The Therapeutic Nation: It’s All About Parents

The Therapeutic Nation: It’s All About Parents

Aug 21, 2024 | Parents and Family

I promote my books as much as I can because I’m a nobody with no platform to speak of, so if I don’t do it, no one else will. Yes, I know, ontologically before God I am not a “nobody,” but you know what I mean.  Getting attention without “a name” isn’t easy. I feel like the bum in front of the luxury hotel rattling a tin cup for pennies, while the Big Shot who everyone looks at pulls up in a Rolls Royce. And people are bombarded by a zillion things today that vie for their attention, and sadly fewer people read books than ever before. That alone makes me despair for civilization, but I also pray for a revival of book reading to add to a revival of the Holy Spirit transforming lives. If vinyl albums can make a comeback, so can books.

I say all that to plug my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent. It wasn’t a terrible rookie contribution to the Christian book market, and the message is more relevant than ever. The subtitle makes the point of this post: How to build an enduring faith in you and your children. Christian parents think this is more difficult than ever given the state of our world and culture, but I disagree. The reason is because of Parents, both for good and bad. The first section of the book, the first two chapters, is the title of this post, it’s all about parents.

 

I was thinking of my book as I recently listened to this conversation of Al Mohler with Abigail Shrier about her new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. What Philip Reiff called The Triumph of the Therapeutic in 1966 has become a contagion in 2024. Navel gazing has turned into an art form, encouraging a search for the authentic self that destroys the self. We’ve reached the critical mass of this triumph because we’re living with the generational consequences of what Reiff wrote about almost 60 years ago. Parents who grew up in the 60s and 70s (boomers) raised therapeutic children, who in turn raised their children (generation X) the same way, who did the same with their children (Millennials), who have given us the basket case generation Z. As God said through Moses, God punishes “the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate” him. This isn’t God being a big meany; it’s just a generational sociological fact.

As I was listening to Mohler and Shrier, I couldn’t help thinking, how stupid are those parents! But as I said, this is the result of generations of children raised primarily by parents who swim in a secular irreligious therapeutic culture where self is God. Of course such parents will raise basket cases who find life inscrutable and impossible to deal with. With such raw material, the left has an easy job of brainwashing today’s college students; stupid parents raise stupid children. In biblical terms, fools raise fools.

Often when I encounter children or teenagers, or even adults, however they act, good or bad, I automatically think it is likely a reflection of their parents and how they were raised. Which always reminds me of something my mother told me when I was young. The simple folk wisdom of my Italian from‑the‑ old‑country grandfather. He used to tell my mother if she misbehaved when she went into town, people wouldn’t think she was a bad little girl; rather, they would think what rotten parents she has! This problem of raising therapeutic children is certainly a secular issue, prevalent in families in which God is invisible, but Christian parents are not immune. Culture’s influence, any culture, is impossible to escape, and unfortunately Christians are as susceptible to the therapeutic mindset as their irreligious neighbors. As my grandfather knew, it’s all about parents.

Having said that, not all children raised by fools will not end up living their entire life like fools. God is doing a great work in our time, and many of these will be saved and brought into their right mind. However this fundamental fact about the nature of reality, that parents have the greatest influence on their children’s development, means the most important cultural battle is in the home. Not only in how we raise the children God gives us, but in having more children. Secular people have fewer children than religious people, and Christian families should have more than they currently do. God’s command to be fruitful and multiply was never abrogated. We need to outbreed the enemy!

Do Parents Bear Ultimate Responsibility for their Children?
Given the insecurity many Christian parents feel about their own children and raising them successfully in the faith, this is a question that needs to be addressed. I found as I began promoting my book the contention, it’s “all about parents,” was for some “controversial.” Normally the knee jerk reaction was, “So you think you can guarantee how your children turn out?” The question reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of God’s created reality, fallen though it is, and our place in it.

First, the most obvious thing that needs to be said that shouldn’t need to be said: We can’t guarantee anything and are in control of nothing. And these facts of existence apply not only to raising children, but in all of life. That human beings have ever thought guarantees and control are possibilities is a reflection of sin and the distorted hubris that comes from it. Life, however, is not endless uncertainty because God decided we needed some semblance of predictability for healthy, flourishing lives. Raising children is like anything else in life

We live in a cause and effect universe; God made it that way. We can have a reasonable expectation that if we do X, then Y should result. This expectation can be in raising children in the faith, tending a garden, building a house, practice honing an art or craft, building a business, getting a degree, anything human beings do. Can we be absolutely certain of or guarantee results, or that we are in control of the results? Of course not! But to say that because of this it follows that we can’t then have a reasonable expectation of the results, or be confident that we can produce results is, well, unreasonable. And unbiblical.

In philosophical terms, God is the primary cause of all things, while human beings are the secondary cause. Both causes are required because that’s the way reality works. Man gets this backward when he thinks that secondary causes, us, don’t require a primary cause, God. It’s the same in the “natural” world, where people think trees, for example, grow because of dirt and air and water and sun. They do, of course, but without God as the primary cause of trees, there would be no trees! Yet the trees must be watered, and human decision and agency to make sure the watering gets done.

Back to children. When we hear statistics about children who abandon their faith, we tend to see parents as bystanders and victims of social forces beyond their control. That’s simply not true. Sociologist Christian Smith in his books Soul Searching and Souls in Transition found that the most important factor in a young person keeping their faith into adulthood was their parents. Peter Berger, writing 40 years before Smith, states that, “In the sphere of the family and of social relationships closely linked to it, religion continues to have considerable ‘reality potential,’ that is, continues to be relevant in terms of the motives and self‑interpretations of people in this sphere of everyday social activity.” Berger, a sociologist, knows what 19th century Princeton theologian Charles Hodge knew about the centrality of the family: “The character of the Church and of the state depends on the character of the family. If religion dies out in the family, it cannot elsewhere be maintained.” As important as extended family and the Church are to the faith of young people, nothing comes close to the influence of parents, for good or ill.

Parental influence is not only a sociological fact but a biblical reality. It is the way God made things. In the Old Testament we see that God’s calling is generational. In other words, when God called Abram, he promised that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him. We live in a hyper‑individualized culture that sees people as autonomous, independent organisms with barely a connection to that which gave them life, as if tree branches have no connection to the tree. In Scripture, by contrast, the family is the central medium for the transmission of the Faith. Children are never treated as aliens to the covenant, but rather were bound up in it. Moses gets at the centrality of the family to Faith, and Faith to the family, in Deuteronomy. 29:29:

The secret things belong to the Lord our God; but the things revealed belong to us and our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.

