Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For September 11, 2024

 June 15

To Heidelblog and David Hall for the part of David Hall's articles (Part 1 and Part 2) that review what went on at the most recent Presbyterian Church of America General Assembly meeting.

It seems that's some labels have acquired unexpected implied traits. So is the case with the the conservative use of the labels 'conservative' and 'progressive.'

Conservatives seem to always imply infallibility when using the word 'conservative' and being fatally flawed with the 'progressive' label. And so, that reminds me of a Martin Luther King Jr. quote from his speech against the Vietnam War:

'The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.'

Because of their use of the above mentioned implied traits, conservatives appear to be replacing the word 'Western' with the word 'conservative' in the above quote. And so it seems that it is conservatives who are actually  putting themselves in an even a less flattering light than they intend to put progressives in due to the traits they imply when using those two labels.

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Aug 3

To Heidelblog and Michael Wear and his article advertising his book that labels the political divisions in America and the Church 'Political Therapeutic Deism. This appeared in Heidelblog.

The full article can be found at:

    https://mereorthodoxy.com/political-therapeutic-deism

It is understandable as to why politics has a divisive effect on the Church. It is because, among other issues, politics deal with an array of moral values. And which political groups we most associate with can partially reveal the moral values about which we are most concerned. And our differences can arise from having different priorities of moral concerns people have.

But since no political ideology or party encompasses all moral values about which we should be concerned with as Christians, each political ideology and party are not only incomplete, but inconsistent as well. Take what is called pro-life for example. To reduce the meaning of being pro-life to concerns about abortion produces vast inconsistencies in what it should mean to be pro-life. Likewise, to not include concerns about abortion is to produce a deep inconsistency with what it should mean to be pro-life. And so which political ideology or party is consistently pro-life? And here we should note that being consistently pro-life does not mean that we have covered all moral issues with which politics is involved.

Since I am not now able to read the whole article, I will speculate as to what isn't covered that can explain what the writer wanted to explain. The divisions occur when we act like the Pharisee from the parable of the two men praying (Luke 18:9-14) with our moral concerns. That occurs when we exalt ourselves over others because they don't share our priority of values or even values while neglecting to be even aware of the moral values that our own political views fail to adequately address. What James said in the second half of chapter 2 in his epistle also explains why we have divisions.

That Phariseeism is something to avoid almost at all costs. Why? Consider the plight of that Pharisee from the parable.

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August 27

To Heidelblog and D.G. Hart whose article was quoted in part on HeidelBlog. His article  reviewed Tim Alberta's book: <I>The Kingdom, The Power, And The Glory</i>. Alberta's book is about the Evangelism and its recent political ventures.

Hart's full article can be found at:

    https://lawliberty.org/book-review/whats-left-to-say-about-evangelicals/

The trouble with Evangelicalism is, like Christian Fundamentalism, how it is defined. The original definitions of both terms focused on their religious beliefs. But then, because of the traits of some of its members, Evangelicalism's working definition began go deemphasize its religious beliefs and began to revolve around traits that had nothing to do with Evangelicalism's religious tenets just as what happened to Christian Fundamentalism.

As with  Christian Fundamentalism,  the change in the working definition of Evangelicalism was in part due to the desire of some Evangelicals to distance themselves from fellow Evangelicals because of their traits, in particular their political views. And so some Evangelicals decided to separate themselves because of their political disagreements rather than to simply admit that Evangelicals do not form a monolith. Had they done that, it is possible that Evangelicalism's working definition would still revolve around its religious beliefs.

History shows that Evangelicalism's venture into the political realm started decades earlier that what Hart claimed. It started with its opposition to the government's efforts to force racial integration onto some Evangelical institutions such as Bob Jones. What followed that became the focus on abortion. And what ignited the biggest Evangelical passion for politics was the 2015 Obergefell Decision by the Supreme Court. Since then, a concerted effort by a mixture of Evangelicals, Christian Fundamentalists, and Roman Catholics to '<b>take back</b>' America to its Christian roots has begun. Unfortunately, America's Christian roots were determined greatly by a demographics that no longer exists.

