Section I

Click here for the series introduction and Part 1: “Finding God in the Blood and Guts of Birth and the Big Bang” by Fred Tribuzzo

Part 2: “A Search For An Authentic Life” by Alec Ott

Part 3: “Life-Changing Literature” by Chris Queen

Part 4: “To Know The Truth About The World” by Jon Bishop

Part 5: “The Long Road To Becoming An Essential Author” by David M. Swindle

Perhaps it’s inevitable that if you love western civilization, you will fall in love with God. This is what struck me after reading Alec’s opening paragraph on Andrew Klavan’s book The Great Good Thing. Klavan’s love of our culture, his conversion, and “longing for that other perfect place,” are the lessons I took from Klavan’s memoir and Alec’s essay.

The American Left knows instinctively and to its horror that love of country, of our very civilization, brings about spiritual expansion, which motivates one to look back on our history, to reflect, study, savor, and correct wrongdoing.

Slavery is the best example, existing for thousands of years in all cultures. Thomas Sowell points out in Black Rednecks and White Liberals that many of those cultures never even became conscious of slavery’s evil, seeing it as a fact of life, right as rain. The worldwide slave trade would only be abolished through the spread of Christianity. Along with those freed from bondage, modern men and woman owe their liberty to Judeo-Christianity, supported by the concept of the rule of law and democratic governance codified by our Greco-Roman past.

In the West there is the excitement of experiment, whether into outer space or into the hearts of people connected to the God of Abraham. We want to participate in this fabulous civilization: writing a novel, starting a business, or raising a family with an eye on the eternal. Not witness to the eternal, the modern Left demonizes these or any other activity when citizens ignore the leftist meme “the debate is over.” When the Left gets a whiff of religious expression, patriotism, or even common sense at work, like securing the border, they proclaim fascism, saying we’re only minutes away from the next war, the next occupation, the next genocide.

Through Klavan and C.S. Lewis, Alec rightly points out that the “perfect place” is a God- centered universe that races into the bloodstream in not only the believer and the agnostic, but in the virulent atheist as well. Religious energy can’t be denied, and when the true source is denied, that energy resurfaces in places like politics, or environmentalism, bringing a fury of violence against the “nonbelievers.” Communism, the terror of twentieth-century, exposed the modern atheist’s desire to replace Christ of the New Testament with the state: the state delivers justice for the poor; all are equal in the eyes of the state.

When religious energy infuses the politics of the moment, or some new fad, the Left’s downward spiral away from western civilization becomes all the more terrifying. Their answer to God’s unlimited grace and mercy is an unending descent into politically-correct madness, where they dance in a lower circle of hell, some even declaring human life to be a cancer itself, to be destroyed in order to get Mother Nature back on track, free from the disease of humanity.

As Americans, we examine our worst sins and look for the best path forward, knowing that the gravest of political conflicts are handled best in a constitutional republic with a rational God at our philosophical and religious center. Some of our agnostic Founders, such as Ben Franklin, understood that the very concept of the Judeo-Christian God would anchor life, liberty and pursuit of happiness in the eternal, finally clearing the way for real human progress.

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