Monday Morning Music Ministry

2-19-24

This essay is published mid-way between the birth day of Abraham Lincoln and the homogenized American consumer-holiday called Presidents Day.

The imports and legacies of great Americans like Lincoln and Washington cannot be ameliorated by the elevation of three-day weekends and used-car commercials with buffoons dressed in stovepipe hats. But the unrelenting trashing of American traditions continues in uncountable ways, from legislation and court decisions, to entertainment and media content, to re-branding the formerly solemn regard once paid to icons of our heritage.

Yet figures like Abraham Lincoln survive.

Lincoln is the closest we have had to a civic saint: certainly a secular saint for his wisdom, words, and actions. I think so partly because he was not exalted, except by ballots, but more as he was the simplest of men; common; honest. Literally, a typical American.

Theodore Roosevelt (whom readers know I also revere) framed his assessment of Lincoln (and George Washington): “There have been other men as great and other men as good; but in all the history of mankind there are no other two great men as good as these.”

More than anything, we are struck by Lincoln’s humanity. He was forever patient. He arrived at policies amid anguish, but he executed them firmly. He knew firsthand the turmoil of broken families, brothers fighting brothers; he suffered all these painful tests and duties. We know he kept his sense of humor. But what I have come to admire as much as any other trait is Lincoln’s faith.

It is a matter of debate how “religious” Lincoln was; whether he accepted Jesus as the Son of God; whether he believed in salvation or the need of personal salvation. It is not a matter of debate that he seldom attended or joined churches. It is a matter of record that he read the Bible his entire life, quoted even obscure verses often, and laced his speeches and writing with Bible quotations, scriptural allusions, King James cadences.

We cannot judge most of these things: some close friends like his longtime Illinois law partner Billy Herndon claimed that Lincoln was a gnarly heathen – but Herndon’s relationship was always rocky, and he wrote a biography of Lincoln after the assassination that sniped at a hundred minor particulars. However, Lincoln’s personal secretary John Hay (another hero of mine, by the way; a neglected figure in history), testified to Lincoln’s spiritual struggles, and his reliance on prayer in the White House. This was a time, generally, of private expressions of faith, when many Christians thought that respecting Christ’s teachings was more important than publicly affirming His divinity (this is not a recent phenomenon!), and when Old Testament lessons were preached more than New Testament parables. And many babies received Hebrew names.

Yet it was also a time, despite these anomalies of private beliefs and public expressions, of latter-day “Great Awakenings” as they are called, when waves of revivals spread throughout America, and when conversions to Christianity led to movements like Abolitionism, against slavery.

There are aspects of Lincoln’s faith in Christ that are beyond doubt. The pressures of holding a country together, and prosecuting a horrendous war, coincided with Lincoln’s growing faith. It is inspiring to read of this evolution (and I have read more than 65 books on Lincoln, including his complete letters and all his speeches), but most inspiring is to read his own words.

Lincoln, during his last years, displayed a steady progression of appeals to God… invocations of Providence… references to Jesus as Savior… seeking the Lord’s guidance… biblical quotations… allusions to Bible history… setting aside national days of prayer, as well as fasting, humiliation, and thanksgiving; a multitude of times; and with increasing clarity and spiritual contexts. By the end of the war, the speeches and proclamations of President Lincoln resembled actual sermons, always beseeching God in humility, never presumption; always inspiring.

It is this Abraham Lincoln we remember today.

Some of his quotations included his reference in the first inaugural address to “a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land.” In the second address, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” And of course his reference in the Gettysburg Address that this “nation shall under God have a new birth of freedom.”

A proclamation:
It is fit and becoming in all people, at all times, to acknowledge and revere the Supreme Government of God; to bow in humble submission to His chastisement; to confess and deplore their sins and transgressions in the full conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and to pray, with all fervency and contrition, for the pardon of their past offenses, and for a blessing upon their present and prospective action. And whereas when our own beloved country, once, by the blessings of God, united, prosperous and happy, is now afflicted with faction and civil war, it is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation, and in sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals, to humble ourselves before Him and to pray for His mercy.

In private communication, 1862:
We are indeed going through a great trial – a fiery trial. In the very responsible position in which I happened to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out His great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to His will, and that it might be so, I have sought His aid.

About his “dark” moments when Lee’s army invaded Pennsylvania, Lincoln wrote:
When everyone seemed panic-stricken… I went to my room… and got down on my knees before Almighty God and prayed… Soon a sweet comfort crept into my soul that God Almighty had taken the whole business into His own hands….

During the war, Lincoln responded to someone’s wish that “the Lord was on the Union’s side.” Lincoln responded:
I am not at all concerned about that, for I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.

Lincoln said about the Bible:
In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say I believe the Bible is the best gift God has given to man. All the good Savior gave to the world was communicated through this Book.

And other reflections:
I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.

God loves us the way we are, but too much to leave us that way. I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.

Imagine, if you will – and we ought to – an American president who would write or speak, or believe, such things today. Lincoln was reviled then, and often now, as an “agnostic, deist, infidel.” But by their fruits ye shall know them.

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A country-flavored version of a favorite hymn – well, Lincoln WAS from Kentucky – but with a true story of the President’s exercise of Christ-like compassion:

Click: Abraham Lincoln – What a Friend We Have in Jesus

1-1-24

I wonder what the “over / under” is with New Year resolutions that are kept; that is, let’s say, kept by most people beyond the third week of the year. Or third day? Most of mine are history by the third hour. Resolutions are stronger than intentions, and I shudder when reminded that the road to hell is paved with the latter…

Nevertheless, many of us make New Years resolutions… or we intend to. If in the process we make an inventory of our shortcomings and prioritize our goals, we have accomplished something after all.

This has prompted me to speculate on whether God makes Resolutions. Without being presumptuous or blasphemous or outright ignorant (have I headed everyone off at the pass?) I know that everything in the Bible, indeed His workings as revealed in history, from the Commandments to the Incarnation to judgments and miracles, are reflections of His resolutions… but let us wonder for a moment. 

If God would compose a list of resolutions, at least to remind us of how He works, and what He desires, what would they be?

I think God would resolve not to give up on His people. He is swift to judgment, yet long-suffering.

Salvation is free but will continue to be offered at a precious cost; God will ever grieve for those who reject Him.

God, who revealed Himself through Jesus Christ, will continue to act amongst us, and in us, through His Holy Spirit.

The eternal “I am” will resolve as always never to be the “I was.”

Among other resolutions of God, if we might put His will into our words, would be:

He always will be Without end… He will never change… He will keep every promise… He always will be – He only can be – Holy… He will be righteous, compassionate, and just… He will be faithful in His resolutions and promises.

How will He act? God resolves to communicate with His people through prayer… He will be “the God who healeth thee”… He will punish sin but ever remind us that “He chastises those whom He loves”… He will affirm His rules for a satisfied and joy-filled life through Resolutions already shared, from the 10 Commandments to the teachings of Jesus.

God resolves that His character will not change. We may be secure in knowing that He is omniscient, He is omnipresent, He is omnipotent… He does not only love; He is love… He is trustworthy… He is good all the time, and all the time He is good… He extends Grace to those who love Him – while we were yet revels and sinners He provided a way to be reconciled to Him.

You might notice that none of these resolutions are new. I did not have to “stretch” or imagine attributes of our Heavenly Father. He has revealed Himself; He is Unchanging; He is – let us say part of his job description? – “from Everlasting to Everlasting.” 

We make resolutions to correct our mistakes and try to do better.

God has made resolutions, affirming that He cannot make mistakes; when all is said and done, this year and every year, He is the best that we can imagine.

Let us hereby resolve, ourselves, that we praise His Holy Name and dedicate ourselves to serve Him. 

Happy New Year!

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Click: Great Is Thy Faithfulness 

12-25-23

“Wars and rumors of war.”

The Bible foretells of the End Times, and signs of its imminence. God keeps us on our toes, because wars, like the poor, we always have with us. Has there ever been a good war or a bad peace, as many have asked through the ages? I say yes; there may be just wars, and the willingness to do battle is irretrievably part of a nation’s soul.

“If I must choose between peace and righteousness,” Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “I choose righteousness.” Nevertheless, lately I am persuaded to settle for a long wait if people want to find a war to be joined…

Humankind seems not to have “advanced” much through the centuries; neither with children on playgrounds nor adults on battlefields that once were playgrounds. We congratulate each other – that is, fool ourselves – that “progress” is the hallmark of our times. Yet the bloodiest death toll from wars, in any century of the earth’s existence, was in the Twentieth Century, more than in all previous centuries combined. We brag that we – “civilizations” – have finally ended the scourge of slavery; yet there are greater numbers of slaves today than ever in human history. The numbers now are not the faces that flash in our minds: bondservants. But, instead, all manner of children, women, minorities, homeless, voiceless, migrants, the anonymous.

As long as there are power elites; as long as greed outpaces love; as long as hypocrisy can always find a nicer name, humankind will be (in the Bible’s phrase, Proverbs 26:11; II Peter 2:22) like dogs returning to their vomit. Think about what changes have occurred, really, when science develops new ways to save lives… as it also invents new ways to end lives. What a spectacle, when people march to save baby seals and whales, and march for the right to kill babies.

Well, Merry Christmas, anyway. Let the holiday sing.

Some wars are years, or generations, festering; some start on a random morning, or so it seems. But one thing we seldom encounter is peace breaking out. In the midst of a raging war, interrupting a bloody battle. Yet it has happened. Not many people know about the Christmas Truce. It was a virtual miracle during the first Christmas, in 1914, of World War I – the so-called Great War, surely the most useless of history’s many useless wars.

A few months after war was declared in Europe, by almost every big and small nation on the continent, almost a million soldiers already had been slaughtered. Christmastime was come, and soldiers were mired in trenches that were to become so established that for more than two years the battle line never moved more than 30 miles one way or another. In that unlikely hellhole a miracle occurred.

Minor details differ but the dispositive facts are acknowledged: Peace broke out.

Soldiers of Germany, England (Scotland, actually), and France, at night, spontaneously sang Christmas carols… and were joined by their “enemies” who could hear across No Man’s Land… nervous soldiers climbed from trenches to greet their foes, and shake hands… gifts were exchanged, even little trinkets, but also pastries and wine sent from home. They shared pictures of wives and children… more hymn singing… fireworks, intended to illuminate battlefields so to aim the cannons, were now shot skyward in celebration. There were tentative, but successful, attempts to communicate.

Of course they communicated. The languages that night were hymns and Bibles and chocolates and cigars. Handshakes and smiles and tears.

A Merry Christmas. A Holy Christmas. Peace on earth… at least in that narrow 27-mile-long battle line, south of Ypres and east of Armentieres, site of the song about les Mademoiselles, that night.

A British soldier recalled the Christmas Truce almost two decades later: We stuck up a board with a Merry Christmas on it. The enemy had stuck up a similar one. … Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads. Two of the Germans did the same and commenced to walk up the river bank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench.

We and the Germans met in the middle of No Man’s Land. Their officers were also now out. Our officers exchanged greetings with them.… One of their men, speaking in English, mentioned that he had worked in Brighton for some years and that he was fed up to the neck with this damned war and would be glad when it was all over. We told him that he wasn’t the only one that was fed up with it. (Frank Richards, “Old Soldiers Never Die,” 1933)

Another history records: [The British] Brigadier General G.T. Forrestier-Walker issued a directive forbidding fraternization: “For it discourages initiative in commanders, and destroys offensive spirit in all ranks. … Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices and exchange of tobacco and other comforts, however tempting and occasionally amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited.” (Stanley Weintraub, “Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce,” 2001)

How much different would the next day have been – how much different would the world be today – if the Truce had held?

Note that chocolates and cigars were only the presents. The GIFTS were hymns and Bible verses – they brought the soldiers out of trenches; not the prospect of snacks or smokes or a soccer game in the snow.

Christmas. God did not intend for Jesus’s Incarnation, the spirit of that Christmas Truce, to be a one-time miracle, but to be everyday life. He intended that we know-and-show that love and fellowship can be normal, not rare. We can be changed by the Holy Day, not be annoyed by yet another holiday.

“You started it!” “No, you did!!!” Wouldn’t it be great if we all exchanged those words happily, about starting love, sharing affection, and living in Heavenly Peace?

Who “started it”? God did.

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If your YouTube video opens in anything besides a man playing a bagpipe, then you need to switch to a desktop to play the video. There is a problem we have not solved yet with the videos on pads and phones.

Click for an excerpt of the motion picture: Joyeaux Noel

9-11-23

“9-11” will never lose its meaning in America; maybe it will have evocations as long as the world lasts. More than a mere “event,” it is one of those moments in history that people will always associate with where they were, what they were doing, when the news of the terror attacks occurred.

It might not lose its meaning, but will it lose its significance?

My son Ted was an intern at one of the major cable news networks at that time. Its studios are across the Hudson from lower Manhattan, and every day – before 9-11 – he could see the Twin Towers from the station’s parking lot. On that day he put in extra hours, working non-stop on the breaking news, correspondents’ feeds, editing video footage, some of which, featuring falling bodies and splattered corpses and collapsing monoliths, have still never been publicly shown.

I frequently have challenged audiences in some of my speeches if anyone could state, even approximately, the number of victims of terrorism there were on 9-11. Hands go up, and the invariable estimates are around 3,000. And my invariable response is this correction:

No. There were approximately 3,000 victims of murder on 9-11. The victims of terrorism are about 330-million… and still growing.

If there were “silver linings” to the clouds of smoke and dust on 9-11 it was that America was briefly united, even unified, in our response, grief, and resolution. Skeptics worried that clarity, patriotism, and some common purposes would be short-lived.

Of course, the skeptics were right. Many young people responded by volunteering for military service. American adventurism, however, has led to ambiguous results if not Pyrrhic victories. A Patriot Act inherently is flawed, perhaps compromising as many rights as it purports to protect. According to elections, surveys, and streets filled with spilled blood and broken glass, our citizenry is more divided than ever.

The terrorists are following an agenda. But who wrote it?

We are in this state not because of a few hijacked planes on 9-11. There were attacks before; many since; and 9-11 only represented the most palpable and perhaps symbolic of the threats America faces. In fact, as with the Roman Empire and all empires and decadent societies throughout history, such attacks are virtual metaphors for the self-destruction that essentially plagues us.

America has invited this situation by our abandonment of core values. Our society – indeed the West in general – is a Post-Christian culture. Among those who might say “I told you so” are the “great cloud of witnesses” described in the Bible (see Hebrews Chapter 11) and, by the totality of His Word and Commandments and Judgments, God Himself.

For further commentary (“Don’t take my word for it!”) I will commend some reflections by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was the Soviet exile, a man who fought Communism and somehow survived persecution and prisons (the gulags) and escaped to the West after his writings were smuggled out of Russia; they won praise and Nobel Prizes.

I will quote him briefly but wish I could share his thousands of pages. Find his books! His analyses – his warnings – are dispositive today. They are not mere critiques of monstrous Communism. They recognize the Bureaucratic State that threatens “democracies” today. They attacked all of the decadent West. They recognized that the Crisis of the Twentieth Century was not confined to the Communist State into which he was born.

The infection, he said, is not Communism per se – although, of course, Marxism is alive in American education, media, and party politics – but secularism. The rejection of God. Therefore he attacked not only Stalin of the past but the Bidens of the present; not only the Soviet apparatchiks but the American Dark State:

If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than… “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”…The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.

We are witnesses to the devastation of the world, be it imposed or voluntarily undergone. …sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction. This plunge into the abyss has aspects that are unquestionably global, dependent neither on political systems, nor on levels of economic and cultural development, nor yet on national peculiarities.

It was Dostoevsky… who drew from the French Revolution and its seething hatred for the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that preached by Marxism…. hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions.

Through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West ceased to stand for anything more lofty than the pursuit of “happiness”, a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short-lived value. It has become embarrassing to appeal to eternal concepts, embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system.

Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hate for their own society. Amid all the vituperation, it has been forgotten that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, freed from all limitations just as the various human rights are; that under communism (and communism breathes down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) — under communism the very same flaws become completely unbridled in any person with the last degree of authority; and that everyone else under that system truly does attain ‘equality’ — the equality of destitute slaves.

Instead of the ill-advised hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can only reach with determination for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently pushed away…. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.

From more than 50 years ago Solzhenitsyn speaks to us. Prophesies fulfilled before our eyes. Solutions under our noses.

Several correspondents have written lately to me about so many “gloom and doom” subjects in these messages, when I promise “a song in your hearts.” Well, yes. But I am a reporter of Biblical things and current events – I try to eavesdrop on the Lord. So these messages convey the facts of our situations, not fantasy.

God, however, writes “between the lines”! Turning to Him, repenting and reforming, will heal our land and dispel gloom and doom!

It is not too late – as individuals and as a nation!

For I the Lord will hold your right hand; Fear not! I will help you! (Isaiah 41:13)

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A dear friend has written that this is a song not in our hearts but to our hearts:

Click: Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand

9-4-23

The unofficial end of Summer: This weekend there will be the sounds of parades, the colors of flags, the sights of smiling friends and family, and if nothing else… the aromas of barbecues. Particularly dear to me as, these very weeks, my daughter Emily, who lives in Northern Ireland, is amping up her American-barbecue business in Ireland and the UK; the BBQueen of Derry. Appropriate Cultural Appropriation you can taste!

I have told this story before about summer get-togethers. When I skip it, I get letters asking “Where was that great song you post every summer?” On this Labor Day weekend, I remember a simple barbecue, but one of the most profound days of my life. A holiday far away from my home… but very close to my heart. It happened on a summer holiday almost 30 years ago.

And it always makes me wonder, Is an America we once knew disappearing?

I lived in East Texas back then for a few months, conducting interviews and research for a book I was writing. Once settled, I took out the Yellow Pages (remember them?) to chart the location of nearby Assembly of God churches, intent on visiting as many as I could through the summer. East Texas was in every way new to me, and I wanted to experience everything I could.

Well, the first one I visited was in Cut and Shoot. That’s a town’s name; you can look it up. A small white frame AG church was my first stop that summer… and I never visited another. In that tiny congregation, it was, um, obvious in three minutes that I was not from East Texas. I was born in New York City. Yet I was treated like family as if the folks had known me for decades. A fellow named Dave Gilbert asked me if I’d like to go to his farm for a barbecue where a bunch of people were just going to get together and “do some visitin’.”

I brought the biggest watermelon I could find as my contribution to the pot-luck. There were dozens and dozens of folks. I couldn’t tell which was family and who were friends, because everybody acted like kinfolk. When folks from East Texas ask, “How are you?” they really mean it. There were several monstrous barrel barbecue smokers with chimneys, all slow-cooking beef brisket. (Every region brags about its barbecue traditions, but I’ll fight anyone who doesn’t agree that low-heat, slow-smoked, no sauce, East-Texas barbecue is the best.) There was visitin’, surely; there were delicious side dishes; there was softball and volleyball and kids dirt-biking; and breaks for sweet tea and spontaneous singing of patriotic songs.

I sat back in a folding chair, and I thought, “This is America.”

As the sun set, the same food came out again – smoked brisket galore; all the side dishes; and desserts of all sorts. Better than the first time. Then the Gilberts cleared their house’s porch. People brought instruments out of their cars and trucks. Folks tuned their guitars; some microphones and amps were set up; chairs and blankets dotted the lawn. Dave Gilbert and his brothers, I learned, sang gospel music semi-professionally in the area. Pastor Charles Wigley of that local church, during the summer had opened for Gold City Quartet at a local concert, playing gospel music on the saxophone.

In some churches, in some parts of America, you sing solo every once in a while. You’re not only expected to – you want to. So into the evening, as the sun went down and the moon came up over those farms and fields, everyone at that picnic naturally sang, together or solo or in duets or quartets. Spontaneously, mostly. Far into the night, exuberantly with smiles, or heartfelt with tears, singing unto the Lord.

I sat back in the folding chair, and I thought, “This is Heaven.”

I have grown sad for people who have not experienced the type of worship where singers, and people who pray, do so spontaneously. From the congregation. Moving to the front. Sharing their hearts. Crying tears of joy or conviction. Loving the Lord, and each other, freely. If you have not… then visit a church where this is commonplace. Even witnessing it is an uplifting balm to the soul, where there is freedom and joy in singing spontaneously.

I attach a video that very closely captures the music, and the feeling – the fellowship – of that evening. A wooden ranch house, a barbecue picnic just ended, a campfire, and singers spontaneously worshiping, joining in, clapping, and “taking choruses.” Smiling, hugging. There were cameras at this particular get-together, but it took this city boy back to that holiday weekend, finding himself among a brand-new family, the greatest barbecue I ever tasted before or since… and the sweetest songs I know.

And I think to myself, nervously shedding a tear… “THIS is the America we are losing.”

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Click: The Sweetest Song I Know

2-12-23

Some people of recent times have torn down statues and monuments of American history’s great figures, including those of presidents. I am not only condemning vandals armed with paint balls and ropes, who were widely videotaped but never so much as arrested or fined. I refer instead to government officials and descendants of those leaders who scurried and hurried to align themselves with PC mobs, and support the desecration.

Those despicable anti-patriots in their suits and from their offices might be the virtual vandals, but they can never subtract from the greatness of many historical figures, including two whose birthdays we observe this month, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Theodore Roosevelt said of them, “There have been other men as great and other men as good; but in all the history of mankind there are no other two great men as good as these.”

I want to linger a moment before Lincoln. From his roots in crushing poverty and absence of schooling, he rose to be the savior of the Union, his wisdom equaled only by his humanity. It seems a miracle that that this unlikely person was the perfect leader at a unique time. I believe it was God’s working.

I also want to linger on the misconception that Lincoln was an atheist, or an agnostic. Yes, he was unchurched and seldom attended formal services. But his Bible was well-worn; he quoted Scripture extensively; and indeed by the end of his presidency, his messages and speeches were as much sermons as civic documents.

His humanity? We remember his reading the stack of requests for soldiers’ pardons he considered one day, each with testimonials from influential people… except one plea from a soldier who left his ranks to return home to a sick mother. “Does this man have no ‘friend’?” Lincoln asked. He was told No. The President said, “Well, he does now,” and pardoned him.

His faith? We remember his clear and powerful statement of theology, when he said in effect, “I am not so much concerned that ‘God is on our side,’ but that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”

Lincoln’s personal secretary John Hay testified to Lincoln’s spiritual struggles, and his reliance on prayer in the White House. It is inspiring to read of Lincoln’s steadily increasing faith… the progression of his appeals to God… invocations of Providence… seeking the Lord’s guidance… Biblical quotations… allusions to Bible history… setting aside national days of prayer, fasting, humiliation, and thanksgiving.

Lincoln’s first inaugural address acknowledges his “firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land.” In the second address: “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” And of course his reference in the Gettysburg Address that this “nation shall under God have a new birth of freedom.”

A proclamation:
It is fit and becoming in all people, at all times, to acknowledge and revere the Supreme Government of God; to bow in humble submission to His chastisement; to confess and deplore their sins and transgressions in the full conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and to pray, with all fervency and contrition, for the pardon of their past offenses, and for a blessing upon their present and prospective action. And whereas when our own beloved country, once, by the blessings of God, united, prosperous and happy, is now afflicted with faction and civil war, it is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation, and in sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals, to humble ourselves before Him and to pray for His mercy.

In private communication, 1862:
We are indeed going through a great trial – a fiery trial. In the very responsible position in which I happened to be placed, being a humble instrument in the Hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out His great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to His will, and that it might be so I have sought His aid.

About his dark moments when Lee’s army invaded Pennsylvania, Lincoln wrote:
When everyone seemed panic-stricken… I went to my room… and got down on my knees before Almighty God and prayed… Soon a sweet comfort crept into my soul that God Almighty had taken the whole business into His own hands….

Lincoln said about the Bible:
In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say I believe the Bible is the best gift God has given to man. All the good Savior gave to the world was communicated through this Book.

And other reflections:
I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.

God loves us the way we are, but too much to leave us that way. I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.

We do not need to contrast these confessions of a sitting President, whom ignorant secularists like to portray as an unbeliever, with the actions of the current sitting President who recalls his days as a choir boy but supports the murder of babies and other policies in contradiction to his Church’s teachings. But the temptation is strong to draw contrasts.

