Published by Canon Press
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Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom. Copyright ©2023 by Douglas Wilson.
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Version:20230517Kindle
5What Is Mere Christendom?
6A Brief Scattershot Primer on Christian Nationalism
7e Goodness of Mere Christendom
8Church and State
9All Liberty Is Founded in Christ
PART THREE
Lies about Mere Christendom
10“Christendom Would Be Oppressive”
11e Biblical Necessity of Free Speech
12Restrain the Worst Blasphemer First
13e Lure of Hypocrisy
PART FOUR
How to Restore Christendom
14Two Revolutions
Preface
IN THE WANING DAYS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, ONE WIT COMPLAI
that “everything was at sea, except for the leet.” We think we can relate to
this, except that as Americans, who like to think that because we do
everything bigger, faster, and on a grander scale, we think that our cultural
disintegration has to be more in the grand style—kind of like a Super Bowl
haltime gone wrong, as being watched by someone who had just dropped
a couple of hits of contaminated acid. If the last few years are anything to
go on, it certainly seems that way.
I am ofering this book to evangelical Christians, and evangelical
Christians are quite accustomed to the basic thesis of this book, which is
that “Jesus is the answer.” But because they are also accustomed to express
this sentiment in ways that artfully dodge the real issues, we should
perhaps take just a moment to look at things more closely.
Jesus is the answer, but to which questions? e way we usually frame it,
we mean that He is the answer to the problems of personal guilt and need,
and then personal salvation ater that.
e point of this book is that Jesus is the answer to every ultimate
question that can be framed by man, and that this is not limited to the rst
person singular—“Why am I here? Where am I going? Why am I so guilty?
Is there a way out? How should I then live along the way? Who am I
accountable to?” ese are all wonderful questions, and they are the
necessary starting point. Individuals as individuals must get right with
God, and a man must be born again if he is to see the kingdom of God.
us far our evangelical pattern.
But at some point, we have to move on to the rst person plural. “Why
are we here? Where are we going? Why are we so guilty?” and all the rest.
Cultures and societies and generations need Christ also. e Lord Jesus
Christ is not just the answer to our personal dilemma. He is the eternal
Logos of God, and as such, He is the spoken Answer to every legitimate
question that any given society might pose, or all of mankind for that
matter. His Lordship applies to politics, culture, entertainment, media,
and His answers to our rebellions and follies are just exactly what we need
to hear.
But if we want deliverance, we must call upon Him. We must name Him.
Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. e framework
for doing this is what I am calling mere Christendom, and hence this book.
I argue here for a principled abandonment of the disastrous experiment
of secularism, and for a corporate confession of the fact that Jesus rose
from the dead, and all done in such a way as to preserve and protect our
liberties. is no doubt raises questions, and hence this book.
But before we get into it, I also need to share a few things about the
structure and format of the book, which means that I should explain how it
came about. Over the years, as I have argued for a proper understanding of
the common law, natural revelation, American history, theocracy,
Protestant resistance theory, free speech, and whatnot, a number of these
elements began to take shape as a coherent “project.”
As I posted a number of articles to my blog on these various issues, I
started to attach a tag to them, and that tag was mere Christendom. ey all
had something in common, which is that over time they all contributed to a
sprawling and smoking slag heap of words. ey may have been sparkling
and efervescent words, but it was a slag heap of them nonetheless—
somewhere north of 400,000 of them. What I did was to hire my grandson,
Knox Merkle, to work through all that material and pull out and arrange
sections that could be used in a book like this, a book of ordinary size, and
that was somewhat episodic or snapshotty in nature. You may wonder
what that is supposed to mean, but it should become apparent to you
quickly enough—provided you go ahead and read it.
At any rate, this assigned task of assembly was very ably performed by
Knox, and then ater that I wrote over the top of the whole thing, taking
out infelicities and putting new ones in.
is book is therefore dedicated to Knox. It really is wonderful to have
your children and grandchildren engaged in the battle together with you.
And when that battle is the cultural equivalent of Helm’s Deep, it is a
particular encouragement.
Douglas Wilson
Moscow, Idaho
PART ONE
Where We
Are Now
CHAPTER 1
e Wickedness of Secularism
WHAT IS SECULARISM? ASIDE FROM BEING THE VILLAIN OF THIS BOO
the idea that it is possible for a society to function as a coherent unit
without reference to God. It is the idea that a culture can operate on the
basis of a metaphysical and religious agnosticism. It is the idea that we can
understand what human rights are without knowing what a human being
actually is.
ere are oten occasions for many to trot out that apocryphal Luther quote
about preferring to be governed by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.
Right, but what if you get a foolish Turk? Now what? But even though
Luther didn’t say it, I would agree with him if he had—I personally would
much rather be governed by a pagan who acted like a Christian than a
Christian who acted like a pagan. But what we always seem to get are
pagans who act like pagans, and then, when we object to that, we are
soundly refuted by a misunderstanding of something Luther never said. All
I want is a wise Christian. Is that too much to ask? Apparently.
In a Darwinian society, the highest civic value has to be survival, and since
we are talking about species, it has to be survival of the group. ere is
therefore no theoretical ground for our secularist rulers to value individual
liberty. e true ground of individual liberty is the recognition that
individuals will live forever, and in a way that the current regime will not.
In order for genuine liberty to be extended to non-Christians, it is
essential that non-Christians not be allowed to dene genuine liberty. e
blind should not lead the blind, as someone once taught us, and it is
astonishing that even some Christians have been maneuvered into
thinking that blind leadership can have any hope of keeping us on the road
and out of the ditch.
e public square cannot be neutral. If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar isn’t. If
Jesus is Lord, the liberties of those who don’t believe in Him are far more
secure than the liberties of everybody in the hands of a Caesar who answers
to no one above him.
e liberties of the individual are too precious to be let in the hands of a
civic agnosticism. To not know why you are extending liberties to the
citizenry is to not know why you would be doing anything bad if you took
them all away.
In Christian societies, overreach is a possibility. e Scriptures teach that
all men are sinners, and men will sin in Christian societies as well as in
secular ones. But in secular societies, overreach is not a possibility, but
rather a necessity, by denition. If there is no God above the state, then the
state has become god—the point past which there is no appeal. If there is a
God above the state, then hubris in high places will always be dealt with
appropriately.
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. If the Spirit has been
exiled, how can we still have what only He can give? How can we reject the
Giver and keep the git? ose who puf themselves up and say that they
can do this thing need to remember—wisdom is always vindicated by her
children.
When we look at what is happening to the culture around us, and we
recognize that so much of the destruction is avoidable, and we consider
also the fact that the people implementing these suicidal policies are not
idiots—and indeed exhibit an intelligence of the highest order in other
areas—the conclusion appears inescapable. Our problems are spiritual.
ey are the sort of moral problems that have always alicted—pardon the
use of an anachronism—sinners.
Sinners always want salvation. e damned don’t want salvation—that is
what it means to be damned. But sinners aren’t there yet, and so they are
always casting about in search of a savior. Of course it has to be a lattering
savior, one who will whisper soothing words on the way to the bad place.
is is because sinners want to be damned, sort of, eventually. At least they
prefer approaching damnation to the only alternative, which is a real
Savior, that is to say, Jesus. And their preference stays this way unless a real
Savior intervenes.
is is not just true on the individual level—although it certainly is true
there. We are social beings, which means that we go to Heaven in groups,
and we go to Hell in clusters. Civilizations are what they are because we,
within those civilizations, think the same way about things. Among these
things we should include the topics of sin and salvation.
Put this another way. ere is no way to preach the gospel clearly to an
American without also preaching what America needs. And if you are not
preaching what America needs, what you are declaring ain’t gonna save
nobody in particular. Of course, considering the way many preachers
declare the gospel these days, that may be (secretly) the point.
One of the basic decisions confronting the secularists is whether they give
priority to secularism, which is a result, or to democracy, which is a
method. Democracy might wind up with a government that is not secular
in the slightest, and a secular dictator might insist on a secular state
despite the majority of his citizens wanting it to be some other way.
Secularism and democracy are not synonyms.
If they were foundationally democrats, secularists ought not to mind,
ater 500 years, if an overwhelmingly Christian populace voted in the blue
laws again, where ordinary commerce ceased on the Lord’s Day. But if they
are foundationally secularist, it doesn’t matter to them if that is what a
society-at-large wants to do. ey are still against it. But why?
Conservative Christians are suspicious of democracy also, so that is not
my point. Being suspicious of the results that democracy might come up
with is a perfectly respectable way to be—if there was one thing that gave
some of the Founders bad sweats in the middle of the night, it would be
democracy. H.L. Mencken once dened democracy as the establishment of
truth by the expedient of counting noses, and promulgating the results
aterward with a club. Democracy can do bad things, like federally
subsidized entitlements for instance, and that is why we need a
constitutional republic, where certain things are recognized as of the
table. Certain basic issues are not up for a vote.
is is why it is important that we have certain inalienable rights that our
Creator gave us, and not rights that were bequeathed by the latest
referendum, or by the kindness of the king. If the Lord gives, only the Lord
can take away. If the state gives, then the state can take away, and blessed
be the name of the state.
e point here is that the Christian has a natural point of appeal above
every human institution—whether that institution be popular elections,
that fortress of fraud we call the Congress, the faux-imperial White House,
or the black-robed Nazgul who ghoulishly prey on the unborn. One of them
singly, or all of them together, can be withstood by one courageous man
with an open Bible. “You may not, as Yahweh reigns, do this thing.” To take
such a stand would require courage, as John the Baptist had to have in
order to rebuke Herod, but to take such a stand would not require an ability
to follow a convoluted set of political contradictions. Life is simple. God
outranks the king. e king is to do what God says, not the other way
around. “What a strange religion you Christians have!” I can hear someone
saying.
But for the secularist, what outranks the highest human authority? What
text can a secularist point to when he is trying to stand against certain
democratic measures? It matters not if the democratic measure is a great
idea or a howler. So long as he difers with it, it should not matter to him if
the people are voting to close Home Depot on Sundays, or if they are not
sufering a witch to live. ere is no God above the people, right? Imagine
there’s no Heaven; it’s easy if you try.
e secular state dispenses freedoms (it would be better to call them
privileges) like they were party favors. ey function as bribes. ey serve
as... bread... or circuses. As Chesterton points out somewhere, sexual
license is the rst and most obvious bribe to be ofered to a slave. For many
in our era, that was the bribe that ushered them into their bondage to the
state.
If we are to have rights at all, in the strong sense, they must come from
God. God-given rights cannot be revoked by any agency of man. If such
rights are not grounded in the will of God, then whatever space I might be
allowed to move around in is something that can be revoked. e state
gives, and the state takes away, and blessed be the name of the state.
is is why secular conservatism, and secular libertarianism are both
impotent against the collectivist idol of the state. e state, by insisting on
secularism, is making sure that there never arises a school of thought that
maintains the state is a creature, accountable to God like all other
creatures. For if that idea takes root, it becomes possible for the state to
hear a rebuke from outside the system, which it absolutely does not want
to hear. ese people want every possible rebuker to receive a security
clearance rst—and they are the ones in charge of the security clearances.
But that is not the kind of ambassador YHWH sends.
Now if certain Christians start to think that the secular project is actually a
ve-gallon bucket of lamesauce, what then? Well, any purveyor of such
crazy talk will be immediately dismissed by the secularists as a neo-
Confederate ayatollah weird beard, and the Christians who have made
their peace with this present world will join in the denunciations, so that
they might get back to their missional outreach work with that rising
Demas demographic.
e choice between secular options on the right is like a competition
between a gentlemanly Epicurean and a rowdy one. e former walks at
dawn in a manicured lower garden, contemplating chess moves and
Rawlsian political theory, while the latter is more interested in crack
cocaine and hoochie mamas. Without an overarching standard governing
the two of them, we are simply comparing a longer life of nobler, milder
pleasures, and a shorter life consisting of a blowout lled with orgiastic
ones. But when we have to choose on those grounds, it is simply a matter of
personal preference.
e secular conservative wants industry, thrit, and hard work. Oh, and
low taxes. e secular libertarian wants to smoke pot and marry another
guy. But neither of them have any ultimate standard to which the
overweening state must submit. e power relation goes the other way. e
state, for its purposes, will encourage the latter fellow, for he is helping to
perpetuate a society of disconnected and atomistic individuals, who are
much more manageable. e state will also tend to tolerate the former,
grudgingly, because he has a job and an income, and is kind of a cash cow.
But introduce the lordship of Jesus Christ over every facet of life, and see
how the whole equation changes. Liberty is no longer “what I, the
automaton, please,” but rather what Jesus says I should be allowed to do.
Under the authority of Christ, not only should I be free but so should my
neighbor be, in the same way and on the same terms. If he is doing
something that Jesus said was okay for him to do, then why should I hassle
him? Or ne him? Or make him ll out forms? Or walk through a nudie
scanner?
is is only possible when the gospel of Jesus Christ has been proclaimed in
power, and men have received it and have been brought into the fellowship
of the Father through the blood of Jesus. When men have been set free in
this sense, set free from their sins, then it makes sense to speak of free men
creating free markets. It is not possible otherwise. Every other defense of
“free” markets is equivocating on the use of the word free.
is is also why it is possible to say that Jesus hates socialism. He hates
statism. He hates crony crapitalism. Why? Because it doesn’t run on love.
Love is obligatory, but it is not coercive. Coercion, masked as it is by the lies
of modern statist theory, is their great counterfeit of love.
If a man has been set free by Christ, he has been set free to love others.
He has not been set free in order to run through the vibe eld of
impersonal market forces, making random purchases. e free market (the
real one) is not a deistic machine. Rather, it is people loving each other in
accordance with the law of Christ.
So freedom is dened by Jesus Christ. He denes it both positively and
negatively. He sets us free to do as we ought, which is to love one another.
He also sets us free negatively, establishing the boundaries that enable
others to respect and love me by respecting and loving those boundaries. In
the same way, I am set free to love him by respecting what God has given to
him. God has posted signs everywhere that say meum and tuum. So if you
don’t love the sexual laws of Scripture, and you don’t love the property right
set forth in Scripture, then it is very simple. You don’t love your neighbor.
How do I love my neighbor? Let me count the ways. I do it by not coveting
his stuf. I love him by not coveting his wife, or his house, or his
manservant or his maidservant, or his riding lawn mower. I love him as his
immediate neighbor, looking across the fence at him. I also must love him
when looking across the table at him in a zoning commission hearing. e
Bible does not say “thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.”
When done rightly, it is not done because his liberty or mine is being
taken as an absolute. What kind of sense would that make? It is being done
because his liberty, just as much as mine, is the grace of God. And what
must we do with the grace of God? We must receive it, treasure it, hold it,
and embrace it. We must die before we let it go.
And this is why all Christian discussion of economic theory must begin
with a full-throated denial of secularism. We must begin with the Lordship
of Jesus Christ. In this Christian context, within these constraints, we
could have a productive debate between a theocratic libertarian, a
theocratic conservative, and a theocratic classical liberal. It would be
productive because we would have a common standard to appeal to.
In short, the price of admission to a true Christian debate on economics
is the confession of the crown rights of King Jesus. Visualize world peace,
which means visualizing the nations discipled. In that day, when the lion
and the lamb lie down together, and the children are chasing the cobras,
does anybody seriously think that we will still be mailing half our potable
income to that bloated monstrosity on the Potomac? So that ten million
federal employees might have something to drink and pee away?
Without such a standard, our debate will consist of us just waving tatters
and remnants of systems that once were godly, and citing passages from
books that nobody reads any more. And without that standard, at the end
of our debate, we would all just look at the moderating state to nd out
what was legal. Not very much, the answer turns out.
In the meantime, those who defend free markets on the basis of biblical
law (and their only possible basis in the gospel of free grace) cannot be said
to be doing so because they have in any sense made freedom an absolute.
Only the word of Christ is absolute.
Someone might reply that I am just bringing in “Jesus” to justify my love
of the free market—doing so quite conveniently, but still ater the fact
nonetheless. How, the scong might continue, are we supposed to gure
out what economic principles your “Jesus” might prefer? Ah, I would reply,
we are extremely fortunate. He wrote a book on it.
One of the characteristics of lust is that it hates to be constrained. is
applies as much to political lusts as to sexual desire, and it explains a great
deal about the dishonesty of the progressive mentality. How many times,
when you have asked someone a specic question about some important
issue, have you been told by that person that he “hates labels.” I dare say.
Labels interfere with getting what you want. People remind you tomorrow
of what you said yesterday, and this restricts your freedom of movement.
Augustine wrote wisely of the libido dominandi, the lust for power,
characteristic of so many progs on the campaign trail, and even more
characteristic of them when they get hold of the levers of power.
ose who are in favor of smaller government are, when this is
translated, in favor of a smaller capacity for coercion. ose who are in
favor of bigger government are in favor of increased opportunities for
coercion. e libido dominandi is therefore characteristic of those who want
more access to coercive policies, and it is not characteristic of those who
don’t want that. So if someone says, using labels, that he is pro-life, pro-
free market, anti-big government, he is saying that he believes we must
reject the temptations of libido dominandi, just as someone who says he is
quitting smoking is saying, as a natural consequence, that he wants to stop
buying cigarettes. But someone who has cartons of cigarettes stacked up in
his basement has no intention of quitting. So suppose we saw those stacks
of cartons and commented, “So you’re a smoker, then?” and then we were
told that he “really hates labels.” What he really hates is being caught. He
hates being called on what he is doing.
Now in passing, I should acknowledge that there are conservative types
who don’t hate labels, but who use them in the most clunkity fashion
imaginable. I have personal experience with this; I speak as a close
observer of some conservatives whose worldview is made out of cinder
blocks and cheap cement. Okay, that happens. In the theological sphere,
with confessions and creeds, and in the political sphere with platforms and
campaign slogans, and so on, there are those who cannot handle some of
the subtleties of the world God made. at is a problem, sure enough, but
in our age, it is not a huge one. e intellectual life of our age is
characterized by a squishy goulash of subtleties all the way to the bottom of
the pot, a farrago of pomothot, and the purveyors of this pomothot are
oten quite clever—they don’t hate labels because they can’t follow
arguments. ey hate labels because they can follow them, and those
arguments get in the way of their lusts. Remember that the devil is a
dialectician.
If relativism is the case (and secularism is a form of relativism), then
anything goes. If relativism is the case, then anything goes, including the
worst forms of absolutism. is is why, incidentally, secularism has mounted
such a pitiful response to the demands of fundamentalist Islam.
Secularism is relativistic, of necessity, because all societies relect the
nature and attributes of their god. If man is god, as he is in secularism,
then the ethics of that society will relect the nature of man. But man
changes all the time. He is unstable, like water. Secular ethics is relativistic
because man, the god of the system, is himself relative. He is relative to his
genetics, his environment, his upbringing, and he says whatever comes
into his head. And whatever comes into his head becomes law. For the time
being.
e response of secularism to radical Islam makes no sense, at least on
paper. Why worry about hypothetical fundamentalist Christians who might
execute a blasphemer centuries from now, and in the name of resisting this
threat make common cause with radical Muslims who are executing
blasphemers this very minute? Some might say we do stand up to them—
don’t we bomb them? No, we bomb some of them and cozy up to others.
Many of those we cozy up to are the worst. But we shouldn’t spend too
much time trying to make sense of it, because it doesn’t make sense. If it
made sense, it wouldn’t be sin.
Where this does make some sense is in the fact that the root of secularism
is actually a rejection of the Christian faith, and the root of Islam is also a
rejection of the Christian faith. Anything but Christianity, and anyone but
Jesus. is is the commonality that trumps everything else. is is the
hidden tie that binds.
Here are the markers of the god of the system:
First, the god of the system is the nal court of appeal. ere is no appeal
beyond him. Once you get to his court, and the decision has been made,
the matter is settled. If you continue to resist ater that point, then you are
a disruptive rebel and an enemy of mankind. You are out of the appeals
process and into the justice system.
Second, the god of the system requires that his words be interpreted
according to the historical/grammatical hermeneutic. Lots of legal
theorists think that the Constitution is a living document, which is elastic
and stretchy, but only when you are stretching it to the let. e fact that
you can mess around with constitutional words in this creative way means
that the words of the Constitution are not part of the god of the system. But
notice how nobody ever says that the majority opinions in pursuit of
judicial activism are “living documents” also. No, you have to interpret their
words with sobriety and respect, no funny business, and why? Where
respect for the plain meaning of words is demanded, you have identied
the god of the system.
And last, the god of the system is the fountainhead of morality. is is
why Christians have an easy distinction in their minds between “legal” and
“moral.” But for those who believe that there is no intelligence beyond our
corporate and collective intelligence, there can ultimately be no such
distinction. Right? Christians worship the God who is outside all our
systems—He is transcendent—and that is why we can distinguish sins and
crimes.
Godless secularism still maintains an impressive facade. Like an ornate
shell of a long dead creature of the deep blue sea, there is enough to keep
quite a number of people from pointing out the obvious, to wit, that the
shell is hollow.
So a lot of people have conspired together to not notice what is going on.
e reasons for this conspiracy can be summed up in one word, which is
paycheck. But there are reasons for believing this cannot be kept up for
much longer.
e strength still manifested by the West is all residual or borrowed. e
residual is let over from previous generations when men were more
faithful, and the shell, while hollow, still has some strength. e borrowed
is taken from the red state enclaves. at game cannot be kept up much
longer.
CHAPTER 2
Taxation
A STORY IS TOLD OF A FELLOW WHO WAS MUGGED IN AN ALLEY BY A
and he put up a ferocious ght. Ater about teen minutes, they got him
down on the ground and found just two dollars in his wallet. “Two dollars?”
one of them said. “You put up that ght for two dollars?”
“Well, no, actually. I thought you were ater the $500 in my boot.”
One of the most precious possessions a government has is its moral
legitimacy. When they have it, taxes are paid, for the most part,
voluntarily. Any society requires force for the outliers but is not held
together at the center by force. When the ruling elites start to opt out of
this societal bond—“laws are for the little people”—there is usually a time
lag, but the “little people” do catch on. And when they catch on, the whole
thing spirals down into chaos.
One of the central techniques that is used by despots for divesting
themselves of moral legitimacy is the technique of governing through
arbitrary administrative law. A free people live under laws passed by
legislatures in which they have freely chosen representatives. e
prerogative of passing such laws may not be transferred. So if you chafe
under rules and regs that spew forth from all the alphabet agencies, then
you are not free. It doesn’t matter that you are currently not being
harassed. No despot can torment all his slaves simultaneously.
When there is no standard above the state, then the state becomes the
standard. If there is no God above the system, then the system becomes
god. And because the state is always ravenous for tax money, the tax
burden gradually becomes a monstrosity. e people carrying this burden
have gotten gradually used to it and don’t even notice anymore how
radically unscriptural it all is.
We are currently living under a form of government that our Constitution
was explicitly designed to prevent. We are told ad nauseam that we are a
free people, while at the same time our administrative managers, our
ruling elites, reserve to themselves the right to dictate to us pretty much
anything that comes into their heads. ey walk the corridors of power
with the demeanor you might expect from such little gods.
Obviously it is a sin to steal, and it is not a sin to be stolen from. e rst
part is lat prohibited in Scripture (Exod. 20:15; Eph. 4:28), and the second
part is intuitively obvious. Better to be wronged than to do wrong. But
when making this point that it is not a sin to be stolen from, we are talking
about someone sneaking into your garage at two in the morning and
taking your bicycle. It is not wrong to be wronged in this way.
Our current sin is found in the way we are being stolen from. When God
prohibits stealing, this assumes the institution of private property. When
God prohibits adultery, what is in the background? Unless there is such a
thing as marriage, you cannot have adultery. Adultery is dened as
violation of marriage vows. In the same manner, stealing is a violation of
someone’s right to remain in possession of their own property.
So the requirement here is to learn a little blunt force honesty with
yourself. It is not a sin to write a big check to the government. It is not a sin
to be stolen from. It is a sin to write that check and tell yourself that you are
just “doing your share.” at is the sin of being delusional when God has
required us to be clear-headed. It is a sin to believe that our government is
anything other than a pirate ship of the thieves, by the thieves, and for the
thieves. It is a sin to go on believing the lies when we have no good reason
to.
In short, the rst step for the Christian taxpayer is the same as what you
nd in addiction recovery groups. First you have to admit you have a
problem.
I am required to love all men because all men bear the image of God, and it
is not possible to love a man without simultaneously respecting his stuf.
“For this, ou shalt not commit adultery, ou shalt not kill, ou shalt
not steal, ou shalt not bear false witness, ou shalt not covet; and if there
be any other commandment, it is briely comprehended in this saying,
namely, ou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Rom. 13:9, emphasis
added).
ere are two moral imperatives here that presuppose private property—
the prohibition of stealing and the prohibition of coveting. None of these
prohibitions should be over-engineered. I cannot commit adultery if there
is no marriage. I cannot murder if there is no right to life. I cannot bear
false witness if there is no truth. And, bringing this to the point, I cannot
steal or covet unless there is such a thing as my neighbor having a right to
whatever is modied by his very own personal pronoun. To adapt the
nouns from the tenth commandment—his house, his servants, his
livestock, or anything else that is HIS.
is requirement to love extends from the lowest strata of society to the
very top. Paul tells those who make their living as thieves to steal no longer,
but to get an honest job, working with their hands. But what about the
“high and lonely destiny” that the lords of the earth would like to have?
Sure, the Bible prohibits pickpockets, but where do I get the authority to
relegate the mighty ones who pass our tax laws (in their august and solemn
assemblies) to the status of those who say arrrgh, and who have a parrot on
their shoulders?
Well, it’s like this. More Bible thumping. When Samuel warns the people
against anointing a king like the other nations have, he warns them of the
consequences to their property. In other words, it is reasonable to worry
about the pickpockets in town, but wise men worry about another set of
men, whose grasp of the distinction between meum and tuum is every bit as
tenuous. ese rulers will rise to the pinnacles of hubris, claiming to be
equal to God, deserving of a tenth.
And he will take your elds, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them,
and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your
vineyards, and give to his ocers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants,
and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his
work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out
in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the L will not hear
you in that day. (1 Sam. 8:14–18)
If we got back to a ten percent taxation rate, we would think we were
living in a libertarian’s daydream. We are pretty far gone. We have
forgotten that liberty must be understood in terms of durable goods.
Last example, showing that the requirement to love a man by respecting his
stuf is not limited to street urchins. Kings are included. Kings are singled
out, actually. Let’s talk about Naboth’s vineyard, shall we?
Ahab the king broke the tenth commandment and coveted Naboth’s
property. He had a case of the sulks about it, until his wife suggested that
he institute land reform, or zoning regulations, or inheritance taxes, or
targeting the one percent. Something like that. e greedmeisters call their
“reforms” by many diferent names, but greasy envy is always in the mix.
