Transforming Christians to Transform Culture

Cultural Hegemony: Roots of Western Leftist Domination

Posted on September 3, 2016
gram

 

Many middle-age and older Americans of a conservative bent, Christian or not, must sometimes scratch their head in wonder at what has become of their nation and its culture over the last 50 years. All generations seem to lament the losses of their youth and the past, but there is objective evidence that the present generation has departed radically from the civilizational truths and mores of even the comparatively recent past. Think only of the legal redefinition of marriage to include two persons of the same sex, a scenario never occurring anywhere in the history of the world until recent times. Changes like these did not emerge out of thin air; they were planned.

Students of the history of ideas are especially interested in the genealogy of widely accepted ideas in today’s world. To understand the roots of Western Leftist domination, it’s important to know about the Italian revisionist Marxist Antonio Gramsci.[1] Almost every leading feature of Leftism in the modern world (and Leftism is almost identical to Libertarian Marxism, an expression I use to describe the philosophy undergirding the dominant social vision of our time) we can find in Gramsci.

Gramsci was a hunchback born in Sardinia. He was a dedicated Marxist and a contemporary of both Lenin and Stalin. He lived for a time in Moscow. He was later jailed until his death by Mussolini’s fascist regime, but was given freedom to read and write. His prison writings in particular lay the groundwork for Libertarian Marxism. His views are more important to us than Marx’s. No thinker had a greater impact on Asian and Eastern Europe in the 20th century than Marx. The Communist states are a testimony to this fact. But this isn’t true about Western democracies. In France and Germany and England and the United States, Gramsci’s ideas shaped the Leftist elite.

 

Marxism, Western-style

 

Gramsci agreed with Marx and the Communists in their atheism, socialism, and statism. But he felt they didn’t go far enough. In any case, the Communist ways wouldn’t work in the West. For Marx, the important goal was equalizing material conditions. All of life is at root economic, and nothing else. Everything else is just an expression of economic need and desire, even if it looks very un-economic. For instance, ideas and the state are simply tools of the ruling class’s economic interests. The goal is to capture the state in order to create the economically equal society. Then even the state would be unnecessary, and all could live together in peace and harmony, sharing all economic resources. This never happened in any Marxist society, of course, but that was what Marx predicted and wanted.

Antieconomic Marxism

Gramsci was a more profound cultural thinker than Marx, who was a philosopher and economist. For Gramsci, not just economics, but everything in culture should be equalized. Gramsci believed that Marx fell short. Oppression isn’t just economic; it’s cultural. Therefore, what was needed wasn’t just a liberationist economics but a liberationist culture in toto. After spending time in Moscow, Gramsci decided that since “radically different conditions prevailed in western Europe . . . a fundamentally different strategy for revolution [was necessary] in the west” (145). He was an “antieconomic Marxist” (39, 56). This Gramscian revolution is succeeding in the West where Communism failed. Libertarian, not Communist, Marxism is becoming the victor.

 

Cultural transformation

 

Gramsci believed that if you capture the culture, the state would be unnecessary. The state only enforces what the culture should dictate. If almost everybody buys into the culture, you don’t need political coercion. Though he didn’t invent this language, Gramsci was one of the first to grasp that politics is downstream from culture.[2]

The Leninist-Stalinist Communists were committed to overthrowing the alleged unjust order by force. For Gramsci, you overthrow the unjust order by capturing culture and its institutions: art, music, education, science, literature, religion, technology, music. Even the choice of grammar is a political act. When you note that the sword “gender” has replaced “sex” in common discourse as a result of Leftist feminism,[3] you are seeing the victory of Gramsci.

You don’t impose the just order; you create it. The new politics wins not by force but by worldview. His opposition to fascism, however, was not that it was tyrannical but that it did not revolutionize culture. The important thing isn’t power by a few at the top; it’s transforming an entire culture.

The long march through the institutions

For Gramsci, the way to win in the West is by incremental cultural gains. He called it “the war of position” (256–257), analogous to trench warfare. The revolutionaries take one cultural sphere after another, until they control all of society. This is the root of his famous “long march through the institutions” line.  Political coups, seizing power by seizing the state through force of arms, is not likely to work in the West. The West is committed to peaceful political transfers of power by democratic elections. You don’t change the culture by capturing politics; you capture politics by changing culture. Gramsci popularized the word “hegemony,” which is cultural dominance. Particularly when we hear about “cultural hegemony,” we’re hearing the echoes of Gramsci. “To create a counter-hegemony was the revolution’s first task” (30). It’s not a counter-politics; it’s truly a counterculture. Better yet, a new culture replaces the old one. Culture goes where politics cannot. Its change is therefore deeper and more permanent.

