Remembering the Titans

Papua New Guinea, 1982. I'm in a training camp with my wife and toddler. Among the other campers is a single German woman, very plain, half a head taller than I am, not the stuff of daydreams. Perhaps twice during the two months of the course, we're within conversational distance, but both times she makes it surprisingly and memorably plain that she's not interested in conversing.

Eugene, Oregon, 1987. I see the same woman at a bulletin board in the dormitory we're living in during the summer. She sees me, lights up, introduces me to her husband, asks all sorts of questions about the intervening five years, and generally treats me like a long-lost friend.

In my grammar class that same summer is a single German woman who owns what looks to me like a really nifty computer. She answers my questions about it with as few words as possible and makes it plain that she's not interested in conversing.

Papua New Guinea, 1990-something. The woman from the grammar class sees me at the market, lights up, introduces me to her husband, asks all sorts of questions . . . .

My conclusion: while respectable single US women can be freindly (as defined by a US man) with married men, respectable German women can't, but they can once they are married.

People are different, and not all of their differences sit well with their neighbors.

One of the subplots of the movie Remember the Titans involves a white high school football player who takes his two friends, one white and one black, into a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, circa 1970. The owner firmly, though civilly, informs the white boys that the black boy is not welcome in the restaurant and tells them to leave. The boys do leave, but at the end of the movie they return; when the restaurant owner again tells them to leave, the white boy says that his father works for the feds and can sue the owner for a daunting list of civil rights violations. The restauranteur backs down, the black high schoolers get to sit in the restaurant, and everything is hunky-dory.

The message is clear: the restauranteur was a bad guy, and the kids were made heroes by the government. Government good: entrepreneurship bad.

I'd like to play devil's advocate here and take the side of the restaurant owner in the movie because I think he was acting rationally and within his rights even though I would have wanted to see the black boy seated. Furthermore, he was not nearly as evil as those the movie portrays as heroes.

So here I am. I've worked at jobs I don't particularly like for years, saving my money instead of spending it on things I would like to have, like nice clothes, a nice car, season tickets for the Senators or Redskins, whatever. Maybe I've taken out a sizable loan to buy the stoves, refrigerators, freezers, flatware, plates, etc., I need to run my restaurant. I've rented or taken out a mortgage on the building and paid for the structural changes and signage. I've advertised in the Yellow Pages, in the newspaper, maybe even on the radio and TV.

All this before the first customer walks through the door.

When I open the door, I have no guarantee that customers will come in. I probably had a grand opening discount deal for the first week, but there was no guarantee those who took advantage of the low prices then will come back and pay full fare. But let's assume I got over the hump and have been in business for a few years.

Who are my customers? They are the people of Alexandria. I grew up with them. I know their names, where they live, and how they think.

Tillamook, Oregon, August, 1972. I'm riding my bicycle up the Oregon coast. I pull into Tillamook at sunset with no idea where I'll be sleeping, and it looks like it might rain. I ride around the town a bit and don't see anyplace tolerable. So I stop at a low-end Mom and Pop motel and ask if they've got a bit of floor I can sleep on.

They reply that they have a room that has just been painted and they'll let me have it for half price. Oh, joy!

It even has a bed in it!

A few minutes later Mom and Pop surprise me by inviting me to dinner: fried chicken, potatoes, and I can't remember what else, but I was hungry and probably ate like a bear. And we get to talking. They ask about me and really seem interested in my world, which at that point was leftist politics. Eventually—I don't remember when, but it makes the story better if I say it was after thirds on fried chicken and halfway through dessert—I ask about them. They tell me they're from Louisiana.

"Oh. So why did you move up here?"

"Too many niggers down there."

Generous, loving people can be racist.

I know that my people don't choose to have anything to do with blacks. But they're not bad people.

Like my aunt who gave me my first bicycle, my neighbor who taught me to repair lawn mowers, or my father who worked two jobs and paid for the sign on my restaurant. But these are the people in my world, Alexandria, Virginia, circa 1970.

Maybe I'd like to leave someday, maybe not, but I can't yet, so I do the best with what I've got. But leaving my people I love so that I can spend more time with black people isn't a high priority for me now.

Meantime, the success of my restaurant, and my ability to earn a living, depends on the good will of white people who, whether I like it or not, choose not to associate with black people.

So now a black boy comes into my restaurant with his two white friends. Most of my clientele is adults, so they're already somewhat out of place, but if kids that age behave themselves properly, they're welcome.

But what do I do about that black boy?

If I choose to open my main dining room to him, the whites now here will leave, never to return, and tell their friends not to patronize me. So almost overnight my entire clientele will be black. There are [I'm having to guess here—QP] only half as many blacks as whites in Alexandria, and their earning power is also about half that of whites. So we're looking at a reduction in my gross revenue somewhere near 75% if I seat this fellow.

I could open a separate dining room for blacks, but it wouldn't be as nice as the white dining room for the same reason Chock Full o' Nuts isn't as nice as the Waldorf: the offering has to be tailored to the prospective buyers. And if the blacks are going to be offended that their room isn't as nice as the whites' room [I'm probably bringing in an anachronistic bit of twenty-first-century entitlement mentality—QP]; I also, not being black and not usually associating with them, run the risk of making mistakes based on my unfamiliarity with black culture. So why should I risk the resources to open a separate dining room? Why not save my money and do my best to serve the people I can serve best and leave the opportunity open for a black entrepreneur to better his lot by opening a restaurant that blacks will enjoy going to?

It's my property. It's my capital and living on the line. "I'm sorry, boys, but you can't eat here."

The "good news" we all heard about is that before long all restauranteurs had to open their doors to black and white, so now blacks and whites eat in the same restaurants, sleep in the same motels, go to the same schools, ride in the same airplanes, and so on. As my Yankee upbringing (since repudiated) would have me expect, I've never heard of any white folks getting cooties from the experience.

But has getting what we wanted gotten us where we wanted to go?

Years ago I read (in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, but I don't remember which one) a lament that in racially integrated schools the black kids sit on one side of the lunchroom and the white kids on the other. And why not? If Germans and Yankees have different expectations and customs and preferences, we would expect the same of black and white kids thrown together by government decree, ¿nó?

What do the closing of beaches in Milwaukee and Chicago because of interracial violence, and the rancor over the killing of Trayvon Martin, tell us, if not that government can put black and white in the same room but can't make them like each other?

More importantly, we should also remember that those Titans are my contemporaries, who voted for the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama, and so share the guilt for depradations of those monsters. Compared to the mega death dealt by those "heroes," a restauranteur defending his livelihood seems like pretty small potatoes.

I would even go so far as to say that someone whose response was less civil than that of the restauranteur in the movie is small potatoes. Consider Lester Maddox, who famously ran an erstwhile black customer off his property with a gun and a club.

Photo source

Compare that with this achievement of the Titans, a scene from Afghanistan that is matched by many in Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq, and now Yemen and Pakistan.

Photo source

Loving, generous people can be racist. They can also be litterbugs and road hogs. In the case of Bush Republicans and Obama Democrats, they can be proponents of mass murder.

Yankees celebrated the desegregation of restaurants and put their (I should say our, since I did at the time) trust in government to do what was right and make the world a better place, morally as well as economically. Today little protest is raised against government attempts to stamp out every evil from racism to distracted driving to substance abuse to to prostitution to terrorism, even where it involves invasions into what any reasonable person would consider one's private life (like the bathroom and bedroom). Even when it involves the mass killing of innocent people.

But I would suggest that where government has failed to stamp out these vices, accepting its right to do so has involved us in much greater evil.

Jesus nowhere tells us to regulate others' views on race. We are to pursue justice for all, the safety of all people and their property from violence and fraud, and we are to be hospitable, a city on a hill that welcomes those outside the main stream. I can castigate Lester Maddox and try to change the thinking of his society all I want, but if I'm not willing to say, "Mr. Negro [That was the polite term in those days—QP], you don't need Lester Maddox's restaurant. Come to my house for a barbecue," I'm not doing my job, plain and simple. And, as is most likely the case, if Mr. Negro says no, he'd prefer to be with his people, he's within his rights as well.

Christian Nudists? (Part 3)

— How goes it?

— Well, I will admit that I wasn't looking forward to seing you here today.

— Thanks a lot! How so?

— I found out that my son has been looking at pornography on the Internet.

— And you expected me to what, be glad about it?

— Well, you're such a fan of nudism . . .

— Wait. I said that every argument that can be advanced against nudism can be applied to the wars overseas, and I said that every argument in support of what the TSA does at airports can be applied to nudism, but if you remember, that was my way of saying that the wars and the TSA are immoral, not that nudism is moral. If either of us was saying that nudism is a good thing, it was you, by rejecting my argument.

— Well whatver, I don't think looking at pornography is good.

— I might surprise you and think it's not good too. But is there anything to be thankful for here?

— What?

