“Q: Which is the ninth commandment
A: The ninth commandment is, thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”
Q : What are the duties required in the ninth commandment?
A (in part): The duties required in the ninth commandment are, the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbour, as well as our own” – The Westminster Larger Catechism, Questions 143 and 144
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience” C.S. Lewis
Those who are determined to be “offended” will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt” – Christopher Hitchens
It is not uncommon to hear politicians and activists, after a tragedy, refer to something “better” within us as people. We are “stronger than hate”, we are told a certain social ill “shouldn’t exist” in 2024 or 2025 and following. Perhaps there are appeals to “the better angels of our nature”.
Under all these slogans are the assumption that people, by themselves, are above hatred, violence and despising the other. As a culture, however, we do a very good job proving these assumed facts to be false. It is something of a meme that social media discussions are toxic time sinks, the large-scale protests, for their impressive size, don’t seem to say anything but “x is wrong”. Riots are justified as legitimate expressions of anger whether they’re attacking the Capitol or a business in Ferguson, Kenosha, Pittsburgh or elsewhere (depending on who is doing the justifying). We even have the idea that “property damage” and “violence” are two separate things depending on perspective[1].
I’ve been wrestling with this for a while now, and am regularly reminded of the promise of the New Atheists, and those who came after them, that we didn’t need God to create a moral society. Once Christianity lost its cultural power, enlightened Man would be able to bring about a world made better by his inherent goodness. Science would answer moral questions, and our culture would be more rational, calmer and on a path towards a “new enlightenment” [2]
In this essay, we will observe how secularism’s lack of a moral foundation has made ad hominem not just acceptable, but encouraged, we will see how this manifests in the MAGA and progressive worlds and finally discuss how God is not only the foundation of objective morality, but imbues the speaker and their opponent (or, perhaps “target) with equal value apart from either’s perception of the other’s political beliefs, which are often rigidly dualistic and designed less to be objectively correct and more to condemn the other person to hell.
Two sides of a decaying coin.
William Lane Craig, in his excellent book “Reasonable Faith”, begins the first chapter by laying out a case for a simple observation: There is nothing objective or transcendent without God, up to and including moral values.[3] Despite this, the secular culture is awash in moral claims about how this thing is wrong or how that person is evil. The lockdown era saw the popularization of segregating people between vaxxed and unvaxxed. The hatred even for small business owners who needed to work to survive was justified as a necessary “sacrifice” to save the country from COVID (“sacrifice” in this case meaning something stolen from the owners, not something actually sacrificed).[4] And in the aftermath of that, there were perhaps two prominent articles quietly admitting that the moral panic ultimately did not work, and those who had justified incredible gaslighting and abuse were found to want everything to quietly retreat into history[5]. One assumes this is so they could act in a similar way when the next moral panic arrived and be the heroes there as well. It’s here we come to the first problem of political civility in a secular world; there’s no real call for contrition on either side. It is now beyond question that those in favor of the lockdowns not only disobeyed the orders they imposed on others but also saw everything that came from those lockdowns, such as learning loss, abuse, lost businesses, and a few million people “slipping” into poverty as the Wall Street Journal put it, as acceptable damage. Governor Wolf of Pennsylvania among others regularly referred to the idea that “we were all making sacrifices”, when it seemed like those in favor of the lockdowns could afford them for as long as the lockdowns “needed” to carry on[6]. The hatred for the other of this ideology is best demonstrated in the creation and early embracing of the dehumanizing term “non-essential worker”. There is something off about anyone who supported this ideology deciding that they were wrong, it didn’t work, and it’s time to move on from everything, while the pleading ignorance to avoid contending what their ideology caused.
It is this mess that makes the following questions rhetorical: Given the callousness of the “heroes” of this movement, from what foundation do these same people get to determine that what they did was wrong (assuming they admit this so clearly), but it doesn’t matter because we have other problems to worry about and that’s what’s important?
In the same way, on what grounds are those who were cast aside as “non-essential” obligated to accept this cruel and indifferent approach and, in doing so, confess that they’re not important and can be cast aside a second time whenever these lunatics decide they need to save the world again?
Was the moral obligation for those who were against the lockdowns, once they found themselves on the abused end of it, to simply accept their “non-essential” status and accept their fate as being left to wither on the vine? The answer, of course, is that there is no obligation for any of it, and there shouldn’t be. What the lockdown cult and other progressive activists did has surely left a great deal of destruction behind, but their “system” allows for the breaking of every egg in sight on the way to the most perfect, if completely hypothetical, omelet.
