We throw the word radicalized around constantly now.
It is what we say about people we have decided we are done with, and it almost always means something closed, someone who has turned away from us and turned dangerous.
But a person can be changed all the way down to the root without being dragged anywhere near that - and being changed at the root can just as easily mean you have finally come home to something.
Because if I am honest, the word fits me.
I am radicalized - by the West.
By what it was built and raised upon. By the thoughts and ideas my ancestors kept refining and died defending, the very bedrock of what I am and where I come from. And the longer I look at it, the less willing I am to let any of it go. To move. Or negotiate.
I am radicalized by the simple idea that there is a Truth, and that you are allowed freely to go looking for it, that the world holds together in a way the mind can actually reach, and that I was given reason and language for exactly that, so I could ask, doubt, and find my own way. It is what The Ancients called Logos, The Word and the Meaning behind all things - and the strange part of that gift is that it closes nothing. It opens. To a path. A Way to orient and live life more fully.
I am radicalized by Freedom, not as a word you shout in a square, but as the plain - and heavy - fact of being able to choose wrong and still be the one who chose. Because a freedom that cannot fail is no freedom at all.
I am radicalized by Love, which asks nothing in return.
I am radicalized by Justice, which can see exactly what a person has done and never forget that he is still a person - coming down hard on the deed while holding a shield over the one who did it.
I am radicalized by Truth, which is no truer for the crowd nodding along and no less true when standing completely alone.
I am radicalized by Beauty, not as ornament laid on top of the True, but as the true made visible. The old conviction that the beautiful does not Lie, that it points beyond itself toward the One who gave it form.
I am radicalized by the quiet fact that a Human grows whole and healthy by finding his own place rather than clawing his way to it - and that love for my neighbor only turns real where it begins to cost me something.
I am radicalized by the thought that every single person bears an image that means something in itself. Dignity. Value. Imago Dei. Not because a state has granted it, not because a majority has voted it into being, but because it was set there before any of them had a say, and cannot be taken out without something essential leaving with it.
I am radicalized by the line the West drew around Power itself. The refusal to let ANY power become the last word. No King, no Party, no Order, no Movement gets to be God. The deepest thing the West ever did was to draw that line - and hold it. To say render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's, and so to fence off a room inside the Human that no power ever may enter.
Every Tyranny worth the name has tried to tear that fence down, because a power that cannot reach all the way into the soul can always be answered, judged, refused, outlived. That is the whole secret of the open road. Where no earthly thing is allowed to be ultimate, the book can never quite be closed, and the pen stays in your own hand.
The Order we live in, the West, is built on exactly that.
Not on one arty or one era, but on the Open Truth and that Image of the Human - and it is the whole reason you get to speak your mind, turn around, be wrong, and start over. And beneath all of it, older than any order, the freedom to fall and still be saved by Grace.
The West is an open road. You can see where you are going, you can stop, you can walk back and try again.
And that is where I will not be moved. Not because I am closed, but because the one thing I am holding on to, is the only thing holding everything else open.
When someone comes along wanting to trade the open road for something already written to the last page, and calls it 'progress' or 'freedom' or 'safety for my own sake' - I say no, because I can tell a road from a book.
I do not move because a closed order arrives from outside and means to colonize the house from within, and I do not move because a godless technocracy, fluent in the language of justice and loyal only to money, turns up promising to free me from my own inheritance as though it were a shackle on my foot. The one would overwrite the house, the other would hollow it out while it talks of progress, and each hands me the same closed book to sign.
That inheritance is not a shackle. It is the ground under my feet.
So yes, call me radicalized. I have been carried all the way down to the root of something that points up and out - not in and down.
An open road is one you can always turn around on, and that, in the end, is what Christianity is. A liberation of the Human. A way of living where you are freed from religion, and where the heart, once it has been surrendered and given over, never walks the road alone - because the road turns out to be Someone, and He walks every step of it with you.
As a living breathing relation to Truth, to Christ, to God.
A closed book is the opposite. It is already written, all the way to the pages about you.
Communism has one. Nazism has one. Islamism has one. Wokeism has one. Technocracy has one. The climate religion has one. Scientism has one. Every last one of them comes with the whole story fixed in advance and hands you a pen you are only allowed to sign with.
And to all of them, my answer is the same.
No.
No, thank you.