Category: Culture

I Samuel 8:10 So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking for a king from him. 11 He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. 12 And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. 15 He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. 16 He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. 17 He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. 18 And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day.”

This proclivity of Government to be a tyrant over the people is a theme that we find repeated throughout history. In point of fact, this very kind of tyranny, that we find warned against in I Samuel 8 is listed as a reason by the 1776 Colonialists as a reason for Declaring Independence. In the list of complaints against King George III we find,

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Clearly the theme of harassment and the multiplying of offices is a link that connects I Samuel 8 and the Declaration of Independence. God warns Israel about the way of Tyrants and the Declaration of Independence complains about the ways of Tyrants.

However, we find the same thing happening in our own lives with the advent of Obama-care. Socialized Medicine parallels God’s warnings about tyrants and is consistent with the complaint denounced in the Declaration of multiplying offices. The number of regulations and the horde of administrators necessary to execute the scheme are staggering. We have only to think here of the Independent Payment Advisory Board. It is a commission of 15 members appointed by the President, charged with the task of reducing Medicare spending. Then there are the reports of the IRS needing thousands upon thousands of new employees to administer socialized health-care.

What else is this but a multiplying of offices? What else is this but the creating of swarms of Officers to harass people? What else is this but insuring that the substance of free people is confiscated and redistributed in order, in part, to feed the appetite of these swarms of new officers. The confiscatory taxation to pay for this boondoggle has a large percentage of it dedicated to pay the salaries of these swarms of officers.

God warned against this eventuality in I Samuel 8. God said the result of Israel being like the Nations around them with a cherished King would be enslavement.  God was their King but now they would have a sovereign that was human and humanistic and the result would be slavery.

Thus is always the consequence of throwing off God’s Kingship for a human one. The result is always the loss of true liberty and the corresponding presence of slavery. Whether individually or corporately a person or people cannot throw off the rule of God without at the same time becoming a slave to man.

This explains why the Calvinistic heart has always burned so red hot for liberty.   The Calvinist knows that God in Christ is His liege Lord. Christ has paid for his sins and set him free from the dominion of darkness. As such He would be ruled by God in every jurisdiction from government to self to government of family, to government of Church to government in the civil realm. Precisely because the Biblical Christian understands who he is governed by the Biblical Christian has not tolerated, through the centuries, those who would rule him in ways inconsistent with the Lordship of Jesus Christ. They learned this from Calvin who said,

“We are subject to the men who rule over us, but subject only in the Lord. If they command anything against him, let us not pay the least regard to it.”

Book Four, Calvin’s Institutes

“If princes demand that we turn from honor of God, if they force us into idolatry or superstition, then they have no more authority over us than frogs and lice do.”
Sermons Acts

John Calvin“For earthly princes lay aside their power when they rise up against God, and are unworthy to be reckoned among the number of mankind. We ought, rather, to spit upon their heads than to obey them.”

― John Calvin, Daniel, Vols 1-2

For the Biblical Christian — for the Calvinist this is a matter of the first commandment. Christ has paid for His sin and so the Christian is not His own but in life and death and body and soul belongs to His faithful savior Jesus Christ. As such the Biblical Christian’s fealty – loyalty is to God in Christ. and woe to anyone who would govern him in ways inconsistent with God’s expressed rule.

To paraphrase Kipling’s poetic advice of a King to his son who would one day rule,

"You can enslave your Methodist parsons, or abuse your
      Lutheran peers;
But don't try that game on the Calvinist; you'll have the whole 
     brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained 
              serf in the field,
They'll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise,
                  you  will finally yield.

This nation, in its founding, was imbued with this disposition. It is true, there was also present contrary ideological winds in our founding. There was the presence of the Enlightenment deistic influence. There certainly was a Masonic influence as well. But however imperfectly present, Biblical Calvinist Christianity influenced the formation of this nation.

One of the Authors who I quite enjoy, Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn once wrote,

“If we call the American statesmen of the late 18th century the Founding Fathers of the United States, the the Pilgrims and Puritans were the grandfathers and Calvin the great grandfather…. [T]hough the fashionable 18th century Deism may have pervaded some intellectual circles, the prevailing spirit of Americans before and after the war was essentially Calvinistic.”

But we do not have to take Leddihn’s word for this. The Historian Carlson informs us,

“When Cornwallis was driven back to ultimate retreat and surrender at Yorktown, all of the colonels of the Colonial Army but one were Presbyterian elders. It is estimated that more than one half of all the soldiers and officers of the American Army during the Revolution were Presbyterian.”

