YOUR AMERICA ALONE THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
In 1944, at a terrible moment of the most terrible century, Henri de Lubac wrote a reflection on Europe's civilizational crisis, Le drame de l'humanisme athée. By 'atheistic humanism', he meant the organized rejection of God - not the freelance atheism of individual skeptics but atheism as an ideology and political project in its own right. As M de Lubac wrote, 'It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man...'
Olivier Roy, one of the most respected Islamic experts in France, nevertheless insists: 'Secularism is the future.' Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. 'Atheistic humanism' became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumanise in which a present tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European.
America has always been somewhat of an exception to the above - as I had cause to reflect when the aggressive and subversive automatic "spell-check" (installed unbeknownst while I slept) altered "Henri de Lubac" to "Henri de Lubbock". The next world war will be caused by an unnoticed autocorrect that slips through into the final draft of the summit agreement.
Nevertheless, both Henri de Lubac and Henri de Lubbock have been conspicuous in recent days on either side of the Atlantic. Yesterday millions of Americans watched the broadcast of what I think was a five-or six-hour memorial service for Charlie Kirk. As John Hinderaker saw it, the focus started very religious and gradually got more political - which is rather the opposite of the journey of the martyr's own short life. As for how that transition was managed on stage, consider these words from the Vice President of the United States:
You know, I was telling somebody backstage that I always felt a little uncomfortable talking about my faith in public, as much as I loved the Lord and as much as it was an important part of my life. I have talked more about Jesus Christ in the past two weeks than I have my entire time in public life. And that is an undeniable legacy of the great Charlie Kirk.
Mr Vance wasn't the only one. America's Secretary of State:
Messrs Rubio and Vance are the two leading candidates to succeed Trump as the forty-eighth president. Their remarks would have been disqualifying in a French or German political candidate. Tony Blair's spin-doctor, the gruesome Alastair Campbell, famously interrupted a Vanity Fair interviewer asking the Prime Minister a question about his faith with the rebuke: "We don't do God." Yesterday, all politicians present (save perhaps for Trump) did God openly and unabashedly.
Last week I observed that there was a critical difference between recent events in the New World and Old:
In Europe, the people who want you dead are the imported barbarians - the rapists and beheaders loosed upon the land by madmen like Merkel and Johnson. In the US, as we have learned this past week, the people who want you dead are your fellow Americans controlling the commanding heights of your society - the schools, the hospitals, the mainline churches...
What they share in common, however, is that both threats are pseudo-religious in nature. Islam is a hideously false religion, which is why, where e'r it goes violence follows and calm comes only when Mohammed is king on a field of corpses. There is little contemplation of the divine: In accord with its founder's earthly inclinations, paradise is a brothel staffed only by virgins. Practically speaking, it is a political project masquerading as a religion, which is mighty convenient because, if you submit a municipal planning application for a new mosque, you're treated as if you wish to build a Congregational church.
But the psychotrannies and other American predators have their pseudo-religions too. Some worship Gaia, some repurpose "the world's oldest hatred" as unbounded love for fashionable victim groups: On Saturday night in my own state of New Hampshire, several hours south of me on the Massachusetts border, a man went to a wedding reception at a "country club" in Nashua and was gunned down in front of his mother, wife and daughter by a killer entirely unknown to him but who yelled as he did the deed "Free Palestine!" That's a very un-Granite State kind of murder. He wasn't Charlie Kirk; he was just a guy who installed heating and air conditioning, and lived in a state with a very low homicide rate. But he's dead because he went to a wedding.
The late Kenneth Minogue used to call it "the new epicureanism", where "freedom to choose" trumps all. A woman can choose to become a man, and then a "pregnant man". A man can choose to become a woman, and then choose to stop halfway and become "non-binary" and announce their pronouns as they/them. A lesbian couple can choose to conceive. A homosexual "throuple" can choose to parent and have all three men recognised as their daughter's father:
And likewise believers in all the above can choose to kill apostates.
Why wouldn't you? After all, if Adam can be assigned male at birth and then decide to become Eve, who is really the Almighty? In a world where three blokes can have a daughter, and in a year or two collude with the state, if it's decided she's really a boy, to slice off her breasts and render her infertile... in such a world (as Laura Rosen Cohen has said at SteynOnline) every man is his own god - and (to return to M de Lubac's insight) one can only organise the world against man.