We see now, in the aftermath of the “progressive moment”[7], that for all the moralizing and promises of utopia, the fading of this secular religion leaves a legacy of destruction. It has improved nothing and made relations between people of differing worldviews harder to maintain. Further, through the MeToo movement’s “bomb-throwing”[8] phase which it never grew out of, it has made cases of actual sexual assault harder to prosecute than they already were, or even to have those cases taken seriously to begin with, which they already weren’t.
Now that these moral panics have passed and done their damage, and given the lack of contrition in the people who caused this damage, there is also nothing mooring us to return to the center. The pendulum has now swung in the opposite direction. Donald Trump and his MAGA crew have begun taking a hatchet to everything created during this era, including and especially the DEI departments within government and academia. They have done this to the extent that the people who advocated for DEI in the BLM era have retreated to the middle-ground long after they burned their own dubious moral superiority. In the discussions during the era of DEI, it was noted that those with disabilities were lost in the discussion over race, gender and sexual identity and orientation[9]. Now that the era of DEI is ending, activists are bringing those with disabilities into the discussion as a last-ditch effort to maintain the synthetic moral high ground and keep the grift going just a little longer.
To be clear, it is true that disabled people were lost in the discussion. It is also true that the people who took the lead in that discussion should’ve advocated for them and done so in a good-faith manner, instead of taking the self-righteous and myopic approach they did. That does have long-term consequences. Now, the other side of the aisle is in power, angry, and in a vindictive mindset because of their treatment in the progressive understanding of DEI’s time in power. But they had nothing pointing them toward a humanizing discussion and did not appear interested in having one anyway.
And now, they have lost. MAGA world is now in power. Where the Trump crowd were once generally useless conspiracists obsessed with “owning the libs” above all things, they are now demonstrating what happens when an intense cult of personality is given four years to fester and mewl over injustices both real and imagined. And here, we find another point worth making.
While it has been the secular progressives that have done a considerable amount of damage while in power, that does not mean that a “Christian Right” worth the term is in charge now. In fact to them, Jesus Christ is the One who calls people to vote for Donald Trump who is the true messiah. We will deal with the concept of the “Christian Right” and a “Christian candidate” later. But for now, let us lay out a brief overview of the MAGA world, before discussing how, while progressives are openly anti-religious (at least in the sense that they don’t believe in God), the MAGA world has a shallow, convenient view of God, and a highly selective take on Scripture in order to turn the Trinity into a Quad.
The best example of the MAGA world’s cult behavior was a golden statue of Donald Trump outside the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2021, when the conspiracies about the election being stolen were at their height. Donald Trump, it was said, was the wounded hero; a classically American leader who put the country first and was fighting against the “Deep State” [10], an amorphous, unfalsifiable and shadowy cabal of academic, Hollywood, business and political leaders rallied against their Chosen One. Through this perpetually oozing wound, the MAGA movement had many ways to avoid a basic, straight-forward question that could kill it before it became powerful; if the election was stolen while Donald Trump was in power, how was he to win again now that the people who “stole” the election were nowin power? Upon Trump’s victory in 2024, their response was simple: the election was “too big to rig”, which does not answer the question, as if a few extra million people would render those in charge of the scam incapable of managing it. This gaslighting is as common in MAGA world as it is in progressive activist circles. Whatever can’t be explained, doesn’t need to be explained. And if it does, which we’re not admitting, there are many better things to do, and the adherents will definitely get come back to it; much, much later.
But the Right generally makes a claim to being more religious than the Left, and here we come to Trump’s coziness with evangelicals and prosperity gospel types, dragging the name of Christ through the mud with them. Donald Trump’s “spiritual advisor” in his first term and now the “Senior advisor to the White House Faith Office” is Paula White, a televangelist and prosperity gospel preacher. White and a prosperity gospel preacher named Wayne T. Jackson, who gives himself the title of Bishop, offered prayers at Trump’s first inauguration. Trump also pulled the “big bible photo-op” trick the Clintons used to do at St. Johns Church in Washington, an Episcopal (liberal) church in LaFayette Square. In fact, in almost every instance where Trump and faith meet, it’s never a matter of Trump being a Christian as he is instead an all-American Prophet. Supporters sing hymns in light of a Trump victory, Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt in Butler, PA was pitched, both by him and his supporters, as proof that God had chosen him to save America. This “God-appointed” theme was a major throughline during the campaign[11].
