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

Church Fellowship After Lutheranism

Posted on September 9, 2025 by Matt

A year and a half ago, I began writing a series of blog posts with a theme of “After Lutheranism.” Between egregious actions like the LCACA witch hunt, deeply entrenched doctrinal errors such as antinomianism, and the grim reality of demographic collapse, it was only natural to consider whether conservative Lutheran bodies like the LCMS actually have a future.

In the interim, Synod has mostly concerned itself with doubling and tripling down on their guilt-by-association war with Stone Choir, ruthlessly attacking its whistleblowers, tolerating LGBT advocacy in its Registered Service Organizations, and further alienating any of us who are more interested in upholding Lutheran doctrine than upholding the Postwar Consensus. Sadly, it seems no less likely to me now that the LCMS will simply fade away because it never really left liberalism behind.

But there were several big questions I failed to explore last time around. One of the most important is what will Church fellowship and membership look like for those who remain or become Lutheran in doctrine but have no institutional home?

A History of Standing Apart

Confessional Lutherans, after all, have a well-earned reputation for being insular. We deliberately resist many kinds of interactions with other traditions to the point that it’s become part of our identity. And this tendency is not without reason.

Historically speaking, the LCMS exists specifically because Prussia tried to force Lutherans and Reformed to worship together despite our inability to even agree on what worship actually entailse. Rather than allow the government to dictate our theology, CFW Walther and others decided to emigrate to America where they could practice their faith without Calvinist interference. Naturally, one doesn’t undertake a journey like that only to become chummy with Reformed traditions on the other side of the ocean.

There is also the matter of doctrinal purity. During the Lutheran Reformation, Luther’s defiance of the most powerful institution on Earth was justified by one simple fact: according to Holy Scripture, Luther was right and Rome was wrong. That was the source of his courage and determination. As a priest and doctor of the Church, Luther could not in good conscience allow Rome’s abuses and false teachings to go unchallenged. He did not relent because despite all the vitriol and conflict, no one was willing to demonstrate from Scripture and plain reason how he was wrong. They only demanded submission to the Pope. So long as God’s written Word was his highest authority, Luther could do nothing other than what he did.

Lutherans generally aspire to that same reliance on Scripture for rectitude–or at least imagine ourselves as doing so. Sound doctrine based on God’s Word is the foundation of how we see ourselves. Therefore, when other denominations speak contrary to that Word, we naturally treat it as spiritually dangerous error rather than some mere difference of opinion. Like Luther, we worry less about building bridges and making friends than with simply being correct where God has spoken and silent where He has not.

Our history and heritage gave us our insular tendences, and they have not really faded over the centuries. On the contrary, the temptations of the Devil have required insularity from us. We need it to combat repeated attempts to smuggle in some stupid trend or another from American evangelicalism in exchange for a vain promise of popularity. We are not as on guard as completely or as competently as we should be, perhaps, but moreso than the average American protestant.

The Limits of Denominational Identity

Practically speaking, however, our insularity now depends wholly on our denominational identity and mechanisms. For example, we (usually) practice closed Communion: we don’t share the Lord’s Supper with non-Lutherans because coming together as one means very little if we can’t even agree what we’re doing. While we are not as strict as the early church, which sent visitors and catechumens away before the Service of the Sacrament, we have a reputation of declining even family members when they hold to different confessions. (And to be clear, this is a good and proper thing.)

However, the way the LCMS gauges such agreement is by whether one is a member in good standing of an LCMS congregation (or the handful of Lutheran denominations with which we’re in altar & pulpit fellowship.) That’s our shorthand for keeping track of the catechesis and confession that should produce agreement among us. If one is confirmed in the LCMS, we presume he is fit for the Supper.

This mechanism does leave something to be desired, however. Church discipline is remarkably lax among us, and it’s appalling but not particularly shocking that a full 50% of self-identified LCMS members are apostates who support gay marriage and abortion. Clearly, our record on catechesis is nothing to write home about. Furthermore, the accidental death of private confession among us has rendered self-examination before the sacrament a matter of liturgical formality. So while we talk a good game about guarding the altar, the reality is that we let administrative processes do most of the heavy lifting. The consequence is a great deal of disagreement even among Lutherans communing together.

