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.
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.
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.
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 us. 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.
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.
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.
Until recently, I had only heard of one instance of excommunication in my 43 years as a Lutheran. I was only a child at the time, so my information was second-hand. But from what I remember, it was a very clear-cut matter. Two married members of the congregation were discovered to be having an affair with one-another. Rather than repent of their adultery, they both chose to divorce their faithful spouses and marry each other instead–a rather clear rebuke to any attempt at reconciliation or departure from the sinful desires they had embraced.
That is how I’ve always understood excommunication from Lutheran theology and practice: a matter of manifest sin plainly condemned by God’s Word and a persistent refusal to acknowledge that Word and repent. Church discipline, a formal attempt to win an errant brother back to Christ, is a rare sight among us–too rare, as I’ve written in the past. Not too rare because we need more excommunications, but too rare because we tend to let our conflicts fester into resentment. What’s more, we are often afraid to teach God’s Law at all on subjects where we abandoned it en masse lest we be compelled to the uncomfortable task of winning back brothers.
Mr. Turnipseed is not the only man who was caught up in this–only the most recent and outspoken about it. Others have made it public that they were excommunicated or simply driven from their churches. Still others have kept their “discipline” private. I myself was required to defend my criticism of LCACA before Synod officials, though to the credit of those particular men, it was not disciplinary, and they conducted themselves as Christians throughout.
We have some hard questions to ask ourselves as a Synod. To be sure, our leadership provoked this entire travesty from beginning to end. They put false teachings alongside our catechism; they acted as though those teachings were no big deal; they chose to retaliate against the whistleblowers rather than repent. But we cannot pass the entire matter off on them because they found fertile ground in the LCMS for their efforts. It was frightfully easy for them to turn the Office of the Keys into a weapon against the faithful. We certainly must ask ourselves who we’ve chosen as our leaders, but we must also ask why pastors and congregations have gone along with it so readily.
One of the most important reasons for our vulnerability is a perennial doctrinal failing in the LCMS often called “soft antinomianism.”
Despising God’s Law
I’ve written about this leaven before at length for those of you who want a full explanation. Here, suffice it to say that soft antinomianism does not outright deny the truth of God’s Law but does deny most of its relevance to the life of a Christian. Our Confessions recognize three ways God uses His Law: 1) curbing our outward sinfulness, 2) showing us that we’re sinners, and 3) guiding a Christian in a God-pleasing life. Soft antinomians wish to restrict the Holy Spirit to Second Use only. They need to reveal sinfulness to maintain their employment as absolvers. However, any attempt to teach God’s Law in a way that could actually alter someone’s behavior is met with suspicion of works righteousness.
The Radical Lutheranism from which these practices derive is a false teaching which draws souls away from Christ. Many of our leaders and theologians embrace Gerhard Forde, which has created a spiritually toxic environment in many sanctuaries and classrooms. But when you consider how church discipline and excommunication would need to work in a soft antinomian environment, the atrocious treatment of Ryan Turnipseed begins to make much more sense.
Church Discipline Under Antinomianism
When God’s Law has been deliberately ignored, obfuscated, and excluded from our sense of moral judgment, church discipline becomes dangerous rather than helpful. The only judgments that could draw someone into church discipline are not from the Law, but from what cannot be excised from fallen human nature: our propensity for taking personal offense. Every child knows it’s wrong when someone steals his toy or calls him a name; and he will loudly object to it. But if the child is not disciplined by his parents, he will never know the difference between another child stealing his toy and mom taking it away because it’s time for dinner. Both will offend him. Neither would he know the difference between being made fun of and being scolded. One need only look at our culture today to see this infantile dynamic at work.
As in our godless society at large, this puerile impulse is all a soft antinomian has left once he finishes training himself to ignore God’s Law. But his own personal offense and his uncultivated empathy over personal offense felt by the likeminded are still sufficient to drive him into action. He will still pursue retribution according to popular custom. In the modern church, that means having a sit-down to talk about why he’s “deeply concerned” about whatever triggered the feelings of offense.
Once those wheels have been set in motion, there’s little to hinder them because the brakes have been removed. After all, how exactly is one to recognize manifest–open, clear, and unambiguous–sin as compared to any other kind without the Law? Surely every man in Corinth was guilty of having committed adultery in his heart by lusting at some point; but Paul commanded them to expel only the man who was sleeping with his step-mother. How is a soft antinomian going to make such a distinction?
According to our sinful natures, literally every action we take involves some measure of sin, so any action at all could qualify us for excommunication. Soft antinomians consider raping children to be no more serious than being mildly discourteous, so considering severity is of no help to their discernment. And since recognizing one action as more unambiguously sinful than another would be an exercise in self-righteous judgment by their standards, that isn’t an option either. Without instruction in and understanding of the specifics of God’s Law, there’s nothing to distinguish manifest sin from A) actions that are only debatably sinful or B) the thousand peccadilloes each Christian commits every day that do not require formal church discipline. The only pertinent factor is whether someone felt sufficiently offended to make an accusation and whether the leaders sufficiently empathize with it.
But what’s left to convict someone in their eyes? Only impenitence. Once the accusation is made, if the accused does not react obsequiously enough to salve bruised egos, he will be considered impenitent. After all, shouldn’t he have just apologized and backed down if a brother in Christ was offended? And if he refuses, doesn’t that mean he self-righteously believes he’s kept God’s Law perfectly? Clearly, he must be impenitent! Soft antinomians will then latch onto the fact that any impenitent sin can separate us from God, and use that as a license to keep escalating the “discipline” because they don’t know how else to stop. Lacking any sense of proportion, they make themselves tyrants rather than peacemakers.
The Case Against Ryan Turnipseed
When we view the case against Ryan Turnipseed in this light, it begins to make more sense. Consider the nebulous and poorly-defined charges against him. There were no clear accusations of manifest sins such as adultery, murder, or other open wickedness. Indeed, specific accusations based on clear Scripture were conspicuously absent from the proceedings. What did come up repeatedly, however, was guilt-by-association, tone, and impenitence.
The guilt-by-association came from the fact that he recorded a livestream on the subject of LCACA with a small group of Lutherans that included Corey Mahler and Woe. These two hosts of the Stone Choir podcast hold political beliefs which are about as far right as one can possibly get. And whatever else you may say about those beliefs, the majority of modern Americans would certainly find many of them offensive–foremost among them, their alternate takes on WWII history.
But what was curious about how Mr. Turnipseed’s former pastor and elders pursued the issue is that they didn’t focus on whether or not he shared any particular belief. After all, as with any two people on Earth, there is both common ground and divergence. They did not ask him to deny any creed or retract any statements he himself had made. Instead, it all came down to his being “offensively” associated with “offensive” individuals.
Accordingly, they condemned him for “platforming” them at all (i.e. having public interactions with them on the internet.) Leaning on President Harrison’s letter, they condemned him for being too cozy with the “alt-right” despite admitting they were unable to even define “alt-right.” They instructed him to disavow their entire persons as his means of repentance. In all of this, they were unable to provide any Scriptural warrant for such a bizarre demand, and so Mr. Turnipseed naturally refused.
Along with guilt-by-association came the equally nebulous matter of “tone.” In the letter placing him under the minor ban, his pastor & elders decreed that he had not “clothed [him]self with humility” and was therefore “intentionally dividing the church.” They likewise decided that “many of [his] social media posts… were not made in love.”
Tone is a favorite accusation of soft antinomians and woke-scolds alike because it’s so subjective. It is certainly true that Christians are called to love and humility, but it’s also true that none of us achieve perfect love or perfect humility in this life. Everyone is guilty, and so anyone can be accused. There is no need for “impious” contemplation on whether a failure to love is mild or severe. They need not consult Scripture to consider whether a harsh tone could be a reasonable judgment call in pursuit of love. After all, men like Luther, Paul, Elijah, and Christ Himself often spoke sharply out of love for their flocks. No, our soft antinomians leave themselves with a very simple if/then that avoids any need for cultivating moral wisdom: If the accusation is rejected, then it’s ipso facto a refusal to repent.
This failure is compounded by our culture’s propensity for reducing virtues like love and humility down to mere “niceness.” Whereas love doggedly pursues the true good of another and humility unflinchingly reminds us not to think others are beneath our concern, niceness is simply the urge to keep everything on an even keel and avoid upsetting anyone. Among those who dabble in this confusion, anyone feeling offense is therefore a victim of hatred and pride. And on that same line of malformed reasoning, anyone who actually tries to defend their choice of words is an impenitent sinner self-righteously putting himself outside of the faith.
So although no clear Scriptural absolutes were violated, repentance was demanded of Ryan Turnipseed all the same. And here we get to the accusers having nothing left but impenitence to sanction the process. They told him that he “scorned God’s established authority” by not obeying his pastor and elders when they told him to repent of a sin they had utterly failed to establish from God’s Law. In reality, all he had done was ask his accusers to justify their accusations against him and attempt to defend his own actions. In minds polluted by soft antinomianism, however, such endeavors would put one firmly in the realm of impenitence.
And this is why there can be no internal brakes to any church discipline that has been thus corrupted. Any system that parses accusations in a fair and just way must incorporate opportunities to reasonably determine whether or not the accused is truly guilty of a crime. There must be due process to make sure this is accomplished impartially. For that, you must weigh evidence of wrongdoing according to specific laws in a well-ordered and reasonable manner. Soft antinomians reject such “legalisms” in favor of the sure and certain knowledge that coram deo, we’re all guilty anyway. And while British sketch comedy has famously asked the question “are we the baddies,” such self-reflection is alien to any who were instructed to avoid specifics of the Law.
The Mechanics of Going Woke
It strikes many as absurd that the LCMS, well-known as a very conservative church body, could be going woke. Though there are certainly leftists in our ranks, a great many of our leaders–even ones afflicted with soft antinomianism–would be considered right-wing by most Americans. Many of them even despise the woke left. And yet, here we have behavior that has far more in common with communist revolutionaries than with men of God. How can this be?
