Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Homosexuality and the theology of suffering

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It seems to me that all the theological arguments in support of the proposition that homosexual sex isn’t sinful boil down, ultimately, to one assertion:

God couldn’t possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.

That’s really the bottom line right there, I think. All of the irrelevant arguments* about genetics are simply efforts to reinforce the second half of that sentence, to convince people that not acting on homosexual desires really is that hard and that painful. And yes, I do think this is the bottom line both for those who have desires and for those who don’t but who support the pro-homosex position—such folks would, on my observation, affirm this for themselves, and so they’re being logically and morally consistent in affirming that this must be true for others as well. (In that respect, I must admit they have a certain moral superiority to many who uphold the scriptural prohibition of homosexual activity, who are simply holding others to a moral standard which they would never dream of applying to themselves. The divorce rate among self-identified evangelicals bears eloquent witness to that.) In our suffering-averse, death-avoiding culture, I suspect you would find overwhelming agreement with this proposition: “God couldn’t possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.”

To which I can only say: You have no idea. Our difficulty squaring a loving God with one who allows us to suffer—indeed, who actively sends us trials and uses suffering and struggle (and, yes, failure) for our growth—is ours, not the Bible’s. Consider how God tried Abraham, Ezekiel, Hosea, Job; consider how he answered the disobedience of Jonah; consider how he rewarded the faithful witness of Paul. Consider the testimony of Hebrews 11, which offers this summation of the life of faith:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

And ultimately, consider Christ, and the suffering God willingly endured for us. We have a hard time when James says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,” but to him, it makes perfect sense: “for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” His priorities are not our priorities, and indeed, God’s priorities are not our priorities; we’re focused on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain—not necessarily in a crude, hedonistic sense, but even if the pleasures we value are intellectual and rarified, it doesn’t change the basic equation—while God is on about something else entirely in our lives.

For the sake of argument, grant everything the advocates of same-sex marriage and ordination of those who practice homosexual sex and the full societal normalization of homosexual practices claim and declare and argue about homosexual desire—grant it all, every last contention and conclusion, and set it against the biblical texts. Does it justify setting aside the historic interpretation of Scripture that homosexual practices are sinful? No, it doesn’t, because God doesn’t let us off that easily.

Indeed, as much as our culture tends to fixate on sex in various ways, and as powerful as our sexual desires and drives are, they aren’t our deepest or most fundamental desires, and they don’t fuel our strongest or most elemental temptations. When Paul references homosexual practice in Romans 1, it’s in the course of making a greater point about a deeper, more fundamental and more powerful temptation: the temptation to idolatry. Unfortunately, the 21st-century American church largely hasn’t followed him there, and thus hasn’t even confronted the lesson it truly needs to learn from that, which isn’t about sex at all: it is, rather, that yes, God could and does want me to do something that hard and that painful. He wants me to take everything, right down to the thing I most desperately do not want to give up—whatever that may be—and lay it at his feet in total self-surrender.

And here’s the kicker: he wants me to do it joyfully, and in fact he gives me every reason to do it joyfully; he wants me to lay it all down, as hard and as painful as it will be, because he has something far better to give me in return. In exchange for my life, he gives me his, which is a life that can face trials and sufferings and still sing hymns of praise from a jail cell at midnight. It’s a life that can see pain, and even struggles with temptation, not as something to be avoided or something of which we should only be expected to take so much, but rather as an opportunity to know the grace of Christ and share in his ministry.

*I say these arguments are irrelevant because they commit, ironically enough, the genetic fallacy. Desires are neither stronger nor more justifiable, nor for that matter more expressive of our sense of our own identity, for being genetic rather than the product of our experience and the choices we have made. Whatever conclusions one may draw about a neurological and neurochemical component to homosexual desires, and whatever answer one may offer to the chicken-and-egg question of whether that component is cause or effect of those desires (or, for that matter, stands in some other relation altogether to them), the whole matter is logically irrelevant to the question of what any given individual ought to do with those desires. Whatever their source, the desires exist, and they are what they are, and they must be considered on that basis. The rest is all so much smoke.

