Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Win or Winnow or Both?

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

INTRODUCTION

Sometimes, after I have thrown a Molotov cocktail or two, meaning by this an incendiary adjective, or hot incandescent metaphor, a number of my friends who follow this blog have counted to twenty-five, muttering to themselves all the while that they know there is going to be a follow-up post, one that will seek to put out the fires that were just started, a follow-up post they will agree with completely—and another problem they have is the length of some of my sentences, but let’s not go into that right now—and they wonder to themselves why the deuce I didn’t write the calm, cool, and collected post first. Everybody’s happy, everybody learns something, nobody’s spitting red hot nails, and so why couldn’t you do it that way?

TWO ANSWERS

There are two answers, one earthly and one spiritual. I will start with the earthly one so that those who want to maintain their prejudices about me may continue to do so. “Such a carnal man.” I would rather write two or three provocative posts, and then a follow-up post read by 20,000 people, than to write the contents of that follow-up post in adjectiveless prose that your sainted Aunt Millie would never object to, and have it read by 200 people. The point of writing is to have people read it. Or so it would seem to me.

And whatever else you might want to say about it, conflict is interesting. It catches the eye. Do you recall how, in junior high, no crowd whatever would gather around a couple of girls in the hallway exchanging views on what they would wear to the dance tomorrow, and a huge crowd would gather around a couple of girls, standing in that very same spot, scratching each other and pulling hair?

And no, I am not defending conflict for conflict’s sake. Nor am I saying that it is good to whip up conflict for entertainment purposes. Picking a fight for the simple sake of traffic and clicks would be wicked and ungodly. As your sainted Aunt Millie would say, “Heaven forfend.” But I am saying that—when the challenges are great, the threats are dire, the cause is just, your civilization is disappearing up the kitchen hood, out into the night sky, on account of a wicked bad grease fire, and taking one thing with another the leadership of the good guys is feckless—conflict is a tool in the toolbox that needs to be used way more.

In a war, conflict is not an unfortunate by-product. Conflict is the point.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Religious Right Is Dead. 

Long Live the Religious Right.

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

In the ongoing aftermath of the ever-generous fiasco that we call the Trump campaign, Russell Moore wrote that if Donald Trump has accomplished anything of value, it is that he has snuffed out the religious right. The first half of his piece says a lot of things that are pertinent, trenchant, on the mark, and otherwise okay.

I believe, with Moore, that this particular disaster-on-stilts is what we might call a “teachable moment.” It is filled with lessons we must learn if Trump goes down in flames, and with very similar lessons if Hillary does. But it is by no means assured that we have learned, are learning, or will learn those lessons.

My evidence for this is the second half of Moore’s post, and so I propose we take a brief walking tour through his comments.

“There is good news, though, behind all of this, regardless of how this election turns out. The old-school political Religious Right establishment wonders why the evangelical next generation rejects their way. The past year is illustration enough.”

First, it is always dicey to speak for something as ill-defined as the “next generation.” But second, to the extent that we can do so, it by no means clear to me that anybody is “rejecting their way.”

Militant Secularism Gathers Strength

The Battle for Religious Liberty

By  George O. Wood
PE News

I feel impelled to write you this most unusual pastoral letter. I do it out of deep concern and I ask you to hear my heart.

We are on the precipice of losing critical religious liberty protections in our country. Over the past 25 years, the Supreme Court has severely limited the traditional understanding of the First Amendment to the Constitution. While matters like selection of ministers and internal doctrinal issues are probably not under near-term threat, the Constitution is no longer interpreted by courts to give people of faith, as well as the schools and service ministries we form, the protection we need in order to fully live out the implications of our most cherished beliefs. Meanwhile state courts, legislatures and city councils around the country have moved to further narrow the protections granted for religious liberty, as their citizens must choose between adherence to religious faith and full participation in the public square.

The threats to religious freedom that are now upon us can be likened to the frog put into a pan of water placed on the stove. The water warms gradually and the frog does not realize its peril until it is too late to jump out of the pan.

Many evangelical and Pentecostal believers and leaders have not been previously alarmed at how the "pan" has been gradually heated in the assault against religious liberty. For example, in our own Fellowship I and district offices contacted nearly two thousand credentialed ministers to support a religious freedom bill just a month ago that was before a committee in the Missouri House of Representatives. Less than 15 percent of them even bothered to respond.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Surrender the Good Surrender?

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

Carl Trueman says a lot of good things here, and I invite you all to reflect on them. Having done so, I want to take this occasion to argue with his selection of one word, about which more in a minute.Surrender

Trueman sees right through the posing of those Christians whose idea of “engaging culture” is really just an excuse for aping pop culture, driven by a deep-seated need to show clips from top movies during the sermon. But fondling the Egyptians’ gold and leering at the Egyptian girls is not the same thing as plundering the Egyptians. Quite a different mindset is involved.

