The 96th Thesis - The Devil Never Sleeps; so the Reformation never ends.The 96th Thesis | The Devil Never Sleeps; so the Reformation never ends.

Honor Thy Ancestors and Thy Descendants

Posted on May 13, 2025 by Matt

One of the most frustrating aspects of defending Christian Nationalism is dealing with those whose entire worldview hinges on modern hyper-individualism. Most people will concede (sometimes grudgingly) that you ought to love your own parents, wife, and children more than strangers. Nevertheless, when you suggest that one should therefore also love his own nation more than foreign nations, they find it beyond the pale. The 4th Commandment, they think, implies no such thing.

This disconnect is a sad testament to the 20th century’s focus on the nuclear family to the exclusion of extended family. Modern traditions sever our children from their families, communities, and congregations for the sake of education and career, obscuring the ordinary ties that bind men together. The resultant poverty of identity makes us think of ourselves as individuals first and even our most important relationships as arbitrary. And when nations are seen as arbitrary collections of random individuals, it’s difficult to see why we owe them any special love.

Sad or not, however, that is the reality our generation has been given. Mourning America’s poverty of national identity is appropriate, but those who know better should also try to help those in need–even if it usually feels like explaining why water is wet. So let’s take the opportunity to start from square one: the 4th Commandment.

Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother

When God tells us to honor our father and mother, He is commanding a kind of respect that goes beyond simply loving them. He has given them a responsibility for our well-being and an authority to go along with it. Honoring them involves respecting that authority by willing obedience while under their direct care and by reverence throughout our whole lives. Honor also includes gratitude for the many ways they’ve succeeded in carrying out that responsibility–ways which most people never understand or appreciate until they become parents themselves. Without the work of our parents–even if they were negligent in some ways–we would have literally nothing in this life, not even our bodies. Accordingly, we are to treasure and esteem them for the position and work which God Himself has assigned to them. So far so good.

Next, we need but a moment’s reflection to realize this honor does not (and logically cannot) stop with our mother and father. Our parents also have parents of their own whom God has commanded them to honor. In order to properly honor our parents, we must therefore also honor our grandparents for our parents’ sake. After all, one can hardly honor his father and mother by raising his children to despise them.

What’s more, a great deal of what our parents pass on to us is simply what they received from their own parents. We should therefore have gratitude to our grandparents as well. To be sure, our parents do come first. Grandma and grandpa don’t get to override whatever mom and dad told you. Still, God did not create a world in which true honor evaporates as soon as you’re one generation removed.

Neither does this honor stop at death. We do not simply toss our parents’ bodies into the backyard for the vultures as though our job were done, but honor them with a Christian burial and leave flowers on their graves. We tell their stories to their grandchildren, use any inheritance responsibly, and try to continue living in a way which would make them proud. As with any kind of honor, a sinful world or sinful parents may make this more or less difficult. Nevertheless, the true honor due to our parents cannot immediately transform into disregard at the moment of their death.

Taken together, these two simple and obvious truths make it quite clear that God has commanded us to honor our ancestors. To be sure, this honor becomes more abstract the further up the family tree we go. Most of us don’t even know our ancestors’ names after a few generations. Even so, honor remains possible because our ancestors have left us a heritage. At the very least, we all possess body and life simply because of choices made by a thousand generations before us. Usually, we inherit a language, a country, a government, a culture, and a way of life as well. Those who are truly fortunate will possess a heritage that includes things like property, reputation, and the Christian faith. And if you do not, you are blessed with the opportunity to be the first in your family to begin building such an inheritance for your own children.

To honor our ancestors means to treasure our heritage and receive it with gratitude. We respect the work that went into it and do our best to maintain and preserve all the good within it so that we may pass it on to our own children. We do not look a gift horse in the mouth over any imperfections or perceived deficiencies. No one’s heritage is perfect, for we and our ancestors have all been sinners. Nevertheless, it was to sinners that God gave the Fourth Commandment. Our ancestors’ failings are therefore no excuse to refuse to honor them.

To be clear, this does not mean we’re enslaved by our heritage–that we can never change a single thing while we steward it. But honor does alter how and why we change things. We can liken it to inheriting a family home. Treasuring that home will always involve maintenance–things like new shingles, carpet, and paint from time to time. Sometimes, it involves building an addition or tearing down that unsalvageable shed your parents failed to maintain. But whatever changes you need to make, you make them with both honor for your parents and love for your children. So it is with any other part of our inheritance.

Love Your Posterity

This brings us neatly to the unspoken half of the 4th Commandment. The literal sense instructs children to honor their parents. Nevertheless, a moment’s reflection will demonstrate that this obligates the parents as well. Our honor and authority is not for our own sake, but for the sake of our children. The office and authority exist to care for the offspring with which God blesses us, for God designed humanity so that our young ones cannot take care of themselves. Therefore, just as we honor our parents above strangers, we also love our own children over strangers. This priority is so clear even by natural law that the Apostle Paul goes so far as to say, “if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

As before, this straightforward reality does not abruptly stop with a single generation. The special love we have for our children naturally extends into a love for our grandchildren. After all, how can we love our children by treating their own children as though they were nothing special to us? We gave of ourselves to our children to help them prosper, but part of that prosperity is having children of their own.

We must therefore give of ourselves to our grandchildren as well through our children. The joy with which grandparents greet their grandchildren is no mere custom or affectation. It is the normal and natural response of godly men and women seeing the fruits of their long years of service to their children. Scripture likewise affirms this extension, for Proverbs says that a righteous man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.

For similar reasons, our love also extends laterally through our cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts, and uncles. If parents must prioritize loving their own children, then siblings likewise must prioritize loving one another for their parents’ sake. It shouldn’t take anyone much effort to remember how much of their parental instruction involves making sure siblings get along. And if we must honor our grandparents along with our parents, then we must also love our cousins, for they are all the grandchildren of those we honor. This love also extends down through the generations. Caring for our nieces and nephews more than we do for random strangers is not only normal, it’s an organic extension of the 4th Commandment.

Therefore, just as our honor extends up the family tree, so too does our love extend downwards and outwards–even to those children who are not yet conceived. Our pious hope that God will bless our children with children of their own requires this extension. And yes, as before, our love becomes more abstract the further into the future it reaches. We will not live long enough to know the names of our great great grandchildren or our 6th cousins thrice removed (in this world, at least.) Nevertheless, we act according to that hope by planting trees in whose shade we will never be able to sit. We take the heritage we’ve received and cared for and then pass it on to our entire posterity as Scripture commands.

Cherish Your Nation

We’ve now established that the 4th Commandment extends all throughout our family tree and that we obey it by means of the heritage we inherit and bequeath. From there, applying it to our nation is only a simple logical step away. The further we traverse our lineage, the more people our honor and love encompass. What’s more, they hold their heritage in common with other relatives who may not be in your direct family line. This heritage includes a common language, culture, religious sensibility, country, and history. An individual may hold any of these things, but no individual can maintain them on his own. This means that honoring our father and mother ultimately requires working collectively with our extended family: our tribes and nations.

As much as modernists try to remove any sense of blood and ancestry from the word “nation,” the etymology will always have its revenge. The “nat” in nation is, after all, the same as the “nat” in natal. That’s why the word has traditionally referred to men living amongst one-another with the recognition of sharing common ancestry, culture, language, belief, and history. Therefore just as we have a special regard for our own parents over other people, and our own children over other children, so too must we hold a special regard for our own nation over other nations.

We must also treat our national heritage as we treat our family heritage: we treasure it, maintain it, and pass it on to our posterity rather than despising it, neglecting it, and parceling it out to strangers. In other words, we must not, as Jesus said to the Canaanite woman, take the children’s bread and give it to the dogs.

That Jesus expressed this idea in such blunt terms should be a clue that the reality of national inheritance and priority is recognized throughout Scripture. The Biblical nation of Israel was, after all, named after a specific man and is comprised of his posterity. God describes the land collectively held by this nation in familial terms as their inheritance. God gave this nation laws which favored the Israelites over foreigners. God threatened this nation with the ascendance of foreigners within their land if they despised His commandments. Virtually nothing in the Old Testament makes sense without the presumption that the 4th Commandment extends to ancestors and posterity.

But if our responsibilities extend so far through our family tree, then don’t they extend to every human on Earth? Of course! Everyone is, after all a son of Adam or daughter of Eve at the end of the day. That’s why we regard even strangers more highly than whales, spotted owls, rocks, or trees. When we encounter a man beaten by the side of the road, we offer him aid regardless of how distantly he is related. We have any number of moral responsibilities to our fellow man that we don’t have to other creatures.

But as we’ve already established, the further the relation, the more abstract the responsibility, and mere humanity is the most abstract of all. Unlike a nation, humanity does not share a common language, culture, or religious belief which can be cared for together. The history and ancestry we hold in common in likewise far more limited. We must keep the moral law with respect to everyone (i.e. to love everyone) because we all share the same nature; but there is no equality to be found there. Whenever we remember our vocations, we cannot help but realize that God has given us special responsibilities to certain neighbors which are not shared among all of humanity. Shared humanity therefore cannot stop us from loving our own nation more than other nations any more than shared nationality stops us from loving our own family more than other families.

Ordo Amoris

Scripture and plain reason clearly provide a hierarchy to our loves (or ordo amoris, if you prefer). Our families come before strangers. Our tribes come before outsiders. Our nations come before foreigners. When we reject that hierarchy in favor of equality, we deny the 4th Commandment.

Postwar liberals will, of course, claim that all these obvious conclusions are being made simply to justify racism, kinism, racial partiality, or whatever label they’re using these days. The truth, however, is that they are using their own Pavlovian response to racism to justify abandoning God’s clear instructions to us. The Spirit of the Age is dead-set against the 4th Commandment in our time, and seeks to minimize its reach however possible. We have, sadly, been discipled thoroughly by the world and that training obscures God’s Word among us. Accordingly, most will contend that we have no need to honor our ancestors or care for our posterity. Just like the Pharisees, they use their traditions to make void the word of God.

But the truly wicked go even further. They do not simply neglect their obligation to ancestors and posterity, but command others to deliberately reject such honor. They put their lies in God’s mouth to say we must treat our nation and countrymen as though they were interchangeable with every other people on earth. They call it selfish to want children of their own people or to maintain an inheritance for them that isn’t open to the rest of the world. I’ve written before that Marxism is the demonic inverse of family, and their replacement of the 4th Commandment with equality continues to prove them to be Satan’s flock. Truly, they are foremost among those who call evil good and good evil in the modern age.

But it need not be so among Christians. We have heard God’s Word. He has gifted us with wisdom to understand and apply it. Doing so in defiance of the Devil, the world, and our sinful flesh is the ordinary trial for every Christian living in this vale of tears. We should be thankful that Providence has made it so easy to recognize in our own day and appeal to God for the strength to resist it.