Or consider our vaunted purity of doctrine. In theory, it’s a matter of whether our doctrine correctly confesses what Scripture says and conforms to the Lutheran Confessions. In practice, there is an overreliance on denominational branding to make such judgments for us. If we want doctrinally sound materials, we have Concordia Publishing House to produce theological material that’s gone through doctrinal review so pastors and congregants don’t have to worry about it. That’s where we’re supposed to go first and usually last because we’re told we can trust it implicitly. In contrast, there’s a strong skepticism regarding any outside material. Congregational leaders therefore shy away from anything which isn’t from CPH.

While that skepticism is certainly not unfounded given the sad state of American Christianity, the solution again leaves something to be desired. We say we compare our doctrine to God’s Word, but more and more Lutherans have simply outsourced that work to the denomination. That’s a short trip back to the institutional problems which begat the Reformation in the first place.

Our recent experience with LCACA demonstrates that this vulnerability not just theoretical. Doctrinal review missed some major problems packaged alongside our confessions; and those responsible for guarding us still deny that any of it was truly problematic. Likewise, the fact that many of our Registered Service Organizations have been parading around celebrating sodomy has been met with outrage from faithful laity, but barely a shrug from Synod. Despite how we like to think of ourselves, pure doctrine and fellowship rooted therein is clearly not a priority for our leadership.

Respecters of Person or Doctrine?

How, then did our institutions see these controversies? They complained about too much criticism coming from the laity or taking place outside of the normal institutional channels with which they could typically sweep it all under the rug. When they came up at all, actual comparison of our teachings to God’s Word took a back seat to process, and many critics actually received retaliation for pursuing purity of doctrine.

At one point, I was brought in to defend my own criticism of LCACA before Synod officials. One of the things which struck me about the conversation was that while I was mainly criticizing the statements and arguments from the errant essays, my interlocutor was more focused on his knowledge of the people involved and their reputations within the denomination as good solid confessional guys. At one point, I was actually told I should have called up each of the authors individually to discuss my concerns (as though words on the page aren’t required to stand on their own merits once they’re published.) When the rubber hit the road, the denominational branding didn’t facilitate holding our doctrine up to the light of God’s Word–it replaced it.

After Lutheranism, the specific problems of failed processes like this will go away along with the failed institutions which established them. However, the underlying needs will always be with us. Congregations will still need to be wary of false teachers and ensure their teaching and practice conform to the Word of God. The tools however, will have to be different.

In the beginning, it can be fairly simple–which is not to say easy. Christians will need to do the hard work themselves instead of relying on shortcuts like denominational identity. They will need to understand Scripture, understand their fellow congregants, and apply the former to the latter. Pastors and teachers will need to stop relying on CPH and create more of their own material. When they do use outside work, they need to vet what they get from CPH as thoroughly as they do from any other source.

Churches will also need to evaluate their own rubrics for participation in the congregation–qualifications for different offices, admission to the sacraments, etc. “LCMS member in good standing” says increasingly little about shared convictions. Likewise, controversies over inclusion have caused many of us to ask old questions which our culture considered settled. Questions such as whether modern equality is necessary for Christian love or which offices are appropriate for women have been thoroughly mishandled by most churches. We need to ask them again with minds that are open to Scripture but skeptical of the world (and hearts courageous enough to resist cultural tides.)

Common Confession

Nevertheless, while “Doing our own research” has become essential, it cannot stop there. Pietism showed us what happens when it’s every congregation for itself: they splinter into a thousand different communities with a thousand contradictory rubrics, most of which die or abandon their convictions within a generation or two. Likewise, Baptists have shown us happens when Christians take a “just me and my Bible” approach to theology: they adopt a reconstructionism that neglects Church history and projects modern philosophies onto Scripture. That’s not much better than what we have now. Congregations need external unity as well as internal.

The Lutheran Confessions can, of course be of great help in defining unity, but they are not sufficient. If they were an adequate touchstone for common ground in the 21st century, we would not be reading this and pondering a time after Lutheranism. The errors of the 1500’s which they address are not always the errors of today, just as the errors addressed by the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds did not deal with the errors of the 1500’s. The modern assaults of Satan against first article truths like sexual morality, the nature of men & women, the existence & duties of nations and the like will need to be addressed by more than just atomized congregations.

What Lutherans (or perhaps post-Lutherans) will need as we struggle against the errors of this day is a new confession to define the common ground and exclude those we deem false teachers.

