Over at,

http://matthewtuininga.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/how-to-be-aware-of-a-culture-war-without-becoming-a-culture-warrior-thoughts-on-acton-university/

Matthew Tuininga strikes again.

He titles his piece,

How to be aware of a culture war without becoming a culture warrior: thoughts on Acton University

I might subtitle it …

How to be aware of a culture war without becoming a cultural warrior, or, how to become a cultural warrior without admitting you’re a cultural warrior.

For those who want the whole article, I direct your attention to the link above. I’m interacting with only the bits I found curious.

Mr. Tuininga wrote,

But is not the work of the Acton Institute simply a culture war in reverse? Do not many Christians simply seek to impose their own agenda and ideology by means of the power of the state? To be sure, I did hear some people at the Acton University talk in this way. While the speakers and attendees were very sensitive to liberal accretions on state power, there was less criticism of the ways in which conservatives have sought to use the state to advance their own ideology. In general, however, this was not the spirit of the conference. In general the speakers and lecturers recognized that it is vital for both freedom and virtue for government to be kept in its place.

The problem here, of course, is that the Obama administration does believe that it is keeping to its place when it desires to force Christian institutions to provide abortifacient measures. The Obama administration believes that people like Mr. Tuininga are being reactionary conservatives by desiring to limit the Government from a place it believes it has a right to enter. Now, in this example, I agree with Mr. Tuininga that the Government is overstepping its bounds in seeking to make Christian institutions a arm of the State. What I don’t agree with Mr. Tuininga on is that somehow the State can remain in some realm designated as “neutral.” If the Obama administration doesn’t get its way on this matter then the Christian agenda of more limited more decentralized government will have won the day. If the Obama administration does get its way on this matter then the progressive pagan agenda of a Centralized top down system will have won the day. There is no neutrality. Whoever wins on this battlefront moves the culture war in one direction or another.

Mr. Tuininga offers,

As one speaker pointed out, Christians should not argue for a free market or capitalist society because Scripture or the Church has given us such a system. Rather, the moral case for a free market and for capitalism depends to a significant degree on the fact that it works. Principle, in that sense, is inseparable from pragmatism. If you want to help the poor, why would you support any system other than that which has done more to create economic growth and has lifted more people out of poverty than any other institution or force in the history of the world? If you value freedom, why not maximize it as much as is possible consistent with general prosperity, peace, and order?

However the reason that free markets and Biblical capitalism (as opposed to evolutionary capitalism or Corporatism Capitalism) work is because those economic orders are consistent with what is taught in Scripture. With the Eight Commandment we find the idea of private property, which is the foundation of Biblical capitalism. The problem with appealing to pragmatics is that it tends to peel the ethic away from the theology that creates the ethic. Biblical Capitalism works because it is informed by a Biblical theology that then gets into Biblical economics. I’m all for free markets (though I am a little enamored with the ideas of the Distributists — man is, after all, more than a economic being) but I’m also for free markets remembering that freedom only has any possible sustainable meaning inside of a Biblical worldview.

Mr. Tuininga ends with,

(1)That does not mean our arguments for a free economy should not be fundamentally moral. Human beings are fundamentally moral creatures and must always be addressed as such. (2) That said, however, the arguments we make should not be designed to advance a particular ideological or religious agenda, but to appeal to human beings’ basic understanding of morality and truth in light of experience and sound scholarship. (3) In short, while we may recognize that there are those who are launching a culture war on American society, our response should not be to launch a culture war of our own. (4) On the contrary, our response should be to work as thoughtful, loving citizens, urging and convincing our fellow citizens of the best ideals, policies, and practices conducive to our prosperity as moral human beings. (5)To put it another way, our aim should not be to conquer, but to win hearts and minds with the truth.

The second sentence in that paragraph convinces me that I’ve fallen into Alice’s Rabbit hole.

If we make arguments that are not designed to advance a particular ideological or religious agenda, haven’t we at that point designed arguments to advance the ideological and religious agenda of not making arguments that advance a particular ideological or religious agenda? My point is that ideological and religious agendas are inescapable and Matt doesn’t escape them by insisting that he does escape them. The whole idea that an appeal to human beings’ basic understanding of morality and truth in light of experience and sound scholarship can be done absent of either religion and / or ideology is a howler of the first order. What is the interpretation of human experience based upon except for religious and ideological a-priori’s informing the interpretation? What is sound scholarship based upon except for some pre-commitment to a religion or ideology that is informing the scholarship? Has Matt forgot that both facts and a philosophy of fact must be considered simultaneously? Human beings are fallen creatures and it is a dangerous game to appeal to the basic understanding of morality and truth of creatures that are fallen as some kind of foundation for social order truths. What good was Stalin’s basic understanding of morality and truth in light of experience and sound scholarship? What good was Chairman Mao’s? Felix Dzerzhinsky’s? Pol Pot’s? One does begin to quickly get my point.

Sentence (3) is yet another curio. If someone is attacking me, is it war if I resist? If the cultural Marxist are continuing with their long march through the Institutions is it culture war on my part if I start my own counter long march through the Institutions to return them to what they were before the Cultural Marxists started marching? In sentences (4) and (5) we have a whopper of a false dichotomy. We are not to try and conquer but we are to win hearts and minds with the truth … which of course would mean that if successful we would (shh … don’t say it to loudly) C-O-N-Q-U-E-R.

“In fact, one might say that all modernity, all the creators of the intellectual artifice that is the modern age, were bent on nothing more than rationalization of apostasy, with sexual rebellion as its vehicle. What do Margaret Mead, and Bloomsbury, and Picasso, and Sartre and Freud, and the various forms of socialism, and Paul Tillich, and any number of lesser lights have in common? Precisely that: rationalized sexual misbehavior construed as liberation. In reality it was nothing more than an attack on God in general and the Christian sexual morality in particular….