Why can’t we vote these people out before the ethics charges?

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Two weeks ago today, I cast my GOP primary vote here in Indiana’s 3rd Congressional District for Bob Thomas, who I thought had a real chance to beat the incumbent, Rep. Mark Souder. Ever since moving here, I’ve been hearing Rep. Souder denounced—by conservatives, mind you—as the worst sort of Republican; the only reason he won re-election last time around is that people held their noses and marked his name to beat his pro-card-check Democratic opponent. If Republican voters around here had felt they had the luxury of throwing away a Republican vote in the House, they would have sent him home. Running up to the primary, there was an anti-Souder direct mail campaign going, and anti-Souder TV ads . . . unfortunately, there were also too many challengers, and he took the primary with a plurality. I thought Thomas had a chance to win because he had the money to advertise, but the best he could do was a third of the vote, and that wasn’t good enough; Rep. Souder won.

IN-3 looks pretty stupid for that now.

Eight-term Rep. Mark Souder will announce his resignation Tuesday after it came to light that he was conducting an affair with a female aide who worked in his district office, Fox News has learned.

Multiple senior House sources indicated that the extent of the affair with the 45-year-old staffer would have landed Souder before the House Ethics Committee.

You know, if all the conservative challengers had been willing to get together, unite behind one of their number, and focus on the big picture rather than trying to grab the brass ring for themselves, we wouldn’t be in this mess. If conservatives can’t even put principle ahead of personal gain at this level, how in the name of all that is right and good are we ever going to reform this blasted party?

Man, I hope Chuck DeVore is paying attention . . .

The culture of death and the death of culture

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In an excellent short essay in the latest issue of The City, Baylor’s Francis J. Beckwith responds to a Washington Post column by one T. R. Reid claiming that ObamaPelosiCare would reduce the number of abortions. His evidence? There are more abortions per thousand women in the U.S. than in countries like Denmark, Japan, Germany, and the UK. Of course, the birth rate’s also quite a bit higher in the U.S. than in those countries, so his choice of statistic is more than a little disingenuous. But then, as Dr. Beckwith points out, there’s also a much deeper and more profound problem with Reid’s argument:

The prolife position is not merely about “reducing the number of abortions,” though that is certainly a consequence that all prolifers should welcome. Rather, the prolife position is the moral and political belief that all members of the human community are intrinsically valuable and thus are entitled to the protection of the laws. “Reducing the number of abortions” may happen in a regime in which this belief is denied, and that is the regime that the liberal supporters of universal health coverage want to preserve and want prolifers to help subsidize. It is a regime in which the continued existence of the unborn is always at the absolute discretion of the postnatal. Reducing the number of these discretionary acts by trying to pacify and accommodate the needs of those who want to procure abortions—physicians, mothers, and fathers—only reinforces the idea that the unborn are objects whose value depends exclusively on our wanting them.

A culture that has fewer abortions because its citizens have, in the words of John Lennon, “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,” is a sad, dying, empty culture. Mr. Reid seems to think being prolife is just about instituting policies that result in fewer abortions. But it’s not. It’s about loving children, life, and the importance of passing on one’s heritage to one’s legacy.

As Dr. Beckwith points out, that cultural emptiness—we might say, the absence of a strong pro-life impulse—has profound negative consequences:

What is going on in these nations is a shared understanding among its citizenry about the nature of its culture and its progeny: our civilization’s future and the generations required to people it are not worth perpetuating. It is practical nihilism, for each nation believes that its traditions, customs, and what remains of its faith are not worthy of being preserved, developed, and shared outside of the populace that currently occupies its borders. In practical terms, this means, for one thing, that the present generation of Europeans older than 55 will not have enough future workers to sustain their own health care needs when they are elderly.

So, as we have seen in the Netherlands, involuntary, non-voluntary, and voluntary euthanasia will certainly become the great cost containers (or as they say more candidly in Alaska, “death panels”).

