I do find that those folks with whom I am acquainted at times have a very different take on reality.
Please tell me how you would establish the Catholic Church, or any other Church as secular government without starting a religious war.
As
secular means
the state of being separated from religion, I have no intentions of supporting, in the end, any form of
secular government, even if it were to have a religious beginning.
How would
I install a Catholic government in America without a violent Revolution?
I would have no idea. Hopefully, however, God has a better plan in mind, as He seemed to with pagan Rome, and one devoid of violence and chaos.
Let’s look back to the Medieval era, that time that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. Establishing a Christian government on top of the pagan Roman political machinery (not just changing the religion the state officially promotes, but changing the laws and manners regarding how the state behaves and to whom, meaning the Church, it is held accountable) might have been impossible, which is why though Constantine converted while the Empire still basically existed, the Empire had to perish utterly before Christian Europe could be born. Lacking a mundane explanation for this, I can’t help but conclude that this was the will of God, that the Empire should fall
before something new and better could be built. Certainly, one cannot build a new home on a ruined foundation - the old must be swept away, first.
That, and given how Christians were physically persecuted (not merely legally marginalized as we see in modern America but actually murdered) in pagan Rome, God in His inscrutable providence allowed the Empire to perish rather than permit the persecution of Christians to continue, especially because the fall of the Empire paved the way for the restoration of European society (and, in large part, the very creation of it to begin with).
I do not dare to claim to know the mind of God, but the fact the Empire fell both
after its official conversion to the Faith and before a Christian society could rise in Europe seems to indicate precisely what I have mentioned. A rotten society has to fall first before a new one can be built and the Faith kept safe.
The Empire fell under its own weight. The greedy imperialism which is necessary to sustain a proper Empire eventually caused it to reach beyond its grasp. Of course, the tattered moral fabric of the Empire also played its part, but in terms of material ends, the Roman Empire - apparently invincible and eternal - eventually killed itself. America is heading in much the same direction; it is morally corrupt, greedily imperialistic, its citizens believe it to be divinely-favored and invulnerably eternal, and it is politically rotten to the core.
Of course, there is the example of Constantine; after his victory at the Battle of the Milivian Bridge, he established Christianity as the faith of the Roman state. So here we have a legal declaration backed up by the inertia of a military victory and protected by force of arms. In the end, for all our puffed-up posturing, humans only understand force of law and force of arms.
But, as the early Christians did before this great moment in our history came to pass, we must pray for the conversion of our nation to the Faith, and maybe God will move the hearts of the right folks in power. That we fail to do so, and the fact that we still uphold the sacrilegious idea of secularism, I suspect is part of why our prayers are not answered. After all, if we ask for a better society, yet say in our hearts
we will have a secularist government whether You like it or not, why should God listen?
Impossible. A conversion by force means nothing.
Note, however, that I’m not talking about
forcing a conversion at sword (or gun) point. I’m talking about making the faith part of the law of the land, which happened once before, and successfully, it must be concluded. It’s one thing to make a religion the law of the land (at least in the sense of allowing no others), and another to kill those who refuse to convert; the Lord only asks us to make converts of the whole world, not to stoop to heathen barbarism.
Making Christianity the law of the land would promote conversions on pain of death no more than the fact that shoplifting is illegal does not promote honesty on pain of death. Speaking from the perspective of the law regarding shoplifting, the citizenry is free to
believe that theft is OK, so long as they do not engage in it; the law requires no actual, heartfelt conversion to the notion that it is wrong to steal from stores. The same would apply to the Faith; though the people are free to believe that the Church is bunk no one would actually be forced to practice the Faith - anything else would, however, be outlawed. Conversions would be the sole responsibility of the Church to make
within the law, as of course a forced conversion is much like a confession extracted under torture - meaningless.
In the end, humans must be made to go in the direction that is best. If only we were so enlightened as we assume we are, perhaps we wouldn’t even be having this or any similar discussion now. That’s why we have laws regulating our behavior in civil and mundane affairs. Humans prove that without laws we will do whatever suits us.
I apologize if I’m not explaining myself clearly.
But it’s terribly difficult to have a discussion like this with folks who have been raised in modern America, where we are taught that religion is subjective and what God wants of us is just make-believe. Speaking from the perspective of a “latin conservative”, this is unacceptable.
Exactly what I was thinking. So how should I vote 
