I’m not posting on X as much these days, but here are my notes for the first part of August.
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In 2012, a wealthy philanthropist gave an 18 year $10,000. That 18 year old turned that investment in the most influential conservative political organization in the country, bringing in tens of millions of dollars each year. The young man spoke at countless high school and especially university campuses. That young man became the driving force in Trump’s 2024 re-election. That young man spread the gospel along with biblical principles of family, economics, etc. That young man had a wonderful message to young people and changed many lives for the better.
That young man took the talent he was given and multiplied it abundantly. That young man died for his faith, and that young man surely heard, “Well done good and faithful servant” when he entered into glory.
That young man was Charlie Kirk.
Be like Charlie.
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“’I wish it had not happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”
— Tolkien
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“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
— Chesterton
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“The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle – and not lose it.”
— Chesterton
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The gravest threat to freedom is not the tyrant but the suppression of unpopular truths.
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“In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an auto-da-fe but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority that is able to open it. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before making public his opinions he thought he had sympathizers; now it seems to him that he has none any more since he has revealed himself to everyone; then those who blame him criticize loudly and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away without courage. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth….”
— Tocqueville
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With Tucker Carlson’s Hunter Biden rehabilation interview, the horseshoe in horseshoe theory is almost complete. Tucker really seems to think he can create a new centrist party that incorporates features of the right and the left in a common sense platform (with a dash of Islam thrown in). But the left is not going to budge on the things it holds most dear, like abortion, sodomy, critical race theory, and immigration/importing the third world. The right is going to give a whole lot more in this coalition than the left. A lot of what Tucker is suggesting is just fine, but it’s not really profound or deep, and thus doesn’t solve the biggest problems we face.
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The old America was a land of high social trust. A man’s word and a man’s handshake were enough to secure a deal. Those days are long gone.
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We will never get our nation back by treating Christian faith as one religion among many. Christian faith must be privileged in America the same way Islam is privileged in, say, Saudi Arabia. Of course, the privileging of Christian faith bears very different cultural fruits than privileging Islam, and we want to see Christian faith privileged in every nation, not just America, but religious pluralism makes any kind of robust Christian culture impossible.
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Opposing Abortion not about stripping rights from women but loving people
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Lowering taxes not about some abstract principle but serving the good of families
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John Adams preamble to resolution, a key step on way to American independence, adopted May 15, 1776:
“Whereas his Britannic Majesty, in conjunction with the Lords and Commons of Great Britain, has, by a late Act of Parliament, excluded the Inhabitants of these united Colonies from the Protection of his Crown; and whereas no Answer whatever to the humble Petitions of the Colonies for redress of Grievances and reconciliation with Great Britain has been or is likely to be given, but the whole force of that Kingdom aided by foreign Mercenaries is to be exerted for the destruction of the good People of these Colonies; and whereas it appears absolutely irreconcileable to reason, and good Conscience, for the People of these Colonies now to take the Oaths and Affirmations necessary for the support of any Government under the Crown of Great Britain, and it is necessary that the Exercise of every kind of Authority under the said Crown should be totally suppressed, and all the Powers of Government exerted under the Authority of the People of the Colonies, for the preservation of internal peace, Virtue and good order, as well as for the defence of their Lives, Liberties and Properties against the hostile Invasions and cruel depredations of their Ennemies; therefore
Resolved That it be recommended to the respective Assemblies and Conventions of the United Colonies, where no Government sufficient to the Exigencies of their affairs hath been hitherto established, to adopt such Government as shall in the Opinion of the Representatives of the People best conduce to the happiness and Safety of their Constituents in particular and America in General.”
See also John Adams’ “Thoughts on Government” and “Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law.”
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Letter to TPC about TCA, 8/11/26:
Dear TPC family,
You may have already heard the disappointing news from the Hoover city council meeting last night: They denied our request to be de-annexed from the city of Hoover. As a result, we did not start the TCA school year today as planned. I want to, as briefly as possible, give you an overview of this complex situation, how we got here, where things stand, and what we plan to do next. As with any setback we face in life, we are to “cast all our cares upon God, knowing he cares for us” (1 Peter 5:7). We will “be anxious in nothing” (Philippians 4:6) and “give God thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18), whether good or bad. The same God who closes doors also opens doors. God never puts us through a trial apart from his design to use hardship to make us stronger and wiser. Such trials draw us closer to him and bond us ever more tightly to one another. May it be so here. While TCA families did not have the anticipated joy of a first school day this morning, they did have the joy of gathering to sing God’s praises and pray for his wisdom in the midst of trial (James 1:2-7).
Some background: We take full responsibility for misunderstanding our zoning situation. It would have been nice if Concordis, our consultant, had mentioned this, but it was still our responsibility to handle it and we own the mistake. It was an honest mistake, but still a mistake. We thought that because TCA is an accessory to our church, aiming to fulfill the same mission and using the same physical facility, that we did not need to seek a conditional use permit beyond what we already had, upon purchasing the property in 2019. Alabama state laws are very favorable to church schools. In discussions with government officials about the traffic light in front of our property, it was brought to our attention that we did indeed need to update our property’s status to cover the school (another reason to not like the traffic light!). Wanting to obey the authorities God has set over us, we began working on the zoning issue right away, but these things take time. In the course of that process, city representatives suggested that if our property got de-annexed from Hoover back into Shelby County (where the property had always been until Brook Highland Community Church had it annexed into Hoover, around 2018, aiming to increase its marketability before putting it up for sale), there would be no problem starting the school on time. Shelby County has more flexibility in its process than the city of Hoover, so this seemed like a common sense solution to the problem. Given that our property barely touches any other part of Hoover and has historically not been part of Hoover, de-annexation seemed like a relatively small request.
Our request to de-annex met a couple of concerns. First, there was a concern about traffic. We met this concern by pointing out that our school is relatively small (under 50 students) and will have virtually no perceptible impact on traffic in the area. That part of Cahaba Valley Road is busy, but that’s not due to TPC and TCA. Obviously given the size of our property, there is a hard cap on how large we can grow at our current location. While we do desire TCA to have an upper school, we have recognized from the beginning that it will eventually need to be at another location. Second, there was a concern about the future of the property. If TPC got de-annexed and then decided to sell the property, Hoover would no longer have a say in the future of the property. That’s a very reasonable concern, one we can all sympathize with. Zoning laws exist for a reason. We met this concern by offering the city a restrictive covenant which would, for all practical purposes, require that property to only be used for a church and/or school permanently, even if it changes ownership. We agreed to terms on the restrictive covenant with the city attorneys before Monday’s meeting, and we thought the city council would be satisfied with it. Our property is currently zoned C-2, which is one of the broadest and most permissive categories the city has. We obviously do not want to sell, but if we were to sell (which is the city’s fear), the property could become anything from a car dealership to a liquor store to a motel, and the city would not be able to stop it. De-annexation with the restrictive covenant would have reduced the 32 “by-right” uses the property is currently zoned for to 2 uses, a church and a school. To sum it up: If the city de-annexed us with the restrictive covenant, they would be assured that the property would always be a church and/or school. By keeping us in Hoover, they leave the property’s future use open to a much wider array of less desirable possibilities. We saw our offer as a win/win for the city and for us: The city gets assurances about how the land will be used in the future and we get to start school on time while beginning the permit process in Shelby County. Obviously, we have no intention of leaving our current location and we demonstrated that to the city in a variety of ways (improvements already made, capital campaign and architectural plans for future sanctuary, etc.), so we believed the city had no good reason to turn down our request. Setting aside my role as TPC’s pastor and looking at this issue only as 20+ year resident of Hoover, I think the city was offered a very good deal.
Alas, the city council decided it was more important to keep our 7 acres in Hoover than to have a guarantee that the property will only be used as a church and/or school in the future. This surprised us since the city suggested de-annexation, the city attorneys agreed to our restrictive covenant, and the proposed plan seemed to address the city’s core concern about the future of the property. The disappointing reality is that the city council did not believe a restrictive covenant could be trusted. It is sad to think that even in a community situated in the heart of the Bible Belt, like Hoover, where city council meetings open in explicitly Christian prayer and where the city council members sit under the words “In God We Trust,” social capital has declined so much that even a signed, notarized, legally binding restrictive covenant, filed at the courthouse with other official property documents, is somehow “not good enough” to secure confidence about future actions. A sign of the times, I suppose.
So what’s next? We are looking at temporary places for TCA to meet while we pursue the conditional use permit for the school in Hoover. The city council has indicated they are willing to help us expedite the process and the paperwork is being submitted as soon as possible.
Here’s what we are asking you to do:
- Pray the city of Hoover can expedite our conditional use permit.
- Pray we find a temporary home for TCA (we have some very promising leads on this already and hope to start school next Monday!).
- Pray that our board, families, and teachers can navigate this bumpy road with grace and wisdom, as they have been.
- Pray God’s kingdom would come, even though the advance of the kingdom is often met with various kinds of resistance.
- Pray TPC and TCA would love God and love one another in all circumstances.
- Pray TPC and TCA would be grounded and rooted in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, resting solely in his death, resurrection, reign, and return as our hope.
Obviously, if you have any questions, feel free to talk to a pastor, elder, or board member. We are here to serve you. And we will keep you updated as all of this unfolds.
In Christ,
Pastor Rich, on behalf of the TPC Session and TCA Board
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“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
— Chesterton
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An incomplete podcast on the Federal Vision that I did with Jonah Saller back in April, 2023:
https://youtu.be/e77dUVtIeEQ?si=Yl-NFJgwrJ5v5DKm
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Without political preaching, there would be no United States of America. Without a new rise in political preaching, there may be no United States of America in the future. Where is the black-robed regiment when you need them?
Some say, “pastors should not preach on the culture war.”
But this imposes an extra-biblical standard upon the pastor, who is called to preach the whole Bible. It muzzles the preacher so he cannot say what’s God’s Word says in many areas – and precisely in those areas where the pastors flock needs to be discipled.
If we are not supposed to preach on so-called culture war issues, what is left to preach? There are very few issues in our culture that have not been politicized. There are very few issues that are not connected to the culture war in some way.
If we are not supposed to preach on culture war issues, then marriage and sex cannot be preached because every aspect of marriage and sex have been swept up into the culture war. Obviously it is ridiculous to say these issues should not be taught on from the pulpit. A pastor who does not address marriage and sex is not a faithful pastor. He has to be able to define marriage and male/female. He has to be able to talk about God’s sexual design.
Or take something that might seem to be more distant from the culture wars, but really isn’t, like anxiety. Preaching on anxiety might seem to be insulated from the culture war, but it’s really not. As soon as we start preaching on anxiety, we are going to touch on issues of mental health, medication, and the causes of anxiety. Each one of these will get into culture war issues. We live in a culture that once stigmatized mental illness but now glorifies mental illness; surely the church must say something about that. The issue of medicating away anxiety and other emotional problems has been a hot topic in the culture since the Rolling Stones sang about it in their 1966 song, “Mother’s Little Helper.” If Mick Jagger recognized we were overmedicating women in the 1960s, surely today’s pastor can notice it. What are the causes and curses of the anxiety rippling through our culture? The church has to say something about this topic. There are many reasons for increased anxiety in the culture today, ranging from family breakdown to social media use to incompetent leadership at virtually every level of government and society, and so it is impossible to separate the causes of anxiety from the wider problems facing our world. If we are going to cast our cares on the Lord who cares for us, we have to identify those cares, and that will undoubtedly run us into culture war territory.
Or take another example that may seem far removed from the culture wars but really isn’t: Love of neighbor. It might seem like a pastor could preach on love of neighbor without getting entangled in the culture war. But a few years ago, we have had leading evangelicals and many politicians from both sides of the aisle tell us that loving our neighbor requires shuttering the economy, canceling public worship services, socially distancing, not visiting the sick in hospitals or the elderly in retirement communities, receiving an experimental vaccine, and wearing a mask in public. Either love of neighbor requires these things or it does not, but it is impossible to remain neutral. The church will either meet or not. The church will either require masks or not. There’s no way to avoid these issues. Further, we often told living neighbor means voting a certain way or not criticizing various “lifestyle choices” (we know what that euphemism stands for). Training people in biblical love of neighbor inevitably involves touching on culture war issues.
This is really the bottom line: It is simply impossible for the faithful pastor to avoid the culture war. It is all pervasive. It has seeped into almost everything. There is no way a church’s leadership or a pastor in his preaching can somehow avoid being a combatant in the culture war. The calling of the church is not to somehow transcend the culture war (that would likely turn us into Gnostics) but to fight the culture war faithfully.
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“Christianity should be twisted in with national constitutions, that the kingdoms of the world should become Christ’s kingdoms [Rv [1:15), and their kings the church’s nursing-fathers [Is 49:23]…What is the principal intention of this commission; to disciple all nations….”Admit them disciples; do your utmost to make the nations Christian nations;” … Christ the Mediator is setting up a kingdom in the world, bring the nations to be his subjects; setting up a school, bring the nations to be his scholars; raising an army for the carrying on of the war against the powers of darkness, enlist the nations of the earth under his banner”
— Matthew Henry
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“If the church confines its teaching to spiritual matters, it must neglect most of Scripture, which speaks to man’s condition in every area of life. Christian faith is either relevant to all of life or it is relevant to none of it: the claims of God are either total, or He is not God. To ask Christianity to stay in its own territory is to ask it to stay in all of life. Religion as the Bible conceives of it and declares it has no separate domain apart from the rest of life. It is the over-all purpose and meaning of all life in its every sphere. … The task of the church must be to challenge every sphere of life in the name of the sovereign God and the Lord Jesus Christ. The Great Commission requires that all nations be made disciples, and every sphere of life be brought under the dominion of Christ the King, made to hear Christ the Prophet, and find its redemption and intercession in Christ the Priest. Anything less than this is a defamation of the Gospel.“
— Rushdoony
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There is a kind of latent antinomianism that permeates much of Reformed Evangelical preaching and modern worship music. Preachers and songwriters tell church members they are “nothing but sinners” and “rebels condemned to hell” so they can do nothing right. The Christian is reduced to his faults and Jesus is reduced exclusively to being a Savior from the punishment of sin.. In other words, there is no awareness of the power of the Spirit that dwells in the believer and transforms him so that he can do genuinely good works, nor awareness of other roles that Jesus plays in our lives, as that of the King, who rescues us from the kingdom of sin so that we can submit ourselves obediently to His authority. Eventually, this can create the feeling that Christians are so miserable that they shouldn’t even bother trying to be obedient, and that all that effort and struggle for obedience is probably a form of legalism. The result of this teaching is a weak and immature church, vulnerable to yield to the world. Christians who do not have much hope in the transformation of their own lives or that of the world are easily manipulated and deceived by cultural influences; they lack courage and have too much shame. At the end they ask themselves, “Why strive for?” ”. If nothing can really improve in this life and in this world, why even try?. That’s why it’s so important to recover the teaching we’ve offered in this chapter. We need to know that God not only forgives our sins, but crushes them under His feet and ours. While we must be realistic about the sins and weaknesses that remain in our lives, we must also be triumphant. We must approach each day with a spirit of triumph because we have the assurance of victory in Christ our Lord.. We must not wallow in sin and shame. We must stand up and seek obedience because the Lord is with us.
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“I will merely add that it is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism: to think in terms of “our” industry or resource is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest. But in this respect the Continental liberalism which derives from the French Revolution is little better than conservatism. I need hardly say that nationalism of this sort is something very different from patriotism and that an aversion to nationalism is fully compatible with a deep attachment to national traditions. But the fact that I prefer and feel reverence for some of the traditions of my society need not be the cause of hostility to what is strange and different. Only at first does it seem paradoxical that the anti-internationalism of the conservative is so frequently associated with imperialism. But the more a person dislikes the strange and thinks his own ways superior, the more he tends to regard it as his mission to “civilize” others—not by the voluntary and unhampered intercourse which the liberal favors, but by bringing them the blessings of efficient government. It is significant that here again we frequently find the conservatives joining hands with the socialists against the liberals—not only in England, where the Webbs and their Fabians were outspoken imperialists, or in Germany, where state socialism and colonial expansionism went together and found the support of the same group of “socialists of the chair,” but also in the United States, where even at the time of the first Roosevelt it could be observed: “the Jingo and the Social Reformer have gotten together and have formed a political party, which threatened to capture the Government and use it for their program of Caesaristic paternalism, a danger which appears now to have been averted only by the other parties having themselves adopted this programme in a somewhat milder degree and form.”
–Hayek
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Killdozer, a story that reminds what can go wrong when a corrupt government forces a reasonable man to do unreasonable things through a mix of cronyism and abusive zoning laws:
https://youtu.be/TqEA5DPoEMY?is=DCMgxi4jWRmnUgyp
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We are in a populist moment, but what we need most is a noble, virtuous aristocracy.
You can see the effects of populism in the cultural political discourse. More swearing, more crass language, more demagogic appeals to people’s basest instincts. I think there is real opportunity for those who will, in the style of John Hancock, rise above the cacophony, speak with wisdom and clarity to the issues of the day, and not compromise their intergrity in the pursuit of power.
We need leaders who do not recalibrate their positions or style every time the majority seems to be shifting one way or the other. We need leadership that is grounded, that stays devoted to the larger mission and keeps in view the bigger picture. The older aristocracy ruled well because they knew better than the people what was good for them – but they could also persuade the people why that was the case. They genuinely served the common good.
