Rend From Caesar

C.S. Lewis: Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely.

Over at Vox Popoli, Vox discusses the latest battle in The Gates of Hell shall not prevail, along with long passage from a Rod Dreher article. He was contacted by a law professor acquainted with the highest levels of the American justice system, and he says:

What prompted his reaching out to me? “I’m very worried,” he said, of events of the last week. “The constituency for religious liberty just isn’t there anymore.”

Like me, what unnerved Prof. Kingsfield is not so much the details of the Indiana law, but the way the overculture treated the law. “When a perfectly decent, pro-gay marriage religious liberty scholar like Doug Laycock, who is one of the best in the country — when what he says is distorted, you know how crazy it is.”

“Alasdair Macintyre is right,” he said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.

Vox writes:

It's time for the church leaders and the heads of Christian families to start learning from #GamerGate, to start learning from Sad Puppies, and start leading. Start banding together and stop accommodating the secular world in any way. Don't hire those who hate you. Don't buy from those who wish to destroy you. Don't work with those who denigrate your faith, your traditions, your morals, and your God. Don't tolerate or respect what passes for their morals and values.

Religious liberty in America is dead. Well and good. That was a fatal mistake by the other side, because now that they don't respect our religious liberty, we have no reason or responsibility to respect theirs. Now it's just a raw power struggle and we have the numbers, we have the indomitable will of the martyrs, and we have the certain knowledge of God on our side.

They have nothing but the carnal desires to which they are enslaved and the Prince of this fallen world, who has already been defeated by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Their world is post-Christian, post-rational, post-modern, post-morality, and post-law. It is absolutely doomed to failure of every kind, beginning with demographics.

So stop cowering. Stop hiding in the closet. Stop trying to play by outdated rules that are no longer in effect. They imposed the new rules on us, now let's prove that we can play much better by them. What they don't realize is that those rules were in place for THEIR protection, not for ours. It's time to teach them the value and importance of religious liberty again.

We are not given a spirit of fear. We are the sons and daughters of the Crusades and of the Inquisitions, institutions so terrible that they strike terror in human hearts nearly one thousand years later. We are the heirs of Christendom. They cannot defeat us and they cannot defeat our Lord. Augustus and the pagan emperors of Rome failed. The Ottoman emperors failed. The French Revolutionaries failed. The Communist killers of Spain, the Soviet Union, and China failed. The post-Christian seculars of the latter-day USA will fail too.

Read the whole thing.

His post brings to mind neoreactionary thought on Exit. Recently at 28 Sherman there was talk of a Carving an Exit - A Thede Union. It's a topic that has been discussed by Arnold Kling in Exit, Voice, and Ignorance and at Outside In. While Nrxers struggle to come up with ways of building an exit, one is already there.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. 32 Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. 15 My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

Nrxers and libertarians use the term exit because they are thinking of our current relationship with the State. However, the only people who will see it as Exit will be those left behind. One doesn't choose to exit, but to begin again, to perfect what has come before. Christians in the first century did not exit from the Roman Empire, they entered into the Church. The Christians who left Europe entered the New World. The Founding Fathers chose to build a more perfect union.

We cannot build upon a foundation of lies. Much of the foundation of society has already collapsed: families are destroyed, schools indoctrinate children in lies, murder is a growing choice. The only choice is to rebuild from the bottom up.

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and by so rendering, rend yourself from Caesar. All the power we need is in our hands and in our hearts, for God is with us. All it takes is that we stand together in Christ.

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.