You can read all about it in 1 Kings 21:1–29.
is is why a bedrock qualication for political oce is that a man must
fear God, love the truth, and hate covetousness (Exod. 18:21). Do we have that
in the halls of Congress? Not even a little bit close.
Because taxes can be a form of thet, and because taxes need not be thet at
all, a reasonable question to ask is how we can tell the diference.
e baseline, the starting point, is that property belongs to the
individual. He is the one that ou shalt not steal applies to. He is the one
with the house, the vineyard, the lawn mower, the wallet, the smartphone,
and so on. Whenever the Bible talks about property, it always talks about it
in two categories. e rst is God’s absolute ownership of all things (Deut.
10:14), and the second is the relative ownership that you and your neighbor
enjoy (Deut. 8:18). When we talk about the state possessing things, this
possession is derivative. e state extracts value from the taxpayer, the
appointed steward of God’s wealth, and this extraction can also be divided
into two categories. is value can be extracted lawfully, or the state can
play the role of the thief. So how are we to tell the diference?
We know that taxation can be done right because the Bible talks about
paying taxes to the one to whom it is due (Rom. 13:7). ese are taxes that
we owe, and they may not be considered thet at all. We should no more
chafe at paying our legitimate taxes than we do paying our bill for satellite
television. ere are taxes we do not owe, but ought to pay anyway, having
more important things to do. is is the meaning of what Jesus teaches
Peter—we don’t owe it, but go ahead and pay it (Matt. 17:24–27).
And then there are other circumstances where the illegitimate taxes have
become so onerous, and the justication for them so outlandish, and tax
courts have beclowned themselves to such an extent, that the Lord raises
up a let-handed means for the children of Israel to pay their tribute (Judg.
3:15–19).
Now I am not issuing any kind of call to action, other than the action of
understanding what the heck occurreth. It is long past time for us to be
sons of Issachar, understanding the times and knowing what Israel should
do (1 Chron. 12:32). In our circumstance, deliverance would be ours if most
of us came to the simple recognition that our ruling elites are governing
unlawfully. ey are illegitimate.
So this brings us back to the earlier question. How do we tell what kind
of taxation is challenging the law of God as opposed to the taxation that is
in line with the law of God? ere are three basic criteria.
First, the level of taxation must not rival God (1 Sam. 8:15). God claims a
tithe, and if that is all God needs, and if God is a jealous God, then we
ought to see any attempt on the part of the civil government to go past ten
percent as an aspiration to Deity. is is the perennial temptation for fallen
man (Gen. 3:5), particularly for rulers of all kinds (Isa. 14:13), and so that
temptation must not be funded. Cutting of the government at nine
percent is like refusing a third Scotch to a wobbly tavern-goer at 1:00 a.m.
Shouldn’t be controversial.
Second, the taxes need to be levied, in the main, so that the rulers can
perform the functions that God requires them to perform. Coercion is a big
deal, and so the government must only be allowed to exercise it when they
have express warrant from the Scriptures for what they are doing. If they
have express warrant to hunt down murderers, and they do, then they have
express warrant to collect money to pay for certain men to do this. ey are
God’s deacon of justice, and the deacon of justice needs to be paid just like
the rest of us (Rom. 13:4). ey are not allowed to collect fees to pay for
activities that are prohibited to them. If they are not allowed to do it in the
rst place, they are not allowed to tax us to pay for it. To do so would be
thet.
ird, the taxes must be lawful and in accordance with the established
constitution of the people. Arbitrary and capricious government, when the
constitution outlaws arbitrary and capricious government, is hypocritical.
It sits in judgment upon us in points of law, and contrary to the law it
commands us to be struck. Since I have no particular person in mind, I
may feel free to echo Paul’s sentiment about this without overstepping any
personal boundaries—the men who do this are a whited wall (Acts 23:3).
So then, in summary, taxes are thet when the government is aspiring to
be god in the lives of its subjects, when the government is refusing to do
what the real God requires of them and is doing something else instead,
usually something very expensive, and when the government is not
obeying its own legitimate processes for levying taxes.
When you get lots of pirate ships, what do you have? is is not a trick
question. You have a pirate leet. You have lots of pirates. Augustine
records a time when a pirate was captured and brought before Alexander
the Great. e pirate asked why he was styled a pirate for doing to ships
what Alexander was doing to countries, and, despite this, Alexander was
styled a great emperor.
History is silent as to what became of the witty pirate then, but his
question did have a certain resonance. Secular man, with covetous loins,
hands, and brains, has not yet been able to answer it. ere is, however, a
stif ne for raising the question in inappropriate ways.
I am not issuing a call to action, but rather a call for understanding and
recognition. Clearly this is not because action is irrelevant, but rather
because rash and precipitous action is usually destructive. ink, and then
do. At some point, action will be necessary, and when that day comes,
Christians need to have consciences that are prepared for the necessary
action. If you are going to run a marathon, you don’t get ready for it by
running around the block the day before.
Laws multiply when the lawgivers want to have subjects instead of
citizens. When laws swarm like the frogs of Egypt, the reason for it is to
increase guilt. is guilt means two things—one is that when there are
multitudinous regulations, they can always get you for something. Second,
it turns everyone into a lawbreaker, but because our consciences are not
trained by the Scriptures, when it gets to the point of resistance, we are
dragged into the fray with uneasy consciences—instead of walking toward
the confrontation with a clean heart and well-oiled shield.
Swarms of their froggy little laws, and swarms of ocers to eat out our
substance, are a threat to us. What is a threat to them? Well, the gospel is
the enemy of tyrants everywhere precisely because the gospel liberates the
conscience. Even if for years ater conversion, every forgiven sinner does
nothing explicitly political against the tyrants, the tyrant nevertheless
objects to the fact that the gospel is plainly removing all his handles from
the sinners. A forgiven man is a free man, a fact regarded by taskmasters
everywhere with frank suspicion.
If you doubt what I say about how these laws are a teeming nuisance,
utterly inconsistent with living as free men and women, this is just because
you don’t want to come to grips with the fact that you are probably
committing a felony right this minute. Have you ever thrown away some
junk mail that came to your house addressed to somebody else? at, my
friend, is punishable by a sentence of up to ve years. Now if you receive
this information, and then next week you receive a missive about a sale at
Macy’s addressed to Harry Schwartz, and you are not he, and you blithely
throw it in the regular garbage (instead of the mandatory recycle bin, you
villain!), and you do all this without any qualms of conscience whatever, it
means that you are actually making some real progress. We might make a
Christian of you yet.
Now some like to respond to this emphasis on property rights as human
rights as a thinly veiled defense of “it’s mine, I tell you!” I make the mistake
of issuing a clarion call for integrity as we learn how to stand up to the
gargantuan thievery of the modern state, and defenders of that kleptocracy
can only hear me saying, “We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious.
ey stole it from us. Sneaky little Hobbitses.”
is is all part of what I mean by beginning with “recognition.” e early
Christians trusted in God, which is why they could joyfully accept it when
their property was plundered. When the prehensile and rapacious state
seizes my property, like a dragon from the north, I should accept it from
the hand of God—with the same principled contentment I ought to display
if I lost my earthly goods in an earthquake or re. It’s only stuf.
For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of
your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding
one. (Heb. 10:34, )
In other words, I don’t object to them stealing my stuf because I am
revealed as a heart idolater by their attempts at stealing (Eph. 5:5). If God’s
object is to reveal my undue attachment to stuf, He could do that by means
of re, lood, high winds, or congressmen saving the children. And if a
property owner’s idolatry is revealed by whatever circumstance, then it
stands revealed. But whether or not the victim was an idolater, the thief
who revealed that idolatry to the world remains a thief.
When Job lost all his worldly goods, some of it was because of natural
disaster (Job 1:19) and some of it was by human agency (Job 1:27). But Job
attributed all of it to God and submitted to God’s will in it. e fact that he
recognized the hand of the Lord in all of it, and accepted that loss from the
Lord, did not mean that he had acquiesced to a new economic theory as
developed by Chaldean raiding parties, or socialists, but I repeat myself.
So before we charge of to save our goods, we need to learn that they are in
fact being stolen, and we need to get this information down into our wee
little brains. Ater that information has simmered there for a number of
years, and we start to notice a certain lightness of step, and a certain spring
in our conscience, then we might be equipped to formulate a plan of action
that was not certiably insane.
So we accept the plundering of our goods joyfully, while naming it as
plunder. Naming the plunder is the rst step in learning eventually how to
put a stop to it. For the magistrate to take property from anyone without
scriptural warrant is thet simpliciter. e fact that we are used to it justies
nothing. Illicit taxation is thet, just as the fabled droit du seigneur was
sexual immorality—whether or not all parties cooperated.
Being a creature, I reason from axioms and decline the invitation to prove
my axioms. A good axiom should therefore occupy a place on the trunk
down near the grass, and not be a set of twigs up near the airy heavens, and
so here it is.
We are created by God, and it is self-evident that we were endowed by
that Creator with certain rights that are inalienable, and that among these
rights are the right to life, liberty, and property. If someone claims that I
am refusing to pick up the onus probandi, the burden of proof, I will simply
laugh contentedly and acknowledge that this is entirely correct. I believe
the burden of proof should actually be on the guy with a gun who wants to
rob me. He is not hard to identify—he usually has big block letters on the
back of his jacket. Ask him what he is doing.
Being a magistrate is not a universal “it’s all okay” permission slip. Taxation
without representation is thet. Taxation to nance cockamamie wars is
thet. Taxation to pay wheat farmers to not grow wheat is thet. Taxation to
fund Planned Parenthood is murderous thet. Taxation to fund research
programs into whether cocaine causes quail to engage in risky sexual
behavior is thet. Taxation to buy fuel for the 100,000 backhoes dumping
our money into the Fannie Mae sinkhole is thet.
And not being able to see thet in all this is tantamount to standing on
the top of the levee in the middle of Hurricane Katrina and being unable to
“detect the breeze,” and asking the rescue worker pulling on your elbow to
please “dene breeze.”
CHAPTER 3
Tactics of the Enemy
ONE OF THE CENTRAL TACTICS OF OUR REGNANT SECULARISM IS TO
foundational assumptions are religiously neutral, and that we need not
look at them. In other words, they hide the foundation they have poured,
they hide the blueprints of the building they want to build, and if you point
to that foundation, or to the blueprints they are holding behind their back,
they resort to calling you a conspiracy theorist. A time will come when they
are open about it, but until then, they deny that their atheistic secularism
leads of necessity to moral anarchy. But it has to.
When I was in high school, I took a sociology class, and it was just the
kind of class you might expect. One day the teacher came in (a very nice
young lady) and asked if any of us had ever been afraid of a black person. I
helpfully raised my hand, and she called on me, pleased at this opportunity
for us to do some helpful relating. “And why do you think you were afraid of
him?” she asked, wanting to get to the root of some of our societal
problems. “Because he had a knife,” I said.
Now to be perfectly fair, we were kids, and it wasn’t much of a knife. But
it was enough of a knife to scare me at the time, and to make me seek help
years later in my sociology class.
is was the same teacher who, on another occasion, taught us all that all
teenagers went through a time when they hated their parents. But I didn’t,
and I raised my hand and honored my parents by saying that I loved them.
She said, no, that wasn’t true.
Words form societal expectation; words catechize; words build. And if
there is another civilization in the way, words tear down. In e Abolition of
Man, Lewis provides a striking quote from an old English song about
Herod—“and so he sent the word to slay, and slew the little childer.”1
So let’s return to the question of “fearing” whoever it is now. ere is a
missing premise in the question, which is that all such fear is irrational, a
point that is reinforced by the increasingly fashionable use of the sux –
phobia. Some unfortunate people won’t go outside anymore because of a
phobia about a bee getting in their hair. Others are irrationally afraid of
enclosed spaces, and others have hyper-jitters about heights.
So there are irrational fears, for which the sux –phobia works quite
well, and then there is the PC-point that is advanced with every use of that
sux in words like homophobia or Islamophobia.
You should see the tactic clearly—any opposition to their agenda, for
whatever reason, is dismissed as a mental illness. It was the Soviet Union
that rst pioneered this tactic, because anyone who opposed the
establishment of that glorious paradise was obviously sick in the head. You
obviously need treatment. ey haul you away to their reeducation centers
more in pity than in anger.
Christians therefore have no business using such words, unless it is to
make fun of them. I know lots of Christians who think that Leviticus and
Romans exclude homosexual behavior, but I don’t know any Christians who
have an irrational fear of homosexuals. I know many Christians who don’t
believe that Mohammad was Allah’s prophet, but I don’t know any who have
an irrational fear of Muslims. And when prudence dictates extra
precautions, what some might call fearful precautions—say you are lying to
an airport that is on the State Department’s list of dumb places to ly to—
that is hardly an irrational fear. One soldier does not turn to another, right
before they go over the top, and ask if he ever struggles with bulletphobia.
“Why, yes,” the reply might come. “anks for this opportunity to open up a
bit. I think my mother must not have tucked me in enough at night when I
was little.”
Words matter. e word phobia is a weapon. So are words like
Christendom—used negatively or positively—and words like community
and missional.
Chesterton says somewhere that the modern world has insisted on exiling
the Savior, but has done so from the midst of the story of the Gadarene
demoniac. e upshot of this means that our naked public square has been
purged of any reference to Jesus, but we are now let with the devils and
with the swine.
Too many times Christians have placed the consequences of not believing
in Jesus too far of in the eschatological distance. e things we say about
that placement are quite true, as far as it goes—to be admitted into the
presence of God we must be clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ,
and if we are banished from the presence of God on that great day, it will be
because we never knew Him.
But not knowing Him does not just result in Hell later. It also means that
when we refuse to acknowledge Him here and now, the end result is that
we start building little prototypes of Hell in order to test-drive them. And
that is why the public square rapidly becomes a haunt for owls and jackals.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the devils know how to work us in
two ways. Too many conservative Christians tend to think that the devil
simply wants to tempt us with variations on the orgy porgy debauch. But
the devil is actually parsimonious—he hates pleasure and only uses it to
bait the hook. If he can get us to take the naked hook, so much the better.
e Gadarene demoniac was not living in luxury, remember, and the legion
of demons was not feeding him grapes. Never forget that the devil at heart
is a prohibitionist.
Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith,
giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having
their conscience seared with a hot iron; Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain
from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which
believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if
it be received with thanksgiving: For it is sanctied by the word of God and prayer. (1 Tim.
4:1–5)
Doctrines of devils? Sounds interesting. What might they teach? Well,
the devils want you to have sex issues along with a bunch of food issues,
and that pretty much describes our generation down to a T. And many
professing Christians—who are too embarrassed to name Jesus in the
public square—are not too embarrassed to stampede along with all the
food phobias that are dictated to us, not to mention being slowly afected
by the gay pride parades that gyrate slowly past, and they do not put these
two realities together. As Dylan taught us, you gotta serve somebody. It
might be the devil, or it might be the Lord, but neutrality is no option at all.
Chesterton hammered those pinched souls who were well on their way to
banning salt and pepper, along with mustard, as a most “unnatural
stimulant.” ose pinched souls don’t know that they are pinched, and they
don’t know that they have been outmaneuvered, and that the only
alternative to the path they are on is a good confession of the crown rights
of Jesus Christ.
If Jesus is Lord, then this means that our lower intestine has been
dethroned from its place of privilege and power. If the Lordship of Jesus is
denied, then the only alternative, since our god is now our belly (Phil. 3:19),
will be to confess the crown rights of the lower reaches of that belly, and to
begin to leave bizarre and unnatural oferings on that altar.
ose oferings might include the sexual organ of another, or it might be
fecal transplants. Whatever.
Regardless, the solution is to turn back to Jesus—not simply in our
hearts, although it must begin there, but to do so on the steps of the county
courthouse. When it comes down to it, there is fundamentally a basic
choice. Either we will have a nativity set there, with Joseph, Mary, the baby
Jesus, two cows, a goat, and a drummer boy, or we will have two (or more)
homosexuals holding up their marriage license for the photographers.
Not being an anarchist, I believe that some forms of coercion are good and
necessary, but because I also believe that cops, legislators, judges, and
SWAT teams are made up of sinners, it is absolutely necessary for us to
know that we have warrant from the Almighty God before we try to make
anybody do anything. Before ning someone, or logging him, or putting
him in jail, or exiling him, or executing him, which pretty much exhausts
the options, we had better know that what we are doing is authorized by
God. If it is, well and good. If it is not, then we are abusing someone
created in the image of God, and God is going to hold us accountable for it.
We should either coerce with a clean conscience (and an open Bible) or not
at all.
Liberals do not like this form of argument, because they want to pretend
that there is nothing whatever coercive about what they are doing. ey are
not taxing certain individuals at abusive rates while simultaneously
threatening the inadequately cooperative with imprisonment. No, what
they are actually doing is “asking” the “wealthy” to pay their “fair share.”
Oh, since you put it that way...
Look, if you don’t do what they say, at some point in the proceedings,
men with guns are going to show up at your house. I do not have a problem
with this if those men with guns are going ater a pedophile, or a rapist, or
a murderer. Go ahead. Coerce away. If you need them, I will provide you
with the verses that show that God approves of this kind of coercion. But if
they are showing up at a man’s house because he got tired of having
bureaucrats pee a bunch of his money into the Potomac, then something
has gone wrong somewhere. As the saying goes, the liberal idea of
democracy is three coyotes and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
ey don’t want any limiting principle, in principle. us far, and no
farther, is not a phrase that they like to nd in the mouths of the voting
public. It reminds them too much of that lag with the rattlesnake on it.
But in order to have a genuine limiting principle, one that works, it has
to be grounded in the work and words of the God who made us all. One
nation, under God. If God is not in the picture, then something or someone
else will rise to the position of ultimate authority. If there is no God above
Caesar, then how do we keep Caesar from declaring himself god? Not only
so, but because as god he answers to no one, this means there is no such
thing as ethics. ere is no authority over him to which he must defer. And
if that is the case, then everybody under him must defer to him—and he
could well be an erratic or ill-tempered or insane god with bad digestion.
And does anybody really want a god with a bad temper who is capable of
getting toothaches or migraines?
So it is not surprising that they abuse language to hide the coercive
nature of their project. And one of their signature moves is to turn the
tables on anyone who identies and objects to their coercions. It is
“coercive” to identify what they are doing. It hurts their feelings. Well,
tough.
I am going to appeal to Girard here, but I need to say at the outset that
Girard tries to throw all his valuable insights away by refusing to embrace
the propitiatory nature of Christ’s sacrice. But even though he tries to
throw those insights away, I will not do so.
One of the things that Girard noticed about the Scriptures, not to
mention human history, is that oppression is always respectable, and that
the victim who protests that oppression is not respectable. He is told to
shut up. Persecutors always feel persecuted. e oppressor feels oppressed
and is highly indignant when the victim won’t shut up. When the victim
writes a psalm of lament, he is not playing the dutiful role that he was
assigned. e victim is therefore the troublemaker and must be dealt with.
One time Jesus told His interlocutors that they were trying to kill Him.
ey said He was nuts: “Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you
keepeth the law? Why go ye about to kill me? e people answered and said,
ou hast a devil: who goeth about to kill thee?” (John 7:19–20).
Jesus knew the play that was being run on Him, and the people running
the play did not know.
It is the same kind of thing here. Liberals want to stay respectable. is is
why their threats are couched in the interrogative. Let’s “ask” everybody to
do this and haul them of if they don’t. ey want to draw a veil over their
bloody and violent ways. If anyone pulls the veil back, then he is the
troublemaker. Such a man is—to borrow the words of Ahab—a troubler of
Israel (1 Kings 18:17).
Wanting to leave people to their lawful pursuits is not coercive. And
neither is it coercive to identify those who will not—for love or money—
leave them alone.
One of our diculties is that conservatives confound the rule of law, which
we want to ght for, with the orderliness of process, which is oten used to
distort and overturn the very meaning of righteousness. Many times we are
outmaneuvered because we think we have an obligation to play by their
rules all the time, even though their rules are ungodly. Believers should
care about righteousness and let the bureaucrats care about their processes.
Remember that, right ater having committed the crime of all crimes, the
murder of the Christ, when Judas came back and returned the thirty pieces
of silver, these orderly process-mongers were very concerned about what
account they put the money into. ey didn’t want to get dinged in the next
audit. Ethics are so important.
Private persons should not be coerced into approval of what they know to
be sin—that is where liberty of conscience applies. Assuming that
something can be sinful without being criminal, a free citizen should have
the right to disassociate himself from it, to not approve of it. But the public
magistrate does not have liberty of conscience in this same way. e
magistrate is God’s deacon, God’s servant, and is solemnly charged by God to
reward the righteous and punish the wrongdoer (Rom. 13:1–4). is cannot
be confounded with rewarding the wicked and punishing the righteous.
at would be to frame mischief with a law (Ps. 94:20). And when the
foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do (Ps. 11:3)?
In A Man for All Seasons, omas More is portrayed as saying that you
should not waive the law in order to get at the devil, for when you have
done so, you nd that you have no way to stand when he turns on you.
More is talking about the importance of the rule of law, even when you
desire to prosecute the devil. How do you prosecute the devil, in other
words, without turning into the devil?
But this is quite diferent than standing by silently as you give the devil
leave to write the laws, and to amend the laws as he pleases. I am with
More if we are talking about honoring man-made laws, even if the
defendant is the devil himself. But suppose the devil is the prosecutor. Now
what?
omas More was talking about men who wanted to dispense with the
rules of justice in order to achieve their idea of a “higher justice.” If the
culprit is known by us to be guilty, then why bother with trials and
evidence? Why bother with hearing from both sides? We already are
convinced in our own minds of the answer, and so let us proceed directly to
the sentencing. is is the demented logic of lynch mobs, a subject I latter
myself as knowing something about.
ere I was, I will tell my great-grandchildren, sitting on a skittish horse,
hands behind my back, rope around my neck, and a learned academic voice
called out from the crowd, “Ya! What does someone like you know about
Girard?”
If there is one thing that Christians need to learn more about in this
“click to convict” era, it is the importance of due process, presumption of
innocence, hearing both sides argued, and so on.
And, with More, I would want to follow all these principles though the
indicted man were the devil himself. But if the devil is the prosecutor, and
has swathed himself in a multitude of wicked laws, you can be assured that
none of them will protect anyone’s rights. e devil is an accuser, and he
detests anything that might slow his accusations down.
So what I outlined above—presumption of innocence, due process, and
others like them, like the right to face your accuser—are what More would
call man-made laws. But they are man-made methods for implementing
biblical principles. ey are instituted in a fallen world, which means that
they might have the result of allowing a very guilty person to get of. But
better that, More argues, than to insist on hanging a guilty man, but at the
expense of mowing down all the laws that protect a hundred innocent men.
So we must never mow down the law to get at the devil. But not
everything that is called a law is in fact a law in this older sense. Depending
on the state, our current “law” allows for the dismemberment of little
children, and that by the million. Our law does prohibit selling the pieces of
these children, requiring instead that the children be thrown in a
dumpster. Let us call it a dignity dumpster. at kind of law is protecting no
one. at kind of law is what sixty million of our people needed protection
from. Moreover, when the law prohibiting the sale of baby parts is openly
violated, our lawless rulers not only refused to prosecute, they openly
refused to cease subsidizing the practice. So our laws on this subject are
not laws that, if removed, would allow the devil to turn on us. ese laws
are the devil turning on us.
And the laws of matrimony are not currently being upheld by our rulers,
and merely extended to people who happen to be a little more creative with
their sex organs. No, the goal is the abolition of marriage. ese laws are
not mildly adjusted marriage laws. ey are laws that will have the efect,
in the very near future, of nullifying and/or outlawing marriage. ese
current laws are not standing between us and the devil. ese laws are the
devil.
So then, in answer to an inaccurate application of More’s principles to
the resistance of lesser magistrates, we are not trying to mow down the law
to get at the devil. e devil is mowing down the laws of many centuries in
order to get at us.
And still the majority of Christians believe that they have a duty to stand
by and watch it happen.
1.. C.S. Lewis, e Abolition of Man (1944; New York: HarperCollins, 1974), 1.
CHAPTER 4
Jesus Mobs
A NUMBER OF YOU HAVE BEEN LANGUISHING OUT THERE FOR A WH
sermons from a man who, if he had been a character in e Pilgrim’s
Progress, would have been the Rev. Rabbitheart. But for the incoming
troublous times, you need something a little more bracing than that. You
might be in the position of an ancient Persian who surmised that the king
and Haman were playing drinking challenge games again: “And the king
and Haman sat down to drink; but the city Shushan was perplexed” (Esther
3:15).
Given that America is lling up with competing mobs now, one of the
things that believing Christians ought to do is go back to the Scriptures to
see what we can learn about mobs. ere is a great deal there, actually, and
if we pay the right kind of attention, we can prot more than a little bit.
When the Messiah was born into rst-century Israel, He was born into a
room full of fumes, ready to go of. It was politically volatile, and
complicated, but it was also a complexity that could be reduced to two basic
groups—those who had been baptized by John and those who had refused
it.
So before we get to that reduction, we have to take a number of other
factions into account. at way we know what we are reducing to their
version of red state and blue state. ere were the Sadducees, well
connected to the aristocracy that controlled the Temple. ey were
theologically liberal but quite conservative when it came to their own
vested interests. ere were the Herodians, whose connections were to the
political elite, and who had a deep investment in what Rome was seeking to
maintain. e Pharisees were a lay renewal movement, highly respected
among the people, at least until Jesus got done with them. ere were
about 6,000 Pharisees in Israel at this time. ey were largely merchants
who had made enough money to be able to retire to a life of personal
devotion, their goal being to get the average Israelite to live up to the
holiness standards that the Torah required of priests.
Let us (temporarily) exclude from this political roster the immediate
followers of Christ—His twelve disciples, other extras, and the women in
His entourage, but I am not excluding the crowds who loved Him, and who
were not far from the kingdom. is was yet another group. ink of the
massive crowds who welcomed Him during His Triumphal Entry. And as I
never tire of saying, there is absolutely no reason for identifying this crowd
with the mob that was yelling crucify Him a few days later. Jerusalem was
big enough, and complicated enough, to have rival mobs.
But there is another group, almost always overlooked, a bit more surly and
anti-establishment but still clearly in the pro-John-the-Baptist, pro-Jesus
camp. is was a group of signicant size that was hostile to the
establishment that was hostile to Jesus. And by this I mean that they were
seriously hostile, and at life-threatening levels. ey were “on the Lord’s
side” but had not really internalized all that Sermon-on-the-Mount stuf.
e Lord once rebuked a few of His disciples for not knowing what spirit
they were of (Luke 9:55), but it should be pointed out that there was quite a
large group out there who t in the same category.
Let me introduce you to the Jesus mobs, and please bear with the
repetition.
Jesus once asked His adversaries what they thought of John the Baptist.
Remember what I said earlier about John the Baptist as a real dividing line.
