Trump, A Great Awakening, and the Refounding of America

Trump, A Great Awakening, and the Refounding of America

Mar 26, 2025 | America

If you’re not one of my multitude of fans, all three of them, you won’t know this is the subtitle of the book I published last year, Going Back to Find the Way Forward. As we see things unfolding in Trump’s second term, I’m thinking I might be some sort of prophet. Since most of you reading or listening to this haven’t read the book, you may want to check it out to see the bigger, grand historical context in which our momentous times are taking place.

If we look back through redemptive history we see God working out his plans to redeem His people and His earth even up to this very day. None of what’s happening now should be seen outside of its historical, ultimately redemptive context, even in the grimy world of politics and governing. Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven applies as much there as it does in our personal lives and in our churches. If you don’t believe this, or if that statement rubs you the wrong way, I encourage you to read or listen to three of my previous posts:

Because I now see the Christian faith, mine included, as something grounded and rooted in history, nothing that happens is outside of God’s ultimate redemptive purposes. History is the outworking of those purposes, of which are the subject of my book. Let’s see why I believe everything that is happening is of God.

God, Red Pills, and History’s Dividing Line
As 2024 progressed and Democrats continued to double down on stupid, I became increasingly optimistic, an optimism developing since I first came across Steve Bannon’s War Room after the 2020 election. As a long-time card carrying member of Con Inc., officially from when Reagan was first elected, I had gotten used to conservative losing. Our side talked a good game, but never did anything to actually challenge the progressive status quote, let alone push back. Then Trump.

Democrats will rue the day they did everything in their power to not let Trump win the 2020 election. If he had, his second term would have been mired in controversy and “resistance,” but most importantly the Democrats would not have been able to inflict wokestan upon the American people to the degree they did, which opened the eyes of tens of millions of Americans to their stupidity and lies. They actually believed what they were doing was morally good and the American people were behind them. Lies will tend to make people delusional. As important as the left’s blindness and stupidity, Trump and the people around him would not have had those four years to learn what they did wrong in the first term, and apply it in his second. He’s accomplishing things literally nobody thought possible. Even Democrat analysts are amazed, saying in effect this is truly something new under the sun. Even worse for the Democrats? They pissed Trump off, pardon the French, but trying to kill and put him in prison for 500 years will do that to a guy. The determined, angry, focused Trump is the Democrat’s and left’s worst nightmare.

What explains all this? If God isn’t at the top of your list, you’re not paying attention. As the book developed over ’22 and ’23, I would look at the print on my office wall Washington praying next to his great white steed at Valley Forge. Painted by Arnold Friberg to celebrate America’s bicentennial in 1976, its symbolic meaning would grow in importance to me by the day. I began to realize the odds against the newborn American republic were far worse than ours against the leftist woke Uniparty deep state. America should have been still born against the mighty British Empire, so God explains our founding as He does our potential refounding.

The founders fervently believed their success ultimately depended on the Almighty God revealed to us in Scripture. The supposed Diest, Benjamin Franklin, may have said it best. At the convention where the details of America’s experiment in self-government were being hashed out, he said these words to the august attendees which could come out of the mouth of any fervent Evangelical of that time or now:

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.

In our case the question is, can an empire endure. Only God knows, but more importantly it is only God who determines whether it will or not. As I was writing I believed and hoped that was true, but now I’m suspecting in fact it is. God appears not to be done with the United States of America!

 

Everyone in the world knew, even the hardcore atheists were tempted to admit it, that Trump turning his head at that exact moment wasn’t chance. And then the raised fist and Fight! Fight! Fight! Are you kidding me? I get chills envisioning it again as I write this. If we didn’t know any better we would think this was scripted by mega reality TV Star Trump, but we do know better, and it was most certainly scripted by Almighty God. Both Reagan and John Paul II believed God saved them from the assassin’s bullet for a reason, and that was so together they could defeat the Godless Soviet Union. Trump too is a man on a mission to defeat the progeny of those same Soviets embodied in our Democrat Party and everything they stand for in American government and culture. Trump is on a mission from God, having said as much, that God spared him to do exactly what he’s been doing since January 20 at noon Eastern Standard Time.

As I’ve often said, this Great Awakening, the one I write about in the book, is not at all like the previous Great Awakenings. Those were primarily spiritual, taking place in thoroughly Christian cultures among Christian peoples steeped in Christians assumptions and a Christian worldview. This Great Awakening is happening in a thoroughly secular culture whose assumptions and worldview are agnostic. Like the ancient Epicureans, everybody believes in God, save the very atheist few, but lives as if God is completely irrelevant to their lives and the world, persona non grata. We call this religion moralistic therapeutic deism, the faith of secularism, a failed several hundred year experiment in Western culture out of whose ashes will come a new Christendom. It so happens that Trump came along right at the time secularism was showing its age, its impoverished worldview leaving an increasing number of people looking for more.

Because this awakening is not only spiritual but broadly culture, red pill experiences are touching people just at the point of what I call in the book, “the dividing line in Western culture: truth.” Whether this is related to politics, or the administrative state, or endless wars and the military industrial complex, or the Uniparty and Con In., or money and economics, or justice and injustice, or health and the medical-industrial complex, Big Pharma and Big Food, or the woke insanity, those whose eyes are opened are those who care most passionately about truth. And I argue that even if these people are not yet Christians, they just haven’t realized their allegiance to truth points them inevitably to the one who is The Truth. As such, truth itself has metaphysical and spiritual implications. I believe this is why Jesus and Christianity in our cultural moment is no longer uncool and “controversial.” I recently wrote a piece about how We Went from Negative to Positive World in One Day! Even the non-Christians know Christianity captures something deeply at the heart of the nature of reality, and it’s now welcome in the public square like it hasn’t been in a long time. They know something about Christianity leads to societal flourishing. We need to build on that.

The Founding of America
Covid was a blessing in disguise. So many things came to light for so many people during those few years it’s impossible to see any chance of refounding America without it. God’s providential sovereign control of all things could not have been displayed any more clearly if an airplane was writing it in the sky. Of course, in the midst of a storm it’s difficult to see anything but the storm, but since life is 20/20 hindsight, we can see His hand all over the place. As for many things in life, the easiest way to see it is in contrast. Holding two things side by side allows us to compare them and see what we’re really dealing with, in this case two contrasting views of human government, views as different as night and day. The founding is our north star contrast.

Which brings us to the story of Babel in Genesis 11. Man in his hubris was building “a tower that reaches to the heavens,” and God understood if he let them continue, “then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” The moral of the story is a simple one sinful human beings seem adept at forgetting; concentrations of power are bad. We can see throughout history how common aggrandizing power is, and how jealous man is of his power once he has it. Man not only wants to be God, he wants to be God over others. In previous ages this could be limited geographically. For example, the Roman Empire and its tyrannical rule could only extend as far as Roman physical power allowed it. In the 21st century, the aggrandizing is global, something we’ve come to call globalism, run by globalists. In the early 1990s George H.W. Bush called this a “new world order,” and many of us thought it was a good thing. We obviously hadn’t learned our lesson from Babel well enough. Then Trump. So much of the red pill times we live in come down to, then Trump. I still marvel, incredulously, that God would use a man I once so despised and thought so little of to do such remarkably good things.

