Tyranny is a problem, and as with all other problems it must be properly diagnosed before we start proposing solutions. I take it as a given that we are living under what Paul Rahe calls “soft despotism.” While it is true we don’t have to put up with goose-steppers or missile parades, the nanny state really has grown to grotesque levels. For some, calling it tyranny might seem like a radical overstatement, but we need to remember that liberty can be suffocated as well as shot.
The first step in dealing with tyranny is for the oppressed to realize that the sanctions of God are always just. Whenever a people are visited with tyranny, it is clear that they are not experiencing the blessing of God. What they should want is to have the chastisement lifted, and to come under the blessing which has fled from them. In order to have that happen, they must come to the recognition that their experience with despotism is not the result of some foul-up in the heavenly bureaucracy. It is not a cosmic mix-up. In short, what we are experiencing now is better than we deserve.
Secular attempts at reform are constantly frustrated because the root causes are never addressed. The root cause is that we are governed by thieves because we have thievish hearts ourselves, we are governed by busybodies because we are busybodies ourselves, we are ransacked by worshipers of Mammon because we really like those little icons to Mammon that we click for our own online banking. This is why the first rule for reformers is that repentance comes first.
Pragmatic conservatism never conserves anything. It keeps up appearances through a “respectable amount of growling,” but has no intention of ever turning anything around. It is, in the immortal words of Dabney, merely the “shadow that follows radicalism to perdition.” It has no intention of turning anything around because it has no intention of repenting.
When Gideon undertook the work of reformation, he did not start by marching out against the Midianites. The first thing he was told to do was overthrow the altar to Baal that was at his father’s house, and to chain saw the grove around it(Judg. 6:25). The enemy was closer to home than Washington, D.C. When it comes to the sanctions of God, the enemy is always closer to home than we think.
Repent of what? It would be easy (and to a certain extent, true) to point to things like the abortion carnage, or the rising tide of same-sex marriage. But these are symptoms. By saying they are symptomatic, I do not wish to minimize how grievous they are as sins in their own right, for they are wicked. But we have failed in our responsibilities to God before we created this catastrophic failure in our duties to our neighbor.
Our lame secularism is a gross violation of the first table of the law. We have separated theology and state so that we can enthrone ourselves as god on this side of that Kantian divide. We have failed to recognize the truth of what even Nebuchaddnezzar knew — the living God rules over all the nations of men (Dan. 4:34-35). Instead of bowing down before the triune God, we have opted for the grandeur of our own petty pantheon — populated with dignitaries like Harry Reid, John Roberts, Barack Obama, John Boehner, and, not to leave out America’s wet nurse, Michael Bloomberg.
We have gotten the order reversed. It is not our cultural sins with things like abortion and other sexual perversions which will result in an eventual secularization of the public square. Rather, it was the evacuation of true religion from the public square that resulted in God giving us over to all this. The wrath of God is being visited upon us — homosexual parades in our cities, and killing clinics in every major city, are not simply sins for which there will be a great judgment later. They are a great judgment now for a greater sin we committed back when we thought we were on the top of the world.
Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked.