Peak Farce

Listen to the radio broadcast here.

Trust the Technocrats

Listen to the radio broadcast here.

Villains at Vanderbilt

Listen to the radio broadcast here.

Well, you might have heard the controversy about Vanderbilt. If you haven’t, I highly recommend checking out the Matt Walsh Show and listening to his case against Vanderbilt – it is quite compelling. But more interesting and more disturbing than the fact that the good folks at Vandy will happily violate the Hippocratic Oath by mutilating and sterilizing children, is the fact that the ire that this has drawn has, predominantly, been ire directed towards Walsh. It is difficult for me to decide which better illustrates the banality and repugnance of evil. On one hand, the sterile, clinical, profit-centric, euphemistic language of hospital officials, as well as the peppy, smiling, first-day-orientation videos, centered around how to mutilate and sterilize children are disturbing. Reminding us all that you don’t need pitchforks and red pajamas to make a Hell – indeed, a smiling, cheerful, clean, efficient bureaucracy makes for a much more well-ordered godless malevolence. On the other hand, the simple fact of the matter is that that people are aware that there are hospitals where children are mutilated and sterilized, and the response is largely – how dare anyone point that out! that’s going to get someone hurt?

Wait!? What?! The concern is that someone will get hurt!? You mean someone OTHER than the children being mutilated and sterilized?! Oughtn’t they to be the focus; shouldn’t the children who are going to be brainwashed, deluded, drugged, castrated, and mutilated be the primary focus of our concern?

Now listen; I do not advocate violence. But just imagine if this weren’t a clean, respectable, university hospital, and instead were some creep in his basement. Imagine if someone were mutilating children in a cabin in the woods. This is the stuff of nightmares. This is the content for horror films. This is the stuff that Orwell dismissed because it was too fantastic.

If some creep were castrating kids in an abandoned warehouse we’d cry out for him to hang. But a creep in a labcoat does it, and we need to be concerned for his welfare. Because let’s not pretend that the creeps at Vanderbilt aren’t creeps. They are deeply evil and corrupted men and women. And the fact that they are doing it out of a combination of ideology and profit make it, in some ways, more disturbing than if it were some demonic slasher. The fact that it’s so crisp and clean and tidy hides the monstrosity that it is. The enormity of it all somehow escapes us because, well, they’re Doctors, and they have Guidelines, and their Professional Organizations have Codes of Conduct. As though that somehow made it better! As though me being a theologian made it OK for me to tell people to worship Satan and blaspheme the Holy Spirit.

NO! It makes it worse.

Some ghoul torturing children in his basement is an aberration; and we recognize it as such. And, chances are, such a person is psychotic and or demonically possessed. But someone who has gone through the training to become a doctor and knows about the body and ought to have some kind of training in ethics – it’s so much worse for them to mutilate children, because they know better and because we give them a pass because they’re doctors.

Friends, let me say it clearly. Earning a medical degree does not make someone moral or wise or good. There are bad people who are doctors. There are doctors who are fools. There are doctors who are evil.

In the 19th and 20th centuries everyone was afraid of the Mad Scientist who conducted his experiments in basements and castle dungeons—the medical and scientific establishments wouldn’t accept their work. The deranging drive to push the boundaries of the possible, to expand knowledge at any cost, the distracting need to know and to experiment, these things were considered beyond the pale, so the mad scientists of yore had to do their work in secret.

But CS Lewis knew better. He knew that some day a godless bureaucracy would place the mad scientists on the dais at the professional conferences and have them at the podium giving the keynote addresses. What Lewis understood, and makes so clear in That Hideous Strength, is that once academia becomes godless all the disciplines will follow and the mad scientist will become the norm, and the good doctor will become the outlaw.

But again, I want to return to the question of WHY? Why has Matt Walsh – the person publicizing what Vanderbilt is doing the bad guy? Is Vanderbilt not performing these surgeries? Are they not giving puberty blockers to kids? If they weren’t doing these things, then why did they delete their pediatric transgender clinic webpage? If they aren’t doing these things why did they have a pediatric transgender clinic? I mean, if you don’t intend to actually give puberty blockers—which at least in the case of Lupron are just chemical castrators—and if you don’t intend to perform surgeries—or mutilations as I and all non-delusional people call them—then why does such a clinic exist? And if such a clinic exists to offer therapy and no surgery, then the website should exonerate them, right? But it doesn’t because they do. They, along with many hospitals, do, in fact, chemically and then physically castrate and mutilate children.

Now, you might say, well, Luke, this is different than some psycho because they have parental consent…umm, that’s worse! That’s so much worse. We used to call that Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy. If you drop your kids off at the mad scientist’s castle and fill out a consent release form that’s more horrifying than an abduction because the parents are supposed to protect their children from these goblins. Parents are supposed to give their lives to defend their children from falling into the hands of these villains, not ensure the insurance forms are correct!

Now, you might say, well, Luke, you’re using some pretty strong language. Yep. I’ve called the people who castrate and mutilate children: monsters, demons, ghouls, creeps, villains, and Mad Scientists, I’ve compared them to kidnappers and torturers and deceivers. Yep. And if and when the time comes to use more descriptions I will. These people are modern day Mengele’s with the exception that we know that Mengele was evil and we think these people are compassionate.

Except the Nazis convinced themselves they were compassionate too. By killing off the sick, the feeble, the mentally retarded, the deformed, and the Untermenschen, they were relieving them of the burden that was their own lives. They were mercy-exterminating. They were so compassionate, you see.

And if you try hard enough and don’t care about truth, moral logic, coherence, or fundamental decency then you can come up with a rationalization for just about anything.

“But Luke,” you might say, “these kids are suffering from Gender Dysphoria, they need treatment.” Yes. Yes they do. First, many of this current wave of confused children are just sad and lonely kids who want to feel special and important and are trying to get attention. Second, many of them have nightmarish mothers who are grooming their own children into a life of misery. Third, puberty is hard, and when we start telling children that if you feel uncomfortable in your body you belong in another body, at a time when everybody feels uncomfortable in their bodies, you’re likely to convince some of them. Fourth, some children have been abused and as a result of their abuse have become sexually confused. Fifth, some children may have gender dysphoria really and truly and without an obvious cause.

But in NONE of these instances is castration and mutilation the solution. Many kids need to just grow out of it. Literally, according to the most up to date research, 80% of children grow out of gender dysphoria once puberty is over. Which is good news for confused children. It’s terrible news for those who wish to mutilate children for love or money. But even of those children who don’t grow out of it, castration and mutilation is not the solution. MANY children need friends or caring adults in their lives to help them develop their identity apart from attention-grabbing gimmicks. Many children need their parents in prison. Many children need therapy and to go to a bible teaching church.

The solution is NEVER (except in possibly some of the monumentally rare case of intersex people, the term that has replaced, and probably for good reason, hermaphrodites) mutilating their bodies. The mutilation of healthy sex organs or body parts bearing secondary sex characteristics is never the solution.

But maybe you’re thinking, “well, maybe for YOU Luke, but these kids have rights.” Except no. No they don’t. They are minors. You see, in our society, as in all not-insane societies, children are not considered adults. In our society we recognize that children are children. We do this legally. You can’t operate a motor vehicle on the road while under 15 and a half in Ohio. You can’t buy cigarettes or dip until you’re 18—no that was back when I was a kid; now you can’t buy tobacco until you’re 21 in Ohio. You can’t buy alcohol until you’re 21 in Ohio. You can’t legally enter into any kind of contract until you’re 18 in Ohio. You can’t join the military until you’re 18. You can’t vote until you’re 18. You have to go to school until you graduate or emancipate yourself, normally about 17 or 18. You can’t get a credit card until you’re 18. You can’t rent a car until you’re 21 in Ohio. You can’t go to some movies until you’re 17. You can stay on your parents health insurance till you’re 26!

Now, frankly, I disagree with some of these age requirements or at least the contradictory logic behind them. I think minority is minority and majority is majority. But that’s not the point. The point is that we all agree—or we agree enough to still have these laws, that kids can’t be trusted to make certain decisions.

Our laws say you can’t go to the movies if you’re under 17 and watch the Breakfast Club, but you can decide to get your genitals mutilated and be castrated. At Vandy they’re doing these procedures on 14-year-olds—and their logic is that you can’t start these kids early enough on their mutilation schedule because the more these boys and girls become men and women the more likely it is they might just decide not to give the hospitals their big payday—a 12-year-old is much more pliable than an 18-year-old.

Because that’s the dirty secret. If 80% of these kids grow out of it, post-pubescently then you gotta strike when the iron’s hot and mutilate those kids before they change their minds. We’re talking hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars per mutilation. You can’t leave that kinda money on the table!

So again, a 14-year-old can’t do anything without custodial consent. Nothing. BUT, they CAN decide to have themselves mutilated. In what world does that make sense? Because it isn’t any world that exists or could exist. There is no world where a minor with no legal agency can also make the decision to be castrated and mutilated.

And yet, that’s the world we inhabit.

How did it come to this?

Well, there are lots of answers to that question—answers with merit that are certainly PART of the answer. People point to the rise of atomistic individualism where everyone is their own center of truth. People point to the rise of Emotivism, the idea that feelings are the basis of truth. People point to the disintegration of social norms, the disintegration of communal life, the disintegration of the nuclear family, the disintegration of personality.

All of these are real problems. All of these are issues that the Bible deals with and the Church has answers for. All of these, certainly, contribute to the psychosis of our society.

But at root, the answer isn’t all that complicated. It’s what Solzhenitsyn said: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” My heart breaks for kids being swept up in this horrific hysteria. It’s demonic and cruel and ghoulish and ogreish and perverse and corrupt and fiendish and diabolic and vicious and evil. It’s also happening. And if we want to see it stop happening then men need to remember God.

Immoral Immigration

Listen to the radio braodcast here!

So, in case you missed the growing trend, sending “migrants” to Martha’s Vineyard was just the most recent move by Redstate governors to pressure the Biden Administration to do something about the border.

And I must say that there is something inherently rich and hilarious in watching Bluestate governors and Bluecity mayors cry foul about the overwhelming influx of illegal immigrants into their cities and states. They are calling these actions a “stunt”. They are complaining that Governors Abbot and DeSantis haven’t called ahead. They say that it’s cruel, and dehumanizing, that it’s a stunt.

Now, I’m not going to spend the whole episode pointing out the logical incoherencies of the Democrat arguments against this practice. Other people who are committed to politics and not theology have already done so. But I will say that the arguments against Abbot and DeSantis are all either incoherent, idiotic, or bad-faith.

The reality is that there is one person who actually has the power to do something about this now – and that’s President Biden. And there is 1 body who has the power to provide a more permanent solution – that’s congress.

Congress has the power to build a wall, to pass border legislation, to empower Border Patrol. The President has to power to enforce the laws we have on the books. He can halt all entry into the country. He can stop and detain people at the border.

This may be a problem with no complete solution; but it’s not a problem without a satisfactory solution. Immigration stabilized throughout President Trump’s term in office. Border removals were up but interior removals basically disappeared because Bluestate gov’s and mayors refused to help enforce the laws. So-called Sanctuary Cities resisted ICE’s ability to remove illegal immigrants.

But, according to research compiled by Cato, the total number of illegal immigrants residing in the US dropped from about 11.3M to 10.9M from 2016-2020. Granted the total number had been on a decline since 2010, when it was estimated to be 12.5M. And the number stabilized and declined under President Trump’s presidency, despite a booming economy and a refusal to enforce the law in many places in the US interior.

So, again, there will never be a complete solution to ending illegal immigration, but we certainly can significantly reduce it.

And there is a moral and theological case to ending illegal immigration. Despite the caterwauling of congressional professional mourners, these moirologists have actually set themselves up for a fall. By claiming that sending illegal immigrants to very large wealthy cities in the north, they are proving the point – illegal immigration is immoral, exploitative, and intolerable.

Let me pause and prove my point in a way that is, indeed, ironic. And not only is it ironic because the quotation itself says the opposite of the point it’s trying to make, but it’s ironic because it is so often quoted on the internet by people who seemingly have also missed the towering irony of the statement. The quote I’m giving you is the beginning portion of a much longer piece of writing from Anthony Bourdain. And Bourdain has, I admit, a lot of good and worthy and deep insights in this piece. But I think he maybe misses the point on at least on major issue. And it’s a major issue that a lot of people seem to miss the point on…or, more darkly, perhaps Bourdain didn’t miss the point at all and he was pointing out American hypocrisy. I’ll leave you to determine whether Bourdain was oblivious or subversive. But here’s what he said:

“Americans love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas, tamales and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities. We love Mexican beverages, happily knocking back huge amounts of tequila, mezcal, and Mexican beer every year. We love Mexican people — we sure employ a lot of them. Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, and look after our children. As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy — the restaurant business as we know it — in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are “stealing American jobs.” But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position — or even a job as a prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, probably, simply won’t do.”

Now, I’m not going to dispute with him that in many or most major metro areas illegal immigrants or immigrants on visas do in fact do almost all the cooking, cleaning, landscaping, and nannying.

I’m not going to dispute that he’s NEVER had one American kid come in and apply to be a busboy or a dishwasher.