As shocking as this prospect might sound to our “nothing ever happens” mindset, this task has already begun among our liberal institutional leadership. President Harrison’s call for excommunication over novel (i.e. fake) sins like racism, capital punishment for sodomites, and the like is a backhanded attempt to establish a binding new confession of faith. So are the many stories I’ve heard of Lutheran churches withholding baptism from new converts who listen to Stone Choir or the dismissal of pastors who doubt the Holocaust. These are, for all intents and purposes, the beginnings of a new confession. It just happens to be one which syncretizes Christianity with Critical Theory.

Those of us who choose to remain faithful to Christ will need to start drawing lines as well. But unlike our institutional leaders, we need to draw these lines from Scripture and our Christian heritage rather than from the Postwar Consensus. This process will come at a cost; many of us have already felt Satan’s retaliation through his agents in our denominations. Even so, that cost covers a unique advantage: The more men worldly church bodies condemn over their refusal to offer a pinch of incense to the Spirit of the Age, the more faithful men there will be to forge this new confession.

A Strange New Ecumenicism

But as Lutherans (or perhaps post-Lutherans) engage in this common struggle for survival against the errors of our day, we will also have an opportunity to find more common ground. With denominations driving men out, that search for common ground may lie outside our old institutional homes. And as our denominations themselves erode our denominational identities, congregations and individuals will need to figure out anew how to faithfully relate to those of different traditions.

As we carefully work with others, we will undoubtedly come to learn that some of the human traditions we insist on can be traded away given what’s at stake. For example, the LCMS requires pastors to be rostered by the denomination and go through seminary & elaborate call processes to be considered authorized to publicly preach and administer the Sacraments. As someone who has defended those traditions, I nevertheless have to admit that they’re small beans compared to modern challenges like whether your pastor will try to get you fired or call the FBI on you because you said something “racist.”

Meanwhile, men of other traditions will be doing the same, which offers them a chance to leave behind traditions we would find errant. For example, many try to maintain a “this is my body, but it’s not bodily my body” distinction with respect to the Lord’s Supper. But maybe they’ll find that their speculation about what’s possible for God is less important than whether your congregation will undermine your household authority by teaching your wife feminism. If Lutherans can provide an alternative for men with such concerns, they will come.

Now, my point is not correcting any specific Lutheran or non-Lutheran doctrine here; it is only this: Just like during the Reformation (and many times in Church history), the extremity of malfeasance by church leadership provides all of us with a strong incentive to reflect on whether the doctrines and traditions we take for granted came from God or from man. These modern challenges we face span denominations. Accordingly, the Holy Spirit will be directing men from many different traditions against the devil. We may be surprised at what becomes possible under such circumstances.

We may also be surprised where we ourselves end up. As Satan drives us from our corners of the visible church, many Lutherans will have a pressing concern: Where shall we go? Some of us will be blessed with congregations which stay steadfast and faithful through the chaos. Many, however, will find themselves in something akin to an ELCA church–one which bears the name “Lutheran” out of tradition, but which also whores after the Spirit of the Age and refuses correction from God’s Word. We cannot remain in such places forever or even for long. But neither can we ignore the God-given need to assemble with other believers.

What then shall we do? I am no prophet, and it’s too soon to know what our solutions will be, but some of us will undoubtedly end up in parts of the visible church we would have never before considered.

To be sure, the end result of all this isn’t going to be some ecumenical utopia in which no divisions exist among us. As we explore this new approach, we’ll still find that we can join together and cooperate only inasmuch as we can actually agree on what we’re doing together. Even so, Lutherans and others will naturally find ourselves becoming less insular–or at least our insularity will become congruent with our convictions rather than with our branding. God has, in the past, used such convictions to draw men to Himself. He may do so still.

Those who preach the pure Word of God will inevitably draw Christ’s people and repel His enemies. The converse, of course, will also be true. Those synagogues of Satan which continue to elevate the Postwar Consensus above the Word will draw the world and repel Christians. In such circumstances, there’s no way to avoid a reshuffling of the post-Reformation traditions with which we’re familiar. As we discover that a common struggle against the Devil and the World makes for strange bedfellows, even Lutherans may find a need to relax some of our insularity and join together with those from whom we’ve been divided.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Without Excuse: LGBT Advocacy In the LCMS

Posted on July 28, 2025 by Matt

The existence of social media must be endlessly frustrating for the leadership of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Among the elderly in the pews, their reputation as a steadfast and conservative denomination is pretty much without blemish. The internet, however, has given legs to a number of stories which otherwise would have quickly died out. One of the latest of these is the revelation that some of our Registered Service Organizations have been involved in LGBT advocacy in the LCMS. This not only includes marching in pride parades (with children) but also seeking out sodomites at pride events to whom they can foster children. These joint ventures with the ELCA are carried out with support from the LCMS (such as LCMS members serving on their boards and the option of financing from our Lutheran Church Extension Fund,) and they are branded with our RSO promise that it’s “in harmony with LCMS doctrine and practice.”