The Calvinist drive for Liberty against Tyranny was embodied by a Presbyterian minister named James Caldwell,

In the Battle of Springfield, Pastor Caldwell, who’s own Church had been burned to the ground by the British, discovered that Patriot troops were out of paper wadding for their muskets. Caldwell rushed to a nearby church, gathered up the hymnbooks, and brought them to the battle front.

As the Patriot soldiers tore through the hymnals to stuff the paper down their muskets, Caldwell noted that many of the hymns in the book were written by Isaac Watts. With that, Parson Caldwell rallied the Patriots with his now famous battle cry, “Now put Watts into them, boys!”

And on the influence of Calvinism and it’s thirst for Liberty upon this country we remember that Horace Walpole spoke from the English House of Commons to report on these “extraordinary proceedings” in the colonies of the new world. Walpole said,  “There is no good crying about the matter. Cousin America has run off with the Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.”

And these Calvinists … these Biblical Christians did not countenance political enslavement. They would not be ruled by those who would place upon them the yoke of humanist slavery. Some have suggested that the Calvinist war for Independence in the Colonies was merely a continuation of the English Civil War when there also the Puritans would not be tyrannized by King Charles.

That the Calvinists would not be enslaved is also seen by their refusal to have a Bishop named for the Colonies. This is a factor in our Independence that is seldom spoken of today. The Colonialists were dreadfully concerned that King George was going to appoint a Anglican Bishop over them. They understood that this was one more example of the Crown trying to enslave the colonies because they understood the political power wielded by Anglican Bishops for the Crown.  The Calvinists, many of whose forbears fled England in order to escape Anglicanism, were not going to have any of that.

In a political cartoon about the plot to impose an Anglican bishop over the American colonies, the patriot mobs in New England, influenced by their Calvinist Churches, throw a copy of John Calvin’s book at a bishop… The crowds shout to the Bishop, “No Lords Spiritual or Temporal in New England,” and “Liberty and Freedom of Conscience,” and “Shall they be obliged to maintain bishops who cannot maintain themselves.” John Adams later wrote that the rumor that a bishop might be appointed in the colonies was one of the first sparks that ignited the American Revolution. The Presbyterian Francis Alison stated in 1766 that ‘he did not care if the Anglicans had 50 bishops in America …. what we dread is their political power and their courts. The Presbyterians feared that this appointment would lead to religious tyranny and a loss of freedom to worship.

This aspect of the matter demonstrates how the religious and the political are always intertwined.

Christians have always believed that this kind of Tyranny they lived with then and which we are living with today is Usurpation that must be directly stood against. Because Christian have always believed this Usurper and Tyrants have always hated Christians and Christianity. Where there is a willingness to live with this kind of tyranny it is a open question how much Christianity is really influencing the people.

Well, that is where we started. Where are we today?

I’m afraid that our Calvinist and Reformed blood runs thin and anemic. No longer is there the will to resist tyrants … either in the Civil realm or in the Church. Whereas Calvinists used to live so as to bend recalcitrant Rulers to God’s revelation now many many Calvinists find themselves so far bending to tyranny as to try and defend it as “God honoring.” Or, alternately we have the effeminate Calvinist crowd who are constantly declaring that the Church has no business being concerned with what Tyrannical Magistrates do in the common realm. These current effeminate Calvinists would not be recognized by Farel, Beza, Knox, Witherspoon, and the authors of Vindication Against Tyrants, as Calvinists.

Conclusion

We live in desperate times and because of that there is reason to rejoice. The wicked create a trap for the righteous but then fall into it. A sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous. When the fall comes it is the Biblical Christian who will rebuild if he is ready.

Like my Fathers before me, I am weary with the habits of a bloated State. I believe it is time for vocalizing counter-revolutionary sentiments that we are no longer going to be content to allow the State to usurp the place of God. We will not continue to make the mistakes that the Israelites made in I Samuel 8.

We are a blood bought people. Christ has redeemed us from the rule of darkness and so with no God but God we will not be ruled by those who have set their face against Christ and His authoritative law Word.

When Marx adopted the Hegelian dialectic he stood it on its head by converting Hegel’s idealistic dialectics to a materialistic dialectics. Hegel believed that ideas were the moving forces in history. These ideas wrought change by way of the dialectical process. Marx, on the contrary held that material conditions were the moving forces in history. Hence Marx’s emphasis on Economics as Theology (Queen of the sciences). The shift that resulted is a shift from the contest of ideas to the contest over control of material things.

