Evidence Of Spine

     I’m always heartened to learn of some indication that Americans are rediscovering their courage, in these times when so much has been done to make us furtive and timorous. This one from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho cheered me in two ways:

     Christians in Idaho who had been banned from carrying religious symbols during their 4th of July parade came out in force on Thursday proudly toting crosses.
     Those who attended the Independence Day parade in Coeur d’Alene in the deep red state could be seen proudly waving crosses alongside the star spangled banner.
     As some carried crosses alongside Old Glory, others wore t-shirts with the symbol of the cross emblazoned across it.
     The move by locals came after the Coeur d’Alene Regional Chamber reversed a policy which had banned the use of religious symbols in the July 4 parade.
     New regulations that had been implemented had banned ‘symbols associated with specific political movements, religions or ideologies’, branding them unacceptable.

     Apparently, the Chamber of Commerce, which asserted authority over the Independence Day parade, reversed itself just before the residents of Coeur d’Alene held it up before the world as a toothless would-be tyrant.

     This event can be approached from several directions:

• What was the CoC’s problem with religious symbols?
• Would it have tried to ban the black flag of Islam?
• The “movements and ideologies” provision would ban “Black Lives Matter” and “Pride” flags too, wouldn’t it?
• Did the CoC expect that the town cops would enforce any such bans? Did any cop try to do so?
• Did it occur to anyone on the CoC that Independence Day is about a specific political ideology: the one the United States is founded on?

     I know a few people in northern Idaho. They’re patriots, Christians, proud to be both, and proud to say so. They understand the essential connections between Christianity, freedom, and the history of our nation. So they reared up on their hind legs and told the CoC to get stuffed. And the CoC, like petty tyrants everywhere in space, time, and circumstance, folded and shut up about it.

     I entreat you to spread this around, Gentle Reader. With luck, it will inspire emulation. But with that, allow me a few words about freedom of religion, and why that underdefined right has caused America, Britain, and much of Europe so much trouble in recent decades.

     When Fisher Ames composed the final version of the First Amendment to the Constitution, the peoples of the thirteen freshly liberated colonies were nearly all Christians from Christian nations. There was a relatively young Unitarian movement, particularly in the lower New England region, and (of course) there were a few Jews and a few “free thinkers” (i.e., atheists). “Religion,” Ames might have thought, would be essentially synonymous with Christianity in its several denominations. Anyone who might choose to disbelieve in Christianity’s preachments could nevertheless be expected to conform to its ethic, at least in public. Ames and the other Founders were anxious to avert “establishments of religion,” wherein a dominant denomination could compel those who follow another to be regulated and taxed for the dominant one’s benefit. Americans had had enough of that sort of crap in Europe and could not be expected to tolerate it in their New World homes.

     However, the passage of time brought new “religions” to the United States, including that most destructive of ideologies, Islam. Other faiths such as Buddhism which conform to C. S. Lewis’s “Law of General Benevolence” – in effect, Christ’s command to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you – would prove no problem. But Islam and the rise of an increasingly aggressive atheism would trouble the body politic, entirely because of the First Amendment’s wording.

     An aggressive creed, whose aim is to impose itself on others by force, is plainly incompatible with a regime of freedom. Yet under the First Amendment, all “religion” is protected from government interference. The crisis arises entirely from that overbroad wording. The consequences are in plain view: Muslims demanding special privileges and asserting themselves over non-Muslims; and aggressive atheists demanding that all traces of Christian teaching and adherence be purged from the public square and public life.

     Shockingly, Christians in our Christian-majority country have sat still for it. So have the nations of Europe, the continent once known as Christendom. But events such as the one in Coeur d’Alene suggest that that might not be the case for much longer.

     The time has come to admit that we can’t all “just get along.” When Smith is willing to tolerate Jones, but Jones is determined to rule over Smith, “just getting along” is impossible ab initio. The Jews of Israel have had that demonstrated to them repeatedly by their “neighbors.” Note the proliferation of “demonstrations” – attempts to intimidate American Jews and others who support Israel – that have swept over our urban zones since HAMAS’s October 7 attack on Israel from Gaza. It’s a demonstration of Islam’s core agenda, which includes wiping out every other creed on Earth.

     By comparison, the aggressive atheists who’ve striven to remove every iota of Christian teaching from any and every public institution probably don’t seem as threatening. But stripping Christian precepts and symbols from our public life must necessarily require excluding Christians from it as well. As Islam is at war with every other faith, and Christianity is its principal adversary, Christians must recognize that war and our admittedly reluctant participation in it. To quote celebrated military SF writer Tom Kratman, “Never go to a religious war without your religion” – and there is no conceivable argument that a war between religions is “not a religious war.”

     Christians can tolerate, accommodate, and befriend adherents to other Benevolent faiths: Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Unitarianism, and so forth. But to prevail in the worldwide religious war, we must recover our religion, nourish our faith in it and its precepts, and learn to be passionate about it once more. The alternative is subjugation: whether by the voracious, rapacious adherents of the aggressive creed called Islam, or by the godless who want no God, and no eternal principles of right and wrong, to shield us from them.

     And so I declare myself a Christian nationalist. There, I’ve said it. Your choices are your own affair.