— We're supposed to rejoice evermore and in everything give thanks. So what's there to rejoice and give thanks about?

— Help me here.

— No, seriously. Could he have been looking at anything worse than what you think he was looking at, or doing something even worse?

— Oh, yeah. I'm sure there's worse out there.

— Can you tell what his favorite stuff is?

— Yeah, he'd fit in with you. He says he doesn't want to see sex. Just nudity.

— Be careful what you accuse me of. So he's into chicks, but nothing kinky.

— Right.

— Well, see there's something to be thankful for. He could be looking at baseball.

— I wish he had been looking at baseball.

— What I meant was it would be worse if he were looking at baseball.

— Looking at baseball is worse than looking at naked women? You're out of your mind. Wait. Don't tell me. Let's see if I remember. Doctors and TSA agents look at naked women all the time, so they're inured to it, so it's not a sin, and if my son looks at enough naked women he'll get inured and everything will be hunky-dory. I'm supposed to believe that?

— If he were inured to it, he wouldn't do it for fun, would he?

— No, he'd move on to other things. But those other things might be worse. Like kinky sex. Like sadomasochsim. Like mass murder, the way Ted Bundy went. Bundy said he started out with pornography and went on to mass murder. I don't want my son to go that way.

— I don't want your son to end up a mass murderer either. That's why I say you don't want him watching baseball.

— The blogger from hell won't have a post until you tell my why, so I'll be a good straight man here. How is it that baseball leads to mass murder?

— It does perhaps more often than pornography, but not always.

— And the connection is . . .

— It's right here. The San Diego Padres' Sunday home uniforms. That is a stylized combat outfit, right?

— It is. So what?

— Professional baseball players are glorifying people who go off and murder innocent people.

— You're assuming what you need to prove, that the US Army is guilty of murder.

— Ever heard of My Lai? Or Najibian? And if Eisenhower and MacArthur were right, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mass murder on a scale Ted Bundy wouldn't have undertaken if you'd offered it to him. Do you think Jesus is a hundred percent OK with how the west was won, or Sherman's march through Georgia, or the killing of a quarter million Filipinos after the Spanish left?

— Those were exceptions.

— So was Ted Bundy. The number of people looking at naked women is greater than the grains of sand on the seashore, but we can pretty much count the people who have gone from there to becoming mass murderers. The number of people involved in those wholesale slaughters runs into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

— Sheesh. Even if you're right, that still doesn't involve baseball.

— So you don't think that the Padres and Major League Baseball are at all complicit in the "collateral damage" our military is creating overseas.

— It's up to you to prove that they are.

— How about if I show you that baseball is an arm of the government? Would that help make my point?

— Yeah. Like drinking extract of peach pits "helps support" good health.

— So what would convince you?

— I don't know what would, but I can't seem to shut you up. How is baseball an arm of the government?

— Of the thirty stadiums in the major leagues, twenty-nine were built with government money. Every Little League I know of plays on government property, either a government school yard or a park. Almost every baseball program between Little League and the major leagues is played on government property, the exceptions being private schools that have baseball programs. How'm I doin'?

— So the government generously provides these things. So what?

— The government generously takes my money against my will and provides these things.

— That's just "sour grapes." Besides, that's local government, not the feds.

— Taking my money to build baseball stadiums is of a piece with taking my money to kill innocent people.

— Says you.

— Why do you think Congress has held hearings to prodsecute the likes of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens for steroid use?

— Because those men are in a position of influence, and what they do to their bodies can influence children, and protecting children is the government's business.

— So the government needs to control them.

— Right.

— Who controls this arm?

— Oh, so because the government controls it, it's an arm of the government.

— Who else's arm would it be?

— I'm still not convinced. And I still would rather have my son watching baseball than looking at pornography.

— Depending on your definition of pornography, I would too. If pornography is the graphic representation of extramarital sexual activity, I certainly would say he's better off with baseball. But you said that's not where he's at.

— Do you really think it's better for him to be looking at naked women than watching a baseball game?

— I've never heard of nudists blowing up innocent people and then being proud of it the way the people who unfurl the flag, sing the national anthem, and salute the military flyovers at baseball games are proud of those who kill thousands of people overseas and then deny their victims' humanity by calling them collateral damage. There's something to be said for having the goal of living in peace and asking only to be left alone.

— But—good grief!—they run around naked!

— But—good grief!—baseball players steal other people's money to build their stadiums! I don't know how accomplished you are at taking other people's property, but I suspect you've been naked with no one objecting. You might even have been naked in the presence of other people who didn't object. When was the last time you heard of someone taking other people's property against their will without those people being unhappy about it, let alone bombing their houses or killing their family members?

— These are just the tragedies of war. They can't be helped.

— Who would you rather have fora neighbot? Someone who runs around naked, or someone who would blow up your house and kill your family with no regrets if he thought it were the best way to protect his interests?

— Nudism is just wrong. And besides, these people get kids hooked into that system.

— Collateral damage includes children dead and maimed. Do you think flyovers and honor guards and other connections of baseball with the military, and government in general, has no influence on getting kids to join the military, let alone to accept government programs like schools and parks that are financed by theft?

— Come on, those stadiums were built with bond issues, or through the decisions of elected officials. That's not stealing!

— So if five people decide to take what belongs to one other person, or four other people, it's not stealing?

— Not if it's government.

— So if a government agency were to open a nudist resort, it would be OK for them to tax you to support it?

— No, it wouldn't. Nudist resorts are inherently immoral. Schools and hospitals and baseball stadiums aren't inherently immoral.

— And neither is killing innocent people?

— Not if we aren't targeting them. Bad things happen in war. That's why it's so important to fight them over there: so we don't have to fight them over here.

— Is there any limit to the number of innocent people you can collaterally damage before it becomes immoral?

— Not if the alternative is that we lose the war.

— And it's also OK to tax people to build baseball stadiums, but not nudist resorts.

— Right.

— And there's no moral limit to the amount of taxation as long as people benefit from what the government does with the revenue.

— Right.

— If the end of a nudist resort can disqualify taxation as a means for acquiring revenue, doesn't that mean the the end of a baseball stadium, or even a school or hospital, justifies that same means of taxation? Aren't you giving me an end-justifies-the-means argument for all taxation?

— No.

— So when does the end justify the means and when does it not?

— The end never justifies the means, but it can disqualify it.

— So if the end is good, taxation is OK, but if the end is bad, it's not.

— Right.

— But that doesn't mean that the end justifies the means.

— Right. Look, this hasn't been any help at all. I think there are better things my son can be doing with his time than looking at naked women.

— Really? Like what?

— Like reading the Bible, or the classics, or praying, or meditating on Scripture, or getting in touch with people who need company, or volunteering somewhere. Or learning a musical instrument or a foreign language, or woodworking, or painting, or writing poetry or hymns.

— I notice that . . .

— Or watching baseball. You can look at naked women all you want, but I don't want him doing that.

— I don't want me doing that either. Everything on your list is better.

— Even the baseball?

— No, but since I still watch it occasionally, I guess I'd better shut up.

— It's about time.

Five Reasons Barack Obama Is Bad News for Black People

The Trayvon Martin case has sparked a loud response from "the black community" (as though blacks are so many chocolate bunnies out of the same mold), one of the loudest of which belongs to President Barack Obama. While I don't know what transpired before the shooting of Mr. Martin, that Mr. Obama would speak so loudly tells me that things are not as he would like me to believe them. Despite his rhetoric, Mr. Obama is no friend of black people, and if he says one thing, people should consider the possibility that its opposite is actually true. This is especially true for blacks, who arguably comprise the most vulnerable ethnic group in our country.

Why should no self-respecting black person trust Barack Obama?

Inflation

Mr. Obama has presided over a huge increase in the supply of digital dollars, "money" backed by nothing but "the full faith and credit of the United States government." Why does this hurt blacks?

Whenever anyone creates "money" out of thin air, either by counterfeiting paper bills, clipping or debasing the metal in coins, or declaring the money into existence using a computer keyboard, the effect is the same: those with immediate access to the new "money" have increased buying power: they can buy goods and services at the old prices. But the more money there is in circulation, the more those at the front of the line can bid prices up, and those at the end of the line, who have to wait for the "money" to trickle down pay higher prices, as do those who do not have access to it at all. Those in the inner circle benefit; everyone else suffers.

Blacks as a group are underrepresented in the inner circle and overrepresented at the end of the line, so they are more likely than whites to face the higher prices caused by inflation with little or no additional new "money" to pay them. Think gasoline: how many blacks are earning today three times what they were earning ten years ago? Yet the price of gasoline has more than tripled, as have the prices of such things as groceries, clothing, and highway tolls.

Cronyism

Much of the money that Mr. Obama has allowed to be created has gone directly into the coffers of the elite bankers, the richest people the world has ever seen. As I've just explained, this money has esentially been taken out of the pockets of blacks and given to whites.

