Is the Phrase Christian Nation an Oxymoron?

Is the Phrase Christian Nation an Oxymoron?

Aug 28, 2024 | Politics & Government

Unfortunately, most of the modern conservative movement thinks so, including one of the most respected men in my conservative world, Hillsdale college President Larry Arnn. He said exactly this in a discussion on his podcast. Ironically, the title of the episode is, Bold Christianity in a Secular World. Yet Arnn thinks a Christian nation is a contradiction in terms. That means America should remain a secular nation, right? Here is the question: Are we to have a secular nation or a Christian nation? Those are our only choices. The further question is, what do each of those choices mean. Larry Arnn, as brilliant as he is, like many post-World War II “consensus” conservatives seems to have no idea what either means. He made that very clear in his comments toward the end of the discussion.

Arnn is one of my favorite people in the world. I got to know of him when my daughter started attending Hillsdale College in 2010. I heard many of his talks, read a couple of his books, and was always impressed with his breadth of knowledge and wisdom. I’ve gotten Imprimis, their monthly speech digest, since the early 1980s, so I’ve been a longtime fan of Hillsdale. I had just graduated from Arizona State University in 1982 when I learned about Hillsdale and was bummed out I hadn’t gone there. In my wildest dreams I would never have imagined my own daughter would go there (and she now works for Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative). In 2013, he started joining Hugh Hewitt every Friday for what they called the Hillsdale Dialogues, and I’ve listened to those consistently over the years. Although Arnn is a traditional conservative, it was him taking Trump seriously during those dialogues that opened my mind to Trump when I didn’t think it possible.

His contribution to the conservative movement through Hillsdale has been impressive and important, but secularism is a blind spot for conservatism, and one that needs to be addressed. One of the fronts in the war to re-establishing America as a Christian nation is getting conservative Christians to realize secularism is the enemy, and that pluralism based on secularism is a recipe for totalitarianism. The only basis for real liberty of conscience and true pluralism is Christianity and God’s law. Most secularists, Christian or non-Christian, believe Christianity and God’s law at a societal governing level are a basis for tyranny. Thus to them, like Arnn, a Christian nation is an oxymoron. For someone who knows Aristotle so well, Arnn begs the question like a pro, assuming this conclusion as if it were a self-evident truth. In a Christian nation, he implies, rulers will force Christianity on the ruled. Who in the world believes that!? Not anyone who believes God has called nations to be Christian as a result of the great commission. Yet, this fallacious belief persists for a reason, even in the minds of intelligent people. Why?

The Source of the “Theocracy is Tyranny” Lie
The idea that a Christian nation is an oxymoron, or that God’s rule (theocracy) based on Christ in a society, is inherently tyrannical exists for a reason. It came primarily from a certain slice of Christendom 1.0, as Doug Wilson calls it, where tyrannical force was indeed used to coerce belief in certain things. We know this as the Inquisition, a judicial procedure and later an institution that was established in the 12th century by the Catholic Church to identify heresy. Before we Protestants get on our high horses, our forebearers thought they too could compel belief. This is a complicated situation of the Middle Ages that historical ignorance and bias only makes worse. Religion and state were not separated, and to think people at the time should have thought otherwise is, as C.S. Lewis put it, chronological snobbery. Protestant Christian princes, and everyone else, thought that heresy would create societal instability, and it must be stopped. Catholics get the worst press, however.

Bloody Mary’s purge of Protestants in Tudor England from 1553-1558 is a primary example where an estimated 300 Protestants were burned at the stake for not converting to Catholicism. In Germany, Martin Luther’s heresy against Catholic dogma was seen as a threat to the Holy Roman Empire’s political authorities. He was called to stand before the Diet (Assembly) of Worms in 1521 and recant. When he declared his freedom of conscience it changed the direction of Western Civilization, slowly but surely, in the direction of religious liberty. Commanded to repudiate his writings, he stood against an array of powerful clergy and statesmen asserting he could not go against his conscience. The official transcript quotes him as saying:

Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason (I do not accept the authority of popes and councils because they have contradicted each other), my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. So help me God. Amen.

In Luther’s collected works his closing words come down to us most famously as, “Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.” Nothing like this, a declaration of freedom of conscience, had ever been said before.

You can’t leave a discussion of Christianity and tyranny in the Middle Ages without addressing the case of Michael Servetus. He was burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553. Supposedly this was John Calvin’s doing, but it was the Geneva city council that condemned him for heresy and called for his execution. Calvin agreed, but tried to have him executed by sword rather than burning at the stake, a more merciful death. The council refused and Servetus was executed. He was a wanted man all over Europe, so this would have happened no matter where he went. Denying the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ were capital offenses throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. To make Calvin the bad guy is disingenuous because he couldn’t have saved his life even if he wanted to.

Moving forward to the 17th century we see progress for religious liberty. Puritans like Oliver Cromwell proclaimed freedom of conscience, although not quite up to modern standards. After his reign ended in 1660, Catholic King Charles II did the same, again not as we would understand it, but this was unique in the world of that time. Especially important for religious liberty is the development of the rule of law in England, starting with Alfred the Great in the 9th century. In 1215 Magna Carta was passed which started the process of taking absolute power away from kings. It was the Glorious Revolution in 1688 that cemented the idea in Western civilization. The 17th century also saw Puritans, called dissenters, flee England for the New World which was instrumental in starting what eventually would become America. Speaking of the rule of law and America, I will mention the Salem Witch trials (June 1692–May 1693) in passing because skeptic and Christian both use it as a cudgel to try to discredit theocracy. In fact, in due course the rule of law in this Puritan community worked to finally discredit the injustice and hysteria just as it was supposed to, the fruit of almost 800 years of English history.