Well, if you consider the ideological left and how Critical Theory actually functions, the same mechanisms are at work–only for different reasons. In general, the left tends to abandon the morals and values of the past for the sake of progress. Critical Theory replaces all of that with a narrative of liberation from oppressors. The flavor of that narrative changes according to the style of the times (haves vs. have-nots, men vs women, whites vs. people of color, chaste vs perverts, etc.) but it’s always a simple matter of good guys vs bad guys. And rather than laws or principles, wrongdoing is identified by that same puerile impulse of whether the good guys feel offended by the bad guys. Those who sufficiently prostrate themselves before the good guys may be saved, but anyone else must be destroyed.
Soft antinomianism parallels this dynamic. The morals and values of the past are still abandoned, but for the sake of the Gospel rather than progress. While their goal is to replace the Law with nothing at all, they still cannot expunge human nature, and so offense remains. It’s just not tied to any of God’s commands anymore. That offense is not determined specifically by narratives of oppression as in Critical Theory, but it is determined by broader cultural narratives. They refuse to treasure God’s Law, and so there’s nothing left to feed their consciences apart from whatever they pick up from the world. And in the end, it likewise comes down to good guys vs. bad guys–with the former being the offended and the latter being those who will not “repent” enough to assuage them.
Yes, they will pick up conservative culture-war beliefs because those are out there in spades just as liberal ones are. But soft antinomians will never discipline actual manifest sins defined by Scripture like fornication, divorce, or abortion because those sins are culturally normal–they spark no outrage anymore. In sharp contrast, they will treat the Postwar Consensus as sacrosanct because that’s what virtually every American, right or left, has been trained in from their infancy. Deviations from that will offend them more than anything else. And when offense occurs, they will act the same way as the woke left because they’ve surrendered to the same childlike impulses. They’ve expunged any objective standard by which their actions could be governed. All they really needed to get started was institutional permission, which President Harrison’s letter amply provided.
Where We Go From Here
The LCMS is my home. I was raised and confirmed in her congregations. I was educated in her schools and in her seminaries. I’ve been supported and encouraged in good times and bad by her faithful members and pastors. Throughout it all, I’ve always found our Confessions to be a faithful and true witness to Biblical Truth. I am aghast at what is now going on in my home, and it needs to stop.
Soft antinomianism has left the LCMS with a culture in which the Law is habitually neglected because it is viewed with suspicion by so many of our leaders and theologians. It is only natural that practices like church discipline which touch heavily on the Law would be corrupted as a result. But if we have a void of God’s Word–or at least parts of it–our only option is to fill it, so that the whole counsel of God can be taught among us once more.
Praise be to God, the Word still remains whatever happens to our Synod. We are blessed with the means to read God’s Word for ourselves quite easily. And we are not left without a great cloud of witnesses to help us learn and understand it. The Lutheran Confessions are free online and available in pretty much any LCMS church library. Many great works of Christendom are likewise attainable for anyone at libraries or on Amazon. There are still solid Lutheran thinkers who work hard to apply this treasury of wisdom to life in the modern west; though sometimes you may find them making podcasts and blogs rather than being published by our failing institutions. And yes, there are still many faithful pastors and teachers among us. If you have any at your congregation, treat them as more precious than gold because they most certainly are.
Then, as God teaches us how to love, we must put it into practice. That includes loving brothers like Ryan Turnipseed who are being attacked by our Synod. Though our leadership loves to chant “best construction” to silence their critics, we would do well to remember what comes right before that in Luther’s Small Catechism: “defend [your neighbor], speak well of him.” If you see a brother being mugged in the street, you don’t worry about whether calling for help would damage the mugger’s reputation or wait to get the mugger’s side of the story before giving aid. Neither should we do so when we observe our brothers being subjected to a retaliatory witch-hunt by abusive clergymen.
Soft antinomianism will not stop itself because it cannot. That leaves the task to those of us know better. May God save His Church by filling us with His Word and bringing us to a real repentance so that we may be enlivened once again by His infinite grace.
Like any nascent political movement, Christian Nationalism is an idea that is still coalescing. For the time-being, it means some different things to different people–especially to critics who are inclined to construct straw-men decorated with a few of the worst examples they can find. But movements must either coalesce or die off. And because I don’t want “Christian Nationalism” to go the way of the short-lived “Alt-right,” I’ve found value in taking time to give the idea some specificity rather than merely a defense.
That’s why, a year and a half ago, I wrote down my first draft of what Christian Nationalism means to me–and certainly what I want it to end up being. But drafts are made to be updated. Between a year’s reflection and some feedback on another draft I recently posted on X, I found a number of points that needed some further clarification.
And so, my list of 14 points has now grown to 18. If you’re keeping score, the new ones are 4, 14, 16, and 18. These were added to answer common questions which I erroneously thought should have been clear such as “which denomination is going to rule?” (18) and “how can we tell one nation from another?” (4) I’ve also updated the language slightly on other points in response to silly but frequent criticisms, like “Christian Nationalism can’t make a perfect society” (10) and “Christians should never be separate for any reason” (6).
The Postwar Consensus has irrevocably failed; it’s not coming back. The West therefore needs a new way forward–one that stands for something more than just a rejection of what came before. There will be a new way whether we want one or not. When we consider the vile options being pushed by our elites, America could do far far worse than Christian Nationalism as defined below:
Christian Nationalism is a political ideology informed by the Christian faith, not a religion informed by political ideology.
The Church does not need Christian Nationalism for her wellbeing. Nations need Christian Nationalism for their wellbeing.
Christian Nationalists understand nation as meaning a people who share common ancestry, religious heritage, language, culture, and history together. Nation is not synonymous with country or with state.
Whether these traits are sufficiently “common” among a people to make them a nation is determined by whether they can peacefully agree on how to govern and how to be governed together. If these traits diverge to the point that they cannot agree, then they ought to peacefully separate instead.
We put our own nation first–not because it is superior to all others, but because it is the nation of which Christ has made us a part. Accordingly, we serve it above all other nations, love it above all other nations and, when necessary, defend it against all other nations.
We respect that other nations are likewise responsible for themselves first and therefore seek to govern ourselves separately from them but live in peace with them whenever possible–just as neighboring families live peacefully in different homes and under different rules.
Christian Nationalists reject the incoherent religious neutrality of classical liberalism, and strive to honor Jesus Christ as King in every area of life, including government, education, and public speech.
We understand that government is incapable of forcing conversion to Christianity because conversion depends on a faith that cannot be coerced into existence. The Church’s tools are sufficient to the task of conversion.
Government’s purpose is not to make men righteous, but to restrain human wickedness and establish a just peace within its borders by punishing wrongdoers and commending those who do right.
Some wrongdoing may be tolerated by government and society when legal or social suppression of an evil would lead to even greater evils. Utopia is not among Christian Nationalism’s goals; a relatively just peace among sinners is.
Christian Nationalists distinguish right from wrong and weigh greater vs lesser evils according to Christian moral principles, and we seek to carry out the purpose of government in accordance with our principles, not others’ principles.
Evils which must be legally restrained include, but are not limited to: clear blasphemy against Jesus Christ, murder (regardless of age), sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and unbridled greed. A government which does not seek to restrain such evils is negligent.
God has appointed fathers to govern their own households. National government proceeds from this household government and exists to serve it. It does not replace it and may not usurp it. Rather, government maintains peace among our many households.
Christian Nationalism rejects the modern worship of diversity & inclusion imposed by Critical Theory. We recognize the variety of nations in the world as a strength, but national diversity under a single local government as a severe weakness.
Immigration is tolerable only insofar as it neither unduly burdens nor harms our nation. Mass immigration is always harmful. Immigration is more harmful the more immigrants differ from our nation in terms of ancestry, language, history, culture and religious heritage.
Because we believe our religion is true, we do not value religious diversity. Government must provide the same just peace to Christians and non-Christians within its borders, but it ought not include or commend any foreign religious beliefs in carrying out its duties.
It is good and proper for governmental institutions to participate in religious expression so long as that expression is explicitly Christian. This includes prayers, ceremonies, holidays, and the like.
Different Christian traditions will naturally be reflected in national government according to their presence and prominence in that nation’s religious heritage. Some traditions will work well together. Others will not.
By now, we should all be aware that Western marriage and fertility rates are an unmitigated disaster. These circumstances raise a lot of questions. Among them is how Christians ought to talk about singleness in and out of the Church. Given the existential nature of this crisis for the West, the question may not be as urgent as “how can we teach fruitful chastity again,” but it’s certainly a valid one. There are a growing number of singles in our congregations and our mission fields. Many will not emerge from this societal collapse married. Some may have become unmarriageable–whether by circumstance or by their own actions. Others may simply never find success. Either way, such situations testify to the fact that we never really get over some hurdles this side of Paradise.
But worthy though the question might be, the popular answers leave a great deal to be desired. As I’ve written before, the typical attitude is a vainglorious one: singles (especially women) are said to be the unsung heroes of the Church, and voices need to be raised STAT. Marriage, we are told, is just too highly esteemed–a peculiar point of view given how our culture despises it–and singleness needs to finally receive its due.
But while the topic is timely, Concordia STM student Jacob Rhodes’ presentation, “The Never Married: Developing a Vocabulary for and about Singleness,” does little to improve the discourse. It at least attempts to avoid the common pitfalls while solving the problem he perceives. However, it’s hard to overstate how badly it fails in that attempt or how much Rhodes inadvertently undermines his own thesis.
Rhode’s Argument
According to Rhodes, the Church has become ensnared in a narrative it received from society rather than from God. If one considers the beginning, middle, and end of a normal life, family characterizes the end, and preparation for family the middle. While the Church puts its own spin on the first two stages, she nevertheless still makes holy matrimony the centerpiece of earthly life. The fruit of this narrative is the ubiquitous attitude that marriage is the normal state of a healthy and mature adult.
