Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, December 9

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

THE WEEKLY BRIEF
JERUSALEM
The Lord shall write in the book of the nations:
  “Here is their birthplace.”
They will sing as in joyful processions:
  “All my being springs from you.”
So writes the Psalmist of Jerusalem. At the heart of a nationalist foreign policy for America is dealing honestly with other nations as nations. Israel is a real nation with borders that it won in several wars against enemies trying to eradicate their existence as a nation state. To carve out of of Israel a "second state" called Palestine as a real state with its own military and foreign policy would be to eliminate the physical ability of Israel to defend itself. One honest look at a topographic map shows that fantasy is a death wish. It is true that Israel could wreck havoc on its enemies in a war, but it could not defend itself as a territorial entity. It is one of the great ironies of the surreal world of globalists that the one nation they will defend and lionize is the one that doesn't exist and never has: Palestine. America should not join Israel in their adventure with Muhammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia against Iran, but as a Christian nation ourselves we must defend the miraculous return of God's chosen people to the Holy Land. (See below on President Trump's speech, Russian recognition and the European approach. To help think more clearly about "the two State solution" see this excellent 15-minute  CBN documentary: Who are the Palestinian people?)

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

ADVENT BEGINS - SEEK GOD FIRST AND ALL THINGS WILL BE ORDERED: The Pope on putting God first. The Three Comings of Christ from AoA.

PRIESTLY FRATERNITY VS. CARBON MONOXIDE CLERICALISM: A young priest writes: "For the Year for Priests in 2009, Pope Benedict issued a letter that I believe was prophetic but under-appreciated. He wrote that 'the ordained ministry has a radical "communitarian form" and can be exercised only in the communion of priests with their bishop.' "

ETHIOPIA - A BASTION OF ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY: The amazing resilience of Africa's oldest Christian nation. The longstanding churches in Africa are the Egyptian Copts and Ethiopian Orthodox. In this old Orthodox country, however, there is a remarkable Protestant presence as well. The Lutherans went to the least Orthodox of regions, and set up health and educational institutions allowed by the Orthodox king. Today, only Germany has more Lutherans. (The Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus now has 8 million members. In 2013 they broke communion fellowship with the ELCA over the North American endorsement of homosexuality.)

II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

TILLERSON, KUSHNER, IRAN, ISRAEL, AND SAUDI ARABIA: Is the US preparing a war cabinet?

SAUDIS, YEMEN, AND IRAN: How MUHAMMED BIN SALMAN (MbS) helped Iran in his war against the Houthis. Analysis of Muhammed bin Salman the reformer.

SAUDI ARABIA STREET LIFE MORE RELAXED: The veteran Saudi women’s rights activist did not know whether to laugh or cry. “Everything is so much more relaxed now,” she said. “You can feel it on the streets.” Then she paused, and added: “Except for the men. They are in prison.” From the Times of London.

IRAN, SYRIA, RUSSIA, AND TURKEY: Discussing their different goals in Syria.

YEMEN: DEATH OF SALEH: He has played every side. In the last week he turned against the Houthis and opened to the Saudis. He was killed days after his betrayal.

III. PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

TRUMP RECOGNIZES JERUSALEM AS ISRAEL'S CAPITAL: President Trump formally announced US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Read the speech. The first country to recognize (West) Jerusalem as Israel's capital was Russia (eight months ago). The European Union agreed that Jerusalem should be a capital - the capital of Palestine.

THE LOGAN ACT: A clear narrative on how the Obama administration got after the Trump transition team.

IS THERE A MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX? Does it run through the think tanks?

IV. CULTURE OF LIFE, CULTURE OF PROTECTION

RUSSIA - CHRISTIANITY VS GODLESS FEMINIZED WEST: The deeper conflict.

KENYA - A MICROCOSM OF AFRICA, CHRISTIANITY, AND TRIBAL ANIMOSITIES: John Allen reports. The failure of Catholics to propose an armed national civic strategy of protection leaves the people trapped by those loyalty systems willing to use guns - the ancient tribes and Islam.

MEXICO - BEHEADINGS BY CARTELS: This is a Catholic country in need of an armed Catholic civic response to the rule of violent predators. The poor are paying the price for the pacifist public formulations of European and North American prelates comfortable with their wealth and oblivious of their duty as shepherds at war with wolves. The bishops should not wield the sword, but they should readily encourage nationalist Catholics who will fulfill the protective punitive duties of governance. Otherwise in places of violence, only the pagans will govern.