And they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven; he will say, Why
then believed ye him not? But and if we say, Of men; all the people will stone us: for they be
persuaded that John was a prophet. (Luke 20:5–6, emphasis added)
Jesus had cornered them by asking a question that forced them to choose
between their own actions and the hostile reactions of a very hostile crowd.
All the people will stone us. A few verses down from this, we see that the
Jerusalem elites were plotting against Jesus, and they thought they needed
to deal with Him secretly because why? Because they were afraid of the
people. Jesus was really popular with a lot of people who did not really grasp
the implications of what Christ had come to do: “And the chief priests and
the scribes the same hour sought to lay hands on him; and they feared the
people: for they perceived that he had spoken this parable against them”
(Luke 20:19, emphasis added).
e gospel writers tell us this over and over. Two chapters later, the same
thing is repeated: “And the chief priests and scribes sought how they might
kill him; for they feared the people” (Luke 22:2, emphasis added).
In the gospel of Mark, the same thing is mentioned and emphasized.
And the scribes and chief priests heard it, and sought how they might destroy him: for they
feared him, because all the people was astonished at his doctrine.... But if we shall say, Of
men; they feared the people: for all men counted John, that he was a prophet indeed. (Mark
11:18, 32, emphasis added)
And in the next chapter of Mark, we see the same thing repeated: “And
they sought to lay hold on him, but feared the people: for they knew that he
had spoken the parable against them: and they let him, and went their
way” (Mark 12:12, emphasis added).
And this same pattern does not disappear ater the Lord ascended into
Heaven. Not at all. When ocials went to detain some apostles, they
handled them quite gingerly. And why? Because they feared for their lives.
“en went the captain with the ocers, and brought them without
violence: for they feared the people, lest they should have been stoned” (Acts
5:26, emphasis added).
Now can we all agree that these crowds, as warmly afectionate toward
John the Baptist as they might have been, and as doggedly committed to
the honor of the rabbi Jesus as they were, were people who had not taken
on board the full import of what the Scriptures required of them? I mean,
had you gone to one of their rallies, who knows what kind of lags might
have been there? And did their presence in the mix in any way discredit
what Jesus was up to? Not even a little bit.
Did Andrew or Bartholomew ever need to feel a little sheepish and urge
the Lord to issue a press release immediately to “denounce these
unconscionable threats of violence”? Is there any hint of any of any weepy
tweets from any of the Twelve, agonizing over how these Jesus mobs—
ready to pick up stones, mind you—were making their BLM-friendly
acquaintances feel?
No, the Lord knew of this group’s cluelessness. He understood their
cluelessness. He even used their cluelessness in His debates with that other
form of cluelessness, the respectable kind. e kind that is always the last to
know. But He never apologized for their cluelessness.
And the Lord spake unto them, saying, “I have recently been informed that the chief priests
have been receiving credible threats against their lives, and I wanted to hasten to apologize
for any forms of violence that are being justied in my name. I would refer you to our most
recent press release.”
And just because we live in demented times, I need to remind you that I
am not saying that Jesus said that. I am maintaining that He didn’t say that.
So in this powder keg called Jerusalem, what did Jesus do? Did Jesus come
in to pour soothing oil on troubled waters? No, He went into the Temple, for
crying out loud, and started lipping over tables.
I wonder if the respectable kind of clueless, the kind that is always the
last to know, would have categorized the cleansing of the Temple and the
storming of the Capitol as the same kind of thing. Actually I don’t wonder
at all. We call it the cleansing of the Temple, of course, because it is
thousands of years in the past, and we read a bronze plaque about it in the
Museum of Heroic Bygone Deeds. What would we call it if it had happened
last week? Vandalism? Performance art? Prophecy without a permit?
And at this point someone is going to begin to bluster hard, and say, “You
mean to say that you don’t know the diference between Jesus and Viking
Man?” And my reply is, “No, no, I am saying that you are the one who can’t
tell the diference. You are the head curator of Tombs of the Prophets
Museum, and you are the one, if Jesus were here today, who would be
demanding that He apologize for what Viking Man did.” And Russell Moore
would come out from the back ranks of the disciples and try to apologize
for it, and then Jesus would shush him.
How do I know that you would demand that Jesus apologize for Viking
Man? I mean, Jesus had nothing to do with it. Right. And neither did we,
but you are demanding that we apologize for it.
Given the events of the last few years, there are more than a few
disheartened secular conservatives out there. ey see the radical let
growing in strength and inluence, and they know that unless it is
somehow (miraculously) stopped, their beloved America is done for. ey
see the squishy Republican establishment and wonder if they would ever be
willing to ght for anything. ey see the sot evangelical “culturally
engaged” center lusting ater the respect of the world, and willing to lick
dirt to get it. As an aside, licking dirt is not a great strategy for gaining
respect. ey see the teeming crowds that Trump attracted, like sheep
without a shepherd, and they wish that energy could be led but still don’t
want anything to do with it.
To those who are in that position, I simply want to invite you to come to
Christ. Call upon Him and ask Him to bring you to the Father. We can have
no salvation without a Savior, no word without the Word, no transcendent
anchor without a Lord. And I want to ask you to consider Christ, not only
as the Lord of your life, but also as the Lord of our public square.
e alternative is militant atheism in the public square, and by militant
atheism I do not mean mild agnosticism. I mean the savage gods of
militant atheism. And if you have begun to wonder, as you ought to have
done, how “all this” could have happened in America, the answer is that we
turned our backs on Christ. Because you have not trusted in Christ, the one
who is Lord of all, you are part of the general apostasy, which means you
are part of the problem. e let wants the apostasy and lusts ater the
consequences of the apostasy. e secular right wants the apostasy but
doesn’t really like the consequences. But America, like the prodigal son
staring at an empty wallet, is now reckoning with the fact that the
consequences have arrived regardless. So as part of your repentance, you
need to acknowledge to the Father that secular conservatism conserves nothing.
Come to Christ, and do it now. He will receive and forgive you. We are
fast approaching the point where real churches will be the only real
resistance. Find and join one.
But not all churches are healthy. Don’t join a diseased one.
ere are two kinds of syncretism we must deal with. One of them is
fairly obvious, at least to those outside the evangelical world of Trump
Love. If you have a lag with Jesus on it, and Jesus is wearing a MAGA hat,
then you fall into this category, and you need to put away your grotesque
idols. You need to topple these small deities of an Americana amalgam. If
your church year revolves around the Fourth of July, then this is your
religion, which means that it is your damnation.
e other kind of syncretism looks at what I just wrote and mutters,
“He’s just saying that. He’s just ticking the box. He’s just ‘yes butting.’” is
is because the other kind of syncretism needs to be able to relegate
principled Christian conservatism, which really is out there, and alive and well
here in the pages of this book, to some category that can be easily
dismissed by them, so they don’t have to feel bad about their grotesque
compromises. I won’t itemize all their compromises, or give you a name for
their overall project—but it rhymes with joke.
If in the name of racial reconciliation, you gave the old evangelical sot
soap to the BLM riots, then apart from true repentance, you are on your
way to Hell. I am tempted to say this because the people with their
blasphemous Trump lags could use the company, but there is actually no
such thing as “company” in the outer darkness. Still, it is all the same
direction—a long, slow spiral into the abyss with no bottom.
Christian cultural engagement means “Jesus, Lord over everything in the
world.” It does not mean “Jesus and anything the world might be saying just
now.”
Our cultural and political situation is a rocky and desolate moonscape.
ere are multiple groups and factions out here. ere is a general clamor
and a babble of voices. Some of them, faithful voices, believe that God has
promised us that the moonscape will be restored to Eden again. e trees
will be on both sides of the river, and the leaves will be for the healing of the
nations (Rev. 22:2). It is possible for people who understand this, who do
not trust in politics or in Trump, to see that the progressives are the
current screaming threat to civic stability. And when the progressives by
their tyrannies provoke various carnal reactions elsewhere, which they will
continue to do, I am resolved not to feel apologetic over those reactions.
Not even a little bit.
I am not one of the Twelve, or part of the Lord’s inner circle. But I am one
of those who lined the streets of Jerusalem, shouting Hosanna so many
times I could scarcely talk the next day. And I was in the crowd listening
that one time when the Lord asked those Temple johnnies, the
ecclesiastical fat cats, whether the baptism of John was from Heaven or
not. ey twisted in the wind for about ve minutes on that one, let me tell
you! If they said that it was from Heaven, then He was going to follow up
with, “Why didn’t you get baptized by him then?” And if they said it was
from men, then they were afraid of “getting kilt” by that surly lot just across
from us—not our people, but, you know. ose guys.
In our day-to-day Christian walk, we all have to guard against double
standards. It is a temptation that all of us are prone to. We must never
attempt eye surgery on our brother, trying to get the speck out, when we
have a beam in our own eye (Matt. 7:3–5). When we come to correct a
brother, we have to remember ourselves, and consider ourselves, lest we
also be tempted (Gal. 6:1). is should be part of ordinary Christian living.
Do not expect others to cut you slack while at the same time cutting no
slack for others. is is basic. Golden Rule. is is the law and the prophets.
We are not dealing with ordinary, life-in-the-village-level double
standards. We are not even dealing with egregious double standards, as
when those men were going to stone a woman for adultery (John 8:5) when
they all were compromised by that same sin (John 8:9). ey had enough
remaining decency to feel ashamed and to tiptoe away. So I am not here
discussing venial double standards, and not even talking about grotesque
double standards.
No, what we are dealing with is double standards embraced openly,
eagerly, relentlessly, lagrantly, and insolently, along with an impudent
look that says we dare you to say anything about it. at is what the handlers of
the let are orchestrating, and they know exactly what they are doing. is
is what I mean by the weaponization of double standards. “If any of you
shiny establishment Christians take any note of what we are doing out here
in the noonday sun, we will promptly call you Trump-loving racists, and
then where will you be? You misogynists.”
e double standards are on display, on purpose. We are not discovering
their double standards, as though they had been trying to hide them. ey
have been beating us over the head with their double standards for quite a
while now, and they have been doing this because they want us to see what
they are doing and yet pretend as though we somehow didn’t.
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist
societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to
persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it
corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are
being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies
themselves, they lost once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to
co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist
anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to
control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same efect and is intended
to.1
And this is being done in a such a way that the double standards involved
have been ramped up to a point where they cannot be missed, kind of like
those words that I just put in all caps. ey are unmistakable. And this is
how we nd out who the cowards are. e cowards are those who will not
say what everybody sees and knows. e purpose of the glaring double
standards is therefore to humiliate, and the deploying of these double
standards is intentional.
But if we understand the biblical teaching about the Jesus mobs, we
won’t care about their double standards anymore. And that means the trick
will no longer work.
So all this is not happening because those conducting these continent-wide
psych-ops are stupid or blind. No, it is being done so that pretend
conservatives and pretend Christians will agree to act as though they were
the stupid and blind ones. And many of them do it. Remember, the
purpose is to humiliate.
It is as though a villain from a vintage western came up to one of our
respectable guys, told him to dance, and started shooting at his feet. Later,
when the humiliating and unfortunate incident was over, we tried to
encourage that guy, because he was supposed to be our guy ater all, and he
said, “Oh, no. at’s not it at all. Dance is very much part of our western
cultural tradition, and we evangelicals have neglected it for far too long. I
made sure to thank that gentleman for reminding me, in his rather direct
way, of this important facet of our very imperfect heritage.”
Few spectacles are sadder than all those soi-disant responsible Christians,
the ones who have been chiding and rebuking me for years over my strictly
Pauline views of slavery. Neither have they appreciated my understanding
of what actually resulted from the War between the States. eir version of
their concern is that I have been needlessly opening the Church up to
unhelpful charges of racccciiiisssm. But you know what will actually
condemn every last Christian as a vile and incorrigible racist? Just ten more
birthdays, that’s all.
e game that is being run on you people is plain and obvious, and you
still refuse to see it. May the good Lord hasten the day when He gives you
back your eyes.
So let us say that the Proud Boys do something that both you and your wife
found to be less than enchanting. Not what you would have done. You did
not do cartwheels when you heard about it. Should you feel terrible about
your complicity? No. Why should you? You are not complicit.
We have to deal with these crowds, surging back and forth all around us.
We might agree with something they do, we might be appalled by
something else they do. We might debate with some of them, try to teach
some of them, and call the cops on others. But we need not feel bad if we
are right there in the middle of these tumultuous times, and we are
actually part of a complicated Venn diagram. We need not feel bad about it,
because we worship Almighty God on a weekly basis, in the name of Jesus
Christ, and that is where our identity is.
As you do your level best before God to provide for and protect your
family, you might nd yourself in odd company sometimes. If you join a
refugee column leeing some deep blue weird diversity, it is quite possible
that there is a crank conspiracy theorist somewhere else in that same
refugee column. Should you feel bad about it? Crawl back to the people who
made the refugee column necessary in order to seek their absolution and
forgiveness? Not if you are a free man or free woman in Christ. I say this
because the terms “man” and “woman” are terms that we have retained in
our faith tradition, continuing to use them down to this day.
Jesus dealt with the crowds, in an ongoing way, and some of the crowds
He dealt with were pretty dense. But we are followers of Christ, and the one
thing He did not do with crowds is entrust Himself to them. So neither
shall we.
Now when he was in Jerusalem at the passover, in the feast day, many believed in his name,
when they saw the miracles which he did. But Jesus did not commit himself unto them,
because he knew all men, And needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what
was in man. (John 2:23–25)
And this is why we need to follow Christ, Christ above all. ere is only one
kind of deant joy in the world that can successfully stand up to this kind
of godless pressure. ere is only one path for defying the screechers—
without becoming a screecher yourself. at path is Christ, the one who
has risen from the dead. And He rose from the dead in the same place
where they crucied Him, which is to say, in the public square.
Remember: the reason Christians still own the public square is because
Jesus rose from the dead in it. I know that the militant secularists despise
this truth, but truth it is, and they should have thought of those objections
before they crucied Him there.
And they somehow think that they can do something about that
foundational and drastic mistake of theirs (1 Cor. 2:6–8) by dragging real
believers out there and doing the same thing to them. Go right ahead. is
is how Christ conquered the West the rst time, and this is how He will do
it again. Supplementing the blood of Abel will do nothing to silence the
cries. When those guys start up with their pogroms targeting anyone who
believes in a transcendent reality beyond the reach of their shaking sts,
conservatives will start doing what they should have been doing all along—
which is to say, going to church. Real ones, the kind that refuse to get a
permit.
In the meantime, the Rev. Rabbitheart will have moved on, and now has
a job with HR at Amazon, so you won’t be able to try his church out. Just as
well though.
Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died.
Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of
the grave.2
Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the
mountains might low down at thy presence, as when the melting re burneth, the re
causeth the waters to boil, to make thy name known to thine adversaries, that the nations
may tremble at thy presence! (Isa. 64:1–2)
PART TWO
Mere Christendom
CHAPTER 5
What Is Mere Christendom?
SO WHAT DO I MEAN BY MERE CHRISTENDOM EXACTLY?
I mean a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic
acknowledgment of the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and the fundamental
truth of the Apostles’ Creed. I mean a public and formal recognition of the
authority of Jesus Christ that repudiates the principles of secularism, and
that avoids both hard sectarianism and easy latitudinarianism both. Easier
said than done, but there it is. at is what we have to do, and we have to
do it because secularism has run its course and does not have the
wherewithal to resist the demands of radical Islam. Or a radical anything
else, for that matter.
It is possible to argue for this without supporting an “established
church,” which—in the form of tax revenues—I do not support. But in
order for this to happen at all, the Church must be established, in the sense
that the magistrate has the responsibility to recognize her, to convene
synods and councils to seek her counsel, and to listen to her. e
magistrate himself has the responsibility, as a public gure, in the
discharge of his oce, to believe in Jesus, Lord of Heaven and earth.
As we proceed, remember that we must always hold on to the truth
represented by “not whether, but which.” It is not whether we will be
governed by Christ, but rather which christ we will be governed by. e
Lordship of Christ is not an option that we might select from a row of
numerous options. It is Christ or chaos. It is Christ or Antichrist.
A word “God” that encompasses both the deity of Mormonism, who used to
be a man just like us, and the triune Creator of Heaven and earth,
worshiped by orthodox Christians, is for all intents and purposes a
worthless word. It is a thin word, not a thick one.
Salvation for nations is religious, and it needs to be religiously thick. We
cannot be saved by a thin religion. We cannot be saved by a religion the
theological denitions of which will not stand up under ve minutes of
questioning. Etiolated faithy-words have no saving power. Why would
they?
And, as it turns out, this problem goes back to John Adams. He rightly
held that our republic was founded on “reason, morality, and the Christian
religion” without “the monkery of priests.” But though this was correct,
Adams himself was beginning to move toward Unitarianism, the
granddaddy of all the errors of American civic religion. Adams said that
Christianity was necessary, at the very moment he was driting out of it.
But we need Jesus Christ, the only-begotten of the Father, raised for our
justication, and we most certainly do not need a Generic Fomenter of
Uplit in the Sky.
e mistake we made was this. If we want and need a “mere
Christendom,” then we need to keep that Christendom from becoming
sectarian. at’s one thing. But when you pour a diluting agent into your
theology willy nilly, unless you take care, the dilution will afect the
essential aspects of the Christian faith, like the death and resurrection of
Jesus, and not just the relative unimportance of the debate between
supralapsarians and infralapsarians.
Mere Christendom needs to be thin when it comes to the diferences
between Lutherans and Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists, and so on.
But it needs to manage to do this without thinning out the contents of the
Apostles’ Creed. It needs to be thick there.
Jesus is Lord. I have been arguing for years now that what is required is a
return to Christendom, but in a form that I call mere Christendom. If you
like, you can call it mere fundamentalism. A free civilization is necessarily
larger than any of the Christian denominations within it, but at the same
time a free civilization will have to be Christian. So I propose no single
established church, no tax-supported denominations, but I do propose the
formal adoption of the Apostles’ Creed, and without any hermeneutical
funny business. I propose that as a nation we formally confess together
that Jesus actually did rise from the dead. If you protest that this would kill
the great secular experiment that is America, I would reply that the great
secular experiment that is America appears to have already gone out
behind the barn and shot itself already.
e libertarian aspect of this insists that most of our practical problems
can be addressed through repealing laws and abolishing agencies. When
most people hear about a “theocratic” anything, they assume they will soon
be confronted with ayatollah-manned death panels. But all societies are
theocratic, with the only thing distinguishing them being the nature and
attributes of the reigning theos. Since our current theos happens to be a
bloodthirsty maniac, and because I am not a devotee of that particular
religion, I would urge my fellow citizens to turn away from him and turn to
our heavenly Father.
e rst thing that would happen in a biblical law order is that the EPA,
the IRS, the Department of Education, etc. would all be abolished.
Legitimate functions of government (Defense, State, etc.) would be
signicantly downsized or redirected.
e positive laws I would like to see enacted would be in the area of
constitutional process and reform. e kind of government we are
currently abused by is precisely the kind of government that our
Constitution was originally drated to prevent. Consequently I would like
to see reform primarily undertaken through “process” laws instead of
“content” laws. By this I mean laws of process restraining our rulers, and
not any new laws governing the peons.
A good example would be term limits, or a law requiring “none of the
above” on every ballot, such that if “none of the above” wins, a new election
with new candidates be scheduled. e goal should be to have a
government that stays within its appointed bounds. e goal should be to
keep the termites out of the woodwork.
A formal recognition of the Lordship of Jesus is necessary but not
sucient. More is required than paper commitments. All true
constitutions arise from the people, and genuine allegiance to Christ is not
going to happen unless there is a reformation and revival. In order for any
of this to work, we must have countless preachers of the gospel, faithfully
declaring the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. e role of the
government here is to stay out of the way, allowing such preachers free
access to the people, and thereby encouraging them to have at it. If you
don’t give a heck about the man with the Bible in his hand, as the Staple
Singers taught us, just “get out the way and let the gentleman do his thing.”
ere is a straight line blessing that runs from free grace to free men, and
from free men to free markets.
Culture wars should be fought in the culture, not in the courts. One of
the central reasons for having a constitutionally limited government is so
that one cultural faction does not get to cheat, using the force of law to
skew the outcomes in their favor. Since law is coercive by denition, the
areas in which coercion is allowed should be radically limited. e law
should protect life, liberty, and property. Ater that, the alternative visions
for truth, goodness, and beauty may freely compete. Using their own
money, voluntarily donated, the secularists and atheists may build their
own schools, write poems and novels, produce plays and movies, build
cathedrals, compose concertos, and so on.
But it will not have escaped your notice that such free competition is a
Christian value, and by limiting government in this way we have already
decided what is the best way for everyone. ere is no neutrality. So I don’t
want liberty for secularists because secularism is true—it isn’t. Secularism
is an opium dream, complete with lashing eyes and loating hair. I want
liberty for secularists because Jesus is Lord. Because Jesus is Lord, the right
of fallen sinners to wield coercive power must be strictly limited. One of
the toughest lessons for sinners to learn is the necessity of leaving other
sinners alone. When we do not leave them alone—in cases of rape and
murder, for example—we have express warrant from God to do so. We do
not have express warrant from God to make secularists confess something
they don’t believe.
Biblical masculinity is cultural gluten. Without it, the cookie just crumbles
to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that. Or someone at the
organic equivalent of DuPont comes up with an articial bonding agent
that either doesn’t work or turns the cookie into an all-natural shower tile.
What are we to say of those Christian leaders who are masculine enough
to want to be in leadership, but not biblically masculine enough to accept
the assigned sacrices that go with it? One of the central sacrices is this—
one who assumes authority in the kingdom must be willing to be the
drudge servant of the others (Matt. 23:11–12). But ater three years with
Jesus, the disciples got into a quarrel on the road to Jerusalem about who
would be the greatest (Mark 9:33). Ater three years with Jesus, the disciples
were disputing among themselves at the Last Supper about who would be
large and in charge (Luke 22:24). Does anybody honestly think that the
leadership of the North American evangelical church is free of this
temptation that repeatedly snared the disciples?
I am fond of quoting Chesterton’s great observation that the one taste of
paradise on earth is to ght in a losing cause, and then not lose it. at
prospect is before us now. But where do we go to ght? Where is the center
of the ght? ere are various aspects to this question, but one of the more
obvious is that in order to be the center of the ght, there has to be
ghting. As the fellow once said, this ain’t beanbag.
Without Christ, nothing holds together (Col. 1:17–18). But in order to be
an active part of His kind of bonding, leaders have to be more than
hirelings (John 10:12). ey have to be gits from Christ to His people, and
in order to be complete gits from Him, they need to be more like Him. But
we need to be done with leaders who want to be like Jesus, only not so
bloody.
When that gracious git is nally given, then God will raise up leaders
who can look at the chaos of our battleeld and see a straight-line path to
victory. If God does not give it, then our particular cause is lost, and see
you in the resurrection. We can look at all the game lm then—and we will
be able to handle that because there will be no tears there (Rev. 21:4).
Whatever the case, we are well past the point of being able to save
ourselves. We have to quit pretending.
As Tozer once put it, if revival means more of what we have now, we most
certainly do not need revival.
One of the more notable features of the life of our Lord, as recorded in
Scripture, is the fact that references to the outside world are
overwhelmingly political. When Jesus was born, Augustus was Caesar
(Luke 2:1) and Quirinius was governor of Syria (Luke 2:2). Herod the Great
was ruler in Judea (Luke 1:5) and wielded his power to the grief of many
mothers in Bethlehem. Tiberius was Caesar when John the Baptist began
his ministry (Luke 3:1–2), and Luke includes a number of interesting names
when he dates the arrival of the forerunner of the Messiah. Tiberius was
still emperor when Jesus died, and this political orientation is sealed by the
fact that Pontius Pilate was included in the Apostles’ Creed.
e New Testament is silent when it comes to the other outside
celebrities. We are told very little about their poets, their actors, their
singers. We know little of their architects from the pages of the New
Testament, even though they had magnicent architects. No, Scripture
focuses on the political rulers, and this is because it is where the
fundamental challenge was mounted.
If we may speak so, Herod was a prophetic unbeliever, a man of despotic
insight. He learned from the magi that a king was born among the Jews
and consulted with his scribes on the assumption that this was the Christ
(Matt. 2:1–2). e magi simply saw a king—a scepter would arise in Israel,
and a star would rise in Jacob (Num. 24:17). ey took the revelation they
had been given with simple delight and brought treasures to the young
king. But Herod, the moment he heard of it, knew that he was dealing with
a rival, and he acted accordingly.
He was wrong in the side he chose, but he was not wrong in the facts of
the case. Jesus saw Himself as a rival to the world’s way of running things.
He would not receive the kingdoms of the earth from the devil’s hand, and
He refused because He intended to be Messiah the Prince, the Prince of His
Father, and not the prince of the dark archon. And He was a rival to every
form of ungodly rule from the rst moment He took breath. ough we call
it a silent night, this suckling child was actually the deafening shout of
God’s deance. e principalities and powers, the thrones and
dominations, were all going to come to nothing.
And so He was born in our midst, Immanuel, God with us, the one who
was to become King of all kings, and Lord of all lords.
When Jesus assumed human nature, He did so rst as a single cell. e
eternal Word of the eternal Father, the one who spoke the heavens and
earth into existence, took on a body that was the size of the period at the
end of this sentence. His intent was to redeem every aspect of human
existence, and so He did it by assuming it all. He was a baby, a toddler, a
young boy, a teenager, and a man. He did all this as a way of receiving us
back into fellowship with Him. He was redeeming what He was taking on.
He was taking on human nature, and so it was that He was redeeming
human nature. When He saves us, He receives us. But as a result, when He
saves us, we receive Him. And when we receive what He assumed to
Himself, which was a mortal body, we are in fact receiving a cosmos
remade. ere is no way to receive the child in the manger without
receiving what that child was given, which is all rule and authority,
dominion and power, world without end.
is leaves us with a choice. If we receive Him, we are also receiving what
He received. When we welcome this child, we of necessity must welcome
the children. ere is no way to welcome the Lord without also welcoming
His dominion.
And this is why the perennial, constant choice is always between Christ
and Herod. Either the children are brought to Christ so that He might bless
them, or soldiers go out from Herod so that they might slay them. It is
either the blood of Christ, redeeming the children of men, or it is the blood
of the children of men, polluting the thrones of men. ere is no other way,
no other option. If you will not have Christ-sons for rulers, then you have
made your choice—you will have the Herod-apes for rulers.
Whenever we talk about the “true meaning of Christmas,” we must
always keep this truth immediately before us. e central Christian
message has always been that Jesus is Lord. We celebrate His birth because
He was born among us in order to become Lord. Now that He has been
established in that rule, we can commemorate His birth because we also
remember to commemorate His coronation. Without the Ascension,
Christmas is nothing.
Our civilization has made this choice, in an appalling direction, toward
the abyss of a bottomless damnation. Like ancient Carthage, we pretend to
ground our liberties on the blood sacrice of living children.
