I really do hate to disenchant—anything.   I was tempted to title this “A Star is Fallen.”  Which has as much rich connotation as the title of this movie.  But then I wonder if that isn’t just what good criticism is for, to prevent art from disenchanting us.  Can I recommend this film?  Does it enliven the soul more than crush it?  There are so many wonderful aspects to it.  It does story telling in the medium of the motion picture very well.   This is art, done by talented artists.  They know their audience and the tools of their craft and they connect the two in a production that is not only entertaining but will grab your emotions in the way they wanted to grab them.  But like the movies stumbling alcoholic lead, it is a mix of excellence and shocking evil.  Is this just the reality of the world?  You have to take the good with the bad.  That is the truth, Jesus comes to us and finds us where we are.  You can’t make the art you wish people would understand, you have to make the art that works for your audience.  But you should bring them up to something better as well.  Is the lure of the bottle enchantment?  It promises, a sort of bliss.  Is it disenchantment to get between a man and his drug of choice?  Is it pessimism to remind him that this journey into fairy land will leave him embarrassing himself in the gutter? I don’t think that it is.  The Scripture is full of warnings.  But as I think of them they all are for the young man.  Each generation as it passes down should warn.  But there is the reality of the other man, the old man in all it’s meanings.  The old man is our decades of wrongs committed and received.  The old man is old, his ways are set, his path is known.  So there are two camps.  The young man who needs a warning and the old man who needs the grit and shock to speak to his scarred soul.

First to the young man, to the child held in Jesus’ arms.  Woe to you who corrupt him.  And there is much to corrupt here.  The whole opening scene is like those violin shrieks at the climax of a horror flick.  And it really makes no sense.  It seems to be nothing more than a woke dog whistle to the lapping QWERTY community.  It makes absolutely no sense to discover a female singer in a drag bar.  It’s not witty or provoking, it’s just messed up.  There was a time when the gay person would make for a good plot twist, like a man who was left-handed in ancient Israel.  But now it’s just gratuitous perversion.  And then there are all the casual sex scenes.  I think it is precisely this type of portrayal which has led to the casual sexual reality which so many teens now live in.  This is not love, it’s lust and when you wake up in the morning , the fools gold is seen for what it is.  And the movie does get to some of this reality.  In the beginning, foolish couples come together and all the flaws and the realities are hidden.  Young lovers think they are invincible, but they often end in tears.  And so A Star get’s this right. But this is the wisdom of hindsight the old man can appreciate, the young will only be enticed.

But this is not the worst thing.  Crying in a mansion, now a star, over a tragic love story is nothing compared to turning to drugs or prostitution, homeless on the streets of La La Land.  There is a certain annoyance at the film/music industry for their constant self adulation.  They make movies and write songs, about making movies and writing songs.  As with the gay theme, this used to be a device of self aware writing.  Authors made jokes about their own art, which is to come out from behind the curtain of the artifice.  Ovid said the purpose of art was to conceal itself, but more on him later.  This device used to be subtle, now it is little more than formulaic narcissism. The problem is summed up in one line describing a love song in the movie “It just fell out of me, I guess and onto this page.”  Which is such an amazing lie.  Not only did this song not happen this way, it wasn’t even written by uber talented Gaga.  It required at least three other authors, and probably a whole supporting cast.  These things don’t just happen.  I hesitate to say ‘spoiler’, because good art can’t be spoiled by revealing plot lines.  But while it is good to keep up hope and to dream big.  Rock stars don’t walk into your bedroom and whisk you away to be rich and famous.  It doesn’t even happen to one percent, maybe one percent of one percent.  And that’s fine, a thing worth doing is worth doing badly.  Singing and writing for it’s own sake is fine.  But you should be prepared for the hard work.  Especially in a culture so driven by envy as our is.  Success takes a lot of blood sweat and tears, on your part individually not to mention the grand scale.  Without the men of old, pioneers carving civilization of out a wilderness fighting beasts, and weather and sinister men we wouldn’t be playing around writing music at all.  On a larger scale it took almost 1200 years from when Jesus the Christ laid down his life for his bride, for the first love song to be written, Le Roman de la Rose.  Before that romance was not a thing.  However you take the Song of Solomon, no one took it the way we do until Guillaume de Lorris, or his world, created his poem.  Some suggest that Ovid did the same thing 2000 years ago but his amores are generally thought to be satire.  And so this elaborate scaffold built by our forefathers is simply discounted.  Christ bids men to consider the cost, before foolishly rushing in.  You probably won’t become a rock star, and even if you do, there is a high cost. Again the film got to some of these themes.  Ally’s father lives his live in obscurity, believing he had the talent of Sinatra without the random luck.  Jack’s brother is always the voice of reason, reminding us that the reality behind those rose colored glasses is thorny. Hit movies don’t just happen they require thousands of hard working people, and a decadent culture. And good writing requires countless hours of good reading, good listening.  You can’t work out what you haven not worked in.

There is another lesson mostly ignored, also from Ovid.  He spoke for the ancient pagan world in his Metamorphosis.  Things are always changing into other things.  It just happens.  If the fates decide or maybe just because.  Darwin took up his mantle and so fish evolved into monkeys and on to men.  But that’s not how it happens.  Bad men stay bad, and they certainly stay men.  The film is on point for a bit.  Change requires a great shock and even then a lot of hard work is required to recover, sober up, go a different way.  We all need the blood of Jesus and real repentance when we hit bottom.  This world required a great creator, a storyteller, putting each element in it’s rightful place.  And when you leave your place only destruction happens.  Men don’t become women.  Everyone doesn’t become a movie star because they want it.  And alcoholics aren’t saved by their energetic loving young wives.  A Star only get’s one of these right.  Suicide doesn’t morph into sacrifice, it is a selfish thing, again the voice of reason “it was his fault”.

But the movie is very beautiful as a tale to the old man.  This is the reality of our world.  Each and every young person is dropped into this mess to find their way.  We can’t have the ideal world, we can’t have the ideal song, we can’t have the ideal relationship.  We have to make the best of what we do have.  And so the poetry of the music isn’t Dante or T. S. Elliot, but it is ours.  It speaks to the American in our language, with our rudimentary working knowledge of music.  I wish it could be better, that we could desire more and work with richer poetry, but we don’t, we are here.  The movie even gets to this struggle with the pop pull of the new star vs the rich texture of the old cowboy.  This journey has to be at least a little autobiographical for Gaga.  The contrast is stark, and true.

So as to this love song, which didn’t just happen, it has some truth in it.  Many of us are tired of broken relationships, and “giving our heart away to another stranger”  sounds like a familiarly horrible proposition. “I don’t want to start another fire.” The past has been a mess, we want to grab on to something young and undefiled and hold onto it forever.  All performed by Gaga reaching down into her soul and evoking the best of our diva canon, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and Whitney Houston.  Both rhyme and reason together, and that rhyme can powerfully pull at your emotions.  Which may be what we need to awake us from the ashes of our loves lost.  The textured vocals and the crescendo, climaxing in the final frame will grab you, as if you don’t ever want to hear another song again, in it’s finality.  What a farewell.

And the love relationship is a completed sale.  In fact, Gaga and Cooper are still selling it on the stage of the Oscars and in the tabloids to this day.  I have always known Gaga had talent in theory, despite the reality as it is applied to her freak show.  Madonna Part Two.  Sadly because that is what the American people wanted.  Americans don’t long for Catholic school girls beautifully executing delightfully artful sonnets.  We want angsty semi-clad pop tarts, in meat dresses who may or may not be alt-sexual.  And so we made a Gaga.  Until now I have avoided this parade.  But she really does sell the story from the screen with Bradley Cooper.  Even given all the gratuitous flirtations with evil, it comes together as a true thing.  I really believe she did love him, thick and thin.  She stood by and wanted him to be remade, and he almost was.  He really loved her, he gave her the chance, he gave her what he had.  He passed on the fire he once sang, that needs to be spread to the world.  But sometimes it’s too little too late. The despair of failure, he couldn’t hold her back.  He didn’t cling to the success, he drowned in the flaws.  In the end he did not pull her down, though he did break her heart.  Emotional journeys should be for the purpose of setting us back down on earth better men.  Old made new.  And there are a few of these moments pressing through the looking glass here.  So this only to think through the siren song and put some true words to the conversation of this mess we call Hollywood.

It keeps coming to my attention that not enough people are aware of P.G. Wodehouse, even literature students from good Christian universities.  I suppose he has not yet risen to the level of literature, but still. Don’t those well educated in letters need to take a break?  Have some fun?  And that’s what Wodehouse is, fun.  Rich, learned, erudite, whimsy.   His canon is full of rich cultural illusions, Biblical themes and well crafted wit, in the most harmless plots you ever dreamed of.  While the gods of industry and politics are off building and destroying kingdoms, Bertie Wooster is having it out with his butler over a dinner jacket.

Now that I think about it many of those Universities have C. S. Lewis centers, and Wodehouse is much older than Lewis.  Even Lewis gleefully exclaim, that the professor hiding from his wife in the attic reading Wodehouse was certainly doing real reading.  But in this day you shouldn’t have to feel bad about participating in the dying art of reading.  It’s certainly better than having you brain sucked out by the latest comic book made low for the masses by millions of dollars in CG graphics.  When static pictures are not enough that we must resort to the emotional tug of the moving picture, reading anything starts to look very sophisticated.  But even in 1917 Wodehouse was sophisticated.  The world out there is a mess and sometimes it does our souls good to play.

C. S. Lewis said that the lowest form of reading is done by those who read only newspapers.  Because even their stories have to be true.  He was trying to get at the idea that entertaining another world in your head is a sign of maturity(the maturity not necessary to watch movies).  As his sometimes friend Tolkien pointed out entertaining that other world can often make our living in this world better.  I spend a lot of time reading news stories and laughing at them mostly, for me that is an escape.  Who can really live like these freaks that are splattered over our news feeds?  Even when you get past the sensational headlines,  I find people trying to live without God or sense to be very hilarious.  Of course it’s also tragic and I try to address that all the time.  But that’s what real Christian joy is,  facing that insanity every day and laughing—anyway.

You can spend all your effort fighting for what is right.  But a lot of well meaning striving has resulted in a lot of death and carnage(I would be surprised to find Obama reading Wodehouse, not Bush.).  I often marvel at the West and the depth of it’s creations.  Walk through our museums, they don’t contain the weapons or heads of our vanquished foes.  We don’t fill them with the treasures stolen from those we conquered.  They are full of every sort of created thing from minute jewelry, ironwork, woodwork, furniture, paintings, and china to the architecture of the huge buildings themselves.  We also build other huge buildings just so that we can fill them with beautiful music.  Every night thousands of people fill other large halls to watch, play.  We are not off engaged in tribal wars, we are building and creating and singing and dancing.  Whatever the Baptists have to say about rhythmic ceremonial rituals, they sure beat scalping parties to the next camp.  Whatever you want to say about America’s past, one of the biggest problems we had wasn’t race wars.  It was over segregation.  Some people didn’t have access to the play house.

Wodehouse writes about the idle English gentleman often.  He seems harmless as he enjoys his smoking and the pursuit of felicitous matches.  But that English gentleman won World War I and II.  The U.S was not the only sleeping giant that the Germans kept overlooking.  Those eccentric men reading their papers in their clubs were preparing for war.  They loved a free and lazy world so much they were willing to give everything to save it.   Chesterton gets to this spirit in his Napoleon of Notting Hill.  But this is supposed to be in praise of Wodehouse.  And so it is, go and be idle, read Wodehouse.  I don’t think you can go wrong with anything he has written.  And today like never before there are countless easy ways to get him.  Librivox has a number of well produced audio books.  Some of his works are in the public domain,  surely this says something about his literary quality?  Mark Nelson has the perfect voice for these stories.   A lot of the Jeeves stories are held and published by various imprints.  But you can get them on your phone and start enjoying them in a few minutes. Or, hey you could go buy the actual book.   You too can become a better person, by reading harmless fiction.

