Time was when we could look at our political differences and see those differences as just a wrinkle in the cloth of society. We could look at our religious variances as mere quirks -- most people recognized God in one way or another. No more. Something really dreadful is happening. We are not experiencing ordinary variations in opinion; we’re experiencing war in every area of our society. We can no longer “agree to disagree” and expect our society to be there when we wake up in the morning. We’ve slid into a Tolkeinesque nightmare deep in the mines of Moria. There is a way out, but we’re going to have to fight the Balrog to get there.

One of the first principles of warfare is “know your enemy.” Who (not what) is this Balrog? The Democrat party? -- key Democrats, those with the loudest, most influential voices, have largely succumbed to the temptations of power and unrestrained sex, to the easiness of dreaming up their own set of values -- ones they can easily excel at -- tolerance, inclusiveness, and diversity. The leadership of that party completely believe that the end justifies the means – any means at all, including the killing of babies, the undoing of the family, the wrecking of businesses, the destruction of an economy, the demolition of a child’s education, to say nothing of cheating to win elections.

I recall the introduction C.S. Lewis wrote for his novel The Screwtape Letters. In that essay he discusses the concept of Satan, the Father of Lies. He addresses a misconception that has plagued humanity from the get-go -- that Satan is God’s arch-nemesis, God’s equal antagonist, but Lewis points out something about the archangel-gone-bad -- that Satan, for all his ill-gotten power, for all his beauty (Yes, Satan is beautiful.), for all his brilliance, is still just a creature. God, on the other hand, created all the heavens and the earth, as well as all the angels. No other entity is the equal of the three members of the Trinity. We must remember that so as not to become despondent.

The problem is a logical one; if Satan is God’s opposite (but equal) opponent then Satan could have none of God’s attributes. The opposite of life is death. The opposite of omniscience is no mentality at all, a vast and hopeless stupidity. The opposite of infinite strength is no power of any kind. Satan could have no intelligence, no strength, no attractiveness, no honesty, no life. God is omniscient, omnipotent, beautiful, truthful, and completely outside of time and space. Satan is merely an angel, a created being, far beneath God in all attributes. Yes, he’s smart, crafty, capable (but not infinitely so), beautiful (the most beautiful of all the angels). He will live forever, but he did have a beginning, unlike God, Who always has been, and Satan’s eternity will be spent alone in Revelation’s Lake of Fire.

My point is this: God is perfection, Satan is a mere creature who has run amuck. His arrogance has blinded him to the impossibility of his rebellion succeeding, and we’re caught right in the middle of his final, last-ditch offensive.

What we are seeing is evil so strong that it’s almost bubbling up out of the ground. The pivotal evidence is the way we are treating children. The Left likes to talk about “systemic racism,” but I argue that what we’re truly seeing is systemic, Satanic, child abuse. If we don’t rip children limb-from-limb from the womb (and sell their body parts), we raise many of them in households where they are ill-fed, ignored by parents too busy to really pay attention, and too secular to take them to church. We send them off to government schools that have failed horridly (A third of our children cannot read at grade level, then we lock them out of their schools, where they at least had friends. Then we have stuck them with an overload of questionable vaccines, and now we have allowed sexualization at an alarming pace culminating in the schools getting involved in grooming young children for sex with adults and, even worse, sexual mutilation without parental consent. This is not just human evil. We’ve gone back to the time of Baal and Moloch, idols that demanded human -- i.e. child -- sacrifice.

It's largely a spiritual problem. One of my Bible college students described a recent Christian youth conference where one of the speakers explained that God was a sexual being with male sex organs, and He wanted us to be sexual too. Whoa. The church, I’m afraid, is as much infected as the schools. Some churches teach that health and wealth will be ours if we cough up enough money. Some teach that we can suck a dead person’s spirituality out of his/her grave and appropriate it for our own use. But how many bother to teach what Jonathan Edwards taught in his famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God? I can’t imagine that our Maker is not angry with us right now.

Yes, I think we’re face-to-face, as was Gandalf, with the terrifying Balrog. He’s taken the appearance of power-hungry government officials, of liberal schoolteachers, of money-hungry doctors and pharmaceutical companies. He looks like militant Islamic fanatics, like pimps and child rapists. He looks like the drug-infested, the slovenly, the lazy.  It is interesting that there doesn’t seem to be one particular group organizing all this Satanic nastiness -- though it is also fascinating that the Democrat agenda lines up well with the demonic. How many pro-life Satanists are there? How many against euthanasia? How many anti-gay, anti-molesters are also in the Satanist camp? I would venture there are none. There are communists (a Satanic system if there ever was one), anarchists, racists, college professors, media people, medical folk, corporate giants, and those indulging a variety of perversions -- and they’ve all sold their souls simultaneously creating a perfect storm. 

A society can only stand so much chaos, so much evil. We can’t really help the rest of the world, but we should have the ability as American citizens to correct our itinerary and do away with this many-headed monster that is about to eat us alive. Because this is such a multifaceted problem it has to have many concurrent solutions. We -- millions of us -- have to start locally and small. We can invite friends over to see documentaries like Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules. We can show up for school board meetings -- over and over and over again, as necessary. We can file lawsuits, write letters to the editor, go to church -- one that will actually teach something true. We can join or form conservative groups, start a school or homeschool our children. We can learn our history, start a prayer group, talk to people and stand up for what we know is right. We will have to expect to offend some people, but it’s either that or we, our children, our grandchildren will live (if they live) in abject misery. Look at the misery that is already overwhelming our kids -- a recent study of teenage girls found that 30% had contemplated suicide.

It's no longer a matter of “you have your truth and I have mine.” That nonsense is over. And if we don’t get on the stick and straighten out our thinking and our actions, we will be over. It’s going to take much more than just winning an election, and given the Left’s willingness to cheat, that might not even be possible anymore. Gandalf faced the Balrog by himself, and had to sacrifice himself -- in a Christ-like fashion -- all alone. We don’t have to do that. We have each other. We have God. We have the Constitution. Let’s do this.

Deana Chadwell is an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College https://pacificbible.edu in southern Oregon. She teaches writing, logic, and literature. She can be contacted at dchad_02@charter.net.

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