Monday Morning Music Ministry

6-22-20

Pick and choose. It should be the new motto of the United States, surely more appropriate than e pluribus unum – “out of many, one.”

In fact we have become a culture that can be described as “out of many: many more.” No more unity. Only a push for uniformity.

It explains the New Abnormal for every totalitarian, from news anchors to street thugs: reliance on lies, half-truths, and intimidation. “Never mind what I told you,” W C Fields once barked at a caddy; “You do what I tell you!”

So the rest of the population, the vast majority, obeys or shuts up. Looting, vandalism, destruction, attacks, theft, and murder… most Americans watch on TV as if the events are parts of a bad cop show. What can we do? Change the (virtual) channel, is peoples’ mindset.

What Americans mostly do is what every decaying society throughout history has done. We pick and choose. We might express solidarity, or sign petitions, or express concern, unless “there, by the grace of God, go I.” Unless it is our shop being stripped bare; our neighborhood being terrorized; our friends or our police being murdered.

We pick and choose our outrage; pick and choose our sympathy. We have picked, and have chosen, to be blind fools.

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Pearl Harbor came quickly upon most citizens. And like on that morning, we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of a world war. Or the Second American Revolution? The pandemic, whether really random or orchestrated, muddies that calculation. But as urban rioting and destruction by strangely similar black-clad shock troops appear in cities of the world that never heard of George Floyd – or otherwise have little contact with black lives – “World War” is the apt description.

The utter outrage of public streets taken over; of public art being wantonly vandalized and ruined; of police being proscribed, attacked, and killed; of officials condoning and encouraging such savagery; all on top of occasional video-looped bad police actions – is nothing but nihilism. Definition: deadly anarchy aimed not at racism but at you and me; at the American Republic; at Western Civilization.

The battle theaters in this Third World War are not randomly chosen, and certainly are not spontaneous. We see the same black costumes, the same tactics, the same bundles of bricks.

And the same willing dupes at the fringes of rallies, in parades, occasionally pushed into the crossfire. Well-meaning moms and kids. Nature abhors a vacuum, so when when supine leaders accommodate, the radical Left provides leaders. When police are silenced, the radical Left provides street thugs. When small business owners – tragically, many of them black entrepreneurs – lose their life’s dreams, the radical Left provides a new socialist-style economy.

These templates, by the way, were outlined in the handbook Rules For Radicals by Saul Alinsky, two of whose students were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

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Christianity has become a Pick and Choose religion in America. Perhaps consumerism and national wealth has encouraged flaccid faith, the abandonment of Biblical standards. After all, who needs God when we have Social Security and Medicare, and TV comedies or music on hand-helds 24/7, and 12-step programs for everything? Not to mention drugs and booze and…

Welcome to America, 2020. And for many of those who still attend church, many denominations are Pick and Choose too. Biblical truths are bent, or ignored. Doctrine is regarded as mistaken or outdated. God’s words about morality and responsibility are, well… you Pick and Choose what’s “right” for yourself. Honk if you love Jesus.

Of course, a god who allows such “beliefs” is not a God at all. Suddenly, the God of our fathers has changed from “the Great I AM” into “the Great I MIGHT.”

I drag the Lord into this because He should be at the center of all our discussions, decisions, and values; as natural as the breaths we draw. But… we are, instead, suffocating as a nation these days, not healthily breathing.

Every day of the spreading stain of anarchy and nihilism might mean a year or so of restoration. Streets can be cleaned; windows replaced; graffiti sand-blasted. The replacement of statues would be decades of sickening, useless debates, and probably futile. Warped views of society – especially the perceptions of youngsters – might be irretrievable.

Perpetrators are likely never to face justice, despite starring on news videos. The American public, stretched thin from the plague and the anarchy, will have extra tax burdens from the clean-ups. Rather, this nightmare will likely continue, with more defecation, more defaced statues, more cultural heritage obliterated from national life – worse than when Stalin merely airbrushed his enemies out of photographs.