AUSTRALIA - LIVE WITH CHINA OR ALLY WITH US IN NEW INDO-PACIFIC AXIS: Should the East and South Pacific be dominated by China or should China be encircled by an alliance organized by the United States? An Australia government white paper makes a choice.

RESTORING THE SACRED AND THE NATIONS IN THE WEST: By David Goldman. Illuminating writing about both Catalonia and Germany. It is long, but worth reading. Goldman understands the need for the sacred.  His definition is divorced from the reality of the supernatural. Thin gruel indeed! Another Jewish intellectual who cannot bow to the Living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is a great writer but he should bow his head in prayer and learn from Eliade the meaning of the sacred.

THE CHRISTIAN LEADER IS OFTEN NOT A POLITICIAN PASTOR BUT A HERO-SINNER WHO WILL FIGHT THE EVIL FORCES: An excerpt from Goldman (above):

Our “America First” President stands squarely in the mainstream of American culture. Donald Trump, I argued on the day of his Inauguration, “is instantly recognisable as the protagonist in a Christian drama: the lone avenger who stands up to the wicked powers of the world and calls them out for combat. Ted Cruz, though an engaged and enthusiastic evangelical Christian, failed to understand the religious impulse of the American electorate. They did not want a politician-pastor to preach to them what they already knew. They wanted a hero, sinner though he be, to give battle to the forces of evil — a Jephtha or a Saul.” No matter how far it strays from conventional religion, American culture remains stamped delibly with the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. It does not look for saints who live exemplary lives but for sinners in search of redemption.

THE CHRISTIAN RES PUBLICA IS BUILT ON MEN SHARING A LOVE OF THE SACRED - NOT A CONTRACT OF SHARED SELF INTERESTS: Another excerpt:

"Augustine (in City of God XXIV) famously took issue with Cicero’s definition of a res publica as an association founded on common interest, arguing instead that it was founded on a common love. It might be more accurate to say that it is founded on a common sense of the sacred, for the sacred embodies not only love but also awe and fear, specifically the fear that by violating the elements of tradition that define us we will lose ourselves."

ON THE GERMAN NATION: From Goldman essay above:

"All of this was said before and better by the earliest German Romantics in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. It was Germany’s bad luck to fight its way to nationhood in response to the Napoleonic conquests, at a time when its intellectuals largely had abandoned religion in favor of philosophy. The modern notion of self-invention erupts into history through the Cult of Reason. Its prophets were Rousseau and Kant, who were armed by the French Revolution. In Germany, the first salvo against the Cult of Reason came from J. G. Fichte, who argued that Kant’s transcendental reason could only exist in human consciousness, and that this consciousness must arise from nationality. Fichte’s young student Novalis inquired rather how national consciousness might be formed in the first place. Consciousness, he argued long before Heidegger, is time-consciousness, and our sense of ourselves in the present moment was an ecstatic unity of memory and anticipation. But upon what memory might the Germans draw? In his 1799 essay “Christianity or Europe,” Novalis proposed a return to the Christianity of the early Middle Ages, but a Christianity that would ennoble the tales (Märchen) of the past. The disenchanted world which Schiller bemoaned in his poem “The Gods of Greece” would thus become reenchanted (wiederverzaubert) through the fairytale world that underlay medieval Christianity.

That in summary was the Romantic programme, and a very bad idea it turned out to be. Where Schiller and Hölderlin hoped to re-enchant the world with Hellenism, the Romantics succeeded only in dredging up the raw material for a revived paganism. Heinrich Heine warned in 1834 that “if ever the Cross — the taming talisman — were to fracture, then the wildness of the old warriors will clatter to the surface, their mad berserkers’ rage . . . and the old stone gods will raise themselves up out of the forgotten dust and rub the dust of a millennium from their eyes, and Thor with his giant hammer will at last rise up and smash the Gothic domes.” In the hands of Richard Wagner, the Nibelungenlied became an anti-Christian manifesto. In the 19th century Germany brought forth a peerless high culture in literature, music and the sciences, but its national sense of the sacred lost its way in the land of Märchen and was bewitched by the pagan past.

Germans continued to look to their high culture as a wellspring of identity until the end of the First World War. Most of its leading intellectuals, including a dozen Nobel laureates, signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three of 1914, alleging that the war was an attack on German culture. Thomas Mann famously contrasted German Kultur with the mere commercial civilisation of France and Britain. Max Weber supported the war wholeheartedly and, after the defeat, looked forward to Germany’s victory in a future war. The identification of war aims with Kulturdiscredited high culture among the defeated German people. That is why Nazi playwright Hans Johst has a character say that when he hears the word “culture,” he releases the safety catch on his pistol."