Axe to the Root with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network

Welcome to Episode 20 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about the Moral Majority, its initial successes and its ultimate failure to produce a dent in the culture or in the political process, or even to slow down the rotting of Washington DC and the local governments. A movement that was so promising at the beginning and even appeared to take the political process in America by storm, within a few years after its first spectacular victory lost momentum – much like the Tea Party in the last several years – and eventually had to disband, or rather surrender to what seemed to be inevitable, namely, the dissolution of the Christian social order inherited from previous generations, and the takeover of the political process by neopaganism.

For those of our listeners who are too young to remember, the Moral Majority was a political organization started in June 1979 with the purpose of fighting the dissolution of Christian morality in the public square and to oppose the political war on traditional family values; it also had the goal to create a permanent Christian presence in American politics, a presence that had been lost in the previous 50 years due to the self-conscious retreat of the majority of American Christians from politics. That new presence would later come to be known as the New Christian Right or simply the Christian Right: a loose movement of politicians, mainly within the Republican Party, political action councils, lobbyist organizations, religious organizations, and media networks, all devoted to pushing what is known as “socially conservative goals,” namely, fighting the laws that allow abortion, public expression and political protection of deviant sexuality, and laws aimed at the undermining the authority of the traditional nuclear family.

Such goals were quite revolutionary at the time, given that the majority of Christians didn’t bother with politics or voting at all. Just a few years earlier, the very founder of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, would advise against political involvement by Christians. The Supreme Court had banned prayer in public schools in 1962, and had ruled against state laws banning abortion in 1973, but these did not produce any movement among the supposedly “conservative” Christian groups. No major denomination responded to the Supreme Court decision; if anything, some groups like the Southern Baptist Convention responded positively, and The Southern Baptists’ General Assembly affirmed a positive stance of approval of abortion in cases of incest, rape, or likelihood of damage to the health of the mother.

The goals were revolutionary, but the American society was ripe for them – or at least, that part of society which was was increasingly concerned about the continuing dissolution of morals, especially in the late 60s and in the 70s. There were previous attempts at creating such political organizations and influencing the political process. The Heritage Foundation was started in 1973. In 1974, the Conservative Caucus was organized. In 1978 Christian Voice was established. Withing the same period, a number of leading Evangelical preachers and evangelists gradually changed their view on political involvement. The wake-up call, of course, was the Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court, but there were other factors as well, for example, the debacle with Jimmy Carter’s pretended faith: Carter garnered the Evangelical vote by claiming to be a born-again Christian but once in office, he was more liberal and anti-Christian than any president before him. The Moral Majority was mainly the fruit of the work of three men: Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, and Howard Phillips. It is sometimes falsely claimed that these three men represented the three main religious groups in the US, Evangelicals (Jerry Falwell), Roman Catholics (Paul Weyrich), and Jews (Howard Phillips). The truth is, Howard Phillips was born in a Jewish family but had converted to Protestantism in the early 1970s; at that time he was already under the influence of Christian Reconstruction and specifically R.J. Rushdoony. (Unfortunately, Mr. Phillips’ Reconstructionist views didn’t take root in the Moral Majority; we would be having a different topic now if they had.) Weyrich and Phillips had previous political experience, both in government and in political activism, being instrumental in the establishment of several previous conservative activist groups. Jerry Falwell didn’t, and he just recently had abandoned his previous position of political non-involvement and had repented for it. But because of his reputation, Jerry Falwell became the central figure in the Moral Majority.

The initial successes of the Moral Majority shocked the political world in the US. Within a year of its founding, the fund-raising campaign brought in millions of dollars from tens of thousands of private donors. The mail list – always an indicator of the success of a public ministry – grew by another hundred thousand within that same year. Given that the Moral Majority was mainly active in the South (economically inferior to the rest of the nation at the time) and had chapters in only 18 states, this was a significant achievement. In one primary after another, candidates supported by the Moral Majority defeated the liberal candidates, and opened the door for a political change that Capitol Hill hadn’t seen since the 1950s. Then, the Moral Majority got involved in the presidential race, just a couple of months before the elections. Ronald Reagan was still trailing Jimmy Carter by a double digit difference. Within a month, the difference was not only closed, but it was Carter trailing Reagan. Within another month, Reagan carried 44 states in what was one of the most astounding victories in America’s politics. Of course, ascribing all of it to the Moral Majority would be an overstatement; many other factors contributed, like the sorry state of the economy, Carter’s foreign policy failures, etc. How much of a factor the Moral Majority was can’t be measured exactly, but one thing was sure: What the historian Godfrey Hodgson called, in an essay of 1976, the “liberal consensus,” was crumbling down. There was no real consensus. America had a silent majority which disagreed with that liberal consensus, and apparently, the Moral Majority found the right message to tap into the power and energy of that silent majority.

But the first disappointments came almost immediately after the election. Ronald Reagan didn’t turn out to be the Moses the evangelicals expected him to be. Always rather uncomfortable when speaking on socially conservative issues, he did nothing against abortion in the first year of his presidency. In addition, he appointed Sandra O’Connor to the Supreme Court, a move heavily opposed by the Moral Majority, with no success: Reagan didn’t change his mind, and some Republicans in the Senate who vowed to vote against her nomination eventually voted for it. Neither the newly elected Republican Congressmen – elected with the support of the Moral Majority – nor the new Republican majority in the Senate initiated anything towards achieving the goals of the New Christian Right.

Almost immediately after the elections, the level of donations started dropping; presumably, since the Moral Majority had betted all on the presidential elections, and since the elections was won by the right candidate, the donors didn’t perceive that the danger was the same as before the election. Throughout the 80s, until the final dismantling, donations continued dropping, even though the leaders continued assuring their followers that there’s much more to be done and achieved. Reagan won his second term hands down, but it was unclear if the Moral Majority had much contribution to that victory. In Congress and the Senate, the candidates of the Moral Majority didn’t show much initiative to promote socially-conservative goals. By the end of Reagan’s second term, the social energy of the Moral Majority was exhausted. So was the war chest, and the contributions were down to nothing. In 1989, ten years after the founding of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell disbanded it. His reason was that the goals were achieved. In reality, none were.

Leaving the details of history for another time, it is worth delving into the real reasons for the failure of the Moral Majority. After all, we in our time have seen the same failure, over and over again, of the religious right. We have also seen the failure of evangelical ministries – no matter how much money we poor into them – to change course of America’s moral downfall. With all these failures, seems like it’s time to start figuring out what led to them.

The greatest problem with the Moral Majority can – and could at the time, if they had ears to hear – be derived from Ronald Reagan’s attitude to them. Throughout his campaign, and later in office, Reagan was quite uncomfortable and awkward about their support. Not that he rejected their goals; to the contrary, he continued using the same socially conservative rhetoric as he did before his campaign. But when he came to enacting policies on goals of the Moral Majority, his reply was always the same: “I am not going to waste precious political capital on these goals. We need to take care of the economy first.”

