“The Righteousness of Destroying Satanic Altars” | Homefront Crusade
Sarah Cain: The destruction of a Satanic statue in the state capital of Iowa is “a moment in which self-professed Christians have been forced to choose where their loyalties lie.”
Source: “The Righteousness of Destroying Satanic Altars” | Homefront Crusade
Fellow substacker Homefront Crusade’s Sarah Cain writes, “It has been fascinating to watch a nation get riled up over Michael Cassidy’s decision to behead the satanic shrine in a state capital. It’s a moment in which self-professed Christians have been forced to choose where their loyalties lie.”
She continues to discuss the matter in more depth: a very good treatment of this issue, in my opinion! My recommendation? “Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest”! As she notes,
“It is one thing to fear consequence, or to judge in prudence that the cost of such an action might be too great on a personal level, but it is another to refuse to assert that the act itself is moral. Any law that prevents the destruction of satanic altars is an unjust, immoral law. The worship of evil is itself an act of evil (at risk of being redundant), and thus it is right to stop it.
“We can argue on constitutionalities, but the Constitution is not my God. It is not from whence goodness and righteousness come. Likewise, we can argue about the American Founders, but even if they had been in favor of satanic altars (they weren’t), they are not my idols.
On this point, it does seem worthwhile to at least mention that those Founders believed that morality came from religion, and they sought a religious people. They did not believe that an immoral nation could stand. While they prevented the government from establishing a specific religion, they did so in an attempt to create an environment of tolerance for all of the different sects of Christianity.
“What we have lost, at minimum, is the understanding that we should wish for a moral nation—largely because we can no longer assert what that is. By having a complete indifference to all religions, the state ultimately lands at an indifference to morality itself.”
Indeed. I yield to no one in my love for the Constitution, and our Constitutional system, and I deeply revere our Founders: all the more reason to believe that using it and them as an excuse to tolerate and excuse immorality and even flat-out evil is ludicrous, and indeed deeply insulting to their legacy! As John Adams put it, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." And George Washington added,
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness-these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens... And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”
Cassidy, a former Navy pilot (pictured above), says of his decision to destroy the statue and behead the idol of Baphomet that had been placed inside the Iowa State Capitol’s Rotunda, not far from a Christmas Nativity display – tossing the head into the trash! – and then turn himself in to Capitol security, “I saw this blasphemous statue and was outraged. My conscience is held captive to the Word of God, not to bureaucratic decree. And so I acted.” He also refers to his action, accurately in my view, as an act of “Christian civil disobedience.”
He has been charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief, and it is reported that “the Satanic Temple of Iowa is seeking to press charges, according to police.” (There is a GiveSendGo account set up to assist with his legal defense.) Conservative pundit and Fox news-host Jesse Watters “noted the contrast between reaction to Cassidy's act and the dozens of protests in recent years that featured left-wing activists tearing down statues of Confederate officers, former U.S. presidents and historical figures like Christopher Columbus,” pointing out then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s
“dismissal of the crowd in her home neighborhood of Little Italy, Baltimore, who leveled the Columbus statue and tossed it in the Patapsco River. ‘People will do what they do,’ Pelosi said at a July 2020 press conference,” Watters further notes that the “city of Richmond, Va., in recent years removed an entire street's worth of statuary dedicated to Confederate Gens. A. P. Hill, ‘Stonewall’ Jackson and J. E. B. Stuart, all of which lined the former Confederate capital’s ‘Monument Avenue’ for decades.” An egregious and horrific action, in my opinion!
But the same people are now up-in-arms over a Christian prior-service military officer’s overthrow of a Satanic statue set up as a foil to the crêche in a State Capitol’s rotunda. As my late mother might have said, “it all depends on whose ox is getting gored!” Indeed, it might almost be funny, if it were not so appalling. Returning to Sarah Cain’s post, she concludes,
“the desire to have a morally neutral government is a very modern notion. It has resulted in an establishment that considers the destruction of satanic altars to be more egregious than killing the unborn. No clearer contrast could be made of the morality of the modern elitist class.”
And she notes that the Whining Class “act as if to be a Christian is to be passive, impotent, or cowardly. Certainly [that idea] has been commonly asserted in the modern age, but that was not the Christianity of antiquity.” Indeed, it was not!
Thank you for sharing this! I agree with every word, both hers and yours.