We Win. The Forces of Antichrist Lose

An absolutely superb review of Mary Eberstadt's recent book by Rachel Lu, writing at the Federalist: Why Are Progressives On An Anti-Christian Witch Hunt?  I want to focus on these salient words from the article:

Eberstadt presents the persecution of Christians as a kind of witch-hunt. Even though traditional religion is in fact culturally marginal, progressives view Christians as a monstrous threat, poised to subvert the whole nation with our anti-freedom theocratic agenda. We’re a kind of cultural boogeyman in an age of overwhelming anxiety.

On this reading, the impulse to persecute arises from a kind of mania. Deep cultural anxieties get transferred to Christian scapegoats. Progressive fear of Christians is like a Freudian psychoanalytic phobia.

David Goldman, in his review of Eberstadt’s book, points to another possible explanation. What if progressive fear of traditional religion isn’t based on a delusion? Perhaps liberals correctly perceive that their cultural dominance is fragile and already beginning to crumble. Perhaps they fear Christians because they accurately identify is as the most significant cultural force outside of liberal progressivism itself. Perhaps they sense that traditionalists, even when relegated to a counter-culture, have the cultural resources to challenge their hegemony. . . .

Over the last few decades, the progressive elite has enjoyed congratulating themselves for outgrowing traditional religion. Religious people have long been presented in the media as reactionaries and rubes, hopelessly blinded by hateful prejudice. A thousand elite autobiographies have begun with a smug recounting of the progressive “saving experience” wherein the child in church realizes that God is dead, and that the Sunday School teacher is just a pitiful functionary of a corrupt purveyor of fairy-stories. This condescension towards religion is an elemental component of progressive faith.

Now the liberal elite has a problem. Traditionalists aren’t nearly as extinct as we’re supposed to be. Actually, our beliefs and communities are looking surprisingly resilient. Committed Christians met a nice, gay couple (even several!) and still held to traditional sexual morals. The pro-life movement keeps hanging around like a bad cold. Liberal progressivism has not been the unqualified political and cultural success they expected it to be.

Things feel precarious. Liberals feel threatened. The psychic balance between progress and tradition is wildly disturbed. Panicking because a Christian friend offers to pray for you is in a way quite absurd, but to the insecure liberal, the offer to invoke divine influences may seem genuinely ominous. They don’t understand traditional religion, but it seems to have an eerie staying power. Some traditionalist spokesmen, if you listen to their siren song, actually seem fairly reasonable. They even have the audacity to bolster their self-image by doing good deeds!

Suddenly those reactionary rubes start seeming like a real threat. The hysteria begins to mount. . . .

Like Goldman, though, I’m mildly perturbed by the way Eberstadt presents Christians as culturally weak and helpless. To be sure, many elements of the present situation are beyond our control. Persuasion is very important at the present moment. In many respects, though, progressives are right to fear us. They have reason to shut down conversations before they can begin. We aren’t really looking to dominate them through theocratic tyranny, but we do have some very powerful critiques of their sex-obsessed “faith.” Also, our traditions have a depth and balance and reasonableness to them that progressives have barely begun to appreciate.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Christians will populate these American shores for a long time after our insecure degree-toting elites have been relegated to the pages of dusty books. That’s a good enough reason for progressive liberals to read Eberstadt’s book, and reflect on their manic animosity towards Christians. It’s also reason for Christians to persevere in hope.

Contrast this with the recent utterly defeatist tone of Rod Dreher's recent piece, The Coming Christian Collapse:

Spencer predicted that Catholicism and Orthodoxy would benefit from this collapse. Maybe so, but he must have had no idea how unprepared Catholicism and Orthodoxy are to react to these developments among Evangelicals. We can hardly keep our own young people, much less offer a safe, strong position for refugees from the Evangelical collapse to land. In theory, we have it. But we either don’t really believe what our own traditions teach about themselves, or we don’t care enough about it to teach it effectively to our own young.

Conclusion: Christianity in America is strong in pockets, but mostly its strength is only apparent. It is a façade that will come tumbling down when social conditions are right. This is something that most of us Christians will live to see. This is something that few of us Christians will have prepared for.

And when it happens, our bishops, leading pastors, and senior laymen will be like the GOP Establishment in the Age of Trump, left to wonder what in the hell happened.

Wrong, Rod.  As I wrote in the comments section under his article, "I beg to differ . . . . Ruin is coming to the West, and the Church will be the sole beneficiary", and in a friendly tweak to his despondent nose, I posted this video from Apollo 13:

"There’s no doubt in my mind that Christians will populate these American shores for a long time after our insecure degree-toting elites have been relegated to the pages of dusty books."  Lu is right and Dreher is wrong.  Lu is right because the Church is Christ's and Christ is the Dread Sovereign and Lord of History.  Ruin is coming to the West, which is to say, to the liberal elite who imagine that they run the West, but whose program has been an abject failure and whose states no longer enjoy political legitimacy, if they ever did.  They are going down, and they're going down hard.  They will go down because we will take them down one way or the other, either by our efforts alone (pass the ammunition), our efforts aided by  supernatural blessing (praise the Lord and pass the ammuntion), or by supernatural means alone (Praise the Lord, i.e., the Eschaton.)

Rod:  stop wringing your hands and cowboy the you-know-what up.  "¡Viva Cristo Rey!"