Month: November 2009

Another thought-provoking comment by Joe Sobran

“…the whole history of Western Civilization is rooted in religion. Unless you understand Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, along with the rise of Islam, you don’t understand the events that shaped the modern world. The issues of the Reformation were still alive when the United States was founded, when slavery was debated, when the Civil War tore the country apart, when Prohibition was adopted, when Joe McCarthy assailed “godless Communism,” when John Kennedy became the first Catholic American president.

“The Christian Right is closer to its own historic roots than most Americans, yet the media and the history textbooks treat it as a marginal, virtually un-American movement. This isn’t “multicultural”; it’s anti-cultural. It refuses to take America’s real origins seriously, adopting the Supreme Court’s shallow and ahistorical interpretation of the separation of church and state.”

Indeed. And that’s why my proposed corollary to Santayana’s Axiom is important in today’s cultural and political debates.

Santayana’s Axiom:

“Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

And for those very, very few who cannot locate third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axion in the blog header,

“In a democracy (’rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”

I must confess that although I was blessed in my youth with literate parents and grandparents (and aunts and uncles) who were constantly discussing (often times arguing) historical and biblical (extended family gatherings included biblical and theological scholars among its numbers) context of current events at family gatherings, and my early public school years featured much, much more in the way of instruction in history than I’ve seen become the norm in the past 30 years or so, it wasn’t until college that I realized the huge gap in pubschool education that Sobran highlights above. Indeed, it wasn’t until one year in grad school when I was reading (for pleasure reading, not coursework) Jan de Hartog’s novelization of Quaker history, The Peaceable Kingdom, that I began to think seriously about just how large that knowledge gap loomed in public discourse.

But it’s even worse nowadays than I had ever thought in previous decades. Heck, in a time when more Americans can associate Paula Abdul with American Idol than can associate, “…a government of the people, by the people, for the people…” with Lincoln, let along The Gettysburg Address (something we were required to be able to recite from memory when I was a lad), it’s hardly any wonder that almost no one–it seems–is aware of the deep roots our own Constitution has in Christian thought and history.

And no one who is ignorant of The Battle of Tours (also called The Battle of Poitiers, 732), The Battle of Lepanto, The Battle of Vienna and other hugely important turning points in the 1,500-year-long conflict between Western Civilization and Islamic barbarity really has any business opening their mouths concerning today’s war for survival between the tattered remains of Western Civilization and Islam.

Sidebar: Oh, you noticed “Islamic barbarity”? Anyone who’s not read the Koran and familiarized themselves with the history of Islam denuded of Islamic disinformation and self-hating multi-culti lies from surrenderist leftards can feel free to argue with me about that characterization, but expect to be refuted with facts and roundly mocked for cultural and historical illiteracy.

I agree with Perri Nelson that the first task facing us in warding off the collapse of our own country that’s being engendered by leftard traitors and faux “conservative” Dhimmis and dimwits on the putative “Right” is that,

“…we need to be ever vigilant, and do what we can to preserve the ideals that they [The Founders] handed down to us.”

But more–and Perri makes this point many times on his blog–we need to engage everyone we interact with in dialog on the events of the day and we also need to inject historical context into our every interaction concerning current events. To do that, we need to be as fully informed about historical precedents and influences as we can be. With modern barbarians holding power in the White House and Congress, the only means we have left to us to preserve what little remains of the republic bequeathed us by our progenitors is to build up strong walls at the local level and then extend those walls further and further into the public arena.

And that means we need to become ever more aware of the genuine, valuable and significant influence of religious history on our current situation. Absent that awareness, our understanding of where we are will be deeply flawed.