{"id":2291933,"date":"2024-07-10T13:09:02","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T17:09:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/americas-conflicts-are-not-political-or-ideological-but-religious\/"},"modified":"2024-07-10T13:11:59","modified_gmt":"2024-07-10T17:11:59","slug":"americas-conflicts-are-not-political-or-ideological-but-religious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/americas-conflicts-are-not-political-or-ideological-but-religious\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s Conflicts Are Not Political Or Ideological, But Religious"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Famericas-conflicts-are-not-political-or-ideological-but-religious%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2291933&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The conflicts in American \u2063society today are not <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/supreme-court-disappoints-democrat-lawmakers-with-non-partisanship\/\" title=\"Supreme Court disappoints Democrat lawmakers with non-partisanship\">primarily political<\/a> or ideological, but religious. \u2063Despite being a secular country, America finds itself in the midst of a\u200b <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/palestinians-riot-over-israels-plans-to-build-elevator-at-holy-site-for-people-with-disabilities\/\" title=\"Palestinians Riot Over Israel\u2019s Plans To Build Elevator At Holy Site For People With Disabilities\">religious war<\/a> due to its foundation on Christian claims. The idea that all men are created equal, a core principle of America, is rooted in Christianity and without it, concepts like free \u200dspeech, liberty, and\u2064 equality would not exist. Attempts to separate\u200c American values from their Christian roots are unsustainable and lead to a decline \u2064in societal\u200c coherence. The rejection \u2064of Christianity in America could result in a resurgence of a pre-Christian pagan order that denies the \u2062equality of all men. The battle in America today is not between secularism and Christianity, but\u2063 between a\u2063 Christian-based society \u200dand a post-Christian \u2062paganism that rejects the core beliefs \u200bof Christianity.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>The conflicts roiling American society today are not primarily political or even ideological, but religious.<\/p>\n<p>America is supposedly a secular country, with separation of church and state, free exercise of religion, and so on. Yet we find ourselves in the middle of what amounts to a religious war. How could this be?<\/p>\n<p>Because America, like all nations, is founded on religious claims, and relies on those claims for its coherence. We<a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/biden-pick-for-pentagon-policy-chief-opposed-sending-troops-to-southern-border\/\" title=\"Biden Pick for Pentagon Policy Chief Opposed Sending Troops to Southern Border\">\u2019ve long<\/a> been accustomed to talking about America as a \u201cpropositional nation,\u201d a phrase taken from Abraham Lincoln\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/dribbler-shuts-up-lebron-james-refuses-to-use-powerful-voice-to-promote-covid-19-vaccine\/\" title=\"Dribbler Shuts Up: LeBron James Refuses to Use \u2018Powerful Voice\u2019 to Promote COVID-19 Vaccine\">famous line<\/a> in the Gettysburg Address that America was \u201cdedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The idea is that America is fundamentally different from the ethnic nation-states of Europe, which were based on blood and soil and religion. America supposedly transcended all that. It was based instead on an idea \u2014 a proposition. Anyone could become an American if he agreed to the proposition. <\/p>\n<p>And this is true. But nearly everyone who says America is a propositional nation is wrong about <em>what the proposition is<\/em>. America is not a collection of Enlightenment tropes at the intersection of Locke and Rousseau, a grab bag of philosophical sentiments about the rights of man. America is the creation of Christian civilization.<\/p>\n<p>The proposition at the heart of America, undergirding our nation\u2019s existence, is not just \u201call men are created,\u201d but <em>Christianity and all that comes with it<\/em>. Without Christianity, you don\u2019t get free speech, liberty, equality, freedom of conscience. All of it relies on the claims of the Christian faith, none of it stands on its own.<\/p>\n<p>Some will acknowledge the Christian inheritance of America but insist that it\u2019s a point of departure, that once the American experiment was launched, it could be safely separated from the religion that launched it. They think it\u2019s possible to take the \u201cbest\u201d parts of the Christian faith without the need to continually affirm Christ. \u201cChristless Christianity,\u201d you might call it.<\/p>\n<p>But it doesn\u2019t work like that. A few months ago the famous atheist Richard Dawkins wondered aloud in an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=COHgEFUFWyg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">interview<\/a> why his own country, England, could not just go on having \u201ccultural Christianity\u201d without actual, believing Christians. He said he liked the cathedrals and the Christmas carols, and would like to enjoy them without the bother of actual Christianity. He wants fewer <em>believing<\/em> Christians and more <em>cultural<\/em> Christians.<\/p>\n<p>It never occurred to Dawkins that you don\u2019t get to keep the culture without the cult. The sad spectacle of modern England should suffice to prove the point. If there is no one to worship in the cathedrals, they will become concert halls or, in England\u2019s case, mosques. If no one really believes what the Christmas carols proclaim, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/australian-police-tear-gas-pro-djokovic-crowd-after-legal-win\/\" title=\"Australian Police Tear Gas Pro-Djokovic Crowd After Legal Win\">eventually people<\/a> will stop singing them.<\/p>\n<p>The same goes for us here in America. The American proposition that all men are created equal is a religious claim, specifically a Christian one. Not to belabor the point, but the American founders only ever believed that all men are created equal because they believed that we are God\u2019s children, created in His image. Our entire system of government flows from that belief; without it the whole system collapses.