We read of the familial nature of Faith in the New Testament as well. In Acts 16, Paul and Silas found themselves severely flogged and in prison for bringing the Kingdom of God to Philippi. At about midnight, they were praying and singing hymns to God (what else would you do if you were beaten, bleeding, in pain, feet in stocks, and in prison). When a violent earthquake shook the ground, all the prison doors flew open, and everybody’s chains came loose. The guard was ready to kill himself when Paul stopped him because no one had escaped. The man, trembling and in great fear, pleaded with Paul and Silas, “What must I do to be saved?” Notice:

31 They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.” 32 Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house. 33 At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his household were baptized. 34 The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them; he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God—he and his whole household.

Children are assumed just by their birth to be part of God’s plan, and that did not change after the resurrection of Christ.

Lastly, Solomon in Psalm 127 famously says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.” This is absolutely true. But, if we build a crappy house that is blown over at the mildest spring zephyr is that the Lord’s fault? Nobody would say it is. If our children turn out to be apostate heathens, do we as parents not bear some of the responsibility? Of course we do. The issue isn’t to rub it in and make those parents feel guilty, but we all in life have to take responsibility. And knowing what to do and not do helps Christian parents build solid houses that endure for generations.

Raising Children Differently in a Secular Age
This was the reason I wrote the book. Many Christian parents don’t understand that living in a secular age means we have to raise our children in the faith in light of that fact. Just taking our children to church and Sunday school, reading the Bible and praying with them is not enough. That is the reason the second section of the book is, It’s All About Truth. Because of where we were in our lives at the time when our kids were younger, I rarely did family devotions and Bible reading with them. I would pray with them before bed sometimes, but my wife did that more often than I did. I was just not very good at that, and looking back, it bums me out. I told that to my daughter one day, how bad I was at being spiritual leader dad, and her reply was, “Well, daddy, at least you taught us Christianity is the truth.” I guess there is that!

This relates to one of the great moments of my life, and in saying that I do not exaggerate. One Sunday on our way home from church, I was doing my typical lecturing on various and sundry topics. Our youngest, a son, maybe seven or eight at the time, said something with not a little annoyance like, “Why do you always have to lecture us, Dad?” I was taken aback a little when our daughter came to the rescue, “Because, Dominic, daddy is always teaching.” My heart melted—truly one of the great compliments of my life. After all, this is one of the primary reasons I exist: the profound responsibility to raise our children before God. And I would like to suggest this can be done well or done poorly. Who would disagree? The question is, what does raising our children well or poorly in our current historical and cultural context mean.

It starts with truth. I was motivated to write the book because of a young lady who grew up in a Christian home, very involved in her church, went away to college and promptly became an agnostic. It angered me because I thought that would never happen to my children. As I said, some people think that’s arrogant or naïve, but it is neither. As I also said, we live in a cause and effect universe, and we can have a reasonable expectation of results in light of our current cultural challenges. I taught my children from their earliest days that Christianity is the truth, and that is the only reason we believe it. The truth of Christianity, and the lies of every other view non-Christian view of reality did not seem to be part of this young woman’s upbringing because in her story of leaving the faith the truth of Christianity, or not, never seemed to be a consideration. That, I believe, is a parental dereliction of duty in the 21st century post-Christian secular West.

The reason this is so important should be self-evident. If our children believe, have been persuaded and taught, Christianity is the truth, and nothing else is, they are far less likely to abandon it. If they do, if they go through a period of rebellion, chances are they will know it’s rebellion and not believe Christianity has been discredited as a lie. This is simple logic. They must be taught and understand the law of non-contradiction, that A cannot be non-A, so only one faith, religion, worldview is true, and every other one is a lie. If we’ve taught them this, that Christianity is true, what we believe and why we believe it, doggedly, persistently, annoyingly if necessary, I am confident they will never abandon their faith. Who is going to reject what they believe in their hearts and minds is the truth? Nobody!

You can read my book to find out some of the ways I did that with our children.

 

 

A Christian Prince: Nayib Bukele

A Christian Prince: Nayib Bukele

Aug 14, 2024 | Politics & Government

That name is likely not familiar to you, as it wasn’t to me until recently. He is the President of El Salvador. I knew something of El Salvador’s turnaround over the last five years, but knew few details, or how drastic it has been. I also knew nothing about the man who led the effort. He came to my full attention recently when I listened to his interview with Tucker Carlson. He was initially elected president in June of 2019 when El Salvador was one of the most violent countries on earth with nearly 110 homicides per 100,000 people. Compare that to today when the country has just 2.3, making it safer than the United States and Canada. This piece at IM—1776.com called, “Bukele’s War for Peace” gets into the details of how they accomplished it.

This transformation reminded me of Trump’s victory over ISIS. Remember during the Obama years when beheadings and torture were commonplace, sickening videos popping up all the time. During the campaign Trump said beating ISIS would be easy, and it would happen very quickly. Obama, by contrast, had said the war against ISIS and terrorism would be a long slog, a generational battle, and implied it would go on for the foreseeable future and there was nothing we could do to change that. This is typical of liberals and leftists, their weakness and compromise with evil always leads to more evil, which always means not punishing evildoers. We see this in American blue cities, and especially since the current radical leftist regime took power in 2021. As a Christian, Bukele took seriously Paul’s charge in Romans 13, that as a ruler he is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on those who do evil. His first priority was peace, and wrath is how he would make it happen.

What stood out to me, though, wasn’t his strategy to punish violent criminals, the gangs that controlled the country. Rather, one of his primary strategies for success was to pray to God for Wisdom. When Tucker asks him how they did it, how they accomplished something nobody thought they could, including against the leftists ruling the country at the time that tried to stop him, he gave two reasons. One was the “official” reason, the strategies and tactics to defeat criminal gangs and restore peace. When Tucker asked him about the other reason, he said, “It was a miracle.” Then he explains as the gangs fought back and things started looking bad, his government had meetings, and they prayed. Not just once, but several times, and God gave them the victory. He says El Salvador is a secular country, but in fact he accomplished job one of a Christian prince and government, one ruled by God’s law: peace. In the article I linked to above we learn that El Salvador, contrary to Bukele, is de facto a Christian Country:

It is the most religious population on earth, dominated by evangelicals, mostly Pentecostals, and they responded strongly to his message of carrying out a holy war against the satanic gangs. Even if we had a Bukele, it is questionable whether our weak, watered-down, secular first-world societies would stick with him and back him the way Salvadorans have consistently done with Bukele, returning him to office this Sunday with nearly 90% of the vote.

Can you imagine, almost 90% of the country voted for success and peace, not failure. America, on the other hand, has probably 40% of the voting public who continue to vote for failure. If you look at blue states and cities, what do you see? A populace that continues to vote for Democrats who continue to bring misery and suffering to the population. It makes no sense, but when does evil ever make sense.