Theocracy is Inescapable Because Neutrality Is Impossible
Skeptics mock the “dark ages” of religious persecution and blame it on Christianity, specifically “theocracy.” Handmaiden’s Tale is only the most ridiculous expression of something even most Christians believe, that the rule of Christianity and God’s law is inherently tyrannical. Self-righteous censorious Christians can unfortunately give some credibility to that slander, but standing for God’s law will never be easy in a fallen world. Unfortunately, the answer for skeptic and Christian secularists alike is the rule of secularism, a truly neutral public square where justice and not religion rule. Such a thing, however, has never existed because it cannot exist. A nation’s culture and laws are a reflection of its worldview, its faith commitments. Its culture and laws are the externalization of its religion. Doug Wilson calls this “inescapable theonomy” because “all societies are theocratic.”

That this is now denied across the ideological and religious spectrum, and secularism unquestioned dogma, goes back 300 years to the developing Enlightenment, so called, in Western culture. Initially it was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption we’ll call the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutrality assumes that religion is fundamentally a private, personal thing that only messes up the tranquility of society if it is brought into how a society is governed.

Fortunately, in Western history we have two experiments in government by which we can see the religious/secular contrast, the American and French Revolutions. The former was drenched in Protestant biblical Christianity, and the latter in hostile anti-religious secularism. The results speak for themselves. However, the proponents of secularism will tell us the radical nature of the French experiment isn’t typical but extreme, and secularism is able to give us a kinder and gentler non-religious public square. The problem with such an understanding of secularism is that in practice it can never hold up. The West is a perfect example. As long as Christianity as a cultural force endured, the religious tendencies of secularism were held at bay, but as soon as Christianity was completely dethroned, we see the true nature of secularism. What do I mean by this?

R.J. Rushdoony wrote a book in 1959 called, By What Standard? The title says it all: there must be a standard, whether for personal or societal morality. The foundation of a nation’s laws, and what is considered right or wrong, good or evil, legal or not, must be based on some kind of standard. For the Christian nation, that standard is God’s law in biblical revelation, for the secular nation that standard is human reason. The history of philosophy tells us that developing a moral standard, personally or societally, without the revelation of God is a slippery thing. Ultimately the question must always be asked, says who? Somebody must have the last say, and the two revolutions tell us unequivocally that will be either God in Scripture or man and his reason. Secularism will always end in tyranny, and as such is a perversion of true theocracy. We must educate fellow Christians that this is biblical truth.

America’s Secular Founding?
Secularists will argue that this is a false choice. Christians and conservatives in the mold of Larry Arnn believe natural law is sufficient to bring Christians and heathens together in agreeable harmony about what is right or wrong in a society. I ask a simple question: natural law based on what? Post WWII conservatives like Arnn seem to miss this point thinking that America’s Declaration of Independence is an example of a kind of secular founding of a country. It most certainly is not! Even those who argue that America’s founding was Christian believe because of the modern changed religious demographics of America, a neutral secular pluralism is required, but secular pluralism has failed, and we can’t tweak it to success. Natural Law must come from somewhere, be based on something.

For most of my adult Christian and conservative life, north of 40 years, I had no biblical categories for a Christian nation. Like all Christians I longed for more Christian influence in culture and politics but had no idea how that would happen. I had never thought through my own Christian political philosophy, but my latest book was an opportunity to do that. As I discuss there, we have an argument today over the interpretation of America’s founding. Was it Christian, was it secular, or was it something in between. The Marxists tell us it was fundamentally evil, while all normal Americans believe it was fundamentally good. Unfortunately, much scholarship in the 20th century bought into the secular founding myth, including Christian scholars. Mark David Hall in Did America Have a Christian Founding? dismantles that contention, but shows even respected Christian historians like Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden claim America’s Founders were primarily Deists and Unitarians and “not in any traditional sense Christian.” As I argued, none of America’s most famous founders were doctrinaire Deists, and the rest were in fact orthodox Christians. Hall contends only one, Ethan Allen, could be considered such a Deist.

The conservative movement since its inception in the 1950s with William F. Buckley’s National Review, has had an inter-conservative squabble between those who believe America’s founding was secular, and those who believe it was Christian. A good example is an article in American Greatness by

Edward J. Erler. He writes about Harry Jaffa and Willmoore Kendall, and this paragraph makes clear Erler falls into the secular trap. Speaking of the Mayflower Compact, he says

What was its attraction for Kendall? It was pre-Locke—although that didn’t preclude it having “Lockean” elements—it didn’t mention equality, and it did, albeit in passing, make a bow to Christianity, whereas the Declaration’s “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” seemed to make a secular reference to Divine Providence.