The prime offenders are the conspiratorial black-clad thugs, of course. I do not blame police (I mean for their lack of riot response); if my son were a cop I would advise him against suiting up for what has become a daily suicide mission. But the guiltiest parties are these: those who have choreographed these events, whether directed and funded by Soros or others; and elected officials in America. National “leaders” rattle swords, but their inaction invites more thuggery. And local “leaders” have been radical moles waiting for these opportunities, or hiding behind radical slogans because they are moral cowards.

In any event this national disgrace will outlive burned police stations, ruined public art, and broken businesses and life-dreams. As I said, this is a stain that spreads easily and in every direction. And will be hard to wash out.

It is coming to your neighborhood. Your city hall, your public library, your local shops. Maybe your home’s windows and front doors and parked cars. The choice of responding will be one more case of picking and choosing: Accommodation with cowardice and surrender; or committed, righteous, action — physical and spiritual.

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Click: A New Birth of Freedom

1-30-17

“The old order changeth,” and sometimes it changeth pretty dang fast. With the sum of human knowledge doubling every 17 months, they say – whoops, this just in: it doubles every 16-1/2 months – our heads spin.

Surely this is the case beyond facts and scientific data. Common folk feel a disconnect with changing morality, musical styles, social policies, and fashion. Such things have always evolved, but never before between breakfast and bedtime. To the extent that essentially evanescent matters change, humankind has always been assured, and relied upon, and embraced the Word of God as immutable, everlasting.

That contemporary churches and denominations are re-shaping their brands of theology to accommodate contemporary mores, instead of the opposite, is disturbing. It offends the faithful, subliminally. It is incendiary to spiritual activists, Christian soldiers, as the hymn identifies us. It is odious, we are persuaded, to God Almighty, whose Word commands that we not conform to this world.

The nature of friendship has changed, or rather has been changed. Once upon a time if you fell out of affection with an associate, you discussed the problem. In the misty past, and in extreme cases, opponents would fight duels… but only then after elaborate notices, challenges, appointments, nominations of “seconds,” and scheduling. Swords or pistols must have seemed virtually inconsequential after all those preliminaries.

Fast forward to today, when people Unfriend others on Facebook. It is the equivalent.

Inherent in Unfriending, except when clearing one’s In-Box (or re-establishing order and sanity to the daily grind, another topic) is condescension, disapproval, and exclusion. Safer than swords or pistols, the e-version of casting someone from your social circle and yelling “unclean!!!” is to Unfriend.

It has happened to me lately, although not specifically. I have been gathered, like a happy fish minding my own business, in wide nets cast in the waters by people who demand that folks who voted the way I did recently remove myself from their site. Anathema! – we are denounced, condemned, excommunicated.

In a few cases I have taken the trouble to say, in effect, “It’s been swell; have a nice life.” In every case the response has been that their outburst was not personal, and, gee, we can still talk and Message (now a verb, ugh) but simply avoid politics. My cheek should become Unslapped by the glove.

Beyond the evidence of a culture hurtling toward terminal superficiality, there is a deeper and more disquieting trend at work here at the nexus of Politeness and Politics. Relevant Magazine recently published an article about the dangers of social isolation and the resulting indifference to other people and their needs. It is true that Internet Etiquette has transformed our computer and smart phone screens into virtual shields, or allows us that option.

I think it is an objection without full force; apart from spiritual regrets we might have, it is largely a mechanistic argument. In any event, what is more alarming to me is the visceral effect: it is a condition, not a theory, that confronts us.

The election of Donald Trump – I would say the America of both Obama and Trump – has our society in a more contentious state than at any time since the Civil War. This is a major malady, no longer a possible passing case of civic indigestion. We are headed for some form of crack-up; it is inevitable.

As in the Civil War, families are split, arguments are heated, friendships are… Undone. I have not one single (or married) friend who does not have a story about dinner-table arguments, holiday disruptions, emotional scenes, snide insults, rolling eyes, snarky comments, about politics in general and the election specifically. Liberals AND conservatives. In person, and online.