The bigger question is why.

Why have no American kids applied for these jobs where Bourdain has worked? Why do Americans “demand” that Mexicans do this work? Why do Americans refuse to do this work?

Because it doesn’t pay well enough. It’s not a complicated issue. It’s not some insoluable riddle. Does decadence and laziness play a part? Sure! But when I was in High School I got a job as a dishwasher at a local restaurant working for family friends, and I was grateful for the job, and I worked hard. Growing up in the Evergreen school district all of the boys, at least all of them who wanted money and who weren’t farming in the summer, and even some who did, all of us worked construction or worked at restaurants or baled hay or fed hogs. Evergreen kids worked for the road crews, the concrete and roofing companies, the fast food joints, the local businesses and farms.

The work wasn’t beneath us. But in places like Southern California those jobs don’t go to High School kids or people looking for entry level positions in a career – they become terminal positions for illegal immigrants who are paid slave wages. And everyone, or at least everyone with a shred of honesty, admits that places where illegal immigrants are tolerated in the workforce are places where wages in those fields drop.

When Bourdain argues that Americans won’t do those jobs, he’s wrong and right. He’s right that Americans won’t do those jobs FOR THOSE WAGES. But he’s wrong that Americans won’t do those jobs. I’m American. I’ve done those jobs. My wife has nannied for wealthy families; my sister-in-law has nannied for wealthy families, and my wife and her sister are as white as they come; nobody’d mistake them for Mexican.

But this is the point. Illegal immigration is not tolerated because it is a humanitarian moral imperative – the fact that all these Bluestaters are moaning about it proves they don’t actually believe their own rhetoric. Illegal immigration is tolerated because it creates a nearly bottomless pool of slave-wage workers to make sure that our houses, babies, and dishes are all clean. And this, by the way, isn’t new. In the West there were Anti-Chinese Leagues because people said that, the “Chinaman couldn’t outwork the white man, but he could underlive him.” And this is not in any way to diminish the plight of Chinese immigrants to this country; a lot of people suffered very significant trauma and hardship. But the point was that having a huge pool of labor that would work for far less than others was a threat to the wages and standards of living of other workers.

And this has happened all over the world and many times over. There is a constant struggle between wage earners and wage payers and consumers. Wage earners have an incentive to form guilds and unionize to ensure that wages stay high. Wage payers have an incentive to increase the labor pool to create a race to the bottom and to earn more profits. Consumers have an incentive to see prices lowered across the board.

But, for some reason, lots of people in America, lots of people who like to view themselves as compassionate, caring, class-conscious people are either blithely unaware or cynically don’t care, that there are millions of people in this country who are living FAR below where a fair market would place them, because it’s convenient for capitalists and consumers to bring in illegal immigrants and pay them lower wages so that the business owners pocket more money and the consumers save more.

But this is immoral. It’s not only immoral because it’s exploitative towards the illegal immigrants (who, are participating in their own victimization, by the way) but it’s immoral towards actual citizens who want to do those jobs but who also have taxes to pay and who want to earn a decent wage. It’s also immoral because it’s employing people without paying into the social security and Medicare/ Medicaid and Workers Compensation systems. It creates a criminal class of employees who are taking wages, taking jobs, and not paying into the system they exploit.

Now look, if I lived in a desperately poor and crime-ridden place I might be tempted to hop the border illegally, too. But let’s not pretend that what they’re doing is a victimless crime, because it isn’t. It drives down wages, it takes money out of the social safety nets, it leaves broken societies in Mexico and Central America where there are whole communities with no men.

More than that, it undermines the actual value of citizenship. Tolerance of illegal immigration reinforces the ludicrous cosmopolitan notion that we’re all just “citizens of the world” and that citizenship in a nation and state and community don’t matter. But, of course they do. Maybe if every, self-described “citizen of the world” would voluntarily de-register themselves to vote, I might take them a little more seriously. But they don’t so I won’t. The undermining of the value of citizenship is destructive to the body politic and weakens communal ties and the sense of responsibility to a people and a place that God has put upon all people.

But perhaps the worst thing about tolerance of illegal immigration is that it teaches us to look at Mexicans as an underclass. I don’t think people realize this, but when you see illegal immigrants, almost all from Mexico, and they are the only people who are doing what some consider menial tasks, that has a formative power on the brain. We associate a race of people with a kind of work, and if that weren’t bad enough, we associate a race of people with work we deem dirty, and beneath us. Mexicans are not only deemed to be an underclass – albeit subconsciously – but because they lack citizenship and political agency they have no means of raising themselves above their current position. And that sounds an awful lot like slavery.

And perhaps it’s worse, in some ways, because at least with slavery you had to look its ugliness in the face and recognize it for what it was. But with illegal immigration we’re creating a permanent underclass and patting ourselves on the back because of how nice and virtuous we are.

I could say more on this topic; but suffice to say, that theologically, from a Christian perspective, illegal immigration is immoral. And as Christians we should seek to uphold laws, value citizenship and communal duties, protect tradesmen and unskilled workers, and maintain the dignity of all people despite their race, heritage, or place of origin.

Christians have a moral duty to oppose illegal immigration, because illegal immigration is immoral. We need to take that duty seriously.

Lessons From Queen Elizabeth II

Listen to the radio broadcast here!

What stands out to me, and has always stood out to me as being of vital importance when discussing the Queen, is that she viewed her position, and others, generally speaking, viewed her position as one of service. Indeed, in not just the contemporary British monarchy, but in talk about monarchies around the world, and in the past, there was much talk of service – often the word used was “duty”.

There is a sense that there is a tradeoff – yes, when you’re a monarch you get lots of money and nice stuff and you get big houses and people have to kneel and all that jazz – but the tradeoff is that your life is a life of never-ending duty and service. You are choosing to live in a fishbowl, and in times past it was a very carnivorous fishbowl. History and literature have no lack of stories about soon-to-be monarchs who run away.

Now, perhaps that doesn’t quite hit us with our democratic and modernist sensibilities. Why should anyone run away when they have the opportunity to wield authority? Why would people run away from a life of wealth, power, and prestige?

Maybe because it’s not all it’s cracked up to be!

Maybe the tradeoffs that must be made to live a life of monarchical wealth, prestige, and power are more than most can bear.

Now look, I’m not gonna try to convince you that monarchy is all about service, because, frankly, we’re all Americans and we hold a pretty low view of monarchy round these parts. And I’m sure that my even talking about monarchy as service and duty has some of your Uncle-Sam-Senses tingling. Maybe you’re thinking, “well, golly, Luke, all this pro monarchy talk makes me wonder if you’re a secret monarchist!” And so, I understand that some of you are thinking that MAYBE, just MAYYYBBBBBE I’m a crypto-Imperialist who wants to overthrow the government and reassert King Charles III as our rightful and lawful sovereign. Maybe all this radio preaching has just been one long ruse, so that someday, eventually, upon the death of the Queen, I could rally my half dozen listeners, and we could begin a movement to revoke the constitution and have the people of this colony sing God save the King from sea to shining sea!

Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe that’s what I’m doing. It’s not. But I guess you’ll never know! Or conversely, you can know and that’s not at all what I’m doing.

What I will say is that I do, in fact, believe that monarchs, at their best, are servants to their people. Monarchs, at their best represent stability, the honor of traditions and norms, they are a voice for the past that can guide the future. At their best, monarchs can guide a people, a nation, an empire, an they can guide them into greater prosperity, greater morality, greater unity. A monarch can unite a people by reminding them that there is something that binds them that goes beyond ideology, or even blood and soil – devotion to a monarch is able to unite people of broad differences, ideological, religious, racial, economic, and so on.

And this is both good and bad. It’s good when it allows modern Britons, some Anglo, some Scottish, some Welsh, some Irish, some Jewish, some Indian, some Pakistani, some African, some Arab, some Caribbean, and even some French, to all unite around a person whom they call a sovereign.

Now, right now you’re thinking, “there he goes with that pro-monarchy crap again! Luke, don’t you know that what you’re saying is heretical – it’s idolatry?!”

No. It isn’t idolatry. It’s close to it, sure. Respecting a sovereign king or queen is always going to be in danger of becoming idolatrous. But don’t let’s pretend that there isn’t an equal and opposite error. Treating royals as though they were nobodies because you don’t want to be an idolator is crass and rude and violates Romans 13 and is in danger of becoming blasphemous.

Idolatry and Blasphemy are two sides of the same coin – which is the corruption of the image of God. When we mistake the glory inherent as man as a glory to replace God’s it is idolatry. When we denigrate the glory inherent as not glory worth glorying in we blaspheme the image.

That’s why, despite how many, MANY problems I have with the Roman Catholic church, I have never bashed them for their ornate vestments and clerical garb. I have never had a problem with priests wearing special clothes that separate them from other people and give them special honor and dignity. And it isn’t just Catholics who have clerical vestments, by the way.

And the reason that I, as an Ex-Catholic Mennonite have no problem with, and even encourage clerical vestments is NOT because I think priests and pastors are just better and holier than lay Christians. I mean sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t.

But that’s not what it’s all about. Vestments are about dignity and honor to the office, and the hope is that the man in the garb will strive to live up to the honor imbued into his collar, or robe, or stole, or miter. The point is not that you look at a guy in long robes with a funny hat and say, “wow, he must be very pious!” The point is that you look at him and say, wow, he stands in an office that is honorable and he is the personal embodiment of an ideology that honors God and His servants.

Now, you might think that I’m cutting that hair into some pretty fine splits. OK. Maybe. And maybe I’m just a died-in-the-wool conservative. But I think that there is NOTHING inherently idolatrous about looking to the Queen and pledging loyalty to her – or King Charles. Can it be idolatrous? Of course! Is it by necessity? Of course not! And can it lead us to a deeper anthropological truth? Most definitely!

God has made us to want to seek to elevate someone or something. We are made to worship. We have an innate and unshakable impulse to look to someone and pledge loyalty and fealty to them.

We are, if you’ll forgive the neologism, we are “obligate worshipers”. We die if we don’t worship and so we find things to worship. And part of being obligate worshipers is that we want to elevate those we worship to kingship and queenship and lordship. We want those whom we worship to lead us and command us. There is something inherently submissive in humanity. Part of our inherent need to worship is a need to serve, to dedicate our lives to not merely a cause, but a person. Now, when that Person is God, the worship and service are glorious and redound to our own personal flourishing. When we direct worship, not merely loyalty, but worship, towards someone who isn’t God, that worship becomes idolatry and the service becomes servile. There is a distinction with a difference between being a servant and being servile! Just as there is a difference between being loyal to your queen and dedicating your life in service to her as a way of serving God…there’s a difference between THAT and worshipping the queen a licking her boots.

And, let me go farther, there is even a sense in which we should “worship” people who aren’t God. The old English word “worship” merely means “to pay honor to worth” – it was worth-ship. So, when you see something worthy, you give it its due. If a man was worthy of praise, you praised him; if a woman was worthy of honor, you honored her – you gave worth-ship. I know that’s not how we use the word in contemporary theology, today. But what I’m suggesting is not that words change, but that perhaps we’ve lost a concept. Perhaps in our move to modernity and postmodernity we’ve lost this nuanced middle-ground of paying honor to worth in a way that is worship, but not idolatry.

Because in the end, we are, all of us, bearers of the image of God. And if God is glorious and worthy of worship then aren’t those who bear His image also glorious and worthy of worship? Yes, God deserves greater honor and our first loyalty – He deserves our best love; but does that mean that others are entitled to NO honor and NO loyalty and NO love? Just because God is entitled to our highest and first worship does that mean that no one else is entitled to any?

And let me go yet further, and I’m sure I’ve made many of you doubt my orthodoxy at this point, but, hey, in for a penny, in for a pound! Let me go yet further and say that the worship that a husband pays a wife, the worship that a daughter pays her father, the worship a knight pays to his queen, the worship that a queen pays to the nation. Perhaps these things are not idolatries, but rather, are inklings, just little hints, just appetizers that train our emotions, our intellects, our hearts and our heads, to worship Christ as greatest and most glorious.

Perhaps, if we wander about in the old attic of truth, rummaging through the lost and past ideologies and theologies of human history, maybe as we wonder through these Mathom-houses we would discover that the love and honor and devotion we pay one another are not the fusty, tattered cobwebs of a dead and dying paganism that get in our eyes and stick to us, leaving us feeling like we need a bath; perhaps they are the old tin soldiers, imitations, and sometimes bad imitations of really truly courageous men from a bygone time – imitations, yes, but imitations that point to a greater reality. And like the tin soldiers, they once filled us with happiness and imagination and gave us grand notions of duty, honor, sacrifice, loyalty, bravery, brotherhood, and more. Now that we’re older and wiser we know that they’re imitations, just a game. And yet a part of us knows that they were real and that they served a purpose.

Some day all the vestments and royalties and honors will be swept away and a new economy of honor will be established, and we’ll see, once and for all, what all kings and kingdoms pointed to! We’ll see what all the funny hats and strange uniforms were all about. We’ll see Christ. And when we see Christ it will all make sense – even what was wrong will make sense now that we know the right.

