The Fighting Moderates, aka the Pink-Pilled

Introduction

I have from time to time noticed a certain measure of exasperation with me. I am not here speaking about the exasperation of the progressives on the left because that can be hard to quantify. They are always exasperated with something or with everything, and so it is always difficult to tell what is going on.

Rather, I speak of a different kind of exasperation. It is the kind of exasperation shown by former students or followers of mine who learned from me the importance of worship and liturgy, but who are then astonished that I have somehow failed to follow them into the Church of Rome.

Or, more to the point that I will be developing today, the kind of exasperation I am speaking of comes from someone I was responsible for red-pilling, to use the jargon of the day, but they then run headlong into other views that I don’t really share—whether those views are on the nefarious Jews, or on the faked moon landings, or on Michelle Obama being a tranny. But of course, we must always qualify everything. It stands to reason that any Jews who really are nefarious are nefarious Jews, and who would deny it?

At any rate, this is the interpretation I place on the meme included here, which floated by in my feed the other day. I am not learned in meme-lore, or in mutant turtles, and I know next to nothing about rodents in bathrobes, and so my interpretive take on this could be all wet. But my interpretation is that I am being acknowledged as the gateway drug into a world where we don’t believe the regnant liars anymore, but it is also being claimed that certain initiates of mine have gone on to uncover more lies than Horatio ever dreamt of in his philosophy, and that I am somehow failing to come along to check out the full dénouement. They thought back in the day that I was red-pilling them, but as it turns out it now it appears to them to be more of a pink pill, maybe akin to the blush of a high end Rosé. And what they are now calling “hard core” looks more like toying with black pills to me.

Extremists or Fighting Moderates?

I generally think of my position as being that of a moderate who refused to move. For various reasons, many of them going back to Rousseau, our entire culture decided to lurch to the hard left over the course of this last generation, and yet some of us didn’t budge on command. Now the hard core guys (HCG) think that moderates of all description, in every age, are the preeminently budgeable ones. They are the gelatinous ones. There really are countless examples of this, and so the HCG do have something to point to. As C.S. Lewis put in one of his pieces, “how should a jelly not conform?”

But actually, no. There is a true category that Kurt Schlichter once called the “militant normals.” Once they get the trannies out of the public library, they have no deep desire to move on to uncover what the Rothschilds have been up to, but rather want to get back to selling insurance.

Think about it. I am categorized an extremist and a hater because I believe that our society should only recognize marriage between one woman and one man. This position, seething with hatred—which, recall, is not a family value—was the publicly articulated position of Obama when he was running for president, and of Hillary when she was. Why were they not stigmatized as haters? Well, the answer to that is quite a simple one—everybody knew they were lying. This is how the left can identify their leaders in virtue . . . the reveal is in all the lies.

But still, the need to lie represents where our whole society was at the time . . . it was necessary for them to lie about something like that in order to get any kind of political traction. Anyway, what everybody thought back then when I was still in my fifties . . . I have the temerity to continue to think. I am getting old and don’t have the flexibility in my joints that their Orwellian yoga requires. I was also taught in such a way as to make me think that truth has nothing to do with changes of the calendar. The pronouns I used for everybody else way back then, like he and she, I still use. Having been taught them as a wee child, I have found them serviceable, and have no desire to abandon them. Moreover, I am willing to fight over it.

Now I grant that there is something of a down side to such willingness to fight—faithful Christian witness in other eras can seem a bit more high-hearted and noble than what we have been given. They confessed Christ, and so faced lions in the arena, and gulags, and inquisitors in mitred hats. We are in hot trouble for refusing to say anything as stupid as ze, hir, hirs. I think God has decided to humble us lest we become proud in our own conceits. The early Christians stood up to Nero, the Huguenots stood up to the king of France, and here we are, standing up to the creepy clowns.

Where All This Actually Comes From

Auron MacIntyre recently laid out the strategy of the left in a very cogent way. Their strategy is to kick the dog until the dog bites, whereupon they will be justified in shooting the dog. Pay attention. Remember this. Act accordingly. This is why I don’t think it is the smartest strategy in the world to have hard right web sites that are dedicated to getting the dogs snarling and in a bad mood before they even go out in the morning.