Now, retrospectively, it is easy to blame Ronald Reagan for being hypocritical and not really concerned about the bloody massacre of unborn children in America. But let’s not judge Reagan before we start the judgment from the House of God. At the time, the church itself was not sure yet whether abortion is an important battle to fight at all. Remember, just a few years before Reagan’s election, the Southern Baptist General Assembly was still in favor of abortion. By the early 1980s, there were still not many sermons against abortion. When Operation Rescue started in 1986, the church still hadn’t awaken to the evil of abortion – only a precious minimal number of churches really supported Operation Rescue. (Most big celebrity ministries were against them, and John MacArthur, for example, encouraged the deputy police chief of LA, a deacon in his church, to use force against the rescuers; it resulted in brutal torture of rescuers on the street, and one pregnant mother was kicked by the cops until her baby died in the womb. MacArthur basically saved the abortion clinics in LA from Operation Rescue.) Others, like Bob Jones University, joined the Moral Majority for the wrong reasons – to protect their tax-free status, threatened by the IRS for their racial segregation on campus. Paul Weyrich would later remember that a good number of Christian schools who joined the Moral Majority were concerned more with their tax-exempt status in relation to segregation (calling it “religious liberty”) than with the plight of the unborn. It’s easy now to blame Reagan for not making abortion his priority, but let’s keep in mind that Reagan was only following the church, and the church hadn’t made abortion its priority yet. The judgment must always begin from the House of God.

What is more important is that Reagan’s response, emphasizing other priorities, showed that he considered the Moral Majority a one-issue lobbying group. When your advisors have a comprehensive view, with a strategic view of priorities in the context of a fully consistent worldview, you don’t tell them to go fly a kite until the time of their priorities come. You listen to such advisors. When someone comes obsessed with one issue only, unconcerned about the full picture, you tell them to wait outside. That’s what Reagan did to the Moral Majority.

Don’t get me wrong, abortion is a very serious issue, and I am not trying here to justify Reagan’s lack of concern about it. The truth is, however, that indeed, the Moral Majority had no comprehensive view of reality. Its leaders were focused on one – or may be a couple issues – but they were oblivious to the larger world out there, and had no idea what a Christian strategy should be in such a world. The bewailed the immorality of American politics, but they had no idea what a fully consistent moral politics or civil government would look like. As I pointed out, many of them had the wrong idea about what the right political goals should be – keeping tax-exempt status with racial segregation policies, for example. But even those who had the right priorities – abortion – had no idea how abortion fit in the bigger picture of the American society, and in the bigger picture of the Biblical view of society. Even more precisely, they had no bigger picture. They could see how morality played in certain issues like sodomy and abortion. But they couldn’t see any application of the ethical principles of the Bible in politics in general – taxation, regulations, monetary policies, foreign policy, technology, government schools, unions, etc., etc., etc. in the early 1980s, the American society was facing a number of different challenges from within and from without. The Moral Majority had no answer to any of them, and neither did it have a comprehensive and consistent Biblical worldview to answer any of them in a strategic, consistent manner. It was only concerned with a couple of these challenges, and it had no idea what needed to be done besides electing the right people to power. In a very real sense, the Moral Majority was looking for a Messiah who would know what to do without being helped by the church. Short of a Messiah, they had no plan, and no worldview to make a plan.

This lack of comprehensive worldview also led the leaders Moral Majority to misjudge the real problem and the real immorality in the society. For them, the immoral revolution started some time in the mid-1960s, with the hippies and the sexual revolution and Woodstock; or, in the political arena, with the ban on prayer by the Supreme Court in 1962, or Roe v. Wade in 1973. Somehow, if America could return to the good times of the 1950s, with the prevalence of that American spirit and the traditional values, things would be so good. The problem is, America’s immorality didn’t start in the 1960s,; the events in the 1960s were only a symptom of the true immorality that started much earlier, in the first half of the 20th century. That root immorality, that abandonment of the Christian social order in America was the rise of American nationalism and statism, and the establishment of the Federal government as the supreme lord over America and over every American. The Federal Reserve, the federal income tax, the government schools, the laws restricting immigration, the Social Security Ponzi scheme, individual and corporate welfare (corporate started much earlier, mind this), standing armies and empire abroad – all these were established way before the 1960s, and they all had the purpose of placing enough power in the hands of the Federal government to make any resistance against its policies futile. Abortion and sodomy wouldn’t become part of national politics unless there was an all-powerful federal government – contrary to the earlier, decentralized and individualist Christian social order – which federal government could pass its policies unafraid of any political challenges. But the Moral Majority lacked the worldview and the insight to see the real roots of the problem; it remained silent on that real root. Gary North’s words about this situation are very relevant:

The churches find themselves temporarily outgunned and undermanned in today’s confrontation with the State because conservative, Bible-believing preachers have not been reliable pastors for four generations. They have not called the attention of church members to the inescapable conflict between the society of Satan and God’s society. They have not set forth the principles of righteous, God-ordained civil government, generation after generation. They have neglected the law of God. This was also the sin of the Levites in ancient Israel, and it led to the apostasy and subsequent enslavement of Israel on several occasions.

Pastors have not preached that taxation at 10% or above is immoral by biblical standards (I Sam. 8:15, 17), since it elevates the State to the level of the church, which alone can legitimately collect 10% of one’s increase. They have not warned the flock constantly against fiat money, fractional reserve banking, and the Federal Reserve System, which debases the currency unit, in direct violation of the biblical requirements of honest weights and measures. Christians were politically silent in the United States in 1913, when the sixteenth amendment was passed, establishing the Federal income tax, the same year in which the Federal Reserve System was created.

From the end of the Civil War until the 1960s, conservative critics of the Social Gospel movement had no systematic, Bible-based criticism of the liberals’ social, political, and economic programs. The Social Gospel had its critics, but the critics never attempted to offer a full-scale biblical alternative set of programs.

Even when it came to the central issues that he Moral Majority was concerned about – abortion and sodomy – it had no systematic judicial approach to these issues on the basis of the Bible. The Moral Majority’s sales pitch was, “We are defending the traditional family.” This pitch worked for a while, but then, since the organization’s goals were political, it had to have some form of consistent judicial view of how the civil government should deal with the two evils. Abortion was acknowledged as murder. (Although, not right away; it wasn’t until the Operation Rescue started in 1986 that the Christian Right started referring to abortion as murder.) But the New Christian Right could not bring itself to the point of declaring that abortionists should get the same prevalent civil penalty as that for murder, let alone ask for the Biblical penalty, death. Concerning sodomy, the situation was the same: every state had laws on the books against sodomy, but the Moral Majority never asked for those to be implemented, let alone ask for the Biblical penalty, death. Their defense of the family eventually earned the reputation of  wishful thinking; they had no consistent worldview behind their goals, and therefore could have no strategy for achieving them, and no clear vision of what a judicial system would look like if it applied their goals in practice.

