Rapid Fire Against Classical Liberalism … Four Musings Attacking Liberalism

I.)

Modern Liberalism, like Classical Liberalism by definition is religiously pluralistic. Modern Liberalism insists that all the gods be allowed into the public square. Given this definition no Biblical Christian can be a liberal or can support Liberalism as a social order motif. The Biblical Christian insists that only the God of the Bible be allowed to rule in the public square. This is why chaps like Jeffrey Ventrella, Doug Wilson, Toby J. Sumpter are being disloyal to Christ. Their advocacy for a “muted pluralism,” or a “principled pluralism,” remains pluralism and is a violation of the 1st commandment.

Now, the ironic thing about all this is that Liberalism really isn’t pluralistic, though it certainly sells itself as such. The hidden secret of Pluralism and so Liberalism is that while Liberalism does ostensibly allow all the gods into the public square it is only on the condition that each of them and all of them realize that their authority is always underneath the authority of the singular God of the the social order; to wit, the State. Pluralism (Liberalism) says all the gods are invited into the social order. Pluralism (Liberalism) gives that appearance to fools but at the end of the day Liberalism is just as monotheistic as any religious forming social order you would like to name.

And this is why, for the Biblical Christian, Liberalism as a worldview has to go. Biblical Christians resolve that Classical Liberalism has to go because Classical Liberalism provides a singular God as located in the State’s authority to dictate to the God of the Bible as to how influential He is allowed to be in the public square. For the Christian to support Classical Liberalism is for the Christian to support idolatry.

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II.)

“For my part, I will start by repudiating all of these tired old forms of “post-liberalism.” Because it will not end any differently than it did the last time.”

Dr. Brian Mattson

Substack Article

One of the “tired old forms of ‘post-liberalism’ that Mattson is rejection is Nationalism. Indeed, the whole article is given over to why Nationalism is evil and how it alone is the reason for two world wars in the 20th century. Of course, in order to conclude that one has to ignore the Internationalism that was seeking to conquer the world. One has to ignore as well that a particular and unique kind of Nationalism arose in the 20th century precisely as a defensive mechanism against the Internationalism being floated by the Bolsheviks. Perhaps Mattson is right that Nationalism has killed its millions but he fails to remember that Internationalism killed its scores of millions.

Mattson sems also to forget in his article that in Genesis 11 the agenda wasn’t Nationalism but it was International Empire and that God’s solution to Babel was on one hand to scatter the effort at Internationalism while at the same time to raise up a confederation of Tribes to be a Nation that would be a light to the Gentiles. Mattson likewise seems to forget that Jesus himself sanctions nations — and by extension nationalism — when, in giving the Great Commission, He commands His Lieutenants to “Disciple the Nations.”

All this anti-Nationalism, issuing forth from Reformed-dom and Evangelicalism is a testimony to a profound misinterpretation of history as combined with a profound misinterpretation of the Scriptures. Sometimes it really seems to be the case that we are being led by the dumbest smart people the Church has ever produced.

It is interesting though, that when the topic turns to the sovereignty of Ukraine, all these post-nationalist pastors (paging Brian Mattson) suddenly become regular Garibaldis shouting “Long Live Ukraine.” Yet, according to them God hates Nationalism for White Christian descendants of Europe.

These WOKEsters laud the post-nationalism of atheists like Klaus Schwab and Pope Francis while at the same time consigning the Calvinist Viktor Orban to the Hate Bin. This is just the kind of thinking one might expect from Team Church. And herein we see the irony of it all. We may be living in a time that has never seen a bigger push towards one World Internationalism and clowns like Mattson are out there hanging on the cord of the tocsin shouting;   BEWARE NATIONALISM.

It’s hard to believe anybody is really that stupid and as such one has to
conclude that there is no reason to think that guys like Mattson aren’t ALL bought-and-paid-for WEF agents. Although since they’re Team Church, no doubt they sold their souls for a criminally meager price. On the other hand maybe they really are just that stupid after all?

Well, I hope that if they have sold their souls they at least received in the bargain a year’s supply of adrenochrome, or maybe they were just happy to know that they were practicing neighbor love. Sometimes getting people to do the right thing is satisfaction enough.

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III.)

