Article VI Blog

I am beginning to wonder if the metaphorical “culture wars” are going to become a bit less metaphorical.  And it is more than just a religion thing – it’s a war on common sense.

I should have smelled it coming when “PZEV” started to appear on vehicles in California.  That stands for “Partial Zero Emission Vehicle.”  This is an official government classification out here is looney land:

PZEVs have their own administrative category within the state of California for low emission vehicles.

This vehicle category was created as part of a bargain with the California Air Resources Board (CARB), so that the automobile manufacturers could postpone producing mandated zero emission vehicles (ZEVs), which will require the production of electric vehicles or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Now I realize not everyone is a math person, but I don’t think you really have to be a math person to understand the grammatical absurdity of that designation.  “ZERO” indicates nothing.  How can one have part of nothing?  How can one divide nothing?  This designation is truly Orwellian in its abuse of language.

But it seems California lawmakers and regulators are not done twisting the language:

Leave it to my state of California to head off in radical and expensive directions. Legislation has been filed that would require group insurance to cover gay and lesbian infertility treatments just as they do heterosexual.

Gay and Lesbian infertility?!  Of course they are infertile – it s a definitional thing!  If you want the government to pay for in-vitro and surrogacy and sperm donation and all the rest of the gyrations that would be necessary in this case, then fine.  I won’t vote for it, but that is what democracy is all about.  But to call it “infertility?!” – That’s a bit like saying, “We have to fix this whole night and day problem and compensate everyone for the lost wages while they sleep.”

Remember last week when I talked about Christianity as being a force to preserve excellence?  This is part of that, this may seem like a little thing, but the abuse of language and definitions here is horrifying.  That people would buy into this is testament to an utter lack of anything resembling educational excellence.  This is not college level stuff here.

But the “war” is more overt than just language perversion.  There is this from the United States Army:

A U.S. Army training instructor listed Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism as examples of religious extremism along with Al Qaeda and Hamas during a briefing with an Army Reserve unit based in Pennsylvania, Fox News has learned.

And this from the most liberal paper in the UK:

Which brings up the second obvious aspect about these issues: that they will be with us as long as there are political actors and business interests that have an interest in promoting and exploiting them for their own gain. If one scapegoat gets away, there will always be another to take its place. In fact, there is no shortage of replacements for the fading attack on gay rights.

One of the newer sources of potential conflict is the religious right’s novel idea of “religious liberty”. Religious freedom used to mean freedom from having other people impose their religion on you. Now, it apparently means the freedom to impose your religion on others.

WOW! That perverts language, history, and declares war all in two paragraphs.  “Religious freedom used to mean…,” well if “used” extends back no farther than 1963 or so, perhaps, but religious freedom as it was coined in the United States, and Britain for that matter, was about PRACTICE of religion – that we are free to practice our faith.  And yet we find our freedom of practice curtailed everyday in things like the HHS mandate, and you know it is not going to be long before states where same-sex marriage is legal are going to force churches to perform same-sex ceremonies in the name of equality.

Which brings me to this little number from The American Conservative:

Mike Huckabee warns that if the GOP caves on same-sex marriage, Evangelicals will walk. I don’t believe it. This is an empty threat. Huckabee and I are on the same side of the SSM question, so for “Evangelicals” you might as well substitute “social conservatives.” I think very few of us will abandon the Republican Party over this issue. Why would we, given the alternative would be a Democratic Party that’s more hostile to our values and concerns?

If he’s talking about Evangelicals and other social conservatives walking away from political engagement within the GOP, and on behalf of GOP candidates, he may have a point. If they decide that the party has surrendered on the issues that are most important to them, that can’t help but reduce enthusiasm and engagement. It’s not quite the same thing, but in the wake of the Iraq War and the economic crash, and the subsequent inability of the Republican Party to do anything but double down on its ideology, I quit identifying as a Republican, changed my registration to Independent, and now consider myself simply a conservative. I am more likely to vote Republican than Democrat, given my convictions, but I’m not nearly the automatic Republican vote that I used to be, while also not becoming enthusiastic in the least about Democrats.