Yet Abraham Lincoln, as a Christian Patriot, can stand on his own, without human contrasts. And he compares well with standards laid out by God Almighty, His Son Jesus, and the Holy Bible. Let us stand in that manner, too, on this President’s Day; and all days.

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Click: Battle Hymn of the Republic

11-14-22

The history of humankind proceeds not on a straight line but in waves and bursts, progress and regress, prosperity and misery, exploration and stasis, freedom and… the yearning for freedom. It is interesting to trace history through topics and not calendar pages: the effects of history’s many epidemics, for instance. The search for gold, riches, a Fountain of Youth. The extent to which food and agricultural items have shaped the course of nations – the “routes” and wars over sugar, spices, tobacco, cotton, opium.

The cycles hold true for ideas, too. Do not dismiss this view. The imposition of mere loyalty to flags and rulers – changing peoples’ minds – has resulted in constantly changing borders and uncountable lost lives. The appetite for Communist hegemony among its police-state borders led Stalin to liquidate – he embraced the term – millions of people, including a virtual depopulation of Ukraine. The “Cultural Revolution” in China annihilated an estimated 60-million people. Pol Pot in Cambodia slaughtered an estimated million peasants, and he was proud of the mountains of skulls he displayed.

The battles for hearts and minds have been as consequential (and often bloodier) to “progress” than wars for riches and treasure.

Thank God, there have been intellectual movements that have proceeded more peacefully. Among these has been the spread of the Gospel. I will save correspondents their ink and electrons by noting that Christianity sometimes engaged in “imperialistic” and fratricidal conflicts. Often, doctrinal disputes morphed into persecution and death. Much of the spilled blood also was in defense of the faith against fierce attacks by such as Islam, Communism, and state-secularism.

But thanking God further, many of the Christian movements affecting world history have been bloodless. Missionaries to minds, bodies, and spirits were beneficial in many lands. During the Reformation, not every reformer was challenged by Catholic Inquisitions. With notable exceptions, the followers of Luther and Calvin, as well as Pietists and Anabaptists were unmolested. With exceptions, again, Methodists and Quakers in England increased their numbers of adherents.

… and when they were persecuted, at vital inflection-points in history, they said farewell to their fractious societies and sailed to the New World. Eventually in the Colonies and the United States, these faith traditions enjoyed for virtually the first time in human history freedom of thought and freedom of conscience. Freedom to worship.

These movements have labels: everything from conquest to imperialism to trade wars to military hegemony. And “the spread of Christianity.” In America, especially as we look forward to Thanksgiving, the unique exercise of religious freedom was not a static thing. Rather than retreating, liberty grew and reaffirmed itself. Some of those growth spurts resulted from revivals, evangelism, and missionary work.

But they often were labelled – and are better understood now because we need another wave today – Awakenings.

“Great Awakenings” were major factors in the establishment of the American nation. The nurture of civic virtue; patriotism in the early days of the Republic; the impetus behind the movement to abolish slavery; the inspiration of social-reform movements in the Industrial Age – all were not populated by leaders who happened to be Christians. They were, rather, by-products of massive waves of evangelism and revival, conversions and commitments to the Gospel — positive movements led by Christians.

In Colonial America a man named William Tennent established The Log College whose graduates spread into the frontier, converting red and white people to Christ. In his history The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt described week-long revivals and camp meetings on the frontier.

The most famous person associated with any of the Great Awakenings was Jonathan Edwards. A powerful preacher (Yale graduate and eventually president of Princeton College), his sermons sometimes lasted four hours, delivered to rapt congregations and large assemblies. His many books influenced the Founders.

George Whitefield was a preacher who toured the Colonies in the years preceding the Revolution. It is arguable there might not have been the Declaration of Independence or a movement to secede from Great Britain without Whitefield’s effect on the population of American towns and cities. From the disparate strains of Christian faith, he wrought unity of fellowship and purpose. His listeners in the streets and parks of Philadelphia numbered as many as thirty thousand at a time. Among them, every time, was an admiring Benjamin Franklin.

The next Great Awakening commenced around 1803, led by Timothy Dwight, grandson of Edwards and president of Yale. He led half the student body to Christ, which inspired transformations at other colleges. Charles G Finney was an attorney who was converted to Christ and thereafter converted thousands of others. He held a revival in 1830 that spread and lasted, uninterrupted, for more than a decade. By many reports, where he preached, bars closed, churches opened, and crimes decreased.

These movements resulted in more than folks being nicer or changing their social customs. America practiced widespread piety and charity. When the Frenchman Alexis deToqueville visited America at this time he was astonished (by more than anything else) at the bedrock Christian faith, the number of churches, and the moral standards throughout American cities, towns, and frontier villages.

“America is great because America is good.”

The life-changing effects were of course manifested in social reforms, the conscience of a population. In 1857 the businessman Jeremiah Lanphier inaugurated weekly lunchtime prayer meetings near Wall Street. The sessions grew in attendance, and soon more than 10,000 people joined daily prayer meetings across New York City. A few years later the Civil War commenced, and it was widely acknowledged that the millions converted during this Great Awakening accelerated the urgency of Abolitionism.

Since then there have other waves of revival, evangelism, street preaching, media ministry, Pentecostal and Charismatic renewals; and popular, effective preachers like D L Moody, Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Billy Graham. It is tempting, however, to see these latter-day movements as blessings somewhat more modest in scope than earlier Great Awakenings.

At a time when many believers behold a nation fallen far from its spiritual moorings and Biblical foundations, another Great Awakening is essential. Our society has become hostile to Christianity. Its new standards are sexual immorality, a drug culture, crime, abuse of children and women – and not only acceptance but the promotion of such.

The recent elections have exposed the unfortunate fact that many Christians have put disproportionate faith in the political system, and less in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Widespread apostasy in American churches has clouded the vision of well-intentioned Christian patriots.

Set your alarms. America needs less Woke and more Awake – a new Great Awakening. Everything, including politicians and elections, is futile without another such move.

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From a 1995 Promise Keepers event (my son and I were in attendance):

Click Video Clip: Amazing Grace

7-4-22

When my children were young, my wife and I had them memorize our family’s address, in case they ever strayed from home or lost their way. To orient themselves or assist those who would help.

In these times, we would do well – all of us, adults as well as children – to memorize another Address ourselves. We have, in many and substantial cases, strayed from Home as a people. Our culture seems to have lost its way.

On the Fourth of July we observe a national birthday, commemorating the date affixed to the Declaration of Independence. With the Constitution and other founding documents, speeches, and sermons, it is testimony that the nation and the very “idea” of a Republic were endowed by our Creator.

Many Americans have grown cold or indifferent to those ideals, and we see examples of citizens taking their rights and blessings for granted At the other extreme, radicals denigrate those ideals and besmirch the Founders and Framers.

However, elsewhere in the world there remain lonely and courageous freedom-seekers who are inspired by those words. There are young and fragile governments who model their struggles on those words.

There should be American children and, yes, adults, too who commit to memory some of the ringing words of our heritage.

July Fourth is a unique day for several reasons. Among them, the Declaration was signed; it was when Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders secured San Juan Hill in a bloody battle; and it was the day (actually one of three days) that the consequential Battle of Gettysburg was fought.

There are some people today who reject the idealism of statesmen and soldiers of our past. They dismiss the sacrifices and hard-fought benefits of our difficult civic evolution. They reject the blessings of God; His working in a land when His guidance was sought; they deny God Himself.

Among other heresies, people claim that the conscience of a nation was not roused by the cancer of slavery; that other motives animated a civil war. But I have archives newspaper and magazines of the era, and it is striking how simple citizens – even newly arrived immigrants – affirmed and reaffirmed allegiance to a nation they could not abide splitting apart. And there was a burning determination to end slavery. As President Lincoln said, “If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong,” and hundreds of thousands died so that bondsmen they did not know would be free.

When I was in grade school I chose to memorize Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I am still moved when I recite it, or read it, or hear it spoken. It is only about 250 words long, and when Lincoln delivered it, the address followed a two-hour speech by that event’s “main” speaker. Witnesses say that the assembled crowd had barely settled, after stretching their bodies and routinely applauding, when it ended!

But its words – Lincoln’s message and meaning – were soon regarded as profound. It is now regarded as one of the great orations, great essays, of humankind.

I am afraid, to use Lincoln’s invitations, that if we cannot re-dedicate ourselves to what constitutes “this nation, under God,” we are lost as a people. The world might indeed little note nor long remember whatever it was we have done here in America.

We need to be reminded of our home addresses, so to speak, for we have lost our way.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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Video Click:

6-27-22

Certain events in my life have caused me to dread headlines – not every day; and for years as a newspaperman it was my business to write headlines – but we all have been conditioned to expect surprises. Weather, wars, assassinations, disasters. I was just beginning a new job in San Diego, living amidst boxes in my new home, when the TV showed the breaking news of what we now call 9-11.

That I knew that Manhattan neighborhood well, and had been to the top of the Towers, added but little to the shock. Even today, almost every time I turn on the TV news in the morning, I wonder whether a similar headline will confront me.

In a similar way, and not only as a student of history, there are events that I would happily anticipate as headlines – hopes and dreams that might be fulfilled some day. Usually these thoughts are futile. But sometimes they happen: dreams do come true.

I was astonished, for instance, that “the Wall fell,” and Communist governments not only collapsed across Europe – one after the other, like dominoes – but that hardly a drop of blood was shed! Oh, maybe someone hurt themselves as the Berlin Wall was razed; and excepting the Romanian thug Nicolae Ceauşescu and his immediate family there were no fatalities, either by regimes’ defenses or by freedom fighters. (Strangely, in college I briefly had dated the daughter of the government minister who fleetingly tried to assume power in the dictator’s wake.)

My point is that a headline, “Communist Governments Overthrown, Bloodlessly; Democracy and Capitalism Come to Europe,” was one I never expected.

A similar headline – “Roe vs Wade Overturned and Invalidated by Supreme Court” – is one I dreamed of for half a century, and simply never believed would happen. Indeed as with the subsequent “Casey” ruling, I was certain that America would continue down (!) the path of disrespecting and dismantling our cultural heritage. Declining. What I have called “The Culture of Death.”

My friends know that in the days of “Roe,” those almost nihilistic times, I was untroubled by the idea of abortion… unpersuaded by opposing arguments… and approving of its legalization. Those views and actions are never merely abstract in debates and events; when you choose sides in such matters you become a complicit enabler. There are few things from which I have reformed that have caused such bitter tears and prayers for forgiveness. So I became an activist on the “pro-life” side.

… and therefore I was, frankly, astonished to learn that Roe vs Wade has been overturned. And without violence or bloodshed (except, that is, for the 63-million babies that have been killed since the Court decided it).

Growing from my concern and activism, in 2005 I managed to secure a magazine interview with Norma McCorvey, the “anonymous” Jane Roe (a female “John Doe”) of the landmark case. She was famously reclusive and granted few interviews. Her own baby (of the case’s focus) in fact never was aborted, but was given for adoption. After her “win,” she worked in abortion clinics… was disgusted by what she witnessed… became a Christian… and then worked to counsel other women.

That interview will soon appear in a national magazine, and I will share it here, too, in coming weeks.

But let us not celebrate too soon or too enthusiastically. Just as Communist governments fell, but Communism lives on – in other governments; in academia; in the media; in “progressive” politics – so abortion will continue. Sobering facts to realize and remember:

• Overturning Roe and Casey does not end abortion in the United States. It merely lets states accept or reject the practice. Some do, some don’t; more will, more won’t. Just as drug laws are local, so will legal abortions be available here and there. I have been to “dry” counties and towns in Kansas and even California – where alcohol is outlawed – but people drive a little bit; and they will for abortions too. Vacation packages might be designed around abortions.
• Abortifacients will abound; “morning after” drugs probably will become more common than weed; and even in proscribed locales, “procedures” likely will become as common as Botox treatments. They always were, of course: what has really changed in our lifetimes is this: what people once whispered about, many people these days brag about. Savage, but true.
• Is the Court’s decision, therefore, futile? No. Societies define themselves by laws, art, and literature. So the “overturn” might in a larger sense be a codification of our nation’s essential standards. IF it stands, or holds. No sure thing.
• So the “fights” will continue, but in state capitals, in town councils, in local elections. That is the point of the Court’s reversal: the Framers meant that some matters (not only concepts and technologies they could not anticipate) are best decided in communities. Of, by, and for communities. We might not be perfectly united, but we are states.

There is another point that might not be appreciated going forward… but it is a lesson in democracy. For all the tumult and shouting about guns and abortions, and about election frauds and discredited stories about Russian collusion, “impossible” dreams do come true. Communist dictatorships did collapse. The guarantee of self-defense according to the Second Amendment finally seems secure. And contrary to social drift in America, and standards in other countries (our abortion policies are generally more permissive than dozens of other countries’ around the world)… we are in fact reading headlines that bring hope on the issue of infanticide.

Other battles remain to confront us: crime; abuse; drugs; the breakdown of the family; education reform… but we can sense redemption from pessimism!

And perhaps the most unlikely surprise among startling news is the “vessel” who successfully carried water on these issues. The Bible has many examples of unlikely or unknown or untested people who God used to exercise His will. In a future generation, Americans will read in history books, not only newspapers, the headline: “Orange Man Good.”

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Music Video Click: Unplanned

5-30-22

America has become so secularized that we are stripping our traditional religious observances – Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving – of spiritual distinctives, re-branding them in schools, public squares, and the media as Winter, Spring, and Fall Fests, and more innocuous labels when they can be found.

Even worse, our secular solemnities also are being neutered. The greatest of presidents whose lives are inspirations have been consigned to virtual snow-globes and shaken up as flakes in a generic “presidents day” flurry, lost among unfortunate and forgotten nonentities. Fireworks and parades on the Fourth of July are symbols that largely have yielded to barbecues and reunions. All of those former commemorative days have morphed into excuses for long weekends and cheesy TV commercials.

Suffering not the least in this rush to homogenize our cultural heritage is Memorial Day. I thank God that some people still recall and honor the origin of the patriotic day, originally “Decoration Day,” established for visits to graves and monuments of fallen heroes.

We can be thankful for small favors, but I generally curse the impulse that kidnaps Memorial Day and uses it as an excuse to “mark the beginning of summer” and inspire weekend sales at furniture outlets and used-car lots.

My dad served in World War II (he overflew D-Day in a Weather Squadron) and came home; so “his day,” as with millions of others, and from other wars, was Veterans Day. Memorial Day honors those who sacrificed their lives.

Military service always incurs sacrifice, whether men were drafted or men and women who volunteer. And no less (to the nation’s shame) spouses and children who often sacrifice greatly too. From my perspective, and what inhabits my desire to memorialize and hold these dead in awe, is what motivated those service personnel whom we honor.

In every war through history, combatants sometimes have been motivated by hate. It manifests itself in all sorts of ways, from summoning bravery… to action “beyond the call of duty”… to, occasionally throughout history, savagery and atrocities. The range of motives and performance is wide – but I have always believed that the essence of hatred, if it could be distilled and measured, routinely is stronger in civilian leaders than in the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines.

Largely this is due to the underlying causes of many wars. As a historian and as a Christian, I will unfurl the flag of my cynicism. Wars have been fought for noble reasons, including defense and rescue operations. Many also have been fought for territorial gain or commercial advantages – often brutal, yet arguable extensions, as von Clausewitz wrote, of politics and diplomacy.

Cynicism joins the battle, so to speak, when we recognize how many wars have been fought, and lives lost, over hollow objectives; futile suicide missions; changing war goals; civilian slaughter; friendly embraces of recent enemies; abandoned rationales for “why we fight”; and neglect of gold-star families and veterans’ needs.

Should I mention such things on a Memorial Day? I cannot help it; but in my mind such memories inspire a greater motivation – indeed, a necessity – to honor the dead. If not the wars, memorialize the dead.

Most fallen soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, I believe, have not fought and died out of hatred, even against malign enemies… but more out of love.

They love their homeland. They love their families, their Main Streets, their heritage. They love their flag. They love peace, the ultimate goal. More – and here is what leaves me awestruck and deserves our “memorialization” – they love service. They love serving. They love and accept and embrace sacrifice.

How many people have that “DNA” any more? Thank God for the “few and the proud” in all military branches… and we surely can wonder whether the “few” are growing fewer in society. If America’s shores and cities and towns were invaded, would regular citizens be willing (or able, if guns are confiscated) to rise up in defense?

I truly wonder whether the ghostly echelon of the fallen – whose graves I hope we all will visit on Memorial Day, even if the cemeteries and the gravestone names are unfamiliar – would have been so dedicated if they could have looked ahead and could have seen what has America has become. I won’t start a checklist of horrible transformations in our society, but if you have read this far, you probably agree with me. If not… well, the right publicly to disagree, which is threatened, remains one of things our fallen heroes died to protect.

Salute. Shed a tear. Raise a prayer. We honor fallen heroes for wearing the uniform, embracing the flag, and sacrificing “their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor.” Let us honor them too for America’s dwindling (God forbid) spirit of service and sacrifice.

Let us pray that not one of them, after all, did not die in vain.

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Click: Memorial Day – Taking Chance

12-25 and 27-21

Christmas

“It’s your fault!” “No! It’s your fault!” “You started it!” “No, you did!”

We hear exchanges like these yelled back and forth in the schoolyard, or playgrounds.

Or in diplomatic debates. In politics. On cable news. Or on bloody battlefields.

Humankind seems not to have “advanced” much through the centuries; and neither with children nor adults. We congratulate each other, and fool ourselves, that “progress” is the hallmark of our times. Yet the bloodiest death toll from wars, in any century of the earth’s existence, was in the Twentieth Century; and more than in all previous centuries combined. We brag that we – “civilizations” – have finally ended the scourge of slavery; yet there are greater numbers of slaves today than ever in human history. The numbers now are not the faces that flash in our minds, bondservants; but all manner of children, women, minorities, homeless, voiceless, migrants, the anonymous.

As long as there are power elites; as long as greed outpaces love; as long as hypocrisy can always find a nicer name, humankind will be (in the Bible’s phrase, Proverbs 26:11; II Peter 2:22) like dogs returning to their vomit. Think about what changes have occurred, really, when science develops new ways to save lives… as it also invents new ways to end lives. What a spectacle, when people march to save baby seals and whales, and march for the right to kill babies.

Well, Merry Christmas, anyway. Let the holiday sing.

Is society’s spoken wish of the season an empty phrase? Or is there a spark of hope when we manage to pause at Christ’s Mass, to think, or sing, or worship around the meaning of that word Incarnation? That concept – Emmanuel; God With Us.

Once in our latter days it was manifested; only briefly, in a unique setting; and it is largely forgotten by history. Not many people know about the Christmas Truce. It was a virtual miracle during the first Christmas of the “Great War,” World War I, surely the most useless of history’s many useless wars.

A few months after war was declared in Europe, by almost every big and small nation, almost a million soldiers had already been slaughtered. Christmastime was come, and soldiers were mired in trenches that were to become so established that for more than two years the battle line never moved more than 30 miles one way or another. In that unlikely hellhole a miracle did occur.

Minor details differ but the dispositive facts are acknowledged: Peace broke out.

Soldiers of Germany, England (Scotland, actually), and France, at night, spontaneously sang Christmas carols… and were joined by “enemies” who could hear across No Man’s Land… nervous soldiers climbed from trenches to greet their foes, and shake hands… gifts were exchanged, even little trinkets, but also pastries and wine sent from home. They shared pictures of wives and children… more hymn singing… fireworks, intended to illuminate battlefields so to aim the cannons, were now shot skyward in celebration. There were tentative, but successful, attempts to communicate.

Of course they communicated. The languages that night were hymns and Bibles and chocolates and cigars. Handshakes and smiles and tears.

A Merry Christmas. A Holy Christmas. Peace on earth… at least in that narrow 27-mile-long battle line, south of Ypres and east of Armentieres, site of the song about les Mademoiselles, that night.

A British soldier recalled the Christmas Truce almost two decades later: We stuck up a board with a Merry Christmas on it. The enemy had stuck up a similar one. … Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads. Two of the Germans done the same and commenced to walk up the river bank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench.

We and the Germans met in the middle of No Man’s Land. Their officers were also now out. Our officers exchanged greetings with them.… One of their men, speaking in English, mentioned that he had worked in Brighton for some years and that he was fed up to the neck with this damned war and would be glad when it was all over. We told him that he wasn’t the only one that was fed up with it. (Frank Richards, “Old Soldiers Never Die,” 1933)

Another history records: [The British] Brigadier General G.T. Forrestier-Walker issued a directive forbidding fraternization: “For it discourages initiative in commanders, and destroys offensive spirit in all ranks. … Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices and exchange of tobacco and other comforts, however tempting and occasionally amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited.” (Stanley Weintraub, “Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce,” 2001)

How much different would the next day have been – how much different would the world be today – if the Truce had held?

Note that chocolates and cigars were only the presents. The GIFTS were hymns and Bible verses – they brought the soldiers out of trenches; not the prospect of snacks or smokes or a soccer game in the snow.

Christmas. God did not intend for Jesus’s Incarnation, the spirit of that Christmas Truce, to be a one-time miracle, but to be everyday life.

He intended that we know-and-show that love and fellowship can be normal, not rare.

We can be changed by the Holy Day, not be annoyed by yet another holiday.

“You started it!” “No, you did!!!” Wouldn’t it be great if we all exchanged those words happily, about starting love, sharing affection, and living in Heavenly Peace?

Who “started it”? God did.

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Click for an excerpt of the motion picture: Joyeaux Noel

9-13-21
Nine-Eleven ~~

Think back on 20 years ago, September 11. How many victims of terrorism were there?

Most people will cite around 3000.

That is wrong. On September 11, 2001, there were approximately 3000 victims of murder at those three American locations.

But there were 300-million victims of terrorism. And still are.

Words are important. They can point to the truth; they also can obscure the truth. They inform us; they deceive us. Humankind is persuaded that words and language elevate us over the rest of animate creation; but in truth, “communication” is only useful according to the character of the user – and the discernment of the hearer – and otherwise camouflages the baser aspects of human nature.

“Terrorism” does not need adjectives and modifiers. Have you noticed TV news reports of, say, a school shooting or a planted bomb exploding, and the reporter says, “Officials have not yet determined whether it is terrorism.” Idiots. People are terrified – that suffices to be Terrorism.

America has been on a war footing – a wartime economy, busied with large and small wars, newer and newer weaponry – since World War II and the Depression it overcame, so we live in an Age of Terror. Afghanistan became boring to many Americans after 20 years, but we forget that history is replete with Hundred Year Wars and Thirty Year Wars. Not only wars: for centuries, people lived under constant threat of Black Plagues, Yellow Plagues, and other mysterious pestilence.

Of course I do not minimize the current waves of Terror, and of course I mourn the murdered and honor the brave rescuers. Searing emotions. But for our nation to lull itself into thinking that 9-11 was a “one-off,” or that life can be “normal” again… invites another shocking news story interrupting our regular programming. We want Terrorism to be a limited series and Terror incidents to be sound bites. Transforming evil into banality is seductive… and ultimately deadly.

I was a boy at the dawn of the “Nuclear Age,” when schools had bombing drills. Herded into hallways by the gym, or taught to kneel with hands over our heads, under desks, in order to protect ourselves, we were told we protected ourselves from a possible thermo-nuclear attack. I had nightmares.

My son was an intern at MSNBC (when it was a different cable-news operation) on 9-11. Its studios are in New Jersey, across from lower Manhattan; its parking lot affords a superb view of the Statue of Liberty, and, on that morning, a clear view of the flaming, smoking, collapsing towers. Working three straight emergency shifts, he edited raw footage of bodies falling and people dying that have not yet been widely seen. My late wife was afraid he would be emotionally scarred; but he, young professional, has not had nightmares.

The truth is we are all scarred, and scared. We all have nightmares – of different sorts, but… the world is different, more dangerous than it was 20 years ago.

We were attacked because we were a Christian nation thriving on freedom and private enterprise. Have we doubled down on those values, or moved away from those values, after 20 years?

