Public Opinion Polls, Historicism and Psychological Warriors

“Bernard Berelson was trained as a librarian but by the late 40’s was considered an expert in public relations and the manipulation of public opinion. One year after the publication of Blanshard’s book on Catholic power, Berelson co-edited ‘Public Opinion and Communication’ with Morris Jankowitz, one of the seminal works of communications theory, and a good indication of how the psychological warfare techniques refined during World War II were now going to be turned on the American public as a way of controlling them through the manipulation of the new media, i.e., radio and TV. Berelson establishes the book’s major premise in his introduction:

‘Growing secularization has meant that more and more areas of life are open to opinion rather than to divine law and to communication rather than to revelation. Growing industrialization has not only extended literacy; in addition, it has provided the technical facilities for mass communication.’

The goal of secularization was the reduction of all of life’s imperatives to ‘opinions,’ which is to say not the expression of moral absolutes or divine law. Once this ‘secularization’ occurred, the people who controlled ‘opinions’ controlled the country. Berelson is equally frank about where the new science of public opinion originated:

‘Research in the field was accelerated during WW II by demands for studies on the effect of communications upon military personnel, adjustment to army life and attitudes toward military leaders, enemy propaganda, and civilian morale. After the war this growing interest led to the establishment of additional university centers for the study of public opinion and communication by the methods of social science. Together with the continuing activities of industry and government, they now represent a large scale research enterprise.’

…. Berleson wrote also in 1950 that,

‘ there is a virtual pro-religious monopoly on communication available to large audiences in America today.”

Religious belief meant ipso facto the opposite of opinion, and therefore ideas not subject to the manipulation of the people who controlled the communications media. What needed to be done then was to move large areas of thought from the realm of religion to the realm of opinion if any significant breakthroughs in political control through manipulation of the media were to take place. Sexual morality was the most important area of religious thinking that needed to be moved into the realm of ‘opinion’ where it would be then under the control of psychological warriors like Berelson and those who paid his salary, namely, the Rockefellers.

And this is precisely what happened…

E. Michael Jones
Libido Dominadi

Notice that there was a designed and concerted effort, funded by the huge tax free Foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.) to drag public thinking away from the residual remains of Christianity in the public square to a thinking that was called “secular.” The problem, of course, is that this was not a case where the public square was being unclothed of religious presuppositions, (secularization) but rather it was a case where the public square was being stripped of what remained of Christian presuppositions in favor of presuppositions consistent with Religious Leftist humanism.

This is seen in Berelson’s drive to get rid of religious absolutes in favor of “opinion.” However, clearly the problem here is that directed and manipulated opinion would now be the new absolute. The new absolute exchanged for the idea of Christian absolutes was the absolute of no absolutes. Any humanist absolute (masquerading as “opinion”) would be accepted in the secularized public square over and above a religious absolute.

Note also in the quote above the ascendancy of public opinion. Public opinion is to moral guidance what Historicism is to Historiography. In both cases, the absolute being evacuated, the only place a transcendent constant can be found is in the immanent subjective realm of space and time. If there is no transcendent constant then in order to shape public policy is to create public opinion through putative scientific public opinion polls and then to reify those subjective numbers into objective transcendent constants so that direction can be given to public policy. This is the same thing that happens in Historicism. As Historicism allows for no fixed transcendent constant by which history can be known and evaluated, therefore History itself must become its own fixed transcendent constant. Public opinion polls serve as absolutes for the immediate just as Historicism serves as absolute in interpreting the past as a guide for the future.

However, in both cases of Public Opinion polls and Historicism the results they yield are only as good as the manipulator the psychological warriors operating them.

Without the God of the Bible, who alone can give us a fixed transcendent constant as well as the certainty that the transcendent has become immanent, (thus assuring that the transcendent isn’t so transcendent that it loses touch with our sitz-im-leben), we only have a word and world of flux where man is a being manipulated and controlled by the Psychological warriors named Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie.

