America’s tragic “event horizon” now seems unavoidable, except through prayer
By Christopher A. Ferrara *[Note: This essay was written in October before the Election]
Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix
Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze
The story political modernity tells about itself, which even American “conservatives” view as received wisdom, is that the “moderate Enlightenment” freed Western man from an outmoded worldview, leading to the so-called Age of Democratic Revolution (roughly 1760 to 1800). Then, so the story goes, the oppressed peoples of America and France, followed by the whole of the Western world, rose up against the tyranny of Popes and kings, establishing republics according to their own sovereign will.
Today, so we are told, Liberty reigns throughout the West and Western man enjoys a degree of personal, economic and religious freedom he could scarcely have imagined during the long Dark Age of the old order of altar and throne.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
From a Catholic perspective, as seen in the admonitory and prophetic anti-liberal encyclicals of a string of Roman Pontiffs from Pius IX through St. Pius X, a radically different narrative emerges from the details of philosophical and revolutionary history: the philosophes of the “moderate” Enlightenment, following the path laid down by Hobbes and Locke, the co-founders of political liberalism, disseminated demagogic and lying propaganda against the Church and the monarchy.
Revolutionary cadres exploited popular grievances and engaged in political theater to incite a small segment of the populace, almost entirely in key urban centers (e.g., Boston and Paris), to rebel against local authority.
In the resulting power vacuums, self-appointed radical leaders declared themselves provisional governments in the name of “the people” and crushed all opposition by force. The provisional governments were replaced by “republican governments” created “in convention” by self-appointed “representatives” behind closed doors and then presented to the masses as a fait accompli.
Then followed a token “consent of the governed” by means of hastily arranged plebiscites in which only a tiny percentage of the population participated. Later attempts to resist or withdraw from these governments were declared treasonous and were prevented by massive bloodshed whenever necessary.
The new governments first “conceived in Liberty” in America and France almost immediately imposed far greater burdens on the people than the overthrown kings had ever done — just as the anti-Federalists had predicted in the aftermath of the Constitutional Convention.
The Age of Democratic Revolution was followed by the Age of Obedience to ever-more-powerful central governments.
John Locke (1632 -1704)
Today, the political principles of the “moderate” Enlightenment embodied in the modern state system — first imposed in every case by the violence of revolutionary cadres — are now seen as a “conservative” inheritance opposed to the excesses of liberalism — including socialism.
These principles, inherited from the political philosophy of
Hobbes and Locke, include the following:
- A hypothetical “social compact” or contract as the foundation of the State
- The origin of political sovereignty in the “consent” of the governed (invariably presumed to be given by those wielding power)
- “Government by the people” according to the “sovereignty of the people,” meaning majority rule on all questions, even if contrary to the natural law
- Church-State separation and the non-“interference” of religion in politics
- The confinement of religion, above all Christianity, to the realm of “private” opinions and practices with no controlling effect on law or public policy
- The unlimited pursuit of gain, including the freedom to buy, sell and advertise anything whatsoever deemed permissible by law
- Total liberty of thought and action, both private and public, within the limits of a merely external “public peace”
- The dissolubility of marriage, and thus the family, as a mere civil contract founded on a revocable consent
The Roman Pontiffs understood that these principles in practice would mean not only the end of Christian civilization, but the end of human history itself in terminal apostasy.
Leo XIII (pontificate 1878- 1903)
Writing in 1878, Leo XIII condemned “the shamelessness of those who, full of treachery, make semblance of being champions of country, of freedom, and every kind of right; in fine, the deadly kind of plague which infects in its inmost recesses, allowing it no respite and foreboding ever fresh disturbances and final disaster.”
Even evangelical Protestants, echoing the warnings of the Roman Pontiffs, could see by the mid-nineteenth century that “final disaster” would be the outcome of the emergence of the secular state divorced from Christ and the law of the Gospel in the United States.
Benedict XVI (pontificate 2005-2013)
Thus, in 1872 a movement of mostly Presbyterian evangelicals called the National Reform Association proposed that the Preamble of the Constitution be amended to read as follows:
We the People of the United States, [humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, his revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government,] and in order to form a more perfect union…
The 43rd Congress of the United States rejected the NRA’s “Christian Amendment” out of hand, with a House Judiciary Committee report declaring that “[T]he fathers of the Republic … in full realization of the dangers which the union between church and state had imposed upon so many nations of the Old World, [decided] with great unanimity that it was inexpedient to put anything into the Constitution or frame of government which might be construed to be a reference to any religious creed or doctrine.” Congress was deaf to the NRA’s entreaty that, given the utter exclusion of Christ and the Gospel from the nation’s organic law, it would not be long before “our whole political page becomes a pure, unbelieving, irreligious, Christless, Godless blank.”
Today, as even Francis Fukuyama admitted in his tribute to the triumph of political liberalism, which he viewed as the evolutionary pinnacle of human progress: “The liberal state growing out of the tradition of Hobbes and Locke engages in a protracted struggle with its own people.”
With the presidential election of 2024, the struggle between the liberal state in America and the residuum of Christianity in the populace subject to its immense power has reached a point of no return.
Theoretical physicists tell us every black hole has an “event horizon” — the point of no return for any object that reaches it. Political liberalism is a moral black hole which, as Election 2024 approaches, has drawn the United States very near to its event horizon — that “final disaster” of which Pope Leo and even the Protestants of the NRA warned.
Should Trump win the Presidency again, the nation’s acceleration toward the edge of the abyss would diminish for a time, just as it did after his election in 2016, only to resume with a vengeance in 2020.
But make no mistake: the mode of “conservatism” Trump represents is still subject to political liberalism’s moral entropy.
This is why the Democrats of only a lifetime ago would view today’s gay-friendly, abortion-in-some-cases “conservative” Republicans as radical liberals.
Our duty to mitigate harm to the common good counsels a prudential decision to delay as long as possible the nation’s traverse of liberalism’s event horizon.
But let us not delude ourselves by thinking that a vote in any election can reverse the irreversible course of a civilizational apostasy. That would require a miraculous metanoia no less dramatic than the reconversion of the West after the fall of Rome. Unless and until that happens, we must be realistic about the situation in which we find ourselves, so famously described by Alasdair MacIntrye: “[T]he barbarians are not waiting beyond our frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.”
And, when we vote, we should bear in mind the prayer remarked by Pope Benedict XVI in his own dire assessment of political modernity during his Christmas greeting to the Roman Curia fourteen years ago: Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni ut salvos facias nos — “Stir up Your power, O Lord, and come, that You may save us.”
For as Pope Benedict observed on that occasion:
“The very future of the world is at stake.”
* Christopher Ferrra, J.D., is President and Chief Counsel of the American Catholic Lawyers Association, and author of numerous articles and books on political philosophy, culture and the Fatima apparitions.
Facebook Comments