Learning the Obvious Lessons

Christians don't need complex political analysis to act well in the modern cultural climate. We need the Gospel, a Scriptural view of human nature and to obey what Jesus commands.

Evangelical Christians believe our intellect is affected by depravity- like everyone else. The Flesh, that sinful, reactive, instinctual, disordered, rebellious and selfish, self doesn’t want to know the truth. It wants to know truths and facts that confirm our self-justification, but not the whole truth- not the truth that can make us our brother’s keeper, or give justice to our neighbor, or to figure out how to love our enemy. Certainly not anything that could leave us responsible to God. We’re not looking for responsibility.

Because of this, we (Christians, like all humans) tend to get stuck on a certain surface level of analysis that approves of the justification narrative we feel we need and whose community we belong to. In Christianity, the object of our trust in a false justification is called an “Idol”. We might use modern sociological terms like “confirmation bias” and such, but the old categories of sin, flesh, and idolatry work just as well- with their attending moral denunciations. The more we use language for how our sociological neurology works, the less moral responsibility we take for our actions or our character.

Part of Christian faith is being so justified in Jesus’ death and resurrection for us, that we can suffer the death and humiliation with him. Jesus isn’t only God, he is also the only truly good man. Therefore, accepting humiliation and denunciation with Him is either unjust suffering we can endure, or the transforming ‘death’ of discipleship we need. Such death and discipleship is meant to create humility, and the self-control, perseverance, brotherly affection and love (2 Pet 1:5) needed for virtue to triumph over fleshly reactions and the evasiveness against the truth the Flesh creates.

Anger over Sex

This is hidden by the fact that we have become unacquainted with the moral stories about anger. In fact, we are quite a lot less morally sophisticated than most medieval writers about how humans work. Everyone knows sex sells. We have a porn industry that make billions. But sex sells in sitcoms and movies and advertisements, and in everything. But as the evening news has known for years, fear and anger sell even better. Spectacle, as the Romans said.

St. Augustine spoke of this in the Confessions. In his day it was the Games. The Roman area was the spectacle of fear, hatred, and anger of his day. He saw how some of his friends sought to swear off the games, and then one peek, and they got sucked in again to their personal destruction. He writes tenaciously against the Games in The City of God as one of the ways Romans had made themselves morally degenerate. “one peek”. Reminds one of porn. Or, even more, of doom scrolling.

We are no longer ignorant.

We pay lip service to the sociology of hate, and then do approximately nothing to avoid it. Faith without works is still dead. In fact, we seem to be experimenting even with cognate degeneracy more and more. (to be clear, when I say “degenerate” i mean it literally: the opposite of moral “regeneration”. It is a growth vs. diseased analogy). According to this story- combining sex and anger is all the rage. It’s not a new concept. Just a few years ago, choking people you were being intimate with was all the rage. And I’ve heard more than one young woman say, “When you are with a man in the bed room, you can totally tell which ones watch porn, and which mostly don’t.”

It’s like we don’t want to learn about human beings. We don’t want to see how lust and other emotions can go haywire, and we have gotten more and more sexual dissatisfaction, disorder and just plain harm. It turns out the lessons we still won’t stop forgetting we know about sex are now moving over to anger. Humans have known for a few thousand years how anger functions in people. I guess since it wasn’t neurologists that told us, we can’t trust universal human wisdom. Let’s just see what happens.

What I see over and over, among all people, including Christians, is the “yeah, but” phenomena in full swing. I see it in myself. Only conscious action and specific disciplines and strategic friendship can overcome it. We say “Yeah, this political, social media anger, propaganda and spectacle are really bad. They’re destroying our society, our social bonds, the wellness and development of young people, and they’re making us dupes to foreign actors.” And then, like they didn’t hear themselves, “But, did you hear what __________ did? Can you believe it? Oh, the outrage!” It’s like they never say Star Wars episode IV: “Stay on target…”

Disciplined obedience can overcome confusion

Worse, we are not helped by the guardrails of Biblical laws. For example, one of the ten commandments is:

This is both a formal and informal command. It is a profound and insidious sin to say what isn’t true about someone in the same functional social sphere as you in a way that damages them in their interests so that you can be helped in yours. This is slander, false testimony, calumny, and other sins of speech.

