Socialists Don't Sleep-Christians Must Rise or America Will Fall; Worshipping the State-How Liberalism Became Our State Religion; Mises on the worship of the state or statolatry

Amazon:

“Socialists Don’t Sleep is about all the sneaky ways the secular left has pressed socialism into American politics and life – and why Christians are the only ones who can stop it.

Socialists Don’t Sleep tells how America has gone from a country of rights coming from God, not government, to a country that embraces socialism -- where the government’s now expected to pretty much provide from cradle to grave. Cheryl K. Chumley, award-winning journalist and contributing editor to The Washington Times, explains how to return the country to its glory days of God-given, and why Christians, more than any other group, are best equipped to lead the way.”

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Amazon:

'“Many Christians feel that they are being opposed at every turn by what seems to be a well-orchestrated political and cultural campaign to de-Christianize every aspect of Western culture. They are right, and it goes even further back than the Obama Administration.

In Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion, Benjamin Wiker argues that it is liberals who seek to establish an official state religion: one of unbelief. Wiker reveals that it was never the intention of the Founders to drive religion out of the public square with the First Amendment, but secular liberals have deliberately misinterpreted the establishment clause to serve their own ends: the de-Christianization of Western civilization.

The result, they hope, is government as the new oracle. Personal faith in a deity is replaced with collective dependence on government, and the diversity of religious practices and dogmas is reduced to a uniform ideological agenda. The liberal strategy is two-pronged: drive religion out of the public square, and then, in religion's place, erect the Church of the State to fill the human need for a higher power to look up to.

But what was done can be undone. Outlining a simple, step-by-step strategy for disestablishing the state church of liberalism, Worshiping the State shows the full historical sweep of the war to those on the Christian side of the cultural battle--and as a consequence of this far more complete vantage, how to win it.”

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Mises on the worship of the state or statolatry (1944)

A theme in Mises' writings is his critique of “the worship of the state”, which he also called “etatism” or “statolatry.” By this he meant the belief that the rulers of the state and their bureaucrats were more knowledgeable than others, less prone than ordinary people to allow their personal interests to overshadow their civi duty, accountable to a higher moral order, justified in using force against others to achieve the goals of “society”, and so on. Hence, they should be treated as godlike in their powers and virtue. One can trace his use of the words from the Theory of Money and Credit (1912) and Socialism (1922) at the time of WW1, where “etatism” was the preferred term, to WW2 and its immediate aftermath when he introduced the word “statolatry” in Omnipotent Government (1944), Bureaucracy (1944), and Human Action (1949) as a harsher way of saying the same thing. The key point for Mises is the distinction between the State’s way of carrying out its affairs, and the the way things are done in the free market. The former “means coercion and compulsion”, the latter means cooperation and peaceful exchange. In the modern era, Mises points out, the presence of democratic governments does not alter the fundamental equation as “majorities are no less exposed to error and frustration than kings and dictators.” He concludes that we must not forget that, like monarchs who ruled by divine right, “The individuals who form the majority are not gods, and their joint conclusions are not necessarily godlike.”

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