One of fallen man’s most repulsive habits is our propensity to embrace double standards, to treat people who differ from us as fundamentally inferior — not entitled to the same rights that we correctly cling to.
The only enduring remedy to this perennial temptation? A firm, relentless grip on one key moral principle: that every person is made in the image of God. We must remind ourselves regularly 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.
That’s not a scientific discovery. It’s not a logical conclusion of an irrefutable chain of arguments. It’s not even “self-evident,” as the deist Thomas Jefferson thought it was. It’s a restatement of the Christian view of man (or “anthropology”). It’s theoretically knowable by pure reason alone, since it’s part of the Natural Law God wrote on the human heart. But true as it is, it’s by no means obvious to everyone. Our fallen reason errs, our fallen will rebels. So we need revelation even to glimpse such truths of reason.
You Need Faith for Reason Just to Function
In cold hard fact, this core truth about human nature is conveyed to most of us by reading the Bible, hearing sound preachers, and partaking in social institutions grounded on Christian principles — as opposed to other, false foundations. Even in countries where Christian faith has faded, the shadow of Gospel-based decency and humaneness lingers on for a while. That’s why most secular Britons or Swedes still treat human beings better than do devout Muslims in Pakistan, who follow a false code preached by a false prophet teaching that non-Muslims really are subhuman.
That inherited respect for human beings as somehow sacred fades a little more each year in places where faith has waned. Matthew Arnold wrote back in 1867:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
And he knew what lost faith implied:
the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
We Lesser Breeds without the Law
Those “ignorant armies” are the peoples of the West, insofar as we’ve abandoned the Gospel. So it’s no surprise that post-Christians (of the Left or the pagan far Right) are shedding the habits of decency they inherited and returning to the ugly, tribalist ways of what Kipling called “lesser breeds without the Law.” So far, that means we accommodate racial nationalism and thuggish religious theocracy among people of color and non-Christians.
But the day is coming soon when taboos against white people reverting to tribalist bias will suddenly collapse. After decades of our elites declaring “whiteness” to be a moral disease, this reaction will seem justified to millions, if only in self-defense. Then things will get really ugly, as they did in Germany in the 1930s.
We’re reverting to the mores of our benighted, pagan ancestors — with one diabolical refinement: We still wave around little scraps of the Gospel when it suits us. We pretend to defend “the vulnerable” and to speak for “the marginalized.” But we’re just acting like natives on a South Sea island engaged in a cargo cult, collecting scraps of a more advanced civilization whose ways we don’t understand.
That’s how you get governments like Iceland’s, which presses citizens to abort every unborn baby diagnosed with Down syndrome while bending over backward to accommodate much more expensive, demanding “transgender” people. One group gets euthanized, the other becomes a fetish. There’s no rhyme or reason why — except that people confused about their sexual identity are more appealing to postmodern decadent ex-Christians than innocent handicapped kids.
Our Lavender Sadducees
One of the key things undermining faith today is the way our elites appropriate and pervert it — including elites in our churches. It’s bad enough when a pagan like Gavin Newsom hacks “Love thy neighbor” out of context and uses it on pro-abortion billboards. It was orders of magnitude worse when Pope Francis twisted that dictum to justify forcing an abortion-derived, untested vaccine on a billion Catholics or when Pope Leo pretends that “Welcome the stranger” means that white nations (exclusively) must open their borders to limitless numbers of immigrants.
This impetus to twist the Gospel is strong on both sides of the Tiber. The incisive William Wolfe of the Center for Baptist Leadership points out that the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention is thoroughly tainted by such woke, post-Christian politics. Wolfe points to a book coauthored by ERLC trustee Eric Costanzo:
Inalienable: How Marginalized Kingdom Voices Can Help Save the American Church makes it clear that he is not only trying to change lawmakers’ votes, but guide them “to subject their views on this sensitive political issue to the Word of God.” He sees unfettered and unlimited refugee resettlement as a “Gospel issue” that Southern Baptist churches are mandated to support.
An ERLC trustee wrote a book asking, “Can the American church be saved?” And the answer was “Only by accepting migrants into your heart.”
Jesus won’t save us; immigration will.
My latest at @BaptistLeadershttps://t.co/4A2wPg6FfB
— William Wolfe (@William_E_Wolfe) August 4, 2025
There’s an angel behind such efforts. He appears as an angel of light. He pretends that the Church in previous centuries was too benighted to understand the “real” implications of the Gospel — that we must be “inclusive” of sexual perversion, “accepting” of wicked lifestyles, and “welcoming” to millions of aliens who flout our laws and hate our faith.
Screwtape doesn’t care about LGBTQ people, refugees, or Muslims — except as cudgels. He’s using them and the Sadducees who lead us to further one agenda: making the Gospel appear so repulsive, so self-defeating, so self-evidently a civilizational suicide cult, that we reject it. So we become pagan tribalists, as the Nazis did, and follow them into Hell.
Don’t fall for it. If St. Augustine could pray for the Roman Empire to keep out the barbarians, we can storm Heaven on behalf of our embattled ICE officers as they do the same. In fact, that sounds like a good prayer intention for August.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.