Yet, so many Christians I meet seem to be blind to or consistently justify such false testimony so long as it is being done by the “right” side against the “right” targets. My friends:

the medium IS the message. Or better, the discipline IS the discipleship.

Being a Republican offers no more safety against the damning power of slander than if you are a Democrat. In fact, the team with the moral higher ground might be the more vulnerable to justify wicked means to pursue slightly superior ends. It doesn’t matter who is right in this regard. What matters is what is happening to you: it is degenerating you as your anger makes you feel you are fighting for righteousness. It’s not the truth that makes you feel sure- it’s the anger. Like drunkenness makes you not fear consequences, or sexual arousal makes one not care about restraint, anger makes you feel like a knight of righteousness even when you’re a flailing berserker in a hospital waiting room. Scripture tells is that one of the most complete damnations one can reach in this life is when you do something supremely self-damning and think you are doing God a favor.

John 16:2-3 They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God. 3 They will do such things because they have not known the Father or me.

This is not a perception or complexity problem.

It’s an obedience problem.

The irony that the Jews crucified Christ is not that they were worse than everyone else (a false assumption that leads to antisemitism). The irony is they should have been the most able to see who he was. We Christians, having more complete revelation now, are able to outdo them.

However, the Jewish leader’s failure was much worse than not “seeing that Jesus was the messiah”. The bigger, and more damning sin is that they didn’t obey the rules they knew were from God about how to treat people. Even if they had not recognized Jesus, if they had followed their own scriptures and rules that were obvious and explicit, they would not have harmed him.

They may not have believed in him, but they wouldn’t have falsely accused him, lied about him in trial and murdered him. If they had not done these things, maybe over time, they would have gotten it. It was like the tree in the garden. Adam and Eve may have been beguiled by the serpent’s propaganda, but if they had just obeyed God’s one commandment, they would not have fallen. The guardrail would have kept them on the cliff.

We, in this moment of propaganda, spin, and conspiracy, can still act justly toward other people- even while making earnest cases about what is good in a full throated way. Then, if we turn out to be dead wrong about our enemy, we will not have added to the sin of misjudging them the greater sin of slandering and harming them.

Simple: Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.

In my experience, very few writers, journalists or propogandists obey this simple commandment. This is one way to judge our sources predictably. If a person bears false witness, they are not a good witness. If they do it habitually, they are definitely not a good witness.

When you read an author, do they include the information a knowledgeable person would use to debunk their position? Is your opponent being heard for what they are saying, or are they being hear to be “destroyed” or so they “instantly regret it”?

Perhaps unpopular, but concrete examples:

An example on the Left is that I have not found a lot of “there-there” in the “worst quotes from Charlie Kirk”. People on the left seem to want to intentionally misunderstand him. It’s not that the statement is horrible, they are offended by his policy view. Then they bear false witness and use a “pejorative diagnosis label”¹ so that their readers cannot possibly read with an objective mind (a fallacy called: “poisoning the well”). I know that some people will take offence at this, but w are told that we will be judged on the same principles we judge.

Matthew 7:1 “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way as you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. 3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Billy Graham was right, even if he was being evasive, when he said people would not go to hell for being judged by God’s standards, but by being judged by their own. One reason scripture says the unrepentant will be condemned with “every mouth silenced” is not that God will break their jaws, but that he will display their indefensible hypocrisy to everyone by using their own standards to judge them.

I have seen this principle broken numerous times in the weeks after Charlie Kirk’s death, as people have judged him by using his words as they would never thought fair in the use of their own. These three examples come up again and again.

And Remember, the point here is not that Kirk was right- but that people often do exactly what they accuse Kirk of that Kirk didn’t do. They hypocrisy is palpable, and easily discernable if you are willing to see it.

Is wondering about qualifications after discriminatory hiring racist?

For example, when Kirk said that he’d wonder, (given the very active preferential hiring policies the airlines said they had engaged in, including changing standards for new pilots), if a Black pilot was qualified- was he saying that black people couldn’t make good pilots? Was he saying that non-black people were naturally better pilots?

No. He was simply saying that when qualifications are not the reason someone is hired, people who know this are going to wonder about the preferred group’s qualifications. Now, Kirk might be dead wrong. It may be that “more qualified” white pilots have more flight hours or education, but that these advanced qualifications didn’t indicate better flight ability or safety. Thus, the affirmative action policies were discriminatory, but maybe they weren’t compromising.

