Christian Nationalism: The American Revolution Versus The French Revolution

posted by Wolf Howling at American Thinker 

Christianity stands athwart neo-Marxists’ over-arching goal of creating an all-powerful government, free from any competing moral or ethical authority. Because America was founded on Biblical principles, neo-Marxists have to drive Christianity from the public square and uncouple America’s founding from its Judeo-Christian roots. The left’s latest effort has been to attack “Christian Nationalism.”

If you are a believing Christian or Jew, you are likely mystified about this newly made-up class of “Christian Nationalists.” According to Politico’s top reporter, Heidi Przybyla, it is a small subset of Christians—evil ones—who want to establish a theocracy. The defining characteristic of this subset of evil Christians is that they falsely believe that God Himself grants each person immutable rights to life, liberty, and property. 

Here @MSNBC helpfully makes it clear their disdain for Christians in America.

She says that if you believe that your rights come from God, you aren’t a Christian, you are a Christian nationalist.

Somehow they seem to not mention that our own founding documents make this… pic.twitter.com/WTLMqcqTzg

— Wade Miller (@WadeMiller_USMC) February 23, 2024

Przybyla was later aghast that anyone criticized her for this obscene and historically illiterate garbage. She tried to defend herself with an unhinged argument of pure nihilism. To paraphrase: no one truly knows what God wants; therefore, no one should rely on the Bible for moral lessons. In short, all Biblical commands become illegitimate when men interpret them. She stops there, of course, before applying that bit of crazed reasoning to anything else involving human communications or understanding.

Progressive media are now engaged in an effort to portray “Christian Nationalism” as the worst threat ever to our nation. Scurrilous articles have appeared in Politico, the NYT, Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, TNR, and Salon. PBS has produced a documentary, as has Rob Reiner, with his being an epic box-office failure.

The concerted scaremongering against Christian Nationalism carefully avoids discussing the Bible and for good reason. The overarching messages of the Bible are morality, the sanctity of individual life, and the necessity of impartial justice. Indeed, one of the first commands God gave the Israelites before they entered the Promised Land was to create courts of law to administer “true Justice for the people.” He emphasized that the Israelite judges “must not distort justice; you shall not show partiality… Justice, and justice alone, shall you pursue…” (Deuteronomy 16:18-20).

Rabbi Hillel the Elder, the great Jewish scholar of the 1st century BC, when asked to explain the entirety of the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) as briefly as possible, said,

What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this—go and study it!

Jesus Christ reformulated Hillel, summing up the message of Christianity with the Golden Rule, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” Matthew 7:12.

In his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul explained that a Christian should submit to earthly government (Romans 13:1-7). Jesus drove that point home when He said, “render unto Caeser what is Caeser’s, and unto God what is God’s.” (Matthew 22:21)

Scary stuff, eh? Do you detect a whiff of dangerous “nationalism?”

Christianity was the unchallenged foundation of Western Civilization until the Enlightenment. Many of the Enlightenment’s greatest figures, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition, remained people of faith, such as the father of the Scientific Method, Francis Bacon (1651-1626), who “promot[ed] scientific experimentation as a way of glorifying God and fulfilling scripture.” Other Enlightenment figures, particularly in France, were radicals such as Denis Diderot; they embraced atheism and socialism, which proved to have dire consequences for humanity.

In the Anglo-American branch of the Enlightenment, the most influential political philosopher was John Locke, an English doctor and a Christian who wrote his Second Treatise of Government in 1690. Locke explicitly grounded his political philosophy in the Bible, arguing that rights to life, liberty, and property, and a right to be subject to laws made only by a freely elected legislature, were not grants from government that government could withdraw on a whim, but were laws of nature a Christian God bequeathed to mankind. Government could not legitimately withdraw these laws, and citizens could rebel if governments tried to do so. Locke’s work became the American justification for revolution and a blue-print for the liberal democracy contained in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

In 1750, Boston Congregationalist (i.e., Puritan) minister Jonathan Mayhewrelied on Locke’s reasoning to deliver his own Biblical exegesis on government, God-given rights, and justified rebellion in a sermon he titled “Unlimited Submission.” It was the Morning Gun of the American Revolution.”

Mayhew wrote to justify Puritan actions during the bloody English Civil War a century earlier, which culminated with Puritans beheading the Anglican tyrant, King Charles I, for treason. Mayhew grounded English rights and representative government in scripture, particularly Romans 13:1-7, and reasoned from scripture that Christians had a duty to rebel against a tyrant violating their rights to life, liberty, or property. Mayhew had a profound effecton 15-year-old John Adams, who sat in the pews that day. Mayhew also had his sermon published and copies distributed throughout the colonies and Britain.

