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

Welcome to Episode 13 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 educational system of Finland, about the multiple praises it has received over the last two decades from many quarters, about the value of these praises, and about the real situation with education in Finland.

In case you missed that show, education in Finland has been the perennial propaganda pitch in the mouths of socialist educators, government bureaucrats, leftist politicians, and leftists whatever else you may find out there, and occasionally, not just leftist but also supposedly conservative types, those of the our-schools-are-different sort. Education in Finland is splendid, it’s a modern miracle of the collectivist mindset, the kids are all happy, and indeed, the very system is designed to make them happy. There are no exams for students, there is no assessment for teachers. Politicians are not allowed in the schools, and teachers enjoy a very high social status. And Finland is always number one in education, compared to the rest of the world. Oh, I almost forgot, it’s an entirely government-organized and tax-payer supported system; homeschooling is not allowed in Finland. See? We don’t need homeschooling and private schools. The government can provide good education, after all.

And in this episode we will try to get to the bottom of this and see how much these claims are real, and what’s behind the supposed Finnish socialist miracle in education.

People and cultures have short memories. Very short. And not only short memories but also serious cognitive dissonance – which is only a nicer way of saying “schizophrenia.” It was just 70 years ago that Europe lived through one of the worst nightmares in its history: a war that murdered 60 million people and left the continent in ruins. It wasn’t a natural disaster like the plague, where no one knew where it came from and why. It was caused by very deliberate and systematic human ideologies which elevated the collective to the level of a god and denigrated the individual to the level of a cog in the big machine of the state. Obviously, murder and robbery and torture on a large scale can not become the norm unless the worth of the individual is destroyed; and that’s what these ideologies in Europe did, before their proponents were able to commit their atrocities. Europe in the early 20thcentury wasn’t a ripe field for murderous dictators – there was too much of a Christian legacy of belief in the worth of the individual. It had to take a generation for the populations of Europe to accept the normality of mass murder.

So, how did the dictators do it? How did they change the cultural legacy of a whole continent?

By noble, commendable, and beautiful means: education. Or, to put it in different words, “It’s for the children,” probably the second most popular defense of government tyranny, the first being, “But who will build the roads?” By the beginning of the 20th century, Christendom had produced the most literate, educated, and scientifically and technologically advanced civilization in history, and it was obvious that given its natural development based on the Christian worldview. And yet, when the dictators of the 1920s and the 1930s came to power, their most popular propaganda point was, “Here’s free government education, it’s for the children, we want the children to be happy.” You don’t say no to that, do you, if you don’t want to appear as being against happiness for children. Seriously, what kind of a heartless brute are you? The state just wants to make children happy. Are you against it?

It didn’t take long to see what the purpose of state-provided happiness for children was: about the same as the purpose of farmer-provided happiness for his pigs. The children educated by the state in the 1920s and the 1930s were then, in the 1940s, sent to their slaughter by the same state that educated them to happiness. A total of 60 million of them died in that state-produced happiness. That, without counting another 50-60 million that are not considered war casualties because they died in peacetime death camps . . . er, scratch that, re-education camps. Education – and re-education as well – is an important issue, after all, and a good government will always take care of it, if it wants to secure the loyalty of its people. We saw it in China where the Communist party educated to happiness the children of the 1950s, in order to make them cannon fodder for its Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and the 1970s. The Communist governments in Eastern Europe also educated the children to happiness, and while Eastern Europe was spared the same carnage as Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China, by the 1980s many these educated-to-happiness children were more unhappy than any children before in history, and were living in the same living conditions as their feudal serfs ancestors a hundred years earlier.

It’s not like this connection between government education and tyranny is some obscure and secret part of history. To the contrary, it is known even today in Germany that the laws governing education are in principle the same as those passed by the Nazis in the 1930s. In 1999, Rabbi Daniel Lapin posted in The American Enterprise his essay, “Adolph Hitler.” Openly paying homage to C.S. Lewis in the beginning, the essay was an imaginary letter from hell written by Adolph Hitler to Julius Streicher, one of the propaganda chiefs of Nazi Germany, hanged after convicted in the Nuremberg trials. In the letter, Hitler gloats over the fact that the same America which in the 1930s and the 1940s was horrified by many atrocities of Nazi Germany, is now adopting the same atrocities as “liberal policies.” One specific paragraph deserves our attention here:

Finally, dear Julius, you will remember what I frequently said and wrote in Mein Kampf: “The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people.” I explained that as long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation. It is truly heartwarming to see how well this lesson has been learned by the American government. In the name of children, incursions into the private lives of American citizens have been made that we Nazis would have gazed at with open-mouthed admiration. Does it matter that our bodies failed as long as our spirit still triumphs?

I mean, what could be more obvious than the fact that when a government elite wants to educate the children, its real purpose is to indoctrinate the children into obedient slaves to that elite’s agenda?

And yet, all over Europe, including Finland, government education is considered without alternative. If in some places private education is allowed, it must be run like government education. Only in a few places are home education and independent allowed or at least tolerated: the UK (understandably, with its long history of relative liberty and private initiative), the formerly Communist nations in Eastern Europe (understandably, given their direct recent experience), and France (don’t ask me about that one, I have no idea how and why the French government has allowed homeschooling). In all the other countries – especially Germany and Scandinavia – homeschooling is not allowed. Only the government is allowed to educate. And Finland is a very specific, and one could say, a very radical example of it.

For the last 15 years we have been hearing only good things about the education in Finland – which is, by law, only government education, for there is no homeschooling and almost no private education. No, good things in an understatement. Splendid things would be better. Awesome things. Wonderful things. Finland is the future of education. The kids are so happy. There are no drop outs. Everyone is educated. Everyone does what they want best.

And, keep in mind, teachers are happy as well, and everyone in Finland wants to become a teacher. They are very respected in Finland. And they make as much as the doctors in Finland. And you can’t become a teacher unless you have a Master’s degree in a relevant discipline. Finland has found the solution to education.

And of course, Finland is ranked number one, in everything, when it comes to education. Mathematics, reading, literature, science, you name it, those Finnish kids just excel over everyone; and while excelling, they manage to be very happy in school, because the very system is geared to make them happy. Finland is the best, and we don’t need private education, nor homeschooling. Those of us who have been promoting homeschooling in Europe know very well the answer of European socialists and bureaucrats: “No, we don’t need homeschooling, we just need to make it like Finland. They are number one. See, there is an example of government education that has gone right.”

All the praises for Finland’s educational system, of course, come from leftist publications: The New York Times, The Smithsonian, The New Statesman (the publication arm of the British Fabian Society), etc. There is a slide show by Business Insider but it is only parroting points found in The New York Times. As much as I looked around, I couldn’t find any comments on Finland’s education system from real business or technology entities who would take advantage of that top-quality educational system. The only highly visible Finnish company on the world markets – Nokia – has been doing rather mediocre in the last 20 years, since the beginning of Finland’s government’s educational experiment. I haven’t seen multitudes of Finnish graduates hired around the world by multinational companies – whether business or technology. Nor is there any serious rise in interest by those companies towards moving to Finland, where those graduates are. Thus, as of now, these praises – coming from leftist ideologues and government entities – are rather in the sphere of political propaganda. We still don’t have any real data, from the real world, of whether the Finnish experiment is that successful, after all. I mean, I lived the first 19 years of my life under a government that constantly praised and congratulated itself for everything it did, from educational system to technologies, to manufacture, to agriculture, etc. When the chips fell in 1989 and numbers were compared to the real world, it turned out the economy of all of Eastern Europe was about equal to the economy of Belgium.

There are specific numbers, though, on which all these leftists base their praises of Finland’s education: the results of the surveys of a project known as PISA, that is, Program for International Student Assessment, organized and run by the inter-government Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. (Now, as a side note, I find it ironically symbolic that a project can be named after a city whose most popular building is a leaning tower built on soft ground. But, that may be just me.) PISA was started in 1997 and published its first results in 2000. After that, studies were published for several years in a row starting in 2003 through 2009, and then, finally, in 2012. The PISA results have been quoted widely by government and inter-government entities, and especially by high-level UN-bureaucrats. In short, if there is a place where top educational bureaucrats go to get the data for their propaganda and promoting their agendas, it is PISA. And government bureaucrats are very self-conscious of the fact, given that the study is entirely sponsored from the budgets of the participating countries. And they pay big money to participate. It is not clear how much the study costs: such information is not posted on the PISA website, and I couldn’t find it anywhere else. I could find several companies that brag on their websites about getting grants for participating in the PISA project from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development – and the sums are in the ballpark of $20+ million each grant. And who knows how much is spent that is not even accounted for, which is the regular mode of operation of government bureaucrats. Our governments are very eager to spend hundreds of millions of our dollars for their own propaganda efforts, folks.

And no wonder, for the PISA project was specifically designed to support the concept of government education. When one looks – from an unbiased perspective – at the methods of the study and the specific spin of the results, it is very clear that the study has no intention whatsoever to actually measure educational results and help educators find the best methods. The study is simply designed to promote government agenda.