I didn’t know he’d always been an America first populist-nationalist. His timing to run for office in 2015 was perfect because the spirit of Brexit, the nationalist referendum in Britain to leave the EU, was in the air. Globalists by definition hate the nation-state because it gets in the way of their plans to remake the world in their globalist image. They see themselves as an omnicompetent elite who know better than the people they seek to rule what is good for them, but a “rule by experts” always leads to Babel. The progressive movement in the early 1900s started this, and the Trump induced Covid hysteria ended it. With his reelection, for the first time in almost a hundred years, we’re seeing the potential dismantling of the administrative state. In other words, the pulling down of Babel brick by brick, and the left is powerless, both politically and culturally, to stop it. For a conservative like me since 1980 who’s been conned by Con Inc. ever since, this is stunning to behold.

Which brings me to the founding of America. America had been in historical development since Alfred the Great, specifically in the development in England of the rule of law, and the concept of political liberty. It was Christianity alone that allowed this to develop, not some fictional secular so-called Enlightenment. But it wasn’t only a development in Western intellectual history, but simultaneous boots on the ground governance. It developed through Magna Carta in 1215 and over time into the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Virginia had been settled in 1607, becoming the first enduring English colony in North America, and the English Puritans started fleeing religious persecution to the New World starting in the 1620s. Over the next hundred and fifty years waves of immigrants from all over the British Isles would come to America to establish a Christian country with the rights of Englishmen. In due course the unique character of this Christian people would slowly develop. Far from home they began carving out a living in a harsh land, and learned how to govern themselves which would eventually lead to a Declaration of Independence from the mother country, and the founding of the United States of America. As I was writing the book I read A Patriot’s History of the United States, and I highly suggest it. (Put up image) It was the cultural dynamics of this specific people in a specific geography at a specific time in history that God used to create the historically unique American character, and it is that character at our moment in history that gives us the possibility of a refounding.

The question confronting us in 2025 as we fight this war without bullets and bombs, is what exactly we are refounding. In the book I outline three broad perspectives on how the founding is defined:  Christian, secular, and cultural Marxism leftism. The latter has for the most part been defeated and discredited, so the debate is whether America was founded as a Christian or a secular nation. All of Americas founding generation believed Christianity was at the heart of liberty. Without it, they believed a self-governing republic was unsustainable. The quote on the Liberty Bell from Leviticus 25:10 reflects this, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.” The Founders clearly didn’t see a contradiction between liberty and the Bible or Christianity. There wasn’t a secularist in the lot of them! They quoted the Bible, especially Deuteronomy, more than any other book or thinkers as they argued for this new country, believing it was specifically a Protestant Christian people that would enable it to succeed.

Unfortunately, in the increasingly secular 20th century, scholars began to claim most of America’s founders were Deists and the founding primarily secular. The reason they believed this is the same reason most conservatives and Christians today believe America is a secular nation: a Christian nation is not conducive to liberty. Or put the other way round, a Christian nation would be coercive and tyrannical. Only a pluralistic secular society, or so the thinking goes, can avoid the inevitable religious squabbles. I wrote a post last year with a title many conservatives and Christians would answer in the affirmative: Is a Christian Nation an Oxymoron?, a contradiction in terms. They believe this for two reasons. One is misunderstanding the nature of Christianity as the public religion of a nation, and the other is the secular myth of neutrality.

The Refounding of America
The question before us is this: Can America flourish as a secular nation, or was John Adams right when he declared:

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

The reason this is such a critical question is because America was the first government in the history of the world to be one of limited powers, or enumerated in a Constitutional word, over a self-governing people. The spirit of Babel in the heart of sinful human beings made this a rare thing indeed.

For our side of the political and culture football, i.e., we’re not Marxists, it seems all agree we want to get back to an America with a federal government of limited powers per the Constitution. We may be allies and agree on almost everything, or cobelligerents and only agree on some, but we can all agree the Constitution is our north star. At the turn of the 20th century the clouds of progressivism began to obscure the light of that star until the America of our founding became unrecognizable to us. To the progressive mind, the state ruled by “experts” is the essence of “democracy,” and submitting to their guidance like good little sheep for our own good is what America is all about. Then Trump.

In his first term Trump was naive and had no idea what he was up against. For decades Republicans have been the controlled opposition, part of the Uniparty, effectively no different than Democrats. Everyone, it seemed, was on the progressive statist bandwagon. For me, and I’m not alone, many became aware of what we came to call the deep state, but which we know now as the administrative state, the vast sweeping unelected bureaucracy that really runs Washington, DC, and how insidious it really is. The builders of Babel would have been jealous. Then God in his merciful providence and judgment gave the most radical progressives, leftists, Marxists, statists, their every heart’s desire: four years of almost absolute political and cultural power under puppet Joe Biden. They could not control themselves, and average Americans realized the contrast I mentioned previously, and Trump started looking mighty appealing to millions who previously wouldn’t be caught dead voting for the man.

Given almost 250 years have passed since that Declaration amid the massive changes of modernity, we understand America as re-founded will not look exactly like the 1776 or 1787 version, but it will have basic similarities. Instead of Babel and the concentration of power in globalist minded elites, state and local power, or federalism a la Jefferson, will gain the upper hand. It’s a simple matter of governmental tyranny in the hands of the few, or liberty in the hands of the many, what we call self-government. The latter is built into the American DNA, and the newly MAGA infused Republican Party may actually be able to lead Americans in that direction. Culturally, secularism will no longer be imposed by God hating elites, and Christianity will once again be respected as America’s founding religion. Babel will never sleep, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, and in the year of our Lord 2025, we have taken it.

 

 

 

Buchanan, Conservative Pessimism, and the Resurrection of the West

Buchanan, Conservative Pessimism, and the Resurrection of the West

Jan 15, 2025 | America, Uncategorized

I recently finished Pat Buchanan’s, The Death of the West, and it’s been a fascinating experience reading Buchanan’s thoughts about the dying West with twenty-plus years in the rearview mirror. The book was published in 2002, and the Bush administration was in its early days. Given few of us are Bush fans anymore, you’ll be happy to know he was Hitler too. Of course the left now loves him, and the entire Bush-Cheney cabal, because the Uniparty RINOs are just Democrats in sheep’s clothing. The world Buchanan describes, the 90s and turn-of-the-century America, has all the dynamics of the 2020s, with some of the same faces and a few players no longer around, but all playing the same old game. This was before Obama came on the stage to, “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” which turned out to be leftist hubris on steroids. And remember, as the ancient Greeks taught us, hubris always leads to nemesis.

We conservatives, however, aren’t in danger of hubris because given we’ve been consistently losing for over half a century, pessimism is our gig. Buchanan strongly tends in that direction as well. For the time, however, he was appropriately pessimistic about the chances of the West, and specifically America, escaping the probable death coming upon it from the ascendence of the Marxist left. His subtitle says what will cause its demise, and it may sound familiar: “How Dying populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.” Even for the most pessimistic conservative in the early 2000s, it would have been difficult to fathom the woke destruction heaped on America during the Biden administration, effectively Obama’s third term. What many pessimists failed to grasp is how the left’s success, spiking the football and going into woke overdrive, hubris, was key to their inevitable demise, the judgment of Nemesis. Americans saw something deeply unattractive and harmful in the woke ideology applied on a national level. No lies could paint over the destructive consequences inherent in leftist, culturally Marxist ideology.

