Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury – a review

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Read this 5 years ago, and just reread it. Older review is below.

With a low-grade Jabberwocky-like, engaging style, Bradbury spins a fun yarn that addresses wickedness.

When a circus come to town at 3 in the morning, Jim and Will are both excited and disturbed. That’s the response sin evokes in all of us. They are both drawn to it and repulsed by it. Mr. Dark promises free rides and pleasure, but delivers death.

Evil captures souls, and doesn’t let go. Friends see it happen to their loved ones and object. Protest. Call them back. But it isn’t an easy project. It takes a mentor (in this case, Will’s father) to see through it, and explain it to the next generation. It’s no coincidence that he works at the library, finding refuge and wisdom there. When we learn the history of evil, it is in part defanged, unveiled, shown for the tawdry, shallow lies it promises.

But while the book is high on writing style, it is low on substance. The only answer given to defeating the Wicked that comes at you is – laughter. This is in part a good answer. The expulsive power of a better affection, as Thomas Chalmers wrote, is a good answer to the temptations of wickedness. But Bradbury’s laughter is as hollow as Mr Dark’s promises. Secular solutions to wickedness fall flat.

Will’s father is a faint hint of our true Deliverer from evil. Not just a stable, wise, joyful refuge, who evades and tricks the enemy. But a Deliverer who defeats him, head on. Bradbury depicts refreshingly the reality of evil in his secular time. But his worldview has no real answer to it. For that we need the Lord Jesus Christ.


2019 review:
Best known for his Martian Chronicles or Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury is an excellent writer – pretty easy to read, yet stretching vocabulary and compelling prose at times.

“The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts.”

He evokes the looming sense of dread quite well, that something wicked this way is coming. He depicts friendship between the two boys beautifully.


Bradbury’s worldview is sad. Pathetic. The basic message seems to be that we make too much of death and evil, and give it its power by our own fears. If we would just smile, sing and dance, evil would vanish in a puff of smoke, and death would be undone. This is literally what happens at the end. It’s a ridiculous counterfeit savior from death, evil and hell.

1 star for content; 3 for writing skill. 2 stars over all.

Good reading for high school boys who can spot inadequate secular solutions to real spiritual problems.

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Leadership and Emotional Sabotage - a review

Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World by Joe Rigney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Joe Rigney has done the Christian world a service with this short book. Addressing a particular kind of problem, he delves into what it takes to be a good leader when things go sideways in the family or church or community. Keep your cool, don’t get anxious. This is done by staying grounded in Scripture and the Gospel, and by detecting manipulation or sabotage. Don’t let the anxiety, anger, or any emotions of others drive things, whether it is a child, wife, church member or elder.

This book is mainly addressed to fathers and pastors, and they would do well to read it and strengthen their leadership by it.

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Men and Marriage - a Review

Men and Marriage by George Gilder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A detailed and devasting critique of the sexual revolution. A fascinating and insightful look at the differences between men and women. Written in the late 70s, revised in the early 80s, Gilder questions feminist assumptions in detail. Assumptions which have settled into conventional wisdom since he wrote. Many of his assertions are shocking, now, but would have been casually received wisdom 100 years ago. He goes a bit beyond PG13 in his vivid descriptions of sex differences, which was new and interesting territory, especially psychologically and sociologically. I found his writing style gripping, though it’s a bit academic. He is a social critic who disagrees with 90% of sociologists in his thesis.

Basic thesis: If young men are not tamed by female virtue and sexuality, and brought into civilization, they become a destructive force. The only way to tame them, by the laws of nature designed by God, is for them to marry and commit to a woman and their children.

Gilder is prescient on many fronts. Here’s one:
“Rather than defending society, the young men attack it and exalt macho foreign potentates and desperadoes” (158). Read, Putin, on the right. On the left: Che Guevarra. Hamas.

Here’s a sampling of other quotes, to get you to take up and read yourselves.

"women in the home are not performing some optional role that can be more efficiently fulfilled by the welfare state. Women in the home are not 'wasting' their human resources. The role of the mother is the paramount support of civilized human society. It is essential to the socialization of both men and of children. The maternal love and nurture of small children is an asset that can be replaced, if at all, only at vastly greater cost." (210)

"Crucial to creating a civilized society is inducing girls to say no to boys. This requires strong and usually religious rationales and sanctions that differentiate by gender. Value-free sex education is a powerful invitation to premature sex (223)."

