She Don’t Lie, She Don’t Lie, She Don’t Lie . . . Ukraine

Introduction

What I would like to do here, Lord willing and the crik don’t rise, is cover a few related or soon-to-be-related items. With the Russian aggression against Ukraine, this outbreak of war in Europe means that a lot of American Christians need to review what they believe about conscription and military service. There is no telling what we might get dragged into, and as Christians we should be resolved not to let this happen to us without an understanding of certain relevant and related biblical teachings.

So let us talk about Ukraine, conscription, women in combat, how politicians like to wag the dog, and the willingness of our regnant evildoers to use absolutely any vile tactic in pursuit of their great global reset. Events are whizzing by us now at high rates of speed, and you don’t want to wait until your daughter gets a letter from the Selective Service to start trying to figure out what you think about it.

So, if you would, please forgive the patchwork quality of this post. It will kind of be all over the place.

Ukraine in a Nutshell

The victims in this mess are the people of Ukraine. We should be praying for them, as well as praying for those Russians who (courageously) filled their streets to protest this misbegotten invasion. In addition, as God gives opportunity, we should be supporting Ukrainian refugees financially as God gives opportunity—as we here at Christ Church intend to do. Dozens of saints from our CREC churches in Ukraine are already refugees, and both they and our friends in Poland and Hungary who are taking them in will need our help. Please pray for them and for their men who have taken up arms to defend their country. A great vehicle for getting help to some places where it is most needed that can be found here. This is a work that is overseen by friends of mine, and is a work of real integrity. What you give will get to the people who are hurting.

But the victimization of these poor souls did not begin with the Russians—the Ukrainian government has historically been rife with corruption, as has been the Russian government, as has been the American government. How dare Putin attack Hunter Biden’s cash stash? How dare Putin threaten the beating heart of certain Biden money laundering operations? Below is a clip of Joe Biden bragging about how he used the leverage of American loan guarantees to get the Ukrainians to sack a prosecutor who had been going after some of the dirty deals that involved the Biden family.

Whatever you want your courageous young son to go off and fight for, it wouldn’t be for that.

And when the Soviet Union disintegrated, we Americans talked Ukraine into giving up her nukes, telling her that in exchange for their chumpy (and quite endearing) trust in America, we would have their back. We would have their back forever and a day. But of course, all such promises are written with the finger of duplicity in the waters of diplomacy, which have long since evaporated. And America was talking big about the deterrence value of our mighty, mighty sanctions right up to the eve of the invasion.

And then, after the disintegration of the USSR, we arranged for NATO to move steadily and unnecessarily east, which was a dumb move. On this point, I have more than a little sympathy with Peter Hitchens. But if I might push from the other direction just a tad, even if NATO countries made the mistake of treating Russia as though it was still the Soviet Union, which it wasn’t, that is hardly grounds for the Russians to invade a country that isn’t a member of NATO, but which might be some day.

And also remember that Russia possesses the remaining clout that she does in Europe through oil production, and if we had been sincerely concerned about that, we could have prevented a bunch of this by deregulating oil production here in the States. That way sanctions against Russia could have worked because Europe would have had alternative sources of oil. But no. It turns out that the left’s chant of “no blood for oil” actually means, in their lexicon, “shed some blood over there for the sake of not drilling for oil here.” But nobody’s paying them to be consistent.

So here we are now. That being the case, we should do what we can to enable Ukrainians to defend themselves (shipping arms, ammo, supplies, etc.), and we should do this surreptitiously while formally denying that we are doing anything of the kind. We should do this by defining humanitarian relief very broadly. But under no circumstances should we be sending American troops anywhere close to the action.

And all the while, we should be praying that Putin the Dastard will have seriously over-estimated his ability to get what he wanted quickly, and that his regime back home gets the staggers as a result of this black frolic. Pray that the Ukrainians defend their country stoutly, as they have certainly been doing so far, and that Putin fail in this jaunt utterly, completely, finally, and totally. Pray also that the post mortem after the war reveal the extent of just how much American corruption contributed to all of this. American corruptions have global consequences.

Pray for our churches in Ukraine, that they would faithfully set forth the gospel of light to a world that operates in darkness. And pray that Ukrainian Christians would be given the grace to love their enemies.

Biblical Teaching on Conscription

In an ideal biblical republic, conscription for military service would not be allowed. When the prophet Samuel warned Israel about the dire consequences of selecting a king “like the other nations,” one of the things he warned them about is the fact that such a king would naturally want draft their sons.

A biblical society has the right to muster all the men of fighting age, twenty and up. But after they had been mustered, notice what the officers were to say to the warriors who had assembled. Going into battle was to be entirely voluntary. Of course there would be social pressure to not act the part of a coward, but there were to be no civil penalties at all.

In short, Israelite men could refuse to go to war for any reason whatever. And this means that if they were governed by corruptocrats, as we most certainly are, they could simply decline to go. Who wants to go fight for the right of our swells and toffs to remain on the take?

And Gideon acted in the spirit of this law when he winnowed his fighting force down, at least in the first round.

