That Rancid Reservoir, Filled With Guilt

The besetting sin of the various conservative or traditionalist movements of our generation is that they have repeatedly attempted, over the course of decades, to fight the problem of egalitarianism as though it were a logical mistake instead of what it actually is—a spiritual disease. As one comedienne has put it, the two sides can’t get along because they don’t understand what the other side is needing to “forgive” in order to maintain peace. The left has to forgive the right for being so evil, while the right attempts to forgive the left for being so retarded.

But we are actually in a first-order religious conflict, and most of the conservative world persists in treating it as though it were actually a robust debate over this policy proposal or that one. The conservative world is doing this in order to protect the central idol of the previous generation, which is the idol of secularism. That idol was the one that pretended not to be there, and it is the idol that most conservatives worship right along with the progressives, only twenty years behind the progressives. All of us have tuberculosis, but the progressives are the ones coughing up blood.

So there are two problems, two layers of sin. The first is the sin of the patient, and the second is the sin of the cowardly doctor, who does not want to upset his patient with any description of the disease he actually has. This happens because the doctor does not want to acknowledge the disease that he actually has, just like the patient. He and the patient both have the same sickness, one more advanced. Most conservatism today is just ambulatory progressivism.

The unbelieving leftist wants to live in a world of his own devising but, however much he strains at maintaining his daydreams, he continues to live in the world that God actually created. In the world of his dreams, abortion is not bloody, sex is always available however you want it, a living stipend is dispensed to everyone who is breathing, and nobody is better than anybody else.

But because he is created in the image of God, despite his most ardent wishes, he incurs guilt because of the way he walks contrary to revealed will of God. When a generation or a people decide to walk away from the authority of God, doing so collectively, as we have done, they naturally issue dispensations to people over things that used to be considered sinful, back in the benighted days of their great grandparents. It is deemed liberation to cut women loose from the home, to grant them the same sexual license that they thought the males had, and to liberate everyone from the onerous burden of our old and very limited pronouns.

And so this unregenerate generation is a piece of work. Living in high rebellion in this way has built up a Hoover Dam of rationalizations, special pleading, and redefinitions, behind which dam a massive reservoir of rancid guilt has formed. It is a lake of seething discontent, misery, and self-loathing, of the sort that high-powered prescription pills can scarcely touch anymore. That brackish green lake lets off a miasma of fumes, all of which remind us that we have exchanged the clean mountain air of objective truth for the subjective and loathsome swamp gas that floats off the surface of our feels. Empathy is just a noisome belch pretending to be a cool morning breeze off a mountain lake.

All of this sets the stage for an even greater problem.

Man was created to be righteous, and to walk with God, and his rebellion and resultant guilt have done nothing whatever to reduce his need to be righteous. This is one of the deepest impulses that mankind has, and there is nothing whatever he can do to make it go away. No matter how bent and twisted he becomes, he still has a profound need to think of himself as standing up straight. That is why we installed all those crooked fun house mirrors in the government schools, so that people could learn how to look righteous to themselves. If a twisted person stands in front of a crooked mirror, and the light is dim, and he squints, he can feel the righteousness well up within him. He is so superior to those Arkansas hill apes who voted for Trump. This sensation sometimes fades away at 2 in the morning, as the water in his guilt reservoir laps at his feet. But he doesn’t even have a word for that guilty sensation anymore, and besides, he still has some pills left.

This presents quite the problem. His lust demands free scope for whatever he wants to do, and his conscience demands that whatever he does be interpreted as righteous, and applauded by everybody else as righteousness. And this is how the whole moral order gets inverted. His lust demands the evil thing, and his pride demands that it be called good.

This also explains why traditionalist or conservative secularists have been a central part of the problem. When young people are demanding free dental care, and forgiveness of student loans, and a good paying job, and affordable housing, they are actually looking for a world in which their guilt might be assuaged. Socialism is nothing but a hot mixture of lust, pride and guilt, and conservatives have thought to fight this with a cool and dispassionate supply/demand graph. These people are trapped in a spiritual dungeon of nihilistic despair, and giving them Economics in One Lesson—a fine book, by the way—will do absolutely nothing to touch the actual problem or to change anybody’s mind.

What we are up against is not at root an intellectual problem at all. It is a spiritual problem, a crisis of conscience. The people of our day are languishing in a famine of the Word of God. It is a self-induced famine—a hunger strike, if you will—but in either case they have refused the only food that could possibly nourish them. But having done gone on strike in this way, the hunger and thirst do not go away. That is what happens when you don’t eat or drink.

