Western Civilization is imploding: Now is the time for all good men to make their stand

Have you ever wondered why so few Christians seem willing to take a stand against the globalized tyranny that’s bearing down on our country, allowing it to take over their lives a little at a time?

We know that prayer and the Bible were banned from public schools in 1965, the right to murder one’s offspring was declared legal in 1973, and in 2015 the right of two people of the same sex to marry was likewise discovered to be hiding in the bowels of our Constitution.

In the 1990s, the cancel culture overtook college campuses, and quickly spread to the corporate world. Before long, there was a list of things you couldn’t say, people you couldn’t criticize, and now in 2021 there’s an ex-president you’re not allowed to support.

Violators of these cultural codes are publicly denounced in the media, simply for espousing views that for centuries had been considered mainstream.

Bye-bye First Amendment.

Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case, affirmed by lower courts, which would allow police to enter your home and confiscate firearms without a search warrant. This could be done on the flimsiest of excuses, based on their role as “community caretaker.” Isn’t that special?

Bye-bye Second Amendment.

Now we have a president who owes his political existence to the most powerful communist regime in the world, the CCP, and he equates his political opponents to domestic terrorists.

Bye-bye Fourth, Fifth and 14th Amendments.

How did we come to this point in the world’s oldest constitutional republic, the home of the free and land of the brave?

It turns out slogans on our coinage and our venerable Constitution with its amazing Bill of Rights were not enough to protect us from totalitarianism.

As G.K. Chesterton said, learning history is the only thing that keeps us from becoming slaves to the spirit of the age. 

As I look out across the bow of today’s Western culture, I see a lot of slaves.

Their minds are infected with the twin viruses of collectivism and statism. Put another way, their religion is secular humanism and they worship the almighty state.

Many of them have been reduced to walking around in masks, for no other reason than a certain government-sanctioned scientist told them to do so. He didn’t even need to present any scientific proof that masks work. He said it and they obey.

Like women living under Islam, our American men are now afraid to show their faces in public.

Whenever I enter my local grocery store I see 98 percent compliance with mask rules, and it’s hard not to notice that the majority of the 2 percent of brave souls are women. I can’t help but think perhaps these are the few women who have studied Islamic culture and see the real reason for the face-coverings – to deny us our individuality and therefore our humanity. It’s a sign of submission to our new masters.

But how did the men of America become so docile? So weak? So controllable?

It’s not their pastor or priest who they listen to in making decisions as to what they will wear, what they will think and what they will publicly espouse. No, it is the secular state!

Because they lack a spiritual grounding, most men cannot even see what is happening to America, let alone feel confident to resist it.

In their defense, the transition to a totalitarian society has been so gradual that it’s difficult for them to see and grasp, especially if they have not studied the history of totalitarian movements in other countries like Germany, China and Russia.

John Strickland, author of two great books on the history of Western civilization and the blog Paradise and Utopia: Reflections on Christendom and Modern Culture, provides a roadmap for how we got from point A to point B.

Strickland traces the birth of modern secular-humanism to the Renaissance period of the late Middle Ages. But the roots of Christian cultural decline may be found 500 years earlier, in the “Great Schism” that occurred in 1054 between the Eastern and Western Churches of what was then known as Christendom [yes Christianity once dominated the globe]. A house divided cannot stand and the Great Schism was the beginning of many divisions that led to the Reformation, and after the Reformation the Protestant churches themselves split into thousands of different sects.

In his article, the Birth of Utopia, Strickland writes:

“I would now like to take my readers back beyond the twentieth century, beyond even the past five centuries, to the moment when, in my judgment, an event happened that symbolizes a shift away from traditional Christendom to the modern Christendom that would see a decline in Christianity and the rise of a secularized alternative to it. The event symbolized the decline of a civilization directed toward the kingdom of heaven. It symbolized the end of paradise and the birth of utopia.

That event, scarcely mentioned in textbooks, signaled a shift that highlighted one of the most significant causes for the rise of utopia and the decline of paradise — “the departure of the Christendom of the West from the Christendom of the East.”

This separation and disunity in global Christianity played right into the hands of the devil, that most crafty of fallen angels who is the original master at “divide and conquer.”

With each new fracture, another chink in the armor of Christendom took its toll in terms of the Church’s influence over society as a whole.

This same spirit of division is what drives every revolutionary socialist movement. They divide people into groups and pit them against each other. If class warfare doesn’t work, then divide them by race or ethnicity or gender, always making sure to frame one side as the oppressor and the other as the oppressed. This is Marxist critical race theory and it’s being taught to your children and grandchildren in public schools today.

Right now the face of oppression is the white, straight, male Christian. It’s all a lie of course, but as the Nazis found out, if you tell a big enough lie and tell it often enough, people will believe it! The promoters of this lie have the entire mainstream media, the federal bureaucracy, Big Tech, and the world’s wealthiest private foundations on their side.

Helped by these divisions, radical secularism has gradually taken over the culture and filled the void that had been occupied for centuries by Christ’s church.

As Christendom abdicated those spaces – in education, in healthcare, in the media and the arts – Satan’s minions rushed in.

I see many men trapped in the fallout of this secularized, hellish culture that is modern America.

They work their jobs. They come home, watch sports or fiddle in some other diversion. They do whatever is necessary to keep their minds off of the depressing decline of everything that made America great. I get it. I did the same for years.

But there are consequences to spiritual lethargy.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that anything left unattended in the natural world will decay and eventually rot. The physical world is a mirror of the spiritual world.

Sometime around the onset of the industrial revolution, Western man stopped centering his life on Christ and His church and began to focus on career.

The majority of American men, especially those over 50, still identify as Christians.

Many even hold conservative, family values.

But they remain trapped in the mindset of today’s secular-humanistic society, and they continue to play by its rules.

