Culture – Iron Ink

Picking At The Issue Of Culture

In the Christian anthropology man is being that is composed of two parts that are so closely integrated that some theologians have referred to man’s ontological reality as being a “modified unichotomy,” comprised of a corporeal dynamic (being made from the dust of the ground) yet also having a spiritual dynamic (God having breathed into him the breath of life). Some have referred to man as being a dichotomous being but this doesn’t quite capture it given that man’s body and spirit are so closely and intimately integrated. We can distinguish body and soul but we can ever isolate them or divorce them. God alone does that at death and then only for a season until our bodies as glorified will be reunited with our heaven dwelling spirits. Unichotomy is a clumsy way to express this union of body and soul (spirit) since the word itself means “One” and “to cut.”

I lead in with the above observation in order to talk about the problems with what we call “multiculturalism.” Multiculturalism, professing that it delights in a multitude of cultures in point of fact ends up creating a unitarian culture that disallows Christian culture since Christian culture is premised upon the conviction that inferior cultures should not be allowed equal standing with superior cultures. For example, while multiculturalism would insist that cultures that honor sodomite marriage should be protected, Christian culture would demand laws prohibiting such inferior cultural norms as existing among a Christian people.

The link between the first two paragraphs is that for multiculturalism, premised at it is on Marxist underpinnings, holds an anthropology that denies the Christian anthropology insisting instead that man is only matter in motion. Since man is only matter in motion and since there are no transcendent ethics by which man must be guided the multiculturalist seeks to create a culture that is unitary. Since man himself is definitely not a composite of body and soul and therefore is a unitary being then it is inevitable that man should build unitary cultures that disallow for any culture that insist that distinctions exist as given by extramundane God, who, according the to the multiculturalist worldview can’t exist because he is a spiritual being.

So, we have established thus far

1.) Multiculturalism is a euphemism that hides the unitarian uni-cultural agenda.

2.) Man created as body and soul has implications for culture.

It is #2 that I would like to tease out a wee bit.

When we consider culture we have to consider it as being the product of both man’s corporeal and spiritual reality. This is why when asked the definition of culture my answer is typically, “culture is a particular people’s religion externalized.” This is a slight twist on the Calvinistic philosopher’s “culture is religion externalized.” When we talk about what makes culture, culture we have to take into account our Christian anthropology which teaches that man is a modified unichotomy. We have to take into account that like man individually, culture is, a modified unichotomy expressing both man’s corporeal and non-corporeal realities.

Culture is the expression of men living in one geographic area that reflects both a shared genetic heritage (thus tipping the cap to man’s corporeal being) and a shared religion, belief system, worldview (thus tipping the cap to man’s non-corporeal being). Another way of saying this is that “culture is theology as poured over a particular people group.”

The implications of this are fairly obvious if this is an accurate assessment of culture. One implication is that where there is a particular culture that exists one cannot add too that particular culture either a large injection of alien peoples (corporeal aspect of culture) or a large injection of an alien worldview (non-corporeal aspect of culture) and still at the end of that addition have the same culture that one started with before the addition was injected. The application here to massive third world migration to the formerly Christian West should be obvious.

Another implication is that just as one cannot add to a particular culture either a massive injection of foreign peoples or alien ideas and retain the same culture, in the same way one cannot delete or vastly diminish either a particular culture’s convictions/religion/worldview or it’s genetic heritage and still have the same culture after the deletion or diminishing.

The implication of pursuing an agenda of either massive addition or deletion as described above in any particular stable culture will be significant conflict as the new mix vies for hegemony in the new culture.

Now, there are many in the Christian community, who will insist that culture is only a matter of an abstracted large number of individuals owning a shared set of ideas. They do not believe that a shared genetic heritage should be considered an element for building stable Christian culture. The problem here, for these will intended but vacuous thinkers, is that they are denying the Christian anthropology as applied to culture that man is both body and soul. Instead, what they have is an anthropology, when applied to culture, that sees man as only the sum of his thoughts. Historically, this line of thinkinking has been known as “Gnosticism.” This line of thought is Gnostic because it does not take seriously the truth that man is an embodied being, opting instead to see man as a brain on a stick. This line of thinking belittles the corporeal realities that make for the manishness of man.

