by John Daniel Davidson.

G. K. Chesterton said, “Some say it is impossible to return to the past; but the truth is that there is now nothing before us but the choice between two paths which both return to the past. We can return to some sort of Catholic fellowship, or we can return to some sort of pagan slavery. There is no third road.”

A New Dark Age

The argument of this book is straightforward: America was founded not just on certain ideals but on a certain kind of people, a predominantly Christian people, and it depends for its survival on their moral virtue, without which the entire experiment in self-government will unravel. As Christianity fades in America, so too will our system of government, our civil society, and all our rights and freedoms. Without a national culture shaped by the Christian faith, without a majority consensus in favor of traditional Christian morality, America as we know it will come to an end. Instead of free citizens in a republic, we will be slaves in a pagan empire.

Perhaps that sounds dramatic, but it is true nevertheless. There is no secular utopia waiting for us in the post-Christian world now coming into being, no future in which we get to retain the advantages and benefits of Christendom without the faith from which they sprang. Western civilization and its accoutrements depend on Christianity, not just in the abstract but in practice. Liberalism relies on a source of vitality that does not originate from it and that it cannot replenish. That source is the Christian faith, in the absence of which we will revert to an older form of civilization, one in which power alone matters and the weak and the vulnerable count for nothing. What awaits us on the other side of Christendom, in other words, is a pagan dark age.

Here, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we can say with some confidence that this dark age has begun. Why would a pagan America mean the advent of a dark age? Because modern paganism will be no less violent and oppressive than the ancient paganism that Christendom cast down. The reason for this has everything to do with what pagans have always believed, then and now. As Liel Leibovitz has written, their beliefs “may be distilled to the following principle: Nothing is true, everything is permitted. These were the last words, allegedly, of Hasan i-Sabbah—the ninth-century Arab warlord whose group, the Hash’shashin, gave us the English word ‘assassins.’ And his dictum perfectly captures the soul of paganism, illuminated by the idea that no fixed system of belief or set of solid convictions ought to constrain us as we stumble our way through life.”

The term “pagan” here is not limited to worshippers of Zeus or Baal, but refers rather to an entire system of belief, which holds that truth is relative and that we are therefore free to ascribe sacred or divine status to the here and now, to things or activities, even to human beings if they’re powerful enough (a pharaoh or a Roman emperor). In this way, as the Romans understood, paganism is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith, which does not allow for such relativism but insists on hard definitions of truth and what is, and is not, sacred and divine.

T. S. Eliot made this point in a series of lectures he gave at Cambridge University in 1939 that would later be published as The Idea of a Christian Society. Eliot wrote, “[T]he choice before us is the creation of a new Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one.” Writing on the eve of the Second World War, Eliot said, “To speak of ourselves as a Christian Society, in contrast to that of [National Socialist] Germany or [Communist] Russia, is an abuse of terms. We mean only that we have a society in which no one is penalised for the formal profession of Christianity; but we conceal from ourselves the unpleasant knowledge of the real values by which we live.”

Those values, Eliot argued, did not belong to Christianity but to “modern paganism,” which he believed was ascendent in both Western democracies and totalitarian states alike. Western democracies held no positive principles aside from liberalism and tolerance. The result was a negative culture, lacking substance, that would eventually dissolve and be replaced by a pagan culture that espoused materialism, secularism, and moral relativism as positive principles.

These principles would be enforced as a public or state morality, and those who dissented from them would be punished. Paganism, as Eliot saw it and as this book argues, imposes a moral relativism in which power alone determines right. The principles Americans have always asserted against this kind of moral and political tyranny— freedom of speech, equal protection under the law, government by consent of the governed—depend for their sustenance on the Christian faith, alive and active among the people, shaping their private and family lives as much as the social and political life of the nation.

De-Christianization in America, then, heralds the end of all that once held it together and made it cohere. And the process of de-Christianization is further along than most people realize, partly because it has been underway in the West for centuries, and in America since the middle of the last century (although, as we’ll see, the change really began at the turn of the nineteenth century). Only now, in our time, are the outlines of a post-Christian society coming clearly into view.

This book is available at Amazon

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Note: My contention from the beginning and throughout this entire website of over a thousand posts has been and remains that America never fell from grace because it was from its beginning built on a bad foundation. Despite the presence of Christians (of a motley theological sort) and many, many decent persons of good will, it was built on the foundation of Masonic and Enlightenment philosophy, of bad men and women who distorted and mocked true Christianity, the traditional Roman Catholic Faith. Men and women like Martin Luther, Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, Voltaire, Marquis de Sade, Robespierre, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Darwin … to Frenchmen Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and all the way to Planned Parenthood in 2024.

America will not save us anymore than Marx or Nazism can(1). It is impossible. God must save America— or nobody will. We can only attempt to mitigate the damages in this world. May God in Christ intervene to save our children and our grandchildren, and to gather all persons of good will into His Elect, despite all ongoing apostasy, infiltrations and sin. — Stephen Hand, 2024

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(1) E.g, exporting untold numbers of abortions, the Rainbow Revolution, gender and sexual lies, elimination of traditional gender pronouns and family designations like “mother,” husband, woman, wife, etc.; pornography like nothing before in history, surgical transgenderism, etc., in short nuclear family devastation, also organ harvesting for profit, brain implant experiments, total surveillance, and on and on….

✓ Someone has defined modern Democracy as statism with a limited but more widely distributed oligarchy to run it, and who attempt to rule the world by it.

America and Seductive False ‘Liberty’.

America… “not in any sense Christian”

No Kings, no gods.

“….she licensed every form of lust with laws to cleanse the stain o f scandal she has spread.” — Dante, The Inferno, canto V, 57

The fatal mischief in the U.S. Constitution was in the purposeful ambiguity embedded in the Enlightenment concept “liberty”. This is what logically led us all the way to the travesties of Rainbow Wokeism, or to any other abuse of freedom one may wish to read into the concept.

A distortion of “liberty,”(1) far removed from sacred revelation (John:8:32, 2 Cor. 3:17, etc ) and blurring the lines between political and metaphysical meanings, is the crisis of our time.

This was no accident. It directly targeted our Christian patrimony.

“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away [with] all this artificial scaffolding…”  —Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 11 April, 1823; Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon II, 594

… More

Hillsdale College is an independent institution of higher learning founded in 1844 by men and women “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings” resulting from civil and religious liberty and “believing that the diffusion of learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings.” It pursues the stated object of the founders: “to furnish all persons who wish, irrespective of nation, color, or sex, a literary, scientific, [and] theological education” outstanding among American colleges “and to combine with this such moral and social instruction as will best develop the minds and improve the hearts of its pupils.” As a nonsectarian Christian institution, Hillsdale College maintains “by precept and example” the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith.

The College also considers itself a trustee of our Western philosophical and theological inheritance tracing to Athens and Jerusalem, a heritage finding its clearest expression in the American experiment of self-government under law.

By training the young in the liberal arts, Hillsdale College prepares students to become leaders worthy of that legacy. By encouraging the scholarship of its faculty, it contributes to the preservation of that legacy for future generations. By publicly defending that legacy, it enlists the aid of other friends of free civilization and thus secures the conditions of its own survival and independence.

Updated.