The Cheap Trick of Whiteness

A half-truth, as John Lukacs is fond of saying, is more dangerous than a lie, because the element of truth in it, speaking to our hearts and minds, can mask the accompanying falsehood. We see this in the current embrace of multiculturalism, which propagates the dangerous lie that a civilized human society can exist—whether at the level of the family, the city, or the nation—without a unifying culture.  (That, and not the claim that all cultures are equally “valid” or valuable, or even that all other cultures are more to be admired than ours, is the greatest danger posed by multiculturalism.) Despite the evident falsity of this claim (history presents no example of a lasting society without a dominant, unifying culture), the ideology of multiculturalism has flourished in the United States not because it has been imposed by political and cultural institutions, such as public schools and universities (though it has), nor because the former elites of the once-dominant culture in this country have been ill prepared to defend that culture as a unifying force (though they have), but because of the element of truth that the proponents of multiculturalism use like a katana to slice through any resistance to their destructive agenda: Diversity, like unity, is a positive good.

We do not have to draw on parallels from agriculture about the dangers of large-scale monoculture, or from genetics about the dead end of restrictive gene pools, to recognize this truth. It is not simply boredom that leads us to seek out new friends and to sample different cuisines, to learn languages other than the one we were born into and to study the history of other civilizations, or even the far-flung corners of our own. Russell Kirk argued that diversity—true diversity, not multiculturalism masquerading under that name—is a conservative principle, because (like all other true conservative principles) it is a reflection of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The Christian God Himself is a diversity in unity.

The problem, as always, is one of balance. Unity is a positive good; diversity is a positive good; but either one, taken to the extreme, destroys the other. Variety (the saying goes) is the spice of life, and sometimes a dish can become unbalanced because too little salt has been added. Yet, as any good cook knows, it is easier to destroy a dish through an overabundance of spices. Multiculturalism, as practiced in the United States, isn’t a measured dose of garlic or cumin or harissa incorporated into a hearty beef stew; it’s a cup of MSG poured on top of a Big Mac. The initial dish is toxic enough without any help from the Orient’s secret salt.

If the half-truth of multiculturalism is that diversity is a positive good, the half-truth that some opponents of multiculturalism push beyond the limit is that unity is a positive good. When unity becomes the highest value, we end up not with, say, the vibrant yet diverse Christian civilization of Europe in the Middle Ages but with the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism and (as I discussed last month) the post-Christian hypermonotheism of Islam. And among the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism is found an obsession with race as a unifying principle, among both liberals who see “whiteness” as the root of all evil, and some of their opponents who increasingly see it as the sole source and foundation of everything worth preserving.

A.D. 2015 will long be remembered here in Rockford as the year when that great “white power” band Cheap Trick (“Mommy’s all white / Daddy’s all white / They just seem a little weird”) finally received the recognition that they deserve, with the announcement that they will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Bad puns aside, it is hard to imagine four men who are collectively more white than Rick Nielsen, Robin Zander, Tom Petersson, and Bun E. Carlos (Brad M. Carlson, who says that he chose his stage surname because “We sounded like a bunch of Swedes”).  Yet it is absurd to speak of Cheap Trick as a “white” band, even in the sense that it is legitimate to speak of their fellow 2016 inductees N.W.A. as a black one.  Cheap Trick’s music cannot be reduced to a product of their “genetic endowment,” or even to some generic “white culture.”  Nielsen, Zander, Petersson, and Carlos are men of a certain time and a certain place—the mid–20th to early 21st century Upper Midwest, and specifically Northern Illinois—and their music has its feeder roots here and now (and then), even if other roots run deeper. Their longevity is the result, in large part, of their continued connection to this place and to the people who make their home here. As my barber recently noted, Rockford has changed a lot since he was young, but if you’re trying to find out something about a fellow Rockfordian you’ve never met, chances are you know not just one but several people who have worked with him, eaten with him, had one too many drinks with him, or worshiped with him.

Too many use the terms patriotism and nationalism today as if they were interchangeable, but they mean radically different things, especially in the context of a nation spread across an entire continent. Patriotism not only implies a connection to a certain people but demands a mutual connection to a certain place. There may be reasons why it is hard for me, a native of West Michigan, to be a Rockford patriot even after 20 years of living here, but it is many orders of magnitude easier than being a generically American one. America is not a place; it is many places—thousands of towns and regions and 50 states, all within the bounds of a continental empire that even in its infancy was more political than cultural. (The cultural differences between the original states, and even within each state, are almost incomprehensible to those whose historical imaginations have been fed from infancy on a steady diet of Thanksgiving turkey.) This country has always had, by its very nature, an inherent diversity that nationalism at best glosses over and at worst, reflecting its roots in Enlightenment rationalism, seeks to destroy in favor of an artificial unity. The subtitle of this magazine notwithstanding, there can be no single, deep, and lasting “American culture,” but there have been and still are many American cultures, local and regional, and the stronger they are, the more likely it is that the country as a whole will manage to survive.

Fame, alas, is fleeting, and the music of Cheap Trick may not be remembered outside of Rockford a century from now, much less four centuries, but what is true of Nielsen and Zander, Petersson and Carlos is just as true of Bach and Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart. When the multiculturalists dismiss the latter as “Dead White European Males,” and some of their opponents respond by lumping them together as “White Western Christians,” both sides turn these great composers into abstractions, as if the works of each one were (absurdly) interchangeable with those of any of the others. Notre Dame de Paris, Hagia Sophia, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and Sagrada Família were all built by Christian men of varying shades of whiteness, but the individual beauty and majesty of each edifice arises from the differences between those men and their cultures as much as it does from their underlying unity. Those who look at these churches through a monochromatic lens will never experience their full beauty—much less the fullness of truth that each represents and was built to honor. That some of those people, in fact, celebrated the blasphemous suicide of Dominique Venner in Notre Dame de Paris in May 2013 speaks volumes about what they truly worship.