Rhodes claims that the consequence for those who don’t qualify as normal in this sense is to be “othered” by church and society alike. We treat singles as though something is missing in their lives. We place them in singles-only ministry ghettos. They are unrepresented among church leadership. They are implicitly unwelcome at events like family picnics. They have to endure endless familial anecdotes or Biblical instruction for spouses and parents from the pulpit. They feel lonely, alienated, and even fearful of what their communities might think about their lack of a mate.
While Christians value marriage in and of itself, he claims we put no such value on singleness. Christians only value it in two senses: The first he calls “instrumentality”, in which the single person has more bandwidth for various tasks because he’s not tied down with a wife or kids. The second is merely as a time of preparation for marriage–in other words, singleness is valued because it provides an opportunity to end itself in favor of something better. But on its own terms, we define singleness solely in terms of deficiency–the lack of a mate which a person is supposed to have.
So if Rhodes considers this the problem, what does he propose as a solution? In short, he asserts that all Christians should find their identity in Christ and in Christ alone. Appealing to Galatians 3:28, he suggests that just as there is no longer any Jew and Greek or slave and free, neither is there married and unmarried. In that “end” stage of life, we need to replace marriage with the eschaton–eternal life in a world where marriage is (perhaps) obsolete.
What does this mean in practice, though? Surely, most of the Christians about whom Rhodes objects would already say that their most important identity is in Christ and that they are striving to live in light of eternity. What needs to change?
Some of the changes are simply a matter of attitude. For example, he tells us to emphasize the value of singleness to help singles feel more included in the church. But he includes specific suggestions as well: Teach Christians how to live the Christian vocation of singleness that they already possess, rather than teaching them how to prepare for marriage. Include more single people in church leadership positions. Families should invite singles to their meals and celebrations so they won’t feel lonely. Churches should develop singles ministries which aren’t judged by their ability to make singles married. And in general, churches must reduce how often they have family events and reduce family-oriented instruction in favor of more inclusive practices. When we accomplish all this and more, Rhodes contends, singles will finally feel welcome in our churches and the congregation itself can be everyone’s true family.
You’ve no doubt noticed a number of issues with this argument already, so lets just get into the details.
The Problems
It’s an ancillary point, but I’ll begin with the title because that’s also where the disappointment starts. With a name like “The Never Married: Developing a Vocabulary for and about Singleness,” I was expecting something in the way of new terminology to aid the discussion. He offers none. Rather than helpful terms or concepts to be evaluated objectively, he only presents us with highly subjective attitudes he would like to adjust.
But is the alleged focus given to marriage an inappropriate one in society or even the church?
If so, Christians have a real problem on our hands because the Bible itself treats singleness as “other.” Marriage is very much treated as the norm in Holy Scriptures. Rhodes might complain about too much family-oriented instruction, but God told us to “be fruitful and multiply” before literally anything else. He also made sure to explicitly reiterate it after every global disaster like the Fall or the Flood. He might suggest that we have too many married people in church leadership, but when God established qualifications for certain offices, He Himself included things like “husband of one wife,” “manages his household well” and “keeps his children submissive.” And while the Bible directs a great deal of instruction specifically at wives, husbands, parents or children (alongside what it directs to everyone) it devote comparatively little specifically to the single–especially if you deliberately exclude instructions that point them towards marriage.
Just as the Bible presents marriage as the norm, it presents celibacy as “other.” Rhodes might object to the church treating singles as though something is missing, but that’s exactly how God Himself treated Adam in a perfect world before creating Eve from his side. “It is not good for man to be alone.” When Jesus and Paul talk about celibacy, they treat it as an exception that people aren’t generally equipped to handle. For those who are not so equipped, “singleness” is described as burning with desire or unable to be accepted. Jesus and Paul neither need nor command any special accommodation for their “singleness,” but simply take the sufficiency of God’s gift as already given.
Understandably, Rhodes’ analysis of the solution isn’t any better than his analysis of the problem. Given that his diagnosis matches the world’s current obsession with “marginalization” and “inclusion” it shouldn’t be any surprise that his prescription is likewise effectively the same as the world’s: Expunge every natural identity people possess for the sake of peace. Division is, inevitably, part of what identity does. And so, for the thoughtless, eliminating identity is a quick and easy way towards unity. Why would nations fight if nations are just meaningless lines on a map? Religion won’t cause friction if it’s just personal preference. If you treat your parents as a matter of happenstance rather than Providence, they can make no inconvenient claims on you. There can be no battle of the sexes if male and female are just social constructs. In the same way, if we find our identities “only” in Christ as Rhodes recommends, then singles cannot feel alienated.
Rhodes tries to find his license for expunging marital identity in Galatians 3:28 the same way theological liberals do. He also makes the same oversight in his application. The God who said there’s neither slave nor free also gave different sets of instructions to slaves and masters. The same God who said there’s no male or female also announced very different vocations for each in the church, the home, and society. Galatians 3:28 speaks to the universality of the Gospel, but clearly it neither expunges natural identities nor renders them meaningless to the Christian.
The Real Issue with Singleness
Rhode’s case is not only at odds with the plain sense of Scripture, but also with itself. He accuses the church of falsely claiming there is something incomplete about singleness. But consider his own testimony on the subject.
Even though marriage and children are already sidelined by things like education and career in church and society alike, the fleeting references to family that remain are still enough to trigger feelings of loneliness. He suggests that families invite singles to their family celebrations, but what is this except a family providing something that’s missing to someone without a family of his own? And consider this quote he highlights at the end as “enough” to demonstrate his point:
“I hate to admit it, but one of the loneliest times of my week is Sunday morning. Sitting alone in a pew amidst a sea of happy couples and families, I listen to sermons about how to be a more god-honoring spouse and parent and announcements about church-wide family picnics I won’t attend because as a single, I’d feel too out of place. When we had communion a couple of weeks ago, it was served by the deacons–and their wives. As I sat staring at the lineup of smiling couples across the front of our church, I wondered where the single leaders were. And I stopped going to church singles groups because they’re usually too ‘meat-marketty’ or too depressing.”
Setting aside the impropriety of deacons’ wives distributing communion, think critically about this confession and consider the implications. This isn’t a normal response for those who are truly called to celibacy. What Paul describes in 1 Cor 7 or Jesus in Matthew 19 is characterized by contentment. Contentment is manifestly the “gift” part of the situation. And while the Church certainly encompasses many individuals who are contentedly single, that is self-evidently not who this conversation is about. Rhodes’ descriptions make it plain that this is about people who are feeling lonely, marginalized, lost, and even ashamed. The conversation is only occurring because so many people are not content.
Why should the mere sight of happy couples or the mere mention of marital responsibilities elicit such a response among someone with the gift of celibacy? Such people do not seek marriage or desire intercourse. They may have a few wistful thoughts about what marriage might be like, but it doesn’t go beyond that because they are secure and content by the grace of God. But Rhodes’ observations about the plight of the single all attest to a deep and abiding insecurity and deprivation.
The truth of the situation is precisely what Rhodes denies: for the growing population of singles in our congregations, something very important is missing. And given what specifically triggers their feelings of alienation, it’s extremely obvious that what’s missing is marriage and family.
To be sure, they do feel excluded in church. They do feel alienated in church. They do feel abandoned in church. But modern culture fails to recognize that our feelings aren’t self-interpreting. It’s only natural they’d erroneously conclude that the church must be excluding, alienating, and abandoning them. But if you know better about feelings, then you’ll also know better about the root cause. While I have no wish to offend, respect requires that we call a thing what it is. These singles are experiencing envy.
Now, I want to be clear that it doesn’t feel like envy to our suffering singles, but that’s because envy never feels like envy. Even the fox who declared his coveted grapes to be sour walked away feeling disgust and irritation, but not envy. This is because envy isn’t really an emotion at all. Envy is a conviction that a blessing you haven’t been given ought to be yours. Convictions produce all sorts of different feelings depending on the circumstance. Nevertheless, one can see the sour grapes attitude in Rhodes’ argument. “Marriage is just for this world anyway. I’ll find my identity in the eschaton instead.” By Rhodes’ own descriptions, there is clearly a great deal of bitterness at work among Christians singles today.
The Real Solution.
All of this said, we cannot stop there. Naming the problem as envy doesn’t make the problem go away or give the Church a license to ignore it. The valuable part of Rhodes’ presentation is detailing how singles describe their own experience. While Rhodes may be misinterpreting that experience, it nevertheless is what it is. The church needs to help singles with it–all the more because there’s a very real deprivation at work. Once we can actually admit that and deal with the issue in truth, our course becomes clearer. There are at least two ways the Church is instructed to deal with deprivations.
The first and most obvious is to assist those in need. If you say “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? Inasmuch as it lies within our abilities, congregations should help their singles find appropriate spouses. We must recover the lost art of match-making. Parents must prepare their sons to be good husbands and their daughters to be good wives so that they may fulfill these natural longings in one-another. Mature Christians should teach single men and women to avoid inadvertently sabotaging themselves when it comes to finding a mate. Much could be said here, but in short, we must do precisely the opposite of what Rhodes prescribes. We must focus on marriage even more.
Admittedly, we need a lot of improvement in this regard. Rhodes quotes a statistic stating that “62 percent [of singles] felt that their church leader’s advice on relationships and issues of singleness was either not relevant, unhelpful, or virtually non-existent.” I’m only surprised that the percentage is that low. We are several generations past the point where we deliberately jettisoned our know-how on coupling for the sake of feminism. Our Boomer leadership is mostly clueless about the realities of hookup culture and modern “dating.” We’ve long been teaching our culture’s values as though they came from God. The church has put herself at a huge disadvantage in this regard. But that only means the church needs to work that much harder in order to rebuild what we’ve lost.
