The Lone Bulwark . . . No, Really

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Introduction

Comes now the time to make everybody mad! Why dab around the edges?

But we need to set this up first.

The Graph

This chart below gives us an overview snapshot of how different religious demographic groups think about abortion. The bad news comes first. About a third of white evangelicals are pro-abort, which—as a matter of biblical principle—is outlandish and absurd. What kind of preaching are they sitting under? Almost a third of evangelicals are good with a woman being able to obtain an abortion as a matter of choice? That’s simply appalling, as in, really, really bad.

And . . . as it turns out, it is the best of the lot—compare it with Jewish (79%), Black Protestant (72%), Non-White Catholics (67%), White Catholics (52%), and Non-White Evangelicals (49%). So white evangelicals are far and away the best of the lot. Way to stand firm, white evangelicals!

The lone bulwark is what it is because we are less diseased. White supremacy turns out to the healthiest guy in the leper colony.

My Use of That Phrase

So I am throwing around the phrase “lone bulwark” here, and I am doing it because there really is a sense in which white evangelicals are the lone bulwark between us and societal chaos. The dismal spiritual condition of white evangelicals overall notwithstanding, that really is true.

But there was a twitter rumpus a couple of years ago when Stephen Wolfe made essentially the same point—”White evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America.” But Canon Press, Wolfe’s publisher, responded to him along the lines of “c’mon, man,” and there was a ruckus at the time. Wolfe explained that he knew of no other group whose removal would torpedo all conservative hopes, and on the face of it this observation was quite correct. In the aftermath of all of that, I wrote this piece.

So what could be the issue? It has to do with where the credit lies. What variable gets the credit? With those groups that had horrendous stats (e.g. Jews, Black Protestants), what variable gets the blame?

So the denotation of Wolfe’s claim is spang-on accurate. What about the. connotations? Does the credit lie in their whiteness, or in the fact that this demographic group happens to have been more grounded in the gospel and in Scripture? And then it turns out that it is possible for a group to be well-grounded in Scripture on the essentials and nevertheless to have a weird eschatology. They know the triune God, and the Incarnate Son, and the message of the cross, and the infallibility of Scripture . . . but they get the antichrist wrong.

So in response to a follow-up tweet in which Stephen Wolfe invited Canon Press to just say “the eleven words,” I responded with an offer to make a deal. But before getting to that offer (an offer which still stands), let me use it as an illustration of how AI likes to just make stuff up.

I actually said, “So here is my counter-offer to Stephen. I would be willing to say eleven words, and would also be willing to try to get Canon Press to say them. But the deal would be that he would have to say them also. Here they are: ‘Zionist dispensationalists are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America.’” And they are, too.

Now anybody who knows anything at all about my covenant theology, not to mention my post mill eschatology, knows that dispensationalism is not my jam. And they should also know that “not my jam” is kind of an understatement. But I know better than to start a fight with dispensationalists in times like ours. Why? Because they are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in our nation.

I can have good fellowship in Christ with a man who believes there will be a secret rapture prior to the great tribulation. I cannot have good fellowship with the folks in rainbow flag churches. And even though all errors will have a negative impact somewhere, I know which ones are a moral disaster on the face of it. I can tell chalk from cheese, and I know what is of first importance and what is not of first importance.

But what if someone brings up Gaza? Why is that not of “first importance?” The dispensationalist agrees with me that sodomy is evil and the rainbow guy agrees with me that genocide is evil. Why can I partner with the former and not with the latter? I know that the rainbow gunk is evil because of what the alphabet people tell me straight up and what Leviticus and Romans tell me straight up. There is no dispute over the facts, and everything comes down to worldview. I don’t know anything about Gaza because of what Hamas-apologists tell me. There is nothing but dispute over the facts. Propaganda in the middle of a hot war is not the same thing as proof.

But in the meantime, anybody who thinks that little geysers of Jew-hate on the right are going to make Zionist dispensationalists rethink their exegesis of Matthew 24 is a moron and a retard. Behavior like that is far more likely to make them think that the last days timetable is accelerating, and that Israel needs our help now more than ever. And it will also make them think that morons and retards need to be banished from their teeny little place in the lone bulwark.

