AI and the Longing for The Real

AI and the Longing for The Real

Jul 15, 2026 | Culture, Parents and Family

I’ve heard the phrase Artificial Intelligence all of my boomer life. Grok says the phrase goes back to 1955 and a proposal some scientists put together to study the concept. This lead to the “Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence” in 1956 which is regarded as the founding of AI as a formal field of study. I was eight years old when 2001: A Space Odyssey came out, and although the phrase Artificial Intelligence isn’t used in the movie (“machine intelligence” is), AI was by then culturally well known. It hasn’t been until the last several years, however, that the real life implications of AI have become culturally ubiquitous. Along with that have come debates about its value, whether it promises unproblematic endless benefits, or dystopian dangers. And likely plenty of both. I just learned about the history of AI with a simple question to Grok—benefit!

But as sinful human beings are won’t to do, hubris and overreaching is part of the deal. I think that’s where we are. And whenever there is overreaching, as any physicist can tell you, there is always an equal and opposite reaction. The Covid debacle and peak woke are perfect examples. Hundreds of millions of people around the world were driven to question, many for the first time, the “experts” and the managerial class, including in modern medicine. Like me, they decided, also for the first time, that their health is primarily their responsibility and nobody else’s. And tens of millions of people in America decided peak woke was a bridge too far, and turned back to God and traditional morality. I see the same reaction regarding AI, and God is part of that too. When God in his sovereign providence provides the cultural and historical conditions for revelation, we ought to consider taking advantage of it.

I grew up in the era of vinyl records. In the mid-60s big four and then eight track cassette tapes became popular so you could actually listen to your music of choice in the car. Then by the mid-70s little cassette tapes came along, which was mind blowing at the time. Then in the 80s came CDs, and it wasn’t long before vinyl would be dead and gone forever. Uh, maybe not. Everyone said digital was the future, and analogue was passé. Get rid of your records, boomer! Get with the times. It seems, however, analogue waves are more appealing than digits. There are other reactions against all things digital. It’s impossible today to know with any kind of certainty if a picture or video or music is real or AI fake. It’s like living in a world with plastic flowers that look real but have no smell and don’t feel like flowers. How about cars without drivers? For many of us there is something unnerving about that, even as flawed as human drivers can be.

The AI hype seems to have struck a nerve in people who are pining for The Real, the creational order, objective reality as God designed it to be. We can see this in other reactions to what most agree by now is a dying secular culture.

Secularism and the Turn to the Subjective
AI offers us a stark contrast to what I like to call, The Real. This explosion of AI is happening at the same time secularism as an experiment in Western culture is coming to the end of its cultural credibility. The idea of secularism started to develop in the 17th century in response to the wars of religion. Christians killing each other because they disagreed about theology wasn’t real appealing, so Western cultural elites and intellectuals decided to push religion, i.e., Christianity, out of the cultural spotlight, and try to build societies without God. Religious practice became a personal thing, and Pietists went right along with that. It took several hundred years for this to fully infect Western culture, but by the middle of the 20th century, secularism became the default worldview of Western peoples, in effect, the entire world outside of Islam.

Secularism did what C.S. Lewis warned about in The Abolition of Man, turning him inward and making everything in life about the subjective, our feelings, our thoughts, our opinions. Life’s all about me! He famously uses the story of a high school textbook teaching students how the beauty of a waterfall is more about our feelings than about any objective beauty in the waterfall. On the surface this doesn’t appear to be a big deal, but in fact it was the beginning of abolishing human beings as God created them. This is where we find ourselves in this third decade of the 21st century. We got to a point where everything in the culture focused on the individual, “the sovereign self.” The deeper one goes into that self, the deeper one realizes there is nothing there on which to anchor life. That has to come outside of us, something really there, something we can depend on as real.

The indications of the cracks growing in the secular Berlin Wall can be seen in a variety of consequences, but a blatant one is the mental health crisis in our country. I recently received a publication from my Alma Mater, Westminster Seminary Philadelphia, about exactly this. The author starts with statistics from the National Institute of Mental health to make the point:

Over 20% of the population 18 years and older is being treated for a mental illness. For adolescents, 49.5% report having a mental disorder. According to the CDC in 2023, 12.8 million adults seriously thought about suicide; 2.7 million made an actual plan; and 1.7 million went through with it. Depression rates, according to the latest Gallup poll, are at a record high.

Once we reject or ignore God’s created order, and its Creator, we are preparing for disaster. This inevitable descent into the subjective because of secularism was always eventually going to turn out this way. In the book Lewis tells us why objective reality, the real as God created it, is so important:

It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.

The mental health crisis is a result of people being deluded into seeing themselves as something they are not, embracing lies about who they are and what the world is. The delusions are why disaster is inevitable, a form of God’s judgment on rebellious humanity.

The title of the first chapter in which this quote is found is called, “Men Without Chests.” In the classical understanding of man, he is three-fold: the mind, the upper, and the appetites, the lower, and in between is the chest where magnanimity and sentiments are trained so they might become “the indispensable liaison officers between the cerebral man and the visceral man.” Without that training, to put it crudely, we’re screwed.

The Craving for the Real
I’m convinced, in general, people crave what is Real more than what they feel. This is because they are created in God’s image and live in God’s creation; postmodern relativism will always eventually disappoint. We can’t make up our own reality no matter how hard we try. By definition, postmodern relativists have a tenuous grasp of reality because they think they get to determine what reality is. Their take is a slippery one, like living their lives walking on rocks through a shallow rushing river. Why would that be? If our epistemology—what we know and how we come to know it—is based on what is inside of us, then how can we ever really trust what we think we know? Maybe what I’m thinking about at the moment is just a bit of indigestion, as C.S Lewis once said. Or maybe the conclusion I’ve come to about such and such is only some Freudian trauma I’ve experienced with my mother or father.

Postmodernism requires us to believe there is no there, there, and what might be there only has relevance because of my thoughts about it. It’s really always a guessing game. Postmodernists may say, “That’s true for you, but not for me,” and believe it, but they really have no idea, and deep down they know it. Such a shaky hold on existence is the logical conclusion of the triumph of the subjective. By contrast, The Real is truth, not just an abstract philosophical concept, but things as they actually are.

If there is a God, then he made reality a certain way. Sure, sometimes because of our sinful, rebellious hearts we want to do it our way, but the hope is that it doesn’t take too long for us to realize our ignorance or stupidity. We are all born ignorant and stupid; it’s called sin.

The Real can also be seen in the creational order, the way God created it to be. If we follow that order, life gets easier. For example, we might deny the objective reality of absolute moral values, but our denial doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that we get to determine those values. I’ve heard it said that we can no more break God’s physical laws than we can break his moral laws without consequences. Both are part of the very fabric of existence. Postmodern relativists, however, affirm physical laws but believe they can define moral laws. Reality doesn’t work that way. Take sexual morality, for instance. There is a reason God established monogamy between one man and one woman as the moral norm for sexual relationships. Flout it, have sex with whomever you want whenever you want, and you could die. Embrace it, and no sexually transmitted disease will ever touch you. As I often say, “That’s the way the world works.” You do it God’s way, in other words, and chances are things will work out well. If you do it your own way, good luck. I love what Isaiah tells us in this regard:

He will be the sure foundation for your times, a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge; the fear of the LORD is the key to this treasure (33:6).

It is this solid foundation that as we come to the end of this secular age that is becoming increasingly appealing to an increasing number of people.

How Ancient Greeks Help Us to Understand the Real
Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle can be of some assistance when we discuss The Real. They believed in and argued for the existence of objective goodness, beauty, and truth—something countercultural in an age awash in the vagaries of postmodern relativism, yet what every human being believes exist and longs for.

What humans experience of goodness, beauty, and truth, Plato argued, points to the universal or the ultimate form of these things; they exist in life because they exist ultimately. Aristotle, a student of Plato, took his mentor’s thoughts in a more empirical direction: the real for him lay in the thingness of the thing itself, and not in some universal idea of it. Thus, there is a certain dogness in dogs; dogs have the nature of dogness. Roses have a roseness, and so on. This is not as silly as it sounds, and it is perfectly biblical. In Genesis 1 God created everything “according to their kinds.” Things are the way they are for a reason; we can’t wish them to be other than they are, as many Western cultural elites are trying to do with the current debate over gender. Is gender a malleable concept, based on what we feel or think, or is it rooted in the order of creation, “male and female he created them”? The answer is obvious.

It will make more sense if you consider Aristotle’s concept of Telos, or purpose, the ultimate object of a thing. All things in created reality have a reason for being, whether created by humans or God. Their purpose or end defines them. Tim Keller says, “Unless you know the telos of something, what it is for, you can’t make right judgments about whether the thing is good or bad.” It is readily apparent that a hammer has a different telos, or purpose, than a nail. It would be odd to see someone trying to “hammer” a hammer with a nail: Seriously, dude, I think you have that backward.