Why are we so worried about the money in politics? What about the corruption of the incumbency? 

In a parliamentary government you attack your enemy with words(Theoretically these words express ideas and the best ideas win.) and the battle is fought at the ballot box. You don’t use the people’s resources to attack all newcomers.  Obama militarized the government like never before, to attack his opponents with legal battles, tax abuse, fines, redistribution, and anything else he could think of.  This is the real problem with our system, it’s not fake news, it’s the resources of the people being used against some of the people.

The Bosses of the Senate, illustration from the American magazine ‘Puck’, January 23rd 1889 (coloured engraving). Joseph Keppler.

Before Obama it was bad enough with senators using their office to get elected forever.  But he transformed America, and stepped it up a notch.  Everything he did which is not talking and getting votes is immoral.  Everything he did shouldn’t have to be illegal, it should be voted out.  But how do you do that now?  How do you push out the dictator once he abolishes voting?  The IRS is an institution of the people, yet it is mobilized to attack Conservatives.  The institution given oversight of corporate fraud is an institution of the people, yet fines are levied against conservative companies, or fines may be avoided if payoffs are made to other liberal groups.  The institution of the people was enabled to “rebuild infrastructure” with two trillion dollars of stimulus.  The reality is that money was given to unions, who gave it back to the Democrats.  And all the reporting institutions were twisted to report fake numbers to make the economy look better than it was.   Even the park service was used to make the ‘government shut down’ look worse than it was.  There is very little problem in the relationship between contributors and candidates.  The real problem lies in the relationship between elected officials and the resources of the people.  The recent name for this body of militant bureaucrats is “the deep state”.  Which is treated as a conspiracy theory.  Though they may operate like terrorist cells isolated from one another, they are driven by a common ethos like Islam.  The threat is real.

This is the same situation with public sector unions.  The supposed romantic purpose of the union is to protect the worker.  (Though the reality is much more sinister.  Often unions were started protect white people from black labor  or immigrant labor.)  The history  as we are told, is that evil corporations were exploiting their workers, so the people had to unite to form unions to protect themselves.  That is what we are told by Disney propaganda films like Newsies.  Are we really supposed to entertain the notion that the the teachers, working for the ‘local’ school district, ostensibly controlled by the people, are being abused?  The people are abusing their workers, so they form unions, the union bosses go and fight it out with the representatives of the people in chambers of state office? The elected representatives of the people shaken down by as special interest group, pretending to be the people.  Here we have the same problem noted above.  These teachers and their unions have all the power in setting curriculum.  Do you think they are going to teach a history which undermines their power.  Do you think they are going to undermine the romantic notion of Unions?

Taking the people’s resources and using those against them is theft and worse.  Today we are finding out that the Trump Russia Collusion story was jut a big lie.  The Democrats have been using the corrupt tactics of the legal system to attack Trump.  The solution begins with getting your kids out of this system and teaching them what God actually did in this nation and all the other nations.  Teach them the beautiful Laws of God.  Then we need to vote out every person who participated in this Russian scam(Can we posthumously unelect John McCain? At least stop pretending Meghan has coherent thoughts?  Pretty please?).  And what happened to impeaching judges, when did they become God?  We need to stop patronizing every media outlet which pushed this fake story.  Then we need to replace these people with people who will replace the system with a system in which this isn’t possible.  Why is it possible for the legal system to inflict such harm where no actual crimes occurred?  Why was it possible for so many lies to be taken seriously by judges furthering charges which an 8th grader in 1776 would have seen through?  Why do incumbent Senators get to use their offices to get reelected?  Why is the IRS so complicated that it is possible to attack political enemies?  Why are we attacking corporations with so many layers of fines and shakedowns?  Because we have made the government too powerful.  The powers of the ‘special’ people in government need to be reduced so that the freedom of the people might be expanded.

Sadly, I think the roots of this problem are the sin of the people.  We like it when the government does bad things because that means we don’t have to do them.  Do you want to go door to door asking your neighbors for money to protect a worm?  We don’t want the responsibility because we are cowards. The historical manifestation of these problems was probably, Abraham Lincoln.  Under Lincoln’s rule, we decided it was ok to break all the rules as long it was for a really good cause like ‘ending’ slavery and creating hostile race relations to this day.  Well we don’t like to talk about that last part.  See paragraph above about teacher’s unions.  But that’s the reality.  Corrupting the rules to meet immediate ends, is a bad idea.  If you make a bad law to entrap someone, it will eventually entrap you.  Think, Haman. Hoisted on one’s own petard?  Anyone?  Our forefathers knew this.  This is the Biblical wisdom of British Common Law made American Constitutional Government.  We worked this out before.  These results are no surprise.  A government given power will use it and you can bet they will use it for egoistic tyranny and not for the freedom of the common man, his common wife, his common children, in his common home, going to his common church.  Which is the Biblical dream realized in 4th of July America.  It is the American Dream, and this corrupt process eats away at that dream every day.

Tragic story we should not be proud of America: Tucker

The Left is obsessed with color.  And as if skin color were not flimsy enough, they are now obsessed with archaic makeup color.  Since Darwin’s crazy theories, the world has had to deal with the pseudoscience of evaluating people by their skin pigmentation.  This is not the first crazy idea in this vein, there was also the science of evaluating people by their head shape, Phrenology.  But the Darwinian concept is still attractive because it gets people off the hook with their creator.  It’s like filing off the serial number on your car and peeling off the company markings. Now your car just happened.  That factory in Detroit had nothing to do with it.  Now you are free to do whatever you want with it.  General Motors recommends you change the oil every 3000 miles, but who do they think they are? “My car just happened.” “I can do whatever I want with it, including calling it a bicycle.”  “I change the oil whenever I want too.”  And when the motor blows up you blame the Christians, because your car is black and that’s a minority paint option.  Let me know when we are allowed to evaluate people by the content of their character.  You know, what used to be called justice, people found guilty of a crime are punished. Everyone else is left alone regardless of what group they are part of.

