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Critiquing this piece,

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/07/the-nation-the-church-and-the-immigrants

Dr Peter Leithart,

No one denies that US immigration policy is a mess. One poll found that 63 percent of Republicans want to deport the estimated 11 million illegals in the United States. Sniffing a popular cause, Congress has jumped aboard with legislation focused on identifying, arresting, and punishing violent criminals among illegal aliens.

Bret replies,

First, lets contend over Dr. Leithart’s 11 million illegals figure. That number is hotly contested with a respected Bear Sterns report offering the number of illegal immigrants at closer to 20 million.

Click to access BearStearnsStudy.pdf

Ann Coulter’s recent book, “Adios Amigo,” puts the number at 30 million.

Second. one reason that the US immigration policy is a mess is because we have combined the promise of the welfare state with a defacto open borders policy. In providing Government money and benefits what our hostile Government is doing is providing both incentive and subsidies to become illegal aliens. Dr. Leithart’s, essentially alienist reasoning, does nothing to address either aspect of this equation. It is safe to say that as long as our hostile Government continues to combine a defacto open borders policy with a Welfare state the consequence will be increased illegal immigration.

Third, Dr. Leithart points out proposed legislation that would identify, arrest, and punish violent criminal as if such legislation is a bad idea. Does Dr. Leithart really think it is a bad idea to enter into a process that removes the most violent illegal aliens?

Dr. Peter Leithart offers,

Considered strictly as a policy issue, there is much to commend open borders. Like Prohibition, recent efforts to control immigration haven’t done much to control immigration, but instead have pushed immigrants into back alleys and speakeasies that do a brisk business in forgery, illegal and dangerous transport, and other skullduggeries. Opening the border would undercut these criminal networks, as legalizing booze put the bootleggers out of business.

Bret responds,

One wonders what there is to commend open borders as a policy issue?

Is it black teen unemployment rate that Dr. Leithart finds so commendable in a open borders policy?

According to African-American spokesman, Kenneth Blackwell, as given in a critique of the Obama administration’s illegal immigration policy,

“Teen unemployment in the black community is especially shocking. In the past two years, the number has hovered around 40 percent. In Mr. Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago, the Urban League just reported that black teen unemployment is a breathtaking 91 percent.”

Is the problematic crime rate of illegal immigrants something that Dr. Leithart find commendable in open borders?

*Judicial Watch reported last year:

Of the 61,529 criminal cases initiated by federal prosecutors last fiscal year, more than 40%—or 24,746—were filed in court districts neighboring the Mexican border….Nearly 22% (13,383) were drug related, 19.7% (12,123) were violent crimes and 10.2% (6,300) involved white-collar offenses that include a full range of frauds committed by business and government professionals.

Is it the low wages that the US Chamber of Commerce loves that Dr. Leithart finds so commendable in open borders?

We must come to terms with the fact that immigration, both legal and illegal, is a program for redistribution of wealth from the working class to the elite financial and political classes and it has little or nothing to do with concern for the well-being of the poor in other countries. It’s not an honest call to the “tired, poor, huddled masses.” It’s a call for the elimination of the middle class and a turn to a have vs. have not social order.

Is it the fact that American workers are being displaced that Dr. Leithart finds so commendable in open borders?

http://www.vdare.com/articles/national-data-july-employment-data-again-suggests-illegal-immigration-surging-when-will-msm-notice

Is it the fact that America is being transformed from a WASP country to a third world country that Dr. Leithart finds so commendable in open borders?

“For more than 20 years, the consensus—the consensus—among labor economists has been that the immense inflow into the United States since immigration was reignited, after a 40-year lull, by Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 Immigration Act is of virtually no benefit, in aggregate, to native-born Americans.  Immigration does increase output (GDP) in varying degrees.  (In the case of unskilled immigrants, the increase is often minuscule.)  But essentially all of that is captured by the immigrants themselves, through wages.  In other words, America is being transformed for nothing.”

Next, Dr. Leithart compares our failure in our immigration policy with our failure in enforcing prohibition restrictions.

On this score, first observe, that it is always easiest to eliminate crime rates by decriminalizing crime.

Second, note that if we really wanted to enforce policy against illegal immigrants the fact that we have done so before, during the Eisenhower administration, (Operation Wetback) suggests that we have not been serious concerning enforcing the laws regarding illegal immigration. The problem here is not the impossibility of enforcing the law. The problem is that there has been little will to enforce the law. Clearly, Washington, like Dr. Leithart, wants defacto open borders.