Before and during the Civil War this was the case, despite the issues being deeper and the bloodshed flowing redder. But every family and every neighborhood was affected, and tensions were high; friendships ended.

I cannot think of other civic strife in America that tore the social fabric more. Civil Rights? The Vietnam War? Prohibition? Perhaps back to Senator John Calhoun’s calls for Nullification (which I lump with Slavery issues) or Andrew Jackson’s dissolution of the National Bank… no. New England’s threats of Secession in the 1810’s? Not likely. Those issues fomented debates, not divorces. Maybe the Revolution itself, when Loyalists, Revolutionaries, and the indifferent split the Colonial population into thirds.

Now there is a national nastiness, and the word proudly has been appropriated by the women and “others” who marched on the day after the Inauguration. Despite protestations, the national media largely has waged an ideological war on the public, and the public’s awakening to the assault is branded illegitimate – so says the man behind the curtain in the Emerald City.

My daughter Heather, thinking about this dilemma in our midst, wishes for a National Game Night that might re-set the meter of comity and amity. But she knows that dream is a metaphor: unrealizable wishful thinking.

The Bible’s words to be “in this world, but not of this world” shout to us more than ever before. I have shared the impulses, for years, of gathering the communion of saints around us; encouraging one another; joining home schools and small groups. Yes, we should witness. No, we should not leave the non-believers outside the camps. Christians are withdrawing into spiritual cocoons. Good or bad?

I understand that God is our real Friend, an ever-present help in time of trouble, and in every other aspect of life. When we are Unfriended by a hostile world, are we to sigh Relief? Or find new friends? Or Re-friend? It is not an Internet “meme” yet, but might become one: Refriending.

“Hear ye now what the Lord says; Arise, contend thou before the mountains, and let the hills hear thy voice” (Micah 6:1).

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Click: Prayer

10-4-15

Faith has been in the news recently. More precisely, news about faith has confronted us, almost daily, of late.

The Pope visited America, and his words were examined, feared, or cheered. He put some current issues in a religious context. He secretly met with a Baptist woman from Kentucky who went to jail rather than certify, as a municipal clerk, marriage licenses for homosexuals; he reportedly encouraged civil disobedience like hers.

The scandal and controversy about selling harvested body parts of aborted babies has, of course, a religious cast, whether the faith in question is biblical or secular-humanist; its battles are fought, however, with religious fervor.

Christian expression, from signs and symbols to prayers and oaths, are being attacked by some citizens and suppressed by some governmental and military agencies.

Very recently there was another school shooting, at an Oregon college, where the murderer asked the victims’ faiths. Those who answered “Christian” he shot in their heads; others were shot in their legs. Echoes of Columbine, and other violent attacks. President Obama, almost immediately, addressed the nation and deplored the guns.

In a familiar pattern, Obama and the media not-so-subtly assign mass shootings and gun violence into one of two categories. If white people commit the crimes, they are deranged radical Christians whose guilt is shared only by an evil society obsessed by weaponry. If the shooters are black or Muslims, they are misunderstood victims of a bigoted society who justifiably retaliate in a form of workplace violence. So goes the analyses and their logical extensions.

This all might look like random bits, issues of war and terrorism and Constitutional rights and women’s rights and free speech and random violence or mental-health… but they are all, as I said above, religious matters at their core. Spiritual crises; spiritual warfare; spiritual solutions that are lacking. In fact I think the problems are deeper than news headlines or society’s fads: I think the many problems facing our neighborhoods and nation and the world are fundamental, not momentary, troubles.

History might be at a turning point. Our Western heritage is on the verge of extinction.

I might be one lonely essayist making these observations, and you might agree or disagree. But I invite you to read the words of someone who might surprise you, because they scarcely have been reported in the press. So I am happy to quote some presidential passages here:

“Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values… Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan.”

“I did as [my mother] said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since.”