While this is the most blatant example of cronyism, innumerable other examples abound, such as defense contractors and educational institutions. As with everything else government does, whatever the wording of the policies, what actually comes to pass is a product not of justice but of expediency: the powerful will do whatever they consider most beneficial. And while the powerful are not black, those who pay for cronyism are.

Unionization and the Minimum Wage

The banksters aren't the only privileged whites to benefit at the expense of blacks under Mr. Obamma's rule. While walking to work shortly after the election, I saw a headline on the Public Record, a union tabloid: "Obama Owes Unions Bigtime." Barry, Barry, he's their man.

While union rhetoric is intended to portray unions as the friends of the poor, the opposite is true, unless "friends don't let friends take low-paying jobs." The first law of the marketplace is that the higher the price for a good or service, the less of it will be demanded. An employer willing to hire X number of employees at five dollars per hour will hire fewer if forced to pay ten dollars per hour. This is good for those who get hired, of course, but not for those who can find no work.

Similarly, a worker might be willing to shuffle papers for five dollars an hour in a comfortable, friendly environment, but refuse to engage in heavy lifting in the cold and damp or scorching heat for the same wage. If it's fair for workers to refuse to work too long or too hard for low pay, it's fair for employers to refuse to hire at high mandated wages.

Like it or not, blacks are less likely to be hired than whites, and they have the same right to refuse work that demands too much for too little pay. The result is a higher unemployment rate for blacks.

The second law (or is it really the first?) is that only the worker can decide whether he is better off giving his time and effort for the money or looking for a more favorable exchange, and only the employer can decide whether to risk his capital on a given worker. Government-mandated wage scales, which includes both unions and minimum wages, take that choice from the workers and employers. Since lack of freedom to choose is the common definition of slavery, it is fair to say that Mr. Obama prefers a slave system to a free market. Given that whites disproportionately occupy positions of power relative to blacks, who is more likely to be the slave?

While it is true that some union members and minimum wage workers who are employed receive higher wages than they otherwise would, these benefit at the expense not only of workers whose skills will not attract a buyer at the minimum wage rate, but also those whose labor is worth more than the mandated union rate. The former, as I have said, are disproportionately black.

However, one would expect that the latter are also, since blacks generally have to be better workers than their white counterparts to overcome prejudice and be hired for the same job; also, employers have incentive to lower the wages of newer and better workers when they are forced to hire less-profitable workers. This is especially true when older workers, who would be disproportionately white, cannot be fired because of union tenure laws.

So privileged groups benefit from unionization and the minimum wage by pricing under-privileged workers, disproportionately blacks, out of the market and penalizing the hard workers who do break into the better jobs.

The War on Drugs

Candidate Obama dared his detractors to use his past marijuana use against him by looking them in the eye and saying, "Of course I inhaled. That's the whole point." He might as well have added, "What are you going to do about it?"

Though he was trying to appear sincere by distancing himself from Bill Clinton's and George W. Bush's dissembling about their drug use, he thereby proved himself a breathtaking hypocrite: he admits to having used marijuana himself and has paid no penalty for it, but he has no compunction about jailing others who do so. Similarly, he is willing to play the race card in the Trayvon Martin case but shows no remorse over murdering Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, who was guilty of no crime, nor of presiding over a system in which the majority of violators of drug laws are white but the majority of those in jail for violating drug laws are black; furthermore, they serve longer sentences than whites.

Drug-law conviction bars these "criminals" from good jobs, making them vulnerable to the hardships of unionization and the minimum wage. And again, as a group, this hurts blacks more than whites.

The Wars Overseas

The military, like the rest of society, is disproportionately white at the top and black at the bottom. Those who direct the war from their air-conditioned quarters are white; those out in the battle fields getting killed and maimed are black. These "volunteers" come from outside the inner circle and are driven into the killing business by the unemployment that follows unionization and the minimum wage, to say nothing of schools that do not teach and a welfare system that encourages single motherhood. These are the "heroes" honored by flyovers at football games and "Veterans Memorial Highway" signs. Maybe they think these honors make the risk and trauma worthwhile—as I say, only they can decide—but I suspect most don't. I wouldn't.

So there you have it.

Many blacks trust Mr. Obama because he has dark skin and frizzy hair, and their hearts are in it because he is the "President of the United States of America." With the office comes trust. But is he, as president, worthy of that trust? Should blacks want their president to be that man, or someone else?

If I were black, I would want a president who promotes honest money and the rights of prospective employers and employees to interact, and who will end cronyism, the war on drugs and the wars overseas. There is someone in the political arena who has been working hard to do do all that for thirty years, and it's not Barack Obama. If you don't know who it is, you need to find out.

How Can Three Hundred Million People Be One Community?

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 15 What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? (2 Cor 6:14-15)

Christians in the US assume that they are citizens of "one nation under God," applying "red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight" to Uncle Sam as much as to Jesus—provided the people referred to are US citizens. Oh, we have our disagreements, of course. Most of those who voted for president in 2008 voted for Barack Obama, who was, if one was to believe the e-mails evangelicals were forwarding in October of 2008, a precursor of the antichrist, but now that he's shown himself to be as much a part of the establishment as his predecessor and his closest rival . . . hey, there's nothing to worry about.

Of course, the evangelical call now is for "anybody but Obama" to take the oath in 2013, but if Obama wins in November, evangelicals will still sing hymns in teary-eyed joy come May and June when their children go off to join his military.

You've noticed that I don't like Barack Obama. I also don't like John McCain. Or Mitt Romney. Or Hillary Clinton. I don't want them running my life. Not only that, I don't like people who want to run my life by proxy and so vote such monsters into office. I especially don't like people who vote them into office so they will take my money and use it to kill obviously innocent people and jail sinners the Bible calls God's people to persuade (2 Cor 5:11, 20), never to molest. And if that's not enough, if Jesus is the one telling them to do this, then I don't like Jesus either.

If that sounds nasty, think of the anti-Obama (or anti-Bush, or anti-Sarah Palin, or anti-Louis Farrakhan or Rush Limbaugh or whoever) e-mail forwards you've gotten. The names are different, but the attitude is the same, isn't it? Or how about the term "culture war"—does it seem too far fetched? It doesn't to me.

So I ask, How can people who disagree so violently (sometimes in the literal sense) about fundamental moral issues be considered one nation, let alone one community? "Any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and a house divided against itself will fall" (Luke 11:17). By that definition we are at best one nation, but a nation doomed to fall. The liberals hate the conservatives, the free-marketers hate the bleeding hearts, and the crony capitalists hate the tree huggers. And we call ourselves one nation?

What is it that makes you part of a nation? Is it something outside you, like the flag flown and the uniforms worn by the thugs who take your money and use it to spread misery? Or is it what's inside you, what you love, your goals in life?

Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I like to think my citizenship is in heaven, that the world belongs to a God who loves me despite my spectacular failures and who designed his love shown on Calvary to lead me to forsake my sins and live for his glory. My true countrymen are those who love God, which they prove in part by treating their neighbors as they themselves want to be treated. As for those who spurn God's love, and thus his ways, I am to relate to them as much as possible as an ambassador, not an assailant. I see no other nation, nor can I imagine one, worth being part of, and certainly not a nation headed by the likes of Barack Obama that worships such idols as prime-time television and reveres athletes and entertainers, not to mention members of the armed forces, be they "military" or "police."

"But we have to protect ourselves from terrorists [or economic disaster or the flu or pornography or drugs or . . .]!"

Who is this "we"? There's you, who want to take my money and use it in ways I abhor. And there's me. If there's a "we," it's the "we" who will suffer blowback at the hands of survivors of your aggression, or it's the "we" who will be impoverished by your "compassion."

Dear friend, if your compassion depends on weapons, badges, and uniforms to succeed, I don't want to benefit from it, and I certainly don't want to be exploited by it. Go away.

That said, I do know a way three hundred million people can be one community: we stop aspiring to be one great nation and start being faithful in the little things. We clean the Philistines out of our own bean fields—the idols from our hearts and lives and homes (2 Sam 23:11-12). We erect our own private temples, no matter how unimpressive, by discipling our families and keeping our churches focused on the Bible, justice, compassion, and mercy (Zech 4:10). And we trust that the God who sees us faithful in the small things will reward us with greater things (Luke 19:16-19).

I join with people who don't allow abortion, but maybe the next guy's friends do, or my health care plan covers chiropractors but the next guy's doesn't. What they do over there isn't my concern, and more than the carnage in China during the 1960s was my concern (when I was in my early teens). Instead of "Everything you do is my business," we take the tack, "What's yours is yours, what's mine is mine, I'll do it my way, you do it yours." In case of foreign attack, it would be to both sides' advantage to preserve the status quo rather than falling under a more centralized system that chips away at both systems, but beyond that we try to let each polity experiment, and may the best system convince the others to imitate it and be allied with it.