Black and White, Green and Red, all come together.

The Left is also obsessed with the color green. Green New Deal anyone?  This too is joined to a phony science, they call it ‘man-made global cooling, warming, climate change’.  It doesn’t matter what’s on the inside of plans or legislation called green, what matters is that it says green on the outside.  Because again Liberals only want to go skin deep to obfuscate the reality of the character within.  “Making America Great Again” is assumed to be a cover for something sinister because that’s what they do.  Even though the character below the  MAGA veneer, is about making your country better by every actual metric; more jobs, more economic mobility, more actual mobility.  Meanwhile, behind the green titles, lies the total destruction of everything that everyone would have to admit they value.  And there is nothing new about it.

Red is a color too, but red is a color that reveals, it reveals the authoritarian destruction of freedom for what it is.  Senator Joe McCarthy labeled people red, because they were.  Russian records have made it clear, Alger Hiss was a Communist.  Hiss sought to undermine the freedoms recognized in the American Constitution.  His influence led to legislation enacted toward that end.  The record of Communism is clear, and so the Liberals must paint it over with a new coat of shiny green paint.

Liberals enabling bad character have coined the term oreo to refer to a person with dark skin who decides to be a productive member of society.  He is white on the inside and black on the outside, because wanting a good education and a good job is what white people do.  I remember the first time I heard this term, I was just appalled.  It reveals the issue of hiding bad content of character, while pretending that the skin colors matter to your opponents. But I like this new term watermelon.  It’s pointing out that green is the new red.  The green rind just conceals the same old red elitist fruit.  Looking for humanist government concoctions, to replace God-given rules for the organization of men on this sinful planet.  Trying desperately to put their faith in this false god, which has destroyed a hundred million people.  It’s that same old apple in the garden presented by the snake.  Let’s assume it was a green apple concealing the bloody red fall of all humanity on the inside.  It was shiny and pleasant to look at.  And paired with the false promises of utopia, it seemed like something Eve should eat.  So she did.  Fortunately the coating on this Green New Deal wasn’t shiny enough to fool anyone, but all the bills they push every day are.

What a stark contrast to our heavenly father wanting to gather his children as a hen gathers her chicks.  The snake broke into the garden climbing over the wall.  But our father, or maker, comes in through the gate.  He offers us the instruction manual to—ourselves.  He made us.  The snake pretends the green apple isn’t bloody death on the inside. Jesus calls things what they are “you brood of vipers”, to warn his people.  And yet most reject him.  The record of his faithfulness is as clear as the failed history of Collectivism and all the other ’ism’.  He cares for us.  Those who seek to be his people and love him as he loved us have flourished and caused everyone around them to flourish too.

Further Reading:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/virginia-democrats-controversy-intersectional-politics/

So I started with this article and ended up with a word study of flattery.

The article is summing up ‘research’. I probably won’t read the book because like a lot of research it’s just common sense.  Someone said that all this social science research is like climbing a mountain.  We do all this study and data and experiments, and when we get to the top of the mountain, the Biblical Christians were there the whole time.  Human nature doesn’t change. Though modern humans like the religious trappings of science so here they are.

G. K. Chesterton said “Professionals make you want to sit back and watch, amateurs make you want to join in.”  And i think that is a necessary idea in worship music.  To be an ‘amateur’ is to do it for the love of the thing.  To be a professional is to do it for the money.  And as such I have a lot of problems with the professional version of everything including worship music.

It is strange that the modern professional looks a lot like the old priest.  They are up there, we are down here.  They have special access to god, or truth and we just go along.  They make us feel good, forgiven, whatever, we just receive it and go about our daily tasks.  Which I suppose is to be a priest of our segment of reality.

I just find the whole thing so weird.  The word vernacular used to mean the language of the common people.  Now it means the language of the children.  We have a whole nation of people with advanced degrees, though in common sense or citizenship they have about an 8th grade education.  In theology it’s maybe a 4th grade education and in music maybe a 2nd grade education.  We did this, by separating out ‘children’s church’ or ‘Sunday school’ or ‘youth group’ or the ‘college group’.  Always learning never coming to the knowledge.  Tossed too and fro.  We didn’t teach music, and now the vernacular is childish music. . . sung by the professionals, the priests.

Simple four cord repetitions are dressed up in amazingly complex technical presentations of light and sound.  Lasers, flood lights, speakers, fog machines all driven by elaborate computers.  Yet the message, the content, is simplified.  Do we stop using computers because the average person doesn’t have a clue how they work?  Why advance technology and simplified content?  Why are we advancing in technology but not in intellectual complexity?

I just marvel as praise bands loftily twist the common version of a song into their own jazz like riffs, as the people try to sing along.  If only we had a way of communicating what they were doing to the congregation, a written language of music perhaps.  But we do, and since they 9th century, that language has been developed and it progressed to where it is today.  Yet sometime in the last few decades we started going backwards.  We stopped teaching it.  Are people getting less intelligent?  Is the brain of the common man less capable than he was a few generations ago?  I doubt it, and given the luxuries we enjoy, he actually has far more time to learn such things.  As St. Thomas said, the average man is not responsible before God for knowing advanced theology, he has to spend his time making a living.  Scratching a livelihood out of this cursed earth.  But today we don’t have this excuse.  So what is our excuse?

