Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For February 6, 2019

Jan 31

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost quote from Kevin DeYoung trying to distance slavery from the spirituality of the Presbyterian Church. This appeared in the Gospel Coalition website.

The litmus test of whether slavery was referenced to by the Church implies nothing about the spirituality of the Church. For we need to ask whether the spirituality of the Church that preceded slavery contained elements that contributed to the promotion of slavery. After all, the Southern Presbyterian Church did support slavery. And no doubt that, though not supporting slavery, there were Northern Presbyterians who believed in white supremacy.

What is clear from DeYoung's article (see https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevin-deyoung/two-cheers-spirituality-church/ ) is that the spirituality of the Presbyterian Church came from Calvin and Beza. And though I am not familiar enough with Beza to comment on his influence, it is clear that if some of today's categories were applied to Calvin, he, like Luther, would be  seen as possessing an Authoritarian Personality Type. Such a personality type says little to nothing regarding how we relate to God, but it does speak volumes to how one can overreact with hostility and aggression to challenges to preferred sources of human authority and traditions. And it is that kind of personality type that could help facilitate institutions like slavery and/or white supremacy into society.
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Feb 5

To Paul Krause and his blogpost that tries to demonstrate how, generally speaking, the media and universities have disdain for the common man as they promote their top-down ideologies. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.

The above article does everything to stoke the already present fears that some, especially conservatives, have of the media and universities without testing the validity of those fears. Declarations are made about the media and universities in general but no evidence is offered to support the declarations. In essence, we have just another 'fake news' cry made famous by Donald Trump.

Compare Krause's article with a book general claims about the media except that the book mentioned  went to great lengths to provide evidence of its claims. The book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy Of The Mass Media did more than just assert that the media is a servant to its corporate owners and advertisers, it showed data to support the claims. And the claims were not that the media published fake news, it was that through over reporting on one set of stories, and underreporting, if not ignoring, others, the media used emphasis to try to control popular opinion.

Was Gramsci's attempt to break narratives due solely to his Marxist roots? Or were imperialism, colonialism, institutional racism, wars, exploitation, economic classism, and so forth realities that moved many people to reject past, established narratives?

Certainly one of the errors of Marxism is that it tries to substitute one class's rule with another. But Church history shows that, for centuries, the Church also has been supporting class rule by aligning itself with money and power. The pre-revolutionary times of France, Russia, and Spain provide examples of that alignment as well as today's religiously conservative Christian support for Neoliberal Capitalism does the same. The religiously conservative Christian Church has little sense of what democracy really means. For to many religiously conservative Christians, democracy is there to provide the political tools for Christians to gain a position of supremacy over society.

But Western Democracy is more than just elections. Jeffersonian Democracy includes a egalitarian state of being where a given democratic nation is to be owned or shared by all of its groups as equal partners regardless of any demographic differences. That means instead of some kind of authoritarian based rule, as the religiously conservative Church has often worked for in groups like the Moral Majority or through individual campaigns like the support for the Defense of Marriage Act, each group is not only to look out for its own interests, each group is to look out for the interests of other gropus in order to prevent marginalization.

Any group that denies or minimizes marginalization or the other problems that Gramsci worked so hard against seems to me to provide evidence that it has communicated a disingenuous disdain for the common man. And that also goes for anyone from the left, right, or liberal side of things who does not believe in sharing power with other groups. Thus, the vanguard approach, on which Gramsci has no monopoly considering how that was Lenin's approach as well as the approach of the Church when it seeks to control society, is the first sign that those seeking to rule for our best interests are no different from past rulers who ruled without pretense.