Category: Culture

I’ve spent my life reading great men and so, though I can only appraise greatness from that habit and distance, I thought I would offer some thoughts on becoming a great man. Not because I know personally, but rather because I think I have seen something of it in all my reading.

I offer this because I am convinced that we need more great men and that there has been a dearth of great men for a very long time now. It is difficult to be great unless there is greatness in your midst to emulate. Maybe every generation believes that they are living during a shortage of greatness but greatness started dying out when I was a much younger man, and there hasn’t been much to replace the likes of Bahnsen, Van Til, Rushdoony, Clark, Conquest, Nisbet, Berman, etc. — men who have all died in my lifetime.

It strikes me that the first thing to be said about greatness is the desire to be found faithful to the Lord Christ and His cause. If a man has that desire and pursues it then he will be great whether he is acknowledged as such or not by his contemporaries and his times. The reality of being faithful to one’s creator and redeemer pushes one increasingly out of selfishness, pride, and self-centeredness. One begins to realize how little one is and how awful it is to think of oneself as the pivot upon which everything turns. This, by necessity, means that genuine humility is part of what it means to great. Great men don’t think they are great. They have seen how big God is and seeing how big God is they have a proper appraisal of self.

Of course, humility is something that comes from the outside in — the school of hard knocks, pain and disappointment, dreams unrealized and all that. God must give the gift of humility and the giving of that gift is often painfully received. It is as if greatness is only achieved by being familiar and friendly with failure and conversant with hurt while at the same time not allowing all that making one bitter and angry. Greatness typically comes through a back door unexpected. Read the biographies of truly great men and note how often they failed.

After this humility there is the necessity for wisdom and wisdom is different than knowledge and is, like humility, a God given gift. Scripture in the book of James tells us to ask God for wisdom and He will give to the man who is not double-minded. Who do you view as great? Chances are you also see them as being wise. Perhaps we have such a paucity of great men today because there is so few who have heaven sent wisdom as combined with heaven given humility. If you want to be great, therefore, be much in prayer that God would give you wisdom. I read once, years ago, (I think it was from D. Martyn Lloyd Jones) that when a man wants wisdom the way a drowning man wants air then he will know he longs for wisdom. I think you will agree that if there was ever a need for a generation of wise men, as God counts wise, it is this generation. Will we avoid subjugation without it?

Greatness also requires countless hours of practicing and refining whatever gift it is that one has been given. Greatness doesn’t typically come by natural ability alone. I have seen numerous people with natural ability who, because they didn’t practice and refine that natural ability never became great. In some ways natural ability gets in the way of greatness as people rely on their natural ability and so do not hone it and grow it. Consider R. J. Rushdoony. Rush clearly had natural ability. He came from a long line of clerics himself. However, Rush read and studied like a starving man eats. The knowledge he had at his fingertips was astounding. If you listen to his lectures though you realize he was forever honing and expanding his natural ability. He didn’t rest on his laurel or his past learning. The man was forever reading and studying. Rush’s greatness then wasn’t only from natural ability. If you want to move to the field of athletics it is much the same. Those who are considered great in their sport, no doubt had natural ability, but that natural ability could only take them so far. If they did not practice, hone, and sweat, they would have never become the GOAT. So, if you want to be great you have to put the time in. You have to deny yourself the play time (the me-time) that others might pursue.

Perhaps oddly enough, if one desires to be great one has to also develop other interests. Michael Polanyi points this out in his book “Tacit Knowledge.” Polanyi wrote that the mind has to find a way to rest from its pursuits and so it has to find a way to disengage. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. As such, greatness must work, but it also must know how to disengage with profit. Polanyi suggests that many insights have been gained into one’s discipline by greats while their mind was disengaged and so distracted from its particular expertise.

Greatness is achieved when it is achieved in the context of peers. The peers may be who one is competing against. The peers may be those who are aiding and abetting in a mutual pursuit. Peers/friends makes one better and draws out from the well of one’s talents and giftedness even more ability. It is good to be pushed and peers and friends can do that. Sometimes the pushing is collegial, sometimes the pushing can be competitive but it is unlikely that a man will be great who is not himself surrounded by other great men. Edison had his Tesla. Graham Bell had his Marconi. Brady had his Manning. Clark had his Van Til. Patton had his Rommel.

This next one is not universal but in my reading great men are often characterized as having great wives and family. In my reading there seems to be something about the stability of a strong family life that allows those with ability to develop their embryonic greatness. There is a proverb that supports this. “Behind every great man stands a great woman.” My mother-in-law used to morph that by saying; “Behind every great man stands a surprised mother-in-law. I will say this. A man whose family is in shambles can never be a great man. If a man is great that will bleed into his family life in some way and often will be seen in his own children.

