The Church in the new America

The Church, whatever her concern for the common good, is not primarily political. So what should she do in the present crisis?

(Flag image: Peggy Sue Zinn/Unsplash.com; priest at Mass image: Josh Applegate/Unsplash.com)

The Church has always been patriotic here. America offered a better life to millions of Catholics fleeing poverty and oppression, and allowed the Church freedom to worship, evangelize, do charity, and run her own affairs. Catholics responded with gratitude. Indeed, critics complained they went too far, and sometimes seemed to view America rather than the Church as the light of the world.

But times have changed. It was easy to be patriotic as long as the country itself was patriotic, and the Church could be happy with her position as long as that position remained what it was. But American political society has fallen into a crisis that has radically worsened the Church’s position and seems likely to be fatal to American patriotism.

Patriotism is love of country, of a people living together over time, along with the things that make them a people—their history, habits, and qualities. As such, it necessarily includes a desire that the country remain largely true to type.

American patriotism therefore had an inner weakness. The “nation with the soul of a church,” as Chesterton called us, was based on a universal creed, liberty and justice for all. But life cannot be based on abstractions, so our country like others was also based on a particular tradition. England was the Mother Country, and our liberty and justice came out of English liberty and common law, as developed through our own experience. That background limited what the abstractions meant.

All that worked as long as our historical background and the general state of our society was something most people accepted, and the universal creed was not interpreted in too abstract and open-ended a manner. That was so for a very long time. American politics was not ideological but practical, sectional, and interest-based. William F. Buckley, Jr., the conservative Irish Catholic, and Lionel Trilling, the liberal son of a Jewish tailor from Bialystok, could both be Anglophiles and no one took it much amiss.

But weaknesses eventually come due. As liberalism has progressed and social connections weakened, “liberty” has come to be taken in a radically self-defining sense that turns marriage, the basis of social order, into whatever two people say it is, and treats distinctions as basic as the distinction between the sexes as oppressive obstacles that must be pushed aside.

“Justice for all” has also been radicalized. In its current “woke” form it demands not equality before the law or equality of opportunity, but “equity”—equality of result. If two people both want something, and only one gets it, then whatever caused the exclusion of the other is oppression backed by state violence that must be ended immediately. If you disagree, you’re blaming the oppressed for his oppression.

At the same time, the English and older American heritage has come to seem irretrievably foreign to many people, so much so that telling sheriffs that their office “is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement” is now considered racist. And that complaint has its logic. Anglo-Americans are European in origin, so praising their legal tradition, and using it to determine how state compulsion is applied, now seems to many people pure white supremacy. The same applies to all aspects of American society and government with deep roots in the past.

The net effect of all this is that vocal and influential people now view American society and government as illegitimate except to the extent they are engaged in the struggle to create a new society and government that are no longer tied to the discredited traditions that formerly ordered our national life, and so are able fully to realize the ever-expanding demands of freedom and equality. That is the meaning of “Hope and Change” as a political slogan.

Under such circumstances patriotism—love of country and its people and history—is no longer wanted. What’s wanted is ideological loyalty that rejects those things as they have existed.

There are, of course, serious problems with such views, some of which I touched on in my CWR column on wokeness and Catholicism. A very basic one is that they offer no point of stability, no point at which the Revolution might be declared over and reconstruction begin. “Expropriate the expropriators” at least has an end point, when the state has seized all property and life can begin anew with the government in charge of all economic activity. That might mean poverty and slavery, but at least it means order of some sort.

The abolition of sex distinctions and cultural community in favor of radical equality of every identity, lifestyle, and culture, limited only by the need to maintain control and minimum functionality, is far more radical. If taken seriously it means total state control of all thought and social relations for goals that can never be achieved because they are at odds with human nature.

Even so, there is very little respectable resistance. Our ruling class has partly lost touch with reality through its embrace of a technological understanding of human life, partly fallen into the cowardice, conformity, and lack of principle of the careerist. And bureaucrats and billionaires are not likely to object to a movement that destroys all authority but that of money and government.

