What A Nation Is … What It Means To Lose A Nation

A nation as a nation cannot exist as nothing more than a marketplace bizarre of workplaces and stores in which tokens earned at the former are then spent at the latter. Mistaking the economic machinery for a nation is the fallacy of assuming that man is nothing more than the sum of his economic spending habits. This is what we might call “the Libertarian fallacy.” A nation is more than the sum of economic individual choices as existing in that nation. A nation is a nation where there is a shared genetic stock who have a shared religion/faith who together built a shared culture with a shared language, a shared history, and a shared sense of purpose all yielding shared memories.

What happens to a society whose people have no reason to go on beyond their set routines interspersed with bouts of hedonism? What happens to a nation that loses its soul? We are living the answers to those questions. Because Christendom has reduced itself to an economic zone no longer asking or answering the larger questions of life we have lost the ability of self-understanding …. of understanding who we are together as a unique people. Having jettisoned our Christianity in exchange for bouts of libertarian hedonism we have lost the ability to think corporately. We have lost the ability to think of ourselves in terms of community being connected not only to the living who share our familial lines but we have even lost the ability to see ourselves connected to both our Fathers and our descendants. Because we have abandoned the God of our Fathers all other roots have been lost to us as well.

And so we have no auto-immune ability to resist the alien and stranger in our midst. No auto-immune ability to identify the rancid theology that is coming to us from our pulpits that reinforce our alienation, even teaching that the alienation is a positive good that should be gleefully embraced.

The first thing to go then was our undoubted catholic Christian faith. With the dissipation of that Christian faith came the dissipation of corporate self-identity. There can be no sense of belonging to a particular nation apart from a shared faith that serves as the coagulating agent that clots a particular people together.

T. S. Eliot long ago warned us that what we are now experiencing would come to pass;

‎”If Christianity goes the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great grandchildren; and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.”

T. S. Elliot
Christianity and Culture; The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Toward the Definition of Culture — pg. 200

So, because our Christian faith declined the result of that was redefining and reducing a nation to be an economic zone where tokens earned at the workplace are exchanged for goods in the marketplace. What was lost was the ancient Christian teaching that a nation is composed of a particular people, descended from the same ancestors, as located in a particular place. Several generations later we stand on the ledge of a nation that no longer can be a nation because it is now filled with peoples who own contesting religions that work to alienate even people who share the same common Fathers from one another. Now add to this the stranger and alien who serve strange gods from foreign lands and the consequence is “things fall apart. The center cannot hold.”

As far as solutions go, the only one I have is a return to the faith of our Fathers but it strikes me that God may indeed be purging us for our rebellion against His kindness towards us. If you’re a parent with young children the best you can do right now is to pass on to them a Christian faith that is so totatlistic that it explains every aspect of their being and thinking. This must be done because the enemy will search high and low to continue to snuff out all competition to their retooling of the now declining Christendom, so as to refashion it into a haven of demons.

Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him. View all posts by jetbrane