 

Leveling of hierarchies

 

For Gramsci the fundamental cultural change that was needed was the destruction of hierarchies. He hated hierarchies. As a hunchback, he suffered ridicule and exclusion. He turned his private grievances into a cultural philosophy. No person is better than another — and no person should be permitted esteem higher than another. Classes in society, the wealthy above the poor, the master above the slave, the freeman above the prisoner, the healthy above the unhealthy, the aristocrats above the commoners, men above women, the intellectuals above the less mentally gifted, the Italians above the Sardinians — any class or group that has been excluded from honor and esteem and leadership must be included. Gramsci was the self-appointed champion of the marginalized and outcast. Gramsci believed that the marginalized, led by intellectuals who tap into their plight, should gradually reshape the culture such that they become the insiders, and rip down the hierarchies that oppress them.

His objective is to abolish all privilege, not just economic privilege, as Marx suggested. The marginalized must “rouse themselves to bring down the entire hierarchical system that has prevailed in various forms from the beginning of civilization” (68). He completely redefined morality to mean exalting the excluded. He himself was sexually immoral in Christian terms, but Christianity doesn’t matter, so his morality was exhibited in his cultural project. It was one of the first examples of the so-called New Morality.

The notion that the world is what it is because God created it that way — that men are men and women are women, for example, because of creational law — is an illusion serving the interests of the privileged classes. There’s no God to whom to appeal. Present differences that privilege some and de-privilege others are simply matters of the human will. Just as these present differences were created by the human will, so they can — and must and should — be abolished by the human will. The de-privileged are to be liberated from their marginalized existence. Now you know where the great liberation movements of the 20th century — women’s liberation, black liberation, gay liberation, children’s liberation — really come from: they owe their ideological roots to Gramsci.

Bringing low the culturally privileged

But it’s more than liberation Gramsci envisions. He advocated turning the tables culturally. Gramsci wasn’t just about “inclusion.” He advocated the “periphery-centered society” (179). Those who were formerly privileged must be de-privileged. The upper crust must feel the pain of the marginalization and misery of the formerly oppressed. The oppressed must rule over their oppressors. When today we observe vocal homosexuals becoming prominent CEO’s while simultaneously Christians are fined for standing for biblical sexual ethics; when we see the normalization of families in which wives provide all the income and husbands stay home to care for the children and children dictate the family choices; when we encounter college professors forced to attend sensitivity training classes for offending the sensibilities of millennial students, we see on graphic display the spirit of Gramsci.

Replacing Christendom

The chief hierarchy that must be leveled, however, is Christianity. Christian culture has pervaded the West. It privileged some and de-privileged others. The Gramscian program necessitated the replacement of Christendom with the new radically secular order, in Gramsci’s words, “a complete secularization of all of life and of customary relationships” (260).

Liberation doesn’t just mean leveling hierarchies; it means the underprivileged rule. It means establishing a new hierarchy under the guise of compassionate equality.

Redefining normality

This project means it will be necessary to redefine common sense and even normality. What is considered normal today must be considered abnormal tomorrow. If it’s common sense to believe that men are different form women, that sense must become uncommon. If it’s normal to be heterosexual and abnormal to be homosexual, normality must change. Homosexuality must be normalized and heterosexuality de-normalized. The gays are cool are the straights are weird. This is Gramsci with a vengeance.

 

Individual transformation

 

To accomplish this momentous feat, nothing less than a new kind of individual is needed. “Gramsci makes it clear that real change can come about only through an intellectual and moral transformation of consciousness.”[4] He knows that his project is so massive that ordinary means won’t accomplish it. He needs something extraordinary to get it done.

The Bible teaches that sin is so deeply imbedded in man that God must supernaturally remove it (incrementally) by regeneration: the Holy Spirit must resurrect our dead spirit. God transforms the individual. Gramsci redefines sin as cultural hierarchies, and that sin is so deep that ordinary means can’t abolish it. Only a massive education campaign by a dogged act of the will, spearheaded by intellectuals, can do this. In Gramsci’s cultural program, man transforms the individual, “to remake the concept of man” (238). The final goal for society is “a shared mental universe” (256). All of us must be embracing the same egalitarian ideals, “above all . . . develop[ing] an alternative vision of the good society” (153).

