Cross-posted to stlouisteaparty.com
Ten years of syndicating my blog Hennessy’s View on stlouisteaparty.com comes to an end with this post.
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Readers of the Tea Party site have noticed that I rarely write about politics any longer. They’re right. I don’t. They’ve asked me to stop posting my Catholic faith blogs to the Tea Party site. And I will. After this one.
Winter Is Coming #
Maybe I should explain, again, what I explained last year. It goes something like this: I believe most of our political efforts will be fruitless until we get right with God. Therefore, stimulating political action is to raise false hopes. Our little victories will be followed by larger setbacks. Because, without God’s graces, we can do nothing but falter.
In August 2018, I wrote a series of posts that were a long time in the making. They explained that my writing would change.
Crawling Back to Freedom and Happiness was about freedom. And happiness. I pointed out that, while we talk about freedom in conservative politics, we’re usually talking about political freedom, not true freedom. Political freedom has to do with things of this world, but true freedom is about freedom from the things of this world. And true happiness is not about feeling good. True happiness is being blessed. Unpinning all of this is the idea that we, as humans, are always slaves to something. If we make political freedom a god, we will be slaves to politics. But we won’t be happy as slaves to politics. Happiness requires that we chain ourselves to Christ, as the Apostle wrote.
That was the first message. The second, on August 10, was more direct.
What Should We Do Next was about the state of societal decay. The left wants us dead, and they don’t really try to disguise it. They have no moral grounding to hold them back. Might makes right for the left. (The New York Times' executive editor, Dean Baquet, recently admitted that his newsroom—not just his editorial page—has a mission to destroy Trump. First by pushing the admittedly false Russia collusion lies, then shifting the equally false racism lies. He’s proud to be a liar.)
People don’t like to hear that American society, the country their grandchildren will inherit, is falling to pieces. But it is. It might not be a complete shambles by the time your grandkids start kindergarten, but I don’t see a major turnaround until some cataclysmic event causes a reset. That cataclysmic event could be another world war, a major natural disaster, or a bloody and prolonged civil war. Fourth century Romans probably didn’t expect Rome to fall, either. Yet, within 100 years, fell Rome did. Gradually, then all at once, as they say. (That’s how most big things fall, by the way: gradually, then all at once.)
Next, on August 11, I wrote about a Netflix TV series called AD: Kingdom and Empire. It’s a dramatic rendition of the Book of Acts. I found AD: Kingdom and Empire fascinating for many reasons, but mostly because I think Christians will soon (sooner than we want to think) live a lot like those 1st century Christians. We will have to make very hard choices: follow Christ and suffer greatly or abandon Christ and live okay lives. That’s a hard choice. And if my dire predictions of continual social decline come true, that’s the stark choice Christians will have to make.
Not Ready For the Future #
To be prepared to make that choice, I want to practice now. And, because happiness loves company, I’d like to inspire many, many others to prepare in a similar way.
President Trump is a bulwark against the advancing hoards. But President Trump’s administration will end no later than January 20, 2025. Assuming he wins, the left’s rage and vindictiveness will have had five more years to stew. That’s a lot of pent-up demand for vengeance.
When the left returns to power, as it surely will, they will not be satisfied with rolling back progress we’ve made under President Trump. They will want to roll back Christendom itself and its advocates. Wipe us from history the way they melt statues of Thomas Jefferson. As in 1984, the left will erase us. With appropriate technology, they will delete our DNA from the human genome. They seek a final solution to the conservative problem. And, since they already consider themselves unbound by either morality or law, they won’t let anything but overwhelming force stop them.
And the devil, who is the ruler of this world (Ephesians 6:12), is on their side.
What Has Changed? #
Since I wrote those posts in 2018, nothing has changed for the better. Sure, the Russia-Collusion hoax was exposed as a hoax, but the people who wanted the hoax to be true don’t care. Like Dean Baquet, your Democrat neighbors happily invent and repeat new lies designed to whip people into a murderous frenzy of manufactured hate. Antifa still beats and threatens people with impunity, as we saw yesterday in Portland. Blood-thirsty abortion promoters are pushing the definition of “viability” towards the 10th trimester. (Absurdity intended.)
Look at these headlines from today alone and think about what Democrats want to do to you and to this country:
- Tlaib, Omar share anti-Trump, Netanyahu image from cartoonist celebrated in Iran Holocaust contest
- Sanders calls for ‘registry of disreputable law enforcement officers’
- Newborn found naked, abandoned in wooded area in Maryland
- Portland protests: 13 arrested as police declare civil disturbance
Nothing has changed, and it won’t change until massive numbers of people return to some semblance of God-based morals that intrinsically drive us to behave well even if doing so is not in our best interest.
What’s More Important Than Popularity? #
De-syndicating myself from the website and distribution list that has served me well for 10 years isn’t in my temporal best interest. Neither was eliminating paid advertising on Hennessy’s View. Neither is telling you the dark visions I see for us in the future.
But none of that matters. I have only one interest of interest to me: my soul. I want to be prepared for the really bad times when my choice could be to renounce Christ or die. And I don’t trust myself not to take the easy way out by renouncing Christ! I am weak and cowardly, and I will remain weak and cowardly. Only God gives me strength and fortitude to withstand what might be coming.
And what if I’m wrong? What if the gradual decline (then suddenly) of Western Civilization is a figment of my imagination?
Well, then, I’ll spend a lot of energy trying to make myself a better person in God’s eye and begging you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me. Is that so bad?
Refocus Is Not Withdrawal #
That’s not to say we should disengage from the world. To the contrary, I will continue to poke my nose into things that seem to require it. I might even post new material directly on stlouisteaparty.com now and then.
I still believe that God meant for men to live free. I still believe that oppression by big anything—big government, big media, big unions, big political parties, big tech, big corporations—is an evil and must be fought with the tools at hand.
But the most powerful weapons in our arsenal are the Crucifix and the Rosary. Not pen. Not the megaphone. And certainly not the sword.
The Apostle Paul put it best as he closed his letter to the Ephesians. It’s a new weapons system, but the battle is the same: good over evil.
And those weapons only work with properly ordered beliefs.
Belief Systems #
G.K. Chesterton never said, “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.” But I bet he wishes he had. (I and many other have erroneously attributed this quote to Chesterton. It was actually written by Emile Cammaerts in The Laughing Prophet, 1937.)
While I never stopped believing in God, for many years I acted as if I had stopped believing. This led me to believe in many false gods. Among these false gods was politics. And a belief that man can make a more perfect society by his own genius and ingenuity.
He can’t. I can’t. You can’t. We all can’t together.
I won’t bore you with a bunch of quotes from the founders warning of the need for a strong Christian formation in citizens in order to keep the republic viable. You can recite those quotes better than I can.
Managing Weakness #
I’ll end my farewell with this: the strongest will crumples under enough pressure, and none of us can really predict how we’ll respond in dire circumstances. We’re all weak in some way. And I am weaker than most. And, as Peter Drucker said often, we cannot eliminate weakness. We need to manage it.
The next two or five years might continue in a linear progression of the recent past, as long as President Trump remains in office. But a step-change is coming. All our natural strength combined can’t stop it. So I’m looking, now, toward the supernatural. The power that science cannot measure or predict. The power that gave Lawrence of Rome the courage to say, “I’m done on this side; turn me over.”
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