Where to Draw the Line on Loyalty

Nothing in this life is worth your soul

Last Friday I was a guest on the Dr. Gina Primetime. We talked about my latest “End of America” post. But something popped into my head when Gina told we had only a minute left in the segment.

I wish I’d thought of it sooner, because it was the most important thing I had to say. I debated with myself whether to spit it out without explanation or just swallow it and blog about it.

I decided I needed to say it.

I should have swallowed it, because what I said wasn’t what I want to say. So I’ll say it now.

Look, empires die. The longest empire in history lasted about 250 years. That’s it. America is 250 years old as a nation, probably less as an empire. But the clock is ticking. No matter how great a nation America was, or how great a people many Americans still are, all good things come to an end.

And the world passeth away, and the concupiscence thereof: but he that doth the will of God, abideth for ever. (1 John 2:17)

and

And they that use this world, as if they used it not: for the fashion of this world passeth away. (1 Corinthians 7:31)

If this world is passing away, then a nation surely must.

Yes, it’s painful to imagine a world without the United States of America. Talk about humiliation. What could be more humiliating than being the generation that loses the country? My dad was a veteran of World War II and Korea. Do you think I want to face him in heaven and explained how me and my friends wrecked America? “Well, we were drunk, and . . .”

Of course not. Like every generation, ours took the reins expecting to leave the place better than we found it. But it looks like we’ll be happy to leave the place any way we can.

When we think about the end of America, we have to ask whether all those who died for her died in vain.

And if we accept that America’s death is certain, do we then give up? Wouldn’t it be foolish to fight for a nation that cannot survive? It would be like lending money to someone on death row.

To the question of our soldiers and sailors dying in vain, the answer is “no.” Their sacrifice kept alive the idea of freedom and self-governance. And, even if they’d lost the war, freedom and self-governance are worth their last full measure of devotion so long as they believed in those principles.

To the second question, we must fight on—for the American Ideal. But we cannot surrender the American Ideal to save America the country.

For 200 years, the American Ideal and the American nation were synonymous. But the American Ideal existed before America. The American Ideal existed in John Lilburne, the Englishman who defied the crown by bringing religious texts from Holland into the country. Numerous arrests and beatings did not stop him from advancing the idea of natural rights.

[For more on John Lilburne, read The Covenant of Liberty by Michael Patrick Leahy.]

American exceptionalism was this: that the ideals of natural rights and self-governance actually came to life in a government and a nation. That those principles, embodied in that nation, led to the most prosperous and generous nation the world has ever known. That that nation, founded in liberty, proved its animating philosophy beyond a reasonable doubt, which is: good men, reasonably educated and left free from the arbitrary rule of others, will thrive beyond man’s ability to imagine.

We did it. And that is truly exceptional.

That is the American Ideal. That was once the American nation.

Sadly, it is no more. The government that was founded to guarantee and safeguard good, reasonably educated men so they could thrive fell into the hands of bad, mis-educated tyrants who turned our freedom and guarantees against us. Because that government has become synonymous with this nation, America the country and the American Ideal are divorced.

To preserve America the nation is easy: go along with the World Economic Council and the United Nations and Joe Biden. Support DC statehood and nationalized elections. Nothing would ensure the continuation of the American nation more surely than that.

But the American nation would drift further and further from its founding on the American Ideal. In short order, that nation would really become just an administrative district of the one world government. Its people would no longer thrive but merely exist like homo sovieticus. To preserve the American nation means to kill the American Ideal.

I have no loyalty to the American nation, but only to the ideal on which it was founded. If I am to die for something of this world, let it be that ideal, not the malignant government or even the assembly of once-free and independent states the comprise it.

A third option is to fight to expel the tyrants. But that would mean bloodshed. The tyrants will not give up. They have too much to lose. Do you really think Australians, Austrians, or Canadians will ever taste freedom again? Without a civil war which the government is most likely to win?

Do you really think the people who engineered the 2020 election will decide to leave 2024 to chance? Joe Biden just made his emergency powers indefinite. The Constitution is in abeyance. Donald Trump’s entire presidency was undermined by the permanent bureaucracy of Washington. How much evidence do you need that America is no longer a government of the people, by the people, or for the people?

I stand by everything I wrote in August of 2018 :

For the time being, President Trump holds our torturers and persecutors at bay. But Trump won’t be president forever. He could be out of office a year from now should the Democrats take over the House and Senate in January.  And, if Trump is impeached and convicted, the future President Pence has little chance of winning in 2020.

We could then fight a bloody civil war. It would be a low-level war fought in small skirmishes. A guerrilla war that lasts for decades.

As that war wears on, America’s economy would falter. Our ability to maintain a defense would languish. We would be at the mercy of foreign powers like China, Russia, and even Iran. Even if the forces on the right prevailed in the civil war, the victory would be pyrrhic. The America we’d inherit would scarcely resemble the America of our birth or even of America’s birth.

And, in the end, we’d all have blood on our hands. At least all of us who took up arms or supported one side in the war.

But I’m not sure that’s God’s will. What’s the point of gaining the whole world if we lose our souls in the process?

Trump is gone. A pandemic provided the excuse to suspend the Constitution and institute a sort of mild martial law. Previously unimaginable federal powers—forced inoculations, forced masking (shaming), and suspension of the First Amendment in its entirety—have become commonplace and accepted by the majority of Americans.

This is no longer a free country or a republic no matter how hard you wish it were.

Our challenge is not preserve a nation that has become hostile to the very ideal of liberty. Nor is to fight the tyrants at all costs. Instead, our challenge is to preserve the American ideal. Our mission is to nurture a society in which man can thrive beyond his ability to imagine.

That challenge is not easy to comprehend, much less to execute. To understand what we must do, we must first come to grips with the central point of this article: America the ideal and America the nation are no longer the same thing. Preserving the American national government means destroying the American Ideal.

So, what do we do?

When Rome was falling, and all the knowledge of the world was dying with it, monks made off with the great treasures and texts. They retreated to monasteries in remote places and went to work making copies of texts and art. Most of what we know of antiquity we know because of those monks.

We are the monks now. Calling in an air strike on our position might take out the bad guys, but it will also take out the American Ideal. As much as we’re conditioned to fight to the last, at some point humility demands that we put the war to preserve the American Ideal above our desire to win this battle.

A thousand years from now, our generation will be known either as the noble warriors who fought to last to preserve their government, or as the humble monks who preserved the principle of natural law through the New Dark Age.

Finally, I’m not saying now is the time to retreat. I’m saying now is the time to plan and prepare for that retreat. It is time to curb our passions and rekindle our will in resonance with with will of God and lit with the flame of the Holy Ghost. It’s time to stop dreaming and start preparing, to trim our lamps and carry extra oil (Matthew 25:3-4). Be ready to flee to the monasteries in the hills to preserve the treasures of the Shining City on a Hill for we know not the hour of the day. Once its lights go dark, it will be too late.