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.

 

Why I Disagree with Doug Wilson on Charter Classical Schools

Why I Disagree with Doug Wilson on Charter Classical Schools

May 22, 2024 | America

Doug Wilson is not a fan of charter classical schools, to say the least, and I am.

It’s an odd form of disagreement because in so many ways I completely agree with him, in an ideal world. Of course, he and others would argue that without agreeing with him, we’ll never get close to that ideal world. They could be right, but I don’t think so, or I wouldn’t be writing this.

The title of the piece is typical brilliant Doug Wilson metaphor: “Classical Charter Schools as a Cut Flowers Display.” We all know that as beautiful as cut flowers can be, their beauty is fleeting; no soil, no roots, no life. His argument is that charter classical schools without Christ are like cut flowers, or to change the metaphor, like a dead man walking, on death row not long for this world. He believes Christians in charter classical education are in effect trying to prop up the failed experiment in secularism that has been such an unmitigated disaster for America and the Western world.

I think the reason for the disagreement is because of an approach to apologetics, defending the veracity of the Christian faith, called presuppositionalism, which Wilson embraces.

Three Broad Approaches to Defending Christianity
From the first Easter, Christians have been under attack. When Jesus’ followers proclaimed he had come back from the dead to establish a new religion out of a very old one, pagans and their fellow Jews did not give them a warm reception. So, Christians had to defend the veracity of their faith from the beginning.

Prior to the 20th century, Christians just defended Christianity without thinking of apologetics categories. That changed with the rise of presuppositionalism starting with a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Cornilius Van Til (1895-1987), the founding father of presuppositionalism. Because he and his followers declared their approach as the biblical and only correct approach, other apologists were compelled to identify and defend their approaches. I will briefly outline them here before I get to how I think this discussion impacts how we look at charter classical schools.

Before I do, I will say I am personally a whatever works apologist. In practice, I’m presuppositional because a fact of existence is that we can’t escape our assumptions in every thought we have, and those assumptions determine what we think and often the conclusions we come to.

Presuppositionalism —This approach teaches that we must start with the assumption that Christianity is true and the Bible is the revelation of the Triune God because we can’t escape our assumptions about God and the ultimate nature of things. Wherever we start will determine where we end up. If we argue outside of specifically Christian presuppositions, whatever knowledge we present to a sinner, they will suppress the truth by their wickedness” (Romans 1:18). So, any other approach than theirs will be futile. At least that’s the concept.

However, I’ve found over the years having listened to hundreds of testimonies that people very often come to the right conclusions from very wrong assumptions. So I ask, how can there be only one right, biblical way to defend the faith if other approaches accomplish the same thing? My flexible understanding of apologetics separates me from the doctrinaire presuppositionalist.

Classical — I was introduced to this approach in seminary by a book called Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics by R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley. It frustrated me because they were as dogmatic as the presuppositionalists that theirs was the only proper way to defend the faith. Basically, it starts with the proofs for God’s existence going back to the brilliant Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, what Thomas called the five ways. It argues that we must first establish God’s existence, theism, because any historical evidence will only make sense once we’ve established God exists.

Evidential —This approach leans on historical and philosophical evidence but focuses primarily on the former, defending the reliability of the biblical text, and the stories it contains. Philosophy contributes to the evidence, while the classical approach is more purely philosophical.

We could add a fourth approach that takes from these three called the cumulative case method. As in a court of law, an argument is developed with different strands of evidence developing a beyond a reasonable doubt case.

Wilson Believes Charter Classical Schools are Destined to go Woke
Doug Wilson is a doctrinaire presuppositionalist, and I believe this determines his understanding of the frailty of the charter (public) classical education movement. I’m very familiar with this movement because my daughter, Gabrielle, a graduate of Hillsdale College, taught for eight years at a charter classical school, and has worked for two years in their Barney Charter School Initiative.

I believe something like this is of great value as Christians learn to battle and defeat the poison of secularism toward re-Christianizing our nation. I would point out that Hillsdale College would not agree with me that that is the ultimate goal, but challenging that is not the point of this post. Arguing for the value of their project is.

