What is a retrograde? A retrograde calculates, night and day, how to return the world to:
- the Old Order of moral and sexual decency,
- classical masculinity,
- national sovereignty and national borders,
- faith and hope and charity,
- goodness and beauty and truth,
- Christian civic liberty,
- and most importantly, the social kingship of Christ.
In the words of Shakespeare, a retrograde is one of God’s spies.
The retrograde has the unique capacity for understanding the stark chasm between the degenerate, socialist-infiltrated world of decay on one side and the well-meaning, good-hearted, but clueless Christian world on the other.
In a time of such profound decay, being one of God’s spies is a last resort and a pure necessity: it involves not “deep cover,”—i.e., acting like the enemy—but rather “half cover”: acting as a “contra” in the secular arena, a crypto-Christian counterinsurgent willing to fight like a Navy Seal and to think like a counterintel officer.
Retrogrades . . . to the streets: our aim is to reverse the deliberate, deuced machinations of “radicals” like Saul Alinsky who, by penning the rulebook of radicalism, threw down a challenge that has, until now, gone unanswered. Rules for Retrogrades is the handbook men of good will need to win the culture war! Here is a sampling from the call to action found within these pages:
- No truth is “off-limits”; we must never be ashamed to be candid.
- It is a damnable lie that humility disallows Christians from standing up (for what they believe) in the cultural and political forum!
- Control of language is control of thought; don’t let radicals control the language.
- Never trust a man who is unwilling to have enemies.
- Radicals form coalitions but retrogrades form fellowships.
- The root of cultural decay is feminism: end feminism to end radicalism.
Timothy J. Gordon studied philosophy in Pontifical graduate universities in Europe, taught it at Southern Californian community colleges, and then went on to law school. He holds degrees in literature, history, philosophy, and law. Currently, he resides in central California with his wife and five children, where he writes and teaches philosophy and theology. He is the author of Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish without Rome (Sophia Institute Press, 2019).
David Gordon is an attorney, former judicial law clerk, graduate of Franciscan University’s M.A. Theology program, husband, and father of five. He has long endeavored, through work in Catholic apologetics and parish ministry, to restore the health of the Church and to bring about a revival of Christendom in the secularized West. Mr. Gordon currently resides with his family in California’s Great Central Valley.