That’s about it. At its heart, the pro-abortion position is a bet on power; the abortion regime is a classic example of the tyranny of the majority, the powerful abusing the powerless because they can and it suits them. Even the weakest and most powerless women are still infinitely powerful by comparison to their unborn children; and of course, many children are aborted not because women desire the abortion but because they are coerced into it by someone else, usually by the father of the child. Though there are exceptions, almost all abortions are essentially matters of convenience for somebody, driven by the unwillingness to sacrifice pleasures in the present for the sake of the future, and the refusal to allow the self to diminish so that someone else may grow.

This is malignant individualism, a cancer of the ego; and it is not only destructive of human life insofar as it drives the abortion mills, it is also destructive of human flourishing on a broader scale, because it is absolutely inimical to any sort of healthy culture. True growth depends on the willingness to sacrifice, or at least invest, the present for the sake of the future; true culture, healthy culture, arises out of love of life and openness to life, even when that love and that openness carry with them a real cost. To choose abortion is to choose the opposite: rather than choosing life at the cost of one’s convenience, comfort and pleasures, it is to choose death for the sake of protecting one’s pleasures, convenience and comfort. That may be pleasing in the short term, but in the long term, no good can come of it.

The Gift of the Church

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(Psalm 68:1-13, 17-20, 32-35, Ephesians 4:1-16)

Our passage from Ephesians this morning is a difficult one in some ways, largely having to do with Paul’s use of Psalm 68. As you likely noted during the reading, Psalm 68:18 says that God received gifts from people, while the quotation of that verse in Ephesians 4:8 says he gave gifts. At first glance, this seems like sheer incompetence; and yet, Paul had trained as a rabbi and he knew the Scriptures very, very well, so that’s out. What he has done here with the psalm must have been deliberate. Of course, that only raises the question, how could he justify doing what he did?

The answer seems to lie in the broader context of Psalm 68. You see, this is what has been called a “divine warrior” psalm, celebrating God’s defeat of his enemies, both past and future; victorious, he ascends Mount Zion, his holy mountain, having taken captives and plunder from those who opposed him. So far, so clear. The connecting point is that in the ancient world, kings would give away some of the spoils to their supporters, probably as a means of strengthening their position; they plundered their defeated enemies not simply to enrich themselves but to reward and strengthen their friends.

We can see this even in the text of this psalm. In verse 12, after announcing the flight of the Lord’s enemies, the psalmist observes, “The women at home divide the spoil”; and in verse 35, God is praised because “he gives power and strength to his people.” Thus the gifts Christ gives his people are precisely those gifts he has wrested from his enemies. The one who descended from heaven to the earth, Paul says, has now ascended back to heaven in victory, showering on his people the gifts he received.

And what were those gifts? Us. It’s one of the interesting things about Ephesians 4:11 that the focus isn’t on what we think of as “spiritual gifts” but on people who have been gifted to serve in particular ways. Christ came down to live among us, to die on the cross for our sins, to rise from the dead in victory over sin and death, and to ascend back to heaven in glory, where he now intercedes for us before the throne of grace; and in his victory he won us as the spoils, and from his place before the throne he now gives each of us as gifts to his people.

Paul specifically highlights those who have been given to the church in various leadership roles, but note the purpose he names for such people: “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” Too often, churches are defined by their pastors, denominations by their leaders, and both by their structures; but Paul says no, the purpose of those leaders (and thus, logically, those structures) is to serve the people of God, such that his saints—that’s you—are well-trained and -equipped to do the work of the ministry of the church.

Note the goal to which that’s aimed: “until all of us come to the unity”—that’s one: we’re supposed to be united; but on what terms?—“of the faith”—that’s two: “the faith” in Paul’s usage being of course faith in Jesus Christ and him alone, no exceptions, no additions, no alternatives, no fooling—“and of the knowledge of the Son of God”—that’s three: we are to be united in and by knowing Jesus Christ. The primary focus here isn’t on what we know about him, because one could know a great deal about Jesus and not know him at all; that’s part of the picture, but the focus is on the direct, personal, experiential knowledge of Jesus and his love which comes from being in close relationship with him.