Ostensibly, one of the reasons Venner chose to commit his “eminently political” act in the sanctuary at Notre Dame was to awaken the people of Europe to the dangers of Islamic immigration—a real threat that he correctly understood might spell the death of Europe as we know it. But the nations of Europe have faced this threat before, and they did not repel it through individual or mass suicide. Jan Sobieski, Janos Hunyadi, and Giovanni da Capestrano were all Western white Christian men named John who fought Islam, but they did not do so on behalf of the abstractions of “Europe” or “the West,” much less of “whiteness.” Each fought for the truth incarnate in his native land and people, in “the ashes of his fathers / and the temples of his gods.”

Abstractions draw man away from reality and lead him to despair; a firm grounding in reality gives man hope—or at least something that he can fight for when the odds seem overwhelming. A man, history shows us, will fight for his wife and children; for his family and friends; for his home and native land. Given time, talent, and resources, he may build things that last for generations yet to come. He may go to his grave knowing that his name may be lost to the ages within a century or two, but his presence will still be felt.

If, however, he abjures all of this, cuts his ties to his native soil (and never puts down roots anywhere else), makes few lasting friendships, chooses not to marry (or, if he marries, refuses to have children), and devotes his life instead to battles that are so large they cannot be won on behalf of an abstraction spun out of centuries of mass delusion—then such a man has not fought the enemies of civilization; he has joined forces with them.       

First published in the February 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Physics and Philosophy: Or, How Stephen Hawking Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Big Bang

“[P]hilosophy,” Stephen Hawking famously claimed, “is dead.” “Philosophy,” he argued, “has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

Werner Heisenberg might well have agreed with Hawking, though again he might not have. We cannot be certain. After all, Heisenberg was himself both a physicist and a philosopher, though he was the former before he was the latter. In fact, the title of this article, “Physics and Philosophy,” was Heisenberg’s before it was mine. He used it 65 years ago as the title of his Gifford Lectures, in which he grappled with the philosophical implications of quantum theory, and especially of his eponymous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that (in Stephen Hawking’s words) “a particle has neither a definite position nor a definite velocity unless and until those quantities are measured by an observer.”

Classical physics was (and remains) deterministic; quantum physics, Heisenberg recognized, reintroduced something akin to free will, or at the very least acknowledged that the human action of observation has an effect on that which the observer has observed — a decidedly philosophical concept.

About 25 years after Heisenberg delivered his Gifford Lectures, the Reverend Richard Rehm delivered a sermon at Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan. I was sitting in the pews with my trombone — not because I was an odd teenager, but because our public high-school band had been invited to play hymns during a Christmas service. Christ Community was a congregation in the Reformed Church in America, and I was, then as now, a Catholic, but I sat in rapt fascination as the Reverend Rehm, a few years before Stephen Hawking declared philosophy dead, essentially proclaimed the death of theology (though he didn’t phrase it that way).

Physicists, the Reverend Rehm declared, were more likely to discover God than theologians were. As they pursued the holy grail of a grand unified theory of physics, they were, he argued, entering into the mind of the god who had created the universe that this grand unified theory would ultimately define.

To a bright young student who loved mathematics and science and was considering majoring in physics in college, the Reverend Rehm’s words were as tempting as the serpent’s were to Eve. No greater pride hath a teenager than this: to think that he might discover God Himself. In no small part because of this particular sermon, I entered Michigan State a few years later as a physics major, though I switched to political theory after a single term.

About five years after I took a bite out of the apple that the Reverend Rehm had offered me, Russell Kirk, the great conservative thinker who would, over the next half-decade, become one of my mentors, told me that he thought that we were about to enter a new age of faith that would be ushered in by scientists — and, in particular, by physicists — who would prove the existence of God. Since it was the first time we had ever met, I did not have the courage to tell him that I knew that he was wrong.

For by then — even at the still young age of 21 — I had realized that a god who could be summed up in equations would no god at all. “The heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth the work of His hands” — but equating God with the laws that govern the world He has created ultimately subordinates Him to His creation.

Stephen Hawking, of course, was not a believer. In fact, in October 1981, at (of all places) a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he had introduced his “no boundary” hypothesis of the universe, which accepted the idea of the Big Bang but, he argued, removed the need for a Prime Mover to have set the Big Bang into motion. As he wrote seven years later in his most famous work, A Brief History of Time, in the “no boundary” hypothesis “The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would be neither created nor destroyed. It would just be. … What place then for a creator?”

And yet, as his former student and frequent collaborator Thomas Hertog shows in his recent book On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory, Hawking spent much of his life trying to discover the physical theories that the Reverend Rehm equated with the workings of the mind of God and that Russell Kirk thought might lead us to a new age of faith.

It is hard to overstate the enduring grip that the classical view of physics had on some of the greatest minds in physics even after the formulation of quantum mechanics. All too many Christian writers have misquoted Albert Einstein as saying that “God does not play dice with the universe” in an attempt to enlist his authority on behalf of belief in God. But what Einstein was actually expressing, in a letter to quantum theorist Max Born, was his resistance to quantum theory, because quantum theory undermines the determinism of classical physics (even as modified by Einstein’s own theory of relativity). Einstein used, not the word “God,” but the term “the Old One” as a metaphor for unchanging physical laws. Indeed, he had vehemently argued against Abbe Georges Lemaitre’s theory of the Big Bang because, as he told Lemaitre, “this reminds me too much of the Christian dogma of creation.” He preferred a universe with no beginning and no end, governed always by those same unchanging laws that, he was certain, physicists would one day fully discover.

Decades later, Hawking too had trouble shaking loose from the mindset imparted by classical physics. The “no boundary” hypothesis emerged from Hawking’s attempt to extend quantum theory to the macro world of phenomena described by the laws of classical physics. And from that emerged the view of the universe as a quantum wave function, a superposition of every possible state of every particle in the universe that extended the uncertainty principle to a macro level.

Yet even so, for another 20 years, Hawking clung to what he would eventually call a “God’s eye view” of cosmology, which assumed, Hertog writes, “that the mathematical laws of physics had some sort of existence that superseded the physical reality they governed.” It wasn’t until August 2002 that Hawking finally broke through the remaining grip of classical physics once and for all. “Time to stop playing God,” he told Hertog. “We need a new philosophy for cosmology.”