But of course, that's a pipe dream. Politicians and their minions are not interested in the advantage of their subjects; having power over others is the final goal as well as the means of achieving it. And no polity, no matter how small, would be free of those who would enslave their neighbors "for the common good," or in the name of "justice" (which is always in reality "just us"). The best we can pray for is that the large units will collapse before they can do too much damage and that we can find small units of like-minded people to hang with and ward off the looters.

God commands us to be examples of personal integrity and neighborliness (Matt 5:14; 1 Cor 10:31). Whatever effect that has on convincing people to abandon politics and embrace voluntary servanthood, I know of no other way to get them to leave the kingdom of darkness and follow the Light of the World. We may not get three hundred million people to join us, but perhaps God will grant us a polity large enough that we spend most of our days serving people who expect to benefit from serving us. That wouldn't be the world, or even "from sea to shining sea," but do we really need anything more?

What's In a Name?

My editing business has some interesting prospective clients, two writers with Arabic names reviewing books by Palestinian authors about the situation in Palestine (or the Palestinian territories, or whatever you want to call the area). So far they have both treated me as I would like to be treated, so to the degree that it is possible to make one’s customers one’s friends, I have two new friends.

Now the Great Commission tells me that these are two potential disciples, that I am to preach the Gospel to them. How simple it would be to tell them, after an exchange in which they praise my work (and earning that praise is, of course, another matter), that I am an evangelical Christian. How wonderful it would be if they would take that to mean that I make it my goal to love God more than anything and with all I am and have, that the first indicator of that love is my love for all my neighbors as proven by my efforts to do for them what I would have others do for me, that I acknowledge my failures in that regard, and that I know of only one way to escape God’s righteous wrath for my sins, the blood Jesus Christ shed on the cross!

Instead, I would expect them to see “evangelical Christian” and think that I consider Muslims (especially Palestinians) Untermensch and Israelis entitled to impunity.

If God indeed rules the State of Israel, then we should petition Tel Aviv to make us citizens. (After all, God certainly doesn’t rule the US, at least not so’s you’d notice it.) But if he doesn’t–and he doesn’t—then we must conclude that the State of Israel is in rebellion against God the same as any other political entity, including (or perhaps especially) the US, and judge its deeds by the same objective standard we use to judge those of any other individual or group.

More importantly, we need to consider what’s at stake in the words “God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you” (Rom 2:24). If the choice is either to “stand by our ally Israel” or to preach the gospel to the Palestinians, which way do we go? Can we assume that we will never be confronted with that choice?

“Joel of Jerusalem” used to write in the magazine Israel My Glory of the trouble the Israeli government gave him for preaching the Gospel in Jerusalem. That is enough evidence for me that we are more likely to preserve God’s good name by saying, “Let me die with the Philistines” than by confusing God’s glory with the State of Israel.

Reaping What We Sow

"Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." — Luke 6:38

During my formative years we were proud to be citizens of the nation that had conquered Germany, ending the slaughter of innocent people and saving the world from a fascist state notable for imperialism abroad and deadly secret police in the homeland. Movies like The Great Escape, TV shows like Combat and Twelve O'Clock High, and the miniseries Holocaust reminded us constantly of the evils of the Nazis. We were also reminded of Nazi Germany as we read George Orwell's masterful Nineteen Eighty-Four. We knew that what it described was possible because we already had the telecommunications technology, though it wasn't being used by the government to spy on us. But whenever anyone in authority used power for evil purposes, we would respond as on cue, "Hey, man, is this 1984?"

(Those really in the know knew that the Soviet Union was almost a literal fulfillment of Orwell's "prophecy," but most of the media and education establishment were socialists of one stripe or another, so it wasn't polite to point that out. I was totally fooled myself, even though I read a few books by Christians who had been persecuted by the Communists.)

Add Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth into the mix, and we considered ourselves on our guard against the rise of any totalitarian police state in the good old USA.

Unfortunately, Wile E. Coyote had already run past the edge of the cliff. He just hadn't looked down yet.

In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran's prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalized Iran's oil industry, and replaced him with Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had fled for his life for fear of the supporters of nationalization. One reinstalled, the Shah was friendly to US interests, so for twenty-six years, the US overlooked his autocracy, specifically the use of his secret police force, SAVAK, to arrest, detain, torture, and kill his opponents.¹

Consider for a moment what a secret police force is. By secret is meant that no one knows the identity of the agents; no one can say, "My neighbor is a member of the secret police," because no one, not even their spouses, knows who they are.

Targets are chosen in secret, so no one knows who the next target is. And as time goes on, targets can be chosen at the whim not only of the chief of state, but also by those in the secret police apparatus. At first targets might be only those who pose a threat to the regime, but eventually they include those against whom those sufficiently powerful have personal vendettas.

In a police state, once a victim has been detained, he has no recourse to courts (not that having such would do him any good), and his friends and family have no way of knowing what has happened to him, where he is, or when or if he will be released. To top it off, the longer he is detained and the more he learns about the system that has detained him, the less likely he is to be released, because he now knows the secrets of the system, which depends most of all on secrecy.

During those days I was never taught to question the legitimacy of supporting the Shah, not even by my fellow evangelicals. It was only when an article in Sojourners, a left-wing magazine whose view of Scripture I soon found suspect, described the situation that I even knew it existed, so secret were the Shah's secret police. I had heard much about the persecution of Christians in Communist countries, but, child of the media that I was, I had never realized that the taxes I sent to Uncle Sam went to preserving governments we would never tolerate in the US.

Make that past tense. We would never have tolerated them in the days between the Holocaust and 1984, but the evangelical church is celebrating the creation of one in our day.

The presidency of George W. Bush was supported by no one more than the evangelical community. I remember receiving e-mail forwards celebrating that man's godliness. Now there was reason to be glad his Democratic opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry, were not president, but there's a difference between being grateful for the absence of a greater evil and celebrating a positive good, and these were celebrations, not expressions of relief.

During the Bush presidency, one of his functionaries, John Yoo, became notorious in constitutionalist circles because of his work to establish the legitimacy (i.e., lawfulness) of what he termed "the unitary executive": he believed that because the nation was at war (the War on Terror), the president needed to be essentially a king, with powers to declare war, and to detain, torture, and execute "enemies of the nation" at will.

That the next president might be a Democrat fazed evangelical Bush supporters not at all, and indeed they cheered when Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. They cheered louder when he killed Osama bin Laden instead of capturing him and plying him for information about the terrorists who supposedly threaten our existence, and they cheered even louder when he killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, without establishing his guilt of any crime.

So in the US we now are ruled by an autocrat with life-or-death powers over US citizens, just like the Shah of Iran.

Except the Shah didn't have a practically unlimited budget. He was the autocrat of a third-rate country, and though he had resources enough to gain international notoriety for his oppression of his enemies, he was nowhere near omnipotent, as his dethronement proves.

Uncle Sam, in contrast, is nearly omnipotent, the embodiment of the Yuletide hymn, "He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good, . . . ."

Our electronic communications are now all monitored. Soon we will have spy drones in the sky able to track all our movements. Every motor vehicle will be required to carry a GPS that will allow the authorities to track position, speed, and seatbelt usage. As people lose their jobs and homes, revenue from conventional taxes and even from "sin taxes" on such things as tobacco and alcohol will fall, to be replaced by "taxation by citation": if "sinners" are fair game but unable to provide the desired revenue, certainly "lawbreakers"—e.g., speeders and those who don't buckle their seat belts—can expect to be forced to shoulder the load to relieve the tax burden on the law abiding.

The doctrine of American Exceptionalism teaches that the US is the one nation in the world that can be trusted with a totalitarian government; the US government would never become like Nazi Germany, the Shah's Iran, or the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the Bible says that all have sinned, all have fallen short of the glory of God, all have hearts that are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked beyond comprehension. There is every biblical reason to believe that the tyranny of Nazi Germany and the Shah's regime awaits us, as does their ignominious end.

Worse, the disdain we used to heap on German Christians for going along with Hitler will be aimed at us by those who watch us fall. And don't think there won't be many who will work with holy—perhaps even "Christian"—zeal to help us fall the way our "greatest generation" helped Nazi Germany fall about the ears of the Evangelicals who helped build it.

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¹ Nothing in this post should be construed as support for Mosaddegh. Suffice it to say he was a politician, and I have every reason to believe that as such he extorted money and other concessions from productive people and used them for the benefit of those connected to him. My focus is the system that we assented to and supported with our tax money.

Yet Another Reason Government Can Never Be Moral

If government were a moral institution, there would be a moral way to fund it. Government establishes and maintains itself by taxes—an agency funded by voluntary donations would not be government—so for it to exist, it needs to tax, and to exist morally it need to tax morally. We would expect, then, that a moral system of taxation would exist, and further that this system would either be described in the Bible or be easily discerned from nature.