The King is coming and some day we will see him, and everything will make sense.

A Kinder, Gentler, Machine Gun Hand

Introduction

Recently, talking to myself in the car – which I do often – I asked myself a question. I asked, “soul, you have so many things to say and so little time to say it; instead of writing one or two essays a week, maybe fewer, why not just record yourself talking about the ideas you have, and at least then you’ll have an outlet.”

And that question bugged me. It bugged me because it brought up and interesting and powerful point…one I’ve thought on often. It’s best expressed in a little Latin aphorism: ars longa; vita brevis. Art is long; life is short. The point of this curious piece of Roman wisdom is that to be truly good at something is going to take a long time; to be great at something is the work of a lifetime. Moreover, it points out the simple truth that is so difficult for so many to accept which is that, “you can’t be an expert in everything.” As writers have oftentimes retorted to critics (many times in exasperation): you can’t write a book about everything. All history is selective history; all writing is selective writing.

I know it’s hard to believe in the podcast era, but truly good and meaningful thinking takes time. It takes time not only to think through issues, but to even be aware of them. It takes vast amounts of time if you want to say something intelligently and to then critically assess your own arguments so that you don’t sound like a fool.

Again, in the podcast era, in the time of hot-takes, it’s easy for us to forget that real thinking, real scholarship, to do well researched, well thought-out speaking and writing takes vast amounts of time. Granted, some people are content-machines. But people who are content-machines tend to be very widely read, are enormously intelligent, and have a gift for gab. Writing isn’t easy, but for some people it is natural, and for a very few people they have the natural talent and they’ve invested the work and dedication required to write well. They publish. They publish often. They seek-out and carefully consider criticism. They seek to improve.

But again, all this takes time, and the older I get the more I realize that time is the most valuable thing I have.

So I return to my question, since writing takes time, since I have so many ideas, so many concepts I want to explore and share and publish and get into conversation on, why bother writing? Why not just record podcasts or audioblogs?

The answer is simple. The answer is that writing, at least in our culture, is still the most precise and careful monologuing medium we have for sharing ideas. Podcasts and audioblogs and radio are excellent. But they tend to be disposable. They tend to lack precision. They tend to be live. And a live monologue can never be as well researched, as carefully prepared, and powerful as writing. Writing has the advantage of time. I can have an idea and spend years thinking through it, having conversations with friends and colleagues, researching, pondering, wondering, critiquing. I can start a writing project and not return to it for months, or even years.

Now, I’ll grant, that people who write like I do tend to be very time-bound. Essayists tend to be forgotten and a bit disposable. But essayists and their essays tend to survive and be relevant far longer than live monologuing. To this day, we still talk about and read Lord Acton. In fact, if you just do an internet search for famous essayists you’ll find a Who’s Who list of great writers and thinkers!

And the great thing about essays is that they can be a way for writers to experiment and explore ideas that are too novel or too radical to put into book form, but which would pass out of existence if they weren’t written. Tolkien and Tolstoy wrote wonderful essays on writing and theory. Samuel Johnson and Ben Franklin held the world in their hands with their experiments in writing. Essays, while less durable than magnum opus books can and do survive the test of time, because essays rarely attempt to provide the definitive answer on any topic – they’re invitations, they’re the appetizers to the intellectual and spiritual Babette’s Feast that we’re all invited to.

But that’s not the only reason why I write.

I write because well researched prose is not only the most powerful, durable, and experimental form of communication; but it also puts constraints on the author – namely me.

And all of us are aware of this. We tend, at least those of us with any impulse control, tend to communicate more carefully if the medium is long-form prose than if we’re spitting hot-takes or vomiting verbiage on the twitterbox. We tend to think more carefully not only about WHAT we say, but HOW we say it.

And I, for one, need the controls placed upon me. I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to let my mouth run away with me. I have a tendency to speak a bit too quickly. Maybe you’re better than me about that – indeed, I hope you are! But I need controls placed upon how I communicate.

Writing has the morbid power of reminding me of my own limitations and mortality. If I write I am prevented from talking about everything I want to talk about. I simply can’t say everything I want to say, if I have to type it out. And this almost certainly keeps me from saying some things that might be very interesting. It also keeps me from becoming a dilettante – the scourge of the intellectual world, and a species that has been blessed with the blessings of the breast and womb, because they are legion!

We have according to a quick Google search about 2.4 million podcasts out there, with 66 million podcasts available. Of those 2.4 million, how many of them are well-researched; which is a different question than how many need to exist? How many of them are the thoughts and ideas of someone who has something well-thought-out and meaningful to say? I am hesitant to hazard a guess, but I would, if forced, say fewer than half.

Social media have made all of us journalists – and the “like” and “share” buttons have made all of us overnight experts in any issue that tickles our fancy. Now, if you’re like me and you’re always right, this seems like a terrific boon! Because I have so many right things to say. The world is my oyster, as the kids say, all I have to do is to let my brilliance shine forth.

Except not really. I have a lot of dumb ideas. I have a lot of ideas that aren’t fit for print. I have some real stinkers. I sometimes answer in haste – to my shame. And yet it seems that the podcast has come and has replaced the blog or the essay and long-form journalism. And while there are some great podcasts out there, I don’t think this is a good thing. And I don’t think that this is something that’s good for our society – not because podcasts are bad, but because transitioning from an article-reading society to a podcast-listening society is not a transition without costs. Surrendering the written word for the spoken comes with a price. And that price is high.

Now, I’m all for orality! I think the spoken word is powerful and has benefits the written word hasn’t – I mean, I’m a preacher, for crying out loud! Obviously I believe in the spoken word. But we simply don’t perceive, receive, or integrate what we hear with the same level of criticism and care as we do the written. And moreover, because podcasts are so disposable, they are produced to so be. Which means they lack the precision and care that the essay has.

If I were told I needed to speak for three hours on a topic I know well, I would do very little preparation. If I were told to write a 500-word essay I would pore over every word! When you have all the time in the world you simply aren’t as careful. And it’s almost impossible, ask anyone who speaks for a living, to speak for 3 hours and not make a mistake. It’s almost impossible to speak for 3 hours and not say something you’re embarrassed about or regret or look back on later and realize that it was hasty, or ungenerous, or open to criticism because it was poorly defended, or poorly framed.

I have to write because writing provides guardrails that prevent me from giving in to the worse angels of my nature. I need to write because I need the discipline. I need to write because it keeps me honest.

Hot-takes

One of the worst parts of living in a culture of instant gratification and instantaneous communication is that it rarely excites the calmer, more well-reasoned, carefuller side of our cognition. Instantaneity is impulsive and impulsivity (while not necessarily bad) is always unplanned, and in the undisciplined, or even the disciplined who have a lapse in character, it reveals the worst parts of our nature. Impulse can also reveal the best parts of our nature. But most of us don’t have a whole lot of best to offer. Most of us haven’t cultivated the character to always act impulsively and morally reliably simultaneously.

And hot-takes feel good. Just responding impulsively rewards our dopaminergic system and gives us those sweet, sweet brain-juices. But, like many impulsive things that get involuntary juices flowing, it also leaves us cold and shamed, lying naked on the floor (metaphorically speaking…and literally).

And that’s my fear, or at least one of them, and perhaps the primary one, is that hot-takes and impulsive responses to “thing-that-happened” is leading us down the primrose path to functional idiocy. It’s not simply that it’s making us ruder and less tolerant. That’s bad enough. But the bigger, more long-lasting problem is that it’s training us to no longer even be capable of long, careful considered thought on any subject.

We lack the intellectual discipline to read something that’s well prepared. The existence of the expression TL;DR is itself a commentary on our culture. We want everything in soundbites. We want everything summarized. We want to just know the main-idea and the broadstrokes. We’re oh, so smart, and we’re so wise that we don’t need to actually consider an entire argument.

Worse than that, this is our pedagogical model, on top of everything else. We live in the internet age and so there has been a move away from learning facts. We despise the classics because we can summarize them. We don’t need to read Shakespeare because we know the narrative tropes. We don’t need to read Augustine, because we have our theology sorted. We think – if you can call it thinking, and if it ever rises to the level of actual cognition! – that we are so wise that we don’t need to actually read anything, but that we can simply hear a someone else’s version of the main idea and that’s enough to pass judgment.

And it simply isn’t. It isn’t for many reasons. One of the most important reasons being that even if we disagree, and even if we’re right to disagree with someone’s conclusions, they may give us insight into new ideas worthy of exploration; they may show us a new, and better method; they may help us discover ourselves – sometimes they simply are able to put in words something that we’ve only grasped at weakly and had premonitions and intuitions towards. And being able to put a word to an idea is the critical stage in having mastery over an idea and making it ours – of integrating something into our selves.

We need to read.

Also, there’s the added benefit that sometimes our minds will be changed for the better!

But if we only have arguments distilled and summarized into formats we’re familiar with, we can discard anything that challenges our preconceived notions because they aren’t really a challenge – they’re straw-men. Granted, strawmen make the best effigies, but that’s only a benefit if you’re an incindiarist. Alien (to use the technical term) modes of thought allow us, in some ways, to become someone else. That’s a very dangerous thing. But nothing good is risk free. Christianity, the gamble I’ve staked my entire life and eternity on, is fundamentally and irreducibly built on becoming someone else and allowing Someone Else to live in me and to live in Him.

As Christians, we should be on the forefront of careful reading. We should respect the notion of needing to become the other to truly understand the other. And yet Christians, and I’m including…nay, I’m confessing, that I fail to do that.

And when we allow the alien to remain alien we tend to be cruel.

You’ve forgiven a lot of self-indulgent autobiography if you’ve gotten thus far, so indulge me a little further. Believe it or not, I am a pretty compassionate person (at least for a man!) I truly do care about people. But I’m also the kind of person who believes that when something threatens the people I love it is my responsibility to kill it, to suffocate it, to strangle and throttle it and to post its head on a pike to warn off any other threats. And that’s not always a combination of personality traits that come off as winsome and caring.

I know myself well enough, and I’ve witnessed others enough to know that I and they – the word I’m looking for is “we” – often present our worst selves when we reply in haste. We manifest our most ignorant selves when we refuse to consider and simply dismiss.

Critical and Considered

What I’m not suggesting is that we put our guard down. We need to be sober and vigilant.

FAR too much that comes from the cool-kid pastors is just bad shepherding masquerading as being culturally sensitive and compassionate. We have the Word of God. We have the faith, once for all delivered to the saints. We have truth. And that means that we can and should read with a critical eye. We should be sober and vigilant…because lions, you see.

But sobriety and wakeful, watchfulness do not preclude reading. They preclude being a chump. They don’t prevent us from reading and writing with thoughtfulness and care.

Neil Young, a man I’ve never complimented before, has a brilliant line. He, mocking the Reagan era and what he perceived as greedy, militaristic, religious-right, moral majoritarianism said this:

We got a thousand points of light

For the homeless man

We got a kinder, gentler,

Machine gun hand

And that’s pretty clever. That line, a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand has always stuck with me. And I’m afraid that that’s all hot-take Christianity is. We have an army of soldiers waving weapons and protesting their good intentions. We’re all out there using our verbal vorpal-blades, hoping to dispose of our adversaries snicker snack, while we simultaneously rush to the moral high ground.

Now, I will say that there is, indeed a moral high ground in this culture and traditional Christianity is firmly footed on that plateau. And while there is no lack of problems in our culture I wonder if we’re struggling because, in some sense, we’re losing the messaging and marketing in the moralizing.

Don’t mistake me. I’m not saying abandon the moral high ground. I’m not saying we should back down one inch from Biblical truth. I’m simply saying that we can’t JUST be against things. Yes, be against things. We need to oppose baby-murder and genital mutilation and all the other ghoulish horrors going on. But we need to not only present the don’ts but the dos. We need to demonstrate that God’s way is the best way.

We need to show how there is flourishing and peace and prosperity in the way we wish people to go.

So, in light of these observations, let me propose a few proposals.

First, let’s have actual face-to-face conversations as often as possible.

Second, let’s seek to spend more time reading than viewing or listening.

Third, let’s support Christians who are taking the time to write careful, thoughtful, long-form essays.

Fourth, let us seek to simultaneously be inflexible on truth and compassionate to those who err.

Fifth, let us never give a moral don’t without explaining the blessings of obedience.

In closing, let’s consider the words of Jude:

But you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.

Be merciful to those who doubt; save others by snatching them from the fire; to others show mercy, mixed with fear—hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh.

To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy— to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.

Trends and Ends Part III

Listen to the third installment of this radio series here!

Science and Scientism

What does it look like to watch a theory in crisis? Well, we’re lucky enough to be living through just such an event. Right now, many are beginning to openly question the Big Bang Theory (BBT). Perhaps you’ve heard the news that new images from the James Webb Space Telescope are putting serious strain on the BBT. Some like Eric Lerner are saying the Big Bang is busted. Others, however, are not only not willing to abandon the theory that has been central to scientific thinking for so very long.