In such a system, no one would ever be conscripted to go off and fight for some corruption or other.

Women and the Draft

Having women serve in front line combat roles is a loathsome abomination. A nation that would draft her daughters in order to defend the nation is actually a nation that does not deserve to be defended anymore.

In this passage, men are prohibited from cross-dressing. For a man to wear women’s clothing is an abomination. This means that drag queens, transvestites, and cross-dressers are out. But the prohibition for the women is not a reciprocal prohibition of wearing men’s clothing. No, the translation here is “that which pertaineth to a man.” This is the AV’s rendering of keli geber, primarily meaning “the gear of a warrior.” Women were created by God to be givers of life, and it is twisted and kinky to try to transform them into dealers of death.

For these (and other) reasons, the CREC has a memorial, adopted by the entire CREC, that rejects the use of women in combat as a foundational issue. When there is a court case surrounding this issue, which there inevitably will be, our attitude toward women being drafted for war is the equivalent to the attitude of Quakers toward all war.

“It is not lawful for women to be mustered for combat service, for our Lord has declared it an abomination for women to don the martial attire of a man (Deut . 22:5). Christian fathers must protect their daughters from being seduced or coerced into such a circumstance, and the Church must support them as they do so . It is the duty of men not women to protect their countries (Jer . 51:30).”

Memorial E

Where We Actually Are

There have been times when we have gone to war and our cause was comparatively just, and the facts about the conflict seemed fairly self-evident to all—such as our involvement in the Second World War. Conscription was still used, but was quite possibly unnecessary. After an event like Pearl Harbor, an all-volunteer force becomes a real possibility. But if you were to consider the war of my youth, that being Vietnam, the purpose of the war was unclear even at the beginning of it, and after it turned into a quagmire, it became even less clear, more murky, and the original and laudable goal of stopping the spread of communism was almost entirely obscured. When that kind of thing happens, the government has to rely more and more on conscription, which is to drift farther and farther away from the biblical pattern.

None of this is written in a spirit of distaste for military service. My father was a Naval Academy graduate, and he was one of six boys. All but one of those young men served in the U.S. Navy. I grew up in Annapolis, and so honestly the idea of doing anything other than joining the Navy had never even occurred to me. So the Navy it was going to be. But all the same, because my draft number was #19, it was going to be something. Military service was something that you just took in stride. Even with the growing unpopularity of the Vietnam War, the overwhelming majority of the country still thought of the military with respect. I came of age at the tail end of that era.

We live in a time when the ruling classes have melted our national identity down into an inchoate puddle. Things are not the same any more, not at all the same. When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do (Ps. 11: 3)? What are we to do when the center no longer holds, when the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity? What are we to do when scoundrels have their run of our governmental agencies, commit their crimes in broad daylight, and cover them over with the most transparent lies? And nobody seems to care?

While I believe that it is still barely possible for someone to serve in the military without compromising his Christian convictions, this has become increasingly difficult. Many of the decisions made by top brass in recent years have been, in my opinion, calculated to get rid of the conservative and Christian elements in the military. They have been anticipating the nuisance that Christian servicemen would present for their ongoing woke project, and have been deliberately squeezing these elements out. And a nuisance is precisely what a Christian in the military must be prepared to be. If you are in the military, you must wake up every morning and, while brushing your teeth, say something like this to yourself in the mirror. “Today, my friend, may well be the day I wreck my career.”

It could be anything that triggers this response—refusal to hoist the rainbow flag, refusal to receive a woman into your tank crew, refusal to take that fascinating vaccine of theirs, or refusal to shoot a prisoner in the back of the head. In short, it would be any refusal to acknowledge their oddball notion that they have no God above them. But they do.

So even though service could still be (barely) lawful, I would want to discourage Christians from joining up. When it comes to registering for the draft, I would encourage young men to avoid, evade, and dodge it. And when it comes to young women registering for the draft (which is not yet required, but just wait), that should be met with an absolute refusal.

Bottom Line

Even if Biden were morally qualified to lead a military response to the Ukrainian situation—he isn’t but work with me—he does not have the competence. Anything he does on the world stage is likely to resemble the debacle of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. So before Biden goes off to rescue any Ukrainians, we should perhaps ask him to get the stranded Americans remaining in Afghanistan out first.

American corruptions and mendacity were a major contributor to this war. Putin remains responsible for the aggression itself, but we have been a major player in establishing the conditions under which a character like Putin could operate. And we will not be qualified to contribute in any major way to the deliverance of Ukraine unless we go through a major reformation ourselves. We will know that a reformation is under way when we cool it with the lectures about democracy, when a number of our top-ranking officials go to jail, and it is acknowledged on all hands that our ruling elites have become as diseased and addled as all the rest of the countries that the State Department likes to feel superior to.

Nothing there worth fighting for, in other words. I say “nothing,” but that is an over statement. I am referring to any overseas conflicts that would require us to believe anything whatever that our government says. I do think we should defend our country if orcs came pouring out of subterranean caverns.