Tom’s Big Picture

Since their defeat in the late 1970’s in the SBC, socialists and theological liberals (often one and the same) have been clawing their way back into positions of influence in the evangelical world.  Taking advantage of the soft analytical focus of the postmodern era, they have been careful to avoid outright attacks on the Bible, but carefully twist its message for their political agenda.

Groups like Sojourners and other quasi-evangelical left-wing groups often are able to influence young evangelicals, their church experience usually leaving their heads full of feel-good mush more than doctrine, by taking advantage of young peoples’ idealism and foolish assumptions about their ability to change the world. The liberals promote some “new, vain thing”, stirring up the young with cynicism against tradition and their elders, that inevitably leads to greater power for liberals and the government orifices they control.

The Marxists keep marching, and it is this persistence more than anything that we in the opposition must take to heart.  Only when we are willing to fight as hard and as long and against great odds, in other words when our faith exceeds theirs, will we win the battle.

Of particular concern is the tendency of the “Christian pop culture” towards this kind of thing.  When our youth look to shiftless musicians (Christian ones, but still still shiftless artsy muddle-headed types) as theological guides, problems are bound to arise.  Witness the CCM world’s fawning over the socialist manifesto parading as Christian parable called “The Shack” (for a review click here).

It all goes back to the Social Gospel, a movement that must be terminated by the orthodox Christian mainstream.

Gary North’s latest essay on this subject is a gem.  Choice quotes:

If voters can be made to feel guilty about their economic success, they can be manipulated. This is why the politics of guilt manipulation is at the heart of the welfare state.

In a systematic political program to make people feel guilty, the Social Gospel movement within Protestantism has played an important role for over a century.

The Social Gospel movement, which began in the United States in the 1880’s, shared an ethical principle with the Progressive movement, which began at the same time and in the same social circles. This ethical principle can be summarized as follows: Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.

Defenders of the welfare state may wax eloquent about justice and fairness and the moral high ground. But no matter how lofty the rhetoric may be, as you are listening, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Where is the gun?
2. Who is holding the gun?
3. At whom is the gun pointing?

Today, there is a small, dedicated movement within the evangelical Protestant camp that regards Federal tax increases and Federal welfare increases as crucial to extend the kingdom of God in history. This is a recent development.

Top Ten Male-Bashing Ads

Make that the top ten white male bashing ads. I could theorize about this, but the most obvious explanation is that advertisers sometimes like to be funny, and that means somebody has to be the butt of the joke. However, in our politically correct age, white males are the only people left with a sense of humor who won’t boycott you if one of their group members is portrayed in a less-than-flattering light.

This propaganda is having an effect. More reason to never let your kids watch TV. This may sound extreme, but think of the most degenerate little queer screenwriter in Los Angeles, a complete hostile alien to your way of life. That’s who’s writing the scripts to everything on TV. Get a clue, invest in this thing called a DVD player and deliberately pick what they watch.

For a long time I have struggled with the practical implications of God’s Will. What I mean is that I failed to see how God’s Will, while undeniable, could be any sort of real comfort. It’s a variation of the old “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People” problem.

I remember one of the Oprahfied celebrity rabbis out on the West Coast producing a book of the same title. His conclusion was to simply deny God’s sovereignty, that God was not in control since things contrary to His Will took place. But this is no solution for a Christian. This particular rabbi, ate up with the Pharisees’ cultural legacy of supremacist, self-righteous thinking and feeling entitled to God’s blessing, simply morally rejected a sovereign God who offended his fallen sense of right and wrong. As a Christian, I know we are fallen and deserve death, all of us.

So my issue is not a moral rejection of God (who would I be to do that?), but rather a stoic unwillingness to take any comfort in God’s Will. Taking as a given we are fallen and deserve to die, we can lay no claim to anything better than that. Thus, any comfort from God’s Will is foolish, since any range of outcomes, ranging from death to happiness, would fit.

