Fighting the Last War

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America, Bible, China, Christianity, Culture, Culture War, Education, Freedom, Hong Kong, LGBTQ+, Liberty, Secularism

As I look back over American history, and the radical cultural upheaval we have seen, I am reminded of the old saying in the discipline of military history, which goes something to the effect that ‘generals are always fighting the last war.’  What it means is that it’s hard to predict how things are going to be in the future, and trying to learn from the past all too easily takes the form of preparing to meet the next challenge as though it were going to be like the last one.  The result is wrong preparation, and a shock when the new challenge turns out to be truly new.

The classic example of this is the Maginot Line.  After the trench warfare of WWI, the French built a massive line of fortifications against German invasion.  It would have been great, if the next war had simply been a replay.  As it was, WWII began with a display of unprecedented mobility, as the Germans invaded through the Low Countries and the Ardennes Forest and swiftly overcame the French.  The mighty Maginot Line was obsolete, because it was built to fight the last war.

What is the relevance of this to America?  It seems to me that our founders did not take adequate steps against the threats of secularism and paganism, because those threats were hardly on the horizon at the time.  The threat from which our founders sought freedom was sectarian Christian persecution, the battles between Catholics and Protestants and the oppression of an official state church.  So they saw the need for a separation of church and state.  Very good.  And, indeed, it may be fair to say that they were not fighting the last war, but the current war; all the same, they did not anticipate the next war, and the protections they laid down may prove to be something of a Maginot Line in the defense of freedom.

For a simple glance over our nation’s history makes it quite clear that they did not see the separation of church and state as incompatible with having–and pursuing–a Christian nation.  They taught the Bible in Christian schools for most of our nation’s history; for example, Bible reading was still mandatory in Pennsylvania schools until a supreme court decision in 1963.  Freedom of religion and the separation of church and state were designed to prevent the rise of a repressive state church, not to make room for militant secularism to suppress religion in the public square.  It was assumed that the nation would be explicitly Christian in its worldview and morals.

It was assumed that the next war would look like the last war.

But what do you do when you realize you’ve been outflanked?  How do you address it, when you find that your protections against oppressive religious sectarianism have proved weak against militant secularism?

I think the first step is for Christians to see clearly through the secularist charade.  There is a pretended neutrality about secularism that many Christians have uncritically accepted for far too long.  Secularism may oppose all religions evenly, but it does not create a space that is worldview-neutral.  On the contrary, it creates a space that is either functionally atheistic or functionally pagan–perhaps an odd and contradictory admixture of both.

Don’t fall for it.  The flag of neutrality is waved hard for long enough to get the Bible out of schools.  Then, suddenly, the flag of neutrality disappears, and the rainbow flag of paganism is being hoisted instead.  And, in their audacity, the secularist still claims this is the flag of neutrality.  But we know it’s not.  We should have realized that the flag of neutrality was always a false color.  But better late than never.

It is clear now that the steps taken at America’s founding were insufficient to properly ground freedom against its enemies.  For, make no mistake, the secular revolution, advancing primarily as a sexual revolution, is an enemy of freedom.  The lawsuits against Christians trying to conduct their business as Christians continue, and will continue; but these are just early rumblings.  The direction to which secularism heads is more appropriately forecast by looking at nations such as China.  There are environments in which freedom may flourish, and others in which it will not.  Christianity and freedom properly go hand-in-hand.

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Chaos, Control, or Christ

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America, Chaos, Christ, Christianity, Citizenship, Control, Freedom, Government, Jesus Christ, Responsibility, Security

“The choice before us is plain: Christ or chaos, conviction or compromise, discipline or disintegration.  I am rather tired of hearing about our rights…The time has come to hear about responsibilities…America’s future depends upon her accepting and demonstrating God’s government.”

–Peter Marshall, U.S. Senate Chaplain, 1947

Marshall was not, I think, the first to make this pointed and poetic differentiation: Christ or chaos.  But he was prescient in his application of it to American society.  With increasing secularization in American society over the last seventy years, the nation has done a lot of rejecting Christ, and has experienced a good amount of chaos in return.