And they have a point. You don’t make a man the quarterback if he can’t throw the ball more than fifteen yards, with half of those throws constituting what sportscasters like to call “interceptions.” His idea of reading the field is to tuck and run. You don’t put someone in charge of your Manhattan Project when he flunked high school physics and top of that has announced that he doesn’t like the idea of working that closely with so many Jews. You don’t make someone captain of your chess club when he thinks it can’t be too much more complicated than checkers.

So if you actually believe that white evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America, as I do, you have to take the total package.

Yet Another Variable

In addition to the dispensational Zionism, let’s talk about yet another variable. If I had to summarize two of the loci that have attracted the most pronounced animus of the young bucks who have roared into intramural conservative disputes over the last five years, those two issues would be “Christian Zionist support for Israel,” just referred to above, and “the boomers.”

A major part of the bulwarkiness of the white evangelicals has to do with the boomer vibe that pervades the entire evangelical world. And that is because the white boomer believers are themselves the ones who tithe. White evangelicals are generally really conservative, across all age groups, and good for them. But the ones who are generally conservative and have significant resources to donate to the cause would be the boomers. This is not to cast shade on anybody, but as a practical reality you generally have more money forty years after graduation than you did four years after graduation.

And so our strategic geniuses of the right also decided that this was a good time to start antagonizing the donor class of the lone bulwark. What could go wrong? Let’s build up a cohort of young activists who distinguish themselves by calling their only possible donor class a bunch of names. “That’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it plays out for him.”

Coalitions are one thing, and foundations are another. When you are manning the ramparts, you will have disparate groups all around the top of the wall. You and your folks have down to the Fish Gate, and somebody else is manning the section that goes out as far as the Water Gate. It is usually considered bad form to start shooting at allies and cobelligerents up and down the wall, not to mention being a tad counterproductive.

So what are we to make of those who believe that white evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity, which is precisely the case, but who then turn their energies to blowing up that bulwark? The most charitable description of them is that they are strategically challenged.

Let Me Share a Secret With You

Now comes the moment when I let you all in on a tactical secret. This is not a disqualifying November qualification—not at all—but more of a revelation. It is more of a pssstt, let me tell you something situation.

In the foregoing, I have written in unstinting praise of those white evangelicals who are holding back the forces of chaos. Anyone who looks straight at what my position actually is will have to acknowledge that as far as the intelligensileft is concerned, I am a very bad person. And this is something that I believe that every conscientious minister of the gospel ought to aspire to. But there is another thing they should aspire to also, at least if they want to go to Heaven when they die.

Before I tell you what it is, I need to tell about something I have done for decades, as I have sought to evaluate the impact of my long distance ministry. By this I mean my ministry to people who don’t know me personally—my ministry through books, conferences, blog posts, that kind of thing.

What I have done is this. When I travel to another part of the country, say for a conference, and I am talking for the first time to people who follow what I do, and who are thanking me for the impact it has had on their lives, I have taken careful note of what kind of people they are. 

If two/thirds of my fans had three heads, with two of them drooling, it would be high time for me to run a little spiritual inventory on what I was doing. But if the people who really get what I am after are “together people” with happy kids, and the whole family has the right kind of bright in their eyes, it routinely makes me want to go home and write some more.

Now hold that up against this:

One of the wrong-headed things we sometimes do is radically individualize passages that have broader application beyond the life of the key individual mentioned. In the passage above, Jesus tells us to evaluate those who claim to be prophets by means of “fruit.” It is too facile to limit this to the fruit of that false prophet’s individual life—although that is certainly involved in it. If he is an embezzler, or an adulterer, or a fraud, that is fruit, sure. But when evaluating a ministry, you do more than look at just the one ministering. You also need to take into account the impact on those who are ingesting all that crap. Jezebel teaches her disciples to do what she does (Rev. 2:20).

Now I know for a stone cold cert that when anybody sets up to have a based ministry with no varnish, with based taking priority over biblical, one of the very first things that happens is that a whole bunch of epistemological misfits come out to play. They show up in every comment thread, like ants at a picnic.

Mention the Jews, for example, and all the folks with three heads show up. And every tenth commenter seems normal and kind of sane, but he has his feelings hurt because I said that he has three heads. No, I didn’t say that, and that’s not his problem. He doesn’t have three heads— but he clearly has an utter inability to see that he is surrounded by people with three heads.