The reason Wilson thinks charter classical schools are destined to go woke is because they are not confessionally and overtly Christian. That’s basically his argument.

Charter schools remove Christ, the gospel, the holy apostles, and any mention of this astounding grace of God. And so when you take Christ out of this story, what do you have? Now all you have are dead, white guys, and nothing in the story whatever about unmerited grace.

This assumes, however, that the only revelation of God to man is in Christ, and as a good presuppositionalist, Wilson believes without Scripture and Christ, any other knowledge is of no ultimate value. I doubt he would put it that way, but with presuppositionalism it is all or nothing.

I, on the other hand, I would argue that Romans 1 tell us that creation reveals God:

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Material reality reveals God, and He cannot be escaped. Paul says, in effect, that people suppress the truth because they love their wickedness more. I don’t believe, contra the presuppositionalist, that this suppression means they don’t in some way possess real knowledge of God, even if it is not saving knowledge.

Does Christ Inoculate Against Wokeness?
If an organization, or church, is avowedly Christian, does that mean, as Wilson says, that they are protected from going woke? History tells us it does not.

Christian organizations that proclaim the unmerited grace in Christ, as Wilson insists charter classical schools must, have gone woke. One infamous example is CRU, once called Campus Crusade for Christ. In fact, this headline at Not the Bee tells us just how woke they’ve become, “CRU, formerly Campus Crusade for Christ, fired two of its employees after they voiced concerns about the group’s stance on LGBT issues.”

Many Christian denominations and organizations have gone “woke” throughout post-Enlightenment history. J. Gresham Machen, the founder of my Alma Mater, Westminster Seminary Philadelphia, fought the Presbyterian Church for much of his life until he was basically kicked out for being an orthodox Bible believing Christian. The Presbyterian Church, started by the great Scottish Reformer John Knox, most certainly didn’t start out “woke,” and wasn’t for much of its history until it embraced Enlightenment inspired German biblical criticism of the 19th century. Then the inevitable result was a different religion, as Machen wrote about in his 1923 book, Christianity and Liberalism. We can see from the experience of the New Testament Church that people proclaiming the Christian faith doesn’t mean they won’t infect the church with heresy. Speaking of antichrists among the people of God the Apostle John says in his first epistle:

 19 They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.

Unfortunately, as history shows, the heretics don’t always go “out from us,” but pervert the teaching of the gospel from within. The once dominant mainline denominations are a lamentable example, but because of their heresy they are a shell of their former orthodox selves.

Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: Another form of Apologetics
Which brings us to the classical education mantra of goodness, beauty, and truth. If a classical school is actually classical, it takes its marching orders from the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Christians via the Middle Ages. Classical education by definition is rooted in Western history, which is primarily Christian history, and solid charter schools do not ignore that fact, but charter schools are public schools so they can’t proselytize the Christian faith.

What they do proselytize, however, is the objective nature of goodness, beauty, and truth. C.S. Lewis, certainly not a presuppositionalist, wrote about the concept of what he called the Tao in his classic little book, The Abolition of Man. This universal concept of objective values in reality is also known as natural law, or in specifically Christian terms, creation law, or natural revelation. I don’t like the term natural law because in our secular age natural means without God, regardless of what the person believes using it.  Lewis wrote this book in the early 1940s when secularism’s influence was becoming ubiquitous, but not yet affirmed as the default worldview of the West. He decided to use the Tao because his argument about the objective moral values in reality is found in every culture on earth and in every time. This specific passage is relevant for our discussion:

Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can overarch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny, or an obedience that is not slavery.

In other words, something beyond mere human preference is necessary if we’re to escape the inevitable tyranny produced by a merely material universe in the will to power, might makes right, dominating peoples and nations. Put another way, God’s moral law is the only source of true liberty.

As I argue in Going Back to Find the Way Forward, the dividing line in Western culture is truth. Those who believe truth is real, that there is an objective nature to reality, in Lewis’s word, the Tao, believe there is something to which the state, those in power, are accountable, the truth. To those who don’t believe in truth or the Tao, “the narrative” is all, and anything is justified toward its ideological ends.

