Last Crusade 52: The War of Utopia and Paradise
To recover the Church and the world requires the truth. Nothing else will save us.
All other institutions on earth are earthly. Only the Church is immortal, eternal, divine, and aims at something beyond the walls of the world. The Church can be, and has been corrupted, and her spirit is slain. But only the Church knows the secret of returning from the dead. She has done so before. No worldly power can say the same.
We can put no faith in the promises of worldly powers, first, because they are faithless, second, because they are worldly, and finally, because they are powerless.
They are powerless because worldly things are inevitably corrupt, and corruption cannot cure corruption: the leprous doctor cannot cure you of leprosy, because you will contract it from him. All hope in the worldly powers is vanity, because these powers, being worldly, have no love in them, and, without love, there is no beauty, no virtue, no truth.
This sad, benighted enemy has infiltrated the Church, and is dousing her lamps.
We live in the era of the silent congregation. The world has made the Church worldly. We, the faithful, we faithlessly stood by, quite silently, and silently let that happen.
Every third generation or so, the Church must expel from our leadership, and from our fellowship, any enemies dwelling among us who will not repent and convert. The long, slow, painful, and tragic process of cleansing must begin again, as it has so many times before. This is not merely a protracted and painful battle in the Last Crusade, this is the last and also the everlasting battle.
There is no end to it, no more than there is an end to the wash of the waves against the seacliff. The most that can be hoped, is to erect a wall of stones to slow the erosion.
We must be that wall. Our hearts must be as firm as stones, unflinching and unyielding in faith.
All these previous chapters have examined the enemy closely. Here we must turn a weary eye once more upon the marred, formless and gorgon-visage of the foe, to identify their strategy, and emplace our defenses.
This generation has a secular cult, a worship of worldly powers, in the place of the God of Abraham. The Cross and the Ten Commandments have been pulled down from public places, and prayer forbidden in schools.
In its place the enemy has reared up an idol as vast and dark and false as any idol of the Beast mentioned in the vision of the Apocalypse of St. John.
It is the culmination and sublimation of all previous heresies of all the ages folded into one. In a very real sense, worship of worldly powers is the Church of Antichrist.
The worldly powers wage jihad against all the unique cultural artifacts of the West, including, irrationally enough, the very things in whose names they wage war: dignity, equality, liberty, and charity.
But the worldly powers seek all these things by the light of their vapid imaginations, for they shun the light of truth. Hence what results is profoundly vulgar, unjust, despotic, and pusillanimous.
The goal of this revolt of the world’s elite is familiar: anarchy, riot, plunder, and mutiny against heavenly and human law.
The plunder in this case is not only wealth and power in the secular sphere, but the dignity and glory of all the imponderables they have not earned: they crave the palm of martyrdom without the indignity of suffering, the monuments of heroism without the work of war, the laurels of poets for gargling gibberish, the halo of sainthood for abominations and sins, badges of courage for being jejune, conformist, and safe.
However, this is the first revolution in modern times waged by the rich and powerful to dispossess the poor and weak. In the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the institutions of the West are being overthrown.
But not all institutions. Only yours.
The groves of Academia are untouched. Thousands of migrants are not flooding into Yale. But the high schools in the suburbs now must allow boys in drag into your daughters’ locker rooms and sports teams.
The law courts and halls of power are untouched. They hold the same old men of the same old party who supported Jim Crow back in the day. But the ghettos where the poor huddle now have had their police forces “de-funded.”
The rich and mighty still have their many wives and many divorces. Their families are untouched. But mothers on welfare are bribed not to marry the fathers of their children, so that gangland will raise the little delinquents instead. Family life among the poor is nearly eradicated. Among the poor, the aborted outnumber the born, and bastards outnumber children born in wedlock.
It is the suburbs and ghettos targeted for mass influxes of criminals from overseas, jihadists, gang members, illiterate masses. The gated communities will be as lily-white as ever, crime-free, and only English spoken there, for the nannies, landscapers and domestics do not speak until spoken to.
