The Sexual Revolution Is Systemic

Last updated on: July 23, 2021 at 4:08 pm By Gene Veith

What inspired yesterday’s post was an article by Karen Prior, whom I’ve known for a long time. She rejects critical race theory, but still maintains that racism is systemic; that is, that “a culture shaped by racist laws, policies and attitudes affects everyone in that culture.”

To illustrate what she means, she turns to a different kind of sin that has become systemic: the sexual revolution.

I would like us to reflect on that part of her article. She writes:

The sexual revolution that started in the 1960s — spread through popular culture, enacted by the masses and codified in law — is now as pervasive and inescapable as the popup ads on our computer screens. Almost no home or family or person has been unaffected by it.

Not long after the sexual revolution began, Time magazine, in a 1964 cover story, called it “a revolution of mores and an erosion of morals,” likening the shift to “a big machine” (that) works on its subjects continuously, day and night”:

From innumerable screens and stages, posters and pages, it flashes the larger-than-life-sized images of sex. From countless racks and shelves, it pushes the books which a few years ago were considered pornography. From myriad loudspeakers, it broadcasts the words and rhythms of pop-music erotica. And constantly, over the intellectual Muzak, comes the message that sex will save you and libido make you free.

In other words, the revolution became — and continues to be — systemic. Today, any individual striving to resist the lure of sexual sin has not only his or her own temptations and weaknesses to contend with, but an entire social, cultural and legal system, too.

Good point?

She goes on to cite abortion, which has also become embedded in our culture. “These are not just individual sins, but are entrenched and engrained in our culture. They are systemic.” In fact, she observes the very premise of Christians being engaged in a “culture war” is that moral issues are “cultural”; that is, systemic. “If sexual sin can reshape a culture in our attitudes, laws, policies, values and beliefs in ways we can’t always see or recognize, so can the sin of racism.”

Can we say that sin itself is systemic, that part of what we mean by original sin is that our rebellion against God permeates everything we human beings touch, including the cultures, civilizations, and institutions that we build? That would be why they all, eventually, go wrong, why utopias on either the micro- or the macro- scale are impossible and why “the world,” no less than the flesh and the devil, can so easily tempt us to our ruin.

I think that’s part of it, but a few cautions are in order. We mustn’t lapse into the mindset that “society is to be blame,” rather than the sinful human heart. That’s the error of the Romantic movement, which exalts the purity of the unspoiled Self, and sees “society” as the source of all evils. In this mindset, individuals should throw off the rules and conventions that society imposes upon us all. That perspective, in fact, gave us the Sexual Revolution.

We also have to be careful not to condemn “systems” in their totality just because they have become corrupted by sin. Social structures–such as the family, governments, and communities–are part of what makes us human. They are gifts of God, meant for our flourishing. (Think of Luther’s doctrine of the Estates and the doctrine of vocation.)

In terms of the three estates, the family, the church, and the state may all be corrupted, but we cannot do without any of them. Some today would like to, with some on the Left wanting to abolish the family, some on the Right wanting to abolish the government, and “nones” on both sides wanting to abolish the church. What all three of these estates need–that is, what we need from them–is “reformation.”

Sex is not an evil in itself, but the sexual revolution has made it such by tearing it out of the context of marriage, parenthood, and the family. That is, by removing it from culture. Many of the social sins we decry, while embedded in the culture, are actually anti-cultural. Governments are supposed to help, serve, and protect their citizens, not oppress them.

To be sure, some sins, such as abortion and racism, are evil in themselves. But they too are anti-cultural. Parents are supposed to love and care for their children, not abort them, and to do so undermines the foundation of culture–the family–to its core. Societies are supposed to be made up of individuals who come together to form communities. Mistreating some people because of what race they are is a violation of that communal coming-together that makes culture possible.

So, yes, sin infects systems. They thus need to be “re-formed” around their true purpose and their true nature. Laws that regulate external behavior can help with that, but, ultimately, the underlying sin must be rooted out by the inner transformation wrought by the Gospel.

