So when I speak of secularism cratering, I am referring to official, state-sponsored agnosticism cratering. I am not referring to any coming obliteration of the necessary distinctions between the church and the world, between the Church of Christ and the Kingdom of God.
So let us begin there. The Church should think of the entire world as her parish. It is out in the parish that people grow barley, repair automobile engines, cut flowers, make love, and, despite the late sixties, make war. The Church is the ministry of Word and sacrament. Theocracy is necessary and inescapable. Ecclesiocracy is, among other things, quite an appalling thought.
When the parishioners come to church, they are taught and instructed in their duties of discipleship, and they are fed and nourished so that they might have the strength to meet these duties. There is a very real sense in which these members of the church go out into the world as representatives of the church, bringing the church with them. But it is also true that they come into the church as representatives of the world, bringing the world with them. Not the worldliness of the world, but certainly the earthiness of the world. And this materiality includes what the kings bring with them — honor and glory, about which more later.
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Godless secularism still maintains an impressive facade. Like an ornate shell of a long dead creature of the deep blue sea, there is enough to keep quite a number of people from pointing out the obvious, to wit, that the shell is hollow.
So a lot of people have conspired together to not notice what is going on. The reasons for this conspiracy can be summed up in one word, which is paycheck. But there are reasons for believing this cannot be kept up for much longer.
But while many are refusing to acknowledge the obvious, there is a large group of people who do see that the internal faith that used to sustain the West is now completely gone from the central corridors of power, and that their false certainties will always trump that benign and agnostic shrug of the shoulder. The Muslims are coming after the values of our hollow secularism, and watching it is not like watching an actual contest — like watching someone take a jackhammer to a souffle.
The strength still manifested by the West is all residual or borrowed. The residual is left over from previous generations when men were more faithful, and the shell, while hollow, still has some strength. The borrowed is taken from the red state enclaves. That game cannot be kept up much longer.
Some secularists want to laugh off the Muslims — pointing at the state of plumbing in places like Somalia. But contests like this are not determined by counting the guns. You cannot decide a war by comparing the relative size of the GDP. Who was stronger, the Roman Empire or the barbarians that overran it? Wars are not tautological — the stronger force is not whichever one wins by definition. Who was stronger? Boris Yeltsin holed up in his house, or the Soviet Union with all its nukes? History is littered with examples of empires, nations, and cities that fell to inferior forces when by all rights they should not have.
Secularism is a spent force. Its inconsistencies are on display for all to see, and anyone not actively involved in taking bribes should be willing to say so.