For example, studies out of California years ago showed that after 3 years of experience, more years of experience do not make school teachers more effective. So if I hire a teacher with 6 years experience over one with 21, that doesn’t mean I am hiring a less qualified teacher. I may be discriminating againt the teacher with more years of experience, or I may be picking the better teacher- but we cannot know this by this one “qualification”.

Thus I don’t know if Kirk was right or wrong that affirmative action black pilots should be looked at questionably. I have not heard of planes going down. However, his point about Affirmative Action is correct: it does tend to lead to more prejudice and resentment, not least in the group discriminated against. Just as black men might have feared a ferry boat driver in the south in 1852 was less qualified because he was white- it is human nature. Known discrimination leads to prejudice. That material increase in prejudice might be worth it to the black policy leader or Progressive, but the cost is real and unavoidable.

But, more importantly, is Kirk’s statement a statement of “White Supremacy”? That appears to be much more a label of slander than description to me. He made an argument and got a diagnosis in return.

What about the cognitive power of black women?

Kirk was also attacked as believing that “black women did not have adequate mental processing power.” The Progressive Daily Kos posted this clip:

Note the label. Look at the title of the video. Now watch it critically: is this what he is saying?

It turns out quite obviously that he is not. Now, I don’t fully agree with Kirk. Michelle Obama seems pretty smart to me. I’m not impressed with Sheila Jackson Lee- but she probably went to college in the 1970’s, and then, maybe affirmative action was still important to give some black students and women academic access. I agree with him that promoting KBJ to the Supreme court when Biden said he would only pick a black woman was a real problem. However, my thoughts on Brown’s fitness have more to do with the mental constipations of completely captured ideological thinking than they do with her raw IQ or bibliographic knowledge. She doesn’t seem remarkable to me, but I have not read the full text of any of her actual decision. I’m not willing to take conservative commentator’s word for it that she is a dummy. The stupidity of her refusal to define what a woman is in her confirmation hearings is ridiculous, but it is the kind of foolishness one often has to be reasonably smart and quite educated to fall into. Plus, the prejudice around KBJ was caused by Biden’s advertising his discrimination. That’s a white dude’s fault, not a black woman’s.

But with these criticisms and more, Kirk did not do what he is being accused of doing. He did not make a claim about black women’s brain processing power. That is false testimony. It is calumny. It’s slander. And the irony is lost on most Progressives that refer to this or sent it to me. The Daily Koss, and those that repeat this slander, are doing exactly what they object to Kirk doing- except he didn’t do it. They did.

Go ahead and post the video and say, “Charlie Kirk being a jerk in what he says about 4 accomplished black women”. That’s not sympathetic to Kirk. It’s not listening to him as you’d wish to be heard. But it’s not blatantly false. The sin is at least in a subjective category of judgment. It wouldn’t be false testimony.

Better, you could listen to understand how people like Kirk think about being called racists when they think unremarkable people are placed in key places of public life that effect all of us. Kirk thinks that Jackson was not more qualified than other choices for the court, and that her elevation for explicitly racial reasons was not only discrimination, but also administrative corruption of supreme consequence. He might also wonder how she can adjudicate cases of discrimination, being the beneficiary of such discrimination in holding the very post of her jurisprudence. Those are reasonable arguments. Arguments I wish he’d made more explicitly. He still doesn’t deserve a slanderous diagnosis in return.

What about antisemitism and Cultural Marxism?

One more on Kirk. Kirk said that many Jews have supported Cultural Marxism, and may be moving away from it now that they see that it has fostered so much anti-Israel sentiment that has boiled over into antisemitism.

I say this as a man with a Jewish wife and therefore, 4 Jewish children and many Jewish in-laws.

Leftist groups have said that using the phrase “Cultural Marxism” is an antisemitic slur, and some have sought to make this legitimate by quoting the judgment of the SPLC. There is even a WIKI that “objectively” holds this view. It labels it a ‘conspiracy theory’ in the title.