At the time of writing, I still haven’t heard any official statement from Synod on this abominable scandal. However, I have seen LCMS pastors and laity making excuses on social media for the silence. Some have been spreading unsubstantiated rumors that the situation has already been dealt with. But the closest thing I’ve seen to this is a proposed resolution at only one district convention to condemn their errant RSO which, after revisions, resulted in merely letting their status go quietly unrenewed while LCMS members continue to serve on their boards and make donations. And it’s not clear to me whether even this pusillanimous action was ratified in the end.

Secret Action

Others, however, have been trying to explain that action is being taken behind the scenes which the public is unaware of. Such action, they say, needs to be done with patience, grace, and all due respect for Synod processes and polity. After all, the LCMS helping to foster children to sodomites is a very nuanced issue. Besides which, we should be seeking to save as many of these RSO’s as possible rather than burning it all down. In short, they want slow, deliberate, gentle action which can only be done out-of-sight of church-goers who are so easily riled up through social media, common sense, or God’s Word. Cooler heads must prevail.

I can understand why such contentions would be compelling. A decade or so ago, I would have even been grudgingly nodding along. It’s easy to desire quick, bold, and decisive action as a spectator, but responsibility for a large organization tends to temper such desire. I’m quite aware that since I bear no such responsibility myself, it’s far easier for me to call for action than it is for our leadership to deliver it. “Big ships turn slowly” is a reasonable proverb, and there was a time when I would have applied it in this case and left it at that.

But a lot has happened in the last decade. The LCACA controversy and President Harrison’s infernal letter calling for the excommunication of the “alt-right” has amply demonstrated how quickly, boldly, and decisively Synod is willing to act on an issue it actually cares about. Its handling of that controversy has stripped away any excuse it might offer for its indifference to this new scandal.

They Are Without Excuse

They can’t simply call dealing with LGBT advocacy in the LCMS a complex or nuanced issue that requires patience. When it came to people being racist on X, Synod bypassed nuance altogether and bluntly condemned it in the name of Christ. Patience also went straight out the window as they immediately escalated to “repent or be excommunicated.” While they make an offering of nuance to the abomination of sodomy, they had none for Harrison’s long list of accusations which weren’t even sins. They can no longer claim their longsuffering patience as an excuse for their current inaction.

Neither can they appeal to the high value they place on long-standing polity and procedures. Despite acknowledging that the LCMS is not an organization that can simply excommunicate from the top-down, President Harrison committed Synod to doing so anyway. They organized congregations into a Synod-wide witch-hunt to root out those they deemed “sinners.” The excommunication processes which those congregations carried out were often fraught with lapses in due process and even basic decency. It’s clear, therefore, that polity does not actually hold them back on issues that really matter to them.

Trying to recover as many of our institutions as possible could have been a noble goal to which they laid claim. But in their pursuit of racists, no more than lip service was given to “saving” any of those they subjected to Maoist struggle sessions or forbade from entering their sanctuary. The pretense of deep concern evaporated amidst the recorded abuses of persons and process alike. The rush to excommunication left any concern for the souls involved by the wayside. Today, if they claim “saving as much as possible” as their excuse, it only means they care more for saving corporations than for saving souls.

In other circumstances, they could have claimed that while they disagree with their RSOs’ involvement with Pride, they don’t want to condemn the entire organization. In other words, they could go with the lame “celebrating degeneracy is only 3% of what our RSO’s do” excuse. But they sing a very different tune when they go after the hosts of Stone Choir. In that case, it’s not permissible to simply disagree with them on pertinent issues. Instead, Synod has been demanding that people disavow their entire persons. They have therefore already rejected the pick & choose strategy for scandal.