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“…one of the most powerful findings that emerged from observation studies in families with disturbed children was that these families didn’t seem to set aside anything as special. They didn’t try to build traditions. Mealtimes were mundane. Bedtimes were bor-ing. Leaving the bouse and coming back was completely without spirit. The absence of traditions and rituals in these families was giving the children the message that they weren’t important and that the family wasn’t important.”
— Sarah Ban Breathnach, on the importance of family traditions/rituals
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““Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t marry the same sex.”
“Don’t like abortion? Don’t get one.”
“Don’t like gender ideology? Then don’t transition.”
This is a lazy, morally bankrupt argument of a culture that’s traded truth for comfort. We now act as if every serious issue can be reduced to personal taste, just like picking the flavor of our favorite ice cream. We act as if whatever we believe has no implications outside of ourselves.
You would never say:
“Don’t like child abuse? Don’t abuse your kid.”
“Don’t like racism? Don’t be racist.”
“Don’t like drunk driving? Then don’t do it.”
Why not? Because we all instinctively understand that some things are just wrong, and not just for you and me, but for everyone, because these things they hurt people, they corrupt innocence and truth, they distort reality, and they destroy the moral foundation we all depend on to live in a functioning society.
The idea that all moral issues are private choices is a lie. These things don’t stay in our bedrooms or at clinic or in our heads. They seep into our schools, the media, law, culture, and to the next generation.
Everyone pays the price for the lies we choose to accept.”
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“Since wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty, you might think that the left would be as obsessed with the creation of wealth as they are with the redistribution of wealth. But you would be wrong.”
— Thomas Sowell
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“[T]he character of Anglo-American civilization…is the product (and this point of departure ought constantly to be present in one’s thinking) of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other, but which, in America, they have succeeded in incorporating somehow into one another and combining marvelously. I mean to speak of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.”
— Tocqueville
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Our children belong to God. This is the good news about parenting. We are raising His children.
The foundation of covenantal parenting is the covenantal promise which means that we are to parent by grace through faith. In the Christian life, everything is to be through faith from first to last, including the way we bring up our children. We are to entrust our children to God, relying on His grace and resting in His covenant promises. The contrast is between raising children in the flesh or raising them by faith. Faithful parenting is not just a matter of trying hard. Parental good works, like all other good works, flow out of trusting God. Parents must start their task by trusting God’s covenantal promise. God says,
“I am your God and the God of your children” (cf. Acts 2:39, Gen. 17:7). This is the starting point for parents and the touchstone parents turn to when concerned about their caling to rear children. Christian parenting, from start to finish, is by faith.
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A society can never tax itself into prosperity.
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“The first and central virtue to be gained through the authentic pursuit of sport is the discipline to joyfully embrace hardship and pain. The child who masters his body against sloth, gluttony, and cowardice is well disposed to later master his spirit against lust, avarice, and corruption.
There is no noble spiritual system which does not require this strength. This mastery of self fundamentally underpins the pursuit of all higher goals.
As such, every upper caste has a noble and dangerous sport –hunting boars, racing across the polo field… [to teach] courage, steadfastness, and will…
But within the bounds of modern acceptability, sports, danger, and discomfort should be a part of every child’s upbring ing. Explore climbing, riding, hunting, swimming, rugby, polo: whatever is available.
A familiarity with real risk is necessary. The aristocracy have always engaged in dangerous games. This familiarity with death—memento mori-reminds us of the shortness of life, the greatness of the stakes, and the close proximity of the next life.
Dangerous games are less about victory over the opponent, and instead force a focus on victory over the self.”
— Johann Kurtz on the importance of sports/atheltics
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“If we practice charity, every community will be a little heaven.”
— St. John Bosco
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“Our rulers today are a random collection of successful men and their wives… They have been educated to achieve success, but few of them bave been educated to exercise power. Nor do they count with any confidence upon retaining their power, nor of handing it on to their sons.”
— Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals
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“No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, unwittingly making the transcendental argument for God’s existence from the impossibility of the contrary
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Liberal white women are the lone bulwark of progressivism.
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“Hell is other people.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, on how existentialism leads to an anti-communal, anti-social view of life
In reality, hell is absence of other people – utter aloneness and isolation. Heaven is, as Jonathan Edward’s out it, a world of love, in which we enjoy the deepest and most enjoyable communion with other people possible.
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“We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”
— Voddie Baucham, on how public schools are leftwing indoctrination camps
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“If the Jacobin theory be true, then woman must be allowed access to every male avocation, including government, and war if she wishes it, to suffrage, to every political office, to as absolute freedom from her husband in the marriage relation as she enjoyed before her union to him, and to as absolute control of her own property and earnings as that claimed by the single gentleman, as against her own husband.”
— R. L. Dabney
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“Theocracy. Christian nationalism. Separation of church and state.
I have spent decades as a constitutional attorney watching people invoke a constitutional rule that does not exist.
During those years I wrote letters that never should have been necessary.
No, a little girl cannot be forbidden from bringing her Bible to school.
No, students do not surrender their First Amendment rights when they walk through the schoolhouse doors.
No, students do not need government permission to gather voluntarily around the flagpole before school and pray.
No, a teacher answering a sincere question about Christianity is not violating the Constitution.
Again and again I encountered teachers and administrators who sincerely believed these things were illegal. Many even professed to be Christians. They were not trying to persecute anyone. They had simply absorbed a constitutional myth.
That may be one of the most successful myths in modern American history. Millions of Americans came to believe that religious liberty required public ignorance about Christianity.
It never did.
The phrase separation of church and state is not in the Constitution.
Every American ought to know that.
It comes from Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists in Connecticut. The Baptists feared the federal government might establish a national denomination and interfere with their churches. Jefferson assured them it could not. His famous wall protected the church from the state. It did not require the state to pretend Christianity never shaped America.
Those are two entirely different ideas.
Here is something else most Americans do not know.
The phrase they invoke to remove the Bible from public life does not appear in our Constitution. But explicit constitutional language separating church and state did appear in the constitution of the Soviet Union. Article 52 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution mandated strict separation of church and state and school from church.
The Soviets understood exactly what they were doing. Remove the transcendent foundation. Replace it with the state. Control what children are taught about the world they inhabit.
When Americans reach for that phrase to scrub the Bible from public life, they are borrowing from Moscow, not Philadelphia.
Jefferson’s wall was built to protect the church from the state. It was never built to remove the Bible from American life.
In 1805 Thomas Jefferson served on the Washington, D.C., school board. The Bible and Isaac Watts’ hymns were among the texts used to teach children to read.
The man most often invoked to keep the Bible out of schools helped oversee a school system that used it.
America’s earliest public schools did not treat Scripture as contraband. They treated it as the indispensable literary and moral foundation of an educated people. The New England Primer did the same. Not because the government was establishing a denomination. Because the founders understood that self-government required a morally and historically literate citizenry.
Joseph Story, one of the greatest constitutional scholars in American history and Supreme Court justice, argued that Christianity was indispensable to the moral foundation of a republic.
John Adams wrote that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and was wholly inadequate to the government of any other. He also wrote that the general principles on which the Founders achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity.
These were not obscure voices. They were among the principal architects of the American republic.”
— Clayton Wood
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“But nearly all public men and divines declare that the State schools are the glory of America, that they are a finality, and in no event to be surrendered. And we have seen that their complete secularization is logically inevitable. Christians must prepare themselves then, for the following results: All prayers, catechisms, and Bibles will ultimately be driven out of the schools….
. . . humanity always finds out, sooner or later, that it cannot get on without a religion, and it will take a false one in preference to none. Infidelity and practical ungodliness will become increasingly prevalent among Protestant youth, and our churches will have a more arduous contest for growth if not for existence…
You may deem it a strange prophecy, but I predict that the time will come in this once free America, when the battle for religious liberty will have to be fought over again, and will probably be lost, because the people are already ignorant of its true basis and condition.”
— R. L. Dabney
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“It is widely assumed, for example, that children are a choice. This was not always so. The introduction of reliable contraception, especially the pill, made it possible to divorce the inherent connection between sex, marriage, and procreation.
The cultural journey through the sexual revolution went something like this: First, we wanted sex outside of marriage. That required having sex without the threat of babies. Then we wanted babies outside of marriage, and today, even babies without sex. Somewhere along the way, the idea of marriage without children, intentionally I mean, became common too. Even among Christian couples, the idea of not only delaying children but choosing to not have them at all is, in many circles, non-controversial.
In previous generations, an intentionally childless marriage would have been unthinkable. Infertility, as so many couples are painfully aware, is tragic. Intentional infertility is considered a choice today.”
— John Stonestreet, on the illogic of the sexual revolution and it’s anti-natalism
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“Government cannot make anyone a Christian. Faith cannot be coerced.
But protecting religious liberty is not the same thing as pretending Christianity contributed nothing to the civilization we inherited.
Those are radically different ideas. One protects liberty. The other erases memory.
Civilizations do not collapse only because they forget how to build. They collapse because they forget why they built.”
— Clayton Wood
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Satan always goes after the children. If he can’t kill them in the womb, he tries to capture them in the classroom.
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J.D. Hall on young men, the perversion of capitalism/free markets, and the affordability crisis:
“Young men, don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t a good capitalist because you rightfully complain about how hard it is to buy a home, pay your mounting bills, buy your family groceries, or keep a roof over your head.
It didn’t always used to be this way, the deck really is stacked against you, and turning you into debt cattle, tax slave, and lifelong renter were the goals of very wealthy and powerful people since they first assigned you a number. Because that’s what you are to them.
Your right to complain about it is written in your sweat and blood. And no. You are not experiencing “capitalism.” You are experiencing exploitation they call “capitalism.”
You are competing for a starter home against global capital with access to money you could never borrow at rates you could never get. You are paying taxes into a system that subsidizes corporations large enough to purchase the politicians who write the rules governing those corporations. You are watching losses get socialized while profits remain private, industries consolidate until “competition” means choosing which logo gets to fleece you, and financial institutions turn necessities like housing, medicine, education, and even food into investment vehicles to be squeezed for maximum yield.
That is not a free market. That is a market with a thumb and an entire federal bureaucracy sitting on the scale.
Real Capitalism requires meaningful competition, private property, enforceable contracts, and honest money. When the powerful can purchase exemptions, subsidies, bailouts, regulatory moats, preferential financing, cheap foreign labor, and political influence, while you get a mortgage at seven percent and a lecture about skipping Starbucks, somebody has rigged the %# game.
You work. You produce. You build. You fix. You haul. You create things people need. and then you watch an ever-growing procession of governments, banks, monopolies, middlemen, institutional investors, and politically connected parasites reach into your pocket to take it.
There is nothing anti-capitalist about objecting to that. That is a rigged table where the house writes the rules, deals the cards, owns the casino, lends you the money to play, and then calls you “anti-capitalist” and “unpatriotic” when you notice.
Heck, I’ll even complain with you. It’ll be fun. But we’ll have to do it while we work because a single day off might cause cascading financial ruin and then they’ll call us lazy.”
There are some good (and not so good) comments on the thread.
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History of musical notation:
The Western system of musical notation developed primarily within the Christian Church, especially in monasteries, during the early Middle Ages. It arose from the practical need to standardize and transmit Gregorian chant (plainsong) across Europe for liturgical uniformity.
Early Context: Oral Tradition and the Need for Notation
Christian liturgical music, including what became known as Gregorian chant (associated with the tradition linked to Pope Gregory I, 590–604), was transmitted orally for centuries. Singers learned melodies by ear and memory. Regional variations (Roman, Gallican, Ambrosian, etc.) existed. 
Under the Carolingian rulers—especially Pepin the Short and Charlemagne (late 8th–early 9th centuries)—there was a strong push for liturgical and musical uniformity across the Frankish empire to strengthen political and religious cohesion. Roman chant was promoted and blended with local practices. Reliable transmission of complex melodies over long distances and generations required a written system. Ancient Greek notation had been largely forgotten in the West by this time. 
Neumes (9th–10th Centuries)
The earliest surviving Western musical notation consists of neumes (from Greek neuma, meaning “gesture” or “sign”). These appeared in the late 9th century (with some possible earlier experiments around the mid-9th century) as symbols placed above the Latin text of the chant.
- Early neumes were adiastematic (or in campo aperto—in an open field): they indicated the general contour of the melody (rising, falling, or repeating) and sometimes performance nuances (such as emphasis or grouping of notes), but not exact pitches or intervals. They served mainly as memory aids for singers who already knew the melodies.
- Important early centers of neumatic notation included monasteries such as St. Gall (Switzerland), which produced highly refined manuscripts, and centers associated with Metz (Messine neumes) and Aquitaine.
These developments occurred in monastic and cathedral scriptoria, where monks copied liturgical books. The Church’s vast network of monasteries facilitated the spread and refinement of the system.
Heighted Neumes and the Staff (Late 10th–11th Centuries)
Over time, scribes began placing neumes at varying heights relative to the text (diastematic or heighted neumes) to suggest relative pitch more clearly. Dry-point lines or single reference lines appeared experimentally.
The decisive breakthrough is traditionally credited to the Benedictine monk Guido d’Arezzo (c. 991–after 1033). Working in Italian monastic and cathedral settings (including Pomposa and Arezzo), he developed and promoted a practical staff system around the 1020s–1030s: - A staff of four lines (tetragram), with lines and spaces representing specific pitches.
- Colored lines (red for F, yellow for C) and letter clefs to fix absolute pitch references.
- Placement of neumes on the lines and spaces so that exact intervals could be read.
- The custos (a guide note at the end of a line indicating the first note of the next).
Guido also popularized solmization (the syllables ut–re–mi–fa–sol–la, drawn from the hymn Ut queant laxis to St. John the Baptist), which became the basis of modern solfège (do–re–mi…). In his treatise Micrologus and other writings, he demonstrated that a singer could learn an unfamiliar melody from the notation alone—a major advance over pure oral tradition. He reportedly demonstrated this to Pope John XIX.
Guido’s system spread rapidly through monastic orders (including Camaldolese, Cistercian, and others) and became the foundation of Western staff notation. Square notation (a more angular form of the neumes on the staff) later became standard for chant books.
Later Developments and Significance - Precise rhythmic notation developed later (modal rhythm in the Notre-Dame school of the late 12th–13th centuries; mensural notation from the late 13th century onward, associated with theorists such as Franco of Cologne), enabling the growth of polyphony.
- Monasteries and cathedral schools remained the primary centers of musical literacy, theory, composition, and manuscript production for centuries.
- The system created in this ecclesiastical environment is the direct ancestor of modern Western musical notation (the five-line staff, note shapes, clefs, etc.).
In short, the Church’s liturgical needs—especially the desire for uniform performance of chant—and the intellectual and scribal culture of monasteries drove the invention and refinement of musical notation. Without this monastic and ecclesiastical context, the precise, pitch-specific written system that underpins Western art music would not have developed in the form it did.
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“The Bible is the single most influential literary work in the history of the Western world. That is not a devotional claim. It is a historical one.
Consider the writers who have shaped English literature most deeply. John Donne, whose Holy Sonnets are among the most transcendent poems in the language, wrote from inside a biblical imagination so complete that separating his faith from his verse is like separating salt from the sea. Christopher Marlowe, writing before the King James Bible even existed, was already drawing on Scripture’s moral universe. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s greatest works are drenched in guilt, grace, and the longing for redemption. Percy Bysshe Shelley spent his life arguing with the God he could not stop addressing. Milton built an entire epic on the third chapter of Genesis.
Then Dostoevsky. Tolstoy. Dickens. Eliot. Faulkner. Flannery O’Connor. Steinbeck.
They assumed you knew Eden. Exodus. David. The prophets. The Cross. The Resurrection. The Prodigal Son. The Good Samaritan. The language of sacrifice. The language of redemption. The language of grace.
You can read their words. You cannot fully enter their world.”
— Clayton Wood
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Taking on two of the biggest myths/lies of our day: Education is not neutral and Christian faith isn’t private.
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“I think we’re all savvy enough in the culture in which we find ourselves today to know that there is a war on children. It is an educational war on children. It is a psychological war on children. It is a political war on children. But more than that it is a spiritual war on children, and more than that it is a satanic war on children. We don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, the rules of the darkness of this world, and spiritual wickedness in the heavenlies. It is a spiritual war on children. It takes many forms. Right now, it is dominated by a mentality that I would choose to call the anti-truth culture. There was a time when we defined human life post-Enlightenment, post-Reformation, as modern. And that meant we were searching for truth. And that was followed by post-modern, which meant we were no longer searching for truth. We decided there was no absolute truth. You could have your own truth, find your own truth. We’ve gone through that and out the other side into a culture that is bent on lies, and anti-truth. It is an all-out assault on the very concept of truth. It is a willful ignorance of reality. And children are the greatest victims of this, because the perpetrators of this know where they have to go to shape minds. They get them as early as they can.”
— John MacArthur
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From Grok:
Conservatives commonly cite statements and positions from Joe Biden, other Democrats, and progressive figures that they interpret as subordinating parental authority to the state or schools, advancing gender ideology with children, or promoting race-focused curricula they view as divisive. These are drawn from public records, speeches, and policy actions. Context matters—fact-checkers have sometimes disputed maximalist interpretations of specific clips—but the statements themselves are real and have fueled sustained conservative criticism.
Parental Authority and “Whose Children?”
- Joe Biden: At a 2023 White House Teachers of the Year event, Biden quoted and endorsed a teacher’s line: “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child. No such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children.” Similar phrasing appears in other remarks emphasizing collective or national responsibility for children. Conservatives treat this as echoing a collectivist view that softens the priority of the family and elevates the state or “village.”
