Terrestrial Divine Judgments, Part 4: Contemporary Considerations

Part 1: Theological Foundations
Part 2: The Old Covenant
Part 3: The New Covenant

Introduction

Now that we have established from Scripture and history that God both judges the non-elect and chastens His children here on earth, let us proceed to consider some of the practical implications of this theological truth for our contemporary context as Occidental Christians. I am convinced that the suffering the West currently experiences in its moral decline, tyrannical statism, humiliation, and genocide is a direct result of the West’s apostasy over the past century and a half. First, however, allow me to briefly cover the historical background leading up to our apostasy.

The “Enlightenment” and Consequent Apostasy

Following the Counter-Reformation, Catholic states experienced a very prosperous time. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are considered to be the Golden Age of Spain. Even despite their antagonism towards Dutch Protestants and the Eighty Years’ War, Spain and Portugal experienced an extremely prosperous time during this era. The great Spanish Conquistador Cortez even brought to an end the abominable Aztec empire, bringing Christianity to the Americas.¹ The Peace of Augsburg, the treaty between Germany’s Protestants and Catholics, established a principle widely applied in Northern Europe: Cuius regio, euius religio – “whose realm, his religion.” This principle of course would never have been imagined as applicable to Christ-denying pagan religions, but allowed Christians of different denominations to exist in peace together in Europe. This principle would later also be effectively established in the United States.

The era of the Reformation was also marked by an intellectual Renaissance, sparking a great revival in passion for much of the old wisdom of our ancestors. Ad fontes, the famous motto associated with this intellectual revival, shows how much veneration our Christian ancestors had even for their pagan ancestors who, undoubtedly under God’s providence, helped shape Christian Europe. Both the Northern and Southern European nations were extremely blessed during the first few centuries following the Reformation, so much so that white Christians emigrated from Europe to found Christian nations in Southern Africa and North America: consider the Puritan colonies of the seventeenth century, the southern states in North America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Boer Republics of the nineteenth century, and the Union (and later Republic) of South Africa, as well as Rhodesia, of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, as often happens when sinners are blessed beyond comprehension, the West would eventually greatly distort and abuse those blessings. The great intellectual and academic advances of the time also led to the so-called “Enlightenment,” with which thinkers such as Descartes, Bacon, Voltaire, and Spinoza are associated. All the different ideas of this movement broke from Christian traditionalism in favor of secular modernism, and they advocated in unison for the desire of man to liberate himself, at least epistemologically, from the “bondage” of God and religion. Freedom begun to be viewed as liberation from God’s law, rather than the liberation from sin which Christ brings. Similar ideas had been present earlier within the Radical Reformation of the Anabaptists, but they were quickly identified and rejected as heresies by Protestant and Catholic Europe. Now these ideas not only entered the mainstream, but were so much popularized that they had effectively ousted Christian intellectual thought in Europe by the time of Darwin and the Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century. Rushdoony clearly describes how this happened: “Christian thinkers ceased to be the elite men of Western culture with the Enlightenment. It is not an accident that Pietism and the Enlightenment arose at the same time. As Christian thinkers retreated from the world and regarded the inner, spiritual realm as the only valid sphere for the faith, so the vacuum which remained was occupied by the new humanists, the men of the Enlightenment.”²

All of this led to great apostasy. Church attendance is certainly not the alpha and omega in measuring religiosity, but it aids in giving a figure to religious trends. In Great Britain, regular church attendance has declined to about 6%, after having been recorded to be less than half the population for the first time in 1851.³ In the historically Calvinist Netherlands, secularization has kicked in a little later and has had a lesser effect than in Great Britain, but church attendance there also dropped from 60% of the population a century ago⁴ to around 14% today.⁵ Among the formerly steadfast Afrikaner people, thanks to the relative isolation brought about by apartheid, secularization intruded much later; church attendance was still around 80% by the late 1980s,⁶ just a couple of years before apartheid ended. Since then it has plummeted to less than 40% for the first time in 2012.⁷ Once again I should emphasize that these figures aren’t the alpha and omega of Western Christianity, as many believers today also remain unchurched because of the treasonous behavior of the church towards our people. Nonetheless, the numbers do reflect the reality of large-scale apostasy. However, God has also recently encouraged me, in His providence, by raising up the church in Eastern Europe, kindling the hope that the Western nations of our racial family will someday repent and follow.