Everything of human origin has an obvious purpose, and when it comes to creation, the concept is every bit as relevant. I have a simple example that took place in a discussion I had with a friend about something called same‑sex marriage (which assumes sex, male‑female, has nothing to do with why marriage exists). He thought Christians were being unreasonable and judgmental to deny homosexuals the opportunity to marry and be happy; he was adamant the Bible didn’t forbid it. Every biblical argument I tried to make hit a brick wall. Then I brought up the idea of telos. I told him it is evident that the human anatomy, male and female, clearly has a telos. Without getting graphic, it’s clear to any objective observer that certain body parts have an obvious designed end, a purpose for which they were created, and homosexuality doesn’t fulfill those purposes. It’s like trying to “hammer” the hammer with a nail. He got a strange look on his face, stopped, and said, “I’ve never thought of that.” The Bible didn’t open his mind, but telos did.

I’ll end this little foray into the ancient Greeks with a short excursion into nominalism and realism. The Associate Pastor at our church, Rev. John Ravell, is philosophically well read, and young (only 34), and in an e-mail exchange about something related to the ideas in this post, he said modern people are “basically hyper-nominal” as opposed to being grounded in philosophical realism which goes back to the ancient Greeks and Medieval philosophy. I love that phrase. Nominalism as a philosophy was developed by William of Ockham (1287-1347) in a debate with those who espoused realism. A simple overview of nominalism comes from Chat GPT:

Only individual things really exist; general categories or abstract properties are just names we give them. For example:

  • You see many red objects: an apple, a stop sign, a shirt.
  • A realist philosopher might say there is a real universal property called “redness” that all these things share.
  • A nominalist says there is no separate thing called “redness” existing independently — we simply group similar objects under the label “red.”

The word comes from the Latin nomen, meaning “name.”

This was a huge shift in Western Christian culture. Richard Weaver in his wonderful book, Ideas Have Consequences, said this was a profound “change which came over man’s conception of reality.” Indeed it was. Instead of being grounded in an objective reality of things that exist independent of our perceptions of them, we’re awash in a world of meaningless particulars, puzzle pieces with no puzzle or bigger picture into which they fit. As my young pastor friend put it, “We don’t believe in realism anymore. We have a hard time even articulating what it would look like to believe in realism, but it’s exactly in line with a biblical worldview and imagination.” He added, this leads modern people who “attempt to say something about the whole always fixating on the parts, which leads invariably to paralysis.” As Weaver puts it perfectly in the book,

The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than and independent of man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind. . . . The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. . . . which means inevitably—though ways are found to hedge on this—the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of “man the measure of all things.”

This was written 78 years ago in 1948. Weaver couldn’t imagine, although he wouldn’t be surprised, the depths of absurdity people have gotten to by living in figments of their own imagination. It is exactly such absurdity that is opening an increasing number of people to The Real, and leading them back to the Creator, for from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.

 

 

The Culture Project and Societal Transformation

The Culture Project and Societal Transformation

Jul 8, 2026 | Culture, Parents and Family

I mentioned The Culture Project in a recent post, and I decided I needed to share my thoughts about the importance of Christian cultural transformation in more detail. Not only is Christian influence on society critical for the long term health and flourishing of society, but it’s also an important piece of advancing the kingdom of God on earth. I’ll get to that below, but The Culture Project was a non-profit I started in 2008 after I realized almost 20 years of conservative and Christian futility was because we had ignored the importance of culture in the transformation of our nation. We conservative Christians were so focused on politics figuring the culture would take care of itself. It most certainly will not. The late great Andrew Breitbart said, “politics is downstream from culture.” I believe that’s true, to a degree. Public policy and laws are extremely important and have cultural implications, but without cultural transformation long term political effectiveness, which means governance from a conservative and Christian perspective, is a pipe dream.

The vision for my non-profit was to recruit young people into what I called professions of cultural influence, like media, entertainment, law, education, etc., and teach them about the importance of their faith and a Christian worldview for their profession. I envisioned a kind of mentoring project yet on a cultural scale. I’ve since come to see it as a different, more expansive visionary kind of discipleship, something I wasn’t aware of at that time in my Christian journey. We tend to view discipling of children or other young people as a “spiritual” endeavor having to do with their relationship with Jesus, which it is, but that’s not all it is. We bring our faith into everything we experience, and it impacts everything we do, even the most mundane aspects of our daily lives, including our careers, family lives, entertainment, hobbies, everything. We are to have, and teach to our children, a Christian world and life view, and to teach and share that with everyone in our circle of influence.

Christianity over the last several hundred years turned primarily into a personal affair about our relationship with God and our personal holiness. As anyone who is at all familiar with my work will know, this descent into a totally personal faith is a result of Pietism which eventually developed into revivalism and fundamentalism. Along with dispensational eschatology, this truncated version of the faith eventually took over Evangelical Christianity in the 20th century. A unique confluence of cultural streams came together in the 19th century to turn Christianity inward, and destroy the cultural influence it once had. Let’s address that first before we look at the biblical case for cultural engagement.

The Cultural Streams Leading to Christian Cultural Irrelevance
The 19th century was a profound civilizational turning point in Western history, the transition century from a Christian Western civilization to a secular one. It took until the 1960s to fully dominate, but forces that had been building since the Reformation, through Pietism, and the Enlightenment all exploded in the 1800s. Specifically, rationalism, that we can know things apart from God’s revelation in Scripture by human reason alone, developed alongside the scientific revolution. This built into Western culture a faith in human progress melding nicely, and disastrously, with a kind of postmillennial eschatology that had nothing to do with actual, biblical, postmillennialism. A substantial slice of Christianity toward the end of the 18th century was becoming increasingly liberal, which can be seen in a widespread rejection of the Trinity. This effectively turned Christianity into moralism which rejected the gospel of the divine supernatural and transforming power of Christ’s atonement, and the power of the Holy Spirit. Christianity, on a personal and societal level, was turned into moralism by human effort alone.

The father of liberal Christianity is Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), a German theologian who attempted to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant Christianity. That reconciliation, as did the liberal Christianity coming in its wake, swallowed the naturalistic assumptions of rationalism hook line and sinker. That means miracles and the supernatural really can’t happen, which provided the foundation for German higher criticism, an intellectual movement in German universities that completely eviscerated the true meaning of the Bible. That in turn became the foundation of liberal Christianity in America as American scholars went to Germany to learn the latest and greatest about Bible scholarship.

At the same time in the latter part of the 19th century scientific and technological progress was exploding, and Christians in Western culture were convinced there was nothing mankind could not achieve to bring a version of the kingdom of God to earth. Christian politician, and three-time nominee for president with the Democrat Party, William Jennings Bryan, echoed what most Christians believed prior to World War 1:

Christian civilization is the greatest that the world has ever known because it rests on a conception of life that makes life one unending progress toward higher things, with no limit to human advancement or development.

Bryan, a conservative Christian, wasn’t an outlier, but this vision of endless progress toward higher and better things was more in line with a secular version of postmillennialism than biblical postmillennialism. As J. Gresham Machen in Christianity and Liberalism argued, liberal Christianity having rejected supernatural biblical religion was another religion all together. H. Richard Niebuhr captured this perfectly in a book called, The Kingdom of God in America, written in 1938. Speaking of the nature of this basically secular version of Christianity, he says it presents

A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.

It simply could not be said any better. This was the version of Christianity coming out of the 19th century developed in the first few decades of the 20th century into what came to be called the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. While the Bible-believing conservative fundamentalists were basically saving Christianity, at the same time they were losing the culture to secularism. The cultural turning point came with the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in 1925. The cultural irrelevance and caricature of conservative Christianity started here, although as we see the foundation had been laid for several hundred years, including the rise of Darwinian evolution. With the trial it became the official creation myth of secular America.

The revivalism of the mid to late 19th century combined with the new eschatology of dispensationalism basically set the stage for the 1960s and what came afterwards, secular dominance of Western culture. This assertion seems counterintuitive to most Christians, but revivalism and dispensationalism turned Christianity inwards. Christians still complained about sin in society, but that’s about it. In addition to all the various influences I mentioned above, the gospel and salvation, especially with the rise of D.L. Moody and revivalism, came to mean going to heaven when you die, and growing in personal holiness while you’re here. In this view of things, which came to dominate fundamentalism in the next century, cultural influence was merely accidental and had nothing to do with real, “spiritual” Christianity. By the 1950s the die was cast, and whatever influence Christianity had in American and Western culture was slowly dying.