The result of this lack of vision of what a Biblical government should look like, the Moral Majority expected its goals to be achieved within the context of the executive federal state developed in the first half of the 20th century – developed by statists like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt – with all its executive agencies and policies, from the Federal Reserve to the system of government schools. But that executive state was, and still is, immoral by its origin; it is not the original social order of the United States, and it certainly has nothing to do with the Biblical view of civil government. The leaders of the Moral Majority didn’t stop to make an analysis of whether it was possible at all to achieve moral goals using the apparatus of a state whose very origin is immoral and anti-Christian. They made the same mistake many conservatives make to day when they say that the public schools are failing or that the Federal Reserve has failed – to the contrary, they are very successful in their assigned tasks. In the same way, the system of Federal government and courts formed in the first half of the 20thcentury did not fail to maintain a level of morality in the civil sphere – it never had such a purpose. That system was created by the enemies of God with the express purpose to destroy the moral character of government, and to promote immorality by the means of state policies. Jerry Falwell never seemed to have made that connection between the nature of the Federal government and the promotion of immorality as a policy. Even in the last several years of his life, when he tried to revive and restore the Moral Majority, he still didn’t get it, and he still continued trying to seek solutions within the very structure of government which was designed to create the problems in the first place.

And of course, it didn’t help that most of the leaders of the Moral Majority had an eschatology that instilled in both leaders and followers a deeply pessimistic view of the future. Conservatism as a political ideology is by default pessimistic; combined with the pessimism of the premillenial and amillennial eschatology prevalent in the 1980s, it discouraged any positive expectations. The 1980s saw the culmination of end-times books – Hal Lindsey made his best millions during that same period. Others made good money, too, on the same fad. (Remember 88 Reasons to Believe the Rapture Will Be in ‘88?) For all the concern with the moral disintegration of America, most of those who should have supported the Moral Majority preferred to pass; after all, that disintegration was only a fulfillment of the prophecy. The Moral Majority didn’t address this psychology with an optimistic eschatology. To the contrary, its own leaders espoused the same pessimism. Thus, even if they had any comprehensive worldview, they wouldn’t have the emotional and intellectual fuel to prepare a long-term strategy. After all, you don’t polish the brass on a sinking ship; let alone make a plan for its voyages for years ahead. When the Moral Majority was dissolved, no one was surprised. The majority of Christians in the US expected things to get worse.

In the final account, what killed the Moral Majority after its initial successes, was its own lack of comprehensive Biblical worldview, and its lack of optimism for the future. Without these, any organization will spin its wheels for years and will eventually run out of fuel and dissipate its capital. In addition, it won’t be considered seriously by others in the arena; being hyperactive without a clear goal or vision is a sign of insanity, and your enemies eventually notice it. They don’t have to do much to defeat you; leaving you to your own hyperactivity until you run out of fuel is enough. That’s what happened to the Moral Majority.

And that’s what’s going to happen to any organization or movement which do not learn these lessons: that success never comes to those who lack a comprehensive vision and a positive expectation of the future.

The book I will assign this week is Tactics of Christian Resistance, a collection of many essays with editor Gary North. The book was written back in the 1980s, at the time when the Moral Majority was exercising its greatest influence on American politics. If you read the book carefully, you will see that the authors in it predicted the failure of the Moral Majority. And an even more careful reading will help you build your own work and ministry in ways that will give you long-term success.

I read that book in the 1990s, and I based my ministry in Bulgaria on it. That’s why our work there is growing, not by using scare tactics but by preaching a comprehensive worldview and victory of the Gospel in history. Again,My appeal to you all is this: help me grow it even more. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate for publishing Christian books in Bulgaria. God bless you all.

Welcome – after a break of several weeks – to Episode 19 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about voting and principles for voting. Or, rather, we will be talking about voting in the greater context of social and political action. Or, hopefully, we will even touch on the issue of voting in the even greater context of God’s plan for history. Before I continue, I need to mention that there is a slight change in the regular layout of Axe to the Root podcast, and that is that I will have to shorten this and all future episodes to about 20 minutes. The reason, in short, is, we are expanding, and there is demand for airing Axe to the Root episodes outside the Reconstructionist Radio. So I will have to speak less, and yet manage to say enough to make it full of content enough to be able to be of service to you.

What I am going to say won’t necessarily agree with other speakers on the issue – may be it won’t agree even with those of my friends who are the closest to me theologically and ideologically. I don’t claim to speak authoritatively, though, trumping their views from a supposed higher intellectual ground. On this issue, of voting, I am still developing my views. The Bible doesn’t clearly and decisively speak on principles of voting – or I should say, voting as it is understood today, in the context of our modern political system and social order. There is a reason for this, and it is that our modern political system and social order don’t have Biblical origins but are a re-creation of the older pagan forms of government. Yes, I know, they are rather modified from their pagan origins by centuries of Christendom, and there is a veneer of legality and lip-service to moral principles, as well as some real influences of Christian ethics in our modern system. Clearly, our modern culture is not Rome, and our modern political order is not the Roman Empire, and it will never be, no matter how many evangelical pastors are trying to make it Rome again by their insistence on a faulty reading of Roman 13. But while our culture today has strong and permanently established Christians checks and brakes to a full return to the brutality and tyranny of a pagan social order, the ruling ideology of civil government today is still pagan, and we as Christians have done little to nothing to change it, especially over the last 100 years. Our government is still pagan, our justice system is still pagan, we have a number of false governments that can only exist in a pagan context – executive powers, standing armies, police, regulatory agencies, government schools (remember, they are a taxing power, therefore part of the same tyrannical system), taxation agencies, immigration restrictions, prisons, etc. Voting, therefore, since it is part of the political process, is just another ritualized motion in the gigantic liturgy of this pagan political process. It does bear a faint resemblance to the original voting in the true republic, that of the Hebrew nation under the Law of God, where the local communities elected their judges. But today’s voting is not for the election of judges – a legitimate Biblical function of the civil government – but for the election of people to unlawful positions, executive and legislative, that are not commanded nor even allowed in the Law of God. I have talked in another podcast about the un-Biblical character of the standing army of police, and in the lectures at the Freedom Conference in Tucumcari, New Mexico in June (available on Reconstructionist Radio) I talked about the evil of the executive state. To say it straight, from a Christian perspective, voting in the modern context is overrated – it may be good for certain purposes, but we need to keep in mind that in most cases, it simply legitimizes a system that is by definition unjust and anti-Christian.

Obviously, from a Christian perspective, there is a tension – moral and intellectual – when it comes to voting. On one hand, since it relates to civil government, voting has to do with issues of justice in the society, and a Christian can’t just ignore these issues, and can’t just ignore opportunities that God gives to do something about injustice. Justice and righteousness are the foundations of God’s throne, as numerous verses in the Old Testament declare. Do we sit idly when God gives us an opportunity to help our culture to more justice? On the other hand, however, voting in the context of a political and social system – being an integral element in the religious, statist worship of that system – may be a legitimization of idolatry. It is not for nothing that under Communism, voting was mandatory – not officially, but there could be unofficial consequences for not voting. Not that the individual vote counted towards who would be elected (as Stalin said, “It’s not important who and how will vote; what’s important is who and how will count the votes.” And no, this is not a fake quote as some claim; Stalin’s former secretary Boris Bazhanov included it in his memoirs published in Russian in 1992), so, not that it mattered who the voters voted for, but that not voting was considered a form of resistance against the state and therefore was not to be tolerated. So what do we do? If we vote, we participate in the government’s idolatrous liturgy; if we don’t, we may miss opportunities to testify and correct the evils of our age. Is voting in the context of the modern state analogous to bowing down before the golden image of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 3? Or is it like Naaman’s bowing down in the temple of Rimmon while supporting the hand of his pagan king, in 2 Kings 5? How do we know? How do we solve this apparent tension between outward participation in what in our day amounts to a pagan ritual and the ethical/judicial command to us to set the captives free, to rescue those led to slaughter, and to dispense justice in the land?

