Is Violence and Murder "Progress"?

Here is another way in which the modern progressive left is self-contradictory and uses the language of "progress" to describe a regressive decline in culture and morals.

On the one hand it despises empire and attacks the West for its colonialism and imperialism. It sees the United States of America as a new Roman Empire and condemns it for being violent and oppressive to the poor of the earth.

On the other hand it interprets as "progressive" all moves to more and more killing of unborn children and infants and the hard core of the left supports Dutch-style indiscriminate killing by doctors.

But to see the abolition of abortion laws as "progress" is not progress at all; it is reversion to the worst paganism of the pre-Christian West. The following story from the BBC about a Roman era villa, which was likely a brothel where babies were systematically murdered, demonstrates this fact.

Tests on the site at Hambleden in Buckinghamshire suggest all died at 40 weeks gestation, very soon after birth.

Archaeologists suspect local inhabitants may have been systematically killing unwanted babies.

Archaeologist Dr Jill Eyers said: "The only explanation you keep coming back to is that it's got to be a brothel."

With little or no effective contraception, unwanted pregnancies could have been common at Roman brothels, explained Dr Eyers, who works for Chiltern Archaeology.

And infanticide may not have been as shocking in Roman times as it is today.

Archaeological records suggest infants were not considered to be "full" human beings until about the age of two, said Dr Eyers.

The "progress" that "progressives" want is really to regress to the violent, selfish, immoral, and evil past that Christianity has allowed to West to progress beyond. While condemning Christian and Western violence the direction in which the left is leading us is toward more violence and immorality.

One can only wonder what future cultures will think when they dig up our culture . . .

We Can Turn Back the Clock: It is Called Repentance and It is Part of the Good News

I have compared our contemporary culture to Western culture at previous points in the past on this blog at various times and have often received the answer/objection that I am indulging in "nostalgia" and told that "you can't turn the clock back."

For example, if you make the perfectly reasonable point that families were stronger in the late 40s and early 50s than they are today, after the sexual revolution, the chorus comes back: "You can't turn back the clock. That is just nostalgia."

Peter Kreeft, in C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium says on p. 76 that:

"According to the Bible, to be saved you must first repent. This is the one thing a historicist progressivist assures us we cannot do: turn back, turn back the clock."

To me, this point alone demonstrates the incompatibility of Progressivism with Biblical Christianity. What Christ commands us to do, Progressivism claims we cannot do. So it comes down to who you are going to believe? Jesus Christ or Hillary Clinton?

Kreeft quotes Aragorn in his meeting with Eomer on the plains of Rohan as Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli pursue the Orcs who have captured Merry and Pippin. Eomer says:

It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange. Elf and Dwarf in company walk in our daily fields; and fold speak with the Lady of the Wood and yet live; and the Sword comes back to war that was broken . . . How shall a man judge what to do in such times?

"As he has ever judged," said Aragorn. "Good and evil have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house."

Aragorn, obviously, has never been infected by cultural relativism; nor has he had the opportunity to set at the feet of Progressivist philosophers like John Dewey. He is not an historicist. Neither is Tolkien, nor is Lewis.

And this is the point: if historicism is true, repentance is impossible and good and evil change with the times. On the other hand, if historicism is a lie then good and evil do not change and the only thing that matters is bringing our lives into alignment with the Good.

The Sex Vote

Rod Dreher has an excellent post at The Crunchy Con discussing "God, the Sex Vote and Human Dignity." He mentions a post by James Paulos, who mentions "the Sex Vote." Here is Dreher:

He defines "Sex Vote" as a "snappy term for people who are generally willing or even eager to trade away political and economic freedoms for broad (in terms of scope, variety, protection and enforcement) social and cultural freedom." I'd love to read more of his thoughts on this provocative concept, but if I take his meaning, he's arguing that there's really nothing that the Sex Vote crowd won't accept as long as its sexual freedom is protected. I have believed for some time now that for liberal elites (by which I mean academics, journalists, political activists, politicians and the left-wing donor class), the one hill they'll die defending is the Sexual Revolution. And that's true to some degree for us religious conservatives, because sex and culture is not just about canoodling, but has everything to do about the kind of cultural order we'll live in, and even what it means to be human.

Read it all at: http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/02/god-the-sex-vote-and-human-dig.html

The significance of Obama's election is that he won with the sex vote and he knows it. I've said before and I still say that we can expect centrist economic policies from Obama but a strong committment to leftist stances on social issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and euthanasia.

