A Time for Courage. A Time to Fight.

This good fight has already begun. Join it!

I apologize if my last post disoriented any readers and had them reaching for their smelling salts.  Yes, I, of all people, actually got optimistic about this moment in the West.

I saw the resistance across the West to the woke, the Neo-Liberals, the Globalists, whatever you want to call those who would suppress, oppress and replace us and what remains of our Western societies and cultures. And I regained hope that these forces of evil can be defeated, even that their defeat might have already begun.   

That hope prompts me to revisit the question of how Christians and allies should proceed during this time.  On that there has been no little debate between those who urge a Benedict Option and those who urge a Boniface Option, promoted by the two so-named books.

The Benedict Option by

Rod Dreher

along with his more recent Live Not By Lies looks at the “soft totalitarianism” descending upon the West and urges Christians to prepare to persist through the darkness likely to come.  Dreher urges cultivating resilient and resistant Christian counter-cultures as Christians in Communist Eastern Europe did.  And he commends allying with non-Christians who also oppose totalitarianism.  He did not urge passive defeatism as he has been frequently misinterpreted, and he has any number of times corrected those who so misinterpret him.  More on that later.

Andrew Isker in The Boniface Option is much more optimistic about Christians retaking the culture.  He urges them to be aggressive in so doing.  And he is not shy about using combative and even inflammatory language.  Imagine a book that makes my writing look moderate, and you have the The Boniface Option.

The approach I would recommend between the two is . . . both?  Actually, I agree more with The Benedict Option.  I think preserving our faith and culture as a counter culture and allying with those who desire freedom is much more doable than somehow turning the U. S. back into a Christian country.  Yet I do think the ongoing battle for freedom and Western culture is worth fighting and heartily, particularly when so many are fed up with the predations of the Globalists.  One might say I like the wisdom of the Benedict Option with the righteous wrath of the Boniface Option.

Against the misperceptions of his Benedict Option, Dreher himself thinks this a time to be a culture warrior as I wrote back in 2022 for Stand Firm.  I quoted Dreher (Emphasis mine.):

A Christian friend whose opinion I respect counseled me to quit writing all these culture war posts. The war has been lost, he said. Better to spend your time and energy trying to construct arks within which we can ride out the storm. I agree with him, mostly, but I can’t give up the fight just yet, even though I believe it’s a fight we are going to lose, or mostly lose. Why not? Because there are some people who might yet be saved…. We have to fight because it’s the honorable thing to do — but we must ALSO make plans for the long resistance.

I agree although I am now more optimistic about winning the battles in light of recent events.  But I still think we must both fight to win yet prepare to lose.  Preparing to lose means reorganizing our lives as the church and as individuals and families to survive and thrive should totalitarianism take over the West.  We need to cultivate being a Christian counter culture lest we be driven along by the winds of decadent anti-culture.

But, although the time may come for some kind of prudent withdrawal, and we should prepare for that, this moment is not such a time.  When we finally have the Globalists, the woke, the Neo-Liberals, and, yes, the pseudo-Christians supporting them on the run is no time for passivity.  Nor it a time for handwringing about being winsome or about being oh-so careful about the language we use for our enemies as that sad essay by Garwood Anderson does.

No, the enemies of God, our enemies, though still imposing, are on the run.  And when you have the enemies of God on the run is no time to be nice and winsome.  Even Scripture says so.  You pursue your enemies and you defeat them as throughly and completely as God enables you. That goes double when the survival of your society is at stake.

No, I am not calling for bloodshed here, nor for disregarding the command to love one’s enemies. (And many former enemies are so appalled by the Globalists, they have become allies, such as

Sasha Stone

and Russell Brand.) Nor am I calling for everyone to strive in the same manner.  St. Paul taught that we all have different roles to play, not all to be hotheads like me.  But I am among those calling for us to join the battle to politically destroy the Globalists, including today’s DemocRAT Party, as much as God  allows us.  Should we do that, we should keep pursuing those traitors* and criminals so it will be a long, long time before they can do to our societies what they have done to us these past four years.  They won’t give up their predations until we make them give up.

And do not listen to the gelded Rockefeller-funded “Christians” such as the After Party, David French, Curtis Chang, Russell Moore, World Relief, Christianity Today and other Big Eva useful idiots who would discourage us from fighting this good fight or, worse, to take the other side.  Nor listen to those on their pretentious asses who take every opportunity to disparage those in the fight.  They were the Anti-Anti-Communists back during the Cold War.  They are the Anti-Anti-Woke today.  Oh, they aren’t on the side of the Marxists, the woke or the Globalists, they say.  Yet they always find reasons to oppose those fighting the Marxists, the woke, and the Globalists.  Funny that.

These are the sort who would be squeamish about Jehu having Jezebel thrown out the window or about Jesus’ language in His letters to the seven churches or about the happy vulture party at the end of Revelation 19 or about the Fathers’ language about heretics.  Do not listen to the calls of the castrati for cowardice!

No, we owe it to our countries to fight.  We owe to neighbors so they might live free.  We owe it to our children so they might grow and live in free Western societies and not in dystopian Globalist social credit gulags.  We owe it to God and to His Holy Church so that The Faith may be proclaimed and lived in peace, and that our proclamation have credibility.  No one listens to the “German Christians” who cowered before the Nazis.  No one listens to the Mainline Protestants or Liberation Theologians who carried water for the Communists.  No one will listen to those Christians today who are tools of the Globalist Neo-liberals.  Nor should they.

And we owe it to ourselves to fight.  Who wants to look in the mirror and see a coward?  Worse, who wants to find out in future years that he was a tool of the enemies of freedom and of God in 2024?  Yes, fighting for what is right is costly.  It has cost an innumerable multitude their lives through the ages.  But is it not better to suffer loss for what is true and right than live with the knowledge to one’s pitiful death bed that when it was time to fight, you were a coward?

Shakespeare’s great St. Crispin’s Day speech of King Henry V states it well.

Like Henry V and his brave army, we do not know if we will win — well, actually I do know the armies of God Almighty win in the end. (See Revelation 19 again.) But we do not know if we win in 2024.  We do not know what this year will bring or 2025 or even tomorrow.

But I do know this is a time to fight. Let us fight and fight hard with godly courage.

Deus vult!

——

*Yes, “traitors” is a strong word.  But for those willfully aiding the Invasion of the U. S. and Europe, it is an appropriate word.