Could they accept a small mea culpa and contend that their inaction against LGBT advocacy in the LCMS is a matter of simple human weakness? We can never fully escape such frailty in this life, after all. Slow bureaucracies, political realities, or insufficient nerve will always tempt us towards passivity. And yet, none of these things inhibited LCMS leadership from swiftly condemning the “alt-right” in the name of Christ. They cannot hide behind weakness now that we’ve seen them acting out in strength on the world’s behalf.

But perhaps one could ascribe all of this to a few bad apples at the top. Despite our best efforts, every large organization will inevitably have a few of those. Unfortunately for Synod (and for all of us), President Harrison’s call for excommunication was attributed to “its president, vice-presidents and all 35 district presidents, along with its ministerium and congregations.” Literally the entire LCMS hierarchy signed off on that bold and decisive action against mean tweets, but not one of them can do so for consigning children to those from whom we once protected them? Bad actors or transitory leadership are therefore no longer excuses either.

The Nature of Trust

The wide discrepancy between Synod’s response to official LGBT advocacy in the LCMS (a clear and unambiguous sin against God) and mere political “sins” like racism, sexism, or simply “being mean” among random laypeople has left our leadership without excuse. They have pre-emptively demolished any best construction which could have been built upon their inaction. There is no positive conclusion which could be drawn that doesn’t ignore reality. They have proven themselves willing and able to decisively deal with behavior they find scandalous. They either don’t find sodomy or the celebration thereof scandalous in the first place or they fear man rather than God. Either way, the implication is that they take their marching orders from the world rather than from the Word.

This is why the various calls for trust and patience are falling on deaf ears. It’s not because Synod’s critics are being unreasonable or that we’re so enraged that we can do nothing but burn it all down. It is because Synod has betrayed the trust of the people God had placed into her care. They have proven themselves untrustworthy and hence can no longer be trusted without evidence. “Things are moving behind the scenes” is not a credible claim. There can be no benefit of the doubt when doubt has been dissolved.

The worst thing leaders can do when trust has been broken is to try and reestablish it by fiat. And yet I have seen Synod’s defenders claim that trusting our leadership to handle it is a moral obligation or that lack of trust is a moral failing. For example, some (abusively) try to root this demand in the office of the ministry–as though the respect we owe to shepherds extends to their malfeasance. If such were the case, we would have no business being Lutheran, for Rome would gladly accept our submission to the Pope.

Others root their demands for trust in accusation of sin. They attempt to gaslight critics into thinking their mistrust can only be due to some fault within themselves (rage, impatience, faithlessness, etc.) as though Synod were beyond reproach. They use a perverse misunderstanding of “best construction” to bludgeon critics into silence. But all of this only adds arrogance and false witness to their already long list of failings. Heaping wrong upon wrong in such a manner can undermine trust further, but it can never rebuild it.

If Synod has any aspirations towards rebuilding the trust they’ve destroyed, they really have only one viable course of action: repentance. They must openly and deliberately change course from their rank hypocrisy if they want to rebuild trust with anyone. What’s more, this repentance cannot be private. Their hypocrisy is plainly seen in open letters signed by our entire leadership and literal parades down the street. As Luther says, “Where the sin is public, the rebuke also must be public that everyone may learn to guard against it.” Repentance must therefore also be public so that everyone might recognize it.

Repentance must also consist of more than mere words. Any and every leader makes mistakes in carrying out their duties. That is normal and inescapable. Not every leader is capable of being so zealous for the sake of the postwar consensus but so indifferent about the Word of God. This speaks to character problems which cannot be changed overnight even in repentance. Leadership should therefore be passed to men who have not already proven themselves unequal to the task.

Likewise, zealous action must be taken to right these wrongs–both against the RSO’s which promote sodomy and subject children to it and on behalf of the men who were wrongfully excommunicated in Harrison’s witch hunt. Nobody who mistrusts Synod will discover any new reasons to trust it until it takes new actions to prove itself trustworthy.

A Divided Synod

Now, do I expect such action to be taken? No, and it’s not simply a matter of distrust. The LCMS is not nearly as united in doctrine or practice as we would like or as we pretend. We’re used to the division between the good, solid confessional guys who love the historic liturgy and the liberal-but-not-as-liberal-as-the-ELCA guys who want contemporary worship. But that’s hardly the only or the most important division among us.