While we cannot discount the fact that God chooses people that we would least expect to do great good, (Paul was a persecutor of Christians, David had the husband of a woman he desired killed and so on), the examples of Scripture demonstrate God’s power and His way of choosing “the weak to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27). This does notbegin to prove that Trump, an extremely flawed man in his own right, is such an appointee simply by virtue of being an extremely flawed man in a powerful position. It is quite a stretch to say, because God chose Paul, God also chose Trump, and to give both equal reverence is incorrect.
The old villain trope: “We’re not so different, you and I”
The MAGA camp has a similar amorphous enemy myth as the race-grifters on the left. Where the left has “systemic racism[12]”, the right has “the Deep State”. Adherents to these theories state they and their leaders are up against an immoveable and omnipresent force against which nothing can stand, but that they are equally as certain that some random aspect of their worldview, which cannot be well-articulated, will occasionally win a battle here and there. Every victory is explained by the inherent strength of the worldview. In the left’s case, any time a minority leader, who becomes the first X to Y in their field, fails or crashes a business, it is, the system, which they now run, fighting against them and holding them down. If they succeed, it is a testament to their race and/or gender and not their competence apart from that. We see this in the rises and failures of the first transgender PA Health Sec (Rachel Levine, the leader of the disastrous response to COVID), the first black president of Pittsburgh Technical College (Alicia Harvey-Smith, who blew a ton of money on a fresh new office and tanked the school within her tenure) and the first female vice president (Kamala Harris, clearly and horrifyingly out of her depth as a leader). Their ascension to power was a sign of “diversity is our strength” as a slogan winning out. The fact that each other these leaders crashed out is a result of the system they stood in charge of being inherently racist or sexist and impossible to score victories against.
Conversely, the Deep State is the thing that is supposed to have kept Trump out of office and failed despite overseeing the mechanisms of democracy. It was supposed to have kept his cabinet nominees from being confirmed, it has failed there as well. This is also, it is said, to be the same shadowy cabal that now runs the judiciary, which stands in the way of Trump’s numerous illegal or outright unconstitutional actions and is finally succeeding.
The simple fact however is that both boogeymen are largely vague, unfalsifiable problems of adaptable size and power that fill in the gaps of logic with intrigue and a feeling of a historic struggle. This allows for the adherent to avoid reading anything from the other side of the argument, since he already “knows” the foundational force behind his adversary’s opinion, and anything else is, as DiAngelo would say, an attempt to avoid that simple “fact”. With each side is now dominated by pursuing these amorphous concepts to the ends of the earth (for the sake of democracy, of course), anyone who stands in the way of either crusade will be punished accordingly, whether they are on “our side” or not.
Rabbi Jonathan Saks coined a term for this weird narrative that both the MAGA right and progressive left thrive on; pretending to be powerless victims, while at the same time, allowing them to take any means necessary to score “victories” on people and systems that are caught in their righteous onslaught against their amorphous boogeyman. Pathological Dualism is a concept by Jonathan Saks used to describe the philosophy and psychology of group-centric politics. It creates impregnable lines between perfectly good people (usually the speaker and their ilk) and perfectly evil people. It achieves this in three ways. First it dehumanizes and demonizes whoever your enemy is and causes you to see yourself as a victim[13]. More importantly for our purposes, however, this dualism allows those who place themselves on the side of “good” to commit acts of what Saks calls “altruistic evil”; “Evil committed in a sacred cause, in the name of high ideals[14]”. While Saks uses the examples of domestic and foreign terrorists as primary examples (and the Nazis remain the “best” example of this thinking), he also observes that it’s this kind of thinking happens at an individual level and can cause them to justify even comparably small acts of what is essentially terrorism. For example, they can justify burning down one business in a riot or setting a random Tesla on fire. In any other world, that would be considered unthinkable, but in the pursuit of the zealot’s ideals, it is merely strategy. Politics, it seems, can make otherwise rational people, do and say terrible things and be able to justify the negative aspects of their chosen course through unqualified righteousness.
The problem “The Christian Right” and the myth of “the Christian Candidate”
Before we move to discussing how a truly Christian foundation is the only way to civility in politics, we need to get one common problem out of the way which the MAGAs regularly play up; conflating “Republican” with “Christian”.