This brings us to the objective nature of values, or to the concrete reality of goodness, beauty, and truth, and it’s apologetics value. The triune reality of these three values can’t but point to the Trine God who is those things. Those who see them and believe in them and fight for them whatever they believe, are closer to God than those who don’t. They build in a person’s mind what sociologists call a plausibility structure, or a state of mind in which these things actually exist, are believable; they are not mere preferences. God to such people is far more plausible as the explanation of all things than mere chance and matter colliding. I would further argue that people immersed in a worldview of the Tao and its objective nature are less susceptible to going woke than Christians who uncritically swallow the secular zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, the climate of the times. Ours is not only distinctly chilly to God, but it inculcates materialist assumptions into Christians without them even being aware of it. 

This is why Wilson’s argument against charter classical schools doesn’t hold any water. Again, I do agree with him that the ideal is for parents is to send their children to a Christian classical school, or home school them, but that is simply not an option for tens of millions of Christian families. And what about all those children who come from secular families? Do we just abandon them to Marxist indoctrination? Keep in mind, fifty million children every day attend public schools, and that isn’t going to change in the foreseeable future. At some point government or “public” schools must be, in Marx’s term, abolished, but in the meantime, charter classical schools are a possible option.

But is It Really Classical?
As I said, my daughter worked at a charter classical school, and her husband still does. Neither of them have been satisfied that this school is fully classical. I’m not talking about schools like that. I’m talking about schools like those Hillsdale College establishes that understand and teach the Tao in all they do. Here is what the Barney Charter schools believe and teach:

Classical education is a model of K-12 instruction that is rooted in the liberal arts and sciences, offers a firm grounding in civic virtue, and cultivates moral character:

  • It emphasizes the centrality of the Western tradition in the study of history, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts.
  • It features a rich and recurring examination of the American literary, moral, philosophical, political, and historical traditions to equip students for citizenship.
  • Its curriculum is balanced and strong across the four core disciplines of math, science, literature, and history, with explicit phonics instruction leading to reading fluency and explicit grammar instruction leading to language mastery.
  • Well-educated and articulate teachers are central to the classroom, in contrast to conventional “student-centered learning” models.
  • The school culture demands moral virtue, decorum, respect, discipline, and studiousness among the students and faculty—and simultaneously produces a spirit of wonder and a desire to know that which is good, true, and beautiful.

In short, classical education offers K-12 students the sort of rigorous education that undergraduate students receive at Hillsdale College.

I would suggest students who graduate from such schools are far more open to the gospel than their unfortunate compatriots at regular public schools, and are less susceptible to woke indoctrination.

 

The Guardians of “The Narrative” vs. Truth

The Guardians of “The Narrative” vs. Truth

Feb 7, 2024 | America, Culture

I take this title from a piece by the great and erudite Roger Kimball where he asks if these Guardians will win. Before I discuss the Guardians, let me preface my comments by a brief history of where this idea of narrative comes from. The concept goes back to the 16th century, and it means, “a tale, a story, a connected account of the particulars of an event or series of incidents.” As such it was applied primarily to fiction, like the plays of Shakespeare, but it can apply to the ark of any story line. It’s the big picture, if you will, that helps define the meaning of the details of the picture. It’s most powerfully, and deleteriously, used in our time to push political and cultural agendas. We have Friedrich Nietzsche to thank for the initial idea that was then developed by postmodernist scholars in the 1970s and 80s when postmodernism became “a thing.”

Very simply, modernism given to us by the Enlightenment believed finding truth was attainable solely by reason. The romantic movement started pushing back against this in the late 18th century, and by the late 19th century Nietzsche pushed it off a cliff. That’s where the postmodernists (after modernism) come into the picture. They took his ideas and argued truth per se doesn’t exist, contrary to Nietzsche who believed strongly in truth. All that does exist is the meta-narrative (a culture’s big picture) and we derive our meaning of what is “true” or not from that. Basically we’re all living a novel, and whoever the societal author is (or in a culture’s case, the authors are) determines how we interpret the story. There is obviously some truth to that, but postmodernists literally believe truth doesn’t exist or even if it does it is irrelevant. These ideas were catnip for leftists, who not only do not believe in truth, but believe narratives are to be used to establish their political power.

