Government Schools

Texas State Congressman James Talarico Says Something Really Stupid

“Christian Nationalists are not interested in Christian values. They are only interested in legislating Christian dominance. Christian Nationalism (CN) is putting prayer in schools and taking free lunches out. CN is teaching the bible in schools but refusing to give teachers a pay raise. CN is forcing schools to post the ten commandments while nominating a candidate for President who has violated almost all of them. It is not about Jesus. It is about power.”

James Talarico
Texas State Congressman

1.) If Christian Nationalists are not interested in Christian values then they are not, by definition, Christian Nationalists.

2.) What could possibly be wrong with legislating Christian dominance? Is it only Christianity when one legislates the dominance of other non Christian religions?

3.) I am a Christian Nationalist. I am not interested in putting prayer in schools but I am interested in taking “free” lunches out. In point of fact, what I am really interested in is legislating a dominance that results in closing down completely government schools.

4.) There is no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody, somewhere is paying for that lunch.

5.) I am a Christian Nationalist. As a Christian Nationalist I am opposed to the humanist hacks they call “teachers” to teach the Bible in government schools. Can you imagine how badly they would do so? I am also opposed to giving teachers a school raise. In point of fact, in my Christian Nationalist world all government school teachers would be out of work since all government schools would be shut down. I would shut down government school since, as a Christian Nationalist, wanting dominance, I do not want humanists being dominant over children as seen in their teaching the children that humanism should be dominant in their thinking.

6.) If schools are shut down then the idea of posting the ten commandments is now big deal. However, if government schools are not shut down, why shouldn’t the ten commandments be posted since the refusal to post them demonstrates the States desire to have its religion be dominant.

7.) This chap was adamantly opposed to posting the 10 commandments in Texas schools and he contributed to killing the bill in Texas.

8.) In desiring to post the ten commandments while nominating Trump who has violated all of them, Christians are involved in contradiction for sure. However, all because someone supports something wrong (nominating Trump) doesn’t mean it is wrong for them to support a good thing (posting the ten commandments.) It merely means they are inconsistent. Talarico’s inconsistencies are all over this stupid quote. Does that mean everything the man does is wrong?

9.) What ever could be possibly wrong with wielding power? So what if it is about power? When one embraces Christ are they at that point no longer to have authority or power? Should they not have the power of Fathers or Husbands? Should they not have the power of employer or politician?

10.) Why is it that the idea of embracing Jesus automatically means the idea of giving up power? I don’t doubt that for some Jesus is used as a mask to grab power but that doesn’t mean that automatically Christianity and power are incompatible.

On Mastering One’s Fears

“I have a friend in Hollywood. He is an actor. He is a well known actor. He has work. He strongly supports President Trump. He’s a real patriot. He just asked me to be sure that I don’t tell anybody (that he supports Trump) because of the system.”

Roger Stone
Interview with Robert Davi

I am running this quote not in connection with the political aspect but rather with the reality of the fear that people have in connection with their putative convictions. I say, “putative” because how much of a conviction can someone hold who is ashamed of that conviction, or fearful of what would happen to them should their conviction be known?

I have had, as a minister, on more than one occasion have had people speak to me the same kind of idea that Roger Stone had spoken to him by his Hollywood actor friend. More than once I’ve had people say something like, “I agree with you but I can’t be associated with you because it would put my career in danger”, or “I would lose my friends,” or “my family wouldn’t understand,” or “agreeing with you publicly would make it hard on my children.” Another version of this is, “I agree with you but you make the issue at hand far more important than it really is.” Usually, such statements circle around Theonomy, or Kinism, or my views on Government schooling.

I can be very bi-polar about my response to this. On one hand I understand the necessity sometimes to play one’s cards close to the breast. There are times when one keeps the false flag flying and doesn’t raise the Jolly Roger to let everyone know you’re a pirate. I, myself, have, in the past, played the “clever to protect myself” game. I genuinely understand the more than a few ministers who correspond to me telling me that they agree with my Kinism but they dare not let Kinism come from the pulpit or in their online writings — and that even though they agree it is a Biblical doctrine. The price to be paid by especially clergy is a high price to be paid. It means very possibly the end of their career, the inability to provide for their family, and the hatred of countless numbers of dumb people (i.e. — the Normies).

So, I understand the sentiment captured in the opening quote. And I get people’s fears. I myself live with those fears daily.

But at some point it is my conviction that people have to rise above these natural fears because until people in the shadows come out and nail their flags to the mast, the depredations of our egalitarian culture, our lawlessness, and our thinking destroying habits is going to destroy us, first as a visible church, and then as a people. If we will not stand up in favor of Kinism, in opposition to government schooling, and in opposition to the prevalent opposition to God’s law then we will disappear as a people and our children and grandchildren will be the victims of what too often is nothing but cowardice dressed up in the evening clothes of personal pragmatism and an egocentric self protection.

