Why even thoughtful unbelievers recognize this is a really bad idea.

The current new wave of protests on the ‘Poison Ivy’ elite campuses, such as Columbia in New York City continue to assault the senses of the vast majority of the American people. This latest wave seemed to be sparked by Iran’s attack on Israeli citizens via hundreds of missiles and drones. This speaks to not only the moral and intellectual bankruptcy on America’s most prominent campuses, but the larger sense of cultural decline across the political and cultural spectrum.

Evangelical Christians have their explanation for this cultural decline – a move away from our Judeo-Christian heritage. A growing number of people who are not believers also decry this decline, especially in the area of censorship. They say it is a ‘betrayal of liberal values.’ They long for a return to the very recent past where ideas could be debated, not suppressed. Some in the secular/atheist camp even acknowledge that many of the ideas we cherish today such as equality, which brings freedom of speech, come from our Christian heritage, but that we don’t need a return to “Christian America” to retain those values. We don’t need Christianity to retain some of the best of Christian values, such as fairness and compassion, they say.

Here’s the problem – the ‘liberal elites’ enabling such grotesque practices as lawlessness in our blue cities and on our ‘elite’ campuses, support for terrorists, and the mutilation of our teens to transition them believe theirs is a ‘moral’, even religious cause. I say religious because they call themselves the ‘woke’, implying theirs is a new ‘Great Awakening’, like those we’ve had in the past. Only this time we don’t need God telling us what to do. This pseudo religion is a direct result of the anti Christian thought which has existed in most of our universities for the last few decades. A moral and religious vacuum was thus created and demanded to be filled, as nature abhors a vacuum. This is the basic premise of my book Modern Paganism.

Christianity brought many things to us that we all not only cherish, but take for granted. It brought us protections for women and children, the dignity of work and the work ethic, which resulted in our modern capitalistic system. And it taught a radical doctrine – that all people are created equal. This was unknown in the ancient world. The pushback on Christianity by spoiled elites, who have benefitted the most by these values was because of its teachings on sexual behavior. So it was abandoned by our ‘intellectual’ class for the most part, not because it was not intelligent, but because it was not fashionable. Fashion governs those who have a comfortable lifestyle, as it did in ancient Rome, no matter how vulgar the value system needed to support it. And the Roman value system was vulgar indeed, with not only its brutality but its unbridled sexuality, including widespread pedophilia. Prior to the advent of Christianity there were just no rules in this area, except the domination of the weak by the strong.

The problem is the only alternative to a post Christian world is a pre Christian world.

You can’t keep the parts you like of our Christian inheritance – equality for everyone, for instance, and reject the parts you don’t like – rules for sexual behavior, for instance. The new ‘enlightened’ social architects tell us you can – we can be a just, humane people without reference to a divine Authority. There are several problems with that. One, it has never been done. The world Christianity inherited was one totally devoid of human rights for everyone. Ancient paganism is praised by the elites today only because the elites back then enjoyed the privileges of it. The Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century were proposing a secular experiment of a ‘paradise without God’ because of the oppression they observed from the Roman Catholic church, something the Protestant Reformation was rapidly in the process of correcting. They wrongly concluded that this oppression came from Christianity itself, something history has dramatically proven wrong. Jordan Peterson fittingly said in a recent podcast that the Enlightenment experiment has come to an end.

Our founding fathers in the United States correctly understood and stated in the Declaration of Independence that our ‘inalienable rights’ can only come from our Creator. If they come from man, they can be taken away by man. This is what we’re now seeing with the modern pagans. They believe in free speech, as long as they agree with it, which is pretty absurd. They can claim speech they disagree with is ‘dangerous’, in the same way communist dictators do, but the masses understand this is bogus. Only really bad ideas have to be protected by censorship, whether it be done by a government, a journalist, a school, or a tech platform. But if rights do not come from God, then they are not transcendent. Which means they can be taken away.

So where does this leave us? Do we all have to convert to Christianity for society to return to sanity and decency?

Actually, that is not a bad idea. Our children would be safe again. Law and order would be restored. Poverty would be reduced as the number of single parent homes would drop drastically. However, even in our most ‘Christian’ of times as a nation, everyone was not necessarily a true believer. Faith is a very personal choice and people are on different places in that journey. What has been the case in the past was that the Judeo-Christian moral ethic held sway in our public life. The many testaments of government leaders, including Supreme Court justices from the very beginning to fairly recently give testament to this. I refer you to David Barton’s many works as an excellent resource if you need further validation. Historically, we have pushed back against both tyranny and lawlessness using the Christian ethic, and we need to do so again. This is our history. The Judeo-Christian moral code is the founding moral code of our nation. Modern pagans don’t have the right to change it. We don’t want to go back to ancient paganism – we’ve been delivered from it. Their ‘progress’ is really regress.

This is why there has been a mass exodus from blue states to red states, to the tune of some 5 million and counting. It is historical in scale for a reason. People don’t want to live under the oppressive conditions of these modern pagans. Are all the leaders of red states Christian? Not really. But they do embrace its ethics in many areas, and the people enjoy a higher quality of life as a result. I am not under the illusion that this article by itself will affect public policy. But hopefully it can embolden each one of us to push back against those who would try to coerce us to abandon our Christian moral code under the banner of a counterfeit pagan version of compassion and ‘social justice’, no matter what color state we live in. If enough of us do that, our leaders will have to listen. And if your leaders don’t listen, welcome to Texas.