I’m not a scientist. And I won’t pretend to parse the arguments and try to give you a scientific case on whether these images do or do not undermine or explode the BBT. But what I would like to do is draw your attention to some of the defenses made by science writers. You can read Lerner and his arguments against the Big Bang, but I think it’s just as instructive to read the criticism of his criticism.

Some serious scientists are saying, “sure, BBT has problems, but we don’t have enough evidence to disprove it, yet.” And most people would admit that that’s a perfectly reasonable thing for a very smart person to say. But then there are others. These aren’t scientists, as much as they are Scientismists. The are acolytes and clerics in the religion of Science. They promote Scientism, which is dogmatic religious fundamentalism, but from an atheistic, (usually) Darwinistic, perspective. Scientism and Science are related only in that they have confidence in empiricism and observation. They differ in that Science knows where its limitations are: it doesn’t make moral claims; it doesn’t make theological claims; it knows that it can never say anything “for sure”. Scientism does the opposite. It takes real science, and a good bit of fake science, and spins a narrative around it to create a religious worldview, with a clergy, liturgy, and creeds.

In one of the weakest arguments, one science writer said that, “The Big Bang theory is currently the best model we have for the birth of our universe.” First, a bad theory, even if it’s the best available, can still be criticized and even overthrown! Second, the writer concludes with this gem: “Scientific theories can -- and should -- be challenged by well-reasoned scientists presenting highly detailed and thoughtful arguments. This is not one of those times. And that means, despite the headlines, the Big Bang did happen.”

How did he make the epistemic leap from, “it’s the best available theory” to “it happened”? That’s an AWFULLY big leap. One might even call it a “leap of faith”!

And that’s what it was. Are there serious scientists who are not convinced that the Big Bang’s been busted? Sure. Are there a lot of charlatans and pseudo-scientists – Scientismists – who are whistling past the graveyard and telling us all to “move along, folks”? Sure.

Christians need to recognize that “Science” is always in flux. It’s always changing. Just because we no longer think it’s “turtles all the way down” doesn’t mean that our current “science” won’t be considered just as quaint and ludicrous in the future.

It’s crucial the Christians rest our faith in the Word of God. It’s crucial that we not build our lives on the sinking sand of science – or worse, Scientism! – but rather build our lives on Christ. All who put their hope in Science will be disappointed; those who put it in the Son, never will.

Trends and Ends Part II

Listen to it here!

Now last week, in lieu of a single selected news article about current events, instead I brought to your attention some trends. And these trends focused around the US, EU, China, and Russia – primarily. And I was working mostly off of the work of Dr. Michael Burry, a medical doctor turned investment manager, who predicted the housing market crash and Peter Zeihan, a geopolitical strategist who predicted the Ukraine invasion. Last week I summarized for you the things they are looking at, and of course, I mixed in the observations and statistics of other sources, it wasn’t limited to those two, but the point is that these guys, guys who have shown themselves to be not too shabby at predicting bad things are saying that there are some very bad things ahead.

So we looked at some trends. And the trends pointed to something that many people are either unaware of, or underestimate – and that is that Russia and China having a ticking-clock for their geopolitical aims. Both the populations of the Great Russians and Han Chinese are due to implode, if not collapse by the year 2100. Now, I know that Americans don’t think 80 years into the future – the Russians and Chinese do. And this population collapse means that, barring some unforeseen future game-changer, Russia and China, if they want to expand, are going to have to do it within a short period of time.

But not only do they have a demographic countdown to defeat, but they have political and economic countdowns. Russia, post-Putin and after the cadre of Soviet era political leadership die off, are going to be in a leadership crisis.

China might be facing a more immediate threat, and that is that they are on the brink of an economic collapse that could take a lot of countries down with them. They are big and strong and they love to rattle the sabre – but internally, they are coming apart at the seams, and President Xi is living in his own deluded world of self-isolation. Because, you see, the problem with autocratic leaders who shoot the messenger, is that eventually you run out of messengers, and then you’re playing politics in the dark, and that is a dangerous game.

We also noted how because of this ticking-clock, the West has a high incentive to just play the waiting game. The US, and Anglophone Alliance, the EU, NATO, the Quad, all these anti-Sino-Russian alliances, are poised to just wait out China and Russia, and allow their own corruption to rot them from the inside-out.

But the West is not looking so lusty and lithe, either. As the West continues on its post-Christian adventures, societies are fracturing. The US and western Europe are facing waves of immigration that are disrupting their social fabrics. Collapsing birthrates and a general failure to thrive are causing western Europe to grow weaker and less stable, with long-term economic stagnation and negative societal change predicted for the forseeable future – however, this could change rapidly if nationalists in France and Germany can shore up their growing popularity and go the way of Hungary and Poland.

And the US – well, you guys hear me talk about the US all the time: we’re not in a population collapse yet, but as the Boomers age out of the workforce and begin to put their assets to work in real estate, experts are predicting that Millennials who aren’t yet homeowners and Gen-Zers are going to be unable to purchase homes and will be stuck as a renter-class, squandering their wealth, and unable to actually build the kind of economic security needed for a strong middle class. This is to say nothing of the social upheaval and government mismanagement. When Americans are actively talking about the possibility of a civil war, then you know things are not going swimmingly.

Given all these trends, I have a thesis: the world is approaching complete economic disaster and a third world war.

That’s what I think is likely. Is this a prophecy? No. Do I have any special insight? No. Do I have access to secrets? No. Anyone with a public library has the same access to information that I have. Do I say that there is certainly going to be an economic collapse and a third world war? No. But I believe we are approaching those things. And I think that they are very likely to happen. And I think that economic collapse is more likely than WWIII in the short-term.

Again, I am not a prophet nor a prophet’s son; I’m just telling you where I see the trends going.

Now, that’s what we did last week – we got a crash course in the trends in world events. But this week we’re going to consider, how Christians should respond. How should we live? What should we do?

Now, I want to be clear; I’m not a prophet. I’m not a prophet’s son. I’m not a financial advisor. I’m suggesting that there are things Christians can and SHOULD do to protect themselves against economic disaster and rampant inflation.

Now, before we get to the basic steps that I think all Christians should take, let’s stop and ask an important theological question: should Christians focus on world events and spend their time prepping for disasters, or is that too worldly a pursuit? Does preparing for hard times and possibly disastrous times evidence a lack of faith? Does it show that our love is for this world and the things of this world?

Well, there are many who will tell you that such is the case. And I will say, that it is certainly possible that Christians can be so focused on preparing for the worst that they fail to keep their trust in Christ and they become hoarders and miserly. Both of those tendencies are sinful and, indeed idolatrous. Lack of faith in God to protect and deliver His saints according to His will and relying on our own wisdom and skill alone, is idolatry, as it worships the self. Hoarding is greed, and greed is explicitly called idolatry.

And Dr. David Jeremiah writes very brilliantly on this topic. In an undated online article he encourages Christians, saying this: “It’s good to be prepared, and we should take every sensible precaution in these evil days. But our true deliverance is in the King of kings and Lord of lords. God is in control, and nothing will happen without His permission.”

And Dr. Jeremiah I think hits the nail on the head. Can preparing for hard times, even disastrous times be sinful? Of course it can. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t wise to do it wisely! Just because something CAN be sinful doesn’t mean that it inherently IS sinful. Seeking wealth isn’t bad – being greedy and avaricious and miserly and covetous is. Seeking a houseful of kids and grandkids isn’t bad – idolizing blood-relations is. Wanting a group of intimate friends isn’t bad – relying on the approval of friends over the approval of God IS. These three things I just listed, wealth, children, intimate friendships – these three things are positive goods, that the Bible tells us are gifts from God that we should seek. But gifts from God can be turned to evil and sinful purposes.

The same is of course true for preparing for hard times. Because here’s the reality. Unless you live literally hand to mouth on the streets, naked, you are, to some degree a prepper. If you do anything whatsoever to protect yourself against future hardship, you too are preparing and are therefore a “prepper”…not to be confused with a “preppy” but that’s a rabbit trail we shall not go down…yet.

Everyone is a prepper because everyone except for the poorest of the poor who live in abject and utter poverty, everyone stores up and everyone prepares and stockpiles against future want and lack, and just the vicissitudes of life! Being a “prepper” is not a black or white, yes or no thing. We all are preppers, it’s just a question of degree. It’s a spectrum.

And the Bible literally tells us to do this. The Bible commands us to go to the ant and learn from him. Ants work in the summer to prepare for the winter. Jesus says to work in the day, for night is coming when no man can work…now I know that’s about something else, but the point remains the same. The wisdom the bible offers is essentially this: make hay when the sun shines. Or if you’re one of those bad Christians who watched Game of Thrones, the Bible warns us that “Winter is coming”. When you have the opportunity to gain wealth and to store up goods against future want, you should.

Can this become destructive and idolatrous and cause us to live in fear instead of faith? Of course. And of course, as none of us know the future, there is the danger of looking foolish if the disaster never comes. But most people aren’t all that worried about looking foolish.

So, with all my caveats and disclaimers out of the way, how would I advise Christians?

I would advise Christians to do 3 main things on a preparedness side:

1)     Reduce dependency on the US dollar. The US dollar is facing major inflationary pressure. The government thinks it can print its way out of inflation. Think about it this way. If you have $100 today, and inflation on necessary goods like food and housing inflates at a rate of 7% per year for the next ten years, in 2032, your $100 will only have the purchasing power of about $55. Maybe that number is high – maybe there will be cycles of inflation, as there were in the late 60s through 1980. No one knows the future, but anyone knows that when you print money while there is a shortage of goods that prices are going to go up. Diversify your assets with devices that can hedge against inflation. Talk to a trusted financial advisor. But don’t leave the majority of your savings just in a lump sum of US dollars in the bank. Also, have some cash on hand, hidden safely away, as the chances of bank runs in the future might be relatively high.

2)     Seek to become as food independent as is practically possible. Stop mowing so much yard and put in a big garden. Plant fruit trees. Raise chickens, pigs, and cows. Can your produce. Buy bulk meat and have a generator ready. Have a few months’ worth of dried-goods and shelf-stable foods stockpiled. Have emergency water. Have a woodpile or some other way to heat your home in case of disruptions in gas or propane supplies, or just to reduce the cost of heating. Train yourself to live with less. Use less air conditioning to save money in the summer, and turn the heat down in the winter. Go hunting and fishing. Learn to butcher meat.

3)     Develop networks of family, friends, and neighbors who can support and help eachother. Don’t try to do everything on your own. Form co-ops for gardening. Form pig clubs, or cow clubs. Expect things to get expensive and hard. Find people who will help you and whom you can help.

And now I want to give some advice on the being a Christian side. Let’s say you do the things I suggest here. You diversify your assets and aren’t tied entirely to an unstable dollar. You put in a garden and some apple trees. You have chickens and you buy a half-hog and you’ve got some rice and beans stored up. Great. Let’s say you go hog wild and you go all the way and you make your home into a modern day Noah’s ark. Cool.

What are you going to do to love your neighbors? What are you going to do to love your brothers and sisters in Christ? Are you going to invite the impoverished into your home? Are you going to share your hard-earned bread? Are you going to lay your silver and bitcoin at the apostles’ feet? Are you going to clothe the naked and invite the cold into your home in the bleak midwinter?

Or will you hoard your wealth and your precious toilet paper and watch while the world burns? And again, I could be entirely wrong. Maybe the world won’t burn. Maybe President Biden and the Congress and all the economic elite really do have it all under control and we will return to our regularly scheduled financial prosperity any moment now. Maybe. I pray that we will. I don’t want to live through hard times! I’m lazy and a coward. I like nice things. I just think that things are unlikely to get significantly better before they get significantly worse. So what will you do, Christian?

Are you going to share and share alike?

And most of all, we have to think of the one thing that people often ignore in this conversation. And that’s missions and missionaries.

If the world really does go to pot and economies crumble and starvation and war terrorize the globe, then what about missionaries? If things become truly hard and truly awful, sending missionaries might become eminently more dangerous and wildly more expensive. Will missions still be a value and a priority if it costs us significantly more? Will we actually give when it hurts?

Americans are pretty generous. But there are good reasons to believe that the majority of American generosity is generosity out of our wealth and not generosity out of our poverty. Poverty generosity is the test of how much we value something. And, truth be told, missions work, especially overseas missions, provides no short-term, real world benefit to the giver. Do missions do long term good that redound to practical benefits? Of course?! Christianizing a country should make it more prosperous and more humane and a better neighbor and trade and safety should increase in the world.

But that’s 100 to 500 year thinking. In the here and now, ministry, all ministry, really, is, from a business perspective, a huge waste of money. From a hard-nosed, penny-pinching perspective, when we look at missions not in the afterglow, but in the cold light of morning, they are money-pits.

Missions are not places to store treasures on earth but means whereby we store up treasures in heaven. But if hard times produce hard men, and hard women, too, then will these hard men and women, who are experiencing hard times want their money in the here and now or in the hereafter?

Hard times produce hard people. And there’s something to be said about hard people. But hard people aren’t always kind people. And hard people aren’t always good people. There’s nothing wrong with being tough and self-reliant. There is something wrong with being cold-hearted and self-centered.