Angelo Codevilla[5] suggests that for Gramsci, this vision is potentially both sinister and powerful because it tries to win by bypassing cultural conflict. Gramsci “advocated mostly nonviolent cultural hegemony [and] urged Communists to act as if alien ideas did not exist.”[6] Codevilla notes intriguingly that if the Libertarian Marxists had followed Gramsci fully, they would never have launched a culture war by enlisting the state to enforce their dictates. Rather, they would have tried quietly to capture society one sphere at a time. As long as there is a culture war, Gramsci’s full vision cannot be realized. It’s when the Libertarian Marxists get their enemies (us) to buy into their premises that they have truly and finally won. This is why the subversion of the church today (for example) is so sinister: it’s so much easier to convince your enemy than to crush him.

If Christians and conservatives were to be peacefully convinced of Libertarian Marxism, Gramsci would have finally won.

[1] For this entire section I am greatly indebted to Dante Germino, Antonio Gramsci — Architect of a New Politics (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). I could have added footnotes to specific assertions that are entirely reliant on Germino’s extensive research, but there would be so many that they would have unnecessarily cluttered the text. For specific quotes, I have included the page number.
[2] It was apparently invented by Don Eberly. See William B. Wichterman, “The Culture: ‘Upstream’ from Politics,” in Building a Healthy Culture, Don Eberly, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 77.
[3] Gabriele Kuby, The Global Sexual Revolution (Kettering, Ohio: Angelico, 2015), 44.
[4] John Fonte, “Antonio Gramsci and the Transformation of Institutions,” in Building a Healthy Culture, Don Eberly, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 204.
[5] Angelo M. Codevilla, “Cultural Hegemony, Gramsci, and Political Correctness,” private manuscript to be published in the fall 2016 edition of Claremont Review of Books.
[6] Angelo M. Codevilla, The Character of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 97.

Repressive Tolerance

Posted on August 27, 2016
Marcuse

 

In understanding the intellectual development of the great social vision of our time, Cultural or Libertarian Marxism, it’s imperative to know about Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was a German Marxist and part of the so-called Frankfurt School, committed to Critical Theory.[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer and Marcuse were Marxists who wanted to adapt Marxism to Western societies, and transplanted their modified Marxism to the campuses of the U.S. after fleeing Nazi Germany. Their views inspired the New Left of the 60’s and from their elite perch have filtered down to American culture. Marcuse’s view of repressive tolerance is at the heart of that cultural subversion, and it has become a linchpin of the Left in our day.

 

Hatred for classical liberalism

 

Like all other good Communists, Marcuse hated classical liberalism. By classical liberalism I mean the political philosophy that developed gradually in England from the Magna Carta and was transported to England’s colonies, the largest of which became the United States. Classical liberalism (not to be confused with modern liberalism) was shaped by Christianity. The Roman Church bequeathed to it the independence of the church from the state. In the ancient world, the state pervaded all of society. The Western church demanded, and got, independence. It broke the monopoly of the state’s authority. Second, Protestantism contributed liberty of conscience. Politically, this meant creating a zone of privacy around the individual. In turn, this generated individual rights, enshrined in bills of rights. Classical liberalism is marked by religious liberty, individual liberty, economic liberty, separation of powers, checks and balances, constitutions, and the rule of law. It generated the glories of the British Empire as well as the prestige and prominence of the United States. Most significantly, it created societies in which families and churches are free to live within the boundaries of the rule of law. Classical liberalism means maximum, law-based liberty for citizens.

For Marxists like Marcuse, that’s the problem. When you have that kind of liberty, some people and groups flourish and some do not. Some are rich, others poor, and most somewhere in between. Churches and families can reward and punish members. Businesses can establish policies preferring one kind of individual over another. Classically liberal society creates equality under the law. But equality under the law does not lead to equal results. It brings out the latent inequalities in humans. Some are wiser or smarter. Others are lazy and procrastinating. Some are intelligent and some are not. Some are born into wealthy families and some are born into poor families. It is this latent inequality of the human condition permitted by classical liberalism that Marxists simply cannot abide. For classical Marxists, the issue is economic inequality. But for the Libertarian Marxists like Marcuse, it is inequality across the board.

