Introduction:
The prodigal son didn’t run out of money his first week away from home. He was able to afford the best beer, the best women, the best time for all concerned, and to do so for a goodly amount of time. The wisdom of his plan was not falsified by events at the front end of his bender.
If someone, in the grip of a sheer delusion, jumped off one of those bridges where people do their bungee-jumping, and did so without being attached to anything, the sensations he would experience for a few ecstatic moments would be indistinguishable from the sensations of flying. He would feel like he was flying. The wind would blow through his hair like he was flying. The ground might be starting to look ominous, and it appeared that he might be flying mostly downwards. But still he was flying.
Feelings reign supreme around here, and so it feels like flying. But there is a narrative arc for all our creaturely stories, and so there will come that inevitable moment when it feels more like—culling some wisdom from one of those online lists of bad metaphors—hitting the rocks below “like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.” Not at all like flying.
The Predictive Power of Premises:
We need not inquire too closely into the outcome of the delusional behavior. It will end as all such delusions do—either in the nut house or in the morgue. What we actually want to do in the meantime is protect any of our loved ones from getting swept up into the lunacy. We want to protect our children and our friends and neighbors. We want to protect all our fellow church members from buying into the general asininity. Most of all, we need to prevent the Big Names of Evangelicalism from going woke-gonzo. Let me tell you, there is nothing worse than seeing squishy evangelicals with a platform going woke-gonzo.
But we cannot do this simply by predicting our dire Hefty bag outcome. Those in the grip of the delusion have been forearmed against all our warnings. Have they not seen all the sitcoms where the crazy crotchety uncle offered some throwback sentiment about the loveable and obligatory homo-character, and have they not heard for themselves how that poor man was hooted back to his Neanderthal cave by the laugh track? If that’s not refutation, I don’t know what is.
So you are talking to someone up on the bungee-jumping bridge, and you know that they are starting to think about it. He has already dismissed your dire prediction—something about “getting killed”—for, he says, reasoning closely, “In my Superman mode, I can fly.” Perhaps it might be more effective to tackle that premise. His Superman mode is not a thing.
For your friend, teetering on the edge of sanity, is still reasoning validly. His conclusions would follow, granting the premises. But why on earth did we ever grant the premises? A valid argument will always have a true conclusion, provided the premises are true. But whether the premises are true is a question of fact. Not only that, but the diabolical forces in charge of all this know exactly what they are doing, and so they guard those premises with a massive wall of erudite scorn. You will see what I mean in moment when I get to those premises, and sketch them out for you.
The problem is that for at least half a century now, Christians have been granting the false premises of secularism, and then trying to dispute with them over perfectly valid chains of thought. It is not working. How could it work? Granting their premises, what they are doing is perfectly reasonable. And since their conclusion are insane, and they are reasoning validly, that must mean the insanity is embedded in the premises.
Two Sets of Premises:
The Christian view of society is built on this bedrock assumption: God created the world, and we therefore must live under His law and authority. The countervailing assumption coming from the secularists is this: Space, time, and matter are the only ultimate reality, and so any form of matter can be transformed into any other configuration of matter.
When God created the world, He did it by distinguishing this from that. He consistently, all the way through, puts this over here and that over there. God likes setting boundaries. He establishes dividing lines. He did this with heaven over here and earth over there (Gen. 1:1). He did it by placing the evening in this spot and the morning in that spot (Gen. 1:5). He rejoiced when He had the opportunity to place the land in one place and the sea in a completely different place (Gen. 1:9). He made the sun to rule the day, and the moon to rule the night (Gen. 1:16). And at the very crown of this entire glorious process, He created man in His own image, male and female created He them (Gen. 1:27). Men are this way, and women are that way.
So earth cannot decide to go through reassignment surgery in order to become heaven. The land cannot start identifying as wet and soggy in order to become the sea. The sun cannot dim its light and go slumming as the moon. The morning and evening cannot swap clothes and go off pretending to be one another. And so also, a man pretending to be a woman is actually just a pretend-woman. A woman pretending to be a man is actually just a pretend-man.
So in the Christian framework, when God assigns us our spot, that is what theologians like to call “our spot.”
But in the secularist framework, there is no need for God. Billions of years ago there was this pinprick singularity thing, not quite nothing, but almost nothing, but somehow having infinite density. Our best science to date has determined that one day a delinquent Who down in this particular Whoville, a kid named Morris with a bad acne problem and a troubled home life, set off a small explosive device (McClintok/Finch 2013). This was most probably an M-80, but Wiesenheimer disputes it (2015). Anyhow, all orthodox scientists are agreed that this set off a chain reaction, blammo, and space itself ballooned up to its current size. Given this indisputable account of our origins,[1] nothing could be plainer than the fact that absolutely anything goes in this cosmos. Anything can turn into anything else, and nobody can tell them different. And why shouldn’t it be this way? If hyper-dense matter from the singularity can turn into crab nebulae, and a field full of buttercups, and your drunk Uncle Walter, then turning a guy into a girl should be kind of child’s play.
So if lipstick makes you feel pretty, Hank, then it is obviously time for a little bit of lipstick.
And This is Why . . .