I can't speak to Hart's comments on Alberta's book since I have not read his book. But there are things about what Hart said that indicate that, like what a baseball catcher does with pitches, he is sometimes more interested in framing events and descriptions than being fair and objective. Take the following quote from Hart's article for example:'unpeaceful protests on January 6, 2021'

How is it that a violent action taken to overthrow the results of a legitimate election in an attempt to keep the sitting President in office can be legitimately described as being merely an 'unpeaceful protest'?

OR

'As dubious as the diversity rationale now appears—how could white Protestants be outsiders in white Protestant America?—the study of evangelicals coincided with the need to understand a new and vigorous electoral bloc, namely, the Religious Right. '

The problem with that quote is in the question asked. Instead of asking how could white Protestants be outsiders in a white Protestant America, Hart should have asked how did white Protestants BECOME outsiders?  In addition, curiosity about Evangelicalism might have been initiated by JFK's Presidential campaign and questions about whether he could be elected because of his Roman Catholic affiliation. Also, what diversity rationale is Hart claiming to be dubious?

OR

'The election of 2016 practically took all scholars by surprise (some needed smelling salts). It also gave legitimacy to scholarship that explained Donald Trump’s popularity among white evangelicals. Several evangelical scholars went to work to explain the racism, psychological instability, and misogyny that contributed to born-again Protestant votes for Trump. At the same time, evangelical leaders and pundits piled on with books of their own (for instance, David French, Russell Moore, and Peter Wehner) that show evangelicals to be hypocritical Christians and unreliable citizens. What used to be a success story of an obscure group rising to prominence in American life, evangelicalism is now one of the many social ills responsible for spreading illiberal sentiments among the American people.'

With Evangelicalism's ties to America's past which Hart mentions early in his article, perhaps America's history of racism also began to shed light on pathologies that exist in Evangelicalism. Here we should note that Hart is a historian, and yet he does not attribute any of the problems in America's racist past to Evangelicalism's present social standing.

IMO, if my fellow Evangelicals and Fundamentalists want to do well in politics, which is what Hart wants them to do, then they must see the current political battle in the West between Democracy with equality vs authoritarianism with hierarchy.  They need to see this distinction and understand which side that they are currently, and unfortunately, on. I hasten to add that how Hart sees Evangelicals and Fundamentalists would do well in politics could very well differ from how I see them doing well.

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August 30

To Heidelblog and Chris Gordon for the part of Gordon's article that discusses why people reflexively follow Pastors who present themselves as omnicompetent. The title of the Heidelblog post is different.

Chris Gordon's complete article can be found at:

https://agradio.org/blog/the-cult-following-of-the-omnicompetent-pastor

I am not writing to disagree with anything that Gordon said. In fact, I agree with what he wrote. But I wanted to add something that might help us understand why, even in not troubling times, people are looking for authoritative sounding voices to follow. 

It has to do with what Fromm described as the passive authoritarian personality type, or the authoritarian follower to be less verbose. Such people are not just attracted to authoritative sounding voices, they are also looking for simplistic answers that they can understand. But most of all, they want a, what I call, nanny thinker who can tell them what to think. They want to listen to someone with whom they can reflexively agree.

Fromm said that the basic motivation for the authoritarian follower is fear. It can be a fear because of the confusion of the times. But the fear is more general than that. The fear comes from a need to be attached to something significant. And so the more authoritative a leader can sound or the more credentials a leader can portray themselves as having, the more personal significance can be gained by attaching oneself to that person.

One factor that can mitigate the fear that authoritarian followers can have is to become more independent in their reasoning. But a balance is needed here. That is because there is an authority figure who is omnicompetent to speak on all subjects. That is God. And He has spoken to us in His Word.  But what muddies the waters here is how does one interpret God's Word. We do have guides from the past and present, but they are never infallible and were often so influenced by their times that they sometimes read ideas into the Scriptures. And though there are issues in which there can be divergence in thinking among those who believe in Christ, there are other issues in which we can't afford to tolerate diverse views.