The most obvious sign of the real agenda behind PISA comes when we see the target of the so-called “study”: Only students in government schools. That’s right, folks, homeschoolers and students in private schools are explicitly excluded. Not just tacitly excluded, but explicitly excluded; in the very first edition of the PISA reports back in 2000, this was very explicitly said. That is, from the very beginning, the bureaucrats running PISA declared, in prtactice, “We want to measure education results, but we want to make sure we exclude those methods of education that have shown outstanding results in all categories. Like homeschooling.” Why? Well, obviously, what government will pay money only to to make it a public knowledge – and confirm by international studies, at that – that the homeschoolers in the country outperform the government schools by light years? Like one of the Murphy’s Laws of science says, “When doing an experiment, it’s always beneficial to know the results ahead of time.” When that experiment covets the money of a sponsor, it’s always beneficial to avoid results that the sponsor wouldn’t like. That much should be clear to all.

There are other, little things in the study that are also indicative of its nature as pure government propaganda: like measuring the availability of free transportation to school, or of free lunches, and the calories content of those free lunches, etc. One wonders what that has to do with education; and I can’t see any other explanation for including those in the study, except to make sure homeschoolers and private schools – if some country makes the mistake of including them – have a good balance to their outstanding academic results.

For all practical purpose, then, the PISA study is nothing more than pure, unadulterated government propaganda. There is no other explanation why an organization would run a study of educational performance and would avoid the best examples of achievement. Imagine McDonald’s paying for a study of the food in the best restaurants in the world, and specifically excluding all those that are not fast food, comparing only between McDonald’s, Chick-Fil-A, Burger King, and a few other fast food chains. Imagine China running a study on the best developed economies in the world that includes only Communist countries like China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc. And in fact, the national bureaucrats whose countries participate do know the study is government propaganda, and they do expect it to act as government propaganda. No one has any delusions about the objectivity of the study; and most of the participants expect to see the study praising their own country, irrespective of the results. After the results in 2009, India and China withdrew from participation; The Chinese ministry of education didn’t explain why, but the Indian government accused PISA in using standards that were “culturally unfair to Indian students.” Both countries had scored quite low, and under normal circumstances one would think that the local educational bureaucrats would use the survey to find the gaps and improve the quality of education. But that wasn’t their purpose in the first place. Their purpose was to use another world-government organization to praise their own system, whether it was good or not. When it didn’t work, they saw no reason for participation. The Chinese Communists, though, made a smarter move: They did return to participation, but this time only for specific isolated regions – like Shanghai. And in those specific isolated regions, only certain schools were chosen as being part of the school system; in Shanghai, for example, about 2/3 of the schools were excluded, because they supposedly were not part of the government school system. Under Communism, 2/3 of the schools are not government schools? Yeah, right. Predictably, in the 2012 survey those Chinese regions scored the highest of all participants. The Chinese Communists know how to do propaganda.

In the first several issues of the study, though – 2000, 2003, 2006 – Finland scored the highest in all categories; especially in the academic categories. What more could the socialists of the world ask for? There it is, a heavily socialist country of total government control over education, and, there, it scored the highest. For about a decade, everyone was studying the Finnish miracle of education. Then came 2009, and Finland’s score fell a little. And then came 2012. Finland’s score almost collapsed, marking significant drops in all academic categories. Oh, but this was not the worst to come. The 2012 study included a question, “Do you feel happy at school?” Not really a question one cares about when children need to be prepared for life, but then again, the PISA study wasn’t really concerned about real preparation for real life anyway. Besides, with Finland’s falling scores of the previous three years, it should have helped Finland, right?

Guess what. It didn’t. On that specific question, Finland scored 4th or 5th from the bottom – a little over 50% of the children surveyed said that they felt happy at school. Compared with the majority of the participating countries where more than 80% felt happy at school, this was a disastrously low result.

It was a smashing “wait, what?” moment. Finland’s children are unhappy in school? You mean, the children who are lucky to live in the only country in the world that places emphasis on happiness over academic achievement – these kids are unhappy? Children who are basically free to do whatever they want in school, children who have no exams to pass, no homework to do, no contests to be stressed about, no special schools for better students? Children whose recesses are 75 minutes, and whose every single need and desire is met and paid for by the state? These children are not happy in school???

To add insult to the injury, when we ask the adults, they are the happiest nation in the world. Several international surveys place Finland at the top of the ladder in terms of the happiness of its population. The rest of the world complains about lots of stuff, people in other nations are always unhappy and discontent with their lot in life, but when it comes to the Finns, they are always happy and satisfied – even among their fellow Scandinavians in Sweden and Norway. As a Swedish newspaper declared several years ago, “The Finns have found the fountain of happiness.”

But their kids are among the least happy children in the world? How is this possible?

This left the world’s community of educational bureaucrats speechless. After 2012, there were a few ignorant newspapermen who didn’t get the message and continued babbling about Finland’s supposedly miraculous educational experiment. But in general, Finland is not given as an example anymore. The Finnish ministry of education, which in previous years just casually claimed they didn’t care for any results of any studies, suddenly decided that the 2012 study is quite disturbing, and called for re-thinking the system. Some voices in Finland itself even suggested that a system that doesn’t assess its teachers will inevitably lead to complacency and stagnation among the teachers – seems like the Finns have begun discovering hot water, any average American business owner could have told them so. In general, no one knew what to say. The supposedly miraculous socialist experiment with government education collapsed within 15 years of its beginning, and failed to deliver not only on academic achievements – which was the focus of the PISA study – but also on what supposedly was the main focus of the Finnish educational bureaucrats, namely, happy children.

No one had an answer to this mystery. And no one still has.

But a covenantal analysis of the situation in Finland gives us the answer. And it not only gives us the answer, it also shows that contrary to the cheerful image socialists are presenting of Finland, the Finnish society is morally rotten to the bone. And the Finnish educational experience was a hopeless attempt to fill the gap, and provide for the children of Finland something that the society is not capable of providing anymore. And it shows that the inability of the educational system to deliver on its promises over a long term only shows that even with the best intentions, what government bureaucrats can’t deliver, they can’t deliver, because in God’s ethical/judicial reality, it has to be delivered by another institution. And therefore, eventually Finland’s education will collapse to the state of everyone else, unless there is a spiritual revival and a turn to the cultural solutions of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Before we even get to an analysis of the educational system, we need to start with another statistics, one which clearly shows the Finnish attitude to children. And that is that the fertility rate of Finnish women is 1.7 children per woman, well below the replacement rate for the population. It’s not as bad as Germany with its 1.4 children per woman, but it is still very low and decreasing rapidly over the last 10 years. For the last 10 years, death rate in Finland has been greater than the birth rate, and the gap has been widening. The birth rate has been low in Finland for several decades now, so low that the population pyramid is entirely reversed. In any demographically healthy society, the largest age group is that of children up to 15 years of age. In Finland today, the largest group is adults between 55 and 60 years of age – they outnumber the children by about 50%. For all practical purposes, Finland is a childless society.

There are all kinds of nativist and racist and nationalist groups in Europe and in Finland who blame it on “Jewish” conspiracies: somehow some Jewish world elites work to stop white Europeans from having children while encouraging the growth of other races. But the truth about Finland is that not only aren’t people discouraged from having more children, Finland actually has the best conditions and the most encouraging government policies for families who want to have children. This is a country that ranks in the top ten in the world in terms of individual income. It has very low population density. It has a number of government policies that literally push money and benefits and privileges in the hands of mothers who give birth and raise children. This is not Germany or the UK with their monstrous population density. This is not Eastern Europe with its low living standards from the decades of Communism. This is Finland where the people have all they need, and the country side – fertile and productive – is literally depopulated for the lack of people.

And they prefer to not have children. There is no way to blame this on a world conspiracy. There is a severe problem with the very soul and the moral character of the Finnish nation.

And keep in mind, these are the same Finnish people who also rank very high in the world in their professed happiness. They have the money, they have the high living standard, they have the living space, they have the benefits, everything they need to have children, they choose to not have children . . . and they are awfully happy that way. The baby-boomers’ generation is about to retire, there are not enough young people to take care of them and still keep the economy running . . . and they are still very happy about their own lives. These are people happy with themselves, without children, and self-consciously preparing to live off the back of their children. These are not people who are unhappy and would like to have more children but they just don’t have the means. Theirs is the happiness of selfishness and self-indulgence, not the happiness of a life of work, self-sacrifice, and accomplishment. True, the Finnish culture has deep Christian roots. But of those roots they have only kept the legalistic part: Keeping certain rules of conduct. (The Finnish society, according to even British observers, is religiously committed to many restrictions on personal expression.) What the Finns never learned from Christianity, apparently, is future-orientation and self-sacrifice. Or, if they have in the past, they have forgotten it. it’s all about themselves now, even the external self-control are obedience to legal rules.

The obvious conclusion is this: Children are a burden. The Finns don’t need them. They are happy without them. And, of course, even where they have them, they are all too happy to send them off to the government to educate. “Leave it to the experts” means, “We don’t want to bother.” Ship the little rascals to the government, let’s enjoy life. And ostracize parents who love their children too much, and prefer to keep them home and educate them. No matter what the Finns may say, the Finnish society is a society that is in love with its present, and at war against its own future, and it has no love in its heart for those who will live in the future, its own children.

And anyone who thinks the children don’t notice it, has absolutely no idea of child psychology. Children know when they are unwanted and ignored; they know when they are considered a burden and a hassle. They may not be able to express it with the literary categories of the adults; and they may not even be self-consciously aware of what they feel and know. But they feel it and they know it very well. And in their still immature state of lower self-control, their perception of being unwanted will heavily influence their behavior and their motivation. It is not by chance that on that bottom of the list of most unhappy children, Finland is joined by other countries – like Germany and the Czech Republic – of high living standards but low birth rates. Children know.