Point is, the GOP alienated me from politics in general. The only reason I retain a likelihood to vote Republican for national office is over social issues, especially same-sex marriage and abortion and, relatedly, religious liberty. If the GOP gives these up, there will be no strong reason at all for me — or the group Thomas Kidd calls “paleo-Evangelicals” — to privilege voting Republican over Democratic.

That’s called “quitting” folks- and reflects a gross misunderstanding of how the nation works.  If the GOP is “caving” then it is because that is where the consensus lies.  And if that is where the consensus lies then we have failed the nation in so many ways.  We have failed to convince the nation of the correctness of our stance.  Which takes me back to excellence.  If we were excellent in education, excellent in argumentation, excellent in evangelism and excellent in political engagement, then the consensus would be in our direction.  But rather than try to get excellent in those things, by say diving into the party and working harder and better to make it represent our views, we pout and run home.

There is some deep sociological and eccesiological stuff at play here.  I need to explore it more before I wirte about it at length, but the Evangelical church does very little of what the church has done historically – it is church reduced.  Subsequently, many in Evangelical circles have moved to other places to try an exercise that stuff, the GOP being amongst them.  But the GOP has a stated purpose and it is not to do some of the things the church is supposed to do.  This kind of disappointment in the GOP is really disappointment in the church.  At least that’s my theory at the moment, as I say, need to explore it a bit more.

But in the meantime what is obvious is we HAVE to engage or we are going to lose.  We are being assaulted not just on our religion, but on our simple common sense.  Can’t we at least stand up and fight back for common sense?

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Jim Geraghty wonders if we conservatives still trust the people?

My fellow conservatives… the state of our movement is not strong. Let’s face it. We’re depressed. We feel betrayed by the American electorate.

[...]

Anyway, since the election, we’ve been marinating in this very grim story: we, a bunch of Americans who love freedom and believed that we can live happy lives if the government will just get out of the way, got swamped by a growing swarm of voters who believe that government – the very same government who had disappointed them and failed them time and again – will solve their problems.

Geraghty then goes on  to outline some narratives that should restore our trust.  It’s good stuff on a political level, but my trust issues run deeper.  You see, ultimately, I never trusted “the people.”  Theologically we are all sinners, and as such we are all ultimately untrustworthy.  Theologically, my trust has always been in God – and it still is.  That remains my source of hope.

But God acts in our society through agency – the church – and this is where I find my trust fading.  The traditional agencies in America, the mainline denominations, are essentially dead.  The Evangelicals lack sufficient organizational infrastructure to make a difference on a national level. But more, their current prominence is based not on the deep things of God but on a sort of moralistic pandering.  Only the Catholics, and increasingly the Mormons, have the intellectual might and organizational levels necessary to keep our nation strong.  And yet in an interview yesterday, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput said:

Well, I think the biggest issue for those of us in the Western world, and that’s Europe and North America, is the falling off of Catholic practice, and the diminishment of numbers. A church’s strength isn’t proven by the numbers of members, but for us to lose so many, for church attendance to drop from 75% to 30% is a huge issue.

Not to mention Evangelicals, disorganized as they are, remain dominant and they are none too keen on letting Catholics or Mormons up for air.  The left knows our strengths and weaknesses and can therefore concentrate their efforts.

It is these things that make it hard to view Obama’s re-elect as an aberration that can be overcome.  A turnaround is based on an essentially sound organization that has been misdirected in some fashion.  But with faith in such declension, one must be concerned about the essential soundness of the nation.