 

Two kinds of tolerance, two kinds of repression

 

Marcuse offered an ominous counterproposal. It’s expressed in his (in)famous 1965 Brandeis University lecture titled, “Repressive Tolerance.”[2] He means by this the tolerance within classically liberal societies like the United States and England. These societies do not guarantee equality of results (people getting the same wealth, acceptance and prominence), only the equality of processes (everybody is treated the same under the law). Therefore, classically liberal societies are repressive. By allowing individuals and families and churches the liberty to live their lives, these societies create the conditions that foster inequality. So, actually, according to Marcuse, they are repressing individuals who are entitled to equality even while these societies loudly champion tolerance.[3]

Marcuse’s solution is to create an entirely different kind of society. You can’t talk about tolerance objectively across societies. You can only talk about tolerance within a particular (kind of) society. In other words, he is after a different kind of tolerance than we have known in classically liberal societies. But how do you get there from here? For Marcuse, people looking for the just society, led by the elite like him, must reeducate an entire culture. But the presupposition for this reeducation is the repression of, and intolerance towards, all of those elements that would guarantee classical liberalism. Consider this long quote:

 

Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior ….

Earlier he wrote:

 

[T]olerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation. Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private [!] religion. But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.[4]

 

Marcuse is saying that, by their very nature, democracies allow their own subversion by a subversive majority, who are opposing the inherent oppression of society. If there are impediments to the subversion, the way to get rid of them is to undemocratically silence them. The people he has in mind, of course, are the people who oppose the subversive program: classical liberals, Christians, modern conservatives, and so forth. This means that the subversives should loudly demand their right to free speech while denying free speech to people who oppose them. Sound familiar?

 

De-stabilizing language

 

Marcuse understands the importance of language in this program of subversion. The meaning of words must be destabilized. If you can destabilize words, you can destabilize the culture. If you can convince women that abortion is all about “choice,” and not about killing, it’s much easier to legalize abortion. If you can get people to refer to homosexuality as an issue of “equality” rather than subversion of the family, you can legalize homosexual “marriage.” The goal, according to Marcuse, is to “break the established universe of meaning.”[5] Marcuse is a linguistic nihilist: the common meaning must be destroyed to make way for new meaning in a new culture.

 

Pre-censorship

 

Nor is it’s simply a matter of repressing the speech of your cultural enemies. You must also censor their thoughts. In Marcuse’s words, the work of cultural subversion “must begin with stopping the words and images which feed this [opposing] consciousness. To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship ….”[6] The subversives must eliminate words and images that reinforce and preserve classical liberalism. For instance, images of aborted pre-born children must not be allowed. Words like “crazy,” “insane,” “retarded,” “gay,” “tyranny,” “gypped,” and “illegal alien,” must be purged.[7] There must be no such thing as academic freedom as classical liberalism understands it. There must be only the freedom to indoctrinate students in the just society. In other words, freedom, just like tolerance, must be defined differently in the Libertarian Marxist society than in societies like England and America, shaped by Christian truth.

The intellectual elites lead this campaign of subversion. The culture suffers from “false consciousness” out of which it must be educated. This is the job of the intellectual elites: to lead the benighted masses away from their false consciousness of classical liberalism that fosters individual and religious freedom and, instead, lead them to abolish this freedom to produce the egalitarian society. This is the secular, statist, egalitarian society for which today’s radical Leftists are working.[8]

 

Revolutionary violence

 

And, if necessary, education and indoctrination must be supplemented by revolutionary violence. Marcuse is quite clear about this. He refuses to posit a moral equivalence between the violence perpetrated by classical liberals and the violence committed by subversives. The former is evil; the latter is justified. In fact, he argues that since history is not made by ethics, ethics are of no importance. In other words, might makes right. The ends justify the means. He writes that oppressed minorities — and this means people who lack wealth or prestige or acceptance — have the right to extralegal violence if they exhaust all legal means. No one has a right to judge them immoral or unethical. (Think: Black Lives Matter and the call to kill cops.) Marcuse offered a program for annihilating Christian culture and classical liberalism and replacing it with Libertarian Marxism. He had takers.

Those takers became college professors and journalists and foundation presidents and “community organizers” and artists and musicians. They have wielded massive influence on the West from 1960-2016. Their vision is the commanding social vision of our time, working out its implications right before our eyes.

To create Christian culture, Christians must vanquish that vision.

