Introduction
The great Thomas Sowell has written a slew of books, and I in turn have read a passel of them. Part of making America great again is bringing back words like slew and passel. At any rate, Thomas Sowell has written a pile of books, and I have read 11 of them. To be fair, I read two of them twice, but that was an accident and not my fault. Okay, okay, so I have read 9 of them.
I bring all of this up because, in my judgment, his best book was The Vision of the Anointed, with a subtitle that summarizes his thesis nicely—“Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy.”
And this brings us to the small matter of Christianity Today receiving 1.8 million clams from the public treasury. It is a subject fraught with interest for ones such as we, a subject promising to provide us with any number of occasions for chortling—albeit not in an ungodly way (Prov. 24:17).
The Basic Facts
Like so many piglets trying to find a teat, progressive Christians have diligently sought out numerous ways to ransack the taxpayers’ money as a way of pursuing their own cultural agenda. What we thought was an endless supply of leftist money from Soros turned out to be, on closer inspection, an endless supply of money from taxpaying goobers. This technique, of course, would have been very bad if any conservative organizations had ever tried it, but the progressives were above all that, well above the fray. And the thing that was able waft them above the fray was the warm air of self-congratulation, about which more in a minute.
Christianity Today received $1.8M from the feds in the year 2023. We will focus on that one, although we are soon to receive word about a slew of other questionable disbursements—disbursements, gushers, gully washers, whatever—that remind one of a gross misapplication of that nursing fathers verse in Isaiah. Catholic Relief Services got billions between 2013 and 2022, but I want to focus on CT.
This was not an instance of Lenin’s jibe about capitalists selling the rope to the commies, with that rope then being used to hang the capitalists. No, this was communists stealing the rope from the taxpayers, selling the rope back to us at triple the market price, and then hanging us with it.
Some Russell Moore Options
Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief of the magazine in question, the flagship publication for all evangelical magazines on the take. He is also known for hectoring conservative evangelicals for their idolatrous attachment to their right-wing politics. We are now in the privileged position of being able to take these two realities and set them side by side in order that we may look at them both for a bit.
Now there are two possibilities when considering how it might be possible for Russell Moore ever to appear in public again without flushing a deep vermilion. The first is that he is a stone cold opportunist, and always has been. When teaching at Southern, he was a rock-ribbed conservative because that was how the weather was then. When he went over to ERLC, the warm winds of progressivism began to rustle his hair, and he then answered the call. And like George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, he could always say to himself, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.” This is the least charitable of our options, so let us go with the other one.
The other one is that he began to develop the kind of conscience that happens when a certain kind of personality begins to enjoy the self-administered neck rubs of self-congratulation. After a bit, a particular sort of confidence starts to creep in—as in Twain’s observation of a Christian with four aces. This is not a confidence that comes from trusting in the unchangeable Word of God, but is rather a chameleon-like confidence that can change with the whims of man. It is not constant, but the confidence is still possible because self-congratulation is so adaptable. It is a confidence that stands put regardless of outcomes because it is a religious commitment. But bizarrely, it is not an unshakeable confidence in the rock of God’s revelation to us, but rather it is an unshakeable confidence in the dirty, turbulent water of progressive good intentions, taking the promises made by those intentions at face value. The results are never taken at face value.
The spirit of self-congratulation is a magic hooba dust that people sprinkle over the tops of their heads. Once they have done so, they are the anointed. They are the caring. They are the compassionate ones. And when the person who sprinkles this hooba dust on himself is coming from the sentimental and evangelical tradition, the hooba dust works really fast.
And when the said sprinkling has any institutional support, say from the pulpit, or from the press releases of Wheaton College, the delusion is complete. The evangelical Christian enters into enlightenment, like Buddha looking at the pond lilies.
By Definition
The progressive is serenely indifferent to the consequences of his choices, proposals, and policies. This is because the road to Hell is paved with progressive bricks. Good intentions are the name of the game. What he proposes is always in the public interest, by definition, and therefore—please follow me closely here—the consequences must also be in the public interest. No need ever to go check on anything.
Because liberals always think in terms of “solutions,” another thing I learned from Sowell, they never look at the price tag. Because conservatives think in terms of trade-offs, they always look at the price tag. And precisely because they looked at that price tag, they know there is a negative side to whatever it was that anybody proposed. This includes proposals from the left, and it includes their own proposals. There is always a downside, a cost, and this means there is the potential of a significant cost. The conservative budgets for that, and the leftist is always surprised when the bills come due.
Projection and Whattaboutism
This shroud of self-congratulation is what protects these people from ever becoming aware that they are neck deep in precisely the offenses that they publicly worry about the Christian Nationalists getting into.
As I tweeted in the aftermath of these revelations, it seems that we are all Christian nationalists now. There are two camps of CN of course—those who take public money on the sly, and those who don’t.
And so I need to explain how this works. Remember the authority found in that phrase “by definition.” These people were taking money, and public money exists for the public good. Their outlook, their paradigm, their proposals are altogether dedicated to the public good. The ideas of the conservative opposition, by contrast, are partisan ideas, crammed to the gills with special interests, and all driven by selfishness.
Conservatives are the bad guys, by definition, and democracy is a good thing, also by definition. So even though Trump won a resounding victory through democratic processes, he remains a threat to democracy. This is why anything that interferes with the march of their good intentions is a threat to all the good things. They are democracy.
Because they are the spirit of democracy, this means that their opponents are the spirit of fascism.
Once this mindset has settled in, it means that they have an all-purpose card to play. This is what enables them routinely to accuse conservatives of precisely the things that they are doing. If they are rigging elections, they accuse us rigging elections. If they are wielding unaccountable power, they accuse us of wielding unaccountable power. If they are using the justice system to go after political opponents, they accuse us of using the justice system to go after political opponents. Once you and your whims have attained to this democratic apotheosis, the world around you becomes infinitely malleable.
What all this amounts to is the deification of diseased daydreams.
Speaking of Megan Basham . . .
Meg Basham wrote her book, Shepherds for Sale, when it was still possible for the soft evangelical left to try to brazen it out. Yes, she had the receipts, but they were the respected evangelical establishment (all rise!), and she was but a feminine David to their effeminate Goliath.
But she still had a watertight case, and they had not factored in how much damage they had already done to their credibility through all those monkeyshines having to do with George Floyd, BLM, COVID hysteria, shuttering churches, and double-masking for Jesus and your neighbor. A lot of evangelical Christians had been slowly coming to the realization that they did not have the shepherds that they thought they had had. And the reason they didn’t have shepherds anymore is that somebody else had come in and bought them.
And so Megan showed up and demonstrated what had happened, and who the buyers were. Okay, now, everyone who was willing to know the truth could just go read it. But at the time of her publication, it was still possible for the evangelical elites to posture and bluster, and so they did. There was nothing else for them to do, really, and because they still had a ragged end of true believers, and some institutional inertia, they didn’t lose all their credibility. They should have, but somehow didn’t.
And then Elon showed up and blew all the blustering protests about Megan to, to . . . I believe the word I am looking for is smithereens.
Elon had hired some talented young men, gave each of them a couple of flashlights, the four-battery kind, and told them to go down in the basement to shine the light on every cockroach they could find. This they have been doing with the exuberance of youth. And they have done much more than find a few cockroaches. They have found cockroach cities. And the cockroach bureaucrats and thought leaders are trying to get through this apocalypse by putting on a “who, me?” expression.
I have been using the word self-congratulation a lot, but when it comes to Megan, I only want to use half of that word. True congratulations are in order. She was right, and the cool kids were wrong.
Man, was she right.