So the word Trueman uses that I want to take issue with is anti-culture.

Holy Polemics

Fighting the Good Fight

Dr B. B. Warfield once held the chair of Polemical Theology at Princeton Seminary.  There is a great need for holy polemics--the will and skill to hammer the ruling prejudices and reigning vanities of Unbelief.

Douglas Wilson is one such warrior.  He responds to some of his facile critics:  

. . . But did Isaiah hate women?

“Moreover the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, And walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, Walking and mincing as they go, And making a tinkling with their feet . . .” (Is. 3:16).

When I say that some women are biddies, this is not because they differ with me. It is because they are biddies. If I say a woman is a harridan, it is not because she disagrees with me about something. Other factors are in play, one of them being that she is a harridan.

This is one of the central reasons why a certain kind of feminist mind is not capable of engaging with serious thought. Were I to describe a man coming out of his apartment in a wife-beater tee, gold chain nestled in his chest hairs, would I be attacking men? Or would I be attacking a particular version of little coxcomb men?

Suppose a group of feral feminist females organize a slut walk. Bear with me — I am reproducing yet another instance of the problem.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Just Terrifgggkkkk . . .

By Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

When it comes to our interactions with unbelievers, we have two scriptural requirements we have to keep in mind. We have to do both of these things at the same time, which presents a monumental challenge to the tidy-minded. The question is this — do we share table companionship with unbelievers and sinners? This question is an urgent one because of the current full court press coming from the totalitolerance brigade. And the answer of course is that we certainly may, and we must not.

And behold, Levi threw a bash . . .

It is comparable to those two verses in Proverbs that are side by side:

“Answer not a fool according to his folly, Lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own conceit” (Prov. 26:4–5).

Do not get down on a fool’s level because you don’t want to become a fool yourself. Make sure you answer a fool at that level lest he walk away thinking he won the exchange. But when do you do which? You measure by the result.

Letter From America (About "Nuts!")

Cultural Conservatives Have Barely Begun to Fight

A response to Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option”

By David French

National Review Online

An atmosphere of gloom and despair pervades some cultural-conservative circles, and, at first glance, it’s easy to understand why. There’s no question that hysterical public assaults on Christians or others who dissent from leftist sexual orthodoxy are increasing in volume and frequency. It seems as if every day there’s a new story of an attempt to silence, intimidate, or publicly shame social conservatives.

It’s not enough to express disagreement with cultural conservatives — they must lose their jobs, lose their businesses, and close their schools, unless they bend the knee to the sexual revolution. Bonds of friendship and loyalty are meaningless if the cultural conservative holds the wrong view on same-sex marriage, and Christian clubs are vile discriminators if they simply want to be led by Christian leaders. In the “blue” sectors of America, particularly the academy, some Christians feel that they have to live under deep cover to protect their careers.

All of this is true. All of this is daunting. And none of it is cause for cultural retreat. Yet that is exactly what one of America’s more influential cultural conservatives is proposing. Rod Dreher, formerly at National Review and now at The American Conservative, advocates what he calls the “Benedict Option” in the face of the cultural onslaught:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Our Transgressive Daisy Chain

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

The great need of the hour is for Christians in North America to get a map in their heads, a map that has an x on it, that x indicating “you are here.” Related to this, we need to know how exactly we got here. We need to be oriented, and that means we need to be oriented by Scripture — not by the secularists who taunt us, on the one hand, or by the evangelical bedwetters, who believe every last one of their taunts, on the other.

It is not as though we were not warned. We were warned repeatedly, but we did not have the right categories in our minds to process those warnings. We had some prophetic souls who were able to point out where the x was going to be a century after their time. We are now standing on it and we still don’t know. Here is Chesterton, near the beginning of the 20th century.

Too big to fight, or too big to miss?

“For the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back . . . The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but much more in Manhattan.” (G.K. Chesterton: ‘The Next Heresy,’ in G.K.’s Weekly, June 19, 1926).

And this libertine excess, which throws off the “chains” established by God’s moral order, does not result in greater freedom for all. It results in petty tyrannies, soft despotism, and all those 16 ounce soda bans. Chesterton again:

“For when you break the great laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws” (Chesterton on Dickens, Collected Works XV, p. 151).

A glaring example of breaking the great laws would be our culture-wide unwillingness or inability to tell the difference between boys and girls, along with our unwillingness or inability to admit that these are the only two possible options on the menu.

