Rss

  • youtube

America’s malaise

Posted by :admin On : November 14, 2014
0

Category: America, Archives, Christianity, Government, Humanism, Worldview

Malaise seems an inadequate word to describe what’s happening in and to America. Synonyms for “malaise” are sickness, illness, disease, disorder, anxiety, depression, and discontent. It appears all are needed to describe America’s mood and condition. One magazine cover reads, “Is the world falling apart?” [1] Syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan laments the nation’s decline in a recent column titled “Things fall apart for many public institutions.” [2] He lists numerous examples of this brokenness in recent years including the Center for Disease Control’s fumbled response in protecting Americans from an Ebola epidemic; basic security breaches in protecting the president at and away from the White House; the invasion of the southern United States by 60,000 children and young people from Central America; the Obamacare rollout debacle; the federal and state response to Hurricane Katrina in which 30,000 New Orleans residents were stranded for days; the strategic blunders by the president and civilian policy makers in handling the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; failing schools; skyrocketing national debt; deteriorating infrastructure; and political, racial, and cultural clashes. [3] And the list grows weekly.

Buchanan says that things were not always that way, and he raises the question: “What happened to us?” “Whatever happened to that can-do nation” that survived the Great Depression, armed itself and fought World War II over five years, and placed a man on the moon in ten years because we said we could do it? [4] Mr. Buchanan ends his column in dismay but offers no solutions. To Buchanan’s list we must also add the extreme societal devastation caused by the fracturing of the family structure which the late Senator Daniel Moynihan described as the he biggest change in the North Atlantic world that he observed in his forty years of government service and which happened in “an historical instant. Something that was not imaginable forty years ago had happened.” [5]

Something is profoundly wrong in America. The symptoms of the sickness are known and well-defined as shown above. The solutions put forth by politicians, bureaucrats, education professionals, scientists, sociologists and psychologists, economists and business professionals, and a host of others in the knowledge class generally treat only the symptoms with remedies that often seem to make matters worse while at the same time fail to diagnose the disease itself.

How do we determine what went wrong with America and why? To find the answer it makes sense to go back in history to a time when things were working, a time when America was unified and had confidence in the rightness of its central cultural vision? Once we find that point in time, we must ask ourselves what changed. A cursory examination of modern history in America quickly identifies that point in time as the 1960s and the emergence of the Boomer generation. What changed was a dramatic rejection by many in the Boomer generation of the values and central cultural vision of all preceding generations of Americans since their arrival as colonists in the early 1600s. A comparison of the Boomers and the Greatest Generation confirms the beginnings of America’s cultural divide.

Much has been written and said about the Greatest Generation, a term that has gained almost universal acceptance following Tom Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation. For it was this generation that grew up during the deprivations of the Great Depression, fought a world war, persisted in blocking Soviet threats and aggression in a prostrate post-war world, and built the world’s greatest peacetime economy. Following the Allied victory in 1945, the United States stood at the pinnacle of world power. But unlike any other time in history, that generation acted not as victors but as a good and honorable people who poured their resources and energies into helping devastated nations and their starving peoples around the world. And, they didn’t retreat in the face of new dictators and despots as they fought the hot war in Korea and the cold war in other parts of the world, primarily against the USSR and its satellites. Following World War II, they married; went to schools, colleges, and universities in record numbers; and birthed approximately eighty million children who became known as the Baby Boomers. [6]

And through all of these deprivations, challenges, and monumental efforts, “They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith.” [7] But, how do these values play out in twenty-first century America? Personal responsibility has been replaced by government responsibility for our health, wealth, happiness, and well-being. Duty is out of date and doesn’t resonate with the goal of self-actualization. It’s all about me, baby! Honor is no longer based on timeless standards and awarded on merit but is now a matter of personal opinion and popularity. And as to faith, the beliefs of the naïve and ignorant masses that still believe in the Christian God are tolerated as long as they do not share their faith in public nor practice that faith if it conflicts with the dictates of the state.