Addendum

R2K plays right into this agenda quoted from Jones. R2K allows the public square to be cleansed of what Berelson called religious belief in favor of the manipulations coming from the cultural elites.

Who said this version of Jesus + Nothing = Everything?

“Nothing is demanded of you — no idea of God and no goodness in yourselves, not your being religious, not your being Christian, not your being wise, and not your being moral. But what is demanded is only your being open and willing to accept what is given to you, the new Being, the Being of love and justice and truth, as it is manifest in Him whose yoke is easy and Whose burden is light.”

A.) Tullian Tchividjian — PCA Pastor
B.) Jack Miller — Sonship Guru
C.) Paul Tillich — Process Theologian
D.) David Van Drunen — R2K Theologian
E.) All of the Above

Cortez & R2K

“They brought to us 8 Indian girls, all daughters of chiefs, in order to cement our friendship…

The girls, Cortes added, must become Christian before we could accept them, and the people must give up sodomy, for they had boys dressed as women who practised that accursed vice for profit. Moreover every day they sacrificed before our eyes three, four, or five Indians, whose hearts were offered to those idols and whose blood was plastered on the walls. The feet, arms and legs of their victims were cut of and eaten, just as we eat beef from the butcher’s in our country. I even believe that they sold it in the tinaguez or markets. Cortes told them that if they gave up these wicked practices, not only would we be their friends, but we would vie them other provinces to rule. The Caciques, papas and the dignitaries all replied that it would be wrong for them to give up their idols and sacrifices, for these gods of theirs brought them health and good harvests and all that they needed; but as for sodomy, measures would be taken to see that the practice was stopped.

This insolent reply was more than Cortes or any of us who had seen all their cruelties and obscenities could stand. Reminding us of the doctrines of our holy faith, Cortes asked us “If we do not pay God so much honour as to stop them from making sacrifices to their idols, how can we ever accomplish anything worth doing?”

He told us that we must overthrow their idols that very day, and be absolutely prepared to fight if they tried to prevent us. We, as usual, were all armed and ready…

Bernal Diaz
The Conquest of New Spain

Let’s pretend that Cortez was R2K.

They brought to us 8 Indian girls, all daughters of chiefs, in order to cement our friendship…

The girls, Cortes added, could not be accepted because in order to accept them they must become Christian but that requirement would violate our pledge not to pollute the pluralistic public square by requiring of you, as a pagan, that which you do not want to do. Now, in terms of sodomy, we observed how their boys dressed as women who practice that accursed vice for profit but, well, while personally and individually we are opposed to it we understand how pluralism works. Now we noticed that every day they sacrificed before our eyes three, four, or five Indians, whose hearts were offered to those idols and whose blood was plastered on the walls. The feet, arms and legs of their victims were cut off and eaten, just as we eat beef from the butcher’s in our country. I even believe that they sold it in the tinaguez or markets. Cortez told them that he understood the common realm was, well … common and that he knew that if he and his Spaniards wanted to worship on Sundays Cortez’s Spanish troops had to give the Caciques room for their varying forms of worship, however untoward they may seem to the Spaniard. Cortez appealed to the precepts of Natural law as a reason to stop human sacrifice, but they said they had not heard of any god named Natural law and that surely any god named Natural law who was not powerful enough to stop their sacrifices wasn’t much of a god to be worried about. The Caciques, papas and the dignitaries continued by replying that it would be wrong for them to give up their idols and sacrifices, for these gods of theirs brought them health and good harvests and all that they needed; but as for sodomy, measures would be taken to see that the practice was stopped.

This insolent reply prompted Cortez to say that he understood and that it was ok because his eschatology informed him that “evil would alway grow together with good.” Cortez told us, “If we do not pay God so much honor as to not allow a pluralistic social order where human sacrifice to false gods can occur, how can we ever tell them about Jesus?”