To be honest, whoever designed Finland’s educational experiment, was a genius. He realized what the children lacked and needed: a family. Thus, the experiment – at least at the beginning – drew heavily on the experience of homeschoolers. Yes, folks, the deepest irony at the bottom of this most praised by all socialists educational system were principles borrowed from homeschooling. The lack of assessment of teachers was just an institutional form of parental authority: In a homeschooling family, no outside authority assesses the qualifications of the parents, right? They are teachers by default, by the very nature of their parental authority. The lack of exams and grades and competition and rigid curriculum in the early stages was also borrowed from homeschoolers, and particularly from the unschooling movement. The extensive focus on individual assistance was entirely a homeschooling thing: after all, any institutional educational system is based on mass production; teachers have no time for individual students and their personal development. The long periods of play and personal liberty to pursue topics of personal interest – well, gee, where did that idea come from, if not from homeschooling? If bureaucrats could have thought of it independently, why couldn’t they think of it for 200 years, and it only appeared to them after the first generation of homeschoolers demonstrated its effectiveness?

It was then natural and inevitable that in the first several years of the experiment it will produce outstanding results. Not in comparison to homeschooling, of course – only homeschooling can compete with homeschooling, institutional schools are lagging far behind – but in comparison to other government systems which still work under the factory, conveyor-belt model. Of course, when children in Finland are being treated as something more than just cogs in a vast machine, they will feel – comparatively to what they felt before – more wanted, more loved, and more encouraged. Any little step you take towards homeschooling will inevitably produce such results, period. More wanted, more loved, more encouraged will produce a higher level of motivation and commitment. And, as every teacher knows, the child’s motivation and commitment are 95% of the process of learning. In such a system, the teachers didn’t even have to be all Masters – after all, homeschooling mothers with very little formal education produce miracles with their children in the US. We could say that Finland actually spent way too much to produce the effect; the concept of making the kids feel at home was enough.

But it was also to be expected that it couldn’t continue forever. The system tried to mimic the home, but it did it not as a family, it did it as a hive. The main ethical problem remained unresolved. Children are still a burden to their parents. The home is still not the place where the children belong. They belong to a hive where surrogate fathers and mothers are paid to professionally make them feel like home; professionally produce in them motivation, commitment, and purpose. The children eventually will figure out that the school reform is only designed to mask the fact that their parents are happy without them, and the whole world of adults is happy without children; the school – for all its attractiveness – is only a form of friendly concentration camp where the undesirables of the society are kept so that the majority is kept happy. And when the children figure that out, they will lose their motivation, and will deteriorate academically. And also, will be a generation of unhappy children in a world of happy, selfish adults. Did I say “will”? My bad. They already are.

Because there is no place like home. And when you are a 6-7-8-9-year-old kid, and your parents kick you out of their home to preserve their happiness, you are a homeless kid. It doesn’t matter if they send you to the nicest school system ever designed, with the most careful and qualified teachers, all with Master’s degrees – you are still a homeless kid, period. And when you are a homeless kid, in the minority among a population of adults who are all too happy of their selfish present, never really thinking of their future, then you grow up with the idea that you have no future, and no purpose. Yeah, for a short time, your bureaucratic well-paid surrogate mothers and fathers in school may be able to manipulate you to have a surrogate purpose and surrogate future. But eventually, it is fake, and it thins out, and you are left again like the little match girl in  the Andersen’s story, in a cold world of selfish adults too busy celebrating their happiness.

In the final account, no matter how well it started, Finland’s educational experiment will end in ruins, just like any other educational experiment that has tried to substitute a government institution for the family. No matter how bright he teachers, no matter how well-paid they are, no matter how much they try to produce happiness in their students, and no matter how much they copy from homeschooling . . . none of these external things will solve the real internal problem of the Finnish society. And that problem is in the hearts of the Finns themselves, in their selfish love for themselves, and their utter lack of interest in the future, and therefore in their own children. Finland may continue the inertia from its Christian past for a time, until a generation comes which is so bitter against its parents for their selfishness that it eventually breaks with their conventions and rebels against the past – because it has no future anyway.

God is not mocked.

This week I will assign for reading two books, not just one. The books are short, but they are laden with meaning, and they are written by two Russian brothers, science fiction writers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The first book is titled The Final Circle of Paradise (in its English translation; the original Russian title was Predatory Things of Our Age). The other book is The Second Invasion from Mars. Strugatsky’s style is enjoyable, but keep in mind, they are more philosophers than they are fiction writers. Follow the stories carefully. You may discover in them Finland as I described it earlier. And, well, you may discover the modern American society also.

And I will again ask you to consider helping me in my mission in Bulgaria. It’s a fertile field, and we need seed to put in it. The seed is there – hundreds of books that will help us lay that foundation for a Christian civilization. Visit BulgarianReformation.com and donate. We have the opportunity to out-write, out-publish, and out-speak the opposition to the Kingdom of God. Help me use that opportunity.

Welcome to Episode 12 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 a unique contribution the Christian worldview gave to the world of economics, warfare, and exploration: the caravel. Well, not just the caravel, but all the ship designs that followed from it: the carrack, the galleon, and the later ship designs that became the mainstay for the Age of Sail. That whole era between the 15th and the 19th centuries, the era of discovery, evangelism, conquest, slave trade, abolition of the slave trade, commerce, colonization, mass migration, and technological and scientific development, that era literally passed under the flapping of the sails. So important the sailing ship was that in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries, every single able-bodied male in the British Isles was expected to have spent at least a month of his life under the sails of a ship, whether as a sailor, a soldier, a merchant, an explorer, or simply as a traveler. To a certain extent it can be compared to our age where everyone has been on a plane at least once, except that at the time, even simple travelers were expected to know the basic duties of sailors and join the crew in times of emergency. And this era, which looks so romantic to us today, started with a simple, low-cost, and yet ingenious, sturdy, defensible, and economically efficient design, the caravel. The caravel can easily be numbered among the true miracles of Christendom, a technological development that is way too ingenious to be the product of natural development; to those of us who know the history of navigation and naval warfare, there is nothing natural nor evolutionary in its development. Its uniqueness is such as to demand a spiritual, covenantal explanation of its origin. And indeed, we will see in the next 30 minutes, it was really a product of a unique worldview and a unique civilization based on that worldview: Christendom. The caravel couldn’t just develop in any other civilization, for it required a very specific faith, and a very specific concept of man, the world, economics, and the moral value of the individual, in order to develop.

I know, most of you never thought about it, and most of you never thought that there were covenantal lessons to learn from the caravel. But that’s only because we have all been under the influence of rationalistic and naturalistic worldviews; worldviews that self-consciously avoid noticing the supernatural causes in history, even where every single clue points to a cause that is above nature, and above rationalistic interpretations. If you try to learn about the history of the caravel in Wikipedia or any other non-Christian book on history, you will served with explanations of how the caravel developed in some evolutionary way, just naturally from previous ship designs and from a natural technological development. (Which is, by the way, the Marxist view of historical causation: technology – or the evolution of the means of production – as an independent factor, and from it, the historical changes in economic relationships, and then the change in law, religion, philosophy, etc.) But these explanations do not explain why the same design didn’t develop in China, or in India. The several individual technological developments combined in the caravel – and we will look at each one them in detail – have existed for many centuries in China, India, the Muslim world; some were even known to the pre-Roman Celts, as we will see. But the caravel didn’t develop with those cultures, even though they had all the material factors for its development. Something in those cultures prevented them from taking the next step and creating the caravel, even though they had had the technologies for centuries. And there was something in the Western culture that made Europeans immediately make the connection and create the single most important design that became the technological prerequisite for the global dominance of Christendom. And it is very clear, from the historical data, that that something was not a material nor a social factor. It was something else.

It is the same mistake Murray Rothbard made more than two decades ago in his criticism of Gary North: he disagreed with Gary North that there was no neutrality in any area of life, and asked the misplaced question: “Is there a Christian way to fly a plane?” For all his amazing insight and understanding and contributions in other areas of thought an action, Rothbard’s professed agnosticism betrayed him in the crucially important area of epistemology; he failed to ask the question that is obvious to Christians who understand presuppositionalism: “How did we get to have planes in the first place?” Several years ago, I responded to Rothbard’s question in an article for AmericanVision.org: “Is There a Non-Christian Way to Fly a Plane?” And I showed that the assumption that flying a plane is a religiously and morally neutral issue is missing some clearly obvious connections: That the very existence of planes is predicated on certain faith and its specific presuppositions. Without that faith and without those presuppositions, modern science wouldn’t develop, modern technology wouldn’t develop, and the modern systems of financing, production, and economic infrastructure wouldn’t develop. People have to believe certain thing in order to develop planes and make them economical and useful. It takes a belief system even to trust the scientists and the engineers to even pay money for a ticket and get on that plane, let alone to operate it. And the fact that people of different religions are now operating and planes and using the services of airline companies only show that that specific faith that made planes possible has now become dominant around the world, in changing and shaping the fundamental presuppositions even of those who formally do not subscribe to it. Not only is there a Christian way to fly a plane, there is no other way than a Christian way to fly a plane, and even non-Christians have to adopt it in order to fly planes. (On a side note, just as there is only a Christian way to defend liberty, and Rothbard himself had to borrow presuppositions and fundamental principles from Christianity to write his books. And he stood faithful to liberty only to the extent he borrowed them.)