That’s what the Holy Spirit is on about in our lives: telling us about Jesus, drawing us close to Jesus, helping us to know Jesus, and indeed God the Father also, in this real and personal way. The Spirit loves the Father and the Son and wants to talk about them, and so the more we’re filled with the Spirit, the better we will know them, the more we’ll love them, and the more we’ll want to talk about them, too.

Through this, we come “to maturity,” which is “the measure of the full stature of Christ.” It’s important to note that this is a collective statement, not merely that we become mature individuals—though that’s obviously part of the picture—but that collectively as the church, we become mature. Unity in Christ, after all, is an element of maturity in Christ. This is about how we live. All of Paul’s thought in this passage flows out of the clarion call with which he opens it: “I urge you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.” We were created in love by God the Father, and redeemed in love at a horrible cost by his only Son, and now we have been given in love the great gift of his Holy Spirit in our lives; that wasn’t just so we could keep toddling comfortably along like the rest of the world and then go to heaven when we die. God did all this for us to give us something far, far better—to give us the life of heaven, not just after we die, but now—and he wants us to experience the full goodness of his gift.

That’s part of why he calls us as a people and gives us the church, and gives us to the church. He lays out these commandments in verses 2-3, and then look at verse 7: to each one of us grace has been given—how? Enough grace to do this perfectly by ourselves? No; to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. And then he goes on to talk about the spiritual gifts. Jesus sent us his Spirit to empower us to be humble and gentle and patiently loving with one another, to seek the good of others ahead of our own and have a long fuse with the failures and sins of those around us—why? Because those are good virtues? Well, yes, but for a more specific reason as well: because those are the virtues that enable true unity and peace. And why is that important? Most basically, because we are all called by one God, we are one people serving one Lord, filled with one Spirit and given one common faith, and we ought to reflect the unity in love of the God whom we worship; but on a practical level, there is also this: we cannot live the life of Christ alone. God didn’t set it up that way.

Understand this, because this is important, and God did it deliberately: he took all the gifts and strengths that are necessary for us to grow to maturity in Christ, as individuals and as a people, and he mixed them up and gave some of them to each of us—and then he gave each of us as gifts, to the church and to each other. He designed us and prepared us to work together, to live together, to be fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each of us has strong areas that stick out, and weak areas where we have holes; I am strong where you are weak, and you are strong where I am weak, and we fit together such that our strong areas fill in the weak areas of others.

This is what it means when we say we believe in the church: not that we put our faith in the church—we put our faith in Jesus Christ—nor that we believe we are saved through the church—we are saved by Jesus Christ—but that we recognize that we are saved into the church, the one holy people God is creating for himself through the work of Jesus Christ, by the power of his Spirit. It means that we confess that we can’t live this life on our own, that we need each other, because God has designed and gifted us to need each other; it means that we understand that we are not for ourselves, but that we are gifted to serve others, to be God’s gifts to them, and that we need to accept them humbly as God’s gifts to us as well. Granted, some of those around us may not be the gifts we might have wanted God to give us, but even so, they are the gifts he knows we need.

Now, in the language of the Nicene Creed, when it affirms one church, it adds three adjectives, so let’s take a look at those for a minute; and let’s take them in reverse order. The creed affirms the one church as apostolic. There are those who take this as referring to a continuity of structure between the church now and the earliest church; this is of course the basis of the Roman claim for the authority of the popes. That’s false. What’s in view here is something much more fundamental: the true church is that which stands in continuity with the faith and teaching of the apostles, which we have revealed to us in the New Testament. We share their faith and understand ourselves as under the authority of that teaching, rather than feeling free to accept only what pleases us.

Also, the creed affirms the one church as small-c catholic: though the form and culture of the church changes through the ages, and there are differences about particular beliefs, we are not many churches, we are all one, because we all have the same Spirit and worship the same Lord. Any individual part of the church which claims the label “catholic” exclusively for itself makes a false and unjustifiable claim.