This is why every morning I pray the Four R’s for America: revival, renewal, restoration, and reformation. The re-founding of America as the Christian nation it was founded to be is a gospel, Holy Spirit led project. The founders of America believed it was God’s providence alone that would give them the victory over the British. I look at the print of Washington on his knees at Valley Forge in my office as I pray. All of the founders understood and believed what  the supposed Deist Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention:

I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that “except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel.

He couldn’t say it any better for all those today who war against the ever present threat of Babel in our time. Bukele understood this, and so must we.

The Case Against Secularism
The reason I’m writing about this isn’t because of the man who engineered a victory over evil in his country, but because as Christians we need to understand it is specifically Christianity that made it possible, not secularism. This is a difficult thing for most Christians to understand and embrace, let alone those who don’t proclaim the name of Jesus. Secularism is the enemy, full stop. The entire history of secularism, the fruit of its Enlightenment inspiration is a lie. It may not seem like it, but secularism is dead. It has been weighed on the scales and found wanting, only most Westerners and Americans haven’t realized it yet. Secularism promised everything but delivered nothing but misery and despair. The disaster of secularism was inevitable because it is based on faulty premises and an inaccurate understanding of reality. In other words, it’s all a lie, and in the end lies will be revealed for what they are, lies. Truth will always win, sooner or later, because of the One who is the Truth.

Initially Secularism was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption we’ll call the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutral comes from the Latin “neuter” meaning “neither one nor the other,” so it’s come to mean unbiased which it most certainly is not. In this illusory “neutral” place, secularism is the unbiased referee calling balls and strikes without that pesky Christianity getting involved and inevitably leading to theocracy and intolerance, and thus violence.

Imagine this public square as a big banquet table, the place where citizens get together to discuss how we as a people and nation should be governed. Every place setting has one of those little cards you see at weddings with names on it to indicate who is to sit where, except at this table the cards read religions. So at one setting is Buddhism, at another Hinduism, at another atheism, and so on, and there are many chairs. Out of the dozens of settings is a place for Christianity, and for many Christians they are grateful to even have a seat at the table at all. It feels like, rather, that we’ve been relegated to the kids’ table. This setting is seen by Christians, as well as the dominant secular culture, as a healthy pluralism where everyone has an equal chance to make their case. This all assumes the myth is truth, secular neutrality, and that Christianity is happy to at least have a seat at the table.

If this myth had been accepted in the 18th century, there would never have been an America. Most Christians, let alone, most Americans, have no idea how critically important Christianity was to the founding of America. In fact, if there was no Christianity there would have been no America. Read the primary sources if you don’t believe me. The secular “scholars” have for decades claimed America was solely an Enlightenment project. It was not. This claim is pure bias or ignorance, or a combination of the two. My claim, by contrast, is that if America is to be re-founded, it will be because of Christianity and Christians taking responsibility to make that happen. What stands in our way is the enemy, secularism.

It is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism against which we fight. In their book Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.” After almost 40 years, that crisis has reached a revealing point. Their description of secularism is helpful:

Western culture is not pagan, nor is it Christian. It has been secularized. Western man has “come of age,” passing through the stages of mythology, theology, and metaphysics, reaching the maturity of science. The totem pole has yielded to the temple which in turn has given way to the acme of human progress, the laboratory. . . . Resistance to Christianity comes not from the deposed priests of Isis but from the guns of secularism. The Christian task (more specifically, the rational apologetics task) in the modern epoch is not so much to produce a new Summa Contra Gentiles (An apologetics work of Thomas Aquinas to non-Christians) as it is to produce a Summa Contra Secularisma.

The authors further state the obvious:

The impact of secularism . . . has been pervasive and cataclysmic, shaking the foundations of the value structures of Western civilization. The Judeo-Christian consensus is no more; it has lost its place as the dominant shaping force of cultural ethics. . . . Sooner or later the vacuum (the rejection of theology in the West) will be filled, and if it cannot be filled by the transcendent, then it will be filled by the immanent. The force that floods into such vacuums is statism, the inevitable omega point of secularism.

I could not agree with this more, the consequences becoming clearer with every passing year.

The Necessity of Christian Rulers and a Christian Nation
I can’t make this case fully in this short space, but I made it more fully in my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward. First I will have to assert that nations are a biblical concept, and that God deals with nations as ethical entities who can be judged or rewarded based on their obedience to His law and their faithfulness, or not, to Christ. Next I will assert and try to prove, briefly, that God’s law is as applicable today for the nations as it was to Israel. The mode of application is different post Christ’s resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, because no nation is ancient Israel. And as I lay out in the book, we live with over a thousand years of the concept of common law and case law that started with King Alfred the Great in England in the 9th century. Alfred based his law on the Ten Commandments, and the freedom and liberty assumed in God’s law was painstakingly worked out in England until fulfilled most fully in the American experiment.

As Doug Wilson says in his latest book, Mere Christendom, “Limited government is the theopolitical genius of Christianity.” The point of God’s law, and the American experience in self-government, is that selves should be able to govern themselves! Government exists for very limited means, as the Founders argued, and one of those limited means is to punish evildoers. This responsibility as given to us by revelation in God’s word is why Nayib Bukele is a Christian prince, a ruler who takes his God-given responsibilities seriously. If you listen to the interview with Tucker, listen to him share what the transformation has done for his country. People who fled for their lives are now returning home to live among their own people and culture in peace. It is now, as he says, the safest country in the Western hemisphere. I don’t know his political philosophy beyond this, but creating a safe environment for his people is job one of the Christian ruler.

Which brings me to God’s law proper. It’s amazing to me that whenever God’s law is brought up as a requirement for a Christian nation, heathens and Christians alike run to the charge of . . . . theocracy! It’s a stupendously stupid charge because what they are saying is that God’s law is inherently tyrannical. If what Bukele did in El Salvadore is tyrannical, then yes, it is tyrannical. But in fact, what God’s law is, is the ground of liberty and freedom in a society. The point of law, it’s purpose, is not to force people to do or think anything (something progressives and leftists believe), but to keep people from doing evil, or things that will destroy the peace of a society. God’s law is the foundation for true human flourishing because God only blesses righteousness, doing right, not doing wrong or evil. So James tells us, twice (1:25 and 2:12), that God’s perfect law gives freedom. It is the guiderail within which people can live fully human lives. I say this a lot, but since secularism gained all the cultural power in America and shoved Christianity into the closet, people have become generally more miserable. That suicide rates, anxiety and depression, alcohol and drug abuse are all rampant proves the point; without Christ and God’s law, this is what you get.