Over the course of two decades, the “no boundaries” hypothesis had revolutionized physics, leading to, among other things, a multitude of theories of the multiverse, all of which Hawking adamantly rejected. He had intuited all along that there was something wrong with those theories, but only now could he fully articulate the problem. “The universe as we observe it,” he told Hertog, “is the only reasonable starting point in cosmology.” But that has, Hawking realized, serious philosophical implications. “We are not angels, who view the universe from the outside. We and our theories are part of the universe we are describing.” As Hertog writes, in this view, “cosmology is laboratory science inside out — we are within the system, looking up and looking out.”

In one sense, we might say that Hawking was late to the game. Heisenberg had already pointed in this direction in Physics and Philosophy, and two decades later (and 23 years before Hawking) the theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler had laid bare the philosophical implications of quantum theory:

We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass. Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron we have to shatter the plate glass; we have to reach in there …

The physicist, Wheeler pointed out,

must install his chosen measuring equipment. It is up to him to decide whether he shall measure position or momentum. To install the equipment to measure the one prevents and excludes his installing the equipment to measure the other. Moreover, the measurement changes the state of the electron. The universe will never afterward be the same.

“To describe what has happened,” Wheeler concluded, “one has to cross out that old word ‘observer’ and put in its place the new word ‘participator.’ In some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe.”

Indeed, as early as the 1950’s and 1960’s some nonphysicists had taken note of, and expounded upon, the philosophical implications of a participatory universe, including C.S. Lewis’s and J.R.R. Tolkien’s friend Owen Barfield (most famously in Saving the Appearances) and my mentor and friend John Lukacs, in Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past. Both had pointed out that we are not only part of the universe; the universe, as we experience and understand it, is inseparable from our human consciousness. It is this philosophical insight that Hawking imported back into cosmology when he noted to Hertog that “Our theories are never fully decoupled from us.”

If Heisenberg and Wheeler and Barfield and Lukacs and Hawking were right, Albert Einstein’s argument against quantum theory — that “Physics is an attempt to grasp reality as it is, independently of its being observed” — was wrong because it describes something that simply is not possible. As Niels Bohr had put it, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”

For decades, cosmological theorizing had started at the Big Bang and moved forward (a “bottom-up” view that Hawking himself had previously embraced, including in his “no boundary” hypothesis). But the bottom-up view had led to the maddening confusion of multiverse theory: If the universe can be described as a quantum wave function in which every possible outcome exists simultaneously until an act of observation causes a branching and the creation of another effectively infinite set of multiverses, how are we ever to find the universe that we actually inhabit?

Recognizing now that “The universe as we observe it is the only reasonable starting point in cosmology,” Hawking proposed a “top-down” view that moves backward in time from what we currently observe. As novel as this view was in cosmology, it is not, Hertog notes, without precedent in science: This is how evolutionary history is determined in the biological sciences.

But as we move backward in time, history becomes in some fundamental sense contingent on us. As Hawking told Hertog, “The history of the universe depends on the questions you ask.” History, like our theories, is “never fully decoupled from us,” because it is, in the words of John Lukacs, “the remembered past.” “Any kind of tangible past in top-down cosmology,” Hertog writes, “is always an observer’s past.” And thus, Hertog argues, “In a quantum universe — our universe — a tangible physical reality emerges from a wide horizon of possibilities by means of a continual process of questioning and observing.” “This observership, the interactive process at the heart of quantum theory that transforms what might be into what does happen, constantly draws the universe more firmly into existence.” Or, as Hertog sums up Hawking’s top-down view, “We create the universe as much as the universe creates us.”

The scientific revolution, it has often been said, removed man from the center of the universe. Five hundred years later, his top-down cosmology, Hawking realized, “put humankind back in the center.” Yet in doing so, it also puts us in our proper place, ontologically speaking. In adopting a God’s eye view of the universe, mankind had attempted to usurp the place of our Creator, to subordinate Him to the grand unified theory we were convinced that we would one day create. Restored to our proper place, we can see ourselves as Saint Augustine saw us: as co-creators with God of the universe He created for us.

Stephen Hawking never became a Christian, but after he proposed his top-down cosmology, he took Thomas Hertog to a production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at the Royal Opera House to mark, as he told Hertog, “the end of my battles with God.” And 35 years after he unveiled his “no boundary” hypothesis at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he returned to the Vatican to announce that “The universe may have a boundary after all.” In November 2016, Hertog writes, “there were no more battles with God or the pope to be fought. Quite on the contrary, Stephen found a strong and moving resonance with Pope Francis in their shared goal of protecting our common home in the cosmos for the benefit of humanity today and tomorrow.”

The death of philosophy, it appears, has been greatly exaggerated. And even the most prominent scientist of recent decades may have found a place for a creator, beyond mankind’s laws of space and time.

First delivered as a paper to the Cosmopolitan Club of Huntington County, Indiana, on October 17, 2023.

Credo: Or, A Tree Is a Tree Because of You and Me

“A man may swear to tell the truth, but it is not in his power to tell the whole truth or nothing but the truth.”

— Pierre Duhem

The author of these words, the late 19th and early 20th century physicist and philosopher Pierre Duhem, is not as well known today as Werner Heisenberg, who formulated the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, but in both his physics and his philosophical thought, Duhem anticipated Heisenberg. While I began my college studies as a physics major, I came to know the work of both men through my graduate studies in political theory, where I encountered the writings of the Catholic historian John Lukacs, and later the man himself.

John passed away three years ago this month at the age of 95. He was best known for his work on the Second World War, including profiles of Hitler and of Churchill and detailed histories of brief turning points in the war that will long remain standard works. I didn’t come to know him through those works, however, but through books that have never received the attention that they should have, and that are already becoming harder to find: The Passing of the Modern Age; Confessions of an Original Sinner, his first memoir (or more precisely, as he called it, “auto-history”); and his masterwork, Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past, the third edition of which owes its publication to a phone call I made in 1992 to the father of modern American conservatism, Russell Kirk. In those days before the World Wide Web, I scoured countless used book stores but could not find a copy of the first or second edition to purchase. Dr. Kirk, whom I had met three years before and who would pass away just two years later, was the general editor of a line of conservative classics published by Transaction Press. Would he be interested in bringing out a new edition of a work that he, too, considered one of the most important of the 20th century? He would indeed, and the rest, as they say, is history (no pun intended).