Why my doom and gloom on this anniversary? I remember; I do not forget; I honor the brave; I grieve for the lost and their families. We commemorate on the anniversary. But… it is a kind of American trait to seize upon anniversaries so that we may turn the page. And move on. And lie to ourselves about persistent challenges.

We cannot let that happen.

Twenty years ago, would you have thought there would be no “major” Terror attack on our soil for two decades? Answered prayer.

But who would have thought that brave police forces would be cursed and defamed today? Who would have thought that “unity” – so real while the dust was still in the air – would today be a cruel joke and a false slogan? Who would have believed that after thousands of service casualties overseas, and billions spent on arms, today the cursed Terrorists once again would be in control of their vast base, brandishing “Made in USA” weaponry; and an American president cavalier about the situation… a situation that includes dead and abandoned US citizens?

Ah, but words are employed by some people to describe those facts differently. Propagandists at podiums and on cable news engage in “newspeak.” Their training manuals are not so much the writings of Marx and Lenin… but Orwell and Huxley.

This is an essay devoted to Christian encouragement; I have not forgotten. More than Marx, Lenin, Orwell, and Huxley, the training manual we need to be reading is the Holy Bible. The problem with words is not always with the words themselves, but in the deceits of the speakers and the ignorance of the hearers. So we should remember important aspects:

One, that Jesus is the “Word of God.” The world was spoken into existence. We are told in John 1:1, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Second, the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart (Hebrews 4:12).

Finally, since I have mentioned the power of words to deceive as well as inform, remember that the Bible tells us that No man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison…. Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so (James 3:8,10).

Discern things clearly on this anniversary. Those poor 3000 souls were victims of murderers. The rest of us were, and still are, the victims of Terrorism. That fact has not changed. Is our response changing?

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Click: Dido’s Lament

9-6-21
Labor Day Weekend
In whatever way you spend the weekend holiday, pause a moment and pray something from your heart.

Like the ancient Roman empire, this world is doomed to fall
And it’s much too big a thing for mortal man.
Just take a look around and see the writing on the wall.
Somehow we’ve got to find a helping hand.

This world has never been in the awful shape it’s in,
And people scorn the things our leaders do.
It’s time a prayer was spoken from the heart of every man.
Jesus, take a hold and lead us through.

The mighty roar of gunfire is now a local sound
And our city streets are filled with angry men.
Law is now a mockery throughout our troubled land
And destruction seems to be the current trend.

This world has never been in the awful shape it’s in.
And our leaders seem in doubt as what to do.
It’s time a prayer was spoken from the heart of every man.
Jesus, take a hold and lead us through.

Jesus, take a hold and lead us through.

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Click: Jesus Take A Hold

8-16-21

The thoughts I want to share here are important, I think. They are to me, and I think should be to patriots and people of faith. Reflections on a theme are what constitute essays (rather than articles or sermons) and this week I also share a little diary of reading-matter that have paralleled and fueled my thoughts.

… I could say my “angst.” For many of us share an apocalyptic view of the current condition of America – of the West, of the cultural period in which we live, post-Christianity. Overall, we are encouraged since we have peeked at the end of the Book and know how our story ends. But we are in an awful place now; growing worse by the day in myriad aspects; and there will be torment before the End of Time. The Book of Revelation also makes that clear. A glorious spoiler, as it were.

I was talking with a like-minded friend this week, crying in our beer (seltzer water, actually) about the state of things. The virtual impossibility of turning things around. How can we resist? Fight back? Redeem? Rescue? How to insulate? What is next? Where is safe? Who is sane?

I have been re-reading the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, an enigmatic American who was personally reclusive but simultaneously specific and universal in his free verse about everyday people and their character. Pessimistic, said some; fatalistic. He invented a town that was his setting, Tilbury Town. Edgar Lee Masters did the same with Spoon River, but of a different flavor.

Theodore Roosevelt, who “discovered” Robinson and gave him a government job with the instructions to think of poetry first and paperwork second – his lone exception to bending Civil-Service rules! – admitted that he did not always understand Robinson, but he recognized his genius.

In his poem “The Dark House” Robinson wrote,

Where a faint light shines alone, Dwells a Demon I have known.
Most of you had better say “The Dark House,” and go your way.
Do not wonder if I stay….

There he is who was my friend, Damned, he fancies, to the end–
Vanquished, ever since a door, Closed, he thought, for evermore
On the life that was before….

There’s a music yet unheard By the creature of the word,
Though it matters little more Than a wave-wash on the shore –
Till a Demon shuts a door.

So, if he be very still With his Demon, and one will,
Murmurs of it may be blown To my friend who is alone
In a room that I have known.

After that from everywhere, Singing life will find him there;
And my friend, again outside, Will be living, having died.

Before the poem was published in The Children Of the Night Robinson sent the poem to Roosevelt, who replied – mirroring its poetic and metaphysical tone, rare for Roosevelt – “There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us; he who never failed has not been tempted. But the man who does in the end conquer, who does painfully retrace the steps of his slipping, why, he shows that he has been tried in the fire and not found wanting. It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.”

An undying truth, even if seemingly banal. Whether he was trying convince Robinson to look upward – or convince himself – it is a moral watchword. I memorized those lines as a boy and called upon them often. Roosevelt, for all his ebullience, knew about the Dark House, or at least was not unrealistic about the perils of life and our national destiny. In a remarkably revealing story, we are told that he entertained the writer H G Wells at Sagamore Hill and gloomily surveyed the challenges facing America in the future.

But he grabbed Wells by the lapels and fiercely said (again, probably more to himself): “But, it… is… worth… the… fight!”

Yes, America is worth the fight, not the least because we are trashing our foundational commitments to Biblical principles and Christian values. America has evolved from facing challenges, to learning from failures… to penalizing success.

I also read this week the very provocative essay by Charles Pépin, “The Virtues Of Failure.” Its refreshing combination of realism and honesty make an encouraging case for optimism. Translated, I hope well, from the French:

“As a teacher, I often see pupils mortified by the bad grades I dispense. Apparently nobody has informed them that human beings can fail. But it is a simple concept: we can fail…. Animals cannot fail, because their behavior is dictated by instinct. In order not to be wrong they just have to obey their own nature. Every time the bird builds its own nest it does so perfectly. Birds do not need to learn from their own failures.

“Being wrong, facing failure, we manifest our truth as humans — we are not animals determined by instinct; nor perfectly programmed machines; nor gods. We can fail because we are men and we are free. Free to make mistakes, free to correct them, free to progress.”

And here we diagnose the cancer that afflicts us. “Free” is becoming a dirty word. “Freedom” is being canceled. We have accelerated the slide from “cradle-to-grave” welfare to government answers for everything. Light bulbs to sneezes. Encouraging children to choose their gender – as if they could – before they can spell the word. Killing babies. Paying people not to work. Inviting hordes to invade our land, no health screening, no terrorist checks. Equating the Bible with “hate speech.” Reviving race-based bigotry.

And – from government, to the news media, to mass entertainment, to the healthcare industry, to churches themselves – teaching Americans in uncountable ways to look anywhere other than churches, the Bible, and God Almighty for answers to our dilemmas. (And, oh, do we have ‘em!) “No problem, you religious nuts! We’ve got it all covered!”

The government big enough to give you anything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have. Look around you. While you still can.

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive. I John 1:9

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Click: I Know the Master of the Wind

7-4-21

This title might seem blasphemous to patriots. Those who know me and my works and my essays know that for the old red, white, and blue I would cheer three hundreds times, and I have.

There are many among us these days who would offer three jeers for the red, white, and blue. And do so, every day, in many ways.

“My country right or wrong”? Yes, I will defend the flag and our American heritage; and most of you readers do, too. But is not a trio of random colors that we revere, or the mere fabric on which those colors appear. Rather it is the fabric of our republic – the warp and weave, literally, of what made us Americans – that we defend. Or we should.

If those 50 stars represent, instead of separate states, let us say the hallmarks of contemporary America, will we yet rise and defend stars that stand for abortion, loss of free speech, threatened denial of firearm ownership, open borders, censorship of the Bible in public places, government weaponization of tax agencies, legalized drugs, gambling, and perversion, monitoring of “hate speech” and free assembly…?

The Revolution-era Patriots would not have fought for such things. They rebelled against far milder intrusions by the King! Their “lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor” meant more than accepting attacks upon our country, as today’s Christian Patriots go along and get along… not wanting to hurt the feelings of those who despise us. Happy Fourth of July.

This Christian column will turn to Christian things. Many of us have referred to Alexis de Tocqueville’s long visit to America in the 1840s, and his brilliant writings, his analysis of why America is unique in world history. Shame on us, not many of us have read him; shame on me, I did not until recently. But for all of his examination of immigrant groups, laws, fertile resources, and social traditions, he returned again and again to the bedrock strength of the American character: religion.

“America will cease to be great when it ceases to be good,” he wrote in that regard, and how community churches and Christian faith undergirded the American character.

Is Christianity dying in America? Is Christianity an essential component of American greatness? Have our iconic wood-frame churches and beautiful cathedrals become mere social clubs or museums? How many pastors and priests preach “inclusion” instead of the Gospel? How many homosexual rainbow flags fly with – or in the place of – the American flag or a denomination’s Christian flag?

Jacques Rivière once observed to the poet Paul Claudel that “Christianity is dying…. We do not know why, above our towns, there still rise those spires which no longer [host] the prayers of any one of us…. Surrounded by railroad stations and hospitals, and from which the people themselves have chased [the faithful].”

This describes too many churches, too many places, too many people in America today.

These very days we hear government officials bleating for trillions of dollars to take care of those in need. We listen to commercials where companies brag about spending millions (our money, of course) on the poor and disadvantaged. Whatever else these initiatives are – they are battles in the war on religion.

Jesus desires that His children have a heart for the poor. God ordained His church to exercise charity. And the Founders of this nation said – many times, in many ways – that without a religious spirit, a republic is doomed to fail. They would not have dreamed of having a government rob those initiatives from its citizens.

Thank God, the poet Claudel responded to Rivière with brilliant clarity: “Truth is not concerned with how many people it persuades.”

As an aphorism, that is valid; but the question that confronts us on July 4th is, How many people in “Christian America” care about the Truth any more? America no longer argues against Truth, but tends often to ignore it. Truth has become irrelevant. We remember that a lady outside Constitution Hall, as it is known today, anxiously asked Benjamin Franklin as the Framers left one evening, “Sir, what have you given us?”

You know Franklin’s answer: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

Note well: He was not differentiating between the American Constitution and Monarchy. The Framers were careful to design and bequeath a Republic – structured, limited, balanced, representative government. In the style of Athens, Rome, and, yes, the Bible blueprints for a society, as those men frequently invoked.

NOT a democracy, which was despised and feared by Athens and Rome and the wise Framers. There is a difference, and today’s mobs not only blur the distinctions: they have declared war on order, tradition, and the religious spirit – Christianity and its role in our civic life.

I ask again, for serious thought: is this what we should salute as the flag passes by? If we shed a tear, is it for the America of today… or what America used to be?

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Click: Red Skelton’s Pledge of Allegiance

5-31-21

Hey, Soldier. Or Sailor, Airman, Marine. Late servicemen and women, fallen or passed on.

It’s Memorial Day. Your day.

Back when all the holidays meant something – and meant something different – this began as “Decoration Day.” When people decorated military graves, or commemorative statues, or monuments and plaques.

That’s why I’m addressing you as one group, and as anonymous veterans, because Decoration Day was designed to memorialize, to remember and honor, dead servicemen and women. All of you. You know, on the Fourth of July we celebrate our independence; on Veterans’ Day we honor the retired military among us.

That’s the way it was supposed to be. Decoration Day was changed to Memorial Day, maybe because the act of placing decorative flowers and flags was becoming an empty gesture. Or simply wasn’t being done that much anymore. Whatever: most Americans think of it now as “the beginning of summer,” the vacation season. So, backyard barbecues have replaced parades and cemetery services.

Maybe that’s what you fought for, and many of you died for. “The American Way of Life.” My dad didn’t fight in World War II because he hated the “Nazis” or “Japs” like the government told him to hate; he didn’t even believe that Main Streets in the American heartland were about to be invaded. He volunteered and served because it was his duty. That’s another old-fashioned concept.

The dirty little secret about history is that the best fighting forces have met success not because they hated, but because they loved. You American Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines, in your graves through the land – throughout the world, sometimes buried where you fell – loved the flag, loved your people, your homes, your Main Streets; and you loved the concepts of duty and honor.

Most of you guys are probably like my father, and would tell me that you just “did what you had to do,” and most of your kids are probably like me, in awe of dedication and sacrifice. You would tell us to honor the people in uniform right now, and we do.

I am aching to ask you questions, if I could: is it different now? Today we fight enemies so far from our shores, toward victories that have not been defined. So often fulfilling missions to build roads and schools and deliver classroom computers, when back home here, where many military spouses are on food stamps, there are American communities in need of roads and schools and classroom computers.

I know one thing that’s not different, because I have met some of the returning service people today, and have seen them on TV too. The uniforms still grace good people; people who have a sense of honor and duty; brave people who serve because service is honorable. They might not still be wearing uniforms, but I can recognize missing arms and prosthetic legs and eye patches.

So maybe if anything is different now, it’s not the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines; and maybe, when all is said and done, it’s not so much the service they are asked to perform. Maybe the biggest difference is what kind of America they have been fighting for, what Main Streets they return to. I pray they are not much different than those of your day.

… but it was you men and women, now in your graves and represented in those memorials, who brought us to the point where we can even discuss these questions. You didn’t give us Freedom – God did that – but you all defended it. You knew the difference, and you did it well. Often it was brutally difficult, and usually it was far, far away from your homes.

So I’m going to tell you about trips we will take, many of us, this Memorial Day. Not as far away as your places of service and sacrifice. Some of us are not close to our relatives’ military graves, but all of us are close to some military grave or memorial. I am going to suggest that we, the living, pick some flowers or buy some flowers, or get a little flag, and visit a military cemetery. Or any cemetery, and then look for a military emblem on the stone. Or a town’s war memorial. We are going to place a “decoration,” maybe a thank-you letter or a prayer, to brighten your memory and honor you… whoever you are. We are going to pray thanksgiving for your service. For those of us who cannot get out, we are going to make that trip in our minds.

My friend Ron Ferdinand drew an absolutely brilliant Sunday page for Memorial Day. Dennis the Menace, of all places! Dennis and Good Ol’ Mister Wilson, and Mrs Wilson, are discussing the meaning, and the changing names, of Memorial Day. Dennis observes: “Maybe it’s called Memorial Day because ‘Thanksgiving Day’ was already taken.” Brilliant.

I look forward to visiting the grave of a “stranger.” I will symbolically shake your hand, and salute you. I want to tell you that not all of us want to deface and tear down your graves and memorials… God forgive us, on “Memorial” Day.

You represent much that was great about America. You represented us. And I pray that we are worthy of what you did.

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Click: That Ragged Old Flag

3-1-21

Let’s discuss children, if you have any; or grandchildren. Or yourself, reader, if you are a young adult with friends or siblings.

You look around and, increasingly, everyday life and its components disgust you. You are bothered, troubled, worried, alarmed. You see the trash and lies being taught in schools – things that were anathema to uncountable generations throughout history; and recently unspeakable within families. What to do? An answer might be Christian schools or home-schooling.

Ah, but outside that cocoon, it is almost impossible for kids to avoid contemporary music. And when you hear ubiquitous songs and lyrics, if you can understand them, the words and concepts often are filthy. Well, there’s Christian radio…

On the other hand, you can’t escape the awful music in malls and elsewhere, invading everyone’s space. Double-down on reality – current events, news, burning issues. But. The news media on TV, in magazines and papers, on the web, it’s all so distorted, one-sided.

TV has entertainment shows, distractions. But… are there normal lives, wholesome situations, depicted any more? Sexual references, gutter morality, blasphemy and cursing, homosexuality… What shows to watch; how to be warned; and can kids avoid TV at all?

Yes, and maybe by edict, but… these same worldly and offensive challenges are everywhere we turn these days, is my point. Standards of morality, politics, “education,” sports, documentaries, the celebrity culture: we are hostages to a suicidal culture of death, its malignant worldview pressed down upon us from every side.

There is an exquisite detail about the nature of this poisonous post-Christianity. I will say what I do not believe. The guilty parties who foment these attacks and serve them up so attractively do not conspire. I don’t believe that twice a year, or whatever, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, and Bob Iger secretly congregate and plot the subversion of our culture, or coordinate the attacks on traditional values.

But that is not to say there is not a conspiracy. The Bible foretells the time we now live in. End times? Perhaps; nevertheless times of rebellion and apostasy. It could get worse, and when it does, the noxious “values” that are replacing Biblical morality and rejecting our virtuous heritage will surely precede the fall. Like now.

The second chapter of Ephesians is a letter that talks about the dual nature of the threats we face – the enemies, not enemy.

You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air.

The “prince of the power of the air” is Satan. He is in fact lord of the earthly world, roaming about seeking whom to kill and destroy. It is the devil and his influence – his myriad temptations – against whom we do battle. He is the enemy of our souls.

Yet he is one being. His influence is everywhere but his presence is not: there are demons, just as there are angels; and they oppress and attack and tempt. Their work is more manifest.

…the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience [sinners and the unsaved] among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind… were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

In other words, those in high positions have low standards of morality. They exhibit evil intentions for our democracy and our traditions, and – frankly – hate us. They do not have to get together over pizza and plot our destruction. No need to hand out assignments – who will censor this; who will corrupt that; who will cancel what.

How, then, do these people arrive at the same place, share the same perverse goals? They (and of course other millions of deluded souls) have given themselves over to the “world.” The “spirit of the age.” False values, heresies, corruption. And then we see, clearly, that such error descends downward from media moguls to celebrities to members of your school boards.

These challenges to our homes and families are as old as the Garden – heresies and denial of God’s love and guidance; prideful people who “know better” than God. And the challenges are as new as headlines of this past week!

Item: Amazon removes the faith-based biography of Justice Clarence Thomas;

Item: The television services of D James Kennedy, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, are removed from the cable channel Lifetime.

Item: The House passes the “Equality Act” that calls the Bible “bigoted”;

Item: A man who altered himself in an attempt to be a woman (yet has a “wife”) is nominated to a cabinet position by Biden and refuses to condemn counseling three-year-olds to change their sex.

There is no “conspiracy” when pigs wallow in the same mud; it’s what they do. The spirit of the age now rages with the fury of a hurricane.

Our resistance is more necessary, and the stakes are higher, than ever. But Kristi Noem, a Pentecostal and the Governor of South Dakota, said this weekend: “They want to be our shepherds. But that requires that we see ourselves as sheep.”

We are not only more than sheep. We are “more than conquerors,” the Bible says. And Luke 10:19 reminds us that followers of Christ have authority over all demonic forces. It was never more important than now that we exercise that authority.

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Click: This World Is Not My Home, Rich Mullins

2-22-21

Rush Limbaugh died this week. Death is an eventually that comes to us all, but Rush had the somewhat unique disadvantage of knowing several months ago that his time was nigh. “Disadvantage”? Something to ponder.

For his followers it was an “advantage” – that is, versus a sudden death – because we could listen day by day to his reflections on faith, acceptance, hope, gratitude, forgiveness, encouragement, and… faith. Oh, I said that already. So did he, many times over.

Over his career, Rush did not become a preacher; and not particularly so in his last days. But as is often said, you can share the Gospel – and sometimes even use words. No listener, of his millions across the Fruited Plain, doubted that he knew who his Savior was. The Radio Revolutionary surely inspired people in his last days in matters of faith as well as in politics.

“Rest in peace,” many said.

But many people did not; have not; will not let him rest in peace. A tsunami of invective and hate began at the moment his death was announced. In conversations, on web posts, in the media. Gratitude, too; but people grateful that he died. People wishing that he suffered. Curses upon his family and friends.

Unbridled hatred.

With almost demonic fury, these people – fewer in number than his friends, I believe – have wormed into places of prominence, and cloned more such disciples. They allege horrible things – the worst of them tearfully refuted by his producer of many decades, a black man – but as with President Trump, the firestorm of hate from the Secular Left is not for things done or said, but for who these men were.

More specifically, and this is a major point, Limbaugh did, and Trump does, “get it.” They looked over horizons and saw the broader landscape of ideas and challenges. What people call the 30,000-feet view. Their allies quibble over statistics, but Limbaugh and Trump knew that statistics don’t lie… but statisticians do. The Dark State – and what is at stake today – they recognized.

Few people cut through the fog, perhaps occasionally checking “civil discourse” at the door. In the church today there are few, too few, counterparts. Franklin Graham, even more than his father Billy, gets to the salvation message, the centrality of Christ, in the first minute. I don’t mean in sermons; I mean in conversations and interviews. As we all should.

So it was not enough to defeat Trump: he has to be destroyed. Rush Limbaugh could not and cannot be dismissed – he has to be demonized and degraded.

In my little sphere, I have had phone calls and a note in my mail box wishing that… well, that I would join Rush in hell; and similar sentiments. When I once posted a photo of myself with Jack Phillips, the baker who declined to decorate a cake for a homosexual wedding, and was sued all the way to the Supreme Court… a Facebook “friend” immediately posted a message calling me (not Phillips) an obscenity. And this was a guy who previously put out feelers about collaborating with me on something or other. (Notice what Facebook does not censor.)

So they dance on Rush’s grave. They danced quickly on Herman Cain’s grave too when he died an early COVID death. His great sin was being a black conservative, successful entrepreneur, and a presidential candidate with an economic plan.

Dancing on graves – that is, destroying and not merely defeating – is the new blood sport of liberals and secularists. And, like sharks, blood in the water attracts more of them, ever more bloodthirsty.

Sometimes it is not only people but symbols. This summer’s onslaught on statues across America is of a kind. The arson against shop-owners’ stores. The desecration of public buildings. The burning of churches. Few people decried the images of Jesus and Mary defaced and smashed; or the torched historic church in Washington DC. But how loud was the scabrous venom directed at the President when he made a statement, holding aloft a Bible at its shuttered door.

None of this is new – in human history, that is; in societies when they disintegrate.

“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones,” Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar (note to Andrea Mitchell: that’s William Shakespeare, not William Faulkner). Which, in my thesis, is why the loosed demons inspire today’s “Unity” squads to hate and destroy. They can’t stand the truth.

One grave that we remember, however, could not be danced on. The memorials to Jesus suffered superficial effects, spray painting and sometimes sledge-hammer blows this summer. The church buildings dedicated to Him were vandalized. But his grave? No one could or can dance on that, even metaphorically.

Jesus walked out of His tomb. There was no grave that could hold Him down. He conquered sin, flesh, and the devil. He lives. After all, He had more work to do, through His children.

The living do not belong in graves.

And that goes for us, too. If you have Jesus in your heart, neither can you recognize a grave that can hold you down in this life. We too have work to do.

And certainly… do not let anybody start planning to dance on your grave.

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I hope you will watch this music video, perfect with this message:

Music Vid: “There Ain’t No Grave” (For readers with hand-held devices, click or copy and paste: ) https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=jwr-sciUwFQ

Click: There Ain’t No Grave

11-30-20

“What a year this has been.” This has been a common theme of all our conversations with friends these days.

Turn from the pandemic to, say, the economy, which is related (some areas of rebound are remarkable), yet lost jobs, ruined businesses, and shuttered schools because of the oppressive, overhanging shadow – the long-term implications of which we only see through a glass darkly. Meaning, it will get worse before it gets better; the world has changed. Turn from that and we recall, and still face, the rank bitterness of politics, and the lies and thievery so evident. Turn from that and we find ourselves in an America where vandalism, destruction, and riots are virtually condoned and widely accepted as a way of life. Turn from that situation and we shudder to realize that unseen forces, Big Tech and Mainstream Media and Big Brother and others, are spying on us, manipulating us, and censoring us.

In sports, a team has a bad season but applies the balm, “There’s always next year.” We cannot say that in 2020 – or, as it used to be known, 1984. Next year is no guarantee of much better times; probably worse.

