By Colby Malsbury

Just as we were getting ready to pop the champagne on April 15^th to ring in the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, our ardor was dampened by the tragic news coming from Paris that the ancient landmark Notre Dame was ablaze, with its wooden medieval latticework and trademark spire completely gone at a minimum, along with who knows what else in the way of decor within. Perhaps a sadly apt metaphor as, of course, April 15^th was also Tax Day in the US.

The initial story being put forth is, unsurprisingly, that the fire was entirely accidental. Sure, why not? I was born yesterday. The incongruities regarding this line of reasoning began piling up almost immediately. The gamut ranged from an immediate moanfest from the Jewish Daily Forward lamenting all the treasure the Tribe lost in this holocaust to the amazingly ‘coincidental’ flurry of other iconic buildings that also mysteriously caught fire the last few days – from Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque to Brazil’s premier natural history museum to an attempted arson on St. Patrick’s Cathedral . It seems clear that this event was a major acceleration of the current meta-narrative regarding church desecration (and equally simulated ‘Christian’ reactions to same) in order to foment the chaos required for a phoenix of pagan internationalism to arise from the ashes. Indeed, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there is indeed a concerted push on now to transform Notre Dame into a modern-day French Revolution-era Temple of Reason… of which the Torch of Liberty was its most defining characteristic. Aren’t Cryptocratic riddles wonderful?

But that isn’t what this piece is about.

Rather, it is about the response to this burning from a sizable chunk of the Protestant community. A response that is quite frankly disgusting in its historical ignorance.

As could be expected, a certain subset of Protestantdom which doubtless looks upon the likes of John Brown as a freedom-fighter took this opportunity to engage in a little of that ol’ time (and remarkably tone-deaf) iconoclasm. Scarcely could their malicious glee be contained within a cloak of piety. Representative of the breed was a polemic poetically entitled ‘Good Riddance to the Notre Dame Cathedral’, put forth by ReformationCharlotte:

“It is reported that during the fire, some of the relics and statues have been saved and transported to another location. It is unclear as to which ones were saved, but one thing is for certain, Roman Catholic relics have been used to enslave people to the Roman Catholic Church and keep them in bondage for nearly 2000 years.

“Things to remember: as Bible-believing Christians, we understand that God is in control of all things. We also understand that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (James 4:6). The Roman Catholic Notre Dame Cathedral has stood in proud opposition to Biblical Christianity for nearly a millennium. God has sovereignly allowed this symbol to burn to the ground. Was this an act of judgment at the hands of God? It could be. One thing is for sure — in God’s mercy and grace, He didn’t take out multitudes of people with it. It is clear that God is giving idolaters, blasphemers, and haters of God a chance to repent and believe the true Gospel. In this opportunity for repentance, we rejoice.

“In the meantime, we should be thankful that this stronghold of Satan has been burnt to the ground”

Well, thank heavens a mollycoddled Murikan with access to WordPress and a plethora of synthesized seminary semantics clogging up his noodle saw fit to tell Truth to Power! Doubtless his zeal would have been every bit as avid had, say, St. Petersburg’s Grand Choral Synagogue gone up in smoke. Also, I’m glad to learn that the Reformation began in 70 AD. Perhaps we should burn all the works of that papist Augustine while we’re on a kick, too?

Of course, not all Protestants responded to the fire in the same way that Beavis and Butthead would have. Some saw fit to take on an air of noxious exaggerated detachment. Bojidar Marinov, the Groovy Ghoulie himself, set the standard for the rest of this wannabe-Sartre group to follow, on April 16:

“Oh, spare me the primitive nonsense, please. There is no symbolism in burning the Notre Dame. It’s just a building. If God meant to make that particular building his symbol, He’d have burned it in 1792. Yeah, it’s a shame that a beautiful building burned, and I lament the loss of beauty and art. But there is no “western civilization” symbolism in it. The Western civilization will survive and thrive even if all such buildings were burned, and it can go down the drain if all of them stood proud for millennia.

“If there is any civilizational lesson there, it is that the Western civilization has progressed so far in terms of building and fire safety codes. That’s all. Nothing more.

