Templar Mind

On October 28, 1636, a colony of farmers on the edge of the wilderness voted to spend £400 on a college. They had crossed an ocean to build a Christian commonwealth. They had cleared the forests and planted their churches. In their own words, they were “dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.” So the Massachusetts General Court founded a school to train the next generation of shepherds. Two years later a young minister named John Harvard died at thirty. He left the school half his estate and a library of four hundred books. The college took his name. Its early seals named the Lord. The seal of 1650 read In Christi Gloriam, for the glory of Christ. In 1692 a new seal read Christo et Ecclesiae, for Christ and the Church. Truth had a master. Learning had a purpose. Every student knew whom his studies served. In the 1800s, Harvard’s leaders dug an older sketch out of the archives. It bore one word, Veritas, and they made it the emblem of the school. A history published by Harvard’s own press calls the word “brief and not exclusively religious.” Today the shield carries that one word. Truth cut loose from Christ goes looking for a new master. It always finds one. Nearly four centuries later, the school built to raise shepherds for the church raises the men who manage its decline. Where are your children being taught? And whom does their teacher serve?

The emperor’s giant had killed every Christian sent against him. Then a young man went to a prisoner and asked for his blessing. Thessalonica, around the year 306. Emperor Maximian came to the city. His champion was a gladiator named Lyaeus, huge and undefeated. The crowds came to watch Christians thrown in against him. None of them walked out. Demetrios was a Roman officer, a commander of the region. He was also a Christian, and he preached Christ openly in the city the emperor had given him to govern. Maximian had him arrested and locked in a cellar under the public baths. A young man named Nestor knew him. Nestor had watched the giant work. He went down to the cellar and knelt before the prisoner. He asked for one thing: a blessing to face Lyaeus. Demetrios made the sign of the cross over him. He told him he would win, and that he would suffer for Christ. Nestor walked into the arena. The crowd laughed at the size of him. He called out to God and drove his spear into the giant’s heart. The emperor lost his champion in front of the whole city. He took his revenge the same day. Nestor was beheaded outside the walls. Soldiers went down into the cellar and ran Demetrios through with spears. Every age has its Lyaeus. Every age has young men who must decide whether to face him. They rarely go alone. Somewhere behind each of them stands an older man who believed and said so out loud, even in chains. So ask yourself which one you are. Are you the young man who goes, or the man who gives the blessing?

The day before they marched into Valley Forge, a starving army stopped to give thanks. Then they picked up axes, felled timber, and built cabins. Two spirits contend for this nation. One builds and gives thanks. The other tears down and sneers. The first raised a country out of frozen mud. The second has never raised anything. It lives off the labor of better men and calls vandalism justice. Gratitude builds nations. Resentment can only burn them.

The men who founded this nation marched barefoot through the snow at Valley Forge, and their heirs complain when the Wi-Fi is slow. In the winter of 1777, roughly twelve thousand men limped into Valley Forge with too few shoes, too few blankets, and almost nothing to eat. Around two thousand of them were carried off by cold, typhus, and dysentery rather than muskets. They had no promise of victory and no guarantee of pay, only a cause and a general who refused to quit. Many could have deserted. Most stayed. Two and a half centuries later, their heirs live in comfort those soldiers couldn’t have imagined: food on demand, heat at the turn of a dial, the sum of human knowledge in our pocket. Yet we treat minor inconvenience as hardship and hardship as injustice. Would we survive something like Valley Forge? Would many of us even show up?

A boy learns what a man is by watching one. He watches how his father speaks to his mother. He watches what his father does when the money runs short, when the boss is unfair, when the truck won’t start on a cold morning. He watches whether his father prays. He may forget most of the words but he will keep that example for life. A daughter watches too. Her father shows her what a good man looks like, and she measures every suitor against him. Our culture tells men that they are optional. St. John Chrysostom called the home a little church. The father keeps its door. He works for it, guards it, and leads it in prayer. Fathers, your presence is the sermon. Go home and preach it. Deus Vult.

245 years ago today, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. The next morning Washington ordered divine service in every brigade, calling the victory one of “such reiterated and astonishing interpositions of Providence.” They thanked God before they thanked themselves.

The DSA runs on the Democratic line. They support "globalizing the intifada.” They demand taxpayer-funded abortions at will. Wisdom warned us long ago... "For my issues are the issues of life, and grace is prepared from the Lord. But those who sin against me act ungodly toward their own souls, and those who hate me love death." (Proverbs 8:34-35, Orthodox Study Bible)

Three weeks before the midterms, remember who the Democrats put on stage this summer. Hasan Piker addressed their student convention in a Mao jacket. Mao understood students. He handed them red books and turned them loose on their teachers, their parents, and their churches. Tens of millions died under him. Piker preaches anti-capitalist and anti-western rhetoric from a West Hollywood house worth millions. This is who they want our youth to look up to.

The DSA wants to scrap the Constitution and build a single, unchecked legislative body. When you remove the "speed bumps" of government you get a dictatorship. This is why we have a system of checks and balances. We lose them at our own peril!

The Democratic Socialists of America say the nuclear family breeds fascism. Maybe they're right. Look closely at the image below. The dog is clearly plotting something. He may be the next Benito Muttsolini. Perhaps an Adolf Schnauzer. Der Fürrer himself. Or worse, a Karl Barx. Once everything they hate is fascism, their hatred becomes a virtue. Tradition becomes a threat. Marriage becomes a hierarchy. The father becomes an oppressor. The real fascists wanted nothing outside the state. A family like this is the thing outside it.

Mom, Dad, and the baby are a capitalist plot, a scheme John Locke dressed up for the bourgeoisie. The suburbs were built to oppress! The tradwife is a fascist! It takes a doctorate to believe this nonsense. The regimes that have tried to replace the nuclear family with committees have left nothing but orphans and famine behind them.

The DSA published an article called "Abolish the Nuclear Family." The author argues that trans liberation requires "the destruction of the nuclear family and therefore fascism." So the family is fascism now?

You were not created for a life of managed decline. The modern church has spent a century attempting to domesticate the faith, turning Jesus into a therapist and His Church into an emotional support group. The Christian West was not built by passive men who tolerated the erosion of their civilization.

The American constitution runs on friction. Madison built it that way. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," he wrote in Federalist 51, because he expected men to seize whatever power was left unguarded. The House answers to population. The Senate was built to answer to the states. The President carries a veto and his own mandate from the voters. The courts can tell all three of them no. Every gear grinds against another, and that grinding is the point. The first gear came out in 1913. The Seventeenth Amendment handed Senate elections to the same voters who fill the House, and the state legislatures lost their voice in Washington. The Democratic Socialists of America want to finish the job. One chamber, elected by headcount, would choose the executive and the judges and hold both on a leash. The word in their program is "subordinate." An executive subordinate to the legislature cannot veto it. A court subordinate to the legislature cannot overrule it. A citizen who loses in that chamber has nowhere left to appeal. - Marcus Sterling

The Senate is the one room in Washington where West Virginia stands equal to California. That's why the Democratic Socialists of America want it gone. One chamber. No appeal.