However Marx not only stood Hegel on his head, but he also stood the Christian faith on its head. Marx retained the historic postmillennial eschatology of Christianity and merely put it in service of the Utopian Kingdom of man. The idea of Christian conversion was kept but put into the service of delivering men from their false consciousness. The incarnation was retained but instead of a heaven sent Messiah being sent it was the socially conscious proletariat that was the incarnated Messiah sent to save mankind from the sin of the Bourgeoisie Devil. Marxism holds out a second coming as well with the promise of social revolution filling the role of a coming Messiah. As in Christianity, Communism provides a hope of redemption as man is redeemed from the bondage of Christianity replete with its sinister Capitalism, private property, familial connections and just weight and measures to the freedom of Communism with its glorious Statism, public property, sexual and gender familial perversions and redistributionist weight and measures. Marx retained eternity, but he did so by absolutizing time, and he likewise retained spirit by converting it into matter. Marxism, has it has evolved, likewise has retained the importance of justice that you find in Christianity. Only for Marxism justice is the social justice of egalitarianism where not only are all men economically the same but all men are to be socially, sexually, psychologically and ethnically the same. Marx was the “John the Baptist” of anti-religion religion of Communism, spending his life in the wilderness heralding the imminent coming of the social revolution.

Like Christianity, Marx was interested in resolving the alienation that is characteristic of fallen men. Only for Marx the alienation that man suffered was because man had absorbed the rudiments of a Christian world view. The ultimate aim of Marx’s social revolution was to end the alienation of man from himself and his true nature. Marx believed that man was alienated from himself, first by religion (read Christianity), which subjected him to mediating powers. Further man is alienated from himself by private property due to the fact that private property sets him at odds with others and so alienates him from his social nature. The alienation begins to pile up for Marx as man is alienated by the State which was a instrument of class rule and man is alienated from the product of his labor by the theft of the Capitalist. Notice in all this Marx appeals to the creation of the Commune that the individual might be set free of the alienation that results from the sin of not being rightly related to the social order. For Marx, The abolition of Christianity, and the culture it creates is the end of man’s alienation. Christianity, likewise speaks of alienation but the alienation that it speaks of begins with fallen man’s alienation from God, and Christianity likewise insists that only a conversion can set men free from their alienation, but the conversion Christianity insists upon will eventually result in the very things (free markets, private property, particular normative extended families, States that rule according to God’s standards of justice, etc.) that Marx insists is the embodiment of alienation.

Marx is just Christianity turned inside out. It is the perfect humanist religion because it so well apes Christianity. What is saddening is that currently so many in the Church today are defining Christianity with Marxist type thinking. To be sure, nobody in the Church uses the words “Marxism,” “Cultural Marxism,” “Socialism,” etc. but the policies that the Church pursues (normalizing Homosexuality, supporting Statism whether through Global warming or redistribution of wealth schemes, participating in the guilt complex brought forth by assorted race pimps, etc.) indicates that the Church is calling Karl Marx, “Jesus Christ.”

Redistribution vs. Wealth Creation

The “Occupy America” groupies seem to believe that there is a set amount of wealth and since that set amount of wealth can neither be increased or decreased it is their conviction that those who are top heavy in this set amount of wealth should be forced, by the god State, to have their wealth redistributed so that those who do not have as much wealth can have more wealth.

Their are several problems with this but let us first note that when the State, as god, controls either directly or indirectly the means of production or the wealth generated by the means of production what one is speaking of also is the god State being given sanction to control the human mind. This is so because the human mind is that which took abstract ideas and translated those ideas into wealth creation. If the created wealth is not to be enjoyed by the mind that created the wealth but instead that wealth is to be seized then what is being advocated for here is not only the control of wealth distribution by the god State but also the control of the human mind that had the capacity to go from idea, to production to wealth.

Secondly, the emphasis on Redistribution over wealth creation destroys a nations citizenry by cutting the nerve that joins labor to prosperity. If, by the god State’s agency, a morality is inculcated into the citizenry which teaches that those who labor and those who do not labor receive the same wealth benefits then what is incentivized is sloth. If the indigent are subsidized by the god State and if the productive are punished by confiscatory taxation then the consequence will be creation of a citizenry that learns the Aesop tale of the Grasshopper and the Ant is a myth. “Occupy America,” is creating a social order where equality of prosperity through redistribution of wealth means the equality of the ghetto.

