The Middle Ages weren’t all bad.

There was a beauty in what C.S. Lewis called “The Discarded Image,” the orderly cosmology that connected the heavenly bodies with our own bodies and with Heaven itself (until science displaced these connections with facts, as Lewis acknowledged). And there was virtue in the bravery, devotion, and knightly character that Tolkein drew on for his Lord of the Rings books. But the Middle Ages also gave us bad things – gargantuan inequality, rat-borne diseases, arbitrary power. The bad things died out or were corrected by the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment. Religion could flourish again, but only as a “sanctuary,” divided and restrained under a system of secular democracy, with the consent of the governed.

It would be a very useful project for some seminarian or theologian to point out all the ways that the Bible, from Genesis to Revelations, supports today’s secular democracy by way of human dignity, freedom, and an earth-loving kingdom-come.

These days, the President and his henchmen – like the four knights who broke into Canterbury Cathedral to murder Archbishop Becket in 1170 – want to bring back all the bad things about the Middle Ages, including a supposed unity of Faith. They are busy tearing down the long, hard work of the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment.

It is easier to tear down, apparently, than to build up.