Some Christians realized this wasn’t a good thing. For example, Billy Graham and some others started calling themselves Evangelicals to differentiating them from cultural hating fundamentalists. They founded Christianity Today and Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California. In 1968 Francis Schaeffer wrote The God Who is There, and started what became a robust focus in Evangelical Christianity on worldview and apologetics. Today, more Christians than ever understand the importance of Christian cultural influence, and slowly but surely the church is breaking out of its fundamentalist aversion to cultural engagement. Pietism is still dominant, so the case continually has to be made that the impact of the Christian faith is meant for more than our individual lives or the church, but entire nations. Christianity is in fact a culture project! Why is that?

Abraham, The Patriarchs, and God’s Blessing the Nations
The whole point of redemptive history is to bless the nations, not just individuals within those nations. I’ve just been reading through Romans as I write this, and this morning I read Romans 15. Paul is speaking about the promises to the Patriarchs, which are the covenantal foundation of our faith. Do you remember what the promises are about? What the purpose of God is in redemptive history? To bless the nations! The Jews seemed to miss the message, but it’s clear God’s plans always included more than Israel and the Jews. Paul does something interesting in this chapter quoting four passages from the Old Testament. He is talking about the gospel going to the Gentiles, which means every person on earth who isn’t Jewish, so that they too might glorify God. Here is what he says:

As it is written:

“Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles;
I will sing the praises of your name.”

10 Again, it says,

“Rejoice, you Gentiles, with his people.”

11 And again,

“Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles;
let all the peoples extol him.”

12 And again, Isaiah says,

“The Root of Jesse will spring up,
one who will arise to rule over the nations;
in him the Gentiles will hope.”

I looked back at each of these verses in the Old Testament, and almost all the translations use the word nations. Paul uses the Greek word ἔθνος-ethnos, the same word Jesus uses in the Great Commission in Matthew 28. The point is the scope of the gospel’s blessings, those promised to the Patriarchs, going beyond individuals to people groups making up nations. That means the various countries and the cultures they create. That’s what people do when they live together in communities, they create cultures, which includes economics, and law, and art, and education, and science and technology, and entertainment, and architecture, and cities, and transportation, and food, all of it. The point of the gospel, of God’s purposes in redemptive history isn’t to save people’s souls so they go to heaven when they die, or just to make individuals more holy, but to transform their lives and the cultures they create on earth. What does that mean?

What’s the opposite of blessing? That’s easy: curses. Deuteronomy 28 is the well-known blessing and curses chapter where God lays out to his people the blessings for obedience, and the curses for disobedience. The latter is much longer because God wants to get across the point that they really should chose obedience because the option is suffering, which is what brings curses from disobedience. Do you know that the most quoted book from America’s founding generation is the Bible, and the most quoted book in the Bible is Deuteronomy, and the most quoted chapter is chapter 28? America’s founders were not building a secular Republic, but a covenantal Christian nation they desperately wanted God to bless. Without God’s blessing that comes from obedience to his laws they knew there would be curses and thus suffering.

What most Christians seems to miss is that the so called “culture wars” aren’t about “imposing” Christianity on anybody, but about loving our neighbor as ourselves. Remember, when Jesus is asked how he would sum up the greatest commandment in the law, he basically sums up the entirety of the Old Testament like this:

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

This is in fact what the “culture wars” are about, what it means to disciple nations, to create Christian nations in obedience to Jesus’ command.

Our Christian Culture Project and the Kingdom of God
Another way to refer to a Christian nation is the kingdom of God. Jesus and John the Baptist introduced Jesus’ ministry with the exact same words in Matt. 3:2 and Mark 1:15: “The kingdom of God is near” (Matthew uses heaven in his gospel instead of God as his primary audience is Jews). Then Jesus spent three years introducing his people to this kingdom, was crucified, died, buried, raised from the dead, and ascended to the right hand of God to bring the kingdom of God (heaven) to earth. When he said on the cross, “It is finished” (John 19:30), the kingdom manifesting itself in this world was inevitable.

When Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven,” do we think it was wishful thinking prayer? Was he saying, like I interpreted it most of my Christian life, we know the devil has the upper hand “down here,” so we’ll just have to do the best we can and wait till he returns to finally get God’s kingdom on earth? No! I now completely reject that as unworthy of any interpretation of God’s covenantal redemptive purposes in history. When he promised the Patriarchs to bless the nations it wasn’t only  to bless them in the eternal consummated state after sin and death are completely defeated, but on this fallen earth, in our fallen bodies among fallen people, to bring blessing to the nations.

The Apostle John tells us the reason Jesus came to earth (I John 3:8):

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.

And this isn’t just in our personal lives. The purposes of God in redemptive history, from the Patriarchs to Jesus, were always geared toward nations, ethnos, to people living in community and everything they create. Jesus himself gives us a stark contrast between two diametrically opposite expressions of spiritual reality in this material world (John 10:10):

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

He’s simply saying what he already said to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and confirmed through Moses, David, and the prophets.

So, instead of hiding our light under a basket, instead of keeping the blessing for just our personal lives or within the walls of the church, we’re bringing them into every nook and cranny of existence. Our vision is more expansive, more world encompassing of everything we see and do and experience. Like I said above, it’s a more visionary kind of discipleship, teaching others and our children how their Christian faith impacts everything. Our lives and theirs are in fact, a culture project, bringing of transformation not just to our personal lives and relationships, but to everything we put our mind and hands to. It’s an exciting way to live because Christ didn’t come in futility, but in victory over the works of the devil. Let’s believe that, live it, proclaim it, and live by faith, not by sight, for ours and others’ good, and God’s glory.

My Health Journey and The Development of Modern Medicine

My Health Journey and The Development of Modern Medicine

Jul 1, 2026 | Culture

A couple years back I decided I’d like to write a book about my health journey. Covid was such a radical red pill experience for me, like it was for many others, that it changed completely the way I looked at my health and modern medicine with it. In fact, I started writing it but got waylaid by another book, since finished, and another one I’m now working on. So this will have to wait, but I did start writing it, and want to share some of that here. I can’t share much of the journey, but I want to use how it started and specifically motivated me to learn about where modern medicine came from. We are all born into it, and few question how it got here, or why it is the way it is. Until Covid, most of us had no reason to question it at all.

That was the reason I, and many others, have had a “health journey.” Six years ago the world lost its collective mind. Things happened I and few others, outside of the power hungry perverse, could imagine. For me it was deeply traumatic because I knew it was all a lie from the very pit of hell. It was Satanic in the creepiest sense of the word. It changed everything, in the most literal sense of that word. Hundreds of millions of people could never see things the same way again, including our health and modern medicine, but not limited to just that. I am convinced it also precipitated a great spiritual awakening which we’ve seen develop over the last several years. The story that got me here started what seems a long time ago.

I was born in the late afternoon on Friday, July 29, 1960, on a beautiful sunny day at Hollywood Presbyterian hospital in Los Angeles. California truly was the Golden State then, with people from all over the country and the world flocking there in pursuit of the American dream. It was a wonderful place to be born and raised. I don’t remember much about that day, but my mother told me the doctor scheduled my birth day, induced labor, and I came right on schedule! If you ever see the picture of me on my introduction to this cold, cruel world, you’d say, my, that baby has a lot of hair! All black. I’m Italian, after all. But you would also think I was probably a Chinese baby, a little plump Chinese baby born to Italian parents. How did that happen? Alas, I grew out of the Chinese look and ended up looking like a typical Italian baby and child. There’d be no mistaking me for Chinese when I grew up!

I was of course vaccinated. Vaccines, all agreed, were a miracle of modern medicine, and parents gladly submitted their children to the experts who told them so. At the time there were probably less than ten vaccines on the schedule, and I’m sure I got them all. There are many more today. As a late stage boomer, I was born into a world that worshiped “experts.” To question medical professionals about vaccines, or anything else, would have been unthinkable. Why would you? They’re the experts!

The rise of the expert class was part and parcel of the rise of progressivism of the early twentieth century. Holding the firm conviction that with science and technology no problem seemed too big to overcome, progressives were determined to apply this mindset to everything. Something called “scientific” management or planning by “experts” developed in the nineteenth century given it was the century of hitherto unimaginable progress. The number of inventions exploded, and it seemed there was nothing man could not accomplish with the rise of science and knowledge. By the time I was born, the expert class dominated American society, but it had been in process for almost a hundred years. As an academic, Woodrow Wilson wrote a paper in 1887 arguing for “the science of administration,” which speaks to the rule by “experts.” This rule by experts became the rage in the progressive era of the early 20th century, and in due course the default view of American elites and the American people, until Covid brought it all into question.

My story, or that of any other person who experienced a similar awakening, is better understood when we’re familiar with the world of modern medicine I was born into, and how it became “modern.” The development of medicine as it came to be practiced in the 20th century, was built on two things. One, certain assumptions about the human body and disease, and two, how medical education in America was established and practiced. Let’s look at the fomer first.