Much of the populace—the deplorables who are too far down the social ladder to be careerist, and too uneducated to be out of touch with reality—sense the problems with current tendencies, and have made Donald Trump the symbol of their resistance. But a civilization that has to fall back on Mr. Trump for its defense is in a bad way. His immunity to the thought of his betters has left him with the common man’s aversion to their fantasies, but he is not notably civilized.

Which is not to say that the situation is hopeless. When the prospects are otherwise intolerable, you keep on fighting. Official doctrine isn’t going to give us a system that works, and something unexpected may bring better days. And you can’t do politics without getting involved with people who are no less imperfect than you are.

But the Church, whatever her concern for the common good, is not primarily political. So what should she do in the present crisis?

Mostly, what she has always done. Preach the gospel, administer the sacraments, sanctify, engage in charitable works, evangelize. We need those things now more than ever. Her ability to do them is becoming more restricted in a world that has its own gospel, whose absolute and peremptory demands are increasingly backed by the power of the state. So she will need prudence as well as courage to carry out her essential mission.

Prudence includes dropping the illusion that the world’s gospel is compatible with the Gospel of Christ. Many of those who inspired and guided the Church during the very influential quarter century following the defeat of Nazism and death of Stalin—John XXIII, Paul VI, Jacques Maritain—were saintly men. But saints are not always the best politicians, and sometimes attribute to secular tendencies more good qualities than are actually there.

As it turns out, the “prophets of doom” John XXIII dismissed in his address opening the Second Vatican Council had a point. Wokeness is not Christian justice, which doesn’t lie, teach hatred, or think itself entitled to use extralegal violence to pursue its goals. And inclusiveness isn’t Christian love, which refuses to deny the meaning of the body or mutilate troubled young people.

The Church in America should remain patriotic because it is Christian to do so. To love what is human is to love what is noble but flawed. So she should love this country, her people, and the things that make them a people. But she should understand that patriotism as entirely different from what has apparently become our official national creed—an anti-human ideology with no room for the natural and normal, or for a Church that is not utterly subservient.


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About James Kalb 148 Articles
James Kalb is a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Tyranny of Liberalism(ISI Books, 2008), Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It (Angelico Press, 2013), and, most recently, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church (Angelico Press, 2023).

32 Comments

  1. A Church, at least as represented by its hierarchy and bureaucratic institutions, which endorses what amounts to unlimited immigration can hardly be called patriotic in any real sense of the word. One cannot love a country and support (really demand) policies that displace its existing population. Their advocacy is not even limited to Christian migrants; Muslims are to be admitted without hesitation! The United States can not possibly survive the open borders that the bishops, not to mention the Vatican, promote without reservation.

  2. A Church which, at least as represented by its hierarchy and bureaucratic institutions, endorses what amounts to unlimited immigration can hardly be called patriotic in any real sense of the word. One cannot love a country and support (really demand) policies that displace its existing population. Their advocacy is not even limited to Christian migrants; Muslims are to be admitted without hesitation! The United States can not possibly survive the open borders that the bishops, not to mention the Vatican, promote without reservation.

    • Yes, open borders uber alles is the USCCB mantra. Bringing souls to Christ through the Catholic Church is too boring and so passée for the likes of Tobin, Cupich and Gregory. For them and this pope, El Che’ is the patriot hero.

  3. The term “patriot” in the American context today has been hijacked and abused to mean only the nativist, racist, fascist, white American. Recall Trump calling his base like those who believe his lies and stormed the Capitol in insurrection “patriots”!

    • Do you not think another race can be fascist, racist, etc? We wonder why there is such division? Just what the left has wanted for years. As far as Trump, he has many great patriots that believe in America first, free enterprise and less government. As for the capital “insurrection” I don’t believe the democrats wanted any investigation and I bet there was much set up to make Trump and his supporters look bad…if only we could get the TRUTH. Either way no one, including Trump, condoned what happened at the capital. Lies…look at the people who believe the lies of the left.