And so we Christians repurpose the repeated message of Cato the Elder:
the true message of Christmas is Carthago delenda est—Carthage must be
destroyed.
But remember where we began. is will not happen to nameless
functionaries and bureaucrats. Christ is born, the angels sing, the
shepherds became the rst evangelists, the magi came and worshiped. A
particular king named Herod felt the presence of a rival and marshaled his
forces. ose forces are still present in the world today, and they are
ordered about by men and women with names. We still have a large portion
of our task before us—the nations of men must still be discipled. But until
they are, we declare the Christian message, the Christmas message, to men
with faces and names.
We know the names of Jesus and His enemies. We do not know the
names of the magi. ey submitted and bowed low, and so their names will
wait until the resurrection to be declared.
Until then we declare the name of the one raised in the great
resurrection, the only resurrection ever to happen in the middle of history,
and because we name the name of the risen Jesus, we are simultaneously
declaring a victory and defeat. e kingdoms of this world have become the
kingdoms of our God and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and
ever. at is the victory. e names of all who hate and oppose Him will fall
and be forgotten forever. at is their ignominious defeat. I could name
thousands of such, from every political faction, but will content myself
with only one proper name—these are all represented by their covenant
head, Joe Biden. He, and the way of governance he represents, is necessarily
stained with the blood of children. e only alternative is to be cleansed
with the blood of the Child.
erefore, the message of Christmas is that we are saved by the blood of
the Child, and never by the blood of children. And if we are saved by the
blood of the Child, it then becomes possible (and necessary) for our
children to be saved, together with the rest of us.
CHAPTER 6
A Brief Scattershot Primer on
Christian Nationalism
WE SHOULD BEGIN WITH THE RECOGNITION THAT NAMING IS W
cultural collision, each group wants to name the other one, and each group
wants to prevent the other group from taking that name and turning it
around to be used in a less pejorative sense, or even in a positive sense.
Methodist and Puritan were originally names that were taunts from outside
those communities, but were soon enough rendered innocuous. In our day,
the mud-gobbing that calls conservative Christians names like white
supremacist, or theo-fascist, or religious extremist is so overdone that it is easily
answered and then dismissed. Some are so out there that they can simply
be answered with a cheerful roll of the eyes. But another taunt they are now
using—Christian nationalist—can be easily caught and thrown right back
to them. I am a Christian, and I do love my nation. Now what?
I am a Christian, and I am not a globalist. I am a Christian, and I am not a
tribalist. I am a Christian, and I have to live somewhere. What shall we call
that?
Understood rightly, Christian nationalism relates to mere Christendom the
same way that a brick relates to a brick wall. It relates to mere Christendom
the same way that an egg relates to an omelet. It relates the same way that
diferent colored yarns relate to the sweater.
e one possible toxin in the phrase Christian nationalism is found in that
pesky sux –ism. As the fellow said, beware all isms except for prisms.
Christian conservatives are hostile to ideologies, and “Christian
nationalism” can be made to function in such a troublesome ideological
way. But if we take care to dene our terms and guard our hearts against
the poison of party spirit, we should be all right.
But those on the right who gladly welcome sobriquets like Christian
nationalist, but who then receive it like it was the very latest blasphemous
selection from the fruit-of-the-month club, with all the cherries, my only
word to them is that they should repent and knock it of. Just a word.
Driving your pick-up around town with that huge Trump lag lapping on
one side and the Let’s Go Brandon in the original Greek waving on the
other... isn’t helping anything.
A Christian nation should never be mistaken as being the same thing as a
chosen nation. ere is no exceptionalism in it. In the Old Testament era,
Israel was God’s chosen nation, and the other nations were not. But in the
era of the new covenant, the commandment that Christ let for us meant
that we were to disciple all the nations. e rst Christian nation (which
was probably Armenia) was not an only child. She was simply the eldest,
knowing that there were going to be lots of other kids. And as that family
lls out, God doesn’t want us squabbling about which one is the greatest,
any more than Jesus wanted His disciples to argue about that same thing
on the road to Jerusalem. So the “American exceptionalism” of the neocons
is actually the idolatrous construct. What we are urging is simply one more
Christian nation among many, and to God be the glory.
Secular nationalism recognizes no authority above itself, and hence it is in
essence idolatrous. Christian nationalism recognizes a transcendental
authority over all nations, an authority that is before time, above history,
and entirely outside the world, and which views all of our haughtiness as
risible Ozymandian hubris. “Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket,
and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the
isles as a very little thing” (Isa. 40:15).
In the meantime, down here on earth, you cannot teach children to have
respect for other cultures by inculcating in them a contempt for their own.
A son who honors his own mother deeply is going to understand why
another honorable son wants to honor his mother. at makes good sense
to him. A man who loves his American heritage in the proper way is going
to understand and appreciate it when an Englishman loves his, and a
Korean loves his, and an Israeli loves his, and an Argentinian loves his. As
they are all supposed to. ose who attempt to tear down respect for our own
institutions are actually setting in motion a contempt for all institutions
everywhere, and so then no one should be surprised when an alumnus of
this multicultural curricular farrago heads down to their alma mater in
order to shoot up the cafeteria. While it is true that both jingoism and
nihilism start at home, so does respect. Respect and honor are learned
when kids are little, and if you fail to teach them at that point, you are the
one graduating fascists and anarchists.
Mere Christendom is not Christian nationalism. Mere Christendom is the
sum total of lots of smaller Christian nationalisms.
If we were in the business of using red baseball caps as a way of spreading
our views, we would not opt for the MAGA hat. Our adversaries are trying
to t us out for a MAC hat—Make America Christian. Our reply to this is
that if we are going to say it with hats, we would come up with a MACA hat
—Make America Christian Again. I italicize again for a reason.
e thing we are trying to accomplish is not an attempt to square the circle.
It has been done before. In fact, it has been done multiple times before. e
rst Christendom had a run of over a thousand years, which I call pretty
good.
And not only has this Christian nationalism thing been done before, it has
been done in America before. If we succeed, this will not be Christian
America. If we succeed, this will be Christian America 2.0. is will be
Christian America again. is will be America as the prodigal son, tired of
the pig food, coming home to his father.
Unlike the French Revolution, which erased the Christian calendar in order
to plonk down their own humanist version, the U.S. Constitution was
drated in the year of our Lord 1787. e Declaration acknowledged our
rights are inalienable precisely because they were bestowed on us by our
Creator. When the Constitution was adopted, nine of the thirteen states
had ocial ties to a Christian denomination. Connecticut had an
established Congregational church down to the 1830s. Whatever else you
say about church establishments at the state level (and there is room for
criticism), you cannot say that it is unconstitutional. Out of the ty-ve
men at the Constitutional Convention, ty of them were orthodox
Christians. In one survey of the political literature of the founding era, it
was determined that the apostle Paul was quoted at the same level as were
Montesquieu and Blackstone, and Deuteronomy was quoted twice as much
as John Locke was.1 One of the names those in England had for the
American Revolution was “the Presbyterian Revolt,” and on the loor of
Parliament Horace Walpole said that “cousin America has run of with a
Presbyterian parson,” referring to Witherspoon. Speaking of Witherspoon,
that worthy man signed the Declaration, and he counted James Madison
among his students.
Everyone who subscribes to the Westminster Confession of Faith is a
Christian nationalist. is even applies to the American version of the
Westminster, which muted the high-octane Christian nationalism of the
original British version. In the original it says that it is the duty of the
magistrate “to take order that unity and peace be preserved in the Church,
that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and
heresies be suppressed, all corruptions and abuses in worship and
discipline prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly
settled, administered, and observed” (WCF 23.3). is was a bit thick for
the American Presbyterians, who held their rst General Assembly in
Philadelphia in 1789, electing a gent named Witherspoon to be their
moderator, and who modied the Westminster to say this: “Yet, as nursing
fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the Church of our
common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of
Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons
whatever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging
every part of their sacred functions, without violence or danger” (American
Westminster 23.3). Also please note: Isaiah’s nursing fathers, Church of our
common Lord, Witherspoon, Philadelphia, 1789. ese people were all
breathing the same air.
If you know any PCA ministers who are woke, or semi-woke, or just simply
political squishes, try not to rib them too much about all this stuf. ey
probably feel bad enough about it already, especially since they have had so
many opportunities to take an exception to the American Westminster, at
who knows how many meetings of presbytery, and yet they refused to
distance themselves from this element of their theo-fascist past. ey are
probably wracked with guilt over this confessional issue anyhow, and we
should probably just lay of.
One last thing. ere is no such entity as the Judeo/Christian religion. As
religions go, there is no way to combine the view that Jesus is the Christ with
the idea that He was a fraud, or the claim that He rose from the dead with
the counterclaim that He did nothing of the kind, or the idea that the New
Testament correctly interprets the Old with the view that it is the Talmud
that actually does. So as religions, they do not harmonize at the most basic
level. But what then is the Judeo/Christian tradition? Orthodox
Christianity and orthodox Judaism both make transcendental claims,
claims that outrank the pretensions of modern secular man. e
Judeo/Christian tradition was therefore a device used by secular man to get
Christians and Jews to drop or mute their claims about that authority
being from outside the world. is follows because if you establish this
amalgam tradition down here when the transcendental claims are
contradictory, then that means you don’t need to take either Christianity or
Judaism seriously as a basis for governance. You have spiked the
transcendental guns. e Judeo/Christian tradition therefore operates
from within the system, and for a number of years has occupied an
honored spot on secular man’s designated god shelf—mementos and
knickknacks from the past. A Judeo/Christian lapdog cannot stand up to
the secular onslaught, because the Judeo/Christian lapdog was rst
domesticated by secularism, and it has been that way for a long time. So
while conservative Christians and conservative Jews can certainly work
together to challenge the current threats posed by humanist man, they
must do so without kidding themselves—as co-belligerents, as distinct
from allies. In order to do this with any kind of consistency, they must both
recover an understanding of the transcendental nature of their own central
claims. But then again, these ultimate claims are not consistent with each
other. So the best thing that could happen at this point would be for
conservative Jews to reconsider, seriously, the claims of Christ the Messiah.
And of course, everybody else should do that too.
1.. David Dreisbach, Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers (New York: Oxford University Press,
2017), 66.
CHAPTER 7
e Goodness of Mere Christendom
CHRISTIANS WHO TRY TO EVADE THE FORCE OF THE “NOT WHE
argument will sometimes resort to saying it is the “best” system without
saying where they are deriving their understanding of what best means.
So Christians who argue for a secular public square are caught on the
horns of a dilemma. Either Jesus wants this or He doesn’t. Or maybe He
doesn’t care. If He doesn’t want it, then why do they? If He does, then are
they not advocating a civil arrangement based on the will of the Lord,
which would be a theocracy?
When we are talking about a theocracy in the abstract, we are not yet
talking about the content of the laws, only that the laws are based on the
will of God. Biblical law, rightly understood, would not be draconian, but
that needs to be discussed in its place. Right now, the question is simply
whether or not public morality needs to be grounded in the will of God or
not.
So let’s take this a step further. If the laws are not based on the will of
God, but rather on the will of the people, Demos, then what happens when
a large majority of the people think that the laws should be based on the
will of a god? is is precisely the dilemma that democracy faces in the
Middle East. e president of Turkey has said that democracy is like a
street car—you ride it until your stop. en you get of. What happens when
an Islamic state forms as a result of democratic processes? What happens
when Hamas actually wins the election in Gaza, and they didn’t do it by
cheating?
In efect, Demos the capricious god gives way to another god. But on
secularist principles, why would Demos not have the right to abdicate like
this? Who says that Demos can’t abdicate?
When a Christian secularist looks at this kind of scenario, if Demos is the
nal word, then cannot Demos vote itself out of having the nal word? Can
it not enthrone Allah? If Allah is not the true God, can it not, at any rate,
enthrone the mullahs?
Or what about Jesus? On what basis could a Christian secularist object to
an election that voted in Jesus as Lord? He could only do it by saying that
Jesus refused to be nominated and then by pointing to a text that showed
us how Jesus required our civil afairs to be arranged, and that He was
particularly insistent that we be sure to leave Him out of it. But the whole
point for the secularist is that there is no such text, which, ironically, opens
the door for a democratic Christian republic.
Now of course, I believe that Jesus is actually a king, not a president, and
the Great Commission requires us to proclaim that the coronation has
already happened. Jesus is not running for anything, and we do not “make”
Him anything. He is the Lord of lords, the King of kings, and the President
of presidents, and there is nothing whatever that we can do about it. at is
already the case. e world will gradually come to recognize this, and will
become Christian, and this is good news indeed. is is the good news.
is is incidentally why I believe that Christian republics and
commonwealths are formed by preaching, baptizing, and discipleship, and
not by campaigning, legislating, pundit-blogging, and so on. is gospel
work will have political results, but it is not politically established. e
magistrate is a necessary part of the process, but only as a servant to the
gospel. e magistrate must wear Christ’s livery, and not the other way
around.
So here are the options: (1) Jesus doesn’t care whether or not nations are
explicitly Christian. (2) Jesus is opposed to nations being explicitly
Christian. (3) Jesus wants nations to be explicitly Christian.
And here should be our responses to these possibilities: (1) Well, if Jesus
doesn’t care, that means we have the right to care. So let’s make this a
Christian nation, shall we? (2) Okay. Let’s have a Bible study and nd out
why “disciple the nations” really means “don’t disciple the nations,
whatever you do.” (3) Yes, Lord.
e notion of mere Christendom is not just a personal pipe dream. It is not
a collection of “wouldn’t it be nice” surmises. A Reformed understanding of
the gospel, of worship, of education, of politics, and so on, is incoherent
apart from a commitment to Christendom. Christendom is an essential
part of a Reformed theology in its historical setting. is does not mean
that said Christendom must be up and already running—just that there
needs to be a commitment to it by faith. When Abraham saw his
descendants as heirs of the whole world, and not by law either (Rom. 4:13),
he did not have Christendom up and running at just that moment. But he
still knew that the world was his, and that his heirs would walk around in
it.
A faithful Reformed missionary in Egypt knows that Christendom is not
right outside his window. But Jesus is right outside his window, and
everywhere else too. We do not yet see everything subject to man—but we
see Jesus. Christendom will be easier to see when it can be photographed,
but we are called to see it whether it can be photographed or not.
is whole issue is what systematic theologians might call a “big deal.”
Underneath a lot of the current controversies that are roiling the Reformed
world are the issues of paedocommunion and postmillennialism. e thing
these two doctrines share in common is that they are both, in diferent
ways, an optimistic testimony about the course of future generations.
Paedocommunion nurtures the next generation in optimistic faith, and
postmillennialism is the grounded hope that God will continue to nurture
His Church across multiple generations. Generations do not occur in the
resurrection—they are a phenomenon found in this world, and they are
directly connected to the questions that swirl around the formation of a
culture. No culture without cultus. A culture is religion externalized, and
thus it makes sense to ask of every culture what form of worship lies at the
center of it. It is a stark fact that the center of secular culture is not the
worship of God the Father through the name of Jesus, in the power of the
Holy Spirit. at being the case, Christians ought to have no devotion
whatsoever to secular culture. Devotion to their culture means devotion
somehow to their gods, and we should always refuse to bow down to their
gods.
If this historic Reformed faith is resurgent (and it is), and if people are
starting to pay attention to it (and they are), and this poses a threat to those
in the Reformed world who have signed a peace treaty with the Amalek...
I meant to say the secular state, then it might seem like a good idea to
distract everybody by getting people to be suspicious about our Reformed
bona des.
is can easily be done by saying that we are wobbly at best on sola de, or
that we are sacramentalists of some sort, and that such things are clearly
Not Good. But if they were to raise the real objection, which is that we
believe that Jesus is Lord of Heaven and earth, and that the earth ought to
admit it sooner rather than later, a lot of people in their own churches
would wonder (and perhaps say), “What’s wrong with that?” It is easier to
say that we don’t really preach the gospel than to say something far closer
to the truth, which is that we believe that the unchained gospel is in the
process of conquering the whole world.
Ater all, how potent is a gospel that allows you the freedom to sign peace
treaties with Amalekites?
ere is a sense in which (I have argued) every thoughtful Christian must
be a conservative. e Holy Spirit has done a lot thus far in the history of
our people, and we must live up to what we have already attained. We must
conserve it. ere is another sense in which we are to be progressive—the
Holy Spirit has a lot yet let to do in the history of this world. We must
progress towards it.
But unlike that unruly tribe we call progressives, Christian progressives
are looking for that city whose maker and builder is God. We know where
we are going, and we don’t just exult (as they do) in the fact that we are
making good time, and who knows where. And unlike the secularist
conservatives, we are not in love with the existing evils, prepared to ght
of every attempt to replace them with other evils.
So there is a sense in which the Christian faith is both conservative and
progressive, and yet another sense in which it is neither. e Christian
faith is inescapably political, but it must not allow itself to be co-opted by
secular and unbelieving partisanship. And to reject partisanship is to reject
compromises with secularists who want to hook up with an evangelical
voting bloc.
But the necessary rejection of partisanship is not a rejection of
particularity. ere are times when every faithful Christian must vote for
this candidate and against that one, pray for the success of this referendum
and for the defeat of that one.
ere is an expressed desire to keep the gospel “unfettered,” which is
actually a desire to have an Obama-like gospel—always there, and always
voting “present.” You see, if the gospel requires us to say and do something
particular, then enemies of the gospel can always accuse us of being in
cahoots with some secularist organization that has said something very
similar to that particular thing. And thus they can steer us with ease.
We can’t say anything particular, because there is always a group out
there that we could be falsely identied with. According to them, we must
preach an unfettered gospel, by which we mean a loaty thing above all our
heads, which will guarantee that those little loaty things that we call our
souls will, shortly ater we die, ascend up to that Euclidean loaty place
called Gnostic Heaven. ere we will have great fellowship with those
giants of the faith—Cerinthus, Carpocrates, Basilides, and Valentinus.
Ecclesia deformata et semper deformanda.
You see, if the gospel says that repentance and belief actually mean
something in this world—like canceling that sex change operation, or
forgoing the nuptials with someone whose genitalia are uncannily similar
to yours, or letting your kid stay alive, or even worse, having a repentant
king say that such goings-on ought not to be going on—such particulars
might create a stumbling block. No stumbling blocks! We must preach an
unfettered message of repentance, by which we mean that we must
thunder a message that every man must repent of “stuf.” Like what? You
know, stuf.
Suppose the point were to be made—and it is a worthy point to make—that
being a Christian trumps being an American. is is a point with which I
am in whole-hearted agreement, and which I have made in my writing
numerous times. A conservative Republican believer in Jesus has far more
in common with a Palestinian Christian than he does with a secular
representative of the state of Israel. A thousand amens. Jesus makes all the
diference.
But there is a way of agreeing with this that shows one is growing up into
the fundamental tenets of “mere Christendom,” and there is another way of
agreeing with it that shows one is just becoming a liberal. ere is a way of
appealing to Jesus because you nd Jesus appealing, and there is a way of
appealing to Jesus because you nd American hegemony unappealing.
So here is a litmus test for you. I am afraid it is an unpopular litmus test
because it works every time. It is that kind of unpopular.
If you nd yourself in real solidarity with Palestinian Christians, and you
want to know if it is love for Jesus, or just your nascent inner-anti-Semite
rising, just ask yourself this question, which, in its theological structure is
exactly the same question. Who do you have more in common with—a
Palestinian non-Christian or a devout Christian woman with hoop earrings
who just got back from the RNC, where she spent the entire convention
wearing a big hat shaped like an elephant?
I said it is exactly the same question, and it is. e reason we might get
radically diferent answers is that something else is going on. ere is a lot
of “radical” Christianity out there that is just a pretense—it is simply a
stalking horse for another tired form of anti-Americanism. Show me
something new.
I say all this knowing that there is a prophetic case to be made against
America’s sins, which are great, and I know further that it is our duty in the
Church to make that case. I know also that the heavy gravitational pull of
various American idolatries has many conservative believers trapped in a
crisscross spider web of red, white, and blue. But faux-solidarity with
Christians on the other side of the world is nowhere near escape velocity. If
shared love for Jesus can transcend the barriers thrown up by the conlict in
the Middle East, then why can’t it transcend the barriers created by your
neighbor’s love for e 700 Club, and your inability to abide that man?
It turns out that love for Jesus, of this sort anyway, only creates solidarity
if we know next to nothing about a situation. We have created our own
version of Linus’s maxim—“I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.” We
say, “I love Palestinian Christians. It’s dispensational Zionist Southern
Baptist Christians I can’t stand.” And it turns out that the whole thing
hinges on the fact that you actually know some people in this latter group.
And their entire outlook and demeanor (and support for Israel!) means
loving them constitutes a whole new level of Christian discipleship. Might
as well get started.
So our task is to proclaim the crown rights of King Jesus, an imperial
authority that is not based on raw diktat, but rather on His shed blood that
forgives every sin it comes in contact with. But it is important to note that
it comes in contact with sin in places others than the individual human
heart. It does that, too, of course, but the blood of Jesus deals with the sins
of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the President.
e blood of Jesus purchased every state legislature, and the surrounding
grounds, out to the sidewalks. e blood of Jesus purchased every major
New York publishing house. We should tell them. e blood of Jesus owns
every art form and has all movie rights. We should tell them too. e blood
of Jesus is mixed into the mortar that holds the true cornerstone. It is the
only real basis for any future civilization. ere are no other real options.
Which means there is therefore no way to preach the blood of Christ
without advancing the sacricial glory of the next Christendom.
CHAPTER 8
Church and State
AN ARGUMENT FOR MERE CHRISTENDOM MUST NOT BE MISTAKEN
to get back to the church/state relations as they existed in the medieval
period. An argument for mere Christendom is not an argument for some
sort of ecclesiocracy. A good approach to these issues was worked out in
the Reformation era, with its development of what might be called the
historic two-kingdoms understanding, over against a very recent
distortion of that doctrine.
In my various discussions of the modern forms of “two kingdom”
theology, I have frequently summed up my concerns with the question of
how many kings there are. is has made my point, to a point, but it still
needs to be pushed into the corners.
Here is my summary of what I take to be a theological novelty, by which I
am referring to the R2K position, and the position I am interacting with.
God rules all human institutions and endeavors, but He does so in two fundamentally
diferent ways. He rules in His spiritual kingdom, the Church, as a redeemer, and He rules
the civil realm as Creator and sustainer. ese two kingdoms have diferent ends and
functions, and therefore, they must be ruled diferently. e spiritual kingdom is governed
by special revelation, the Bible, and the other kingdom is governed by natural law.
I take this to be a novelty because, according to the Reformers, the
spiritual kingdom was that of the heart, the conscience, the inner man,
while the other kingdom was external and visible, Church included (e.g.,
Calvin’s Institutes, 3.19.15). In other words, this modern form of it divides
Church and state while the reformational form of it divided inner and
outer, invisible and visible.
So with all that noted, here are my basic questions for adherents of the
modern take on two kingdoms. Assuming the divide is between civil and
ecclesiastical...
1. Is there anything in the charter of each kingdom that prohibits cooperation,
communication, and trac with the other kingdom? In other words, does natural
law reveal that we must not ever resort to special revelation? And does special
revelation ever say that we must never import specic and revealed content into the
civil realm?
2. As God rules in the civil realm, does He require us to worship Him? If not, why not?
If so, under what name, and by what forms? Or in this realm is He satised with
being the unknown god of the Athenians? Or was an altar to Him too much? Is the
God mentioned on American coinage the God of natural law?
3. As God rules in the civil kingdom as Creator and sustainer, does our human
disobedience of natural law also mean that He acts in His capacity as judge? Using
the criteria of natural law alone, will God judge us for our abortion laws, same-sex
mirages, and conscatory taxation?
4. If God can act as judge in the civil realm, is there any gospel or good news for those
under judgment in this realm? If He does not act as judge in this realm, in what
sense can He be said to be ruling?
5. If the reason for not bringing special revelation to bear in discussions about what
to do in the civil realm is that unbelievers don’t believe the Bible, what are we to do
in those debates when they claim not to believe in natural law either? If their
denials and unbelief do not cause us to set aside natural law, then why should their
denials and unbelief be the cause for us to set aside the Scriptures?
I have written elsewhere on the ideal relationship of Church and kingdom,
comparing it to the church at the center of town, and life in the kingdom
fanning out into the parish from that center. Word and sacrament are at
the center, and they shape and form the lives of believers outside the
sanctuary, but without ruling and dictating what goes on out there. I am
using the words sanctuary and parish in a gure. e elders of the Church
do not rule over auto mechanics, or garbage collection, or interior design.
First, it is none of their business, and secondly, they would do a bad job.
Family government and civil government and Church government are
the three governments ordained and established directly by God. Our task
is therefore to make sure they are in a right relationship with each other,
and to take care that one of them doesn’t try to swallow up the others. In
our day, it is the state that is swollen with this particular conceit, but other
eras have seen the other two governments try it.
Ater the Great Commission is fullled, it would be appropriate, in a
gure of speech, to say that “the Church” has lled the earth, as the waters
cover the sea, but this is not talking about the Church in the strict sense—
gathered worship, the preached Word, the bread and wine, etc. A great deal
of what will have been done by that point will have been done by nations
and by families. ese nations and families will have been baptized, and
they will return to the sanctuary every Lord’s Day to be instructed and
strengthened, but they will do what they do as Christians—not as ocers of
the sanctuary.
So that’s the background.
Let’s take a test case. I used the phrase “shape and form” to talk about the
kind of inluence the sanctuary has on the parish, and a good example of
this kind of thing from the New Testament would be the case of role
relationships between men and women. It is good for two reasons—the
rst is that there is abundant material in Scripture about it. Secondly, the
issue has that peculiar kind of clarity that will cause the enemies of the
truth to get whipped up into a bubbly froth, and the trimmers of the truth
to hem, cough, and dig a little divot in the carpet with their shoe.
What I want to argue is that the rule of the sanctuary is authoritative in
how it shapes us, but it does this in organic ways. It is not done by rules
made out of two-by-fours. at shaping authority is applied out in the
world by men and women with brains.
To jump back to my illustration of auto mechanics, a preacher has no
business telling a mechanic how to repair a blown head gasket. He can tell
him that he must charge in accordance with the bid he made, and that he
may not take nancial advantage of a little old lady who knows nothing
about cars. e sanctuary inluences the auto shop without becoming the
owner or proprietor of it.
When the Church is healthy, and doing what it ought to be doing, it is
establishing, promoting, and edifying entities that are distinct from itself. e
Church imitates the Lord in this—this is the same thing God did in
creating us. All the families of the earth are to be discipled by the Church
(Gen. 12:3). All the nations of the earth are to be discipled by the Church
(Matt. 28:18–20). And when the process is done, these families and nations
have not been absorbed into the Borg. Rather, they have become more like
themselves than they ever could have done on their own.