In closing, I’d like to quote a very insightful theologian friend of mine, Rebekkah Scott. Talking about Christians and prepping she said this, “"Resist myopia," is what I usually come back to. Think of others when the world goes to heck. And in the meantime, before things get bad, one has to leave room in the management of their resources to live by faith. Go ahead and prep. Fine. But give to missions, too. Buy dinner for your friends. Do profligate things for others, and every once in awhile for yourself. Don't sink every last cent you have into the preps.”

I think she gives some pretty good advice and advice we would all do well to heed. And so, we spent last week talking about trends, and today we spoke about how we should respond. Next week we’re going to talk about where this all MIGHT be headed. Next week we’ll talk about Ends.

Trends and Ends Part I

Listen to it here!

If you’re someone who follows the news, then you’re probably aware that the past couple months have been pretty eventful. Here are just a few highlights. The Ukraine Invasion by Russia; the US entering recession; the Biden Administration trying to get the definition of “recession” changed; news that millions of doses of the Covid vaccine were tainted; news that the FDA knew that the company producing tainted vaccines was a major risk; Elon Musk trying to buy twitter and twitter getting mad and then Elon Must trying to not buy twitter and twitter getting mad; Speaker Pelosi refusing to seat republican congressmen on the January 6 committee; The January 6 Investigation Extravaganza!!!; the overturning of Roe v Wade; the attempted assassination of Supreme Court justices; the fact that China might face economic collapse at any moment; Michael Burry, one of the guys who predicted the Housing Market Crash, shorting US Treasury Bonds and the market and looking to get out of US Dollars; Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan and the Chinese getting mad, because they wanted their Army and Navy to visit Taiwan first; Ghislaine Maxwell being convicted – ironically without her turning State’s evidence on who the rich and powerful pedophiles are; and of course Mar-a-Lago being raided by the FBI over some documents that the National Archives may or may not have.

There has been a lot to talk about, some of it good, most of it bad, and a bit of it disturbing, if not outright frightening. We’re in a state of upheaval and we’ve been in a state of upheaval for quite some time. And, frankly, I don’t think things are going to get better any time soon. Unfortunately, if you’re a one of those people who like peace and prosperity, neither of them look particularly promising in the near future. In fact, many of the public intellectuals who predicted events correctly, people like Dr. Berry or Peter Zeihan, they are predicting things are going to get bad – as in historically bad…as in mass starvation bad.

People are actively predicting the likelihood of World War III. And there are reasons why they are predicting WWIII; and there are things happening right now that Christians should know about. Christians should have a broad understanding of world events. Not because we’re all experts at geopolitics. Not because we’re movers and shakers and can change the outcome of major historical movements. The overwhelming majority of us aren’t. But it is wise to have some idea of what is likely to happen in the near to mid-range future so that we can attempt to prepare.

And more than that, there are major eschatological implications to what is going on right now. Because I have a very basic thesis, stemming from a fairly basic reading of world events and trends. Here’s my basic thesis: the world is approaching complete economic disaster and a third world war.

Now, let me clarify. I’m not a prophet, nor a prophet’s son. God is not telling me this. I have no special insight into anything. But what I have is the ability to read the news and to listen to very intelligent people and to attempt to see where everything is leading. Because, unlike men like Zeihan and Burry, I believe that History is moving towards a definite end. Zeihan is nearly a geographical determinist and Burry is an investment genius. They look at trends – not ends. As a Christian Pastor Theologian, I’m much more concerned with ends than trends. I know what the END is; the trends come and go. Jesus told us that there will be wars and rumors of wars. These are trends. But the END comes after the abomination of desolation stands in the Holy Place.

So, for a Christian, serious about eschatology and world events, there is really only one question that matters: what has to happen historically, for there to be an abomination of desolation standing in the Holy Place?

And the simple answer is: first there has to be a Holy Place. And there isn’t a Holy Place now. So, before the End can come there has to be a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. So the question becomes, what kinds of trends have to happen to make a Temple in Jerusalem possible?

And that’s the $64,000 dollar question of Dispensationalism. Remember, for the Christian there are two kinds of historical phenomena that concern us: trends and ends. Trends are Wars and Rumors of Wars, they are kingdoms rising and falling, depressions and recessions, change, change, and ever more change, the nations foaming and frothing and roiling like the sea. Those are trends – and we live within historical trends, so it’s wise to know how to live and move and have our being in them. We ought to seek to be wise and understand the times.

But there are also ends; in other words, what is the world coming to? Well it’s coming to the Ends – the Kingdom of the World will become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ and in the End the righteous will go to their end, the New Jerusalem, and the wicked will go to their end, the Lake of Fire.

So, here’s what I’m proposing. Over this and the next two episodes, I would like to do three things. First, I want to explain what the current trends are. Second, I want to explain how I believe we should live in the current trends. Third, I want to explain why these might be pointing to the End.

So, first, let’s talk about WHAT the trends are.

OK, so when analyzing world trends there are a couple nations and organizations that need to be identified. Just like at the beginning of a play, in the playbill you have the dramatis personae, we need to know the players. So, here are the important players: The United States; China; Russia; the European Union; the Quad Alliance; NATO; Saudi Arabia; Iran; Israel; and the soon-to-be debtor-states to China.

So now that we know who the players are, we need to consider what’s happening at a MACRO level, as in things that are 100-year trends. So, the first thing to notice is that urbanization and industrialization had a predictable side-effect. It devastated the fertility rates of women. Which means that all over the world, all the major players, except the United States, began a population collapse a long time ago. Americans avoided it because of the Baby-Boom and then the gigantic Millennial generation, and massive immigration, which allowed US population to stay at the 2.1% rate which allows our population to continue to grow.

But Europe, Russia, and China are all facing contracting populations. Those who are in the greatest danger are Russia and China. The population of Great Russians and Han Chinese is due for a collapse and China’s may be far more precipitous than Russia’s.

But this has implications. The implications for Russia mean that if Russia wants to secure its borders through buffer-states, which is what Russia has done from the time of the Tsars, through the USSR, and now under Putin – if they wish to go out conquering and to conquer, they need to do it now, as they won’t have the manpower resources to do it in 50 years.

China, similarly, has expansionist, imperial aspirations. China wants to be to world’s hegemon, they wish to replace the US as the Superpower and to replace the Yuan for the Dollar as the world reserve currency. But China, like Russia, has an aging, and soon to collapse population, that is exacerbated by the one-child policy which meant that many families aborted daughters so their one child could be a son. Unlike Victorian England or Kaiserian Prussia, China was vehemently anti-natalist. But now that China wants to begin colonizing the world, they realize that they have men of fighting age now, but they won’t in 30 years to 40 years and it will take a ludicrous amount of time to restore their population because they don’t have enough women with the inclination to reproduce. Some estimate that by 2100 their population could be cut down to 587 million, and that’s just on birthrates and demographics, that’s not including wars, famine, emigration, or any other causes of depopulation.

Europe has population problems of its own, but Europe is not expansionist and has had mass migration from Muslim countries, which have brought a lot of social problems, and Western Europe looks like while it may be taking the Muslim immigration problem seriously, it has no way to address its population shortage. Several generations of white-guilt being laid upon the backs of Western Europeans for Colonialism, the slave trade, and in Germany, the Holocaust, compounded with the atheism and antinationalist sentiments that existed after the two world wars means that Western Europeans had little economic, philosophical, patriotic, or religious incentivization to have babies.

But Europe doesn’t want to expand like Russia, or colonize, like China.

And so the stage is set. The US, Europe, and Australia, India, and Japan, are all allying to try to hem-in Russia and China. But Russia and China are on a ticking-time-bomb. They have a very serious time-horizon problem: they will not have the population necessary for expansionist wars if they wait too long. Moreover, while Russia is economically secure because of its oil and gas, China is not only dependent on foreign oil and gas, and foreign food imports, it also has a much more unstable economy, and its economic growth has been in serious danger for a long while.

So for China and Russia, it might be now or never. And anyone with half a brain in the West knows this.

On the economic front, the United States is extremely in debt with record inflation and with doubts as to how long the dollar can remain the world’s reserve currency. Inflation seems to be high, but perhaps plateaued. The problem is that if GDP doesn’t increase, companies can only hold cash for so long and eventually the hiring is going to turn into firing. Right now we have the inverse of 2008 – in ’08 it was the “jobless recovery”; now we have the “jobful downturn”; but that can’t continue forever without real growth in the economy.

Europe is also facing hard times as the aging populations are straining their social welfare systems, but most importantly in the short term, Europe’s energy dependence is hampering growth and Europe is looking like it’s contracting economically post-Covid, with many predicting rising poverty in the Eurozone.

Russia, incidentally, has plenty of money thanks to its oil and gas industry, and is hoping that rising ocean temperatures will open the arctic circle to heavy-shipping within a few decades and allow Russia to dominate Eurasian shipping.

But Russia’s neighbor to the south, China is in a very, very bad place. The Chinese housing bubble, alongside historic levels of fraud and Ponzi-schemes are threatening to completely implode the Chinese economy. This is on top of the enormous expenses China has incurred through their Belt and Road Initiative, also known as the “New Silk Road”. China has gotten mired in debt and what’s worse, pulled other countries into debt traps that essentially make ports and infrastructure part of a Chinese neocolonial network. However, all of Chinese debt, along with a slowing economy, and a complete lack of trust in Chinese banking means that an economic downturn is already happening and utter collapse is possible – and has only been avoided because runs on the bank don’t work because they banks refuse to pay out the money.

Which of course brings us militarily to politics by other means. China is expansionist. They have a few simple goals. 1, they want Taiwan. 2, they want to secure the Straight of Malacca so that in a shooting war with Taiwan the Quad Alliance can’t starve them by blocking the straight and cutting off their oil supplies. Gaining control of the Straight of Hormuz would also be a bonus. 3, They want total control of the South China Sea. 4, they want to control high seas trade so they can become the world’s number 1 economy and become the world’s superpower.

Russia’s goals are simpler. Russia is in a gigantic steppe – which means it’s easy to invade. The Tsars’ solution was to invade and conquer other regions to make them buffer states. But these buffers are also invadable so you have to constantly expand. Russia believes that control of Ukraine, and the Baltic – maybe Finland too, just b/c they hate the Finns, they might have enough breathing room so that the West will not be an existential threat. And like the situation under the Tsars the population of Great Russians is the problem Putin faces.

China and Russia believe that their survival depends on winning some conflicts, and these victories can’t wait forever. The West wants to delay conflict and allow demographics to destroy Russia and China – as well as the chaos that will ensue after the death of Putin and the last of the Soviet-trained elites, and the erratic and foolish behavior of Chairman Xi over time can only weaken the Chinese Communist Party.

Again, demographics, geography, sociology, economics, and personal-dynamics all seem to suggest a few things: 1, the age of globalism may be either ending or significantly slowing; 2, the end of globalism will mean worldwide economic downturns, up to and including major starvation events all over Africa and Asia; 3, the West wants to delay a shooting war as long as possible and allow the demographic collapse as well as the financial corruption and political rot inside of Russia and China to destroy them from within; 4, Russia and China both feel the time-sensitivity of all these things and is champing at the bit. Russia has already invaded Ukraine, and will not stop their unless they’re stopped. China is becoming hyper-aggressive towards Taiwan and has used fighting words against the US.

So these are the trends. And these aren’t just my takes. These are the takes of serious people who follow these events in detail. I’m just giving you a summary of what geopolitical strategists and thinkers are noticing both in the here and now and extrapolated out in trends. Does this mean WWIII is imminent? No, but it’s very likely that things will spill over from Ukraine into Taiwan, because there is, without a major unforeseeable change, a closing time-window for Russia and China to achieve their expansionist aims.

Does this mean that there is certainly going to be a worldwide depression and mass starvation? No, but it is almost beyond anyone’s comprehension that the economic collapses of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the banking and mortgage crisis in China will are not harbingers of a worldwide slowdown and serious pressure being put on world markets.

I’m not a prophet. And I don’t know the future. I’m just telling you what the trends are, so that we as Christians will know how we might be able to prepare and also, how world events fit into God’s description of History. Next week we’ll talk about how we can and should respond to and prepare for what is going on in the world.

Get in (the) Line!

Listen to it here.

So, if you haven’t seen the videos about The Line, the new Saudi Supercity, I do highly recommend it. Because, simply reading about the concept of this supercity is really not enough, and frankly, the videos made me want to see more. There is something fascinating, and yet also, threatening and intimidating about a city built on such a vast scale and scope. There’s something impressive and attractive and yet repulsive all at the same time.

Over the past several years, I’ve been thinking through the theology of aesthetics, architecture, and cities. Admittedly these have all been side projects; I haven’t been able to put sustained intellectual energy into it, but by emphasizing these notions and thinking through them, I’ve come to a few conclusions that have been helpful to me, and I hope will be helpful to you.

First, cities are very misunderstood. From a Biblical perspective, from God’s perspective, a city is no more nor less than a set of permanent residential structures that have come together to form permanent communities and social bonds.

In the Bible’s mind, the differences that we make between hamlets, villages, towns, and cities, metropolises, and megalopolises are artificial. The Biblical difference was whether a community was made up of permanent structures or temporary structures. Or, to put it in more philosophical terms, permanency is the essence of the city and size is accidental.