Because my faith is ultimately in God, I am not prepared to give up hope, but grave concern is in order.  And the road back does not begin with political sloganeering or messaging.  It begins with churches.  Archbishop Chaput followed up the remarks quoted above with these:

And so I think the new evangelization is probably the most important issue for the Church of our time. You know, that’s, the new evangelization is undermined by the sexual abuse scandal, and the diminishment of the Church wasn’t caused by the sexual abuse scandal. It was abetted by it and helped, but it wasn’t caused by it, because the diminishment began long before that was the public scandal that it is today. So I think how do we bring people past old forms to come to know Jesus Christ, and to fall in love with Him and to commit themselves to His teaching. That’s what the Church is about. And we have to find fresh ways of doing that. Here, I’m the bishop of Philadelphia now, and I’m actually the bishop of a church that is in decline in terms of the institutions. We were a hugely successful institutional church. At one time, we had 267,000 young people in our schools… [emphasis added]

I found that an astonishing statement from a Roman Catholic Archbishop.  It is not about building the church, or supporting the prelacy, or any of the usual Roman Catholic jargon  – it is a pure statement of faith.   And it is a call to all of us – Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Mormon – we all have to ask ourselves the same questions on a personal and an organizational level.  It’s not about market research or trends.  It’s not about web presence or Twitter accounts.  It’s about the church being about exactly, precisely and only what the Archbishop said -

come to know Jesus Christ – fall in love with Him – commit to His teaching.

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So yesterday I ran across a rumor that Pope Benedict was resigning because he was about to be busted over child sex stuff.  In one sense that is not the least bit surprising, virtually everything conceivable qualifies as an internet rumor these days, and about 10% of the population believes that Elvis is alive.  (That’s an old stat I am quoting that many no longer hold true, he’d be such an old man now that I would hope some of the hold outs would be giving up.)  When I first encountered the rumor I intended to write about the lack of respect for religious institutions reflected in such false accusation.

But then yesterday Obama’s posturing on the sequester became the big news of the day.  It is an old and tired routine at this point – “Congress need to fix the problem and they are not.”  Yet another false accusation – that this is Congress’s sole responsibility.  Sadly; however, this is more than blame shifting, this is political technique.

It is a technique I have seen many a protestant pastor use to deflect leaders in their church that have a pet peeve that is really not important enough to demand the attention and resources of the church proper.  They tell the leader to “go for it” knowing that they hold enough power to keep the leader from getting very far.  In the meantime, the pastor concentrates on what they perceive to be the most important agenda items.  In this case, Obama does not want to be burdened by things like a budget, nor is he concerned about the military.  Nope he has to be concerned about overturning the will of the people, expressed overtly in a vote, on gay marriage in California.

If what Obama is doing can be called leadership, it is subversive at best,  Think about it.  It is a means to passing an unstated agenda that is at least controversial, if not unpopular, while at the same time accumulating power and weakening the other power centers in the government.  After all, at its heart this technique seeks to avoid the nuisance of having to work with Congress.  Or when you do it has them backed so far in the corner that they concede on the Obama agenda in the hopes of getting something, anything, on the stuff that matters.

This technique has it’s limits however.  It only works when the chief executive is popular and more or less untouchable.  Unfortunately in this situation, I do not know how to bring those limitations into play.  That I hesitate to say why is testament to how difficult the situation is.  Obama is untouchable due to his race.  Any action we take to undermine his perceived popularity will simply be reflected onto us as racism.  I have no doubt that there is a significant number of people that will accuse me of racism simply on the basis of having written this entirely analytical paragraph.

There are only two ways out of this conundrum that I can see.  One would be a to find and tilt up a figure with higher levels of popularity than Obama.  (I think this is the game that Marco Rubio is currently trying to play.  Much as I respect Rubio, if I am right his actions trouble me deeply.  This would be a huge mistake.  It one, feeds the errant value structure that got us into this mess and two, the such would serve to further unbalance the constitution.

The other alternative  to hang on.  Such subversive power accumulation is always a house of cards.  Due to its reliance on lies, deception and subversion it always eventually falls apart.  I think most of us are morose because we thought the 2012 election would be its undoing.  We worry because unlike the last time this sort of thing happened (FDR’s re-election in middle of a depression that he only worsened) we fear the cards may not fall in a way that will allow us to readily rebuild.

Frankly, I don’t know what’s going to happen.  But I do know two things.

We cannot allow the false accusations to destroy our confidence.  In other words we must cling to the truth about our ideas and ourselves.  The second thing I know flows directly from this.