  4. As Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in “Democracy in America,” whenever a religion becomes linked to or dependent on the political order it may prosper for a time as a civil institution, but lose its effectiveness as a religion. This, in Heinrich Rommen’s opinion, is why every pope from Pius IX through Pius XII (Rommen was writing in 1946) has praised the U.S. Constitution as a model for Church-State relations in a religiously pluralistic world. One of Leo XIII’s prized possessions was a specially engrossed copy of the U.S. Constitution presented to him on his Jubilee as a personal gift (it couldn’t be official) from President Grover Cleveland on the advice of Cardinal Gibbons. Leo XIII kept it in his private apartments and showed it to favored visitors.

    • It worked for a while, but no solution can be permanent in a religiously pluralistic world, because the political order, which commands the right of life and death, has to have some ultimate reference point. That’s simply a practical necessity, since decisions have to be made on some ground or other.

      So if the principle is freedom and equality of religions, as in America, then the ultimate reference point is that each individual defines ultimate reality. And that’s the ultimate principle the Supreme Court has in fact given us, in the famous “mystery passage.”

      If we’re all gods though, who call reality into being and abolish it equally by mere thought, and that’s to be the basic principle of the social order, then the government has to control all human relations totally so that my divinity doesn’t infringe on your divinity. Transgenderism is an example of how that works.

      There are of course other disadvantages, like the disappearance of knowledge and reason through the disappearance of objective standards.

      • Regarding Justice Kennedy’s spectacularly wrong-headed “mystery passage,” Mr. Kalb’s assessment is the best I’ve ever read: “…then the government has to control all human relations totally so that my divinity doesn’t infringe on your divinity.” Bravo!
        My aim as an educator, and a patriot (slander me as racist all you want), is to uphold objective standards in order to preserve some semblance of knowledge and reason in this time of aggressive relativism. This includes assertion of the Founders’ concept of liberty and rejection of self-defining, ever-expanding demands for “freedom.”

  5. John XXIII’s opening address for V2 seems like a moment of peak ecclesial triumphalism.

    It is riven with papalotry: “Their uninterrupted witness, so zealously given, proclaims the triumph of Christ’s Church.” It is sheer bravado to assert to the Church and the world that every pope has been a faithful witness to Christ, and it is revealing (in the worst sense) that the text celebrates not the triumph of Christ the head, but merely the Church, His Body.

    The section entitled “A Sudden Inspiration” sounds like men detached from reality:

    “As regards the immediate cause for this great event…something which, though trifling in itself, made a deep impression on Us personally. The decision to hold an ecumenical council came to Us in the first instance in a sudden flash of inspiration…. The response was immediate. It was as though some ray of supernatural light had entered the minds of all present: it was reflected in their faces; it shone from their eyes. At once the world was swept by a wave of enthusiasm….”

    There are good fruits in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, and these are expressed in the teachings of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

    And as to those two, B16 reminded and warned the faithful that the Second Vatican Council is NOT some kind of super-dogma that subordinates everything preceding it, but rather, has worth only if understood through the lens of the faithful witness given by the Church in the 20 centuries preceding V2.

    It is painfully obvious that the Pontiff Francis, and the sociopaths like Cardinal Danneels and former Cardinal McCarrick, and their entire cohort of like-minded “super-clericalists,” actually believe that V2 is a “super-dogma,” an ambiguous tool by which they brazenly confect their own, personally-owned property, a counterfeit-church: detached from the faithful Church that preceded them, and as evident in the idolatry orchestrated in Rome in 2019, now publicly shows it is detached from Jesus Christ, the head of the Church, and in their spiritual derangement, they have displaced Jesus in favor of themselves, and worship what Father Imbelli noted is nothing but a “Decapitated Body.”

  6. “(Trump) is not notably civilized.” With the past years of Trump hatred and never Trumpers, I don’t think that I have ever seen that accuzation before.
    “His(Trump’s) immunity to the thoughts of his betters.” Wow. Maybe the author could tell us who he thinks are Trump’s betters.
    If those who oppose Trump are the civilized, I will take the uncivilized.

    • I didn’t say Nancy Pelosi or MSNBC talking heads are civilized. Like I say, we’ve got big problems.

      I intended “betters” to refer to those conventionally considered such. It’s the opposite of “deplorables.”