And finally, the one church is holy, not because we have reached moral perfection, but because the work of Christ in our lives has restored our relationship with God and set us apart as his people; he’s now about the process of changing us from the inside out so that our lives reflect what he has already done in our hearts. It’s rather like education—as one of Lois McMaster Bujold’s characters says, educated is what you’re supposed to be coming out, not going in. Holy is what we’ll be when God is done with us, not what we have to be to sign on.

The key in all this is that when Jesus sent us his Spirit, he didn’t do so just to bless us as individuals—he sent his Spirit to enable us to lead a different kind of life, so that each of us, in our own way and with our own gifts, might be a blessing to his people, his body, the church. He didn’t call us and fill us with his Spirit to live for ourselves; rather, he called us to live devoted lives—lives devoted to his service, to the service of the church, and to the service of all those in need—and he gave us his Spirit to empower us to do so. Thus, as we pray that the Spirit would shine the light of Jesus into all the world, we need to remember that part of the point is that his light shines into every part of our lives, as well, seeking out and burning away the darkness in us; we need to remember that looking at Jesus changes us, and the longer and more intently we look, the more we will change, because the ultimate goal is for us to look like him.

Meeting the challenge

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In our politically and culturally polarized society, those who care about issues—whether political or theological—tend to end up divided into parties, labeled accordingly, associated with the like-minded, and expected not to deviate. The assumptions of our “side” exist not to be challenged; the questions and challenges of the other “side” (or “sides”) exist to be defeated by whatever means necessary. This is unfortunate, because none of us is perfect; even if we do have the big things right (something which we can never simply assume), we’re bound to have lots of the details wrong, by virtue both of the fact that we still sin and of the fact that we’re limited in our understanding. To catch our errors, we do well to accept the help of those who are most motivated to point them out to us: namely, those people who think we’re wrong about everything.

In the current issue of Touchstone, Christopher Killheffer writes about this with respect to the Christian response to atheism. As he says, when Christians respond to atheists with hostility and the refusal to listen,

aside from what we’re losing in the public debate, we are also missing an opportunity to grow in our own faith, and perhaps even to have our faith purified. If we listen to atheist messages with curiosity rather than defensiveness, we will find that many of them are not simply poking us in the eye; their content is often interesting and may possibly even be useful in helping us better understand what we do and do not believe.

He illustrates his point well from C. S. Lewis and Benedict XVI, showing their willingness to listen seriously to the challenge of atheism, and thus to use it as an opportunity to sharpen and strengthen and purify their faith. As he says, we need that; and if we don’t let those who disagree with us ask us the hard questions, who will?

The countercultural Spirit

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Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.

—Romans 12:2a (The Message)

Whatever the culture is, if we’re following Christ, we’re going to be walking counter to it to some degree. That’s just how it is, because cultures are made up of people, and people are sinful, and thus every culture is sinful—even the best of them. Sometimes, if you’re in the right place at the right time, you can influence your culture and make that less so, as William Wilberforce and the rest of the Clapham Sect did; but no one has yet succeeded in turning even one earthly society into a miniature of the Kingdom of God, and no one will until Jesus comes again. Following Jesus is always going to put you at odds with the world in any number of ways, big and small.

As such, the depressing thing about so much of the church is that we’re so comfortable, and so predictable. We can always tell ourselves that we’re countercultural, that we’re standing up for truth, because we’re happy to stand up for the truths that matter to our particular in-group in the face of opposition from those whom we do not fear and whose good opinion we do not value; but that doesn’t answer the bill at all. Even the pagans do that. When it comes to making our own little corner of the world uncomfortable, to challenging the particular subculture (or subcultures) in which we move, we tend to be missing in action. Liberals do not question the validity of same-sex marriage, nor do conservatives try to move the American flag out of the sanctuary; it just isn’t done. Why, if you tried that, the next person mad at you might be somebody you actually care about—and while that might be just what that person needs, we don’t want to face it.

Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Are we that unpredictable, or that uncontrollable? Are we that independent of the conventional assumptions and conclusions of our culture, or our family, or our particular set of close friends? Not really, no; most of us tend to conform pretty closely to the expectations of those whose approval we desire most. That is not Christlike living, however moral we might be by our own preferred standards; that is no sign of the life of the Holy Spirit in us.