But the above introduces a complexity that many authoritarian followers cannot tolerate at the current time. And so the solution is to try to have ourselves and our fellow believers be more like the Bereans who tested everything by the Scriptures (see Acts 17). They both depended on the Scriptures and had a degree of independence so that they even tested the words of the Apostle Paul by the Scriptures. 

And so we need to move people to become a mixture of being dependent and independent. We need to be dependent on God's Word and independent enough from people, even the authoritative speaking kind, so that we can learn from them without reflexively accepting everything they say.

Comments Which Conservatives Blocked From Their Blogs For June 12, 2024

May 5

To R. Scott Clark and his article that talks about the real problems and conflicts behind the scenes of the world we live in. In that article, he made a questionable statement that described the status of our world. The article appeared in Heidelblog.

The least we can do when lamenting the problems of the day is to be accurate and fair. But both seem to be missing to some degree in the above article.

'Undergraduates openly calling for the slaughter of Jews, the widespread use of chemical abortifacients, the transgender madness (now magically embedded into Title IX, an act of Congress, by executive order), and seemingly unchecked crime and violence in American cities'

We should note that the first and last items of lament are exaggerations. How many undergrads are calling for the murder of Jews compared how many are protesting the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel's IDF. In fact, there is no concern for the plight of the Palestinians in Scott's article.

Regarding the last item, the FBI reported that violent crime, including murder was down in 2023 compared to 2022. Homicides were down 13%.

And scientists are discovering some physical causes for gender dysphoria. So how much of the transgender craze is really madness?

We need to be more accurate and fair in reporting the status of our world today. Failure to do so could hurt our credibility when preaching the Gospel

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May 18

To Bill Reddinger and Part 2 of his two part series on Christian ideas that help us be  moderate in our politics. This appeared on the Heidelblog

Radical and Moderate, like conservative and liberal are relative measurements. For example, what was conservative in America during the Cold War was liberal in the Soviet Union. Therefore, being radical or moderate implies nothing about our views.

In addition, it's not whether a position is radical or not that is the problem, it is whether a person believe that they are superior to others to the extent that they believe that they have no need to listen to others.

There are at least 2 areas where this belief in one's own superiority takes place. One is intellectual superiority. This occurs when one believes that they themselves or their own group is so superior to others that they have no need to listen to others. They feel entitled to be the leaders. In fact, they get irritated when someone with different views tries to contribute to a discussion.

The other superiority is spiritual/moral superiority. Here a person believes that they themselves or their own group are spiritually and/or morally superior to others. Here, one can think of the Pharisee from the parable of the two men praying (see Luke 18:9-14) for an example. Note how the Pharisee looked down on the tax collector. This sense of spiritual/moral superiority moves us try to silence those whom we dislike by discrediting them. When we feel spiritually/morally superior to others, we forget that neither is there a day when it is safe to pray like the Pharisee nor a day when we don't need to pray like the tax collector. When we think that we are spiritually/morally superior to others we forget how Romans 2 and James 2 reminds us that either we are in the same boat as the people we judge because we either commit the same sins that they do (see Romans 2) or we commit different sins (see James 2).

When we recognize our ties to others rather than believe that there are areas where we are better than others, it has a moderating effect both on what we say and how we say it. Recognizing our ties to others help keep our ideas more within the realm of reality and prevent us from being too radical in how we express those views.

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To Heidelblog T. David Gordon and the part of his article on Tocqueville and his view of American exceptionalism which was quoted in Heidelblog. Gordon tries to show that Tocqueville had an ore negative view of America and its exceptionalism. This appeared in Heidelblog.

The article cited:

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/10/alexis-de-tocqueville-and-american-exceptionalism-exegeting-tocqueville/

In the article cited by the above blog post, the writer reinterprets a Tocqueville statement on America from being a compliment to that of being a criticism. And thus America did not provide a positive reflection on democracy, a form of government and society which Tocqueville preferred. So America's exceptionalism was a negative indicator rather than a positive one.

If democracy means the 'rule of the people,' then how can one have democracy without equality? But if Tocqueville saw equality in America during that time, then he was overlooking the plight of Native Americans, blacks, and women, to name a few.