This mindset includes the belief that what you do for a living and how successful you are financially is what defines your value to society.

It’s common to hear men talk proudly about the things they and others they know have accumulated. Homes, cars, boats, vacation homes, the size of their 401Ks.

There is nothing wrong with any of these things, and of course we all need to earn a living. But when material things become the overriding focus of one’s life then our lives become out of balance and empty.

When the majority of lives in a nation are out of balance and rudderless, that nation will suffer culture rot. A rotted, disoriented culture becomes the perfect breeding ground for the most advanced, most militant form of secularism — communism.

A culture based on materialistic communism cannot survive. Russia learned this. China is learning it. America will learn the same.

In 1931 Stalin filmed the demolition of Christ the Savior Cathedral, Russia’s largest Orthodox Christian church, for propaganda purposes and built the world’s largest public swimming pool in its place. He thought he could crush Christianity by intimidation, brute force and propaganda. Tens of thousands of priests, pastors and lay people were sent off to prison camps, many more were shot.

But guess what? Christianity is thriving in Russia today. The new Cathedral of Christ the Savior, an exact replica of the original, was rebuilt and consecrated in Moscow on Aug. 19, 2000. The swimming pool was filled in. Moreover, a majority of Russians in a recent poll said they believe strongly in what Lenin and Stalin called the opiate of the people.

We can go one of two ways in America. We can take the events of the last year as an eye-opening lesson, realize the error of our ways and return to God. Or, we can double down on nihilistic materialism and make whatever compromises are necessary to stay in the good graces of our secular-humanist commissars, who think they can rule over us and keep us in our place through naked intimidation.

Maybe that’s why God allowed political power in America to be usurped by a godless, power-hungry, illegitimate administration. Maybe we needed to be jolted back into taking our lives more seriously than just saving up for that next material toy and whittling away our free time watching overgrown men throw leather balls, bounce leather balls, run with and catch leather balls.

While the materialistic lifestyle many Americans have been caught up in may have been comfortable in normal times, many now find themselves feeling anxious, tormented by personal conflict. They will be looking, perhaps for the first time in their lives, for that rudder that can grant them peace in the midst of chaos.

They were taught from the time they were boys and girls that following the law, being tolerant of others and earning an honest living was all that was expected of them.

But now, suddenly, that’s not enough.

It’s no longer enough to tolerate evil, they must embrace it. We are told we must denounce things we know are not real, like systemic racism and ancestral guilt for crimes committed hundreds of years ago.

You might be the star employee but if you are caught harboring certain thought crimes, your presence on the payroll becomes a liability in today’s “woke” society.

But to acquiesce to your corporate boss requires compromising and even denying the truth established since time immemorial by your heavenly boss.  

To preserve our God-given freedoms of speech, to dare to speak about the most fundamental truths, such as God creating us as males and females in His image and that the value of all human life is sacred, marks you as an enemy of the woke society.

This is called persecution — something Christians in China, Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East are intimately familiar with, either currently or as part of their recent history.

American Christians have no experience with persecution.

This is something our fathers never had to deal with. They didn’t have to deal with it on their jobs, in their communities, and certainly not in their families.

But we are learning. How many of us have “woke” children who condemn us outright and treat us as pariahs simply because we hold to our “old-fashioned” beliefs?

What we are learning as Western Christians is what those in the East have known for centuries. It takes courage to practice Christianity under totalitarianism.

As author Eric Metaxas says, “courage is faith in a crisis.”

Many Americans are confused right now as to how they should react in this crisis. They’re not accustomed to being called extremists and domestic terrorists. Some are still not yet aware that we are living under a form of soft communism. They think this is just a brief phase that will pass and in 2022 the Republicans will take over and things will return to normal.

Maybe that will happen. But more than likely it won’t. The leadership of the two major parties are working together, in unison, to make sure someone like Trump, who believes in protecting America’s borders and respecting the values of Christianity, is never again elected to the highest office in the land.

Have you ever noticed that even when the Republicans take Congress we always end up with a GOP leader like John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell? These men are globalists who pander to the same special interests that Democrat politicians pander to, those of Wall Street’s multinational corporations.

These corporations want nothing more than an endless flow of cheap foreign labor, endless wars and the ability to outsource manufacturing jobs to China. These same global corporations want to silence patriotic Americans, take away their guns and brand them as white nationalists if they don’t go along with the program.

To confront and resist these totalitarians makes you vastly less valuable in the eyes of the modern secular world but hugely more valuable to the Kingdom of God.

Most Americans were never taught by their parents, teachers or even their pastors that obedience to government ends at the point where godless politicians start making laws that turn right into wrong and wrong into right. It was always assumed that this is America, a nation governed by the rule of law, and that there was only so much evil that even the worst politician could accomplish. We have separation of powers, checks and balances and “equal justice under the law,” right?

All of those protections have been exposed as extremely fragile. They can simply be ignored or selectively applied when wicked leaders are supported by a dishonest press and an education system that churns out global citizens brainwashed in socialist groupthink.

History shows us how we got to this point and it will help guide us back to the path of freedom. We must resist. Sometimes that’s just a matter of standing up and saying, “No.” Only then will we break out of this dark place where we are more fearful of man than we are of God.

If we look to the God of the Bible and the Christians of past totalitarian societies for our roadmap, we will find that they went on the offensive, fearlessly declaring their faith and letting the chips fall where they may. At some point, truth prevailed over the lie. It always does.

Leo Hohmann is an independent journalist providing news and commentary for such a time as this. This site is 100 percent reader supported and contributions of any size are welcomed and appreciated. Checks can be sent c/o Leo Hohmann, P.O. Box 291 Newnan, GA 30264. Or by credit card via the donate button.