But this paper is not about me, except in the sense that everything we write or say or do is inevitably bound to the writer or the speaker or the doer as much as it is to the subject of his writing or speaking or action. The distinction between subject and object, between mind and matter, between thought and extension that Descartes so firmly implanted in the philosophical presuppositions of Western man began to crumble in the last years of the 19th century, and has since been completely demolished through the work of Duhem and Heisenberg and Lukacs and Ortega y Gasset and, perhaps most importantly, Owen Barfield.

And yet the rubble of Cartesianism continues to clutter our minds and to keep us from being conscious at all times that we see the world not as an external observer but from the inside out. In the language of Barfield, an accomplished linguist and philosopher and close friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, our knowledge is participatory. Heisenberg demonstrated that the act of our observation of a subatomic particle changes the state of that particle, but something similar happens every waking moment of our lives. The world in which we are participants is one that we constantly construct through the activity of our imagination.

This is not to say that everything which we perceive as external to us has no reality outside of our consciousness. In his greatest work, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Barfield referred to that reality as the “unrepresented.” Because our imagination is constantly engaged in actively transforming the unrepresented into meaningful representations without our conscious recognition of that activity, we perceive a world fully formed through our imaginative conception of it. In other words, we don’t consciously know the unrepresented except through those representations—representations that are the product of our mental activity, both personal and communal (through the medium of language). But that means that the represented—the world as we know it—is in every meaningful way something that each of us has helped bring into existence.

To put it in terms that could be taken from a child’s book of rhymes: A tree is a tree because of you and me. To the bird that builds a nest in its branches or the grubs that wriggle through its roots, the unrepresented reality that we conceive as a tree is something rather different. In a lecture on “Evolution” collected in his book History, Guilt and Habit, Barfield quotes from “Our ‘Polar Partnership’ with the World Around Us,” a 1977 Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard, in which Edwin H. Land, cofounder of the Polaroid Corporation, noted that

In many ways the tree certainly does not exist in the physical sense without the observer. The tree does not exist for radio waves of a certain wavelength, nor does it exist for neutrinos. The tree exists as part and parcel of the interaction between that part of the cosmos and our part of the cosmos, namely the “We” that has evolved over many centuries to be a partner with the tree.

Or to put it another way (again, quoting Land), “There really is no outside world and no inside world; there is just one world.” For each of us, the totality of our representation at any moment comprises that world.

I would expect, then, that when I go to sleep, the material world would continue to exist (as it obviously does), but my participation in it would change. And indeed, while we may not always realize we are dreaming while we are dreaming, we very quickly recognize that we were dreaming once we awake, because in our dreams, our imagination is not transforming the unrepresented into representations but transforming memories of representations into new representations and, in the process, often becoming unmoored from the reality of the unrepresented. In our dreams, we, like the neutrino, may be able to fly through a tree, because in our dreamscape both that tree and our body are representations of representations, and not of the unrepresented. But having flown through a tree in a dream, should we try to do so in our waking life, we are most likely to end up with a knot on our head.

If I haven’t yet caused you to wish that my delivery of this paper were a dream from which you could awake, you may be starting to formulate objections to this post-Cartesian understanding of reality. Chief among them, I suspect — because it was the objection with which I struggled for some time — is the thought that the philosophical arguments advanced by Barfield, Lukacs, Ortega, and Heisenberg represent a sort of relativism that threatens to shatter the very concept of truth. If, as I said a little while ago, for each of us the totality of our representation of the unrepresented at any moment comprises our world, wouldn’t that mean that each of us is living in at least a slightly different world?

Yes, and not just in the sense that my imaginative vision of this room and this gathering is different from yours because you’re sitting over there looking at me, and I’m sitting over here looking at you. Our imaginations are colored and shaped by our histories, both personal and communal. That Brooks has spent decades of his life with Barb means that he will understand the words that I am saying somewhat differently than he would have if he had remained a bachelor. That Amy has been married to me for 30 years means that she will understand these words somewhat differently from Barb, even though she and Barb are both hearing them tonight for the first time.

Man doesn’t have a nature, he has a history, John Lukacs often wrote; though to square those words with his Catholic faith and mine, I might say that man’s nature is his history. The difference between Adam’s nature before he took a bite out of the apple and his nature immediately afterward is the history of his (original) sin.

Even when we try to see the world through the eyes of others, we cannot set our history aside. Still, our shared language and our shared history together shape our personal imaginations in powerful ways, so that my representation and yours are close enough that we can easily fall back unthinkingly into believing that Descartes was right. In fact, were that not true, Cartesian dualism could never have taken the firm hold that it did for four centuries upon the Western mind.

As Catholics, John Lukacs and I understand that truth is not relative; all truth belongs to the Truth; and the Truth is a Person. But because the Truth is a Person, and we are people, too, our relation to the Truth (and thus to all truth) is personal. And precisely because we are not God, everything that is personal for us is, by definition, limited—at least until such time as, like John the Evangelist, we see “a new heaven and a new earth,” for “The former heaven and the former earth had passed away” (Rev 21:1).

And that brings us back to Pierre Duhem, and the quotation with which I began this paper. I set out to tell the truth, even though it is not in my power to tell the whole truth or nothing but the truth. And I firmly believe that this is the truth: In moving beyond the error of Descartes, in recognizing that the world in which we live is not wholly external to us but is one that each of us has helped bring into existence, and in humbly acknowledging that it is not in our power to tell the whole truth or nothing but the truth, we do not deny the reality of truth but prepare ourselves to enter into a more personal relationship with the truth—and ultimately with the Person Who is Truth Himself.

First delivered as a paper to the Cosmopolitan Club of Huntington County, Indiana, on May 24, 2022. The text has been slightly modified from the version delivered.

Taking Back the Culture

By the time you read this, “the most important election of our lifetime” will be headed for the history books.  If the last six most important elections of our lifetime are any indication, however, we will once again have a chance to vote in the most important election of our lifetime in 2020.

Or perhaps not, because some of those who have routinely claimed that each presidential election since 1992 has been the most important election of our lifetime changed their tune this year: This, they said, was the last election that would ever matter.  After November 8, the deluge.