It should not be surprising that ater I have urged the establishment of a
mere Christendom for some time, questions about the First Amendment
might arise. It would appear that I am trespassing on the sacred precincts.
It would seem that I am strolling across the manicured lawns of the Temple
grounds, in order to have a better shot at kicking one of the sacred geese.
So perhaps I had better explain. My position on this can be summarized
nicely and in brief compass. It is not the case that a mere Christendom
would violate anything in the First Amendment, and the second point
would be that, even if it did, we need Christ more than we need Madison.
But, on this point at least, we may certainly have both. e First
Amendment, rightly understood, does not prohibit a civil acknowledgment
of the Lordship of Jesus. It prohibits the establishment of a particular
denomination of Christians at the federal level as the national church. It
does not in any way prohibit, to take an example at random, the erecting of
a Christmas creche on the steps of the Mugwump County Courthouse.
Here’s what the amendment says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the
people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Our concerns for the present have to do with the establishment clause
and the free exercise clause. We may discuss what lawyers have done to
mangle the rest of it some other time perhaps.
If you would be so kind, please note the rst word of the First
Amendment, which is Congress. Congress is the only entity that can violate
the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment, and
they can do so in two ways. e rst would be if they were to pass
legislation that created the Church of the United States, as England has a
Church of England and Denmark the Church of Denmark. e Founders
did not do this because they objected to national churches, but rather
because they objected to the idea that the United States was a singular
nation. We were, rather, a confederation of nations, meaning that any
established religions needed to exist at the appropriate level, which was not
the federal level.
At that time, federal government and national government were not
interchangeable synonyms. If you take the trouble to read e Federalist
Papers, a collection of newspaper articles urging ratication of the
Constitution, you will discover one of their points to be the fact that those
urging ratication disavowed the idea that the Constitution was in any way
creating a nation. And this is why, incidentally, Lincoln’s phrase in the
Gettysburg Address—“four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought
forth on this continent a new nation”—was such a masterpiece of revisionist
history.
In fact, this original understanding of the First Amendment provides us
with a model of mere Christendom. e principle of organization between
diferent Christian states need not take a stand on the denominational
questions that divide the states from one another. at is what I am
arguing for. is is the pattern for mere Christendom. But this cannot be
done, let it be said in passing, if Michigan were under Islamic sharia law
and South Dakota under Lutheranism. Religiousdom does not provide a
principle of unity at all.
Christ does.
CHAPTER 9
All Liberty Is Founded in Christ
WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN THAT CHRIST IS THE FOUNDATION OF EV
liberty. Civic liberty is an impossibility for a people who are enslaved to
their lusts. For such a people, constitutional liberties are nothing but paper
liberties—the kind of thin surety that tends to satisfy slaves who need to be
lattered by their masters. My argument is not just that mere Christendom
is consistent with true forms of personal liberty. e argument is that some
sort of mere Christendom is the only place where it is possible to gain and
maintain true liberty. It is the foundation upon which liberty must be built.
Here is Samuel Adams on the subject: “Neither the wisest constitution
nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose
manners are universally corrupt.”1
His cousin John Adams said that our Constitution presupposes a moral
and a religious people. It is “wholly unt” for any other.2
is is why Jesus is absolutely necessary to any civic reformation worth
having. If you want a nation of pot-smoking fornicators to be free, you
want something that is not going to happen. Before giving speeches in
favor of such a proposition, you might want to consider saving your breath
for walking uphill. Republics do not exist without republican virtue. And
virtue does not exist apart from the grace of God, as ofered in the message
of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. is is why, if our freedoms
are to return, secularism has to go.
So liberty is the work of the Spirit of God, which brings us to another
crucial point. e Spirit moves as He wills. He is like the breeze, which
cannot be bottled or contained. is is quite true when it comes to
evangelism and the growth of the Church, but it remains true when we
trace the work of the Spirit through the Church in bringing about civic
liberty.
At diferent times in history, the Spirit anoints diferent men, diferent
movements, diferent civic currents, diferent nations, making them the
delivery platform of His glorious work. If the Spirit then moves on, the
besotted curators of the Ichabod Museum will still want to lecture us all on
the importance of their dead relics. But liberty—and follow me closely here
—liberty itself is free.
Liberty cannot be locked up in a cage, whether that cage is a party
platform, a national constitution, a bill of rights, or a campaign slogan.
Liberty exists, or does not exist, in the hearts of the people. If the people
are free, then civic freedom for the people becomes a possibility.
One time, when I had waxed eloquent on this theme, a reader from the UK
objected to my characterization of the House of Hanover as “tyrannical.”
Britain was the birthplace of constitutional liberties, and so how was it
possible for me to characterize the actions of Parliament as tyrannical?
e answer is that it is easy—the battle for liberty never ceases, and it
never ceases anywhere. Tyrants are always waiting in the wings, looking for
an opportunity. When the people become complacent, driting into sloth
and lust, they have that opportunity—and they always take it. What do you
have to do in order to have a garden full of weeds? e answer to this trick
question is nothing.
A great blow for civic liberty was struck in the establishment of the
Magna Carta. Arbitrary taxation was out. at was established as a
foundational legal principle in England. But the battle for liberty ebbs and
lows. Liberty does not take of like a rocket ship—there are advances, there
are setbacks, there is confusion about the setbacks, there is a revival of
learning, there are advances, and the cycle starts over again.
You don’t banish arbitrary taxation from the world, and then forget
about it. And why? Because kings like arbitrary taxation. So the whole mess
crept back in again. Royal prerogative courts, like the Star Chamber, came
into existence and began to rob the English people of the liberties they were
supposed to have, and still did have, on paper anyway.
As part of the long battle for liberty, the English people in the
seventeenth century rose up and abolished arbitrary government. But like
a burglar who nds one window locked, and who moves on to the next one,
those with a despotic turn of mind immediately moved on to another
device. ey had not all been banished to the moon. ey were all still here,
and people with power soon wanted more of it. It is “necessary,” they say,
with a deeply concerned look. “What about the children?”
So in the seventeenth century the battle for liberty was between the
Crown and Parliament, and Parliament was in the right. In the eighteenth
century, the battle for liberty was between Parliament and the colonies, and
the colonies were in the right. No one institution or nation or entity is
indefectible. Bad men show up everywhere, and I wouldn’t be at all
surprised if our nal liberties were eventually removed by the Czar of All
Fourth of July Celebrations.
In our time, the central threat to our liberties is the administrative state.
Among a free people, laws are only binding (i.e., they are only laws) if they
are passed and approved by the legislature. e legislature is not
authorized to delegate this authority to anyone, and when they attempt to
do so, it is dereliction of their solemn responsibility. Someone might plead
necessity, and say that administrative law is too extensive and too complex
for a legislature to understand, still less to pass. e reply to this is simple
—if a set of regulations is too burdensome for the legislature to pass, then
it is too burdensome for us to live under.
e next question is therefore a practical one. Say that we have come to
our senses and have found that our representatives in Congress have sold
us into bondage. What now? ere are two aspects of this “what now?”
problem. e rst has to do with lawfulness. We have to x it in our minds
that the current setup is deeply and profoundly unconstitutional, illegal,
unlawful, and immoral. e second has to do with prudence. How may we
best resist this massive encroachment?
at may be described as the problem of getting Gideon out of the wine
vat and over to the city park where the Baal is.
We live in a generation that is totalitarian in principle, having accepted all
the basic totalitarian premises. Denying the Lordship of Jesus Christ drives
you to those premises—for if Jesus is not Lord, then there is a vacancy that
men will always want to ll. Without an exhaustive rule through the
predestinating love of the Father, unbelieving men will always see a job
opening. ey will want to ll that gap. ey mimic the Father’s
omnipotence, which is where we get the totalitarian part. ey also try to
mimic His love, which is how we get the tolerance farce. And so it is that we
nd ourselves sufocating under this totalitolerance.
Secularism is simply not capable of sustaining limited government. It cannot be
done, and this is a problem. Because men are sinners, they require
governance. Because men are sinners, they cannot be trusted with
governance. Limited government is therefore the rst and foundational
problem to be solved in any exercise of practical theology.
at said, it is a problem that cannot be solved apart from the
widespread dissemination of the gospel among the people.
Incidentally, if you solve the problem of limited government by denying
any real need for limited government, this is not an exercise in creative
problem-solving, but rather an example of going over to the adversary. e
Spirit of God is the spirit of liberty. e Holy Spirit is not the spirit of
coercion. e impulse to control everything is the machinery of Isengard,
and those who want to be a cog in that machinery have all their aspirations
pointed in the wrong direction.
If the gospel runs freely, enough people are converted to enable them to
understand the problem. If that happens, enough people are converted to
enable them to begin to execute a biblical solution—a sample of which we
can see in the form of government our nation had at the founding (checks
and balances, separation of powers, etc.). at form of government really
was a glorious achievement, and it should be no surprise that it is routinely
disparaged by our generation of soi-disant political theorists, a.k.a. ddlers
and fussers. “You can’t put banana peels in that can! What are you, evil?”
e gospel, pure and unadulterated, is therefore the thing that
Christians must emphasize, and that the adversary will always attack. e
adversary will attack it from without by malevolent persecution and from
within by disingenuous corruption. If we don’t understand the tactics
behind the corruption, then when the time comes we will be mystied by
the persecution. We will not understand what our persecutors are up to,
because we have not understood what our preachers were up to.
I would go further. e lotier the pretensions of the power, the more meddlesome,
inhuman and oppressive it will be. eocracy is the worst of all possible governments. All
political power is at best a necessary evil: but it is least evil when its sanctions are most
modest and commonplace, when it claims no more than to be useful or convenient and sets
itself strictly limited objectives. Anything transcendental or spiritual, or even anything very
strongly ethical, in its pretensions is dangerous, and encourages it to meddle with our
private lives.3
My agreement with part of this, and disagreement with the other part, is
why I have in the past called myself a theocratic libertarian. As should be
easy to see, my agreement with Lewis is on the “live and let live” end of
things. Like Lewis, I want government to be modest and to set for itself
strictly limited objectives. Unlike Lewis, I believe that requiring
government to be modest in this way is a “strongly ethical” requirement.
And as a strong ethical requirement, it requires a transcendental
grounding.
When I tell an ordinary citizen that he must not steal, I should be in a
position to answer the question if he wonders why. If I tell my government
that it must be modest, what do I do in the face of the same question? For
—believe me—governments want to misuse their power more than
ordinary citizens want to steal. My elected representatives want to steal
from me more than my next-door neighbor does. at being the case, they
must be told not to—which is a strong ethical requirement. As such, like all
ethical requirements, it requires transcendental grounding.
e natural assumption that many make is that the higher the claims for
governing authority, the higher the aims of actual governance will be. is
is the assumption that Lewis is making here. In other words, if we grant
that God has established the authority at all, then the authority must have a
double-0 rating and can do whatever it wants.
But this does not follow. A government appointed by God to be a
ministering servant is not a government appointed by God to be a
swaggering bully. Divinely established authorities can also be put under
severe restrictions—and in Scripture, the authorities have been.
So if we withhold divine sanction from government in order to keep
them from claiming too much authority, we discover that we have simply
opened the door to allow them to claim all authority. If there is no
recognized God over the state, then who has now become god? Who is now
the highest authority in the lives of those governed? I am far more likely to
nd myself governed by a swaggering bully who recognizes no authority
whatsoever above him than by a swaggering bully who feels he needs to
justify his behavior from Scripture. In a dispute with the latter, I at least
have something to appeal to.
But the former situation is precisely the position we are currently in. We
wrestle not against lesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, and
pecksnifs. Lewis worried about “meddlesome” rulers—you know, the kind
who would make you sort your garbage into diferent-colored bins. e
kind who would shut down your kid’s lemonade stand. e kind who would
conscate half your income. e kind who ne lorists for not celebrating
vice. at kind. e kind we got.
It turns out that overweening conceit in rulers requires a strong
theocratic restraint.
If there is a court of appeal past our human government, then in principle I
have admitted theocracy. If there is no court of appeal past them, then I
have just made them god. Having made them god, I discover that I am still
in a theocracy, but instead of a loving Father, the theos of this system is
corrupt and grasping, mendacious and low, and full of a latulent hubris.
Requiring government to remain modest and within the bounds of sanity
is therefore one of the most profound ethical requirements that has ever
been promulgated among men.
So if you agree with Jeferson, as I do, that that government is best which
governs least, then it follows from this that that government is best which
appeals to the divine will of Heaven the least. But for what it does do, and
with regard to what it forbids itself to do, it must learn to heed and obey the
most powerful “thou shalt nots” ever uttered.
Whatever appeals there are to Heaven must therefore be the kind of
appeals that reinforce the limitations and boundaries on government. One
of the central things that this government must learn to appeal to is the
fact that Heaven insists that the rulers refrain from overreach and
arrogance. is is why I have argued so oten, and so forcefully, for the
jealous protection of free markets. e issue at stake is this issue. Because
Jesus is Lord, we proclaim free grace, which results in free men, which
results in free markets.
is doctrinal point about the nature of men is one that Lewis himself
makes in his essay called “Membership,” when he says there are two
approaches to democracy. He believed the “false, romantic” view of
democracy was that which thinks all men so good “that they deserve a
share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the
commonwealth needs their advice.” is view really is pernicious. “On the
other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of
them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.”4
I take a brief moment here to dismiss any form of Christian anarchy. What
governmental power exists must be xed, dened, nailed down, watched
very carefully, even though it is swathed in the duct tape of multiple Bible
verses about man’s depravity. To take government down to zero is simply to
create manifold opportunities for ad hoc warlords. eocratic
libertarianism suspects the hearts of all men, all the time, while anarchy,
eternally suspicious of the current rulers, fails to suspect the hearts of
those forming hypothetical militias on the ly.
But some still react to the word theocracy in superstitious ways. ey are
like the ancient Romans who were willing to turn over the whole operation
to Julius Caesar, but would not permit him the use of the word emperor. Or
like Americans, who have granted their presidents more authority than
many medieval kings would ever dream of, but would lip out over use of
the word king.
Why are we so afraid of theocracy? What might happen? Might we go on a
rampage and kill sixty million babies? Yeah, that would be bad. Better not
risk it. Might we set up a surveillance state, with camera clusters pointed in
every direction at all the intersections? Right—theocracies are terrible like
that.
e real reason why our current rulers want us to react violently
whenever we hear the word theocracy is that petty gods are always jealous of
their position, and dread any talk of a Lord who rose from the dead.
1.. William V. Wells, e Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company,
1865), 22.
2.. “From John Adams to Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798,” Founders Online, National
Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102.
3.. C.S. Lewis, “Lilies at Fester,” in C.S. Lewis Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley
Walmsley (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 372.
4.. Lewis,“Membership,” in C.S. Lewis Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, 336.
PART THREE
Lies about Mere Christendom
CHAPTER 10
“Christendom Would Be Oppressive”
WHENEVER YOU PROPOSE SOMETHING, AS I PROPOSE A RETU
Christendom, one of the natural objections people raise is the objection of
trajectories—as in “that’s all very well, but what might this lead to next?”
Given the sinfulness of this world, and the genius we have for corrupting
everything we touch, this is actually a reasonable question.
What is unreasonable, however, is the way the question is asked. It is
posed as though the questioner were standing in a neutral zone, a place
with no consequences whatsoever. But whenever we choose, there will be
consequences to that choice. is applies to all the choices. If you stand at a
crossroads, it would be wise to consider the consequences of going right.
But you must also take into account the consequences of going let and
standing still. It would be folly to pretend to yourself that only one of the
options had possible ramications that were negative. If someone opts for
that folly, you may be sure that the path that they say we cannot risk will be
the path of obedience, doing what God says to do.
When people say that such a Christendom would be “oppressive,” one
answer would be to ask them to look around at what is going on now. If we
are in the re, and someone suggests getting back in the frying pan, it is
hardly to the point to suggest that this might lead to us falling into the re.
You see, if we accept that Jesus is Lord, and that He is the nal authority
in our civic and public afairs, we might nd ourselves, much to the
consternation of fair-minded individuals, burning witches and stoning
rebellious teenagers. See? We can’t risk it.
Okay. You say that we cannot risk this kind of Christian rejection of
secularism, for fear that it might lead to outrages. But what happens if we
stay with secularism? Well, it is just possible, for example, that we might
nd ourselves in mandatory celebrations of the kind of sodomite practices
that got the attention of the avenging angel of the Lord for the cities of the
plain. We might nd ourselves dismembering millions of unborn babies.
What if something like that were to happen?
As Richard Weaver wonderfully put it, ideas have consequences. Moreover,
all of them do. One of the most destructive ideas out there is that some
ideas are privileged in this regard and do not have any consequences at all.
You have to worry about excesses of fundamentalist zeal if you give an inch
to the Christians, but you never have to worry about the excesses of
secularism. I can say that we think that we don’t have to worry about such
excesses because hardly anybody ever does. And yet, here we are, living in
the midst of such pandemoniac excesses. Look at the news, man.
According to the secular catechism we all learned somewhere, violence is
primitive, barbaric, superstitious, and intertwined with that other great
throwback, religion. And Christians (who profess not to accept that
catechism in its entirety) are nonetheless afected by it and are dutifully
apologetic for the Crusades.
Evangelical Christians, who do not want to ditch the Virgin Birth or the
substitutionary atonement, but who do want to ditch something in order to
show the secularists around us that we are making some progress, will oten
ditch the idea of religious violence, granting the notion that their fathers in
the faith used to take great joy in collecting Philistine foreskins. e
principal symptom of such capitulation by evangelical and Reformed
thinkers is acceptance of the ideal of a secular state. We need a secular state
in order to keep the inherently violent nature of religion from bursting
forth upon us again. ese are the gods that brought you out of the land of
Egypt, and ater generations of this kind of thing in our approved schools,
it turns out that everybody knows what everybody knows.
is is why, if someone suggests bringing an explicitly religious concern
into public policy discussion, the vigor with which he is shouted down
exhibits the kind of negative enthusiasm you might reserve for the
advocate of releasing 10,000 plague-carrying rats into Central Park.
at fundamental religious paradigms are in play can be seen by how we
process the ongoing nature of our own continuing violence. e
Enlightenment, contrary to some Pollyannas, did not eliminate warfare.
e exclusion of religion from the public square did not prevent guillotines
from getting set up there. But when we go to war, our violence is pristine,
surgical, necessary, and scientic. We use drones.
Now my concern here is not whether any contemporary warfare could be
justiable from Christian principles (for I believe that there are occasions
when it can be), but rather to point out how we do in fact justify it. We do
not appeal to Augustine’s just war approach, but rather to our foundational
secular myths. In fact, if a general in one of our overseas theaters obliquely
referred to a biblical justication for what the troops were doing there, he
would be frog-marched back to the Pentagon for the dressing-down of his
life. If a chaplain there were to teach the troops from the Bible on the
nature of justiable warfare, and the fact became known, he would nd
that his next duty station was somewhere near Anchorage, where he could
count the days until early retirement.
No human arrangement is absolute. Only God’s Word is absolute. So what
does this mean?
If someone takes human choices in the marketplace as his absolute, the
end result will be a market in which the fundamental commodity will be
the souls of men. But if someone takes the law of God as his direction, the
end result will be a market in which a man can buy and sell his cabbages or
cabinets or cars without getting permission from some functionary at the
Department of Hubris.
If someone takes human tradition as absolute, the end result will be a
stiling and oppressive regime, and way too many bishops. But if someone
takes the law of God for his guide, the end result will be deep respect for the
established authorities, including even some of the bishops.
So take it from me—you can’t have the fruit without the tree.
If you take God’s law as absolute, you will not take it upon yourself to act
coercively without warrant from Him. is will result in an enormous
amount of economic liberty. If you restrict only those transactions that you
have biblical warrant for restricting, then the result will be far more
freedom than we currently have. is is why accusations that a “mere
Christendom” would result in “oppression” are so risible. Are you joking
me?
In our current system, a contractor on a building site can’t scratch his
rear end without talking to the building inspector about it rst. Tell me
more about this free society you are so anxious to preserve. Are we
dropping bombs in the Middle East to protect our right to be groped in a
TSA line? Being lectured on our potential “oppressions” from today’s
statists is like being lectured on public hygiene by Typhoid Mary. I can
never make it through even one lecture without dgeting in my seat. And
they never seem to allow time for Q&A.
Liberty is not the standard. Respect for authority is not the standard. Both
of those things are the fruit, resulting from faithful acceptance of what God
says to do. When a society ignores what God says to do, and the grace in
Christ enabling us to do it, the end result is what we see around us—the
erosion of both our liberties and our traditions. As Lewis put it so aptly, we
laugh at honor and are shocked to nd traitors in our midst. We castrate
and bid the geldings to be fruitful. We remove the organ and demand the
function.
Evangelical Christians, who are pretty much stuck with the Bible, are
afraid that an appeal to biblical principle in statecrat will lead inexorably
to some kind of tyranny or other. is is because they have believed the
slanders that nonbelievers have circulated about the God we worship, and
about the Bible He has given us. ey believe that this God of ours is okay
when it comes to sending His Son into our hearts, but that if we let Him
get too close to the real power centers, the headiness of it all would be too
much for Him. He then might tell us to do appalling things we don’t want
to do. In short, evangelical Christians believe that their own God is a harsh
master, and that if we want really valuable civic blessings, like liberty and
abundance, we must seek them from another god.
Christians invented the most open and tolerant society in the history of
the world. Tolerance, as we have known it historically, is a Christian virtue.
As preachers of the gospel spread throughout a society, and new life comes
to more and more of the population, the preconditions for an open society
are being established. e more the law of God is written on hearts and
minds, which is what happens under the new covenant, the less necessary
it is to have standards of public decency urged upon us from billboards.
ere were all sorts of things that, prior to the last several generations of
general deterioration, “went without saying.” Once that consensus is gone,
you have to start calling the cops for more and more situations, and
freedom starts to erode.
Now some might say in protest that they are quite certain that if
evangelical Christians had their way, there would be no more acts of
simulated (or real) copulation on parade loats in San Francisco, which is
quite true. e observer would go on to point out that such open behavior
would not ly in the totalitarian hellhole that we call North Korea, and QED.
But they fail to note that such frank displays of deranged yearnings would
not have lown in 1958 America, which was a truly open and free society. All
freedom necessitates restraint and, for those who have been following this,
the question has to do with who is restrained, and how.
An important part of the how concerns not the identity of those
restrained but their position in that society. is will have to be discussed
further in its place, but are those being restrained at the center of that
society, or are they outliers? Is the standard enforced with nes ten times a
day, or twice every ten years?
Free societies can only function when the authority of restraint is found
in the old-fashioned virtues of self-restraint and self-control. Free
governments presuppose self-government. is is why John Adams said
that our Constitution presupposes a moral and religious people—it is, he
said, “wholly unt for any other.” And it is wholly unt for any other.
All this said, it remains an ineradicable part of the historical record that
free societies arose and grew out of Christian societies. I am arguing that
there is a connection, and that this is not mere coincidence. I am arguing
for a return to the preconditions of civic freedom and am not arguing for
an abandonment of them. Unbelief does not generate free societies. Out of
all the explicitly atheistic societies that formed over the course of the last
century, how many of them were open and free societies? Ah...
Religious liberty is itself a religious value.
Religions difer. ey difer wildly. ey difer fundamentally. Some
religions value liberty for practitioners of other religions, and some
religions don’t value liberty for practitioners of other religions. Some
religions respect the authority of the individual to choose his own religion,
and other religions don’t allow for conversions at all. If you want the fruit
called religious liberty, you have to want the tree that this kind of fruit
grows on.
is means that if we want maximum liberty for people who don’t believe
in Jesus, then we will have to... believe in Jesus. If there is no God, and if
Christ did not come back from the dead, then the bipedal carbon unit that
doesn’t believe in Jesus is nothing more than 200 pounds of protoplasm
with an average temperature of 98.6, and endowed by blind evolutionary
processes with nothing in particular to speak of. Rights? In order to be
rights at all, human rights have to be grounded in a reality that is
completely out of the reach of our elected and appointed ocials. And that
means religion. For the best results, it needs to be the true religion. False
ones let you down.
Religion makes people ly planes into skyscrapers. Religion makes people
baptize babies. Religion makes people go door to door in order to ofer
little pieces of paper to other people. Religion makes widows be burned
alive on the pyre of their deceased husbands. Religion makes other widows
mail pitiful little checks to Joel Osteen. Religion makes people build
hospitals in the jungles of the Congo. Talking about what “religion” does in
the world is like dening “medicine” as “pills in bottles.” I am not sure you
should take that. My aunt took a pill from a bottle once and was sick for a
week.
In response to this dilemma, we are oten ofered “secularism” as a low-
fat alternative religion. Secularism is an arrangement whereby we adjust to
the realities of our cosmopolitan world, and the genius of secularism is
that it accommodates everybody. Well, actually they don’t accommodate
everybody—but they do accommodate everybody who is willing to be
accommodated! And it must be said that the accommodations have gotten
much more tight in recent weeks. We can hardly turn around anymore.
First, notice that to make “secularism” the approved religion is to
establish a religion. e religion you have established has no candles,
altars, or pulpits, but it remains the reigning worldview, the one that
reserves to itself the authority to sit in judgment on all other religions.
us, a secularist magistrate reserves to himself the right to pronounce
that Ahmed the Jihadist is not a “true Muslim.” Good to know, good to
know. I didn’t know that the State Department was issuing fatwas now.
Well, it is.
And when the Bible tells me not to love the world, the secularist tells me
that I must applaud the lust of the lesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride
of life. In fact, when the pride of life in a codpiece swanks out in front of us
all, I am now required to applaud like a North Korean at a missile parade. If
I don’t applaud the courage! the courage! I am guilty of hate. And, come to
think of it, I am. e fear of the Lord is to hate evil (Prov. 8:13).
Unfortunately for me and my verse, a gent named Marcion at the
Department of Justice has recently determined that Proverbs is “in the Old
Testament.”
So while secularism claims not to be “a” religion, they do claim to be the
arbiter of all religions—the faith of faiths, the religion of religions, the king
of ki... better not go that far yet. Let’s give it a few more months.
Second, please notice that secularism has been radically anemic in its
defense of religious liberty. ey have wanted to pretend that religious
liberty was a value of theirs, when in reality religious liberty was a fruit of
the Christian religion. As faith in Christ has waned, so also has our
understanding of and commitment to religious liberty waned. As
secularism has begun to function in terms of its own premises, we can
readily see that their tolerance for views other than their own is rice-paper
thick.
And third, this is only to be expected. Secularism has no transcendent
ground for anything. ere are transcendent claims, there are false
transcendent claims, and then there are no transcendent claims. Jehovah
spoke to Moses on the mountain of God. Muslims claim that Allah gave
revelations to the prophet. But secularists issue predestinating directives
and decrees from oces with eight-foot drop-down ceilings, waxed
linoleum loors, and blaring luorescent lights. e bureaucrat responsible
for ruining your life has been sleeping at his desk for so long that one side
of his head is lat. But he does wake up periodically to send you a
notication.