The problem is that many of us that are not partisan Leftists went to college. Some of us even studied politics and social movements. I was taught Cultural Marxism in my Poli-Sci minor and in my education classes. It was discussed openly in my women’s studies small groups and history classes. We discussed it quite extensively in my Marx-Engles class. In fact, many of these ideas, in their Fascist and Communist versions were developed by Jewish authors in the 20th century. There were quite a lot of Jewish socialists and social anarchists. It doesn’t make Jews inferior or worthy of discrimination or persecution.

For conservative anti-socialists, it has certainly puzzled many why so many Jews seemed to be on the side of philosophies that seemed so deadly to them in the 20th century. The answer is fairly straightforward: Jews are always a minority. It’s not weird that many Rabbi’s were among the first to show solidarity with southern blacks in the civil rights movement. Minorities often see some of same things through the lens of similar experience.

The real problem here is the part-whole fallacies, the genetic fallacies, association fallacies, and just plain abusive gaslighting in calling “Cultural Marxism” a conspiracy theory. I cannot tell you how many hundreds of hours I spent reading neo-Marxist and Cultural Marxist literature, discussing it with professors and grad students, and talking about it with university students in the late 1990’s. I heard non-stop of the “long march through the institutions”. In fact, one of the Evangelical visions of the 1990’s was to be part of a moderating counter march- to just be in the universities and have another voice available to young minds.

If you haven’t read it, there is an admirable summary of the sexual streams of Cultural Marxism in Carl Trueman’s book The Rise and Fall of the Modern Self. The late Voddie Baucham deserves much more attention on this than he got- not letting the right off the hook in skewering this form of the radical left. In my experience, Jordan Peterson has not exaggerated much in his assessment of the movement. Though his detractors certainly have. Weird, almost like they use the tactics of Cultural Marxists…

And we should continue to remember, Marxism is an anti-Christian, anti-tradition, and anti-essentialist movement. Marxists believe the ends we seek justify the means. This is part of the meaning of “revolution”- we are not trying to convince you. There is no beloved community. We are here to beat you. I was told dozens of times that objective moral standards of behavior were bourgeoisie norms that needed to be torn down with privileged and traditional and Christian society.

For WIKI or the SPLC to say that referring to Cultural Marxism is an appeal to antisemitism, or conspiracy theories, or is a form of white supremacy is pure, intentional gaslighting or willful ignorance of those that claim to be authorities. They discredit themselves at best. They are engaging in abusive behavior that is self-discrediting.

Of course, most groups that seek to combat Leftism are going to then use the phrase “Cultural Marxism”. Consequently, actual white supremacists are going to use the term. It will also be used by some antisemitic people. It will also be used to label people that are not really Cultural Marxists. It will rightly be used of people that are Cultural Marxists, but don’t know they are- think a lot of uneducated “advocate” tiktokers.

These people may also claim Jesus. That won’t make Jesus antisemitic, or white supremacist, or anything else. The claim against Kirk, on these grounds, is false testimony, slander and calumny. Maybe Kirk held real “fringe” views (though this is no refutation). But better evidence will need to be offered against someone that was so prominent a supporter of Israel, and learned more from Dennis Prager, the most prominent Jewish conservative personality in America, than from almost anyone else.

If you think claiming something is Culturally Marxist is White Supremacy. Maybe have a listen to Voddie Baucham:

The problem for me is not that I don’t know anything about Marxism. The problem is that I do. I studied Marxism. I read Marxists. I read biographies of Christians that lived under Marxist regimes. I read Gulag Archipelago (the author’s abridged version). Marxism embraces lying, deception and propaganda on the most fundamental moral level. It is intentionally a regime of lies. It is a conspiracy in that it teaches it's adherents to conspire. It is duped ignorance or complicity to call reference to such things a “conspiracy theory”. People don’t trust Cultural Marxists because they are avowed propogandists and conspirators. Well learned people do not trust them because they have told us they don’t abide by the ethical norms that make trust rational.

None of this refutes Cultural Marxism or the regimes of Critical Theories. Maybe Marxism is better than the alternatives. But that is the question Kirk was debating. And what he got for it was a deceptive and conspiratorial diagnosis from people who were either lying or being dupes.

Equal Opportunity Offence:

I have recently been looking into the claim that Right Wing groups are more violent than Left Wing groups. This seemed odd to me, since the great violent groups of the 20th century European conflict were on the Left. However, the public data tells the opposite tale: The there are quite a lot more “Right Wing” killings than Left wing- until this year. Here is an example article.