[1] Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2015).
[2] Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, eds. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 81–117.
[3] On these differing and mutually exclusive visions of justice and equality, see Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 121–203.
[4] Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 100–101, 88.
[5] Ibid., 98.
[6] Ibid., 111.
[7] Samantha Audia, “Public university spends $16K on campaign to warn students to watch what they say,” http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/21174/, accessed August 23, 2016.
[8] On the totalitarian propensity of Leftists, see Richard Wolin. The Seduction of Unreason (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004).

The Secular Regime

Posted on August 18, 2016
secular-believers

 

We live in a radically and increasingly secular society. This secularization has several prominent historical roots, and it would be reductionist to attribute it to only factor. My point isn’t so much to offer a genealogy, however, but a brief diagnosis.

First, we need to know what secularism is.

Secularism Defined

Secularization doesn’t mean that people no longer believe in God. It means that people no longer believe that God has any interest in culture. “[T]he process of secularization,” states Christopher Dawson, “arises not from the loss of faith but from the loss of social interest in the world of faith. It begins the moment men feel that religion is irrelevant to the common way of life and that society as such has nothing to do with the truths of faith.”[1] It’s possible for many people in a society to believe in God and Christianity and still live in a secular society. This is precisely the case in the West, and even in North America. Secularization isn’t the conviction that God doesn’t exist (it isn’t the same as theoretical atheism). It’s the idea that God doesn’t exist in any influential way in a society. Cultural secularists are rarely interested in what we’d call metaphysical issues; they just don’t want God or any religion crimping their style, and especially their sex lives. Secularization is the abolition of the Triune God from everywhere except between anybody’s two ears or, at best, the family, and the church between 10:00 a.m. and noon on Sunday. Secularization means that God and Christianity simply have no official or formal bearing (and have, in fact, practically no bearing at all) on politics, education, art, science, architecture, music, technology, media and so on.

Plausibility Structure

This secularism has created a massive plausibility structure. By that I mean, it has remanded Christian truth as culturally relevant to the far reaches of society. It has de-privileged Christian discourse. It has ruled it not wrong, but simply out of bounds. Secularism is a faith so widespread that it no longer needs to be defended or even promoted tenaciously. Almost everybody holds it, and to believe differently is not so much to be opposed as to be ignored. Racial equality (for example) is part of our plausibility structure (it also happens to be biblically correct). People today in the West who claim that Whites or Asians are superior to Blacks or Hispanics aren’t persecuted; they are ignored as kooks and cranks. Yet 250 years ago, this was an idea that was hotly disputed in the populace, including by educated elites. By contrast, if you say today that marijuana should be legalized, you’ll get a real fight on your hands. That’s because pot legalization is not a segment of the plausibility structure like racial equality is.

Secularization is one of the great plausibility structures of our time, and perhaps the chief one. If you contend that Christianity in the West should govern science and music and politics and education and sports and architecture and music (say, like it did 400 years ago), people will say, in effect, “This is the kind of arrangement they have in Islamic societies; nobody here believes that. Please get a life and leave the rest of us alone. You’re delusional. Do you also believe in the tooth fairy?” The fact that it is secularists who would have been deemed delusional 400 years ago shows how plausibility structures can change dramatically over time. In 1613 Christian culture was the rule. In 2013 it is not an exception; it is unthinkable.

The Tyranny of the Majority

I think immediately of the haunting prediction of Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America. He was the famous Frenchman who visited the States in the 19th century. He was a keen observer of the United States, and many of his predictions have uncannily proven true. He writes of the “tyranny of the majority.” This is a tyranny in democratic states that is more dangerous than the tyranny of the old despots. He writes:

Fetters [chains] and headsmen [executioners] were the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn. Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as the will which it is intended to coerce. Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says: “You shall think as I do or you shall die”; but he says: “You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow citizens if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn you if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.”[2]

Secularization is the “tyranny of the majority.” It is a huge hindrance to Christian culture because its hostility is so invisible — it’s how the majority peacefully tyrannizes Christians. As long as it remains invisible, it’s very safe in its pernicious depredations. You’ve perhaps heard the Chinese proverb, “If you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish.” The point is that once we invest in plausibility structures, it becomes very hard to evaluate them. The advantage of work by unbelieving scholars like Stanley Fish[3] (no pun intended) and Christian scholars like Herman Dooyeweerd [4] is to rip the mask off the pretended autonomy of modern faiths like secularism. The alleged bonanza of secularism is its reputation as a neutral, rational arbiter among competing worldviews. It sets the ground rules of all social debates. All worldviews have vested interests and agendas, and secularism assures they treat each other fairly in public discourse.

