“We Americans, above all others, are in need of the doctrine of the remnant.”
Charles E. Jefferson, Cardinal Ideas of Isaiah (1925)*
“Once more a remnant of the kingdom of Judah will take root below and bear fruit above.”
Isaiah 37:31
When a man of the Right is at last resigned to the fact that the “sleeping giant” of popular outrage is never going to awake, sleep being that giant’s natural and preferred state of being, he will grasp at the straw of instauration by a saving “Remnant.” Students of scripture know that the doctrine of the Remnant was developed by the prophet Isaiah after Sennacherib, the Assyrian despot, brought the rebellious vassal state of Judah to heel, and that this doctrine states that social renewal is the work of a zealous minority.
A Remnant is like an avant-garde that takes a society backward to the future.
The author of my first epigraph was an American clergyman who gave up on the sleeping giant of the Great American Public but found hope in the doctrine of a saving Remnant. As an American, and more especially as a Congregationalist, Charles Jefferson had long placed his faith in the good sense and durable decency of the common man. But with the raucous and raunchy jazz age blaring and blooming around him (he was preaching in New York City), Jefferson lost this democratic illusion.
“The hope of America does not lie in the masses. The hope of America lies in the remnant.”**
The sleeping giant of the Great American Public wants only to sleep, and is not over-particular about who, or what, climbs into bed beside it. It may grunt, it may roll over, it may even give its blanket a petulant tug, but it can sleep through any orgy of raucous and raunchy jazz.
Isaiah’s Remnant does not lead by example. It is, indeed, and by definition, an unattractive sect of unfashionable retards who for officially discreditable reasons refuse to get with the program and go with the flow. They instead “take root below and bear fruit above” because they are ornery and tough. This botanical analogy is in fact the key to understanding the difference between a true Remnant and a club of antiquarian fuddy-duddies.
The first is a vital stump that throws out new shoots; the second is a rotting stump that can only decay.
And so we see that unattractive sects of unfashionable retards come in two varieties. Some, like the palm tree, die when they fall. The stump may for a short time sport a spurious fungoid life, may even glow with what country people used to call foxfire, but the tree is gone and is never coming back. Others, like the willow, send out green shoots and new foliation.
Every man of the Right should inquire what sort of stump he is defending. For as the Congregationalist clergyman above quoted put it,
“The future of the world belong to the remnant.”***
*) Charles E. Jefferson, Cardinal Ideas of Isaiah (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 136.
**) Jefferson, Cardinal Ideas, p. 137.
***) Jefferson, Cardinal Ideas, p. 122.
The Orthosphere 
Remnant theology is in fact the teaching of Scripture. It is not, alas, the official teaching of the Church, which claims that it can never fail as an institution because of some alleged promise of indefectibility. That’s some swell theory; me, I will go on believing my own eyes and ears. The Church today is 100% committed to a counterfeit gospel of human progress; it is therefore a failed institution. It’s going to the bottom … grab your lifeboats.
Jesus spoke about the many & the few much more than most find comfortable.
Emerson, in his “strike the root” aphorism said something very similar.
But what makes the remnant is the power of the Holy Ghost: it is thereby that the remnant can work to “save the World by the foolishness of preaching”:
And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:
John 16:9: Of sin, because they believe not on me;
John 16:10: Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more;
John 16:11: Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.