We have done our work this year – and by “we” I am referring here to Christian Patriots and Cultural Traditionalists – aware of these things. Except perhaps for the insidious infection of Social Media’s villains, they suddenly have loomed up, and we have tested their spirits.

For us the challenge is not so much to see what is right and wrong… but what to do about it, how to fight, and (frankly) to choose what risks we need take to redeem our culture and save our families.

I invite you to recall the words of John Donne from his Meditation XVII:

Every human’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in humankind. And therefore never look far to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for you.

I have brought 1633’s language into the 21st century, but we all know these observations.
Do any of us disagree, that the death of someone, especially when it is heinous, when we could have intervened, has an impact on the world in general, the human family, and the future? And how we then shall live? Or, at the other end of that scale that thinks of the entire world… that we, individuals, our souls, are diminished too?

John Donne’s “involvement in humankind” did not suggest membership in some club. He says in a unique way that we are all one; no person is an island; we are bound together, interconnected – and should be, and should want to be.

Now more than ever. And if our inescapable fellowship in humanity compels us to react to “every human’s death” when and where and how we can… then we come face to face today with the genocidal impulse behind abortion.

And the terrifying numbers. Not that I run to numbers, in fact usually the opposite, like polls. But this is a question of reality, not charts and graphs; of blood, not ink. The numbers are so cold and so many that they deaden our minds. In recent years:
• One in five American pregnancies ended in abortion;
• Approximately 862,000 abortions performed in 2017 (the most recent stat I found);
• Now, more than 22,000 abortions performed each day in America;
• Since 1973, almost 65-million babies killed by abortion – are we “diminished” as a people 65-millions times? Yes.

I will not crusade here beyond this, attempting to be calm, wondering where in hell this is leading us. Excuse me, but I choose my words deliberately. I know the debates; I know the history; I know the horror stories that “justify” abortion; I myself once was comfortable with the whole idea. Of that, I repent daily; and I can empathize with women who seek it, to an extent. (Not, now, the monsters who perform it.)

My objections are moral; my reasons are spiritual; my reactions are many. Mechanistic – how can we operate and thrive and continue as a civilization when life is worse than cheap but very often contemptible? Why is this the litmus-test issue for half of society, where people who love the unborn are shunned, condemned, and threatened? How do pro-abortion crusaders ignore the fact that many churches, many ministries, many parents desire to adopt “unwanted” babies?

If we have objections, reasons, and reactions, as I just shared, there is another agenda item: we must have responses. If this moral, culture-of-death challenge is spiritual (and it is)… then we need spiritual responses. It is political (and it is)… then we need to get political. If this private angst is, one by one across this country, personal (and it is)… then we need to get personal.

I am tempted not to qualify one moral outrage, or one festering problem, over another, but at the root of the abortion issue – beyond America’s obvious drift from God and the secularization of society – is what I called here “Lazy Virtue.”

Not “easy virtue,” or really even “lack of virtue.” Dr Bill Bennett notwithstanding, “virtue” is a malleable term. Our problems are not because people figuratively smash the 10 Commandment tablets, or burn down churches. Yet.

No: lazy virtue is the worst, because people fool themselves, and are persuaded to fool others, that good is evil and evil is good. For instance, that:
• concern for baby animals is more sacred than saving human babies;
• Lazy Virtue forces those who oppose abortions to participate and even fund them;
• “convenience,” defined so many ways, is more important than others’ morality;
• “What’s right for me is OK, as long as nobody is harmed.”

… whoops, but it is OK to harm a baby close to birth. Even kill it. During the pandemic we hear people yammering about “trusting science.” Well, “science” is now discovering that those blobs and fetuses are (of course) humans; unborn babies can feel pain much earlier than previously thought; and they can survive outside the womb at ever younger ages.

The “tumult and the shouting” of the recent campaign has stopped… No. It hasn’t. But we are supposed to say that every four years. Candidates and presidents come and go. Parties change their appeals and profiles.

But our problems will not go away in America; not automatically. And not easily. As horrible as the sin of abortion is, it is a symptom, not our real disease.

Christian Patriots, Cultural Traditionalists: you might be looking ahead two years or four, and that is good. But start looking to tomorrow. Those bells toll for us, otherwise.

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We toil and look toward that City. Beulah Land, as sweet as it will be, is not Heaven but the border before we cross to the Promised Land which is our home eternal. But what does God require but that we, as believers in Christ, are good and faithful as His servants; do justice and walk humbly.

Music Vid: “Sweet Beulah Land” (For readers with hand-held devices, click or copy and paste: )
https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=avntXsW6WhU

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Click: Sweet Beulah Land

11-23-20

We have just been through a presidential campaign like no other. In other breaking news, the sky is blue – that is to say, it is evident to almost everybody that this election was far from ordinary.

But I am speaking as a trained and published historian when I point out that there have been contested elections almost as bitter. The elections of 1800, 1824, 1876, for instance, had delayed results, “rotten bargains,” and probably fraudulent outcomes. In 1960, John F Kennedy’s father called his vassal, Mayor Daley of Chicago, to “discover” Democrat votes in Illinois to take that state’s electoral votes away from Republicans. On that razor’s edge, Richard Nixon lost the presidency. In 2000, the national results seemed to come down to hundreds of votes in teeter-totter Florida. After Al Gore ran to courts here and there, in 37 days he lost the presidency to George W Bush.

Those elections are only anomalies regarding the contested results. There also were campaigns of dirt, sleaze, scandal, bribery, lies, and slander… much rougher, actually, than in 2020. Washington, our sainted Founder, was treated horribly in the press, and his rival Jefferson (and his rival Hamilton) even worse – moral turpitude and such. Andrew Jackson was libeled for having killed a man and married his wife illegally (she died, partly in shame, about the time he took office). Abraham Lincoln was called a baboon, frankly throughout his presidency.

U. S. Grant’s problems with alcohol were joyously portrayed by opposing cartoonists. Grover Cleveland was accused of fathering a child out of wedlock, in the Victorian days of 1884; he admitted to the fact but was elected anyway. During that campaign, correspondence soliciting bribes written by his rival, James G Blaine, when Speaker of the House, were exposed. In 1896 Democrat candidate William Jennings Bryan was regularly depicted as a demented anarchist. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt called President William Howard Taft a “fathead” with brains “less than those of a guinea pig,” and Taft called former President Roosevelt a “dangerous egotist.”

In contrast, one might think that 2020 was beanbags.

But there has been a difference, and a serious difference. It is a difference that exposes a possibly fatal malady in our Republic; a challenge to all citizens but to Christian patriots especially.

It is not the nature of discourse that should trouble us or, as I have pointed, is that different than disgraceful, quadrennial mud-fights of the past. It is a barely redeeming aspect of American democracy that in the past, the partisan enemies have dusted themselves off and civilly conducted their business. Government by Hypocrisy.

In our times, however, peoples’ basic humanity is questioned and slandered. Platforms, motives, standards, beliefs, sincerity, honesty, and actions are not merely questioned but disbelieved and ridiculed. For what Donald Trump promised in 2016 – and mostly delivered, in itself a departure in presidential politics – his enemies considered him worthy of being destroyed. Not defeated, but destroyed.

A further departure from historical tradition is that these vicious schemes were more personal than partisan; and they began, not in the post-convention season of 2020, but the moment President Trump completed his oath of office four years ago.

It is very important – and very difficult in our contemporary news-cycle and sound-bite culture – for citizens to realize how different this situation is from any time in the American past. How profoundly poisonous. How deep-seated in origin. And how difficult it is to return from. God forbid that we have not passed the point of no return in these civic cancers.

I address Christian patriots above because we are not the only segment of society to be concerned about moral drift. Some on the other side, in fact, think they have a monopoly on morality, and that becomes an excuse for rebellion, subversion, and violence.

As Christians we are aware of Higher Morality, and the necessity of calibrating that to all of our convictions, decisions, and acts. I am outlining a political essay that would in effect ask liberals and radicals, “For four years you have tried to teach us how to treat a president with whom we disagree. Shall I now adopt your methods?” Of course that would seem to be a child’s game of tit-for-tat…

Wouldn’t it? But how should we then act? This question addresses near-term questions about ballot fraud, and long-term attitudes toward government policies on abortion, education, free speech. And more.

“Rules are made to be broken.” That is a sarcasm thrown about informally. There is more determinism than morality in the proposition, as in “mangers are hired to be fired.” But for Christians, rules – adopted or broken – are the types of formulations that are meant to be in flux; adaptable; open to comment, challenges, and change; understood to meet the exigencies of the moment.

Mature discernment, when exercised with responsible citizenship, persuades me that situations allow for rules to be broken.

“Obey the law.” Yes, render unto Caesar. …the things that are Caesar’s. Submit to authorities. Even Jesus went to jail. Disciples went to prison. If the laws, “right” or wrong, sent them there, they complied. But they opposed certain laws, and when the Holy Spirit sent an earthquake the Apostles walked out. There was no democracy in the first-century Roman Empire. There is, today, or supposed to be, in America. In a democracy you obey the law… or submit to the consequences.

Mature discernment, when exercised with responsible citizenship, persuades me, like Martin Luther and Martin Luther King alike, that unjust laws must be challenged.

“Keep the Faith.” Friends, let this become our watchword… but only the first half. An annoying aspect of Obama’s 2008 campaign was the vagueness of his slogans. “Hope.” “Change we can believe in” – changing what, exactly? And “Yes we can!” – can what? The meanings were deliberately elusive, as he gambled on a pliant, gullible electorate.

The same is a danger of “Keep the faith.” Never share that with a complete, intentional meaning. Demand of yourself: Faith in Jesus? Faith that God answers prayer? Faith to pray without ceasing? Faith that our opponents may change their hearts (as we change the laws)? Faith that God is in control?

Faith that if we are forced to go the route of civil disobedience in the next years, God, who protected those in the fiery furnace?

Faith that as we walk through the shadow of death – because we might – God will be with us?

Faith enough to pray, not only that God be on our side, but, as Lincoln maturely discerned, that we be on God’s side?

The Holy Spirit brings gifts of discernment. We can not proceed without it. Especially in these next four years.

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Music Vid: “Help Me” (For readers with hand-held devices, click or paste: )

11-9-20

Yes, we need to be praying more than ever. And some of us have been, lately. We have been reminded that the best position from which to advance is from our knees.

We pray “believing,” as the Bible instructs. “The fervent prayer of the righteous avails much,” we are told. Yet if a billion of us – or merely two of us – pray for different results, can God grace us with the same answer? Or if two pray alike, will God’s response be the same for each?

We should pray for God’s Will to be done – His righteousness – and that our desires may then be pleasing to Him, and right for us, in return.

Sometimes, when we pray over an imminent event, God might say, You think the crisis is nigh, but wait; it is yet coming.

That is, we should trust in His timing. And realize that things can get even worse. And maybe we created our own crises!

Sometimes, in His wisdom, He sees that we only turn to Him in times of crisis. Shudder to think: would that persuade God to keep crises before us, so we turn to Him more? He desires our communion.

Sometimes God says I hear your prayers! But I will answer… in time.
We must learn to trust His timing, not our agendas. Maybe “no” is “not yet.”

“But God,” we cry, “Your enemies are loosed! Help us to fight them!”

Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord. So are justice and righteousness. We are in His army; He is not our servant.

“God! You don’t understand! We are in the midst of a STORM!”

He understands. Better than we do. Must we endure more? Maybe. Storms are part of life; and God sends them, or allows them, sometimes. They clear the air; they wash away dead things; they rearrange things on earth. Sometimes He calms the storm. Sometimes He shows us shelter. All the time He is with us in the midst.

And behind the darkest storm clouds the sun shines. As bright as ever.

I would hasten to my place of refuge From the stormy wind and tempest. – Psalm 55:8

The Lord is slow to anger and great in power, And the Lord will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. The whirlwind and storm are His way, And clouds are the dust beneath His feet. – Nahum 1:3

Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone, and fire from the Lord out of heaven. – Genesis 19:24

When the whirlwind will pass, the wicked will be no more; the righteous have an everlasting foundation. – Proverbs 10:25

And remember, fellow believers and voters and warriors – not from the Bible, but good advice:

When Satan whispers to the warrior, “You cannot withstand the storm,” the warrior whispers back – “I AM the storm.”

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(For readers with hand-held devices, click (if clickable) or copy and paste: https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=GrcvXUvyn44 )

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Click: Till the Storm Passes By

Election Day, 2020

With lack of guidance a nation falls, but victory is won through holy advisers.
– Proverbs 11:4

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O God, Our Help In Ages Past

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Artwork: Winsor McCay, 1914. Restoration copyright Rick Marschall

10-26-20

“May you live in interesting times” supposedly is an ancient Chinese curse. Actually, it seems that it is neither ancient nor Chinese, but has been used to euphemistically describe uncertainty and instability; imminent danger.

For the simple dictionary definition of “interesting,” I say Bring it on, most of the time. We should like change, challenges, and opportunities. But this is all theoretical anyway. Days turns to nights, people marry and are given in marriage, and as per Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun.

However, anyone with pulse knows that within those rubrics, there are pendulum-swings that bring more trouble or less confusion; more worry, various causes of anxiety.

In those regards, these time are more than interesting; these very times.

In the next couple of weeks, we will have a consequential presidential election, perhaps the most important in generations. Many people feel that violence and anarchy will reassert themselves if one candidate prevails. We face, collaterally, control of the Congress. A contentious nomination process for a new Justice just has concluded. We still smell the smoke, literally and metaphorically, from widespread rioting and looting. The world still is in the throes of a plague, with peoples’ health and peoples’ businesses suffering.

As the calendar turns, for someone like me, sharing thoughts and comments, these very days also present an opportunity to recognize Reformation Day. This I will do… not because I see it as a way to visit a calm spiritual subject; but because I think the Revolution wrought by Dr Martin Luther was one of the most “interesting days,” so to speak, in the sweep of Western Civilization.

I think the act of nailing 95 complaints to the church door in Wittenberg 500 years ago changed the course of Western Civilization, not only Christianity. I think the forces that nurtured his revolution – political liberty, literacy, individualism, economic freedom – affected the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and democracy. I think that people today would more firmly reject anarchy, socialism, and relativism if they only would study Luther’s works and acts.

All this despite the fact that Luther himself did not intend to leave the Roman Catholic Church nor launch new denominations. He sought reform – hence Reformation. He even rejected the label of modernism; if anything, he considered himself the last of the Medievalists. He even believed that Reason was the Enemy of Faith (so do I).

The brilliant iconoclast was excommunicated because he intended to translate the Bible into the people’s language (instead of Latin, reserved for priests only). He went on trial because he disturbed public order when he asserted that priests who sold papers assuring people that relatives would be rescued from hell – and such heresies – were in fact blasphemies. He was threatened with death (as other reformers were being martyred at the time) for believing Ephesians Chapter 2, that we are saved to eternal life by grace through faith: not by works that we do.

So in one of the most important moments in human history, the prisoner Dr Luther was hauled before a council (a “Diet”) of regional princes and the power of the Holy Roman Empire, indeed the Vatican itself, all playing out in the small city of Worms, Germany. In the small, rude setting, the world virtually watched – history was watching.

Luther, a brilliant theologian and prolific writer, was required, under penalty of sure death, which he expected, to recant (deny, disown) all his works.

Of course life would have gone on, if he cowardly had surrendered. Other reformers like Jan Hus and John Wycliffe were put to death, and had much changed? Was Luther tempted to give in? Words, after all, are merely words. History is littered, with both heroes and martyrs. And time rolls on.

But here was the fulcrum of history. Words do mean something. We mean something – even we are also in out-of-way places, confronted by massive forces that despise us.

One person, with God, constitute a majority, as Frederick Douglass said… a mighty army. What do we do we stand for? Why are we here? What is the point of a troubled conscience, if we are not spurred to action? Luther did not know, and actually did not care, that his protest of conscience would change the world. He did not look into the future; his testimony was for his own self, his own challenges… his duties as a Christian. As a person of God, whose ideas and ideals mattered.

What might this have to do with us, these days, this year?

A lot. I believe we are at a turning point, not only in politics with an election; not merely in society as forces of anarchy and secularism attack us; not only a crisis of this month or this year but – as with the Reformation – consequences for generations to come.

That’s pretty heavy. But… it’s not the first time, friends. As Ecclesiastes said, “Time and chance happen to all.”

So, with some history as a guide be encouraged.

* Be brave about what you believe. Be armed with knowledge first, then be bold in truth.

* Don’t be intimidated by misinformed family members, kids, teachers, neighbors. Do not compromise with error.

* Discern the truth and avoid media that lie to you. Live without certain TV, movies, news media, papers and magazines. Seek those that speak truth; and redeem the culture.

* In these matters, and voting, consider whether the “lesser of two evils” is something you act upon if you engage or participate. Are you still enabling evil?

* Pray; have fellowship; pray; speak out; pray; let your conscience be not only your guide, but your best friend and constant companion.

* And pray.

And be inspired by words from Luther’s hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God:
Let goods and kindred go, This mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still;
His kingdom is forever!

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10-12-20
There is a bit in an old Laurel and Hardy comedy where the boys are caught in a situation, Ollie impersonating a rich guy and Stan his servant. “Call me a cab,” Ollie commands, thinking of a way they can escape.

“What?” asks the typically bewildered Stan.

“Call. Me. A. Cab,” Ollie patiently orders.

Stan says, “All right. You’re a cab!”

Fast-forward 90 years or so to this election season. In fact to many aspects of life today, and politics, and in the church. Labels have become virtually meaningless. They have not become obsolete, because everybody is quick to proudly adopt a label, or to smear someone with another label. But labels are now fungible, malleable, chameleon-like.

In the same way, statistics don’t lie; but statisticians do.

President Trump identified himself as a very stable genius, a manner of self-description people usually leave to others than themselves, and usually to posterity. Today, critics immediately challenged one, two, or all three of those words. Kamala Harris is described, by Democrat handlers, as a “moderate,” but she would have considered that an insult during the primaries. We recently were told that Antifa is not an organization but an idea… the distinction holds no difference to shop owners seeing their life-dreams torched street by street, city by city by thugs in identical costumes.
The irony is most bitter in religion of the 21st century. Joe Biden calls himself a “man of faith” (faith in what?) but bristles when priests and cardinals deny him the Eucharist because he denies Catholic Church teaching, for instance on abortion.

If the church, the Bible, Jesus’ teachings do not mean anything – if your opinion is superior to the Revealed Word – what is the point of adopting certain labels, claiming to be a Catholic? Some pastors deny the divinity Of Christ, and the Virgin Birth. Are their salaries the same as taking money under false pretenses?

We all evolve, change opinions, and learn. President Trump used to be accepting of abortion, as was I at one point; and a lot people I know. But science, experience, and conscience “spoke” to us. When politicians who also are aware of science, hear of experiences, and have consciences – when they switch “sides” or switch parties — they cannot fail to know where they fight life’s battles now: Who their new friends are. And what effects their defections will have. I refer to conservatives and Catholics who support the party of abortion-on-demand.

This is not in a vacuum; these new rules – or lack of rules – are a microcosm of life today. Heresy is as old as human nature; its first appearance was in the Garden.

“Relativism,” it is called: What’s OK for me is all that matters; There is no right and wrong; You are free to make up your own rules…

I wonder why many people today rebel against Christianity, democracy, capitalism, when the fruits of our civilization have advanced, refined, and are blessings to so many. To ignore our heritage, to decline to defend our values, and surrender to the enemies of our souls… seems like a crime in itself.

If America does not undergo a spiritual awakening, it does not deserve to continue as the Republic we inherited.

Returning here to the political context, and to shifting labels: Politicians and pollsters do not even know what they mean when they profile and predict about the “evangelical” community. Ah, the “faith-based.” Yes, “family values voters.” Some “evangelicals” have enormous differences between them.

Just as Jesus did not die for denominations or missions organizations or charities or movements or committees, but for individuals – you and me – so will the redemption of America not depend upon parties, movements, organizations.

America will be redeemed, revived, and resuscitated by citizens. Individuals. You and me.

If someone wants to know our label, we can use the one that was a perfect description when this noble project of a Constitutional Republic began – Citizen Patriots.
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Click: Who Am I

10-5-20

How many of our mothers tried to teach us about wise choices with that time-tested question: “I suppose if so-and-so jumped off a bridge, you would too?” Remember?

Well, either a lot of Americans don’t remember, or they are quite happy these days to follow every so-and-so and jump off bridges.

The bridge-jumpers are either self-destructive at heart, or somehow happily survive the dares and the leaps. The so-and-sos go beyond those who commit vandalism and rioting in the streets, even when as serious as arson and murder, heinous as those acts are. More consequential is the fact that these things have become normalized.

It is not so much the graffiti and burning of churches… but that few pastors and priests condemn the acts.

It is not so much the destruction of statues and looting of shops… but the fact that those acts go virtually unpunished.

It is not so much the occupation of police departments and hundreds of fires… but that officials excuse (and thereby encourage) such activities.

Since Antifa “is not an organization, but an idea,” according to a major presidential candidate, aspiring leaders virtually admit that there is no manner of countering anarchy, otherwise than gradual surrender. In the American civilization, this is not temporary insanity; it is a suicidal tendency.

Returning to our moms’ finger-wagging lecture – it was not a rhetorical question. Yes, the rioters jump off bridges. And, no matter how large or small a percentage they are of the population, America has started jumping off too. Many think they would not; but our society is doing so.

The secularized culture has not substituted new standards for traditional standards. It has substituted NO standards. The concept of standards – right and wrong; codes of conduct; Absolute Truth – is anathema. Unacceptable. Unfair. Fascistic. So we are told.

Seen in that light, the black-hooded army can operate as it pleases, and so can we… unless we object, or are harmed by, their operations. How can there be right or wrong, when you deny any value-system of standards… except by the imposition of their opinions? Lo and behold, we are face-to-face with the totalitarian impulse they claim to hate.

Very much like as in the French Revolution, when the bloodthirsty street-roaming rioters wanted to abolish even calendars and ways of telling time – not only killing middle-class people and gutting churches – the anarchists will be crushed between the really serious totalitarians from above, and the traditionalists and religious classes from below. That is in the future, surely. Sadly, but surely, to come.

The road to “No Standards” has been gradual, but the changing of opinions (once called Hypocrisy) in fact has been resolute. Views of abortion is one instance.

Respect for human life has been a mantra, as never before in political discourse, for several generations, beginning especially in the aftermath of World War II and the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights. It has been underpinning the work of many nations, many organizations, many activists. Or… it has been the window-dressing.

When abortion became a sub-set of convenience, and as Christianity and religion in general was scrubbed from society’s standard operating procedures, the relevance of someone’s conscience became something akin to arrogant bigotry.

Many societies throughout history have exercised child sacrifice and practiced infanticide. On the path to contemporary peoples’ destination of No Standards are road signs labeled “Convenience,” “Privacy,” and the new mantra, “Rights.”

Rights, of course, except for the baby. Many women (and, by the way, the legal system) regard as irrelevant the fact that men too can have anguish and bitter regrets over abortions. They have obligations when their babies are carried to term, but no role if their babies are murdered before birth.

“Murder” is a harsh term – but less so, for instance to those who currently are wishing that President Trump and his family die (a tsunami on Facebook); or that police must be murdered; or, in gated Hollywood mansions, where they make fortunes by producing movies and TV shows featuring unrelenting violence. So “murder” is a malleable term, too – another case of Standards melting into No Standards. Whatever is right for them is… right for them.

Life is tough. Women who want to recast their biological realities are rescued by a culture whose lack of standards offers them the drugs or forgiveness and acceptance. Suddenly the culture wants us to play football without rules, yard-markers, or goalposts. Like changing the definitions of test scores so idiots can feel like geniuses; or awarding sports trophies for every participant – life might be tough, but is being made easier.

In America 2020, however, easier is getting harder every day.

There is no escaping the fact that God wrote the Ten Commandments. Not the Ten Suggestions.

The platforms of political parties… the pronouncements of cable-news pundits… the preaching of liberal pastors and priests… mean Absolutely nothing to the God of the Universe.

God’s standards do not depend on our own standards, nor lack of them. And surely He does not wait upon our opinion of His standards.

