I’ve been on something of a Stephen King reading binge lately. Last week I posted an article on his novel Roadwork and the way in which this fallen world constantly inflicts suffering on people, grinding them down until they either collapse and surrender or erupt in a rage of retaliation as well as the hope to escape that found in the Restored Gospel. Just a few days ago I finished another of King’s works, his second ever published novel but surely one of his greatest – Salem’s Lot. And reading it I was shocked about how well it functions as a descriptor for the State and statism – the way that statist ideologies fool and deceive people into supporting authoritarian systems that do nothing but parasitically destroy the lives of the public. Here I will explain how vampirism functions as a great metaphor for statism and what truths can be learned from Salem’s Lot that can help us counter the spread of this parasitical ideology.
Book Review
Salem’s Lot is the story of the town of Jerusalem’s Lot (often abbreviated as ‘Salem’s Lot or just the Lot by locals), a fictional town set in the state of Maine in the United States. The main character, novelist Ben Mears, who had briefly lived in the town when he was a children, moves back to the Lot after the death of his wife Miranda. He is there to write a horror novel based on his experiences in a local haunted house, the Marsten House, when he was a child. From the very first it is impressed upon the reader that the Marsten House is not merely an old and decrepit house which spooks young children, it is in fact a locus of evil. If a church or a temple is considered hallowed ground because it contains the Divine Presence and everyday places are profane because things good and bad take place on them, then the Marsten House is a specifically infernal place, a place the very opposite of hallowed ground where the presence of evil is absolute and pervasive. It draws in evil and wicked things, acting as if it were the anti-hallowed ground of the Devil.
On his first day in town, Ben meets Susan Norton in a local park where she is reading one of his novels. After a casual conversation they begin dating and, over the course of the book, fall in love with one another. Ben, still suffering tremendously after the loss of his wife, begins to heal and it seems like good has come into his life in this small town he remembers and loves from his childhood. But it cannot last. Indeed, even as he is falling in love and things seem to be Good, the presence of Evil invade the town in the form of Kurt Barlow and Richard Straker, a Master Vampire and his human servant. Their arrival coincides almost immediately with the disappearance of one child, Ralphie Glick who is sacrificed by Straker to Satan, and Ralphie’s brother Danny who slowly dies of sudden anemia which the reader knows is because he is being fed upon and slowly transformed into a vampire himself.
From here a series of events are set off that eventually see the young but levelheaded Mark Petrie, the older and scholarly high school English teacher Matt Burke, his doctor Jimmy Cody, Ben Mears, the highly skeptical Susan Norton, and the local Catholic priest Father Donald Callahan. Yet as soon as this ka-tet has come together everything begins to unravel for them and for the Lot. King’s vampires have all the classic weaknesses that Stoker’s Dracula does – including being repelled by crosses, the inability to enter a home without permission, and they die when staked or dragged into direct sunlight. Unfortunately, they also have all the powers as well – including the ability to turn into mist, massive strength, immortality, and the ability to hypnotize people with their eyes and voice. As a result the poison of vampirism is able to spread quickly throughout the town as person after person is turned into a vampire as those already turned prey upon their social connections with others in order to gain invitation into their abodes only to feast upon them, adults and children alike.
Susan, refusing to accept that vampires exist because vampires can’t exist (not don’t, can’t) goes up to the Marsten House, which is where everyone knows Straker is living and where everyone agrees Barlow, the Master Vampire, must be in order to disprove the vampirism theory. She is quickly captured and turned while Mark, who she met up with on the way to the house, narrowly escapes after killing Straker. This motivates everyone else to invade the house in force only to find it abandoned except for Susan, now embraced as a vampire, and Ben is forced to stake her through the heart before she rises. Matt Burke dies of a heart attack, his body unable to handle the stress of what they are being called upon to do. Jimmy Cody dies after finding Barlow’s new hiding place due to a simple but ingenious trap. Father Callahan’s faith protects him momentarily in a confrontation with Barlow, but when he begins to doubt and fear his faith fails him and his forced to drink Barlow’s blood. This would normally have turned him into Barlow’s ghoul, his human slave, if not for Barlow’s death soon after. Callahan, alive but unclean and unholy, flees the Lot and doesn’t reappear in King’s work until The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla.