But if that is the case, if that is my sentiment, somebody is going to ask about my web site here. Somebody is going to ask whether or not I take any responsibility for any of those unfortunates who have somehow overshot into various forms of real extremism. The answer is no, not at all, but something else must be said about it first.

Excursus: the qualifier “real” on the word is extremism is necessary because of a standard tactic of the left. Anybody who holds a position to the right of the left’s current demands is immediately identified as a Nazi extremist and beyond the pale. They went nuts over Trump, true enough, but they also went nuts over Romney, and McCain, and George W. If anybody has devalued the word extremist it would be the commie relativists. They have labored mightily to make that word next to useless, along with the word racist.

Everybody who is “not them” is an extremist. By definition. Everybody who matters says so. Those who do not say so don’t matter. By definition.

But as I am not a relativist, and because I am a Christian minister in possession of a Bible, I believe there is actual moderation, and there are actual extremes. I have a way of identifying extremists that is not tied to a particular Marxist agenda. There really are extremists out there—as biblically defined. There really are ethnic tribalists out there—real racists in the older sense. I do hesitate to use the word racist because I am not talking about racism in the contemporary microaggression sense—my sentiments about all of that is that I micro-care.

The widespread difficulty in identifying real extremism is, put simply, the legacy of the left. Anybody who differs with them is a hater and an extremist, by definition. This is because they want to reserve to themselves the right to shoot any of the dogs.

So here is how the bad guys are likely to want to proceed. The first ones to be hauled off will be the nutcase extremists, the ones who think the federal government manufactures and aims tornadoes. This will be useful for their propaganda purposes because the whackadoos are so easily represented as being a public hazard, and as representative of all dissenters. This will help the DoJ establish the need to “do something” about this “dangerous rise in extremism.” Public safety is the issue. Tornadoes are dangerous. The second wave will be the serious Christians, falsely called extremists—the moderates who resist, the moderates who fight. This will also include a bunch of “moderates” who naively thought there was any need to resist or fight. They will be the ones with a surprised look on their faces. And then the third wave will be the HCGs, peeved that they were not picked first. Why on earth would they go after Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council before Commodore T. Boone Elroy and his motorcycle convoy of Salty Dog Patriots ?

As I survey the political landscape, Scriptures in hand, I note that it is quite a jumble. There are pro-life abolitionists who are sane and responsible Christians, and there are abolitionists with a screw loose. There are Christian nationalists who are sane and responsible Christians, and there are Christian nationalists with three screws loose. There are moderates who fight, and moderates who are actually on the other side, and moderates who have an eschatology that requires them to lose slowly. The coalition that will form will be crazy, and the whole thing promises to be pretty festive.

And so, in what follows, I am going to explain why, in a field as variegated as this, the phrase Christian nationalism is entirely serviceable. You don’t have to be a mutant turtle. You do have to be willing for the hard core guys to pat you on the head, acknowledging that you mean well.

Christian Nation or Demonic Nation

So if there are Christian nationalists with three screws loose, as I admitted just a moment ago, then why am I willing to advocate for Christian nationalism? This is a reasonable question, and it has a reasonable answer. Here it comes.

I argue for Christian nationalism because it is the only current alternative to what we see unfolding before our eyes right now, which is a demonic nationalism. We are a nation, and that nation is not going away in the immediate future. For the time being, the existence of the nation as a nation is a given. The secular pretense and charade of neutrality has gone entirely bye bye. We are going to be some kind of nation, and we are going to follow some kind of god. There is going to be some kind of nationalism, and like all nations it will be centered on one kind of authority. Our only current choice is what kind it is going to be. So is it going to be Christian, or is it going to be demonic? It really is Christ or chaos.

Do you still doubt what I say?

I live in Idaho, and really good things are happening here—many of them thanks to the Idaho Family Policy Center. We have begun to restrict abortion significantly. We have banned hormone blockers and trans-surgeries for kids. We really are a red state—but the rot is still far advanced, even in red states like ours. This last legislative session, a bill to restrict the access of minors to pornography in public and school libraries failed. It failed in the legislature by one vote, but it still failed. This means that a convenience store clerk who sells porn to a 12-year-old boy could go to jail for it, but a sixth-grade teacher, with diddling someone on his mind, could take a kid down to the school library and set him up with some porn there. The diddling isn’t legal here in Idaho (yet), but the grooming sure is.

