I am going to postpone my much more interesting Kitchen/House Notes Saturday Diversion to say a couple of things about the foul Trump video that surfaced yesterday or whenever it was. Keep in mind that as I’m typing the little girls are screaming, the boys are needing to be dragged off the Xbox, and Elphine is weeping onto the pages of her math test. So that which I am about to say will either be the epitome of coherence or will make no sense at all.
First of all, a culture that embraces sexual perversion as a moral right will eventually be reduced down to be only about sex.
Second, as Matt regularly rejoins when someone comes and says, “I don’t think I believe in God any more,” “Who are you sleeping with?” In other words, a person’s desire to believe in God is very much influenced by what he happens to want to do with his body. We like to think ourselves as transcendent, rational, possessing agency, but unless we submit ourselves to God, who is truly transcendent and rational, and allow both the mind and body to be shaped and formed by the Ultimate Truth and Light, we end up moralizing the perversions of the flesh. Mr. Trump doesn’t think he has anything to repent of. And we are getting to see who he wants to sleep with. It’s not that complicated.
Third, I seem to remember going on about the absence of a Respectful Tone between men and women, in a post debate article, and here we have the same thing only worse. Mr. Trump isn’t a True Man. He is disrespectful, morally ugly, vain. But he is not some kind of anomaly in an otherwise pure and rarified culture. He is the Icon of the Western Soul. Don’t exclude yourself from this darkness. You can’t kill, or suffer with the killing, of many millions of people–more than in any war or horror–you can’t destroy the institution of marriage, you can’t try to eugenically destroy the African American, and end up with anything less than Trump…or Hillary whose actions against various women destroyed by her husband may feel less crass, but are really hideous as well.
Is this where we wanted to be? Embarrassed by someone’s sexual chatter? No, but we wanted everything leading up to it. And God, in his justice, said have what you want. It seems kind of flat doesn’t it? Sorry, sad, boring, ridiculous. There isn’t anything scintillating or provocative about the way that Trump was talking. There isn’t anything shocking about it either. There should be, but there isn’t.
If you are the kind of person who wishes this campaign season had more regularly featured “important matters of policy”, had wished that someone had talked about America’s place in the world, had wanted to get into the nuance of tax policy, I think you should cheer up. This election is important. It is about the most important matters of our day. Not the wall. Not Russia. Not Social Security. This election is about the very core of what it means to be human, what it means to be made Male and Female in God’s Image. It’s about life itself–who gets to live, who must die. It’s about humanity’s rejection of and rebellion against a God who so loved the world that he took on human flesh, became a man so that the world might be reconciled to him. Wake up people. Repent. You can’t do whatever you want with your mind and body and still have the preservation of your eternal soul.
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