“For simplicity’s sake, I will explain it in this way: a radical is a complete liberal in the same way that a liberal is a half-radical. A liberal is a radical stopped in his tracks. A radical is a liberal who, by virtue of suitable circumstances, was able to grow to maturity. Or, to put it even more briefly: liberalism is the seed of which radicalism is the fruit.”

Groen Van Prinsterer
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: A Refutation of Liberalism

Liberalism gives birth to Alienism inasmuch as Liberalism alienates the liberal from the idea of objective moral values as seen in the fact that consistent Liberalism allows all religions, with their varying moralities, into the public square.  If there are no objective moral values that eliminate the smorgasbord of other values then all that is left is an alienism from all else besides the sovereign autonomous self that is sovereignly determining which moral values will be embraced. As such the Liberal is alienated from any civilization/culture which does insist on objective moral values that must be bowed to by all peoples. The Liberal is alienated from any idea of transcendent truth. The Liberal is alienated from any notion of an extra-mundane God. The Liberal is alienated from reality. All that is left to the consistent Liberal is his own alienation born of the conviction of the sovereign autonomous self that there are no objective moral values. There is nowhere else to go except to an alienism that supports the Liberal’s instinct that there is no objective moral order to call home.

This leads me to conclude that the idea that Magistrates are not supposed to legislate/teach/require morals and instead just allow people to be free to pursue whatever morality they like (Classical Liberalism) has to be the greatest engine for Atheism ever developed.

As a Christian I am duty bound to oppose living in a pluralistic “free society” that allows for all faiths to ply their wares.

As a Christian, I am against Classical Liberalism.

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IV.)

Should Christians desire to win the culture wars against the WOKE cultural Marxists crowd they have to be done with classical liberalism as a worldview and embrace censorship once in power while suppressing ideologies, organizations, and persons who would subvert the Christian vision. In short Christians must practice cancel culture just as is prescribed in God’s Word. In God’s Word if someone, for example, committed a sexual crime their life was canceled. This kind of mindset must be take up again by Christians if they are to defeat those who would practice cancel culture by seeking to economically and personally destroy those who oppose sexual perversion.

The idea of absolute freedom of speech has never been practiced in American History. Early American communities has crimes against taking God’s name in vain. Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchel Palmer threw known communists out of America because of their radical speech and actions that were attempt to overthrow American interests. And today it is no different. Political Correctness does not champion an expansion of free speech. Political Correctness instead exchanges one contextual inhabitation wherein a certain kind of Christian speech dwells for a different contextual inhabitation wherein a certain kind of anti-Christian speech and behavior can dwell. Think of Political Correctness not as broadening the standard for free speech and liberty but rather as introducing a new anti-standard standard for free speech and licentiousness.

To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton we must seek to censor “the thought that stops thought.” We must give up classical liberalism (which was always a myth) and embrace once again God’s Law as the norm that norms all speech and behavior norms.

Now, some will think this sounds harsh and even, dare say it, Puritanical, but keep in mind that this is exactly what is being done to the Christian sense of proper speech, liberty, and decency by the anti-Christ left to the Christian. The anti-Chris left has succeeded in ushering in a liberty that finds kiddies being brought before perverts in order to hear the perverts read during Drag Queen Story Hour. The anti-Christ left has succeeded in brining an “expanded standard” that allows teenage boys to use the girls locker-rooms while the teenage girls are changing. The anti-Christ left has succeeded in shutting down speech that opposes these kinds of things from happening.

Is freedom of speech as wrongly absolutized really something that Christians want to support if it leads to where we are at? We must turn the censoring tables on the enemy. We must quit with the freedom of speech nonsense and begin to censor our enemies just as our Fathers did before us.

The culture war will not be won by aligning with Libertarian who, at least according to their principles have to allow every speech and behavior under the sun (as if that were possible).

If Christians who fancy themselves biblical and so conservative hope to recover anything akin to standards that they need not be embarrassed by then must not only articulate a moral and political vision that are wholesome by God’s standard but they also must suppress and censor and practice cancel culture on individuals, ideologies, organizations, and institutions that subvert our Christian vision.