Most evangelical Christians do tend to vote Republican. This is not a criticism, given that there are only two options, and Republicans are generally anti-abortion and aren’t as openly hostile to religion as the left. However, inasmuch as the Republican platform has a wiff of Christianity in it at all, it is much more like the malleable non-denominational blend than something more biblical (ironically, called more “conservative” Christianity) Having demonstrated already Trump’s connections to prosperity gospel and liberal theology, it is easy to say that Christianity has only been harmed by this unfortunate association. The Jesus of the Bible, and the Jesus that gives way to Donald Trump are two very different people.
Despite most evangelical voting trends, The problem however is that saying “Christians elected Trump” leaves out the fact that most mainline denominations are overwhelmingly liberal in their theology and congregations. They hold, for example, a significantly reduced view of Scripture,[15] ordain women, trans and sexually active gay pastors, and fly pride flags on their property. Their view of Christianity is one that aligns perfectly with what feels good, as opposed to what is good. True to form, this Christianity convicts the person the adherent is aiming at, while asking nothing of the adherent themselves[16]
As we discussed at the top, the fact that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are the best we can do is indicative of a much deeper cultural problem. Donald Trump was not the Republican candidate because he is an exemplar of Christian values. He was the Republican candidate because that’s the person the media pitched as the savior of the Republic and secular commentators and prosperity gospel types got behind him. We haven’t had a “Christian candidate” in a long time.
But what is meant by “a Christian candidate” anyway? More importantly, what is meant by “Christian”. If we take the most prevalent form of Christianity today, it is either the liberal theology of the mainline protestant churches, or the non-denominational (ND) world. In the case of NDs, we’re already lost. The term is essentially meaningless; it’s some vague approximation of Christian beliefs that can look Baptist in nature, preach the prosperity gospel, or be damn near a cult. Regardless, this is not clearly based in any “firm foundation”. If this is what is meant by Christian in the phrase “Christian Candidate”, it is genuinely unhelpful.
Liberal theology can also be dismissed. Any theology that begins with the Scriptures, the Words of God themselves, and declares them to be merely manmade creations open to constant reinterpretation (as the PCUSA and UMC seem to in practice) will get them to say whatever they need to to achieve their political goals. The liberal theologian looks at the clear declarations of homosexuality as sinful and asks “did God really say that” with a knowing grin.
We have probably already given away the answer, but if there is no Christian candidate in the less-heady versions of Christianity, there won’t be a Christian candidate in the deeper, more Biblically focused traditions such as the Reformed world either. Reformed theology, also known as Calvinism, starts with the idea that mankind is, by himself, completely depraved. There is not one who, of their own strength, is truly “good”. And while the current Pope continues to liberalize the Catholic Church, much of Catholic doctrine still leaves those looking for a “Christian candidate” out of luck as well.
Therefore, when we address “the Christian Right”, what we are talking about, at best, is a profound generalization of what is meant by “Christian”. It is meant to drag Biblically-based Christians down with those people and ideas that have politics guiding their faith.
The search for morality in politics
If we were to look at some of what might pass for a founding document of either political sphere, we don’t find anything indicating concern for the other. Progressivism, in some strands, takes as read that there will be significant pain caused on the way to their great uptoia[17]. In this way, it shares its epistemic foundations with Marxism’s belief that man is perfectible, and this perfectibility is both inevitable and will come of their own power, through incredible pain and suffering.
MAGA, however, isn’t operating from any playbook we’ve seen in America for some time. A progressive may draw a line from an old book to MAGA, but Donald Trump is an extremely unique force in modern politics. Moreover, like Biden, he doesn’t exude the kind of self-awareness to have some deep philosophy ascribed to him. At worst, he’s an isolationist psycho with an at-best loose grasp of the truth. At best, he’s a revolutionary, with all the pros and cons of a reckless deconstructionist. He doesn’t bear any resemblance to classic conservativism or liberalism. Rather he seems to be an online libertarian, where all government is bad and there is no knowledge of any of the good government can do. Government is a necessary evil, of course. However, it’s absurd, and historically wrong, to decide that all the good in America is in the private sector. Moreover, someone must write the rules, so this online libertarianism can only be harmful both to the country, and the libertarian ethos.