Returning to the caravel, the best way to show its revolutionary superiority over all the other floating craft at the time is to tell the story of an early voyage. No, it’s not the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492 which remains the most popular and well-known voyage done on caravels ever; and the Santa Maria, which was rather a carrack, and upgraded version of a caravel, is one of the most well-known ships of that era. In Columbus’s voyage, the caravel only exhibited two of its superior qualities – sea-worthiness and constant speed. We will now look at another voyage, 5 years later, in which three carracks (upgraded versions of the caravel) and one caravel were placed in the worst possible conditions, and were strained to the maximum to show their superior qualities. And they passed the test with flying colors, laying the foundation for the expansion of Christendom around the world.

On July 8, 1497, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama and a crew of 170 of Portugal’s finest seamen left Lisbon with the Sao Gabriel and the Sao Raphael, two carracks of the same type, 178 tons each, the Berrio, a caravel of 90 tons, and the Sao Miguel, a carrack of 200 tons tonnage, used as a supply ship. The objective of the expedition was to sail around Africa and reached India. The first two carracks, The Sao Gabriel and the Sao Raphael, were very special; their construction was based on recommendations – and also overseen – by Bartolomeu Dias, another captain who 10 ears earlier had reached the southern tip of Africa and had confirmed that Africa could be circumnavigated. Dias joined da Gama’s expedition until the Cabo Verde islands. He probably wanted to see how his babies were going to behave on high seas. As the expedition proved eventually, they held admirably against overwhelming odds.

(It would be interesting to mention that Dias was 37-years old when he made his voyage in 1488. At the start of his voyage, Vasco da Gama was in his early 30s. Keep that in mind.)

The first feat of the four ships came as they were still in the Atlantic. Da Gama chose to not follow the coast of Africa on his way south but to continue deep into the Atlantic Ocean as far south as he could until he reached the latitude of the southern tip of Africa, and then turn east. The reason for taking this risk was that he knew from Dias that the prevailing winds and currents along the coast of Africa were from the south, so his ships would have to struggle with both wind and current to reach their destination. Da Gama reasoned that the area in the ocean west of Africa should be like a giant pool where air and water move in a circular, counter-clockwise pattern, so he took the route that would move him along the direction of the movement in the circle.

Now, while such move today seems rather logical and safe, it wasn’t so at the time. Waves and storms on the high seas are much more brutal than those close to the shore. In addition, from a navigational perspective, being out of sight of land deprives the ships of the opportunity to determine their position; it was an age of imperfect star tables, no chronometers, and, the southern hemisphere’s navigational stars were not yet charted and tabled. So, from the perspective of safety, the ships had to be sea-worthy, that is, sturdy enough and with the right shape in order to stand ocean waves. On the other hand, for the purposes of navigation, they had to be able to make consistent speeds in all kinds of weather, at minimal drift. From the perspective of ship-building, these requirements are self-contradicting. Sea-worthiness requires that the ship has a lower length-to-beam ratio, that is, shorter from bow to stern and wider from side to side. On the other hand, consistent speed in all kinds of weather requires exactly the opposite: a higher length-to-beam ratio, that is, a ship that is longer and narrower. In addition to it, there two more conflicting demands on the design: the caravel and the carrack had to be able to explore shallow waters and sail up rivers (which required shallower keel) and yet withstand ocean storms (which required deeper keel). Right there we have the first seemingly unresolvable problem which previous ship-builders had given up on. Europe either had long shallow keel oar galleys in the Mediterranean or deep keel but unwieldy ocean-going sailing ships in the North Sea, called cogs. The first test of the design had come.

The four ships passed it with flying colors. Vasco da Gama led the expedition into the open space of the South Atlantic, and that in the winter and spring in the south hemisphere. It took him over three months to reach South Africa, the longest recorded journey out of sight of land so far. (Columbus’s first voyage, by comparison, was only a little over a month from shore to shore.) When the ships finally reached the coast of Africa at the St. Helena Bay, they were only 90 nautical miles north of the Cape of Good Hope where Dias had reached 10 years earlier. From a navigational perspective, da Gama had tried a ricochet shot at a target a thousand yards away which he couldn’t directly see, entirely on mathematical calculations, with the first shot ever with a brand new rifle. And he almost hit the bull’s eye. And the ships arrived in a perfect condition, after three months sailing the high seas.

Having reached the southern tip of Africa, the expedition stopped and broke up the supply ship, the Sao Miguel, and distributed the supplies to the other three ships. No, there was nothing wrong with the ship; the move seems to have been planned from the very beginning with a view of crossing the Atlantic. This was another example of the uniqueness of the caravel: the design that was so effective in both crossing oceans and maintaining constant speed in adverse conditions, was at the same time so low cost that an expedition or a trade convoy could afford to lose a ship or two and still make profit. Within the next year and a half Vasco da Gama would lose one ship – he would have to scuttle the Sao Rafael – and yet the net economic revenue from the expedition would amount to 60 times its total cost. There are not many examples in history where a trading enterprise could afford to lose half of its fleet and yet turn out such immense profit. The caravel was both efficient and low-cost, even for its time.

But the real challenges were still ahead.

On March 2, 1498 the expedition reached Mozambique and enter the harbor of the capital of Mozambique, an Arab-controlled Muslim sultanate which was a major strategic point for the Arab trade in the Indian Ocean. For the next one year, the three ships would be sailing, fighting, and trading in waters entirely controlled by Muslim Arabs, and completely unknown to and unexplored by European navigators. And that at a time when back home, the Mediterranean was boiling with the battles between Christendom and the Muslim world. Fifty years earlier, the Ottoman Turks had defeated the last European crusade of Ladislaw, the King of Poland, and then had taken Constantinople. Six years earlier, the Spanish joint monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella had taken over the last Muslim stronghold in Western Europe, Granada; and the Spanish forces were taking the fight over to the coast of Africa. The Knights of St. John were still holding the island of Rhodes and harassing the coast of Asia Minor. The wars with Islam would continue for another 4 centuries. In fact, forty years later, the two sons of Vasco da Gama himself would use fleets of caravels and carracks to assault the Ottoman Empire in the Red Sea as far north as Suez; and his younger son, Cristovao, would die a heroic death defending the Christian Queen of Ethiopia against Muslim invaders. In a period of history when Islam was immeasurably more powerful than Christendom in terms of economic resources and population, and in time of a merciless conflict between the two, Vasco da Gama sailed right in the very backyard of the Muslim world with only three ships, and not only lived to tell the tale, but also returned fabulously rich, with enough resources to do it over again.

In Mozambique, he pretended to be a Muslim merchant. He was soon unmasked, but he managed to leave the harbor unharmed with all three ships. The harbor fortress couldn’t stop him, for his ships fired their heavy canon at it, creating enough chaos to slip away without problems. He would have to repeat the same feat of leaving a hostile harbor unharmed at least three more times in Muslim ports, and one time in an Indian port. This is an important testimony to the value of the caravel, and we will see why shortly. While sailing in waters heavily infested with Muslim ships, he resorted to looting and piracy; in those days of constant warfare, this was considered a legitimate activity as long as it targeted the enemy; and where da Gama was, there were no friends within thousands of miles, only enemies. In all his encounters, his ships were victorious; he didn’t suffer any defeat, and he was able to load his ships with a lot of precious cargo.

It was this part of the voyage that exhibited some other amazing advantages of the caravel design, unparalleled by anything the rest of the world had at the time.

First of all, not only was the caravel sea-worthy, it was also extremely maneuverable in shallow waters and small spaces. Navigators and pilots know very well the extreme challenges of maneuvering a ship within a harbor or a port – and we are talking about sailing ships here, not the modern motor vessels. Most harbors then, and all harbors today, did not allow ships to maneuver on their own power; they were, and are today, supposed to use tug boats, and specially trained harbor pilots. (Keep in mind that a ship is not like a truck. A ship can’t just press on the brakes if it can’t take a curve; there is no solid surface against which it can brake. Maneuvering a ship – let alone a sailing ship – in narrow waters is a complex science.) Leaving a hostile port with three ships unharmed would have meant not using tug boats, and also being able to maneuver in such a way as to avoid being exposed to coastal artillery – or, always being in a position to suppress any fire from the shore. The caravels proved up to the task of maneuvering, because they not only had a unique hull structure but also a unique rigging – a combination of square and triangular sails on two or three masts which allowed them to both beat upwind and quickly pick up speed downwind.

But they also had the firepower to suppress opposition. This was another unique characteristic of the caravel. While it was built for exploration and commerce, it could also carry heavy cannon turning it into a true fortress on water. This took an engineering miracle unheard of in other parts of the world. On one hand, there was the problem of having enough space for cargo and for the heavy cannon and the cannonballs and the gunpowder. But there was a greater issue to resolve: For a ship to remain stable on the water, its center of gravity has to be as low as possible. But for the cannon to be effective in battle, it has to be mounted as high above the water line as possible. And heavy cannon is, well, heavy, which means placing it higher would move up the center of gravity of the ship, making the ship unstable. When the recoil from a broadside is added to the equation, the problem seems unresolvable, for no ship at the time could mount ten heavy guns on its deck, fire a broadside against an enemy, and not capsize under the combined effect of their weight and of their recoil.