Illustration: Sexual Revolution Buttons by Jlbrandt, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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The Left’s Culture War

Last updated on: July 21, 2021 at 3:21 pm By Gene Veith

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Conservatives and, especially, their Christian fellow-travelers have been waging a culture war, obsessed with imposing their narrow morality when it comes to abortion, homosexuality, and other issues. And the general public is sick of it.

That is the conventional wisdom, and many Christians are themselves want to draw back from the culture wars, thinking that culture-war activism has become an obstacle to Christian witness.

But some observers are saying that it isn’t Christians or conservatives who are the culture warriors today. Now the left is taking on that role. They are the ones who are obsessed with imposing their narrow morality when it comes to abortion, homosexuality, and other issues. And the general public is sick of it.

Kevin Drum has impeccable leftwing beliefs and credentials, including a stint writing for the far left magazine Mother Jones. But he has written a piece entitled If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals.

He cites research that shows over the last few years Democrats have moved much further to the left on social issues than Republicans have moved on the right. Not only that, he points out that white Democrats are much further to the left than blacks and hispanics. He cites researcher David Shor, “who identifies as socialist but is rigorously honest about what the numbers tell us,” who notes that in the last election, African American support for Democrats declined by 2%, and Hispanic support dropped by 8-9%. Shor concludes (Drum’s bolds),

We’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of “racial resentment.” So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.

Drum concludes,

Despite endless hopeful invocations of “but polls show that people like our positions,” the truth is that the Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary—something that Fox News takes vigorous advantage of. From an electoral point of view, the story here is consistent: Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues and Republicans have used this to successfully cleave away a segment of both the non-college white vote and, more recently, the non-college nonwhite vote.

See also Peggy Noonan’s discussion of this issue and Drum’s and Shor’s articles in her column The Culture War Is a Leftist Offensive.

Certainly, the Left has become much more extreme and more aggressive in pushing their cultural agenda.

On abortion, they have gone from legalizing with Roe v. Wade, to Clinton’s “make abortion safe, legal, and rare,” to today’s “shout your abortion,” to Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra’s plan in California to force pro-life clinics to advertise for abortionists, to President Biden’s initiative to force all taxpayers to pay for them.

On LGBTQ issues, they have gone from legalizing, to toleration, to same-sex marriage, to mandating acceptance, to insisting that LGBTQ rights trump religious rights.

As for “imposing their morality,” the Left has gone all in with shaming, shunning, censorship, and virtue-signaling, exerting a censorious presence on social media, corporate boardrooms, the workplace, and not just college but elementary school classrooms.

And the general public, though cowed from saying much publicly, is sick of the left’s culture wars. Furthermore, the general public doesn’t like being cowed!

Drum and Shor, being leftists themselves, express worry that ordinary Americans–of all races–will react against all of this and put them out of power. Peggy Noonan, more on the conservative side, says, “The cultural provocations that are currently tearing us apart do, certainly and obviously, come from progressives. And the left seems to have no prudent fear of backlash.” She cites corporate types she knows who outwardly conform to the woke ideology, but in the privacy of their own minds are dissenting. “They have grown indignant at and impatient with the everyday harassments of woke ideology. Deep down, many of them would like to see the left knocked back on their feet. I think the left is overplaying its hand.”

We shall see. Leftists always assume that the masses are with them, which is why they are saying so much today about democracy and voting. But the masses in America, at least, have a way of thinking for themselves, and they resent being controlled, disrespected, and harassed. We’ll see what happens in upcoming elections.

Illustration from NDLA, Creative Commons 4.0

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The War Against Satire

Last updated on: July 16, 2021 at 11:10 am By Gene Veith

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When we lived in Wisconsin, I would often pick up a free newspaper from Madison called The Onion, a satirical publication whose deadpan headlines were often funnier than the stories, funny as those also were. Back then, The Onion was pretty much an equal opportunity offender, but now that it’s gone national online, it seems to favor the Left, as well as not being as funny as it used to be.