Alas for even the best-intentioned statists, such a system is not to be found. Income taxes, import duties, sales taxes, and inheritance taxes all cannot avoid being immoral, and this is true even if we grant the premise that taxation, the extortion of money under threat of greater violence, is moral to begin with.

Let's begin with the flat income tax, probably the most popular form of taxation among conservatives, who think, and rightly so, that it is fairer than the current graduated income tax with its complicated assessment and deduction system. While a flat tax with no deductions would involve less preparation work than today's abomination, and it would not discourage people from advancing into higher tax brackets, it would still not be fair or just. Here's why.

Ben and Mal work at the same job and receive the same hourly wage, and outside of work they like to play with their kids (they each have two) and go to movies. The salient difference is that while Mal works a forty-hour week, Ben works a sixty, all at the same hourly rate. So Ben's yearly earnings are half again what Mal's are. To the degree that income is the measure of richness, Ben is half again as rich as Mal.

If they both spend X percent of their income on food and shelter, and Y percent on their transportation, and put Z precent into savings, that leaves them both with W percent for discretionary spending. On that basis, we can assume that Ben's car, house, diet, and clothes are half again as good as Mal's, and his bank account is half again as large.

This is because neither is penalized by the grocer, the theater owner, or the clothier for their work habits.

When Ben goes to the store, he pays a shekel for a bag of potatoes and another for a bag of tomatoes. When he takes his family to the theater, he pays a shekel per seat. When he buys a shirt, he pays a shekel. Mal also pays a shekel for a bag of potatoes, a bag of tomatoes, a seat at the theater, and a shirt.

But look what happens at tax time: Ben's flat income tax is half again Mal's, though they both pay T percent.

Why is this unjust? They both net their hourly rate minus T percent per hour. Surely that's an improvment over a graduated tax, which would make Ben's hourly earnings less than Mal's if his increased earnings put him into a higher tax bracket. And doesn't the Bible's tax, the tithe, work exactly the same way?

These are valid arguments, but let's take a step back.

Ben has already spent more time at work than Mal. This not only means that Mal has twenty more hours a week to go to movies and play with his kids, it also means that Ben has, assuming both of them are engaged in worthwhile endeavors, already contributed half again as much to the well-being of his neighbors as Mal has. So if you're going to argue that Ben should "contribute more" or "give back" to society simply because he has more money, I would have to ask how much more he needs to give: he has already given half again as much time, as well as the goods or services he has rendered. To make him pay half again as much for his "stay out of jail permit" makes no more sense than charging him half again as much for a shirt. (And, of course, he could always refuse to buy the shirt; he doesn't have the same option with his tax bill.)

As for the tithe principle, God can ask for the tithe because, first, all property is his to begin with: "The earth and everything in it are the Lord's" (Ps 24:1). The tithe is what he requires from his subjects as acknowledgment of his sovereignty: "A tithe of everything from the land, whether grain from the soil or fruit from the trees, belongs to the LORD; it is holy to the LORD" (Lev 27:30).

Unlike government, for which taxes are its lifeblood, God has no need of the tithe: "If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?" (Ps 50:12-13). He can claim a "flat tax" because the wealth came from him in the first place. So even a flat tax is an assertion of sovereignty; note the flat tax mentioned in this malediction against the Israelite apotates who preferred godless monarchy to godly anarchy: "[The king you are asking for] will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day" (1 Sam 8:15-18). They wanted someone other than God to assert sovereignty over them, and the king's tithe would be a symbol that they had gotten their wish.

Unless you also believe that the government is the ultimate source and owner of all wealth, you need something besides the tithe to base your claim on.

So what about per capita taxes and sales taxes?

One of the arguments for a graduated income tax is that per capita taxes are regressive, forcing the Mals of the world to part with a greater percentage of their incomes than the Bens, and the less Mal earns at his job the harder the per capita tax hits him. For that reason I would have to agree that per capita taxes are unfair: they impact the poor more than the rich. That leaves sales taxes and import duties, but as you've probably already realized, both are simply an income tax in disguise, paid by the merchant rather than by the employee, and the same moral problem remains: the more goods and services the merchant provides, the more he is penalized at tax time.

"God's work done God's way will never lack God's support," the old missionary saw goes. If we can trust the Holy Spirit to guide his people, we can say with confidence "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid": he will move his people to contribute voluntarily to a community that meets our need for protection from enemies near and far, and that provides for the needy in a just and fair way. We don't need a tax-fed system to "shepherd"—that is, coerce—us.

If you're looking around and thinking that's crazy, there's no way God would take the Christians you can see and build such a community, I would suggest that that's because either there is no Holy Spirit or those you are looking at aren't listening to him. Maybe they're too busy trying to protect, defend, and enlarge an inherently immoral system.

Ron versus the Rest

Why this anarchist thinks a vote for Ron Paul, no anarchist he, is a vote for positive good and not a vote for the lesser of two evils:

	Barack Obama	Hillary Clinton	Newt Gingrich	Mitt Romney	Rick Santorum	Ron Paul
Is the Constitution such an arcane document that only an elite cadre can be trusted to interpret it?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Is the Constitution obsolete?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Is the US government entitled to summarily kill or incarcerate anyone it deems a threat to its purposes?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Does the need for safety from terrorists trump the "unalienable rights" spoken of by the Declaration of Independence, or constitutional rights?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Are US citizens somehow "exceptional," better than people from other countries?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot put in your body?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot do in your bedroom?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot do in your bathroom?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine how your children are educated?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot post or read on the Internet?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot pass on to your survivors when you die?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine whether abortion is legal or illegal in a given state?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine whom you hire or work for, or the terms of such employment?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what businesses will survive and which will fold?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Does what you receive in exchange for your labor belong first to the government and then, only after it takes what it wants, to you?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Can the US military be trusted always to do what is right?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should Americans be virtually strip searched and have their genitals touched at airports or anywhere the federal government deems it necessary to do so?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Does the Islamic world hate us for our virtue and freedoms?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Is the nature of things such that some people have to become poorer for others to become richer?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No

Eighty percent of the people in this country say we're headed the wrong way. I say we're headed to go off a cliff that gets higher every day. Five of the six candidates with a shot at the presidency in November want to adjust the speed at which we are headed for the cliff. One wants us to change direction entirely.

That's a big difference.

So Ron Paul Is a Racist: So What?

The Establishment propaganda mill is all a-twitter with accusations that Ron Paul is a racist. Having all my life considered racism a serious sin, a self-righteous Yankee considering it the province of benighted Southerners, I'm not eager to cast my lot with a racist, even if that particular Texan was born in Pittsburgh. Also, as an anarchist, I'm not totally satisfied with Ron Paul's small-government libertarianism. So why isn't this charge of racism, even if true, not enough to get me to tell the Ron Paul REVOLution to go to hell?

Racism is an integral part of fallen human nature.

The original sin was the desire to be "like God," the center of the universe. May I suggest that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," every one of us is the center of his own universe, and we all tend to regard those who are more like us, or who conform to our standards, as more worthy than those who don't? Racism is but one form of prejudice, and prejudice poisons us all.

Let me show you how it plays out in my life.

My morning commute to Philadelphia is less onerous on those days when a certain black lady allows me to walk with her from the train to her workplace. On occasion she'll say something like, "I coulda did that myself." Not the textbook English I was raised to speak, that, and a sure sign of inferiority, right?

Well, no: textbook English or not, when the conversational ball gets dropped, she is almost always the one who gets it rolling again by punching one of my buttons. And her workplace is a prestigious hospital where she's a nurse practitioner, entrusted with life-or-death matters, something I can't lay claim to. Ain't nothin' to look down on there.

Or take the Filipina who works in the cubicle next to me, who can brighten my day by asking for help with work-related matters or by recommending a song she likes. Those communiqués often come in writing, complete with the kinds of errors I see in my editing work. Poor thing, it's not her fault she's Filipina: she must not be able to get that Asian brain around the complexities of English. But again, the rest of the story is that she is still editing our clients' manuscripts while I rightly got yanked out of the editorial department long ago. (And, lest you miss the irony, Asians score higher than honkies on every "intelligence test" ever devised.)

So if you're perceptive, you've seen that not only do I have to consciously fight racial prejudice, I'm also regionalist, sexist, education-ist, and language-ist. And if you were to see those two ladies, you'd also call me appearance-ist: they are both quite attractive, and you might well ask me about them the question I asked in an earlier post: would their favor mean so much to me if they were dumpy white guys?

The isms that I'm subject to are common to all of us to some degree; it's part of the sinful human nature Jesus died to save us from. So if Ron Paul is a racist, he's simply human.

Some forms of racism are more virulent than others.

I haven't delved deeply into Ron Paul's racist screed, but the line that sticks in my memory is a comment about black muggers: "They do run fast, don't they?"

