Great article from Dennis Prager of Orthodoxy Today:
As the greatest foreign observer of America, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, noted in his Democracy in America, ‘Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.’ Or, as the great British historian Paul Johnson has just written: ‘In [George] Washington’s eyes, at least, America was in no sense a secular state,’ and ‘the American Revolution was in essence the political and military expression of a religious movement.’
In fact, the Founders regarded America as a Second Israel, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, the ‘Almost Chosen’ People. This self-identification was so deep that Thomas Jefferson, today often described as not even a Christian, wanted the seal of the United States to depict the Jews leaving Egypt at the splitting of the sea. Just as the Jews left Egypt, Americans left Europe.
The best quote of the article (which is a snip of a much larger article) is here:
If you are undecided which side to fight for, perhaps this will help: Western Europe has already become a secular society with secular values. If you think Western Europe is a better place than America and that it has a robust future, you should be working to remove Judeo-Christian influence from American life. On the other hand, if you look at Europe and see a continent adrift, with no identity and no strong values beyond economic equality and possessing little capacity to identify evil, let alone a will to fight it, then you need to start fighting against the secularization of America.
This gets back to a larger theme I have held for some time. Given the challenge of competing civilizations, it isn’t so much that the Christian West has the better answer. Rather, the Secular West is incapable of answering at all.
The juxtaposition of Western Europe and is open struggle with Islam, versus the United States and it’s willingness to resist such secularism is notable. Secularism for all it’s high-mindedness and heavy-handedness in approaching the question of Islam has all but folded, while the tradition of the free market, a free society, and a free and open public square has been championed by notably Christian thinkers.
One might almost argue that it an increasing fusion between a Protestant work-ethic and population and Catholic leadership. The Battle of Vienna revisited, only this time struggle is to get Islam to come to terms with itself before others bring Islam into a collision with the West.