And this really is the answer to those who find the phrase Christian nationalism distasteful. For the fastidious, who think that Christian nationalism conjures up images of fascists goose stepping their way out of the fever swamps, I grant that you may have seen some movies where such things seem plausible. And in addition, you may also have seen comment threads where HCGs are doing their very best to keep normal people from wanting to join any kind of resistance. “I want to fight against clown world, but do I really have to put triple parentheses around the names of (((people))) I suspect of having some kind of taint in their bloodline?” No, you don’t have to.

And this is why here in Moscow we want to provide regular Christians with a place to stand and fight, and to do so without abandoning the Lord’s requirements that we love all men, including our enemies, and to do so without giving way to irrational hatreds. If you stand with us, you will be accused of misogyny and racism and such, but you will have the true comfort of knowing that it is a slander. One of the ways to tell that it is a slander is this—tuck this away for future reference. Imagine that some incel pops up in one of my comment threads, spewing real hatred toward Jews, women, commies, and blacks. Say that some co-opted regime Christian, with a neck full of righteousness, demands that I denounce these comments. I could at that point ask him, somewhat sweetly, “Why do you want me to denounce what you were accusing me of teaching last year? Are you acknowledging that you were lying back then? You knew all along that I was not good with this stuff?” Not to spoil the thought experiment, but he won’t answer me. He won’t even look me in the eye.

To Call on the Lord

The enemy at the gates is demonic nationalism. That is what we have to head off and prevent. So what are you going to head it off with? The position papers of Adlai Stevenson? Bromides from the League of Women Voters? Scoldings from David French?

David French is like the nice guy in high school who would play checkers against anybody in the cafeteria at lunch time. He was really good at it, and would take on all comers. His renown spread throughout the school. But one day a cafeteria food fight broke out, in which David French was swept up. But he insisted that every action he took in that fight, and that anybody else took who wanted to be on his side, needed to be consistent with the rules of checkers. To act otherwise would be to betray the principles of true conservatism.

Our nation is descending into madness. Some of us want to stop it. They are conducting irreversible surgeries on kids for the sake of their sex cult, and most legislatures haven’t take action yet. Stopping them was a tough fight in Idaho, for pity’s sake. How many tough fights over such issues will it take before Christians acknowledge that our society, culture, people, and nation are up against something that is both formidable and evil? This is what a diabolical full court press looks like.

We are in a really bad way, and a number of people have decided that we need to call on the Lord. But if we call on the Lord, we need to use His name—He is the Lord Jesus Christ. Now follow me closely here. If you want to call on the Lord Jesus, asking Him to deliver our nation from abortion, pornography, the trans-madness, the mutilation of kids, and so on, and you want to do this without being successfully labeled a Christian nationalist by the left, then I wish you the best of luck, and I step aside respectfully, chuckling to myself.

If you call on the Lord, and you ask Him to come down and deal with our various immoralities that are currently masquerading as political issues . . . well, what would you call that? And more importantly, if you are not calling on the Lord for deliverance in a moment like this, what would you call that? I would call it craven compromise.

Now obviously I have no preference for right-wing demons over left-wing demons. I think it was Tolstoy who said the difference between revolutionary violence and reactionary violence was the difference between dog shit and cat shit. The demons hate everybody. So the black-pilled need Christ as well, but if He doesn’t intervene and save them, and if they get anywhere near the centers of power, and they decide to call their forms of evil Christian nationalism, then I will at that point happily call what we are doing something else.

But until then, I believe that the militant normals, while not as active in trolling people on Twitter, are in a good position to argue for a return to Christ as the only avenue to a return to sanity in governance. So if you want deliverance for this nation, and if you want God’s people to call on the name of the Lord to grant us this gracious deliverance, and He in His grace starts to grant it, somebody is going to name what is going on.

What shall that name be? Do you have any suggestions? But until somebody suggests something different that is really sticky, and catches on, its current name is Christian nationalism.

And one of the ways to put all this in perspective, to keep it from seeming parochial and xenophobic, is to zoom out and see it all as part of the mere Christendom project. And speaking of that, I have a book coming out.