Fever in the Bunkhouse Now

Introduction

I will begin by noting that today’s installment is going to be more autobiographical than normal, and will consequently be a bit more personal. There is a reason for this, as I hope will become obvious by the conclusion. It is not that I was looking for a chance to write about myself more, but rather because I believe I need to sketch a map of the general chaos for those who follow our ministries here in Moscow, and to put an x on it that says “you are here.”

There is currently a great deal of churn in the conservative movement, and my purpose here is to describe what is going on, and more importantly, why it is going on. Old alliances have fractured and flown apart, and a lot of people—true believers, trolls, grifters, ideologues, influencers, bots, and normies—are scrambling, trying to find their footing.

We are smack in the middle of a Fourth Turning, and the turmoil of it all has affected the entire West. Over the last five years, virtually every major institution has disgraced itself. What used to be a high-trust society has been blown to smithereens, and nobody knows what to think anymore. And even when an individual person’s convictions haven’t changed, despite the societal turmoil, it is very difficult to know who to think those convictions with. This implosion of all the trusted institutions and relationships has of course included those of us on the political right.

But because human beings are created in such a way that trust is no more optional than oxygen is, this lack of trust only seems like a universal lack of trust. People don’t believe CNN anymore, or the CDC, or the Pentagon, or the Israeli government, or The New York Times . . . but they do believe Candace for some reason. I honestly don’t get it. You can turn the sound all the way off, and still tell that she is running a con.

Yet, there it is.

Where My Head Is At

I am an evangelical, the son of evangelicals. I grew up in a conservative Christian home, with godly parents. It was there that I learned the importance of absolute submission to the Scriptures as the Word of God. I was very conservative theologically, but by default I was baptistic and Arminian.

I was also instinctively conservative politically, but unlike my biblical convictions, there was no real shape to it. I then came across a Bill Buckley book when I was in high school (Up From Liberalism), and he made an immediate conquest of me. He was articulate, conservative, and he was clearly having fun. So I subscribed to National Review while still in high school, and kept up my subscription for many decades . . . until after they stopped having fun.

The NR world, which back then blended into the Reagan world, was committed to the fusionist approach of Frank Meyer. That coalition included free market libertarians, social traditionalists, and anti-communists. Now I happened to be all three of those (still am), and so I fit right in. The problem was that I was still schizophrenic—my political conservatism was running on one track in my brain and my theological conservatism was running along another track in my brain.

I began writing a political/cultural column for our local newspaper in the early eighties, and we founded Logos School right around the same time. And as a result of reading Francis Schaeffer, and Kuyper, not to mention the reconstructionists, those two tracks started to come together in my mind, merging into a coherent worldview. A few paradigm shifts were involved in this, obviously. Over the course of the eighties (mostly) I became postmill, Calvinistic, presbyterian, and paedobaptist (this last one slopped over into the nineties). All the elements of my solidifying political mindset folded into my new Westminsterian framework quite nicely, like there was a higher power at work.

On the political side, my instinctive Burkean conservatism was taking shape at the same time into a paleo-Confederate, anti-revolutionary, classical liberalism. Some might say those three things don’t quite go together, like Dijon mustard and soy sauce on Oreos, but I am here to tell you that it is really quite . . . zesty.

That’s how the concrete set. So for the last forty years, more or less, I have been teaching, writing, preaching, planting churches, founding schools, and then writing some more, and all from this same general worldview perspective. To repurpose a phrase from Nietzsche, it has been a long obedience in the same direction. It is not as though I am stuck here, but I readily confess that this is where I am planted—like a huge willow tree by that bend in the river, the roots go all the way down.

For much of that time, these views were too radical for the evangelical normies, and so we were considered outliers, and were treated that way. But over the last five years, many of these normies have realized that we were on to something, and that when Clown World moved into the chase scene of Act 3, we were prepared for it all, and they weren’t.

As a result, we got a lot of strange new respect, about which more in the next section. At the same time, the right wing has also seen the proliferation of podcast ministries, with cultural/community roots that don’t go nearly as deep, and consequently some of them have overshot into excesses, extremes, and embarrassments.

And when we don’t go chasing Jew squirrels with them, they allege that we have somehow changed or altered

Splashing About Now in the Public Eye

Now here is where it gets a little bit awkward, at least for me. Over the last few years, a lot of cameras and microphones have been pointed in our direction. As a result of all the publicity, all kinds of words come into different minds now, and they vary according to the disposition of those minds—those words being things like notoriety, or infamy, or celebrity, or well-known, or influential, or empire, or theocrat. But the end result is that I get recognized in airports now, and it is an odd trip when I don’t get recognized.