Posted in Christian Nationalism, Culture, Ethics, Family, Natural Law, Politics, The Modern Church, Tradition, Vocation | Leave a comment

A Parable About Immigration

Posted on February 27, 2025 by Matt

black and white photo of a crowd of people facing the camera. meant to illustrate mass immigration

There was once a certain father who had decided to throw a small dinner party. So he proceeded to invite ten of his friends and family to his home for a pleasant and relaxed evening together. A few nights before the event, one of those friends asked him for permission to bring a guest. The father, being a gracious man, immediately told his friend that the guest was welcome to come.

When that friend arrived on the night of the party, the father was surprised to find that he had brought three other guests rather than the one about whom he had asked. But seeking to be a good host, he invited them all inside. He asked his wife to help prepare some extra food and went about adding a few chairs and place settings.

But while he was preparing for the unexpected additions, the man was puzzled to hear more and more knocks at his door. All those invited had already arrived, so who could it be? As it turned out, the friend who brought those three guests had also told them that they were each free to bring guests of their own. And because the man was busy making accommodations, his friend decided to be helpful by answering the door for him and inviting them all inside.

The father returned to his guests only to find a dozen strangers in his home. But even as he considered how to respond, more continued to arrive. He began turning them away at the front door, but some of the strangers became angry, for they had expected their friends to be welcomed. They soon began letting their own acquaintances in via the back door while insulting their host for his callousness towards them.

The man’s home had quickly become more crowded than he had ever seen. Though a few of the unexpected arrivals had been thoughtful enough to bring a bottle of wine or a bag chips, there was nowhere near enough food to go around–and certainly not enough space. In the hustle and bustle of so many people, glassware and decorations frequently broke. One by one, the home’s toilets became clogged and the wastebaskets overflowed. The stench of gathering filth and unwashed bodies became as overwhelming as the noise.

His children had long since fled to their bedrooms to avoid the horde of strangers in their home. But as the intruders expanded further into the house and opened the closed doors looking for more space, the terrified children retreated further and hid in their closets and under their beds. A few of the strangers who had been leering at the host’s wife earlier now had her cornered in the kitchen.

The father had had enough. He gathered the friends and family he had originally invited, and together they began expelling people from his home one by one. Some left begrudgingly but voluntarily. Others had to be roughly thrown out. For the remainder, he called the police for assistance in removing the intruders. The process was long and painful. More than a few were injured or bloodied in the struggle.

Some called him heartless and cruel for refusing to share. Some flatly told him that he had no right to a home for his own exclusive use. Some coldly asked whether he truly thought a few clogged toilets and broken dishes were more important than the human beings he was casting aside. Some wailed at how much he must hate them to treat them so harshly. A few even claimed that because it is was a very cold evening and they had lost their coats, he was sending them out to die. The (now former) friend who had started it all berated him for acting so out-of-character and for failing to show Christlike hospitality to the stranger.

But the father would not be moved by any of their foolish and self-serving words. For the sake of his family, he relentlessly continued until every last stranger had been removed from his house, and he had cleaned up the mess they had left behind.

We all have certain moral responsibilities to guests and to strangers. As Christians, we even have responsibilities towards our enemies. However, God has given us more fundamental responsibilities to our families–as Scripture says again and again. What’s more, these responsibilities are not hermetically sealed to the nuclear family. They become more abstract as they extend further from cousins to tribe and then to nation, but they do not disappear. No command to love enemies and strangers allows us to turn our families or nations into consumable resources for them. If you love your enemies by hating your friends, you are doing it wrong.

There are times when a stranger sets himself against your family. Your responsibility to your family then requires you to take action against the stranger. Sometimes, this is because the stranger is wicked and needs to be restrained by the sword, as when an intruder breaks into your home. Sometimes, this is because the stranger is fulfilling an office that sets him against your people, as when enemy soldiers fight against your nation. And sometimes, the sheer number of strangers and scale of their actions are inherently burdensome and you must act towards a group rather than an individual.

In the parable, the volume of visitors to the father’s house changed his moral priority from being a gracious host to being a staunch defender of his family. He neither had nor needed personal animosity towards any of them as individuals; but circumstances demanded that he throw them out without exception all the same. Likewise, a nation’s moral responsibility to a sojourner passing through its land and its moral responsibility to millions of migrants seeking permanent settlement in its land are not at all the same thing. Mass immigration changes our moral priorities.

Its shameful that this simple distinction is completely lost on so many of our pastors and teachers. It has reached the point where denominations have official service organizations dedicated to dispossessing Americans by facilitating the largest mass migration in all of human history. Many of our pastors and teachers will even take those self-serving objections to deportation and put them in the mouth of Christ, condemning as evil any who would defend their people from invasion. The stricter judgment should terrify such men. In the meantime, however, it falls on Christians to be wary of the false teachers among us and refuse to abandon God’s Word for their traditions.

Christ observed that even pagan sinners could manage to love their own. It is only modern Christians who fail even that lowest of standards. May the Lord bring us back from the depths to which we’ve fallen and remind us of our most important responsibilities.

Posted in Christian Nationalism, Ethics, Law, Politics, Vocation | Leave a comment

Whoever Cannot Generalize Cannot Govern

Posted on February 20, 2025 by Matt

Americans, being the hyper-individualists we are, are highly focused on the particular rather than the general. So if there’s one error we’re on guard against, it’s judging an individual based on some group to which he belongs. This lesson against generalization has been a consistent theme in virtually all media and schooling for as long as I’ve been alive, and the impact on Americans is ubiquitous. But one of Satan’s most popular ploys is to get people focusing so intently on avoiding one error, that they wander blithely into its opposite. And on this topic, he has been so successful that most Americans don’t even realize there is an opposite error.

To be fair, there is certainly some truth to the lesson, for if you are responsible for impartially judging an individual, then you ought to learn enough about him as an individual to make that judgment well. For example, if you are a judge presiding over a criminal case on behalf of God and country, then you are obligated to disregard generalizations and focus on the particulars so that you can give justice to the accused. Likewise, if you happen upon a man who has been beaten and left for dead on the side of the road, no generalization should inhibit you from offering him basic human care.

God’s Gift of Generalization

Nevertheless, God gave us inductive reasoning as a gift, and there are times when it is the right tool for the job. When you make personal judgments on your own behalf rather than rendering impartial judgment on behalf of another, then generalization can be incredibly useful. For example, if you’re weighing what neighborhood would be a safe place to raise a family, the demographics and statistics are very relevant to your interests. You don’t owe your presence to any particular neighborhood. And when you move, you don’t have the luxury of getting to know everyone on the block or in the building beforehand. Your judgment must rest on the kinds of people who live there and whether you like your odds of getting along with them.

But such personal judgments are only the tip of the iceberg. There are times when judging by generalizations is not just wisdom, but a moral obligation. Whenever one is responsible for large groups of people, he must consider the traits and dynamics of those groups and not just a few individuals within them. As finite creatures, no one can gain a personal understanding of every individual in a large population. Laws and policies designed to serve a multitude will fail if they are made without regard to who that multitude is.

That this was once common sense is evident in American history. As John Adams famously noted, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Though this may be an unkind generalization towards the godless, it has certainly proven true in the past century as Americans have become less moral and religious.

And this is hardly the only generalization baked into our government. For example, we require our voters to be at least 18 years of age based on the generalization that children are less responsible than adults. The existence of exceptions doesn’t matter because we’re dealing with a large population. The handful of precocious children who might vote well would not offset the far larger number of normal children who won’t. We bar felons from voting for similar reasons. Likewise, our Founders were wise enough to forbid women from voting based on sound generalizations, and the grim consequences of repealing that restriction should be apparent to us by now.

But we need not stop at historical common sense, for Scripture is also replete with examples of reasoning based on generalization. By inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Paul famously provides Titus with some unflattering generalizations about Cretans to help him successfully minister among them. James likewise generalizes about the rich being oppressors to instruct Christians on the silliness of favoring them within the congregation. And in the Old Testament, God often comments on the type of people the Israelites were in general when explaining what he’s doing among them. Clearly, God has commended the art of generalization to us as a good and useful gift.

An Obligation to Generalize

We reject this gift today because we fear an individual might end up wrongly painted with such broad brushes. If, for example, someone were to observe that one race has lower IQ than another or higher criminality on average, then certain members of that race could end up wrongly assumed to be dumb or criminal. If one observes that women tend to be emotional decision makers, then somewhere, a woman’s level-headed and rational decision could be discarded out of hand. Might we therefore be better off locking up such a dangerous tool so that nobody is unjustly harmed by it?

The problem with shying away from generalization goes deeper than neglecting a useful tool, though. There are certain God-given vocations which cannot be fulfilled without it. Whenever someone is put in a position of authority, he must either generalize or govern unjustly. He might avoid the harm of unfair generalizations if he neglects them altogether, but without them he will inevitably inflict greater harm on the people in his care.

For examples, one need not look further than the fruits of the civil rights era which was founded on this deliberate neglect. The most obvious of these are how we govern men and women. For the sake of our false presumption of equality, we rejected any and all generalizations about the sexes as sexist stereotypes. This decision produced nothing but misery, but for the sake of brevity, let us consider only one such example: the so-called wage gap.

If we use all the mental tools at our disposal, we quickly find that this gap is entirely a product of generalized differences between how men and women approach employment (hours worked, preferred fields, parental leave, etc.) However, if one refuses to use that part of his brain, the only remaining explanation is systematic unfairness towards women in the workforce or in society. For this, we naturally blame men as we presume women wouldn’t exploit themselves without male interference.

So a refusal to generalize leads immediately to false witness, which is evil on its own. But that harm is magnified when a ruler bases policy on this false witness. In order to close this natural gap, our institutions have shown sinful partiality towards women through DEI to “compensate.” They presume that men are “overrepresented” in STEM fields and create a multitude of programs to steer women into work for which they are generally disinclined and ill-equipped. They relax physical standards in military and emergency services so we can pretend women are just as physically qualified as men. As a result, our entire society is ordered to discourage women from their God-ordained work of bearing children and tending to the home.

Governing Tribes and Nations

But this doesn’t just stop at the fruits of feminism. These dynamics also exist when it comes to immigration and race relations in the US. For individuals, it is all well and good to judge a man by the content of his character. Racial differences are hardly insurmountable between two people. At this point, most Americans have learned to get along fine with men of other races as friends, coworkers, and so forth in the ordinary course of life.

Nevertheless, managing great multitudes of men is another matter, for national character eclipses personal character when we move to questions of national policy. Despite the mantras Boomers learned from television, diversity has lead more and more people to notice that race goes far deeper than skin color.