Pasteur, Béchamp and Germ Theory
To understand where we are we have to go back to the 19th century and the development of germ theory, which is the foundation of modern medicine. To do that we need to become familiar with the work of two men, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), who everybody has heard of, and Antoine Béchamp (1816-1908), who few people have. Their titanic battle over germ theory is a microcosm of the same battle in the 21st century over health and modern medicine. Once germ theory became the only accepted theory of disease, the rise of modern medicine as we see it practiced today was inevitable.

I did an Internet search for, “Pasteur, Béchamp, and Germ Theory,” and one of the top results is a Wikipedia article entitled, “Germ theory denialism.” I almost laughed when I saw it. Anytime the word denialism is associated with something, you’ll know instantly the accepted cultural elite position on a topic—and it shall not be questioned! You saw that word thrown around a lot during the Covid era when cultural elites worldwide would not allow any questioning of the “Covid is the Bubonic Plague” narrative. I believe it originated with those questioning the Holocaust, so Holocaust denialism became a thing, and after that anyone questioning the accepted narrative, whatever it might be, was labeled a denier. This, of course, is meant to shut off any debate on an issue. Thankfully because of the Gutenberg Press of the 21st century, the Internet, that is increasingly impossible. BTW, if Wikipedia claims something, I will generally believe the opposite. It’s a platform that parrots the acceptable narratives of Western cultural elites. But I digress.

Before I give you my highly simplified version of this debate as I have finally come to understand it, I will quote from a paper arguing for Béchamp’s perspective. The reason I do this before I get to the debate is because all of us have been indoctrinated from birth to believe in germ theory as the unquestioned reality that explains disease. Because of this it is extremely difficult to see it any other way, which is what I’m trying to get you to do. The author states:

We do not catch diseases. . . . The presence of germs does not constitute the presence of a disease. Bacteria are scavengers of nature…they reduce dead tissue to its smallest element. Germs or bacteria have no influence, whatsoever, on live cells. Germs or microbes flourish as scavengers at the site of disease. They are just living on the unprocessed metabolic waste and diseased, malnourished, nonresistant tissue in the first place. They are not the cause of the disease, any more than flies and maggots cause garbage. Flies, maggots, and rats do not cause garbage but rather feed on it. Mosquitoes do not cause a pond to become stagnant! You always see firemen at burning buildings, but that doesn’t mean they caused the fire. . . . [Germ theory] claims that fixed species of microbes from an external source invade the body and are the first cause of infectious disease. The concept of specific, unchanging types of bacteria causing specific diseases became officially accepted as the foundation of allopathic Western medicine and microbiology in late 19th century Europe.

The reason I had a hard time grasping this concept was because for 60 years I had been indoctrinated like everyone else to believe disease as something primarily coming from outside of us, some little invisible thing that invades us and causes the disease. Germ theory also embraces the dogma of a single cause of disease, that specific microorganisms are the sole cause of very specific diseases. Steven Epstein wrote a book in 1996, well before Covid, titled, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. In it he makes this point:

The cornerstone was laid for modern biomedicine’s basic formula with its monocausal microbial starting-point and its search for magic bullets: one disease, one cause, one cure.

The idea that disease already lived inside me was hard to wrap my mind around, and the more difficult concept was that I was the one who determined whether that happened or not. Would that little invisible thing invading me have an inviting space to do its dirty work, or not? That was up to me, not the little invisible thing. Which leads us to the other theory of disease.

Contrary to Germ Theory, Béchamp developed something called terrain theory. The idea of the former is that germs are what we need to worry about, finding ways to kill them off with some kind of medicine once they get inside us. Terrain theory, by contrast, argues that if the body is well and balanced then germs being a natural part of life and the environment will be dealt with by the body without causing disease. In other words, a germ can cause sickness in one person and not another based on the “terrain,” meaning the inner workings of the body’s immune system. A compromised “terrain” means the body’s inner environment makes it susceptible to viruses and parasites, etc. This means it is far more important to work on the terrain of the body than worry about the latest germ or virus going around. It’s all about the dirt, metaphorically speaking.

You can easily infer from the victory of Pasteur and germ theory, modern medicine’s focus on, well, medicine, was a foregone conclusion. In a documentary related to this topic, a doctor pointed out there is a reason we call it medicine given we ingest or consume something as a treatment or cure. You’ll see as we talk about medical education, terrain is well down on the list of the modern medical professional’s priorities, as in pretty much invisible.

The Flexner Report and Modern Medical Education
Few people outside of the medical profession, and I’d wager not many in it, have ever heard of Abraham Flexner and his report, the importance of which cannot be overestimated. The Flexner Report, published in 1910, transformed the nature and process of medical education in America. In 1908 the Carnegie Foundation authorized a study of medical schools in the country, which were visited and assessed based on how the education was then currently practiced. From there Flexner developed criteria on how doctors would be educated and trained in America and thus made acceptable to the American Medical Association. Both the AMA, which was founded in 1847, and Flexner accepted germ theory without question. By then cultural elites in the West could see the practice of healthcare in no other way. This can be seen in many places in the report, but one quote will be sufficient to understand the fundamental assumptions of modern medicine. Speaking of pathology and bacteriology, he says the goal is “to master the abnormal,” and in that context says,

Now the agents and forces which invade the body to its disadvantage play their game, too, according to law.

Something outside of the body invades it and causes “the abnormal,” so the entire medical system became focused not on the patient’s health and enabling the body’s immune system to successfully handle the invaders, but on medicine used to defeat it. On the very next page, however, Flexner seems to contradict himself by saying, the doctor “through measures essentially educational to enforce, the conditions that present disease and make positively for physical and moral well-being.” This and only one other minor reference to a more holistic approach is about it because by that time the assumptions of germ theory were dominant among the elites in the medical profession. Science was seen as all powerful, while God’s creation, the human body and the immune system, was the victim of forces beyond its control. Man would save the day and defeat disease though his ingenuity.

Henry S. Prichett, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at the time, said the report was basically agnostic regarding which kind of healthcare the medical professional practiced, as he claims in the introduction:

In making this study the schools of all medical sects have been included. It is clear that so long as a man is to practice medicine, the public is equally concerned in his right preparation for the profession, whatever he calls himself—allopath, homeopath, eclectic, osteopath, or whatnot. It is equally clear that he should be grounded in the fundamental science upon which medicine rests, whether he practices under one name or under another.

This in practice, however, would not be the case. Once the “scientific standards” were set by the “experts,” anyone straying from them would be considered something of a quack not to be entrusted with the license of an educated medical practitioner. To that end, Flexner succeeded in aligning medical schools along the university model as the standard for all medical schools. This orientation had its origins in German medical education as American educators and physicians became enamored of university medical schools in Europe. One of the results is that schools ignored what they considered “outdated and unscientific methods,” so doctors received minimal nutritional education and defaulted to treatments primarily with pharmaceuticals. Flexner writes:

The only authoritative competent to pass on such values are trained experts. The entire matter would be in their hands if the state boards should in every state delegate the function of evaluating entrance credentials to competently organized institutions of learning.

Such institutions of learning accepted the pharmaceutical paradigm for medicine which was the inevitable result of germ theory and the rise of science, in addition to a class of “experts” believing medicine was required to heal disease. The profit motive, as well, cannot be ruled out given the financial backers of the report were two of the richest men in the world, Carnagie and John D. Rockefeller. They certainly had philanthropic motives and believed in the cause, but they also likely believed they could bring the production model to the medical profession through the primary cures of disease, medicine.

The rise of what we now call Big Pharma was built into this new university model of medical education. After the report, funding was only given to schools following its recommendations. Those that didn’t get the money couldn’t compete, so alternative schools of medicine disappeared. The challenge with nutritional or holistic healthcare is that there’s no money in it. You can’t patent something readily available from nature like you can something from a lab, which is why I was almost 61 years old before I first heard the saying, “food is medicine.” In addition to the challenge of the profit motive, insurance companies believe they have no incentive to cover anything other than medicine, and they often won’t work with holistic doctors. Keeping people healthy so they don’t need medicine or medical care in the first place is a terrible business model!

Of course, Flexner and those who supported him had the best of intentions, as do those in the modern medical profession, but they were terribly naïve about the monster they were creating. When I read this sentence I had to laugh, sadly, especially in light of the entire Covid debacle:

Scientific medicine, therefore, has its eyes open; it takes its risks consciously; it does not cure defects of knowledge by partisan heat; it is free of dogmatism and open-armed to demonstration from whatever quarter.