Neither worldview has much to say on love for the other. Locke’s Second Treatise on Government is less about love for one’s neighbor than it is about viewing human nature as something that will naturally subjugate their neighbor in a world of “perfect freedom”, free from the constraints of a worldview that obliges them to see the other person as human. Conversely, Marx and Engles worldview is explicitly violent[18]. It might be said that, in expecting political ideologies to advocate for civility, we are asking them to do something that they’re not concerned with. They are primarily worried about economics and liberty vs tyranny, not whether people are good or not. This only makes clearer the point that political ideologies have within themselves the very reason they can’t produce good by themselves; they have no concern for the people their adherents have to live with, but who do not agree with their ends and/or their means that overrides the pursuit of their political goals.
All this being said, we see there are at least two problems with any secular worldview, especially the two we’ve discussed that are expressly political. The first is that there is no transcendent foundation for morality; everything the worldview prescribes is one man’s opinion of how one “ought” to behave, which can include treating those who disagree however the adherent sees fit. This is because it is logically impossible to get from a secular worldview, where we’re all slightly evolved primates, to something like inherent or objective good. Secondly, either the political worldviews don’t have a strong opinion on behavior (regardless of its non-existent “foundation”) or, as we see in today’s progressive and MAGA crowds, empathy toward the other is seen a weakness.
Finding morality in God.
The one transcendent moral system, fittingly, comes from the one who created the universe. Progressives need their “opponents” to be some manner of ist or phobic from the get-go or what they have to say doesn’t stick. Republicans, boomers especially, need their opponents to be “lazy millennials” or their arguments about college and the job market have no merit before the discussion gets off the ground. The Christian foundation, by contrast, is perfectly level. The speaker has nothing in themselves that makes them superior in this political discussion. Christ convicts both the speaker and the person being spoken to (Matthew 7:3)[19].
In this, we have already gotten rid of one of the key reasons the political climate is so toxic; the weight we feel in needing to be “right”. We are “on the right side of history” or “anti-racist” or what have you and anyone who disagrees with us is, by default, on the wrong side of history, racist or whatever inferior position we need to maintain superiority over complete strangers.
To avoid this position, the secularist may note that religious people can be immoral. While this is true, it doesn’t answer the point. The issue is not whether religious people can be immoral. The issue is whether God has an objective moral standard in Himself, apart from those who claim to follow Him. The question is not sociological, it is ontological. Therefore, the objection misses the point completely. The fact that some people are hypocrites when compared to the God’s standard does not disprove the existence of that standard. God is, as William Lane Craig and others observe, the only explanation for objective moral values and duties that survives scrutiny. The existence of a moral law, the argument goes, implies the existence of a moral lawgiver. That lawgiver must be outside of one culture or another.
There are numerous calls to civility that flow from this foundation. The apologetic tentpole of 1 Peter 3:15 as well as 2 Timothy 2:24-25, Matthew 5:38-45 all preach against the act of retaliation in various ways and call the reader to deal with opponents gently. We can look a few of these passages to better make the case.
1 Peter 3:13-15 says “but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect” (ESV) There are three parts to this command. The first is to honor Christ the Lord as holy, from which everything else flows. In the context of discussion, this puts the speaker in their place. They stand, first and foremost, as a child of God and a witness to Christ. For this reason, they are to “be prepared to make a defense to anyone”. Now, Peter is discussing how one should make a case for the Gospel, but it is not a stretch to say this is how one should discuss everything else; know what you are talking about, so you do not have to resort to insults as a first, second or third salvo. “But do so with gentleness and respect” means you don’t have insults open to you in the first place. All of this stands in contrast to the pathological dualism of politics where we are brilliant and good, our opponents are stupid and evil, and we have no obligation to treat them well, which we can justify because of our interpretation of their political beliefs or, for the diversity activist for example, because of their skin color or gender and nothing else.
2 Timothy 2:23-24 says “have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels.And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil”. There are two points here. The first is that one should not engage in discussions that only “breed quarrels”, meaning unproductive conversations. This doesn’t mean don’t discuss politics or religion, but the moment these discussions become personal and vitriolic is the point at which they cease to be productive or meaningful. Again, we see the call for the Christian to avoid being a pugilist and the quiet implication in “patiently enduring evil”, indicates that his opponent is not operating from a moral system, let alone one that values the opponent as a fellow image bearer of God first and a political opponent a distant second.