I wonder too about all the verses in the Bible condemning flattery.  But isn’t this praise music just aural flattery?  Music has a unique ability to control us.  Listening to music is one of the few tasks which stimulates. every part of the brain at the same time.  It’s like a drug. Isn’t making people feel good without the truth a problem?

This thought took me down the rabbit hole, a journey of texts:

Job 17:5 He that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail.

Dan. 11:21   And in his estate shall stand up a vile person, to whom they shall not give the honor of the kingdom: but he shall come in peaceably, and obtain the kingdom by flatteries.

Dan. 11:32 And such as do wickedly against the covenant shall he corrupt by flatteries: but the people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits.

Dan. 11:34 When they stumble, they shall receive a little help. And many shall join themselves to them with flattery.

Job 32:21,22 Let me not, I pray you, accept any man’s person, neither let me give flattering titles unto man.  For I know not to give flattering titles; in so doing my maker would soon take me away.

Psa. 5:9 For there is no faithfulness in their mouth; their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulcher; they flatter with their tongue.

Psa. 12:2,3 They speak vanity every one with his neighbor: with flattering lips and with a double heart do they speak.  The LORD shall cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that speaketh proud things:

Psa. 78:36 Nevertheless they did flatter him with their mouth, and they lied unto him with their tongues.

Prov. 26:28   A lying tongue hateth those that are afflicted by it; and a flattering mouth worketh ruin.

Ezek. 12:24 For there shall be no more any vain vision nor flattering divination within the house of Israel.

1Th. 2:5 For neither at any time used we flattering words, as ye know, nor a cloak of covetousness; God is witness:

Flattery is clearly condemned in the Bible.  Looking at the hebrew word for flattery חֵקֶל cheleq  most of the time it is translated ‘part’ or ‘portion’ and that is a good connection.  Flattery is telling the partial truth.  Flattery tells you the parts you want to hear and hides the realities.  It shows you the glistering product without showing you the cost.  That’s how sin works, it tries to connect evil with pleasure.  That’s why discipline is so necessary.  It rightly connects pain, as in a spanking, with the evil you committed.  If you hit your sister it might make you feel good, but your parents are there to set the record straight by showing you that it actually makes your bottom feel bad.

Modern music hides the bad.  It hides the fact that Christ and thereby his followers, had pain and suffering for their faith. The world tries to discipline us too, in it’s way.  Stand up for Christ and they will knock you down.  The Christian must not learn these lessons.  The adult must not be led by his feelings, by this flattery.  The Psalms are full of enemies, coming to destroy the psalmist, often David.  We know what this was like from the history books.  David was under assault, he was the rightful king yet he fled from Saul.  He was in fear for his life.  There was much suffering and grief.  This didn’t feel good.  But this was true faithfulness.   Seeking a faith without this aspect is seeking flattery.

Prov. 6:24 To keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman.

Prov. 7:21 With her much fair speech she caused him to yield, with the flattering of her lips she forced him.

The ‘adulterous woman’ is connected with flattery.  Her lips tell the tale of pleasure, but really she is asking for sin and the corruption, disease, and pain that always go along with it. She doesn’t want to give you glory as a crown on your head and bear you the fruit of children. She wants to give you momentary pleasure and use you up, exploit you for money.

The Greeks got this to some degree in the myth of the Sirens.  The Sirens lured the sailors to their shores with their sweet music, but beneath the water lied the rocks which destroyed their ships.  So we get our word ‘siren’ which is a warning.  And that is the truth, the siren song should be a warning.  Good feelings should be a warning too, what are they trying to sell you by buttering you up? What lies are they trying to get away with under those smooth words?

So if you have a religion built on feeling good, on aural pleasure.  What happens when it is tested?  It doesn’t like the conflict.  Something must be wrong.  This feels bad, I must change so that I conform to the world.  I must follow the world and not the Word of God.  In short it has no faith.  What happens when this religion is faced with suffering?  It’s can’t cope it questions god, it runs away.  Sell all that I have?  That doesn’t sound nice.  Leave my father to bury himself?  That’s not very warm and fuzzy.  Lay down my life?  Are you serious?  

The Greeks and most ancients were suspicious of feelings.  Feelings were connected with lusts of the earthy body. They minimized those bodily desires.  Reason was the ultimate they said.  But we have gone to the other extreme, we throw out all reason, well except in the inner workings of  our computers.  We pursue feelings at all cost.  But Christianity should be both, logic and emotion; body and mind.  Like an appreciation for music, feelings must be trained and calibrated.  They don’t just exist.  People aren’t born knowing how to read, or reason, or think, in music or any field.  Our feelings or musical abilities don’t come preprogrammed to God’s setting.  They must be trained and taught by hard work.   We shouldn’t treat our bad training as a gift from God.  Being titillated by something bad is not a God-given reality, it is a human failure.  Why don’t we want to make better men?

There is another option besides flattery, that is smoothness without truth.  There is smoothness with truth.  There is beautiful music which carries the truth.  Again Chesterton said, “Nine times out of ten, the coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the word that excuses it.” And so we should beware, but we can have both.  Wisdom has both:

Prov. 31:26 She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness

We should desire this maturity as Paul says, grow up into both truth and love.  But love isn’t just a good feeling it’s serious work against your own feelings:

Eph. 4:14,15  That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;  But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ:

I Tim 2:7,8  (I speak the truth in Christ, and lie not;) a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity.  I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting.

Paul speaks the truth, and what is the truth?  Pray with holy hand lifted up.  We want to go on and discuss how active we can be in the church service.  We want to talk about expressing ourselves.  But the whole point is your hands should be holy, they should be clean.  You must offer up a clean self, without wrath or doubting.  Confess your sins at the alter, stop doing evil with your hands and then offer those hands up to God.

I Tim. 2:12-15 But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.  For Adam was first formed, then Eve.  And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.  Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.