Cortez told us that we must be polite to their idols and show deference that very day, and be absolutely prepared to fight to protect pluralism if any neo-calvinists tried to prevent public square religious pluralism among the Caciques. We, as troops from Westminster SC, as usual, were all armed and ready…

Nicolosi Analyzes Sodomite Origins & Behavior

Joseph Nicolosi, in his book Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality, sees homosexuality as essentially a “male deficit,” which results from family problems, specifically an estrangement between father and son at a crucial stage of the son’s psychic development. As a result of this failure to receive the father’s approval, the homosexual seeks that sense of masculinity from sexual contact with men who seem to embody what the homosexual feels he lacks. “After years of secrecy, isolation and alienation,” Nicolosi writes, describing the psychic odyssey of one of his patients but describing Isherwood’s odyssey from Victorian England to decadent Berlin as well, “most young men find the gay world powerfully alluring, with its romantic, sensual, outrageous, and embracing qualities.” This psychological need for the father’s approval becomes, generally, through seduction by an older man, attached to sexual behavior which quickly becomes compulsive and self-destructive. The homosexual, according to Nicolosi, is attracted to “Mysterious men… those who possess enigmatic masculine qualities that both perplex and allure the client. Such men are overvalued and even idealized, for they are the embodiment of qualities that the client wishes he had attained for himself.”

Women, on the other hand, represent neither beauty nor pleasure, as they do to normal men, but a strange sense of heteronomous duty. Women become a challenge to which the homosexual does not feel adequate, and, with that, comes the sense that liking women and going out with them and having sex with them or marry them are duties imposed from without by forces alien to the “real self….”

Since sex for the homosexual is essentially an attempt to appropriate the masculinity that he feels lacking in himself from someone who seems to embody it, sex with girls has no purpose, since girls do not have what he lacks. Once it gets construed in this way, sex becomes an essentially vampiric act. It is either sucking the desired object to obtain its male essence, to being sucked for the same purpose. Isherwood makes this vampiric character clear, but in a slightly veiled manner, when he talks about Bubi, the first object of his homosexual attentions in Berlin: “Christopher wanted to keep Bubi all to himself, forever, to possess him utterly, and he knew that this was impossible and absurd. If he had been a savage, he might have solved the problem by eating Bubi — for magical, not gastronomic, reasons.”

Again, Isherwood refers to magic, this time to a magic form of cannibalism that will allow him to keep “to Bubi all to himself forever, to possess him utterly, “in other words, to appropriate forever from Bubi what Isherwood himself lacks Cannibalism, as the case of Jeffery Dahmer showed, is nothing more than an extreme form of homosexuality. Both actions involved a “magical” ingestion of the desired characteristics of the other. In this regard, cannibalism is but one term in a series of psychic linkages that radiate out from the vampire, the prime representative of the Weimar Republic culture. With the breakdown of the family, the son does no get the needed affirmation of his own masculinity from the father. As a result, sex becomes an attempt to alleviate this male deficit. It becomes an exercise in feedon on another person, which gets fantasized sometimes as cannibalism but, more often than not, as a sucking off the liquid essence from the desire object in the actual act of felatio or in th symbolic act of vampirism. (Magnus Hirschfield, by the way, in his magnum opus listing all the sexual variants, lists vampirism as one and cites the specific case of a man who could not reach orgasm without first ingesting the blood of his spouse. The Marquis de Sade lists a similar instance in “Justine.”

In either case, the point of the act is to assuage the hunger-like feeling that is the physical manifestation of the deficit nature of homosexuality, but also of lust. As one of Nicolosi’s clients explains about his sexual involvement with a male he admired: “that power and control — I’ve always wanted to draw off of that, to be so together.”

Like a vampire, the homosexual “draws off” that power of sucking, by draining the desired object of its life-force and absorbing it into himself in some ritualistic “magical” banquet. Of course, this magic never works; in fact, it only exacerbates the loneliness and inadequacy which drove the homosexual to this form of sexual activity in the first place, and so, what arises in place of the “magic” is a compulsive, addiction like, vicious circle, in which the homosexual tries to compensate for a sense of masculine inadequacy by engaging in homosexual activity, which, once it’s over, only makes the sense of inadequacy seem even worse.