And yet, the caravel did it. And it did it because the engineers and ship-builders of Christendom had discovered and applied in practice the engineering concept of metacentric height, that is, the distance between the center of mass of the ship and the geometric center of its submerged volume. I will leave you, folks, to read up on this interesting engineering concept, but in short, it is an application of the Archimedes’s Principle, integrated to take in account the geometry of the floating body. It is not a concept that can come just naturally and intuitively to the human mind; it takes serious scientific effort to formulate it and apply it in practice. That mechanical balance could be created by counterposing geometry to mass seemed like black magic at the time. The Chinese did understand the principle and used it to build tumbling mandarin dolls (or the okiagari-koboshi dolls in Japan, or the modern roly-poly toys and the Russian nevalyashka dolls). We don’t know if their engineers applied it to ship-building. If they did, they never used it to mount heavy cannon on their junk boats. It was European engineers who first thought of ships as roly-poly systems, and used it to build their ships into floating fortresses. Eighty years after da Gama’s voyage, this engineering concept won the battle at Lepanto: the six gigantic galleases built by the Arsenal in Venice, with several decks above the water level, with mounted heavy canon, won the battle for Christendom. The Turkish captains believed that these large ships couldn’t be anything else but merchant ships, and happily surrounded them with their galleys, ready to board and loot them. By the time they realized that all these decks above their heads were bristling with cannon, it was too late. Six galleases, built on the same principle of mechanical balance and gun mounting as the caravels, sank a third of the Turkish fleet even before the battle started in earnest.

With his three ships thus armed, Vasco da Gama could face no serious opposition on the sea lanes between Africa and India. The technological superiority of the caravel made him almost invulnerable, and the numerical superiority of his enemies meant nothing. Eventually, he found a pilot who took him across the Indian Ocean to Calicut in India. Calicut brought some disappointment to da Gama, in the fact that the local merchants showed little interest in the European goods; the European economy wasn’t developed enough to be able to offer anything of significant value to the Indian market. Still, even the meager trade he was able to do produced results that back in Europe would amount to enormous profit. Eventually, the relation between da Gama and the King of Calicut deteriorated, which prompted da Gama to flee the port in the same way he fled the Muslim ports, forcing his way out, using the superior maneuverability and firepower of his ships. (This time he even took hostages from the personal guard of the King.)

Immediately after that, da Gama made his only serious tactical mistake: he ignored the local knowledge of the monsoon seasons and tried to sail back to Africa before the winter monsoon pattern had set in. This meant that while the trip from Africa took him only 23 days, the trip back took more than four months – longer than his trip through the South Atlantic. We don’t know why he made that decision; he may have been afraid of remaining near the coast of India after his quarrel with the king of Calicut. But even on that journey, the caravels proved their superiority: they were still able to beat the unfavorable winds – a feat that few ships at the time could do. Again, the unique rigging of the caravels was responsible for this.

On the coast of Africa he scuttled the Sao Rafael and continued back the same way around the southern tip. In the Atlantic, the two remaining ships lost sight of each other during a storm. The Berrio reached Portugal earlier. Vasco da Gama stopped at the Azores to tend for his brother who had fallen terminally ill. After the death of his brother, he returned to Portugal, with a treasure that was 60 times the total cost of the expedition – even after counting the cost of the two scuttled ships and the pensions of the those of the crew who died on the voyage. He had proven his worth as a captain.

And the caravel had proven its unique worth as a ship. It could safely sail the high seas, and yet maneuver in narrow straits and shallow waters. It could maintain steady speed for long distances, and it could beat the wind. It could carry enough cargo to make it economically profitable, and yet mount heavy guns on its deck to make it an unassailable fortress. And it did all this at the lowest possible cost – for it was cheap to build, cheap to maintain, and it could do all these tasks with the minimum number of crew. Improving on the caravel, Christendom now had the means to conquer the world. Within a century, the oceans of the world would become a province of Europe.

The question now is, why was this unique ship design developed in Europe, and not in China, or the Arab world, or in Indochina, or in Japan, or in the Mezoamerican civilization? The different technological elements combined in the caravel were not all discovered in Europe. Europe wasn’t even so well developed economically in the 15th century; remember, among the trade goods Vasco da Gama brought with him, there wasn’t much the Indian merchants would be interested in. Sea-worthy ships were made by the Chinese as early as the second century AD, and they had several masts and also had triangular, fully battened sails, capable of withstanding serious storms. From Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars we know that the Veneti tribe and the other Celtic tribes along the Atlantic made sturdy, ocean-going sailing ships. (In his book, America B.C., Barry Fell shows that Celts and Phoenicians and Hebrews traded with North and South America long before Julius Caesar.) China and India had heavy artillery long before Europe had it; they also made use of rockets and missiles as early as AD 11th century; but they never made it a habit to mount them on their ships. The Chinese also had some knowledge of the concept of metacentric height and the use of geometry to balance mass but used it only for toys. The Arabs knew and applied Archimedes’s Principle to building large merchant ships.

But none of these civilizations, despite their superiority in numbers, scientific knowledge and technological discoveries, and economic resources, made the effort to put all these advantages together and produce the miracle of the caravel. They didn’t even bother to copy it and perfect it after they saw its clear superiority – the way Europeans copied and applied in practice artillery, the paper, missile technology, the Arabic numbers, and many others. Throughout the 16th century these civilizations still had the economic and technological opportunity to catch up with Christendom and beat Europe in her own game. But they never did. To the contrary, in the face of a growing threat, they stagnated further, until in the 17th century it was too late. Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, Swedish, French explorers, merchants, adventurers were roaming the seas in ships even better than the caravel, and there was no force capable of stopping their advance. Why did European engineers and ship-builders invested the money and effort to find all the solution to problems that would face future explorers, merchants, and conquerors? People don’t just naturally take the risk to invest in the future, in discovering and production of new things that may not even prove beneficial; they need to have something to create the impetus for taking the risk of going beyond the zone of comfort and habit. What was it that Europe had that the rest of the world didn’t?

It was her worldview founded on and nourished by her Christian faith. A worldview that the non-Christian nations didn’t have. A worldview that made her ignore the comfortable complacency of the present and the known, and dive into the world of the unknown future, despite her disadvantages in terms of population and economic resources.

First, it was the drive to expansion characteristic to her worldview, which was lacking in any other civilization. Modern historians and sociologists give different reasons for that drive to expansion. Atheist – and especially Marxist – historians blame it on either demographic pressure or greed for gold. But such interpretation is ludicrous. First, Europe was not nearly as densely populated as, for example, India or China, or the valleys of the Nile or Mesopotamia, which had a monstrous density of their populations at the time compared to Europe. Even in Mexico, the Aztec Empire had 3 to 4 million population squeezed in a few cities around a lake, and their military exploits had nothing to do with colonizing more lands or trade but just looting and capturing material for the human sacrifices. And to propose that only Europeans were so greedy as to want expansion, while everyone else was free of greed shows a serious lack of understanding of the human nature. Of course, trade and the desire for riches can be said to have been a major motivation for many people, but still, the same desire for riches didn’t make Japan or China have a mind focused on expansion. Christian historians – like John Eidsmoe, in his Columbus and Cortez: Conquerors for Christ – explains the expansion drive with evangelism. This is a more probable cause, given that evangelism is unique to the Christian faith. (There is a sort of evangelistic drive in Islam, but much weaker, for it is combined with a fatalistic worldview.) I have my own version for the motives for the expansion drive, but that version needs to be developed in a bit more detail. It is that the drive to expansion was eschatological; specifically, finding the empire of Prester John. I think this motive is much more universal, given that not all explorers expressed desire to evangelize or convert the pagans, but for two centuries all of them were officially supplied by their governments with accreditation letters to Prester John. We will talk about it in another podcast.

But all of these – demographic pressure, trade impetus, evangelism, eschatology – were based on a Christian worldview. Yes, even the trade impetus and the demographic pressure. It was the Christian worldview that informed them that the meek shall inherit the earth and therefore the righteous were supposed to leave their comfortable lives and go out and conquer the earth. The expansion mindset was possible only in a Christian context.

But the expansion motive was not solely responsible; there was more than that. Namely, that Europe expected that expansion to happen through individuals, families, and private economic entities. Pagan Rome also had a drive to expansion for a time, as did China, as did some of the ancient empires. But that expansion was an expansion of the state’s borders, not an expansion of a civilization or faith. The expansion of Christendom was to be expansion of wealth and dominion of individuals; Christianity, even in its darkest days, viewed the individual as the basic unit of government, and therefore the individual as the basic unit of civilization. It trusted the individual, it taught the individual to be self-governing and responsible, to be a moral entity of his own, before God. And consequently, the technology and the economy of Christendom took it as their mandatory task to produce the best tools of dominion at the lowest cots possible so that as many individuals as possible could take advantage of then and expand their personal and individual borders – in wealth, land, commerce, industry, etc. The Chinese had magnificent ships and knowledge of ship-building and engineering but they never applied that knowledge to reduce the cost of building their ships; large-scale ship-building was affordable only for the state and its rulers. The lower classes couldn’t afford more than simple boats for fishing or personal transportation. In Europe, even though kings and princes invested in the development of new and better ship designs, the knowledge and the opportunity were open to everyone with heart and desire to take it to the seas.