We want to get as men women in our service as we can, it makes us feel good.  But Paul says women should express their faith in the congregation by faithful children. And he means adult children, your toddler doesn’t have a problem with drunkenness. So women you want to make a splash in the worship service? Raise holy children.  Where are the faithful children carrying on the tradition of rich hymn singing?  Where are the children who can produce the more excellent music for the next generation?  It is still true that a majority of pop singers come out of the church, because that is the only place any music training happens these days, but it could far better.  It’s just so much harder to be good than to be politically correct. Dang it!

I John 3:18 Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.

James 2:14-17   What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?  If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food,  and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?  So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

Reminds me of praise songs “here I am to worship” “I will give you all my worship”  But where is it.  When does this happen?  You talk about giving everything to God and it makes you feel good, but why don’t you show me?  Is it just talk and lyrics or is it something that will actually encourage you to do the right thing when it comes down to it?  Is the feeling of the service just a salve which makes you think your sins aren’t all that bad.  Does the feeling of the music just overshadow the feeling of your guilt without real repentance?   The proof is in the pudding.  Is the pudding of life you make next week more holy than it was this week?  If not, that’s not fruit.

It’s ok to take pride in Christ, to feel good about his work in your life.  But the feelings should not be a substitute for holiness, they should be the result.

Responding to this article:

This is exactly what is wrong with our country.  First of all the insane complexity of our legal system.  To the point that an excellent speaker like McCarthy must still go to great lengths to explain one case to the average person.  And I’m not even sure the average person could make sense of this article.  And McCarthy just scratches the surface.  And the average person should be the standard, that is the genius of the jury system.  Could the average person, were he to put his political biases aside, even conceive of why any  of this is illegal in the first place?  There are clearly no issues of morality here.  These are technicalities of technicalities.  And the whole mess is just a way to enrich lawyers and to wrap your enemies up in a web they can’t possibly get out of.  Regardless of if they actually harmed anyone.  Remember the basis of common law? A crime is when you harm persons or property.  And you might just say property, your person is your property.  Prosecutors have it pretty easy these days.  They don’t have to prove that the accused harmed someone beyond a doubt.  They just have to suggest how he might have broken some arbitrary rule no one ever heard of.  What a joke!

Second, we have built an elaborate system of pay-for-play government.  This behemoth rewards certain industries, and companies and punishes others.  That is the system.  Yet we want to fine and harass people for daring to engage this system for the benefit of their companies.  Well we fine and harass them if they didn’t jump through the right hoops, or if they are not half-black or if they don’t have a D after their names.  In which case these investigations are just another layer of pay-for-play.  If you didn’t pay your politically correct dues, we attack your industry and your person.  Those who drive the narrative, want to make the issue about who is buying government, instead of addressing the real problem, how much is for sale.

Bill Gates never played.  He never bought government, or used government to attack his competitors.  But he succeeded anyway, and so they made him buy in.  That’s that antitrust business that happened a few years ago. It’s not about corporate monopolies, it’s about the Washington power monopoly.  The mafia can’t have one business on the street which doesn’t pay them homage.  Especially when that business is so successful.  And that’s what is going on here.  Trump never paid his dues to get into the club of elite politicians who think they are God and the only ones capable of running things.  And so he must pay.  The mafia must send a message to anyone else who might try it too.  You want to change Washington?  Well how about we raid the homes of every person who had even the most cursory role in your campaign?  And so you see droves of Conservatives and leaving Congress leaving Washington.  Trying to stick it to your enemies with layers of laws will just come around and bite you in the end.

When we all get to Congress what a day of rejoicing that will be!  Or not.  I am stunned by the amount of religious fervor the Christian community here in Bozeman, put into it’s new ‘Christian’ delegation to Washington.  Despite some body slamming and a lot of vague and incorrect economic promises, they stood by their men.  Yet despite having majorities in both houses and the presidency, things are not all that more Christian than they were before the villagers began singing their praises.  In stark contrast to this, the news of the day is AOC.  

The Iron-Rolling Mill, Adolph Menzel. c.1975

A few years back Americans were supposedly fed up with out-of-control spending and a few other things I don’t really remember.  And no one else seems to remember either.  They called it the Tea Party, and it seems like the party is mostly over.  But this AOC, is just one person.  One very ignorant, very incapable person, who seems to be setting the tone.  Of course it may be just that everyone is laughing at her.  It may be that this flame will burn out faster than the Tea Party.  But these types of insanity, don’t seem to die, like Occupy Wall street, they seem to morph into the next insanity.  The liberal undead always come as back bigger zombies than before.  This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.

At any rate, my point is that this is the type of grand change we were promised by GSG.  That is Greg and Susan Gianforte.  If you don’t think the ’S’ is as integral as the ‘G’,  just trust my first hand blows. Or perhaps the ’S’ is Steve.  Where is the Conservative Christian hubbub led by these men? Clamor? Commotion? Revolution? LOL!  But this was the promise, the hype, the hope.  And the result is nothing.  In fact there have been many concessions the other direction, as if small mines downstream from Yellowstone are an existential threat which must be addressed immediately.  As if keeping our public land in Federal hands is an issue that would have sent a tingle up the spines of the founding fathers. As if wealthy retirement is now Christian.   The sad reality is, that already on shoddy ground from that WWF match, GSG is playing it safe for the long term political career.  The goal is probably a run for governor and a run for President, it probably was the goal back in 1996 when he moved to our community.  This is the goal above any AOC type movement of the nation in the Christian direction.

Now I firmly believe that water runs downhill, destroying is easier than building, evil is easier than good.  It is easier to be AOC than to be a Christian.  But that only explains part of it.  AOC’s puppet masters did their homework.  They laid the groundwork.  They are all dead white males, Humanist males.  They are men like John Dewey, Henry Ford, and Jack London, who build the public school system, the government school system.  They didn’t care about building free citizens, they cared about building machines, social machines made up of workers.  This was supposed to solve all human problems.  They didn’t care about spreading the Gospel, to solve the world’s problem of sin.  They looked within, to the human political inventor to solve the problems of Charles Dickens, social problems.  But of course everywhere that social engineering has become a god is has become a vengeful, murderous, butcher.  Even including in our own nation, where Lincoln’s crusade to “preserve the Union” killed almost a million souls.  In China, Russia and greater Europe the tolls are higher but the alter was built to the same god, Humanism.