Nevertheless, our efforts cannot stop there. As I wrote back at the beginning of this piece, not every single Christian is going to emerge from this crisis married. Despite our best efforts, not every injury is going to be healed in this life. Not every belly will be filled. The Church must help the poor, but the poor will nevertheless always be with us. The same is true of singles–especially now.
But our course for such men and women should also be clear: mourn with those who mourn. The material abundance of Western society has greatly dulled our skills in this regard. We implicitly except the healing of our sicknesses and the filling of our bank accounts. What’s more, we expect that the right application of effort will always produce success. It does not. To make matters worse, we tend to avoid the afflicted because we don’t want remind ourselves that we aren’t always in control of our fates.
But mourning with those who mourn doesn’t involve denying that their loss is real. We don’t refuse to mention colors to avoid offending the blind. Neither should we refuse to mention marriage to avoid offending the single. That’s patronization rather than mourning.
So what does it involve? Listening, for one. We ought to give singles space to vent and listen to how they feel. We ought to respond with sympathy rather than pity. Despite what contemporary fools will tell you, we can do this without affirming their every errant interpretation of their feelings. What’s more, we ought to give them the opportunity to see that we take their needs seriously by our efforts to help them. True, those efforts will fail for some individuals. Nevertheless, “at least you cared enough to try” still provides some measure of comfort and blunts the feeling of alienation.
Rhodes’ suggestion of families inviting singles over for holidays is actually a good one–as long as we take propriety seriously. This is the domain of older couples, not couples encountering the seven-year itch. Congregations hosting holiday meals for their members would also help to make sure no one is forced to spend Christmas or Thanksgiving alone. And if singles groups feel too much like a meat market at times, Christians can also organize get-togethers for their fellow congregants centered around identities besides singleness–hobbies, service projects, book groups, movie nights, and a billion others. Giving company to the lonely is certainly within our power.
When it comes to church leadership, we don’t need the quotas for singles that Rhodes’ suggestions imply. Still, there is something to be done on that point. Consider the complaints about couples serving communion and such. There is a real problem here because leadership needs to be about the office serving the congregation, not about the people filling those offices or their familial relationships. It seems to me that promoting exclusively masculine leadership in the Church would bear much fruit towards making those positions less relationship-focused. These vocations indeed do work that is valuable in itself, and we ought to acknowledge it regardless of marital status.
Conclusion
Of course, this only begins to scratch the surface of what the church could do to help. Rhodes deliberately aimed his presentation at beginning a conversation rather than providing the final word. That is no less true of my rebuttal. But whatever course the church takes, we cannot afford to root our efforts in the presumptions of the culture, fairytales about overvaluing marriage, or sour grapes. When we take seriously what Scripture says about men and women, marriage and celibacy, sin and grace, we are provided with a multitude of tasks, both small and great to care for the singles in our congregations and communities. May God give us wisdom, direction, and success in caring for all of His sheep.
Does the right need to work with liberals to accomplish its goals? I’ve heard this contention repeatedly from moderates and conservatives who still find some form of national divorce unthinkable. Usually, it’s intended to explain why they can’t support Donald Trump.
In a way, the frequency of this sentiment shouldn’t be surprising. After all, it was a key part of the political mythology I grew up with. Both sides, they told us, want what’s best for America; they just had different ideas on how to get there. And while a person might find one side or the other more appealing, they taught me to never, under any circumstances, be a partisan. That’s what makes one an extremist. That’s what makes one incapable of independent thought. Partisanship is what prevented both sides of the political aisle from coming together to make common-sense compromises that would move America forward together. It seemed pretty reasonable to me a few decades ago.
But gosh, kind of a lot has happened since then.
I could make a long list about the ridiculous beliefs and practices that have emerged from “the other side” over the past couple decades, but I’ll settle for the one I consider emblematic of the rest: the refusal to recognize the difference between men and women. Transgenderism is one of the Big Lies or our time. If Satan convinces you that men can be women, he can make you believe anything at all. It represents a divorce from reality so obvious it far surpasses “the Emperor’s New Clothes.”
But no matter how obvious the Lie, there is literally no limit to how far its adherents will go to affirm it. They will burn multi-million dollar brands like Bud Light or Sports Illustrated to the ground over it. They will cancel strangers and disown family members over it. They will invite perverts into women’s locker rooms over it. They will deny conservatives life-saving care at hospitals over it. They will steal children from their parents over it. They will mutilate children over it–injecting them with hormones to disrupt their growth, cutting off healthy organs, and carving up healthy flesh (warning: graphic) to construct fake organs. And in keeping with the Lie, they will call it all “love” from beginning to end.
Christians cannot work with such a side.
I cannot work with a side like that. Our respective beliefs are so different that we don’t even have sufficient common ground to work together. During the height of the Cold War, Sting could at least sing “the Russians love their children too.” But here, the sides couldn’t even agree on the meanings of “Russian,” “children,” “their,” or especially “love.” We cannot be fair to one another because we cannot agree on what fairness means. We cannot even resort to minding our own business. After all, “do what you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone” is empty rhetoric if we cannot even agree on what “hurt” means. I think mutilating a confused child until they look like a bad parody of the opposite sex is hurting them. In contrast, they think not doing so is hurting them.
There can be no real polity in a house this divided. In some respects, America’s national divorce has already happened–even if it’s not official.
President Trump’s continuing popularity despite (or perhaps because of) the media-industrial-complex throwing it’s full weight against him proceeds from his willingness to recognize and exploit this division. He’s come to symbolize the growing number of Americans who realize they cannot work with the other side and are just as despised as Trump for noticing it. People look to him precisely because they see him as someone who will boldly defy the left (unlike the absolute failure which is the GOP.) To be sure, I think President Trump’s first term adequately demonstrates that he’s not really such a man. Nevertheless, he has embraced the mythology the left has given him to great effect.
Or at least it would be to great effect if the United States were still a genuine republic. 2016 was likely the last fair and meaningful presidential election America will ever have. Maybe you don’t believe there was any fraud in 2020. Maybe you even think forcibly removing Trump from the ballot in various states is protecting democracy. But even ignoring all of that, there’s a deeper problem. Democracy is supposed to be the electorate choosing new leaders; but our leaders have long been choosing a new electorate–a foreign one that votes more to their liking. Americans aren’t determining the outcomes of our elections anymore. And so, the sides can’t even agree on voting as a way to resolve our differences anymore.
What then is to become of America?
Ordinarily, when two different groups are in such conflict, it’s because each desires government which will benefit its posterity. In such cases, the best solution is peaceful separation so that two governments may be formed–in other words, a national divorce. Abraham and Lot are a great Biblical example of this on a small scale.
Sadly, the United States is cursed with countless foreign posterities within our borders competing with the posterity for whom our Constitution was written. The left’s solution to this self-inflicted tragedy of multiculturalism is to erase the very idea of posterity. They celebrate sterility, cuckoldry, sodomy, anti-racism, and every form of depravity that sets itself against the natural affections which would make peaceful separation work. What’s more, they are culturally ascendant and believe unquestioningly that they can take the whole thing by force anyway. So even a negotiated peace in which good fences produce good neighbors isn’t realistic.
The only thing keeping the two sides from the violent kind of national divorce is that it isn’t yet advantageous for either side. For the most part, there’s still too much to lose. The left has enjoyed virtually unopposed advancement for more than a generation now. They have no real need for open violence–only the implied threat thereof. Their open and official actions are still self-restrained for the moment. They do, however, have a growing impatience which motivates their sporadic escalations to violence. The left is happy to let Antifa and BLM murder and destroy to their hearts’ content because they have no real incentive to stop them. They only bring out heavy-handed government suppression when good men take action to defend themselves against evil–hence their frothing hatred for men like Kyle Rittenhouse or Daniel Penny. The bold actions of virtuous men are the only thing that truly frightens them into violence.
Meanwhile, on the right, we still have corners of society to which we can retreat. We can move away from California or New York. We can remove our children from public schools. We can start our own businesses after we get cancelled. We can choose to remain anonymous on social media. We can turn off Disney+, Netflix, and the other propaganda channels. In short, most of us can still keep our homes and families safe without resorting to violence. That’s why, despite all the posturing from the left, there was no right-wing insurrection on January 6th or any other day.
Nevertheless, we are beginning to understand that those days will come to an end. We got a glimpse of this during COVID when our leftist friends and neighbors were clamoring to lock us up in camps and make our families destitute if we refused experimental gene therapy. They straightforwardly threatened us when they treated January 6th like an insurrection while openly turning a blind eye to all the leftist protestors who jumped White House fences, occupied capitols, or even declared their own independent microstates in places like Portland. We know that we cannot simply work out some kind of compromise; and one day, there will no longer be too much to lose.
It’s Time to Repent.
It is sobering when you consider how many different threat points America is under with potential to remove that last barrier. We are being subjected to the largest mass migration in human history. Eventually, it will cause what mass immigration has always caused throughout history: horrible violence between native and migrant. Our economy is based entirely on debt and bereft of real production. Every time it wobbles, it’s more liable to collapse entirely. Our leaders seem intent on starting WWIII over foreign interests that have no real relevance to us. It’s only a matter of time before we pick a fight that our army of women and men who think they’re women won’t be able to handle. Disaster truly looms around us on all sides.
It would be irresponsible of Christians to view our situation as anything less than divine judgment. Therefore, America’s only hope at this point is to consider her sins and repent. We have shed an unfathomable amount of innocent blood. We have sold our children’s inheritance to foreigners for nothing more than cheap consumer goods and diverse restaurants. We have embraced fornication and adultery as our norms and treated children as a curse. We’ve grown too timid to stand against unspeakable wickedness, and we dress up our cowardice as “compassion.” Our men have allowed our women to rule over us and encourage feminist rebellion while we refuse our own headship. Our sins are great, and their consequences are well-deserved. Our national future hinges entirely on God’s mercy.