Dr. Adi Schlebusch offers insight here as to the historical foundations of this errant form of Gnostic thinking that has invaded the Christian universe of thought;

“This (Gnosticism as applied to defining culture) is the basic tenet of liberalism and this was central to the flaws of the Enlightenment. It is for this very reason that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century counter-enlightenment philosophers polemicized so heavily against abstract theories of human rights or the idea of the social contract as the basis of society.

What the liberal philosophers of the Enlightenment, especially the eighteenth-century French philosophers sought to do was to rebuild a new society based on ideals. It fundamentally sought to de-root man from the so-called “chains” imposed upon him by created realities. In doing so, they often appealed to nature or man’s supposed state of nature which, according to them, had been corrupted by customs and habits imposed by tradition. It is for this reason that I believe the contemporary Neo-Thomist accusation against Theonomists that we are fundamentally liberal in our anthropology as a result of our skepticism about natural law, holds no water. The fact of the matter is that appeals to nature as justification for egalitarianism and a universal human fraternity was actually quite common during the Enlightenment, particularly in France. This is not to say that natural law theory is liberal in and of itself, but it has certainly historically been much more of a tool employed by liberals than Scripture has, for example.”

The opposite problem of a Gnostic definition of culture that insists that culture is only the sum total of how abstracted individuals think is the assertion that culture has nothing to do with any spiritual reality, insisting instead that culture is merely matter in motion. This materialist Marxist understanding of culture viewed man and cultures as being a biological machine(s) that could be shaped by the party in any direction it desired. In reality Marxism was the anti-culture culture because it was the anti-religion religion. Marxist culture remained the outward manifestation of a people’s inward beliefs but what was manifested in Marxist culture was the Marxist religion that held that man was an economic being that could only be understood in terms of class warfare. Because man in Marxist religion and culture was only matter in motion man became dehumanized and having lost the manishness of man he lost those realities that make men, men; connection to family, clan, nation, church, and place.

Only Christianity can build stable culture because only Christianity has an anthropology that seeks to maintain the relation man as body and man as soul. Christianity then must do battle with the Gnostics in the church that says culture is only the consequence of what men in the abstract think and Christianity must do battle with the Materialists in the church who think that man is merely matter in motion.

What is interesting here is that even though man as material alone or man as spiritual alone are stark opposites in terms of anthropology in the end they both will build cultures that are unitarian and monistic. If man is merely one component then man will build a culture that is monochrome and unitary. So, even though spiritualist views of culture and materialist views of culture are seeming at opposite ends of the spectrum they end up building the same kind of ugly mulatto cultures. This is where we are right now with the rise of multiculturalism – a euphemism if there ever was one.

As a Christian the danger that I am dealing with now the most in the Christian church on this subject is the the Gnostic/spiritual side of the equation. More than a few are the clergy who seemingly believe that the results of Christianity, in terms of culture, will eventually be a world where particular nations disappear because the gospel has been so successful that there is no longer a need for diverse nations or cultures. I call this “Christian Globalism,” and it is more prevalent than one might think. It’s almost as if the only reason diverse nations and cultures exist is because of sin.

From what we have said here we see that the finest culture can only arise where there is a dynamic interplay between Christian thinking and Christian genetic heritage. The fun thing about this is that because God has made peoples to be diverse different peoples, these different peoples when turning to Christ, will result in their thinking their thoughts after Christ, and the result of that will be a plurality of diverse Christian cultures, each and all expressing in ways distinct to their heritage strengths the glory of God. Each and all of these cultures will esteem God’s law but the esteeming of that law will run through the prism of genetic distinctive heritage. In such a way the temporal one and many of culture(s) will reflect the One and Many character of God. With this shared owning of Christ the different distinct and different nations and cultures will together glorify the great and magnificent creator God just as a symphony orchestra with all it diverse instruments work together to produce majestic pieces of music.

