The Great Shantytown Plausibility Structure

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Introduction

On one level, the protests at Columbia should have been the easiest thing in the world to fix. All you needed was about 14 fire trucks and 28 fire hoses, all going full blast. The problem almost solves itself.

But on another level, nothing can really be done. No amount of fire trucks, or riot police, or speeches by the Speaker of the House, or isolated expulsions, or stern letters to the Times, can address the actual problem, the problem we actually have. The actual problem is that the goddess of secularism has despaired of her project, and she has gone off to have her nails done somewhere. Somewhere else, anywhere else. The Enlightenment project, once so full of hope and promise, is now a sodden mess, like Voltaire’s birthday cake left out in the rain.

The problem is a theological crisis, one created by the failure and collapse of the gods of the secular public square. This thing isn’t working anymore. The prayers are still said, the litanies are offered, the sacrifices are made, the smoke ascends, and yet the gods remain silent. They remain silent, of necessity, truth be told, because they aren’t there and never were. That was always the weak point in this particular theology.

But it used to be that lots of people believed that they were there, and that was good enough . . . for a while. For a time.

A Rancid Distraction

I want to start by saying that the virulent displays of antisemitism in these protests are a distraction from the main issue—but not because virulent hatred for anybody is ever a sideshow. So because of the gaudy and toxic nature of that distraction, I need to say something about it before getting to the main issue.

The infernal genius of antisemitism is that it is schizophrenic—it manages to be simultaneously overly-intellectual and excessively-stupid. The kind of hatred that is generated in such events is so stupid that it can only maintain its existence in a crowd of people being equally stupid. They prop each other up, and the result is a sort of Shantytown Plausibility Structure. But once you have that, you can justify anything, at least for a time. Even something as egregious as the October 7 Hamas massacre can be justified, provided you have the requisite number of moral idiots surrounding you, all yelling the same thing.

But what did I mean by “intellectual?” When their version of the alabaster city takes shape, made up of tents and refrigerator boxes, they will appoint certain of their number to be their public intellectuals—you know, faculty members who were DEI hires, but who at least know where Israel is on a map, and the fact that the 1967 war happened. They give the whole thing a veneer, as a kind of sop to those who still have the remnants of a conscience. These are the acckkkshually people.

And so then, when the whole assemblage is in place, they give way to their warp spasms of ignorant hate, directed at the Columbia admin, who are animated by a hateful ignorance. They don’t know what is going on.

And then, at the very same time, in a masterpiece of bad timing, a number of disoriented types on the disheveled right have taken up as their own the antisemitic positions of AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar, thinking that what the resurgent right needs right now is a little borrowed something that might be used to discredit absolutely everybody who is waking up the kicks and giggles of clown world.

Antisemitic Sins, Antisemitic Crimes

But then the “responsible” types don’t help either. Confronted with the Jew hate that has erupted at Columbia and all her cousin colleges elsewhere, Congress decided to pass a law banning antisemitic speech—as though the problem were people simply saying what they think about Hamas, as opposed to harassing and threatening and blocking Jews who just wanted to go to class.

Like the Patriot Act, like the Tik Tok ban, there is a certain kind of conservative who never gets tired of fashioning weapons that will be used on them by the next administration. “I know!” a certain kind of conservative says. “What our campuses need right night is more hate speech regulation!”

Antisemitic sins ought not to be against the law. Anti-white sins ought not to be against the law. Anti-black sins ought not to be against the law. People should be left alone in their bigotries. After all, they have to live their life being them, which is usually punishment enough. Crimes ought to be against the law, and the law ought not to care what motivated the crime. We have become accustomed to speak of “hate crimes,” and, you know, this to distinguish them from all the ordinary love crimes that get committed.

Ah, but I did indicate earlier that I was going to get to the main point, did I not? All right, all right. These targeted Jews, although effectively barred from campus and classes during these weeks, will survive this particular warp spasm of hate. The main point has to do with what is not going to survive all of this, and that would be the credibility of the secular project, in which they have pretended that they know how to create and defend a cosmopolitan marketplace of ideas, where all are welcome. That whole thing is a lie, a sham. A shambolic shammy-sham-sham. So to speak.

What a Crisis of Faith Looks Like

As the numbered days of the old Soviet Union were slowly ticking down, I recall an incident that demonstrated clearly what happens when all the mojo evaporates. There was a moment back then when Boris Yeltsin, a Russian politician with a drinking problem, was holed up in a house, and that house was surrounded by the Soviet military. It was a stand-off, and on paper, it could not have been a more lopsided stand-off. One unarmed guy in a house, with his house surrounded by a fully-armed superpower with a massive stash of nukes. And yet Yeltsin won.

It doesn’t matter how big the vehicle is if it is out of fuel. It doesn’t matter how small it is if it still has plenty of fuel. And so it was that Yeltsin on his moped zipped by the big Soviet eighteen-wheeler, there by the side of the road.

The secular establishment still has the infrastructure to deal with antinomian students harassing Jews. It is not as though they don’t have cops. There were cops standing around everywhere. What they don’t have is any more faith in their goddess. They suspect that she has ditched, and so they don’t want to crack down on these belligerent commies, because maybe the commie goddess is about to show up. Maybe she has something that could be useful, because right now, they got nothing.

And some rubes out in the places where they grow corn are even talking about turning back to Jesus, which would be, as everyone should know, a threat to democracy.

I recently tweeted this concern about all of that:

Yeah, the things you are concerned that Christian nationalists might do decades from now are the very things you guys are in the middle of doing right now, and with all the cameras running.