And so on for all the institutions.
This revolution is meant to establish, not to overthrow, a feudal hierarchy.
Only the strongholds of the poor and meek are besieged. And the foremost institution that ever was the help and support of the poor, the Church, is besieged foremost.
The dogmas of this worldly revolt are familiar: that truth is not absolute, logic is not impartial, reality is not objective, beauty has no standards, man is a mere beast possessed neither of honor nor dignity nor natural rights. Life is a flux of meaningless events without justice, without love, fellowship, patriotism, or point, and, most of all, without God. Neither virginity nor matrimony is sacred, oaths are not sacred, truth is not sacred, human life is not sacred, nothing is sacred.
Like the Gnostics of old, the worldly powers hold the cosmos to be divided between the Elect, who are pure, and the Reprobate, who are damned. Their purity flows from an ineffable inner truth, one to which they alone are enlightened, or “woke.” The Elect are beyond criticism, and the Reprobate are beyond salvation.
The Reprobate are literally denounced as deplorable and irredeemable.
As Nihilists, the worldly powers hold is that there is no truth. The fact that Gnosticism and Nihilism are mutually exclusive and logically incompatible deters none of them. For no dogma is not open to question, since to question marks the questioner as a Reprobate, hence one too benighted to be heard or answered.
Instead of the truth, which they despise, the worldly powers have the narrative, which folds and contorts like a world-girdling serpent, twisted ever to their needs of the moment. Why this serpent is so seductive has been said many times, but bears repeating here: Diversity, toleration, victimhood, and political correctness are the four horsemen of falsehood.
First, the appeal to diversity is a slothful and lazy way to seem enlightened, but without the hard work of showing any real love or charity to any real fellowman.
Second, the appeal to toleration is a slothful and lazy way excuse to justify one’s own sins: for none can condemn fornication if we all applaud sodomy.
Third, the appeal to victimhood is a slothful and lazy way to excuse ingratitude, and, hence, excuse the duties of piety and patriotism which accompany gratitude toward father or nation. In general, ingratitude deflects criticism from any selfishness or avarice or failure to help the poor. It also excuses all failures, and shifts all blame to the nearest convenient scapegoat sloth can demonize. It also unleashes the beast of hate from its iron kennel.
Finally, political correctness is a lazy and slothful way to escape from the work of thought, debate, and civilized discourse. Merely redefine any word to the opposite of its normal meaning, and one can spew endless nonsense without fear of contradiction, and one can spew endless contradictions without fear that any man will call it nonsense. Call the free market “capitalism” and call honest work “wage slavery” and voila, all argument is moot. Call any disagreement a phobia or a bigotry, and silence tramples all foes.
Let us pause to reflect on the precision of language here. ‘Lazy’ here means what allows one to claim a reward without doing the proper work to earn it. But ‘sloth’ is the inexact English translation of the technical term acedia which is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Sloth refers to an indifference to spiritual things. These things are all ‘slothful’ not because they are indolent. They are slothful because one who has zeal to save his soul, or a healthy fear of God, would not and could not do them.
Sloth here means the void of passion, the lack of emotion, the lack of grief or care or concern which is akin to despair. Sloth dims the ear and closes the eye. When a man of sloth finds he may be damned to hell, he does not really give a damn.
Political correctness glorifies the act of lying as both courteous and efficient. That those who embrace these lies break divine commandment against bearing false witness with sublime indifference is what makes political correctness a deadly sin and an act of sloth, that is, an act of indifference to spiritual reality. Likewise, victimhood is a pretense born of pride, and is based on false accusations against one’s fellowman and all society. It is the ultimate abnegation of the conscience, hence, again, is sloth. Toleration celebrates sin, and Diversity is Pharisaism. Both are perfect exemplars of utter neglect of the things of heaven, combined with the mockery or mimicking of heavenly virtues. Both are sloth.