‘Dios! Patria! Fueros! Rey! — God, the fatherland, local rights, and the King, in that order

“The political philosophy of the Traditionalist Communion (opposing the Spanish Revolution) rejected any strong central government, parliamentary or otherwise; except for national defense and foreign affairs, they wanted Spain governed by its separate provinces. (The Carlist motto was ‘Dios! Patria! Fueros! Rey! — God, the fatherland, local rights, and the King,) in that order.”

Warren Carroll
The Last Crusade; The Twentieth Century’s War For the Sake Of The Cross – p. 19

There are a good number of variant visions being cast in favor of Christian Nationalism. Recently, I’ve read one Christian Nationalist proclaim that given what we are up against in our own government that it is ridiculous to think any movement that is decentralized could successfully defeat the current Leviathan State. I will concede that is possibly true but be that as it may could I have my vision of Christian Nationalism come to pass it would be of the kind in the quote above. I still believe that power tends to corrupt and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I still believe that if we are able to cashier our current god-state with a centralized state that would work in the favor of Christians the end result would soon enough be a return to where we began. Like our Founders I do not trust power to be concentrated in any one place and as such I would desire a Christian Nationalism has many power centers as lodged in the society.

Of course a multitude of power centers can never work where there is not a harmony of interest among the population and a harmony of interest can only arise where there is a common Christian faith and worldview as embraced by a kin people. Both a common Christian faith and worldview combined with a kin people can provide social order that will avoid the deep fractures that currently exist in what was once Christendom. Where there is a common Christian faith and worldview combined with a kin people then a decentralized arrangement can work. In that arrangement “God, the fatherland, local rights, and the King” can provide a solid foundation for social order.

Naturally, this kind of desire is not possible in our current arrangement in America where massive immigration has instead given us a country where there is no common faith and there is no one predominant kin people. Diversity of faith and/or blood will never be any social order’s strength.

A decentralized and diffuse jurisdictional approach where a people are characterized by a common faith and a common blood is the only approach to building social order where maximum institutional and individual liberty can be lived out. A decentralized and diffuse jurisdictional approach allows the institutions of family, church, civil-social, and others to flourish and that apart from a top-down approach where all authority is lodged in the State.

Fashions Change But Style Endures

In the last few weeks I’ve been in and out of a couple hospitals visiting folks. Of course, as clergy, hospital visitation is part of the calling and so I am not unfamiliar with this territory. However, I’ve noticed something recently that was reinforced by viewing video clips of the different denominational gatherings. Both the denominational gatherings and the hospitals I’ve been in recently are screaming at me that we are a different type of people than even a few short decades ago.

You see, I’m old enough now to remember hospitals from decades ago as well as denominational meetings from the same time frame. Hospitals a few decades ago were staffed by a very prim and proper staff. Nurses wore their white dresses with their nursing caps all wearing their nurse’s pins. Doctors, when making their rounds wore their white smocks with their names sewn into the lapel while wearing a button down collar and tie. Clergy, in a very similar manner attended their denominational gatherings in suit and ties. The few women present serving in support roles were all wearing dresses.

Those times are gone.

Both hospitals and denominational meetings are characterized, for the most part, by people dressed, comparatively speaking to the past, incredibly slovenly. I constantly finding myself arching my eyebrows by what I’ve seen in the past few weeks in both hospitals I’ve been in and by the attire seen at these denominational meetings. Of course, if it were merely a matter of attire I could probably care very little but I suspect that sloppy attire might possibly belie sloppy thinking.

Undergirding this observation is the irrefutably true observation of the difference in attire, in both pulpit and pew, when gathering to worship in God’s house. The clergy and laity in 1975 (randomly chosen) appear for worship dressed in their “Sunday best,” whereas clergy and laity appear for worship dressed like Hobos, Hippies and Hobgoblins. This belies a different view of not only “dress,” and what is happening in and with Worship but it belies low views of God.

I understand that we should be glad that people are in Church no matter their attire. If forced to choose between seeing people in Church dressed like beachcombers and beatniks or not seeing people in Church because they don’t want to dress the part I would obviously choose the former. But I would do so with sadness.