And that truth, even more than riots in the streets and loony political platforms, will shake the foundations of this Republic.

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Click: I Don’t Want To Get Adjusted

9-28-20

I am old enough to remember when every morning, in public school, we would have Bible readings. They were rotated among students who were willing to read and lead; and most of the readings were Old Testament Psalms, in deference I suppose to the Jewish kids in class.

I am old enough to remember being confused and resentful about the prohibitions, when such things became illegal.

And I am not too old to still feel sad about the “enlightened progress” achieved by that “reform.” I was not too young to realize – because I asked them, actually – if the Jewish kids minded the readings, or the once-a-week recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. No, none of them did. I even had a classmate whose family was “artsy” and forthrightly atheist. Kyra never minded, nor appeared warped by hearing Psalms read; certainly she never spray-painted graffiti on the school, or set fires in the library.

But the war against prayers and the Bible were only the early signs of America’s suicidal tendencies. I knew, despite my youth, that some adults predicted that these impulses would lead to, some day, attempts to eliminate any form of religious expression; a generation of young people rejecting traditional values; the denigration, not only of religion, but of patriotism, “family values,” mutual respect, and civility.

Will those times ever come; will those prophets ever be able to say, “I told you so”?

Oh, wait…

From people “offended” by Christmas displays in front of town halls, to objections to saying “Merry Christmas” to strangers (by the way: So what?) to arrests of Christians, and firings from jobs, many dots are being connected in many ways along the slippery slope.

This summer, committees at the Democrat National Convention made a show of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and pausing… silent… where “under God” would have been spoken. Almost every evening, for months, we have seen people on the streets of American cities and towns burning and stomping on the flag.

I call the current situation the “Purge of Allegiance.”

Disloyalty to the American flag and our larger nation and Constitution might technically be legal – sometimes I too am sick of what this society has become – but I would be willing to suffer the approbation and consequences. The street scum today might be aware of Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty or give me death.” Their version is, “Give me a sandbox to soil.”

Renouncing allegiance to one’s country is a step away from having no allegiance to a religious faith or cultural traditions at all. While you are thinking about that, anarchists are leaping to agree. Next on the downward spiral: Having no standards means just that – no standards of right and wrong. Going back to Aristotle and heretics and Relativists of recent centuries, “What’s right for me is right,” period. Anarchy.

American churches, with some exceptions, have bought into this new way of thinking. It is not new, of course – lies as old as the Garden of Eden. We are smarter than God, you see.

The American political system is surrendering to these forces in a hundred large and small ways. Patrick Henry never said, “Give me licentiousness…”

The American culture not only welcomes these awful events, but encourages them and profits from them. An actual curse of capitalism.

Let us think about what the Obama Administration ridiculed only a dozen years ago, those of us who “cling” to our guns and Bibles. While we still can. And thinking, further, about that ragged old flag and the time-honored Pledge…

How close is America becoming, at its (new) core, something that we, too, regret and despise? God forbid.

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Click: Johnny Cash’s “Ragged Old Flag”

9-21-20

Growing up, to the extent I did, in suburban New York City, in the little town of Closter NJ, I remember that at the corner of one of our parks was an enormous bell, probably used in Colonial times to warn residents of British troops approaching (a Closter farmer was our own Paul Revere) or to call volunteers to fight a fire.

It was not a bell whose shape probably comes to your mind. It was circular, metal perhaps five inches wide, like a gong but without the gong-bell in the center. This was an enormous metal ring, like a circular (rather than triangular) dinner bell that must have been heard for miles. My friends and I could never find anything big enough that we could lift that would sound a tocsin, as alarms were called.

Through the centuries, communities relied on substantial bells like that for various reasons; and the frequency or pattern would provide signals to residents. Churches, of course, ring bells to call people to worship, and during the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are lifted. Carillons were invented to play music in concerts. Eventually electricity brought alarm clocks, amplified sirens, cell-phone alerts, and other efficient saboteurs of the good old days.

But the concept of “alarm bells” lives on in culture, in literature, in our consciousness. Sometimes we view events as they seem, but sense that they seldom are hopeful harbingers, but dangerous signals. Predictors of bad things ahead; seeds that will sprout ugly weeds, not beautiful flowers.

“For whom the bell tolls.” Ernest Hemingway took the title of his novel from an essay by the mystical theologian John Donne (1572-1631). Donne, in his Meditation XVII, “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” addressed the ambiguity. Events, customs, announcements, traditions, expectations might be very different than we confidently think… and different observers will have different opinions and conclusions.

We all have separate views of life, and therefore, Donne (who was near his own death when he wrote these words) reminds us of two things. The surety that God is in control, and all will see Him, followed by the end of delusions. Second, Donne’s famous aphorism that “no man is an island.”

By the first point he reminded us (even if Hemingway neglected this aspect) that our understanding is insignificant compared to God’s omniscience. In the second point he observed that the human race is organic; that when something dies or is degraded in one place, the rest of humanity suffers. When reforms and enlightenment and “progress” occur here, people there, so to speak, also will benefit.

I invite you to view the long-brewing but sudden-occuring nihilism and violence, destruction and death in American cities and towns, and see them hear them, as alarm-bells.

The “demonstrators” (what kinds of fools are we to be persuaded by the media’s gentle characterization of vandals and criminals?) might indeed think that the alarm-bells they set off are announcing a brave new world. I am sure that their ringleaders and puppet-masters do. Aldous Huxley’s dystopia, that is; not a pending utopia.

Here are Donne’s passages, in contemporary words:

Perchance the bell tolls for someone so sick or so deluded that he doesn’t even recognize that the bell announces his impending death. Maybe I am that deluded person, deluded that I am better off. Others see me in reality, know I am ill, and have caused the bell to signal my own death, but I am ignorant of it.

Are we dying – as a culture – and do not realize it?

And then:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Rioters and vandals, attacking statues of Jesus and Mary and saints, are not offending brass and stone, but storming Heaven. That is how they see it. Why do Christians not see it, too, and erupt in defense?

Looters and shoplifters vandalize stores, and empty them – often minority-owned shops – and are not stealing sneakers they need; but flail at capitalism itself.

Those who terrorize a city for a hundred days, and occupy police stations… are telling the truth when they declare that your police, your homes, your lives are next.

These things look like news clips and headlines, but they are alarm-bells.

The veneer of historical bad guys’ statues is long gone. When churches are covered in obscene graffiti; invaded and set on fire, the object of these domestic terrorists is not some dead general, but the Living Savior.

Hear those bells? Do they toll for them… or for us?

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Click: When They Ring Those Golden Bells

9-7-20

I have told this story before. On this Labor Day weekend, I remember a simple BBQ, but one of the most profound days of my life. A holiday far away from my home… but very close to my heart. It happened on a Summer holiday more than 20 years ago.

Is this an America that is disappearing?

I was working on a book back then, a three-part biography of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis; evangelist Jimmy Swaggart; and country-music superstar Mickey Gilley, all first cousins to each other. My good friend Maury Forman offered me his unused condo in Montgomery, Texas to get away for a bit of a personal research and writing. Since Lewis lived in Mississippi, Swaggart in Louisiana, and Gilley in nearby Pasadena Texas, it made geographical sense.

Once settled, I took out the Yellow Pages (remember them?) to chart the location of nearby Assembly of God churches, intent on visiting as many as I could through the summer. East Texas was in every way new to me, and I wanted to experience everything I could.

Well, the first one I visited was in Cut and Shoot, Texas. That’s a town’s name; you can look it up. A small, white frame AG church was my first stop that summer… and I never visited another. For one thing – coincidence? – I learned that a member of the tiny congregation was the widow of a man who had pastored the AG church in Ferriday, Louisiana, the small town four hours away where, and when, those three cousins grew up in its pews. She knew them all, and their families, and had great stories. Beyond that, the pastor of the church in Cut and Shoot, Charles Wigley, had gone to Bible College with Jerry Lee Lewis and played in a band with him, until Jerry Lee got kicked out. Some more great stories.

But there was more than that kept me there for that summer. In that white-frame church and that tiny congregation, it was, um, obvious in three minutes that I was not from East Texas. I was born in New York City. Yet I was treated like family as if the folks had known me three decades. A fellow named Dave Gilbert asked me if I’d like to go to his farm for a barbecue where a bunch of people were just going to get together and “do some visitin’.”

I bought the biggest watermelon I could find as my contribution to the pot-luck. Well, there were dozens and dozens of folks. I couldn’t tell which was family and who were friends, because everybody acted like family. When folks from East Texas ask, “How are you?” they really mean it. There were several monstrous barrel BBQ smokers with chimneys, all slow-cooking beef brisket. (Every region brags about its barbecue traditions, but I’ll fight anyone who doesn’t admit low-heat, slow-smoked, no sauce, East-Texas BBQ the best) There was visitin,’ surely; there were delicious side dishes; there was softball and volleyball and kids dirt-biking; and breaks for sweet tea and spontaneous singing of patriotic songs.

I sat back in a folding chair, and I thought, “This is America.”

As the sun set, the same food came out again — smoked brisket galore; all the side dishes; and desserts of all sorts. Better than the first time. Then the Gilberts cleared their house’s porch. People brought instruments out of their cars and trucks. Folks tuned their guitars; some microphones and amps were set up; chairs and blankets dotted the lawn. Dave Gilbert and his brothers, I learned, sang gospel music semi-professionally in the area. Pastor Wigley, during the summer, had opened for Gold City Quartet at a local concert, playing gospel music on the saxophone. But everyone else sang, too.

In some churches, in some parts of America, you are just expected to sing solo every once in a while. You’re not expected to – you want to. So into the evening, as the sun went down and the moon came up over those farms and fields, everyone at that picnic sang, together or solo or in duets or quartets. Spontaneously, mostly. Far into the night, exuberantly with smiles, or heartfelt with tears, singing unto the Lord.

I sat back in the folding chair, and I thought, “This is Heaven.”

I have grown sad for people who have not experienced the type of worship where singers and people who pray do so spontaneously. From the congregation. Moving to the front. Sharing their hearts. Crying tears of joy or conviction. Loving the Lord, freely. If you have not… then visit a church where this is commonplace. Even witnessing it is an uplifting balm to the soul, where there is freedom and joy in singing spontaneously.

I attach a video that very closely captures the music, and the feeling – the fellowship – of that evening. A wooden ranch house, a barbecue picnic just ended, a campfire, and singers spontaneously worshiping, joining in, clapping, and “taking choruses.” Smiling, hugging. There were cameras at this particular get-together, but it took this city boy back to that holiday weekend, finding himself among a brand-new family, the greatest barbecue I ever tasted before or since… and the sweetest songs I know.

And I think to myself, nervously shedding a tear… “THIS is the America we are losing.”

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Click: The Sweetest Song I Know

8-24-20

“If you’re not for us, you’re against us.”

“The friend of my enemy is my enemy,” or variations.

“Decide this day who you will serve.”

… and a hundred similar aphorisms. These are not fortune-cookie sayings or snippets of advice. They truly are life-rules, and are best understood when put into use… when circumstances oblige us to make choices.

I have mentioned before how once when I visited Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist (Maus) and his wife Francoise Mouly, now Art Director of The New Yorker, they were eager to have me explain, if I could, an ad they saw in a magazine. It offered T-shirts, one of which bore the legend “Don’t let Jesus spit you out.”

Surely a curious message for those who are not Christians (and, I’m afraid, many who are); or those who are not familiar with the challenging book of the Apocalypse, Revelation.

The full title of the Bible’s last book, in many translations, is The Revelation of Jesus Christ To His Servant John. The elderly Apostle was exiled to the island of Patmos off the Greek coast, a penal colony, for evangelizing in Ephesus. It was on Patmos that Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, inspired the words of End Times, messages to the major churches of the day, and, many believe, describing the stages of spiritual maturity of believers as represented by future history’s unfolding dispensations.

The words to the churches are… revelatory, and often harsh. Lessons to all believers. They should be read without confusion by Christians who identify with the challenges, shortcomings, and warnings. Some passages:

I know your deeds, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead…. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

… I am coming quickly; hold fast to what you have, so that no one will take your crown. He who overcomes, I will make him a pillar in the temple of My God, and he will not go out from it anymore; and I will write on him the name of My God, and the name of the city of My God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down out of heaven from My God, and My new name.

And to the Church at Laodicea, which many think is a picture of the Christian church of our times:

The faithful and true Witness… says this:

I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth.

Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, I advise you to receive from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed; and eye salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see.

Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline; therefore be zealous and repent.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me. He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

Can these words be true? Chilling, if so!

Jesus would prefer that you are totally sold out for Him (hot)? Or prefer ice-cold nominal Christians, or lax church-goers (cold)? Prefer over “lukewarm” Christians?

Of course it makes sense, and that fact, if lukewarm Christians would stop to think about it, should make them deathly afraid. Jesus does not even say, “Depart from Me; I never knew you,” another famous verse… because lukewarm Christians do not really know the Savior in the first place.

What can be more graphic than virtually “spitting someone out”? – Distaste, disgust, rejection. Jesus warns that He will do it… and that we can bring this on ourselves.

This is surely good theology; it was spoken by the Son of God, in a “letter” written directly to “the Church at ———” (you may supply your home address there).

Beyond theology, there is no better user’s manual, so to speak, in life.

It might not have application in every moment of life, through history (yes, it does, but that’s another message) but it surely resonates today! The threats in this world… the crisis in our nation… the turmoil on our streets, and parks, and neighborhoods, and churches, and government offices… demand that we not be lukewarm.

We cannot be lukewarm in the face of efforts to destroy our heritage. How can you be lukewarm about the destruction of police headquarters, and the homes and shops of average citizens and neighbors? We should be spit out if we are lukewarm about the assault on secular and sacred statues – the Founders of this nation, and of Jesus, Mary, and saints – as we merely watch on TV.

It should against the law to be lukewarm in the face of such things.

Actually, it is. Against God’s law.

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Click: Halleluyah in Jerusalem

8-17-20

History is a litany of humankind’s mistakes and regrets, no less than it is a record of progress and successes.

In other words, life. This view is neither new nor profound. In microcosm, every day of our own lives is constructed same way. If we go to sleep happy, we still acknowledge that there were were moments or decisions we would like to take back. And if we are gloomy, regretting moments of the previous day, we can always take comfort in some redeeming element.

These things not only are true, but should be true. Success keeps us optimistic and moving forward; regrets make us humble… inspire us to do better… keep us realistic about ourselves and about life.

Again, we do not choose this formula; but returning to the larger view about life, we are reminded that the Bible said “the rain falls on the just and the unjust.”

And Theodore Roosevelt – who I quote here often – once put it this way: “It is not having been in the ‘dark house,’ but having left it, that counts.”

These thoughts were prompted by the current craziness in society (that characterization sounds like a trivialization; but I think it extremely serious), and they inevitably prompt thoughts of History.

We live in a profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-historical age. Late-night comedians squeeze countless routines from “on the street” interviews, confirming over and over that average Americans don’t know from whom the Colonists gained independence; who was president during the Civil War, or who were the combatants; who were the enemies in the World Wars. Ask your neighbors how many members of Congress there are; or the names of the Supreme Court justices; or the guarantees listed in the Bill of Rights.

I want to correct myself. I think this is an anti-intellectual age. But, concerning history, most Americans are not “anti” history – they rather think it is irrelevant, which is a far worse thing.

To deny aspects of history might be an academic exercise, a difference of opinion. But the mobs infecting parks, streets, business districts, and residential neighborhoods don’t want to be bothered with history; it is irrelevant to them, except when they need to “pin” a grievance.

What it means is that they act without regard to historical context. They refer to no philosophical bases or previous revolutions. They have no heroes, cite no precedents. They engage in pure destruction, borne of hate.

This does not mean that the street thugs in Portland and uncountable other cities have no agendas. In fact growing evidence suggests they act from scripts and follow orders. But that is not an intellectual underpinning, something that fueled other revolutions throughout history. Which makes them mindless shock-troops of destruction – nihilists. To the extent they think, beyond following orders, they choose to hate.

They hate Christianity; so they pull down statues of Jesus, and they set fire to churches.

They hate America; so they burn the flag, and they occupy government buildings.

They hate rules and laws; so they kill policemen and set fire to police cars.

They hate order in society; so they riot in the streets.

They hate decency and people who make a living; so they loot and burn stores.

They hate the family unit and Americans’ dreams of neighborhood life; so they seek to dissolve marriage, eliminate gender differences, and occupy peoples’ homes.

These things are far beyond a “black lives matter” impulse. Black Lives Matter, the organization, is openly Marxist.

I very much dislike complaining from the sidelines. I do that here, because I think we – all of us – need definition. But unlike the thugs, our actions must be based on thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, tradition, and values. And we must act. And counter-act.

I began, here, addressing “regrets.” The ugly mobs and allies – whether willing, or willing dupes – build their grievances on regrets. That cannot sustain a movement or be its foundation.

Blacks regret slavery. So do I; I shudder that it existed and that some “normal” people enabled it. But the whole gamut of responses from public housing to reparations is misguided: collective guilt and collective dependence. But every life starts its journey anew.

My grandparents came to America with not one “privilege.” Our family has no corporate moguls, but we are comfortable, having lived the “pursuit of happiness.” So can anyone.

When I hear that members of an ethnic group are bothered, say, by being stopped more often then others at routine police checks (often by black officers!), I suggest that in this “middle period” of societal evolution, they direct their anger at the number of their fellows who create that response from authorities. It will end… but not by bitching.

In the same manner, if a large percentage of rioters and looters on TV are not registering civil-rights theses but rioting and looting, “get your own house in order.” Getting jobs, getting married, being good fathers and sons and husbands, pulling up pants and helping cops keep neighborhoods safe… might keep you too busy to riot and loot.

Regrets. When society has no standards, it has no values and then has no rules and has no respect. Regrets has replaced respect. “Not my job, man”… “Not my fault”… “You owe me”… “Who says you’re right?”…

“I have a pulse, therefore I can do what I want” turns the Cartesian postulation Cogito, ergo sum on its head.

Building a philosophy, a movement, a protest, a political campaign on regrets is self-swindling foolishness. It can win the moment, or attract a few nitwits and malcontents, but is doomed to go nowhere else.

The one exception is that it can accomplish the destruction of a society. This has happened in history – a negative consequence.

Can it happen here? At the moment it is happening here. Pastors do not condemn their churches burning, but criticize a president for standing in its doorway with a Bible? Politicians endorse mass protests and violence, but close schools and churches, even meeting by Zoom?

God abolishes regrets through repentance and forgiveness. Today there are monsters roaming our streets who take no heed of God’s example, filling their minds with hate, and their actions based on bitter regrets.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Do you regret that Isaiah 5:20 is being fulfilled before our eyes?

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Click: Highway to Heaven – Jessy Dixon

8-10-20

I stink at math, but nevertheless – or maybe because of that fact – I pay attention to all the times people throw around the “one per cent” figure. We hear it a lot.

“The one per cent” of people ought to pay more to government. “The one per cent” controls our lives. “The one percent” is richer than 80 per cent of us; or whatever.

Almost every time you hear these charges, or this “one per cent” theme, it is not part of a compliment paid to the one per cent who pay more taxes, roughly, than the 99 per cent do. The one per cent creates many of the jobs for the 99 per cent, however. To resent the one per cent often means resenting success in life. Someone else’s success.

The sin of envy is little different than the sin of greed.

The thrust of the “one per cent” prattle these days is to assert that the rest of us are powerless, hopeless, nearly worthless.

In the United States of America none of us is any of those “-less” things. In America change is possible. Slaves were freed, women got the vote, and rights have been extended and affirmed. Slow, maybe, but always sure.

Are we “there” yet?

I have a clue for you: We will never be “there.” Whatever is good about democracy, whatever is true about progress, the value sometimes is as much in the process as the goal.

The “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence I believe is seldom understood correctly. “Happiness” surely was meant not to represent enjoyable vacations in the hammock, but a state of justice; a sense of equality as all men were created; a savoring of liberty, under a system of laws that gave practical meaning to “freedom.”

Then, the word “Pursuit.” They could have advocated Happiness by itself, or made a list of the blessings of liberty. But they wanted us to engage in the process.

Return to that “one per cent,” the following questions are valid for the one per cent and the 99 per cent: How has America practiced democracy for so long and now, seemingly, is convinced that being “right” depends on being in the majority? … of letting polls convince us of what to believe? … of Political Correctness dictating to us what to think, what to hate, what to feel guilty about?

More so, we are talking about the major institutions of society turning anti-American. We are talking about organizations self-defining as Marxist calling for the overthrow of the government (which once was called “treason”). We are talking about mobs of criminals breaking into stores, looting, defacing buildings and monuments, attacking police and setting fire to their cars and stations.

We are talking about mayors and governors siding with these creatures, even when the mobs’ manifestos declare war on wider neighborhoods and the suburbs.

That this continues is not a symptom of polite indulgence, or patience. It is worse than cultural impotence. First or last gasp, we are in the midst of social apostasy, a world-system that has rotted from within. Heresy has planted its seeds, and the roots seem to strangle the other roots, those of our raising. The heresy challenges not only Biblical truths, but all the previous assumptions about Western civilization, American exceptionalism, and neighborly goodwill.

America might be ready for a radical civic overhaul. Maybe a new Constitution. Perhaps the pandemic, the economic crisis, the showdown with China, the accelerated technological changes – perhaps these all will combine to bring about major changes in the way we live every day, and shop, and learn; perhaps such adjustments are overdue and inevitable.

Perhaps. But one thing that is not a surprising flash-point of economics or race relations or radical politics. It has preceded, and underlies, everything else.

It is the decline of faith in America.

We don’t need polls. Church attendance alone is not a barometer, because many established churches themselves have lost faith and strayed from their moorings. Statistics about crime and divorce rates and addiction and abuse and suicide rates? They are effects, not causes.

Christians are fond of praying, or intending to pray, for revival. “God can work miracles”… except when He chooses not to. Nowhere in the Bible does He force revival on an apostate people.

God has surprised His people, often, with blessings, but there is no Biblical record of the Lord rewarding sin and rebellion.

So… have we run out of time to act? And redeem the culture? Aha – that’s where my deficiencies at math are a blessing.

If we see ourselves as the new “one per centers”… I like the odds.

“One person, with God at our side, constitutes a majority.”

Old Testament prophets were so challenged; and learned its truth. Luther claimed this; and John Knox; and Brother Andrew.

And we can remember what Abraham Lincoln said – he whose statues still stand in our parks, and in our hearts – that “it is not so important that God be on our side; what is important is that we be on God’s side.”

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This video clip is unique: a short film produced by The Christophers service ministry when America when in a similar crisis today’s. We meet Father James Keller in the living room of Jack Benny, of all people; and other stars of the day discuss their concern for the values of America, the Bible, and the Declaration of Independence.

Click: You Can Change the World

8-3-20

My grandfather used to tell a story about an old man who went alone to church one Sunday morning when his wife was unwell.

When he returned home the wife asked her taciturn husband what the preacher’s message was about.

“Sin,” he answered.

She pressed him: “What about it, exactly?”

“He’s against it,” the husband replied.

I’m afraid that joke represents the extent of theology many Christians acknowledge. Also, I think it is similar to many citizens’ brand of patriotism.

We know what we are against; but do we know – much less fight for – what we believe in?

Most people are in the quiet center, the normal “middle,” of issues, debates, and controversies… but these times are neither quiet nor normal.

We ought to give thanks that every generation does not experience such momentous turmoil as we face today. But every once in awhile societies are surprised how suddenly the viciousness – of people, and of nature – can be unleashed.

Our current angst might have been precipitated by a pandemic, which unfortunately happens in cycles. And a history of racial injustice has precipitated periodic outbursts of resentments. But except for the coincidence of timing, it is unlikely that the current rioting, looting, and destruction directly are related to those phenomena. Or are spontaneous.

People on the nervous outskirts of these battle zones, or sitting in living rooms far away, watching war correspondents on the evenings news, wonder about the Americanized versions of Mogadishu or Kabul. They wish this mayhem to be a bizarre exception that will vanish some Monday morning. “This is awful, but what can I do about it?”

