Windows Into Worldviews

Is The Moscow vs. Ogden Kerfuffle Really Less Theological Than Political?

https://www.thedailygenevan.com/blog/2025/1/3/paleoconservatism-and-christian-nationalism?fbclid=IwY2xjawHmrLRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHb3EWNdEhbATkejp-zW4VBqNS3fqTkiy4qJ_h24vBS-EbQUk4W_vggniWA_aem_zJNuGIgKhILwy73x6IQDRQ

I strongly recommend the above link by my friend Darrell Dow. It is an excellent and succinct explanation of why Ogden is Battling Moscow. A Battle where the Moscow position is way more liberal than we would like while the Ogden position is not nearly as conservative as we would like.

For those of us who are not completely satisfied with either Ogden or Moscow we have to take what we can and try to support Ogden as much as we can without compromising our core principles. We do this realizing, as Joe Sobran once said, “I don’t have a dog in this fight. My dog died a long time ago.” There really is very little to support in the Moscow position.

Now at points I strongly disagree with some positions of those whom Dow is providing summary. On the other hand I agree with nearly everything that Dow says in his own analysis in this piece except for one important observation;

“With exceptions, the vituperativeness and anger directed at Wolfe and adjacent allies is less theological than political, less about principle than power. The attacks aren’t primarily about doctrinal distinctives (or memes) but a result of men protecting their brands and roles as self-appointed gatekeepers. In other words, it’s all very Buckleyesque. “

I am convinced that the rhubarb in this kerfuffle is indeed not less theological than political and oddly enough, Dow even later agrees with me as he explains the reasons for the break which at their core are all theological.

When you read the article you find Darrell laying out the differences between Ogden and Moscow, (Ogden and Moscow are shorthand … I realize there are more parties involved) and those differences when traced back to their beginning point are straight on theological. Because there are these theological differences there are in turn differences in the politics of each camp.

Darrell spends time noting the differences between Ogden and Moscow by telling us that Ogden in more inclined to hold on to the particulars while Moscow desires to hold on to the Universals. Another way of saying this is that Ogden (rightly I think) is responding with an offered correction to decades and decades (maybe even centuries … stemming back to the Enlightenment) of emphasizing the cosmopolitan and the unity of mankind, which Moscow is championing. This stems from the classically liberal worldview wherein the brotherhood of all men and the fatherhood of God over all men is emphasized. Now, Moscow, is not completely in the tank for that idea but what Moscow is doing is offering up a sanctified version of that world and life view and the chaps at Ogden are protesting in favor of particularity of peoples and nations. This difference can be captured by comparing the lyrics of a couple different songs,

“I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
But yes, I’m still running” U2

This represents the kind of Universalism that the Ogden chaps are opposing. They would prefer to sing along with “Show of Hands;”

“And we learn to be ashamed before we walk
Of the way we look, and the way we talk
Without our stories or our songs

How will we know where we come from?
I’ve lost St. George in the Union Jack
It’s my flag too and I want it back

Seed, bark, flower, fruit
Never gonna grow without their roots
Branch, stem, shoot
We need roots”

Again Moscow is not as WOKE as John Lennon singing “Imagine” but as I said they are trying to bequeath a Christianity that is mixed with this kind of Universalism. Likewise, Ogden is not based enough on this subject but it seems they are moving in a wholesome direction.

Now, back to the theological issue that is driving all this. The theological issue that is driving all this is the Christian doctrine of the One and the Many. Because there is a one and a many in the Creator there is a one and the many in creation. The accusation against Moscow (which I believe is true) is that they are emphasizing God’s oneness over His manyness to such an unhealthy extreme that we are losing particularity in creation, as seen in Doug Wilson’s constant sniping at “racism.” When God is seen as One to the neglect of Many the result is a creeping monism in creation where the particularity that is rightly found in “the Many” is lost.

Now, speaking only for myself, I see the Ogden chaps trying to understand the beauty of this Creator One and the Many as it incarnates itself into the created one and the many. I still think they are holding on too much to the One but it is a breath of fresh air to read some of the things they are saying.

So, we see the differences between Ogden and Moscow are theological before they are political and it is only because the differences are theological that the political division subsequently arises. Because there are differences in theological principles you have this contest over political power. The difference, contra Dow, are doctrinal before they are political. There will be no solving of the political fracture apart from a conversation of the theological issue of “The One and The Many.”

In the West we have lived a very long time neglecting the import of the One and the Many. The result has been egalitarianism, WOKEism, and Cultural Marxism. The Ogden boys are trying to speak to that.

