The fatal flaw of the European Union has been its leaders' assumption that human beings and nations can be regulated and managed as easily and thoroughly as cabbages are grown, bought and sold.
Reductionism is always the Achilles heel of ideological zealots, who in the case of Brussels' bureaucrats, are committed to a solely materialist view of humanity and nations. We have seen the "successes" of the materialist view of humanity and nations in the past, most notably in the form of communist ideology, which purportedly would end all class structures and therefore all wars, as class struggle due to economic inequality was the chief cause of violence. End the class system and establish equality, especially economic equality, and peace would ensue.
The ideology behind the EU is also materialist in nature, and therefore very similar to that of communist and socialist beliefs. "Equality" is the goal, with the accompanying postulation that the end of nation states is a realistic solution to the internecine wars that have afflicted Europe, especially the wars of the twentieth century. Nations are seen as the cause of violence, and as such inherently evil. End national identities as once classes were to be eliminated; and establish a super state which encourages uniformity of nations along with the obliteration of differences among humans, and peace will reign. Laws and regulations for the economic union would establish equality among humans, tribes and nations as surely as one can establish the proper length of bananas.
But the top down system of economic control has meant the incipient annihilation of Europe's nation states and the end of democracies. In return, a faceless bureaucracy centered in Brussels has been churning out rules and regulations that routinely override national laws, thus ensuring the diminishment if not the end of national sovereignty as well as the ability of citizens to have a say in matters important to them.
The push for uniformity also ensures the erasure of national memory; which in turn means the erasure of identity as Europeans have traditionally known identity. Which leads to the next point; namely, the erasure of Western history, as the erasure of national identity ensures the past will drop into a memory hole while the present and future are written in terms acceptable to the globalist EU.
The fact is that the last thousand years of European history have been written in terms of the rise of nations, national identity and the struggles of nations. At stake is the erasure of European history, which to date has been written as the history of nation states-their origins, rise and fall. Erasure of that history in favor of a global narrative favored by the EU would ensure the death of the histories of England, France, Spain, Hungary and so forth.
Historical memory is a key to national as well as to individual identity. One's country, nation and faith are critical keys to human identity. The amorphous and formless global citizen does not exist except as a malleable abstraction in the minds of utopian globalists.
The above is why leaders like Angela Merkel believe it's just fine to import millions of people who are diametrically opposed to a still largely Christianized Europe and whose manners, ways and attitudes cannot be digested by Europe without grave and deleterious consequences. For globalists like Merkel, one human unit is just like another human unit, measureable chiefly in terms of economic impact.
Which brings us to the next point; namely, the totally reductionist secularist ideology of the EU rids individuals and nations of memory, faith and hope, as it is centered only on the idea of humans as economic units who are to be pushed around on a chessboard by faceless bureaucrats.
As Eric Hoffer wrote in 1951 (The True Believer: Thoughts On the Nature Of Mass Movements):
"It is obvious that a proselytizing mass movement must bread down all existing group ties if it is to win a nationwide following. The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone. When a mass movement finds the corporate pattern of family, tribe, and country, etcetera, in a state of disruption and decay, it moves in and gathers the harvest…The milieu most favorable for the rise and propagation of mass movements is one in which a once compact corporate structure is, for one reason or another, in a state of disintegration."
The man without a country, without a faith, without a family is the ideal man of the EU, as he is easily persuaded to focus only on bread and cabbages for survival. The purely economic view will appeal only to a rudderless and aimless populace without faith or roots.
But as the poet, philosopher and theologian T.S. Eliot asked in his prescient book Christianity and Culture (1938):
"Is society "assembled round anything more permanent than a congerie of banks, insurance companies and industries; and has it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?"
According to the European Union, the answer to Eliot's question is, "No."
Society is to be measured only in economic terms. As far as the EU is concerned, practical purposes are holy causes, with economics as a materialistic faith replacing Christianity; and a plethora of regulatory minutiae replacing the Ten Commandments.