We need to think of the sex vote in terms of Nietzsche's "Last Men" and Huxley's Brave New World, which depicts a perfectly Nietzschean world - one that is becoming more and more real every day in the West. With the UK on its knees, only the much-despised and hated social conservatives in the US stand between us and the realization of the Nietzschean vision. Something to think about the next time you read a media slur on social conservativism and Christianity as obstacles to "progress."

The Augustinian Turn: Will Evangelicals Make It?

Caleb Stegall has a brief, but highly fascinating article in Touchstone on Evangelicals.
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=21-07-013-v

He says that 2008 may be remembered as the year that "the Evangelical political consensus - which had cohered so strongly around family values, industrial capitalism, and American exceptionalism - fell apart." He goes on to describe Evangelicals as believers in what Herbert Butterfield famously called "the Whig view of history" in which there is a progressive march through time to a glorious future.

This Whig interpretation of history can be seen in both left wing and right wing Protestantism: in George Bush just as much as in the Clintons and in Mike Huckabee as much as in Barack Obama. Jim Wallis is convinced that utopia is possible through the welfare state and for Michael Novak it can only come through capitalism.

Both liberalism and its daughter, neo-conservatism, are products of modernity. They both owe much to assumptions that lie at the roots of the two great Enlightenment secular religions: socialism and capitalism. And both are deferential to the great invention of the early modern period: the modern State. Neither the left or right have a specifically Christian political philosophy: they both function with a lame version of "What would Jesus do?" thinking.

Stegall notes, however, that an older (pre-modern) Christian tradition founded by St. Augustine is an alternative to what he calls the "restless Evangelicals." They are restless because they are sick of the corruption in the Republican Party, the failure of the leadership to appreciate them and the failure to derail homosexual "marriage" and abortion. Is there something more? Stegall recommends Augustinianism.

I believe that Stegall is right to say that Evangelicals are restless and he is right to commend Augustinianism. But I see the stakes as higher and the situation as more urgent than he does. If Evangelicalism does not make its way home to a more catholic faith it is doomed to go the way of Protestant liberalism. Already, we see Wallis and co. leading Evangelicals into moral compormise as they exchange a capitalist mess of potage for a socialist one.

And as Carl Bratten points out in an article entitled "The Gospel for a Neopagan Culture" the gnostic spirituality of late modern North America finds fertile soil in the pietist tradition. He writes:

"Evangelical pietism that has lost the catholic elements of the great tradition provides a fertile soil for such ahistorical spiritual religion. There are signs that American evangelicalism with its pietist background is breaking up under the impact of the "culture wars,' with one wing seeking to reattach itself to catholic and orthodox traditions, which we welcome, and the other wing allying itself opportunistically with the culture-conforming progressives in American religion." (Either/Or: The Gospel or Neopaganism, ed. C. Bratten and R. Jenson, Eerdmans, 1995, p. 20)

The political problem identified by Stegall is intimately related to the spiritual problem identified by Bratten. Gnosticism and liberalism go hand in hand and both are inimical to catholic orthodoxy.

Stegall describes Augustinian political thought as being built on the idea that what a man (or community) loves is determinative of the kind of man (or community) he will be. Modernity seeks a rationally-designed political system that is so perfect that no one need be good. This is seen in the neo-conservative idea that the greed of individuals results (miraculously!) in the welfare of all. It is also seen in the naive faith placed in the all-encompassing state and its rational planners by liberals. But Augustine will have none of that. He knows that who we worship determines what our community will be like. If we worship "Choice" we will have blood-stained hands as our will to power is exercised against the weak and helpless children who are inconvenient to our plans. Only the worship of the true God leads to shalom.

Augustinians do not see history marching toward glorious things and progressing inevitably toward the good society. Augustinians view life as eucatastophe - a joyful catastrophe. History is a long defeat with a twist at the end that saves the day. This is what it means to believe in the return of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. This life is important, not because it is an end in itself, but because it is the preparation for eternity and the place where our souls are formed for the telos of our lives - to see God and enjoy Him forever.

This is a spirituality with political implications and a politics that is spiritual. It is historic Christian orthodoxy and Evangelicals will either embrace it or they will pass out of the Church and into post-Christian Western paganism along with the rest of the Protestant Gnostics.