Remember that they are living in the world God made, and not the world they have imagined for themselves. In their imaginary world, they make their bread out of sawdust, and their goblets are filled with ditch water, with bits of grass floating in there. They tell themselves, and all the approved voices reassure them, that this is entirely normal and healthy. Living the dream, the line goes. Yeah, a fever dream is a dream all right. The result is a tangled mess—famished, pretending to be full, and wicked, pretending to be righteous.

In this situation, a respectable conservative approaches them. He tells them that socialism cannot deliver on its promises, and never has. He has the facts of history at his fingertips. His economic reasoning is apt, and shrewd. His illustrations are vibrant. The case is conclusive and on point. And yet . . . and yet . . . the result is entirely disappointing. He is entirely ignored. It is as though the man offered his horse a ham sandwich.

It is futile to offer such a rebellious generation a set of answers that are (at the moment) entirely beside the point, and which they reject with impatience because it doesn’t even come close what is going on inside them. But mark this well because we have to distinguish two different kinds of negative reactions.

There is a difference between their impatience over the irrelevance of detached conservative nostrums , and their anger over a biblical gospel that is entirely too much on the nose. Both are negative reactions, and they don’t want either one, but the explosive reaction to the latter tells you that it is actually starting to address the root issue. You are answering their false religion with true religion—with hot gospel. This is entirely different from answering their false religion with a pious fifth generation downstream consequence of true religion, that being an intelligent supply/demand graph.

Their gods must be challenged by the living God, not by downstream consequences of our ancestors having worshiped the true God centuries ago. They are living in chaos, and it really is Christ or chaos. Chaos is their christ, and if they would be saved, they need a different one. Chaos cannot actually deliver anyone from chaos, and does not want to.

So the root issue is estrangement from God. Straight up sin. Disobedience. Wickedness. Pride. Spiritual stupor. Insolence. Stupidity and iniquity in equal measure. We pretend that we are having political discussions, when what we are actually having is a spiritual meltdown. How is it that grown-ups, with drivers licenses, bank accounts, and everything, came to believe that boys can be girls, that the anus is a sex organ, and that chopping people up into pieces is health care? Explain that. How is it that we can have evangelical pastors driving around with a faded Biden bumper sticker on their car, in public, and they have never once had to explain themselves to anybody? Explain that. How is it that we came to believe that the end product of millions of years of blind evolution could become an ethical being? Molecules in motion being most moral? Explain that.

It is not possible to address this spiritual crisis unless we respond with a spiritual answer. The lunacy of our generation is a spiritual warp spasm, and we are not going to calm everything down with a couple of Tylenol. The only remedy for what is happening right now is gospel, and nothing but gospel. And that means, when it is delivered according to the scriptural pattern, it has to come to us as law and gospel.

There is first the standard that defines us a sinful and wicked, and then there is the gospel that offers the remedy for that problem—and only for that problem. The gospel doesn’t address any problems other than our stained and impudent estrangement from God. Let us talk about that, and then we can turn out attention to what Scriptures teaches us about other things.

So the law brings in the standard, and for the worldlings of our generation, it is bad enough that I am saying that the law of God explains why we are so loathsome to ourselves. But in Scripture, the law of God also implies the presence of the wrath of God. What does the wrath of God mean? It means that in our sins, we are not only loathsome to ourselves—you know, when the pills are wearing off—but it also means that we are loathsome to God.

The law identifies the sin, along with the fury that—outside of Christ—is going to land on that sin full force. A certain kind of American hears the curses of the law but then dares to bless himself in the imagination of his own heart. “These hellfire boys are lying—I can have my peace and my sin too” (Dt. 29:19). They have found the secret to making the fury of God smoke against them (Dt. 29:20)—having no idea, apparently, of just how hard Jehovah can punch.

The law makes clear why the Lord God despises the evil doer, and how He has the holy strength to “make [his] plagues wonderful” (Dt. 28:59). The gospel proclaims the Christ as the only one who can remove that lunatic botch—but that will have to wait until the end of the month. For a while yet we are going to continue to address the law and the depths of our American depravity, and the stain it has left on us.

Today’s Giveaways

As the month goes on, watch for additional opportunities, which I will be sure to tell you about here.

For the next five days the Canon Press free Kindle giveaway is my invitation to a glorious banquet: Clean Water, Red Wine, Broken Bread. You can get that here. And new for NQN Vol. 9, we are also giving away actual books—all you pay is shipping. Today’s hardback giveaway is my son Nate’s brand new edition of The Dragon’s Tooth. Quantities are limited, and you can only pick one free book, so get in line over at noquarternovember.com. Scroll down to the physical books section, and look at the little counter to see if you got there too late.

For my Mablog Shoppe, the free book today is Letters to a Rootless White Kid, which can be found here. It is available in EPUB and PDF. It will remain free for the rest of the month.