“First and foremost we should be governed by common sense. But common sense should be based on moral principles first. And it is not possible today to have morality separated from religious values.”

“The… Church plays an enormous formative role in preserving our rich historical and cultural heritage and in reviving eternal moral values. It works tirelessly to bring unity, to strengthen family ties, and to educate the younger generation in the spirit of patriotism.”

Quiz time is over. Not Washington nor Adams. Not Lincoln nor Theodore Roosevelt. (Not, either – need we say? – Barack Obama) These are quotations from speeches by President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Russia has reinstated the churches that were outlawed by the Soviets; and encourages religious expression. Putin has been baptized, has testified to faith in Christ, and attends church regularly. Russia’s foreign policy has been victim of radical Islam, and has pursued policies against it at home, in provinces, and abroad.

In Syria, Russia recognizes that ISIS is at heart an anti-Christian movement. President Assad, for all his sins, is of the Alawite minority, as are Syrian Christians; and Christians generally are protected in Syria – and were similarly protected by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But after the US invasion and withdrawal, Christians have been slaughtered wholesale or driven from their ancient towns – now virtually extinct as a people in Iraq after 2000 years.

Russian law now bans homosexual “propaganda,” abortion advertising, abortions after 12 weeks, and has criminalized the “insulting” of people’s religious sensibilities – a refreshing twist of the American fetish with “hate crimes.” Rev. Franklin Graham has applauded these priorities. President Putin has declared Russia a “Christian country,” not that other religions are outlawed (he recently attended a mosque dedication) but respecting his nation’s heritage and traditions. As once was the case in Christian America.

I, and many friends, are in the odd position of wanting automatically to defend our flag and our country that stands, today, for hedonism, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide, sale of baby body parts, Hollywood “values,” easy divorce, easy abortions, easy immigration, easy drugs… And we are in the odd position of seeing an old foe, Russia, suddenly championing Christian values, calling Islamic expansionist radicalism what it is, and acting where the weak-kneed (or treasonous) American leaders will not.

The Administration favors killing babies, but not ISIS murderers, and Islamic terrorists.

Our government forces the entry of illegals across porous borders and from terror states, but initiates lawsuits against nuns who resist being forced to support abortions, and husband-and-wife bakers who decline to decorate cakes for homosexuals.

This week the presidential candidate Dr Ben Carson widely was criticized for saying that he would not vote for a Muslim for president. Lost in the din were details about those Mohammedans who elevate Sharia law above the Constitution; and the fact that Dr Carson does not advocate the banning of Islam or the deportation of Muslims. He would not vote for one, absent the conditions he stated. We still have freedom of conscience and freedom of action in America. Maybe not for long.

Secularists have almost convinced America that Abraham Lincoln was an atheist, but he once said: “I do not think I could myself be brought to support a man for office whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.”

In the year of our Lord 2015, America is making life hell for Christians at home, and acquiescing in Christian persecution abroad. While worship and freedom of thought are still legal, before our liberties slip away, while all these religious and pseudo-religious battles rage, let us recall another admonition of Lincoln. Let us not worry so much whether God is on our side… but whether we are on God’s side.

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Click: The Old Country Church

3-16-15

I have begun reading “A Chronicle Of the Crusades,” a massive 15th-century illuminated manuscript – in translation, believe me – originally titled “Les Passages d’Outremer.” I am interested in history of all eras and all places, so this is not exactly required reading. However, I am also prompted by President Obama’s recent scolding of Christians to “get off their high horses” and realize that many awful acts were committed “in the name of Christ,” citing the crusades of a thousand years ago; and not mentioning atrocities committed by radical Moslems a thousand years ago or – famously – last week either.

It is not mere (and common) self-loathing of Christians and whites to assume that the Crusades were birthed and maintained in Christian brutality, blood lust, and racism. Aggressive educators and supine defenders of our faith have transformed this contention into a “fact of history” – despite its substance being very much in dispute. Rather, historical facts, if they shall become the subtext of our identity and rationale for today’s policies, must be dusted off and honestly viewed.