That was obviously not the most intelligent statement uttered by a human being, but let's see. Most of the people on the USA Olympic track team, the National Football League, and the National Basketball Association seem to be black. Does running play a part in these activities? Is this disproportionate representation attributable only to training, or could there have been some natural resource inherent in these people on which to build?

(And lest I be accused of accusing blacks of deficient mental capabilities, let me repeat Thomas Sowell's observation that football, basketball, and jazz, areas dominated by blacks, require the ability to enact split-second decisions, unlike classical music and chess, traditionally "white" activities, which allow for slower thought processes.)

How virulent is Dr. Paul's racism? Let's answer that by comparing it with that of someone no one in the public eye accuses of racism: Barack Obama.

Mr. Obama presides over a nation in which most illegal drug-related activity is carried out by whites, yet most prisoners incarcerated for drug-related "crimes" are black. Not only are blacks more often incarcerated, their sentences tend to be longer. If that isn't virulent racism, I don't know what is. Mr. Obama has had three years to change the situation but hasn't. And none of the "non-racist" Republican presidential candidates has even mentioned the problem.

But for thirty years the "racist" Ron Paul has been calling for an end to the War on Drugs and for the release of those imprisoned for drug-related violations, including, presumably, those fast-running blacks.

Verbal assault like Dr. Paul's comment is not nothing, but given a choice between being verbally slighted by the power brokers and being stuck in a cage for years, I'll take the former, and I assume most black convicts would too.

We already live in a nation known for racism.

"American exceptionalism," an idea I hadn't heard of until a year or so ago, is essentially Hitler's master race concept couched in nationalist, not racist, terms. It is the province primarily of the right—Rick Santorum actually dropped the term in a recent debate—but when Madeline Albright spoke in the 1990s of the US as "the indispensable nation," she was a leftist saying essentially the same thing: the US is the best country in the world, and its citizens are therefore entitled to do things the rest of the world's inferior citizens aren't, like invading other countries, changing their governments, killing innocent people, driving them from their homes, and whatever else they need to do to protect and advance their interests.

I have heard both Dennis Prager (an "American exceptionalist") and an ordained Presbyterian elder say in as many words that Uncle Sam's killing of innocents overseas is justified because he is there to make life better for the local population as a whole. He targets only the bad guys, and therefore he can be excused when he kills the innocent, even though he knows innocent people will die as a result of his actions. ("Hey, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.") This about a nation both these men rightly disparage when it comes to the abortion holocaust and pornography.

How a nation that is so sexually immoral and so violent that much of the population thinks no one but the government should own guns lest there be mass bloodshed can consider itself ordained of God to police the world and kill innocent people with impunity is simply beyond me.

The US's most beloved presidents have been racists. One more won't hurt.

Everyone knows that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Washington even signed a law that made hiding fugitive slaves a federal offense. They may have been good, kind masters—my black friend, somewhat to my surprise, once volunteered that her family had been given an inheritance by just such people—but the zeal they showed for the liberty of whites somehow did not apply to blacks. At least not their blacks. At least not until after they died.

Ah, but what about Lincoln, the Great Emancipator? Remember Dion's paean in the 1960s? "He freed a lot of people, but it seems good they die young." If anyone is beloved by both left and right, it's Lincoln.

Well, Lincoln was a racist. I have shamelessly copied and pasted the following quotes from here.

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.” — Abraham Lincoln (Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858; The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, pp. 145–146.)

From Lincoln's First Inaugural Address:

"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

Compare those to the words of the "racist" Ron Paul:

Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist.

If this be racism, make the most of it.

Can Orthodoxy Be Dead?

Our Sunday school class has been going through Ezekiel's prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar, a horrific time in the history of God's people brought about by their apostasy and idolatry. As shocking as the apostasy and idolatry were, the true horror was that the people of Jerusalem were content with the status quo: "The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way" (Jer 5:31).

Leading up to the fall of Jerusalem, the people made no pretense of worshiping YHWH, instead openly worshiping Baal (Jer 2:8) and the Queen of Heaven (Jer 7:18). So of course, God's glory left the temple and headed east (Ez 9-10), by implication to the community of exiles in Babylon. Then "the guards of the city" went through Jerusalem, beginning at the sanctuary, and killed everyone who was not grieving over the apostasy in the city.

The problem in Jerusalem was open apostasy: no one named the name of YHWH, and those who did were persecuted. My question, though, is this: is it possible to hold to all the proper theological propositions and still be apostate?

I live at a time in US history in which over 80% of those polled think our nation is "going the wrong way." By any measure, it is financially bankrupt: the official national debt is higher than could ever be repaid, the currency is losing value by the day, and as businesses fail the unemployment rate is high and still rising. "Whatever is true, ... noble, ... right, ... pure, ... lovely, ... admirable ... excellent ... praiseworthy" is scorned; the only virtue is "pushing the envelope," the only right our government recognizes is the "right" to kill the unborn.

Yet the US evangelical church waves this nation's flag proudly.

"We" are also so afraid of "our" enemies that "we" strip-search wheelchair-bound nonagenarians lest they carry weapons of mass destruction onto airplanes, to say nothing of caging sellers of raw milk and growers of industrial hemp, and killing innocent people overseas by the hundreds of thousands, all with the hearty approval of the evangelical church.

Actually, "hearty apporval" is an understatement. Dr. Michael Milton, the new chancellor and CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, has gone so far as to call the decision to reduce military force overseas immoral.

Now if anyone is as orthodox as the day is long, it's RTS Charlotte. When I audited classes there in 1996, they allowed me to ask questions in class and grading my homework, examinations, and term papers, generosity auditors are usually not given. Nothing I saw while there would testify against their desire to be true to the Bible and sensitive to the Holy Spirit.

I have the same impression of World magazine. And my local church.

In contrast, I look in the mirror and see someone whose commitment to Christ is tepid. While those I disagree with over the war and "compassionate conservatism" seem to be fervent in their desire to know and carry out God's will, I find myself making excuses for my self-indulgence. To be honest, I not only find myself wondering if God loves me, I find myself wondering if there is a God at all and even not caring whether there is or not.

Now I want the gospel to be true—without it life has no meaning. But my wanting something to be true doesn't make it true, and, more immediately, it doesn't make it apply to me. So I write the following in the context of Paul's admonition, "If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall" (1 Cor 10:12): I find myself fleeing my own idols (v 14) too slowly.

But given what has come out over the years about the lies the US government has told to its subjects¹ and, more importantly, the love the US evangelical community has lavished on those lies (see 2 Thess 2:11), I think the question needs to be asked: can idolatry prosper in the soil of even fervent theological orthodoxy?

I find one answer in the second chapter of the Revelation.

The church at Ephesus worked beyond weariness to do good deeds, persevered through hardship, could not tolerate wickedness, and pursued theological orthodoxy. Yet despite all that, they had forsaken their first love. They could hate what God hated—the practices of the Nicolaitans, whoever they were—but they didn't love what God loved (Rev 2:1-6). (Sounds like me, except without the hard work and perseverance.)

My question to Dr. Milton and the rest of the visible evangelical community is this: If you had to choose between being a US citizen (which today, as Congress is passing a law that allows the government to cage anyone they please indefinitely without trial, means someone who goes along with everything the government considers necessary) and being a Christian, which would you choose? If a ratio of dead innocents overseas to those killed on 9/11 of somewhere between a hundred and a thousand to one isn't enough, how many would be enough for you to say that you need to choose between evangelizing them and blowing them to hell? How do you know that that point is not too late to change the situation? Or does it just not matter?

My local church gives three times as much money in taxes for the war effort alone as it does to missions, and given the number of seminary professors and former missionaries in the congregation, I would expect this ratio to be on the low side for evangelical churches as a whole. Its prayers for missions and the military reflect this ratio: the former are sporadic and general, the latter consistent and specific. Is God more than three times as concerned that we worship in freedom (i.e., comfort) as he is that the Islamic world hear the gospel?

For that matter, was it really God who sent Christian soldiers to help found the Republic of Iran, in which Islam is the state religion, and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan? In both nations, confessing Christians have paid a horrible price for their "enduring freedom," much greater than the price paid by US evangelicals, which of course the latter take as a call for even more killing, so that "we don't have to fight them over here."

How about fighting Islam over here?

The most fertile ground for Islam in the United States, save perhaps for the wombs of resident Muslim women, is the prison system, the evils of which I have decried here and here. Most of those incarcerated are innocent of any activity that was considered a crime even by Christians a hundred years ago, when the church was more influential than it is today.² Yet what prominent evangelical leaders are willing to come out and say, e.g., "The Bible nowhere gives me jurisdiction over what you grow in your garden, provided it stays in your garden, nor what you consume in the privacy of your own home, nor what you voluntarily exchange with your neighbors; therefore, in the name of Jesus, while I urge my fellow citizens to exercise the utmost caution and restraint in their use of potential intoxicants, I call on the US government to end the War on Drugs and free all those convicted solely of possession and sale of substances"?

