Introduction
So last week CNN dropped a report that they had put together on all the doings out here in Moscow. That piece was a blessing for us in many ways, and I thought to take a few minutes to explain why and how.
After the release, I wrote to Pamela Brown, our interviewer, and thanked her for the job that she and her team did. And here is why I did that. I know for a fact—from our preliminary discussions with CNN, from the time they spent here in Moscow, and from their follow-up fact-checking questions, that they were working hard to keep it from being a hit piece. To be clear, they did not shake free of their foundational assumptions—but that is quite a different thing. They did bring up the standard objections, however tired, and interviewed one representative of the kind of group that would make such objections (e.g. the reverend lady). That is what a lot of our people noticed.
But here is why that wasn’t the issue. When they got to our responses, they didn’t just broadcast the inflammatory part, and then cut away. They got the inflammatory part, but then included our responses that contained the full context and range of what we actually think about the subject. They did that with Jared’s response on the 19th Amendment, they did that with Toby’s response on household voting, they did that with my response on slavery, and they did that in their interview with the Princes.
Now one of our standard conditions for agreeing to such an interview with “adversary media” was for us to film an independent recording of the interviews. We do this simply as hit piece insurance—and which we would only use if the CNN report had represented us as saying the opposite of what we had actually said. And the fact that we insisted on this, thus indicating that we considered CNN to be adversary media, was a bother to them, and a point that had to be negotiated, because they think of themselves simply as mainstream objective journalists. As a result of all this, at least in our case, they worked hard to be exactly that.
So viewers in our ideological corner could certainly tell they were watching CNN, fair enough. But it was a CNN segment working hard to let us give our side of things, and it was consequently not a hit piece. So the thanks I sent to Pamela Brown privately would be sincere gratitude and I would like to register it publicly. Thanks.
A handful of quibbles. The ladies they showed carrying on at the White House had nothing to do with us, we are not trying to usher in the Second Coming, and I would have preferred the word dominion over the word domination in their headline. But as the philosopher once said, “You can’t have everything.”
Hardest Hit
However, there were numerous viewers of CNN who had their serene bubble of universal tolerance and love interrupted with this report from Outside. This was a report that demonstrated that there was this place in Idaho where some were still holding contrary views. This was an injury not to be borne, and so they responded in a manner not unfamiliar to the Banshees of Diversity. They responded with their standard effin-on-the-blim-blam strategy. The CNN crew labored to be fair to both sides. A fair segment of audience felt no such restraint.
They filled up comment threads with vitriol. They swarmed the phone lines to give our church secretary a boatload of obscene messages to delete. They subscribed us to porn sites. The letters section of this blog received a bunch of mini-screeds and uncalled for comments about my tummy. The world witnessed the eruption of hundreds of little hate geysers.
“. . . an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.”Luke 6:45 (KJV)
This is the kind of event that is revelatory for us, and to use the Greek word, apocalyptic for them. This is the kind of venom that reveals the true nature of what is going on. They should use the opportunity to take a look at themselves. When they say democracy, they mean tyranny. When they say love, they mean coercion. When they say liberty, we can hear the clanking of the chains. When they say dialog, they mean for us to shut up. When they say free your spirit, what they really mean is obey the demons.
It really is possible for a generation to be demon-possessed. Remember what Jesus said about His day.
“Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.”Matthew 12:45 (KJV)
A lot of what passes for political discourse in our day is just a bad combination of drug-addled thinking, mental illness, hot garbage, and demon possession.
Hardest Hit, Second Place
Some of the “race-realism” bros have been working hard to represent Moscow as conservative sell-outs, temporizers who live under the progressive gaze that we only pretend to reject. What this CNN piece demonstrated was the fact that if we are in the process of selling out, we are really pretty bad at it.
It really is possible to be a hard line conservative of the old school without getting sucked down a reactionary wormhole. It is possible to hold to the historic Reformed view of Romans 11 on the Jews without being in any way beholden to the liberal post-war consensus. It is possible to be an unfazed and unapologetic Burkean conservative—when some are maintaining you are not conservative at all unless you are clamoring for a Protestant Robespierre.
Not only is it possible, it is far and away the straighter path. I commend it to you, and invite folks to join us.
Ah, Yes. The 19th Amendment Thing
One of the topics that got a number of viewers sitting on the edge of their couches, breathing into paper bags, was the discussion of the 19th amendment, the amendment that granted women the right to vote. But it has been a few days now, most of the pieces have fallen out of the sky, and so perhaps we can throw away the paper bags and just talk about it.
As Jared’s answer made clear (the part CNN didn’t cut out), our concern in all of this is not the enfranchisement of men over against women. Our concern has to do with the disenfranchisement of the covenant household. We believe that the basic building block of a thriving human society is the family. Societies are not made up of monadic and isolated individuals. And if you recognize the family as a political reality, then the family will need to have a representative spokesman. If the family is part of your political settlement, the family will need to have an authorized representative. That household will be represented by its head.