"There are no 'human beings,' just men and women... Men will do most of the production and women most of the reproduction" (227).

"To the average sexual liberal, the role of women seems so routine that it can be assumed by a few bureaucrats managing child development centers.... the duties of the home are so undemanding that they can be accomplished with part-time effort" (228).

"The woman's role is nothing less than the hub of the human community" (230).

"…the desire for male protection and support, the hope for a stable community life, and the aspiration toward a better long-term future. The success or failure of civilized society depends on how well the women can transmit these values to the men... those matters that we consider of such supreme importance that we do not ascribe a financial worth to them" (230).

"[Sexual liberals] deeply misunderstand what makes people happy. The pursuit of sexual promiscuous pleasures, which many of them offer as an alternative to the duties of family, leads chiefly to misery and despair. It is procreation that ultimately makes sex gratifying and important, and it is home and family that give resonance and meaning to life" (240).

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The Count of Monte Cristo - review

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read this years ago, but just finished it again.

A sweeping, dramatic, Romantic tale of unjust suffering, vengeance, and providence.

Edmond Dantes is wrongly accused of a political crime and locked away, so a “friend” can marry his girlfriend instead of him. After 14 years in a dank dungeon, Edmond emerges educated and fabulously wealthy, thanks to a fellow prisoner and priest. Edmond proceeds to wreak slow vengeance on each of his persecutors, seeing himself as an agent of God’s avenging providence. He is confident, patient, methodical, and unyielding, bringing each to their knees in terrible suffering for what they have done. But when at the very end his actions take the life of others he did not intend, he stops, realizing that God alone can bring justice to men. He saves the life of the innocent, leaving much of his wealth to them.

Dumas includes many different situations of injustice. A spoiled child, a jilted lover, a Romeo and Juliet scene, a son confident of his father’s innocence when he is actually guilty, a man wrongly imprisoned for 14 years, and more. Most of these are resolved in the story, giving the impression that justice CAN be done on earth. One wonders if Dumas had read Kant, about justice being left for the next life, and mostly demurring in this grand novel.

Providence is a recurring theme. The Count is repeatedly referred to as the hand, the very voice, of God Himself. He seems all-knowing, but can any mortal truly be so? To what extent can we carry out God’s will as human agents? Will we miscarry and harm others in the process? If we pursue justice over-much, does poetic justice turn into injustice? Is it right to take up vengeance personally, or should we leave it to much less competent and knowledgeable civil magistrates?

I HIGHLY recommend this book, both for these weighty themes and for the entertainment of the story itself, very well written. Dumas is a high romantic, so it may come across as overly dramatic and fraught at points. But it’s a great story, in the Princess Bride vein, which also raises important themes we should think more about.

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In the House of Tom Bombadil - a review

In the House of Tom Bombadil by C.R. Wiley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a delightful book.

Chock full of Tolkien quotes, the best part was the last footnote on the last page:

“The first time that Tom saved the hobbits it was at a tree, and the second time that he saved them it was at a tomb.”

Wiley never comes out and says it, but Bombadil is a Christ figure. The Eldest, there from the beginning (shades of Proverbs 8). The one who Is. The Master. No one has ever caught him – the devil has nothing on Him. The ring has no power over Him; He has power over the ring.

The chapter on Goldberry, river-woman’s daughter, was fascinating. And Wiley makes great connections to the Silmarillion regarding Tom’s singing.

I also enjoyed the last chapter, where Bombadil is a picture of the consummation, our eternal rest, shown to us at the beginning of the perilous journey.

4 stars!

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The Church Impotent - book review

 

The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity by Leon J. Podles
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The church is overly feminine in character and piety today. Cultural feeling is that the church is more for women, and that a “man’s man” wouldn’t go. The church sings songs that are largely feminine, where exuding emotional expression is essential to feeling pious. Christians need to recover a healthy view of masculine Christianity and not inadvertently suppress it.