Christianity had “holy sites,” associated with the person and ministry of Jesus Christ. Islam, a religion founded centuries subsequent to Christianity, determined to seize lands and sites, sometimes desecrating them. Christians sought to restore ownership, if not management, of holy places in the “Holy Land.” Its center of gravity having shifted northward and westward, Christian expeditions were launched to that end. In succeeding campaigns, there were battles, sieges, pillaging, many deaths, and uncountable examples of bravery and brutality on both sides, on all sides.

It is rather useless, and perhaps intentionlly subversive toward a different agenda, to re-ignite those flames of passion. Yet it is being done, and not only by our president. Wars frequently are bad enough in their first incarnations, without declaring and waging them anew. Perhaps the huge book on my lap will teach me some new things, even though, yes, I realize that it was written by Europeans.

I want to pause for a moment, however, over a larger picture – the illuminated manuscript, as it were, of Western Civilization before and after the Crusades, and what once was rightly called Christendom.

People use the phrase “the barbarians are at the gates,” applying it to everything from video games to the corporate history of Nabisco to the threats posed by ISIS. Oddly, there is no consensus on the origin of the tocsin “at the gates!” but it seems that Barbarians, generally, were called such by the cultured civilizations of Athens and Rome based on the invading tribes’ purportedly unintelligible language: an approximation of “ba-ba-ba” morphed into “barbarian.” Today, alarmists use the phrase because they feel threatened by forces attacking the virtual gates of our culture.

Alarmists legitimately can be alarmed by legitimate threats, just as paranoiacs sometimes DO have people stalking them. Nevertheless the dominant thrust of Western Christianity’s contemporary cultural attitude is that the so-called challenges to our traditions and heritage are real… but are not threats.

Cultural rebels are in command. Anarchists and nihilists ironically are setting many of the rules in society. “The end of history” has happened: the postulation of Francis Fukuyama that millennia of the world’s cultural traditions have been up-ended, enabling disaster or, at best, an unknown new system. Just as with Nietzsche’s “God is dead” – when a culture no longer recognizes God, He is dead to that culture’s life. “How shall we then live?” was the question asked by Francis Schaeffer in a monumental study almost 40 years ago. It is a question posed by philosophers since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle… but never losing its relevance. Or, today, its urgency.

The difference today is the exquisite and apocalyptic precipice upon which we teeter. A death-struggle in the twilight of a once-great civilization. Barbarians are past the gates; they have been welcomed, they live amongst us; they are A-list celebrities.

I am not singling out Hollywood, but our Barbarian culture. We have willingly celebrated barbarism. Sometimes this suicidal syndrome is called anti-intellectualism, but is far deeper, of far more serious consequences. It threatens destruction from which survival is impossible. The contemporary morals and mores of Western Christianity (often masquerading as the new sacraments of “tolerance” and “lifestyle choices”) are nothing more or less than the poisoning of our culture’s well.

Our society’s rejection of God, denial of Christ’s divinity and teachings, and demonization of our Western heritage, is not a minor and enlightened bend in the road of progress. It is a complete U-turn, back to… barbarism.

Hilaire Belloc wrote of the barbarian that he “hopes – and that is the mark of him – that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.

“Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marveling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers…. In a word, the barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this: that he cannot [build anything]; he can befog and destroy, but he cannot sustain; and of every barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization, exactly this has been true.

“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh.

“But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

We will revisit this theme, because it has more aspects and should engage us in many ways. But for the moment – to return to those barbarians at the gates of Western Christianity, Western Civilization – the barbarians have overtaken our culture, either incorporating themselves or coldly obliterating us and what we hold precious.

The historian Arnold Toynbee observed that civilizations seldom die from invasions (gates and barbarians notwithstanding) but by suicide. In that sense the ghastly Clash of Civilizations is not so much prompted by Communist states or Islamic terrorists or extremists who work to do us harm. It is the clash of traditional Christianity versus the barbarism of modern Christianity and post-modernism. Western Civilization has lost that clash of values.