Nobody could have predicted this was how the story would play out, America living through the worst woke nightmare until billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump dashed in to save the day. If you would have told conservatives in the Bush years this was how God was going to save America, or at least give it a chance to be re-founded on true constitutional principles, you would have been laughed out of polite society. Many people of a conservative religious bent like me despised Donald Trump. I hated everything I thought he stood for. It took me a while to believe his candidacy wasn’t a joke, just some publicity stunt. Surely, Donald Trump is not a serious man, right? I’ll never forget the first debate with all 16 candidates in the 2016 Republican Primary when Trump ripped Bush and the Iraq War. It made me physically uncomfortable. You just don’t do that! Of course as we know now, there is a lot Trump does you just don’t do.

His entire first term, ending in the stolen election and J6, perfectly played into the pessimistic conservative perspective on the current culture war, including mine. From 1980 and Reagan’s election to January 6, 2021, I was a good little movement conservative, always living with a low grade pessimism as one might live with a low grade fever. You’re not sick but you don’t feel quite right. As a Christian conservative I’d gotten used to losing, to seeing the conservative movement, which I now affectionately call Con Inc., as an enabler of liberalism. A long time ago Con Inc. had stopped living up to Buckley’s ringing declaration when he founded National Review in 1955, to stand athwart history yelling, STOP!!! Over time it turned into, please slow down. The state got bigger and more intrusive, the culture more hostile to Christianity and coarse, and it seemed like that was just the way things would always be, a cultural Berlin Wall that would never come down.

God and the Resurrection of the West
Pat Buchanan may tend to pessimism, but he is not a doomer. I use that word to label the complainers I come across who are always predicting impending doom. They make Chicken Little look like Joel Osteen preaching your best life now. For them, the worst is yet to come. You might get that feeling reading Buchanan, but I’m happy to say his Catholic faith and Christian worldview keeps him from embracing his inner doomer. Toward the end of the book he says:

While none of us may live to see the promised land, victory is assured. For we have it on the highest authority that truth crushed shall rise again.

That is because He who is The Truth became a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, died on a Roman cross to redeem the world from the curse of sin, and rose again in victory over death. That is why truth will always ultimately prevail because truth is a person, God himself who created everything, is the ground of everything, and ultimately in control of everything. There are plenty of ups and downs, zigs and zags, two steps forward, three back, but ultimately the direction of history and ultimate destination are in His hands. This Christian view of history has implications for how we interpret events unfolding in front of us. My perceptions changing of our current moment in history as I fully embraced this are a good example of how this works. During Trump’s first term, God was slowly building into me something I didn’t realize until the stolen election, and especially J6, that God was giving us an opportunity to win in what seemed like perpetual losing. As the Sovereign Lord of history He can do that. I no longer saw losing because He was giving us an opportunity in the circumstances to win.

My book Going Back to Find the Way Forward was the result of this budding awareness. Up until Trump’s apparent ignominious end in January 2021, all I could see in losing was, well, losing. Then after the election by God’s grace and providence I found Steve Bannon’s War Room, back then on YouTube. As I always say, he got me out of the fetal position, and to mix metaphors talked me off the ledge. Bannon, a Catholic, taught me something I should have known all along, but my pessimism blinded me to: God has given us agency, meaning we can change things, and all it takes is, action, action, action! You can’t get much more biblical than that! Bannon is a nationalist populist, as am I now, adding the words Christian conservative to the description. Bannon is the leader of what he calls “The Grassroots Movement.”

For the four years after the stolen election, he would have average, every day Americans on his show exercising their agency to change things, people who take seriously their responsibility of living in a representative republic of “We the people.” Such activists are the greatest fear of the establishment, America’s cultural and political elite, left or right. They represent Americans in general who will not bow the knee to the supposed “experts.” How dare these people know what’s best for their own lives! Which brings us to the historical significance of Trump.

Trump as the Pivot Point in the Resurrection of the West
This would not have been on my bingo card prior to Trump coming down the escalator. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine overcoming conservative inertia and the penchant for losing without Trump. Bannon calls them the controlled opposition, and that’s exactly what they are. As I said above, the conservative movement is an enabler of liberalism, but it’s worse than that. I’ve come to call them liberals in skirts. They are not conservative in any sense of the term, unless you say their job is conserving the liberal, progressive, statist gains of the last hundred plus years. The reason is because of something we now call the “post-World War II consensus” (PWC), a contentious phrase embraced by liberals, including good “conservatives” and despised by populist-nationalists. Against true conservatism, PWC is secularist, globalist, and corporatist. Throw in perpetual war and you have the perfect recipe for a culture war against America and anything truly conservative.

 

This elite dynamic is the way God ingeniously utilized Trump to undermine it. It’s incredible when you look back on how it all played out, and is still playing out. It wasn’t Trump, mind you, but the reaction to Trump that changed everything. The entire Uniparty elite was exposed for the grift it was. I was initially going to title the book, “Trump the Great Revealer” because that’s exactly what God has used him to do, to reveal the rot and spiritual darkness at the heart of American cultural and political life. Being a developer and builder, Trump turned out to be the guy who pulled the siding off the societal house revealing teaming throngs of termites underneath. God always seems to use unlikely people, as a read through redemptive history in the Bible makes abundantly clear, primarily to make it known: “’Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit’ says the Lord Almighty’” (Zech. 4:6). He is the Sovereign Lord of history. This applies not only to the redemptive history revealed in Scripture, but to all history, which is redemptive, God’s plans working in time and among people to His ultimate glorious ends. God has used this most unlikely man to spark a Great Awakening.

This awakening will be nothing like the Great Awakenings of the past, or like the Billy Graham revivals of the 20th century with stadiums full of people walking down the isle to “Just as I Am.” It is happening on multiple levels, and is thus several great awakenings, not just in people’s religious lives. It is cultural, political, economic, health, as well as spiritual. It’s all spiritual anyway because the Christian faith and view of reality is all encompassing, as is any other faith be it secularism, Marxism-Communism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Paganism, Animism, whatever. The benefit of Christianity over the others is that it happens to be the ultimate truth about the nature of reality, and true human flourishing and blessing can only happen living according to that reality.

Looking at the political angle because that’s where God used Trump the Trigger, and as the pivot point to resurrect it, the perspective change from Con Inc. to Trump was night and day for me. The Uniparty was given its name because most Republicans were effectively Democrats, and “the establishment” has one overarching goal: sustaining their own power. That’s why many Republicans would talk a good game, get our votes and hopes up, and then inevitably cave to Democrats. Trump would have none of that. When he said during his first election we would win so much we would get tired of winning, that was truly something new under the sun for conservatives. Was winning that much even allowed?

Clear and Present Opportunities
If it wasn’t for Trump and his willingness to stand against the entire Uniparty establishment in Washington, it’s likely Buchanan’s pessimism about the West would likely have proved correct. Circa 2002, he laid out four “clear and present dangers” that will inevitably bring death if they are not addressed. Trump was the one God raised up to turn these threats into opportunities and give us a realistic chance of victory over three of them.

  1. Dying population.
  2. Mass immigration of people of different colors, creeds, and culture changing the character of the West forever.
  3. The rise to dominance of an anti-Western culture in the West, deeply hostile to its religions, traditions, and morality, or cultural Marxism, what we now call woke.
  4. The breakup of nations and the defection of ruling elites to a world government, thus the end of nations, or globalism.

