A Toasted Kitten Sandwich

As I write this, we’re not even two weeks into Donald J. Trump’s second presidency, and already the opinions are flying online. Evangelicals who voted for him are generally positive about the way he hit the ground running, others are concerned that too many Christians visibly associated with a secular Trump presidency spells trouble for the church down the road. Still others are, for now at least, holding their peace and waiting to see where this all goes.

Let’s not even talk about the reaction from the Left. You’d think the President had just eaten a toasted kitten sandwich live on national TV. (He didn’t. Let me just head that rumor off before someone starts it.)

Something Nice

“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”

The saying is venerable, to be sure, but not old enough to merit inclusion in holy writ. They’re not the words of a prophet, they’re the words of a rabbit.

Nevertheless, to this generally prudent advice, I would add the following gentle suggestion for my fellow Christians when commenting on politics: If you can’t say something understandable, don’t say anything at all.

Nuttier and Nuttier

As the world gets nuttier and nuttier, so do the popular theories about what’s really going on. As I write, it’s been about twelve hours since a twenty-year old man was killed by Secret Service snipers at a rally in Pennsylvania after shooting at President Trump, injuring the former president and killing at least one member of his audience. Or so we are told. It might even be true.

What is certain is that the narrative will evolve. Initial reports that Thomas Matthew Crooks was Antifa were quickly amended to claim he was a registered Republican.

Too Hot to Handle: Not Quite What They Expected

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

The Atlantic bemoans the failure of secularism to ease cultural conflict in America.

Between 1992 and 2014, the percentage of Americans who reject religious affiliation soared from six to twenty-two — 35% for millennials. And yet partisan clashes today are more brutal than at any time since Vietnam war protests and racial tensions of the late sixties, and the sense of “us” vs. “them” in America is only increasing.

Tom: Is this what happens when we seek peace without the Prince of Peace, Immanuel Can?

Too Hot to Handle: Ending the Gender War

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Suzanne Venker at The Daily Caller says it’s time to “end the gender war”.

Venker says gender relations are seriously shot, and that the feminist establishment is to blame for telling women “You can do anything a man can” and “Society is simply holding you back.” She cites Camille Paglia, who confirms that “Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment.”

Even The Wall Street Journal concedes that an increasing number of men are checking out on the idea of marriage and family.

Five Easy Predictions for 2020

I am not Daniel or Ezekiel. I’m not even George Orwell. So if we’re still here in January 2021, you can either say, “Well, he totally botched that,” or “Not too bad.” More likely it’ll be somewhere in between, as it usually is. Age and experience give one a certain ability to estimate what might be coming our way in our societies and churches. Basically, it is usually something like whatever happened the last time we saw similar symptoms.

But the operative word here is “might”. There are always factors for which we cannot account, the finger of God being far from the least of these.

So with it very much in mind that the Lord will do what he will in our world, let’s speculate about what we might see more of in 2020.

The Least Worst Option

With Christmas over for another year, it’s time for the usual abrupt swerve.

Christianity Today’s December 19 online edition contains an editorial unambiguously entitled “Trump Should Be Removed from Office”, in which Mark Galli takes aim at the President of the United States. I managed to miss it until now. Adam Ford did not.

While Galli’s strong stand will surely generate serious pushback from more than a few of his readers (after all, the president won 81% of the evangelical vote in 2016), CT’s editor-in-chief had already announced his upcoming retirement early in 2020. Thus, it will fall to Galli’s successor to manage whatever fallout his political posturing may produce.

Inclusion by Exclusion

In June of this year, the popular knitting website Ravelry banned support of U.S. president Donald Trump from the platform with the following statement:

“We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry. We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy.”

Interesting. It’s inclusion by exclusion. And it’s trending; the gaming forum RPG.net had previously banned expressions of support for the president in October 2018, explicitly referring to his “open white supremacy” as “evil”.

Semi-Random Musings (7)

Growing up in a Christian home, I was occasionally chastened for misbehavior with the words “Be sure your sin will find you out.” Or I heard other Christian parents using it. Or my irate Sunday School teacher. Or somebody. The memory’s a bit fuzzy, to be honest.

In any case, the line was very familiar, though for some reason I wrongly associated it with Saul and Samuel rather than Moses, who actually said it to the emissaries from the tribes of Reuben and Gad who had proposed to settle their people in the land beyond the Jordan. They solemnly promised to first fight alongside the other men of Israel in order to bring God’s people into their inheritance.

Dropping the Secular Pretense

“If secular America does not die, then America will die. If we do not drop the secular pretense with loathing then it is inevitable that God will drop us. With loathing.”

— Doug Wilson

Hey, Doug, somebody’s trying. The “secular pretense” has officially been dropped. In fact, I can’t recall a world leader who invoked the name of God more deliberately or with greater consistency than President Donald Trump in the months since his inauguration.

You can like him, you can hate him, or you can ignore him. You can claim he’s pandering to evangelicals, and you might even be right. But he’s definitely doing something President Obama didn’t.

Kings and Functionaries

One must be careful what one wishes for, not to mention one’s choice of words.