Read the whole Dow piece and bring yourself up to speed on what is disturbing the “conservative” Church in America. Darrell does a bang up job in his article. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Addendum

Elsewhere I have reduced all of this to this one paragraph;

“If Oswald Spengler was correct (and he is not) that ‘Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism’ then the contest going on right now between the Ogden / Wolfe chaps and Doug Wilson / James White is a contest between an older Christianity vs. a Spenglerian Christianity. Wilson/White/Boot/Sandlin and company, intentionally or not, desire a Christianity that is rootless, and cosmopolitan in its social order theory while being Capitalistic in its worse sense economically. They are practitioners of Enlightenment “Christianity” and they are doing their utmost to halt the return of a pre-Enlightenment Christianity where rootedness, family, and belonging are the signposts pointed at by the few who retain ecclesial sanity.”

Sundry Quotes Surrounding The Slavery Issue

“The negroes were already slaves in their own country — slaves to masters whose authority was absolute — and had been such for time immemorial…. Chiefs built their huts of human bones, and drank the blood of their enemy from human skulls, and yearly offered up whole hecatombs of human sacrifices; and on the death of every head man of the tribe, hundreds of his slaves were butchered over his grave, that they might accompany and serve their dead master in the other world.”

Daniel Robinson Hundley

Social Relations in our Southern States

Published 1860

Honestly, the descendants of those slaves who made it to America should be like Joseph in the Bible and understand that God intended their slavery for good even if others intended it for evil. There is much that the descendants of Africa have for which to daily thank God. One of which is that their forefathers didn’t end up dead in Africa before being brought to the new world.

“No race gets blamed more for the slavery of Africans than whites, yet no race has done more to abolish the slavery of blacks than whites. No race is seen more as victims of slavery than African descendants, yet no race has more promoted slavery of its people than black Africans.”

Isaac Bishop

Defending Dixie’s Land — p. 365

Perhaps the descendants of black slaves should first be demanding reparations from African nations and tribes?

“Slavery, as everybody knows, was forced upon the colonies by the arbitrary and despotic rule of Great Britain.”

Albert Taylor Bledsoe

“When American slave ships first came to Africa, slaves were already a booming African export. Africa’s #1 export was slaves, even before white men came to purchase slaves. Most African slaves had been sold and sent West to Arab Mooselimbs and Asia. Some countries in Africa had as much as 75-90% of their population enslaved by fellow blacks. Further only 6% of the slaves imported to the Western world from Africa between 1640-1820 came to America; most went to places like Brazil, Cuba, the Caribbean, etc.”

Isaac Bishop

Defending Dixie’s Land — p. 362

I suggest America paying reparations to slaves right after Africa and the Mooselimb world pay reparations to slaves.

This whole “reparations thing” is just one more shakedown.

On Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (EP)

“Where he could have freed slaves he did not. Where he did free slaves, he could not.”

Wm. Seward
Lincoln Sec’y of State

The London Spectator reported on the Emancipation Proclamation on 11 October, 1862;

“The Union government liberates the enemy’s slaves as it would the enemy’s cattle, simply to weaken them in conflict. The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he can’t own him unless he is loyal to the US.”

“The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these new [western territories]. We want them for the home of free white people.”

Abraham Lincoln

16 October, 1854

One more piece of evidence that the cause of the War Between the States was NOT slavery. In modern terms the North was “racist” for wanting to exclude blacks from the new territories while the South was “racist” for wanting to own blacks while living in the new territories.

The cause of the Civil War is found in the answer to the question, “What type of Federal Government shall we be ruled by?” Would we be ruled by a top down consolidated Nationalistic Federal Government or a Confederated Union of States where the Federal Government was to have delegated and enumerated powers that were limited and defined? The War of Northern Aggression answered the question for us, until such a time that the legality of the US Constitution can be restored.

“The Slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and glory of all their wealth. The Mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph of an enemy reduced to slavery.”

Black African King — King Gezo of Dahomey

1840

Upon hearing of the United Kingdom’s ending of the Slave trade The King of Bonny (now in Nigeria) was horrified at the conclusion of the practice and said,

” We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.”

The Enemy Are The Luciferian Elites

Yesterday I received a phone call from a friend whose career takes him into high finance. My friend was dining with a colleague in a major capital not in North America working on a deal. This colleague is well connected in the world of the elites as you can imagine many people are who run in these kinds of circles. The colleague related to my friend how he had come up through the ranks and how he had been mentored by Nobel prize winner during his graduate years. The colleague noted that the Nobel prize winner who mentored him was a ruthless SOB and this mentor believed that that Lucifer had been wronged and that God should have shared His glory with Lucifer. Apparently this belief drove much of his mentor’s scientific research. The colleague communicated that many of the physicists working on particle physics at the CERN particle collider in Switzerland share the same belief and their work is an attempt to usurp God’s glory as Creator.