Finally, we have Jesus himself, in the Sermon on the Mount discussing retaliation and care for one’s enemies:
You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and lsends rain on the just and on the unjust
There is a lot for the Christian about “patiently enduring evil”, and this is part of that. This is where Christians struggle the most. At the same time however, those who have a political ideology, especially one as spiteful as MAGAism or progressivism at their core don’t struggle against this because the ideology encourages retaliation, even for small and perceived slights. The term “cancel culture”, for example, is not a Christian creation, it’s a product of a hyper-sensitive, hyper-political world.
At the heart of Christian discussion is the God-ordained obligation to deal with others as image bearers of God well beyond anything else.. Further, as the Westminster Larger Catechism emphasizes, part of this is in “protecting the good name of our neighbour”, which calls for restraining the urge for some to start the debate with an accusation of “racist”, “sexist” or what-have-you. Apart from the fact that this is increasingly a non-starter that says more about the speaker than his target, it has no place in the Christian conception of the sharing of ideas.
In God, the worth of the individual is established far outside of their political opinions and our “wisdom” and “rightness” is both called into question and put in its proper place, far down the list of things that give us worth, alongside anything which we could boast in and hold over our discussion partners. The argument from authority in reference our degrees, our backgrounds, our accolades is rendered useless. There is nothing but the discussion and the truth or falsehood of points being made.
Conclusion
God, being love itself, is naturally the solution to the toxicity of our political discussion. However, I have no illusions that a culture so steeped in politics as a form of identity is going to be able to come to this realization anytime soon. Nor am I particularly concerned with where society goes with it being so steeped in pathological dualism as is it. My concern here has been to lay out my thoughts on civility and productive conversations in politics, and there is one more aspect of political discussion I need to cover that has very little to do with God. That is the fact that your individual conversations do not carry with them the fate of your city, state, nation or world. From the Christian perspective, God is in control of the world; “our God is in the heavens, He does all that He pleases” (Psalm 115:3). His plans are not frustrated by the machinations of a deeply confused and lost generation, even one as self-important as this generation’s American subset. There is also far more that concerns God than the endless political discussions that social media has brought about. Moreover, the Christian’s “legacy”, a subject well outside the scope of this already lengthy paper, is not contingent on our political activism. We are on “the right side of history” in that we are in Christ and thus with God. But we must be aware of our extremely small impact. If, as the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing better than to eat, drink and find joy in our work, that would imply that our impact on the broader world is nothing, regardless of how loudly we yell, how verbose we are, or how many people we call racist, none of which is befitting the Christian approach to debate anyway.
From the secular perspective, this is all there is and we are driven, by an obligation we can’t source, to save the world. “We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for”, and anyone who stands in our way is an enemy to mankind. We don’t have time to think about what we can do in our community, because we need to save the world, do something that will leave a legacy that will outlive us, and make sure our and future generations know just how virtuous and right we were. Regardless of how much destruction, hatred and division it took to get there, assuming we get there at all.
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Toronto, Bertrand Benoit in Berlin, David Luhnow in London and Vipal Monga in. “The Progressive Moment in Global Politics Is Over.” WSJ, December 28, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/world/global-politics-conservative-right-shift-ea0e8d05.
Willmetts, Kathryn Olmsted, Simon. “State Secrecy Explains the Origins of the ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Theory.” Scientific American. Accessed March 23, 2025. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/state-secrecy-explains-the-origins-of-the-deep-state-conspiracy-theory/.
[1] “Personally, when it comes to big businesses I do not condemn it, because I find the distribution of wealth in this country so grotesquely unjust, so impossible to defend by any rational principle, that the violation of corporations’ property rights does not strike me as a wrong. The moral calculus changes somewhat if the property in question belongs to an uninsured small business, because there people’s livelihoods are actually hurt. Attacking a small newspaper office with someone inside it is not defensible.” In what world is, for example, someone working at a big business like Target not hurt if that Target is burned down as it was in Kenosha? Nathan J. Robinson, “Why Damaging Property Isn’t The Same As ‘Violence,’” Current Affairs, June 1, 2020, https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2020/06/why-property-destruction-isnt-violence.
[2] “Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by easy electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development…on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.” Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great (New York: Twelve Books, 2009).
