The Cross and the Shield
How to Win Institutions to Salvage What Can Be in America
More than any other question, people want to know how to save America. Billions of dollars and many thousands of otherwise productive hours are wasted in this fool’s errand that is politics. As long as (A) one side can print limitless money which (B) allows them to control the media/enforcement institutions, and (C) elections can be bought and manipulated, you’re never going to win. Fortunately, a growing number of people realize this after years of various flavors of failure, and we find ourselves asking the more productive question what institutions do we have to play the long game.
Like many of you, I’ve taken a renewed history in not just the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the equally interesting though less relevant to us story of how the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire survived, but in the muddier waters of the transition whereby Rome became first the Holy Roman Empire and then the states of the West. That process took well over a millennium, so we can’t break it all down here, but the opening stages are worth considering. The Romans had civilization and foreigners coming in numbers who basically were being sold the brand, which some took, and some took offense against. The civil authorities ran, leaving behind the Bishops in charge as the most relevant authority with responsibilities ranging from spiritual guidance to much of what they had in their time as a welfare state. Moreover, they had a unifying idea, of universal Christendom, and shared it with the Vandals, Goths, Visigoths, and myriad tribes who largely took on a new character, not Roman but Christian, and where the authority of God passed through the church and shared sovereignty between those who had force enough to manage it, basically warbands which occupied and married up, and the church which sought to maintain its own prerogatives in concert. This mishmash system would eventually endure 1,500 years and keep peace, more often than not, in the Heart of Europe, keep out the Turk and Muslim, and see France and Spain defended, then retaken, and the evangelization of the north and east of Europe like Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Poland.
Let’s break it down to two simple components which make history relevant for today. We had a moral authority which also became a civil authority, whose sanction relied upon following the Word of God, whose authority was local and decentralized as Paul recorded in the Pastoral Epistles (1-2 Timothy, Titus), and whose job was essentially seeing the spiritual and material welfare of the people, defined deliberately and narrowly as the Believers, was met. We had a military authority that essentially was insular and disconnected, who assumed sovereignty through right of combat against presumed authority elsewhere whether Ravenna or Constantinople, and while they sometimes paid nominal lip service to the distant throne, functionally they were autonomous, and eventually all broke away from the corrupt Empire after the plague ruined Justinian’s effort to reunite West and East irrevocably. These tribes, upon taking these lands, settled into these fertile territories, intermarried, and became the new Romans, or Lombards, etc. They became the shield whose conquest was legitimated by the cross.
Pretend we wanted to do the same in America. We have an Emperor with no clothes, a bureaucracy that celebrates the orgy around him, capital trying to re-enact an elitist feudalism of the most dismal sort, and people who are basically helpless targets of a culture war where victories and boycotts do little except encourage against an economic blockade, educational exile, and selective prosecution. Some encourage that we try to retake those institutions, but it is not and rarely has been the nature of what we call the right - I prefer traditionalists here - to centralize, organize, and terrorize as the left does with incredible speed and clarity to our mutual decline. We must think and act like ourselves, knowing we prefer to act locally, that there will be disagreements, that we need government out of our lives, but that we need moral actors to return, with the important lesson learned we cannot live under a hostile media, a deceitful pedagogy, or libertarian largesse. When we look at the country as a whole, using America as exemplar of a common western problem, it looks hopeless at the national level, until you look at the granular map.
This election map from 2020 is demonstrative. Basically, Trump won over 5 counties for every single county Biden won. The dark blue hives are only in the big cities, whose weight in population dominates this system, which is why they love Democracy(TM), but why it is a death sentence for the rest of us to live under hostile occupation while the ongoing demographic replacement is sent into overdrive.
Another map, this one with less gradation, makes clear what sort of country this truly could be. Exclude the California Coast, and the NE corridor, and you have a country well worth defending, with certain problematic enclaves who have outsized representation. If we accept the basic concept that the people who live in an area, closest to the situation, should have greatest authority, which just happened to be the logic behind the original sheriffs in England, and is also the Scriptural mandate to the Bishop, a new way to organize America to fight on three fronts becomes clear.