If they are worried about the spread of Islam, why do they not take a look at the prisons? Is the ratio of Christian converts to Muslim converts "good enough for government work"? Or do we just love the US government, including its barbaric prison system, more than we love God?

Just as the glory of the Lord departed from the temple of Jerusalem because of the people's open apostasy and allowed them to be slaughtered by the Iraqis of their day, it would seem the Lord removed the lampstand of the church of Ephesus despite its hard work and perseverance and turned the people over to Islam (and, even scarier, the church of Philadelphia shared the Ephesians' fate).

In the past I have taken breaks from writing this blog and reading my favorite writers when I felt I needed to make sure my focus was on Christ and his kingdom and not on attacking the libertine state. Would it be unreasonable to ask the evangelical church in the US to take a month sometime to take Uncle Sam's flag out of the sanctuary and off the flag pole, take off the flag lapel pins, and pray exclusively for Christ's kingdom and its emissaries (including military members and chaplains, but only as they are ambassadors of the gospel)?

Germany was once the hotbed of the Reformation. Before my time, its strong central government was the hope of many Protestants³ for recovery from terrible oppression by the victors of a war they were convinced had been forced on them. When Germany went to war, it was to regain what it said was land unjustly taken from it and later to fight Communism. Today Germany is the economic engine of Europe, but it is not known for a vibrant church.

Is our future the carpet bombings and fire bombings and atomic blasts we have inflicted on others, followed by an age in which the Christian church is an irrelevency, ignored and tolerated at best? Do we avoid such a future best by being "patriotic Americans" exporting democracy by bomb blast, or by single-hearted devotion to Christ and his kingdom?

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1. For starters, see this review of one book and mention of others that praise Franklin Roosevelt for lying the US into World War II.

2. I find it ironic that when it comes to killing and caging innocent people, conservative Republicans side against me with the Progressive Democrats Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

3. "The [Protestant] churches did not reject National Socialism on principle. The idea of a strong authority and a close bond between throne and altar, of the kind that existed in the empire between 1871 and 1918, was in keeping with Protestant tradition. Many ... [Protestants] had reservations about the democratic Weimar Republic and sympathized with political forces – such as the German National People's Party – that idealized the past." Wikipedia entry for the Confessing Church. A bulletin insert put out by Christian History magazine (alas no longer available on line), went even further, saying that evangelical churches put swastikas and pictures of Hitler on their pulpits and the Gestapo supported Christian missions.

On Enlisting

Rex, a friend of a friend, is thinking of joining the Army. He's not just thinking about it—he's taking concrete steps, including being part of a high school-level ROTC program. I asked him through our connection if he'd be willing to allow me to urge him to reconsider his decision to enlist. He said yes, but the conversation hasn't taken place yet and probably won't. What follows is my guess at how it might have gone after the initial pleasantries.

Me: Why do you want to join the Army?

Rex: I want to serve my country.

Me: How is joining the Army a better way to serve your country than, say, doing what Steve Jobs did and offering a product or service that makes people's lives better?

Rex: Our country is at war, and I want to be part of defeating our enemies. Otherwise people won't be able to enjoy the things that Steve Jobs makes.

Me: Do you think there are no iPhones or iPads in Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan?

Rex: There might be a few.

Me: Are there only a few because those you consider our enemies forbid people to own them, or is it just that the people can't afford them?

Rex: Probably a bit of both.

Me: I agree with you. I'd say that the people in power in those places consider it their duty to run others' lives. They have no qualms about taking others' property or telling them what they can and cannot do in the privacy of their own homes. So they steal the money that people might otherwise use to buy iPads, and if the people buy iPads or other Internet devices anyway, they tell them what sites they can and cannot visit. Am I right that you don't want to live in that kind of society?

Rex: Yes.

Me: So that's at least part of why you want to join the Army—so you can do what you want with your life and not have to have others telling you what to do.

Rex: That's part of it. More than that I want to protect innocent people from being killed by terrorists. I don't want bad things done to innocent people.

Me: You want to be a good neighbor by protecting innocent people.

Rex: Yes.

Me: And you're willing to put your own life on the line to do that.

Rex: Yes.

Me: Why do we have to worry about terrorists? What's in it for them? Given a choice between marrying your girlfriend and getting blown up, either as a suicide bomber or a casualty in war, wouldn't you choose to marry your girlfriend?

Rex: Well, duh, I'd rather marry my girlfriend.

Me: So why would—

Rex: Because there aren't enough girls over there. Some men have four wives, and that means some men will never get married. And they've been propagandized, told lies that it's all our fault, or Israel's fault, or our fault because it's Israel's fault, and since there's no hope that they can have a better life, they just blow themselves up to kill as many of us as they can to get revenge on us.

Me: So there's no reasoning with them. The only thing we can do is blow them up.

Rex: Not everyone. Just the terrorists.

Me: How do you make sure it's only the terrorists who get killed?

Rex: You can't. There's always going to be collateral damage.

Me: How much collateral damage is acceptable? If you're given a command to fire a mortar, and you know there will be collateral damage, how do you determine whether fulfilling the objective is worth the amount of collateral damage you'll be inflicting?

Rex: It's not up to me to decide.

Me: You just follow orders.

Rex: Right.

Me: And if you find out afterward that you or your commanding officer underestimated the extent of the collateral damage, how do you decide whether obeying was the right thing to do?

Rex: I don't set the policies. I just carry them out.

Me: So you wouldn't let it bother your conscience.

Rex: That's right.

Me: So the only moral obligation you have is to carry out your orders to the letter. The actual suffering you inflict on innocent people is none of your concern.

Rex: I trust my commanders to order me to do what's right.

Me: Do you believe that any human being is perfect?

Rex: No.

Me: So it's possible that your commanders are fallible. They can make mistakes.

Rex: Everyone is entitled to an honest mistake.

Me: What would you do if you thought your commander was making an honest mistake that would needlessly cost the lives of innocent people?

Rex: I'd—

Me: And you couldn't convince him to change his mind.

Rex: I'd obey him.

Me: I understand that. If you disobey, they'd court martial you, even if it turned out you were right, right?

Rex: Right.

Me: And you'd be in doubly deep doo-doo if you turned out to be wrong.

Rex: Right.

Me: So you'd cover your ass by obeying him.

Rex: Right. But I don't think that would ever happen.

Me: You trust the military.

Rex: Right.

Me: All the way up to the top.

Rex: Right.

Me: Including the commander-in-chief.

Rex: Right.

Me: Did you vote for him?

Rex: Um, hello, I'm not old enough to vote.

Me: OK, did you want the current president to win?

Rex: No.

Me: Why not?

Rex: Because—

Me: You're not racist, are you?

Rex: No, of course not. I didn't like his policies.

Me: Which ones?

Rex: Well,—

Me: Scratch the question. Do you like his policies now?

Rex: He's OK.

Me: So really it didn't matter that the guy you didn't want to win won.

Rex: Right.

Me: And you like him enough that you're willing to have him be your commander-in-chief.

Rex: Right.

Me: Did you have doubts about his honesty during the campaign?

Rex: Some. I also thought he was incompetent.

Me: But he's more competent and honest than you thought.

Rex: Right. Besides, I won't take my commission until after the next election, so he probably won't be in office.

Me: And the guy who replaces him will be better.

Rex: I hope so.

Me: The same electorate as last time will elect someone better next time.

Rex: They've seen what a —

Me: This is your commander-in-chief you're talking about.

Rex: They'll do better next time.

Me: You might be right, but it's pretty much the same people voting, and I thought they thought they were doing better last time. Tell me: What would it take to convince you that your superiors were giving you orders that you would regret obeying?

Rex: I don't know. I would have to think it through at the time.

Me: What criteria would you use to decide?

Rex: Well, if it didn't feel right—

Me: Hasn't the army been teaching you to ignore your feelings?

Rex: OK, fine, I'd think it through.

Me: Would you have time to think it through?

Rex: If I did, I'd think it through. If I didn't, I'd obey. What's wrong with that?

Me: May I suggest that if you're on the battlefield you won't have time to develop the criteria you need to think it through, then think it through? That you need to think it through now, before you enlist?

Rex: Well, I've thought enough, and I'm convinced that joining the army is the right thing to do.

Me: You're convinced that you're fighting on the right side.

Rex: Yes.

Me: Uncle Sam is the good guy.

Rex: Yes.

Me: What do you think of the bailouts?

Rex: The banks were too big to fail. If the government hadn't intervened, too many people would have lost their jobs.

Me: People are still losing their jobs, right?

Rex: Right.

Me: So did the bailouts work?

Rex: They worked well enough.

Me: How many more jobs have to be lost before you would say that they didn't work well enough?

Rex: I don't know.

Me: But you still trust the president you didn't want to see win enough to go to, say, Uganda or Tanzania or Iran to kill women and children because he orders you to.

