What Mardi Gras Has for Breakfast
This is happening in lots of different areas, so I don’t want to pick on Rand Paul. But for the sake of convenience, let us start with him. He recently called for a “truce” within the Republican Party on “social issues,” but what such a truce would actually amount to is total capitulation on the part of social conservatives.
To agree to a truce on such issues is to acknowledge in some fundamental way that the issue is not what you have been claiming for it all these years. Principled incrementalism would never use the word truce.
Face-saving surrenders do. If abortion is murder, you don’t go halvsies on it. If you had been fighting the Nazi genocide for years, and they suddenly offered you a truce, wherein they agreed to stop killing the Feingolds and so on through the end of the alphabet, and you agreed to such a deal, would this not reveal that you had no earthly clue what position you had actually been advocating?
Also, it should be said, to agree to a truce on these issues, in this political climate, argues an intelligence that might be competitive with a somewhat backward oyster. Are you kidding me? When have the secularists ever honored a truce like this? Pro-lifers would be like the Ukraine, abandoning nukes in exchanges for guaranteed borders. Didn’t happen? Oops. Well, that was years ago anyways.
Now that the new pomosexual order is moving into a full court press, and given the fact that a lot of Christians haven’t found their epistemological backbones yet (which would be admittedly a difficult task for them), what this means that is that numerous Christians whose conservatism was on auto-pilot are going to be looking for a face-saving way out. Back when they could raise money on the homosexual threat with underlined screechings, they would do so. But now that doing this might actually take some courage, and such money might actually be well-spent, they will move on to another cash cow. Look for them to start raising money to fight the threat of child brides under twelve in Dearborn. Child brides who are thirteen and over were covered by the truce.
What is needed in the meantime, they think, is for someone to provide a plausible-sounding reason for the capitulation. We need for somebody to appeal to “principle,” with the scare quotes airbrushed out.
Rand Paul is offering us this kind of lame and rancid deal in politics. It is really too bad, because — in my view — he had a lot to offer in a number of other areas. Notice the past tense had. But ain’t it the way? “Leaving it up to the states” at the very moment when the state of Leviathan, the mass-culture of Rahab, and the crony corporations of Molech are jackhammering the states into conformity? Yeah, right. The only states rights issue involved here will the right of a state to be a patsy. Arizona’s right to the Super Bowl will be as secure as Ukraine’s eastern border.
Rand Paul comes by his libertarian convictions honestly — I don’t think he is an opportunist, in other words. But anybody who thinks that the size of the modern state can be shrunk by a coalition of potheads and poofters is not, as the liberals like to say, on the right side of history. A constitutionally-limited state is absolutely dependent upon public virtue. Otherwise, forget about it.
We had better get used to all this, because there will be other offerings just like it in other areas. One person will argue that the two-kingdoms theology means that we should be totally cool with same sex mirage outside the church, because, after all, is it not, at the end of the day, another realm entirely? Someone else will argue that God’s design for human sexuality is only pertinent inside the bounds of liturgical worship, and once we are outside the sanctuary, we don’t have to live by what the Bible teaches about human thriving, sexuality, and the variegated roles of men and women.
It turns out we only come up with things like Lent so that Mardi Gras can have something to eat for breakfast.
Cornelius Van Til once said that if the unbelieving heart is allowed one place on the radio dial where he could tune in and not hear the Word of God, then, he said, every unbelieving heart would have his radio tuned to that place of silent relief every day, all day. Who wants to hear about the glory of God all the time? Not anyone who has a kink in his sexual hose. Every false-hearted compromise will share this in common — it will offer a zone where the authority of Jesus can be disregarded, and it will offer us a haven where we can go and still be cool. Every lie we must deal with will in some fashion offer us a silent place on that dial.
We will be told that if we just agree to “these terms” then the controversy will cease. We will be able to build bridges. We will be able to strike up conversations with unbelievers — which will be quite the bummer, because after all the compromises, we will have nothing to say. We will stare across the table at the lost soul we were reaching out to, and a thought will flit across our mind — “I gave up everything so that I might get in a position to offer you the words of life, and now I am across the table from you, and I no longer have any words of life to give.” Call it an opportunity cost. That thought will do no more than flit because anything more might start to look like repentance.
Look. The fix is already in. This means the next step will be to apply all the pressure in the world, and to do so by means of various arguments. The arguments, the proffered rationales, can be rice paper thin because the real force of the argument will be found in the pressure — legal pressure, financial pressure, political pressure, respectability pressure, and accreditation pressure. Some groups of Christians are probably lame enough already to give in to the atmospheric pressure. And a host of evangelical scholars will seek out plausible and footnoted excuses for doing so, like so many eager dogs sniffing at a series of rat holes.
There will be pragmatic arguments. We need to do this in order to win elections. But who cares about winning elections if nothing changes?
We “need to make it clear” to the secularists that these are the “core values of our faith community,” inside the four walls of our little liturgical ghetto, and that we wouldn’t dream of exporting what the Bible says about sexual roles outside the sanctuary. That way, they will leave our sanctuary as the very last morsel before coming in and demanding that — in the name of diversity — the pastor and the entire session will have to agree to kiss Aphrodite’s ass. And a bunch of them will send the stated clerk to do it too, claiming that none of this was covered in seminary really. It is starting to look like Meredith Kline’s glory cloud is good for covering up any number of things.
But that was back in the day, back before America was in tatters. Those were the years of the seven fat kline. Now these are the years of the seven lean kline. And we are the generation that knew not Joseph.
Don’t doubt in the dark what you knew in the light. And don’t ready yourself in the light to start doubting in the dark what you knew in the light. They are going to try to make this all very complicated, when it reality it is very, very simple. Boys and boys don’t go together, and neither do girls and girls, and chopping up babies is bad. What the post-structuralists might say about this is largely irrelevant.
But, the protest will come, if we don’t stop harping on all that, then we are going to continue to lose elections. Well, then, if that is true — and it isn’t, by the way — then it sounds to me like Jesus wants us to lose the damn election.
Postscript: to be filed in the Gnats and Camels folder. There will be many evangelical Christians who will be more offended that this post contained the words “ass” and “damn” than they are offended at the wholesale rejection of biblical authority by the evangelical church. It is worse, in their book, to say damned than to be damned. But I am using such words advisedly, and am being careful to follow the apostle’s injunctions on how salty edifying speech should be (Col. 4:6
).
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