Except it doesn’t. Whatever Jefferson’s personal religious beliefs, he lived in an America that was 98 percent Protestant. He believed when he wrote this, and everyone who read it did as well, that this God of nature was the God of the Old and New Testaments. It wasn’t some far off clockmaker God who made and let nature take its course, but the providentially intervening God who ordains history. Read any founding documents or public proclamations and that becomes abundantly clear. At the Constitutional convention, supposed Diest Benjamin Franklin said these words to the august attendees which could come out of the mouth of any fervent Evangelical of that time or now:

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

Liberty Depends on Christianity
This is the fundamental fact of human political existence that secular conservatives and Christians miss, and the founders understood. It seems obvious to me, but it is not obvious to many brilliant people who should know better. The Puritans gave us the Great awakening which had a profound influence on America’s founding. America’s thirteen colonies were a geographical amalgam of Congregational (democratic), Presbyterian (oligarchical), and Anglican (monarchical) peoples who came to America to run their own lives with limited oversite from government. The Atlantic Ocean made that necessity into a compelling reason to break the bonds with their mother country, but it was Christianity alone that provided the necessary and sufficient conditions for liberty, while the Enlightenment without Christianity led to the French Revolution and disaster.

We’ve also seen over time that as Christianity’s influence in the West declined, secularism become increasingly dogmatic and tyrannical. In the 21st century West we have the theocracy of woke. R.C. Sproul said that “the inevitable omega point of secularism” is statism. And the state, every state, has some ultimate moral standard upon which to base its laws. Either that will be Christianity which gives us the limited state of America’s founding, or without Christianity the unlimited tyrannical state. Here is my claim, and one which every Christian should agree with but unfortunately won’t: secularism can never give us liberty and a limited state. The state (i.e., nation), any state and every state, must be under God, the God of the Old and New Testaments, under King Jesus, if they are to recognize their boundaries.

Because of the Great Commission (Matt. 28), and Christ bringing God’s kingdom to push back sin and the fall, every discipled nation will be a Christian nation. All Christians, it seems, want Christianity to influence government and laws, but they won’t go all the way and declare that the nation should officially be proclaimed a Christian nation. If we want liberty and justice for all, that is our only option.

 

A Christian Prince: Nayib Bukele

A Christian Prince: Nayib Bukele

Aug 14, 2024 | Politics & Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The authors further state the obvious:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Christianity is the Only Source of Political Liberty

Christianity is the Only Source of Political Liberty

Jan 10, 2024 | Politics & Government, Uncategorized

This is an assertion that many Christians, let alone secularists, will vehemently disagree with. Those who disagree, however, need to bone up on their history of Christian Western civilization. Christian England is the only place on earth where the concept of the rule of law developed that could hold a ruler of the nation accountable. Prior to that, whatever the sovereign declared was law. It isn’t a difficult case to make that the only reason liberty exists at all in the world is because of Christianity. Without Christianity all we are left with is either the will to power and tyranny, or anarchy. When societies end up falling into the latter, people would much rather the tyranny; at least it’s predictable.

This is the dynamic in which we find ourselves as we begin the new year of 2024. It will either be anarchy leading the tyranny, or liberty. It’s one or the other. The only way to liberty is through Christ, so I’ll put my money on liberty. But to do this, we need to disabuse a very lot of people of the notion that the rule of Christianity in a nation is inherently tyrannical. They deride the concept with the epithet “theocracy,” as if the rule of God over a society, what the word means, is a bad thing. It most certainly is not! Of course, that all depends on what we mean by theocracy. I address all this in my upcoming book, and I look forward to seeing what people who disagree with me make of my argument. Hopefully, they’ll agree with me after they read it.

The Necessary Idea of Sphere Sovereignty
I’ve recently become aware of Willem Ouweneel, a Dutch scholar and prolific author. I’m currently reading his book; The World is Christ’s: A Critique of Two Kingdoms Theology. He argues that a Christian worldview requires the autonomy of certain societal relationship, like churches (synagogues, mosques, temples), marriages, families, schools, associations, businesses, political parties, etc. He states, “each is relatively autonomous within its own boundaries, and should be free from interference from either the state or the church.” By contrast, “The state has the responsibility to administer public justice.” That’s all. Needless to say, the state as conceived in the modern world per liberalism and much of what calls itself conservative, known as “the post WWII consensus,” is deeply unbiblical. What liberalism has done inspired by the secularism that created it, is claim that Christianity at the societal level is inherently tyrannical. The claim is spurious and easily refuted by Scripture and history, but the distortion runs deep. Here is the way Ouweneel counters it:

The notion of a Christian state does not imply that Christian authorities enforce Christian values upon its citizens, but that they administer public justice in a Christian way. The notion of a Christian school does not imply that Christian teachers force Christian values down their pupil’s throat, but that they teach and educate according to Christian principles.

The tyranny claim is a perfect example of projection, normally associated with leftists. Liberals (secular or religious, left or right) believe the state is the ultimate sovereign, and that the state can force people to do things ostensibly for their own good. R.J. Rushdoony explains why theocracy is so often misunderstood:

Theocracy is falsely assumed to be a take-over of government, imposing biblical law on an unwilling society. This presupposes statism which is the opposite of theocracy. Because modern people only understand power as government, they assume that’s what we want.

In the Christian view, by contrast, the state has an extremely limited role, and the people within the spheres of sovereignty, like churches and families, are completely free from state intrusion except for public justice. If laws are broken, the state is responsible to adjudicate it.