I remember from a few years ago a nice family in my area, with three or four beautiful kids, active in church, the husband a doctor earning an honest living helping people. One day the husband, about thirty years old, comes home and gets a pounding headache. Eventually, it’s so bad he calls 9-1-1. By the time they get him to the hospital, an aneurysm had rendered him a vegetable and within 48 hours he was dead. His children, the youngest an infant, will grow up without their natural father.

Now, I don’t blame God for this. He can do with us what He wishes. What I objected to is the idea that trusting in the will of God is any sort of real comfort. When people say this, I often think it an excuse for passiveness or inaction, as if doing something could prevent the Will of God from coming to pass. Or else, it’s a coping tool that my analytical mind rejected as practically baseless.

Yes, we can take comfort in the will of God, as long as we can take comfort in the worst possible things happening to us. Now some would say that even bad things, such as one’s children growing up fatherless, will work out for good according to God’s will. This view presupposes two things that aren’t really true, A) that bad things don’t really happen, they just look bad, and B) God will come behind and clean up bad things for Christians so that they aren’t really bad and are really a net gain in the long run.

I reject this view, as I believe bad things really do happen, and though the ordinary means of grace can work in spite of bad outcomes, this does not mean a bad outcome (e.g. one’s children being fatherless) is somehow romantically cast as an ideal or preferred outcome. But I understand why people believe this, and I try to be silent about it as much as I can, for I wish to deprive no one of comfort.

Some may see a contradiction in my views, in how I can acknowledge man’s fallen nature (and man’s deserved sentence of death), and yet then complain that God’s will is of no comfort. Actually, what I said was that God’s will was to me of little or no practical comfort.

So while I acknowledge I deserve nothing from God of my own accord, at the same time I want to avoid bad things happening to me and my family. And since I deserve nothing from God, I could not see how I could expect anything from Him and thus, how His will could be of any practical comfort. In the long run, of course, God will set everything aright. But in the long run, we’re also all dead. And I do have very practical concerns about this life in the meantime.

Yet I cannot deny that this view, that I once held, while logically sound is somewhat inconsistent with Scripture, where God is portrayed, for Christians, as a caring father who intervenes frequently on our behalf. It makes sense more from a Deist sense than a Christian one.

Then I made a critical connection with two other concepts related to belief and assurance.

1. Why Faith is Required to Believe: I have heard it said that there is enough evidence of Christianity to either believe or not believe. Unlike obviously false religions like Mormonism or Islam (that are internally contradictory and thus cannot be true), Christianity is plausible, yet there is no absolute proof. A minister explained this to me in this way: it is a mystery, but for some reason God wants us to have faith for salvation. If proof were absolute, say by sight or the physical, visible presence of Christ, then faith would not be required and God would not get what He requires from us. This is why while everyone will be a believer at the last judgment, this belief will not save anyone, as the window of opportunity to be saved by faith will have closed.

2. The Necessity of Vague Assurance: I often look at things in terms of their impact on human behavior, the unintended consequences of things. One good example is the welfare state. On the surface, helping poor people with money and food looks like a good thing, until you see the unintended consequences (though many conservative blacks, the population most impacted, doubt the unintended part as their people have become the electoral slaves of the Democratic Party): illegitimacy, criminality and a permanent dysfunctional underclass. Similarly, I see as untenable any system of theology that gives people absolute assurance of salvation. The Calvinist position, which amounts to a rigorous version of “once saved, always saved, if truly saved”, is tenable. The Church of Christ and Catholic position, that of losing salvation, while more Biblically problematic, is also tenable. What is not tenable is the position of irresponsible evangelicals who promise people assurance through the saying of a prayer, guaranteeing salvation based on one moment of belief. Such a position actually makes people less likely to be truly saved, by holding out the possibility of salvation independent of personal responsibility and behavior. Salvation is not an end in itself, and by making it so and making it guaranteed evangelicals stymie the real heavy lifting of sanctification.

So how are these related to the problem of taking practical comfort in the will of God?

Simple, as both are examples of complex feedback loops and the mechanics of human behavior. Let’s take my example, that of a young thirtysomething father. What if God indemnified all Christian fathers of young children against death or disability?