CREC Libertarian Pastors Who Insist They Are Theonomists; Sumpter & Wilson

“Tucker Carlson says that there is no Nicene Creed of capitalism, and that’s true enough, but there is a Nicene Creed that says that God is the ‘Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible….’ Invisible things would include market forces, the creativity and ingenuity of men, as well as their created needs and desires. Until or unless God gives a government the authority to step in, it is a violation of the Nicene Creed to grasp power for yourself and violently and coercively prohibit the free actions and creativity of people made in the image of God.”

Rev. Toby Sumpter

1.) Has anybody in all of Church history since the Nicene Creed was developed ever used the Nicene Creed to prove that Capitalism (particularly the Corporatism Capitalism that we are currently living under) is God’s preferred economic order? Honestly, this is such a stretch I can’t believe that people don’t die of embarrassment just reading it. Let me guess… the Council of Chalcedon also proves that minimum wage laws are unbiblical.

Look, I’m a Biblical Capitalist (as opposed to the Crony Capitalism we now have) but I would never try to use the Nicene Creed to support my position.

2.) Technically market forces are not invisible. Market forces are very visible inasmuch as they are merely the decisions made by very visible people.

3.) “It is a violation of the Nicene Creed (by the Government) to grasp power for yourself and violently and coercively prohibit the free actions and creativity of people made in the image of God?” Really? If Sumpter is correct here (and he most certainly is not correct) then it would be a violation of the Nicene creed for the FEDS to craft laws prohibiting illegal immigration. After all laws protecting our country from illegal immigrants certainly prohibits the free actions and creativity of people made in the image of God. This is pure Libertarianism and not Theonomic in the least. Sumpter, like his mentor, Doug Wilson are Libertarians posing as Theonomists.

Clearly, Sumpter’s argument here is specious. A real theonomist like Rushdoony argued very differently about the Government making laws violently and coercively prohibiting the free actions and creativity of people made in the image of God. RJR offered,

“Well, first of all illegal aliens have broken the law. And justice to everyone requires that the law be upheld. So if they are illegal aliens they should be deported. Now that’s justice because it’s comparable to breaking and entering into a man’s house.”

Elsewhere the wise pastor Toby Sumpter writes,

“Others have suggested taking over the public schools and turning them into explicitly Christian schools funded by tax dollars and run by departments of education. All of which, I repeat, gives me the creeping fantods. ”

First, of all let it be noted that Biblical Christians would prefer for the public (government) schools to just be closed down with the responsibility of rearing children returned to the parents as opposed to being taken over by the Humanist state. However, failing that Sumpter should consider;

1.) Clearly  Sumpter doesn’t think neutrality is a myth. Sumpter seems to think that public schools can somehow be religious free and therefore they should not be Christian. Sumpter thinks, so it seems, that it is wrong for Christians to take Dominion over the public schools under the banner of Christ.

2.) Does Sumpter get the creeping fantods over the fact that the schools now are explicitly Humanists schools funded by tax dollars and run by departments of education?

You have a choice Dude. Either the Government schools are Christian or they are Pagan. Choose ye this day whom you will serve, either the gods of the pagans or the God of the Bible. This Libertarian smegma is not theonomy.

And here we find another example of creeping Libertarianism masquerading as theonomy coming from Rev. Doug Wilson.

“Christians must learn to distinguish sins from crimes. If God reveals His will on a matter, disobedience is sin. If God reveals the civil penalty which must be applied, then it is also a crime. But without wisdom from Him on the civil penalty to be applied, the civil order must leave enforcement of God’s law to the church, family, or the providence of God….when pornography is made and distributed, it should simply be used as evidence — of the adultery or of the sodomy, etc.”

Rev. Doug Wilson

Here Wilson is arguing that porn should not be criminalized by the State. It can be used as evidence in particular instances but it, itself should not be criminalized.

In his analogy between adultery/pornography and theft/movies which show theft, Wilson laments,

“Why do we resist punishing what God requires punishment for, and insist on punishments found nowhere in Scripture?”

