everyday good human behaviour.

Laws which were almost universally imposed, even outside totalitarian hellholes like Red China and North Korea, over the past four months.

How did our governments justify these insane prohibitions of the good?

They used the harm principle, of course. Engaging in ordinary, decent, human social and economic activity, they claimed, would put people in danger of contracting a new coronavirus which had escaped from China and was rapidly spreading around the globe. While the dangers this virus posed were themselves grossly exaggerated, the very idea of prohibiting almost all ordinary, good, human behaviour in order to prevent harm from a virus is warped. The restrictions and regulations of these “public health orders” are, by the standards of civilization since time immemorial, fundamentally unjust. Indeed, there can be no word more appropriate to describe rules that prohibit the good than the word evil. Make that Evil with a capital E.

It is not over yet. After four months of this abominable universal house arrest which treats all law-abiding citizens as criminals, government health officials are finally considering letting people go back to Church again. Most businesses were allowed to re-open long before this. All sorts of restrictions are being imposed upon the re-opening Churches, and all of them are restrictions that any true believer in Jesus Christ will immediately recognize as vile obscenities that were thought up in the fiery pit of hell by the devil himself. Limiting attendance. Requiring people to register in advance. Prohibiting the Sacrament, in one or both kinds. (1) Prohibiting congregational singing. Prohibiting physical contact like the customary handshake or hug in the Pax. Requiring mask wearing as a condition of attendance. The specifics vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (2) but the evil spirit behind these restrictions is the same everywhere.

It was through liberalism, including and especially Mill’s harm principle, which is clearly not remotely as innocuous and benign as it seems, that this evil spirit has so pervaded the governments of what used to be Christendom. It was through the same ideology, wearing theological garb, that it has so pervaded the Churches that they are willingly submitting to these requirements, as they willingly submitted to the governments’ orders to close in the first place. This is not the obedience to the civil authority that is enjoined upon believers as individuals and as Churches in the New Testament, but a rendering unto Caesar of that which is God’s.

In the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke, the Lord Jesus concludes the parable of the Unjust Judge by saying “And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily.” He then asks this question “Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?”

If He were to come back today, then judging by the behaviour of the Churches in this pandemic, the answer to His question is clearly no. If He were to come back tomorrow, He would likely find His Church wearing the mask of the Beast.

(1) Restricting the Sacrament to the one kind would be less of an issue for the Roman Communion, which broke with the universal practice of the Church from the first to the twelfth centuries almost a millennium ago. The Byzantine Communion has maintained the early Church practice all along, and the Anglican Communion, in returning to the practice in the Reformation, forbade the restriction in the Thirtieth of the Articles of Religion of the Elizabethan Settlement. Communion in both kinds is also the doctrine and practice of the other Churches of the Magisterial Reformation, as well as practically all of the sects.
(2) Some, but not all of the ones listed, have been put in place here in the province of Manitoba. For a much longer list, see Laurence M. Vance’s “CDC Churches.”

A Cause Neither Lost nor Gained

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph” – T. S. Eliot

Has that strange sound from beneath the high altar of St. James’ Anglican Cathedral in Toronto finally ceased?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

The forty-second General Synod of the Canadian branch of the Ecclesia Anglicana convened in Vancouver, British Columbia on the tenth of July. Prominent on the agenda was a motion to alter the canon governing holy matrimony to allow for the performance of same-sex marriages. Canon law requires that such a motion pass two consecutive General Synods. At each of these Synods it must receive a two-thirds supermajority from the lay delegates, from the clergy, and from the episcopal college. It received this, albeit through some questionable shenanigans, at the last General Synod in Richmond Hill, Upper Canada, three years ago. This year, however, while it received 80.9 percent of the lay vote, and 73.2 percent of the clerical vote, it was defeated in the House of Bishops who gave it only 62.2 percent, with fourteen bishops voting against the motion, and two abstaining.