The challenge to the Judeo-Christian worldview by the Boomer elite is not a new occurrence. For hundreds of years a conflict has existed within Western civilization between those that believe in a transcendent God and those that do not. But, it was in the mid-twentieth century as each sphere of influence in American society began abandoning the Judeo-Christian central cultural vision under the onslaught of the purveyors of the humanistic worldview. The abandonment of the biblical foundations upon which the nation was built became evident as the leaders of the Boomer generation took the reins of leadership in the institutions of American life and imposed their humanistic values upon the policies, practices, and standards of those institutions. What are those humanistic values and beliefs held by many Boomers in leadership? There is no God and no life after death. Nature is all there is, and man is merely the evolutionary product of nature. Man can solve his own problems through science and reason. Freedom of expression and civil liberties are paramount in all areas of life. Happiness, freedom, and progress are the goals of mankind. The focus of life is on self and self-development. Society requires extensive social programs to achieve the goals of humanism. [8] It is obvious that these humanistic values have little in common with the Greatest Generation’s values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith.

Arguing from the Judeo-Christian worldview held by Americans from the Founders through the Greatest Generation, Christopher Badeaux describes the provision of order supplied by that worldview and the consequences of its abandonment in favor of the humanistic worldview.

The Lord made the Universe according to a set of hidden but largely discernable rules, and those rules produce specific, predictable outcomes once the rules and variables are known. Furthermore, all things are made ordered—oriented if you prefer—to not only the Lord, but also to decent and right outcomes…Our consciences and our natural inclinations are manifestations of this intrinsic order; disregarding them gives rise to disorder. Indeed, even doing things that are right and good can be taken to extremes that place one outside of that natural order. When we step outside of that order, as anyone who has lived with someone suffering through, say, anorexia or alcohol addiction can tell you, the disorder radiates outward in a spiderweb-crack pattern of pain. [9]

The problem with the humanistic worldview is that its prescriptions fail the test of what is required for a culture to survive. First, cultural unity and cohesiveness necessary for any society to survive can never be achieved through a dictatorial center of authority required by humanism. Second, humanism is inherently a false worldview because it steps outside the order of the universe. Therefore, it cannot answer the basic questions of life by which all people seek to understand the meaning and purpose of life.

With the ascendance of the humanistic worldview in society, the spiderweb-crack pattern of disorder and dysfunction radiates through every institution of American life. This is the reason our public institutions and the institution of family is falling apart, and polls consistently show that Americans believe that society is truly disordered and falling apart. Mr. Buchanan asked what changed America. Without doubt, what changed America was the humanistic leadership of the institutions of American life that abandoned the central cultural vision of the Founding Americans and every generation up to and including the Greatest Generation. It is only when Americans return to that central cultural vision whose foundation is Christianity that disorder will become order and America will began working again.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] “Is the World Falling Apart?” World, October 4, 2014, Cover.
[2] Patrick Buchanan, “Things fall apart for many public institutions,” Tulsa World, October 28, 2014, A-11; Pat Buchanan, “Things fall apart,”
Creators.com, October 14, 2014. http://www.creators.com/conservative/pat-buchanan/things-fall-apart.html (accessed October 29, 2014).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] William J. Bennett, The Broken Hearth, (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 2, 85.
[6] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), p. 9.
[7] Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation, (New York: Random House, 1998), p. xx.
[8] Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism, Eighth Edition, (Amherst, New York: Humanist Press, 1997), pp. 13-15.
[9] Christopher Badeaux, “Faith, Fear and Cormac McCarthy,” The City, Vol. 1, Issue 3, (Winter 2008), 84-85.

Progressive view of American history: The good old days were all bad.

Posted by :admin On : October 31, 2014
0

Category: America, Archives, Education, Progressivism, Truth

There seems to be few things that are exempt from the battlefields of the culture wars. The latest casualty is history…you know, the stuff that is learned in high school or at least what people used to learn in high school. But the history lessons taught in American schools for 200 years following the founding has been dumped by the education establishment in recent years. American history is no longer the grand story of American culture since the arrival of the first Europeans but has become a tool to promote the liberal political/cultural agenda. The nation’s history recorded by each generation’s citizens and eye-witness historians is an accurate record of America’s story. But now we have the latest two or three generations which claim the five hundred years of American history recorded by thousands of historians over the period is distorted and not reflective of the real story. Therefore, it must be trashed and replaced by a revised interpretation of history consistent with the current enlightened understanding of what really happened.

