According to many Christian theologians, Jesus, the moral Will of God, descended from a state of perfection to take on flesh and blood, with all the pain that goes with living and dying in time.  He did this to reveal Himself to the Jews.  A few saw Him as the embodiment of transcendent Perfection—God Himself.  Others saw Him as arrogant or demented—at the very least a casual blasphemer Who pretended for a while to be God.

Today, most of us know Him through remembered anecdotes and words—the way we know George Washington or Saint Francis.  Jesus is no abstraction—no god hidden behind the stars, no watchmaker who makes the watch and then steps back and admires the monotonous tick-tock of his handiwork.

It is important to understand that, according to the New Testament, God came down from Heaven in the trappings of humanity and revealed Himself to a particular people—the Jews.  Till that moment, He had tried the old carrot-and-stick approach, rewarding them when they behaved themselves, punishing them when they whored after strange gods.  Finally, He had made the ultimate sacrifice by allowing Himself to be born a Jew among Jews and to die at the hands of His own people.

Even His Ascension was designed to instruct them about His ultimate identity.  As anthropologists tell us patronizingly, the Jews worshiped a “sky god”—thus, the necessity for an Ascension.  Precisely.  You talk to people in a language they can understand.  In that last earthly act, He spoke one more time to the Chosen People and not, for example, to the Baalites, who worshiped an earth god.  It is impossible to ignore Jesus’s affinity for the Jews when He said, “O Jerusalem, . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”

An old piece of doggerel questions, then affirms God’s wisdom in this matter:

How odd of God

To choose the Jews.

Oh no it’s not.

He knows what’s what.

Indeed, He does.  Christianity spread all over Europe, at first as a sect within Judaism, yet soon enough as a major religion in its own right, the most influential in the history of the Western world.  God’s choice of the Jews—who are still the Chosen People—and His Incarnation as Jesus Christ tell us something profound about human nature—its frailty, its limitations.  In case you haven’t noticed, it’s hard to love Iranians as much as you love Americans.  It’s hard to love the New York Yankees if you’re from Boston.  It’s hard to love East Podunk if you’re from West Podunk, particularly on a football night.  It’s hard to love the folks next door as much as you love your own family.  And it’s hard to love your brothers and sisters as much as you love yourself.

Herodotus tells the story of two armies that meet en route to fight in the Persian Wars.  Curious about each other, they exchange information on customs.  One asks the other what they do with their dead.  We burn them, was the reply.  This response triggered revulsion.  So what do you do with your dead?  Why, we eat them, of course.

That’s a big part of the problem: doing basic things differently.

God created sex to bridge the gap between newlyweds in the process of discovering the subtle but maddening differences in their upbringing and values.  Imagine your horror when you find that your in-laws eat their dead.  A husband and wife may go to the same church, share the same political views, and want exactly the same number of children, yet still hate the other’s table manners or lack of orderliness or cross words in the morning.  I suspect that if it weren’t for sex, few marriages would survive the first week, when seemingly irrelevant issues begin to raise their ugly heads.  It’s important to remember that in extreme cases these little peccadilloes have been the sole motive for murder, like the man who strangled his wife the first week of their honeymoon because she burned his toast.  Those little things can get under your skin.

Now what’s the point of all this?

Today, we are ordered to embrace abstraction, the Community of Everybody, an amalgamation of hundreds of nationalities, organized around what Robert Frost called “the tenderer-than-thou collectivistic regimenting love with which the modern world is being swept.”  We are asked to sacrifice family, neighborhood, town, state, nation, on the lean prospect of experiencing a cozier, cuddlier love affair with, say, the 53 nations of Africa.

It’s difficult not to believe that the Bushes and Obamas are encouraging unbridled immigration to weaken the belief of Americans that we belong to one another in a special relationship that transcends mere locality or government or language—those accidental qualities that combine to make us a people apart from all other peoples.  According to Mexico’s ex-president Vicente Fox, the Bushes conspired with him to prepare the way for political and economic union.  Today, a majority of children in California’s public schools are Latinos.

Our current President tells foreign potentates that we are not a Christian nation, that we are too arrogant, that we should humble ourselves in the presence of other nations, in particular those who circumcise their women, keep them from books, and, on occasion, stone them to death on the strength of rumor.

“We are a nation of immigrants,” our leaders say, in a tone of voice reserved for quoting scripture.  The same people say “Islam is a religion of peace.”  And “America’s strength lies in its diversity.”  These statements are part of a catechism on the make, the doctrines of a rising faith that threatens to overcome memory and reason.

When large numbers have been involved, immigration has always been a painful experience—for the home folks as well as for the intruders.  Ask the Indians if they believe immigration was good for America.  Europeans brought them firewater; they, in turn, gave tobacco to Europe.  Thus each group gave the other the gift of death.

Sherman and Sheridan, after burning Southern houses and fields—and randomly killing Southern civilians—turned their attention to the Indians.  Sheridan famously said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”  And Sherman wrote of his intention “to prosecute the war with vindictive earnestness . . . till [the Indians] are obliterated or beg for mercy.”  He ordered his officers to kill squaws and papooses as well as braves.

The conflict between American Indian and European is an extreme example of the problems too often posed by immigration—the desire to maintain an existing culture: language, religion, and manners and customs surrounding such important matters as the relationship between the sexes; the owning of property; friendship; dress.  And the countervailing drive to instruct lesser breeds without the law in the niceties of the New World Order.  When the white man came wading ashore at Plymouth, wiser Indians checked their quivers to make sure they were filled with sufficient arrows to kill everyone aboard the Mayflower.  Only Squanto—the 17th-century equivalent of George W. Bush—was fool enough to help these Puritan invaders.  The rest of the tribe wished he had let them starve to death.