“So quit imposing your particular political bias and prejudice on history, please. Makes you all look like kindergarteners trying to figure out how a toy works.”

Thus the boorish Slav projects his latent jealousy that the most beautiful building in Bulgaria is some five-story gray concrete monstrosity of an apartment building that the Committee for State Security used for interrogations. But even this breathtaking example of callous utilitarian snobbery can’t compare with our reigning ‘he just doesn’t get it’ champion, Joel McDurmon. His entire commentary on Notre Dame, posted on Twitter, reads as follows:

“Why won’t the media talk about tragic loss to the insurance company?”

(And yes, the missing ‘the’ after ‘about’ is in the original.)

Thanks for that most prescient concern, doc. Was your father-in-law Gary North’s sovereign wealth fund heavily invested in Generali or something? This is a question that an unabashed materialist thinker like Lenin would ask. Though, admittedly, it is entirely in keeping with Gary North’s character as well. Birds of a feather, I guess.

Had this malevolent jeering been consigned to the rogues’ gallery, perhaps we could dismiss it as their latest hobbyhorse and move on. Alas, it is a position that also seems to be popular among a cadre of Southern nationalist Presbyterians as well. Oh, fool in thine conceit! The dividing line between iconoclasm and Jacobinism has always been an exceedingly fine one. Zealous iconoclasts seem to have the temperament of a Carrie Nation going gonzo with an axe on a barrel of cider, whether they be of the SJW or paleocon variety. Do these people see no connection between this wanton act of arson and the removal of the Lee and Jackson statues they rightfully claim to have been the opening gambit in a wider cultural war against Whitey? And how is their stance any less opportunistic than the giddiness demonstrated by fifth-column Methodists and Anglicans cheering on the Judeo-Bolshevik annihilation of Orthodox churches in the brand new Soviet Union of the 1920s? Does a hostility to the doctrine of theosis excuse rampant rapine against the progenitors of such? The tragedy befalling Notre Dame is not of the same scope, but it most certainly is related.

As for the halfhearted caveats proffered by these revolutionaries over the loss of so much ‘beauty and art’, they might as well have saved their Certs-saturated breath. Aesthetics removed from a theological underpinning is mere Dadaism, a urinal representing a fountain that is only somewhat more pleasing to the eye. In his Religion and Literature, T.S. Eliot made the point that “Those who talk of the Bible as a ‘monument of English prose’ are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.” Those Protestants who talk of Notre Dame as a piddling ‘monument of French architecture’ are doing the exact same thing. It is a ‘mere monument to papism’, this cathedral dedicated to God’s glory that sits on the site where no fewer than four previous cathedrals of antiquity (including one authorized by the Carolingians) had stood previously, having been aptly consecrated upon the ruins of a vanquished Roman shrine to Jupiter?¹ Such a history is hardly the stuff of the Borgias, let alone Vatican II. Any Protestant who refuses to take the wider view of this matter and see it for the tragedy that it is is admirably displaying the complete and utter contempt for history – past the general and short-sighted ‘process’ that Marxists insist is history’s scientific basis and the only justification for being a disciple of such – that has made materialist Murika the embarrassing drunk uncle of the world.

Look, I’m no ecumenist. Historic Polish synagogues and Cordoban mosques could be reduced to ashes, and I wouldn’t shed a tear over their demise. And may we ever be emboldened to anathematize Catholicism, including keeping their images and crucifixes out of our own churches. At issue here though is the continuing decimation of Christian Europe, and hence of our identity as a people. I think that’s worth something a little more sober than edgy jests on social media platforms. ‘Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set’, saith the Scriptures (Prov. 22:28). Tis not a stretch to presuppose that neither should we be ebullient over a removal of an ancient landmark that is out of our hands, whatever the agency used to bring about its end.

But iconoclasts are gonna do what they’re gonna do, so let me end this piece with a helpful suggestion. I am well assured that there remains a surfeit of egalitarian conceptual idols stinking up your churches at this current year, Protestants. Concentrate your undoubtedly impressive energies from purging them from among you, and leave the remnants of our past alone.