The Results

The phenomenal kinist blog Cambria Will Not Yield has done an excellent job of addressing and clearly formulating the effects of the apostasy that hit the West in the twentieth century:

The dogma of European conservatives is that World War I gave communism a home in Russia, and World War II made Europe safe for communism. Both observations are true. But I would argue that World War II gave birth to something far more devastating than the communist menace. In the aftermath of World War II a new type of European leader came into being. This new European leader was really a non-leader because he no longer professed a connection to the European people. He was an abstract leader of an abstract people. And it’s no good to say that the people don’t need a leader, because they do. Great movements are always initiated by a spiritual elite. If there is no spiritual elite to renew the peoples’ “ancient heart” the people will wander in darkness and be a reed for every modern ill wind that blows.⁸

Wars devastated Europe during the first half of the twentieth century; Islamic and other third-world immigration and debt, encouraged by the policies of a treasonous Marxist leadership, have further crippled the continent since then. Corruption, violence, and an innumerable host of other depravities and abominations have brought a highly miscegenated South America to its knees. The people of the United States have been increasingly enslaved by debt, and the anti-Christian statism that conquered Europe has increasingly threatened the liberty of the progeny of the nation’s founding fathers, following the apostasy of the Marxist Civil Rights Movement that hit the country in the 1960s. Afrikaner Calvinism in South Africa remained as the last bastion of Christendom in the twentieth century, but following the National Party’s treasonous surrender to the political and financial pressures imposed on the country by globalist and Marxists in 1990, socialist economic suppression and genocide have been the fate of the Afrikaner. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the pathetic state of our Western nations is a divine judgment because of apostasy.

Conclusion: Quo Vadis?

Currently, the future looks rather dim for the West. The seemingly inevitable destruction of the once-mighty Great Britain has recently been discussed on this site. South Africa is a third-world hellhole, and America seems to be well on its way to becoming one. Yet, the answer to all our woes is a surprisingly simple one, found in II Chron. 7:14: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” We have no other option but to repent as individuals, as families, and as nations. God is true to His promises. Our attempts of reform will be in vain if we look to any enemy of Christ for deliverance. No unholy alliance for the sake of strength in numbers, either with liberals or with “conservatives,” will even dent the current satanic path of destruction in the long run. We must repent, for Christ’s Kingdom will most certainly prevail (Matt. 4:17; 16:18). As much hardship and suffering the battle might bring, we can be certain that no assault by Satan and his dark forces, however strong they might appear, will ever conquer the true Church of Christ (Rom. 8:33-39). We can gather some inspiration from the recent growth of Orthodox Christianity in Eastern Europe, and we can be consoled that the small remnant who remains true and obedient to Christ’s Law-Word is slowly but surely starting to reemerge from the ashes of a seemingly devastated West; even though still numerically small, there hasn’t been as solid and devout a group of defenders of the faith in the West in many years as there is today. This series would be fittingly closed with a recent modification of a famous Churchill speech by Pastor Bret McAtee to encourage the little flock for the battle that lies ahead:

The People of God, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soils, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Bastard Cultural Marxists and all the odious apparatus of Sodomite rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in England, we shall fight in South Africa, we shall fight in Australia, we shall fight in the States, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend the Crown Rights of the Lord Christ, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, Christ’s Kingdom or a large part of it were subjugated and starving for a season, then our great High King beyond the seas, clothed with apparel dipped in the blood of his enemy, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the Age to come, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of this present wicked age.