Today’s Squanto would bring about the tearing down of national borders, the adoption of a common currency, and a new morality based on international consensus.  I heard that a few years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev quietly called a meeting to rough out the tenets of a new world religion, a faith of convenience, one that would not get in the way of international trade.  Al Gore reputedly attended the meeting.  So did Squanto, sitting in the first row, grinning like a horse collar, a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in his back pocket, its pages still uncut.  Observers noted he was doing well, this Squanto, living like a Rockefeller on the income from his Nobel Prize.  You can be sure everybody at this meeting had a Nobel Prize.  After all, they’re handing them out in Stockholm like corn dogs at a county fair.  Obama earned his by flapping his mouth about fundamentally transforming America.  Squanto likewise earned his by betraying his people.

Let’s take another example: the “immigration” of Englishmen into Ireland.  As a consequence, the Irish were a captive of the British Empire from the 17th century until the early 20th century.  The Penal Laws, first passed in 1695, made it illegal for Roman Catholics (that is, most of the Irish) to own land, practice their religion, be educated, speak Gaelic, enter the professions, hold political office, engage in trade, and join the army.  Mostly, they planted and ate potatoes.

But they kept their heritage alive for some 300 years: their religion, their language, their folklore, their old ways.  That fierce, perennial resistance is noted in numerous songs and tales, including “The Wearing of the Green,” “The Rising of the Moon,” and “Galway Bay,” which contains this stanza:

For the strangers came and tried to teach us their ways,

And scorned us just for bein’ what we are.

But they might as well go chasin’ after moonbeams

Or light a penny candle from a star.

The Irish finally won their independence from Britain long before India, Burma, and the rest of the empire kicked free.  And they did so by holding on to a culture the British attempted to stamp out by a combination of intellectual bullying and cruelty over the better part of 300 years.  The potato crop was wiped out in the late 1840’s, and half a million Irish “sharecroppers” were evicted.  More than that died of starvation.  It was one of the great disasters in world history, and the immigrant British, who held all the good land and the power, did almost nothing to alleviate the horror.  A million and a half Irish immigrated to America, where they were treated with contempt: HELP WANTED—NO IRISH NEED APPLY.

A more recent example.  The Soviets migrated into Eastern European countries like Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, or at least the Red Army immigrated on behalf of the rest of Russia.  Like the Irish, these nations were ordered to surrender their history, culture, and hearts to the inevitability of Dialectical Materialism.  The schools taught Russian to all, as well as Marxist history, in some cases for as long as three and four generations.  You would think that in every case the result would have been whole nations of glassy-eyed automatons, thrilling to proletarian music and paintings of idealized workers, harvesting wheat or working in factories with beatific grins on their faces.  Stalin, you will recall, ordered Shostakovich to write choral music because it was more reflective of communism.

But when a crack appeared in the foundation of the Soviet Empire, the citizens of these Eastern European nations poured into the streets, waving old flags, singing old songs, their hearts pounding with the accelerated beat of an old, unforgotten patriotism.  Who would have suspected that such sentiments could survive the decades of dreary indoctrination?

Now, I am not suggesting that we huddle together in our own shrinking world and forget about, say, the 53 nations of Africa.  We have the parable of the Good Samaritan to goad us into pitying the tribe that every year follows the wildebeest on foot for a thousand miles, if only because, tired of walking, these folks eat nothing but wildebeest for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  How would we like it if circumstance forced us to eat Big Macs at every meal for the rest of our lives?  Also, the children of Sierra Leone are dying by the thousands—of preventable diseases like worms and malaria.  Some of us get frequent reports of deaths from a group of Anglican missionaries who have taken this sad burden on their shoulders, while nearby U.N. officials loll about in modern buildings and do nothing.  We live in a wicked world—and no one is more wicked than the minions of the Tower of Babel.  The churches need to do more.

That having been said, it should be clear that I believe it is difficult to form a community of strangers.  Or even of people who live in another city.  Or state.  Just as it is impossible to fall deeply in love with a mail-order bride.  The old saying “Out of sight, out of mind” makes a lot more sense than “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”  Willmoore Kendall said of a true community, “You have to be in hollering distance.”

The old affinity of flesh and blood that we feel for one another is basic to nature.  You find some loners in the wild, but not many.  Squirrels hang out with squirrels.  Blue jays hang out with blue jays.  Wildebeests in their frenetic journey up and down East Africa hang out with other wildebeests.  Scientists call this instinct “swarm intelligence.”

Maybe we, too, have swarm intelligence.  Whatever you want to call it, to form a community, we need to be in close proximity to one another, see each other frequently if not every day, speak the same language, embrace the same substantive view of society and the world, love the same things, and observe the same general code of conduct.

Immigration may have worked in conquering the American Indians, whose civilization survives in Hollywood movies and roadside stands.  But it didn’t work in Ireland or in Eastern Europe.  And if you fear that we will all end up as slaves of the Evil Empire—indistinguishable from all other peoples, Old Glory burned to a crisp, the Constitution and Declaration banned as pornographic, history again rewritten (this time to justify the omnipotence of the United Nations and not merely that of the United States)—then I bring you good tidings of great joy.  It will never happen.  Or if it does happen, it will last about 15 minutes.

The New World Order simply won’t work.  Even if philosopher-kings rule the United Nations—and we know in our bones that it will always be run by a gaggle of greedy witch doctors—the American people simply won’t stand for it.  They will rise up, and their rising will not necessarily be prompted by nobility or patriotism, or even by jingoism, but at the very least by a kind of childish petulance, grown to Brobdingnagian proportions, like spoiled brats denied their ice cream.  And if I’m wrong—if they don’t rise up—then, following our last sickening whimper, there won’t be anything left of the world worth salvaging.

In the meantime, we need to remember that even God was careful about the people He chose to live among.