Their group reduced to two, Ben Mears and Mark Petrie try and go to local police for help. The town constable, despite knowing full well that his town is being attacked by vampires, flatly refuses to help them. Instead he is packing up and leaving town before sundown, abandoning it to the forces of darkness and evil within it. (This alone is a powerful and important truth about the way the State truly works as opposed to the propaganda it feeds us about how it promises to work. As always, it is left up to the individual to act and actually make things better in the world while the government fails to do even the most basic things it promises to do.) This leaves Ben and Mark to beard the lion in his den all on their own. Invading the Master Vampire Barlow’s new sanctum and using the holy powers of sanctified water and crosses to counter the powers of darkness they manage to stake and kill Barlow just before sunset. They are only able to escape thanks to the use of holy water to hold off Barlow’s servants until Ben and Mark can get to their car and drive away from the town. In the story’s epilogue they return to the Lot and start a fire which, we learn in the sequel short story On the Road, ravages the town and manages to kill most, but not all, of the vampires. Seemingly the ones left are some of the weakest and stupidest ones which behave more like animals than intelligent beings.
In terms of writing, this book is definitely one of King’s best and it is well worth reading by anyone interested in fiction, not just horror fiction. It is really engaging and pulls you into the story quickly. King does so well at making slice of life stories – like a guy falling in love with a woman and meeting her parents – so interesting that you actively forget that what you’re reading a horror story. And he does a great job at contrasting his supernatural evil with the story of regular old banal human evil (his overall vampire story vs. vignettes in the book of a mother violently abusing her baby) that it twists your insides . It breaks the fantasy of the story in a way that is just as horrible, if not worse, than the vampire tale because it is possible and undoubtedly happening closer to you than you think. The sense of foreboding and tension builds well throughout the story and his descriptions of the vampire deaths is realistic in their brutality. I highly recommend it as a novel and, as I said before and lay out below, many of the aspects of the story serve as apt metaphors for the reality of human politics.
The State is a Vampire
As I said before, I was struck by how well his story, characters within it, and vampirism itself works as a metaphor for Statism. In connecting vampirism with politics I know I am not making an especially unique observation. Rightists have been compared to zombies and Leftists have been compared to vampires by many people for decades now (Vampire Nation, a book about Communist vampires in Romania, is a favorite.) Despite its popularity though I feel like it has a fatal intellectual flaw – namely that Rightists and Leftists are more alike than they are different. As G.K. Chesterton noted, yesterday’s Progressive is today’s Conservative and yesterday’s Progressive politics is the tradition that today’s Conservative strives to uphold. To employ other metaphors, they’re the two sides of the same coin, the two wings on the same bird. That coin, that bird, is Statism and its means and purposes are the same no matter which feathers you ruffle or which side the coin lands upon. They’re not vampires and zombies, Leftists and Rightists are both vampires because all Statism is vampirism.
Consider how a vampire survives. A vampire, like Kurt Barlow, does not do work himself. He does not go out and get a job working the docks, digging ditches, or working as the night manager of the local grocery store. No, the vampire is meant to lead and to rule. The vampire therefore spreads its infection which turns everyone else into its servant. As the ruler the vampire then extorts wealth, land, and sustenance from the public claiming for itself the sole authority. The vampire either co-opts or violently destroying anyone who challenges it or resists it. The vampire trades your life for its power, you die to ensure its continued domination. And its rule is singular and sovereign, it allows for no other equal authorities to claim any power. All authority and power flows from the center, from the vampire itself.
In Salem’s Lot there are two apparent types of vampires – the Master Vampire and the lesser vampire made by the Master to execute the Master’s will. With the guiding intelligence of the Master Vampire the lesser vampires can be a dangerous force spreading not just their vampirism but the slavery it entails as all those turned by a Master of the Master’s childer become servants of the Master him/herself. Without the guiding intelligence of the Master Vampire all the lesser vampires are more animal than person. They hunt, they feed, they defend their territory, but rarely do they develop complex plans that would allow them to expand their power or control. It is clear that vampirism, once it has infected the host, reduces their intelligence drastically and turns them into the extension of the will of the Master and the loss of the Master upsets the ability of the vampire to function in any significant way.
Is this not how the State functions?