Secularism’s Secret

The secret that secularism (and secularists) can’t afford to have exposed is that secularism is itself a worldview and a rapacious, unrelenting one at that. Its goal isn’t the fair assessment of all viewpoints (a creditable goal) but rather the subordination and marginalization of any viewpoint hostile to secularism — especially Christianity. Secularism doesn’t protect freedom of religion, but assaults religious ethics and even its symbols in the “public” sphere (like manger scenes and displays of the Ten Commandments). Secularism doesn’t protect freedom of speech, but penalizes speech (like support for marriage and condemnation of homosexuality) not conforming to its worldview.[5] Secularism doesn’t protect freedom of property, but confiscates property for the purpose of financing its social agenda (“public” schools). Secularism is a lot of things; neutral isn’t one of them.

Secularism is an almost impregnable hindrance to Christian culture, and it will remain impregnable until Christians — and others — discover how false its benign pretensions really are.

[1]Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture, 19.
[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/1_ch15.htm, accessed October 12, 2013.
[3] Stanley Fish, “Why Liberalism Doesn’t Exist,” There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech … And It’s a Good Thing, Too (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 134–138.
[4] Herman Dooyeweerd, The Twilight of Western Thought, 54.
[5] Manny Fernandez, “San Antonio Passes Far-Reaching Antidiscrimination Measure,” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/san-antonio-passes-far-reaching-antidiscrimination-measure.html?_r=0, accessed October 12, 2013.

Marriage: Communion, Community, Cosmology

Posted on August 7, 2016

Homily for the wedding of our son Richard A. Sandlin and new daughter-in-law Samantha Matheson, July 23, 2016, Grace Church-Vancouver, Canada

 

 

IMG_8383

Introduction

 

“The history of the human race begins with a wedding.”[1] If we’re under the impression that marriage is a casual, carefree legal arrangement, we’d do well to ponder that fact. Every human, with rare exception, was created for marriage. The creation of man and woman is inextricably linked to marriage. To be created as human is (in most every case) to be created for marriage.

 

God created humanity in his own image, but he didn’t create just one — a male or a female. A single individual wouldn’t have fully reflected that image. Man and woman both, in complement, comprehensively reflect God’s image. A man alone or a woman alone can’t fully display the image of God. In marriage, humanity most spectacularly images God. Adam must have Eve; Eve must have Adam. Together they embody and exhibit the divine image as fully as a creature can.

 

Marriage is communion, marriage is community, and marriage is cosmology.

 

Communion

 

The Trinity — God the Father, Son and Spirit, God as one nature in three persons — enjoyed infinite, eternal, blissful communion. Their communion was so indescribably joyous, that they decided to share it. God is not stingy. That’s why he created man and woman. The eternal communion of the triune God expands outward to man in time and history. Man and woman now share in the communal life of the triune God.

 

But communion with God wasn’t sufficient for Adam. God can’t meet — and was never meant to meet — the man’s entire needs. The man needed the woman. To revise Tom Wolfe, a man without a woman is a man in half.

 

So the male and female don’t each commune only with God. They commune with one another. Marriage is the co-mingling of faith, love, hope, dreams, children, possessions, and lives. St. Paul tells us that just as the church is mystically united to Jesus, so the husband is mystically united to his wife. There’s an ontological union in marriage whose mystical depths none of us can fully grasp. But as the woman and man join in marriage, they become bone of bone and flesh of flesh; in some mysterious way they become one being before the Lord.

 

Marriage is communion.

 

Community

 

Moreover, marriage is community. Since God is a community (the Trinity), and since man and woman in marriage fully display God’s image, marriage is a community.

 

The entrance of sin into the world didn’t erase that community. God’s objective is to redeem that community, and all communities. The community of marriage is an integral part of the community of redemption. The apostle Paul wrote in the book of Ephesians that the husband and wife symbolize Christ and his church. Just as the husband lays down his very life for his wife, so our Lord laid down his life for the church. That community, the bride, is washed in the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, the groom. All who trust in him by simple faith become part of that community, the church. The church submits to her Lord, as the bride submits to the groom. The groom loves and cherishes the bride, as Jesus Christ loves and cherishes his church.

 

We live in times that champion radical individual autonomy. It always ends in loneliness, alienation and despair. Why? Because humanity was created for loving, self-sacrificial community, not for radical individual autonomy.

