Category: Culture

We have affirmed constantly that cult drives culture. However, it seems that there are those who are taking that affirmation a bridge to far by suggesting that the Christian church as cult is responsible for our woeful culture. Actually, that is only marginally true.

In this reasoning there is a failure to understand that cult drives the culture even when the cult driving the culture is not the Christian cult. Today, in our culture the cult that is driving it is not so much the Christian church as it is the Humanist Church we find especially located in the Government schools. The Government schools are the cult that is driving our culture. Now, inasmuch as the Christian church doesn’t stand up and resist that humanist cult it is responsible for the the pagan cult and culture. And the Christian Church is responsible for our post-Christian culture in the sense that it is taking its clues for Worship from the Humanist cult and its culture. However, the Christian cult (The church)is not responsible in the sense that it is the originating cult for the culture that we currently swim in.

Cult and culture go together and when the Church is not being the Church in a culture then we must look for the animating cult elsewhere.

At about the 1:30 portion of this video-tape you will find a responsive reading begun. Soon thereafter you will hear the congregation repeating regularly,

“Deliver us Obama … Hear our prayer Obama

How many of these types of video-tapes need to show up before we realize that there are large numbers of people who see Obama as the Great Leader?

“It was not too many years ago that when a man misbehaved badly his neighbors and co-workers were able to discern it and exert pressure for reform. It did not always work, but it kept many of us better than we might have been. This sort of social pressure is far removed from the police state. It is, rather, the only alternative to a police state.”

Dr. Clyde Wilson
From Union to Empire — pg. 235-236

This quote hit me right between the eyes as I was reading it. You see recently one of my family members was privy to a highly placed community member hitting (I would almost say “beating”) his wife. The witnessing of it was quite accidental and completely unintentional. My family member came to me asking what do to. I was speechless. I didn’t have an answer. In Wilson’s terms I did discern it but I had and have no ability to exert pressure for reform. Having spoken to this person before about a different touchy matter, I’m confident that if I spoke to the person in question again I would be blown off just as I was on the previous matter.

I hurt for the wife. No woman should be subjected to that kind of abuse.

“(In regards to AIDS) the priorities of the public health establishment, who after all are bureaucrats as well as ‘scientists,’ would appear to be (1) to protect the ‘community’ of deviants from public outrage and discrimination; (2) to pursue heroic curative and preventive measures to save the deviant ‘community’; and (3) to protect the decent public, insofar as it does not conflict with Priority 1….

We are all sinners and fall short of perfection, and we are enjoined to stand ready to extend our hand to our repentant fellow creatures. But I do not detect very much repentance, as opposed to regret and resentment, among the representatives of the ‘lifestyle’ that has put us all in danger. In fact in heeding the admonition not to stigmatize (this ‘lifestyle’), we are all actually throwing up obstacles to repentance.”

Dr. Clyde Wilson
From Union To Empire — pp. 234-235

1.) The disease of AIDS and the ‘lifestyle’ that is associated with it has become a politically protected disease and ‘lifestyle.’ This in turn has made it a culturally protected disease and ‘lifestyle.’ Culturally, it is considered bad form to stigmatize perverted behavior. Indeed, one who does attempt to put a stigma upon perversion is more often than not the person who becomes stigmatized by our culture.

2.) The pursuit of the legitimacy for homosexual marriage is really just a cover for the pursuit of the legitimacy of all homosexuality. Homosexuals aren’t really interested in marriage. The whole idea of monogamy is completely counter intuitive to the desire for the complete removal of all sexual norms that so many in the pervert community desire. What Homosexual marriage achieves is the not the normalizing of monogamous homosexuality but rather the normalizing of homosexuality in all its expressions. When homosexuals get the right to marriage then just as unfaithfulness is no big deal for heterosexual marriages so unfaithfulness will be no big deal for homosexual marriages. Homosexuality, in all of its multifaceted expression of perversion will be normalized with the institutionalizing of homosexual marriage.

3.) The necessity to decry the perversion that is homosexuality does not come from a sense of inherent righteousness or superiority from those who decry it but rather from a realization that certain taboos in cultures must be maintained lest individuals in the culture be exposed to things that would not otherwise be exposed to were the taboos to remain strong. Since Wilson is correct in noting that, “we are all sinners,” it must be the case that if public standards of decency are to obtain then it must be sinners, seeking to uphold the standards of Scripture, who are the ones who raise the banner of decency in the face of those who would redefine decency.

4.) We must hold out Christ as the only hope for those who have been wounded by perversion. Christ came to rescue all types of sinners from all types of sin and we must be forward not only in proclaiming God’s hatred of perversion but also His willingness to forgive who sue for peace.

5.) We do perverts no favors by trying to making peace between their perversion and the Christian faith. In many quarters of the Church today there is a mad rush to prove how acceptable the Church can be towards unrepentant perverts. We accept the sinners at the cost of rejecting the Savior. It used to be the case that we would only accept changed sinners but now it is the case that we will only accept a changed Savior. Jesus must change to get over His previous hang up against unrepentant perverts, and if He won’t … well, we can always find a different chap, who is more amenable to these perversions, to hang the “Jesus” name tag on. The new chap wearing the “Jesus” name tag will have the good sense to accept perverts and reject those who reject perverts.

“In fact official American belief regards the Declaration of Independence as the beginning of an endless process of active movement toward an ever more egalitarian and universalist society. This is because of the intervention between us and the Founding Fathers of that sea-change in the thinking of men that is summed up in the term ‘the French Revolution.”

Dr. Clyde N. Wilson
From Union To Empire

Wilson’s thesis is that American Nationalism has undergone a series of transmutations, the degree of which, has left the successive American Nationalism incomprehensible to the previous American Nationalism. Wilson suggests that the taking of the Declaration of Independence as a document that insures a endless process of active movement toward an ever more egalitarian and universalist society, is the consequence of the second American Nationalism, as crafted by the French Revolution and birthed in America through the war of Northern Aggression. Wilson seems to suggest that the American commitment to the idea that all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights was a far different stripe from the French Revolution egalitarianism that came to be eventually accepted in the American Nationalism that was successive to the form of Nationalism of the Founding Fathers. It would seem that the difference between these two competing notions of equality is the difference between the older belief that men are equal in respect to the application of law and the newer belief that men should be equal in opportunity and outcome.

Wilson goes on to note that there was another American Nationalism that was propelled during the Progressive era and consolidated during the after WW II.

“During and after WWII American society for the third time made a perilous leap into the cauldron of history, boiling down its existing consensus in the optimistic prospect of molding itself into a newer and more daring form. The Civil Rights revolution and a revolutionary alteration of the immigration laws were simultaneously undertaken in the 1960’s. It was as if the Melting pot, having proven itself able to boil down all of Europe, was now to test its capacity to do the same for the whole world.”

The question that Wilson raises is whether or not such a stripped down American Nationalism that is posited only upon unitarian notions of egalitarianism provides enough ingredients in order to make a cultural glue by which a culture may find cohesion.

In a culture where there exist no communitarian mystic chords of memory that includes either a shared ethnicity, a shared literature, a shared music, a shared religion, a shared history, or a shared language there exists nothing that can bind a people together except a shared prosperity. The question that begs being asked is whether or not a nation can stay together when national prosperity turns to national adversity except by brute force as used by the State.