(If you’ve read anything about the CERN super particle collider you’ll now that the whole project is dripping with the occult including a huge statue of the Hindu god “Shiva — the god of destruction.”)

For opening ceremonies of CERN in 2017 laced with occult imagery see;

It seems the minds behind the CERN project want to bring demons into the world and harnessing their knowledge via quantum technology. Charlie Rose spoke about this explicitly, describing them as Lovecraftian beings or entities or something. Elon Musk has warned about “summoning the demon” via AI, and then the Large Hadron Collider seems to be more about ushering demons into the world than it is about dispassionate scientific discovery.

Those who start to understand the demonic component of the world they’re seeking to construct around us, have a useful tool of knowledge.

As the dinner conversation continued between my friend and his colleague, the colleague communicated, upon inquiry, that this belief of Lucifer being cheated out of the glory that was properly due him is shared by many of the global elites. He especially noted that the President of France (Macron) held this same belief as well as many highly placed people in the European Union.

My friend said he was shocked by this casual dinner conversation. I can imagine many of us would be.

All of this is consistent with what we already know about the character of our elites being Luciferian. From the Pizza-gate episode that was tied by coded language to Hillary Clinton and the Obamas to the tightly connected with the Clintons Anthony Wiener’s sexting with minors scandal to the spirit-cooking revelations to the Epstein Lolita express and trafficking children for sex servicing the highly placed elites to the growing testimony of the whole P. Diddy scandal it is now well past obvious that, generally speaking our elites are indeed Luciferians. This reality is underscored by anybody who has read at all on the occultic rituals the young elites go through at Yale’s famous “Skull & Bones” club. These young elites end up being Presidents (William Howard Taft and both Bush Presidents) Senators and leading elites in numerous fields. If you want to read on this I recommend Antony Sutton’s “America’s Secret Establishment; An Introduction to The Order of Skull and Bones.”

Remember this exchange from 2020? It is an example of “Me thinketh the lady doth protest too much. This was during a time when the elites were still trying to belittle and mock the idea that there was an intimate connection between the elites and Luciferian behavior;

None of this is new for those who have had eyes to see. Luciferian rituals were rife at Los Alamos (Trinity Site) during the Manhattan project as Michael Hoffman’s book, “Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare” chronicles.

This has even been in our literature as C. S. Lewis pointed towards this connection between the elites and the Luciferians in his theological science fiction Space Trilogy. Who can ever forget Lewis’ N.I.C.E — National Institute of Coordinated Experiments? This was Lewis’ “Scientific” organization — an organization that we later learn in the novel is manned by Luciferians. Clearly, Lewis was trying to warn us here.

It is my conviction that it is well past obvious that the global elite — the types who attend gala events like the World Economic Forum — are generally speaking, Luciferians. The battle we are fighting against the NWO is not merely one of ideas, though ideology is certainly a component. The battle we as Christians are fighting is against an ideology that is animated by principalities and powers and against people who are animated by Lucifer. Our fight is against very real organizations which are manned by people who are worshiping and serving Lucifer. These people hate the God of the Bible more than they love life, and they hate Christians with that same hatred.

Nobody who isn’t in Christ should get anywhere near this fight because if one is not clothed with Christ and indwelt by the Spirit of the living God they are going to get eaten alive.

Toby Sumpter On Superficial Divisions

“The multicultural globalist want to blend all culture into a bland humanism, but the blood-and-soil types end up insisting on superficial divisions. Covenant is the key to earthy and biblical unity and diversity, of what we might call a Protestant feudalism and Christendom.”

Toby “No Legs Yet Walking” Sumpter

I.) Nothing At All About Blood?

1.) “The Promise is to you and to your children….” Acts 2:39

2.) Gen. 12: 2 I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you; and all the families of the earth will be blessed through you.”

3.) God is known as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, (note the patrilineal descent) and not the God of Abraham, Hiram, and Malik.

4.) Gen. 24:²One day Abraham said to his oldest servant, the man in charge of his household, “Take an oath by putting your hand under my thigh. ³Swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and earth, that you will not allow my son to marry one of these local Canaanite women. ⁴Go instead to my homeland, to my relatives, and find a wife there for my son Isaac.”

Keep in mind that the wife that was later married by Jacob from these same relatives of Abraham was beset with the same pagan mindset as was true of the local Canaanite women as seen in her running off with Laban’s household gods. We note that so that we see that it wasn’t as if the people of Abraham were God-fearers unlike the local Canaanites and their women-folk.