    • I agree comments about Trump AND HIS VERY PRACTICING CATHOLIC SUPPORTERS, were unwarranted AND DEPLORABLE. I would have thought this article articulated something had it not had this paragraph. Should we run down an individual or should we look at what he has upheld? He influenced laws that helped protect the unborn…something my church has refused to do for decades and we as a society are paying the price.

      • Maybe I spoke too much in a private language. Some people understood what was intended but evidently not everyone.

        In the present world “deplorable” means deplorable from Mrs. Clinton’s standpoint. “Uneducated” means not trained to accept current insanities. “Down the social scale” means not part of an appalling ruling class. These are not bad things.

        “Uncivilized” does mean uncivilized. Mr. Trump has good qualities, but that isn’t one of them. That’s too bad when civilization is disintegrating and you want to find a leader.

        But there don’t seem to be many civilized public figures today. That’s part of what it means to say civilization is disintegrating. So it’s more important that he’s not convinced by the destructive fantasies of non-deplorables like the people populating the current administration.

  7. Welcome to the new American Patriotic church, subservient to the whims/mandates/cash of the ruling class, which decides when and how Sacraments are available. But what else can one expect from ones who have feminized the Lectionary, scrubbed it of soul, hell and fasting, and refer to the Blessed Sacrament as an “it”?

  8. Welcome to the new American Patriotic church, subservient to the whims/mandates/cash of the ruling class, which decides when and how Sacraments are available. But what else can one expect from ones who have feminized the Lectionary, scrubbed it of soul, hell and fasting, and refer to the Blessed Sacrament as an “it”? Which part is not true? Is the truth inflammatory?

  9. A Church that is utterly subservient apparently has arrived, due to the good hearted naivete of John XXIII, Paul VI, Maritain. A naivete regards the goodness of our fallen human nature. Alinsky, the seductive neo Marxist ideologue. Neo in that Alinsky sought to use the Church to his ends rather than destroy it outright, so seductive Maritain idolized him [see Peasant of the Garonne] and Paul VI seemed delighted in his practical wisdom. Whoever the prophets of doom were prophets in opposition to change are a dime a dozen. It seems to this dime store prophet events as they were realized had an inevitability. There must have been an enormous body of antagonistic weight pressing against Catholicism’s gates from within for the Louis XIV deluge we suffered and survived. Barely. All seemingly providential; had there been no Vat II there would not have been an apparatus in place, rebels contained, for damage control. Today a subservient Church that has followed a particular Party line has slowly then suddenly under Obama surrendered its moral authority to the State, a State now radical and woke. Our challenge is to regain credibility when clergy sexual abuse has killed it dead. Again, being prophetic we really have no viable option but to take the bull head on grappling with its horns. And horns they are quite diabolic with trans, critical race theory. What we have in our favor besides saving grace is what author Kalb has frequently cited, Natural Law. The kind within each one of us, inherently placed by the hand of God. If the madness of trans and the Marxist fascism [the two have acquired complimentary features] of critical race theory are to be overturned it needs be politically and religiously crafted on what’s common to all.

    • I recall reading a scholarly tome, somewhere, that Maritain was not so much taken-in by Alinsky as he was committed to respecting the person apart from his corrupting ideas. If so, first a supporting quote (yes, likely naïve) from “The Peasant of the Garonne,” and then some timely advice about one-sided mercy or charity…

      First, “And the more freely I affirm what I hold as true, the more I should love whoever denies it—I don’t have toward my neighbor the tolerance demanded by brotherly love unless his right to EXIST [italics], to seek truth, and to express it according to his lights, and never to act or speak against his conscience is recognized and respected by me at the very instant when this pig-headed neighbor—always worthy of love, as dense as he may seem—takes sides against the very truths which are dearest to me.”

      Well, so much for Christ tipping over the tables on the steps of the temple!

      But, then this about mercy or charity: “Charity has to do with persons; truth, with ideas and with reality attained through them. Perfect charity toward our neighbor and complete fidelity to the truth are not only compatible; they call for one another.”