Second, cities develop their own unique character and even culture, and those characters and cultures can be better or worse, in various aspects, than others, but they are noticeable and can help us to understand people and places.

Third, cities are centers of industry, trade, and development of ideas that would not be possible if everyone lived nomadic or rural lives. And therefore, cities are necessary to the growth of humanity in the arts and sciences.

Thus, I wish to offer a Biblical theology of the city, that I hope will be helpful. The city is the realization of man’s attempt to fulfill the creation mandate to rule the earth and subdue it.

Now, I know that that’s a bit of a mouthful, so let’s think through this definition. A city is the realization of man’s attempt to fulfill the creation mandate to rule the earth and subdue it. What I am not saying is that man is fulfilling the creation mandate to rule and subdue the earth in a way that pleases God. What I am saying is that the city is the most complete image of what it looks like when fallen man attempts to do what God has made him to do: rule and subdue the earth.

I’m saying a couple things. 1, even fallen men and women, because we are image-bearers, we still have a desire to rule over the earth and subdue it. 2, men are born into and live in rebellion against God. 3, because we are rebels, the way we attempt to rule over the earth and subdue it is going to be distorted and perverted. 4, because God wants us to rule over the earth and subdue it, and because we’re rebels, and because God is still active in the world and still has grace, not all people are as bad as they could be, and some cultures and societies are less evil than others, and some are even more good than others. 5, those cultures and communities that are less evil or even more good, will (generally speaking) experience more flourishing, because the way they attempt to rule over the earth and subdue it is more pleasing to God and therefore more in line with His will and therefore more prone to be successful in providing flourishing. 6, the easiest way to measure the godliness and strength of a culture is to consider it’s cities (and by that I mean all permanent residential communities, not just large towns) and measure their flourishing.

Cities are important, and again, remember, when I am saying cities, I’m not talking about large, densely populated spaces, I’m talking about groups of permanent residences to form permanent communities. Cities are important, because they are expressions of what humanity is trying to accomplish in any given space. But, since man is fallen, cities are also the clearest expression of the flaws and faults and frailties of a society.

Large cities are everything in the small cities, except moreso. Cities because of the density and the human subduing and ruling over creation express the best and worst of human nature. And everything about a city’s culture, from its habits, and its character, its businesses, its society, its institutions, its schools, its churches or temples, its design, its architecture, its arts, everything about that city tells you something about the people who live in it.

And throughout all of history cities have been, as I said, expressions of the best and worst of humanity – because cities just take everything to the nth degree. Cities maximize traits and tendencies in human nature, or at least, they express the maximum because when you have so many people, you will certainly have every kind of person your society produces and they will have much more impact because they will have contact with many more people.

Cities, of course, despite the wonderful things in them, like centers of education, centers of art, centers of religion, entertainment, food, culture, despite these wonderful things, cities are also homes of poverty, crime, degradation, exploitation, and dehumanization.

Again, this is not new. But the extremes to which cities are falling into are new because as cities grow larger and larger, they maximize more and more traits and tendencies in human nature and put more and more of the good and bad of humanity on display.

But the desire has existed always and forever to create the perfect city. There has always been a Utopian ideal, at least among Utopians, of creating the perfect city; to create a city where all people can be happy, healthy, wholesome, and obedient to government. Because forget not that Utopianism always involves a very powerful government to make sure that the utopia remains Utopian and not dystopian.

And you may have noticed that over the years I’ve spoken quite a bit about utopia as a concept. That’s because Utopia is a key concept in the scriptures. From Cain building the first city in exile, east of Eden, to the Tower of Babel, to Jerusalem and Davidic and Solomonic Zionism, to the Holy City of Rome, to Babylon and the New Jerusalem in the Revelation. Christians have noticed for a very long time that the efforts of humans to recreate Eden are always and everywhere failures, but that God will recreate Eden. Indeed as Augustine argues there are two cities, the City of Man and the City of God that are in competition. But the scriptures are far more literal and less metaphorical than the Bishop of Hippo, because the scriptures speak of real cities builded by real men and a real city that shall be built by God. Yes, of course, these competing metropoli are also such enormous concrete concepts that they are suitable to use as stand-ins and metaphors for other spiritual phenomena.

The Line is just another in a long line of Utopian attempts to reclaim Eden. Again, all cities are, to some degree attempts to recreate Eden, because all cities are attempts to Edenify – to subdue and rule over the earth to maximize the flourishing of human beings – but the Line is different. It’s different because it is an entirely planned city, from beginning to end, and it has a specific vision of what kind of city will be conducive to maximize human flourishing. Rather than previous planned cities, which largely followed traditional designs, The Line scraps them, attempting to maximize efficiency of space, economization is the watchword in The Line. And, of course, this is not significantly different from small, well defined communities that have always existed in big cities, or even as there are mega-skyscrapers that are deliberate attempts to be cities within cities. The stuff of video-game and sci-fi fantasy is possible to see in real-time.  

Only time will tell whether The Line will be successful in its goals, which ostensibly are: to be built; to be maximally populated; and to have The Line perform, at least, marginally better that traditional cities. And let’s be honest, traditional cities in America and elsewhere certainly have their problems: crime; drugs; homelessness; despair; overwork; and very important to me, the fact that cities are just plain ugly, almost deliberately aggressively obnoxiously ugly – as Tom Wolfe said of Modern Art in Back to Blood, it’s “ugly on purpose”.

And, perhaps, you think I’m making too much of aesthetics. I think I might be making too little of it – ugly cities that nobody wants to walk around in say an awful lot about our culture – but that’s another sermon.

Will The Line be successful according to the metrics the Saudi’s are setting? Will this be bin Salmon’s Success or Mohammed’s Mess-up? I don’t know.

But what I can say with confidence is that it will not achieve the goal of making Eden. It surely will be man’s attempt, but that means it will be man’s attempt. It will be one more baby-Babylon, anticipating and typifying The Babylon, the Babylon par excellence – what The Holy Spirit calls The Whore. Will The Line be better than any other city of 9 million in Saudi Arabia – a nation whose biggest city today is Riyadh and has a population of 7 million? Maybe, maybe not. But while we as Christians should seek the prosperity and peace of our cities, where we sojourn we should never, we MUST never forget the words of Hebrews:

“By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.  For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”

Let’s keep our hope in the City of God, the New Jerusalem, while we pray for the city of man.

Big Pharma and Flourishing

Listen to it here!

So, you may or may not have heard about the bombshell research about antidepressants. Everybody’s talking about it, and it’s clearly touched a nerve. People have an AWFUL lot of medical expert fatigue these days, and this research may be yet another straw placed upon the back of a camel with several herniated discs. Before we begin today, however, I want to preface my comments with a few preliminary qualifiers. First, my own personal goal as a pastor-theologian is the help people flourish. I want people to live the best, most fulfilling, most joy-filled, productive, Christ-honoring lives they can. I want people to be happy and healthy. So everything I do, as a pastor and as a theologian is to help people experience the fullness of flourishing that God has for them.

Second, I have nothing but compassion for people who are suffering from major depression. I want them to not suffer. I want them to flourish. Whatever my beliefs on the causes of major or clinical depression, my beliefs on the effects are simple: depression is bad and doesn’t promote the Christ-life.

Third, I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist. So, please don’t take anything I say as psychotherapeutic or medical advice. I have not had the training. So, I’m no expert.

However, the problem with expertise, as all of us are learning right now, is that expertise is never a guarantee of being correct, and often expertise hinders someone’s ability to change their own mind. People who are experts often lack the ability to take criticism, especially criticism that comes from a common-sense critique to their views. Experts often, when challenged by other experts, get into a very illogical and very unacademic posture where what really matters is who has more academic prestige. And worse, if you aren’t an expert in the field you’ll just be laughed at. And there are complex reasons for this. First is pride. Top scholars, in any field, do not ever want to see their own reputations tarnished or their future prospects diminished. Second is confirmation bias. When a scholar or researcher has been looking at the same data and working with the same presuppositions for so long, anything that challenges their paradigm is a threat to be rejected – those guys don’t know what I know, is the attitude. Third is money. The dirty little secret about science, all disciplines but particularly science, is that it’s a zero-sum game. There is only so much research money out there and you gotta get as much of that sweet-sweet green pie as you can, cause nobody’s gonna share theirs with you. And so if something is threatening your research, they’re threatening your livelihood.

So, don’t be surprised when scientific experts are just wrong, and painfully, obviously wrong. Again, the past 2 years ought to have demonstrated, conclusively, that going to a fancy law-school and having lots of fancy friends, and knowing all the technical lingo and jargon doesn’t make you right. You can have an econ degree from Chicago and a law degree from Harvard and still be an idiot and fail to see something that any trucker or plumber or fry-cook can see.

Experts are often blinded by their own expertise.

And this is something that Dr. Joanna Moncreiff has a long history of writing about. She’s been banging the drum for years, trying to get people’s attention about the lack of evidence to support the serotonin-theory of depression. Because, according to her, there is no real evidence that depression is cause by an imbalance in the serotonergic system. And right now, you’re thinking, OK, Lukey-Poo, you read a few articles by one scholar. One swallow does not a summer make! She’s just one lady. Except no.

This is not a secret. The doubts about the serotonin theory of depression have been around for a very long time. Back in 1987 Healy had shown, pretty convincingly, that there was not scientific evidence that depression was caused by a serotonin imbalance. And, there were doubts before that, mind you. And, in fact, things got so bad for Big Pharma, that Ronald Pies, one of America’s most respected Psychiatrists said that the serotonin theory was never taken seriously by psychiatrists, who always know that blaming a chemical imbalance was a gross, but useful, oversimplification – that it was a metaphor.

Yes. Because when being prescribed drugs that will alter our mental state, we want to be reassured that it is safe and effective through metaphor. That’s what I call informed consent, eh chaps!

The problem for Pies was that that was simply untrue. As Moncrieff, Horowitz, and Ang show, the Psychiatric community in its most cited articles and most influential textbooks often did, in fact, tout the serotonin-theory as gospel truth, with unequivocal acceptance.

The problem is that as the public we have a lot of competing voices. We have some, including the pharmaceutical industry saying, nothing to see here, keep taking your antidepressants ; we have guys like Pies saying, nobody is saying antidepressants correct a chemical imbalance, nobody at all; then you have people overtly saying, yes antidepressants totally correct imbalances in the serotonergic system; then you have people like Healy and Moncrieff – and others – who are saying that the data show that not only is there no link between serotonin and depression, there are a lot of negative side-effects associated with SSRI anti-depressants, and these drugs do only marginally better than placebo – except placebos don’t have severe withdrawal symptoms.

 And here’s where I want to interject my own thoughts, and where I think that the Bible and Christian theology are extremely relevant. Whatever the experts say, it’s well for Christians to remember that the experts are very rarely experts for long. It’s wise to take anything said by an expert with a very large grain of salt. Much that is published under the aegis of “science” is not scientific – not in the sense of inductive, experimental, controlled, repeated attempts to falsify hypotheses. Scientific, often means, that which endorses the worldview of people in the Cult of Science. So, Christians oughtn’t to be intimidated by things that have received the Mark of Science on their right hands or foreheads. That doesn’t mean that we oughta be arrogant, or dismissive, it means we shouldn’t be gullible chumps.

Christians always should have been, and still should be skeptical, of the idea that a chemical imbalance is the cause of every single instance of depression. We SHOULD be skeptical. Why? Because despair is so often described as sinful. The Bible, God, commands us to have hope. Depression, real depression, not simply feeling sad, is having no hope.

Now, I want to be clear, I’m not saying that there is no neurochemical imbalance that happens when people are depressed – in fact, I would be surprised if the brains of depressed people were functioning normally. But that doesn’t make something the cause. It may just be part of the effect. Imagine, a house burning down, and you looked at the burning house and you said, man, look at that smoke – that must be the cause for all that heat! Everyone would laugh at you because you’d confused a cause with an effect. Or if you thought that all you needed to do to hit a homerun was to make contact with the baseball (because all homeruns involve contact with the baseball) you would be making a serious error of confusing a necessary condition with a complete explanation.

In the same way, claiming that all depression is caused by a chemical imbalance is even more dubious than the claim that all you have to do to hit a homerun is to make contact. The reason it’s more dubious is that we know, in fact, that you have to make contact to hit a homerun. We don’t have any evidence that chemical imbalances are the cause of depression.

And this matters an awful lot. It matters because, while there may, indeed, be people with brain injuries, or congenital pathologies, whose depression really is beyond their control, that cannot be the sole explanation in a significant portion of the population. And this matters. It matters because if the cause is not biological, then it’s behavioral.

And, truth be told, that’s kinda what most non-experts believe anyways. Most non-experts believe that depression, whatever biological factors exist, can be solved through therapy and other behavior changes. But this doesn’t get to the root.

WHY are people depressed? And why are rates of depression and suicidality rising? Why are so many so sad and so willing to end their own lives, sometimes the lives of others as well?

I would argue that the reason for most people, not all, but the vast majority, is because we are failing to live as God would have us to live. We are failing to experience the blessings of living the Christ-life.