The concept of sphere sovereignty is critical in the never-ending battle against the spirit of Babel, which is another word for the tyrannical centralizing state. The concept is as simple as it is contested by those who embrace that centralizing spirit. It was first introduced by the great Dutch theologian, statesman, and journalist Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) in a public address at the inauguration of the Free University of Amsterdam. The question comes down to authority and who wields it. Absolute sovereign authority rests in God alone, and He has delegated His authority on earth to human beings:

so that on earth one actually does not meet God Himself in things visible, but that sovereign authority is always exercised through an office held by men.

In this he asks two pertinent questions:

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

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

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

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

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

It is only when those in power acknowledge the power of God in Christ as the ultimate authority that the state will recognize its limits. This is the message the secularists (again, be they religious or not) need to be taught. The case, to me, doesn’t appear that hard to make.

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

Secular, understood classically in the medieval world prior to the Enlightenment, simply meant the mundane as opposed to the sacred. The Reformation rightly critiqued this dichotomy between the secular and the sacred as unbiblical, but the rationalism of Enlightenment thinkers ended up affirming the same dichotomy, only now religion ended up becoming dangerous to social harmony. As Christianity’s influence waned in Western civilization, secularism came to dominate the public square as a force hostile to Christianity, and in due course became the dominant worldview of the West. The hostility is expressed in manifold ways throughout government and every area of culture, but there is no need to inventory them here. We’re all too depressingly familiar with them as it is. What well-meaning Christians miss, unfortunately, is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism.

In Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.”

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

They wrote this almost 40 years ago, and we are now in the “later” they speak of—the vacuum has been fully filled. At the time they wrote, nobody could envision the most pernicious enemy of liberty the world has known; the globalist technocratic elite enabled by the ubiquity of the Internet. Fortunately, that same Internet is the Gutenberg press of the 21st century, and the elites will be no more successful in suppressing the truth than the Catholic Church was in suppressing the Reformation.

America’s Fight for Liberty
Most people would agree that true political and religious liberty was for the first time realized in the republic that is the United States of America. Yet, Mark David Hall answers the question of his book, Did America Have a Christian Founding? with a resounding yes! Christianity and liberty are perfectly compatible. In fact, liberty is impossible without it. Unfortunately, the myth of neutrality leads many Christians to mistakenly believe religious freedom means a type of pluralism where all faiths are equally welcome at a neutral public table with mutual respect and tolerance for all. A perfect example of this misconception comes from David French, a one-time conservative who became an implacable foe of Donald Trump (becoming a NeverTrumper). This quote comes from an article in the left-wing Atlantic magazine titled, “Pluralism Has Life Left in It Yet”:

The magic of the American republic is that it can create space for people who possess deeply different world views to live together, work together, and thrive together, even as they stay true to their different religious faiths and moral convictions.

This magic world of America that French invents out of whole cloth never existed, because in God’s created reality, currently fallen and chock full of sinners, such a pluralist Utopia does not and cannot exist. Which is why America was founded as a Protestant republic with shared biblical assumptions and the Bible as its foundational religious text. Most people don’t realize, obviously including David French, that for the first approximately 170 years of America’s history most states had anti-blasphemy and sabbath laws. Not to mention anti-sodomy laws. Doesn’t sound very magical or pluralistic to me!

America’s founders were Englishmen fighting for the rights of Englishmen, which is why someone like Patriot Patrick Henry uttered these immortal words during a speech to the Second Virginia Convention in March 1775:

What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Sadly, most Americans today have traded liberty for security. The English men and women who turned into Americans understood the true value of liberty, of self-government, because they knew their English history, which Americans have lamentably forgotten given the woeful state of so-called “public education.” The revolution was their fight for “the rights of Englishmen.” They knew about Alfred the Great, Magna Carta, The Puritans, Oliver Cromwell and his fight for religious tolerance, and the Glorious Revolution and its Bill of Rights. In fact, Pulpits across America, influential in a way modern Americans can’t comprehend, were aflame with justifications for liberty and revolution. Americans as Englishmen saw their rights earned centuries before being blithely discarded by the British government.

Covid and Recapturing of Our Liberty
None of this was in the realm of abstract “rights” intellectual conservatives love to argue about. It was real, boots on the ground, everyday living as self-governing people before God who granted them the liberty to live their own lives. Americans were eminently practical people, including its intellectual leaders. Unfortunately, with the rise of progressivism starting in the early 20th century, most Americans slowly lost the genius of America as being a self-governing republic. Instead of taking care of ourselves as a self-governing people, we gave over that care to the Nanny State. The Covid debacle was an indication of just how far we’ve fallen. Too many Americans, sadly, proved to be sheeple instead of the independent citizens America used to produce. But Covid has turned out to be a blessing in disguise because God’s job is to turn evil into good and thwart the devil’s plans to destroy his creation.

I’ve always believed the greatness that is America still resides in most Americans to some degree, and the progressive globalist totalitarians cannot wipe it out completely. Once the Covid scam came to be seen as exactly that, a scam, Americans woke up. They realized that instead of blindly trusting “experts” they should trust themselves. Because of the Internet, the globalists can no longer control “the narrative,” and truth is winning. There is a Great Awakening on so many levels. I believe we can defeat America’s woke Maxrist enemies, and re-found America based on limited government as a self-governing people. We need to pray for this daily and trust God in his sovereign Almighty providence will make that happen through us.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: A Parable for Our Times

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: A Parable for Our Times

Nov 6, 2023 | Politics & Government

I don’t know how many years it’s been since I saw this classic 1939 movie starring Jimmy Stewart and directed by the great Frank Capra, so I didn’t realize how relevant it would be to 2023. And I mean spot on relevant. Those two, by the way, teamed up to make the also classic, It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946.

