Abraham Lincoln

Of course America will survive the coronavirus. We’ve many times survived far worse.

Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic in which the United States must seemingly make the frightful choice between saving lives and saving the economy, we inexplicably have a legion of volunteer mathematicians lining up to show off how well they can make the terrible calculations to decide who lives and who dies.

In the fervor to recognize Abraham Lincoln’s invaluable contributions to the abolition of slavery, his commitment to the rule of law and the constitutional limits on presidential power has been obscured.

According to Jonah Goldberg in Suicide of the West, the death of the country will not be the result of civil war but the culmination of a steady rot of the ideas and institutions that produced the liberty and prosperity of the West.

In the ceaseless struggle between civilization and barbarism, America has tipped the scales toward civilization, toward freedom and justice. In many ways, it has organized its national life—its economic, military, and moral resources—toward this end. Are we still up to the task?

Christians should remember this: any political theology that treats its own people as a divinely chosen political community treads on heretical soil.

Christian clergymen of today typically prefer to disparage power and prestige as demonic ensnarements that Jesus shunned when offered. But Jesus exemplifies not the rejection of power per se but rather a godly deployment of it.

In nearly every war both sides point to the offenses and wickedness of their enemies, hoping to solidify that they are on the side of morality and godliness and to justify their decision to fight. The Axis Powers of World War II undoubtedly had perverse and wicked aims, but in this article Eduard Heimann argues that the democracies, and particularly the Christians living within them, deserve blame for the war as well.

This article, originally published in Christianity and Crisis on November 30th, 1942, urges citizens of democracy to have patience with their leaders. Editor Reinhold…