The only thing Trump can’t do is to make people have more babies. That gets to the heart of the matter. As Buchanan says, the culture war is ultimately a religious war, and religious people have more babies than secular people. Christians are going to have to save the West from demographic doom by once again being obedient to God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.

As for 2-4, what happened since Trump came down the escalator and the left went crazy is something Buchanan could not have predicted then. In God’s providence, allowing the election to be stolen was the brilliant strategy of providence, God making it the fundamental factor in the process of exposing the left. With Trump apparently finally vanquished, especially after the deep state PSYOP of J6 when Trump and all of MAGA were finally discredited, they could now get on with Obama’s “fundamental transformation of America.” It turns out Americans are not so fond of Marxist fundamental transformations. And I don’t use the word Marxist frivolously. In the               , Marx and Engles identify four enemies of communism that must be abolished, and they perfectly align with the four “clear and present dangers” laid out by Buchanan. That is not a coincidence. They are:

  1. Private property
  2. The family
  3. The nation-state
  4. Religion, i.e., Christianity

Everything the Democrat Party of Obama-Biden stands for, Marx would applaud because their policies effectively abolish all four of these. The sexual revolution starting in the 60s effectively abolished the family and contributes to dying populations and demographic apocalypse. Again, Christians will have to lead the way in obedience to God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.

When Biden took office, he immediately opened the boarder which means the end of the nation-state, and effectively globalism. So called “free trade” and the dominance of major corporations is an assault on private property, as is global finance and fiat currency. Lastly, woke went into overdrive which is a direct assault on Christianity and the family, and you have the perfect Marxist storm for the death of the West. But therein lay our opportunity for those with eyes to see. The woke globalists were building a fragile papier-mâché Berlin Wall culture that would come tumbling down as the lies were being exposed. Everything the left does, however, is built on lies, and an empire of lies cannot stand. With Trump as enemy number one, the left completely lost their minds and normal Americans woke up and said we’ve had enough. Trump’s “loss” in 2020 was the best thing that could have happened to America and the West.

Not only have Americans, as Steve Bannon says, had a belly full of it, but Trump and the entire MAGA movement have learned a lot in these last four years. The entire apparatus of the administrative deep state is now exposed, and Trump has a mandate to take it on. The dream team he’s assembling will take no prisoners, but as we’ve seen, the establishment will not be handing out the welcome mat for the dissolution of their power. It will be hand-to-hand combat, sometimes like World War I trench warfare, an inch at a time, but the cover of darkness is no longer available to the swamp. Limiting the size and scope of government might for the first time in my life be a real possibility, but MAGA and true conservatives must be persistent, determined, and downright belligerent at times to make sure the ball moves forward, even if it’s two yards and a cloud of dust.

What’s most exciting for me is that Christianity is once again being seem as a positive force for human flourishing. This is especially true among the youngest generation who moved in a conservative direction in a most unexpected way in the election. Young people just don’t do that because, well, they’re young and stupid, and that’s what you do when you’re young. Not this generation. They’ve lived with the lies of secularism, grown up with woke and Covid, and they want nothing to do with it. It’s actually cool for the first time in my life for young people to be conservative! And Christians are able to be “loud and proud” about their faith, instead of homosexuals or feminists about their perversions. The Great Awakening is happening, and it is a thrilling time to be alive. And we’re only just getting started.

 

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.

The Left’s Obsession with Fascism and Nazi’s and Donald Trump

The Left’s Obsession with Fascism and Nazi’s and Donald Trump

Jul 17, 2024 | America, Uncategorized

I finished this piece prior to the assassination attempt on President Trump, and I had no idea how timely it would be: July 13, 2024, another day that will live in infamy. I added his name to the title because he is the quintessential example of the obsession. God clearly saved Trump’s life, even as another young man, Corey Comperatore, gave his life to protect his family. This is what you get when you call someone Hitler for nine years. To the left, Trump is an existential threat to Our DemocracyTM, an authoritarian tyrant that must be stopped, and one could go on. You can hear these three alone every ten minutes on MSNBC. I don’t want to believe this was intentional, but is there really another explanation? The only other option is complete and total incompetence, and I’ll be waiting for evidence and mea culpas, max mea culpas if that turns out to be the truth.

None of this should surprise us because the left has been obsessed with Fascism and Nazi’s for a very long time? Everyone who opposes them are Fascists and Nazi’s, even as the tactics they use against their enemies are fascistic and worthy of Nazis. They are skillful and shameless in their use of projection (accusing others of doing what they do) and hypocrisy, having turned it into an art form. This piece I saw the other day from some leftist is a perfect example: “Why Aren’t We Talking About Trump’s Fascism?” And the dude is serious! I’m convinced now they really believe it. There was, of course, zero evidence of fascism from Trump in his four years in office, but so what. He’s a Fascist! And if they can they are going to put him in prison on trumped up charges, as they’ve done to his followers, just like actual Fascists. That is projection. We’ll see where the lawfare goes after they almost killed him.

Have you ever noticed that this obsession is reflected in the products that come out of Hollywood? There are a zillion, give or take a few, movies and TV shows either about Nazi’s or where Nazi’s are the bad guys. If it’s not the actual World War II Nazi’s, it’s Neo-Nazi’s, who are of course the personification of ultimate evil, White Nationalists. Oh the horror! By contrast, the world champions of butchery and genocide, the communists, are rare in Hollywood productions. Why this obsession and contrast? We have two German scholars and their reaction to World War II to thank for this, Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979).

Anyone interested or engaged in the 21st century culture wars needs to know about the Frankfurt School. In 1923, a group of Marxists established the Institute for Social Research as what we call today a “think tank” associated with the University of Frankfurt in Germany. In due course it came to be referred to as the Frankfurt School, out of which the world was given what we now call cultural Marxism. We can thank Adolf Hitler for bringing the cultural Marxism wrecking ball to America. If the Institute for Social Research had remained in Germany, cultural Marxism may have stayed isolated in Europe. However, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 with many in the school being Jewish, it relocated to New York City in 1935 and set up shop at Columbia University. It shouldn’t surprise us that Marxists would find a welcoming home at an American university in 1935—secular academia always welcomes subversive ideas first.

The primary insight of the cultural Marxists wasn’t that class-based economic oppression didn’t bring the fruit of revolution Marx promised, but that the revolutionary consciousness required would clearly not arise spontaneously; it must be assiduously cultivated via culture. They recognized Western societies produced cultures that were almost completely resistant to revolution. Marxist revolutionary consciousness had to find its way into the worldview of the average prosperous Westerner, and that could only happen through the transformation of the culture.

What the economic and cultural Marxists had in common, though, was their antipathy to Christianity because it stood in their way. Christianity and its cultural influence must be taken down, specifically through the eradication of traditional norms and institutions. The purpose of the Institute would be to unmask all the institutions and organs of culture that promoted and maintained the shared value systems responsible for the public support of those institutions and culture, most especially the family and religion. Paul Kengor in The Devil and Karl Marx identifies the strategy to accomplish this:

Rather than organize the workers and the factories, the peasants and the fields and the farms, they would organize the intellectuals and the academy, the artists and the media and the film industry. These would be the conveyor belts to deliver the fundamental transformation.

The film industry was captured by the cultural Marxists, and thus we get Nazi’s everywhere.

