{"id":10423,"date":"2016-12-06T11:12:40","date_gmt":"2016-12-06T19:12:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=10423"},"modified":"2016-12-06T20:31:05","modified_gmt":"2016-12-07T04:31:05","slug":"apocalypse-averted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/apocalypse-averted\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Apocalypse’ Averted"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hillary<\/a>by Archpriest Alexander F.C. Webster –
\nIn A Christmas Carol<\/em>, a seasonal favorite that Charles Dickens wrote in 1843, the miserly misanthrope Ebenezer Scrooge is privileged, thanks to the silent, ominous Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, to glimpse his miserable future and lonely demise. Before he turns to read the tombstone inscribed with his own name, Scrooge asks the specter with great trepidation, \u201cAre these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?\u201d<\/p>\n

In view of the numerous overwrought displays of grief, disbelief, and even violent protests following the unexpected defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton by President-Elect Donald J. Trump in the November election, I propose that we consider what might have been if the Democrat nominee had prevailed. What are the \u201cshadows of things\u201d that might have been? <\/p>\n

On October 11, 2016, in a moment of “extreme carelessness” (like her email server scandal) or sheer hubris, Mrs. Clinton declared to Mark Leibovich<\/a> of the New York Times<\/em>, “As I’ve told people, . . . I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse”. Mrs. Clinton was, as usual, mistaken. She<\/em> would have been the “apocalypse,” politically speaking, of the American Republic.<\/p>\n

A LITANY OF EVILS<\/strong>
\nIn an article titled “Transfigure or Die Trying<\/a>” in Touchstone<\/em> in May \/ June 2015, I suggested that traditional religious communities in America were already under siege in a \u201cpost-Christian vortex that bears a striking resemblance in many ways to the formative centuries of the ancient Church.\u201d In broad strokes, \u201cmilitant secular progressives are hell-bent on subverting the cherished moral virtues of life, family, chastity, work, responsibility, and piety.\u201d America \u201cis drowning in a sea of idolatrous self-worship, pursuing a modern version of \u2018bread and circuses\u2019 through increasingly violent and vulgar forms of entertainment and self-expression, a permanent welfare state from cradle to grave, abortion on demand, unrestricted sex, artificially constructed sexual identities, and publicly sanctioned \u2018marriages\u2019 between persons of the same sex\u2014a contra naturam abomination that even ancient Rome at its worst moments never imagined.\u201d<\/p>\n

militant secular progressives are hell-bent on subverting the cherished moral virtues of life, family, chastity, work, responsibility, and piety<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The two-year national election campaign just concluded accelerated our spiritual and moral decline as a people. The coarsening of public discourse and private conversation is breathtaking and almost enough to drive one to despair. Pathological lying, lawlessness, and acts of malice and personal destruction are omnipresent among the political class, the mainstream media, and the cultural elites in the academy, Hollywood and the other entertainment industries, even professional sports.<\/p>\n

Almost no component of our federal government is above political and moral corruption—from the White House to the Congress to the U.S. Supreme Court to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the U.S. armed forces in which I served as an Orthodox chaplain for a quarter of a century until my retirement in 2010. Particularly ominous for traditional Christians in America are the increasing rhetorical, legal, and federal assaults on the religious freedom<\/a> heretofore guaranteed to all Americans by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.<\/p>\n

In his dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges<\/em> decision in June 2015, Chief Justice John Roberts rang an alarm bell: “The majority graciously suggests that religious believers may continue to ‘advocate’ and ‘teach’ their views of marriage. . . The First Amendment guarantees, however, the freedom to ‘exercise’ religion. Ominously, that is not a word the majority uses. . . . Indeed, the Solicitor General candidly acknowledged that the tax exemptions of some religious institutions would be in question if they opposed same-sex marriage.”<\/p>\n

As recently as September, 2016, Martin R. Castro, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, summarized a special report<\/a> on religious freedom by that federal agency: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”<\/p>\n

In April 2015, Mrs. Clinton herself declared, “[F]ar too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth. All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice, not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed<\/a>.” Mrs. Clinton’s use of passive voice in the last phrase (“have to be changed”), instead of the usual active infinitive one might expect (“have to change”), betrayed the authoritarian intent of a would-be despot.<\/p>\n

THE WRATH OF CLINTON<\/strong>
\nAnd that brings us to what a President Hillary Rodham Clinton might have wrought, if she had defeated Donald J. Trump.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Clinton\u2019s use of passive voice in the last phrase (\u201chave to be changed\u201d), instead of the usual active infinitive one might expect (\u201chave to change\u201d), betrayed the authoritarian intent of a would-be despot.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Within her first 100 days in the White House\u2014the standard for measuring the success of a new U.S. president\u2014Mrs. Clinton would have undoubtedly begun to construct via proposed legislation, \u201cexecutive orders,\u201d or nominations and appointments a new socialist order with open borders and unrestricted immigration; all abortions\u2014including \u201cpartial birth\u201d\u2014fully funded by the federal government; the transgenderization of all public bathrooms and locker rooms in all fifty states, including all government (\u201cpublic\u201d) schools; 50% quotas for women in federal hiring and appointments; a federal prohibition against \u201chate crime\u201d speech that associates jihadist terrorism in any way with Islam, a \u201creligion of peace\u201d; a radical left-wing nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court bearing no semblance whatsoever to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who interpreted the U.S. Constitution as a strict constructionist; needless provocations of the Russians owing to an obsessive anti-Putin animus but also rooted in hostility to the rebirth of the Russian Orthodox Church and the symbiotic resistance of Church and state in Russia to the West\u2019s perverse crusade for \u201chuman rights\u201d as viewed through secular progressive lenses; and other, unanticipated acts of foolishness and recklessness.<\/p>\n