So if because we don't have equality, we don't have democracy, then what has America been since 1776? Jeff Halper's distinction between technocracies and democracies might help us what America has been and still is (see pg 74 of Jeff Halper's <I>An Israeli In Palestine: resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel</I>):

'<b>An ethnocracy is the opposite of a democracy, although it might incorporate some elements of democracy such as universal citizenship and elections. It arises when one particular group—the Jews in Israel, the Russians in Russia, the Protestants in pre-1972 Northern Ireland,  the whites in apartheid South Africa,  the Shi’ite Muslims of Iran, the Malay of Malaysia and, if they had their way, the white Christian fundamentalist in the US—seizes control of the government and the armed forces in order to enforce a regime of exclusive privilege over other groups in what is in fact a multi-ethic or multi-religious society. Ethnocracy, or ethno-nationalism, privileges ethnos over demos. whereby one’s ethnic affiliation, be it defined by race, descent, religion, language or national origin, takes precedence over citizenship in determining to whom a country actually “belongs.” Israel is referred to explicitly by its political leaders as a “Jewish Democracy.”</b>'

Halper's distinction between ethocracy and democracy adds more criticisms to America than what the cited article claimed that Tocqueville was giving to America at that time. That perhaps, Tocqueville didn't understand what democracy was about, which is quite understandable for his time. 

But we also need to add that because of Tocqueville's admiration for British society, perhaps Tocqueville was using British society as his canon for measuring how advanced a society is. That though Tocqueville saw the American experiment as being detrimental for any positive claims one would want to make about democracy because of the lack of advancement in American society, Tocqueville was being unfair in his evaluation of the American experiment. Tocqueville was being unfair because he took for granted Britain's age and thus its time to development vs America's. That is a point that the writer of the article directs our attention to.

Therefore, any conclusions about democracy in society cannot be confidently reached by the comparison of America to Europe. First, there was no equality in America and thus it was not a true democracy during Tocqueville's time. Second, Tocqueville was comparing a just born nation with nations that were middle age if not old. Their stages of development were in two different times.

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May 19

To Russell Hittinger and his article on the failure of liberal humanism and the importance of basing a nation on Catholicism. His article appeared on the Imaginative Conservative blog.

If liberal humanism includes democracy with equality, then we must ask the question of whether liberal humanism has failed us or have we failed liberal humanism. For what we see when we look at when religion dominates society is a pervasiveness of intolerance and a domination of the other, of those who are different. At least, that is what Church History teaches us. And seems not to matter which branch of the Church is in control over a given region.

Those who call for the dominance of religion are like those who support Trump for President in 2024. For those who support Trump for President do so regardless of Trump's history. It matters not why they support Trump for President. It matters not whether they are true believers in Trump or they just oppose Biden, Trump left the nation in shambles when he was voted out of office.  Trump's bungled responses to Covid, his attempts to overthrow fairly elected new government, Trump's lies, Trump's racist descriptions of immigrants from South of the Border, his setting the future up for disaster by denying climate change, his divisiveness by denying systemic racism, his risking our future by his part in renewing the arms race, his threats to our nation's sovereignty by his friendships with and admiration of several dictators in the world, and his part in threatening our economic future by increasing deficit spending even before the Covid pandemic.

What does Church history tell us about religious dominance over a nation? It tells us of religious wars, inquisitions by both Protestants and Catholics, support for imperialism and colonialism, anti-Semitism, the acceptance of superstitions, and the oppression of those who don't believe. All of that was practiced during Christendom. Regardless of any contributions to the understanding of metaphysics, Church History does not speak well of religious dominance.

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May 23

To David Hall and his article that calls the current protesters who are siding with Hamas the 4th Reich. This was posted on the Heidelblog website.

If the above is not hyperbole, I don't know what is. It isn't that Jewish anti-Semitism hasn't increased or isn't a problem. BTW, I believe that the ADL would tell us that Jewish anti-Semitism occurs in right-wing circles more than on leftist college campuses. But if the 2nd Reich had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, why should we name what's happening today the 4th Reich? Perhaps some so name this present time in order to incite fear and enflame fury against a favorite whipping boy in order to rally the troops.