Chaos is, I think, what we are presently experiencing culturally.  It is fairly contained at the moment, and for that we can be thankful.  But we are a divided people, and the moral and psychological consequences of secularization are all too obvious.  Chaos is, at present, where America has gone.

But suggesting that we return to Christ–that we put the Bible and prayer back in schools, that we repent of the hideous wickedness of abortion, etc.–is, to many, a worse alternative to chaos.  Some of them suggest an alternative solution, and that is control.  Whose control?  Well, the government’s, of course.  Give the government ever more intrusive power over the lives of the citizenry, and they will bring about a just and safe society.

We had a choice between Christ and chaos.  We chose chaos.  It’s not going well.  So, rather than choosing Christ, a sizeable portion of the American people would prefer to bring in a third factor–control.  This is the sacrifice of freedom for security.

For there is another triad to bring into the discussion: virtue, freedom, and security.  These three fit well together; or, more properly, virtue allows you to have both freedom and security.  The virtuous man will use his freedom responsibly for the good of others.  But the unvirtuous man will use his freedom to harm others; when a society has thrown out virtue, they must choose between freedom and security–they can’t have both.  Or, to return to the first triad, when a society has rejected Christ, they must choose between chaos (loss of security) or control (loss of freedom).  They must have one.  And it is entirely possible that the attempt will fail and that they will have both chaos and control, neither freedom nor security.

This is the dynamic that a Christian must observe around us.  People feel unsafe, so they ask for more intrusive government control; they also feel their desires inhibited, so they throw off restraint and embrace chaos.  Neither chaos nor control will bring flourishing; but Christ will.  What America needs is not primarily education or legislation, but conversion.

Seeing the Choice

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America, Christianity, Culture War, Humanity, Liberalism, Pluralism, Religious Left, Secularism, Truth

A coalition of liberal Christians has recently put out a statement “Christians Against Christian Nationalism,” supporting a pluralistic society, rather than one distinctly Christian.  ‘Christian Nationalism,’ in their term, “demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian.”  This definition, and other features of the statement, tend to lump together the idea that American society should be Christian at the core with other ideas, as “to be a good American, one must be Christian.”

The statement, of course, raises questions it does not directly answer:

Christianity should not be privileged by the state?  What worldview should the state privilege, then?  For the state will certainly promote a worldview, otherwise it cannot enact and enforce laws.

And again, “Government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over nonreligion.”  No?  And if someone wants to revive the practice of human sacrifice engaged in by so many religions throughout history?  We mustn’t reject those religious views?

“Religious instruction is best left to our houses of worship, other religious institutions and families.”  And whose morals and virtues will you teach in the schools?

We must have some kind of a nation.  Why not a Christian one?

Now, when one looks at the greed and corruption, racism and hate, sprawling abortion industry and militant sexual revolution, it is fairly easy to say that we’re not a very Christian nation.  There are a lot of Christians in the nation–and they do a lot of good!–but the character of society is in many ways not very Christian.

But the really important question is not “what is America?” but “what was America meant to be, what should it have been, and what might it be?”  And there the answer is quite obviously “a Christian nation”–in some sense of the term: not as a nation where everyone was or was required to be a Christian, not in the sense that pastors wrote the laws or in the establishment of a state church, but in the sense of a nation founded largely by Christians and shaped through most of its history by Christian morals and principles (the obvious exceptions and hypocrisies notwithstanding).

For what these pro-secularism liberals seem to miss is that a society must have some governing ideology.  Pluralism is never really advocated for that job, except perhaps by thoroughgoing anarchists, because real ideological pluralism would allow any religious and cultural practices a place, and that is obviously not the intention of such secular coalitions.

A limited pluralism is not a foundation-level ideology; something beneath it sets the limits.  The supposed pluralistic ideology being pushed is actually grounded upon something else, some ideology that decides which values and practices are permissible and which aren’t.  That underlying ideology is probably some form of atheism, pantheism, or (most likely) paganism.