Most dire for Orthodox Christians, other traditional Christian communions (both Roman Catholic and Protestant), and the Orthodox and Hassidic Jewish denominations is the high probability that Mrs. Clinton would have, as President, issued an executive order unleashing the IRS to revoke the 501c3 federal tax exempt status of religious organizations that have not yielded to the new intolerant orthodoxy enforcing the LGBTetc. agenda. A gutting of the \u201cfree exercise\u201d of religion enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution might have followed in the first year or two of President Clinton\u2019s reign.<\/p>\n

It is neither silly nor unrealistic also to have expected attempts by federal agencies, cheered on by a thoroughly corrupt mainstream media and an increasingly radicalized Democrat Party (both dominated by secular progressives), to discredit dissident churches and synagogues (though probably not mosques, for obvious reasons) and even close them and, perhaps, arrest and imprison dissident clergy on bogus charges of the violation of \u201chuman rights.\u201d In a Hillary Clinton administration that modern political concept would have undoubtedly ballooned to include unchecked abortion and LGBTetc \u201crights.\u201d<\/p>\n

ROUSSEAU IN A TROUSSEAU<\/strong>
\nA self-described \u201cprogressive\u201d but a totalitarian at heart, Mrs. Clinton, a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of the radical left-wing agitator Saul Alinsky dating from her senior thesis at Wellesley College, is, I would contend, a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the political godfather of modern totalitarianism.<\/p>\n

In the chapter \u201cOn Civil Religion\u201d in his influential, prescient 1762 treatise, The Social Contract, the French philosopher allowed for religion as a reflection of the \u201cGeneral Will\u201d (or collective \u201csovereign\u201d) that must govern the citizens of a state [Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. By Donald A. Cress; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987, p. 102]. But that \u201creligion\u201d must be \u201ca purely civil profession of faith, the articles of which it belongs to the sovereign to establish, not exactly as dogmas of religion, but as sentiments of sociability, without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or a faithful subject.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rousseau enumerated those essential\u2014and exclusive\u2014\u201cdogmas\u201d as the \u201cpositive\u201d concepts of (1) a powerful, personal, providential \u201cdivinity\u201d; (2) an afterlife; (3) \u201chappiness of the just\u201d (but not everyone, to be sure); (4) \u201cpunishment of the wicked\u201d; and (5) the \u201csanctity of the social contract and of the laws.\u201d In addition, there was one \u201cnegative\u201d dogma\u2014the exclusion of \u201cintolerance\u201d in the pursuit of \u201ctolerance.\u201d Rousseau\u2019s version of acceptable civil religion was little more than a very muscular Unitarianism.<\/p>\n

To enforce the sole, national, civil religion Rousseau proposed two draconian measures adopted only a generation later by the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution and, eventually, by the worst totalitarian regimes\u2014both fascist and communist\u2014in the twentieth century. Rousseau averred that \u201cthe sovereign can banish from the state anyone\u201d who refuses to believe in his \u201csentiments of sociability\u201d as the civil and sole \u201creligion.\u201d However, a citizen who had publicly professed those \u201cdogmas\u201d and subsequently \u201cacts as if he does not believe them . . . should be put to death\u201d for his apostasy. Either accept and live according to the civil religion\u2014in George Orwell\u2019s fictional scenario, \u201cLove Big Brother\u201d\u2014or suffer EXILE or EXECUTION!<\/p>\n

Substitute \u201ctraditional Christians and observant Jews\u201d for Rousseau\u2019s \u201ccitizens\u201d and we have a preview of the 21st century reign of terror that \u201cStalina,\u201d the first female president of the United States, might have inflicted upon America.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The Democrat candidate tipped her own hand in her infamous \u201cbasket of deplorables\u201d insult on September 9, 2016, against half of Donald J. Trump\u2019s supporters\u2014or roughly one quarter of the entire adult population in the United States. Mrs. Clinton dismissed as \u201cirredeemable\u201d (a religious term) and \u201cnot American\u201d those American citizens whom she excoriated in a string of nasty, extreme left-wing epithets: \u201cracist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic\u2014you name it<\/a>.\u201d Mrs. Clinton obviously views multiple millions of Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christians, as well as hundreds of thousands of observant Jews and, ironically, Muslims, who affirm traditional sexual morality and marriage as contemptible and, to draw a logical conclusion, intolerable. That could have, in a worst case scenario, rendered Mrs. Clinton\u2019s \u201cdeplorables\u201d worthy targets of marginalization, oppression, and, ultimately, persecution in the neo-Stalinist regime that might have been.<\/p>\n

“GOD BLESS US, EVERY ONE”<\/strong>
\nThis year, more than any in recent memory, we can wish one another a \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d or a \u201cBlessed Nativity\u201d with joy and a sense of great relief. Thanks to the divine providence of our Lord Jesus Christ and to the voting citizens of the United States, the Clinton Apocalypse will not descend upon us after all.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Archpriest Alexander F. C. Webster, PhD, is a retired U.S. Army chaplain in the rank of Colonel and rector of St. Herman of Alaska Russian Orthodox Church in Stafford, Virginia.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Hillary<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Archpriest Alexander F.C. Webster – In A Christmas Carol, a seasonal favorite that Charles Dickens wrote in 1843, the miserly misanthrope Ebenezer Scrooge is privileged, thanks to the silent, ominous Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, to glimpse his miserable future and lonely demise. Before he turns to read the tombstone inscribed with his … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[113,37,133,142,15,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-persecution","category-culture-war","category-leftist-hypocrisy","category-leftist-tyranny","category-moral-issues","category-orthodox-christianity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}