- Terry McAuliffe (Virginia Democrat, 2021 gubernatorial candidate): In a debate he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” while opposing parental ability to challenge library books or curriculum decisions. This became a central campaign issue and is widely quoted by conservatives as open rejection of parental oversight.
- Michigan Democratic Party (2022 Facebook post, later deleted): “The purpose of a public education in a public school is not to teach kids only what parents want them to be taught. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client of the public school is not the parent, but the entire community, the public.” The party walked it back after backlash, but conservatives cite it as revealing the underlying progressive posture.
- Melissa Harris-Perry (MSNBC, 2013 promo): “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” She stood by the core idea. Conservatives see this as a clear statement of the progressive view that the family is secondary to the collective.
These lines are offensive to many conservatives because they invert the traditional (and, in their view, natural-law and constitutional) priority: parents as primary educators and guardians, with schools as agents or partners, not owners.
Gender Ideology, Transgender Issues, and Schools - Biden has repeatedly framed restrictions on “gender-affirming care” for minors (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgeries) as “cruel” and, regarding Florida’s rules, “close to sinful.” He has also emphasized non-discrimination and support for transgender youth in ways conservatives interpret as endorsing social and medical transition pathways for children.
- The Biden administration’s Title IX regulations expanded the definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity. This was challenged in court and struck down in significant part; critics said it compelled pronoun use, opened sex-separated spaces and sports to biological males identifying as female, and sidelined parental input. Conservatives view this as erasing sex-based protections for girls and forcing affirmation of contested claims about sex and identity on schools and students.
- Related progressive policies and rhetoric (including some school districts’ approaches under Democratic-aligned leadership) have included social transition (names/pronouns) without mandatory parental notification and curriculum materials introducing gender identity concepts early. Conservatives argue this medicalizes and socializes children into an ideology that denies biological sex, produces irreversible harms for many, and treats parental disagreement as bigotry.
Progressives typically frame these as anti-discrimination protections and evidence-based care for a vulnerable population. Conservatives counter that the evidence for youth medical transition is weak or contested, that rapid-onset and desistance data matter, and that schools have no right to keep parents in the dark or override sex-based categories.
Race, CRT-Related Content, and “Honest History”
Biden’s Department of Education proposed rules and guidance that referenced the 1619 Project and the work of Ibram X. Kendi while encouraging certain approaches to teaching race and “equity.” The administration also opposed or criticized state laws restricting teachings that critics labeled as critical race theory or “divisive concepts” (e.g., that individuals are inherently racist/oppressor by race, or that the United States is fundamentally defined by systemic racism). Conservatives object that these frameworks teach children to view society primarily through racial power dynamics, induce guilt or resentment based on skin color, and downplay individual agency, classical liberal principles, and American achievements. They see parental pushback against such materials as legitimate, not “book bans” or domestic terrorism (a charge that arose after the National School Boards Association letter to the Biden administration).
Broader Pattern Conservatives Highlight
Progressive education discourse often prioritizes “inclusion,” “equity,” and “belonging” in ways that, to critics, subordinate academic basics, biological reality, and parental rights. Examples include opposition to parental opt-outs on sensitive topics, teachers’-union resistance to school choice, and rhetoric treating public schools as the primary site for social transformation. Conservatives argue this produces declining academic outcomes, erodes trust, and treats children as instruments of ideology rather than individuals under parental care.
These statements and policies are not fringe inventions; they come from elected officials, party organs, and administration actions. Conservatives find them offensive precisely because they challenge the premise that parents, not the state or progressive educators, hold primary authority over children’s formation on contested moral and anthropological questions. Progressives generally reject that characterization and emphasize civil rights, expert consensus, and collective responsibility. The disagreement is fundamental.
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The purpose of a Christian school is to be an extension of the parents and to aid the parents in fulfilling their mission of training their children. The school is also an extension of what the church is doing in its role to make disciples. In general, the classical Christian school movement has succeeded because the school is usually part of a larger ecosystem that includes family and church so that all three institutions reinforce the reality of God’s truth, beauty, and goodness in the lives of the students. A classical Christian school should be paired with a classical Christian home life and a classical Christian church with a classical Christian liturgy. A classical Christian school should build upon what families and churches are already doing, and thus create synergy between these institutions. The school should mesh tightly with how parents are seeking to nurture their children and how the church’s liturgy is shapes her people into holistic worshippers.
Josh Gibbs explains how a classical Christian school needs a classical Christian home here:
https://circeinstitute.org/blog/classical-education-demands-classical-home/
I explain further how church, family, and school can all work together in the formation of a new Christendom here:
https://www.trinity-pres.net/audio/23-12-05GenevaTeacherTalk-edited.mp3
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On parenting/discipline:
One of the greatest gifts you can give your children is to be a well-disciplined and emotionally balanced father or mother. I usually summarize the essence of Edwin Friedman’s work as follows: “To lead, you need to be the calmest person in the room.” This applies to both fatherhood and motherhood.
Many parents miss precious moments of teaching and undermine the effectiveness of discipline simply because they do not maintain emotional control when their children disobey. If you lose your cool when your child sins, you are the one who really needs discipline. And if you are not disciplined, you cannot discipline effectively. Before you correct your child you need to correct yourself.
Good parents are resistant to panic and anxiety. Bring up your kids by faith not fear. They are able to train them because they have trained themselves before.
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The church in America today does not face a quantity problem — we have plenty of Christians, plenty of local churches, plenty of Christian ministries, plenty of radio stations and publishing houses, a massive social media presence, and so on.
We do not lack in numbers or resources.
What the church in America today faces is a quality problem — the quality of our lives, the quality of our preaching, the quality of our worship and music, the quality of our cultural engagement, the quality of our mission and mercy work, and so on, is sorely lacking.
This is doubly or triply true in the Bible Belt, where there are more low quality Christians and churches than anywhere else.
Fewer Christians, who lived higher quality Christian lives, and who attended higher quality Christian churches, with higher quality preaching and worship, would be far more effective than the millions upon millions of Christians, and thousands upon thousands of churches, that we presently have.
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We celebrate religious “liberty” victories instead of discipleship victories. But the goal of the church is not to carve out a place at the table. It’s to transform our nation into a Christian nation, a discipled nation.
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C. S. Lewis said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” This is the essence of presuppositional apologetics. Without the sun, everything is dark.
It’s also the rationale behind the necessity of Christian education. Without the light of Christ in the classroom, students are seeking to learn in utter darkness.
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Affirming people in sin is hatred, not love.
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Kinism has inescapably incestuous tendencies. Isn’t the best way to preserve family culture and genetic line is to have your son marry your daughter?
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Solving America’s immigration problem will help on many fronts, but it will take much more to solve America’s cultural crisis. Deportations will not automatically resolve issues like low marriage rates, low birth rates, high illegitimacy rates, the mass slaughter of the unborn, widespread porn use, etc. Progressives have been working to subvert and destroy the remnants of America’s Christian heritage and identity for a long time and unconstrained immigration has been only one of their many weapons.
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The Bible only knows of two kingdoms, the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness. What classical Protestant political theory refers to as the the two kingdoms, three estates, etc. are perhaps more helpfully called spheres (following Abraham Kuyper) or institutions.
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It’s amazing how deeply the feminist movement has made inroads into the conservative, evangelical Reformed church. We now have a plethora of what I call “strong independent thin complementarian women.” These thin complementarian “boss babes” really think they are checking the biblical boxes when it comes to sexuality, but they are really aren’t.
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Doug Wilson has rightly said that hard teaching makes for soft hearts; that is to say, faithful, hard words from the pulpit will make the hearts of the people soft and obedient to the Word. Likewise, hard discipline makes for soft, pliable, obedient children.
We need hard preaching/teaching in the church and hard parenting in our homes; this is the only way to create people with soft hearts. Hard teaching in the church is not yelling and screaming from the pulpit. It’s the firm and uncompromising application of God’s Word to the people’s lives. And hard parenting is not abusive or tyrannical; it is measured, proportional, and consistent discipline that inflicts pain for the sake of bringing about correction. Pastors who love their people will preach hard truths. Parents who love their children will care about them enough to discipline them even when it is difficult or inconvenient. Hardness in pastoring and parenting produces softness (of the right sort) in congregants and children. If we want Christians who can do hard thigns for the glory of God, who can endure hardships as faithful soldiers of the cross, it starts with hard teaching and hard discipline.
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Faithfulness never goes to waste.
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Courage is rarer than genius. Moral courage is harder to come by than physical courage.
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No doubt, anti-white racism is real — there is especially a bias against white men. The examples of this “reverse racism” or “revenge racism” seem to be multiplying every day. But it’s important to understand this anti-white hatred is not really (or solely) about race. The white male is a stand in for Western (that is to say, Christian) civilization. Think of the statues that get toppled. Whether it is Robert E. Lee or Christopher Columbus, the point is not merely to dishonor those men but to destroy whatever remains of the civilization that created them and of which they were a part. The changing of symbols points to a deeper shift: a changing of gods.
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Stephen Wolfe once tweeted something to the effect that “white evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America.” I suppose I could grant this if Wolfe would grant that white progressives are the main driving force behind America going morally insane. But if you set the problem up that way, note that the “white” part gets cancelled out. What we are left with is evangelicals vs. progressives in a battle for moral sanity or insanity in America. I do not see why race would be brought into it as a defining factor. There are plenty of whites who are not Christian or conservative and there are plenty of non-whites who are. The Christian faith has no necessary tie to a riacial group. So why structure the discussion along the lines of race? It seems to me this kind of thing is actually part of the moral insanity. It also seems to me that its a sure way for Christians and conservatives to keep losing. We need as many allies as we can get. Why not invite conservative Christian blacks, Hispanics, Asians to join us in the fight?
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In any cultural conflict, the person (or group) with the strongest convictions will win. In a marriage, if a husband wants to lead his wife in a particular direction, he has to hold his convictions more strongly than she holds hers; otherwise, he will eventually give in and fail to lead. One reason Muslims and LGBTQers often win in the culture war against Christians is because they hold their convictions more strongly than we hold ours.
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Politics must be a matter of great importance from time to time so that it can be a matter of very little importance most of the time. In a battle of those who just want to be left alone (which desribes most conservatives) versus those who really want to win, those who want to win will always defeat those who just want to be left alone. So: if we want to be left alone, we have to want to win.
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Cultural reformation in our situation requires a three legged stool. Major political transformation is beyond our reach at the moment, but if we can reform church, family, and school, these can be the building blocks of kingdom renewal. When these institutions get synergy, with the Christian church forming Christian families, which in turn start Christian schools to disciple their children, we will start to make headway.
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There’s anecdote that floats around from time to time. It goes something like this. A man was trying to decide between staying at his Reformed church or joining the Roman Catholic church. He went to his Reformed pastor, who gave him a book to read. He went to the Roman priest, who prayed with him. The man joined the Roman church. The point the anecdote is supposed to make is that Reformed types tend to be too intellectual, too bookish, too argumentative. But I think the whole anecdote (whether it ever actually happened or not) is a sham. There is no dichotomy between prayer and rational argument. The same Paul who told us to pray without ceasing also argued and reasoned with men in the synagogues (and in his epistles). Prayer is not more pious or spiritual than making well-reasoned arguments from the Scripture, any more than arguments can make prayer superfluous we need both.
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Evangelicalism was a twentieth century movement that was supposed to correct the anti-intellectualism of fundamentalism and bring greater respectability to the Christian faith. Mark Noll wrote his book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” to lament that there was no evangelical mind. In other words, evangelicalism has given us the worst of both worlds. It has not maintained the gritty courage and dogged biblical fidelity that characterized fundamentalism. But it has also failed to develop a robust intellectual culture that could push back against modernity’s rationalism. Instead, evangelicalism has become obsessed with relevance and respectability, which has allowed it to be steered further and further to the left as it chases the Overton Window and tries to look cool and winsome in the eyes of the its cultured despisers.
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As we move further and further into negative world, institutional ownership will become more and more important. Do you own the platform on which you deliver content? Do you own physical space in which to meet? Starting schools, businesses, etc. are more critical than ever. If we depend on others for our physical and virtual meeting spaces, we could quickly find ourselves squeezed out.
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Patience is a hard virtue to develop because learning patience requires waiting.
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Historically the exercise of political authority tied to responsibility for military defense. This is one reason why political rulers were traditionally male.
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The spirit of feminism is the spirit of egalitarianism which is the spirit of revolution and rebellion.
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Children who grow up in homes where there is a lot of marital conflict, even low key marital conflict, almost always struggle with anxiety and relational bonding when they get older. Having a happy marriage will cover many parental shortcomings because the child has a secure foundation. God has established spousal roles, domains, and an authority structure in marriage precisely so that conflict can be minimized in the home. When love and respect flow back and forth between spouses, when there is joy and peace charactering the marital relationship, and the children are put in a position to thrive.
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A common problem dynamic in marriage:
She doesn’t feel like having sex when he initiates. When he’s rejected, he’s feels like looking at porn. If feelings are the authority in the marriage there is no way to resolve it.
Thankfully, Scripture gives a pathway forward. When the Bible is the authority, rather than feelings, both spouses recognize they have duties/responsibilities to one another which must transcend feelings.
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Not a single woman fought the war to end slavery in America.
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We have more empirical data on male/female attraction (eg, what it takes to make an opposite sex romantic relationship work) than almost anything else – and yet these reams of accumulated data are almost entirely ignored by mainstream sources, including the church. Hollywood gets it wrong most of the time these days. Given how important marital happiness is to one’s overall happiness, and how important successful male/ female bonding is to civilization’s surviving and thriving, this is a massive problem.
A lot of women still think that men will find them attractive if they are highly educated, successful in their careers, etc. And far too many men still think women will find them attractive if they soft and sensitive, vulnerable and emotional. This gets attraction backwards on both counts. Men are attracted to femininity in women; they are not looking for masculinized women. Women are attracted to masculinity in men; they are generally repulsed by effeminate softness in men.
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In the church today, submissive husbands are a bigger problem than tyrannical husbands.
Many Christian husbands do not lead well because they do not have convictions in areas where leadership is needed. They do not care about very many areas of their household. The void left by their lack of convictions is filled by the their wives’ leadership and her convictions. They think are doing well be being a “nice guy,” minimizing disagreement by not taking a position on most issues in the life of the family. In reality they are abdicating. Men need to think through more issues, arrive at settled convictions, and the lead their families accordingly. When a man thinks through an issue, he obviously needs to do so in conversation with his wife, but he also needs to come to a position and then own it for himself. Otherwise, a married couple tends to fall into role reversal: he becomes her helper and she becomes his leader.
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One of the worst things a husband can say to his wife repeatedly is, “Just tell me what to do” or ” What do you want me to do?” This just puts the burden on her to lead, to figure this out, to determine the family’s vision. She wasn’t built for it and quickly gets decision fatigue.
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Don’t demonize the rich. You need them to hire you. You will never work for a poor person.
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There is nothing more satisfying than being in a high polarity marriage.
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If Aristotle was right about the races then the biblical vision of heaven is impossible.
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If you go woke, you can never go woke enough.
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It’s been rightly said that progressives reproduce not in the bedroom (they have a birth rate of about .7 right now, well below replacement rate). Instead, they reproduce in the classroom. If Christian parents do not want to be breeders for progressives, they need to give their kids a covenantal education.
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In a therapeutic age, personality replaces character, charisma replaces virtue, and “servant-leadership” replaces rule.
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Anyone who identifies their feelings with reality is a narcissist. Anyone who always demands other people validate their feelings is a narcissist.
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This kind of stunt is just what’s needed. If the WNBA lets him play, it will quickly prove how different men and women are. If they don’t, they are violating their own principles by being transphobic.
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“Make no mistake. We are locked in a battle. This is not a friendly gentleman’s discussion. It is a life and death conflict between the spiritual hosts of wickedness and those who claim the name of Christ. It is a conflict on the level of ideas between two fundamentally opposed views of truth and reality. It is a conflict on the level of actions between a complete moral perversion and chaos and God’s absolutes.”
— Francis Schaefer, 1984
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Religious faith and politics cannot be mixed. You can only mix them if they are initially separated – and they are not separated, or separable, ever. Politics, like culture as a whole, is always already religious. All law is legislated morality, and morality has a religious basis. That religion may be secular humanism, which makes man the measure of all things. That religion may be Islam, resulting in Sharia law. Or that religion may be the gospel of Jesus Christ. But every society has a religious foundation, and all politics is the expression of those foundational religious commitments in the public square.
Secular humanism disguises its religiosity under the guise of neutrality but this is naive and/or dishonest. It is most certainly a religion. Neutrality is a myth. Secular humanism is a rival to Christian faith. If one wins, the other loses. It’s that simple.
Christian faith built Western civilization, including America. Without the load-bearing wall of orthodox Christian faith, our nation collapses. This is why many of us believe the only hope for America is found in repentance and righteousness, as defined by God’s Word. America must repent or perish (as Tucker Carlson reminded us last Charlie Kirk’s memorial).
This is also why the expression of religious faith at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service was so important. It was explicitly Christian unlike anything in living memory. Just compare Kirk’s memorial, with its open declarations of Christ’s lordship, to the post 9/11 memorial in 2001, when our leaders sat under a female Episcopalian priestess and heard speeches from imams and rabbis. It was a pluralistic, idolatrous, damnable mess. We were inviting God’s judgment with that service, a judgement only staved off by the Lord’s patience with us.
While America still does not have the Christian substance we need to sustain our constitutional republic, hearing so many of our civil leaders openly proclaim the lordship of Christ was a firm step in the right direction.