In the words of everybody’s favorite pseudonymous paleo-Straussian, the 2016 contest was the “Flight 93 Election.”  If we failed to rush the cockpit by prevailing on November 8, this country that we all love so much—even though, to listen to us, we seemingly cannot stand anything about it—would come crashing to the ground.  A few months ago, Donald Trump declared that, if he were not elected president, the Republicans would never win the White House again.  In mid-October, in a speech in Florida, he upped the ante: “This is not simply another four-year election,” Trump said.  “This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization [emphasis mine] that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government.”

Forget Flight 93; the pseudonymous paleo-Straussian was thinking too small.  The 2016 election was the Siege of Vienna; it was Charles Martel at Tours; it was Horatio at the bridge.  Pat Buchanan, a veteran of two White Houses and a presidential election of his own, emphatically agreed with the Republican presidential nominee who, in 1999, called him “a very dangerous man” who “has enjoyed a long psychic friendship with Hitler.”  Politics, as we know, makes for strange bedfellows, and everyone in this bed agrees that, by 2020, it will be too late to fight back.  The demography of the United States is changing too rapidly, and demographics is destiny.

There are many half-truths in all of these statements, but a half-truth, as John Lukacs has often said, is sometimes more dangerous than a lie, because the element of truth makes it easy to ignore the element of untruth.  On virtually every measure that true conservatives care about, the country will almost certainly be worse off in 2020 than it is today—just as, on all of those same measures, the country was worse off in 2008 than it was in 2000, a reality that played no small part in the election of Barack Obama.

One definition of insanity, we are told, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  Yet that’s exactly what we have done by investing each presidential election with monumental importance—and finally, in this year, apocalyptic importance.

There is a way, though, in which this year was different.  Donald Trump ran the tables and defeated 16 other Republican candidates in the primaries, because he was willing to champion issues that no Republican presidential candidate since Pat Buchanan in 2000 has had any desire to touch.  Those issues are the very ones that we at Chronicles have advocated for the last 30 of our 40 years of publication.  We have known all along that these issues were more important to more of the American people than the things that MSNBC and FOX News, the New York Times and the Washington Post and NPR, spend all of their time discussing and debating, and we—and other authors and editors of Chronicles, especially the late Sam Francis—correctly predicted that any presidential candidate who took them on forthrightly would garner tremendous support.

How could we have been so certain?

Because, at root, all of these issues are neither political nor economic but cultural.  Immigration, trade, manufacturing, law and order, even the question of foreign wars and the role of the United States in world affairs—all of these are just as much a matter of culture as are, say, abortion and gay “marriage.”  But just as with abortion and gay “marriage,” we tend to forget the irreducible cultural nature of these issues when we find ourselves in the heat of political battles.  We begin to act as if politics—especially national politics—is all that really matters.  And, as so often happens, thought follows action.  So we convince ourselves that abortion can be brought to an end by Congress passing a “Personhood Amendment” or by the Supreme Court taking up another Roe v. Wade and deciding it rightly this time.  That a president or Congress can somehow reduce local crime without increasing the federal government’s near-tyrannical powers.  That the heads of multinational (or, more correctly, transnational) corporations have shuttered factories in the United States while opening new ones in China and Mexico simply because Congress passed laws and the president signed treaties that made it economically viable to do so, rather than that Congress passed those laws and the president signed those treaties because politicians of both political parties were heavily lobbied to do so by corporate executives who have next to nothing in common with the workers in their factories because those executives long ago quit thinking of themselves as Americans in anything more than a purely accidental way.  That the executives of other companies that cannot take advantage of such trade agreements to move their operations overseas because it costs too much to ship a frozen chicken from China have repeatedly chosen to employ illegal immigrants illegally simply because those immigrants are here, and not because the stock grants that their board has promised them if they beat projections on the next quarterly earnings report are more important to those executives than whether the grandchildren of the farmers whose way of life their corporate forebears destroyed in the middle of the last century are able to provide for their families and to remain within at least driving distance of the graves of their ancestors.

As we have said consistently in these pages, there are no political solutions to cultural problems—and every one of these is, at root, a cultural problem.  And the greatest cultural problem that we face today is the all-encompassing nature of modern politics, which, especially at the national level, has proved to be an extraordinarily efficient means of destruction of traditional society, morality, and culture.  Attempting to harness that destructive power to restore the culture, revitalize morality, and rebuild society is like trying to perform open-heart surgery with a chainsaw.  Anyone who tries to do so is just going to make a huge mess.

In the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, an octogenarian grandmother in Indiana vowed to Mike Pence that she would fight a revolution should voters choose Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.  What that grandmother does not realize—what all of us, to the extent that we are captivated by national politics, do not realize—is that we are living today in the midst of an institutionalized revolution.  Hillary Clinton is part of that revolution, and Barack Obama is, too, but as Billy Joel would say, they didn’t start the fire.  That fire has been burning brightly in the minds of men for two and a half centuries—and not just a few men but all those who, like the French revolutionaries, elevate ideology above truth and politics above culture.

Russell Kirk used to say that “the American Revolution was no revolution truly, but simply a War of Independence—a revolution (in Burke’s phrase concerning the Glorious Revolution of 1688) ‘not made, but prevented.’”  Dr. Kirk was right, of course, but American history did not stop once we had won our independence.  The move from the English unwritten constitution to the written Constitution of the United States of America, and the adoption of a written Bill of Rights, were very good things in the context of their time, but they also gave the modern revolutionary spirit something to take and to twist, and by the time of Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the process had begun.  Instead of being confined to its proper sphere, as the Framers of the Constitution wished it to be, national politics took on greater and greater importance, and society and culture were deliberately subordinated to politics.

All of this, as I noted last month, is there from the beginning in the writings of the godfather of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, implicit in his concept of the general or national will that required the destruction of all social and cultural institutions that stand between the individual and the nation-state—especially the family, the Church, and the patriotic attachment to one’s native place and the people therein.  But later philosophers of the revolution, such as Antonio Gramsci, were explicit about the need to subordinate culture to politics.  The point of the “long march through the institutions” was to subvert the family and the Church and the schools and the news and entertainment media from within, by transforming these cultural institutions into political ones.  Once the forces of revolution succeeded in doing that, the revolution would become unstoppable.  Because this is the reality of the modern world: Whenever the battle is confined to the political arena, the revolutionaries always win.  In politics, ideology always trumps tradition.  Why?  Because anyone who elevates politics above culture, abstraction above reality, even if he thinks of himself as a conservative, is, from the vantage point of tradition, an ideologue, a revolutionary.