Jesus spoke about the necessity of taking up the cross, and denying one’s self. The writer to the Hebrews reminds his recipients not to give up on Christianity because of the difficulties they were facing by embracing Christianity, reminding them, “you have not yet resisted unto the point of blood.” Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progess” is all about the theme of the winning through the difficulties of following Christ. It was not about the theme of avoiding the difficulties of following Christ.

I can hear now the potential protests. “But those issues and those types of issues are not really hills to die on. They are not the issues upon which Christianity pivots.” It’s hard to believe that someone would argue this way given how government schools are brainwashing our children against Christianity, and given how our culture (and Church) is manifestly doing everything it can to evade championing God’s law, and given the egalitarianism that has now gone so far as to seek to normalize the most aberrant of behaviors. This egalitarianism did not start with the transgenderism that we are embracing as a culture now but started far further up on what turned out to be the slippery slope of all slippery slopes.

And yet people are frightened. So frightened that even some of them don’t want to it to be publicly known that they embrace what Trump symbolically stands for. (Admission … I like Trump as a symbol, but I do not think the man matches the symbol and so will not be voting for Trump.) However, fear, is no reason to not play the man and come forward consistent with one’s “secret convictions.”

Here I am in the middle. Being frightened myself I get that people are scared. However, the whole idea of courage is the ability to stand even in spite of legitimate fears.

I hope, that in the near future, Roger Stone’s Hollywood friend can have enough courage to come out of the closet and let it be known he is done being ashamed of his convictions, and that regardless of the cost.

R. Scott Clark’s Opining on Christian Nationalism Rejected — Part II

Just as Machen, though sick with pneumonia was bound and determined to keep his word to travel to South Dakota to preach and support a new Presbyterian work there, so I have lifted myself up out of my post-operative open heart surgery rest and recovery regimen in order to answer the absolute inanities of R. Scott Clark and Keven DeYoung on the subject of Christian Nationalism. Aren’t you impressed?

There is nothing quite so as stirring and enlivening to one’s spirit and health has to have the opportunity to lance, like so many piece of vegetable and beef on a shish-kabob, the non-Christian musings of the highly functioning lobotomized clergy class.

R. Scott Clark notes the desire of DeYoung to have “some form of Christian Nationalism,” and then as the cheek to say that no one has ever answered his previous queries as to what it means to modify “nationalism” with “Christian.” Clark, ever the intellectual autistic that he is, insists that no one has ever given him a coherent response as to what it means to speak of “Christian” plumbing or “Christian” math. All I can say here is that if he has seen no coherent response to this it is because he is looking with his eyes shut. Here is my response to that question a couple years ago. It is not the first time I have answered this question for he who runs “The Heidelfog.”

Not Getting R. Scott Clark’s Inability to Get The Obvious

Also, if R. Scott Clark would read my book he would see that I provide an answer for him again in that book in the chapter titled, “Transformation of Culture.” So, either R. Scott Clark is lying when he says he has seen no coherent response to his queries about how math, softball, or nations can be Christian or else his worldview won’t allow him to see an answer that everyone else can easily see.

Clark then insists that he is not a defeatist. All I can do is offer that such a statement is a real knee-slapper. Everything that Clark contends for in terms of his R2K social order project guarantees that Christianity will return to the catacombs. As I argue in my book in the chapter “Militant Amillennialism” R2K’s eschatology requires defeat. Quoting from my book, I note,

“The R2K eschatology is what I call a militant amillennialism. The Amillennial eschatology does not allow for the victory of the Gospel and Biblical Christianity in space and time. In Amillennial eschatology the return of Christ is a return characterized by a church that is under assault and is greatly diminished in the world. Christ returns to rescue the Church much like the US Cavalry rides in to save an almost depleted Fort Custer as surrounded by the Indians ready to make their final push to take the Fort. The R2K Amillennialists really believe this and so it is baked into their eschatology. Because they do not believe that victory is possible they have developed a theology under the tutelage of men like David Van Drunen, R. Scott Clark, Mike Horton, D. G. Hart, and others that by definition does not allow for victory. By creating a common square that, by definition, can not ever be anything but common the R2K Amillennialist has created a self-fulfilled eschatology. Since by definition the public square cannot be anything but common the public square cannot see the triumph of Christ in space and time in the public square. The is militant Amillennialism.”

Clark next insists that all he is arguing for is a return to the American project which means the restoration of secular government while pursuing a desire to re-frame the classical Reformed distinction between nature and grace.