One attempted solution in our day is the purist solution: Don’t vote at all, and don’t participate in politics or government at all. It used to be the solution of modern evangelical pietists. Almost every single evangelical celebrity used to be against voting or political participation. Jerry Falwell, just a few years before he started Moral Majority, was still preaching against political participation by Christians. (To his credit, he did later address his earlier views and repented for them, which can’t be said about some of the modern churchian celebrities.) The same attitude to voting and political participation has been expressed before by some modern celebrities like Franklin Graham and John MacArthur, and they still spoke against political participation just a few years ago. Ironically, when such celebrities finally decided to change their views on voting, it was to advocate for voting for a cult member, Mitt Romney, not for the only real Christian and Southern Baptist in the race, Ron Paul, who even had his confession of faith in a prominent place on his campaign website. And neither Graham, nor MacArthur, nor any of the others ever offered a statement of repentance of their earlier views. I bet future generations will scratch their heads how we could be so blind to waste hundreds of millions of dollars on leaders of such poor quality.

There is a more consistent and more principled purist position, though, and it is that of a small group within the Reformed churches, the modern covenanters. Their position is similar to that of the pietistic evangelicals – no voting at all – but the similarity is only on the surface. In reality, it is much more consistent and well-defined, and it is not based on the pietistic premise that politics is bad by default. To the contrary, modern covenanters believe that politics – like everything else – must be subject to the Law of God and therefore is a legitimate area of Christian endeavors and work. Their rejection of political participation today comes from their understanding that godly politics can be done only in the context of a political system that has explicitly vowed to serve God. The nature of the fundamental political oath is determinative to their decision to participate or not. Since our modern political system is based on a religious oath which is not explicitly Christian, it is therefore idolatrous and any participation in it that would require taking such oath would be idolatrous. Modern covenanters would participate in the political process only when it becomes Christian by explicit oath.

While somewhat consistent, though, this position has serious drawbacks. For one, modern covenanters’ view on the nature of civil government is not very different from the modern state. What they envision is a modern government whose executive power is harnessed to serve Christian goals – defined, of course, by a priestocratic elite of church elders. Thus, they never discuss if the nature and structure and principle of operation of the modern state are Biblical; they take those nature, structure, and principle of operation for granted, as something not to be discussed, and are only concerned with the ritualistic part – the oath. To give a Biblical analogy, modern covenanters want Moses to take over Egypt and use the Egyptian state as it is, without any structural or operational changes, and make it serve Yahweh. And second, their position destroys any possibility for peaceful, gradual change of the modern state into a Christian civil government. If they don’t participate, they can’t influence the process of changing even the oath; and they can’t train a future generation of Christian magistrates. The only change, then, will have to come through a violent overthrow of the system. Their explanation is that such change will come when an existing ruler converts and changes the oath – in other words, they are expecting a sort of messianic figure who will be powerful enough to change the whole system for them, and yet be a new and therefore inexperienced convert, for he would have to convert midlife to Christianity (an old believer wouldn’t even participate in the political process). Such faith in a new convert who will also be the messianic figure to overhaul the system and its fundamental oath is not exactly a consistent position.

Then there is the lesser-of-two-evils crowd; the majority of American voters, on both sides of the political spectrum, well represented also within the broadly Evangelical and also Reformed churches. The belief there is that voting is almost a sacred ritual which shouldn’t be missed because somehow “this election is the most important election at all,” and if we allow for the greater evil to be elected, it will get really bad. The ideology behind this position is simply fear. I take that back: not simply fear but fear developed to the level of elaborate political propaganda and manipulation, with the purpose of conditioning the minds of the electorate to support whatever candidate their party nominates. Thus, Democrat voters have been voting – against their own professed ideology – for rich white politicians at the payroll of Big Business; and Republican voters have been voting – against their own professed ideology – for practical socialists and progressives. The negatives of this position should be obvious to all, and the history of the US of the last 50 years is an abundant proof that such position not only doesn’t solve any problems, it is part of the problem itself. It can be useful only in limited circumstances, for meeting emergencies – real emergencies, not the constant political and media manipulation of the voters in the US. Limited, as in places in the Middle East or North Africa where a socialist dictator may be a better option for Christians than a Muslim radical, and there is an imminent disaster coming. In the US, to be honest, the scares never really materialize, and are only good for the politicians’ agenda.

By far the best of all currently existing views – shared by many of my closest friends – is the view that voting must be based on character: we must examine the moral character of the political candidates before us; we must judge, first, based on their profession of faith, as far as we can from their own statements, second, based on their walk in life, third, based on their record of voting so far, etc. this position has numerous direct verses for support in the Bible unlike the previous positions. There are a number of qualifications for rulers in the Bible that establish the necessity of orthodox faith and good moral character for the candidates. It is obvious why we should vote only for candidates of exemplary character, irrespective of pragmatic reasons – whether they have a chance of winning or not. Our voting only for candidates of character is our way of taking the testimony of the Gospel to the political process: by voting only for Biblically qualified candidates – that is, candidates of approved moral character – we are declaring to the world around us our commitment to our covenantal – that is, ethical/judicial – principles. There is a bonus to voting only for Biblically qualified candidates as well, and it is in the fact that there is less need for external checks and balances for a candidate whose self-control provides internal checks and balances. Like in everything else, internal self-government makes external control superfluous – it is for this reason we Christian Reconstructionists have called for less focus on institutional governments and control and more focus on self-government, the foundation for our Christian libertarianism in politics. Moral character equals self-government, for self-government is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23); and a political candidate who has shown a sufficient amount of self-control in his personal life would be expected to show a similar amount of self-control in office, or at least, during the election campaign (so that we are not ashamed of him).

As good and consistent this position is, though, I must say, it is not sufficient – and here lies my partial disagreement with many of my friends. Yes, character is important, no doubt about it. In fact, I would say that there are important points in the other two views as well; practicality – or call it pragmatism if you will – has its place, even if limited, in all our dealings, including our voting. And yes, I also believe that politics, as it is practiced today, is rotten, and barely deserves participation, specifically in the voting booth. I would also agree that an explicit Christian oath and requirement for a Christian oath is the ideal situation, and before there is such an oath, any political system must be held under suspicion by any professing Christian. So character is an important part of our standards for voting for a candidate, and yes, a candidate who has proven his character to be of low moral quality, should not be supported, even if his opponent is Hillary Clinton.

But character is not enough. Because there is a higher, more comprehensive principle, and that more comprehensive principle has to do with issues higher than the individual candidates, and even higher than the specific act and process of voting. I call this principle “God’s purpose to this generation,” based on the words of Paul to synagogue in Pisidian Antioch in Acts 13:36: “David, after he had served the purpose of God to his own generation.” (The English versions translate it “in his own generation,” but there is no “in” or any other preposition in the original, only the word generation is in Dative, which means the correct preposition in English should be “to,” as in something given to them.) Voting, of course, must be governed by the ethical/judicial principles of the Law of God, but not just abstractly applied without respect to the times. The concrete reality of the times and of God’s specific purpose to this specific generation must be understood and must be taken as the grounds for our decision how to vote and whether to vote. Or, to be more comprehensive, for our decision how to participate politically and whether to participate politically at all.