If the material cosmos is infinitely malleable, and there is no God above us, then there is absolutely no reason why we may not tinker with our arrangements of atoms and eye shadow, genes and genitalia, boxers and panties. If we are just atoms banging our way down that great concourse of atoms, that great tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, then of course Cole Porter nailed it. Anything goes.
Sex with robots. Sex with multiple partners. Female genital mutilation. Trannies in the restrooms at Target. Anal intercourse. Oral sex hook-up culture in junior high. No fault divorce. Fruitless marriages. Same sex mirage. Abortion carnage. An untouchable gay mafia in the Roman Catholic priesthood. The altar boys are, alas, not untouchable.
Our cultural car is careening down the other side of a very steep mountain, and we can’t do a blessed thing about it because the brakes are out.
Evangelical Stockholm Syndrome:
Our evangelical leaders and movers and shakers and hokey-pokiers have had the secularist gun pressed to their temples for so long that they have developed a kind of affinity with their captors. They have started to kind of see things their way. They have felt the heat and have started to see the light. There is apparently no intention whatever of being guilty of anything like faithful martyrdom.
For an example of the most recent ongoing capitulation consider the evangelical response to potential Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) legislation. The lame response by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) has been to try to work out an attempted truce. It is called Fairness for All, and it proposes to safeguard both religious liberty and LGBTQ+ rights.
I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s definition of an appeaser as one who throws others to the crocodile in a bid to be the last one eaten.
Why is this kind of thing even a possibility? There are two basic reasons, the first practical and the second theological. The practical reason is that conservative donors have not yet caught on to the scam being run on them by ostensibly conservative colleges. The colleges will talk a big resistance game when hitting up the donors, while at the same time, behind closed doors they will be trying to cut a deal with the solons of Sodom. So keep your eyes on the actions of CCCU in the months to come. If they finalize their Fairness for All capitulation, their buckling, their surrender, their complete transformation into Craven & Crawling Colleges and Universities (CCCU), then donors should really move into their best “not one thin dime” mode.
Please take note: The evangelical establishment has been almost completely overrun.
The second reason is theological. Liars are not trustworthy. Any agreed upon truce that our appointed cowards work out for us will be a truce that will be violated at the first opportunity, as soon as it benefits them to violate it. Our putative leaders would have done better to remember Faithful’s response to Adam the First in The Pilgrim’s Progress.
“Then it came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said, and however he flattered, when he got me home to his House, he would sell me for a slave.”
Religious liberty is a religious value. It is valued by Christians for deep theological reasons, and those reasons are not shared by the secularists at all. Any worldview that does not hesitate over dismembering millions of little babies will not hesitate to dismember their manifestly superficial agreement made with evangelicowards.
We cannot negotiate our way out of this. We cannot manage it. We cannot hire consultants to finesse it for us. Massaging the tumor is only going to stimulate blood flow and help it grow. The only way out is repentance and deliverance.
The only way out is repentance and deliverance.
Lest the point be missed, I would like to say that the only way out is repentance and deliverance.
But We Can’t Even:
I said above that in the Christian understanding of the world, we are created by God and are required to do as He says. This is true, but it is not the entire truth. That is the way created reality is, but there is another factor. We not only have the biblical premises that the first two chapters of Genesis give us, we also have to deal with the reality of the Fall that is outlined in the third chapter.
Put simply, the meaning of chapter three is that we all hate the meaning of the first two chapters.
This hatred of God and His ways is a necessary and inveterate habit with us, one that we cannot do anything about. Left to our own devices, therefore, we will necessarily spiral slowly toward our ultimate destination in the outer darkness. Anywhere where we will not have to deal with Him.
This is another way of saying that our natural condition is one of insanity. The end result of our pride and insolence is the same as it was for Nebuchadnezzar during his bovine sabbatical. Our sanity returns on the same basis and with the same understanding as when it returned to Nebuchadnezzar.
“And at the end of the days I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me, and I blessed the most High, and I praised and honoured him that liveth for ever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation” (Dan. 4:34).
But this is not possible for us to do apart from an appeal to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are in desperate need of gospel, and this is the only gospel there is. Christ died for sinners, and we fit that bill. Christ died for moral imbeciles, and we qualify there also. Christ died for proud and insolent rebels, and once again it appears we might be in possession of the only basis for appealing to Him.
So put all this together, and you will see what America needs to do if America is to be saved. First, we have to confess that God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and we must deny Darwinism, root and branch. Second, we must therefore acknowledge that we are answerable to God and His law, which means denying our central lust, which is the lust for autonomy. And third, we have to confess the name of Jesus, and ask Him to take away our heart of stone, replacing it with a heart of flesh. We must do this because He died on the cross for the sins of moral imbeciles, just like us, and because He rose from the dead so that we need not return to that condition ever again.
No hope otherwise.
I Was Told There Would be Free Books:
The free book you are getting today is Fidelity. This is a book written for men about various aspects of sexual temptation, and was composed in the old Dutch uncle style. What this means is that I don’t sugar coat it; I just say it. This caused some problems a few years ago when Rachel Held Evans threw a grand indignation party for a hapless guy who had the misfortune to have quoted from it. Although it must be frankly acknowledged that anybody who quotes me on the Internet is kind of asking for it.
[1] “Indisputable account” means that no orthodox scientists dispute it. And orthodox scientists are those who don’t dispute things they oughtn’t.