From ancient times to the modern day, the State is largely the same. The State is an ideological apparatus, a form of government that enables an elite class of people in control of the levers of power to gain and maintain their rule over the masses through brute force (Weber’s “monopoly on violence”) so that they can continue to extract the wealth of the public from it to line the pockets of those in power. No politician creates anything beautiful, invents anything useful, or provides any service that cannot be better obtained through private means. They don’t work. They dictate to us and demand we obey and thank them for their domination. What they do is use the taxation powers of the state to steal the money of the public and redistribute it to those in power and their politically connected cronies. The lifeblood of the poor, their money and their wealth, is taken and they are left drained of their vitality, their ability to improve their lives weakened and stultified. Even those programs supposedly designed to help the poor in reality only leave them more anemic, victims of the ravenous and eternal hunger for money those in power have.
In a very real way this is comparable to a vampire stealing the life of its victims by draining their blood. Money represents the results of your blood, seat, tears, and strength – a manifestation of the value you have used your physical labor to produce. Taking it *is* taking away a portion of your life. Taxation in a very real way steals your life from you leaving you weaker than you would have otherwise been if you hadn’t been drained by the Parasitic State. And it isn’t just money, the State demands the power to drain from you anything about your beliefs, lifestyle, and culture – anything it finds “objectionable”- it will take from you, leaving you a hollowed and brutalized shell in its image. Just as vampires take everything from a person and turn them into extensions of the Master Vampire’s will and instinct, so too does the State seek to crush and destroy individuals and individualism in order to remake all of society after its own image and its own ways. Anyone who has been a religious, sexual, national, or racial minority knows exactly what I am talking about. All those horrors and oppressions you can think of, the systemic abuse, and torture? Notice that they’re all just that – systemic. Without the system, without the State, they are impossible. This is why the smaller the state the better and best of all is no state at all. Anarchy, libertarianism, voluntaryism, these are surer protections for the life, liberty, and property of any and all than any statist (“state-ist”) system ever concocted.
Like the Master Vampire, those in power claim the ultimate authority on law and morality, dictating from on high what people may and may not think, say, or do. These edicts those in power call “law” though their orders are no such thing. Those in power centralize all control to themselves and anyone who challenges that authority face crippling, crushing, even lethal punishment from the state and its enforcers. They cripple the ability of people and society to function without the authority and direction of those in power as it regulates and organizes every level of human life. Like the vampire Barlow in Salem’s Lot whose first victims are children – one sacrificed for Barlow’s power and the other converted to Barlow’s servant by being embraced – the State takes aim at the young first and foremost. In childhood they train us to think we need them and that without them we would be lost and through that learned helplessness make it harder to even envision, much less build, build a free society liberated from their rule. They infect us with the statist ideology that teaches us to be subservient to the statist apparatus of power even as it slaughters people worldwide and oppresses us at home. They thereby turn us into inferior vampires, running around defending, justifying, and enabling the Master Vampires in power. When they are threatened they will demand that you and your children suffer, bleed, and die for them – human sacrifices made at the idolatrous Altar of the State to ensure that the apparatus of power continues to exist and that they maintain their positions in it. Whether killed through the military’s war on foreigners or the domestic security forces (aka the police) and their war on the public, the State is only maintained by oppressing, weakening, and killing you.
Billy Corgan may have argued that the world is a vampire, but the reality is that the State is the vampire and the world is its victim.
This, by the way, is a message that Salem’s Lot makes very directly. In a discussion between protagonists Ben Mears and Susan Norton, she says that the idea that vampires exist, “is lunacy,” to which Ben responds, “Yes, like Hiroshima.” (pg. 492, e-book version) and he sticks by that comparison when challenged on it. The American State infamously carried out the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and since then eight other countries have gained the wicked and sinful power to murder entire civilizations and exterminate all life on Earth. Think about what the novel is saying with this exchange between Ben and Susan comparing the State, symbolized in all its violent might by the American State, with Vampirism. Barlow the vampire is a monster, a creature of darkness which literally worships Satan and seeks nothing but to corrupt the world and twist all to its service, destroying anything good in it. As we will see from Barlow’s interactions with Father Callahan below, the vampire isn’t just unholy it is the complete antithesis of holiness and, being Evil (note the capital E) is absolutely rejected by God. So, what then are we to understand about the State by this equating of it to something completely and purely diabolical? Vampirism and the State are the same – both infernal, both Satanic, both Evil. This comparison has been made in scripture as well with John the Revelator comparing the kingdoms of the world with a great Beast, a monster in service of the Antichrist, the Prophet of Satan.