The problem is that our nation is deeply divided – not primarily politically, but religiously. A house divided against itself cannot stand, and we are very much divided right now. On the one hand, we have the religion of progressivism – a form of secular humanism tinged with Marxism’s oppressor/victim dynamic. On the other hand, we have traditional Christian faith, which was on display in much of the Kirk memorial (though obviously, not all the speakers were orthodox Christians). Our political and cultural wars feel ultimate because they are – they are really religious wars. The culture wars are over; the wars of religion are now firmly underway.
Traditionally, Americans have thought of politics as the art of compromise. That worked ok at times, mainly because the two sides were reasonably close and shared a broad worldview. Both sides worked within a shared framework for much of our history. That is no longer the case. The two sides are rapidly becoming mirror images of one another, so that what one side calls love, the other side calls hate, and vice versa. The transgender issue and abortion issue could be exhibits A and B of this phenomenon, but there are now countless examples. Politics as usual no longer works.
The story of America has entered a pivotal chapter. We can descend further into darkness than we already have or we can move towards the Light of the World. We can be one more once great Western nation that falls into utter apostasy or we can reclaim the faith and practices that built a once glorious civilization. Echoing the words of Joshua to Israel, “Choose this day whom you will serve, America, either the gods of humanism, secularism, and Marxism, or Allah, or the Lord Jesus Christ.” I pray America makes the right choice.
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The alternative to the culture war is a kinetic war.
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In polarized world, what Christians think of as the culture war and the spiritual war will collapse into one another almost completely. Christians will use (rightly in my view) demonic language to describe much of what they are up against.
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It is important to understand the culture war is largely a war over who will disciple the next generation.
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The culture war is not the primary calling of the church. The war behind the culture war is the real war we are called to fight. The culture war is merely symptomatic of the real battle, the “holy war” we wage not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers that lead peoples, nations, and cultures astray. The real battle for the cosmos takes place in the sanctuary and concerns worship; the culture war is downstream from this liturgical war.
This is why the weapons of our warfare can never be merely political, educational, technological, or martial. All of these things can be used for good or evil; they can be controlled by the righteous or by the wicked. They have their place but they are limited.
Ultimately we fight by means of the blood of Christ and the word of our testimony (cf. Revelation 12:11). We fight by faith. We fight by praying, preaching, and singing. We fight by loving, serving, forgiving, sharing, stewarding, giving, and helping. We conquer by these means.
It sounds crazy to say we can charge the gates of hell with nothing more than hymnbooks in hand. But think of Saul and David. When Saul was tormented by an evil spirit, how did David drive it away? Through song! We can exorcise our culture – but if and only if we are willing to sing and pray our way to victory.
Apply this to our present cultural situation. The most popular public Christian in the world has just been killed. What do we do? Do we fight with the same weapons used against us? Certainly Scripture teaches there are just wars and proper uses of force in self-defense. But that’s not appropriate here. We do not need to shoot back at one of theirs because they shot one of ours. That would be an ungodly response. That’s not how we conquer.
What does that warfare look like? The left, especially the far left, seems to be in the grip of demonic darkness. Transgenderism is quite obviously tinged with superhuman evil; it certainly has pagan roots. Abortion has demonic roots in Molech worship, going back to the ancient world. The church’s primary response to these kinds of evils is to preach against them from the Word of God, and pray against them in the way Scripture commands us to. We believe the Word and prayer have to power to change the world. Yes, we should also seek to exercise influence in other ways – in conversations with neighbors, in how we vote, perhaps even in what we post on social media. All of these are also forms of warfare, properly understood, because through them all we are seeking to roll back the kingdom of darkness and bring in the reign of Jesus, the light of the world. Jesus’ kingdom is already established, but he uses our efforts to further his kingdom and advance his truth.
This is why if you want to do something about the darkness you see in the world around you, one of the best things you can do is go to a good church. When God is faithfully worshipped and his Word rightly proclaimed, we are actually fighting against the demonic principalities and powers, and their manifestation in human cultures.
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If you want to understand the left, you have to read Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals — which, by the way, he dedicated to Lucifer (because Lucifer was the first leftist).
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We are now in polarized world. C. S. Lewis explained what is happening in our culture:
“If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family—anything you like—at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.”
The soft squishy middle is going away. Third wayism and winsomeness have been proven inadequate. The myth of neutrality has been exposed as a lie. The left is going more and more to the left, getting more and more consistent with its own godless presuppositions. The right seems to be getting more explicitly and openly Christian (at least it looks that way at the moment – I hope this is the case). Both sides are moving towards the logical conclusion of their positions, which means they are getting further and further apart. It’s time to buckle up your chinstrap.
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George Washington: “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”
Benjamin Franklin: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”
John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.“
Our constitution only works with a virtuous (Christian) populace. Trying to be the constitutional republic our founders created without a Christian (or Christianish) people breaks the system. It’s a mismatch. It’s like trying to run Microsoft Windows on a Mac computer. The hardware and software are incompatible. Our constitutional hardware requires Christian software.
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Secular, Christless conservatism is largely bankrupt. It cannot meet the challenges of the day. It does not have the weapons or tools to defeat progressivism.
This is why Christian Nationalism is important as a movement. CN is simply conservatism, going back to its roots in Christian faith and in the Bible. Conservatism cut off from Christ withers and dies.
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The American dream was never supposed to be a secular prosperity gospel. Going back to George Washington, it was rooted in Micah 4:4 and other messianic prophecies of shalom – the peace, prosperity, and property that a free and virtuous people can experience when living under limited and competent government.
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When Islam first arose, it was a judgment on an icon-worshipping church, which had completely disregarded the second commandment.
In the modern West, the Islamic invasion is a judgment on our pluralism. If all gods are really the same, if all paths lead to paradise, if all cultures are equal….well, the true God is giving us a heavy dose of how many lies we’ve believed.
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“The church will not transform American society primarily by political or legal action. The church will have its most profound impact on the world by faithfully performing its distinctive tasks of sacramental worship, teaching the whole Word of God, evangelism, discipline, and mercy … These have always been the chief concerns of the church, and, regardless of the condition of the social world, they remain the chief concerns of the church today, the chief means by which the world will be transformed into an image of the coming kingdom.”
— Peter Leithart
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A question for transgender people: if you won’t accept who God says you are, why should I accept who you say you are?
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“You are held hostage by the bottom 1% of society infinitely more than the top 1%.
Elon Musk is not the reason the store shelves are locked up, and cities are setting up Flock cameras on every street corner.
If we didn’t have a violent and impulsive lumpenproletariat underclass destroying everything around them, there would be no argument for treating the rest of society like potential criminals when they’re out in public.”
— Christian Heiens
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There are some details here to quibble with, but this post from SightBringer is largely correct:
“Trump is treating the United States like an empire that finally realized its tribute system had been running in reverse.
For decades, America supplied the reserve currency, the deepest capital markets, the military umbrella, the consumer of last resort, the payment rails, the technology stack, and the geopolitical backstop.
Other countries built national models around access to that architecture. Trump’s instinct is that Washington confused leadership with generosity and allowed dependency to accumulate abroad without extracting enough in return.
That instinct is directionally right.
The United States possesses forms of leverage that almost no other country can replicate at the same scale. Access to American demand matters. Access to dollars matters. Access to Treasury liquidity matters. Access to U.S. technology matters. Access to American security guarantees matters. A foreign government that depends on several of those at once is already inside an asymmetrical relationship.
Trump sees the asymmetry and wants it monetized.
That is the real doctrine beneath the Switzerland remark.
He wants every dependency converted into bargaining power. Trade surplus? Pay. Security dependence? Pay. Dollar access? Align. Technology access? Align. Strategic vulnerability? Concede. Domestic market access becomes a toll road through which the rest of the world must pass.
That can work for a while because the American position is still enormous.
The deeper danger is temporal.
An empire can extract rents from dependence only while dependence remains cheaper than escape.
Every tariff, sanction, export control, financial threat, and market-access threat teaches the target the same lesson: build an alternative before the next confrontation.
That is the hidden cost of coercive leverage. Using power reveals where the power lives.
Once revealed, everyone begins routing around it.
So Trump is spending accumulated geopolitical capital in order to buy time for national reconstruction. That is the real bet. Use market access aggressively now, force concessions now, redirect production now, rebuild industrial capacity now, harden supply chains now, then hope the American core becomes stronger before the external world becomes less dependent.
That is a race against adaptation.
China understands it.
Europe understands it.
The Gulf understands it.
India understands it.
Switzerland understands it.
Every serious state now understands that economic interdependence can be weaponized.
The age of innocent globalization is over.
The country that controls the chokepoint controls the negotiation.
Trump’s deepest instinct is imperial in the old sense of the word. He thinks sovereignty means being able to impose terms because others need access to what you control.
And right now, America still controls more chokepoints than anyone else.
The question is whether he uses that inheritance to rebuild the foundation of American power, or burns through the inheritance faster than the world can be forced to yield.
That is the entire game.”
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The decline of seminaries:
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I asked Grok if and how a liberal democracy like America could defend itself against Islam, since Islam had its own law code and culture:
America is not without means of self-defense, and the claim that Muslims as a class inherently reject the Constitution and the rule of law is an overgeneralization that does not match the evidence.
The Core Problem You Raise
Liberal democracy faces a genuine tension often called the “paradox of tolerance”: a system committed to individual rights, free speech, and equal protection under law can be exploited by people or movements that reject those principles and seek to replace them with a different legal-political order once they gain sufficient power or numbers. Political Islam (Islamism)—the ideology that seeks the supremacy of Sharia as public law and governance—contains strains that are explicitly incompatible with liberal constitutionalism. Certain interpretations treat democratic legislation as illegitimate when it conflicts with divine law, reject freedom of religion/apostasy, and subordinate individual rights to group religious norms. Where those views predominate and are acted upon, friction with the U.S. constitutional order is real.
That said, American Muslims are not a monolith. Large majorities are not seeking to impose criminal Sharia or overthrow the Constitution. Many practice Islam as personal faith and family tradition while accepting the secular legal framework. Treating an entire religious category as an existential internal enemy is both factually inaccurate and constitutionally barred.
How Liberal Democracies Defend Themselves
A constitutional system does not defend itself by suspending its own rules against a religious group. It uses the tools the system itself provides:
- Immigration and naturalization control. The federal government decides who enters and under what conditions. Citizenship requires an oath to support the Constitution. Ideological and security screening (including against those who advocate violent overthrow or membership in totalitarian organizations) remains available under existing statutes derived from the 1952 Act and later expansions. Numbers, vetting standards, and refugee policies are political choices, not constitutional impossibilities.
- Equal enforcement of ordinary criminal and civil law. Violence, coercion, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, honor-based abuse, material support for designated terrorist groups, and attempts to operate parallel courts that override constitutional rights are already illegal. Neutral “American Laws for American Courts” statutes in multiple states reinforce that foreign or religious law cannot supersede fundamental rights. Parallel societies that enforce illegal norms can be disrupted through ordinary policing and prosecution.
- Free speech and cultural contestation. Criticism of political Islam, Sharia doctrines incompatible with constitutional rights, demographic trends, or failures of assimilation is protected. Liberal democracy relies on open argument, persuasion, and social pressure toward assimilation far more than on criminalizing belief.
- Majoritarian politics on neutral policies. Voters can support education curricula, welfare rules, family law, national-security measures, and cultural norms that reflect the majority’s understanding of ordered liberty—so long as those policies do not single out a religion for unique legal disabilities.
- Citizenship and allegiance. Naturalized citizens and native-born citizens who commit actual crimes against the constitutional order (espionage, material support for enemies in wartime, levying war) face the same penalties as anyone else. Mere holding of illiberal religious or political views is not treason or sedition.
These tools are imperfect and depend on political will. Democracies have historically contained or defeated internal challenges from communism, various theocratic movements, and other illiberal ideologies without abandoning constitutional constraints. They have also failed when elites refused to enforce borders, laws, or cultural expectations.
Limits of the Framework
The Constitution constrains government more tightly than private citizens. Private individuals and groups may hold views that reject liberal democracy; the state may not punish belief or peaceful advocacy of those views. A “Muslim takeover” in the sense of demographic or electoral replacement of the constitutional order is not occurring and is not inevitable. Long-term demographic change is real and contingent on fertility, immigration policy, and assimilation rates—variables subject to democratic decision.
If a significant subset of any group systematically prioritizes a rival legal-political system over the Constitution and acts on that priority through violence, coercion, or institutional capture, the response is enforcement of existing law, political mobilization, and cultural confidence—not the creation of a religious exception to the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The system’s self-defense capacity is only as strong as the willingness of its citizens and officials to use the lawful tools it already possesses.
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What is liberalism’s solution to this?
Then there’s this:
I’m sure Muslims are laughing at us as we fund the spread of their religion and undermine our nation. Who could be this stupid?
Maybe we should accuse people who chant “death to America” of treason.
Also, note that simply banning Sharia law will not help if we keep allowing Muslims into the country. They are not going to respect the Constitution, the rule of law, our history/heritage, or our founding principles. They won’t care, and they won’t respect the American system.
See also this:
And this:
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“Never before our own times has equality meant in terms of political reality that literally everyone is everyone else’s equal—which, of course, does not imply that everybody is the same as everybody else, although the leveling tendencies of our modern society can hardly be denied. Prior to the modern age, equality was understood politically as a matter of equal rights for people of equal status. In other words, it meant that those who were equal should be treated equally, but never that everyone was equal. The Christian notion of the equality of all men before God, so frequently cited as the origin of modern political equality, never intended to make men equal on earth, but on the contrary insisted that only as citizens of a civitas Dei could they be considered equal. The shift of emphasis from civitas terrena to civitas Dei as the ultimate destiny of man did nothing to change the basic inequalities of man’s political status on earth, in the framework of which political equality and equity were supposed to operate. The Christian way of life-to live in the world without being of the world-could deny the relevance of earthly distinctions between men in order to affirm the ultimate equality of destiny. But “ultimate” meant beyond this world, leaving earthly distinctions completely intact, and “destiny” referred to a beginning and end, neither of which was rooted in the earth. Because Christian equality before God did not even demand political equality of all Christians, let alone of all men, there is as little justification for praising Christianity for the modern concept of equality as there is for blaming the Church for the equanimity with which it tolerated slavery and serfdom throughout the centuries. Insofar as statesmen were Christians, and not merely statesmen who happened to be of the Christian denomination, they had nothing to do with either.”
— Hannah Arendt, on how the Christian doctrine of equality before the law got perverted into egalitarianism
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To grow in wisdom during your years on earth, you have to go through life with your eyes wide open. You have to pay attention, both to God’s Word and to God’s world. You have to learn from mistakes, your own and others around you. Wisdom is not a given as we age. What is given that you will grow in either wisdom or in foolishness, depending on how you approach life.
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Many Christians today are asking, What’s the biggest problem in America, abortion, LGBTQ, or immigration?
Here’s another way of looking at it: what if the invasion of demon-worshipping immigrants who won’t assimilate, who take our jobs and defraud our welfare system, are God’s judgment on on us for tolerating abortion and sexual perversion?
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“Any further acts of valor on the part of my troops would bring them into contact with the enemy.”
— Satirically attributed to Civil War Union General George McClellan, who was infamous for making excuses and refusing to attack the enemy even when he had more troops and resources
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And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.
— Ephesians 5:18-21
Note that when Paul describes what it means to be filled with the Spirit, he gives 4 verbs and 3 of them have to do with singing:
- addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs
- singing
- making melody to the Lord from the heart
- giving thanks
Where the Spirit is present, there is singing. Where people are filled with the Spirit, they make music.
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Wisdom is the skill and power to make and remake culture, so it aligns with God’s design.
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From 9/10/24:
Any form of education that does not fulfill the requirement of Deuteronomy
6:7ff is forbidden. The positive command – to train your children comprehensively in God’s ways and truth – entails forbidding the opposite, even if not spelled out explicitly.
The Israelites did not need command, “Thou shalt not give thy children to the Canaanites to be educated,” in order to know it was wrong.
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“I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.”
— Martin Luther
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“The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the only business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God—this is his task on earth.”
— R. L. Dabney
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“True education is, in a sense, a spiritual process, the nurture of the soul.”
— Dabney
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“A non-Christian training is literally an anti-Christian training.”
— Dabney
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Dabney said Christians are people “who carry their religion into everything.”
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“Fathers and mothers are the most natural agents for God to use in the salvation of their children. I am sure that, in my early youth, no teaching ever had such an impression upon my mind as the instruction of my mother; neither can I conceive that, to any child, there can be one who will have such influence over the young heart as the mother who has so tenderly cared for her offspring.
We should especially tell our children our own experience… Perhaps, my friend, there is no testimony that you can bear which will be so useful, so interesting and so striking, as the testimony of what you have, yourself, seen and handled of the Word of Life.
Tell the gospel as you find it in the Bible, but set it in the frame of your own experience of its preciousness! Tell your son how you sinned and how the Lord had mercy upon you. Tell him how he met with you, how you were brought to seek his face, how you were born again, how you received a new heart and a right spirit. He will think the more of this great change because it happened to his father, or to his mother, or to some kind friend. And, perhaps, if he is not himself converted as a child, in his later life he may think of what you told him or the remembrance of his mother’s God may rise before him when he is far away from the scenes of his youth and has spent many years in foolish vanities — and he may even then turn to God, beckoned back to the great Father’s House above by the memory of his godly father and mother here below.”