This should come as no surprise when you consider the very different societies and civilizations that the world’s tribes and nations have produced to accommodate not only their circumstances, but also their own inclinations, preferences, and capabilities. Some foolishly believe the modern age has miraculously erased these differences. Nevertheless, evidence to the contrary abounds among those willing to notice phenomena like the voting patterns of different demographics, how much “disparate impact” occurs while enforcing basic laws, the causes of modern riots, and so forth.

The long and short of it is that different tribes and nations aren’t necessarily going to get along smoothly under the same set of laws and policies. Some groups will find certain policies more beneficial or more problematic than others. The increasing unrest in the West caused by diversity should put this beyond question.

Nevertheless, as with feminism, men who refused to generalize blamed all disparities on the “sins” of racism and white privilege. As with feminism, we founded this false witness on nothing more than a presumption of interchangeability between any and every tribe on Earth. We likewise tried to address the matter with an endless variety of DEI programs that did nothing to change outcomes for the better, but did much to foster hatred against the American posterity for whom our Constitution was written. One could certainly debate why different ethnicities have such different outcomes in the United States. However, the very fact that our common policies have resulted in such wide differences no matter what accommodations we experiment with should be instructive.

A Mob of Rulers

But is this an issue for most ordinary people? Maybe negligence and injustice are inevitable for a ruler who doesn’t generalize. How many of us rule anything at all, though?

Here, democracy throws us a curveball. Universal suffrage has made almost every adult in the West a very peculiar kind of ruler. Because we each represent one tiny vote among millions, our executive authority is virtually non-existent. Nevertheless, the scope of our tiny authority is extremely wide as our votes help choose the highest offices in the land. And we are expected to base our votes on how we think the candidates intend to rule. While one may doubt the merits of the democratic arrangement, the current reality is that on matters of national policy, virtually all Americans are rulers. We all therefore have a moral obligation to generalize when appropriate.

It therefore behooves us to learn to govern well and therefore to generalize well. For starters, that requires us to disregard those who would manipulate us into confusing the general for the particular. Our immigration policy shouldn’t be decided based on a picture of a crying child or distraught mother. Instead, we ought to consider what is best for the American people and to what extent we can actually afford to be generous to others. The place of women in society shouldn’t be settled by the quirky talents of your Great Aunt Mabel, but by God’s design and the wisdom of history. General policy shouldn’t be determined by the exceptions, but by the norms.

We likewise need to rebuke those who call it a sin to generalize. However much the prophets of the Spirit of the Age may bristle, we have bigger concerns than their made-up rules. We shouldn’t be too concerned about whether we’ve expressed a stereotype. Better questions are whether that stereotype is true or whether we’re improperly using it as a shortcut when judging an individual. We must also reject the phony moral obligation to cram all tribes together under a single government and instead learn how to build good fences which will make good neighbors. Against such things, God has given us no laws. But the extent to which the Church has aped the world’s foolishness and declared new sins should appall any Christian.

But what then shall we do for victims of unfair generalizations? Keeping the general and the particular consistently straight may well be more than we can expect from the average person. Reopening this door may therefore cause some harm. But if this is the case, it is an argument against democracy and globalism, not against making generalizations.

Since generalizations must be made, let’s make them easier to parse and not give the responsibility to everyone. The best defense we have against unfair generalization in day-to-day life is to live among our own people who understand us best. Likewise, the best way to protect others is to encourage those others to do the same. When different tribes and nations govern themselves, they are freed to do so in ways that work best for them. When they must interact, let it be a matter of foreign policy resting on those who are well-equipped to such a task.

To this end, we would do well to encourage borders–both on maps and in societies–rather than working feverishly to erase them. If we focus on building up our own nations and honor other tribes who do the same, we may find it easier to recover the lost art of generalization and understand it as a blessing rather than a curse.

Posted in Christian Nationalism, Culture, Ethics, Feminism, Politics, The Modern Church, Vocation | Leave a comment

In Defense of Anger

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Matt

As the West spirals further into chaos and depravity, righteous men are continually given new provocations to anger. After all, what we’re experiencing isn’t just a matter of unfortunate circumstance, but deliberate attacks on our faith, our people, our civilization, and even our children by men and women who actively hate us. When a pervert attempts to groom his child, surely a father ought to get angry. When foreigners try to take away the country his fathers gave him and give it to strangers, surely a man ought to get angry. When his brothers and sisters abandon Christ’s teachings for the Spirit of the Age’s, surely a Christian ought to get angry.

As Christians, we have a surfeit of evidence that anger can indeed be righteous. Scripture tells us that God is both slow to anger and that His wrath is quickly kindled depending on the circumstance, but both acknowledge the reality of holy anger. And Jesus Christ, the only perfect and sinless man, felt and even acted in anger on several occasions towards money-changers and Pharisees. To call anger inherently sinful is therefore an explicit denial of God’s Word and condemnation of His character.

Most Christians will agree with this in principle. They will acknowledge that anger can, theoretically, be righteous. However, they will quickly point out that while God’s holy anger proceeds from His perfect justice, the same cannot be said of sinful men. Our sense of justice is corrupted by our sinful nature, and so any consequent anger will be sinful as well. When we rationalize our own sins rather than confess and repent of them, we suppress the truth in unrighteousness and thereby distort our moral judgments. What’s more, we are prone to sins like pride and envy which produce the kinds of anger which are in direct opposition to true righteousness. Add to all this the fact that we are simply fallible and therefore that our judgments may be in error due to ignorance or mistakes. All of this is true, and it is entirely necessary for Christians to understand this sinful weakness in our nature.

Burying Our Anger

Unfortunately, these truths are often immediately followed by a vile and pernicious lie: “Therefore, a Christian should strive to avoid anger.” For the shallow-minded, it seems to follow quite logically. If your anger is inevitably going to be sinful, you should do whatever you can to rid yourself of anger. You may not be able to avoid feeling angry sometimes, but you should certainly ignore it or suppress it instead of acting on it until your emotions catch up to the forgiveness God has commanded you to offer. In this view, as a Christian grows in holiness (if they even acknowledge that possibility), he’ll also find himself being less angry and more tranquil regardless of provocation.

One can recognize the error in such instruction quite easily by applying the same reasoning to the parts of our psyche which tend to oppose anger. For example, by nature, our tranquility is no less sinful than our wrath. Our judgment is still corrupted by our suppression of truth in unrighteousness, so we are liable to say “peace, peace” where there is no peace. We are prone to sins like sloth and gluttony which produce the kinds of languid calm which are in direct opposition to true righteousness. And, of course, we remain fallible beings and can therefore mistakenly think everything is fine even as it all burns down around us.

Our feelings of tranquility, peace, and calm are no less subject to concupiscence than anger is. And yet, you’ll seldom find pastors advising Christians to strive against peace or tranquility. We aren’t taught to suppress it or to rouse ourselves to anger whenever we find ourselves feeling calm so that our feelings can catch up with our zeal. Neither will most Christians ever hear warnings against such vulnerabilities in our fallen nature.

Why not? Well, it has nothing to do with Scripture. As we’ve already seen, the Bible does not condemn anger in itself, and it gives us examples of false peace. Rather, we have been burdened with the false presumption that when it comes to sin, doing nothing is safer than doing something. Whereas anger demands action, tranquility easily contents itself with inaction. Accordingly, we routinely cast suspicion on the former and baptize the latter.

Sanctifying Our Emotions

But playing it safe in this way offers only the illusion of security. For one thing, our safety before Almighty God rests completely in the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ which we receive by faith alone. No amount of moral reform will help us there, and so we are free to take godly risks. But more to my current point, destroying one God-given emotion while allowing sin to freely reign in a competing one will never lead to virtue. The Christian’s need to do good works will be stymied until every aspect of our nature is brought into submission to God’s Word.

The only way in which we can mortify the flesh and bring it into submission is to judge our every impulse according to God’s Word. That doesn’t mean trying to trade one feeling for another, but disciplining both. Like sexual desire, anger needs to be shaped and directed rather than discarded.

If you want to know whether your anger is appropriate, you need to ask yourself who told you to be offended. Are you upset over what God has established as valuable or over a mere shibboleth of modern culture? Is it your business–a matter which affects those whom God has given into your care–or are you merely being a busybody? Is your anger motivating you towards truly good works or disrupting your efforts by muddling your thinking? You’ll never be able to answer such questions without a steady diet of God’s Word to inform your conscience. But if you won’t both restrain your anger when it rages against God and let it burn when it produces righteous zeal, then you’re only letting Satan teach you to pick it up and put it away as his pleasure.

The same is true of your calm and tranquility. Are you being lazy and neglecting your responsibilities or are you content that you’ve done your work well and are leaving the consequences to God? Do you abstain from a conflict because its not important in the grand scheme of things or because you don’t really care about something God Himself has commended to us? God’s Word will inform you of your responsibilities and give you wisdom to discern when stepping back is the right move. The world’s discipline, however, will sideline you from the great battles of our time while you concern yourself with minutia.

Anger According to the Law

Unfortunately, this is not what modern Christians are taught to do. On one hand, our antinomians wholeheartedly despise striving to conform our behavior to God’s Law. They would accuse me of legalism for even suggesting this approach. And under their wicked tutelage, many Christians are starved of God’s Law and have no sound basis for discerning good from evil when it comes to anger or anything else. Even their God-given impulse to do good works and love as He loved us is subverted by accusations of self-righteousness whenever they actually try to drown their sinful nature.

On the other hand, Christians have allowed the world to redefine love for us. Instead of God’s assurance that love is the fulfilling of the law, the world tells us that love is found in obsequiousness. We’ve been discipled to think that rather than requiring us to be good, kind, gentle, and respectful, love demands only a vague niceness. But the merely nice cannot stand the conflict that righteous anger brings. Those pastors and teachers who have fallen into this trap rigorously police their sheep according to tone instead of truth. And because anger offends niceness more than any other tone, that’s what we’re told to stop feeling.

Christian love must avoid both of these pitfalls lest we strangle it before it reaches our neighbors. We live in a fallen and often perilous world where the good things God has given us are under constant threat. Where danger abounds, true love must become fierce. A well-disciplined anger will always be a part of that. As Paul wrote, “Be angry, and do not sin.”

To reclaim a godly ferocity and shake off our worldly torpor, we must reject the false teachings that surround us and return to Scripture–especially to those parts of it which the world hates. And whether we’re sinfully angry or sinfully sedated against things that should make us angry, we must seek God’s grace for our sins and the power of His Spirit to turn away from them. May God thereby discipline our anger and use it for His glory.