As Theodore Roosevelt said in another context, our choice is not whether to meet these challenges… but whether we meet them well or ill.

If the murderous street thugs perhaps are misguided youths who emerged like larvae from their parents’ basements around the same time… they will have to be chased, one by one, down into the parents’ basements if necessary. Lawbreaking never has been unaccompanied by penalties, whether in the Bible or in civil societies… until now, inexplicably.

Some Christians are very quick to quote Christ’s admonition to turn the other cheek when we are wronged. We may have different reactions, however, when Jesus is wronged.

The Bible tells us always to be ready to mount a good defense… and it may well be for settings beyond polite living-room discussions.

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked.” The Lord knows what is in the hearts of those who curse His name and defile His places of worship. The verse from Galatians concludes that whatever people sow, they also shall reap. That warning applies to enemies of the Cross… but also to those who are too timid to defend their faith and their God.

Luke 11:21 – “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are undisturbed.”

Luke 22:36 – “If you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one!”

We must remember that defense is different than revenge. The Lord sanctions defense of life and family and the Word; but “vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

“Repay no one evil for evil. Respect what is honorable in the sight of all.” People sit in groups, clucking about what they disdain on the evening news. You know what you resent, what you hate. What do you support; what do you love, enough to answer the anarchists and revolutionaries in kind?

Is this too fine a “needle” to thread? Does the Bible contradict itself? Of course not; it is precise, with detailed teachings. “All scripture is given by the inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the people of God may be perfected, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (II Timothy 3: 16, 17)

And we watch – we watch – as hordes topple statues of Mary and Jesus and saints. And destroy or spray-paint the ruined statues. We see acid, urine, and feces spread over the statues. Likewise are churches defaced, looted, and set afire. Flags are burned, and Bibles too. We hear the vilest curses screeched about Jesus, not to mention George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

We watch.

Like the old man who summarized the pastor’s sermon, “We are against” these things. But… what are we to do?

Be filled with righteous anger. Do not be overwhelmed with frustrated complaints. Pray about the outrages committed against our nation. God will answer us with wisdom.

Be “equipped” – grounded in the Word of God, and in the Declaration, the Constitution, and other foundational documents of our Republic. Affirm what you are for!

“Network” – seek out others who share your feelings. Not to complain, but to plan, to anticipate, to act. Be bold, be willing to go out; consider civil disobedience.

Do these things soon. Get ready. When – not if, but when – this all comes to your neighborhood, know how you will respond. Be ye doers of the Word, and not hearers only. History is threatened. History is watching.

History is now.

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Click: Mahalia Jackson

7-27-20

By suggesting that we revisit slavery, I do not mean to try it a second time. Of course not. I do mean the topic of slavery, a hot topic in America, as slavery and its legacy were the sparks that ignited the tinder of current, prolonged, anarchic, bloody riots throughout the land.

To revisit the facts, rather, about slavery requires a simultaneous confrontation with the implications and legacy of slavery, beyond facts, statistics, and numbers. Slavery over periods of history and various cultures; reflections of human nature; what it says about us.

Every era and every society in every land is stained with slavery of some sort. In ancient Egypt, the Jews were slaves for hundreds of years. In ancient China, entire ethnic groups were assumed to be inferior and therefore destined, or doomed, to slavery. In Central and South America slaves built mighty cities and temples. In Biblical times, slaves were written about matter-of-factly, just as they were considered in Athens and ancient Rome. The Irish of the 4^th century served almost naturally as slaves to Romans in Britain. Europe itself went through periods of slavery, feudalism, serfdom – only vague distinctions to the lowly. Many Irish who emigrated to the United States traveled as indentured servants, their liberties restricted, and virtually owned by masters until they labored their way to “freedom.”

The word-association of slavery to most Americans refers to Africans. Sold and then transported, mostly as field laborers, frequently assigned new names, separated from families, and physically bound. These conditions attended many slaves in many cultures through history. The majority of Africans in the “New World” were repopulated to the Caribbean and South American, actually only a percentage to North America.

Colonists and settlers, and later planters, seldom enslaved Native Americans, but Africans were in bondage, and that is why, despite the universal, and shameful, practice of slavery, Americans of all colors today associate “slavery” with Africans.

Did all European-Americans congenitally regard Africans as sub-humans? It is not borne out by the facts. Abraham Lincoln was appalled to his core when he encountered a slave market, and said “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” The thrust of his career and life – and death – was to eradicate slavery. Slavery was a burning topic at the founding of the United States, and all but a few of the Framers knew that they were compromising with evil to let it continue for a time. In one way or another the sin of slavery was an issue at both the highest and most local levels of American society for two generations – little comfort to those who still suffered under the lash – until a war was fought to free slaves.

I am something of a Civil War buff, and in my overflowing library I have a complete run of Harper’s Weekly, the landmark newspaper through which I get a sense of everyday realities and people’s feelings. The “Revisionist” historians contend that the Civil War was an economic conflict; agrarian vs. industrial; state sovereignty vs. a national system. These facts are true but insignificant compared to the reason Northern soldiers fought. Over and over soldiers agreed that slavery needed to be abolished, and this view was held by farmers from prairies and fields, farmers who had never seen a man with black skin; and by thousands of recent immigrants from Europe, who swore opposition to slavery. They too suffered and died, for four years.

With the same determination, of course, Southern soldiers died, sometimes to uphold slavery (although few of them owned slaves, or lived much better), sometimes for a fealty to their region’s traditions. Again, however, most of the bondsmen toiled in servitude as the war ground on.

Great Britain’s end to slavery was attended by little acrimony. As in many other countries, the legacy of slavery’s end was more benign than in America. Of course economic disparities endured with almost all freed slaves around the world in every situation; but the “racial divide” as well as economic and social stratification is more pronounced in the United States than almost anywhere else.

The descendants of slaves as a lot surely are better off by many standards than 150 years ago, when emancipated. But in the 50 years since the monumental array of programs first known as the War on Poverty, the same can hardly be said. The legacy, in contemporaries’ focus – not that of Booker T Washington or Martin Luther King – is disillusionment, bitterness, and resentment. At the moments its goals seem to range from reparations to impositions of new forms of segregation and preference.

We know these things if we have televisions or see newspapers, or leave our windows open a crack. It is a condition, not a theory, that presents itself as resentments find expression in fallen statues, looted stores, obscene graffiti, attacks on police, and, sometimes, murder. Long in the making, as I have limned, the angry violence has manifested itself, to the current degree, almost overnight… and will not recede overnight.

My purpose in “revisiting slavery” is not to roll out a history lesson; and as I said not to entertain an idea to return to its evil horrors. Of course not.

But I implore you to realize that slavery has not disappeared from this earth. There are more slaves today, studies say, than at any time in history. There are white slaves (prostitutes), sex slaves, child slaves. Arabs are involved in trafficking Africans. I was involved 20 years ago with the work of International Justice Mission, which fought slavery, mostly of children, in India – everything from sex to cigarette manufacturing. Just this month, leaked drone videos of Uighurs in China – rounded up by the thousands to work in fields and factories – in bondage. Slaves.

Finally, please consider the slave drivers, the masters, those who enable the system. It is you and me.

When you buy a range of products – we cannot hide behind ignorance – we often subsidize slave labor. What has made Walmart the biggest retailer in the country, and Apple the richest corporation, is products made cheaply in China and other Pacific and Latin countries; also along the Indian rim and in Africa. Shoes, shirts, electronics – you know.

Think of complicated ear bugs or calculators that sell for two dollars, or ten dollars; think of the many components, the plastics and wires, the making of them, the packaging, the shipping to the US, the distribution from ports to warehouses, the stocking of store shelves – and everyone making a profit along the way. You know that the women and children working 12-hour days back in those factories, “earning” perhaps 20 cents a day… are slaves by another name.

We are all complicit. Many people, confronted with these truths, hide behind excuses that “they probably are better off now than when…” No, that does not cut it. That is what Northern factory workers and purchasers of clothes said before the Civil War. “Oh, they are better off than in Africa.” Slavery is slavery is still is slavery.

American workers lost jobs because of foreign competition, and went to the Walmarts across the landscape for cheap goods – made by the foreigners who took their jobs. Suicidal insanity.

I am not arguing for a kinder sympathy for those who once profited from blatant field-slavery. No; of course not.

But I am arguing that we wake up to slavery in the world today. All of us. And whether tempted by radical politics, or deciding to tear down statues and destroy shops and set fire to police stations – let us instead direct our energies to eradicating modern-day slavery.

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Click: Softly and Tenderly

7-20-20

Do you notice in your Bible – the King James Version and some other versions — that words in the middle of sentences sometimes are italicized? Do you wonder why?

I love study Bibles, and profit from them. I believe that John Calvin’s Geneva Bible was the first to feature footnotes, reference notes, parallel verses, and explanations. It is possible that many Bible readers get lost in that frenzied information, and do not notice or wonder about randomly italicized words.

When I want only to read my Bible, to absorb its narrative and, yes, meaning, I open the “clean” Bible – Scripture as literature – that reads like a novel. No superscripts, no footnotes, no parallel accounts. The Word of God, after all. I recommend this: there are passages I read hundreds of times in the past that somehow seem new.

Back to italics. This is not a grammar lesson, but it is interesting to note that occasionally translators, hewing so strictly to original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts, came to places where sentences threatened confusion. So names, places, adverbs were supplied for clarity. They indicated those by italics. Occasionally, words or phrases were italicized for emphasis – dramatic or theological intensity.

And then there are words, especially those of Jesus, where He is quoted or cited as speaking in the present tense. Present tense for events hundreds of years ago?

Revealed truth is true, whether 2000 years ago or today. Words of Jesus, if applicable today, are often printed in the present tense. If this is good grammar, it is better theology. King James’s translators used “historical present tense,” especially from the Greek texts; the Catholics’ Douay-Rheims Bible employs italics similarly. The New American Standard Bible uses asterisks, by the way.

A big deal, or scholarly nit-picking? A hint: it’s a big deal, because Jesus speaks to us today. God is from Everlasting to Everlasting; and Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Note “is” and not “was.”)

We should always remember that whatever we read of Jesus’s wisdom and teaching, He speaks to us, today, as much as to the people around Him. Even on the cross, when He asked the Father to forgive “them,” I believe He meant us too… because our sins sent Him to die. When He looked down from the agony, I believe He looked into our eyes, not only of the people gathered there. “When He was on the cross, I was on His mind,” the song says; and that is not time-travel, but rather the ever-present incarnate Savior’s love.

All of this has come to mind as I think on Scripture’s accounts of times when Jesus wept. The most famous passage, “Jesus wept” (probably because of the trivia question, as the shortest verse in the Bible), before the grave of Lazarus whom He was about to raise from the dead. Weeping, perhaps, touched by Mary and Martha’s grief. But another time is particularly poignant:

As He approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, “If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side, and level you, and your children within, to the ground; and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not know the time of your visitation.

Yes. Jesus grieved for unbelief in the Holy City. Yes, He prophesied the imminent invasion and destruction of the city and its temple. Yes, He looked upon people who knew the Truth but rejected it. This scene is cited in Luke, chapter 19. Earlier, in chapter 13, we hear Him say:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate…

We live in a new dispensation; the Old Testament promises have been fulfilled… but its commands and warnings are still in the present tense. The United States might or might not be the New Jerusalem… but America as a Christian nation is Jesus’s place today as was Jerusalem then. Or… was His place.

As our continent was visited, explored, and colonized, it was also, from the first settlers, claimed for the cause of Christ. By planted flags, by prayers. By promises. Natives were evangelized. The Declaration of Independence, which still inspires people around the world, knelt before the Creator. Governments, including the Constitutional Republic we still live under, were careful to acknowledge God and organize under Biblical principles.

Today newcomers and new thinkers deny and insult these traditions, these pledges. The sacrifices of generations, the hopes of millions, destroyed as we said recently by the “foes of our own households.” They invent new “rights” to shred the heritage of the greatest nation in history. In the twinkling of an eye, America has gone from barely being aware of subversives and malcontents here and there… to being overwhelmed by anarchists, thugs, arsonists, looters, vandals, and murderers.

Surprising? Yes, many of us are shell-shocked. But… on one hand there should be no surprise, because America has methodically shackled religious liberty; removed God from classrooms and the public square; encouraged the promiscuous use of drugs and alcohol; allowed free expression of pornography and sedition; and promoted sexual deviance, abortion, marital abuse and dissolution, child and spousal exploitation.

But more surprising is that religious traditionalists and Christian patriots have allowed this to happen. As a rule they – we, excuse me – are merely sitting back and complaining to each other. This makes us as guilty for the destruction of all that America was, and could be.

One more Bible verse, from Hosea chapter 8: They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

This is not only a warning to our enemies in the streets. It is a grim promise from God. Past and present.

Meanwhile, Jesus weeps.

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Click: Jesus, Take a Hold

7-13-20

The tenth chapter of Matthew is one of the hardest chapters in the Bible. Not hard to understand, at all. No, it has the hardest truths, hardest warnings, and hardest of challenges – commands, really – as anywhere in Scripture.

It contains the words of Jesus, start to finish.

This is not the moony-faced Jesus of paintings on Sunday-school lessons or church bulletins or calendars. The chapter quotes the Jesus we saw in flashes like overturning the tables of money-changers in the Temple courtyard; or when he rebuked people. Just as God the Father in the Old Testament would show Himself sometimes as a God of jealousy and vengeance, so Jesus was sometimes “hard.”

When children need correction, we discipline them. When God sees sin, He hates its presence and routs it out. When Jesus perceived lack of faith, He sternly confronted His followers with… the Truth.

The Lord disciplines the ones He loves, and chastises every child whom He receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as children. For what child is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not His (Hebrews 12: 6-8).

Most of Matthew 10 is teachings and warnings, a battle plan for His warriors. The chapter names the disciples; directs who should be first given the Good News; and promises spiritual gifts of healing power.

Significantly, He says if people are not receptive to the Message, to “shake the dust from your feet and move on”! For such people and such communities, He said, what befell Sodom and Gomorrah would be better than the fates they deserve. Hard-sounding, but in our times there will be an urgency preceding Judgment; and some people will have stiff necks, hard hearts and stopped ears, will reject the Truth no matter what we do.

Jesus promises here that if we are in jeopardy in perilous times, the Holy Spirit will give us wisdom to answer, and power to withstand. This is the chapter where He reminds us that if a sparrow cannot fall without the Father seeing, how much more will He care for us? God knows the number of hairs on our heads, and will provide.

But then… get ready for the Hard Gospel. Not warnings, but marching orders into the midst of oppressors. Difficult Times, Persecution, Trials.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law…. He that loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me: and he that loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he that takes not his cross, and follows after Me, is not worthy of Me. He that finds his life shall lose it: and he that loses his life for My sake shall find it.

Thus saith the Lord.

I regret to say that many of our churches today, filled with Sharing the peace, and “Smile like you mean it” mantras, and happy music performances with PowerPoint projections of springtime fields, and more smiley faces on banners than crosses on the walls… they only preach half the Gospel. Or less.

They don’t know the Jesus of Matthew 10.

How many of us do? “Weren’t those warnings only for the early Church?” No. “Didn’t Jesus give these words as fall-backs for occasional crises they faced?” No, He spoke in the future tense. “Weren’t those words just for End Times?”

We are living in End Times. His words are for today.

Christians are under persecution in America, in the West. Not only in Communist and other oppressive regimes – where, despite persecution, individuals and communities of faith are thriving. But believers in the United States are being crushed from two sides: an Establishment that uses the power of the State to suppress rights, remove Bibles from schools, Jesus from the public square, references to faith from daily life, except, virtually, in secret. Where saying “God bless you” is proscribed, and statues of Jesus are defaced and toppled. Also squeezed, now, by common rabble, from below.

It is times like these that Jesus told us to be ready for… and how to be ready… and what to expect.

We should expect – no, we are seeing it now, aren’t we? – our neighbors and our children turning against us. The “world” defining us in libelous terms… and that we suddenly face life-choices that we never dreamed of; and with life-altering consequences. But Jesus here tells us, in effect, to preempt these attacks. Not only be ready for it, but proactively act it before it kills us.

For our sake. For His sake.

Choices are seldom easy. I guess that’s why they are “choices” and not slam-dunks. The “hardest” part of all the warnings and commands of Jesus in this passage is verse 36, right in the middle. It is hard to hear… but we see – especially in these very days – in the news and on the streets:

A man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

We need to understand that those rebels, the “protesters,” anarchists-with-initials, the vandals and arsonists and looters and murderers, the cop-killers… we need to understand who they are. They not a foreign army; they are not romantic revolutionaries; they are not philosophers with agendas for utopias; they are not lovers of anything but selves; they are haters. They hate the nation and our heritage. They hate themselves and the society that bred them. They hate the Revealed Word of God and they hate you.

And where did they come from? Jesus called them out already. “Foes of our own household.” They are perverted versions of ourselves. They grew from the soil of our increasingly secular, self-absorbed, prosperous, liberal and “accepting” culture.

We ignore the foes of our own household at our peril. What has happened lately is only a little foretaste. We cannot let it – and them – roll over us. We can continue to fool ourselves about where we were until recently in America, that we had “found” lives of comfort and security.

Just remember that Jesus said that those who find such lives… will lose them.

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Click: I’m America

7-6-20

Another thought? Gee, haven’t we discussed it enough with the protests and riots?Haven’t we put it into context with all the rules about confronting the virus? Isn’t the Fourth of July over? Are we going to debate these things endlessly? Don’t we have freedom? Didn’t we end slavery?

Well, no; yes; no; yes… not so fast!!!

Whatever views have been weaponized in these recent controversies – offensive and defensive – at the end of the day it is a good thing that citizens consider the value of freedom. Even if opponents characterize each other as using freedom to destroy, or freedom to suppress (the middle ground of debates has been abandoned), freedom is the essential matter at hand.

For those us who might confuse the terms – most of all us, at times – and to save yourself from registering for three or four college courses, a problem with contemporary society is that we have lost the distinction between freedom and liberty. Basically, freedom is an internal matter of the mind, a gift from God that is a matter of the heart. We are free from… fill in the blank; sin, for instance. And we are free to… fill in the blank; worship, assemble, speak, and publish, for instance.

Liberties are what we do with freedom. The Enlightenment thinker Rousseau mistakenly thought that freedoms were bestowed by the state (and not by God) and ten years after his death, the French Revolution erupted, defacing monuments and churches, massacring and beheading people. Significantly, the Revolution’s slogan was “Liberty (not Freedom), Equality, Fraternity.”

The Bill of Rights – the first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution – carefully recognized and guaranteed freedoms in America. Since then, and no doubt into the future, liberties have been debated, granted, modified, withdrawn. When slaves were freed, they became at liberty – subject to further efforts and guarantees – to exercise that freedom.

It is a distinction with an enormous and consequential difference. In times like these crazy days, we are reminded that Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots every generation. How that blood is shed, or for what causes, are dispositive questions we ask of Mr Jefferson, yet the willingness to rebel ought to be cherished.

Whether Christians and patriots are as willing to fight for things they believe in, as nihilists are willing to fight for things they don’t believe in, is the question that confronts history right now.

Who the Son sets free is free indeed.

John 8:36 records that promise. It is one of those wonderful Bible verses that is short in words but unlimited in meaning. Simple but profound. Every word should be parsed. “Who”? – a notice to all, without restriction. “Sets free” – as we discussed, all manner of things we might be free from… and we can joyfully consider all we are freed to! “Indeed” – God puts a period on the sentence; an emphasis; a promise of totality; no reservation.

“Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, free at last!” Dr King said. Carefully. Free… to enjoy liberties. History is littered with societies that have confused liberty with license.

Jefferson, seduced somewhat by some of Europe’s philosophers, did insert “liberty” in the Declaration of Independence’s famous passage, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Brilliantly crafted needle-threading: Rights including liberty are secured by governments supported by the people… in order to guarantee God-given rights… fulfilling Natural Law… and our Creator’s will.

And “Equality,” unlike a mere slogan and goal of the French Revolution, is addressed as something that is.

Next – as it always has been – is the question of what a free people will do with their liberty.

We know what anarchists, subversives, and nihilists do with it. What will Christian patriots do?

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Click: I’m Free

6-29-20

After many statues have been yanked down, marble figures broken, bronze artwork twisted, heads of memorialized people broken off, bodies and pedestals spray-painted with obscene words and Communist slogans…

And after so many windows broken it looks like memorials to Kristallnacht; after streets and stores and buildings covered with obscenities and slogans; random cars laid waste by clubs and tire irons; mothers and children terrorized; fires set in stores and dumpsters…

And after sections of cities have been occupied, stores looted of TVs and apparel in the name of civil rights for a dead man, after grocery stores and toy stores, many started by black people struggling to make a living…

And after police are told not to counter the anarchy, after police are killed, and after officials from the White House down to local mayors talk tough – or don’t – and the jungle is thereby encouraged to spread its savagery…

WHAT IF –

What if the Theodore Roosevelt statue at the museum is the next to go?

What if the next target is the Lincoln Memorial, slogans spray-painted all around, paint splashed on the Great Emancipator?

What if the Washington Monument is next, obscenities around the base, and then, maybe by drones, the top of the monument felled?

What if Mount Rushmore is defaced from the top, paint and acid dribbling down over the “evil” faces?

What if the House and Senate are shot up, rushing guards; if the Library of Congress is set afire? What is that long-feared attack on Times Square finally happens? What if the Statue of Liberty is the target by planes or drones, and explosions and fires in its base? What if headstones and memorials are defaced at Arlington National Cemetery?

What if… the targets shift to your town, your city hall, your police station, your schools, the car in your driveway, your front windows…

What if the nihilists continue to deface and burn churches, from across the street from the White House to… your neighborhood?

Or…

WHAT IF –

Those in “authority” sweep the “zones” and arrest the vandals? What if they look at news footage and video tapes and know who to prosecute? What if people who destroy public property pay for their destruction? What if the Department of Justice files amicus briefs on behalf of shop owners, business people, small entrepreneurs, and average citizens, against mayors and governors who prevented law enforcement, and aided and abetted the destroyers?

Further, what if police were allowed to be police again? What if police funding were restored and increased? What if deluded citizens stopped defunding and started defending?

What if Christian “leaders” stopped making excuses for savagery in the streets, and in their basements? What if Christian worshipers started to find preachers who started reading the Bible instead of Marx, who would look for lost souls instead of hiding criminals?

What if God would (in effect) apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah, in any event I mean give America one more chance?

WHAT IF –

America doesn’t deserve it?

In fact, we don’t. We have, as God spoke in II Chronicles, turned away and forsaken My statutes and My commandments which I have set before you; and served other gods, and worshiped them… And God would uproot them from My land which I have given them… And as for this house [which we may see as America, once dedicated to Him] which is exalted, everyone who passes by it will be astonished and say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land and this house?’ Then they will answer, ‘Because they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, who… embraced other gods, and worshiped them and served them; therefore He has brought all this calamity on them.

Many Christians know, and quote, over and over, an earlier passage in II Chronicles: If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

That is a very big if in there. What if God really wanted Solomon to beware – and for us to be warned – what calamity we may bring up ourselves?

How many ways we have strayed from Him!!!

What if He is a God of justice?

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Please view the music video this week. It is the instrumental version of achingly beautiful Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott (“Have mercy Lord, My God, for the sake of my tears”) by Johann Sebastian Bach. The violinist, Lisa Batiashvili, speaks before her performance about the street violence and downed airplanes, everything in between, in her homeland. The audience, Dutch people on their boats in Amsterdam Harbor, share the intensity of the sacred music.

The words in Bach’s full version ask God for mercy and plead for His forgiveness –
Have mercy, my God, for the sake of my tears!
See here, before you, heart and eyes weep bitterly.
Have mercy, my God.

Click: Have Mercy, For the Sake Of My Tears.

6-22-20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Click: A New Birth of Freedom

11-18-19

Back around 1970 I was on the staff of New Guard Magazine, the monthly journal of Young Americans for Freedom, the national student organization founded by William F Buckley. At the height of the hippie culture and anti-war protests, we were, perhaps the original “resistance” movement against the political status quo.