At Christ Church, when we have our elections for elders and deacons, we vote by household. Membership is individual, but in any act of collective decision-making, we treat the household as a governmental entity. The person who casts the vote on behalf of the household is the head of that household, which ordinarily is the husband and father. But this means that when a woman is the head of the home (e.g. a widow), she is the one who casts the vote. When we have our Heads of Households meetings, the women who are heads of households attend them. If Lydia had been a member of our church, she would have been a voting member of our church (Acts 16:14-15). She was clearly the head of her household.
So our position is not one of discrimination against women as women, but is rather a refusal to allow the radical individualism of our age pressure us into cooperating with the political erasure of the household as a civic player. We refuse to cooperate with that destruction, and we certainly refuse to celebrate it.
This is an entirely reasonable position for conservative Christians to hold and, as Jared’s response made clear (“I would support that”), we refuse to be embarrassed by it. We live in a time when our ruling elites don’t understand the difference between a man and a woman, between a citizen, a legal resident, and an illegal interloper, between a taxpayer and a benefits recipient, or between a legitimate child and an illegitimate child. The radical individualism of our age looks at all 330 million Americans, and sees nothing but a vast array of bi-pedal carbon units, all of them interchangeable. So here is my question for rank-and-file conservatives. Where do households fit in your political thinking?
When the infamous Roe decision came down, the decision to abort a child was a decision to be made by whom? It was between the mother and the doctor. Not only was Roe authorizing the murderous elimination of millions of children, it also authorized the destruction of the family as a decision-making unit. It was the abortion of the household. Where was the father in this decision over his child living and dying? Right . . . he was irrelevant. He was banished. It had nothing to do with him. He was nothing more than a nameless sperm donor. So even though it would have been just as murderous had the fathers been included, it still needs to be granted that a lot more was going on with that decision than the blood lust of our judiciary.
So it is not that we don’t want women voting. It is that we don’t want individuals voting as autonomous units. When solitary individuals vote in our church elections, they are doing so as a smaller household.
That said, this is simply one issue among numerous others that will contribute to the restoration of the American household. But remember what I said in the interview about 250 years. Repealing the 19th Amendment is not one of our hot action items. It is not on our current to-do list. On my list of cultural priorities, it is probably around #128. But because radical individualism is this generation’s “precious,” it is understandable why we would be asked about it. So when you ask a question like that, it should not be surprising that you got a straight answer from us—an answer that cannot fit within the categories of radical individualism.
But even though it is not on our current to-do list, it is not as though it receives no attention. We should have a strategy concerning it. I would encourage other conservative churches to evaluate and consider our method of household voting. Model that for a watching world for three or four generations. The government of the church is already in a position to respect and honor the government of the household, and we don’t have to pass any laws to do it. When this is done well, households start to thrive and the women flourish. So the thing I think we should do on this subject is work it out for everybody. Let them see what we are talking about in action.
Simple question. If you wanted to enfranchise the household, how would you do it?
A Miscellany of Reactions on Other Fronts
The responses have been varied and interesting.
For example, James Lindsay expressed the view that I am not a Christian, and that I have some kind of weird off-Broadway project going. That’s a good one to start off with. What Lindsay does not understand about the classical liberal order is that it cannot survive without a transcendental grounding. This means there must be a broad Christian consensus in order to support anything like that. Genuine economic liberty is a religious value. It does not grow out of Islam. It does not grow out of secularism. It does not grow out of Hinduism. So if you want the free markets of classical liberalism, you gotta have Jesus. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is the hand of the triune God. It should not be considered weird to say out loud what our fathers all knew.
Tom Hicks lamented the fact that we did not present the gospel, which was a really curious objection. That can be answered in two distinct ways. The first is practical. This response is that CNN gathered hours of footage, from which they distilled this eight-minute segment. What gets said or not said in the final report, and what winds up on the cutting room floor, was not up to us. Hicks should know better than to assume self-editing on our part when CNN was doing all of the editing.
But from a gospel perspective, here is the second reason why I think Tom Hicks is wide of the mark, and why I was delighted with the impact of the report, simply on gospel grounds. In a generation like ours, faithful proclamation of the gospel is always going to include law and gospel. The message throughout Acts is repent and believe. The law requires what from us? America needs to repent of what? Moreover, a biblical presentation of law and gospel does not always rush to the gospel. Jesus was not being unfaithful to the gospel when He told the rich young ruler to give away all his stuff, and the rich young ruler went away despondent. Sometimes when the law comes, the sinner has to just stew in it. So a simple demand of the law can be part of a larger gospel move.
Now the secularists have wanted to transform certain moral issues into political issues. That way they can accuse us of mixing religion with politics when what we are actually doing is mixing religion with the Ten Commandments.