But in 2016, a Christian version of The Onion came into existence online: The Babylon Bee. Its satire was mostly aimed at Christian targets: the prosperity gospel, celebrity preachers, evangelical fashions, etc. But, though that focus continues, the Bee also started stinging worldly targets and has become a prime supplier of conservative political and social satire. Here are some of the headlines from today’s edition of The Babylon Bee, with links to the full piece:

‘You Just Don’t Understand Socialism Like I Do,’ Says College Freshman To Man Who Escaped Socialism On A Raft

Democrat Governors Afraid Cuban Desire For Freedom Could Spread To The U.S.

Bernie Sanders Heads To Cuba To Tell Protesters To Be More Grateful For Their Excellent Social Programs

‘Vaccines Should Be Mandatory,’ Says Woman Wearing My Body, My Choice T-Shirt

Now some people just do not understand irony. They think Bernie Sanders really did go to Cuba. And progressives in general don’t like to be made fun of. So an effort is under way to cancel the Bee by claiming that it is printing “fake news.”

To take one example, the Bee put up a piece saying that CNN is using an industrial-sized washing machine to “spin” the news. So the fact-checking site Snopes brought up the story, researched it, and–since there is no evidence that CNN used a washing machine for this purpose–declared it “false”!

Because of many such reports from other literal-minded fact checkers and people who can’t take a joke, the Bee has been branded as a “right wing disinformation site.”

As a result, it is being kicked off of Facebook and other social media. That hurts, since advertisers pay websites (including Patheos) according to the number of page views, and people forwarding favorite links to their friends on social media is the major way that the word gets out. So the goal is to put The Babylonian Bee out of business.

Seth Dillon, who leads the Bee, has been battling these false charges and willful misunderstandings, with some success. When the New York Times described the site as “a right-leaning site” that “sometimes trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire,” he filed a lawsuit for defamation, whereupon the Times deleted the slur. Snopes now offers a new kind of verdict: “labeled satire.” Facebook has backed down from some of its censorship.

But some progressives who do recognize that the Bee is publishing satire are pushing for a new criterion. Satire, they say, is supposed to “punch up,” attacking those in power. But it should not be allowed to “punch down,” making fun of the oppressed. So Facebook is saying that it will moderate satire that “punches down,” possibly classifying it as “hate speech.” To that, Dillon says,

“Conservatives have been on the ropes in the culture war for a long time. We’re in a defensive posture, fighting back against the top-down tyranny of the left’s progressive agenda that destroys everything it touches. That agenda is fueled and furthered by all the nation’s most powerful people, corporations, and institutions. If that’s not punching up, I don’t know what is,” Dillon wrote. . . Having failed in their effort to lump us in with fake news, the media and Big Tech are looking for new ways to work together to deplatform us. They now hope to discredit us by saying we’re spreading hatred—rather than misinformation—under the guise of satire,” Dillon wrote. “But we’re not punching down.’ We’re punching back.” Dillon feels “the left’s new prohibition of ‘punching down’ is speech suppression in disguise” and blasted anyone who plays along. “It’s people in positions of power protecting their interests by telling you what you can and cannot joke about.

It has been said that satire is the most conservative of literary forms, since ridiculing evils requires objective moral standards to judge them by. Certainly, the greatest of our satirists, the conservative clergyman Jonathan Swift, bears that out. As another conservative satirist, Thomas More, said, “The devil. . .the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.” And on this, More’s nemesis, another conservative satirist, Martin Luther agreed: “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” So being a satirist is a valid Christian vocation, so I salute the writers for The Babylon Bee.

Illustration: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50780174

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The Importance of Luther’s Doctrine of the Three Estates

Last updated on: June 7, 2021 at 5:55 pm By Gene Veith

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When we think of Luther’s thought as it relates to culture and our life in the world, what comes to mind are his doctrines of vocation and of the Two Kingdoms. But there is a third teaching that is critical in its own terms and in helping us apply the other two: The Doctrine of the Three Estates.

I came across a quite brilliant article on the subject by Dr. Michael Laffin from the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of a book I now want to read entitled The Promise of Martin Luther’s Political Theology: Freeing Luther from the Modern Political Narrative.

This article was published in the journal Ad Fontes, a publication of the Davenant Institute, a study center that happened to have had me as a speaker last week.