Christianity was at the forefront of the march to revolution that followed. Peter Oliver, the loyalist Chief Justice of colonial Massachusetts, wrote in 1780 that Mayhew and his fellow Congregationalist clergy—the “Black Regiment”—caused the American rebellion. In 1775, Britain’s Horace Walpole drew a similar conclusion when he quipped that “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian minister.”

Famously, in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson invoked immutable, God-given rights to justify rebelling against a tyrant who violated those rights. Jefferson’s reasoning, and indeed, much of his verbiage, was lifted from John Locke. In the months before Jefferson penned the Declaration, Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, a pamphlet that caused a sea change in the colonial embrace of revolution. He opened the pamphlet with religious arguments against the monarchy.

Ben Franklin, a man who was pivotal in the Christian evangelical movement’s rise in America, proposed in 1776 that the Great Seal of the United States should show Israelites escaping from Egypt as recounted in Exodus, with the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” Jefferson liked that motto so much that he adopted it for his personal seal.

It’s irrefutable that the people who drafted and approved the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Constitution (1787), and the Bill of Rights (1791) believed that the rights to life, liberty, property, and representative government flowed from God and government could not infringe them.* For a good discussion of religion’s role in our government, see this 2006 speechfrom former federal judge and Senator James Buckley.

The canard of “Christian nationalism” comes from the atheist path that brought the Enlightenment to a bloody end with the French Revolution. Virtually all modern society’s ills can be traced back to that Revolution, which birthed socialism and a modern police state with absolute power. Naturally, the first thing the French radicals had to do to remake society was rid the nation of a competing system of morality and authority—i.e., Christianity—and this they did with brutality and bloodshed. George Neumayr explained,

The secularists of the French Revolution regarded the Roman Catholic Church as the last obstacle to atheism’s final triumph. Blurting this out, the French dilettante Denis Diderot proposed to his fellow revolutionaries that they strangle the last priest with the “guts of the last king.”

The French Revolution’s legacy has been a disaster for humanity. Over 100 million people died in the 20th century because of communist, socialist, and fascist police states unmoored from Judaism and Christianity. Moreover, the children of the French Revolution, people such as Michel Foucault, a gay pedophile, and Herbert Marcuse, have overtaken the West’s ivory towers and poisoned the West with postmodernism, critical theory, DEI, and atheism.

And now, the French Revolution’s legacy gives us the utter canard of Christian Nationalism. It is a charge that relies on historic illiteracy to redefine our nation. It must be fought tooth and nail, for the stakes could not be higher.

The worst wildfire in Texas' history has a complex link with climate change

 Temperatures dropped and snow began to fall on the Texas panhandle, dusting the scorched grasslands, thousands of dead cattle, and hundreds of burnt-out buildings with a fine layer of white powder. It was a welcome relief – and an apocalyptic image – for the state, which has been battling its worst wildfire in history.

The Smokehouse Creek fire, which started on 26 February in Hutchinson County, has so far burned more than 1.2 million acres (486,000 hectares), and killed two people and thousands of cattle. On 27 February, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties in response to the wildfire.

Wildfire risk is expected to increase across Texas as climate change brings drier, hotter conditions, according to a 2021 report by Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon. The wildfire season will likely last longer in places where there is little rain, such as eastern Texas and areas commonly affected by wildfires may expand eastward, as fuels become drier faster, thanks to a warmer climate.

But the Smokehouse Creek fire did not spread so rapidly and burn so intensely because of any prolonged drought – instead, the flames were exacerbated by a wet winter. The reasons behind this kind of extreme fire behaviour are not quite as clear cut as one might first think.

Why drought did not fuel the Texas blaze

Extreme wildfires have become more common across the US in recent years, primarily thanks to  drought and warming temperatures. But the area where the Smokehouse Creek fire is burning – just north of Amarillo – is not currently in extreme drought like other more southerly areas of Texas.

"Drought has not dominated Texas's climate nearly as strongly as it has in the region to the west," says Park Williams, a University College of Los Angeles geography professor. In 2020, Williams published a study which showed the American south-west is currently experiencing a megadrought – the worst dry period the region has seen since 800AD. But only a "sliver" of Texas was included in the study, Williams says.

The primary reason the Smokehouse Creek fire spread so quickly was due to a relatively wet winter, combined with warm temperatures and high wind speeds, Williams explains.

There are other ingredients for wildfires aside from drought; four "switches" are required: fuel abundance, fuel dryness, source of ignition and suitable conditions for fire spread. In Texas, these switches are often flipped in the first part of the year when it comes to extreme fire: of the 30 largest wildfires in Texas history, 90% occurred between January and May.