YAF had 55,000 members across America, and more than 700 chapters in high schools, colleges, and in communities. I was state chairman for a while in DC and New Jersey, and, as I say, on the staff of their magazine, and editor of The Free Campus News Service, syndicating news and cartoons and opinions to college papers.

I cut more than a few eye teeth at YAF, but concurrent with these activities I was still a student at American University, and worked a part-time job in YAF’s mail room. Always look on the back of everyone’s business card.

Some of those “eye teeth” I cut were opportunities to meet and work with many of the leaders of our time. One seems unlikely today, and is an example of how much our nation has changed in one generation.

West Virginia Senator Robert C Byrd, Democrat, was a conservative. He wrote an article on tradition, conservative principles, and religion in America for New Guard. I was asked to illustrate it. I was a budding cartoonist, but this assignment I handled with realistic drawings. A patriot next to the flag; a student praying; etc.

Robert Byrd eventually became Majority Leader in the Senate (beating Ted Kennedy in the caucus) and when he died he was the longest-serving senator in American history.

In this period of his life he was a fierce defender of conservative values and the role of Christianity in our national life. He defended his own values, too; a country boy, he liked mountain music… and often played fiddle tunes and hoedown-music at festivals, rallies, and… well just about anywhere.

“Anywhere” included the Grand Ole Opry and the hit TV show Hee Haw. The music video to click below is one of his guest appearances on the CBS network show. More than his service in the Senate, more than his article that I illustrated, I ask you to watch Sen. Byrd, in his trademark red vest, playing and singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” the old Carter Family standard.

Watch and listen… and think about how much America has changed.

Today, a United States senator singing hillbilly music on a cornpone TV show? (More: CBS carrying a hillbilly-music show???)

Today, the Majority Leader of the U S Senate singing a gospel song on network TV? Can you imagine Chuck Schumer pickin’ and grinnin’?

Today, a politician of either party enthusiastically singing about Jesus, smiling and raising his arms in joy at every mention of the Savior’s name?

We all know that – somehow – we have arrived at a place where senators, not only local jerks, would threaten to sue TV networks or shut down TV stations for daring to mention the name of Jesus. A lot of senators spend their time and efforts working to legalize drugs and decriminalize criminals these days. Mentions of personal faith or faith-based policies, like defending the unborn, have to be done in carefully chosen places, speaking carefully selected words.

We sang the songs of childhood, Hymns of faith that made us strong…

I’m gonna sit down besides my Jesus When I lay my burdens down…

Will the circle be unbroken By and by, Lord, by and by?
There’s a better home a-waiting In the sky, Lord, in the sky.

The song has lived in several versions since it was written in 1907 by Ada R Habershon and Charles H Gabriel; the most familiar is a funeral theme by the Carter Family.

When you see the joyful and unembarrassed performance of this old time Gospel classic, on national television, by the Majority Leader of the United States Senate – not too many years ago, really – you might think it is, after all, kind of a funeral theme for America.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Meet Times, They are A-Changin’.

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Click: Will the Circle Be Unbroken

9-2-16

I have told this story before. Like a couple weeks ago, a reprint by request; I have gotten a lot of comments on this memory I share. It is about a holiday far away from my home… but very close to my heart. It happened on a Summer holiday years ago.

A number of years ago I was working on a book, a three-part biography of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis; evangelist Jimmy Swaggart; and country-music superstar Mickey Gilley, all first cousins to each other. My good friend Maury Forman offered me his unused condo in Montgomery, Texas to get away for a bit of a personal research and writing one summer. Since Lewis lived in Mississippi, Swaggart in Louisiana, and Gilley in nearby Pasadena Texas, it made geographical sense.

Once settled, I took out the Yellow Pages (remember them?) to chart the location of Assembly of God churches, intent on visiting as many as I could through the summer. East Texas was in every way new to me, and I wanted to experience everything I could.

Well, the first one I visited was in Cut and Shoot, Texas. That’s a town’s name; you can look it up. A small, white frame AG church was my first stop that summer… and I never visited another. For one thing – coincidence? – I learned that a member of the tiny congregation was the widow of a man who had pastored the AG church in Ferriday, Louisiana, the small town FOUR HOURS AWAY where, and when, those three cousins grew up in its pews. She knew them all, and their families, and had great stories. Beyond that, the pastor of the church in Cut and Shoot, Charles Wigley, had gone to Bible College with Jerry Lee Lewis and played in a band with him, until Jerry Lee got kicked out. Some more great stories.

But there was more than that kept me there for that summer. In that white-frame church and that tiny congregation, it was, um, obvious in three minutes that I was not from East Texas. I was born in New York City. Yet I was treated like family as if the folks had known me three decades. A fellow named Dave Gilbert asked me if I’d like to go to his farm for the holiday where a bunch of people were just going to get together and “do some visitin’.”

I bought the biggest watermelon I could find as my contribution to the pot-luck. Well, there were dozens and dozens of folks. I couldn’t tell which was family and who were friends, because everybody acted like family. When folks from East Texas ask, “How are you?” they really mean it. There were several monstrous barrel BBQ smokers with chimneys, all slow-cooking beef brisket. (Every region brags about its barbecue traditions, but I’ll fight anyone who doesn’t admit low-heat, slow-smoked, no sauce, East-Texas BBQ the best) There was visitin,’ surely; there were delicious side dishes; there was softball and volleyball and kids dirt-biking; and breaks for sweet tea and spontaneous singing of patriotic songs.

I sat back in a folding chair, and I thought, “This is America.”

As the sun set, the same food came out again — smoked brisket galore; all the side dishes; and desserts of all sorts. Better than the first time. Then the Gilberts cleared the porch of their house. People brought instruments out of their cars and trucks. Folks tuned their guitars; some microphones and amps were set up; chairs and blankets dotted the lawn. Dave Gilbert and his brothers, I learned, sang gospel music semi-professionally in the area. Pastor Wigley, during the summer, had opened for Gold City Quartet at a local concert, playing gospel music on the saxophone. But everyone else sang, too.

In some churches, in some parts of America, you are just expected to sing solo every once in a while. You’re not expected to – you want to. So into the evening, as the sun went down and the moon came up over those farms and fields, everyone at that picnic sang, together or solo or in duets or quartets. Spontaneously, mostly. Far into the night, exuberantly with smiles, or heartfelt with tears, singing unto the Lord.

I sat back in the folding chair, and I thought, “This is Heaven.”

I have grown sad for people who have not experienced the type of worship where singers and people who pray do so spontaneously. From the congregation. Moving to the front. Sharing their hearts. Crying tears of joy or conviction. Loving the Lord, freely. If you have not… visit a church where this is commonplace; even witnessing it is an uplifting balm to the soul., where there is freedom and joy in singing spontaneously.

I attach a video that very closely captures the music, and the feeling – the fellowship – of that evening. A wooden ranch house, a barbecue picnic just ended, a campfire, and singers spontaneously worshiping, joining in, clapping, and “taking choruses.” There were cameras at this Gaither get-together, but it took this city boy back to that holiday weekend, finding himself amongst a brand-new family, the greatest barbecue I ever tasted before or since… and the sweetest songs I know.

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Click: The Sweetest Song I Know

7-2-18

I have told this story before. Readers have liked it, and some have asked that it not get buried in Archives. It is about a holiday far away from home… but very close to my heart. It happened on a Fourth of July years ago.

A number of years ago I was working on a book, a three-part biography of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis; evangelist Jimmy Swaggart; and country-music superstar Mickey Gilley, all first cousins to each other. My good friend Maury Forman offered me his unused condo in Montgomery, Texas to get away for a bit of a personal research and writing one summer. Since Lewis lived in Mississippi, Swaggart in Louisiana, and Gilley in nearby Pasadena Texas, it made geographical sense.

Once settled, I took out the Yellow Pages (remember them?) to chart the location of Assembly of God churches for all the weeks ahead, intent on visiting as many as I could. East Texas was in every way new to me, and I wanted to experience everything I could.

Well, the first one I visited was in Cut and Shoot, Texas. That’s a town’s name; you can look it up. A small, white frame AG church was my first stop that summer… and I never visited another. For one thing – coincidence? – I learned that a member of the tiny congregation was the widow of a man who had pastored the AG church in Ferriday, Louisiana, the small town FOUR HOURS AWAY where, and when, those three cousins grew up in its pews. She knew them all, and their families, and another piano-playing cousin, David Beatty; and had great stories. Beyond that, the pastor of the church in Cut and Shoot, Charles Wigley, had gone to Bible College with Jerry Lee Lewis and played in a band with him, until Jerry Lee got kicked out. Some more great stories.

But there was more than that kept me there for that summer. In that white-frame church and that tiny congregation, it was, um, obvious in three minutes that I was not from East Texas. I was born in New York City. Yet I was treated like family as if they all had known me three decades. A fellow named Dave Gilbert asked me if I’d like to go to his farm for the holiday where a bunch of people were just going to get together and “do some visitin’.”

I bought the biggest watermelon I could find as my contribution to the pot-luck. Well, there were dozens and dozens of folks. I couldn’t tell which was family and who were friends, because everybody acted like family. When folks from East Texas ask, “How are you?” they really mean it. There were several monstrous barbecue smokers with chimneys, all slow-cooking beef brisket. (Every region brags about its barbecue traditions, but I’ll fight anyone who doesn’t admit low-heat, slow-smoked, no sauce, East-Texas BBQ, Lo and Slo, is the best) There was visitin,’ surely; there were delicious side dishes; there was softball and volleyball and kids dirt-biking; and breaks for sweet tea and spontaneous singing of patriotic songs.

I sat back in a folding chair, and I thought, “This is America.”

As the sun set, the same food came out again – smoked brisket galore; all the side dishes; and desserts of all sorts. Better than the first time. Then the Gilberts cleared the porch of their house. People brought instruments out of their cars and trucks. Folks tuned their guitars; some microphones and amps were set up; chairs and blankets dotted the lawn. Dave Gilbert and his brothers, I learned, sang gospel music semi-professionally in the area. Pastor Wigley, during the summer, had opened for Gold City Quartet at a local concert, playing gospel music on the saxophone. But everyone else sang, too.

In some churches, in some parts of America, you are just expected to sing solo every once in a while. You’re not expected to – you want to. So into the evening, as the sun went down and the moon came up over those farms and fields, everyone at that picnic sang, together or solo or in duets or quartets. Spontaneously, mostly. Far into the night, exuberantly with smiles, or heartfelt with tears, singing unto the Lord.

I sat back in the folding chair, and I thought, “This is Heaven.”

I have grown sad for people who have not experienced the type of worship where singers and people who pray, do so spontaneously. From the congregation. Moving to the front. Sharing their hearts. Crying tears of joy or conviction. Loving the Lord, freely. If you have not… visit a church where this is commonplace; even witnessing it is an uplifting balm to the soul. Where there is freedom and joy in singing spontaneously.

I attach a video that very closely captures the music, and the feeling – the fellowship – of that evening. A wooden ranch house, a barbecue picnic just ended, a campfire, and singers spontaneously worshiping, joining in, clapping, and “taking choruses.” There were cameras at this Gaither get-together, but it took this city boy back to that holiday weekend, finding himself amongst a brand-new family, the greatest barbecue I ever tasted before or since… and the sweetest songs I know.

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Click: The Sweetest Song I Know

6-25-18

We are reaching full employment in America, the experts say. I know one job category whose openings are greater than the number of workers or applicants these days: Jeremiahs. Biblical Jeremiahs: that is, not mere prophets but those who discern the times, the danger signals, the warnings; and raise the alarums.

The Old Testament’s Jeremiah was not simply a grouch, or a pessimist, or someone who got out of too many wrong sides of beds too often. And we need a similar fiery servant who can know God’s mind, analyze the crisis of the age, and deliver articulate solutions.

America has been gifted with preachers and teachers, with revivalists and reformers. But our times are different, and a different messenger is sorely needed in our land, in our time.

I once was phlegmatic about the pendulum-swings of social pathologies. But I am now convinced that challenges have turned to problems have turned to crises. Contemporary turmoil is no longer evolutionary release-and-realignment. It is the harbinger of disintegration and destruction. Of course I have a point of view about this retrogression – and I believe, humbly, that it is an informed, Biblical view – but the inevitable firestorm of opposition we receive will prove my larger point. Only a few years ago, reasonably presented opinions perhaps risked arguments and debates… but now are certain to invite savage billingsgate, and insure obloquy. Forget Thanksgiving dinner disruptions; innocent Facebook posts and overheard mall conversations routinely incite everything from heated rhetoric to hate-filled rhetoric.

America has, with shocking rapidity, become a country where good will is an endangered species. Quoting Bible verses or Rodney King (“Can’t we all just get along?”) is unlikely to have everyone waking up tomorrow morning, desirous of kissing and making up. One time that theoretically would have made people happy. Now, many people are happy to be unhappy; they love to hate.

We see it every day, every where. We see it – for instance; and I know I am tap-dancing in a mine-field – in the “debate” over today’s border problems.

People arrive who claim asylum from lands south of Mexico; but no one proposes helping those countries solve their problems, the source of social angst.

Mexico (whose own Southern border is harsher than Trump’s fantasies for our own), allows “caravans” to trek hundreds of miles… protected, not even challenged; but no one proposes treating Mexico as a virtual accessory to felonies.

Adults, often with evanescent “asylum” claims (and in spite of orderly remedies and applications where we have embassies) use children as “anchors,” because, as children are released into the maw of America, they must be too.

Well, these are the challenges, and I honestly did not want to start yet another debate over these issues. My point, however, is that goodwill in American has left the building. And this issue illustrates it. Even among Christian friends, I have seen it go this way:

They once agreed with border and immigration policies of Clinton, Bush and Obama. Trump enforced the same policies… which oddly earns him the sobriquet of “nazi.” If you object to children being separated from adults so they are spared jail-house situations, you are a nazi. If you accede and say they should be incarcerated with the adults, you are a nazi. If you look for a solution that would return them all to their home-countries, or neutral locations, even while their cases might be adjudicated, you are a nazi. If you advocate shelters built for (grateful) hurricane victims, temporary and probably superior to homes the migrants have left, you are a nazi.

Showing contempt for America’s previously normal and compassionate laws, and a larger concern for the orderly welfare of children, today has Christians judging fellow Christians as… bad Christians. And worse.

Lost in all this is concern over social burdens, costs, crimes, that accompany these radical disruptions whose details-of-compassion are rudely dictated to the rest of us. The parents of Kate Steinle are supposed to be compliant. After all (I suppose) they are nazis, too, if they object to the state of affairs and dare to miss their daughter. Twenty years ago – before this all came to a head – I had a friend who taught the second grade in a Southern California school. All but two of her (oversized) class were Mexicans – not Mexican background, but kids whose parents were not citizens, many of whom were driven across the border every day to attend school from towns south of the border. And that was 20 years; no doubt more widespread, and farther north, now. I am sorry to sound like a nazi if questioning the lunacy of such things fits your definition. No… I’m not.

I mention the immigration flash-point, and the vicious vituperation, because it clogs the headlines right now. But the same evaporation of comity and reasonable goodwill marks other, and widely separate, topics: the crusade to ban religious expression; coercion in the form of regulation and taxes; prior censorship of decorations on cakes by bakers, and sermons by pastors; mandatory sex instruction in schools but regarding parents’ opposition as “hate speech”; attempts to violate the consciences of doctors, nurses, clergy who resist being complicit in aborting babies.

Wow, how many of us nazis are there? No matter, they will try to silence us all soon.

The question of abortion provides a focal point. The radicals claim that keeping children of criminal migrants out of jails is nazi-like. But they often are fine with killing babies in the womb. Forgive me for thinking the lunatics are trying to Occupy the asylum.

Can we return this to a Biblical context? I am not especially optimistic about God’s imminent intervention in America. I might change my opinion if someone can show me an example of any time in history when God sent revival to a people when they did not pray for one as a people. He certainly may intervene through judgment, because He has done that many times throughout history. And because, frankly, America deserves it.

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Click: Dido’s Lament

5-28-18

Memorial Day. It is easy to get caught up, these days – or lost – in the homogeneity of patriotic holidays. Fourth of July? Veterans Day? Memorial Day? The culprits, if we forget the specific origins, are the general diminution of patriotism in America, and also the side-effect, the lack of teaching and remembrance. A disregard, frankly, of the importance of who we are as people… how we got here… and who paid the costs.

The Fourth of July, of course, commemorates our independence, and the spirit behind that independence. Veterans Day generally honors the veterans amongst us. Memorial Day, once “Decoration Day,” honors not so much the veterans who live, but those who died.

I wish we had few such holidays. Not because I want to wish away wars, and certainly not against the spirit of sacrifice. But just as “President’s Day” cheapens the immense honor due to Lincoln and Washington and few others, when officer-holders high and low are commemorated, so would more holidays. Especially when our contemporary age creates or re-fashions national holidays around weekends and possible commercial sales opportunities.

On Memorial Day, “we call to mind the deaths of those who died that the nation
might live, who wagered all that life holds dear for the great prize of death in battle, who poured out their blood like water in order that the mighty national structure raised by the far-seeing genius of Washington, Franklin, Marshall, Hamilton, and the other great leaders of the Revolution, great framers of the Constitution, should not crumble into meaningless ruins,” said Theodore Roosevelt in a Memorial Day address.

Speaking personally, I have opposed many of our wars, especially in my lifetime. I am a man of the Right, in Whittaker Chambers’ phrase, ready to die for the red, white and blue, but not always for the flags of strangers. I revere the American Republic; not necessarily the American Empire. But what I think is statistically irrelevant, and irrelevant in my slight role as an essayist with some followers.

My own ambiguity about foreign policies and priorities that result in shed American blood is put aside – cast aside – on these Memorial days.

I pray that we all share admiration and respect and honor for those Americans, especially in these days where the military draft no longer exists; those who did what they did for the heritage of our past, the reality of our present, for the hope of the future.

What were these men and women made of? They volunteered; they sacrificed; they died. They suffered nightmarish injuries. When able, many of them re-enlisted.

No matter what progressives, especially those of an earlier generation, say, our servicemen and servicewomen did not wear uniforms and train with weapons because they hated.

They loved.

They loved their comrades. They loved their flag. They loved their missions – the people whose situations they liberated, the people they rescued. They loved their families back home, believing that the sacrifices ultimately were worth it. They loved their homes and streets and towns; their way of life.

Even the least-schooled understood the inchoate but essential virtues behind the tattered flag – that America has stood for something. They fought, and were willing to die, for something greater than a village, or bunker that must be cleared. They were conscious of being children of a great tradition (even if they were recent immigrants in uniform)… and were conscious of being fathers and mothers of that continuing tradition.

I put aside the controversies surrounding our wars and rumors of wars. On this Day especially I stand, and salute, and visit graves at random, of men and women who did the unimaginable courageous things, often in dutiful and routine ways.

Because of who they were. Because of what America is. Or was, God help us.

We salute you.

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Click: Thank You

2-26-18

Even since last week the “gun debate” in America has intensified, taken on a new tone. What’s next?

“We need to change hearts, not laws.” Cliches generally become cliches because they are true. Laws are useful; often necessary, but raise false hopes and can be cruel tricks if people believe they will bring Heaven on earth. And the extreme of firearm confiscation or severe restrictions will only remove hardware… not hate.

I can write a book, or deliver an hour-long sermon, but my counsel for ending gun violence and similar social maladies can be summarized simply. Not Washington; not Congress; not the President; not laws; not armed guards. Simple… but not easy:

America, stop glorifying violence. Hollywood, stop making movies that preach violence – and guns – as the tools of justice (and stop the hypocrisy of those same actors rallying against the violence that makes them rich). Christians, stop letting your kids go to such movies, and play such video games. Choose.

America, stop destroying your families. Girls, stop having babies and start having weddings; men, start respecting yourselves and your girlfriends – wait until they are wives. Churches, teach your children standards. Black Church, why are 75 per cent of your teenage moms single? White church, why are your divorce rates as high, or higher, than in the general population? Choose!

America, get off drugs, get off drink, get off the cell phones, start eating together. Guys, pull up your pants and wear your baseball caps straight, and not inside the house. Teenage girls, stop trying to look like women your moms’ age when you go to the mall. And moms, stop trying to dress like teenage girls. CHOOSE!

America, stop the secularization. Re-institute prayer in public places; return Bible readings to classrooms. I am not ancient, but I remember opening each day with Bible readings in the public school. Did it “save” anyone? Maybe not, but it implied “values” to all. The Jewish kids read from the Old Testament, and one Hindu girl read from her holy book; two kids from atheist families were allowed to read or stay silent or however they felt comfortable. Choices.

A nation that is raised – as ours now is, make no mistake – not on DIFFERENT values than previously, but taught that there ARE no values; that nation is doomed to die. And worse than die, its children are consigned to respect no rules but their own. When they do not respect themselves, they cannot respect others – which I believe is why there are so many PC Thought-Police today: at our core, we all still desire rules and standards, so secular nonsense is imposed by elites. “Do as they say…”

A generation ago, “stiff-necked bigots,” as we were called, predicted that if we disconnected God from our nation’s formal workings, our nation would fall apart at the seams. “Hurting the feelings” of minorities, atheists, etc., became more important than affirming our own standards. We predicted that if heritage and tradition became loathsome values… that we risked raising a generation of self-indulgent, morally loose, selfish kids who largely were more interested in pleasure, even drugs and alcohol and sex, than the earlier generations of kids who made American great, and sustained that America. Silly predictions?

The answer is easy. “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord” (Acts 3:19). Easy… but not simple. Holy behavior, often empty, is not the true way to Jesus, but Jesus truly is the way to holiness.

Do-able? America just has to decide between a return to morality and Biblical values; repenting of personal and social sins; giving up immorality and self-indulgence, leading to a safer, happier, more just society – or deciding for more of what America has become. Arguments, hate, lack of trust and respect. More shooting, more guns. If fewer guns, then more knifings. If fewer knives, then other forms of ugliness, pick ‘em. Hatred can be very inventive, as we see.

The answer is sincere changes of hearts. Brother Billy Graham, who recently died, was represented on TV by clips of his quotation of the simple Bible truth: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life” (Matthew 7: 13,14).

Without making such a simple choice, America’s fate is to endure more rot in society, more anguish, more mothers’ tears and fathers’ grief; more bitter fights within families. Worse Thanksgiving dinners and family picnics… more, and worse, school shootings.

These are the bitter fruits of the seeds we choose to sow.

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Click: Hide Thou Me

2-19-18

Another week, another school shooting. Or so it seems; the news media and politicians recently cited 18 deaths by firearms on American school properties in the first six weeks of this year.

Well, it turns out that most of those were parking-lot encounters after dark, between adults; or accidental discharges barely near schools, and so forth. Four angry, and ugly, assaults – but I am not saying “only four,” Any is too many.

The gun issue is one of many in contemporary America where hyperbole has overtaken rationality. Everyone – I think on both, or all, sides – readily adopts exaggerations and logical extensions and, lately, personal invective, to press their points.

What once was abstract is individual, and we see it in the “gun debate” as much as in any other area, and even among people who never encountered danger or grief. We can of course be passionate about issues without being touched personally. But I know the real root cause of our heated debates these days in America – that are more heat than debate.

It is the Slippery Slope. The term in logic indicates the danger of granting one point, in fear of losing the entire argument. To open the door a crack threatens to destroy the entire house, given time.

The Slippery Slope is more than a debating term. When it is used today, even when not called by name, people in effect indicate distrust of the opponent. In the gun debate, for instance, many defenders of the Second Amendment believe that any compromise will be seized upon, leading to… seizure of all firearms. “Give an inch; they’ll take a mile,” and it did not help rational debate when a Democrat officeholder a few years ago admitted that, yes, she would not stop at each restriction.

We can avoid slippery slopes by not even going near the slopes.

For instance, the solution to the “gun problem” in America is simple.

Not “easy,” but simple. Questions and answers:
For two centuries we have had virtually unrestricted access to firearms, and virtually no mass slayings and “senseless” attacks. Why?