Most importantly, and what allows peace, or in Hebrew, Shalom, is love, because love is the fulfillment of the law. In fact we can say that theonomy is love in practice on a societal level. Paul confirms this in Romans 13 when he says that “love is the fulfillment of the law.” I didn’t make this up. Paul got his teaching on love from Jesus who when asked which is the greatest commandment in the law summed it up as loving God, your neighbor, and yourself, the latter commandment he took from Leviticus 19:18. This kind of love, as with all love, can be hard, but it is necessary, tough love, without which a society will devolve into chaos and anarchy. Real love, biblical love, Godly love has nothing to do with feelings, least of all with Romance, but with action, righteousness, and justice.

A last point. A Christian nation isn’t a totalitarian nation, by definition it can’t be because in a Christian nation ruled by God’s law liberty is maximized for its in habitants. Self-government, and self-rule, requires a people not enslaved to their own lusts, wants, and desires, but a righteous people able to, well, govern themselves. Thus a Christian nation is a gospel centered nation, and the great need of the hour is what I call the Four Rs, and which I pray for every day: revival, renewal, restoration, and reformation.

 

Plausibility Structures and the Importance of Jordan Peterson

Plausibility Structures and the Importance of Jordan Peterson

Aug 7, 2024 | Culture, Uncategorized

Since I became active on Twitter earlier this year, mainly to promote my new book and work, I’ve noticed that Christians can be narrow minded and dogmatic. And lest you think I’m bagging on my fellow Christians, these less than appealing traits come naturally to sinners regardless of what they believe. Such myopia, the inability to see beyond their own certitude, is why I often see people saying that Peterson is not an orthodox Bible-believing Christian, therefore he’s either dangerous or not worth listening to. I could not disagree more. I believe God is using him as an important piece of the puzzle to re-Christianize America and the West. I believe this, strongly, because of a concept most Christians have never heard of; plausibility structures. This post will be a short primer on the importance of this concept for our specific time in history, living in what Aaron Renn calls “negative world,” and the importance of Jordan Peterson.

In my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I explore plausibility structures in some detail, which is the idea of the reality generating mechanism of a culture. The term was coined by sociologist Peter Berger in his books, The Social Construction of Realty (with Thomas Luckman) and The Sacred Canopy. As a sociological construct (i.e., what it means to live with and among human beings and the culture and meanings they create), it simply means what seems true to us, and the social structures that contribute to that seeming.

A simple example is that for secular people God seems no more real than Santa Clause. Whether God is real, is not the point; what seems real is. Society creates the plausibility structures that contribute to God being plausible to us, or not. These structures are built into our educational systems, media, entertainment, etc. They are the secular air we breathe, and they affect us in ways big and small without our being aware of it. Christians are not immune to it either. In the West, God is persona non‑grata; if he exists at all he is merely a personal preference. I am convinced most people reject Christianity or never entertain it, because it just doesn’t seem real to them. For most, whether it is true or not is beside the point.

The sociology of knowledge is the study of how a life lived among persons in society affects their perception of reality, the “seemingness” of it. Reality isn’t just there; in some sense it is socially constructed, and the plausibility of our faith to us is directly related to the idea of a socially constructed reality. Christians affirm objective reality, that meaning inheres in things apart from our perceptions or experiences of them. Reality, however, is mediated to us in a variety of ways, through our senses, our psychology, our upbringing, interactions with other people, and society itself. This mediation means that although we affirm that objective reality exists, it must be interpreted by us, to us, and for us. Pure human objectivity does not, and cannot exist. Yet most human beings take reality for granted, as if their view of it was perfectly objective, no interpretation needed. All the while they are ignorant that interpretation is not an option; it is going on all the time whether they acknowledge it or not.

Secularism: There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Western post-Christian secular culture no longer shares our Christian presuppositions. God, it is asserted and assumed, is not part of reality in any objective sense. He is wholly subjective, likely a projection of our wishful thinking, a purely personal phenomenon, and as such His existence has no bearing on society.  This perspective, however, starts with the secular world’s understanding of faith.

Secular cultural messaging denies that irreligious people need faith because faith is defined as something required only by religious people. Secular, non‑religious people, however, don’t embrace something called unbelief, but rather some other faith. All people live by faith, but we live in a culture that defines objectivity in a way that prejudices it against religious belief. Scientists and those who live by its light, we are told, can be purely objective, while religious folks by definition can’t be. This “objectivity double standard” allows the culture to define objective reality against us because in this view religious people can’t be objective. Secular people technically may not be “religious” in that they don’t go to church, but they still have a worldview based on faith commitments, which is why there is no such thing as an unbeliever. Finite creatures of limited knowledge can only exist by faith, by trusting the knowledge or expertise or insights or authority of others.

Secular irreligious people don’t know this, and many Christians unfortunately don’t know it either. To the secular, the Christian faith is less believable, less credible, than the secular faith they embrace which seems more credible, more plausible. This faith takes many forms, be it agnosticism, atheism, or an indifference to the claims of Christ, but it is faith, a trust in something, nonetheless. It seems more plausible to such people that God is either not worth pursuing, or even if He’s there it doesn’t much matter, or that any meaning to be had is in this life alone. None of this is merely rational or logical, and I would argue it rarely is. What they believe has more to do with what seems real to them than what is actually real. Society and culture in many ways determine this.

The Social Construction of Reality
In order to work under the rubric of “science,” sociologists have to bracket questions of truth or ultimate meaning. So when they say that reality is a social construction, they are not saying that it is only a social construction. What they are saying is that human beings interpret reality, give meaning to it, in social settings, and that social settings in turn affect that meaning. In the words of Berger and Luckmann:

Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world. As sociologists we take this reality as the object of our analysis.

The key phrase here is “reality interpreted.” Reality isn’t self‑interpreting. Looking at the world through our eyes is not unlike how we experience a movie or TV show. The director constructs a reality, i.e., meaning, for us through various mechanisms at his or her disposal, and they are all deliberately, painstakingly used. After laying out an extensive list of what goes into making these virtual fictional worlds meaningful for us, Ted Turnau in his book Poplogetics says:

Each of these techniques adds meaning and texture for the imaginative landscape projected by the film, a world that the filmmaker constructs for our imagination.

Our world, however, is inundated with far more meaning than any film; it’s a veritable Niagara Falls of significance. And it doesn’t take a director to manipulate sound, light, or camera angles; we just have to wake up in the morning. The meaning exists out there, and we hunger for it as we hunger for stories told to entertain us.

Reality, however, isn’t merely something socially determined for us. The idea of the realness of reality, if you will, its objective nature, is both biblical and classical. In the Bible this is assumed from beginning to end, and Plato and Aristotle believed and argued that things have meaning in and of themselves apart from our subjective experience of them. The only other view of meaning, the default of most in the West, is that we are sovereign meaning creators because reality is what we make of it. Ernst Becker, a cultural anthropologist writing in the 60s and 70s, in his book the Structure of Evil writes that there was a “problem of creating meaning,” and that man is “the meaning creating animal.” His fundamental assumption about the nature of reality was that “man maximizes his Being by creating rich, deep, and original human meanings.” Even though in some sense we do create meaning, the difference for the Christian is that meaning is primarily there to be discovered. Our attempt to interpret it is to get as close as we can to the thing that is actually there, but as finite limited creatures we will always be one step away.