Rex: Like I said, I don't think he'll be in office when I'm commissioned.

Me: So you trust the same electorate that elected him to elect a better commander-in-chief next time.

Rex: Aren't you listening? It's not the same electorate. They'll know better next time.

Me: Will you still enlist if he gets re-elected?

Rex: Yes.

Me: He's not the best there could be, but he's good enough.

Rex: Yes.

Me: So it doesn't matter who's in the White House. If he tells you to go to Tanzania or Iran to kill women and children, you'll go.

Rex: I won't be going to kill women and children. I'll be going to fight terrorism.

Me: What reason is there to believe that innocent women and children won't be killed by the action you'll be part of?

Rex: Hey, stuff happens in war. The terrorists target innocent people. We don't target them.

Me: But you know they'll die.

Rex: Stuff happens.

Me: If the Chinese decided some guy was a threat to them and killed him while he was in the US, and your girlfriend were killed in the blast, and they knew when they fired that she would be killed, would you say, "That's OK; they didn't target her; stuff happens"?

Rex: No. They shouldn't be killing people on American soil.

Me: But if our government considers someone a threat, it's OK for US troops to kill him, even if he's in another country, and even if they know they will kill innocent people in the process.

Rex: Here's the difference: The Chinese government is bad. Our government is good.

Me: Do you believe that selling raw milk is evil?

Rex: No.

Me: Our government does. They are sending agents these days to jail people who sell raw milk.

Rex: Well, no government is perfect.

Me: What would the government have to do before you would be convinced that it is not good?

Rex: It would have to do bad things to innocent people.

Me: Jailing people for selling raw milk doesn't fit that definition?

Rex: No.

Me: How about arresting people for being Christian?

Rex: Maybe.

Me: Your girlfriend is very active in her church, so she might be one to go to jail if they start arresting Christians, and all you can say is "Maybe"?

Rex: Well, if she went to jail, that would convince me.

Me: Braveheart would be proud of you. Do you know what her church's stands on abortion and homosexuality are?

Rex: Yes.

Me: Do you know what our current president's stand—

Rex: He won't be president when I'm commissioned.

Me: And his replacement—

Rex: —will be better.

Me: And if he's re-elected,—

Rex: It won't matter. Look, I've had enough of this. Goodbye, sir.

Who Would Profit from Another Terrorist Attack?

US citizens are being rendered destitute by the War on Terror, directly through the increase in debt and the consequent increase in taxes needed to pay the interest on that debt, and indirectly through "quantitative easing," the debasement of the currency that makes the accumulation of capital impossible. More importantly, our liberties are being revoked by agencies that consuder us guilty of terrorism until we are able to prove our innocence by passing searches that violate standards of decency considered sacrosanct all over the world until a decade ago.

When asked why they tolerate being so abused by their own government, most USians patiently explain that they are willing to give their great-grandchildren's inheritance to those who would literally strip them of their dignity so that no terrorist will attack them. Asked "Why would anyone want to attack you?" they wil rattle off the conventional wisdom—they hate us because we are good, they hate us because we're evil, they want Islam to take over the world, they want to screw beautiful virgins forever, etc.

But there is still another question to be asked: What would the jihadists gain from another attack? Or even better, who would benefit from another attack?

Before getting to the serious stuff, let's dispose of the virgins-in-paradise argument. I'm a guy, and I know how guys think. The old expression "A bird in hand is better than two in the bush" didn't come from nowhere. Not many guys who've got a chance at getting and keeping women in this life are going to give that prospect up for the words in a book.

How do I know? How hard is it for even the most devout Christian to "lend to anyone who asks without asking for return"? How many of us really forgive unconditionally? How many of us really "do not fear for [the LORD] is [our] God"? Or look at the divorce rate among Christians: do we really bear with each other's faults? We can sing as loudly as we want about leaning on the everlasting arms and standing on the promises of God, but actually doing it doesn't come easily. Unless the Holy Spirit is really a Muslim and has more power than the Christian version, suicide bombers are going to be few and far between enough that we've got other things to worry about.

Now polygamy in the Muslim world does present the real problem that there are simply not enough females to go around, which means that there is a significant bachelor herd for whom death might be preferable to life without a mate. I know of no possible solution to that problem but preemptively killing all Muslim males unlikely to marry, and I don't think God would honor that. But I would also like to suggest that killing women and (female) children as "collateral damage" is just as certainly no solution.

However, the question is moot: recruiting terrorists by appealing to the virgin argument has been spectacularly unsuccessful. The FBI has run half a dozen or more domestic sting operations designed to—well, designed primarily to keep USians afraid of terrorism, but ostensibly to catch those with terrorist leanings—and while the prospect of screwing virgins forever doesn't seem to get much traction, that being the reward for all Muslim men, anger against the killing of innocent people overseas does. If the best way to encourage the supply of potential terrorists is to keep killing innocent people in the Ummah, one would think that the best way to prevent terrorism would be to stop killing people overseas; but that alternative is, alas, off the table.

So, if a terrorist martyr doesn't increase his supply of virgins, what would he gain by a suicide mass murder?

To start the answer, what did the 9/11 suicide murderers accomplish? If they could look back at the fruit of their labors over the last decade, what benefits would they say they accrued to their cause?

Is the Ummah a better place because of the 9/11 attacks? Jihadists killed three thousand USians, true—if you believe the official version, which I don't, but let's go with it here—but a hundred times as many innocent Muslims have since died, more than that have been maimed, and millions have been displaced. One could argue that this is a short-term sacrifice that might pay off for Islamism in the long term, as evidenced by the bankruptcy now taking down every government in the West, but unless you're going to write off as totally irrational the community that gave us the number zero, algebra, the compass, the mattress, coffee, and the linguistic terms our seminary students to this day use to learn Hebrew grammar, you've got to predict that influential Muslims will seriously consider whether the same goal could be achieved with less spilling of innocent blood. By that measure, another attack would do the cause of jihad no good, and so one would expect the jihadists to try to destroy the US in some other way.

So if the cause of jihad would not benefit from another terror attack, who would? Answer: No one would benefit from another attack as much as the US government.

As Bob Dylan and Joe McDonald sang in the 1960s (to the disgust of the evangelical community, as I remember), there is plenty of good money to be made by the masters of war for supplying the army with the tools of the trade. In fact, in a twist worthy of Mel Brooks' producers, there is more money to be made from fighting wars than from winning them, a fact that cannot have escaped those intelligent enough to market guns and bombs, to say nothing of night-vision goggles, or for that matter the CEOs of fast-food companies that serve large military installations overseas. After World War II, government spending was cut 60%: soldiers and manufacturers alike could no longer rely on income the government had taxed away from people who had earned it; instead, they had to offer goods and services that private individuals would voluntarily part with their money to obtain, a significantly more difficult task. They learned their lesson well, and the mistake has not been repeated: the Vietnam war went on long after the government knew the effort was futile, US troops stayed in the Ummah after the cease-fire that ended Desert Storm, and, of course, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have promised their corporate sponsors that the war that presently stretches from Uganda to Afghanistan will not end in their lifetimes.

What of those called upon to fight, tired as they must be of being away from their families and the risk to life and limb?

To their credit, they are putting their money where their mouths are, giving more money to Ron Paul, who promises to get them out of the war zone forthwith, than to any other candidate, and twice as much as to all other Republican candidates combined.

But in the end, they are expendable. Why should the government waste money on combat pay for people might be killed, and whose deaths in great numbers could begin a backlash against the system? Far better to leave as many of them as possible at home or simply discharge them, have only enough boots on the ground to do what drones cannot do, and let the drones take the risks. Again, if a soldier dies, there are human consequences. If a drone is shot down, according to the Keynsian economics that guide the establishment, that is a good thing, because it brings about government spending that employs people to build a replacement. Drones in the end are cheaper than foot soldiers, and managing the needed production process can be extremely profitable for the corporations that manufacture them.

In short, the next terrorist attack will see an increase in drone warfare, with only as much increase in troop involvement needed to sell the program: fewer US military combat deaths, but an increase in money spent on whizbangs, a boon for the military-industrial complex.

It will also be a boon for those who believe in strong central and even global government. Such an attack will be followed by calls for more checkpoints, chatdowns, patdowns, strip scanners, and drones flying overhead. All will reduce our privacy as they augment the bank accounts of the corporate elite and the power position of the New World Order.

The implication of this for Christian mission is obvious. Unless the New World Order is indeed God's way of fulfilling the Great Commission, it is the reaction to the attack, not the attack itself, that will make fulfilling the Great Commission more difficult. Since that reaction will simply be an extension of the reaction we already see to past attacks, isn't it time we asked if the reactions to 9/11 that the evangelical community has tolerated and even celebrated might be, far from our legitimate means of  self-defense, the Devil's way of obstructing the fulfillment of the Great Commission?