Introduction
Why are there no climate change protests in China? The answer is pretty easy when you think about it for a moment or two.
They are unnecessary there because China is already communist. Why are there no Black Lives Matters marches in China? Because they are already communist. Why is their society not riven with strife over everybody’s preferred pronouns? Besides the fact that their language probably has a whole different pronoun system? I don’t know, leave me alone. Despite that niggle, they are free from all such strife because they are already communist.
This is because communism is the whole point, their entire entelechy, and always has been.
The Arc of Their Proposed History
The teleology of clown world is always going to lean heavily in the direction of increased state control. This will continue until they reach the apotheosis of a demented system of suicidal control. They will not stop until we have ceded all power to the commies, in other words. They are playing a different game than we are, but they always keep their eye on what they think is the ball. So beneath all this clown world buffoonery of theirs is a deadly serious power grab.
Every idiotic measure causes monumental problems, and these problems cry out for swift and decisive action. And when the problems begin to cry out in this way, the American people then demand that their representatives in Congress “do something.” What should they do? I don’t know, but I think it is something that trained professionals call “solutions.” But have you ever noticed that pretty much every proposed new solution is an attempt to clean up the mess caused by the previous round of solutions? Solutions are a political perpetual motion machine.
The mess gets bigger and bigger, and such big messes obviously require “swift and decisive” action. More solutions, so to speak. It is like that situation in the gospels where the more that woman spent on doctors, the worse her ailments got, and the more money the doctors got. The only difference is that in our situation there is only one doctor now, with his offices, such as they are, open Thursdays and Fridays 10 to noon, and all because he managed to get the city council to run the other doctors out of town, in what was at the time called the Efficient Health Care Solutions and Too Many Confusing Options Ordinance (EHCSaTMCOO). To which the only appropriate response is to say gesundheit.
What About All My Carrying On?
And, truth be told, beneath all of my skylarking over these statist lusts, camouflaged and festooned as they are with their prismatic pride month lunacies, is a deadly serious refusal to have anything to do with the play they are running. Not going to do it. Wouldn’t be prudent. What would I say to Patrick Henry when I got to Heaven? What could my story possibly be?
“And then I said, in my two minutes at the microphone at the national conference of those august and compromised worthies (of the SBC, PCA, LCMS, choose your very own downgrade adventure), and the atmosphere was electric, let me tell you, and so I said to them all, straight to their faces I said, ‘Give me incremental losses at a slightly slower pace or give me death!’”
A hypothetical me in Heaven, but not really. I wouldn’t say that, not in Heaven, even in a thought experiment. Wouldn’t be prudent. And were I to say it, Patrick Henry’s response would be the first time anybody ever slapped anybody else in the resurrection, and so the whole thing is best avoided. Let us move on.
It was a mic drop moment, let me tell you.
It is not that I believe the disintegration of great republics to be funny. It is not that I think a once robust evangelical church sinking into a state of complete dereliction is a laugh riot. No. As MacPhee once put it on a comparable occasion, “These appeals to the passions and emotions are nothing to the purpose. I could cry as well as anyone this moment if I put my mind to it.”
What Then?
The only real questions have to do with what kind of war we are in, and what array of weapons we have that are both lawful and effective. If all I had was rocks, I would throw rocks.
What I do have is a sense of humor, and so that is what I am throwing. And that, as it turns out, is more effective than throwing the wadded up tissues that were found around the base of the altar after the all-night prayer meeting (Mal. 2:13). There is a disobedience that looks like devotion, and there is a faithfulness that looks like impertinence. Scripture teaches us that such appearances are deceiving, and that no one is more juked by them than the pietists.
In the meantime, the mention of MacPhee from That Hideous Strength is apropos. The forces of Belbury appear to be flourishing like a green bay tree, and the shadow of their dark intentions truly is six miles long. The masses who are just going about their regular lives are like the benighted inhabitants of Edgestow, Cure Hardy, and Sterk. The company of St. Anne’s is sitting there faithfully, growing vegetables, wondering what the harvest will be. Merlin is not with them yet, and all they have is a wounded linguist leader, a bear, and some disturbing dreams.
What is the basis for any kind of optimism then? Why the cheerfulness in the face of such darkness? The basic reason is that God remains in His Heaven, and this God remains the God of the Bible. He did not downgrade His attributes in order to cater to our shifting winds of doctrine. When it comes to His sovereign control over the course of this world, He pays not the slightest attention to our jim jams, or to the latest currents in the journals that all the theologians of the furrowed brow all write for.
We serve the God of the eucatastrophe, and so it is our task to look for His coming deliverance. That means looking for and expecting His coming and promised deliverance. Our generation of believers is not going to achieve the dubious honor of being the very first time God let His people down, where God didn’t come through.
So one of our fundamental tasks is that of persuading and calling the evangelical church to repent of her functional atheism. We are dismayed that our cultural elites have no fear of God before their eyes, but the reason we are so dismayed is because there is no true fear of God before our eyes. I mean, look at our worship services. We named the baby Ichabod first. So we are dismayed because of our unbelief, not because of theirs.
And reformation and revival occur when the Spirit of God moves in our hearts, all of us together. And why do I think He will do this? Because He always has.