[BretLudwig]

CHRISTIANITY TODAY



"If you desire to preserve our country and our civilization, you must
face two fundamental facts.

The first of these is that 90% of all the active support of pro-American
efforts has come from Christians.

Of that, there can be no doubt. Almost without exception, all of the
thousands of "conservative" and "anti-Communist" organizations that have
come and gone during the past fifty years have been specifically
Christian, proposing to defend Christianity and the Constitution
simultaneously. Many of the most active organizations today are
evangelical and try to revive Christian faith by holding meetings in which
the Gospel and patriotism are inseparably blended. Some organizations
specifically established to resist or promote certain legislation do not
explicitly raise religious issues, but they take Christianity for granted.
The only patriotic organizations that are explicitly non-Christian are a
small periodical, The Truth Seeker, which, having spoken disrespectfully
of Jews, is now being forced to the wall, and one small "activist" group
in California.

It is true that a very successful promotion was founded by a
master-salesman who began by admitting, with a show of candor, that he
rejected belief in a personal god as childish and preferred a vague
pantheism that recognized an "upward reach" in "all mankind" that was
similar to the upward reach of growing plants. But after testing the
market, he began to claim that he was purveying a doctrine that was a kind
of pep pill good for all religions and guaranteed to make the purchaser a
better Christian, better Pharisee, or better Moslem, as the case might be.
(There are no Buddhists, Parsees, Yezidis, Jains, Saivites, or Tantrists
with large bank rolls in the United States at the present time, nor are
they represented by oil-rich governments abroad.) The only point that need
concern us now is that the promoter accurately gauged his market. Of all
the members who passed through his organization in its heyday, at least
80% were Christians€”probably 90% of those who really worked and gave
money to the limit of their resources.

You have only to attend any "anti-Communist" meeting, including both the
most sincere efforts and the most fraudulent promotions, and talk to the
persons who attend and contribute to convince yourself that almost all of
them are Christians, and by that I mean persons who really believe in
Christ, as distinct, of course, from the many persons who attend
Sunday-morning clubs because they think it good for business, politically
expedient, or socially amusing. Whether you like it or not, you must
accept the fact that 90% of the active support for patriotic and
pseudo-patriotic efforts comes from men and women who have a sincere faith
in Christ.

During more than two decades, the active Defense of the West has rested
almost entirely on the shoulders of Christians in all Occidental nations.
And that has been true on all levels. I know that comparisons are
invidious, but to make my point I will say that if I had to pick one
periodical on our side as having the highest literary finish and
intellectual content, I should have to name Découvertes, the monthly
publication of a highly cultivated group of staunchly Christian Frenchmen
now in Lisbon.

That is not astonishing. For almost fifteen centuries Occidental
civilization was Christendom, and, as is shown by the data that we have
always examined, Christianity as we know it is, and always has been, an
Indo-European religion, incomprehensible to the rudimentary minds of the
primitive races and unacceptable to the subtle minds of the Orientals who
have civilizations of their own. If that seems to you negative proof,
consider the conversion of the Norse peoples during the early Middle Ages.
They were not subject to a Christian government that could coerce them and
they needed no Christian support against anyone; the Christians whom they
plundered on occasion were certainly not militarily superior, nor were the
institutions and culture of the Dark Ages anything that Vikings and
Varangians might have envied and wished to imitate. Their only reason for
abandoning the bleakly pessimistic religion of Thor and Odin must have
been that Christianity was more congenial to their minds.* Such
spontaneous conversions are rare phenomena in the history of the worlds
religions; the closest parallel is the adoption of decadent Buddhism by the
Chinese who found it congenial to their mentality.**

(* One historical factor often overlooked was Christianitys appeal to
the historical sense of our race. Norse theology was a collection of
inconsistent tales, admittedly mythical since the skalds could revise or
elaborate them at will, about the adventures of various gods in Niflheim,
Jotunheim, Asgard and other realms outside the known world and
inaccessible to men, at dates no more specific than "once upon a time."
Christianity offered a circumstantial and realistic narrative of events
that had taken place in remote but specific and well-known towns and
geographical areas at precisely stated times during the reigns of known
Roman Emperors; the historicity of the narrative was further guaranteed by
the generally consistent and apparently independent statements of four
eyewitnesses, whose veracity was further guaranteed by the official
reports of Roman governors who had themselves participated in the
climactic scene (i.e., the Acta Pilati, Epistula Lentuli, and other
forgeries that were accepted as genuine during the Dark Ages). It may be
relevant that the Epistula Lentuli certifies Christ as unmistakably
Nordic: tall, fair-skinned, with blonde hair and blue eyes.)



There is a second fact that you must also face. The Western world is no
longer Christendom. The religion that once united us has become the faith
of a minority.

That is obvious from what is happening here and in every country of Europe
except Spain and Portugal. The real question is how small a minority are
Christians in the United States.

In 1942, after a very careful study of the situation in England, Professor
A. N. Whitehead concluded that "in the whole country far less than
one-fifth of the population are in any sense Christians today." There is
very little difference in this respect between England and the United
States. And today?"



Excerpt from:
http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/oliver.html

--
Message posted using http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/group/rec.audio.opinion/
More information at http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/faq.html