— Charles Spurgeon
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“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
— Umberto Eco
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Michael Foster with some good thoughts on vision, visionary leadership, and team-building:
“First, as much as I hate the idea of a visionary, I know that vision matters in leadership. What I mean by vision is simply a mental picture of a task complete. So when you cast a vision, you’re using words and other tools to show people what can be accomplished if we work together toward a goal. Money and people follow vision. And so if your church is struggling, a lot of times it’s because there’s a lack of vision…
The reason we hate the idea of vision so much is that a lot of men who claim to be visionaries are what I would call delusionaries. These are men who don’t know the difference between reverse engineering a plan rooted in reality and attempting to execute their fantastic dreams.
Many well-intentioned people have mistaken the daydreams of delusionaries for vision and sadly wasted sometimes a decade of their life. Therefore, pastors don’t want to look anything like some cheap Christianese version of Steve Jobs. But you do need to have a vision. Matter of fact, I would argue one of the chief responsibilities of a founding pastor, or the pastor who is most experienced in leading an elders group, is to work with those men to create the vision and then keep everyone working toward it….
[As] you climb and gain more authority, with authority comes more responsibility. And responsibilities must always be dealt with soberly.
I remember watching some war movie where the general has to have the courage to send the army out to fight, even though he knows that the casualties will be extreme. But it’s what the battle requires. When he was a younger man, he was a doer. He was the guy at the bottom in the infantry. But now that he was an older man, he was the decider and director. And such authority, because of the power attached to it, required sobriety.
If you’re going to move up, you’re going to learn to speak differently, even dress a little differently, and recognize that while you must maintain a common touch and be reasonably accessible, the ladder is real and there’s a distance between the rungs by design.
To swing back to the delusionary just for a moment, most delusionaries are much more interested in skipping the doer floor-level rung and getting right to the decider-general rung, which is why their daydreams are so disconnected from reality. My years of laboring in obscurity and struggling were very good for me. Don’t resent where God has you…
Along with your responsibilities as a leader is the need to make sure you spend your energy in the right place and on the right people. A lot of people think of the pastoral ministry as almost like a spiritual first responder, as someone who prioritizes people in crisis. Therefore, many pastors develop a habit of giving attention to the most needy and desperate people in their churches.
The problem with this is that if you spend all your time on the needy and desperate people, who are often people who don’t actually have acute problems as much as chronic problems, you will overlook the people who are healthy and productive and, with just a little more investment, would flourish all the more and in turn create a more stable, healthy ministry that’s able to help the needy and desperate people.
First, as a senior leader, you will be the most visible, and those people will want the best help they can get, which is very natural. But you only have so much time, so you must be very careful how you spend it. I have found one of the best ways to help those people is to make them wait a little bit to see you.
Now, if it’s truly an acute situation, such as a death in the family, physical abuse, or something very dramatic, obviously that’s something you must jump on. But a lot of these things can wait a night or two, if not even longer. And by enforcing that boundary, you teach them a lot. You teach them to take responsibility for themselves and that the world doesn’t revolve around them. You also find that many times those people work it out themselves. It’s still good to follow up with them, even if just by a phone call and a prayer.
I will say also, as a senior leader, these are opportunities for you to help younger leaders get more experience in dealing with these sorts of problems. You simply tell that person, I’m not able to meet today, but why don’t we have you connect with this or that person? I’ll connect you by text, and you guys can at least have a discussion, and we can follow up.
You always have to be raising up new leaders. It never stops. The moment you stop raising up new leaders is the moment your church starts to die. Which is why it’s so important that you use your time to invest in the healthy people who often won’t ask for your time because of who they are. Those are the people you cannot ignore….
If you can’t build teams, you can’t build. And if you can’t raise up other leaders, you can’t build teams. A healthy church has all different sorts of people involved with different roles, different levels of authority and responsibility, and different needs.
It’s really hard for a really talented quarterback to have success with a bad O-line. And the best O-line can’t compensate for a guy who can’t remember the plays and throw a ball well. You’ve got to find your place on the team. And sometimes it means you’re second string for years before you’re a starter. Sometimes it means you’re special teams. And while you’re not out on the field much, when you do go out on the field, it matters big time.
Whatever you are, you have to give yourself to it fully if you want to see a plan achieved.”
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In 1830, Tocqueville could declare, “Almost all education is entrusted to the clergy,” which is say that the church controlled generally controlled education in America. By 1930, America had a completely state-run, bureaucratically controlled educational system.
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“Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.”
— Tocqueville
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Rod Dreher with a sobering assessment of how and why Trump’s Iran War is dragging on – with no end in sight, and virtually no way to avoid a massive loss of American power and influence in the region. Dreher quotes a conservative military veteran who says Trump entered the conflict because he was drunk on power after the easy take down of Nicholas Maduro and thought he could take down the Iranian regime just as easily. If that’s true, it was a catastrophic miscalculation that will reverberate for years to come. The thought that we could overthrow Iran without a land invasion – which no one wants and which would be political suicide – was crazy. Anyone who knows the history of the Middle East and the culture of Iran would have never thought that.
The worst thing Trump can do at this point keep on announcing peace talks or negotiations that really don’t exist and aren’t accomplishing anything. It is sad that, for all the good Trump has accomplished, he will likely be remembered most for this deep scar on his presidency. I do not want Iran to have nuclear weapons, but this was dumbest possible way to deal with the problem.
https://roddreher.substack.com/p/covid-a-societal-chernobyl
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It was obvious from very early on in COVID that Fauci cared more about his own celebrity than public health. It’s also obvious he is a pathological liar.
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Peggy Noonan’s conclusion on the whole COVID/Fauci affair is exactly right:
“My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.”
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All too often the saying is true: Yesterday’s Democrats are today’s Republicans.
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Social atomization always leads to some kind totalitarianism and tyranny. This is why leftists always seek to undermine the church and family. They are trying to isolate you so they can control and manipulate you.
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The current system slanders young men and flatters young women. So it’s no surprise young men reject the system and young women embrace it.
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Cutting through the data center non-sense:
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Ironically, in the most feminist era in history, feminist women are the most unhappy people in society and anti-feminist women among the happiest.
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“I actually think gratitude is going to make or break this country, because we have somehow reached a point where victimhood is being rewarded on every side.
For years, conservatives understood that building your identity around everything that has gone wrong in your life is destructive. You can acknowledge that the world is unfair. You can acknowledge corruption, economic hardship, bad leadership, broken institutions, betrayal, and real injustice. But none of that means the answer is to teach people to see themselves as perpetual victims.
That mentality used to be something the right rejected. Now parts of the right are adopting the exact same framework, just with different villains. And I think that is incredibly dangerous, not just politically, but personally. Because once you convince someone that their entire life is the result of what everyone else has done to them, you have also convinced them that their future is outside of their control.
Gratitude changes absolutely nothing about your circumstances, and somehow it changes everything. When you learn to be grateful for what is actually in front of you, even something as basic as taking a breath of fresh air, your entire perspective starts to change.
You stop measuring your life only by what you do not have. You stop waking up every morning looking for someone to blame for the gap between your life and the life you think you were entitled to.
Gratitude does not mean accepting injustice or pretending everything is fine. It just means refusing to make grievance your identity. You can fight for something better without becoming consumed by resentment. You can recognize what is broken while still being grateful for what is good.
A culture built entirely around victimhood eventually becomes a competition over who has been wronged the most. That is not healthy on the left, and it is not suddenly healthy because the right has discovered its own list of grievances.
Victimhood will not save people. Gratitude might.
Because gratitude gives people their agency back. It reminds them that even if they cannot control everything happening around them, they can control what’s inside.
Victimhood is not just about damaging the Republican Party. It’s about damaging all the young people who need to grow up and realize that they control their lives, no matter what at the end of the day you are in full control of your life and what you choose to do with it.”
— Insurrection Barbie, on gratitude, agency, and responsibility vs victimhood, anger, and passivity
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No Western nation that puts false religions (like Islam or Hinduism) on equal footing with the true religion (Christian faith) can survive. Christian faith must be privileged or we are doomed. I asked Grok, “What legal and constitutional mechanisms can Christians in red states use to discriminate against Muslims, Hindus, and other false religions, eg, preventing the building mosques and sub-communities that implement sharia?” Here is Grok’s answer:
“There are essentially no lawful constitutional mechanisms for state or local governments in red states (or anywhere else) to discriminate against Muslims, Hindus, or other religions as such in the ways the question describes. The First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA, 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc) flatly prohibit it. Government cannot prefer Christianity or treat “false religions” worse in official land-use decisions, permitting, or the recognition of private religious practice.
Zoning, Mosques, and Houses of Worship
RLUIPA was enacted unanimously in 2000 precisely because local governments had used zoning to burden minority and start-up religious groups. It imposes these rules on state and local land-use regulation:
- No substantial burden on religious exercise unless the government proves a compelling interest and uses the least restrictive means.
- Equal terms: religious assemblies (churches, mosques, temples, synagogues) cannot be treated worse than comparable nonreligious assemblies (clubs, meeting halls, theaters, banquet facilities).
- No discrimination on the basis of religion or religious denomination.
- No total or unreasonable exclusion of religious assemblies from a jurisdiction.
Courts and the Department of Justice have repeatedly enforced these provisions against denials of mosque permits that rested on traffic, parking, noise, or “neighborhood character” when the same standards were not applied evenly to churches or when evidence of religious animus appeared (statements by officials or selective enforcement). Facially neutral, generally applicable zoning rules (setbacks, height limits, parking ratios calculated the same way for every assembly use, traffic-impact studies) can be enforced. Rules or applications that single out a religion, or that treat mosques worse than churches, lose under RLUIPA and the First Amendment.
Private property owners remain free to refuse to sell or lease land to anyone for any reason (subject to limited Fair Housing Act constraints on residential property). Once the land is purchased and public permits or rezoning are required, the government must act neutrally.
Sharia and “Sub-Communities”
No U.S. court applies criminal sharia (hudud punishments, apostasy rules, etc.). Those acts are ordinary crimes under state and federal law and are prosecuted as such. Voluntary private arbitration under religious rules (Islamic, Jewish, Christian, or otherwise) is already limited by public-policy exceptions: courts will not enforce awards that violate constitutional rights, fundamental fairness, or state criminal law.
Many red states have enacted neutral “American Laws for American Courts” (ALAC-style) statutes or constitutional amendments. These bar courts from applying any foreign or religious law when doing so would violate rights under the U.S. or state constitution or state public policy. Explicit bans that name “Sharia” alone have been struck down as Establishment Clause violations (Oklahoma’s 2010 amendment in Awad v. Ziriax). The neutral versions that apply to all foreign law have generally survived or gone unchallenged because they do not target a religion.
Private religious communities may live under voluntary internal rules, form associations, and use private dispute resolution so long as they do not coerce non-consenting persons or commit crimes. They cannot create parallel sovereign jurisdictions, enforce criminal punishments, or override state family-law, contract, or criminal protections. Attempts to do so are already illegal under ordinary law that applies equally to every group.
What Is Actually Available - Neutral, even-handed land-use regulation applied to all religious and secular assemblies alike. This can make large-scale construction more difficult everywhere; it cannot be weaponized against one religion.
- ALAC-style foreign-law statutes already on the books in multiple red states. These reinforce the existing rule that no foreign or religious code overrides constitutional rights.
- Ordinary criminal and civil law against violence, coercion, polygamy (where still criminal), forced marriage, or any other illegal practice, enforced without regard to religion.
- Private ordering: individuals, churches, businesses, and associations may refuse association, employment, or commercial dealings on religious grounds where state public-accommodation laws do not forbid it. Red states generally have narrower public-accommodation regimes than blue states.
- Political and cultural advocacy for majority norms on education, marriage, family law, and immigration (the last being primarily federal).
Government power cannot be used to declare some religions “false” and then deny them the same free-exercise and equal-protection rights that protect Christian churches. That is the consistent holding of the Supreme Court and the statutory scheme Congress enacted. Attempts that cross into religious targeting are unconstitutional and regularly lose in federal court.”
Historically, of course, this isn’t true; the Christian faith was most certainly privileged in early American history. So I asked Grok, when the first amendment was written, the religion in view with the “free exercise” clause was various Christian denominations. The Christian faith clearly had a privileged position in early American history. Why can’t we return to that? Grok responded:
“The historical record is more nuanced than a simple “Christian-only Free Exercise” claim, and the constitutional text plus subsequent developments make a formal return to early-19th-century privileges extremely difficult without amendment or a fundamental shift in judicial interpretation.
Original Context
At the founding, the dominant religious culture was Protestant Christian. Most colonies and early states had established churches or preferential systems (Congregational in New England, Anglican in the South). Religious tests for office, Sabbath laws, blasphemy prosecutions, and public funding or recognition of Protestant Christianity were common at the state level. The federal First Amendment was written against that background: it restrained Congress from establishing a national church or interfering with free exercise, partly to protect the existing state establishments and the diversity among Christian denominations (and, to a lesser extent, groups such as Quakers, Jews, and Catholics who faced varying degrees of disability). 
Madison and Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) and the broader disestablishment movement already pointed toward broader liberty of conscience rather than confessional privilege. The text of the Religion Clauses uses the general term “religion,” not “Christianity” or “Protestantism.” Contemporary statements sometimes spoke of Christianity as the background culture, but the operative legal language was not confined to it.
Why the Privileged Position Eroded
- Disestablishment: By the 1830s most state establishments had ended. The trend was toward formal neutrality among Christian groups and, gradually, toward non-Christians.
- Fourteenth Amendment and incorporation: After the Civil War, the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses were applied to the states. That changed the legal landscape dramatically; state-level preferences that once existed could no longer be defended on federal constitutional grounds in the same way.
- Judicial interpretation: From the mid-20th century onward the Court treated the Clauses as protecting sincere religious belief and practice across traditions (Jewish, Muslim, Native American, etc.), while still allowing neutral, generally applicable laws (see Employment Division v. Smith). Even originalist justices have not adopted a “Christians only” reading of Free Exercise.
- Demographic and cultural change: The country is no longer overwhelmingly Protestant. Constitutional text and structure are not self-amending to match demographic shifts in reverse.
Barriers to “Returning”
A formal restoration of Christian privilege (preferential zoning for churches over mosques/temples, religious tests, establishment of Protestant norms as the legal baseline, or denial of equal free-exercise protection to non-Christians) would confront:
- The plain text of the First Amendment (“religion,” not a named faith).
- Incorporation via the Fourteenth Amendment.
- RLUIPA and related federal statutes that enforce equal treatment in land use.
- Longstanding precedent treating Free Exercise as applicable to non-Christian faiths.
- The political reality that any attempt to single out Islam, Hinduism, etc., for worse treatment is litigated under the current framework and routinely loses when religious animus or unequal treatment is shown. Originalist arguments exist that the Founding generation assumed a Christian moral culture and that the Establishment Clause was primarily about preventing a national church rather than requiring strict neutrality. Some scholars and a minority of judges argue for greater accommodation of traditional majority practices. Those arguments have not produced a doctrine that allows government to deny mosques or other houses of worship equal treatment under land-use law, or to treat non-Christian religious exercise as outside constitutional protection. Changing that would require either a constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court willing to overturn large bodies of case law and statutory interpretation—an outcome that is not on the near-term horizon. In short, early American practice did give Christianity a privileged cultural and often legal position. The constitutional text, the process of disestablishment, incorporation, and subsequent doctrine do not authorize state governments today to recreate that privilege by discriminating against other religions in the exercise of their faith or the construction of their places of worship. Neutral laws, private ordering, and political persuasion remain available; formal religious discrimination by government does not.”
I asked Grok about accomplishing this at other levels of government: Would it be possible for a state, say Alabama, to declare itself a Christian state and refuse to allow mosques to be built?
“No. Under current U.S. constitutional law, Alabama (or any other state) could not successfully declare itself a “Christian state” with legal force and then refuse to allow mosques to be built on that basis.
Establishment Clause Barrier
The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) has been incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. This means states are equally barred from establishing a religion, preferring one religion over others, or endorsing a particular faith in a way that has coercive or preferential legal effect. 
A formal declaration that Alabama is a “Christian state,” if it carried legal consequences (official preference, funding priorities, or discriminatory land-use rules), would be treated as an establishment. Even ceremonial or symbolic language has limits once it is used to justify unequal treatment of other religions. Alabama’s own state constitution already contains language providing that “no religion shall be established by law” and “no preference shall be given by law to any religious sect, society, denomination, or mode of worship.” 
Free Exercise + RLUIPA Barrier to Banning Mosques
Even if a state passed a pure symbolic resolution, any concrete refusal to permit mosques because they are mosques (or because the state has declared itself Christian) would violate:
- The Free Exercise Clause (as applied to the states).
- The Equal Protection Clause.
- The federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which explicitly forbids land-use discrimination against any religious assembly or institution on the basis of religion or denomination, requires equal treatment with non-religious assemblies, and prohibits substantial burdens on religious exercise unless the government meets strict scrutiny.
Courts and the Justice Department have repeatedly enforced these rules against local governments that try to block mosques through zoning, traffic, parking, or “community character” objections when the real or apparent motive is religious. Neutral, generally applicable zoning rules can be enforced against all houses of worship, but a targeted ban or differential treatment fails.
Practical and Doctrinal Reality - Some justices (notably Thomas, and occasionally others) have argued that the Establishment Clause should not have been incorporated against the states, which would theoretically give states more room to favor a majority religion. That view has never commanded a majority of the Court and is not the law.
- Early American state establishments and Christian preferences existed before incorporation and widespread disestablishment. Those historical practices do not authorize modern states to recreate them.