Posted in Ethics, Law, Sanctification, The Modern Church, Vocation | Tagged Christian Living, Sanctification | 2 Comments

The Worst Curse Word of All

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Matt

What’s the worst curse word of all? It depends on who you ask. The FCC and MPAA have their opinions, of course, and enforce standards on the media within their purview. Progressives often have a very different standard–liberally cussing a blue streak with traditional profanity but catching the vapors when anyone uses politically incorrect terms. Conservative Christian pastors and teachers will often weigh in as well according to the wisdom God has given them. Some will be stricter than anyone, broadly applying Ephesians 5:4 to a larger-than-usual list of bad words. Others will turn a blind eye to what our culture considers more “severe” four-letter words which are merely earthy, but they forbid more common curses which are actually blasphemous or deal flippantly with grave realities like damnation.

But if we ask which common curse word breaks the most Commandments, there’s a clear frontrunner–and it’s frequently found on the lips of media personalities, progressives, and conservative Christians alike. I’m speaking, of course, of the word “Nazi.”

While it’s not exactly what we think of when we hear “curse word”, Nazi is a curse in the truest sense: It seeks to bring calamity upon those to whom it is applied. But most strikingly, whereas the F word might break the 6th Commandment because of its indecency or the 4th because your mom doesn’t want to hear you say it, “Nazi” manages to break the entire second table–and all 10 when we put it into the Church’s mouth. And the same goes for all the associated labels like “racist” or the ever ill-defined “white supremacist.”

Consider what happens when someone is called a Nazi in 2024. Everyone in the US, left and right alike, has been conditioned to react to the term as though it’s a genuine curse. Liberals use it against anyone to their right. Conservatives also use it against anyone to their right. And in each case, its entire purpose is to mark someone as a public enemy–to unperson the target and render them an untouchable. “Nazis” need neither free speech, nor due process, nor common decency because mass media has ingrained their villainy in every American mind. But if we contrast this with the Ten Commandments (and especially Luther’s explanations in the Small Catechism) the transgressions against each become quite clear.

Sins Against Our Neighbor

Most obviously, of course, calling someone a Nazi is a matter of bearing false witness. The historic Nazi party ceased to exist long ago, and former members are now exceedingly rare given the passage of time. There are some few who LARP in Nazi regalia, but that’s the closest anyone comes today. In short, “literal Nazi” no longer means literal Nazi.

Now, it’s fair to object that historical accuracy isn’t really a concern in the rhetoric of name-calling. Nevertheless, even as name-calling, “Nazi” moves beyond mere ridicule and is applied specifically to damage your neighbor’s reputation. The term’s continued use by cultural & political elites as a way to mark their very real enemies for attack ensures that such damage is far more persistent than a mere insult. But our neighbor’s reputation is precisely what the 8th Commandment is given to protect.

Modern cancel culture, however, ensures that the curse is not limited to the 8th Commandment. Labeling someone a Nazi bears with it the intention of removing him from proper society. You’re not supposed to associate with “Nazis” or employ them. Rather, you’re meant to treat them like lepers and tax collectors. We’re all too familiar with innocent men losing jobs, homes, friends, and family because of precisely the kind of pointing and shrieking accomplished through this word and its corollaries.

We must therefore consider the 9th and 10th Commandments as well. According to Luther, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house” means we should be of service to him in keeping it. Likewise, “Thou shalt not cover they neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, etc” means we should not estrange away our neighbor’s wife or workers, but urge them to stay and do their duty. Calling someone a Nazi does precisely the opposite, and it does so deliberately.

Once we run afoul of these last two Commandments, we inevitably break those against adultery and theft as well because that’s what they’re meant to hedge against. Robbing a man of his livelihood by rendering him unemployable through slander is unmistakably a matter of theft when we’re called to help our neighbor “improve and protect his property and business.” Likewise, putting someone into an “untouchable” category like Nazi is designed to destroy his personal relationships, including with his wife. One need not spend that much time on social media before you see a myriad of calls for women to divorce any husband who votes for whoever they liken to Hitler this week. Whether that call is heeded or not, the cries of the mob do damage relationships. This is a far cry from the love and honor the 6th Commandment requires us to offer our spouses.

Even the 4th Commandment is transgressed by this same dynamic. To be sure, your mother and father may or may not approve of calling someone a Nazi. They may even do it themselves. But it’s easy to see how it corrodes the bonds of love, honor, and loyalty that God commands us to cherish. Every Christmas and Thanksgiving, we hear stories of families too broken apart by politics to even share a meal together. If politics is an idol that prevents us from loving the family God has given to us, then “Nazi” is certainly the idol’s means of marking blasphemers who must be expelled.

And if there was ever any doubt that calling someone a Nazi violates the 5th Commandment, this election cycle should put it to rest. There have already been two assassination attempts against Donald Trump–the current candidate being constantly likened to Hitler by his opponents. And it should be no surprise given common rhetoric. Every movie we’ve ever watched has conditioned us to believe that killing Nazis for any reason or no reason at all is always permissible. We already heard the left proudly exhort us to punch Nazis after Charlottesville. Indeed, violence against anyone labeled a Nazi is the entire purpose of Antifa, the terrorist wing of the Democratic party. Calling someone a Nazi in 2024 is an unmistakable attempt to bring bodily harm upon him when done publicly (and a wish for bodily harm when done privately.)

Sins Against God

So that covers the Second Table of the Commandments which govern how we treat our neighbors. But for the Christian, it does not stop at the Second Table like it should. This is because many Christians have begun calling men Nazis in the name of God.

Once again, there’s one very obvious Commandment being broken: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain. Certainly, the misuse forbidden here includes cursing someone in God’s name, as Luther’s explanation explicitly states. But then, this is precisely what the LCMS did to critics of the false teachings they recently packaged with Luther’s Large Catechism when President Harrison accused them of Nazism and its usual corollaries like racism, white supremacy, etc.

But there is also the Third Commandment to consider. While Christians are not bound to keep Israel’s sabbath, we are certainly bound to treasure what the Sabbath was for. As Luther explains it, “We should fear and love God that we may not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.”

Well, President Harrison’s demands for excommunication were fulfilled not only against those labelled a Nazi but even against those merely associated with those labelled as Nazis. And in the case of the former, the congregation did the unthinkable and filed a restraining order so that police would prevent their target from ever hearing God’s Word from that congregation ever again. This can hardly be called holding the preaching of God’s Word sacred. On the contrary, by raising the stakes of the dispute to excommunication (over worldly doctrines rather than Biblical ones, no less) they displayed enormous contempt for the hearing of God’s Word.

That just leaves us with the first and greatest commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. I could take the easy road and simply point out that violating any Commandment is also a violation of the First. After all, every time we choose to sin, we choose to put something ahead of God in our lives. But the matter goes deeper than that.

In the contemporary world, “Nazi” and its corollary labels are always and only given in service to Critical Theory, which owns those terms. But as I’ve pointed out before, Critical Theory is not a run-of-the-mill philosophy, but a false religion. Its doctrines of liberation from oppression are religious in both nature and fervor, and its labels are meant to mark blasphemy against them. When Christians use these labels, they are therefore practicing syncretism–a matter of including idols alongside Christ. So those who curse men by calling them Nazis are also offering pinches of incense to false gods whether they intend to or not.

But What If He Really IS a Nazi

In my experience, pointing out the sinfulness of cursing someone as a Nazi always raises the same objection: “But this guy really IS a Nazi, so it’s OK to call a spade a spade!” Color me dubious, because everyone thinks the person they call a Nazi “really” is a Nazi. But let’s play devil’s advocate and assume you’re the very special exception.

As I’ve already explained, virtually no one is actually a Nazi in 2024, but perhaps there’s really some relevant similarity between Nazis and your target. Perhaps it’s even the kind of similarity that makes such a person your enemy. Very well, then. It is time for you to love your enemy. As God clearly tells us, love is the fulfilling of the law. You therefore cannot love your enemy by calling him a Nazi and thereby breaking all Ten Commandments. Unless you have been appointed by God to wield the sword, you have no business bringing calamity upon this person for being your personal enemy.

“But we must warn people about him!” Indeed, we ought to warn people against dangerous neighbors, false teachers, and the like. And yet, Christians have been doing so for thousands of years before the word “Nazi” was ever conceived. True morality has never changed in all this time, and we have ample language without resorting to mercurial novelties. Given the common American principle of “everyone to my right is a Nazi” even as we slide ever leftward, it’s a label that invokes harm while simultaneously being morally vapid. Surely a pious and learned watchman like yourself can compose a more meaningful warning related to something that’s actually Biblical rather than a curse born and raised exclusively in the last century.

“But we have to make sure people know that the Nazis were bad!” Our entire society is literally built around Nazis being bad. We’re so morally bankrupt that Hitler is the only remaining direction on most moral compasses. Your own input on this point is therefore wholly insignificant except to the men you sin against. What you really want to ensure is that everyone knows that you think Nazis are bad so they don’t hate you too. But sacrificing others to establish your own reputation is hardly Christian behavior. Rather, it is the behavior of the second-least popular kid in school mocking the least popular kid so he can, for a brief moment, feel like part of the “in” crowd.

The cost of this virtue signaling is high indeed, for it turns men into moral vegetables. The wise man roots moral questions in the unchanging word of God found in Scripture and Natural Law. Modern fools, however, turn every moral question into a competition to determine who can tie the opposing side to Hitler most convincingly. To make matters worse, their game of pin the tail on the Nazi is based on the most puerile version of WWII history fed to us in television and movies. As a result, contentions like “don’t be strict and orderly because Nazis were strict and orderly” bear as much emotional weight as “don’t try to exterminate lesser races because Nazis tried to exterminate lesser races.” Men who should be devoted to wisely discerning good from evil instead concern themselves with explaining to the world why their vision of good is less like the Nazis than that of their opponents.

A Spirit of Fear

There’s a reason such a severe cost is so gladly paid. The beating heart of these objections is that the entire Postwar Consensus was established specifically for the sake of burying the Nazis permanently. And whatever else you may say about it, it was quite successful in that respect. No matter what view of WWII history one takes, it’s undeniable that the Nazis were defeated so profoundly that even their name remains our greatest curse nearly a century later. But despite this, we’ve all been trained to fear questioning the Consensus because doing so might somehow unseal the grave. In short, we do it because the Spirit of the Age has us absolutely terrified.

But God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. We can find soundness of mind by basing our judgments on the Wisdom of God’s holy word instead of the passing fashions of the 20th century. We can find love by following God’s Commandments towards friends and enemies alike, rather than obsequiousness towards whoever the TV tells us to feel sorry for this week. Were we to do this faithfully, I’m certain we would discover we had far more power than what few petty dregs of authority the Spirit of the Age tosses our way when we toe his lines.