But true repentance and working with the other side are mutually exclusive. We cannot turn away from these evils while continuing to placate and enable those who are pursuing them with single-minded fanaticism. That is how we got here in the first place. True, we must tolerate some evil when stamping it out would cause even greater evils. But when we consider the moral weight of what we’ve done and the utter destruction that awaits us, we can put “greater evils” into its proper perspective. The gravity of our grossest sins crushes the petty concerns of our would-be collaborators–things like sensitivity, equality, or democracy.
Because we no longer have any ideological common ground with the left, our only option for working together would be to adopt some measure of their ideology. If America is to repent, we must therefore refuse to work with the other side, for we dare not share common cause with evil. And so, for the sake of our children, we must steadfastly resist the temptation to seek cooperation. If that results in an official national divorce and the end of the United States, so be it. Either we prevail against them, or we fall to them. Providence has given us no other options.
If you’ve ever borne witness to argument’s between Christian Nationalists and their opponents on the right, you’ve probably come across disparaging references to “the postwar consensus” from time to time. But what does it really mean?
Put simply, it’s a bundle of fundamental doctrines about politics and morality which modern Westerners presume to be universally true–a standard by which men of all ages must be judged. But in contrast to such broad scope, these doctrines only became widely accepted relatively recently in the aftermath of World War II. While questioning them may seem unthinkable to Americans today, they are very peculiar beliefs from an historical perspective–far from being objective moral standards akin to natural law or Holy Scripture. Their disguise of universality is maintained only through constant repetition by mass media, public schools, universities, and other cultural authorities in the West.
These are the key doctrines of the postwar consensus:
Democracy is the only legitimate form of government.
Americans tend to see voting not as a privilege or as one particular method of political decision-making among many, but as a fundamental human right. Therefore, to deny any adult the right to vote is to render them less than human.
This doctrine is at the root of how easily we grant foreigners the ability to make America’s political decisions and how blasé we tend to be about resident aliens voting fraudulently. After all, if you count voting as part of being human, then the rest is just dubious paperwork.
This is likewise at the heart of our military adventurism abroad. Americans are quick to justify our forever wars with “spreading democracy” because we see all other forms of government as various shades of wicked dictatorship. And so, we perversely mistake every bomb dropped on the Middle East as some kind of favor to its targets.
The United States of America was, of course, founded as a republic–a form of government that uses democracy for many of its mechanisms. It’s only natural that we would have a preference for it. But embracing democracy as the universal political solution and embarking on a moral crusade to install it worldwide was an errant ideal that grew out of WWII’s resolution. We violently forced democracy on Japan and Germany as a means of making peace, and so we thought that same mechanism could bring peace anywhere. Accordingly, we spent the next 80 years defending the “Free world” against Communism and employing dubious means of imposing democracy on what we called the Third World. Reifying democracy as a moral absolute was the means by which our national conscience justified itself.
But as unquestionable as most Americans may find it (at least for the moment), this doctrine is nowhere to be found in Scripture or in sound theology. Scripture teaches us that God establishes government for the sake of punishing wrongdoers and commending rightdoers. Apart from declaring Christ as our King, it does not specify any other particular form, only the just pursuit of those ends. (And given our last century of experience, anyone paying attention should be skeptical that democracy is capable of pursuing such ends in the long run.) Christians may believe democracy to be suitable, but it is by no means required of us by God–only by transient historical circumstance. Accordingly, it is wicked for Christians to condemn their brothers in the name of Christ for pursuing alternatives.
Inequality is the root of all evil and discrimination the greatest sin.
Americans have become morally shallow as a people. Hitler is the sole point on most moral compasses, and by most accounts, his great sin was treating one group of people as superior and another as inferior–the Holocaust being considered the inevitable conclusion of any such a belief. And because “Hitler bad” is the only publicly-acknowledged moral certainty we have in common, most Americans embrace a false dichotomy between equality and hatred. Either you think that each group is the same as any other in every way that matters, or you literally hate them. There is no other option.
A notion of equality was, of course, baked into the founding of the United States, but only to a point. The scope given to the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of equality (rooted as it is in the laws of nature’s God and specific rights) is far narrower than how we treat it today. America’s early policies bore this fact out. Only male landowners were allowed to vote; immigration was limited by ethnicity; blasphemy was a crime; and while a federal church was disallowed, Christianity was nevertheless favored over any and every other religion in culture and policy alike. Early Americans as a whole in no way considered any of this contradictory with their ideals.
It was only in the 20th Century when the modern notion of equality consumed this older version whole. There were movements in this direction before the war, of course–women’s suffrage being the most obvious example. But it truly took off afterward. This era is when religious neutrality was ruthlessly imposed on public education and municipal institutions. This era is when freedom of association was abandoned for the sake of ending segregation–by sex, by race, and most recently by perversion. This era is when all restrictions were thrown to the wind and the border slowly became an evil. This era is when the parental duty of privileging one’s children was denounced as evil and maintaining law & order denounced as racist. It’s hard to overstate how much of this was motivated by endlessly repeating WWII’s Hitler narrative that “discrimination” is the greatest sin anyone can commit.
The grim result of this transformation has been moral and social insanity. We cannot prefer our own families, tribes, or nations over any given stranger on the other side of the globe. We cannot recognize that men and women are fundamentally different. We cannot say that chastity is morally superior to sodomy. We cannot even say that truth makes one religion superior to the rest. To be sure, conservative Americans will carve out a space for such discrimination in private while liberals do not; but both sides agree that expunging all such belief from the public square is a moral imperative–the only moral imperative we’re allowed to impose by force. Our every institution must not only be morally and religiously neutral, but must also treat every human being as utterly fungible.
From a Christian perspective, this is obscene. Scripture never imposes the burden of equality on us, but God does require us to discriminate in many important ways–equality be damned. But while Christians ought to be proclaiming Scriptural truth over-and-against our culture on this point, many of us are all-too-eager to do the Spirit of the Age’s dirty work and try to forcibly conform God’s Word and God’s people to modern equality instead.
Education can solve any problem.
Once equality leads a people to accept (either explicitly or implicitly) the blank slate theory of human nature, it follows that sufficient education can overcome any disadvantage and resolve any conflict. Does one race or one sex intellectually or economically outperform another? It can only be due to inequalities in their upbringing or preexisting prejudices in society–both of which can be solved by systematic education. Has virtually every multiethnic society in history devolved into violent separation? Well, as long as we can teach everyone that we’re all one race–the human race–we can finally avoid that. Is there interreligious conflict and even violence? If we teach them to understand one-another and realize how much they have in common, then religious differences will cease to matter. Even mundane issues like pestilence or poverty can be solved with just the right application of scientific know-how gained exclusively through formal education.
Americans have certainly swallowed this one hook, line, and sinker since WWII. From preschool to daycare, parents put children in standardized institutions at an ever-earlier age. At the same time, expected education has been extended further and further into adulthood. The Baby Boomers enjoyed material prosperity which made college a possibility for more people than ever before. They, in turn, made college an expectation for the entire middle class, and did all they could to bring as many poorer youth as possible into universities as well. The moral obligation to college is now so ubiquitous that few Americans can perceive anything strange about it.
This sense of normalcy changes, however, when a Christian begins to look objectively at what is given up for the sake of a college education. God says to flee fornication, but despite knowing how debaucherous college campuses are, we send our children there to have what we tell them is the best time of their lives. God warns us against pursuit of mammon, but even conservative parents still send their children to professors they recognize as wolves because they believe it’s the only path to economic success.
There’s nothing wrong with formal education per se, but the twisted priority Americans place on it is wholly ungodly. Nevertheless, as the whole “debt-free virgins without tattoos” controversy proved, this fact doesn’t stop many Christians from siding with the world against the Church on this doctrine. For liberals, it’s a matter of saving the world; for conservatives, it’s a matter of mammon; but for both, the postwar fantasy of what education can achieve outweighs anything God has commanded us.
The nation-state is obsolete.
Here we find an inevitable consequence of all the previous points. If government is morally obligated to be democratic, and voters are all fungible blank slates formed by education, then the nation is an irrelevant concept. This view is so far advanced among us that many Americans don’t even recognize the difference between a nation (a group of people bound together by common ancestry, history, and heritage) and a state (a civil government) in the first place.
For Americans today, a nation is just a geographic entity whose only legitimate purpose is to help administrate the global citizens within its borders. And make no mistake, the typical American conservative holds this belief just as strongly as liberals–their only real deviation from the left is that “within its borders” must mean “legally within its borders.” There is no one left to care for Americans as a singular people–only as an arbitrary collection of atomized individuals which can be replaced in bulk without issue.
As ubiquitous as this belief is now, it only became so following WWII. Our leaders blamed nationalism for the conflict, and declared caring for one’s own people “too much” dangerous to world peace. The United Nations was established in the months following the war, and the idea of a global government that transcended nations states become truly institutionalized. And while many American conservatives remain dubious of the UN, they clearly do not object to the concept. After all, these are usually the same conservatives who think the United States should act as a global police force. For them, it’s only a matter of which bureaucracy carries out global governance better.
This notion of global citizens was facilitated among Americans by 20th Century rhetoric about immigration. Nobody called America a “melting pot” until 1908, and it wasn’t an American who came up with the idea. Today, most people will piously intone that America has always been a nation of immigrants, but we have not always seen ourselves as such. It was only in the 50’s that this phrase entered our lexicon. Only in the 60s did we stop being picky about what kind of immigrants would fit in with Americans and how many could be tolerated. It was only in the subsequent decades that enforcing our borders became a mere technicality.
But once again, this product of 20th Century politics is neither found in Scripture nor derived from sound theology. The Bible describes the nations we’re blithely trying to dissolve in a melting pot as God’s creation. It treats rule by foreigners as a curse. It establishes our duties to our families as a far higher priority than our duties to strangers. And as Luther explains in his Large Catechism, the 4th Commandment is the root of all civil government–it ought to be inherently familial. In short, God is not the one who has commanded us to take up this doctrine. So why are so many Christians willing to condemn their brothers for rejecting it?