Now, one of the basic lessons we should have learned in the interim is this.
e leaven works through the loaf slowly. e mustard seed grows slowly.
e living water from Ezekiel’s temple gets gradually deeper. But when
doctrinaire Christians get power, one of their temptations is that they want
to impose their whole system, down to the jots and tittles. We must refrain
from doing this, not because truth is relative, because it isn’t, not because
truth is a matter of community-perspective and there are multiple
communities, for that is incoherent, but we must refrain from doing this
because Jesus Christ demands that we refrain. is is what I mean by the
mere in mere Christendom.
I said above that the fear of Christians mistreating Christians was mostly
wrong. It has been, and it will be, regretfully, sometimes right. e
temptation mentioned in the previous paragraph is not universally
resisted. But it ought to be—Christian maturity demands it. But if I grant
that it will not be universally resisted, then why do I want to run the risk?
e answer is that we are not registering our wishes from some neutral
zone. I am wishing for a civilization where, my critics would say, a Baptist
might be ned for failing to understand the covenant with Abraham.
Right, but I am not wishing for this civilization from the balconies of
Heaven. Rather I am wishing for it in a civilization where Baptists are
currently ned for not separating their garbage, ned for having the wrong
kind of light bulb, ned for providing a Baptist education to their
homeschooled kids, and ned for holding Bible studies in residential
neighborhoods that aren’t zoned for that. In large part, I want out of this
secularist paradise we are in because I think it is high time that we laid of
the Baptists.
CHAPTER 11
e Biblical Necessity of Free Speech
I HAVE ARGUED THAT RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IS ITSELF A RELIGIOUS VA
religion of secularism is a religion that does not share or respect that value.
If religious liberty were an app, secularism is not a platform that supports
it. ey respect our right to speak our minds in the same way that
kidnappers respect their victims’ attempts to make themselves heard
outside the car trunk.
So according to biblical law what is the basis of our basic freedoms? e
Declaration says that we are endowed by our Creator with certain
inalienable rights, those being the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. is is quite correct, but what are we to say to those who object
and say that John Locke is not to be confused with the Creator? We will get
to that in just a bit. For our purposes here, we will be focusing on the
question of free speech.
ere is no such thing as absolute free speech. ere will always be
restrictions on what you can say—I don’t care who you are, or where you
are. ere is no such thing as pure anarchy when it comes to how we speak.
is means that we are not being hypocritical by touting ourselves as
champions of free speech while at the same time wanting to see porn
banned.
In the (now censored) documentary I was in called Free Speech Apocalypse,
you are treated to the spectacle of activists painting bruises on themselves
to portray the anticipated “violence” of my words, while their carrying-on
required me to have police protection. I was able to give my lecture, but
only because of a cordon of cops.
e Christian framework for society is one that brings form and freedom
together and allows both to be maximized in a Spirit-given balancing act.
Without the pervasive inluence of the gospel in society, freedom will
collapse into form only, or form will deteriorate into anarchy only and you
will have the free speech equivalent of a failed state.
One of the things I learned from Rushdoony is the idea of the inescapable
concept—not whether but which. It is not whether we will impose
morality, but rather which morality we will impose. As a confessing
Christian, it is my desire to impose a Christian morality. But this is not to
say that this would shut down the nonbeliever’s right to say anything. No.
My point is that the free speech rights of the average nonbeliever would
be far more secure in a Christian republic than they currently are in this
epistemic fun house of ours. If you want free speech protected, not
absolutely, but fairly and generally, in a way consistent with decency and
good order, then you should ask the Christians. ey know how to do it.
Secular pagans don’t know how to do it and, moreover, have no desire to do
it. It is not one of their values.
When it comes to the history of ideas, it is relatively simple to show that
religious toleration, which includes tolerating verbal expressions of ideas
repugnant to you, is an idea that germinated in Christian soil. In Christian
history, we see it as early as Lactantius (an early church father who tutored
Constantine’s kids), and it comes to full bloom in the American Bill of
Rights. Letting other people express their errors without fear of reprisal is
a distinctively Christian ideal.
Now mark this well. I am not saying that it was an ideal that was perfectly
realized from the rst moment the problem arose in Christian history,
which was when Christianity became the ocial religion of the Roman
Empire. For example, Augustine decided it was copacetic to use the power
of the state to whack Donatists on the head, which admittedly needed
whacking, but still, it was far better not done. Religious persecution had
been standard operating procedure throughout the ancient world, and it
took some time for the yeast of this Christian ideal to work its way through
the entire loaf. But it did do so, and the loaf did rise.
Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and
open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.
—John Milton, Areopagitica
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all
liberties.
—John Milton, Areopagitica
In 1689, ater James II was forced out in the Bloodless Revolution, and
William and Mary installed, a bill of rights guaranteed “freedom of speech
in Parliament.” is development happened in an atmosphere that was
decidedly Christian.
And the First Amendment was also adopted in the midst of Christian
consensus. Yes, there were a handful of Deists at the American founding,
but the environment was overwhelmingly Christian. And this amendment
to the U.S. Constitution guarantees four basic freedoms—the freedom of
religion, speech, press, and assembly, unless of course there is a pandemic
that virtually everyone survives. en all bets are of, and the government
can pretty much start restricting things as the t takes them.
Just kidding. at pandemic stuf was not anticipated by the Founders.
Neither would they have anticipated our craven acceptance of the most
cockamamie reasons for surrendering our freedoms. “You see, the reason
we cannot allow you to publish editorials that are critical of our august
leaders in Congress is that we are afraid your views might lead to a drastic
increase in sickle cell anemia in our African American communities. Which
is why your impudent request to publish those editorials has to be seen as
profoundly racist.”
But the reason it cannot be racist, to borrow a page from Titania
McGrath, is that I identify as a white person of color. And I say such things
in order to demonstrate that I am still exercising my freedom of speech,
and they haven’t tracked me down yet. Neither have they cracked me down
yet.
I intend to continue speaking and writing as a free man because I am a
Christian. is is one of the great legacy items of Christendom. Why should
we surrender it?
Here is a brief historical timeline for you to keep in mind: Christian world >
post-Christian world > anti-Christian world.
In the post-Christian secular world, free speech was not the fruit of the
standard, but it became (idolatrously) part of their standard. But when a
post-Christian secular world has been around for a while, as ours has been,
it becomes an anti-Christian secular world. And in this anti-Christian
secular world, free speech is no longer the end but rather comes to an end.
It is not a desired but unattainable ideal. Rather, it is no longer desired at
all.
e reason why the post-Christian secularists could applaud free speech
and the anti-Christian secularists cannot is the same reason why the
prodigal son could buy free beer for all the ladies. He was using his father’s
money.
Post-Christian secularists were using Christian capital. As the saying
goes, the post-Christian secularists were born on third and thought they
had hit a triple. Christians invented the idea of religious toleration and free
speech, and when the swanky thought leaders of the Enlightenment kicked
away all that transcendental grounding, they thought (for a time) that it
was “self-evident” that free speech was important.
A classic example of this post-Christian commitment is illustrated well
with Voltaire’s famous comment: “Monsieur l’abbé, I detest what you write,
but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.”
But today the downstream heirs of Voltaire are urging us to remember that
they detest what we write, and hope that we come to a better frame of
mind by the time we have graduated from the Sunny Uplands Reeducation
Camp. And they would cheerfully send us of to the camps ater they have
pulled down a statue of Voltaire, yet another dead white guy.
Hold! Stay your hand! Unhook that cable! He was a dead white guy of
color.
In the classical liberal order, there was an arbitrary desire to hang the
rights of man on a great big invisible sky hook. But whenever you bolt this
sky hook into the azure blue, it does not much matter how many extra
Kantian bolts you use—the thing simply will not stay up there. As Richard
Weaver pointed out so astutely in Ideas Have Consequences, there can be no
true liberty that is not grounded in transcendentals.
It has not ever happened. It cannot happen now. It will never happen in
the future. Secular society come to fruition is the sworn enemy of freedom and
liberty.
If man is not created in the image of God, then he is simply so much
protoplasm. And “so much protoplasm,” the end result of so many million
years of blind evolution, is not possessed of any rights whatever. We are
endowed with our rights by a Creator. If no Creator, then no rights. Put
another way, Darwin hates you.
Ideas have consequences, and C.S. Lewis was right to tag Rousseau as
the father of the totalitarians. e honchos of Big Tech are materialist
secularists, and to expect their worldview to generate rights for the average
guy is like expecting them to stand in a bucket and then to carry themselves
upstairs.
So then. We have seen that consistent secularism cannot justify protecting
free speech as a consistent value. It does not low from their premises. If
you begin with autonomous man as the starting point of your reasoning,
you cannot get to the freedom of individual men and women as your
conclusion. As Samuel Rutherford would have put it, were he only here, “It
followeth no way.”
We have also seen that the value placed on freedom of speech was a value
that was assigned to it in a Christian era. Christians who believed the Bible
were the ones who pioneered the idea that those who were in error should
be accommodated. at accommodation is not innitely elastic (it cannot
be, and never is), but it was true accommodation, and it was kept in
working order so long as Christ and His Word were honored. Get out a
map of the world and put an x on every country that has a heritage of the
kind of freedoms tagged in the First Amendment. When you are done, get
a diferent color of highlighter and put an x on every country that has a
heritage connected to the Protestant Reformation. You will then notice that
you are putting x’s on top of x’s. is is not a luke.
But a nagging question still remains for some. Were those Christians
who developed the idea of free speech being fully scriptural? We can
certainly nd this commitment in historical theology, but can it be derived
from exegetical theology, from biblical theology? And this is particularly a
pointed question if we are willing to quote good old Rushdoony. is is
because Rushdoony was a man who was willing to whittle his theonomic
stick until it had a pointed, jabby end. And then he would walk up to the
classical liberal order in order to poke it. He would then want to ask some
follow-up questions.
And so here let me say that two things are crucial. e rst is that
Christians who believe the Bible must acknowledge that the death and
resurrection of Jesus transformed our applications of biblical law. at is
the rst thing. It is crucial. But the second is that our understanding of
this will never be advanced by denying the essential goodness of the Old
Testament law, dead teens and all, slavery and all, stoning for adultery and
all.
And so while I may difer with the recons about certain modern
applications of biblical law, these are exegetical diferences. I do not difer
with them about the need to restore the Bible as the quarry from which to
obtain the needed stone for our foundations of social order. When it comes
to that point, I would simply want to say—“Rushdoony, now more than
ever.” “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Ps.
11:3).
What about now? Where did free speech go? As we disciple the nations
(Matt. 28:18–20), our weapons for doing so are Word and water, bread and
wine. ese are the instruments we are to use in order to make the
obedience of the nations complete. ese are our assigned weapons for the
gospel era.
For though we walk in the lesh, we do not war ater the lesh: (For the weapons of our
warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)
Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge
of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. (2 Cor. 10:3–5)
We can see how the apostle Paul pursued this in his own ministry. “And
Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and three sabbath days reasoned
with them out of the scriptures” (Acts 17:2, emphasis added).
Reasoning with people who were disobeying the rst table of the law?
Yes, exactly. “And as he reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and
judgment to come, Felix trembled, and answered, Go thy way for this time;
when I have a convenient season, I will call for thee” (Acts 24:25).
I could go on and on about the glory of this, but I don’t want to wear you
all out. So the concluding point is that if the weapons of our warfare are
mighty, as Paul says above, and they are mighty enough to conquer the
nations of men, then it follows that they are mighty enough to sustain the
subsequent discipleship. If the power of the gospel can bring the nations to
baptism, then the authority of the gospel, taught with authority and not
like the scribes, is powerful enough to teach them the way of obedience.
And so what is free speech? It is not a means toward theocratic tyranny.
Neither is it a secular end in itself. No. It is gospel fruit, and Jesus is the
Lord of it.
So I want to ask you to work with me here on a thorny theological problem,
a problem caused by a number of factors—those factors including the
continuing validity of God’s holy law, the totalitarian impulses of our
current rulers, the nature of the diference between the old and new
covenants, the inescapable nature of theocracy, and the fact that there is no
absolute right to free speech in any society. And the problem is this. Within
the framework and limits I have just described, I want to argue for the
biblical necessity of a genuine right to free speech. Stay with me.
I do not believe that an abstract principle called “free speech” is in any way
our savior. We have no Savior but Jesus. But when Jesus saves us, one of the
things He saves us from is our own misguided eforts to stile the free
expressions of others. We do not hang on to free speech so that we might
talk about Jesus. We hang on to Jesus so that we might talk with each other.
We do not adopt freedom of speech so that we might fumble our way
into the truth. No. We are given the truth by the grace of God, and part of
that truth includes how we are to treat those who have not embraced it yet.
Before we come to address the theological problem, we have to recognize
that our task is the more dicult because we are currently being abused
and manipulated by corrupt politicians and the titans of tech, all of whom
despise any kind of speech that might contradict them or interfere in any
way with their designs. ey aren’t even pretending anymore and are quite
brazen. ey are a cabal of snollygosters.
If you think that their ability to whip themselves up into a meringue will
be exhausted once they are done with Dr. Seuss and his sneetches, or with
statues of Confederate generals—not to mention Union generals that look
to their uneducated eye like they might have been Confederate generals—
you are quite mistaken. ey are coming ater the Bible, and ater any kind
of speech that depends on the Bible.
You ought to be able to see that red laser dot quivering on the cover of
your Bible. Ater all, your Bible is black, and the red dot should be quite
visible by this point.
In the midst of this, there will be a temptation that therefore presents
itself to Christians, which will be the temptation to become reactionary
instead of remaining reformational. A reactionary response would shut
down their ability to speak their piece because turnabout is fair play, right?
Sauce for the goose, right?
Wrong. A Christian civil order will grant them liberties that they have no
intention of granting to us.
But what I just claimed is not immediately apparent when someone starts
reading their Bible seriously. e problem arises when someone reads
through the Old Testament and concludes that a commitment to biblical
law means we are to bring all the requirements of the old order straight
across.
And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, Whosoever curseth his God shall
bear his sin. And he that blasphemeth the name of the L, he shall surely be put to death,
and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in
the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the L, shall be put to death. (Lev. 24:15–16)
It should be obvious that in the time of Moses, that particular
blasphemer could not appeal to his Jefersonian right to free expression.
And when David slaughtered two-thirds of his Moabite prisoners (2 Sam.
8:1–2), they did not have the recourse of appealing to the Geneva
Convention. But what do these righteous laws and such admirable
examples mean for us today?
What does it mean for us who say that we want biblical law to serve as a
foundation or framework for modern society? On the one hand, it should
not mean retaining a basic secular outlook, decorated with a few references
to the gods of American civic religion, which are then festooned with a few
Bible verses that we got from the Liberty Bell and the speeches of Bill
Clinton. No, it doesn’t mean that.
But neither does it mean picking up the Mosaic code with a huge
grappling hook and plonking it down in the middle of the year of our Lord
2022. ere is no need to have the Idaho Code include a provision that
prohibits boiling a kid in its mother’s milk (Exod. 23:19; 34:26; Deut. 14:21).
Or requiring all homes to have a parapet around the rooline (Deut. 22:8).
And here’s why.
e principles embodied in these laws do still apply, but the circumstances
they were addressing are no more. And the central circumstance that has
been transformative for all human cultures has been the coming of the
Christ.
In the meantime, nobody wants to boil a baby goat in its mother’s milk
anymore, and it remains just to hold a homeowner liable if someone falls
from a second-story deck that was not secured with a rail.
ere are two basic approaches to law. One is the approach that tries to
anticipate every eventuality, and to have a regulation in place to deal with
that eventuality when it comes. Coming up with this kind of law system is
the bureaucrat’s dream job. is is because bureaucracies always aspire to
omniscience and are never deterred by how oten or how spectacularly they
fail.
e other kind of law is the case law system. Old Testament law does not
just have odd provisions, like the baby goat and mother’s milk law, but it is
also an expression of a legal system that should seem very familiar to us. A
case law system is based on precedent, and the principles of justice that can
be identied in that precedent. ere is every expectation that as
circumstances change, the decisions that respond to the changes will adapt
along with it, while the principles of justice involved are to remain
constant. Our common law system is a case law system that goes all the
way back to King Alfred, who got it from Deuteronomy. It is foundational
to our liberties.
Many modern Christians want to say that we should enforce the second
table of the law (the last six of the Ten Commandments, those having to do
with our fellow man), but that we should not even think about enforcing
the rst table (those duties that we have toward God). is is the uneasy
truce they have made with secularism.
Other Christians, of a more ardent reconstructionist bent, don’t see why
we shouldn’t apply the blasphemy law from Leviticus 24 straight across. We
should stone the blasphemers, and ring squads are certainly permissible,
for what are these bullets but very small stones?
And then I come along, urging us to respect the right of free speech for
unbelievers, and it seems to some that I am waling, noodling, and
backlling. “Wilson is just a squish with a tough guy act!”
No. ere is a diference between a theocracy that operates with God’s
direct involvement and a theocracy that has to operate on the basis of God’s
written law alone. A righteous ruler would start where Jesus commanded
us all to start, which is with himself (Matt. 7:1–5). e rst lesson that a
healthy Christian theocracy would have to learn is to be deeply suspicious
of their own loty pretensions. is is not a refusal to apply the words of
Christ. It is a basic application of the words of Christ: “ey shall put you
out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you
will think that he doeth God service” (John 16:2).
Some might think it is “clear” that we simply must enforce the rst table
of the law against the likes of Servetus, but we must also remember at the
same time that Christendom had been guilty of enforcing the rst table
against some of the godliest people in their realms. For every miscreant
like Servetus who was executed, there have been countless thousands of
saints who have been executed by that bloody maniac, the state.
And we should never forget that Christ was convicted on a rst table
ofense. is should give us pause, not because it should never be applied,
but rather because of how easy it is to be misapplied: “Ye have heard the
blasphemy: what think ye? And they all condemned him to be guilty of
death” (Mark 14:64).
e same thing happened to the rst Christian martyr, Stephen. at
was a rst table ofense also. “en they suborned men, which said, We
have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, and against God”
(Acts 6:11).
ose who want the government to have the right to kill blasphemers are
also asking for the government to have the right to kill those who rebuke
their blasphemies.
As a Christian who believes that all governments are theocratic in
principle, I want our deep suspicions about the depravity of human nature
to begin with our rulers, and not with their subjects. I am far less concerned
about the blasphemy that might come from some impudent and
sophomoric atheist with a web page than I am about the blasphemy that
might come from the powerful and well-connected, those who have
complete and absolute control of those blasphemy laws. is concern of
mine is theologically grounded, and it is a rst order theonomic concern.
is is not a sotening of “theocracy,” but rather a foundational
application of it. Dostoevsky knew what he was about when he had Christ
hauled up before the Grand Inquisitor.
Before we get to the details of biblical law, in other words, we must rst
have the framework of biblical law. at means embracing the biblical
doctrine of the nature of man, which means limited government,
separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism, which in turn
means a removal of many of the temptations to bring in the kingdom with
a sword.
And yet, the mission given to the Christian Church does require us to
eradicate blasphemy. We want the world to be lled with praise, and no
longer with cursing and bitterness.
For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great
among the Gentiles; and in every place incense shall be ofered unto my name, and a pure
ofering: for my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the L of hosts. (Mal. 1:11)
So how is that mission to be accomplished? Not through the law: “For the
promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his
seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith” (Rom. 4:13,
emphasis added).
I said above that the coming of Christ was transformative. e message
that we are supposed to proclaim to all nations is that man is sinful and
God is holy, and that there is therefore a settled antipathy between them.
e chasm between God and man was bridged in the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has thereby made all things new (Rev.
21:5). Christ’s followers are therefore commanded to fan out across the
globe with the message of salvation, a gospel that commands all to repent
and believe.
e rst part of that message (repent) applies to every creature. It even
applies to kings and all in authority (1 Tim. 2:1–2). Part of what is entailed
in this message is the theological truth that rulers, kings, princes, and
presidents share with the rest of us this radical disease of depravity. When
those rulers are brought to obedience, one of the rst things that will
develop from this is the idea of limited government. ey will no longer
consider themselves lords of the earth. ey will learn to walk with
humility. When the message comes to these kings, their rst application
will be to repent themselves, and not to enforce the repentance of others
with a sword: “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth
the L require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God?” (Mic. 6:8).
Walk with humility. And the more power a magistrate has, the more
necessary this is. And the more instructed he is, the more the magistrate
will know that the power of the gospel is not to be found in carnal weapons.
He should do whatever he can to keep his coercive powers out of the way.
When Jesus commanded His followers to conquer the world (and that is
what He told them to do), what instruments were they to use? ey were to
wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the Spirit, and then what?
And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in
earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and
of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have
commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
(Matt. 28:18–20)
Christ gave us our mission and He gave us our methods. e world is to be
brought to Christ, with all the nations submitting to Him, agreeing to obey
Him. at is the mission. e method consisted of Word and water, bread
and wine. In this passage from Matthew, just the words and the water are
mentioned.
Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of
Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the
world began, but now is made manifest, and by the scriptures of the prophets, according to
the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience of
faith: To God only wise, be glory through Jesus Christ for ever. Amen. (Rom. 16:25–27)
Now if all nations are to come to the obedience of faith, this means that
the speech of all nations will come to the obedience of faith. Blasphemy will
be eradicated. It will be put to death, a sentence that it richly deserves. And
how will it die? It will be crucied in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But how is obedient speech free speech? In fact, it is the only way that
our speech can ever be truly free. Obedience to the gospel of God is the only
way for sinners to be set free, and this includes their speech. But it has to
come through gospel, not law.
e power to do this is resident in the gospel, in the preaching of Jesus
Christ, which is to be made known to all nations for the obedience of faith.
e nations, all of them, are to be brought to obedience. is would
obviously include the obedience of their words. One of the things we are
laboring for in the gospel is obedient speech. But this is a gospel result that
can only be accomplished by gospel means.
e historian Christopher Dawson once said that the Christian Church
lives in the light of eternity and can aford to be patient. But in the
meantime, I nd it interesting that Luke, also a historian, commends the
example of Gamaliel to us.
en stood there up one in the council, a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law,
had in reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the apostles forth a little
space; And said unto them, Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as
touching these men. For before these days rose up eudas, boasting himself to be
somebody; to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined themselves: who was
slain; and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered, and brought to nought. Ater this
man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, and drew away much people ater
him: he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I say
unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of
men, it will come to nought. (Acts 5:34–38, emphasis added)
Truth is quite sturdy and has nothing to fear.
CHAPTER 12
Restrain the Worst Blasphemer First
WE ARE NOT DONE WITH THE FASCINATING TOPIC OF BIBLICAL LAW
One of the reasons why the question of free speech in a hypothetical
Christian republic is such an interesting topic is because it brings together
all kinds of issues, and presents them to us in a sizzling pan, a sort of
corned beef hash with eggs and onions and exotic sauces all mixed up
together and piping hot. Some of the taste sensations you might not have
anticipated as going well together before you rst tried it, but they do go
together.
I am talking about issues like God’s law in the covenant of grace, the
relationship of Old Testament law to modern society, the diferences
between sins and crimes, the central theopolitical genius move of
Christianity, the actual charge given to us in the Great Commission, and
more.
But here is the bottom-line issue. Can someone committed to the long-
term mission of the Christian church, which is in fact to disciple all the
nations of men (Matt. 28:19–20), with the end result of that process being
the obedience of all those same nations, be genuinely committed to a robust
doctrine of free speech? e answer to that question is yes, with no
shucking or jiving. Another way of saying this is that theocratic
libertarianism is not an oxymoron.
Given that the topic is so challenging, I made the prose here extra
scintillating, which comes from the Latin word for sparkly, and I did this by
not stinting when it came to inserting extra adjectival joy.
I believe that when a Christian theocratic libertarian is challenged with
regard to his free speech bona des, the challenge is absolutely a legitimate
one. On paper, there can appear to be serious tension between free speech
on the one hand and the biblical strictures against blasphemy on the other.
So I don’t begrudge the questions. In fact, I anticipate them and ask a
bunch of them below myself.
But what I do think is funny is when I am asked these questions by
anyone who has ever been any part of the woke brigade. We are living in a
time of unremitting hostility to free speech, and the people who have
declared open war on that free speech are those most likely to be supported
by those Christians who are most skittish about any kind of theonomy
redivivus. So cancel culture is real, and the Christians who are kind of on
board with all of that BLM and woke stuf (“Shut up,” they explain) are also
the ones having Rushdoony nightmares. Our summary dismissal of them
is just.
So consider this an interaction with committed believers, who aren’t
woke at all, but who still wonder how it is possible for a “general equity”
theonomist like myself to argue for free speech—and like I said, without
shucking or jiving. It is a serious question, deserving a serious answer.
e standards of God’s law, being rooted as they are in the character of God
Himself, do not change. How could they change? But God’s tactics, God’s
strategies, do change because the world is a eld of battle, and battles have
a narrative arc. Because of the triumph of Christ on the cross, which was
the turning point in the long war, one of the central strategic shits for
God’s people has occurred in this area. By “this area,” I mean the realm of
religious liberty, free speech, personal freedoms, all that.
One of the diferences between the law under Moses and law of Christ as
given to us in the New Testament is this. In the old covenant, unholiness
was contagious, and in the new covenant it is the holiness that is
contagious. Jesus went around touching lepers, and instead of Him being
made unclean, they were made clean. And lest we say something trite like
“yeah, well, but that was Jesus,” we have the same kind of logic applied to
believers generally.
In the old covenant, the people of God were not supposed to fraternize
with the Canaanites. at was basic. ey were supposed to stay clean
away. ere appears to have been a policy of zero tolerance.
Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his
son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.... But thus shall ye deal with them; ye
shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and
burn their graven images with re. (Deut. 7:3, 5)
e examples of Rahab or Ruth marrying into Israel were not violations
of such restrictions, because they were examples of complete conversion:
“Your God will be my God” (Ruth 1:16, ).
But in the new covenant, we nd a striking reversal of attitude. We are
given clear permission to fraternize with pagans: “If any of them that
believe not bid you to a feast, and ye be disposed to go; whatsoever is set
before you, eat, asking no question for conscience sake” (1 Cor. 10:27).
And don’t worry about where the central dish came from. e pagan who
invited you to dinner got that roast somewhere, and you shouldn’t care that
much about it. If it stumbles a weaker brother in the faith, you should care
about that, but you shouldn’t care about the meat. e meat is not demon-
possessed. You shouldn’t mind sitting down at a table with rank
unbelievers. e earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness of it.
e membership of the Church is to be kept holy, and that holiness is to be
enforced through church discipline. But that discipline is emphatically not
concerned with simple fraternization with idolaters—rather, the concern is
any overt immorality committed by someone who was a member of the
covenant people of God, a professing Christian.