1. First of all, such a phenomenon would make the problem of #1 most acute. Little faith would then be required. If Christian fathers could jump off cliffs and be shot in the head and live, then that would be pretty solid physical proof of Christianity.

2. Christian fathers would do some stupid stuff playing around with their invincibility. Why not crash a motorcycle, or drive at 100 mph? This is a silly example, but this IS what would happen.

Just a few thought experiments like this and it becomes obvious that God cannot and will not be used as a vending machine. His intervention will always be undetectable and unpredictable. Else, fallen man would use any “insurance” with impunity. This is a concept economists call “moral hazard“:

Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions. For example, an individual with insurance against automobile theft may be less vigilant about locking his car, because the negative consequences of automobile theft are (partially) borne by the insurance company.

We see this in the current housing crisis in most of the country. The feds gave an implicit guarantee on mortgages, so banks and other lenders got stupid in handing out loans. More loans means more money chasing the same number of houses, which means price inflation in housing. Price inflation invites speculation and creates a bubble. Moral hazard is summarized by the proverb, “No good deed goes unpunished”.

The longer I live, the more I realize how non-linear and unpredictable life is. I am convinced that if God wanted to, there are innumerable opportunities for Him to slip in and out, put His thumb on the scale, without anyone noticing. Our world is extraordinarily sensitive to initial conditions (i.e. it’s chaotic, sorry I couldn’t resist the math geek-out), probably by design!

The problem with this hypothesis is that it’s unprovable. It can only, logically(!), be taken on faith. What a coincidence. God has created a world where He can only be known and believed in by faith. Almost like it was meant to be that way, huh?

So how do I take comfort in God’s will? If you were hoping for something life-changingly inspirational, I’m sorry to disappoint.

All I’ve got is something typically Calvinist.

Our comfort in the will of God is as follows: whatever our situation, things could be, but for God probably would be, and but for God definitely should be worse. A lot worse. Working within the constraints of His holiness, man’s fallen nature and His long term plans, the world we live in is better than it would be otherwise thanks to His undetectable and unpredictable, and thus unexploitable, but frequent interventions.

Paul disappointed but is still in the game. Iowa has a poor track record of predicting the nominee.

That said, Huckabee does look unstoppable from a neutral point of view. The “flyover” part of this country is so tired of being marginalized that they’ll nominate a bad conservative from Arkansas (who at least seems to be mostly decent in his personal life and shares their Christian faith) over bad conservatives from Massachusetts. And it is with a bit of sporting regional pride that I say this, as nobody makes better politicians than the South. When the fake conservatives fight, ain’t nobody gonna out-fake a southern-fried good-old-boy like Huckabee. He was born in that there briar patch!

And I can’t help but smile at Rudy Giuliani’s butt-whooping in the Heartland. Paul has saved us from the cross-dressing criminal at a minimum.

My gut in the first debate told me Huckabee was the best political tactician: I actually cringed a few times when watching Paul in the first debate. Unfortunately for Paul, most of the populace votes with their gut, not based on researching the policy positions of the candidates. If Paul does not succeed, the most interesting question is this analogy- Goldwater:Reagan::Paul: [?] . The Paul Revolution is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon already.

I think Peggy Noonan does a good job at explaining Huckabee, similar to my analysis of his Christmas ad. Mix equal parts cultural alienation from the elites, social gospel-lite and millions of Christians with their heads full of doctrinal mush and Huckabee is what comes out:

Something new begins on the Republican side, too.

Everyone said Mike Huckabee was a big dope to leave Iowa Wednesday to fly to L.A. to be on Jay Leno, but did you see him on that thing? He got off a perfect line on why he’s doing well against Romney: “People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off.” The studio audience loved him. And you know, in Iowa they watch “The Tonight Show” too.

Mr. Huckabee likes to head-fake people into thinking he’s Gomer Pyle, but he’s more like the barefoot boy of the green room. He’s more James Carville than Jim Nabors.

