Writing for The American Conservative, James Pinkerton offers Crusader talk and a Shire Strategy for the West (links added below). For myself, I am not reassured by his alternative to substitute one backward religious tyranny for another. But his points are valid when drawing some parallels between Tolkien’s Middle Earth and or own modern-day Mordor in the Middle East:

This Shire is ours now, but the way things are going, it won’t be ours permanently. So we must vow to defend the Shire, always. In the last of the “Rings” films, Aragorn the Strider proclaims, in full St. Crispin’s Day mode, “A day may come when the courage of Men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Men comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!”

We in the West will always need warriors. We must have chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche—“Knights without fear and without reproach”—to safeguard our marches and protect our homes. Men such as Leonidas, whose Immortal 300 held off the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 BC, long enough for other Greeks to rally and save the nascent West. Or Aetius, the last noble Roman, who defeated Attila the Hun, Scourge of God, at Chalons in AD 451. Or Don Juan of Austria, who led the Holy League to naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. Or Jon Sobieski, whose Polish cavalry rescued Vienna from the Turks in 1683.

These are not just legends, not just fictional characters—they were real. And if we dutifully honor those heroes, as heroic Men of the West and of Christendom, we will be rewarded with more such heroic men.

Future epics await us. Future Knights of the West, ready to defend Christendom, are waiting to be born, waiting for the call of duty. If we bring them forth with faith and wisdom and confidence, then also will come new heroes and new legends.

Read more here: The Once & Future Christendom