This approach to history is not new for it has been around since the early 1800s. It is called the Whig theory of history and is also known as the Progressive theory of history. This theory rests on the belief that the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development. It assumes “…that history is an inevitable march upward into the light. In other words, step by step, the world always progresses, and this progress is inevitable.” [1] Thus, the historical record must be judged only in light of current beliefs, assumptions, and politics, all devoid of timeless truths, wisdom accumulated through the ages, tradition, and heritage. The roots of the Whig theory reach back to the humanistic concept of human perfectibility of the French philosophers which arose during the Age of Enlightenment during the eighteenth century. Known as progressivism, the theory contradicts the Christian view of man as having a fallen nature.

The progressive theory of history is alive and well in the twenty-first century halls of academia and the organizations that serve its needs. One of those organizations is the College Board whose membership is comprised of 6,000 institutions of higher education. Its mission is to expand access to higher education by helping students to achieve college readiness and college success through such programs as the SAT and the Advanced Placement Program. The organization also acts in areas of research and advocacy for the education community. [2] It is in the College Board’s new Advance Placement course in history that dramatically advances the progressive view of history and which has caused considerable concern to many including the Texas State Board of Education and the Republican National Committee as well as some of the more conservative members of the Golden, Colorado school board.

The school board wants to review the College Board’s Advanced Placement U.S. history course which they believe contains significant anti-American content. The school board proposed to establish a committee to review texts and course plans to assure the course materials were balanced and “promote more citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights” and “don’t encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard for the law.” [3]

Now, who could argue with teaching that promotes a good citizenship and patriotism in a well-ordered and lawful society? Well, hundreds of students, parents, and teachers are bothered by such radical ideas and have been protesting the school board’s planned review for weeks. The protesters claim the board is attempting to change the course content to suit their views (what about the views of the people that elected them?). The College Board’s Advanced Placement history course content being taught for the first time this school year “gives greater attention to the history of North American and its native people before colonization and their clashes with Europeans, but critics say it downplays the settlers’ success in establishing a new nation.” The College Board stated that the course was built “around themes like ‘politics and power’ and ‘environment and geography’.” However, what is missing from the course framework is as significant as that which is included. For example, Martin Luther King isn’t mentioned, but the Black Panthers are. The Board explained that the content was not to be considered exhaustive, but one New Jersey teacher cut to the heart of the College Board’s unspoken agenda. He argues that the course “…has a global, revisionist view” and “depicts the U.S. as going from conquering Native Americans to becoming an imperial power, while downplaying examples of cooperation and unity.” [4]

To a large extent, Americans are a people that are ignorant of their history. Because they don’t know where they came from, they are unaware of the dangers into which the dominant humanistic worldview is leading America. This was not always so, and it has occurred by design and not by accident or neglect. The teaching of history falls within the sphere of education, and education has been in the hands of progressives for a hundred years. Of all of the institutions of life in America, the educational establishment is the one that is most saturated in the humanistic worldview which stands in direct opposition to the biblical worldview upon which the nation was founded.

The founder and architect of America’s progressive education was John Dewey who was bitterly hostile to Christianity and traditional Western thought. Dewey did not believe in the existence of God, supernatural religion, and life after death. Man was an evolutionary product and nature is all there is. The only thing that mattered was human self-realization through interaction with nature. On this foundation he built the progressive theory of education which emphasizes experience, observation, social responsibility, problem solving, and fitting in to society as opposed to centuries of traditional education by which is meant the acquisition of knowledge. [5] For progressives, the historical record holds little importance as a guide to the present and future unless it is used as the “horrible example” of America’s past sins for the purpose of leading ignorant citizens to surrender their values and freedom. From this denigration of American history, we see the obvious disconnect between progressive education and the traditional understanding of that history. If one holds the progressive view of history, the views of the present generation must be superior to those of past generations and by default superior to their concepts of timeless truths, ancestral wisdom, tradition, and heritage. In this denigration of America’s past, the progressive theories of education and history support and promote the larger all-encompassing philosophy of humanism which has been described in several earlier articles.