Add to apostasy the sexual sin that follows almost automatically therefrom — modernity, as I said, is nothing but rationalized sexual misbehavior anyway — and then add the abortion that follows naturally from the sexual revolution, and you have, after a while, a pretty impressive pool of guilt, one big enough to form the basis for a political movement…. Guilt has not only become endemic; it has become a powerful political tool. Liberalism, as currently practiced, is the politics of guilt. Guilt is the engine that pulls the Liberal train… what we are interested in here is the political grammar of those ostensibly involved in righting these wrongs. All the liberal causes are orchestrations, in one way or another, of the pool of guilt that has been building throughout this century.

The Democratic party is a good example of how this all gets brokered. The women blackmail the Liberals, who feel guilty about the sexual revolution, and the feminist power block comes into existence. The homosexuals blackmail the feminists, who feel guilty about abortion and so compensate by allowing the homosexuals to become officially designated victims, so that the feminists won’t have to face the real victims — their own aborted children. Guilt becomes the power base for each of these movements. It becomes the medium of exchange in the political marketplace. In order to play, you must first get yourself designated as a victim…. It works in direct proportion to the number of people in our society who turn away from Jesus Christ, the one and only effective antidote to guilt. It is simple enough to be reduced to an equation: the politics of guilt and blackmail will increase in inverse proportion to the number of people who follow Jesus Christ and — we might add, as he would — do his will. All of this only makes sense because the need to escape from guilt remains a constant in the life of human beings. If people deliberately turn away from Jesus Christ … they will be forced to seek release from guilt by ritual actions … ”

E. Michael Jones
Degenerate Moderns – pp. 121-122

“The reality of man apart from Christ is guilt and masochism. And guilt and masochism involve an unshakable inner slavery which governs the total life of the non-Christian. The politics of the anti-Christian will thus inescapably be the politics of guilt, man is perpetually drained of his social energy and cultural activity by his overriding sense of guilt and his masochistic activity. He will progressively demand of the state a redemptive role. What he cannot do personally, i.e., to save himself, he demands that the state do for him, so that the state, as man enlarged, becomes the human savior of man. The politics of guilt, therefore is not directed, as the Christian politics of liberty, to the creation of a godly justice and order, but to the creation of a redeeming order, a saving state. Guilt must be projected, therefore, on all those who oppose this new order and new age.”

R. J. Rushdoony
The Politics of Guilt and Pity — p. 9

1.) Rejection of God and His Law word as incarnated in Jesus Christ brings guilt. Guilt is objective and will always require some attempt at being assuaged. For Biblical Christians our guilt is assuaged in the blood atonement of Jesus Christ and the following assurance that “if we confess our sins God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The modern does not have this means to relieve themselves of guilt and so much of their behavior and life is spent as a means to find a relief valve for their personal inescapable guilt.

2.) Since those outside of Christ do not have the only proper means to deal with their guilt they only have one of two options in order to find a temporary release of guilt. Those two options are either sadism in some degree or another or masochism is one degree or another. This is just another way of saying that either they will punish themselves (masochism) for their guilt or they will punish others for their guilt (sadism). If they punish others for their guilt often it will be those who are closest to them in their personal relationships. The attempt at removing guilt by means of self atonement can be seen in history by the religious flagellants as they whipped themselves bloody in order to relieve their sense of guilt. However, this means of relieving guilt can also be as comparatively benign as some small form of self sabotage that insures that one can not succeed in some effort. Sadistic attempts at removing guilt are sometimes as blood drenched as abortion where living human beings are made the guilt sacrifice of their parent’s sins or it can be simply the work of a parent shoving their guilt off on their child or a spouse placing their guilt upon their husband or wife.

3.) Guilt becomes a tool whereby whole cultures and social orders are manipulated. For example, White people are made to feel guilty for their success and they are manipulated, by false guilt, to support policies (quotas, educational set asides, manipulated SAT scores, etc.) that work to insure that they, as a people group, no longer can be successful. False guilt over a false sin, as named by a false god, can only be paid for by a false masochistic atonement. For example, women are made to feel guilty for being a wife and homemaker and they are manipulated, by false guilt, to take up careers and to place their children into day care centers. False guilt over a false sin, as named by a false god, can only be paid for by a false atonement. For example, heterosexuals are made to feel guilty for rightly finding sodomy and perverseness disgusting, and they are manipulated, by false guilt, into believing that their natural abhorrence is unnatural and worthy of being sanctioned. False guilt over a false sin, as named by a false god, can only be paid for by a false atonement. Guilt, as Jones notes, is a powerful political tool.

4.) When guilt is allowed to be the train that pulls the body politic, then the weak rule over the strong. When guilt is allowed to be the ruling motif of any social order then it is only those who can somehow claim victim status who are prioritized in import over non-victims. When this happens (and it has happened in our culture) then whole pecking orders of “more victimized than thou” are created. Women more victim then men. Lesbian women more victim then straight women. Handicapped Lesbian women more victim them non handicapped Lesbian women… and on and on it goes. In such a culture the weak dominate the strong so that the strong must continually brought down to the level of the weak.

5.) The blackmailing that happens that Jones mentions I suspect takes place in the following way. In return for homosexuals not mentioning the abortion issue to guilt laden feminists the feminists lend the weight of their support for the homosexual movement. In such a way guilt over abortion is used as a muting factor that allows a large power bloc that was itself created by guilt (feminists) to turn a blind eye to the creation of another large power bloc that is created by guilt (homosexuals).

6.) Blood is still often connected with this pagan relieving of guilt. The blood sacrifice of abortion provides relief of the guilt that comes from violating God’s 7th word.