- Alabama has passed measures reflecting Christian cultural majoritarianism (Ten Commandments displays, certain education policies, foreign-law restrictions). Those have been carefully drafted or narrowed precisely because broader preferential or exclusionary measures invite immediate litigation and defeat under existing doctrine.
A purely symbolic, non-operative resolution (“Alabama recognizes its Christian heritage”) might survive as political speech. Turning it into an operative policy that denies equal land-use rights to mosques would not. The combination of incorporation, Free Exercise protections, and RLUIPA makes the specific outcome you describe—declaring a Christian state and refusing mosque construction—unconstitutional and unenforceable under present law.”
Looks like the only way to save our country is to break existing law and revert America back to her original factory settings.
The “problem” with Christian nationalism is that it goes against current American jurisprudence. Along the way, American transformed from a Christian nation to a pluralistic one that makes treating all religions as equally true (or equally false) as a legal requirement. The first governments, whether at the municipality or state level, to resist the tyranny and falsehood of American pluralism, will be the ones that give us a chance to survive. But will anyone do it?
21st century America has made 18th and 19th century America illegal. 21st century America has made it impossible to restore the legal norms that were essential in making America great.
Finally, I asked Grok, does this mean it legally impossible to stop the spread of Islam in America? Grok responded:
“No. It is not legally impossible to resist the spread of Islam in America. What is heavily constrained is the use of government power to discriminate against Islam (or any other religion) as such—banning mosques, denying equal land-use rights, or declaring official Christian preference that burdens Muslim free exercise.
Here is the practical distinction:
What government cannot do
- Target mosques or Muslim institutions for worse treatment under zoning, permitting, or land-use rules because of their religion. RLUIPA, the Free Exercise Clause, and Equal Protection forbid this.
- Establish Christianity (or any faith) as the official state religion in a way that has coercive legal effect against others.
- Criminalize peaceful religious practice, belief, or voluntary community formation by American citizens or legal residents.
These limits are real and enforced.
What remains available and legal - Neutral, generally applicable laws enforced evenly: Strict application of criminal law against violence, coercion, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, honor-based violence, material support for terrorism, and any attempt to operate parallel legal systems that violate constitutional rights. Many states already have “American Laws for American Courts” statutes that bar courts from applying foreign or religious law when it conflicts with U.S. or state constitutional rights. These tools are religion-neutral in form.
- Immigration and border policy (primarily federal): Congress and the executive control who enters, under what conditions, and in what numbers. States have limited but real tools on refugee resettlement cooperation, driver’s licenses, and certain public benefits.
- Private ordering and free association: Individuals, churches, businesses, and private organizations can choose whom to associate with, sell property to, employ, or platform—subject only to the anti-discrimination laws that actually apply in that jurisdiction. Red states generally have narrower public-accommodation and employment mandates regarding religion than blue states or federal race rules.
- Speech, culture, and persuasion: Criticism of Islamic doctrine, history, treatment of apostates/women/minorities, political Islam, or parallel societies is protected speech. Evangelism, apologetics, cultural advocacy for assimilation, and arguments about social cohesion are likewise protected. Demographic and cultural trends (birth rates, conversion rates, intermarriage, language acquisition) respond to social pressures, not just law.
- Political majoritarianism on neutral policies: Voters can support education curricula, national-security measures, welfare rules, and cultural norms that reflect the majority’s values so long as those policies do not single out a religion for unique burdens.
In short, the Constitution blocks religious discrimination by the state. It does not block enforcement of ordinary criminal and civil law, control of immigration, private refusal to facilitate, free criticism, or cultural resistance. Those channels remain open. Whether any particular strategy is wise, effective, or consistent with broader principles of ordered liberty is a separate question from whether it is legally available.”
At the level of current jurisprudence, Grok is correct. It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of religion. It is illegal to privilege Christian faith. Here’s the dilemma: America was founded as a largely Christian nation. But today, American law forbids the restoration of a Christian America. It forbids distinguishing the true religion from false religions. All religions must be treated equal by the law.
To put it another way, Christian nationalists have to use means other than government power to stop the spread of Islam in their communities or they have to violate current American jurisprudence.
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Here’s the problem Christian nationalists face: Under current American law, it is illegal to discriminate against false religions and it is illegal to privilege Christian faith in public life.
To put it another way, historic Reformed and Presbyterian political theology calls on the magistrate to show special favor to Christian faith. Magistrates can still do this in informal ways (eg, speeches and personal example on things like church attendance), but current American laws forbids them from using their power in this way to promote Christian faith. It would be illegal for an American magistrate to implement the political teaching of the Westminster Standards.
The old saying, “he saves his country commits no sin” takes on new meaning in this context. We need Christian magistrates who will violate American law by using their power to privilege true piety and suppress public idolatry. We need magistrates who will disregard court rulings that go against them.
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“This is the sanctification of your studies: when they are devoted to God, and when He is the end, the object, and the life of them all.”
— Richard Baxter
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I’ll never understand how a doctrine of future justification according to works compromises the graciousness of the gospel. How does it compromise grace to to that God not only accepts Christ’s work for us (initial justification), as well the Spirit’s work in us through Christ’s intercession (final justification)?
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Euthanasia is inherently anti-Christian, and not just because it is murder/suicide. The whole point of euthanasia is to end suffering. But how do you know suffering ends when you die? Euthanasia inverts Pascal’s wager; the sufferer places a bet on the Christian faith being false.
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“All over the United States, churches, Christian schools, and parents and children have been on trial. The attacks have come from a variety of state agencies, especially departments of education, zoning, welfare, and the like. Federal attacks have come from the Internal Revenue Service, the Labor Department, the National Labor Relations Board, the White House, and more. The press has given minimal attention to these things, although they represent a major reversal of American policy. The press has become a commercial enterprise as part of large conglomerate enterprises reaching into a variety of manufacturing areas, all valid efforts, but, in the process, it has forgotten the religious nature of its immunity. The freedom it has enjoyed has not been a federal grant but a religious principle. The change of its status is due to a shift in faith.
If man’s faith is in the state, then the state is the protector of man’s freedom, and the author thereof. Then, in every area, we are dependent upon the state: the state giveth, and the state taketh away: blessed be the name of the state!
The national favorite of the United States, “America,” still celebrates in song an older and theocratic faith. The last stanza of Rev. Samuel Smith’s song (1832), declares:
Our father’s God, to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing.
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light:
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our King.Protection, in this theocratic perspective, is not by state controls, but by the might of the “Great God” who is “our King.” The brightness of the land is not in regulatory agencies but in “freedom’s holy light.” This phrase is an echo of the premise which undergirds the First Amendment, the relationship of freedom to faith.”
— Rushdoony
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“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
— C. S. Lewis
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“The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after….the coming of the marvels of technology, the establishment of universal education, and all the enlightenment of the modern world. And thus was lost-or impatiently snapped-the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby: the habit of thinking.”
— Chesterton
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There is no such thing as religious liberty in an absolute sense, only religious tolerance in a relative sense.
Whatever doctrine of religious liberty we devise must honor Christ as Lord. Just as fathers must fulfill their vocation under Christ’s lordship, so statement must as well.
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Rushdoony on the covenantal nature of the American system of government in its original form:
“Article II, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution requires an oath of office from the president. Such an oath is now a meaningless and even blasphemous fact. However, to the framers of the Constitution, an oath was a Biblical fact. To them, an oath was, first, a covenant fact, i.e., of a covenant between the state and God, and second, a theocratic fact, an oath of loyalty to the sovereign. In the Constitutional Convention, an objection was actually made to adding anything to the oath such as “and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The fact of an oath, Wilson held, made this addition unnecessary; it was, however, still retained. Third, an oath invoked the covenant blessings for obedience, and curses for disobedience, as declared in Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26. An oath thus invokes a judgment from God rather than man as the basic judgment. It sees God, not the state, as the Author of all blessings, including liberty.
Today, we are in a time of judgment, because men have sought, all over the world, both freedom and blessings from the state rather than from God our King. As a result they have gained slavery and curses.
In the humanistic, statist conception of things, freedom is not a privilege and a blessing from and under God, but either a human right, or a state grant. Man the sinner, however, is a slave, and his freedom is in essence a freedom to sin. The love of slavery has more clearly marked human history than the love of freedom. Mankind has largely been in chains throughout history, because men have preferred security to freedom. Men have often rebelled against the limitations imposed by slavery, but even more against the responsibilities imposed by freedom.
Freedom is not a natural fact but a religious principle, and the decline of freedom is an aspect of the rise of false faiths, false forms of “Christianity,” as well as other varieties of faith.
This century has seen, moreover, the divorce of freedom from faith, with great damage and decay on both sides.
When Luther offered his protection to the Elector Frederick, he had just come out of hiding at the peril of his life. His reappearance was an act of faith, and one which Frederick matched.
For all too long, those who have believed the most have been Marxists, Keynesians, fascists, and humanists generally. Their “freedom” has been slavery, for “the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel” (Prov. 12:10). Now, however, as the faith of Christians strengthens, battles are underway for the freedom of Christian schools, churches, and families. Religious liberty is only a product of religious understanding, growth, and faith. If Christians lose their freedom, they will only have themselves to blame, and their indifference to the Author of true liberty, the Lord our King.”
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“Why, you fool, it’s the educated readers who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem: we have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
– CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Our most educated people are often the most gullible. Plumbers and electricians tend to not fall for transgenderism, wokeness, therapy culture, etc.
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“It makes no difference what men think of war, war endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
— Cormac McCarthy
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“Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen”
— George Savile, on civil justice as a deterrent to crime
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Biblical love is neither led by emotion nor void of emotion.
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Why do we mainly sing metrical psalms at TPC?
Here are a few notes on the chanting psalms vs metrical psalms is a debate:
At the TPC, we have a sung psalter lesson in our liturgy each week. We chant psalms on occasion, but it is usually a meterical psalm. In our judgment, metrical psalms generally “count” as psalms.
Some criticize metrical psalms as “not really psalms” because the lyrics are usually loosely translated from the Hebrew and reconfigured in some ways to make them fit a more familiar musical form. So metrical psalms are really just psalm-based hymns in their view. Metrical psalms subordinate the God-given text to a man-made musical style rather than the reverse. They prioritize the ideas of the psalms over their actual God-given form and structure. Doesn’t God want us to sing his songs back to him exactly as he gave them (albeit in translation)? Those are the criticisms.
In some cases, this may be a fair take. For example, “Joy to the World” is Watts’ metrical version of Psalm 98, but it’s pretty different from the actual language of Psalm 98. Watts usually took greater liberties to make his versions of the psalms more explicitly Christian. Watts called his 1719 collection of psalm-based hymns “The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament,” so that gives an idea of what he was up to. We “cheat” and count “Joy to the World” as a psalm during Advent/Christmas, but if someone criticized that and said “you’re not really singing Psalm 98,” I’d understand. I do it mainly so people will understand that one of their favorite Christmas hymns is really a psalm. 98A, another TPC favorite, is closer to the actual English text of Psalm 98.
In general, however, we believe singing a metrical psalm is singing a psalm, and this has always been our conviction at TPC. The psalms that come from the Book of Psalms for Singing (many of which are in the Treasury Hymnal and in our TPC repertoire) are actually quite closely translated. A lot of those metrical psalms have the verses imposed on the sheet music so you can compare what we are singing to your favorite English translation, verse by verse. You’ll see that in this week’s (8/9/26) psalm lesson, Psalm 21. The opening hymn this week is Psalm 95 – it’s a slightly looser translation, but I’d still have no problem saying, “we are singing Psalm 95,” though I wouldn’t use that one as a psalter lesson. We also have “Lift Up Your Heads” this week, which is a hymn based on Psalm 24, though many would consider it close enough to be considered a metrical version of that psalm. “As the Hart About to Falter” is also being sung this week; it is more loosely based on Psalm 42 so I do not think we ever sing it as a psalter lesson because it’s a little too far removed from the actual text of that psalm. The line between a metrical psalm and hymn based on a psalm is often a thin line. The Book of Psalms for Singing is generally considered the gold standard for metrical psalmody because it generally does a pretty job preserving the text.
Interestingly, the Book of Psalms for Singing, which comes out of the RPCNA/Scottish Presbyterian tradition, actually includes a few psalm chants and a guide to chanting in the back of the psalter. So the Scottish Presbyterian tradition, while favoring metrical psalm versions, is not opposed to chants and makes some use of them (just like TPC has always done).
Sometimes we sing what is called a through-composed psalm – it’s the actual text of the psalm, but set to a more singable hymn tune rather than chanted. If you look at the version of Psalm 126 we regularly sing by Nick Kozell, it is exact text of the NKJV of Psalm 126. It has the advantages of a chant (total faithfulness to the text) with the singability of hymn or metrical psalm.
Jim Jordan has pushed for very literal translations of the psalms in his psalm chants. Jim is critical of metrical psalms as “not good enough.” At TPC, we disagree – again, I think singing a good metrical version of a psalm is singing that psalm. Just as sometimes we paraphrase a Bible passage (the way the apostles sometimes paraphrased OT Scriptures), but we’re still “quoting the Bible,” so it is with metrical psalms.
Some really good, more singable chants have been developed in recent years. At our school, TCA, the kids will chant a psalm each morning. The result is that TCA students will have several psalms in close translation memorized over the course of the year. This is wonderful.
Most churches today have broken completely with the tradition of Psalm-singing. This is odd since the psalter has been universally recognized as God’s hymn book for his people and until relatively recently in church history, was sung by virtually every Christian tradition/denomination. For Presbyterians, this usually meant metrical psalms, but there is no question the psalter was the core of what was sung. Now, in the contemporary American church, some Christians go their entire lives without ever singing a single psalm, except perhaps “Joy to the World” (assuming that counts). “10,000 Reasons” might take a few ideas from Psalm 103, but it’s not Psalm 103, quite obviously. The church is impoverished because she has abandoned the riches of her inheritance in the psalter.
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Progressivism is actually regressivism. It’s a regression to paganism.
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“No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity.”
— Wendell Berry
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“…since you cannot be of assistance to everyone, those are especially to be cared for who are most closely bound to you by place, time, or opportunity, as if by chance… who, in reality, are chosen by God.”
— St. Augustine, on Ordo Amoris
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“God did not call me to minister to the millions, but to minister to the one in front of me.”
— Mother Theresa
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“The truth is that the modern world has committed itself to two totally different and inconsistent conceptions about education. It is always trying to expand the scope of education; and always trying to exclude from it all religion and philosophy. But this is sheer nonsense. You can have an education that teaches atheism because atheism is true, and it can be, from its own point of view, a complete education. But you cannot have an education claiming to teach all truth, and then refusing to discuss whether atheism is true.”
— G. K. Chesterton
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“Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.”
— Chesterton
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“Everything has been sundered from everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we shall hear of specialists dividing the tune from the words of a song, on the ground that they spoil each other… This world is all one wild divorce court.”
— Chesterton, on the fragmented worldview of modernity
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“Every education teaches a philosophy; if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. Every part of that education has a connection with every other part. If it does not all combine to convey some general view of life, it is not an education at all.”
— Chesterton
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“There is something to be said for teaching everything to somebody, as compared with the modern notion of teaching nothing, and the same sort of nothing, to everybody.”
— Chesterton
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“Non-Christian education is Godless education . . . Godless or nontheistic education is therefore also non- or anti-Christian education. Godless, non-Christian education naturally becomes humanistic, i.e., man-centered. If man does not need to live for God, he may live for himself. If then we want a God-centered and truly Christian education, we will have to break away completely from the educational philosophy that surrounds us.”
— Cornelius Van Til (Foundations of Christian Education)
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The problem that ails the human race is not merely ignorance but sin.
And so the solution is not merely education but grace.
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“Imagine walking into a supposedly professional environment and seeing a man dressed in women’s clothing and knowing this delusional weirdo is the person entrusted with teaching your child how to read and write.
But it’s not just reading and writing and math. No, this is the kind of teacher who boasts about teaching your child “how to sissy that walk,” all while you’re paying taxes to fund this circus.
Imagine your child, confused by their surroundings, asking questions about the rainbow splattered propaganda all over the classroom walls, and this pervert, eager to brainwash them with queer propaganda, steps in as their self-appointed guide to gender identity and sexual orientation. Imagine trying to raise your child as a decent, functioning human being who contributes to society only to have those values undermined in the classroom, not even by peers, but by the person you’re forced to pay to teach them.
Imagine feeling powerless as this teacher boasts about having parents pull their children from his classroom—parents just like you who don’t want their children indoctrinated by someone pushing their personal identity as a central focus of their teaching. But there’s a silver lining, according to him—he’s still there, still ready to educate the rest of the class on how to “sissy that walk.”
And just when you think it can’t get any worse, imagine hearing this teacher openly admit that even his administration asked him to “tone it down,” yet he’s still there, apparently unphased, continuing on his mission. The public school system is letting this happen, and it’s happening with your blessing. So, imagine what your child is absorbing—it’s not just algebra and reading comprehension.”
— Jeff at The Dissenter, on the current state of public education
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“Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning…
The high school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature…And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”
— Flannery O’Connor
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Whoever tells the best story wins.
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“I would advise no one to send his child where the Holy Scriptures are not su-preme. Every institution that does not unceasingly pursue the study of God’s Word becomes corrupt…. I greatly that the [schools], unless they teach the Holy Scriptures diligently and impress them on the young students, are wide gates to Hell.”
— Martin Luther
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“The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools in teaching natural philosophy as an accomplishment only has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of creation to the Creator himself, they stop short and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of His existence.”