Whose Interpretation?
Even though as Christians we affirm objective reality, our everyday existence in the world is a constant encounter with a plethora of circumstances and experiences that must be, in one way or another, interpreted and attached with meaning. Berger and Luckman use the term, “Subjectively meaningful.” This reality is meaningful to us, and as such it must form some kind of “coherent world”; it must be comprehensible, it must make sense to us.

Everything, however, turns on the interpretation, which is “the action of explaining the meaning of something.” Interpretation, then, is where the true battle for the soul of Western civilization lies. Who gets to interpret reality? It is either God in Christ in Scripture, or secularism by default. The biggest challenge for the rise of a new Christendom is secular culture. As Berger points out in The Sacred Canopy:

One of the most obvious ways in which secularization has affected the man in the street is as a “crisis of credibility” in religion. Put differently, secularization has resulted in a widespread collapse of the plausibility of traditional religious definitions of reality.

And he wrote that in 1967! It wasn’t too many years prior that a universe without God would have been inconceivable for average Americans. Among Western society’s cultural elites after the Enlightenment it was totally conceivable, and it only broke out into the wider culture with a bang in the 1960s. Sociology helps us to understand how wider social currents, like secularization, get internalized into individuals.

The interpretation process and how human beings derive meaning from the world is interactive. Berger and Luckman:

It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity.

They call it a paradox that human beings construct a world that they “then experience as something other than a human product.” At first blush, concepts like “humanly produced, constructed objectivity” may appear arcane, but it is important for this discussion and Christianity’s influence in our secular world. This “seeming” process happens because all of us interact socially. In producing a world in our perceptions we externalize it, then interacting with it we objectify it, and finally we internalize it as “reality.” In effect our perceptions become reality for us, whether they reflect objective reality or not. You might want to read that sentence again, and think about it a bit. As Christians it is a good idea in our knowing and what we think we know to exercise some epistemological humility (I Cor. 8:2). I have written about that in detail previously.

Christians Should Not Take “Reality” for Granted: Says Who?
What does all of this have to do with Jordan Peterson? Everything! Reality and how people perceive it is in some way always socially defined. The dialectic process of a world becoming “real” to us is never ending. Christians can never take “reality” for granted because the question is always, “Says who?” That is, who serves as the definers of reality, secular culture or God. In The Sacred Canopy, Berger puts it this way: “The fundamental coerciveness of society lies not in its machineries of social control, but in its power to constitute and impose itself as reality.” The power of this imposition occurs when reality becomes taken for granted. We should never let reality be “taken for granted,” never assume reality is there to be seen for just the way people instinctively think it is. This is where Peterson comes in as a powerful question mark on this secular-taken-for-granted reality people inhabit in the 21st century.

Our Job as Christians battling secularism is to be consistently defining reality biblically. If we don’t, the hostile secular culture will always do the defining, and Christianity will lack a compelling plausibility to most people. The cultural air breathed throughout the West is plausibly secular. It is much easier for most people to believe in an irrelevant God (few are philosophical atheists) than the providential God of Scripture who ordains and defines all things. The challenge for Christians and Christianity at this moment in history, in “negative world,” is that we don’t have any cultural credibility. In fact, as Renn’s phrase implies, the dominant secular culture sees Christianity as positively harmful and dangerous. In this environment it is, practically speaking, extremely difficult to gain cultural traction. Most of us have little culture defining power, except in the very narrow pocket of our personal lives. Then, in God’s providence steps Jordan Peterson, himself a secular, Canadian liberal academic psychologist, and a most unlikely driver of a new Christian cultural consensus.

Too many myopic Christians focus on Peterson’s lack of historical Christian orthodoxy, as if that really matters for the cultural job God has called him to. It doesn’t. It’s almost a sport now, parsing Peterson’s words to see when he’ll finally take the plunge and declare with his mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in his “heart that God raised him from the dead,” so that he will finally be saved (Rom. 10:9). And being a man of many words, it’s a robust sport! It seems The Hound of Heaven is after him, though, given his wife is a convert to Catholicism, and his daughter an outspoken born-again Christian. Not to mention how many people challenge him on his conception of Christianity. But at this point, whatever the form and nature of this conception, his job is much bigger than his own salvation. I know that’s not a very Evangelical thing to say, but it’s true.

 

 

The reason Peterson is so important is because the “conceptual machinery” that elites in a society impose on the masses must be unmasked so that the underlying assumptions are always questioned. The secular culture like a machine grinds its notions, or concepts, into our plausibility field, so to speak, to make reality seem a certain way. This seeming must be questioned. As the popular bumper sticker in the olden days demanded, we must “Question Authority.” We as Christians in a culture hostile to our Faith must always question the authority of the definers: “Says who?” That is Jordan Peterson, and God has given him a huge platform to do that. This short video is a good example of how effectively he does that.

He also has credibility among cultural elites who are not leftists. Not being a run of the mill conservative Evangelical has helped him gain an impressive traction among people who would otherwise not find Christianity plausible at all. I’ve heard quite a few stories of people who have come to Christ because of him, so his lack of orthodoxy hasn’t kept people from being influenced by him to embraced Christ as Lord and Savior. The battlefield in our secular age is immense, and much of it happens, as Burger and Luckman say, on a “pretheoretical level,” that is prior to people even thinking. What Peterson is doing so well is again making the Christian worldview a player on the secular world’s stage, making it plausible for an increasing number of people. That means they will take it more seriously as a possible answer for the crying needs of our time. Secularism is not working, an experiment birthed in the Enlightenment that has proved wanting at every level. Let’s pray for Jordan that he makes it all the way to the only one who can save him from sin and death.

What’s A Matter with Church Growth Movements Anyway?

What’s A Matter with Church Growth Movements Anyway?

Jul 31, 2024 | History

In the conservative Evangelical and Reformed circles I’ve run in over the years, I’ve come across a lot of skepticism and criticism of church growth movements. I’ve always questioned what seemed to me a knee jerk reaction, even if the criticisms could be justified at some level. Do these critics not want their churches to grow? Do they think churches growing and the number of Christians increasing is a bad thing? Certainly they can’t, but the criticisms remain.

In a recent church service our pastor shared some verses in Acts that talk about the church growing as if it were a good thing, as if it’s actually part of God’s plan. And now that I’m postmillennial in my eschatological perspective, I believe a growing, victorious church is what God planned from the beginning. God reveals to the Patriarchs that his plans are a church growing, numbers that can’t be counted, like dust of the earth, sand on the seashore, and stars in the sky. That sure makes it seem like church growth should be the norm, not an exception to the rule of small churches.