You see, my problem with all the above approaches is that they are all approaches based on a stagnant and abstract view of reality and human society, a view rather divorced from history and the specific historic situation we are facing today. Generations of men are not all the same, they do not have the same circumstances and the same challenge, and they do not have the same purpose. What one generation finds a severe challenge, another generation may just take for granted. What in one generation may be considered victory, in another may be a defeat. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are eternal ethical/judicial principles, but these principles still need to be applied to specific cases, and the specific cases most often depend on the specific purpose God has for our specific generation.

This principle of action – and especially political action – depending on the historical purpose of God for the specific generation is clear in the tribulations of Jeremiah, in Jeremiah 38. The officials of king Zedekiah requested that Jeremiah be thrown in jail; or, because Israel didn’t have prisons and jails like the surrounding pagan nations – the Law of God doesn’t allow for prisons and jails, they are part of an anti-Christian social order – Jeremiah was thrown in a water reservoir that was not used. His crime? He called for surrender to the Chaldean army, because that was the purpose of God to their generation, to go to Babylon and stay there. Now, 250 years earlier Elisha did exactly the opposite to his countrymen in Samaria, encouraging them to persist because God had sent His fiery chariots to rescue the city. An another 700 years earlier, God was telling Joshua to not fear, because any place where he would put his foot will be his. Obviously, fighting a war against God’s enemies wasn’t always part of God’s purpose for every generation; for God’s covenantal purposes, Judah had to surrender and go in captivity. Not that God was a capricious God; to the contrary, there was a clear reason why He changed the purpose: Israel had to suffer the consequences of their sins. But it took a prophetic word to declare God’s purpose to their generation.

The necessity of having a clear historical understanding of the times we live in is obvious also from that famous phrase, the men of Issachar in 1 Chr. 12:32, who came to join David at Hebron. These men, the text says, “understood the times, knowing what Israel should do.” Again, this was a political/government undertaking, they came with the specific purpose to turn the kingdom from Saul to David. Under any of the views I described earlier, there would be no necessity on them to elect David over Saul; what was needed was specific understanding of the times, as well as a prophetic word (1 Sam. 16). Their political actions had to be based on more than just abstract principles of character or nature of government; they had to be aligned with God’s purpose to their generation. Only then could their undertaking be in agreement with the Law of God, and with the plan of God for their nation.

There’s a multitude of other examples in the Bible showing that a bare knowledge of the Law of God or of the ethical principles for politics and character is not enough for one to get involved in politics or civil government. My favorite modern example of historical understanding is Gary DeMar’s reply to those who use the verse, Give to Caesar what is Caesar; DeMar’s reply is, “We don’t live under Caesar anymore.” There has to be specific understanding of the historical challenges and the historical purpose of God to our generation. In every generation, there is a multitude of wrongs to be corrected, a multitude of good works that can be done, and sometimes there are mutually exclusive alternatives for action, neither of which is lawless per se. (Neither defending the city in Elisha’s time nor surrendering the city in Jeremiah’s time were wrong per se.) How do we know where we need to invest the resources of our generation, the efforts of our political system and government? The Bible doesn’t give specific instructions for every generation; it gives us the eternal principles of the Covenant of God. So there has to be specific understanding of the times, based on the Biblical testimony, of course, but also applied to our present use, to borrow a phrase from John Calvin. And when we have that wisdom and understanding of applying the revelation of the Bible to present use, they will become the foundation for our principles for voting.

So before we go to vote, when we are vetting the candidates, we as Christians need to be asking ourselves this question: What is God’s purpose to our generation? What are the most important issues of justice our generation is facing, issues that can be resolved through government action – or inaction. What are the specific challenges? What are the specific opportunities for action. Does that purpose of God require that we skip voting this election, because any vote would only be a legitimization of things contrary to God’s purpose. May be there are candidates with good moral character, but can we vote for them if we judge them clueless about the real issues and the purpose of God to our generation. There is a number of good Christians who are running in this campaign, but almost all of them are statist in one way or another, being in favor of foreign wars, or standing armies like the police, or regulations, etc. Do we vote for such people just because of the good character; or do we place the purpose of God higher than that and refuse to vote for them? Could there be a situation where a man of lesser character has a better understanding of the real issues, and perhaps should be trusted with authority? Etc., etc.

Thus, voting – or not voting – simply based on abstract principles divorced from the dynamics of the historical process and from the specific challenges of our times – God’s purpose to our generation – won’t be really Biblical voting. We need to understand the times to know what Israel should do. At our point in history, we have a very specific problem: statism. (Which, as Rushdoony said in his Foundations of Social Order, is idolatry) Our previous generations have slept comfortably while both the right and the left side of the political spectrum have been turning the US into a land controlled by the executive power of the government. We have comforted ourselves with the lie that the government is there to protect our Christian roots. It is not becoming more and more obvious that the real purpose of that Beast of the executive government is to wage war against the saints. It’s about time to wake up and oppose him. Our government is not the government of Romans 13 anymore, and hasn’t been for over 100 years. It is the government of Revelation 13. And when we vote – or don’t vote – we need to understand that the great battle of our time will be Christendom vs. the modern pagan state. And based on that, pick our candidates.

The book that I will assign this week is a small book but very important, for it gives us a Biblical understanding of the principles of understanding history. Correct, we need to understand history to know to vote; when we don’t understand the times, we won’t ever be willing to join the David’s of this world, and we will always stand with the Sauls. The book is R.J. Rushdoony’s The Biblical Philosophy of History. Read it, let it sink for a while, then read it again. The book is not your regular book, it is written in a language that most people are not used to.

And again, help me continue my work in Bulgaria. The long vacation I took from Axe to the Root podcast was not really a vacation; it was a trip to Bulgaria for a worldview conference. This is not the place to share about the victories and the opportunities for the Gospel in Bulgaria, so go to BulgarianReformation.com and subscribe to our newsletter. And then hit donate. It’s a ministry and mission unlike most other. We are changing the culture. God bless you all.

The post Principles for Voting appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Welcome to Episode 18 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about the Long Telegram, one of the most interesting and unique documents in America’s history, or at least in America’s history of foreign policy and relations. If you are the average American, educated in public school – and even if you were educated at home – odds are, you have never heard of the Long Telegram before, and therefore, you are unaware of its vital significance for the development of America’s foreign policy between the end of WWII and the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a separate area of policy-making, American foreign policy has been generally ignored in our modern textbooks, except when related to some military cataclysm, and even then, most of the important details of the foreign policy decisions are usually omitted from the textbooks. How many people, for example, know from their textbooks that the attack on Pearl Harbor was known ahead of time and could have been averted by simple diplomatic negotiations? Even in our day, few people really know anything about the principles and practices of our foreign service. Only in the last couple of years this has become sorta popular, because of Hillary Clinton’s epic failures. Outside that, US foreign policy – as principles and practices – remains pretty much a terra incognita for the vast majority of US voters. When it comes to WWII and the Cold War, I have found that most young people in America (under 35) are almost completely ignorant about this specific period of history. And yet, that period is so important to anything that happens today, given that the roots of many of the modern government policies and practices, and the roots of our loss of liberty in the last 20 years can be clearly seen in these years, between 1941 and 1991. This ignorance of our recent history is, of course, dangerous, and God willing, here at Axe to the Root I will try to contribute to solving this problem.