It was this motion to which I alluded when I suggested in the concluding paragraph of my Dominion Day essay that John Strachan, first Bishop of Toronto, was probably spinning in his grave. While it is good that the motion was defeated it is important that we recognize that although this was a defeat, of sorts, for liberalism it was not a triumph for orthodoxy. Had orthodoxy triumphed we would be talking about a liberal motion that never made it past its first round through Synod because it was voted down by lay, clerical, and episcopal supermajorities larger than those required to pass it. The reason it is important to recognize this is because the temptation for the orthodox faithful in the Anglican Church of Canada will be to look upon this as the end of a decades long battle of which they are already weary. This is not the end, but rather the beginning. The liberals may not have had the numbers to overcome the constitutional roadblocks that were wisely placed in the way of quick and easy changes to canon law but they clearly outnumber the orthodox and they are not giving up. Indeed, it is quite apparent that they came to Synod with their Plan B already in place in the event they lost the vote. Their Plan B is basically to treat canon law in the same way in which they have long treated the Holy Scriptures, the Creeds, and the traditions of the Church – as texts that can mean anything, which is another way of saying they mean nothing, and therefore mean whatever they want them to mean. It is this sort of thinking, rather than the mere symptom which is their desire to redefine marriage to suit the alphabet soup crowd, that is the essence of the cancer of liberalism that has been eating away at the Church.

Indeed, the breakdown of the vote reveals that the path that lies ahead for the orthodox faithful will not be an easy one. The duty of the orthodox, when a portion of the Church has fallen into grievous error, is to win those who have strayed back to the truth. This is never easy, but it is much more difficult when those who have fallen away have the larger numbers, and especially when they are a majority even among the bishops, those to whom the specific duty of safeguarding the faith had been passed on by the Apostles. It is interesting that the motion received a larger percentage of the lay vote than the clerical vote. Twenty-one years ago Rev. George R. Eves in a book which addressed the growing divide between liberalism and orthodoxy in the Anglican Church of Canada at a time when the battle over same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage was in its early stages (1) observed that the clergy were a lot more liberal, both theologically and politically, than the laity. If the vote at General Synod accurately reflects the thinking of clergy and laity today – and this is a big if, since it may simply suggest that liberals had control of the lay delegate selection process – then this would appear no longer to be the case. The laity are the largest segment of the Church and if they are also now the most liberal it will be that much harder to reclaim the Church for orthodoxy.

In light of this, the orthodox faithful would do well to remember the words of our Lord and Saviour as recorded in Luke 18:27 “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”

The fight for orthodox Christian truth has being going on since the very founding of the Church – the Apostles first encounter with Simon Magus, to whom the Fathers of the second and third centuries traced the origin of the heresy of Gnosticism, (2) is recorded in the eighth chapter of the Book of Acts – and will continue, according to prophesies made by both Jesus Christ and His Apostles, until the Second Coming. Explicit warnings against false doctrines and/or exhortations to remain true to the Apostolic faith are found in almost every book of the New Testament. With regards to the outcome of this ongoing war and the battles within it the faithful have both the assurance of the Lord Jesus Christ that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church built upon the Apostolic faith (Matt. 16:15-19) and the warnings given to particular Churches about the judgment that will come if they fall away from the faith. The letters to the angels – which in this somewhat singular use of the term means bishops – of the seven Churches of Asia Minor in the second and third chapters of Revelation are a particularly good example of this. Note the warning to the bishop of Ephesus: (3)

Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent (Rev. 2:5)

The falling away that is addressed here was less than the abandonment of the faith for which the term apostasy is usually reserved. Had the Ephesians been guilty of apostasy the warning would hardly have been lesser.

The assurance of Matthew 16 and the warnings of Revelation 2-3 do not contradict each other. The former is made to the catholic Church, the latter to particular Churches. The gates of hell, of which heresy and apostasy are weapons, shall never prevail against the catholic Church, that is to say, the entire or whole Church, but particular Churches within the catholic Church - and, sadly, Church history demonstrates that this is as true of entire dioceses and provinces as it is of individual parishes – can fall to heresy or apostasy. Fortunately, the same history also provides examples of particular Churches that have been recovered from heresy. (4) The orthodox must be ever vigilant for the “faith once delivered unto the saints” but must not succumb to despair when error appears to be in the ascendancy. The present situation in the worldwide Anglican Communion is a particular smaller-scale illustration of this point. However much the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Episcopal Church in the United States have been permeated by the leaven of liberalism, orthodoxy prevails in most of the other provinces of the wider Anglican Communion.

