Category: Culture

According to the America mythology a cruel people once enslaved a noble race of men. Over time this noble but mistreated race of men persevered and by herculean effort, despite incredible opposition and against all odds this noble race reclaimed their nobility. Inch by inch this distinguished sable race of men advanced against all the evil machinations that a cruel majority race could contrive. Eventually, one of the noble race reached the pinnacle of achievement by being nominated to be President of these United States. A member of the noble race would be the standard bearer for the socialist party.

So on one hand we are all proud that a Black man could actually be elected as President. We are proud because it putatively shows how far we have come inasmuch as a man from a noble people — a people who did not have any rights and were subjugated by a cruel barbaric people — is now on the cusp of being elected to President. We are proud because this ennobles all of us. It ennobles the barbaric race because they have grown past their barbarity towards the noble race of men they once enslaved. It ennobles the already noble race even more because it reveals how great they really are to have come so far.

And yet on the other hand this very man, who has had projected upon him the role of poster child for of how far America has come, treats a different constituency in this country far worse then his people were ever treated. This Black man from this noble race denies life and liberty to the unborn. When Obama was an Illinois state legislature in 2002, he voted against the Induced Birth Infant Liability Act. The bill was designed to extend the same medical care to babies who happen to survive an abortion attempt as is enjoyed by all babies born alive under duress. In other words Obama’s vote was a vote in favor of leaving babies who had survived abortion gasping for life, squiggling and crying in pain. Obama’s vote was a vote to legally forbid medical treatment to those babies. More then that it was a bill requiring that medical treatment not be given. When a similar bill came before the US Senate not even NARAL, the pro-abortion organization, was in favor of it.

Come on people… this barbarity makes the treatments of slaves in earlier US history look like floods of mercy. This support for hacking, burning, and torturing the unborn and then voting to leave them in their agony if born alive completely overturns the whole myth about a noble race. A noble race which has overcome oppression doesn’t act this way towards a different people contending for their own liberty.

Is this the way a man acts who comes from a people who have themselves overcome tyranny and oppression? Is this the way a man acts who is supposed to be the living embodiment of how far we’ve come as a nation? Is it progress to elect a man from an oppressed people who oppresses another people — the unborn — in ways far more severe then his people were ever oppressed?

Yes indeed… Look how far we’ve come.

Barack Obama’s campaign theme has been “Change.” This sing-song of change has already mesmerized large portions of the electorate. If you read people write about Obama or if you listen to people interviewed you begin to notice there is real belief on their part in the idea of change for the sake of change. They don’t ask what Obama’s change is from and to. They don’t ask just exactly what change Obama has in mind. They don’t care if the change that is being proposed is realistic or possible. They only want change.

Most Americans, not being able to remember the last episode of their favorite television sitcom, don’t remember that this is not the first time that change has been a campaign theme. Jimmy Carter, in 1976 ran a campaign theme of change. America had just been through Watergate and Vietnam and Carter, a political neophyte, ran as an someone outside the beltway who could bring real change to Washington D.C. Again in 1992 Clinton & Gore ran on a change campaign promising to bring generational change to Washington D. C. Even as far back as 1952 in the Eisenhower campaign the idea of “change” was prevalent.

Now some of this is natural and inevitable. One way to move the party out of power into power is by accentuating the differences and calling for change. The problem though, is that in recent campaigns you don’t really get an explanation of the differences on a policy by policy basis but rather instead what one gets is an appeal to change that is based on change for changes sake. Since 1976 the appeal of change has been been on a more visceral, emotive and personal level. Change is now more about somebody’s charisma then it is about the policies by which they would govern.

This kind of change — a change for change sake — is the kind of change that one would expect of a people who are governed by an existentialist World and life view. For the existentialist the central motif is the idea of becoming or of always being in process. An existentialist world and life view thus automatically recoils against continuity and the status quo since existentialism is itself about always changing, always becoming, always remaking ones-self. Is it the case that Obama, with his campaign theme of “change” has tapped into the mother vein of American self-consciousness? Has he become the existenialist candidate for a existentialist people.

