I am not a believing man – or certainly not in the traditional
sense of attending religious services, observing the holy days, studying
theological texts (except for research purposes – I have a decent knowledge of
the Bible, the Talmud, and the Koran), saying grace at table, or praying before
bed. When it comes to a divinely ordained plan for the human drama, I
recall Nobel physicist Richard Feynman's remark that the stage is too big for
the play. The human presence on the planet strikes me as an evolutionary
hiccup.
Nonetheless, when I regard the condition of the American Republic,
it is hard not to believe that something like divine retribution, a force of
cosmic or spiritual justice, has been slowly at work throughout its history, or
at the very least since the middle of the last century. This is Jonathan
Cahn's argument in his troubling volume
treating the nature of the Shemitah, or sabbatical judgment (which I
considered at length in a 2015 article
for PJ Media).
A nation whose leaders, whose cultural elite, and a moiety of
whose people have given themselves over to every conceivable form of corruption
has been demonstrably faltering, its greatness, Ozymandias-like,
a thing of the past. It is a nation that slaughters its unborn in an orgy
of indifferent cruelty; that mercilessly extorts the living substance from
those of its citizens who still struggle toward decency and the values of
community; that sets bread and circuses over justice; that has invested its
energies in raising a Tower of Babel rather than a Temple of Gratefulness; and
that pays no heed to the noble intentions of its Founding Fathers. In his
aptly titled book Coming
Apart, Charles Murray concludes that "the American project is
disintegrating." The four domains of happiness he identifies –
family, vocation, community, and faith – "have all been enfeebled."
Is this plunge into the abyss merely a function of historical
inevitability – all things human, great and small, must eventually decline?
Or are Jonathan Cahn and those who share his thesis right? Is a
devastating punishment being levied on a nation that has sold its soul, that
has lost its way, that refuses to recognize an authority superior to itself and
has sunk into a morass of pervasive immorality? What reasonable person
cannot be troubled by the spectacle of shallowness, self-aggrandizement, utter
ignorance, and sanctioned immorality that confronts and embraces us?
These sound like quant notions that can appeal only to the naïve and the
zealots. And yet what conscientious person can say with absolute
assurance that such is not the case?
Broadly speaking, these two explanations for cultural, national,
and civilizational decline – the evolutionary-historical and the
moral-theological – are similar in the effects they postulate, but they differ
insofar as the latter allows for the tempering of justice with mercy – that is,
for the mollification of a vengeful deity. The reversal of decline, a
stay of execution, remains possible, assuming a people rethinks itself at the
eleventh hour, repudiating its penchant for pandemic depravity, and seeks to
restore a lost courage, honor, humility, and fundamental decency.
The
downward path is effortless, a law of cultural gravity; the upward path is
arduous and against the national grain but theoretically possible. In
secular terms, following the upward path is called wisdom or prudence; in
religious terms, it is known as grace or salvation, the gift of divine concern.
True, Abraham may have lost his bargain,
but God was willing to listen. And perhaps still is.
It is always tempting for those of a certain cast of mind to
discern the hand of God operating in human affairs.
"There's a
divinity that shapes our ends / Rough-hew them how we will," says Hamlet. If
an eminent thinker like Adam Smith can propose an "invisible hand"
operating in the economic realm, why cannot a brilliant theologian like Karl
Barth affirm
that "the best proof of God's existence is the existence of the Jewish
people"? Can we not say the same of the improbable ascent and unique
political character of the American republic in the history of the world?
Perhaps the two domains of the empirical and the spiritual are not as
distinct as we have been led to believe. May not the election of Donald
Trump, coupled with the defeat of the most corrupt and vindictive political
figure in the country, represent the intervention of the numinous in the life
of a once-great nation that can be made great again? Who can say?
The questions we now face are crucial. Has America truly
changed course at the pivotal moment, whether by sheer accident or transcendent
guidance? Will it last? The Edomites are still swarming, and the
rift between a part of the nation committed to the values of work, family, and
creative expenditure and a part of the nation mired in ignorance, pride, and
destructive sentimentality – in effect, between heartland and coast, rural and
urban, conservative and left-liberal – is permanent. The attempt to heal
the chasm, however laudable, is doomed to fail.
Questions persist. Might the spirit of irony ultimately
prevail? Will Trump revise
his stated principles for national recovery and accede to some of his
opponents' policies and demands? Will the Electoral College
"flip" on December 19 when it casts its vote, allowing Hillary Clinton
to eke out a marginal victory? As Mac Slavo writes
in Freedom Outpost, "[w]e expect that within hours or days the
push from the liberal media will be widespread and the thousands of
protesters taking over major cities across America will be calling for
recounts, faithless electoral votes and revolution." The devil
always finds a way to work his mischief; alternatively, Edgar Allan Poe's
"imp of the perverse"
abides perpetually in the human soul.
The hope is that the best part of the nation can survive the
burden of its parasites and drones and still manage to prosper. Yuval
Levin in The
Fractured Republic sees America as essentially a "creedal
nation" animated by "a love of the ideal that we have always held out
before ourselves as the American possibility ... put forward in the Declaration
of Independence," a nation "built up out of communities." Similarly,
James Piereson in Shattered
Consensus, though agreeing with Charles Murray that America is in
"a process of unravelling," remains hopeful of a future trajectory
opening the way "for a new chapter in the unfolding history of the
American idea."
Considering the totally implausible result of the recent election,
and assuming that the worrisome events mentioned above fail to materialize, may
we not suggest that there were a sufficient number of the just and deserving, a
saving remnant, for a "new chapter" to be opened in the history of
the republic, or to put it another way, for the Abrahamic bargain to be won?
Is there more to this election than meets the skeptical eye?
Mere speculation, of course.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/the_shaping_of_our_destiny.html#ixzz4PuUCtSEz
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