“Cyberporn: A Case Study”
Credenda/Agenda_, vol. 7, no. 5, p. 11
It bears mentioning that not all modern Theonomists agree with Wilson that pornography is not a crime. For example, R. J. Rushdoony states;

“the link between pornography and revolutionary totalitarianism is a necessary one. The rise of totalitarianism has always been preceded by moral anarchism… the politics of pornography is a moral anarchism whose purpose is revolution, a revolution against Christian civilization. . . . Certainly new and clearer legislation [against porn — BLM] is necessary and urgently needed. . . we need and must have sound legislation”

Law and Liberty, pp. 18-20

In case you are not already aware there are serious problems today in what is left of Institutional Theonomy. Wilson and the CREC crowd might should just be called “the Cringe Crowd.” Gary DeMar over at American Vision has embraced full on Full Preterism. Sandlin is a ship that has no rutter. I seriously doubt the goofballs at Joel McDurmon’s “Baal’s Reign” even want to be known as theonomists.  Indeed, it would not be going to far to say Institutional Theonomy is dead were not for the work that Dr. Adi Schlebusch is doing at the Pactum Institute.

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends; Dan Brannan — “The Library, Liberty & Lies”

Granted, subversive books aimed at kids are nothing new. The works of Shel Silverstein, Maurice Sendak, and Dr. Seuss soft-pedaled socialism and moral relativism to kids from the mid-20th century forward. And J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was standard curriculum in high schools from the 60s to the 80s despite simultaneously being the most banned book of the era.

Nevertheless, parents still imputed innocence to children’s books as a medium, and took for granted that the library remained a relatively safe institution for kids. What can I say? Naivete is a stubborn thing.

Cognitive dissonance began to evaporate however, with revelations of teachers leading elementary students in talks about kink, all things LGBT+ (Take a wild guess at what the + means.), and demonstrations with sex toys, which apparently came as a package deal with gender neutral restrooms and schools covering for crossdressers raping girls therein. So, when our libraries began arranging face-to-face liaisons between queer exhibitionists and children for the express purpose of desensitizing kids, parents were able to acknowledge it for what it is – organized Predation.

Eyes opening to the agenda, parents began to notice that the library shelves – the children’s and teens’ sections in particular – had become a devils’ buffet of XXX pornography, and LGBT-grooming materials. To say nothing of anti-Western, anti-Father, anti-Family, anti-White, and anti-Christian propaganda found in abundance there now.

Adding insult to injury, when parents objected, they were smeared as “un-American,” “book-burners,” and “Fascists,” hellbent on depriving children of works of mathematics, science, history, etc. Over against which, the predators and their enablers comically declared themselves the champions of Free Speech, Constitutionalism, and Americanism.

Keep in mind, these Leftwing “champions of free speech” are the same people who, up to present, are banning, purging, redacting, or otherwise suppressing every significant work written prior to 1950. Remember Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Harris’s stories of Uncle Remus? Orwell’s 1984? These are all on a constant seesaw of banned status.

Shakespeare has been revised, and intermittently banned. Why, this very morning they are applauding the PC redaction of works by Roald Dahl as well as Fleming’s James Bond books! The virtual whole of the Western canon is under revision by the very people now boasting themselves the champions of free speech. It seems they only don that mantle when pedophile porn is at stake.

Where the Right, including the authors of the 1st amendment, have always conceived the bounds of free speech at matters of indecency, blasphemy, and calls for criminal acts against persons or property, the Left suppresses speech in regard to virtually everything else. “The personal is political” is a 60s radical slogan which assumes all forms of sexual deviance to be sacrosanct; and any speech which might offend the deviant – all standards of the good, the true, and the beautiful – must be suppressed by government bootheel. Survey Leftist regimes around the world and what you find uniformly, is rigid control of speech pertaining to just about everything. All under the auspices of fighting “hate speech,” of course. This despite the fact that ‘hate speech’ means nothing more or less than speech Leftists hate; and this concept is invariably wielded as a terror-weapon against the people Leftists hate.

Thankfully, to date, no such concept is recognized in American law, because the SCOTUS still acknowledges that so-called ‘hate speech’ is both unquantifiable, and antithetical to the 1st amendment. Heedless of all these facts, the Left takes ‘hate speech’ as a given; and that, as pretext against all truths they find inconvenient. Which, as confirmed by their own track record, necessarily touches every subject.