Israel said to the prophet Samuel, “Appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.” They were looking for a judge and a defender, someone who would grant them justice against their domestic enemies and take up arms against foreign enemies on their behalf. Instead, in Saul, after an initial honeymoon period, they got a king who judged them arbitrarily, oppressively, selfishly and moodily, and who fought on their behalf with only limited success.

Exactly like all the nations.

The Commentariat Speaks (11)

Cail Corishev on truth:

“I think the rhetorically-challenged person hears ‘truth’ and thinks, ‘literal truth in correspondence with the facts.’ In that regard, he sees a picture of Donald Trump riding a war horse over a corpse labeled CNN while a cartoon frog-pope waves, and sees no truth at all. Literally, nothing in that picture is true, so that’s bad, maybe even Leftist.

But rhetorically, that picture is completely true, and a better, more persuasive representation of the truth of that situation than you could convey in any amount of dialectic.”

Now, like everyone else, I too can be sold by a grand rhetorical flourish, but that’s fairly unusual. Generally I’m inclined to skepticism. So here’s the meme to which Cail is referring.

On Tactics and Their Acceptability

A well-known biblical precept begins with the words “Do unto others ...”

Context strongly suggests the Lord intended his followers to engage with his teaching actively rather than passively, by performing positive moral acts toward those in need of them.

That said, the negative implication most commonly drawn from his words (“Refrain from doing things you WOULDN’T like done to you”) is not wrong.

Either way, the social justice crowd would do well to pay attention.

Too Hot to Handle: Not Quite What They Expected

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Too Hot to Handle: Lies Lies Lies, Yeah

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Once in a while everyone, no matter how trusting, comes across a news story that just doesn’t smell right.

Now, thanks to U.S. declassification protocols, we know that Fake News has been a real phenomenon since prior to 1975. President Trump is not huffing and puffing on Twitter over nothing. In fact, we now know the CIA is primarily to blame. The biggest names in media have a lengthy track record of publishing false stories actually written for them by the CIA: The New York Times, LA Times, Fortune, Newsweek and even the venerable Saturday Evening Post. Other news services would then pick up these stories from sources they believed were trustworthy, and the disinformation game was afoot.

Tom: Was it the Boomtown Rats who sang “Don’t Believe What You Read”, Immanuel Can?

To Jezreel By Chariot

Jehu-style leadership is not always a bad thing.

Both Jehu and David were anointed king of Israel at God’s command. David chose to serve King Saul faithfully until forced to flee for his life, then served God and country as he was able while on the run until Saul met his end in battle. It took approximately 32 years to establish David’s kingdom.

Jehu, on the other hand, sniffed the political winds, discovered his fellow commanders all had his back, then promptly drove his chariot to Jezreel at speed and killed not just the king of Israel and his entire family, his friends, his priests and his inner circle, but the visiting king of Judah to boot. His kingdom was established in a matter of hours.

The similarities end with the anointing oil.

Out of the Closet and Out of the Sea

Globalism is out of the closet. Finally.

For years now, politicians from countries all over the world enraptured with the Ideology That Dared Not Speak Its Name have pursued their dream of global government. Until the end of last year, they were savvy enough to do it behind the scenes, giving the occasional barely-perceptible nod to national interests in order to avoid raising the hackles of the rank and file that their policies had impoverished and unemployed by the millions. Attentive observers of Washington and the Eurozone noticed something was a bit off, but recognized that being overly vocal with their suspicions would tend to nuke their credibility with the audience that pays the bills.

Hey, even political commentators have to eat, right?

Playing Word Games

Keeping laws cannot save us, as we were reminded earlier this week. God gave his law to Israel for the purpose of demonstrating to mankind our total inability to consistently abide by whatever rules we might make for ourselves, not so that we could accumulate sufficient spiritual brownie points to inspire St. Peter to open the gate of heaven just a crack and let us squeak through.

That being understood, laws still serve a very useful purpose. They cannot by themselves reclaim a single lost human heart, but a society in which the majority of citizens recognize and respect the rule of law will do notably better over the long term than a society that operates only on the principle of the will to power.

We are currently observing the abandonment of the rule of law south of the (Canadian) border.

Lies That Sound Like Truth

It’s getting harder and harder to figure out what’s really going on, isn’t it? This week, I’ve tried to navigate my way through two very different propaganda minefields.

The first is a brief speech from President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin in which he lectures the West on its departure from Christian morality. Pure, ironic gold.

The second is an uncharacteristic opinion piece from the pen of Lefty billionaire and master manipulator George Soros, who usually lurks in the shadows behind paid political operatives when trying to tip the scales of American public opinion. But nobody flushed more money down the drain in November’s election than George Soros, and in this op-ed he purports to tell us why.

Both Putin and Soros assure us they are determined to save Western civilization — by precisely opposite means.

Too Hot to Handle: The Trump Years

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Anybody bristling at the thought of one more word about last week’s U.S. election is advised to turn back here. But I promise this two-parter is absolutely our final discussion of the subject for a while — at least until President Trump actually assumes office and does something worthy of commentary.

Assuming, of course, we are allowed to comment.