There are those who would object to depicting the marriage debate as one between orthodoxy and heresy. The grounds for this objection, when it is based on something more than mere squeamishness over the use of strong language, have only the most superficial sort of validity. That same-sex marriage has never been formally condemned as a heresy by an ecumenical Council is due entirely to the fact that up until the last twenty to thirty years or so nobody would have ever dreamed that the need for such an anathema might arise. That the Creeds do not contain a line to the effect of “and I believe in one holy, sacred, matrimony between man and woman” is not because this is something about which there has been no “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus” consensus among the faithful, but because like many other truths about which the Scriptures are clear this one would be out of place there. Creeds, as the formal affirmations of the Church’s faith, are not intended to be comprehensive lists of all the truths she adheres to but of those upon which she rests her confidence in God’s grace. (5)

There is, however, a sense in which the objectors are right, but to the opposite effect of what they intend. The ancient heresies were affirmations of the Christian faith that deviated from orthodoxy on some essential point because of an overemphasis upon another. Sabellianism emphasized the unity of God to the point of denying the Trinity, whereas Tritheism was the reverse of this. Arianism denied the full deity of Jesus Christ, whereas Docetism and Apollinarism denied His full humanity. If this is what heresy is, liberalism is something much worse. Keep in mind the point made earlier about the push for same-sex marriage being merely a symptom. (6) The disease to which it points is a way of thinking in which individual wish-fulfilment is the highest good, truth can be discovered or created by majority vote, and every affirmation of the Creed, every tradition of the Church, and every statement of Scripture is open to an infinite number of re-interpretations to bring it in accordance with these ideas. Heresy affirms the Christian faith while distorting its truths, liberalism denies the Christian faith under the guise of an affirmation. It is far more dangerous than any mere heresy.

This does not make our duty to contend for the orthodox faith against liberalism any less than against heresy. If anything, the duty is greater. The same Scriptural warnings apply – but mercifully, so do the Scriptural promises.


(1) The book entitled Two Religions – One Church: Division and Destiny in the Anglican Church of Canada was self-published by Rev. Eves in 1998 and has just been revised and updated for this year’s General Synod. The updated version is available here: https://georgereves.com/books/two-religions-one-church/

(2) St. Justin Martyr, Apologia Prima, 26, St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I.23. St. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, IV.51 and VI.2, 4-15.

(3) At the time the Book of Revelation was written, this would have been St. Timothy, the same St. Timothy whom St. Paul recruited to join his evangelistic mission from the Church in Lystra in Acts 16 and to whom he later wrote two canonical epistles. Since St. Timothy was bishop of Ephesus until his death in 97 AD, he would have been the one addressed regardless of whether St. John’s exile to Patmos took place under Nero or Domitian.

(4) Take the history of the orthodox Church’s struggle with Arianism in the third and fourth centuries, for example. Several provinces which accepted or leaned towards the heresy condemned by the first ecumenical Council in 325 AD were later brought back into communion with the orthodox Church. There was a period, however, not long after the Nicene Council, when the Arians very much appeared to have the upper hand.

(5) Peter Toon made this point with regards to other truths. “Neither the Apostles’ nor the Nicene Creeds mention hell or Satan. To add to either of these the words, “and in one devil, tempter and enemy of souls; and in damnation to hell everlasting,” would sound odd; belief in Satan and hell is of a different nature than belief in God and heaven. The contents of the creeds point to realities which are to lay hold upon us and grip us in faith and love: Satan and hell are to be avoided, not greeted.” Austin Farrer said something that was very similar in Saving Belief: A Discussion of Essentials, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1964.

(6) An even more serious symptom is evident in the apology retiring primate Fred Hiltz made on behalf of the Church to Canadian aboriginals at General Synod and in some of the articles regarding dialogue with the Jewish community that have appeared in recent issues of the Anglican Journal. While dialogue and better relations between these communities can hardly be viewed as a bad thing per se, liberalism is willing to sacrifice the truths of the Christian faith to achieve these goals. One such truth is that there is only one true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The idols of pagans – whether we are talking about the gods such as Zeus and Odin that European peoples worshipped prior to converting to Christianity, the gods that North American aboriginals worshipped before being evangelized, or other pagan deities of other peoples – are demons. Another such truth is that the saving grace of the one true God is only available through the Redeemer He has provided for the fallen race of mankind, His Son Jesus Christ. Liberals appear to be willing to sacrifice both of these truths to achieve “reconciliation” with the aboriginals, and the second of these truths to achieve dialogue with the Jews. Stephen Roney, who is a member of the Roman Church, has pointed out how a denial of these truths is latent in Hiltz’s apology. For why the second truth should not sacrificed to the goal of better dialogue with the Jews see the chapter on evangelizing the Jews in Suicide - The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada?, written by the “Anglican Billy Graham” Dr. Marney Patterson and published by Cambridge Publishing House in Cambridge, Ontario in 1999.