What we have learned about Mr. Huckabee the past few months is that he’s an ace entertainer with a warm, witty and compelling persona. He won with no money and little formal organization, with an evangelical network, with a folksy manner, and with the best guileless pose in modern politics. From the mail I have received the past month after criticizing him in this space, I would say his great power, the thing really pushing his supporters, is that they believe that what ails America and threatens its continued existence is not economic collapse or jihad, it is our culture.

They have been bruised and offended by the rigid, almost militant secularism and multiculturalism of the public schools; they reject those schools’ squalor, in all senses of the word. They believe in God and family and America. They are populist: They don’t admire billionaire CEOs, they admire husbands with two jobs who hold the family together for the sake of the kids; they don’t need to see the triumph of supply-side thinking, they want to see that suffering woman down the street get the help she needs.

They believe that Mr. Huckabee, the minister who speaks their language, shares, down to the bone, their anxieties, concerns and beliefs. They fear that the other Republican candidates are caught up in a million smaller issues–taxing, spending, the global economy, Sunnis and Shia–and missing the central issue: again, our culture. They are populists who vote Republican, and as I have read their letters, I have felt nothing but respect.

But there are two problems. One is that while the presidency, as an office, can actually make real changes in the areas of economic and foreign policy, the federal government has a limited ability to change the culture of America. That is something conservatives used to know. Second, I’m sorry to say it is my sense that Mr. Huckabee is not so much leading a movement as riding a wave. One senses he brilliantly discerned and pursued an underserved part of the voting demographic, and went for it. Clever fellow. To me, the tipoff was “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”

Of course, I think the cultural alienation and populism are valid concerns of an increasingly marginalized majority in the country. And Huck’s social-gospel-lite does appeal to the little old ladies who vote in Republican primaries, soft-hearted folks who can’t comprehend the harmful consequences of unregulated state-funded charity. As a Baptist preacher, he’s got more experience than anybody with that demographic.

I do apologize to my readers that this blog has become a running commentary on the Presidential race, but I think we are witnessing one of the most interesting races in a generation. Among the recent topics was this ad by Mike Huckabee:

As a student of political tactics, I’m going to take some time here to respect Huckabee the politician. I don’t know if there’s been a man with more natural political charisma since Bill Clinton. And in many ways, Huckabee is more likable than Clinton. This is precisely, of course, why Huckabee is so dangerous. Like Clinton, he has floated through life on his natural people skills, believing he can talk his way out of any situation (and often succeeding) such that he never is forced into the political inconvenience of standing on any real principle.

Unlike Clinton, who was intelligent enough to adapt to changing political winds, Huckabee is Dubya dumb, not necessarily of particularly low intelligence (Dubya’s 95th percentile SAT scores exceeded Kerry’s, a little known fact; I seriously doubt, however, Huckabee approaches either, the high academic standards of Ouachita Baptist University notwithstanding [average SAT score of about 1085, at about the 60th percentile]) but given to a particular type of self-righteous stubbornness, based not on principle but on himself. Witness Bush’s description of himself as “The Decider” as other such nonsense.

But let me just focus on this political ad in particular. Many were offended, assuming Huck’s intention was to say that he was the only Christian in the race. Even if he intended it, it is true, though, vis-a-vis Romney (Mormon), Giuliani (open adulterer), Thompson (see previous) and McCain (questionable as an Episcopalian, a group whose gay-marrying Scripture-denying theology is infamous). The only other known Christians in the race are Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter, both Baptists.

I am a Ron Paul supporter, but the reaction of some of the Ron Paul people and even Paul himself (who quoted the liberal culture-critiqueing Sinclair Lewis: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”) reflect a sort of libertarian blindness to and (among some) sympathy for the 20th-century culture destroyers like Lewis and their penchant for declaring healthy family relationships as repressed petri dishes for fascism. It’s the same Freudian pseudoscience perpetrated by the Frankfurt School in their fraudulently-conducted “Authoritarian Personality” studies: families with strong religious values and strong fathers are inherently defective because of sexual repression which inevitably expresses itself as hostility to the “other”, particularly Jews.

The disproportionately Jewish Frankfurt School researchers read into American Christianity evidence of fascist tendencies. Never mind the fact that if not for American Christians willing to die on their behalf, the pagans of Germany would have had their way with them.