One thing before I get to my thoughts. It’s refreshing to watch a movie that doesn’t have gratuitous F words thrown around all over the place. In fact, the entire movie didn’t have one single vulgarity, and it didn’t affect the verisimilitude of it at all. Every new TV show and movie, unless it’s specifically a Christian production, has to have F this and F that all over this place. It’s banal now and tiring, and is ruining a perfectly good vulgarity by overuse. Now to Mr. Smith.

You might be surprised to learn the exact same dynamics we see playing out in 2023 politics has always been so. In fact, the more I learn the details of America’s founding era, the more I see nastiness is the nature of politics. There never has been nor will there ever be a golden age of politics. However, there have only been two periods, so far, where bloodshed was required to get political answers to intractable problems. The first was the Revolution where Englishmen engaged in a civil war to see whether political independence would be a reality for the American colonies. Once it did, keeping the states united in their independence was a struggle. It wasn’t at all obvious the United States of America would last. The next time our countrymen went to war against one another was the Civil War, the conflict caused by the great scourge on our country, slavery. There too it wasn’t at all obvious that the United States of America would last. We are now in third period of American history where America as we know it seems like it could easily fall apart. As it is often said, we live in a time of cold civil war.

The Nature of this War
In the book I just finished (I’m in the process of getting it published), I wrote a chapter on the re-founding of America. The republic as founded if not lost is slipping away, quickly. The current regime, junta really, has jettisoned the rule of law. Now, Democrat-leftist politics is law, the in-Justice Department and their military, the FBI, has created a police state. This weaponization of government—which only goes one way, left against right, Democrats against Republicans, Media-Industrial Complex against regular Americans—started back not long after 9/11 with the Patriot Act. Promoted by the Bush/Cheney administration, it passed the House that year 357 to 66, ironically the majority of the no votes coming from Democrats (62). It is important to understand what happened in this legislation:

  • The Patriot Act turned the intel surveillance radar from foreign searches for terrorists to domestic searches for terrorists.

What was allowed in other countries, i.e., spying on people, was now allowed on American soil, all in the name of catching terrorists, of course.

Then two things happened when Obama was elected president and took office in 2009. Remember he boasted five days before the election that his goal was “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” This began happening in two ways. First, leftist groupthink took over the Democrat Party and the corporate media. For the latter, all pretensions to objectivity went out the window. The media was now the cheerleader for all leftist-Democrat policies and politicians, and complicit in discrediting their opponents, Republicans and conservatives. All things leftist not only took over government, including the intelligence bureaucracy (CIA, DOJ, FBI, etc.), but the culture as well. The war against America, its fundamental transformation, was waged on two very effective fronts. The second relates specifically to the Patriot Act.

  • The Obama/Biden administration redefined what a “terrorist” is to include their political opposition.

This happened during his presidency, but we began to see the full pernicious power of this “deep state” before Trump even took office. Despite Republicans controlling both houses of congress, the wheels of injustice kept turning because Republicans hated Trump as much as Democrats (it’s called the Uniparty after all). If you want to take a deep dive about all this to see exactly what patriotic Americans are up against, I encourage you to read this detailed piece at The Conservative Treehouse on The Post 9/11 Weaponization of The U.S. Govt. It is sobering.

You’ll also want to watch this trailer, and eventually Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie called Police State. It’s almost unfathomable this can be happening in the United States of America, but alas, it is. The Marxists are in charge, and like all good Marxists they will do whatever it takes to keep and extend their power. Power is an aphrodisiac to some, and a responsibility to others. Mr. Smith understood it was the latter. The problem for the bad guys, however, is us, and the genius of the Founding Fathers of America. There is still enough of America left to save it all.

How We fight back-We the People . . . .
I encourage you to watch Mr. Smith Goes to Washington if you haven’t seen it, and watch it again if you have. It’s almost da ja vu all over again. The people and the technology have changed, but it’s eerie how it mirrors our own day. It shows that there is real, substantive power in “We the people,” something never before given to a people in the history of the world. We just don’t take advantage of it. We the people are the first words in our Constitution and have changed the world in too many ways to count. Yet, what do we do? Complain. We’re terribly good at it too. We even delude ourselves into thinking that means we are doing something. It most certainly does not!

I must quote from an article written in The Atlantic in April 1877 by the twentieth president of the United State, James A. Garfield, then a member of the US House of Representatives. It is called “A Century of Congress,” and he reflects on the history of American government focusing on congress and its importance to a well-functioning republic. It could not be timelier or more apropos for our day because of the inherent fragility of this experiment of government of, by, and for the people (in Lincoln’s memorable phrase):

[N]ow, more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand those high qualities to represent them in the national legislature. . . . The most alarming feature of our situation is the fact that so many citizens of high character and solid judgment pay but little attention to the sources of political power, to the selection of those who shall make their laws. The clergy, the faculties of colleges, and many of the leading business men of the community never attend the township caucus, the city primaries, or the county convention; but they allow the less intelligent and the more selfish and corrupt members of the community to make the slates and “run the machine” of politics. They wait until the machine has done its work, and then, in surprise and horror at the ignorance and corruption in public office, sigh for the return of that mythical period called the “better and purer days of the republic.” It is precisely this neglect of the first steps in our political processes that has made possible the worst evils of our system.