 

In the church, and in the wider Christian community, the community of marriage finds its fullest fulfillment. The church loves and nourishes and encourages and corrects and disciples the marriages in its midst. Just as man and woman weren’t designed each to be alone, so marriages were not designed to be alone. The Christian community is God’s great sustenance and bulwark for marriage. Marriage is community — and is itself designed for community.

 

Cosmology

 

Finally, marriage, the union (and communion, and community) of man and woman before God, is woven into the creational cosmos. It’s every bit God’s ordinance that the physical laws of gravity and propulsion are. It’s not a historically evolving, legally malleable, casually optional social construction. It’s rooted in the world’s creation order.

 

As a divine ordinance, it’s calculated to contribute to the smooth, organic existence of the cosmos. To our first parents God gave what we call the cultural mandate: to steward the rest of creation for God’s glory. Man and woman are God’s deputies in this world.

 

But not man and woman as separate, autonomous creatures. Rather, it is man and woman in marriage that fulfill (despite the effects of sin) God’s plan to steward this splendorous, awe-inspiring creation to glorify him.

 

This is why marriage is a permanent component of cosmology. Our world was created to be stewarded by humanity in the ordinance of marriage: the man and woman united in oath-bound covenant before the triune God.

 

And this is equally why the erosion of marriage necessitates the erosion of the created order itself. To preserve and perpetuate and promote marriage is to preserve and perpetuate and promote the world itself. The simple word of “yes” or “no” by the bride at the altar not only shapes and reshapes human history. It also, and more importantly, cultivates and nurtures and perpetuates the very cosmos itself.[2] The married man and woman cultivate the cosmos for God’s glory; and without marriage, the cultivation of the cosmos would finally fail. (This is why, by the way, despite the blistering assaults on it, marriage will not finally fail.)

 

It is for this reason that the most momentous event today in Vancouver occurs not in the ivory halls of government edifices, or in the opulent boardrooms of high finance, but in this solemn, sacred service before God.

 

Here. Now. Today. We are witnessing a world historical event.

[1] Herman Bavinck, The Christian Family (Grand Rapids: Christian’s Library Press, 2012), 1.
[2] I take the basic idea from Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution (Norwich, Vermont: Argo Books, 1969), 9.

Racist Democrats and Crooked Clintons: A Review of Dinesh D’Souza’s “Hillary’s America”

Posted on August 4, 2016

 

Hillarys-America

 

Long-time friend David Souther once told me that whenever there’s a radical discrepancy between the verdicts of the critics and those of the commoners on the popular movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, you should safely go with the commoners. This is certainly the case with Dinesh D’Souza’s explosive new (and highly successful) documentary Hillary’s America: The Secret Life of the Democratic Party. At this writing, the certification is 4% fresh for the critics and 80% fresh for the commoners, the greatest discrepancy I’ve ever seen.

 

The commoners are mostly right, but the critics are not entirely wrong.

 

D’Souza, convicted of campaign finance violations in helping a friend’s failed political quest, served the evenings of eight months in prison and must fulfill five years of community service for his crime. D’Souza claims he was unfairly targeted by the Obama administration, whose namesake he had himself targeted in his highly successful 2012 documentary Obama’s America. D’Souza’s thesis in that movie, based on his book of the same title, is that Obama’s goal has been the dismantling of American influence in the world and the diminution of prosperity at home. D’Souza flatly — and correctly — asserts that the ensuing four years have verified his thesis. On the basis of that fulfilled prediction, D’Souza now turns his attention more broadly to the Democratic Party and to its 2016 presidential nominee.

 

In Hillary’s America, D’Souza parlays his prison experience into an explanation for the Democratic Party’s agenda to control America and impose its radical agenda. Like the cons D’Souza met in prison who concoct unscrupulous schemes to bilk the naïve out of their money, the Democrats are pulling the wool over the eyes of simple Americans and pilfering their way of life. Their goal is to divert America from its heritage and rob Americans of their country.

 

The Not-So-Secret History of the Democratic Party

 

D’Souza begins with “the secret history of the Democratic Party,” exhibiting its roots in Andrew Jackson’s inveterate racism, slavery support, and sexual exploits. He also reminds viewers that it was the Democrats that sequestered Native Americans on reservations and in effect launched the KKK. He equally indicts the Democrats in Congress in both the 19th and 20th centuries for their persistent support of slavery and, after the Civil War, their staunch anti-black sentiments. He documents Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s widely attested but less-mentioned racism, and he notes that more congressional Republicans voted for the 1960’s civil rights legislation than Democrats.