Consider a 25-year-old man 200 years ago. Life was hard. But that 25-year-old, along with 90% of other Americans lived in a rural setting. He got plenty of sunshine, plenty of sleep, ate few processed foods and no real junkfood, and the sweets he ate he burnt off with manual labor. He had a wife and probably at least one child. He worked with his hands, seeing the results of his labor, and there was broad optimism about the future of this country and that he and his children’s prospects would only go up. He lived in a community where people knew eachother and were forced to rely on eachother. He went to church and his whole life was built around the idea that there is a loving God to Whom we must give an account. He may or may not have truly believed in Christ, but he believed in enough religion for it to affect his entire outlook on life.

Compare that with the average 25-year-old man today. He likely lives in a city or suburb with his parents. He’s unmarried. He has no children. He does not have a career that he’ll stick to his whole life. He gets less sunshine, less sleep, eats worse, gets less exercise, has lower testosterone. He doesn’t live in a community built around mutual trust and obligations; he doesn’t know his neighbors; he views children as hindrances to be murdered if necessary; he has no conception of the Biblical God.

Which person sounds like he’ll be happier? Which person sounds like he’s more prone to despair?

Friends, flourishing comes from living God’s way. Yes, Christians, too, can despair. It’s a sin. It’s built on not trusting God or His promises. We can lose our sense of hope and purpose. And sure, maybe antidepressants can help. But as believers, we ought to recognize that the overwhelmingly high numbers of people suffering from depression cannot simply be a matter of chemical imbalances – especially as we look at it in age cohorts. Rather depression, largely speaking, is a theological issue.

I’m not claiming that Godliness is the cure for ALL depression. But I am saying, I believe it to be the cure for most, if not the vast majority. And even if it isn’t the cure – godliness is beneficial in all things, anyways. I know for many, if not most, loving and finding fulfillment in Christ and the Christlife is the cure for despair and depression. I know it was for me.

And I hope that we as a Church can share the life and hope-giving message of Christ with a society that needs Him.

Choosing the Chosen

The Chosen – maybe you’ve seen it, maybe you haven’t. But, chances are, if you’re a Christian, you’ve probably seen, or at least heard of it. It’s, largely, what you would expect. It’s a dramatic retelling, mostly through fictional events and dialogue, of the Gospels. And when I say “mostly through fictional events and dialogue” I mean “almost entirely”.

The Chosen is, essentially, Historical Fiction. And how we assess Historical Fiction as a genre is pretty complicated. Some find any deviation from “actual history” to be blasphemous and unacceptable. Those are the same kind of people who won’t shut up about how the book was better than the movie. How do you know who these people are, you might ask? You’ll know…oh yes, you’ll know. On the other hand there are people who will accept any piece of Historical Fiction because they don’t care about the History part, just the Fiction. These are the people who thought that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was really good, and gave them a new perspective on the Civil War. Now, there is a lot of in-between and most people are probably in-betweeners. Most people would like their Historical Fiction to have broad, predictable, and pretty close adherence to the events as we know them. We would like dialogue to be constructed in a manner that fits the actual characters. Most people understand that for sake of the page or the screen, perfect Historicity is impossible. But what we want is something that is largely true to the facts, but which is as true as possible to the spirit of history.

Now, the thing about The Chosen is that it’s Historical Fiction. It’s Art. And the Church has a long and sometimes tumultuous relationship with Art. The Old Testament forbade graven images made for worship. But there was still a lot of Art, just not images of God, or images made to worship. But the Church has had a much looser relationship. Because Christ came in the flesh and was visible, people since the very beginning, it seems, have been making mosaics and icons and images of Christ, of God, as a man.

But not everyone has been a big fan of this. Many, throughout history, have rejected images of Jesus, and some have rejected any imagery in the church whatsoever. And so we can see that believers are split. Some want icons and stained glass and others feel a little hinky when they see a bouquet of flowers. And then there are the inbetweeners.

So why am I talking about The Chosen? Because it is Historical Fiction, which is very present in our culture. It’s also Art – which is and always has been crucial to the life of God’s people. But these are things that the Church is very divided on, in implementation. And not for nothing.

Art is dangerous. I don’t merely say this because Art is often subversive (though it is); I say this because Art is powerful, and it works while bypassing the conscious mind. Only those who have trained themselves to analyze the aesthetics of a Church can take conscious control of what Art is doing, and even then, it might be beyond their power. Certain chords, especially certain chords in relationship to one another can almost FORCE and emotional response. And this power can be used for good or for ill. It can be used in serve of orthopathy, to ensure that we have the right emotional responses to certain truths. Or it can be used manipulatively to keep meat in the seats and hands in wallets. Architecture is all too often overlooked, but it is powerful. The lines and movement of a building speak just as powerfully as a sermon, but on the unconscious mind. Architecture matters. Aesthetics matter. Beauty matters.

So I repeat. Art is dangerous. And dangerous doesn’t mean bad. Christ is dangerous. But so is a serial killer.

Art is dangerous. The Chosen is dangerous.

That, in itself, is not enough to reject it – in my humble opinion. The question is, is it the good kind of dangerous or the bad kind?

Recently I was debating an issue with another pastor. And he referenced a scene from The Chosen. And when referencing this scene, he wasn’t talking about how the acting put a new spin on an old truth – which is what dramatizations are really good at…or really bad at. But he was referencing something that not only is not described in the Gospels, but that almost certainly never happened, and that almost certainly wouldn’t have happened, when using a broad-based Biblical theological analysis. The exact issue isn’t important. That’s not my point. My point is that The Chosen is powerful, influential, and dangerous – because all Art is.

My point is that my attitude towards The Chosen has cooled over the past months. Comments by Dallas Jenkins (whose clarifications just made things worse!) as well as subtle issues in the show, have given me pause and made me question how willing I am to watch this with my children. Because if you’re watching The Chosen with you’re children, you’d better recognize that Dallas Jenkins’ Jesus is going to likely be just as, if not more, formative of your child’s idea of Jesus as your teaching. Very few parents read their bibles to their children every day. Very few children are in Church every week. Very few children are given a thorough catechesis.

And I fear that substituting The Chosen for a well-formed, Bible-centric, church-soaked theological pedagogy is going to result in some very seriously erroneous images of Jesus. To the degree that Jenkins, et al., have skewed the image of Jesus – which the must – that’s on them. To the degree that they simply present a dramatization and the weak teaching of children, and new believers, and immature believers, that’s on us.

I don’t want to be unfair. Historical Fiction is a very difficult genre. Making a perfect show about Jesus is impossible. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done well, but it does mean it can’t be done perfectly. And the question for us as an audience is not whether it’s done perfectly, or even if there’s a place for dramatic representations, I think there most certainly is. The question is whether this, very powerful, very influential, very dangerous dramatic representation is sufficiently well done to allow the Art to form our theological imaginaries.

As for me…I’m not so sure, anymore.

Courage and Honor

Listen to the radio broadcast here!

The Name Game

So, in case you were too busy with the ridiculous continuing fallout of Depp v Heard, or the serious fallout of Dobbs v Jackson WHO, Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted and sentenced to 20 years. Except it might be a mistrial. And, who knows, maybe another jury will find her not guilty, or maybe the government just won’t bother bringing charges.

I’m cynical about this case and you should be too! The initial attempt to convict Epstein of child molestation, back in 2006, was botched to a degree that beggars imagination – with the prosecutor undermining the witness, on the stand, in front of the grand jury! Epstein did no jail time after being indicted for soliciting prostitution. Then he has huge influxes of cash from unknown sources, and he spends his downtime recording domestic and foreign dignitaries (SEC, FBI, NSA, CIA apparently have no interest…). Then when the FBI DOES raid his property they just happened to have the wrong warrant and therefore couldn’t take sex videos with “[girl’s name] + [man’s name]” and so they just left them and countless incriminating photos there unattended. Shockingly, they disappeared! Aw shucks, the FBI REALLY wanted to investigate I bet…oh well. Then Epstein dies in prison, ostensibly of suicide. Then again, there are no cameras and no witnesses, but let’s just assume that the pedophile blackmailer just killed himself and there was nothing more nefarious involved at all. No reason to suspect anything untoward! And then…as far as the public are concerned, the trial just ends.

Of course, there is the inconvenient existence of Ghislaine Maxwell. And she’s indicted and convicted. She’s also, stunningly, refused to name names. Can’t imagine why…Oh well, I guess we’ll never figure out who Epstein’s clients were…just no way of knowing. Nope. Just better walk away. I mean, the fact that according to Acosta (the US Attorney who gave Epstein a sweetheart deal) Epstein “belonged to Intelligence” certainly doesn’t imply that he was getting protection from people high-up in government! And, I mean, it’s not like we have flight manifests, photos, and many, many women who will testify as to who, what, where, when, how, and why. Nope, case closed…Ah! If only the FBI had the correct warrant! Alas and alack!

As a pastor, as a theologian, as a father, as a citizen, this whole situation is deeply disturbing. There are major theological and spiritual implications when crime goes unpunished. Blood calls for blood and unpunished and unatoned sin are not only disgraceful, not only poisonous to the body politic, not only do they encourage and invite further corruption and evil, not only do they erode our corporate sense of trust and unity – but they bring about God’s judgment. And part of God’s judgment is Him ignoring evil. God gives us over to the evil we long for, or at least tolerate. When we refuse to care about injustice God stops intervening – He lets us go.

I know that the gears of justice turn slowly. I also believe firmly in the right to a fair trial by jury with the presupposition that all are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But this looks a lot more like a cover-up than the meandering course of justice. If we want to live in a just society we cannot permit anyone to be above the law, no matter how rich, powerful, or well-connected they are. If we want the blessing of God and wish to avoid His curses, then it is imperative that our justice system acquits the innocent and punishes the guilty – without fear or favor – that we all face equal justice under law.

Defending Dobbs

Listen to the radio broadcast here:

What’s New In Neverland?

Vasectomies. Or the voluntary act of making a man sterile. These are, according to Time Magazine, “trending”. You may have seen articles or social media posts about young men, married and unmarried, choosing to get a vasectomy specifically because of the Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey, and causing abortion to be outright banned in some states and severely restricted in many others.

These young men are acting out of an immense generosity – so they argue.

Now, I’m not saying that vasectomies are never a good idea. I’m not saying that they are theologically taboo. I’m not saying that there’s never a time when I would consider getting one. I can think of several scenarios where I might.

But I’m a 38-year-old married, father with 4 children ex utero and 1 in.

I’m not a 20-something hoping to not get saddled with a bastard after my Tinder meet-up goes so right it goes wrong. And this, as much as anything, reinforces what people with any common sense have known all along. Men were always pro-abortion, not because they cared about women’s choices, or because they were so concerned with medical autonomy, or because they cared so deeply about rape and incest or women’s health – but because it freed them of responsibility.

Abortion was, and is, and will be used as birth-control.

And these man-children who are rushing our to be made eunuchs are so desperate to live in a state of narcissistic perpetual adolescence that they simply refuse to accept basic biological and anthropological realities.

Lemme lay it out real simple. Men want sex. Boys want sex without responsibility. Men want sex with their wives so they can, among other things, have children and raise a family. Why? Because men seek out responsibility because it tends towards their status in the home and in society. Men know that being a father allows them to extend themselves into the future. It allows them to be important builders of society. It wins honor and veneration and influence for them. The responsibility of being a husband, father, householder, patriarch, and village elder were and are all serious responsibilities that should NEVER be entered into lightly. But they do bring honor and glory.

But boys don’t want that. Boys are interested in fame – not honor. And fame and honor are not the same thing. Fame is renown; it’s being known, or at least “heard-of”. Honor is the idea that you as a person have value and weight and meaning. Now, these do overlap, certainly, but they aren’t the same. And one of the MANY failures in our society is the substitution of “fame” for “honor”…Tik Tok, I’m looking at you!

But, as I said, our society and culture are narcissistic. Consider the list of blessings God offers the Israelites, Genesis 49: “…the God of your father who helps you, and by the Almighty who blesses you, with blessings of the heavens above, with blessings of the depths below, with blessings of the breasts and womb.”

There are, of course, many parallel passages that include the language of blessing on wombs, but the fact is that for people throughout human history fruitful wombs and milk-laden bosoms were a tremendous blessing. Why? Because they lived in Premodern societies that were patriarchal (not a bad word in my usage), and that believed that families and nations gained honor and glory through, among other things, a large population of healthy and productive people. These people believed, genuinely and truly, that having lots of healthy babies and building a society was one of the greatest honors a person could be blessed with. The took on the responsibilities of raising families and building civilizations. They thought that it was not only their bounden duty to do these things, but that they would gain honor and prestige if they did.

In the end, the Premodern idea of God’s blessing was one of material gifts that brought increased work and responsibility, but which redounded to the honor and glory of those who bore those responsibilities. That’s why Premodern societies show deference and honor to the aged. That’s why patriarchies are the way they are, because they believe that the ones who bear responsibility also make the decisions.