<\/p>\n<p>The idea that every person is in some way sacred, created in the image and likeness of Almighty God, is \u201cself-evident\u201d only to a moral conscience formed and awakened by the teachings of Christianity down through the millennia \u2014 teachings that came from Christ Himself.<\/p>\n<p>The American founding is therefore not comprehensible in strictly secular, rationalist terms. Our nation begins with a proposition about the nature of God and man. If that proposition is discarded or denied, whatever comes after that isn\u2019t America. It might call itself America, it might even deploy the familiar vocabulary of rights and liberties, but it is not America.<\/p>\n<p>So when I say we are engaged now in a religious war, this is what I mean. We are either going to be a nation based on Christian claims about what man is and how society should be ordered in light of that, or we are going to revert to a societal state that existed before Christianity, one that is based on pagan claims about man and that posits a very different vision of how a nation should be ordered in light of those claims.<\/p>\n<p>To be clear, the contest is not between secularism or \u201cwokeism\u201d and Christianity. If we reject Christianity, the future of America will not be a secular liberal utopia, where we go on living off the capital of our Christian inheritance without replenishing it. It\u2019s going to be a new version of paganism, and you\u2019re not going to like it. <\/p>\n<p>This post-Christian paganism might not outwardly look like the paganism of the past, but it is no less hostile to and incompatible with Christianity. Its tenets, then and now, constitute an inversion of Christian claims and commitments: a rejection of transcendent truth, moral absolutes, and even objective reality. These are all at the root a rejection of God.<\/p>\n<p>Above all, the new paganism rejects the claim at the heart of the American nation: that all men are created equal. It posits a different claim, from an older, pre-Christian order: men are not equal; by nature some are slaves and some are masters. Inequality is inherent in our nature, and should be reflected in our government and laws.<\/p>\n<p>So the Christian retreat in the West heralds something both new and old: a de-Christianized political order emerging from the ruin of Christendom. What comes at the sunset of the Christian era rises up from the distant past, appearing in new guises and names but nevertheless heralding the return of a pagan order, one based not on the reality of Christ but on the raw power of His fallen angels. Under its banners march the old gods, the lesser deities and principalities that were original enemies of Christ\u2019s church since the beginning of time.<\/p>\n<p>To fight this new paganism, Christians in America will have to shed the false notion that their religion is a purely private matter, that there must be a \u201cwall of separation\u201d between our religion and our politics. We have to argue, without apology, that public life in this country should be shaped by Christian morality and ordered by its dictates, as it was for most of our civilization\u2019s history.<\/p>\n<p>Most of all, we have to accept that our American culture of self-government and liberty under law cannot long survive cut off from its source, which is and always was the Christian faith. <\/p>\n<p>Without that faith, alive and active among the people, there can be no American republic. If we want to save the republic, we\u2019ll have to become a Christian people once again. And that means we\u2019ll have to fight \u2014 and win \u2014 a religious war for America.<\/p>\n<p>The stakes for the nation are as high as they can be. We see now that there is more than one way for a nation to fall. There is the Roman way: a centuries-long decline eventually succumbing to wave upon wave of invaders. There is the British way: a dwindling to irrelevance and impotence, passive in the face of an assertive Muslim immigrant population.<\/p>\n<p>And then there is the American way: not to decline and fall, not to dwindle into irrelevance, but to become evil.<\/p>\n<p><em>A version of this article was delivered at the NatCon conference in Washington, D.C., this week.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Pagan-America-Decline-Christianity-Dark\/dp\/1684514444\/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Pagan+America&#038;qid=1695306441&#038;sr=8-1\"><i>Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come<\/i><\/a>. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The current conflicts in American society are not primarily political or ideological, but religious in nature. Despite being a secular country, America&#8217;s foundation is rooted in religious claims, particularly Christianity. The idea that all men are created equal, a core principle of America, is a Christian belief. Without Christianity, concepts like free speech, liberty, and equality would not exist. Attempts to separate America from its Christian roots are misguided, as the entire system of government is built on these beliefs. The rejection of Christianity could lead to a return to a pagan society, with a different vision of how a nation should be structured. To combat this, Christians must advocate for the influence of Christian morality in public life and accept that the American culture of self-government and liberty is dependent on the Christian faith. Without a revival of Christianity, the American republic may not survive. The author argues that America must become a Christian nation once again to prevent its downfall<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":518,"featured_media":2291934,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Pilgrims.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[5374,15847,7940,5894,10248],"class_list":["post-2291933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-america","tag-conflicts","tag-ideology","tag-politics","tag-religion"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Pilgrims.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2291933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2291934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2291933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2291933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2291933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}