Ferrara – Elections Won’t Change Culture Where Truth Is Greeted With Anger And Violence

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – The usual suspects are all out there doing cartwheels across parking lots and backflips and what have you and informing us on all the great things that they’re going to do with their new majorities.  The other usual suspects are lamenting the fact that they’ve lost political power, lost control of this, and lost control of that.  What I marvel at, Chris, for the “Christian” nation that we are, is that none of you are in control.  If you actually were this Christian nation, you would know that neither one of your parties are in control, are they?  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  The usual suspects are all out there doing cartwheels across parking lots and backflips and what have you and informing us on all the great things that they’re going to do with their new majorities.  The other usual suspects are lamenting the fact that they’ve lost political power, lost control of this, and lost control of that.  What I marvel at, Chris, for the “Christian” nation that we are, is that none of you are in control.  If you actually were this Christian nation, you would know that neither one of your parties are in control, are they?

Chris Ferrara:  Well, what we’re looking at are the final consequences of the operation of the democratic principle in politics after it already emerged in religion.  When we have the fragmentation of Christianity based on the principle of private judgment that naturally led to the breakup of Christian commonwealths, revolutionary movements, republican governments, and then the principle of private judgment dominated politics as well.  So what’s the outcome of that?  Well, if everything is a matter of private judgment, then the private judgment of the majority controls.  There’s no overriding moral standard to govern the outcome of elections.  Elections become essentially majoritarian exercises of the popular will, and then they devolve basically into disputes over money.

If you look at the CNN exit poll after this midterm election outcome, 45 percent name the economy as the most important issues, healthcare 25 percent, illegal immigration 14 percent, and foreign policy 13 percent.  What about the mass murder of unborn children?  Not a problem apparently.  The homosexual agenda of forcing gay marriage down our throats, not even on the radar.  That’s not what people care about.

Orestes Brownson, a famous Catholic convert in the mid-19^th century who had gone through all kinds of different religious enthusiasms — he was a transcendentalist after having been an atheist.  He finally ended up in the Catholic Church.  When he became a Catholic, he became very realistic about the way things were going.  He was once a committed Americanist, very positive about the American experiment, but as he got older, towards the end of his life, he realized which way events would go and which way they would go inevitably unless something radical happened for the better.

He said, in 1873, one of the last issues of his publication, “The Brownson Quarterly Review, “Our republic may have had a material expansion and growth; but every observing and reflecting American, whose memory goes back, as mine does, over fifty years, sees that in all else it is tending downward, and is on the declivity [Ferrara: Meaning the downhill slope] to utter barbarism.”  He said that in 1873.

I think even he would be surprised at how quickly we got there with the mass murder of children in the womb, the divorce culture, the contraceptive culture, the rampant militant homosexual taking over everything, even the Supreme Court, in its drive to legitimize what is obviously contrary to nature.  What do we do with these elections?  We don’t even touch these issues.  People don’t have a problem with them.  What’s happening is the moral fiber has rotted away.  Elections have become disputes about economic issues, the next war, immigration, all ultimately pocketbook issues.  How will we spend our money?  People don’t see that underlying all the Sturm und Drang about the latest election is a moral problem.  They don’t see that if they don’t address the moral problem, the economic problem ultimately will be impossible to address.

I’m thinking of something that Pius XI, a pope of the Catholic Church, said in the 1920s, after the First World War had ended.  This wasn’t a case of just being pessimistic about a war.  This is the interwar period.  People were actually becoming optimistic that the world would have peace through the League of Nations.  He said: Don’t fool yourselves.  The problem that had developed in Western civilization was very simple.  No one had a foundation for civil authority other than the will of the majority, and that was going to have catastrophic results, not just morally but economically.

He said, and I’m quoting, “With God and Jesus Christ excluded from political life, with authority derived not from God but from man, the very basis of that authority has been taken away, because the chief reason of the distinction between ruler and subject has been eliminated.  The result is that human society is tottering to its fall, because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation.”  Of course, a pope said this, but anyone with any common sense, any sense of morality can see that it’s true and that it applies not just to Catholics but to all men and all nations.  You need a foundation for civil authority.  That foundation is God.  We don’t have that foundation any longer.  That’s what you’re exploring in your show.

Mike:  We’re trying to.  Chris Ferrara, the author of Liberty, the God That Failed, a great book in the Founders Tradin’ Post and Amazon and great booksellers everywhere, is on the Dude Maker Hotline.  Let’s pivot for a moment here.  Yesterday was the American civil religion’s equivalent of a holy day of obligation.

Ferrara:  On an emotional level, and to some extent on a rational level, we can take pleasure in the fact that the Democrats got a drubbing and that some somewhat more conservative politicians were elected.  I’m happy.  I voted.  I voted straight Republican.

