America, the Godless . . .

***  UPDATE  ***

Marc Bennetts from the Washington Times contacted me to verify the quotes in his article.

He provided the source quotes for his article so it confirms that Putin does believe America is Godless.

See his full email at the end of this article.

*** UPDATE ***

 

 

 

Thus is the declaration of an article written by Marc Bennetts published by the Washington Times, January 28, 2014. Well, this sentiment is ostensibly attributed to the Russian President Vladimir Putin. After a brief preamble, the article says this:

“Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a recent keynote speech. “Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.

In his state of the nation address in mid-December, Mr. Putin also portrayed Russia as a staunch defender of “traditional values” against what he depicted as the morally bankrupt West. Social and religious conservatism, the former KGB officer insisted, is the only way to prevent the world from slipping into “chaotic darkness.”

As part of this defense of “Christian values,” Russia has adopted a law banning “homosexual propaganda” and another that makes it a criminal offense to “insult” the religious sensibilities of believers.

I will stop here since these paragraphs contain the essence of the article’s point: Russian leaders are condemning America’s slide into moral decadence.

So here is the drama behind this article. It has gone far and wide throughout the blogosphere being picked up by notable outlets like Brightbart.com, the American Thinker, and other conservative and Christian blogs that pay attention to current events. Nothing gets American Christians hot in the shorts like a good dose of moral condemnation against homosexuals and by extension, the evil, decadent America that lets homosexuals be seen in public. And like John Hagee sweating and frothing from the pulpit, the blogosphere comments poured forth hearty amens, declaring that America was Babylon ripe for God’s judgment. Surely Vladimir Putin is right. America is going to hell in a rainbow-colored Versace.

Faaabulous! (Jazz hands)

Ehem . . .

We will get back to this.

You will notice that I said that the sentiment is ostensibly attributed to President Putin. Here is the problem I have. I wanted to see the broader context for Putin’s comments, so I went looking for the “recent keynote” speech referenced in the article, and guess what?

I couldn’t find it.

I went to the official site of the President of Russia and read through the transcripts for the last two months thinking that qualified as “recent.” I searched the web. I had my assistant duplicate the search. I called the Washington Times to continue my fact-checking. My first call was to David Sands. He turned out to be the wrong desk, but he did tell me that Marc Bennetts, the writer, is stationed in Moscow. He transferred me to Matt Cella; I left a message. When he didn’t return my call and since I didn’t have his number, I called the foreign editor, Carleton Bryant, twice and left a voice mail. At the time of publishing this article, neither man has returned my call. In all fairness, I suspect that this has less to do with the article and more to do with the fact that I’m nobody. Right?

The lack of sourcing gave me pause about using the Washington Times article as a foundation, but my fact-checking led me to find the State of the Nation Address on December 12, 2013 where Putin “portrayed Russia as a defender of traditional values.” The Kremlin put out an English transcript that isn’t quite the same as the YouTube video, but it is close enough to confirm Putin’s appeal to defending “traditional values.” (Roughly minute 54) Also, it is a well-documented fact that Russia has passed a law against homosexual propaganda and pedophilia, a law that Putin endorses with wholehearted affirmation but holds out the caveat that there still remains no criminal penalty for homosexual action within Russia. Additionally, Putin’s commitment to the Russian Orthodox Church is, while politically understated, a well-known fact.

There are two other men of note quoted in the article—Patriarch Kirill and Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin. And much like Putin, their quotes are not sourced. I wasn’t able to track down the specific comments, but I did however find enough subsequent information to confirm that Kirill and Chaplin have expressed ideas similar to those stated in the Washington Times article.

So what does all this say for the credibility of the Washington Times article? That is good question, a question that is going to have to remain beyond the scope of this essay. But I wanted my readers to know I couldn’t verify the article’s specific content, but I think there is enough evidence to support that Putin, Kirill, and Chaplin hold the position that America is Godless. (Particularly that nut Vsevolod Chaplin.)

Ehem . . .

We’ll get back to him in a minute.

Most American Christians are fuzzy about the history of their local church. I’d bet a quarter that most people don’t know the details of the doctrinal fights and splits that created their current church. (And don’t pretend for a minute that your church wasn’t created from a split. It was.) American Christians are vaguely aware of some “Protestant” church history because the Puritans are everyone’s favorite Thanksgiving heroes. But that is about as far back as their church history goes because no one behind the American Plexiglas podium actually teaches church history, or more importantly, the doctrinal evolutions that have shaped church history. As far as they are concerned, church history started the day they walked into church, and two millennia of Western history that came before . . . piffle. Who cares?