I have not looked into this enough to know if the methodology is valid. For example, they have clearly not included 9/11 in these statistics. It is also true that these numbers are remarkably low for a nation of 350 million people as diverse as ours. But in my preliminary research, this is the first result of a survey of the literature.

Many conservatives I know say, “The Left is just way more violent- there is no comparison.” That may be true of property crime. Most Left Wing violence seems to be destructive, but non-lethal. Be that as it may- the question still stands: where are the rebuttals to this data if such should exist? I did not find anyone yet that explained how this data is bad data.

If this is the case, could we understand why some people on the far Left think groups like Antifa need to exist? I consider Antifa a terrorist organization. However, that doesn’t mean all they do is terrorism. Like the street thugs of the 20th century- they defended their own as well as harmed others.

I’m not sure we can convince our neighbors on the Left that they need no “street armies” if it is true that most deadly extremist crime is done form the right. They will need people on the right condemning violence on the right before they will be willing to be people on the left condemning violence on the left.

Godliness and Human Nature

As a Christian, I am always going to preach a message of repentance and the power of the Spirit in regenerate people. We don’t have to live as reactive, petty, angry, lying and violent people. In Christ we can be so different.

However, I don’t expect people that are not Christians to live above the fray. I expect hem to get dragged down to the actions of predictable human nature. I don’t just believe that because it’s my theology. I believe it because it is what I see- in my neighbors, and too often, in myself.

Thus, as Scripture teaches, Christians, we have to start with us. We have to obey our own God’s laws. We have to refuse to slander people. We have to reject conspiratorial projects. We have to be honest with data that we find. We have to bring the temperature down. We have to speak full throated disagreement in the most persuasive and respectful way we can. We need more love and courage. More listening and more boldness. If we think Biblical godliness is a superior way of being to worldliness, we have to show people by what we do. Contrast is key to moral persuasion.

Look fairer and smell fouler

This essay is not about Charlie Kirk. It’s about listening to God in order to save our souls, and to be salt and light in our culture.

In the Lord of the Rings, the hobbits didn’t know whether to trust Aragorn at first. He was just Strider, the gruff ranger. But Frodo showed uneducated wisdom in choosing to trust Strider- even though the fate of whole world laid on his decision.

In talking to Strider he said, “You have frightened me several times tonight, but never in the way that the servants of the enemy would, or so I imagine. I think one of his spies would- well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand.”

You and I are at an impossible information disadvantage. We cannot know what is true politically, legally, economically, and so on. We can’t really “do our own research”. In so complicated a nation we are reliant on a “press”- a mediating class of people telling us what is happening and what to think about it.

It is for us to be discerning. But we cannot discern by knowing more information than the propagandist who comes clothed as a journalist. We have to be able to judge on closer criteria. Criteria we can sense, or verify. And criteria that the wicked cannot overcome by “appearing as an angel of light”. We need to train our senses and our sentiments in virtue.

We should start with some key Biblical commands. We can start with: “do not bear false testimony against your neighbor.” We can listen for those that want to inflame the flesh in us. We can ask ourselves: do I want to be judged with he exact same criteria I am judging right now? We can ask, “Is this person even-handed? Are they telling me all the relevant facts- or do they leave out just the ones that make their case worse?”

Jesus could teach us to be discerning. He does not seem at all interested in just giving us the answers- he wants us to become mature and wise and self-controlled inside the whirlwind. Such maturity does have the perk of helping us experience more peace and less anger and anxiety. We will grow in virtue rather than degenerate into self-justifying hardness. We will rely more on the grace of Jesus to justify us. We will be much more able to show self-control, love our neighbors, and get to the bottom of more of our difficulties. We could be the Salt and Light, the City on a Hill we are meant to be.

1. I’m coining this term based on a quote I heard recently: “In many of my political conversations I offer an argument and I get back a diagnosis. I say, ‘I think policy A is better than policy B.’ What I get back is, “Oh, You’re a white supremacist…or a racist…or a Fascist…or a…’ you get the point. Once you realize this is what is happening, it’s a lot less confusing. They aren’t arguing the point, they are giving you a diagnosis.”