The process of transformation would be helped tremendously by someone who came between Marx and the Frankfurt school who had a profound influence on the continuing secularization of Western culture, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Marx didn’t have the discipline of psychology which developed later in the nineteenth century, nor Freudian teaching on sexuality, but the cultural Marxists did. Kengor calls what the Frankfurt school developed a kind of Freudian-Marxism, the worst of the ideas of the nineteenth century wedded with some of the worst of the twentieth. Both the older and newer Marxists believed religion, i.e., Christianity, and the family had to be “abolished,” as Marx put it, but the old way just didn’t work. The Soviets did everything they could to snuff out both, including murdering tens of millions of their own people—religion and the family, however, just wouldn’t go away. Bishop Fulton Sheen said communists failed to convince the world there is no God. Rather, they succeeded only in convincing the world there is a devil. 

Repressive Tolerance, Adorno and Anti-Fascism
After the war most of the faculty went back to Germany to re-establish the school, but Marcuse decided to stay in America. Adorno returned to Germany as well but returned to America in the early 50s for a time in order to not lose his American citizenship. Although he returned to Germany after a time, he had a significant impact on the culture wars in America. Marcuse though was the most significant figure to come out of the Frankfurt school. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1940, and is most famously known as the father of the “New Left” and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, he was influential in the growth of political correctness and the wokeness of our time. The “Old Left” were those who embraced the old orthodox forms of Marxism, and especially that as practiced in the Soviet Union. Young Marxist radicals by contrast were disaffected with Soviet Communism and looking for new ways to bring down the capitalist West, and the cultural approach of Frankfurt would come to dominate American Marxism through the pen of Marcuse. 

His essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” is the inspiration for what we now call “cancel culture.” Only certain accepted speech can be tolerated because actual tolerance is “repressive.” Written as part of a book called A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Marcuse argues that “tolerance today is in many of its most effective manifestations serving as a cause of oppression.” From the perspective of a cultural Marxist, of course it is. The perverse logic of Marcuse as a cultural Marxist has to be read to be believed. In this upside down, inside out world, tolerance “actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination.” Free speech and the First Amendment are considered dangerous; a common trope on the left is “speech is violence.” If that is true, of course it must not be tolerated, and we’ll see why from Marcuse’s perspective.

Part of his argument will serve to introduce us to Theodor Adorno. What Adorno did in 1950 allowed Marcuse to develop “the Nazi argument.” It was a diabolically genius move paying cultural dividends to this day. First Marcuse lays his cards on the table:

Liberating tolerance . . . would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the left.

How convenient, but we’ll see why he says this when we get to Adorno. Then he gives us the punch line:

In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.

It’s a short trip from this to “speech is violence,” and by definition it can only be speech from the right. This led to a common phrase the New Left used in their protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, “No free speech for Fascists.” Thus what we know as cancel culture is a necessity to keep the right from doing what Fascists and Nazi’s always do. Not cancelling people on the right and their speech would be a dereliction of duty, the First Amendment be damned. Of course, all the political violence is on the left, but that is justified violence because it’s used against the Fascist right. A group using violence today can be called Antifa, for anti-fascists, with a straight face. You can’t make this stuff up!

Adorno was the one who made this connection in his 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality. Dinesh D’Souza in his book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left has a section titled, “The Deceitful Origin of ‘Anti-Fascism.’” He writes that after World War II, “Nazism became the very measure of evil. So Marcuse and Adorno knew that anything associated with Nazism or fascism would automatically be tainted. They set about putting this obvious fact to political use on behalf of the political Left.” Fascism in this distortion of reality would now be associated with capitalism and moral traditionalism, which as we’ve seen must be “abolished.” 

D’Souza argues persuasively that Marxism and fascism are ideologies of the left, but because of Adorno they came to be associated with two different ends of the ideological and political spectrum. In his book Adorno introduced the F-Scale, in D’Souza’s words:

The basic argument was that fascism is a form of authoritarianism and that the worst manifestation of authoritarianism is self-imposed repression. Fascism develops early and we can locate it in young people’s attachments to religious superstition and conventual middle-class values about family, sex, and society.

So a la Marx, religion and the family must be “abolished.” The book and ideas were swallowed hook, line, and sinker by an already liberal academia and media, becoming the accepted perspective that fascism was a phenomenon of the right. It’s a complete lie, but that’s what Marxists do. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, Hollywood was blatantly patriotic, but when the New Left exploded on the scene brining its cultural Marxism with them, it was only a matter of time until the Nazi’s were frequent guests on the big and small screen. Keep in mind, from the perspective of the woke leftists who make movies and TV shows, all references to Fascism and Nazi’s are a reflection on conservative, religious, traditional, patriotic, dare I say, MAGA Americans. That is how they see you, and me, as threats to Our DemocracyTM.

Wokeness Takes Over American Culture and the Solution
In a well-known exchange in The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’” Gradually and suddenly perfectly describes the apparent suddenness of woke ideology completely taking over American culture the last handful of years. Like most people I was surprised but I shouldn’t have been. Not only had the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism come to America in the 1930s, but as it took root with the leftist radicals in the ‘60s and ‘70s, those people went into academia and brought their cultural Marxism with them. From there many went into education and programmed a generation of children who are now adults into the woke Marxist worldview. This process has been going on for decades and it was only a matter of time before we experienced the cultural and governing effects we now have.

The modern-day cultural Marxists, the wokesters, have been programmed, or more accurately brainwashed, into Marx’s dialectical worldview of critique and crisis—or conflict theory. In a nutshell according to Marx, those with wealth and power try to hold on to it by any means possible, mainly by suppressing the poor and powerless. A basic premise of conflict theory is that individuals and groups within society will always work to maximize their own wealth and power. It’s an ugly view of reality which creates ugly people. All relationships are power struggles. Vladimir Lenin argued that the oppressed cannot of their own accord sufficiently understand the depths of their oppression and, therefore, need an intellectual class continually reminding them to be angry and feel hated.  Leftists push this emotional narrative of outrage which becomes axiomatic and unchallengeable—those who do must be silenced.

Wealth and economic power are no longer part of the oppression equation because the left, the cultural Marxists, are incredibly wealthy and have all the cultural and political power. So the “poor and powerless” of Marx are transferred to the culturally oppressed which has nothing to do with economics. There are many in the parade of victims we’re familiar with, including “people of color” which makes white people, especially males, the oppressors. Religious minorities are oppressed as well, which makes Christians (in the West) the oppressors. The most popular of the oppressed are the sexual minorities like lesbians, homosexuals, transgendered, etc. which makes heterosexuals the oppressors. There is even something comically evil called intersectionality which creates a hierarchy of oppression. At the top of the oppression scale would be white heterosexual Christian males, the worst of the worst, especially those married with families. Next in line would be heterosexual women again married with families. Single women regardless of their sexuality are always lower on the scale (meaning they are more easily oppressed) than married women. Any person of color regardless of sexual preference, marital status, or religious conviction is always lower on the scale, and so on. In addition, in the woke narrative any form of inequality is equivalent to oppression, and the full oppression matrix is the means to the end of total societal transformation into a Marxist Utopia, or whatever. In practice there is no such thing, so perpetual revolution via perpetual criticism is the result—misery forever. 

How do we counter wokeness and the cultural Marxists? It has to happen on three levels simultaneously: the political, the legal, and the cultural. If Christians really want this to change, it is going to take more than complaining, which we are all really good at. It is going to take work, involvement, and as the great Steve Bannon always says, action, action, action! Thankfully, since Trump and the Great Awakening we’ve been experiencing, conservatives and Christians are getting this like never in modern times, and it is extremely encouraging. We must remember, however, this secular, Marxists takeover of Western culture has been several hundred years in the making, and we are not going to change the direction of this massive societal ocean liner overnight.