Therefore, instead of cursing our neighbors, we ought to do some soul-searching to discern whether our abject fear of a dead and defeated movement is reasonable. Are there, perhaps, more clear and present dangers facing those God has entrusted to us? For example, there might be political movements afoot which are A) demonstrably responsible for far more wickedness than the Nazis and B) aren’t completely defunct. Or perhaps our nation is so far fallen that it’s calling down upon itself Old Testament punishments like barrenness, foreign invasion, debt slavery, and female rule. Maybe our trusted religious leaders are substituting modern political doctrines for our historic confessions of Christian Truth and declaring men damned for disagreements over 20th century wars. It may even be that the Postwar Consensus in which we trust is actually driving all of these greater evils, and our continued empowerment of its curses only makes it more effective.

If so, then we ought to consider the possibility that our fear of the Spirit of the Age vastly outweighs our fear of the Lord–and repent accordingly.

Posted in Culture, Ethics, Musings, The Modern Church, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Not That Kind of Lutheran?

Posted on September 4, 2024 by Matt

Conservative Lutherans compare ourselves to liberals like the ELCA, we’d like to think the key difference is that we adhere to timeless Biblical principles and they do not. Unfortunately, the recent reality in the LCMS does not at all live up to the ideal.

From my latest at American Reformer:

Walz’s congregation is, for example, committed to “Antiracism work” and “de-centering whiteness.” But last year, President Harrison of the LCMS sent out a letter to our entire church body to “categorically reject the horrible and racist teachings of the so-called ‘alt-right’ in toto.” He even demanded the excommunication of those who falls under that defunct and ambiguous label of “alt-right” or under meaningless labels like “racist” or “Nazi” which leftists use to slander conservatives every day. And yes, it has resulted in a number of individuals being unjustly expelled from their congregations. This work of antiracism is the only doctrine for which I’ve seen our leadership go the mat so hard since the “Battle for the Bible” in the 1970’s.

It’s hardly an isolated instance either. For example, President Harrison also wrote a lengthy statement on George Floyd’s death and the subsequent riots. Therein he denounced racism as “America’s original sin,” demanded repentance from all of us, and pleaded for new policies to end racial injustice. In 2017, Synod added racism to Luther’s Small Catechism under the 5th Commandment despite racism becoming an increasingly meaningless term. Our recent Large Catechism with Annotations and Contemporary Analysis (LCACA) likewise included an essay reframing the 9th & 10th Commandments using the concepts of Critical Theory to condemn sins of “privilege” like gentrification.

And when it comes to “de-centering whiteness,” LCMS leadership is quickly getting on board. Parishioners and leadership alike often complain that at 95% Caucasian, our churches are simply “too white.” In the face of our demographic decline, President Harrison has dismissed the idea that having children again will improve our numbers and favored programs that diversify the LCMS through outreach to immigrants and “diverse communities.” And on the website for our National Youth Gathering, the first and most prominent image representing our “overly white” Synod only features people of color (with a couple white youth barely visible in the background.) It seems that much of our leadership would prefer our congregations to be statistically random samples of the United States’ diversity rather than the non-random people God has actually entrusted to us.

You can read the entire thing here: https://americanreformer.org/2024/09/not-that-kind-of-lutheran/

Posted in Culture, Lutheranism, The Modern Church, Theological Liberalism, Tradition | Tagged Lutheranism, The Modern Church, Theology, Tradition | 5 Comments

The Cost of Being Christian at “Christian” Schools

Posted on August 6, 2024 by Matt

As the world closes in on faithful Christians, it’s only natural that those who hold to the faith of their fathers would look to their brothers and sisters in Christ for sanctuary. After all, God’s instructions to His Church about loving one-another are clear and pervade Scripture. As we pray for help, we seek answers to those prayers among other Christians and the institutions we’ve built.

This is especially true of parents as we consider our children’s futures. We can protect them for a time, but at some point, they will need to be able to make their way in a world that will hate them as long as they remain faithful. Those who need assistance in preparing their children for a difficult adulthood have long looked to Christian schools who have made such preparation their mission.

But worldliness (the temptation to pursue esteem among those who hate us) works directly against the love Christians have for one-another. Instead of caring for our brothers in need, we try to make sure everyone knows we’re not one of those Christians. We take pains to separate ourselves from them and their concerns. In some respects, this temptation is far stronger in Christian schools than elsewhere. The practicalities of operating can require more cooperation with many worldly institutions and therefore currying more favor from them.

So it is that many of our institutions have become Christian in name and branding, but not in practice. A friend of mine discovered this the hard way a few years ago. During his decade-long service at a Christian college attached to a conservative denomination, he found that it was precisely his faithfulness to Christian mission–a mission highlighted in their literature–which brought him into conflict with his employer.

Christian at a “Christian” College

This conflict first became apparent when, in addressing a history class, he presented Vasily Surikov’s painting of the Apostle Paul before Agrippa and Festus in a slide. This was, after all, a trial in which Paul explained Christ’s Resurrection as something true, rational, and public–in other words, a matter of history. One should hope that a school which seeks to serve Christ by educating its students about history would take no umbrage at such an example, but this was not the case. He was quickly relieved of his duty to train history students at a Christian school because he spent a minute telling them that the Resurrection was a matter of history.

There was also an article he wrote for the school newspaper addressing LGBT issues after a campus event which strove to create more gay-friendly viewpoints at this Christian school. I’ve read the piece, and he bent over backwards to be gracious: extending welcomes, condemning bullies, minimizing homosexuality as an issue that the church shouldn’t focus on, welcoming civil conversation on the subject, and so forth. His stated concern was merely the authority of Scripture and that a Christian school must accept that homosexuality is one sin among a great many other sins as Scripture says. Indeed, he went so far in being winsome, that I would even disagree with some of his points as a result. But none of his nuance, sensitivity, or understanding prevented him from being rebuked as judgmental by the Dean of Diversity because of it. (Note: if your “Christian” college has a Dean of Diversity or any other DEI personnel, it is actively promoting a false religion.)

But the conflicts did not stop there because my friend did not stop Christ’s mission there. Over the years, he continued to perform his remaining duties at the school as a Christian rather than a pagan. When his department held ongoing events exploring Islam, he suggested they do so from a Christian point of view. He objected that the search committee for his department’s new director contained no serious Christians. He periodically tried to persuade his coworkers to take the school’s purported Christian mission more seriously–even if it put them in tension with worldly professional organizations. And, of course, he spoke out about religious and political issues on social media. Though he did not violate the school’s policies, his views were nevertheless held against him.

Pagans in Charge

Christ warned us that such faithfulness would earn us conflict with the world, and that’s precisely what he received. “He is insane”, “unprofessional (crossing religious and political lines)”, “not neutral/not ‘welcoming all'”, “religious obsessions”, etc. These are common reactions from pagans, of course, but we often forget that the world is with us even within our “Christian” organizations.

As it turns out, making an organization’s official mission Christian does little good when unbelievers are hired to carry it out. As his supervisor once put it in a performance review, ““He is learning that since we are not a Bible College but rather a Liberal Arts College, not all colleagues appreciate his desire to integrate these into the daily life of the [organization].” Indeed, she made it clear that the department was to remain “neutral” rather than Christian so that it could “respect and honor the various belief systems that we may encounter.” This is the reign of the Spirit of the Age.

Neither does being extremely conscientious about how one contends for the faith offer us much protection. My friend picked his battles. He worked hard to perform his duties with excellence. He was diligent about cultivating good relationships with colleagues. While he was no more perfect than any of us, he strove to be respectful in all things. Christians who seldom find themselves in hostile environments think that being loving enough or “winsome” enough will save them from the world’s ire, but this has never been the case. None of us will be as loving as Jesus, but the world still hated Him enough to put Him to death.

The final straw for my friend came when the school was in danger of violating state law in its COVID procedures, and he gave them an unwelcome reminder of their legal obligations. Once again, he bent over backwards to be understanding and objective in the way he addressed it–even seeking his wife’s input to make sure it wasn’t out-of-line or taking an adversarial tone. Once again, he was treated with hostility. They dredged up a history of “infractions” which he had never even been approached about in the past. They even gaslighted and falsely accused him in the form of the insidious “I feel threatened” card, which conveniently says nothing at all about its target, but is used liberally to justify abuse. Finally, they could tolerate his faith no longer, and they fired him after over a decade of service.

Sadly, his state’s government refused to protect him as a whistleblower, and allowed the matter to fall under at-will employment, meaning an employee can be fired for any reason or no reason at all. But whatever the legality of such a choice, the morality behind it was anything but Christian.

Start Being Vigilant

So what are Christians to take away from stories like my friend’s? For parents and prospective students, the lesson should be clear: Denominational branding is woefully insufficient for judging whether or not a school is actually Christian. Mission statements and the positive aphorisms of your tour guide don’t cut it. As tempting as it is to think you can send your sons off to college without simultaneously sending them off to war, the reality is that even most conservative Christian schools simply do not offer you that option. Your efforts will be best spent preparing them for that conflict with the world just as much as for academics.

Donors need to take away that same lesson and consider exactly what they’re supporting with their money. This point will largely be lost on Boomers who blithely donate even to their secular alma maters while simultaneously complaining about how our universities have become leftist indoctrination centers. But they’re not the only class of donors anymore. Consider what the school has been up to before signing any checks for them. Suspending faculty or reprimanding students for being conservative Christians is an obvious tell, but many other victims like my friend remain anonymous. Instead of just looking for Christian affirmations in their literature and among their faculty, also make sure you look for the affirmations of the Spirit of the Age. Do they brag about their diversity? Do they have any DEI-related staff? Do they make common cause with Satan in any way that goes beyond required legal boilerplate for non-discrimination? No self-proclaimed Christian organization which dances with the devil in such a way should see a penny from a Christian.

But there’s also a lesson for Christian organizations themselves–at least those interested in remaining Christian: If you do not actively oppose infiltration by the world, the world will consume your institution. “What communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?” This shouldn’t need to be said, but the answer to Paul’s (rhetorical) questions is not “inside my Christian service organization!” If you hire unbelievers, they will inevitably undermine your Christian mission. Not because they’re mustache-twirling villains or because they’re just much worse sinners than you, but simply because they are animated by a different spirit. Their priorities are the world’s rather than Christ’s.

To be sure, this is not as easy as it sounds. It’s hard to find people who are both faithful and qualified for very specific positions in very specific time-frames. Even my friend’s former employer had made efforts in the past to hire more Christians, but weren’t able to pull it off effectively. Like many organizations, they found that having strict standards of faith for the personnel would severely limit how many personnel they can actually have. Like many organizations, they probably thought they could be larger and serve more people if they relaxed those standards. And that’s true in the short term. But in the long term, while they can certainly grow larger, the service they provide drifts further and further from their original Christian mission. In the end, they become only a larger and more efficient servant of the Spirit of the Age. It would have been better to serve far fewer people for Christ.