Ashley Maher is an eighteen year old Chatfield High School senior who helped organize the protests against the Golden school board’s plan to review the content of the Advance Placement history course. She assures that, “We are going to fight until we see some results.” [6] By “results,” it must be assumed she means that the school board’s desire to promote citizenship, patriotism, the free-market system, respect for authority, respect for individual rights, civil order, national unity, and respect for the law will be duly censored from any Advance Placement American history courses in Golden’s high schools. It would be interesting to hear Ms. Maher’s response to the question as to why her values and interpretation of American history are superior and should be taught while at the same time suppressing and/or misrepresenting the factual historical record about which she knows nothing. Following that moment of silence from Ms. Maher, it is also doubtful her parents or her Boomer grandparents peopling the picket lines could give a coherent, logical answer. Should they manage some sort of response, we counter with the words and actions of those eye-witnesses to American history: the Pilgrims and Puritans; colonial farmers and frontiersmen; Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and the rest of the founding generations; Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the Abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln, the Doughboys of WWI and soldiers, sailors, and airmen of WWII, and millions of others who made America the greatest nation in the history of the world. For most modern-day Americans of the last three generations, it would be an answer they have not heard thanks to humanism’s revisionist view of American history and suppression of the historical record of our ancestors.

Larry G. Johnson

[1] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Progressive Theory of History,” Ludwig von Mises Institute, September 14, 2010. http://mises.org/daily/4708 (accessed October 28, 2014).
[2] College Board, https://www.collegeboard.org/about (accessed October 14, 2014).
[3] Colleen Slevin, “Colorado board backs review of curriculum,” Tulsa World, October 3, 2014, A9.
[4] Colleen Slevin, “Critics slam school board over history course review,” Tulsa World, October 4, 2014, A4.
[5] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 23-24, 289-290
[6] Slevin, “Critics slam school board over history course review,” A4.

Freedom

Posted by :admin On : July 4, 2014
0

Category: America, Archives, Christianity, Humanism

Fifty-six traitors to the crown signed their own death sentences and then fought to escape the hangman’s noose. So began the first steps in forming a new nation. It was a typically hot summer in Philadelphia in 1776. Day after day a group of men met to argue, pray, sweat, and wonder what would be the outcome of their deliberations. Eventually, the product of their labors was the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. The wording of the revered document was approved on July 2nd by the Continental Congress, and on July 4th the delegates voted to accept it. What was so valuable that these men would risk their lives for it? It was freedom.

The word “freedom” is misused much as is the word “love.” Freedom’s meaning is misunderstood and has been stretched, changed, distorted, overused, cheapened, made merchandise, used to defend or promote conflicting purposes, and co-opted for support of principles and philosophies that are inherently in opposition to its real meaning.

Why is it that human beings value freedom so much? Before we can answer, we must realize that one’s worldview will ultimately define his or her understanding of the concept of freedom. If a worldview is fundamentally flawed in that it is in conflict with truth, that worldview’s concept of freedom will also be flawed and result in bondage of some type and degree. In Western civilization there are two worldviews contending for dominance—humanism and Christianity.

A Freedom that coerces

In the humanist worldview, man is encouraged to realize his own creative talents and desires and exercise maximum individual autonomy that is free from the mores, norms, tradition, and distant voices of the past. This freedom gives unbridled expression to self and senses. However, one must read the fine print in the humanists’ promises of freedom which requires individual autonomy to be consonant with social responsibility. Therefore, humanists harness an individual’s dignity, worth, and freedom to the principle of the greatest-happiness-for-the greatest-number which is hitched to the humanist belief that the highest moral obligation is to humanity as a whole. Freedom of the individual is subservient to his obligations to the larger society, and those obligations are determined and defined by the humanist intellectual elite. In other words, man replaces God as the defining authority for truth, and man’s highest moral obligation is to humanity as a whole and not to God.[1]

The source of true and lasting freedom

To understand the Christian worldview as it relates to freedom, we must examine God’s creation of man. Man was created with God’s divine image stamped upon him. Man has an insatiable thirst for freedom because God made man with freewill. It was necessary for man to have freewill in order for love to exist. God did not create man out of need. Rather, it was a will to love, an expression of the very character of God, to share the inner life of the Trinity. By creating man with a free will meant the possibility of rejection of God and His love. Being God, He knew the course and cost of His creation would be the death of His Son on the cross. In other words freewill and the potential for rejection of God was the penalty for the possibility of love. So it is on the earthly plane, to risk love is to risk rejection.[2] Love is a choice because man has freewill, and true love reflects the divine in that it focuses on relationships and not self.