Chalk this up to the more things change . . . . I like the way someone in our day, Eric Metaxas, puts the opportunity and danger inherent in the American system of government:

[B]y itself the Constitution could do very little. What it promised would require the efforts of all those who henceforth called themselves Americans. It was they who must keep it, the republic and the grand and noble promise of that republic. That is the wonderful, spectacular genius of it all, and the terrible, sobering danger of it all too. The document and the men who created it put these unimaginably great and fragile things in the hands of the people.

Notice very carefully what President Garfield concluded: “It is precisely this neglect of the first steps in our political processes that has made possible the worst evils of our system.” So if you want to know who to blame for what’s going on in Washington, DC right now, look in the mirror. We call this tough love.

What Can I Do?
Well, I’m glad you asked. I can’t explore in detail here what civic engagement will look like for each person. It will look different for each one of us depending on our talents, aspirations, age, commitments, resources, etc. As the Apostle Paul said, different parts of the body have different functions but they are all of value and necessary. But I will share a few thoughts.

For most of my life I’ve seen the key to changing our country happening from the top down; I was wrong. Many Americans agree with me, realizing nobody is coming to the rescue; that if our country is to be saved it is going to be up to us—we the people. Change has to happen in large part from the bottom up, at the local level. We’ve become fat, happy, and lazy believing if we just vote things will take care of themselves. Clearly they won’t. This is a challenge for those of us of a conservative bent like me who just want to live our lives, take care of our families, and enjoy God’s blessings. That is no longer an option. I know the 80/20 rule is a fact of life, that twenty percent of the people do eighty percent of the work and vice versa, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and we must encourage each other to get involved or lose the right to complain. But what if twenty percent of God fearing patriotic Americans actually got involved? We could turn the world upside down! 

Those inclined to run for public office can serve in local city government, or county, or even at the state level. This is a heavy commitment which is why we need to pray for God to raise up Godly men and women of integrity committed to America’s founding principles. Those not so inclined must hold accountable those who are. This takes time and often money. It means showing up, writing e-mails, and making calls. I started seeing the possibilities of this when I discovered Steve Bannon’s War Room. There are patriots all over the country who realize the desperate times in which we live, and Bannon offered me a window to see this happening. It’s one of the reasons after the 2020 election and J6 fiascos I turned from a pessimist into an optimist. Because of the genius of the Founding Fathers, even as far gone as America is now, there are still many legal, peaceful means to fight back and defeat America’s enemies. 

One thing my wife and I have done (which doesn’t require an extensive commitment) is become precinct committeemen in our local county GOP. On War Room in February of 2021, I learned about something called the Precinct Strategy on his show as a means for conservatives to take over the Republican Party. There are over 400,000 of these positions throughout the country, and at least half are empty. I learned we can take over the Republican Party from the RINOs, who are not committed to America as founded, by becoming voting members of the Party. Unlike the Democrat Party, the Republican Party was developed to be run from the ground up to truly reflect what America is as a self-governing representative republic. People can be involved a little or a lot or anywhere in between, but I’ve seen this make a difference at the ground level in various states. I always think about the 200,000 empty positions when I see people complain.

Anytime you are tempted to complain, think about Mr. Smith and the power of “We the people.” We have our own modern example of Mr. Smith and the power of “We the people.” That would be congressman Matt Gaetz. Almost single handedly he, along with five or so other congressmen he led, were able to get the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, deposed, a first in American history. He stood firm for three weeks while being pilloried by so-called conservatives and the left-liberal media. But as Steve Bannon often says, courage is contagious. And like “We the people” in the movie put pressure on their elected representatives, so did “We the people” on the real congress, and Mike Johnson was elected Speaker, an unashamed Christian who brings his Christian convictions and worldview boldly to his duties as Speaker. We, with lots of prayer, are our only hope.

A Rebel with a Cause, Matt Gaetz Delivers Righteous Remarks to Florida Freedom Summit on Saturday. Mr. Smith would be proud.

Russell Moore’s American Evangelical Church Crisis and the Myth of Neutrality

Russell Moore’s American Evangelical Church Crisis and the Myth of Neutrality

Oct 2, 2023 | Culture, Politics & Government

If you don’t know who Russell Moore is, you’re not missing much. He used to be a big shot in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and last year became the Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today. He left the SBC amid some controversy in 2020 and eventually took over at Christianity Today. He’s a Christian, along with people like David French, leftist elite society loves. He writes for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, among other establishment organs of the approved secular cultural and political narratives. To say the least, he is not a fan of the MAGA movement thinking it’s infected the Evangelical church and as he argues has created a crisis for the church. He writes of this “crisis” in a July article in The Atlantic, and since my last two pieces were about “gospel losers,” I figured it would be important to continue the theme of the biblical contrast to such anti-cultural engagement Christianity.