Do I evaluate ministries or schools of thought this way? You bet I do. Some solon says something witty and clever about the Second World War, and the comment thread fills up with additional observations from idiots, or from the malicious, and sometimes from both. If someone invites me to look past “all that” and to do a deep dive into the arguments, my reply is “no, thanks.” If someone claims that the witty prophet brought the receipts, and has a shoe box full of them, and they want me to spend my next rainy Saturday going through the shoe box, the answer is still “no, thanks.” Life’s too short. I don’t need to drink an entire bottle of vinegar in order to ascertain that it is still vinegar at the bottom.

Having pointed out the obvious, there is another obvious thing to point out. Only a fool would evaluate anything based on the behavior of the occasional misfit. As the wisdom of our fathers teaches, you don’t judge the barrel on the basis of one bad apple. You don’t judge an elite academy based on the performance of the guy who flunked out of it. You don’t judge the Twelve based on the behavior of Judas, son of Simon.

But you can judge a bottle of vinegar based on the first three sips. I am actually surprised it took three sips.

So whenever we direct a withering sneer at the “far right fartulence,” as we have done from time to time, it is the most facile thing in the world to assert that we are trying to make David French happy. First, I am not sure that is even possible. Men who want to be unhappy are going to be unhappy. Second, what on earth makes anyone think that accomplishing something like that would be anywhere on our list of desiderata? And last, and most importantly, the fact that such jabs are not performative gestures for the sake of leftist approval does not mean that they are not performative at all. They most certainly are performative.

They are a clear signal to two kinds of people. The first would be the kind that we most ardently desire would not attach themselves to our ranks. It is a signal to stay away. It is a “not welcome here” sign. Say that someone argues that the way of Christian nationalism, the way forward, is the “will to power.” This is either an assumption that the Nietzschean worldview was a common grace thing however much it collided with Scripture, or it displays deep ignorance of where that phrase came from. But the will to power is actually an itching lust that cannot rest until God is toppled from His throne, which is absurd and cannot happen—and that is precisely why the will to power will always wind up in the outer darkness enveloped by a Nietzschean madness. So representing Christian political theory as a will to power is like thinking that Lynyrd Skynyrd was the band featured in Spinal Tap.

The second kind of person is the one who is a good-hearted Christian,a dispensational Zionist, say, who has been told his entire life that politics is dirty, but he now sees clearly that when Christians abandon the public square, it gets dirtier still. It gets unspeakably foul, in other words. So he is ready to sign up, but he still has that nagging worry left over from the sermons he heard as a kid. He was taught growing up that John the Baptist cut a promising ministry short by getting involved in politics. So he is wavering some. He is playing teeter totter in his soul.

But to be fair, he then goes to check out some REALLY based ministry, one that thinks that Goebbels had some observations that contemporary Christians need to be humble enough to learn from. He clicks on the “About Us” tab and sees a gallery of four-year-olds who look like they were playing in the dirt, and that then they had some black licorice handed to them, and it kind of smeared, and it was a cold day so their noses were runny. He wonders, “So that is Christian nationalism?” No, that is not Christian nationalism. That is something else.

I want men like that man to realize that there are people out there who want to fight the left with everything they’ve got, but everything they’ve got is actually Christian. We want to fight the dirt, not with it.

These Giveaways are a Real Thing, You Know

There are two places you must go in order to get those giveaways. The first is the special page that Canon has set up to process all of this, and those titles can be found here. The offers will change with each post throughout the month, but for these Canon titles, they will always be found in the same place.

You are now at liberty to obtain, and for free . . . Andrew and the Firedrake, Evangellyfish, Flags Out Front, Man in the Dark, Ride Sally Ride, Susan Creek, Two Williams, Barbary Jihad, and Blackthorn Winter. All for free at noquarternovember.com. If you like, you can call it free fiction day.

The second place you should want to go would be to my Mablog Shoppe. The list of free titles will grow throughout the month. The current list of free titles there is as follows:

Concise and to the Point
Virgins and Volcanoes
Blue Sky Vision
The Pink Spiders of Empathy
Letters to a Rootless White Kid
Jokes I Like to Tell
Chestertonian Calvinism
21 Prayers for Pastors
Letters of Marital Counsel
No Artificial Tweetners
N.T. Wright Rides a Pale Horse
Letters on Homosexual Desire
Letters to a Broken Girl
Some Adventures of Fun Dad
A Parliament of Pots
Song of Shulamith
The Doors of the Sea

As I said in the video, if you wind up not getting any of these . . . that’s on you.