— Thomas Paine
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Without political preaching, there would be no United States of America. Without a new rise in political preaching, there may be no United States of America in the future. Where is the black-robed regiment when you need them?
Some say, “pastors should not preach on the culture war.”
But this imposes an extra-biblical standard upon the pastor, who is called to preach the whole Bible. It muzzles the preacher so he cannot say what’s God’s Word says in many areas – and precisely in those areas where the pastors flock needs to be discipled.
If we are not supposed to preach on so-called culture war issues, what is left to preach? There are very few issues in our culture that have not been politicized. There are very few issues that are not connected to the culture war in some way.
If we are not supposed to preach on culture war issues, then marriage and sex cannot be preached because every aspect of marriage and sex have been swept up into the culture war. Obviously it is ridiculous to say these issues should not be taught on from the pulpit. A pastor who does not address marriage and sex is not a faithful pastor. He has to be able to define marriage and male/female. He has to be able to talk about God’s sexual design.
Or take something that might seem to be more distant from the culture wars, but really isn’t, like anxiety. Preaching on anxiety might seem to be insulated from the culture war, but it’s really not. As soon as we start preaching on anxiety, we are going to touch on issues of mental health, medication, and the causes of anxiety. Each one of these will get into culture war issues. We live in a culture that once stigmatized mental illness but now glorifies mental illness; surely the church must say something about that. The issue of medicating away anxiety and other emotional problems has been a hot topic in the culture since the Rolling Stones sang about it in their 1966 song, “Mother’s Little Helper.” If Mick Jagger recognized we were overmedicating women in the 1960s, surely today’s pastor can notice it. What are the causes and curses of the anxiety rippling through our culture? The church has to say something about this topic. There are many reasons for increased anxiety in the culture today, ranging from family breakdown to social media use to incompetent leadership at virtually every level of government and society, and so it is impossible to separate the causes of anxiety from the wider problems facing our world. If we are going to cast our cares on the Lord who cares for us, we have to identify those cares, and that will undoubtedly run us into culture war territory.
Or take another example that may seem far removed from the culture wars but really isn’t: Love of neighbor. It might seem like a pastor could preach on love of neighbor without getting entangled in the culture war. But a few years ago, we have had leading evangelicals and many politicians from both sides of the aisle tell us that loving our neighbor requires shuttering the economy, canceling public worship services, socially distancing, not visiting the sick in hospitals or the elderly in retirement communities, receiving an experimental vaccine, and wearing a mask in public. Either love of neighbor requires these things or it does not, but it is impossible to remain neutral. The church will either meet or not. The church will either require masks or not. There’s no way to avoid these issues. Further, we often told living neighbor means voting a certain way or not criticizing various “lifestyle choices” (we know what that euphemism stands for). Training people in biblical love of neighbor inevitably involves touching on culture war issues.
This is really the bottom line: It is simply impossible for the faithful pastor to avoid the culture war. It is all pervasive. It has seeped into almost everything. There is no way a church’s leadership or a pastor in his preaching can somehow avoid being a combatant in the culture war. The calling of the church is not to somehow transcend the culture war (that would likely turn us into Gnostics) but to fight the culture war faithfully.
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“Christianity should be twisted in with national constitutions, that the kingdoms of the world should become Christ’s kingdoms [Rv [1:15), and their kings the church’s nursing-fathers [Is 49:23]…
What is the principal intention of this commission; to disciple all nations….”Admit them disciples; do your utmost to make the nations Christian nations;” … Christ the Mediator is setting up a kingdom in the world, bring the nations to be his subjects; setting up a school, bring the nations to be his scholars; raising an army for the carrying on of the war against the powers of darkness, enlist the nations of the earth under his banner”
— Matthew Henry
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“If the church confines its teaching to spiritual matters, it must neglect most of Scripture, which speaks to man’s condition in every area of life. Christian faith is either relevant to all of life or it is relevant to none of it: the claims of God are either total, or He is not God. To ask Christianity to stay in its own territory is to ask it to stay in all of life. Religion as the Bible conceives of it and declares it has no separate domain apart from the rest of life. It is the over-all purpose and meaning of all life in its every sphere. … The task of the church must be to challenge every sphere of life in the name of the sovereign God and the Lord Jesus Christ. The Great Commission requires that all nations be made disciples, and every sphere of life be brought under the dominion of Christ the King, made to hear Christ the Prophet, and find its redemption and intercession in Christ the Priest. Anything less than this is a defamation of the Gospel.“
— Rushdoony
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Grok on the history of Christian faith and public education in Alabama:
The Bible and Christianity have played a significant and evolving role in Alabama education from the territorial period through the present, though the nature of that involvement shifted dramatically over time—from informal and church-centered beginnings, to formal requirements in public schools, to legal restrictions after mid-20th-century court rulings, and more recently to elective and released-time options.
Early and Antebellum Period (Pre-1865)
Education in early Alabama was heavily shaped by Protestant churches (Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians) and, to a lesser extent, Catholics. Denominations founded academies, colleges, and schools primarily to train ministers and provide moral/religious instruction alongside basic literacy. Notable examples include Spring Hill College (Jesuit, 1830), Judson College (Baptist women, 1838), and Howard College (Baptist men, 1841; later Samford University).
The Bible itself often served as a primary reading text in home schooling, Sunday schools, and early common schools, consistent with broader American Protestant practice. Republican ideals of an educated citizenry were frequently linked to biblical literacy and Christian morality. Enslaved people were largely barred from formal education after the 1830s (with laws criminalizing teaching them to read), though some learned informally, often motivated by desire to read the Bible. 
Reconstruction and Late 19th Century
After the Civil War, the Freedmen’s Bureau, Northern missionary societies (especially the American Missionary Association), and Black churches established numerous schools for freedpeople. Literacy was often pursued so that adults and children could read the Bible. Black Baptist associations and other denominations founded schools and colleges (e.g., Selma University origins in the 1870s). White denominational colleges continued, and public schooling expanded under the 1868 constitution, though funding remained limited and unequal.
Localism and cultural conservatism strongly influenced the emerging public system. Protestant values remained culturally dominant even as formal public education grew. 
Early-to-Mid 20th Century: Formal Requirements
In 1919, Alabama passed a law requiring daily readings from the Holy Bible in every public school supported by public funds. Teachers had to certify compliance, and non-compliant schools risked losing funding. This remained in force for over 50 years.
Bible reading (without comment, in the nonsectarian Protestant style common in many states) was a standard feature of Alabama classrooms well into the mid-20th century. Moral and character education often carried Christian overtones. Church-related private schools and Bible institutes (such as the roots of Southeastern Bible College in the 1930s) also flourished.
Mid-to-Late 20th Century: Legal Challenges and Pushback
U.S. Supreme Court decisions (Engel v. Vitale 1962, Abington v. Schempp 1963) and subsequent rulings restricted school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading. Alabama’s mandatory Bible-reading law was struck down in 1971 (Alabama Civil Liberties Union v. Wallace).
Additional Alabama cases tested the boundaries:
- Classroom prayer and moments of silence led to Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), in which the Supreme Court invalidated an Alabama silent-prayer law.
- Controversies over textbooks, evolution disclaimers (Alabama’s prominent “Cadillac of disclaimers” in biology books), and claims of “secular humanism” in curricula reflected ongoing cultural conflict.
Many white families responded to desegregation by forming private “segregation academies,” a large number of which operated as Christian schools emphasizing biblical worldview and traditional values.
Late 20th Century to Present
Alabama has moved toward voluntary, elective, and off-campus approaches that courts have generally allowed: - 2007: First state to adopt a statewide textbook (The Bible and Its Influence) for elective high-school academic study of the Bible.
- 2019 and later: Legislation authorizes elective courses on the objective study of the Bible (Old Testament, New Testament, or both) and religious history in grades 6–12. Teachers may decline to teach them.
- Released-time Bible education: Programs (e.g., School Ministries Alabama) allow students, with parental permission, to leave campus during the school day for privately funded religious instruction. State law has clarified and expanded options for elective credit in some cases.
- Recent legislative efforts have included requirements or encouragement for Ten Commandments displays in schools (framed as historical documents) and related cultural-heritage measures.
Private Christian schools and homeschooling with explicitly biblical curricula remain significant, and school-choice programs have increased public funding flowing to some of those options.
Overall Pattern
Christianity—especially evangelical Protestantism—has been the dominant religious influence on Alabama education for most of its history. The Bible moved from informal primary text and moral foundation, to a legally required daily classroom practice (1919–1971), to a restricted or elective status after constitutional rulings. Today the emphasis is on voluntary academic study, released-time programs, and private/Christian alternatives rather than state-mandated devotion in public classrooms. This trajectory mirrors broader Southern and national patterns while reflecting Alabama’s particularly strong evangelical culture.
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Christianity and a Protestant-infused sense of morality were deeply embedded in Alabama public-school classrooms, textbooks, and curriculum for much of the state’s history—far more as a cultural and practical reality than as formal doctrine after the mid-20th century.
Textbooks and Reading Materials
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the most common elementary textbooks were the McGuffey Readers. First introduced statewide after the 1854 Public Education Act (under Superintendent William F. Perry), these graded readers taught reading through selections heavy with Protestant piety, biblical allusions, moral tales, and virtues such as honesty, industry, thrift, patriotism, and obedience. They functioned as both literacy tools and character-formation texts. Many schools also used the Bible itself or Bible-based materials for reading practice. 
Alabama history textbooks (especially those used from the early 1900s through the 1970s–80s) often carried moral and cultural messaging shaped by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Lost Cause interpretations. These framed Southern history in terms of honor, duty, and Providence, sometimes portraying slavery as a civilizing or Christianizing influence. Examples include works by authors such as L. Lamar Matthews, Albert B. Moore, and Charles Grayson Summersell’s long-used Alabama History for Schools. Companion workbooks reinforced these narratives through discussion questions and activities. 
Later textbooks faced the opposite criticism. In the 1980s Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County case, plaintiffs argued that certain history, social studies, and home-economics texts promoted “secular humanism” by omitting or downplaying the role of religion (especially Christianity) in American history, while teaching moral relativism. A district court initially agreed and ordered dozens of books removed; the 11th Circuit reversed, finding the materials advanced legitimate secular values (tolerance, self-respect, logical decision-making) without establishing a religion. 
Classroom Practice and Curriculum
- Daily Bible reading (required by the 1919 law until struck down in 1971) was the most explicit Christian element. It was typically non-sectarian in form (reading without comment) but Protestant in cultural assumption.
- Moral and character instruction was assumed to be part of schooling. Teachers were expected to model and reinforce Christian-influenced virtues.
- Character education became a formal statutory requirement in 1995 (Alabama Code § 16-6B-2). Local boards must provide at least 10 minutes of daily instruction focused on a list of traits: courage, patriotism, citizenship, honesty, fairness, respect for others, kindness, cooperation, self-respect, self-control, courtesy, compassion, tolerance, diligence, generosity, punctuality, cleanliness, cheerfulness, school pride, respect for the environment, patience, creativity, sportsmanship, loyalty, and perseverance. The program must include the Pledge of Allegiance. This is framed in secular civic terms but continues the older tradition of deliberate moral formation.
Later Developments
After Supreme Court rulings limited school-sponsored religious exercises, explicit Christian content shifted toward elective academic Bible courses (authorized by state law), released-time programs (off-campus Bible instruction with parental permission), and cultural/historical framing (e.g., recent Ten Commandments display laws presented as historical documents). Alabama biology textbooks have long carried a prominent evolution disclaimer reflecting ongoing cultural tension between science and traditional Christian views of origins.
In short, for most of Alabama’s public-school history, Christianity supplied the default moral vocabulary and many of the actual texts used in elementary classrooms. Over time this became more formalized as “character education” and more contested as courts and cultural changes limited overt religious instruction, while debates over textbook content (omissions of religion, treatment of other faiths, or residual traditional values) continue into the present.
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Raymond Ibrahim takes on effeminate, doormat Christianity:
“To be sure, Christianity does command Christians to lose—lose their pride, their greed, their lusts, even their very lives (Matt. 16:25).
Yet Scripture never commands Christians to lose—that is, intentionally forfeit—the truth.
On the contrary, Jesus repeatedly challenged and won arguments against the Pharisees, Sadducees, and scribes—even against Satan himself. Never once did Christ intentionally lose an argument for the sake of appearing “gracious”…
Similarly, Christians are exhorted to “contend earnestly for the faith” (Jude 3); to “always be prepared to give an answer” (1 Peter 3:15); to appoint leaders able both to teach sound doctrine and “refute those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9). Paul goes so far as to say “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God” (2 Cor. 10:5).
Notice the distinction. Christians are commanded to sacrifice themselves. They are not commanded to sacrifice truth—indeed, they are commanded to uphold it, unto death itself…
Christianity conquered the Roman Empire not because the apostles intentionally lost arguments, but because they persuaded others through the truth—even when it got them killed. The early Church Fathers did not concede to pagan philosophers; they boldly and unapologetically answered them. Athanasius spent much of his life in exile precisely because he refused to “lose the argument”…
You may have heard me use the term “Muscular Christianity,” by which I mean a robust, masculine, assertive form of Christianity, the sort widely practiced before the modern era and the advent of its antithesis, what I refer to as “Doormat Christianity,” the idea that Christianity begins and ends with being nice and letting anyone and everyone walk all over you.
As it happens, there was an earlier movement, in the nineteenth century, also known as “Muscular Christianity.” It arose in Britain precisely as a reaction against the growing tendency to equate Christianity with passivity and physical weakness. Its leading proponents, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, insisted that God intended Christians to cultivate courage, discipline, strength, and excellence. The body, Hughes wrote, was to be trained “for the protection of the weak” and “the advancement of all righteous causes.”
The movement profoundly shaped modern sports, which is unsurprising considering that Paul repeatedly compares the Christian life to an athletic contest, urging believers to “run in such a way as to obtain the prize” (1 Cor. 9:24).
The YMCA adopted physical training as part of Christian formation. Basketball was invented at a YMCA as a game meant to cultivate Christian character. Theodore Roosevelt became one of Muscular Christianity’s most influential champions, insisting that strenuous competition produced courage and moral fortitude. Even the educational ideals that helped inspire the modern Olympic movement were deeply influenced by this tradition.
In other words, much of modern organized sport was shaped by Christians who believed that vigorous competition—conducted honorably—helped form virtuous men.
And now, from that very stage of athleticism, Christians are told that the truly Christian thing to do is… “Lose. Intentionally.”
Every civilization has celebrated those virtues that enable it to flourish. Rome praised fortitude. Sparta admired courage. Islam has long celebrated jihad. Medieval Christendom revered saints—but it also honored defenders, men such as El Cid, Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard the Lionheart, Skanderbeg, and countless others who understood that charity and courage, piety and prowess, were not opposites.
Only modern, Western Christianity seems obsessed with celebrating one virtue to the exclusion of all others—surrender—the very “virtue” that serves only to empower anti-Christian forces.
Incidentally, isn’t it curious how one looks in vain for campaigns urging Islamists to wash the feet of—instead of slaughtering—Christians? Nor are Leftist revolutionaries ever urged to “lose intentionally,” rather than seize every institution they can.
Interesting how such exhortations are exclusively reserved for they who are already “turning the other cheek” more than anyone else—Christians. Apparently, it is they who always need to be reminded—that is, guilt tripped into believing—that they need to surrender more, forgive more, yield more, and ask less of everyone else.
The agenda of all such messaging should be obvious by now.
A Christianity taught to mistake meekness for weakness serves only those who oppose and even despise Christianity.
Christ never instructed His followers to become doormats. He instructed them to become saints. Saints wash feet—but they also confront kings; they forgive enemies—but they also expose falsehood; they surrender wealth, comfort, reputation—even life itself—but they never surrender the truth.
Historic Christianity did not transform the world by teaching men to lose, but by teaching men to conquer themselves—and then the world—with truth.”
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“The Father in divine things is Grammatica, for he gives the Word and is the pure fountainhead from which, if one may so speak, floweth good, excellent, pure speech. Ths Son is Dialectica; for He giveth the arrangement whereby a thing should be set in good order of succession so that conclusion and consecution by certain. But the Holy Ghost is Rhetorica, the orator, for He excellently sustaineth, bloweth, and impelleth, maketh quick and powerful, so that an impression is made and hearts are taken.”
— attributed to Martin Luther
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A while back, I was on an online panel for Reformed Evangelical Seminary on “Ministry and Masculinity.” I think I already posted a transcript of my talk, but now the video is up:
“Biblical manhood: Taking on the responsibility and developing the character and competence to lead in bringing and maintaining order to the world under the Lordship of God’s Son.”
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I think a few of his comments on capitalism are offbase, or miss the real issues. But when all corporations care about is finding the cheapest possible labor in a global labor market, it does create problems.
Free markets need to be tethered to morality and national interest (e.g., there is no good reason to be in trading agreements with ideological enemies, like China).
I thought the video’s investigation of what it would take to re-shore even some pretty simple manufacturing was fascinating – and frustrating.
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Young white men today who feel oppressed and therefore angry would do well to read Clarence Thomas’s autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
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“History meant far more to Christianity than it did to the ancient world. It was the Christian conviction that the divine had appeared in the domain of time, not as a pale reflection but in the whole fullness of its glory; hence as the dominating central point of the whole it must relate the whole past to itself and unfold the whole future out of itself. The unique character of this central occurrence was beyond all doubt. Christ could not come again and yet again to be crucified; hence as the countless historical cycles of the ancient world disappeared, there was no longer the old eternal recurrence of things. History ceased to be a uniform rhythmic repetition and became a comprehensive whole, a single drama. Man was now called on to accomplish a complete transformation, and this made his life incomparably tenser than it had been in the days when man had merely to unfold an already existing nature. Hence in Christianity, and nowhere else, lie the roots of a higher valuation of history and of temporal life in general.”