Rather, the Spirit of God is at work in the people of God to break that conformity, to renew and transform and grow us into people who can no longer be confined by it. Being a Christian, living out the life of Christ, is not a matter of simply following a bunch of “thou shalt”s and “thou shalt not”s, as if outward conformity to some particular standard was sufficient; but neither is it about some free-form idea of “love” and “grace” that makes concrete standards of behavior irrelevant. Rather, it’s about something far greater than either: it’s about learning to walk according to the Spirit, opening ourselves up to be changed by the Spirit, from the deepest wellsprings of our behavior on out, so that our lives will be set free from the world’s mold, to be conformed instead to the character and the holiness of God.

If we’re truly living Spirit-filled lives, we’re going to make people uncomfortable.  In particular, we’re going to tick off people who, if it were up to us, we would try very, very hard not to tick off. We’re going to be countercultural, not in some cheap fashion, but in a way that truly costs us; we’re going to be reminded that we worship a Lord who said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” We’re going to realize that Jesus could just as well have said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own teachers and colleagues and close friends and best allies, yes, and even the community whose approval he most desires, he cannot be my disciple.”

That’s because Jesus doesn’t call us and the Holy Spirit doesn’t empower us to be counter someone else’s culture, but to be countercultural in our own, in the one in which we live and work and play. God isn’t satisfied for us to tear down the idols we don’t worship, he wants us to reject the ones we do, and the ones we’re tempted to worship, the ones before which our theological and ideological soulmates bow. He raises up conservatives to be labeled unpatriotic, and liberals to be questioned as anti-gay, for being unwilling to let sacred cows lie. He calls us to ask the questions we least want asked, and to be willing to accept—and to give—the answers we don’t want to hear. He commands us to speak the truth, in love, yes, but so clearly and unflinchingly that we risk being rejected by our own people. After all, we’ve been given the Spirit of Christ, and isn’t that what Jesus did?

Your Attorney General at work (updated)

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I posted a comment on this on a friend’s Facebook page and thought I’d note this here as well. It is honestly bewildering to me the way the Left refuses to recognize that the anti-Western wing of Islam, particularly its jihadists, is adamantly opposed to all that liberals profess to believe and hold dear. I don’t want to jump to the negative conclusion and assume that they’re all either moral cowards or secretly enamored of Islam’s totalitarian impulses, so I keep looking for a more charitable interpretation . . . but so far, I have failed to find one.

Update: Jonathan Gurwitz of the San Antonio Express-News has an excellent column up about this, pointing out an important truth:

About the same time Holder was refusing to utter the threat that cannot be named in the Obama administration, security officials in Indonesia—the world’s largest Muslim nation and third-largest democracy—foiled a plot to assassinate the president and top officials, massacre foreigners in a Mumbai-style attack and create a state governed by Shariah, or Islamic law.

That last goal provides a clue as to who was behind this violent conspiracy, though Attorney General Holder may not be able to recognize it. But it is important to do so because in spite of 9-11, Times Square and every event in between, Americans are not the primary victims of Islamic extremism. Muslims are.

Over the past decade, radical Islamists have carried out successful terrorist attacks in Amman, Baghdad, Casablanca, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Riyadh and Sharm el-Sheikh, to name a few Muslim targets. Muslim civilians and leaders, such as Benazir Bhutto, are their principal casualties. In the countries and forbidden zones where they have been able to establish Shariah rule, Muslim women are treated like chattel, Muslim gays are summarily executed and Muslim girls are doomed to illiteracy and honor killings.

America may be radical Islam’s fount of all evil. But more often than not, citizens of Muslim nations are their first prey.

Holder and the president he serves do no favor to the overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims when they refuse to identify our common enemy. You can’t delegitimize what you won’t even acknowledge exists.