Remember, this was written in 1910 when science was the unquestioned, benevolent, and all powerful god of the age who would never disappoint but only bring untold blessings to all the peoples of the earth, or something like that. Flexner and his supporters, including the entire Western cultural elite, missed the little fact that science is practiced, and its results applied and implemented, by sinful human beings. Thus it can never be free of “partisan heat” or “free of dogmatism,” and as we saw with Covid, it most definitely is not “open-armed to demonstration from whatever quarter.” In fact as currently practiced, modern medicine is the exact opposite of all these. If, for example, you question the efficacy of vaccines, you are automatically discounted as a “denier.” My journey, in fact, became filled with denialism, and I realized my health is ultimately my responsibility, my lifelong journey, and the learning never ends.

This doesn’t mean modern medicine doesn’t bring blessing because it does in abundance. If you get hit by a bus, have a heart attack, or some other catastrophic thing happens to you, modern medicine is the greatest. Medicine when it’s necessary, like treating infections with anti-biotics, is priceless. We just need to realize our health is up to us, and God has provided everything we need to be healthy and productive into old age. Then we will get to spend eternity in a new resurrected body free from pain, disease, and death.

 

 

The Black Pill and the Psychology of Doomerism

The Black Pill and the Psychology of Doomerism

Jun 3, 2026 | Culture

Being active on Twitter, now X, has exposed me to the big population of Chicken Littles among us. I expect negativity and doom from the left; it’s built into every one of their little petty Marxist genes, but seeing it so widely on the right is terribly annoying. I’ve come across the word panicans which some creatively use for such people, which captures well the story of Chicken Little, the story of the little doomer chicken. It isn’t commonly taught to our children today, but it’s a helpful warning for not to being overly negative and pessimistic.

First published in the 1820s, It’s a fable or fairy tale of unknown origin with various versions, but the message is the same. Chicken Little, who goes by various names in the different versions, is walking in the woods when she is struck by an acorn falling from one of the trees. Convinced this is a sign the sky is falling in, she rushes from the woods to go and warn the king. On her way to see the king, she meets a number of her friends, who are also birds, usually with rhyming names: Henny Penny, Goosey Loosey, Ducky Lucky, Turkey Lurkey, and so on. As she meets each of them along the way, Chicken Little tells them the sky is falling in, and that she has first-hand evidence of this. All of these other birds join Chicken Little as she makes her way to the king, and soon there is a large group of them convinced that the sky is falling on them. On their way, they come across Foxy Loxy (a fox is not a good sign in a fairy tale), who asks them why they’re in such a hurry. Chicken Little explains to him the sky is falling and they’re on their way to notify the king. Foxy Loxy offers to take them to the castle where they will find the king, and the birds agree to accompany him. However, the cunning fox leads them not to the castle, but to his den, and the birds are never seen alive again.

I wish the panicans, the doom and gloomers, would take this cautionary tale to heart, but they won’t. Sinful human nature combined with a fallen world and certain personality types means we’ll always have Negative Nellies among us. But that doesn’t have to be us!

A more modern metaphor for this negative mindset comes from the 1999 hit movie, The Matrix. Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is given a choice by Morpheus, Laurence Fishburne, of a red or blue pill. If he takes the blue pill he goes on his oblivious way and nothing changes, but if he takes the red pill his eyes are opened and he see reality for what it is, an awakening as it were. This metaphor has been extended to positive and negative outlooks. If you’re positive and optimistic, you’ve taken the white pill, but if you’re negative and pessimistic you’re black pilling. There seems to be an epidemic of people OD’ing on black pills in this second year of the Trump presidency, especially with the war in Iran. It seemed to get its start with the whole Epstein conspiracy, which in my mind was much ado about absolutely nothing. The black pillers, however, were convinced there was a vast deep state conspiracy and the evil doers were getting away with it. Whatever.

Be that as it may, or with anything else people complain and whine and moan about, the tendency to catastrophize is a fallen human nature thing, as well as a bad eschatology thing. I’m so naturally inclined to this it’s annoying, even though I’m generally not a conspiracy guy. I’m also naturally an optimist and a glass half full guy. I have to fight the tendency to the negative. Whatever it is, my mind will go right to catastrophe, whatever the worst case scenario is, and 99.9% of the time that isn’t the case at all. So I’ve learned to fight the inclination, and I repent at what I see as my lack of trust in God. To me everything about life, and death, comes down to whether I trust God or not, and far too much of the time I don’t. My aspiration in this regard comes from Isaiah 26:3:

You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.

If I have perfect peace I trust him, if I don’t, I don’t. In my almost five decades of attempting to live a Christ honoring life I’ve come to the conclusion my greatest sin is not trusting God, which is why repentance for it is a common feature of my prayer life.

Human Psychology and Doomerism-Conspiracy Theories
As we were enduring the stolen election of 2020 and the Covid debacle that contributed to it, I became a fan of conspiracy theories. The reason is that anytime anyone questioned the accepted establishment narrative, leftist media lackies would call them “conspiracy theorists,” as if that alone would disqualify them from being taken seriously. It didn’t take long to realize when they trotted out the conspiracy theory trope that whatever was being questioned must either be true or a threat to the establishment. As the early 2020’s progressed and life was moving more online, I began to notice a certain cynical type that actually embraced conspiracy theories, not just to discredit political opponents, but really believed in them. The word cynical is important because while it is a good thing to be skeptical about things going on in the world, cynicism is another level of distrust. For such people behind everything that’s happening they don’t like, there is a pernicious cabal of other people executing a plan to take over the world, or something like that.

As we know, human beings are messed up creatures. We Christians call that fallen, the result of original sin. Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior, and it can help us understand why individuals behave the way they do and how they interact with others. There are a million reasons why people think and act the way they do. Everyone is born with certain personality traits and dispositions. Then they are raised in certain cultures and familial environments that shape who they are and become. Nobody we encounter was raised in a vacuum. Whenever we encounter them in whatever context, they’ve lived through a history that has made them exactly who they are. In a way, although God still treats them as accountable beings, they really can’t help it. And this allows us to deal with them so they don’t drive us nuts. We can have the same effect on others, but we trust the work God is doing in us will teach us what it really means to love others.

Even as I understood all this, I started to see an extremely unappealing dark side to the conspiracy mindset. These people assume the red pill encounters they’ve had gives them insight into everything behind the Matrix. At their worst, they believe they can see things other people are too stupid and blind to see. They become arrogant and dismissive. I’ve encountered a lot of these people online, and some in real life. There is a close connection between the conspiracy minded and doomers. We might say all conspiracy minded people are doomers, but not all doomers are conspiracy minded. For both kinds of people, though, they are sure the worst is yet to come. It’s Chicken Little all the way to the fox’s den. Nothing good comes from a doomer pessimistic mindset. In addition to being a sin, it is impossible to accomplish anything, or build anything of lasting value, if we believe there are forces arrayed against us over which we are basically powerless. We give up our agency to forces we can’t even really be certain exist. When we are tempted to it, we must repent, and we’ll discuss below what we can replace it with.

At the other end of the mental spectrum is Donald Trump. You gotta love the guy (and I know plenty of people don’t, at all). For him, there is no obstacle that cannot be overcome. Everything he does or tries to do is the greatest, the most spectacular, nothing like it has ever been seen before. He also has never met an enemy, whether it be in real estate, the law, politics, entertainment, or as we’ve seen recently, in geopolitics, that he doesn’t believe he can’t overcome. Over time people have come to see his optimistic hyperbole as just who he is, but there is something to it. The man has accomplished a ridiculous amount in his life, and this mentality is part of the reason. He took the leg up his father gave him in the rough and tumble world of New York real estate, and transformed it, often against incredible odds, into an empire. When he entered politics in 2015, everyone, including me, thought it was a joke. He didn’t stand a chance. When he won in spite of the onslaught against him, the political and media establishment of both parties spent four years trying to destroy him. When they were afraid he’d come back, they tried to put him in prison. Yet again, he came back and won, and is reshaping the country and the world. Doomers don’t do that.

I bring up Trump not to affirm everything he says or does; far from it. I only do it to point out the contrast between the mentalities of those who accomplish things in life, and those who do not. Look throughout history, and we see men of action, and some women, changing the world, and not always for the better. It’s easy for sinners to be positive for sinful ends as well, but our goal as image bearers of God and followers of Christ is to advance God’s kingdom on earth. God himself wants us to do that, has given us his revelation and Spirit to do it, and Christ himself prayed we might actually accomplish it, on earth as it is in heaven.

The Christian Mindset-An Historical Overview
The word mindset captures well what I’m trying to convey. It’s an attitude or disposition in how we look at the world. Our theology will very much affect our mindset, how we see things. Life is largely about interpretation. We are confronted with situations and information that doesn’t have one inherent meaning; we must give it a meaning we choose, knowing we’ll never understand it perfectly. As Christians our God is the sovereign almighty Lord of history, which means we must have a providential view not only of history, but of every current and future event. I would argue that because of this a conspiracy minded doomer mentality is sin. Even if doom is our short term destiny as it has been for many Christians throughout history, a negative, pessimistic Chicken Little mindset is still terribly anti-Christian and dishonoring to God.

