Rod Dreher believes that God withdrew His hand of protection from the United States on September 11, 2002. And, let’s face it, subsequent events do tend to support his contention.
On this morning in 2002, I woke up before daylight to join a journalist friend in Brooklyn, where we both lived, and to follow a NYPD bagpipe band down to Ground Zero. The NYPD arranged for one of its piper bands to begin marching from each of the five boroughs, all to converge simultaneously at Ground Zero, where the memorial service was to begin.
The only people who had access to Ground Zero were family members of victims, and officials. But when we arrived there, a huge crowd had massed outside the perimeter. I said goodbye to my friend, and melted into the crowd to gather material for the piece I was writing for National Review (I had gone to work there that previous January). I remember standing there at the edge of Ground Zero, looking at my watch, waiting for the minute when, one year earlier, the first plane struck the north tower. That was also to be the signal for the start of the memorial service at Ground Zero.
At that moment — at that precise moment — a ferocious wind blew in from the same direction that the plane had taken. It was uncanny. There was a hurricane far offshore, and this was its outermost fringe. Still, the timing was eerie. That wind blew like something biblical, all morning. Signs, chairs, anything not tied down was blowing around. I walked around in that for hours, watching and talking to people.
After a while, I made it to the other side of Ground Zero, and took refuge from the wind in Trinity Church Wall Street, the old Episcopal church next door to the Twin Towers. The Archbishop of Canterbury had come over to preside over a memorial service there. I stayed for that. At some point towards the end of that service, we all heard the bells toll from Ground Zero next door, signaling the end of the reading of the names, and that service. When I emerged out onto the street a few minutes later, the wind had stopped. I don’t know what time it ceased to blow, but I would bet it was when the last name was read. In all these years since then, I’ve never seen anything online remarking about it one way or the other.
I walked back home to Brooklyn, wrote a piece for NR, filed it, then relaxed. The phone rang. It was my journalist friend, slightly freaking out. “Come over,” she said. I took off.
At her apartment, she led me into her home office, and pointed to something hanging on a wall. It was a small American flag, almost paper-thin, and very old. Judging from the number of stars on its field, I would say from the Revolutionary War era. It was mounted and framed under glass.
And it was torn from top to bottom, right down the middle.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
She explained that someone had given her that antique flag many years earlier. She had it framed, and it had hung on the wall of every home office she had had since then, wherever she lived. Every day she was home, for years, she had looked at it.
On this day, however, when she returned from Ground Zero, she noticed that it had been torn right down the middle.
Nobody else had been home, and if they had been, they would have had to have torn the paper on the back of the frame to get to the flag. It was untouched.
Both of us were, and are, Christian. The significance of this sign was not lost on us.
The curtain of the Temple separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Temple. Traditionally, Christianity interprets this sign as indicating God’s judgment on the religion of His people, the Jews. I can’t speak for my friend, with whom I lost touch after I left New York, but I immediately interpreted the torn flag as a sign that God had withdrawn his protection from America, in judgment.
The USA observably ceased to be either a Christian or an American nation after its leaders surrendered to decades of tireless blandishments by judeochristians, led by Emmanuel Cellar, in 1965. But it wasn’t until 2001 that it became undeniable the US government was being ruled by a foreign elite, as the intentional sacrifice of thousands of US citizens for the purpose of engaging in imperialist warfare and eradicating historical American liberties sufficed to demonstrate.
If Dreher’s instincts are correct, then America was judged for its excessive tolerance, for committing the sins of Jeroboam and for its submission to evil, and was given over to the wicked to rule. And so long as the wicked rule, the suffering of Americans and those who live in US satrapies will continue, and most likely, will continue to increase.
What do Jeroboam’s sins have to do with us today? More than one would think, because the root cause of his sins is a temptation faced by most Christians today. Tolerance is a byword for virtue these days, but it was Jeroboam’s tolerance for that which was wrong which led to his disobedience, and ultimately culminated in the kingdom’s full-blown rejection of the Lord God of Israel. The Israelites did not immediately turn to Baal and Asherah, indeed, it took them many years to reach that state of apostasy. But the seeds of evil had already been sown by Jeroboam, in his willingness to tolerate forms of worship that God had expressly forbidden.