Trust Not in Denominations

It’s easy to be discouraged over stories like this. It’s easy to be discouraged as yet another institution in which we might have hoped becomes just another casualty of Satan’s war against the saints. It’s easy to think we’ve been left alone, but we have not. Christ is with us, and he has given us many faithful men and women to work alongside. The difference is in how we find our allies.

The age where we sought common-cause through denominational branding is drawing to a close. We will find our brothers and sisters among those who actually act as fellow Christians have been instructed to act by God’s word. They are the ones who love one-another, who defend one-another against the world, and who actually come to your aid when you are under attack. They are the doers of the Word rather than hearers only. They have Christ’s priorities in mind rather than the world’s. They will defend you even if you are imperfect rather than letting your peccadilloes excuse them for abandoning you. As Christ says, you will know them by their love, and the Word remains true. Look for those who love their fellow Christians. And more importantly, be one of those who loves his fellow Christians.

May God provide us with many such saints; may He bless those like my brave friend who have taken wounds in His service; may He bless us all as we build new institutions and reclaim fallen ones; and may He teach us to hold them steadfast and true against the world’s incursions.

Posted in Christian Youth, Culture, Lutheranism, Politics, The Modern Church, Tradition, Vocation | 4 Comments

Cancelling the Left

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Matt

Building with sign on top that says 'everything is cancelled.'

Like the old Soviet Bloc countries, America is plagued by leftists driven to punish citizens for dissenting from their doctrines. The advent of social media, however, has given them a more interesting set of means. There’s no need for a well-organized secret police force when you can crowd-source an organic information network. Whereas an organization like the Stasi had hundreds of thousands of citizen informants feeding their friends and neighbors to Marxists, we have millions. The difference, however, is that the majority of them are their own bosses as they both carry out and report their surveillance on platforms like X or Meta.

Such is the machine of cancel culture, and by now, we should all be well-acquainted with how it works. Innocuous behavior like donating $25 to Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense, smiling at an activist beating a drum in your face, posting a meme, or even wearing face paint at a football game is noticed by an offended informant. Then they spread the word and swarm around their target producing controversy–pointing and shrieking in the hopes that a frightened supervisor, administrator, or family member decides to sacrifice their target to them for the sake of peace.

In this way, even the punishments are mostly crowdsourced these days. The government (usually) doesn’t force companies to fire the targets of our modern Stasi or (officially) send the rioters who burn down their cities. To be sure, the left does have well-organized activist networks and terrorist organizations, but the most apparent role of the state is simply turning a blind eye if these agents break the law in pursuit of their quarry.

Naturally, as conservatives have been the primary victims of cancel culture, they have also been its primary critics. But this has caused a rather curious phenomenon in the wake of the attempted assassination of President Trump and his instinctive (and photogenic) response of “Fight!” Suddenly, some of the leftists who have been openly wishing for Trump’s death for years are finally being noticed. Whether it’s a famous band like Tenacious D or a poor and unknown cashier at Home Depot, a few leftists openly calling for assassination are facing unexpected consequences. And this time, it’s the right swarming the targets and informing supervisors. For once, we are cancelling the left.

Predictably, the usual soft-hearted conservatives are shocked and appalled by this turn of events. They’ve spent decades imagining if the situation were reversed and the left responding with ashamed repentance. But now that it actually is reversed–even to the smallest extent–they are rushing to the left’s defense to make sure they don’t have to repent.

Thus far, these defenses have come in two different flavors: a moral appeal against hypocrisy and a strategic appeal to peacemaking. Let’s take a look at each of these.

Cancelling the Left is Immoral?

The appeal against hypocrisy is fairly simple: “If cancel culture is evil, then it’s evil for us to use it.” In other words, the very fact that conservatives objected to men being cancelled over political beliefs means that integrity compels them to refuse taking such actions against the pro-assassination crowd now.

This might be a valid objection if we were morally opposed to social consequences for odious beliefs, but this was never the case. The reason we opposed cancel culture in the first place is that it was being used by the wicked against good men. The left cancelled people for actions that ranged from completely harmless to morally righteous. It is only the moderates who tried to remain aloof and neutral by condemning the means rather than opposing the evil itself.

It is certainly true that adopting cancel culture represents a massive shift in custom. Free speech, after all, was as much a social contract as a legal reality in the United States. One can hardly say “I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” and then immediately fire the person. Nevertheless, social contracts are not moral absolutes, and it is foolish to treat them as such. When one party breaks a contract, the other party is hardly obligated to continue holding up their end. If a tenant refuses to pay rent, the landlord who evicts him is not “sinking to his level.”

To be sure, I greatly preferred the old social contract where people could talk about their politics and religion in public without fear of reprisal (though openly advocating for assassination was always beyond the pale.) However, the right cannot unilaterally re-establish that contract, no matter how much we might want to. After all, the landlord can’t force delinquent tenants to pay rent simply by refusing to evict them. And that brings us to the strategic appeal to peacemaking. If conservatives want cancel culture to end, shouldn’t we refrain from cancelling the left?

Cancelling the Left Prevents Peace?

The problem with this view is that it completely fails to understand the modern left. Their long march through our institutions is nearly complete. Cancel culture has done nothing but accelerate their success. So what motivation do they have to stop cancelling their political opponents? Because it’s wrong? Well, they’ve already painted their opponents as Nazis specifically to remove moral value from the equation. Because it betrays their own principles and makes them hypocrites? Well, they don’t operate on principles, but on a narrative of good victims vs evil oppressors which they themselves manipulate. Because what goes around comes around? That one could actually work if they believed it would happen, but our frightened conservatives are working specifically to prevent that.

The left broke the old social contracts precisely because they favor a new one: constantly monitoring all speech and punishing their critics. Thus far, they’ve been quite successful in imposing this new contract on America. Conservatives, meanwhile, have done nothing to make them think they can’t have their way. Accordingly, the left won’t stop while they can still advance by attacking their opponents with absolute impunity. There’s a word for their mindset: warfare.

And that’s really the difference between those who want to return fire by cancelling leftists and those who do not: It boils down to whether “culture war” is empty rhetoric or a daily reality. Those of us who have actually lost things for stating what everyone believed until about 5 minutes ago understand that war is our reality whether we want it or not. Telling us that we’re sinking to their level by cancelling someone is therefore like telling a soldier he’s sinking to the enemy’s level by returning fire. It’s pure absurdity. They started this war, and now they’re going to have to deal with retaliation.

Finding a New Peace

Of course, like good schoolmarms, conservatives will now respond, “It doesn’t matter who started it; it’s time to stop it.” And to be fair, there are circumstances when it really doesn’t matter who started it. For example, if there’s a just authority who is ready and willing to step in and restore a just peace, then appealing to that authority makes far more sense than striking back in kind. That’s why parents tell their kids not to. Or alternatively, if a destructive conflict has gone on for so long that both sides realize they’d be better off suing for peace, then it makes sense to try and work out a treaty rather than continuing the fight. Unfortunately, Americans don’t find ourselves in either of these situations.

There’s no appropriate authority on Earth to whom we can appeal because our government has been weaponized against the American people in countless ways. They have done nothing but protect the left as they cancel us. Indeed, Donald Trump’s popularity is driven by the idea that he would become that kind of amenable authority, and we can see how threatened the left is by such a prospect.

Neither do both sides realize we’d be better off with peace. After all, the conflict has been entirely one-sided thus far. The left has been curb-stomping conservatives for a generation with virtually no reprisals. Terms for peace are dictated by the winners, and right now, that’s still the left. The only social contract they’re interested in establishing is their new one where anyone who disagrees with them is socially, economically, and (if necessary) physically destroyed. The only question in their minds is whether the right will surrender to them before they’re destroyed. Before they’ll consider peace, the right needs to show them they can’t actually win.

And that brings us back to the nature of our American Stasi. The original relied on civilian informants for its work, and that has only been amplified in our own crowd-sourced version. Is it better to target celebrities like Jack Black than random cashiers at Home Depot? Sure. But let’s not pretend that the rank-and-file aren’t legitimate targets. They are the gears of the machine. They are the foot soldiers. They drive the social media outrage, report our friends to HR, accuse us of thought crimes, and unperson us by calling us Nazis. But they don’t wear uniforms. We recognize them only by the statements they make (like asking for better assassins) and they are indeed fair game.

Conservatives cannot force leftists to end cancel culture without either subjecting them to it or to something even worse. I sympathize with the conservative desire to live in peace without the ugliness of a culture war, but at the end of the day, it’s not up to us. It only takes one side to start a war, and the left has already done so. If the right wants a just peace with more reasonable social contracts, then we have no choice but to fight for it. And we can’t afford to pull our punches.

Posted in Culture, Ethics, Politics, Tradition | 2 Comments

Whether Voters, Too, Can Be Saved

Posted on July 8, 2024 by Matt

silhouette of a ballot being placed in its box

Ever since the Fall, the evil impulses of man’s heart have needed to be restrained, lest wickedness proliferate among us. In His mercy, God sent Jesus Christ to die on our behalf, providing whoever believes in Him with the eternal remedy for our sinful natures. But even in the here and now, God has not left mankind without recourse. Out of love, He instituted human government and assigned it the sword to place hard limits on our ability to follow those sinful natures while we yet possess them.

As American Christians watch our family, friends, and neighbors suffer because evil goes increasingly unrestrained, we are stirred up with that same love shown to us by the Father. We not only pray for the gift of godly government, but work through the vocations He’s given to establish it among us. When He gives us voices and platforms, we speak against evil. When He appoints us to vote or govern, we use that authority to restrain evil. Whenever He puts people into our care, we seek the best ways of restraining evil for their protection. At its most basic level, Christian Nationalism amounts to nothing more than fulfilling this love towards our families and countrymen.

Unfortunately, the reaction against Christian Nationalism has produced a new crop of anabaptists among us. Like those sects born in the 16th century, these men have determined that it is unchristian to participate in government, but they have done so with a modernist twist. While the old anabaptists had sufficient integrity to eschew politics and government altogether due to their pacifism, this new batch has given Christians a very peculiar license: A Christian may indeed vote and govern, but never for the sake of restraining evil according to a Christian understanding of right and wrong.

The Idol of Moral Neutrality

Christian Nationalists identify evil in light of God’s eternal Word and natural law rather than popular consensus, academic fads, or legal tradition. Wherever laws and constitutions call good evil and evil good, we know we must work to amend them. When schools teach that evil is good and good is evil, we know we must rebuke them. If individuals wish to delight in evil whilst calling it good, we know we must work to restrain them. Christian Nationalists straightforwardly reject the religious and moral neutrality of the Postwar Consensus.

