[In the previous part of this essay, Part 4, we concluded our brief review of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition (ACCT) as it provides ways to recover from the destructive and disintegrative results of the administrative state. We also began to inquire about the relative seriousness of the differences between the policy positions of the Biden administrative state (on matters such as climate alarmism and economic policy, or racial and gender ideology and public education), and the policy positions of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition. Are these differences just a matter of partisan and cultural opinion, or do they strike a deeper, more critical blow at moral and political principles that really and truly are non-negotiable for those on either side? In this part, we seek to answer these questions following the insights of Eric Metaxas and his mentor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.]

A Critical Time in Our Nation’s History

In his small but compelling book, Letter to the American Church, Eric Metaxas helps us face these questions, and begin to answer them. Metaxas’s Letter is a plea to our American churches, but also to American citizens in general, to wake up to the awful and calamitous moment in which we are living. He thinks, and I agree with him, that this moment in our history is ominously similar to the period of the 1930s in Germany, when the German people and their churches closed their eyes and sat quietly by (no doubt in concern for their own comfort, safety, and security) while Hitler and his Nazi party turned their country into a totalitarian state that would eventually decimate other nations and destroy its own soul by its demonic genocide of the Jews. Perhaps one who has not studied this period closely, or looked in our own time beyond the thin virtuous veneer of the Biden state (constantly patched and polished by the corporate media) might doubt this comparison. Isn’t this talk of Germany, Hitler, and America just a lot of hyperbole? Except, perhaps, when Biden applies it to Trump and his supporters?   

If we are to take seriously Metaxas’s comparison between America under the Biden state and Germany under the Hitler regime, we need to revisit some of the “false crises” mentioned earlier in Part 2, only now to see them in sharper detail and to grasp why they cannot be regarded merely as “policy” choices. For example, let us try to form a concrete picture in our minds of the desperate plight of inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, or New York, where no one is safe, not even children, because young black men have been told that they are the victims of systemic racism and therefore have a right to snatch life and property from anyone who gets in the way of their “freedom.” Picture, if you will, the bodies lying in the street as life and possibility drain away? This is happening now in Democrat-led cities across our nation, as rogue prosecutors push their agenda on unsuspecting voters under the guise of legal reform. This is what Kamala Harris herself has promoted on public video during the BLM, defund-the-police riots of 2020. This is what the administrative state produces when “pure reason” and politicized “science” are applied to social problems without the moral guardrails of religion and the family, the Constitution, and the rule of law.

Or, we might look more closely at the devastation caused to thousands of people and small businesses by Biden’s COVID lockdown policies and vaccine mandates. Thousands are still waiting for our government to take responsibility for the terrible harm it has done. Can you see those who are still shaking with neurological tremors caused by adverse reactions to the experimental COVID shots, not to mention those who are already dead? They are invisible to the Biden state. Or, yet again, we might look at the explosion of fentanyl deaths, human trafficking, and sex trafficking caused by the criminally-open Biden-Harris border policies. Neither Biden nor Harris, nor their DHS staff, nor their cooperant media ever speak of these deaths and depravities. And then, looking to the future, God help us, we should try to picture soberly what will happen to our economy if the miscalculations of the Biden-Harris Green-New-Deal policies ever take full effect. The outcome could literally rival the atrocities and degradations of Mao’s infamous “bird famine” as supply chains falter and food supplies stop. Ideological, politicized science is not real science. 

All of these and more could be depicted in graphic and ruinous detail; but my goal is to awaken our consciences and to stimulate courage and conviction that leads to active resistance and change; not to overwhelm with shocking images, however realistic the images are in fact. Nonetheless, in the interest of conscience and conviction, let me give one more example in greater detail, one that may be the most compelling of all for many of us. 

If we need to face with full seriousness the resident evil of the Biden state (just as German citizens had eventually to face the death camps in 1945) then let us picture without turning away the scarred and mutilated bodies of children and minors who have been subjected under Biden’s Public Health Service to the lucrative medical experiments of so-called “gender affirming care.”[i] These are minors and children as young as 11 years old (with younger children in public schools across the nation being indoctrinated as we speak) who have followed the advice of “experts,” teachers and counselors, and some psychologists and doctors. They have taken experimental drugs (puberty blockers) for which no long-term studies of safety or effectiveness are as yet even possible, much less available.[ii] They have submitted to radical experimental surgeries that leave them with ghoulish scars and monstrous appendages that require ongoing medical care and attention, often for the rest of their lives. They face a life with permanent disfigurement, often combined with the loss of any ability to have children of their own. And yet, the promoters of this defacement of human life in the Biden state (and in groups like WPATH, whose junk science provides the so-called “standards of care”) do not want us to see or hear from the growing number of “de-transitioners,” children who have come of age, changed their minds, and are now being left to face all of this damage, much of it irreversible, on their own.[iii]

How much further would radical gender surgery have to go before people of common sense and sensitive conscience, and a measure of good faith, stand up and cry out, “Enough! Cease! Desist! Stop in the name of God and of all that is decent!”? We ourselves may not want to hear these stories. They are hard to imagine, nearly at times imponderable in their devastation. But then, Hitler did not want the German people to know what was going on in the camps under the direction of Joseph Mengele. And the German people did not want to hear or believe what they were forced by Eisenhower to see and smell when the camps were thrown open after the war. Metaxas warns us, in the spirit of his mentor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that if we refuse to face what is happening now, then we, like the German people in the 1930s, are at least tacitly accepting and supporting it.

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. God will not hold us guiltless.”[iv]

And if we do hear and begin to speak out, will we then follow up this outcry with campaigns to elect leaders who represent a genuinely religious and moral people, leaders who will dismantle the authoritarian administrative state, and require again that our country’s laws and its character be subject to a truly representative process? According to Metaxas what we need most is a recovery of genuine faith.

Looking ahead to Part 6

In the next two parts of this study, Parts 6 and 7, we shall look more closely at what went wrong among the German churches and the German people in the 1930s that allowed Hitler and his Nazi Party to come to power without greater opposition. According to both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his biographer, Eric Metaxas, what went wrong had to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of the biblical meaning and practice of “faith” and “discipleship.” As you prepare for the next part, consider the following questions: Does our faith in Jesus and his Spirit prepare us to engage in matters of cultural and political consequence? If so, why and how does our faith in him have this result? And, if not, why not?

Endnotes

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[i] The head of Biden’s Public Health Service is, of course, Admiral Rachel Levine, who has been aggressive in promoting radical gender ideology in our public health services and in our public schools, even when this involves hiding the school-based “counseling” process from parents. For up to date tracking of state sponsored rules and mandates for radical gender ideology in public schools across the nation see the online data and research of Parents Defending Education, and consider becoming a supporter of their important work.

[ii] See Dr. Jay Richards, Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War (Salem Books, 2024), and Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Regnery, 2020).

[iii] For firsthand accounts of the suppression of information about de-transitioners by WPATH and other medical groups (who now have a great deal to lose, given the rising number of malpractice cases) see the stories of Chloe Cole and the ongoing research of groups such as Genspect. A recent Genspect webinar compared the current craze for radical gender surgery on minors with the infamous fad for lobotomies that captured the medical profession for a brief time during the 1930s and 40s.

[iv] Eric Metaxas, Letter to the American Church (Salem Books, 2022) p. 51.