By Cal Thomas | Oct 13, 2022 – for Townhall.com

My cmnt: Cal Thomas is a faithful Roman Catholic and as such has a fear of non-Catholic Christians pursuing some kind of war against them. This is not what is going to happen and is a bit of a strawman. Thomas needs to understand that the people in American government and within the ruling elite (i.e., university professors, democrat politicians, the Deep State, Hollywood, Journos, the alphabet networks, the billionaire class of autocrats, etc.) are the ones he needs to fear. They represent the cancel culture and Marxism and oppression of Biblical Christians and free-minded patriots.

My cmnt: The following is from a comment from a reader: First, the term “Christian nationalists” is not a term patriotic Christians chose to call themselves. It’s how their enemies in the MSM choose to label them. It’s telling that the author adopts this term. Second, this entire piece rests on the straw argument that patriotic Christians want to establish “something approaching heaven on earth.” This is false. What patriotic Christians want is to ensure that the great country which they built, does not become hostile to them, to their children, and to their faith. Their crime is that they refuse to be bulldozed by the anti-Christian Left. They understand that they disengage from politics at their peril; that if they don’t target the Democrats’ anti-Christian agenda, the Democrats’ anti-Christian agenda will still target them. The choice for Christians is not the false choice between the “Heaven on Earth” or the abject surrender that the author suggests. It is between fighting for their Christian way of life on this earth or losing to the anti-Christian forces on this earth. Christians understand what the author does not; namely that the question of what happens in heaven is one between God and each of them individually, but what happens on earth can be changed by getting out and voting and never, ever voting democrat.

The subject of “Christian nationalism” has again appeared in our political life, establishing residence in the Republican Party. It is nothing new, though, having taken many forms in the past, including Moral Rearmament, Prohibition, Christian Reconstructionism, Moral Majority, and the Christian Coalition.

In each incarnation, people have been told that something approaching Heaven on Earth can be accomplished through the political system and through a government led by folks who believe as they do. Each time the push has failed to achieve its stated goals.

Leaving aside for a moment the flaw in Christian nationalist theology, let’s apply some pragmatism to these movements, including the latest called “ReAwaken America,” led by former Donald Trump National Security Adviser (for 22 days), Gen. Michael Flynn (retired).

As the respected Pew Research Center has noted, “The decline of Christianity continues at a rapid pace.” That is reflected in the profile of people who are attending Gen. Flynn’s rallies. They appear to be mostly older and white, hardly the image of an America that will follow their generation. Several polls have shown that when asked their religious affiliation, millennials make up the highest percentage (32 percent) of “nones.”

According to Pew, “sixty-five percent of Americans” self-identify as Christians, but it is a diverse group. Among them are Mainline Protestants, who generally vote for Democrats. Among Evangelicals, there are also divisions, with some voting for Democrats and others favoring Republicans. Roman Catholics, too, are divided, especially on social issues such as abortion. They also pledge allegiance to competing political parties or identify as Independents.

The question then becomes: how does this minority within a minority within an even smaller minority expect to win elections in sufficient numbers to pass legislation that will reverse what they see as a moral and cultural decline? If it could be done, would it not have been done by the previously mentioned movements which enjoyed a larger percentage of like-minded people?

Oklahoma entrepreneur Clay Clark heads the ReAwaken America organization. An Associated Press story about a recent rally in Batavia, New York, quotes him: “I want you to look around and you’ll see a group of people that love this country dearly. At this ReAwaken America Tour, Jesus is King (and) President Donald J. Trump is our president.”

That comment sums up the attempted fusion of faith with politics.

This ideology, this misplaced faith that a fallen humanity can – or should – impose a worldview through government that a majority do not share goes back to at least the time of Jesus. In the Book of Acts, the Disciples asked Jesus, “Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel and restore our kingdom?” (Acts 1:6 NLT). They were looking for an earthly kingdom with themselves in charge. They wanted to throw off the Roman occupation and “take over.” Make Israel great again!

Later, Jesus would respond to Pontius Pilate who asked Him if He was a king: “My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my Kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36 NLT). That statement is a powerful rebuke to those who seek a kingdom that would be as flawed as they are if it ever came to fruition.

I have always appreciated this observation from C.S. Lewis, which speaks to the current and past movements of “Christian soldiers” wishing to transform America into their image: “Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’; aim at Earth and you will get neither.”

Perhaps these well-intentioned but misguided Christian nationalists should obey the commands of the One they claim to follow (and I don’t mean Donald Trump). When that was the priority for Christians in the past, culture changed. A re-awakened America won’t come through politics and government no matter how strongly Christian nationalists wish for it.

Readers’ comments:

I’m a Christian because of what Christ did for me on the cross. I’m a nationalist, too, because of what the founding fathers did for me in 1776. My eternal home is in heaven, but my family and I have to live here, for a lifetime. So I will exercise my right to vote for what I think is right. If I’m in the minority and we lose, so be it. That’s the system we have, and I’ll have to live with it. In the meantime, I’ll not lose sight of my savior, and where I’m ultimately going from here.

But as long as I can vote, I will vote for Christian values and America first. They can vote for the opposite, but that won’t deter me. We have already given up to the other side our academia, the media, sports, entertainment… heck, we even conceded the Boy Scouts to them. Let’s not concede the government also, without a fight. Let’s vote them out while we can.

Instead of a National Divorce, How About a National Backlash?

Kurt Schlichter | Oct 13, 2022 – for Townhall.com

Dumping the libs and their garbage, blue cities – figuratively throwing their junk out on the lawn just in time for the sprinklers to go off – is so tempting and sounds so sweet. If only we could wave a magic wand and make the weirdos, losers, and mutations of the left just go away, along with annoying states like New Jersey. After all, they are pretty much a significantly less hot Amber Heard, and they are figuratively doing to America what she did to Johnny Depp’s bed.