Like the young pastor Poythress in my previous posts, Moore believes in a personal pietistic kind of Christianity, and thinks cultural and political engagement is poison to the true mission of the church. As with other people who think like him, he is good at setting up straw men (a logical fallacy) so he can mow them down. The Christians he criticizes are caricatures in his imagination. He condemns people like me, but what he says I believe is inaccurate and untrue. The straw man strategy is an effective way to get people who already agree with you to agree with you, which is why he writes for leftist publications, and Christianity Today has lamentably become one of those. He doesn’t know any populist-nationalist (MAGA) conservative Christians like me because if he did he couldn’t write pieces like this in good faith. I’m not going to go through the paragraphs like I did in my previous posts, but give a couple examples of his straw men and false choice assertions, and argue for the biblical position. Which, by the way, can be proved without doubt by the history of the church. Here is the very first paragraph:

The No. 1 question that younger evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible. These young people are committed to their Christian faith, but they feel despair and cynicism about the Church’s future. Almost none of them even call themselves “evangelical” anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories.

I will assume he’s being honest here and not using this to simply make a rhetorical point. If it is true, he needs to talk to more young Evangelicals. And beware of anyone who uses the phrase “internet conspiracy theories” to discredit others. We’ve seen the last several years how the globalist deep state elites used this to try to stifle dissent and anything against the accepted “narratives.” You can see in the last sentence he embraces a personalized pietistic faith that shouldn’t get too involved in politics. He asserts a false choice typical of such thinking: it’s either “culture-war politics” or prayer and the Bible. It is not. Here is the most egregious straw many setup:

Some evangelical Christians have confused “revival” with a return to a mythical golden age.

Really? Can you give me some proof of this, Russell? He can’t because they don’t exist except in his imagination. He uses the word nostalgia four times in the piece to make his point, which only makes it weaker. As he says, “The idea of revival as a return to some real or imagined moment of greatness is not just illusory but dangerous.” I wonder how dangerous it really is when nobody actually believes it! I’ll quote two more sentences that show how committed his is to a personalized pietistic Christianity.

Nostalgia—especially of the sort wielded by demagogues and authoritarians—cannot protect religious faith, because it uses religion as a tool for worldly ends, leaving a spiritual void. The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace.

It doesn’t surprise me that Moore accuses those Christians he disagrees with as being “authoritarians.” Since the New Left arose in the 1960s they’ve used the “authoritarian” card to discredit and try to silence Christians who dare bring their faith into the public square. Unlike the leftists, Christians are supposed to leave their faith at home, and apparently Moore agrees with them. This is especially targeted at Christians who want their Christian faith and worldview reflected in how our nation is governed. That he is using leftwing rhetoric to discredit fellow Christians is reprehensible.

Lastly, he says the answer is “a commitment to personal faith and to the authority of the Bible.” He won’t get any argument from me there, but we mean something completely different by “personal faith.” The distinction of what “personal faith” is gets to the nature of the Christian faith and the heart of the issue. Pietism has been a disaster for the church and its influence in Western culture. This movement of 17th century German Lutheranism in due course influenced Evangelical Christianity in a way that divorced faith from life beyond the Christian’s personal piety. In other words, personal holiness and devotion, prayer, Bible study, church, etc. are such a priority that everything else pales in comparison. As you can see from Moore, even being concerned, or engaged in things like politics or “culture wars” distorts Christianity from what he thinks is its true purpose, personal transformation. The problem with this view is that it is not only not biblical, but an extreme distortion of the gospel. Cultural influence at every level, including politics, is baked into the gospel cake.

Christians in the first centuries of the church declaring “Jesus is Lord” was a loaded political statement. Unlike modern pietistic Christians, the ancient church knew there was no such thing as a “neutral” society. Someone had to be Lord, and it would be either Caesar or Christ. Many of these early Christians gave their lives because they understood the Christian faith was not at all just personal, but had ramifications for all of life. It wouldn’t be until the rise of the Enlightenment in the 17th century that secularism began its attack on Christian Western civilization which by the 20th century introduced the concept of neutrality, or as it is rightly called, the myth of neutrality. That Christians bought into, and still do, this myth has been a disaster for Christian cultural influence in the West over that last sixty plus years. Secularism reigns in our day, and because it does Christians who venture into the public square declaring God’s law and word as applicable to everything are attacked as “authoritarians,” among other epithets. As long as we accept our place at the pluralistic table and keep our faith respectfully private, we can occasionally scrape up some cultural crumbs to keep us happy. Russell Moore obviously agrees with the secularists.    

Jesus clearly said (Matt. 28:16-20) because he was given all authority that we are to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them to obey everything he commanded. This is also the same Jesus who said we are to live on every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matt. 4), and who declared that the entire Old Testament was about him (Luke 24). From the moment God called Abram out of Ur to make for himself a people (Gen. 12), the faith of His people had radical implications for all of life, both personal and societal. How could it not! Human beings live in communities, live as peoples, as nations, and some worldview, some ultimate source will be authoritative. In the West, which includes most of the world today, that source is either God in Christ revealed in His Word, or man. There is no in between, as badly as Russell Moore wants to think there is.

 

Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose, Part 2

Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose, Part 2

Sep 28, 2023 | Culture, Politics & Government

In my last post I vented about the badness of this piece by a young pastor, Justin N. Poythress: “How Evangelicals Lose Will Make All the Difference.” There was too much badness for just one post, so I continue here. His last section is titled, “Better Way,” so let’s see exactly what this way entails. He starts with a doozy:

Jesus tells his followers to take up their crosses, not their crowns (Matt. 16:24–26).