And that is where we are today.  Historically, we stand at the apotheosis of revolution.  The rapid pace of cultural change over the last few years has been surprising, even astonishing, to most people—not just those of us who are opposed to that cultural change, but even those who are in favor of it.  But we make a grave mistake if we think that political action brought about that change more than such action reflected it.  Gay “marriage” did not come out of the blue (no pun intended), imposed by the political powers that be, any more than, in an earlier day, no-fault divorce and legalized abortion did.  In each case, the courts and the politicians ratified a cultural revolution that had already taken place.

Think back to 2008, when Barack Obama told us that he did not believe in gay marriage.  Or to 2012, when Hillary Clinton continued to say the same.  To dismiss these statements as mere lies is to fail to understand that even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been driven by the long march through the institutions as much as, or even more than, they have driven it.

One of the best insights that true conservatives have had about the Republican Party over the past 30 years is that, when the Democrats have power, they push the revolution forward; and when the Republicans gain power, they institutionalize the revolutionary changes that the Democrats have made.  That analysis is true, as far as it goes; but it doesn’t go far enough.  The reality is that Gramsci and his disciples were right: By its very nature, cultural revolution drives political change.  All of modern politics, Republican or Democratic, left or right, consists of the institutionalization of a revolution that has taken place, and continues to take place, in the culture.

Conservatives have been warning about “Cultural Marxism” for years while fundamentally misunderstanding the underlying strategy of the long march through the institutions.  Rather than resisting any attempt to politicize the institutions of culture—the family, the Church, the schools, arts and literature—we have responded to the revolutionary subversion of these institutions by politicizing them in a different way.  But the end result is the same: Those institutions have become thoroughly politicized; truth has been replaced by ideology; the revolution has advanced.

So we fight for “family values” as if this abstract phrase is more important than the family itself; we march under the banners of “academic freedom” and “free speech” when what we should be promoting are truth and beauty and goodness.  We blithely import Christian language into our political rhetoric, labeling our political adversaries demons or the devil incarnate and ignoring Christ’s injunction to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and God that which is God’s” by citing the fact that God not only could but did use a Constantine for His own purposes as undeniable proof that He is clearly doing so right now, in the United States, in 2016.  We start out by joking about “God Emperor Trump” and end up believing our own joke with a fervor that we should reserve for the clauses of the Nicene Creed.

And along the way we have lost sight of a reality that conservatives of a previous generation understood: that investing secular politics with religious significance is itself a form of the long march through the institutions, a subversion of the Church and the subordination of her divine mission to the revolutionary agenda of modern politics.

In The Screwtape Letters, written in the midst of World War II—long considered an existential crisis of the West, though one, I must admit, that pales in comparison with the election of 2016—C.S. Lewis has the superior demon Uncle Screwtape offer this advice to the novice Wormwood:

I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy [God], are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them. . . .

Whichever [the patient] adopts, your main task will be the same.  Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion.  Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part.  Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause”, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. . . . Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.  Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours.

My point is not to suggest that politics is unimportant—far from it—but that we need to return politics to its proper sphere, to recognize (as I wrote last month) that culture is prior to politics, both in the sense of existing before politics and in the sense of being more important than politics.  When we invest politics with religious importance, we profane religion, we undermine the culture, and we become unwitting soldiers in the long march through the institutions, doing the very work to which our political adversaries have devoted their lives.

Let us turn to Lewis once more, this time from The Weight of Glory:

A man may have to die for his country: but no man must in any exclusive sense live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering unto Caesar that which of all things most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

What, then, should we do?  After all, no true conservative can deny the element of truth in all of those half-truths I mentioned earlier.  The hour is late; the long march through the institutions is nearly complete; we stand, as I said, at the apotheosis of revolution.  And standing here, we face a choice: We can choose to continue on the path of revolution, by accepting the domination of politics over culture, and steel ourselves for an unceasing but always losing battle in the political arena; or we can become counterrevolutionaries, returning politics to its proper place by focusing our efforts on taking back the culture.  And in doing so, we might just win.

If we choose the latter option, the struggle will not be easy.  Nor will it be as exciting as waging political campaigns or watching FOX News or reading political blogs or even tweeting and Facebooking the latest political meme.  What it will be is living our lives the way that we were intended to do so, conforming ourselves to the unchanging truths revealed to us by nature and nature’s God.  It will mean starting our own long march through the institutions, not in order to politicize them but to restore them.  And rather than resembling an army marching in lockstep while wearing redshirts or brownshirts, we will look a lot more like a band of pilgrims, making our way back to the sources of our culture and to the institutions that are closest to those sources—chief among them the family (the natural source) and the Church (the supernatural one).

While the process may be hard, it is also quite simple.  If you’re not married, get married.  If you are married, stay married.  If you can have children, have one.  Have another.  And another.  Keep repeating, not until you can’t afford to have more, but for as long as you can’t afford not to.  Baptize your children.  Raise them in the Faith.  Treat your parish as an extension of your family.  Encourage your fellow churchgoers to have children of their own.  Educate your children well, in whatever way you need to do so.  Make sure they understand that the purpose of education is not to make them good citizens or good workers but to cultivate in them a lifelong desire for goodness and truth and beauty, the critical faculties to discern what is good and true and beautiful, and the imagination to become co-creators with God, increasing the treasury of goodness, truth, and beauty in this world.

Introduce yourself to your neighbor.  Introduce your neighbor to your other neighbor.  Treat your neighborhood as an extension of your family.  If you can share a turkey with Uncle Charlie at Thanksgiving even though he had a Hillary sign in his yard just a month before, you can be civil to your neighbor who had a Hillary sign, too.  If you don’t want to share a turkey with Uncle Charlie because he had a Hillary sign, do it anyway.