I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators: Yet not altogether with the
fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then
must ye needs go out of the world. But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if
any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a
drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat. (1 Cor. 5:9–11)
Notice that Paul is here assuming that faithful believers are going to be
in company with (associate with, mix with, hang out with, share meals
with) what? People who are fornicators, covetous, extortioners, and,
straight to the point of this chapter, idolaters.
Please note this. Christians were given explicit and free permission to
keep company with idolaters who would worship Aphrodite by fornicating
with prostitutes at her temple. But is that not a blasphemous activity? Yes,
it is, and this is the Pauline strategy for attacking it.
e mission assigned to the Church in the Great Commission is the
eradication of idolatry in the entire world.
So this is not happening because we are now instructed to make our
peace with such idolatry—far from it. Our mission remains the same,
which is to bring every thought captive. e mission assigned to the Church in
the Great Commission is the eradication of idolatry in the entire world. It is quite a
sinful world, and it is a huge mission. Idolatry is still the great enemy,
along with the attendant blasphemies, and this means that idolatry must
go.
But how? is next passage was quoted in the last chapter also.
“For though we walk in the lesh, we do not war ater the lesh: (For the
weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the
pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high
thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into
captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:3–5).
Paul tells us here that the artillery of the new covenant is more powerful
than what the people of God had in their possession in the old covenant.
ese weapons of ours are not carnal, Paul says, but rather mighty. Because
they are mighty, they are able to accomplish their assigned purpose.
Some people think that in the transition from the old covenant to the
new, blasphemy went from outlawed to somehow acceptable. It actually
went from outlawed to doomed.
So none of this is written because we as post-Enlightenment Christians are
supposed to feel a little bit sheepish about all the Mosaic hardball.
When Elijah executed the priests of Baal down by the brook Kishon, what
he did was not a violation of the modern spirit of ecumenism. What he did
was holy, righteous, and good. When Moses commanded a man to be
executed for picking up sticks on the Sabbath, that too was holy, righteous,
and good. And when the son of Shelomith blasphemed the name of the
Lord in the camp and was executed at the word of a holy God, his execution
was holy, righteous, and good. ere was nothing wrong with any of that.
And the son of an Israelitish woman, whose father was an Egyptian, went out among the
children of Israel: and this son of the Israelitish woman and a man of Israel strove together
in the camp; And the Israelitish woman’s son blasphemed the name of the L, and
cursed. And they brought him unto Moses: (and his mother’s name was Shelomith, the
daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan:) And they put him in ward, that the mind of the L
might be shewed them. And the L spake unto Moses, saying, Bring forth him that hath
cursed without the camp; and let all that heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let
all the congregation stone him. And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying,
Whosoever curseth his God shall bear his sin. And he that blasphemeth the name of the
L, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as
well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the
L, shall be put to death. (Lev. 24:10–16)
But if his execution was holy, righteous, and good, inquiring minds want
to know something. Why is that not to be the law for any future Christian
republic you might want to develop the blueprints for? What will we do
with the sons of Shelomith then?
omas Jeferson once said that if someone “neither picks my pocket,
nor breaks my leg,” then we should leave him entirely alone.1 As well-
catechized Americans, this sits well with us, and it goes down easy, but
how on earth can that be harmonized with Leviticus 24?
Sit still, children, and I will tell you. Stop squirming.
is is the hinge upon which all turns.
Many Christians mistakenly interpret the transition to the new covenant
as one that acknowledges that the Church is consigned to perpetual
marginalization. No, the git of the Spirit at Pentecost signaled a transition
from defense to ofense. at rst glorious day was a preview of coming
attractions.
is conquest is not evolutionary progress. It is not a case of our better
angels breaking out of the chrysalis of ignorance and poorly funded public
education. No, it is a conquest of our sin and iniquity by means of the
proclamation of a crucied Christ.
So I don’t believe in free speech because I think that everybody has
something valuable to say. No, I believe that all men and women are bad
sinners, and it shows up in their speech. e trouble is that as soon as you
start talking about regulating their free speech, because it is bad, all the
possible enforcers and regulators are rock hewn from that same quarry.
Censors are sinners too.
When you give the state power to punish a blasphemer, you are giving
the state the power to blaspheme with impunity.
Keeping in mind the things shown earlier, the Christian Church began
its long campaign against the biggest blasphemer—the state. Limited
government is the theopolitical genius of Christianity. What I am arguing
for is not a secular libertarian ideal, where any man can blaspheme if he
wants to. Rather, in its long war against blaspheming idols, the Christian
Church started by attacking the biggest blasphemers, the central
blasphemers, the blasphemers with the power of coercion: “And there was
given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power
was given unto him to continue forty and two months” (Rev. 13:5).
So here is the baseline argument. Whenever you give the state power to
punish a blasphemer, you are in that moment giving the state the power to
blaspheme, and limiting a government’s power to punish blasphemy is
actually limiting a government’s power to blaspheme. And the biggest
blasphemy culprits in human history have consistently been these so-called
lords of the earth—and not the mental patient who got of his meds and is
saying erratic things in aisle 7 at Safeway. e state has always been the
principal blasphemy threat, in other words.
Pontius Pilate had the power to punish blasphemy. e Sanhedrin had
the right to urge him to. And Jesus was in fact convicted on a spurious
charge of blasphemy. It was by such means that the greatest blasphemy
ever committed in history was in fact committed. e greatest act of
blasphemy our race was ever guilty of was committed in the name of ghting
blasphemy.
“Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? And they all condemned
him to be guilty of death” (Mark 14:64).
is fact alone should make every true Christian more than a tad nervous
about “executing the blasphemers.” e high priest stated his outrageous
charge in front of the Sanhedrin, and it was Dostoevsky’s genius that
enabled him to see that very same spirit in the Grand Inquisitor.
So you want to shut down blasphemy? Great. Let’s start with the biggest
ones.
Whenever you give the state plenipotentiary powers to crack down on x,
y, and z, what you are actually doing—please remember this—is giving
them plenipotentiary powers to commit x, y, and z. is is because sinners
don’t do well with plenipotentiary powers. e doctrine of sin and total
depravity is the cornerstone of a true doctrine of free speech, and hard-
headed democratic liberty.
I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You
may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the
commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. at is, in my
opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe
fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power
over his fellows. at I believe to be the true ground of democracy.2
And I see more sin lurking in the repression of speech than I do in the
speech itself.
And so the central Christian theopolitical contribution is to frame the
constitution in such a way as to take human depravity into account. at
means limited government. at is essential.
Why haven’t we learned this principle yet? When you pass something like
the Patriot Act, with much fanfare, in order to enable patriots to spy on the
bad guys, what winds up happening is that the act is used to enable bad
guys to spy on patriots. So the license to punish blasphemy is actually the
license to blaspheme. And yet... Leviticus 24 is still in the Bible. Hold on
for just a few more moments.
So Abraham and his seed will in fact inherit the world. But we will not do it
through law. It is the proclamation of gospel truth that will do it. We inherit
the earth, but not through law. We conquer idolatrous blasphemy, but not
through law: “For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was
not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the
righteousness of faith” (Rom. 4:13).
is means that the laws will be afected downstream from this
inheritance, but the inheritance will not be brought about by means of the
law. Rather it will be through the proclamation of the righteousness of
faith. is will happen when scholars start preaching a hot gospel.
is is the yeast in the loaf. According to the balances of Scripture, it would
be far better for a guilty man to get away with his crime than for an
innocent man to be punished for something he didn’t do. e latter is a far
greater travesty. We can see this principle embedded in the standard that
requires two or three witnesses to convict someone of a crime. One witness
can see a particular crime, and be absolutely sure of what he sees, and yet it
would be better to let that particular guilty culprit walk free than to
establish a principle that would allow for the conviction of an individual on
the basis of one man’s testimony alone—because then you are inviting real
trouble. You have opened the door to outrages. A wicked man could take
out his enemy, using the instrument of the courts, which would dele the
courts. And when the courts are corrupted and deled, we are all in
trouble.
In a similar spirit, it is better to allow a troubled individual to blaspheme
than to give, for the sake of preventing such things, regulatory powers over
the denition of blasphemy to the very people most likely to be tempted to get
into real blasphemy.
at’s all very well, somebody is going to say, but what about Leviticus
24? I haven’t dealt with that yet, have I?
First, the executed man there was not a victim of injustice. He got a just
penalty for his crime, and it was right and proper for the Israelites to stone
him. No apologies here for Leviticus. God told them directly to execute
him. How could it not be just?
e Mosaic law as given to Israel in the wilderness was holiness in a kit.
e laws were hard-edged, cut and dried, God was present with them, they
had prophets on scene, and God’s purpose was to dene and defend a holy
people called by His name. at law was, pure and simple, rough-cut
justice. It was capable of killing blasphemers, which was right and good,
but was still not capable of ending blasphemy.
For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the lesh, God sending his own Son
in the likeness of sinful lesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the lesh. (Rom. 8:3, emphasis
added)
For if that rst covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a
second. (Heb. 8:7, )
So what I am arguing for here is a Christocentric theonomy—theonomy as
though the Christ had come. It is not a question of whether the law of God
is just, but rather a matter of how that standard of justice is to be
implemented throughout the world. It will eventually show up in the law,
but it will not be implement through the law.
And when it shows up in the law, it will have worked the way yeast works
through a loaf of bread. It will not be given to the world in a fearsome
revelation at a new Mt. Sinai. It will not be given all at once, with the
people instructed to guard every detail of the law with the ferocity of
Phineas.
ere are three basic reasons why this should be taken as what God intended
for us to do, and not as an example of idolatrous compromise, pure and
simple.
First, the Mosaic code is a case law system, not a top-down system. It is
not a legal code that tries to anticipate every eventuality and then make a
rule about it. So following Old Testament law is much more about copying
the system of law that it contained than it is about reproducing every detail
of the law. is is what our common law system does—it is a theonomic
reproduction of a system of precedents and principles. at is what a case
law system is, and despite some recent setbacks, there has been some good
headway made. is is why my ideal Christian republic, set sometime in
the future, would not have a law requiring a parapet around the roofs of
houses, but would nevertheless hold a home owner liable for damages if a
guest fell of a second-story deck that had no rail and broke his arm. You
look at a situation, discern the principle, and apply it to a new situation.
Second, the Lord of glory has been made lesh, and through His death,
burial, and resurrection, and through the coronation that followed His
Ascension, He has made all things new. Like Aslan bringing stone creatures
back to life, this new life that originated in His resurrection is inexorable
and will spread to the entire world. e earth will be as full of the glory of
the Lord as the waters cover the sea. at means the conquest of this
Canaan will not end with corrupt kings, disaster, and exile. is Israel will
not falter at the end. e power that was dropped into the world as a result
of God’s gospel intervention was such a great power that it justied the
shit in tactics that we see and that I described earlier. But it does not alter
the end result that we are aiming for—obedience to every word of Christ—
including the things He said about the words of Moses.
ird, because God has more condence in His gospel than we do, in His
wisdom He dropped the yeast of His Word, which included that system of
case law into the Greco/Roman loaf. is means that as we teach the
nations and tribes to obey every one of the Lord’s commands, and to
submit to all of His teachings, this would include His teaching that Old
Testament Scripture cannot be broken, and that He did not come to abolish
the law but rather to fulll it. But He also taught us, and we are called to
remember this also, that this kingdom of His was to spread gradually—as
we go out there and make friends with the Canaanites.
ese are not dark and mysterious tasks. We have already done this once,
and historians call that result Christendom. We learned a lot in that initial
rollout, and there are some things we don’t want to do again, certainly, but
that’s all right. We have plenty of time—as Christians we live in the light of
eternity, as Dawson put it, and can aford to be patient. And so the world
still lies before us, and that world is what we Christians call “a mission
eld.”
So it is time for a Christendom upgrade, a reboot, as it were. I am
suggesting that we call it a mere Christendom.
1.. omas Jeferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 165.
2.. C.S. Lewis, e Weight of Glory (1949; New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 169.
CHAPTER 13
e Lure of Hypocrisy
THE LORD JESUS HAD A GREAT DEAL TO SAY ABOUT HYPOCRIT
professed to love God with their mouths but whose hearts were far from
Him (Matt. 15:8). Scripture never praises hypocrisy, and so why on earth
should we institute a form of government that will create enormous
pressure—for anyone who is socially, or culturally, or political ambitious—
to name the name of Christ for carnal reasons?
is is a genuine worry for many believers. ey have oten heard that
when Constantine was converted, and then later when Christianity was
made the religion of the empire, just this kind of pressure was exerted.
Many looded into the Church because that was the way the tide was now
running, and this brought about a major infusion of insincerity into the
Church. And if there is one thing that most churches don’t need, it would
be major infusions of insincerity.
How should we respond to this?
One time Martin Luther was responding to an objection that said that if
we preached free grace the way he was doing, this would result in some
people abusing that grace. His response was straight to the point. “Let
them,” he said.
An argument that would prevent us from doing the right thing in our
social, cultural, and political life together because some people would
pretend to support it when they didn’t really mean it is truly an odd
argument.
If we have genuine twenty-dollar bills that can be used to purchase goods
and services, then it is certainly going to create the temptation that
counterfeiters have to print their own twenty-dollar bills in the basement.
But nobody takes this as a good reason to abandon the use of currency.
is is a fallen world, and if we do absolutely anything worthwhile,
somebody is going to copy it, pretending that they have done what they
have not done. is is true about painting beautiful pictures, being
courageous in battle, bringing children up well, running a successful
business, and... setting a nation to rights in accordance with the Word of
God.
ere was a great revival going in Jerusalem once, and the people
involved were sold out in the love that they were showing one to another. Of
course, this created the opportunity for Ananias and Sapphira to try to get
a full-price credit for a discounted commitment. is will always happen
when we set about to do anything good. Let it.
PART FOUR
How to Restore Christendom
CHAPTER 14
Two Revolutions
AS OS GUINNESS HAS ABLY POINTED OUT, THERE ARE TWO SPIRITS C
one another in our time. ey are the spirits of two revolutions, that of 1776
and that of 1789—the American and French Revolutions respectively. ey
are not related to one another as B is to A, but rather as A is to not A.
Because the progressive let understands this antithesis better than most
conservatives do, they have engaged in a great deal of work seeking to
undermine, redene, explain away, and/or debunk the accomplishments of
the American War for Independence. is means there will be no successful
establishment of a mere Christendom unless we review the game lm, in
order to take away certain key lessons from the good run that the American
version of a mere Christendom had.
is means comparing the radical diference between the American and
French revolutions, and I would like to do so with the aid of Friedrich von
Gentz (1764–1832). He was a German writer, thinker, publicist, and man of
public afairs. He wrote a short little booklet comparing the two
revolutions, and it was published in 1800, the same year Jeferson was
elected to the presidency. is year was signicant because Washington
and Adams had both been Federalists, and with the election of Jeferson, a
Republican, it was possible to see the rise of normal “politics” and peaceful
transitions of power. America had survived—but what was the nature of
this thing that had survived?
e booklet was translated for the English-speaking world soon ater
publication. e translation was done by John Quincy Adams, the son of
our second president and a man who was destined to become our sixth
president. is meant the essay was presented to the reading public in
English long before the translator rose to the presidency, and it provides us
with a good glimpse of the early struggle to control the narrative of
America’s founding. Everyone knew that America was independent now,
but what did that mean exactly?
We should consider the roles of names rst. I would prefer to call our
revolution the American War for Independence, but the American
“Revolution” resulted in far more than simple independence. It was an
event that captured the world’s imagination, which meant that many
diferent factions wanted to use it for the advancement of their own
projects. Everyone knew that the War for Independence was important.
But what sort of importance did it have?
As historians, biographers, journalists, and politicians wrote about it, a
battle for control of the narrative began, and it began very early on. Some
saw it as the rst in a series of inevitable revolutions, and so they naturally
welcomed the French Revolution as the obvious next step. Others (e.g.,
Edmund Burke, Friedrich Gentz, or John Quincy Adams) saw the
revolutions as strikingly diferent from those that came ater, as diferent
as night and day.
Modern Christians have gotten used to our “culture wars.” is should not
be surprising—these culture wars have been with us from the very
foundation of our nation. ey are not something new that erupted when
the rst hippies started to disrupt Berkeley. From the very beginning, we
have had men like Patrick Henry wanting America to take her place among
the nations of Christendom. And also from the very beginning, we have
had men like omas Paine, who wanted something much more like the
French Revolution. For Christians, part of the reason our culture wars are
so confusing is because we have neglected the principles that were laid
down at our nation’s founding.
e ghting that we now call the American War of Independence actually
started in 1775, and independence was not openly declared until July of the
next year. e war lasted for eight years, until 1783. When the Treaty of
Paris was signed, the new nation operated for six years under the Articles
of Confederation, ater which a consensus arose about the need for a more
robust constitution.
So John Quincy Adams wrote the preface to his translation of Gentz’s
booklet. He makes his basic point very strongly. Gentz did a ne job, he
said, because his booklet “rescues that revolution from the disgraceful
imputation of having proceeded from the same principles as that of
France.” Now disgraceful is a strong word. He goes on to say that the
revolutions of America and France were as diferent as “right and wrong.”1
I have already mentioned the issue of names. At the time of the American
Revolution, the word revolution did not have the connotations it came to
have ater the French Revolution. When we use the word revolutionary
today, we mean some kind of re-eater. At this time, the meaning of the
word was closer to its cognate word revolve. A revolution simply meant that
there had been a change in the government, that things had “turned over.”
An example of this usage would be the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in
England. While the basic structures of English society remained what they
had been, one king was removed and another one installed.
But starting with the French Revolution, a more sinister and radical
meaning took root. A revolution still means a turnover in the government,
but now we have the extra connotations that guillotines bring to the
situation. When the American Revolution was rst undertaken, revolution
was a reasonable noun to use. But now, in the atermath of numerous other
revolutions, almost all of them nasty, it would perhaps be better to use the
alternative name for our war—which is the American War of
Independence.
Using the modern denition of revolution, it is safe to say that the
nineteenth century was the century of revolution—more or less. e rst
revolution in this sense was the French Revolution, occurring just before
the opening of the nineteenth century (1789–1799). e Russian Revolution
occurred just ater the nineteenth century had ended (1917). During the
course of that nineteenth century, there were various street revolts in
Europe (e.g., 1848). is century of turmoil did not leave the United States
untouched—we did have an event that was roughly comparable to the
French Revolution, but that happened in 1861, not 1776. Karl Marx followed
our Civil War with great interest and saw in it possibilities for the kind of
radicalism that he was fomenting.
But the point I am making here, and which I want to make in the
strongest possible way, was that the American War of Independence was
not the rst in this series, but was rather a diferent kind of event entirely.
We took a diferent path. Edmund Burke, that great and insightful enemy
of the wrong kind of revolution, the man who predicted the Terror before it
happened in France, was an English parliamentarian statesman... who
took the side of the Americans. e constitutional radicals were in control
of Parliament, while the conservatives ghting for the basic principles of
the English Constitution were here in America.
Of course, this requires explanation.
When the Stamp Act was passed in 1765, the American reaction was hot.
But the problem was not the amount of the tax per se, but rather the
constitutional authority to tax. What would you do, as a resident of
Montana, if one day you received a tax bill authorized by the legislature of
Rhode Island? Take a step further. Suppose the bill was only for ve dollars,
and your friends tried to quiet you down by pointing out that it was only
ve dollars. You would hopefully point out that the amount was not the
point. e point would be that Rhode Island had no lawful jurisdiction over
you. at would be the point, right?
Parliament was the legislative body for England. e colonies all had
their own lawfully constituted legislatures. is is what was meant by the
phrase “no taxation without representation.” Because the colonists had no
representatives in Parliament (but did have representatives in their own
legislatures), it was therefore completely out of line for Parliament to levy a
tax on Virginians, Marylanders, or Pennsylvanians.
But how had Parliament come to think that it did have such a right? e
answer requires us to go back one more century. In the previous century,
the English Civil War had resulted in Charles I being executed in 1649. As a
consequence, Oliver Cromwell ruled (not as king but Lord Protector)
during a period known as the Interregnum (1649–1660). Ater Cromwell
died, his son Richard did not demonstrate the same competence of his
father, and so Charles II was brought back to the throne in the Restoration
(1660). He ruled for a bit, and when he died, he let no legitimate heir,
which meant his brother, James II, took over.
Unfortunately, James was a Catholic with a bigoted streak. He
mismanaged his rule rather badly, and so in 1688, he was evicted from the
throne and replaced by William and Mary. is event was called the
Bloodless Revolution, or the Glorious Revolution, whatever suits you. But
the central point is that England had not been kind to kings in the
seventeenth century. James II was deposed, and Charles I had been
decapitated. Naturally enough, ater 1688, Parliament assumed, with some
justication, that the relationship between themselves and the monarch
had been greatly altered. And so it had been altered in England. But in the
colonies, nothing had changed.
So the problem was that the colonies had all been planted, and their
political constitutions xed and established, prior to all this turmoil in
England. ey were across the ocean, quietly growing up into a signicant
power, both economic and political. And their constitutions had been
settled under the old system.
Here is Gentz on this crucial detail.
Most of the colonies were founded before the middle of the seventeenth century; all before
the revolution of 1688. e province of Georgia, the most southern of the colonies, and
which was originally part of South Carolina, was the only one which received her separate
constitution since the beginning of the century; (in 1732) and was likewise the only one for
the settlement and cultivation of which the British government had been at any cost.2
e settlements were varied. Maryland, for example, had been a grant to a
private individual. Others were royal provinces, which meant that the king
was the immediate sovereign over them. Yet others had the authority of the
king strictly limited in their charters—as with Massachusetts and
Connecticut. According to their founding documents, they had various
degrees of relationship to the king, but not one of them had any relationship to
the Parliament whatever.
Each legislature had authority over its own laws, period, end, stop. e
Charter of Maryland, to take one example, said they had the right to “free,
full and absolute Power . . . to ordaine, Make, and Enact LAWS of what
kind soever, according to their sound discretion.” Now the colonists were
Englishmen, and this meant they were under the English Constitution.
And this meant, in turn, that the power to tax was resident in those
legislatures where they, the colonists, were represented. And only there.
So with regard to their taxation, English Parliament was an alien body.
In no single colony, however its constitution, in respect to its dependence upon the crown,
was organized, was there a trace of a constitutional and legal authority, vested in the
British parliament.3
e sole basis for Parliament’s claim to authority over the colonies was
that they said they had it. But they didn’t.
So the stage was set for conlict. Ater 1688, the authority of Parliament in
England ascended. During that same period of time, the colonies were
prospering. e average standard of living for the average American grew
past the standard of living for the average European by 1740. America had
become an economic force to be reckoned with very early on. Parliament
had become a political force (over against the king) at the same time.
Conlict was inevitable.
Now Parliament’s mistake was a natural one. Now that they were in
charge of the king, why wouldn’t they also be in charge of anything the king
had been in charge of? is included all those prosperous, fat, untaxed
colonies “over there.”
But all the constitutional power shits had been occurring in England, not
in America. is meant that when the Americans took their stand, it was on
the basis of their rights as Englishmen. is is why a conservative like Burke
could support them. e Americans were in the right, constitutionally
speaking.
Each colony had an executive head, which was the Crown. Each
legislature was dened according to its respective charter. Not one of those
denitions had any room for Parliament. Parliament was not listed
anywhere on the low chart. Maintaining the point in just this way was a
matter of admirable consistency. is is why the Declaration of
Independence is a series of complaints against the king. ey didn’t
complain against Parliament because they had nothing to do with
Parliament.
At the same time, the king had a constitutional responsibility to protect
them from all such unconstitutional usurpations of Parliament. And this
brings up another point that might seem to be an arcane bit of law, but it is
really quite important.
In British feudalism, the king or lord owed his subjects or vassals
protection. In return, those subjects owed him allegiance. at was how
feudalism worked. In December of 1775, the British Parliament passed the
Prohibitory Act, which stripped the colonies of the king’s protection, and
determined that they were to be treated as foreign enemies.4 e king did
not step in to protect the colonies from this tyrannical force, and so, in the
Declaration, the colonies declared themselves free of any allegiance to the
king. ey did not have to declare themselves free of any allegiance to
Parliament, for they had never had any.
Compare all this to what happened in France. Take someone from
Maryland, who had been born in 1750. Say he died in that same
commonwealth in 1805. Such a citizen would have lived his entire life
under the same civil authority, in the same civil society. Someone who had
been born in France in the same year, and who died in the same year, would
have died under a completely new order. e old regime was devastated,
while in America independence was the result. e old England was still
there. So the American War for Independence was strictly speaking a war
of independence—an attempt to recognize the ocean. e French
Revolution destroyed the ancien regime and sought to replace it with a
complete novelty.
e French Revolution (1789–1799) began with a nancial crisis. e
Estates-General were summoned to deal with it, but things spiraled
quickly out of control. e Bastille was stormed, and then the royal court
was brought back to Paris from Versailles by force. Louis XVI was beheaded
in 1792. e Reign of Terror followed (1793–1794), and some tens of
thousands of people were executed. is is the time of the guillotine. But it
has to be said again that Burke, who knew how to read the trajectory of ideas, set
his face against the French Revolution before the Terror showed how right
he was.
Ater the fall of the radicals, the revolution was then governed by the
Directory, until it was replaced by the Consulate of Napoleon Bonaparte—
the dictatorship of a charismatic leader. So when you look at the appalling
series of events involved in the French Revolution, and you look at the sober
restraint that characterized the American War for Independence, to say
that they come from the same stock is really quite an astonishing historical
slander.
Both wars had revolution in their names. Both occurred within a few years
of each other. And unless you were as clear-eyed as Burke, what the French
Revolution became was not immediately obvious. And it is true to say that
some of the intellectual currents that were very popular in France were
present in America, but not nearly at the same levels. omas Paine was the
kind of person who could really move things in France, but he was pretty
lonely in his radicalism over here. So the revolutionary elements that made
the French Revolution so appalling were present here, but those sparks here
did not come in contact with the same kind of combustible material as they
did over there. ey did not come into contact with those combustible
materials, because those kinds of materials were largely absent here—
thanks to the Great Awakening.
Now of course there were some responsible Americans, men like omas
Jeferson, who were open to the French Revolution initially. Remember that
the French had come to our aid in our war. It was the French leet that had
bottled up Cornwallis at Yorktown. And George Washington had been
greatly helped by Lafayette, who later on became a participant in the
French Revolution.
But even with such historical details, we have to make some distinctions.
e French Revolution, once it took of, had its cooler heads along with its
incendiary types. Lafayette was one of the former, one of the cooler hands,
and in their assembly he was seated with others like himself on the right
side of their chamber. In fact, this is where our phrases right wing and let
wing come from—the right wingers were the more conservative
revolutionaries. I would argue it is not good to be either, but current events
were as complicated back then as they are now.
