Oppressive Truth and Liberating Madness

Tags

America, Astrology, Christianity, Cultural Engagement, Culture, Culture War, LGBTQ+, Life, Occult, Paganism, Science, Sexual Revolution, Society, Submission, Transgenderism, Truth

There were, in the Vox.com article I referenced yesterday, a couple of paragraphs not directly connected with what I was discussing, but which invite analysis on their own (de)merits.  The interviewer asked why things like astrology, “traditionally considered more feminine and kind of taboo”, are enjoying more mainstream appeal these days.  And Chani Nicholas (who you may recall has the dubious distinction of being styled “head astrologer at O Magazine”) answered as follows:

I think what’s happening is everything that the patriarchy has tried to kill and withhold from us, we are reclaiming. White supremacist colonial patriarchy says that there’s only two genders and there’s only one science. There’s only one way to have sex and there’s only one way to be in a relationship. It’s stripped us all culturally and personally of the richness and the diversity of life. And I think we’re just sick and tired of it. We know it’s a lie, and the devastation that those systems have caused is showing its ass.

Because who the hell fits into those fake, made-up systems? Nobody. They don’t represent us. Everything that the white supremacist patriarchy has tried to hold back is now coming forward and being like, “I don’t think so. I get to dig up my own space.” And astrology is part of that. All liberation movements are parts of that. From everything like being able to see body hair and stretch marks and acne — these very simple things are just so human.

What an instructive pair of paragraphs.  Here is a (post)modern worldview, in all its defiant incoherence.  Where to begin in pulling apart this tangle?  Here’s an effort to pull a little bit at the threads:

1. Observe first the framing of everything in the buzzwords of popular ideology.  On the one side you have not just “patriarchy”, but “White supremacist colonial patriarchy.”  On the other you have “richness”, “diversity”, and “liberation movements”.  The bad guys and good guys are delineated with appropriately emotional terminology, rendering careful thought rather superfluous.
   1. That being said, one must appreciate her candor in admitting that science supports the gender binary.
   2.  Astrology, of course, is lumped in with the liberation movements.  It’s something that gives us self-realization, and it’s something we’ve been robbed of by the evil “White supremacist colonial patriarchy”.
      1. Did you think that it was science that had disabused us of the ignorant notions of astrology?  You probably thought that because science is, it would appear, a tool of the “White supremacist colonial patriarchy”.
2.  But here is the ideological center of the tangle: truth is evil and oppressive.
   1. For Nicholas has to defend the absurdity of astrology–and a particularly (post)modern western version of astrology, one concerned with self-realization and self-actualization, the kind of astrology that very much belongs in Oprah’s empire.
      1. So she shows how her ideology is a part of the self-actualization program ripping apart western civilization, especially as realized in the sexual revolution.  Astrology and the sexual revolution have in common that they are part of a self-actualization movement, or revolution, or rebellion, that is opposed to science–that is, opposed to truth.  Truth has been oppressing them for quite some time.
   2. But how can you denounce truth?  How can you convince people to get on board with your rebellion against scientific fact?  You have to somehow delegitimize science.
      1. Start with a good ad-hominem.  Switch from your real target to a bogey-man sure to get an emotional reaction from your audience.  The enemy isn’t really science–it’s “White supremacist colonial patriarchy”!
      2. Then comes the assertion of basic relativism.  The WSCP has not only suppressed astrology, it has also suppressed transgenderism and has insisted “there’s only one science”
         1. The only sense I can see in this last and crucial phrase is that scientific findings, in such fields as astronomy (which goes against astrology) and biology (which goes against transgenderism), don’t matter because there can be other sciences which reach other conclusions.  Since the enemy is WSCP, there is, presumably, some feminist or non-western science that is more friendly to some of these ideologies–her notion, not mine.
      3. The rest follows on the gelatinous foundations of this relativism.  There is no right or wrong in sex and relationships.  Richness and diversity is found outside the rigid order of a worldview that thinks there are boys and girls and that they’re meant for each other.  Such a worldview is harmful, and accurately describes no one.  But now we have liberated ourselves from the WSCP, and can embrace the astrology and other self-actualization we’ve been so long denied.

The poison of such ideology should be all too clear.  Liberation from the truth, freedom from reality, is otherwise known as madness.  If chaos is what we see in such a liberated society, we should not be surprised.

But there is another option.  We could ally ourselves with reality, submit ourselves to the truth, and let science inform our worldview.  We could see in the order and rationality revealed by astronomy the grand handiwork of a divine Creator.  And, finding His revelation, we could submit to that as well.  We can submit to appropriate authorities and discover the secret of freedom, or we can pursue liberation to the point of chaos.

True freedom is possible; but in a culture of chaos, freedom and rationality will require the willingness to be strenuously counter-cultural.

