Over the past few years, and especially during 2020 as America burned to the cheers of the woke, we have often heard the words “civil war” pronounced by pundits and scholars. America was on the verge of a civil war, we were told. As the crowds in the streets swelled and the rhetoric turned to brawling and outright murder, the talk of civil war grew more immediate, and then it seemed as though we really were in the midst of an armed insurrection.

I am not so sure. It seems to me that the civil war ended, for all practical purposes, long ago. Not the one pitting Grant against Lee, but the one pitting Christian America against the Progressives. The culture wars—remember those?—were the Second Civil War. People began to argue over things which no society can hold two views of and survive. Are babies human beings, for example? The phrase “pro-life” entered the lexicon, as though it were normal to have to stipulate in everyday conversation that one was not pro-death.

Another defeat: Can homosexuals marry? Obviously they cannot. But then, all of a sudden, the Supreme Court—the same institution which sanctioned infanticide on a January day nearly fifty years ago—called gay marriages real.

And on it went. There were many other losses, but the above two paragraphs describe our Ft. Sumter and our Gettysburg. We thought that maybe a second civil war was coming, when in fact we were right in the middle of losing it.

And so here we are. Washington is making it perfectly clear that there is to be no place for Christians in the New America. We will have to learn from the Jews how to be pariahs, how to live in exile, how to commemorate the ancient workings of the Living God and hold out hope for the world to come. We will daily choose God over everything else, without a country and without even much support from the Vatican.

The nature of the Enlightenment is nothing more or less than the violent eradication of the non-woke. From Cromwell to Goebbels, the Enlightenment was always and everywhere the herding of the Other into camps. Our Enlightened government declared the Indians so un-woke that they penned them in corrals, where they remain to this day. The same was true of Japanese Americans under the supremely Enlightened Franklin Roosevelt. Babies are the least woke of all, and so 62 million of them have been sacrificed on the Enlightenment Altar of Reason. Your government, my government is the proprietor of the altar.

When considering how to live surrounded by the Robespierres of the hour, a look at Zionism is instructive.

American Protestants have in many ways made a kind of idol out of the state of Israel, seeing it through the numerological, end-times lens with which Fundamentalists tend to read the books of the Bible. But this is a distraction from the fact that Zionism was not really a religious movement; it was a political one. Many Zionist leaders have been atheists, or at best agnostics. Here is how Shlomo Sand put it in the Israeli paper Haaretz a few years ago:

Zionism as a national movement that rebelled against historical Judaism was mainly atheistic. Most of its leaders and activists ceased believing in redemption through the coming of the Messiah, the long-standing essence of Jewish belief, and took their fate into their own hands. The power of the human subject replaced the power of the omnipotent God.

As Sand then explains, the rabbis at the time understood very well what was going on, and so many of them opposed Zionism. Zionism was taking God’s work into human hands, the rabbis (rightly) thought. A travesty, a blasphemy—not a real redemption. Even today, although Israel is arguably much more Jewish in a religious sense than it was when the first, socialist Zionists set about making the desert bloom, many traditionalist Jews are dead-set against Israel. Zionism counterfeits the ingathering of the exiles, they say. It is politics masquerading as the revealed Word of God. It is hiring an Enlightenment contractor to rebuild the Temple.

Catholics in the United States must see a parallel here in Fusionism. Fusionism is American Zionism — a political solution to a spiritual problem. America was clearly unraveling when American “conservatism” was born, the last fumes of the Catholic faith boiling off the Protestant residue in America and leaving behind a wild frontier-land of cults, revivals, and hedonism. Fusionism says that “conservatives” should oppose all this, that godless old-school liberals and every strain of Protestantism can work with Catholics to prevent the Enlightenment takeover of America.

Fusionism was spearheaded by Frank Meyer and championed by William F. Buckley of National Review. Buckley liked to say that conservatives were to stand athwart history and yell “Stop!”

History didn’t listen to Buckley, or to us. “History” is a Hegelian concept; it is the Enlightenment, weaponized. “History” was always going to run over our Fusionist selves, one way or the other. It was just a matter of time. “Progress” gained mastery of the entire field on January 20, 2021. Our attempt at a political solution to a spiritual problem failed. Buckley himself was nominally Catholic, but his real religion was the Fusionism, the “conservatism” he spent his adult life preaching.

Remember that National Review was the first out of the gate against Trump. Trump was no Catholic, but he was against wokeism. And for that, he was pilloried. “Fusionism,” we must remember, can just as easily fuse with the Woke League as stand against it.

So, we must brace ourselves for what is coming. We cannot shout at the Enlightenment to stop anymore. The civil war happened, and we lost. The State is coming for us next. We will need to be ready to be cast out. This does not mean we are defeated; God wins in the end. But our Trail of Tears is nigh.