Now we begin to see the fundamental differences between humanism and Christianity that shape the disparities of how those worldviews define freedom. In the Christian worldview, freedom simply means a lack of coercion but also implies self-restraint and deference to relational patterns revealed in the mores, norms, tradition, and distant voices of the past. True freedom is found only when an individual chooses a right relationship with God through the acceptance of Christ as one’s savior. In such relationship, man chooses to subordinate his own freewill to Christ, to accept Him, and to follow the road of freedom found in the revelation to the ancient Hebrews and first century Christians. From this foundation of a right relationship with God, man can find right relationships with his fellowman in family, community, and state.

In a contrary view of freedom that exalts self, humanists attempt to release the individual from the relational patterns flowing from those same mores, norms, tradition, and distant voices of the past. However, the subjugation of divinely ordered relational patterns to the god of self results in loneliness, pain, suffering, and loss in this life and eternity thereafter. In other words, true freedom is found in freely subduing one’s will to that of God’s will as opposed to the exaltation of self and the senses. Christ’s words in Luke’s gospel capture the essence of this seeming enigma.

…If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it. [Luke 9: 23-24. RSV]

Freedom lost

In twenty-first century America, the god of self rules the day. America’s humanist masters have taken control of the nation and its institutions. Many Americans recognize there is something amiss with the country, but they take little time to look, listen, understand, and challenge the despoiling of America’s central cultural vision upon which the nation was founded. Americans are much like Esau who sold his valuable birthright for a bowl of stew, that is, he traded what was important, godly, and honorable for temporary pleasures. America’s hard-won two-hundred-plus year birthright of freedom is being willingly and rapidly surrendered to a growing legion of humanistic overlords in exchange for a bowl of entitlements, fleeting and licentious pleasures, self-centeredness, egotism, radical egalitarianism, imaginary rights, sloth, and an obsession for life-consuming leisure activities.

Fifty-six traitors to the crown signed their own death sentences and then fought to escape the hangman’s noose. They were overwhelmingly Christian in worldview, and like God in His creation of man, the Founders knew the cost of freedom as revealed in the final words of the Declaration of Independence, “And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”[3] (emphasis added)

The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence paid a tremendous price for our freedom: 5 were arrested by the British as traitors, 12 had their homes looted and burned by the enemy, 17 lost their fortunes, 2 lost sons in the Continental Army, and 9 fought and died during the Revolutionary War.[4]

Edmund Burke’s famous observation of the eighteenth century still rings true today. “All that is necessary for the evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”[5] To defend America’s birthright of freedom, good and Godly men and women must once again depend on the providence of God and pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to subdue the humanistic apostles of self that are enslaving the nation.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American
Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), p. 389.
[2] Ibid, p. 158.
[3] Henry Steele Commager, Documents of American History, (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1934), p. 102.
[4] William J. Federer, America’s God and Country, (Coppell, Texas: FAME Publishing, Inc., 1996), p. 144.
[5] Ibid., p. 82.

This was done by ordinary people – Part IV

Posted by :admin On : June 20, 2014
0

Category: America, Archives, Christianity, God's Law v. Man's Law, Government

The role government and the role of the church as it relates to government

Dietrich Bonhoeffer went to his death on a Nazi gallows in 1945 with a very definite understanding of the role of the church in society, and his death was the eventual outcome of his living that understanding. God ordained the establishment of government for the preservation of order and the establishment of laws that define that order. The church has no right to interfere with the actions of the state in purely political matters. That said, Bonhoeffer also firmly believed the church plays a vital role in helping the state be the state by continually asking if the state’s actions can be justified as a legitimate fulfillment of its role. In other words, do the actions of the state lead to law and order and not to lawlessness and disorder? Where the state fails, it is the role of the church to draw the state’s attention to its failures. Likewise, if the state creates an atmosphere of “excessive law and order,” the church must also remind the state of its proper role. Excessive law and order becomes evident when the state’s power develops “…to such an extent that it deprives Christian preaching and Christian faith…of their rights.”[1]

Bonhoeffer demonstrated his belief of limits on state authority in his arguments to the German Lutheran church (effectively the state church) against its acceptance of the Nazi Aryan paragraph in the synchronization of all German life in accordance with Nazi dictates. The Aryan paragraph served as the basis for many laws that denied Jews their rights as German citizens.