Indeed he does, but what has that to do with crowns, you ask? The young Pastor Poythress creates a false choice. If Jesus calls his followers to suffer in some way, then crowns, or winning, is somehow at odds with the suffering we are called to in Christ. But as I said in the previous post, suffering can take many different forms for the Christian. In fact, we suffer in a myriad of ways every day, psychologically, emotionally, at times physically. This is what I call the pain of sanctification. Sadly there are some Christians called to physical suffering for proclaiming their faith, as is the case in many places around the world today. That doesn’t mean, however, that such suffering is inevitable or the only calling of the Christian. Far from it. Here is the perspective of our Lord and Savior who sits at the right hand of the Father when he gave his followers what we call the Great Commission:

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

Notice what comes before “Therefore.” We only go and make disciples of “all nations” because Jesus has been given “all authority in heaven and on earth.” What’s the point of Jesus saying he’s been given this authority if he’s sending out his disciples to lose? Did he intend when he said this that his disciples, those trained and instructed as his followers, could not win?  And as I often proclaim, Jesus didn’t say to make disciples of all people, of all individuals, but all nations, in the Greek ethnos-ἔθνος. Does the Christian influence coming from “teaching them to obey everything” he commanded them not apply to politics and issues of culture? To issues of the so called “culture war”? This was a war, by the way, we did not start. Do these questions not answer themselves? Is it not obvious? (Read Psalm 2 and Eph. 1:15-23 in case you’re not sure.)

Then following his crosses, not crowns declaration he states:

Though our faith may be increasingly marginalized and devalued in the West, losing cultural battles with grace, dignity, and love can persuasively display Christ’s cruciform beauty. Conversely, there’s nothing persuasive about chasing the perks of power.

What exactly is “cruciform beauty”? The word simply means in the shape of a cross. The problem with this statement is that it’s absurd. I know what he means, the Isaiah 53 sacrifice of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, for our sin and reconciliation to our Creator. That is indeed beautiful. However, there is nothing beautiful about a cross. It was the most ugly, horrific, means of torture and death ever devised by sinful man. The cross is only part of the story. The other parts are Jesus’ life lived in perfect obedience to God making him able to grant us his very own righteousness (Rom. 3), his resurrection, victory over death itself, and most importantly, his ascension to be seated at the right hand of the Lord God Almighty. He earned the right to sit there and reign over all of creation, visible and invisible, to advance his kingdom on earth, to reverse the fall if you will, and build his church, conquering all his enemies until the final one is defeated, death (I Cor. 15:25).

Notice also there is supposedly something dirty about “power,” and the “perks” it conveys. It reminds me of certain legalistic Christians who think sex is “dirty.” Power like sex is a natural part of life, and everything depends on what we do with it. He seems to think if we’re seeking “power” we’re doing something inherently wrong, as he says:

Suffering because you’re harmful or obnoxious isn’t Christian faithfulness. Worse, desperately clutching for the instruments of power or elbowing to get a seat at the table sacrifices Christ’s cause to chaos.

Who exactly are these “harmful or obnoxious” people? Jerks on the Internet? And clearly this power he’s obsessed with is a dirty business and in no way has anything to do with Christ’s cause. I would say this is naïve, but it’s worse than that. He completely lacks wisdom about the nature of reality and sinful man, and life lived in societies full of fallen people.

Aristotle in his Politics said that man is a political animal because we live in communities and seek certain ends of our own good, and this can’t happen without power; the process of deciding what is allowed or not, and the means to enforce it. Simply, politics is the distribution of power, and Christians throughout all of history were intimately involved in it and didn’t think of it as beneath them.

Poythress gets to the heart of what makes his understanding so problematic.

This doesn’t mean Christian political savvy is thrown aside while we lie down and float away with the cultural tide. It does mean American evangelicals have a golden opportunity, even in years when it seems the sun is setting on our influence, to prove our hope is vested beyond the material and visible. We can chart for the next generation a trail of faithfulness that avoids bitter and reclusive cultural withdrawal on the one hand and vengeful scorched-earth behavior on the other.

This is typical of third wayism as if our choices are extreme withdrawal or behavior, or some middle way. To Poythress here is the “Better Way”:

As faithful evangelicals, we advocate for God’s ways and encourage our neighbors to follow them while leaving the results to God.

He assumes fighting for Christianity and truth in the public square means we’re not leaving the results to God. This is the typically condescending perspective of Christians who think they’re above it all. He seems to forget God uses people to accomplish things in this world even though ultimate results are always up to Him.

This mentality is an example of a typical artificial duality in overly spiritualized Christians. Joe Boot explains the problem in his little pamphlet For Mission:

[This] is an implicit and destructive duality that slices up reality into matter and spirit, nature and grace, secular and sacred, naturel and supernatural, time and eternity, higher and lower, with one area perceived as lesser or evil and the other as higher or good. This tendency has resulted in a radical separation of creation and redemption (where redemption is essentially for the higher story of existence), spiritual life and historical-cultural development and mutually reinforcing pattern of subservience to non-Christian culture/nature/secular on the one hand, and the abandonment of Christian culture-building (grace/sacred) on the other.

Boot calls this Churchianity, or those Christians who are “at best disinterested in Christ’s manifest Lordship over any other sphere of life or institution, and at worse are hostile to it.” Francis Schaeffer was warning Christians about this faulty understanding of Christianity back in the 1960s and 70s before the West had become completely secularized. He spoke out against such a dangerous duality that would completely impoverish Christianity’s influence in culture. Too many Christians ignored his warnings  and secularism, along with all its horrors, has won the day. It doesn’t have to be this way.