Good Friday this year is an important opportunity to reflect not just on what Jesus Christ accomplished at Calvary, but the many sacrifices that enabled Americans to enjoy the benefits of U.S. citizenship and the “exceptionalism” that non-canceled history and the founding documents of the nation display clearly.

For Christians, Christmas celebrates the birth of humanity’s savior.  Good Friday commemorates the central event in the history of Christianity and Western civilization: the fulfillment of God’s redemptive plan for humanity, when that baby savior grew to manhood and was publicly misjudged, tortured, and crucified, and then rose again.  This horrific tragedy had a silver, awe-inspiring “Good News” lining: Christ conquered not just physical death, but also human sin.

The New Woke Religion

Christ-hating atheists who place their faith in laughable “real science” embrace a fantastical alternative “faith” in unseen and never scientifically proven Big Bangs and spontaneous incarnation of life from not an omnipotent Designer, but a lifeless mud puddle.  C.S. Lewis observed that believing in the Bible may be crazy, but it is much crazier to embrace this alternative faith — and it most certainly is not based in scientific fact.  It is “theoretical,” like Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, Queer Theory, and Climate Warming Theory.  These poor souls believe in things unseen — just not in the human soul.

This New Age deluded religion has usurped all others, in direct derogation of the First Amendment.  Social/climate “justice” unjustly prohibits alternative views as misinformation because it cannot survive the light of truth and critical analysis.  This intolerant, demonic cult parades as loving while crushing all individual liberties that dare cross its path.

This directly offends the First Amendment, as well as most state constitutions safeguarding religious liberty.  It is now the Established Church of the Christ-Hating Age, swapping equality for racist equity, free speech for compelled pronouns and stifling of dissent, equal protections for regressive “equity,” and love of country with hate for everything.

The cross of Christ, celebrated joyfully this day, is the path to rescue the Bill Gateses and Klaus Schwabs of the world — and the nation — from their cognitive dissonance.  They hiss at “Christian nationalism” because it is such an obvious fact, and because it dares to claim that men are men and women are women — assigned chromosomally by God (ACBG) at birth.  It claims that abortion of viable human babies, to be left screaming on a gleaming, sterilized table, is a barbaric abomination (an inconvenient truth clearly acknowledged even by the vaunted unholy scrolls of Roe v. Wade).  It questions the morality of “same-sex” unions.  It is anathema to the Establishment of Woke Theocracy.

Real Christian Nationalism

Today, Americans are told the greatest threat to their nation is “Christian nationalism.”  Yet these lies can never for a moment tarnish the truth of what transpired at the center of history: God became man, to die for man.  This radical atonement is taken for granted by those who slander Christ yet enjoy the exceptional benefits of equality and human liberty that were achieved through His death...on Good Friday.

This nation is covenantal, a unique pact between God and the young American nation: the fact of Christian nationalism.  It infused the faith of Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr.  It championed the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. ... And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

This Declaration is itself a direct consequence of Good Friday, that radical intersectionality of Christ the man-god on a rugged cross — justice tempered by grace.

The Threat of Anti-Christ

Writer and philosopher Oz Guinness describes the fundamental tenets embraced by America’s founders as a triangle, or three-legged stool, constructed upon freedom, faith, and virtue.  Without freedom of faith, there can be no virtue, without which there can be no freedom, and so on.

All three of these foundational legs are being kicked at, viciously, by those who must be forgiven, for they know not what they do.  (That’s Jesus’s appeal to the Father on behalf of those who had crucified Him — Luke 23:34).  Should they succeed in their anti-Christian crusade, America’s anarchists and history-cancelers will devour themselves and the nation in the demonic bargain.

GK Chesterton was amazed when he visited U.S. shores, proclaiming in What I Saw in America:

The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal.  There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.  That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world will find out more and more to be a fact.  Every other basis is a sort of sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds.  Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of constraining the tyrant.

Chesterton predicted that if America ever abandoned this creed, it would dissolve the covenantal cement that had bound it together.  As Christians celebrate this Good Friday of gratitude and humility before their Creator, they do well to reflect not only upon their own sin, paid for by Christ at the cross, but the collective sin of their increasingly unstable and violent nation.  Chesterton warned boldly in 1922:

It would be the worst sort of insincerity ... to conclude even so hazy an outline of so great and majestic a matter as the American democratic experiment, without testifying my belief that to this also the same ultimate test will come.  So far as that democracy becomes or remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic.  In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly undemocratic.  Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at least of patronage.  Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in method but in aim; since they are but the negations of the human appetite of property and personality.

Let Us Pray

Let us pray that Chesterton’s prophecy may be avoided, that the pre-eminence and truth of Christian nationalism will prevail, and that America will spare itself from the consequences of rejecting so noble and great a heritage in favor of lies, hatred, and endless retribution.  Social justice is not biblical justice.  It contains no mercy.

Attorney-farmer John Klar hosts the Small Farm Republic Substack and podcast from his Vermont farm.  His recent book is Small Farm Republic: Why Conservatives Must Embrace Local Agriculture, Reject Climate Alarmism, and Lead an Environmental Revival.

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