In Conclusion
I consider these four doctrines the core of the postwar consensus. But while Americans defend them with religious fervor, they are not doctrines of the Christian religion or even natural religion. On the contrary, they are foisted on us by the Spirit of the Age, and they lie at the root of all the biggest problems in America today.
Naturally, Christian Nationalists attempting to solve those problems are quite willing to attack these doctrines. While we ought to expect massive pushback from the world, it’s tragic that so much of it comes from fellow Christians who condemn us on the basis of their political preferences while pretending they do so at the command of Christ. Many of them don’t even realize who told them to be outraged at us.
American Christians need to take a long, hard look at who they’re truly serving. Do you really want Christ to return to find you beating your fellow servants? When He asks you why, do you really think “they denied the postwar consensus!” will be adequate? The Christian Faith has existed since the Fall and transcends nations, states, time, and space alike. We are in no way beholden to the postwar consensus; it’s time we start passing judgment on it and stop passing judgment on its behalf.
As I wrote when I started this “After Lutheranism” series, one of the greatest threats to American church bodies is our ongoing failure to adequately oppose the progressive social justice agenda or “wokeism.” Indeed, the recent events surrounding our now infamouslybad additions to Luther’s Large Catechism are leaving many Christians with a sinking feeling about the LCMS. After all, the samepatterns which have typified the downfall of so many different institutions are observable among us as well. Is the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, once known for staunch adherence to God’s Word, now going woke?
Evidence to the contrary is sadly lacking, but there is one objection I see coming up again and again: The LCMS certainly runs on the politically conservative side, so it therefore cannot truly be going woke. It usually goes something like this: “How can you say the Synod is going woke when there are so many conservatives? You may not agree with them on everything, but aren’t their views pretty close to your own? Certainly, they must be far closer to yours even than to the average American’s–let alone some purple-haired trans lesbian’s! Clearly, the contention that Synod is going woke must be the product of a growing over-sensitivity and extremism on the right rather than reality.”
The problem with this objection isn’t that it’s making a false observation. The LCMS does remain an relatively conservative church body by typical measures. The problem is that the objection only considers positions on the wider debates of our day which are far too superficial. Yes, we may look almost identical on a standard American opinion poll because we have a lot of complaints in common. However, complaints alone do not determine one’s vision of what his society should look like or what direction we should take to get there.
The foundational beliefs which determine vision and direction usually fail to be captured by mere complaints. For example, the average conservative LCMS functionary and I would agree that women shouldn’t be permitted to be pastors. And that agreement would indeed set us both apart from the average American who considers such a view archaic, though not unheard of. However, Lutherans and conservatives alike have a well-earned reputation for merely being a few decades behind the times. Accordingly, whether we would allow women’s ordination today is far less relevant than whether we embrace the worldly priorities which would make it a reality in the future.
Details like that are precisely where our differences emerge. The average LCMS conservative believes that we need more women in church leadership—just not in the pastoral office. He would also accuse men of sin for believing otherwise. Handing our reins to feminism while retaining a small space for the Bible to set a few seemingly arbitrary boundaries does lead to women’s ordination whether the conservative wants it to or not. It is one well-trod paving stone in the road to hell because God isn’t the one who told us to seek women leaders.
And that is how all of these woke-adjacent issues work. The West has been given a vision and a direction by progressive liberalism. Conservatives follow the crowd slowly because they hem, haw, pause, wander, and daydream, but they do ultimately follow. What they don’t do is openly defy the crowd by offering a different vision and pointing out a different way of getting there. That kind of difference is anything but superficial, and yet you would never discover it by asking about the controversies of the day. You’d find it by asking about issues that are not yet real controversies. For example, instead of asking whether women should be ordained, you would ask whether women should be allowed to vote. Or instead of asking whether gay marriage should be legal, you should ask whether sodomy should be criminalized. Those are the kinds of differences that matter in the long run, and they are precisely where adherents of ancient Christianity depart from the merely conservative Christianity of today.
And because conservatives are genuinely dubious of the ancient faith of their forebears, they will ultimately find common cause with that purple-haired trans lesbian. For example, they fundamentally agree on the equality of men & women and the evils of sexism. They merely disagree about whether a refusal to ordain women is truly sexist or not. That’s why the conservative always has far more vitriol for a man who says women shouldn’t be pastors because they’re easily deceived than he has for any actual pastrix. He may see both conclusions as wrong, but only one “error” really cuts him to the quick.
No matter how much a conservative Christian agrees with me superficially, I’ve come to realize that he will always side with the woke against me whenever their shared fundamental beliefs about pluralism, secularism, equality, multiculturalism, and globalism are threatened. And that is exactly the behavior we’ve been observing from the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod over the past few years. If you know, you know; and those of us with a genuinely different vision for the West know.
It remains to be seen whether the LCMS will successfully overcome this very real slide into wokeism. I am no prophet, but as the “after Lutheranism” theme of my last few posts suggests, I don’t really expect it to do so as an (intact) institution. Nevertheless, whatever happens to the institution, the large faithful remnant among us will stand against it–both now and after Lutheranism should it come to that. The question with which we are left is “how.” While I’ve written a fair amount on that subject as it pertains to laity, we need to start grappling with the question of how our clergy and leadership ought to oppose wokeism among us.
The question is difficult only because so many people think wokeism is purely political and fail to recognize it as a false religion. So when many pastors hear that they need to oppose wokeism, they erroneously think they’re being asked to take up a political crusade. While there’s nothing wrong with a pastor taking political action, neither is it a requirement of the office. Many pastors find themselves too busy, too disinterested, or too ill-suited for political leadership, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But wokeism, driven as it is by critical theory, is a wolf set on destroying Christians in both body and soul. It is a false religion put into practice through corrupting institutions–governmental, ecclesial, economic, or otherwise. Any man who seeks to be a true shepherd rather than a hireling must therefore be prepared to drive these wolves away from his flock. With this proper understanding, the following responsibilities of a pastor in opposing wokeism should become clear.
Care about your flock.
The extent to which many Lutheran clergy make themselves aloof from this conflict is egregious. “Trust not in princes.” “We lose down here.” “We don’t need a political savior.” “God is still in control.” “Our home is in heaven.” “Set your hope on things above.” “We are but sojourners and exiles here.” These are the kinds of rote responses given by many pastors when laymen speak up about their distress over what’s happening to their families, homes, and nation. There’s truth in most of them. Many of them are even explicitly Biblical. However, there is something very wrong with how many pastors are applying these sayings.
When Scripture speaks this way, it is as encouragement. We live in a wicked world and many evils befall us–often specifically because we are faithful to Christ, for the Spirit of the Age hates us for our Lord’s sake. The Christian needs to know that evil does not get the last word. And so Paul tells us that our current sufferings cannot be compared to the glory that awaits us. Peter tells us that our sufferings now will result in glory and honor on the Last Day. Jesus tells us that we are blessed when we are persecuted because our reward will be great in heaven. As we fight the good fight of the Faith, we need to be reminded that Christ is our conquering king. Whatever setbacks we experience in this life, his armies will nevertheless receive the crown of victory and trample Satan underfoot. His heirs will nevertheless inherit the Kingdom.
In contrast, many pastors offer these aphorisms not to encourage us in our fight, but to discourage us from fighting at all by telling us that our battles are meaningless. “Trust not in princes” and “we lose down here” are deployed to tell us that politics don’t matter therefore we should ignore them. “We are sojourners whose home is in heaven” is deployed to tell us to stop bothering to defend our homes from perverts and invaders. “God is still in control” and “set your hope on things above” are deployed to tell us not to concern ourselves with our children’s well-being. These are the very earthly vocations Christ has commanded of us, but too many pastors are quick to tell us there’s no point to any of it. By telling God’s faithful to abandon the field, these sayings are emptied of all Biblical wisdom and turned against their godly purpose. Words meant to avert desperation are instead leveraged to encourage complacency.
The impression this gives to faithful Christians is that our shepherds simply want us to stop bothering them with our petty concerns. But what are our “petty” concerns today? Schools try to convince our sons to literally emasculate themselves. Society teaches our daughters to be whores. Our government threatens our families with destitution unless we submit to medical experiments. Our families disown us and our employers fire us because we refuse to deny God’s condemnation of sodomy. The heartless cruelty of nihilistic clergy telling us that this is all beneath concern cannot be overstated. Lutheran churches who persevere in this battle will be shepherded by men who actually care that such things are happening to their flocks. Wherever this is the case, comforting the afflicted and encouraging the defeated will be a pastoral priority–as they should have been in the first place.
Boldly call evil evil and good good.
One of the most spiritually devastating aspects of woke culture is the constant gaslighting. Whether it’s claiming that trans women are women, that men can marry each other, that all religions are basically the same, or that everybody is completely equal in every way, Western Christians are constantly surrounded by lies. But the ubiquity of the deception isn’t even the most dangerous part. Our culture goes even further by having authority figures in government, universities, businesses, and media tell us over and over again that we are the crazy ones for doubting these lies. It is an understatement to call this a spiritually toxic environment in which to live and raise our children.
Man was never created to exist atomistically; peer pressure is part of our design. We will always be affected by the voices shouting in our ears whether we want to be or not. Therefore, as the Spirit of the Age constantly corrodes our grasp on natural law and Biblical wisdom alike, Christians need men who will boldly proclaim God’s Word in opposition to these lies. Where the devil is at work, our Pastors should be constantly pointing out the deceptions and reminding believers that they aren’t the crazy ones. And they should be doing so with confidence.
Sadly, this is far less common among us than it should be, and the reasons are legion. Some pastors try to avoid it out of a relatively innocent desire to be apolitical–they know that politics are divisive and would prefer not to involve themselves in it. Given that shepherding a church is already quite difficult, it’s understandable that a pastor would want to keep things simple and avoid such treacherous waters. Nevertheless, God’s Word stands in judgment over politics as well. Where Scripture speaks and sheep need to hear, a pastor has no excuse for silence.
