Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For December 12, 2018

December 11

To Thomas Ascik and his article that asked if America can return to being a Christian society. In his article he reviews the work of a few other Christians and is dismayed in discovering that they offer no legitimate actions that would make American society a Christian one. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.

Perhaps the most prominent fault that religiously conservative American Christians share is that of the lack self-awareness. For example, religiously conservative Christians are not demonized for holding to traditional definitions  of marriage and roles for sex, they are demonized for trying to force unbelievers into accepting and practicing Christian traditions.

Likewise, if government cannot define marriage for society, then who can? Is the Church in position to define marriage for unbelievers?

Also, in calling for a limited, small government, what does Thomas Ascik, the write of the above article, think will happen to resulting the power void? Does he imagine that it will automatically dissipate? Those who call for limited government, despite having legitimate concerns, are also calling for a limited democracy wherever a working democracy is employed. Shouldn't the size of government be democratically determined as long as those limits stipulated in the Amendments to The Constitution are respected?

I have never figured out why any of my fellow religiously conservative Christians call for a return to a Christian Society from the past that never was. For we could never have legitimately claimed to possess a Christian society for as long as we embraced a racism that believed in a white supremacy that ethnically cleansed Native Americans from the land and subjugated Blacks through slavery, Jim Crow, and wealth disparity regardless of the percentage of Christians in the land or the influence of Christianity on society. For our claims to be Christian can be easily negated by how we treat those from groups other than our own. And our obliviousness to that negation only shows how much we lack self-awareness.

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Matthew Summers and his blogpost that defends Capitalism. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative Blog.

One of the most prominent faults we religiously conservative Christians have is that of having a lack of self-awareness. That lack of self-awareness applies both to us personally and how we try to rule over others in society rather than share society with unbelievers as equals. And our lack of awareness is demonstrated in obliviousness to how our sacred cows affect others. And a lack of self-awareness is shown in the above article that defends capitalism.

We should start with the faulty definition of capitalism:

The term capitalism refers to an economic organization in which the means of production are privately owned, and production is guided by profit.

Here capitalism is determined by private ownership rather than public ownership. However, a key distinguishing trait of capitalism has been left out. That trait is that ownership and guidance of production is also determined by solely by wealth which leaves out labor. Here we should note the central role of labor in producing wealth for the business. But those who only provide such labor are objectified by the capitalist system. Of course, there are individual business owners who show more respect for the their workers than other business owners. But in a system where the largest businesses are owned by shareholders, those who own the most shares indirectly guide production. And the most prominent ethic employed by those shareholders is the maximize  personal profits ethic. That ethic is a cannibalizing ethic that devours all competition. Logically speaking, if a higher profit can be gained by breaking the law, then the maximize personal profits ethic demands that one breaks the law. Thus this ethic makes the most powerful shareholders into absentee landlords of the workplace.

Yes, there are owners who treat many of their employees with respect and loyalty. But just as there were some slave owners who were kinder to their slaves than others, the real issue is how much dignity does the system recognize in those at the bottom of the pile. How much dignity did slavery recognize in those who were slaves? And so how much dignity does the capitalism system itself recognize in its workers when labor power can be commodified, and thus objectified, to the same degree that raw materials are?

Above all, because ownership and control is determined by wealth, Capitalism distributes power by wealth. And that distribution of power applies both to the workplace and government. The sharing of power with others then is looked upon as an impediment to the maximization of profits. And yet, the sharing of power is the beginning of peace while the refusal to share power is the beginning of war. Perhaps that is why we tend to have class wars under Capitalism. And we should that just because an exploited class has not resisted does not mean that we have no class war.
There are elements that we should borrow from capitalism to form a hybrid system. But capitalism per se is not worth defending.

Finding Places Between God And Caesar For The Sake Of The Gospel

One of the things that most hinders evangelism today is the Church's credibility. And on the thorns in the side of that credibility is how the Church, especially the Conservative Church,  reacts to the world in what it insists on and what it lets go.

Kim Davis' refusal to issue marriage licenses in the light of the SCOTUS decision on same-sex marriag serves as an example of when the Conservative Church's demands on society gives reasons for others not to listen to the preaching of the Gospel. For what Davis did was to use her religious convictions, as sincere as they are, as a reason for denying legal rights to a group of people. And the issue of the denial of legal rights is sexual freedom.

But as Joe Paterno once asked how did Nixon know enough to vote Texas #1 in football in 1969 over his undefeated Nittany Lions while he knew nothing about Watergate, unbelievers are asking conservative Christians how come they know so much about dangers of sex while knowing so little about the precarious situation that an exploitive economic system, destruction to the internet, and war and militarism puts most of the world's people in.

See, according to many unbelievers, the Conservative Church in America doesn't know when to talk and when to shut up. For it wishes to speak to those who sin by individuals practicing sexual immorality, but it is complicit in its silence when our economic system sins or when we rely too much on war and militarism. And that doesn't mention our apathy to how our way of life is destroying the environment.