The State vs. God
Father Donald Callahan is a unique figure in King’s fiction. He is a faithful, God-fearing, people loving Roman Catholic priest. And he desperately wants to stand up to evil, not just the small e “mindless, moronic evils of everyday life” but the “EVIL” personified in Satan, the cosmic evils given real form which he could battle face to face. (pg. 343-348, e-book edition) When asked to bring some of the Host to an investigation of the possibly vampire infested Marsten House, Father Callahan responds giving a description of the power and purpose of the Church that establishes the role and purpose of religion in the book itself, explaining why it can so powerful and easily destroy even the most powerful vampires such as Barlow:
‘I’m not going to say no, not at this point,’ Callahan said. ‘And I ought to tell you that if you’d gotten a younger priest, he probably would have said yes almost at once, with few if any qualms at all.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘They view the trappings of the church as symbolic rather than practical-like a shaman’s headdress and medicine stick. This young priest might decide you were crazy, but if shaking a little holy water around would case your craziness, fine and dandy. I can’t do that. If I should proceed to make your investigations in a neat Harris tweed with nothing under my arm but a copy of Sybil Leek’s The Sensuous Exorcist or whatever, that would be between you and me. But if go with the Host… then I go as an agent of the Holy Catholic Church, prepared to execute what I would consider the most spiritual rites of my office. Then I go as Christ’s representative on earth.’ He was now looking at Matt seriously, solemnly. ‘I may be a poor excuse for a priest – at times I’ve thought so – a bit jaded, a bit cynical, and just lately suffering a crisis of… what? faith? identity? … but I still believe enough in the awesome, mystical, and apotheotic power of the church which stands behind me to tremble a bit at the thought of accepting your request lightly. The church is more than a bundle of ideals, as these younger fellows seem to believe. It’s more than a spiritual Boy Scout troop. The church is a Force… and one does not set a Force in motion lightly.’
Salem’s Lot, pgs. 666-667, e-book edition
In the story this Force manifests in numerous ways. Crosses, for example, repel vampires even if the holder of the Cross is not particularly faithful himself or even a Christian. The same is true of holy water which can hold vampires at bay or, when doused upon a weapon such as an ax, could turn it into a holy weapon vibrant with the elemental power of the universe and able to cut through the darkness and all that protected evil. One of my favorite examples of this power comes when the group decides to go after the vampires who are holed up in the Marsten House. Father Callahan, having the existence of vampires proven to him, is dressed in his stole and priestly garments, carrying a cross and the Host, the blessed Body of Christ. He is, as he says in the paragraph above, come as Christ’s representative on Earth. And he will not allow evil to bar their way. When the group arrives at the Marsten House they find it locked against them and Ben Mears says they’ll have to break the front door down. Father Callahan says that won’t be necessary, walks up to the front door, and then this occurs:
In the last moments he did not lead them so much as he was impelled.
‘In the name of God the Father!’ he cried, and his voice took on a hoarse, commanding note that made them all draw closer to him. ‘I command the evil to be gone from this house! Spirits, depart!’ And without being aware he was going to do it, he smote the door with the crucifix in his hand. There was a flash of light-afterward they all agreed there had been-a pungent whiff of ozone, and a crackling sound, as if the boards themselves had screamed. The curved fanlight above the door suddenly exploded outward, and the large bay window to the left that overlooked the lawn coughed its glass onto the grass at the same instant.
Salem’s Lot, pg. 725, e-book edition
There are numerous things to appreciate about these paragraphs, whether you happen to be Catholic, Orthodox, a Latter-day Saint, Protestant, or some other religion. Churches, religions, and faiths are not simply Boy Scout Troops, gatherings of likeminded individuals looking to be nice and do some basic charity works in an unobtrusive and inoffensive manner. Religion is about cosmic truth and universal powers that define existence and serve as the foundation for human existence – the “Power… move[s] the greatest wheels of the universe.” (pg. 898, e-book edition) To rebel against these forces always puts one out of step with the true nature of reality and leaves one isolated from the truth of reality. You do not bargain with God or Gods, you do not rebel against the nature of reality, you submit completely. The way these powers manifest in human society and provide the guidance humans need in order to place themselves in harmony with reality is through the religious movement – the sect, church, or religion in question. The church then is the conduit of power through which God or the Gods interact in human life – a source of Force and Power which undercuts all other claims to truth and authority. When one is most in touch with this cosmic truth it fills them in ways that astounds them, enlightens, and uplifts them, an experience which the individual can recognize as originating from without his or her self. Christians talk about this as the influences of the Holy Spirit, and Father Callahan in the last paragraph above is a great example of this in action, but various religions recognize this idea in some form – for example the way the loa possess practitioners in vaudou. In religion transcendent Pure Truth which supersedes all human authority is communicated from the eternal cosmic reality to the individual – from God/the Gods to you – and humans are commanded to follow this Truth no matter what other people say or want.