We should note how the term anti-Semitism is wrongfully used. It is wrongfully used because it is selectively used. We should note that the Semite classification of people does not revolve around ancestry or race. The Semite classification is for people whose language comes from a specific group of languages. And therefore Jews are not the only Semites in town. Arabs, and that includes Palestinians,  and people from some African nations are Semites too. And yet, the term 'anti-Semitism is not used when prejudice and bigotry is expressed against Arabs or certain groups of people from Africa. Quite often prejudice and bigotry expressed against Arabs is called Islamaphobia. And do we associate the same shame that we do with Islamaphobia  as we do with anti-Semitism? BTW, one never has to worry about answering rhetorical questions.

By that, I don't mean that we should minimize what is now called anti-Semitism. But if we believe in equality, then we would either call prejudice and bigotry against any Semitic group of people 'anti-Semitism' or we would rank prejudices against other Semitic groups as being equally wrong as anti-Semitism.

BTW, something that is not well known amongst conservatives. Some of the most famous Pro-Palestinian college encampments are organized by a coalition of Jewish groups and other groups. That was the case at the Columbia University encampment which included an anti-Semitism workshop, Seder service, and, if memory serves, a joint prayer meeting. In addition, along with the encampments. increases in Islamaphobia have also been seen across college campuses. And so why wasn't that reported?

One final point, yes, Hamas is horrible. They want the land from the river to the sea for a pro Islamic Republic. And their means include committing horrific atrocities. But doesn't Modern Zionism want the same land, the land from the river to the sea, for its own people too? The Settlers I spoke to once outside a CUFI conference told me that they view the land that Palestinians live on as their, referring to the themselves, inheritance. Israel has sometimes denied the presence of its Occupation by asking how can one occupy its own territory. And during the Occupation, besides oppressing Palestinians, Palestinian land on the West Bank is being confiscated and annexed by Israel. And yet, none of that is reported by the above article.

Instead, the above article rightfully complains about those who support Hamas. But the same article neglects to report the full context of why some wrongfully side with Hamas. Instead, it seems to suggest that all of the pro Palestinian college encampments are pro-Hamas. Doing so is simply dishonest.

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June 7

To T. David Gordon and his series of articles that opposes sending an overture regarding regarding transgender procedures for minors to the government. This was posted in the Heidelblog website.

Click here for Article #1

Click here for Article #2

Click here for Article #3

Just perhaps the WCF is the problem. I understand its position in Reformed denominations like the PCA. But when an argument is based solely on the WCF and not first on or even supplemented by the Scriptures, then doesn't that indicate that the WCF is put on too high a pedestal?

The problem I see with the WCF passages pertaining to the issue mentioned in the above article is that it prevents this portion of the Church from speaking prophetically to society and the state concerning corporate sin. Such produces a silence over perceived corporate sins. And as Martin Luther King Jr pointed out in his sermon against the Vietnam War, silence can be betrayal.

The problem I see in sending the above mentioned overture to the government--Civil Magistrate is an antiquated term--is that the Church has not put itself in the position to sufficiently understand the what science has to say about the issue. And so the overture can be based too much on ignorance even though I agree with the positive character assessment of the people responsible for the overture. And I would say the same about those who would support the above article.

We need to see that the Scriptures tell us to oppose sin, which is part of preaching the Gospel. The Old Testament prophets preached against the social sins of their time. And though we don't see much of that in the New Testament, one of the reasons could have been the context of that time. The average American citizen in today's world bears much more responsibility, due to our democratic form of government than citizens in the Roman Empire during the time of the Apostles.

By relying too heavily on the WCF in judging the sending of the Overture, we forget the disparity in the contexts of the time in which the WCF was written and now. To neglect that disparity in determining how the Church should interact with the government today is not a wise thing to do. Instead, adhering to the WCF 31.4 and other related passages in today's setting could indicate a blind obedience to the WCF and the placing of the WCF on too high a pedestal.