“Immediately after every homosexual experience,” one of Nicolosi’s clients explains, “it feels like something is missing. The closeness I wanted with another man just didn’t happen. I’m left with the feeling that sex is just not what I wanted.”

And once again, the vampire provides the best explanation of the cyclic nature of this pseudo-sexual activity. There is the depletion of death, the craving, the hunger for what the vampire lacks, which is temporarily alleviated by the sucking of fresh blood, but the transformation is eternally temporary, forcing the vampire, or, in this case, the homosexual, to engage in a never ending search for new partners / victims so that he can draw off from them a momentary escape from his feeling of isolation and inadequacy. “Considering the habit forming nature of sexual behavior,” Nicolosi writes, “the more homosexuality active the client is, the more difficult the course of treatment.”

Dr. E. Michael Jones
Libido Dominandi — pg. 246-248

Marriage Homily

Of course that which makes a marriage uniquely Christian is the pledged allegiance of both the Christian Husband and the Christian Wife to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Here we have two people who have been set apart for salvation from eternity, and who have been declared righteous in Christ in God’s court. They have been united to Christ by the Spirit’s work and now they enter into marriage. Very well then, it is quite obvious that that which will make the marriage Christian is their bowing to the Lordship of their King and Savior in their marriage.

This concern about the Lordship of Jesus Christ begins even before marriage in the courting process and manifests itself first in the careful attention of each that they are marrying someone who is suitable for them.

This is what God said in Genesis

The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Now, it stands to reason that this woman who was to be suitable for Adam found an Adam that in turn was suitable for her. This is just to say that Adam and Eve were a fit. They were quite literally made for each other.

First of course they were a fit in the sense that they understood that they were God’s creatures and were beholden to Him. In our language today we might say that they shared a common faith. No marriage should be entered into where man and wife do not share a common understanding of their shared Christian faith. Indeed Scripture forbids it for Christians when it forbids unequal yoking.

But the correspondence, — or suitability if you prefer — between our first parents of course only began with Adam and Eve’s common faith — a common faith that found each of them trusting in God at each turn.

But beyond this common faith were other commonalities. They were yoked in other ways. After all this was a woman who was, in Adam’s own words, “Bone of my Bone, and Flesh of my Flesh.” Adam and Eve mirrored one another. I suspect that Adam and Eve corresponded to each other in the way that they looked and in their mannerisms, in their likes and dislikes. They not only shared a faith and a bed but they shared common delights, common palates, common speech patterns, and common characteristics.

Rudyard Kipling caught something of what I am getting at in terms of the need for commonalities in uniquely Christian marriage that is never less than a common faith but is always more than a common faith when he wrote,

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk–
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

Dr. Clarence Macartney, a well known Reformed Minister from my Grandparent’s generation put this time-tested concept, if also time-worn idea, in a sermon he preached on Marriage and family life. Macartney preached,

“Love imagines that it can overleap the barriers of race and blood and religion, and in the enthusiasm and ecstasy of choice these obstacles appear insignificant. But the facts of experience are against such an idea. Mixed marriages are rarely happy. Observation and experiences demonstrate that the marriage of a Gentile and Jew, a Protestant and a Catholic, an American and a Foreigner has less chance of a happy result than a marriage where the man and woman are of the same race and religion….”

I know that Anthony and Rachel share the kind of commonalities that the Lordship of Christ anticipates for a uniquely Christian marriage. They are not strangers to one another in terms of suitability. They share a common understanding of their common faith. They share a worldview. They come from similar family cultures and backgrounds and they share a people group. They are suitable for each other.

II.) When it comes to a uniquely Christian marriage not only is the Lordship of Christ pursued in the issue of the suitableness of each for one another but it is also pursued in each of them submitting to God’s Law.