Just as writers on the Two Kingdoms often refer to them as the two “realms” (a word which means “kingdom”), Laffin refers to the Three Estates as “institutions” (a word that means “estates”). But perhaps the less-medieval terms are more clarifying for modern readers.

Here are the first two paragraphs from Michael Laffin, Inhabiting the Places of Promise: Martin Luther’s Teaching on the Three Institutions [my bolds]:

Discussions of Martin Luther’s writings on society, ethics, and politics in the English-speaking world tend to focus on his teaching concerning the two kingdoms, which divides authority into temporal and spiritual realms. Often overlooked is the larger theological framework within which the two kingdoms teaching is situated. In particular, his teaching concerning the three institutions (or “estates,” as they are more commonly called) has been, with a few important exceptions, largely neglected. According to Luther, Scripture references institutions or “con-creatures” (concreatae sint),created together with human beings, that bear God’s promise to provide for human creaturely life, especially in its social aspects.^[1] The three institutions are, Luther says, the church (or ecclesia), the household economy (or oeconomia), and politics (or politia). When Luther’s treatment of the three institutions is neglected, the teaching concerning the two kingdoms tends to take on a life of its own, leading to quietist interpretations of the Christian’s relation to governmental authority, or a division of human life into autonomous “worldly” and “spiritual” spheres, the latter understood in an individualistic and inward sense, none of which was intended by Luther.

In part, wariness of Luther’s political theology stems from appropriate concerns about how it was misused in early twentieth-century Germany to justify subservience to Hitler’s Nazi regime. A proper understanding of the institutions and how they function in Luther’s thought, however, will show that they help us to subject earthly authority (churchly, political, economic) to the criticism of divine revelation and force into the open the idolatry behind any claims of absolute authority by any of the three institutions. Such claims were made primarily by the church hierarchy in Luther’s time, the state in Nazi Germany, and, some might claim, by the economy in our own time. Further, without attending to the teaching on the institutions, Luther’s social and political ethics become separated from his larger theological commitments, dissolving their organic unity. The three institutions can give us much needed critical purchase as we seek to faithfully inhabit our vocations, and the institutions that support our vocations, in the world today. Therefore, my purpose is to set forth Luther’s teaching on the three institutions, indicating its inseparable connection to his larger theology of the Word of God, and then to spell out its implications for the way we might think about social life, ethics and politics.

[Keep reading. . .]

We have vocations in all of the estates, and God’s reign over His temporal kingdom is carried out by means of these “institutions” that He created for human life. The “oeconomia”–a Latin word meaning literally the laws of the house, from which our word “economics” is derived–includes the family and the means by which the family makes its living. In the late middle ages, virtually all economic labor–whether of peasant farmers, merchants, craftsmen, the nobility, kingship–was a family affair. Today, we spin off “economic” vocations from the family, and in the popular usage “vocation,” which comes from the Latin word for “calling,” has come to mean “occupation” or “profession,” as opposed to the various offices and relationships that God calls us to.

Also, Luther’s conception of the Estates is not that of the middle ages or the French Revolution, in which each person belonged to one and only one of the estates–the Church, the Nobility, or the Commons–categories that entrenched the medieval social hierarchies. For Luther, each person belongs to all of the estates at once: all Christians constitute the Church; we are all citizens of our community with its temporal government; we all belong to and have a role in supporting a family.

I am interested in Laffin’s point that any of the three estates can become idolatrous when it asserts itself over the others. It is certainly true that Luther strenuously opposed political rule by the Church, as in both the papacy’s claim to exercise temporal authority over secular rulers and in the anabaptists’ attempt to set up Christian communes. So much for today’s theories of Catholic integralism, Reformed theonomy, Pentecostal New Apostolic Reformation, and other theocratic schemes. At the same time, Luther insisted that the political order must not presume to rule the church in its spiritual workings. Nor, it follows, should the church or the state take over the functions of the family or, by extension, the economy. So much for totalitarianism. Or, Laffin suggests, for making the economy our “absolute authority,” as it has become by some of us conservatives, traditional liberals, and consumer capitalists in general.