So we have to see the choices clearly for the future of our society.  The illusion is that we have a choice between a Christian nation or a pluralist nation; that is not the case.  We have a choice between a Christian nation and a pagan nation.  Either culture will promote an agenda for society, will teach their values in the schools and media, and will enforce their morals in the justice system.

“Christian nationalism” is simply the alternative to pagan nationalism.

The Foundation of Freedom

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America, Freedom, God, Patriotism, Truth

It doesn’t take much reflection to observe that America today is home to many people for whom the nation’s founding principles must appear odious, even scandalous.  Consider how this early line from the Declaration of Independence must read to many in our culture:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Scandal upon scandal!  One offense unfolds upon another.  First is the assertion that anything should be certain and universal, much less “self-evident”, a defiance of the basic relativism of the postmodern mind.  Second is the generic use of the masculine pronoun, a capital offense in contemporary academia.  Related (Second, Part Second?) is this concept of a ‘man’, which a fair number of our legislators and academics, and the majority of our celebrities, seem no longer very clear on.

But third–and here I wish to dwell a moment–is the real scandal.  The worldview and claim of freedom in this document seems to be explicitly based in theism.  And, though this sentence does not specify, I think the historical background is sufficient to assert that this theism is a monotheism of at least vaguely Christian contours.

Doctrines of God, creation, and providence are foundational to the American experiment in freedom.  Upon such foundations was built a republican (small r) government that most people no longer understand, and which the Democrats (big D) are trying to dismantle because it has proven a nuisance to them lately.  But those who like freedom may usefully contemplate its Christian theistic basis, and the implied danger of our growing trends towards secularism (soft atheism?), atheism, paganism, and religious pluralism.

What sort of society do we want?  One where schools outlaw prayer and promote sexual immorality and an atheistic evolutionary worldview (the last two are surely related)?  One where Antifa thugs beat journalists in the streets?  One with increasing government control and technocratic paternalism?  Or one where a responsibly free people inculcate in their children a Christian character, and live out that Christian character in love of neighbor, caring for the needy, and pursuing virtue?

If what we want is the last one, then we have to see that secularism as currently understood is not how our nation was put together, has ushered in the other isms aforementioned with their destructive tendencies, and will never produce a just and good society.  The American experiment has had massive failures and hypocrisies (e.g. slavery), but it has also had measured successes.  Its best hope for getting back on track is to affirm once again the foundation of responsible freedom: the one true God.

“For the LORD Most High is awesome, the great King over all the earth” (Psalm 47:2, NIV)

Proper Respect

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1 Peter, America, Authority, Christianity, Citizenship, Patriotism, Society

Independence Day is a time to celebrate the many blessings we have as a nation, especially the great amount of freedom we really do enjoy.  In some countries you can be punished for criticizing the government, or for your religious beliefs.  But times of patriotic celebration also invite us to consider the relationship between our citizenship in this world and our citizenship in the kingdom of heaven.

Of course, loyalty to Christ comes first.  The apostle Peter is quite pronounced in his declaration that heavenly citizenship makes believers “foreigners and exiles” in the world (1 Peter 2:11, NIV).  Yet, interestingly–perhaps surprisingly for some revolutionary-minded Christians–this does not mean that Christians are disruptive to the earthly societies in which we still live.  On the contrary, having our citizenship in heaven makes us very good citizens on earth, in every way that would not compromise our fundamental loyalty to Christ.

So the apostle says, “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right” (vv.13-14).  Loyalty to Christ, so far from leading to social revolution, implies that we should be respectful and obedient to earthly authorities.  And we should remind ourselves that the Roman emperors if the first century were not good or godly men; they were pagans, with pagan morals and vices.  When we take this into our own context, it suggests that disrespecting the president and other government officials is not Christian behavior–even when those officials are immoral.

This doesn’t make Christians government stooges.  When the powers go against God, we must respectfully disobey (see Acts 4:19).  But the general rule is that citizenship in the kingdom of heaven means good citizenship in the earthly lands where we presently sojourn as strangers.  This will help our witness (1 Peter 2:15), as we live out our loyalty to God (v.16).