The Long Telegram – and you can find a facsimile of its original text online – was really a telegram, and was really long: 19 typewriter pages by the standards of the 1940s, or 5,500 words. It was sent to the US State Department on February 22, 1946, less than a year after the end of the war, by George F. Kennan, an American diplomat and political scientist who at the time was part of the US foreign service and was minister-counselor with the US embassy in Moscow. An enormously intelligent man, Kennan spoke several languages, including Russian. He had the amazing skill – which later proved invaluable, when he was US Ambassador to Yugoslavia – to grasp the deep motives behind the policies and actions of foreign leaders, and thus predict their future actions and responses to the US foreign policy. Kennan viewed the arena of diplomacy and foreign policy in terms of deep commitments and psychological perceptions and responses; this gave him the opportunity to understand his opponents better, and to act accordingly. His problem, though, was, that he worked in the context of several Presidential administrations that were rather simplistic and one-dimensional, and followed the legacy of FDR of power play and confrontation at a base level, which rendered American foreign policy helpless to contain Communism for 30+ years. Kennan was frustrated, and eventually he resigned and left Foreign Service while at the zenith of his diplomatic career. His elaborate and profound views on foreign policy were not adopted until the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan used them to reverse the victorious march of Communism around the world.

The Long Telegram itself was perhaps one of the best expression of his views. In 1945, the Treasury Department asked the State Department to explain certain actions of the Soviet authorities towards the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The question was forwarded to the US Embassy in Moscow. In his response, George Kennan – as a Deputy Chief of Mission – presented a comprehensive analysis of the deep commitments, motivations, hopes, and fears of the Soviet leaderships in the 1940s, right after the war, and he explained why the Soviets are doing what they are doing. But this was not the most interesting part of his analysis: after all, anyone can imagine anything they want about the inner motives of another person. It’s only when he predicts future behavior that we know that his assessment of another person’s motives are correct. The second part of Kennan’s Long Telegram was exactly that: another comprehensive analysis, this time of the future policies and the practices of the Soviet government, both on official level, and on the level of subsurface activities.

For those of us who know the history of the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century, reading Kennan’s predictions is an uncanny experience: He knew every single trick and tactic that the Soviets would use, for the next 45 years. He knew that the Soviet Union would have two different levels of policy: one official, one unofficial, which he called “subterranean.” He predicted in 9 points, in great detail, what the Soviets would officially do in respect to internal policies, international organizations, colonial nations, economic relations and global trade, cultural exchange and collaboration. Then, in the last part of his telegram, which took almost half of the whole text, he predicted in an even greater detail all the “subterranean” activities of the Soviet government for the next 45 years. For us today, it almost sounds like a prophecy. Everything is in there: the use of foreign Communist parties (and even the different approaches to their leadership and to their rank-and-file membership, which many years later was well explained by Frank Meyer in his book, The Moulding of Communists), the use of national and international organizations, of organizations based on racial characteristics (pan-Slav, Turkic, Black, etc.), of internal political and judicial pressure on Western countries to weaken individual liberty and increase statism (think of the US Federal government and the Supreme Court), etc. He also saw the difference between the Nazi regime and the Communist regime in that the Nazis were adventuristic, while the Soviets understood power, and understood they were weaker than the West. So he predicted there would be no attempts at a major conflict and the Soviets will always be cautious, always working through underground means, not through a direct conflict. Thus, his policy recommendations were for containment based on economic and social pressure based on the true original character of the American Republic rather than on military confrontation or on creating a similar police and militaristic state to that of the Soviets.

And he ended it with his dire warning – and perhaps also a sad prediction, although he never meant it so – against foolish reactions by the US government against the Soviet threat. Listen to this, and see what wisdom this man had, which the US government ignored:

Finally, we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem with Soviet Communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

Bingo! At the height of the triumph of the Soviets, having just defeated Nazi Germany, he saw through all the propaganda and better than anyone else in the world at the time figured out that the Soviet Empire was a colossus with legs of clay, and that eventually it would collapse of its own weight. He didn’t see any necessity for the US or the Western world to abandon their ideals of liberty and free trade, and strongly recommended against a knee-jerk response to the Soviet threat which would turn the US and the West into the same police and militarized state as the Soviet Union itself was. He rightly saw that while the Soviets respected power, the power of the West lied not in horses and chariots but in its concept of society. Had his recommendations been accepted, and had the US recommitted its foreign policy to containment based on social and economic principles instead of predominantly military principles, Communism could have collapsed much earlier. But his recommendations were ignored; and consequent administrations continued ignoring his continuous recommendations. Even as a US Ambassador to Yugoslavia in the 1960s, he saw the opportunity to unhook this pivotal country from the Soviet train; and advised the US government accordingly. Ignored. We can say that the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s could have been averted as early as the 1960s, if the US acted on his recommendations – Yugoslavia could have become a Western ally as early as the 1960s. I can understand the man’s frustration with his bosses, and I can understand his decision to resign when he was at the height of his career. He was old-school. He worked and thought in terms of ethical/judicial motives and commitment. But he worked in the context of administrations that were increasingly pagan, and therefore worshiped power and domination.

Anyway, our point here is not his predictions. They are important to us only insofar as, 70 years later, they are the best proof that the man knew his field, knew exactly what he was talking about, and, most important, that his assessment of the internal psychology and motives of the Soviet government was incredibly on point. In fact, we can say, inadvertently, in those 19 pages of official, classified information, George Kennan gave the best professional analysis of the psychology of all pagan governments in history ever written. He was only speaking of the Soviets. But the principles he laid out were, and still are, applicable to every government which is at war against Gos and His Anointed. And what I want to do here is to give a short overview of his analysis, which, I believe, will help us understand the psychology not only of the Soviet government of the second half of the 20th century, but also of the Russian government today, and of all governments in general today, and – listen to this carefully – of the US government today, and even of all state and local governments in the US today, including government organizations like police, the IRS, Homeland Security, and even of the majority of individual Americans today, be they liberals and union members or supposedly “conservative” pro-police and anti-immigration types.

Kennan started his analysis with the official ideological outlook of the Soviet government concerning the international situation at the time:

USSR still lives in antagonistic “capitalistic encirclement” with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful co-existence. As stated by Stalin in 1927 to a delegation of American workers: “In course of further development of international revolution there will emerge two centers of world significance: a socialist center, drawing to itself the countries which tend toward socialism, and a capitalist center, drawing to itself countries that incline toward capitalism. Battle between these two centers for command of world economy will decide the fate of capitalism and of communism in entire world.”