We cannot allow our personal values to shift.  When it falls, and it will fall, if we have not preserved our values, rebuilding will be impossible.  Germany is now essentially a secular state because the church largely went along for the ride with the Nazis.  When that catastrophe ended, there was nothing to rebuild.  Am I promoting a form of political martyrdom?  That could happen, but I don’t think it will.

You see, I think that if we just stand tall and true and committed, the fact that what we have is better will be come apparent.  Ronald Reagan borrowed from religion and called us a city on a hill.  That’s not a weapon – it’s just a light.  If shine brightly, people will flock to us.

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I started my morning with my devotional, but that is not where I want to start this post.  Rather, let’s start with the next thing I read – Victor Davis Hanson:

Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?

[...]

One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian literature on the eve of the city’s takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over slicing up a shrinking pie. Athenian speeches from that era make frequent reference to lawsuits over property and inheritance, evading taxes and fudging eligibility for the dole. After the end of the Roman Republic, reactionary Latin literature — from the likes of Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius and Tacitus — pointed to “bread and circuses,” as well as excessive wealth, corruption and top-heavy government.

[...]

By any historical marker, the future of Americans has never been brighter. The United States has it all: undreamed new finds of natural gas and oil, the world’s pre-eminent food production, continual technological wizardry, strong demographic growth, a superb military and constitutional stability.

Yet we don’t talk confidently about capitalizing and expanding on our natural and inherited wealth. Instead, Americans bicker over entitlement spoils as the nation continues to pile up trillion-dollar-plus deficits. Enforced equality rather than liberty is the new national creed. The medicine of cutting back on government goodies seems far worse than the disease of borrowing trillions from the unborn to pay for them.

So true and not the most pleasant way to start the day.  So Hanson sees the nation making a choice – MAKING A CHOICE! – to decline.  Why would we make such a choice?

That question brings me to my next reading – this one from “C.S. Lewis”” Facebook page.  I have been a “friend” to this page for some time – apparently the foundation that cares for Lewis’ writings runs it and mostly they just put up quotes.  This is the one that caught my eye:

“Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that…. The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.”
~ Mere Christianity

If you think about it that speaks volumes about media and nation and church.  Which brings me to my devotional:

The first few times I read Jesus’ Parable of the Three Servants, I missed the point entirely. “So the  third servant buried his silver in the ground for safekeeping. What’s so terrible about that?” I reasoned. I concluded that he was unfairly punished simply for proceeding more cautiously than the other two servants, who had invested their money to earn the master even more

[...]

The key, of course, is to recognize your gifts and use them for the good of others. Don’t play it safe, Jesus tells us in this parable. Don’t hide your gifts; don’t bury them, like the fearful third servant did, where they can’t impact anyone else. And don’t squander them either, but instead, invest them in growing the kingdom of God.

And now we know the answer tot he question posed by Hanson.  Why are we choosing to decline?  Because we are hiding our gifts, and in an effort to seem “relevant,” churches experiment with the new rather that teach the old over and over and over again.

That brought me back to last Wednesday’s post in which we discussed how the political opposition is committed to transforming every single aspect of our society, from the most sacred to the most profane.  I have not written for this blog since then, because of the implications of that observation.  The implication is that we are not as committed to preserving our society as they are to transforming it.  I have been trying desperately to think of ways to restore our commitment.

But the more I think about it, the more I think there is no trick or method or single means to restore that commitment.  The only way to restore a commitment is to commit.  And such commitment must be on all levels of our lives.  We cannot just throw some money at it and let someone else carry the ball.  We cannot be publicly committed and privately ambivalent.  We cannot profess our faith, but be less diligent in living our faith.

We hold a royal flush.  But we are allowing ourselves to be bluffed – which should be impossible because nothing beats a royal flush.  Which means we don’t really believe we hold a royal flush.  That’s our problem.  We are just as anxious “not to see the old simple principles” as our opposition.  Oh sure, we pay those principles lip service, but we do not really believe them at the deepest levels – we are not committed to them.  Certainly we are not as committed to them as others are to the newer, errant principles.