Prior to my eschatological conversion, I believed more people would be damned to hell than would be saved. It was probably this verse from Matthew 7 more than any other that “proved” it to me:

13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

This seemed so obvious to me it was beyond debate, and nobody I knew or read questioned it. Only a few find it, what’s to debate?

Then there is Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew 22. He prefaces it by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like . . . .” So clearly, I thought, the parable is about “going to heaven” when we die. My mind always seemed to go there rather than the resurrection. I knew and believed the ultimate end of God’s plan is not a spiritual disembodied reality in a place called heaven, but a material reality in a new heavens and earth where His people will have new, resurrected bodies. But since I believed, and still do, that our souls maintain consciousness when we die, then we do go to heaven. But is that what Jesus is really talking about? He ends with these words that seem to leave no doubt:

14 “For many are called, but few are chosen.”

The gospel proclamation is the invitation to the wedding feast, and it goes out to all people, but only a few will respond and thus be the chosen. Again, this seemed beyond debate. Then, as I say, postmillennialism dropped out of the sky on my head, and I wasn’t so sure.

Jesus’ Ministry to the Jews
Most Christians miss the fundamental fact about Jesus’ life and ministry: it was primarily directed to Jews. He was Israel’s Messiah, sent to the lost sheep of Israel. Twice in Matthew Jesus uses that phrase. In the first he is sending out the twelve apostles to proclaim the good news and these are his instructions (Matt. 10):

5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. 7 As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’

The second time he uses the phrase is in Matthew 15. A desperate Canaanite woman cries out to Jesus’ disciples to help her demon-possessed daughter, and he basically blows her off. Why?

24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

He makes an exception in her case because of the depth of her faith, but this statement is deeply profound and should affect not only how we interpret his parables, but his entire ministry. He was the Jews’ Messiah, a Savior they had been anticipating for 400 years. Unfortunately, the Jewish religious professionals rejected their Messiah, and Israel faced the ultimate judgment of God in AD 70. I will get to the theological significance of that in a moment.

Because Jesus was speaking and ministering primarily to Jews, we can’t interpret the meaning of the wide and narrow gate to apply to anyone beyond its Jewish context. It is the same with the parables. Their meaning can have universal application, but we can’t assume that is always the case as is the default in modern Evangelicalism. The number one principle in biblical hermeneutics, or biblical interpretation, is that context determines the meaning of the passage. When viewed as written to Jews in the first century in light of their 2,000 year history, statements like wide and narrow gates and many are called and few are chosen take on a whole new meaning, and in a similar manner the parables.

The Theological Significance of the Destruction of the Temple
For all of my Christian life until recently I didn’t understand the theological significance of AD70 when the Roman General Titus and the Roman army decimated Jerusalem and completely destroyed the Jewish temple. By AD66 the Jews had had enough of Roman rule, and for the next three years revolted against the Romans. By 69 when Titus took over the army from his father, Vespasian, who was called back to Rome to become emperor by the Senate, the army had pushed the entire Jewish rebel army back into Jerusalem. During the Passover of 70, the Romans allowed Jews to go into Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, which would be the last of the Jewish Old Covenant era, but they would not let them leave. The siege was brutal with starvation and death rampant.

We have great detail of the war from Josephus, a former Jewish rebel who defected to the Roman side to save his life. He became an historian who wrote priceless accounts of the end of the Jewish nation. Wanting to save the temple and the Jewish way of life, Josephus tried to negotiate a truce between the Romans and Jewish rebels, but neither side trusted him, so it didn’t work. In August of 70, the Romans breached the final defenses of the city, and massacred most of the remaining population, completely destroying the temple in the process. Some scholars believe Titus didn’t intend for that to happen, but the Roman soldiers were so furious with the Jews that they were out of control and destroyed everyone and everything. I heard someone refer to what happened in Jerusalem as “grotesque butcheries,” horrors that are unimaginable even to those familiar with brutality of modern warfare.

The question is, what did it mean, something most Christians don’t ask, nor did I until recently. Those familiar with the Synoptic gospels will be familiar with the Olivet Discourse, recorded in Matthew 24 and 25, Mark 13, and Luke 21. Jesus is speaking to his disciples approximately 40 years prior to AD70 and we’re told the following:

Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. 2 “Do you see all these things?” he asked. “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

This must have stunned his disciples because the temple was a massive complex. To think not one stone would be left on another was unfathomable. Nonetheless they ask Jesus,

3 As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Most Christians being premillennial dispensationalists interpret “end of the age” as referring to the end of time, but Jesus says (v. 34) that “this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” Forty years later, they happened. The age Jesus is speaking of is the Old Covenant age which Jesus came to fulfill, and since “the Jews” (i.e., their leaders) rejected Jesus, God brought judgment on the nation. This had been the message of the prophets, and now it had been fulfilled. The destruction of the temple and the sacrificial system that went with it communicated in no uncertain terms the message of the book of Hebrews, that one greater than Moses had come.

There is no space to get into a detailed understanding of these challenging passages, but it is clear some applied to that generation only, and some to another time in the future. But when Jesus is speaking about wide and narrow gates, or few being chosen, he is specifically speaking to Jews of that generation, not gentiles in the age of gospel proclamation. In fact, the Old Covenant’s failure to produce a growing generational church is the reason there needed to be a New Covenant. Bulls and goats were only types and shadows of a coming reality, signs pointing forward that most Jews couldn’t read. Think of God’s Old Covenant people as a small speck of light at one place on earth four thousand years ago, obscure and invisible. God slowly grew His people, but the growth plan never took. Then Jesus. Today there are over two billion specks of light all over the earth, and dust, sand, and stars are looking more realistic every day. What Christ accomplished on the cross, his resurrection confirmed, and ascended to the right hand of the Father to fulfill, sending his Holy Spirit to guarantee it. We’re on the winning team, brothers and sisters; we just need to get to work!

Church Growth is the Plan
I’ve noticed in some of the churches I’ve attended over the years people praying for their churches to grow, but not doing anything to make them grow. As if God will magically just bring people to Christ and their church without Christians doing anything. All throughout redemptive history God uses sinful, imperfect human beings to do His work and advance His kingdom. In this case it’s evangelism. Few churches have pastors dedicated to evangelism, yet Paul charges Timothy that he is to “do the work of an evangelist” as he discharges all the duties of his ministry (2 Tim. 4:5). Elsewhere he asks how people can believe in one who they have not heard, and how they can hear without someone preaching or proclaiming it to them? (Rom. 10:14). Yet I rarely hear evangelism encouraged or training made available. I recently wrote a post called, “Be More Annoying for Jesus,” because I believe all Christians at some level should be eager that everyone they encounter know they are followers of the way, the truth, and the life. I recently listened to this podcast about this problem in Reformed churches, and it is an excellent discussion of the problem that applies to all Christian traditions.