5.) Do keep in mind also that there is a reason for all those genealogies in Scripture that demonstrate that Jesus the Christ was the son of David, the son of Abraham. (Matthew 1) In point of fact Jesus remains the Lion of the tribe of Judah at this very moment with DNA typable blood at the right hand of the Father.

6.) Ezra and Nehemiah and their decrying of mixed marriages and children anybody?

7.) “I was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel.” Jesus the Christ

Now before I am accused of suggesting that blood is the only consideration allow me to disavow that. I am only saying there that the covenant is not a Gnostic covenant. Grace, because of God’s ordination, typically runs in generational familial lines. Blood is not everything but neither is it nothing. Jesus enemies during his earthly ministry made descent an idol. Today the enemies of Biblical Christianity make descent to mean nothing as if grace does not, because of God’s free assignment, run in generational lines.

II.) Nothing At All About Soil?

So much for all those promises about “the promised land.” And what about our one day “inheriting the whole earth?”

So, it is not at all about blood and soil and yet Christ had to come from the tribe of Judah. It’s not at all about blood and soil yet Paul can say in Romans;

“the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.”

And Jesus will say to the Samaritan woman in John 4;

22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.

What is hilarious is that these same people like Old Toby will deny all categories of blood and soil while still insisting that those reputed to be blood Jews still have a glorious future ahead of them misinterpreting Romans 11. Still others want to say that the blood Jews are going to rebuild the temple on the glorious soil of Jerusalem.

Old Toby’s “thinking” (we’re feeling generous in calling it “thinking) gives us not only propositional nationhood but also propositional covenant theology. This is Gnostic covenantalism. The fact that it comes from putative Presbyterians demonstrates how far many of the Presbyterians have gone in grace destroying nature.

Again, my point in all this is to say “Old Toby is wrong.” Covenant has to do with blood and soil. My point is that while blood and soil are not everything neither are they nothing. For Pete’s sake that is proven by the 5th commandment. That is proven by the fact that the Holy Spirit can say;

“if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

I Timothy 5:8

Finally, note this clergy member said that family ties are nothing but superficial divisions. Good gravy, if that isn’t the theme song of the Globalists among us I don’t know what is. I find it shocking that a Presbyterian — the folks who historically believed that the best method of Church growth was by having large families — is telling me that family ties are superficial divisions. It is shocking as hearing P-Diddy saying “sex should be saved for marriage.”

Family is not everything. We must give up family if necessary to follow Christ but family is so important that God uses the idea of “family” to define how the church members should inter-relate.

And yet for Old Toby it is a “superficial division” — kind of like being a Michigan or Michigan State fan.

Redemption Aimed At In “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance?”

An article by Marvin Olaskey got me thinking about this and pushed me to come up with my own slightly different take.

_________

In the film, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” film-maker John Ford demonstrates in the villain’s name and character (played by Lee Marvin) that Liberty expressed as malevolence (Hence the name Valance?) is the worst kind of license.

The character played by Jimmy Stewart is named “Ransom Stoddard.” In the film Ransom is willing to surrender his life (as a ransom) in an attempt to rid the town of the malevolence of the license brought by “Liberty Valance.” And that is what everybody thinks happened as Ranse is universally thought of as “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

The town Sheriff is aptly named “Sheriff Appleyard” (played by Andy Devine). Appleyard is a bumbling but lovable fool with no real authority in the town. Devine was Barney Fife before Barney Fife was Barney Fife. The Sheriff’s last name is interesting though if only because man showed himself a fallen fool as happening in a “Appleyard.” No real help against the license of Liberty Valance is going to come from the fallen Sheriff Appleyard.

In the climax of the film, everyone has abandoned Ranse as he faces down Liberty Valance in a gun fight wherein Ranse is clearly overmatched. It is dark out. Here we see themes of Jesus being abandoned by all while all is still dark. Ranse is rescued by Tom Doniphon’s (played by John Wayne) surreptitious gunslinging thus providing a ransom for Ransom.

Because of Doniphon’s heroics he loses the girl (played by Vera Miles) to Ranse Stoddard. Could it be that the name Hallie in the film is short for Hallelujah?

“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” is indeed a tale about Liberty and how liberty can easily turn into license. It’s also a tale about how true liberty has to put down false liberty in order for all people to enjoy true liberty, but it’s also a tale about how a town is ransomed so that everyone can say “Hallelujah.” Finally, it might be taken as a tale that teaches that the true hero who provides the real ransom sometimes is not recognized by those whom he provided the ransom.