“...but your iniquities have made a separation
between you and your God,
and your sins have hid his face from you
so that he does not hear.”
—Isaiah 59:2
“Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers?” — Malachi 2:10
You have heard it said to love and welcome the stranger.
Yet, what good is it to love the stranger to the estrangement of your neighbor?
How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity with faith and love for one another under God!
Yet, how strange and unpleasant is the rootless march of modernity that celebrates estrangement as progress – held together, not by faith and love in one another, but by a sword and a hundred cravings.
The more the modern West progresses, the more estranged we seem to become.
Estranged from what? And who is responsible?
Well, it’s not quite clear. Ourselves? Our past? Our leaders? Our God?
It’s like we’re wrestling with a collective memory we all once shared and haven’t fully forgotten yet can’t quite bring ourselves to remember. Out of self-conscious fear, something that should be familiar, like the face of a father, remains hidden, separate and deaf to us.
Despite being more connected than ever, despite prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors, we are forlorn and fragmented in this sea of plenty – lost and adrift as isolated individuals, strangers to our neighbors, reduced to playing the part of consumers and spectators and mere pawns caught up in cycles of some cynical elite game.
The global elite say they love the stranger, but their true love has always been estrangement. Put simply, estranged people are much easier to control than those with deep roots and long memories. For example, mass migration, heavily facilitated by the global elite, has served as one of many tools to uproot the West – all aided by a multi-decade revolutionary march through global institutions to demoralize and demonize the achievements, traditions and faith of a civilization that was once called Christendom.
The good news is that the covenant seeds first sown by America’s forefathers have blessed Americans with so much that we have yet to fully feel the consequences of the estrangement currently on ugly naked display in Europe and the U.K.
The bad news is that American estrangement is starting to show. Americans are starting to notice that things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
No matter how titillating the bread and circuses remain, an unnerving strangeness of not knowing where we’re going or where we’ve been has started to set in.
No matter how many creature comforts we use to anesthetize our restless minds, a creeping unease about who is truly in charge or who to trust, admire, follow or worship keeps spreading like a silent virus, nameless yet on the tip of the tongue.
You have heard it said to love and welcome the stranger.
Yet, what good is it to love the stranger to the estrangement of your neighbor?
What good is your invitation when you have made a stranger of your nation? What good is your hospitality when you are so inhospitable to the heritage of your home? Who are you to give away the fruits of this soil when you deny the very roots that bore the harvest? Who are you to break with past generations of Americans you now presume to judge and condemn as lesser men? Who are you to call this land a home for all, yet say it was stolen by those whose ancestors have long called this land home?
Who are you to profane the covenant of our fathers? Yet, who are we who claim to be blameless victims of others’ wicked ways?
If we are so estranged, then we must have had our own part to play.
We cannot blame the stranger or some wretched elite for all the things we ourselves have failed to do or say.
Though we bear the iniquities of others and suffer the schemes of powerful men, we could have only made a stranger of God by the stain of loving the estrangement of our own sins.
So, since we have made God a stranger, it is better for us to repent of our estrangement and sin so that we may learn to love the stranger and welcome back our one Father again.
Joey Clark is a native Alabamian and is currently the host of the radio program News and Views on News Talk 93.1 FM WACV out of Montgomery, AL, M-F 12 p.m. - 3 p.m. His column appears every Tuesday in 1819 News. To contact Joey for media or speaking appearances, as well as any feedback, please email [email protected]. Follow him on X @TheJoeyClark or watch the radio show livestream.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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