 

Two Things…

Tags

America, Censorship, Christianity, Cultural Engagement, Culture, Culture War, LGBTQ+, Media, Secularism, Society, Truth

…worth taking in from Rod Dreher at The American Conservative:

1. His insightful line, “Sexual permissiveness is the prosperity gospel of progressive Christians. Nadia Bolz-Weber and Creflo Dollar are working against the Gospel in equal measure.”
2.  If you’re willing to risk feeling a bit depressed, he shows a bit more specifically how the whole tolerance thing is going.

How Tolerance Works

Tags

Anthropology, Culture, Culture War, Facebook, LGBTQ+, Media, Social Media, Society, Tolerance, Transgenderism, Truth

…or doesn’t, as the case may be.

First you bring in a new ideology, say, one that’s manifestly absurd and overturns the most basic facts about humanity which have been understood by every culture throughout all of human history.  But you say that this new ideology is deeply important to some people–a few people, which makes them a vulnerable minority who must be protected, but an increasingly large number of people, which demonstrates that however contrary this ideology is to science and common sense, it must be true.

You insist that people tolerate this ideology out of love and kindness to those who are different from them, out of charity and humility, and out of regard for a persecuted and misunderstood minority.  Somehow, you convince influential people to begin tolerating, then advocating for the tolerance of, what is obviously untrue and ultimately misanthropic.

Then, with a critical mass of social support, you begin bullying opponents of the new ideology into silence.  When someone speaks out against the nonsense you’re promoting, you arrange that anti-bullying educational efforts will be used to get their teachers, peers, bosses, etc., to call them bigots, discipline them, and possibly fire them.

In a late stage of the effort, between the general social stigmatizing of reasonable opinions and making such opinions actually illegal, private social media platforms begin declaring that speech against the new ideology is totally out of bounds and must be silenced.  There can be no discussion, because to even disagree about this ideology is hatred.

Tolerance at its finest.

Resisting God

Tags

Authority, Bible, Christianity, Church, Discipleship, God, LGBTQ+, Morality, Sexual Revolution, Truth, United Methodists

Respect for God’s authority has fallen on hard times in large sections of the American church.  Combine a culture that idolizes youthful rebellion with a loss of confidence in the Scriptures, and you have the perfect setup for being blown about on the winds of ever-changing social mores.

Consider this report from last year about a class of young people at a Methodist church who declined to pursue confirmation because the UMC voted to keep biblical sexual ethics.  The pursuit of justice–defined by the world, in opposition to justice as defined by God–led them to decline being confirmed into the church.  Conforming to American society won out over confirming themselves in the faith.

But when you read their letter, you see that while declining confirmation is their piece of youthful protest, the basic sentiment was not theirs at all.  It was their church which inculcated in them this confusion.  They have been catechized into immorality–what surprise, then, that they do not want to be confirmed in a church that maintains some vestige of biblical morals?

As for the leaders of that church, who catechized these young people into the sexual revolution, a certain passage about a millstone comes to mind.

But the overall lesson is one that every church and every believer must confront; true discipleship means obedience to God, absolute regard for His authority.  Those who take the way of true discipleship will be hated by the world.  But those who conform to the world’s standards can never truly be part of the church of Jesus Christ.

Slow Surrender

Tags

America, Christianity, Cultural Engagement, Culture, Culture War, Freedom, Homosexuality, Legislation, LGBTQ+, Life, Same-Sex Marriage, Society, Truth

There’s legislation that’s been under discussion for sometime and was recently introduced to the House of Representatives under the acronym FFA.  FFA ostensibly stands for “Fairness for All”, but it might more accurately be given as “Freedom Freely Abdicated” or “Frankly Futile Appeasement”.

It is, in brief, an attempt at compromise between religious liberty and the sexual revolution.  It offers classification of sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories in civil rights legislation, in exchange for exemptions for religious institutions.

Those wishing for a more extensive explanation of what this means and why it’s a bad idea may see here, here, here, here, and here, and hear here.  I will only offer a few summary points:

1. As a rule, compromise with the sexual revolution is a bad idea.  That’s because it’s a revolution, not a gentle and measured reform.  It does not tolerate dissent.  For the sexual revolutionaries, compromise–when accepted at all–is always a stepping stone.  They see it as ‘a good first step’ in their direction, not a binding treaty.
2. This particular compromise is actually surrender of the key point we’re supposedly disputing at the moment.
   1. To some extent, all compromise with the sexual revolution is surrender of the truth; before the sexual revolution got rolling, America had an understanding of human identity and sexuality that was an approximation of the truth in most ways.  We’ve been surrendering to falsehood ever since: pornography, divorce, promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality, and so on, have each in turn been a surrender of the truth.
   2. What FFA offers is to effectively surrender the truth about the distinction and complementarity of the human race.  God created us as man and woman, with a proper orientation of one for another.  Christians maintain that we are not bigots in opposing homosexuality and transgenderism, because these are not legitimate identity categories, they are illegitimate denials of the truth about humanity.  FFA offers to surrender the basis of the Christian argument, and instead merely reserve the right to be bigots.
3. There appears to be no real danger of the FFA passing.  Plenty of conservatives are against it, and the liberals aren’t even interested in this compromise, having much more ambitious plans.  So the real thing to note is not that this legislation is gaining traction, but that far too many conservatives, many of them evangelical Christians, somehow became convinced it was a good compromise.