Shop at that local store run by the young guy with sleeve tattoos and his wife with the multicolored hair and piercings.  The jobs they create will never be sent overseas by some heartless corporate executive.  Say nice things about the child that they chose to bring into this world rather than to abort.  Don’t worry about whether they think of themselves as liberals or voted for Hillary.  Pray that they stay married and have more children and continue to live in your town and contribute to your shared economic independence.  All of those things mean that their children will be more instinctually conservative—that is, more connected to reality—than they are, just as your children will be more instinctually conservative than you were if you raise them this way.

Every once in a while, turn off FOX News, and MSNBC, and CNN, and NPR.  Pick up a book.  Read poetry to your children.  Read a novel with your spouse.  Study history.  Learn what an existential crisis really looks like.  Watch television shows and movies, but be discriminating.  Don’t worry about whether a particular actor or director holds political views with which you disagree; consider whether what he has created is a worthwhile work of art.  Listen to music.  Make music, if you have the talent to do so.  Make music even if you do not have the talent to do so.  Encourage your children to do the same.

Subscribe to your local newspaper, no matter how poorly written and edited the stories may be, and how biased the national coverage is.  Read it for the local coverage, for the things happening within a few miles of you that will never make the national news.  The quality of your water is more important to you and your family than “global climate change” will ever be.  Use that water to grow a garden.  Plant vegetables and flowers.  Plan for the future by planting fruit trees.  Mow your lawn and paint your house and wax your car and act as if material possessions have spiritual value, because they do.

And don’t forget to vote.  Not just every four years on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November, but every time there’s an election.  Try to learn enough about the candidates for every office so that you can make an informed decision.  Give every office the weight that it deserves.  The dogcatcher who removes a rabid animal from your neighborhood may do more for you and your family than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump ever would.  So, too, the city councilman who fights to have a stoplight installed at the dangerous intersection down the block.  And the sheriff who arrests real criminals whose crimes threaten you and your family.  Spend more time learning about local candidates than you do about state candidates, because they affect more aspects of your everyday life, and it’s easier to learn the truth about them, because they are closer to you.  Spend more time learning about state candidates than about national candidates, for the same reason.  And candidates for Congress more than those for the Senate.  And those for the Senate more than those for president.

Take the long view.  Don’t worry about “winning” within your lifetime.  When Gramsci’s disciple Rudi Dutschke coined the slogan “the long march through the institutions” 50 years ago, the march had already been under way for at least a quarter of a century.  Our countermarch may take just as long.  But we have an advantage that the Cultural Marxists did not: The Gods of the Copybook Headings are on our side.  We’re bringing people back to reality.  And living your life in harmony with reality is its own reward.

After all, what have we got to lose?  Remember: This was not only the most important election of our lifetime, but the last one that will ever matter.  We might as well do something with the rest of our lives. 

First published in the December 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

One Moment in Time

“You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?”

“Over a hell, conceivably.  There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation.  Most of them are private.”

Those words echo in my thoughts as we approach the building.  Turner School, built in 1898, is no Balgrummo Lodging, the Scottish manor house that is the setting of Russell Kirk’s Lord of the Hollow Dark, and not simply because the massive brick-and-stone structure sits right in the heart of Rockford, Illinois, about as far geographically and culturally as you can get from the suburbs of Edinburgh.

Still, as I draw near to the building for the first time, the words play over and over again in my mind.  For in Turner School, as in Balgrummo Lodging, unspeakable horrors—indeed, ritual murders—have taken place, and the closer we come, the more strongly I feel the possibility of unavenged souls trapped in the place of their bodies’ destruction—and the souls of some of their destroyers as well, returned here, years later, to the site of their sin.  If there is such a thing as a Hell on earth (and theologians as late as St. Alphonsus Ligouri have argued that Hell is, indeed, a physical place), Turner School, I can have no doubt, is one.

Over the past eight-and-a-half years, I have passed by here countless times, but always in a car.  Driving down Broadway, headed to a bookstore or restaurant, you cannot help but shudder as you pass, if you know what Turner School has become.  The moment, however, passes quickly, aided by the speed of Dr. Kirk’s “mechanical Jacobin.”  Only approaching by foot, and with the intent of being here, does the full weight of this place come to bear.

For Turner School is no longer a school but a victim, like the children it used to house, of America’s 50-year-long failed “experiment” in school desegregation.  Rockford suffered for 13 years (from 1989 to 2002) under a federal desegregation lawsuit whose educational and social effects will be felt for decades to come and which may, in fact, have destroyed this town.  And Turner School was there at the beginning, closed by the Rockford School Board in 1978 after parents, led by the courageous David Strommer (later, in the 1990’s, a school-board member and one of the fiercest opponents of desegregation, school consolidation, and judicial taxation), rose up against a plan to bus students from Turner to other schools to satisfy state “integration” guidelines.  In the end, the board decided it was simply easier to force the issue by shuttering the school and scattering the children to the wind.

In doing so, the board not only sacrificed the students then at Turner School to the gods of “progress” and “diversity” but offered up future generations to something even worse: The building now houses the Northern Illinois Women’s Clinic (N.I.W.C.), the euphemistic name attached to Rockford’s only abortuary.

Partisans of state-sanctioned murder, such as Planned Parenthood, like to portray the “procedure” as “safe” and “clinical,” performed as an “outpatient service” in “modern facilities.”  Fort Turner (as its owner, Wayne Webster, refers to the decommissioned school) gives the lie to the glowing description.

In the pro-death mythology, thousands of women died every year in back alleys across America until an “enlightened” Supreme Court, in 1973, overturned the laws of all 50 states regulating the barbaric “procedure.”  From the outside, however, Fort Turner has much in common with the alley to its east, where, as we walk down it, Aaron Wolf finds tattered porn magazines and empty liquor bottles.  The horrifying thought crosses both of our minds: Are children being conceived out here, only to be butchered inside?  At the very least, it seems likely that less “respectable” partisans of death—less respectable, that is, than politicians and doctors—may get a sick thrill from performing their own ritual acts so close to the gates of Hell, where even the mulberry trees in the fencerow refuse to bear fruit.