Third, to compare legalizing the elimination of borders to the elimination of restrictions on alcohol consumption is a category mistake of profound consequence. The impact of an open borders policy has profound and far ranging consequences that extend far beyond the consequences eliminating restrictions on alcohol. Some of those consequences are teased out in this article,

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends — Darrell Dow Refutes Dr. Leithart on Immigration

 Rev. Dr.  Leithart goes on,

Even Pat Buchanan admits that most migrants work hard for their share of America’s prosperity. If border controls were relaxed, Kevin Johnson has argued, honest refugees and migrants could come in safely through legal checkpoints, allowing the INS, Homeland Security, and other agencies to use scarce resources to target known or suspected terrorists, drug-runners, and other criminals.

Bret responds,

1.) Here is Pat Buchanan’s admission that  Rev. Dr. Leithart cites,

” … the sense America’s borders are undefended, that untold millions of lawbreakers are in our country, and more are coming. While most (illegal immigrants) come to work, they are taking American jobs and consuming tax dollars, and too many come to rob, rape, murder and make a living selling drugs.“

Somehow in  Rev. Dr. Leithart’s world becomes,

“Even Pat Buchanan admits that most migrants work hard for their share of America’s prosperity.”

This is, at best, disingenuous on Rev. Dr. Leithart’s part and, at worse, and example of lying by a member of the clergy to advance a weak point.  This was something that only liberal clergy used to do.

2.) Rev. Dr. Leithart’s desire for open borders reminds me of the old Roman Catholic technique of bringing in the pagans en mass, adding some of their tribal rituals so they will feel comfortable with being present (Cinco de mayo anyone?) and in this case, voila … American citizens. In brief, Rev. Dr. Leithart would have us outwardly sprinkle them and pronounce them American and ex opere operato they are Americans.

Rev. Dr. Leithart continues,

With open borders, Johnson says, “rules and regulations governing the entry of noncitizens into the country would approximate those that exist for goods, services, and capital that enter.” We’d benefit from freer, more mobile labor, as we benefit from cheap imports. Many doubt whether the new immigrants can be assimilated, but for all our groping disarray, America is still damned good at turning people from every corner of the globe into devoted Americans: In the image of ourselves make we them. It’s not hard. Most of them are here because they’ve long dreamed of becoming Americans.

That’s hardly a slam-dunk policy argument, but it’s a serious position, worthy of better than the wacky-nut treatment it’s usually given.

But it is a policy argument, and there’s the rub, because immigration cuts deeper than policy can reach.

Bret responds,

1.) This is basically both a Libertarian argument that reduces men to their economic equation and a propositional nation argument that sees a nation as nothing but a hodge podge of people who agree on shared propositions. Both of these are beyond suspect. Rev. Dr. Leithart’s statement does nothing to consider the human or cultural dynamic except to offer that “America is damned good at turning people into devoted Americans.”  Neither is there any consideration on Rev. Dr. Leithart’s part of whether or not it is a Christian desire to see people “turning into devoted Americans.” Some might argue that such a statement, especially in light of matters like the recent Planned Parenthood “baby body parts for sale,” reveals that Rev. Dr. Leithart’s agenda to turn the alien and stranger into a devoted American is contrary to seeing them become devoted Christians.

2.) Honestly, Rev. Dr. Leithart speaks of the wacky-nut treatment his ideas are usually given but I hope we can begin to see why wacky-nut ideas are given wacky nut treatments.

 

The postmillennialism of Federal Vision Alienists like Rev. Dr. Leithart is a Sarumanic postmillennialism. It is an attempt to immanentize the eschaton and as everyone does that to one degree or another; I get that. The problem here is that Rev. Dr. Leithart‘s Eschaton is the Eschaton of Babel. It is the eschaton of Sauraman who believed the only problem with Sauron’s eschaton was that it wasn’t “Christian,” and could be rescued if it was just given that “I love Jesus” touch that could be provided only by a Jesus loving Saruman type policy.

End Part I

 

 

^{Acts 2:37} Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” ³⁸ And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.³⁹ For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” ⁴⁰ And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” ⁴¹ So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. ⁴² And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

Means of Grace — Those instruments of God’s favor that God uses as the means by which God accomplishes His people’s conformity to Christ and growth in the Christian faith.