The Balkanisation of Western Europe

Stupid Arrogance

Cultures never exist in a vacuum.  Never.  Every human culture draws upon habits, beliefs, and truths which, consciously or unconsciously, reflect a particular world-and-life view.  For many, if not most, particular cultural beliefs and practices have no more foundation than habit.  We do this or that (for example, female genital mutilation, or drinking in the pub on a Friday night) because we "have always done it".

But if one starts to think further Big Questions immediately come into play.  Is female genital mutilation right or wrong?  Is drinking at the pub right or wrong?  If both are moral actions, by what standard are they justified?  And upon what standard does the standard justifying female genital mutilation and pub-drinking rest in turn?  Whence does its authority come and upon what or whom does it rest?    And so forth.  Every culture will have embedded, tacit answers to these questions.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Culture War — Now More Than Ever

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

1992, Pat Buchanan put the phrase “culture war” on the map with his speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Since that time, there’s been a lot of water under the bridge, but — we should be careful to note — it is all the same river. One of the things you may have noticed lately is that various Christians of various stripes have been trying to put distance between themselves and this culture war. They are “tired” of it. It just seems to go on and on, and what’s the point? Instead of all this, the Church should be focusing its energies on things like furrowed brow concern over climate change — something that will garner applause instead of sneers.

When it comes to the culture wars, I would like to begin by making a distinction between those who are tired from being on the right side, and those who are tired of being on the right side.

Human and Racial Integration

No Scythians Here

Do races represent hard-coded divisions in the human race, such that two or more races can never cohere in a common culture or society?  Clearly racial ethnicity is hard coded, genetically speaking.  But does race mean cultural hard coding in an ethnic or genetic sense?  Clearly not.  If a white child is adopted and raised in a black family, the adopted child will inevitably adopt the family cultural patterns, mores, and behaviours.   And vice versa. 

When people speak of a "black culture" or an "Asian culture" the terms may well be descriptive.  However, they are definitely not prescriptive.  Some years back we used to hear references to the blues being "black music"; whites could not play the blues nor sing them.  That was until whites broke barriers and some became premier blues musicians.

World Views At War: Merry Warriors Needed

Sex After Christianity

Gay marriage is not just a social revolution but a cosmological one.

By Rod Dreher • April 11, 2013

The American Conservative

Twenty years ago, new president Bill Clinton stepped on a political landmine when he tried to fulfill a campaign promise to permit gay soldiers to serve openly. Same-sex marriage barely registered as a political cause; the country was then three years away from the Defense of Marriage Act and four years from comedian Ellen DeGeneres’s prime-time coming out.

Then came what historians will one day recall as a cultural revolution. Now we’re entering the endgame of the struggle over gay rights and the meaning of homosexuality. Conservatives have been routed, both in court and increasingly in the court of public opinion. It is commonly believed that the only reason to oppose same-sex marriage is rank bigotry or for religious reasons, neither of which—the argument goes—has any place in determining laws or public standards.

The magnitude of the defeat suffered by moral traditionalists will become ever clearer as older Americans pass from the scene. Poll after poll shows that for the young, homosexuality is normal and gay marriage is no big deal—except, of course, if one opposes it, in which case one has the approximate moral status of a segregationist in the late 1960s.

All this is, in fact, a much bigger deal than most people on both sides realize, and for a reason that eludes even ardent opponents of gay rights.

Letter From America (About Mozilla's War)

Mozilla’s Culture War Is a Bad Model for Business

Russell Moore
Penny Nance
April 8, 2014

Time Magazine 

The decision to remove Mozilla CEO Brandon Eich is not good for anyone on any side of the culture war

Last week’s forced resignation of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich should have sent a shudder through gatherings all over the country. This shudder was felt, it’s true, in gatherings of evangelical churches, Roman Catholic parishes, Orthodox Jewish synagogues. But this shudder should also have gone through corporate boardrooms, because it signals a dangerous trend of forced political uniformity, rather than tolerance, in corporate America. That’s not good for anyone, on any side of the culture war.

At issue, of course, is Brendan Eich’s 2008 donation of $1,000 to a campaign in support of Proposition 8, a California ballot measure to retain the definition of marriage in that state to the union of one man and one woman. Eich was hounded out of his job by activists who didn’t simply disagree with Eich’s view but who wouldn’t tolerate any dissenting view in the company at all. The goal, it seems, wasn’t dignity or justice, but enforced equality of thought.

As social conservatives, we, of course, were shocked by this development. Columnist Rod Dreher spoke of it as Portlandia’s form of Sharia Law. But those on the traditional marriage side of the cultural divide weren’t alone.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

On Not Being Scabrous

Posted on Thursday, January 30, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Magblog 

Trevin Wax and Alissa Wilkinson have a good conversation going about movie standards, here, here, and here. Allow me to commend them both for many good things said, and then just add a couple more items that I would like to see considered more frequently in this kind of discussion.

