I appreciate the counsel Michael Brown offered here last week, making the contrarian case that despite the many evils that would come in the wake of a woke takeover by the Gadarene Democrats, we could still find spiritual benefits in the ensuing chaos. The Church is not dependent for her existence on friendly regimes, and has proven anti-fragile at various points in the past. In the Roman empire, it did indeed prove true that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Christ Himself told us to “rejoice” and “be exceedingly glad” when our faithfulness to Him provokes hostility from the world.

This truth lies at the very heart of Christianity, which paradoxically calls the Friday when Jesus died “Good,” and sings of Adam’s “happy fall, which brought so great a Redeemer.”

Brown writes that in the wake of a national win (honest or not) by the party that is completely committed to abortion and child-castration:

[R]ather than lobbying our man (or woman) in the White House, we would be seeking the help of God with great earnestness and devotion.

We would spend more time in fasting and prayer.

We would give ourselves more passionately to the Great Commission.

We would become more active on the local level, advocating for our values in the schools, in our communities, in our local elections.

Simply stated, rather than taking our foot off the pedal once we succeeded in getting our candidate elected, we would pray and seek God’s help even more earnestly after the elections. And rather than relying on our access to the Oval Office through our relationship with the president, we would rely on our access to the Throne Room in Heaven.

Well, maybe. Doubtless some would. The spiritual heroes out there would surely redouble their efforts, while some of those worldly Christians who’d been coasting along in comfort would be awakened from their slumber when faced with the stark demand to renounce key parts of their faith — or suffer the consequences.

Bless You, Prison

That’s what happened to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was locked up after World War II — not for principled anti-Communism, much less bold Christian faith. He was caught up in Stalin’s nets for a Twitter post — or the equivalent in his day, a private letter wherein he cracked a joke about the dictator’s moustache. A loyal Communist and fervent atheist, he was (as he’d later confess) arrogant, ferocious, and cruel.

It took years of abject suffering in the grinding squalor and hunger of an Arctic gulag for Solzhenitsyn to discover empathy, the moral depths of the human person, and the profound truth of the Gospel. He would write in the pages of his prison diary which he scrawled on scraps of paper (later smuggled out and published as The Gulag Archipelago):

Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

Then the Cock Crows

Are you made of the same stuff as Solzhenitsyn? I’m sure I’m not. It takes a kind of spiritual pride, even hubris, to feel sure that you’d be courageous and faithful when put to the test. St. Peter rashly assured Jesus that he would stand with Him to the end. Already in that moment, Our Lord could hear a cock crowing.

Countless millions of lives were blighted by atheist socialism in Russia, as it will blight our lives right here if the Democrats and globalist cabal attain the unlimited power they seek. And most of the Soviet people didn’t go on to find the Gospel. They didn’t evangelize secretly and harness the power of suffering to build a vital Christian society as the underground Church has in China. They collaborated and caved, or embraced “learned helplessness” and learned to “live by lies.” They crawled into vodka bottles and aborted most of their children. They cursed God and died.

What’s worse about the regime which seeks right now to imprison its opponents and silence its critics is that it’s not openly and honestly anti-Christian as Lenin was. Instead, our domestic enemies are following different dictators’ playbooks: Mussolini’s and Hitler’s. Each of those aggressive unbelievers sized up the Church in his country as too strong for a frontal assault. Instead, those churches had to be infiltrated, compromised, and corrupted — desiccated from within so they could be destroyed by a slight breeze from without. They lavished kind words and government money on Christians willing to play ball with the regime, and reserved real persecution for “extremists” and “cranks.”

Remember how the Church responded during the COVID panic, when Francis Collins wielded the carrot of millions of dollars in federal grants? He cozened countless pastors into wielding the stick themselves, to lecture their congregations that gathering to worship or refusing an untested abortion-derived vaccine meant they “didn’t love their neighbors.” Pope Francis, that small-A antichrist, corralled all the power of the Vatican to bully and bulldoze Catholics — abandoning Church teaching on the ethics of abortion-based medical research. Meanwhile, Donald Trump let himself be fooled into enabling all this tyranny and has not yet had the character to acknowledge that fact and repent.

What’s at Stake Is Millions of Souls

Most of us failed. That’s what most people do. Most countries where the Church is persecuted for long periods of time see the Christian faith disappear, or shrink to tragic splinter groups of the beaten-down and forgotten. The heartland of Christianity was once in what’s now Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia. Centuries of grinding humiliation at the hands of Muslim occupiers, more than open threats of death, turned most of those Christians into Muslims. How many souls were lost which might have been saved if those weak people hadn’t been pressed by extreme circumstances?

Jesus Himself told us to pray so that we would be strong enough not to be led into temptation. Why was that? Because we mostly fail. Most German Christians did, as Eric Metaxas reminds us in his Letter to the American Church. And after the Nazis were beaten, the Church there didn’t come roaring back. Largely disgraced by its failure to fight, it limped along for decades, muttering apologies, and now most German Christians have rainbow banners over their churches. Surrender to Caesar and Mammon just became part of that church’s DNA.

So what’s at stake for me in this political fight isn’t just the prospect of food shortages, gun grabs, and suffocating tyranny. It’s the fate of millions of souls (my own included) who will be led into temptation. Yes, there are temptations also that come with worldly success and approval, and we saw countless pastors succumb to those when the Bush administration sought support for its pointless wars that caused Christian genocides, and its squalid compromise approving abortion-based vaccine research.

But what we face if the Democrats win is a different set of spiritual pathologies: the sins that come with weakness and fear. And they are every bit as deadly, and equally damning. The weak are tempted to lie, to cheat, to hoard, to snitch, to betray, to collaborate, to despair and descend into drugs. They face real temptations to sell out their best friends and family members for scraps of bread or rolls of toilet paper.

Yes, some people find Jesus in prison. Many more, after years of evil company, drug use, and casual rape, become still more hardened criminals.

Zmirak Propaganda from John Zmirak on Vimeo.

We Didn’t Love Freedom Enough

With all that in mind, we can understand why Solzhenitsyn didn’t counsel passive acceptance of suffering and evil. Instead, he wished that Soviet citizens had fought with knife and gun and poison against their oppressors. As he wrote:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If … if … We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

That’s my text for meditation as I prepare for this election.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.