[3] First of all, atheistic humanists are totally inconsistent in affirming the traditional values of love and brotherhood. Camus has been rightly criticized for inconsistently holding both to the absurdity of life and to the ethics of human love and brotherhood. The two are logically incompatible. Bertrand Russell, too, was inconsistent. For though he was an atheist, he was an outspoken social critic, denouncing war and restrictions on sexual freedom. Russell admitted that he could not live as though ethical values were simply a matter of personal taste, and that he therefore found his own views “incredible.” “I do not know the solution,” he confessed. The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist. As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.” Craig, William Lane. 2008. Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics. Edited by John S. Feinberg and Leonard Goss. Third Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. 79
[4] Jon Miltimore and Dan Sanchez, “America’s Small Business Owners Have Been Horribly Abused During These Riots and Lockdowns. That Will Have Consequences,” accessed March 20, 2025, https://fee.org/articles/america-s-small-business-owners-have-been-horribly-abused-during-these-riots-and-lockdowns-that-will-have-consequences/.
[5]“COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.,” accessed March 20, 2025, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/covid-lockdowns-big-fail-joe-nocera-bethany-mclean-book-excerpt.html; Emily Oster, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” The Atlantic (blog), October 31, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/covid-response-forgiveness/671879/.
[6] “How Cowardice And Class Privilege Shift Support For Lockdowns,” accessed March 20, 2025, https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/23/how-cowardice-and-class-privilege-divide-support-for-coronavirus-lockdowns/.
[7] Bertrand Benoit, David Luhnow and Vipal Monga “The Progressive Moment in Global Politics Is Over,” WSJ, December 28, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/world/global-politics-conservative-right-shift-ea0e8d05.
[8] “TIME Person of the Year 2017: The Silence Breakers | Time.com,” accessed April 10, 2025, https://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2017-silence-breakers/.
[9] Denis Boudreau, “Disability Inclusion — the Missing Piece in DEI Efforts,” Medium (blog), August 14, 2023, https://dboudreau.medium.com/disability-inclusion-the-missing-piece-in-dei-efforts-6dd7d312f89.
[10] Kathryn Olmsted Willmetts Simon, “State Secrecy Explains the Origins of the ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Theory,” Scientific American, accessed March 23, 2025, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/state-secrecy-explains-the-origins-of-the-deep-state-conspiracy-theory/.
[11] “In the past Donald Trump had talked about having had a Presbyterian upbringing. But despite his strong support from Christians in last week’s election, he never tried hard to convince them in his most recent campaign that he was one of them”…“I think he realised it was going to be a bit of a stretch to argue that he himself is a religious man, but instead he adopted a quid pro quo approach,” says Robert Jones, founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), which has long tracked religious trends in the US “The Christians Who See Trump as Their Saviour,” November 16, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20g1zvgj4do.
[12] Human Events CMS “The Specter of Systemic Racism.,” Human Events, accessed March 23, 2025, https://humanevents.com/2020/07/21/the-specter-of-systemic-racism.
[13] Johnathan Saks, Not In God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence (New York: Penguine Random House, 2015). 54
[14] ibid, 8
[15] Section 9.29 of the PCUSA’s “Confession of 1967” states “The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current.” “The-Confession-of-1967.Pdf,” accessed March 20, 2025, https://cathedralofhope.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/The-Confession-of-1967.pdf.
[16] The real authority, for liberalism, can only be “the Christian consciousness” or “Christian experience.” But how shall the findings of the Christian consciousness be established? Surely not by a majority vote of the organized Church. Such a method would obviously do away with all liberty of conscience. The only authority, then, can be individual experience; truth can only be that which “helps” the individual man. Such an authority is obviously no authority at all; for individual experience is endlessly diverse, and when once truth is regarded only as that which works at any particular time, it ceases to be truth. The result is an abysmal skepticism J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, New Edition (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 66–67.
[17] “If even these relatively mild insights of critical race theory are adopted, however, the effort will not have been in vain. American society, not to mention its intellectual community, seems receptive to thinking (if not acting) more creatively about race. Certainly, mainstream liberal civil rights law has been generating little excitement, nor has it provided much in the way of support for minority communities in great need of it. Perhaps if outsider scholars—and new converts and fellow travelers—persist, their work in time will come to seem not so strange or even radical, and change may come to American society, however slowly and painfully.” Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2017).
[18] Using the primary texts of Marx and Engles, Connor Tomlinson demonstrates over 45 minutes how violence is at the core of the far-left, which only stops occasionally when violence has made them unpopular and not because their victims don’t deserve pain and suffering. “‘Real Communism’ Has Already Been Tried | Lotus Eaters,” accessed April 10, 2025, https://www.lotuseaters.com/real-communism-has-already-been-tried-17-04-2023.
[19] Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Matthew 7:3 (ESV)
Finally tonight 