We would note here that when Clark tells us that he desires to return to the American project what he is telling us is that he desire to return to the vision of the Enlightenment crowd numbered among the founding fathers. This is a vision that affirms neutrality as seen in the insistence that the State (as well as the national institutions) remains neutral when it comes to the issue of religion. Clark continues to not understand, and no power short of conversion can make him understand, that neutrality is a myth. Jesus Himself said that “he does not gather with me scatters.” Jesus Himself said that, “he who is not with me is against me.” Jesus Himself said, “You cannot serve two Masters.” Clark desires to serve Jesus as Master while having a neutral state that does not serve Jesus as Master. This is not only not Christianity that Clark is pushing this is anti-Christianity. Let it be said clearly that there is no such thing as a secular State/Government if by secular you mean a State/Government that is ruling apart from a standpoint of religion and ruling apart from some god or god concept. Clark’s idea of secular is the idea that Roger Williams (He of Anabaptist fame) instantiated in Rhode Island. R. Scott Clark as more in common with Roger Williams than he does John Calvin.

Clark next invokes the sainted Abraham Kuyper. Clark would be better served reading Philippus Jacobus Hoedemaker’s critiques of Kuyper on this score. After Clark is finished reading Hoedemaker he can then buy a copy of Wm. T. Cavanaugh’s, “The Myth of Religious Violence.” From that work he can learn that all his chicken little screaming about violence from Christian magistrates is just so much hooey.

Clark then offers a real eye-popper when he writes;

“As a historian, I am endlessly puzzled by the desire, expressed by Wolfe and others, for a return to a state-church. What do they imagine the outcome will be? They claim that they will get it right this time, though virtually all other attempts before them have failed. This reminds me very much of the Marxist claim that we should give that another run because the right people have not tried it yet.”

I too am a historian, though I never earned a terminal degree in the field. (If Clark is an example of a Historian with a terminal degree I thank God I never went on to get the terminal degree.) History was one of my under-grad degrees. I took all the historiography courses. I examined the different schools of history. I read the heavy hitters. So, as a historian I am endlessly puzzled by Clark’s inability to see that a state-church is an inescapable category. Our nation is covered with state-churches, supported with state-funds, manned by state-educated state-Priests. Somewhere in the vicinity of 90% of American children (ages K-12) attend these state-churches being indoctrinated thoroughly with the state religion. Yet, Clark is so jejune that he can suggest that we, in America, do not have a state-Church. It is amazing. Clark complains that too many people are like Marxists and yet the man can’t see that our state-Church pushes some one form or another of Marxism.

R. Scott Clark’s Christianity is completely novel. No Reformed person before Meredith Kline thought anything like this. As Dr. Stephen Wolfe has written regarding R2K;

“Van Drunen (Clark belongs to this school of thought), for example, resolves the ‘contradictions’ of traditional two kingdoms theology with a theological system that affirms post WW II norms of secularism, multiculturalism, and anti-nationalism. His political theology might rightly be called ‘post WW II consensus theology,’ and I suspect that historians, looking back at it, will conclude that his theology is highly historically conditioned.”

Van Drunen, D. G. Hart, R. Scott Clark, Mike Horton, Sean Michael Lucas, Matthew Tuininga, David T. Gordon, and countless others are spewing a “theology” that is perhaps 80 years old at best. It is completely novel and it is a theology that none of the Reformers or their descendants would recognize as Reformed. Yet, despite the truth of that these posers are all over the place screaming that they alone are orthodox. Jesus refused to turn stone into bread but these highly educated dunces have gladly complied.

“Christian Academia” and it’s Inability to Think Christianly

“The deterioration of the historic roots of Christian orthodoxy upon the campuses of Christian learning is straightforward. Christian academicians isolate individual concepts and methods of choice from non-Christian thinkers and adopt them into their own ‘Christian’ worldview. In contrast, the directive that needs to be followed is that every concept and method presented by a non-Christian thinker must be subjected to a holistic critical analysis within the structure of the thinker’s own system.”

William Dennison
In Defense of the Eschaton; Essays in Reformed Apologetics — pg. 78

Dennison’s point here is that before conceptual strands of thought as from non-Christians and non-Christian Weltanschauungs can be adopted by Christians and made a part of a Christian world and life view what first has to be done is that non-Christian conceptual strand of thought must be engaged, via a transcendental analysis, in order to see how that strand of conceptual thought is functioning in that non-Christian Weltanschauung. It may be the case that while the conceptual strand in and of itself is acceptable, it is functioning in a way that is not acceptable for a Christian as it exists in a Christian worldview.

In brief before adopting a conceptual strand from an alien worldview that conceptual strand must go through a surgical debridement process wherein the necrotic material from the original dysfunctional worldview wound is removed from the conceptual strand being adopted by the apologist who is doing the surgery. The conceptual strand must be cleansed of its former association before it can be grafted on to the healthy tissue of Biblical Christianity.