This was a new and surprising element in the ideology of foreign relations, one which had not existed in the world since the times of Rome. Such black-and-white, polarized thinking had long been forgotten in the West, and since the West was dominant around the world, it was forgotten in the whole world. Foreign relations were either based on “natural law,” after the doctrine of the Dutch Arminian lawyer Hugo Grotius, or on pragmatism – like the British doctrine of the balance of interests or the German Realpolitik. All these saw war as only a more brutal extension of state politics and diplomacy but neither believed in war as permanent state, and therefore neither believed in a conflict to death between civilizations or cultures. Cultures or systems were expected to die of natural death or through one or another form of evangelism: when a critical mass of members of an inferior culture accept a superior culture and refuse to live according to their old ways. They had good reason to believe in such gradual, peaceful change: it was happening around them. Turkey and Iran which just a generation earlier were the proverbial stagnant backward oriental monarchies, were in the 1940s as Western as any Central European country. The local elite of India was adopting the ways of the British, Latin America was striving  for its place in the civilized world, and Africa was nothing like what it was 100 years earlier when David Livingstone was lost somewhere in its interior. Not that all these changes were all peaceful, but they were accomplished with very little of actual fighting, compared to the European wars of the 20th century.

The Soviet’s position looked like a relic from Barbaric times, even if dressed in modern ideological language: Destroy or be destroyed. Of course, the Soviets’ idea was not to wage a constant military conflict – they were aware of their own inferiority in terms of technology, resources, and industrial power. But they were not seeking peace; in fact, they believed peace in any form was impossible. Their ideology was such as to see an unrepairable gap between socialism and capitalism, and therefore between socialist and capitalist countries. If the gap was unrepairable, then it meant that even in a formal state of peace there would be no peace, there would be only war to the bitter end, and one of the systems had to die.

In practical terms, Kennan rightly perceived, it would mean that the Soviets would never come to the bargaining table the way managers or businessmen do: to seek agreement in mutual benefits. From a Soviet perspective, international politics – and this is another one of those primitive, savage attitudes – was a zero-sum game. There was no chance for two players to gain at the same time. When one player gains something, the other loses something. This is how Marxism viewed economics: profit in one place, in Marx’s view, could be generated only by loss in another place. If the capitalists made profit, it was because the workers lost. If the workers as a class are to gain something, the capitalists must lose something. Thus, the ultimate gain for the workers was expressed by the term, “Expropriation of the expropriators,” or, as it was expressed in Russian by Lenin, “Loot the looters.” The capitalists were viewed as looters: there could be no other reason why they would be able to make profit, for all profit is loot. Thus, for decades, the Soviet diplomats were instructed very specifically to avoid making any concessions, even when the trade off left the Soviet Union in a better position; for them, anything benefiting the other side was net loss on the Soviet side, just because it benefited the other side, for no other reason. For decades, American diplomats couldn’t grasp this simple rule. It was Reagan who figured it out and he made it his habit to leave summits and talks when the Soviet diplomats just refused to give in on minor point simply because they were trained to not concede anything. It was a Barbaric attitude, but it came straight from and was consistent with the ideology of Marxism and its view of the world and of international relations. Mutual benefits were non-existent in such a view. If one side gained, then the other side lost. A zero-sum game. The western worldview at the time, in the shadow of 1,000 years of Christendom, couldn’t comprehend such an outlook.

More than that, it couldn’t comprehend the motives behind such an outlook. Why would anyone want to live in a mindset of a constant war and destruction, rather than mutual profit? Christendom was an exclusive civilization and it expected the surrender of all other civilizations; but meanwhile, it saw co-existence and mutually beneficial economic co-operation with them possible and even mandatory, given that it opened the door for the Gospel. Christian and Muslim merchants had traded together in the centuries past, not awfully honestly all the time, but both groups saw the necessity and the benefits of such trade. Why wouldn’t the Soviets see those benefits and just take advantage of such trade – all the more that they were technologically and economically inferior, and therefore could only profit from such a trade? For the Western mind, conditioned by the Christian worldview of the past, such rejection of what is obviously good and profitable was unexplainable. For most of the history of the relations between the USA and the Soviet Union, American diplomats and foreign policy experts were puzzled over such refusal. It led many of them to the erroneous conjectures that the Soviet Union was perhaps economically much better off that what the data showed. Some leftist economists in the West – like John Kenneth Galbraith – even fell victims to the fantasy that the Soviet economy was two-thirds of the American economy. (After the fall of Communism, when the real figures were finally available, it turned out that it was two-thirds alright, but of the economy of Belgium.)

And here Kennan’s genius of being able to judge the motives and the inner hearts of his opponents – almost supernatural – was revealed in the Long Telegram. He gave the real motive behind the ideology and the actions of the Soviet government. This paragraph deserves to be quoted at length:

[Quote]

At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.

It was no coincidence that Marxism, which had smoldered ineffectively for half a century in Western Europe, caught hold and blazed for first time in Russia. Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. After establishment of Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin’s interpretation, became a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability. Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes. This is why Soviet purposes most always be solemnly clothed in trappings of Marxism, and why no one should underrate importance of dogma in Soviet affairs. Thus Soviet leaders are driven [by?] necessities of their own past and present position to put forward which [apparent omission] outside world as evil, hostile and menacing, but as bearing within itself germs of creeping disease and destined to be wracked with growing internal convulsions until it is given final Coup de grace by rising power of socialism and yields to new and better world. This thesis provides justification for that increase of military and police power of Russian state, for that isolation of Russian population from outside world, and for that fluid and constant pressure to extend limits of Russian police power which are together the natural and instinctive urges of Russian rulers. Basically this is only the steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries old movement in which conceptions of offense and defense are inextricably confused. But in new guise of international Marxism, with its honeyed promises to a desperate and war torn outside world, it is more dangerous and insidious than ever before.

[End of quote]

Insecurity and fear, mainly of their own people. Fear of their precarious position as rulers who can be deposed at any time because they have no legitimate basis for their rule. That fear was not shared by the majority of Russians, Kennan said, it was imposed on them by the party propaganda. In an earlier paragraph, he said:

First, it does not represent natural outlook of Russian people. Latter are, by and large, friendly to outside world, eager for experience of it, eager to measure against it talents they are conscious of possessing, eager above all to live in peace and enjoy fruits of their own labor. Party line only represents thesis which official propaganda machine puts forward with great skill and persistence to a public often remarkably resistant in the stronghold of its innermost thoughts. But party line is binding for outlook and conduct of people who make up apparatus of power – party, secret police and Government – and it is exclusively with these that we have to deal.

It is here, in these paragraphs, that George Kennan put his finger on the most painful spot of all rule that is in rebellion against God and His Messiah. I don’t know how he did it, whether he was a very wise reader of the Bible or he just had a unique gift of reading the minds of powerful rulers. At the time, it was not known that both Stalin and Lenin were suffering of paranoia; their statements to their closest associates show that they believed that conspirators are always around the corner for them. Stalin reportedly often spoke of “them,” and no one knew who “they” were, most probably a fantasy of his sick mind. Kennan couldn’t know this – most facts about Stalin’s personal life were confidential. But he saw through the smoke and mirrors, and he saw that the Soviet Union was a political representation of the Wizard of Oz: a small, crippled, trembling fellow who has created a magnificent display of himself as a way to deal with his fears. And, in the process, has forced or manipulated everyone under his authority to be driven by the same fears and accept the greatness of the small, crippled, trembling fellow.