Unfortunately, Pietism has had a pernicious influence on too many Christians who think engaging in politics and cultural pursuits is not “spiritual.” Too many Christians think supporting one particular political party perverts the gospel, when what really perverts the gospel is thinking it only applies to our personal, religious lives. Too many Christians think engaging in the “culture wars” is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (I heard a pastor at a church we attended once say exactly that!), a diversion from saving souls and doing the true, spiritual work of the kingdom. This is the same kind of pernicious piety that truncates the gospel and Christianity as if it applied to only a narrow slice of life. It was the great Dutch theologian and statements, Abraham Kuyper, who rebuked such narrow-minded Christian thinking, famously saying:

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!

Cultural Marxism and wokeness lead to misery and societal decay, as we see all around us, while Christianity and God’s law leads to blessing and societal flourishing. If we want America to flourish again and God to bless our land, we will take Christ out of our churches into every square inch of existence, including all that is political, legal, and cultural.

 

Christian Activation: Waking Up Christians to Their Transformational Calling

Christian Activation: Waking Up Christians to Their Transformational Calling

Jul 3, 2024 | America

Almost every morning I pray for America with what I call the four Rs. All Christians regardless of what they believe about “end times,” want America rescued from its wicked Marxist enemies, and the only way that happens is with God, specifically God in the person of Jesus Christ. That means God must pour out his Holy Spirit on our land, and therefore I pray for revival, but that is just the beginning of what needs to happen. That must be followed with renewal, restoration, and ultimately Reformation. The church and the Christians who inhabit it are the tip of the spear for the re-conquest of Christian Western civilization from the pagans, but what needs to happen goes far beyond the four walls of a church.

This prayer is why the picture of Washington at Valley Forge is so profound to me. I didn’t realize it would be so important when my wife and daughter got it for me on my birthday in the momentous Covid year of 2020, the year in God’s providential mercy that woke up the world. Since then, and the writing of my book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, I’ve come to see a connection between the founding of America, and the current need to refound it. In this context, I came to realize our job is far easier than it was for those who fought the mighty British Empire to forge a country out of 13 separate colonies.

Those who are given to doom and gloom, we’ll call them doomers, don’t seem to realize how immense the odds were against America ever coming into existence. Very few people in the 1770s thought the Americans had any chance to defeat the British. Most thought it was some kind of joke, and the rebellion would be quickly crushed. After the Colonies declared independence on July 4, the rest of 1776 looked like those predictions would prove true. But Patriots fought and prayed, and prayed and fought, believing in the rightness of their cause before Almighty God. I would suggest the odds against the founders of America were far worse than the odds of us refounding America in the 21st century, and that is what I think and pray every time I look at this picture.

One morning when I was praying I realized that to accomplish this we want and need more Christians, and a Great Awakening type of revival, but there are plenty of Christians in America already. What is needed is for these Christians to be activated to their true calling as world changers and culture transformers. Unfortunately, it’s far easier to complain and do nothing, to be a doomer. Not only that, but most Christians’ faith is a form of Pietism, a type of faith that is focused primarily on going to heaven when we die and personal holiness. Christianity is a whole lot more, and we need to wake up these Christians, to activate them to their Christian responsibilities to their families, their communities, their counties, their states, and their country. And this means teaching them to take their Christian worldview seriously as applying to ever area of life, and proclaiming Christ as sovereign Lord over all of reality.

What Does the Great Commission Mean?
What I’m describing is the context of the Great Commission given by Jesus to the 11 Apostles in Matthew 28:

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Most Evangelical Christians see this as primarily relevant, often only relevant, to individuals, but Jesus clearly says nations and not individuals, the Greek making that abundantly clear. Yes, nations are made up of individual people, and those people need to be discipled, but Jesus used the word ethnos, a race, people, nation, for a reason. We need to decide why, and if it has implications for how we disciple the people who make up a nation. I am convinced it has profound implications.

First, let’s look again at Jesus’ charge in the Great Commission. There is a reason Jesus said he was given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” and few Christians appear to ask what that reason might be. Again, most Christians think this is for “spiritual” reasons of our personal salvation from sin and holiness, justification and sanctification. Jesus’ authority applies to this and nothing else, so this means it applies only to the church and those within it. Because of this perspective, one we imbibe unconsciously from Christian culture, Christians think the Lord’s Prayer, God’s kingdom coming and will being done on earth as it is in heaven, is only applicable to the church. The rest of the earth and those who don’t come into the church, are going to hell in handbasket, which it appears to them has been the plan all along. I beg to differ.

One reason comes from the Apostle Paul who gives us more context in Ephesians 1 about the extent of “all” and from whence Jesus exercises it. Jesus, he says, was raised to the right hand of God in a position “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked,” both in this life and the one to come. This power raising him to the ultimate position of authority in the heavens and earth is that same power that conquered death when he raised Jesus from the dead. That is ultimate power because death is the ultimate enemy of man. And you, I, and every other human being who has ever lived knows it. Death is the biggest bully in the school, and he’s been picking on everyone in the school our entire lives. Now we know because Jesus of Nazareth came back from the dead, the bully is ultimately powerless over us, even if he roughs us up a bit in our journey to the resurrection.

If we go back to Matthew 28, there is also a reason Jesus said immediately after his declaration of all authority, therefore go. The authority, his authority, means he calls the shots, he’s the ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords. Nothing happens outside of his express will, whether that is allowed or caused to happen, we have no idea, and it is fruitless to speculate. We only know all history is redemptive history, and moves inevitably toward his teleological end, meaning his ultimate purposes in a redeemed and restored heavens and earth. The process started when both John the Baptist and Jesus declared in the exact same words, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt. 3 and Mark 1). Pentecost was when Jesus began to implement his mission on earth. We read in Psalm 2 via Acts 4 that his mission was specifically to the nations just as God had declared to Abraham and the Patriarchs 2000 years before.

What does this mean, then? It means the implications, the consequences of the Gospel and God’s law are for the entirety of creation, and that means everything nations do. It applies to entire cultures just as a painters’ paint encompasses the entire canvas, every pixel is imbued with the color of God’s salvation from sin. That means we as his body, his emissaries, his bride, push back against the curse, we overcome it by the truth, God’s law, and the fruit of the spirt. In fact, as Paul says in that passage in Galatians 5, against such fruit there is no law. In other words, that law can’t condemn and provoke those who live out the obedience to the law, which is to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, and minds, and our neighbors as ourselves. Love is the fulfillment of the law, and is transformational wherever it goes. And this is how nations are discipled, teaching Christians to love and serve in every single thing they do.

Discipleship in 21st Century Secular Pagan America
I had never thought along these lines until I went to my first post-millennial conference in March 2023. I heard a speaker say something like we need to disciple Christian lawyers, and Christian academics, and Christian architects, etc. The point isn’t to be a more moral and honest lawyer, academic, or architect, but for Christians to understand how their Christian faith impacts how they understand and practice law, or how Christianity informs their academic pursuits, or what it means to design and build things as Christians. This applies to worldview professions, or those that are a direct influence on the worldview of the culture, but it also applies to those who work with their hands; they influence the culture in more indirect but no less important ways. We often think creating or building a Christian counter culture coming primarily out of Hollywood, but that is only one slice of the cultural pie, albeit a critically important one.

