I did not write the introduction today, and all the points in Vox Day’s quote I knew… with the exception of the freedom of religion: if you have not read Tom Kratman’s discussion of (lack of) secularism at Lepanto you should go read it, for there was no secularism and he ends up by saying that in this religious war, those without religion are bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Vox is referring to the Huntingdon book The Clash of Civilizations, which has ended up being more predictive than Fukuyama’s end of (whiggish) history.

Now, one can blithely try to wave away Huntington’s civilizational perspective and his thesis, but considering how The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order was published in 1996 and has proven to be not merely far more insightful and predictive than Fukuyama’s End of History thesis or any other conceptual model, one would have to be grossly ignorant to do so.

So, if we accept the idea that Western civilization and Islamic civilization are in conflict, what must we logically conclude from the three quotes provided?

1. The decline of the West is the direct result of the decline of Christianity in the West, both religious and institutional.
2. The growing power of Islam in the West cannot be halted by secularism, white nationalism, or any sub-civilization-level force.
3. The preservation of the West requires a revival of Christianity.
4. The preservation of the West requires the abandonment of some, though not all, secular values, beginning with the freedom of religion, that conflict with the restoration of Christianity

There is considerably more that can be concluded from this particular perspective, but I expect most people, even of an Alt-West persuasion, will struggle to accept just those four inescapable conclusions.

One can, indeed should note that secularism claims the form or religion. It has rules, precepts, heresy trials for hating, one command (Tolerance) and its Dominicans (the Social Justice Warriors) and Jesuits (the third and fourth Internationalist Socialist/Bolsheviks). But it lacks the power of religion, because that involves the Spirit.

And that there are more than one kind of spirit or one kind of religion. What you believes matters.

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

(1 Corinthians 2:6-16 ESV)

There are risks. The old saw that the religion of the king is the religion of the people led to war for a hundred years, and drove Elizabethan and Jacobean England to a creative peak we still mine. The concept of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion came with the nation-state, where the conceit that you could be a good Frenchman and a Huguenot was accepted: this would have been unthinkable a century before. But that did lead to the skeptics saying you could be a good Frenchman with no religion, or the ideology of the enemy.

The idea of the universal, or Catholic church includes the church being for the people, this people, and allowing, indeed encouraging, all to have a living faith, from the King to the murderer on death row. There was to be no distinction in our need for the gospel.

In older days we knew this.

The problem with such a church is that it can become worldly. But so can the churches of the Anabaptists, who take getting out of Babylon, away from the necropolis, and into a holy community, shining on a hill, as foundational. But that is corrected by the spirit.

For the Spirit of God will bring life and health and love and gentleness and kindness. You can tell a church with the spirit by looking at the children in it.

The Spirits of our tribal religions were bloody: from the wicker man of the Druids to the ritual hangings of the cult of one-eye Odin, human sacrifice and blood feuds existed in the Northern People before the Celts sent missionaries to those who had driven them out — from Wessex and Kent to Northumbria.

The spirit of Islam is death and torture and hatred and grief. The Spirit of the East is acceptance, self-hatred, and an imploded population. And the less said about the bloody cult of Kali, the dark side of the Hindu pantheon, the better.

Let us therefore pray that the Spirit gives us wisdom to judge, in truth. Not in us saying it as religious speak for doing what we want, but in righteousness, joy and truth.

For the other side worship fervently, and dance when our cities are destroyed, or people lose faith and converge.