Even a casual reader of history will have noticed over the past many years that the antiseptic term Common Era (CE) has slowly but surely replaced the elegant Anno Domini (AD) as the marker of the time period that began 2,025 years ago in most historical works.
Though at first glance this may appear to be a minor change, it most definitely is not, and given the Trump administration’s brave and much-needed work to repair the damage done by wokeness, it’s possible that the damage here could be reversed.
Before getting to how an executive order bringing back AD would work, let’s first take a look at why it is so necessary to restore it to our written works of history.
Anno Domini is not only a description, it is an explanation. It is directly telling us that the reason we call this year 2025 is that Christ lived 2,025 years ago. It’s not just some happy accident that Jesus lived at this time. His life is the entire basis of the chronological system.
This keeps us in communion with over 1,000 years of our own history, from old books that used, ‘In the year of our Lord, ….’ to 20th Century classics of history that used the classic and traditional AD.
Now, progressive historians, which accounts for all but about six of them, insist that all they are doing by using Common Era instead is separating religion from the ‘scientific’ or at least empirical, study of history. But this is an easily disproven lie.
The names of our months, for example, are taken from Roman gods, and yet nobody thinks we should change the name of March so it isn’t derived from a Pagan god of war. The difference is that, like all things leftist, this is really about power.
Months named after Roman gods do not bother progressives because they do not view ancient Roman Paganism as part of a dominant culture that has to have its power over society weakened by the enlightened. But this is exactly how they view Christianity.
Put another way, Leftist historians are convinced that using AD imposes Christianity on non-Christians, and therefore a more neutral, or dare I say, common term should be used instead.
This is nonsense. There was never any significant group of people living outside of ivy-covered walls and ivory towers who were even remotely bothered by the term AD before the historians started in with this silliness.
You’d sooner find a bodega owner in the Bronx who wants to be called ‘Latinx.’
Moreover, this change from AD to CE is part of a much broader attempt to erase Christianity not just from public life, but from the history of the West as a whole, of which it is unquestionably the most important force.
Christianity didn’t grow up alongside Western civilization, it IS Western civilization, or at least was until about 10 minutes ago. Not only do progressives want Christian heritage and tradition removed from our society’s present and future, they want to erase it from our past.
As to the restoration of AD in our history books, there is a huge step that President Trump could take by executive order. With the swipe of a Sharpie, he could require that all books documents produced by the federal government or with federal funding use the more accurate and descriptive term Anno Domini.
It really is not too late to make CE a quirky footnote, used during a brief tenure of academic madness in the early 21st Century. Given how much federal funding university book publishers receive, the change could come very quickly.
Of course, such a move by Trump would occasion bloody howls of censorship and accusations of stomping out academic freedom. But American taxpayers, Christian or otherwise, should not be paying for the Left’s mission to tear Christianity from the heart of our civilization.
Sometimes it’s the little things, the ones which don’t seem to matter, that wind up mattering the most, because it starts with who cares if a man wants to wear a dress, and then its surgery on kids. It starts with leveling the playing field and winds up at ‘no white males need apply.’
The erasure of Anno Domini is one of these times, one of these canaries in a coalmine for our society, and the time is now to restore it to its rightful place.