Culture is a strange and amorphous thing, more like trying to hold water in your hands or nailing Jello to the wall than catching a ball. At its most basic level, culture is whatever human beings create, meaning culture is an amorphous set of influences. Christian sociologist James Davison Hunter in his book, To Change the World, states that, “culture is a system of truth claims and moral obligations,” and that, “culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on.” Culture affirms certain values and propositions, while it denies others, it embraces certain beliefs, while it eschews others; culture is never neutral. Our modern concept of culture derives from a term first used in classical antiquity by the Roman orator, Cicero: “cultura animi.” In Latin, cultura literally means cultivation. We could say culture cultivates.

This seems obvious, but most people don’t realize that culture shapes not only what they believe, or what they like, or how they behave, but literally shapes who they are. Most people also don’t understand, including Christians, that everything we do shapes culture as well. It is a two-way process of shaping and being shaped. Even if we are not aware of it, it is happening in and around us. This is why Christians need to think in a discerning way about the culture we inhabit, to not be merely reactive but rather proactive. Culture is something we cannot take for granted or escape, so we must take into account its effects both on us and us on it.

This means in everything we do we represent the King of Glory, the Lord Jesus Christ and everything he stands for, both law and gospel, the truth about the nature of things, his creational order. It is only through obedience that there can be righteousness, and only in right living, i.e., love, will true flourishing be able to happen, in Hebrew shalom, peace as well as prosperity. Many Christians don’t like to hear this because there are a lot of places in the world where there is very little peace and prosperity. We give monthly to Voice of the Martyrs, and I read their magazine every month, so I’m well aware many Christians in the world are living and dying as martyrs, but that doesn’t change the biblical facts. If we want peace and prosperity, if we want God to bless our efforts, that will only happen through prayer and obedience. As I often say, work like it depends on you, pray because it depends on God.

This applies to everything we do in our families as husbands and wives and parents, building the God glorifying home being the foundation of civilizational blessing, or in some cases survival. It applies in our occupations whatever those are. With an attitude of a servant’s heart, we are advancing God’s kingdom and spreading the fragrance of Christ in the culture, and more importantly transforming it from a cursed, weed infested, overgrown garden, to one bountiful and beautiful that can sustain and bless people, as was God’s plan from the very beginning, to spread His blessings on earth.

Why We Should Have Hope: There Are a Lot of Christians!
As we know, American and Western culture are in dire shape. Wokeness infects everything like a black plague spiritually wiping out millions upon millions, spiritual bodies metaphorically dropping in the streets all around us: bring out your dead! But this can change. This will change. The question is, do you believe that, and do you want to be part of making that happen. If not, you are part of the problem. That’s called tough love, speaking truth to spiritual and cultural apathy. There is no opting out in this war, no floating downstream on this one. Any old dead fish can do that.

If we’ve decided to go against the rushing current, then we must figure out how we do our part, whatever that might be. We are all called to be world changers in whatever sphere God has called us to, big or small or in between. Whatever we do, we do specifically as Christians, and how as Christians that determines how we do it, even if that is just serving others with a great attitude and a smile, going the extra mile. I also suggest that everyone you interact with on whatever level knows in some way that you are a Christian, and that means they will also in some way know being a Christian makes a difference in who you are and what you do.

Given that there are a huge number of conservative Christians in America, our influence should be massive. The reason it isn’t is the above mentioned Pietism, a disaster for Christian culture and society, as is obvious to all. But instead of going down the doomer drain in rebellion against God (pessimism and cynicism is a sin reflecting a lack of trust in God’s goodness, love, and power), we can begin to set the example for other Christians in our lives and words that we are servants of the King. Does Paul sound like a doomer?

14 But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. 15 For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, 16 to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.

This sounds like Paul very much expected victory, both in this life, and in the life to come.

Are You a Christian Nationalist?

Are You a Christian Nationalist?

May 29, 2024 | America

Some time back I asked on Twitter if people would call themselves Christian nationalists or not. There were a variety of responses from yes to no to everywhere in between. Here is one representative of the in between.

Until there is strong agreement on what it means, I will not embrace a term that is also claimed by groups that I would never support, endorse, or fellowship with.

Here’s another from a yes:

I’m a Christian. I think biblically based public policy is the best recipe for human flourishing.

I absolutely agree that a biblically based public policy is not only the best, but ultimately the only recipe for human flourishing. This got me thinking about how I would describe myself, and what exactly I do believe in this regard.

First the term. We all know it is leftist dog whistle to imply Christians and nationalists are white supremacists without saying it. This also tells us the left fears both Christians and nationalists because they are a threat to their God-less Marxist, globalist agenda. If you’ve never read Karl Marx’s little Communist Manifesto, you may not know that Marx and his progeny have four enemies that must, in his words, be “abolished” if the revolution is to succeed and communism is to lead inexorably to a classless Utopia where all are equal:

  1. Private property
  2. The family
  3. The nation-state
  4. Religion, i.e., Christianity

Of the four, Christianity is the most dangerous to their diabolical project because from it the other three are derived and sustained.

I will explain below the tentative conclusions I’ve come to about my own political philosophy and what might describe me at this point in time, but first some preliminaries.

The Nation-State
The nation-state is one of the many gifts of Christian Western civilization. I wonder how many Americans know that the idea of a nation with identifiable sovereign borders is a relatively new phenomena in the history of the world. Prior to the seventeenth century, borders were determined by military power, and as power dynamics shifted among peoples, so did borders. This began to change in the seventeenth century as the result of a European peace treaty called the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). The basic idea of the Westphalian system is that each state, or nation has an equal right to sovereignty.

So taken for granted by most people, this arrangement is assumed to be the natural order of things—it is not. The reason is because of sinful man’s penchant for building towers of Babel (Gen. 11). Babel teaches us that hubris will always tend to make people consolidate power to unbiblical tyrannical ends unless they are countered with forces that limit their power, something America’s Founders understood better than any thinkers the world has ever known.

Because the nation-state is un-natural, it is fragile, and in our day is uniquely under assault by transnationalist globalist elites who see borders as inhibiting their Babel-like agenda. Put simply, nationalism is an obstacle to the goals of the globalist technocratic elite, the builders of a modern globalist babel. Given this natural sinful tendency to centralize and absolutize power, Christians are obligated to be nationalists, and need to recognize the Satanic threat of globalism.

A nation is more than borders, much more. It is first a local experience because loyalty and commitment comes from the bottom up: first the family, then the locality, town, or city, then the county, the state, and finally the nation. The organic nature of the nation is described well by Stephen Wolfe:

[T]he nation, properly understood, is a particular people with ties of affection that bind them to each other and their place of dwelling; and thus nationalism is the nation acting for its national good, which includes conversation of those ties of affection.

Affection is the operative word. We can’t have a real personal devotion and loyalty to an abstraction like a United Nations or European Union. Affection is only possible with what we know in some measure personally, intimately. The neighbors we see every day, or the parents at school, or people in the grocery store, it is they who we develop a connection with, not people on a screen on the other side of the world. This sense of peoplehood, if you will, is inevitable and necessary in a world full of nations.

The concept of the nation, or specific people groups, is an important biblical concept, the word being used well over 600 times. In fact, when Jesus gave what we’ve come to call the Great Commission to the eleven in Matthew 28, he told them to make disciples of all nations (ethnos in Greek), not all people (anthropos in Greek). In Acts 17 the Apostle Paul lays out the case for the God ordained nature of nations:

26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.