Of course this lack of due diligence has profound consequences. If nothing else, the failure to grasp the big picture of church history is what leads American Christians to get hot pants over Vladimir Putin’s—alleged—comments. They do not understand the real roots of the religio-political landscape, nor the significance of America in world history.

So let’s do some remedial work so we can understand what is being said.

Constantine capitalized on a Christian trend toward political power that started around 150 AD. So by the time Constantine presided over the Council of Nicaea in 325, the church was already full of political intrigue and statist ambitions. Constantine used those ambitions to galvanize ecumenical support to strengthen his power within the failing Roman Empire. He used his civil authority to condemn the opponents to what we now call the Doctrine of the Trinity. In trade, the “winning” bishops pledged their allegiance to Constantine. Constantine died in 337, but the council at Nicaea lasted for almost twenty-five years, and as each year passed, the Church became increasingly more embroiled in civil governance.

Fast forward through many civil wars and political machinations, wars with the Persians and endless skirmishes with the Goths, the death of Valentinian, and then the death of his brother Valens at the Battle of Adrianople to the appointment of Flavius Theodosius to Emperor in 379. Theodosius’ role in history, and more importantly church history has been, as Charles Freeman notes in his book A.D. 381, airbrushed out of existence. This is a profound failing because in 381, Theodosius, Emperor of the Eastern Roman empire, decreed that all of his subjects were to pledge commitment to the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as coequal—on pain of death. For the first time in Greco-Roman history, religious orthodoxy became synonymous with political power.

In 381 AD, the power of the state was galvanized into Christianity, forever changing the face of the world. From this point forward, the leading Christian theological concern was who had the authority (force) to compel doctrinal outcomes. No matter the specific theological hair being split, the underlying fight was who held the force to suppress the dissenting opinions.

The Eastern and Western Empire had been administratively divided in the late third century, which meant that they were practically divided along linguistic and ethnic lines: the Greek-speaking East versus the Latin-speaking West. This administrative division was eventually to become a theological divide. From roughly 400 AD to 1000 AD, the Greek East dominated the doctrinal and political landscape. From Constantinople, the Greek Church presided over pretty much the whole of the prosperous and urban eastern world (from the boot heel of modern day Italy to the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea). The Christians in the Latin West were considered the country bumpkins in the wilds of Europe (modern day Spain, France, Germany, Britain, and Ireland). The West was seen as the ignorant stepchildren to the Holy Roman Empire who spoke a funny, ridged language called Latin and couldn’t follow the sophisticated Greek arguments.

Beyond the endless string of councils and synods from 325 on, the two sides of the universal church did not mix. For the most part, the Western Church was left to play with the barbarian hordes, evangelize the pagans by cutting off their heads, and engage in the political machinations of their choosing. But eventually, the Latin West decided that they wanted to wear the big boy pants. The Papacy in Rome (Leo IX) insisted that he (the Papacy) held universal jurisdiction over the eastern patriarchs via apostolic succession from Peter. The Patriarch Michael Cerularius said the Papacy (Leo IX) had lost his mind. And then began a storm of excommunications, claims of heresy, demonic possessions, and all the standard Christian denunciations.

As an aside, I have it on good authority that Patriarch Michael Cerularius was the one who told CJ Mahaney how to hold on to power when some snot-nosed kid decides he wants your spot. He was the one who gave CJ the line “I’ve not been given the grace to perceive my great sinfulness.” And it was Leo IX that told Joshua Harris how to take over the Holy See.

Ehem . . .

Anyway, of course church leaders can’t waste a good church split and Church history would not be complete without at least one war over doctrine. The Greek East struck first in the Massacre of the Latins and the West retaliated with the Sack of Thessalonica. Nothing finalizes a schism like bloodshed. So by 1200 AD, the split between East and West was permanent.

