Two comments

Taken from a video discussion between Paul VanderKlay and Paul Anleitner.  Both are pastors – VanderKlay in Sacramento, Anleitner in Minneapolis.

My first comment:

The first five minutes or so of this conversation offers the best commentary that 2020 has been the fruit of evil.  No human power could have so easily infected the minds of men to willingly and suddenly abandon all the gifts that give life meaning - up to and including physical church attendance (to include Easter, and, soon enough, Christmas).  Whatever one believes of a proper understanding of Romans 13, it certainly isn't this.

What prompted this comment?  They discussed the world since corona – mostly VanderKlay discussed this.  His church was closed for the first three months, then opened, then the state wanted another shutdown, but he didn’t go for it.  He sees his parishioners deteriorating, especially the older ones.

VanderKlay laments that this is the new equilibrium.  No one has any idea what church looks like on the other end.  What will resolution of covid look like, etc.?  There is a tone of almost complete resignation.

Sadly, Anleitner says that his church shut down before any government decree.  “It was never really about meeting in person.”  Needless to say, this is stunning to me.

On to the second comment: At some point later in the discussion, they hit on the culture war.  They were discussing the attraction of Jordan Peterson.  He was saying many of the same things for many years prior to his rocket to fame.  One of the two Pauls noted: “The thing that really propelled [Peterson] was his entry into the culture war.”

Peterson could get people by the countless thousands to listen to him speak on the Bible – to spend real money to listen; they would come by the countless thousands to hear him speak about a life of meaning – to spend real money to listen. 

In other words, people spent money and came to hear Peterson speak on what the church should be speaking on for free every Sunday.  Yet churches are dying, despite not having a cover charge.

But what brought people to him was that he was not afraid to dive into the culture war, on the side of what I would describe as a natural law position.  Maybe church leaders could take a cue from this (and from Peterson’s positions on the matter) when discussing their concerns about why the congregation is stagnant or shrinking. 

But neither of these pastors want anything to do with this.  They don’t like the culture war stuff.  One of them said, paraphrased: “It is commendable that [John] Vervaeke doesn’t do the culture war stuff.”

My reaction?  No, it isn’t.  Perhaps don’t wonder why churches in the west are dying.  Destroy culture and you destroy meaning and, therefore, you destroy man.  Whose objective is it to destroy man?  It isn’t God’s, it’s the other guy’s.

Murray Rothbard would write, in 1992: “Yes, yes, you rotten hypocritical liberals, it's a culture war!”  It is a culture war, and, unfortunately, it is almost exclusively those on the side of evil that realize this.  My second comment at the site was on this point, the culture war:

One side of this culture war has the aim to destroy Christianity; the other side doesn't act accordingly, and, therefore, is losing.  Read Antonio Gramsci.

Gary North would write of Gramsci:

Gramsci in the 1930s acknowledged that Western society was deeply religious, and that the only way to achieve a proletarian revolution would be to break the faith of the masses of Western voters in Christianity and the moral system derived from Christianity. He placed religion and culture at the base of the pyramid.

Regarding Gramsci, Malachi Martin would write how the church must be adapted to a “this-worldly” vision of a communist “material paradise”:

They [communists] join with the Christian churches in brotherly dialogue and in common humanitarian ventures. But the object is to confirm the new Christianity in its anti-metaphysical and essentially atheistic pursuit of liberation from material inconvenience, from the fear of a nuclear holocaust, from sexual restriction of any kind and, finally, from all supernatural constrictions.... Total liberation is to construct the long-dreamed Leninist-Marxist Utopia.... By just that process, authored by Antonio Gramsci... has Western culture deprived itself of its lifeblood.

It was asked by Anleitner: “How to recognize ‘this is the evil we are actively to resist.’”  The evil we are to resist is right there, under your nose.  But too many Christian leaders either don’t want to engage in this battle or are fighting on the wrong side of it – either knowingly or unknowingly.  For those who are honest actors, the confusion stems from an ignorance of the value and necessity for natural law.

Conclusion

Ephesians 6: 12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

Do we think these principalities and powers are just floating out there, only in disembodied spirits?  I have offered that it is not the case; this evil prince works through human actors, real flesh and blood.  Don’t trust me?  The Apostle Paul gives his answer:

Ephesians 2: 2 Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: 3 Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.

