They Don't Know What Time It Is
They Don't Know What Time It Is
It’s time for all conservatives and other Christians to abandon their Leftist-aping love affair with the state and its coerciveness and return to a sound conservative Christian worldview.
Dear friends and supporters,
We’re living in a time in which classical liberalism, the free society established by Protestants whose fathers first arrived on this shore, and bounded by God’s moral law, is being squeezed out by statists on both Left and Right. We might think it’s a unique moment. We might say, as many conservatives do today, “We know what time it is.” We do, but not in the way they imply.
Actually there was a strikingly similar moment in Germany between 1919 and 1933. After its defeat in World War I, Germany was shredded by internal conflict, not just the punishing sanctions imposed by the victorious Allied powers. The violent conflict was between the far Left, communists, or Spartacists, on the one side, and the Right and far Right, the monarchists, and the growing Nazi party on the other.
The conflict was so intense that the seat of government had to be moved to the smaller city of Weimar. The fragile government established a constitutional order, basically classical liberalism. It was hated by both the Left and the Right. The Right argued that Weimar granted too much individual liberty. The Left argued it was still tied too much to traditional law and order.
The Right wanted a reestablishment of the monarchy or military or hierarchical society, and the Left wanted classical Marxism such as was recently established in the Soviet Union.
Sadly, there were very few principled intellectual defenders of the new constitutional republic. In fact, many Communists hated the Weimar Republic more than they hated the monarchists and militarists and the Nazis. And many of the Old Right hated the new free society more than they did the Communists. The real enemy for both sides was liberty. The only society either side could envision was a top-down, muscular dictatorship.
In the end, that’s precisely what they got. The Nazis were democratically elected in the spring of 1933 and the communists were jailed and exiled. This began a 12-year horror show that played itself out across Europe and almost to the gates of Moscow and the shores of England.
There are numerous differences between 21st-century America and the Weimar Republic. We’re not overrun by communists and Nazis, and won’t be anytime soon, no matter what hyperventilating partisans on Right and Left are claiming. Our country has a long history of classical liberalism, the free society.
Troubling Similarity
But there is one troubling similarity. Both the Right and the Left wings are now suffocating classical liberalism. The Leftists want to use the state to impose the progressive society, “social justice.” More and more of them are declaring that the American Founding was a big mistake. What we need is a federal government strong enough to enforce nationally legalized abortion-on-demand, gay “marriage,” and transgenderism. Donald Trump and his party (they trumpet) are enemies of democracy and will revoke a “woman’s right to choose” and undermine the homosexual agenda. They must be stopped at all costs.
Similarly, a number on the New Right have claimed the American Experiment has turned out to be an abysmal failure. The idea of liberty as espoused by our Founders has been shown to have been mistaken. It has led to all of the sexual and moral decadence we see around us. The only solution is to enlist a government strong enough to enforce Christian orthodoxy and de-privilege non-Christians. It must economically advantage families by state-financed coercion, and disadvantage single individuals. It must enlist a political strongman, a Protestant Franco, to crush the progressive agenda. Their agenda sounds eerily like that of the right-wing intellectuals of the Weimar Republic. As one historian writes of them:
[T]here was unanimity among them about certain basic beliefs: nationalism, the conviction that parliamentary democracy was wholly unsuitable for Germany, the belief in the need for strong, authoritarian government.1
Conservatives that ape the spirit (if not the ideology) of the Right wing of Weimar bellow they know what time it is: time for big government, time for a political strongman, time for nationalist socialism, time for ethno-statist racism. They’re wrong. They have no idea what time it is.
It’s time for all conservatives and other Christians to abandon their Leftist-aping love affair with the state and its coerciveness and return to a sound conservative Christian worldview of limited government, strong families and churches and businesses, economic liberty (free markets), and a color-blind society. It’s time to return to the truth that politics is downstream from culture, and that culture should be Christian culture, not a coercive political culture.
Politics Is Not Our Hope
Our hope is not political. Our hope has always been and always will be religious: turning to the Triune God of the Scripture and the gospel of Jesus Christ. If we want a Christian political order, we need first a Christian culture, and that is accomplished not by political imposition or executive fiat, but the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit. By Christians reordering their lives according to the word of God. By the gradual reclamation of all areas of culture — education and music and art and literature and science and technology and economics and, yes, finally politics — to the glory of God.
This is not a coercive political agenda. This is a Christian cultural agenda, recognizing the authority of Jesus Christ in every area of life. He is the King. Our job is simply to submit to him and champion his kingship everywhere. That King, our King, will win in history.
That’s what time it is.
Personal
I’m finalizing the essay collection The Sanctified State: Politics in the Christian Worldview. David Bahnsen, Joe Boot, George Grant, Brian Mattson, Levi Secord, Jeffery Ventrella and I are contributing. There are many too many books on Christianity and politics, a few of them begin with the standpoint of the Christian worldview. This one will.
The next post planned for CultureChange is “Olympianism.” This is an exposé of our Leftist world-be betters who bear the self-imposed burden of world transformation and leadership — and in effect see themselves as gods, like the 12 Greek Olympians of old.
Next Sunday, October 27, I’ll be speaking twice for my friends at Church of the King-McAllen, Texas (Dr. Ron Smith, Pastor). I'm planning to deliver an Election Day sermon as well as the ordination charge to my friend Fred Beall. I hope to see many of you Rio Grande Valley friends there.
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Yours for the cosmic Lord,
Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership
Isaiah 49:1–2
Marriage In the Christian Worldview
This easy-to-understand book tackles head-on same-sex “marriage” and attraction”; female subordination in marriage; creational versus Christian marriage; complementarian and egalitarian versus Reformational marriage; the fallacy of “falling in love”; aborticide; eros in culture; the LGBT+++ agenda, the lust for singleness; the child-free life; “natural” law; and much more.
It offers nothing less than a bold, creational, Reformational view of marriage amid the present cultural chaos.
Get the book here.
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Walter Laqueur, Weimar, A Cultural History (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 98.