For those of you paying attention, I expect that you saw Michael Cerularius’ title—Patriarch. And you also saw that the name Patriarch Kirill in the article. So now you have some insights to the roots of the Russian Orthodox Church. The title Patriarch is similar (sort of) to the title Pope. It is too tedious to trace the Eastern Orthodox path from Constantinople to Moscow. But Patriarch Kirill is so named in deference to the ancient title bestowed on the leaders that presided over Christendom’s beginnings. And it is that same Eastern Orthodox Church that held Russian state support from the earliest tsar right up to the Bolshevik Revolution. The Russian Orthodox Church, exactly like its Greek forbearers, was fully merged with a functioning auxiliary to the power of the tsarist state.

For the whole of its history, the only separation between church and state in Russia came from Lenin. He separated them . . . with a gun.

Lenin’s motivation to separate these historic, despotic bedfellows was simple. He accepted the Marxist axiom that religion was the opiate of the masses which prevented the Russian serfs from seeing what James Madison observed.

“What influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the Civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny: in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries.”

Lenin didn’t say it as well as Madison, but he didn’t have to. Everyone knew that the Russian Orthodox Church was in bed with the monarchy and using government force to feed at the public trough at the expense of the Russian serfs. This was a Marxist wet dream that proved the point: the bourgeoisie gets rich at the expense of the proletariat. To create the Workers’ Paradise, all the people had to do was throw off the economic oppressor and his mystic henchmen. Alakazam! Poof! The bloodbath of the Soviet Union was born.

And now, dear reader, you can see John Calvin’s Geneva church in the 16^th century didn’t invent tyranny. The Church has been fused with state power since 381, and tyranny has been its legacy ever since.

So this begs the question, why would modern day Russia return to a relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church?

As always, the answer to this question resides firmly in how men integrate their fundamental life premises. I’m no master of geopolitics and my Russian is nonexistent, but I read enough about Vladimir Putin and the current state of Russia to know they are going through some interior turmoil.

In Putin’s State of the Nation speech, he spoke candidly of the political corruption and the ethnic unrest that plague Russia. He spoke about the need to protect entrepreneurs while listing government program after government program, regulation after regulation. He affirmed the need for defending freedom and democracy while insisting that the youth of Russia should be required to attend state schools that teach them unique “Russian traditions.”

Whether Putin knows it or not, he is advocating mutually exclusive ideas. Notice that entrepreneurship is the consequence of capitalism. The essence of capitalism is the separation of the state and money. Government regulation is the antithesis of capitalism and therefor the death of entrepreneurship. Also notice that a corollary of liberty is rational independence. Compulsory education is the antithesis of rational independence. When the state is in charge of education, the state is really in charge of man’s mind. A mind compelled to absorb what the state prescribes on threat of penalty is not free. The independent mind functions without regard to “national traditions” because traditions are irrelevant to rational judgment and the tools of logic. A tradition is merely a longstanding cultural convention, but it holds no authority merely because it is a convention. The rational mind does not bow to authority, so the rational man does not defer his individuality to collective identity. To conform to the collective is by definition an abandonment of rationality, which is really the abandonment of individual liberty.

So when Putin speaks of freedom and democracy in one sentence and then prescribes compulsory education in “Russian traditions,” he is illustrating a fundamental ideological conflict. As a president elected by popular vote, Vladimir Putin is anecdotal for the conflict indigenous to Russian culture. These mutually exclusive ideas give away the roots of Russian struggles.

Putin is a collectivist. His political ideal is statism. (And by extension the Russian people—at least the current ruling class—are also collectivists/statists.) This means they believe that the individual is property of the state, and it is the individual’s duty to foster the wellbeing of the state or society, or the community, or the tribe, or the common good. In all its varied forms, statism holds the same government premise: man is owned by the collective.

With this in mind, it is no secret why Russia is having “ethnic struggles.” Ethnic struggles are really conflicts between genetically dissimilar groups. When people organize their government along genetic lines, they are merely forming tribes. All tribal governments are driven by the quest for power to promote genetic superiority. A government who uses its power to advantage an ethnic group is really little more than a gang. The only way for other “ethnic” groups to compete is to secure their own force so they can fight back. And so goes the endless tides of tribal power and conquest.

The root of Russia’s problems is the same as any nation trying to live by irreconcilable ideas. Collectivism is not compatible with individualism. No house divided against itself can stand. Or said another way, Russia is trying to put the new wine of enlightenment liberty into the age-old statist wineskin. They are a nation without philosophical consistency. Social chaos and ethnic unrest is an inevitable consequence. (America, take note.)