You can’t get more biblically unequivocal than that!

The Kingdom, the Church, and the Nation
Related to the issue of a Christian nation, is the problem of the modern confusion in conflating the Church with the kingdom of God. Until recently I believed the kingdom was the church, and the church the kingdom. This is not true. The kingdom of God or heaven is God’s rule or reign on earth brought by God’s redeemed people, not by church bodies as such. It is also not just saved Christians who advance God’s kingdom on earth, but saved Christians who apply their biblical and Christian worldview to every square inch of life, a la Abraham Kuyper who said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” God’s kingdom is also advanced by non-Christians who embrace Christian values and assumptions about the nature of reality and apply them. Worldviews have consequences, and our job as faithful Christians is to inculcate the Christian worldview into the culture, which is a people’s beliefs externalized and applied. The ultimate goal is people imbibing a Christian worldview instead of the poison of the secular woke cultural Marxism they currently do. No culture, like its government, is worldview neutral.

For a long time, I struggled with what as conservative and Evangelical Christians we’re trying to accomplish. What exactly is a Christian society or nation? What does such a thing look like? Is it fifty-one percent of the people being professing Christians? I was always frustrated because I knew intuitively what makes a nation Christian isn’t just the number of Christians. I’m not sure there’s ever been a time in Western history where the vast majority of people in the nations of Christendom were Christians, yet the people, Christian or not, considered themselves living in Christian nations. Most Christians seem to believe if we just convert enough people things will magically change for the better. It doesn’t work that way.

Joseph Boot in Mission of God relates well how this kingdom-church confusion creates a false dilemma:

Believers tend to think that they are confronted with a very restricted choice in these matters: either pursue a return to a form of the ecclesiastical culture of Christendom where power and authority over various cultural and political matters is restored to a particular church denomination, or accept that we now live in a post-Christian age where the only thing Christians can realistically hope for is being one of many interest groups in a diverse, multicultural society, perhaps with a seat at the table—a chair pulled out for us by a humanistic secular state now to be embraced as the norm for human society.

The second view dominates modern Evangelicalism.

The problem, other than these not being the only two choices, and I would argue neither is the Christian choice, is that both lead to totalitarianism. Neither Christian nor pagan (i.e., secular) totalitarianism lead to good results as the historical evidence makes painfully clear. However, going beyond these two limiting choices we realize there are indeed only two ultimate choices—the rule of God or the rule of man—God or paganism. It is abundantly clear how the latter works, but there is unfortunately an abundance of confusion about how the former would work in the modern world. The rule of God in a nation isn’t really difficult to understand, but ignorance and secular programming makes it so. Bringing such a reality to pass is another story.

The Necessity of Sphere Sovereignty
The concept of sphere sovereignty is critical in the never-ending battle against the spirit of Babel. The concept is as simple as it is contested by those who embrace that spirit. It was first introduced by the great Dutch theologian, statesman, and journalist Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) in a public address at the inauguration of the Free University of Amsterdam. The question comes down to authority and who wields it. Absolute sovereign authority rests in God alone, and He has delegated His authority on earth to human beings; “so that on earth one actually does not meet God Himself in things visible, but that sovereign authority is always exercised through an office held by men.” In this he asks two pertinent questions:

And in that assigning of God’s Sovereignty to an office held by man the extremely important question arises: how does that delegation of authority work? Is that all embracing Sovereignty of God delegated undivided to one single man; or does an earthly Sovereign possess the power to compel obedience only in a limited circle; a circle bordered by other circles in which another is Sovereign?

These spheres interact and overlap in society, but one sphere must never usurp the authority of the other. The only way this possibly works, and thus the only possibility of true liberty in any society, is the acknowledgement of the absolute Sovereignty of Christ. Kuyper explains why.

But behold now the glorious Freedom idea! That perfect and absolute Sovereignty of the sinless Messiah at the same time contains the direct denial and challenge of all absolute Sovereignty on earth in sinful man; because of the division of life into spheres, each with its own Sovereignty.

Stephen Wolfe explains it well in The Case for Christian Nationalism:

[I]t follows that every sphere of life requires a suitable authority, with a suitable power, to make determinations. For this reason, God has granted specific types of power by which the authorities of each sphere make judgments. The family has the pater familiar with patria potestas (“fatherly power”); civil life has the civil magistrate with civil power; the instituted church has the minister with spiritual power, and the individual has a power unto himself. The nature of each sphere dictates the species of power required. These powers and their differences are not arbitrary but arise from the nature of each sphere.

Although as a Thomist he attributes this to “natural law,”16 there is nothing natural about it. It is only when those in power acknowledge the power of God in Christ as the ultimate authority that the state will recognize its limits.

What Do I Call Myself?
When I was 24 and decided I was going off to graduate school to become an academic and scholar, which obviously didn’t work out, I thought political philosophy would probably be the path I took. Since that didn’t happen, I never felt compelled to develop my own distinctly Christian political philosophy. It wasn’t until I started writing my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, that I realized I needed to do just that. Given I was now going to publicly put myself out there in the battle to save America from its Marxist enemies, and hopefully bring along Christians in the fight, I could no longer depend on others to do my thinking for me. I had to figure out what my Christian faith compelled me to believe about how human beings govern themselves. That’s another way of saying, have my own political philosophy.

It’s clear from the above that I am both a Christian and a nationalist. I believe every Christian given God’s revelation in creation and Scripture is compelled to obviously be the former, but also the latter. The only other option is to be a globalist, and Babel teaches us that is not an option. Another word I’ve come to embrace since I’ve been become aware of and have been listening to Steve Bannon over the last several years is populist. The word gets a bad rap because it is associated with the rabble, with the passions of the people to rebel against any and all authority, to in effect be the authority. Another word for that is anarchy, or as the ancient Greeks called it, Democracy. According to Aristotle, there are three forms of government, and each can be good or bad, and it can by laid out this way:

Who Rules?   Good form             Bad form
one person         monarchy                  tyranny
few people          aristocracy                oligarchy
many people      polity/timocracy      democracy

Timocracy is basically rule by property owners, something we know America’s Founders adopted. Democracy, which America is not (we’re a representative republic), is 51 percent rule.

In their genius, America’s Founders decided to adopt each form of rule in the American republic to hopefully keep the country from going to the bad form of government. Unfortunately, the progressives in the early 20th century came up with the idea of a “living” constitution, which is no constitution at all, and by the 1960s and the Civil Rights revolution, the Constitution was dead. This is laid out in painful clarity and detail by Christopher Caldwell in The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, one of the most important books of the 21st century.

America has become an oligarchy, or as we now know it, the deep state, a rule by unaccountable “experts” who only care about maintaining and extending their power. This fact, we’re all too painfully aware of now is why we need to bring back the polity (maybe one day God willing timocracy too), and thus why I’ve embraced populism. I will repeat, America is a representative republic, the democracy side, which means our elected representatives are accountable to us, their constituencies. Both parties, or as we disparagingly call them now, the Uniparty, despise their bosses, us. They and we have forgotten that the very first words of our governing document, the Constitution, begins with, “We the people . . . “ Re-founding America is only going to happen if We take back our government from the oligarchy.

Thus, I would now describe myself as a nationalist populist Christian conservative.