And not only the ship designs, but the weapons too. The caravel and the subsequent ship designs wouldn’t be of much value for private individuals if the heavy cannon needed to make it a fortress on water weren’t also available for purchase by private individuals. Between China, India, and the Arab world, Europe was the last to place heavy guns on the battle field. But pretty soon European arms manufacturers were producing them in large quantities and at prices low enough for small ship owners to be able to afford dozens of them. A private businessman shopped for guns in the same way we today shop for tools: He’d just order them and have them delivered to his ship. That was Christendom, folks, and that was liberty. We argue and fight today  for open carry for little handguns. Our Christian forefathers could open carry mortars and 42-pounders. Keep that in mind. This concept of the private individual as a responsible, self-governing moral agent, worthy of trust and delegated to expand Christendom on his own private initiative, through commerce and conquest, was unique to Christianity. Without understanding this unique concept, we can’t understand neither the development of the caravel, nor that whole period of the history of the world between the 15th and the 19th centuries.

And of course, their optimistic view of the future, characteristic only to the Christian faith. European engineers wouldn’t apply their talent and skill to creating the miracle of the caravel if it wasn’t for expectations of the future that told them that it will be better and more developed than the past. People do not normally get out of their comfort zone, or out of their habits, to risk, innovate, explore, invest effort, unless they are moved by a faith that not only tells them that success is possible but also, that it is mandatory. The concept that there is always a solution to every legitimate problem before man is not a natural concept; it must be nurtured by a supernatural faith. Why would anyone invest time and effort to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem – like the conflict between stability and defensibility of a ship – unless he has the faith that there is a solution to every problem? Why would anyone believe there is a solution to every problem unless there is an underlying faith that both problems and solutions are created by the same Creator, who has created mankind with the purpose of taking dominion, that is, solving problems? This explains why non-Christian civilizations, even when they had superior scientific and technological knowledge, didn’t bother to apply it in practice. It also explains why Europeans, immediately after making a discovery, rushed to apply it to practice and mass production and make it available to everyone at the lowest price possible. Without Christianity, no one would bother to design such a unique ship as the caravel.

Thus, when historians say that European dominance was caused by Europe’s superior technology, they are right. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. For behind that superior technology, there was a superior faith with a superior worldview, which made both the science, and the technology, and the economic infrastructure possible. Without this understanding, we can’t understand history.

We tend to take technology for granted these days, but we shouldn’t. There is no natural evolutionary origin of technology, and there was no such natural origin of the caravel. The caravel was not simply another ship design. By the standards of the age, it was a monster. It combined several technologies that were previously thought incompatible within the same design. It solved problems related to navigation, safety, exploration, commerce, and defense, that were previously thought unsolvable. And it did it at a cost so low that any middle-class private entrepreneur could afford to buy and dispose of the ship when needed, and still make a profit. Its development was so unique that to the world outside of Christendom it was nothing less than magic. Magic it wasn’t, but its engineering wasn’t natural either; it was the supernatural product of a supernatural worldview that laid the foundation for expansion, profit, and success, and that not only for the powerful of the day but for individual men and private businesses as well. The caravel was the start of the global dominance of Christendom, and the origin of the caravel was in the Christian worldview of Europe.

The book I will assign for reading this week is a very short but informative book: Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White, Jr. The book is not about the caravel, it is about three earlier technological developments. The value in the book is not so much in its worldview – for it is not explicitly Christian – as it is in showing that what we take for granted today was in fact history changing. We need to stop taking things for granted and see God’s direct involvement in history, through His Gospel and through the worldview created by His Gospel. And for this, we need to learn to see the important details where we haven’t seen them before.

And I will return you again to my work in Bulgaria. We just recently published in Bulgarian R.J. Rushdoony’s The Foundations of Social Order: the book that I consider the most unique book ever written in Christendom. And that book is exactly about that: how the worldview of Christianity changed history. I need your help to publish more books. Visit Bulgarian Reformation.com and help me create the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Bulgaria.

God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 11 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 our modern effeminate culture in all its manifestations; and we will also try to see where exactly the reason for the rise of that culture is. Hold fast to the arms of your chair; you may discover that those who have been most vociferous in denouncing that culture have actually been the main culprits in its creation and nurturing.

To think about it, it hit us all of a sudden, didn’t it? Just a few years ago sodomites and other sexual perverts and monsters were still noisy but rather absent from most of American life, and limited to a few dens of sexual depravity. If anything, their influence seemed to be waning. In November 2009, in the same week the progressive Air America announced it was ceasing operations, another network declared bankruptcy: Window Media LLC, a financial group specifically focused on financing and operating newspapers and magazines geared toward the sodomite community. It shut down several publications in South Florida, Atlanta, Houston, and Washington DC. The group’s market forecasts for a growing market of sodomite demand didn’t materialize; the assessments about the sodomite community amounting to at least 3% of the population proved to be wrong. Earlier that same year both Obama and Hillary Clinton, when asked about sodomite so-called “marriage,” said they were not going to support it nor push it. Apparently, their assessment of the numbers was not in favor of it. It would take lots of imagination in 2009 or 2010 to predict that the miniature share of sexual perverts in the US will go on offensive in just a couple of years, and within 4 years will not only turn the tables but will also exercise social and political influence widely disproportional to their small numbers. If, of course, we are talking about sexual perverts, indeed, and not about political and legislative initiatives of groups who care nothing for the sexual perversion itself but are using it for other purposes. (And most probably will eventually throw the sodomites in the next dumpster once their agenda is accomplished.)

Either way, the hits came so quickly and unexpectedly that today, no one really knows what to do. Among most Christians, the mood is that this can’t be stopped nor reversed; all we can hope for is some rearguard action, to slow down the assault. Kim Davis who simply obeyed her state’s laws was kidnapped by federal thugs while the Sheriff of her own county remained passive and uninvolved. A few Republican politicians started incorporating the issue in their repertoire of talking points, under the meaningless heading of “religious liberty,” but we know how effective that is, when it comes to real action; how many Republican states have banned abortion so far, and what have Republican majorities in Congress and the Senate done in this regard? Most Republican politicians have already surrendered, as have the supposedly “conservative” TV big mouths, also known as “pundits.” (Remember how Ann Coulter happily jumped at the opportunity to speak to some sodomite “conservative” organization?) No more than a couple of months after the Obergefell decision, the issue of men in dresses who want to have access to the ladies’ restrooms suddenly became a big legislative and judicial issue. Pedophiles are preparing for action too. Where does this end? No one knows, and Christians not only don’t have a plan, they don’t have any faith nor hope it can be stopped. Remember my podcast about the Denethor ministries to which American Christians contribute billions of dollars every year? Go through their websites and find me a single one of these ministries that offers anything of value for its money, saying that we will win this battle and here’s the plan to win it. There isn’t one. They are all convinced that this trend is unstoppable. They have all surrendered to it, psychologically, and they are teaching and leading their listeners to surrender as well. Why not, after all, they have been teaching surrender when America was still at least outwardly decent in its culture and legislation and politics. Now that all pervert hell is breaking loose, what should make them change the tune? Remember Denethor’s cry, “Abandon your posts”?

The situation is even worse, as a matter of fact. Not only no one has any hope or any plan for victory, neither do they have any understanding of what caused all this. Yes, yes, all these ministries repeat these days that America will be judged by God for this apostasy. Strange that they would say that, though. When Christian Reconstructionists first preached and taught the covenantal character of history – that God judges in historynations, cultures, collectives, and individuals for their obedience or disobedience – these same ministries, 20 or 30 years ago, opposed it and objected that God doesn’t judge anyone or any nation in history. Meredith Kline established the foundational tenet of the modern Two Kingdoms rhetoric, “prosperity and adversity being experienced in a manner largely unpredictable,” because God dispenses them without any regard for men’s obedience or disobedience. Today, even the staunchest two-kingdoms theologians have abandoned in practice what they taught just a few years ago, and believe that America, after all, will be judged for this apostasy.

But still, there is no answer to the question: what brought us this far? Where did this apostasy come from? Why is it that suddenly Christians are so weak and powerless, and the enemies are so bold and powerful and victorious? How did the culture change so abruptly? How did our culture suddenly forget the difference between the sexes, or chooses to ignore it . . . nay, worse than that, actively – through legislation and court action – seeks to suppress it? And why blame it on legislation when the very society adopts the same mentality in its cultural habits and mores. Men – even those men who are not perverted – are more and more effeminate, more and more exhibit behavior and conduct that we used to associate with women in the past. Forget about the perverts, it’s the straight men who look like women more and more, and act like women more and more. Men used to value action and purpose and work and toughness, used to brag about their achievements and exploits, they even bragged about their scars and survivals and how many hits they took in a brawl and still stood firm and fought back. And just the other day I read an article titled, “39 Things Women Will Never Understand About Being a Man”! And the author goes on and on in listing in how many ways his little tender sensitive soul finds offensive in being a man, things like “We never get complimented for our looks,” or “We are hardly ever allowed to express any emotion,” or “We don’t have anyone to hug us when we are hurt or down.” Seriously. And the article had something like half a million shares. And no, it’s not just the liberals. Try to say any harsh truth in an only mildly harsh way in any church today and see how many men will have their feelings hurt, and will ignore the truth you are saying; and you will buried under an avalanche of “corrections” of how to tell them the same truth in a way that won’t make them feel bad about it. Seems like the sodomites and other perverts are our least problem. Our greatest problem – present everywhere around us – is the effeminate culture of our straight men.