 

This is a short video by two black liberal scholars who today are likely viewed as right wing radicals by the left. It is an excellent overview of these two poles of the metanarrative idea (they just used the word narrative). John McWhorter (on the right) says because of the way it’s misused, he hates the word narrative. Then Glenn Loury counters, explaining how narratives work and can be used in positive ways to help people interpret their past and present as a people. He acknowledges they can also be misused in ways that harm people. The black victim narrative is one such way that has created untold misery and suffering. It’s well worth a six minute and thirty second listen.

Narratives and the Will to Power
Nietzsche argued that because God was dead and Christianity no longer offered a metanarrative (he never used the word) that could hold Western civilization together, man must develop his own moral framework to accomplish that. He believed that could only be accomplished by great men he called Übermensch, often translated as Superman or Overman. He never fully defined exactly what such a man was, but he developed a complimentary idea in the will to power. I don’t know enough about Nietzsche to know how he developed all this, but the idea certainly originated with him, and fit his worldview. The attempts to interpret Nietzsche are numerous, and there seem to be as many interpretations as scholars doing the interpreting. In essence his worldview was the result of his desire to fulfill Satan’s temptation to Eve, that he could be like God knowing good and evil. In a universe without God that is kind of the only choice. You have to be your own god, and he knew that. Therefore, if you are going to mold reality to your will, you must have the “will to power,” must impose that will on matter, including human beings. It was another idea he never fully worked out.

Fast forward to today, and the modern left epitomizes the “will to power” in the use of narrative. The left and the Guardians of the narrative (the media) have completely taken over Western culture, using their influence for political power, defined as legalized coercion. Governments have the monopoly on the use of force, which makes politics a very important business. The Democrat Party and legacy media shamelessly use the “will to power” in pursuit of their ideological agenda. Their hypocrisy is so in your face it’s almost impressive. Controlling or directing the narrative has always been important and a fact of existence in politics and government, but it is critically important in the information age. The left controls the narrative, however, specifically to mold and shape opinion regardless of truth. The only “truth” they care about is what serves their ideological interests and political power. This has become more egregious since Obama became president as we learn from “the paper of record,” the New York Times.

In the Spring 2020 journal Academic Questions, Dr. David Rozado did a word frequency usage study on New York Times articles written between 1970 and the end of 2018. He was looking for progressive/Marxist buzzwords used by groups with an ideological agenda. He discovered in 2010 and the years following such words and phrases had exploded in frequency. There are numerous charts in the article graphically displaying the jump in terms such as climate change, sexism, patriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, white supremacy, and so on. Apparently, all these things became such critically important issues around 2010 that America’s “paper of record” found it necessary to endlessly report upon them. In fact, they were doing what the left always does, driving “the narrative,” but in this case it went into overdrive. Joseph Goebbels would have been impressed.

The driving of “the narrative” took steroids when Trump came down the escalator to announce his run for president in June 2015. Speaking of the rebarbarization of civilization, Kimball gives an example we’re all too familiar with:

The 2020 election . . . took place during the period of eagerly embraced Covid hysteria. That hysteria provided a justification or, more accurately, an alibi for the numerous violations of the law in the conduct of the election. The Constitution of the United States stipulates that state legislatures are in charge of determining voting procedures. But various governors and secretaries of state, from blue states mostly, swept that Constitutional provision aside in their eagerness to assure the appearance of a Biden victory. Such anomalies were noted and commented on at the time but somehow never got traction. Why? Because the media, that great tool of The Narrative, determined that it oughtn’t to get traction.

