Free Republic

Our Christian NationChristopher Dawson was an English historian in the middle of the last century, one of those intellectuals prominent in his own day—T. S. Eliot called him “the most powerful intellectual influence in England”—but mostly overlooked in ours. Which is the usual treatment posterity gives to intellectuals, and usually for the best. But as to Dawson, it’s a shame. At this troubled juncture in American history, he is worth recalling. His lifelong subject was the study of religion and culture. And his lifelong thesis was this: Every great culture in the history of mankind has depended on “a common...

“Despite the many challenges and opposition from ill-wishers, the past year witnessed the birth of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” Epifaniy said on December 14, 2019, at Kyiv’s St. Sophia Cathedral. “As such, a centuries-long struggle for autocephaly, establishing historical justice by freeing Ukraine from the unsanctioned control of the Russian Church over Ukraine, was accomplished.” The move to establish the OCU heralded a historic break with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), ending more than three centuries of Russian spiritual and temporal control of the dominant faith in Ukraine. It also sparked one of the biggest rifts...

Christendom Is the Solution for the Emptiness of our Nihilistic Society Grave moral problems are tearing the country apart. For many, this is apparent in the form of broken homes, procured abortion, shattered communities and lost Faith. Many people get it right when pointing out the problems. However, they get it wrong when looking for solutions. Some get it wrong because they look for solutions that address symptoms, not causes. Others search for a way out that involves the least possible effort. In these politically correct times, people are told not to offend anyone by their proposals. Thus, they automatically...

...I have long maintained – and the film 1917 brought it vividly back to mind – that one of the causes of the collapse of religion in Europe, and increasingly in the West generally, was the moral disaster of the First World War, which was essentially a crisis of Christian identity. Something broke in the Christian culture, and we’ve never recovered from it. ...For five awful years, an orgy of violence broke out among baptised people – English, French, Canadian, American, Russian and Belgian Christians slaughtering German, Austrian, Hungarian and Bulgarian Christians. And this butchery took place on a scale...

Among the countries which the present war has brought to the attention of the world is Persia, a land with a historic past, but for centuries rarely heard of. Its very name has been changed to Iran, a name which means much to the historian and the ethnologist, but conveys little to the man in the street. Few persons would connect Persia, or Iran, with Christian history, For centuries Persia has been a Moslem land, though of the "Shiite" sect, rather than "Sunnite " professed by most followers of the Prophet. In earlier ages it was the home of the...

Until this year, the first 20 pages of “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers (Random House, 1952) comprised the most brilliant preface or foreword I’d ever read. Chambers, who had crossed over from Communism to Christianity, explained that Communism is “man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’” And gods play to win, as Chambers goes on to show during the next 788 pages, which are good but not as good as the beginning. The first 17 pages of historian...

“Le grand absent—c’est l’Empire” C. Dufour, Constantinople Imaginaire Everywhere Western man longs for Constantinople and nowhere has he any idea how to find her. To do so is to reclaim, at last, the meaning of an empire that once defined a hierarchy of imagination long ago abandoned by our civilization; of an eleven-century political, religious and cultural struggle that sought to reconcile Christianity and Antiquity, transforming the Western spirit into a brilliant battleground between Latin and Greek, Augustus and Basileus, reason and faith, ancient and modern. Yet to unearth this Byzantium, this “heaven of the human mind”, as Yeats dreamed...

The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009. Both Protestantism and Catholicism are experiencing losses of population share. Currently, 43% of U.S. adults identify with Protestantism, down from 51% in...

October 7 is the Feast of our Lady of the Rosary, formerly the feast of Our Lady of Victory. The date marks the 448th anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto in AD 1571. The Battle of Lepanto was a miraculous victory in which the combined ships of the Christian Holy League under Don John of Austria, defeated the fleet of the Ottoman Empire in a decisive battle that blocked Turkish imperial aggression from the western Mediterranean. Six years before in AD 1565, the Knights of Saint John had gained a similarly miraculous victory over the Turks at the Siege...

There have been of late a splurge of populist history books damning Constantine the Great as the villain of the piece. Almost without exception they have drawn their picture of this most complex and complicated of late-antique Roman emperors from secondhand, clichéd and hackneyed books of an older generation, adding their own clichés in the process. Constantine has been sketched luridly, as the man who corrupted Christianity either by financial or military means. At long last we have here, in Peter Leithart, a writer who knows how to tell a lively story but is also no mean shakes as a...