Means of Grace — Word & Sacrament

Two Sacraments — Baptism & Eucharist

We see all these present in Acts 2:38f

A Sacrament is not merely a symbol as if baptism and the Lord’s Table merely represented something else as a flag might stand as a symbol for a nation.  The Sacraments are not mere visible jogs to the memory to remember something larger. In a Biblical understanding of the Sacrament the reality of what is being pointed to is contained in the symbol and for those who participate by faith the sacrament is what it symbolizes and so does what it promises.

Illustration — Sign saying Lansing is 25 miles away.

But what if the Sign was made of that which is Lansing? Maybe of a peculiar type of tree that grew in Lansing. And maybe the dye that formed the letters on the Sign was of a dye that was peculiar to Lansing. There would be a sense then that the sign to Lansing, as a symbol for Lansing, had Lansing in it.

Just so with the Sacraments. God, in His sovereignty, has put the reality of forgiveness, cleansing, and eternal life into the Word and Sacraments themselves and for those who come to the Sacraments full of Faith in Christ alone the Sacraments give what they symbolize. For those who do not come in faith then the Sacraments remain only empty symbols that at best jog the memory.

This explains why throughout much of our Church History God’s people have so desired the means of Grace and why Church attendance was such a given. God’s people understood that in the assembled community of God’s saints there they would be fed with Eternal life and drink the promises of God’s favor. In the assembling of the saints, Lord’s Day by Lord’s Day, the weary and battered people of God would come and be built up and strengthened by God’s favor preached.

Illustration — The means of Grace, Word and Sacrament, then is like Josh’s Pickle juice after fighting in his 90 pounds of armor in the hot sun when he does his Medieval Knight re-enactments. Worn out and weary with the exertion of fighting I am told that Pickle juice revives and vivifies almost instantly.

Just so with the means of Grace. We gather Lord’s day by Lord’s Day, weary and exhausted with contending for the crown rights of the Lord Christ in battle — whether that battle is with foes external or internal or both. Where will we find the refreshment for our souls and the invigoration to continue? The Church has always taught the place that is found is gathered worship … in the means of Grace … in Word and Sacrament…. in God’s pickle juice for spent warriors.

Illustration — Popeye and Spiritual Spinach

II.) Means of Grace (Baptism) Teaches a particular Anthropology

Because of their belief in Covenant Theology Reformed people have always inclined towards being Conservative with its impulse of seeing that human nature is corporate before it is individual. Liberal thought, as expressed most clearly in Anabaptist circles, has always seen the individual as having pride of place over the community. The individual precedes and the community depends upon the collection of individuals. This has meant that the sovereign self is the prime integer in Anabaptist Christianity. This is not so for those who are Biblical Christians…. for the Reformed.

Classical ethics proposes restraint as the means of freedom; Sade proposes vice as the way to freedom; indeed Sade’s political theory proposes freedom as a way of annihilating moral restraint, but ends by imposing another more severe restraint in its place, thus introducing the central paradox of the Enlightenment: freedom equals control. ‘As we gradually proceed to our enlightenment,’ Sade writes giving the standard physics of the enlightenment as his starting point.

‘we cam more and more to feel that, motion being inherent in matter, the prime mover existed only as an illusion, and that all that exists essentially having to be in motion, the motor was useless; we sensed that this chimerical divinity, prudently invented by the earlier legislators, was in their hand, simply one more means to enthrall us.’

In classical physics, all objects were at rest unless moved by some agent; in Newtonian physics, all objects were in motion unless halted by some greater opposing force. The same could be said of Sade’s politics, which he derived from Newton’s physics. In an inversion of both Plato and Aristotle, Sade saw ‘insurrection’ as the natural state of men, who are nothing more than machines made out of matter in which motion was inherent. Since the passions are the moral equivalent of gravity, the successful government is not on which stifles passion, but rather one that foster it, and then directs the subsequent motions to its own ends. The state, in other words, should foster vice as an instrument of control:

‘The Greek lawgivers,’ Sade writes,

‘perfectly appreciated the capital necessary of corrupting the member citizens in order that their moral dissolution coming into conflict with the establishment and its values, there would result the insurrection that is always indispensable to a political system of perfect happiness which, like republican government, must necessarily excite the hatred and envy of all its foreign neighbors. Insurrection, thought these sage legislators, is not at all a moral condition; however, it has got to be a republic’s permanent condition. Hence it would be no less absurd than dangerous to require that those who are to insure the perpetual immoral subversion of the established order be moral beings: for the state of a moral man is one of tranquility and peace, the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual unrest that pushes him to, and identifies him with the necessary insurrection in which the republican must always keep the government of which he is a member.’

