As I have been watching the brazen moves of Obama and those who are his codependents, I have realized something about his Christian cheerleaders, not to mention something about those who want to say “these power grabs are really nothing to get worked up about.” They want to be “above it all.” I refer here to any Christians who refers to social justice as a good thing, as a thing to be desired.
Congress is seething to and fro, and I can tell, by the pricking of my thumbs, that something wretched this way comes. I mean, Henry Waxman couldn’t have gotten that way without it being mostly his own fault. And Christine Romer comes off like that perennial camp crafts counselor who wants us all to spend Saturday afternoon weaving wrist bracelets out of these little strips of naugahyde vinyl. And Obama himself tilts the head back for that professorial air, as he lectures the freshmen with hangovers in the back of the classroom who don’t know anything. And yet, whether these people come off as greasy, insufferably cheerful, or as an aristocrat on one of his lofty days, they all are telling us the same outrageous lies. Nevertheless, some Christians support them in this (e.g. Jim Wallis), while others take the apparently more modest route of saying that those who get worked up about it must be in the grip of Enlightenment categories. This is “not that important,” and “the gospel is not right-wing,” they add. They don’t support Obama, mind you, for they are anarchists, but this is nothing to get in a dither about.
If we want to understand all this, we need to remember something about Marxist theory. If you will allow me a brief paragraph to explain, I will have a run at it. Marx
relied on a Hegelian dialectic, which meant that history was supposed to ratchet steadily upward until it got to the dictatorship of the proletariat. A thesis would beget its opposite, the antithesis. The two would clash, producing a synthesis. That synthesis would become a new theis, begetting its opposite again, and steadily upward we would all climb. Then, in the secularized Marxist eschatology, the end would come. In that final condition, the state would wither away. This was the final vision that motivated the commies in their constant and relentless grubbing for state power in the here and now. The whole thing had an eschatological justification. They needed to use force now, so that they might hasten the day when the whole thing would be unnecessary. This is how those who claimed to be anarchists (eschatologically) could be, in effect, totalitarians (historically).
And some Christians are falling into a muddle at just this point. It is an old lie that has been brought out of storage, and it appears to be working. They are justifying their non-opposition to Obama on the grounds that they are “anarchists,” which means that they cannot be tarred with Obama’s big government schemes. But at the same time, they don’t fight his big government schemes because that means they would run the risk of being taken for some tea party kook, or a Sarah Palin fan, or something.
But the two basic positions we have to choose between right now are these: either we want to diminish state power now, or we don’t. If we don’t, it does not matter if we have an eschatology that says it will all be magically diminished at some distant point in the future. Not to be a radical, but the direction you are actually walking is the direction you are going.
Imagine that two men are walking away from each other, one to the left and one to the right. The one walking to the left cannot say that he is not really doing this because he has a firm belief that when he gets there, he will be somewhere else. You cannot walk in anti-kingdom ways and arrive at the kingdom. Straik in That Hideous Strength comes to mind.