Looking back through Christian history is a helpful study to see how Christians in the past handled the inevitable challenges and suffering of life. I would challenge you to find a prominent doomer mindset that is common among them. It’s not. I cannot do much of an historical overview in a few words, but I am confident the examples to make my point are legion, or Christianity would have died out long ago. Our religion from the very beginning was always confronted with what seemed like insurmountable odds, but we have a God who controls every single thing on earth for our good and his glory. Reading through Acts at the moment, I think of the Apostles’ response in Acts 4 and 5 to these odds. You’ll notice it’s the exact opposite of doomer. Peter and John are called before the Sanhedrin and are told in so many words to shut up! No more of this talk of Jesus. Of course, they keep talking, then they are arrested again, but God frees them from prison via a helpful angel, and they go right back into the temple courts to “tell the people all about this new life.” They are again brought before the Sanhedrin and told to shut up! They want to put them to death, but are talked out of it by a more level headed member, and just have them flogged. Notice how the apostles respond:

41 The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name. 42 Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.

The entire Jewish religious establishment was against them, and soon that would include the entire Roman Empire. But they never stopped proclaiming the gospel and advancing God’s kingdom on earth in their lives. The result was eventual victory over all the forces trying to stop them, the development of Christian Western civilization, and the gospel going to the ends of the earth. All of this would have amazed the early Christians, but it would not have surprised them. They lived what Jesus taught them to pray:

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

Theirs was not a Christianity of escape from a fallen world, but a Christianity of transformation of that world. I would suggest Chicken Little isn’t welcome in such a world, except that he and his followers are not going anywhere anytime soon. That means for those who refuse the doomer temptation must be eternally vigilant.

The ending of Jesus’ prayer, and ours, about God’s kingdom rule is the critical factor in the mindset Christians should have. The reason God’s kingdom will continue to advance on earth is because as Christ told the Apostles prior to his ascension that all authority in heaven and earth had been given to him. To what end? To disciple nations, not just individuals. I’ve recently written about what I think that means, but it can’t mean pessimism in any sense. In fact, when the Apostle Paul is teaching us about the Ascension in Ephesians 1, and tells us Christ was raised to the right hand of God, he tells us this meant Christ was far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.

Notice that Paul assumes his readers take it for granted that Christ’s authority and rule is obvious for this age, but he feels he has to remind them it’s also for the age to come. That smells like victory to me, not doom, no matter how things look at the moment. Which is why we live by faith, and not by sight

The “Nazi” Label as a Rhetorical Kill Switch and Cultural Marxism

The “Nazi” Label as a Rhetorical Kill Switch and Cultural Marxism

Aug 6, 2025 | Culture

The first part of this title came from a post I saw on Twitter by Joel Webbon, a pastor from Texas and leader on the dissident right, or New Christian Right, or whatever one calls that these days. Sadly, he was referring to other people on the right who use this “kill switch” to try to discredit and shut down conversation about possibly uncomfortable issues. Joel’s description of this rhetorical sleight of hand comes from a friend on Twitter:

It dehumanizes. It demonizes. It’s meant to silence, to isolate, to destroy reputations, and ultimately to frighten the next man in line from ever speaking up.

And that’s the real strategy. The left used to do this, but now the neocon right has adopted it. “We’ll smear you as a Nazi, and everyone else will take the hint.”

I’ve only been active on Twitter (X for the purists) for the last year and a half, and this kind of stuff only started popping up in the last year or so. We lived through peak woke during the Biden administration. Which is why it’s disconcerting, now that Trump has started the process of cleaning our societal house, to see people on the right use the same cancel tactics the left uses to stifle dissent and limit the scope of acceptable discourse. One phrase, for example, that annoys me because it is doing exactly this is “ethno-nationalism.” There are some who argue that an ethnic monoculture, i.e., not “diverse,” is better for societal flourishing than a cultural United Nations. I’ve read and listened to their arguments and find them plausibly persuasive, but when others call them “ethno-nationalists,” the implication is . . . Nazi! White supremecist isn’t far behind. They, it is implied, should be shunned. Uh, no they shouldn’t. Sure, some on the outer edges, the fringe, should be identified as lines must always and will be drawn in any society, but the Nazi line is weak and almost never justified.

I responded in a comment that it’s a shame most people have no idea where the rhetorical effectiveness of this “kill switch” came from, but I will tell you. It’s a tactic the left has used since shortly after World War II (and even some prior), and yet another of the woeful consequences of what Pat Buchanan called an “Unnecessary War.” (If that triggers you, I would suggest you read Buchanan’s book, Churchill, Hitler, and /The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Agree or not, his case is not a frivolous one.) Let’s see how we got here.

The Post-World War II Consensus
Seeing fascism as a phenomenon of the right is part of what some of us see as the toxic stew of the “post-World War II consensus.” I’ll get to that below, but we need to address this so-called consensus first. Worldwide tyranny and totalitarianism were the great fear coming out of the war, and the Western nations were united in their commitment to not allow its worldwide expansion. The Soviet Union, a product of the first Great War, which gave us the second, ended up dominating much of the world anyway because of Allied incompetence or treachery, take your pick. The Cold War was the result. Godless communism was the great enemy of the time, and there was a consensus for transnational cooperation to keep it at bay. Only Ronald Reagan thought Soviet Communism could be defeated, and it was. Another area of consensus is that fascism in the form of Nazism was the apotheosis of evil in the modern world, the apex of the apex, top of the mountain, never matched in the history of the world, and to be avoided at all costs. In this consensus it is assumed fascism is a phenomenon coming from the cultural and political right, and few question that. All agree, though, it must not be allowed to fester, thus the “rhetorical kill switch.”

Liberal democracy is also an unquestioned good in this consensus, and this is true on the left and right. I realized I was a conservative in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and I had no idea the conservative movement was a liberal movement. None, and for decades. I knew there was “something rotten in Denmark” for a long time, but I couldn’t identify it. All conservatives did was lose. At best, conservatism was committed to slowing down the gains of the progressive liberalism of Democrats since Woodrow Wilson, but reversing it didn’t seem to be part of the plan. Oh sure, they talked a good game, but when push came to shove, they didn’t do anything. I had learned about William F. Buckley and National Review magazine back at the beginning of my conservative journey, and he was a hero of mine for 35 years, then he wasn’t. In the very first issue of the magazine in 1955 he wrote of the mission of the magazine and by extension the fledgling conservative movement, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” At best conservatives became those who pleaded, “Please slow down a little.”

I struggled wondering in my disillusionment exactly what I was politically  if I wasn’t a conservative. Maybe a libertarian? I quickly realized that was basically evil; choice as the ultimate good is a stupid moral standard—one that leads to destruction. Thankfully, a New York billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star came down an escalator on June 16, 2015, to save me from myself. It just took a while to realize God had put my political salvation in the most unlikely package. Over the Trump years I’ve come to realize the conservative movement is basically filled with liberals in skirts, just another form of modern liberalism, classical liberalism some call it, but one that believes in tradition. Most conservatives buy into the secular political and cultural order just as much as liberals and most are not all that different than liberals. They all believe in the secular myth of neutrality, that pluralism is a positive good, and that no one religion should be privileged in government or the public square, including Christianity. The phrase Christian Nationalism is anathema to them, and a Christian nation an oxymoron. One of my favorite conservatives in the world actually said that, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, and I challenged that in a post last year. And they all believe fascism comes from the right.

I have discovered through my MAGA journey what I am politically, thanks in large part to Steve Bannon. I would now call myself a Christian populist-nationalist conservative who is deeply suspicious of the post-World War II consensuses. This also includes the accepted narratives of 20th century wars. I would again highly suggest Buchanan’s Unnecessary War, and at least you’ll know there are valid questions about the narratives, agree or disagree.

Because of Trump I began to question many things, and because of Covid came to question everything. I am determined not to turn into a cynic, which I believe is sinful, but to have a healthy skepticism about everything. Writing my last book I learned about the true origins of “the Nazi kill switch,” and it puts into perspective experiences those of us on the right are all too familiar with.

Adorno, Marcuse, Anti-Fascism, and Repressive Tolerance
We have cultural Marxism to thank for “the Nazi kill switch.” It goes back to the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920s which migrated to America prior to the war. The Marxist intellectuals in this movement realized traditional or “orthodox” communism based on class oppression wasn’t working, so a change in tactics was required. The primary insight of the cultural Marxists wasn’t that “orthodox” Marxism 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 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. Thus in due course arose the strategy of the “long march through the institutions.”