This is Leon Podles’ thesis, with which I generally agree. But I am concerned with some underlying assumptions he makes, which I’ll address here. Podles overreacts to a genuine problem in the church.

Culture today sees male and female on a fluid spectrum. You might feel and identify as female today and male tomorrow. Too many conservatives today overreact, insisting there is a hard line between the two. A man should never act stereotypically female: as a receiver, a submitter. If he does, he is acting against nature and emasculating himself.

Better to see the two sexes as two good ways to live out our piety. Occasionally the lines cross, but we should revert to our lane when needed. Yes, a man should consider himself part of the bride of Christ, and submit to Him, as a wife is called to do to her husband (Eph 5:22). But he should also imitate Christ in manly initiative, going forth into the world to actively do His Father’s will. We need more of the latter today, but that doesn’t make the former wrong. Both can be distorted and overused. Female piety can be distorted, as Podles documents happened in the middle ages, and is happening again today. But I’ve seen plenty of distortion of male piety in reaction against that these days, too.

Examples:
If a husband heeds his wife’s wisdom, he has been emasculated.
If a woman wants a career outside the home that doesn’t interfere with her domestic duties, she is stepping out of bounds.
A husband being a servant leader is just code for abdicating his real leadership.
A single young woman seeking to marry should have no aspirations outside the home, or she is a feminist.

All of this comes from overly bifurcating sex roles. There are plenty of times the man needs to be tender and caring, and the woman needs to be tough and courageous. I would have voted for Margaret Thatcher. One cannot assign specific virtues to separate gender boxes. The fruit of the Spirit are not gender-specific. The Bible gives us examples of this in the courageous initiative of Abigail (1 Sam. 25) and Ruth, of David’s Psalms (awful lot of feminine-sounding love talk in there), and others.

Here are some examples of Podles overly bifurcating the sexes:
“Masculinity involves nurturing, but a nurturing achieved in a willingness to suffer and die.” (195)
What? This is meant in contrast to the feminine. Is a mother not willing to suffer and die for her child in bearing and raising him?

“Men disclose themselves through their actions, women through their words.”
What? Tell that to David and Solomon, who wrote the Psalms and Song of Solomon.
Tell that to every wife who wants (legitimately) to hear more words of affection from their husbands.
Yes, a man’s actions mean more to him than his words, but a woman’s actions in the home are as equally as definitive for her as a man’s outside the home. The stereotype is unhelpful.

Finally, “the body of Christ in the Eucharist was the object of women’s devotion” (200).
Podles seems to take this as a criticism, when it should be true for both sexes. He says Christ becomes a feminine figure in feeding His church, in communion, and thus criticizes not feminism, but the very pattern God gave us in the sacrament. This gets a little crass, but I believe the metaphor is biblically sound: Podles rejects the idea as overly feminized, that Jesus unites with His church as a man inserts his seed in a woman, causing pleasure and communion. Medieval theologians may have run too far with this metaphor, but it is valid in that Jesus does this so as to make her fruitful (John 15:1-6).

Purgatory. Podles claims this doctrine is uniquely feminine, as women more than men, “seek to aid others even beyond the barrier of death and also causes them to be reluctant to admit that any are lost” (206). This does not seem to me uniquely feminine and Podles gives no rationale for it.

Self-flagellation. Podles cites positively the public practice of self-flagellation by men as a helpful rejoinder to the feminization of the medieval church (233-236). This is the epitome of overreaction in Podles’ Catholicism: seeing such unhelpful piety as a constructive corrective to the feminization of the church.

The last chapter is the best:
The critique: “A man can be holy, or he can be masculine, but he cannot be both” (326).
The answer: “holiness is not the negation, but the fulfillment of masculinity” (326).

Podles has mostly helpful things to say, and I recommend the book, but the reader should be warned against some Roman Catholic distortions and overly rigid gender assumptions.

3 stars, out of 5.

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Building Your House - Hebrews 3

Hebrews 3:2-6

Moses also was faithful in all God's house. For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. (For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.) Now Moses was faithful in all God's house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God's house as a son. And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.


We are all trying to build a house. Increase our income, raise our children, prosper our family, expand our borders.

Interesting that God in Hebrews takes up this metaphor and says Jesus does this faithfully, as God’s Son for His Father (verse 6). And that WE are the house He is building. Husbands all try to live out Christ to their bride, but fail in some way. Jesus doesn’t. Pastors all try to live out Christ as shepherd to their sheep, but fail in some way. Jesus doesn’t. Magistrates fail to build a nation, “a single sword to Thee,” but fail. Our earthly rulers falter. But Jesus doesn’t.

In my circles we put a lot of emphasis on earthly authority of fathers, church elders, and civil magistrates. And rightly so. But they will all fail in some way. Jesus is building the Great House. The houses we’re all trying to build are incomplete, imperfect. But He will establish them by His GRACE. By our faith in Him, and not by our own works.

So as we build our houses, He is building His, with us as His stones (1 Peter 2:5). Remember that when your house falters a bit, God knows how to rebuild, reshape, refashion your stones into his glorious house. Trust Him to do it. Then you won’t get desperate, grasping after particular methods, turning from His power and Spirit to your own paltry efforts. Jesus may do it another way.

Trust Him.

Quick Thoughts from John (3)

John 16:5
none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’

I find this verse fascinating. Peter had asked Jesus exactly this just hours before, in John 13:36! 

So what does Jesus mean?

I think He means, you’re focused on your own pain at losing Me, at what God’s people (the Sanhedrin) are about to do to Me (see John 16:6), not on God’s plan, to glorify Himself. Peter asks “Where are you going?” because he doesn’t want bad things to happen. He should have been happy Jesus was going to the Father, but all he/we can think about is our own pain at feeling the absence of His presence when we are mistreated or just wounded (John 14:28). 

That is a hard lesson to learn in affliction, but an important one. Jesus feels distant in our hard times, but He is not.

Quick thoughts from John (2)

John 11:48-50

If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” 49 But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all. 50 Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.”

This one struck me differently in this election season.

Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin believe that preserving the nation in its present state is absolutely essential, and that they have to get it done.

It’s deep irony: “to preserve God’s people, Jesus must die.”
Deeply true, theologically.
Caiaphas got it completely wrong, politically.
(Can’t resist, but this was Denethor the steward opposing Aragorn the King…)

If you are prone to believe during this election that one candidate must be kept from the highest office to preserve the nation (or that another must be elected), you may want to give this a closer look.

God shakes the nations all the time. Not monthly, or even in our lifetime, but regularly throughout history. If He has the right to reconstitute His chosen people Israel into a church, which He does and did, surely He has the right to let a nation like ours fall due to its continued unbelief and rebellion. We don’t HAVE to make America great again, though we may want and work for that. America is dispensable in God’s plan, as the Sanhedrin also was.

By all means, love your country, and back your preferred candidate (coughcoughnotharriscoughcough), but don’t lose sight of God’s sovereignty. He often brings about a great catastrophe, like the cross, that brings a phoenix out of the fires. Trust and hope in Him alone.

Quick Thoughts from John (1)

John 13:34-36
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, where are you going…”

One thing usually pointed out here in the upper room is that Jesus will be leaving them soon, and they’ll need one another in the coming days of His absence. But for the first time today, I connected Peter’s response to a deeper possibility. Peter basically ignores this new command to love those around him, and stays focused completely on Jesus. Even though Jesus just told him to focus on the other disciples!

Is it possible that we can get so wrapped up in the grief of losing a close loved one, or the pain of personal trauma, that we can’t remember our call to love others? Absolutely it is. It’s a very natural response, which is why Jesus brings it up. The consequences of sin and heart wounds isolate us and send us within ourselves. We need to work against that and… “love one another.”

Now, this isn’t a heartless demand to them not to feel pain at His departure, or to you not to grieve when it is time. But we should seek to dig out from under our grief and be at least functional again, over time. We may even find that reaching out to others in compassion and service can be a key way we DO overcome our personal hurts and wounds. After all, God “comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor. 1:4).

The Only Plane in the Sky - a review

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A gripping, detailed account of 9/11, from the survivors on the ground.

I never read a book so fast. A real page-turner, because it was real, not some Tom Clancy novel.
The whole thing is only transcripts of interviews of survivors of 9/11.

I was turned off at first by the format. Each paragraph of only 1-4 sentences flipped from one person to another – I got ADD real fast. But I soon realized this was purposeful. It helped the reader get in the mindset on the ground: what’s happening? The lack of knowledge is a key part of the story, and just getting little blips of information is how it happened, and conveys the confusion of the day.

One striking thing is that after the last plane went down in PA, everyone assumed more was coming, even though it was “over.”

Garrett Graff the editor does a masterful job interweaving normal office people in the Pentagon or the World Trade Center with senior leaders like NY Gov. Pataki, VP Dick Cheney in the bunker, President George W. Bush on Air Force One, and senior staff to congressional leaders. He sticks with a cluster of related people for a while then moves to another cluster.

EVERYONE should read this. People under 30 should read it to understand the terror they’ve only heard of second hand, and to grasp the “boomer” politics that ensued. People over 30 should read it to recall and learn anew what all actually happened that day, beyond what they saw on the TV.

It isn’t for the faint of heart. There are a few expletives, and brief descriptions of body parts. But the way it conveys the reality on the ground is unbelievably well done. The fire departments of New York and Arlington are not lauded for merely sentimental reasons – they lost hundreds as they went up into the flames of buildings that were about to collapse, and rescued many. Rudy Giuliani and Don Rumsfeld stuck out to me as quite heroic on the ground, but even more so were the emergency workers and office co-workers who wouldn’t leave without rescuing people from the rubble, often at the cost of their own lives.

Should we be pursuing enemies of the USA beyond our borders as vigorously as we do, when we have so many domestic problems? Don’t answer that question until you read this book.

May God bless America, in His mercy.

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Dance with Dragons - a review

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is a wicked, horrible book. Do not read this series.

I don’t know why I finished it. Can’t resist plots of political intrigue, I suppose.
And I wanted to see what the culture was in such a tizzy about. But looking into this cesspool is indeed nauseating.

The last in his Game of Thrones 5 volume series, yet still unfinished, Martin satisfies only salaciously. He cannot finish a story, or convey meaning with his world building, because his worldview is nihilistic. The only thing that really matters is power. “Words are wind” is a repeated theme, though better minds know that the world was MADE with words.

Soaked with crass vulgarity on nearly every page, Martin seeks to shock, and it’s closer to X than R rated, on the movie scale. This isn’t just sexual innuendo – it’s in your face gratuitous violence and sex, meant to make you think that life is just meat and flesh, and then it’s done. Materialistic despair, run amok, seeking to soothe it with whatever power and pleasure you can get.

Interestingly, Martin is deliberately non-egalitarian. Jaime is a better knight than others. Tyrion has more wits than most around him, and so survives and advances though he is a dwarf. Rulers who are humble like Jon Snow, and less arrogant or cock-sure like Cersei Lannister get on better.

This nausea-inducing series paradoxically gives me hope. I see more clearly now how despairing people are, apart from Christ. They are desperate for hope, though most Martin readers are probably like the dwarves in The Last Battle, who will refuse to believe in the opposite good, true Story, even when it’s shown to them clearly in the face.

At least I know a little better now, how to speak to them the Gospel of hope, the antidote to this nihilism.

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The Bible - a review

 

ESV Study Bible by Anonymous
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just finished reading through the Bible, and it hit me that I might do a “review.”
[This isn't a review of the ESV Study Bible, just the text of the Bible itself.]

Of course, you don’t review a book that GOD wrote the same way you do books that humans write.
But still. I thought it would be a helpful exercise.

Made up of 66 books written over centuries by many different human authors, the Spirit inspired each of them to contribute to one grand narrative. The creation, fall, and reclamation of humanity for the glory of God. The Bible makes sense of life, telling us how we should be living, what we were made for, and why things are as miserable as we are because we don’t live up to God’s purpose for us.

A diversity of genres make up the Bible. History in the first third or so, mixed in with statutory laws on how to live and worship. Poetry in the middle, on how to speak and relate to God in various circumstances, as well as practical wisdom in how to live well. Prophecy completes the middle third, which we ought to pair with the history of the kings more than we think to do. The prophets clearly spell out why God’s judgment comes on His people, and on other nations. The Gospels beginning the new testament are a unique genre that narrate the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The epistles mostly explain the meaning of the person and work of Christ further, and teach the church how to live, believing in Him as their Lord and Savior. The last book shows that God is at work, even when horrible things happen around us and to us.

A key point: God’s purpose is potent. He will bring His people to Himself throughout history, and see His will done, regardless how horrific things are in the present. He means to sanctify us by His Spirit, as He has redeemed us at the cross of Christ. Nothing will stop this.

Take up your Bible, and read. Be encouraged. Reconnect with your Creator. Re-center yourself on the Christ who is the center, and who holds it all together.

The only book that will ever receive 6 out of 5 stars, not that my rating matters…

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Criminalizing Post-Abortive Women Doesn’t Work – Now

A guest post by my daughter, Grace, contra abortion abolitionists.

 

Abortion abolitionists claim that because abortion is murder, the law ought to reflect this by criminalizing post-abortive mothers, and therefore establishing justice for the unborn. Abolitionists are correct in their moral ideology. Elective abortion is murder, not because a law calls it murder, but because the procedure, whether performed medically by pill or surgically, intentionally destroys a human life which is made in the image of God. This should be obvious to any Bible believing Christian. Any society which holds founding principles derived from Christianity should recognize this and implement laws which reflect the murderous nature of abortion.

Abolitionists are wrong to ignore the mechanics of politics and the legislative process. The insistence that abolitionist bills are the only morally acceptable type of bill by which justice can be established against abortion creates a black and white moral framework rarely fits into the mucky grey of politics.

First, the briefest of practical political application: It's not practically obvious that a pregnant mother can be criminalized, depending on the culture of the state in which an abolitionist bill would be proposed. Within supermajority or very strong Republican states where the culture already accepts abortion as murder and post-abortive mothers as murderers, abolition bills would help solidify the Christian mores which that state’s constituency and culture desires. However, federally, and in most states, a legislator (who is elected by a public which does not view post-abortive mothers as infanticidal criminals) who carries an abolitionist bill in the current culture puts a shotgun to their own knee. Depending on how bad the PR fallout is, their constituents will fire them next election and replace them with a legislator more moderate on abortion, causing the prolife or abolitionist legislator to lose their job without effecting change, and causing the prolife or abolitionist lobby to lose an ally by which they could have proposed further bills. In many states, it may very well be bad stewardship of our prolife allies and representatives to strong arm them into carrying an abolitionist bill to committee if the odds of the bill dying are high and the odds of a different prolife bill passing are high. Some wars are won through a blitz. Some wars are won through an island-hopping attrition campaign. Wisdom is knowing what kind of war you are in. The battle in Arkansas is not the same as the battle in New York.

I think, however, that the entire abolition vs. prolife debate misses the point and sounds too much like asking, “Where was Gondor when the Westfold fell?” The debate strikes me as a marked failure of Christians (abolitionist or prolife or otherwise) to understand the pro-abortion strategy. The battle is not being fought at the level of the state laws, it is being fought at the level of the culture and the level of state constitutions. As state after state caves to a popular pro-abortion constitutional amendment, we ought to recognize that without cultural change, even if our legislators passed abolitionist laws in every state, we would still lose this war via popular votes on state constitutions. A primary example is Ohio, a supermajority Republican state with a Republican governor, which still voted popularly for a constitutional right to unlimited abortion up to and including the moment of birth. No abolitionist law could have saved them, and even if one had passed, it would now be considered an unconstitutional law in Ohio and would be struck from the books in short order, likely with great pomp and circumstance by the pro-abortion lobby.

One of the main arguments of the abolitionists is to say that the law is a tutor, and with an abolitionist law, many women would be deterred from procuring abortions. To say that the law is a tutor is true, but it’s an oversimplification.