This cry for change is also reminiscent because in it we may hear echoes of pagan religion where the pursuit of chaos was seen as the means of social regeneration. This was a theme that R. J. Rushdoony mentioned frequently in his writings. An embrace of change merely for the sake of change as that is pursued by a functionally existentialist people communicates the irrational belief that order and social regeneration can arrive by the means of chaos. What else can a support for change merely for the sake of change be but a pursuit of the chaotic?

Also when we consider that to support change merely for the sake of change, with no ability to rationally articulate whey change is being supported is a prime example of existentialism where an irrational faith in irrational faith is all the reason one needs to have in order to believe in anything. If the American electorate, or any large portion of it, is going to vote for Obama merely on the “gut instinct” that the change he represents would be “good” then we must conclude that that portion of the electorate are functional existentialists.

Now, this is not to argue that change is always bad. A hard bitten allegiance to the status quo and to old paths represents its own set of unique problems. Change has its place, but there is a difference between notions of Biblical change and notions of pagan change. I see very little in the messianic attraction to Obama’s call for “change” that is representative of Biblical notions of “change.” What I see instead is a existentialist people prepared to vote for a existentialist candidate for existentialist reasons.

In what is already old news last week in Michigan two Muslim women at Barack Obama’s rally were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women’s head scarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate.

We already know how all of political theater manages the ‘news.’ Images are arranged to communicate a particular spin. Language is chosen to leave just the right impression. The point that I want to develop here is that given how all of what we see and hear is micro-managed in order to produce a particular (I almost and perhaps should have said “theatrical) effect it should not be any surprised that people believe in conspiracy theories nor is there any reason not to believe in conspiracy theories.

Look, when you are forced to ask how it is that the handlers are trying to manipulate you in everything you see and hear in the media a person would be a fool to not believe that there always exists a real reality behind the psuedo reality that is being produced and manufactured on stage. If John Q. Public is cynical about what he is told its only because John Q. Media and John Q. Public Official has worked in such a way to make him so. After Lyndon “Gulf of Tonkin” Johnson, after Richard “I’m not a crook” Nixon, after Gerald “I didn’t promise Nixon a pardon in order to be president” Ford, after Ronald “You mean we were trading arms for hostages” Reagan, after Bill “I never had sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky” Clinton and after George “You mean there weren’t weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” Bush we would be fools to not believe in conspiracy theories. We would be fools to not believe that things are other then what we see and what we are told. Barack Obama’s manufacturing and creating an alternate reality by manipulating the photo op image is just one small example why a wise person is always looking for the conspiracy.

So, no more lectures from the elites on the weakness of the American character for readily believing conspiracy theories. When people begin giving us the unvarnished truth I suppose people will quit looking for “the real truth.” If we are going to continued to be lied to then we should have the privilege of trying to discern the real reason why we are being told what we are being told.

For those who desire to see a film representation of what I am talking about I encourage you to go rent “Wag the Dog.” Certainly, it is fictitious and it is exaggerated but if anybody doubts the existence of the spinning and the spin-masters (i.e. — lying and liars) in Washington and in all Media that is represented in that movie you really need to lose your virginity on this issue. We are lied to, and we are spun so often by the chattering class and by everybody in the game one would have to believe in conspiracy theories in order to believe we were being told the truth.

Still, we must not get hung up on or consumed by conspiracy theories for in the end God is sovereign and His truth will win out. Men can spin all they want but they will never be able to spin God and they will never be able to frustrate the truth He desires advanced. So, in the end we believe in conspiracies because we have good evidence that we are being manipulated but we don’t act as if God is being frustrated by the spin or the manipulation behind the conspiracy. We must remember that God is in heaven holding the spinners and conspirators in derision and is laughing at them (Psalm 2).

“Instead of imagining that Christ against culture and Christ transforming culture are two mutually exclusive stances, the rich complexity of the biblical norms, worked out in the Bible’s story line, tells us that these two often operate simultaneously.”