There's still relatively little research on how wet winters impact wildfire intensity. "Climate change may have affected the amount of vegetative growth that provided fuel for the fire," says Nielsen-Gammon, "but there hasn't been much work on the subject."

Why have the fires in Texas been so bad?

Texas generally receives more rainfall in the summer, the warmest part of the year, and it is dry but cold in winter and spring. "In other words, key factors for fires do not line up perfectly: it's cold when it's dry but wet when it's warm," says Flavio Lehner, assistant professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University in New York says. Except, for this year.

The Smokehouse Creek fire followed an unusual weather period.

In mid-February, the week prior to the fire, cities in the panhandle broke records for high temperatures, hitting 83-85F (28-29C). Then strong, cold winds blew in –  hitting up to 70mph gusts, fanning the flames and pushing the wildfires to the east. Another wind blew in southward, shifting the fires to the south.

"Given the weather pattern and strong winds, climate change would be expected to cause higher temperatures and greater evaporation rates, leading to drier fuels that are easier to ignite and burn," says Nielsen-Gammon.

Why long-term droughts may lead to more wildfires

Drought does increase the probability of large-scale wildfires by drying out the soil. It also increases fire intensity because more fuel is available to burn, and the drying of organic material in the soil can make suppressing fires much harder.

"Megadroughts can set the perfect scene for large wildfires," says Danielle Touma, research assistant professor at University of Texas' institute for geophysics. "It can also make it more difficult to suppress wildfires due to the limited amount of water in the region."

But there's a flip side, Touma adds. There can be less vegetation growth due to drought, which would prevent regrowth of vegetation in areas have already been burned. Essentially, if there's not enough water for vegetation to grow, there's no fuels for fire to burn.

What is certain however it that higher temperatures and drought conditions in Texas are likely to increase the severity, frequency, and extent of wildfires in the future. A 2020 study warned that water stakeholders should prepare for future droughts that will be unlike anything the region has experienced, as climate projections portray an "unprecedented" drought risk.

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The current blaze shows how severe a fire can be even without these added pressures. Lehner described the growth of the Smokehouse Creek fire as "explosive".

"It's not surprising to see wildfires in this area, although the rate at which this one grew and also the area it has burned so far are certainly exceptional," Lehner says. "Like a lot of grass and shrub-land fires, the wind is the key factor, driving the fire across the landscapes at speeds effectively outpacing fire suppression efforts."

Texas' climate is expected to become more fire prone, Lehner says. "It's more likely than not that conditions favourable for wildfire will become more common in Texas in the future." The entire state is facing longer and more intense drought conditions, creating "fire weather".

The uncertainties of a changing climate

But, he adds, climate change is making it harder to foresee how quickly and to what extent Texas will become more vulnerable to wildfire. "Interestingly, with climate change we are observing an eastward shift of the dividing line between these two climate zones, which means Texas' climate, especially in the panhandle area, is expected to become more fire prone."

But, as Williams notes, precipitation plays a key role – which can be hard to anticipate.

"How quickly and how strongly this will happen is difficult to say, as it depends a lot on how rainfall patterns will change." Rainfall is much more challenging to predict than warming temperatures, says Williams, due to the complexity of the processes that generate precipitation. Climate change will also make rainfall even harder to predict.

In this particular region of Texas, the panhandle, where there are extensive grasslands, it is less clear how continued climate change will affect wildfire overall, Williams continues. "In order for warming to have a reliable influence on fire, abundant fuels are needed, and the grassland fuel availability in this region is strongly affected by year-to-year swings in precipitation."

What does this mean for Texans?

The state is one of the country's leading exporters of agriculture commodities – 86% of Texas land is in some form of agricultural production and the industry employs one out of every seven working Texans.

"Cattle and crop losses are significant and infrastructure damage is catastrophic," said Sid Miller, commissioner for the Department of Texas Agriculture. "I know of ranchers who have lost everything. Even those Texans fortunate enough to save their herd may not have anything to return to but ashes."

The industry was already facing pressure from the widespread drought that gripped the state last year, forcing cattle ranchers to manage smaller herds – which led to higher beef prices and contributed to a decrease in beef production nationally.

That the Smokehouse Creek Fire was not the result of prolonged drought is even more concerning for Texans, but follows the pattern of weather in the state becoming more frequent, more extreme. Data projections predict a significant increase in the land burned by wildfires – for example, by 2050 Colorado is expected to see a 600% increase in areas burned by fire. As always, the key in coping with these events is preparation. Managing the land – through prescribed burns and managing fuels, can decrease fire spread and intensity.

"When you have an unprecedented event like this, there's a chance that communities are not adequately prepared, as they simply have not experienced this before," says Lehrer.

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