I don’t need to make the case that freedom is falling, even in Western lands that once stood as icons of liberty. In the Britain of the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights, a godless theocracy now partners with illiberal immigrants to target the native population — which is bullied and busted by the police meant to protect them, for “crimes” like rude Facebook posts and nonviolent protests.

On the left 26 months for gesticulating and shouting at officers.

On the right Ricky Jones of the Labour Party talking about people he disagrees with “they are disgusting nazi fascists and we need to cut all their throats and get rid of them all”

Will he get the same treatment? pic.twitter.com/Ov2XKsRl7G

— Sean (@Xcellent78) August 8, 2024

🚨🇬🇧 “Am I going to be locked up for the night? Do I need to bring my medications?”

Welcome to 2024 Britain where The Police arrive at your home to arrest you for comments made on Facebook.

As Britain descends into lawless chaos – the Governments priority clearly isn’t fixing… pic.twitter.com/YmxBj92aCl

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) August 5, 2024

In the France that claims to stand for “Liberty” as well as “Equality and Fraternity,” visiting Christians who drove a bus whose signage objected to the blasphemy at the Olympics got arrested and held without food or water by bullying armed police:

NEW: 6 Christians arrested for driving a bus around in Paris that read ‘Stop Attacks On Christians’ on the side.

According to @CitizenGO, 6 of their team members were forced to spend the night in jail for denouncing the Olympics opening ceremony.

Three women were forced to… pic.twitter.com/AJHYCacsvU

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 7, 2024

And here in the home of “ordered liberty” and the U.S. Constitution, the Democratic Party has given up any pretense of protecting personal freedom except in the bedroom — which seems to be the place where liberty starts … and stops. Apart from sexual libertinism, the Left in America opposes medical privacy and autonomy, property rights, parental rights, election integrity, gun rights, free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Basically, the Democrats have taken a red pen to every single amendment in our treasured Bill of Rights.

Not Limited to the Left

Meanwhile, on the disgruntled Right, we see people so embittered by the abuse of American freedoms that they have given up on it in principle. Catholic Integralists want to outlaw Protestant churches, Protestant Christian Nationalists wonder if Jews should have full citizenship, and neo-Nietzschean race fetishists are reviving fantasies of state-based eugenics. “Post-liberals” on the Right see the whole vast panoply of illegitimate powers seized by the leftist administrative state … and instead of fighting to roll that tyranny back, they turn with green envy and dream of using the State’s bayonets and jackboots to impose their vision of “virtue.”

Some of us still cling to the old vision of an America with a tolerant Christian culture, with laws based on Natural Law, and the maximum personal freedom compatible with the common good. But we find ourselves waved off as “Zombie Reaganite Boomers.” It didn’t help that those who took over Reagan’s party cynically used the genuine ideals that stopped the Nazis and won the Cold War to justify stupid, mercenary wars throughout the world in the name of planting “democracy” in deserts where it never grows.

But the ideals on which the U.S. was founded weren’t empty rhetoric in the service of companies like Halliburton. No, the idea of God-given rights guaranteed by a small, decentralized government was in the fact the genuine legacy of the Gospel, the most authentic defense of the Christian view of the person, as Pope John Paul II wrote in Memory and Identity.

What must we then do? Should we catch the wave of love for coercion, control, and tribal groupthink? Has the historical moment for free institutions, free churches, and free families simply passed, leaving us sad nostalgia junkies waving our tattered “Appeal to Heaven” flags for a parade that’s already over?

When the Spirit of the Age Has a Name: “Baal”

That same temptation presented itself in the 1920s and 30s. Everywhere, it seemed, even on our own shores, the market economy had been discredited by the Depression, and democratic institutions exposed as hollow by the First World War and the chaos that followed. Fashionable intellectuals abandoned their countries’ old flags and constitutions, forming up in lines to salute Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler, who claimed that “progress” and “science” demanded totalitarian systems.

As I wrote in The Race to Save Our Century, a few men were willing to speak up for our sacred freedoms, though it cost them shame and exile. Wilhelm Röpke in the late 1920s used the money he earned as a professor to write, publish, and personally distribute anti-Nazi pamphlets, long before most people even saw that movement as a threat.

After those fanatics came to power by wielding Anarcho-Tyranny (which Kamala Harris and Tim Walz endorsed in 2020), another professor, Heinrich Rommen, risked his career and freedom by speaking out against Nazi “positivism,” which claimed that the State may make whatever laws it wishes, unhindered by any higher Natural Law that God wrote on the human heart.

Both Röpke and Rommen were driven into exile, and saw their beloved country sink into the darkness. Freedom lovers in Britain and France today have a taste of how those men felt. If the Left wins this November, we Americans will too.

But God doesn’t sleep, and the Gospel won’t go away. The coming of Christ revealed to all the world the true value of man. However hard you suppress it with billyclubs and algorithms, that truth spreads with the wind, and speaks to the depths of the human soul which a loving God created, and then redeemed. We must be ready for sacrifice, suffering, shame, and spitting.

But flip to the end of the Bible. Spoiler: Christ wins.

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, activist, and human rights worker. He is also the author of three books, the latest of which is The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset.