America First, and Ukraine

There's an irony in the current nationalism movement on the right.

The hunch, the original premise that I'm starting with is this: those who wear the nationalist badge with pride are the same people who want us out of Ukraine.  We could be using that money on our own border, after all, they say.  And these two groups are also roughly equal with the "America First" crowd.

This belies the slogan.  It isn't "America First."  It's "America Only."  It's the same isolationism that let Europe drift into World War II in the 1920s and 30s.

So the irony is this: a truly Christian nation would certainly protect its own citizens and borders first - agreed.  But it would ALSO seek to help weaker nations being preyed upon by stronger ones.  Only myopic vision would assume that what a global neighbor does won't affect us.  Would say, "If the president won't defend our border, then we shouldn't help the kid getting beat up by the schoolyard bully, either."

Two wrongs do not make a right.  We are not protecting and honoring our own heritage and civilization as we ought to do, true.  But at least we are helping other vulnerable nations to stay their own nation.

I believe the Bidens have profited corruptly from bribery in Ukraine.  That does not mean we should let the Ukrainian people be literally conquered by Russia, to spite the Bidens.  A whole people does not deserve subjugation because a few of its leaders are (were?) corrupt.

Christian nations would not make such calculations: "We know you're being invaded by an authoritarian, but we're not sure if you'll use our money well, so you can't have it."  

We've already let dictators conquer Hong Kong, once a bastion of free capitalism.  Now Ukraine.  Taiwan is next.  It's like we are willfully denying there is a Cold War continuing.  And that Reagan won it by peace through strength.

Populism, Elites, and the Benedict Option

Populism levels and diminishes the importance of institutions and authorities.  I find it a cancerous blight on our current political discourse.

I'm going to make an analogy from the theological idea of Sola Scriptura to political populism, so stick with me.

Recently I was discussing the "No Creed but Christ" creed with a friend.  See what I did there?  We should have no other authority than the Word of God, it is argued.  Sola Scriptura argues that Scripture alone is the ULTIMATE authority, but not that it is the ONLY one.  There are legitimate authorities in the family, church, institutions of learning, and so on.  There are specialists who know more about a field than the general populace.  These authorities aren't infallible (ahem-Fauci-ahem), but when they get it wrong we are sorely tempted to just shove them aside, and believe what we read on the internet ourselves.

Do you see the connection?  There is a parallel error in rejecting the authority of any theological confessions, and rejecting political authority.

Now, the confessions should be rejected at any part we find them to deviate from Scripture.  Just as a politician should be challenged when he advocates an unconstitutional policy.  But the ecclesiastical authority of the confession remains, as does the political office.  They are both needed for good order in civil and church society.

So here's my punchline: conservative Christians who rail against political elites, but revere their confessions, are deeply inconsistent.  Let us respect and honor earthly authorities in every part of our lives, as Scripture calls for, and not pick and choose.

Let me head off an objection: "But our loyalty is to the document, not to the people filling the office!" it is claimed.  This is true, but only in part.  Office holders should be true to the written, social contract, yes.  But you don't have a nation without people chosen to set policy, and other office-holders chosen to decide whether it is judged as in line with the society's charter.  You don't have a church without pastors to teach the Bible.  We need to be Bereans, but if each individual is the sole arbiter of whether the pastor is faithful to the text, we have chaos.  As Aaron Renn has argued recently, a society needs elites, even when we are deeply frustrated at their wicked recent behavior.  

(This is what the Magisterial Reformation was all about: Luther and Calvin and the other main figures sought to uphold and work with the civil rulers.  The Anabaptist radicals in stark contrast sought to reject them, drop out of an incurably corrupt society, and set up their own parallel institutions / communes.  I fear the conservative church is becoming Anabaptist instead of Magisterial in its politics.)

We can deem the policy our society adopts to be wrong, and seek to change it, but we are still part of that society.  Dropping out, a la the Benedict Option, can only be achieved in part.  The church is to be salt and light in the world.

This principle also doesn't mean we should meekly go along with bad policy.  Strenuous objection is a form of honor.  If a Christian father converts to Islam, and his wife and 19 year old son who live with him just shrug and leave him, they are not honoring him.  They should plead and persuade and convince him to return to the faith first.  And if he doesn't, he is still their father.

We used to mock the Hollywood star who vowed to move to Canada if the Republican candidate is elected.  Now such moves are literally happening en masse.  This is not wrong, per se.  We don't have the same loyalty to a state or country as we do to our family.  But we are naive idealists if we think we HAVE to live in a civil society that shares our values in large part.  Most Christians who have lived throughout history have NOT done so, and yet prospered spiritually.

So let's find ways to honor and work with authorities political and churchly, with whom we disagree.  I fully admit there is a swamp to drain out there.  But we are not egalitarians either, setting ourselves up individually as the arbiter of all truth.

Grace Goes First

[Letter to Doug Wilson on his blog, where he said] “In a biblical marriage, respect confers respectability.” What do you say to those who say that respect is earned by being respectable? - grh

[Doug Wilson responds:] "grh, I would say that in that case, love is earned by being lovable. Which is obviously false."

There's deep, important truth in these few words.  We are SO tangled up as a people in relational grudges and moralistic saviors, that it is VERY attractive to us to say, "respect is earned by being respectable.  I'll treat you right when you start treating me right."  Until we see the reverse in love, and realize, this would be a world totally lacking in grace.  

Trust me, none of us wants a world in which we get exactly what we deserve.  So we need to go first in extending respect to the not-quite-respectable-yet husband.  Go first in extending love to the not-quite-yet-lovable wife.  

Not to get them to change - don't get mad when they don't respond perfectly to your uber-graciousness the first time.

But simply because you should.

John 13:34 - "just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another."

Covid, and Now Elections

I want to bring up a sensitive topic in conservative churches right now.  

An elephant in the room that we are not talking about.  

The issue is the legitimacy of elections, and how deep the corruption goes in our political system.  This issue's figurehead is Donald Trump.  If you think elections have been and will be stolen, and the rot goes all the way down, you'll likely vote for Trump.  If, on the other hand, you think elections were not stolen (but were heavily media-influenced), if you think the system is salvageable by sane, moderate people, you are probably not a Trump supporter.

Both groups are now sitting in the same set of pews, eyeing each other.

The way church leaders in MY circles are handling this (and this is who I'm critiquing!), is by ignoring it and talking about Covid.  How we all know now what to do next time.  We are finding a false unity in the Covid post-mortem, when we should be dealing directly with our current disagreement.

As an aside, the Covid post-mortem really bothers me.  Almost every church with very few exceptions shut down for 4-12 weeks in March-June 2020.  But now we talk as if we didn't, and that we were all on the same page against shutdowns throughout.  We weren't.  We brag about how quickly we reopened.  A bit of honesty and humility here would be refreshing.

Set that aside.  I don't think the church is learning very well how to deal with disagreements.  The Covid issue was acute, and people voted with their feet, whether to mask or not.  Many churches have a whole new set of people in their pews because of this.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a yellow flag.

How will each church handle the 2024 election?

Will we wind up with churches proclaiming an election-denying, Trump-supporting position, and people vote with their feet to go there?  I would urge that this should not be.

Politically, this is a moment in our country where the Republican-voting populace is trying to figure out where to land on this issue.  This is a moment for the church to speak.  It's probably unwise to come down hard for or against Trump, as a church voice.

But laying out basic political principles, and how to disagree well is direly needed.

Next time I'll share my thoughts on that.

To Kill a Mockingbird - book review

 

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To Kill a Mockingbird review

The perfect vacation read. Having never read it, I picked it up and read the whole thing in less than a week – rare for me!

Set in the 1930s, told from the perspective of a lawyer’s prepubescent daughter, Harper Lee’s vivid writing grips. The reader can easily visualize the porches, the people, and the town. Here are some themes I discerned:

Individual dignity
Whether it was the hermit next door they liked to mock, or the racism against the blacks painfully depicted, Atticus Finch was the foil, persuading us to respect the dignity of any and every person. One way the author did this was to not tell the reader the race of key characters until far in, sometimes never. It became important to the plot to know, at some points, yet you didn’t know. A person’s race mattered to the town, and to the plot of the book. But it shouldn’t have. Another key example of individual dignity comes from the title. When Atticus gives his children air rifles for Christmas, he instructs them: “Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Their neighbor explains further, “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” (119). This is a metaphor for vulnerable people like hermits or minorities. The community COULD hurt them, but should leave them alone and let them sing their song.

Injustice
But what we see under the surface of the nice small town is people who DO want to hurt others. Teachers want to impose ideology without understanding for individual students. White trash want to put down blacks to feel better about themselves. (The “n” word is used liberally.) Good folks put down the white trash, and the African native needing civilization, to feel better about themselves. This all culminates in the accusation of rape against a black man on a backwoods white man’s daughter. Though all the evidence points to her propositioning him, the father charges the man with rape to escape the shame of it.

Incrementalism toward justice
Atticus was happy to lose his case, with the jury deliberating for hours instead of minutes, knowing the judge was on his side. That was progress. It meant there was at least one man on that jury who stuck up for the truth in the face of sheer prejudice, and that was a win. This would be unacceptable compromise today, from any political viewpoint. But it is a mature understanding of realistically changing society. It takes time and baby steps to get there.

Innocence of children?
One theme that bothered me at first was the refrain that children haven’t learned the sin of prejudice yet, so are more distressed by it. The book flirts with Rousseau’s idea of the tabula rasa: children are innocent; it is society that corrupts them. But I believe we can reject that, and also see that some societal sins like racism are corporate and learned. As a theological example, I became convinced of paedo-Communion when I read 1 Corinthians 11 in context: it was the adults who were slighting the poor during Communion, not the children. The grownups weren’t discerning the body by giving everyone an equal share. That wasn’t something the children would have even thought to do, yet THEY are excluded from the sacrament by most Christians, on the assumption that THEY can’t discern the body. Disregarding the poor or the young are learned, societal traits largely unknown to our children. This doesn’t mean they are innocent until society corrupts them. They have their own sinful nature, too. So it is with sinful patterns like racism.

A God’s-eye view
The hermit who lives next door, whom they never see, I believe represents God. He is distant and absent for the whole story. Talked about, wondered at, even mocked. But at the end we find out that he has been seeing the whole town drama play out from his window. He emerges to protect, and to bring justice. Even the sheriff realizes there was a higher law that he fulfilled. In front of the hermit and the principled lawyer he obliquely justifies the hermit’s actions. This is the refrain of the popular mystery novel: justice has been done outside the conventional standards. Is that okay? The implication is strongly, “Yes.” “A righteousness, apart from the law…” (Romans 3:21ff).

Conclusion
In our day, the woke have co-opted the civil rights movement to advance wickedness (the trans are the new afflicted minority) and injustice (“down with white privilege!”). This prompts the anti-woke to reject books like this as the seeds of liberalism. I reject this view entirely. It’s true the worldview of this book isn’t tethered much to God or a biblical worldview. We only get hints of that. But Atticus Finch fought a good fight. The judge was right to put him on the case, and lean on the jury to decide for righteousness. Finch was right that he was obligated to take the case, for his integrity’s sake.

When the woke exploit and corrupt ideals like racial justice for their own purposes, let us not throw out the ideal, but continue to stand for it in its pure form, as Atticus Finch did.

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