One of the cultural Marxists, Italian Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), had developed the concept of “cultural Hegemony,” meaning the dominance of one group over another through cultural norms. This dominant position of a particular set of ideas leads to them becoming commonsensical and intuitive, especially traditional religion, and cultural Marxists were determined to take it all down, replacing specifically Christian and capitalist ideas with Marxism. Marxist revolutionary consciousness would then “naturally” develop, or what we know today as woke. The effectiveness of this strategy is remarkable, and through it we have “cancel culture,” only certain accepted speech can be tolerated. This mentality has been endemic to the left, but it took a while for the “long march” to make it widely acceptable in Western culture. We largely have Adorno and Marcuse to thank for that.

The rise of Hitler and National Socialism, and fascism thanks to Mussolini, was the narrative in which woke incubated. The Nazi rhetorical kill switch was already being used prior World War II as interventionists were trying to get America into the war. Since Hitler and Nazism were ultimate evil and soon to take over the world, those not sufficiently bellicose were called Nazi sympathizers. It wasn’t widespread because the vast majority of Americans had no interest in getting into another European war, but Roosevelt and his administration sure were. The war and the Holocaust seemed to prove the ultimate nature of Nazism’s evil, but that’s only because the allies and the left played down the wickedness of Stalin and communist atrocities. In a contest between totalitarian tyrant baddies, I’d vote for Stalin to get the grand prize, with Hitler getting the runner up. And one last World War II point. Hitler, despite claims to the contrary, never had designs on worldwide conquest, while Stalin sure did; it’s baked into the communist cake. The Cold War proved it. But nobody today, left or right, uses “Commie” as a “rhetorical kill switch” to stifle debate and discussion. Let’s see why.

Theodor Adorno (1903–69) – Adorno published a book in 1950 with the loaded title, The Authoritarian Personality. The default position ever since is that fascism is a phenomenon of the right, and communism of the left, a convenient distortion for our
cultural elites. 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 a la Marx 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. This has some plausibility because Hitler hated communism, but that doesn’t make National Socialism any less an  ideology of the left. In his book Adorno introduced the F(ascism)-Scale as D’Souza explains:

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. Sadly, the right largely accepted this taxonomy, as if Nazism and communism were on opposite sides of a continuum of political totalitarianism. We should reject this, let alone use it to verbally tar and feather those on our side of the political, cultural, and religious spectrum.

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) – After the war Marcuse decided to stay in America. Adorno went back to Germany but returned to America in the early 50s for a time in order to not lose his American citizenship. Marcuse was the most significant figure to come out of the Frankfurt school. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1940 and served as an intelligence analyst for the precursor of the CIA from 1941 to 1944. After the war, he continued in that work for another agency, and then made his way back into academia. He taught at Columbia and Harvard universities (1951 to 1954), Brandeis University (1954–65), and the University of California, San Diego (1965–76), where after retirement he was honorary emeritus professor of philosophy until his death.

He is most famously known as the father of the “New Left” and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. 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; the cultural approach of Frankfurt would come to dominate American Marxism through the pen of Marcuse. During his time in academia, he attracted young radical disciples like Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman among many others.

Marcuse, a prolific author, wrote Repressive Tolerance in 1965. That counter intuitive title comes from his argument that tolerance is “repressive” when it tolerates ideas from the right. 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 Marxist logic of Marcuse 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.

Adorno 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.

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!

Now That We Know?
Since we now know where the “Nazi rhetorical kill switch” came from, can we use it in good conscience? Do threats from potential fascists and Nazi’s actually exist? Is the “dissident right” full of “angry young men” who are susceptible to the “the authoritarian personality”? While I conceded there are some angry young men who are rightly frustrated at the dominant globalist establishment manifested in the post-World War II consensus, is it valid to “cancel” them? To discredit them in a way that seeks to silence them? To ignore their concerns? Or discredit their arguments without at least understanding them? It seems to me the questions answer themselves.

When I see, for example, this tactic being use on, of all people, Stephen Wolfe, who wrote The Case for Christian Nationalism, I call garbage. I am deeply uncomfortable with the antisemitism among some of this crowd, but I’ve tried to engage with them and understand where they are coming from, while rejecting their fundamental premise that Jews are “the problem.” Outside of that, I have no problem with this slice of the conservative Christian right questioning the “consensus”, the accepted narrative of political and cultural reality since the end of the war. I myself once accepted the dominant narratives of everything from the Civil War on, then Trump. Covid then destroyed the credibility of all the supposed “experts,” and created millions of skeptics who were otherwise not inclined to question things. Even the Lord of Glory says, “Come now, let us reason together,” (Is. 1:18), so let us discuss things without assuming the worst motives of our interlocutors, and everyone will benefit as we continue bringing God’s kingdom on earth as Christ taught us to pray.

 

 

Christ and Culture Revisited

Christ and Culture Revisited

Jun 18, 2025 | Culture

Way back in the mid-1980s when I was introduced to Reformed theology, my theological and intellectual mentor introduced me to an influential book I’d never heard of by H. Richard Niebuhr called, Christ and Culture. The Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold (1892–1971) and H. Richard (1894–1962), were prominent American theologians and ethicists. Reinhold was the more well-known of the two, but Richard’s Christ and Culture became a classic that put him on the mid-20th century intellectual map. Written in 1951, it analyzes five broad approaches Christians have taken to their interaction with culture in church history. For me it was significant because when I was introduced to the gospel in college at the ripe old age of 18, engaging culture was not a thing for the Christian group I was involved with. When I discovered Francis Schaeffer a couple years later I learned that Christians should indeed bring their faith to bear upon the culture, which expanded my vision of Christianity greatly. Niebuhr’s book explores how Christians thought about and practiced cultural engagement in the past, and what that might mean for us today.

Something became quickly apparent to me. Almost from the beginning, Christians have disagreed on how they ought to interact with the culture. One of the great church fathers, Tertullian, wrote a work called Prescription Against Heretics, in which he gave us one of the most famous rhetorical questions in church history, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” He was questioning the value of Greek philosophy about which there was much disagreement. In Niebuhr’s phraseology, Tertullian would be Christ against culture. The culture in which the church was born was a thoroughly Hellenized culture with Greek influences everywhere, which some embraced, others rejected, and most were in between if they thought about it at all. We can file this under the more things change . . . .

Many Christians think cultural engagement, or what some pejoratively call, “the culture wars,” is a waste of time and a distraction from the important work of the gospel, as if the gospel had no implications for the culture. They’ll point to the New Testament and say, see, there are no exhortations of commends to “engage” or “transform” the culture, and they’ll say it dismissively as if it’s too obvious to need an explanation. Duh! They miss the salient fact that the New Testament church was only newly born into an exceedingly hostile world, and it would take some time to figure out how to interact with it. These culture engagement critics treat the early church as if it were a middle age career family man who has life pretty much figure out. In fact, none of those early Christians even thought they would reach middle age. Jesus was coming back soon, and they had better be prepared.

After the Apostles died, and the first turned into the second century, it became apparent Jesus wasn’t coming back so soon after all, and people like Tertullian realized they had to figure out how Christians and the culture were going to interact. All of the things the New Testament didn’t address, like politics and economics and law and art and architecture and education and entertainment had to be addressed from the Christian perspective—disagreements have been going on ever since. I can’t explore Niebuhr’s five categories in any depth in a blog post, so if you’re interested I would highly suggest the book.

Before he gets to those, his first chapter of introduction tells us there are no easy, obvious answers to what he calls the “enduring problem” of Christ and culture. Christians disagreeing about culture is nothing new because Christians disagree about everything all the time, always have and always will. Sinners, even saved ones, are finite creatures with limited knowledge who get as much wrong as they get right. That will never change. It’s good to know as you survey Christian history the bickering in our time is nothing new. God knew agreement for sinners would be rare, which is one reason the greatest commandment is love. The problem endures. But before we assess Niebuhr’s take on our interaction with culture, it might be good to define what culture is.

What Exactly Is Culture?
At its most basic level, culture is whatever human beings create. Culture is also 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, 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 how culture shapes not only what they believe, or what they like, or how they behave, but literally shapes who they are. Unfortunately, many Christians fail to think in a discerning way about the culture we inhabit; they are reactive rather than proactive. Culture is something we cannot take for granted or escape, so we must consider its effects, not only for us and our families and friends, but for everyone culture impacts.