I’m not looking for a return to 3 piece suits or even the nurses white dresses and little hats of old. I merely desire professionals to dress professionally when working in their professional capacity. At this point I’d only ask people to think through this matter a wee bit.

Shiloh Boudicea And The Morlock vs. Eloi War

H. G. Wells in his famous novel “The Time Machine” Wells gives us two classes of people. On one hand you have the Eloi species of humanity who in Well’s novel serve as a food source for the Morlocks. The Morlocks are described as bestial Troglodytes who basically farm the far weaker and benign Eloi species of humanity.

Last week in Minnesota a Morlock sought to consume an Eloi but in a narratival role reversal the Eloi fought back. Of course, I am writing of the now notorious Shiloh Hendrix. We should say at the outset that Miss Shiloh probably isn’t the poster child for resistance to Morlocks that the Eloi elite may want. The single mom, Miss Shiloh, is inked all over her arms (and odds are elsewhere) and who has never met a profanity she couldn’t wield like a sailor now is the new Boudicea for white people in the US. Boudicea, if you recall, was an ancient Brit Queen who led an uprising against occupying Roman forces.

And white Christian America is increasingly becoming occupied territory. Consider, that we never would have known about our own Boudicea dropping an N bomb on a pilfering 5 year old Morlock if a Somali Morlock had not been occupying the same playground as our Shiloh Boudicea. When I was Shiloh’s age my Dad would’ve asked; “What the fudge is a Somali Morlock doing in a Minnesota playground?” That question gets more complicated when we realize this Somali Morlock has previously been charged with sexually assaulting a 16 year old and though the court case was dropped it does make one wonder what this Somali chap with the wonderfully Morlockian like name of “Sharmake Beyle Omar” was doing at a children’s playground camera in hand.

So how is it that Somali Morlock, Sharmake Beyle Omar, was at a Minnesota playground? Well, currently the most densely populated Somali area in America is primarily in Minnesota. Morlock Sharmake is in Minnesota because the US Government, with their insane immigration policies, brought Sharmake the Morlock to the US, doubtless because “diversity is our strength.” Everyone knows that Eloi can’t be happy without Morlocks in their midst.

However, our Shiloh Boudicea decided to be an Eloi that refused to be intimidated by the local Morlock population. Doubtless, fatigued with being constantly surrounded by Morlocks, Shiloh stood her ground and the N bomb she dropped on the pilfering 5 year old Morlock she repeated repeatedly at the request of the Somali Morlock who was recording on his phone — a phone certainly acquired vua the offices of a US Government agency titled; “Elois Providing Phones For Morlocks” (Dept. of EPPM) — a cascade of further N bombs while strafing the Somali Morlock at the same time with sundry F bombs.

Now, I grew up with “women” like Shiloh and the best advice is just to avoid them like the plague. There is no other way to say it except to say Shiloh is poor white trash. Everything about the video screams that. However, to be honest, at this point it is irrelevant that our Shiloh Boudicea will never be mistaken for Betty Crocker. The Eloi, being where they are now at, were not going to be inspired by a properly raised young lady who, because of their proper rearing would never casually drop N bombs or F bombs. No, it would take someone like a Shiloh who despite her trailer trash pedigree could be transmuted into our own Shiloh Boudicea — defender of the West.

So, as the saying goes, “God delights drawing straight lines with crooked sticks” and God is using crooked Shiloh to draw the straight line of awakening the White Eloi to their danger of being totally replaced by the Morlocks among us. Perhaps Shiloh is not the hero we might want but she is our rallying point all the same. Shiloh now stands for all those White people — heritage Americans — who now realize that it really is the case that the goal is to replace them and further who have decided that they are going to resist.

It may be the case that most decent white people would teach their daughters not to use that kind of language. It may be the case that most decent white people would teach their daughters not to paint their skin in psychedelic colors. However, as I said above, all that is irrelevant when one begins to realize that the very existence of white people is what is on the table. Either the Eloi stand together on this issue or the Morlocks eat us one by one.