The argument works because it is subtly circular. Neurotic psychoanalysts like Freud, who are obsessed with sex, power relationships and defecation, assume everyone else shares their mental illness. Since we aren’t neurotic and crazy like them, it must be because we’re repressed. Thus the naturally neurotic define normal Western psychology as deformed, while simultaneously defining their neurosis as evidence of normality! (Aside: when one considers the prevalence of deviant sexuality in Hollywood movies, at seemingly random moments in no way adding to the plot, we get a window into this mindset: these people literally think about sex and potty humor all day long.)

The American people are tired of being told that their traditional culture and religion are defective. And they’re particularly tired of the repression of Christmas. In this ad, the real message was not “I am the only Christian” but rather “I am not ashamed to publicly identify myself with your culture despite pressure from the media elites”.

Unfortunately, many libertarians, as Tom Fleming put it, “run gagging to the sink” at any suggestion of religious, cultural or ethnic solidarity. Paul should have been out front with an ad like this, and he missed an opportunity.

I have to give it to Huckabee on this one tactically: he hit the bullseye and the other candidates just got schooled in the art of identity politics.

Good article on his record of embracing theological liberalism as president of the SBC.

I have nothing to add:

You would think in our increasingly global society where valuing diversity is our highest value that an epidemic spitting on someone because of their religion would at least merit a mention in the nightly news summary. I mean, that sounds like something out of a Steven Speilberg “comic book Nazi” movie, except the messiness of reality reverses the media-anointed perp/victim mythology (click here for the story):

Christians in Jerusalem want Jews to stop spitting on them
By Amiram Barkat

A few weeks ago, a senior Greek Orthodox clergyman in Israel attended a meeting at a government office in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul quarter. When he returned to his car, an elderly man wearing a skullcap came and knocked on the window. When the clergyman let the window down, the passerby spat in his face.

Funny how Israel gets a free pass to pursue policies in their national interest: a preferred place for their historical religion, a restrictive and selective immigration policy, a functioning border fence to keep out terrorists and a foreign policy in its own self-interest. Funny how the neoconservatives and neoliberals who support Israel’s right to do so deny the same to Americans.

This time it’s Hillary Clinton:

Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York) will join Rick Warren at his California church this month for an AIDS conference.

A year ago this was offensive. Now, with the likes of Pat Robertson endorsing the baby-killer Giuliani, I guess we were too hard on Pastor Rick. Abortion is a minor problem compared with ingratiating yourself with politically correct causes (in Warren’s case) or compromising your principles to hold onto power to advance Israel’s foreign policy objectives so the Rapture can come sooner (in Robertson’s case).

We are seeing the hollowness of both the social gospel and extreme dispensational premillenialism, as both compromise God’s Law for supposedly “higher” causes. It matters little whether that cause is Marxist wealth redistribution or War for Israel. Both are examples of “doing evil so good may come of it”, something explicitly prohibited in Scripture.

The most powerful expression of our heritage is the Christmas season, and it is for this reason it is continually attacked and undermined by our society’s elites, who desire a homogenous generic multi-culti “holiday” soup that profanes Christ’s name while securing additional rents for themselves by stimulating retail avarice.

To counter this, I believe it is of utmost importance to transmit the real heritage of Christmas, the most powerful cultural meme of our Christian and European heritage. I’ve always found it interesting that Christmas carols are all, almost to the song, written in minor keys. There’s a bleak beauty in the music, transporting one instantly to cold winter nights circa 1600 somewhere in Scotland.

Anyway, I found the two following resources to be very helpful. The first is a pdf of many Christmas carol lyrics, which can be easily printed at home for singing with the family:

images.meredith.com/bhg/pdf/ChristmasCarols.pdf

The second is a site with a cornucopia of Christmas carol-related information, including pdf’s of sheet music now in the public domain:

www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/HTML/table_of_contents.htm

Am I alone in starting to listen to Christmas music on November 1, and continuing all the way to Epiphany on January 6th?