For an excellent resource on this topic–including the key passages from Luther–see Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller’s post Thinking Like a Lutheran: The Three Estates.

Illustration from the Marriage and Religion Research Institute

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If James Bond Became a Pastor

Last updated on: June 9, 2021 at 2:14 pm By Gene Veith

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Yesterday, I posted about James Bond.

Now, imagine that James Bond, the dashing spy with a license to kill who keeps saving the world, decides to become a pastor. A Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor, no less.

That mashup is basically the premise of the Pastor Stephen Grant novels by Ray Keating.

Grant is a former swashbuckling CIA agent who finds himself called to the ministry. He has a small parish with the usual pastoral concerns. But he keeps being drawn back to his own life and to his particular skills. A church-shooter, terrorists, organized crime, and vast global conspiracies involving religion force him to draw on both of his vocations. Pastor Grant extends pastoral care to people he encounters–explaining the gospel, offering marriage counseling, and bringing God into the conversations–though he also dispatches bad guys with his gun. Talk about Law and Gospel.

Does that create a sense of cognitive dissonance in your mind? Well, that is part of what makes them interesting.

There are now 15 of these Pastor Grant novels, beginning with Warrior Monk, a title that references the actual monastic orders that specialized in warfare, such as the Templars and the Hospitallers. You can get the complete 15-book series on Kindle.

I read the first one years ago, and the author, economist and columnist Ray Keating, sent me his latest after I appeared on his podcast (see #31).

This one is called Vatican Shadows. It seems that a new Pope is sympathetic to the theology and the reforms of Martin Luther. He wants to rehabilitate him and the earlier reformer Jan Hus. (I blogged about that work of art celebrating the burning of such heretics, which I learned about from this novel.) To that end, he assembles a group of scholars to study the issues involved. But a sinister secret religious order that wants to prevent the Catholic church from embracing Luther starts murdering the scholars, including a history professor from Concordia Chicago. Pastor Grant is called into action to thwart the plot against this second Reformation.

There is lots of local Lutheran color in these novels, from references to the Concordia University system to discussions about one of the series’ major themes: the doctrine of vocation. (There is also a character who took the opposite path of Rev. Grant: a pastor who became a CIA agent.) Some Lutherans might get cognitive dissonance from Rev. Grant’s friendship with the Pope, but that positive depiction of Catholicism is balanced by the negative depiction of the ultra-traditional Catholics.

Also creating cognitive dissonance is that Mr. Keating does not draw back from bad language or mild sexual references–in flashbacks to the hero’s James Bond days and to his more appropriate relationship to his wife–and that his books contain a great deal of graphic violence.

But Mr. Keating knows how to tell an exciting story. And these books, like the James Bond novels, are ridiculously entertaining.

As for larger themes, there is vocation, of course. I see these books as honoring the pastoral ministry. Because in real life, pastors are heroes engaged in saving the world.

Illustration: Detail from the cover of Warrior Monk via Amazon.com

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Deep Worldview

Last updated on: June 6, 2021 at 9:02 pm By Gene Veith

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Last time we blogged about a study that found that only 6% of Americans and 9% of Christians hold to a consistent Biblical worldview, as defined by the researchers’ benchmarks.

As I said, some of these questions have more to do with doctrinal lapses–such as the authority of Scripture, the nature of salvation, etc.–than worldview issues, as such.

And often the concept of “worldview” is used as means to smuggle in the notion that there is a Biblical “law” that governs every facet of life, as distinct from regular laws that govern that facet. A story on the study quotes the Reformed theologian, statesman, and worldview-thinking pioneer Andrew Kuyper: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” Right. But we Lutherans say, it is already His. The secular realm even in its secularity is already part of God’s temporal kingdom, which He rules in a hidden way. We don’t need to Christianize everything. The workings of ordinary vocations, the natural laws disclosed by science, the dynamics of social order, etc., etc., are part of God’s creation and His providential care for what He has made, though we always have to contend with our sin, other people’s sins, and the usurpation of the Devil in these realms. But meanwhile, we are also part of God’s eternal kingdom through the Gospel, in which God is no longer hidden but revealed by His Word, which, though it contains God’s Law, must not be reduced to a law book.