Pack your stuff, libs, and get out. You’re someone else’s problem now.

But as much fun as it is to simply wish our pinko ex would just disappear and that we in red America could buy a Porsche, rent a condo, lose some weight and get some hair plugs, then hook up with an eager actress/model/whatever half our age, that doesn’t work out when middle-aged accountants do it, and it won’t work out for us if we try it as a country. The devil is in the details, and the details get really, really devilish.

I discuss a national divorce in my most recent non-fiction book, “We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America,” but I show the consequences of one in my seventh and latest novel in the “People’s Republic” series, the just-released “Inferno.” Beyond all the new book’s gunplay and shooting – there’s a lot – and its cruel mockery of woke, liberal nonsense – there’s a lot of that too – “Inferno” gets into the weeds about what happens when you split a country in two.

The answer is not a lot of good.

When was the last time you heard of a happy divorce, especially when the exes have to live next door to each other? And they would – right next door to us. A national divorce means splitting up the country. This state goes blue, that one red. Some places are easy to take – yeah, blues, Chicago is all yours. But what about the rest of Illinois? Once you get out of Beetlejuice’s hellhole, you are mostly among normal Americans who like America, know which bathroom to use, and don’t murder each other with gleeful abandon. What, are we going to leave them behind the lines?

That’s not going to work well, especially when the blue rulers decide to turn blue America into a giant college campus and mandate that everyone sits to pee as a Harrison Bergeron-esque nod toward urination equity.

My “People’s Republic” novels, the first one having come out in 2016, all deal with America splitting into red and blue, and these novels have a real problem. I always tried to take reality one step beyond the plausible to satirize the insanity and evil of blue America if it was suddenly unchained to normal – i.e., red – America, and no matter what madnesses I predicted over the last six years, from pronoun laws to social credit scores (“privilege levels”), the reality has always more than caught up. Right now, we have people running our country who think that mutilating kids to conform to their gender delusions is not merely acceptable but something to be celebrated. It’s kind of hard for fiction to top that.

There are a lot of logistical problems with splitting up the old United States. How do you handle national defense? What about the national debt? Will the borders between old and new America be open? Can people move between them – hell, we’re already seeing a bunch of productive people moving to places like the Free State of Florida, so will red America let them in? Will blue America let them go? We know where the hobos will go – where people will tolerate their depravity, I bet. The blue states almost collectively Nadlered their chinos when four dozen Latinx migrants showed up in Martha’s Vineyard. What happens when red America outlaws being an illegal alien or a bum – oh, more about the backlash in a moment – and the illegals and the transients flow into the blue?

In red America, illegal immigration will again be illegal, and the illegals already here illegally will stop getting free money and start getting deported if they don’t scoot to the blue states with the “NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL” signs in their front yards. And the bums, too – no living on the street in red America. Your choices? Jail, rehab, the looney bin, or take this bus ticket to New York City. Oh, and criminals, too – red America will lock them up. Think of a national divorce as a way to unleash the conservative id just as much as it would unleash the leftist id.

But could a red America and a blue America live side by side? Well, when have you known the libs to live and let live? Do you think the blue regions will look at the nightmarish hellscape they have created and say, “Gosh, our neo-socialist garbage policies have failed. Better rethink them”? No. They will blame the racist, sexist, red states, with their Jesus and guns and law and order, and blame us for the blue chaos. Look at what the Democrats claim causes crime in their blue cities now. Is it lax policing, soft judges, lousy unionized schools, or tolerating social pathologies? No. It’s that people who don’t live there or go there can have guns.

Blue America will fail, and the cause they identify will be red America not failing. Remember, red America’s miserable ex would be living right next door. Unless we build a giant wall around ourselves – like most normal people, like you and I, would move to red America in this scenario since we don’t want to get hauled off to the reeducation camps by the Thought Police – we are not going to be able to shut out the insanity down the street.

Now, there are stirrings of a backlash. There is an informal separation going on already as normal people move to free states. Their November elections will reject blue nonsense. In the culture, if not geographically, there is already a divorce going on. Do you watch the pinko TV networks? Me neither, but the blue people do. Queen Latifah is…” The Equalizer”? I assume she solves crimes involving microaggressions. A soft divorce is already underway.

But it won’t be enough. They cannot let us be. They cannot have our sanity, competence, and happiness providing a devastating counter-example to the mess they are making. Already, sensible Hispanic Americans are moving to our side in droves because they don’t want to be ruled by losers. To save their own tenuous grip on power, for they control almost all of our failing institutions at the moment, they must stamp out our uppity resistance. We can see it in the trash FBI arresting innocent abortion protestors, in Silicon Valley moguls trying to control what we say, and in the media trying to otherize normal people while trying to normalize weirds like The Lump running for Senate in Pennsylvania. But these things are not what the strong side does. They are what the weak do when they fear they are losing their grip.

And they are losing their grip. There is not going to be a national divorce. There is going to be a national backlash, a backlash against the stupid, corrupt, and evil ideology of the left. We normal people are not going anywhere. We’re not chopping up our country any more than we are going to tolerate these monsters chopping up our little kids. We will not divorce them. We will defeat them. And it will be glorious.

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Book seven of my Kelly Turnbull series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, “Inferno,” is finally out! Catch up with all my action-packed bestsellers, including “People’s Republic,” “Indian Country,” “Wildfire,” “Collapse,” “Crisis,” and “The Split“!