While the 50,000 or more children he has murdered over the past 30 years will never have names by which they can be remembered, the butcher of Fort Turner, “Dr.” Richard Ragsdale (I refuse to use his title without the inverted commas), will go down in history for his “contribution” to “a woman’s right to choose.”  Showing exquisite care for his “patients,” Ragsdale filed suit in 1988 to overturn an Illinois law that required “clinics” like N.I.W.C. to have operating rooms that meet hospital standards.  (Ragsdale was already operating out of Fort Turner by that point.)  Turnock v. Ragsdale, scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on December 5, 1989, was expected to provide the Court with an opportunity to revisit Roe v. Wade (or at least to clarify questions raised earlier that year in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services).  On November 22, however, the case was settled out of court, when the state of Illinois agreed to create a new class of lightly regulated abortion “clinics” (that just happened to include Ragsdale’s chamber of horrors at Fort Turner) and guaranteed the “right” to an abortion with essentially no restraints through the 18th week of pregnancy.

“Dr.” Ragsdale has privileges at two of the hospitals in town, SwedishAmerican and Rockford Memorial.  (St. Anthony’s does not let him in the door.)  As we walk back up the alley to Broadway and the front of Fort Turner, I wonder: Do any members of the board of either hospital ever pass by here?  If so, what do they think of the rubber chickens hanging in the gable windows, Wayne Webster’s sick slap at the pro-lifers who meet out on the sidewalk every week to pray?  Or the signs in other windows: “What the Hell You Looking Up Here For?”; “PROTECTED BY MR. SMITH & MR. WESSON”; and, just to show his concern for his tenant’s “patients,” “BEWARE OF PICKPOCKETS AND WILD WOMEN”?  (Previous signs were even worse: “Jesus loves these braindead a--holes,” “These Bible-thumpers suffer from lack-o-nookie,” “Free coat hangers to picketer’s wives and mothers,” “God bless these horny old sweat-hogs.”)  Or the mocking little shrine Webster has created of items—a crucifix, a nun doll, a picture of Pope John Paul II—left behind by pro-lifers?  Do they know that Webster’s own son went to Turner School, where now 25 to 70 children are slaughtered every week?  Do they even care?

The answer is obvious.  The “pro-life” Republican candidate for mayor in 2001, Denny Johnson, sits on the board of SwedishAmerican.  When I questioned him on a radio talk show during the campaign, he gave the standard dodge—Ragsdale doesn’t perform abortions in our hospital—and dismissed my suggestion that he take a pledge that, as mayor, he would use zoning regulations to close down Fort Turner.  (The idea, he admitted, had never even crossed his mind.)

Webster and Ragsdale are both living proof that abortion is not simply a “service” that someone can “provide” while being otherwise normal and well adjusted.  Webster has confronted pro-lifers outside of Fort Turner wearing a devil costume; he once hired someone to pass out helium-filled condoms to pro-lifers’ children.  On killing days, he broadcasts loud music and other sounds from loudspeakers mounted on the outside of the building, to drown out the voices of the faithful praying the rosary.  Ragsdale and his wife, Debbie DeMars, were charged in September 1994 with four counts of producing and distributing child pornography, after they took film to a local developer that included pictures of their three-year-old foster daughter in suggestive poses, wearing a black-lace thong, with her genitals exposed.  When Ragsdale and his lawyer claimed that the charges were politically motivated, Winnebago County’s Republican “pro-life” state’s attorney, Paul Logli, quickly cut a deal in which, in exchange for the charges being dropped, DeMars signed a statement admitting that the photos “were of an inappropriate nature and could constitute a violation of state law.”  (If the photos “could constitute a violation of state law,” isn’t it the duty of the state’s attorney to prosecute?)  State child-protection services apparently regarded the situation more seriously than Logli did: The girl was removed from the home and never returned to Ragsdale and DeMars.

Walking down the sidewalk on Broadway, I understand clearly for the first time the deepest dimensions of this battle.  If they knew where the gates of Hell were, would the faithful not keep constant vigil outside, offering—as in a scene from a medieval fresco—rosaries as lifelines to those being dragged down into the pit by leering demons?  And these doors—once the girls’ entrance to Turner School—are truly a gate to Hell.

Most pro-lifers speak reflexively of abortion as “the destruction of innocent human life.”  Would that it were.  Looking at the doors, I begin to understand the frustration and the horror that must have overwhelmed Fr. John Earl when, in September 2000, he smashed his car into Fort Turner and set about destroying the inside with an ax, before Webster, who lives in his house of horrors, convinced him to stop by firing two shotgun blasts into the wall.  For Father Earl remembers the words of the Psalmist: “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”  The children sacrificed on Richard Ragsdale’s altar of progress bear no personal guilt, but they have inherited Adam’s sin.  That is why abortion is perhaps the most perfect weapon Satan has ever devised: Deprived of Baptism, the souls of these children may never find true rest.  That—more so than the death and destruction of the body—is the true horror of the act.

Father Earl, by his reception of Holy Orders, is an alter Christus, and perhaps he thought he was acting as such.  Some acts in salvation history, however, are only to be performed once, and Christ Himself descended into Hell, throwing the gates wide.  Our struggles are out in this world, not inside the doors of Fort Turner.

Some abortionists undoubtedly understand what they accomplish when they destroy an unborn child; does Richard Ragsdale understand as well?  We can only pray that he does, because then there is the possibility that his victims are, in some sense, martyrs, and that their souls may thus find rest.

In Kirk’s novel, 12 disciples gather at Balgrummo Lodging, where their leader, Apollinax, promises to grant them a “Timeless Moment”—an experience to be gained through the murder of a mother and her fatherless child.  In the midst of their act of depravity, Apollinax arranges for them, too, to die; and he knows that he will have created the only kind of Timeless Moment man can gain through his actions alone: the inverse of the Beatific Vision; an eternity in Hell.

Confused and beguiled by the lies of the god of progress, the prince of this world, the women who enter the gates of this hell, if they emerge again, may, in time and through the prayers of the faithful, come to recognize and—more importantly—repent of their sin.  And, in time, Richard Ragsdale and Wayne Webster will pass on, and Fort Turner may once again lie vacant, except for those souls trapped in a Timeless Moment within its walls—and possibly those other souls who, having repented, are graciously granted the ability, after their death, to continue, in time, to work out their salvation with fear and trembling.

“You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?”

“Over a hell, conceivably.  There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation.”

First published in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.