And now we can begin to understand why Russia would be moving toward readopting the Russian Orthodox Church as its ideological partner. I suspect they understand–at least on some level—that they are in ideological drift. Twenty years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed and with it went the philosophical base (because reality illustrated for the billionth time that it doesn’t work). Marx provided the advocates of communism a turnkey philosophical solution. meaning he provided a comprehensive worldview: from the metaphysical (Dialectic Materialism) to a blueprint for central planning. But the communist collapse also meant a philosophical collapse. And now they are looking for a way to reintegrate their world.

As long time readers of my work, you dear readers, already know that man cannot live without integrating his ideas, and neither can a culture. There is no such thing as a little bit of freedom mixed with a little bit of despotism. That is like mixing a little bit of food with a little bit of lead. In the end, the lead wins. This is why countries fail when they try to mix a little bit of liberty with a little bit of statism. Eventually, the state wins because the state is the one with more bullets.

So where do former communists go to find a comprehensive statist philosophical worldview?

Well, this isn’t rocket science. Since Augustine fully integrated Plato’s Republic into Christianity and then Christianity was galvanized to the state under Theodosius, Christian doctrine has been the world’s second leading statist philosophy. And the Eastern Orthodox Church has never abandoned its theocratic aspirations. Alakazam! Poof! Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church are a match made in statist heaven.

This is of course why Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin (quoted in the Washington Times article) is a central player in Russian Politics. Read for yourself what he has to say:

“It’s no coincidence that many today see Russia as a defender of Christian ideals and traditional morality, as a place that can offer a real alternative to the world’s golden calf and its destructive concepts of freedom. To begin with, Russia should act as though it were the centre of the Christian world. That’s the only way it can work. Anything else, firstly, is petty, and, secondly, self-destructive”. (web source)

*   *   *

“Today, despite the West’s objections and reproaches, we mean it when we say, ‘We insist that we must protect our children from premature sexual awareness, and even more so, from the promotion of homosexuality. We hold that the adoption of Russian children by foreign families in a time of demographic crisis is a highly irrational move. We don’t want perverts to adopt these children, so that they’d lose the faith into which they were baptised, to lose the hope of a normal life’”. (web source)

*   *   *

“I am convinced that we should have tough policies for destructive or pseudo-religious things, without looking back at our eternal teaches in some Western and eastern countries,”

“We need to bear in mind that the state and society has a right to react to the risks of the appearance of such structures and communities, protecting ourselves from deceit, aggression, and the propaganda of radical doctrines, which, as contemporary history shows, always lead to bloodshed and violence.”  (web source)

*   *   *

“If she wears a mini-skirt she can provoke not only a man from the Caucasus, but a Russian man as well. If she is drunk, it is even more likely that she will provoke men. If she actively contacts people and then wonders that this contact ends in rape, she is not right at all.”  (web source)

*   *   *

“The western democracy model is now used by a minority of the population of our planet, and it should eventually be realized as an indication that this model is not the only model and that insisting on its universality, especially that all peoples and all legal and political systems should adjust to it is, to put it mildly, unfair and unjust.” (web source)

*   *   *

“The separation of the secular and the religious is a fatal mistake by the West. It is a monstrous phenomenon that has occurred only in Western civilization and will kill the West, both politically and morally.” (web source)

No man in his position can be this wrong about Western culture by accident. Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin is scary.

First, the integration of the secular and the religious is called theocracy. As long as the religious has hold of civil power, there is no such thing as secular. Second, if history shows us anything, theocracy was the original monstrous phenomenon. To be sure, current events continue to illustrate that theocracy is a monstrosity. The Islamic Middle East, in its ever present goal of creating a caliphate, plasters the news footage with example after example of theocracy’s sociopolitical disaster. Third, to be clear, Western civilization is only possible because of a separation between the secular and the religious.

Now pause for a moment and re-read Vsevolod’s last comment. I want you to notice the implicit presumption. Do you see it? Because the West has removed religion from its secular existence, it has destroyed its moral base. Or said another way, Vsevolod presumes that religion is the source of morality.

Religion as the source of morality . . . here is where all points of the current discussion converge: President Putin’s newfound commitment to Russian Orthodoxy, Archpriest Vsevolod, the American conservative blogosphere’s hot pants over the Washington Times article, and Christians thumping their Bibles over the great American moral decline. They all assume the same thing: religion is the source of morality.

“But, John, of course religion is the source of morality. Without God, man could do whatever he wanted.”