Finally, for our purpose, greatness is often a matter of “the man meeting the moment,” which is to say that men should pursue greatness but it is up to God to ordain it so that the prepared man meets the moment he was prepared for. I suppose many great men have lived and died that have remained completely unknown because that moment that their greatness was best suited for, in God’s sovereignty, never came to pass.

It should be the prayer of all men that God would make them great in His service while at the same time praying for contentment with what God has and does not have for them in the way of achievement. It should be our prayer that we would once again live among a people characterized by the number of great men in their midst.

I have a couple chaps I know online who I count as friends. We likely agree on 75-80% of theology. Maybe. But when they get it wrong it is like fingernails across the chalkboard.

One such friend is a Baptist clergy named J. S. Lowther. Now Baptists come in all contradictory shapes and sizes and I’ve never met one yet that didn’t have a hitch in their gitty-up. Rev. Lowther is no different. Lowther is good on the Kinist issue, understanding the need to think categorically according to ethnic/racial/family groupings and yet despite that he refuses to Baptize babies because he doesn’t understand that God has placed our children in Christian ethnic/racial/family groupings. Go figure. On one level he understands that the family is the basic social order unit over and above the individual while at the same time by not baptizing babies he proclaims he doesn’t understand that the family unit is the basic social order unit over and above the social order taught by Scripture. He’s like the former Soviet Sub commanders who were famous for their “crazy Ivans.”  (Look it up.)

Rev. Lowther, being both Baptist and a strict regulativist (another odd combination) also is a Christmas hater. Lately he’s been knocking my chops about celebrating Christmas. Of course, the tradition I’ve spent the last 30 years part of (Dutch Reformed) have throughout their history celebrated Christmas. The Dutch Reformed Churches will often be found having a Christmas Eve or Christmas morning Church service. The Dutch likewise love their SinterKlaas. Over the years I’ve learned about their past tradition of stuffing wooden shoes full of goodies much the way that most people stuff stocking. I’ve learned from them about Zwarte Piet,  De Sint, De Goede Sint and De Goedheiligman’s (3 other Dutch names for St. Nick)  helpers. Why a Dutch Elder who is a lawyer even tutored me on the anti-Santa named Krampus.

All that to say, that in the Dutch Reformed tradition, as well as the Hungarian Reformed, the Swiss Reformed, the German Reformed, the French Reformed and others have all celebrated Christmas. I mean, its not as if the Christmas haters have any kind of ability to go about constantly yakking that “this is a papist tradition.” Put a sock in it guys and belly up to the spiked egg nogg and loosen your underwear a tad bit. It will do your pietism some good.

Now to address this issue of Christmas celebration. Look …. I get why the Puritans (some of them) didn’t want to celebrate Christmas. If I had been alive at that time I would have likely agreed with them. But if they were alive today they would agree with me because our problems today are the opposite problems they had. Their world was threatened by the Superstitions of Rome with its Mass and with its every day of the week is some kind of saints day. They had over-enchanted the world. But we don’t live in that epoch. We live in a world that has been disenchanted. There is no longer any sense of the Holy in the way we measure time. And so, I support the small celebrating of Christmas in the hopes that by doing so it will be a small step to bringing back the enchantment of the world.

Second, there is the reality that if we refuse to measure time by a Christians standard we will measure time by a heathen standard. Think about it. Right now Martin Luther King gets as much billing as Jesus Christ in terms of days marked as special. If we dropped Christmas we would allow the heathens to completely bring in their litany of heathen saints. Christmas would be replaced by Rosa Parks day or Harvey Milk day or Trannie day. Folks who want to insist that celebrating Christmas is not pleasing to God are dullards who do not realize what time it is — where we are in history. We need more Christian High days and not fewer. We need to bring back the Lord’s Day especially as a high day.

However, in order to show what a reasonable chap I am, I’ll make a deal with the Rev. Lowthers and Ryan Halls of the world. When the larger culture brings back honoring every Lord’s Day as Holy unto the Lord I’ll be all in on dropping Christmas off the calendar as long all the other pagan saints day are extinguished as well. But as that is not going to happen any time soon, I am celebrating Christmas along with Luther and a punch bowl full of spiked egg nogg. Merry Christmas to JS Lowther and all my Covenanter type Grinch friends. I hope before you die your heart grows 4 more sizes.

“The truth is that, for all their talk about social “roots,” conservative intellectuals in the postwar era were often rootless men themselves, and the philosophical mystifications in which they enveloped themselves were frequently the only garments that fit them.”

I started reading Sam Francis just about when he started writing in public venues. I suspect that I have read a good percentage of what he put down on paper. I also listened to many of his lectures and interviews. Francis was a pillar in establishing what I had been building as part of my understanding of politics. There were others before Sam. Growing up in Michiana I was exposed very early to M. Stanton Evans; Editor of the Indianapolis Star. At age 18 I received a subscription to “Human Events” as I began college. Evans was also the Editor of Human Events and I was gifted with the subscription by a conservative Uncle who was concerned that I would go liberal attending college. Also on the early conservative arc, as a youngster I  would devour all of Mike Royko of the Chicago Tribune I could get my hands on. Royko was a hard-bitten cynical conservative and his sarcasm, as in the mouth of Slats Grobnik, gave me a good laugh before I folded up the newspapers in the preparatory process that would end with me delivering those newspapers on my bicycle all over Sturgis, Michigan.