Middle Eastern Christians have endured a long and violent history at the hands of radical Muslims. At the turn of the 20th century, Christians made up 20 percent of the population in the Middle East. Today, that number is only 3-5 percent. "Christians have been harassed in more countries than any other religious group and have suffered harassment in many of the heavily Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa," says the Pew Research Center's Katayoun Kishi. By 2050, it is estimated Christians will compose 3 percent or less of the population of the Middle East with Muslims...

Christian charity Open Doors was informed that armed members of the terrorist organisation - that has pledged allegiance to IS - invaded the Christian community of Kuda near Madagali in Adamawa state, north east Nigeria on Monday. They then went door to door, killing as many as 25 people. Field workers have asked supporters around the world to pray for the Lord's grace to the Church in the Madagali area as they face renewed instability. A spokesperson from Open Doors told Premier: "Pray for the Holy Spirit to be at work in the lives of all those affected. "Pray that...

Declarations of hope that Notre Dame can be resurrected have been much in evidence this Holy Week. Such is the lesson of Easter: that life can come from death. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, that other great emblem of Paris, Notre Dame provides the French with evidence that their modern and secular republic has its foundations deeply rooted in the Middle Ages. Notre Dame has always been more than just an assemblage of stone and stained glass. It is a monument as well to a specifically Christian past. Last summer, one of the world’s best-known scientists, a man as celebrated for...

As Notre Dame, the great Gothic cathedral of Paris, was gutted by fire, French President Emmanuel Macron was expected to reach the hearts of his people. He didn't disappoint them. Oratory from politicians doesn't put out fires. It doesn't save relics so important to the Roman Catholic faithful, such as the crown of thorns said to have been worn by Jesus Christ at his crucifixion. And oratory won't save Christianity in a modern, left-dominated and secular Western Europe undergoing great cultural change. It is a Europe that is spiritually and culturally adrift, while holding Christianity firmly at a distance. And...

One of Christendom’s greatest and oldest sanctuaries has suffered great damage but largely survived. According to whom you read, its devastation is a metaphor for European Christianity’s collapse or for its rebirth through fire. The mass horror over Notre Dame’s fire, and the immediate resolve for the cathedral’s full restoration, signify that France’s connection to Catholicism is not so remote as often imagined, True, it was a national political and cultural symbol. But it was chiefly an active church where the Eucharist is celebrated daily and whose architecture honors saints, Apostles and prophets. Neither France nor Europe nor the West...

The symbolism of the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral, the most renowned building in Western civilization, the iconic symbol of Western Christendom, is hard to miss. It is as if God Himself wanted to warn us in the most unmistakable way that Western Christianity is burning -- and with it, Western civilization. Every major Western (and one major non-Western) social and intellectual force has conspired to rid Europe of Christianity and the civilization it produced. Within the Western world, the French Enlightenment -- the intellectual basis of the French Revolution and the modern West -- sought to replace Christianity, and...

As night fell in Paris and the fire continued to roar, the surrounding crowds came together in heartbreak, in disbelief and in song. Rising above the flames came a chorus of voices — uniting through hymns as they mourned their beloved cathedral. As of Monday evening, a video of bystanders singing “Ave Maria” had been viewed more than 3.5 million times on Twitter. The video was widely shared, with many users referring to the scene in Paris as “powerful” and “moving.” France’s Notre Dame, steeped in history, survived the French Revolution and two world wars. Around the world, many reacted...

The importance of Christianity in the formation of Western civilization can hardly be denied. That importance is not simply a matter of the past. In the process of secularization Western culture did emancipate itself from its religious roots, but that emancipation was by no means complete. A complete break from Christianity was not intended in the seventeenth century by those who wanted to put the public culture on an anthropological rather than religious foundation. The issue at that time was not a revolt against the Christian religion, nor even against its influence on the culture. Rather, there was an urgently...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed converting the fabled Hagia Sophia into a mosque on Sunday. The Greek government responded with anger on Monday, pointing out that the Hagia Sophia was the seat of Greek Orthodox Christianity for centuries and has been designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations. Erdogan said during a television interview on Sunday that the Hagia Sophia might be “reverted” into a mosque, referring to the structure’s status as a mosque following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 A.D. The Hagia Sophia was constructed as a relatively modest Greek Orthodox church in 360,...

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) prevented an attempt by Russian intelligence to recruit a Ukrainian citizen, offering a US$2,000 reward, to set on fire a temple of what was until recently called the Moscow Patriarchate, aiming to sow tensions and discord on religious grounds, provoking further destabilization. According to the SBU press service, security operatives revealed that Russian intelligence and Moscow-controlled "security services in the occupied parts of Donbas had been working to recruit Ukrainian nationals who would commit arson attacks on temples operated by Orthodox priests of the former UOC-MP. The targeted Ukrainian was promised to receive the...