I know that secularism has been bulldozing its way across American society for the past sixty years, and that the sexual revolution pushes its agenda with tremendous coercive force.  But slow surrender is neither a courageous response nor a promising strategy.

It’s about Jesus

Tags

Advent, Christmas, Homosexuality, Hope, Jesus Christ, LGBTQ+, Liberalism, Nativity, Progressive Christianity, Truth, United Methodists

“You’ve got to call out evil and lift up justice,” said one of the ministers in defense Claremont UMC’s nativity scene that pictures Joseph, Mary, and Jesus as a separated immigrant family.

The hypocrisy of such a statement coming from a church that has traded courageous defense of God’s righteous law for promoting popular immorality is noteworthy.

But more specifically to the point, Christmas is not about social agendas.  Yes, the gospel has social implications of all sorts.  But the implications follow from the gospel.  We dare not make the gospel message subservient to social issues.

The great message of Christmas is that God has reached down to us in our darkness and given us light; He has sent His Son to become man, in order to be the Savior of the world.  Christmas should always be a season of giving and generosity, of caring for the poor and oppressed and the stranger; but it is such a season because on that first Christmas our Savior was born.

Let the nativity be about Jesus.

Approval vs. Forgiveness

Tags

Christianity, Church, Forgiveness, Homosexuality, LGBTQ+, Reconciliation, Repentance, Restoration, Secularism, Sexual Revolution, Sin, Society

I saw an article the other yesterday on a liberal news venue, pushing back against a conservative church’s attempt to influence their community.  Several observations might be made, but one will suffice for the nonce.

One of the reasons this church’s influence is so objectionable to some is the church’s promotion of Christian sexual ethics, particularly their opposition to homosexuality.  Christian sexual ethics are considered intolerant to secular society.  But, interestingly, another objection cited in the article was that the pastor had officiated the marriage of a man who had a different area of sexual immorality in his past, of which he had repented.

That is to say, part of what some people find so offensive about this church is that it does not approve of sexual immorality (of the kind society presently approves), and another part is that the church believes in restoration for people who have engaged in sexual immorality (of the kind society does not [presently] approve).

I think this is an interesting observation, that can be seen in society at large, at least to some degree.  Tolerance is aggressively (intolerantly?) promoted by de-stigmatizing of numerous immoral behaviors.  Acceptance is the order of the day.  But there are still numerous things that are not tolerated, not accepted; and for these things, forgiveness and restoration for the repentant can be in very short supply.

The Christian church calls sin what it is, but preaches that anyone can be forgiven their sins if they will repent and place their faith in Christ.  It should not be surprising that the secular world, which finds the conviction of sin offensive, sometimes finds forgiveness offensive as well.

Rejecting Young Lives

Tags

Academia, Christianity, LGBTQ+, Secularism, Sexual Revolution, Society, Truth

Famously liberal Religion News Service gave an unintentionally apt title to a recent article: “Duke University’s student government rejects Young Life over LGBTQ policies.”  It would have been even more apt had they not capitalized “Young Life.”

The story is an old one by now: supposedly tolerant university decides that, in the wake of the sexual revolution, the standard Christian morality that has been a cornerstone of two millennia of Western civilization is no longer to be tolerated.

Not surprising, since Duke University is a very prominent academic institution, and therefore expected to yield immediately to inane cultural movements.

Interestingly, Duke’s motto is Eruditio et Religio, “Knowledge/Learning and Faith.”

The eruditio is hard to dispute, but I have a question about the religio–namely, what religion would that be?  Not the Methodism of the school’s history.  Some sort of paganism, apparently.

In their privileging of sexual deviancy above Young Life, Duke’s student government has shown they do not understand what will really nourish the minds and souls of young lives.

One more reminder that secularism is a mask for anti-Christian ideologies, and not the neutral force it pretends to be.

Case in Point

Tags

Big Tech, Censorship, Christianity, Culture, Culture War, LGBTQ+, Media, Secularism, Society

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the non-neutrality of secularism.  I don’t think this is a controversial claim, but if anyone needs convincing…

It’s been in the news lately that Amazon, though it carries all sorts of obscenely objectionable material, has decided certain books that oppose aspects of the sexual revolution are simply out of bounds.  An apt example of the thinness of secularism’s commitment to neutrality.

But this is only an early stage in the effort to regulate the marketplace of ideas.  Big tech censorship is a matter of private enterprise.  Parts of Europe are more advanced.  In the UK, you can face charges for telling the truth about a “transgender” person’s identity.  And, most recently, in Finland, the police are investigating a politician who cited the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality.

Ostensibly neutral secularism is just the camouflage worn in the West by anti-Christian ideologies.

Fighting the Last War

Tags

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.