“We were made for union with God in Heaven. But on this earth, we were made for fighting,” writes Catholic commentator and political activist Austin Ruse in his new book, Under Siege: No Finer Time to Be a Faithful Catholic. He makes a call to arms for Catholics and other defenders of human life and the family.

“I urge my fellow Catholics and all Christians not to miss this extraordinary time,” Ruse writes with shades of Shakespeare’s Henry V. “Our descendants will envy it just as we envy the time of our founding generation, the generation of the Civil War, and the Greatest Generation.”

Ruse’s allies might well sympathize with the English army at Agincourt in 1415, for today has effectively arisen an “established State Church of exactly the kind that our [American] Founders feared.” Therein “abortion, contraception, and sexual perversion are all sacraments of the sexual Left” in whose name the “new priests of the new religion have gotten as powerful as the priests of Baal once were.” Clerisy members dominate the “federal government and all its terrible might, the mainstream news media, rich men and women, rich foundations, the entertainment industry, and powerful nongovernmental organizations” like Planned Parenthood.

Drawing upon the analysis of Pat Fagan, director of Catholic University’s Marriage and Religion Research Initiative, Ruse notes disturbing parallels between the past Muslim Ottoman Empire and the new faith. “Christian children were once kidnapped by the sultan and turned into an elite army called Janissaries whose job it was to destroy Christian communities,” he writes. Similarly, modern public “schools are also teaching your kids to hate Christianity and their own country.”

The results are graphic, Ruse notes. “Sex-ed has become practically pornographic” as five-year-old children learn about things like oral sex. “Kids get ‘trans’ stuff in history now, and literature, and all the other disciplines. There is nowhere to hide,” even if parents might have opt-out options for sexual education.

Beyond the schoolhouse academia is no better, for in effect “modern liberal arts schools have become religious schools” of evangelists for the dark side. Herein lies philosophical weakness, for the “new orthodox are typically unable to defend their positions effectively.” Hence the need to silence “heretics”--  because their rational arguments cannot be defeated.   

The media has moved in tandem with academia. “It is increasingly difficult to publish in any newspaper, large or small anything critical of homosexuality,” Ruse claims. In 1995 the New York Times mentioned the word “transgender” twice (one in a letter to the editor), but in 2016, 1,166 times -- three stories daily..

Ruse documents how the business world has undergone a complete LGBT takeover. He suspects considerable opportunism on the part of corporations who fear a backlash from rainbow warriors. “Czech writer Václav Havel recalls shop owners’ displaying Soviet symbols in their windows, not because they believed in communism, but simply as the cost of doing business,” Ruse notes.

Under civilian control, even the “military turns out not to be one of the hardest targets for State Church ideologues to conquer, but rather one of the softest targets,” Ruse notes. “It is a rare to encounter a high-ranking military officer who is not weak and political. Most have their eyes trained primarily on their next promotion.” Unsurprisingly, post-operative trans people serve even when lifelong needs for hormones that require refrigeration, often unavailable in warzones, make them undeployable.

The Catholic “Church is the only institution that has stood solidly against the agenda, and now the religion, of the sexual Left,” Ruse argues. “Most, if not all, of our society’s deadly aggression is aimed at the Catholic Church.” But even this rock has human infirmities, as many bishops “are careerists who want only to achieve that inviting red hat. Others are likely cowards who do not have the stuff to stand up to the State Church.” Abusive homosexual priests have provoked morally and financially ruinous scandals.

Yet Christian believers are sorely needed, for America’s “Great Awokening” is ultimately a spiritual crisis, Ruse says. “The story told by the elite that this is secular age is quite frankly nonsense.” In a 2019 Pew survey, only 21 percent of self-described “nones” without any religious affiliation confessed to being atheist.

America “is now in the grip of the old and vicious false gods that have tormented humanity from the very beginning,” Ruse observes while drawing astonishing analogies between the modern West and its Graeco-Roman forebears. Modern “society is drenched in sex, obsessed with sex,” a “striking resemblance to the classical world,” where Rome hosted pornographic parades. Ironically, the parallels inspire him, for Christians “have already fought these same battles—and won.”

Ruse disagrees with “retreatists” like Rod Dreher, who has proposed a “Benedict Option” -- withdrawal from a post-Christian society into a faithful subculture. Ruse finds that “fear seems to animate Dreher.” He believes that “there is no withdrawal or tactical retreat from the dominant culture.”

Ruse is confident that the truth about the Declaration of Independence’s “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” will set societies free, irrespective how daunting the followers of the age might be. In the Old Testament, he reminds his readers, “Gideon’s army was tiny too, only three hundred men. God seems to like giving us long odds. It forces us to remember to give Him the glory, when we succeed.” As Thomas Paine wrote in the American Revolution’s dark hours, “there are times that try men’s souls”. We live in such times, Ruse suggests, and as they won, so shall we.