All this to say that I was exposed to the conservative mindset from the tenderst of ages. This was then given epistemological foundations when studying under Dr. Glenn Martin — a man who somehow slipped through the cultural Marxist net that worked to exclude doctrinaire conservatives gaining status in higher education. This was already well established by  1977 when I matriculated to Marion College. Glen Martin solidified all that I already was by instinct because of my family, my Christian religion, and my reading habits. Later in my 30s I subscribed to “Conservative Chronicle” and in my 40s it was on to “Chronicles Magazine.” Serving as a foundation underneath that reading of Conservative Essayists and Journalists I was reading the books that those Journalists themselves had read. Authors like Burke, Dabney, Burnham, Lindbergh, Garet Garrett, Meyer, Whittaker Chambers, Christopher Dawson,  Maistre, T. S. Eliot etc. have been eagerly consumed over the years.

Today, I have given up the “Conservative” sobriquet as conservatives are typically about as useful as tits on a bore given how they have been compromised by the liberal zeitgeist of the last 85 years. Today, I refer to myself as “Dissident” or “Paleoconservative,” or “Biblical Christian.” I have come to the conviction, as learned from Rushdoony, that it is not possible to be “Conservative” and not be Christian since any conservatism that is not built on the foundation of Biblical Christianity is just another form of humanism. Should anyone doubt that they should listen to Rushdoony slice and dice the conservative foundations of Russell Kirk from one of Rush’s lectures on Pocket College.

Much today in the “Evangelical Church” that is considered conservative is just warmed over cultural Marxism. This explains why Samuel Francis once wrote;

“The institutional Christianity that flourishes today is no longer the same religion as that practiced by Charlemagne and his successors, and it can no longer support the civilization they formed. Indeed, organized Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it.”

Samuel T. Francis

In the initial quote Francis explained how useless modern Conservatism had become. In this immediate quote above Francis underscores how useless Christianity has become as it is now a different religion than the Christianity embraced by our Fathers.

Every generation is prone to reinterpret Christianity through the lens of the prevailing zeitgeist and worldview. Our generation is no different. Today the Christianity that is found even in our putative “conservative” churches is a
Christianity that our Fathers as recent as Machen, Morton H. Smith, and John Edwards Richards would neither recognize nor would they confess.

And with the change of Christianity so Western Civilization as changed into a civilization that our Fathers would likewise not recognize. Civilizations are what they are according to two realities;

1.) The people that populate those civilizations
2.) The theology (belief system/Worldview) those same people embrace

Those two realities are not isolated from one another. When a people’s theology changes so will the people themselves and as the people change so one can look for the theology to change. We see this in the West right now. As we have abandoned the Christianity of our fathers we have simultaneously embraced the theology of alien and strangers so that we ourselves are losing our ethno-national identity. Having given up on our previous ethno-confessionalism we have embraced a differing ethno-confessionalism so that both our confession and our ethnicity are different than even what our Grandfathers confessed and were. In brief, if we could bring back our Grandfathers-Great Grandfathers they would not recognize us as their descendents — either in what they believed nor in their genetic makeup.

Francis’s last sentence in the quote above is worthy of consideration. Organized Christianity is, more often than not, the enemy of the West and the White Anglo Saxon Christian who created it. This fact is easily demonstrated by positing that even the reading of this sentence in most “conservative” churches would be met with screams, howls, and clothing rent in anguish.

The chief problem in the West is not political, sociological, nor educational. The chief problem in the West today is the “conservative” “Christian” church with its soyboy “clergy.” Just look at the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod with its “attack without due process” of the Stone Choir podcast chaps. Just look at the OPC and its embrace of the gynocracy. Just look at the PCA with its inability to discipline the proto-sodomite crowd in their midst. Just look at the CREC with its constant anti-whiteism agenda reaching its zenith in the fatuous Antioch Declaration. The current conservative denominational scene bears testimony that what Sam Francis wrote 30 years ago was prescient.

Christianity is such an enemy of the West and the race that created it today that were I myself not clergy it is doubtful that I would darken the door of a church. Today’s Christianity has been reinterpreted through the grid of Cultural Marxism and Jesus Christ has no more interest in the conservative Christianity today than He had interest in the synagogue before His resurrection and ascension.

We need to psychologically resolve to understand that the visible church today, exceptions notwithstanding, is ICHABOD and act accordingly. There is no shame in not attending a Church that holds to a Christianity that is at war with what the Church taught when it was not yet compromised by the spirit of the age.