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The Litany of St. James, written in the 4th century, sung by Cynthia Clawson.

Click: Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

2-9-15

Today I will continue the theme of a couple recent essays, and the credit, or blame, goes to the president of the United States. In recent essays we have visited the clash of Islam and Christianity and Western civilization. It is a history that goes back farther than 9-11. By my mail I know that many people are surprised to learn that physical and military assaults on Europe and Christianity by Mohammedans began almost 1500 years ago. Indeed, during the first generations of that faith.

After the recent murders of magazine writers and cartoonists (two of whom I knew) in Paris, I wrote an essay for the website RealClearReligion discussing the response of Western civilization in general and Christianity in particular to militant Islamic extremism.

We should understand and clarify the issue to an even greater degree.

I do not need to be disabused of the fact that President Obama is not among my readers. Or that, if he were, I should expect him to be converted either to Christianity or to my views on certain issues. I realize that questioning the president’s devotion to the Christian faith is presumptuous. And I also mean to be provocative.

My concern (Yes! it IS a concern, for his soul, and the nation’s) grows as weeks and months pass; with each speech; and with his policies. Some policies are enunciated; some are quietly put into effect. Some people see anti-Christian sentiments. Some people see principles that are inimical to exercises of faith. Some people see pro-Islam actions. And I don’t mean to employ the “passive” mode: I often find myself among the “some” in those camps of observers.

He invites these suspicions and observations.

Christianity is under attack. There are scarcely other items in the news since forever, it seems, except for the perennial scandals in the federal government. It is under attack, not from, say, the Dalai Lama, who was a guest at this week’s national Prayer Breakfast in Washington. No, even the dullest nitwit knows that Islamic Extremists lately have been bombing, hijacking, kidnapping, torturing, and killing. They have been reviving the ancient modes of beheading, stoning, burying alive, and immolation. They are proud of these things, using modern technology to brag to the world of ancient barbarities.

It must be noted that, surely, some of their quarrels are with co-religionists who decline to subscribe to their levels – that is, depths – of savagery. But, except for targeting an ancient Zoroastrian sect called the Yezidis in their neighborhood, their hatred is reserved for Christians.

Christians. Have we heard of Hindus or Buddhists or followers of Confucius or those who follow the Shinto practices, have these people been kidnapped and slaughtered? Even the recent Japanese victim of beheading was a convert to Christianity. Atheists are not targeted, and you would think the Prophet might despise them more than any others.

Curious – with Israel so close to ISIS territory. Jews have not been targeted in these recent campaigns. Jews, with whom the Arabs and their religionists have contended since the infancies of Esau and Jacob. Look it up. Jews, whose establishment of Israel has so inflamed the Middle East for almost 70 years. Is it not curious that ISIS has withheld its holy fury from them?

Most people think, properly, that one reason might be the absolute certainty of a massive, obliterating response by the magnificent defense capabilities of Israel.

There is always a back story to every controversy and news event; and one day we might know why Israel chooses not to be preemptive; or why Obama insults Israel at every opportunity. Anyway, the fact remains that so far, ISIS has been as hostile to Jews as card-carrying members of the Anti-Defamation League.

That leaves the question of the assault on Christians, which, of course, not a question but a fact, as I hope we agreed a few paragraphs ago. And when this fact is clear (as not all facts are) to virtually everybody – notably violent Islamic extremists themselves, as per ISIS press releases – the real question is why the president averts the truth. If that question is a little ember that glows in your mind, let it become, rather, a Burning Question.

That the president, acting for us (in fact, committing all of us: this is the sometime unpalatable aspect of democracy) does not call Islamic terrorism Islamic terrorism, although Islamic terrorists do; and Islamic leaders like King Abdullah does. While Rome – so to speak – is burning, Obama fiddles with pronouncements about “hijackers of the religion of peace,” as a jerkwater professor would do. Meanwhile Islamic terrorists are hijacking cars, trucks, planes, and land.