— Rudolf Euchen
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“Christianity is itself the central content of this great history…. Everyone who thinks it through must come to this insight: apart from and without Christianity there is no possibility of history in the proper sense, no history of the world and humanity.”
— Herman Bavinck
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C. S. Lewis on evolution as a self-defeating myth:
“The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of the irrational— if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel —how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution?”
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The blessing of marriage and family:
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/195fusVDCJ/?mibextid=wwXIfr
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Muslims are anti-Christian and always have been.
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“No man has a right to lead such a life of contemplation as to forget in his own ease the service due to his neighbor; nor has any man a right to be so immersed in active life as to neglect the contemplation of God.”
— Augustine
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“[Lord] nail down our flesh through fear of You, and do not let our hearts incline to words or thoughts of evil, but wound our souls with longing for you; that, ever gazing on you and guided by the light that comes from you… we may give thanks to you, the Father without beginning, with Your Only-begotten Son, and Your All-holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now and forever, and to the ages of ages. Amen”
— St. Basil the Great
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“Communism is church for people who don’t believe in God. It’s religion for atheists. Their ‘tithe’ is taxation. Giving without love, receiving without gratitude. Christianity believes envy is a sin. To the communist, envy is a virtue. They envy and lust after everything they don’t have — and will use force to get it.
Bernie will not give up his summer homes. AOC flies private. Mandami lives in a mansion. Illhan is worth $30 Million. But don’t ask her to pay a penny more in taxes. Charity is NOT a virtue to the communist. As soon as they get theirs, it’s locked down.
Their life is a virtue signal. These are not good people. These are not moral people. Give them power and it always ends the same way…”
— Benny Johnson
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George Gilder argues that capitalism is fundamentally a system of giving and altruism—rooted in faith, hope, and love—rather than greed or mere self-interest. This is a central theme in his influential 1981 book Wealth and Poverty and related writings. 
Core Argument
Gilder rejects the common caricature (shared by many critics and some defenders of markets) that capitalism rests primarily on avarice or “homo economicus” responding only to incentives. Instead:
- Capitalism begins with giving, not taking. Entrepreneurs invest time, capital, creativity, and effort without a predetermined return—analogous to a gift. Success depends on accurately understanding and meeting others’ needs better than competitors. The return (profit) comes later, if at all, and is uncertain.
- It channels self-interest into altruism. Profit measures how well a firm has served customers who voluntarily choose its products or services. Businesses that prioritize their own interests over customers fail; those oriented toward others succeed. “Capitalism at its essence, then, is a competition of giving… The genius of capitalism… is that it channels self-interest into altruism. Entrepreneurs can only help themselves by helping others.”
- Altruism is essential. Gilder draws on anthropological examples (potlatching, tribal “big men” or mumi who compete by giving feasts) to show that productive economies historically begin with contests of generosity that expand human sympathies and create reciprocal obligations. Modern investment works the same way: the gift (investment) has no fixed contractual return and depends on insight into others’ desires.
He summarizes: “And the foundation of wealth is always giving, not taking. The deepest truth of capitalism is faith, hope and love.”
Faith, Hope, and Love as the Moral Foundation
Gilder links these virtues explicitly to economic creativity: - Faith: The entrepreneurial leap into uncertainty—committing resources before knowing the outcome—requires trust in others, the future, and a providential order.
- Hope: Sustaining effort despite risk and frequent failure.
- Love (or altruism/commitment): Orientation toward the needs of others; the creative, generative impulse that “infuses ideas with life and fire.”
In his view, wealth is less a stock of material goods than a flow of knowledge and ideas generated by this orientation. Materialist or purely incentive-based theories miss the creative, spiritual dimension. Capitalism thrives when it relies on these qualities and decays when reduced to short-term extraction or when policy and culture undermine them.
This perspective appears consistently in Gilder’s work (including later writings on information theory and knowledge economies) and in talks such as his PragerU presentation “Why Capitalism Works.” It stands in deliberate contrast both to Marxist materialism and to purely utilitarian defenses of markets.
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The difference between capitalism and socialism is the difference between freedom and coercion. It’s the difference between productivity and theft. It’s the difference between service and envy.
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“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
—Benjamin Franklin
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“Americans need to know the truth behind the story Zohran Mamdani used to say America needs to accept mass migration
Zohran Mamdani said “I consider my own faith, Islam, a religion built upon a narrative of migration. The story of the Hijra reminds us that Prophet Muhammad was a stranger too, who fled Mecca and was welcomed in Medina.”
Here’s the part that he left out and it’s VERY important
- Muhammad started his religion in Mecca, where he made about 70 converts until the citizens of Mecca literally chased him out of the city
- So he fled from Mecca to Medina, which was a mostly Jewish city that was occupied and controlled by 3 opposing Jewish tribes
- He then he made a treaty with the Jewish tribes, establishing himself for the first time as a political leader. So Muhammad continued to gain followers and grow politically and militarily until he eventually got big enough and strong enough that he just decided, “Well, I don’t have to follow these treaties anymore.” And so for two of the tribes, he voided the treaty, and he cast them out. He expelled them out of Medina.
- The final tribe that was still in Medina, he brought all of the men from the tribe into the middle of the city and beheaded them and then all of the women and the children from the tribe were either sold off or brought into slavery
Now this is the story that Zohran Mamdani references. “Prophet Muhammad was a stranger too, who fled Mecca and was welcomed in Medina.”
Yeah, except for within 5 years, Muhammad had killed, enslaved or expelled every Jew from Medina
Zohran Mamdani literally used this story as his reasoning to say we need to accept mass migration
The story ends with mass murder of the native people and the compelled takeover of the land by Muslims
That’s our future”
— From https://x.com/wallstreetapes/status/2083934597499535436?s=46&t=au-C34qTtl4rGPFr5igkAw
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“If the world grows too worldly, it can be rebuked by the church; but if the church grows too worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldliness by the world.”
— G. K. Chesterton
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From Stunner, on feminism as a luxury belief:
“FEMINISM CAN ONLY EXIST INSIDE PATRIARCHY. IT COULD NEVER SURVIVE OUTSIDE IT.
Feminism doesn’t fight patriarchy. It needs patriarchy to justify its existence.
Feminism needs:
The police force built by men to protect her right to protest
The laws written by men to give her equal rights
The military of men to keep her country safe so she can complain about men
The electricity, roads, infrastructure, technology invented by men to give her a platform to say men are useless
The food supply chain built by men working dangerous jobs to keep her fed while she says she doesn’t need men
Outside of patriarchy? In the real state of nature?
No police. No laws. No rights. No grocery store. No AC. No internet.
Just raw survival. Brute strength. Violence. Starvation.
In that world, feminism dies in 24 hours. Because in that world, a woman with a gender studies degree cannot compete with a man with an axe. She NEEDS the patriarchal structure to survive.
Feminism is a luxury belief that only exists when men have already made life so safe and comfortable that women can afford to pretend men aren’t necessary.
You will never see feminism in a war zone. In a famine. In a collapsing country. In a village with no running water.
You only see it in first-world countries, in safe cities, where men have built everything so well that women forgot who built it.
That’s why feminism can only exist INSIDE patriarchy. It could never survive OUTSIDE it.”
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If you don’t feel some weight and pressure from your responsibilities, you are probably not ambitious enough.
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God is going to dwell in the world our work creates.
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““They would have to sing better songs for me to learn to have faith in their Redeemer; and his disciples would have to look more redeemed!”
— Nietzsche
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“Jesus promised His disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.”
— Chesterton
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On the common good:
“If you believe in property rights, you believe in the common good. Property rights establish the conditions for responsible stewardship, economic cooperation, social stability, and human flourishing.
If you believe unborn children should not be killed, you believe in the common good. You recognize that justice requires protecting innocent human life for all, especially when it is vulnerable and defenseless.
If you believe male and female are objective categories, you believe in the common good. You recognize that society must order itself according to the truth of the human person rather than treating reality as a matter of individual preference.
If you think traffic lights are valuable, you believe in the common good. You accept reasonable limits on individual freedom so that everyone may travel safely and public life may proceed in an orderly fashion.
If you oppose murder, you believe in the common good. You affirm that civil society must protect human life and punish those who unjustly destroy it.
If you believe contracts should be honored, you believe in the common good. Trustworthy promises make economic exchange, institutional cooperation, and ordinary social life possible.
If you believe parents have duties toward their children, you believe in the common good. The family is not merely a collection of autonomous individuals but a natural community structured by obligations of love, care, and formation.
If you believe children should receive an education (whether public or private), you believe in the common good. A society has an interest in preparing the next generation to pursue truth, exercise responsibility, and participate constructively in communal life.
If you believe the government should defend the nation, you believe in the common good. Political authority exists, in part, to secure the conditions of peace and safety that no individual can provide alone.
If you believe courts should administer justice impartially, you believe in the common good. The rule of law protects citizens from arbitrary power and preserves a just order shared by all.
If you believe pollution may rightly be restricted, you believe in the common good. Individuals and corporations do not have an unlimited right to impose the costs of their conduct on their neighbors.
If you believe public parks, roads, and utilities are worthwhile, you believe in the common good. Some goods are enjoyed together and require forms of cooperation that transcend individual consumption.
If you believe citizens owe one another honesty, you believe in the common good. A society cannot sustain trust, deliberation, or justice when deception becomes the accepted norm.
If you believe freedom should be ordered toward what is true and good, you believe in the common good. Liberty is not merely the absence of restraint but the social and moral space in which persons and communities may flourish.
The real debate, then, is not whether there is a common good. Every political philosophy presupposes one. The debate is over its nature, its scope, who defines it, and what means political authority may legitimately employ to secure it.”
— Andrew Walker
“For collectivists, the “common good” does not name some specific outcome or vision. Instead it serves as an open-ended invitation to expand the authority of the government. The “common good” serves as a totem, justifying them in doing whatever they decide is “for the common good.””
— Cody Libolt
“If you deny the reality of “public good” and reduce everything to absolute “individual rights” you are trying to extinguish political life. You can’t really have politics without some conception of the common good.”
— Stephen Wolfe
Each of these quotations true from a certain perspective. The common good is and should be a reality. But it serves the common good to respect individual and familial rights. Ordered liberty resolves the tension between the common good and individual rights.
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A podcast I did with my friends Joshua Haymes and Andrew Isker on righteous deception in politics:
I don’t think the Jehu case in 2 Kings 10 is any different
It’s warfare, so deception and violence are wielded righteously to righteous ends
We could debate how such warfare applies today – was it herem warfare or normal war? Was it an application of Deut 13 and if so how does that text apply today?
2 Kings 10 is warfare, not electoral politics
Jehu deceived an enemy in order to give them what they deserved, not to trick them into voting for him
In general, if you’re justified in killing someone, you’re justified in deceiving them
And Jehu was definitely justified in killing the prophets of Baal – and prophetically commissioned to do so
Spying is another interesting test case – obviously the Bible justifies spies in a military context
Spies deceive and “steal” information
But I don’t think that is a license for, say, a government to spy on its own law-abiding citizens
If the end goal is just attaining power, why not spy on law-abiding voters to gain a political advantage? But I don’t think this is how Christians should do things, nor do I think it will bring God’s blessing which is the key to a nation’s flourishing
Shrewdness is fine but shrewdness is not the same category as lying
In fact shrewdness is usually honest, just in a calculated way
It’s like a presbytery exam – you don’t have to share every thought you’ve ever had on the topic of the question
A politician doesn’t have to share everything he thinks or knows and he can deflect questions he doesn’t want to answer
If the podcast had more time, we would have gotten into a fuller discussion of Machiavelli – the use of Machiavellian means for good ends
In my view, we already have too much Machiavellianism in our politics – and Machiavellian means will almost always lead to Machiavellian ends
There is much to appreciate about Machiavelli, in terms of understanding how political power works (eg, lions and foxes)
But Machiavelli was a very self-conscious break with traditional Christian political philosophy, and that needs to be kept in mind
Bottom line: we must not confuse the ethics of kinetic war with the ethics of culture war
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“The individual good is impossible without the common good of the family, state, or kingdom. Hence Valerius Maximus says of the ancient Romans that ‘they would rather be poor in a rich empire than rich in a poor empire.’”
— Aquinas
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“The Nazis built a full SOCIALIST economy.
In “Human Action”, Ludwig von Mises explains that while the Soviets nationalized everything outright, the Nazis used the “German pattern”, leaving the paperwork of ownership alone while seizing every decision that ownership is supposed to mean.
Under Hitler, the State told owners what to produce, how much, at what price, and where to sell it.
Entrepreneurs became shop managers, Betriebsführer, executing someone else’s orders.
The 1936 Four Year Plan under Göring centralized labor, wages, raw materials, and investment, and price controls froze the entire economy so nothing could legally rise.
Cartels were mandatory and those who refused faced expropriation.
Once the state controls production, prices, quantity, and hiring, the title on the building means nothing. It’s all socialism.”
— Rothmus
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“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.”
— Ronald Reagan
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There has been a tradition for at least a century and a half that “men are demons, women are angels.” Women were considered more pure and innocent than men. Hopefully the number of young women voluntarily choosing to have Only Fans accounts proves that is a lie. Women can be pretty demonic as well. Abortion makes the same point. The number of women who have chosen, without pressure or coercion, to murder their own babies, and the lengths to which they will go to protect that right, shows just how evil women can be. American women have killed 10x more babies than Hitler’s killed Jews.
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Your average American evangelical church member cares more about what his local pastor thinks than your average American Roman Catholic cares what the pope thinks.
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“I’m not a racist. I’m a culturalist I believe some cultures are superior to others
For example, I prefer cultures that do not encourage wife beating, paedophilia, clitorectomies, stoning and constant inflation of the male ego
I am also aware of the difference between Islamoscepticism and Islamophobia
Notice that hate does not come into this Only moral preferences”
— John Cleese
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In a therapeutic age, personality replaces character, charisma replaces virtue, and “servant-leadership” replaces rule.
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Christendom is dying the death of a 1000 paper cuts.
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On motherhood and the fertility crisis:
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Noah Revoy on parenting (from X):
“When you have small children, especially children under five, you must simplify your life.
You do not need a bigger house. You need a house that is easier to clean, maintain, and manage.
You do not need more money nearly as much as you need to spend the money you have more wisely.
You do not need more activities. You need activities that are simple, nearby, and suitable for doing with several children.
You do not need a more impressive schedule. You need a predictable routine that reduces confusion and makes daily life easier.
You do not need more possessions. You need fewer things to organize, repair, clean, and put away.
You do not need a more demanding career. You need work that leaves enough time, patience, and attention for your family.
You do not need a complicated social life. You need relationships that fit naturally into family life rather than pulling you away from it.
Children under five require an extraordinary amount of work. They need help with nearly everything, and they need constant supervision, repetition, and attention. During those years, every unnecessary complication takes time and energy away from parenting.
The goal is to arrange your life so that as little effort as possible is wasted on maintaining complexity. The simpler your life becomes, the more of yourself you have left for your children.
As they grow older, the equation changes. They become more independent, more capable, and easier to include in a wider range of activities. That is the time to take on more complicated projects, expand your career, travel more extensively, or pursue ambitions that demand greater time and concentration.
The early years are not the time to prove how much you can manage. They are the time to remove everything unnecessary so that you can give your children what they cannot receive later: your full presence while they are small.”
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Will Tanner on accelerationism (from X):
“Accelerationism has worked so well in South Africa, where years of the most anarcho-tyrannical, race communist government imaginable have finally produced that right-wing reaction that retook the country!
Oh wait, everything has gotten worse consistently with no “collapse” or revolution, and whites are only able to flee from the horrors of their homeland to America because Trump, rather than Kamala, is in charge
Accelerationism is utterly buffoonish. You do not win by losing and being mad about the indignities foisted upon you. You win by winning, and consistently taking what victories you are able to manage both in the face of resistance and when the wind is in your sails
The way the South gradually clawed its way out of the Reconstruction by maintaining a coherent and united front with manageable objectives is the path to victory, not losing in the hope things then get better. After all, losing the Civil War didn’t mean that the South eventually radicalized and restored itself…it meant it forever lost its antebellum culture, was changed much for the worse, and only kinda economically recovered generations later
Winning is the path to victory, not losing”
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I’d say something about the Fauci hearings, but what is there to say. He lied. He scammed the American people. He made a few bucks. And he did it all in the name of public service and public health. A greater abuse of the public trust would be hard to imagine.
Put it in perspective: Fauci helped create and then coverup the virus. He’s responsible for the deaths of 7.1 million people globally, more than Hitler. He is responsible for wrecking the global economy, harming the health and well-being of countless people, destroyed many childhoods and educations, etc. In a real sense, the world has still not recovered from that disaster.
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Why is natural law not persuasive today?
Perhaps because Darwin destroyed the whole concept of nature on which natural law arguments rest.
But also because we are immersed in virtual reality — we are detached from the physical world, from objective reality, from the “stuff” in which God’s moral design inheres. This is no excuse for us – but it does mean there is a way of using technology that aids fallen man in suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.
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For those keeping score at home, Fauci has a Roman Catholic background and is of Italian descent.
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