The culture for the last 100+ years has learned that the emotional and intellectual self is the highest moral authority, and if that selfish moral authority requires the death of unborn children, so be it (see Carl Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self ). An abolitionist law passed and enforced tomorrow will not undo the last 100+ years of cultural self-worship. It will only spit in the eye of a much stronger cultural power, a power which has no problems exerting itself on millions of unborn children. Expect disastrous reprisal. Many abolitionists criticize Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as a legal prolife victory resulting in sweeping cultural pro-abortion victories worsening the situation in many states. How would an abolitionist law be any different? While we shouldn’t modify our language or message in order to make the leading class of the pro-abortion movement like us (they never will), we would be wise to take some cues from their winning strategy. They didn’t need the law to teach culture, they simply captured the institutions until their cultural power increased to critical mass. By the time Roe v. Wade came before the Supreme Court, it was already too late, the pro-abortion wing had won.

I’ll cite the Comstock Act as a law originally written in 1873, in a more Christian and principled America. The Comstock Act is currently on the books, currently in effect, which legally prevents people from mailing obscene material, including abortion pills. Abolitionists might think that this law is currently acting as a tutor, teaching the culture about the moral wrong of shipping abortion pills from state to state. Unfortunately, the Comstock Act is not enforced because our judicial system and society at large no longer holds the moral principles of 1873. Federally, we lack the moral framework even to desire to enforce the Comstock Act.

Equal protection and justice for the unborn is a good, moral, and righteous idea, if the law is a good, moral, and righteous law, and if the judicial system applies the law in a good, moral, and righteous way by good, moral, and righteous people. Despite the blessing of our judicial system, we should recognize its brokenness, the current brokenness of our culture, and the depravity of any human being, whether they be judge, juror, lawyer, or police officer. If tomorrow you passed an abolitionist law, and the day after you brought a woman to trial for getting an elective abortion with full knowledge of the personhood of the baby and the process of an abortion, not a single person on that jury would find her guilty of first-degree homicide, no matter how strong the evidence. Judeo-Christian morality lacks the cultural strength it held in 1873, and unfortunately, this means that many laws which work within a Christian moral framework, such as the Comstock Act, are culturally rejected, and therefore left unenforced.

That’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s the current state of affairs, and a legal change will have little effect on the culture. The only way the culture will truly change is through the spread of the Gospel. This is where our efforts should be focused. God will grant the cultural change as He sees fit, but let us not be caught slacking in our commission.

  

The Road to Serfdom - a review

The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A tour de force of conservatism, which I’ve been meaning to read for many years, Hayek does NOT disappoint.

Writing in England near the end of World War II in 1944, Hayek raises the alarm: many Europeans are adopting the same socialism that Germany did in the buildup to Hitler. Collectivism, whether fascist or communist, is the road to serfdom. Western nations must resist it and insist on the first political principle of individual liberty. State bureaucrats should not plan our economy – the free market is the best instrument for this.

The ad Hitlerum argument is overplayed these days, but for Hayek it packed a powerful punch. The carnage he wreaked had become evident. And Hitler was the one who wanted to organize society and industry under the state, subsuming the family, church, and individual. Now the socialists in the west want to do the same! No. Let the market sort out the best allocation of resources.

At many points, Hayek is prescient in seeing the downsides of the United Nations and the European Union, neither yet formed when he wrote.

There was a strange section I think I disagreed with, where Hayek argues that no society has a comprehensive ethical system. Therefore we cannot have central planners dictate rules for everyone, since not everyone agrees to all the moral priorities. There is some truth to this, in realpolitik, especially surveying our divided society today. But he doesn’t address the Judeo-Christian heritage in Scripture, which certainly DOES provide Western nations of Christian heritage with a comprehensive ethical system. Should Hayek’s libertarianism be moderated by some sort of Christian theonomy? This debate rages today.

Be that as it may, Hayek is a master in exposing the good intentions of socialist planners as totalitarians at heart. Even today, especially today, subsidizing various industries in many areas of the economy (green energy comes to mind), these socialists continue today to chip away at freedom, seeking to plan and direct the free economy to their own ends. Even the right has gotten on board lately, with their tariffs and nationalism.

Hayek is a helpful political compass to bring us back to what government is FOR. Not directing a society to the state’s “ethical” ends, but enforcing established rule of law so individuals can plan effectively how to use their resources to the fullest.

Hayek was an academic, and is not very easy to read. His average sentence length is probably double that of popular writing today. But it is well worth the effort. A rare 5 stars!

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