Again, we would note here that the very thing that “Occupy America” is demanding (redistribution of wealth) is the very thing that will ensure that they remain penniless, miserable, and discontent. Redistribution of wealth always ends up with economic equality, to be sure, but it is the equality of the miserable. Success for “Occupy America” will not be the lifting of the protesters to grand economic heights but will instead mean the descent of the wealth creators to miserable existence of the protesters.

This bring us naturally enough to our next contrast.

Property as Public vs. Property as Private

If the god State is empowered to redistribute wealth the clear implication is that all property is public and no property is private. What “Occupy America” is advocating is the abolition of private property in favor of all property being public. When “Occupy America” demands the government to take private property in order to spread the wealth what they are advocating is the end of private ownership. Thanks to generations of this kind of thing, our once strong private property rights have been abolished through regulatory oppression, bureaucratic tyranny and unbiblical types of taxation and the consequence is the creation of a social order that represents the Hive, the Borg, and the machine, where all exist for the good of the Queen Bee, or for the favor of the those who see themselves as owning the Machinery.

A Liberated America would return to a emphasis on private property and individual achievement. A Liberated America understands that the security that is sought to be guaranteed by making all property public only guarantees both a loss of personal liberty and the personal security that the belief of collective ownership was thought to assure.

Environment as Sin vs. Man as Sinner

“Occupy America” believes that the reason the some people are “have-nots” while other people are “haves” is because of the evil social order environment that locked people in their place. The belief here is that man is impoverished because of the evil cultural institutional environment that has oppressed men. The solution for “Occupy America” is to dismantle the cultural environment and the social order structures that have turned so many people into poor, and oppressed outcasts. For these protesters we find scattered throughout America the evil is located in what they call the Capitalist environment. This can only be fixed by deconstructing what they are calling Capitalism. Only by doing so, can man be free to reach his true potential.

Liberated Americans realize that if the cultural or social order Environment supports sin and reinforces sinful behavior, it is only because it is first the case that men are sinners. Liberated Americans realize that environment does not create sinners so much as it is a reflection of the culture that sinners construct.

The upshot of this is that “Occupied America” types believe that a Utopia can be reached by reconstructing man by reconstructing his sinful environment and so they demand the “New Soviet Man,” or “The New Humanist Man,” through the building of a New World Order that will so adjust future generations that those future generations will be as perfect as the environment that “Occupy America” types intend to build.

Pursuit of Anarchy vs. Pursuit of Liberty

Our last contrast between “Occupied America” and “Liberated America” is the fact that “Occupied America” crowd believes that Liberty will only be assured by anarchy. The irony in this is that if they are successful to this end the result will be Tyranny since a anarchistic social order is not possible and will always eventually result in a strong man to bring order from chaos.

Actually, as much as people hate hearing this, the only possible way to achieve Liberty is to understand that true Liberty has boundaries and constraints. Further, genuine Liberty can only thrive among a people who share a common worldview since without a shared worldview what results is each man doing what is right in their own eyes. This explains why a Libertarian political stance can only work in a social order context where a shared worldview provides the foundation for a Libertarian ethic. Finally, as it is the case that only men freed from their sins by the payment of Jesus Christ for sins on the Cross, therefore only Christians can build cultures that are characterized by Liberty. All cultures that are not Christian are by definition Occupied cultures. Because “Occupy America” descends from a non-Christian world and life view all that will result from any success they have will be only more bondage then we already have.

This final point explain why, ultimately, the problems we have in our political or economic systems will not be resolved through alterations in our social order. Men enslaved to their sins will always build political and economic systems that reflect their bondage to their sin. Liberty, then, will only be procured by men learning that the only way they can be free of their bondage is by learning Christ. Men who have learned Christ will then incarnate that learning into the free social orders that they construct.

I am adamantly opposed to “Occupy America” because I am convinced that if they are successful the consequence will a even deeper bondage then we currently are living with right now. However, for all the opposition and revile that I have for “Occupy America” I realize that the Liberty they desire will not be had through political or economic systems but only through men and women bowing the knee to a non-Marxist Christ.

For several weeks now a astro-turf movement, called “Occupy Wall-Street” has occupied public parks in different cities throughout America (and now the world) and has protested against Corporate greed while appealing to the state to police and regulate greedy corporations. Such an appeal is akin to demanding a ex-lax suppository in order to cure diarrhea.