When we tell them to stop killing babies, they want to be able to accuse us of playing partisan politics. But no. They must stop killing babies because of what God said to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Abortion, sodomy, secularism, cross-dressing . . . all of these sins are condemned by the law of God. And all of these sins are also being confronted as sins by Christian nationalism. Moreover the Christians who are involved in our cultural battles in this way, opposing such moral atrocities, are doing far more to prepare the ground for hot gospel preaching than are the stick-close-to-the-catechetical-shore law and gospel preachers. Explaining the law/gospel distinction within the confines of your adult Sunday School classes does not help prepare the way for reformation and revival. That is like confiding to your wife that Herodias ought not to be married to Herod. But that’s just my view, you whisper.
But it is fully granted that none of these sins can be repented of apart from gospel preaching—and for more on that, see below.
Anthony Bradley demonstrated, yet again, that he is incapable of hearing or understanding any distinctions at all if the subject is race or slavery, and also within fifty yards of me. Oh well.
And Meg Basham entered the chat with her usual good sense.
Gospel Goodness
So speaking of the gospel, let’s talk about that for a minute. In fact, let us conclude with it.
When confronted with the holy law of God, the sinful mind twists and turns the same way a rattlesnake would if you picked it up right behind the head. Not only does the sinner’s mind do this, so also does the collective sinful mind. The collective sinful mind will do anything except cooperate with the holy hand that picked it up. And there is only one solution really . . . that snake has to die.
Christians have been catechized to believe that they must not mix their faith with “partisan politics,” and most of us accepted that transparent lie at face value. So their next move was to translate a whole range of ungodly behaviors, immoral actions, and unholy lusts into political language. Chopping a baby up into pieces became a constitutional issue, fraught with subtleties, and carried on beneath the shadow of penumbric lies. Whether those who slaughtered these children had the right to sell off the pieces became a controversial issue of taxpayer funding. Two dogs humping on a pride parade float became an issue of First Amendment free expression. Christians were taught to stay out of politics, and then all of our sinful rebellion was promptly imported into the political realm. “They will never find us here,” the sentiment ran. “What a bunch of chumps,” came as an afterthought.
This generation of Americans is a wretched lot. Our sins are like those of Sodom, and our rationalizations are like those of Capernaum. We are porn-addled. We are the most pampered generation ever to live, and we are the most discontented. We manage our way through thanks to the river of anti-depressants—the north fork of the Big Pharma—that flows by us all. We sacrifice millions of babies for the sake of personal convenience, and we have pronounced anal intercourse to be just one more form of holy matrimony. We have had a generation of leaders who were hellbent in their warbucks commitment to forever wars. The lust to control everything, the libido dominandi, has our ruling elites by the throat, and they are now trying to manufacture a dimmer switch for the sun. And over this decaying corpse, we have placed a linen shroud of what we are pleased to call constitutional propriety, maintained by lawyers who argue learnedly about precedent and stare decisis. Thanks to their ongoing labors, the shroud is replaced regularly. They can’t do much about the smell though, which remains pretty bad.
This is because we are an ordinary country, made up of ordinary sinners, and these ordinary sinners have figured out a way to fend off any form of rebuke from the faithful remnant of Christians who still live among them. But when ordinary sinners kick off all restraint in this way, what happens is that they soon become extraordinary sinners. And so they have compounded their rebellion by making up fancy rationalizations that will present believers from calling out the iniquity.
Many Christians fell for that ploy, and so they labor to shush any Christians who see and understand what is going on. But what is going on?
What is going on is that America is trying very hard to throw herself headlong into the Abyss. And the rebels also maintain that anyone who thinks they shouldn’t do that is a theo-fascist.
But—as though reasons were needed—here is why we should not pitch ourselves into the outer darkness. Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, and He came to earth in order to save us from our sin and folly. He lived a perfect sinless life, was betrayed into the hands of sinners, was crucified for our sin and iniquity, was laid in the grave for three days and night, and rose again from the dead. What that resurrection means is that this same Jesus now owns the world. What that resurrection means is that God the Father has proven for us that Jesus Christ will judge the world in righteousness (Acts 17:31). The resurrection is not something we seek to prove—the resurrection is the proof of something else.
That something else is this. Jesus Christ, the one who died to save the world (John 3:17), is the same one who will judge the world. And an essential part of our repentance will consist of learning a basic lesson in logic and geography. Jesus Christ is Lord, and He will judge the world. North America is part of that world, and cannot be partitioned off from this world through anything so flimsy as our lame and legal rationalizations.
Christ crucified and risen. That’s the message, along with all the biblical implications of that message.
One of those implications is the necessary appeal that must always be made on the basis of all this. So here is the appeal to America then. Repent. Stop it. Be reconciled to God. Come home. Surrender. Give it up. Stop lying. Stop lusting. Put it all down. The chaos is before you, and the abyss, a very real abyss, is opening up before your feet. Turn around. The one behind you is Christ. He will receive you. He will still receive you. Come, for pity’s sake.