The Bible speaks of this paranoia of earthly rulers in Psalm 2:3: “Let us tear their fetters apart, And cast away their cords from us!”, say the rulers of the earth. Those who started building the tower of Babel did because of fear, “lest we be scattered.” Saul had no reason to persecute David; he was entirely motivated by fear of David. The expansion of the Roman Republic was motivated by fear, that any neighbor who is not conquered will eventually grow strong enough to push the Romans back into the sea; Hannibal’s 15 years war on Roman soil left such a deep impression on the Roman mind that 2 centuries later mothers still scared their children with the phrase “Hannibal at the gates!” We see even Pilate, wielding as he was absolute power over Judea, still acting based on fear of a Jewish insurrection. Etc., etc., etc.

Fear is at the foundation of every pagan government; it is the ruling motive, and sometimes the overt ideology of pagan governments. In fact, as I argue in my article, “Terrorism: Biblical Analysis and Solutions,” fear itself is religious worship, at the foundation of all idolatry. And therefore every pagan government must by necessity be driven by fear.

Unknown probably to himself, Kennan simply gave the Biblical description of all pagan governments. And he also gave the practical conclusion of it: Contain them, not through direct confrontation but through economic and social competition. They will collapse eventually, because their own people will see beyond the insecurity and the fear of their governments.

The question now is, this is all old stuff. Archaic. My generation in Europe grew up in the shadow of WWII; everyone had a close relative who had fought in it and probably died in it. We also lived our formative years in the last decades of Communism. We lived through that propaganda, we tasted that paranoia ourselves. It was instilled in us from our early years; and there are still people there who live in the same paranoia of anything that is outside the small box of their local culture. There were others in Europe who lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but they also lived under the constant fear of another global conflagration. But most of us were freed from it. And besides, of what I perceive, most of my listeners are much younger, of the millennial generation. They have never tasted that paranoia, never had to live under it, or under a regime that is controlled by the same fears as the Soviets in the 1940s. So why do I find George Kennan’s insights relevant to my listeners?

And here, hold fast to the arms of your chairs, I have to drop the following bomb: George Kennan’s warning at the end of his analysis, has come true in respect to our own Federal and local governments. Let me read it again:

Finally, we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem with Soviet Communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

This is not usually a sentiment included in official reports; it is not dry information from a bureaucratic mind. This was an emotional statement by a man above his capacity of a government bureaucrat. Kennan saw the danger of fear, and how fear could distort man’s actions, and the policies of any government. He could see it in the actions of the Soviet government; and he was afraid that the same can happen to the American government. His plea was a sincere plea, “Do not become like them!”

His problem was, at the time he was writing this, the American government had already started the transition towards a pagan government ruled by fear, insecurity, and distrust of its own people. Kennan was a little too idealistic: FDR’s politics was a politics of fear, and he had used every single propaganda tool he had at his disposal to change the motives of most Americans from courage and optimism to fear and pessimism. The churches and their pessimistic eschatologies were helping him – he wouldn’t be as successful in the 19th century, when the majority of the church was officially postmillennial and therefore optimistic. The process of changing America from a nation of courage to a nation of fear had already started. The insecurity  Kennan saw in the Soviet leaders was gradually becoming the outlook of the American government itself, and consequently, of the American people as well. From there, it went downhill for the next several decades, with the only exception in the 80s, when the visible collapse of Communism restored the optimism in the West – for a short time. Eventually, that optimism retreated again, and was finally given a death blow on September 11, 2001.

You want to see clearly the transition of America from a Christian nation to a pagan nation? Study the transition from courage and optimism to fear and pessimism. There is no better indicator. For example, read two inaugural addresses separated by exactly 100 years: That of Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 and that of George W. Bush in 2005. Roosevelt was a fascist, as Joel McDurmon’s book on him reveals, but his address in 1905 matched the motives and the worldview of the American people: a nation of courageous, self-relying individuals who looked forward to a bright future. Bush’s address is clearly to a bunch of helpless, fearful sheep who are looking for a protector. We are today afraid of everything – of the rich, of the poor, of the blacks in the inner cities, of immigrants, of a small group of Muslims somewhere in a desert we can’t even find on the map, of free trade, of competition, of everything. We think judgment will come on this nation in the form of economic disaster. It may. But it has already come in that our hearts are taken by fear of everything: “So your life shall hang in doubt before you; and you will be in dread night and day, and shall have no assurance of your life. In the morning you shall say, ‘Would that it were evening!’ And at evening you shall say, ‘Would that it were morning!’ because of the dread of your heart which you dread, and for the sight of your eyes which you will see” (Deut. 28:66-67).

And because of that fear, we are now submitting to unjust rulers, expecting them – who are driven by fear themselves, and who have manipulated us into fear – to take care of us.

Unless we understand fear, unless we understand that it is the foundation of all pagan rule and policies, unless we understand that the motivation of all government agents – from the President to the lowest clerks and local cops – we won’t be able to understand pagan governments. And unless we understand how fear affects those ruled, and how it makes them willing to abandon their liberties, we won’t be able to understand modern America. Kennan rightly saw that the deep motivation behind the Soviet Union was fear.

It’s time for us to realize that the deep motivation behind America’s policies is fear.

And rebel against it.

We like to see modern governments as a self-confident conspiratorial group who has a clear, optimistic agenda about the future, who know what they are doing and there is no way to stop them from doing it. The truth is, behind the facade, there is a bunch of faceless, mediocre bureaucrats who love power but who paralyzed by insecurity because – just like the Soviet government in 1946 – they know that their rule is supported by no principle of legitimacy, that they have usurped the power they have, and the only reason that power hasn’t collapsed yet is because the people under their rule have not figured it out yet. This applies to the President, to the Supreme Court, to state governments, and all the way down to the last cop in your police department. They all know they are frauds; they all know they have no legitimate claim to power. They all are scared of the possibility that God eventually will bind them in fetters and cords, and the people under their power will look beyond the screen to see a small, crippled, fearful fellow. Just like the Soviets, of course, they all know that there is an alternative to their rule, much better than anything they can offer: a society of free, self-governing individuals who owe no allegiance nor taxes nor obedience to any earthly power but to God. They all try to use fear to manipulate people to not look at this Biblical solution of all society.

And, following Kennan’s advice, it is time for us to start building the social and economic alternatives to their rule, and prepare for their downfall. The Soviet Union collapsed within a generation. It’s modern ideological heirs won’t survive longer than that.

The book I will assign this week is The Dictators, by Richard Overy. It’s a tough book to read, but I believe many of my listeners – especially those of the millennial generation – must become familiar and understand the facts of our recent history. Some of those facts are ugly, but don’t complain. Rejoice I didn’t assign Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. We are not supposed to long for the past and try to restore it – but we are obligated to know it well, and teach it to our children so that they don’t make the mistakes of our fathers.

And do not forget my mission field where my heart is. As I am preparing this podcast, I will be flying in a few hours to Bulgaria, for a worldview conference and work with the homeschoolers there. I need your prayers, and I need your help. The books published so far have greatly helped our mission. We need to publish more. Even if you commit just $10 a month, this is three copies of an average book in the hands of the Bulgarian Christians. BulgarianReformation.com, Donate.