But Bonhoeffer’s arguments regarding the German government’s treatment of the Jews really framed the larger question of “what is the church?” In other words, from where does the church receive its authority? Is it an instrument of the state and therefore subject to the state or is it apart from the state? If it is apart from the state, then what does the church do when the state oversteps the boundaries of its legitimate authority?[2]

Actions of the church with regard to government

Bonhoeffer listed three actions the church should take regarding the state. The first has been described—the church must question the state with regard to its actions and whether its actions can be justified as a legitimate concern of the state. Second, the church must “…aid victims of state action in its ordering of society…even if they (the victims) do not belong to the Christian community.” Bonhoeffer did not stop there but said a third step may be necessary. The church must “…not just bandage the victims under the wheel…but a stick must be jammed into the spokes of the wheel to stop the vehicle. It is sometimes not enough to help those crushed by the evil actions of a state; at some point the church must directly take action against the state to stop it from perpetrating evil.” But Bonhoeffer’s stick in the spokes of the wheel of state is justified only if the church’s very existence is threatened by the state and the state is no longer a state as designed by God.[3]

In Part III we identified three groups of churches in Nazi Germany of the 1930s: the apostate German Christian church, the Confessing church which became the silent church of appeasement, and a faithful remnant that became the suffering church. The great majority of German churches during the Nazi era subordinated themselves to the Nazi state, did not speak out against Nazi tyranny, and did not aid the victims crushed by the wheel of state.

We also drew disturbing parallels between the German church of the 1930s and the American church of the twenty-first century. Christianity and its values are under full-scale attack in America. The church must decide what it will or will not do in response to that attack. Some will choose to do nothing and as justification point to Paul’s letter to the Romans with regard to a Christian’s conduct in relation to the state.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. [Romans 13:1-5. RSV]

But to do nothing is a misinterpretation of Paul’s message. Paul is not saying that we should be obedient to government regardless of what it does. It is nonsensical to claim that all rulers are legitimate authorities who must be mindlessly obeyed because of a misunderstanding of the meaning of Romans 13:1-5.

So how do we resolve the dilemma of whether we are to obey a specific ruler (government) or not? The issue revolves around whether or not a government is one that receives its authority from God. Christians must be subject to governing authorities if the authority is instituted by God, but Christians are not required to submit to those rulers whose authority is not instituted by God and therefore is illegitimate. The distinction becomes apparent from Paul’s words when he says that rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad conduct. But we know that many rulers in this world are a terror to good conduct and therefore do not fall within Paul’s description of a government that receives its authority from God.

The church and bad government

Even where there is a bad government, Christians must be subject to governing authorities to a point. Christians are required to be subject to government laws and regulations even when they disagree with them. However, when those laws and regulations require Christians to compromise or disobey biblical commands with regard to one’s personal life or the lives over which they have been given charge, the Christian must be obedient to God’s word and not government authority. Two current examples come to mind which give meaning to this distinction. The Christian owners of Hobby Lobby have refused to provide health insurance to their employees under the Affordable Care Act because of the requirement for the inclusion of abortion services. A Christian Colorado baker refused to make a cake for a homosexual couple’s wedding. Both are laws which conflict with what it means to be a Christian who is obedient to the word of God. Christians must still be subject to the governing authorities except when their obedience conflicts with the higher laws of God.

The church and illegitimate government

There is a step beyond bad government when a government’s authority becomes illegitimate because it no longer fulfills its role in providing order and has become lawless and disorderly. Therefore, Christians must be careful to distinguish between bad government and illegitimate authorities not ordained by God. We must also realize that bad governments, through a succession of actions upon which evil is piled upon evil, will at some point forfeit their legitimacy as God withdraws His authority. At that point the ignored warnings and admonishments of the church to a state rushing head-long into lawlessness and disorder must be exchanged for sticks to be thrust into the spokes of the wheel of that illegitimate government. However, Bonhoeffer cautioned that casting sticks into the spokes of the wheel of state is justified only if the church’s very existence is threatened and the state is no longer a state upon which God’s authority rests.