These four together, diversity, toleration, victimhood and political correctness act to summon a vision of the shining towers of utopia rising in the pink clouds of a new dawn, where unicorns dance and rainbows sing. Imagine there is no heaven; it is not hard to do. Imagine no hell, no possessions, no nations, nothing to kill nor die for. Imagine no families, no individuality, both sexes as one bisexual unisex drone-creature, bald and gray with dead eyes. Imagine all the people living for their own daily physical gratifications, living together as one, amid the universal peace and happiness of a worldwide graveyard of perfect silence.
This utopian vision is a lazy way to substitute emotion for thought, to disguise selfishness, to mask wickedness, and to excuse the reckless defamation all that is bright and good, civilized, and decent. Cloaked and garbed as the righteous fury of the morally supreme, hatred, pure hatred, hatred without limit, the hatred of hell which has neither point nor purpose nor satiation, is let loose upon the world to work its will.
The utopian vision unleashes hate in the name of love, moral degradation in the name of moral purity, falsehood in the name of enlightenment, perversion in the name of liberty, and, in short, everything low in the name of everything high.
This is what has entered the churches of the Christians, the temples of the Jews, and the hearts of all men of goodwill.
The question then is why this vision of utopia prospers when the more logical and healthier orthodox alternative, that is, Christianity and all the Western tradition, is despised and silenced.
Who would prefer a cult that offers total condemnation with no forgiveness, promises utopia on earth, but only in a future that never comes, and promotes a doctrine of universal original sin, but no doctrine of universal atonement?
It is not preferred because sober debate confirms it. No arguments are made to support utopia. One cannot argue the a self-contradictory mess is more true than a doctrine known to be self-consistent and sound, nor that a half-witted heresy is more coherent, ancient, authentic, and sober than the ancestral doctrines tested by millennia, and affirmed by the wisest minds of all generations.
It is preferred for the reason endlessly repeated here: laziness and sloth. This hellish idiocy has prevailed, and is even now consuming the Church like a galloping leprosy, not just because of the sloth of its advocates, but, more to the point, the sloth of its opponents.
The advocates of Antichrist betray Christ because this is an easier way to gain their goals without embracing the difficult paths of martyrdom, heroism, genius, saintliness, or self-reliance, without even the modest inconvenience required by normal levels of decency, courtesy, civic virtue, modesty. Our allies and leaders, allegedly the pastors of Christ, do not resist the blind servants of Antichrist, because this is also the easier way. Resistance leads to inconvenience.
The Church must be the standard bearer and permanent institution devoted to the reformation of civilization in all the ways outlined in these chapters: to reform or raze the news, popular entertainment, political life, the corporate culture, the academic world, and the intellectual life of Western civilization.
This requires the same type of networked organization in which the enemy excels: boycotts, lobbyists, pressure groups, think tanks, and dedicated cadres of individuals assigned to the long-term goals of outwaiting the lifespans of professorships with tenure and judgeships with lifelong terms of office, to control the candidacy of the rising generation, and exclude the faithless and unpatriotic, the weak, impure, and criminal who control the pool of candidates now.
The only institution with the staying power to organize over the long term and across all nations, as she did since the time of Constantinople, is the Church. In Roman times, without the slightest hint of violence, or even disobedience to the Imperial authority, the Church exerted a continuous and silent pressure against such abominations as gladiatorial games, slavery, pederasty, sodomy.
She must do so again in these modern times against these same abominations come again, some in their old masks, as sodomy and pederasty, and some in new, as slavery is now called human trafficking, and is disguised as an immigration reform issue.
For the Church to take on this role requires the reform of the Church, and of all denominations, which is a long-term and difficult process, perhaps impossible.
The Enemy knows and has always known that the Church is the main stronghold against him, his minions and thralls, and has taken great effort to divide the church and corrupt its leadership. Reunification of the Church is more feasible now than in any generation past, now that the number of martyrs, slain for Christ’s sake, exceed those of any time in the past, including the bloody days of Nero.