So with all that said and recognized, clear-headed Americans knew that
what they had fought for was not at all like what the French Revolution was
seeking to establish. To run them together really is a historical slander and
would mean throwing away one of the great achievements of the American
founding—a righteous heritage.
e last thing to note in this regard is the fact that the American War for
Independence was waged and won by a collection of Christian states. When
the French Revolution overthrew the previous order, Christianity was
included in what was overthrown. at was not at all the case here. Over
half the signers of the Declaration of Independence had the equivalent of
seminary degrees. e Constitution was drated in the year of our Lord
1789. One of the names for the War in England was the Presbyterian Revolt.
A number of the colonies had formal relationships with specic Christian
denominations. Over half of the Continental Army under Washington were
Presbyterians, and a large part of the remainder were Congregationalists.
Observations like this could easily be multiplied.
e fact that it was Christian meant that our republic was part of
Christendom. e fact that numerous Christian denominations were
involved meant that we provided the beta-testing for a mere Christendom.
As time went on, one revolution swallowed the other one. e radical
revolution in France, with its centralizing and secular logic, swallowed the
American War for Independence in the events that we call the American
Civil War. at was the moment when the centralizing humanist logic
established its beachhead. But even though the Revolution of 1776 was
swallowed then, it has proven dicult to digest. And that is why we still
have an ongoing conlict.
1.. John Quincy Adams, preface to e Origins and Principles of the American Revolution Compared with the
Principles of the French Revolution (Philadelphia: Asbury Dickens, 1800), 3–4.
2.. Gentz, e Origins and Principles of the American Revolution, 37–38.
3.. Gentz, e Origins and Principles of the American Revolution, 39.
4.. John Eidsmoe, God and Caesar (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1997), 34.
CHAPTER 15
American Exceptionalism
WE HAVE MANY GOOD REASONS FOR BELIEVING THAT SECULARISM I
If this is correct, then at some point we are going to discover what will rise
up to take the place of that secularism. We need to be prepared for such a
realignment. But we also need to be prepared to suggest that the
realignment take into account the fact that Jesus rose from the dead on the
third day ater His crucixion.
And so am I the only one around here tired of hearing about American
exceptionalism?
e founding of our nation really was exceptional, because the men who
drated our Constitution knew that American politicians, taking one thing
with another, would be every bit as sleazy as the same class of men from
any other clime. As Samuel Johnson once put it, “Politicks . . . are now
nothing more than means of rising in the world. With this sole view do
men engage in politicks, and their whole conduct proceeds upon it.”1
Surprise! Crossing the Atlantic did not change human nature. File this
under things we should have learned from e Who, who weren’t going to
get fooled again. Meet the new world, same as the old world—novus ordo
seclorum needs to come back to Jesus.
e Founders knew we were not exceptional, and they drated a
constitution that did not trust us, not even a little bit. e subtext of the
Constitution is not “beware of the English crown,” and it is not even
“beware of the commies from the Soviet Union.” e subtext of the
Constitution is that we are constantly to beware of Boobus americanus and
the inveigling mountebanks they elect. We are particularly to watch their
beady little eyes (Art. I, Sec. 2), their greasy palms (Art. III, Sec. 1), their
sweaty foreheads (Art. II, Sec. 4), and their glowing promises lled with
Uplit and Sunshine (Art. IV, Sec. 4).
at self-awareness really was exceptional. But we have now lost
anything resembling such humility, and have replaced it with an
Ozymandian pride, and are the laughingstock of the angels crammed into
the balcony at the celestial matinee, who have seen ten empires rise and
fall, and it is not even lunch yet.
ose who misuse American exceptionalism try to pretend that they are the
only ones in the world who have had these blessings—which means that
they will not learn the lessons of history when it comes to the abuse of
blessings. ose who recoil from an ordinary and humane patriotism, as is
common on the let, try to pretend that there have been no blessings at all
—and thus they don’t have to worry about stewardship of blessings either.
If everything we have was stolen from Indians in order to rape the land,
then it doesn’t make sense to think of our responsibilities in terms of
stewardship.
When it comes to the patterns of history and the temptations of fallen
human nature, America is not exceptional at all. Read the story patterns of
history—the rise and fall of empires and great nations is one of the oldest
stories in the world. Now when it comes to the current roster of the United
Nations, I would rather have my grandchildren growing up here than
anywhere else. But in growing up here, they have to learn to appreciate
what they have been given, and what their responsibilities are in
preserving it, so that they have something to pass on to their
grandchildren.
Most people only know half of Stephen Decatur’s famous toast—“my
country, right or wrong.” But the whole thing was much more admirable.
“My country, may she always be right. But my country, right or wrong.” e
abbreviated version makes it sound like national interest is the only
standard that a full-tilt patriot would ever recognize. e full version
recognizes that there is a standard of right and wrong that far transcends
national interest.
One of those transcendent standards, incidentally, is what undergirds
the necessity of a connected loyalty to other sinners—the second part of the
toast.
In a fallen world, such loyalties are obviously not absolute. ere are
times when high rebellion against Heaven on the part of the other needs to
be recognized, and it is time to walk away. But a decent respect for the
opinion of mankind should, if this becomes necessary, require that you be
able to give an orderly account of why you consider the bond of loyalty to be
dissolved. In the meantime, “my country, may she always be right...”
In my experience, those who are most ambivalent or cynical about
patriotic pieties—lags, reworks, and fun—are most likely to embrace the
second half of Decatur’s toast without qualication. ey are most likely to
support the abuses of statist power when the state is attempting to be some
jitney god in the lives of its citizens. But those who wave the lag at the
parade, and eat their hot dogs aterwards, are most likely to recognize that
the government has gotten itself way out of line.
Take a couple big-E-on-the-eye-chart issues—homosexual marriage and
abortion. Take a poll of a thousand people at a Fourth of July parade, where
lags are everywhere, and then poll the same number of people who would
not dream of attending such a cheesy event. Which group is most likely to
support the oppressive tyranny, right or wrong, and which group is most
likely, overwhelmingly, to oppose it? Right.
Say that Mom has a drinking problem, and it is time for an intervention.
Whom do you want leading and coordinating it? e son who calls every
week and sends lowers and a card every Mother’s Day, or the son who has
been a cynical smart-mouth from high school on? e son who has
observed the pieties is qualied to say something about the maternal sin
and is the most likely to do it right. e other son might actually be the
source of the problem and ought not to be put in charge of xing it.
How is it possible to move from a discussion of well-ordered patriotism
and into a question of whether there is a coming crack-up of the United
States? It should be possible because that is what we are about to do. It
might be emotionally dicult, but it is not a tough logic problem. e duty
we have to honor our mothers should not be taken as requiring us to
believe that our mothers are immortal.
You cannot build a federal system when the component parts belong to
diferent civilizations. Neither can you do it when the component parts
were once part of the same civilization but have been headed in diferent
directions. But I am running ahead.
My commitment to federalism is pretty strong, but nothing in that
category outranks the laws of God. So this means that I would want to use
federalism to manage the crack-up. Depending on the circumstances, my
inclination would be to let them go. ere might be times when ghting
with a departing state would be morally necessary, but that would have
nothing to do with states’ rights—the same circumstances would require
war with a neighboring sovereign state. If you could go to war with Canada
over it, then you could go to war with a departing Massachusetts. If not,
then not.
e question of secession goes right to the heart of an incipient idolatry
of ours that is found in the word indivisible. Only God is indivisible, and all
others are pretenders. If the idea of a state going its own way is
“unthinkable,” then it would perhaps be a good idea to inquire into why it is
unthinkable. Only God is indivisible.
Right next door to the question of secession—a right that the Founders
should have made more explicit than they did—is the equally challenging
matter of expulsion. ere needs to be a mechanism for frog-marching
somebody to the curb. But enough about California.
A states’ rights approach is not the same thing as saying that states know
best how to govern themselves. A number of them clearly do not—Illinois
springs immediately to mind. States can become tyrannical, and so my
questioner asks what would I say about my precious states’ rights when a
state was being tyrannical on a signicant issue like the right to life, and
was (in our thought experiment) at odds with the federal government,
which on this matter was in the right. Take the example of New York State
liberalizing their abortion laws before Roe v. Wade. During that brief time,
a state was running ahead of the central government in this wickedness.
Should pro-life Christians abandon their federalism and demand that
the federal government intervene and do something? Suppose New York
wanted to secede rather than give up their abortion?
Quite apart from the inversion of the Bill of Rights ater the Civil War,
there can be legitimate, constitutional, and necessary restrictions on what
a state can and cannot do. A state cannot set up a monarchical form of
government, for example (Art. IV, Sec. 4).
But what happens if they do? I don’t believe the federal government
should come in to x it—that would turn the state into a province. I say
this despite the fact that the Constitution says the United States shall
“guarantee” each state a republican form of government. It says that, but
we don’t have a mechanism for it, and we plainly need one.
I believe that the Constitution should have a provision that would enable
the rest of the country to deal with something like this. at provision
should allow (say) the Feds to process things in much the same way that we
would impeach a president. e House would indict the culprit state, and
the Senate would hear the case. If the state is found guilty, they would have
three options. e rst would be to accept the judgment and x the
problem—the king of South Dakota would return to being a simple
governor again. e second option would be for the state to peacefully
secede. e third option would be for the Senate to vote to expel that state
from the Union.
Such a process would ensure that something like this could be done in an
orderly way. What it would not do is create the possibility of “two Americas”
developing. at would have already been accomplished by a state adopting
a cultural stand at radical variance from many or most of the others. e
recent culture war lash points like abortion and homosexual marriage are
a case in point.
I can get gumbo and grits more easily in New Orleans than I can in
Manchester, New Hampshire. e same goes for hearing live zydeco. ese
represent variations in a common culture. A farmer with a pickup truck in
Wisconsin listens to music all the time that sings about red Georgia clay,
and this despite the fact that he has never seen any. is is part of the
texture of a common culture, and a big part of what makes it so enjoyable
to live in a country as big as ours.
But abortion represents an alien civilization. It is ancient Molech worship
redivivus. e same-sex marriage mirage is the same kind of thing. is is
not making the same dish with a slightly diferent recipe. Neither is this
gumbo or goulash. It represents an alien civilization, one with a radically
diferent idea of what it means to be human. How could it not be radically
diferent? Mothers cultivate childlessness, wives are male, and husbands
are female. Other than that, everything is the same as it was.
is is not making an omelet with three eggs instead of two. It is making
an omelet with three rocks instead of two eggs. And the average diner will
not be able to get it down, no matter how many tolerance seminars you
make him attend.
e remnants of Christendom and the rising acceptance of the Molech
state cannot coexist. One will devour the other. One must give way to the
other. e apostles of the aspiring Molech worship know this better than
the Christians do. It is a striking fact that the religion of secularism does
not have an R2K contingent.
ere is a wonderful passage in e Everlasting Man where Chesterton
compares the decent (but still lost) pagans of Rome and the dark pagans of
Carthage. I think it was because the Carthaginians had what Van Til would
later call epistemological self-consciousness. ey saw their damnation
and doubled down.
So bringing it back to the original question, these two civilizations—
secularism and Christianity—cannot be cobbled together, however stout
the ropes. I believe that self-government in a federal and decentralized
republic is the strongest and best form of civil government. But it is a form
of government that has to presuppose a particular kind of civilization. It
grows nowhere else.
Pagan Rome was on its last legs and desperately needed a principle of unity
that the old forms of worship could no longer provide. And so Constantine
turned to Christ, in much the same way that a wino might turn to Christ in
order to “kick this habit.” He has one great problem he knows about, but he
has not thought through the implications beyond that. But once the booze
is put away, is Christ then done? It was shortsighted in the extreme to think
that Christ would take the old Roman Empire, shine it up a bit, and then
wait for the Last Trump.
e same kind of situation applies to us. Secular western liberalism is on
its last legs. e integrating principle of coherence is clean gone, and as one
wit put it in the languishing days of the British Empire—“everything at sea
except for the leet.” In these disintegrating days, there will be a temptation
to appeal to the Lordship of Christ in order to prop up the western liberal
tradition. And if the appeal is to Christ, I’ll take it, just like I think the wino
at the soup kitchen ought to pray the prayer.
is is why I appreciate men like N.T. Wright and Oliver O’Donovan so
much. We need Jesus in a very public way, and we need men who will say
so. But I also suspect that with these gentlemen, and with others who are
like-minded, the desire is to “patch” what we have now—instead of
radically transforming what we have now. is is particularly evident on
issues of sexual egalitarianism, but it comes out in other ways as well. is
becomes evident when it is suggested that Christ might overthrow some of
the basic practices of our decadent liberalism. No, no, the assumption is
that Christ will somehow make it all “work.” And that was Constantine’s
mistake.
1.. James Boswell, e Life of Samuel Johnson (London: Jones, 1827), 253.
CHAPTER 16
Courage and Civil Disobedience
WE ARE NOT PRIVILEGED TO IMITATE THE AMERICAN FOUNDERS IN
do not have the option of sailing to a new world and starting over. We
cannot move out of this dilapidated house in order to go build a new one.
No, it must be a remodel project. e house is run down, and so we must
x it up. Not only so, but we have to do this while the house is also on re.
And at the same time, many of the other residents like it just the way it is
and are ghting us tooth and nail. All this means that we need to have a
robust theology of resistance.
Of course we should all know that Christians ought not to be scolaws.
We are to be among the best citizens a magistrate ever had—we should be
diligent and hard-working, dutiful and responsible, so that we might put
to silence the ignorance of foolish men. We should bake the best cakes in
Colorado, but not for the homo-fest, sorry.
But wait... doesn’t the Bible say that we must do whatever they say we
must do—cakes, lowers, incense to Caesar, the works? Well, no (Acts 5:29).
Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king,
as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of
evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well. For so is the will of God, that with well
doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: As free, and not using your liberty
for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God. Honour all men. Love the
brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king. (1 Peter 2:13–17)
So let’s take a look at some of the actions of the man who wrote those
words—and not in order to charge him with hypocrisy either.
And, behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined in the prison: and he
smote Peter on the side, and raised him up, saying, Arise up quickly. And his chains fell of
from his hands. And the angel said unto him, Gird thyself, and bind on thy sandals. And so
he did. And he saith unto him, Cast thy garment about thee, and follow me. And he went
out, and followed him; and wist not that it was true which was done by the angel; but
thought he saw a vision. When they were past the rst and the second ward, they came
unto the iron gate that leadeth unto the city; which opened to them of his own accord: and
they went out, and passed on through one street; and forthwith the angel departed from
him. (Acts 12:7–10)
Peter then went over to John Mark’s house, let a message, and
disappeared from the book of Acts a wanted man, on the lam, with his
picture in all the post oces.
is was what we might call a jailbreak, and it was not just a bit of
innocent fun. e guards involved were executed for negligence they had not
been guilty of (Acts 12:19), and yet, despite the seriousness of the issues,
Peter did not consult with a bunch of modern Christians, who would have
urgently advised that he turn himself in—citing, as they did so, with tears
in their eyes, 1 Peter 2:13–17.
What we desperately need in these times of amoral chaos is to recognize
that the obedience of the Christian man will frequently be taken by tyrants
as something other than the righteous obedience before God that it
actually is.
What did Jehoiada do? He honored the king. What did Athaliah call it? She
called it treason (2 Kings 11:14). While we are not surprised that she would
call it that, we are surprised that lots of modern Christian political theory
listens to her.
I am reminded of that great line in Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. “Sir, you
speak treason!” “Fluently.”
So now let’s take a quick look at the man who wrote Romans 13.
“In Damascus the governor under Aretas the king kept the city of the
Damascenes with a garrison, desirous to apprehend me: And through a
window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and escaped his hands” (2
Cor. 11:32–33).
is is what we would call, in modern parlance, evading arrest, and
obstruction of justice, and, depending on how close the window was to the
nearest gate, running a roadblock. e apostle Paul failed to show them his
papers. He neglected to have those papers stamped. He didn’t pay the fee.
And he did all this in full harmony with what he wrote for us to observe in
that famed passage, “Romans 13.”
Who honored the royal dignity of King Saul more than David? And who was
more uncooperative with Saul’s tyrannical designs than David? Had
Romans 13 been written at that time, would we say that David honored it?
Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the
powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the
ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are
not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that
which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee
for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain:
for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.
Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. For
for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon
this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to
whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour. (Rom. 13:1–7)
ere are many things that need to be unpacked from this passage, but
let me start with just two of them. at will do for starters.
First, the magistrate here is assumed to be operating to enforce a moral
order that is not inverted. You see the same assumption in the passage
from 1 Peter—“as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of
evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well.” ese rulers are not a
terror to good works, but to evil (v. 3). Doing good wins their praise (v. 3).
e magistrate is a minister of God for good (v. 4). He is an agent of wrath
for those who do evil (v. 4). What they command lines up with the believer’s
conscience (v. 5). We pay tribute because they work at doing good
constantly (v. 6).
Second, the magistrate is called the servant of God three times in this
passage. He is the minister (diakonos) of God (v. 4), and again, the diakonos
of God (v. 4). e word diakonos is the word for deacon, servant. A few
verses later, another word for servant is used (leitourgos).
Now, where do we go in Scripture to nd out how to respond to rulers
who reverse all this, who punish the good and reward the evil, and who
insist as a matter of dogma that there is no authority above them, that they
are fully secular, the servants of no God? Anyone who believes that Romans
13 ofers a blank check to tyrants is someone who simply has not read it
carefully and is not comparing Scripture with Scripture (Isa. 5:20; Ps. 11:3).
ere is a vast diference between the dutiful Christian citizen and the
craven Christian who cites passages out of context in order to justify a
continuation of his cowardice. ere is no biblical way to be a friend of true
authority without being, simultaneously, and for the same reasons, a deadly
foe of tyranny. Never forget that Peter and Paul, the men who wrote the
passages above, were both executed by authorities who had abandoned the
station assigned to them in Scripture. And they were executed precisely
because they were a threat to that tyranny.
When we come to understand their words as they understood them, we
will be a lot closer to seeing how something like that could have happened.
It was not all a big misunderstanding.
It turns out that it really is true—resistance to tyrants actually is
submission to God.
Christian patience is all about patience as we await deliverance, which means
that it knows which direction to look, to long, to pray, and to labor. is
means that one of our central tasks as culturally engaged Christians is the
task of advancing the blessings of liberty, real liberty—and not the pot-
smoking kind: “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the
Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17).
A people who are enslaved to their lusts will never be the kind of people
who successfully throw of tyrants. We have been ofered a series of bribes
—free love, porn, drunkenness, government handouts, and other forms of
lotus-eating—and these are the bribes that make us content with the
dimensions of our prison cell. But a man set free by the gospel will begin to
think like a free man, and that will soon enough afect his body, his
business, his travel plans, and so on. It is all grounded in obedience, and
obedience is not possible apart from the grace of God that is ofered to us
in the gospel. Ecacious grace is rst, and holiness second: “So shall I keep
thy law continually for ever and ever. And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy
precepts” (Ps. 119:44–45).
And the verse that is inscribed on the Liberty Bell is this one:
And ye shall hallow the tieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his
possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. (Lev. 25:10)
at is why it is called the Liberty Bell. at is why we as a people used to
be free. Jesus used to be with us.
CHAPTER 17
Preaching and Prayer
THE CENTRAL WAY THAT CHRISTIANS ARE CALLED TO TRANSFORM T
be found in politics. Nor can it be done through the arts. It is not going to
happen if we steer Christian students into STEM. All such things are
lawful, of course, but the center of our authority is to be found in Word and
water, and bread and wine. is is the center of the mystery that will bring
about another Christendom and, if need be, another one ater that.
ere has been an attempt, remarkably successful so far, to build a huge
epistemological dike that will keep the ocean of evangelical faith out of our
dry little secular lowlands. Now people naturally function the same way
with the gospel of Christ as they do with the other things they believe, but
the hatred that our lords and princelings have for the Lord complicates
things.
Since it is Christ we are talking about, and because there are many of our
eyes-like-grease elites who “will not have this man rule over us,” they have
labored to create a construct that will keep Christ far away from anything
that matters.
is project of theirs, impossible to achieve when the ocean levels are
normal, has been accomplished by dint of ceaseless labor. e secularists
have done their part with their unremitting eforts to keep the church/state
dike in good repair, and evangelical preachers have done their part by
preaching in such a muled way as to keep the ocean at levels low enough
to make this possible.
But if God grants us a reformation in preaching, and if we start planting
churches of Word and sacrament in the power of the Holy Spirit, then the dike
need not be repealed—it will just give way. If the river starts to rise, like it
is supposed to, then we may reapply these prescient words from Dylan.
If it keep on rainin’, the levee gonna break,
If it keep on raining’, the levee gonna break.
Everybody’s saying this is a day only the Lord could make.
—Bob Dylan, “e Levee’s Gonna Break”
Unless pastors and elders are willing to read the world, read the story their
people are actually in, there is no way to bring the authority of the Bible to
bear in the lives of the people. What good is an absolutely infallible book
that cannot ever be applied? Application means making a connection
between what is happening here in the world and what the Bible is talking
about. People want to know—and it is right for them to want to know—
whether Jesus allows them to get a divorce under “these conditions.”
Now this kind of reasoning is not given any promises of infallibility, but
welcome to earth, kid. e straight reading of the Bible isn’t given that
promise of infallibility either—whether reading, preaching, writing, etc.
Nevertheless, the one who speaks should speak as the very oracles of God (1
Peter 4:11) and, not unrelated, not many of you should want to be teachers
(James 3:1).
Another issue has to do with informed reason, common grace, natural
revelation, and the tradition of Reformed casuistry on such matters—none
of which should be lightly set aside. I agree that all of them should be used
to inform our minor premise. Scripture supplies the major premise—
dishonest weights and measures are an abomination. e minor premise
would be that inlation (and related practices) is a form of manipulating
such dishonest weights and measures. Our information about that has to
come from men whose minds have been steeped in Scripture, but who also
have learned what constitutes a valid argument from Aristotle, who have
learned how pins are made from Adam Smith, who have realized through
natural revelation that the law of supply and demand cannot be repealed by
Congress any more than the law of gravity can be, and who have studied
the history of theology and economics.
I quite agree that we should not expect every pastor to be up to speed on
every last issue—there are only so many hours in the day. But at the same
time, efective pastoral care requires a man to be an informed generalist.
Not to decide is to decide, and not to counsel one way is to counsel another.
People come to you with questions like, “Is it lawful for me to join the
military?” Or “Is it right for my children to get a vaccine developed decades
ago from fetal tissue?” Or “Can I watch R-rated movies?” Or “e employees
in my business want to unionize and I am in a position to stop them. May
I?” All of these issues, and many more where those came from, require a
pastor who is an equipped generalist. He could save himself a lot of work,
and just shrug when asked, but that will lead to a certain set of answers,
depending on the prevailing winds of the outside culture. He is a pastor
and is going to give direction one way or another, no matter what he does. I
think it ought to be purposive and informed.
All that said, when I write on economics, I am not just popping of
because I am now on the brink of leaving my sixties, and I can feel myself
getting crusty and all curmudgeonly. No, I have been studying economics
for forty years or so and, if it’s myself that says it, I know my onions.
Debasing the currency is one of the oldest dishonest and knavish tricks in
the book, and the age of computers has simply changed how it is done.
Back in the day, brigands and highwaymen would take your purse by
waving a cutlass under your nose, and a modern mugger might use a
Glock, about which the prophet Isaiah says nothing. is should not leave
us scratching our heads about the lawfulness of armed robbery.
I have oten argued that Christian parents ought to accept the fact that
their job is not to get their children to simply conform to the standard, but
rather to get their children to love the standard. If they are failing at this,
then they should lower the standard to the point where the whole family
can love it together, and then progress together, growing up into a shared
love of that standard.
A former student once asked me this: is there not a civil equivalent to
this? Is it not the task of the Christian Church to bring the outside world
into a love of God’s standards for living, and not try to enforce God’s
standards of law on a surly and unwilling populace? e answer to this is
yes, but with an important qualication.
In the case of parents, there is a limit to how much they can lower the
standard. ey have the full authority to do that with “house rules,” but
they do not have the authority to alter or bend God’s black letter standards.
ey have the authority to dispense with a forty-ve-minute time of
mandatory family worship every day. ey do not have the authority to set
aside God’s standards on fornication in order to let their teenage son have
his girlfriend spend the night in a sleepover.
We are in a similar case. A couple generations ago, when our society
acknowledged the general “rightness” of Christian standards, but did not
love them, our task at that time was to call our people back to their love of
righteousness. Our task at that time was not to ght for the retention of
Sunday blue laws, for example. But now, when we are dealing with high
deance and rebellion, when the cultural center is being dominated by
pooter queens, the case is diferent. We have to testify faithfully to a
rebellious generation, and we have to testify that they are in deance of the
weightier matters of the law. is sin that has us by the throat is not a
matter of missing tithes from the spice rack.
But we do this because it is efective evangelism, which is what calls
people back to love. We preach the law, and we preach the gospel. When we
preach the condemnation of Christ and the love of the Lord, we are doing
what the early Christians did. We are calling a nation to repentance, which
is the only thing that will bring them back to their rst love.
We cannot get people back to a love for God by means of sentimentalist
kitten hugging. We do it by declaring the wrath to come, and the
staggering provision that God has made for ugly and deant sinners
against that day of wrath. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
And this is why I keep going on about the absolute need for regeneration
and the cross of Jesus Christ. It is only a work of the Spirit that can give us
new hearts. Christian civilization is absolutely necessary, but without
those new hearts, Christian standards of civilization are intolerable, as can
be easily veried.
ere truly are evil men in the world, and this is what imprecatory psalms
were made for. is is why we have them. ere are men who will grin for
the camera over the prospect of beheading Christian children, and our
response to them should be to pray the words of God back to Him.
Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O
L. (Ps. 58:6)
Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man: seek out his wickedness till thou nd
none. (Ps. 10:15)
Our psalter has this second example rendered as “O God, come down and
break their evil arms.” In the face of the kind of evil that is abroad in the
world, evangelical Christians need to stop lling up their worship services
with sentimentalist treacle and to start worshiping biblically in a very dark
world. We are confronted with a great and growing evil, and we are
discovering that we do not have the liturgical vocabulary to respond to it
appropriately at all. When we sing or pray the psalms, all of them, there are
two consequences that should be mentioned. One, we are praying in the
will of God, and He hears such prayers. Second, we discover that praying
and singing biblically transforms us. is really is the need of the hour.
We need to become the kind of people capable of standing against this
kind of thing. Read Chesterton’s great poem about the battle of Lepanto
and plead with God to raise up a tting leader for our day. “But Don John of
Austria is riding to the sea.”1
1.. “Lepanto,” e Collected Poems of G.K. Chesterton (London: Cecil Palmer, 1927), 103.