The very existence of the American church is being threatened by excessive laws and the heavy hand of the government as it attempts to drive Christianity from the cultural and institutional landscape of America. The church and Christians must continue to admonish the state as to its over-reach and a possible loss of legitimacy. As the American government deprives its citizenry of their rights regarding Christian preaching and Christian faith, society will continue to slide into a cultural swamp devoid of any hint of morality. There may come a point at which God will lift His authority as the government fails to fulfill its proper role. At such a time the church must be ready with sticks to thrust into the spokes of the wheel of a lawless and chaotic government.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2010), p. 153.
[2] Ibid., pp. 152-153.
[3] Ibid., pp. 153-154.

The New Ministry of Truth 2014

Posted by :Larry G. Johnson On : March 7, 2014
0

Category: America, Archives, Government, Socialism, Truth

In 1949, George Orwell wrote 1984, a grim novel about an omnipresent government set in Airstrip One, formerly Great Britain but now merely a province of Oceania, a superstate ruled by a political system called English Socialism. Oceania’s leaders are the Inner Party, a privileged elite headed by Big Brother, the pseudo-divine party leader who uses mass media, propaganda, and a cult-like following to create his idealized, heroic, and god-like public image. Oceania is a land of constant war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control. However, the oppressive nature of the regime is justified by Big Brother and the Party in the name of the supposed greater good.

Control of the public’s mind is achieved with the assistance of the Ministry of Truth which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism and controls the news media, entertainment, the arts, and publishing. The Ministry falsifies the historical record where necessary to conform it to the government-approved version of events. To assist in its propaganda and revisionist efforts, the government invented Newspeak, a language used to limit freedom of thought and other expressions of individualism and independent thinking which are considered thought crimes.

In 2014,it appears that America’s current version of Big Brother is attempting to develop his own Ministry of Truth. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hired Social Solutions International, Inc. in 2012 to develop a study and data gathering procedures which were scheduled for testing this spring in South Carolina. The study is designed to:

Identify and understand the critical information needs (CINs) of the American public (with special emphasis on vulnerable/disadvantaged populations).

To provide a comprehensive analysis of access/barriers to CINs in diverse American communities.

To determine what barriers to entry exist in FCC regulated market and to what extent these barriers have a negative impact. [Social Solutions International, Inc., pp. 2-3.]

To put FCC’s Newspeak into layman’s language, the purpose of the FCC study is to uncover information from the daily operations of television and radio broadcasters, newspapers, and the Internet that will reveal the process used to select news stories for presentation, frequency of coverage of critical information needs, media bias, and media responsiveness to underserved populations as perceived by FCC. [Perkins]

The FCC has already identified certain information that it considers as critical information needs of all Americans: health and welfare, education, transportation, economic opportunities, environment, civic information, political information, and emergencies. [Social Solutions International, Inc., p. 61.] Effectively, the FCC will control news content through imposition of content standards consistent with its own definition of CINs. Deviation from the FCC’s CIN standards will be judged as broadcaster/print media bias and therefore subject to FCC regulatory oversight, censure, punishment, and correction.

Although the study has been labeled as voluntary, the Multi-Market Study is merely the door-opener for federal control of the content of broadcast and print news media. Broadcasters must obtain periodic license renewals, and once FCC-defined CIN standards are established, what is to prevent the FCC’s power over broadcaster license renewals from being the hammer used to force broadcasters to accept FCC CIN content requirements? This is somewhat akin to a state or a local school district’s “voluntary” acceptance of Common Core standards. If Common Core standards that are acceptable to the U.S. Department of Education are not chosen, funds will not be forthcoming. [Johnson] Also, the FCC does not have regulatory authority over print media and the Internet at present. However, if FCC-defined bias is found by the study to exist in print media, such perceived bias will be justification for the federal government to expand the FCC’s regulatory reach into newspapers, magazines, other print media, and the Internet.