It should not be a problem given the message of Acts about a growing church and how it happens. We’ve established, albeit in a cursory manner, that growth has always been the plan. I’ve heard people of a pessimistic bent bemoaning the rotten state of things say, well at least like in Elijah’s day God has reserved a remnant of the faithful, as if the church is only a remnant instead of the dominating cultural force God made it to be. In fact, Christian Western civilization was a result of what we see happen in Acts. Here are the verses I spoke of above.

Acts 2:
41 Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.
47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Acts 6:
7 So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.

Acts 9:
31 Then the church throughout Judea, Galilee and Samaria enjoyed a time of peace and was strengthened. Living in the fear of the Lord and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, it increased in numbers.

Acts 12:
24 But the word of God continued to spread and flourish.

Acts 16:
5 So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers.

Acts 19:
20 In this way the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power.

We now live on the other side of Christian dominance in the West, what some call trash world or negative world, and the tendency is to think because of that growing the church and numbers of Christians is a pipe dream, or at best an uphill struggle. I beg to differ. Think about the lay of the land Christians faced who Luke was writing about in Acts. The odds against them succeeding were apparently insurmountable. The entire Roman Empire and Jewish establishment was against them, and persecution common, yet just over 300 years later Christianity was pronounced as the official religion of the Roman Empire. I guarantee you nobody saw that coming, yet the church remained faithful in prayer, proclamation, and community. I believe we learn by this that growth is something that should be planned and sought and worked for, and celebrated when it happens. As I often say, work like it depends on us, and pray because it depends on God.

 

The Most Important Book of the 21st Century: “The Age of Entitlement”

The Most Important Book of the 21st Century: “The Age of Entitlement”

Jul 24, 2024 | America, Uncategorized

I heard several people reference how important a book The Age of Entitlement is, but I had no idea just how important I would come to see it. The title actually kept me from reading it for a while given I have a bunch of other books to read, and I thought I knew what it would be about. We live in an age when people feel entitled for a variety of reasons, and I figured it would be exploring this well-trod ground. The subtitle also gave me that impression, “America Since the Sixties.” Our culture that decade starting with the youth, the now much maligned baby boomers, pulled a collective tantrum, and I, me, mine, and me, myself, and I became the new Trinity American culture would come to worship. That preoccupation with the self was what I thought the book was about, but it’s much worse than that.

What is it about, and why do I think it is so important? And so important, I think it’s possibly the most important book of our troubled century? A turning point which had been brewing a long time in America was reached in 1964 with a concept and phrase most Americans see as unproblematic and positive, civil rights. Sixty years ago on July 2, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law against the votes of southern Democrats and with the help of Republicans. It was signed by the new president, Lyndon Johnson, and as soon as the ink dried everything in America had changed. Or it would shortly do so, and in ways that would in Barack Obama’s infamous 2008 declaration, fundamentally transform America. The means by which that transformation was unleashed that day was by a word now sacrosanct and unquestioned on the American left, diversity. The seeds of DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and woke, was planted that day, and would become in due course a jungle of lies and dysfunction that would make America the unrecognizable mess it is in 2024.

Is the Constitution Dead? 

This video seems to be “controversial” in social media circles because it appears some people think the constitution that was bequeathed to us by America’s founders is not dead. It is impossible looking at current day America to conclude the constitution of 1787 is alive and well, unless you believe the constitution is playdough you shape into anything you want, which is exactly what it has become. The reason goes back to the progressives of the late 19th century. They came to believe the government of a   homogeneous population was no match for a modern industrial society. Woodrow Wilson saw the U.S. Constitution as an antiquated document for another time not up to the new realities of “modern government.” From Wilson would flow into the progressive bloodstream the idea of a “living constitution,” a playdough constitution if you will, which is of course no constitution at all.

Holding the firm conviction that with science and technology no problem seemed too big to overcome, progressives were determined to apply this mindset to government. Something called “scientific” management or planning by “experts” would become the rallying cry of the new century, and this mentality took over American government with the presidency of Wilson in 1913. As an academic, Wilson wrote a paper in 1887 arguing for “the science of administration,” which speaks to this rule by “experts.” This idea of ruling became the rage in the progressive era of the early twentieth century.

Because these “experts” knew so much better than everyone else, society, and thus people, progressives believed, could be molded from the top down. Law ceased to be what Scripture said it was, a means to restrain evil people and their wickedness (Romans 13), and became a mechanism to create a certain kind of society. Law was now a means of salvation from the depredations and vicissitudes of life; if Jesus isn’t your Savior, government will be. Slowly throughout the 20th century, law became a means to an end of the liberal vision of what a good society looked like. Man’s law was now salvation instead of the means to protect our liberties. Law, and it’s extension, administrative fiat, became a means of coercion to determine how we think and act, of course for our own good.

The founding generation, and why America became great in the first place, had a completely different notion of how a society became good. It wasn’t top down, created by government or law, but bottom up, from the people. They believed people could not be coerced to be good, virtuous citizens, but must have the liberty to choose to be good. Thus, the importance every single person of that generation placed on religion, specifically, Christianity. We could quote the founding generation all day long about the importance of “religion,” meaning Protestant biblical Christianity, but the most popular quotation to make the point comes from the second president of the United States, John Adams:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Again, and there is zero debate on this point, Adams was referring to the Christian religion. The syllogism writes itself:

  • America’s Constitution requires a moral and religious people.
  • America is no longer religious or moral.
  • America’s Constitution is dead.

But instead of the secular elite burning the old Constitution and writing a new one, they pulled a bait and switch. The Constitution had been tinkered with previously during the Civil War and the New Deal, but at least it could be argued it was the same animal, related to the original. What happened with the Civil Rights Law of 1964 gutted the original Constitution and replaced it with a fake, a counterfeit that bears very little resemblance to the original.

The New Constitution: Rule from the Top Down
The first section of Caldwell’s book is called, “The Revolutions of the 1960s.” Notice the plural. What exploded in the 1960s expressed itself in a variety of ways, the Kennedy assassination in November 1963 unleashing these forces in revolutionary ways. Not coming from a specifically Christian perspective, Caldwell doesn’t address the massive elephant in the room, secularism. None of these revolutions would have happened without its slow creeping rise throughout the 20th century. Ultimately, the only thing that will hold the state at bay is Almighty God revealed in the Old and New Testaments. When Jesus said, “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” (Matt. 22:21), he revealed the only means to limit the state: God. No God, means unlimited state. Secularism, and the Pietism that enables it, means no God because a merely personal God stuck within the church walls and in the home is culturally in effect an invisible and powerless God.