When Olivier Roy confidently asserted "Secularism is the future", he could not have been more wrong. Secularism is the void in which Islam, mass trannification and the other horrors of the age have incubated. In that respect, as significant a societal shift as can be observed in Rubio and Vance's remarks may have been the overt invocations of Christianity throughout Tommy Robinson's London rally a week earlier. It was called "Unite the Kingdom", but there was no mention of the King - for the obvious reason that, with his ostentatious iftars and other Islamoschmoozing, he's crossed over to the other side. So the day did not conclude with "God Save the King" - that's between him and Allah - or even with "Land of Hope and Glory", but with "Jerusalem", Sir Hubert Parry's magnificent setting of Blake's great meditation on whether Christ (or at least Joseph of Aramathea) ever landed Trump-like at Stansted:
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant Land.
England is no longer so green and pleasant; much of it is a filthy semi-Islamised bleephole. And I regret that so few of the crowd knew Blake's lyrics: in my day, everyone did, and we would all have sung along very lustily. But the decision to end the day with a very specific pledge - to cease not from mental fight, or let one's sword sleep, till we have built Jerusalem in England - was rather striking, especially from a "far-right thug" dismissed even by the less bonkers members of Britain's "mainstream" media as a "pound-shop Mussolini".
But something stirs, even in post-Christendom. Carl Benjamin was one of the unheard Unite-the-Kingdom speakers, silenced by the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt Brit Wanker Coppers when they decided to shut down the rally early. Mr Benjamin is a shrewd political commentator, but reflexively atheist, as are almost all English, Canuck, Aussie, Continental pundits. However, he has recently allowed that he is not ill-disposed toward Christianity as it is the "traditional" faith of England. So he joins the swelling ranks of "cultural Christians" such as Douglas Murray and John Derbyshire, non-believers who like the old buildings and hymns and The Book of Common Prayer.
Well, it's a start, but it won't be enough. If you want to know where that's likely to wind up, read Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission. Yet, as with the Canadian Liberal Party's sudden embrace of the monarchy, when nothing else works you play the dog-eared card that's left at the bottom of the deck. "Secular humanism" is the problem not the solution. As I wrote all those years ago, every enduring society needs a transcendent meaning. It's not hard to figure out: entire areas of human achievement, from music to architecture, have died with the collapse of faith. Charlie Kirk was brilliant at the politics - who's two points up in Iowa - but his legacy is far beyond such trivia: get married, he urged; have children. And, without a transcendent meaning to human existence, why would you do that when you could be getting it on with your bepenised woman at a Gaza climate-change demo?
Except at Christmas I don't often address these things explicitly - partly because I'm aware that my own failing health makes me over-invested in the topic of what awaits. But, absent the "revival" that was the theme of the Kirk memorial, it is not hard to predict what will happen: The false religions, whether Islam or mass trannification, will increase their tribe - although it is not hard to see which one would win a head-to-head showdown. In the meantime, both will co-opt the "mainstream" churches - as we heard from that tranny fetishist in the forty-seventh president's inaugural service at the National Cathedral and more recently in the action to the Tommy Robinson rally from the woeful bishops' bench in the House of Lords: the road to hell is greased by the post-Christian churches.
Why is Eva Vlaardingerbroek, another Unite-the-Kingdom speaker, such an effective warrior? Because, as you know from our shows together, she believes in something worth fighting for. Melanie Phillips, on the other hand, prefers Nigel Farage - a chap who describes himself as a "lapsed Anglican" but is prepared to allow there might be something "out there". Might be God; might be another large cheque from Zia Yusuf.
Islam is bollocks, but it is something. You can't beat something with nothing. In their different ways, the last week's events in both Arizona and London get that.
~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on the post-assassination bloodlust - and the feeble GOP response. On Saturday there was the latest edition of Steyn's weekend music show, while Rick McGinnis's movie date was Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City. Our Sunday Song of the Week was the only hit to be sung into your dictaphone, and our marquee presentation was Part Two of Mark's special twentieth-anniversary audio serialisation of his highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone.
If you were too busy this weekend being fitted for your tucking pouch, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.