This is not to say that “worldview” is not a useful concept, but it just goes deeper than many people, Christians and non-Christians realize. Again, the term comes from the German philosophical term Weltanschaung, referring to the view of the world that human beings bring to their perceptions.

Linguists talk about the “deep structure” of language, the ordering principles that underly grammar itself and that can apply to multiple languages. Perhaps we can think of “deep worldview.” The Bible indeed has shaped the deep worldview of Christians and non-Christians alike in Western civilization. Here would be some survey questions that reflect the deep worldview. I suspect that the scores for Biblical influence would be much higher in a study of these questions, though they too would show that this may be changing.

(1) Does the universe exist or is it an illusion? The answer might seem obvious–of course it does!–but this is a worldview issue. The reason that virtually everyone in the West today–no matter what their religious beliefs or lack of them might be–is the Bible’s teaching that the physical world is the creation of God, who, in addition, declared it to be “very good.”

Hinduism, along with the traditional culture of India, teaches that the objective universe is an illusion, one spun by the demon-goddess Maya. Salvation comes from escaping this maze of illusion through meditation, yoga, and acquiring positive karma. In doing so, one can end the endless cycle of reincarnation into this world of misery. (That’s another point of difference: I suspect that all of the Christians documented in that study who believe in reincarnation think that this would be a good thing, that it would be really cool to come back and live a bunch of different lives. But Eastern religions who believe in reincarnation consider it a bad thing.) Buddhism similarly believes that the objective universe is a realm of samsara, a state of constant suffering. As opposed to the Biblical teaching that the objective, physical creation, for all of its problems, is “very good.”

I do think that this worldview assumption is fading in the West. The postmodern notion that reality is a “construction” would be an example, similar to the Hindu notion of the god within who projects what we experience. The existentialist conviction that life is “meaningless” is also similar to the Buddhist assumption that existence is nothing but suffering. We have a broader, more popular trend of rejecting the physical world in favor of being “spiritual,” or, perhaps more accurately, just delving into our own subjectivity.

Notice that modern science depends on this Biblical worldview assumption and that it cannot be sustained by the denial of objectivity inherent in contemporary thought.

(2) Does time progress forward or does it simply repeat itself? Again, a linear view of time seems to most of us, believer and nonbeliever alike, as the only way it can be. But it’s in the nature of Weltanschauung, or deep worldview, to be so fundamental to our perception that it will seem obvious and unquestioned.

Pagan cultures, whether animistic or the relatively sophisticated version of the Greek, tend to have cyclical views of time. Indeed, this makes perfect sense. The sequence of the seasons repeats year after year. In human life, we are born, grow up, have children of our own, get old, and die. And those children likewise grow up, have children of their own, get old, and die. And on and on.

The Bible, of course, recognizes and speaks of the seasons of the year and of human life, and the weekly pattern of the Sabbath and the yearly courses of the festivals keep recurring. But it also speaks of time having a beginning (the creation), a middle, which is also the climax and the turning point (the incarnation), and an end (Christ’s return).

Again, this Biblical view of time is shared by modern scientists, Marxists, historians, and progressives in general.

(3) Is every human being equally valuable? Of course! But that is a Biblical idea. In many hierarchical societies–including here in the West, but also elsewhere throughout Europe–some people really are considered better than others. Such a worldview gave us aristocracy, slavery, racism, and every kind of oppression. But such views in the West were hard to sustain in light of Biblical anthropology, with its teachings that all human beings bear the image of God, have a common origin, are equally subject to God’s moral law (including kings, priests, the rich, etc.) and are objects of God’s love and Christ’s redemption (Revelation 7:9-10).

(4) Is war, though perhaps sometimes justified, a bad thing or a good thing? You don’t have to be a pacifist to consider war to be horrible, tragic, and evil. But in many societies, war is considered glorious and greatly to be desired.

We could go on. . . .

Interestingly, when the New Atheists criticize Christianity, they are often doing so by drawing on the Christian worldview.

Image by stokpic from Pixabay

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