Other pastors avoid it out of a desire for worldly approval. They crave the recognition of unbelievers and want to be seen as the reasonable ones, rather than one of those Christians. They may speak the truth from time-to-time, but not with boldness. On the contrary, they bury Scriptural proclamation in endless nuance designed not to edify, but to avert the world’s ire. They might reluctantly admit that sodomy is a sin, but they’ll never use the term “sodomy” and will immediately change the subject to easier issues like pornography. They might briefly acknowledge that feminism is wrong, but they will spend far more time talking about what evil and abusive failures men are. Where their congregants need bold presentation of God’s Word, they proclaim sensitivity & “winsomeness” uber alles and thereby propagate their own timidity among God’s people.
But the worst of the bunch are the blatant false teachers among us. The LCMS continues to be plagued with antinomians. These men will not proclaim any of the specifics of God’s Law over and against the Spirit of the Age, preferring to acknowledge sin only in the abstract–enough to justify their jobs, but not enough to actually be faithful. Because wokeism primarily denies and corrupts First Article gifts rather than their own reductionist gospel, they have no interest in the subject. What’s worse, if they actually hear any Lutheran speak out against the gross public sins America celebrates, they will fall upon him like a pack of wolves to accuse him of self-righteousness and hatred for the Gospel.
Those congregations who persevere through the woke calamity will have pastors who routinely remind them that while the world has gone mad, God’s Word remains the same forever. They will have pastors who are unafraid of being blunt in sermons and Bible Studies wherever God’s Word is blunt. When they offer nuance, it will be to help their wavering sheep understand the virtue of God’s proclamations, not to hide from worldly condemnation. They will openly speak against the insanity of wokeness so that their congregation can build on the Rock.
Don’t bind your congregation’s conscience to modernism.
As I’ve said, it’s understandable that many pastors don’t want to get involved in politics. The body of Christ has many members with different functions and we certainly don’t need each member to be an eye. And yet, many of these apolitical pastors who cannot be roused by all the woke, ungodly attacks against the Church quickly find their ferocity whenever modernism is threatened. If men in their churches begin to believe that the postwar liberal consensus is at the root of many of the problems in our society and seek to undermine it, then and only then is it time to break out the church discipline. While they have no interest in politics for themselves, they deliberately hamstring other Christians who are better suited to that purpose when they rock the boat.
But such action for the sake of modernism is highly dubious, for modernism is not a Biblical doctrine, and the postwar consensus is not a Scriptural command. On the contrary, a straightforward reading of Scripture will put many of its shibboleths under judgement. The Bible tells us that women are the weaker vessel and that wives should submit to their husbands, but our pastors get outraged if anyone questions egalitarianism. The Bible tells us that the nations are God’s creation but pastors eagerly pursue diversity and hinder anyone who tries to preserve their nation by halting globalism. The Bible tells us to flee fornication and condemns adultery, but pastors rush to the defense of every unrepentant fornicator they can find and tear down men who express the godly desire for a virgin bride. Scripture tells us that any man who fails to care for his family is worse than an unbeliever, but our pastors condemn and deride men for putting their own children before foreigners.
It is not God who instructed our clergy to be outraged over such things, but many of them nevertheless seek to tie the hands of laymen who bring God’s Word with them into their earthly vocations. A good father who protects his family from wokeism or a good citizen who tries to steer his nation down a godly path will inevitably question social ideals which Americans take for granted. Lutheran congregations who cultivate such godly men will have pastors who refuse to be an enforcer of the Spirit of the Age, but instead feed them with God’s pure word, affirm their Christian freedom to do good for their neighbors, and uphold their authority in their own homes.
Be willing to suffer alongside your sheep.
For most of my life, every pastor preaching or teaching the various verses about persecution would include the comment, “thankfully, we don’t need to worry about that sort of thing in America.” Clearly this is no longer the case, and for now, that blessed time is drawing to a close. The pagans that surround us have once again been given free reign to take their hatred of Christ out on His followers. The satanic woke assault on nature and goodness is the great conflict of our time. Those laymen who live out their faith in opposition to the Spirit of the Age are beginning to suffer for it once again.
Pastors who attempt to drive off the wolves that would deceive, discourage, or distract their congregations from this conflict will likewise face consequences at the hands of the world. Feminism in particular is deeply entrenched in our congregations and will take decades of patient struggle to finally root out. A pastor may not be fired for condemning sodomy the way a layman might, but there will still be a cost to being faithful to Scripture, for many rank-and-file Lutherans who sit on boards and councils are quite worldly indeed. So what I’m asking of pastors here is no less daunting than when Peter instructed slaves to be obedient even to cruel masters.
But as Peter also says, that is what we have been called to. And when we suffer for doing good, it is a gracious thing in God’s sight. There are many false teachers who would rob all Christians of that comfort. What Scripture means coram mundo, they will apply coram deo and assert that your actions were not truly good because you’re a sinner. They will say you’re suffering because you weren’t sensitive enough, winsome enough, or loving enough. And because we are sinners, there will always be some faults even in our best actions. But you will never be more perfect or more loving than Christ, and He still endured suffering at the hands of the world. As we strive to be truly Christlike, we must rest in the sure and certain knowledge that our faults are forgiven, and through faith, our good works are made acceptable to God. These comforts are truly meant even for sinners like us. When we comfort one another, we will suffer, but we will suffer as one, as we ought.
As fellow members of Christ’s body, faithful Christians need to support everyone who is fighting on the same side of this battle. Maybe we think they are being too extreme, or maybe we think they are being too hesitant, or maybe they’ve made big mistakes. But as long as we are truly on the same side, we should be understanding about such things. Pastors need to support the laity who fight the good fight rather than undermining us, and laity need to treasure those clergy who serve them well as more valuable than gold. Let us all learn. Let us all grow. Let us all fight. And let us all be one body as we do it. But as for those Christians who would beat their fellow servants and team up with the world against the Church, there can be no real unity, for we are on different sides. There are many men of high standing and repute in the LCMS who would do well to consider which side they are truly on.
Throughout history, Satan has attacked the church in many different ways in different times and places. But today, in our own time and place, wokeism is where his stroke falls heaviest against us. This is what is undermining our doctrine right now. This is what is leading to our persecution. This is what is driving ordinary men down paths of reprehensible wickedness. We must therefore faithfully resist him, for it is not our place to choose which walls are under attack.
Those churches which man their stations and remain faithful through this conflict will be the ones to inherit a future after Lutheranism. May God send faithful workers into the field to support His people; and may He preserve each of our churches with an unyielding faith in Jesus Christ.
Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day. Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts. I hold back my feet from every evil way, in order to keep your word. I do not turn aside from your rules, for you have taught me. How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth! Through your precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate every false way.
-Psalm 119:97-104
Back when I was about to start seminary, the class I looked forward to the most for my first term was Theological Ethics. I had wandered off from the Church during high school and college–mainly due to my own failure to properly apply God’s Law to my life and circumstances. And it was certainly the conviction wrought by God’s Law over my sins that sent me running back to the Gospel I had learned in my youth (and then into studying apologetics to see whether that blessed assurance was really true. It is.)
Under the circumstances, it should be no surprise that, like the Psalmist, I love God’s Law and want to meditate on it. I love that it revealed my sin. I love that it’s restrained me from even greater wickedness. I love that God did not just save me only to abandon me, but actually wants me to do works that please Him and even teaches me how. Yes, the Law causes pain when I take it seriously, but that’s only because of my sins. And since there is no longer any condemnation for me because I am in Christ Jesus, that pain is fleeting in the face of learning God’s Wisdom.
So upon returning to the faith, I sought to learn more and more about God’s Word and Lutheran theology. But while I always count on Lutherans to expound wonderfully on many different matters of theology, I found myself having to read men from other traditions to deepen my understanding of the details of morality (and always having to tweak and adjust what I read to “Lutheranize” it.) While I went to seminary to ground myself in many different matters of doctrine, I was particularly looking forward to finally getting some of that missing ethical insight.
What I got in Theological Ethics was not exactly what I expected, to say the least. The majority of the class was devoted to making sure that ethics didn’t get in the way of understanding that we are saved by grace alone–something every Lutheran learns from the cradle. Even a class specifically about ethics couldn’t focus on equipping future pastors to understand God’s Law and apply it to the real-life circumstances they and their future congregants were likely to encounter.
As grateful as I am for my time in seminary (and even for Theological Ethics, in which I learned much, even if it wasn’t what I was expecting) it did serve to reinforce my gnawing suspicion that contemporary Lutherans have a serious Law problem. A kind of soft antinomianism is entrenched in our institutions. We treat the Law like those action movies where two officers have to get two keys and turn them clockwise simultaneously to unlock the nuclear weapons. In practice, far too many of our pastors and theologians see God’s moral instructions as something to break out only in the most dire and exceptional circumstances. They don’t (usually) go full antinomian and explicitly deny God’s Law, but they do passive-aggressively despise it to keep it out of anyone’s mind.
As is typical of passive-aggression, their techniques for Law-avoidance are legion. In many cases, they avoid it simply by sniping at other Christians. Though they’ll cite the 8th Commandment endlessly when it comes to those who object to public false teaching, they won’t give a second thought to accusing faithful men of works righteousness if they even express what they feel is “too much” interest in morality. Likewise, if you argue in favor of moral wisdom learned from Scripture, they’ll accuse you of adding to God’s Word instead. Ironically, they’ll invent rules as legalistically as any Pharisee if you (like Jesus, Paul, or Luther) make even the most obvious of inferences from God’s commands. The intended effect is to shame any pastor or layman who dares break their embargo on Biblical morality.