How did we get to this?

I remember the Hollywood movies back in the 1980s. Bulgaria was a former Communist country so we were not free to buy and watch Hollywood movies – certainly not Hollywood movies that would depict the greatness of America, or her liberty, or her economic prosperity, or her superiority over the Communist regimes. Rambo, Rocky, Top Gun, and many other ideologically incorrect movies of the 80s were simply not allowed. Tapes were smuggled through the borders, nevertheless, copied, and these copies of low quality and disastrous translations at times were sold on the black market. Some were, those that were judged to be harmless in terms of the ideology of class warfare. So for us, watching Hollywood movies – even of the lowest quality – was a sort of defiance to the regime. Looking back through my Christian faith now, none of these movies were Christian or had any Christian worldview attached to them – with the exception, I suppose, of the optimistic endings of all of them, very typical American from the perspective of European audiences; and yet, that optimism came from an earlier era of Christian influence on the American culture, when the modern Denethor ministries – amillennial and premillennial – were not yet the dominant influence on the church. Save for the optimism and for a few moral lessons of self-sacrifice, though, nothing else was pointed to a Christian worldview. Back in the 1980s, Hollywood was just as thoroughly pagan as it is today.

And yet, in these movies, men were men and women were women. The established stereotype for a male protagonist would be strong, purposeful, and capable of taking hits and punches without flinching or complaining. A scarred face was a badge of honor; men brawled in bar rooms and then drank together. Women were far from the fleshless pale creatures of romanticism but they were just as far from the genderless creatures of our modern third-wave feminism; these were women of beautiful femininity as much as they were of vigor and strength. If there were effeminate men or masculine women, they were either antagonists, or ridiculed; and perhaps even subjects of redemption – and that applied to all kinds of movies, drama, action, or comedy.

How did the culture change so abruptly? How did Hollywood transform from celebrating manhood and strength to hating them, and to celebrating genderless, non-distinct creatures and sodomites that were ridiculed just 30 years ago? Modern churchian celebrities place the blame on the “world” or on the depraved heart of man. But this explanation can’t hold water. For the last 19 centuries the world and the depraved heart of man were not able to prevent the spreading of the Gospel and the turning of the world in an essentially Christian world. (How else can our modern celebrities speak of a post-Christian world?) There must be another reason for this sudden turn in the culture, specifically in America. A reason that is very specific for the last one hundred years, in the West.

And that reason is the church itself, and these very celebrities who now ostensibly decry the rise of the effeminate and sodomite culture. The ball started with them.

In order to see how this happened, we need to go back to a book I have advertized for quite a few years now, a book that I believe is the most unique book ever written in the history of Christendom: The Foundations of Social Order by R.J. Rushdoony. Nothing like it has been written before, and nothing like it has been written since, although I do hope we will eventually see more such books written. The uniqueness of the book is in its thesis: In it, R.J. Rushdoony makes the case for the true origin of the Western civilization and everything good and righteous and just it encompasses in the creeds and the councils of the early church. In the book, he examines in detail the theological principles developed in the creeds and the councils, and from there, the philosophical, ethical, judicial, political, social, scientific principles at the foundation of the Western civilization.

It is difficult to not notice the revolutionary character of his thesis. See, from the perspective of most non-Christian historians, the Western civilization may be unique, but its development came from natural factors: whether genetics, or geography, or some haphazard combination of material and historical factors. Modern historians, with a very few exceptions, are overtly or covertly Marxist: they believe in the sovereignty of impersonal “historical forces” – whatever that means – in shaping history. As a matter of fact, most modern theologians are practical Marxists when it comes to history and interpretation of history, because they too have a rather impersonal interpretation if history. Yes, yes, I know, they say that God moves history, but then their God moves history in such a mysterious and unpredictable way that He really doesn’t differ from the impersonal historical forces of Marxism.

In the book, Rushdoony followed to its logical conclusion the Calvinistic concept of culture so beautifully summarized by Henry Van Til in his groundbreaking book: “Culture is religion externalized.” Or, to rephrase it, if you want to understand a culture, follow its religious presuppositions. Rushdoony laid that as the foundation of his book, and instead of looking for the sources of the Western culture in material, social, economic, genetic, or other such factors, he found those sources in the religious presuppositions uniquely developed in the West: the Trinity, the nature of Jesus Christ as God and Man, the ontological distinction between the Creator and His creation, the concepts of man’s sin and God’s redemption, the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, and the eschatology of victory in history and final consummation in the final judgment. It is this uniqueness of the religious presuppositions developed in the West that produced the uniqueness of the Western civilization. All we hold dear today – liberty, limited government, the value of the individual, rule of law, habeas corpus, just measures, protection of private property, freedom of conscience, due process, universality of ethics and law, science and the scientific method, technological development and optimism for the future, the value of the family, the protection of the weaker members of our society, true charity, entrepreneurship, decentralization – economic and political – all these followed from the Creeds and the Councils. Man is as he believes, and his beliefs determine his practical actions. He may not always be self-conscious about every single detailed link between his presuppositions and his practical actions, but in the bigger picture, whether he is aware of it or not, he will create a culture that exactly corresponds to his most fundamental beliefs.

Again, Rushdoony’s thesis was – and still is – revolutionary. It still sounds foreign even to the so-called “Reformed” theologians and celebrities today. “Reformed” today is made to mean a few simple propositions about individual soteriology, about the personal salvation of man. If you can quote the TULIP and if you can say that it is God who saved you and predestined you to salvation, you pass for “Reformed” these days, even if in everything else – your view of society, culture, history, law, and everything else – your view doesn’t differ from any pagan ideology out there. We have today “Reformed” celebrities whose interpretation of history is no different from the Marxist interpretation of history; they view the rise of Christendom in purely technical or materialistic terms (The two Westminster seminaries and the Southern Baptist seminary in Kentucky come to mind when I mention such Marxist interpretation of history). We have others for whom such interpretation is not even needed because they do not see any connection between the development of the Christian doctrine and history, or between the development of the Creeds and the rise and fall of civilizations.

But from a Biblical perspective, as I argued in a lecture to the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society a few years ago, history is not only not independent of the Creeds of the church, history is defined by the Creeds, and history is nothing more than the perfection of the creeds over time. (That is the very title of the lecture, “History Is Nothing More Than the Perfection of the Creeds Over Time.” You can find it on my web-site, ChristendomRestored.com.)

Now, of course, some would say, we knew that the faithfulness of the church to God changes history, nothing new about it. If we are obedient to God, God will send His blessings, if we are disobedient to God, He will send His judgment.

While that is true, it is not my point here. The issue here is not whether God judges or blesses a culture, the issue is how a culture develops in the first place. We know that the Classical civilization was in rebellion against God and was eventually judged and replaced with the Western, Christian civilization. But how did it develop in the first place? What gave the beginning, the impetus, the foundation for it? Why were Rome and Greece what they were and not something else? Same about any other civilization, China, Japan, India, the pre-Columbus civilizations in America. And of course, that unique civilization which we now call the West.

The West, therefore, was born in the creedal faithfulness of the Church in its first 5 centuries of its existence. Not necessarily in the moral perfection and uprightness of Christians: in fact, if anything, in those early centuries the church had to deal with a number of ethical and judicial leftover habits from the older, pagan civilization. (Just read what Paul had to deal with in the Corinthian church and keep in mind all the missionaries had to deal with similar abominations among their newly converted listeners.) This moral imperfection, though, was a lesser factor compared to the greater factor, the creedal faithfulness of the leaders of the church. They weren’t all perfect, and many of them made mistakes for which they had to repent later, but their zeal for the Biblical doctrines was unsurpassed, and these early church leaders were willing to bring upon themselves the wrath of the Empire but not budge on the issues of doctrinal and creedal purity. Christendom was born not in the moral perfection of the church but in the doctrinal faithfulness of her leaders, and consequently, of her members. History is nothing else but the perfection of the creeds over time, and therefore the history of the West was entirely predicated on the creedal formulation of the Christian faith.

But this influence wasn’t limited to the emergence of the Western civilization. The church’s creedal faithfulness became the major factor which determined the ups and the downs of that civilization. As long as the church held true to its creeds and developed them and perfected them faithfully, the West prevailed. Where and when the church abandoned its commitment to them, the civilization waned and retreated. The best example is the fate of the Eastern Empire: as long as the Eastern church held fast to the doctrinal decisions of the early councils, the Empire stood strong against its pagan and Muslim enemies. The decline started in the 7th century when the creeds were modified to encode subordinationism in the Trinity, worship of images, and dualistic views of salvation. (See my article on “The Filioque Clause: Why the West Is West and the East Is East.”) By the 10th century, the Empire was spending more resources on fighting internal heresies that were splitting it than on its external enemies. By the 12th century, it had lost its demographic and military superiority. By the 15th century, only a shadow of its former glory had remained. The loss of creedal faithfulness led to the loss of the cultural force and vigor which had created and sustained the civilization.

