Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Prophet Sober and the Culture Drunk

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Magblog

March 9, 2015

Well, it is Monday morning, so let me write something outrageous. We can sweep up the pieces later. But also keep in mind the fact that just because something is outrageous, it does not follow that it is untrue or unnecessary. In fact, now that the cultural headquarters of our republic has been transferred to the National Zoo’s central monkey house, every day that goes by makes normality more and more outrageous. So there’s that.

Worldview thinkers know that everything is connected. The world is all of a piece, and in the final analysis, the long war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent is an interpretive war over the whole. The seed of the woman seek to understand the world as the Creator of it understands it, and the seed of the serpent seek to understand it in evolutionary terms, which is to say, on its own terms.

The cosmos is here because God put it here. Or, taking the other route, the cosmos — in some form — was always here. Either God is eternal, or matter/energy are. In the former scenario, there was nothing material and then bam, there was everything that is. In the latter, you have constant, everlasting, unrelenting change. No hope, but lots of change.


The seed of the woman understand that the foundation of all wisdom begins with the Creator/creature divide. In the beginning, God . . . before the beginning, there was God. And God spoke, and “not God” came into being. And this triune God declared “not God” to be very good. Cornelius Van Til called this rudimentary fact the Creator/creature distinction. Peter Jones calls it Two-ism. But whatever you call it, the foundation of all true wisdom rests upon it.

The seed of the serpent insists that everything that is here morphed out of something else that was already here, and somehow, in some way, everything that is used to be something else. There was no ultimate beginning. All is One. This worldview exalts evolution of necessity; the whole thing is necessarily a protean, shape-shifting inchoate mass.

As a cultural value, faithful heterosexual monogamy is distinctively Christian, and not traditional at all. Pagan thought — which is necessarily evolutionary — has always made room for, and has insisted upon, sexual perversion.

Now the worshipers of the Creator God have a Word from their God, and they also have the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The worshipers of Change have a faith also, and a sacrament to go with it, which turns out to be the multi-directional orgasm. They testify to their faith in evolution by insisting that anything be allowed to have sex with anything else. In case you were wondering, this is why that creepster transgender dude is in the women’s showers at the fitness club. It is also why discipline in such situations, when it is applied, is applied to any person who has a problem with the creepster being in there.

And besides, any woman who objects to showering with a dude who currently self-identifies as a woman is probably a woman who has a deep problem with Pharisaism.

This particular clown car phase of our cultural decadence is actually in line with the inexorable line of reasoning that Paul pursues in Romans 1.

“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Rom. 1:24–27, ESV).

If you abandon the worship of the one true God, you will find yourself at some point partaking of the sacrament offered by the only other religious alternative. And that sacrament is sexual in nature. This is why, incidentally, an appeal to “traditional values” won’t work here. As a cultural value, faithful heterosexual monogamy is distinctively Christian, and not traditional at all. Pagan thought — which is necessarily evolutionary — has always made room for, and has insisted upon, sexual perversion.

And this brings us to the half-way position proposed by BioLogos. The existence of God is still affirmed, but it is claimed that He used evolution (shape-shifting) as His means of creating. This appears to be a mid-way position between the two, but another question has to be asked. Which direction is it going?

We become like what we worship. If we worship Change, we will come to insist on our right to be turned into anything, and to be turned on by anything. If we worship God, and God only, we will gladly accept His sexual assignments. If He decided to make you a boy, since He is God, then it follows that your duty is to like girls. After that, when you choose one of those girls, you give yourself to her completely. Life is simple.
I am not a betting man, but if I were a betting man . . . better yet, forget the bets. I am a thought experiment man. There really is a deep structure here, and I invite you to think in terms of it.

Take one thousand Christian schools, K-12. In your thought experiment, assume that five hundred of them adopt the BioLogos evolutionary approach to the sciences into their science curriculum. The other five hundred adopt a strict young earth creation approach. With me so far? Now fast forward twenty years. How many of these schools will have openly homosexual teachers and students? And are the percentages of such schools different in our two groups? Now sit down and think hard for a minute. Is there any conceivable connection here? Or am I just slinging around wild accusations? I will help you out — there is nothing wild about them.

When the prophet is sober and the culture is drunk, the charges only seem wild.

And besides, what additional proof of a deep commitment to shape-shifting do you need? If you can read a text that says that God formed Adam from the dust of the ground, and fashioned his wife from Adam’s rib, and from that text come to think that what God was really trying to get us to think was that all life arose from the sea, and that such life struggled across millions of years to eventually reach a gaggle of primates, so that God could give a couple of them a haircut and a bit more smarts, then frankly, putting up with a sex change operation should be a trifle.

I will admit that having the English Lit teacher self-identify as a junior high girl every second Tuesday so that he can shower with the rest of them might take a bit of getting used to. But progress is hard! Besides, the law says! Romans 13! And also besides, Selma!