Yes, I expect that is what most people believe. From the time people are old enough to absorb guilt, Christian parents use God’s displeasure as the motivator for right action. Certainly almost everyone in the Western world has heard of the Ten Commandments. Break God’s commands and he will send you to hell. Catch an episode of John Hagee and you will see him work into a lather thundering away about God’s wrath against sinners. If only people would believe in God, if only people would fear God, then everyone would act right, so goes the lament. Religion as the source of morality is so endemic to the American (maybe the world’s) psyche that I dare say no one ever challenges the presumption.

But failing to challenge this presumption is why Christians are so often sucked into supporting despotism.

Let’s dig a little deeper into religion as the source of morality. The moral calculus goes like this: do what “god” says, or “god” will do harm. This presumes that man, left to his own devices, is immoral. Therefore, man must be compelled to moral action. But notice that this means morality is merely extortion. The standard of human action is secondary to the harm visited after moral failure.

Do you not see the inherent disaster within this perspective? Do you see how far this separates man from moral action?

And it only gets worse as the layers of Christian doctrine get added to the mix.

Let’s watch what happens when the doctrine of Original Sin and Predestination are attached to the moral equation. Original sin says that man is guilty of moral failing merely because he is alive. By definition, there is no right action man can take because he inherited a corrupt nature from Adam. Man enters the world condemned to eternal punishment, condemned of a crime that he never had the ability to avoid. There is no causal relationship between action and condemnation because man is predetermined to his lot in life. Whether it be Augustine’s soft determinism (man has some choice) or Calvin’s hard determinism (man has NO choice), the outcome is the same. Man’s existence is metaphysically corrupt, and his actions are existentially predetermined. God’s wrath is . . . . well, it just is. Why God chooses to wreck one man’s existence and spare another is totally unintelligible, totally undefinable.

Anyone who takes this position seriously soon arrives at the only available conclusion. There is no such thing as morality. Man can’t take moral action because all action is determined, and his “inclination toward sin” is absolute.

Of course when the moral calculus is written out directly, people start replacing the doctrinal variables so they can find a different sum, as if the solution to the conundrum is to redefine God’s identity. God really isn’t X. He is really X – Y. Oh, wait. Maybe God isn’t X at all, but rather A + B. But in this instance, swapping variables is the same thing as swapping the definition of God. Or said another way, man has to find a different God to make the moral calculus add up to human moral culpability.

And this is when man walks up to the edge of the moral abyss.

Religion as the source of morality really means that the source of morality is mystical, which is to say that morality is the product of a revelation from another worldly realm.

So which “revelation” from which “god” is the right one?

Christians like to pretend that the Christian God stands in a vacuum, that he exists and other gods are irrelevant. Okay, fine. But other religions say the exact same thing about their god. Remember we are talking about religion as the source of morality, which is the same thing as saying that mysticism is the source of morality. As long as morality is the product of a mystical realm, the Pandora’s box of mysticism is thrown open wide. Christians say Jesus is the foundation of morality. Islam says it is Allah. For an age, people said it was Osiris, in another age it was Enkidu, and in yet another it was Zeus or Apollo or Dionysus. The persecutions in the first and second century were driven by the premise that Christian refusal to offer sacrifice to the Greek gods was a moral affront to the gods. The Greeks said that the Christian apostasy was the source of plagues and wars and disasters.

Maybe they were right.

Who is to say?

No, really. Who is to say? By the Grecian mystical standard, Christians were immoral. By Christian mystical standard, the refusal to offer sacrifice to other gods was virtue.

How can man solve this problem?

He can’t, which is why throughout history man has plunged into this moral abyss over and over and over. Since there is no rational means to identify which God has the right moral standard, the first fight man must have is which “god” supplies the mystical plumb line. This is the source of all religious wars. This is the source of Islam’s war of domination since its inception in AD 630. This is the source of the East-West schism. This is the foundation of the Catholic-Protestant split.

And dear God, how the blood has flowed . . .

It was in the face of this specific fight that Western culture was born. Contrary to Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin’s assertion, it was “religion as the source of morality” that gave rise to separating the church from the state. Or maybe I should say it was the first time since the Greek Republic that the secular could exist. By separating the political from the doctrinal (force from Orthodoxy), man was free to peruse his conscience. In Western culture man is free to live in harmony with his own conscience. He has no legal obligation to defer or adopt anyone’s religious convictions. In other words, mysticism does not rule social interaction. The result was the longest standing periods of global peace the world had ever seen . . . a peace that has only been shattered by militant collectivist theocratic ideologies. I guess if you consider peace monstrous, then Western culture is guilty as charged.