      But wait, one of the four principles of Evangelii Gaudium (2013) is that “realities are more important than ideas.” I guess this means that charity and truth are equally compatible, but that the former is more equal than the latter.

      • Updating my above comment: “The Peasant of the Garonne” was written in 1966 and published in English in 1968. Maritain’s praise for Alinskky, therein, is brief but unambiguous. However, in a later publication, C.J. Wolfe of the Claremont Graduate University (“Lessons from the Friendship of Jacques Maritain with Saul Alinsky,” Catholic Social Science Review, Vol. XVI, 2011) comments on later letters from Maritain to Alinsky (Maritain died in 1973).

        In his correspondence of 1971 Maritain is critical of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” whereas, earlier, he was influenced by Alinsky’s “Reveille for Radicals”. Of the later work, Maritain writes to Alinsky that he “appears to me as an incurable idealist…” Maritain was especially critical of the claim “we are motivated by self-interest but determined to disguise it [and] in war the end justifies the means.” He asked Alinsky whether war justifies “torture? Indiscriminate bombing? Annihilation of cities? OK for Hitler and the like?”

        So, friends, but finally not two peas in a pod.

  10. Trump is “not notably civilized’??? REALLY? He couldnt learn from his “betters”??? REALLY?? That comes close to saying he is an uneducated dolt. The man is a billionaire, and “stupid billionaire” is an oxymoron. I am a two time Trump voter. Having both a Masters Degree, and people of color in my family who I love dearly, I am neither uneducated nor a racist. I am sick to death of assumptions like that. As a New Yorker I will tell the rest of you living in other states that Trump is not noticeably different than ANY New Yorker of my life-long acquaintance. New Yorkers are blunt. Period. That may not sound “nice” to some but it’s a way of life here. If you can’t support us, kindly get out of the way.Its too bad for the country that so many “sensitive” suburban women cannot manage to handle truth spoken bluntly. Better to vote for someone too senile to insult you. We reap the consequence of that ill-advised vote in the country now. In plain sight is a near invasion at our border, bringing with it drugs, gang members, sex trafficking, abandoned children and infectious covid cases which this leftist administration is distributing all over the country with willful glee.What galls them the most is that TRUMP WAS RIGHT about the border ( among manyiother things) , an admission they cannot politically stomach.I am sick of the untrue lie of “systemic racism” and efforts of the church hierarchy to buy into that and spread guilt among believers. The accusation is visibly untrue, except to the deliberately blind. Witness the two-time election of Obama, who could NOT have ascended to office without a LARGE white vote, as blacks comprise just 12% of the population and could not elect him alone, lacking the sheer numbers. Witness blacks in every job under the sun, including astronaut. When a NATIONAL white supremacist rally is announced and you get a gathering of 20 people, it pretty much tells you the whole story. Or, it did until people were allowed a whole summer to burn and loot our major cities and escape without punishment largely due to their color. I grew up white and poor,worked hard very hard to get an education, including commuting for years on a bus and train to a minimum wage job beginning at age 16. I dont owe anything to anyone, except my parents and God. “White privilege” is a sick joke. Most Americans, including myself, expect people to come here legally, work for what they have, and obey the law. When laws are broken we do NOT expect to see double standard justice meted out, depending upon one’s political persuasion. We do not expect nor want un-elected CEO’s of corporations engaging in social engineering, suppression of free speech, and defaming fully half of the population by attacking their beliefs. WE love our country and will NEVER accept the lying distortions which now are being promoted as ” revised” American history.And we believe that racism is just as disgusting, hateful and illegitimate when practiced by blacks as when practiced by whites. Law breakers should not be treated to free hotel rooms and bus tickets to infect other portions of our population under the guise of “Christian Charity”. The church should know better. “Render to Caesar…”, remember? We have laws here which should be respected. The ivory tower church hierarchy needs to back away from their engagement in politics, including American immigration law, before they completely lose the loyalty of those people of genuine good will who still remain in the pews.Struggling working class people who are the backbone of both their country AND the church may mostly remain silent as they observe the vicious attacks on the country and their beliefs. But it would be well to remember they still vote.

