Not Cool at All

I just recently finished reading Not Cool by Greg Gutfeld. It is a book filled with astounding insights and unnecessary crassness, and all from someone who describes himself as a “troubled agnostic.”

Gutfeld sees, as few other people do, that our politics is a matter of preening, and that the whole country is a maladministered high school, one in which the cool bullies have seized all practical control. The subtitle “The Hipster Elite and Their War on You” says it all, and it is not really overstated. I wish more of our preachers could see the problem that afflicts us as Gutfeld sees it, while continuing to see what Gutfeld does not yet see. The only way out of this morass is the gospel of grace.

I thought of having this be my book-of-the-month next go round, but then I would have dump in so many disclaimers as to make the whole thing a grand exercise in pushing and pulling. So I thought I would write on just one aspect of Gutfeld’s book. He describes himself as libertarian, but I think he is more of a contrarian than anything. He leans against conservative groupthink when he is around them, and against libertarian groupthink when around them. For example, his chapter on the military was much more positive than a thoroughbred libertarian would write.

The aspect of Gutfeld’s jeremiad that I wanted to address was his chapter on homosexual marriage. He is a libertarian, so he is for it. But the chapter largely revolved around his complaints against straights who come out for same sex mirage as a way of increasing their cool quotient. He also remonstrates with all the activists who want to tag opponents of same sex mirage with “hate thoughts” — Gutfeld seeks to be reasonable there as well. Give everybody a minute, he argues. This has been a huge shift, one that has occurred in the course of just one generation, and so why are you hectoring everybody who wants to think about it for a moment? So this was a defense of opponents of same sex mirage by a proponent of it.

And while I appreciate the respect, allow me to push back a tad. Opposition to same sex mirage is a matter of principle, and not a matter of being given the courtesy of a little extra time to get with the program. We are not going to get with the program because we still know how to read, and we still have our Bibles.

Gutfeld argues in favor of same sex mirage because he thinks that men — both homo and hetero — are pigs, and that marriage helps society address this. Men need to be civilized, domesticated, calmed down. And so they do, and it is women who can do this. Just using the noun “marriage” doesn’t do it at all. Other men cannot do it. It doesn’t have the same effect. Men need a woman’s touch, not a definitional touch from a lexicon put out by all the queens of gender theory. A man who takes responsibility for a woman is learning the responsibility he must learn in order to cease being a destructive presence in society. A man who enters into the mirage state with another man is not addressing the problem — he is just doubling down on it.

And this brings us down to the real point, which is Gutfeld’s troubled agnosticism. He has all these insights, floating in the air around his head, like so many children’s party balloons with half the helium gone, and no way to gather them up. He sees what he sees, and can’t help but see it. The balloons are pretty big, and they are right there by his head. But other troubled agnostics, of the totalitarian stripe, will have no problem batting them away.

True Christianity does two things. It reveals the light, and it reveals the darkness. We have the testimony in ourselves that God is true (John 3:32; 1 John 5:10), and this is a testimony to the light. But there is a flip side to it, and that is the revelation of condemnation.

“He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved” (John 3:18–20).

Whatever happens in this next electoral go-round, Christians must agree together that they are not going to blur the distinctions between righteousness and unrighteousness, between light and darkness. We are not up against petty infractions. We are up against big sin, and there is always big mammon in big sin. Steve Deace has pointed out that there are about 4,000 abortions a day, and the price averages about $500 a hit. That is two million dollars a day, and somebody is pocketing that.

We might wonder how we can stand against such evil. I would suggest, as a mild beginning, that we avoid all alliances with it. Perhaps if we want to overthrow something, we shouldn’t call a truce on such issues.