From Thomas Fleming’s recent editorial in the June 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture :
And yet it is Christianity, not Marxism or liberalism, that usually receives the credit or blame for the repudiation of loyalty and patriotism. Pseudochristian leftists—including far too many Catholic bishops in the United States—make the preposterous claim that Christ came to liberate us from the duty to defend borders or respect the law. Antichristian nationalists, following in Nietzsche’s drunken meandering footsteps, complain that Christianity weakened Western man’s resolve to defend his interests against other peoples and races. Paradoxically, many of these neopagans are also followers of Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman—the liberal gurus who did their best to dissolve all the bonds linking human beings and to replace them with (to use a phrase Marx borrowed from Carlyle) the cash nexus.
If the neopagan nationalists had ever read any history, they would, perhaps, be puzzled by the behavior of Christian warriors like Justinian and Charles Martel, Saint Louis and Saint Joan, but their response would be that Saint Joan was a bad Christian who did not understand Christ’s message as well as they do—ill-read pagans though they are.
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Vengeance belongs to God, who then delegates that power to the ruler, who is to protect the innocent from violence by punishing lawbreakers and defending his kingdom or empire against invaders. His subjects or citizens, correspondingly, have a duty to pay their taxes, obey the laws, and defend their country. This reasoning depends on an important premise, that a commonwealth—whether city republic or kingdom or empire—is a legitimate human institution that requires the power to defend itself. In the high Christian Age, Thomas Aquinas would make it clear that Christians owe a primary moral duty to their family and a civic duty to their commonwealth. All other arguments are, quite simply, moral heresy and lead to pernicious consequences. The greatest Catholic moral theologian, St. Alphonsus de Liguori, while laying down conditions for a just war, is careful to explain that a conscripted subject does not sin even by fighting in what turns out to be an unjust war. “I was only following orders” may not be an excuse for a war criminal, but it is a justification even for the citizens of a republican government that has decided to go to war.
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Catholic and Orthodox rulers and their subjects had no reluctance to defend their commonwealths against pagans, heretics, and their fellow communicants, and, if they had no other piece of Scripture, the story of the Tower of Babel would have informed them that their Creator had established separate peoples and warned them against any attempt to corral all the nations into a world government. Christians only began to lose their will to defend themselves during the Enlightenment, precisely the period when they began to replace their Christian Faith with the moral absurdities of John Locke and Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant.
I am not concerned to defend any nationalist policy or any particular immigration law. My object has been to point out the dishonesty and absurdity of “Christian” arguments against waging war and restricting immigration. When pastors and priests, bishops and theologians today defend illegal aliens or invoke the doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they are not speaking as Christians but as Marxists or Hindus. And when supposedly conservative writers try to tell Christians that they have undermined the West, it is time to tell them that they are defending a West to which they do not belong.
Please read the editorial in full to completely appreciate Thomas Fleming’s argument against the dominant Marxist and Radical Anti-nationalist thinking within the Christian Church.