That was depressing, but the point is that this battle is a lot bigger than AOC and her 29 years.  The house-not-divided has been operating for a long time, waiting for this day.  As Vaclav Klaus has rightly pointed out the veneer of ‘Green’ is just another paint job on the Red machine of Communism.  But what has Christendom been building?  We glory in the fact that our children fall away every generation as a badge of honor.  “Look at us we let our children decide.”  “Look at us we don’t raise Christian hypocrites.”  But we don’t raise Christians either.   While the opposition, the Evil One, whatever, has been raising children and training them that the world is going to end if we don’t end air travel.  While every public school in this nation teaches that cow farts are destroying the planet.  What have we been doing?  We have been sending our children to these fools to be similarly misled.  Christian children don’t know how to be Christians.  They can’t even understand the Christians from one generation ago, much less emulate them in any real way.  Since the 80’s Christian education has been making a come back.  Even so, it only accounts for a few percent of children that come from confessing Christian homes.  This systems trains our children to fight against us. We lost the battle before it even began.

The sad reality is that GSG is barely a Christian.  They took the one solid Christian school in this valley and transformed it into something more recognizable to those social engineers.  After their illegal takeover they transformed it from a humble ministry to a business training school.  Instead of asking if the students had the fruits of the Spirit, they asked whether the students could get good jobs.  Instead of trusting the power of the Gospel, they trusted the power of cutthroat business acumen.  Instead of presenting the beauty of children raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, they presented big buildings and sports teams.  This is why there is no change in Washington, because there was no change here.  Right here in your family, in your church, in your community.  There is no Christianity in Washington because we didn’t send any there.  We didn’t have any to send.  Reagan lamented that he couldn’t find enough Christians to fill all the positions in government that needed filling.  Those qualified Christian citizens don’t just happen in one election.  They must be grown over generations of faithfulness.  The problems in the nation at large are our problems.  We made them.  AOC is part of a vast military prepared for this fight.  Like the Germans preparations before both world wars.  Christians were not prepared for the coming storm, in fact their cowardice allowed it to form.

It’s time to get your children out and build up for the next fight.  God will reward faithfulness as he did that of the Puritans who escaped to this nation 400 years ago.  The Puritans made a few reforms in Parliament, but they accomplished little in the long run besides making their name a term of derision to this day.  But when they fought the next battle, the American Revolution.  They won.  They won morally, economically and militarily.  They were prepared to make the arguments, fight the battles and sacrifice their comfort.  And they changed the whole world.  They didn’t revive Parliament, they made Parliament irrelevant.  They fought off the world’s super powers, more than once.  And it is estimated that our economy surpassed any other nation by 1820.

Judas threw in is lot with Jesus because he thought Jesus was the fast track to overthrowing Rome and putting the Jews in their rightful place.  All the disciples fought over who would be the greatest in this new Jewish regime.  They didn’t know what they were asking.  The kingdom of Jesus is founded on suffering and sacrifice and selflessness.  It doesn’t happen with one vote in one election or even 100 elections.  Jesus overthrew Rome and made it Christian, but it took a couple hundred years.  Years of lost battles, lost brothers, lost rights, lost children.  Christian ‘Mericans think we have a rightful place at the head of the line, in the halls of power.  It irks us that no one cares anymore about Christians.  But if you think you can get it back by maneuvering, wrangling, business models, making jobs, a good economy, or sending the right businessman to Washington, you are as crazy as AOC.

I was listening to another lecture about preaching by Timothy Keller, who is the country’s foremost expert on preaching.  He has the fruit to prove it.  If you don’t get what he is doing, try harder.  Of course he is not perfect, as he would say, and perfect is never an option.  We should always be attempting bigger and better things, moving mountains.

Among other things, he mentioned his love for and the necessity of expository preaching.  This is of course the Presbyterian tradition.  And given the number of other recent orthodoxies he challenges, this is not a piece of furniture he wants to move too far.  But he did go all around the edges encouraging other types of sermons, which is great.

St Paul Preaching in Athens[Non-Expository], Raphael, c. 1515 

It got me thinking though.  Why is it that being directed by God, through an expositional schedule is any different than being directed by God in other ways?  You can say, I preached Romans 4 because we are in Romans and I am letting the text direct the preaching.  But why not Genesis 12?  There is still human choice in what book you chose, how detailed your sermons are, as well as every word you chose and what order you put them in(Not to get into the direction of the Muses too much.).  Why is it any different than if you took up your daily newspaper and addressed the sins of that day?  Did you write the news?  Are these not the problems that were given to you to deal with as Christians?  Are we not to be salt and light to the world around us.  Missionaries in place?  Or perhaps more to the point, what if the pastor listens to the congregants going through his office and addresses the problems they seem to be having, from the pulpit?  Is this not the task of the good shepherd, to lead his sheep?  He didn’t invent the wolves that attack them.  He didn’t cause the grass to grow on this hill and not on that one.  By addressing problems as they come is he not also allowing God to direct his steps?

I think also of the way Paul spoke of his work to the various churches.  He was not ashamed to list his credentials, and they were great, but not among them was ‘magician’ or ‘superman’.  His most important qualification was as faithful suffering servant.  We sometimes give the apostles super human characteristics, to excuse our own bad behavior.  I have heard pastors often say “well he was an apostle.”  to excuse their bad exegesis of the Old Testament.  The message is all too clear; Paul could do whatever he wanted because he was magic, we just have to read the New Testament.  But that is not how Paul presented it.  He called his own actions into question if they diverged from the Orthodoxy he and the other Disciples, and Jesus had preached(Gal. 1:8).  But on the other hand Paul was not shy about putting his name on his work. Paul refers to himself almost a thousand times in his letters and not just to give postmodern examples of his own failure.