A Curious Notion!

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America, Christianity, Church, Ecclesiology, Megachurch, Multi-site, Pastoring, Shepherding

The recent retirement of the lead pastor of a multi-site church, David Chadwick was featured in a little article at the Christian Post.  At the end, the article notes:

He said prior to his decision to resign he had started having doubts about the multicampus church model where lead pastors mainly connect with the congregation through video.

“Churches all over the country are doing it, with videos shown on the screen in other places,” Chadwick said, “Elevation (Church) is probably the primary example here in Charlotte.  You know, I just began to wonder more and more–how effective is that?

“I know I’m a good communicator…I can have people come and listen.  But doesn’t a pastor need to speak to his people?  So I began to struggle with that too,” he said.

What a curious notion!  A pastor needing to speak to his people?  Like, physically present with them?  How charmingly old-fashioned!

I speak with tongue in cheek, because Pastor Chadwick had “began to struggle” with something that should be patently obvious (though obviously it is not obvious to a large section of the American church)–that pastors are supposed to speak to their people.  Not only does that mean being physically present, but, even more, that means a pastor should actually know the people to whom he is preaching.

A pastor is supposed to shepherd the flock of God.  He preaches the Word not to strangers, but to people with whom he has a relationship.  He should know them by name, and have some knowledge of what’s going on in their lives.  The same pastor who preaches the Word of God to them should be the one they can talk to about their struggles, the one who visits them in the hospital, the one who baptizes them, dedicates their children, marries them, and buries them.  That’s a shepherd; that’s a pastor.

This suggests not only that multi-site churches are highly problematic but that megachurches are problematic too.  You can preach to 10,000 people; but you can’t pastor them.  A church need not be tiny, but it oughtn’t be huge.

I know that such a radical claim is contrary to the accepted wisdom of much of the American church.  But I think the church would be stronger if we had more moderate sized churches instead of megachurches and multi-site churches.  As a side bonus, it might help us avoid this sort of thing.  In any case, it would encourage pastors to be pastors, and churches to be real communities, sojourning together through the storms of this life.

The Massacre of Innocents

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Abortion, America, Humanity, Planned Parenthood, Repentance, Truth

King Herod Gov. Cuomo has recently signed into law legislation that makes it legal in the Empire State to put to death babies in the womb, at any time prior to birth, and for (effectively) any reason.  With much fanfare, the pro-abortion state legislators advanced this assault on the life of the most vulnerable.  The blood of the innocents is on those clapping hands, who have enabled this unspeakable evil.

We are reminded that America today tolerates an evil as great as any in our nation’s history.  Powerful forces promote the killing of babies, most notably Planned Parenthood; as their president, Leana Wen, recently said, “our core mission is providing, protecting and expanding access to abortion and reproductive healthcare.”  The key lie that abets this vicious crime is the idea that abortion is healthcare, rather than the destruction of an innocent and vulnerable human life.  This is what Planned Parenthood has recently tried to reinforce in a billboard campaign, where one of the images features a woman with the quote “I had an abortion, & it was just healthcare.”  It wasn’t.  It was the murder of a baby.  Other messages begin the same way, but end “and I am not ashamed” or “and I am not apologizing.”  But shame is appropriate in this case, and apologizing would not be nearly enough.  Repentance is necessary, before the throne of God.  Only there can healing and forgiveness be found.

Worst of all, this widespread wickedness is given cover by some who claim to serve God.  The priests of Molech liberal clergy also have made news in their support for this evil.  The rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, and other supposedly Christian leaders, should perhaps have sensed something was amiss with their theology when they found themselves teaming up with the minister from the First Unitarian Universal Church.  All pretensions of Christianity aside, nothing is so pagan as child sacrifice.

The child in the womb is a human being, made in the image of God.  Their lives are sacred, and abortion is a hideous evil.

Yet remember also that Christ died to save a world of sinners; that when we turn to Him with repentance and faith, He forgives all our sins.  And God may yet give us the grace of national repentance, and have mercy on us, and turn our nation from this evil.  For this we should pray.