The children of disobedience.  They are here, physically, today.  It is time to recognize this evil that we are actively to resist.

Epilogue

As mentioned, Anleitner pastors a church in Minneapolis; it is on the same street where George Floyd was shot.  He has had parishioners pulled from cars, beat up, etc., as he discusses in the last few minutes of the video.

Isn’t it obvious the evil we are actively to resist?

A Pleasant Conversation

I recently watched a video conversation between Ira Katz and Mary Kochan.  Those of you who read LRC might be familiar with Ira – and I have also mentioned him several times at this blog.  I came to learn of Mary through the Paul VanderKlay community.  Her videos are deserving of a wider audience.

I offer my comments below – comments I also posted at Mary’s site.  Sorry, I didn’t time stamp any of this; however, if you find the topics mentioned below of interest then you will find the entire video interesting and worthwhile.

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I enjoyed this conversation.  Thanks to both of you, and thank you, Ira, for the mention.  As you know, I learn much when reading your work as well.  Please forgive the length of the comment, but the two of you offered too much fruit in one short hour.

On a natural law view of liberty: we have liberty only if we are fee to live according to our nature, our purpose, our telos.  If it is good enough for a lion, a tree or a rock, it is good enough for humans.

On the technocrats (or whatever label you choose) having no more need for the rest of us: they will hand out some version of a basic income guarantee, to avoid revolution.  Having removed everything that gives meaning to life for us (the little people), like travel, family gatherings, church, concerts, sports, social events of all kinds, even seeing a stranger smile, they will have to do nothing but watch us slowly wither away – as they wish.  Remove all meaning from the life of a lion, the same thing follows – he will wither away.

The realignment we are seeing is based on natural law – whether the participants (Weinsteins, VanderKlay, Peterson, etc.) realize it or not.  It would be good if they could be brought to see this.

In addition to the necessity of cultural and traditional aspects required for liberty, the intersection of natural law and libertarian theory can be found in a proper understanding of natural rights.  Natural law describes for me my proper ethical behavior – regarding myself, my family, and others.  Violations of natural law need not be violations of human law.

Natural rights, however, describe what I might demand from others – this is limited to a demand that others respect my life and my property.  Violations of my life and property are subject to human law.  And this, then, offers the proper understanding of libertarian theory – as a guideline for legal action, not a guideline for life.

Monstrosity as the Basis for Law

I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity.

-          Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton (ebook)

This book is turning quite Christian, as it must, I suppose, given that through it Chesterton is telling how he came to believe that which he believes.  In this telling, he includes the value and meaning of tradition; it is on this that I will focus.

Much of this is packed into one paragraph, which I will break into several more manageable parts:

The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right.

This theory was born in the Enlightenment; in short form:

Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order.

The starting point for most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition absent of any political order (termed the "state of nature" by Thomas Hobbes).

Returning to Chesterton,

But they really were wrong, in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests.

This is why the conversation that came to the fore by Jordan Peterson and is being held by people such as Eric and Bret Weinstein, John Vervaeke, Jonathan Pageau, Paul VanderKlay, Ben Shapiro, and the long list of celebrity atheists such as Sam Harris and others, will come to naught.  It is a conversation based on a “conscious exchange of interests,” ignoring the foundation that must underlie order.  More on this shortly.

As to the idea of a social contract, this is not how social order came to be at all:

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place." They gained their morality by guarding their religion.

Man didn’t surrender his freedoms to a ruler in exchange for protection; he worked out his freedoms with his fellow man in the face of an authority above and outside of man’s control.

The history of the Jews is the only early document known to most Englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from that. The Ten Commandments which have been found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands; a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert.

But none of the commandments said “protect the ark.”  Instead, the commandments captured (I will not say “established,” as the reality of these “commands” was inherent in the natural order before they were ever carved in stone) behaviors that were necessary for a society to cultivate if it was to protect the ark.

The first table properly set man’s relationship to God – to something higher than himself.  The second table properly set man’s relationship to man – that which is equal to himself.  The commands of the second table could not survive without properly respecting the first table; the order is important.

What was the ark?  Why protect it?  Among many other things, it was that around which the Hebrew society was to be, and remain, ordered.  It was the symbol used to bring focus to this order – the orders offered via the commandments held inside.