But neutrality is a popular idol among Americans. As more Christians repent of our idolatry, those who remain thralls of the Spirit of the Age don’t quietly accept our departure. “We lose down here.” “Trust not in princes!” “The Gospel is a suicide mission.” Many pious slogans are trotted out to convince Christians not to love their neighbors by defending them from evil.

They’ll use Christ’s promises of suffering for His sake to convince us that protecting our families is faithless. In their hands, the Gospel of eternal salvation becomes a means of despising his gifts of peace in the here and now. His commands to love our enemies are likewise leveraged to make us think the governmental task of restraining evil is, itself, an evil departure from God’s love. At least, they tell us this when it comes to actual sins condemned by Scripture. When it comes to violations of the Postwar Consensus like racism, sexism, or inequality, they quickly forget about losing down here.

Their blatant hypocrisy and slavish devotion to the Spirit of the Age should be sufficient reason to reject their false teachings. Even so, we cannot let this misuse of Scripture go unanswered. With the whole world screaming these deceptions at us, it’s easy for any Christian to be taken in when their leaders tell them God’s Word requires them to go along. But understanding Scripture well is the best remedy, so let’s take a look at these arguments.

Loving Your Enemies

By the reckoning of neutralists, Christian Nationalists who seek to restrain the wicked with the sword of government ipso facto cannot love their enemies. After all, how could the executioner’s blade possibly be loving? But the fact that so many of our pastors and teachers perceive a contradiction here proceeds from their failure to understand love in the first place.

Loving anyone, friend or enemy, is a matter of following God’s law. That is the form of love in day-to-day life. Plagued as we are by soft antinomianism, it should be no surprise how often this fact is overlooked. Not content with distinguishing Law from Gospel when it matters (i.e. when one questions whether he is saved) they prefer to separate them altogether. They believe the Law is God’s hatred and the Gospel his love. They therefore disregard Christ when He says “if you love me, keep my commandments,” Paul when he says “love is the fulfilling of the law,” and John when he says, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.” How could they purport to love their enemies when they do not even know how?

Indeed, Christians ought to love our enemies. We must not murder them, lie to them in God’s name, covet their wives, and so forth. On the contrary, we assist their bodily needs, hold God’s name sacred before them, and help them to keep their marriages intact. As God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike, we are to fulfill our moral responsibilities to the just and the unjust alike.

Here, they think they have us caught. “The sword of government harms the body rather than provides for it! Therefore Christians must stay their hands when governing.” Once again, however, they only reveal their ignorance. For woven throughout God’s eternal law are the natural roles he ordained during creation.

These roles do not evaporate when we love our enemies. Loving an enemy like you love your wife, for example, would be adultery towards her and betrayal towards your children. The 4th Commandment likewise tells us we are to honor our father and mother in ways that we do not honor ordinary enemies or friends. Paul gave us far stricter responsibilities to our own children than to strangers–whether they are enemies or not. Even the parable of the Good Samaritan makes these kinds of distinctions plain. Who upon finding his own son beaten half-dead on the side of the road would simply drop him off at an inn and continue on his journey? How we love our neighbors therefore depends on relationships that run far deeper than friend or enemy. This is not a peculiarity, but the norm in Christian life. Loving your enemies is always a matter of vocation because loving your friends is as well.

The Fifth Commandment likewise leans heavily on vocation. “You shall not murder” does not forbid all killing because not all killing is murder. It depends on the roles of those involved. A soldier does not murder the enemy combatant he kills. Neither does the executioner murder the criminal or the father murder the man who breaks into his home at night. In such cases, killing is a true moral obligation done out of love for one’s neighbor who, whether friend or foe, is protected from evil. And if even killing can fulfill the Fifth Commandment by protecting our neighbors’ bodily well-being, then surely lesser punishments can be appropriate as well. A Christian with authority–even in the form of voting–is doing God’s work when he uses that authority to direct the sword against the wicked.

You see, “your enemy” and “the wicked” are not always synonymous, even for a Christian. This is especially true concerning the kind of severe, overt wickedness that government is ordained to suppress. The man who sues you for your tunic is your enemy, but the sword isn’t there to restrain him. The government official who gives you unpleasant work like carrying his baggage for a mile may be your enemy, but he is not necessarily a wicked man who deserves the sword. The person who insults you–even out of evil intent–may not have done anything worthy of the government’s attention. Enemies per se are therefore not the Christian’s target when he uses the sword; the wicked are. And the Christian who formulates laws to suppress evil must suppress evil done against friends and enemies alike. But evil is what God says it is–not simply what we (or our enemies) dislike.

This is what it means to love one’s enemies. We are to do what is morally right even when we would rather see harm come to those who have harmed us. To a judge, love means giving justice even to someone who hates you, not refusing to sentence murderers. To a soldier, love means feeding your prisoners of war, not opening your city gates to invaders. Christians who vote to suppress evil in such ways are likewise fulfilling the law of love. Christian Nationalists do not seek to make the sword a tool of personal vengeance against our enemies. Rather, we seek to establish a just peace within the lands God has given to our people so that all of us–friend and enemy alike–may have freedom from the wicked acts of wicked men.

Suffering for Christ’s Sake

What, then, about suffering for Christ’s sake? There is no question that our Lord promised us suffering and persecution from the world on his account. Rather than telling us to shy away from it, he taught us to embrace it, for our reward will be great in heaven. Those who would worship neutrality alongside Christ use these promises of His to accuse Christians of cowardice when they take any action to oppose evil and the suffering it causes. In their rhetoric, the work of restraining evil is inherently opposed to the Christian’s duty to take up his cross.

This view, however, is so childish it should embarrass any who hold it. Our Lord speaks of suffering inflicted on us by the world because we are His children. He is not instructing us to deliberately produce suffering by either harming ourselves or by neglecting our duties. For example, if I feel the ordinary suffering of hunger, that is my God-given reminder to fix myself dinner. Eating is not an act of cowardice or a rejection of any supposed cross of starvation. Those whose cross is hunger suffer due to circumstances like famine, poverty, or punishment, not by willful refusal of God’s gift of food. By both natural law and Holy Scripture, God has given each person the task of basic self-preservation, for as the Apostle says, if a man will not work, neither should he eat.

The same is true when it comes to threats of harm against ourselves or those in our care. There are times we must suffer violence due to circumstance or duty. Other times, we must resist violence for the sake of circumstance or duty. When the Jews attacked Jesus, He often chose to escape rather than submit to it because His time had not yet come. When that time did arrive, He laid down His life of His own accord rather than having it taken from Him. When Paul was threatened by evil men, there were times when he would likewise preserve his life by escaping. And when invading kings had stolen his nephew, Abraham raised a small army and took him back rather than abandoning Lot to his cross. For this action, Abraham was recognized and blessed by Melchizedek, priest of God Most High.

We do not endure suffering the way medieval monks did–retreating from our natural responsibilities so we can suffer self-imposed harm for the sake of false piety. We endure as we fulfill our callings. We endure as we marry, build homes, have children, love our neighbors, protect our people, and live as Christians. Suffering will inevitably come, but our crosses are given to us. We do not choose them for ourselves. If evil men threaten my family, then as a father, my cross is the grueling labor of contending against such men, not “bravely” abandoning my children to suffering and death. The same is true when evil men threaten my tribe or nation. The cowards are those who refuse their God-given duties and cover their shame by attacking faithful men.

And really, suffering is not such a rare resource that we must deliberately produce more. Christian Nationalism won’t put an end to it. If you think that worldly success and godly government will deprive us of our opportunity to suffer for Christ, fear not. When we get groomers out of schools and learn to respect our own borders, our trials will not cease. Satan will certainly not lie down in despair and retreat to Hell if Donald Trump is elected. The world and the pleasures of the flesh will still try to choke out your faith even if pornography is banned. Christian government may fulfill its godly duty of restraining evil without dreading the end of suffering. The only difference is that when we do so, we will suffer for doing good instead of for doing evil.

What About the Gospel?

But what about the Gospel? Ever since the Garden of Eden, Satan has worked to convince man that God’s Word is unsatisfactory. He has not ceased this endeavor in the modern age. Whether it’s Theological Liberalism, the Gospel Reductionism of the mid 20th-century, or the soft antinomianism of today, Christians are always tempted to abandon whichever parts of God’s Word the world finds offensive. Right now, Satan’s crosshairs are dead-center on God’s First Article gifts–creation and its ordinances.

This reductionist temptation bleeds into modern Christians’ theology of government. Those who embrace Gospel Reductionism or soft antinomianism often contend that the state can have nothing to do with Christianity because it has nothing to do with the Gospel. After all, what government provides is strictly limited to those first article gifts. They may or may not reject those gifts outright, but of what use could they be without the Gospel? Any temporal benefit comes at the price of creating a strictly outward appearance of righteousness which could turn everyone into legalistic pharisees. So clearly, Christians should therefore devote their energy to saving souls through proclamation of the Gospel while civil government should remain a wholly secular affair.

The problem is that the state doesn’t have “nothing to do with the Gospel” anymore than God’s Law has “nothing to do with the Gospel.” Lutherans distinguish Law and Gospel for a very specific purpose–to point those who question whether they are saved to the Cross for the only reliable answer. After all, if they consult the Law for that, they will only find condemnation because we all fall short. But faithful Christians never separate Law from Gospel because that question of justification is not the only thing Christians need to think about. As justified children of God, we have been given many blessings, instructions, and exhortations as we make our way towards heaven because we have a Father who loves u s. Law and Gospel both proceed from the same mouth of our one God, and both bless the Christian continually because the Law no longer condemns us.

In the same way, Law and Gospel cannot be severed from one-another when it comes to government. The state does have a role to play in making disciples of all nations–it’s just not the same role as the Church’s. Can the state make people Christian by outwardly restraining wickedness? Certainly not in the way most people think. The Christian faith cannot be compelled by force–not even military force. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put our fallen nature together again. The government cannot make us righteous before God.

On the other hand, civil government can indeed make people Christian in a far more mundane way. After all, parents are the most fundamental form of civil government, and it would be foolish to contend that parents cannot make their children Christian. True, it is the Holy Spirit who creates faith in the heart of every believer, but the Holy Spirit has decided to accomplish this through means: God’s Holy Word and His Sacraments. Likewise, these means do not spontaneously generate from the ether, but are administered by men on God’s behalf and by His command. That is what the Church is for.