Remember we are speaking here of a Christian marriage and in a Christian marriage you have two people who have had wrought within them the desire to look to the interest of the other. You have two people, who, when they say they “love” each other they understand that love is an empty concept unless if is defined by God’s law. Anthony must not love Rachel in ways that are inconsistent w/ God’s revealed word and Rachel must not love Anthony by defining what love is by her own law word. In order for their marriage to be Christian each must love in ways consistent with God’s revealed law-word.

Of course you already know that never was a word more cheapened in our culture than the word “love.” We have sentimentalized it, we have coarsened it, we have invoked it in order to cover the most hateful of actions. And the reason for this is that “love” has no stable meaning because each man loves as is right in his own eyes. This is not so in a Christian marriage that takes the Lordship of Christ into account. A Christian marriage understands that “love” is regulated and finds it’s meaning in God’s law being applied. Jesus Himself draws our attention to the same point when He told his disciples, “If you love me keep my commandments.”

The fact that marriages fail so often can be accounted both by the fact that two people married who did not correspond to one another to begin with and by the fact that both people in the marriage are seeking to regulate the marriage according to their own self-governing law word. In short, marriages fail because one if not both partners are seeking to be God in the relationship. It can get pretty ugly when the Gods go to war.

When both husband and wife submit to a royal law of love that is defined and regulated by God’s Law-Word then the conflict of the wills have a boundary in order to limit them.

So, a uniquely Christian marriage finds God’s revealed law-word governing their marriage and their homes. Anthony shows his love to Rachel by serving her much as Christ served the Church in the washing of his disciples’ feet. He serves her by leading, protecting, providing, and by nurturing her in her undoubted catholic Christian faith. Rachel shows her love to Anthony by submitting to him, by being a complement to him, and as Christ always delighted to do the will of His Father so Rachel will delight in doing the will of her husband who will lay down his life for her.

III.) The Lordship of Jesus Christ is expressed in uniquely Christian marriages by the teleology or goal of the Marriage.

Theologians will tell you that part of what constitutes man as the “image of God” is the fact that he was charged with having dominion over God’s creation. He was to be a ruling steward over creation for God as King.

When God gave Eve to Adam that giving was in the context of Adam’s dominion work. The giving of Eve to Adam was for the purpose of aiding and assisting Adam in his work of dominion.

In the Christian understanding nothing has happened since Adam was created to exercise dominion and since Eve was created from Adam to be a help-meet in that dominion taking that has rescinded the idea that the ultimate goal of marriage is a Husband and Wife co-operating, under God’s regency and Law-Word, in exercising godly dominion. The Husband and Wife, together as man and wife, are to reconstruct all they put their hands too in a Christ honoring direction. Even the having and rearing of children is to be unto the end of being able to more readily exercise dominion to the glory of God.

And clearly we live in times that desperately need humble Christian dominion taking. Clearly we live in times where we should pray that God will raise up a host of Christian marriages that understand the charge to begin dominion taking first by reconstructing marriage and family again along Biblical lines.

You see, the ordaining of marriages is not about our creature comforts. When God joins suitable Redeemed men and women together, as under His law word, they are commissioned to the end of going on quest to reconstruct all of the un-real reality around us so as to be consonant to God’s Kingdom reality. And if the sound of dominion lands to roughly upon your ears look at what I am speaking of as Christian marriages contributing to the healing of a broken world with the medicine of God’s Word.

If we were to put this in terms of a epic adventure novel, Christian Marriage is an adventure where the husband is a Knight of the Lord Christ’s round table protecting his wife and family by taking dominion over the serpent dragon who would seek to destroy Christ’s authority and Kingdom at every turn. The wife is no helpless damsel in distress but she is helping the husband to better able to demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and the advance of His Kingdom.

And so a uniquely Christian marriage looks to the Lordship of Christ in these three areas

I.) Suitability
II.) Governance by God’s Law
III.) Dominion”