Sade’s politics is the classical tradition turned upside down. The key insight of both the Marquis de Sade and the Christian West is that the moral man is in a state of peace; he is, in other words, not in motion and so therefore impossible to direct and control from the outside. The revolutionary’s very restlessness, his very rebellion against the moral order, which is the source of his restlessness, holds within it the seeds of control because once in motion the state need only manipulate the revolutionary’s desire by controlling his passions, and it succeeds in manipulating and thereby controlling him. Sade is not slow in drawing this very conclusion. ‘ Lycugus and Solon,’ Sade tells us,

‘fully convinced that immodesty’s results are to keep the citizen in the immoral state indispensable to the mechanics of republican government, obliged to exhibit themselves naked at the theater.”

Lust in other words, is the force which keeps the citizenry of the republic from succumbing to the inertia of tranquility which is the fruit of adherence to the moral order. At this point we enter into something like a circular argument. Lust is good because it fosters the restlessness of republicanism, but republicanism is also good because it fosters lust. Either way what we have here is the rationalization of desire as an instrument of simultaneous ‘liberation’ and control; what was hither to deemed pathological is not to be seen as social norm:

We are persuaded that lust, being a product of those penchants, is not to be stifled or legislated against, but that it is, rather, a matter of arranging for the means whereby passion may be satisfied in peace. We must hence undertake to introduce order into this sphere of affairs, and to establish all the security necessary so that, when need sends the citizen near the objects of lust, he can give himself over to doing with them all this his passions demand, without ever being hampered by anything, for there is no moment in the life of man when liberty in its whole amplitude is so important to him.”

Liberty, according to this line of thought is the ability not to act according to reason, but rather th ability to gratify illicit passion, which means that in the very act of attaining his ‘liberty’ man becomes the thrall of the passion he gratifies. Before long, it becomes clear that Sade’s politics is in many ways just the physics he says it is. Man at the beck of passion is in many ways like a particle with no will of its own, since reason, especially morals, is the soul source of man’s ability to govern himself. And once gratification of passion becomes the definition of ‘liberty,’ then ‘liberty’ becomes synonymous with control because he who controls the passion controls the man. Liberty, as defined by Sade, becomes a prelude to the most insidious form of totalitarian control known to man. This was the genius of Enlightenment politics, which is in reality nothing more than a physics of vice. Incite the passion; control the man; this is the esoteric doctrine of the Enlightenment, one that has been refined for over 200 years through a trajectory that involves everything from psychoanalysis to advertising to pornography and the role it plays in the Kulturkampf. Sade clearly understands that sexual liberation leads to social control and sees this liberation and subsequent control of passion as the basis of permanent revolution that life in France would become ‘If You Would Become Republicans.’

‘No passion has a greater need of the widest horizon of liberty than sexual license,’ he writes, 

‘here it is that man likes to command, to be obeyed, to surround himself with slaves to satisfy him; well, whenever you withhold from man the secret means whereby he exhales the dose of despotism Nature instilled in the depths of his heart, h will seek other outlets for it, it will be vented upon  nearby objects; it will trouble the government. If you would avid that danger, permit a free flight and rein to those tyrannical desires which, despite himself, torment man ceaselessly: content with having been able to exercise his small dominion in ht middle of the harem of sultanas and yours whose submission your good offices and his money procure for him, he will go away appeased and with nothing but fond feelings for a government which so obligingly affords him every means of satisfying his concupiscence.’

There are a number of ironies here, some obvious some not. One irony is obvious: Once man is freed from the moral order, he is immediately subjected to the despotism of those who know how to manipulate his desires. This is the essence of the enlightenment regime; not to prohibit, but to enable, to encourage motion or restlessness, and direct the flow of that activity by manipulating desire. This is the political genius behind a regime that is based on advertising and pornography and opinion polls and the other instruments which control liberated man.”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters From the Id — pg. 85 – 88