As Christians, we must think about culture biblically, as opposed to sociologically or anthropologically. Christians define culture differently than non‑Christians because we start with the Bible, God’s story about his relationship with the human race, and not with something called culture that somehow exists independently of His story. The Bible has no word for culture, thus, no definition of it, but we can say culture is the imprint human beings put on God’s creation. In Genesis 1 and 2 we learn of God giving Adam and Eve the cultural or dominion mandate. He tells Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply to fill this earth, but also to subdue it, to rule over everything He has created. Most importantly for culture making and interaction, man is made in God’s image, male and female He created them. We are God’s visible representatives on earth! We reflect His likeness and attributes in every aspect of our human faculties, be it moral, intellectual, relational, etc. All of these attributes contribute to creating culture.

There is much more that can be said and that has been written on culture, an endlessly fascinating topic, but the takeaway for Christians is that we must realize culture and its influence is inescapable. We must as Christians cease to be reactive and become proactive, meaning a constant awareness of cultural messaging through the variety of ways it communicates to us. None of this messaging is neutral, so we have to learn how to interrogate the culture, like a skillful seasoned prosecutor in a courtroom drilling a defendant. What do these lawyers do? They ask questions, a lot of them, and we must be skilled prosecutors of the culture. Let’s get to Niebuhr.

Christ Against Culture—This might be the most intuitive of the categories, but the least justified. In this perspective, antipathy to culture makes sense in light of how fallen this world is and the people in it are. Niebuhr Identifies the first letter of John as “least ambiguous presentation of this point of view.” These well-known verses from chapter two make his point:

15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. 17 The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

This is an uncompromising either or, the world or the will of God. As Niebuhr says, “a clear line of separation is drawn between the brotherhood of the children of God and the world.” Culture is “the world” in John’s terms, and it is seen as a threat, something to be avoided or escaped. Christians are a separated people and must live like it. However, the number one rule of biblical interpretation, hermeneutics, is context determines meaning, and I John comes in the context of the entire Bible. We can only determine John’s meaning in light of the rest of Scripture.

When I first became a Christian in college I was exposed to a kind of fundamentalist Christianity that didn’t expressly teach “Christ against culture,” but it was sense I got, Christianity on one side, the world or the culture on the other. This “against” dynamic in American culture developed with the rise of so called liberal Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th century. A movement of fundamentalists pushed back against the liberals with a vigorous defense of supernatural Christianity in what are known as the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. The modernists won, and fundamentalism became a cultural backwater of Christians who were determined to separate themselves from a decaying culture. Nieburh identifies this mindset going back to Tertullian, and it expresses itself throughout church history, but the fundamentalists embodied the most well-known against culture Christian approach of modern Christianity. This was how I saw culture in my early Christian years, but came across Francis Schaeffer in college and moved more into other categories.

Christ of Culture—Rather than avoid it or see it as hostile, this approach embraces and accommodates Christianity to culture. As Nieburh says, “They feel no great tension between the church and the world,” the complete opposite of the against culture Christians. The liberal Christianity of the early 20th century and the once dominant mainline denominations fit this approach. In effect, liberal Christians, what we call progressive Christianity today, gets swallowed up by the dominant secular culture, and its values determined by it.

The next three are what Niebuhr calls “the church of the center” because they fall between the extremes, and this is where almost all Christians fall. Theologically, in assessing cultural issues, these three positions affirm Jesus Christ as Lord, and God the Father through the Holy Spirit as the Creator of all things. As such, creation reflected in cultural human products can’t be the “world” and the realm of godlessness because the “world cannot exist save as it is upheld by the Creator and Governor of nature.” All agree “about sin’s universality and radical character,” and to some extent “the primacy of grace and the necessity of works of obedience.” The “three families” as he names them, are “synthesis, dualists, and conversationists.” You, dear Christian, fall in one of these “families” whether you know it or not.

Christ above Culture—This approach affirms a synthesis of Christ and culture, that the two cannot be completely separated. Culture isn’t fully corrupt, but must be informed by revelation. They affirm “both Christ and culture as one who confesses a Lord who is both of this world and of the other.” The synthesis sees culture as “both divine and human in its origin, both holy and sinful, a realm of both necessity and freedom, and one in which both reason and revelation apply.” Nieburh puts it very well when he writes, we can’t say “’Either Christ or culture,’ because we are dealing with God in both cases.” The greatest representative in church history of this approach is Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the most influential philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. His influence today is as great as it was in the 13th century.

Christ and Culture in Paradox—The dualist differs from the synthesist in that Christ and Culture are in perpetual tension. Culture is a battle between sin and Grace, a holy God and sinful man, law and gospel. Sin pervades all human works, so while God’s creation is embraced as good, there can never be a synthesis that isn’t tainted by sin. In other words, any attempt at synthesis is a fool’s errand. Nieburh writes:

The dualist Christians differ considerably from the synthesists in their understanding of both the extent and the thoroughness of human depravity. As to extent: Clement, Thomas, and their associates note that man’s reason may be darkened, but is not in its nature misdirected; for them the cure of bad reasoning lies in better reasoning, and in the aid of the divine teacher.

For the dualist, however, the only hope is not in reason but in divine grace. We could use the phrase made popular by the rise of Calvinism in the 16th century—the total depravity of man. This corruption is inescapable in all human works of culture, so skepticism is the right approach to engagement with those works. The accommodation of the synthesist is effectively seen as compromise. The debate between the synthesists and dualists goes on strong and heavy today, especially among Evangelicals.

Nieburh believes Paul fits in here, but I think judging Paul’s approach to culture in the specific first century context is an anachronism; it doesn’t fit this historical context because the newly born church didn’t have the luxury of thinking critically of its interaction with a concept that hadn’t even been invented yet. A better representative is Luther; the man God used as the torch to set the reformational blaze in Medieval Europe. He says Luther has “a double attitude toward reason and philosophy, toward business and trade, toward religious organizations and rites, and well as toward state and politics.” Which makes sense when you believe in God’s good, created order, but also in the profound power of sin corrupting all things.

Christ the Transformer of Culture—For most of my Christian life I fit squarely between synthesis and dualist, ambivalent and often confused. When I first read this section of the book I wasn’t sure what to make of it because Nieburh isn’t clear about exactly what transforming means. I’ve always been for Christ transforming culture, at least since I found Francis Schaeffer in college, but I had no theological justification for it. It’s interesting to read this chapter from my relatively new perspective of postmillennialism, and see that Niebuhr got it more right than wrong after all. The point of the gospel isn’t just to change individuals, but to permeate, thus transform, everything they put their minds and hands to. Christ’s righteousness isn’t just to be imputed to Christians, but to be lived out and brings its influence everywhere sin has distorted God’s good, magnificent creation. Christ is King, and “culture is under God’s sovereign rule, and the Christian must carry on cultural work in obedience to the Lord.”

He calls these the conversionists, as opposed to the synthesists and dualists, although they would side with the latter in their understanding of the seriousness of sin, except they have a more hopeful attitude toward culture. What the dualist misunderstands, is that the transformation of culture while done by Christians active in cultural pursuits, is all about “the creative activity of God and of Christ-in-God,” and our actions are “under the rule of Christ and by the creative power and ordering of the divine Word.” The critics of postmillennialism, conversionists through and through as we are, are always claiming we think transformation comes merely through our own activity, as if we, without the power of the Holy Spirit, could transform anything—we cannot!

A key word that distinguishes the dualist from the conversionist is corruption. Human nature has become corrupted, but “it is not bad, as in something that ought not to exist, but warped, twisted, and misdirected.” Taking from Augustine, a primary example of the conversionist, the loves given man at creation are disordered, as in they are no longer ordered correctly, thus corrupted. “Hence his culture is all corrupted order rather than order for corruption, as it is for the dualist. It is perverted good, not evil; or it is evil as perversions, not badness of being.” Although not a conservative Evangelical as we would understand it today, he perfectly captures what we postmillennialists believe, that “The eschatological future has become for him an eschatological present. . . . Eternal life is a quality of existence in the here and now.” The conversionist is focused on “the divine possibility of a present renewal.” The “transformed human life in and to the glory of God” can now transform culture. To me that’s the point of the gospel, not merely to go to heaven when we die, but to bring heaven to earth here and now.

I will finish this with a long quote that perfectly captures the hopeful, optimistic theology that brings the end of all things into the here and now until the end:

The life of reason above all, that wisdom of man which the wisdom of God reveals to be full of folly, is reoriented and redirected by being given a new first principle. Instead of beginning with faith in itself and with love of its own order, the reasoning of redeemed man begins with faith in God and love of the order which He has put in all His creation; therefore it is free to trace out His designs and humbly to follow His ways. There is room within the Augustinian theory for the thought that mathematics, logic, and natura l science, the fine arts and technology, may all become both the beneficiaries of the conversion of man’s love and the instruments of that new love of God that rejoices in His whole creation and serves all His creatures. . . . Everything, and not least the political life, is subject to the great conversion that ensues when God makes a new beginning for man by causing man to begin with God.

Amen!