Per their rejection of revealed morality, they see nothing as a sin so long as it serves their cause. A fact summed up in another of their cherished slogans, “By whatever means necessary.”

Hence the timeline of their argument in the library matter:

– “There’s no such thing as pornographic children’s books or LGBT recruitment materials aimed at kids. It’s a Rightwing myth.”

– “Okay, maybe they exist, but there is no such material in our libraries.”

– “Okay, even if it’s in the library, it isn’t available to children, only adults.”

– “Okay, the Young Adult (YA) category applies to children as young as 12, but it isn’t pushed or prominently displayed to children.”

– “Okay, it is pushed and prominently displayed to kids, but checking it out is still at the parents’ discretion.”

– “Okay, we don’t actually inform parents of grooming content in YA books, but it isn’t the library’s responsibility to parent your children or inform you of the contents of every book.”

– “But that doesn’t mean parents can decide what’s inappropriate material for children. That’s the library’s decision.”

– “Afterall, banning sexual content aimed at children is contrary to the 1st amendment. Only Fascists do that.”

Debauchery aside, they simply do not argue in good faith. Because their worldview precludes the possibility.

As covered, the Right has a habit of deluding ourselves on this point too. Acknowledging that men are created in the image of God with rational faculties beholden to absolute truth, coherence, and virtue, we often mistakenly impute our values to our opponents.

We have also taken for granted that the benevolence of the public library, as a concept, so presupposed the unity of truth and virtue that even those of an antithetical worldview would be compelled to the same standards.

Moreover, the Right has tended to take for granted that safeguarding the innocence of children was a value held by all but the smallest margin of reprobates. But both in theory and practice, our opponents testify to the contrary.

More are awakening to the fact, however, that the library, as a repository of narrative, was an inevitable front in the culture war. And the impetus for that battle is that those running the institution now repudiate all of its conceptual underpinnings.

We must not forget that the institution originated with the church libraries of the American colonies. Which were, personal collections aside, the only libraries at the time. And in the early 1700s Christian ministers began opening their libraries beyond their respective congregations, for provincial use. And they described this new institution, the public library, and its reason for being, as a “charitable Christian mission” and a matter of “civic piety.”

Even the most metropolitan example – the famed New York Public Library – was launched entirely with collections donated by Christian ministers and funding by The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

Which is to say that those now framing the debate as between an innately “secular” institution on one side, and interloping Christian Authoritarians on the other, are only repudiating the whole conceptual basis for the Public Library.

Those insisting that the library is a foil against the Christian world order wind up only undermining the foundation of their own house.

To spurn universal (Latin, uni versa, lit. “first verse” a la Genesis 1:1) truth and revealed morality in favor of convention, they can defer only to majorities, expertise (which always means licensure or dictatorial elitism), or even sillier excuses like “it’s the current year.”

And this unmoored thinking results, as it must, in most erratic sophistry: when they believe themselves in the majority, they contemptuously mock any who would protect children as “fringe,” “extremists,” “a backward, outcast minority.” But when they assume themselves the minority, they spin on a dime, claiming to be besieged rebels standing against the “privileged majority culture of Patriarchal White Christian Supremacy.” Between these two extremes they whirl like dervishes, either insensate, or unashamed of their rank hypocrisy.

Unmoored from objective truth, all their wild vacillations come down to one thing though: appetite. Which is to say that after all the excuses are cleared away, what remains is the fact that they are desperate to sexually groom children.

For many, this appetite may not be libidinous interest per se, but rather, “virtue signaling” – a desperation to identify with the system, celebrities, and/or the menagerie of deviants. And, of course, there are those for whom it is in fact, sexual. But pervading all is hostility toward objective morality, and God back of it.

Which is why they find the innocence of children so offensive. It indicts those who have embraced perversion as their identity. And it’s not just me saying this. Articles abound in mainstream journals, magazines, and newspaper editorials explicitly condemning childhood innocence as “privilege,” “a social construct,” “White Supremacy,” and “Christo-fascism.” Thus they openly confess that they are offended by childhood innocence, and feel that corruption is the only remedy.

Having thus rejected the sacrificial atonement provided by God in Christ, the process of corrupting children takes on a religious function as an alternative sacrifice of innocence.