So how is the Christian suppose to intervene here so that he/she both brings honor to the Gospel in the eyes of others while keeping God's Word? The Heidelcast interview conducted by R. Scott Clark on Daryl Hart (click here for page containing Hart's bio) is meant to give some general guidelines that would teach us how (click here for the Heidelblog page containing the link to the interview). But here, we should note that such isn't the setup for the interview. 

How should Evangelicals participate in the political system? On the one hand, Hart rightfully notes that we are different from Israel where God gave specific laws for the people of Israel to follow as His own. Today, no nations have replaced Israel which would call for the Church to not identify with the state in a sense. In addition, we want to follow Jesus' teaching on how to give Caesar what is his and  God what is His--there is a difference between God and Caesar which would come as a great surprise to some world leaders. Neither do we want to attempt to create any New Testament version of Israel as was at least partially done in Constantinianism when Christianity became the state religion which occurred some time after the death of Constantine. Such was a mistake according to Hart. An equal mistake was for the government to claim the right to oversee the Church and pick an official denomination.

According to Hart, America has done a good job at avoiding the mistakes of the past when it comes to practices that violate the separation of Church and state. Hart correctly notes about America that though its population was predominantly Christian, it did not become a Christian nation. It allowed for pluralism though the degree of that pluralism is certainly greater today than ever anticipated by our Founding Fathers.

The distinction in what we owe Caesar and what we owe God constitutes a dualism according to Hart. A dualism that exists between the things eternal and the things temporal, the things unseen and the things seen. the concerns of God and the concerns of man. And thus, Caesar and God give us different sets of rules by which we should live, that is for the most part. And for Christians to expect Caesar to, in any sense, enforce Church laws and regulations would be a mistake. Hart correctly points out that there is no 'blueprint' for a Christian nation in the New Testament. So what Hart does adequately in the interview is to tell the Conservative Church how it should let go of a lot of things it wants to force on society  even though those things are condemned by the Scriptures.

But what is not mentioned in the interview is some of the context for Hart's views here. Hart is a Reformed Theologian who is both an adherent of Two Kingdom Theology (2KT), the Reformed version that is, and a believer in small government--the latter becomes apparent when he briefly mentions how immigration had been handled in the past. What is important about this context is the fact that 2KT basically prohibits the Church to speak as the Church against sins committed by groups, in particular, groups like the state because, at least with Hart, it doesn't acknowledge that groups, like nations or society, commit sins. So while Hart does an adequate job in giving a framework that could help us religiously conservative Christians from imposing our religious views on society so as to make people too mad to listen to us, he does not help us to avoid the problem of Church's complicity with sin by remaining silent in the face of certain sins. And a large part of the reasoning that allows for that comes from Hart's, and Clark's too, notion of an acceptable dualism.

There must be a dualism to accommodate pluralism in society seeing that society is not meant to be the Church. But there is an inconsistency when examining Hart's version of dualism. For when he and others talk about the eternal vs the temporal and the seen vs the unseen, certain temporal states of affairs as they relate to individuals can prevent individuals from enjoying the eternal. Sexual sins or other violations of the Ten Commandments such as theft and murder can affect our eternal state. Now if that is the case for individuals and their sin, how is it any different for individuals  if the are either silent or even participating in what Caesar does as Caesar robs from and kills both our fellow citizens and foreigners through government policies? Aren't killing and robbing when performed by individuals sin? Then how is it any different when the groups we belong to do the same even when the groups we belong include our own nation?

Yes, Hart is more than right in saying that there is no New Testament blueprint that defines a Christian nation or society. But if we leave it at that, we fail to avoid our other problem of the Church when it fails to preach against certain sins. For example, during the time when our nation embraced slavery, several denominations failed to preach and act against it. Likewise, not many Protestant denominations opposed Jim Crow. And not many denominations, especially conservative ones, preached against the Vietnam War.

So today, though there is a growing awareness of the horrors of racism in the Conservative Church, it remains silent about economic classism, the destruction of our environment, and war and militarism. That silence translates into what Jesus called 'stumbling blocks' for unbelievers which prevents them from listening to the Gospel when we preach it. Though not in the interview, Hart has, in his blog (click here) equated calling for the Church to speak out on today's issues as the OT prophets did with wanting to return to Israel's previous covenant status. But here, Hart fails to notice that the Old Testament prophets sometimes preached repentance to other nations besides Israel. This contradicts his reasoning.

Yes, Clark's interview with Hart is helpful and informative. It could help many of us to decide how we can avoid unnecessarily offending unbelievers by trying to create a Christian society or seek a privileged status for Christians in society. But our troubles with protecting the honor of the Gospel has two sides. One side is addressed by what Hart says here and elsewhere, while the other side of remaining silent in the face of corporate sin as the Church did in the past over slavery and Jim Crow remains untouched.