The idolatry of moralism

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Tyler Jones, a church planter with Acts 29 down in Raleigh, has an interesting post up today on the Resurgence website called “The Poison of Quaint Moralism”; it’s addressed to his Southern context but has validity far beyond it. He writes,

The South has been poisoned, and the poison is “quaint moralism.” This poison has systematically infected tens of millions in the South and we are now in the midst of a moralistic pandemic. . . . Our churches are full of good-looking, upright, moral people. The tragic irony is that our goodness is our poison. A great many Southerners claim Christianity as their religion, mimicking righteousness on the surface while their hearts remain unchanged by the gospel of Jesus. I understand the gravity of that statement and do not make it hastily. Here in the South, the gospel has either been ignored or foolishly assumed. We have satiated our desire for God through quaint morality, allowing people to ignore their need for Jesus.

There is a common and deadly misconception that the church is supposed to produce people who live “good Christian lives.” This misconception spreads easily because it bears a strong superficial resemblance to the fruit of true holiness; but it just isn’t so. After all, it’s perfectly possible for most of us to be nice, moral people—good enough on the outside to make most folks happy, at any rate—in our own strength; and in this country with its Christian heritage, the world is perfectly happy to let you live a nice, moral life, as long as you are properly “tolerant”—which is to say, that you don’t do anything that makes anybody else uncomfortable. It’s a way of living that makes it easy for us to look at ourselves and think we’re doing just fine, and not realize how much we need God—while on the inside, our hearts remain closed to him. As C. S. Lewis said,

We must not suppose that if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world.

Moralistic religion is bloodless and powerless; it can affect behavior, but cannot touch the roots of sin in the heart. It directs our attention to ourselves and our own efforts, and thus away from God; it turns us away from grace and toward legalism, and thus waters the seeds of self-righteousness, arrogance and spiritual pride in our souls. The Devil is perfectly happy to make us moral, if only we will be moral to please ourselves (or other people) rather than God; what else, after all, was Jesus’ complaint against the Pharisees? Thus Michael Horton opens his book Christless Christianity with this story:

What would things look like if Satan really took control of a city? Over a half century ago, Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse offered his own scenario in his weekly sermon that was also broadcast nationwide on CBS radio. Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia, all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say, “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.

If Christ is preached, everything else follows. If Christ is not preached, nothing else matters.

Watching the storm roll in

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There has been a lot written trying to project the outcome of this fall’s elections—a task which, as the inestimable Jay Cost has noted, is a lot harder than some people seem to think; but even Cost, who has said his answer to that is “I really don’t know,” opens his latest post by quoting Bob Dylan’s “Thunder on the Mountain.” Following a list of the troubles career politicians have been having this year, he writes,

This is the thunder on the mountain, the early warning that something bad is about to blow through the District of Columbia. I don’t think there’s anything anybody there can do about it. The people have a limited role in this government—but where the people do possess power, they are like a force of nature. They cannot be stopped.

His colleague at RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende, mapped out the November landscape as it looks from here and concluded,

I think those who suggest that the House is barely in play, or that we are a long way from a 1994-style scenario are missing the mark. A 1994-style scenario is probably the most likely outcome at this point. Moreover, it is well within the realm of possibility—not merely a far-fetched scenario—that Democratic losses could climb into the 80 or 90-seat range. The Democrats are sailing into a perfect storm of factors influencing a midterm election, and if the situation declines for them in the ensuing months, I wouldn’t be shocked to see Democratic losses eclipse 100 seats.

Though Cost is right about the difficulty of prediction in this environment, because we really don’t have anything like good comparables on which to base a meaningful prediction, Trende lays out a compelling argument for his position. Of particular interest is this, from the end of his piece:

The problem for the Democrats is that these voters are packed into a relatively few states and Congressional districts nationwide, diluting their vote share. This is why the median Congressional district is an R+2 district. Thus, the President could have a relatively healthy overall approval rating, but still be fairly unpopular in swing states and districts. The increased enthusiasm that Obama generated among minorities, the young and the liberal is useful, but only if it is realized in conjunction with Democratic approval in a few other categories.

President Obama’s policy choices to date are wreaking havoc on the brand that Democrats cultivated carefully over the past twenty years. Bill Clinton worked long and hard to make it so that voters could say “fiscal conservative” and “Democrat” in the same sentence, but voters are finding it difficult to say that again.

