Not too long ago I was reading an article to do with religion - specifically the challenges which face the Church as it goes forward. One phrase struck me - a Jesuit, commenting on the parlous state of his once-powerful organization, said that they - meaning the younger Jesuits - would inherit the ruins of the group, and then rebuild it into to organization its founder intended. "Inheriting the ruins" has been running through my mind fairly regularly now - it just seems all too appropriate not just for the Jesuits, but all those institutions which once upon a time made up Judeo-Christian, western civilization. We Americans live in a ruined civilization - and we are inheriting those ruins.

We could spend quite a long time debating when the civilization began to be ruined and when it reached its final ruination (I see the start in the manner greedy secularist rulers and businessmen used the Reformation to degrade Christianity; the final ruination was during the two world wars, with WWI actually striking a more fatal blow than WWII) - but that is not what interests me at the moment. What interests me is just what we do with these ruins, now that we've got them.

The civilization lies in ruins - but it isn't entirely destroyed, and there is still life in it. Most of this life force is in the United States (which has suffered a far less amount of ruination than, say, Europe), but it is also rising fast in Latin American and Africa. In spite of the belated surge of our civilization in places like Africa, it still falls to the United States to be the primary defender and rebuilder - in Africa the rise of Christian civilization is still a very new thing, it is still physically weak and could easily be destroyed (as it was in Japan in the 17th century) if outside forces are allowed to do so. It falls to us - but it remains to be seen if we'll do it, or just destroy ourselves as Europe did.

If one holds to the view that our civilization has been nothing more than one imperalist, racist, sexist, homophobic crime after another, then there's no point in reading further - and there is no point in our arguing. I hold to a different view. To state it briefly - Judeo-Christian civilization has been an incredible boon to the human race. From things like education of the poor to hospital care for the sick, it has been the religious underpinnings of western civilization which have been the driving force. The other great civilizations current today cannot match the moral, intellectual and artistic achievements of Judeo-Christian civiliation - in as much as these civilizations have advanced at all over the past 500 years it has been at the prodding of Judeo-Christian civilization. To me, our civilization is a precious thing, worthy of our best efforts to preserve and improve.

As the least-affected part of our civilization, we are the bulwark - the defender of what remains; but anyone with a knowledge of struggle can tell you that if you are merely defending, then you are doomed to eventual defeat. We have inherited the ruins, but we must rebuild them to their former splendor - we must, that is, recapture those moral and philosophic foundations upon which our civilization was built. We must, in a word, re-create what was once upon a time called, "Christendom". It is either rebuild, or eventually be swallowed up by a successor civilization - as Egypt, Greece and Rome were in days gone by.

By what exact steps we do this I am unsure - this is a fairly new idea with me and I'm still pondering ways and means. I'll likely put this into book form over the next year or so, other writing committments permitting. But we must start - and start soon. Doom already stares at us - confident that we will be submerged in the wreck of our civilization, much as the European part of our civilization was consumed over the past half century. It might be that we have as little as a decade or two to halt the rot and start to rebuild - any longer than that, an our efforts will avail us not, and all we Christians will be able to do is pray for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and rely upon God's promise that the gates of hell would not, in the end, prevail against Christianity. A firm promise and the final hope - but I don't believe we were set here at this time to supinely wait upon our enemies.

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.battlebornpolitics.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/109

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Inheriting the Ruins: America's Role in the 21st Century:

» Inheriting the Ruins: America's Role in the 21st Century from Blogs for Bush: The White House Of The Blogosphere
Details over at Battle Born Politics.... [Read More]

Tracked on September 30, 2007 3:36 AM