The West wasn’t safe of it either. While many today believe that sodomy has never been so rampant in the West, and there have never been sodomite “marriages” before in history, thew truth is, sodomy was much more rampant, and that among the European elite, in the 14th century, a little over 100 years before the Reformation. Sodomy was so rampant that it was openly and unashamedly depicted in paintings and engravings of that era; some even depicted Biblical scenes in sodomite interpretation. (One prominent example is a depiction of the Magi in an obviously sodomite position in Taymouth Hours, a popular illustrated devotional book in 14th-century England.) The sodomite drive behind the Renaissance is acknowledged today; what is less known is that originally, it was promoted under the auspices of the church. In fact, many of those sodomite paintings and engravings are still surviving today in cloisters and churches in Italy, France and Germany. Sodomy was rampant in the monasteries, it was also popular among the ruling classes of Europe; there were quite a few sodomite marriages performed by priests. The cities of the Italian principalities had quarters separated for sodomite prostitution.

The Western civilization received its judgment for this abomination, eventually, in the form of the Turkish advance in the Balkans and the Mediterranean, and also in the several breakouts of the plague. The question, though, is the same as for today: How did it get there? Just 200 years before that the West was pounding the much larger and richer Muslim world to smithereens; small groups of crusaders were turning large Muslim armies to flight, and the role model of the West were the knights protectors of the City of God, Jerusalem. How come just a couple of generations after Richard the Lionhearted, the West was celebrating effeminate men and perversity, becoming worse in its wickedness than the pagan Romans and than its Muslim opponents?

The answer is: the church had abandoned its original commitment to creedal faithfulness and orthodoxy. By the 12th century, theology and scholarship in Europe returned to the pagan presuppositions of the Greek philosophy, and the intellectual formulation and defense of the faith was increasingly surrendered to a worldview hostile to the Word of God. Scholasticism, which started well by trying to correct certain formulations and beliefs, soon degenerated into empty philosophizing no different than the idle habits of the Athenians described in Acts 17:21. Once the formulations of the faith were surrendered, every single definition of the faith was surrendered – including the definition of manhood. It doesn’t matter how righteous and upright the scholasticists were – and some of them were exemplary men. Their intellectual apostasy from the Biblical presuppositions and formulations, and their adoption of pagan presuppositions in their thought led to the decline.

Christendom only recovered with the rise of the Reformation and the restoration of the original creedal formulations. Ironically enough, the revival of the Reformation restored the civilization not only in Protestant lands but in Roman Catholic lands as well. By the 17th century, both Protestants and Roman Catholics were again back to the original creeds – at least formally – and the West was back to valuing Biblical manhood as a civilizational choice and as a drive to action. We cannot understand the mission explosion of the 17th and the 18th centuries, and we cannot understand the European colonization impetus without looking at the restoration and the perfection of the creedal formulas in the Reformed confessions of the 16th and the 17th centuries. The Western civilization was planted in the creedal faithfulness of the church, and it was watered and nurtured in the development and perfection of the creeds. When solid creedal theology was abandoned, the Western civilization withered and almost died. When it was restored and perfected, the Western civilization was back on its feet, kicking and conquering the globe.

Contrary to the two kingdoms doctrine, history is not moved or shaped by common grace. There is no principle of commonness that is neutral or independent of God’s redemptive purpose for His Covenant people. History is entirely defined and moved and shaped by God’s special, redemptive, salvific, covenant grace. As the church goes, so does the civilization. When the church perfects her faith and doctrine and confession, the civilization around the church externalizes that faith and doctrine. When the church abandons her faith and doctrine and confession in favor of pagan or heretical doctrines and presuppositions, the civilization externalizes those pagan or heretical doctrines and presuppositions.

In short: If you don’t like the world, blame it on the church, and on her leaders.

Fast forward to our own times. No, pause for a moment in the 1980s. That same 1980s when Hollywood men were still men and the women were still women. Not awfully Christian either of them, but at least men had a purpose, a cause, and didn’t do selfies because they didn’t care how they looked but rather what they did and what they achieved. The era of cultural dominance of men of strength and purpose and a cause to fight for; and of women who didn’t have to lose their beauty and femininity to be strong. What we need to remember is that while Hollywood was putting out these movies, an institution in the American society was promoting selfishness, self-absorption, self-focus, and, most important of all, safe spaces. While Hollywood was still preserving and celebrating some form of masculinity and femininity and gender distinction, there was an institution at war against it, teaching men that they didn’t have to get hurt, that the world revolves around themselves and their little precious souls, that they have the moral right to shun anyone who speaks harshly and challenges their tranquility and bliss, and that the highest good for man is to separate himself from the battles of the world around him into a nice comfortable emotional ghetto of other men and women like him, committed to the same comfortable existence without any pain, harsh words, or even uncomfortable feelings.

That’s right, folks. That institution that stood against Hollywood’s old-fashioned gender distinction was the American church. In the 1980s, when the world was fighting the last battles of the Cold War, when President Reagan was calling in Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”, when in the Middle East a formerly Christian country, Lebanon, was being destroyed in a civil war, when Christians in Africa were fighting dictators and Communist guerillas, when the whole world had a short-term cause to defeat Communism and a long-term cause to deal with wars and oppression and poverty, the American church was conveniently retreating in its ghetto, and was teaching its men that all that mattered was their salvation, and that there wasn’t much that could be done about the world, except to “learn to live a kingdom life (whatever that means) in a fallen world.” And no, this refrain was coming not only from the dispensationalist churches; it was actively preached in supposedly Reformed churches and taught in supposedly Reformed seminaries and by supposedly Reformed ministries. As the world was coming out of a long winter, and was in dire need of real men taught to real manhood, the American church had already dropped the ball, turning its men into sensitive tender creatures focused on themselves and their own salvation and emotional well-being, ready to crack down under the most miniature contradiction against themselves.

And, just as it was before, back in history, this change in cultural commitment was not independent of the creedal commitment of the church. For just two generations before that, the church had abandoned the main Biblical doctrine that defines the Biblical man and Biblical manhood: The Dominion Covenant. And without the Dominion Covenant, there is no restoration of Biblical manhood.

I know, there has been a lot of effort in the last 20 years in churches and ministries to restore Biblical manhood. Sermons, seminars, lectures, books, articles, etc. unfortunately, most of it stillborn and useless. And it is stillborn and useless because most of it is based on a faulty theology that has has specifically ignored the very Biblical doctrine that is at the foundation of the Biblical definition of man. I have heard celebrity preachers trying to look and sound tough and brash and even obscene from the pulpit, because that is how a real man  is supposed to be and look like and sound like, right? I have seen others try to find the nature of Biblical manhood in something they call “family leadership,” that is, a real man is supposed to lead his wife and children – not clear where exactly, mainly in a family version of empty church rituals. All these predictably degenerate to a point where the brashness and the obscenity lack any substance, and the “family leadership” develops into humiliation and patronizing, and treating the wife and even the adult children as perpetual imbeciles. The reason for this degeneration and this failure to restore Biblical manhood is in the fact that man is not defined according to the Biblical definition of him, and that is, according to his purpose in the covenant. The Biblical man is a man of purpose, and that purpose is the Dominion Covenant, conquering the world for Christ. That purpose was given to him even before he had a wife, so the definition of man can not be found in his relation to his family, and less than that in some “family leadership” which didn’t come until the curse. I have explained this Biblical definition of man in my sermon on “What Is Man?” (somewhere on SermonAudio), but in short, man is not defined by what he is, he is defined by what he is created to do: to take the formless and void world and re-create it to be an ordered, organized, productive, capitalized world for Christ. Only when this doctrine of the Dominion Covenant is restored, Biblical manhood can be restored.

But in the 20th century, this doctrine was not only abandoned, it was actively opposed by the church, and specifically by the so-called “Reformed” part of it. All kinds of excuses were given by seminary theologians why we are not called to dominion anymore, but we should abandon the world to the enemy. All kinds of fancy terminology was invented to convince men to abandon their dominion – “royal exiles,” “mourning by the rivers of Babylon,” “here but not yet,” etc., I have talked about it before, no need to repeat it all here.

When the only concept that defines the Biblical man was taken away from the pulpits and the minds and the hearts of the church, inevitably, the church lost the concept of Biblical manhood. And while the world – and Hollywood – were still in the inertia of an earlier Christian era, when man was defined by his purpose and therefore was a true man, the church pulpits were setting the stage for the loss of manhood and for the creation of the modern concept of a genderless society of no real men and no real women. The church had a 40-year head start on Hollywood. The modern culture of perverts and effeminate men was born not in the studios of Hollywood or in the meetings of cultural Marxists but in the faculties of the modern Reformed seminaries, and in the pulpits of our own churches. Because culture is religion externalized, and an effeminate religion will inevitably create an effeminate culture.

Welcome, therefore, to the world created by the same ministries we have supported for decades now. And the same ministries that are so genuinely surprised by the culture of perversity, and so vociferously against it.

And make your conclusion of how we can bring about a reversal in the culture.

The book I will recommend this week is that great and revolutionary book by Henry Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture. When he wrote it back in the 1950s, almost no one in Reformed circles paid attention to it. And for a reason – while it was strictly an academic book, the conclusions were too damning for the churchian establishment. But one man paid attention: R.J. Rushdoony. We better follow his example, if we care for what world we are going to leave to our children.

And do not forget my work in Bulgaria. In the mission field there, our mission has been faithful to the concept of the Dominion Covenant – a concept not easy to convey to a nation that has had 45 years of Communist domination. But by God’s grace, we have not abandoned it. Consider supporting our work. BulgarianReformation.com, Donate.

God bless you all.