Temptations in the arena of worldly striving and carnal ambition do not cease simply because you have “left the world,” and have joined the perfect church, or attached yourself to some edgy inner city monastery, or have become a hermit in a hut. You might go clean outside the city, like St. Simeon Stylites, and …
Crooked Little Hearts
I believe I have done more than my share of trying to damn and blast the idolatrous notions of American exceptionalism. Americans have ten toes like everybody else, Americans put their trousers on one leg at a time like everybody else, and Americans have crooked little hearts like everybody else. The Founders were exceptional men …
Blood Up to the Horses’ Bridles
So what do I mean by mere Christendom exactly? I mean a public and formal recognition of the authority of Jesus Christ that repudiates the principles of secularism, and which avoids both hard sectarianism and easy latitudinarianism both. Easier said than done, but there it is. That is what we have to do, and we …
Boy, Howdy
Hunter follows his chapter on the Christian Right with a chapter on the Christian Left. As with the previous chapter, this one is mostly overview of the players and positions, and it is a helpful overview. While there is a temptation to dash off to engage with some silly thing or other that Jim Wallis …
News Flash: Secularists Support Secularism
To believe in the inevitability of anything is to have a doctrine of history. To deny that one has a doctrine of history and yet to hold to the inevitability of anything is to take back with one hand what you gave with the other. Secularism, the idea that a civilization can function for an …
European Style Cancer
A common rallying cry for conservative activists, including Christians, is that we need “to take America back.” Okay, sign me up. Take America back where? Generally the point is that we need to take America back from the liberals and progressives — the secularists in the academy, the homosexuals in the streets, and the raunchy …
Only a Republican Would Oppose Molech Worship
This will be a relatively short post, even though it deals with James Davison Hunter’s chapter on the Christian Right. This is because the chapter is simply a broad overview of the Christian Right’s take on what has happened to America, and what they want to do about it. For the most part, I found …
Look at All Those Alabaster Cities
In his most recent book, R. Emmett Tyrrell points out that the American conservative movement that grew up after the Second World War was a fusionist movement — a coalition of small government libertarians, anti-Communists, and traditionalists. As it happened, I was (and am) all three of those, and so I fit right in. But …
Obama Rides a Dragon While Waving His Cowboy Hat
The second section of Hunter’s book To Change the World begins with a very short chapter, so I will consider it and the following chapter together. I want to begin by differing with what I believe to be a premature assessment, one that I commented on earlier. “As we have seen, though, Christians have embraced …
Hard to Climb a Hill and Not Look Down
Chapter 7 is a very brief conclusion to the first section of Hunter’s book. Hunter sets up a very helpful discussion of the tension that exists between the fact that change is accomplished by elites, and the fact that the spirit of the gospel prohibits an attitude of elitism. “This is why elitism — a …