Mike:  As did I.

Ferrara:  I’m realistic about what this process can produce without radical reform, and by radical reform I mean the restoration of the basis for civil authority, which is not the will of the majority, but, as you were indicating earlier, the commandments of God.  What good are these elections going to do if we continue to allow the moral fiber of the nation to rot away?  It has its economic effects.  If there are no children, the economy is going to suffer.  If marriage is destroyed, the family is going to suffer.  If the family is suffers, the economy suffers.  All of these things translate into social wellbeing on every level.  Unless you restore the foundation of social wellbeing, you’re not going to have any kind of wellbeing ultimately, not even economic wellbeing.

It’s all part of God’s plan.  If you live according to his law, you follow his simple plan — there are ten points known as the Ten Commandments, the owner’s manual of human existence — if you follow that plan, you’ll also have prosperity.  I’m not preaching the prosperity gospel here.  There’s suffering in this life.  People have setbacks.  But to the extent that you can have human flourishing on an economic level in this life, the closest thing you’re going to get to paradise on earth is a life well lived according to the commandments of God.  That’s what has been abandoned in the American electoral process, unfortunately.

Mike:  It’s not just been abandoned in the U.S.  It’s been abandoned in all of what is formerly known as Christendom, the British islands — if you combine Great Britain, Ireland, and Scotland, they have ushered it to the edge of the cliff.  There are some hangers-on, and there are some now new reformers and some new traditionalists, but I don’t even like to call them traditionalists.  To call them traditionalists means there’s something old and archaic about what they do.  They’re just correct.  When someone says, “Are you a traditional Catholic?” I try to say, “No, I’m just basically Roman Catholic.”  The problem is that the tradition has been so abandoned that we tend to want to affix labels to people.

I want to pivot, to take what you just said, because one of the things that I get the most amount of grief from, from people that hear this for the first time — of course, they threaten to never listen again.  They threaten to never do business with me again and to tell everyone that they know to never do business with me again.  I politely and with as much love as I can muster say: I regret that you feel that way.  You certainly have the freedom and liberty to do so.  You are one of the people I will continue to pray for every day and I hope to hear from you again.  What I try to explain to them before they part ways is, when you say you’re not going to shove your religion down my throat, I like to respond these days: You already have a religion that’s shoved down your throat.  You’re made to accept homosexual marriages as part of the American civil religion.  You’re made to accept rampant slaughter of the unborn as part of the American civil religion.  You are forced and then compelled into not only accepting it but being a part.  I don’t know if it’s a near or remote occasion of sin, but you’re also forced and compelled to pay for it.  Some of your labor goes into this.

A gentleman called me the other day and he said: Mike, what can I do about this if I don’t want to participate?  I said: Well, do you want the talk radio easy answer or do you want the Roman answer?  He goes: What’s the Roman answer?  I said: What did the Roman martyrs do?  They told the Caesar no.  When the Caesar said “I’ll cut your head off,” they said, “Oh, please, and you don’t even have to sharpen the blade.”  We’re incapable of that kind of martyrdom.  We can’t even think about that kind of sacrifice to try and win a more beautiful, longstanding, and peaceful future for our children.

Ferrara:  We’ve lost sight of the vision of the Christian centuries, which we’re told was a horrific dark ages.  Meanwhile, we’re supposed to ignore 150 million people slaughtered in the 20^th century, many of them by democracies fighting useless wars.  You said something a few moments ago about how people object that you’re shoving your religion down their throat.  Let’s look at that.  What have you really done but to propose for people’s consideration certain religious truths?  Why do they react as if you were compelling them to accept these truths, as if you had them down on the rack and you were stretching them out, forcing them to recant?  I’ll tell you why, because the things that you’re proposing have power.  People feel assaulted when they hear them because what you’re saying challenges their convictions.  Even though you’re merely proposing these things, there’s an overwhelming sense of dread that you just might be right and I don’t want to be forced into this position.  People, without even realizing it, feel they’re being compelled by Mike Church, but what they’re really being compelled by is the truth.  That makes them uncomfortable.

Mike:  I’ve also tried to gently explain that, and I usually get four-letter expletives hurled back at me, at which point in time I go: I guess the theory has just proven itself correct.  I wish you well in the future.  Thank you very much.

Ferrara:  What happened to tolerance?  You propose something on the air.  It’s supposed to be a talk show, a free exchange of ideas.  You’re not the grand inquisitor.  You’re not burning anybody at the stake.  You’re just talking about things.  What accounts for the fact that people react so violently to it?  What happened to toleration?  Why is it that the only thing that isn’t tolerated in our society today is the truth, and particularly the truth of the Gospel, which elicits fulminating hatred?

End Mike Church Show Transcript