The omnipotence of economics replaces the omnipotence of God. Faith and family are irrelevant.
As Beverly Stevens, a professor of finance and editor of Regina magazine puts it:
"…[P]eople from the ancient ruling families of France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain were very worried about the EU's assault on the family. After the EU specifically rejected the idea that it had Christian roots, many of these people became genuinely alarmed. Since then, they have been monitoring the myriad of regulatory 'fixes' - especially concerning education - which demonstrated that the EU's self-styled 'masters' were aiming at shaping a society where 'the family' simply didn't exist.
"And it has worked. Basically, wherever the EU has reached, the birthrate has plummeted, and the Faith is all but dead…
"And the EU's vision of their brave new world? A flattened globe, where borders are crumbling and identities are fluid. Banking, commerce and media elites bind the nations together into a seamless new tapestry. People are free, finally, to seek opportunity and pleasure, without the confining strictures of tradition, family or morality. In this world, 'morality' is also a fluid concept; people can hook up, produce children or abort them, hire technology and surrogates to make babies - it's all the same to the Super-State. It collects high taxes, grants eye-wateringly lucrative contracts to its corporate supporters, turns a blind eye to bad behavior by any group it is protecting and increasingly persecutes anyone who dares to oppose the Super-State's version of 'morality'."
We Americans should be grateful that Great Britain has recovered some of its memory as a nation and has indicated she does not wish her national identity to disappear down the memory hole. We can be glad she sees herself and her people in more than economic terms or as part of a faceless bureaucratic super state.
One can even hope that she and America as well may also recover the memory of her Christian past and put it to work in visualizing a Christian framework for the nation. That effort would be heroic, largely because the effort of recovery of memory and the actualization of a vision for the future is supremely heroic work.
Today's concerned Christians find themselves in the situation of England's Christian community during 1938, when their country was facing the prospect of totalitarian aggression and absorption into a secularist super state determined to rule all of Europe. T.S. Eliot quoted the letter from a troubled colleague that inspired his book. The words are applicable to Europe and America today, including applicability to the current events in Dallas, Texas and the Hillary Clinton email scandal. The symptoms all point to the same spiritual malaise:
"…The period of grace that has been given us may be no more than a postponement of the day of reckoning unless we make up our minds to seek a cure. Our civilization can recover only if we are determined to root out the cancerous growths which have brought it to the verge of complete collapse.
"Whether truth and justice or caprice and violence are to prevail in human affairs is a question on which the fate of mankind depends…The basal truth is that the spiritual foundations of western civilization have been undermined…What clear alternatives have we in this country? The mind of England is confused and uncertain.
"May our salvation lie in an attempt to recover our Christian heritage, not in the sense of going back to the past but of discovering in the central affirmations and insights of the Christian faith new spiritual energies to regenerate and vitalize our sick society?
[Is not] the path of wisdom an attempt to work out a Christian doctrine of modern society and to order our national life in accordance with it? [Our institutions] feature a complete denial of the Christian understanding of the meaning and end of man's existence; and of the stupendous and costly spiritual, moral and intellectual effort that any genuine attempt to order the national life in accordance with the Christian understanding of life would demand…But if the will were there, I believe the first steps to be taken are fairly clear: The recognition that nothing short of a really heroic effort will avail to save mankind from its present evils and the destruction which must follow in their train." --J. H. Oldham
It is 1938 in England, Europe and in America. Britain has made the giant step toward recovering her national identity and sovereignty. It remains to be seen if the Christians within her and her cousin America will take the next step and heed Mr. Oldham's clarion call.
Will our nations once again seek to make the Christian understanding of the meaning and end of man's existence ascendant in national life?
With God's help, we can.
--Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her its prize for excellence in systematic theology. Her thoughts have appeared in many online publications, including American Thinker, National Review, RealClearReligion, CNS, Fox News and Russia Insider. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com
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