There’s also the division between our soft antinomians who despise teaching God’s Law and those of us who love God’s Law and meditate on it day and night. There’s also a division between those who practice syncretism with Critical Theory (and therefore treat racism, sexism, etc. as grievous sins against God) and those of us who do not. These divisions are much closer to the heart of Synod’s hypocrisy, but most people in the pews aren’t even aware of them.

The primary reason for this lack of awareness is the age of Synod in general. For the most part, Boomers have not had to grapple with these issues the same way the younger crowd has. To them, Radical Lutheranism (a term they usually don’t even know) just seems like an emphasis on the Gospel because they’re from the generation that took God’s Law for granted rather than the generation among whom it’s now been forgotten. And while all living generations have been indoctrinated in Critical Theory, only the younger generations are having to deal with it being taken to its logical conclusion all around them. We experience the problems viscerally and therefore react more stridently.

Since our leadership reflects the age of the Synod as a whole, they don’t recognize these things as big problems and reflexively consider them overreactions. They are content with life together despite Synod’s fissures and think it’s possible as long as they can just throw out the rabble-rousers who make a big deal out of them.

But unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, Synod’s unity will die with them. The younger generations tend to either be fully invested in Critical Theory or vehemently opposed. They either love God’s Law or the world’s law, but neither finds “the Gospel” a reasonable excuse for disregarding whichever law they favor. Our leftists might use antinomianism as a tool to eject parts of the Bible, but they won’t hesitate to hold others accountable to the traditions of men.

Likewise, one side agrees with Scripture that fornicators, idolators, homosexuals, etc. won’t enter the Kingdom. The other side believes that only racists, sexists, and homophobes will fail to enter it. That side will never give up LGBT advocacy in the LCMS because their false god demands it. There’s not enough common ground there to sufficiently cooperate in running a large church body.

How that will play out is still up for grabs, and that’s why I’m writing this. I don’t expect our leadership to retract their evil letter or expel Synod’s sodomites. But the next generation will have an opportunity to do better with at least some portions of Synod’s remains. Whichever leaders have not soiled their garments can stand up now to be counted, to be trusted, and to ultimately help their successors.

We can be firm now about what is right and wrong according to God’s Word. We can decide now not to yoke ourselves to the false religion of Critical Theory. We can take the Lutheran heritage which was entrusted to us, clean up the errors and confusions that Synod has added, and pass it down to our children. But none of these things can happen if we lie to ourselves about the sorry state of the LCMS.

It’s time to return to God’s Word and hold it more sacred than Synod polity. May God in His mercy grant us repentance for what we’ve gone along with, the wisdom to see His path, and the patience to bring as many of His children with us as possible.

Posted in Ethics, Heresy, Lutheranism, Politics, The Modern Church, Theological Pietism, Tradition | 6 Comments

Honor Thy Ancestors and Thy Descendants

Posted on May 13, 2025 by Matt

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

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

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

Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love Your Posterity

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

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

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

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

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

Cherish Your Nation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ordo Amoris

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

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

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

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

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

A Parable About Immigration

Posted on February 27, 2025 by Matt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoever Cannot Generalize Cannot Govern

Posted on February 20, 2025 by Matt

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

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

God’s Gift of Generalization

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

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

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

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

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

An Obligation to Generalize

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

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

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

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

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

Governing Tribes and Nations

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

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

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

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

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

A Mob of Rulers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Defense of Anger

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Matt

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

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

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

Burying Our Anger

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

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

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

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

Sanctifying Our Emotions

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

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

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

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

Anger According to the Law

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

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

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

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

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

The Worst Curse Word of All

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Matt

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

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

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

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

Sins Against Our Neighbor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sins Against God

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

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

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

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

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

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

But What If He Really IS a Nazi

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

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

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

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

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

A Spirit of Fear

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

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

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

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

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

Not That Kind of Lutheran?

Posted on September 4, 2024 by Matt

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

From my latest at American Reformer:

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

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

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

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

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

The Cost of Being Christian at “Christian” Schools

Posted on August 6, 2024 by Matt

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

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

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

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

Christian at a “Christian” College

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

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

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

Pagans in Charge

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

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

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

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

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

Start Being Vigilant

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

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

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

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

Trust Not in Denominations

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

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

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

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

Cancelling the Left

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Matt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cancelling the Left is Immoral?

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

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

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

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

Cancelling the Left Prevents Peace?

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

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

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

Finding a New Peace

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

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

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

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

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

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