We’re quitting, not losing.

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Karl Rove in this morning’s WSJ:

Many are arguing these days that President Obama has forged a new majority coalition of women, minorities, young people and upscale cultural liberals so large and durable that he can do what no president has done before—pursue a very liberal agenda without serious opposition or defections from his own party. Demography is destiny, this argument holds, and it is irrevocably on the side of Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party.

Demography as destiny certainly seems the principle behind he current push on immigration.  It is almost naked in its efforts to capture a voting bloc.  But as Rove concludes:

Demography isn’t destiny because nothing is permanent in politics…

So, what changes things?  Well Hugh Hewitt is on to something in his push to link immigration reform with school choice and education reform.  More here:

Third, as Arthur Brooks has repeatedly argued, conservatives have to be for the poor –really be for them—if we want to make the best case, which is the moral case, for free enterprise.

A grudging acceptance of immigration reform does nothing to communicate the reality of the conservative hope for immigrants. Putting the education of the newly regularized immigrants at the heart of the GOP response to immigration reform puts a moral response at the center of the conservative contribution to the debate.

Hewitt’s point is vitally important.  Education and social morality changes, and this is a smart way to lead that change.  And yet I am uncertain of the potential for success of these endeavors.  For one thing, as Daniel Henninger pointed out this morning, Obama is playing for serious keeps:

Marcuse called this “the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions.” That, clearly, is what President Obama—across his first term, the presidential campaign and now—has been doing to anyone who won’t line up behind his progressivism. Delegitimize their ideas and opinions.

A Marcusian world of political intolerance became a reality on U.S. campuses. With relentless pushing from the president, why couldn’t it happen in American political life? Welcome to the Thunderdome.

I am concerned that we are playing subtle long term strategies while Obama seeks to obliterate us.  I am worried that we do not have the protection of the English Channel while Obama blitzkriegs his way through the nation.  Can we marshal our forces before they are overrun and conscripted?

But I also have deeper concerns.  Moral and cultural change must precede political change.  And while education is one institution to produce such, religion is the other.  Hewitt is rightly promoting a way to try and recover one of those institutions, but what about religion?  Can it recover?

There remains serious infighting amongst religious groups.  The argument about who is and who is not a “Christian” continues unabated – in some cases exacerbated by the results of the last election when it should have been truncated by it.

The majority of churches today, particularly Evangelical megachurches which are the growing edge of faith at the moment, focus on TV show like worship services and do not build the sorts of infrastructures (schools, community centers, etc.) that can truly affect culture.  I worry that if Hewitt’s goal of vouchers for normalizing immigrants comes to pass there will not be the necessary capacity in educational alternatives to public schooling to put those vouchers to use.  And if there is such capacity, I wonder what the quality will be.

When busing was ordered in the south, private schools sprang up like weeds.  Because the best teachers wanted out of the public schools as well, these private schools tended to be pretty good.  I wonder if that will be the case should this come to pass.  With the teachers unions being as strong as they are will the best educators want to make the move?  Moreover, will the private schools be able to compete in salary and benefits?

These are questions that need to be answered now and in conjunction with efforts like Hewitt’s.  Churches should be forming educational committees right this minute and beginning to explore the possibilities.  The massive facilities that have come to exist around the megachurch phenomena need to be put to this use, and it won’t be easy.  You can bet your bottom dollar the teachers unions will make licensing and permitting for such private endeavors as hard as possible.  If they do not already exist, regulations will rapidly come out that will make the overhead of such an operation huge.  BIG money will be needed.

BIG money takes time to accumulate and in this situation, continued flow of money will be needed – that’s even harder to set up.

And that may very well mean that we have to set aside our theological differences to pool our resources to get the job done.  The Roman Catholics, and to some extent the Lutherans have well developed educational systems.  The Mormons have well-developed supplemental education.  There’s some great shortcuts.  Do we have the wherewithal to take them, or will we be too busy decrying their theological impurity?

We’re in Thunderdome folks.  I, for one, want to leave.

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