“It’s the economy stupid.” Used to be a term of derision attacking the Conservative who valued Christian values, above the lust of mammon.  Trump’s message seems to derision now turned maxim: “It’s the economy stupid, and the economy is good.”  The Left is now  backed into the political corner of attacking a good economy.  But what do they replace it with, the vague new names for the old death cults, socialism, social-justice and identity politics? Which only thinly veil envy, tyranny and tribal revenge war. Christians should replace the pursuit of mammon with the Gospel.

The Worship of Mammon, Evelyn De Morgan. 1909. Oil on Canvas.

It seems to me that moral energy is leaving the political sphere more and more.  Debates have shifted from what is right to what works, or what the mob wants.  This first tendency has been going on since modernity began, and our founders were always wary of mob rule.  The debates of those founders often lacked a certain blatant acknowledgement of Jesus or even God Almighty, but that was to be expected.  Theirs was a Christian culture, Alexis de Tocqueville lays this out quite clearly.  When Christians then entered the public sphere they were free to debate whatever issue, because all the various opinions or applications were Christian.  Christians doing politics, Christians doing printing, Christians forging silver, Christians building homes. Many diverse flavors of Christianity unified in one Christ.  Today that is not the case, when political debates are devoid of Biblical morality, the two sides represented are the Humanist and the Christians hiding their faith.  When todays conservatives operate, they are not conserving nearly enough.  They have fallen back to pragmatism or populism, they keep their light hidden.  So all wander in darkness.

A recent National Review article quotes a review of a book.  Got that? :

Cato’s Ike Brannon, who notes the authors find that Big Business has “proven to be better at achieving all that both the Left and the Right deem important to the U.S. economy: Big businesses pay higher wages, provide better benefits, have higher worker productivity and more innovation, do more research and development, export more, and achieve more in terms of environmental protection, worker safety, training, tenure, and diversity. In short, if the Left and the Right were to examine business solely by outcomes, both would more forcefully advocate that the government do more for big business.”

I find our highest ideal strangely devoid of the things de Tocqueville found at the heart of the American Democracy success story.  This from the foremost conservative publication.  Where is the love and fostering of the family?  The founders were very intent on leaving this world a better place for their children and their children’s children to the 10th generation.  They made sacrifices of their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor, so that their descendants might live and flourish better than they had.  And we all reap the fruit of their work every day. I love this John Adams quote :

I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

And all this under the umbrella of Christendom, that great City on a Hill.  This is the Christian narrative, we sacrifice ourselves, as did our Christ, and then we spread that light to the world.  Peaceful men writing poetry are much preferred to tribal men fighting wars.  But today the light has gone out.  Today we live for ourselves, for the here and now.  The narrative we operate under today is not one of taking the light to the nations.  I can’t help but be reminded of Lady liberty given to us by France.  She is walking forward with the torch, the light, taking it to the world.  Today we think the statue is about accumulating the world’s trash because everything is our fault.  Who turned out the lights?  This narrative is a dark one.  The popular perspective on the future is that global warming and all human progress is going to destroy the earth in 12 years.  And the ‘christian’ version, which may be it’s basis isn’t much better.  It’s something like, the whole earth blows up in a giant fireball and the select few, who did their daily devotions, get raptured away.  The world is trying to build a colony on Mars and Christians are just sitting back and watching the world burn.  It’s a doomed Batman and a mocking Joker.

Is this really the best we can do?  Is this really the message of the Gospel?  Is this the sort of thing that makes people from around the world come here to see, what is this joy that lies within this people?  Is this the type of nation which provokes Alexis de Tocqueville to write over a thousand pages of accolades?  I don’t think so.

We have forgotten the family.  In our mad rush to be as egalitarian as Marx, we made the individual the ultimate end in many ways.  In a fractured psyche we also have our groups the same as ever.  Instead of men and women we have feminists vs christians. And a dozen other examples.  But the God given divisions have been blurred.  The rights of the family have been diminished in favor of the individual, especially if she is a  woman, or just identifies that way.  The rights of fathers are attacked at every turn.  These forays into non traditional families have not worked by any measure.  We can talk about economic growth and advances in technology or *ahem the environment.  But the reality is that children raised in these brave new families don’t accomplish anything as well as those raised in real Christian families consisting of a father working and a mother loving her children and her husband.

This was the dream of Distributism and of early America.  Many family businesses, small businesses coming together to express unparalleled freedom.  The nation’s capital distributed to the most hands.  Every man a king in his own family.  Every woman a queen in her own house.  The whole family contributed to the endeavor, and met the greater church community as a unit.  Today we work jobs as a cog in a machine, then we had lives as citizens in a community.  Today we work for bosses who don’t even know our name, or care, and yet we deride Southern plantation families?  Today we rush to punch our ticket for the man, then we wrote our own ticket.

I am always grieved a little when self-employed people take a job with a company.  The self-employed are their own man.  They are the people who can stop and help the woman on the side of the road, because they don’t have to be in their cubicle at a certain arbitrary time.  They are the people who can listen to the still small voice, be directed by the weather, and any number of other God given markers.  This is true freedom.  To stay home and love your children, the real future, instead of worrying about your 401K.  To raise your children up in the nurture and admonition of the lord instead of worrying about the climate.  To face the community as a family instead of letting your children be devoured by the lies of the world.  To be truly diverse by expressing your humanity in your own way and not conforming to the educational or workplace systems, Union, HR, corporate molds.  To create and build and love as the amateur and not as the wage slave. Maybe you should get your social security number tattooed on your arm, since that’s the most artful thing about you.

As Chesterton says wouldn’t you rather have true camaraderie, brotherhood, family over all the wealth and modern science there is?  We are supposed to dislike big business, it’s the premiss of that article. Who cares about the monetary gain they might give?  Is it good, really good, earthy good?  We rail against slavery against one man controlling so many.  But we set up these same men today under different rubrics.  Great men controlling many built the pyramids and modern France but they nearly conquered the world and they did kill millions.  We forgot the family business building homes, firing pottery, baking bread. Do we want exotic tourist monuments to fill in our narcissistic Instagram accounts, or do we want homes filled with a quiver of arrows?

America was built on rejecting the greatest King and empire in the world, in favor of the small farm. We rejected the Pope in favor of the country church.  George Washington turned down the kingship and went back  to his beloved Mount Vernon.  We had Yankee Pride,  Southern Spirit, The Frontier Spirit, The West, Montana, Alaska.  But the light is flickering.  The spirit is gone, the Spirit is gone.

So what are we conserving exactly?  Is our operating narrative the gospel, that old book which brought us this new world? Do we  go forth into all the world, laying down our lives for the lost sheep?  Do we baptize them, and lead them into all godliness, teaching them how to be the people of God in their homes, which will send out the next generation?  Or are we waiting for the world to burn and trying to be the best slave on the way down?  One of these lives has a future, one of them does not.