Now that the media are “Guardians of the (left-wing) Narrative,” Edward R. Morrow must be rolling over in his grave. In their latest futile effort to destroy Trump, the Guardians have pulled out all the stops on narrative building because of the danger Trump poses to our DemocracyTM if he gets elected again. Oh the horror!!! Peter Berkowitz highlights some of these efforts in a piece explaining how these people imperil the rule of law (they believe they are a law unto themselves). He writes:

[A]nti-Trumpers have been sounding the alarm continuously against Trumpian tyranny since 2016 and have picked up the pace this cycle. This gives Democrats time to grasp the grave threat and take suitable precautions. But what precautions are suitable to thwart the authoritarian conquest of America.

For those who believe Trump is Hitler, there is nothing they won’t do to try to stop him.

God obviously has a terrific sense of humor. He not only picked Donald J. Trump, billionaire New York real estate developer and reality TV star to be the primary agent of change in this moment in history, He also apparently made him unstoppable. Everything the left and the Guardians have thrown at him for over eight years has only served to make him more popular and influential. Now that is funny!

Truth Wins
“Will the Guardians of The Narrative Win?” is the title of Kimball’s piece. I don’t believe he intended this to be a rhetorical question, but I do. Of course they won’t! If we live by sight, the odds of defeating them seem impossible, but God is in the habit of making the impossible possible. For example, the Lord tells Abraham and Sarah when she’s 90 and he’s 100 that they will have a son in a year. Sarah laughs at the absurdity of it. In reply, the Lord asks, rhetorically, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Although not meant to be answered, Paul speaking about Abraham gives it to us anyway:

He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were (Rom. 4:17).

For the God who created everything out of nothing, raising the dead and doing “the impossible” is what he does for breakfast.

Every time you’re tempted to live based on what you see rather than trust, which leads to fear, worry, and doubt, first repent. Then remember He makes things to exist that currently do not exist. I encourage you to think about this revealed truth for a while. Not only does the truth therein apply to you personally, your life and problems and dreams, but to entire societies, or Jesus would never have commanded the Apostles to “make disciples of all nations,” not individuals. It is, of course individual people who make up nations, but Jesus was giving us the big picture, the meta-narrative, the purpose for which he came to earth. When people repent and believe on the Lord Jesus, it isn’t only for their personal salvation and holiness, or to grow the church and populate heaven, but to bring his kingdom reign to the entire earth, his blessings transforming this fallen world “as far as the curse is found.”

However, sometimes, as in the depth of the Covid scam, it appears the Guardians will win, but it is impossible for lies to ever triumph in the long run. The Negative Nellies and Pessimistic Pauls always give power to lies they do not possess. In the Trump years I’ve come to call them doomers because for them it always seems to be doom and gloom, the worst just around the corner. They have an unhealthy level of skepticism we call cynicism. I love this definition of that unhelpful state of mind: a faultfinding captious critic, especially one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest. If you didn’t know the definition of captious either, it means, marked by an often ill-natured inclination to stress faults and raise objections. The word nature is important. Such people are inclined to be this way because that is who they are. Christians, by contrast, should never be cynics or captious because it’s sin and it’s not who we are in Christ. So if you’re a cynic or given to cynicism, stop it! If you’re given to doom and gloom, repent, and pray for God to give you a spirit of trust in his almighty power. If Romans 8:28 is true, then all things in our lives, both personally and societally, work for our good and his glory. If you believe that, I mean really buy into it, circumstances, including other people, will have no power to control you, specifically your emotions and peace of mind. As the prophet Isaiah says,

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you (Is. 26:3).

There is a reason truth will always win eventually: Jesus. He who is the Truth (John 14:6) will make sure of it. But it’s bigger than that. Our confidence, even optimism, is based on what happened when Christ ascended to the right hand of God after his resurrection. As he says in the Great Commission, all authority had been given to him, therefore go. We go and work and plan and make it happen not in our authority and power, but in the authority and power of Jesus Christ. He is now reigning over all things toward his glorious ends in a new heavens and earth until every last enemy is vanquished, the last being death. Knowing this, we understand that the Guardians are spitting into a gale force divine wind. They don’t have a chance.