So what then of the charge that America is godless?

I say that you should thank God that it is. Or maybe better said, you should thank God that America is an agnostic state, meaning the state has zero interest in theological orthodoxy. Unfortunately, far too many people misunderstand the function of American Government. Its sole and delimited purpose is to defend the INDIVIDUAL in the pursuit of his life, his liberty, and his happiness. The function of American Government is NOT to define, enforce, or protect mystical moral standards, which means it must not protect religion . . . any religion. But the flip side of this coin is that the American Government must not be used as a tool against domestic religious doctrines (that pose no conflict with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights).

Unfortunately in America, the separation between church and state has evolved to mean that Christians may not voice their opinions in public, and the government is used as a tool of suppression in the name of “civil liberties.” In a twist of madness, the American people have bought in to the lie that private citizens violate civil liberties, and the government is charged with regulating private behavior. This is a first class fraud. Civil liberties are in fact the delimited “liberties” of government, meaning the government is constrained at all points unless given the specific liberty to take action. It is NOT a violation of civil liberties for an employer to deny a job to a homosexual man because he is a homosexual. The employer is a private citizen whose convictions and property are NONE of the government’s business. He is the sole owner of the job. It is his property to dispose of as he sees fit. It IS a violation of civil liberties for the government to compel an employer to give a job to ANYONE. It is the height of tyranny for the U.S. Government to demand that a private individual engage in actions that violate his convictions. In the American form of government the individual is sovereign, and the state is given delimited “liberties.”

But before you Christians applaud too loudly, you must understand that equal protection under the law means that no advantage can be gained by the law. So take a hard look at your income taxes and notice the marriage deduction. Take a hard look at government regulation that compels insurance companies to reject same-sex households. These are only two examples of the advantage gained under the law for those who are “married.” Under the American form of government, this is error.

Beyond the quest for cultural legitimacy, the current homosexual lobby is seeking to redress a justifiable grievance. Under current law, they are unjustly penalized. And in typical shortsightedness, the Christian world wants to fuss over the morality of homosexual action and pass laws to define “marriage.” There is nothing like straining at gnats while swallowing philosophical camels. The government has no business defining people’s private affairs. If there is no demonstrable harm done to consenting parties and no force used, the government has nothing to do with private action. And the definition of marriage is irrelevant the moment government is out of the money business. The real problem with the marriage tax break is TAXES. The federal government should not be in the business of seizing private property, let alone creating fraudulent reasons to dole it back out as if it is doing people a favor. And the root problem with insurance coverage is government regulation. The solution to our current problems is to separate the government from money, and someone, somewhere will provide a desired service to a profitable demographic.

But instead of understanding the principles of America’s representative republic, Christians default to their collectivist/statist roots and look for a sympathetic government to defend, advocate, and enforce “moral” standard. This is the same thing as saying they look for a government to enforce their religion. They don’t believe they can win the public mind in an open discussion of values by offering a better argument in the public square. They look for a government host to carry their social ambitions by force. Any government unwilling to do their dirty work is condemned as an “immoral” state, and surely God (turn up the reverb) will punish the godless.

This is why Vladimir Putin sounds like an oracle of God. He is denouncing homosexuality in the name of Christian values. Christians mistake political orthodoxy for divine affirmation, and this mistake only ends in disaster. This is why Christians get sucked into supporting dictators. They hear a tyrant advocating “moral action” and applaud the theory and thereby applaud the public policy carried out in behalf of the theory. They catastrophically fail to grasp that it wasn’t “moral action” the tyrant was advocating. He was justifying FORCE against what he considered immoral.

American Christians . . . hear me!

Be very, very leery of a man preaching a return to “morality” as a platform for government action. Make no mistake, that man is coming. He will sound like an oracle of God. He will be heralded as a strong leader. He will affirm your convictions and play on your fears and speak sweet nothings in your ears. And when he finally arrives on the political scene, make every effort to get the reins of government out of that man’s hands.

And until that day comes, thank God every day that America is godless.

 

 

*    *    *

Marc Bennitts email.