One of the questions concerned The Wolf of Wall Street, and  whether Scorsese portrayed Wall Street sin accurately. I believe that — at least as it pertains to certain tawdry elements — he probably did. But unaddressed is the matter of whether he portrayed the sins of Hollywood directors accurately, which I think he probably didn’t.

This needs to be teased out some, but you can file it under “no animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture.” What I mean is this — everyone knows that more matters than simply what winds up on the screen. If, in order to get that cinematic product up on the screen, you had to kill some horses, everybody seems to agree you shouldn’t do it — whether or not the resultant portrayal of the world of chariot racing was real, gritty, and true-to-life. Yeah, that might be true, but it still matters to a lot of people whether the horses got hurt.

In a similar way, we need to learn to distinguish “acting,” on the one hand, from “behaving badly with a camera running” on the other.

Douglas Wilson's Letter from Moscow

No Need for Right Wing Devils

Posted on Saturday, July 13, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

Jesus teaches us to expect slander, to expect misrepresentation. Further, He teaches us to believe that when this happens, it is a sign that we are gaining on it. In Luke 6:22-23, Jesus tells us to rejoice and leap for joy when we reviled, excluded, shunned, and held in contempt. In Lattimore’s translation of that passage, Jesus tells us that we are “to frolic” when this has happened.

We are able to do this, Jesus teaches, because we know the outcome of the story. We have the big picture. We know that great is our reward in Heaven. But being heavenly-minded is not an opiate — being heavenly-minded brings real earthly perspective.

Conservative activists who are surprised or indignant at the gross lopsidedness of the whole system are being foolish because they are expecting the devil to be a gentleman. They are expecting him to fight clean, and to avoid every form of fighting dirty. What makes us think he might do that?

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Book of the Month: June 2013 

Saturday, June 1, 2013
Douglas Wilson



This was a very good book on one level, and a very important book to me on another.

First, Meaning at the Movies was a good book because it managed something that a lot of Christian books about movies do not manage. If there is a ditch on both sides of the road, as there usually is, this book stays out of both of them. On the one hand we find the problem of an over scrupulous approach, where worldview analysis is done by cuss counts, and the thinking is about as deep as the skin that is being complained about.

The opposite error knows only one thing, and that is that of having no intention of being lumped in with that first group. The phrase Christian liberty is used as an all-purpose disinfectant, and if it has a sound track, clear thinking about it becomes immediately impossible. You don’t want to be in either ditch, but it has to be said that this ditch is dumber and dirtier than the other one.

Meaning at the Movies is a book that is not ashamed to bring foundational biblical truths to bear on the movies, and to praise or blame them accordingly. At the same time, the biblical truths that are applied are not trifles. The things that the overly pious object to are placed in their proper context — but it is not as though it is the beginning and end of the matter.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Broken Loose 

Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 29 April 2013

We live in a bad neighborhood, meaning this world of ours, and so this means that we have two kinds of problems. The first would be, naturally, the bad dudes roaming the neighborhood. The second problem would be those endearing but exasperating naifs living inside the house with us, who persist in leaving invitational lights on and doors unlocked. One problem is direct, and the other is indirect. One problem is assault and the other problem is failure to take the real possibility of a real assault into account.

So here is the the unlocked door. It is what W.W. Bartley called the "retreat to commitment."

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

A Deeply Flawed Human Being 

Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 23 April 2013


One of the first things a reformer has got to get used to is the experience of being despised and unpopular. Societies do awful things (that which needs to be reformed) because they want to, and the reformer is the one beckoning them to a state of affairs that they don't much want.

"You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit" (Ex. 23:2-3, ESV).

Notice what this passage requires of us. There are times when the doing of evil is popular. Many want to do evil, and they summon you to join them. There are other times when you are being pressured to bear false witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, in order to pervert justice. And if you didn't trip over the next verse, you weren't paying attention. It prohibits every form of affirmative action, along with all its ugly cousins. The man of integrity decides according to the law, and not according to whether the plantiff has had a hard life.

A Captain in the Armies of the Lord of Hosts

Battle Lines Being Drawn

It is always encouraging when Christian leaders and Christians face up to the Great Antithesis between belief and unbelief and build their lives and ministries accordingly. Here is a clip of Bishop E. W. Jackson calling for black Christians to leave the Democratic party because of its persistent and virulent anti-Christian positions.  He has started a movement called Exodus Now!, evoking the biblical injunction to "come out from among them and be ye separate."

According to some media reports, the call is being heeded--to the consternation of the Democratic Party.  Before you read those reports, listen to the challenge and appeal Jackson makes to fellow black Christians.  It will be heart warming and encouraging to all Christians.