What we face here is not ultimately a political party, or an interest group, but a sex cult. Complete with its own doctrine of original sin, reprobation, sacraments, and priesthood. One whose doctrine of salvation is found in the sacrifice and corruption of children.

And make no mistake, in terms of parental consent, as well as the STDs, drug use, prodigious rates of domestic violence, and suicide rates attendant to the LGBT+ lifestyle, it is a blood sacrifice.

Civilized people do not abide this sort of evil. God save the children

McAtee Analyzes Quote From “Conversations that Matter,” touching Soft-WOKE Churches

As long as seminaries fail to teach what the Bible assumes about nations and gender we will continue to have soft-woke pastors who think they’re just being biblical because “imago dei = egalitarianism” “every tribe, tongue, and nation = local church diversity telos” and “women can’t be in pastoral office = they can have any other leadership.”

The created order the authors of Scripture presumed is now universally forgotten in favor of blank-slate biblicalism.

We need history. We need reason. We need tradition. Not as final authorities but as tools and fences.

Conversations That Matter

1.) I’m sorry, but this not soft WOKEism. This is hard WOKEism. We have gotten so used to WOKE we ourselves are willing to call hard WOKE, “Soft WOKE.” Now, to be sure, doubtless there are even greater degrees of “WOKEness” but lets not allow ourselves to believe that the above is “Soft WOKE.” Churches and ministers that are that kind of WOKE should be abandoned with the purpose of saving your own soul.

2.) Of course Blank-slate Biblicalism is a non-thing. They really are not blank slate but are starting with WOKE presuppositions on their slate and so are finding it confirmed in Scripture. The problem is not that they are really “Blank-slate.” That is impossible. The problem is that their slate has scribbled all over it anti-Christ presuppositions.

3.) History, reason, and tradition are only as good as the theology they presuppose. They can not exist independently of theology. Our problem is not that we do not have history, reason, or tradition. Our problem is that Christian theology is not informing our history, reason, and tradition. Instead an alien theology is informing what we call “history,” “reason,” and “tradition.” History, reason, and tradition never exist independent of some a-priori theology. Therefore if history, reason, and tradition are going to help us at all we have to get our theology right, and we have to start explicitly connecting the dots between our history, reason, and tradition and our Biblical theology. If we don’t make those connections then history, reason, and tradition will not and can not serve as tools and fences.

4.) It is true that history, reason, and tradition can be tools but they are only useful tools if we see the connection between our history, reason, and tradition, and the theology that of which they are expressions.

 

McAtee Contra Littlejohn

“The fact is that “race” is largely a constructed category, with infinite variations of genetic difference across the whole glorious spectrum of the one human race. Whatever differences that millennia of in-marriage might have produced between South Koreans and West Africans, they can be dissolved in just one generation by the loving marital union of a Korean man and a Liberian woman.”

Brad Littlejohn

Online Article – Nationalism must reject Racism

1.) Keep in mind that Littlejohn insists that “Racism” must be rejected and yet he never gives a definition in this article as to what “racism” is so that we can reject it. Frankly, the word “racism” has just become a scare word invoked in order to defeat a Biblical Christian/conservative.

2.) Nobody ever talked about race being “largely a constructed category” until Franz Boas came along in the 1930s. Boas was one of the Fathers of Cultural Marxism. In my estimation Littlejohn (and his Davenant Institute) has adopted one of the planks of Cultural Marxism by insisting that race is a largely constructed category. Try telling a bi-racial patient waiting for a bone marrow transplant that race is a largely constructed category.

3.) It is the height of ignorance to claim that one marriage between a South Korean and a West-African can be dissolved in one generation by one marriage between a male and a female from each people. First, we have to assume that this marriage does not end in divorce, which miscegenated marriages, statistically speaking, more often do end. Second, we have to assume that the offspring of said union will find a way to fit in. One of the key founders of the Presbyterian Church of America warned about this;

“No human can measure the anguish of personality that goes on within the children of miscegenation… Let those who would erase the racial diversity of God’s creation beware lest the consequence of their evil be visited upon their children.”

John Edwards Richards

One of the founders of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)

Littlejohn in this article is merely seeking to sanctify one of the main tenets of Cultural Marxism. He should be called out on it.