 

D’Souza links the Democrats’ racist past with the present by suggesting that today’s slavery plantations are the black ghettos, where the party essentially provides social programs in exchange for minority votes. D’Souza argues that the reason blacks today vote so overwhelmingly for Democrats is FDR’s New Deal, which assisted them economically at a time they were impoverished. It has nothing to do with the party’s movement away from racism, which persists. D’Souza contrasts the GOP, a party begun as a protest to slavery and which has constantly countered the Democratic Party’s racist sentiment and policies before, during, and after the Civil War.

 

One of the most riveting scenes of the movie is the interview with Vanderbilt’s African-American professor Carol Swain, who left the Democrats after researching the racist roots and subsequent flowering of it in the party of the vast majority of her fellow African-Americans. The Democratic Party is pulling a big con, positioning itself as the altruistic party of racial minorities and their interests when it’s anything but (D’Souza himself is an Indian-born American).

 

Hillary in America

 

D’Souza breaks off his exposé of the Democratic Party to unmask Hillary Clinton, whom he links with the self-serving, mob-inspired radical Saul Alinsky. Hillary, a “Goldwater girl” in her youth, was radicalized by Alinsky as a college student and brought him to her alma mater Wellesley College to speak. D’Souza claims that even in her college and law school days she was aware she had mediocre political instincts, so she latched onto tall, popular fellow student Bill Clinton. She saw her role as providing the (radical) political philosophy, and Bill as providing the popularity and political success. D’Souza argues that Hillary has always tolerated Bill’s numerous sexual dalliances because the marriage is one of political convenience. This explains why Hillary vilifies all the women who claim they were bedded or even raped by Bill Clinton, and why Hillary herself once seemed to make light of an accused rapist whom she was appointed to defend even though she believed him guilty.

 

D’Souza takes aim at the Clinton Foundation, notably its alleged fraud in its fundraising for Haiti and its quid pro quo influence peddling for a Canadian businessman and one of their big donors.

 

If Americans expect to preserve their country, they must wrestle it away from the Democrats and Hillary Clinton.

 

He’s right about that.

 

This commoner critic’s criticisms

 

Hillary’s America is far from flawless, however, though the defects do not diminish the impact of the movie’s factual content. Still, they are well worth mentioning.

 

First, D’Souza does not create a logical or even artistic link between the racism of the Democratic Party and the crookedness of Hillary Clinton. In fact, it seemed at times as though I were watching two one-hour movies rather one two-hour movie.

 

Second, D’Souza launches the movie with another attempt to vindicate himself in his own legal case, despite the fact that he pleaded guilty. True or not, the notion that the Left targeted him for prosecution does nothing to bolster his case against the Democratic Party and Clinton.

 

Third, D’Souza engages in gratuitous motive questioning. For example, he states that Clinton became disengaged from the notorious Benghazi debacle because there was no money in it for her. Where he came up with this idea or how he could prove it is beyond me.

 

Fourth, Hillary’s America offers a whiff of conspiracy thinking, an odor D’Souza actively cultivates. In his visit the DNC headquarters to uncover the real truth about the party, we see D’Souza furtively slipping into an off-limits door to enter the basement, where allegedly the hidden, damaging documentation is found. The irony is that most assertions he makes about the party are readily discoverable, and that is why in this review I never included a spoiler alert: there is no concealed plot to spoil. Everything he reveals as a secret history is as secret as a sixty-second Google search of D’Souza’s legal problems.

 

Finally, in the beginning of Hillary’s America, D’Souza declares that the Left in the Democratic Party is dedicated to controlling every aspect of the lives of every American. That thesis is far from far-fetched. Unfortunately, D’Souza doesn’t attempt to link his documentary research with that thesis. Apparently we’re left to assume that political racists, sexists and influence peddlers want to steal America. That thesis may be true (I think it is), but it’s far from self-evident. Here D’Souza missed a major opportunity to make a major case.

 

Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party is at its best when it documents the racism and sexism of the Democratic Party and the crookedness of Hillary Clinton, and it’s at its worst when it postulates unconfirmable motives and conspiracy theories that only undermine its case among reasonable people and when it fails to connect the dots between bold assertions and facts that support them.

 

That’s a pity, because Hillary Clinton is bad for America, and the evils of the Democratic Party are no secret.