If brand damage is truly seeping over into Congressional races—and the polling suggests it is—then the Democrats are in very, very deep trouble this election. There is a very real risk that they could be left with nothing more than Obama’s base among young, liberal, and minority voters, which is packed into relatively few Congressional districts. It would be the Dukakis map transformed onto the Congressional level, minus the support in Appalachia. That would surely result in the Democratic caucus suffering huge losses, and in turn produce historic gains for the GOP this November.

Now, anyone who’s read much of anything I’ve written on politics has probably figured out that I’m a pretty conservative sort when it comes to politics; so you might think I’d be rubbing my hands with glee at this prospect. You’d be wrong. In fact, I have significant misgivings about it. To understand why, go back to Cost; after predicting a popular revolt at the voting booth this fall, he says,

That’s bad news for the establishment this year. They’re going to wake up on the morning of November 3rd and be reminded of who is actually in charge of this country.

Democrats will be hit much, much harder than Republicans. Even so, it would be a huge mistake to interpret the coming rebuke through a strictly ideological or partisan lens. Yet predictably, that’s what many will do. Republicans will see this as a historic rejection of Barack Obama’s liberalism, just as they saw the 1994 revolution as a censure of Bill Clinton, and just as Democrats saw 2006 and 2008 as admonishments of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. These interpretations are only half right. When the people are angry at the way the government is being managed, and they are casting about for change, their only option is the minority party. The partisans of the minority are quick to interpret this as their holy invitation to the promised land, but that’s not what it really is about. They were only given the promotion because the people had no other choice.

The entire political class needs to understand that the coming events transcend ideology and partisanship. The electoral wave of 2010 will have been preceded by the waves of 2006 and 2008. That will make three electoral waves in a row, affecting both parties and conservative and liberal politicians alike. The American people are sending the establishment a message: we’re angry at the way you are running our government; fix it or you’ll be next to go.

That’s right on, and I don’t think the GOP establishment (or at least most of them) get this. I don’t think they get it because I don’t think they want to. Let’s be blunt here: the Republican Party absolutely deserved the electoral repudiation it got in 2006 and 2008, and maybe even worse than it got. It deserved it because it had abandoned its principles, its philosophy, its ethics, and its commitments, in favor of enjoying power and the fruits that attend thereunto; the hard slap in the face from the voters was well-earned, and should have come as a real wakeup call. I’m not at all convinced it has. As I wrote a few months ago,

I had hoped that the GOP would really internalize the lessons of its defeats in 2006 and 2008, enough to be humbled and chastened, before regaining power, and I really don’t see that as having happened; rather, the misplays, miscues, and mismanagement by the White House that prompted Mortimer Zuckerman to declare that the President “has done everything wrong” have handed them a shot at a political recovery that they have by no means earned. This is very worrisome to me. . . . If they do wind up back in the majority, they’re likely to wind up right back to the behaviors that got them wiped out in the first place. I believe, to be blunt, that that’s exactly what the Beltway GOP is hoping for.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anything to change my mind on that. If 2010 does turn out to be another “wave” election, it will sweep back into (some) power a GOP establishment that’s likely to go right back to carrying on the way they were doing before the voters turned them out. What we need here is not change between the parties, but change within the parties; we’ll likely continue to see power bouncing back and forth between them until we get that, or until something else happens and the current system breaks down.

This in a nutshell is the biggest single reason I support Gov. Palin: she isn’t a part of the machine, and she has a solid history of opposing business as usual in our political system, in her own party no less than in the other one. I applaud her for working to build up and support candidates who similarly are not creatures of or beholden to the political machine, and I devoutly hope she’s correctly picking people who have the character, gumption and understanding to continue to stand against that machine and against business as usual. We need her; we need more people like her in politics—on the liberal side of the aisle no less than on the conservative. Indeed, it may well be that there is no greater need in American politics right now than a Democratic Party equivalent to Sarah Palin. Without more folks like that, the storm that’s coming may ultimately sweep away more than just several dozen political careers that will never be missed.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)