Introduction
Our impending cultural collision can be seen in what the Navy calls a “steady bearing rate.” If you see a ship off your starboard bow at 30 degrees, and then half an hour later, it is bigger, but still at that thirty degrees, that is called a steady bearing rate. If it keeps up, with the other ship always getting bigger and always at 30 degrees, you are eventually going to have yourself an incident at sea.
The grasping overweening overreach of our would-be overlords is exactly like this. Their lusts are increasingly demanding, and every day they get bigger. Almost every day they are always right there, 30 degrees off the starboard bow. And every day they demand that we kowtow to some larger absurdity. If I were still in the Navy, the collision alarm would have already sounded by now, and all the watertight doors would be shut and cinched tight.
In the meantime, an awful lot of Christian leaders who invested heavily in the status quo ante are very interested in this cultural debacle on debut turning out to be nothing at all, nothing to worry about, nothing to concern our widdle heads about. How long will they stick to that story? My current estimate is that they will continue to reassure us that everything is more or less fine and better than Trump until after the 17th Capitol Hill cop has committed suicide, after which point they will write a stiff letter of concern to the appropriate authorities, asking them to look into it.
The Players
There are three main groups that we need to acquaint ourselves with. I am going to draw the circle fairly loosely around all three here, and that means I think there will be actual Christians in all three groups—but in two of them, the Christians will have been compromised in varying degrees.
What are the three groups? There will be the woke, there will be the red-state normals, and there will be the consistent Christians.
Of course there will be Christians in the first two groups, but these will be the Christians who did not heed the apostle John’s caution that we should keep ourselves from idols (1 Jn. 5:21 ). In other words, they say they believe in Christ, but their general worldview is still shaped by another religion, and then the appropriate “Christ words” are made to fit into that alien framework somehow. Remember that the reason that John told genuine Christians to keep themselves from idols is because genuine Christians would be tempted not to.
The woke have had their worldview shaped by Marx (with that oppressor/oppressed grid going), they then discover that the word justice is in the Bible, which is about how deep their exegesis goes, and so Christ is glibly placed on the god shelf alongside Che.
The red-state normals think the Christian life means you like to eat elephant ears and corn dogs at the state fair, and you get choked up when Lee Greenwood comes on.
The first group wants to be the storm that knocks the house down. The second group wants the house to remain standing somehow, but without a foundation (Matt. 7: 26-27). What neither side seems to recognize here is that the storm-riders and the “let-us-build-without-a-foundation-because-we-build-for-less” contractors are actually working toward the same end—a collapsed house. One does it intentionally and the other unintentionally, but they are ultimately working in concert.
The third group is made up of Christians who actually mean it. And by “mean it,” I am not talking about the sincerity of their belief that Christ will bring them to Heaven. This is larger than personal salvation. I am talking rather about their conviction that Jesus is Lord of all, which means that everything must be subordinated to Him—either brought into His service (2 Cor. 10: 5) or cheerfully jettisoned.
This third group, the consistent Christians, know that unless the Lord builds the house they labor in vain who build it (Ps. 127). This includes those who would build a nation. If a house cannot withstand a storm without a foundation, how on earth can a nation withstand a storm without a foundation? What is happening to America right now is what happens to houses that are not built on the rock of Christ’s words.
It All Begins with the Name
Right now the woke are on offense. They are clearly going for broke in this despotic beta test of theirs. The red state normals are currently playing defense, but getting increasingly exasperated. As I have written on other occasions, there is a blow back in the offing. It remains to be seen how much rough stuff will make up this blow back, but I do think the fact of it is now flatly inevitable.
When that happens, there will be a lot of yelling from the left, and a lot of jeering from the right. As Kurt Schlichter puts it, the progressives are not going to like the new rules that they themselves designed. That outlook is perhaps best represented by the Clint meme above. But . . . and there is a crucial but coming.
But as Christians under the authority of Christ, we do not have the option of picking up the godless rules that the left designed for us, and spinning them around to use in a “how-do-you-like-them-apples?” kind of way. The Scriptures do not tell us “do unto them as they vainly thought they were going to do unto you.” That is not the Way. The left will in fact fall into the pit they have dug (Ps. 7:15), but we are not to pitch them headlong into it. We are not to treat the left as they planned to do to us—for that would involve concentration camps, and us becoming like them. And who wants that? We are to do unto them as we would be done by.
The only hellhole we can give to them is the hellhole of being prevented from turning everything into a hellhole, which was their idea of paradise.
They have been planning a hellhole for us. That does not give us the right to create a hellhole for them. The only hellhole we can give to them is the hellhole of being prevented from turning everything into a hellhole, which was their idea of paradise. For them, that is sufficient punishment. It is a punishment that will admittedly be hard on their feelings, but as that is more or less their fault, we don’t need to concern ourselves with it too much.
The Changing of the Guard
I believe that when it comes to leadership in the evangelical world, we are long overdue for a changing of the guard. The leaders of the evangelical movement have not successfully guarded that which was entrusted to them, and so it is time for them to step aside. They are being thrust aside by these tumultuous events in any case.
A number of them are fine Christians on a personal level, but that is not the same skill set as knowing what to do when your ministry team, handing out tracts to the bar traffic, gets swept up in a knife fight in the parking lot.
As we are considering who should lead us in the future, and who should speak for us in the crises to come (and please note the plural, crises), we should look to those who acquitted themselves well in this one. Now that our governing elites, and our public health professionals, and our media nabobs, have discredited themselves in just about every way it is possible for them to discredit themselves, here is a simple litmus test for us to use for any up and coming leaders. This should be our bare minimum—and here it is:
We should ask for all pastors to affirm that under no future circumstance will they cancel in-person worship services.
If they will not make this simple affirmation, then we should look elsewhere for our spiritual guidance. You might as well look elsewhere, because you wouldn’t be getting any spiritual guidance anyway. It is a simple standard—under no circumstances will they consider canceling their in-person worship services. I may be about to prove my extremist bona fides, but we may even find ourselves being led by some Canadian pastors. Yes, it has come to that.
Prior to this disgraceful episode in our country’s ongoing humiliation, and the broader church’s feckless descent into cowardice and timidity, I would previously have been inclined to allow the fire chief to notify the worshiping parishioners inside that their roof was on fire, and I would also have let the governor send a bus to drive all the parishioners away because the dam was going to burst, and I also would have been pretty understanding if the tornado watch people burst in and had told everyone to get down the basement right now.
That was because once upon a time I was a reasonable guy, but that reasonable guy died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head, which means, naturally, that he died of COVID. So with my inner “reasonable guy” thus disposed of, I am now inclined to think that it would be preferable for the occasional church to go up in flames, or under the water, or off to the four winds, than to give any kind of credence to the foolishness that has us all by the throat now.
So now? We are going to worship the Lord, on the Lord’s Day, in the manner prescribed by His Word, and we are going to do so despite, but not limited to, the following: alien invasions, lice outbreaks, the very latest climate change updates, a spike in measles cases in Arkansas, or nuclear war. Other scenarios will have to be considered on a case-by-case basis.