But Christian parents have a role here as well. As God commands, we do everything in our power to ensure that our children receive these gifts. My own parents were no exception. They brought me to be baptized. They sent me to Lutheran schools. They discouraged me from sin and evil. They raised me in the faith and prepared me to worthily receive the Sacrament of the Altar. And in doing so, God’s Proverb was fulfilled: train a child up in the way he should go, and even when he is old, he will not depart from it. It would therefore be quite appropriate to say that my parents made me a Christian–even as I simultaneously confess that the Holy Spirit called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctifies, and keeps me in the one true faith. I am thankful to my parents and even more so to the God who gave them to me and used them to deliver His gifts.

As Luther points out in the Large Catechism, government is rooted in parents enlisting one-another’s aid and delegating their authority. It is ordained to assist governance among the many households within its borders. So what then happens to the parental ability to make Christians? It certainly weakens, for civil government can never take the place of parents (and it creates ungodly disaster whenever it tries.) Nevertheless, as long as government maintains its proper place of assisting parents in protecting their households by restraining the wicked and commending the good, this ability does not go away entirely.

Government cannot hold your hand as it takes you to church, but it can remove unnecessary distractions through means like blue laws. God forbid that government try to take over baptism from the Church, but it can honor the name in which we are baptized by the holy days it recognizes, the prayers its functionaries offer, and the blasphemies it punishes. It cannot preach the Word of God, but it can most certainly learn from it as it makes its judgments of what is good and what is evil. In all these senses and more, a government can be Christian, and it can serve the very Church to which its citizens belong.

Can God build His Church despite the oppression of a hostile government? Of course! He has proven time and again that no earthly power can stand against Him. And yet, His omnipotent power is not a reason to despise what He has explicitly told us about the earthly roles and earthly consequences He has ordained. Do we dare call God a liar when He tells us the fruit of raising a child properly? Do we dare call Him a liar when he speaks of the spiritual dangers of surrounding yourself with sexual immorality or men of bad character? Do we dare call Him a liar when He says he’ll punish the third or fourth generation of those who hate him? The Church is not the State, but neither does it exist in a hermetically sealed bubble. We ought not pray for God’s divine intervention out of sheer laziness–a hypocritical piety that refuses to make use of the ordinary gifts He has given.

To be sure, some Christians’ vocations are more properly restricted to the direct work of the Church. Perhaps you are a pastor and you believe your calling is exclusively to make new Christians through Word and Sacrament. May it be well with you. But if you’ve decided that government is not your business, you must hold your peace among those of us who have been given broader callings. Subjecting others to the peculiar rules of your own profession will bring them nothing but harm.

Christian Nationalist Voters May Indeed Be Saved

Christians can certainly debate whether democracy is a good form of government in general or whether it is an appropriate form of government for 21st century Americans specifically. God gave us no mandated form of government beyond Christ’s Kingship, after all. We may debate how best to restrain particular evils and commend specific goods in our own place and time. God has given us wisdom to make such decisions, and we should let iron sharpen iron as we contend for our beliefs on the subject.

But what we should never need to debate is whether government can be Christian or whether Christians may carry out its duties according to Christ’s commands. We should never need to consider whether God or popular consensus gets to delineate good from evil. And far be it from us to condemn to Hell the entire Church from Constantine to the French Revolution simply because they encouraged their rulers to kiss the Son lest He be angry. Neither should we condemn today’s Christian Nationalists who do the same. Those suggestions come from the Devil and ought to be rebuked instead. Christians should pray for God’s gift of Christian government, work towards it within the vocations he’s given us, and receive it with gratitude should He grant it to us.

Posted in Christian Nationalism, Ethics, Family, Law, Natural Law, Politics, The Modern Church, Theological Pietism, Two Kingdoms, Vocation | Tagged Christian Nationalism, Ethics, Government | 1 Comment

If You Want Well-Behaved Children in Church, Teach God’s Order

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Matt

stained window of Jesus welcoming children in church

When God blesses a congregation with young children, He is blessing them with a future. Given the average age in many of our churches, it’s a blessing we ought to fervently pray for. Nevertheless, when God does bless an elderly congregation with a second chance at life by placing young families with children in church, it does come with certain challenges.

One such challenge is maintaining order in worship when there are a lot of small children around. After decades of quiet, hearing the sounds and seeing the constant wiggles of a new generation during the divine service can be distracting for older members. It’s not long before the complaints arise; and finding Biblical rationalizations for their feelings comes easily. “Our Lord is a God of order rather than of chaos.” “We should be approaching Him with fear and trembling.” “Raising children in the fear and admonition of the Lord means teaching them to be quiet in church.”

As the complaints bubble to the surface, they can quickly foster resentment. To be sure, sometimes these complaints are made downright wickedly. My wife and I have been subject to that ourselves. But even innocent approaches can end up corroding church fellowship when those who object don’t really understand those they address.

They try to say “please teach your children to behave in church so we can concentrate on worship.” On the surface, that’s a very reasonable request. What’s more, they remember it as the standard when they grew up. I often hear older Christians reminisce that they would never have dared get noisy or disruptive in God’s house because their parents would bring the hammer down. “My father had to take me out of the service once, and boy oh boy, I never wanted that to happen to me again!” By and large, they not only loved their parents, but feared them as well because of how strict they were.

But as our culture severs generations from one-another, mutual understanding is one of the casualties. In this case, the older generation overlooks an important factor: Most parents today who join their children in church are already embarrassed by any disruptions and work hard to train their children appropriately. Neither a disregard for reverence nor a lack of will inhibit them.

A Culture that Hates Discipline

One can say “do something about your kids” or “work harder to discipline them” all he wants, but parents are fully engaged already. They possess nothing more they can give to resolve the complaints. To the majority of parents who are already trying their best, “we want your children to be more quiet and well-behaved in our sanctuary” is indistinguishable from “we don’t want your children in our sanctuary” because they have no concrete pathway from A to B that they haven’t already tried.

That raises another important question, however: Why? Couldn’t parents today just discipline their children the way elderly Christians remember from their own childhoods? While rose-tinted nostalgia explains some of the disconnect, I don’t think it explains all or even most of the issue. Likewise, once could point to the increase in neurological disorders and the parenting challenges they present. But while such cases skew the averages, they nevertheless aren’t responsible for the norm. No, I believe parents today cannot govern their homes the way previous generations did, and it’s not a matter of will or effort. In many respects, it’s not even a matter of skill per se, though much skill has been lost from generation to generation.

One does not parent in a vacuum. No matter how much you might wish to disregard the world and do things your own way, nobody ever reinvents parenting from scratch. You will use the examples set by your own parents, for better and for worse. You and your children alike will acquire ideas of what’s normal and expected from the children and parents in your neighborhood, from your friends & family, and from whatever media you consume. When every strict parent you’ve ever seen on television your entire life is always the bad guy, that affects how you parent even when you know it’s propaganda.

The law also gets its say. You might remember your father taking you to the woodshed, but if a modern father did that, he could end up in jail or lose custody–if he could even bring himself to do so at all. Unless you live in utter solitude like monks, the customs and norms of your community will judge and constrain you whether you like it or not.

Feminism Abhors Order

The rise of feminism is another novelty we must consider. Generally speaking, moms are considerably less inclined to be strict with children or to level effective discipline than dads are. While a father should certainly listen to and consider his wife’s input to ensure he does not provoke his children, he also needs to understand that A) she’ll always feel that discipline interferes with her instinct to nurture to some extent and B) the buck stops with him rather than her.

However, now that unilateral divorce is always in a woman’s back pocket as a solution to marital complaints, he needs to tread with excessive caution. If his son needs to be spanked but his wife has been listening to a peaceful parenting podcast lately or has even had a bad day, he has to consider the potential outcomes. The divorce threat point requires many fathers to weigh the consequences of weak discipline against the consequences of his wife nuking his family.

But discipline is a much broader matter than mere stricter punishment, and frivorce is only the symptom of a deeper issue. Many older Christians remember obeying their parents not because they threatened punishment, but because they commanded respect.

A child’s obedience should certainly proceed primarily from respect rather than threats. But where exactly are they to learn that respect? We have transitioned far away from a culture that could say “father knows best” without snickering. And while we can (and do) blame the culture all day, our churches by no means escape culpability. The same generation complaining about unruly children cultivated an environment of disrespect for fathers. At this point, many churches display contempt for men as a matter of tradition.

But fault lies even closer to home than that. By design, a mother ought to provide her children with an example of respect and obedience towards their father. Today, the average mom is far more likely to set an example of disrespect which her children will learn quite well. And once again, our churches not only tolerate this violation of God’s Word but actually facilitate it.

And the corrosion extends beyond fathers. In the end, it annihilates respect for their mother as well because a wife has only the authority delegated to her by her husband whom God has made her head. In undermining him, she undermines herself. Equality is poisonous, not only to marriage itself, but also to the families marriage creates & serves. For if the husband and wife treat each other as equals, that is how children will learn to treat father and mother alike.

Cultivating Reverent Children in Church

So what then are Christians to do? Has reverence gone extinct forevermore? Must the older generations resign themselves to chaotic services? No. But older Christians need to think less about what they’re owed and more about how they can help parents with children in church. And all of us need to repent of disregarding God’s order in home and society so that we can receive it once more.

First, complaints must be set aside whether or not they are valid simply because they are counter-productive. If you want parents to be enabled to go further in disciplining their children, they need to be confident in slowly rebuking their culture more and more. Calling them failures or constantly demanding what they cannot provide only undermines confidence. But producing confidence is also within our power. Honor parents who win the struggle to bring their children to the Lord’s house. Gladly help them wrangle their children when they need it.

Is swallowing your complaints fair? Maybe, maybe not. (Although considering how these cultural transformations occurred on the watch of the older generations, I would contend that it’s quite fair.) But either way, it is certainly more helpful to your goal of having a peaceful divine service free of distraction.

Second, our churches all need to repent of submitting to feminism rather than God’s Word. “Children, obey your parents” follows right on the heels of “Wives, submit to your husbands” and “husbands, love your wives” for a reason. That is how God designed marriage and family to work. We cannot expect that undermining His design will bear good fruit.

The older generations need to help walk back the changes they’ve made. Fathers and mothers should be honored rather than despised. That means holding men who head their families in high esteem and advocating for their authority in their household. That means doing what Scripture does and pointing young women towards motherhood and being keepers of the home rather than being career-oriented girlbosses.

That also means restoring church governance to match God’s order rather than undermining it by seeking equality in every office but that of pastor. Women aren’t abandoning their vocations because their nature directs them to, but because the older generations built a society which honors and esteems them for it. Congregations must honor men and women for being God-fearing instead.

Parents can become more skilled and effective at disciplining their children. We can make reverence for God’s house normal again. We can bring order to chaos. But complaints and grumbling will never achieve it. Only once we begin shoring up the foundations we’ve neglected will we be able to build on them once more. You cannot expect children to be orderly in church if your church will not uphold God’s order in the home.

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