But reunion of the leadership of a visible church is not needed now — what is needed is cooperation, nay, love between all the brethren of all denominations, to work in the common purpose to save all denominations from common degradation and destruction.
The Roman Catholics must rid their pederast priests from their seats of power in the Vatican. The Episcopalians must cure sodomites of their sin, not coddle them, and cease from teaching that unnatural vices are nothing more than a bold lifestyle choice. The Anglicans must have an inquisition, and eliminate those who preach and teach that abortion is licit. And so on.
And this return to Christ is only the first step. Once the Church resumes her ancient role as the Church Militant, taking up sword and shield and donning all the armor of virtue, and raising aloft the banner in whose sign we conquer, the question then is where to go, and what method of combat to employ.
The early Church clasped hands in prayer, raising no fist in violence. The price was high and bloody and painful, but the victory was sure. Violent insurrection is justified, seemingly inevitable, now that the enemy has lightly tossed away the last figleaf of lawful conduct, and stolen the government by naked fraud.
Nonetheless, it is not feasible.
A second civil war would be far worse than the first. The men of the war between the states, those many years ago, were men of honor, and could win without vaunting or surrender without dishonor. That the nation was reforged back into one whole was a miracle. The scars remain and always will, and lingering resentment will always be found to stoke the ancient division back into flame.
But those were civilized men. Peace was possible after war. This generation is addicted to dishonesty, cowardice, and vice. There are no men of honor, no men who fear God, among the worldly powers. No word of treaty could be trusted, no peace could hold. Breaking the nation now will simply hand the world to China, whose hegemony will last beyond all foretelling.
Civil war in America will lead to clear disaster and the downfall, not of America only, but of all Western nations.
The enemy has a clear and simple plan: to continue to provoke patriots in the name of public safety or protecting democracy or helping transgenderqueer black men-women or fighting global warming-cooling, or whatever other idiotic bafflegab gushes from their teeth. The excuse does not matter.
The traitors will provoke the patriots until the patriots take up arms; whereupon public safety will demand confiscation of all guns, registration of all citizens, total surveillance of all civilians at all times, and the whole apparatus of secret police, anonymous accusations, arrests and executions without trial, mass expropriations and deportations to penal camps, and everything the Twentieth Century taught mankind how to do.
And the gates of hell will open.
It should be noted that the enemy does not necessarily know or care what will come once the shooting starts. Whether they think they will survive the wreckage of the West and rule the ruins, or whether it will come as a surprise to them when they are slain in the chaos, or during the ascendancy of whatever power steps into the vacuum thus created, is of no matter.
For our part, we must tolerate the impositions and resist with all legal methods remaining, if any. Taking up arms should be eschewed until the actual gun confiscation begins.
Other acts of civil disobedience, such as by going to Church on Sunday in open defiance of the laws forbidding this, or preaching against homosexuality, are not only permitted, but wise. How and when and where each man decides to break this law, let him and his pastor decide. But let it be done deliberately, by planning, as part of an overall strategy, not haphazardly, not hastily, and not at the prompting of passion. Count the cost before you challenge the law.
In all respects, this is a spiritual war. The undisguised love of the enemy for all things miserable, unjust, abhorrent, and ungodly has never been more clear.
As said above, we must blacken the name of utopia, rob the lazy imagination of glory and give it no more courtesy of a hearing. The vision of all men living as genderfree egalitarian serfs toiling under the lash of enlightened self-anointed benevolent despots is a vision of the fiery lake of sulfur where fallen angels and damned souls scream and wail and mutter and burn.
A vision that is better awaits. A true vision.
To win hearts and souls and arguments, we must propound the great and dramatic story of Man and the World, which only the West understands and loves. The young need to be enchanted, lured, and mesmerized by a finer vision than the story of victimhood. They need to be told about heroism. We must replace the narrative of victimhood with the narrative of that typically American heroic ideal, namely, the self-made man. This vision must rule the intellectual life of the West.