D. A. Carson
Christ & Culture Revisited — pg. 227

I would only disagree with Carson here by insisting that Christ against culture and Christ transforming culture always operate simultaneously, for when we are against culture is it not for the purpose and with the hopes of transforming culture? And when we are attempting to transform culture is it not always precisely because we are against that aspect of culture we are seeking to transform? Perhaps others can come up with some examples but as I think this through I can think of no instances where a person operate in the Christ against culture mode wasn’t at the same time seeking to transform culture. Similarly I can think of no examples where we seek to transform culture except that we are against it at some point.

“In more popular parlance, however, all three words, — ‘secular,’ ‘secularization,’ and ‘secularism,’ — have to do with the squeezing of the religious to the periphery of life. More precisely, secularization is the process that progressively removes religion from the public arena and reduces it to the private realm; secularism is the stance that endorses and promotes such a process. Religion may be ever so important to the individual, and, few secular persons will object. But if religion makes any claims regarding policy in the public arena, it is viewed as a threat, and intolerant as well.”

D. A. Carson
Christ And Culture Revisited — pg. 116

Before getting to this quote I want to make it clear that I always find reading and listening to Carson stimulating. My posts here continue to critique him but that shouldn’t be interpreted as meaning that I disagree with him at every point. I have read Carson over the years with great profit and I have to say that among all the big guns I’ve seen and heard preach his sermon on water and life is one of the best I’ve ever heard. In this book his section “One (Epistemological) Step Further” is worth the price of the book. In this section he quickly and efficiently undresses James K. Smith and his book, “Who’s Afraid Of Postmodernism.” In this section Carson offers a way to navigate between hard modernism and hard post-modernism, and I like it because he agrees with me.

Still, after saying all that I will continue to critique Carson. First, this quote above is pretty standard fare among the Reformed intelligentsia. I have read the same type of thing over the years from Os Guiness, George Marsden, and others. It is precisely because this type of thinking seems to own the academic and intellectual field that I continue to return to the problems contained therein. Those of you who have made a habit of reading my offerings are not going to surprised by what I say next.

The idea that ‘the religious’ can be squeezed to the periphery of life is just not true if only because the secular, secularism, and the secularization process stem from religions operating incognito. Those who are pushing the ‘secular agenda’ are pursuing it from a core of religious convictions. When ‘religion’ gets pushed to the periphery it is religion under the guise of secularism that is doing the pushing. The effectiveness of secularism is found in its ability to disguise its religious orientation.

There seems to be an inability to understand that God or a god concept is an inescapable category and as such it is not possible to have a realm where there is no god ruling. This continues to be important to re-articulate since those who want hold to the idea of the secular are insisting that the project of locking out religion (which always follows in the train of the presence of a god or god concept) from the public square is achievable. It is not.

Another way to argue this is by locating the god that is left in the public square once all other religions are removed. If, by way of legislation, god, and so religion, are removed from the public square, there must, by necessity, be a mechanism in place that monitors and governs the public square in order to make sure that it remains naked. This policing agency in our putative secularism has the responsibility to ensure that the various competing gods and their religions don’t encroach upon the public square. In a defacto sense this makes the policing agency the god of the gods. This policing agency is charged with governing the gods making sure they don’t show up in the public square. Everyone knows that the institution charged with policing the public square in order to make sure the competing gods know and keep their place is the State. The State, as God in the public square, continues to build around it a religion dedicated to the preeminence of the State as God. Hence, all of this contributes to the pursuit of a religion that dominates the public square that goes under the fatuous name of secularism. But make no mistake about it, this putative secularism is a religion, replete with all the defining characteristics of a religion. Its effectiveness as a religion is enhanced and advanced by cloaking itself as ‘secularism,’ and Christians contribute to the problem of revealing the charade when they continue to speak as if secularism is not religious complete with its own God (State), Church (Government Schools), Priests (Government School Teachers), along with every other traditional manifestation of religion. In secularism the religious is most certainly NOT at the periphery of life. Like all religions it informs everything and like all religions it is intolerant of any competitors.

It is absolutely essential that Christians begin seeing this for what it is because the failure to do so is keeping us from seeing that the option isn’t between some ascendant religion in the public square and no religion in the public square but rather the option is always between one religion or another dominating the public square.