This, of course, the State cannot abide. Enter the Vampire.
After the scene last described above there is a confrontation between the Master Vampire Barlow and Father Callahan in the kitchen of the teen Mark Petrie’s home. Having escaped the Marsten House before the group arrives, Barlow waits until nightfall and then attacks Mark Petrie’s parents. Just before Barlow arrives, Father Callahan and Mark try to explain what is really happening in the town and the danger of vampires, but his father will not listen. Henry Petrie, the father, is well-educated man of rationality whose logic which is “complete and seamless, and his world was machined to a point of almost total precision,” who is “confident in himself and in the natural laws of physics, mathematics, economics, and (to a slightly lesser degree) sociology.” Everything can be explained, everything can be reduced to formulae and statistics. Everything is scientific and precise. Like Susan Norton who can’t imagine vampires could be real because that just isn’t how the world works, Henry Petrie pronounces them, “Impossible,” and won’t hear anything else. (pgs. 758-759, e-book edition) His refusal to listen goes right up to the moment that Barlow bursts through his window and murdered him and his wife by slamming their heads together so powerfully that their faces collapsed inwards and they died from the trauma.
Father Callahan is only able to ward off Barlow by holding his cross out. Filled with a power that vibrates through Callahan himself, it glows in the dark and holds the vampire at bay. Barlow though has a hostage, he has his claws around the throat of young Mark Petrie, ready to rip out his throat if Father Callahan comes any closer. The mere mention of God causes Barlow excruciating pain and he demands that Father Callahan stop or Barlow will kill the teen. Barlow’s price for freeing the child is that Father Callahan throw down his cross, something Father Callahan agrees to, and Mark Petrie is set free. After being encouraged to do so by Father Callahan, Mark flees the house and the confrontation with Barlow turns against Father Callahan. Alone, in the darkness, standing against the crushing and overwhelming power of the Master Vampire and his rage, Father Callahan begins to become afraid. He refuses to throw down the cross because he worries that it is the thing itself that matters. As his fear grows his faith falters and fails him. Barlow’s explanation of why is enlightening:
You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross… the bread and wine… the confessional… only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. If you had cast the cross away, you should have beaten me another night. In a way, I hoped it might be so. It has been long since have met an opponent of any real worth. The boy makes ten of you, false priest.
Salem’s Lot, pg. 776, e-book edition
Father Callahan isn’t killed. Instead he is forced to drink Barlow’s blood. He then has to flee lest he become the servant of the Master Vampire. Ultimately, the only thing which saves him is the death of Barlow in the climax of the novel at the hands of Ben Mears and Mark Petrie. In The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, Father Callahan faces a similar situation. He and the boy Jake have burst in upon a group of vampires and Father Callahan, faith restored, is holding them back with his gold cross while Jake escapes to complete their mission. His faith is so strong that merely touching one of the monsters with the cross (here they are not strictly vampires, but taheen – humanish creatures which similarly serve Evil) causes it to dissolve beneath the might of “the bauble of the Sheep-God.” (pg. 14) Ultimately, Father Callahan dies rather heroically, having realized the power of self-sacrifice and being fearless even in the face of his own earthly demise. He knows that he dies for a greater cause and goes to a greater reward.
The White Commands You by Michael Whelan
All of this is a great parable for where we stand in relation to the State.
As Dr. Carl Jung explains well in his book The Undiscovered Self, (and explored by me here) religion provides a realm of authority, power, and morality that supersedes the power of the State. Those who are truly religious will deny the authority and commands of the government when they believe those commands violate the commands of their God or Gods. In the face of this challenge to its authority the State responds in three ways: It uses the violence it controls to destroy it, it uses its mastery of statistical science to diminish it and convert people to the beliefs of the State (turning all of us into Henry Petrie), or finally, like Father Callahan being forced to drink Barlow’s blood, the State infects religion with the beliefs of the State and thereby turns religion into the servant of the State. Only true dedication to the Faith can counter these powerful forces. The symbols, relics, and social aspects of religion are all nice and needed and helpful when used correctly as channels to help us build a relationship with God. But, when we place our faith in symbols, relics, and social relationships then our faith, like Father Callahan’s in his cross, will be weak, built on the wrong thing, void of a true relationship with God, and ultimately will fail us in our most desperate hour of need. When we are facing the dark, challenging Evil directly, our faith in things will never be enough. Not even our beliefs will save us. As Dr. Jung explains:
It is not ethical principles, however lofty, or creeds, however orthodox, that lay the foundations for the freedom and autonomy of the individual, but simply and solely the empirical awareness, the incontrovertible experience of an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship between man and an extramundane authority which acts as a counterpoise to the “world” and its “reason.”
