I think the dishonored chaplain is confusing two essential forces. The power of love is akin to the power of leaves of grass, to burst through asphalt, in that it comes from within. You can’t force people to love you, just like you can’t force them to tell the truth.

Joseph Campbell called it “mythic dissociation” and “social identification,” the complete identity of one’s own narrowly defined social group with a god who is always “out there,” never “in here.”

Here’s the relevant passage from Campbell’s The Masks of God: Creative Mythology.
http://library.plymouth.edu/read/210146

The life-desolating effects of this separation of the reigns of nature (the Earthly Paradise) and the spirit (the Castle of the Grail) in such a way that neither touches the other but destructively, remains to this day an essential psychological problem of the Christianized Western world; and since it is at root a consequence of the basic biblical doctrine of an ontological distinction between God and his universe, creator and creature, spirit and matter, it is a problem that has hardly altered since it first became intolerably evident at the climax of the Middle Ages. In briefest restatement: The Christian is taught that divinity is transcendent: not within himself and his world, but “out there.” I call this mythic dissociation.106 Turning inward, he would find not divinity within, but only his own created soul, which might or might not be in proper relationship to its supposed Creator. The Old Testament doctrine held that God (x) had concluded a Covenant (R) with a certain people (c). None other enjoyed this

394 CREATIVE MYTHOLOGY

THE BALANCE 395

privilege; it was unique. A relationship (R) to God was possible, consequently, only through membership in this group, this people: cRx. To which the New Testament adds that in the fullness of time a child, Jesus, begotten of God, was born of that holy race, in whom humanity (c) and divinity (jc) were miraculously joined. All of us in our humanity (c) are related to that of Jesus, who in his divinity relates us to God (x). However, participation in this relationship (R) can be only by way of the Church that he founded (once thought to be single, but now of a million differing sects, any one of which might be true or false). Consequently, just as in the Old Testament view a relationship to God could be achieved only through physical birth as a member of the Holy Race, so in the, New, only through baptism (spiritual birth) into membership in Christ’s Church; i.e., participation, in either case, in a specific social group. I call this the way of social identification. One equates the realm of value with one’s social affiliation, and extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

Unhappily, however, in the light of what is now known, not only of the history of the Bible and the Church, but also of the universe and evolution of species, a suspicion has been confirmed that was already dawning in the Middle Ages; namely, that the biblical myth of Creation, Fall, and Redemption is historically untrue. Hence, there has now spread throughout the Christian world a desolating sense not only of no divinity within (mythic dissociation), but also of no participation in divinity without (social identification dissolved): and that, in short, is the mythological base of the Waste Land of the modern soul, or, as it is being called these days, our “alienation.”

The sense of desolation is experienced on two levels: first the social, in a loss of identification with any spiritually compelling, structuring group; and, beyond that, the metaphysical, in a loss of any sense either of identity or of relationship with a dimension of experience, being, and rapture any more awesome than that provided by an empirically classifiable conglomerate of self-enclosed, separate, mutually irritating organisms held together only by lust (crude or sublimated) and fear (of pain and death or of boredom).

It has become fashionable to write of this broken image of a world as though it were a function of some new social construct, brought about by a combination of recent economic, scientific, and political developments: the industrial revolution, capitalism, colonialism, atom bombs, high or low taxes, or what not. In the broad prospect of our present, nearly concluded survey of the epochs of mankind, however, it can be seen that the actual nuclear problem was already present, and recognized by many, at the very peak of that great period of burgeoning French cathedrals (1150-1250) which Henry Adams characterized as representing the highest concentration of moral fervor in the history of the West. As the ravaged lives of Abelard and Heloise already had foretold as early as the first years of the twelfth century, neither human love nor human reason could much longer support the imposed irrational ordeals of an imported mythic order, out of touch with every movement of the native mind, as well as heart, and held in force only by a reign of terror. The cathedral-building passion itself, it would even seem, was but a compensatory, desperate screening effort to deny and nullify the increasingly obvious fact that the mighty image from Asia had begun to crack, disintegrate, and go asunder.
(Campbell, J. (1991). The masks of god: vol. 4: creative mythology, pp.393-395. Arkana.)

I think this goes a long way toward explaining Klingenschmitt in particular, and the the myth of American exceptionalism in general.: “Either you’re with us, or we’re sending you to hell in the name of Jesus.” That little phrase is the most kinetically forceful formulation Klingenschmitt can imagine.

And obviously, that power has been co-opted and is being used to convert us self-sovereign citizens into loyal subjects of a power ontologically divorced from us.