    • He’s obviously no dolt. He has an idiosyncratic way of thinking that’s very effective in some ways but doesn’t owe much to the educational system or as far as I can tell to anyone but Donald Trump.

      That’s a advantage, since our education system now trains people into ways of thought that are out of touch with reality. It doesn’t make him civilized though – try to talk to him e.g. about cultural matters and I don’t think you’ll get very far. But then there’s not a lot of civilization today. As I say, we’re in bad shape.

      “Betters” is simply the opposite of “deplorables.” Put it in quotation marks if that makes the meaning clearer.

    • My dear LJ! You are truly a voice crying out in the wilderness! You have summed up my exact experience of my 66 year life span on this earth so far. And I know that I speak for tons of other people who feel similarly as you do! Thank you!

      Mr. Kalb, you make some fine points and I don’t doubt your sincerity in the least, but when it comes to understanding people, your private language is best applied in private conversations, in my humble opinion.

  11. This article is typical white American jeremiad which used to be called the Great Replacement Theory (whiteness’ version of the Critical Race Theory). Badly, it takes its cover under Patriotism. However it is also manifest that even Patriotism is now openly presented as white supremacist racism and fascism.

  12. In any evaluation of Trump you need to include the nature of his opposition. He didn’t establish the terms of engagement, this was done by the Alinskyite left who have been following the Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” long before Trump ran for POTUS. Pure character assassination of the opponents of the ruling establishment elites.
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    Trump voters were fed up with the empty campaign promises that the polite establishment candidates had been giving them for decades. They wanted a fighter who would go to bat for them and wouldn’t sell-out. Trump didn’t look down his nose at his voters like the establishment politicians do. There appears to be a visceral hatred for the common people who make up the Trump voter block. They are trashed with impunity by the establishment. Remember the bitter clingers, irredeemables, and deplorables comments? Michael Bloomberg made disparaging remarks about blue collar working class people during the Democrat presidential primaries. The media lampoons the Trump voters on air. Near as I can tell they are treated like they are expendable.
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    The Holy Family, and many of the people Christ called to apostolic and discipleship roles were people who worked with their hands. St Joseph was a carpenter. St Paul was a tent-maker, with Aquila and Priscilla. There were several fishermen. When Peter and John appeared before the Council in the book of Acts 4:13 it says:
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    “13 Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they wondered; and they recognized that they had been with Jesus” (RSVCE)
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    Their socio-economic status has more in common with the Trump deplorables than it does with the globalist elites.

  13. Trump’s disgraceful presidency places him flat in the prism of the historians’ eyes. However, the “old hierarchy” in the new America must adjust to his lifestyle with… compartmentalization, to conceal his false pompous pontifications while focusing on his “good deeds”. Moreover, there is a crime that dose not fit a compartment… treason. Think of one way Trump is a traitor in our midst and secessionist… Inciting the January 6, 2021 Capitol riotous insurrection.

    My “old GOP” is history and wallowing in another decaying compartment.

    • Think of one way Trump is a traitor in our midst and secessionist… Inciting the January 6, 2021 Capitol riotous insurrection. (sic)

      You remain a lying, demented fool, Morgan.

      “Now it is up to congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. [Referring to the stolen election.] And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down, any one you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the capitol. And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”

      “We have come to demand that congress do the right thing, and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. Lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for [the] integrity of our elections.”(emphasis added)

      “My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country – and I say this despite all that’s happened – The best is yet to come. So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania avenue, (I love Pennsylvania avenue), and we’re going to the capitol. And going to try and give – the democrats are hopeless, they’re never voting for anything. Not even one vote. – But we’re going to try and give our republicans (the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help) we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you. And God – Bless – America. Thank you all for being here, this is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.” President Donald J. Trump, 6 January 2021

      • Gary, with all due respect, I am surprised your comment got printed, given the rules of cordial debate. Can people disagree without slinging insults at each other?

  14. Gorgeous piece of writing, and it took a few readings to fully appreciate. Yet, what is patriotism or Christian justice? It’s so hard to know. What I love for being “noble but flawed,” might cause you to scratch your head.

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