So, while I may not support Shiloh Boudicea’s personal lifestyle, I absolutely support that which she has now become a symbol. I support white resistance to being swallowed alive by the Bagel’s Morlocks. I support returning all Morlocks to their countries of origin so that whites have their own homeland as they did when I was a lad. I support resistance against the Morlockian New World Order that is driving the presence of Somalian Morlocks in Minnesota and elsewhere. I support a mother protecting her child, however raw that protection might be.

Having said all that I am saddened that it is a woman who is now this symbol. One could have prayed that it might have been a man who was caught bravely standing up to the Morlocks in our midst. Maybe yet there will be more men who become the symbol of this resistance to the Bagel’s Morlockian New World Order. There are men out there — good men — who have resisted in similar ways as Shiloh has but the moment clearly had not been right to draw this kind of national attention.

I have hopes that the Shiloh Boudicea event is evidence that the Saxon is learning to hate that which hates what they love.

It happened in a trailer park playground
As recorded by a Somalian ingrate
In the context of fatigue with the browned
When the Saxon learned how to hate

Look people, if we don’t wake up right now we are going to become strangers and aliens in the land that our fathers built.

Lead on Shiloh Boudicea.

Chesterton & McAtee On The Meaning Of Apparel

“All women dress to be noticed: gross and vulgar women to be grossly and vulgarly noticed, wise and modest women to be wisely and modestly noticed.”

G. K. Chesterton

It’s been a beef of mine for quite some time about the way we post-moderns dress. We are far removed from the class and the Haute couture of previous generations. It all bespeaks a coarsening of the human condition… a continuation of our disintegration downward into the void.

And now it is not enough to be ill-kempt in our dressing attire, now we seek out being ill-kempt in our own flesh with our comparatively recent fascination in the West with tattoos and body piercings.

Of course all of this is especially desultory on women as they are were created to be the fairer sex. It is one thing if one is living in a old shack to have torn and ugly furniture. It’s quite another thing if one is living in an upscale and higher end home to have it decorated like Berlin in May of 1945. God created women to be bearers of beauty as among mankind but today countless numbers of them dress like they are trying to star in a Jackson Pollack painting. One has a hard time today discerning a band of women at a shopping center from the crew of the fictional Whaler ship made famous as the “Pequod” from the novel “Moby Dick.”

I would go so far as insisting that the coarseness of our culture is perhaps best captured by the coarseness of our women-folk. Now, of course, as men are the head and creators of every culture (whether by abdication of their responsibilities to lead or by active leading askew) men are ultimately responsible for a culture populated by women covered in ink, pierced with metal, and dressed in spandex. When I was a boy, one could only see what I see daily by going to the circus or the county fair.

Look, I know that our women-folk have been led astray and so aren’t alone responsible for the ways they seek to de-beautify themselves. When living in a madhouse culture we can hardly be surprised when people begin to think that the madhouse is the norm and so follow the customs and norms of the madhouse. If a young lady sees her friends, peers, and elders looking like skin calligraphy is the hip thing one can hardly alone fault the innocent naive who have few better role models to not want to get pierced, inked, and trolloped in order to fit in with the madhouse culture.

I look at old photos of America from just two generations ago and it is like looking at another reality. Recently, I came across the photo of a major league baseball game in the late 1960s and I was amazed by the number of attendees who were wearing ties and suit jackets as well as the number of women wearing dresses. It was clear that the way they dressed then proves how coarsened we have become as a people. Another example is the way folks dress for church. Growing up we understood what “Sunday go to church clothes” meant. Nearly everyone was dressed in the best they owned. I have photos somewhere around here of me as a child with my Sunday School class with all of us 5 year olds all dressed up for church full of grins and sas.

None of this is to necessarily say people were better or more moral then. Often times dressing appropriately was a hypocrisy that was paying its coin to virtue, but people understood dressing like a vagrant was not acceptable. Even if all that finery in attire was hypocrisy, better the hypocrisy then, than the outright in your face non-hypocrisy that we have today. We could use a little hypocrisy in the way we dress.

So, our attire is just one more piece of evidence that we, as a people, are declining. What we wear, accouterments and all, screams volumes about us and screams volumes about what we think about God. There is theology being revealed in the way we dress (or don’t dress).