Christians must stop thinking this man is oddly misguided or sadly mistaken. He is not stupid. At stake is not an election cycle but the lives of millions, the preservation of our culture, the future of our civilization.

At the National Prayer Breakfast this week, noted above, President Obama had a chance to seize an appropriate platform to deliver unambiguous words about this nexus of religion and statecraft. And he did! Yes, there were words about biblical injunctions to love, and to serve. I never regret the citation of Bible verses, even if they are selective. The president acknowledged the presence of missionary Kenneth Bae, who had been imprisoned (“held,” the president parsed) by North Korea for two years; no embarrassment that the mighty USA could not effect that release sooner. He noted that a Christian convert, Pastor Saeed Abedin (no: he did not note Abedin’s conversion to Christianity) is still in Iranian jails, variously condemned to death and then pardoned and then back again; and that he met with the pastor’s wife and children – cornered in Boise, Idaho, after years of attempts for an audience with Obama.

After those niceties, the president summoned his rhetorical arsenal. He lectured those assembled (who convened in the Name of Christ) about the sins of Christianity. He called himself a “person of faith,” not a Christian. He warned believers not to mount “high horses,” and then tarred Christianity with thousand-year-old specters of the Crusades; and ancient atrocities perpetrated by the Inquisition; and the Christian sanction of “slavery and Jim Crow” laws in America.

No one spoke up there – can we do so now? – to note that the Crusades were a reaction to offenses; and that both sides sometimes acted cruelly as well as nobly. And that the Inquisition, even witch burnings, did take place… but also were localized, brief, and well in the past, without ameliorating our stipulation that they were horrific.

We are dealing with very current threats, not passages from textbooks of ancient history. When Obama says “persons of faith,” presumably even about himself, one gets the feeling that he is a bureaucrat talking about a sociological classification, and not a confession.

The major take-away that should animate our reaction and resolution is that the dark moments of our collective past… all right, let’s take the predictable topic, slavery. It existed throughout humankind’s history; and still does. But in the United States it was instituted by Christians, but not as a Christian imperative. It was instituted out of greed, yes; and cruelty, and severe insensitivity. BUT NOT BECAUSE SLAVE-MASTERS THOUGHT TO PLEASE CHRIST. Some of justified themselves by quoting ancient Bible history. But that cart was well after the horse: a futile rationale.

That is the opposite of the Islamothugs: they claim to be following and therefore serving the Prophet.

But a worse offense, because sin we will always have with us, and we need leaders who can organize our defense: Obama cited ancient crimes committed by Christians WHEN HE COULD HAVE PRAISED CHRISTIANS FOR ENDING THEM and numerous examples of Christian persecution, and Christian service, charity, bravery, sacrifice, persecution, and martyrdom TODAY.

This deliberate distortion of history, and conscious perversion of proper priorities is a menace, a national crisis. In his entire speech, Obama mentioned the name of Christ twice, each time damning the sins of the past committed “in the name of Christ.” Never once even the name of Jesus. Several times, though, the word “humility” – an attribute that was in short supply, when Christians at a Christian event were being lectured about how bad Christians are.

May God help us.

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Click: Carl Orff: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi – Carmina Burana

1-26-15

After President Obama’s recent State of the Union address he spent an hour being interviewed. As usual he handpicked the questioners, but they were not of the predictable softball corps of friendly journalists. He chose three internet blog hosts of irreverent, even absurdist sites, like one girl with green lipstick famous for filling her bathtub full of milk and Fruit Loops and eating breakfast. His hour of questions, not surprisingly, were either banal, as were his replies, or loopy. Not Fruit Loopy: just weird, random, irrelevant.