Three areas must be won: Education, because our children need to be learning the proper ideas. Enforcement, because our people cannot be constantly thrown in jail or subject to the burdens of incessant lawfare. Economy, because when the government tries to force funny money (they soon will - CBDCs) or punish people for non-compliance, there needs to be the ability to have fully self-sufficient local economies which both meet the basic public needs and has extra for public welfare for the noncompliant. The exciting news is the Cross, a healthy church which provided meaningful public education for children, authoritative news and commentary for the people, and charitable and work services can emerge to handle much of the education and economy functions and thwart state and propaganda. But, for the church to stand strong, the Shield of the Sheriffs will be needed, for deliberate non-enforcement of laws against the locality. If you had a strong sheriff, willing to turn a county of believers into a posse at moment’s notice, and a bishop standing strong on what is true, not just within their county, but with their fellow counties, you would quickly see America’s feared government as unable to govern.
All they can do is attack and threaten, because they do not produce. Cities may have the weight of numbers, but let them sink under that, and be sovereign in their own rights. The Canadian Trucker blockade showed a path. Imagine the good and often ignored people of upstate New York, the Pennsylvania “T” and the Western Counties of Maryland followed their conscience and made Interstates 70, 76, 80, 84, 86, and 90 just lines on a map instead of thoroughfares. Turn them into toll roads against the government’s theft, each county recouping losses, and you would be amazed how quickly the colossus could crumble. But what this requires is security at home - in the community and in the county - a shared code of values, and the recognition that the law of the state never was the highest authority, but rather that the natural law given to us by God as the natural state of our being - not some gift from the Constitution, but something antecedent and far more vital. If we have the courage to bring back morality to the fight, and to uphold our belief in law, as exercise of will, then this can work.
Bishops are local, imagined here at the county level, of a new American church that reflects the core Scriptural values of time and history, but that also reflect local variations as is appropriate. Decentralization and affiliation, with counties making choices, and where Washington, Congress and President alike are removed from authority, and where the office of Governor even remains too distant. After all, how few states are there where the majority of counties are blue even in the most “progressive” areas?
What is needed for this to happen? The Church was neutered first by the First Amendment, then by the propaganda machine, the obscene conflation of Judeo-Christianity, which makes no sense, the Johnson Amendment which sicked the IRS on them, and now the desire to be worldly and liked. That Church that lives for the world, whatever denomination it is, is inherently anathema to Christ, and must be rebuked and reclaimed. Even if from scratch. We must find new ways to build a new church to win, an institution that works for us and is made from us, and which accepts authority for all society, including the difficult powers of exile and compliance. Responsibility isn’t easy, but we have learned if we do not stand up for our own, we will certainly have no place of our own to ever resides as we are simply bred out.
What does that church look like? That is the question we must now work, but some obvious precursors occur to me.
Bishops must be selected locally and be assumed to have full authority within their county.
While bishops can and should meet in council, no bishop inherently has authority over any other bishop outside their own diocese.
Scripture should guide the moral direction of the church.
The church should determine who are members in good standing, with faithful men being assumed to take leadership roles.
Such membership should be expected of all supported officeholders.
These simple rules will make enemies. I’ve left the tricky theological and denominational conflicts aside for the moment as well, because I want everyone to understand the options are lose or fight. One can flee, and I very well may because I see so little in America to inspire hope or courage, but even then, fight will eventually be necessary somewhere. So, if you want a way, here’s what it looks like.
Why won’t it happen? We believe too much patently false BS about America to act. We’re too comfy for a real struggle, especially as the economic costs are only going to rise. We are stuck in dead denominations which serve interests opposed to Christ by habit or traditions. We have given up - and maybe that is fair. I can’t judge against the last one, because like many of you, we’ve all fought too long against a system where a mindless mass bludgeons us into indifference and even latent hostility.
But, for those who are younger and more vital, we can at least share as dissidents what won’t work. You need your own institutions, stamped by your character, but honoring our best traditions, and those of us who can help you by thinking more than working at this point surely would do so. A Cross and a Shield brings a Holy American Empire that would be something new, and if not certainly something better, something different than where we are otherwise headed.