Battling Team Evil

TRANSCRIPT 
 

It is just a real-world truism that team evil simply has more weapons at their disposal than the good guys. There's just no getting around that. They'll lie, cheat, steal, kill and resort to anything that works in their favor. Their mission is to demolish what is good and holy so as to build up the kingdom of their father, the Devil.

Not for nothing do we have the expression, "Good guys finish last." But beyond tactics, they also have a built-in advantage: the will and skill to actually use their weapons to their advantage. Referring to the dishonest steward in Luke's gospel, Our Blessed Lord touches on this very point, saying, "The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light." (Luke 16:8)

Team evil and the children of light both recognize that they have a mission to build up and establish their respective kingdoms, each one for their respective father. Followers of Christ pray for this multiple times a day: "Thy kingdom come." But where it seems these two camps diverge is in the understanding and willingness to engage in the necessary step before construction — and that is demolition.

Neither Catholic Christians nor team evil are moving about in the world in a vacuum. Each side has built up something of its own kingdom — not completed, of course, but nonetheless in various stages of completion. Team evil long ago, however, understood that in the construction of the Kingdom of Hell, the Kingdom of Heaven would have to be demolished. That concept is almost completely lost on the children of light. Demolition is necessary. The path must be cleared for construction to begin.

The Early Church understood this and, over the first few centuries, demolished the Roman Empire. Once demolished, Catholic Western civilization could emerge, and construction began in great earnest. Among the greatest architectural feats in human history bear witness to this, as enormous cathedrals built to the glory of God and the establishment of the kingdom rose up all over the Catholic world, bearing testimony, in a material sense, to the underlying spiritual reality which gave birth to them.

A pagan kingdom had been demolished to make way for the construction of the Kingdom of Heaven. What seems to be lacking today — indeed, for the last (roughly) six to seven centuries in the Church (with rare exceptions) — is any real grasp of this dynamic: You must demolish in order to build.

Spiritual war does not happen in a vacuum, nor is it static. We are not engaged in a zero-sum game. These two kingdoms cannot coexist, even if that stupid bumper sticker plastered on cars everywhere calls for it. That bumper sticker itself is part of the war propaganda of team evil. There really is only one weapon the good guys possess, and that is truth.

It is the most dangerous weapon in the arsenal, so in one sense, it is the only one needed. But if it isn't deployed, if it just sits in the munitions supply house, then who cares? Team evil's weapons are all knockoffs of the truth. A lie depends on the existence of truth in the first place. Theft depends on the truthful order of things. Killing is completely dependent on the truth of life. Every single battle is ultimately a battle over truth.

Team evil completely understands that their kingdom (the kingdom of Satan) cannot be completed as long as truth exists, so they set out in everything they do to demolish truth. Unfortunately, the good guys don't seem to have grasped this absolutely basic concept.

It is correct, to a degree, that truth is its own defense — but only to a degree. Yes, in the abstract, truth is more powerful. It always upsets the lie and shows it. But people don't live their lives in the abstract, in the murky ether of theory and the ivory tower of egghead argumentation. People live their lives in practice, and it is here where team evil makes such gigantic strides. The old saying goes, "An army moves on its stomach" — a recognition that it needs food (nutrition) to complete its mission.

The same is true in the spiritual war. Team evil seeks to deprive the good guys of truth and expends all its energy to cut off those supply lines. It cannot directly attack truth because truth is simply too powerful a weapon. So its extraordinarily successful strategy has been to undermine truth — to sublimate it to other things, like passions, emotions and, above all, feelings.

We humans, as we all know, are a complicated, tangled-up mess of intellect, feelings, life experiences, wounded psychologies and a host of other ingredients. Most of the time, most people have all this jumbled up together and haven't established things in the right order — meaning the order which corresponds to truth.

This is where team evil is able to move in for the kill — and does. Human beings are built by God for truth. We know this is correct from everyday life. However, because of our fallen state, we are afraid of what the truth will cause in our daily lives. So when truth gets too close, we pull back because we instinctively know we have to change.

It is that fear, that reluctance, that team evil capitalizes on, which is precisely why the good guys must deploy truth as the most powerful weapon on the battlefield. There is objective truth — truth that stands on its own, no matter how many deny it. And truth, like light, permeates everything — every single aspect of our being — our minds, our wills, our actions, our worldview. As the psalm says, it's like the sun moving across the sky; nothing escapes its burning heat. (Psalm 19:6)

But too few of the good guys are comfortable dealing with this weapon and, therefore, refuse to deploy it, at least to its full power. They don't educate themselves enough; they don't delve enough into the realm of philosophy, for example. Team evil has made such strides because it distorts truth and espouses errant philosophy that, on the surface (absent critical thought), seems correct — even to some children of light.

There are multiple ways in which these distortions are deployed, and one is through the corruption of language. Words have definitions — that which points to the reality behind the word. But if you keep the word while changing the meaning, people can be fooled. "Gender-affirming care," for example, is team evil's operating term to suggest that a child's gender can be surgically altered to correspond with the feeling in his head.

First, human beings don't have a gender; we have a sex. And there are only two: male and female. Nouns in some languages have "gender," which then correspond to adjectives and so forth. But it is necessary for those on team evil to deny these truths, even to the point of absurdity, such as when Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, during her nomination, had to say out loud that she didn't know what a woman is. She couldn't offer a definition.

She was being asked by a woman. She herself is a woman. And yet the concept of "woman" is completely lost on her. Not really, but lies do that. They back you into a corner, and the most ridiculous stuff has to come out of your mouth to keep the lie alive. It is the duty of the children of light to engage in truth wars, to throw truth bombs at every turn, to whatever degree they can and whatever the circumstances allow.

Team evil doesn't keep scoring victory after victory because they are successful with their lies, but rather because the children of light refuse or hesitate to whip out the most powerful weapon in the war and actually deploy it and use it. One day, once the kingdom of good has been sufficiently demolished and team evil has advanced very far, truth will reassert itself — it always does — by some intrepid military types who are comfortable in using it and have been properly trained to do so.

Truth, because it is ultimately Christ Himself, wins hands down, no doubt. What's important is to make sure that we, as individuals, will participate in that ultimate victory. And that is dependent on how much we engage with truth in this life, for the good of souls. Saint Paul tells the Galatians, "And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up." (Galatians 6:9)

And again, St. James extols us, "Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial. For when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him." (James 1:12) No one is guaranteed victory because of what's in his head or his heart alone. Victory comes through the actual fight in the real world.