Let Us Be Called Jerubbubbles

Cultural shifts are accomplished, or prevented, by various policing actions. I am not here referring to the cops, although they are sometimes part of it. But I am referring to the rigorous imposition of sanctions. Those sanctions could involve fines, denial of tenure, loss of vocation, restriction of liberty, etc.

Whenever old gods are being jettisoned, and new gods are being imposed, this is done by means of sanctions. And during the transition, although the debate circles around whether you believe in the old or new gods, the actual debate revolves around whether or not you believe in the sanctions. If you believe in the sanctions, and conform to whatever the sanctions require, you can do this without at all believing in the gods represented by them. Your grandchildren will believe in those gods, but they only do so because you believed in the sanctions.

So when someone undertakes to change something about the culture, he either does something and nothing happens in response, or he does something and something happens in response. When Gideon first provoked a reformation in Israel, he did so against marked resistance. His opponents (his neighbors) tried to make something happen, but Gideon’s father faced them down. Under instructions from the Lord, Gideon had torn down the altar to Baal at his own house, toppled the Asherah pole next to it (Judges 6:25-28), and had taken a chainsaw to the grove. What happened then?

“And they said one to another, Who hath done this thing? And when they inquired and asked, they said, Gideon the son of Joash hath done this thing. Then the men of the city said unto Joash, Bring out thy son, that he may die: because he hath cast down the altar of Baal, and because he hath cut down the grove that was by it. And Joash said unto all that stood against him, Will ye plead for Baal? will ye save him? he that will plead for him, let him be put to death whilst it is yet morning: if he be a god, let him plead for himself, because one hath cast down his altar. Therefore on that day he called him Jerubbaal, saying, Let Baal plead against him, because he hath thrown down his altar” (Judges 6:29–32).

Gideon rejected Baal, but more to the point of the story, Joash rejected the sanctions. And Gideon got a new name out of the deal—Jerubbaal, meaning that Baal could take it up with Gideon if Baal were inclined to defend his own honor.

And this is what Christians need to start doing in our day, rejecting the sanctions, laughing at them. This whole tide of political correctness is a tsunami of bubbles—the actual content of this worldview is beyond parody. It is a massive wall of cascading froth. But their sanctions are as real as sanctions ever have been. So we should reject the right and authority of the devotees to police us, and issue a challenge to the gods of egalitarianism directly. We must insist that the bubbles themselves deal with our understandable recalcitrance. Let us henceforth be called Jerubbubbles.

Those who would discipline us in the name of their lunacies are in deadly earnest, and if they succeed in getting us to fear their sanctions, it will be our fault and our responsibility if our grandchildren fear their gods. But the only way for us to prevent our descendants from fearing their gods is for us to laugh at their sanctions.

So we really need to laugh at Title Whine, and anything that rhymes with Title Whine. This is not to laugh at the idea of women competing in athletics, for the bubble gods have already destroyed that by letting tranny men compete with the women. What happened is that Title IX was weaponized, and put into the service of the snowflake army. And so everything about our culture-wide warp spasm of incoherence needs to get one response from us, and one response only, which is that of the sanctified horse laugh. All of it—safe spaces, self-identification as fill-in-the-blank, puppies, PlayDoh therapy, coloring books, pronoun buttons . . . ah, had you not heard of the pronoun buttons?

PGPs are now a thing. What are your preferred gender pronouns? Prepare yourself for some future social mixer, where you are invited to wear a little button that notifies people you meet what pronouns you would prefer to go by. He and she are of course still acceptable (for now), but there is a long chain of new ones that go straight down the rabbit hole. I myself want my pronouns to always be in the accusative—never he, just him. That way I can save up all the pronouns that are not used of me during the day, come home after work, sit on the back deck, pop open a drink, and say them out loud myself. He! He! He!

To some this might seem disrespectful, but I really don’t see how that can be. I don’t self-identify as disrespectful. Catch me if you can. We can do this all day if you like.