Dennison uses Plato’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul as an example. All Christians believe in the immortality of the soul but the Christian can not take Plato’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul en toto and just own it as a Christain doctrine. Only after putting Plato’s pagan doctrine of the immortality of the soul through surgical debridement can that doctrine be accepted as being fit for a Christian worldview.

Dennison is insisting (rightly so) that Christian academia is NOT doing this and is instead too often borrowing from the Egyptian’s thought world without ridding the conceptual strand of its Egyptian skubala. What Christian academia too often is doing is that it takes elements from Romanticism or Darwinism or Existentialism, or Post-modernism, or Empiricism, or Barthianism, or Rationalism, or Freudianism or Skinnerism or any number of other anti-Christ worldviews and without putting the conceptual strands through a Biblical Transcendental analysis debridement process just affix these pagan conceptual strands to a Biblical Christian World and life view with the result that their “Christian” World and life view is not at all Christian. At least not consistently so.

Ask the Pastor — What Should We Make of the Current Higher Education Scene?

Dear Pastor,

Can you elaborate on the concept that University academia is inherently flawed and anti-Christian? I have always noticed that the Christians I know that have been to University tend to be more political leaning in one way, more sympathetic to humanistic ideas, anti-death penalty, more sympathetic to homo ‘rights’ etc etc.

Obviously you can be a Christian and be extremely infected with worldly ideas…which Universities of course specialise in propagating. What would be the practical alternative in an ideal world?

Thanks in advance,

Felix

______________

Dear Felix,

Thank you for writing.

The modern University system is flawed and anti-Christian because, in the great percentages of cases, it is owned and operated by the Cultural Marxists. As such, when you attend a University you are paying top dollar to be propagandized into one form of Marxism or another. Christian parents who pay to send their children to University are shelling out 20K a year for the privilege of having their children indoctrinated against Christianity. Christian Universities and Colleges are usually the worst because they take the same doctrines and teachings and cover them with a thin patina coating of “Christianity,” thus convincing students that the Marxist faith is, in point of fact, the Christian faith. Because this is so, I wouldn’t send my dog to modern Christian Universities – Colleges, never mind God’s covenant seed.

Second, there is the whole student debt angle. Many students graduate University with house mortgage type debt and a lousy degree. This insures that they will remain controlled and ineffectual as they are beholden to what jobs they can find and as they will be so consumed with working to pay off their debt that they will likely not take the time to ever think for themselves. Once you’ve interacted with professional Academicians one easily begins to see why our church and culture is in the shape it is in.

However, Felix, this is not anti-intellectualism on my part. It is, rather, anti-humanist intellectualism on my part. It is simply the case that by in large Christian intellectualism is dead on the vine. Harry Blamires made this point over a generation ago in his book, “The Disappearance of the Christian Mind,”

“We are all caught up, entangled, in the lumbering day-to-day operations of a [social] machinery, working in many respects in the service of ends which we as Christians reject. This situation, the present [schizophrenic] situation of thousands of thinking Christians is the end product of a process that began the day Christians first decided to stop thinking Christianly in the interests of national harmony; the day when Christians first felt that the only way out of endless public discussion was to limit the operation of acute Christian awareness to the spheres of personal morality and spirituality.

From that point, the spheres of political, cultural, social, and commercial life became dominated by pragmatic and utilitarian thinking.”

The only way the Christian mind will be recovered is to not marinate our children’s minds in the paganism that is typical of Universities, Colleges, and Seminaries Christian or otherwise.

Third, there is the whole Frat house – whore house college experience which emphasizes College as a Summer camp – Animal house experience. Hardly healthy.

Yes, I fully realize Felix, that exceptions to all this exist but the exceptions are indeed exceptions. We are floating in a sea of Academic Humanism.

What are the alternatives …

1.) Autodidact
2.) Education by Extension (College Plus)

In college plus one can get the Bachelor’s degree without being indoctrinated.

3.) Forget formal education and become Entrepreneur.

One more point on this score that you did not ask about but I want to mention. Christians, in order to overcome this current situation, simply have to get over the whole idea of “accreditation.” Educational establishments like to tote that they are “accredited.” Christian needs to start asking, “Yes, but accredited by who?” You see, the point I’m making is to ask why Christians think it is important that their children attend schools accredited by the humanist enemy who wishes to destroy us. Consider Gordon College. Recently, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges’ Commission on Institutions of Higher Education considered whether Gordon College’s ban on “homosexual practice” runs contrary to its Commissions Standards for Accreditation.

Why would Gordon College care? If the Cultural Marxists don’t want to Accredit our schools that should be a reason for rejoicing. Christians, should they desire to return to Academic and Intellectual respectability, simply have to give up trying to curry the favor of Humanist Accreditation agencies.