Another approach they take is to try and lock down God’s Law so that it only has the specific effects they desire. Lutherans teach that there are three uses of the Law: 1) to restrain our overt sinful actions and reduce the harm we do to ourselves and others, 2) to reveal that we are sinners by nature whose only hope of salvation is the grace of God in Christ Jesus, and 3) to teach forgiven Christians how to live in God-pleasing ways. Second use is the only reason soft antinomians tolerate God’s Law at all. Their occupation as pastors would dissolve without it along with their false piety, for without some abstract form of sin, no one would require forgiveness from them. But theologians like Gerhard Forde, Steven Paulson, and their many followers in the LCMS have made it their life’s work to reduce God’s Law to a mere technicality sufficient to justify their paychecks.
Third Use was the first to be rejected, based on a corruption of simul justus et peccator. This (true) teaching that Christians are simultaneously saints and sinners was perverted to claim that A) totally depraved sinners cannot be reformed by the Law and B) already perfect saints have no need to be reformed by the Law, therefore C) Christians ipso facto have nothing to learn from God’s Law except their identity as sinners. Of course, this legalistic sophistry not only ignores Scripture’s constant moral exhortations to believers, but also the obvious fact that even perfect humans still learn how to do good. Even Jesus Christ required such instruction according to his human nature.
But the matter didn’t stop at Third Use, for First Use is under assault now as well. This time, it’s Luther’s doctrine of the Two Kingdoms that’s perverted in service to the antinomians. Here, the teaching that the Church and civil government have two distinct sets of God-given responsibilities is recast into 20th Century “separation of church and state” in which government is required to be religiously neutral. Of course, that kind of religious neutrality is not only logically incoherent (for one cannot even serve two masters, let alone hundreds) but unbiblical as well. According to Scripture, civil government is established specifically to punish wrongdoers and commend right-doers–and God is still the one who defines that right and wrong.
Nevertheless, our soft antinomians willfully defy Scripture in order to support the post-WWII consensus that the only good society is one that’s both secular and pluralistic. Consider, for example, how the President of the LCMS recently condemned in the name of Christ any who would use the civil law to restrain the wickedness of sodomites as God Himself did in Israel. Or consider the broader reaction against Christian Nationalism by those who insist that God’s Law has no place in the way a nation governs itself. “That would be theocracy!” they wail, pearls clutched firmly in hand. Once again, the purpose is to keep God’s Law under lock and key, lest anyone actually hear it and perceive its wisdom.
And where good Lutheran doctrines cannot be perverted, they are simply forgotten. For example, Luther taught that there are two kinds of righteousness: righteousness before God (coram deo) and righteousness before the world (coram mundo). The former can only be received by faith in Christ, because none of us can keep the Law perfectly in God’s sight. The latter, however, can be achieved through basic virtue and decency, for imperfect humans cannot hold each other perfectly accountable. This is a good, proper, and useful theological distinction; and it is forgotten whenever Lutherans want to shut down uncomfortable conversations about morality.
The whole “debt-free virgins without tattoos” controversy made this deliberate oversight plain to many of us. When men acknowledged that they actually want wives with moral character (an obviously coram mundo judgment), many of them took fire from pastoral white knights. Some were accused of denying the forgiveness of sins for Christian women with a history of fornication. Others were called hypocrites for daring to care about a woman having slept with two dozen strangers when they themselves had lusted after women in their thoughts. Judgments like these, however, are plainly coram deo, dealing as they do with imputed righteousness and perfect adherence to God’s Law. In all these objections, apples are conflated with oranges to shut up those who want God’s Laws and values to govern their lives.
I could go on listing examples, and I have done so in the past–from “Saint/Sinner Nestorianism” to bizarre legalisms like “avoid moral specifics when preaching” to reducing Law & Gospel to a tool of emotional manipulation to produce shame and relief at will. As I said, their techniques are legion. One cannot observe this cavalcade of anti-Lutheran & anti-Christian stupidities coming from our highest profile leaders and fail to notice the pattern: They are all an attempt to steal God’s Law away from faithful Christians.
These are not the actions of a church body with a bright future, for there can be neither Church nor Christianity without God’s Law. For one thing, of course, there is no Gospel of forgiveness if there is no sin. Even most soft antinomians would agree with that, though as I said, they think they can get away with second-use-only without turning the Law and Sin into a meaningless abstractions rather concrete wrongdoing.
There is also the practical matter that without God’s Law, neither family, nor congregation, nor society will actually survive. Sin isn’t just naughtiness–it is destruction and uncreation. When we disregard God’s Law and embrace open sin, providence will grind us into dust one way or another. And as I wrote last time, our refusal to learn wisdom from God’s Laws about sexual morality is the root of our terminal demographic decline.
But more to my point here, if we divide God’s Word into Law and Gospel, but consider preaching the former to be beneath us, we have absolutely no business being a church body anymore. The Law is God’s Word, and we don’t get to second-guess God about which of His words are valuable. Every Christian has parts of the Bible he doesn’t like simply by virtue of being a sinner, but faith and humility require us to acknowledge that we are in the wrong on such matters. How, then, ought we to regard something as beyond the pale as striving to categorically dismiss half of Scripture because you don’t like how it makes you feel? Do you really think a church can deliberately embrace and enforce faithlessness of that magnitude without our Lord removing its lampstand? When you consider that even our Synodical President openly treats the Law as something to be taught only as a matter of last resort, it should make it plain how unfirmly our denomination stands.
The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod needs to wake up and realize that we have a severe Law problem on our hands. And it goes far deeper than simply having a bunch of fools in our midst who teach this antinomian garbage. This is deeply embedded in our institutions, in our leadership, and in our culture. We are actively and passively conforming ourselves to this error. Having attended one of our seminaries myself, I can attest that this is how our clergy are being trained. For all intents and purposes, neglect for the Law is part of the curriculum. Sometimes this is deliberate, as it was in Theological Ethics. Sometimes it is entirely absentminded. Either way, we have made soft antinomianism a matter of outward piety throughout our leadership. We have been trained to perceive contempt for God’s Law as love for the Gospel because that is how our prominent antinomians present themselves.
But here is the key point we all need to drive home in our own minds: If they truly believed the Gospel in the first place–that they are forgiven and redeemed from sin by Christ’s blood–then they would have no need to hide away from the Law. The Law always accuses, but there is no condemnation for those of us in Christ Jesus. There remains our own feelings of guilt and shame, but these are entirely healthy feelings for sinners to have, just as pain is a healthy sensation when one’s hand is to close to the flame. But like pain, guilt & shame are not pleasant.
Also like pain, we cannot leave guilt & shame behind in this life. At the very least, this is because we all continue to sin. We will always have new failures to be ashamed of. Other times, it will be because you cannot leave the consequences of your sin behind. If you’ve done things like mutilated your family through divorce or let your children grow up to be wantons, perverts, or pagans because you failed to raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord, you will naturally be reminded of it until Christ returns. And of course, for those with besetting sins, it is a constant struggle even to leave the sin itself in your past because it continually stalks you.
As these circumstances have multiplied among us and among our leadership, we are therefore more and more subject to the sinful impulse to scream “DON’T JUDGE ME” whenever the Law written on our hearts is brought to our minds–the same impulse that has proliferated in Western culture at large. We are therefore commanded to be sensitive by refusing to mention the specifics of God’s Law that we most desperately need–the parts that will restrain our children from following us into sin, that will point us to the absolute need for a savior, and that will teach us how to live apart from that sin. And the more we neglect them, the more sensitive we will become to anyone else who mentions them. Thus, the vicious cycle continues as we desperately try to hide our shame behind fig leaves.
But that is not a cycle in which a Christian ought to live–especially a Lutheran who knows we are saved by divine Grace alone apart from our works. Forde taught that Law and Gospel were found in the provoked feelings of shame and relief respectively, leading many astray in a vain pursuit of the more pleasant feeling of the pair. Real Lutherans know better. We know that God’s assurance of our forgiveness in Christ is real no matter how we may feel about it, for God’s proclamations transcend emotion. When we receive the Sacrament while set on fire for the Lord and ready to take on the world, we are forgiven. When we have to reluctantly drag ourselves to church and the altar because we feel like sinful refuse, we are still forgiven. And when we hear God’s just statutes, we know them to be true and good no matter how anyone may feel about them, and so the faithful Christian seeks them out regardless.
So how do Lutherans overcome the contempt for the Law we’ve instilled in our hearts? Well for one thing, you know a lot of the antinomians’ tricks now, so don’t fall for those. But there is much more to be done.
Unfortunately, we cannot rely on our leadership or our institutions to help us in this matter, for that would be the blind leading the blind. Thankfully, we have not been left as orphans. If you need a perspective from outside contemporary culture, then the simplest solution is to read old books. And we are truly blessed in this regard. Holy Scripture is wide open to any of us who wish to learn what our leadership tries to hide. Likewise, the Lutherans Confessions and other works of the early Lutherans are available to anyone and readily demonstrate that they did not share our modern contempt for God’s Law. Once again, I can attest from personal experience that the more you read faithful writings, the more you will be able to recognize and overcome the antinomianism being foisted on you. This is especially necessary for pastors whose training has required them to face the most temptation in this regard.
But what starts with self-study does not end there. Share what you have learned with your brothers and sisters in Christ however you can, and learn from others who have taken up the same journey into the Faith. And if you find you need to resist some of them–even pastors and presidents–you can stand firm on God’s Word just as Luther and countless other Christians through the ages have done. And whenever you do find Lutheran pastors and teachers who have overcome the antinomian impulse, treat them as a precious treasure, for that’s what they are.
From the very beginning, Satan has used many and various ways of hiding whichever parts of God’s Word he finds most opportune to hide. And from the beginning, whatever heartache his efforts have caused, his designs have always failed as God’s Word is proclaimed again and again throughout the world. This age is no different in either respect. God’s Word will prevail with or without Lutherans. Let us therefore repent and pray that it would prevail with us.