…The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass. Merely intellectual or even moral insight into the stultification and moral irresponsibility of the mass man is a negative recognition only and amounts to not much more than a wavering on the road to the atomization of the individual. It lacks the driving force of religious conviction, since it is merely rational.
The Undiscovered Self, pgs. 15 & 16
When you lack a relationship with God mere beliefs will not give you the strength to endure. What you believe is merely a rational choice and like all rational decisions can be argued against depending entirely on what evidence you choose to accept or discount. How many have lost faith because it is easier to go along and be convinced by what those around tell you are the “facts” and tell you that you are an idiot for not accepting? How many want to risk looking like a stupid individual? It is far easier to lose your individuality and become part of the crowd, to join those “pointing the finger of scorn” (1 Nephi 8:33) at those who dare to be different. Far better to drink the blood of the vampire, to allow yourself to be impregnated with the ideals and morality of the State, while keeping the empty trappings of religion. Without truth faith, without a relationship to God, religion and its symbols will never be enough.
But when you do have a faith-filled living relationship with Living God (or the Gods) then nothing can stand against you or control you. This is demonstrated in Father Callahan’s ultimate triumph in The Dark Tower VII. Filled with faith the monsters he fought could not cow him or control him. He accomplishes his mission and fulfills his purpose. True, he dies, but only his body is destroyed. His spirit continues onward and achieves Life greater than he knew ever before. In the face of his faith those who tried to defeat him lost even as he died. This is a great lesson to us as well. The State can only control you when you fear it and its means. When you no longer do it cannot dominate you, control you, or compel you. Freedom and liberty unquenchable have become yours. And if we as people understood this then the State, like the vampires of Salem’s Lot and the taheen of the Dixie Pig before the Cross, would curl up, shrink away, and ultimately be destroyed. The one power the State has, the power to use its violence to terrorize us into subservience to it, would be ripped from it in the Light of God and the assurance of eternal life. Like a stake through the heart of the vampire, the loss of this control over us would doom the State and all its political operators to the garbage heap of history.
Final Thoughts
Salem’s Lot is one of Stephen King’s best works. But it isn’t only that. It is an apt parable for the relationship of the individual to the State. The State is a parasite, a vampire, which wants to consume you. It seeks to infect everyone with its beliefs in order to turn us into its servants so that it can feast upon us, our labor, and our lives. Like every master, the Master Vampire of the State promises that its rule will be beneficial, but the end goal is the same. We end up as servants to the Masters while our life is being drained away from us by their policies. The only way to survive is to turn and become bloodsuckers ourselves, feasting on the lives of others through the programs the State runs. This ultimately destroys our individuality, turns us into servants of those in power, and steals from us our liberty. The only opposition to this can be found in religion because religion provides a source of truth and foundation for society that supersedes the will, power, and arguments of men.
The power of true faith – that is faith not founded in the symbolic trappings of religion or the society of believers but is rooted in a deeply personal relationship with God or the Gods – provides the ultimate bulwark against the depredations and degradations of the State and its bloodsucking lackeys. Religion’s teaching of absolute eternal truths allows us to banish the indoctrination, propaganda, and lies fed to us through the State’s “public” schools and mass media. Ultimately, we win the victory over the powers of the State because our Faith defeats their fearmongering. Whether we live like Ben Mears and Mark Petrie or die like Father Callahan we refuse to submit and in the face of that refusal to bow we cannot be forced to kneel. The State can only kill us, but even in that our defiance is absolute and the State is denied what it needs most to continue to exist – our submission. Because religion teaches us about what comes after death and how to live so that we will love that next stage of existence the fear of death holds less or even no power over us. If so martyred we serve as lights for others to follow. If not then we stand as the vanguard of liberty resisting the edicts of those in power. In either situation the State loses. And the more who stand against the State and refuse to obey it, the more it shrinks away until finally, like Barlow in Salem’s Lot, it is reduced to dust.