Is it because guns are more sophisticated and deadly? Nonsense. Everything exists in the context of its time. Daggers are more convenient than dueling swords, yet there were not mass stabbings when they were readily available.

Speaking of knives, if the automatic reaction of many people – ban all guns – were a solution, should we look at the growing numbers of mass killings around the world by weaponized cars and trucks, and, yes again, random stabbings, and… ban cars and trucks and knives?

Such scenarios depend on slippery slopes, to propose and dispose… and will never lead to solutions.

It is self-swindling delusion to look to Washington for the answer to these problems, and almost everything, these days. “Why doesn’t the president act?” “Why doesn’t Congress DO something?”

Let’s explain something to America: Shut up. Washington is not the answer to everything… cannot be the answer to everything… and, as often as not, is the answer to nothing; unable to have the answers. Washington is not our savior.

We already have a Savior. And now we are face to face with our solution. Remember, I said “easy,” but not simple; not simple to make happen. Not in America, 2018.

Guns don’t make kids shoot. Hate makes them shoot. Listen to people shouting about laws and calling for more guards and more psychologists and more counselors. Where is Jesus in the middle of it all? Can you hear anyone calling for Him? For more God?

Some of the “simple” solutions in next week’s message.

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Click: Hard Times, Come Again No More

11-27-17

If you have been visiting with this Junior Jeremiah of late, you know that I am persuaded that our problems in America, in the West, in the church, are well nigh intractable. I am afraid that we have slipped down the slippery slope, and probably are close to swirling down the tubes.

God is sovereign, of course; and many of us pray for revival. Fervently. But logic, not to mention Biblical history, argues against spontaneous moral regeneration. Does God impose rectitude on a people who are not so inclined? Is it likely that our culture, en masse, will awake some Monday morning, saying, “OK, enough of several generals of decline! Let’s all return to being moral, polite, just, considerate, chaste, responsible, and religious”?

The Law of Civilization and Decay (posited in the brilliant but largely forgotten book of that title by Brooks Adams, 1895) is unfolding in history’s latest crumbling culture, our post-Christian West. The statistics about our condition are dispositive… and daunting.

Yet as a Christian, if not otherwise an optimist, I do not prescribe resignation. As Christ’s representatives in the world, we will go down, if we do go down, fighting. Christians have already won in the sense that we are joint heirs with Christ to the Eternal Home that is ours. But to fulfill His Great Commission, for the sake of our children, and for the lost souls of the world who need to hear the Truth… we fight on.

The signs of “progress” around us can be mirages. Communism largely has been defeated, but repressive governments have not. We have become a people who brag about liberating people’s minds and bodies, yet millions willingly enslave themselves to drugs and destructive ideologies. Including folks in our very midst.

At home, we have built a society where “sex sells” — libido-drenched imagery in movies, TV, ads, commercials, music, entertainment. And then we should be surprised when people conform their behavior to sexual impulses?

Overseas, our government cuddles up to China, which this week raided yet more Christian churches, jailing worshipers and ordering the installation of portraits of Xi Jingpin. “Acting on American values” — which are…?

The “progress” we applaud is an opiate, calming our sense to the Pentecost of Calamity that is coming in this world.

So. How do we fight these trends?

There is a crisis of the Old Order. We, as citizens – albeit pilgrims and strangers in this world – are stuck with Democracy. Can I mean that? Yes, I choose my words. Democracy in many ways has come to mean a corrupt web of favoritism, corruption, and deceit. Broken promises, cynical use of the System. Secret alliances between Big Money, Big Media, and Big Politics. Running up IOUs to fall upon our children. Consensus-building by pandering.

In the same manner I have also realized that Capitalism has become our enemy, having been transformed into Finance Capitalism, Crony Capitalism. We instead should embrace Free Enterprise, a nice-sounding brand name for our economics, but which scarcely ever has been practiced.

Winston Churchill is supposed to have said that Democracy is the worst form of government… unless you consider the alternatives.

A clever aphorism, but it has the practicality of a sieve when we need to bail the sinking lifeboat. If we recognize that we are in a spiritual crisis, it is a spiritual solution that we need. Political action? God bless activists… but we must look beyond. There are three traditional areas we turn to these days, each more difficult than the next.

The first: CHANGE LAWS. Especially in this system of pandering, of government by propaganda, of Big Lies and False Promises… the cry to “make things right” by new laws is the biggest lie of all. Laws are not magic wands. Prohibition did not work; drug laws are a farce; and gun regulations are chimeras. However, people look to Washington for salvation… in futility.

The second: CHANGE MINDS. Here is where Big Media plays its game. Background players and manipulators control the debate… and, we see increasingly, they monitor, manipulate, and censor internet communication and cell-phone activity. We think we may persuade (and, theoretically, we still can, in small ways) but appeals to reason are merely tolerated, and do not thrive, these days.

The third: CHANGE HEARTS. Aha. The simplest route? Sit down; talk and share; appeal to morality and self-interest; cite ethics and God’s Word. The “hot button” issues – guns, abortion, heresy, homosexuality, war, abuse, divorce, greed, immigration, workplace discrimination, drugs – can’t we all “get along”?

All you have to do in each of these topics is cite a “higher authority”; for Christians it would be the Bible. Secularists would fall back on philosophers. Changing hearts of opponents in such arenas should be the easiest way to begin changing hearts, no? Laws get rusty, and peoples’ minds change. And such remedies are seductive: easy to try, relatively easy to apply, and… very easy to forget. We can wipe our hands, and brush the dust from our sandals, and move on.

No, the hardest of all methods to bring change to our world is to change hearts.

It is the surest way, too. But to change hearts we must be committed, be earnest, be persistent, and be sincere. We must, if necessary, leave some our OWN hearts with those with whom we contend.

Take the current sexual-predator scandals. We can appeal to the Law: “We will make it (more) illegal to do such things.” We can appeal to the Mind: “Wise up! You might get caught!” Or we can appeal to the Heart: “It is wrong. You are harming someone. You disgrace your family. You are displaying a lack of self-respect. You are better than that! It is a sin. Repent, seek forgiveness.”

“Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

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Click: The Wide Gate

11-6-17

George Santayana famously said that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. A cartoon-meme popping up on the web these days has an old guy reflecting that those who DO know history are doomed to watch other people repeat the mistakes.

That IS a danger. Rather, it is a reality. We see it around us, every day.

Without delving into whether this is unprecedented or one of history’s tragic cycles is open to question, but ultimately the question is silly – in the face of reality. In this world, today, it surely seems that a large portion of humankind has gone mad. We have rejected in many ways the concept of Absolute Truth, the possibility of its existence, and the benefits of seeking to know it. History’s masses, let us say in the West, often suffered as a lot in life. However they usually believed in improvement; in advancement; in better things and better days. They believed in themselves, in leaders they respected… in God.

The world, in turning inward instead of outward, living for today without regard to an afterlife, abandoning standards that nurtured their ancestors, of course will reflect disharmony and chaos. Art imitates life, after all (what Plato called “Mimesis”). This should worry us very, very much about the state of things ‘round about us. This world is not one politician or one new fad or one hangover away from righting ourselves. We fool ourselves when we think so. And meanwhile we are diverted by bread-and-circus movies and sports and TV shows and celebrity orgies…

Never since the Flood has humankind, over the face of the earth and not in isolated pockets, rejected Truth and Purity in such determined ways.

So, we fight. We fight as individuals, we fight as nations – or, we give in as individuals and as nations. This truth reflects a crisis of the age, and the great challenge of our time. It has always been our portion to fight – “Life is real; life is earnest,” Longfellow wrote:

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each tomorrow Find us farther than today.

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

About these fights as individuals and as nations, Theodore Roosevelt reminded us that it is beyond our choosing to participate in our fate. Our only choice is whether we play our parts “well or ill.”

For more than a generation America has had a volunteer military. I cannot imagine American society, our country’s youth, ever returning to a military draft. To have to interrupt (or fulfill) your life’s path by having to serve in one of the military branches? Frankly, I wonder even if America were attacked whether the spirit of service and sacrifice, across the population, would exist again as in the past. I wonder, further, that even if there were universal social-work service for one, two, or four years whether American youth would comply.

We have compartmentalized military service. In an intellectual manner we have come to treat the military as slaves. We “thank them for their service,” yet keep our hands clean of their work; the sacrifices; the threats; the separation, injuries, deaths; the stress and trauma. At the same time, sadly, we also separate ourselves from the glory of service, the thrill of victories and fights well fought, and the pride of wearing those uniforms.

That is a tragedy. Unfair to the servicemen and women; robbing the rest of the population of necessary components of healthy souls.

In these days of “advanced warfare techniques” (a sanitized term for more efficient means of maiming and killing) it is almost beyond comprehension how men and women enlist – and often re-enlist, and volunteer for repeated tours – knowingly assuming the collateral “oncoming” of separated families, variable support from the System, oftentime insufficient medical and psychological care as veterans.

We cannot admire these servants enough. Even if we dissent from foreign policies, overseas involvements, controversial missions and nation-building… we must stand in awe and gratitude to the people who serve.

And. For those of us “at home,” we cannot forget that we serve too. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines do our bidding in faraway places. Which makes it easier to be seduced by the feeling that all our battles are being waged by others. But we, all of us, have battles too, every day.

We must fight for our souls, against evil. We fight for our families, against all manners of threats. We fight for our culture, against corruption. We fight for our civilization, against enemies seen and unseen. We fight for our God, against the devil and all his ways, and for the Kingdom that is to come.

Or… we should.

If we don’t fight these battles, we surely will be subsumed.

On Veterans’ Day let us honor those who have served… and let us re-enlist, the rest of us, for the battles of life. Sooner or later, we too will be counted as veterans of those good fights.

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Click: Gone Home

8-21-17

Do we need one more essay or column on the cultural/political divide in our country? When certain points of view have not been articulated, I think so.

Crowds gather to vent their spleen in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Boston, ready for fights. Itching – hence the ersatz riot gear, the homemade armor, the hoods, the intimidating costumes, and, sometimes, mace and sticks.

Any of us who watched coverage of the day in Charlottesville knew beforehand that protesters were there to dissent from Robert E Lee’s statue being torn down. The larger assembled group, armed and wearing hoods, were there to protest the protesters. The police were ordered to not keep the groups separated, for reasons still be to be explained.

Initial reports noted that the driver of the car had a stone thrown through his windshield, and protesters rocked his car. Whether out of fear and panic, or premeditated vehicular homicide… we saw what happened. Copycat of Nice and London? Precursor of Barcelona?

In coverage of the Boston protest, networks spent hours talking about “protesters” and “counter-protesters,” with no hint of which “side” was defined as free-speech advocates. Both? Neither? By the way, eventually the crowd estimates were released – about 100 conservatives; about 39,900 lefists.

It is a circus, but largely a media circus. Many people are merely sheep, feeling the need to be angry; expressing inchoate frustrations; and willing to test the limits of discourse… for the cameras.

A few years ago I had a meeting in the Summit Ministries office of Dr David Noebel at the Brannon Howze’s Worldview Weekend headquarters. These are people and organizations that do much good, but I was struck by pictures framed on the wall – large, vintage portraits of Stonewall Jackson and other Confederate leaders.

I am not a crusader on the slavery issue, mostly because it is, thankfully, dead and buried; or should be. There still is slavery in the world, but not of the “South will rise again” variety; on present-day slavery I am a crusader. Nobody in America dreams of its re-institution; however there are multitudes who profit from phony controversies and threats. I agree with Lincoln that “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” and I wish more people felt the same about abortion, our current social abomination.

I remarked on the portrait of Stonewall Jackson in Dr Noebel’s office and was reminded that he was a Christian who prayed every day with his troops. I replied, “He was also a ‘gentleman’ who defended slavery; and, after taking an oath to defend the United States, proved himself a traitor.”

Treason, vintage 1860s, does not bother some people. But neither does treason and anarchy today bother other people. Not “Antifa” protesters; not the slobbering media.

As a historian, and an artist, and a patriot, I am deeply disturbed by actions to pull down and destroy statues and paintings. I am Christian, yet I was aggrieved to see the demolition of ancient Buddha statues by the Taliban. ISIS has destroyed priceless religious artwork in Africa and the Middle East. The Nazis burned books. Good company of the Antifa movement and Black Lives Matter. Role models?

Even the French Revolutionaries let cathedrals stand. Bolsheviks did not destroy the Amber Room or the Winter Palace of the Czars (although the Palace was looted by Bolsheviks, especially its wine cellar, leading to the “longest hangover in history,” as it became known). Stalin, on the other hand, airbrushed his enemies from photographs. Futile, but it is what totalitarians attempt.

In the rush to eliminate immobile “vestiges” of history, self-appointed censors have climbed up statues like monkeys and defaced or toppled statuary, a few of which, ironically, have been artistic allegories having no relation to slavery.

There is a joke that goes: “Do you know how to save a drowning bigot?” “No.” “Good.” Bigotry, in whatever cause, and the crime of re-writing history, can never be allowed – at least by a society that needs to know where it has been, in order to know where it is going.

In another nod to good intentions, I suppose, the county executives of Lee County FL, reached an agreement this week to hire an artist to doctor a portrait of Robert E Lee in the county seat. Lee will remain, but soon he will be clad in a business suit, not a general’s uniform. Strange. Maybe his statue can be altered so he rides a Harley.

Where will it end? Will black people refuse to drink from Dixie Cups? Stop driving through the Lincoln Tunnel? Before white radicals move their next nihilistic cause (remember when the names of “Christian” cities like St Louis and Los Angeles were targets? They moved on from that) will they burn those portraits of Andrew Jackson in their wallets? Teachers are fired for saying positive things about Southern authors, but a Missouri state senator is praised for openly calling for Pres. Trump’s murder.

Statues are works of art (except when poorly executed, another matter) – but provide teachable moments. Talk to your children; don’t teach them to make paint balls. Live a life so your grandchildren will honor you, maybe hang a portrait in your honor, or theirs; not slash a painting of someone else. Martin Luther King denounced homosexual marriage; should his statue on the Mall be felled?
If you do not – if you cannot – learn from history, you will be its next victim.

I have a solution to the current furor: Stop shouting, and learn sign language. What do I mean by that?

I urge a variation of Marschall’s Solution to the Pete Rose controversy. Should he kept out of the Baseball Hall of Fame because he gambled and lied? No, I say. His statistics earned him a place. But his plaque should include, alongside his dates and numbers, the facts that he gambled and lied and was banned for life. History.

In the same way, write new signs beneath or next to statues and paintings of “controversial” historical figures. Birth and death dates; training, accomplishments, failures; then the “negative” information. Numbers of slaves owned or people killed. If Civil War generals, the good (valor) and the bad (carnage) (both sides, sure; Trump was correct). And so forth.

History, laid out. The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. If future generations are too stupid to be informed and instructed by such signage, we are lost anyway. But let people glimpse history, and reflect.

And then they can yell at each other about the signs, instead of statues and paintings. Bad television, but good public policy.

“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet,they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” Isaiah 1:18
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Click: Iris DeMent’s Keep Me, God

7-24-17

1.
Last summer, learning about Michigan trip by trip, I visited Grand Rapids and the Gerald R Ford Presidential Library. I came away with a new repect for the modest accidental president. This week, returning from my latest European trip, I came home with a new respect for America. It was in an unexpected manner, in unexpected ways.

I have waved the flag in many ways through my life. I support our heritage and our military in traditional, and often fervent, ways. My patriotism – the catch-all word for the bundle of impulses – has an aspect that is somewhat unorthodox these days, but not unique.

I favor a strong military, but I think we have used it far too often in recent years. I am for peace, but not always going to war on its behalf. I endorse democracy, generally, but I do not think it is perfect for every society, especially by our imposition. I have been uneasy about America having bases in something like 140 countries. I think we breed resentment among other nations by interfering in their affairs, their trade – and, yes, their elections – when we wantonly define our own self-interest. I think “nation-building” is noxious and pretentious elsewhere when our own nation is crumbling in many ways – structurally, economically, morally.

My patriotism, then, is not qualified but has standards. Neither is it blind; and not defined by knee-jerkers of the left or right.

It is informed by the eternal wisdom of the Roman military tactician Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus in his book De Re Militari: “Si vis pacem para bellum” — “In times of peace, prepare for war.” Unfortunately, he lived in the Fourth Century when Rome, about to be overrun by by Vandals, most needed the advice. Rome was paying the price of choosing Empire over Republic, however.

My patriotism is informed by George Washington, who warned his countrymen, and posterity, to be free of “entangling alliances.”

And it is informed by Theodore Roosevelt, who combined both outlooks, and, typically, other sober considerations when he said: “To be rich, aggressive, and unarmed, is to invite certain disaster and annihilation.”
2.
I mentioned Gerald Ford because upon my arrival on home shores, the commissioning ceremony of the USS Gerald R Ford, the biggest and most powerful battleship in the world, and world history, took place this weekend.

It was worthwhile for any patriot, indeed any citizen, to watch. It is a ship possessing as many superlatives, perhaps, as weapons systems and lethal innovations. The length of more than three football fields and powered by two nuclear reactors, the floating fortress will be head of a battle group, not even a solo player on the world’s oceans.

I was unexpectedly moved by elements of the ceremony that, to military people, could have been the most mundane. But the uniforms; the protocols; the orders, salutes, and marching; all impressed me. Military life is a way of life from which the American public has largely grown ignorant, even immune, since Volunteer Service created a segregated system almost half a century ago.

Thank God for aspects of that system, that tradition, for instance the discipline that still flows therefrom.

Perhaps my sensibility was tilled by two weeks in Ireland, where I was struck by comments from all manner of people about the current state of things in America. After many overseas trips since the age of 14, I am used to Europeans being curious about the United States. Whether as a tourist peppered by questions about blue jeans and rock ‘n’ roll; or making appearances on behalf of the US Information Service of the State Department about… well, often again, blue jeans and rock ‘n’ roll, I was aware of a fascination with America.

Seriously, I have also parried questions about Pershing Missile deployment under Reagan; the first Gulf War under the first Bush; and, now, about Donald Trump.

Trump largely is despised by the European public, left and right. When he is not despised, he is dismissed or merely dissed. That is a given, at least at present, and was not a surprise.

But what did surprise me, in many (and unscientifically charted) conversations was a common feeling among all types and classes of my encounters. Generally stated, it was not a basic resentment of the United States as a country, even as a power. Rather, many people confessed to a realization, even a conscious reliance, on America’s role in world affairs… European security… even country-by-country’s occasional internal matters.

Not about all details of their lives, surely; but, nowadays, more than blue jeans and rock ‘n’ roll. “We need America.” You ask them about paying their share of NATO, and they will shrug in embarrassed agreement, but there is little “America, Go Home” sentiment in Europe. They cannot understand Trump – as if all Americas can – but they appreciate our presence, including our military shield, in inchoate ways.

3.
Which brings me again to the commissioning of the USS Gerald R Ford, and what the battleship (and the commissioning ceremony) represents.

Ultimately, even if the battleship sees action in some virtual holocaust, it is more of a symbol than an arsenal. The USS Gerald R Ford represents American might. Our entire military complex manifests our strength. American power has been in danger of losing its effectiveness over the past decade because the world came to realize that some presidents and some parties are unwilling to deploy; that bluffs have become seen as substitutes for action; that red lines are empty threats and “resolve” can only be found in the dictionaries, not operations manuals, of the White House and Pentagon.

Americans, and Europeans, can be sure that the current president is not ambiguous on such matters. Significantly, Russians and Chinese, as well as Iranians and North Koreans, can be quite unceratin about how Trump will act – and that is a powerful stealth weapon in and of itself.

However, deflating my swelling breast a bit, I have legitimate worries that America of the 21st century is too much like Rome of the 4th century.

Are we an empire being eaten away at the edges? Are we a society whose spiritual core has rotted? Are our priorities chiefly wealth and it accumulation? pleasure? license? relativism? Do we project power, and not values, any more?

Of course, the questions are rhetorical. II Chronicles 7:14 says, “If my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways….” We read the holy promise, but we can hear the holy warning.

God forbid that the elements of the American arsenal like the USS Gerald R Ford will be just so much metal and wires and tubes and diodes. Things that rust and decay were never what made America great.

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The Naval Hymn, with a photo of Gerald Ford in uniform. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy.

Click: The Naval Hymn / Eternal Father, Strong To Save

5-29-16

July 4 is a pivotal date in American history, not only the date when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Fifty years later, to the day, two of the Framers, erstwhile political opponents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third presidents of the United States, respectively, died. After the Siege of Vicksburg, U S Grant accepted the surrender of that Confederate stronghold of the Civil War. The battles around San Juan Hill were fought and won by Col Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War.

And, of course, it was on the 4th of July that Southern troops under Gen Robert E Lee withdrew after three bloody days at Gettysburg PA in 1863, and retreated to Virginia.

It was to establish a National Cemetery and commemorate that Battle of Gettysburg during the iconic Fourth, that President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg address. It was one of the great state papers in America history; and indeed one of the finest orations in the history of humankind.

It is, not at all, to denigrate that speech – how could anyone? – nor to criticize our current President, whom I have grown to admire, if for nothing else, daring to keep his commendable campaign promises, that I offer here the Gettysburg Address as it might be delivered by Donald J Trump (stick with me!):

Four score and seven years ago – that’s eighty-seven years, folks; a long, long time ago, let me tell you – our forefathers brought forth, upon this continent, this great, great continent, believe me, nothing like it anywhere in this country, a new nation; conceived in Liberty – right? Liberty, nothing like it, I tell you – dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Great, great men. And women too, don’t forget the women.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, the greatest – maybe the greatest ever in this country, and I know what I’m talking about, believe me – testing whether that nation, or any nation so concerned, and so dedicated, and so civil, let me tell you, can long endure. Long. Endure. I tell you, long endure, right? We are met here on a great, great battlefield of that war, that great war. The greatest; you know that, right? See, I told ya. We have come to dedicate a portion, a wonderful, wonderful portion of it, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. Resting and living, how great. Rest and live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. Fit – we fit, right? C’mon!

But in a larger sense, a much, much larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hollow this ground. Hollow ground, believe me. I love hollow ground. The brave men, living and dead and many other ways, many wonderful wonderful ways, I tell you, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or subtract. But not poor for long, just wait! The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. Never. Forget. The great state of Gettysburg, which supported us in November. Right? Remember? C’mon – the world WILL remember!

It is for us, the living, rather, you and me, and Corporal James Tanner – where are you, James? Where are you? Stand up! Somebody help him stand – we are dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on, ahead of schedule and under budget! It is rather for us… to be here dedicated… to the great task remaining before us… that from these honored dead, all those dead, those many, many dead, believe me, to take increased devotion to that cause… for which they gave the last full measure of devotion… to which we are devoted… a great, great devotion, let me tell you… that we hear. Highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, I tell you. That this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, great freedom; and that this government will Drain. The. Swamp. I tell you. With all of the people, to all of the people, from the people, shall not perish from the earth. I tell you, you will be tired of not perishing.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Well, I beg forgiveness to those who think I being irreverent to either Lincoln or Trump… or those hallowed dead. In fact, Gettysburg, and Lincoln’s address, are the closest things we have to civic holiness in America. I am tweaking the president’s rhetorical style, as a friend – and as an admirer of his most recent speech to vets and Christians, on July 1, 2017.

There is a larger point, perhaps, that as thinkers and writers and speakers we should be careful about our presentations. Words matter. Lincoln’s genius was in part his pellucid thoughts… and his flawless delivery. Not his voice, which was remembered as high and raspy, but his brilliant arrangement and construction.

This attends whether we argue legal cases, preach the Word of God, teach classes, or instruct our children. Everyone’s business is communication.

End of “lesson”! I am loth to finish, however, without citing the actual Gettysburg Address. It is something I long ago committed to memory; and I think every American should.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Finally, we go from Fake News to Fake History if we believe the books that say that Lincoln was a religious skeptic or agnostic. Year by year through his life he increasingly invoked God and the Bible. In his last years his speeches, writing, proclamations, letters, and conversations were so spiritual that he sometimes sounded like a preacher.

Of the many biblical affirmations he made, to me among the most profound is:

My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side.

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Click: Battle Hymn Of the Republic