In this article I want to take just a little space comparing and contrasting the vision of Occupy America vs. the vision of a Liberated America. Remember the assumption behind a Occupational force is that there is a previous evil regime that is being overthrown. If America needs to be “Occupied” one can only wonder what is the evil regime that needs to be overthrown. This brings us to our first contrast.

Capitalism vs. Corporatism

Most of the protesters at these rallies are brain dead in terms of economic theory. A cursory review of the you-tube videos quickly reveals that. However, if there is one utterance that falls across their uneducated lips it is the thought that they are against evil Capitalism and are for sainted Socialism. The Occupiers however don’t realize that the problem that we are having now is not too much Capitalism and too little Socialism but rather that we have too little Capitalism and too much Corporatism (i.e. — Fascism, Socialism, Statism, etc.). The occupiers have rightly seen that there is to much economic disparity in our country but the solution that they are pursuing guarantees that such disparity will be institutionalized as Corporatism gives a system of a thin layer of wealthy elites combined with dense numbers who comprise the oi polloi.

The “Occupy” protesters are too economically illiterate to realize that what they are demanding is a license for those same mega-corporations that they are protesting to continue ignore the market realities that find customers disciplining those corporations by taking their business elsewhere because the mega-corporation did not respond to customer desires and so instead, to avoid bankruptcy they bribed Washington DC to provide the very bailouts about which the protesters are so incensed. The mega-corporations did not minimize their costs, did not make a profit, did not respond to the demands of the market and so in order to stay afloat they turned to their cronies in DC and received bailouts, stimulus, and pork. If instead, the principles of Capitalism had been followed — those very principles that the “Occupy” economic dullards are protesting — those mega-corporations that the protesters insist they hate so much would have been allowed to crumble and fall, thus allowing shrewder Capitalists to purchase the assets of those failed companies and to proceed to provide a better product to the customers. Genuine Capitalism would have let the Big 3 Auto industry fail, they would have let Goldman-Sachs and the New York money interest fail, they would have let the Federal Reserve fail because genuine Capitalism does not believe in private gains and taxpayer losses. If the “Occupy America” crowd had a lick of economic sophistication they would be protesting Fascism, Corporatism, Statism, and they would be doing so both at Wall Street and on Capital Hill in DC. Instead what we get are a bunch of economic heroin addicts who are demanding more heroin in order to cure their heroin addiction.

Rule of Law vs. Rule of Men

Once upon a time there existed a quaint notion that law was objective to all men and that all men, both ruled and ruler, were to be governed by that rule of law. That this was so is seen in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights of 1780 which has as its goal the establishment of a “government of laws and not of men.” Further, the English jurist Sir William Blackstone could write in 1765 that “law is not a transient order from a superior to or concerning a particular person or thing, but something permanent, uniform, and universal.” To the contrary current definitions of law are seen as being merely a social construct. Laws are subjective and their only reality is the reality that force can give to the law as it serves the whim of whoever is controlling the levers of power.

“Occupy America” does not believe in the rule of law unless one believes in their motto that “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” The “Occupy America” has no concept or respect for a transcendent law that speaks of private ownership, they have no concept or respect for a transcendent law that speaks of valid contracts that set fixed limits between what is yours and what is mine, and they have no concept or respect for a transcendent law that establishes connections between labor and success. Instead what they are advocating for is a arbitrariness in the nature of law that allows them the expedience of legally stealing.

Liberated Americans understand that without objective law what eventually descends is Mao’s “power comes from the end of a barrel,” reality. Without the acknowledgment of objective law we return to a world that is red in truth and claw and where the shadows of madame guillotine and Sir Gulag begin to be cast over the landscape. Without a objective law what results is a nation of citizens who are the slaves of the Government since the State is that institution that is control of the capricious and arbitrary law.

This brings us naturally to the next distinction between Liberate America and Occupy America.

Extra-mundane Personal God vs. State as God

Occupy America by insisting on a law that is a social construct by necessity requires someone or something to be the social constructor. If law is not objective and does not descend from a God who rules over men then law must descend from the State as the social constructor. The result is that modern man lives and moves and has his being in the state, or as Mussolini put it, “all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

To see that “Occupy America” views the State as God one only has to understand that it is the State to which they are demanding to arbitrarily recreate the social order that they desire. There is nothing in the appeals of “Occupy America” except the appeal of using the State as a instrument of blunt force to create a more fair world.

“Occupy America,” by locking out the God of the Bible has insured that man will be ruled by the fickle, capricious State god.