We must topple the fatuous towers of utopia, built on pink clouds of airy nonsense, and draw the eyes of men to the unpleasing truth: we live in the landscape of Pilgrim’s Progress, with the Slough of Despond at one hand, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the other, and somewhere on the rocky road ahead, the great prince of this world, black and magnificent in adamantium armor, sword burning in his hand, is waiting to defeat and enslave us.
To undermine the towers of utopia we must do all that Caesar promises to do, and cannot perform. We must be the hope of the poor and the champions of the downtrodden.
Again, if we do not have a plan for the hardship, empathy, and sadness of the poorest and most ignorant of the inner-city mobs, all is lost. Among these humblest do the seeds of the Word of Christ have the richest soil. Here are saints born. Here saints are needed.
We have to show these poor why freedom, including private charity, is better and more reliable than life on the vote-plantation, with its crippling big government welfare-state nanny-state smothering all hope.
Real reform we began to see, in a small way, in the last four years: politicians willing to break with machine politics, free enterprise zones, support for Black Colleges rather than for Black Victim Groups. The worldly powers reacted with insane hatred at these attempts, screaming like vampires repelled by the crucifix about a virgin’s lovely neck. The worldly powers openly broke the laws and defrauded the voters in order to seize the powers of the government once more.
As of the time of this writing, barbed wire fences and armed troopers surround government buildings, and no plans to return to a free society are contemplated. This was not an overreaction by the evildoers. The slight bit of honest charity and aid given to the poor threatened to rob the vampires of their stranglehold over the lifeblood of nation now and forever.
No law need change for the culture of the inner city to change, and no institution save the Church stands the smallest chance of spearheading such a change.
Or, rather, laws are downstream of culture. Once the culture is Christian, the antichristian laws and customs will give way.
Alas, I doubt me that the current Church can face the task. We must set our holy places in order first, and seek the face of the Lord.
If the rumors of cooperation between the traditionally black denominations and the machine politics of the Inner City are true, the congregations must rise up against the wolves disguised as holy shepherds, and anoint truly godfearing men, courageous, humble, just, and pure in faith, to lead in their stead.
I call it rumor because it would be untoward of me to criticize a denomination of which I am a not a member. Let each flock know and bind up its own wounds, and expel the Judas at their supper table.
Me, I can comment with all due humility only on the Roman Catholic Church, whose variance, vagrancy, neglect, and satanic indifference to the laws of God and the laws of nature all my coreligionists know all too well, or, at least have heard the ugly rumors. An Inquisition is called for. Pederasts among the priesthood and idols in the Vatican should either be burned or thrown in the Tiber with a curse. The shameful cowardice with which American bishops allowed our masses, from Easter to Christmas, to be closed, while are brethren in the Far East are being martyred for the least crumb of the Eucharist, cries out like the blood of Abel in the earth. Despite this, no layman is excused from his obedience to the pastors and fathers put over us.
Once this is done, we can begin to make a truly Christian society.
Let me close with words wiser than mine. This comes from the pen of C.S. Lewis. I have taken the liberty of adding parenthetical American words for his English words, for clarity.
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The New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like:
Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Everyone is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one’s work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them.
And there is to be no “swank” [stylishness] or “side,” [affectation of superiority, snobbery] no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist.
On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience—obedience, and outward marks of respect, from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and — I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular — from wives to husbands.
Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls “busybodies” [meddlers, troublemakers, coveter of other men’s things].
If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, “advanced” [Progressive, Leftist] but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned—perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic.
Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing.
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How shall we reform the Church? How quell the disunity of the denominations, and act as one against our common foes?
How shall we begin the great work of resurrecting Christendom, and making the West Christian once again?
We must begin with ourselves, in prayer and fasting.
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This ends my final chapter and last word in this series of essays. I have no more to say on the topic of the Last Crusade. The time is come to take up the red cross and march to war.
It has been an honor to be allowed to offers these thoughts and exhortations. Let your ears not be too heavy to hear, nor let your sword sleep in your scabbard. The time is at hand.
Godspeed.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
