In this season of Advent, during a visit to the magnificent 900-year-old Christian Cathedral in Brecon, Wales, I couldn’t help recalling that, throughout human history, people who look to God before Caesar have often found themselves in harm’s way.
One of the most vicious modern assaults on Christianity came in the form of France’s first state-sponsored secular religion, the revolutionary “Cult of Reason.” In its wake, attacks on the traditional order and the Catholic Church picked up considerable momentum.
Since Christmas Day 1914, when the Christian spirit of peace descended on troops and briefly interrupted hostilities between opposing armies in World War I, forces on the left have pursued a persistent campaign against people of faith.
The famous Christmas truce between rank-and-file soldiers never reoccurred, and since that time, humanity has experienced more than a century of moral chaos, violent revolution, economic disparity, and totalitarian forms of governance.
During the same Great War, Bolshevik revolutionaries carried out a bloody coup in Russia, murdered the family of their Tzar, and ushered in more than a century of Marxist aggression against Western civilization.
Marx declared religion to be “the opium of the people.” His mid-19th century “Communist Manifesto” called for the destruction of the family, the church, and the nation. He stoked discrimination against Christianity, and Lenin followed suit with brutal attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church.
Against the ‘Great Reset’
One of the latest collective suicide pacts promoting the dissolution of family, church, and national sovereignty can be attributed to a self-appointed cabal of cultural engineers who meet annually in Davos, Switzerland, for a conclave known as the World Economic Forum (WEF).Unlike Christ, who loved the world despite its flaws and frailties and modestly entered history in the little town of Bethlehem, our globe-trotting Davos messiahs are proposing a more thorough transformation of the human condition through a secular miracle known as “The Great Reset.”
In his recent book “Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order,” American editor Michael Walsh published a collection of insightful essays by free-thinking authors, several of whom are regular contributors to The Epoch Times.
Walsh’s essayists combine to explain how a cabal of techno-administrative, green ideologues are serving anti-religious, amoral, anti-nationalist, and anti-Western ends.
Conrad Black, who for many years attended the WEF by invitation, wrote about being subjected to a soft Orwellian conformity that was “for democracy, as long as everyone votes for increased public sector authority in pursuit of green egalitarianism and the homogenization of all peoples in a conformist world.”
Regarding the Davos disposition toward religion, Black recalled a particular occasion when “a hotel concierge stared at me as if I had two heads when I inquired where the nearest Roman Catholic Church was and was even more astonished when I trod two miles through the snow there and back to receive its moral succour.“
In Annus Duo of our post-pandemic new world order, practicing Christians are facing increasing levels of contempt. The prophets of planet worship and high priests of “woke,” more than ever, regard church-going folk as an expendable class of lowbrow deplorables furtively clinging to their Bibles and guns.
We Are Still Here!
Throughout history, Christianity has provided a foundation for free and well-ordered societies. Christian values have guided the way we live our lives; interact with family, friends, and neighbors; and fulfill mutual obligations.People of faith intuitively recognize the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, and loyalty and betrayal. Judeo-Christian Scriptures have taught us that moral corruption can wreck a nation, while respecting God’s laws can restore it.
Over the coming weeks, despite the left’s creeping vilification of traditional religious holidays, millions around the world will continue to celebrate Christmas with family, friends, and fellow citizens.
Christian traditions incline us toward love of both God and country; and however materialistic it may have become, the annual celebration of Christ’s birth is central to the rediscovery of what First Things Magazine editor R. R. Reno has called “the strong gods” of faith and nationhood.
In Wales, where my wife and I have been visiting with family, there’s a popular folk anthem, often sung by fans at international sporting events such as this year’s FIFA World Cup. It’s most emphatically delivered when a Welsh national team has fallen behind on the scoreboard.
In the Welsh language, the song is “Yma o Hyd.” Translated into English, the assertion is “We are still here.”
Inspired by the enduring spirit of Christmas, one can’t help hoping that lovers of God, country, and freedom will send the same powerful message to the globalist janissaries of the WEF and the Chinese Communist Party.
We, too, are “still here!”