The Real Issue

For the secularist, the public square is the great haven of judicious neutrality. In secular terms, it is their holy place, and consequently it is a place that needs to be guarded against any possible sectarian displays. This is why your town now has a decorated “winter tree” at Christmas time. This is why they fight tooth and nail to get rid of that nativity display on the county courthouse steps. Their secular neutrality is a high and lofty ideal which must be jealously guarded lest any sectarian bigotry creep in.

And the great universities, particularly the Ivies, were supposed to be the Holy of Holies. They are the places where everybody is supposed to learn how to do this great thing together. “C’mon, people, now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now.” Don’t any of them realize how lame their bromides sound to us all? The tenets of secular liberalism come off now like cool cat bell bottoms, or eighties hair.

So instead of that stated ideal, the universities, and particularly the ones in the news right now, are riddled with cancerous hate on the one hand, and ridiculous and dithering ineptitude on the other. The students are shouting about what they want, which appears to be ethnic cleansing from the river to the sea, and the administrators of one of the most prestigious universities in the country are looking down from their windows on that surging sea of ignorance and hatred, scratching their watches and winding their rear ends.

So what will not survive this display is the clear charade that liberal secular democracy has become. This is a political construct that will not or cannot defend itself. The liberal project clearly has AIDS. They cannot fight off infections as their immune system has clearly collapsed. Their uniformed white blood cells are just standing around, waiting for the orders that will not come.

The concept of a free marketplace of ideas, protected by wise and thoughtful men of neutrality, is now officially a dead joke. It was always a joke for those who know how to think in a straight line, but back in the day it was at least a plausible joke. But now it is four in the afternoon, the priests of Baal are all bloody and tuckered out from dancing around the altar for hours, and still no fire from heaven.

Woe Unto You . . .

And we should finish that sentence with “scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites!” I want to finish this with gospel, and so I must first say a word to all my fellow believers who have wanted to fend off a total gospel approach with something they describe as “gospel-centered.” They have wanted to describe Christian nationalism as a distraction from the gospel, when what it actually is a gospel-centeredness with a defined circumference, one that includes our corporate life together as a society. It is not a distraction from the gospel, it is application of the gospel. Total application, and no remainder.

A robust gospel presentation needs both the elements of law and gospel. The law tells us what the problem is, and the gospel presents God’s offer of deliverance from that problem. The problem is rebellion against Heaven, and the solution is submission to Heaven’s gracious offer of free forgiveness in Christ. This is all on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But the “gospel-centered” approach has made the circumference artificially tiny. This is what I mean. Told to witness to one of the priests of Baal who had been dancing around the altar, a representative of this approach would go up to him, as a solid Reformed evangelist, in terms of law and gospel. But the questions about the law would all be individual and limited to his household. “Have you ever spoken harshly to your wife? Have you neglected any of your kids? Have you ever been tempted to cheat on your taxes?” What he wouldn’t ever do is bring up the fact that the priest had just been dancing around the altar to Baal fifteen minutes ago—because that was a corporate and social activity, and gospel-centered types don’t think that we should mix the gospel with politics.

Why hasn’t it ever occurred to these people that our central sin, the crux of our rebellion, has been political? Why do they assume that a wicked people can’t sin politically?

What?! Do men not sin against the God of Heaven in concert? Is rebellion never organized politically? Did the Tower of Babel start to go up because each individual happened absentmindedly to drop off a brick? Did the whole thing evolve by itself?

Gospel-centered witness today doles everything out piecemeal, a teeny portion offered to anyone who might want a little bit for themselves, and it entirely neglects and shamefully abandons how throughout Scripture the God of Heaven spoke to nations like Moab, and Edom, and Ammon, or to cities like Nineveh. The Word of God applies to nations. The prophets of old would come roaring out of the wilderness to speak to kings as kings.

A generation ago, I remember reading a popular Bible teacher telling us that John the Baptist had cut a promising ministry short because he had gotten involved in politics, talking to Herod about his brother’s wife that way. So my conclusion is that America is neck deep in her current depravities because evangelicals have been neck deep in their complacency, excuses, fastidious exegesis, self-serving theology, envious turf protection, and cowardice. Don’t leave out the cowardice.

We have even gotten to the point where if a preacher declares that America must repent, and America must believe in Christ, that this will be represented as though said preacher is simultaneously a threat to democracy and the gospel. He is a threat to democracy, where the critic’s actual allegiance lies, and a threat to the gospel, where the critic’s ostensible allegiance lies. A true preacher of the Word will be represented by the critics as a threat to Baal and Jesus both. Makes sense after a fashion, if you squint, and have smoked a lot of weed.

When societies sin organically and corporately, as our society has manifestly done, there is no presentation of the gospel which is not also a presentation of law and gospel. And there is no presentation of law possible that does not address the politics of the thing.

America must be confronted with her corporate sin, the sin that occupies the White House, that dominates the Congress, and which has the Supreme Court by the throat. It is good that Roe was struck down, but we still need to repent of Roe. We continue in our collective impudence when we think that Obergefell is not a demand that God respond to us all with fire and brimstone. We have corrupted the great gifts God has given us, and we have trifled with the small ones. Our rebellion has reached up into to the heavens and down to the pronouns. We are a diseased nation, and no one appears willing to tell her this.

The death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Christ are events that have political implications. They are direct implications, with no ambiguity about them. America needs to repent, and America need to call on the name of Jesus.

But how will she hear without a preacher?