Rom. 1:8 “I thank God for you.”  1:13 “I do not want you to be ignorant.”  1:16 “I am not ashamed.” 8:18 “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” 9:1   “I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit”  12:1   “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

1Cor. 4:14   “I do not write these things to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children.”  5:9   “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people…”  9:8   “Do I say these things on human authority? Does not the Law say the same? “ (He appeals to the law, can we not do the same?) 11:1  “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”

I hear similar complaints about the work or life of Jesus.  I say, “well Jesus did this or that”.  And people respond, “You’re not Jesus”.  But in a real sense we are Jesus, we are the body of Christ, we are his hands and feet on this earth(I Cor. 12).  That’s how he set it up.  That’s why what we do here matters and we shouldn’t be afraid to own it.  We should also be willing to repent when our actions are not like Jesus.

As Keller goes into his wonderful discipline of rhetoric, of reaching the people you are speaking to, he encourages a connection and a listening to your audience that is so lacking.  And I think preaching non-exegetical sermons, sermons which listen to what your people need, what the world needs, is a further extension of this type of shepheardly love for the congregation and the world.  There are of course abuses on every side.  I have heard expositional sermons which are such an abuse of the text I was furious.  They were clearly imposing their pet biases, or rather pet excuses for sin, on every passage.  And I have heard pastors pick and choose to the point that the sermons are not exegetical, but they are all the same.  And that seems to be the biggest proof that the only voice in the sermon is the Pastor.  Or perhaps a better term would be ‘activist’.  Because the speaking of the Spirit is real and it is crucial.

But fears of gospel marketing campaigns and the emergent church, shouldn’t keep us from addressing the real needs of the people.  Listening to what is going on in your church and community is the other necessary half of preaching the Gospel.  This is also God given guidance.  If your people speak French, getting up and reading the Bible in German every week is not preaching the gospel, though it may be the best, most true sermon ever.  We need to put a few things back on the table.  Any good principle can go bad when it becomes a sterile rule.  Strict exegesis has become this rule, which is probably why there is an emergent church.  Don’t be afraid to put your name on your sermon, for good or ill.  And if it doesn’t bring good fruit, don’t cling to your doctrinal statement or your seminary creed.  Repent and go a different way

It is interesting watching movies from the 80’s and early 90’s.  Political posturing was more rare than now, but the political postitions of the past stand out a lot more now than they did then.  That is the benefit of encountering cultures other than your own.  And today, any yeterday is a foreign land.

The Rings of Dante’s Paradise
Gustav Dore. The Beatific Vision from Dante’s Divine Comedy. 19th Century.

Great works like those of Shakespeare and Dante stand the test of time well because they are not merely about their own time.  No one cares about a blog post you wrote about yourself five seconds after it is written, if they cared at all.  And the number of people who cared, even at that time, is limited to a small audience.  But when you write stories that tap into the nature of human existence  and experiences we all share as humans, those stories can appeal to more people at the time and more times than their own.  And so Romen and Juliette in fair Verona speaks to relationship between youths today.  Beatrice can speak, inform, enliven, and motivate our passions to this day.  Because she is timeless.

In the recent past, movies had short commercials for causes like the hole in the ozone layer, soda six pack rings, the horror of killing trees, paper bags and other trivial nonsense which is all to plain to see today.  The overall message of many of these movies is that business is bad, culminating in Stone’s Wall Street.

I was considering another message about the problems of consumerism.  Like the political climate with Trump today, Reagan was attacked for the good he did simply because they needed something to attack.  So the poverty index of Carter’s fail pesidency becoming the prosperity of the Reagan tax cuts had to be made to look sinister.  So we had the “greed of the 80’s” or the problems of consumerism.  Similar themes resurfaced when Bush 41 encouraged people to spend our way out of the recession.  And his big government, bailing salvation put his money where his mouth was.

And so today I hear about how the millennials are so against consumerism.  They don’t favor big government.  The only problem is that these are the opposite of the truth.    As Mark Steyn has pointed Howard Schultz becamse wealthy by offering a product that is more expensive and less efficient.  He made coffee take longer and cost ten to fifty times more.  And the same is to be said of most of our food and beverage industry.  ‘Organic’ was little more than a slick euphemism for ‘elite’.  I’m better than you, eat organic.  And as everyone knows that isn’t cheap.  Whole Food has created another whole industry offering lower quality food for a much higher price.  I say lower quality based on sickness and disease caused by organic food’s higher concentration of bacteria due to fertilizing.  I say lower quality because it last’s half as long.  If you buy a $2 carrot instead of a $1 carrot, you are consuming more.  Money is little more than a unit of energy and while feeling good about saving the planet is nice, the reality is you are consuming more.

Soda rings. The horror.

So it seems to me the consumerisitc spirit is alive and well by every measure of consumer spending I could find, Americans spend more, they just spend it on more fleeting things.  They don’t buy heirloom quality things, they eat out at niche botique eateries puncuated by dozens of woke adjectives.  They don’t  buy houses and other real assets, they flit about the globe pretending that pollenating americanized tourist enclaves makes them world travelers.  They don’t buy cars, they waste billions having experiences and posting about such nonsense on twitter, often while drunk.  And perhaps the biggest waste of money, their ridiculously overpriced multidegreed educations.

After writing this, the first story I found, seemed to confirm.  Yeah, that’s how I do research.
https://havenlife.com/blog/millennial-spending-habits/

Which is even more disturbing. They spend more on alcohol, and interest.  They spend less on books, giving and saving.  So those educations are really just for show.  This is another sad reality, the day you graduate you never read another book again.   And you pay more for everything because your ‘education’ never taught you about basic economics.

Further Reading, no one will do:

Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics

http://walterewilliams.com

“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.