His defenders claim that the President was going where the votes are, or will be, and “connecting” to young people. By implication his allocation of time and attention is clear. This same month he declined to be present at an anti-terrorism event in Paris that virtually all other major world leaders attended; and refused to meet the Prime Minister of Israel who soon will visit Washington. The President wants to be seen, rather, with semi-literate, foul-mouthed internet curiosities.

A sharp contrast for me was an invitation I received, this past week, to address a group of home-school students several towns away from where I live. Polite, well-dressed, courteous, curious, thoughtful. Many of them introduced themselves as they filed in; most thanked me afterward; all sent written appreciation of my talk. The Q&A period was sincere and lively.

If the president had invited three such students to interview him, or to have a televised conversation, how much better a picture of young America would that have been?

What better encouragement for other youngsters to be intellectually curious and determined to face the questions of society?

Could there have been a higher standard, a better example, for our culture – to set a bar of self-respect, to show other kids, adult citizens… to demonstrate his own self-respect?

What kind of leader trolls the lowest common denominators of our culture to… lead? to be an example? to create a legacy? (I am tempted to say that he doesn’t have a legacy to stand on.) Perhaps, as with Trayvon Martin, the internet’s GloZell reminded Obama of one of his daughters.

Such actions by our leaders today cannot be seen as infrequent occurrences, or in vacuums. By the way, I should rather more precisely say, our celebrities, not “leaders,” because leadership today is an endangered species in the United States and Western Civilization. As the business leader and possible presidential candidate Carly Fiorina pointed out this weekend at the Freedom Summit, America has an abundance of people who consider themselves managers… but has very few real leaders.

For all the aggressive acts by prominent people in politics and popular culture that leave traditionalists astonished, and make responsible citizens worry for the future, the bad things that plague us today could not happen if the culture itself neither created the degenerate conditions, nor was not ready for even more downward momentum.

Maggots generally eat away at organisms that have first begun to rot. It is a rule of nature that things generally do not decay until they have been neglected, or rust sets in, or decomposition has been introduced and tolerated. And societies never spontaneously regenerate. Rather, the law of civilization and decay ends in disintegration, putrefaction, and death.

At the other end of the spectrum, in reality as well as metaphor, is a strong organism: healthy, upright, long-lasting. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” it says in Proverbs 22:6.
 
So when Christians and patriots and traditionalists despair, we should resist the temptation to blame, too much, the representatives we identify as agents of decline. That would be a president whose small acts, like the demeaning love-fest with YouTubers, to substantial decisions like inaction against Islamic terrorism or defending persecuted Christians around the world. And politicians and judges who enable the advance of abortion and drugs. And the education monolith that presumes to know better than parents what values to instill in children. And the Hydra-headed entertainment monster that seductively inculcates destructive standards of violence, sex, ethics, and civility.

Our complaints cannot be laid totally at their feet, because, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault… is in ourselves. We let our guard down. And we tolerate the things we now claim to despise.

But. Before we leave, we can remind ourselves of a few pertinent Bible verses about leadership, and about evil or false leaders:

“For lack of guidance a nation falls, but many advisers make victory sure” (Proverbs 11:14).

“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (II Timothy 2:15).

“Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer, he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (I Timothy 3:1-3).

“Understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people” (II Timothy 3:1-17).

Let us return to the stark contrast I experienced this week: President Obama’s portrayal of the rising generations of Americans, exemplified by the green-lipped Fruit Loop bather; and the young citizens I met in a home-school event.

The students I met stayed my tendency toward pessimism about this nation. God help us, that a generation, even a remnant, might arise and be the leaders we need.

“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land” (II Chronicles 7:14). Incidentally — or not so incidentally, speaking of contrasts — this verse was Ronald Reagan’s favorite Bible verse. His mother’s Bible, with this verse underlined and with a margin notation, is where Reagan placed his hand when he took the oath of office as President.

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An old American folk-gospel song aurally illustrates this essay. The plaintive song is sung by the Swedish singer Jill Johnson, who has mastered American folk and rural music, in Uppsala.

Click: Calling My Children Home