But our Postmodern Peter Pans want our society to be full to bursting with Lost Boys. Lost Boys whom they, like the literary Pan, will cull if you start growing-up. Time, et al., are valorizing vasectomies because they are celebrating adolescence. They are celebrating a degenerate culture. And I mean degenerate in the literal and figurative senses. Our culture is de-generating we’re undoing ourselves and halting and hindering population growth. We’re degenerating our cultural institutions – we’re undoing them. We’re morally degenerate, as well, but that’s not what I want to focus on.

I want to focus on this idea that so many men have, that by never fathering children their lives will be better. Now. If they were choosing a life of celibate service to Christ, then, yes, their lives would be better. But they aren’t. They are getting snipped so they don’t get subpoenaed. They don’t want to have to care for a child, because that baby might force them to give up on their dreams of watching youtube videos, and swiping left and right, and living in the narcissistic fantasy that dogs are children or whatever other garbage that tickles their fancy.

A kid would just get in their way.

Yes.

Yes he would.

Because that’s what responsibilities do – they are obstacular by nature. Hence the word. You have to respond to them.

Why is this being promoted by so many forces? Why are there so many people in our society who want boys to remain boys and men to revert back to adolescence? Well, there’s a whole host of motivations. The two I think are most significant are the ones I’ll deal with.

First, perpetual boyhood is good for corporate bottom-lines, at least in the short-term. You may or may not have heard of this thing, but in most of human history, most of the work that enriched the superrich and powerful was not done by said superrich and powerful but by people who lived in very limited and circumscribed circumstances. They focused on work and nothing else. Work was the main thing that consumed their time: not family, not children, not politics, not patriotism, or national defense, not self-education, not social concerns. These people were fed and housed as little as possible to ensure their compliance and docility, while exploiting the maximum value from their existence. Punishments were extreme and rapid to keep everyone in line.

The power of large networks of human drones was able to make a LOT.

We called it slavery.

Now, slavery in America is illegal. So corporations are attempting to get the next-best thing. Hives and colonies of workers who spend 60-80 hours serving the corporation and the rest of their time narcotized on the couch. They are consumers. They aren’t builders. These people live in tiny expensive apartments, that are more and more going to be part of the “company store” model. They don’t farm, they don’t garden, they don’t even cook their own meals – they just consume, taking all their wealth and transferring it back to the superrich. Their personalities are outsourced to their “devices”; they are undereducated and over credentialled, brim-full of unearned confidence without real competence, having the brazen arrogance that only the truly stupid have. They are so well heeled that they will believe anything Body-Positive Sibling (the non-fat-shaming, gender affirming version of “Big Brother”) tells them, including but not limited to: boys can be girls; men can have babies; killing a child in utero is not murder; math can be racist; no one knows what a woman is; truth doesn’t exist; 2+2 can equal something other than 4.

The Lost Boys (I’ll talk about the Lost Girls in another article) will be the perfect tool for the elite to use for re-instituting serfdom on the Western world. Even if Schwab and the fellows of the WEF don’t have their wildest fever-dreams fulfilled, they still think that soon and very soon they’ll having us all making mules of ourselves and eating bugburgers because…the environment.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

The second reason why so many forces are coalescing to perpetuate pubescence is because our society is becoming demonic. Demons are real and they have real influence. And their power stands in inverse proportion to our love and devotion to God and godliness. And as our culture, more and more, rejects Christ and His way, more and more, demons will have increased influence and power over people. And while I believe that Satan is clever and cunning and his ultimate desire is not merely to steal and kill and destroy, but to be worshiped, he also does love to steal and kill and destroy because convincing people to destroy themselves is Satan’s best way at successfully hurting God. And so people shatter their lives with scalpel and smartphones and Satan smiles with glee, knowing that he’s causing God to sorrow over His fallen creations. So demons destroy and those who have handed themselves over to demonic power through their repeated rejection of Christ will carry out their father’s desires.

America is a modern-day Neverland. And our Lost Boys truly are lost. They are throwing away the opportunity for a meaningful life of purpose and flourishing…for what?

Answering the “for what” is complex because human motivations can be complex: social acceptance; immediate gratification; freedom from responsibility; freedom from emotional risk; freedom from monogamous expectations…et cetera. But ultimately they are throwing away manhood because they have decided it’s not something worth having. The misanthropic, atomistic-individualist, consumerist, hedonist culture is shaping boys, not men. Men are a deadly threat to the new serfdom. But boys. Boys will do. So the cogs of social engineering continue to turn and churn out boys: boys that will serve the new lords – boys that will serve the new lords and think that they’re being liberated.

Roe No Mo

Listen to the radio broadcast here!

Spiderhead Review

Introduction

The latest bit of content to drop on Netflix and cause a bit of a critical stir is Spiderhead, a film based on a book I haven’t read, that everyone says is much better than the movie. OK. Sure. I’ve always dismissed critiques of film that negatively compare the film (or tv show) to a book. They are two entirely different media and you can do vastly more with a book than a film – always. And the reality is that people who read the book are (almost) always disappointed with the film. OK, sure. Why shouldn’t you be?

On the State of Media (Skip if you just want the theology)

Film is in a weird place as a narrative medium. While the never-ending need to create content to justify a plethora of streaming platforms is invariably and indubitably ensuring that the content will mostly be only that – content – it’s also, according to the Laws of Normal Distribution, means that only 15% will be any better than “ehh”. In short, this means that studios have created a monster. The need to justify a streaming service means you need to populate that streaming service with things to stream. When Netflix came out, before is started making its own content, it had the advantage of pulling from a lot of extant and forthcoming material. But now with everyone and their brother having their own service, and reducing the availability of their studios’ material to aggregating services like Netflix, it means that the volume of content has necessarily increased. Which means that the volume of mediocre to bad has necessarily increased.

However, a series has one distinct advantage: time. It has time to flesh out characters, to do world-building, to make its own story its own. This should mean that episodic stories should be in their heyday. Which means that for movies (essentially 2 episode monoseries) to have their effect they need to effectively become short stories.

And short story writing is complex and difficult. It has to pack a punch. Admittedly before the proliferation of serial stories, film wasn’t compared to any other media (not really). TV was decidedly episodic, with the exception of miniseries and the budgets were lower, and the film quality lower, and the talent was not as apparent and the writing was simply not as good.

All that has changed.

Film is now in the position that “tv” was – having to justify its existence. And making films based on short stories seems like a good place to go, but in reality, it’s a very tricky thing. Short stories can be short because the written word has powers that are not really available to a filmmaker, except in a very limited set of plot-devices.

While, again, I haven’t read the book, Spiderhead falls prey to the economic pressures of producing content, AND being compared to series, AND trying to convey in a 90 minute “talkie” something that was said and said well and powerfully in an entirely other medium.

A Brief Review (note well the movie is NOT family friendly and may offend Christians – exercise your own conscience before watching…in fact, I don’t recommend it)

And I don’t think Spiderhead pulled it off – but I don’t think that it was the drek that the critics are claiming it is – at least not from a theological perspective. And that’s what I want to focus on. But first, a few words about the film. First, it has problems. The ethical issues aren’t really as powerful as the film wants us to think they are. SPOILER ALERT: the big evil secret is that they are testing a drug that induces obedience. K. Remember this is a place where people are getting penal diversion by participating in pharmaceutical studies that manipulates to people’s emotions and behaviors to the degree that with the touch of a smartphone can cause you to “fall in love”, experience panic fear, engage in suicidal ideation, see garbage as transcendentally beautiful, and laugh hysterically at atrocities.

Wait the big, deep-dark secret is that a prison where people’s free-will is violated is violating people’s free-will?

K.

I mean, this sorta lacks punch. And by “sorta” I mean it’s not an ethical problem. Sure, you could argue that their acknowledgements to engage in other tests were meaningless since they were under the influence of B-6 (the obedience drug O-B-D-X). But that doesn’t really change things in a meaningful way. It doesn’t make the tests ethical – but none of them really were! It is, as Kenny Wayne Shepherd would say, blue on black.

Theology

Spiderhead has other issues, that are more technical that I won’t go into, but I want to give it credit for raising an issue that is theologically evergreen and one which is particularly relevant today. And when I say “issue” it’s really a constellation of issues. From Transhumanism, to Ethics, to Utopianism, to Free-Will, to Anthropology, there are a LOT of implications in this piece; and that’s ALWAYS going to be heavy stuff for any film to deal with. That’s why films like Ex Machina relied on mythic tropes and narrative forms to do the heavy lifting – and succeeded with aplomb! But Spiderhead doesn’t rely on stories or idées fixes in the Western Canon; which puts it at a narrative and theological disadvantage because it has to do all the heavy lifting rather than letting tropes and forms do it for us.

Since I did my Masters’ Thesis on theology and impulsivity, that’s where I’d like to focus. It’s well established that impulsivity can be regulated, with a relatively high degree of success through medication. SSRIs (Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors) being some of the most successful, but also drugs that work on the Dopaminergic system have shown a lot of promise as well.

And all of us manipulate our body chemistry deliberately. A brilliant theologian I know was recently complaining of being hangry and later said she was feeling better as “the ravioli was taking effect”. We know what blood-sugar does (the Chili Peppers would add sex and magic, but that’s another pop culture reference for another day!) People drink alcohol for a variety of self-medicating reasons. We exercise to get endorphins and to excrete cortisol. We are constantly consciously affecting our chemistry to achieve desired results, and very often these are mood-altering. And we alter our mood, at least in part, to alter our behavior. We hand over a portion of our free will to our body chemistry (which one might argue isn’t really handing it over). For some this means an extra cup of coffee, or a hard spin class, or taking long drags on a cigarette or long pulls on the whiskey bottle. Some of us eat our feelings. Women are blessed with the ability to cry-it-out. Men in Scranton hug-it-out.

And yet, we all know that this is, or could be, cheating. That affecting our mood with chemistry is legitimate to a point, but somewhere in our nebulous ethics is a red-line that we darestn’t cross.

But should there be?

If we could solve societal problems through neurochemistry, would that be wrong? What if it only influences behavior without determining it? What if it DOES determine behavior?

Now, right off the bat, it’s theologically clear that people are culpable for actions that are not the result of a free-choice – habitual behaviors are still morally relevant behaviors. Now, many theologians, including the Roman Catholic Church’s Catechism states that free-will is an imperative and violation of free will is a moral evil. Is freedom really worth rape, murder, banditry, self-destruction, and fraud? Is it worth broken homes and broken lives?

Or should we rebuild the Tower of Babel with neuropharmacology?

These are interesting questions and ones that while they may have dogmatic answers, they aren’t easy answers because they come up hard against the problem of evil. Societies abrogate free-will constantly (that’s what a law is, in case you didn’t know). So is medicating a population a difference in kind or merely degree?

I don’t know.

I will say, that I’m against it. But I’m not against it because I think that evil is good. Or because I think that stopping evil things from happening is bad. I’m against it because I think it misses the point. I’m against  it because I think it wouldn’t work – I have no doubt that we can, some day, effectively alter people’s moods so that a population becomes a docile, pliable, peaceful, society. But I’m not certain that that’s actually flourishing. Not because I think “flourishing” requires our feelings to be authentic (I am not sure that authenticity has as much to do with flourishing as our individualistic society has made it out to have). But because it sidesteps the issues altogether.

The real problem, in the end, is that we are in rebellion against God. The reason we cannot and do not flourish is because we rebel. Because in all our thoughts God is not. We want to live without God and without reminders of Him. That’s why we call murderers who are clearly rational “crazy” instead of “evil”. Why we attempt to medicate all our problems away, hoping for a better life with chemistry, rather than examining ourselves and seeing if there isn’t something fundamentally broken about us.

Doping a culture on happy-drugs, and love-potions, and obedience-pills is, in the biblical sense of the word, sorcery. It is witchcraft, in the biblical sense.

God didn’t stop Babel because it would fail, but because it would succeed. God insists that a certain degree of pain exists in the world so that we do not grow deaf and calloused to our alienation from Him. Moreover, this is not only eschatologically merciful, because dying apart from Christ means eternal separation from Him. It’s also temporally merciful. Yes, drugging up America might solve a lot of problems now, but it will create bigger problems later. Because the godless who will play God and never consider His laws and wisdom will not act in the best interests of others. Tyranny will be the result. And not tyranny where we’re all happy drones – but the worst kind of tyranny – the murdery, rapey, exploitative kind. Because the one thing we can be sure of is that the kinds of people who will control others for their own good will not be controlled. These are the people to whom and for whom no laws apply. It is the will to power that matters.

I think, in short, that Spiderhead asked a lot of good questions. It answered them ham-fistedly. But in the end, it’s narrative point was simply this: those who wish to use science to control the population view themselves as above the law and ethical norms and will violate them and will do ghastly evil in pursuit of their base pleasures.

Was it worth watching? Nah. Was it theologically interesting – sure. But in the end, I didn’t care about the characters, which is always my standard for whether something was entertaining. It was interesting, for sure – and it raises topics that will be very relevant very soon (and if they don’t become relevant, presume that the pharma-bros have already won!) and that hopefully will be handled more deftly by people with greater ethical understanding.

Orders of Magnitude

Listen to the radio broadcast here!