The most obvious revolution was sexual, which caused everyone to miss the depth of the race revolution, specifically in civil rights law. This didn’t mean the two weren’t intimately connected, as we’ve seen in the last 10 years. First, race had to be established as the fundamental narrative of the American Republic. Since the 1960s, Caldwell writes, “slavery is at the center of Americans’ official history, with race the central concept in the country’s official self-understanding.” This was not the case before the 60s. After this, he writes, “the constitutional republic was something discussed as if it were a mere set of tools for resolving larger conflicts about race and human rights.” The radical nature of this change is lost on most Americans, few if any knowing how unpopular the race revolution was. The ideology of anti-racism became all-consuming for America’s liberal elites even as most Americans resisted the re-formation of their country in the name of race. They didn’t have a choice. Legally, this was going to happen, like it or not, and polls show they didn’t like it at all. They would be made to like it, or pay, literally and figuratively.

What the Civil Rights Act did was embolden and incentivize “bureaucrats, lawyers, intellectuals, and political agitators to become the ‘eyes and ears,’ and even foot soldiers, of civil rights enforcement.” This means, “more of the country’s institutions were brought under the act’s scrutiny. . . . with new bureaucracies to enforce them.” The obsession of American government was to mold the whole of society “around the ideology of anti-racism.” In due course it all took on an inevitable life of its own. This race consciousness was also pushed culturally through education and Hollywood; it could not be escaped. Out of this milieu inevitably grew the concept of diversity as an unquestioned moral good, which means any kind of sameness is a moral evil that must be eradicated, which is why Obama could say diversity is “one of our greatest strengths.” This would never stop with race, and soon the relations between men and women, and sex itself became a focus of the diversity police. The sexual revolution went well beyond sex and debauchery. Although nobody could conceive of such a thing at the time, once the Civil Rights Act was passed, two people of the same sex getting “married” was a foregone conclusion.

As I said above, these radical changes had been brewing for a while, through the latter 19th and for the entire 20th century. The entire capture of America (and the West) by secularism was inevitable once the poison of the Enlightenment was unleashed in the 17th century. That too like race consciousness was a top down affair, intellectuals slowly pushing God aside until they finally shoved him out the window in the 19th century. What was unique about the 20th century was adding the idea coming out of progressivism of “rule by experts,” also pushed by the intellectual classes. The plebians, the lower and middle classes, could never be allowed to run their own lives and obviously make a mess of them and society as well, so the “experts” would come to the rescue. America is no longer a self-governing republic, but a society with a total state.

Want Your Constitution Back? Vote for Donald Trump
The fact that Donald Trump is the only man standing between America and the tyranny of the deep state proves that God has a sense of humor. Like many others, I was not a fan of Trump and thought his candidacy was a joke. He had no more chance of winning the presidency than the man in the moon. As with scotch, Trump was an acquired taste for me but now I like both, a lot. As I say in Going Back to Find the Way Forward, Trump is the red pill that keeps on giving. Just recently we had the conviction that “was heard ‘round the world,” and there was a run on red pills. People who wouldn’t in a million years vote for Trump, are now voting for Trump. Thank you, deranged Marxist leftists, and your Democrat Party. 

In my book I explore how the history of England and the common law lead directly to America, something we don’t learn from so called, “public education.” We have to go back to Alfred the Great in the 9th century to see the beginnings of the American Republic. For almost a thousand years the “rights of Englishmen” Americas founding generation fought for was slowly developed from Magna Carta in 1215 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In God’s providence, the great Puritan migration to New England from the 1620s through the early 1640s set the predicate for America’s founding: no Pilgrims or Puritans, no America. Of course, secularists deny that and claim America was a result of the so called Enlightenment, but that is a very simplistic distortion. I deal with this in detail in the book, so if you want details on all this, you’ll have to get the book.

As Christianity and the church made its slow decline into irrelevance, so did the liberties of Americans. As government power increased, so did the independent self-governing nature of Americans slowly atrophy as well. This decline also went hand-in-hand with the rise of what we now call, “the administrative state,” the bureaucratic apparatus that effectively governs almost all of our lives. It is pernicious and evil, and destroys the possibility of true liberty. This is the reason Trump is the mortal enemy of the left: he is an existential threat to their power, and they love their power. Since they ditched truth a long time ago to embrace postmodernism and “the narrative,” i.e., whatever protects or extends their power, all they have is the aphrodisiac of power and the will to power.

Trump has the gift of rubbing the right people the wrong way, and what most terrifies his enemies is that no matter what they’ve thrown at him, they can’t stop him. They know he did not become the success he is, and the most well-known human being on earth by accident. He learns from his mistakes, and he made a lot in his first term. He was naïve and gullible, as hard as it is for Trump haters to imagine that. From all the people I’ve heard who interact with and know him, they say he’s a genuinely nice guy. But he’s also a killer who not only knows “the art of the deal,” but knows how to win. Winners always learn from their mistakes because they really like to win.

Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower on Monday June 16, 2015. He was a gift to the “fake news” media that didn’t stop giving. They didn’t take him seriously until he defeated Hillary Clinton, something that should endear him to every American patriot forever. From that moment he had to be destroyed, and we’re all familiar with the unprecedented efforts by the Uniparty to do that. I say that because the Republicans we complicit, hating him almost as much as the Democrats. None of what happened to Trump would have happened without their full cooperation, even if much of it was done by omission. It was this that finally fully opened my eyes to the con in Con Inc., and why I no longer consider myself a conservative. As I explained recently, I am now a nationalist populist Christian conservative.

The lawfare, a word most of us had never heard of until Trump, is the final nail in the constitutional coffin. And in spite of Trump taking up all the oxygen in the room, Democrat lawfare is ubiquitous; abusing the law is how Democrats gain and maintain power. It has literally nothing to do with justice or Our DemocracyTM. Peter Navarro, who served in Trump’s White House, is serving a four-month prison sentence for something that nobody in the history of America ever has. Steve Bannon, another alum of the administration, and a primary driver of the MAGA movement, is now serving a similar four-month sentence for the same thing. They are trying to throw Rudy Giuliani in prison, among others, and the travesty of the J6 prosecution has destroyed the lives of many innocent patriotic Americans. And to top it off, many lawyers in Trump’s orbit, or who defend patriots, are threatened with a pernicious process to have them debarred. It’s so Orwellian it’s hard to believe it is all actually happening, but it is.

If you’ve ever read the Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, you’ll notice that these rights were specifically designed to limit the scope and power of the government, not the people. In fact, the Tenth Amendment says this specifically:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Civil Rights Act basically took white out, pun intended, and made this amendment completely disappear. Ridding America of civil rights law is a long term project, but if we want a shot at getting our constitution back, it will only happen if Donald Trump is Elected in November.