For those that haven’t been paying attention, this is the liberal formula for controlling American society: create a victim, elevate victim status to being deprived of an imaginary “right” and thus tantamount to discrimination, and finally impose a government solution to fix the discrimination. The perception by the FCC (a perception perhaps encouraged by the FCC’s superiors) is that some Americans are being victimized, particularly the vulnerable and disadvantaged, by not getting the critical information they need from a “biased” media. All Americans have a “right” to critical information to which some are being deprived and therefore are discriminated against. The government’s solution is to eliminate the perceived discrimination found by the FCC study by (1) requiring existing media to disseminate whatever the government determines to be critical information and (2) providing government licensing, support, special privileges, and sources of financing for new media outlets that will supply the critical information needs of the diverse but marginalized-vulnerable-disadvantaged communities presently unserved or under-served by the existing biased media.

Since the FCC’s proposed insertion of monitors into newsrooms caught the attention of many Americans, there has been a firestorm of controversy surrounding the intrusion of big government into the newsrooms of America. Because of the massive negative publicity, the study has been shelved although not rejected at the present time.

Opposition to the FCC study has come from both within and without the media. Opponents have voiced a loud and long defense of First Amendment protections of a free press. But where are the First Amendment champions when religious freedom also guaranteed by the First Amendment is repeatedly trashed by the Obama administration? This administration has made it clear that wherever conflicts occur between religious freedom and its definition of equality, equality will be the victor every time. One need only look at the Affordable Care Act and the advancement of the homosexual agenda as just two of many examples of the trouncing of religious freedom in America.

The FCC’s efforts to control the message through dictating CINs mimics the tactics of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s fictional account of a totalitarian socialist state. However, the FCC has also become the real-life moral and de facto equivalent of Communist political commissars of the twentieth century who were assigned to military units to teach party principles and policies and to insure party loyalty. Non-military commissars were also used to attempt to control public opinion or expression. [Webster]

The FCC’s latest attempt to inject themselves into the newsroom and thereby control the message is just one example of the over-reach of American government into the minutiae of the lives of all Americans. We see the same government intrusions into doctors’ offices and hospitals, school rooms, businesses, local government, property rights and right of contract, religious organizations, and families to name just a few. Government intrusion ranges from serious violation of the Constitution through behavior and speech codes to ridiculous regulations on sugary drink sizes and light bulbs.

Massive government intrusion into the lives of its citizens began in the 1930s under new interpretations of the general welfare clause of the Constitution. Government expansion began in Roosevelt’s New Deal Years of the 1930s and accelerated with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s. However, the exponential growth during the last five years into the minutest detail of the daily lives of American citizens has become suffocating. Alexis De Tocqueville, in his 1835 Democracy in America, had a prophet’s foresight into America’s 2014 slide into a totalitarian Oceania.

We forget that it is, above all, in the details that we run the risk of enslaving men…Subjection in the minor things of life is obvious every day and is experienced indiscriminately by all citizens. It does not cause them to lose hope but it constantly irks them until they give up the exercise of their will. It gradually blots out their mind and enfeebles their spirit …

The democratic nations which introduced freedom into politics at the same time that they were increasing despotism in the administrative sphere have been led into the strangest paradoxes. Faced with the need to manage small affairs where common sense can be enough, they reckon citizens are incompetent. When it comes to governing the whole state, they give these citizens immense prerogatives. They turn them by degrees into playthings of the ruler or his masters… [emphasis added] [Tocqueville]

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

George Orwell, 1984, (New York: Signet Classics, 1950).

Social Solutions International, Inc., “Research Design for the Study of Multi-Market Critical Information Needs,” Federal Communications Commission, (Silver Springs, Maryland: Social Solutions International, Inc., April 2013). http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/research-design-multi-market-study-critical-information-needs (accessed February 22, 2014)

Tony Perkins, “American Pai: FCC Chair Fights off Government Snoops,” Family Research Council, February 21, 2014. http://www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/american-pai-fcc-chair-fights-off-govt-snoops (accessed February 22, 2014);
Ajit Pai, “The FCC Wades Into the Newsroom,” The Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2014. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304680904579366903828260732 (accessed February 22, 2014)

Larry G. Johnson, “Common Core Curriculum Standards: The devil is in the details,” culturewarrior.net, November 8, 2013. https://www.culturewarrior.net/2013/11/08/common-core-curriculum-standards-the-devil-is-in-the-details/ (accessed February 26, 2014).

“Commissar,” Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, (Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, 1963), p. 166.

Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Gerald E. Bevan, Trans., (London, England: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 807-808.