Daily Verse | Genesis 26:24
“I am the God of your father Abraham. Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I will bless you and will increase the number of your descendants for the sake of my servant Abraham.”

Wednesday’s Reading: Genesis 27-29

It’s Wednesday and I can’t help but feel that we’re headed toward a showdown between the forces of freedom and the forces of tyranny, which in full flower is the evil of communism. In yesterday’s post I mentioned that there have been several articles by lefty publications fretting about a new “civil war.” They’re late to the table, though, as I, myself, have been warning for years (recent samples here, here, here and here) about the trajectory we’re on as a country, concluding that the natural (though not inevitable) end of the arc was a violent clash between Left and Right.

Today I would modify my statement to say that the clash is between those who are alarmed over the restrictions being placed on their natural rights and freedoms, and those who want to consolidate power and lord it over the citizenry. At its core, it’s a clash of visions over what America will be: will it collapse in on itself and go the way of European multi-cultured socialism, or renew its strength as the sole bastion of personal freedom and opportunity never before seen in the history of the world?

Into the debate about whether or not we’re on the cusp of another civil war drops this article by William Sullivan, titled, “What Issue Was Really at the Heart of the Civil War, and is it Relevant Today?” After tracing the causes of the war way back to 1828, Sullivan explains, “The federal government issued new tariffs which were, by design, both harmful to the South and beneficial to Northern producers. A tariff of nearly 49-percent was issued on nearly all imported goods.” In response, South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union, but war was averted with “the 1833 passage of both the Force Bill and the Compromise Tariff, which gave the federal government the right to militarily enforce tariffs and lowered the tariff rates, respectively.”

However, that raised the question that remained unanswered right up until South Carolina actually seceded from the Union in 1861:

If the people of a state surmise that the federal government is pursuing a policy that compromises the liberty and prosperity of its citizens, does that state have to conform to what is perceived by the people of the state as an unconstitutional abuse of power, or, more bluntly, intolerable tyranny?

Sullivan goes on to quote Clifford Dowdey, who “offers a fairly good summation” of what led the country to civil war:

[The North and South] had diverged into patterns of life which became increasingly antithetical; antagonisms and rivalries grew in intensity. The industrial North did wish to buy cheap and sell dear at the expense of the South, while Northern money power needed the South in a colonial status for exploitation.  Slavery did exist in the South, and there was a high moral tone in the issue of freedom, held by a small minority. Extremists on both sides did inflame passions. There was, as an amalgam of all this, the nationalistic sweep of the new industrial middle-class society represented by the North, in alliance with the expanding, democratic West, and against these the South stood as an anachronistic, arrogant feudal culture in the path of manifest destiny. All of this defines the elements of duality within the corporate body of the nation; yet, put them all together, with equal emphases or any single emphasis, and the element of explosion is missing.

Sullivan then draws the parallels with our own age:

Red and blue states have, in fact, diverged into patterns of life that have become increasingly antithetical in recent years, and antagonisms and rivalries are growing in intensity. Blue states did fleece the taxpayers of red states last year by demanding a federal bailout for their decision to keep their states irrationally closed during the pandemic and in order to keep their broken, and internally unsustainable, entitlement programs afloat. There is a high moral tone being expressed on abortion in red states, an institution that disregards the right to life among the unborn just as the institution of slavery disregarded the right to liberty among slaves. Extremists on both sides are inflaming passions. Effete coastal liberals and elitists in the media and academia view middle-class, red-state denizens as anachronistic God-worshippers who prioritize their families and communities before the needs of the national collective, and are thereby impediments on that Hegelian path of history toward their inevitable vision of “progress.”

Red and blue states do, in many ways, seem like separate parts locked in a struggle that must be resolved if we are to function as a nation. Will this warring duality be resolved, or will we explode when, for example, the federal government decides to mandate vaccination IDs be issued by all of the states, and several states refuse?

Nobody would deny that we’re deeply divided in our country today. But what is the core cause of this divergence that we’re experiencing between red and blue states or, more candidly, between progressive activists and conservative citizens? What started the divergence in the first place?

Sullivan hints at it when he writes of “red-state denizens as anachronistic God-worshippers.” Remember that a key feature of cultural Marxism and its ultimate state, communism, is the superiority of Man and the rejection of God in any form. In his book, Witness, written 70 years ago, Whittaker Chambers explained that the trial of Alger Hiss, “was a trial of ‘the two irreconcilable faiths of our time — Communism and Freedom.’ And that struggle, that trial, he wrote, ‘can end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending forces.'”

Communism, he wrote, is

man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals …. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.

That is the root cause of the division we are experiencing in our nation today—the denial of God in favor of the supremacy of Man. As John Adams wrote,

“Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and Religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.“

If we are no longer a “moral and religious people” who acknowledge the sovereignty of God and our Constitution wasn’t written with such people in mind, then we find ourselves adrift with no governing structure fit for us. Our system of government depended on self-restraint, or self-governance, which came from a belief in a sovereign God.

The core of our conflict is a clash between those who believe in God’s Providence and those who would assume for themselves the ruler’s throne. We can’t go on this way indefinitely. One or the other of the competing visions for our life together will be destroyed, but which—freedom under God or communism under Man?