This is because of stories in Meet the Press, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Politico, and so on. “I keep gettin’ richer, but I can’t get my pitcher on the cover of the Rolling Stone.” Excuse the literary allusion. And of course, we can’t leave out the unrelenting impact of the Canon+ platform that we built out.

So one time I was talking with a reporter from the NYT (not the Ross Douthat interview), and this was before I had come to Washington to preach at our church plant there. At the time she was talking to me, I had met Pete Hegseth exactly one time at his church in Tennessee, and I had met Russ Vought at a panel discussion in DC one time. The reporter was wanting to know whether I was going to be networking with a bunch of influential people when I came to Washington. “No, no, I am not,” came the reply. “But what influential people are you going to be talking to?” was the gist of her next question. “Well,” I said, “you guys mostly.”

Then there was the cover of Der Speigel. Trump was in the center, Hegseth was yelling at somebody off to the left, JD Vance was in the lower middle with a mean face, Pam Bondi was there all serious-like, and there . . . there in the lower right hand corner was yours truly. My best theory is that the guy who did the cover design had never been to the States, didn’t know how big the country was, and consequently didn’t know exactly where Idaho is located. I just hope that the other people on the cover had as much joy in trying to figure out who “that guy” was as I had in being that guy. The whole thing was a hoot. Excuse me . . . der hooten.

A Few Observations from Curtis Yarvin

Curtis Yarvin and I are not exactly on the same page, but he is a provocative someone to learn from nonetheless, and I recently picked up on a few things in his book Gray Mirror. Whenever there has been a real regime change, something curious happens to the general consensus. As I am convinced we are in the final stages of a “regime change,” with the old regime represented by phrases like “the post war consensus,” I thought these comments pertinent.

As he put it:

And also this:

Translated, and e.g., once Fauci no longer had the power to make you wear a mask all the time, the rationale for wearing a mask all the time just evaporated.

When the serene liberal consensus was decoupled from power, as is now happening as we speak, that old Walter Cronkite voice of authority is just plain gone. All the things that were “self-evident” to those who lived under its sway are no longer self-evident. That being the case, the next set of “self-evident truths,” the set that will govern during the coming First Turning, is up for grabs. You know, as in, jump ball.

During such times of transition, there is a good deal of maneuvering on the part of those who want to climb the greasy pole of ambition. To change the metaphor, a lot of folks are posting up under the basket, and some of them are throwing elbows. To change the metaphor again, when the liberal consensus disintegrated, the crack cocaine of ambition became readily available, and there’s a fever in the bunkhouse now. Okay, four’s enough.

Notice that phrase, “the ideas and institutions of the next regime.” That, and “must exist long before.”

Now I want you to take careful notice of the modesty of my claim. It is not as though we think we have built an alternative civilization or anything. It is not as though we have planted a utopian commune, swathed in promises we could not possibly fulfill. What we have enjoyed here in Moscow, under the grace of God, is a working prototype of a normal Christian community. There is nothing about the 21st century that makes this an impossibility. Furthermore, it is one that has strong antibodies against the rampant intellectual sins of the age—whether of the woke left or the Nietzschean right. We have schools, restaurants, publishing houses, a college, multiple churches, musicians and concerts, and hordes of happy, thriving children. Nancy and I went to the Logos Christmas program last night, which had to be held in an arena at the University of Idaho. Like I said, hordes of children, singing about the miracle at Bethlehem. That’s how you do it. All those singing kids are an eschatological statement.

The answer to the madness of our day is not a black-pill. It is a little girl in a pretty dress in the front row of a school choir, together with her classmates singing a Christmas carol.

A few years ago, I was visiting with a gent who had come here for a relative’s wedding, and we were chatting at the wedding reception. He looked around at what was happening, and his comment was, “I didn’t know that this America still existed.” Well, it does. And we need to fight for it.

So the way through is not to join up with an army of groyper bots from India. As it turns out, the massive appeal of the likes of Nick Fuentes may well have been an item manufactured to order—and also note this. It is this sort of thing that has made Elon Musk say recently that Fuentes is a Fed. I wouldn’t go so far as that, but I am willing to say that if he were to turn out to be a Fed, absolutely nothing would be different. Either way, that is not the way.

So what am I saying? When being normal is weird, be normal. When being normal is normal, remember why you should be normal, and be prepared to defend it, which cannot be done apart from Christ. And when being normal is weird, don’t be extra weird. Be extra normal. Normal you say? By what standard? To the law and to the testimony. Exactly so.

In Season, Out of Season

Paul tells Timothy to preach the Word when people want to hear it, and when they don’t want to hear it. Preach the same message, rain or shine. Preach it in winter, and preach it in the springtime. Preach it in the halcyon days and preach it in the dystopian apocalypse. Preach the Word, and apply that Word to absolutely everything.

This is no weather vane faith.